Author's Note: I am very grateful to everyone who is taking the time to read, especially comment and vote! 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

Kotyc (koh-TEESH): strong

Ba'vodu Gan: Uncle Gan

Ner vod (nair-vohd): "my brother/sister"; colloquially also "my friend"

Fierfek: was a slang word that meant "hex" or "curse," but was commonly accepted to mean "poison" by non-Huttese-speaking races, most commonly . During the Clone Wars, it was adopted by clone commandos as a curse word. Boba Fett and Han Solo would later use it during the Second Galactic Civil War.

Shabuir (SHAH-boo-EER): extreme insult - "jerk", but much stronger

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

Haar'chak (HAR-chak): Damn it

Aruetiise (ah-roo-ay-TEE-say): traitor, foreigner, outsider

Barve: was a small, six-legged animal raised for its meat. Their unclean reputation led to the word barve, or adjective barvy, being used across the galaxy as an insult. The insult was especially prevalent among bounty hunters. The insult was also used to label Jedi affected by force psychosis, with people calling them "barvy Jedi".

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Chapter 10

Hearts see what blinds the eye.

Old Tochinite proverb, generally given as advice prior to an arranged marriage

Tochin Moon III, 784 Days ABG

Crimson Squad watched with uncertainty as the princess now sobbed heavily. Her body shook with the strength from the crying and the emotional explosion that had overtaken her.

 Her weeping sounded like she was in pain, her breath gasping. She appeared to show no signs of letting up, and whatever was going on in her mind was not loosening its grasp on her.

Jas knelt before her, and his memories suddenly flashed back to one of his first live-fire training exercises when his body was not much older than that of a young child. He thought he had been prepared for it through the flash training and the practice exercises, but nothing could prepare him for the shock of live-fire combat. 

When he let his memories wander too far away, he could still hear the sound of bombs, see the blaster fire grazing the ground where he had been moments ago, and he could still experience beneath his boots the feeling of tripping and falling over clones that hadn't survived - children's faces just like his. 

Jas didn't remember any of the debriefings of that exercise.

 But he vividly remembered that about an hour after the training was over, he had gotten violently sick. Losing everything he had eaten all day. Then, his crying had started, turning the racking and uncontrollable fits of sobbing. 

The Kaminoans had thought he was a failure and wanted to recondition - terminate - him. Seeming to come out of nowhere, Ba'vodu Gan had stepped in and took Jas in his arms, demanding that the Kaminoans allow him some time to emotionally absorb his ordeal in the training. 

He argued that a good soldier knew what it was to live and want to live and that they had to learn that human emotions could only be suppressed so much, Gan demanded that the Kaminoans stop treating the clones like droids and let them learn from their experience instead of writing them off as failures.

Jas and gan had promised to keep that breakdown a secret and that it would be used to make Jas a better soldier. Looking at the princess, Jas knew she was undergoing as such a shock can onset at any time after an emotional ordeal.

 Crimson would be naïve to think that a girl who was raised in a safe sanctuary would be able to go about the rest of this mission unaffected by a kidnapping.

 She was bound to crack at some point, and it was probably better now, shortly after her rescue than later when they could be caught in the midst of defending against a wild beast or in a firefight where they would be forced to leave her to her demons while they fought.

Gath took a calm breath. "She's in shock and trying to process too much at once. It's overloading her."

"So how do you fix it?" Dusty asked.

Mouse quickly knelt onto the ground by Jas. Without thinking about it, he just opened his hand and slapped it across her cheek. 

The loud strike of his glove against her skin seemed to echo through the forest, and it was worse than releasing a thermal detonator in the silence, waking small animals that suddenly began skittering in a panic,

Dusty couldn't help himself and laughed with genuine humor. "I could have done that, ner vod!"

Jas didn't see the humor in Mouse's actions, and she wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. During Has' ordeal years ago, Gan had simply held Jas strongly, doing nothing more than offering calm reassurance.

Mouse's trike on the princess, however, seemed to be enough of a rouse that it brought her back from her mental nightmare. 

She quickly looked up, and her cheeks were soaked from her crying, but her eyes had cleared. She touched a hand to the place where the commando had slapped her as though she could feel the residual sting.

"Ma'am?" Jas asked. "Are you okay?"

"There was no peace in his eyes," she whispered. Then, her eyes came to the visor of the soldier before her. Her blue eyes were sad, broken. "He didn't deserve it. It was immoral/"

"Hazar?" Jas aked, "The man who captured you?"

Arlesse used her sleeve to brush away the dampness on her face. Taking a few deep breathes, the touch of that murderous mercenary's hands began to subside and the coldness of his eyes began to fade from her consciousness. 

