Chapter Text
The first thing wrong is the pillow. Soft, by a soldier’s standards, both in texture and volume.
Adrenaline spikes through Rex’s body, tearing him from sleep into full alertness with a painful surge. He takes stock of himself: still fully armored, no new injuries that he can feel, dry mouth. Blasters are—
His blasters are racked. In this windowless little bunk room he doesn’t recognize. His helmet, too, is placed on a side table, the table itself bolted to the wall and floor.
The wall and floor which are humming. He’s on a ship. Just as he was when he fell asleep, except he knows Echo’s little freighter doesn’t have enough rooms for any trooper to bunk alone. Rex remembers turning down a real bunk, in fact, to let his men get some real rack time, and instead choosing a crash seat in which to fall asleep, much to Echo’s particular consternation.
Rex moves as stealthily as he can manage, scooping his bucket and taking both his blasters as he heads for the door. The damn thing is going to whoosh noisily the moment he hits the panel, so he may as well be ready for whatever’s on the other side. Whatever captor was stupid enough to let him keep his armor and weapons is about to have as bad a day as Rex has been having.
He grits his teeth inside his helmet, body tensed as he smacks the door open with the butt of a blaster, and rolls into the darkened hallway outside to land in a crouch, blasters raised to either side of him. Nobody—yet.
“I know why you’re doing this, you know,” a quiet feminine voice says, from behind the door directly in front of Rex. “You can’t keep avoiding him by coming to me.” Whatever conversation this is, it seems to be distracting its participants from hearing anything amiss, like a prisoner’s door opening.
“Who said anything about him?” a deeper voice asks, just as quietly. The cockpit is close, though the shape Rex can make out in the pilot’s seat looks big and furry. What he can see of the windshield is filled with the blue of hyperspace. “I can’t just want to spend time with you?” A beat, and then, “What, you don’t like it?”
A snort. “Sure, Kanan, I like it, but I also like my space. Go cuddle your new roommate if you need it. I’m—”
The door opens just as Rex starts for the cockpit, and he jolts to his feet, swinging both blasters forward.
The human man on the other side of the door only looks surprised for a moment before snarling, “I knew it!”
The Twi’lek behind him looks no less shocked, but she puts a green hand on the man’s shoulder, saying, “Kanan, wait—”
“Stay where you are!” Rex barks. “Where are my men? What have you done with them?”
“I told you clones are crazy, Hera,” Kanan says, teeth bared. “I told you it would be like this! Nobody—”
“Answer me!” Rex only takes a second to switch his blasters to stun; he won’t get anything out of them if he kills them.
The Twi’lek—Hera, presumably—holds up one hand while she yanks at Kanan’s shoulder with the other. As worked up as Kanan is, he moves to one side for her; Rex keeps one blaster trained on him, the other on Hera as she steps forward.
“Rex,” she says, with the gentleness of someone approaching a frightened animal, “what men?”
And that—this is all wrong. “How do you know my name?” he demands, eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.
“Alright, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know I don’t like it,” comes a new voice, a low growl from the direction of the cockpit. A species of alien Rex can’t even recognize—big and furry just as he’d guessed—is aiming a rifle at Rex, frowning down the barrel. “Nothin’ personal, old timer, but I got my loyalties.”
“Okay, knock it off!” Hera snaps. “Everyone stand down!”
“But Hera—” the big alien starts to protest.
“Thank you, Zeb!” Hera says, a clear dismissal. She sighs, and adds, “Let me handle this, okay?”
Rex is clearly not enough of a threat to these people. Nothing is adding up. “I’ll ask one more time,” he says, even as Zeb’s rifle begins to lower. “Where are my men? And why have you captured me?”
”Cap—Rex, nobody’s captured you,” Hera says.
“This is not where I fell asleep!” Rex shouts, taking a single step forward that Kanan very clearly doesn’t appreciate, held back only by Hera’s outstretched arm. “Where am I? Where are my men? Where’s—”
Omega.
“Where’s the kid?” There’s something like panic rising in him now, shortening his breaths. These people don’t look Imperial, but anyone can strike a bargain.
“Ezra’s on a mission right now, Rex,” Hera says, and that only makes things more confusing. Not only does that name mean nothing to him, but Hera says it as if it should. “It’s okay—”
“Omega!” Rex says, jabbing his blaster at her. Zeb raises his rifle again, growling low in his throat as he closes in, and Rex doesn’t have enough blasters, or arms. “You—you sold her to the Empire!”
Hera and Kanan exchange a look that conveys nothing to Rex.
“Enough,” Kanan spits, and raises a hand. There’s an inexplicably familiar heaviness to the air, for only a second, and something hurtles past Rex’s helmet to hit Kanan’s open palm.
“Kanan, no—!”
Blue plasma ignites into the recognizable shape of a lightsaber.
A Jedi.
And for that, Rex will stand down, stepping back as he holsters his blasters with shaking hands.
“Yeah, you know what this is, don’t you, clone?” Kanan says, his sneer cast in the lightsaber’s glow. “I told you he’d go crazy. I told you it was a bad idea to bring him onboard.”
“Kanan, stop it!” Hera says. “Look, he put down his blasters. I said everyone stand down, and I meant it. Zeb, can you please go back to the cockpit and let us work this out? Keep an eye on the instruments?”
Zeb sighs, bracing his rifle over one big, muscular shoulder. “Sure, Hera. But if I hear one blaster bolt—”
“I appreciate it, big guy, I really do.”
