I will not be the last Jedi.

The beat of shock that runs through Hope is palpable, at least to him.

“Rex?” he asks, leaning in an inch or two, as if he didn’t hear the words right. “Captain Rex of the 501st?” Even as his mouth is formulating the question, he realizes that it must be true, if this man had spoken to him about Anakin Skywalker. If there was anyone outside of the Order who knew him, it must be– must have been– Rex.

Quickly, Hope runs through his mental calculations of the timeframes involved: when Skywalker met Rex, it might have been twenty years, thirty, since the end of the Clone Wars? Hope can’t imagine it being any more. Aging as a concept makes sense to him, although his own experience with it is rather unique to the clone experience: he knows, intellectually, that they age physically at twice the speed of normal humans, so their lifespan is approximately halved, assuming they live even that long. Scaling that beyond fifteen years or so, however, becomes… a little fuzzy. He’s not sure exactly what eighty years looks like on anyone, let alone someone who looks just like him. (He wonders, briefly, how old Skywalker actually is. It doesn’t seem right to ask.)

“That’s incredible,” he says, settling back into a thoughtful quietness. “I never thought any of us would live that long.”

“The very same.  Even as old as he was, he was one of the best the Rebellion had.  I was better for having met him.”  There had been a sadness to Rex, though he hadn’t been willing to voice it to the then-Jedi Knight.  Luke had been a man of considerably more social tact back then, so he hadn’t pressed him on anything.  Not on how the Republic fell, or why there were so few clones left.  “Rex wouldn’t say exactly how old he was then, but he was about as healthy and at peace as he could be."

Luke wanted to expound on Rex’s reasons for fighting.  Wanted to talk about how the old soldier had told Luke he’d joined to see the Republic restored.  To make sure his loss in the Clone Wars meant something.  But those were Rex’s words to say.  He did settle for something, though.

Skywalker seems tired, and suddenly older. Is it the conversation, or just Hope’s imagination– his invincible perception of the Jedi crumbling the more he’s told? He forces himself into a more relaxed posture as he follows Skywalker to the seat– ‘more relaxed’ being relative, since technically, even standing stiff and steel-straight is more natural than salute or parade rest. He can feel his arms automatically trying to fold behind his back, so he crosses them in front of his chest instead.

Hope can feel things inside himself folding, compressing, battoning down into something cool and smooth and less vulnerable. He would very much like to talk about something, anything, other than this.

Still.

“I’m the first clone you’ve met, then?” he asks, mildly. It seems like the logical assumption, but maybe this is just the first time Skywalker has connected the dots. But he doubts it. “You’re the first person I’ve met here who’s from… someplace I recognize.”

That was the thing about the Force.  It filled you up, strengthened you, and connected you to everything that was.  But when you burnt your connection near to the point of death, all that left you.  And as he felt his bones ache he was reminded of the price of overextending one’s self. 

Hope was changing the subject, doubtlessly dodging the undermining of everything he knew.  Luke couldn’t blame him, and even appreciated it.  Any more talk of the Jedi and one of their darkest chapters of the Order was fit to make him physically ill.  Clones, he asked about.  There had been one, on Endor.

“Second, actually.  There’s rumors of your brothers surviving into the Imperial era, but I only ever ran into one.”  Luke stroked his chin, searching for a name.  It had been a brief meeting moonside before Anakin’s funeral.  The clone had introduced himself, had lamented Anakin’s fate and tried to console Luke.  “Rex.  Rex was his name.  We met on Endor and... and he was old, as old as I am now.”

dualsunset‌:

The effect of Luke’s words are apparent on his face.  It’s brief, and an untrained eye would have missed the mask slipping, but Luke sees it… and his heart aches for the clone.  Luke couldn’t imagine the feeling.  You’re bred and raised to fight to the death for an ideal, to follow the Jedi and the Republic like it was all that mattered in your life.  And you find out not only was it for naught, it was the Jedi that brought it all crashing down in the end.  Even worse, you find out from the son of the Jedi that helped snuff out every last trace of the Republic.  Luke feels his shoulders tense up, the weight of being the one made to tell this tale threatening to crush him.

