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There’s nothing for it. Cody’s put it off for as long as he could, but now? Now he has no choice.
He pushes through the swinging doors of 79’s and into the noise and lights of the bar.
This early in the evening, the clone bar is only half full. Clones in greys and in plasteel are playing sabacc or talking and laughing, and the strobe-dazed dancefloor is still only sparely populated.
It’s easier for clones to tell other clones apart than it is for standard humans, let alone any other alien species. You spend your first eight or nine years growing up surrounded by your own face, it becomes second nature to recognise a brother by his gait, his mannerisms, the microexpressions that flicker across his face, not just his tattoos or his hair or the markings on his armour.
If he didn’t already know—because it’s his job to know—Cody would be able to tell just from a glance around the bar what ships are docked on this side of Coruscant tonight. As well as the Negotiator, the boys of the Sentinel, the Indefatigable and the Nevoota Bee are preparing to kick up wild in town tonight.
Not to mention, of course, General Skywalker’s new flagship. Cody spies them at the bar from twenty yards away—Rex, Fives, Jesse, Kix, and the new kid Tup. They spot him at almost exactly the same time.
Ppulling a face like he’s seen a gundark walk in, Rex declaims, "By the stars!" His voice turns heads all around them. "He’s alive!" He swoons back against the bar with his hand to his forehead like somebody out of a drama serial on HoloNet Entertainment.
Beside Rex, Fives does a surprisingly convincing roll of his eyes and goes limp, topping backwards into Tup’s arms—who, face screwed up with the effort of not laughing, glances up at Cody as if to make sure he’s not going to get into trouble for this. Jesse pirouettes on his toes and drapes himself over Kix, and Cody can’t tell if he’s meant to be fainting or in the throes of passion.
Cody stops, and sighs.
Rex pulls himself back up and waves him over. "Oh, come on, Commander," he says, leaning on the title just hard enough to emphasise the unseriousness of it. "Let me get you that drink I keep promising you."
It had been too much to hope that his little performance on the Negotiator hadn’t made it off the cruiser yet. He had told General Kenobi he would never live it down, and he hadn’t believed a word of the general’s blithe reassurances. Still, he can’t turn around and leave. That would just make everything worse.
As he reaches them, Fives revives in Tup’s arms only to take Cody by both shoulders, eyes wide. "I thought you were dead, sir," he stage-whispers. "Now kiss me!"
Cody wrestles him off as he leans in. "Not on your life, soldier," he growls.
From the other side, Rex slings an arm around his shoulders as the barman sets a bottle of Polaris on the bar in front of Cody, followed by Corellian whiskey chaser. Rex gives him a gentle shake. "Glad you made it," he says. Then, averting the danger of being taken seriously, "You need a stiff drink after your fainting spell."
Cody rolls his eyes, turning to face his brothers. There’s nothing for it—he’d just have to ride it out and hope that one day they’d forget about all this. (Fat chance, his brain chimes in, unasked.) To Rex, he says, "I suppose if General Skywalker got shot off a rooftop, you’d breathe a sigh of relief. At least you wouldn’t be getting thrown around by the Force any more."
"Nah," Rex says cheerfully. "Ahsoka’d still be around."
"Is it true General Kenobi shaved off his hair and his beard, sir?" Tup pipes up.
Reclining against the bar, Fives says, "I heard he looks like a baby fresh out the tank."
"If I saw General Kenobi without any hair," Jesse muses, "Think I’d faint too."
His general does look unsettlingly young without his hair, Cody thinks. At least it’s growing back. He turns to Tup. "Tup, you don’t have to call me 'sir' when we’re at the bar," he says.
"Yes, sir," Tup says. Then: "Sorry, sir! Uh, I mean—sorry."
Cody barely remembers what it was like, to be that shiny. (Of course, back then, everyone was shiny.) Tup’s no raw rookie, but in comparison Cody and Rex had been off Kamino the better part of three years by now, and the others not much less than that. Given enough time, Cody hopes, Tup will ease up, and learn how to exist outside of the punishing strictures of his upbringing the way they all had.
