Chapter Text
Emsleyan Mimicry (n): an unusual phenomenon whereby a deadly prey imitates a less dangerous species
They were supposed to have received backup seven days ago.
Four days ago, they were supposed to have received backup three days ago. And, two months before that, the 212th had retreated to the mountain pass in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the separatist forces in their advance south. They had sent their cry for help into the cold void of space, fingers crossed on the grips of blaster rifles that the message thrummed its way across the stars to Coruscant command and they would be heard.
And heard they were.
Paging Gen. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the 212th Attack Battalion will be reinforced by the 337th Battalion. ETA eight standard weeks Coruscant time.
A death sentence and benediction both—folded, creased and sealed with good republic coding. They were heard. They were condemned.
Kenobi had snorted (his version of a laugh these days), reading the missive aloud to the command tent in the poshest accent he could muster with mud staining his white armour red and Vector hissing at him to stay kriffing still General or do you want to tear my stitching again while he wrapped the General’s shoulder in gauze.
That stunt got a laugh out of the group. Kenobi made a quip about punching new belt notches and ill-fitting armour, flashing a hard-edged smile to Cody.
Cody had set his jaw and tightened rationing once more. Passed the logistics onto the quartermaster and bent back over the battle map, letting the blue glare of the holos pierce his eyes and hoping it would be enough to keep him awake and functioning long enough to figure out how to keep his troops alive for one more day, and the day after, and every day for two months.
It worked.
In the distant, hyperreal memories of kamino flash learning, Cody recalled an article about blue light and sleep, something about circadian cycles in human and diurnal species and warnings about datapad use in dim environments. Useful information, apparently. But mere light could not override the simple, bone-deep exhaustion that soaked into his limbs, weakening him and turning his body to lead.
It would not be satisfied or staved off by forceful exposure to sunlight-simulation or the adrenaline his own body pumped out every time a blaster bolt grazed too close for comfort. In the rare moments between waves of droids, Cody could lean against the wall of the trench, rifle cradled by the sandbags of the trench parapets with the safety switch locked, slippery under his stiff hands which wouldn’t let the stock go, and steal a minute of shut-eye.
Fucking dangerous you fucking di’kut, was what the part of Cody’s brain that imitated Rex said everytime he took a nap in the hot zone. Force, he had wished Rex was there. If Rex was there, then Cody wouldn’t have had to sleep standing up with his knees locked and he might be able to use an empty munitions box instead. His bedroll had been donated to the med tent back in week four.
Point was, the exhaustion was relentless. It had slowed him down and by the fifth week, Cody’s eyes had started to slip closed in command meetings.
And maybe it said something about the potency of Command training that his—the commander’s— first thought when he noticed it was that he should be setting a good example for the troops. Cody’s first thought was that he needed some toothpicks to keep his eyes open and that maybe he should swing by the mess tent on his way to get shot at by commando droids to see if he could pilfer some.
He didn’t, of course. Not because it was an absurd, baseless thought, but because halfway through the meeting, Kenobi stiffened, swore in four languages and started strapping armour back into place, prompting the rest of command to do the same. A minute later the scout ran in to report a breach on the eastern flank and Cody’s toothpicks were forgotten in the chaos.
Kenobi, in contrast to the rest of the sleep-deprived officers, hadn’t resorting to using parapet pillows. Maybe that was because a lightsabre didn’t make a nice comfy headrest but Cody knew the man well-enough to be familiar with his coping mechanisms – or lack thereof. His stamina was, as one shiny had described it to him from the pallet next to Cody’s in the Negotiator medbay a lifetime ago, fucking unreal. Endless, it seemed.
He’d been assured by the Chief Medical Officer himself that it was not endless, and neither was the Jedi’s ability to draw on the force to supplement his natural endurance abilities.
War, Cody had learned, was the perfect situation to push Kenobi to reach the end of his rope and as his second in command, Cody got the dubious pleasure of knowing what the end of Kenobi’s rope looked like. Bloody and bitter and full of teeth, it’s at that point that Kenobi was filled with strangely impersonal desperation and cold mania that Cody wished he could forget. It’d saved his life before. He never wanted to see it again.
So, when Kenobi started slipping and using plural pronouns in reference to himself and laughing at “Oh you know, Commander, the Force, the beauty of our lovely mountain retreat, the fact that core socialites would pay thousands to be half as drenched in mineral-rich mud as we are,” Cody mentally measured the length of rope remaining and found it shorter than was comforting.