It took some time before Luke was able to shove down the emotion rising in his throat, before he could speak calmly and evenly again.  It did come, though, and with it maybe a chance to give the clone some tiny glint of hope.  Though in the face of everything else he’d said, it felt like a drop of water on a wildfire.

“By the time Anakin died, there had been a rebellion ongoing for some time.  I mentioned earlier I was a Commander, for instance.  That was the last rank I held in the Alliance, before I de-enlisted to devote time to being a Jedi.”  He still doubted to this day if he’d made the right decision.  If it had been fair to let Leia shoulder the majority of rebuilding while he went off through the galaxy playing Jedi.  “I digress, but it was the effort of that Alliance that lead to a final confrontation with my father and the Emperor.  In the end, Anakin chose to sacrifice himself.  To end the whole wretched thing with him.  He… died shortly after.”  In his arms.  That memory never did leave him.  Luke felt himself dwelling on that, but moved on before he could.

“The Empire collapsed not long after that.  Too much infighting and incompetence, whole thing just fell apart.  Took too long and we lost too much, in the end.”  Luke was silent for a time after that.  There was more, of course.  The story of the First Order, of his nephew and the outbreak of war with Leia’s Resistance.  But he wasn’t sure if it was worth it, having already troubled the man so much. 

“For what it’s worth… I am sorry.  For having to tell you, and that what was done to you and your brothers was all for naught.  Not that it ever could have been justified.”  Luke noticed the lack of ‘Sir’ earlier, and though he wasn’t sure, his strict stance seemed to be faltering.  “I realize it will take time to be comfortable with this, but you don’t need to treat me with the respect of the Jedi you knew.  Not unless I earn it back.”

Hope remembers one of Victoria Squad’s first independent missions, a few months after Geonosis. They had been waiting for the signal to strike, lying in a stakeout for a few days. He’d been cleaning his armor, helmet off, low and out of the open in their encampment, when Twenty had shot a drone down out of the sky before it could scan them. The DC-17m had gone off a foot past his left ear. It took a week for his hearing to come back– four terrifying days in the field, feeling like he was missing a limb, then three days praying not to be reconditioned.

In the end, his hearing had come back. But he will always remember those first few seconds of numb silence, like he was floating in the black void of space, far away from anything familiar.

That’s how Hope feels now. Like he’s going to feel the blood trickling out of his ears at any moment, or look down and see the injury that’s sent him into shock, as his limbs sink into pools of icy water. He needs to focus, find something to catch a grip on.

Different realities, Skywalker had said. Hope wonders if, maybe, this isn’t his future. It seems self-indulgent to hope for that, but does anything here make any more sense?

“Thank you for explaining, sir.” His voice is still as clear as glass, although quiet, as if he’s forgotten the noise of the street fair and the waves in the distance, or is somewhere else entirely. “You don’t need to be concerned. We’re glad to do our duty, to whatever end.” The words are hollow, filled up with smoke and doubt, but he believes them, or nearly does. The GAR is a weapon, in its most essential form; it isn’t his place to question or consent to how it’s wielded.

He keeps expecting the sand underneath their feet, beneath the boardwalk, to dissolve into the waves, and take them with it.

“Apologies, but it’s difficult to break the habit,” Hope bites off the sir with effort. “We spend our whole lives training to serve the Jedi. Most of us never meet one up close.”

“I tried not being concerned for a decade or so.  It tends to just make things worse.”  Luke felt his bones begin to ache.  Age and a long day was catching up with him and he found himself turning towards a bench a step or two away.  If he still had the full strength of the Force, he could have just willed away the pain.  Instead, he sat.

The clone kept apologizing, and he was still talking of duty and serving even all this way from the front.  Lamentable wasn’t the word for it.  He’d heard tales of the clones’ obedience, but to see it up close was enough to made Luke angry.  He finally did stop calling him sir, at least.  Though the effort it took was visible.