Cody goes on, "It’s true the general looks a little different—but he can still kick your ass from here to the Outer Rim, Fives," he turns a gimlet eye on Fives, "And that’s what counts."
Unabashed, Fives lifts his drink, grinning. "Oya to that!"
To which there’s nothing to reply. Cody lifts his ale to clink against Fives’, letting the corner of his mouth curl up a fraction. "Oya," he says.
Later, when Rex and Cody have withdrawn to a booth in the back to let the others cut loose without their senior officers close by, Rex slings his arm back over the bench and leans closer to Cody. They’d been talking about nothing—the boloball highlights on the holoscreens hanging above the bar, the quiet but fierce rivalry between the men of the 442nd and the 212th, the merits of the lost Resolute versus General Skywalker’s new flagship—but now Rex’s voice takes on a different tone. "Hey, so."
Cody raises an eyebrow at him.
"I know I’ve been pulling your leg, but—you okay after the whole General Kenobi thing?"
Cody takes a moment to sip his ale while he turns over the question. Okay? He—alongside the rest of the galaxy—had thought his general was dead. Not in battle, not in the vacuum of space, but just the bad luck to catch a criminal’s blaster bolt on a Coruscant rooftop. It had scooped out an aching hole inside Cody’s ribcage, and he’d tried to fill it with battle plans and ship movements and datawork.
And then the general had come back.
There he’d been, on the Negotiator’s bridge, completely unexpected: General Kenobi, smiling at him with that familiar insouciance, that glitter of amusement in his eyes. At first Cody had been sure he was hallucinating. What made him doubt it was the hair. Why would he hallucinate the general without any hair?
It had been over two long years of war—his whole adult life—and in all that time Cody had never, not once, expected a miracle.
He’d been confused. He’d been stunned. And he’d been angry. There was no other way to interpret that sick knot in his gut. It felt like a sucker punch. It felt like a trick. Sleep deprived and strung out on caf and stims, he’d had no way to disentangle the dismay and the bewilderment and the fury and the joy. Instead, it had all gone straight to his head, threatening to flip the switch and send him to the deck.
When the storm passed, what he’d felt was a relief so immense it was like being plunged into bacta.
He says, "Yeah, I’m fine."
Rex elbows him in the side. "I should’ve known. You’re always fine. That’s your quirk, that’s why you ended up with General Kenobi in the first place." He shoots Cody a wink. "Too level-headed for your own good."
Cody wonders if he’s missing Rex’s point. "What’s that supposed to mean?"
"You’re a good man, Cody," Rex begins, which doesn’t bode well. "And you’re a brilliant commander. You know how to talk to your men. You know how to act around the Jedi. You know how to run a battlefield, or a blockade, or a whole sector for that matter. The kind of thing that fazes me–" And Cody knew Rex was talking about the loss of men in his command, "–it doesn’t throw you off balance the same way." Which is Rex’s tactful way of saying that Cody is capable of being cold, which was something they both know Rex has never mastered.
This was the kind of talk they never approached except five bottles deep, and then rarely. "Whatever it is, you take it in, and you use it, but you don’t let it use you." Rex gathers himself, scuffing a hand across his bristled head. "So when I hear that, after General Kenobi died, you stayed at your post for three straight days with no sleep, subsisting on nothing but caf and ration bars, and then you full-on collapse when he walks through the door–"
"It wasn’t that bad," Cody mutters.
Rex ignores him. "–I’ve got to wonder why."
When Cody looks up from his beer, he finds Rex’s gaze on him again. That look he knows so well, that says: I’m here. I’m listening.
