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Tony was not the only Jedi who left a padawan at the Temple during the rush to Geonosis. Multiple voices—some from younglings as small as nine or ten—called out for their masters as the hanger swarmed with activity. Engines sputtered and hyperdrives whined as they cooled. The air was thick with a smog of grease and sweat. Yet none of these sensations were as disjointed as the maelstrom that so many agitated Jedi created in the Force. The fabric of energy around Tony practically vibrated with it.

As he stepped out onto his shuttle’s exit ramp, he paused briefly to try to center himself. Underneath the crust of disturbance, there was serenity.

That’s what he told himself, at least.

After a breath, he moved forward, pressing his shoulders back in a mimicry of the fortitude he ought to feel. His eyes were sweeping the crowd long before his boots hit the hanger floor. Within seconds, he spotted a familiar face rushing towards him.

Peter reached Tony’s side with remarkable speed, jostling into him for just a moment before regaining his balance. “Master! You’re back!”

“So I am.”

He didn’t dawdle on the platform. There were more ships that needed to land, each and all carrying Jedi. Some would disembark to similar reunions as this one. Some would not. Tony tried his best not to think of the string of funerals that he and Peter would spend the next week attending. Instead, he slipped his hands into his sleeves and strode purposefully towards the exit—and the first true breath of peace offered to him in days. Peter immediately fell into step beside him, although he bounced excitedly every few feet.

“So?” The boy pushed after a few minutes of silence, raising a conspiratorial eyebrow. “Is it true?”

“Specificity, padawan-mine,” Tony chastised, biting back a smile. “Is what true?”

“That the war’s begun.”

“The Council is in discussions with the Senate and the Supreme Chancellor—”

“So it has.”

Tony sighed. Peter had always been particularly precocious. He attracted the Light like a burning flame, but his control of his emotions was—even at fourteen—still frenetic. Tony did his best not to blame himself for that, even if he suspected that the Council did.

“At this point, the conflict appears inevitable.” They came to a brief stop outside their shared rooms. Tony keyed in his security code and waited for the soft snick of the locking mechanism retracting. “But remember, young one: a Jedi does not delight in bloodshed.”

“I’m not delighting in it,” Peter protested. He followed Tony through the doorway and into their small sitting room. “I’m just curious.”

“You do have a right to know,” he conceded after a moment. “And I’m sure we’ll be given the specifics soon.”

“Haven’t you asked Rhodey? He’s on the Council, and he usually tells you—”

Tony sank down into their sofa, holding up a hand to cut Peter off. “Master Rhodes, Padawan.”

Peter rolled his eyes at the correction, which Tony pointedly pretended not to notice. “Fine. Haven’t you asked Master Rhodes?”

“I haven’t seen him. He and the other members of the Council are busy. As I said, I’m certain we’ll hear more when there’s more to hear.” Tony glanced up at the chrono on the wall, then fixed Peter with a suspicious glare. “Don’t you have classes to attend?”

Peter shrugged. “It’s all been in chaos since you left. They didn’t even try to organize anything today. A bunch of our instructors went with you, anyway.”

And how many have returned? Tony wondered. He hadn’t yet seen the casualty list. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Despite Tony’s careful shielding, Peter seemed to pick up on his wandering thoughts. He sat heavily next to his master, gaze turned down to their knees. “Are… Well, some of my classmates were saying that they saw caskets being taken out of the first ships in yesterday. And when I was sparring with a group of other padawans this morning, Master Reumar came in and took Shram out. I haven’t seen them since, and someone told me that it’s because Master Eris is dead.”

“I don’t know about Master Eris,” Tony answered. “But many did die. The price of our victory was high.”

Peter’s reaction to the news swelled high enough that it leaked through his shields and across their training bond. Sorrow, guilt, fear. No, Peter was not delighting in the news from Geonosis. He and the other padawans were frightened, confused, and seeking an explanation from wherever they could find one.

Tony didn’t have those answers for any of them. He suspected that none of their masters would. All they could do—all any of them could do—was trust in the Force.

Perhaps that was today’s lesson, yet again. It was one of many teachings that can never be reinforced enough.

A Master’s work is never done, he thought ruefully.

“Come,” he sighed, pushing his weary body to its feet. He had hoped to spend some time in the ‘fresher and settle down for the evening with a cup of caf, but the tempest of feeling still leaking off of Peter had quickly changed those plans. “If you have no classes to attend, then you should have no qualms about joining me in a moving meditation.”

Peter groaned, but followed.

—

The war shattered across the Temple. The halls—once vibrant and awash with Jedi, each one humming in their own tenor of the Force—grew quieter by the weeks. Masters and Knights alike scattered across the war fronts. There were hasty knighting ceremonies as elder padawans rushed to complete their Trials, all of them eager to join their former Masters in defending the Republic.

Despite this—because of this—Tony did his best to ensure that Peter’s routine was left relatively unchanged. Morning meditations, classes, private instruction in the evenings. Not for the first time, Tony found himself grateful that the Council had taken little interest in him after his unorthodox knighting. While it meant that his official updates on the war were relatively sparse, it also meant that he had yet to have been dispatched with the GAR. And whatever he really wanted to know, he could almost always wrestle out of Rhodey in the caf.

Peter, of course, agitated for more and more combat practice. After a few weeks, Tony relented.

The sparring arena was empty. Prior to the war, such a sight would’ve seemed otherworldly. Tony had frequented these chambers more than was healthy in the first year of his knighthood—nerves fresh and raw from his former master’s betrayal—and had never once been alone within them, even in the earliest hours of the morning.

Peter dutifully moved through his basic guard poses. He was using his own lightsaber for these; its glow caught both of them in a soft blue haze. They would switch to training ‘sabers later, once Tony decided that his padawan had fairly earned himself a sparring session. Peter would lose, of course. He always did. The margins by which Tony disarmed him, however, were growing increasingly narrow.

“Do you think they’ll send us, soon?” Peter asked, playfully spinning his ‘saber from one pose to another.

Tony nudged Peter’s heel with his toe until he shifted his weight forward, into the correct position. “You have two more years of study in the Temple before you’re old enough for war front missions. Now focus on your vertical line. Keep your center steady.”

“Thalia and Nico are only a year above me, and they’re on the front with their masters.”

Tony bit his tongue. It wasn’t just the two padawans Peter had named—old playmates of his from his years in the crèche, Tony believed. Nearly all of the padawans above Peter had been deployed one way or another. The Council had been given little choice. Even just a handful of months into the war and the Republic already reeked of desperation. Despite the miracle of the clone army, the Republic would be sorely outnumbered until Kamino could churn out the next few batches of soldiers. And even then, they seemed forever trapped on the defensive, forced to dance from planet to planet as the Separatists swerved, conquered, and killed.

Tony had hoped that the war would be over long before Peter reached an appropriate age to fight. Now, it was clear that the conflict would stretch on for far longer than anyone—even the Supreme Chancellor—had expected. It was only a matter of time before he and Peter were swept up in the same wave of necessity.

“As you say,” he finally answered, “they’re a year above you.”

Peter started to roll his eyes, then seemed to think better of it. “The Council would be stupid not to send you soon, though.”

“My place is here.”

The hum of Peter’s lightsaber vanished as the blade retreated into its sheath. He gestured widely towards the walls—and to the bustle of Coruscant beyond. “Don’t you wish you were out there?”

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But I made a commitment when I chose to take you as my padawan, and it’s not one I regret.”

“I hear things, y’know,” Peter muttered. “You were never here, before you started training me. You were always on missions. Dangerous ones, too! If it wasn’t for me, you would’ve been one of the first Knights to get a command. I know it. And I hate feeling like I’m stopping you from doing something important.”

“I’m precisely where I want to be, Peter, completing the most important task of my life.” He held his padawan’s gaze for a few moments, allowing his pride and honesty seep through their training bond. “Do you understand?”

Peter broke the contact—through their eyes and the Force—first, blushing furiously. “Yes, Master. I do.”

He nodded. “Your ‘saber now, Padawan.” He jerked his chin towards the hilt, held loosely in Peter’s grip. “We’ve much more to do before you’ve earned a break.”

—

Just shy of six months into the war, Tony and Peter were assigned their very own clone battalion: the 258th. Within a single conversation, Tony became a General of the GAR. Peter, a Commander. Less than four hours after that, they were on a cruiser headed to Malastare.

