Stormtrooper Rex AU
He chooses his brothers’ side.
Commander Rex looks at the rows of clone troopers dressed in white armor, their helmets painted with the togruta padawan - Ahsoka’s - face markings, and, unlike any other clone commander faced with Order 66, he chooses to obey it.
He doesn’t know if it’s out of cowardice or mercy, but he tells her to walk up to Jesse as if he is going to follow her plan, only to then raise his blaster in a shaking hand from behind her. He cradles his grip with his other hand, steadying his aim and squeezing the trigger. Be it by instinct or her keen Force-guided senses, Ahsoka dodges a few inches to the left, and the bolt only grazes her shoulder.
Her pained scream echoes loudly, and in his trained soldier brain, every following second seems to unfold in slow motion. She stumbles forward, hands darting to the lightsabers concealed at her lower back, and Rex follows his training, eliminating the threat before it becomes more dangerous.
It’s all in the manuals. Drilled into him from the moment he was able to understand words. Head, heart or stomach. Shoot to kill.
The next blaster shot meets the spot between her shoulder blades, at her heart’s height, and the blaster’s kickback shakes Rex’s to his core just like it had the first time he fired one, in Kamino. Ahsoka gasps, more shocked than in pain, and collapses forward on her chest with a dull thud.
Jesse makes a sharp gesture with two fingers pointed forwards, and the men follow his command fire at the small fallen figure on the floor that had once been their commander. The electric-blue bolts are reflected upon Rex’s dark visor as they meet her collapsed form over and over, making her body jerk and jolt until it no longer moves.
Rex can barely hear anything past the loud ringing in his ears even after the shooting has long ceased, but he assumes he hears Jesse ordering the men to take every ship and escape pod available to flee the carrier that is now reaching what will be undeniably a crashing course, pulled in by the gravity of the nearest moon.
The entire ship shakes and groans as it dives down, and the men march like a stampede, seeking the exits to make their way out with their lives, and Rex walks, falters, stumbles until he reaches the lifeless body on the floor and dropping to his knees close to it.
He gingerly reaches for her - Ahsoka’s - shoulder, flipping her on her side and then on her back. To his dismay, her eyes are open, staring right at him, wide with pain and betrayal.
“How could you?... How could...” she coughs, pain deepening her scowl “I trusted you. We were friends.”
Her words send a shard of cold into his heart, tearing its way through. Rex pries his helmet off, dropping it carelessly next to them; he shakes his head, reaching for her hand and taking it between his. It feels so small, impossibly so. Unlike him, she is a child in the body of a child, only seventeen and looking even younger, despite the tool the war had taken on her.
For some reason, his mind goes to Dogma, forced to take a choice no one would understand. Forced to kill a jedi to keep his brothers safe. Played like a pawn in a game he could never win. Damned if he made a choice and damned if he didn’t.
“They’re all I have.” he whispers, voice breaking; his sight becomes blurry with tears, and still he can see the contempt, the anger in Ahsoka’s face. She tries to pull her hand away, but he holds it tighter.
“They’re no longer who you think.” she grits out “They were wiped clean. You’re choosing to save something you can’t save.”
Rex sniffles, feels the hot tears trailing down his cheeks, his face burning with shame and guilt and despair.
“I’m so” the air in his lungs seem to not be enough, regardless of how much of it he is gulping with each breath “so sorry! But I have to try! I have to!”
He frees her hand, reaches for a device in his belt, a small hand scanner which he trails over Ahsoka’s torso, blinking his tears away and paying close attention to its readings.
“Y-You can still make it. I’ll smuggle you in, put you into a bacta tank-”
Ahsoka bats the device away with surprising strenght, clenching her teeth. Her breaths are shallow, cut off by the shivers that wrack her body.
“I’d rather die than become a prisoner of the Sith.”
Rex’s eyes widen at the cold resolution in her blue eyes. The pain and shock of the blaster fire had made her sunny, red-tinted orange skin fade into an ashy dull shade drenched in a sheen of sweat, her nostrils flared and the tendons on her neck jutting out in her unwavering tension.
“Ahsoka-”
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, commander Rex.” she all but spits it, but her voice breaks at his name
Her irises are surrounded by reddened veins, and tears suddenly bud at the corners of her eyes, trailing down her face; now, more than ever, she looks like what she truly is – a child, scared and in pain, thrown by adults into the battlefield to lead armies and take lives, never being allowed to be anything other than a soldier.
“Sir!” Jesse calls him from the blast doors much farther ahead “I’ve secured a ship for us! We should leave!”
Rex looks at his friend – his brother – over his shoulder. He turns back to Ahsoka, holding out his arms to try and lift her up when he notices the lightsaber in her hand.
“Don’t.” she snarls “Leave me here to die in peace.”
Rex’s eyes widen, and he notices her thumb grazing at the ignition button of her saber.
“You made your choice.” She grits out, swallowing down thickly “Better be able to live with it.”
Rex hesitates, takes several small instants to lower his hands, to pick up his helmet and get up to his feet. He turns to see Jesse waving urgently at him, nodding at the nearby craft. With one final look to Ahsoka – general, commander, friend, little sister, jedi, enemy – he places the helmet in his head and rushes away to Jesse, boarding the ship and following his fellow troopers among the stars.
-
Ahsoka closes her eyes and waits patiently for the moment she’ll be joining the force, free of all pain and torment of the war. A man clad in black robes walks up to her, stares at her wounded form and thinks back to the day he, too, was left behind, betrayed and with a broken body in need of healing.
He senses the small padawan general still clinging to her life, stubborn and wounded by the betrayal of those from whom she expected protection. The man’s tattooed arm shoots down, hand gripping tightly at the neck of her robes as he drags her unconscious form up to and into one of the nearby fighters. He places her on the back seat, carefully taking her lightsabers. Can’t be too careful.
“Betrayed by your master and abandoned to die.” Maul mutters to himself as he sets his course to Dathomir “I believe this will help you make up your mind… apprentice.”