Physical exhaustion, the General could hide well enough; mental fatigue was another game altogether.
Their armour was looser around their chests than it had been two months ago and all of them had their own personal beast growling in their bellies. And, sure, they were all stuck on this force forsaken spit of mud and rock and fog, death picking them off one-by-one (and only some kindly taken by blasterfire), but there was only one General. One Jedi who they depended on to give them a tactical edge over the enemy.
Kenobi needed to stay alive. He needed to stay awake and not fucking zone out with his eyes open on the field which Cody noticed him doing at the week seven mark. Force osik or something uniquely Kenobi, it didn’t matter. He would stride with his usual preternatural Jedi grace, slick armour moving soundlessly as he advanced across the field, and yet appearing too large for his skin. Balanced, but eyes glassy and vacant despite shining with the reflected blue of his blazing sabre.
During an early morning raid, Kenobi had taken two blaster bolts to the thigh; the first bolt had charred the cuisse and the second had cracked it, hot plastoid burning through the fabric underneath and making Kenobi stagger in pain.
Cody had dragged the man back behind the lines and shouted for a medic while Kenobi, sheet-white in pain, fixed his eyes on a point over Cody’s shoulder, smiled and said “We’re alright, Commander. Nothing we haven’t lived through before.”
The smile faded, but not once did he flinch as Vector picked melted plastoid out of the blistered flesh, dressed the wound and strapped the broken cuisse back on over the bandages.
“Can you stand?” Vector had asked. Kenobi had blinked once, twice slowly, then answered.
“Yes, we can.”
That was all the confirmation needed for Vector to stick a stim patch to Kenobi’s neck. Then the brief reprieve was over and Cody had followed the puppet-like General back into the fray.
And the stim worked fucking magic. Well, Cody would have been pretty damn disappointed if medical grade stimulant didn’t have any effect, but given the track record of Kenobi’s high tolerance to an array of substances, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if it only had minimal effect. The General’s storm-grey eyes had cleared, starting to focus on Cody’s face when they shouted strategy to each other over the din, and he began to settle back into his skin.
The latter wasn’t much more than pure gut instinct on Cody’s part. It wasn’t like there was a measurable unit to go by, only that when Kenobi started reacting appropriately to artillery shells—anticipating trajectory and moving to deflect them like he was a force-damned professional holoball batsman hitting a home run, instead of flinching and dodging out of the way—Cody knew Kenobi was back at the reins.
The storm had broken, sheets of water and sleet washing mud down armour plating in smears of brown and crimson silt, even the survivors bleeding red as the world turned charcoal-dark and the droids were forced to retreat back down the pass. The ground turned to slurry under metal treads which slipped and churned, eroding the way up the pass until the droid commanders wizened up and abandoned the endeavour.
The General had been the one shot full of stim, but Cody had felt like he was the one crashing after the battle ended.
Though he had previously described his limbs as leaden, the descriptor hardly began to encompass the draw of gravity Cody had felt then. Each step was one further than he thought he could take. Every order given was more than he thought his mind could process.
It was three more hours until Cody could rest.
He ended up passing out shoulder-to-shoulder with Kenobi on the floor of the command tent, both of them still in full armour (sans helmet) with a damp canvas tarp as a barrier between them and the ground.
Waking a few hours later, Cody came to realise that Kenobi had, in fact, crashed like one of Skywalker’s ships, burning up in the descent and smashed to smithereens while somehow keeping its occupants mostly-intact. Unacceptable.
Damage to GAR property is strictly prohibited and any damage incurred must be repaired promptly by the agent.
Part of the regs drifted through Cody’s mind as he rattled around the tent checking comms and waiting for Kenobi to finish his beauty sleep. Cody rummaged in the boxes until he found a stray teabag which, when it didn’t smell funny or bear signs of mould, he stuck in the unscrewed cap of his canteen with some stale water to brew.
That tea was a piss-poor excuse for caffeine even when heated but in the absence of anything nicer, Cody knew better than to pass it up. His messed-up system sure didn’t care that the weak stimulant tasted like thin liquid cardboard with delicate notes of machine oil from the components that were stored in the same box where he’d found the tea. Kenobi, awoken shortly thereafter as if resurrected by the presence of “tea”, said as much. The words he used were far too fucking long for three in the morning and Cody let them flow in one ear and out the other.
