WHILE OTHERS RAISED A WHITE FLAG

This is another installment in the "While Others" universe. If you have not read the other three stories, please go read them now.

Cast of Characters (Italics indicate an OC)

Ahsoka Tano

Lux Bonteri

Saw and Steela Gerrera

Mina Bonteri – Also known as "BonScary," because God help the fool who gets between her and her children.

General Tandin- the current King of Onderon

Captain Rex

Hutch St. James- a former Onderon Rebel who is obsessed with University of Onderon sports.

John Bonteri- Mina's kindhearted husband.

Sierra Bonteri- John and Mina's daughter, three years Lux's junior.

Hero St. James – A former Onderon rebel who loves to cook, Hutch's wife.

Explanation of the AU

It's been a while since I completed "While Others Fell To Darkness," so here is a quick crash course in the AU that this story is set in.

One: Lux Bonteri's parents and Steela Gerrera are all alive due to a government program called the Lazarus Project. The aim of this project was to distract the people after Order 66 and get them on the side of the Empire.

Two: While Tarkin was revealed to be behind the Project, King Dendup was a key player. For his treason, he has been deposed and General Tandin is now the King of Onderon.

Three: Lux and Ahsoka are married, as are Hutch and Hero

Four: Currently, Order 66 has just been activated and Captain Rex arrives to "blow the whistle".

Now without further ado, I present "While Others Raised a White Flag".

CHAPTER ONE

Is it possible that any villainy should be so dear?

-Much Ado About Nothing

"The Republic's been overthrown. In its place is an Empire," Rex sobs. "All the Jedi are gone. All my brothers are murderers. You're the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker. They want you gone. And the rebels are too big a risk for them to leave alive. You have to run."

He pushes Ahsoka and Lux forward.

"Now."

….

Lux ends up behind the wheel, driving like a madman to his parents' house. Ahsoka's in the backseat with Rex, on the comm with Steela.

"I don't know what's going on," Ahsoka blubbers. "Rex says that the clones killed Anakin and all the other Jedi! What are we going to do, Steela?"

"Calm down, Ahsoka."

Ahsoka flushes. "Don't you think I'm kriffing trying to?"she yells.

Rex grabs the comm before this can escalate, and very calmly tells Steela what's going on.

"Head Advisor Gerrera, you need to take the king and get out of the city. We'll regroup at your old outpost in the jungle, hopefully no one will think to look for us there."

….

Wilhuff Tarkin rubs his wrists, rejoicing in the absence of cuffs.

A stormtrooper escorts him to his old office, and he shrewdly takes in every detail. The whole place has been scrubbed from floor to ceiling, but otherwise untouched from when he left for the Citadel.

It's good to be back, he thinks before ordering an LEP servant droid to fetch him a cup of caf.

He sits down at his old desk and activates his holoscreen.

The meddlesome Jedi are all but gone, and it is his task to destroy the last remnants of the Order.

If everything had gone according to plan, he would have stood each one of his Lazaruses up on a pedestal, watching as they told the people how the Jedi killed them, and the Sith brought them back to life. The Project would be water, to help the people swallow the bitter pill of the new Empire.

But he would make do with the current circumstances.

"You could have been luminaries," he said. "It's unfortunate I have to kill you both."

Tarkin activates his holocom and puts out an order.

"Commander, it has come time for the Project to be ended. Eliminate the Lazaruses."

"Yes, sir."

….

Bethany Squadron gives their report hours later.

"Sir, we have eliminated the Twi'Lek."

Tarkin mentally crosses that Lazarus off his list, but he has a feeling as to why the trooper isn't mentioning the most troublesome Lazaruses.

"Very well. Now, what of the Bonteri family and Steela Gerrera?"

He spits out the last name.

The trooper swallows hard.

"They have fled Iziz along with the King. We have yet to locate them."

The look that Tarkin gives lets him know that he'd better bring their heads on a silver tray as quickly as he can.

