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By Emparra

Warning!
Depictions of terrible things that happen in war, vague-ish description of bombing aftermath, grief, battlefield mourning, though I tried to not get too crazy with it. It's a sad little bit of writing, mostly.


[I've had dreams, and I've had visions,

I've been held them in my hands and watched them slip right through,

Like they were only tiny grains of sand…]

As Rex watches the Jedi, he knows it is a heavy, heavy thing for one to lose a brother. A heavy, deep thing, something rooted firmly in the soul, or the heart, the psyche… whatever makes sentients individuals. And he knows that loss breaks them, even just a little. Of all the troopers, the vode, Rex knows this. Two of the most outstanding Jedi of the generations run in his circles of the war, and he has known them for the whole of it. And he has seen them lose.

Today… today they have all lost.

One of the wisest, kindest, and most effective generals in the Grand Army of the Republic has fallen, like the strike of lightning in midnight, so brightly and quietly in the distance, and he is counting, waiting for the awful crack that thunders their loss throughout the heavens.

Fallen! Fallen! Kenobi is fallen! Mourn, all ye men, for a good man is dead! Is dead!

Once on a little planet in the Mandalorian Run, they heard the natives sing their songs of mourning for the fallen in battle. They had fought well, aiding the clone army in defense against the droid hordes, and they had joined around their pyres.

Later, Cody told him that planet had birthed Kenobi.

On this cursed, blood-baptized shore, the dust of the bones of carefully numbered men will join the sands as hallowed ground, washed by the relentless surf. There should be a stone here, placed after they count their dead. There should be graves in the dirt just beyond the beach… but there is not enough left to bury. There should be a monument so no one will forget. Some sort of thing to plead to the inhabitants of this wretched place to remember that good men died for them, burned to ashes on their front steps. A good Jedi, one of the very best, certainly the kindest he'd ever known– especially in the aftermath of Kadavo. Rex, the Clone Trooper, would not have passed through the doors of that hellhole without Kenobi, and he was in no way too proud to admit it.

But as empty, as sick as he feels now, he knows it is nothing compared to his general.

There is no way to know where one body ends and another starts on this burned beach. There aren't so much bodies as crumbled… blackness. There is no plastoid, no rifles, no bones, just black and fire, and somehow there is red in the water.

There is one sliver of something bright, in the very middle, in the worst of it all.

A lightsaber.

Somehow, it shines on when everything else is melted.

The Jedi will want it, he is sure. Skywalker is on his way; it feels as if a storm approaches with his star fighter, screaming through the sky to the beach where the fighting was the worst.

Rex watches Skywalker as he catapults out of the cockpit and across the battlefield, searching… searching…

They stop on him, on the cylinder in his hand. Then he is there, reaching for it, cradling it in his hand, quiet, quiet like he had never been until now, and somehow that is worse. It is worse than the explosion of thunder, the booming to signal the end of too many lives.

Skywalker stands with Rex in the middle of where men stood only this morning, now ashes and bitter dust in the air, his eyes tightly shut as… as… as nothing.

There is nothing.

Perhaps he is searching in the Force, trying to find his brother, to find any of their brothers, but they are no more.

It is silent. And Skywalker says no word.

Suddenly, he looks up and Rex cannot look away. He will not drop his gaze, not now, not when those eyes that blaze blue fire have been banked into low coals. The air is heavy, and it looks as though half the world rests on the General's shoulders now; perhaps it does. He is the Ranking Officer of the Third Galactic Army now, at least until they return to Curiscant. He does not sink, only stands in sorrow, holding a lightsaber that is not his in his hand.

"This lightsaber is your life."

Every man in the third army has heard those words in Kenobi's voice.

Now Kenobi's lightsaber rests in the hands of Skywalker, and his hands are dust on the beach mixed in the vod.

Jedi are hardy, but this is worse. As it had been explained to him, Jedi bonded their spirits together as teachers and students, a bond of choice rather than blood, a bond deeper than brotherhood of batch or brood. It would be the loss of part of the spirit that brought a Jedi low; this is what Rex sees before him- a man just realizing a part of him is gone, a part that was another person.

Hours later, after the names are collected and the coup is counted, Rex knows Cody is marching further on, stubbornly in step with his General.

Skywalker is not as he was with the Rako Hardeen gambit; he is quiet, but he is present. Some grief stirs men into rage, and some settles them.

Skywalker has settled.

Orders go out, action follows, and cleanup scrapes away as much of the carnage as possible, but for the beach. The people have come out of hiding now, and they lend their hands too. They witness the sacrificial altar that their land became for the gods of war, for the pursuit of liberty, and they have already hallowed it.

After the General leaves, none step on the blackened sands.

The names of the fallen are called, and the Vode sing their songs of victory and mourning, and they sing a ballad from the planet that gave the galaxy Obi-wan Kenobi, and its somber words haunt the Negotiator, ghostly echoes that haunt the halls.

[…through the night, as I face the storms of life, the anchor holds despite the storm…]

…and then he woke.


Finess.

Notes:
Well, this was a terrible idea...
So I took it and wrote a Thing with it!