Hi everyone! Hope you've been keeping safe.

Sorry for the slightly longer wait this time. I had a lot of it written up, and had to rewrite most of it when I decided that the character arcs weren't exactly going where I wanted them to be going. That being said, I might start taking a little longer to pump out the chapters from now on. Writing recovery is hard, and I want to get it exactly right!

On a completely unrelated note, anyone been following the Bad Batch? I was excited at first, and then hesitant, but now I think I'm excited again! So pumped for the finale. Let me know your thoughts on it!

Also, since we're out of the violence and the gore, I probably won't do chapter summaries anymore. If something comes up that might be triggering or should be cautiously read, I'll let you know.

Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY:

There's a lightsaber in Obi-wan's hand. A lightsaber. She still remembers how to wield one. Or at least how to activate one. Maybe if she could just-

A presence suddenly forces its way into her mind, and she shrieks and brings her hands up to press hard against her temples. But she's not strong enough to push it out. It persists, digs deeper and deeper and she can't do anything but scream. Please!

Sleep Ahsoka, the presence speaks to her, and with it comes a heavy wave of exhaustion. No she can't. They are not kind when the slaves fall unconscious. But the wave is too strong, and she's slowly but surely yielding to it.

Please, no…

Please…

Sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE: Reunion

The 104th battalion comes storming into the slave facility control room to find Rex crouching on the floor beside Obi-wan, who holds Ahsoka's unconscious and frail form in his arms.

The men were told that Ahsoka was here with them. Rex knows because they come with a team of medics, and with three stretchers instead of two. But it doesn't stop the gasps and the heads shaken in incredulity when they see her with their own eyes.

"Ad'ika," he hears Wolffe mutter in disbelief, his eyes wide as he takes in the scene. Rex can still hardly believe it himself.

The extraction goes by like a blur. The three of them are brought to the 104th's light cruiser, then to the Resolute where it waits for them in orbit around the planet.

Kadavo, he soon learns. They're on Kadavo. It looks just as miserable from a distance as it does up close. He hopes that he never has to set foot on the cursed planet again in his short lifetime.

Anakin and Kix are amongst the first to meet them when they arrive. Rex is the first to step off the gunship, and Kix expertly scans over Rex's form, cataloguing his injuries as he limps off the ramp. Anakin doesn't even spare him a glance, and looks like he wants to board the ship himself. Rex already knows that his injuries aren't life threatening, and Kix's eyes move behind him to Obi-wan who's a little more worse for wear.

Then it moves to Ahsoka, where they finally freeze.

A few troopers from the Wolfpack bring her out of the ship on a stretcher, and Anakin swears viciously in a language that Rex thinks is Huttese. He stumbles forward, but Kix catches him before he can go far.

"Let me go, Kix!" he snarls as he glares at the medic darkly. Kix, to his own credit, doesn't even flinch.

"Respectfully General, no."

It only further sparks his rage, and he twists against his grip. Not enough to hurt the clone, but enough for Kix to be struggling to stop him from rushing over to where Ahsoka is being escorted towards the medbay. Rex continues forward to help him, but so does Obi-wan and he's much more effective at gaining Anakin's attention, so Rex lets him handle him. Although maybe it's a mistake, because the attention he receives is usually explosive and this is certainly no exception.

"Anakin, stop," Obi-wan says from behind him, and Anakin's eyes are quick to snap to him, and he looks murderous. He storms over to them, finger pointing accusingly at Obi-wan.

"Don't tell me what to do with my padawan," Anakin seethes, "when you were the one who told me to leave her for dead!"

The commotion is causing the troopers in the hangar to notice, and they don't need to see their General this unhinged. And they definitely don't need to see Ahsoka in the state that she's in. Kix puts an arm to his shoulder to get his attention.

"Captain, I need to tend to her in the medbay. You need to talk down the General, make sure he won't get in my way," he says to Rex in a way that only Kix could get away with. "He'll listen to you."

Rex almost laughs. How wrong he is. "I'll try."

He starts to limp forward, but Kix doesn't quite let him go yet. The stern and stoic medic is gone. He's angry too.

"Tell him he's not the only one who thought she was dead," Kix snaps. Rex knows Kix well enough to know it's not out of scorn, but out of pain so he keeps the reprimand to himself. "Tell him that he doesn't get to see her until he's calm and I say she's ready to be seen. And General Kenobi needs to be checked in the medbay. You too."

"Understood trooper," Rex nods, though he knows he's not going to repeat those exact words to Anakin. He values his life after all.

There are still troopers in the hangar, helmets off and gawking as the two Generals, or rather as Anakin disputes, and he sends them stern looks. He hasn't gotten his armour back yet, so he can't order them all out through the comms in his helmet. They seem to understand what he wants anyway, because they reluctantly drop their maintenance tools and drag their feet away out of the hangar.

They wouldn't have left if they were around when Ahsoka was the Commander. They're all shinies, and don't quite understand what's happening.

After he's sure all the troopers are gone, he turns to the two Generals.

"General Kenobi," he says quietly, because the Jedi looks fragile after Anakin's tongue lashing. "Kix wants to see you in the medbay."