“You’re alive,” Rex says to Kanan, as Zeb trundles back into the cockpit. He can’t keep the awe out of his voice; he doesn’t want to.
“Yeah, no thanks to clones like you.” Kanan powers down the lightsaber, though he looks unhappy about it.
Rex swallows. The inhibitor chips are barely common knowledge among clones; natborns who aren’t Ahsoka have no reason to know about them. Without that, Kanan’s venom is entirely fair. “I just want to know,” he says, slowly, carefully, “where I am, and where my men are.”
“Rex, what men?” Hera asks. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know who you mean.”
Fine. If this is what it takes. “Echo,” he begins, swallowing again around his dry tongue. “Gregor. Nem—” No, Nemec is dead. Fireball, too. There’s an entire list of brothers Rex has to mentally cross out all over again, their corpses left behind on Teth. “H-Howzer. The kid—”
“Howzer?” Hera interrupts, with real urgency. “Did you say Howzer?”
Rex nods.
But she only looks confused. “Howzer was—he was my dad’s confidante on Ryloth. But he got arrested by the Empire years ago.” Her frown deepens. “I was still a kid.”
Unless Twi’leks age even faster than clones, that doesn’t track at all.
“And Gregor’s on Seelos,” she adds. “With Wolffe.”
“With—” A wave of vertigo passes over Rex. How could everything have gone so wrong as he slept? How did he sleep through it? “The Empire has Gregor?”
“These clones are fucking senile,” Kanan groans. “What happens the next time he gets confused and grabs his blasters?”
“Rex,” Hera says, and there’s that tone again. The one for cornered beasts. “Can you take off your helmet for us?”
He doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to do anything but be unconscious and hope that when he wakes, he’ll be back in his normal nightmare of a life, one anchored by Echo, and Gregor, and all the good men who have survived his failing leadership thus far.
Shameful tremors run through his hands as he unseals his bucket and pulls it off. Any chance of rescuing his men is worth it.
“Now that doesn’t seem right,” Hera says, but Rex barely hears it, watching the blood drain from Kanan’s face. “I think we should call Ahsoka, don’t you?” she continues, and Kanan nods mutely.
At least that’s one familiar thing in whatever’s happening to Rex now. If they know Ahsoka, well—they probably didn’t kidnap and sell off his men. Probably.
There’s a clatter from the cockpit again. “Zeb, I told you—” Hera starts.
“You’ll want to see this,” Zeb says. “Everyone.” He catches a glimpse of Rex and screws up his face, then swats the air as if swatting away the very idea of thinking about Rex.
Hera nods. “In the lounge, then. Kanan, get Sabine up.” She glances at Rex as Kanan moves, though Kanan still throws a suspicious look over his shoulder. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you. I promise we want to help, but there’s a lot going on. For right now, stick with me, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Years of training are the only thing keeping Rex’s voice and face impassive, but he puts his helmet back on anyway to give at least his face a break.
“Sabine” turns out to be a teenager with dyed hair, possibly Mandalorian if her armor means anything. With all the paint on it, though, it might not mean a thing. Kanan takes the furthest seat from the door next to Sabine, Hera sliding in on her other side. Zeb stays standing, despite the available seating, and an astromech that’s seen better days rolls up to round out the little troupe.
Rex stands back.
The lounge’s table is in fact a holotable, playing a cutoff distress call. Phoenix Home to Ghost! We’ve been pulled out of hyperspace! The Empire—
If nothing else, the—presumably—Ghost squad don’t spend much time arguing the finer details. Sabine reveals herself as ex-Imperial, which makes Rex twitch, but this doesn’t seem to be news to anyone else, and Rex doesn’t believe for a second that any Imperial would let a Jedi like Kanan walk free.
“Alright everybody,” Kanan says, resolutely not looking at Rex as he stands. “Gear up. We’re going out there.”
Hera, for her part, actively stares at Rex for a hot second before she’s up, too, pulling Kanan back by the shoulder. “Actually, I’ve got a better idea.” She looks at Rex again, gesturing him over; Rex obeys. There’s no other option.
“Hera, no.” Kanan looks at Rex with blatant disgust.
“You haven’t even heard my idea yet!”
“I already know it’s bad if you’re asking—” Kanan gestures wildly at Rex, ”—him to be part of it!”
“Don’t be an ass, Kanan.” Hera reaches up to flick Kanan’s ear, and he winces. She turns to Rex. “Look, um, I know this is confusing for all of us. But one of our own is aboard that Imperial ship.” Her expression softens minutely. “I know it’s asking a lot, but—”
Rex wants to grab her by the collar and shake answers out of her. Rex wants to lie down and pretend none of this is happening. “If it hurts the Empire, you don’t even need to ask,” his mouth says, independently of his wants. “What do you need?”
“No. No. Uh-uh.” Kanan shakes his head. “If you want to send me off on some stealth mission, then at least pick someone from, you know, our actual crew? Sabine, or Zeb! Not whoever this guy is.”
“I see Kanan’s already going senile,” Sabine snorts.
“Rex,” Rex clarifies. “My name is Rex.” They’d seemed to know it so well earlier, after all.
“Okay, sure, and I’m Governor Tarkin,” Kanan snaps. “I don’t know what you are.”
