Work Text:
“The time has come. Execute Order 66.”
“Yessir,” he said, and flipped the comm off.
---
To an outside observer, the clone army was a monolith of unyielding white plastoid. There was no reason to look past the identical helmets - they had faces, sure, but only the one. Some of the clones varied their hair styles, had tattoos or piercings, anything to claim that body as theirs.
CC-2224, Marshall Commander of the 7th Sky Corps, did nothing of the sort. He was set apart from his brothers by just three things - the kiss of an explosion that left a scar curling around his brow, an extra clip on his belt the right size for a lightsaber lost, and of course, his name.
They all had names, or at least all those who lived long enough to choose one.
Fate had never been kind to clones. Statistically speaking, Cody’s survival was a miracle. In the lightning-splinter branches of possibility, he could have died an infinite number of times before Utapau. The first battle of Geonosis, the second. Aching and weary, a taunt in someone else’s story. In uncountable deserts, one arm around a brother.
But the fall of the Jedi was a fixed point, and there had to be a hand on the gun. It might as well be his.
*
CC-2224 with the control chip in his head signaled to the artilleryman. “Blast him,” he said, his arm coming down like an executioner's axe. His mind has been stolen from him, though he does not feel the loss.
*
There was no chip. Over three long years the Commander built a trust with his General, enough to lift a teasing eyebrow when he handed back his dropped lightsaber yet again. They were friends, in a professional sort of way, the distance necessary between a commanding officer and his men, between a Jedi and the rest of the galaxy. A distance demanded by duty. Cody’s duty was, as always, to the Republic - and so the Jedi dropped like a rock.
*
On Umbara, Pong Krell took temporary command of the 212th. On Utapau, Cody already knew the aftermath of a Jedi’s fall. You can get used to anything. He took the shot himself.
*
Cody loved Obi-Wan as much as he trusted him. They were brothers in all, welded together by the sparking furor of blood and battle. They spent three brutal years leaning on each other, eating the same shitty rations, cursing every Sith-forsaken dustball, cradling the bodies of their men, blood slipping from cold fingers. It was enough to break a man. Cody loved him. Cody remembered Slick. His desperate snarl, as he grasped for freedom.
He brought Obi-Wan down like he would any brother turned traitor.
*
Some things are facts, they stay true whether or not you believe in them. In any universe, Marshall Commander Cody who makes it to Utapau, watching the back of his Jedi, executes Order 66. Without hesitation, without regret.
---
There’s nothing special about Utapau. Just one more desert planet.
It’s not a good place to die. The desert dogs and birds do not waste protein - though the barrens are wide and desolate enough that they don’t always get to the body. Over the course of a long, hot day, the moisture from a corpse gets wicked into the dry air, leaving behind a hard callous of bone and leather. Hyperwind storms are as likely to pull a man apart as they are to bury him.
Utapau was an ocean planet once, 70% of its surface covered by water. Though its rivers only run underground now, its sands still remember the salt. Laid to rest under this unconquerable dust, sometimes old bodies rise to the surface, near-perfectly preserved. Ghosts that you can touch.
The soldiers will tell you that the only good thing about this planet is the low rate of infections - the animals are vicious, the air is dry enough to choke on. The desert will kill you.
Still, sometimes it rains.
---
Darth Plagueis the Wise, Palpatine had said to Anakin. The man who had discovered the secret of immortality. In truth, as he’d cut down his old Master he’d thought him very clever but not very wise.
Plagueis had tortured a Jedi once - ostensibly for information, in practice a lesson.
“The Sith of old,” Plagueis sighed, “believed that victory achieved without demonstrating one’s superior power was not true victory.”
He’d strung up the Jedi’s wrists so her feet could barely touch the ground. She could either stand tensed on tip-toe for hours, or relieve her legs and risk destroying her shoulders by hanging from her arms. It was a choice that ultimately meant nothing.
“They were fools, and so they died. For all their strength they could not end the Jedi.” He strolled the length of the room, gesturing with one hand. “So much brute force without the understanding of the principle of leverage. What is a hammer or a scalpel or a lightsaber but a tool? Power, true power, is carefully applied knowledge so the defeat of your enemy is inevitable - and that comes from understanding your enemy’s nature.”
