Chapter Text
Then
—
In the inky darkness of space, the remains of the flagship Triumphant and her two sister ships sprayed out in a glittering cloud of shrapnel, drifting in the blue light of the system’s star like chips of ice, or quicksilver dancing across the surface of the sea.
Beautiful.
Almost serene now that the Negotiator had pulled far enough out from the wreckage that it was but a lovely glimmer smeared across the viewport, soon to be swept into orbit around the indigo-white fire of its nameless bastion—a delicate halo of steel and soft, young corpses.
Cody picked at the edge of his datapad. The screen had long since stopped showing his unfinished reply, the half-filled paperwork, the standard missive from central command.
So that the Republic may mourn and honour the fallen, the unnamed battlefield must be christened forthwith by the Republic commanding officer present during the conflict.
Funny, he thought, for the Republic to trip over itself in a rush to ‘properly’ name this ball of blue fire and radiation, only for the casualties themselves to be listed by designation number.
He twitched when he felt a silent presence at his back.
“You going to stand there all night?”
The floor panels creaked.
“If you had let me,” the General said, “I didn’t want you to be alone after…that.”
Cody unstuck his jaw, throat clicking as he tried to find the words for the twisted, bitter thing lodged in his chest.
Plastisteel rasped on glass as the General settled against the viewport.
The click-click…click of him loosening his armour was a familiar pattern, one that even with his eyes closed, Cody could envision in which order he’d undo the buckles. Always the chest and backplate clasps first, then cuisses, greaves, and boots.
“All of them out there,” Cody began, “have the same flesh and blood as me. So, I called— could have called them my brothers.”
“‘Could’…?”
He twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug. Not for the first time he cursed the no-smoking-while-shipside regs. What he would have given for a cigarette.
“Never knew most of them. Probably never met them either.”
The floor shuddered as the Negotiator’s truly massive hyperdrive engines rumbled to life, panels rattling and lights flickering as she warmed up for the jump.
“The Admiral…?”
“On the bridge. He said to, and I quote verbatim: ‘piss off and take a nap’.”
Classic admiral behaviour.
He was decent, as far as military natborns went. Prickly towards everyone regardless of their mode of conception into the galaxy. Competent and whatever the word was for the opposite of verbose.
Cody rubbed at the peeling edges of paint on his bucket, the visor staring up at him. Little golden flakes stuck to the pads of his fingers.
“They must’ve been scared shitless, before the end. The ship was dead in the water for a few minutes, then the ship was dead. Vented into the black. All few thousand of them, save four.”
And his forehead still ached from where he’d pulled Wolffe close, felt him breathing loud enough to deafen him to all else, held him strong enough to bruise. He had marched him into the arms of the medic’s tender graces, then thrown up in the medbay fresher.
His mouth still tasted of bile.
“I think—” his words stuck. He measured a single breath. In six counts, out ten counts. “I think some part of me expected to know— to somehow sense that they were gone. You know how the holos say how in sync we all are—that we all live in each-others’ heads.” He snorted, resting his head back on the cold panelling, “Propaganda. You know how it is.”
And both the Republic and the Separatists were equally eager to use the narrative, albeit taking turns to spin it in opposite directions. Once clockwise for a unified front of power, then twice counter clockwise for mutant flesh droids.
Independent publications, in a feat of paradoxical triumph, spun the damn thing both ways at once.
Impressive.
Have a gold star sticker.
In these trashy little (government funded, billion-credit industry) fictions, the clones were endless, living and dying and living on through their brothers’ spirits. Resurrected, reborn by the graces of their creators to fight again.
The stuff of fairy tales or psychological horror, depending on the author.
Frequently both.
Reading it made Cody shiver with rage. The point behind his right ear prickled with phantom aches and he’d had to have a heart-to-heart with the training mats—one long enough that his hands didn’t shake when he next picked up his datapad.
“I can’t shake the thought.” He said, hating it and yearning all the same. “There’s an entire fleet dead out there and I can’t feel a damn thing.”
Obi-Wan gave him an unreadable look. He folded his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, eyes reflecting the glittering expanse.
“I don’t think they would have wanted you to feel that pain.”
Cody hummed. “At least it might make this all feel…” his words failed him. He worked his jaw, wrestling with this awful knowing that nestled in behind his heart, hot and angry and pulling everything out of place.
Obi-Wan waited, softly.
“Less distant.” He said, finally, unsatisfied and burning up inside. “All of this—,” he nudged his boot against the viewport shimmering with the lovely gleam of the newborn graveyard beyond, “—is too real. And nothing at all.”