How many Jedi had been complicit in this?  Had Obi-Wan let it happen?  Yoda, even?  Luke couldn’t fathom how their ghosts could seem so at ease.  Obi-Wan had at least died trying to rectify things, but Yoda just passed away in his sleep.  He never did know how much sway either of them had held in the Order back then, but he had to know if they had done anything at all.  But it wasn’t fair to force Hope to answer for it.  Or to deal with an old, bitter Jedi’s self-loathing.

“That never should have been the case.   But I won’t force you to deal with that any more than you’re prepared for.  Not that my experience really compares, but I remember all too well the feeling of finding out everything you thought you knew was false.”

…Okay, honestly, Arthur had been thinking more along the lines of “this nearby rat vendor is selling ‘meat’”, but, Luke’s implications that the meat is rat seems… pretty likely actually! Which makes him all the more okay with not eating any more of it.

“I’ve actually been here a few weeks, now,” he says with a nonchalant shrug, leaning back against his bench. “Which I guess is sort of new, relatively. Plenty of people arrived here after me, though.”

He pauses, and grins at Luke. “And, hey, not a problem. You’ve got an aura around you, something like-” he pauses again, leaning his head back as he tries to think of words to describe it “-’grizzled old traumatized vet who had to start fighting again’.” He leans back fully, staring up into the sky, the grin sliding quickly off his face. “I know people like that. It’s the least I could do.”

When Luke gives his name, Arthur sits back up, grinning just as wildly as before - as though he’d never stopped smiling. “The name’s Arthur, and - what the fuck is that.”

Green milk. The milk is green. The milk. is green.

Chewy and, even though it was cliched, it tasted like chicken.  Luke tried not to think about the implications of a man-sized rat cooking up and serving a much smaller rat on a stick.  Not Luke’s first barbecued rodent though, so he ate it with the ease one would regular meat. 

Luke almost admired the kid’s bluntness, though he was mildly annoyed that someone could spot his baggage at a glance.  He was getting sloppy on the meditation or very off his guard if that was happening.  “Traumatized is a word for it.  Tends to happen when your father was a brutal warlord and you were forced to help topple an Empire at 19 because you’re ‘the chosen one’.”  Luke put air quotes on that.  Some chosen one he was.

The sight of his milk irked the young man, apparently.  In fact, the expression on his face was identical to the one Rey had worn when she had witnessed it.  Luke shrugged and took another long drink from it.  Wiping his face, he put the cap back on.  There wouldn’t be much left if he kept drinking it at this rate.

“Thala-Siren milk.  Comes from a creature I live on back in my galaxy.  Nutritious, filling, got all manner of vitamins in it that the blue milk from my home planet doesn’t.”  Luke paused for a minute, realizing he might as well explain that too.  “Blue milk comes from Banthas.  They’re like... very big herd animals.”

It feels like he’s listening to some kind of fairy tale. He’s never been told one, only heard fragments second- or third-hand, but he imagines this is what it’s like: grand forces of good and evil, secrets and betrayals, magic. There is a sense of unreality about it, like he’s looking through meter-thick clear plastic.

Hope doesn’t have the words to respond– he doesn’t even have the words to name his feelings, grim and cold and detached, like shrapnel once the shock sets in. His voice is quieter than he intends, when he finally does reply, but level and steady: “Generals Skywalker and Kenobi command the 501st and 212th Infantry Battalions. I’ve only met them in passing. We– Commandos– don’t have that kind of specific assignment, so our interactions with most Jedi are limited. I’ve heard–”

His voice falters.

Does it matter? If the Republic loses the war, what difference does any of it make? Is there any point to dwelling on any detail of the army– on any of their lives– if it was all a waste? Something twists in his stomach. They were bred to serve the Jedi– to die for the Jedi, for the Republic. It’s as fundamental a fact of reality as anything he’s ever known– as certain as the amount of blood he can lose without dying or the body temperature range he can survive at. The idea that it will all fly apart because of a Jedi’s betrayal– he feels like someone is amputating a limb he wasn’t aware he had.