He and Rex go back further than almost anyone else Cody knows. They were batchmates, known each other in passing since they were small, before there’d been such a thing as rank between them, then got better acquainted during the first round of command training. Early on, he’d recognised the fierce spark inside Rex, that relentless determination to do better, always better. It was the thing Cody admired most about him. They’d been together on Christophsis, and Cody had been there in the aftermath of the ground battle on Teth that had all but wiped out Torrent Company. They had both been at Ryloth, and Felucia, and Geonosis, and countless others. There’s no clone Cody trusts more.
Which is why he answers honestly. "I saw the holovid they captured on the news, on HNN. A two-second clip, just a body falling from a rooftop. Couldn’t even tell who it was, if you didn’t know. And then… I couldn’t sleep. It kept playing over and over in my head." His hand tightens around his bottle. "I’ve lost a lot of men in this war. I’d say uncountable…"
"But you remember every one," Rex finishes for him.
Cody acknowledges this with a tilt of his head. "Sometimes I see them, behind my eyelids when I go to sleep. Start to think what I could’ve done differently." He closes his eyes for a moment. Just a moment, then he opens them again. "But if I start that, I’ll never stop. So I just– I just don’t start." He takes a long swallow of ale, sorts his thoughts. "But it was different for the general."
It was war. He’d almost lost General Kenobi a half dozen times. Almost died himself twice that. So why, then, had the nearly inevitable come as such a blow?
Clones—like his brothers, like him—were made to die on the Seppies’ guns. But the Jedi, he reasoned, were meant for more than the war.
Beside him, Rex shifts. "The Jedi are a funny thing," he says, slowly.
Cody looks up sharply.
"Don’t get me wrong," Rex says, putting up his hands. "If I had to, I’d give my life for my general’s in a heartbeat. But that’s what I mean—with all that backflipping, swordfighting, mystic powers, and so on, you somehow don’t really expect to have to."
Rex is right, Cody supposes. It’s rare for troops to survive their Jedi general. When a company loses their Jedi, there’s a certain cloud that falls over them. Cody recalls it as a mix of shame and grief incomprehensible to those untouched by it.
Cody says, with an unintended rawness to his voice, "I wanted to. Give my life for his, I mean." The words jumble in his mouth. He draws a harsh breath, and spits them out one by one. "I’d rather have died than be without him."
In the wake of that startling admission, Rex sits back. Cody can feel Rex’s eyes on him again. He’s flushed with hot and cold at the same time, like a fever.
Then Rex’s fist collides bruisingly with his shoulder. Cody looks up, into Rex’s wide, bright grin.
"I knew it!" Rex says. "I knew it all along. You got it bad, vod!"
"What?"
"Hey, it’s only natural," Rex says, spreading his hands as if to smooth Cody’s ruffled feathers. "It happens to a lot of clones, especially if you’re working closely with your commanding officer."
"What are you talking about?" Cody asks.
Eyes glinting, Rex says, "You got a crush on General Kenobi."
The bottom drops out of Cody’s stomach. He swallows, and says, "Don’t be an idiot."
Rex’s eyebrows raise. "Sounds exactly what someone with a crush would say." Before Cody can protest, he goes on. "Look, you don’t have to talk about it. I’m just saying—the way you look at him? I knew it all along."
Cody’s mind is a highly secure, tightly controlled space. It has many bulkheads, and many blast doors. As a general rule, things stay where they’re supposed to, and don’t transgress their stations. Here was the door he could open now, off-duty, suffused with the warmth of alcohol and safety and his brothers. Here was fear, a double-edged blade: useful to sharpen his senses and quicken his thinking, but deadly if it made him panic. Here, behind this door, locked and bolted, the vast black void of grief for everyone he had ever lost.
And here was the door Rex had just jimmied open, freeing what was inside.
It was all Kenobi. The set of his shoulders, the shape of his calves in his boots. His eyes, the colour of a clear sky. His voice, that effortlessly pleasant upper Coruscanti accent. His preternatural grace in battle, and how having him there on the front lines always made Cody feel that much more assured. How Kenobi is this creature Cody will never fully understand, and how it makes Cody that much more fascinated.