An academic instead of a warrior, and all the more dangerous for it, his cruelty always carefully measured out. But where his Master was a scholar, and the Sith of old were warriors, Sidious intended to be a king.
He watched the Jedi set her mouth to an implacable line. “You will learn nothing from me. There is no point to this.”
Plagueis smiled then, an indulgent professor proving a concept to a skeptical student. He instructed Palpatine through each cut. Plagueis was a strong proponent of practical experience and Mirialans were rarely available as specimens in the Core worlds. The Jedi stood silent, immovable as stone, as blood the colour of oil-slick trickled down to the floor.
“She will not break,” said Palpatine, when they left to take late-meal, letting some of his frustration seep into his voice. He knew it was what his Master wanted to hear.
Sure enough, Plagueis smiled again, agreeable. “Not from that, no.”
When they returned to their work with their hunger sated, Plagueis had Palpatine drag in a Bothan girl by her mane. She’d looked 14, maybe 15, her fur still retaining distinctive juvenile spotting.
“M-aster,” she cried out, a pathetic warble from where she was pressed to the ground.
“Padawan,” said the Jedi, the only word she’d spoken since her declaration at the beginning. Her eyes were dark. From that one word, Sidious knew she’d lost.
The little one held out for longer than he’d expected, screaming and crying and still telling her Master not to say anything. “There is no death,” she’d chanted, when she wasn’t sobbing. “There is only the Force.”
The older Jedi had raged, yelling themselves hoarse about how pointless pain was for getting any accurate information, then begging them to stop, then weeping helplessly, murmuring her Padawan’s name like a prayer. By the end she’d promised Palpatine anything, everything, even though she must have surely known that both her and her student would die here.
“This is the nature of the Jedi. Their true weakness - attachment. Love. They say it themselves, in their teachings.” His Master looked over the bodies with a clinical eye.
“A Jedi master who walks steadfast no matter the trial will shatter when those under their care are hurt, and they are left helpless to watch. Their self-denial only prolongs their suffering.”
Plagueis nudged one limp hand with this foot, before waving off Palpatine to clean up the mess. “Really, such a waste of time.” The Jedi had told them nothing they hadn’t already known.
---
Jedi Knights. The title should be an oxymoron. How can you fight for peace?
Yet for a thousand years, the Jedi walk steady on the metaphorical edge of that lightsaber. Negotiators and warriors, a balancing act. Perhaps this is simply the ideological work of addressing doubt, the messiness of faith when translated to reality.
Still, many of their philosophers believed that as soon as you unsheathe your ‘saber, you have already lost. A negotiator for peace who’s best remaining option is violence has failed their duty. And yet, almost all would still agree that you must draw your blade. Not for fear of your own life, but to preserve and protect the lives of those behind you as best you can, seeking to reduce harm.
This was the basis of Plagueis’ idea of a clone army. The army led by the Jedi had to be alive, and their opponents could not be. Too many Jedi would leave the order if they had to kill sentients, but bind them as the leaders of men and they would willingly trade their lives and their morals to protect them. Not every Jedi had a Padawan - if a weakness does not exist, then make one.
The Jedi lost as soon as they chose to fight the war. And how could they have chosen any differently?
---
“Seriously. Just leave it alone.”
It was the distinct cadence of a clone’s voice coming from an alley straight ahead. Rex tilted his head, moving towards curiosity. In response, Cody put a hand on his back and herded him into a sharp left turn.
For once, their shore leave had miraculously aligned with Fox’s actual off-duty hours. They were a fractional subset of his official rest time, because criminals and senators did not particularly care about the schedules of beings not even legally recognized as ‘persons’. His off-duty hours were enforced by Commander Thire and a medic holding a very potent sedative, which was almost as effective as actually having worker’s rights.
The requisition forms had been sent in, the shinies settled, every metaphorical fire put out or at least covered with a very heavy pot lid. Cody was intent on getting to 79’s before yet another emergency inevitably surfaced. It was soppy, and Fox would surely mock him for it, but he had missed his brother. Whatever was happening in that alley was not his problem. Whoever was in charge of those idiots could deal with it.
“He’s hurt.”
“Waxer, you’re going to get hurt.“
Ah, shit. Those were his idiots.
He ignored the flicker of a smile on Rex’s face as he spun sharply on his heel and strode back towards the alley.