Hope’s eyes are out of focus, staring into the gray-brown of Skywalker’s robes. He blinks, and looks up once more. The wind is cold. He expects it to blow him away, like ash.

The implications are dizzying, and he seizes on them: if the Republic falls, then is it the Separatists who establish a new imperial power? If Skywalker is responsible for the disintegration of the Republic, is it by betrayal or coup? Hope does not harbor strong political sentiments, any more than a saw or a knife has opinions of the work it does. He does know the horrors he’s seen with his own eyes on Separatist-occupied planets; whether or not the Republic is right has never been a question that concerned him or that he was asked to consider. But the implication that the Republic, or its ruins, might be the dawn of a new empire is disturbing.

It makes a certain grim sense. The galaxy he knows is strained, slowly tearing itself in two with the violence and upheaval of the war, spreading further each day: with proper organization and mobilization by a new power, there would be almost no resources to mount a resistance. Hope can picture whole systems falling at once, exhausted by war and without any recourse. Perhaps it would even seem a relief.

His voice is clear and calm when he finds it again: “If Anakin Skywalker died, what became of the Empire? There must have been a resistance over twenty or thirty years, organized or not.” There is always a resistance, is a lesson he’s learned: no one ever learns to love the boot crushing their neck, only tolerate it as best they can. He realizes he’s forgotten to say sir. 

The effect of Luke’s words are apparent on his face.  It’s brief, and an untrained eye would have missed the mask slipping, but Luke sees it... and his heart aches for the clone.  Luke couldn’t imagine the feeling.  You’re bred and raised to fight to the death for an ideal, to follow the Jedi and the Republic like it was all that mattered in your life.  And you find out not only was it for naught, it was the Jedi that brought it all crashing down in the end.  Even worse, you find out from the son of the Jedi that helped snuff out every last trace of the Republic.  Luke feels his shoulders tense up, the weight of being the one made to tell this tale threatening to crush him.

It took some time before Luke was able to shove down the emotion rising in his throat, before he could speak calmly and evenly again.  It did come, though, and with it maybe a chance to give the clone some tiny glint of hope.  Though in the face of everything else he’d said, it felt like a drop of water on a wildfire.

“By the time Anakin died, there had been a rebellion ongoing for some time.  I mentioned earlier I was a Commander, for instance.  That was the last rank I held in the Alliance, before I de-enlisted to devote time to being a Jedi.”  He still doubted to this day if he’d made the right decision.  If it had been fair to let Leia shoulder the majority of rebuilding while he went off through the galaxy playing Jedi.  “I digress, but it was the effort of that Alliance that lead to a final confrontation with my father and the Emperor.  In the end, Anakin chose to sacrifice himself.  To end the whole wretched thing with him.  He... died shortly after.”  In his arms.  That memory never did leave him.  Luke felt himself dwelling on that, but moved on before he could.

“The Empire collapsed not long after that.  Too much infighting and incompetence, whole thing just fell apart.  Took too long and we lost too much, in the end.”  Luke was silent for a time after that.  There was more, of course.  The story of the First Order, of his nephew and the outbreak of war with Leia’s Resistance.  But he wasn’t sure if it was worth it, having already troubled the man so much. 

Skywalker talks, explains, like he’s peeling off sticky layers of bandage away from wounded skin, grim and methodical. Hope listens, blank-faced and silent.

His first inclination is to dismiss it, since it has the ring of nonsense, but first of all you don’t just dismiss a Jedi like they’re some trooper bleeding into their brain, and second of all he has a hard time dismissing anything given the circumstances. When it’s lined up with the other information available– alternate planes of reality, omnipotent and omniscient artificial intelligences, magic and teleportation and who knows what else– time travel isn’t so implausible.

That leaves the content of the history Skywalker is outlining for him.

A chill settles inside him.

So they lose, he thinks.

He can’t name the emotion that wells up in him at that: he thinks of Geonosis, and the smell of thermal detonations and clay dust.