The ship’s rumbling rose in pitch giving the tell-tale whine of hyperdrive acceleration, setting Cody’s datapad buzzing against the floor.
“I know you have a different perspective, what with being wired in to your siblings,” Cody said and Obi-Wan stilled, looking up at him sharply.
“You know—?” Obi-Wan blinked, then gathered himself. “I suppose, well, yes, it’s a different perspective, to say the least. Though, you understand, my…network isn’t comprised of millions of frontline troopers. To be in war connected to that…”
Cody got the picture. “Skywalker and Tano are enough stress, huh.”
“Oh.” He toyed with the clasps on his vambraces, strangely quiet. “Yes. Yes, they are. Them and a few other Jedi.”
“Vos?”
“He’s alive.”
“Hm.”
Click-click…click-click.
“When we’re next on Coruscant, remind me to show you the memory moths. It’s not much—” Not the same as the funeral his brothers will never get. Not enough to bring them back. “—but its peaceful there. Private.”
Cody had heard about those from some troopers that had been in the 212th for the massacre that had been the Jabiim campaign. They said that at the memorial, there were pillars of light and gossamer wings—silver dust from insects no bigger than a credit that whispered the names of the lost into infinity.
He resolved to bring Wolffe with him.
“I think I’d like that.”
Stars streaked across the viewport, the hyperdrive sang, and Cody was bathed in blinding, kaleidoscopic blue.
—
Now
—
There was no more tea.
The bucket in the mess tent was cheerfully empty where it stood next to the similarly barren bucket for caf packets. Cody recalled survival training stories of people licking the insides of ration packets, trying to scrape out the last few molecules in starvation-fuelled delirium.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
At least there were some weeks left until they ran out of the synth caf too. Theoretically, it tasted the same as proper caf despite not being made of…whatever caf beans were made of. Something about it being a completely different chemical that just happened to have a similar flavour. Cody had passed his basic chemistry courses but those were geared more towards understanding how their ammunition worked and the ins-and-outs of the seppies preferred chemical weapons, not food.
Personally, he couldn’t tell the difference but there were brothers that swore black and blue it ‘tasted more like dirt than caf’. And, according to all the supply requisitions Cody had to sign off on, synth was always the least popular of the three.
Go figure. The cheap synth tasted like cheap shit.
It was still a stimulant, though.
He grabbed a couple sachets from the bucket. With the metallic, gritty taste of mud that seemed to stick to his tongue, he wouldn’t taste the ‘slight bitter aniseed undertones’ that he’s been told is characteristic of the synth.
Besides, given they were past the ‘tight rationing’ stage and well into the ‘textbook definition of starvation but we have another two weeks until we’re completely out’ stage, how shitty something tasted was the least of his worries.
Stepping back out into the steady mizzle, water dripping down the back of his neck, he briefly mourned the shelter of the tent. He hadn’t bothered finding another helmet and while he was no stranger to going bareheaded, to spend so much time on the field like this was new. Unsettling, to say the least.
There was a saying—a joke among older batchers that clones were decanted with armour already on. To go without it felt wrong. It was their skin, their faces—an exoskeleton that was just as much their body as their soft, fleshy insides and taking it off was like peeling a crab out of its chitin shell. It made deep-seated instincts twist and recoil, feeling vulnerable, exposed.
One night before the war, Rex had crammed himself into Cody’s sleeping tube—both of them far too big to fit comfortably anymore and far too stubborn to admit it—and they’d whispered back and forth about things Alpha had told them. Rex had a theory that the Kaminoans had coded the need for armour right into their DNA and that the instinct was a way of making them follow that part of the regs.
About that, Cody was highly sceptical.
It didn’t change that the sensation of wind on his face, reminding him of his unprotected head, was unnerving. His neck and scalp were still stinging slightly from the mud that was caked on for hours the previous day. Cody would never understand why core-world magazines advertised that sort of thing as therapeutic when it always made your skin red and itchy afterwards.
Yeah. He’d do anything to not get covered in mud on a daily basis.
He dropped down into a main thoroughfare and made for the eastern front, glad for the duckboards to walk on, though the brilliant red and orange scummy water washed thinly over the surface. This was one of the first deep trenches they’d dug. The drainage channel had been dug too shallowly and the boards installed with too little clearance off the ground to accommodate for the rains.
The little veins and micro-tributaries of their encampment had swollen with the first downpour, then blown open. And then they had no more resources to engineer dry feet.
The General was right where Cody left him: knee-deep in red slurry and heaving sandbags up onto the outer wall with a squad of troopers.
