Chapter Text
So. The logical thing to do would to just say 'You can recognise me by the absolute giveaway that I am a clone, and we, characteristically, look a certain kind of way.' That would be the efficient thing to have done, and the sensible thing also, and if Cody's known for anything, it's for taking the efficient, sensible option where that option exists.
But he hasn't. Which he's now regretting.
Once again, he can blame '7931's really irritating habit of treating him like a person. He does it all the time, and frankly it's impairing Cody's mission performance. He treats him like a person, with no apparent preconceived ideas, and doesn't think of him as just another clone at all.
Cody quite likes being just another clone. It's something he's proud of, and he loves having that certainty of companionship, of support; he doesn't know what he'd do without it. But. Well.
He'd been harbouring some kind of ridiculous idea that if he never mentions it, then maybe '7931 will never mention it, and things can carry on precisely as they have been, except now—
He doesn't know what he wants to change. But if he didn't want anything to, he wouldn't be here.
And now he's fucked up, because by entertaining the ridiculous idea, he's left '7931 no way to identify him, so instead of whatever vague ideas have been keeping him from standard expected performance all the way back from Eol system to Coruscant, he's just leaning up against a pillar like an idiot, looking lost or possibly concussed, waiting. Cody has not got the brains the Kaminii gave a lab mouse.
Clones are allowed in here. Technically anyone is allowed in here, but it's a huge academic database in the middle of the Jedi temple and presided over by one of the scariest people Cody has ever met—it makes sense that there's not a lot of foot traffic. And there is a lot of data here; so much that processing it is a task of unimaginable size, so much that just navigating it is hard. Cody's prepared for several hours of work, filtering down through the terabytes to find what he's after. If you aren't looking for a specific document, and you aren't some kind of masochist, it's almost always easier to check other, more specialist archives, which are easier to steer through.
Clones are allowed to be in here, but they usually aren't. Cody has special access to a few of the more restricted files, thanks to his position, old military records that have yet to be declassified, things relevant to fighting the Sith. He thinks about that sometimes, about the trust that that implies; he knows how the Jedi fight as an order, knows how they have in the past, and which strategies work against them. Sure, it's fascinating, but it's also... Worrying. He could do a lot of damage, he knows, if he ever wanted to. He doesn't like thinking about that, but he does.
He thinks about after-the-war, sometimes. He thinks about what he'll do, and what the Republic will want to do with him, and what he's willing to do. And when the Republic wishes to enforce its decisions, it sends the Jedi.
There are a lot of things he doesn't want to think about.
He checks the time. Half an hour past when he should have met '7931 here.
This far into the Temple, the sounds of the city are muffled to a distant murmur; the sky is bright if blurred through the rotunda, the light dimmed in comparison to the glow of thousands of thousands of databanks, gleaming blue. He doesn't know how much power this place sucks up; the light is nothing compared to beaming data requests to researchers all through the galaxy. It's got its own communications relay, blaring on crowded frequencies on interstellar power, so that it's difficult to send or receive anything else, this close to the antennas. He knows that, because he looked it up on the OpenNet last night.
He's trying to fend off the sinking feeling. Surely he'd have noticed someone new coming through, someone who wasn't a Jedi; he's been scanning the crowd, thin and meagre as it is with almost all the masters off-planet for the war, but there's been no-one. He hasn't let himself think up an imaginary face for '7931.
It's just padawans working on projects, all looking very impressed and serious, a handful of knights, and Master Nu moving very fast through the rotunda as she checks between the different sub-sections and tries to keep an eye on the padawans at the same time. And General Windu, who he thinks is on supervision duty, though he can't think why; he's leaned up against a pillar, talking quietly with a knot of miscellaneous Jedi, looking up every so often and scanning the room. He's dressed oddly, just the tunic and trousers in some strange Jedi attempt at casualwear, and it turns out that holding onto your elbows without robes you can hide your hands in just makes you look very awkward.
