AUTHOR'S NOTE: this was the last prompt I completed for rexsoka week. The prompt is "shadows."

Wolffe was a good companion. He was Rex's brother, after all, and nobody understood one another quite like the clones. That being said, Wolffe was a bit of a kill-joy.

"Come on, Wolffe. Just one game," Rex said, holding his portable holochess set out in front of him like a peace offering.

The two of them just barely fit on the beat-up, tiny transport they'd managed to barter for a few systems back, but Rex somehow still felt lonely at times. He only hoped their intel was right and that they'd find Commander Gregor at their destination.

Wolffe crossed his arms and dug further into the ancient copilot seat in which he'd encamped. "I don't have time for games."

"We're in hyperspace. We'll be in hyperspace for the next few hours. What else is there to do?"

"Plan tactics. Think up our next move. Sleep."

"Alright, alright," Rex said, giving up his brother as a lost cause.

He switched the holochess set on and turned on the one-player setting. It was better than nothing, but he'd always preferred a real, non-artificial opponent.

Rex looked over the projected warriors on the holochess board at Wolffe, who'd taken his own suggestion and fallen into a deep sleep. He remembered a time when he might have behaved the same way as Wolffe. Each of the clones started out essentially exactly the same, but over time different friends, assignments, and life experiences gradually set them on different paths, distinguishing them from each other and refining their personalities. The 501st in particular tended to turn out clones who were more independent, aggressive, and fun-loving.

The battle was fierce, but Rex eventually beat the AI into submission. He knew if the AI had been set on its most difficult setting that he'd never win, which was part of why he preferred a sentient opponent. Rex put the holochess set away and sat back in his seat, closing his eyes and attempting to relax. He remembered the first time he'd played holochess, also on a spaceship but one much larger than this. It had been not long after Teth and the whole mess with the Hutts, and he'd been so shiny it almost hurt to think about.

"It's your move, Rexter!" General Skywalker's new Padawan said.

Rex bit back a grimace at the nickname. It was just the kid's way of showing affection, so he tried to take it in stride, even giving her an affectionate moniker as well, but she'd stick to "Rex" or "Captain" if he had his way.

Rex considered the board for a while, trying to keep all the rules Commander Tano had explained earlier straight in his head. Some argued that holochess could teach valuable ideas about strategy and tactics, but the Kaminoans had considered it too far removed from actual battle to be an efficient use of time. As such, Rex hadn't learned to play on Kamino.

After some thought, Rex moved a piece three squares over, towards one of her more vulnerable pieces.

"That's an illegal move," Ahsoka said.

"What? But I thought it could move three spaces?"

"That's its range. It's movement is three."

"Ah," Rex said, annoyed with himself for forgetting. "My mistake."

He moved the piece back two squares so it had only shifted one square from its original position. He was pretty sure it was an awful move, but he didn't much care. He was just playing to humor the young Jedi anyway.

Ahsoka immediately moved one of her pieces to attack the piece he'd just moved, killing it. She crowed in victory, and Rex leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

"Shouldn't you be off meditating or something?" he asked.

Ahsoka shrugged. "Eh. You can't be meditating all the time. It's important to find opportunities to relax and have fun. It helps you perform better when you need it most."

"Hmm."

"I can see you don't believe me," Ahsoka said. "But guess what? I'm the best lightsaber duelist my age in the galaxy. Relaxing and having some fun every once in a while didn't dull my edge."

"Really?" Rex asked, legitimately impressed. "You're the best?"

"Yeah," Ahsoka said with a proud grin. "Why do you think Master Yoda let me get involved in combat?"

That did seem like the only logical explanation for someone as young as Ahsoka fighting. Rex still didn't approve, to be honest. It didn't seem right that someone as young and innocent and… full of life as Ahsoka should be on the battlefield. Although he supposed it would be odd of him to object considering he was actually a few years younger than her.

"Well I'll take that into consideration, Commander. And you'd better watch your back, because one day soon I'm going to beat you at this blasted game."