"Of course, Captain," he says. Rex can see he's trying for as much dignity as he can as he painfully starts making his way towards the medbay. He winces as the movement shifts the torn flesh on his back, and Rex finds that he can sympathise with him.

Then Rex turns to Anakin, and his eyes are still burning with rage.

"We shouldn't have listened to him, Rex," he says. With Kenobi now gone, he's allowed himself to lower his voice some, but there's still that cold quiet ice. "We should never have listened to him!"

Anakin's right, though Rex can't help but notice the hypocrisy in the statement, and in the anger. Anakin shouldn't have listened to Obi-wan in the same way that Rex shouldn't have listened to Anakin and Obi-wan shouldn't have listened to the Jedi Council. This slipped past all of them and the blame is for them all to share.

That being said, Rex is just too tired to hold the blame against anyone but himself.

He just sighs. "Sir, Kix told me to inform you that he'll let you know when… the Commander is ready for visitors." He nearly chokes on the title. Is she still their Commander? He doesn't know, but he hopes so because there's a reason that Rex could never allow himself to take up the position.

"Oh karking… That's my padawan Rex!" Anakin growls as he runs his fingers through his hair in aggravation. "He doesn't have the clearance to authorise that, and I've had enough of people making decisions for me!"

Anakin looks even more livid now, this time at Rex, and Rex just feels more drained at the sight of it, as if it's his own energy that's being sucked out of him to fuel Anakin's anger. But he needs to do something, say something, because Anakin might outrank Rex, but he knows better than to let the man into the medbay when he's a danger to himself and those around him. Especially if that now includes Ahsoka.

"Sir, I can more than understand your anger, but it won't do much good around healing patients," he tries to say, and he can only hope that his General is able to hear his plea through his outwardly raging emotions. "Ahsoka doesn't need anger, she'll need support. We only want to make sure you're fit to give it before you try."

Anakin just stares at him, but Rex can see the anger slowly ebb away. For a moment, Rex feels relieved because if the General truly decided to oppose him, Rex knows he wouldn't be able to do a single thing about it. But now he just looks deflated and this is worse.

""We abandoned her," Anakin whispers in defeat.

It's a quiet hurt now, and it does so much better at reflecting Rex's own sorrows back at him. He recognises the slow realisation of what happened as it seeps into his eyes, and it's almost like seeing his own. Can he even try to reassure Anakin of anything if he can't do the same to himself?

No, he decides. I can't.

"I know," is all he says before turning away to hide his own guilt-ridden face. "I'll comm you when Kix clears you for the medbay."

"Three fractured ribs, blunt trauma to her liver, nerve damage to her left shoulder, second degree burns around her neck, lekku and back, and multiple lacerations. The worst being her severed lekku tip," Kix lists quietly as he cleans the wounds on Rex's own back, careful not to wake Ahsoka or Obi-wan. The conditions in the Kadavo facility have caused them to borderline on infection, and the treatment to his open flesh stings, but he refuses to flinch.

Not when Ahsoka is only a few beds away and faring much worse.

You're lucky to have found her when you did, the medic had told him before. The infection was already in her bloodstream for some time.

Rex can't help but glance over to her frail state as a few junior medics adjust her monitors and take notes on the displays they see. Kix is wrong. There's absolutely nothing "lucky" about how they had found her. If anything, it's horrific that they had only managed to find her when she had been tortured long enough to be dying. She only had months left.

His lingering thoughts on Kadavo lead him to another memory, something that Kix didn't mention in her long list of bodily injuries. Agruss had threatened her with something. Rex doesn't know for sure, and could have misunderstood it, but he just has to know that he's wrong.

"Did you do a rape kit?" he asks Kix quietly. Kix's precise hands go still against Rex's back.

"Would I have to?" Kix asks, his voice turned to steel. Rex can feel his fingers trembling behind him, and he turns his back away to face him. Kix can dress his wounds later.

"It's something her slave keeper said," Rex admits, and Kix's jaw sets. "He threatened her with sexual assault, made it sound like it happened before but I'm not sure."

Kix looks murderous, and not at all like Kix. If they weren't in the medbay and surrounded by sleeping patients, Rex is sure Kix would have thrown something by now.

"What happened to her, Rex?" he asks, his eyes wandering over to where Ahsoka is sleeping. "She was only a kid when we lost her! How… how could they?"

Rex doesn't have an answer.

"Ahs'ika," he whimpers as his face crumples in helplessness. He sounds younger all of a sudden, like a shiny.

Kix was only a shiny when they lost her. The both of them were shinies together after the Battle of Teth, and Rex's heart breaks to see them now. Neither of them are the same people they were. Both were forced to grow up too fast, separated to face two very different sides of a cruel galaxy. This is the aftermath. A hardened medic and a beaten slave.

And a failure of a captain.

Rex mourns for the blissfully ignorant and impish girl she once was, just as he has learnt to mourn for the innocence of his men who were deployed on campaigns as shinies and have come back as veterans. Time has never been kind to any of them, not during war, but now even less so.

"She was with slavers Kix," he tells Kix gently, though his own blood is boiling. "That's what slavers do."

