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"Some nights I stay up cashin' in my bad luck;
Some nights I call it a draw."
—"Some Nights"; Fun.
"Play along."
A breath of a whisper, somehow cool against the shell of his ear even in the oppressive heat of the cantina.
The place was jammed full, the whole of it reeking with the local's preferred smoky-sweet vice. The stench—noxious weed and sweat and too much alcohol—made his head spin.
Maybe that's how she got so close.
Before his body could react, one slender finger brushed his lips and Rex felt the voice again. "Shhh. Trust me?"
He froze as adrenaline iced through—then burned—his veins, needle-sharp and—
Fek. No.
He could feel her, settling closer against his armor, perhaps emboldened by the fact that he hadn't turned and blown her brains out. Part of his body rebelled against the reality of a slender hand now touching his neck, rough calluses skittering along the sweat-slick skin to the tell-tale pounding of his pulse.
She was dead.
She had to be dead.
But he would never, ever forget that voice.
"Ah—"
"No," she whispered, even as her finger found his lips again.
He turned his head and she was near enough to smell, to see, to taste—vibrant, vivid, alive. But a completely different color: red, with white lines that somehow changed the shape of her facial bones and made her completely unrecognizable. Even her eyes seemed...different. "Why are you here?"
Humor flashed bright across her face before she tucked herself close to his ear again, so that he could only see the luminous blue and white of her montrals.
Blue and white. Like a talisman of what had been his life as a soldier.
He couldn't even go back to that fragment of himself if he wanted; it was all now a curse, drenched by the blood of those he'd sworn to serve.
That night would burn in his mind until some lucky chakaar finally offed him.
"To have a good time," she murmured. "Just like you."
He'd almost forgotten his own question. His body was too stunned to do more than clench at the drink in front of him and his mind too busy shutting out the memories her voice brought. "Won't find anything like that here."
"Mmm. Maybe a private conversation?" There was a lilt even to her whisper. He remembered that best, from before. Her laugh, hiding beneath her words.
His own laugh was short and harsh, mockery of what had been. He pulled her around, one gloved hand sliding under a heavy lek and to her neck. He felt her pulse, now, steady as a Destroyer's thrumming engines.
He hovered over her mouth, close enough to feel each soft brush of air. She was alive. Alive and here.
But it didn't matter.
"Go."
Her eyes held an incalculable number of nanosecond decisions, an intensity only rivaled by her former Master.
Hells. Did she know?
Of course she did. She had to.
"You have to leave." He said the words against her lips, close enough that his mouth moved over hers. It might've been erotic in another situation, but the surge of adrenaline had hardened under the sheer, brutal pain of reality, not twenty steps away through the cantina's main entrance.
Fek, what was she doing here? What was she even doing on this kriffing planet? The Empire didn't care how it was packaged; Force-sensitivity, regardless of proclivities, was a death sentence.
"Only if you'll follow," she whispered back, and kriffing hells if his body didn't stir in stubborn awareness. Some part of his brain still thought he was alive.
It was wrong. He'd died that night the Temple burned.
She found the shell of his ear again. "Ten minutes."
His blood soared as it hadn't in three long years.
All around, white, white, all white. A sea of it, blinding and faceless and meaningless. But not here—and he'd escaped that night just to sate the need of his own head, lost in a press of bodies that both feared and loathed him. Before her whisper, Rex had debated the merits of a good, old-fashioned cantina brawl, just to scuff the kriffing hell out of his newly-minted, pristine white kit.
And maybe a dead blade between all the damned white would end the sterile, colorless hell his non-existent life had become.
But now...
She'd breathed an address before slipping away and he found the apartment easily, although his own glaring white silhouette—a sole trooper, without the safety of roving squad—set his instincts alight. Only three years into the regime and the Emperor had already worn out his welcome; flattening people's homes tended to alienate even the most passive of creatures.
Yet the so-called stormtroopers' orders were clear. Dissidence was unacceptable.
Deadly force was acceptable.
Anything to ensure the safety of the Empire and route out their enemies, although the concept of 'enemies' was as fluid and changeable as Kamino's weather.