Some of them were shovelling dirt into sacks while others helped lift the filled bags and rebuild the parapet. A couple of the troopers on shovelling duty had unmarked armour hanging loose around their limbs, swimming in their kits though the buckles were fastened as tight as possible.
Cody’s heart ached. They couldn’t have been more than seven years standard.
Realising he was there, they perked up skittishly, their exhaustion failing to overrided their fresh-off-Kamino reaction to stand at attention, as though they hadn’t been working ten feet from High General Obi-Wan Kenobi.
He waved them down.
It was a good task Kenobi had set for them. Kept the blasters out of their hands and their heads well below the battlements. Clankers had taken to sending lightweight snipers up the pass lately.
While the pass was in no condition to be traversed by anything equally heavy as or heavier than a standard B1 battledroid, sniper droids with modified treads could make the climb. And by only sending a few at a time, they didn’t churn up the whole track, saving its integrity for better weather when they wanted to march the whole army up.
Cody hated that the clankers had finally wired creativity protocols into their systems. He preferred it when they replied “Polo! Roger, roger” when someone shouted “Marco”. Entertaining and useful for thwarting stealth operations. A regular morale booster despite the reminder that those silly, chipper B1s would put them in the ground given half a chance.
“General!” Cody called just as Kenobi and the other troopers finished lifting a sack onto the wall. He nodded meaningfully down the trench.
Their current definition of confidentiality would make a linguist blow a gasket.
Kenobi followed Cody a short distance away from the construction. Cody sat on a firing step—an abandoned rations box embedded into the front wall that a trooper could stand on to shoot over the parapets—supressing a groan of relief at getting off his feet for the first time in…he couldn’t recall. Kenobi sagged back against the wall next to him.
“Luck?” he asked, eyes slipping closed.
He’d been short on words last time they’d talked too. Cody doubted he’d returned to normal while he was gone only to coincidentally slip exactly when Cody returned.
Cody grunted. “Waxer thinks he could do it. He knows his squad better than me and if he says they can handle it, there’s a good chance he’s right. Still would be hard. High risk. And not just because they’d be re-wiring explosives.”
“High reward?” Kenobi gave him a questioning look as if expecting Cody to be a damn mind reader who could extrapolate the entire three-minute litany of concerns and strategy that he meant to say.
And sue him, he had clocked enough hours with Kenobi that he could infer that information. If he didn’t think it was some sort of dissociation, and if it didn’t interfere with battlefield communication, he might think the man liked to make him play fill-the-blank.
Cody nodded. “Geo came back from scouting. Said the western slope of that peak was primed to slip right down onto the pass. Its more exposed than initially estimated and the key sites are in full view of the seppies, so the timeframe is a lot narrower. They’d have to be in and out under cover of night.”
“Sun, right. But—” Kenobi frowned, blinking up at the dark fog settling over the pass, rivulets of water dripping down his face. “Commander, the rain, the…” he trailed off and gestured upwards.
“Lugging heavy artillery shells up a mountain will be hard enough without doing it in the rain. Can’t rely on it for cover. Better to do it at night.”
“Ah.” Kenobi tipped his head, lips twitching in something that might be a smile. “You know better than us.”
Cody snorted, “You would have stood a better chance if you didn’t stand watch instead of sleeping when you were supposed to. You left me to freeze my tits off.”
And the temperature had been dropping. They’d been stuck here long enough that it was approaching winter on this planet and warmth was in short supply. Sharing the tarp in the command tent was increasingly about staying warm and less about it being the most convenient place to crash.
One slitted grey eye flicked from Cody’s face to his chest plate and back again. An eyebrow quirked.
“Metaphorically. Of course, you’d know all about those, Master Jedi,” Cody relished Kenobi’s grimace at that. Those clean scars over Kenobi’s browbone and cheek twisted with the motion and, not for the first time, Cody wondered where they came from. With all the stories of Kenobi’s animal encounters, there was a fair chance something with claws managed to land a lucky swipe, despite his affinity for befriending them.
That’s what Cody was betting on, anyway.
Settling down onto his heels, Kenobi rested his head back against the wet dirt. He looked about as tired as Cody felt.
Well, Cody thought, they were already taking five for strategy, might as well make the most of it. He fished out a crumpled synth caf packet, tearing it open with his teeth and dumping the contents into the makeshift cup of his canteen lid, mixing with his finger.
