"Might I suggest less sleeping and a little more work?"

—Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi

Republic's finest, puking his guts out.

Coric tightened his grip on Kix's shoulder and felt for the man's pulse, moving with him when Kix heaved forward again. The beat beneath his hand was elevated—but not rapid. Sweat-slick skin, distinct pallor but not waxy; nothing too alarming. Still…

"Kark it, Jesse. How much did he have?"

Another wet splat hit the duracrete and Jesse winced from his place across from Coric. The trooper only shook his head and adjusted his grip on Kix's shoulder bell.

After hauling a grimly silent Kix out of 79s, Coric had taken one look at the greenish cast to to the medic's face and vetoed any kind of air transport. Flying vomit was not the preferred ending to his evening.

No, his preferred ending had only smiled and winked at him as the sight of Kix being an utter rancor's ass dragged him away from her soft touch.

Their small group—Kix slung between Coric and Jesse while Tup trailed close behind—had only made it a couple of blocks before Kix abruptly leaned over and lost it. Another couple rounds—"You've got worse aim on the line," Jesse complained, with a disgusted look at his own boots—and they managed to haul Kix into an alley.

"Better out than in." Coric shook his head. Kix should know better. Even a pissed off, moodier-than-an-eight-year-old-cadet Kix. "You know, even with our metabolisms, there is such a thing as alcohol poisoning."

"Do you need your med-kit?" Tup asked, not-quite-hovering at Coric's side. Coric couldn't fault him; the smell wafting up from the duracrete was about as fragrant as a rackarian gutfish.

Coric shook his head. "Best medicine is time. But I'd recommend putting a break on the sabacc for a few rotations." He shot a pointed look at Jesse. If any trooper was winning enough leave-creds to get this drunk, command would need to take a closer look—something Coric knew Rex would rather not have to make an issue of.

There were far too few opportunities for any of them to be more than just soldiers.

Jesse jerked his chin down in an affirmative but didn't say anything; from the looks of it, he was trying to hold his breath as much as possible. Coric snorted; Jesse wasn't a rookie, but certainly didn't have a medic's stomach. Try picking shrapnel out of a gut.

Another damp splatter and this time, a low moan. "Still with us, eh?" Coric said to the figure hunched under his hands.

A string of non-Basic curses answered him. Hells, they weren't even Mando'a.

"Impressive," Jesse quipped, albeit weakly. He patted Kix on the shoulder. "Didn't know you knew that much Huttese."

Another mutter and Kix staggered back upright, only to make a stumbling lurch to the grimy plascrete that plastered the side of one building. Even on the surface levels of Coruscant, not everything could be pristine and gleaming—although, from the looks of the alley, Kix wasn't the first to drag himself away from 79s and have an heart-to-heart with his stomach.

"You all done?" Coric asked. "Or do you need to paint the wall, too?" He didn't hold back the irritation in his voice; Kix had taken the deaths down in the prison sector hard, but imitating the business end of a ronto wasn't an acceptable outlet.

Kix grumbled something about Coric's face and droid excrement.

With a sigh, Coric slipped a hand under Kix's upper arm. Kix shrugged him off. Coric stepped even closer and pitched his voice low. "Let it go, Kix."

"Why should I?" Kix's voice was equally low, but reduced to a wet rasp. He turned his head to fix Coric with a stony glare.

Coric studied him; the glassy, red-rimmed eyes and, beneath, that gray-tinged pallor. He'd bet real credits it didn't come from too many shots of Alderaani bourbon. 79s or even the last few days dirt-side also wasn't the source of the deepening lines across the younger medic's brow.

"Report to the base med-bay after you've slept this off," Coric said. "Eleven-hundred hours."

When Kix growled his dissent, Coric laid a hand along his vambrace. "We need you at a hundred percent when we ship out, trooper." He pressed on the armor, enough that Kix's arm trembled and his balance wobbled, even though he was braced against the wall. "You're a good medic, but you won't be good for anything if your body isn't physically up to it." Coric fixed Kix with another direct, hard stare when the man opened his mouth in a snarl. "You know I'm right."

It took Kix a moment, but he relented with a slight dip of his chin and a reflexive swallow. There may have been a flash of regret in his eyes, but Kix had dropped his gaze quickly enough that Coric wondered if he'd imagined it.

Satisfied, Coric let his hand fall away and stepped back—only to nearly bowl over Jesse. "Kark it, man. Breathing room!"

