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The sunrise on Kamino is surprisingly beautiful.
Luminara wraps her arms around her knees and watches it. It’s raining, but only as a mist, and she is wearing a hooded cloak that will keep her dry enough for several hours yet.
Rain will just be part of their life now, and she has no objection to it.
She looks down from the tower rooftop she’s perched on and lets her gaze wander over Tipoca City. Already it looks different; swathes of color are appearing on the outer walls as well as the inner ones as the vod’e take to redecorating from the sterile white with joyful abandon. They are knocking holes in walls to make windows and doors and partitioning off rooms with various amounts of skill.
There were crude handholds gouged out at irregular intervals up the back side of the tower, and she wonders who put them there. There’s a small niche built from what looks like salvaged bits of transparisteel and cloth that is clearly intended as a shelter for someone about the size of a cadet, but it just as clearly hasn’t been tended to for years. It was at some point painted white and probably blended in very well to the roof, but the paint has flaked off.
She can’t see the entrance to the Temple from her perch, since it’s underneath the city proper, but she can see most of the city, and smiles as sleepy cadets stumble out into the light and begin their morning routines. The older vod’e had decided that they needed to keep to their routines as much as possible, with obvious modifications, and so the younger ones are still learning to be soldiers.
It makes a heavy weight settle uncomfortably inside her, but Luminara knows that they need to know how to defend themselves from a galaxy that knows their face.
The few Kaminoans that had escaped Shaak and Plo’s wrath are working to find a way to safely alter the genes of the older vod’e to stop their accelerated aging, and if they decide to make more, that gene will not be included. Neither will the modifications designed to make them less independent and more subservient. Not that they had really worked in the first place.
The piece of machinery that controlled the chips in their heads is under constant guard now. It has a master switch that can override even whatever kind of signal that Sidious was using.
Luminara still isn’t quite certain what is going on with that, but Gree does not want her chip removed, and all of the others she had spoken to were the same. She isn’t sure what they gain from leaving them in, but they seem to find them useful.
It disturbs her more than she’s willing to admit, knowing that those things were inside her Gree, her men, all of them, but in the end it is their choice and their bodies, so she can’t do anything about it other than trust that they know what they’re doing.
She rests her chin on her knees and sighs, deep and from her bones. It’s been a tiring few days and so much has happened.
Taking Kamino had been easy. Going through Tipoca City to remove all the trackers, spy cameras, listening devices, and ways that both the Republic and the Separatists could contact them was harder. Fortunately, most of those things were concentrated in the areas the Kaminoans had lived in.
There were cells and rooms down beneath the waterline that had clearly been used for prisoners, but they were abandoned now. They were going to go through them, just not at the moment. There were only bodies left.
The incinerator where the Kaminoans had disposed of flawed products was one of the first things to go, pulled to pieces and thrown into the water by the older vod’e. All of them had disappeared that night and come back in the morning disheveled and tearstained.
Luminara doesn’t blame them.
Yoda had brought the Temple out of his ship the first morning they were there, and it had hovered above his hands for a few moments before abruptly blinking out. When they had thought to look, there was a neat hole in the water enclosing a stairway beneath the city.
The Temple had moored itself to the seabed, setting up a Force bubble around itself to allow the gardens and courtyards to remain exactly the same as they had been on Coruscant. It hung off the edge of an underwater cliff, glimmering eerily in the underwater sunlight. Now all the sublevels that had once been sunk into the undercity were tunneled back into the rock instead, and the ones on the cliffside edge, mostly residential, had windows and were much more suitable for living than they had been.
The escape routes that had once led to places around Coruscant now led up to Tipoca City, where doors and walls and hallways and stairwells had appeared overnight out of nowhere. A few of the routes led out under the seabed to peaks of the underwater mountains that formed small islands, or to holes in the cliff far away from the Temple itself. All the places where water could come in were blocked with the same flexible, faintly rubbery, shiny, clear wall that was seemingly made of the Force itself.
Though if they leaned on it with enough weight, they would pass right through and into the water, as Yoda found out to everyone’s amusement.
Luminara feels safe, and so it takes her far longer than it should to realize that someone is climbing up the tower after her. She’s surprised when it’s Cody’s head that pops up over the parapet.
He doesn’t see her until he’s already on the roof, and then he looks at her with wide eyes and backs up, raising his hands. His knees hit the edge and he almost falls backwards, but Luminara reaches out with the Force and pulls him to safety.
She tilts her head, a little worried, as he slumps down with his back against the low wall and goes still, breathing harsher than she thinks it ought to be, even with scaling the wall and nearly falling off of it. The vod’e have had harder climbs in more danger and been less . . . unsettled. She’s been there with them.
“Shall I go?” she asks quietly.
His head bobs from side to side. Luminara isn’t sure what that means.