“Alright, stop it! I’m the captain,” Hera says, “and what I say goes. As far as any of us can tell, that’s Rex, so let’s stick with that, okay? So it’s gonna be you and Rex going to that system. Find that ship, and I bet you find Ezra and the others.”
“I don’t like this,” Kanan mutters, but Hera steps in close to him, laying a gentle hand along his jaw.
“I know. Everything’s weird right now. But I’m going to contact Ahsoka on our way to the rendezvous, and then you’re going to rescue Ezra, and we’re going to work this out. Everything will be fine. Trust me?”
Kanan sighs before nodding. “Yeah.”
“Whatever’s going on with Rex, I don’t doubt he has the military experience that will be invaluable in getting you in and out of there.” She steps back, twining her fingers with Kanan’s just long enough to give his hand a squeeze. “And of anyone else here, he can impersonate a stormtrooper best.”
“Right,” Kanan chuckles mirthlessly, “that’s because he is a stormtrooper.”
Up till now Rex has been staying out of it. If helping with a mission ingratiates him with his not-captors and gets him to his men faster, so be it. He’s at their mercy no matter what. “I am a clone trooper,” Rex says, slipping into the voice he used to use when correcting shinies. “Even the shiniest trooper fresh off Kamino was a better soldier than any Stormtrooper.” He spits the term like a slur.
“Right.” Kanan’s eyes narrow. “Good soldiers, right? They follow orders.”
“I wish you would,” Hera tells Kanan, oblivious to Rex freezing behind her. “Kanan, I sent Ezra. This is the only way.”
“Alright.” Kanan takes both of her hands, squeezing back. “We’ll get ‘em back. All of them.”
Hera heads to the cockpit, the rest of her crew trailing behind her. Zeb doesn’t spare him another look, and the droid chatters something Rex doesn’t quite catch, but Kanan definitely shoulder-checks him in passing. Sabine brings up the rear, regarding Rex with a tilted head. “You don’t usually wear your helmet inside the Ghost.”
Add that statement to the pile of confusion Rex has been amassing. He shrugs noncommittally, and she snorts before following Kanan.
Hera brings the ship out of hyperspace, quick to land before Rex can even try to clock the planet. She hands out rapid fire orders to Zeb and Sabine, who race off the ship as soon as she finishes speaking. Hera directs Rex to wait in the cargo bay below.
“I don’t know how you’re doing this,” Kanan says as he enters the cargo bay. He comes to a stuttering halt just as the doors close behind him, and when Rex looks up Kanan’s eyes are trained on the blaster Rex is checking over. If Rex knew this Kanan at all, he might say it’s raw fear he sees in Kanan’s expression, however fleeting.
“Doing what,” Rex asks, without inflection. He holsters the blaster, pulling out the other to examine.
Kanan shakes his head, pulling himself out of his trance, and gestures as he approaches. “This. This whole—getting younger thing. Or whatever this is.”
“Uh huh.” Rex’s blasters have survived whatever trip landed him here, anyway. He chooses, in that moment, to actively take nothing these people say to heart. Not one word he’s heard since waking up has aligned with Rex’s understanding of the world, and the sooner he accepts that, the sooner he survives this and moves on.
“Don’t ignore me.” Kanan pulls up next to him. “And take off your helmet.”
“Think it’s best I don’t. Not right before a mission.” Not like Kanan had reacted well to Rex’s face before anyway. He can’t imagine a clone-hating Jedi wants to see his face, not really.
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Zeb’s voice says, right before Zeb himself climbs the ramp and tosses two barely-conscious stormtroopers at Rex and Kanan’s feet. “Here are your disguises. Went outta my way knocking these two particular buckets together, so don’t be a primadonna about it. Either of you,” Zeb adds, with a particular heat aimed at Kanan.
Rex kneels to inspect the stormtrooper in front of him. He’s never had a chance to look at TK armor up close like this; he can’t say he’s impressed. Even the most cut-corner Phase II armor that went out with the rush order brothers is made better than this garbage. For all its brute strength, the Empire sure cheaped out on the brutes.
The stormtrooper groans. Rex stands, pulls a blaster, and hits both troopers with a stun round.
“Now—hey!” Zeb protests. “What is this, a critique of my work? I got ’em good ’n’ dizzy!”
“Never hurts to be sure,” Rex says, before actually looking at Zeb. “You said your name is Zeb?”
The question clearly unbalances Zeb, but he clears his throat and nods anyway. “That’s right.”
“You’ll keep my armor safe?”
“I, uh… Sure, yeah. We’ll stick it in your bunk.” Probably the room Rex woke up in, then. Zeb clears his throat again, passing between Rex and Kanan to head back up to the main cabin. “You boys have fun, eh? Don’t kill each other, and bust some bucketheads for me.”
Despite himself, Kanan laughs, promising Zeb he’ll bust as many as he can. Rex kneels again, getting to work on pulling off one of the stormtroopers’ armor in silence.
“It’s creepy, you know,” Kanan says, as he starts shucking the other stormtrooper. “Keeping your helmet on for this.”
Rex huffs, unsealing his helmet and placing it next to him with an assertive thunk. “Better?”
“You’re weirdly easier to deal with when you’re old, you know that?”
“Sure.” Whatever that means. The man under the stormtrooper helmet is a young natborn human, pale skinned with a regulation haircut. Rex only wonders for a moment what Tarkin offered this man to help replace a military trained from decanting to be the ultimate fighting force. Then he pulls off the man’s cuirass.