She knew he would haunt her for a long time, and it frightened her to think that he had managed to scar her so deeply without harming her.

"No," she said softly. Then, she looked to Dusty. "Him."

Dusty stopped suddenly from pulling open his kit and turned to the frightened girl on the ground. He didn't understand at all what connection she had made with him, and it made him extremely uncomfortable. 

Hiding his discomfort, Dusty aimed his words at Mouse. "Looks like you hit her too hard, ner vod."

Arlesse suddenly shook her head as though trying to understand something, but there was a piece missing. Her eyes passed over the three commandos and their helmets, hr forehead creasing with thought.

 After a few moments, she returned her gaze to the soldier with no helmet. She caught his eyes and realized that he wasn't the same soldier who had been tortured by her captor. 

There was something in her eyes that made him different, even though he looked the same at first glance.

"Buckets off," Gath gently instructed. He realized that something about Dusty had sparked a memory for her, and he wondered if it had something to do with being in Hazar's captivity. The way she was studying Dusty also led Gath to believe she had encountered a clone before. "Let her see us."

After a couple of seconds, a series of soft hisses broke the quiet darkness. The rest of Crimson Squad had unlocked their helmets and pulled them from their heads.

Arlesse took a deep breath at the four similar faces that looked at her. They all had dark hair and dark eyes with a strength that exuded from them. 

The way their eyes passed over her, however, told her they were four different men. 

There was a vulnerability they showed from being unmasked that they made sure to keep hidden beneath their armor.

Taking a moment she looked to each of their eyes, trying to remember exactly how the soldier who was imprisoned with her had pronounced the words he said to her. 

She thought about it carefully for a moment before speaking. She didn't want to mispronounce the phrases and possibly insult the soldiers who were with her now.

"He told me to stay ko..." she paused, fighting with an accent she wasn't confident she could replicate. "Ko...teesh..."

"What?" Dusty asked, unable to hide his shock. "You met someone who spoke Mando'a?"

Arlesse felt suddenly confused and overwhelmed. She didn't know what Mando'a was. Instead, she shook her head trying to say that word again, thinking she may have mispronounced it. "He said ko-teesh. I didn't know what it meant."

Gath decided the word itself wasn't important. They needed to know who would use such a word and say it to her. He kept his voice calm and even. "Who told you to stay kotyc?"

Arlesse took a breath, her eyes lost in the similarities of the men before her and the one from the prison cell. "He was a man like you but with white armor..."

"Fierfek!" Jas said softly, but angrily. The trooper might have still been on that ship somewhere, and they didn't find him. His guilt suddenly overwhelmed him. "I saw clone trooper armor the gallery, just before Hazar's underling shot at me. In the confusion of everything, I never tried to find him."

"A clone trooper?" Gath asked the princess, hoping to fill in some of the blanks and make a better sense of her emotional confusion.

Arlesse nodded. "Yes, a clone trooper. The man who kidnapped me, the one you call Hazar, said the Separatists gave him the trooper to keep him busy so that he wouldn't touch me."

"Kriffing shabuir," Dusty grumbled angrily.

"Kotyc," Jas explained as he put his buy'ce on the ground beside him and tried to get back on track with something relevant, "means strong."

Arlesse breathed softly, looking at the soldier kneeling before her. "He told me to stay... ko-teesh."

Jas nodded. "The clone trooper you saw, he was trying to tell you to be strong."

"Do you know what happened to him?" Gath pressed carefully.

Arlesse swallowed hard at the lump that formed in her throat again as she thought about the cloned man and his horrible fate. She felt a tear fall free, and as she looked to these four men the haunting similarly made her shudder. "He tried not to scream..."

"What happened to him?" Dusty asked, the anger moving in his voice.

The princess shook her head and felt her hands shaking again. Then, she felt a gentle but strong grasp on her hands, encouraging her to not back down but to face her frightening ordeal.

Jas didn't think about reaching out to touch her. It just seemed like the right thing to do, and he was sure that Gan would have done the same thing had he been here with them.

Arlesse looked to the armored man who held her hands in his steady grasp. Something in his touch and mannerisms made her realize that he was the same one who stayed with her in the prison cell. 

He was the one who found the escape pod and brought her with him, allowing her to hold onto him because she was afraid that if she let go, she would return to her nightmare. 

He had said earlier that he was going to keep her safe, and she believed him. She had no reason now to give up believing that he was going to keep her safe again.

"Stay kotyc," Jas told her softly.

Arlesse heard the similarities in the voices between the soldier before her and the trooper she knew briefly on the mercenary's ship. 

