Quotes
“General Plo Koon raises both arms, eyes closed in concentration as he pulls at the shattered bridge of the fallen Venator. His Jedi robe whips in the dry winds of Vanqor. Beside him, Padawan Ahsoka Tano mirrors his movements, assisting in stabilising the wreckage…” Tavi typed on her personal computer. She ignored the cold, half-eaten boiled egg sitting untouched on the saucer beside her caf. It was already 1100, and she hadn’t showered.
Commander Wolffe had finally relented to toss her a quote. The commander had been unimpressed at best, exasperated at worst. Determined to piece together the story before the next cycle of war news swallowed it whole, she’d take what she could get. Another update had come through just before she shut her computer: bounty hunters had taken hostages, one of them being a commander - Bly, a batchmate of Wolffe’s. There was no word on a rescue or negotiations, and until there was, it remained a loose thread in an already incident.
She pushed herself away from the desk. If she stayed here any longer, she’d let herself get sucked into the endless cycle of information overload - refreshing news feeds, cross-referencing sources, picking apart casualty reports.
Putting on a pair of casual loose trousers and a plain black long-sleeved shirt, she reached for her perfume, a Core Worlds blend that was supposed to smell like lazy Benduday mornings. It was a little too refined for someone who spent most of her time chasing war stories, but she liked the way it softened her days. She pulled her silver hair into a loose half-tie, stuffing her personal computer and recorder into the leather totebag - the one her mother had clocked as expensive the second she saw it.
Wolffe had chosen Redemption Tap for their meeting, a small tapface nestled in Column Commons. The Grand Army funded the place, a project meant to give prisoners with good behaviour a shot at something better than breaking down old blaster casings in a recycling facility. Supposedly, it made reintegration easier. That was the official line, anyway. Tavi had her doubts, no one ever talked about how many actually made it out and stayed out.
It was like any other café in Column Commons - the scent of freshly baked pastries and over-extracted caf hit her like a slap on the nose, warm and insistent. Redemption Tap tried to look modest - but everything about it felt intentionally designed to look modest - rustic wooden counters, exposed durasteel beams, filament lights that glowed soft gold even in the middle of the day. Its location in the heart of the Commons - just a block away from the Galactic News Service, and two from the Senate Press Hall - meant she couldn’t walk two steps without someone giving her one of those thin, polite smiles that oozed more competition than friendliness. She smiled and waved back out of habit. Mainstream folks. Republic-aligned. Press briefings at 0900, fluff profiles on senators by noon.
She ordered an iced black caf with a spritz of lemon and a meiloorun doughnut. She found a seat by the window, the way she always did. Better light, easier exits.
“Slow news week?”
The voice came from the next table. Lasat. Mid-forties maybe, dressed like he’d been up all night rewriting the same pitch. Chinos, wrinkled. Checkered shirt opened over a faded tee that read “NO WARS BUT CLASS WAR” in bold red letters. He didn’t look up, fingers flying over his keyboard, face bathed in the bluish light of his computer.
“Not really,” Tavi replied, sipping the lemon-spiked caf. “I just got back from the field. Vanqor.”
That made him glance over. “Huh. Embedded with the troops, eh? Who are you writing for?”
She shrugged. “Honestly? No one yet. Probably smaller publications - y’know, the ones still willing to publish something critical of the Republic. Just got a grant from SRN, so that’ll keep me floating for a bit.” A small smile tugged at her mouth. Quiet pride expanded inside her chest. Earning that grant wasn’t easy.
That got a chuckle out of him. He closed his computer with a gentle snap, then pulled a holocard from his front pocket and slid it across her table. “Bas Pawaka,” he said, tapping the edge. “Editor-in-Chief, The C Project. We’re a new independent initiative. Running under a few rotating grants. The usual. Our whole pitch is to serve the underreported and hold all kinds of power accountable. Lot of cross-collab with civil society groups, research collectives, anti-corruption watchdogs. We’ve only been around for five months, but we’re holding up.”
Tavi checked the holocard. Clean design. No Republic emblem in sight. That was rare. Encouraging. She raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” she said, “sounds like my kind of people.”