Kix is silent for some time, and Rex lets him absorb the information. Then he deflates, fixes his face back into a hard frown and just like that, the medic is back.

"Turn around Captain, I wasn't done dressing your wounds," Kix tells him in a clipped tone, and Rex complies, because he knows Kix really just wants him to turn around for a moment to himself. It also gives Rex the same luxury of privacy, because Kix doesn't need to see how much this is affecting him too.

"CAPTAIN!" A clone voice yells from outside, and Kix swears loudly as he looks up.

"Fives, no-"

"CAPTAIN!"

Then Fives is at the doorway, breathing hard and eyes a little wild as he scans the medbay until he sees Rex. Jesse slams into him from behind and has the decency at least to look at Kix apologetically.

"I'm sorry! I tried to stop him-" Jesse tries to apologise but Kix just growls angrily.

"You weren't supposed to tell him at all!"

Fives isn't even paying attention to the two of them argue, his eyes are still on Rex, questioning, pleading.

"Is it true, Captain?"

Rex doesn't respond, because they clearly aren't supposed to be told (Jesse isn't really supposed to know anything either, but Kix doesn't keep anything from Jesse anyway), but Fives' gaze just wanders further until he spots the bed on the far end of the medbay where Ahsoka is, and his face morphs into something much, much sadder.

"Oh no," he whispers and drags his feet through the door and past them to take a closer look at her. Kix makes a sound of disapproval and Rex wants to order him out of the medbay, but Fives has gone silent, and his irate movements have turned cautiously gentle as he makes his way forward, so Rex lets him.

At the lack of disciplinary action against Fives, Jesse also finds the courage to inch forward until he stands next to Fives beside Ahsoka's bed.

"What happened to her?" Jesse croaks and looks towards Obi-wan, who's asleep on the bed next to her, as if his unconscious form might hold more answers. His eyes find the scars crisscrossing the older Jedi's skin, and he turns around to stare at Rex who wears the same wounds.

"Were you all flogged or something?" He asks Rex. Rex doesn't answer because the mission was classified and the two of them are on thin ice already. He also just doesn't want them to know.

Fives though, kriff him, has had much more experience on the field as an ARC trooper, and his fingers ghost gently over the heavy burns around Ahsoka's neck. Then he turns to look at Rex, and his usually playful eyes turn hard, though his voice is still soft. Still scared of waking her up.

"She was wearing a shock collar," he states, looking accusingly at Rex's own bacta-covered burns wringing his throat. "You were too. Are there slavers on Kadavo? Is that how you found her? At a slave market or something?"

"That's classified information, trooper," Rex glares at him, his heart jumping at just how close to the truth Fives was. Except that it's not the truth. Not really, because they had found her in a place much worse than a slave market, but he's not about to say that.

"We left our own Commander for dead," Jesse deadpans suddenly, and everyone looks at him. But no one disagrees, and as much as Rex wants to wholeheartedly agree with the notion, the blame isn't for him to share with his men. He was the one who ordered them to halt the search. He was the one who forced their hand, despite their heavy protests. Despite his own silent plead to himself to let them keep looking. This is on him.

"You were only following orders Jesse," he tells him gently. "There's nothing you could have done."

"Like kriff there was nothing we could have done. She's family!" Fives yells, and Kix pauses the bacta treatment on Rex's back to reach out and smack him on the arm.

"If you wake the Commander or the General up, you're out," he hisses, and Fives sighs and drops stubbornly into a seat by Ahsoka's side and crosses his arms.

"You can't force me to do anything," Fives says and slumps in on himself as if he plans to stay a while. Jesse just hovers around Kix as he continues to treat Rex. It doesn't quite manage a smile out of Rex, because it's not enough to outweigh the bad in this circumstance, but seeing Jesse's protectiveness towards Kix pulls at his chest.

"You can stay until the General comes to visit her," Rex caves. "He'll need the seat." Fives just nods to him, but Rex can see that he's more than grateful. Then Kix is just about done, and he and Jesse pull up chairs to join him. Jesse slips his hand into hers, and Rex looks away because the sienna fingers wrapped within a clone's gauntlet is such a familiar sight, and one he hasn't seen for so long.

Rex doesn't join them. Instead, he shuffles himself on his own bed and props himself up against the bed frame so he can watch the entrance.

He can't fault them for being protective over Ahsoka. He knows what they're probably feeling because he feels it too.

They let her down. Rex knows from what he saw in the slave facility that at some point, Ahsoka had learnt to survive on her own. But how many days had she spent hoping that they'd come for her? How many days had she believed in them until she had no choice but to accept that they had really failed her?

The urge to do anything it took to make up for everything they let her go through is almost burning. This time, they wouldn't let her down, even if it's just keeping her safe while she sleeps.

MANDO'A TRANSLATIONS:
- Ad'ika - kid
- Ahs'ika - Little Ahsoka (Ahsoka said with some brotherly affection)

How was that? Okay? We're on the flip end of things now, but we all know that emotional trauma can be just as bad as physical trauma. They're not out of the woods just yet.

Let me know what you thought about the chapter, and about the story. I absolutely love reading your comments!

Feedback is always welcome

See you for chapter 6!