"Sorry, sir." As Jesse's attention was still fully locked on Kix, Coric highly doubted that. But then Jesse did turn his attention on Coric and he suddenly wished for a few extra doses of tact in all the younger troopers' brains. "He's fine? He'll be alright, right, sir?"

"No, Jesse," Kix snapped irritably. To his credit, he pushed himself upright and managed to at least stand without much wavering. "Severe case of nerf-pox. 'Fraid it's fatal."

"Ha. Haha." Jesse made to shove at Kix's shoulder and Coric hastily intervened. "Let me be the one to make the jokes."

"Why?" muttered Kix. "To perforate my eardrums?"

"Oh, now you're the funny one."

"No, just the charming one." Kix stepped forward, between Coric and Jesse—and although he needed a steadying hand once, did well enough. Enough to get back to base— "You've got the funny. A winning team—we could ju—uust—"

—or not.

"Easy!" Coric's arm shot out as Kix toppled forward like a felled walker.

But Jesse made the catch, and with a good-natured laugh, slung Kix's arm around his neck. "They should put us in with the Seppie Council. We'd win them over and we could all retire to 500 Republica. All the nuevian sundaes we can stomach."

Kix groaned, "Don't mention food right now," as Coric steered the two toward the alleyway's exit. But one of their number wasn't following; when Coric glanced back, Tup was staring down the length of the alley, where the hazy night deepened to full darkness.

"Tup?" Jesse asked. He'd noticed Coric's hesitation and twisted around, too. "You with us, brother?"

For a surreal moment, Coric's hand twitched for a nonexistent blaster. There was an odd, familiar intensity to Tup's posture and Coric's muscles tensed as he recognized it: a trooper ready for a signal, coiled in wait for an assault's forward surge.

Kark it, they were on Coruscant, not on the line.

"Tup?" Coric kept his voice low. "What's on sight?"

"Nothing," Tup replied too quickly. He turned, abrupt as a parade drill, one hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. He didn't even glance at his brothers as he headed toward the mouth of the alleyway. "Let's get to base."

Coric stared at him, then back where the alley tunneled off out of sight between the rising 'scrapers. Nothing moved in the night other than sluggish tendrils of steam that rose from the duracrete in a dirty haze. Nothing set his own instincts on edge.

By the time he turned back around, Tup was waiting at the pedwalk beneath the stark light of the raised glowrods. He still wouldn't meet any of the group's gaze, and as they exited the alleyway, he shot forward, leading them along the familiar walkways. Coric shook his head at the whole lot of them; the night had been weird enough without a spooked trooper and an osik-faced brother.

"Guess someone's been sneaking off with my holomovies." Jesse stared at Tup's back plating with a morose sort of half-scowl. Tup's quicker pace planted him far ahead of the group—although he didn't seem inclined to slow down much. "I wondered what happened to Attack of the Cthons."

"Considering your other movie tastes," Coric said at his driest, "he's more likely to be terrified of a roaming pack of Zellies."

Over Jesse's protests, Kix managed an actual laugh. "Remember, Jesse." The medic wriggled his fingers out in front of him as if over a keypad. "Reset the holoterminal."

Jesse, never down long, shrugged easily. "I'll just sign in on your chip, next time."

Ahsoka was quiet during their ride back to the Temple hangar, a fact that should have tipped Rex off.

He eased the speeder down beneath Processional Way, past the looming pillars and zig-zagging pedwalks and into the hangar's half-lit maw. Ahsoka's shuttle was painted a subdued maroon beneath the bare lighting, although the pale glowrods reflected in thin glowing strips across the shuttle's transparisteel cockpit.

A tiny voice inside of him made note that he was just a tad envious of her new-found freedom. A quick mental choke, and that little voice went silent.

"Rex?" she finally asked as he dismounted and she followed suit. When he glanced her way, her brow was scrunched and her gaze was still fixed on his speeder. She tipped her montrals toward the shuttle. "Do you have a moment?"

He should leave.

But even now, the prospect of heading back to the Coruscant base—only to bunk down with all the half-formed suspicions from the last few days and the knowledge that his own troopers doubted the best among them—was a leaden weight that had dropped to 'when absolutely necessary' on his list of duties. He had half a mind to wait it out on the Resolute until he was called for the next war council.

His opinion must've shown on his face, because the corners of her mouth twitched. "I'll take that as a yes." And without another word, she marched off for the shuttle.

Rex didn't need any more of an invitation.

