Chapter Text

The streets of New Kaon are thronging with life: endless and dirty and loud. Cody misses the clean lines of the Vigilance like he would a missing limb; they’ve been trawling through the inner city grime for far too long without even a firefight to keep things interesting.

One step forward and one step to his right, Obi-Wan is starting to look like he could use a firefight, too. People part before him like water around a stone as he moves forward, focused and serious. He’s wearing a tan leather jacket and jeans instead of his robes, and he’s keeping his head down and his arms tucked in, but Cody wonders how anyone could think this man is simply part of the crowd. As if in answer, Obi-Wan slows his pace until he and Cody are walking side-by-side, and Cody takes the hint. He deliberately curves his back, ducks his head, and starts dragging his feet. It’s a posture that would’ve earned him latrine duty when he was a shiny, but it transforms him and Obi-Wan into two weary commuters, side by side, returning home after a long day.

Lately, it seems less and less like Obi-Wan is merely acting the part.

“No luck today, then, sir?” Cody asks.

Obi-Wan’s response is a rough bark of a laugh. 

“Only bad luck,” he adds, tilting his head towards Cody and keeping his voice low. “It would help if I truly knew what I was looking for. This city has so much life and, somehow, even more lowlife. I must have uncovered five different weapon smuggling rings in the wharf alone this week, but nothing along the lines of what the chancellor is worried about.”

“Five? That’s—concerning.”

Obi-Wan waves a hand through the air in front of him, easily dismissing the danger associated with coming into contact with five highly armed cartels on his own. The perks of being a Jedi, Cody supposes. “No, it’s fairly common this far out. There’s less oversight from the Republic, and people here know that the best ticket off-planet is to build something that they can sell to either army. Honestly, I do sometimes wonder how much of our technological advancement has been merely the byproduct of the pursuit of a bigger, better bomb.”

Cody eyes his general, concerned.

“Sir?” 

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Obi-Wan says. He drops his arm, clearly wishing he could fold his hands into the wide sleeves of a Jedi’s robe instead of his tight zippered pockets. “Just getting cynical in my old age.”

It’s a weak excuse at best. The idea of Obi-Wan being old is absurd; he has had an air of timelessness to him since Cody first joined the 212th three years ago. This far from Coruscant and outside of his robes and his role as a negotiator, though, Obi-Wan is less untouched by time. He had seemed unscathed by the war for so long, but here, at last, the veneer of ‘omnipotent sage’ has been at least partially chipped away.

As Cody watches, Obi-Wan covers his frustration by running a hand through his hair and then bringing it down over his face with a sigh. 

“Alright, don’t tell him I said it, but this would be easier with Anakin,” Obi-Wan admits. As they maintain their slow progression through the city, Obi-Wan turns to give Cody a wry, sympathetic smile. “And if he were here, you wouldn’t have to run a quarter of the GAR from a warehouse basement while also playing Jedi nursemaid. I’m sorry again for this mess, Cody.”

“Don’t be sorry, sir. I’ve run more with less,” Cody says. 

A harried-looking nautolan cuts between Cody and Obi-Wan, his head-tresses curling up at the ends in either anxiety or frustration. When the two of them come back together, Obi-Wan’s thoughts are clearly far from here, seeking out worlds and people galaxies away. 

Cody pauses, wanting to be delicate. Obi-Wan had been trying to direct the conversation away from Anakin, but. “You’re worried about him. About General Skywalker.”

With visible effort, Obi-Wan pulls himself back into the debris-strewn streets and smoke-filled air of the city. 

“As always,” he says. “One lasting impact of raising a padawan, I suppose.”

Cody stays quiet, patient. He knows what it is to worry generally about a younger brother, and he also knows that this isn’t it. As the silence stretches on, Obi-Wan sighs again. 

He’s been doing that more, too. 

“I’m more worried about the chancellor, actually,” Obi-Wan admits at last. “Calling Anakin back at the last second, forcing the 212th to scramble to provide back-up… I can't imagine what could've been so important that he had to disrupt a month’s worth of planning, and the chancellor wouldn’t tell the council when we asked. And now we’re out here,  kiloparsecs into the Outer Rim while the war ramps up near the Core worlds, and this mission of ours is starting to feel more and more like a wild goose chase.”

It’s more dissatisfaction with the chancellor than Cody’s ever heard from his general, and something about his tone makes the hair on the back of his neck rise.

"Would you happen to have a bad feeling about this, sir?"

Obi-Wan just smiles, wry and humorless, and he jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans in an attempt not to fidget. 

"Something like that," he agrees. "But what else is new, these days?"

He looks so tired, and his hair is falling lanky and unkempt into his eyes. Cody makes a mental note to stock up on the gold-brand tea Obi-Wan likes so much. They don't get many resupply shipments this far out, but he can't help with Obi-Wan's mission, and he can’t bring Obi-Wan’s former padawan down from his new reckless heights. But he can requisition tea, at least, and he can encourage Obi-Wan to slow down.

"General, you should get some rest. Even you have limits," Cody tries, wishing he had some Jedi mind tricks of his own. They're within sight of their temporary base, where a million and one new things are waiting for Obi-Wan's consideration. Cody won't have any chance to convince Obi-Wan to rest once they enter the doors, though he knows he hardly has any chance now.

Obi-Wan turns to Cody with a smile, but Cody can see the lie of it in the growing swatches of white at Obi-Wan's temples and in the slight shake to his fingers. Bones needs to start limiting his stim packs. 

"The Force will sustain me, Cody. I'll be fine." 

The door to their temporary base opens with a wave of Obi-Wan's hand, revealing a set of dark, disused hallways that he ushers Cody into. And that’s what Cody remembers most clearly from that last glimpse of Obi-Wan before he went missing: watching the affection in his eyes bleed into exhaustion as the moonlight painted his features wan and gray.

When the orders had first come in to relocate the whole 212th to New Kaon, Cody had been unconvinced of the necessity of the mission. He had been even less convinced of the necessity of the 212th’s intended role. Assigning any of the regular troopers to espionage seemed like a bad use of good resources.

“It’s peak inefficiency, yes,” Obi-Wan had said, smiling knowingly at Cody’s frown. His calm blue eyes had sparkled through the steam rising from his tea cup. “Unfortunately, the Senate won’t let me do this alone after Jedi losses on Saleucami. Anakin can’t come, and the senators seem to think there is a one-to-one conversion ratio for Jedi and attack battalions, so the 212th is his replacement. I would never doubt the abilities of our men, but I recognize that this isn’t quite the kind of recon that Ghost Company is renowned for.”

“We’ll do whatever you need us to, of course,” Cody had said, unsure of everything but that. “It’s just—sir, clones aren’t meant for undercover ops. We’re hardly inconspicuous.”

Obi-Wan had snorted, but he was serious when he put his tea down and pushed a datapad across the desk. 

“Commander, you can do far more than what you were meant for. And let me assure you that most people on a planet as far out as Devisiun wouldn’t know you from Padme, let alone be able to identify you as a clone. Core World politics are far from here, and the Republic has been quite sparing with any propaganda showing your actual faces.”

“Face, singular,” Cody had corrected, deadpan, and Obi-Wan had laughed again.

“Yes, well. I know that isn’t true,” Obi-Wan had said. His eyes had tracked the curl of Cody’s scar even as he handed Cody a datapad. “Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking for assignments.”

The datapad had opened to a list of deployments, and Cody scrolled through them. It quickly became clear that Obi-Wan had ensured as minimal a disruption as possible for Cody’s ongoing operation plans for the Third Systems Army: most of the people assigned to Devisiun were from the 212th’s SysOps division and could do their analytics anywhere with a reasonably good computer. Obi-Wan had already requisitioned use of a sensitive compartmented information facility in New Kaon for encrypted comms.

“…Sir,” Cody had said after reading through it twice. “We may not be Jedi, but we’re not exactly useless in a fight. Why haven’t you assigned anyone to the actual op?”

Obi-Wan’s smile hadn’t reached his eyes. “I’ll tell you planetside, Commander. For now, I’ll ask for you to trust me.”

And Cody had, because trusting Obi-Wan had been the easiest thing in the world.

Right now, the only thing Cody can trust is Obi-Wan’s ability to get into trouble.

"Ping him again," Cody growls, and Crys hits the exact same series of commands that he's been using for the last twenty minutes. The screen pulses a serene blue, and the white line at its center stays flat. Crys looks up at him with a frown. 

"There's no response, sir,” Cry confirms. “He's not responding."

"Those are two different things," Cody snaps, fists clenching on the console. 

He stops and takes a deep breath, centering himself on the facts of the situation instead of the panic creeping up his spine and through his lungs. There's no reason to overreact; Obi-Wan can take care of himself, obviously. He's missed check-ins before and has always been fine.

But he’s only once left base without telling anyone. Cody grits his teeth at the memory of Mandalore—of his general recounting, polite and bloodless, exactly what had happened with Maul—and focuses on the data.

“Sir!” One of the new recruits calls, pushing through the crowded control room to press something into Cody’s hands that Cody would recognize deaf and blind. “Sir, we found the general’s lightsaber!”

Cody can’t find a single word as he blinks down at the lightsaber in his hand. His mind feels like it’s been submerged into the dark, tumultuous depth of Kamino’s oceans: empty of light but full of danger. Obi-Wan has dropped his saber in the field before, but he’s never left it behind. Cody knows his general doesn’t need it to be dangerous, that Obi-Wan didn’t leave the living Force behind, but some primal part of Cody hates the thought of his general without a tangible weapon or Cody at his side. 

There's silence in their makeshift command room, and he feels dozens of identical eyes staring at him and awaiting orders. Standard operating procedure dictates that he should wait until the operative misses a second check-in, but, well. Cody doesn't know if he's just spent too much time around Obi-Wan lately, and he hates that he's even thinking these words, but: he has a bad feeling about this.

"Alright, squad leaders, form up," Cody says, pushing all emotion to the very bottom of his chest as he curls his fingers around the saber. "We'll search the city by quadrants, then by city blocks. Everyone in teams of two. Crys will forward each pair the optimal search pattern based on city infrastructure and population densities. Check-in with him every half hour. The first squad has fifteen minutes to prepare; the second will leave fifteen minutes after that, and so on. No armor. Keep your heads down and your radios on; you know the general. He could come waltzing back in here any second, wondering about all the fuss."

Cody hopes like hell for that, but hope alone has never done shit for him. His brothers, though? He can rely on them for anything. In front of him, the ARCs fire off salutes, and their commitment and concern keep their backs straight and their movements sharp. 

Five minutes after the first group leaves, Cody slips out the side entrance with nothing but his comm on his wrist, his Deece in a shoulder holster, and Obi-Wan’s goddamn lightsaber in his jacket pocket. 

He hates this city, but he knows it well. Although the clones had been unable to accompany Obi-Wan through the winding streets of his espionage pursuit, they'd been able to help him keep his cover. Obi-Wan had been correct that people didn’t recognize the clones as clones, so they hadn’t recognized the fact that the person accompanying Obi-Wan to and from “work” were, in fact, different people altogether. That way, SysOps for the third systems army weren’t disrupted, no communication stream had all of the puzzle pieces of Obi-Wan’s whereabouts, and there was always at least one brother on stand-by to help.

Cody knows Obi-Wan, so he knows that the most likely explanation for Obi-Wan's disappearance is that Obi-Wan had found something yesterday and decided to get a little closer to it today—without telling anyone, of course, and for some godforsaken reason without his lightsaber. Obi-Wan’s intended routes were ears-only and discussed only with the brother on stand-by duty that day, which means that Cody is in the best position to retrace Obi-Wan’s steps. He doesn’t know why Obi-Wan hadn’t told anyone that he was leaving; he only knows that Obi-Wan likely had a good reason for venturing out in secret. If Obi-Wan’s in deep cover, Cody will do what he can to keep that cover intact until the risk to his general’s safety outweighs the risk of blowing the mission. 

And, if that happens, he’s made sure that half of the men on-planet are already on the streets to help.

The front organization that the 212th are using in the city is the production center for a jazz magazine, and the stares of Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes on various posters follow him as he makes his way into the building. Although the front organization is fake, the innards of the warehouse are real. Cody dodges heavy printing presses as he makes his way through the maze of assembly lines and piles of what look like paper—real paper, not flimsi: a sign of how outdated this backwater is—waiting patiently for ink. 

The smiling faces and increasingly bizarre brass instruments make for a cheerful atmosphere, but the true value of the warehouse is the warren of tunnels connected to the basement floor. The city had once been split in two, each dominated by a separate warring power, and this building had been a mainstay for the resistance that had spanned both halves. 

The Republic had bought it a year ago in preparation for the Separatist invasion of Devisiun that never came.

Cody quickens his stride to just shy of a jog. The basement passes by in a blur of adrenaline, and he slips through a heavy durasteel bank door that, fortunately, swings open at his touch. The tunnels had been built over a period of twenty to thirty years of resistance; the older ones are shored with stonework, but as the rebels' operations grew faster than their funds, they had to prioritize speed over quality. The newer ones are packed with clay over duracrete, and the one to the wharfs has a dirt floor that retains the soft imprint of Obi-Wan’s boots. The tunnel path starts climbing when the soil beneath Cody’s feet starts turning to mud. The ladder at its end takes him up twenty feet, and he emerges into air at the top so stained with salt and grime that Cody is reminded vividly of the aiwha roosts on the edges of Tipoca City. 

The smell of rotting fish and ocean air tells him he’s at the warehouses a few miles inland of the docks, which, honestly, seem as good a place as any to hide a weapons cartel, biological or otherwise. The overwhelming sea stench could cover even the extensive quantities of Tibanna gas involved in particle-beam artillery. It’s a near-barren piece of land, just far enough from the city’s shopping district to lack commercial value and just far enough from the wharf to be useful for shipping. The railyard, too, is close enough to fill the air with the rumble of engines and horns, so suburbia has put its roots down elsewhere.

Alright, he knows that this is the quarter Obi-Wan had set out to investigate yesterday, but he doesn't know much more than that. 

He pulls Obi-Wan’s lightsaber from his pocket and stares at it, at the gleam of durasteel and the warm butter glow of polished brass, and he wishes it knew him as well as he knew it. It’s warm in his hands from his pocket but nothing else. Perhaps a Jedi might be able to use it to find Obi-Wan, but no matter how much he asks for help, it doesn’t feel like anything more than a metal weight.

“Kark it all, General,” he mutters as it tucks it away. The harsh calls of the wharf-side gulls drown out the sound. “Where are you?”

Any outward display of urgency might give away the game, so Cody keeps his hands jammed into his pockets and walks unhurried through the street grid boxing in warehouses of every shape, color, and degree of structural integrity. He slows down a few times, squinting down the narrow corridors between shoddy buildings, but he doesn’t stop until he’s at the edge of an alley like any other, in front of a dumpster the same as every other rusted tin can in the district.

And yet.

Alpha-17 had always stressed that instinct was driven by a subconscious awareness of more detail, and Cody sees no reason to doubt that now.

There’s no sign of a scuffle in the alley, and there’s nothing else in or around the dumpster to indicate that Obi-Wan might have been this way. There are a lot of six-eyed, many-legged creatures two-feet tall crawling in and along the alley’s walls, seeming to thrive on the accumulated moisture and grime. They’re avoiding him, though, and they’re avoiding an air-conditioning vent by the dumpster. Every square inch of the alley has been scratched, chewed, or overcome by mold, except for this piece. There’s a thin line of clear space above the vent, too, in the amorphous shape of an air plume. Shouldn’t there be more mold growth next to a moist air vent?

Cody eyes the critters as he moves further into the alley and crouches next to the vent, pushing a fingernail into the seam between the metal grate and the cool duracrete of the wall.

It pops out easily. Inside, the duct is as clean and chrome as something cast yesterday.

“Alright,” he tells the many watching eyes behind him. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes with my general, tell Boil he gets command.”

He’s grateful for his lack of armor for the first time since this horrible mission started as he crawls through the ducts, not remotely sure if he’s just wasting his time or blowing their cover. His instincts have got him this far, though, and the weight of the lightsaber at his side reminds him of what he has to lose.

Even without armor, crawling through the vents is difficult, and crawling through the vents quietly is next to impossible. Cody stops every few feet to listen, but he doesn’t hear a single sign of life beneath or above him. He’s about to turn around, mind already ticking through other possibilities for his general’s whereabouts, when the familiar melody of Obi-Wan’s voice narrows down the possibilities substantially.

“Come now,” Obi-Wan is saying, and even though it’s smooth and cajoling, there’s a slight tremor to his voice that immediately puts Cody on edge. “Surely there’s been a misunderstanding.”

Through the metal fins of the nearest air vent, Cody can see Obi-Wan on one side of a sterile lab lined with chemical hoods and various pieces of inscrutable chrome machines. 

Nestled against the far wall, a steadily-clicking projector is splashing a strange orange light all across Obi-Wan’s front, and next to it is the biggest devaronian that Cody has ever seen. His chest looks wider than the doorway behind him, and his deep red skin and scarred, curling black horns keep catching little motes of the orange light. He straightens the clean lines of his lapels as Cody watches. He is so intimidatingly huge that it takes Cody a second to even notice that he isn’t alone. There are six grunts in light armor around him, all clutching their blasters and shaking with the nerves clones had trained out of them as toddlers. 

On paper, this should be easy. On paper, this should already be over. 

And yet.

Obi-Wan is smiling his negotiator’s smile, full of confidence and calm, but Cody can see that something’s wrong in the curve of his shoulders, in the slight hitch of his breathing. There’s something very wrong, too, in the sickly orange glow making him shine. Is there sweat gathering at Obi-Wan’s temples? Why isn’t he using the Force?

“I see our intel was right, for once. Many little mice in our maze, but we’ve managed to catch the rat,” the devaronian says, and his hooves make a click-click-clack on the duracrete floor when he steps forward. His voice is soft and theatrical, as if he’s narrating the opening to a play. “What good fortune we’ve had today. Imagine my surprise when the only thing I was missing was a Jedi, and one walked right through my front door.”

“A Jedi? Oh, no, of course not,” Obi-Wan says with the perfect hint of disbelief in his voice. “I’d be a poor Jedi, surely, with no laser sword and no mind tricks. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

Cody inches towards the vent and sneaks his vibroblade out from his back pocket. It can cut through a super battle droid’s neck plate on full power, and he doesn’t think it’ll have trouble cutting through the aluminum wings keeping the vent on. The blade’s hum blends in with the loud electrical thrum coming from the projector as he cuts. 

The devaronian waves someone forward, and a spindly man in a silver lab coat appears from behind him, so small that Cody had missed him completely. The scientist walks towards Obi-Wan with a syringe held in front of him like a sword, and Cody’s breath catches. What is that? A tranquilizer? 

Obi-Wan doesn’t move. Why isn't he moving?

Cody hesitates, weighing his options. This could all be part of Obi-Wan’s plan, and if he interferes, he might ruin a lot of work—especially if Obi-Wan’s still trying to convince this group that he’s not a Jedi. But that needle is getting closer, and even if sacrificing Obi-Wan’s well-being for intel is in Obi-Wan’s playbook, it isn’t in Cody’s. His general’s safety comes first, always.

He gives Obi-Wan one more second to react, then two, and then he kicks open the vent and swings down, landing with a thud on the unforgiving duracrete floor.

Everyone in the room stares. The grunts are open-mouthed, and even the devaronian creases his eyebrows in faint alarm. Surprise locks the whole terrorist cell into inaction as they wait, confused, to see what Cody will do next.

Unfortunately, Cody didn’t plan that far.

Out of the corner of his eye, Cody sees the orange light glinting off the syringe still too-close to Obi-Wan’s throat. He has Obi-Wan’s lightsaber in hand before he can think better of it.

“If you’re looking for a Jedi," Cody begins, improvising rapidly from what he’d heard. The lightsaber sings on with a vibrant hum, and waves of power pulse from the blade to warm his face. “Then you’ve found one.”

The awful orange light swings from Obi-Wan to Cody in an instant, and it feels like nothing at all. 

“Cody!” he hears, but he’s focused on acting like the biggest and only threat in the room, trying to distract them all so Obi-Wan can get away, and the bright combination of the lightsaber and that strange projector leaves afterimages on his skull. 

Through the blinding light, he sees the devaronian motion for something. Cody is stepping forward with the saber when he hears two things in quick succession: a single gasp, wet and ragged, and the sound of knees hitting the duracrete floor. Something goes missing in Cody’s brain, some pressure: some extra, unknown sense. It feels like the loss of a limb, and it hurts.

The bastard by Obi-Wan had depressed the trigger on the syringe.

“Try not to kill him,” the devaronian says, waving his hand at Cody, and a flurry of blaster fire erupts from the hired men.

Cody manages to block one blast with the saber out of pure, adrenaline-fueled instinct, but the next one hits him as a searing burn in the shoulder. He hits the deck and starts rolling, careful to avoid the plasma blade that could cut him to pieces with a single mistake. Seven karking hells , he wishes he could get to Obi-Wan, but the best he can do for his general right now is to clear the room and double back.

All of the relief he’d felt in the air duct about not having his armor is long gone. One of the metal machines is in front of him near the wall, and he crawls behind it hoping that the chrome finish is more metal than paint. The lightsaber hums in his hand, and he pulls out his Deece with his left, momentarily grateful that he's carrying a DC-17 hand blaster instead of his usual heavy DC-15S. 

If he gets out of this, he owes Rex an apology for mocking his taste in blasters.

The blaster fire dies down slightly, and he waits until he hears the first tentative footsteps towards his cover to roll forward, firing aimlessly with his blaster at the sound and swinging the lightsaber in front of him. It’s just like a regular sword , he thinks a little hysterically. A regular sword, but on fire. 

One of the grunts falls to a blaster shot, then another, and then Cody is close enough to slide the lightsaber straight through the torso of a third. It cuts through skin and bone as easily as a vibroblade cuts through flimsi. It’s exhilarating. 

It’s terrifying.

The projector goes down next in a sputter of sparks and the grating sound of dislocated fans still trying to spin. The room is dark without it, lit only by faint LED strips of emergency lights along the fume hoods and the exits. In their dim light, Cody sees the devaronian looking at him with calm detachment, looming and terrifying for his casual appraisal in a room full of bodies. Cody risks a single glance towards Obi-Wan and finds him in a crumpled puddle on the floor, limbs in an ungainly sprawl and his lank hair covering his eyes. The scientist that injected him is gone, likely cowering behind one of his machines.

Blaster still in hand, Cody fires it at the devaronian while lunging forward with the lightsaber. The monolithic man jumps back, absurdly fast for his size, and pulls up a wrist shield to deflect the blaster fire. He holds his ground easily, digging his hooves into the floor with an audible scrape.

The three remaining grunts in the room have dived for cover, and Cody casts a casual spray of fire over their heads to keep them there.

“We weren’t prepared for two of them,” a grunt wails, and the devaronian’s eyes tighten minutely. “Lott, the beam didn’t even work on this one. We have to regroup!”

The devaronian—Lott?—backs away in an almost stately manner from Cody’s approach with the saber, and Cody shifts his advance so that Cody’s in between these terrorists and Obi-Wan. There are few enough of them now that he might be able to grab his Jedi and beat a goddamn retreat.

The grunts are really starting to panic, and Cody's already-low estimation of them is dropping rapidly even as he's grateful for their disorder.

From behind a titration table, another one pipes up. “We can’t take on a fully powered Jedi, and he’s already taken out Omicron and Theta squads. Sir, we have to move!”

The appraisal in Lott’s eyes shifts to a clinical assessment. He seems so, so cold, and Cody shoves an animalistic, primal fear down in his gut even as he keeps firing and as Lott keeps blocking.

“Well done, then, Master Jedi,” the devaronian says, regarding him cooly, and Cody pulls the lightsaber into the opening stance he has seen Obi-Wan use so many times: his feet shoulder-width apart, the saber pulled up next to his face and running parallel to his chest, and his left hand held out in front of him in a taunt—although he’s never seen Obi-Wan use a blaster for the taunt.

He just needs to keep the façade up long enough to get these assholes out of the room.

The devaronian presses something on his wrist, and an opening appears in what had previously been the uninterrupted wall behind him. The grace with which he backs through the opening lets Cody know that this is a retreat and not a surrender. The grunts, cringing and desperate, scramble through it. Cody keeps firing through the opening until the wall seals back over, until he’s painted the faded durasteels with dozens of smudged black ovals, and then he’s vaulting over lab tables towards Obi-Wan.

The knees of his pants tear on the duracrete as he falls to the floor by his general. Unconscious but breathing, he registers blindly, pressing two fingers to Obi-Wan’s windpipe to feel the blood and air moving past. The injection site is a reddish, building bump on the other side of Obi-Wan’s neck, and Cody forces himself to make sure there are no other signs of bruising or swelling before starting to move him.

If he’s moveable, then any other first aid can come once they’ve gotten somewhere safe.