Cody sinks his head into his hands.
Rex’s hand lands on his shoulder, and after a moment another drink appears in front of him. "Hey," Rex says, softer. "It’s okay."
"Is it?" Cody says, muffled.
"Of course. Stang, have you met Bly?"
Cody looks at Rex over his fingers. "Am I that obvious?"
"You mean as obvious as Bly?" Rex grins. "Bly is like an akk puppy that’s imprinted on General Secura. Anyone with a working pair of eyes—scratch that, anyone with a brain, 'cause that includes Wolffe—can see Bly is in deep. You?" Rex nudges Cody with an elbow. "You’re a stone wall. Except to me, of course." He winks.
That was something, at least. But this is all too much. To distract himself, he asks, "How about you? I’ve never known you to fall for anyone."
Rex shakes his head. "Nah. Not my scene. Never has been."
"Never?"
"I used to wonder," Rex says, "but eventually I figured out I was just looking to feel what other guys felt, you know?" He spreads his hands. "What I’ve got is enough for me. More than enough."
Cody nods. He finds himself wishing it were otherwise—maybe if he knew Rex had felt something like this too then he wouldn’t feel like such a raw nerve, exposed and vulnerable. "Wonder if the Kaminoans ever planned for any of us to feel like this."
"Who knows if they even know what feelings are." Rex folds his arms across his chest. "As long as we look right and shoot straight, what’s it to them?" Rex, with his white-blond hair a visible mutation, had had a harder time on the homeworld than Cody. Now he takes a long pull on his ale, and wipes his gloved hand across his mouth.
But when he looks at Cody, his face softens again. He says, "Forget them. We left them behind. Maybe we don’t have a chart for how to be out here in the galaxy, but I don’t think they did either. We’re on our own, brother."
"Except for the Jedi," Cody says, quietly.
Rex agrees, "Except for the Jedi."
"What about the Jedi?" Fives appears, leaning over the back of the booth, breathing hard from the dancefloor—and the moment breaks apart there and then.
"The only people in the galaxy who dance worse than you, Fives," Rex says without a second’s hesitation, leaning back again and crossing his arms behind his head.
"Until you put a lightsaber in their hands," Cody joins in, picking up Rex’s thread. "Then it’s just you."
Later on, Cody returns to the Negotiator. The view of Coruscant from the transfer shuttle is never better than like this—slightly the worse for drink, sleepiness making his body heavy, all the lights below an ever-shifting galaxy of life. But tonight, it’s hard to see it past all the thoughts Cody doesn’t want to have rattling around his head.
He falls into his bunk—a solo compartment, the privilege of leadership—in his blacks and his socks. There’s the low thrum of the ship at rest, only perceptible in quiet moments like this. Metal creaking as it adjusts minutely to the Coruscant winds. Footsteps in the corridors, far away voices.
Now, the things from behind the door come creeping back.
The curve of the general’s smile when the seed of a plan begins to sprout in his mind. His face with his eyes closed, brow untroubled, in meditation or sleep either of which was too rare these days. The smell of him: warmth and linen and something herbal Cody doesn’t know what it is.
All those years behind him, before Cody was even commissioned, let alone alive. And all the years ahead of him, too: the future after the war that holds nothing but certainty, nothing but belonging, his future as a Jedi always secure—whereas for Cody, the end of the war is the end of his imaginings. (He tries not to think about it, as a rule, and usually he does quite well.)
General Kenobi is a different kind of creature to Cody, to Rex, to their brothers. He’s so far out of Cody’s scope, Cody might as well look up and pine after a star.
A crush. Rex had made it sound like something simple.
Cody resolves to secure that door in his mind again, reinforce it, and keep it closed except for moments like this—alone, in his bunk, where he can let his thoughts out safely and then tidy them away again before morning.
He sighs. Cradled in the sleepy hum of the ship, gazing up at the ceiling vent, his eyes fall closed, and he lets himself dream.