“Fox is going to be pissed if we’re late,” Rex said, hands clasped behind his neck, following with a relaxed stride he’d probably copied from General Skywalker. As if he hadn’t planned on doing exactly the same as Cody just moments ago. The kid was getting cheeky lately. Wielding dual pistols like some kind of souped up Mid-Rim bounty hunter - the standard 15As were perfectly serviceable, thank you very much.
“Fox is a big boy. He can entertain himself,” Cody grumbled, though it was half-hearted. “And you don’t have to follow me.”
“No, I’m coming.” Rex sounded almost cheerful. Good to know at least one of them was having fun.
They’d gotten close enough to clearly hear the characteristic banter of his Ghosts. “There are billions of pathetic life forms on Coruscant. You can’t help all of them.”
“Not billions, millions maybe. Billion’s larger than you think.”
“Fuck your millions, you know what I mean. What matters - “
“What matters is that I can help this one! We can’t just leave him.”
“And what exactly are we supposed to do?”
“Troopers, what’s the problem?” Cody turned the corner to see Waxer trying to pet a bearsloth. “Oh what the -”
“Commander,” said Waxer, startling to attention. His hand was still extended, a perfect target for teeth. He wasn’t even wearing his armour, and had the sleeves of his dress greys rolled up.
Cody had already lifted his blaster. “Back away very slowly.”
Waxer followed his orders, even as he blinked at Cody in confusion. Good. Cody was still going to put Waxer through the worst physical training of his life, but the trooper had just spared himself from the worst of Cody’s. Alpha-17 was a bastard.
“Sir, he’s just a dog,” said Waxer, anxious.
That hulking black mass tied to the post stared Cody down, cloudy third eyelid flicking back and forth over its shiny black iris. It was about a metre in height, had a row of spines bristling down its back, and was about as much a dog as Commander Wolffe was. That is to say, liable to bite regardless of what you called him.
Faced with Cody’s silence, Boil slipped into the cadence of a situation report. “It’s been here since yesterday, sir, tied to the pole. Nobody’s come to feed it.”
Boil liked to think of himself as hard-hearted, but he was closest to Waxer for a reason. No matter how much he’d protested, he’d clearly come back to help him with the beast. Both troopers were emotionally invested. As always, if someone had to take the hard shot, it would be Cody.
…He thumbed his blaster to stun.
“Isn’t there some sort of,” Cody paused. The clones’ training for wildlife encounters stopped at ‘eat it if it’s not poisonous and don’t let it eat you’. Incidentally, bearsloths were venomous, not poisonous. “Animal… control?”
“They’ll decommission him,” said Waxer. His eyes flickered between Cody and Rex and then down to the ground. “Too old and too big. Probably sick. Nobody will want him.”
“It’s ‘put down’, with animals,” said Rex. He had a hand hooked into his belt, next to a pistol. “You put down a defective dog.”
He still kept his hair cropped short. Cody kept his eyes on the matted fur of the stray, the slow and stiff movements of its stump of a tail, instead of looking at the gold crown of Rex’s head. Pockmarks littered the dark shell of its face and lined the bottom of a puffy eye, and its right forelimb rested at an odd angle. It was clearly unwell, even lying down with most of its soft body hidden. Something hurt and then abandoned when its owner no longer had a use for it.
Didn’t make it any less dangerous. Cody was a practical man, so he didn’t drop his blaster. He did tip his head at Rex, a silent ‘well, what do you want to do about it.’
Rex’s forefinger tap-tap-tapped on his belt, a wasteful, pacifying movement as he thought. It put some ease back in the tensed shoulders of Waxer and Boil.
“I don’t know who’d take him,” said Rex. He held up a hand, a gesture to wait, though nobody had moved to interrupt him. “But we don’t have to fix everything now, and we don’t have to fix it alone. Taking one more day won’t hurt. We can feed him, and then see if any of our contacts on planet are in need of a little… extra muscle.”
That was a very limited pool of people, considering the clones didn’t socialize much beyond their own, the Jedi, and a handful of miraculously decent civilians. It was a long shot, and Rex knew it.
Cody dipped his head. “Alright. We’ll do what we can.” That was all they could do. Foolish hope was the realm of men unlike them.