He clips his weapons onto his belt and starts bending Obi-Wan’s knees in preparation to pull his deadweight off the floor. Moving without thinking, he crouches to grab Obi-Wan’s clammy wrists, and he almost doesn’t let himself search for a pulse as he stands and pulls Obi-Wan’s body towards him. He uses Obi-Wan’s momentum to duck under his body as he pulls it across his shoulders, finishing with one arm around Obi-Wan’s left leg and the other around Obi-Wan’s left arm. With Obi-Wan’s weight settled over his shoulders, Cody rises from a squat to stand. 

His Jedi is far lighter than he should be. 

Unnerved, Cody moves towards the door opposite from the wall Lott escaped from, trying to ignore the way Obi-Wan’s head lolls. He gathers Obi-Wan’s limbs in his left arm as he tries every button on the door pad, and he bites back a curse when the red light refuses to turn green. If he shoots at it, it could fail either open or permanently locked. If he searches the grunts behind them, one of them might be carrying a keyfob. 

Damn. Damn . He could really use a conscious Jedi right now. A lightsaber would carve through the locking mechanism like—

Oh, right.

Obi-Wan’s lightsaber sings on with an expectant hum, and the metal of the door answers that hum with a satisfying hiss as it melts. Cody turns his body so Obi-Wan’s head is furthest from the spitting, molten slag until he can at last slide the door open. When he cranes his head as far to his left as he can, he can just barely see a trail of dark blood dropping like red molasses from Obi-Wan’s nose and into his mustache. Stretched as he is over Cody’s shoulders, it becomes immediately obvious when Obi-Wan starts to shake.

Cody doesn’t bother to bite back his curse this time.

He takes a right out of the hallway, following his instincts and a vague mental map of the twists he took through the ventilation shafts. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber makes easy work of every locked door, and Cody stops turning it off after the third one melts down. It doesn’t make sense that he hasn’t run into any other grunts or sentries. These people caught Obi-Wan; they can’t be this incompetent. 

When he turns down a fourth hallway, lit saber held out before him like a beacon, he finds the rest: unconscious and trussed in the facility’s break room. This must be the other squads the grunt had mentioned, Cody thinks, and he stares down at the neat rows of dispatched men. So Obi-Wan had been prepared for reinforcements, but not whatever that light was.

“How did they get you?” Cody asks, more to himself than to his Jedi, but he feels a slight shift in the weight on his back anyways. 

“Cody?”

Stars, his voice sounds like someone put it through a flour mill. 

“Just hold on, General. We’re almost there,” Cody says. He’s not sure if it’s true, but it’s exactly the kind of lie Obi-Wan would have used. There must be some comfort in the familiar.

He backs away from the break room and restarts down the hallway. The adrenaline in his veins is petering out, but the relief that Obi-Wan can talk—that Obi-Wan still knows Cody’s name—carries him through the rest of the facility. By the time he reaches a massive door that looks more like it was forged from deadbolts than durasteel, Obi-Wan has woken up enough to tap at Cody’s shoulders and ask, with the politeness that never seems to burn away, to be let down.

Cody bends at the knees and tilts his torso, ignoring the twinge in his obliques, until Obi-Wan’s feet touch the ground. He straightens in time to catch Obi-Wan when Obi-Wan staggers, clutching his gut, and gives them both a second to breathe. Cody’s seen his general push through worse but not much worse, and Cody still has no idea what took Obi-Wan out in the first place.

“Ok?” he asks. Cody waits until Obi-Wan nods before he ignites the saber once more and slowly, painstakingly, carves a line through the last barrier between them and the outside world. 

They emerge, blinking, into the bay. The watery pre-dawn light that brought Cody here has evaporated into something warmer and brighter, and it drips egg-yolk yellow across the surrounding tin roofs. From the outside, the lab behind them is only one of a thousand ratty warehouses on the edge of the city’s shopping district. The banality of it makes Cody angry, suddenly: a visceral, molten anger that he has to choke down before it climbs up his throat. His Jedi will not be taken out on some ignoble backwater, Cody thinks. High General Obi-Wan Kenobi will not be lost amidst these dilapidated relics where no one knows his name.

Cody can’t promise ‘never’, but he can promise ‘not here’.

He tucks Obi-Wan’s lightsaber into his jacket pocket and puts an arm around Obi-Wan, trying not to swallow too obviously when Obi-Wan leans into him. 

“Steady, Commander,” Obi-Wan murmurs.

Laughter bubbles in Cody’s chest next to the rage and fear.

“Take your own advice, sir,” he says. 

Stars, he just wants to set Obi-Wan down and check him for other wounds, to see what exactly they did to him, but he needs a safe space. He needs a plan. 

What do you have? What do you need? he hears in Alpha-17’s voice. 

I’ve got a semi-conscious Jedi, sir, and nowhere to put him , Cody thinks back. 

If Lott and his crew are regrouping, then Cody doesn’t want to stop in the open long enough for them to catch up. He needs to get far enough away from the lab that, if Lott starts looking, the 212th will find Cody and Obi-Wan before he does. They’re in a part of town where people don’t double-take at someone wearing a pint of blood, let alone at two men staggering as if drunk at 8 am. Cody weighs the benefits of not drawing attention to themselves and the cons of no witnesses, and he turns with a sigh towards the seedier portion of the tourist district that overlaps the industrial section of the wharf. 

He’d memorized a map of the city before the mission, of course, but he’d hardly gone into the type of detail he’d need to recognize street names. Next to him, Obi-Wan trips on a broken piece of pavement, and Cody tightens his hold on Obi-Wan’s waist. Stars, if Obi-Wan had just taken Cody along—if he’d told anyone else where he was going—if Cody had just gotten there earlier—

What do you have? What do you need? 

I need a Jedi that follows basic protocol , Cody thinks, vicious with worry, and then refocuses on finding any sort of safe harbor at all. 

As they move, inching along, the grinding gears and humming engines of the warehouses transition into the lapping waves and blaring horns of the docks. Beyond that, they at last come to the row of seedy motels and seedier bars that always spring into being for the drifters that always blow into a trading port. The buildings stand like clusters of discarded milk cartons: yellowing towers collapsing in on themselves in the dirt. Cody pulls his Jedi into the alley next between one bar and the next. 

Inside the alley, broken beer bottles and wrappers litter the alcove, mixing in with the snaking, heart-shaped vine that covers most of the surfaces near the wharf. The smell is awful, rancid and curdled, and it seems strong enough to wake the dead, let alone a semi-conscious Jedi. Cody pulls Obi-Wan over to a stretch of concrete that’s covered more with vines than with trash and lays him down.

He puts two fingers along the vulnerable curve of Obi-Wan’s neck and tries to to panic as Obi-Wan’s eyes close and don’t reopen. His pulse is thready but there, and his breathing is fast and shallow. The injection site is swollen and red, but there are no red veins standing out against the pale skin and no necrosis around the sight. Stars, but it honestly looks like a saline injection. Could the poison be slow acting? A neurotoxin? Something else? 

Obi-Wan lists to the side, and Cody thinks he’s fallen unconscious until Cody raises his wrist to comm the 212th.

Faster than Cody would have guessed Obi-Wan could move, Obi-Wan slaps a hand over the comm.

“Wait.”

His usually musical voice falls flat in the dark basin of the alley, but it’s still a joy to hear. His eyes are thin slits of pale pink and dull blue.

Cody gently pulls Obi-Wan’s hand away. 

“We’re gonna get you somewhere safe, General,” he promises. “Our boys are on the street already. Just let me call ‘em in.”

“No, that’s not,” Obi-Wan takes a deep breath, interrupting himself, and Cody waits. “I think our comms are… compromised.”

Cody keeps Obi-Wan’s captured arm in his hand and shifts his fingers until he can feel a pulse beneath them. He’ll wait, but he won’t wait long. Obi-Wan continues.

“There are things Lott—knew—that he couldn’t have known. It’s why I left. Like that.”

Obi-Wan pants with the effort of explaining. The slur in his words worsens as he goes, and Cody tucks all his frustration back behind his teeth. Are their lines compromised? Or is one of the men? He still remembers pinning Slick to the floor, sickened by the knowledge that he shared a genome with someone who would turn traitor. It’d been an important lesson, if a painful one, that someone could have his face and not his morals. He focuses back on Obi-Wan; no matter if the compromise is in their lines or their people, he needs to get Obi-Wan somewhere safe.

“But why would that affect my calling for help?” Cody asks. “Are you worried Lott will hear our location and try to finish us off?”

The devaronian had been huge. As confident as Cody is in his combat abilities, he’s not sure he could take Lott down alone.

“Quite worse than that, I’m afraid,” Obi-Wan says, the words spilling out of him in a breathy rush. “They’ll know their serum works.”

Cody freezes. His Jedi dying in his arms had seemed like the worst of all possible futures, but the fear in Obi-Wan’s voice makes Cody wonder if that lacks creativity. Obi-Wan Kenobi has never been afraid of death.

He asks, “What does it do, sir?”

He doesn’t bother asking Obi-Wan if he knows a cure; if he did, he wouldn’t be sweating out, pale and shaking, in Cody’s grip.

“I—well, I can—I can only conclude that they. That the serum, ah.”

It’s painful to see Obi-Wan lose all of his carefully cultivated eloquence, and it’s even more so to see him try to hold onto it still. The burnt and ruined armor of his charm is cinders in his mouth.

“Sir?”

“It strips a Jedi of their powers,” Obi-Wan says, looking to the side with a ragged exhale. “I can no longer sense the Force, or you, or anything, for that matter.”

The words don’t register at first. They are too strange, too impossible, and Cody can’t do anything more than stare, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, while Obi-Wan’s breathing becomes increasingly erratic. Cody pushes the rising panic back down his throat and feels it rattle, growing and growing teeth, in his gut. 

Obi-Wan hadn’t used the Force earlier because he couldn’t. Is that why he’s collapsing now? Is he going through withdrawal? Can a Jedi survive without access to the Force?

Is it permanent?

Obi-Wan’s voice cuts through the whirlwind buzzing of questions flying through Cody’s mind. “Commander, focus. Regardless of my handicap, we have to prioritize warning the Republic without warning Lott. If he can’t find me or find proof… he can’t sell this to the Separatists.”

There’s a grim certainty to his tone that makes Cody angry; he knows this must be tearing Obi-Wan apart, and he still doesn’t quite believe it’s true. Obi-Wan closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and when he opens them again, there’s some warmth returning to his cheeks. Cody recognizes it as the last surge of adrenaline before a crash: a broken body’s last ditch effort to get somewhere safe before it gives out. He’s seen it many times, but he’s never seen it on his general.

His Force powers are gone, really and truly, just. Gone. Cody remembers what he had felt with the syringe went in—no, he remembers how he knew that the syringe had gone in. The extra, unknown pressure, that warm and patient light… that had been Obi-Wan. 

“Can’t return to base,” Obi-Wan continues. “If Lott’s hacked our comms, he could know our access codes and send a fire team. I won’t recklessly endanger the men by limping back just to lick my wounds in air conditioning.”

Cody knows Obi-Wan well enough to know where he’s going with this. Obi-Wan wants Cody to leave him in some seedy motel so that Cody can head to base and send an SOS to the Jedi Council. 

And it’s a good plan, but, “I’m not leaving you, sir. Not like this.”

"I'll be fine," Obi-Wan lies. At Cody's glare, he amends it to, "I'll be fine until you can—can warn the Council. Get back-up."

Cody is still holding Obi-Wan’s wrist, and he can feel the pulse beneath his fingers hammer unevenly. Every missed beat feels like the stuttering kickback of a semi-automatic SR-12, beating a bruise into his chest.

“You can warn them yourself, sir,” Cody says, firmly pushing his questions to the side. What he has and what he needs are still the same; nothing will be helped by more questions. 

“No. This is bigger than either of us,” Obi-Wan says, a single spark of his usual fire flaring back to life. “Commander Cody, your priority has to be the intel right now, not me. That’s an order.”

Cody turns his head to look at Obi-Wan, at the stubborn glint in his jaw and the pain gathered in the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and he thinks that the only thing he wouldn’t do for this man is leave him behind. He holds Obi-Wan’s clouded gaze as he raises his comm to his mouth and clicks his back teeth to turn it on.

“I found the general,” he says, and the chorus of cheers almost manages to drown out the alarm running riot on Obi-Wan’s face. Cody continues, “He’s still in deep cover for his mission. He took a few hits, but he’s going to stay on the hunt. My RTB is two hours. Recall all hands.”

He turns the comm off with another click of his teeth and raises an eyebrow at his general.

“You can court martial me after we survive this, sir, but I’m getting you help, and I’m getting it now,” he says. The corner of his mouth twists into something distantly related to a grin, and he adds, “As far as I can tell, I just have to wait until you pass out again, and then I’ll be the commanding officer in the field anyways.”

The glimpse of fire in Obi-Wan’s eyes wanes, but the stubbornness remains. 

“Commander, I,” he starts to say, but his body seizes up before he can get the admonishment out, all of his muscles going taut and rigid at once and tipping him over.

Cody moves to catch him with one arm against his chest and the other supporting his back until Obi-Wan untenses. With Obi-Wan in his arms, Cody figures that’s enough sitting and talking in a dark and nameless alley, and he hauls them both to their feet.

“Not to base, I know,” Cody says before Obi-Wan can waste any of his energy on a reminder.

The walk back to the tunnel entrance is stumbling and slow. Cody is hyper-aware of any sound that isn’t a gull call, and Obi-Wan seems less and less aware of anything at all. Fortunately, most of the denizens of this section of the city are still sleeping off the previous night. The few people that cross their path are just as reticent to be seen or in just as much of a hurry as Cody is, their heads down and focused as their feet shuffle over the cracked concrete. The sun is almost directly overhead, shining an odd burnt yellow over the smog of the wharf, and Cody can’t help but tug Obi-Wan along a little faster as the thin wisps of clouds start to clear.

Obi-Wan doesn’t argue any more. His earlier adrenaline has evaporated like the last traces of mist, and Cody is practically carrying him as he fades in and out of consciousness. Cody is so overcome with worry that he can’t even be relieved by the time he gets to the manhole covering the ladder down to the tunnels. Going down the ladder with Obi-Wan on his back is an exercise in patience and balance and one heart-stopping slip, but eventually Cody has his Jedi safely away from the city’s cold light and colder eyes.

He sets Obi-Wan against one of the tunnel walls to slide the manhole cover back over the entrance, and when he returns, Obi-Wan is completely asleep. He doesn’t wake up even as Cody lifts him into his arms and halfway jogs through the tunnels, watching Obi-Wan’s chest rise and fall more than he watches where he puts his feet. The basement of the printing warehouse is silent in its welcome but at least familiar, and Cody swallows as he walks through the wrought iron machines and their empty, abandoned pages. 

At the back, there’s an ancient breakroom he’s only been in once. The couch there might be more mildew than foam cushioning, but it’s wide enough even for Obi-Wan’s long legs, and Cody lays him down with enough care that he hardly even disturbs the dust. After a second’s thought, he shrugs off his ill-fitting leather jacket and folds it beneath Obi-Wan’s head. Obi-Wan’s bangs fall across his eyes, the copper strands turning lank and rust-red with sweat, and Cody combs them back with shaking, awkward fingers before turning to walk away.

He makes it two steps before turning back, and two more before turning back again. With all his courage pushed to the outline of his ribs, he unsnaps Obi-Wan’s lightsaber from his belt and tucks it into Obi-Wan’s unresponding hands. 

It’s the one thing he can put back where it belongs.

Chapter Text

When Cody arrives back at base, he has to fight not to flinch at the relief in everyone’s eyes as they welcome him home. 

“I know the 501st think they’ve got it bad with Skywalker, but our general must give us at least as many heart attacks,” Crys says, shaking his head. 

Boil laughs. “More, probably. Not that anyone would ever believe us.”

Cody can’t bring himself to join in the banter, and Boil turns to give him an assessing once-over.

“Commander?” he asks. The relieved laughter in his voice sharpens into concern. “You said you were injured, didn’t you?”

It’s a suggestion in the polite disguise of a question, and Cody doesn’t brush it off like he usually would. 

“I’m heading to Bones now. Boil, you’ve got command,” he says, and he ignores Boil and Crys’ stunned blinks as he turns towards their makeshift medical center. And then, after a second’s thought, he adds, “Crys, with me.”

Their base is suited far more for intelligence gathering and analytics than any sort of combat readiness, but GAR regulation insists on even a bare-bones first aid station for any large deployment. Bones had, of course, gone above and beyond in his medical requisitions. Considering the irregularity of the mission and Obi-Wan’s propensity for trouble, Cody had signed off on them without much protest. 

He's glad he did now. He doesn’t know if any of the extra equipment can help bring the Force back to a Jedi, but he lets himself hope anyway.

Crys matches his quick steps down the hallways, and Cody pulls him into one of the many empty offices that the 212th is using for storage. 

“Sir, what—”

“Crys, have you seen anything strange in our systems logs?” he interrupts. He doesn’t think Crys would see something strange and not tell someone, so he isn’t surprised when Crys shakes his head, bewildered.

Cody’s mouth twists, debating what more to say. He doesn’t want to rouse suspicion, but Crys has been with the 212th since Geonosis, and the comms logs are the obvious place to start on their hunt for a leak. 

“Check our comms logs,” he says at last. “If there are any unplanned or unexpected calls, in or out, get them to me. And, Crys—don’t tell anyone, and don’t get caught looking.”

It isn’t a question. Crys, despite clearly having a million questions of his own on his tongue, fights down his curiosity and alarm. He just nods, and Cody can see a glimmer of understanding in Crys’ eyes. Cody’s already said too much.

He bites his tongue and heads towards their makeshift medbay, knowing he’s taking two risks: Crys and Bones. But at least they’ll each have only half the puzzle.

The electronic doors open automatically on his approach. Bones looks up from where he’s loading a hypospray next to an empty biobed, and his eyebrows immediately draw together in a frown.

“Stars, Commander,” he says. “Here I was preppin’ to hunt you down. How bad is it?”

“Bad,” Cody admits, and Obi-Wan’s gray and sweat-sheened face won’t leave his mind. “But not for me. I need you to grab as much field gear as you can, come with me, and not ask questions.” 

“Commander…” Bones says. One of his eyebrows is almost at his hairline. Cody knows his technical authority over his CMO doesn’t extend this far—to obeying without question, to leaving his post—but he’s hoping Bones’ trust does. Coming to Bones is a gamble, but Obi-Wan clearly needs medical help, and if Bones is the leak, Cody will eat his bucket.

“Please, Bones,” Cody says, and this, even more than coming straight to the medical center, even more than admitting something’s wrong, makes Bones straighten in alarm.

But he doesn’t ask questions. He comms Ratchet to take over his post and starts pulling things into a MOLLE pack. Cody watches IVs, bacta, compression packs, and surgical equipment fit neatly into the seemingly infinite space and clenches his teeth. Bones has enough equipment in there to treat everything from intracranial hemorrhage to a severe lightsaber burn, but Cody has no idea what could possibly help. He doesn’t want to mention any of Obi-Wan’s symptoms out loud, either. 

 He trusts Bones to know his work; he doesn’t trust the medical center not to be bugged.

Without prompting, Bones tells the two guards on duty at the door that he’s getting more supplies, and that he doesn’t trust Cody not to violate his orders to rest while he’s gone. Cody rolls his eyes, playing along, and the men wave them off without asking why, if they’re going on a supply run, Bones’ pack is full instead of empty.

Bones grumbles under his breath across the dimming stretch of city from their makeshift base to the printing warehouse. It’s so clearly a mask for his own discomfort that Cody doesn’t check him, not even as they merge into and out of crowds, moving as fast as they can without being overly suspicious. When they finally make it to the printing floor, Cody can’t stop himself from breaking into a run: from running through the presses until he can see Obi-Wan and the barely perceptible rise and fall of his chest. 

In his sleep, Obi-Wan’s fingers have curled, proprietary and unthinking, around the hilt of his saber.

Bones bursts into the room a second later, slowed down by the weight of his pack.

“General,” he breathes, and he moves towards the couch without hesitation, slinging his pack off and pulling his tricorder out in the same motion. “Damn it, man. Commander, I get that you can’t tell me everything, but you better tell me something.”

And Cody wants to admit that he doesn’t have anything to tell; he wants to let even an inch of his panic show on his face; he wants Bones to tell him that Jedi lose the Force all the time and that Bones has got just the hypospray canister for this.

None of those wants are helpful.

“The bioterrorists had him,” Cody says as he falls into parade rest. “They injected him with something, and he crashed. I don’t know what it was.”

Bones doesn’t look up from where he’s moving the tricorder in steady lines over Obi-Wan’s chest, but tension gathers in his shoulders. “I assume there’s a damn good reason he’s laid out here an’ not in my medbay?”

Cody keeps his face rigid as he considers what to tell Bones. He knows as well as his CMO does that Cody's authority ends where anything concerning the health of the men begins. Only Bones’ trust that Cody would never endanger Obi-Wan beyond what is absolutely necessary is keeping Bones’ hand from his radio.

“Our comms are compromised,” Cody says at last. “Possibly more than our comms. He wanted me to leave him in the city to keep anyone from knowing his condition.”

He wants to scowl down at his Jedi in the telling, but the second he looks down at Obi-Wan, he can’t do anything but pinch his lips together in worry. 

Bones looks up at last, eyes pinched. “His condition. Cody, what is his condition?”

Cody swallows. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

With a sigh that rattles through his lungs like a loose bolt, Bones runs his tricorder over Obi-Wan again and shakes his head. 

“All I’m reading is exhaustion,” Bones says. “Exhaustion, malnutrition, and dehydration. I’m not seeing any toxins or abnormalities. Honestly, his read-outs match those of someone who’s been trapped behind enemy lines for two weeks, running on bug juice and desperation. I’ve seen it dozens of times on brothers, but never…”

“Never on a Jedi,” Cody fills in for him, thinking about how much Obi-Wan had been pushing himself. The Force will sustain me, Obi-Wan had said.

The Force isn’t sustaining him now.

“Shit,” Cody says, staring down. Obi-Wan had been borrowing energy from the Force, and now his body is demanding its repayment with interest. How had it gotten so bad? How had Cody missed it? He’d been trained to keep a wary eye out for overuse of the Force in his general, but Obi-Wan has always been good at hiding the extent of his wounds.

“How would you treat that?” he asks, ignoring Bones’ glare.

“I’d give him sleep and a saline drip, and I’d take him to the medbay to see what actually happened to him. Exhaustion like this doesn’t happen in a day, not to a Jedi,” Bones says, scowling. “So if you don’t want me to knock you out and take him home, you’d better tell me what really happened, sir.”

He somehow manages to make ‘sir’ sound like an insult. His bushy eyebrows are furrowed, and his fingers are straying to the hypospray at his hip in a clearly telegraphed threat.

Any other day, Cody would’ve been grateful down to the marrow of his own bones for his brothers’ shared love of Obi-Wan. Today it just makes him wince. His hesitation isn’t even because he doesn’t trust Bones; he’s trusted Bones this far, after all. It’s because if he says these next words out loud, he’ll make them true.

“The general can’t use the Force,” he admits at last, quiet, as if he could keep the secret from the universe if he only says it softly enough. “Whatever they did to him, it cut him off from his powers.”

He doesn’t say anything about Obi-Wan’s status as a Jedi. Nothing could ever affect that.

There isn’t much that alarms the 212th’s grouchy CMO, but that does it. Bones looks at him with wide, disbelieving eyes until, haltingly, Cody starts to explain. He tells Bones what he had seen and what Obi-Wan had said, and he falls silent when Bones bites his lip in consternation. The medic hems and haws, torn by exactly the same pros and cons that Cody was, before scowling.

“Fine,” Bones says in response to Cody’s request to keep things secret, at least for now. “I’ve got enough stuff with me to get him stable, and I can run midichlorian diagnostics with blood samples in the med bay. But someone needs to stay with him. That gonna be you?"

“Yes.” It isn’t a choice. He can and will take care of Obi-Wan. It’s his responsibility, after all, for failing to get to his general before Lott’s scientist did. “Most of my time is spent remotely coordinating the 3rd System, and I’m behind on reports and strategy reviews anyways.”

With a gruff nod, Bones gets to work. 

Obi-Wan doesn’t move even as Bones shifts him along the couch, and even though he flinches at the click-hiss of Bones’ hypospray injection, he doesn’t seem to be waking up. Bones clicks his tongue and sets up a stand for an IV, hanging bags of saline solution from the branch at the top. The needle Bones inserts for the cannula doesn’t wake him either, and neither does the blood draw. It’s only when Bones has set the IV lines after filling a few vials with dark red that Obi-Wan moves, his eyelids fluttering as he tries to pull his arm away.

His hazy blue eyes focus slowly, too slowly, on Bones.