Machine oil tea, however, revived Kenobi from ‘ashen corpse’ to merely ‘pallid’. A success.
A stimulant, however shitty, seemed to help keep his di’kut General from drifting too far even if he was chronically ‘a little to the left’ as Vector put it when Cody tracked the medic down in hopes of scoring stim patches. And yes, that was absolutely a medical term. And no, Cody didn’t get any stim patches. He mentally vented steam and didn’t wilt until he’d left the med tent. Stim patches were in short supply and there weren’t any to spare for the General while he was still (mostly) lucid.
“Head must be taking complete cover in the clouds, sir, completely shot to the sky, sir, stratospheric, sir, until I shock the poor bastard’s system with another patch,” Vector said to Cody, sorting through medical gear.
“Why?”
Cody didn’t like that Vector had been sharpening his trademark unimpressed look.
“Sir, Commander, meth-fucking-amphetamine isn’t a fucking joke, sir. Un-respectfully.”
And that was that.
He stuffed a handful of teabags into his ammunition belt when next he passed through the mess tent, ignoring the hunger that still gnawed at his guts after splitting his ration bar with Boil, and promptly forgot about them until he was shin-deep in red water filling the trenches. Tasting copper—the mineral tang from mud or blood he couldn’t tell, he had watched through his rifle sights as the lightweight droid rear scouts lingered several hundred meters down the slope.
He watched the droids through thin sunlight, catching his breath and spending it again to curse out the newly-fine weather which had allowed the seppies to climb back up the pass. Kenobi, standing on unsteady legs next to him, laughed. No sound, just a hoarse rush of air before he cut it short, looked over Cody’s shoulder and said that he wouldn’t be able to curse the sun for long.
“We’re sure of it, Commander,”
Fuck.
Tea.
The General needed a fucking metaphysical child-leash to keep his brain tethered to his body.
Kenobi tried to holster his sabre and missed the clip three times.
One of the ones with an elastic, retractable cord, Cody thought, fishing a teabag from his belt and sticking it in his unscrewed canteen cap.
“We didn’t know droids had a weakness for dried foliage, Commander. Is it an effective ballistics projectile?”
And a harness with child-proof clips, Cody thought.
“No, sir. It’s a defence mechanism.”
A minute later, blue and black clouds boiled up over the mountains and it started sleeting again. Cody stuck the cup out in the rain, poking at the tea bag to help it steep. Then, he drank half and pointedly put the cup into Kenobi’s hands, who barely seemed to register it but brought it to his lips anyway and knocked it back like a shot of liquor.
His features twitched in distaste and by his standards, it’s a grimace. Cody took the cup back, rinsed it with more rain, and screwed it back onto his canteen.
“Ammunition spices,” Kenobi said, “We’re sure of it.”
Cody wanted the dots in his head to connect and make sense out of this but his brain couldn’t make the connection no matter which way he bent it so he just nodded. The General seemed to take this as a positive reaction, settling. The patter of rain and ice was familiar enough by then to be soothing and Cody leant against the sandbags, half-dozing with one ear open to Kenobi.
Ten minutes later Kenobi’s infrequent, scattered sentences started making more sense and whether that’s because Kenobi’s tongue was livened by the caffeine or because Cody’s brain had enough energy to comprehend words again, he didn’t know. Maybe both.
Cody didn’t particularly care, so long as it worked and kept them awake, alert enough that when the next break in the weather arrived, they could stand against the tide once more and rally their waning battalion to break the wave of enemies. The endless sea and dying sands. It would sweep them all away in time, eroding them piece by piece, body by body until there was nothing left but broken armour buried in the red soil and the twin peaks cradling the bloodbath between them.
On his vambrace, Cody’s com remained silent. He resisted the urge to turn it off and on again to see if that would somehow make a message from reinforcements appear. Time, it seemed, was in plentiful supply.
“General!” the high voice of a scout called, “defences on the eastern flank were damaged. Company leader needs hands to help repair it.”
Well, not like there was a short supply of things to do while the reinforcements took their sweet time playing up in the black.
“Copy, private,” Kenobi said, already moving, “We’ll take it from here. Reply…”
His gaze slipped over the crest of the pass to the low, roiling clouds, “Copy, private. Reply: bringing hands and we’ll take it from here.”
