when the war is over

when the war is over → one shot

author's note: i re-read a strip from a clone wars comic where anakin and ahsoka are talking to one another after the zygerian slavers arc in the tv series, and basically they say that they'll go around the galaxy and free all the slaves when the war is over. (insert me crying for ten years.) it got me thinking about the phrase "when the war is over," and i wondered just how often that phrase was used during the clone wars, especially by jedi, who heartbreakingly wouldn't live to see the end of the war. and because i'm a slut for irony and because i like to make myself cry, i attempted to blend that saddening truth with my passion for exploring the repercussions of war, and the ways in which its necessities are so often morally compromising. (if you've read luminosity or my unfinished wwi series on my other account, you know that's literally all i ever write about. geez, j, you aren't ernest hemingway. calm yourself.)

anyway, i hope you enjoy ♥️

fandom: star wars
subject: order 66, the clone war, jedi
characters: oc padawan, oc jedi masters, oc clone troopers

                                 ★★★

It's funny, the things you think about right before you die.

Dekka's double heartbeat pounded in her ears. Fear, adrenaline, and exhaustion had mingled together into such physical stress that the two identical organs were out of synch, and the sound relentlessly bombarded her hearing. Her ragged breath scratched in and out, grating against her eardrums as well, and the cacophony added to the sickening dread washing over her in waves was too much. She choked back a sob. I can't think I can't breathe I don't know what to do I'm going to die-

She clamped one hand over her mouth, the other clutching her lightsaber so tightly that the skin on her knuckles had turned from pitch black to charcoal gray. Her breaths shook, and she with them, shuddering violently. She was forced to outstretch two fingers from their death grip on her saber to brace herself on the ground, nearly falling forward from her crouch as trembling wracked her body. She tried to calm herself, but her usual oasis of serenity, the Force, was dripping with chaos and pain. She wasn't entirely sure what was happening, but she knew that Jedi were dead. A lot of them.

Evening was descending upon Montross, and on any other evening Dekka would have called it beautiful. Montross was a grassy world with many established outposts but only one true city, many kilometers away, and as a result, it was a much appreciated contrast to Coruscant, where Dekka had spent all of her life that she could recall. True, she had lived and studied within the walls of the Temple, but on the occasions that she ventured out into the rest of the planet -under the careful watch of a Jedi instructor, of course- she had been greeted with overcrowding, pollution, and hurried, angry beings of nearly every kind. The diversity had been fascinating to her, but the overload of sights and smells, along with the claustrophobia of being crammed into the middle of a herd of sentients, had suffocated her curiosity. Montross, on the other hand, was a refreshing antithesis, a wild, beautiful world largely untouched by technology. As the first sun began to slip past the horizon, casting vivid orange and red over the brown-green landscape, she realized that this world could be the last she would ever see. A very frightened portion of her, one that was most un-Jedi-like, tentatively suggested that such a planet could be a good place to die.

No, she rebuked herself firmly, her right hand sliding down from her mouth to then reach up and tug at her Padawan braid, the chain of silka beads that hung from one of her small horns. She had only begun crowning four years prior, near her eleventh year, and because of this her horns were still diminutive. However, she insisted, I am strong. Master Loray has taught me well.