“Just me, General,” Bones says, his voice as soft as it ever gets. “Just me. Go back to sleep.”

Obi-Wan does.

Bones leaves Cody with a firm set of instructions for monitoring Obi-Wan’s hydration, his ability to sense pain, and his awareness. Cody memorizes them with the same attention to detail that he uses for the GAR’s launch codes, then waits at attention as Bones chooses which equipment to leave here and which to take.

At last, Bones turns to leave. He stops when he gets to the door with one hand on the handle.

“You watch him good, Cody,” Bones says, not looking back. “I mean it.”

“I will, Bones.”

When Bones turns around, his face is heavy with an angry sort of grief. “Not just the list I gave you. I might not’ve seen this before, but I’ve seen a sniper lose an eye. I’ve seen a detonation expert lose both hands. A medic with crippling arthritis. So you look after him, okay?”

“I will, Bones,” Cody repeats. He may never again be able to look away.

Obi-Wan sleeps most of that first day. Cody doesn't.

He spends so much time running between the operations center and the warehouse that, by the afternoon, he’s basically running a third of the GAR from Obi-Wan’s bedside on no sleep. He’s brought over a pack of ration bars and instant caff, grateful the warehouse has running water even though he has to mix the caf in cold. Bones checks in every six hours or so, wielding a hypospray like a weapon, and he inches closer and closer to stabbing Cody with it instead of Obi-Wan.

The fourth time Bones returns, he brings a cot instead of medical equipment.

“You’ve got to sleep at some point,” Bones says, unfolding the cot from its canvas bag with two metallic snaps. “But the boys are gonna talk if you do it here instead of on base.”

“It’s fine. I've informed the command team that Obi-Wan set up a two-way hypersecure comm link here before he left," Cody says, barely looking up. "I'm in here 'monitoring his progress'."

Bones raises a skeptical eyebrow at where Cody sits at the plastoid folding table he’d dragged in from the work room, tapping away at two datapads and the field workstation he’d smuggled out of the data core lobby. Less than a foot from the wobbly fourth leg of his chair is Obi-Wan’s couch and Obi-Wan himself, looking less worse for wear but still out cold. Bones had disconnected the IV but left the cannula, and the plastic tubing is still sticking up prominently from the vulnerable curve of his elbow.

"Hypersecure comm link, huh?” Bones rolls his eyes. “You mean the three feet of air between his face and yours?”

Cody grins tiredly and returns to work.

He’d considered calling the Council as Obi-Wan had intended, but he doesn’t know which communications lines—if any—are compromised. Obi-Wan’s plans had hinged on the idea that their communications had been electronically intercepted, but he had failed to consider the advent of compromised personnel. If one of the intelligence officers is compromised, then even the E2E encryption on their off-planet comms to Coruscant would mean nothing. Warning the Council would be useless if Lott catches wind of Obi-Wan’s condition and escapes before the Council, kiloparsecs away, can do anything about him. They need to find Lott or at least strand him here before chancing a comm to Generals Yoda and Windu.

Cody is grateful, at least, that almost all of his operatives on Devisiun work in information security. He coordinates with the systems analysts to track shipments of anything even remotely related to medical equipment, flights in and out of the wharfs, and any suspicious activity noted near the warehouse Obi-Wan had been trapped in. They have nothing yet, but there’s no such thing as the perfect crime. Lott will have slipped up somewhere, and they’ll catch him—provided their leak isn’t sowing false trails.

He stands up to use the fresher, grateful again for the running water, but he pauses when he comes back. There’s still a fine layer of dust on the table, the floor, and the ancient mugs and caf-maker perched by the sink of the yellowing breakroom. Cody’s eyes are drawn, as ever, to Obi-Wan, and the worry in his gut is a beast with lengthening fangs. He’s worried, in the fearful and nonsensical way of the truly exhausted, that the dust will gather on Obi-Wan, too, if he doesn’t wake up soon.

Nothing to be done for it but work. He rubs the grit from his eyes and settles back in. When he starts to nod off, he grabs a 20-minute nap between calls. Usually Obi-Wan is there to stop him when he overextends, and Cody can’t help but think, irrational with pain, that if he pushes hard enough Obi-Wan will wake up to stop him. Half his heart expects to feel a hand on his shoulder any second now and to look up to find his general telling him to get some sleep. And Cody will protest, and Obi-Wan will remind him, as he has a thousand times before, that Cody’s just making more work for himself by trying to power through.

The hand never comes.

At last, the words on his screen become too fuzzy and ill-ordered to read. Cody turns the lights off and scoots the cot until one of its long edges overlaps the cushions of the mildewed couch. In the dim orange haze of the room’s single emergency light, he sets an alarm on his wristchrono and lays on his side, head pillowed on one bent arm, and he watches the rise and fall of Obi-Wan's chest until he falls asleep.

Some time between three and four, in the dark depths of the witching hour, Obi-Wan sinks into what Cody can only assume is a nightmare. He calls aloud in his sleep, names of other generals and names that Cody doesn’t know, until the concern in Obi-Wan’s voice tinges with throttled panic. Cody sits up, paralyzed with indecision, before reaching over to grab onto Obi-Wan’s shoulder.

The fabric beneath his fingers is damp with sweat. At his touch, Obi-Wan recoils, pushing himself into the cushions at the back of the couch, before blinking blearily awake. The dull, hazed blue of Obi-Wan’s eyes is a relief despite the pain of Obi-Wan’s fear. It’s been almost two full days since Cody’s seen that particular shade of blue.

“Ah, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, his voice shredded. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, then reaches up to pat Cody’s hand where it lingers awkwardly in the air, hovering where it had been when Obi-Wan had pulled away. “Sorry. So sorry.”

His fingers wrap around Cody’s wrist, fingers pressed into the artery between Cody’s wrist bones, and his grip is strong where his voice was weak. As he settles back down onto the couch, he pulls Cody’s hand down over his chest.

He’s asleep before Cody can ask what Obi-Wan could possibly be sorry about.

When Cody wakes up again, Obi-Wan is trying to coax the ancient caf-maker on the counter into boiling water for him.

“Sir?” he says, and if he’s slower to wake than his Kaminoan trainers would have liked, he’s still a couple dozen hours short of the sleep he needs. 

“Here, Cody,” Obi-Wan says. His voice still sounds like something caught in a LAAT/i’s aft engine, but he seems alert and responsive. He’s awake, at least. Caught in the haze between sleep and waking, it’s enough to make Cody want to go back to sleep. His general is here, he thinks. His general can take the watch. 

Reality comes trickling in.

“How are you feeling?” Cody asks, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot and rubbing his eyes. He’d slept in the jeans of his civvy disguise, and he’s not altogether sure they’re more comfortable to sleep in than the hard plastoid of his armor.

Obi-Wan gives him a wry smile, one eyebrow raised, and Cody knows that means Obi-Wan is still without his powers. He at last manages to get the stubborn caf-maker to start burbling with intent instead of disdain, and he returns to Cody with his hands cupping his elbows. The cot is in the way of the couch, and Cody takes a second to wonder how Obi-Wan had climbed out without waking him before he scoots over to make room.

“I should call Bones,” Cody says as he watches Obi-Wan sit gingerly next to him. “I need to—”

“To read me in, I think, Commander,” Obi-Wan says, interrupting as politely as anyone can, but there is a hard wary edge in his voice that makes Cody swallow and nod.

“No one but Bones knows you’re here,” Cody says, and Obi-Wan relaxes minutely at that. “I told him in person, here, and all of our communication since has been in code. Everyone else thinks he comes here to treat me, and that I’m here guiding your activities in the field.”

Obi-Wan nods, thoughtful and slow. “Clever.” 

Cody’s back wants to straighten with pride and bend with relief. He continues, “But I haven’t tried to get in touch with the Council. We don’t know which comm lines are compromised—”

“—the Jedi channels—”

“— or which personnel, clone or Jedi,” Cody finishes, and Obi-Wan shuts his mouth with a click.

“Ah,” Obi-Wan says instead. He doesn’t contradict Cody, even though Cody can almost see the protest hovering on the tip of his tongue. The memories of Slick's betrayal and the Pong Krell’s massacre hang heavy in the air until Cody clears his throat.

“I’ve been coordinating with the teams back at base to see what we can find out about Lott. He was technically our mission before, and he’s still our mission now, so that shouldn’t seem strange to anyone.”

“It appears that you’ve handled things as efficiently as ever in my absence, Commander,” Obi-Wan says. “Thank you.”

Silence descends like a roughspun wool cloak, itchy and smothering, and Cody looks beyond his own fears that he misstepped. Next to him, Obi-Wan’s eyes are focused on the dull black screen of the nearest datapad. His hands are folded in his lap. The long fall of his civilian shirtsleeves doesn't hide his white knuckles like his robes would. His breathing is uneven, still, and he is listing almost imperceptibly to one side.

“Sir,” Cody says. “Sir, you should rest.”

Obi-Wan looks up at him with his rueful little smile, his “what can you do?” smile, and Cody can’t untangle the roil of emotions from the exhaustion in the well-loved planes and curves of Obi-Wan’s face.

“Right again, Commander,” he says. “Wake me up in a couple of hours, if you would.”

“Of course.”

As Obi-Wan lifts his body from the cot to the couch, inchingly slow, Cody moves towards the sink. Two mugs, cleaned of dust by a studious hand, sit next to the caf-maker. The pot is full of water, clear and hot from having run through a machine empty of grounds.

The sight plants a lump in Cody’s throat. He lays out the instant caf and doesn’t pour any of it, content to leave the heating element beneath the pot on until Obi-Wan can share in the fruits of his labor. His datapad is full of notifications even after such an abbreviated night, and he settles back into his rickety plastoid chair at his crumbling folding table, and he works. 

Lott is a common-enough surname, even among devaronians, that the team hasn’t been able to get ahold of the man’s chain code just yet. There’s a high chance that it’s a false name, of course, but the SCIF can tunnel into the Republic’s high powered computing center, and tracking a few hundred men across the galaxy isn’t going to occupy more than a few of those cores. A few of their leads are promisingly suspicious, and Cody sends a few follow-up queries to his team before signing off and turning back to his general.

As much as Cody wants to let his general sleep, he realizes too late that Obi-Wan hadn’t eaten anything when he’d been awake. Bones’ wide array of hyposprays can work wonders, but there’s no substitute for food in your belly. 

A message from the man himself waits on his private comm asking if he’s slept. Cody taps out a quick, “yes, but awake now,” and he knows Bones will understand that he’s talking about Obi-Wan. Bones tells him that he can come by tomorrow to check. Few non-lethal injuries last longer than a couple days with bacta and modern medicine, so Bones can’t come by as often as he could earlier, but Cody can take care of Obi-Wan in the meantime. 

He has to.

He wakes Obi-Wan two hours precisely after Obi-Wan had lain down. Obi-Wan looks more clear-eyed than before but still drowsy, and he nibbles pensively on the ration bar Cody hands him before sitting back at his makeshift desk. Cody doesn’t want to hover; Obi-Wan hates people mothering him when he’s sick, and Cody doesn’t know how else to describe what Obi-Wan is right now.

“Any news?” Obi-Wan asks.

Cody sketches out what the operations teams have found, what trails they’re following, and the progress they’ve made with the local shipping authorities.

“Hm.” Obi-Wan chews another bite of ration bar, eyes focused on something a thousand yards in the distance, thoughtful. He stays quiet, nodding along, as Cody rattles off details.

Fortunately, Cody is fluent in his silences. “Problem, sir?”

“Hm? Oh, no.” Obi-Wan shakes his head, hesitates, then adds, “I’m just trying to remember what he said to me. If what he knew was limited to comm transmissions or anything restricted to ears-only. I thought I might be able to narrow down what paths he had access to, or at least put an upper limit on the leak, but… I don’t know. There was something familiar about him, too, but I can’t put my finger on that either.”

The water in the caf pot reaches a gentle boil again, and the machine automatically lowers the heat. They both look towards it, surprised by the new sound. This long-abandoned break room is not the strangest place in which Cody has waged war, but its mundanity somehow mutes the sharp edges of their conversation. At Obi-Wan’s nod, Cody stands and pours instant caf and boiling water into the two clean mugs.

As he hands Obi-Wan one of the mugs, Cody lingers a minute on the tired curve of Obi-Wan’s neck. He’s seen plenty of brothers have trouble with recall after a hard battle or, frankly, any trauma. Obi-Wan draws further into himself, curled around the warm cup, and Cody realizes, suddenly, that he doesn't know what's from exhaustion and what's from the serum. Neither of them know how much of Obi-Wan had been tied to the Force. How much of his strength, his wisdom, his encyclopedic knowledge of languages…? 

He swallows the urge to ask Obi-Wan any translations in Ryl.

“You’re still exhausted. Give yourself time,” Cody says instead. “And even if it never comes, we’ll still find him.”

“Mm.”

Obi-Wan sighs, and Cody watches his shoulders sag once, twice, before he manages to keep his back straight. He shakes himself a little to stay awake and on topic.

“I’ve been thinking about how to contact the Council, too. There’s a Jedi channel that requires a hard token to access. I’d need to be on base to use it, but not even you’d be able to intercept it. It’s for Jedi only,” Obi-Wan says, and he smiles that rueful smile again. “Well, Jedi and me, I suppose.”

The soft, amused words burn like poison-tipped vibroblade in the tender flesh of Cody’s gut. 

“Sir,” Cody says, because here, now, is Obi-Wan’s fear in the light. “You’re still a Jedi. General, you have to know—sir. We’ll figure this out, yes, but. You’re a Jedi with or without the Force.”

Cody doesn’t know what conviction is driving his words, but it’s true. He does not have many truths to hold to, but one of the few he holds in his heart is that Obi-Wan is a Jedi.

Obi-Wan is his Jedi.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Obi-Wan says gently, as if he’s already trying to prepare them both for a future in which Obi-Wan is not a blazing light at the tip of the 212th’s spear. Cody refuses to consider the idea that Obi-Wan’s condition might be permanent. It’s clear that Obi-Wan has, and in depth. 

He’s always been overly accepting of tragedy, especially his own. He accepts it as his due.

With all his frustration tucked behind his teeth, Cody turns back to the datapads on his makeshift desk.

“Look through these shipping summaries, please,” Cody says, holding one out. “See if anything jogs your memory.”

With a stalemate hanging in the air between them, Obi-Wan finishes his ration bar and takes the datapad, and they fall into a tenuous silence as they sort through the endless flood of data for anything that would help. Bones comes by at some point in the early evening, clucks over Obi-Wan like a mother hen, berates them both for overworking themselves, and then leaves in a whirlwind of barely-concealed relief and curses that’d make a spice runner turn red.

It isn’t even that late when Obi-Wan yawns so widely that Cody hears his jaw pop. He looks at Cody and rolls his eyes before Cody can even open his mouth.

“Yes, Commander, I know,” he preempts. “But you’re sleeping too. You’ve been running on fumes, I can tell. Come; you’re just making more work for yourself by trying to power through.”

They take turns in the fresher, and they change into the spare clean clothes Bones had brought on an earlier trip. Cody thinks about dragging the cot further from the couch this time, but he doesn’t manage it before Obi-Wan crawls over the cot and onto the couch cushions. When Cody lays down to sleep, he doesn’t even feel his head hit the pillow before he’s out.

Cody wakes to the sound of Obi-Wan moving in front of him. He blinks hazily at the shifting shadows. He's normally a light sleeper, but the past few days’ adrenaline have worn him down to the weary, uncomprehending bone.

“Gen’ral?” he asks, and Obi-Wan shushes him as he swings his legs over the arm of the couch. 

“Go back to sleep, Commander,” Cody hears.

He means to. He wants to, even, but he hears the door to the breakroom open and shut, and even his dulled half-conscious mind won't settle, waiting to make sure his general comes back from the fresher or stretching his legs. After ten minutes pass in the dim, illegible twilight of the breakroom, Cody sits up and walks on bare feet to the door. 

He digs his toes into the duracrete and reaches out with every sense he has, straining for any hint of his general on the base—reaching for the dim, silent corner of his mind he’d started associating with Obi-Wan’s absence—but there’s nothing. There’s no sound in the warehouse but the brief expanding hum of a speeder going by on some midnight errand, distant and far away. Cody opens the door as softly as he can, irrational panic burning in his chest, and he stops to see Obi-Wan folded in lotus pose on the weathered duracrete floor just outside.

He swallows hard enough to feel it in his teeth, wondering if he should go back, but he sees Obi-Wan’s breath hitch, once, in the watery blue light of the metal halide street lamps beyond the warehouse’s windows. Cody folds himself up as best he can next to his general instead.

“My apologies for disturbing your rest,” Obi-Wan says, keeping his eyes closed, and he tries to wave Cody off. His voice is smooth but his hands are shaking. Even in the scant light, the bags underneath Obi-Wan’s eyes are deep enough to house a LAAT/i. 

“No problem,” Cody says, not sure what else to say. He’s never been one for useless platitudes, and he doesn’t know why Obi-Wan’s out here. Is it grief? Fear? Obi-Wan is the bravest man Cody knows, but Cody also knows that Obi-Wan doesn’t break down in a crisis. He buries the panic and despair until the crisis is over, and then he breaks down later, when he's alone with his thoughts. Cody knows that Obi-Wan, alone, had mourned his former master; alone, he had mourned General Gallia; and, alone, he had mourned Duchess Satine.

He is not alone now.

There are some things you can only do in the empty early morning hours, when all the perils and strictures of reality momentarily loosen their hold. Without thinking, Cody reaches out a hand in the dark.

Obi-Wan’s fingers spasm around his.

“I apologize,” Obi-Wan says again. He still hasn’t opened his eyes, and he turns from Cody until his face is cloaked in shadow. “I just. I can’t feel it, I can’t hear it… I can’t even hear you —”

Obi-Wan shuts himself off with a snap of his teeth, but Cody thinks he can hear the rest of the words still rattling in Obi-Wan's chest, fighting to break free. He’s been exhausted for too long, stripped too bare. Cody doesn’t know what the living Force sounds like, but he now knows, horribly, what it sounds like when High General Obi-Wan Kenobi breaks down.

He’d honestly rather take Kamino’s Killing House over having to hear it ever again.

“We’ll fix this, General,” he says, and it comes out horribly weak when he says it. Empty of anything but hope. “Sir, please, just. Let’s go back to sleep. You won’t find answers out here.”

Even whispered, his words echo through the old machinery and up to the high ceilings, to the skylights filtering starlight down.

Obi-Wan smiles, and there’s a sorrow in it that runs deeper than the well water of his eyes. “Yours is a rare and gentle loyalty, Cody.”

His words have a wretchedness to them that makes Cody hesitate, even as his heart turns towards the praise like a flower to sunlight. He shakes his head; the Third System has hundreds of thousands of brothers, and any one of them would have this faith in Obi-Wan. Everyone but Obi-Wan himself. 

“My loyalty’s not so rare, sir,” he says. And then, thinking of what he would do to get his general back on his feet—what he would do to Greer Lott, if given half a chance—he adds, “And it’s not so gentle.”

Obi-Wan can’t help but crack a real smile at that. 

“Perhaps not to our enemies,” he allows.

Cody follows Obi-Wan meekly back to where the couch and the cot are still lined up end to end like mismatched shoes. Obi-Wan lays on his back, prim and proper and rigid in what he demands of himself. It’s painful to watch him, but Cody knows the last thing Obi-Wan needs right now is pity, just as he knows it’s not his place to reach out again.

He wants to, though. As Obi-Wan purposefully slows his breathing down into a facsimile of sleep, Cody tenses with helplessness. He can’t offer Obi-Wan the Force, and he still doesn’t know what it’s supposed to sound like, but. But.

Clones weren’t built for comfort, but Cody raised many of his brothers. He has held brothers who lost their pod to live-fire exercises, and he has hushed their cries as the Kaminoan minders walked the sleeping halls. He remembers Obi-Wan holding onto his wrist the night before, and he remembers the finger pads pressing into the ocean wave of his pulse. He remembers the warmth of the Force presence at the back of his mind, patient and soft until it was gone.

With the last of his bravery, as the last few drops of the witching hours drain away, Cody reaches out to take Obi-Wan’s hand and pull it slowly, deferentially, to his chest. The slit of blue glinting at Cody in the dark is curious until Obi-Wan’s palm presses over the steady drum of Cody’s heart and Obi-Wan's pride gives way to grief.

Some of the tension seeps out of Obi-Wan, as slowly and incrementally as water moves through clay. 

“Thank you, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody breathes as slowly and steadily as he can until he feels Obi-Wan collapse back into a fitful sleep.

Cody wakes up, which means he must have accidentally fallen asleep himself. He can almost hear his trainers deriding him for his negligence.

There’s a weight on his chest that feels like the aftermath of a fight with a super battle droid, and he blinks awake to the sight of an auburn storm of hair just beneath his chin and a pale, freckled ear peeking out of it. He holds his breath as memory and awareness filter back in. His general had needed him, he thinks nonsensically, staring down at where his general is curled on his chest with one ear pressed against Cody’s heartbeat. He buries the urge to run his fingers through the bird’s nest of Obi-Wan’s hair or to run his hand up Obi-Wan’s back. 

His general needed him, and Cody will give whatever he has, for whatever his general needs. That’s all.

Obi-Wan wakes in stages. He’s usually awake at first light, making sly asides that Skywalker barely notices before a second cup of caf, but this level of exhaustion is clearly not one that two nights of rest will solve. When he at last looks up, there’s a hint of embarrassment in the tilt of his eyebrows, and Cody isn't sure if it's from the closeness or from remembering last night. 

Still, when Obi-Wan draws away a careful inch, it isn't with alarm or reluctance but with a carefully measured grace. He looks better; he looks like he slept. There's a hint of color in his pale skin again, and his madder blue eyes are a little more blue and a little less mad.

Cody has no idea what to expect. He's never slept with— next to —someone before.

"Ah,” Obi-Wan says as if realizing something wasn’t a dream. “Good morning.”

He smiles ruefully and pulls back onto the couch. He seems okay for now, but he has always been exceptional at seeming okay. "You have a knack for finding creative solutions to challenging problems, Commander."

"You might be challenging, sir," Cody says, his half-asleep brain on autopilot, "but you're not a problem."

Obi-Wan laughs, then, small and breathy, but it's the first real laugh Cody's heard from him in too long. It seems to replace some of the warmth Obi-Wan took with him when he drew away. He sits up on the couch and gives Cody an assessing look, then straightens his shoulders as he looks Cody in the eyes.

“Forgive me for last night. The mixture of exhaustion and losing access to the Force has been, well. Difficult to handle properly," Obi-Wan admits, and Cody marvels at Obi-Wan’s ability to understate even this. “Even while wearing inhibitor cuffs, I could at least feel the Force out there. Now there's just… nothing. A hole where my heart should be. The silence overwhelmed me, and I'm sorry."

Cody shakes his head. "There’s nothing to forgive. However I can help, whatever I can do, just say the word."

The edges of Obi-Wan's lips quirk into a smile.  "Well, it's certainly harder to feel alone with you here."

"Then I'll stay." Cody continues, ignoring the blush rising blotchy and hot up the back of his neck, “I'll be wherever you need me to be.”

Obi-Wan looks at him then, really looks, as serious as any king accepting a pledge. His affable smile is gone, but his small frown seems, somehow, kinder.

“Thank you, Cody,” Obi-Wan says again, and he bows his head a careful inch.

On the folding table, Cody’s communicator beeps with a message from Bones. Cody extricates himself from the cot to find Bones waiting at the door to the warehouse floor. After the usual exchange of health statuses, grumbling, and hypospray threats, Bones offers a datapad to Obi-Wan. 

“I can’t stay long,” he apologizes, “but I ran those tests you told me to run on your blood samples yesterday. All the data’s saved locally on this. Sir, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it means, but they ain’t dead. I can tell you that much.”

Only the years Cody has spent watching the line of Obi-Wan’s shoulders lets him see the hitch, small but sure, in those shoulders now. 

Obi-Wan takes the datapad carefully, almost hesitantly. “Thank you, Bones. I’ll let you know what I find.”

“I just hope it’s worth findin’, sir,” Bones says. “You come home soon.”

He runs a few more cursory tests, leaves them a few more supplies, and turns back the way he came.

As the door closes behind him, Obi-Wan sits on the cot with the datapad held in loose fingers. With a deep, sure breath—with the look he wears when a contingent of spider droids appear over the hills just when the battle was drawing to a close—Obi-Wan activates the data pad.

Half of Cody wants to be busy on the other side of the room, to give Obi-Wan the privacy he’d been looking for last night. He hesitates by the sink until he can’t stand the unknowing, and he sits in the chair at the table to scroll, unseeing, through his own reports until Obi-Wan huffs out something that isn’t a laugh.

When Cody looks over, all he sees on the data pad are lines and lines of numbers. “Sir?”