He's beginning to wonder if something's happened. There's a war on, after all, and he knows that the lower levels of Coruscant can be like concentric circles of some kind of hell—if '7931 had to get all the way up here from somewhere deeper, that might mean trouble. Or he just forgot—but that doesn't make sense. '7931's always too careful, deliberate about anything. He wouldn't just forget.
So maybe he's not coming. He doesn't know why—he doesn't think he would—surely he would have said. He'd suggested this in the first place, and '7931 does things on purpose. He doesn't rush. He likes to be certain.
But maybe Cody knows him less well than he thinks he does.
He's just going to—he's just going to get on with things, then. He supposes. He doesn't like to wait.
He likes Master Nu. He's not in here often, but she seems to be immune to the general Jedi tendency towards nonsense, and she's sent Skywalker packing enough times that he's suggested Rex write her a thank-you card. She blinks at him, suspicious, when he stops and asks, but he has a list of search queries to narrow things down and knows how to operate all of the technology already, so he suspects this is the easiest thing she's had to deal with all day. He avoids being threatened with violence, and disappears into a side-hall.
This was not the most efficient method. It also was not particularly sensible.
But Mace has always had a sneaking suspicion that he is more useful than he is wanted. Talking, recently—to someone who had no expectations of his position or his skills, no ulterior motive and no duty-driver—this has been the first time he's ever been really bothered by that. He knows that that state of affairs, the dizzying way they talk to each other, is built on a lack of information, not matter how much it feels somehow, sometimes, that his patrolman knows him better than he's ever been known before.
Selective non-reveal is only not lying if your morals come down to technicality. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly clear that sometimes his do.
This is a problem. It has been a problem for some time. It's just that he is entirely up to his neck in problems, and so he has chosen not to fix this one, selfishly, because unlike his other problems, it's pleasant not to solve; to let the situation continue, draw it out beyond its natural end point, past a dozen points where it would have been sensible and reasonable to mention his role as a Jedi, his position in the Order, the truth of the work he grumbles about in the evenings in the tiny chat window which represents the only real peace he gets.
The problem is not his affection for a friend, which is real and pleasant and bracing-bright. The problem is not even that his mind defaults to the coiling fondness of the possessive pronoun, though that has the potential to become a greater problem; the problem is that he wants to hold the current situation past the point at which it should have changed, and in doing so is delaying or perhaps destroying all potential future happiness which is the result of letting a relationship grow and change.
The other, wider problem, of course, is that he is very nearly in violation of his self-imposed principle of Only One Religious Crisis At A Time. It feels disrespectful, to be worrying about whether this one meeting will go well when there is, at present, an intergalactic war tearing the galaxy into tiny little pieces and the Jedi are helming an army composed primarily of slaves on behalf of a senate which seems to have taken the excuse of warfare to polish off its corruption and leave it, gleaming, in the light for everyone to marvel at.
And no way out of it. No guidance in the Force. No path that he can see.
Just the war and the choices and the choices and the choices, and the choices are always the wrong ones. The war and bad choices and, occasionally, for a few hours, thinking very hard about something which has nothing to do with that, and someone who will think about it with him.
He's been waiting for someone new. Someone who he wouldn't expect to be here. But there's been no-one he doesn't know peripherally passing under the rotunda, no... He has tried not to make an image. Guessing is counterproductive and raising hopes lets down the future. But his faintest imaginings struggled on regardless, and made an image of some Mandalorian, someone neatly-built and solid, colours unknown, proportions unknown, almost everything unknown.
It's been longer than it should be. A few of the senior younglings, and some of the few padawans who are still at the temple and not on assignment, who are, he thinks, supposed to be writing reports but are instead mostly reading each other slightly disturbing facts about medicine and asking him questions, are beginning to suspect that Master Windu standing in one corner of the rotunda, watchful and very possibly beginning to slip towards the dreaded state of lurking, is not standard.