Kanan at least accepts the silence as they get into their disguises. Switching from his own customized blend of Phase I and Phase II clone trooper armor into the TK armor feels wrong, and not just because the armor isn’t molded to his body shape, or because all of it feels too lightweight to be worth a damn.
But this is the only way forward. Rex picks up the helmet—and he wonders what the turnover rate in stormtroopers must be, for the helmet to have already been redesigned so quickly—and slots it on.
Nausea. He will not vomit in a stranger’s helmet, even an enemy stranger, but the HUD is all wrong, something inside flickering at a dizzying speed. Whether that’s intentional or a consequence of hard impact with another helmet is impossible to say; he can’t imagine hitting even a stationary target while wearing this thing. He pulls it off almost instantly, inhaling deep lungfuls to quell the lingering queasiness.
“Perfect fit,” Kanan snorts, looking Rex up and down. Rex’s guilt—flashes of the 332nd’s obsession with executing Ahsoka—wars with his low patience for attitude, just long enough to fizzle each other out.
“Think these were made more for natties like you, actually,” Rex says, and turns to face the wall. He can’t bear to put on that fucking helmet for a second longer than he has to, but the wall is better than looking at Kanan.
“Natties?” Kanan echoes, but Rex doesn’t engage. He doesn’t move at all, in fact, until Hera beckons them out into the hangar.
Hera meets them at the bottom of the ramp, trailed by a pair of humans in orange flight suits, and helmets with insignia Rex doesn’t recognize. “Kanan, Rex,” she says, nodding at each of them. “Once you’re in, signal me, and I’ll come in with Phoenix Squadron to blast you all out.”
“Phoenix Squadron” sounds a lot more like organized military structure than a handful of spacers with a reasonable grudge against the Empire. Rex’s mental notes have been slapdash at best since waking up, but this much he intentionally jots down.
“How are we getting in, anyway?” Kanan asks, which is a hell of a question for him to be asking when he’d been the one to mobilize in the aftermath of the distress call.
Hydraulics hiss behind them as the hangar opens up for another ship, and an Imperial Lambda-class shuttle drops in. Sabine the teenager hits them with a thumbs up from the cockpit; that explains what her orders must have been.
“How is it the Empire lets us keep stealing these things?” Kanan asks, more to Hera than to anyone else. Another one for the mental notepad; maybe these people are some kind of insurgent cell. He almost considers asking if they know Saw Gerrera.
“I thought Rex was going with you,” Sabine says somewhere behind Rex as he climbs the ramp. Whatever Kanan says in response, Rex doesn’t catch it as he heads into the cockpit—and pauses, inspecting the…art he finds on the back wall. The figure on the right is definitely Kanan, looking surprisingly happy as he brandishes his lightsaber, but the figure on the left leaves him scratching his head. An old man with a bushy beard and a bald head defends Kanan, wielding two DC-17s, and his portly little body is decorated in white armor with splashes of what almost looks like 501st blue.
He considers, as Kanan joins him in the cockpit, asking who the hell that’s supposed to be. Then again, he hasn’t liked much of what Kanan’s had to say to him so far, even setting aside the unintelligible parts. Kanan glances at the painting anyway, taking his seat in the pilot’s chair.
“I don’t know why she does that,” he mutters, turning to glare at it once they hit hyperspace.
“She?” Rex asks, despite himself. “The Mandalorian girl?”
“Will you knock that off?” Kanan says, turning his glare on Rex. “Sabine. You know her name. I don’t know what kind of weird clone shit is going on with you, but you’re still Rex, aren’t you?”
He shouldn’t have engaged. Rex sighs. “Yes. Sabine.” I don’t know any of you people, and far be it from a Jedi to call anyone weird, he doesn’t say. Generals Skywalker and Kenobi had done all sorts of mind-boggling things during the war, and treated it as natural as breathing.
There’s a big, awkward pause, Kanan clearly expecting Rex to say more. When he doesn’t, Kanan clears his throat and says, “Once we board this thing, Chopper will plug in, find out where they have our people, and we get them out of there.” That must be the shambling astromech that had followed them into the shuttle, its orange dome swapped for something vaguely Imperial-looking. He’ll have to leave it at a guess, because if Kanan snaps at him one more time for not knowing the names of a pack of strangers, he might just pop him one.
“Alright.” Rex should leave it there. “And the weapon? The one snatching ships out of hyperspace?”
“I mean, yeah, I don’t like it either. Hard to have a rebellion if the Empire can intercept us any time, any place. But this is a rescue mission, first and foremost.”
He gets the feeling that if he asks about the rebellion, it’ll be more of the same. “Look,” Rex begins, hoping he won’t regret this. “It’s clear that you seem to know who I am, or at least my name. But me? I’ve never met you before today. Any of you. So can I ask questions without you biting my head off?”
Kanan frowns, twisting in his seat as he considers Rex. “You really don’t know me, huh?”
“Hand to Prime. I don’t.”
The other man snorts, eyes suddenly unfocused as if lost in a memory. What little levity Kanan might have found in that memory fades quickly, though, replaced by a bitter glassiness.
“Something funny?”
“No. Not really.” Kanan pushes a hand over his hairline, smoothing his already smooth hair. “Just—someone I used to know said that a lot.”
His CC, Rex is willing to bet. He wishes he could ask what battalion Kanan had led, but that’s one sleeping strill he’s happy to let lie.