“I can’t make sense of it either,” Obi-Wan says, shaking his head. “Sorry, I should explain. These are my midichlorian counts from all the blood samples Bones took over the past few days.” 

Cody’s understanding of midichlorians is theoretical at best. “Those are… the things that let you use the Force?”

But Obi-Wan shakes his head. “That's a common misconception, actually. They are commensals, and they function as an indicator organism only."

At Cody's blank look, he smiles, and he slips into the voice he always uses when teaching: warm and patient. "Commensalism is a relationship in which one organism—the midichlorians—benefits, while the other—us—remains unharmed. They aren't part of the Force in the same way that viruses aren't; they neither use or make energy of their own. All living things are connected to the Force, but, like viruses, midichlorians aren't alive. With that said, they are still… something. They activate and reproduce in the presence of Force use, and there are more of them in people who have greater access to the Force."

"Like in Jedi," Cody guesses, and Obi-Wan nods. "So they, what, eat the Force as it moves through you? …How does the Force work?"

"Besides in mysterious ways?" Obi-Wan teases, and Cody chuckles before remembering to be surprised that Obi-Wan is joking with him again. "I don't know, honestly. I don't think any Jedi does. Lott has, quite obviously, discovered something we have not."

"But yours are still alive, or at least detectable. Unless they're inactive?"

Obi-Wan shakes his head. "No, the numbers are fluctuating, so something is changing in their biome. And it isn't even that my numbers are down to the levels of a non-Force sensitive; they're fluctuating around the number I usually have, although that’s never been very high. Something is maintaining them, so..."

"So there's hope," Cody presses, because that seems like the most important thing.

Obi-Wan smiles, his eyes twinkling, and Cody has followed that exact smile into battle a hundred times. He’ll follow it a million times more.

"My dear commander, there's always hope," Obi-Wan says. His words are a spring breeze thawing the frost on the walls of Cody’s heart. "There's always hope."

There’s a lighter atmosphere in the room after that. For all Obi-Wan’s stalwart resolve, Cody thinks Obi-Wan had been trying to prepare himself to read a long line of zeroes across every page. Cody aches, suddenly, for the warm sense of presence he now knows was Obi-Wan reaching out to him in the Force—but he’ll feel it again. He swears he will.

Obi-Wan sets the datapad down on the table beside the others, tapping it gently with his fingertips as he lifts his hand away. 

“We should plan,” he says, and Cody grins.

They expand their base of operations beyond the cluttered, windowless breakroom. By the watery light of the morning sun filtering through the fog and the warehouse’s dirty, scuffed windows, Cody shows Obi-Wan the extent of their resources. Together, they check the paths to the subterranean tunnels for movement and any of the connected doors for tampering and find none. While Obi-Wan had been out of commission, Cody had made sure that all of their activity had been confined to a single out-of-the-way room. If someone had come searching the warehouse, Cody would have known before they’d ever gotten to the break room door. 

Now that his general is back, they can take a few more risks.

They commandeer one of the huge drafting tables at the back of the warehouse where artists decades before had sat to sneak propaganda between the lines of real news and exaggerated musicians. As Cody and Obi-Wan’s task now is to demarcate what’s known and what’s not, Cody hopes the table’s former owners don’t begrudge them their pursuit of the truth. 

“Alright,” Obi-Wan says. “We ought to treat this like any other military objective, I believe. So, first, let’s review our intel. We can’t rely on my having found everything Lott knew, even if I were confident in my memory of it, but we can at least identify which communication lines are definitely compromised. Our wrist comm radios definitely, and our long-range comms possibly. Cody, let’s create a map of confidential information flow in the GAR. I’ll show which areas he apparently had access to; you start working out how we can test whether or not he has access to the others.”

Most of the paper they find is so old that it disintegrates beneath the oil of their fingertips. At the back of the warehouse, Cody finds a stack of misprint templates that seem sturdier than the others. He rifles through it, searching for a print large enough to spread across the whole table, and he can’t help but laugh when he sees one with a picture of a massive blue ortolan behind a jett organ. The text beneath it proudly proclaims “MAX REBO, RENOWNED JIZZ MUSICIAN”. The word “JIZZ” is accompanied by a thick red outline, three exclamation marks, and a heartfelt plea for the design team to fix the typo.

Art drawn by Three-Fold-Symmetry on Tumblr (@montmorillon on Ao3). ID in alt text.

“This one, I think,” he says, grinning, and Obi-Wan rolls his eyes and continues searching for something to write with.

The ink in the pens is long-dried, and Obi-Wan hunts through the drawers around them until, with a smile, he produces a few long wooden sticks. Cody stares, uncomprehending, until Obi-Wan shows him how the wood encases a piece of graphite, and that the graphite will shear off to lay a fine silver path on the paper’s surface.

Cody’s mouth twists in distaste at the archaic method, but they don’t have much choice. All of the datapads except the one Bones brought this morning are still connected, irrevocably, to the Republic’s network. Since Cody is still using them to coordinate with his on-planet teams and the Republic’s databases to track potential bioterrorists, he wouldn’t be able to take any of them offline permanently and have that go unnoticed.

No. If they want to catch their villain, they’ll need to plan this out the old-fashioned way.

“Far better to have pencil and paper than sticks and mud,” Obi-Wan says, elbowing him lightly as they start sketching out the various lines of communication and information pathways the Republic uses. “Trust me.”

And as they work, he tells Cody of being in a war when he was no more than a child, marshaling kids on the cusp of puberty in a fight for their very existence. He tells tales of smoke signals and precious, pilfered radios, and he laughs as he describes how, when there wasn’t mud, they drew lines in a fine dust that would blow away in the wind and take all their plans with it. Cody nods, frowning, and wonders at how much of the Force Obi-Wan had had at that age. Had he even been trained well enough to use it? Or had that been a time, too, where Obi-Wan had built something from nothing with his will alone?

He puts the thought aside, and he pulls on his professionalism like the armor he doesn’t have. Once they have all of the lines of communication on paper divided into wired, wireless, and spoken, they stand back. Obi-Wan has circled areas of information Lott definitely knew—their data encryption methods, the particulars of the Republic’s mission in New Kaon, which materials flows were being monitored in and out of Coruscant—and starred which areas he only appeared to know—Obi-Wan’s movements through the city, which Jedi were in this sector, and, strangely, Obi-Wan’s affinity for mind-influencing Force powers.

“He really was after a Jedi, then. He was after you,” Cody says, staring at the details of what Lott had known about Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan must have been trying to use a mind trick on Lott when Cody had dropped in, because there would have been no other way to convince him that Obi-Wan was—is—a Jedi. The man had been thorough in his research.

Obi-Wan nods, hand moving to his beard. “Mmm. He clearly had a very particular goal in mind. As far as I’m aware, he’s the first to manufacture a chemical weapon capable of, ah, disabling a Jedi.”

“Or a Sith,” Cody offers, because he didn’t become marshal commander by failing to consider all angles. If it weren’t a possible war crime, he’d love to have a few poison darts with that serum for the next time Maul or Ventress comes sniffing around his general.

“Or a Sith,” Obi-Wan agrees. As he strokes a hand over his beard, his eyes unfocus to somewhere over Cody’s shoulder. The rightness of the look clicks into place like a well-worn piece of armor; it’s a look that has gotten the 212th out of more scrapes than the reserve gunships ever did.

“I couldn’t get a sense of his motive,” Obi-Wan says at last. “For all the time I spent observing him in the Force, he was as implacable as a durasteel wall. There was no smudge of emotion on his surface, but there was… a certainty to him. He worked with the calm focus of someone who believed their success to be inevitable.”

“A true believer, huh. So you don’t think he’s just trying to make something he can sell?”

The light from the late-morning sun is bleeding into the warm yellow of early afternoon. The warehouse stands like an old stone golem around them, a carcass filled with complex clockwork inwards frozen in mid-motion, and Cody wonders what it had been like when it was alive with activity. The air is stale and stiff with crumbled paper and oiled machinery, and Cody and Obi-Wan stop every time a speeder goes by with a buzzing wave of engine.

One goes by now, and they wait to make sure it carries on before Obi-Wan smiles.

“If I thought we could buy Lott off with cash, well…” Obi-Wan laughs. “Then we’d have to compete with the Separatists, and it'd be easier to out-shoot Count Dooku than out-bid him. No. Regardless of Lott’s motives, we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

Cody grins at him. “Don’t we always?”

They continue their work. Cody devises categories of information to dole out to various isolated communication pathways. They don’t know much, but they know Lott wants Obi-Wan. Cody sets out a list of places, days, and times, and he doles out parcels of that list to isolated portions of their map of communication lines. Obi-Wan and Cody can set up surveillance in each place, and, based on where and when Lott shows up, they can identify what information Lott followed to reach his conclusion. It’s like a logic puzzle: no information can contradict another, but all possible sets of information must lead to a finite place and time.

Art drawn by Three-Fold-Symmetry on Tumblr (@montmorillon on Ao3). ID in alt text.

Cody puts the finishing touch on a decision tree that would, no matter what, lead to Warehouse 12 at 4am, and sits back to twist his arms behind his back. He’s double-checking his work, grimly satisfied that no one without the whole picture would be able to see through the lies, when his wrist comm beeps with an incoming call from high command.

He and Obi-Wan trade looks. He moves away from their drafting table towards the cluster of ink vats by the far wall, hoping the background of the call will appear non-descriptly industrial. Theoretically, it might be easier for Cody to leave the room, but he can’t help but feel like he’s finally gotten Obi-Wan—his Obi-Wan, his general, his Jedi—back at his side, and if Cody leaves, he'll lose Obi-Wan again. He should set aside the feeling, but it wouldn’t do to leave high command waiting longer than a few seconds.

A press of his finger brings a cloaked finger into an array of shifting, scanning blue. Cody straightens automatically, eyes going wide. He wishes he had his bucket.

“CC-2224 reporting, sir,” Cody says, forcing his designation to roll as easily off his tongue as it ever has, and the Supreme Chancellor smiles up at him. 

“Ah, Commander Cody, good,” the Chancellor says. He sounds more like an elderly grandfather checking on a favorite nephew than the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic speaking to one of his highest-ranking officers. “I’ve received some worrying reports about General Kenobi, and I was hoping you might be able to assure me to the contrary.”

It’s unkind of him, and entirely unfair, but Cody has never liked the Chancellor’s voice. There’s something about the cadence of his words and the innuendo hidden beneath them that makes the man unpalatable: oil-slick and as dangerous as a hidden knife. Consequences seem to slide off him like water slides off a duck. 

Cody tries to swallow his discomfort. He doesn’t know what report the Chancellor could be talking about, either; none of the men seem to suspect anything untoward, and it isn’t as if their potential spy would send a report to the leader of the Republic.

"Everything is under control, sir." Cody says, making sure to say only what could technically be considered true. He's served under Obi-Wan long enough to know the importance of technicalities. “General Kenobi is still in the field. He hasn’t answered his radio in some time, but the 212th is treating his status as being under deep cover. Is there something I can relay to him at his next check-in?"

It takes every stubborn inch of Cody’s willpower not to raise his eyes from the Chancellor’s figure to where he knows Obi-Wan is hovering just out of reach, listening in.

“Yes, actually. We’ve received some new intel that has changed the situation quite, ah, materially,” the Chancellor says, drawing the syllable out in a way that raises Cody’s hackles. “Call him in. I’ll need to discuss it with him over a more secure line.”

Cody forces himself to salute with his right hand. “Yessir. Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes, Commander. You’re dismissed.”

Cody shuts down his comm and triple-checks the recording light. On second thought, he turns it off completely, and on third thought, he takes it off his wrist and leaves it by the wall before heading back towards Obi-Wan. The Chancellor’s insistence on a secure line and the sudden presence of new information makes Cody wonder if their mole isn’t isolated to this mission. Is someone acting as a shadow broker within the GAR, hacking into secure channels and selling the information to interested parties? Is this bigger than Lott? Bigger than the 212th?

He catches Obi-Wan’s eyes across the room and swallows. Bigger than Obi-Wan? It’s not an easy thought, but finding Lott and saving Obi-Wan had been well-within his original mission parameters. The only path forward had been to find the leak while keeping Obi-Wan safe. But if their mole threatens the GAR and other missions, other battalions and other fronts, Cody will, by necessity, need to rethink his risk calculus.

No matter what it would do to him to risk Obi-Wan.

He sees the same conviction reflected in the tense set of Obi-Wan’s jaw, and he almost sighs in relief. They have both, always, known their duty.

“Our plan is still the best way to identify compromised information from where we are,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody nods. “However, if subspace communications like that are being monitored, then I need to head back to base tomorrow to assuage the Chancellor’s concerns and any potential listeners-in.”

At Cody’s deepening frown, Obi-Wan dusts his hands of eraser shavings and smiles. “Honestly, this might be for the best. It’s good practice to lay a trap close to the nest.”

Obi-Wan’s words and that smile are, again Cody’s better judgment, reassuring.

“Will you tell the Chancellor?” he asks.

Handing the reins of this operation to the Chancellor worries Cody for some reason. His instincts shy away from the idea, and not just because the Chancellor’s military choices to date have been far from sound. Which reports had the Chancellor reviewed? How had he known to be worried?

But Obi-Wan just shakes his head. “Depends on what he tells me. At a minimum, we can use the situation to test one of our secure channels, I think. Let’s see what we can adapt from what we’ve already done.”

With their heads bowed together, they revise and rework the information that Cody had laid out. Elbow to elbow, they pick out what they can send, and where, and to whom. They work on this ancient paper, borrowed from ghosts, and the strange feeling of long-dead trees beneath his palm sends a shiver up Cody’s spine. This, here, finally, is what Cody had been made for: to work in perfect unity, in steady concert, with Obi-Wan. He remembers what Obi-Wan had said about Lott’s calm certainty, and Cody thinks he might have the same sense of conviction—but not in himself. In his general . In his Jedi.

He’s willing to bet his belief is the stronger one.

That night, Obi-Wan falls asleep without his hand curled over Cody’s chest, and Cody doesn’t reach out. But he lays in his cot for minutes that stretch into hours, listening to Obi-Wan’s soft snores and wondering at how he wishes he could.

Chapter Text

The next afternoon, Obi-Wan officially reappears back at base. 

"I lost the trail," he explains with a sigh, stroking his beard pensively. "We’re back to the drawing board, I’m afraid."

The troopers gathered in the ops room all nod respectfully during the very brief debrief, but afterwards they swarm with barely-contained relief around their general. Obi-Wan has been out of their sight and chain of command for longer periods of time, of course, and he’s been in considerably more dangerous circumstances, but the men never really recovered from the Rako Hardeen incident. Although the story had been faked, the pain of thinking they had lost their general when they weren’t there to protect him lingered.

“You’ll get ‘em next time, General,” Scrapper says, and Sleeper nods.

“And don’t do that to us again, sir.”

“Hell, don’t do that to Cody,” Trench says, and Cody’s glare doesn’t manage to stop the slicer from adding, “I think he nearly had an aneurysm when Scrapper here handed him your lightsaber without you on the other end of it.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes crinkle at the corners, the crow's feet gathered there deepening with joy, and it’s almost enough to make Cody reconsider the latrine duty he’d been about to assign.

Almost.

“Is that so?” Obi-Wan asks, and only Trench is dumb enough to nod. “Well, then. I suppose I should be grateful that our commander hasn’t gone and glued it to my hand just yet.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Cody growls.

The men laugh, reaching out to pat Cody on the back and press Obi-Wan’s hand between their own. Amid the furor of relief and goodwill, Cody can’t believe that any of his brothers here would turn on the general. Not Boil; not Scrapper, not Crys and not Trench. 

Mentally, he reaches for the map of their operations structure that he and Obi-Wan had built. He’d been convinced more sinister forces had been at work, but is it possible that they just have multiple security flaws? Some major vulnerability in their infrastructure? They don’t use much open source software in their operations, though, and Crys swore from Coruscant to the Outer Rim that he’d implemented every Porg4J patch the Techno Union had pushed.

He follows Obi-Wan through the hallways, nodding to the troopers who press their backs against the walls and salute as their commanding officers move past them. It’ll be fine regardless, he thinks. They’ll isolate the leak, find Lott, get an antidote, and he and Obi-Wan can go back to winning the war exactly as they were.

It’ll be fine.

He leaves Obi-Wan to Bones’ untender mercies for a ‘post-op check-up’ with a twinge of regret. If the men are still on edge when the general is undercover months after Rako Hardeen, Cody hesitates to think how the last few days have affected him. He hovers outside the door to their makeshift medbay with his hands clenched at his sides. Obi-Wan hasn’t been out of his sight for more than a few minutes since Cody found him kneeling in that warehouse. Even when Cody had been asleep, Obi-Wan had at least been in reach, and Cody—

Cody turns on his heel. He takes a quick shower and shrugs into his blacks, extremely grateful for the familiar warm fabric, feeling a piece of his soul fit back into place. When he emerges, he glances around in discomfort. His own quarters have been neglected for too long, and he pulls his field kit out from beneath his bunk to clean his blaster. The administrative AI reads out the messages he’d missed while organizing his and Obi-Wan’s return to base, and he addresses anything urgent with distant calm. One of his notification inboxes receives every update to the calendars of anyone ranked higher than Major, and it pings him when Obi-Wan is booked into a series of secured meetings in the SCIF, undoubtedly by the Chancellor and the Council.

Eventually, his stomach growls a need for its own maintenance. He heads to the mess hall for third meal and grabs a tray. Boil sits across from him while Cody picks at his food, and he gives Cody a brief update on morale and what the official reports aren’t covering from the Anoatan Front. Boil leaves after Cody signs off on a few requisitions, and Cody watches him go, discontent. With a start, he realizes he’s barely touched his food after more than half an hour. He’s lingering.

No, worse than that: he’s waiting.

Resigned to his own paranoia, Cody rolls his eyes and fetches an extra plate of food from the night shift cooks, all of whom look entirely too understanding. He gets a couple mugs of hot water, too, and he heads to Obi-Wan’s quarters trying not to curve his shoulders in embarrassment over the two trays. He knows his general can take care of himself. He knows it from his training, from years on the battlefield, and in his own soul. Obi-Wan may be constantly pushing his limits, but he knows better than anyone where those limits are.

On the way to Obi-Wan’s quarters, Crys finds him.

“Sir, wait,” Crys says. His eyes are rimmed with red like he hasn’t been sleeping. Cody knows the slicers tend to have a poor sleep schedule, but this doesn’t feel like any normal over-caffeinated state. “Sir, about the comms breach—”

The vast network of communications technology that he and Obi-Wan had mapped out earlier springs to Cody’s mind, and Cody shakes his head. Crys has clearly found something, but Cody doesn’t want it said out loud. He wants it in a format he can ship the Jedi Council at a moment’s notice, and, if he’s honest, he wants it after he’s reassured himself that Obi-Wan is still upright.

“Not here,” Cody says. “And not now. Can you—draft a report for me on something not connected to any network and bring it to me as soon as you can.”

Crys nods, snaps off a salute, and takes off at a half job down the hallway to their HPC resources. Cody turns and, with a pace that is slower but no less urgent, lets his feet carry him, unerring, to his north star. 

He’s overreacting, he knows. Obi-Wan’s fine. He’s fine. Cody’s about to prove it. 

Once in front of Obi-Wan’s quarters, though, he can’t bring himself past the door. 

As he hovers outside of the room, berating himself both for doubting his general and for hesitating, two voices barely filter through the thin durasteel door. These rooms are little more than repurposed offices with beds stacked in them, so it isn’t a surprise that Cody can hear them, but it is a surprise to hear the angry alto of General Skywalker reverberating inside. After another second, his voice stops, and, in the aftermath, Cody hears a harsh intake of breath and a long breath out.

He’s turning to leave when another voice calls out.

“Cody, come in,” Obi-Wan calls, and the door slides open as Cody twists his body back towards the room.

He steps past the open door with surprise. Obi-Wan smiles at the food in Cody’s hands and starts clearing off the little setting table that Cody mainly uses to house the flimsiwork overflow from his desk. He has already changed into his robes, and his auburn hair forms soft waves as it dries. Most of the refreshers here have water showers instead of sonic ones, and neither he nor Cody had bothered with cleanliness while sheltering in the jazz warehouse. Cody had barely noticed when he’d taken his own, but he’s belatedly grateful for it now, watching the fine hair at the back of Obi-Wan’s neck curl upwards.

“How’d you know it was me?” Cody asks. He searches automatically for that sixth sense at the back of his mind but comes up empty. He knows, knows, Obi-Wan would have mentioned if anything had changed in his condition, but he’d also assumed that Obi-Wan’s supernatural ability to know who was standing outside of his door had been, well. Supernatural.

Obi-Wan winks at him from overtop a few handfuls of flimsi. 

“Just a good guess,” he says, and Cody raises an eyebrow until Obi-Wan huffs a laugh. “Ah, well. You have a very distinctive walk, Commander. And you have a specific way of hesitating before a door that you’re not sure you should open just yet.”

Cody sets his burden down in the newly cleared space, and even though he’s never considered the way he walks before, he can admit the truth of Obi-Wan’s words. He’s still curious, though.

“I… sorry to pry, General, but I’d assumed you used the Force to tell the brothers apart.”

“The Force helps,” Obi-wan admits. “Especially for some of the newer recruits with whom I haven’t yet worked closely. But you, Cody, come now. I’d know you in a blind light, across a crowded room. You needn’t be so surprised.”

The words are said so easily, so reassuringly, and yet Cody has to bend his head down over the food to hide the blush creeping up his neck. Obi-Wan must know what that sort of thing means to the clones, he must —right?

Cody’s staring so intently at the trays that he only notices that Obi-Wan has come closer when two tea balls drop into the mugs, packed densely with leaves. It doesn’t look like his usual Camien brew: it’s darker, less green. When he takes a sip, the taste is much stronger than Obi-Wan’s usual brew, heady and sweet with an undercurrent of something like hazelnut. The warmth down his throat settles into his chest like liquor.

“If there were ever a time to break out the good stuff, I think it might be now,” Obi-Wan says at Cody’s questioning look, and Cody feels a wave of affection for how his general would describe a tea as the good stuff . 

“I know for a fact that you keep a bottle of tihaar in your armor locker, General,” Cody says, almost unable to keep the fondness from his voice.

"Yes, but I’m saving that for when things get really bad.”

“Then I’d hate to see your ‘really bad’, sir,” Cody says, knowing full well that he’s already seen it.

Cody watches Obi-Wan pick up his utensils and mechanically work his way through the food, which looks exactly as bland and unappetizing as the reports surrounding it. They’ve both developed the battlefield habit of eating without speaking, and, even on base, Obi-Wan inhales his food as if he might be interrupted by blasterfire at any second. Still, Obi-Wan looks as though he’s picking at his food in the same way Cody had been earlier, hesitating a second longer and staring into some space far behind the walls of the base and, potentially, the walls of New Kaon itself.

There are a million things to worry about, of course. The war marches on; an impossibly powerful bioterrorist is on the loose; the Force is uncertain; and Skywalker hadn’t exactly sounded happy earlier. Any of them would be worth a thousand-yard stare like that.

Still, Cody asks, “Is there something I can help with?” 

Obi-Wan passes with his fork still halfway to his mouth before setting it down and shaking his head. “No, thank you, Cody. I appreciate the food. I’d clean forgotten in the whirlwind of today.”

“But?” Cody probes. If Obi-Wan tries to deflect again, he’ll allow the change in subject, but he wants to ask at least once more.

Obi-Wan smiles, acknowledging his own failed gambit. “But. Ah, just. I’ve made a habit of calling the troopers by name when I see them in the hallway. I suppose your comment made me remember earlier, when I… When I wasn’t sure enough to use a man’s name without the Force. He hasn’t earned his paint yet.”

Guilt rings in Obi-Wan’s words as clear as a bell. 

“Sir,” Cody says, then stops. Of course Obi-Wan would expect to be able to memorize the individual names of the entire contingent of identical men on base. Of course he’d expect to be able to do that even blinded to the Force, to his sixth through sixteenth senses, and then would berate himself for the failure.

“I know, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, and he does at least look like he knows even Kal Skirata mixes up a few of his adopted commando sons from time to time. “But one of the reasons any Jedi have made good officers thus far is because the Jedi are capable of distinguishing between clones when most people without Force sensitivity can’t.”

He didn’t say ‘we’ when he mentioned the Jedi. Cody bristles, about to address that, when something about the worry in Obi-Wan’s voice, something about the way he talks about command, about being good at it, makes him stop.

Obi-Wan worries, but he doesn't doubt himself about this: not about how much he does for his men.

“General Skywalker said something to you, didn’t he,” Cody realizes. “You told him.”

Obi-Wan nods at a keychain fob no bigger than his thumb lying on his desk. “I mentioned the Jedi comms network? It has no connection to either the GAR or the Senate, and it’s stood safe from the Sith for more than 4,000 years. So, yes, I told Anakin… but I did not tell the others. Not Palpatine, and not the Council.”