The question startles him, as intimate as a touch in the hollow cold preoccupying his thoughts. “Hope, sir,” he answers, voice flat. He hasn’t slipped out of his parade rest– it feels like flotsam, something to cling to, as if abandoning that small thing will leave him truly adrift.

This Skywalker is old, face weathered and lined, but Hope finds himself studying his shape. He wonders what the man looked like when he was young. He can recognize the fixation as it forms, can feel his mind turning over that question rather than focusing on the sinkhole expanding in his chest.

“If you won’t object to a personal question, sir,” Hope begins, slowly, with the deliberation of a man examining a ticking bomb, “would General Anakin Skywalker be your father, then?”

Luke felt a pang of guilt about revealing it with so little care for pacing or tact.  But how did you put ‘the Republic fell and all good in the universe was snuffed out’ in a manner that wasn’t upsetting?  “Hope.  Good name.”  Force knows the galaxy needed it, at all times.  Without it there was no Rebellion, no Resistance.  Luke had been hope, once, for a galaxy that sorely needed it.  Not any longer though.  That responsibility fell to Leia, Rey, and the Resistance now.

And the inevitable question came.  Luke tried not to sound too hesitant as he answered.  “He is.  My sister Leia, and I, were spirited away at birth so he couldn’t harm us.  Though I understand you may know him... very differently than I did.”  He said it all very matter-of-fact.  Not as if he didn’t care, but because he’d made his peace with the matter of his parentage a decade or two ago.  Luke did wonder though, what was he like back then?  Were Obi-Wan’s stories true?  Anakin couldn’t have always been that evil if there has still been some good in him at the end.

“After the Republic fell, my father turned to the dark side.  He took the name Darth Vader and was instrumental in maintaining the strength of the empire.”  Decades of practice couldn’t make the next sentence any easier, though.  “He died saving me.”  A lot of people seemed to die for, or because of, him.

Poe…actually kind of likes the Sea of Tranquility.

It’s grassy and choked with trees but not the kind of forest that holds gloom, or feels threatening. It’s just a forest. It makes something in Poe’s chest clench, not painfully, just with longing. Makes him miss his ma terribly. The memory of Yavin IV – home – always does.

Which is how he finds himself at the markets, trying not to gape at the…people…selling their wares.

“People” might be cutting it close with the descriptors. They were people in that they walk and talk, but…to put it bluntly, Poe may have dove behind a pile of wooden crates and hissed “What the fuck are these overgrown Ewoks” into the holophone until it showed him a picture of what some people in some other galaxy called a “bear.”

So, yeah, the bear people thing may have thrown him off just a little. But Poe’s a pilot, a Resistance officer, he’s acclimated to worse than alien species that could give Wookiees a run for their money when standing up. He’d sucked it the hell up, dusted himself off, and sauntered into the market as if nothing happened, and no one paid him any attention. As of now, he’s just another resident of the Ark on a shopping trip.

Poe believes that, too, like really actually believes it to the point where he doesn’t need to buy a pack of smokes to fumigate the anxiety out of his chest for once. He’s not having a breakdown, he’s taking in the atmosphere, he’s buying some fucking oranges. Fuck yeah.

That is, until he overhears arguing and makes the mistake of glancing over his shoulder to see none other than what has to be the ghost of Luke kriffing Skywalker, as in the Luke Skywalker that disintegrated into fucking ash within the past month of so, arguing with one of the shopkeeps.

Poe drops his oranges.

They were very nearly about to go south when he heard a man call his name from behind him.  Sparing one last ireful glare at the shopkeep, he turned to see a very startled man with oranges rolling around his feet.  “Who...” Luke trailed off because he immediately felt a sense of familiarity.  The patch on the man’s jacket indicated he was Resistance.  One of Leia’s soldiers, then.  Still, there was something more.  Around when he got a good look at this face, and his mind flashed back to a picture one of his old Rebellion contacts had sent him.  A child, roughly five or six years old with the same curly black hair.  His mind started to go from there, remembering his mission to Vetine with Shara Bey.  She’d expressed a desire to leave the Alliance to settle down with Kes Dameron, to start a family.