It also isn't quite fair, not to be able to give their questions—some are really quite advanced—the thought they deserve. He realises he's frowning.
"My apologies, Tallisibeth," he says, and she crumples up her face a little, still squinting at him skeptically. "If you would come speak to me tomorrow morning, we can discuss it properly. A very good question."
"All right," she says, wilting a little, and he gives her a smile. Some students struggle to pick up on the ways that instructors use their impressions in the Force to reassure or guide; he himself was one, and she seems to be as well, so he smiles a little more than he usually would, and she perks up. He hopes that she will come and ask, but, frankly, doubts it.
"Heck," the commander says very quietly, and shakes his head when Mace looks up. "Sorry, General—I just don't have clearance."
Mace wonders, briefly, what the hell kind of tactics Kenobi is running, if his commander is looking up access-restricted documents, and then decides firmly that it isn't his problem. Commander Cody has demonstrated himself to be competent enough at managing nonsense to stop things getting any more out-of-hand than is standard, and he just doesn't have the energy to intervene himself.
"Give me a moment," he says, and clears his own terminal screen. "I'm fairly certain I'll have clearance, if you want to check."
"Oh," the commander says, pleased, and a little relieved; the scar beside his eye crinkles with the movement of the muscles of his face, and Mace notices the neat ironed line of his shirt, the civilian getup—the most dressed-down he's ever seen a clone trooper, except for a debacle involving Ponds, a groundlander bar, and the worst attempt at extortion he's ever seen. Carefully dressed, if not skilfully, and it suits him; he wonders who he's trying to impress, and then decides, again, that it's not his business. "Thank you."
"No problem," he says, keying in his access and stepping back so that the commander can find whatever he's looking for. "The restrictions have never made much sense to me."
"There's the problem of mission-critical data, of course, there's that security risk," Commander Cody says, exasperated, "Which I understand, but this absolutely isn't mission-critical to any mission you could think of, it's just inconvenient." Then he seems to realise he's complaining, and to whom, and closes his mouth again, slightly red around the ears.
"There shouldn't be mission-critical anything in here," Mace says, letting a little irritation creep into his voice. "This is supposed to be an academic archive, it ought to be accessible."
It may be that this is something he has strong feelings about. Perhaps. But the commander agrees, apparently, nods with more vehemence than he's seen in strategy meetings and frowns at the terminal as it chews on the input for a few moments.
The proposal to restrict access came through about five years ago, suggested by the senate and then suggested again, rather more forcefully, from Republic Intelligence—and it's another thing Mace regrets, disagreeing but acquiescing, though it grated. But now the thing is done, and it can't be reversed during a war, with tensions so high.
He does wonder, though, if that's quite true. If it can really count as outside of the purview of the military information security laws, when the Jedi themselves are not, when half the information here is brought back from Jedi on assignment—the constant question of when it's a war and when it's an intervention, when it's peacekeeping and when it's... He doesn't know. Whatever they've been doing, which is not peacekeeping.
But when he was a padawan and a young knight, the captured Sith records he'd gone through to reconstruct juyo had been available to anyone—difficult to find, just because of the sheer obscurity, but possible. The building-blocks of Vapaad. It's clear to him, perhaps clearer than it is to anyone else, quite how dangerous that information is, how access to it can be a threat not only to one person but to the Order, to more than that. And still he can't quite bring himself to accept the utilitarian argument which presents itself clear and plain, that it ought, because of that threat, to be hidden. It makes sense. But he doesn't agree. And now those texts are in their own section, with a guard-droid by the door.
The commander steps away with another nod of thanks, an access card with the location of whatever he was looking for held in his hand, and Mace, on some impulse, looks up one of the histories from the old, old wars, older than the Crown Order he's researching now; utterly unreliable when it comes to sequence of events, but trustworthy on matters of swordsmanship, which had been what interested him when he was younger. The kind of gory, fascinating thing he would read out fragments from to Sora, circa one million years ago.