"It's a good ship," he said once he'd mounted the hatchway ramp and taken a closer look at the interior. Nothing expansive; all dark durasteel, with a bunk inset on one side and a variety of multi-use and storage on the other. A single doorway, open, led to the cockpit and Ahsoka had already taken the pilot's seat, head bent over one of the comm arrays.

"Hm?" She glanced up at him, then around at the cockpit when he came to stand in the doorway, one elbow propped against the frame. Her brow was still furrowed in thought. "Yeah." She grimaced. "Recognize it?"

He had recognized it—although at the time, the stenciled numerals had only nudged at the back of his brain like a small, insistent comm reminder. On the flight back to the GAR base, he'd let the Coruscanti auto-traffic control the speeder and dug through what records he could access via his HUD. Oddly, it took a roundabout search through the database to find out when exactly it had been requisitioned to Generals Skywalker and Kenobi; all other aspects of the mission to the Chrelythiumn system were securely classified.

"General Skywalker called it the Mortis Mission, correct?"

Ahsoka wrinkled her nose. "Yeah." She leaned back in the seat, head tilted up and gaze tracking along the various reader-boards above the console and viewing pane. "Did he ever tell you anything about that mission?" Before he could respond, she held up a hand. "Wait. Scratch that."

"The answer's 'no', if you're worried for some reason." He watched her, somewhat wary. She was hiding something, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know. "Listen, about Kix—"

She waved him off with one hand and a self-deprecating twist of her lips. "The records say I did it, right?" She shrugged, but Rex recognized the determined line between her eye markings. "That's all he can go by. Can't say I blame him."

The last statement rang with enough truth that he winced. "Fives is right. The men know you—"

"And I knew Barriss." She shook her head. "You don't have to defend him or excuse him or anyone else." Her head bent forward and her frame hitched with a deep, long breath. "But I did want to thank you for—for not believing I did it. That night."

Rex stared at the juncture of her montrals and the metallic pieces of her headdress, dull in the shuttle's low light.

The inescapable truth of the matter was that he had considered the possibility. In the same breath that he'd stated his trust, he'd known the evidence was stacked obscenely against her. That three more clones were dead from a lightsaber's distinctive slice, and Ahsoka had been the only possible—if not plausible—suspect.

Until he'd seen her.

Krell had made no attempt to spare anyone; nothing could erase that image from his mind, or the screams of his men. But Ahsoka had dodged and deflected, her defense as recognizable as if Skywalker and Rex had been right there, coaching her through civvie disarming and avoidance.

None of that negated his own doubt. "Ahsoka, I called the APB on you." She lifted her head and he forced himself to meet her steady gaze. "I'm the reason they used live rounds. I reported that you killed three clones, and that you had to be considered armed and dangerous."

She was silent a long moment, the brilliant blue of her eyes dimmed to gray in the half-darkness of the cockpit. He held her gaze; he owed her this.

But instead of disappointment or dismissal or any other expected response, she dropped her focus to his waist—to his holsters, empty and nearly weightless without the comforting heft of his deeces. "I fought beside you for two years, Rex," she said. "You didn't take a shot. You didn't even draw. If you had thought I did it, why didn't you try to take me down?"

He swallowed against an inexplicably dry mouth.

"You would've, you know," she went on, voice soft. "You know me well enough to know how to land at least a stun—and don't deny it," she added, when he opened his mouth.

It was true. It also hit too close to the nightmare that had replayed in his sleep, over and over, since Umbara. The cruelty of his subconscious—replacing Krell's face with hers, ready for execution—was an irony he bore as punishment for Dogma's fate and for all the men who'd died on that fekking planet.

"But you didn't," she finished, with a clear, adamant finality, as if that were the only act that mattered.

"You ran, Ahsoka. Even though you did everything to avoid a confrontation, that was enough proof to cast doubt."

She flinched, but her mouth thinned to a narrow line and her eyes took on a steely, determined intensity.

"And that's why you're digging into this, isn't it?" he finished, observing the familiar posture of a certain Padawan who wouldn't let anything get in her way—not when it came to a perceived injustice. "Not for you, but..." There are worse options, he reminded himself. Like going off to be a damned bounty hunter. "Just don't let me catch your holo up on the Wanted list."

Her laugh was short and awkwardly abrupt. "Can I ask you something?" Without waiting for the obvious, she went on, "Does your helmet record everything—even when you're not wearing it?"

"That's two somethings, and no, it doesn't." This, at least, was a topic he was fully comfortable with. He unclipped and shifted his bucket around to show its innards; dark, with the soft blink of electronics. "It goes on stand-by when there's no active use. Still receives transmissions, but re-routes comms and commands to my 'brace."