“We’re coming up on Ezra’s last known location,” Kanan says, shaking off the gloom as he reaches to exit hyperspace. “Here’s hoping we find—oh.”
Reality snaps back into place in the windshield, and right now reality includes a massive starship, bigger than any Republic flagship he’s ever seen. The shuttle’s comms flash, and an annoyed voice says, «Interdictor to Shuttle S257, this is a restricted area.»
Military experience, Kanan mouths at Rex. Oh. Is this why Hera had asked him to take this mission?
“This is Shuttle S257 to Interdictor, good copy, sir,” Rex says. He pictures reporting to fussbucket Yularen, and takes a deep breath. “We’re experiencing code 157, repeat, code 157, requesting emergency permission to board.”
«S257, you are not cleared. This is a 675 test zone and off-limits to you.»
“Acknowledged, sir,” Rex tries again, “but we are on the verge of code 3376. Requesting emergency permission to board, urgently, before—” Ugh, he can picture Yularen’s upper lip curling. “Before we have a 3376 off your starboard side, Interdictor.”
A short pause, and then, «Interdictor to Shuttle S257, requesting your emergency access code.»
“Copy that.” Rex digs deep, falling into something close to a trance as he rattles off a long protocol code. Kanan seems to be talking to the droid, but he’s barely aware of that.
«Stand by for code verification.»
“Why the hell do you know these codes, anyway?” Kanan asks quietly, leaning away from the comms.
“Surprised they still work,” Rex murmurs, watching the comms with undue focus. “Cody’d have a fucking laugh about it.”
“Cody?”
He still holds out hope that Cody is alive, somewhere. Unable to contact Rex, or unwilling—it doesn’t matter, so long as he keeps breathing, wherever he is. Crosshair had told him Cody had been reported AWOL by the Empire, a fact Rex had thanked him for and promptly thrown out as tainted information.
But Echo had been alive, hadn’t he? And Cody is just as hardy.
Belatedly, he remembers Kanan asked him a question. “The GAR had some bare bones protocols when we left Kamino, but Cody and I—well, we filled in a lot of those gaps.” He rolls his eyes just thinking of the Jedi-shaped reasons they’d even had to make some of those protocols. “Our generals got into situations no trainer on Kamino could have ever predicted.”
“Huh.”
Rex waits for Kanan to say something acerbic. Instead, the comms come alive again. «Interdictor to Shuttle S257, you are clear on heading 1599 to Hangar 11.»
“Copy that, sir, and thank you.” The comms go dead, and Rex huffs in relief. “Imperial bastard.”
Kanan shoots him an indecipherable look, and brings them in toward the specified hangar.
They’re silent as they helmet up and head down the ramp. Rex is a taut string, fighting his urge to either start blasting or hug the wall and find a stealthier route in. He had never been much for subterfuge, as had been made clear to him on Zygerria. The HUD in the TK helmet is still fritzing, but Kanan walks in a straight line; maybe Rex is unlucky enough to have the only helmet of the two to be damaged. Kanan also walks like a civilian, which is a bigger problem.
“Command deck says you need to make your repairs and depart,” one of the stormtroopers guarding the nearest door says. Rex opens his mouth before he’s even sure what he’ll say—and Kanan steps forward, holding up a hand in a very familiar gesture.
The pair of troopers agree that the two in front of them need to get to maintenance, and that they can go on their way. It feels so—open, to just use a Jedi mind trick like that aboard an Imperial vessel, with Order 66 still only a year or so back. But there are no other troopers nearby, the rest of them flitting around the hangar while paying no mind to more of their own talking to each other by the door.
If General Skywalker were still alive, he’d probably be as fearless. More, really; he probably would have entered the hangar with his lightsaber already drawn and swinging. He would have brute-forced his way to the command deck and—
Well. He would have been efficient, by at least one definition of the word.
The squat little astromech finds out that this “Ezra” is in the process of being transferred to a secure cell. Kanan worries that the Empire “knows who he is,” something Rex is probably meant to understand before Kanan remembers Rex is a stranger. Obviously, he doesn’t put it past the Empire to criminalize children, or hunt them for their own ends, but Kanan talks about Ezra like he’s a notorious bounty hunter.
Rex follows Kanan into a turbolift, and thinks only to stand at attention before Kanan elbows him. “Push the button!” he hisses.
“What—which button?” Rex stares at the array; this Interdictor has more levels than two Venators put together.
“I don’t know, pick one! Hurry!”
“What, can’t sense the right button in the Force?” Rex snorts, and Kanan seems to inflate like an angry blowfish before a natborn officer steps into the tiny lift with them, and they both shut up.
The officer doesn’t even greet them, presenting them with his back as soon as he’s aboard. “You have forgotten to press a button, troopers,” the officer remarks, throwing an icy glance over his shoulder at Rex. “What is your destination?”
“Detention block, sir,” Rex answers, hoping Kanan lets him take this one.
The officer scoffs as he presses two buttons. “I don’t see why it takes so many soldiers to move a boy. I hope we are not left short-staffed in other areas of the ship because of this.”
“No, sir, I don’t believe we will be.” Privately, Rex can’t believe he’s agreeing with an Imperial—how many troopers are being rerouted to escort this Ezra kid that an officer would comment on it? “Shouldn’t take long, sir.”