Restricted access, it reads. Huh. But... Actually restricted. From him, also, not just people wandering off from the street.
That doesn't make sense.
He makes a note—it's probably administrative error. But it's added to the list, the list he doesn't want to be making, of tiny things that are probably administrative error or entirely benign or not meaning what they're implying but which keep adding up, conglomerating, grinding together like dust in a delicate mechanism. Grinding, rasping, all the time in the back of his head. The sort of creeping suspicion that is almost impossible to tell apart from paranoid delusion, or from the warnings of the Force, which may or may not be the same thing.
He clears that screen, puts it aside for later, and returns to the matter at hand, though he's been delaying it. Doesn't want to do it alone, or, rather, doesn't want to find later that there's some completely reasonable explanation for him not to have come—in fact he's certain there is; he's punctual and reliable and straightforward and wouldn't miss a meeting—and that there's now excuse for them to meet again, if Mace goes ahead and solves the problem today.
There's a file covering part of the Crown Order's history which he had accessed previously, part of the collection available on the holonet, and he cues that in now. The search autocompletes; he blinks at it, and decides not to look convenience in the mouth. The file's there; he tabs to advanced settings and rifles through the version history; additions five years ago, fifteen, four decades, a flurry of small edits almost a hundred years ago, and somewhere back in the mists of time, the original, in physical copy and still stored in the archive.
There are no edit descriptions, which is just bad practice. Simply unprofessional. He huffs out a breath and squints at the screen—
That also doesn't make any sense. The dust scrapes a gear to a halt and the whole mechanism whirs and complains. Each of the version files is exactly the same size. He opens another, checks it—down to the byte.
What the hell.
He opens the information card for the physical copy. You are accessing this work, the screen flashes.
Mace contemplates an act of violence against an innocent library terminal.
The commander returns while he's still engaged in a staring contest with the timer which is telling him he has five hours to return the research material he has not accessed or be subject to a fine. The terminal informs him that physical copies cannot be removed from the archive, but he is able to print a flimsi from the digital if he wishes.
Mace has never in his life returned anything late to the library, except for once, when he was a padawan, and he has the standing excuse that he was kidnapped by pirates. Jocasta had forgiven him as soon as he'd mentioned that that had been the mission on which he'd found Depa. He doesn't think 'I never touched it' will go over so well, not having an attendant two-year-old with very convincing eyes.
He nods to the commander, wedged sideways into a chair and chewing on his stylus as he pages through what he's reading; the commander makes a sideways acknowledging motion with his hand, a kind of distracted twitch, disappeared into his own little bubble for now. There's a run of fading bruises across the back of his knuckles, darker where he knows the gauntlet presses if it doesn't fit quite right, a cheap bacta patch doing double-time, and Mace remembers that the only time he's seen him fight, he'd kicked a battle droid in the jaw. It's an odd thing to put together with him in the blue light of the databanks, making notes in neat block-aurebesh handwriting.
Mace slips out of the tiny study-room, checks his handheld comm though he knows that the archive communications relay blocks out most everything, does not allow himself to sigh at the last message, sent by him yesterday evening. Takes the stairs down two levels and waits for the clicking system to pull out from the densely-packed physical archive the shelf he needs; it rolls to a stop with a hole right where the information card said the thing was supposed to be. He runs his finger across the metal; no dust.
Something clicks. Up two levels again, hurrying this time. He's really going to look like an idiot if he's wrong about this.
He'd thought this would be a quick check, just filling in the gaps, but there's—more missing. It's worrying.
Nobody ever checks the originals, it seems. The galaxy is too broad, the method just a little too complicated, the digitals too easy, and someone's taken advantage of that. He just can't figure out why—what's the advantage? This is, it's increasingly clear, deliberate. And he can't imagine that it's restricted only to this specific piece of obscure historical fussing-around.