Bas grinned. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
Before she could reply, the mechanical door swung open with the kind of force that made everyone’s heads turn. Commander Wolffe barged in - still in full armour sans the helmet, expression fixed into that perpetual scowl she’d come to recognise . This man had no chill , Tavi thought. No intention of pretending to blend in either. He scanned the room until his eyes locked onto hers, then made a straight beeline towards her table. The room fell quieter. Curious eyes followed his every step. You didn’t usually see clone troopers in Column Commons unless they were part of the Coruscant Guard’s patrol rotation, and even then, they mostly stayed outside. The moment he reached her table, he pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat like a wall. Back straight, shoulders squared, elbows off the table.
On the other table, Bas took the cue. He nodded once to the commander, already packing up his things. “Just contact me whenever,” he said lightly to Tavi, sliding the holocard closer to her caf. “Send over a few past pieces. Congrats again on the SRN grant.”
Tavi barely got a smile before he vanished through the same door Wolffe had blasted through. Wolffe watched him go, turning his head until his entire torso pivoted towards the door. Only when Bas was fully out of sight did he look back at her.
“Shoot me your questions,” he said flatly. “I’ve got a meeting after lunch - if you haven’t heard, some bounty hunters took hostages back on Vanqor. Two of them are my brothers.”
Tavi reached for her recorder without breaking eye contact. She’d interviewed enough commanders to know the ones like him didn’t blink at being recorded - they just didn’t like wasting time.
“I need a quote to frame the Vanqor piece,” she said. “Something to contextualize the rescue efforts. Most of what I have is visual, terrain notes, and my perspective. You were on the ground too. Your voice matters.”
He glared at her, as if she’d just asked him to narrate his own trauma for entertainment.
“You were there,” he said flatly. “Didn’t seem like you needed me then.”
Tavi kept her tone even. “I need the perspective of the men who were ordered to locate Mace Windu and Anakin Skywalker in a fallen Venator-class Star Destroyer turned graveyard - one that was blown apart by their very own brother. A clone. Boba Fett. That’s not something I can manufacture from my observation on site.”
That got him. Wolffe scoffed. His eyes drifted past her to the window, where speeders zipped through the lower skylanes of Column Commons like insects. He didn’t speak for a moment, and Tavi expected him to stand up and leave. But instead, he settled in the chair, leaned forward against the table, forearms resting heavy atop the scratched wooden surface.
“They sent us to pick up the pieces,” he said. “Literally.”
He glued his eyes on her amber orbs. The white gleam of his cybernetic eye caught the sunlight pouring through the window. “The Endurance was scattered across the canyon. Some of the men didn’t even have their tags on by the time we got to them. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to jump out of the LAAT/i during the retrieval, I might’ve let you tag along on the sweep teams. You’d have seen what we saw. Bodies in soil, armour peeled off, blast wounds in the chest and head, those who survived the crash were executed. Hands still locked around blasters like they had a shot. We had to ID half of them by scars or armour markings. I don’t know what story you’re trying to write, Drezz, but don’t pretty it up for your readers.”
“I won’t,” Tavi said softly.
Wolffe exhaled. “We got the generals out. Skywalker. Windu. That was all that mattered, right?”
He cracked his fingers one by one. “That kid, Boba, he did this. Pretended to be one of the cadets. Wore their fatigues. Slept in the same bunks. He mapped out their schedules. Very observant. That’s how he got away.”
Tavi nodded slowly, letting the silence fill in the space between them before she continued her interview carefully, “So what do you do with that kind of betrayal?”
The commander looked away again. His gaze had fixed somewhere to the patrons of the cafe. “He’s still our brother,” Wolffe finally said, “but so were the ones we buried. And I don’t forget my brothers.”
He paused again, then straightened his posture to ground himself.
“General Plo always tells us we’re not expendable. I hold that true. I have to. Otherwise, there’s no point getting back to the warzone. No point suiting up the next day. No point trying to be more than what they built us to be.”
“He’s right,” Tavi mumbled without thinking.
Hearing that response, Wolffe simply raised both his eyebrows and dropped them immediately, the closest thing to a shrug she’d probably ever get from him.
“You got what you need?” he asked.
Tavi clicked off the recorder.
“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”
“Comet might want to be interviewed,” Wolffe said unexpectedly. “For additional context. Some of the boys who made it out of the ship, they’re still in medbay. You might want to talk to them while they’re lucid.”
Her eyes widened before she could stop herself. Was that... an invitation? From Wolffe? She was caught off guard, words tangling in her mouth for a moment before they found their footing.
“I—” she started, then cleared her throat. “I would love that. To interview them, I mean.”