"Stand-by, but not off, right?"

"Right." It should've been unnerving that she had her own suspicions regarding the troopers' tech. Instead, it was a relief.

Despite the thoughtful gaze she still leveled at him, her lips twitched. "Things I didn't even know until I was out of the GAR."

A memory bubbled up in his mind and he fought back a laugh. "I recall you trying on a few trooper's buckets."

"Hey, they've changed since then. And besides, those were pilots' helmets."

And she'd looked ridiculous; tiny, bony body with Lieutenant Axe's helmet dropped down to her shoulders. She'd even attempted to make a comm call and somehow rerouted everything to the PA system.

Rex recalled reaming her out. Twice. And she'd subsequently tried to steal his bucket for a week—up until her disastrous first command above Ryloth. "That was your first mistake. Command buckets have the best tech."

"You wouldn't let me try on yours, remember?"

"Regs are regs."

"I'd believe you more," she muttered, with a familiar roll of her eyes, "if I didn't know how many regs you toss out the viewport on any given rotation."

His grip on the helmet's rim tightened. Rex dropped his focus to the nicks and scrapes and scores across the plastoid, a focal for the brief moment he needed. "Regs have their place, Ahsoka."

She snorted in disbelief, and when she didn't say any more, he lifted his head. She hadn't caught the double meaning, and he wasn't sure if he was thankful or not.

But a little, sly smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "You'd probably make a good pilot."

He raised an eyebrow at her. Where had that come from? "Careful, kid. I might get insulted."

"Okay, maybe not now." She tipped her montrals to the side, towards the co-pilot's seat. "Maybe…after the war."

A buzz started in his ears and swam down to his chest when he caught her meaning. The fact that she would even suggest, after his admission of doubt, after everything—

When he didn't reply, Ahsoka faltered. "I—I mean only if you, you know, get tired of the boring life." She flashed a lopsided grin and shrugged. "Unless you really want to take up something normal. Like accounting."

"Ah—no pushing flimsi for me." His fingers twitched and he tamped down the response he wanted to give her—which seemed to hover somewhere between the urge to either shake her or kiss her. Yet instead of something polite and innocuous and safe, he heard himself say, "I appreciate the offer, but I think we both know the likelihood of my survival."

Silence stretched between them.

"The war won't last forever, Rex." She echoed Coric's statement perfectly and he shifted on his feet, fingers sliding over the bucket's rim. Her eyes dropped to his hand. "Rex—"

"I will do my duty, Ahsoka."

Fek, he sounded like a pretentious ass.

If she took offense, she didn't show it; she was back to studying him, her eyes soft and thoughtful, and if he'd expected some other emotion to cross her face, he would've been disappointed. "Then the offer stands, Rex," she said.

The buzzing dropped further, down into his stomach, and for the first time in almost a year, he felt utterly awkward in her presence. "I should go."

Her throat worked for a moment before she simply nodded.

Rex readjusted his grip on his bucket, re-clipped it to his side, stalling, but there wasn't any more to say besides, "Goodbye, Ahsoka." His voice caught on her name, but he didn't care.

Instead of replying, she rose out of the pilot's chair and, without hesitating or asking, wrapped her arms behind his neck and hugged him close and fek it all if the buzzing in his mind and body drowned out even his own heartbeat. This time, though, he managed to hold his head together long enough to pull her against him.

"I know you'll take care of him." Ahsoka's voice was broken and he breathed her in, musky leather and pungent oil. "I know you'll take care of your men."

"Nothing less."

"Take care of yourself, too."

He swallowed thickly, unable to articulate a response, much less a promise.

Her grip tightened and her words were warm against his ear. "Goodbye, Rex."

Rex could only hug her tighter, until the moment he had to let her go, to take on the weight of her absence, hanging in silence over his mind.

Maybe the war wouldn't last much longer. Maybe the losses they'd suffered recently were the brutal punch needed to push them further, farther—and faster. But it was a hope encased in ice, and he wondered what kind of fire could burn a path through the all the blood-soaked battlefields to any kind of final victory.

He hesitantly slid one hand beneath her rear lek, then down, along the curve of her upper back; felt the coolness of her bare skin through the thin twill of his gloves.

He had one more future to fight for, even if he would never have a part in it.

Padmé woke with a jolt.

The stem of her wineglass slipped from her fingers to land with a soft clink on the carpet, spilling the final dregs of her pale moscato across the rich weave. It took her a moment to reorient herself; the lights were on, but dimmed, the windows dark and the night beyond lit only by the never-slumbering city.