That picture had been sent to him by Kes when she’d died, a picture of their son Poe.  So this must be him.  They hadn’t had a proper chance to meet when Luke projected himself to Crait.  He’d barely had time to say goodbye to Leia.  Which meant that the last time Poe saw Luke, he’d vanished after being seemingly struck down by Kylo Ren.  This week was becoming a series of increasingly strange explanations.

Commander…? Is he one of the Jedi padawans? Hope feels uncertain, suddenly, a feeling he doesn’t relish. He’s no expert on Jedi, but he’s met a fair few, and never a padawan so old as this. The confusion is clear enough on the man’s face, eyebrows knitted and eyes narrowed, but Hope can feel it coming off him like heat. He swallows the thought, pushes back that connection into the dark soil at the heart of him. He’s never been sure if Jedi can read minds, or if it’s just a rumor, but he doesn’t intend to find out now.

Even as he feels his organs sinking into ice water inside him, prickling with dread, the sight of a Jedi so clearly unsure sets something instinctive in him on edge. Like dreaming of the sky falling. Dreaming of–

Hope settles out of his salute and into parade rest at the Jedi’s direction, but he does make eye contact now. He dips his had in recognition, smoothing out a frown before it can bloom. “It’s an honor–“ a beat of hesitation, “Commander Skywalker.” He pauses once more, unsure of the shape of the social interaction he’s being drawn into. “RC-8018, sir. Republic Commando, Victoria Squad. We haven’t met.”

(He wouldn’t expect the Commander to remember him if he had; in fact, he would prefer not to be remembered.)

Even if Luke couldn’t properly read the man with the Force, he knew confusion when he saw it.  It had been but a millisecond of expression before the clone corrected it, but he saw it just the same.  More displays of respect followed, and Luke felt irritation at being treated like a a Jedi General of old.  He squashed it though.  Not his fault that Luke had baggage with the label and mantle of Jedi.  “Obviously.  For starters, your Republic isn’t the same as mine.”  He exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose.  Summoning every bit of composure he could (and it took quite a bit), he decided to just get it over with.

“I think whoever’s responsible for this grabbed people from many different times and realities.  In our case... you’re from my past.  Or my present.  There’s rumors of clones living clear into my era, but I never verified them.”  Luke felt himself falter a bit.  To explain that the Jedi were half responsible for the rise of the Empire had never been easy.  “The Republic fell, not many years after the war broke out.  Its death gave way to a brutal Empire, one where the Jedi don’t mean what they did in your time.”  Luke paused for half a second, then adding a half-muttered “Not that they ever should have.”

If you were okay with a few tricks every now and then, Crises was, okay. Sure, it seemed like some awfully horrid place, and the rat denizens didn’t help much, but it was habitable, and at least Arthur had a consistent source of money for food and other goods.

Speaking of food, that’s where he was now; after staring too long at the contraption that was known as an “oven”, he decided that he just did not know how to deal with that right now, and so he’d gone out to find a suitable place to buy something precooked. The rat who’d sold it to him said that it was “meat” and nothing else, which meant it could be anything, really, but it was edible and tasted good, actually, and if it was going to give him food poisoning it sure hadn’t done that yet.

So when a ragged-looking grumpy old man he’s never seen before passes, the one who gives off an air of having lived through quite a lot, in his time (like Oifey, or Finn, or maybe, even though he hates to think it, Levin), Arthur’s in the proper mood to say hello. After all, there were no human denizens of the Ark, which meant that whoever this is was probably dragged here as well by whatever powers be. And maybe he could also use some lunch.

“Yo,” said Arthur, raising a hand in the laziest attempt at a wave imaginable. “You new, here? This rat has Meat, if you want it.”

