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The fighting had stopped for the day, which on a campaign was a thing you learned to notice the way you noticed a change in the weather — a loosening in the air, a lowering of the shoulders, the particular quiet that came when men who had spent the daylight hours trying not to die were finally, for a few hours, allowed to simply be tired.
The 212th and the 501st had made joint camp on a low rise above the valley, their two colors mingling for once, orange and blue side by side in the dusk. It had been a hard few days, and it would be a hard few more; the campaign was not going especially well, and everyone knew it, and there was a weariness on the whole camp that no amount of rest was going to fully lift. But the sun was going down in a spread of pink and gold over the far hills, and the guns were quiet, and for a little while the war was somewhere else.
Cody had come up to the edge of the camp on nothing more than habit — the commander's habit of putting eyes on things, of walking the perimeter of his men in the quiet hours to see that all was well. And he had found, gathered at the rise's edge where it looked out over the valley, a small silent knot of troopers.
They were ARC troopers, mostly — the best of both battalions, hard men, veterans, the kind who had seen everything the war had to offer and been unimpressed by most of it. Rex was among them, and a couple of the 501st's senior men, and two or three of Cody's own. They were standing very still, and very quiet, and they were all looking at the same thing, and there was an expression on their faces that Cody had not often seen on faces like theirs.
They were watching the Jedi.
Out at the very lip of the rise, silhouetted against the burning sky, two figures sat facing one another in the cross-legged stillness of meditation.
One was General Kenobi. The other was the little Togruta — Commander Tano, Skywalker's padawan, the youngest of the Jedi who moved among them. And between the two of them, laid out on the ground, was an unremarkable little pile of flat stones, the kind you could find anywhere, gathered up from the valley floor and stacked into a rough cairn.
Cody drifted up beside Rex, quiet, and the captain gave him a small nod without taking his eyes off the scene, and neither of them spoke, because it did not seem like a moment for speaking.
The two Jedi were very still. The General sat with his hands resting loosely on his knees, his eyes closed, his weathered face utterly at peace in the golden light — that particular deep quiet he had, that Cody had come to recognize, the stillness of a man who had set down, for a moment, everything he carried. Across from him the young one sat in the same posture, though not as easily; Cody could see the difference, the faint tension in her, the frown of concentration, the effort of a student reaching for something that did not yet come naturally. Her montrals were tilted forward. Her small hands were open on her knees. And her eyes were fixed, with a kind of fierce hopeful frustration, on the little pile of stones.
The General was speaking to her. His voice was too low for Cody to catch most of it — it carried only in fragments on the still evening air, a word here and there, calm and unhurried and warm. Cody caught "...not with your hands..." and, a moment later, "...you're reaching for it. Don't reach. Let it come to you..." and the young one's frown deepened, and the top stone of the little pile trembled, and lifted a hand's breadth into the air — and then wobbled, and dropped, and clattered back down onto the stack.
The girl made a small sound of exasperation.
The General's mouth curved, just slightly, and he said something else, gentle, and though Cody couldn't hear it, he could see the effect of it — the young one's shoulders coming down from around her ears, the frustration easing out of her, a reluctant answering smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. Whatever he'd said, it had steadied her. He said something more, and gestured faintly with one hand toward the stones, unhurried, patient, and Cody understood without hearing that he was showing her again — talking her through it, walking her back to the beginning, the way a good teacher does when a student runs at a thing too hard and needs to be turned around and pointed at it more gently.
She closed her eyes this time. She breathed. Her hands stayed still on her knees.
And the stones lifted.
Not one, this time — all of them. The whole little pile, one flat stone after another, rose slowly and smoothly up off the ground and hung there in the golden air, drifting apart into a loose, turning, gently orbiting constellation, spread out between the two seated figures like something out of a dream. They floated. They rotated, slow and serene, catching the last of the sunset on their edges. And the young one's eyes came open, and her face broke into a grin of pure delighted astonishment at what she was doing — and the stones wobbled at once, threatening to fall as her concentration cracked with her joy—
But the General's hand lifted, the smallest movement, and Cody felt something — a shift in the air, the faint electric hum he had learned to associate with the General reaching into whatever it was the Jedi reached into — and the stones steadied. He had caught them. He had reached out, without opening his eyes, and gently taken up the weight the girl had nearly dropped, holding the little floating constellation in place, keeping it aloft through the moment her own control faltered — so that her mistake did not become a failure, so that the joy did not cost her the thing she'd made. And then, as her focus returned, as her grin settled back into concentration, Cody felt the General's touch withdraw, easing the weight back to her, handing it over again so subtly that Cody suspected the girl herself barely knew he'd done it. The stones went on floating. But they were hers again.
They stayed like that for a long moment, the two of them — grandmaster and student, though Cody did not yet know to think of it that way — with a slow constellation of common stones turning in the air between them and the whole sky on fire behind, and it was, Cody thought, one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
"I've served with General Skywalker two years," Rex said quietly, at last, his voice pitched low so as not to break the moment. "Seen him do things I still don't believe. Never seen anything like this, though." He shook his head slowly. "The General — General Kenobi — he's different when he teaches. You watch him fight, he's all business. But this—" He gestured faintly at the two seated figures. "This is something else."