He found Peter standing at a quiet viewport, the soft blur of hyperspace illuminating the peaks of his face. He had his hands folded neatly behind his back, the hood of his robe pulled up over his head.

“Master,” Peter greeted softly, bowing his head in respect.

Tony nodded back, joining him in front of the transparisteel and matching his posture.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Peter said suddenly. “I’m one of the best with a ‘saber in my class.”

Yes, Tony thought, which is precisely why the rest of your classmates will spend tonight bundled safely in their Temple beds, and you will not.

Peter was the first of his agemates to be cast into the clutches of the war. He was the obvious choice. Despite his youth, Peter was skilled, clever, and fiercely in-tune with the Force—all aptitudes that had made the Council hesitant to allow Tony to take him as his apprentice in the first place. They had wanted a better Master for the boy. That much had been painfully obvious to Tony, even if it had never been explicitly voiced. One less impulsive, more connected to the Living Force. One without a broken, darkened lineage. And yet the Force had made its intentions clear: Tony Stark was to train Peter Parker, whether the Council—or Tony himself—liked it or not.

He took a deep breath and struggled to release his tumultuous feelings into the Force. The past was a picture already painted. There was nothing he could do to reconfigure its strokes. And the future was fickle and opaque—Rhodey had told him that even Master Yoda was struggling to see past the veil of darkness that the Sith had cast over what was to be. There was nothing he could do to prepare Peter for the coming conflict that he hadn’t already done.

“I know you are,” he finally murmured. “I taught you, after all.”

Peter grinned. “Pride is not the Jedi way, Master.”

Nor is war, he thought.

“Pride has nothing to do with it.”

They stood in comfortable silence. Or, Tony did. Peter doubtlessly vibrated with a need to fill the space, but he had grown to sit in that discomfort for longer and longer before finding himself overcome by it.

Tony eventually took pity on him, drawing in a deep breath. Peter’s gaze darted over, and Tony turned to face him completely. Peter mirrored him.

“I need you to promise that you’ll listen to me, once we arrive.”

Peter nodded enthusiastically. His eyes were bright; his fist was clenched tightly around the hilt of his unlit ‘saber where it rested against his hip. If they hadn’t been standing in a starship assembled for war, Tony might’ve been able to fool himself into believing that the boy was about to challenge one of his fellow padawans to a friendly sparring match.

“Of course I will! I mean, do I ever not listen to you?”

Despite himself, a smile tugged at Tony’s lips. “Frequently.”

“Well, I only ignore you when I know I’m right.”

“No,” Tony chided gently. “You only ignore me when you think you’re right. And that’s fine when the only consequence is a late assignment to one of your instructors, or a fresh welt from a training ‘saber. This is different.”

“I get that.”

“Do you?” He could feel Peter’s faint surprise at the intensity of the question across their bond. “When we’re on Malastare, you may find that you’re asked to do things that you find repulsive. Are you prepared for that?”

“They’re only droids,” the boy murmured after a moment, although there was little conviction in his voice.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Their commanders will not be.”

Peter’s expression wobbled for a moment, then solidified. He stuck his chin out and squared his shoulders. “I want to help, Master. You won’t change my mind.”

“That wasn’t my intention. I just want you to understand what we’re about to face.”

“I do understand.”

He couldn’t, of course. Nothing Tony said would achieve that. Peter had never killed. He’d grown up in the Temple’s crèche and gone straight from the younglings’ dormitory to Tony’s quarters once he’d become a padawan. Besides a handful of simple diplomatic missions he’d accompanied Tony on, he’d spent the entirety of his memorable life on Coruscant, swaddled in the safety of the Order.

Tony had been the same, once. But now he was forever haunted by the feeling of lodging his own blade in his master’s chest.

“I swear I’ll listen to everything you say, Master,” Peter said, honesty bright in his eyes. “Every single thing. I won’t let you down.”

How horrible it was, really, to hear such a promise and have it settle like a pit in his stomach.

—

“On your right, General!”

Tony spun without question, slashing his ‘saber through a battle droid that had snuck around his flank. It fell to the ground in two distinct thuds—one piece after the other. He searched for the clone who had given him the warning, nodding his thanks. The man saluted him with his blaster, then vanished back into the fray.

Tony had been wary of the clones at first, but all it had taken was five minutes in hard battle with them to discard those feelings. They were brave beyond duty, as if their veins ran with it. Kind, compassionate—they never left a comrade behind that they could’ve saved. After just a few days on Malastare, he’d grown to value them as he did his ‘saber.

Slowly, he was learning their names. His Captain went by Jax. The man’s silver hair was shaved tightly to his head, with tattoos weaving over his ears and into his scalp. He knew that Peter had asked about them, once, but Tony had been busy discussing causalities with their head medic—Botch—and had missed whatever answer the Captain had given.

The skirmishes on Malastare were sudden, violent, and persistent. They’d spent less than a week planetside, but they’d already taken heavy fire. The planet’s flat, featureless planes gave them little opportunity for cover, although it did afford them a fair view of approaching droids. Tony had read that the majority of the planet was forested, but they had seen no evidence of that. He assumed that was because they were so close to the Dug’s fuel refineries—the very subject of their presence.

Another bolt zinged past his ear, close enough that his eardrum ached. Not for the first time, he felt grudgingly impressed by the Separatists. A droid army was perhaps the best thing to throw against Jedi. All padawans were trained in blaster combat, but much of their techniques were rooted in small-scale skirmishes with perhaps a half dozen combat remotes. Otherwise, they were mainly instructed in facing living enemies—to pick up their intentions through the Force and therefore predict their actions.

But droids were empty in the Force. They had no signature to give warning before an ambush, no intentions to indicate which individual was going to fire first. The only Force signatures Tony was able to sense were the dim lights of the clones and the white-hot star of his padawan—a light that, at the moment, was blazing towards him.

Peter sprinted up at a full pace, slashing down two droids at once in a particularly broad stroke.

“I’m at fifty-five!” he shouted, reaching out with his free hand and using the Force to drag another droid towards him and into his waiting blade. “Actually, make that fifty-six!”

Tony sliced the head off of the enemy in front of him, then drove the body into one of its comrades taking aim at Peter. “Eighty-nine, Padawan. Four of which were droidekas.”

“No fair!”

He indulged Peter in making these skirmishes a form of play, even if the competition was decidedly un-Jedi-like. If not for his padawan’s sanity, then for his own.

“Whining is unbecoming, Padawan.”

“That’s not—”

“Peter, drop!”

Tony’s alarm snapped through his voice and their bond in unison. In any other situation, he might have felt guilt at allowing Peter such an intimate look at a shudder of his emotional control. As it was, however, Peter—who seemed to litter Tony’s life with a constant stream of questions and revisions to those questions—threw himself into the dirt without a second of hesitation. Yet even with such an immediate reaction, the blaster bolt that screamed over him singed the back of his tunic. Behind him, a droideka clicked as it readjusted its cannons.

Tony lunged forward, switching his grip on his ‘saber hilt. Peter rolled fluidly out of his path, and some part of him deflated in relief the moment he came between his padawan and the enemy. Before he could do much more than draw its attention, however, he noticed a droid popper roll through the destroyer’s shielding.

He caught one more bolt on his blade before electricity crackled through the droid’s body. Its joints locked, a whining exploding from it as its systems fried. Jax came jogging past its smoking carcass, blaster raised in greeting.

“General.”

Tony nodded in acknowledgment. “Captain.”

He spun around to see another clone pulling Peter to his feet. “You alright there, Commander?”

“Think so.” Peter spun his ‘saber in an experimental arc, then grinned. “Thanks, Colt.”

“Just doing my job, Sir.”

Tony met Peter’s eyes, tilting his head just slightly in his own unspoken question. There was the barest edge of lingering fear in his padawan’s expression, but his responding nod was solid and strong. He was fine. Startled, yes, but fine.

The clones dispersed, forming a loose perimeter that allowed Tony and Peter a moment of respite before they would have to dive back into the fray. Tony took a step closer to Peter, arms held out in a challenge.

“You’d better get going, young one,” he quipped, nodding towards another wave of droids, forms slowly unblurring as they approached from the East. “You’ve thirty-three to go before you’ve matched me.”