Something had woken her. With a quick stoop and a twist of her shimmersilk night robe, she retrieved the wineglass and set it and the datapad she'd been reading—still scrolling regular news updates on the Temple's inner turmoil and Ahsoka's departure, like it was all just the latest celebrity scandal—on the low table close to her settee.

The hours had stretched by innocuously after she'd walked with the Twi'lek youngling from that Temple anteroom. She'd watched the sunset deepen to a bloody red before giving way to the softer palette of twilight, then the hazy constant of the Coruscanti night. As the chrono had slipped past midnight, Padmé wondered if he would come at all.

But as she padded across her sitting room toward the pool of darkness beyond her bedroom doorway, she knew he was there.

His silhouette was black against her window, his fists clenched tight against his sides and the whole of him crackling with an energy that would've made a lesser creature scurry away. There were times she wondered if that instinct in her was actually a bit of wisdom, rather than weakness.

She knew he couldn't take this well. Any of this.

"I'm sorry, Anakin."

Empty words, but he would need to hear them. She'd known, somehow, before Ahsoka had ever left the tribunal chamber, before Padmé had accepted the dismissed charges and watched her young friend from the corner of her eye, bent and broken even if her body hadn't shown it.

The damage had been too great to repair with simple words.

His head dipped but he didn't turn. "It wasn't your fault."

"No," she said after a quiet moment. The tension radiated from him in almost palpable waves. "But I had hoped it wouldn't come to any of this."

He didn't respond. She watched him for a long moment; studied the play of darkness and flickering light across his face, the lines that shouldn't have spidered out from his eyes, the muscles of his jaw working as he ground his teeth.

"Come to bed, Ani."

If possible, his fists clenched tighter. She could hear the leather creak, rubbing and sliding over metal and skin.

She closed in on him, letting her hands drift over his bracers, then up into the rough fabric of his robes. He still reeked of old oil and the Undercity's rot, laced with his ever-present cologne of ozone and plasma.

He was still silent, eyes hard and durasteel gray in the scant light cast by the windows. Her hand found the wild half-curls along the nape of his neck, felt the muscles there tense beneath her touch. He was so inexplicably different from the young man who had hovered awkwardly at her side, over two years before—harder and wilder, now, all of his mind and heart echoed with startling accuracy by his body.

"Obi-Wan…" he began, then let the words fade between them.

"Tell me."

Anakin turned to her, and the intensity of his gaze sent a flutter of something akin to fear down her spine to pool in her belly, anxious and tight.

She remembered—far too clearly—the quiet homestead on Tatooine and the stumbling admission he'd made.

"I won't ever let anything happen to you, Padmé."

She tried to twist her lips into a smile but failed. "You can't protect me from everything, Anakin." When his eyes hardened further, she reached a hand up to smooth over his brow, then down to cup his cheek. "Nor would I want you to."

But he shook his head, dislodging her hand. "This war…"

Again, he trailed off, and this time, she finished for him, linking her fingers in his. "It won't come between us, Anakin. Trust me in this."

"What would, then?"

She hesitated, taken aback by both his question and the underlying edge to his voice, the pressure and weight that all seemed to coalesce on her tongue.

"Come to bed, Anakin," she tried again.

"Tell me—"

"Come to bed," Padmé repeated, cutting him off effectively and lifting his hands to press his fingers against her face, then let them trail down to her collarbone, then her shoulders.

Finally, she saw the heat in his eyes shift, the intent sway from one passion to another, too much like a pendulum, unable to find stillness or peace while pushed between an ever-demanding war and a never-satisfied Council.

Her voice lowered to a whisper as his hands drifted down to encircle her waist. "Let me be your wife, Anakin."

A tiny part of her mind acknowledged her implicit part in his defiance of the Council and the hypocrisy of her act; that regardless of his arguments against his Order's strictures, she understood the need for both distance and empathy in any peacekeeper's effort. As queen, she'd had no choice but to understand such things.

Yet among the greater cosmos, among the trillions that lived and died in the space of a single breath, surely their lives—from the perspective of the stars—were as insignificant as any other.

And as his arms wrapped around her and held her close, both gentle and terrifying in their strength, all she could offer him was her love.

Ahsoka scrubbed at her bleary eyes and failed completely at holding back a jaw-cracking yawn.

The last few hours had dragged by with all the sluggish energy of a Hutt, and at this point in the early dawn hours, her eyes felt like Tatooine had blown in for a stay.