Wolffe didn’t reply. He stood and adjusted the kama around his waist, straightened a stray strap to lay flat against his armour, and turned to leave. Across from him, Tavi remained seated, staring at the now-empty space in front of her. She was already mentally sorting her gear, checking the available light for portraits, calculating the best way to request access clearance to the medical wing. She hadn’t expected today to open up like this. She hadn’t expected him to open up like this.
She was halfway through estimating how long it would take to get to the base from Column Commons when his voice jolted her from her reverie.
“Then why are you still sitting there?”
Tavi snapped her head up, only to see Wolffe already at the door.
“Oh. Okay,” she said, mostly to herself, scrambling to grab her recorder, computer, and half-eaten meiloorun doughnut that she definitely wasn’t going to finish. Her caf was long forgotten. She shoved everything into her tote then hurried after him.
The ride to the Republic Military Base was quiet. Another thing Tavi hadn’t expected was that Wolffe had come by speeder. GAR-issued, matte grey, function over form. He jerked his head towards the parked speeder as they exited Redemption Tap, red zone, of course he could get away with that.
“GAR-owned,” he confirmed as he slind into the driver’s seat. “Commanders can use them while stationed on Coruscant. Only for GAR-approved business.”
Now, fifteen minutes into the ride, her fingers itched to pull out her datapad and start outlining the next piece. But she didn’t. Not with him sitting less than a metre away. They zipped past the edge of Column Commons, traffic growing more frantic the closer they got to the Military District.
“You don’t listen to music?” Tavi asked suddenly, trying to fill in the awkward silence.
“Is this part of the interview?” Wolffe deadpanned, eyes glued to the skylanes. “Trying to humanise us?”
The way he said it like he’d heard the question before told her everything.
“No,” she answered. “Just asking.”
Another stream of silence passed between them. She expected him to leave it there, but then he tapped his fingers against the steering wheel before stilling again. “Never got into it,” he said finally. “Didn’t grow up with it. Kamino didn’t play tunes in the barracks. Closest thing we had was the alarm system.”
Tavi looked at him, surprised he answered at all.
The commander went on. “Music makes you feel things. Sometimes it helps. Especially in the battlefield, on the LAAT/i, to hype us before battles. Sometimes it makes it worse. Most days, I don’t need help remembering.”
Tavi tilted her head toward him slightly, her voice cautious. “Memories stuck with you?”
Wolffe sighed and made a sharp turn. She saw the hesitation on his profile, and she was ready to apologise for crossing the lines.
“I was on Abregado,” he said finally, like he was pulling the words up from an unwelcome place. “Separatists jammed the signal before our surprise attack. We didn’t even see it coming. They had a superweapon hidden - massive ion cannon. First shot took out communications. Second hit the fleet.”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “The ion blast engulfed all three Venators. Systems dead. Lights out. Every fleet is frozen.”
Tavi decided to stay quiet. She didn’t need to prompt him.
“General Plo ordered evacuation. We scrambled the crew from the Triumphant into escape pods. Some didn’t make it in time. He, Sinker, Boost, and I managed to launch ours right before she exploded.”
Another pause before he continued quietly.
“Full crews. Gone in seconds.”
The speeder buzzed quietly as they passed into the first checkpoint of the Military District. Wolffe offered no ID; the clone on guard saw him and waved them through.
“Wolfpack died that day,” he added, as if it were just another tactical report. “All of them. Except me, Sinker, and Boost. Comet was on another mission. The rest of the boys helping on Vanqor weren’t there either. They came later.”
He reached down, absently brushing the grey-painted edge of his armour plating with one hand.
“This used to be maroon,” he said, not looking at her. “We painted it grey after Abregado. For the dead.”
The speeder finally pulled into the perimeter of the Republic Military Base. It was just as massive as she remembered, if not bigger. A small city disguised as a single facility, complete with its own traffic, mess halls, housing blocks, medbays and hospitals, hangars, and some other bureaucratic hellscapes.
Speeders buzzed through designated lanes whilst gunships hovered overhead, coming and going. The scale was absurd. Just getting from one wing to another required a vehicle - unless, of course, you were in the mood for extra cardio and felt like earning your lunch with a klicks-long hike in full armour or a tote bag weighed down with recording gear and a computer.
Wolffe veered off the main avenue and guided the speeder towards one of the back wings - 104th Battalion territory, far behind the central command building. When they reached the lobby entrance, he slowed the speeder. “Get off here,” he commanded. “Wait inside. I’ll take care of the speeder.”