With a laugh, Peter bounded away from him. Tony didn’t let himself watch his outline get smaller and smaller. Instead, he turned in the opposite direction and let the battle sweep through him.

—

Malastare was the site of their first battle, but not their last. Tony had known that they’d be hard-pressed to escape the war once they’d been sucked into its orbit, but even he was grimly surprised by the slog that fell before them as the days blurred into weeks, then months.

They were given armor. There had been no time to outfit them with it for Malastare, but the pieces had been waiting for them in their rooms when they had arrived back in the Temple. Each piece was made of a plastoid-alloy composite in white—a perfect match to the clones in their command. As soon as they had rejoined their battalion on the way to the next conflict, a group of men had helped Peter emblazon the symbol of the Order on his left shoulder and the GAR on his right. Tony had forgone the frivolity for the first five or so of their battles, until finally relenting and allowing Jax, Fen, and Colt to do the same to his own now-battered shoulder plates.

Peter’s enthusiasm rapidly became Tony’s tether to hope. Planets blurred before them, yet his padawan’s presence was a steady and soothing constant. He wasn’t sure how he would’ve fared on his own, without such a perpetual and chatty reminder of the point of this horrific war.

Tonight, that reminder knelt across from him on his meditation mat as Tony’s knees dug into the thin cushion of his own. His and Peter’s shared quarters were the largest on the warship, yet the space between their beds was still cramped enough that their legs brushed. They were both weary to the marrow of their bones—this, they had grown used to. Like too many times before, they had been given less than six hours of reprieve in the Temple before their battalion had been reassigned to assist the 224th on Mimban. Despite his and Peter’s twin desperations for sleep, Tony knew that the brief intermission offered by their long hyperspace journey may be one of their last chances to center themselves within the Force for days.

If Tony was pressed to ascribe one state to every Jedi he had met over the past year, it could only be tired.

“Breathe deeply, Padawan,” he murmured.

Peter did so, eyes closed. Through their training bond, Tony could sense the boy’s unease winnowing as his connection with the Force deepened. When Tony had first taken Peter as his padawan, his meditations had relied heavily on Tony’s guidance through their fledgling training bond. Rarely had Peter been able to obtain the concentration necessary to enter a true meditation without Tony’s signature melded at least partially to his own. Now, the boy needed only the occasional nudge.

“When you feel ready,” Tony instructed, “release your discomfort into the Force. Your pain, exhaustion, and fear. Breathe in the Force. Breathe out the rest.”

Peter didn’t answer, but nor did he need to. Tony could sense him following his instructions.

“You should be doing this with me, Master,” Peter whispered after a while. His expression stayed steady and serene, but a gentle wave of concern crested above his previous calm.

Tony resisted the urge to tell his padawan off. He was, after all, perfectly correct in his observation. Tony should be joining Peter in his meditation. They were just as pained and worn out as each other.

And yet…

He shook off the hesitation.

“Of course, Padawan.” Tony let his own eyes close and nudged Peter’s knee gently with his own. “You’re doing well. It won’t be long until you’re able to do this without my help.”

A glow of delight rolled off of Peter at the praise until he released it, too, into the Force. “I hope that we’ll always find time to meditate together, Master.”

Fondness joined the Force flowing throughout Tony’s body, soothing his aching limbs in equal parts. “As do I, young one.”

As Tony sunk deeper into the familiar embrace of the Force, his awareness stretched far beyond Peter and himself. He could feel the thousands of sparks of life that were their troopers, mulling and drifting throughout the bowels of the ship. Each one built to be the same, yet undeniably unique in the Force. On the journey home, those stars of light would be fewer.

Tony squashed the sorrow before it could drift across the training bond to Peter. The action was hypocritical. He should release such emotions as he instructed Peter to do.

He didn’t, of course. And he knew, privately, that despite his growing independence, Peter himself held onto a pocketful of his own illicit fears, hopes, and dreads. The nightmares that bled through their bond were enough to confirm that. In a different world, Tony would take the time to talk to Peter about them. He would share advice, extend their meditations, and even offer a gentle yet firm reminder of the Code. But Tony knew the truth of the moment, even if the Council had yet to accept it themselves.

The days of that Jedi Order were long gone. In its place, there was only war.

—

The planet in the center of their cruiser’s view screen was awash with continents of soft, mossy green. Cloud wisps obscured sections near the southern pole. Tony could remember a time when the sight of each new world filled him with a wonder for the universe and the Force that bound it together. As it was, the war had jumbled everything so thoroughly in his head that he had to nudge Jax and ask which planet this one even was.

“Aleen, Sir,” the Captain responded, not a hint of judgment—or exhaustion, the bastard—in his tone. “Band of Seps are occupying one of the larger tahikos. Intel suggests that they were originally scouting one of the planet’s moons for a listening base. Not sure why they went planetside.”

Tony strained his memory back to the briefing, but could only remember vague snatches of it. He wasn’t even sure that the Council had taken the time to acquaint him with the history or customs of Aleen before sending him to gather his men. There was little time for that, nowadays.

“And a tahiko would be…?”

“Family groups,” Peter answered dutifully from his left, eyes still fixed on the planet—and the fight—that loomed ahead of them. “They used to have a more complex system, but that was ages ago. A single tahiko usually composes an entire settlement.”

“Is each settlement under its own rule?”

“No,” Peter said. “They’re all ruled by a king. The eldest member of each tahiko acts as a representative in a kind of Senate, I think. And the monarch’s elected, like on Naboo.”

Tony nodded his approval. “Well remembered, Padawan. Your instructors would be proud.”

Peter blushed. “Thank you, Master.”

“We shouldn’t have to worry about any pushback from the locals,” Jax offered. “King Manchucho was the one who petitioned the Republic for aid when the Seps turned up. The elder of the occupied tahiko sent word to him through a messenger. The damn Seps hounded him the whole journey, but he managed to make it to Manchucho before he died.”

Tony startled at that. “The messenger’s dead?”

Jax nodded, jaw set in a grim line. “Aye, General.”

Tony closed his eyes, struggling to calm himself. It was becoming harder and harder to do so.

So much death, he thought. A profound weariness swept through him and—if only for a moment—he felt that he understood how it was to be as ancient as Master Yoda.

They split apart quickly after that. Tony to his fighter—he would lead the assault in the space surrounding the planet’s atmosphere—while Peter and Jax headed for their troop transports. With Jax as backup, Peter would spearhead the ground assault. It was the first time that he and Tony would be separated during a battle, but with the Separatists staging a blockade and ground intelligence indicating that the locals were running dangerously low on supplies, the tactic was necessary. Of the two of them, Tony was undeniably the most skilled pilot. He and his starfighter squadron would open up a path for the troop transports and a couple of cargo ships to make it to the planet. From then on, it was hard to figure out which one of them would have the harder task. Peter, securing the surface, or Tony, wrestling for control of the blockade.

Necessity forced him to discard such thoughts as he guided his Eta-2 out of the hanger and into the violence beyond. Almost immediately, he had to twist his trajectory clear of a Vulture droid. The Separatist blockade must have scoped their ships as soon as they dropped out of hyperspace, for their attack to have already begun.

As he made for clearer space, Iron Squadron formed behind him. They positioned Tony as the point of their spearhead. Each of his pilots sounded off for their check-in, voices bright with varying levels of battle-lust.

Here we go, Tony thought, flipping his fighter belly-up as he swooped underneath yet another Vulture droid. One of his men—he didn’t know which—sheared off its wing with a well-aimed shot just a second later. It spun wildly, finally evaporating into a shower of sparks as it made contact with one of the Republic’s cruisers’ shields.

The Force filled him with a steady sense of control. He drove its tendrils into the ship, feeling out every instrument, every component, every span of steel that constructed the shell. He was at once a pilot. A Jedi. A warrior. A man.

And all around him, the galaxy burned.

—

Four days passed, and finally Aleen was won.

Even as the engines of his Eta-2 flared in preparation of landing in his cruiser’s hanger, Tony could barely hear over his body’s dogged wails for sleep. Peter’s ground assault had slogged on and on, necessitating a near-constant presence from Iron Squadron. Without them wreaking havoc in Aleen’s orbit and upper atmosphere, Separatist bombers could’ve swept the 258th aside like a field of dry leaves. Tony had done his best to keep a steady rotation of men in and out of the fighters—if only to ensure that anyone in a cockpit was fresh enough to tell their hyperdrive from their weapons array—but his own breaks had been few and far between.