….

"General Matthew Cooper, you are being demoted."

Cooper straightens behind his desk and fixes the messenger with a withering glare.

"Under whose orders?"

A new person walks through the door.

"Mine. Cooper, get out of my office."

Cooper stands, white-knuckling his desk.

"No." he says. "I won't let you take charge of this facility after what you did to that child, and all the prisoners before her!"

"Admirable, Cooper." Tor says, straightening his uniform. "You've finally grown a backbone."

"You son of a-."

And those are the last words Cooper says before Tor and the messenger shoot him dead.

….

In his left arm, King Tandin holds Steela as she weeps over the realization that Tarkin had meant to use her to smooth over this slaughter.

In his right he holds Saw, numb from shock and unwilling to let a single tear flow.

(Come to think of it, the only time someone has seen Saw cry was at Steela's fake funeral. There were no tears of joy when he found her. Just shock, like now.)

But Tandin is weeping as well, for the people he was forced to leave behind. He knows the Empire will place a cruel king, maybe even Dendup, on the throne, and his people will suffer.

Thank God they had the sense to leave Talia in charge of the former rebels. The people at least will have a fighting chance.

Tandin takes a deep breath.

"Steela, if you're right, then we need to find out what else he was planning to do. It had to be larger than the Lazarus Project. There had to be someone higher up than Tarkin, someone pulling the puppet strings."

Saw shrugs out of Tandin's embrace.

"We'll find them. And then we're going to kill them." He mutters. "I'm going to get Bonteri. As soon as Ahsoka's done being hysterical, then we're going to figure out who the Bigger Kahuna is."

SAW

Settling in to the old rebel outpost is the easy part.

We only had two places to sleep: the room for the men, and the room for the women. Lux, Hutch, Tandin, Rex, and I take over the men's barracks. The girls set up shop in the women's. Easy as pie. The hardest part was moving two beds into two storage rooms: one for John and Mina, the other for Tandin.

Not really because we want to separate them. It's more out of necessity. Stressful situations bode for a lot of arguing between us and the last person we want to deal with is Mina.

Oh Mina. We all love you to death, but you scare us sometimes.

Tandin plops his bag of belongings down on the bed. "Thank you for moving this here, Saw and Hutch."

I nod. "No problem, sire."

"I'm not King anymore." He says forlornly.

Just then, a racket arises from the girls' room.

There is a crash.

Then somebody (Hero probably) calls someone else a clumsy slut.

Yep, only Hero would say something like "clumsy slut."

I grab one of Tandin's pillows and wrap it around my head to cover my ears. The Republic is gone, we've had to run for our lives, and I do not want to deal with girl drama on top of that.

But Tandin extends his hand to me, in the universal gesture for rock-paper-scissors.

"May the best man win."

….

Tandin picked paper. Of course he picked paper. Steela must have told him that I always pick rock.

I'm mumbling about cheating at rock-paper-scissors when I meet Lux and Hutch going down the hallway.

"Are we on Onderon, or the set of Mean Girls?" Hutch asks.

"I don't even know."

We bump fists. All three of us have each other's backs, ever since Steela's fake funeral.

"Let's do this."

Lux knocks on the bedroom door.

"Is everything okay in there?"

There's a scuffle, and the door opens.

"Thank the Lord," Sierra mutters, ushering us in.

"What's happening?" Hutch asks.

Sierra doesn't have to answer. She just points.

Dozens of recipe cards are strewn across the floor. Hero and Steela are on all fours picking them up and sticking them in a card organizer. On the other side of the room, Ahsoka lies on her bed with her back to us.

"Steela knocked Hero's recipe box over and it spilled everywhere." Sierra explains.

Lux crosses the room, careful not to step on any of Hero's cards. He makes his way over to Ahsoka and rubs the place between his wife's shoulder blades in a circle.

"Are you tired, honey?"

Ahsoka turns her head. "No. I have a headache."