“I should hope not.” The officer rolls his eyes as the turbolift comes to a stop. The door opens, and much like his arrival, he leaves without any acknowledgment of the troopers behind him.
“You’re very comfortable doing that, you know,” Kanan says, once they’re alone in the lift.
“Doing what?”
“Talking with Imps. Telling them what they expect to hear.”
Rex pauses. He’s pretty sure what Kanan is trying to imply, again, and it’s already gotten old. “Oh, no, it’s not that he’s Imperial. It’s that he’s a natborn. All natborn officers are the same.” The doors open, and Rex marches out before Kanan can respond. “Forward march, then.”
“Wait—do you hear that?” Kanan says, one step out of the lift.
Blaster fire. Kanan takes off without another word, his long legs carrying him nearly all the way to the corner before Rex has even registered he’s gone. “For fuck’s sake,” Rex grumbles, launching himself after the Jedi. He supposes one Jedi general is a lot like the next when it comes to rushing headlong into danger.
Kanan takes the corner—and drops, as the glow of a stun blast flashes across his armor. Rex flattens his back to the wall, listening hard for enemy movement. The nausea is from the flickering HUD is only made worse by this, somehow, and Rex gamely resists the urge to rip the helmet off.
Chopper feels no such caution, and rolls right into the line of fire, blatting smugly that Rex is a scared little pit droid.
“Chopper?” a young voice calls out. Chopper burbles something else, and the same voice gasps, “Oh, oh no…”
Well, maybe Rex is a scared little pit droid, then. He edges out from behind the corner, hands up and rifle dangling from his thumb. “Kid?” he asks, which is as accurate a moniker as any.
“Oh, shit,” the kid in question says, Kanan’s helmet still in his hands. “Rex?”
“Heard you were being transferred,” Rex says, hoping he can keep up this little charade just long enough to get the three of them off this ship. Here’s yet another person who knows his name without even seeing his face, and it’ll only slow the rescue effort to have to muddle through another round of I don’t know who the kark you people are. “See you handled it yourself.”
“What happened?” Kanan groans, sitting upright with effort.
“Uh, well, uh,” Ezra says, looking at Rex as if for backup. He’s a lot like Commander Tano in her first months in the war, in that way. Rex shakes his head.
“Kid saw a stormtrooper advancing on him and fired,” he says, as Kanan hauls himself to his feet. “As he ought to.” He turns to Ezra. “Free advice—don’t waste stun blasts on stormtroopers. Shoot to kill, and save the stunners for brothers.”
“What—kill?” Kanan sputters.
“What brothers?” Ezra asks, at the same time.
“Why would he think a stormtrooper was you?” Rex says, because Ezra’s question is a lot more dizzying to address. “You saying you wouldn’t fire on a stormtrooper? Or—or stab one, I guess?” he adds, mimicking swinging around a lightsaber.
“No! I mean—I don’t know, I—”
“Okay, how about we have this conversation later?” Ezra interrupts, a strained note riding his voice. “We gotta find Sato and sabotage this ship. They have this gravity weapon thing, that—” He quirks his brow, mostly at Kanan and his flat expression. “You know all this.”
“Did you have a plan in mind?” Kanan asks.
“Well, we should probably split up,” Ezra says, mouth set with determination. “I’ll take Chopper, and he can get me to the reactor that powers this thing. You two bust out Sato.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We are not splitting up,” Kanan says, gesturing down the hall they came from. “Let's get Sato and get out of here.”
“We can’t let them keep this weapon!” Ezra bullies into Kanan’s space, despite how much height the other has on him, and glares. “We have to destroy the whole ship, it can’t be salvageable!”
“We don’t have time for this. You think there’s not a prisoner escape alarm going off right now? We’re about to be drowning in stormtroopers.”
“What does that matter if the Empire can just—” Ezra grabs violently at the air, “—snatch our ships out of hyperspace? We’ll never be safe, and the Rebellion will be dead in the water in less than a year!”
“We can’t afford to separate! If I show up back on the Ghost without you—”
“What do you mean, if you show up back on the Ghost?” Ezra shoots Rex a bewildered look. “Rex, are you going somewhere?”
Rex knows where he’d like to go, but that option isn’t on the table yet. “Not planning on it just yet,” he says, cocking his head. The HUD flashes in protest; this bucket really is karked.
“Then say something! Back me up!”
“Parameters of the mission put extraction first,” Rex says. Just as Kanan and Ezra both open their mouths, each visibly relaxing and tensing respectively, he adds, “But the kid is right. If you have the chance to destroy an Imperial weapon this powerful, it’s dangerous to do anything else.”
“So—so what, risk leaving him behind?” Kanan yells. “No! We can come back, we can find this ship again, we can—”
“No, you can’t, and you know you can’t. If you’re lucky enough to see this blasted ship again, it’ll be because they found you, and you can bet it’ll be out of testing phase by then.”
“Kanan!” Ezra says, throwing up his hands in desperation. “Part of the reason I took this mission was to get a break from—” and the kid shoves his way between them, “—this!” He scowls at them both, Chopper already rolling ahead of them. “Chopper and I will meet you at Sato’s ship.” No salute, no goodbye; Ezra and the droid just disappear into another branch of the star destroyer’s maze of halls.
“Well, that was all Hera,” Kanan mutters, before jamming his helmet back on. “Let’s go.”
