Star Wars Republic Commando: Knight of Honor ✓

Chapter 34

Author's Note: If you have any tips writing tips, please feel free to comment.

As always, I continue to hope that I am doing justice to the spirit of Star Wars as well the respective authors and characters from which I borrow. Again, I gratefully accept constructive criticism as a means to help me develop my skills further as a writer.

Mandalorian (Mando'a) words

Buy'ce (BOO-chay, BOO-shay): helmet; Colloquially: pint, bucket

Ika (EE-kah): diminutive suffix written as 'ika - also added to a name as a very familiar or childhood form, e.g, Ord'ika - Little Ordo

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Chapter 34

I wanted to give you a moment in time, an opportunity to remember. You needed to know who you fight for, not just what and why.

Cerina Browlin, liaison to RC-1168, "Dusty," during the Denon Mission

Tochin Moon III, 786 Days ABG

Jas held his helmet in his hands without looking up and found himself studying the dents and scratches, the reminders that he was a soldier who trained hard to be the best at what he does. His survival came from too many years of preparing for war in live-fire training exercises, and he knew that he shouldn't have survived at least a third of those simulated missions. For as much as he and his brothers fought amongst each other and bent the rules as necessary to get their jobs done, they also were one of the tightest knitted squads in the Republic Army. Gan had told them once that their bickering and fighting had made them stronger because they weren't afraid to be who they were meant to be.

Their opinionated differences gave them the opportunity to see all angles of a problem or a situation and by doing so they had the ability to find the loopholes. Orders for Crimson were nothing but a guideline to be loosely followed, something they were given to outline the situation that lay ahead of them. How they handled the problem was entirely up to the way the situation had evolved by the time they got there.

Jas often considered himself lucky that he wasn't just one of the regular troopers who was limited in skills and knowledge. He couldn't imagine following orders with something that seemed like blindness to him. He saw how the troopers did as they were ordered, barely questioning it. He wondered why the Kaminoans had created so many of his clone brethren without the want to think beyond their orders and challenge such commands.

However, Jas had decided that he should just be grateful that the Kaminoan scientists had given him and his brothers a little extra independent thinking, something that was required for the skills of a specialized soldier in a squad such as Crimson.

For a brief moment, Jas wondered what would have happened if he didn't have that independence and how it would have affected the bond he had formed with Les'ika. He was certain that if he had been developed with a lesser free will, he would never have taken the time to really look at her and see that she wasn't a material object he was ordered to retrieve and protect.

Because he could think outside the conventional borders, he was able to see her as the human she was, the gentle girl who lived a life of safety and comfort that most beings only dreamed to experience. And, he knew that it wouldn't be much longer before he would be sending her back to that existence, saying farewell to her and ending a special moment in his life that had somehow changed him.

Setting the helmet onto the ground now, Jas glanced at Les'ika, realizing that he had no idea how he wanted to approach the subject of their time together coming to its finality. They weren't even supposed to have grown close, especially not in the manner that they had, and Jas knew that he should have prepared for this separation better.