He staggered out of his fighter on numb legs. As his feet hit the hanger floor, he doubted he would’ve managed to stay upright without the steadying grip of one of his men.

“Thank you, trooper,” Tony muttered, tiredly scrutinizing the clone’s face and coming up empty on a name. Peter would’ve known it, he was sure, and the thought of his padawan sent a thrill of adrenaline through him. “You’re going to have to remind me of your name.”

“It’s Punch, General.” The man stepped back and saluted him. “Would you like me to call a medic?”

He shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. However, I do need transport down to the surface. Is there an RTT that I could catch a ride on?”

The trooper blinked, but didn’t protest. Tony liked that about them. “Should be, Sir. They’ve been departing frequently from the nose-end of the hanger.”

Tony nodded his thanks and forced himself in the direction the clone had indicated before he lost all sense of momentum. Men stopped and saluted him as he passed, their expressions gleaming with respect.

The Jedi are winning them over, he thought, caught between pride and bitterness. They see the warriors in us.

He brushed his palm across the hilt of his ‘saber, safely fastened to his belt, and wondered when he’d started thinking of it as a weapon instead of a symbol.

—

The troop transport landed with a sharp jerk. Aleen’s surface sprawled out around them, its light soil seared black in wide strips from blaster fire. They had landed a fair ways out from the village, likely to avoid as much further disturbance to the locals as possible. A futile pleasantry, Tony supposed, but such minutiae was what separated the Republic from the Separatists.

And yet in the distance, he could see smoke twisting up from a massive funeral pyre.

We both bring death to these planets, Tony thought. Death and destruction. What does it matter if we’re kinder about it in the aftermath?

As Tony stepped out of the ship, he spotted Jax hustling toward him. He didn’t bother asking how the man had known to anticipate his arrival. While Tony himself hadn’t thought to send word, it didn’t surprise him that one of the many clones he had interacted with between leaving his cockpit and boarding the RTT would’ve informed their captain that their general was en route.

“Sir,” Jax greeted, nodding in a quick sign of respect before leading him towards the smattering of tents that the men has erected on the outskirts of the village. “Heard you and the boys gave those clankers some real hell up there.”

Despite himself, a smile tugged at the corner of Tony’s mouth. “We did our best.”

Jax grinned back. “Well I can say that we sure appreciated your best down here, General. Made our job a lot easier.”

Tony took the appreciation with a slight nod. “Speaking of down here, I’m looking for an update.”

Jax gestured around them. They’d entered the tents, now, and troopers rushed to-and-fro, no doubt chasing various tasks. “As you can see, we’ve got a base started. Commander Parker had us set up away from the town, to avoid crowding. He’s also got a group of us bringing supplies and medical attention to the civilians that’ll accept it. Any orders?”

“Let me get a measure of things before that.” Tony cast his gaze around their makeshift camp. “Where is Commander Parker?”

Jax snorted. “If Botch had his way, then I’d guess he’s being held down for an exam in the med tent.”

Tony stopped dead, forcing Jax to a halt a half-step ahead of him. “Was he injured?”

“Got caught by a stray bolt sometime in the first wave. Colt and Deadeye told me he fought the whole battle without mentioning it to a soul. He’s a tough one, that kid.” Jax appraised him. “Suppose all you Jedi are.”

He nodded halfheartedly. “Where’s the…?”

“Med tent’s that way, Sir.” Jax pointed to the North. “Biggest one. Can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, Jax. I… believe I ought to check in with my padawan before I get back to you on those orders.”

A small smile pulled at the corners of the clone’s mouth. “Aye, General. Thought you might want to do that. I’ll hold things down here until you’re done.”

Tony took off in the direction Jax had indicated without another word. The Captain hadn’t lied: the med tent came into view quickly, looming above the rest. Peter was just pushing his way past the flap when he spotted him, hand pressed to his shoulder. The vice crushing Tony’s chest released at the sight.

Thank the Force, he thought, vaguely dizzy with relief.

“Padawan!”

Peter’s head jerked up. A tired smile pulled at his face, replacing a wince. He paused and waited until Tony reached him.

“Master.” His voice was soft, albeit slightly rough from shouting over the chaos of battle. “Jax told me you were coming down. Everything still okay above atmosphere?”

“Secured.” Tony nodded at Peter’s shoulder. “That arm in danger of falling off when I’m not looking?”

“I got grazed,” Peter admitted, looking slightly chagrined. “Botch slapped a bacta patch on it, though. I’ll be fine.”

Tony let it go, trusting that the medic did everything necessary, and it wasn’t long before inertia and duty swept them away from each other. The violence may have stopped with the battle, but the aftermath was no less time-consuming. There were relief supplies to organize, reports to complete, and treaties to revise. At least four different clone groups had to be sent out to hunt down droid stragglers that had escaped destruction in the main conflict. Peter led one of them and came back looking flushed from adrenaline and the midday sun.

They found each other again in their shared quarters on their cruiser. The Council had called them back to the Temple to report to the Supreme Chancellor, an honor and a relief. Tony knew they’d be lucky to have a full 24 hours on Coruscant before another deployment fell in their laps, but even a single night in a real bed was a luxury.

Peter was sitting on his bunk when Tony slipped into their dark room. His boots were in the floor next to his socked feet, but the rest of his armor remained on his body, untouched. His elbows rested on his knees, glazed eyes fixed on some indiscernible point in the distance. Tony wondered, briefly, if he had ever seen anyone look so tired.

“Padawan,” he murmured.

Peter startled, head snapping up. His hand jerked impulsively towards his ‘saber before recognition seeped into his expression.

“Master,” the boy greeted, a hair breathless. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Tony quirked an eyebrow at him. It had been a long time since he’d been able to startle Peter like that. He should scold him for his absentmindedness, really. If he had been properly connected to the Force, he would’ve sense Tony’s presence long before his arrival.

Instead, he settled down on his own bunk, raising his hand in a silent peace offering. “How’s your arm?”

Peter rolled his shoulder experimentally, then winced. “Stiff.”

Tony beckoned to the empty space at his side. “Come here.”

It was telling that Peter did so without question or complaint. As soon as he’d sunk into the thin, military-issue mattress at his side, Tony carefully unstrapped and lifted Peter’s breastplate over his head. Next came his shoulder pads and wrist gauntlets. He discarded each piece on the floor with only the slightest sense of guilt. He knew that they ought to take the time to clean and repair the plastoid in preparation of the next conflict, and yet…

By the Force, Tony was tired.

He gestured at Peter’s shoulder. “Let me see.”

“‘S got a bacta patch on it,” Peter offered instead, so tired that he swayed where he sat. “Botch checked it. ‘M fine. Really.”

“Alright,” Tony conceded.

Peter slouched back against the wall. Tony winced at the torque it seemed to place on his spine, but soon found himself mimicking the position. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as it ought to, his limbs deadened from overuse.

“We should meditate,” Tony whispered after a while, although he knew the comment was just for show. Peter’s Force signature had mellowed into near-sleep and Tony’s own exhaustion was finally settling deep into his marrow.

Peter hummed in a half-response, which was more than he had expected.

Each of his senses was dulled by fatigue. Even his connection to the Force felt tenuous, strained and threadbare. He had always known that there was a limit to even a Jedi’s endurance—and perhaps this war would bring that truth into a sharp and unavoidable light.

He nudged Peter sideways until he slumped across the bunk, using a trickle of the Force to slow his descent. With a heave of trembling muscles, he lifted his padawan’s feet onto the mattress and slung his thin blanket across his waist. Staggering a little, he paused over Peter just long enough to press his fingertips to the boy’s temple. He swept the Force through his body, checking for any unnoticed injuries. He sensed almost too many sensations to count: small cuts, fresh bruises, an unknowable number of aches. A burning emanated from Peter’s shoulder, but Tony was too tired to pay it much mind. The bacta patch would do its job.

Then, he crossed the room in two steps and collapsed into Peter’s bunk. Sleep came quickly after that.

—

Hours later, the Force woke him.

It shrieked a warning so visceral that Tony wondered if even a non-sensitive could hear it. He staggered upright, expecting an attack, but found his quarters undisturbed. No warning lights or sirens pierced the gentle hum of hyperspace. All was as he remembered it—

—until he reached, unconsciously, for his bond with Peter. Fire raced through the tendril of thought. Hot, raging pain. Confusion. Fear.