Despite having hunched over the shuttle's processing terminal for—Wow, five hours, she realized with a glance at the chrono—she knew absolutely nothing else about the inner workings of the past three days. She did know that the upper levels of the new med center had insets of Mustafarian obsidian and TriSol Shipping had lost their contract with the GAR over an embarrassing mixup with hovermops and munitions.

Fives' datachip proved to be a tangled mynock's nest of information—a bizarre assortment of medical supply manifests and GAR base recordings, everything from the as-built holos of the new med-center to a long history of shipment rosters and routes to the GAR base.

Rex had disappeared into the night with all the gruff intensity of a bull bantha and she'd slipped the shuttle out of the hangar to find a reasonably-priced public spaceport. Master Kenobi's credit bank chip had been placed conspicuously on top of the pilot's console, and once she'd settled the shuttle into an empty berth, she'd fixed her full attention on the ARC's final gift, nerves tingling in anticipation.

Only she really had expected something a little more...relevant.

Even now, as an early morning fog shrouded the graying dawn and dampened the port's floodlights to only pale, distant pinpricks, she was reduced to digging through the various files at random, hoping something blatantly obvious would pop up. Like the missing recordings from the prison sector.

No luck. With a groan, she leaned her elbows on the console and rubbed at her temples. "This is going to take a while."

Days. Weeks.

But at the moment, she didn't have anything better to go off of and she knew something was buried in the information. She just needed the clarity of mind to sort it and figure out all the connecting points—and hope it rose into a hologram that made some sense of the tangled thoughts that kept crowding through her head.

Anakin said… What had he said in the prison cell, when he'd brought Padmé? "The clones didn't report seeing anything," she murmured, closing her eyes and rubbing at her brow. It would've been impossible not to see the effects of her fight with Barriss; nothing left a mark quite like a lightsaber. There had to be reports. Somewhere.

She just had to figure out exactly where—and who had them.

With a sigh, Ahsoka closed down the terminal and stood, stretching cramped legs. If she was going to be spending her time hunched over a console, she would at least get something to keep her eyes open.

"Wonder where Master Kenobi requested all his tea from," she muttered, peering around the shuttle and remembering the few times she'd sought his counsel. He always had a kettle of tea ready when she had appeared at his doorway; granted, he'd probably always sensed her coming.

"Your Force signature has all the subtlety of a hurricane," he'd once remarked.

"I'll take that as a compliment, Master," she'd shot back.

It only took a moment of searching the main cabin to find that, yes, Master Kenobi had ensured the shuttle was well-stocked—and obviously to his tastes. A neat little row of cyrodil tea lined one duraplast shelf.

She smirked at the delicately painted boxes. Of course.

A moment of more rummaging revealed a small conservator and a heating element; in another compartment, a sonic sink and an inset container for drinking water. She grimaced. The 'fresher, she knew from her last time in the shuttle, only had a sonic shower. Not the favorite way for any Togruta to get clean.

In a smallish side-compartment, her fingers brushed over a slim, metallic box. Curious, she pulled it out and keyed it open—

A Pantoran Constallis Goddess—all dark blue stone, rubbed smooth—from Chuchi, after the Trade Federation's failed blockade; the Togrutan sash—tattered and burned—from a young mother on Kiros; the little trooper helmet carved by Hardcase, who had been more artistic than he'd ever wanted to admit.

Her Padawan beads.

Ahsoka snapped the box shut and shoved it blindly into the recesses of its shelf. Some things—some memories—would need to wait before she could face them again.

She took a ragged breath. "Well, it's you and me, now," she said to the ship, and her voice echoed loud in her montrals. "Although I wouldn't mind a droid."

The ship gave a tiny answering hiss as she closed the storage unit's hydraulic door.

"Caf," Ahsoka decided. "Frothed caf." That would keep her awake.

But as she descended from her ship, draped in a hooded cloak to ward off the pre-dawn chill, she wondered if she should've just taken a nap. The fog was thick enough to distort both her vision and her montrals, and each dark, docked ship loomed up out of the fog like durasteel-plated beasts, hunched and sleeping, waiting to be roused.

It only seemed appropriate that she hadn't even reached the edge of the port before she sensed the tell-tale pinprick in her mind of a nearby Force-sensitive.

Someone was following her.

Many thanks again to the wonderful laloga, who does wonders with her beta'ing skills! Obi-Wan's preferred tea, cyrodil, is of her creation and she kindly allowed me to plunk it into this 'verse, too.