"Do you want something to drink? A hot towel? A cuddle buddy?"

Ahsoka puts her head back in its original place. "No."

"Well whenever you're ready, we're going to move the bed into another room."

Ahsoka rolls over. "In that case, I'm ready now. I've shared a room with Steela for a year, and she snores."

Steela looks up. "Well, you talk in your sleep."

"And Hutch steals blankets." Hero supplies. "Either way, I still have recipe cards to pick up."

Steela rolls her eyes and continues picking up the cards. Hutch gets down to help.

"I never thought we'd be stuck in here again." He mutters.

"Me neither." Steela agrees.

Hutch mutters something that I can't hear, but Steela sure can.

Her head snaps up.

"Care to repeat that, Hutch?"

"I said that we all know whose fault it is that we're here." Hutch says, louder.

"Of course we do. It's Tarkin's."

"If Tarkin hadn't been fed a continuous stream of Lazaruses, he would have gotten antsy and made a mistake!" Hutch says.

Steela straightens up. "Are you telling me this is my fault for falling off a cliff?"

"No! It's just that-."

"If it's anyone's fault that I fell, it's Dendup's! He pushed me!"

"But who shot the gunship down?" Sierra asks.

Silence.

Then I raise my hand.

"Then it's your fault!" Lux shouts.

I jump to my feet. "Hold on. I may have shot that gunship down, but I wasn't at the top of the cliff with a rifle that could have taken out the cannon that shot Ahsoka. If Lux did what he was supposed to do and, I don't know, looked over the gunship, then Ahsoka wouldn't have dropped Steela and she wouldn't be a Lazarus."

"So it's your fault!" Sierra interjects.

"What?" Lux asks. "No!"

"Yes it is!" Sierra snaps.

Lux's face flushes and he takes a step toward his sister. "There wouldn't even have been a rebellion if you hadn't overslept the last morning on Raxus. If you hadn't needed me to drive you to school, I would have been home when the Lazarus Project came for Mom and Dad and I could have stopped it. Mom would still be the Senator, she would have taken Rash off the throne and knocked some sense into Dendup and everything would have been fine!"

Hutch, Hero, Steela and I flank Lux, boxing Sierra in. "Then it's your fault!"

"Wait a minute!" Sierra cries, hiding behind Steela like a human shield.

Steela spins around to face her. "If you hadn't overslept…"

"If Lux and I had been home they might have killed us."

Lux and I start pointing at each other. "If you had only done your job…"

"If you hadn't shot that gunship down…"

And then Hero butts in, ending the stalemate.

"If a certain someone had let Tarkin fall into a lava pit, there would be no Lazarus Project in the first place!"

All eyes except for Lux's go to Ahsoka.

"If she hadn't saved Tarkin, none of this would be happening!"

Ahsoka stutters, trying to think up a way to throw blame onto somebody else, but she can't think up another until…

"If Tarkin hadn't been ordered around by whoever was in charge of this whole thing, then it wouldn't have mattered whether I saved him or now. So he's responsible. It's his fault!"

The entire room is silenced.

"Considering that, I am suddenly in the mood for revenge." Lux says.

"Not. Again." Ahsoka says, rubbing her temples. "I have a screaming headache, and the last thing I need is for you to go running off to Death Watch."

"I don't mean that." He explains. "I mean, we figure out who Tarkin's boss was, and then hurt him wherever it hurts most."

"How are we going to find out who Tarkin's boss was?" Hero asks.

But I already understand.

"The same way we found Tarkin. Let's get out the documents, people. We're doing some profiling."

A/N: And here we go again! This is the sequel to "While Others Fell To Darkness" that you all voted for in the poll.

I would like to thank 082 Martian Scout. Without him, this story would still be an outline – an over-humorous, farcical outline. So a thousand thanks to you, for your much-valued assistance.

Another thing that would be very appreciated are reviews! So please leave your thoughts in the review box on your way out.

Until next time,

Lux's Sister