It was cold and bitter and just as bad tasting as expected, almost sour on his tongue. It washed the silty grit from between his teeth as he sipped it slowly, savouring it, however much such a word could be used to describe such an underwhelming experience. It still tasted the same as regular instant caf.
“Here,” Cody said, knocking his and Kenobi’s boots together, holding out the half empty cup. “You look like bantha shit.”
And it was Kenobi’s turn to snort, “We’re flattered.”
It was routine, by now.
Kenobi didn’t savour the caf and it was gone in a single swallow. He pulled a face like it was whiskey. Like it burned.
Cody screwed the cap back on his canteen. His hands felt steadier, his eyelids less leaden and wearied.
“Did you even taste it? Do you do that specifically so your delicate tastebuds don’t catch notes of— what was it again— grease? Canvas wax?”
Tea was Kenobi’s preference by far, and Cody didn’t remember him ever drinking caf, but a stim was a stim and—
“Commander? I—” he broke off coughing. Once it subsided, he drank from his own canteen to soothe it, shaking his head as if to clear it, blinking. His hands tremored.
Cody frowned. “You’re not coming down with a cold, are you?”
“Faith, much.”
Cody rose with a series of loud joint pops, stretching his sore muscles. “Again, out of the two of us, I’m not the devout.”
The incredulous look he knew was shot his way burned into his back and he snickered. Kenobi huffed.
“Comedy, Commander. It— you really—,”
“—have a sparkling sense of humour?”
Kenobi barked a laugh then winced as it triggered a coughing fit, turning to cover it with his arm.
Fuck.
Cody hoped he hadn’t actually caught pneumonia after last night in the cold rain. For all the Jedi’s assurances that his immune system was up to snuff and that he could bolster his health with the force, he was only human. And humans got sick in poor conditions. It was a reality of having an organic body and a respiratory system.
“That doesn’t sound good,” he said, smothering his concern with a wet blanket dubbed ‘understatement’.
Kenobi waved him off, gesturing to his throat. “Dry,” he said, attaching his canteen back to his kit, fumbling with the clip for a moment.
“You sure?”
“Times up,” Kenobi said, shaking his head even as he rubbed absentmindedly at his chest.
And true, they couldn’t leave shinies to fix the entire front line on their own. They got nervous and skimped on the thickness of the structure if left entirely to their own devices. Teaching the art of trench warfare took time and it would be some weeks until this lot were up to snuff and carrying the 212th’s reputation of expert ground operations.
With the med tent a good ten minutes away, making a round trip twenty minutes minimum plus the time spent being picked over by Vector, it would be too long to cut from the shift.
Kenobi stood, swayed then grasped at the sandbagged wall for support.
“General.”
His pupils were shrunk to pinpricks, eyes flicking back and forth, unfocused.
Kenobi frowned, batting away Cody’s hands. “Good weather,” he said in the same tone he used for ‘I’m fine’, and that wasn’t worrying at all given he’d said that before with a broken leg. Cody had gathered that it was a reflex to divert medical attention was focused on the more seriously injured soldiers.
A self-triage of sorts. Apparently jedi could use some force thing to last without help a bit longer. Useful in battle aftermath or crises. Cody had watched Kenobi use it a number of times, seen him sink into that trance state and felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle at the staticky sensation of force-use.
And whatever this was, it wasn’t the same.
“You’re not fine. Did you hit your head?” Cody asked. Kenobi could have a gaping headwound and it would be completely disguised by the sticky, mineral rich mud caked through his already ginger hair.
“We’re not— what— ?” he shuddered, scrunching his eyes shut and trembling fingers pressing into his temple, “…Cody?”
He never called him that on the field, it was always Commander always proper and—
“Obi-wan,” Cody said, putting a hand on his shoulder, steadying him “Obi-Wan, you need to sit down.”
Obi-Wan’s hand landed on Cody’s chest and he started as if surprised to find him so close, blinking down at him with glazed eyes. He didn’t seem to notice that he was leaning into Cody’s grip, knees locked heedless of Cody’s coaxing.
His focus slipped sideways.
“We’re— ?” he said, blinking again. He shivered, the spasm running from head to toe like the shock of grounding lightning. “Cody, there’s something— ,” he sucked in breath as if hungry for it.
“I’m listening, I’m listening, just lean on me. You need to sit, yeah?”
“No—? Cody— ” Obi-Wan shivered again, face sheet white. “We’re…” his jaw worked as if trying to get the words off his tongue, to no avail, “we’re not—?”
And the look on his face was one Cody could only describe as horror.
Then, softly, “… I?”
He fell with a sharp cry, buckling forwards to his knees in the muck.