“I take it he didn’t react well?”

Cody can’t begin to imagine what this might be like for Obi-Wan, and he knows Obi-Wan and Skywalker are closer than brothers. He’d want to tell someone, too, but he can’t imagine Skywalker reacted helpfully to something like this.

Obi-Wan trades his fork for his mug, sipping at the over-steeped tea. The tea spills over the side slightly as he brings it to his mouth, and the lost drop glistens in his beard. Cody doesn’t think he’s ever seen a slip like that before.

“Anakin thinks I should return to Coruscant immediately,” Obi-Wan says without further preamble. “Where it’s safe.”

Cody looks at him across the table, quiet and oddly unsurprised. Each of the Jedi he’s worked with has been reckless, and each in their own way. Ahsoka Tano is reckless because she hates her limits; Obi-Wan Kenobi is reckless to the very edge of his; and Anakin Skywalker is reckless even beyond that, because he hasn’t found his limits yet.

Skywalker’s power is great, but there isn’t much question of what he’d be without it. He defines himself by the Force, by being the Chosen One. If forced to define himself without the Force, he’d draw a blank. Obi-Wan, on the other hand, defines himself by what he can give to others, and what he can give has never been limited to ‘the Force’.

I would know you in a blind light, Obi-Wan had said. Across a crowded room. It amazes Cody that a man who could say that could think he is worth any less without the Force.

“But you won’t go back to Coruscant,” Cody confirms, and Obi-Wan nods. “Because your leaving would signal to Lott that his serum worked.”

“That, and we’re too far from the front for reinforcements to get here before he catches wind of them, and even if he didn’t, we don’t know how big Lott’s operation is. If it’s small enough, he could easily slip through a blockade on a planet this size. And, well. As much as I’d like for this to be a tactical choice, it’s personal as well.”

One corner of Obi-Wan’s mouth lifts into the cousin of a smile. “I want to finish what I started.”

“Of course, sir,” Cody says, relieved, but the furrow between Obi-Wan’s eyebrows doesn’t settle out. “Sir?”

Obi-Wan shakes his head, slow and steady, and, for once, he drops his gaze first.

“Ah, nothing, it’s simply that... Well, I can speak for my own actions, of course. But the GAR is structured such that Jedi are generals, and by necessity, then, generals must be—”

Understanding hits Cody like a photon torpedo.

“Don’t you dare,” Cody interrupts with such vehemence that Obi-Wan’s jaw snaps shut on his next word, and he stares, wide-eyed, at how Cody is leaning forward across the table towards him. 

Cody swallows, because he’s never been one for big declarations, and the weight and shape of what he feels doesn’t seem like it could fit in his mouth. 

But it needs to be said.

“I know the Jedi—I know they didn’t choose their battalions,” Cody says. His hands are shaking, and he forces them to stop. “And we didn’t choose our Jedi. But sir, I’d choose you anyway. I’d choose to follow you every time, over all the others, always.”

Obi-Wan stares at him, blinking rapidly, and Cody has always finished what he started. He presses his lips together and continues, “Powers or not, sir, you’ll always be my general.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says, but nothing follows. He opens and closes his mouth once, twice, and he searches Cody’s eyes. Cody doesn’t know if he’s looking for some lost truth, some deeper meaning, but Cody doesn’t have any. He said what he meant. He won’t take it back.

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan says at last, and he doesn’t say anything more.

In the gentle fall of silence, Cody doesn’t know what else to do. Half his heart wants to kneel at Obi-Wan’s feet and press his lips to the white of Obi-Wan’s knuckles, to bow his head and beg for the blessing of a blue saber a hair’s breadth from his shoulders, but. He has never needed big gestures to show his loyalty before, and he doesn’t need one now.

He watches Obi-Wan instead, and the harsh blue-white fluorescents overhead deepen the bags beneath Obi-Wan’s eyes to purple. He’s still exhausted, Cody realizes. Exhausted and working exactly as hard as he had been before he crashed, without food or sleep, despite not having the Force to fall back on. The flimsi he’d cleared off the desk had today’s date on it, so he’s already organized the work he’s missed over the past week. The schedule Cody had watched fill up earlier had barely had a bathroom break in it after Bones’ check-up. And even when Obi-Wan had gotten a chance to rest here, he’d immediately called Skywalker.

Seven kriffing hells, how is Cody going to go back to his own quarters, knowing that his general will be picking up a stylus instead of his pillow?

Obi-Wan knows his limits better than anyone else, Cody thinks, but as much as he hates to admit it, Obi-Wan has new limits. 

With a clatter of porciplast on durasteel, Obi-Wan sets his mug back down and collects their trays for compost and reuse. Cody watches him stand with a trained eye, and he sees Obi-Wan stumble slightly as he packs the trays away and then moves to gather some of the flimsi he’d organized earlier and flip through the stack. 

“Thank you for dinner, Cody,” Obi-Wan says. There’s a resignation in his voice that Cody is unaccustomed to. “Alas, I’ve missed a few things in my absence that are rather urgent. I’m sure you have quite a stack yourself.”

It’s the politest of all possible dismissals, but Cody can’t even consider leaving Obi-Wan alone right now. Bones’ words echo in his mind— you watch him, Cody —and Cody stands. He’s not going to let Obi-Wan continue to grind himself to dust in either penance or a desperate need to be more than he is, not surrounded by flimsiwork and the worn meditation mat he no longer feels entitled to. 

Cody comes to a decision faster before his brain forms the words. He catches Obi-Wan’s elbow as he stands, feeling compelled by some greater working than his own conviction. Perhaps the Force is moving through me, he thinks, as it tries to find its way back to its true son. 

“Speaking of urgent,” he says, “I asked Crys for a report on any irregularities in our recent system logs. Can you come look it over? I asked for it on a datapad with wireless comms disabled, so I can’t show it to you here.”

He also can’t show it here because Crys almost certainly hasn’t started it, let alone finished it, but he’s become accustomed to stepping neatly around the truth as marshal commander. He also isn’t willing to gamble that Obi-Wan’s ability to spot a lie has been due entirely to the Force. Obi-Wan knows people—how they work, how they think, what they want—and that’s never been entirely supernatural. Many Jedi can spot an outright lie, sure, but there’s only one Negotiator.

Cody holds himself still, his hand still on Obi-Wan’s arm, to watch the war within him. The man is tired, more than tired, and he clearly just wants to sit down and drown himself in his work. Cody is banking on his general’s courtesy getting the best of him, though, even as he regrets not being able to think of an excuse that would let him watch over Obi-Wan in Obi-Wan’s quarters instead. The furrow between Obi-Wan’s eyebrows relaxes as he sighs and stands. Cody’s seen that look before: the look of Obi-Wan convincing himself that he can take one more step, lead one more charge, and go one more mile through the snow-filled woods.

At Obi-Wan’s nod, Cody neatly takes the flimsiwork from Obi-Wan’s free hand and tows him to the door without looking back. Even in the harsh fluorescent of the hallways, Cody can’t bring himself to let go.

Obi-Wan doesn’t resist; he just lets himself be towed. Even on tired feet, he keeps pace with Cody through the winding hallways to the narrow suite of offices that had been repurposed into officers’ quarters. By some single stroke of good fortune and the late hour, they don’t see any other troopers in the halls, and Cody ushers Obi-Wan into his room with a sense of rightness and relief in his gut.

The door shuts behind them, and Obi-Wan turns with an eyebrow raised. “Commander?”

It takes effort not to blush. 

“Sorry, sir,” Cody says. “I just thought. Well, there’s no such thing as too much caution at this point.”

Cody realizes belatedly that he hadn’t planned anything past getting Obi-Wan away from his work and his loneliness. He’d hoped to be able to get Obi-Wan to put his head down, but that would mean his Jedi in his bed. There’s very little space in his quarters, and—and— 

He’ll sleep on the floor once he can convince Obi-Wan to stay.

“Of course,” Obi-Wan says. “But the report?”

The lights are set to half-brightness in Cody’s quarters, but the harsh blue-white tinge still casts a cold light on the few bare furnishings. There wasn’t much funding for items that would make a former office-space seem like a home. Cody’s eyes search his neatly made twin bed, the stack of flimsi on his own half-desk in the corner, and the armor locker newly screwed into the drywall and the duracrete, looking for an excuse. He doesn’t find one. 

Instead of creasing into frustration or anger, Obi-Wan’s face softens into a terribly gentle smile. He opens his mouth to say something that will undoubtedly be equally terrible and equally gentle, but there’s a knock on the door.

To Cody’s shock and relief, Crys is on the other side, panting.

“It’s not everything,” Crys says. Cody cants the door so that Crys can’t see Obi-Wan in the room, but Crys doesn’t seem to see anything beyond the datastick he’s holding. “But I wanted to make sure you had this sooner rather than later.”

He hands Cody a datastick, turns on his heel, and walks at a fast clip down the hallway. The door shuts behind him without a salute.

Cody doesn’t manage to wipe the surprise from his face before turning back to Obi-Wan, and he knows Obi-Wan has pieced together the fact that Cody’s earlier request hadn’t been entirely genuine. He tries to give the datastick to Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan curls his fingers around the stair-step curve of Cody’s hand instead of the stick.

“Let me guess. You had a bad feeling, hm?” Obi-Wan asks. When Cody meets his eyes, all he sees is a soft kind of understanding, though Cody doesn’t fully understand himself. “I’ll admit that even bad feelings are something I’m starting to miss—”

Between one word and the next, one breath and another, a massive explosion slams through the base.

It’s a cacophony of sensation: a crash like a sledgehammer on his ear drums, a flash of light, and Cody loses track of the world around him in the chaos until he comes to on his knees. His ears are ringing, empty of sound. The lights flicker on and off, and in the darkness he reaches for where he thinks his general should be.

A second shockwave rumbles through the duracrete, sending him all the way to the floor. The emergency light comes on after a few seconds, and even those lights flicker on and off as the ‘crete floor and plasteel wall beams groan beneath and around him. The rattling of the metal casing around the fluorescent lights persists even as the floor stops rolling. In the thin new light, the air shimmers with the rain of plaster dust, and the flimsi that had been stacked on Cody’s desk is now scattered on the floor.

“Cody? Are you okay?” Obi-Wan asks, coughing as he tries again to stand. Plaster is collecting in his hair, adding to the flecks of gray that had gathered naturally. 

They hear shouting from down the hall, voices low and tightly bound in the professionalism Cody had drilled into his men. Feet thunder past the door. The power to the door is out, and Cody has to pull the manual override to get it open. Cody wants to grab his armor and head towards the explosion, but he also knows, now, exactly the direction the explosion came from: the path they had walked not thirty minutes before. Whoever is after his general knows he’s here.

But they didn’t know his general wasn’t in his room.

He looks back at Obi-Wan and sees that understanding reflected in the tightness around Obi-Wan’s eyes, the tense lines of his shoulders. He needs to get his general out, but he doesn’t know what’s lying in wait for them. He doesn’t know what just sent them to their knees. Heavy artillery? Is there a ground force? Do they need air cover if they want to escape?

He wishes Obi-Wan could ask the Force what’s happening, but they’ll just have to trust themselves and their instincts.

Obi-Wan’s nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath. “Ah. Tibanna gas.”

Cody can smell it now, too. The fact that they can smell it at all after the explosion doesn’t bode well for the size of the detonation. The only way someone could have gotten that much tibanna gas into one place, especially when that place is a GAR bunker, is—

“I think our leak isn’t just limited to comms,” Cody says grimly.

“No, indeed,” Obi-Wan responds. “We’ve got a gas leak as well, I think.”

Cody rolls his eyes and stuffs the datastick Crys gave him into a pocket while looking around for what else he can carry. Obi-Wan’s being flippant, but he’s right. Someone must have used the 212th’s own explosives against them. 

He starts packing. “Grab that blaster. At this point, the one thing I know is that you’re their target, and I’m getting you out.”

Obi-Wan hesitates for a single second, looking around, then nods once. Cody remembers him saying Cody , the ship is already lost on the Negotiator , and he hears an echo of that same sentiment now. “Very well, Commander. Lead on.”

The night draws close around them as they hurtle through the streets of New Kaon, but it doesn’t quite draw close enough. Sirens and the flash of multi-colored lights chase them around each turn and beneath each sprawling overpass, through alleys over cobblestone paths. It hadn’t been easy to hustle Obi-Wan out of the burning, collapsing base without being seen, but they had one advantage: no one would ever look for Obi-Wan Kenobi running away from trouble.

Obi-Wan pulls Cody closer to him as they slow their pace, ducking their heads close to each other sticking to the shadows. There’s a real danger of someone trying to mug them because they’re out alone past midnight and not because they, together, command a quarter of the Grand Army of the Republic, but. Street gangs are at the bottom of Cody’s lengthening list of worries.

They don’t have much worth stealing, anyways. Obi-Wan had changed into a spare set of Cody’s blacks while they waited for the initial rush of troopers to stampede past, and Cody had shoved Obi-Wan’s robes into a pack more to hide the evidence of Obi-Wan’s survival than for safekeeping. He also packed the ration bars he’d kept in his desk, a second set of street clothes, and a few spare charge packs for his pistols. One of those pistols is tucked into Cody’s thigh holster; the other is tucked into the inner pocket of the leather jacket Obi-Wan’s wearing over the blacks.

A leather jacket and mussed hair wouldn’t fool more than a cursory glance, but Cody thinks they managed to avoid even those. Because their base had been an office building before it had been an op center, any cameras were ones the security team had installed. They hadn’t had the time or inclination to hide them well or ensure full coverage of the base. Cody is pretty sure they managed to avoid line of sight, droid or trooper, but he wants to get as far from the smoldering wreckage of an attempted assassination as he can.

He runs his fingers over the comm he snatched as he left, making sure that it’s off. Stars, he thinks. Stars, someone almost killed Obi-Wan. Someone got closer than Grievous and Ventress and Maul ever had. But who could it have been? According to Obi-Wan, Lott’s operation was too small to include that level of heavy artillery. And the explosion itself must have come from inside the base. Could there have been a suicide bomber? Within the 212th?

They have too many unknowns, too few resources, and no direction. Cody wishes, nonsensically, that he had taken his armor with him. But it would be blindingly white in the dark night of New Kaon when they need to lie low. Outside of the GAR, it wouldn’t mark him out as one of many. 

It’d just mark him as a target.

Obi-Wan puts a hand on his elbow, and Cody shakes back into focus. Right. They’re on a mission, even though it isn’t in a terrain he’s ever trained for. His mission is to protect his Jedi, and he can do that without armor, without his rifle, and without his brothers at his back. He can do that in a twisting maze of duracrete and plasteel giants, rising from the damp earth to block out the stars Cody has lived amongst for so long. He feels like a rat in a maze, scurrying through yesterday’s trash, and he hates it.

As they walk, the city around them becomes more lively. A few people cross their paths, and more lights are on in the first and second floors of the buildings around them: sunset red and yellow through warped glass. 

When Obi-Wan slows them to a walk, Cody takes the chance to murmur a question. “Do you know where we’re going?”

Cody’s first thought had been to head to the jazz warehouse, with its tunnel access and the medical supplies Bones left, but they’re on the other side of the city from it now. He sort of expects Obi-Wan to know about some remote Jedi contact or secret Temple location hidden on Devisiun instead. 

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “No, but I know where we’re not.”

His sharp blue eyes glance over a knot of people huddled in front of an iron gate separating the pulse of the street from an ingrown garden. Satisfied that no one is listening, he leans his head in close to Cody’s and smiles like a lover. Cody blinks, a little stunned, until he realizes Obi-Wan's sharing strategy.

“People are normally rather difficult to predict,” he continues, “but they’re easy to predict when they panic. People in danger will seek safety; people who are lost will seek the familiar. The first place we want to go while reacting to a surprise attack is usually exactly where the enemy wants us to go.”

“You think they want us at the jazz warehouse.” Fuck, Cody thinks, stunned again at how poorly prepared he'd be for an espionage mission. That hadn't even occurred to him.

Obi-Wan nods. “We don’t know it’s compromised. But, well. At this point, we won’t know what’s compromised until we know who our enemy is.”

Cody's eyebrows crease together, wondering if Obi-Wan is only referring to their potential leak. It doesn't sound like it. “Not just Lott?”

“Not necessarily.” Obi-Wan glances around again. “I’ll explain more when we’ve found a place to land. For now...”

He winks, eyes flicking back to Cody for a single second. “Trust me.”

Even here, even now, even after everything, that’s still the easiest thing in the world to do.

The two moons of Devisiun glint overhead, glowing a dim brownish-white through the wash of smog, and their thin light slides off the nooks and crannies of the city like water off plasteel. Cody and Obi-Wan slide through the dark, empty streets until they reach an area of the city that has yet to sleep. 

A steady base beats through the streets, a pounding baton passed from one nightclub to the next as Cody and Obi-Wan slip between crowds of people dressed in less and less clothing. The elastic sheen of spandex and glow sticks covers the sweat-slick gleam of bare flesh, and Cody startles to realize that many of the laughing faces they pass are covered in various colors of shimmering paint. Yellow and purple and red eyes glint behind shocks of dark hair and curling montrals, hidden within a forest of different colors, The sheer number of differences in the faces and clothes is more foreign than any individual’s fashion,

A train rattles by on lifted rails overhead, and gravel and broken pieces of duracrete on the road below shake with its passing. Obi-Wan’s posture settles into something more casual and less hunched as he goes, easily winding his way through the thickening crowds. The route he picks out is so twisted that even Cody wouldn’t know they’d crossed the same intersection twice if not for how he doubts there can be two clubs advertising Hutt pole dancers on one planet.

Somewhere between glaring pink neon lights and blaring electronic dance music, Obi-Wan pulls Cody into a thin dark corridor. Sounds echo down it, muted, and something small and scaly rustles the trash that’s blown against the walls. Cody breathes in through his nose, trying to calm his heartbeat, and regrets it.

“Here you are,” Obi-Wan says, passing over a thick black cape with a hood so wide at the back that it must have been made for a nautolan. As Cody shrugs it on, Obi-Wan ties a dark blue wrap over the auburn sprawl of his hair. The tasseled ends drape over his shoulders and down the lean lines of his leather-covered arms. He’s still in Cody’s blacks beneath it, but beneath the wrap and the zippered jacket, the blacks look more like leggings than tactical gear.

When Cody looks up to meet Obi-Wan’s eyes, his Jedi is moving towards him with fingers that drip with gold and black in the dim light.

“Sir?” Cody asks, fighting the urge to step back, and Obi-Wan takes the chance to step close.

“This should help us fool any facial recognition scans performed on any street surveillance footage. We just need to disrupt the lines of your face slightly,” Obi-Wan says, and he accompanies each word with a swipe of black or gold grease paint. He must’ve picked it up from one of the groups they passed. “It won’t fool any algorithm using well-lit pictures but here in the dark, we can buy ourselves just a little more time.”

Cody holds as still as he can, swallowing past his instinctive shock. This isn’t anything like letting someone else do his armor paint, he tries to remind himself. His face isn’t his bucket. This paint will wash away come the morning, even if the tingling across his cheeks feels like it might last forever.

At last satisfied, Obi-Wan steps away to blacken the area between his own eyes and nose, to swipe a diagonal down one of his cheeks, and to line the other in vertical gold.

Obi-Wan glances back towards the entrance of the alley, where a crowd of Twi’leks wearing more glitter than clothing amble laughingly past. “Alright, give me your comm.”

Cody hands it over without a question. “It’s off.”

“Good.”

With a pocketknife that Cody wonders if Obi-Wan nicked, Obi-Wan neatly unsnaps the cover of the plasteel sheath and pulls the positive terminal free from the battery housing. He coils the freed wire around the circle of the battery and resnaps the case.

“We can put it back in later,” Obi-Wan reassures him, “but ‘off’ does not always mean untrackable, Commander.”

Cody swallows and nods, then follows his general back into the growing crowds of nightlife. Another hour passes of ducking into alleys and increasingly drunken crowds before Cody stumbles, the weariness settling in. He knows Obi-Wan must be feeling the exhaustion worse, and he can’t help but wonder if Obi-Wan is planning for them to sleep rough tonight. He’s slept rougher than a city alley, sure, and he can see other city residents already curled up on the cracked concrete and beneath shallow awnings.

“Not tonight. We’re almost there, just a little further,” Obi-Wan reassures him in a low voice, and then he winks. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

Cody rolls his eyes but squares his shoulders. He can always go just one more step, no matter how many steps “just one more” ends up being.

The sound of the wharf is a surprise until Cody realizes that they must be on the other side of the bay’s peninsula from Lott’s warehouse. A single gull calls, alone in the entrenched night, and a strange deep-throated barking answers it.

There are fewer partygoers closer to the splash of water that Cody knows in his bones is an ocean, but lights are still on in the surrounding buildings. He realizes in the fugue of adrenaline crash and exhaustion that Obi-Wan must have covered much of the city in the month that they’ve been here. Although he might not know of any hidden Jedi hideouts, he probably knows corners that the city at large has long forgotten. As the smell of booze and vomit fades into seaspray and mildew, Cody notes a few people staggering into motels advertising low rates and no questions. 

The breeze blowing in is colder than the thick, muggy air of the previous district, and Cody shivers. He misses his armor. He misses the command structure. The war is hell, but he’s always had a battalion of brothers at his back and a plan to carry him through it.

Obi-Wan loops his arm through Cody’s and leads them, at last, towards a hotel that looks just as condemned as its neighbors.

The togruta at the front desk doesn’t even look up from the datapad she’s flicking through with disinterest. Her long pink nails tap, tap, tap on the screen in the silence before she sighs. “How long?”

“We’ll pay by the week,” Obi-Wan says smoothly. “And if you have a room on the first floor, away from the lift–”

“No lift,” she says, tutting. “You want the Ritz, it’s a few kilks east, hon’. Charge or chit?”

“Chit. And–”

“Y’all spice-runnin’ or bounty-huntin’?” she asks, already reaching out to take the credit chit that Obi-Wan pulls from the confines of his jacket.

“Bounties,” Obi-Wan says.

Cody tries to keep all of his questions off his face, but it’s hard to stay neutral in the face of this casual lawlessness. He nods as she rattles off a list of rules–no blaster discharges on premise; no brokering spice deals in the lobby but hand-offs are okay; if someone dies on premises, they have to move the body before calling anyone–and clenches his teeth when Obi-Wan hands over another chit to avoid being thumb-printed.

Obi-Wan seems to be producing these chits with no problem, and Cody can’t help but wonder where they’re coming from. Had he had some with him when he left? He wouldn’t be using anything Republic-issue; had they been in the jacket he’d nabbed on the way? Had he been picking pockets the whole way here?

The clerk hands over a plasteel fob with a key tag reading 113. Cody follows at Obi-Wan’s heels down the hallway to the left. The carpet beneath their feet is about the texture of the astro-turf on the Vigilance ’s running track, strangely springy and rough, and it has so many colors in the weave that any sort of stain would fade into the absence of pattern. When they at last reach their door, Cody is surprised to find a halfway-reasonable room on the other side of it.

There are two twin beds with no visible frames, and they look serviceable if not necessarily comfortable. There’s a desk by the window on the far wall and a chair beneath it, and the two floor lamps in the room turn on when Cody flips the wall switch. Obi-Wan moves to the center of the room and nods, apparently satisfied. The beds, however small they are, sing a siren’s song of rest, but Cody can’t help but feel like he needs to wait for Obi-Wan’s ‘okay’ before he relaxes. Every step of this journey has had more danger in it than Cody had seen, and he doesn’t know what might be lurking in this room.

“Ah, Cody.” Obi-Wan’s eyes crinkle at the corners when he looks over. “How about you take the first shower? You’ve certainly earned it.”

Cody nods and drags himself into the closet-sized refresher tucked into one of the room’s corners. He would love to faceplant on a bed and pass out, but Obi-Wan’s right; he’ll sleep better for having showered first.

The age of the city shows itself again. Cody had been hoping for a sonic that he could use to shake some of the sweat and grime from his clothes, and he stares in vague disappointment at the collection of knobs and hoses of a water-only shower. The pipes squeak and rattle when he twists the knobs before releasing a spray of water so cold that Cody pulls himself away with a bitten-off curse. 

He strips while praying that it will eventually heat. As much as he’ll hate having to pull his dirty clothes back on afterwards, he’d rather have them be dirty than wet.

At last, the rattling pipes start pouring out steam instead of ice, and Cody steps under the spray with a long sigh of relief. The water pressure isn’t bad, and the heat loosens muscles in Cody’s back that Cody thought might never unwind. He scrubs his face with the thin bar of soap in the shower and runs his nails through the clipped coils of his hair. Paint and dirt and plaster run down the weary lines of his body to circle the clogged, coughing drain. Cody closes his eyes and tilts his face into the spray, breathing deep lungfuls of air through his mouth. 

