It's Commander Tano, Not Padawan

Chapter 34

A/N: Slow to arrive, but here it is. Hope you enjoy. (Just a heads up, I realized I made a mistake of forgetting that Anakin was with them in Chapter 33, so I need to go back and update that a bit, but Anakin is here as he is supposed to be in this chapter.)

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Echo was alive.

A blaster bolt seared uncomfortably close to her right montral, the pain and smell of singed flesh dragging her back to the current foray.

Lifting her saber, Ahsoka fought to keep her mind on the incoming barrage.

"How?" she demanded. Her fear-confusion-hope was palpable between them.

His voice was hard. "By making him into a machine."

Her stomach twisted and shrunk into itself like a tinnie that Anakin had crumpled. Force-throwing a few of the droids before them against the wall, Ahsoka turned to Hunter. She needed to get in there.

"Sergeant, I'm going to check on Rex and Echo. You and Anakin, have this?" she asked.

Hunter didn't say a word, merely removed his vibroblade with a skilled twist and scanned the corridor.

She'd take that as confirmatory.

Feet pounding beneath her, Ahsoka felt a matched pounding in her chest renew itself. Echo? Alive? She wasn't lying when she told Crosshair that she had watched him die. He had exploded in a fiery blaze before their eyes, taking a part of her with him. Taking a larger part of Rex with him.

The durasteel door slid apart for her and three forms greeted her eyes, though their backs were to her. Not two. Three.

Rex was kneeling, hunched over a pale, skeleton-like body that was propped against the control panels on the ground.

Everything she was witnessing screamed with silent agony – with a pain that could not be expressed.

But his chest was moving. Echo – whose dimmed Force signature still pulsed with a familiar thrum – was alive.

Her eyes raked over his pitiful figure, eyes catching on each glinting implant and embedded wires that ran along his skull and spine; the way they had lowered him to that of a droid, his scomp arm sending vibrations of anger, red and hot, tingling down her arms.

But he was alive.

She breathed.

"How is he, Rex?" she finally asked, kneeling next to him. Ahsoka laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, shocked by how cold he was. His eyes were rolling, unseeing.

Ahsoka closed her eyes.

Force help me.

"He's too weak to walk. Very disoriented. Doesn't even remember how he got here. He remembers being at the Citadel, but that's about it," he replied, both of them ignoring the shakiness in his voice.

Ahsoka's chest felt like a larty had landed on her, her breath short.

"Fives is still alive and well in his mind."

"I know, Ahsoka," he murmured, his eyes never leaving his brother.

She wanted to scream – to rip the entire factory from the ground and crush it like a tinnie, but their time for mourning was nonexistent.

Ahsoka would deal with her anger later or else their entire mission would be made futile.

She swallowed and stood with her arms pulled taunt behind her.