The scout saluted and darted off, splashing through the water. It’s painfully obvious how shiny the kid was—couldn’t have been in the battalion longer than a month before this campaign— and Cody’s chest aches. He wished it would stop doing that (except he doesn’t. He, Cody, would not exist if his lungs didn’t constrict when wet-behind-the-ears troopers were on the field).
He gathered a unit and fell into step behind the General.
The eastern defences were shot to hell. The front trench had a steaming crater right in the middle, collapsing a fifty-metre stretch of sandbags and mounded earth to make a nice wide welcome mat that a simple B1 droid could easily waltz in on. Half a dozen other blasts across the network of trenches had also made putty out of the earthworks and with the pelting rain, the damage was being eroded further.
Fucking rain.
Cody hoped it never stopped.
On the bright side, at least the destruction made the earth soft and easy to shovel when Cody’s body was already aching. He shared that thought with the rest of the unit to raise their moral and motivate them to shovel faster, and then he thoroughly shut up before the next thought could make its way from his brain to out of his mouth.
The General, at least, seemed to be having fun puddling in the mud. Every once in a while, he’d put down his shovel, lay his hands on the newly reconstructed earthen barriers and the whole section would compress as if being compacted by heavy machinery. Red slurry was squeezed from the trench wall like a giant sponge and spilled over the General’s gauntlets—well, over the General as a whole, turning his red hair even redder—leaving a smooth, strong wall.
Useful to have around, Jedi were, even if it took a bit of work to keep them functioning. Though, Cody mused as the blisters on his hands popped and mud slurry dripped into his boots, the reports from the other commanders didn’t paint their Jedi generals as- well, Kenobi-ish. Maybe that was just a unique flavour Cody’s General had.
But useful as they were, even Jedi couldn’t control the rains and with every shovelful of earth, Cody was increasingly aware that they were running on pure chance. The only reason they hadn’t made a hasty retreat in the face of this damage to their position was that there was nowhere to retreat to. The Steep, rugged terrain of the valley falling away behind the pass was exposed. Anyone in the saddle of the pass—where the 212th was camped—could rain fire down the valley.
Forget the silver platter, retreat from the pass would be a handing over their deaths as a seven-course meal to the separatists. And so, Cody gritted his teeth on a half-remembered song and drove his shovel back into the ground, the melody of the ditty spiralling round and around his head.
Rain, rain stay the day,
Buy an hour and make them pay.
The rains bought the 212th four more blessed hours.
Day turned to night and somewhere in it all, a thick, low cloud enveloped the pass and Cody didn’t notice the change from rain to fog until the General stiffened at his side. Cody had a split second to register the change before the General shouted “Incoming!” and in one powerful movement, leapt on top of the trench wall, ignited his sabre, and deflected a whistling artillery shell back into the fog.
Chaos descended.
Tools were discarded for weapons and troopers fell into ranks in the trenches, blasters pointed out into the swirling fog and fingers on triggers.
“Hold fire!” Cody barked, “And for Force’s sake turn your lights off!”
At night, lights would only make yourself into a neon flashing sign saying “Here I am! Shoot me!” and Cody had no interest in letting his troopers become target practise for clankers. Or his General, for that matter.
Glancing to his right, the General apparently had listened to Cody’s order and the only parts of him visible in the darkness were the smears of skin not covered in mud, the glint of his teeth when he grinned, and the strange greenish gleam of his eyes.
Good.
Cody braced his blaster, finger on the safety. He breathed steadily in and out exactly as he was taught, waiting for the enemy to reveal themselves. He prided himself on being a somewhat patient man but the minutes before battle - anticipation gathering in his bones like static charge before lightning - made him feel like a twitchy cadet again.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Cody dragged another bleeding trooper back to the cover of the trenches and brutally crushed the bitter voice in his head that said with the number of casualties, the 212th Battalion should be renamed the 212th Legion.
He set them down against the sandbags, sitting in the mud and listing limply to the side. They didn’t respond. There’s no time to check if they’re dead or alive and Cody could only spare a breathless ‘k’oyacyi vod’ before running back into the fray. Running towards death. Running towards the gout of azure fire that split the dark in the hands of his General.
The red splattered on his armour ran pink and thin, whorls of blood twisting and blurring like smoke and none of it was his own. His shoulders ached, bruised by the repeated kickback of the rifle, and sparking with bright, acidic pain at every motion. Yet, he braced his rifle once more, aimed, fired twice into the chest CPU of a droid and gritted his teeth through the white flare of agony it caused.