He stumbled to his padawan’s side. He was stretched out on his back, the blanket that Tony had laid over him earlier in the night bunched up around his knees. His breaths heaved—far too fast and sharp for sleep—and his dirt-stained tunic was darkened with sweat.

Tony swore under his breath as he knelt beside the bunk. His leg muscles trembled as he did so—his own body’s quiet but persistent reminder of its limits. He pointedly ignored it, instead reaching out to grasp Peter’s face between his palms. His cheeks burned with fever, red and slick.

“Padawan,” he murmured, fighting to balance his urgency with gentleness. “Wake up.”

Peter’s eyelids flickered. He made a wounded noise in the back of his throat, arms flailing weakly in an attempt to orient himself. Tony pulled one of his free hands from the boy’s face in order to catch his nearest wrist, holding him steady.

“Master,” Peter whimpered, although his gaze drifted over Tony’s face without recognition. He sensed him through the Force, then. “I… I don’t feel well.”

“I’m sure you don’t, young one. You have a high fever.”

“Fever,” Peter repeated, voice wispy and strained.

“Yes.” He swallowed. “But you’ll be quite alright. I’m going to take you to the medbay.”

He didn’t wait for Peter to respond. He just slid his arms under the boy’s knees and back and—aided by the Force—scooped him up.

He was heavier than he had once been.

Tony headed straight for the medbay, spurred into a half-run by Peter’s hot pants against his collarbone. The halls were eerily quiet, although he chalked that up to the collective desire for sleep that had seemed to sit, heavy and lustful, over every one of the crew’s face when Tony had boarded one of the last transports up from the surface.

Yet when he staggered through the medbay doors, he found the space consumed by chaos.

He realized that he should’ve expected that to some degree—while the causalities from Aleen weren’t as terrible as they could have been, the medics certainly had their work cut out for them—but the swarm of panic and voices that greeted him as the doors retracted was a step above anything he’d seen before. Dozens of men rushed about the room, only some of them trained medics.  Men moaned and writhed on their cots. The air held the unmistakable stench of sweat, blood, and death.

Tony skirted around the edge of the room, seeking one of the only empty cots in sight. As he settled Peter down across its chilled surface, he did his best to impress the sensation of I’ll be back through their bond. Peter gave no indication—through the Force or otherwise—that he understood the message. He simply lay still, face flushed and eyelids twitching, the fever having burned out any of his remaining strength.

Tony waded through the medbay’s chaos until he spotted their head medic, Botch. The clone nodded at him, mouth set in a grim line.

“It’s good to see you, General.”

“What’s happening?” Tony asked, raising his voice to be heard above the bedlam. “It wasn’t this bad when we entered hyperspace.”

Botch studied him for a moment. “Didn’t you hear? I thought that was why you came rushing down here.”

He shook his head. “I brought Commander Parker. He’s—”

“—got a temp so high it could cook a lava flea in its carapace?”

“How did you—”

“Because that’s what’s happening, Sir. First man went down with it about an hour ago. It wasn’t until the third that we made the connection.”

“Do you have any idea what it is?”

Botch shook his head, looking as frazzled as Tony had ever seen him—had ever seen any clone, for that matter.

“No, Sir. It only seems to be affecting the wounded men, but not all of them.”

Tony swallowed, glancing around them to check for unwanted ears. “Could this be a Separatist bioweapon?”

Botch’s tone was grim. “It could very well be, Sir.” The clone stepped closer and dropped his voice so low that Tony had to tap into the Force to decipher his words. “I’ve got a section of the sick that were critical before they became symptomatic. If this keeps on as it is, we’ll lose some of them before we can get to Coruscant.”

His heart sank. These were all good, brave men. The Force had shined upon them that they survived the battle in the first place. To be lost to something so sudden seemed doubly cruel.

“Do what you can, Botch,” he sighed. “Unless there’s anything you need from me, I’m going to rejoin my padawan.”

“No, Sir.” Botch peered around him, to the cot that Tony had laid Peter across. “Is there anything you can do for him, General?”

Tony inclined his head. “Some, but far too little, I’m afraid. The healing arts have never been my specialty. But it’s imperative that I keep his fever at bay for as long as possible. If it climbs too high, he may begin to lose his control over the Force. I’d like to avoid any… unpleasant consequences of that.”

Botch’s expression tensed in a way that told Tony he understood just how dire those unpleasant consequences could become. “Aye, Sir. I’ll see that you’re not disturbed with anything non-urgent.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

On his way back to Peter, Tony had to skirt around two clones who had burst into the medbay sometime near the end of his conversation with Botch. They supported a third man between them, whose head lolled forward unnaturally. His heart panged at the sight, but he forced himself to release the sensation. The only thing he could do for these men was keep Peter from becoming a further threat. Everything else was in the hands of Botch and his team.

He knelt at his padawan’s bedside with a deep sigh, preparing himself for a long, long journey home.

“It’s me, Peter,” he murmured, gently splaying his fingers across the boy’s forehead and temples. “Come on. Let me in.”

He immersed himself into the Force.

As he did so, the chaos around him didn’t cease. Instead, it took on a different quality. Noises shifted to sensations. Panicked shouts became spikes of energies. The sickness around him burned white-hot in his awareness. Fevers, nausea, agony—each individual’s suffering warred for his attention. He wrapped the Force around himself as a living, pulsing buffer, then poured his awareness into the thread of connection that bound his and Peter’s minds: the training bond that had been present since the first moment of their meeting.

Peter’s shields—already weakened by battle and further diminished by fever—collapsed at the barest of mental touches. At once, Peter’s own emotions and hurts assaulted him, sharper and more immediate than those of the clones being treated around them. Tony only allowed himself to pause for a moment—to project a soft apology for his invasion—then pressed forward into his padawan’s frazzled consciousness.

Ideally, Tony would place Peter in a healing trance for the duration of their trip home, but he didn’t trust himself to do so without a trained healer present. He’d never even managed to guide himself into one, let alone bring someone else down with him. Instead, he just aimed for as deep a meditation as possible, hoping against hope that the stasis would slow the progression of whatever illness burned through the boy’s body.

He pressed deeper, further. He and Peter had melded closely before—during meditations, mostly, but more recently to swap memories vital to the war effort as clearly and accurately as possible. Never, however, had Tony tried to initiate such a connection without the active participation of the other person. It was difficult. If Peter’s mind had not been so familiar to him, he imagined it would have been impossible. Peter’s fever had taken a deep enough root to scatter his thoughts. As much as Tony tried to impress a steady sense of peace over his padawan’s signature, he only ever managed a minimal effect.

Still, he persisted. Grit his teeth and poured himself deeper into the meld, noting peripherally that he would need to apologize to Peter for the intrusion, once he was well again. Unbidden, images and sensations flashed between them. Tony did his best to let them glide through his consciousness unobserved—they were private, after all, and Peter wasn't in any state to consent to the intimacy of the meld Tony had imposed upon him—but flashes wormed their way past his concentration.

Laying across a bed of moss in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, laughing with a pair of his crèchemates. Master Thusa would notice their absence soon, but until then, they were free within the humid embrace of the room’s vivid flora. The air tasted thick and sweet with fresh flowers. The Force hummed all around them, filling Peter’s body with a glittering warmth. He wondered how non-Force sensitives could live without this. How cold they must feel.

Kneeling on the floor of his rooms, a rhythmic tugging motion at his scalp as his Master rewound his padawan braid. Tony’s touch was gentle—something Peter wouldn’t have expected at first, considering the ‘saber callouses that rose along his palm and fingers. A sense of serenity washed over Peter—Tony’s own, projected through their fledgling bond. He was meant to use this time as a meditation, as his Master was. Yet shame held him back from the peace he sought. Shame, because, in that moment, he felt a deep affection for his Master that verged dangerously near attachment. Shame, because he couldn’t find it within himself to purge it.

Staggering through a battle on a planet whose name he’d known, but that the heat of conflict had whisked away. The blaster-burn on his shoulder sent sharp spikes of pain through his chest and arm with every adjustment of his ‘saber stance. The death of yet another clone rang out in the Force like a gong. The sensation churned Peter’s stomach. It made him feel cold, small. Defeated. Even as he knew he ought to find comfort within the Force’s embrace, he shied from its touch. He couldn’t bear the horror-pain-terror-HELP that his men unknowingly poured into its fabric. Force help him—he couldn’t bear it.