Rex pulled a ration from the depths of one pocket, the red wrapper marking it for carnivores.
“It’s all proteins. I carry them for Ahsoka,” he explained to Waxer and Boil as he tore the wrapper off in a quick, single-handed motion, as easy as reloading a blaster. The dog raised his head at the crackling sound. Rex frowned, hesitating. “Although I’m not sure if what’s safe for Togruta is safe for dogs.”
Cody snapped off a stunner before he even registered the creaking of a rusted chain giving away as the dog lunged. Another stun bolt dissipated off its head spine, he had to wonder kind of nervous system this thing had - too close, it’s teeth were too close -
Cody punched it in the face.
Thankfully, Cody’s boys were very, very good at unconventional tactics. It turned out that the 212th dog-pile worked not only on General Grievous, but also other dog-adjacent beasts brimming with incredible violence.
Fox laughed so hard the comm screeched with feedback when they called him for back-up. Fortunately, the Guard had more experience with the natural wildlife of Coruscant’s underbelly, up to and including all manners of criminals, politicians, and dogs. Sergeant Hound had come by his name honestly.
“He’s a Massiff,” he said, wielding a hypo as easy as any medic Cody had ever seen. “Usually they pick ‘em up for sentry work, though they’re just as good for tracking.” Hound’s mouth twisted, a little wry. He stroked one hand down the dog’s flank, lingering over some unseen wound. “They’re smart enough to bite if you don’t treat ‘em right, but loyal like nothing else if you do. So you get a couple of two-bits with a whelp they don’t know how to raise to only bite other people, and when it gets too big and too fierce to beat...”
The troopers who stayed on Coruscant tended to pick up different slang from the heavily mobile divisions. Hound spoke quickly and let the edges of his words blur together in unfamiliar ways. Still, Cody understood the sentiment well enough.
“Jorso'ran kando a tome, Vode an,” he said, thumping one hand heavy on the other trooper’s shoulder plate. We shall bear its weight together, brothers all.
Most of the clones had never been taught any Mando’a, but they all knew that old Mandalorian war chant, sung together in low voices as they mourned their brothers. The weight of grief was not meant to be carried alone.
“ Vode an,” replied Hound, laying his hand on top of Cody’s.
If the kennels of the Coruscant Guard gained a mysterious new member that day, well, the only ones who ever came down to them were the clones.
The war will change them all. Waxer will die on Umbara and some essential part of Rex will forever lie in the same dust as that boy’s corpse. The trust and ease between Rex and Fox will burn away with the smoke of a blaster bolt. He’ll lose his bonds one by one, Echo, Ahsoka, Fives, Kix, Anakin - the last of them snapping like an old metal chain under the force of desperation.
Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to be the one who survives.
There are billions of miserable life forms in the galaxy, and saving one won’t do anything to change their fates. The tides of time inevitably wash away the footsteps of those marching on ahead. But the shore stays, even if it looks a little different.
Even after Order-66, it wasn’t against regulations to keep a dog in the kennels. That was what they were made for. So when Darth Vader snapped CC-1010’s neck for failing him, the last clone left in the Guard still had one more brother. If he took a while longer to do his nightly check-ups of the hounds, well, it’s important to get the job done right. And if it happened to calm the tremors in his hands and voice so he could face his new commanding officer with the same expected blankness as usual, he didn’t have to waste the Empire’s resources with decommissioning another defective model.
The Massiff was content to lay fat and heavy on his knee that night, and many more after.
----
History compresses, like memory. The minds of most life forms are simply not built to handle that much information. Forgetting is a mercy.
People will remember the desert, and the suns, not each grain of sand. They’ll remember the silent audiences to great evil, and call the nature of man foolish at best and cruel at the worst. They’ll remember the blinding flash and fall of heroes, impossible exceptions to the rule like distant stars untouched by a planet’s gravity.
People will remember the Jedi, remember the clone army, and forget that they each had scars, and choices, and names.
They gave themselves names.
They had nothing, and they gave themselves names.
---
Utapau was hardly the first desert planet where the 212th Attack Battalion had fought; the Outer Rim is particularly dense with desert planets. The leading theory as to why is that massive solar winds from the destruction of a star eons ago partially stripped the atmosphere from a scattering of nearby planets, which then slowly drifted into new configurations. A runner-up puts the blame on an ancient race that excelled at space travel but not resource management, leaving behind a trail of desertified planets like a grubby thumbprint on the galaxy.