In a shower of sparks and molten metal, the droid collapsed.
And another took its place.
Aim. Fire. Cody let the red-and-white plasma burn into his retinas and aimed again at what he prayed was the next target and not the after-images in his vision.
Then he would repeat. Bite back the pain. Double tap the clankers to make sure the fuckers are dead so you don’t get shot in the back from a half-finished job, then shout to hold the line.
Their numbers were too thin to hold their ground, wavering like a thread stretched to breaking point, blade pressed against the fibres that break one by one. In the centre, the raging counterpoint to the blade, the General cut a swathe through the droids. Blue light searing the air, the light and metal and night around him seemed to writhe—waves dashed against the unforgiving stone of a lighthouse that shone and burned against that rolling, ebbing force. Kenobi gave a soundless cry, a high, reverberating call for the land at his back to rise, break that which would burn your roots—that which would smooth your edges and wash you into oblivion.
And the vode answered.
The line surged forwards, what little white remained on their armour reflecting blue fire and their own crimson fury and the blade’s edge bent. Gears grinding and the mechanical whirr of engines was drowned, for one perfect moment, by the single roar from hundreds of throats.
Cody fell in at the General’s side, pushing against the tide with his rifle and the song playing in minor key between his ribs even as he gave his voice to the sky, emptying his clip into the unit of clankers in front of him. Tides, he knew, could never be stopped. Only slowed. Only delayed by too-small hands pushing sand into castles and digging trenches around them on shores far from home, as if that would change its fate.
Just a minute longer, vode, just hold it for one more and—
The shockwave rattled his bones as a shell landed a hundred meters to Cody’s left, leaving his ears ringing with the echoes and the fresh screams of the injured. One heartbeat, and then another. The thread pulled taut again and, finally, snapped.
“Fall back” Cody shouted as the droids breached the bombed-out trench defences on the easternmost fringe of the line, feedback from his helmet comms hissing with static.
He ceded ground to the hungry sea, guarding the retreat of his siblings with a stubbornness Alpha-17 would have boxed his ears for even as the General guarded him. The two of them, stealing precious seconds until the sand in the hourglass was gone and they dropped back behind the front barricade.
“The fog.” Cody said to the General, discarding his empty clip and reloading again in deft motions. His hands had done it enough times that even with the exhaustion tremors, he didn’t slip. “They shouldn’t be able to lock targets with the fog.”
“New sunshine, commander,” the General said, lifting a finger skywards, “And we’re dug in.”
New sunshine. Ah. Dawn. When the rain had lifted its protective cloak that morning, the droids would have been able to lock targets and save that mapping data. Data which they now used to calculate the trajectory of cannonfire and heavy shells to blow Cody’s siblings to hell.
The ground shook with another blast and the two men curled behind the sandbags as a spray of mud and clods of earth rained down on them, shoulders pressed together as if closeness with the other would stop thirty kilograms of explosives from blowing them to oblivion.
“Dug in. Sure.” Cody said, not quite hearing his own voice over the ringing in his ears, “At this rate, we’re going to have to be dug out.”
The General coughed something that could pass for a laugh as Cody peeked over the barricade, aimed, and squeezed off another few shots, the blaster bolt haloed in red light reflecting off the fog and smoke.
Blue fire flashed, deflecting shots that would have made living a bit hard for Cody. It was also a bloody signal flare for the location of the General, but Cody liked having his head intact thank you very much; and, the last time he made noises about lightsabres giving away the General’s position, Kenobi had pointed out that it was a two-in-one melee and long-range weapon and Cody had caved in the face of efficiency.
The shockwave from a blast to their right made Cody’s aim slip and glance off a droid’s armour. He swore. The droid toppled over with a charred hole in its chest.
“Don’t dig us out, Commander,” the General laughed, hoarse and spitting mud, clearly having shielded Cody from most of the blast material. There was a tremor in the man’s body though his blade was as steady as ever. He grinned, teeth gleaming red with the mineral pigment, and it wasn’t an expression of joy or victory, but fear.
“Easy graves,” Kenobi said, “Living earth makes for good sleep.”
And that’s the last thing Cody heard before the world broke.