Thoughts returned to the present, Rex looked across the cockpit towards his brother again. Wolffe's eyes were closed, but his frequent fidgeting suggested he was awake.

"Come on, brother," he said, putting a warm hand on Wolffe's forearm. "If you can't sleep at least find a way to relax. We'll be in a better position to help Gregor if we aren't wound so tight."

Wolffe opened first his good eye, then the cybernetic one, casting a sideways look at Rex. "Relaxing and messing around didn't help save my men."

Rex's features softened and he tried to keep the pity from his face, knowing Wolffe wouldn't appreciate it. "It didn't get them killed either. That was nobody's fault but the enemy's."

Wolffe stubbornly crossed his arms and closed his eyes again, and Rex decided to let the issue go. He was halfway through another game against the board's AI when Wolffe stirred beside him.

"Fine," Wolffe said, turning his seat towards Rex and reaching for the board. "Couldn't sleep anyway."

Rex couldn't help but smile.

"Blast it," Ahsoka cursed under her breath as she dodged yet another laser bolt, this one coming close enough to singe the cloak that covered her montrals. She'd come to this particularly shady smuggler-ridden Corellian city to finally meet an Imperial contact she'd been working for months, but it looked like her contact had set her up.

Ahsoka leapt away from the blaster fire, ducking behind a large crate of who-knows-what for cover and cursing her bad luck. Or maybe it wasn't luck but rather an inevitability. Whenever she made contacts, no matter how meticulously vetted their background or carefully tested their intel, at some point she had to trust them and take the plunge into a full-blown partnership. The contact she was supposed to meet with today had been very promising, and Ahsoka was disappointed that all that time developing the potential mole hadn't panned out.

She'd known as soon as she'd stepped into the dingy cantina that she'd been set up—the five imperial soldiers dressed as bounty hunters had given that away immediately. "Dewback," as the contact had called himself, was a skilled counterintelligence agent, and she had to guess he hadn't been responsible for equipping the disguised stormtroopers with identical, brand-new E-11's.

The stormtroopers' bodies now decorated the cantina floor, but Ahsoka hadn't managed to take out Dewback himself. She'd caught a vague glimpse of him in the shadows during her fight, but it wasn't until the stormtroopers were all down, when Ahsoka was carefully looking over the place to see what hostiles were remaining, that he'd attacked.

And now here she was, pinned behind this stupid crate in the dead-end of an alley in some Force-awful Corellian slum.

If only I could use my blasted lightsaber, she thought, but that had to be a last resort. She'd have to only use her two blasters if she didn't want to stick out like a sore thumb. The empire was looking for her—and her specifically, though she couldn't imagine why. It would already be bad news if Dewback was able to report back to his superiors that she was a Togruta. If he reported back both her description and that she used lightsabers? That was a worst-case scenario.

Best-case scenario: she killed Dewback here and now without using any Jedi-specific weapons or abilities. He'd already caught a glimpse of her, so he needed to be taken out.

Ahsoka closed her eyes and reached out with the Force, trying to pin down where her assailant might be. The Force was unfortunately being difficult, though, and she could only get a vague sense of distance. He wasn't sneaking up behind her, and he hadn't crept too close either, so that was good to know. She took a deep breath, readied her blasters, and decided to take a quick look from behind her crate.

Shec caught a brief glimpse of Dewback maybe fifty feet away from her at the mouth of the alley before he started firing and she had to duck back behind cover. He knew where she was, and she had nowhere that she could run (without using some Force-empowered acrobatics, at least). He had the upper hand in every way except that there was no cover from where he stood at the mouth of the alley to Ahsoka's current position. She could use that to her advantage.

Ahsoka closed her eyes again and reached out with the Force, this time blocking out any extraneous details and instead only trying to get a sense for when the Imperial spy started moving towards her. As soon as he left the cover of the corner at the mouth of the alley, she'd break cover and fire on him.

Not yet…

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

Now!

