Chapter 2

Comfort

"I'm not sure which part was weirder. Me comforting a teenage girl half my size with my one good arm, or the fact that halfway through her attempt to wash my shirt with her face I realized that she's actually four years older than I am. And a year ago she would have been my commanding officer."

Arc looked like any other trooper, if you ignored his unkempt hair, the bandages covering the right side of his face and the stump of a right arm. He sounded like one too, except that he was missing the typical Concord Dawn lilt to his voice. Arc, or as he was once known, TG-427, had been part of a test batch. Instead of the usual flash training based on the teachings of Jango Fett, his group had been given a more diverse set of flash training. As a result, he had a much more neutral accent than most of his clone brothers.

And while his test scores for most aptitudes put him squarely in the middle of the pack, leaving the Kaminoans to decide that the experiment was not particularly a success, he did have one talent that moved him up the rank ladder. His sense of spatial judgment, especially in terms of objects in motion, was far superior to most clones. When given grenades, missiles, or any other weapon that shot in an arc in gravity, he was a perfect shot. After his first squad saw him effortlessly toss a single droid popper in a perfect arc over a wall, under a tree branch and into a ten centimeter gap in the armored topside of a droid tank, he earned the nickname Arc. This was long before he was offered the chance to become an ARC trooper.

Jyssa Motla took a drag from her last hand rolled Toydarian cigareme, then blew the smoke out slowly. "Yeah, well I think the weird part is that she went right back to meditating on top of that dead tree in the middle of the courtyard. There's an entire kriffing excavation team twenty yards away from her, trying to unearth the rest of this place. All of her old friends just got shot or put on the Empire's Most Wanted List. That whole Empire thing is kinda new too. And she goes right back to sitting in a tree and meditating. That's weird for you."

"Maybe I should go see this dead tree for myself. My wing may be clipped, but I can still walk. And I haven't seen the sun in a while."

"You need to find a walking stick. Your inner ear isn't working right, and you've got no depth perception."

Arc stood up, unsteadily, but he was on his feet. "I'll be fine."

"I dropped Ahsoka when she collapsed last time. I ain't even gonna try to grab you if you fall. You're way too heavy."

Arc grinned, and with half of his face scruffy and overgrown and the other half resembling ground nerf, it wasn't pretty. "Are you saying I'm getting fat?"

"Yes. Now get your fat rear in gear and go check on Ahsoka so I can enjoy my last cigareme in peace."

Arc gave a rough salute with his left arm. "Yes sir, captain sir."

He stumbled out the door, holding on to the door frame with his left arm. Jyssa shouted after him as he left, "None of this sir druk, soldierboy. My ship, my rules."

Jyssa heard a faint 'Yes sir, captain sir!' before the ship's hatch opened and Arc's uneven footsteps pattered on the ship's ramp.

"Grife, why do I put up with them?" She shook her head, and then took another drag on her cigareme. It could be a while before she could find another one. She was going to enjoy this one as much as she could.

It didn't take Arc long to hobble around the ancient ruins. He'd been around the galaxy in his short life. Felucia had been an explosion of colors, nothing like the plain white walls and dark, wet skies of Kamino. Geonosis was dry, red, and had astounding spires of rock. Kessel... well, from space Kessel looked like a tuber. On the ground... still looked like a tuber. A close up surface view of a giant tuber that was floating through space. And Ren Vhar was stunning, beautiful, white, and full of painful memories of a battle that lasted far too short for Arc, and took far too much from him.

The view around him on Dantooine was beautiful... but boring. Long grasses swayed in the breeze. The highest ridges and hills here were no more than ten meters higher than the rest of the plains. That was all he could see, other than the ships and the ruins. Long, rolling plains. A small herd of Iriaz played nearby. Arc followed the sounds of digging to the small group of archaeologists who were excavating the ruins.

"I'm looking for Ahsoka. My captain said she was near where you were digging."

A Bith wiped the dirt off his forehead and blurbled something at Arc in a language he didn't understand.

"Ahsoka?" Arc asked.

The Bith nodded and pointed to his right. He blurbled, "Ahsoka-Jedi."

"She's not a jedi. She left the order a year ago." Arc didn't know why he immediately went on the defensive. Maybe it was just a reflex. The Jedi were being hunted down. Even if the archaeologists had no intention of turning her in, the more people who knew her as a Jedi, the more dangerous things would be for her.

The Bith blurbled something unintelligible, and then turned back to the hole he'd been digging.

Arc followed the passageway that the Bith had indicated, and sure enough found his way to what had once been a peaceful garden. And, as Jyssa had said, Ahsoka sat at the top of the broadly built, but long dead blba tree. Meditating.

"Ahsoka?"

Her eyes flickered, but she didn't respond.

"Ahsoka, we're worried about you."

"I'm fine. I'm just trying to reach out. I've got to find someone."

"Who?"

"Anyone. I know there are still Jedi out there. I can feel them. But I can't connect to them. It's like something is blocking me. I have to find them!" Her shoulder slumped, and her posture sunk out of the relaxed but rigid posture that Arc had come to identify with Jedi meditation. "Why can't I find them?"

"Ahsoka, you can't save everyone. They're all Jedi. They'll find a way to survive. Right now you need to find a way to survive too."

Ahsoka slid out of the tree, showing no sign of the vital young woman that Arc had come to know since he had met her. She looked up at him. "You know what I'm going through."

Hearing those words put an icy spike through Arc's gut. The icy ground of Ren Vhar, turned red from the blood of his brothers. With a clenched jaw, he said, "Yes. I do."

"Maybe I didn't see it happen. But I could feel it. I could feel them die. All of them. Master Fisto. Master Windu. Mundi. Secura. Luminara. I felt them all die." Her eyes closed, mostly concealing the tears forming there. "I felt Master Plo Koon die. My oldest friend in the galaxy. Dead. I used to always be able to know that Master Skywalker was alive. I don't know what happened, but I can't feel him anymore. He's gone."