Explosions, from an outside perspective, are quick. Over in less than a second. But violence has a way of slowing time, drawing it out and imprinting every millisecond of blinding pain and terror into a memory, rendered in excruciating detail.
Colour and yet complete blackness bloomed in Cody’s vision as his whole body was compressed and torn apart in the same moment, joints bending in ways they weren’t made to and armour cracking. He would have heard the rending of bone and plastoid from the unlucky few too-close to the blast, but the roar of wind and fire and earth drowned everything except the sensation of heat and the sound his mind imagined.
The pressure vanished and Cody, not knowing his own name, registered gravity again.
He struggled to rise, ribs screaming in pain, disoriented and winded from bring thrown. He registered the lack of comms static, the wetness on his face, and the wind in his hair, realising that his bucket had been knocked off.
He groaned. Or at least he thought he did, feeling his chest vibrate and vocal cords grate together. The air was colder in his spasming lungs than he thought it would be and he fought to move his limbs. Did he still have them?
Coughing, the acrid smoke was sour and bitter on his tongue, so different from the mud which he now tasted metallic and sweet. A last meal for the dead, mouths choked with red earth.
No sugar rationing six feet under, boys, he thought hysterically, wishing for his com to share the thought with Rex even though the message would never connect. He’d get a kick out of it. He lifted his head from the ground, numb hands slipping and scrabbling ineffectively for purchase as he tried to push himself upright to no avail.
Then, there were hands under his armpits, gauntlets digging into his screaming ribs as they dragged him up and rolled him over, propping his back against the wall. Cody blinked spots from his vision, looking up at the face above him. Too close. Speaking words that were sharp and cutting—strange in a way that made Cody think it wasn’t his own brain once again failing to process language—yet muted as if spoken underwater.
Ha. The fog and fuck-knows-what-else was thick enough that maybe it counted as an aquatic environment.
The General’s hands on his shoulders squeezed tight, shaking him once.
“Zvedny!” his voice was distant through the ringing in his ears, broken and Cody frowned, not understanding. He said it again, shaking Cody, then flinched as blasterfire seared the air by his head.
The clip on the General’s belt was empty.
“No”
It’s soft, breathless and high-pitched, and though Cody didn’t know the word, he knew the meaning.
A plea.
“General”
Cody didn’t even know what he wanted to say. He had to say something, reaching for the only other soul he could see, whose eyes were as wide and scared as his own. And maybe at the end, the name alone, unfinished, would be enough. He could only pray.
And pray he did, with profanity and begging, to that merciless higher power as Kenobi released his shoulders and bared his teeth, rising into a crouch with every trembling, powerful line of his body coiled to strike.
Waiting. With a sound like multiple switchblades flicking open in quick succession, curved metal points pierced through the tips of the General’s gauntlets, blade-like and barely visible in the darkness. And those are new.
Cody had caught glimpses of the strange metal hand coverings his General wore under his gloves before though their purpose had been a mystery. Until now.
Kenobi flexed his hands, chest rising and falling with his shallow breaths, the edges of the—well, for lack of a better word—claws glinting with wicked sharpness.
Gears whirr, blasters whine, tinny automated voices informing them to surrender even as their blaster muzzles lit up with energy, and the General lunged. Faster than a striking mantis-fish that Monnk had told Cody about once, the man—Cody hesitated to call him a Jedi in this moment, though he didn’t know why—struck the first droid, metal plating slicing open like soft clay.
Sparks cascaded as Kenobi ripped the processor free with a snarl and shoved the twisted frame of the droid into its comrades, gold and white and red—all the colours of the sun Cody had loved so much he painted it onto his armour. That life-giving fire in which thousands of stars bathed the known galaxy had called to him. He had known it even on Kamino where its light was hidden by the endless rains.
Here, lying broken in the mud for people who would never understand his name and shrouded in night, he saw the sun again. A corona of light and crimson darkness through the swirling fog, arcing with convection patterns of glowing shards of steel and electricity.
The sun, Cody knew, shone brightest in the void without the interference of other light to hide its true fire. And at the end, in the face of death, fusion birthed iron in the veins of the man who burned.
Cody tried again to gather his legs under him, hands searching in the mud for his rifle even as his muscles failed to support him. His hands closed over a barrel and he raised it to his shoulder, feeling for the ammunition pack with stiff fingers and blinking spots from his vision as he looked down the sights.