Tavi shrugged. “It’s okay, I can go with—”
“No, you can’t,” Wolffe cut in, not even looking at her. “Wait at the lobby.”
“Right,” Tavi gave him a short nod, slung her tote over her shoulder, and stepped out without another word. The speeder pulled away as soon as the door sealed shut behind her, disappearing into an armour grade barricades nearby.
She turned to the building in front of her. The lobby doors were massive sheets of reinforced transparisteel, sleek and spotless, sliding open with that soft hydraulic hiss that seemed to follow her everywhere inside Republic facilities. There was a holographic directory glowed in one corner. A couple of wall-mounted chrono ticked away - one showed Coruscant’s standard hour, another showed the Outer Rim standardised hour. A few clone troopers moved through the area, barely acknowledging her.
The silver haired journalist found one of the couches near the corner and sat down, adjusting her bag beside her. The receptionist didn’t greet her. Probably clocked that she arrived via GAR speeder and filed her mentally under cleared by someone above my paygrade. Which, technically, she was.
A few minutes later, Wolffe walked out from one of the access halls behind the reception desk. He didn’t call her name, simply jerked his head towards the hallway.
Tavi stood and made her way towards him. “Do I need to…?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at the receptionist’s desk.
“Nah,” he said. “Just come quick.”
It wasn’t the same wing she remembered - the one where she’d spent almost two hours sitting with Chiko Renalla, waiting for someone from the 104th to escort her out of the war room before her assignment on Vanqor. That wing was to the left of the receptionist. This one branched right. Narrower halls. Fewer signs. More lived-in.
Wolffe pushed open a wide set of double doors, and the scent hit her full in the face.
Mess hall.
It was packed, predictably. Rows of clone troopers hunched over trays of identical set of food, laughing, arguing, talking with their mouths full. A few looked up when the door opened. A few more looked again when they noticed who walked in next to the commander.
“Comet agreed to be interviewed,” Wolffe said as he led her through rows of tables.
They hadn’t gotten five steps in before she was bombarded by the noise.
“Damn, we getting girls in here now?” someone near the caf dispenser called out.
“No, that’s the journalist from Vanqor! You’re collecting comm codes too?” another voice chimed in, laughing.
“She can interrogate me any day.” a third voice hollered from somewhere further back, followed by another group laughter.
“Miss, if you need a clone bodyguard, I volunteer!” another one shouted.
And then, of course, someone let out an actual, cartoonish wolf whistle.
Halfway through the row, Wolffe stopped cold, and turned towards the troopers. “Do any of you want latrine duty for the next two rotations?” he shouted.
What followed was an immediate clutter of trays. Eyes back on food. The room somehow got quieter without losing its noise.
“Didn’t think so.”
He turned back like nothing had happened and kept walking, leading her to a more secluded table near the far wall, partially sectioned off by a half-height divider and conveniently out of view from most of the chaos. Waiting there with a cup of caf in front of him was a trooper with regulation cut hair, stubble just starting to show around his jawline, and a relaxed posture that stood in total contrast to Wolffe’s usual steel rigidity.
He looked up as they approached, “Ah,” Comet said, raising his cup. “We meet again.”
“She’s here to interview you,” Wolffe said as he slid into the bench beside Tavi. “Needs more details from your perspective about the Vanqor rescue. First-hand account, something with teeth. And your thoughts on Boba. What happened, what it meant. Also…” He knocked his fist twice on the table. “Escort her to medbay after this. Endurance survivors are still there, yeah?”
“Yes, Commander,” Comet straightened his posture. “They’re still in recovery. Mostly stable now, some of them up and talking.” He paused. “Do we need clearance from the 91st?”
Wolffe nodded. “Already commed Neyo. He cleared it. I’ll text you the willing subject. Neyo said to keep it short and non-invasive, standard ‘don’t freak out the patients’ protocol.” He checked the chrono embedded in his vambrace. “I’ve got to leave soon anyway. Impromptu meeting, General Plo wants me at the Grand Medical Facility. We’re chasing intel on Sing’s last movement,” Wolffe continued.
Tavi blinked. That wasn’t public information. “Aurra Sing?” she asked carefully.
Wolffe gave her a sidelong glance. “Notorious bounty hunter. Ex-jedi. Until those hostages are accounted for, she’s our priority target. Wherever she goes, Boba trails behind.”