Without intending to, Tony realized that he had allowed the meld to go deep enough that he was struggling differentiate Peter’s memories from his own. Had he snuck out of his crèche? Was he laying underneath the tangled branches of a wroshyr tree? Or was he the one meant to chastise such excursions—the master weaving a boy’s hair into a thin braid? His shoulder ached, he thought—or did Peter’s? He was trying to help… to help with… to help someone. To help his padawan. Or was he the one being helped?

He fought to exert some form of control over the chaos, but Peter’s mind had become an ion storm. Even as he tried to retreat back to his own body, he found the way blocked by a sudden rush of his padawan’s panic. Tendrils of the Force dug into his signature, pulling him closer, further, down—

Please, Tony thought, distantly, a fresh edge of desperation giving him the barest breach above the maelstrom of his padawan’s mind. He poured every inch of his determination into the message. Please, Peter. I need you to focus, else we’ll both be lost.

For a moment, it seemed that they would teeter there forever—caught in a tug-of-war that Tony was beginning to doubt his ability to win.

Then, a tendril of attention, weak but present. It broke over Tony in the form of a single word, sweet and impermanent as ocean spray.

Master?

Relief. Although whose it was, Tony wasn’t sure.

I’m here. I’m here, young one. Now let me help you.

A flicker of tired acceptance rushed through the storm. Then, slowly, the chaos quieted. Peter’s signature seemed to collapse in on itself, retreating and consolidating until Tony could stretch his own easily around it. His padawan’s consciousness was still scattered, flayed and blurred by whatever infection burned its way through his bloodstream, but his resistance had vanished. In fact, he seemed to lean heavily on his master’s Force signature. A drowned man clinging to a scrap of driftwood.

Carefully, as if he were maneuvering a proton bomb, Tony guided Peter into meditation. Then he withdrew, just enough to be certain of himself again, his signature still resting over Peter’s like a blanket. The journey back to Coruscant became a blur of concentration and ache, knelt beside Peter’s cot and only half aware of his body. It was nowhere near the most comfortable place to perform such a strenuous mental task. The entire area smelled of blood, vomit, sweat, and death. Frantic beeps, shouts, and the pounding footsteps of medics threatened to puncture his concentration in unpredictable intervals. Even worse, there were more than a few moments when the chaos reached a crescendo and Tony felt yet another casualty ring out in the Force. Even in his fevered state, Peter reacted to these losses, whimpering and twisting weakly in Tony’s grip.

“Peace, little one,” Tony whispered, over and over again, pressing locks of the boy’s sweat-soaked hair back with the pad of his thumb. “Peace. All will be well.”

—

Tony would rarely have described the Halls of Healing as his favorite place within the Temple. Yet following the events of Aleen, he found himself immeasurably grateful for its simplistic rooms and wide windows. The architecture may have been uninspired—the style was purposefully bland, to facilitate peace and healing—but the side chamber where the healers had brought Peter to recuperate was warm and serviceable, and the hard chair that Master Che had reluctantly provided him with was significantly more comfortable than kneeling on the metal floor of the cruiser.

It had been two days since the 258th had returned to Coruscant, and only in the early hours of that morning had Peter’s fever had finally subsided. Looking at him now, it was hard to imagine how close to passing into the Force he had been when their transport had touched down at the Temple. Master Che and others had been channeling massive waves of the healing Force through the boy’s body at regular intervals throughout the days and nights. These sessions had rapidly healed his superficial wounds, leaving Peter’s face unblemished and smoothed in sleep. One hand had been laid over his stomach, while the other was clutched between Tony’s own. The only physical evidence that remained of his ordeal—the bandage covering his healing blaster wound—was concealed beneath his crisp white medical robes.

As for Tony, his efforts with Peter had left him… weathered. A constant headache pounded at his skull, and every time he reached out for the Force, it slipped free of his grasp. He knew that he had exhausted himself beyond the point of safety—Master Che had made that explicitly clear to him—but he found that he cared little. Even with every ounce of his concentration and skill, he had only just succeeded in keeping his padawan alive and his powers at bay. Had he not applied himself as he had, the consequences would have been far more dire than an inconvenient case of Force exhaustion.

Peter had been lucky. The healers anticipated that he would wake from his healing trance as soon as his body gathered the strength—and that from then, he would need only a few more days of rest within his chambers until he was ready to resume training and combat missions. Many of their men would not be so fortunate, a fact that Tony knew would cause Peter no end of guilt when he awoke. This was how Tony justified the vigil he held at the boy’s bedside. It wasn’t necessarily taboo for masters to sit with their padawans in the Halls of Healing—the presence of familiar Force signatures tended to improve a patient’s recovery times—but Tony was fully aware of how obsessive—how attached—he had begun to seem.

Still, he clung tightly to his padawan—to both his hand and their bond. Peter’s shields had slipped enough that he could feel both of their aches—Peter’s blaster wound still hurt, even in unconsciousness—yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to winnow their connection. He had been frightened by the events of the past few days. If he hadn’t been so beaten by the battle—by all of the battles, one after another after another—he would never have allowed himself to linger on such an admission. But there, slouched next to Peter’s bed and half-dozing, there was little he could do to escape it. He had been afraid. Afraid for his men, for the people of the Republic, and above all… for his padawan.

These were not the feelings of Jedi Knight. Tony knew this as well as he knew all of the Jedi teachings—those he had learned himself, and now passed onto a padawan of his own. And yet knowing the dangers of fear, it seemed, did not translate into a freedom from it.

Across their bond, Tony felt Peter’s consciousness shift. A vague stirring, at first, although it quickly grew and morphed until Tony recognized it as the unmistakable presence of his padawan, finally deigning to grace the world with his presence.

Peter turned his face in Tony’s direction before he even opened his eyes, groping clumsily for their bond even as he blinked back into awareness.

“Master?”

Tony sat forward, relief so sharp he swore he could taste it on his tongue. “I’m here.”

Peter squinted at the light, moving to sit up instinctively. Tony jerked his grip from Peter’s hand to his chest, gently pushing him back down.

“Easy, padawan-mine.” As soon as Peter relaxed into his bed, Tony slouched back, pasting a soothing smile over his face. “How do you feel?”

Peter seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then,

“Tired.”

“I’m sure you are. You’ve been through quite the ordeal.”

Peter tore his eyes from his master’s face, flicked them around the room, then returned. “I’m in the Halls?”

Tony snorted. Of course the boy would recognize his surroundings quickly—his brash stunts in practice had landed him here more times than anyone wished to count. “Indeed. What do you remember?”

“I got… shot?” Peter’s brow furrowed and Tony sensed his signature turn inward, sifting through memories. “But I was alright. Botch put bacta on it.”

“Which did more harm than good, I’m afraid. Not that Botch could have possibly anticipated that.” He folded his hands across his lap. “As it turns out, our activities on Aleen offered an unprecedented opportunity for geological discovery. Tell me, Padawan: what did your instructors teach you of the soil structures of the planet?”

He could sense Peter’s annoyance at the seemingly unrelated question, but the boy put up with it reasonably well. There was only the barest hint of impatience coloring his reply.

“It’s a fairly rocky planet. Underneath the upper crust, there are a series of complex caverns with their own biosphere. Nobody’s been down there in ages, though. Even the locals. Why?”

“Because it seems that you and a large section of the 258th furthered that knowledge. Do you remember falling asleep on the cruiser?”

Peter nodded.

“Hm. The Force woke me some time later. Your fever was worryingly high. Some of the men were falling ill alongside you. At first, we worried you were the victim of a new Separatist bioweapon. It wasn’t until we brought you to Master Che that she recognized the pattern. Only ground troops with open wounds seemed to be affected. It became clear that if the Separatists created this bioweapon, then it was a rather poor one.”

“So it wasn’t the Seps, right? It was… something native to Aleen?”

“Precisely. Botch checked traces of soil from your boots and ‘saber—we’ll have a conversation about cleaning your weapon before resting at another time, Padawan—and isolated a bacteria undiscovered during previous geological surveys of the planet. Jax told us that the Separatists snuck a few Hyena bombers past our air defense. It seems quite possible that one or more of these explosions exposed a section of cavern to the open air, therefore introducing the bacteria into the wider biosystem. That, or perhaps it was harbored in the deeper bedrock. Neither Botch nor Master Che are sure. What they do know, however, is that the infection very nearly killed you.”