"He's a patient man," Cody murmured. He'd seen it himself, more times than he could count — the endless patience of the General, the way he explained a thing a second time and a third without a flicker of irritation, the way he could take a frightened shiny or a frustrated padawan and simply, quietly, steady them. "Best teacher I ever saw. And I've watched him teach a lot of people a lot of things." He nodded toward the young Togruta. "Didn't know she was one of them, though. She's Skywalker's padawan. Why's she learning from General Kenobi?"
It was one of the 501st men who answered — Jesse, Cody thought, one of Rex's, who had a way of picking up on the strange internal doings of the Jedi. "Family thing," Jesse said, keeping his voice low. "Way I understand it. General Kenobi trained General Skywalker — was his master, back when Skywalker was a kid. And now Skywalker's training the Commander. So that makes General Kenobi kind of like—" he searched for it, "—her grandmaster. Or something. They've got a whole line of it, the Jedi. Goes back and back. Master to student to student, for — I don't know. Generations. Centuries, maybe."
Cody looked at the two of them with new understanding — the old master and the young student, three steps apart in a chain that ran back further than any of them could see. It explained the ease of it, he thought. The particular warmth. The General wasn't teaching a stranger out there. He was teaching his own — the grandchild of his own teaching, the next link but one in a line he was part of, passing down what had been passed down to him, the way it had been done long before any of them were made and would go on being done long after.
There was something in that which Cody found unexpectedly moving. The clones had no such thing. They had their brothers, which was no small gift, and Cody would not have traded it. But they had no line running back through the years, no grandmasters, no inheritance of hard-won knowledge handed patiently down from one generation to the next. They were made, all at once, and sent to war, and that was that. To watch the General sit in the sunset and gently teach his grandpadawan to lift a stone — to watch a thing being handed down, with love, across the years — was to catch a glimpse of something the clones would never have, and it stirred a quiet ache in Cody that he did not entirely have words for.
Out on the rise, the young one laughed — a bright clear sound that carried up to them on the still air — and Cody looked back to see that she had let the stones drift into a slow spinning ring, showing off now, delighted with herself, and the General was watching her with an expression of such fond, patient pride that it might have been carved from the same warmth as the sunset. He said something. She laughed again and made the stones do something more elaborate, and one of them promptly shot off sideways and bonked her gently on the montral, and she yelped, and the whole floating constellation came clattering down into the dirt at last — and the General's shoulders shook with quiet laughter, and the girl was laughing too, scowling and laughing at once, already scooping the stones back into a pile to try again.
The gathered troopers, watching, found themselves smiling — hard men, veterans, ARC troopers who had seen everything, standing in the dusk grinning like children at the sight of a Jedi Master and his grandpadawan laughing over a spilled pile of rocks.
They watched until the light was nearly gone.
The young one got it, in the end — got the whole pile up and holding, steady and sure, and held it there long enough that even the General nodded his approval and said something that made her sit up straighter with pride. And then, as the last of the sunset died and the first stars pricked out over the valley, the two of them let the meditation end. The stones settled to the ground for the final time. The General opened his eyes and stretched, and said something to his young student, and she scrambled up and offered him a hand, which he took with a small courteous nod, and the two of them rose and turned back toward the camp.
The watching troopers, caught, straightened up and tried to look as though they had not been standing there transfixed for the better part of an hour. The General noticed anyway; the General always noticed. He caught sight of the little knot of ARC troopers at the camp's edge, and something amused flickered across his face, and he inclined his head to them politely as he approached, entirely unembarrassed to have been watched.
"Commander," he said, to Cody. "Captain. Gentlemen. I hope we weren't disturbing your evening."
"No, sir," Cody said. "Not at all, sir." And then, because it seemed a shame not to say it, because the men beside him were all thinking it: "That was — it was something to see, sir. All of us thought so."
The General glanced back at the little pile of stones, and then at his young student, who had gone slightly pink at the praise, and his expression softened into something warm and private.
"She's coming along," he said, and there was a quiet pride in it that he did not bother to hide. "Faster than she gives herself credit for. She reaches too hard — they all do, at that age; I did myself — but she has a gift. A real one." He looked at Ahsoka with the fond, considering look of a teacher appraising a promising pupil. "It's a privilege to help her find it. She isn't strictly mine to teach, of course. But the line looks after its own. Someone helped me lift my first stone, a very long time ago." His eyes crinkled. "And I imagine, one day, she'll help someone else lift theirs. That's rather how it works."
And with that he bid them a courteous goodnight, and moved off into the camp, his young grandpadawan falling in at his side, the two of them talking quietly as they went — the master and the student, three steps apart in a line that ran back centuries and forward into a future none of them could see.
Cody watched them go. Beside him, Rex let out a slow breath.
"'That's rather how it works,'" the captain repeated, and shook his head, half a laugh in it. "You'd think he was talking about the weather."
"That's the General," Cody said.
And the captain and commander stood a while longer in the gathering dark, at the edge of a camp on a hard campaign in the middle of a hard war, and thought — each in his own way, and neither quite saying it — about lines and legacies, about the things worth passing down, about the strange privilege of having watched, for one quiet hour in the sunset, a thing being handed with love from one generation to the next.
Then the stars came out in earnest, and the cold came down, and they went to see their men.
But it stayed with them that evening. It stayed with all of them who had seen it — the sunset, and the floating stones, and the Jedi Master teaching his grandpadawan to lift them, with all the patience in the galaxy, as though there was no war at all.