However, this soldier's accent was stronger and more commanding of that accent. His deep inflection of the dead clone trooper's words was beautiful and melodic. 

The way this soldier said those words brought her back from the darkness of the horrific memories that continued to run through her thoughts.

"Hazar killed him," she whispered as she felt like she couldn't look away from the man who was holding her. He was a lifeline to her safety, and he was the net that would catch her if she started to fall back into the nightmare of the clone's torture. 

She didn't know this man before her, but she knew she trusted him. His touch revealed protection and honor, and he silently encouraged her to tell them what happened to one of their comrades.

Arlesse swallowed hard, needing to tell them about what she witnessed, if for no other reason than they had the right to know. She never looked away from the soldier before her, feeling like she needed to confess to him. "Hazar tortured the trooper and never stopped. He was entertained with it, laughing at me for being frightened and upset." she trembled once more, putting into words what she had observed. "Hazar said he was going to dissect the cloned soldier, and he did."

"Haar'chak!" Dusty shouted. "Had I known, I wouldn't have simply shot the shabuir."

Taking a deep breath, Arlesse let her fingers curl tighter around the soldier's strong hands, fearing that if she loosened her grasp the slightest bit, she would return to that prison cell and start living the nightmare again.

 As guilt washed over her, she focused her eyes on his, apologizing personally to him, "I'm sorry. I know I should have tried to do something..."

"No," Gath said gently but with strength. He understood now that the princess was not physically harmed, but Hazar had done well to hurt her emotionally. "You're not a soldier and not trained. That clone trooper will be missed, but he died doing what he was supposed to. He was doing his duty to keep you safe."

Arlesse brought her eyes to the soldier who had offered her absolution for her failure. "Did he have any way to be remembered?" she asked.

"He did," Gath answered. "He had a name, just like we do."

"You're mourning him," Mouse breathed, unable to hide his surprise. "Aruetiise don't mourn for us."

Arlesse looked to the commando who had been quiet up until now. Her words were a sad whisper. "I never thanked him."

Mouse narrowed his focus to only the princess and himself, as though assessing her. His dark eyes bore into her blue irises noting that her intentions were well-meant and not a load of osik. "You didn't have to, Ma'am. He saw it."

Then, Mouse quickly rose from the ground and started to put his buy'ce back in place. Before he got it over his head, he glanced at her. "I'm Mouse."

Silently now, the helmet was returned and sealed in place. He had said his peace, and he was ready to continue with the mission. He was not designed to deal with a frightened young woman, and he would rather leave his brothers to that task.

 He knew that the princess was going to be a challenge to them, and he hated challenges like this. He wished the mission had been a simple assassination like last time. That was something he could comprehend.

Dusty settled himself on the ground now and pulled out the water from his kit, taking a long sip. After a moment, he raised the bottle as though offering a toast. "I'm Dusty."

He then pointed the bottle toward one of the soldiers. "That's Gath."

"And, the barve you're holding hostage," Dusty continued, "That's Jas."

Arlesse brought her eyes to the soldier before her and felt her cheeks heat up in an unusual warmth as she was suddenly embarrassed but not understanding why.

 She was grateful that the darkness hid her flushed face. She had never been compared to a hostage-taker in her life, and she wasn't entirely sure what to make of the comment.

Jas had begun to doubt if he would ever have free of his hands again. This was the second time she had taken hold of him, and he wondered if maybe his display of benevolence to earn her trust had backfired on him.

 He gently pulled his hands free, confused between relief that she let him go and disappointment that she hadn't held on tighter.

"Ma'am," Dusty said, "I urge you to take a drink. We don't need you dehydrating on us."

Arlesse nodded weakly and grasped the offered bottle. She took a long swallow, finishing off the last quarter of the bottle that Dusty had given her, and she returned it to him.

"I'm sorry, I drank it all," she told him.

"That's fine."

Rubbing her eyes, Arlesse offered a small, sad smile. Then she watched Jas as he reached over to his helmet and stood up. 

After a moment, she glanced toward the escape pod and covered her mouth, yawning heavily. "Can I stay out here with you all? I don't want to be alone."

Gath nodded, aware that there was quite some time left until dawn. He wasn't entirely sure what to make of the fact that they only had the girl in their possession for a short time and she already had them spinning in ways none of them were prepared for.

 Hoping once again that her home was closer than they imagined, Gath told her, "I'll find you something to sleep on."

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Quick Author's Note: The words "barve" and "fierfek" are not actually Mandalorian words, but I am including them because some people might be curious and want to know what it means.

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