She looks around at the little shelter again. “Did you know this was here?”
“I made it,” he says, voice muffled. “When I was a cadet.”
“Clever.”
“Were you a cadet at the same time as General Kenobi?”
Luminara stills where she has just begun to rise from the ground. “We were crechemates,” she says cautiously. “Shared most of our classes until I was taken as a padawan and he aged out. Afterwards we saw each other less, but we still spent quite a lot of time together until we were adults. Quinlan and Kit were the others in our clan.” She’s not entirely sure why she added all that, but there’s something about the way Cody’s hands are curling inwards around his calves as he sits huddled over in the mist that makes her think he is not having a good day.
“What do you mean, he aged out?”
Drawing her cloak a little more closely around her face, she sighs. “There used to be a custom, before the war, that any child still living in the creche by thirteen and unclaimed by anyone to become their padawan was automatically sent off to one of the Corps. The other three of us were chosen before then, but Obi-Wan –” Luminara wonders how best to convey the unhappy complexity that had been their childhood. In some ways, it feels like she was born into war and is only now getting a glimpse of what peace could be like.
“Obi-Wan was the obvious target in our clan,” she starts. “He was always smaller, and a bit younger. Quin bites and isn’t shy about making his needs known. Kit would just plow you over but do it with such a big smile that nobody would believe that you were trying to bully him. And his smile has teeth. I had the benefit of being looked after by the other Mirialans in the Temple, as is our custom, and I was tall for my age when I was a child, I could reach further and run faster than most. Obi-Wan . . . got picked on a lot. Both for being the obvious target and for being somewhat favored by the crechemasters. And he didn’t have the patience he has now, or the diplomatic skills. His usual method of conflict resolution was just to hurl himself at whoever was tormenting him and damn the consequences.”
She draws aimless patterns in the film of water on the roof.
“We tried to help when we could, of course we did. But we couldn’t be with him constantly. And so he got a reputation for being a troublemaker, arrogant and angry. He wasn’t, I swear he wasn’t, but that’s what all the adults eventually believed. So he aged out without being chosen to become a padawan and that made the bullying get even worse. There’s a – a prejudice around the idea of going to the Corps. It’s stupid, but it’s there. Our agemates especially thought that if you didn’t become a Knight, you were nothing. Literally.”
Her hands swirl and her eyes are glassy.
“We were so stupid,” she whispers. “The three of us were so relieved that we’d been chosen, that we hadn’t failed, that we missed when he was shipped out. They sent him to some planet to work with the AgriCorps and the next thing we knew it’d been months since we heard from him and then he came back looking like death and as the padawan of Master Jinn. I don’t know how it happened. He won’t talk about it. But the whole thing wasn’t normal. I have friends in all of the Corps that I grew up with and we commed each other all the time from the time we left the creche until the war started. I don’t know why he never wanted to talk to us.”
“Would that have been listed as a mission?”
Luminara starts, almost having forgotten she was talking to a live audience. “What?”
“Would have the thing that made Jinn accept him been listed as his first mission in the archives?”
“Oh. Yes, I imagine so. It doesn’t matter where the actual padawan accepting happens, anything after that has to be filed under their name.”
“I found that one,” Cody says. “Bandomeer.”
Luminara nods. The name sounds about right.
“He was captured and sold to work in a mine and then offered to be a suicide bomber to let Jinn escape and free the others.”
Luminara drops her head into her hands. “That lines up with the injuries he had when he came back,” she murmurs. “I don’t remember a lot from then, but I remember coming to see him in the infirmary and –” She shivers. “Not even Quin had gotten himself that badly hurt on a mission yet.”
“Is it – was it common, for cade-padawans to be injured so often?”
She shrugs. “The life of a jetii is not always a safe one. Since we usually work alone, or in pairs. And young ones can get a very high price in some places. People will pay for a Force-sensitive slave, especially one they can train because they are too young to know different.”
Cody’s eyes narrow.
“And Master Jinn had a tendency to be rather self-absorbed, not exactly neglectful of his duties, but he certainly believed strongly in what he felt to be the will of the Force and would follow it no matter the consequences.”
“What he felt,” Cody repeats flatly.
“Yes.”
“So that was why he was prepared to abandon my General over and over while he was still a cadet. Because he was selfish.”
Luminara winces. She has a lot of questions to ask Master Jinn, if she can pin him down somewhere for a few hours.
“So now he’s terrified of wanting anything for himself, because he sees all personal want as selfish and only associates it with being hurt.”
That . . . was not a leap of logic that Luminara had ever made herself, but now that she thinks about it, it’s horribly true. She tries to smile, but it feels unstable.
“Congratulations, Cody, I think you’ve come the closest to figuring out Obi-Wan’s issues than anyone ever has.”