Ahsoka rose out from behind the crate, a blaster in each hand, and started shooting towards the shadowy figure she saw darting into the alley. Dewback dodged and weaved, and Ahsoka's shots went wide, her aim getting worse as the kickback from the blaster knocked her off balance. Dewback returned fire, and Ahsoka was forced to duck behind the crate again.

"Kriff!" she hissed. Over a decade later and she still wasn't listening to Rex. She could practically hear his voice from her first blaster training session all those years ago.

Ahsoka shot towards the target, her blast going wide and her arm swinging wildly from the force of the shot.

"Not one hand. Two," Rex said sternly.

Ahsoka pouted. "Why not?"

"The kickback is too strong, it'll throw off your aim."

"But you shoot one handed. One blaster in each hand, even!"

Rex took the blaster from Ahsoka's hand, inspected it, then put it back in her hand, adjusting her grip and bringing her other hand up to support it. "That's because a blaster is my primary weapon, and I've been practicing with it for years. My mind and body know how to stabilize against the kickback and adjust my aim accordingly."

"I could do that, too."

"I'm sure you could, but your time is much better spent with your lightsaber. Everyone has their place in an army, Commander Tano, and you can be most effective with your lightsaber. These lessons are just to help you out if you're in a scrap—they're not meant to make you a master marksman."

"Fine," she said, conceding that Rex knew what he was talking about and she didn't.

She raised the blaster up, keeping the grip that Rex had shown her with one hand on the trigger and the other supporting, and fired off a shot. The center of the target lit up with sparks.

"Good shot, sir!" Rex said.

Ahsoka grinned up at him. "Thanks, Rex."

Back in the present, Ahsoka tossed one of her blasters to the side and held onto the remaining one with two hands. She tugged the necklace out from under her shirt and held onto the pendant, taking a deep breath and focusing on the Force.

The Force came easier to her this time, and she sensed Dewback not twenty feet from her in the alley. Now was the time. She broke cover again and raised her blaster, holding it straight in front of her with two hands, then shot. She fired off several blasts, but the first one was all she'd needed. Dewback dropped to the dirty street, smoke rising from his singed cloak.

Ahsoka let out a breath of relief and sat back a moment, collecting herself before going to the spy's corpse to collect whatever information she could. She closed her eyes.

Thanks Rex, she thought.

"Don't come after me!" Wolffe yelled before breaking cover and sprinting towards the besieged bunker. He dodged expertly between screaming blaster beams, some coming from the insurgent forces in the bunker and others coming from the Imperial forces in the valley below.

"No, Wolffe, wait!" Rex screamed after him, then cursed and ducked back behind the mossy boulder.

"He's going to get himself killed," Gregor said from his spot next to Rex behind the boulder.

Leave it to Gregor to state the obvious, Rex thought with some frustration. He wanted desperately to rein Wolffe in, but he didn't think Wolffe would stop at anything to get to that bunker.

A whisper of a hint of a rumor had brought them here, deep in the jungles of Dantooine, in search of one of the last members of General Plo Koon's Wolfpack. After successfully executing Order 66, the 104th had been sent to track down other "rogue" Jedi. Wolffe had had the misfortune of actually finding his target, who proceeded to massacre his men until only Wolffe was left. Wolffe eventually managed to kill the Jedi, but he never recovered from losing his men. That was when he'd decided he wanted out of the Imperial army.

Several years later and Wolffe had believed himself to be the only surviving member of the Wolfpack, but then they'd started hearing rumors about Boost. Somehow the other member of the Wolfpack had survived, and he was hiding out in the jungles of Dantooine. What Wolffe, Rex, and Gregor hadn't known when they set off for Dantooine was that Boost had somehow gotten mixed up with a group of dissidents in the jungle, and that those dissidents would be under attack by the Empire when they arrived.

"What do we do, Rex?" Gregor asked. "He's as good as dead, but we can't just leave him… can we?"

Rex didn't know why Gregor and Wolffe acted like he was their CO when he ranked lower than both of them, but it was the dynamic that had developed between them. Rex supposed it was because he'd had longer to adjust to life without the chip, though it could also be because he didn't have to deal with the guilt of killing his Jedi on top of losing all of his men like Wolffe.

