Written on Sunday, a spare day after watching RotS.

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Children are sacred, in every culture. They are the future survival of the species; a species that suddenly goes sterile is doomed to extinction. Bail Organa remembers his secondary school biology teacher talking of how every species that makes it to space-flight has an instinct to protect its' children, somewhere in the base of the brain where the spinal cord begins.

No civilized culture kills children, either its' own or others.

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He was worried when he saw the clone soldiers running around the Jedi Temple. There are laws against such, and they have stood uncontested for millennia. For someone to break them now is… It isn't good.

But it was when he saw the boy running that he knew it was over. It was beautiful, in its' way – the boy arching over the ground in leaps and bounds, tendons and muscles accentuating the lankiness of his teenage bones, physical force augmented with powerpropelling him forward. The human body is an efficient machine…

The look in the boy's eyes as he decapitated three soldiers in a second would stay with Bail for the rest of his life. It was half-insane with grief. It was anger. It was a desperate hope that somehow, someway, he would isurvive/i.

He didn't.

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Bail looked back once as he sped away.

He couldn't see the boy, of course. But he could see his blue lightsaber flashing this way and that. Then he saw dozens of red bolts converging in one place.

The blue light went out.

It was then, watching the lightsaber die by the glowing, smoking ruins of the Jedi Temple, that he knew the Republic was finished.