Understanding seemed to sharped in Peter’s expression. “And the bacta patch just trapped the bacteria inside, didn’t it? That’s why you said it didn’t help. I mean, that blaster wound was open for the whole battle. Who knows what got into it?”

Tony bit back a sigh. “I think you’ll find that Master Che is painfully aware of exactly what got into it, as you say.”

Peter didn’t react to his sarcasm. He seemed to have retreated inward again, a far-away look in his eyes. “You carried me to the medbay. And then… Were you…?” He waved his hand around his head—a gesture so childlike that Tony had to hold in a laugh. “Y’know. Did you…?”

“I did,” Tony answered. “It seemed the most effective way to control your fever. And I apologize. I should never have initiated such a meld without your permission.”

Peter shrugged. “Oh, no, it’s fine. I mean, I trust you. And it’s not like I was really in a position to give permission anyway. I’m just trying to make sense of it.”

Tony softened. He forgot, on occasion, the true and absolute trust that his padawan placed in him. He had felt the same towards his master, once… A blind, foolish belief…

He reached forward and rested his palm over Peter’s good shoulder, carefully tucking the memories behind his shields. They would do him little good here—after all, they never had.

“I’m very glad you’re alright, Peter.”

“Thank you, Master.”

—

The bloodshed dragged on. Their missions grew longer and more complex. At times, they spent so long bogged down in sieges that Peter’s hair curled out past his temples. For a while, Tony shaved it back into the standard padawan cut during convoys back to Coruscant. Then the next mission would come, the next crush of combat-blurred weeks, and it grew out again. After a while, Tony started to leave it be. They saw too little of the Temple for the formality of it to matter.

Their armor stained and wore. Replacements—of clothes, of supples, and of clones themselves—came slower than they once did. Tony and Peter’s main connection to Coruscant filtered down to them through grainy snatches of the HoloNet. There were more than a few nights where they fell asleep to it, bedrolls laid out beside each other or shoulder-to-shoulder against the walls of their makeshift camps.

And somewhere amongst it all, Peter’s hesitance faded. His ‘saber form stopped looking painstakingly practiced; instead, the moves melted through his body. He became as strong a commander as Tony—and perhaps, at times, an even more intuitive one. The men trusted him. Peter learned their names. He sat with them when time allowed for it. He mourned them when they died.

Yet the maturity brought silence. Peter’s face—once expressive enough that Tony could often scold him for a burst of unbecoming exuberance with their bond completely closed—became quieter. Closed off. His nightmares grew violent enough to reach Tony from across a cruiser. When he woke, he rarely consented to speak about them. On the better days, he’d let Tony sit near him as the adrenaline waned, a soothing tendril of the Force connecting them in a way simple touch never could. On the worse days, he would slam their bond tightly shut and curl his back to his master, silent, trembling, and withdrawn.

—

The fighting never stopped, really. It followed them everywhere.

On his worst days, Tony found himself terrified by the thought that maybe it always would.

—

They were on Coruscant—enjoying a few days of desperately-needed leave—when the news of Padawan Zhaf’s death reached the Temple.

After the funeral, Tony and Peter made their way to the Room of a Thousand Fountains by some unspoken consent. Tony had spent little time there before taking Peter on as his padawan. His master had scorned it and, by consequence, Tony had never been given much time to appreciate its beauty. Yet Peter loved it. Tony had known he and his playmates used to sneak off to spend time amongst the room’s ponds and greenery even before the aftermath of Aleen. Peter always seemed to find his purest connection with the Force in the room—it had been integral to his early meditations as a fresh padawan.

And, through Peter’s eyes, Tony too had grown fond of its wonders.

The room opened up before them in a seemingly endless span of green. Flora from an uncountable span of planets bloomed here together, in harmony. Drongarian snarlvine wound around the trunks of D'larah palms; beds of starflowers butted up against bushels of bull-fern. Tony strolled beside Peter down the meandering paths until his padawan veered suddenly away, guiding them deeper into the plants. Eventually, they stopped on a mossy knoll, sheltered by a few low-sweeping Panopticon willows. A creek babbled nearby, tripping itself over rocks and creeping roots.

Peter sank to the ground, pulling his knees close to his chest. Tony sat beside him, content to rest in the relative calm that surrounded them—such quiet had become a luxury so rare that touching it even briefly felt strangely unreal. In the background, Tony swore he could still hear the whine of ship guns recharging.

“We were crèchemates,” Peter said after a few minutes. “Zhaf was brought to the Temple just two months after I was. We used to play here together, before they went to apprentice with the healers.”

Tony knew this, of course, but he kept that knowledge to himself.

“They were your friend.”

“Yes,” Peter whispered. “They were my friend. We should have become knights together.”

“Yes.”

Peter glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “But… the Force willed it otherwise. That’s what you’re supposed to say.”

“Is it?”

Peter’s face twisted up in confusion. “I… Master, I think I would like a lesson now.”

“And what kind of lesson would you like, Padawan?”

“Don’t you know, Master?”

Tony sighed. Wondered, as he often did, if the Council had been right in their hesitation to sanction his training of Peter. Beyond them, the massive waterfall that served as the center-most jewel of the room crashed against the rocks and pools below it. The sound was steady, strong. Eternal. All the things that Tony—that any living being, even Master Yoda himself—could not be.

No, he thought, surprised by his own conviction. The Council had not been right. The Force willed Peter to me. The Force sees what we cannot.

“Death,” Tony responded, after a moment, “is as senseless as it is inescapable. In your time at the Temple, you have studied many cultures. The breadth of their belief systems is so wide that many can often seem incomparable. And yet they all struggle to make sense of the inevitable moment that our lives—and the lives of those we love—come to an end. Such a need is a commonality among all sentient beings. In the end, we must all adopt a doctrine that gives us some measure of peace. I cannot tell you what that looks like for you, Peter. It’s something you must decide for yourself.”

“I thought you’re meant to lecture me about… controlling my negative feelings,” Peter whispered, so hushed that Tony had to strain to hear him over the roar of the falls.

“Would that help you, do you think?”

“No,” Peter admitted. “But I’m a Jedi. There’s… There are expectations.”

“Yes. And one of those expectations—and, perhaps, one of the most important—is to bring compassion to all things. Sorrow is simply a sign of that compassion. The Jedi have not vanquished emotion, Peter. All of the great masters within this Temple feel. The goal is to acknowledge those emotions, then free them before they can consume you. The doctrine requires only the end result. How you get there, however, is up to you.”

Peter’s face twisted. For the first time since the news of Padawan Zhaf’s death had spread through the Temple, Tony felt Peter reach for their training bond. As the thread ignited, he felt his padawan’s grief—not just for his friend, but for all the Jedi lost to this war, for the clones who had perished under his command, for the millions of innocents suffering beneath the dueling hands of the Republic and Separatist armies. This past-grief mingled painfully with his fears for the future—the inevitable loss of time, of security, and, eventually, the inevitable loss of his master.

“I don’t want to do this,” Peter whispered.

“No one does, I’m afraid.” Tony reached out a hand and laid it on Peter’s shoulder, squeezing softly. “But you have a great privilege, young one. You do not have to do it alone.”

Gratitude drifted between them, warm and accompanied by a contented hum from the Force. They sat together in its tenor for many minutes, Tony half-meditating, half-waiting.

Finally, Peter shifted. The quality of his presence changed—not into the same grief as before, but still something slightly melancholy. Pensive.

“I keep thinking about Master Rafa,” he murmured.

Ah. Padawan Zhaf’s master—a respected healer in the Circle. Tony had met him only a handful of times, and yet…

“As do I,” he answered, bowing his head with a strange pang of sorrow.

“I’ve heard the others whispering… Do you really think he’ll take another padawan? So soon? I mean… would the Council even allow it?”

Tony had heard the same rumors. He’d brought them up to Rhodey, just before the funeral.

“If the Force has guided him to this path, then we must trust it’s the right one.”

Peter smiled, although his eyes stayed solemn. “Master Rhodes said that to you, didn’t he?”

Tony smiled back. “Perhaps.”