"I don't know. We can't go after him, but I don't want to leave him behind," Rex said, shaking his head.

"If we're not leaving then we should join the fight!" Gregor said, his eyes reflecting that wild gleam they sometimes got when he was losing his grip.

Great. Another clone going off the deep end in the middle of a firefight. Just what I needed, Rex thought. Every instinct he'd developed over his long years of service told him to hang back. They didn't know who the dissidents were or if they'd be hostile to him and his brothers, and they didn't know the numbers and firepower of the attacking Imperials either. It simply didn't make sense to rush into the middle of a firefight they didn't have anything to do with.

"Hang back," he said.

Gregor looked over at him in disappointment. "But Wolffe!"

"I know, but..!" Rex huffed in frustration, screwing his eyes shut. It wouldn't help Wolffe if he and Gregor got themselves killed. There was nothing they could do.

"Well I couldn't just stand back and watch!" Ahsoka shouted, and Rex winced. He'd seen enough arguments between Master and Padawan that he knew this would only escalate.

"Ahsoka, sometimes being a leader means you have to watch people die. You can't save everyone, and everyone here knows the sacrifices that might be expected of them," Anakin said.

General Skywalker didn't say "everyone knows what they signed up for," Rex noted, because of course the clones never signed up for anything. Rex chastised himself for his traitorous thoughts, but he knew nobody would notice. The two Jedi had forgotten he was there a while ago.

"Well I disagree. We have to at least try to save everyone," Ahsoka said.

"Sacrifices have to be made to win wars."

"I want to win the war, but not at the cost of my principles! The men of gamma squad would have died if I hadn't intervened, and yes, maybe it was reckless. But I had to at least try, and I don't regret it," she said stubbornly.

"Karking hell," Rex muttered under his breath. It was like Ahsoka had stretched her hand out from wherever she was across the galaxy to smack him on the head with that memory.

"What was that?" Gregor asked.

Rex shook his head. "Nothing. Ok, we're going in, but we're going to do this smart."

Gregor nodded eagerly. "Yeah! Yeah!"

"See that tree line along the ridge? We're going to follow it to the bunker, moving one at a time and covering each other as we go…"

Several hours later they returned to their rusty ship, carrying Wolffe between them. They'd found Boost, but the grizzled clone had refused to go with them, explaining that he was dedicated to the rebel cause now. So they'd helped fight the Imperials off, then left. Rex might have thought the whole excursion was a dangerous waste of time if he hadn't glimpsed the foreign light of happiness in Wolffe's good eye.

Rex allowed himself a secret smile as he punched in the coordinates on the navicomputer after liftoff. It had been over five years since he'd last seen Ahsoka, but she still managed to barge into his life. And he was a better man for it.

"What do we do, Fulcrum?" the rebel agent asked Ahsoka, eyes wide in fear and uncertainty. His fear was reflected in the handful of other faces that clustered around, all of them looking to her for direction.

"I don't know, just give me a second!" Ahsoka snapped, guilt immediately rising as the agent flinched back at her response. "I'm sorry," she amended. "I just need a moment to think."

Of course the first time she decided to meet with her agents in person the Imps would show up to their rendezvous point looking for them. Ahsoka and her nine recruits had all been meeting together in an abandoned hovertrain platform on Ord Mantell when Ahsoka's comm crackled to life with a warning from their lookout. Buckets on the move. ETA to your location ten minutes.

This would be so easy if she were on her own. Force leap across the platform, vault a few walls, and nobody would even know she'd been there. But she couldn't very well carry all nine of her agents with her while she escaped. If they'd been experienced spies then she'd feel comfortable leaving them to their own devices, but none of these people were career agents of espionage. Some of them had been passing along information for some time, yes, but they'd simply been going about their daily lives as normal and reporting Imperial activity in their cities and towns, not infiltrating enemy bases or disappearing in plain sight.

Calm them down, Ahsoka. They need you.