Okay, he thinks. Okay.

He pulls himself from the water a long five minutes later. The towels tucked beneath the sinks are as thin as dish rags, but there are plenty of them. He wets the corner of one of the hand towels and scrubs what stains he can from his jeans before hanging them on a hook to dry. He flips his undershirt and boxers inside out, tugs them on with a grimace, and grabs his pistol and shoulder harness before stepping into the chill of the room.

When he comes out, Obi-Wan has drawn the curtains and pushed the back of the chair up beneath the door handle. The room is dark with the curtains pulled and only one lamp on, and it casts strange shadows as it travels over the chair and beds to the far wall. Obi-Wan puts one finger between the curl of one of the porceplast bases and the bulb on the other lamp, and he pulls a black speck out from the recessed groove as Cody walks in. 

Cody’s stomach drops out, but Obi-Wan smiles.

“Simply a holdover from one of the spice cartels, I think,” Obi-Wan says, crushing it between his fingers. “We should be fine.”

“Good. Then, uh, the shower’s free,” Cody says, and the warmth on his skin lingers when Obi-Wan presses his shoulder on the way to the ‘fresher.

Cody sits on the edge of one of the beds, so exhausted he feels like his rib cage is going to collapse from it. The bed moves when he shifts his weight back too far, and he has to recenter it and himself. He’s still sitting on the edge, trying not to rock the mattress back and forth on the casters, by the time Obi-Wan emerges. 

He’s stripped to a white undershirt and the leggings of Cody’s blacks, and he runs a towel behind the back of his neck as he shuts the door behind him. His auburn hair is dark brown and curling beneath the weight of water, and his scar-studded skin is flushed a soft red from the heat. Cody has seen him out of his robes before, of course, being treated in the med bay or floating in bacta, but never like this. Never soft and rumpled and stripped.

 He’s—he’s so—

Stars, at least now he doesn’t have to worry about Obi-Wan catching any of Cody’s feelings in the Force. Cody looks down at the riotous carpet between his feet and accidentally shifts the bed again.

Obi-Wan laughs at the squeak while Cody tries to put it back in place with his feet.

“Ah, I should have expected as much,” he says, and Cody raises an eyebrow. 

"Bug or feature?" 

“Feature. Many hotels use modular platforms to more easily accommodate multiple species. The staff can slide these platforms together or break them apart, then put larger or smaller mattresses on top. It’s a cheap way of providing bedding for everyone from Chewbacca to Master Yoda without having to buy hundreds of massive Wookie-sized beds.”

He sits down as well and laughs when his own bed moves beneath him. 

“Usually they lock in place,” he grins.

The atmosphere is light, suddenly. Light and easy in a way Cody hadn’t expected, and he is surprised to find that Obi-Wan’s good cheer seems genuine: actually genuine, and not one of his usual fronts. Cody bites the inside of his cheek, wondering how Obi-Wan has found cheer here, alone and cut off from their men and their purpose.

They sit in an uneasy quiet for a minute, then two, and Cody looks up to see Obi-Wan’s calm blue eyes soft with patient curiosity.

“Ask, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, gently parting the waves of silence.

“Sorry, sir, I only…” Cody pauses to gather his thoughts. “I’m used to danger. I’m used to expecting death around every corner and laughing about it. Joking on the battlefield, blaster fire raining down, that’s second nature. I'm used to handling that kind of fear. But this?”

He shrugs, not sure how to put everything in words. Now that they’ve sat down, the reality of their situation is crashing in. Obi-Wan is still powerless; they still have a leak in their comms or a traitor in their midst; they don’t have access to any Republic resources; and their only mission is to find someone who could be long off-planet. It’s a different kind of fear, here, and he doesn’t know how to joke about it. 

Obi-Wan may be the one who lost his powers, but Cody’s never felt more powerless.

He swallows the panic rising up his throat. He knows how to control that, at least.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says at last. He’s used to following Obi-Wan’s lead, too, but he’s also used to being useful while following. All he’s been able to do since they left the base is duck his head and run. “This is—it’s not what I’ve trained for.”

“Mm. Well, nothing needs doing now. If anyone was tracking our comms, they think we’re clear on the other side of the city, and if they were tracking us, well. I swung us through enough loops and back alleyways that they’re at least very dizzy,” Obi-Wan reassures him. “And the staff think we’re bounty hunters, so they won’t raise an eyebrow when we start looking for Lott.”

Cody nods and doesn’t tell Obi-Wan that that wasn’t what he’s worried about. He can find a way to be useful, he thinks. They just need to find Lott, and Cody can pick the rest of it up along the way. The GAR had provided plenty of on-the-job-training; he’s always been a fast learner. 

He just hopes he’s fast enough.

Across the two feet of space between their beds, Obi-Wan tilts his head. His focus sharpens on Cody, and apparently the way he can see people—truly see them, all of them—hadn’t been due to his Force sensitivity.

“You know, Cody,” he says, tone still light, “I feel more like a Jedi now than I have in three years.”

Cody’s head snaps up. “What?”

But Obi-Wan just keeps smiling. “It’s ironic, really, I know. But when I was a padawan, all I did was travel from planet to foreign planet with my master, trying to solve poorly defined problems while on the run from, well, everyone.”

His eyes drift to some point over Cody’s shoulder and a million light years away. “Odd as it is, this is something of a return to form.”

When Cody had been preparing to take command of the 7th Sky Corps, he had read what records existed of Obi-Wan's involvement on Naboo and Mandalore and countless others. And he’d read them again, when General Kenobi—just Kenobi, then, before Cody had become intimately familiar with the man's white knuckles and wry smiles—had promoted Cody to marshal commander of the Third System. The Jedi didn't have reporting requirements, though, so details had been few and far between. Cody knew that the Jedi didn’t have much experience with war, but he had never imagined they used to spend their time like this: alone in a run-down hotel room with nothing but the clothes on their backs and unknown, untold threats beyond their door. 

Three years ago, Obi-Wan had joined his world. And now Cody’s joined his.

"You do it well," Cody says. He doesn’t just mean the sneaking around, either, but everything: being a general, being a Jedi, and being a good man.

“That remains to be seen, I think. It’s hard to know what the right choice is without the Force. I’m running on instincts now.”

“Seems to me that the Force is mostly instinct anyways. It never did give you a straight answer,” Cody says, and Obi-Wan laughs in agreement before silence takes the room once more.

The Jedi weren’t meant to be generals, but the clones were never meant to be anything more than their soldiers. And here and now, in the dim light of a hotel lamp on the other side of the galaxy from the war, neither of them are anything they’re supposed to be.

Cody wants to lie down, but he thinks he’ll be asleep before his head hits the pillow if his body leans even a few degrees off vertical, and he has one more thing he needs to know. One more thing bounces like a caltrop at the bottom of his stomach, and he opens his mouth.

“Sir?”

“Mm?” Obi-Wan responds, sounding half-asleep himself.

“Why didn’t you include any clones in your mission plans?” 

Cody fights not to twist his fingers into the bedsheets beneath his palms. He doesn’t have his armor or his army, but he has his dignity still. He’s amply proven that he isn’t much use in an undercover op, but he isn’t completely useless, and neither of them had known that comms were being monitored before they left Coruscant. He doesn’t speculate on why; he just waits while the guilt in his stomach turns over.

If he had been there sooner, he thinks, he could have kept his Jedi a Jedi. Could have kept him safe so that he could go back to what he loves after the war.

And yet.

Obi-Wan sighs and strokes his beard, letting his hand cover the regretful downturn of his mouth. 

“We didn’t know—well. We didn’t think they were developing a weapon to use against Jedi,” he admits. “We thought they were making one to use against clones.”

When Cody just stares, Obi-Wan’s mouth twists further. He says, “There were rumors that someone was making a virus keyed to the Fett genome, and military intelligence put the base of operations on Devisiun.”

A virus keyed to the Fett genome would be able to take out the entire clone army without once harming any of the organic Separatists or the civilians that both sides want to keep alive. Icy fear drives itself into Cody’s heart before he remembers that military intel had been wrong, that his brothers are safe, and that the Jedi are not.

“We would have helped, no matter the risk,” Cody says, because that seems important. That would’ve been a threat to every single one of his brothers, everything he fought for, everything— “You have to know that.”

“I know. Of course I know.” Obi-Wan shakes his head. When he looks up, his eyes are more gray than blue. “I just. I didn’t want to give them any chance to obtain even one more test subject. Not you. Not anyone.” 

Seven kriffing hells, Cody thinks. No wonder Obi-Wan had worked himself to the bone, to the marrow, trying to hunt down Lott. No wonder he was so adamant in going alone and still chasing every lead. He’d put himself perfectly in Lott’s crosshairs to protect his men, and his men hadn’t been there to watch his back. He’d lost his everything to save Cody’s everything.

“I’m sorry,” Cody says, and his voice breaks horribly on the second syllable. “I’m so—I’m so sorry that you—that you’re—”

But Obi-Wan just looks at him with a twinkle coming back into his eyes.

“Oh, come now. It’s not not so bad. I wasn’t always going to be a Jedi, you know,” Obi-Wan says, and the shock of the statement is enough to snap Cody out of his guilt. The clones had never had any other option; he’d thought the Jedi were the same.

“You weren’t?”

“When no master would choose me as their padawan, I was almost forced into the AgriCorp. Wouldn’t that have been strange? Master Qui-Gon always had a greener thumb than I did, but, in another life, I would’ve been pulling weeds.”

Rex had told Cody once, in confidence, about a clone who had found his way into a different life: one on a farm, pulling up weeds. A deserter? Cody had asked, eyebrows drawn together, but Rex had shaken his head. A free man , Rex had corrected before knocking back another cup of the moonshine from Boil’s still. The words had rested uncomfortably between them, sharp-edged and too-large, until the bell for the fourth shift had rung.

A free man, Cody thinks again, and he looks across the space between them to see Obi-Wan watching him with his eyes half-lidded in the orange lamplight. The atmosphere feels thick around them, heavy with something not at all like understanding, and Cody wonders if this is what natborn sleepovers are like: liminal with uneasy truths.

The question is out of his mouth before he even thinks it: “What life would you choose, if you could?”

When Obi-Wan smiles again, there’s nothing self-deprecating in it at all. It’s wistful and soft, and it makes Cody’s heart stutter in his chest.

“I’d be a Jedi, of course,” he says. He traces the line of one of his wrists with his thumb, and the veins there stand light blue against his pale skin. “If I could choose, I’d be a Jedi.”

Cody closes his eyes. Of course.  He wonders briefly if all Jedi would say the same: if Commander Tano had thought about it before she left, or if Skywalker wonders about it every time he visits his senator on Naboo. 

“What about you, Cody?” Obi-Wan’s voice cuts through his thoughts, and Cody looks up. “What would you choose?”

“I don’t know,” Cody says, overly honest. He can’t imagine a life that isn’t like this one, even though he knows many of his brothers have. Every spare bit of his time and energy over the years has been spent trying to get better, to get harder and faster and smarter, to get as many of his brothers through the war as he could. 

To get his Jedi through the war. 

Honesty runs through him again, driving him forward. There is one truth he knows.

He swallows. “But I’d choose you if I could, sir. I’d choose you every time.”

“I…” Obi-Wan starts, but then stops and breathes out. After a long second, the corner of his mouth quirks into a crooked smile. “I’m not sure I’d choose the war, but… but you must know. Cody, you must know that I’d choose you, too.”

He falls quiet, eyes soft. “Given half the chance, I’d choose you, too.”

Cody’s heart flutters, uneven and unsure, within the bars of his rib cage. He watches as if from a great distance as Obi-Wan pulls the string on the last lit lamp. A click, and the light in the room snuffs out like a candle.

A thin sliver of moonlight leaks through the curtains to snake across the floor. A light from the charging port on the desk casts a red sun on the ceiling, and a blue spark from beneath the bathroom door dances through. Cody lies back and winces as the springs creak. Kriff, but he didn’t know they made beds more uncomfortable than the sheet-covered bricks that pass for mattresses in the GAR. 

He’d thought he’d fall asleep instantly, but he isn’t quite there. He can hear the steady ocean rhythm of Obi-Wan’s breathing two feet away, and the sound fills his own lungs. He doesn’t think about how easy it would be to reach out a hand.

He doesn’t think about how easy it would be to put the bed casters to good use and push the two together.

“Is the silence of the Force still hard?” Cody asks, drifting into a hazy sort of halfway sleep. His Jedi is alive, he reminds himself. He should just pass out, but he can’t help checking.

“It's still taking some getting used to,” he hears, which means yes in Obi-Wan. Cody can’t fix that right now, but at least he can sympathize.

“I miss it too, you know,” Cody says as he drifts off, remembering the violence of the loss that had cut through him when the needle had gone in. “Feeling you there.” 

It had taken him too long to recognize the feeling of Obi-Wan checking on him through the Force, and now he might have lost it forever. He almost thinks he can feel it again now, that warm and patient and well-loved light, but it’s a ghost of a presence: there and gone. He pulls the memory of the feeling tight to his heart and lets himself slide under.

“…wait. Wait, you... Cody?” he hears, but then he’s fast asleep.

Chapter Text

The next morning dawns muted and gray through the heavy fall of the room's closed curtains. Cody blinks awake, exhaustion still leaden in his bones, and pulls himself upright with a force of will. Even with his brain half asleep, he seeks Obi-Wan out like a compass seeking north. 

It’s a small room; Obi-Wan isn’t hard to find.

He’s standing by the little automatic caf maker by the desk and staring it down with an expression of perfect focus. On the desk to his right, there are two paper cups with tea bag tags hanging over their rolled lips, and Cody has no idea where he could possibly have gotten tea. He doesn’t ask, just swings his legs over the side of his bed and moves, unspeaking, towards Obi-Wan. 

Obi-Wan hums with satisfaction when the caf maker dings. He must have run it without any grounds in the basket because the carafe beneath is full of clear water and steam. 

“Apologies, Cody. They were out of caf,” Obi-Wan says, pouring hot water into both cups. Steam and something earthy wafts upwards, and Cody breathes it in with a bare sliver of awareness. 

“Who runs out of caf?” he manages as he takes the proffered cup, and Obi-Wan laughs.

“The 212th surely would, if anyone but you were managing our supply runs,” he winks.

Cody barely notices the compliment, too busy calculating how difficult it would be to get back into the printing warehouse to get the instant caf he knows is on the table—and arriving at “impossible”.

Obi-Wan huffs a little breath of amusement and turns away with his tea. He sits on the edge of his bed and crosses his legs, blowing across the top of his cup to cool it. Despite his early morning and possible supply run, he looks better. Not perfect, of course: he’s still wearing the leggings of Cody’s blacks and a white undershirt. The blacks have grayed with dust; the undershirt has grayed with time. His auburn hair has clearly been combed to the side with wet fingers, and his beard needs a trim. 

But despite all that, despite everything, his eyes still twinkle up at Cody. The muscles in his arms are corded beneath the scars, and the line of his back is strong with purpose.

“Good morning,” Cody says, finally waking up and fighting back a blush for no good reason whatsoever. “What’s the plan?”

Obi-Wan takes a thoughtful sip of his tea. “Well. Our goal is still to avoid giving Lott any evidence that his serum works, and to stop him before he can sell or ship it. To that end, we’re still treating all communications as compromised, but we need more information.”

As marshal commander, Cody is well-accustomed to operating on less than perfect information, but the information they have is less than nothing. He’s not sure what the right move is here, though: technical reconnaissance? Physical scouting? 

“Where do we start?” he asks.

“With the information we already have, I think. You still have Crys’ report?”

Cody’s hand goes to the where the inner pocket of his jacket would be if he were still wearing it. He’d almost forgotten about the datastick in the explosion, the long and twisting race through the city streets, and the revelations of the prior night. 

“I do,” he says, grabbing his jacket from the foot of the bed and pressing his fingers to the nub of plastoid tucked safely into it. Crys hadn’t had much time to research, let alone compile or summarize data, and Cody hopes that Obi-Wan hasn’t put too much stock into it. He’d mentioned it to Obi-Wan to get him away from work; he doubts there’s anything useful to the cause.

“But I don’t have high hopes for the information,” he continues. “He’d only had a few hours to pull it together.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he brought it to us anyways,” Obi-Wan says, smiling, and Cody realizes that he just admitted that he hadn’t actually been expecting Crys to be bringing the report.

“Ah, sir,” Cody says, tripping over his tongue in search of an apology. Obi-Wan raises a hand and an eyebrow to stop him.

“And on that note,” he says, and Cody straightens into an approximation of parade rest, preparing for one of Obi-Wan’s light admonishments that always hurt worse than any of the Cuy’val Dar’s punishments. 

But Obi-Wan just smiles. “We’ll need to drop titles going forward. There’s no need to stand on ceremony; we’ve no army to run, and I’ve no Force powers with which to help run it. You should call me Obi-Wan.”

The bottom drops out of Cody’s stomach. Ice fills his veins while air refuses to fill his lungs. Drop titles? 

“Sir—”

“Obi-Wan,” Obi-Wan corrects.

“Sir,” Cody stresses, gritting his teeth, and a surge of anger mixes into his shock and alarm. He won’t let Obi-Wan abandon being a general that easy. “Sir, if this is more of you trying to—to let me down gently, to start stepping away from the GAR, I won’t let you. You can’t just drop us—you can’t just—”

What? Can’t walk away? What could Cody do to stop him?

He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say or what he wants. He knows that the generals of the GAR are Jedi, that the Jedi are Force-sensitive, and that Obi-Wan is no longer Force-sensitive. He also knows that, if they don’t get their hands on Lott and his research, Obi-Wan’s condition might be permanent. He knows all of this, yes, but he’s not going to just give up . Not like this, not this quickly, and he’s upset that Obi-Wan might already have.

That Obi-Wan might be so willing to let Cody go.

“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, eyes wide. “Oh, no, that’s not…”

He stands with a whisper of sound, and when he moves to stand in front of Cody, the weight of his presence is palpable. His voice fills the room. “Cody. Cody, I’m not—I won’t walk away from you and your brothers. With or without powers, I won’t abandon you, and I’m sorry if that’s what you thought I implied.”

Cody holds his breath, distantly impressed that Obi-Wan had been able to see through his fumbled complaints to the heart of his fear, and tries to settle the racing of his heart as Obi-Wan takes Cody by both arms and holds him there. 

“I meant—I meant, regardless of what our ranks are or should be, we’re in this together. Your opinions and expertise matter as much as mine—no, Cody, they do. We have to be partners in this. I need you beside me, not behind me. Trust yourself, because I trust you.” 

Cody feels fit to shatter, held over-gently and treated with such sweet words, and he holds himself together just long enough for Obi-Wan to let go. Obi-Wan steps back as he does, giving Cody back his space, and then one corner of his mouth quirks up with wry humor. “And besides all that, calling me ‘General’ would blow our cover.”

Cody nods, mind still churning through what Obi-Wan just said but able to accept at least that last point. Obi-Wan doesn’t move to sit down again, though. He continues to look at Cody, equal parts patient and expectant, and it takes Cody a few long seconds to realize what he’s waiting for.

“Oh.” Cody wishes, not for the first time, that he could shove his bucket on. Still, it’s not nearly as hard as he thought it would be to say, “Okay. Okay, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan opens his mouth, satisfied, but Cody keeps going, forging on with fierce determination. He has something that Obi-Wan needs to accept, too. “But you’ll always be my general, okay? My general, and my Jedi.”

The words settle into the thickening atmosphere between them, and Obi-Wan lets them hang there, a warm ultimatum, before his eyes crease into half-moons.

“Thank you, Cody,” he says, and Cody manages a nod before he steps away.

The terminal in the hotel is as ancient as everything else, tucked away into what is clearly half storage closet, half office, and a quarter the size it needs to be. The brown-gray ends of a mop fall across his hair as he stands over Obi-Wan’s shoulder to better see the screen. He brushes them off, ignoring the impulse to put the closet into GAR regulation order, and leans in.

“Where to, Gen—Obi-Wan?” he asks, and Obi-Wan zooms out from what is clearly a map of the city. Cody knows well enough that it’d be unwise to load anything classified to a hotel terminal, but he doesn’t know where to find a reliably secure public access point. He knows, too, that they don’t have enough credits to buy anything to use themselves.

“There, I think,” Obi-Wan says, pointing out a holonet cafe a few kliks from their location. A strange wave of domesticity washes over Cody, huddled close in his borrowed clothes. He wonders if this is how the few tourists of the city are spending their morning: looking for places to go and how to get there.

“It’s got 83 reviews, all equally bad,” Cody observes. “Wow. The Republic’s bureaucrats could learn something from that kind of consistent mediocrity.”

Obi-Wan snorts and closes out their session. “Mm, well. At least there’s no paperwork on the run.”

“Almost worth it,” Cody says, and Obi-Wan laughs again.

The city is different in the light of day. The sunlight has bleached the danger from the streets, and the rustle of the trash blowing along the gutters is dull and mundane now that Cody can watch it roll.

There are a few people out, all focused on their destination, and Cody and Obi-Wan fall into step together on the cracked sidewalk. The roads are empty of speeders in this area, but more and more begin to pass as time ticks towards midday and Cody and Obi-Wan get closer to actual residences. Crowds thicken around them, brushing by with callous and casual normality. Cody is so accustomed to seeing civilians in refugee camps or marshaling a resistance of their own. Even on Coruscant, still untouched by the war, Cody has never walked the streets out of armor. It’s strange to think that the people moving past him now aren’t noticing him at all.

The holonet cafe that Obi-Wan had found is close by relative to the long and twisting path they took last night, but it still brings them past a main shopping district. They pass a place selling what Obi-Wan assures him are actually shoes, one that has a rainbow array of ponchos shining out from the display windows, and a novelty tea store that manages to draw Obi-Wan’s genuine attention for a second. When they reach their destination, though, the display windows are papered over with advertisements for this game or another and various discounted rates.

The door to the holonet cafe opens with the tinkling of a little bell. It’s dark inside, a stark contrast to the clear sunshine in the streets, and the few faces gathered within are lit only by the pale blue glow of terminal screens. Within the dim light, most of those faces look like they’d started last night and don’t care about the onset of morning. Obi-Wan doesn’t look at them; he presses one of his chits to the self-serve kiosk at the door and takes the card it spits out. There are plenty of open terminals, and none of the other customers even look up when Obi-Wan walks towards one set in a secluded corner of the shop. He plugs the card into the side, and the screen lights up.

Cody knows these terminals have enough nested virtual private networks to puzzle even the GAR’s top slicers, but he still hesitates to hand over Crys’ datastick when Obi-Wan holds out a hand. 

Once it’s plugged in, a folder pops up with a couple of data sheets, a bunch of files with alphanumeric names,, and a single plain text file labeled ReadMe. Obi-Wan opens this last to find a hurried explanation of what each file is: system logs for their on-base communications network, a triangulation of recent official and unexpected calls, and a near-incomprehensible list of information about end-to-end encryption keys. It’s a lot of work for three days of monitoring, and Cody wonders exactly what had caused this much intense forensic activity.

At the bottom of the readme, he finds it.

11308 not from Separatist space , Crys has typed out. Originated Republic, 0.0.0.

“What does that mean?” Obi-Wan asks, opening the other files and starting to scroll through. “What’s 11308?”

“I think it’s the number of an entry. Can you search it in one of the data sheets?”

Cody had been thinking that Crys might find some lingering irregularity in the system logs: activity at odd hours or a user account logging in from two locations at the same time. He didn’t think Crys would find a specific call.

“The logging system doesn’t decrypt or save the message being sent, so we can’t figure out what was said,” Cody continues. He had never specialized in slicing, but he’d had comms flash training just the same as all the command class clones. “We can, however, see metadata associated with the call. We can guess the encryption method based on the hash, and it will pick up various signal tags as it’s routed through space, so we can see where it’s been.”

The second data sheet Obi-Wan pulls up has a 11308 record, and it’s the very last row.

“This was yesterday,” Obi-Wan says, scrolling across to the time stamp. “Yesterday, and…”

“Another one, an hour before the explosion,” Cody finishes. That call must have been what sent Cry running. He reads the originating coordinates and frowns. “But what does Crys mean, ‘not from Separatist space’? That’s in the D'Astan sector. It's practically Serenno.”

They switch back and forth between files, checking Crys’ file key and the slapdash, technical explanations he included that are just as much of a puzzle as the lists of frequencies, time stamps, and coordinates. 

The sheet of triangulation calculations at last bring clarity.

“It wasn’t originally from Separatist space,” Obi-Wan concludes grimly. “It was only routed through one of their relays. Someone in the Republic wanted to make this call seem like it was from the Seps.”

Cody taps the ‘ 0.0.0’ tacked onto the end of Crys’ last message. “Not just someone in the Republic. Triple zero means Coruscant.”