Peter laughed. It was a true laugh—the kind that had become so rare since the war began. And yet the flash of joy was as quick as Coruscant’s summer lightning. It quickly collapsed into this older Peter’s default expression: something complex and withdrawn.

“Will you meditate with me, Master?”

The abrupt question both surprised and warmed Tony, somewhere deep in his chest. At this point in his apprenticeship, Peter was perfectly capable of meditating without his guidance. Their joint sessions—once a daily occurrence—had become transient artifacts in their action-packed lives.

It was not the Jedi way to mourn a student’s progress, but Tony did often find himself missing the days when Peter’s lessons stretched out before them endlessly.

“Of course.”

Slipping into a bonded meditation was as easy as following a muscle memory. Peter’s signature was as familiar to him as his own—golden, blue, lapping against Tony’s own in a tide of energy, curiosity, empathy, balance. It was relieving, in a way, to find his padawan’s soul so wholly unchanged by the war, even as his veneer morphed and thickened to compensate. Tony could certainly feel the threads of battle-trauma in Peter’s mind—the lingering grief, ache, exhaustion, and fear. But below it all, he was still very much the same Peter that Tony had stumbled across in the youngling’s dormitory all those years ago.

Connected as they were, Tony could feel Peter’s curiosity rise long before the boy’s voice drifted across the space between them.

“Will you take another padawan?”

Even through the serenity of his meditation, the question startled Tony, although he did his best not to let it show. He kept his eyes closed, forced his breathing to stay even.

“The Council doesn’t permit a Master to take two padawans at once, as you well know. And while your progress has been remarkable, you are still many years away from attempting the Trials.”

“I meant if I die,” Peter clarified, voice still holding an unnatural calm. “If I’m killed in the war, like Zhaf. Will you take another padawan?”

The concept of Peter’s death chilled him, as it always did. As he knew that the concept of his death chilled Peter. And he asked himself, for the first time, if he could sacrifice his padawan. For the Republic; for the Order. He could hear the voices of the grandmasters in his head as he pondered it. There was no such thing as sacrifice. Should the Force call Peter before Tony, he should feel no sorrow. No pain. He should sink himself into the words of the Code—those words that he, Peter, and all Jedi learned to recite from the earliest days in the crèche.

There is no death, there is the Force.

And yet the sorrow remained. Today, it permeated the Temple like a shroud. A padawan was dead—and so many Jedi before them, with so many Jedi to come after them, all at the hands of this blasted war—and the Order pulsed with the open wound.

“No,” he finally said, the truth hanging heavier than the blanket of humidity in the air. “I don’t believe that I would.”

“Attachment is against the Code, Master,” Peter said, voice low. “If the Force wills it…”

“Yes,” Tony answered.

They both knew what he meant, and neither of them spoke again.

—

Peter’s seventeenth Life Day came and passed in the mountain caverns of Eriadu.

Tony found him long after their skirmish was over, curled up near the mouth of the cave that had become their battalion’s hideout. Light from the planet’s single moon cast a grayish glow across his face, making the edges of his brown eyes strangely silver. In front of them, a moderate smog obscured most of the surrounding topography. Not for the first time, Tony worried about the air quality. Many of the clones he passed had chosen to sleep with their helmets on, likely to reap the benefits of their built-in rebreathers. He and Peter lacked that advantage.

“Master,” Peter greeted, eerily still.

“Peter,” Tony answered, infusing his padawan’s name with gentle familiarity. He sank to the ground beside him, biting back a groan. “You needn’t keep watch, you know. Jax has a rotation going.”

“I’m not keeping watch.”

“Alright.” He nudged the boy’s knee. “You’re seventeen today.”

A blossom of affection drifted across their bond. And for the first time since Tony arrived, Peter looked at him.

“You remembered.”

“Of course I did.” He paused. “Is that what’s keeping you up?”

“No.” Peter returned his gaze to the landscape, the hints of a blush rising in his cheeks. “No, I… I just can’t sleep.”

“Then you should meditate.”

“I don’t think I can do that, either.” Peter blew out a breath. “I’m sorry, Master.”

“What for?”

“I think I’ve disappointed you.”

Tony swallowed a laugh at the absurdity of such a statement. His padawan would certainly receive it in the wrong way.

“You haven’t.”

Peter scoffed. “You’re not even going to ask how?”

“I don’t need to.”

Peter curled his legs closer to his chest, as if he could minimize himself to a degree that everyone would forget him—the Council, the Separatists, even Tony himself.

“I’m not sure what this war has made me,” the boy finally murmured. “I… I wanted to be a peacekeeper. But I don’t think that’s what we are, anymore.”

“You’re a Jedi. Throughout history, our Order taken on many roles—but Jedi we remain.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.” Tony hoped that, despite Peter’s shielding, he could sense the honesty in his master’s words. “And you’re going to be a great one.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I do.” I do. I so very do. “I’ve always known that you would become the best of us, Peter. I don’t doubt that any more today than I did at the first moment I met you. In fact, I find myself even more sure of it.”

“Really?” Peter whispered. “Because… I’m afraid I don’t feel much like a Jedi these days, Master.”

Oh, Peter.

“I know,” Tony answered, once the silence became too wide to hold, that familiar sorrow settling somewhere deep in his bones. “Nor do I, young one. Nor do I.”

—

Weeks trickled past them and resolved into months. Planets, missions, relief efforts. The war went badly. They fought on in spite of. They fought on because of.

Tony crouched beside Peter, the leafy undergrowth of Devaron tickling his hand where it rested against his ‘saber. Behind them, half of the 258th waited in various positions of leisure and stress. Nobody spoke. Barely anybody seemed to breathe.

He and Peter had positioned themselves on the crest of a hill. A little under three clicks ahead, a Separatists invasion force had set up base. Battle droid scouts meandered around the perimeter, and although their optics weren’t anywhere near advanced enough to spot the two Jedi pressed against the ridge, they both hugged low to the ground on instinct.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, they waited.

The quiet was pierced when Tony’s comm crackled. Jax’s voice leapt through the device, slightly tinny but unmistakable.

“Nearly ready for you, Sirs. I hope you’re set to give these clankers hell.”

Peter grinned, sharp and dangerous. He leapt to his feet and took shelter a few bounds down their side of the slope. The boy spun his ‘saber between his hands, working the knots out of his shoulders. Tony followed him slowly, resisting the urge to join in his jitters. The battle was close enough that he felt electrified—every sense burning hotter, sharper. Even the Force felt coiled within him, a spring waiting to be freed, and sharing Peter’s own nerves through their bond did little to steady him.

With a deep breath, he held the comm up to his mouth, splaying out a cautionary hand to still his padawan. “We’re just waiting for your signal, Captain.”

A moment later, a flare leapt through the air to their North: Jax’s signal. At once, their company surged forward, Tony and Peter slipping into the lead. Their ‘sabers hummed as one—two streaks of twin blue in Devaron’s mossy dusk.

“You heard Jax,” Peter whispered, a tiny smile curling across his face. These days those expressions never quite seemed to reach his eyes. “Let’s go turn some Seppie droids into spare parts.”

“Violence is not the Jedi way,” Tony lectured softly, on instinct. Robotic.

“I know that, Master,” Peter responded, but the words were hollow.

Three hours later, Tony watched from across a battlefield as Peter sliced down rank after rank of battle droids. He deconstructed them with a brutal efficiency—and despite Tony’s former caution, pride swelled in his chest. Peter’s dance was practiced. It was beautiful. It was wrong. And among the pride mixed the bitterness, and that is what stayed after the blaster fire ceased.

When it was over, Tony helped the surviving troopers strip the dead of weapons and salvageable armor. Peter drifted in and out of his sight, body language pulled down by sorrow and exhaustion. Tony prodded their bond only once, to assure himself that the boy wasn’t hiding any life-threatening injuries. To his surprise, Peter offered no resistance. Tony didn’t sense even a spark of irritation. Peter just tiredly dropped his shields for the few seconds it took for Tony to be satisfied. In return, Tony tentatively offered him the same. They both walked away with the same knowledge, as small a comfort as it was: they ached, they mourned, but another day they would see.

The stripped bodies of the fallen men were gathered together in a wide pile that reached just above Tony’s waist. The remaining troops stood at attention in a jagged throng, backs straight in spite of. Because of.

Captain Jax lit the mound.

Peter stood at Tony’s side while the pyre burned.