Whatever the reason, the Outer Rim Sieges had taken them from dustball to dustball, and now to this long stretch of horizon.
“Sir,” said Cody. It was the all-purpose army knife of vocabulary, which let people read into it what they wanted to hear and no more. This was particularly useful when you were the sort of person who might be punished for having the wrong opinion (which was any opinion at all) but occasionally needed to apply unconventional tactics to rein in your unconventional commanding officer.
Unfortunately, Obi-Wan had chosen this moment to discard his title of Negotiator and ignore any and all implications that may or may not be present. His reply was infuriatingly peppy. “Yes, Commander?”
They had gone to negotiate with one of the Republic’s ship manufacturers once, because the Senate used General Kenobi like an all-purpose army knife, or even the whole damn armoury. Bunker buster and stiletto in the boot and lightsaber and good, ol’, reliable deece and all. As if the man had time to play dark ops when he was leading a sixth of the entire Republic army.
But good soldiers follow orders, so Cody hadn’t said a word as they’d been taken on a tour of the factory. The rows and rows of steel behemoths had hummed with purpose, a soothing, heavy song that made his bones thrum in resonance. The foreman had grinned as he’d led them to a tinted screen, with all the smug and possessive fondness of a ruler overlooking their kingdom.
“Best automatic laser welders in the Republic,” he’d said. Even past the dark screen, the light had seared and sparked in patterns that made Cody’s eyes ache. “Continuous beams, 15% more efficient than the old TX models. Nobody else could handle battleships of the size you’re looking for, in the timeline you want.”
It’d been a boast, and the truth. The Senate had sent the Negotiator for a reason. The General had dialed up his usual charm like he wasn’t standing with two cracked ribs and pumped full of enough painkillers to put down even a genetically enhanced trooper, and for once they’d walked away with a mission success that only cost credits and not lives.
Here and now, Cody wished he was too tired to think. But he was made with a mind more kin to those machines than the men who used them - sharp, disquietingly precise, and incredibly dangerous when aimed in the right direction. As surely as a laser welder knew the arc of its path over metal, Cody knew how many steps they’d taken since the crash and how far they had to go. He knew how much water they had left, and that the cool grace of dawn would soon leave them for the true heat of a desert day.
They carried Barlex between them, his arms slung across their shoulders. It was slow going. In maddeningly uneven intervals, he thought he could hear the dripping of his brother’s blood - though the rasp of their march across the sands would surely conceal such a subtle noise.
They wouldn’t last past noon. But Obi-Wan, moving forwards alone, had a chance. Was it even a choice, when in every universe he would choose the same?
“Sir,” said Cody, and then dropped all his pretenses. “Obi-Wan. We won’t make it.”
“My dear, I never took you for a quitter. Come on now, we’re nearly there.”
The General was not very good at estimating ‘nearly there’. He was usually a very good liar, but perhaps the desert had stripped him of his falsehoods the way its winds would tear flesh from the bone.
“We can’t make it. But you can. The Republic needs you, General. Our men need you. You aren’t replaceable.”
“Neither are you.”
Cody shook his head. He didn’t know how to explain his meaning, though Obi-Wan surely knew already. It wasn’t that he thought himself expendable, and he certainly wanted to live, but no words could change the numbers on their balance sheet from red to black - only the ruthless crossing out of liabilities. As always, if someone had to take the hard shot, it would be Cody.
He slowed to a near stop, angling his head to look at the other man. His face was hidden underneath his helmet, but his General had plenty of experience reading him even with it on. “You have to live. We’re slowing you down.”
Obi-Wan kept moving, silent. His stride forced Cody to lurch forwards after him, or risk dropping Barlex.
“Obi-Wan,” said Cody, finally letting some of the frustration seep into his voice. “It’s not a matter of endurance.”
He tapped the canteen at his belt. “Force-sensitive or not, three people need more water than this to last even a day in the desert. We’ll be losing it quick once the suns go up. Even you can’t overcome the facts of nature with sheer determination.”
He expected an argument, braced himself to sling back a rebuttal.