Kanan is right, of course, that the word of Ezra’s escape is already sweeping across the comms of every stormtrooper aboard. Which means it’s also not long before they start coming across clumps of them. “Is this another ‘military experience’ moment?” Rex asks under his breath.
“No, we don’t have time for more of your codes and protocols.” One of the stormtroopers ahead wears a red pauldron, holding up a hand as he approaches them. A red pauldron, when almost every clone still serving the Empire had been forced to strip their paint.
“Direct approach, then?” Rex asks, hands shifting on his rifle.
“That’s the one.” Kanan raises his rifle and fires point blank into the stormtrooper officer’s cuirass. It’s a short firefight; Rex marvels at how well the stormtroopers can miss when firing from only a couple meters away. Not that he’s not having trouble, but he’s happy to blame a broken bucket.
“Never was much for stealth,” Rex comments as he hops over the stormtroopers. Maybe he ought to feel something, stepping over men in their death throes. But they chose to be soldiers.
“I mean, it’s not like they don’t know we’re here,” Kanan says. “Let’s keep moving.”
Truthfully, it feels like pulling on an old set of blacks, battling their way to the other end of the detention block. Enemies appear, enemies get put down. Advance. Enemies appear, enemies get put down. Advance. Frankly, Rex finds the TK troopers a lesser threat than Seppie clankers; at least the droids had huge numbers and an inexorable march on their side. These stormtroopers are scattered in their formations, with no real communication between each other that Rex can spot.
“Getting closer,” Kanan huffs, as they clear the latest squad. “Almost there, I think.”
“You think?” Rex asks, even as he scans the area for—
There’s a terminal in this hall. Rex is moving before he even realizes it.
“Rex!” Kanan hisses. “What are you doing?”
What he wouldn’t do to have Echo with him right now. Not just to scomp into this terminal and copy data from the ship’s servers, of course, but there’s no disagreeing that Echo would make quick work of this. Rex wakes the terminal; no password prompt. Which means there probably won’t be much available, but if he doesn’t try he’ll never forgive himself.
“Rex! Knock it off, we have to go!”
“Just let me…” Rex trails off, digging through the available files. It can’t be too locked down, not on the Empire’s very own star destroyer, right?
> TANTISS he types.
Nothing. Well, he had to try.
> HEMLOCK
Denied again.
“We don’t have time for this,” Kanan growls. Rex is distantly aware of the sound of many boots, growing louder by the second. “If you don’t get moving, I’m going to leave you here.”
> ADVANCED SCIENCE DIVISION
> OMEGA
Denied. Denied.
“Rex!”
> CC-2224
And Rex knows that one is desperate, selfish.
No results.
There’s nothing. He passed by files of full trooper rosters, ship schematics, all sorts of sensitive data an insurgent ought not be able to access, but there is nothing about even one clone.
> CT-7567
One file. A degraded holo accompanies it, of Rex in his Phase I armor. His designation at the top, but no name; he expected that much. Status: AWOL.
Wolffe gave him up. Rex’s head feels squeezed, his limbs heavy. He should have known. He should have—should have kidnapped Wolffe, stunned the clones under his command and taken them too, all while fighting off the natborn troopers—
It would have gotten the last remnants of his men killed. This was the only way it was ever going to work out.
A hand claps Rex’s shoulder, and he jolts, reaching for a deecee at his hip that isn’t there. “Rex, wake up!” Kanan bellows, centimeters from his face. “We’ve got company!”
It makes him woozy just turning his head to look at the fresh cadre of troopers gathering at the other end of the corridor, rifles raised. A bolt flies past Rex, clipping the filter on his helmet, and the HUD freaks out in response, almost blinding him.
He tears the helmet from his head with a snarl, and hurls it straight at the trooper who shot at him. It hits home, cracking the stormtrooper’s visor as he collapses. “Couldn’t see in that thing,” Rex says. With his vision clear and riding a wave of adrenaline, Rex fires shot after perfect shot, eliminating every stormtrooper in sight within seconds.
And a few seconds after that, Rex’s hearing normalizes, and he realizes he’s panting. Despite the accuracy of all his shots, his arms are trembling in the aftermath.
“How—” Rex’s mouth is bone-dry, his tongue sticky. Licking his lips does little to alleviate it. “How close are we?”
Kanan stands at a distance, as still as a rabbit under a predator’s eye. Hadn’t he just been right behind him, close enough to touch?
“Kanan. Sato’s cell.”
Kanan unfreezes, though there’s still a tension in his limbs. “Next corner, should be.”
“Then let’s go.”
All of Kanan’s commentary and ribbing falls away, and they move in silence. Rex should have taken a helmet from one of the fallen stormtroopers, his face naked and very clearly a clone’s, but Kanan was right; it’s not like their presence is a secret. The sheer amount of hostile stormtroopers they’ve encountered proves that much.
Naturally, there’s still one more round of whack-a-trooper to play when they reach the cell that Kanan says holds this Sato character. Rex takes point without a word, Kanan slipping by him to shoot the door controls open. This time, it seems like the TKs are spawning into being right around the far corner, another trooper appearing every time Rex shoots one down.
When Kanan returns, his helmet is gone and his rifle is in the hands of the natborn behind him. That must be Sato. “We don’t have time for this,” Kanan says, putting his hand on Rex’s shoulder without looking at him. “I’ll pull, you fire.”
“Sounds like something my General would have done, too,” Rex says, a flutter of nostalgia in his chest. General Skywalker liked making games of destroying enemies, and he liked involving Rex in those games, especially early on in the war.