Comet whistled. “So we’re talking about another off-world op?”
“Possibly. Depends.” Wolffe stood, fast and sharp. “In the meantime, Drezz gets her interviews. Keep her out of trouble.”
The moment Wolffe exited the mess hall, the atmosphere seemed to change like someone had cracked open a window. Comet let out a long, suffering sigh. “This is getting personal real quick,” he muttered, eyes still on the door his commander had just disappeared through.
“What do you mean?”
Comet sipped his caf before answering, like he was trying to organise a thought that was too big to hold all at once. “Ponds,” he started, “he was from the same batch as Wolffe. Grew up together on Kamino - same barracks, same drill sergeants, same routine. They trained together, got slotted for different commands later, but that doesn’t erase the batch connection. You don’t forget that. You remember who got their teeth knocked out during sparring and who cried in the bunk after the trainer scolded the batch. It sticks.” He took another sip, then kept going before she could even ask.
“Wolffe, Ponds, Fox - you know, the Marshal Commander of the Coruscant Guard?” He side-eyed her. “You live here, you should know that one. Red armour, looks like he hasn’t slept since the war started?”
Tavi chuckled, and nodded. “He vouched for me. I’m one of the regulars at the Senate Building.”
“Yeah, him,” Comet continued. “Cody from the 212th is part of that circle too. So’s Bly from 327th. I think he and Ponds got into a fistfight over a girl once. Anyway, they were all trained to be commanders from the start. That’s what makes ‘em a batch. Some others, like Gree and Bacara, they float around the circle. Gree’s always hanging around when they’re on the same world, and Bacara shows up whenever things get vaguely suicidal.”
“So… they’re friends?”
Comet made a face, squinting slightly. “It’s more like… dysfunctional sibling energy? I mean we’re all brothers here. But in their case… It’s like, if one of them is in trouble, the rest are legally obligated to grumble about it while helping cover it up. Or start a search-and-rescue mission that breaks a dozen regulations.” He paused, then added with a smile, “Rex, from the 501st? He was a batch under them. But he kind of got adopted into the circle anyway. I think Cody picked him up and they became really close, and he never left. Like a stray took up permanent residence. No one questioned it.”
Tavi scribbled a few notes into her datapad. “So you’re telling me there are cliques in the Republic’s elite military command structure?”
“Obviously,” Comet laughed. “The entire GAR. Even the Jedi have cliques. You think we’re all just one big shiny monolith? Please. We’ve got cliques, drama, call signs, inside jokes, feuds, and at least one conspiracy theory about who’s been stealing rations on deck twelve.”
“...Is it you?”
He grinned. “I plead the Fifth. Oh wait, that’s not a Republic thing, is it?”
She snorted, and for the first time since she stepped into the base, she felt like she was talking to a person.
Comet leaned forward to rest his arms on the table. “Anyway, Ponds being taken is not just some casualty report on Wolffe’s desk. That’s his batchmate. It’s personal. And when things get personal for someone like Wolffe, it means the rest of us get mission briefings with zero prep time and about six hours of sleep spread across three days. And, if the generals don’t approve the op, they’ll run things their way. Discreetly, of course,”
“Huh.” Tavi adjusted her recorder in her palm, thumb hovering near the activation switch, but didn’t press it yet. She tilted her head. “How’s working with him like?”
Comet let out a small involuntary laugh that didn’t quite make it all the way up to his eyes. “Wolffe?” he echoed. “Imagine being supervised by a walking disciplinary form with legs. That’s day one.”
He finished his caf, then shrugged his shoulders. “He’s sharp. Fast. Doesn’t tolerate incompetence or backtalk unless you’ve got something useful to say. Doesn’t yell, either, not unless someone’s actually bleeding out. Just gives you that look , and somehow that’s worse.”
Tavi smirked. “I’ve seen the look.”
“Yeah, well, if you’ve seen it and lived to tell the tale, you’re doing fine.” Comet leaned in again. “But here’s the thing. He’s fair. Not nice. Not warm. But fair. If you mess up, you fix it. If you get hurt, he carries you back. He keeps track of names. Not everyone does that anymore. He remembers who we’ve lost, where, how. Every single one.”
“And under all that hardass outer shell,” Comet added, “is another, slightly angrier, smaller hardass shell. Like a nesting doll made out of durasteel and plastoid armour.”
“And under that?” Tavi laughed.