Cody's always liked detective stories. Hasn't, of course, been able to access them frequently, but he finds them satisfying, the putting-together of clues, racing against the protagonist, the satisfying itch of not-quite-right spinning into oh-I-see. This feels a little like a detective story.
The general comes back, and Cody winces a little internally at the prospect of asking if he can use his accesses again—this line is pointing to something, maybe, in the legal archives, and half of those, he knows, are sealed.
He copies out another line before he quite registers that the general isn't at the terminal again, has sat himself on the other side of the table that Cody has conquered in a sprawl of flimsi and the flickering holo-screen of his draft which he's been ignoring since he found the larger project.
He looks up; Windu's looking directly at him over his hands, elbows on the table, fingers laced together. He thinks there's a smile behind his hands, from the curve of his eyes, and it makes something trip over in the back of his mind. "Uh," he says, and then closes his mouth.
The general takes a handheld from his pocket—he reaches obviously for the pocket of a robe first, realises he isn't wearing one, and then goes for his trousers, which is amusing to watch—and rests it on the table. The holonet link clicks on, the way that these things reach for the last open page, and projects onto a palm-sized square in the air the drafting page for the Crown Order article. Back-to-front, the transparent holoprojection facing away from Cody, but still recognisable through familiarity.
Cody's mind cycles through several responses. 'I thought you weren't coming' is dismissed immediately, and 'I'd expected you to be shorter' is thrown out in short order too, on grounds that it isn't true; he'd deliberately avoided building a mental image out of wishful thinking. He blinks, puts his stylus down, and says with as much judgement as he can muster, "You edit on a handheld?"
The general—Windu—'7931; names are difficult and formality levels are more difficult and everything is terrible and he does not, currently, have the wherewithal to sort through the complicated and conflicting social codes that apply in this situation—he makes a noise that really does sound like 'nork.'
He waits a moment, and tries not to watch so intently as he feels he is. But '7931 is always a little nervous about the jokes he makes that are anything less than entirely deadpan, careful and unpracticed; he's a little uncomfortable outside of established social rules, the way that Cody is sometimes, stiff and searching for a structure. He gives it a second, hopes, hopes.
"Big words from the man who confessed to starting out on his HUD," '7931 says, and Cody snorts.
"Aich-you-dee," he says in response. "With all the letters by themselves? On my aich-you-dee?"
"You're deflecting," Windu says, immoveable, but with the smile still lingering around his eyes. "Face the accusation."
A little of that sudden tension slips. Cody grins; he can feel it in his cheeks, despite him being fairly certain he didn't ask for a grin to appear. But the grin grins regardless, undignified but sincere, and he understands the impulse to hide it behind hands. "Fine," he says. "Fine, I concede. But I don't do that any more, and you're using this thing right now."
The world stalls like a misbehaving engine. He isn't sure what causes it, but the tension snaps back into place, something he can feel in his stomach—he thinks, what the fuck am I doing.
He'd been worried about all sorts of things. He'd worked himself into a little knot this morning, the kind of tangled beast in violation of all topological theory that the hero in the story can only unravel by pulling out a knife, about—about how nice it is, that '7931 knows him, in a way he thinks he hasn't been known before, but also about he really doesn't know several pertinent facts; about how he doesn't want to be treated like a clone, but he does want to, because he is. And he'd thought that that was the kind of worry confined to him, but it might not have been, because he realises that there's a lot he didn't know about '7931. About General Windu. About the man directly in front of him.
He thinks, a mystery. Not what he can ferret out through steady detective work against a concealment attempt, but the mystery of what '7931 would like to show him, because, after all, he could have walked off as soon as he'd figured it out, but he didn't. He didn't, and he's sitting directly in front of him, not hiding at all.
"Shall I," he says, "Go through what I've got so far?"
"Please do."
"Right," he says, and turns his page of notes, which, if he's honest, are mostly question marks. "Yeah, tell me I'm right and that this makes no sense, because—"