Apartment 305 loomed off an outer stairwell; the whole building didn't even rank a short 'lift or slideramp. He hesitated in front of the gray, grimy frame, fingers sliding along the unfamiliar smoothness of his pristine white helmet.
He entered without knocking. The room was devoid of any sign of life, tiny, dark except for a sole, begrudging glowrod. A bed in one corner, a sink in another, a table close to the door.
Nothing else.
Air brushed along the back of his neck—from the doorway he'd failed to key closed—but before he could move, she was there, pressed along his back plating and pushing him further into the room, one finger again on his lips and her other hand already working the releases of his armor.
His body hummed again even as he firmly slammed down all thought, as quickly as the door behind them slid shut. The night had rapidly become too surreal, too jarring; a gimbal-read spinning wildly and he suddenly didn't want to think.
He'd had far too long to just...think.
His own hands replaced hers, working and fumbling against still-unfamiliar catches—the Spaarti stuff was just different enough for him to resent every moment spent in it—while she slid the bucket out of his other hand.
A tinny, metallic whine—the air crackled with fried electronics and burnt plastoid—and he knew he shouldn't have been surprised when he spun around and her head was bent over his helmet, a thin, rod-like device in-hand and roving all along the blasted helmet's innards.
"Wh—"
Her head shot up and now her eyes were hard. She gave a little shake, montrals tipping back and forth minutely.
The helmet came to a rest on a low table and she again tackled his armor, pulling piece by piece and running the rod-thing over each curved, gleaming white segment. Sometimes, there was the acrid stench of burned wire; other times, nothing at all. Throughout it all, he stared at her, befuddled...and a bit irritated.
She even waved impatiently at his boots until he shoved them off.
Finally, she sighed and slipped the rod back beneath the bulky coveralls he swore she hadn't been wearing at the cantina. "We can talk freely now. They bug you boys worse than the senators' apartments."
"What the fek do you think you're doing?"
She blinked in surprise up at him and he had to shake his head to clear away the image of her younger self, transposed and altered now like a badly set holo-recorder. "I felt you back there—I had to at least try—"
His hands lashed out to grip her wrists before she finished, tightening around the tendon and bone there and he felt that same thrumming pulse. She was so kriffing alive. "You're dead. You haven't existed for three years."
"There's probably a data cube somewhere. Other than that, I never existed." Despite the relentless pressure of his hands around her wrists, a wry grin rounded her cheeks, although the grim, feral light in her eyes was completely at odds with the expression.
He didn't doubt her. His own searches had been superficial; dig too deep into anything, and he'd get an interesting call from a never-mentioned sector of the military.
He rubbed at the material of her coveralls, felt the rough weave of a typical spacer's sui—no… It was a shipbuilder's undersuit, worn beneath their heavy protective gear. "Why are you here?"
Her lips quirked; it was a telling non-answer.
He rounded on her, suddenly infuriated. "The war is over—it's been over for you for a lot longer. What the fek do you think you're doing?"
She met his anger easily and threw it back in his face with a heat that set his blood boiling. "You really think that, Rex? You really think I ever stopped fighting for one—single—moment?"
His grip on her wrist tightened even as she shoved a finger against his chest. The oddity her touch, cool through the bodyglove, reeled his senses. He hadn't really felt anything for so fekking long.
But she wasn't done, and even as he tried to formulate a retort, her voice lowered to a hiss, too much like an aggravated nexu: "You know exactly why I'm here. You can probably guess this was not planned." She closed in on him again, finger still pushing on his chest, a pressure point ready to give. "I know what you did. They're all still alive. I didn't think I'd ever—that I'd be able to say thank you. Or even see you again. But you don't have to be this."
She cast a glance over at his pile of armor, dulled to a flat gleam beneath the room's dim light, then went on, softly, "Come with me."
He dropped her wrists as if she'd torched him with an electrostaff. "How can you ask me that?"
Before he'd finished, she was close again, shushing him, eyes darting as she likely listened with an ability that he could never wrap his brain around. He shoved her away.