What Obi-Wan came out with instead was, “Did you know that more people die from drowning than from dehydration in the desert?”
Cody didn’t know how to reply to such a poor attempt at deflection. After a moment of stunned silence, he said, “...Don’t know if I believe that, sir.”
“It’s the truth,” said Obi-Wan, a laugh in his voice. “You don’t have to believe in it for it to be true.”
He hefted Barlex a little higher as they started hiking up an incline. “You can ask the guides on Geonosis, though I’m uncertain as to how they got the numbers - I’d think most corpses would be lost to the desert. Regardless. Sand has very large particles and little organic material, so not a lot of rainfall is absorbed, most of it sluicing off the surface.”
Cody was going to die, and in their final moments together the man he would go to his death for was lecturing him on the particle size of sand. If he survived this, he was going to join General Skywalker in the sand hating club.
Oblivious to his thoughts, Obi-Wan continued. “People prepare for dehydration, they expect the heat and the wind. They don’t expect the flash floods - it seems antithetical to the nature of the desert. Still, rain falls without care for the plans of men. You may want to move just a bit faster, Commander.”
Despite wondering if his General was heat-dazed, Cody still fell into his pace as easy as breathing. They scrambled up the side of the plateau. Barlex’s boots kicked up red dust where they dragged against the earth.
“Sir -”
“That strip of land down there is an arroyo, which translates to something like ‘ephemeral river’, in Basic. Poetic, but mostly literal. It’s a river that only forms, briefly, when it rains, and then vanishes again.” Obi-Wan eased off as they approached a slight overhang. “Let’s sit here for a bit.”
They leaned Barlex against the sandstone wall. He was a little feverish, and murmured when Cody touched his face, but he hadn’t bled through his bandages. There was a peculiar feeling in the air, a physical sensation, like the smell of ozone when a lightsaber ignited or the syrupy premonition of a hit before he pulled the trigger on his blaster.
The sky was unusually dim, for a desert morning. He watched Obi-Wan tilt his face up.
Cody heard it before he saw it - a pit-pit patter, only audible now that they’d stopped, still and silent.
The overhang barely helped. It kept Barlex’s center mass dry enough, but Obi-Wan was drenched in seconds. The water darkened his hair, left it pressed wet and stringy against his face. Obi-Wan started giggling, high and heady, his eyelashes wet with rain and relief. With a curl of his hand, a small ball of water began to gather.
Down where they’d come, greedy white fingers of floodwater churned over the dry basin, inching across the land like a desperate soldier crawling hand over fist.
Cody felt a laugh bubble up in him in response, something nearly hysterical, just barely suppressed. Instead, he reached out to grab the collar of Obi-Wan’s robe and hauled him closer so they could all properly huddle underneath the overhang.
“Don’t catch a cold, now.” It was such an absurd statement, when he’d been waiting for the killing heat of day, that Cody really did laugh. He was swinging so quickly between bewildered and scathing that he could only land face first on bemused, one eyebrow raised. “You couldn’t just say it? You couldn’t just tell me it was going to rain, and that everything was going to be ok? I know General Yoda prefers to teach with the cryptic, but I’m no Jedi youngling.”
“Ah,” said Obi-Wan, a little sheepish now. His face had ended up pressed close to Cody’s neck, and the chill of his nose meant Cody had to carefully suppress a shiver. He didn’t want him to move away, after all. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, in case I was wrong. But in this case, I suppose my old master was right - the Force provides.”
“Sir,” sighed Cody, too exhausted to muster up any more feelings. He smoothed a hand over Barlex’s brow, watched the rise and fall of his chest. There was something to be said, about Jedi magic and Jedi miracles, what the rest of the galaxy called luck and they called the Force. Cody was not the man to say it. He’d rather have armour than belief between him and a blaster bolt, no matter what his General insisted on running around without.
So he just hoped their luck would hold out a little damn longer, and see them to the end of this war.
---
Order 66, in its entirety, reads:
In the event of Jedi officers acting against the interests of the Republic, and after receiving specific orders verified as coming directly from the Supreme Commander (Chancellor), GAR commanders will remove those officers by lethal force, and command of the GAR will revert to the Supreme Commander (Chancellor) until a new command structure is established.