“Well. If you ever find out, let me know. I’m still working on it.” Comet smiled.
“I asked this question to Wolffe,” Tavi said, clicking a button on the recorder to switch it back on. “And I want to ask it to you too. To see if all troopers share the same sentiment towards Boba Fett. The kid.”
She paused for a moment to let him prepare. “What do you think of him? Wolffe said he’s still a brother.”
Comet clenched his jaw as he stared past her, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. For a moment, he didn’t answer. Then he let out a quiet exhale. “He was not our brother,” the corporal said, straight to the point, and without hesitation. “We may share DNA, sure, but that’s not what makes someone a brother. It’s training together. Sleeping in the same pods. The same bunks. Covering each other’s backs in the middle of a firefight. Losing your voice screaming for a medic because someone you actually know just took a round to the throat.”
He paused to rip open a wrapper of a protein bar, giving himself time to choose his next words carefully.
“Boba didn’t have any of that. He didn’t grow up with us. He didn’t go through Kamino. Didn’t get yelled at by the instructors, didn’t line up for rations, didn’t grow up rapidly like the rest of us. He was raised by a bounty hunter, our template, the one we wanted to see as a father, but saw us as cattles. The one who taught him how to kill, not how to serve. That kid walked onto The Endurance pretending to be one of the cadets to blow it all to hell. He shot a couple of our men point blank. That was a choice. And it cost us everyone on that ship.”
He looked at her then, directly, his expression unreadable but his voice steady.
“So no. Not a brother. Not to me.”
There was a silence between them after that. Tavi nodded, letting the recorder catch the weight of his emotion.
Comet took another bite of the bar. “Wolffe’s a better man than I am. He’s got space in him for compassion. I saw what was left in those wrecks. I helped carry the bodies out. You don’t unsee that.”
And with that, he looked away again, suddenly very interested in the far wall.
“Anyway, yes,” Comet laughed as they stepped into the sterile glow of the medbay entrance. “One time we pulled a stunt on Wolffe, and we got latrine duty for two days straight.”
Tavi looked up, caught off guard by the sudden shift in mood. A restrained laugh escaped her. Some of these troopers were too interesting. One minute they were processing battlefield trauma and the weight of brotherhood, the next, they were recalling prank wars and laughing about it.
Comet just grinned, unbothered, clearly delighted by the memory. “The Wolfpack and I made him do a trust fall,” he continued, dead serious, “in the middle of a battle.”
“You what?”
“It was Sinker’s idea, technically,” he went on, like that somehow made it less insane. “Boost dared him. We told Wolffe we were testing reaction time under high-pressure conditions, so he had to close his eyes and fall backward during an artillery pause. Team-building.”
Tavi stared.
“And we made him do morning affirmations,” Comet added, completely deadpan. “You should’ve seen him. ‘I am composed. I am efficient. I am emotionally available.’ The driest delivery you’ve ever heard.”
Tavi chuckled, shaking her head. “And you pulled this during combat?”
“Technically between volleys,” Comet corrected. “Timing was everything. It was fine. We caught him. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Comet winced. “Yeah, well. He landed on me. Full armour. I think he did it on purpose, honestly. Had that look in his eye. Like, if I’m going down, someone’s coming with me. ”
Tavi tried not to laugh too loud as they stepped deeper into the medbay, the clean, quiet air around them almost making the memory feel like it belonged to another world entirely. “Anyway,” Comet said with a shrug, “like I said, we got latrine duty after that. Worth it. Absolutely worth it.”
Comet led her d down a quiet corridor that opened into a wide recovery room. Rows of single beds lined the walls, each one separated by a thin mint green privacy curtain drawn back to expose the white bedding, the faint beep of diagnostic monitors, and the occasional smell of bacta fluid haunting the room. Nurses moved like ghosts through the aisles, clipboards in hand, low conversations murmuring between troopers sitting on their beds, some of them were dozing, or staring blankly at the ceiling.
“These are the Endurance survivors,” Comet said, changing his tone back to the lower register he used when things got real. “Mostly trauma recovery. Physical and otherwise. A few of them were caught in the blast. Wounded when the kid set his traps.” He gestured loosely towards the end of the room, where a few troopers sat upright, nursing lukewarm mugs of drinks. “As you know, the ones who actually went down with the ship on Vanqor didn’t survive. Sing made sure of that.”
Tavi nodded, her recorder already in hand, thumb resting lightly against the activation switch.