“Not a general,” Kanan says, and raises a hand. Stormtroopers start sliding out from behind the corner, pulled right off their feet as an invisible hand yanks them by the ankles. They make for easy targets, even as they flail in confusion.
There’s a neat pile of troopers by the time Kanan confirms in the Force that there’s no more lying in wait. The natborns that had been in the cell with Sato collect rifles from said pile, and Kanan runs ahead to lead the way. Back to the hangar, presumably.
Rex shakes his head, and follows swiftly.
The thing about stormtroopers is that natborns, even limited to natborn humans as all TK troopers seem to be, number so many more than the clone trooper population at its peak. A seemingly bottomless well from which the Empire can recruit. That’s how it feels, anyway, as stormtroopers start swarming them in larger and larger numbers. Even with the help of the armed prisoners running with them, math is simply on the Empire’s side.
“If we don’t get these people out of here, this won’t be much of a rescue op,” Rex grunts, ducking a wide-flying rifle bolt and shooting back a much more accurate one of his own. Dropping one stormtrooper feels like a wasted effort at this point, each fallen trooper replaced in twos and threes.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Kanan grunts right back. All stealth is out the window, his lightsaber lit and parrying blasterfire right back at their shooters.
“You’re trying to take all these troopers out, but we need to keep moving!” Rex shoots another trooper down. For all that Crosshair is a strange, sad little shadow of the smirking commando he’d met on Anaxes, he wishes he had him here now, too. A few of his reflector disks and a single shot would have wiped this corridor of enemy activity in heartbeat and a half. “Give me your rifle.”
“You have a rifle,” Kanan points out.
“Thanks for letting me know,” Rex says, rolling his eyes. “And you have a lightsaber. Just hand me the damn rifle, will you?”
“Just don’t shoot me with it,” Kanan says, tossing him the gun. It’s not quite apparent whether he’s joking or not, but Rex has no time to dwell on it. The rifles are definitely meant to be two handed weapons, but they’re light, and not too long. With a blaster in each hand, Rex feels more in tune with himself.
And he sweeps the corridor. Kanan keeps his distance as Rex carves the way through the incoming stormtroopers, gaining them ground as they close in on the hangar.
Ezra joins them, wielding his own blue lightsaber, and stops short when he catches sight of Rex. “Kanan, who—?”
“No time,” Kanan says, nodding toward the knot of ex-prisoners up ahead, shooting at the stormtroopers up ahead while Rex takes out the ones following them. “Come on, let’s get the rest of the way through.”
By the time Rex catches up, Ezra and Kanan have cleared a good half of the rest of the way back to the hangar. They look well synced, Master and Padawan. It’s—Rex is glad, at any rate, that the Empire hasn’t managed to squash that particular miracle of the universe. Sato and his crew follow in their wake, and Rex with them.
It feels too easy, somehow. A little corvette waits for them, Sato’s crew slotting into their places, and they leave the Interdictor behind. There’s an effort, on the Interdictor’s part, to draw them back in with the gravity well, but it doesn’t last. The well draws in every Imperial ship nearby at a destructive speed, long before the corvette even comes close. By the time they jump to hyperspace, the massive star destroyer is already partially imploded.
Ezra stares at Rex while Sato thanks the three of them for saving his life and the lives of his men. Kanan accepts the thanks on all their behalfs, an even blend of awkward spacer and stoic Jedi. It’s only once Sato settles back into command of his ship, leaving the three of them to their devices, that Ezra finally speaks up.
“Where’s Rex?” he asks, despite looking Rex dead in the eye.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rex asks, too, looking at Kanan in turn.
“Alright.” Kanan throws his hands up. “Why don’t we clear this up right now, huh? Now that there’s no immediate emergency.”
“Sure.” Rex leans against the wall, arms crossed. “I’d love to clear it up. Why do you all talk to me like you know me?”
“I don’t know you,” Ezra huffs. “I thought Rex was on this mission with Kanan. Who’re you?”
“I’m Rex, and I’ve never met you before today.” Rex pinches the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t clearing up anything.”
“How are you Rex? Rex is… He’s old.” Ezra looks Rex up and down. “And, uh, bigger than you.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying to me.” The headache that’s setting in is probably more to do with the awful broken HUD in the stormtrooper helmet, but this is not helping in the least. He glances at Kanan. “And you? Anything else confusing you want to say?”
Kanan considers him with narrowed eyes, one finger resting against his chin. “How old are you, Rex?"
“What?”
Kanan only looks at him expectantly.
“Well, I’m a generation one, so…” Rex calculates; he doesn’t usually think of his age in years standard. “Fourteen. Why?”
The two Jedi only look at each other, though Rex has seen too many Master-Padawan duos communicating through the Force to trust they aren’t doing the same. “What?” he prompts.
“Okay,” Kanan says, taking a deep breath. “How long has the Empire been around?”
He can’t follow where this might go, and he frowns with suspicion before answering anyway. “Less than two years.”
“Wait,” Ezra says, with—excitement?—in his voice. Why does he sound excited? “No way. No way.”
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Kanan says, holding up a hand, but he doesn’t sound very convincing. “Not until—”
“Are you kidding? There’s a perfect conclusion just waiting for me to jump to it!” Ezra grins as he gestures toward Rex. “This is Rex from the past!”