Ahsoka blinked in surprise when she realized the voice in her head sounded a lot like Rex.

"Don't worry, we can do this," she said, taking the voice's advice. "The rest of the station is crowded, and we can blend into the crowd, we just need to make sure we leave at different times from different locations."

"From different locations? But we're all in the same place," one of the spies, a Rodian man named Gundie said.

Six other people started asking questions at once, their chatter forming one incomprehensible mass that hurt Ahsoka's montrals to listen to.

Delegate. Pick the person with the most potential and let them develop under the responsibility you've given them, Rex's voice sounded again in her mind.

"Quiet!" she hissed, her authoritative voice cutting through the chaos. "Gundie, you take half the group and hike down the tracks to the next platform. That one is also abandoned, so there shouldn't be anyone there. Once you're there, each of you leave the platform for the main station one at a time, a minute apart each. Some people can leave together if you think you can make it look like you're traveling together. I'll lead the rest of us to do the same thing here."

Gundie nodded, then opened his mouth to ask another question.

"No time," she said, cutting him off. "We have eight minutes until troopers arrive. Let's move, and once you're safe back in your assigned locations send me a signal"

She picked out the four agents with Gundie and sent them on their way, then turned to her own group. "Ok, head for the platform exit. We wait there behind the gate, then one at a time slip into the main station. And keep quiet."

Lead by example, Rex's voice continued. Stay calm and inspire their confidence.

Ahsoka schooled her features accordingly and walked to the head of her little group, crouching low and moving carefully but trying her best to project calm and confidence.

It wasn't surprising to her that this advice would come in the form of Rex's voice. While Ahsoka had technically been Rex's superior, that had mostly been by virtue of her status as a Jedi. Ahsoka's role in most battles had more resembled a specialized advanced combat unit than a commander, and Rex had done most of the leading on the battlefield. It made sense. Ahsoka was an expert with a lightsaber, but she'd become a commander as soon as she'd become a Padawan, and she'd certainly never been trained in battle tactics or military leadership as a youngling. Everything she knew about leading men she'd learned from Anakin and Rex. And now that she thought back on it, most of the lessons she wanted to keep with her she'd learned from only from Rex.

They reached the exit of the abandoned platform, and Ahsoka held up a hand to call her agents to a halt. She took up a position behind one of the barriers blocking off the hallway to the abandoned platform where she could see the main hallway but couldn't be seen herself. She waited for a large group of commuters to walk by, then signaled for her first agent to leave.

The nervous man who'd asked for her help went first. Then an Ithorian woman, then two humans left together. Ahsoka took a deep breath as soon as the last two spies rounded a corner at the far end of the main hall and finally let herself relax. Right on time, a squad of stormtroopers entered the opposite end of the main hall and headed in her direction.

"I'd like to see them try and stop me," Ahsoka said to herself with a smirk, though of course she'd prefer they didn't see her at all.

She faded back into the shadows of the abandoned platform and leapt up into the air to land on a metal maintenance walkway high above the ground. She rushed down the walkway towards a utilitarian door that her preparations informed her led to the roof, and by the time the stormtroopers arrived on the platform, she was long gone.

That night, as Ahsoka curled up in her tiny bunk aboard the ancient stealth fighter she now called home, sleep evaded her. She tossed and turned for a bit, but still her thoughts raced. Hearing Rex's voice, imagined though it had been, had called attention to the ache in her chest that had laid mostly dormant for a while now.

With a sigh Ahsoka sat up, giving up the fight to sleep for now. She tugged on a leather strap that she always wore around her neck out from under her shirt, feeling along its length for the pendant and holding the smooth metal in her hand. She didn't need to look at it to know what she'd asked the Togruta craftsmen to etch there for her. Not many people knew how to read Togruti, Ahsoka included, but even if they did they wouldn't know what 7567 was supposed to mean.

Ahsoka held the pendant tight in her hand and her mind gradually calmed, allowing her to drift off to sleep. She missed Rex terribly, but today had been a reminder that he was always with her, even if only in shadows.