She let him, but she held onto his hands, gripped them with a strength that quickly numbed the tips of his fingers. "I know you don't want this." Her montrals tilted to the left; unseen, four blocks away, rose Baron Usvek's new holding, proclaimed as such by Imperial decree. A monumental block of a base, squat and ugly, from which the Baron could oversee the system's vast shipyards. "I could feel you, back there. You hate this. All of this."
She was actually hopeful; she actually thought he was still the same man she'd known.
He rubbed his thumbs across her knuckles; her skin was smooth, unscarred. "By the Emperor's command, I should kill you."
A wan smile. "If you were going to kill me, you would've already done it."
He closed his eyes and wrenched his hands out of her grip.
She stepped forward, close to his chest. She had to hear the slamming of his heartbeat; it drowned out any other noise except for her voice. "I heard about—about what you—"
"Don't."
One hand came to rest on his cheek, following the curve of his jaw. "You don't have to stay."
When he opened his eyes, there was enough compassion and warm sincerity in her gaze that he instinctively retreated. Karking woman kept pace with him, all the way to the bed, where his heels dug into the plesmold frame. "You've changed," he finally growled, resenting every fekking second he was still in this vaping room.
She actually smiled at that; a real smile, warmed with more humor. At least she found something to enjoy about the situation. "Only out of necessity."
He clenched his jaw, temper stretched taunt. "Don't start talking like a J—" Her eyes narrowed and he cursed. "I'm—"
"Do you want to go, Rex?" Any humor was gone and he caught something durasteel-hard and sharp-edged as a vibroblade in her voice.
He huffed out an impatient breath. "Go where? There's nothing—"
"You don't have to stay with me." He'd irritated her; part of him was gratified by that. She'd knocked him out on a ledge he never thought existed. "There's others—"
"Others?"
A nod. "Cody—"
"Cody?"
She punched him on the shoulder and he winced. She was still as strong as a ronto. And obviously still stubborn as one. "Would you not yell everything?" she hissed.
But he rested his hands on her shoulders, unswayed. "Tell me."
She rolled her eyes. Hells, maybe she hadn't changed. "Cody was in a bad way."
"Tell me."
"He's fine now. I won't say where he is, so don't ask." Her eyes were still...wrong, wrong color, wrong something, but still fiery with the same expressiveness he'd known and blazing with that same intensity—as if anyone had reason for any type of conviction under the Empire. "This is about what you want, now."
A laugh caught at the back of his throat. It might've been a half-sob.
The soldier—the fighter—still inside him stirred up from his gut and sniffed the air.
It was ridiculous. It was a death sentence.
But his existence always had been, for some cause or another, to simply...die.
Another thought cut through his mind like a 'saber strike, sharp and burning. It was...impossible. But then, according to the Empire, Ahsoka didn't exist.
Maybe the impossible wasn't so improbable, anymore.
He grit his teeth, not trusting himself to speak.
"If you want," she went on, her voice dropping to the whisper she'd used in the cantina, "I can get you out. The shipyards are dangerous and I know what they have you do now."
She was too close, too alive, and that real soldier in him roared fully awake and now stalked the back of his mind, impatient to carry on the fight.
It was so fekking tempting.
"No."
"No?" She stared at him, incredulous.
"I can't leave my men."
"Clones or..."
He snorted. "Brothers. Although there's plenty of new...recruits." He couldn't keep the disgust out of his voice.
Her answer surprised him—although like before, it shouldn't have. "Bring them. Well," she quickly amended, "not the recruits. They're hopeless. But if any of your brothers want out..."
At his stare, she shrugged. "Seriously, you're not the first. I just thought you'd be..."
She trailed off, and he knew the unspoken words: that he'd still be at the six of his general; the creature now named Vader. He suppressed a shudder.
"A team would be easier to make disappear," she finished.
He didn't want to ask how that logistic worked out in her head.
"So..." she prompted, and he caught a glimpse of hope again, bright in her eyes.
He was insane. She was insane.
But maybe...
Maybe there was still something worth fighting for.
A/N: If anyone gets this far, thanks for reading! I blame this on finishing A New Dawn and on all the feels I get from Nyakai's Little'un series (which is absolutely amazing!) and it all just kinda fell onto the open doc-file. Has absolutely no relation to the Causatum-'verse; thus the movie section.