The rifle was slick and heavy in his grasp, weak muscles struggling to hold it steady. Cody exhaled, bites back the stabbing pain in his ribs, and squeezed, anticipating the kickback but oh it was so much worse than before.
Over the sights, he watched the carnage unfold.
Metal shrieked as it was torn apart, mangled, and reduced to scrap with indiscriminate fury. No quarter was given and the General offered no mercy as he cut through the droids. He did not dance through them as he did with his sabre—too brutal, too personal, for it to be anything that the Jedi could have taught him.
But there was music in it.
A pattern was woven almost song-like through the movements, discordant yet balanced, and written in a key Cody didn’t know full of physical atonality and phrases structured differently to how he learned to fight. The General played a short staccato strike to a droid’s neck followed by vicious application of leverage, disjointing and digging into the vulnerable point in an elegy of mechanical death.
An instrument of battle.
The last droid toppled to the ground and the General wavered amidst the wreckage of droid scrap strewn through the trench, still crouched as if waiting for the next wave which is undoubtably already marching nearer. Those gleaming metal claws flexing, twitching at his side. The General remained still, shaking, and the hairs on the back of Cody’s neck stood on end before his conscious mind could process why.
Then Cody heard the sound.
A high whistle cut through the air. Soft and sharp, it wavered, multiple tones clashing and resting side-by-side even as it rang hollow as a broken flute from the General, ebbing and flowing with his shallow breaths.
“General?”
No response.
Fuck.
“Kenobi?” Cody tried, shaking arms lowering the rifle to rest on his hip. Kenobi didn’t so much as blink, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the darkness, foreign whistle edging every rasping breath and something at the back of Cody’s mind recoiled in fear, some instinctual sense of wrongness.
Yeah, everything is wrong, what the hell is new.
At least, that’s what he told himself. Tried to tell himself. He called again, listening to the not-so-distant sounds of clankers, and Kenobi only trembled, focused on something Cody couldn’t see and didn’t want to see. Not when Kenobi’s eyes shone with the horrified, green reflection of what he beheld.
Cody shifted again to stand, biting back a cry at the retribution his undoubtably injured ribs take for the motion and letting the slick weight of the rifle fall from his arms in favour of leaning against the wall.
Softly, Cody called again, the name unfamiliar in his mouth, calling to the human inside the soldier.
“Obi-Wan?”
He might as well have been talking to the empty, smoke heavy sky for all the reaction he gets. The nearing grind of gears and cover fire carving bloody lines over their heads didn’t make Kenobi so much as flinch. Then again, with how badly he shook, it’s not like Cody would have been able to tell.
He coughed a laugh of pure adrenaline and fear.
He limped to Kenobi, teeth clenching on the grit in his mouth to avoid biting his cheek at the pain. He cupped the man’s cheek, tilting his head to look in his eyes.
There was no one home but the lights sure were fucking on. Eyes reflected green and fire, gleaming with water or tears he can’t tell and won’t ask.
“General, we have to retreat.”
Cody would’ve liked to give a good dressing down to whoever had filled the good general’s ears with wax that day. The General, for his part, trembled under his palm. At this distance, the singing vibrated behind Cody’s teeth and he wanted nothing more than to deafen himself to the noise.
“Fucking songbird, you are,” he bit out, changing tactics and grabbing hold of Kenobi’s armour straps to drag him, “Don’t get us caged.”
Later, Cody couldn’t remember staggering back, arm over Kenobi’s shoulder and being carried just as must as he was carrying, both of their grips slipping on the muddied armour and fingers too bruised to be anything but numb to it all as they retreated behind the line.
He remembered the pressure of the hands pulling them both over the hastily constructed trench barricades, plastoid clacking as brothers bodily dragged them to safety, and the fainter, whistling breaths of Kenobi on his right.
Even with the ringing in his ears, he could hear it. He listened to it ease to hollow rasping as they sat in the mud, arms still over each others’ shoulders and too tired to think of moving. Kenobi was clear as day, yet the vocoder-sharp words from the medic that kneels next to him were unintelligible.
Asking for orders, maybe? No. Medics gave orders, not ask for them.
Cody frowned and blinked up at the blurred shapes of red-black and ghostly grey. Hmm, brothers then.
Safe.
Someone said more words that he couldn’t quite think fast enough to process. He opened his mouth to tell them to slow down, yawned, and between that moment and the next, discovered that the shoulder he leaned against made a fantastic pillow.