---
The truth, like a mountain or a really big rock, is an immovable object (unless you have enough firepower, like, say, a Death Star, to blast the whole thing to smithereens and call it all a moot point).
Nevertheless, the people of Alderaan could tell you that the views of the same mountain from east and west are quite different.
When they say this, they mean it as both metaphor and fact. Great, sweeping clouds rolling off the ocean will break and burst against jagged peaks, dispensing their watery cargo long before reaching the other side. This means the land behind the mountains sees very little precipitation and tends towards arid shrublands and deserts, while the shoreline faces seasons hot and humid. On one side, the storm, on the other, its shadow. The stark difference in climate meant people on either side of a mountain lived very differently - different foods, different languages, and different views of the same mountain.
Like many other planets, at one point Alderaan had a smattering of nation-states rather than a united planetary government. Mountain ranges are particularly good at keeping nations separate, especially when they are covered in snow. Even without the cold there was plenty to worry about. Turbulent rockfalls, hidden crevasses, animal attacks of all sorts, and the fear that this was the year great-uncle Jon’s heart would finally give out trying to climb that god-awful old herding trail.
Despite all the environmental hazards, trade routes still found their way through the steepest peaks and deepest valleys. Thousands of people travelled through those paths, carrying spices and silks, songs and stories.
Senator Organa’s favourite drink, one he included at every winter dinner he hosted, was a mulled wine that sat sweet and warming in the stomach. Every year he’d gesture to the snowy peaks bordering their capital with a glass in one hand, and talk about the history of the star anise and desert agave. It was a drink only made possible by a united Alderaan, fruits and spices from each region arid or cold or tropical. A drink to peace, which could only be made in peace.
The mountain is immovable, but the people aren’t.
---
In many, many timelines, Alderaan is gone - but from certain perspectives in the galaxy, you can still see its light.
---
In every universe where Anakin Skywalker stands in that office before Darth Sidious and Master Windu, with his eyes fevered thinking about his wife, he always falls. How could he choose any differently? It’s in his nature. He loves, and loves, and loves -
---
In every universe where Anakin Skywalker falls, Obi-Wan faces him. He draws his lightsaber. Sometimes, often, he wins.
He always loses.
—-
Death, yet the Force -
---
In every universe where the Empire rises, it always falls. Sometimes when Luke Skywalker faces down the Emperor and chooses to love his father, sometimes when Leia Organa does the same but chooses to end him. Sometimes when a stormtrooper chooses a name. It falls to Bail and Breha, to Mon Mothma, to Padme, to two thousand and counting representatives of their own people. Or to a savvy pirate from the Outer Rim, when it turns out an increasing Imperial influence is just plain bad for business. Perhaps to all of them, or to their children, and their children’s children, in ideology if not in blood.
The weather on Coruscant has been controlled for years, carefully temperate. They used to have postcards stamped in bold font - “IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY ON CORUSCANT!” - mostly for workaholic parents to send home, as nobody liked to vacation on the city-planet.
The locals know this to be as true as a politician’s promise. You can delay it. You can direct it. But not even the Emperor can change the nature of water. Eventually, it always rains. It has to. Somewhere, somehow.
Sometimes, you even live long enough to see it.
---
“Yessir,” says Cody, and he flips the comm off.
He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t think about deserts, about kindness pressed like a canteen to the hand, about who Obi-Wan is to him.
Some things are facts. They stay true whether or not you believe in them.
Cody doesn’t believe in his General. He was made with a mind as sure as a machine, that knows its dangerous path forwards with unerring precision. Something as ephemeral as faith would have long burnt away to old smoke under the cutting heat of truth.
Here were the facts. The man had just killed General Grievous, the last of the Separatist leadership, effectively ending the war. Days before, he had risked his life to rescue the Supreme Chancellor - the one that the Jedi back on Coruscant were now trying to kill.
Maybe Cody has a chip in his head. Maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter - Marshall Commander Cody, in any universe, will always execute Order 66. It doesn’t matter, because there are no Jedi officers here acting against the interests of the Republic.
Two taps to his vambrace opens a comm line to his General. The other man is a distant speck atop his varactyl, but Cody thinks he can see him lift an arm to receive the comm.
“Come back in, General. The Chancellor has updated our orders.”
The galaxy turns on.