The look he gives her, when he finally raises his head, shows that he knows and appreciates what she is trying to do, but it isn’t working.
“How likely do you think it is that he will ever want to see me again once he recovers and remembers what he has said during all of this?”
That genuinely startles her.
“What do you mean? He adores you. I think he has since a few months into the war, even if he didn’t realize it until now.”
Cody shrugs, eyes lowering again. “He’s too proud to show weakness in front of anyone, even if he’s literally dying. He’ll just keep standing there and mouthing off until he collapses. He learned when he was a padawan not to let anyone ever know what he was really thinking because then they’d leave him. Melida/Daan taught him that.”
Luminara bites her lip. It’s harsh but accurate.
Force, how messed up were they? How long had Sidious been chipping away at their unity and trust in each other?
Wait. “What was Melida/Daan?”
Cody gives her a flat, sullen look that she knows all too well; it’s one of the things that all the vod’e share. Gree looks at her like that when she’s done something ‘di’kut jetii’, like absently jumping from atmosphere to ground without giving her fair warning or forgetting where her lightsaber is. “Obi-Wan had just turned fourteen when Jinn summarily threw him out of the Order and left him behind on a planet in the middle of a karking civil war where one side was made of baby shinies because Obi-Wan wanted to not leave them all to die and Jinn was more interested in getting his mission finished.”
They’ve barely been here a tenday, and already he’s gone through what sounds like most of the files the Temple has from Obi-Wan’s time as a padawan.
Well, the Kaminoans had made the clones to be quick learners. Luminara focuses on the tiny splashes of raindrops on the roof and does a breathing exercise. When she can trust her voice again, she says “I thought that was always nothing but a rumor.”
Cody shakes his head.
“Fuck.”
“From what I read, that was the last time he ever expressed a strong opinion about wanting anything, until now, when all his shields and filters are nonexistent because of the mind trauma and the medication.”
Luminara raises her head again to squint at Cody through the thickening mist. It’s beginning to really rain now that the sun is properly up. “So you are worried that he’s going to recant everything he’s said and run for it as soon as he’s healed?”
Cody nods. His jaw is set, and she suddenly realizes that he’s not angry. He’s grieving.
She scoots over to him and wraps her arms around his shoulders. At first he startles, but then he leans into her, taking deep shuddering breaths.
“He hasn’t left you yet,” she says as he tucks his head under her chin and she feels warm tears begin to join the cold raindrops on her shoulders. “And he won’t, if he knows what’s good for him. I will personally drag his ass back to you if he does anything as stupid as leaving you for your own safety or good or because you deserve better or whatever reason he comes up with in his idiot brain. He won’t leave you because he doesn’t love you. You do know that? He doesn’t hold people away because he doesn’t want them, he holds them away because he loves them too much and can’t handle it when they leave.”
Cody makes an uncertain snorting noise, and she realizes that it was a laugh. “Gree was right,” he mutters. “You were the right person to ask.”
“Gree told you to come talk to me about this?”
“She said –” and oh, that sends a dizzying feeling of relief and affection all through her, to hear that Gree is being so easily accepted for who she is among her brothers –“that you probably understood him the best of everyone because you grew up with him and aren’t Vos.”
She chuckles. “Fair enough.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he leaves me,” he says a while later, still shaking and tense under her arms.
Luminara runs a gentle hand over his damp hair. “Then we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t,” she says firmly. “You are good for him, Cody. He really does love you. He pulled himself out of an anxiety attack to go help you when we woke up in the Temple. That was the only thing that got through to him, the thought that you were in danger and we needed to help.”
“But he’s conditioned to be afraid of having anything he wants –”
“Then we will help him learn that he can be happy without all the sacrifice coming from him.”
Luminara thinks that her determination to help both Cody and Obi-Wan get their happy ending after the frankly shitty lives they have had is finally getting through to him, because he relaxes against her and snuffles openly, no longer trying to hide his tears.
The rain gets heavier, but they are sitting on the high end of the slightly sloped roof and she has draped her cloak over both of them. It’s fine.
After a while Gree comes climbing up the tower, worried about them, and joins their huddle.
Luminara watches the rain drift over Tipoca City, Gree’s arm about her shoulders and Cody huddled between them half-asleep and heavy, and feels at peace, real peace, for the first time in her life.
Below her, Barriss and Feral are playing in the rain, training sabers glowing in their hands as they flip and dodge. The sound of their laughter drifts up to her, as well as the squeals of the tiny vod’e cadets who have gathered in the shelter of the overhangs to watch them spar. Barriss feints, dodges, and tackles Feral to the ground with a kick to the back of his knees. They roll across the plaza, play-fighting, sabers forgotten, until she has him pinned and then collapses on his chest, both of them panting and giggling.
The Force is calm and clear.
She has at least one and possibly two idiot asses to kick.
Life is good.