Comet scanned the room, then pointed his finger at a trooper seated on the edge of a bed near the windows. The man looked up, caught Comet’s eye, and gave a nod in return. He was broad-shouldered, maybe a little younger than Comet, but it was hard to tell under the fatigue and hospital lighting. He had dark circles under his eyes, a bandage on his jaw, and a stiffness to the way he moved that told her painkillers were doing a poor job.
“That’s the one,” Comet said under his breath. “Name’s Wasp but don’t expect him to let you print that. He was on the bridge when the alarms went off. Helped escort some cadets to the pods and escaped with them.”
With Comet beside her, Tavi approached the trooper carefully, making sure that she was nonthreatening. She stopped just out of his reach and asked. “Mind if I ask a few questions? Just for context. You can stay anonymous.”
“Fine,” Wasp nodded, voice gravelly. “Wasp. CT-98-2819, 91st Mobile Reconnaissance Corps. Just don’t print my details.”
“Of course,” Tavi replied, switching the recorder on and placing it gently on the bedstand beside him. “You were aboard The Endurance during the attack?”
He snorted bitterly. “Yeah. Escort duty. Was assigned to help with the cadets. Move ‘em from the halls to the pods once the alarms hit.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “They tell us it was a win. That we managed to save the generals. Skywalker. Windu. Which is great, I guess.”
Wasp’s voice faltered. “I just remember the bodies,” he continued. “Cadets. Troopers I trained with. I’d seen blaster marks in the walls. Some of them were already dead by the time the explosion rocked us. Shot. It was turned into a graveyard before it even crashed on Vanqor.”
The trooper closed his eyes for a second. “I used to spar with some of those brothers. I knew their names, their habits. Fog used to cheat on fitness drills. Tide hoarded Beep Boop Bites in his footlocker. I remember the smell of the bunks on the Endurance. I remember the damn jokes. Now I can’t forget the way the hallway looked when I dragged one of them out and saw the hole in his chest.”
Tavi didn’t interrupt the trooper’s emotional confession.
“I don’t care what the final report says,” he added after a long silence. “I survived. But it didn’t feel like winning.”
He looked at her then. “That enough for your report?”
“It’s more than enough,” she said softly, and moved her finger to click the recorder off. But Wasp spoke again, just before her finger touched the button.
“When peace comes… if it ever does,” he muttered, eyes drifting towards the skylane traffic outside of the window, “what happens to us? Do we get our lives then?” he asked. “Or do we just disappear?”
The recorder clicked off in the silence that followed.
For a long moment, Tavi didn’t move. The weight of Wasp’s confession still lingered in the space between them like smoke that clung to the walls, threaded through the antiseptic air, and settled into the quiet corners of her mind where no deadline could touch. She should’ve been thinking about the rest of her day. The overbearing list of interviews she still had to conduct, the stack of papers waiting to be reviewed for her article, the cross-referenced casualty reports that still needed proper attribution and quote clearance. There was a whole narrative to build, a structure to shape, editors to satisfy. The usual grind.
But for some reason, it all felt like noise underwater. She thought of something she read back in university, in one of those ethics modules no one paid enough attention to at the time. A line buried deep in a battered flimsiback, underlined in blue ink during a lecture she almost skipped. Something about memory. How remembering was its own kind of moral act. The last form of resistance. The last form of love.
“To remember is an ethical act.”
She hadn’t understood it fully when she first read it during a 0300 cram session. But now, she did. This job wasn’t just about reporting, or writing clean copy, or chasing quotes that fit a narrative arc. It was about remembering. Not the kind of remembering that leads to vengeance, or keeps wounds open for the sake of legacy, like how Boba remembered Mace Windu beheaded his father. But the kind that preserves quietly and stubbornly what others would rather let dissolve. The kind of remembering that refuses to let people vanish into the footnotes of a military report, or become data points in someone else’s war story.
In a galaxy where forgetting made the machine run smoother, choosing to remember felt almost radical. And maybe that was her job, she thought. Not to fix anything. Not to make it clean. But to sit in the middle of the wreckage and write it down before someone came along and swept the pieces into a more convenient version of the story, skewing the collective memory.
Tavi thanked Wasp, before standing up with care. She slipped the recorder back into her, and walked back towards where Comet was standing. Leaving the trooper alone with his silence. There were more stories to chase. But this one, she knew, would follow her.