Author's Note: THE SEQUEL IS HERE! Or not here but on my authors page. Remnants is the sequel to both Only Words and The Expelled. It picks up right at the end of both stories with Ahsoka and Padme. Comments, concerns, suggestions, random drug induced epiphanies: leave them in a review. Hope you like it. -Ember.

P.S. since we're technically not supposed to have whole chapters of just author's notes you get an epilogue thingy. This one is about Rex and set just after the Battle of Teth (a.k.a. The Clone Wars movie - think little huttlet and returning to Tatooine).

Epilogue: Dreams

Rex woke with a start. For a moment he was confused, staring at the slats of the bed above him and trying to reconcile where he knew he was with the silence in his ears. The Torrent Company berth echoed with breathing of just six men. One hundred and thirty seven bunks laid empty.

Rex wondered whose bunk he was lying in. It wasn't strange for him to sleep with the rest of his men even though as a Captain he had his own quarters on the Resolute. There was always a bunk open somewhere: a dead man's bed or one vacated by a recovering trooper staying in the Med bay. There was something soothing about sleeping surrounded by his brothers, their mixed breathing making a comfortable white noise in the large space. It also gave him a chance to sit down with his men and ask about the missing troopers; it showed them he cared. He would never know who slept in this particular bunk before Teth. None of the six survivors around him remembered the dead man who had once called the six foot by two foot space home. There were one hundred and thirty seven bunks just like it.

"You awake Captain?" Coric asked from the bunk above Rex.

"Yeah, vod, I'm awake." Rex whispered so as not to wake the others. Coric must have been thinking the same thing because he held out his hand over the edge of the bed. Rex wordlessly passed up the medic's helmet and slipped on his own. Inside their buckets they could talk normally without waking anyone.

"Couldn't sleep?" Coric asked.

"Couldn't stay asleep," Rex replied.

"Nightmares?"

Rex was silent. Who wouldn't have nightmares after what they had been through? He felt like he should say yes, if only to make the medic feel better. Coric had lost more brothers in his care in the past 24 hours than any medic should ever have to bear. Teth would be as much of a scar for him as it would be for Rex. And it would be the truth to say he had nightmares, they just weren't about Teth.

"They all get them," Coric went on when Rex was quiet. "The men, I mean, they all have them. Even the shinnies. They tell me, you know, because I'm the medic and they worry it's… a sign of deficiency." Deficiency was every clone's fear on Kamino. A deficient clone went through reconditioning and if he survived was never quite the same again.

"Every soldier has nightmares. Even Kaminoan's can't breed that out of us," Rex replied.

"Sometimes I think they breed it into us," Coric replied. "You see I get the same ones."

"About the war?" Rex asked, trying not to hold his breath. Helmet comms picked up every little breath and swallow, and he was desperate to hide how much he wanted to know if he was the only one. In the end all clones wanted to be like their brothers. They felt safe in the anonymity of it even if they took pride in their meager individuality. Too much individuality, they all recognized, was dangerous.

"No," Coric replied, "about the Jedi."

Rex swallowed reflexively. He didn't need to ask what about the Jedi they dreamed of because he saw it too. It was always the same: a snowy field tainted red and his brothers scattered around him in their equally white armor smeared with blood and burned black in long stripes. In the dream he stood alone on that field and stared down the enemies that closed in around him, lightsabers glowing in their hands and dark faces hooded in their brown cloaks. His gaze would always settle on the last face, his General, Anakin Skywalker glaring at him with burning eyes. Rex knew in that moment that he would hunt Anakin for the rest of his life if he lived. It would be his mission, his sacred fight. He would wake up then, heart pounding and blood racing, ready for a fight he never wanted and crushed with an unfounded grief. Now that grief was all too familiar. He'd felt it on Teth, standing on the bloody ground where his brothers had died: One hundred and thirty eight men who would never return to their bunks.

"I guess you know what I mean," Coric said after his Captain's second pregnant pause.

"Yeah. I know what you mean."

Rex and Coric lay in their bunks without taking off their buckets in silence for the rest of the night. Not talking but neither of them sleeping either. Rex didn't know why Coric did it, but for his part he didn't want to relive the dream that had awoken him. He could live with seeing Skywalker's face in his nightmares every night. He didn't know if he could live seeing the little, Togruta child in her master's place.

Author's Note: So little tidbit of information, the nightmare is based off of the battle of Galidraan where Jango Fett and the True Mandalorians fought the Jedi. Eleven Jedi died and Jango Fett was the only Mandalorian survivor. That is the origin of his hatred for the Jedi and why he let the Kaminoan's use his genes for the Clone Army; he personally wanted to shoot every Jedi in the back. Too bad he didn't live to see it. -Ember