Luke twitched in the young man’s direction.  He was distinctly beginning to miss secluded island living.  He hadn’t been forced to interact this much since Rey showed up demanding his training.  The kid offered him a stick of what he claimed was rat meat.  Rat was... admittedly not the worst thing he’d put in his mouth.  Some of the stuff Yoda had made him eat on Dagobah made rat seem tame.  At least it was cooked well enough.

“I am.  Given you don’t look like this meat while it was still alive, I take it you are as well.  And.. thank you.”  Luke cautiously took it and tore a chunk off with his teeth.  Not terrible.  The fish he caught on Ahch-To was better, but it was a start.  Reaching for his belt, he washed it down with a swig of green milk.

(drowning, child death, child abuse cw)

Mare Nectaris is not what he had expected. Maybe it’s just that most of his memories of beaches are the farthest thing from relaxing he can imagine. (Standing on the boardwalk overlooking the crashing waves, he thinks about the violent oceans of Kamino, battering the foundations of their facilities every minute of every hour. He thinks of Kite squad, who came up at the same time as Kilo did, and how he’d felt when he heard that two of them had drowned in the rough water training, one trying to save the other.)

The beaches he sees now, spread out before him and glittering like crystal, are serene. The water stretches farther than he can see, and from here it almost looks gentle. He has his doubts.

He’s caught up in his thoughts, as well as some kind of street event– there are chaotically-plumed birds selling food out of stalls, cawing out specials, and it’s a testament to the sinking disquiet Hope feels looking out on all that water that he isn’t trying as much food as he can carry.

He’s preoccupied, his thoughts on Kamino and Kite. Some part of his brain is cataloguing the conversations around him, tracking the motion of feathers and color, but his focus is not here. It’s a lapse in discipline. It’s a hazard.

A voice calls out, and Hope turns reflexively to look, drawn in by the tone of authority more than any expectation that he’s the one being hailed.

If he were given to emotional outbursts, he would blanch at the sight of those stern blue eyes, offset by Jedi gray and taupe. His chest is full of knots, tangled together in ways he can’t trace: his heart is in his throat and he’s tamping it back down, leveling out his breathing, suppressing the siren of paranoia that always spikes when he is in the company of the Jedi. Beyond that– he’s relieved. This must be relief.

His reaction is instant, snapping into a salute and the rigid posture of attention.  “General.”

General, the man called him.  The posture he took and salute he gave confirmed Luke’s suspicions about the man’s military status.  But the fact that it was being given to Luke boggled him.  “General?  I’ve never been more than a Commander.”  He’d been a very skilled pilot in the Rebellion at best.  Leia was the General in the family, not him. 

What was more confusing though was that the man seemed to recognize him.  No one outside of the old Rebellion should know his face.  He kept circling back to General though.  Leia wouldn’t have inflated his rank and status for Resistance propaganda, it wasn’t practical.  She’d always been a symbol enough.  He supposed the New Republic was a probable suspect, but he’d had purposely little contact with them so that was likewise in doubt.  Luke had to search back further and think harder about this.

Wait... there was a time when the Jedi had held the rank of General.  He’d read about it in an old holocron he’d managed to salvage.  Far, far, far back before the dark times of the Empire.  When they’d presided over a clone army in aid to the Old Republic.  A clone army that had been programmed to obey them.  Rumor had it they’d had some involvement in the downfall of the Republic, but it had always just been hearsay.  The period of transition between the Old Republic and the Empire was heavily censored and any material on pre-Imperial rule he’d recovered had been half-corrupted at best.

Luke had almost wished he hadn’t remembered.  Before him stood a testament to the Order’s failings.  They’d not only stood by, but allowed the creation of innumerable sentient soldiers programmed to obey and fight and die on their behalf.  He felt regret.  Shame, even, weighing in the pit of his stomach.  To be sure it wasn’t his deed, but he was what remained of the Order.  If any were to answer for the crime it should be him.  Not now, though.  It wouldn’t be fair to force the man to process that when they hadn’t even exchanged introductions.  That wasn’t even approaching the issue of how Luke was meeting a clone at all, let alone one that appeared this young.