"Mm. So, there's someone on Coruscant with enough Republic clearance to know our encryption protocols and to have access to our secured communications terminals… and enough Separatist clearance to know theirs.”

"Someone who wants you dead," Cody reminds him, because there's coincidence, and there's direct evidence of a kill order.

A kill order that one of the 212th obeyed.

But why? Why would any of the 212th do this? Just on a verbal order from a Separatist spy? This doesn't make any sense. 

Obi-Wan doesn't respond; he just stares at the blinking cursor at the end of the unassuming line of text and brings his hand up to the auburn curve of his beard. A furrow is building between his eyes, and Cody has never seen him look perturbed at the idea that someone wants to kill him. It's something he usually assumes about people he doesn’t know.

“Sir? I mean—Obi-Wan?”

"Is there a way to pick apart what was in that message or who sent it?" Obi-Wan asks. Durasteel runs through the backbone of his voice. "Any way at all?"

Cody shakes his head. All their encryptions use asymmetric keys and trapdoor functions.

"Not without more people, computing power, and time. Lots of time.”

“Ah, time. The one thing you can’t buy or steal when you need more of it,” Obi-Wan says, pulling the datastick from the computer. He wipes their session with a few keystrokes, pulls the login card, and stares at the resulting blank screen with barely concealed anger. He presses his lips together as he stands. “Damn. Damn.”

It’s hardly the first time that Cody’s heard Obi-Wan curse, and he knows it won’t be the last, but it’s a surprise every time. He follows Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan drops their card off and pushes the door open, and they walk single-file into the bright yellow sun of the afternoon. 

“Obi-Wan?” Cody asks, jogging slightly to catch up to Obi-Wan’s lead.

Obi-Wan shakes his head once, the barest hint of motion, and Cody stays silent as they work their way through the crowds and the busy streets. They walk side by side, heads down, until the sounds of the waves overcome the sounds of speeder engines. Cody catches sight of some of the white-winged birds that circle the bay as they walk, and a strange bark like that of a young aiwha echoes through the heavy humid air.

The colors of the shops around them grow more and more garish until, at last, Cody and Obi-Wan reach a set of piers. Obi-Wan leans on the rusted metal railing over the crashing gray-blue waves and the honks of the almost-aiwha. He stares out at the waves as he starts to speak in a low, serious voice.

“There is a shadow over the Republic,” Obi-Wan says. “More than that—there is a spider, spinning a vast web and pulling on its many strings.”

Cody’s mouth twists in confusion. As much as he loves listening to Obi-Wan, sometimes he wishes the man would get to the point. “What do you mean?”

The murky storm of Obi-Wan’s eyes matches the sea rolling beneath them. He looks at Cody for a long second, weighing how much of an answer to give, before sighing. Cody hopes it’s an “spill everything” sigh.

“The Jedi believe that there is a Sith sitting somewhere in the upper echelons of the Republic, leaking secrets or falsifying them,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody’s eyes widen. “This thing with Lott… we don’t know if they’re related. But finding someone highly ranked in the Republic, routing calls through Separatist space to attack me, to manipulate our men… ” 

The wind whips his words into nothing, and Cody leans in close against the biting cold of the breeze. It’s a very serious threat, and an even more serious accusation. “Do you have proof?”

But Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“No. We have only what the Jedi have always had: a bad feeling.”

As much as the Jedi have always acted on their feelings, on the will of the Force or their interpretation of it, they have rarely needed to defend their actions in court. To take down a spy entrenched in the Republic, they would need more than a feeling.

Obi-Wan sighs. “It could be a coincidence. Lott should want me alive, not in pieces on the floor.”

The waves with their white caps crash into the posts of the deck below, over and over again, and Cody stares at them while thinking. When you don’t have data, sometimes you have to trust your gut. “No, that call coming in when it did wasn’t a coincidence.“ 

“How do you know?”

“Whoever put in that call could’ve done it any time,” Cody says, completely certain. None of their filters had flagged that call, and it was only because Cody had set Crys to review the logs that anything had been found at all. “It wasn’t just that they wanted you dead and finally succeeded. They only tried to kill you after you’d lost the Force, which means they knew you had, either from Lott or another source. But why?”

“Perhaps they had assumed that the Force would have protected me before this.”

“If it’s a Sith, they’d know the Force doesn’t protect against explosions. No, they acted because they didn’t want proof of Lott’s success getting out. You’re evidence they need to destroy as much as you’re evidence Lott needs to keep,” Cody says, and Obi-Wan’s eyebrows draw together like a closing curtain. “We know Lott had been getting classified Republic intel from somewhere, and it was probably the Sith, but...”

“But now one wants me dead, and the other needs me alive. They had been using each other to achieve different goals,” Obi-Wan says. His hands clench on the rust-red flaked railing until his knuckles bleach to white pearls. “Damn it. And we’re still not any closer to understanding what those different goals might be.”

A few ships make their way along the horizon: great durasteel monoliths that look like toys at this distance, gliding smoothly along far-away waves. The crash of the waves and the thick smell of fish and salt are the only similarities to Kamino. The rest of it—the beach to the right and left of them, the dull cacophony of people moving along the wharf, and the steady warmth of Obi-Wan at his side—is as unlike the cold sterile cage of Cody’s homeworld as an ocean could be.

“We’ll figure this out,” he says, drawing from some well of certainty he’s never felt before. “We will.”

Obi-Wan gives him a smile, small and all the more real for it, and pushes off from the rail. They turn in step back towards the hustle of the wharf. “Alright, Cody. Sitrep. Where do we start?”

Cody mourns, briefly, the vast differential between things they know and things they don’t, but he also thinks that Obi-Wan was right: he’s better prepared for this than he’d expected. It’s still a strategy game, he thinks. He’s just playing on a wilder, less familiar board.

“We still don’t know what comms are compromised, by either the spy or Lott, but we can’t fight two battles at once with just the two of us. We should stay focused on Lott. Our top priority hasn’t changed: stop him from selling his serum or using it again. Plus, of our two enemies, he’s the one who doesn’t want you dead yet.” Cody shrugs as Obi-Wan snorts. “What? It’s a point in his favor.”

“Hm. Do we know he’s still on the planet? He could very well have given up on me and decided to hunt down a different Jedi,” Obi-Wan says. There’s no dismissal in it, just curiosity. The back-and-forth feels the same as their debates in his quarters do in the long lead-up to a siege, and Cody hums thoughtfully.

While he’s thinking, Obi-Wan leads them towards a different part of the piers. This one is further from the shipping and fishing docks, and it holds the faint ring of cheerful tinny music and an incredible sugary smell. Cody inhales, fascinated by it, before refocusing on Obi-Wan’s question.

“…No,” Cody says at last. “No, I don’t think so. I think this whole mission has been a trap for you, specifically.”

“Me?”

Cody ticks through the information on his fingers as they walk, becoming more and more certain as he does. 

“You said Lott knew things about you that aren’t public knowledge, so he’d researched you in advance and knew you were coming. You were sent here alone, without a Jedi partner, and under false pretenses almost certainly planted by a spy in the Republic. Pretenses,” Cody adds, “that were tailor-made to ensure you wouldn’t take any clone back-up. Most other generals would’ve taken us along anyways. This trap was set for you, Obi-Wan.”

Cody doesn’t know why, exactly. Almost any other Jedi would have been easier to catch. Skywalker’s more powerful, maybe, but Obi-Wan’s a slippery bastard. If Cody had to pick a Jedi to capture or kill, Obi-Wan would be at the bottom of his list, and not just because Cody—

Cody—

Obi-Wan slants him a knowing, considering look. For a second it’s just like he has his powers again, and Cody worries, nonsensically, that Obi-Wan has regained them just in time to catch Cody’s affection in the Force.

“Perhaps he wanted to make sure his serum worked against a powerful Jedi,” Cody offers, trying to focus. “Or maybe he wanted to target someone with a high enough profile that the Separatists would notice your absence in the war even if you escaped. Regardless, he’s after you.”

Obi-Wan hums again and tucks his arm through Cody’s again, pulling them both through thickening crowds and to the source of the incredible smell. Cody’s grateful for the link as they fight their way through the crush of commuters and heavily muscled dockyard workers even as the new closeness sends his heart to his throat. Someone is yelling from the front of the mob in a language Cody doesn’t know, and the jostling of people around him has his hackles up. 

What could possibly be worth this, he thinks, distracted from his earlier line of thought. Why would Obi-Wan—

A tall Kel Dor at last moves out of Cody’s way, and he can see, at last, the piles and piles of powdered, cinnamon covered miniature donuts behind the counter in front of him. Through a feat of acrobatics and at least two thrown elbows, Obi-Wan manages to secure a bucket of the things, hot and greasy and covered with sugar. He passes the bucket over to Cody with a grin and they make their escape, their prize tucked carefully between them.

Cody looks over. “Why?”

“Try one,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody does. 

The taste and texture are incredible: a burst of sugar and melted butter and savory, salted dough. The first bite practically melts on Cody’s tongue. He’s halfway through a second one before he realizes that Obi-Wan’s laughing at him, albeit politely and behind the curtain of his hand. There’s powdered sugar on Cody's fingers and down the front of his stolen black jacket, and he hardly cares. He finishes off the second donut and licks his fingers clean, chasing the taste, and he catches a brief burst of red at the tops of Obi-Wan’s ears as he does. 

Ah, Cody thinks, and he fights down a grin and tries to remember his manners. “Thanks. But why donuts?”

Obi-Wan looks away as Cody reaches for a third donut, and the nascent blush is covered by the auburn fall of his hair. Cody mourns the loss, wondering if it goes down the back of his neck, too.

He coughs lightly before answering. “Two reasons. First, because nothing distracts a crowd like fried street food, and we need the money.” 

Obi-Wan pats the pocket of his jacket, and Cody only just now notices how much heavier it looks. It looks lumpy even from the outside, and it clacks a little as they walk. Did he—did he really get all of that from the few minutes they were by the stall? Cody is still conflicted over the casual theft the Jedi seem so comfortable with, but they are trying to save the galaxy; he hopes that counts for something.

He offers the bucket of donuts to Obi-Wan as a reward for his quick fingers, and Obi-Wan smiles as he takes one.

“What’s the other reason?” Cody asks.

“Think of these as an apology present,” Obi-Wan says, and his smile turns rueful. “I’ve got an idea, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“I don’t like it,” Cody says.

“I know.”

“I really don’t like it,” Cody stresses. “Obi-Wan, she tried to get you killed.”

“We assume she tried to get me killed.”

“This plan only works if she did!”

“Yes. There is that,” Obi-Wan says, still smiling, and Cody bites back a series of increasingly creative Mando’a curses as Obi-Wan opens the door.

The inside of the shop is a visual cacophony. There is barely space for light to trickle through the clouded, dusty panes of the barred windows. Junk—and Cody doesn’t know what else to call it, because it just seems like junk —is everywhere. In the entryway alone, Cody can spot pieces of a speeder engine, a food blender, a tiny gumball dispenser, and a credit-operated laundry machine. In the corner, he thinks he sees a windmill blade propped next to what he would swear is a cardboard cut-out of a much younger-looking Chancellor Palpatine.

Not a little disturbed, he tears his eyes away and refocuses on Obi-Wan. He catches a flash of familiar reddish-brown hair disappearing through the overflowing shelving units and floor stacks, and he picks up his pace.

Somehow, Obi-Wan manages to find a counter. There’s an ancient register on it that Cody at first thinks is yet another relic for sale, but the very real and very current credits and lumins and flors stacked next to it seem to say otherwise. There’s a stack behind the counter that looks like a precariously-built pile of metal dinner plates, all flashing flat curves, until it moves.

Cody blinks, staring, as two massive eyes blink open to stare back. An oddly human head pops out of the pile wearing one of the plates as a hat, and they squint through a set of glasses that look more like two magnifying glasses welded together.

“Oh. It’s you,” the person croaks in a high, fluted voice. “Still alive, huh? Didn’t expect to see that fine ass in my shop again.”

Whatever shocked curiosity Cody had felt towards the shopkeeper before this moment burns instantly into dislike.

“Marj,” Obi-Wan says warmly, and Cody can see the moment Obi-Wan turns on his people-pleasing charm. “You had such little faith in me?”

Marj snorts. “Faith? Faith ain’t nothin’ doin, sonny. Thought you were dead for sure when I heard Lott was leavin’.”

Over the realization that this woman is Obi-Wan’s informant comes the sudden fear that Cody had been wrong in his earlier certainty. Had they been played? Had only the spy in the Republic wanted Obi-Wan, and Lott hadn’t cared in the least? He swallows. They can’t let Lott get off-planet. They can’t let this happen to any other Jedi, and they need his research.

They need to fix Obi-Wan.

“Leavin’?” Obi-Wan asks, and he keeps his demeanor calm and easy. He changes the way he speaks to match hers, flattening his vowels and cutting off the ends of his words. Cody’s so accustomed to Obi-Wan’s musical Coruscanti accent that it startles him. “Well, that’s a shame. He and I have unfinished business, and I know how much you care about business.”

“I do, at that,” she says. Her eyes sharpen beneath the massive frames she wears, though Cody still can’t see much of her expression behind her ornaments. “But I don’t see how this business of yours is any business of mine.”

“Just the same as before, I’m thinkin’,” Obi-Wan says, and a credit appears between the splay of his fingers, tick-tick-ticking from one end of his palm to the other.

She stares at it for a second, caught in the small spectacle of the movement, then very intentionally turns back to watch Obi-Wan’s face. 

“I got less info this time, kid,” she says bluntly. It’s odd to hear honesty from someone that Cody is 99% sure sold Obi-Wan out earlier this week. It’s even stranger to hear someone call Obi-Wan ‘kid’. “And even less that I’m willin’ t’sell. He’s moved locations. But I think you already knew that.”

“Got what he wanted, huh?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t shift on his feet at all, just stands slouched and casual as he keeps easy eye contact with Marj over the counter space. 

“Between us, Marj, I think you’ve got something you might be willing to share,” he says at last. “That big of an operation, headin’ out of a little town like this? You’ve heard something.”

When she shakes her head, all the little metal plates on and around her jingle.

“He’s good, Lott is. Quiet for such a big man.”

“Not that quiet,” Obi-Wan snorts. “We’ve heard some shuffling ourselves.”

“Oh?” 

Cody has spent the vast majority of his life surrounded by people who look almost identical to him in every way. When he was younger, it was worse. There were fewer tattoos, less diversity of hair cut and color, and no rank insignia to differentiate brothers. They all learned, and quickly, to differentiate each other through minutiae: small differences in speech patterns and micro-expressions.

It’s the only reason Cody notices, now, that Marj is actually surprised. Surprised, and interested.

Obi-Wan’s smile is languid and a little taunting, a smuggler’s smile. “You interested in a trade, Marj?”

“Depends what you’re tradin’. If you knew where he was, you wouldn’t be here.”

“And if you really didn’t know, you wouldn’t be stringing me along like this. So how about this: I tell you where I think he is, and you tell me if I’m right.”

She squints at him, her eyes narrowing to slits. They look like horizontal lines in the massive magnification of her glasses. “Try me.”

Obi-Wan doesn't waste any time.

“The warehouses connected to Pier 32,” Obi-Wan says, and his sharp blue eyes narrow as he watches her for any reaction at all. “Off Clovis Street and 113th.” 

“There are twenty of ‘em over there,” she says, aiming for uninterested, but her voice isn’t quite as snappish as it was.

Obi-Wan leans across the counter, intense and intent. The weight of his focus is a palpable thing, visceral in the air, and it feels almost like his presence in the Force used to. 

Still leaning over the counter, he says, “Yeah. And I’ve got a good feeling about number 12.”

The tension between them vibrates through the air, hot like a live wire, and Cody keeps his face as neutral as Mandalore claims to be. Behind his stone facade, he can’t help but marvel at Obi-Wan’s style. Cody had always wondered if Obi-Wan’s ability to convince others—to persuade and corral—had stemmed from some Force affinity for mind tricks. But here he is, Force-less and stunning, and Obi-Wan has this woman exactly where he wants her.

Cody still hates this plan, but he has the sneaking suspicion it’s going to work.

“We’re not going to be able to find Lott in time, not like this,” Obi-Wan had said before they’d left. “We have to make him come to us.”

Cody had squinted at him, drawing his hand away from the remaining donuts. “Ok,” he’d said skeptically. “How?”

And Obi-Wan had grinned, more than a little feral, and said, “Remember the plan we pulled together in the warehouse? Well, we’ll simplify it a little: we’ll tell him exactly where I am, and he’ll come running.” 

In the cluttered, crowded confines of the pawn shop, Marj breaks first. 

“Huh,” Marj says. “Well. If your info’s good, Ben, I’ll let you know.”

Ben. Cody bites back a colorful list of reasons why Obi-Wan needs to pick a new code name and waits.

Instead of reassuring Cody that he hadn’t used the same code name again on purpose, Obi-Wan straightens up, smirking. He seems every inch the overconfident fool, convinced he’s gotten Marj to admit that he’s right. 

He says, “I think I got what I needed to know. I’ll be gone by Centaxday, so I’m not sure I can wait.”

Three days, then. Just enough time for Marj to sell the info, for Lott to adjust his plans, and for all of them to—hopefully—finish this.

Stars, but their success hinges on so many unknowns that Cody hardly wants to count them. It assumes that Lott still wants Obi-Wan enough to hunt him down; that Marj had been triple-dealing information between Lott, Obi-Wan, and the spy in the Republic; and that Marj still has some incentive to rat Obi-Wan out. And, even if everything goes according to plan, their window of opportunity to prepare is almost negligible.

Apparently satisfied, Marj turns her wide, blinking eyes to Cody. The plates move with her seamlessly, and Cody is almost too distracted by wondering if they’re part of her body or part of her outfit to realize she’s talking to him.

“What about you, honey? You got something you want? A toy? Information?” She snorts out a series of high-pitched laughs and leers. “A threesome with your strapping young lad here?”

Cody tucks every single one of his emotions back behind his teeth and wishes it wouldn’t be a dead giveaway for him to fall into parade rest. As it stands, he flattens his stare and refuses to answer.

To his surprise, her smirk softens a single millimeter, and she rolls her eyes. “Oh, come now. Your man here’s already put in a down payment. Ask something, before I lose my reputation for fair trade.”

Obi-Wan shifts beside him, clearly ready to jump in with a quick word, but Cody does have something he wants to know. 

“What was Lott like when he first got here? What'd he have?” Cody asks, and her eyes widen in surprise as she tilts her head. Cody hopes he hasn’t somehow ruined the operation by asking, but eventually she just shrugs.

“Fair question for the cost,” she says. “Came from Chad a few years ago with more money than this planet’s worth and a starcruiser that looked hot off a Mon Calamari press. He recruited from the port drifters, and, for that first year, swore he was workin’ on something that’d change the galaxy. Real firebrand. Power to the powerless, all that jazz, but he kept his circles small.”

More like powerlessness to the powered, Cody thinks, but it doesn’t really answer his real question. “When was that, exactly?”

“Can’t remember the specifics, not really. It was a while ago.”

Cody tries not to let his disappointment show on his face, but he does startle when Obi-Wan rolls his eyes and tosses a few credit chits onto the counter.

She scoops the chits up with a quick flash of the silvery discs on her arms, then turns to what Cody had assumed was a credit register. He was wrong a second time, he guesses, because she taps a few of the ancient, clacking keys and turns back to Cody. 

“In ‘55, a few weeks after the Festival of Stars… the 25th. The 25th of the first month of ‘55.”

That’s–

That’s two weeks after Geonosis, Cody thinks, blinking. He’d still been locked in commander training at the time, but it’s not a date any clone could forget. Remembrance Day, the Alphas call it. The day their lives changed from training to doing.

Marj keeps looking at him, and Cody can’t help but feel like she knows why he reacted the way he did. She must already know he and Obi-Wan are Republic soldiers, and if she's good with faces she probably knows he's a clone, but he can’t help but kick himself for reacting. Clones weren’t trained to lie, and they certainly weren’t trained for this level of subterfuge.

“Did he have anything else, besides cash and a ship?” Obi-Wan asks, putting a few more of their stolen chits on the table.

She looks at him, then, weighing the chits on the table and the information she knows, or thinks she knows. At last, she shrugs and turns back to the machine on the counter. She taps a few of them, searching, and the bottom drawer cha-chings open. The piece of flimsi she fishes out is a little yellow but not terribly so, and she hands it to Obi-Wan with a roll of her eyes.

“This ain’t about what he had,” she says. “But it’s about what he left behind.”

LAST OF THE LOTT! PHARMACEUTICAL SCION LEAVES CHAD FOR NEW VENTURE , the headline proudly proclaims. The article focuses on the fate of the company and not the man, but there are a few details about his promising but abandoned career. The centerpiece of the article is the full color photograph included within the text, which depicts Lott walking toward the yawning mouth of a starship. He’s halfway up the boarding ramp, and the photographer caught him as he turned to look over his shoulder. His black suit is pristine, but he’s hunched forward, and there’s something hunted in his expression.

Something about the photo, at last, tips Obi-Wan off his carefully crafted game. Cody doesn’t think anyone would be able to see it, even Marj and her owl eyes, but he knows the lines of his general better even than those of his brothers. He knows how to read the angle of Obi-Wan’s shoulders and the way his knuckles bleach bone-white, and he knows what Obi-Wan’s surprise looks like. Cody turns back to the article, searching through the lines of printed ink until he sees what caught Obi-Wan’s attention: a curved and jet black handle hanging on Lott’s belt. 

It would look like a snub-nosed blaster to anyone not thoroughly, intimately familiar with lightsabers.

Outwardly, Obi-Wan just smiles. “Curious. Well, it’s always a pleasure, Marj. We’ll be back, I’m sure.”

Marj waves him off, and he turns and walks unhurriedly through the overcrowded, overflowing shelves of miscellaneous items. Cody looks at him out of the corner of his eye, a question on his tongue, but Obi-Wan keeps moving.

They blend back into the streams of people walking through the outskirts of the commercial district, and, with their heads down, make their way slowly back.

Chapter Text

Cody steps out of the shower in higher spirits, grateful that Obi-Wan had insisted they grab some clothes and other necessities on their way to the hotel. The short-range radios they’d nabbed are on the desk next to the packets of microwaveable food and instant caf, and Obi-Wan is still fiddling with the ancient, outdated TUI-83 datapad they'd found. It’s so old it’s practically a glorified calculator, but Obi-Wan had insisted on picking it up. It has holonet access, at least, and it chugs through excessive loading times as Obi-Wan swipes across the screen.

He sits on the edge of his bed and pulls his two blasters into his lap, intent on cleaning them out with the kit he’d bought alongside extra power packs, but he stops when he hears Obi-Wan’s soft intake of breath.  When he looks up, Obi-Wan’s eyes are closed, and his fingers rest heavy on the datapad in his lap. 

“Obi-Wan?” Cody asks, tamping down a sudden surge of nerves. Has Obi-Wan been pushing himself too hard? Exhaustion takes a long time to heal, and Obi-Wan doesn’t heal as fast as he used to. He stands up from the bed, intent on making Obi-Wan a cup of tea, but Obi-Wan waves him closer instead.

“I’m ok,” Obi-Wan says. “But I’ve finally discovered why Lott seemed so familiar to me.”

He hands Cody the datapad, and he’s shocked to see the memorials page for Geonosis on the screen. 

The memorials for the Jedi, at least. Cody doesn’t think there’s a public one for the clones.

There’s a woman a third of the way down the page, smiling at the camera with sharp white teeth shining out of a red face. Her horns curl backwards along her head, and she’s braided her smooth black hair into criss-crossing diamonds along their rough, curving lengths. A little bit of gray is sprinkled into the black, not unlike Obi-Wan’s hair. She has broad shoulders, a square-set jaw, and a sure confidence that’s obvious in the way she holds herself.

Cody is well-accustomed to the nuances of genetic similarities, and he knows where he’s seen this genetic set before.

“He has a sister?” he asks, then corrects himself. This is a picture from a memorial, and few of those are made for the living. “Had. He had a sister?”

“He did,” Obi-Wan says. He puts his fingers on the edge of her photo, and the light from the screen highlights the edge of his torn nails and dry skin. “I remember her… she was a little old when she joined the temple, but she fit in well. She was clever, very much so. A natural engineer with a surprisingly green thumb. She and Anakin used to build and race drones from one Temple tower to another when he was younger and I was off-planet.”

He flips to the next page, which holds a picture from the mass funeral held for the hundreds of Jedi who died on Geonosis. Cody spots her likeness on one of the piers near the front, and he spots her lightsaber beneath the burning flame: jet black, with a handle curved like a pistol. Exactly the same as the one in the photo of Lott.

Stars, Lott’s sister was a Jedi. Cody lingers over the hundreds of near-identical piers, over the lightsabers and pieces of lightsabers beneath them, and marvels at how Obi-Wan could pull her face from the breadth of the tragedy. On Remembrance Day, some of the troopers who’ve embraced their Mandalorian heritage will recite the names of all the clones lost alongside the Jedi: those who left nothing more than a name or number on the burnt sands of Geonosis.

Cody hasn’t said the names. It takes several hours to recite them all, and he rarely has the time or breath to spare. Perhaps one day he will.

“But I don’t understand,” he says, staring at the flickering flames of the memorials. “Why would Lott attack a Jedi? Shouldn’t he want revenge against the Separatists, since they’re the ones who killed her?”

The ever-present weight on Obi-Wan’s shoulders seems to hang a little heavier. He curls into himself like a comma, and he pauses. “Perhaps. But, perhaps, the fault depends on your point of view.”

Cody’s gaze snaps to his general, disbelieving. “You’re not saying he might blame the Jedi.”

He knows Obi-Wan blames himself for not saving more of his people on Geonosis that day, but Cody also knows he could spend a lifetime—a whole natborn human lifetime—arguing that particular point with him, so Cody saves his breath and waits.

“I don’t know, Cody. Nothing about this makes sense.” Obi-Wan’s mouth twists to one side as he thinks.  “But no, I don’t honestly think he might be seeking revenge. He didn’t kill me, even though he easily could have. Getting a needle into a Jedi is considerably more difficult than shooting one. If his sole intent was to create a weapon to use against the Jedi, well. Plenty of weapons already exist that can kill a Jedi.”

His mouth twists further, and he adds, “Most of them can, in fact.”

Considering Obi-Wan’s persistent and reckless disregard for danger, Cody thinks Obi-Wan needs that reminder more than Cody does.

The room around them seems small and ordinary when underlying a conversation like this. It doesn’t have the gravity of the stars of the hum of a hyperdrive, and Cody is suddenly, irrationally angry at the shorn carpet and the fraying bedsheets. Even the curtains are thin and insubstantial, leaking the sodium-orange glow of streetlights into the room. Obi-Wan looks so tired, ragged on all his edges and almost transparent himself, and Cody remembers that the man had been unconscious on a warehouse couch only a few days ago. 

Willpower can only get you so far past the laws of physics. 

But then Obi-Wan shrugs and continues. “Perhaps he truly did just need me as part of a greater experiment. Perhaps an injected serum was the first step towards aerosolizing it and deploying it in the Temple’s air filtration system. Perhaps he plans on making it ingestible and dropping it into a water distribution plant; as a non-lethal substance, it might slip past the sensors. And his team had developed that odd light as well, although it seemed more akin to inhibitor cuffs than… this.”

He recites these possibilities offhandedly, but each word sinks another nail into Cody’s chest. As powerful as lightsabers are, they can’t deflect light or gases or drinking water. The war has shown, too, that even what can be deflected can’t always be deflected en masse.

Especially if Lott somehow managed to contaminate the water supply, it would be difficult to pinpoint water as the source. Detectors track known toxins, and non-Force sensitives drinking the water would be entirely unharmed. The serum did not appear to be damaging to humans: just a human Jedi. 

“Or we could be catastrophizing,” Obi-Wan says, smiling, but it’s little reassurance against the wall of catastrophes he laid out. “No, listen. Do you remember what I told you about what I felt from him during my reconnaissance?”

Cody does. “Conviction. You said it seemed like he knew he would succeed, that he had faith.”

“Yes. Faith enough to move mountains. Cody, we might not know his motivations, but I think he believes that what he is doing is right.”

Oh, no. May the stars shine on his general’s persistent belief in goodness and reason, but if Obi-Wan wants to argue that they should just hug it out with Lott— “Obi-Wan.”

A set of dragging, belabored footsteps echo down the hallway, and Obi-Wan waits until the footsteps carry on past their door before continuing with a softer voice.

“Listen, let’s go through what we know. One, he’s been manipulated by a Separatist spy just as we have,” he says, marshaling the facts to his case in a display of logic that Cody knows is to reassure him. It doesn’t make it any less annoying. “He abandoned a family fortune after the death of his sister, indicating some sort of trauma response. He kept her lightsaber, indicating some affection for her. And he didn’t kill me, which you yourself admit is a point in his favor.”

There’s nothing worse, really, than Obi-Wan using his own words against him. Cody opens his mouth to respond, to push back, but Obi-Wan isn’t done.

“Lastly,” he continues, “if there’s any chance to convince him to share his research, or to get even a single hint at how this serum might be reversed, I’d like to take it.”

His voice is quiet, but it doesn’t need volume. It’s a precision strike, slipping between Cody’s third and fourth ribs, quick and clean.

Cody doesn’t bother trying to argue again. He lets all of his frustration out in one heavy breath, then breathes back in through his nose. His original plan had been fairly straightforward: booby-trap the warehouse to kingdom come, lure Lott in with rumors of Obi-Wan being there, then blow the thing sky-high from a safe distance. It had been easy, straightforward, and relatively low risk.

He should’ve known better when crafting a plan that included Obi-Wan.

“Alright,” he says, and Obi-Wan tilts his head with an air of ready skepticism. Obi-Wan knows, too, that Cody doesn’t give in so easily. “But we’re going in with a strategy, okay? None of your usual dropping in from the ceiling with nothing but a ‘hello there’ and a lightsaber.”

“Oh, just as you did, at the start of all of this?” Obi-Wan teases.

Cody doesn’t deign to grace that with a response. “I'm not convinced he can be bargained with. We need a back-up plan if negotiations fail. You won’t be able to use any Jedi mind tricks on him.”

“No Jedi can rely on Force persuasion all of the time. I do have my own charms, you know,” Obi-Wan says, winking as his smile slides into a smirk, and Cody blinks. Heat sparks in his chest and drops, liquid, into his stomach. He knows.

He definitely knows.

He falls silent, trying to distract himself by strategizing, and eventually Obi-Wan moves to fill the caf maker’s empty reservoir to start boiling some water. Cody’s planning process isn’t like Obi-Wan’s, which often seems like watering a vast field and waiting for the worms to pop up. He can talk through a sprawl of ideas with his quick and clever words, jumping from one possibility to another and another with no visible path between them. Obi-Wan calls it brainstorming, spitballing, throwing things at the wall to see what works—but that isn’t how Cody works. He prefers method to madness. He starts with a comprehensive list of all possible angles of approach and a comprehensive list of failure criteria, and he keeps what works and discards what doesn’t as he assesses each.

Obi-Wan had laughed, wry and impressed, when Cody had walked him through the process. “It’s like a greedy search algorithm.”

“More like simulated annealing,” Cody had answered, and he’d been gratified when Obi-Wan’s eyebrows had risen in pleased, curious surprise.

Nowadays, they mix their chaos and their control. Cody has often wondered if their give and take of wild ideas and thorough consideration has been the foundation of their success with the Third System. Cody’s thinking has certainly become more lateral and more adaptive, and Obi-Wan—

Well. He jumps out of fewer buildings these days, at least.

Still, he’s grateful as Obi-Wan, in a well-worn routine, leaves him to his thoughts. He’s already agreed that they should at least try to reason with Lott, but he isn’t going to risk Obi-Wan’s life for the off chance that they might be able to restore Obi-Wan’s powers. If Obi-Wan goes alone as bait to talk to Lott, Lott will take Obi-Wan and run. Their only tactical advantage is what they can set the warehouse up with, and Cody can hardly use explosives against Lott if he takes Obi-Wan hostage. Obi-Wan’s good, but no one could fight Lott and all of his cronies at once. 

Not without the Force.

No, think. He needs a ruse good enough to lure Lott into the warehouse and into a conversation without actually giving him what he wants. He needs tempting bait, and he needs something that would allow him to stall for time. 

Cody bites his lip, feeling as if the answer is just out of reach. What bait would be compelling but not fulfilling? Lott wants Obi-Wan because he needs a Jedi to complete his experiment. So he’d come calling for a Jedi, that much is clear, but Cody doesn’t exactly have a spare on hand.

Unbidden, Obi-Wan’s earlier words echo in his head: Just as you did, at the start of all of this?

…Unless.

He sits up, brain whirling, just in time for the caf-maker to start its cheerful burbling. Obi-Wan sits next to him on the bed in the next minute and extends a little cup filled with the murky brown of store-brand instant caf. “So, any ideas?”

“Just one,” Cody says, and he grins. “But you’re not going to like it.”

“You owe me apology donuts,” Obi-Wan grouses over the wrist comm.

 Cody bites back a laugh.

“Sorry, Master,” he replies, and he hears a choked inhale in response. He isn’t surprised when he hears the tell-tale crackle of the short-range radio in his ear a few seconds later. Cody mutes his wrist comm and keeps his wrist as far from his head as he can so that their two comm systems don’t interfere with each other, and he waits.

The receiver in his ear spits out, tinny with aggravation, “Oh, really, Cody. Can’t you just use ‘General’?”

“Well, I’ve never heard Tano call Skywalker ‘General’, and Skywalker’s never said it to you. I’m following Jedi standard protocol,” Cody says, then adds, “Master.”

“Augh,” Obi-Wan says, clicking the short-range to mute and switching back to wrist comm.

The shingles beneath Cody’s feet are sun-warm and rain-slick, and he makes sure his footing is secure before taking another step. The roofs in the warehousing district are only gently sloped, just enough to send rainwater down to the streets below. Their thin angle makes it easier to walk on top of them, but there are very few places to hide. Anyone looking from the right window would be able to see his gray-clad figure moving among the weather vanes and chimneys. 

He climbs down the edge of one such chimney now, moving between the tower of brick and the wall of a neighboring building. Although the roofs are highly visible, the buildings are so crowded here that their sides are almost all obscured by adjacent buildings. Most of the outer shells of the warehouses are corrugated steel panels, uncomfortably hot even in the cool breeze from the bay, and Cody presses against them uncomfortably as he tries to reach a nearby ledge.

“Status report,” Obi-Wan requests through his wrist comm a few minutes later.

Cody waits to answer until he leaps and lands beneath one of the warehouse windows, breath blowing out of him in a wheeze as he rolls flat. He gets to his knees and peers through the grimed glass, trying to keep his shadow hidden from anyone who might actually be in the building as he checks for movement.

It’s empty.

“No sign of Lott just yet, but I can feel five… six life signatures in the warehouse,” Cody lies, still staring through the window. He wonders if he should add some sort of vague mysticism to the end of his sentence but decides it isn’t worth it. Not all Jedi have Obi-Wan’s deep well of words, and he’s sure that some Jedi know when to shut up.

At least one of them must, even if Cody hasn’t met them yet.

“Mmm, well. He can’t be there all the time,” Obi-Wan says, continuing the ruse.

Cody picks his way along the upper walls, careful of his footing and any curious eyes below. This part of the city is cluttered and crowded, built hastily and without a plan. Its growth seems almost organic in its spiraling, shifting, and haphazard nature. There was some attempt at a grid system in the very beginning, Cody thinks, but it has long since been abandoned for the ease of building wherever there’s room. He uses this to his advantage, jumping from the cornice of Warehouse 12 to its neighbors and back.

As he pretends to relay activity that doesn’t exist within the bounds of where they’re laying their trap, he looks for weakness to exploit.

His wrist comm crackles after another few minutes. “You know, you’ve adapted to Jedi training well, Cody.”

“Thank you,” Cody says, blinking. It’s a false compliment, sure, but his heart has an instinctive response to praise from Obi-Wan. He pulls his head back into the moment. “I appreciate the Council’s decision to give me that training.”

“It was an eventuality we should have planned for. Honestly, out of three million of you, we probably should have expected more. All known sentient species have Force-sensitives, after all, and Force sensitivity isn’t genetic.”

If this were an actual mission, and Obi-Wan wasn’t intentionally trying to lay a trap for someone they can only assume is listening in, Cody would have shut this conversation down in the name of comms hygiene minutes ago. As it is, he’s just grateful that their wrist comms are the one comm line Obi-Wan knows was compromised; it’s still possible that Lott’s off-planet, but if he’s not, he’ll be listening.

“Maybe we just haven’t found them,” Cody says instead, and he is startled to realize that he means it. He’s heard through the command grapevine about a possible Force-sensitive clone—Glitch, was it?—but even beyond him… 

Cody switches to their short-range radio, the ones that would be near-impossible for Lott to intercept. “I always wondered about Fives.”

“Fives? Really?”

“Always in the wrong place at the right time, just like a Jedi. But, if he did have the Force, it hardly did him any favors. He had a fool’s luck for trouble.”

Obi-Wan is silent across the breadth of space and frequencies between them. “Hmm. Well, here’s an actual Jedi lesson for you: there’s no such thing as luck. There is only the Force.”

Cody hums. He can almost hear the whir of Obi-Wan’s thoughts churning through some new complication, some conundrum ten steps down the board, and he leaves his general to it. 

The warehouse is strange: it’s more than three stories tall, but there are no windows except along the very top. Cody glimpses the raised beveled edges of skylights in the center of the building’s roof, but it seems much better fortified than the other warehouses in the area. He slides his vibroblade between the sill of one of the windows and wiggles it, surprised to find a reinforced durasteel latch instead of plastoid.

“Obi-Wan, what was actually in this warehouse?” Cody asks through their private comms as he wiggles the blade, alternating between vibration modes. He’d assumed he’d be able to break in easily, but it’ll take a little more work than he’d thought. 

“One of the spice families was using it to store weapons and explosives until rather recently,” Obi-Wan says. “Unfortunately, they made the poor business decision to try to pull one over on the Pyke Syndicate a few months ago. It’s remained on the market since, mostly due to superstition, and I thought it’d be the perfect place for a bioterrorist group trying to stay under the radar of the cartels. Then, when I had to think of a place to lead Lott to—well. The catwalks seemed promising.”

“Understood.”

Cody finally gets the latch open, and the window opens with a loud creak. It looks like a wire for a silent alarm had been attached to the sill, but there’s no power running through the wire. It hadn’t done the original owners much good against the Pykes, apparently. 

Cody props the window open and unspools the rope he’d brought with him. He doesn’t have enough rope to reach the factory floor, but there’s a catwalk on the second floor that looks reachable. He folds the slats of the corrugated metal sheeting of the wall back as much as he can and is surprised to find brick beneath it. The durasteel anchor in his pocket just barely fits into a crack in the bricks, and he hammers it in as best he can with the hilt of his vibroblade. His rope catches on the sides of the corrugated steel as he ties a quick water knot around the anchor, but it holds. The free ends of the rope stretch through the window to coil on the walkway beneath.

“All clear?” Obi-Wan’s voice says through his wrist comm, and Cody can’t help but smile at his general’s impatience. He is unaccustomed to being off the front lines, even though he’s hardly out of danger at the moment as he searches for additional supplies. 

“All clear,” Cody confirms, hovering on the edge of the windowsill. “I’m going to check the other warehouses around here, just in case.”

The geolocation signal on the comms only tends to be accurate to about 30 meters, and he hopes the signal wobble will make it seem like he’s exploring the area as he descends into the warehouse.

The metal platform he swings onto creaks beneath his feet, and he makes his way through the thick layers of dust coating the metal railing. He’ll have to do a little work to make it feasible that this building has been in use again, apparently. The air around him is thick with stagnation. Most of the light in the warehouse is provided by the skylights overhead, igniting a shower of gold dust motes with their wide sunlit fingers. The walkway ends in a thin metal staircase stretching down to the large, empty floor beneath. Oddly shaped shadows and scuff marks decorate the duracrete where ancient machinery used to rest, but it’s otherwise a barren landscape. 

Cody paces along the edges of the vast floor, eyes flicking to various points of entry. The place really does seem like a fortress; the windows would be impossible to reach from the catwalk without rope, and the windows have metal cylinders over them that look like they hold rolling security shutters. He continues making his way around the warehouse, checking through empty storerooms and wondering where he might be able to hide some sort of trap—and what that trap might be.

The last door on the right leads to a set of duracrete stairs, covered in dust and cobwebs, curving down. Cody flicks on his flashlight and starts his descent, cold basement air rising to meet him, and there’s a familiar smell beneath the musty odor of time that he can’t quite place.

When he reaches the bottom, a grin spreads across his face.

He clicks his private radio on. “So,” he says, “you said they stored explosives here? Imagine that.”

Like all clone commanders, Cody had undergone basic training in each of the trooper specializations. On Kamino, this included everything from information security to combat casualty care, and it definitely included demolitions. The demo course in its entirety had lasted four months, but Cody has only ever needed what he learned that first day, when Bric had dragged a smartscreen to the front of the test bunker. The screen had flickered to life, and Bric had pointed at the equation displayed in stark black letters on the screen.

“There are two equations you need to know for demo,” he’d said. “The first is P = .375*A . P is how much explosive material you need, and A is the cross-sectional area of whatever it is you’re trying to cut through.”

Cody had frowned, already experienced enough to know that you rarely had the leisure to measure out a cross-section in the field. He’d asked, “But what about when you can’t get A? How do you find P?” 

“That’s when you use the second equation,” Bric had said, clicking to the next slide, and his grin had been feral at the edges as he’d read it off. “Then, P = Plenty.”

In the warehouse, Cody packs C4 and remote dets into the corners of anywhere that Lott and his cronies might come through or hide in. 

“P for plenty,” he recites under his breath, keying the remote det signals into his wrist comm as he goes. He’s under no illusion that he might be able to take Lott out with one of these packs, but they could be the distraction that he needs to get the upper hand. If he’s on the warehouse floor and Obi-Wan’s hidden in the rafter of the warehouse with a rifle, a distraction might be all they need. There’s little better than smoke and fire to cause panic, and there’s little better than panic to give one side an advantage.

After half an hour of hunting and placing, Cody dusts his hands off and stands. He wishes they’d been able to find a few remote cameras, but they had been out of their limited budget. Plus, they wouldn’t have any way to check the feeds. He checks the floor once more for any hidden trapdoors, adds more C4 to his pack and a few more dets, and then returns to the catwalk and his dangling rope. 

The afternoon sun is a balm on his face after the sweaty, nerve-wracking work of planting explosives.

“Still haven’t seen Lott,” Cody reports on his wrist comm, and he knows that Obi-Wan’s sigh is more relief at hearing Cody’s voice than regret.

“Best come back to base, then,” Obi-Wan says. “Perhaps we’ll have better luck tonight.”

“Another 4 am adventure, Master?” Cody asks.

This time, Obi-Wan leaves his comm on as he groans in disapproval. “Tch. Well, you know how I love long walks in the moonlight.”

Cody laughs, turns off his comm, and starts making the long trek back to the hotel.

When he comes into the room, Obi-Wan is pacing a hole through the terrible, garish carpet. The desk in the table has new tenants: two IB-94 pistols, a few electromagnetic pulse grenades, and, best and most incredible of all, a DC-15S and the sniper attachment. Cody makes straight for it, sighing with joy at how it fits into his hand. The DC series blasters predate the Clone Wars, but Cody’s always suspected that they were made to fit clone hands–or, perhaps, the other way around.

The heft of it is a bastion of familiarity in a mire of the unknown. Cody checks the slide, the gas canister, and the power pack without a conscious thought, and when it performs to his satisfaction, he sets it down with reverence.

“I thought that might please you,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody startles to find Obi-Wan watching him with fond self-satisfaction.

“How did you find one?” Cody asks, still strung with delight. A DC-15S , here, in his hands.

“I have my ways. Oh, don’t give me that look. It was in the bunker of one of the cartels I investigated when I first arrived here. Since I’d already mapped paths in and out of their safe houses, it was fairly easy to regain access.”

It’s been a little hard to stomach all the stealing, but it’s certainly easier to accept stealing from drug cartels than from people on the street. Droid poppers are hard to come by, too; Cody wouldn’t be surprised if this equipment was lifted from a GAR repository. Sometimes, in the case of over-hasty retreats, a platoon or company has to leave their equipment behind in order to keep their lives. The droid armies have no need for this equipment themselves, so when the Separatists have left, the scavengers come in. There is a surplus of droid parts on the market now, sure, but durasteel is durasteel, and there’s no such thing as a surplus of guns in wartime—or on the Outer Rim.

So, the likelihood is high that Obi-Wan’s just stolen these guns back.

Cody checks the pins on the droid poppers, their charge states, and the gas canisters and power packs of the other two pistols. The equipment isn’t pristine, and it certainly isn’t up to GAR standards, but the haul is in surprisingly good condition for what it’s been through. He looks up in satisfaction to see Obi-Wan’s good mood muted; a furrow has dug itself into the space between his eyebrows, and his hand strokes a meandering path down his beard.

“Obi-Wan?” Cody asks. The name rolls off his tongue easily now, a rhythmic three syllables. “Is something missing?”

Obi-Wan snorts. “Any more guns and we’d need to be General Grievous to wield them. No, I was just… contemplating contingencies.”

Most of Cody’s contingencies involve having more explosives. If Obi-Wan goes down, Cody will blow the whole warehouse to Antilla, regardless of his own condition. He can’t risk Lott escaping and developing a bioweapon that could cripple the entire GAR command structure. He isn’t Skywalker; he won’t gamble the whole war effort on his ability to complete a mission solo. 

But Obi-Wan isn’t going down.

“Not just for us,” Obi-Wan corrects, almost as if he’d heard the angle of Cody’s thoughts. “I only wish I could somehow send word to the Council. It may seem as though we are still floundering in the dark, but we’ve learned so much. In the worst case scenario, I’d hate for that knowledge to die with us.”

Cody frowns. “We don’t have any secure comms or time to get them. You’d have to broadcast it.”

“Not a bad idea,” Obi-Wan says, considering, and Cody’s face creases in alarm.

“What? No. Do you have any idea how many people want you dead? No way. We’d be able to fill that whole warehouse with vengeful, jealous idiots in two seconds flat.”

“It’d be one way to lure Maul out,” Obi-Wan says with a smile, and at least he’s finding this humorous. Cody feels an ulcer coming on. “He might come just to laugh at me.”

“Obi-Wan, I’m not shooting us in the foot before we even face Lott. You want to rig a dead man’s switch to send a broadcast if we don’t get back in time? We can do that. But we do this. Even by ourselves,” Cody argues, “and even without the Force. We’re not giving away the game without trying.”

Cody’s feet have moved him, unbidden, to stand toe-to-toe with Obi-Wan on the bed. This close, Cody can see how Obi-Wan’s smile has taken on soft edges, feathered into fondness. Cody wants to put his thumb on the creased corner of it, to test its give.

“And here I thought I was the optimist of us,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody hears it for the acceptance it is. The tension in the room has ratcheted higher, and Cody knows that Obi-Wan is giving him an emotional out here. 

He doesn’t take it. 

“It’s not optimism. I’ve followed you for three years, in and out of every hell, and I know exactly what you can do when push comes to shove.” 

It comes out overly honest in the dark quiet of the room. Behind the walls, the pipes creak as someone steps into their shower; the whir of a speeder echoes as someone pulls into the parking lot; and, distantly, hopefully, Lott is preparing for war.

Obi-Wan's smile is as grateful as it is unconvinced. “Thank you, Cody.”

It’s frustrating to hear the doubt pool in Obi-Wan’s voice. Cody wishes, now more than ever, that Obi-Wan could reach out to him in the Force. He doesn’t know what Obi-Wan ever picked up from his emotions, but he wishes he could press his certainty into Obi-Wan’s soul. He wishes he could show his faith through the lens of the Force, through which no lie could pass.

But he can’t. All either of them have are their words.

Cody backs away as Obi-Wan moves to stand. He wipes his palms on his leggings as he does, and his focus sharpens as he looks to the present instead of his far-off what-ifs.

Obi-Wan continues, "Then, if you’ll indulge me, I have one last piece to add to our ruse.”

Cody turns in front of the closet’s mirrored sliding doors feeling more and more uncomfortable by the second. He and Obi-Wan are of a height, yes, and Obi-Wan has more muscle mass than most people expect. The fabric is loose, and there is stretch to it, but—

“I don’t think I can wear these,” Cody says, fighting not to fidget as Obi-Wan steps in front of him to adjust the folds of fabric bunched at the belt around Cody’s broader waist. The robes don’t quite fit. It isn’t just the drape of the fabric, either; Cody has had an itch between his shoulders since he first took his armor off, but it’s a different itch, now. He wonders if, having been out of his armor for so long, he has somehow accidentally outgrown it.

But he certainly hasn’t grown into Jedi robes.

“They’re more comfortable than you might expect once you get used to them.”

Obi-Wan’s scarred hands smooth down the twin tabards of his own robes on Cody’s chest, and Cody hesitates. There is the faint rumble of a thunderstorm across Obi-Wan’s fine-lined features. Is Obi-Wan wondering how he'd feel if he were to don these robes again without the Force? Would he feel undeserving of them? Or, worse, would he put them on and feel it to be just as much of a charade as it is for Cody?

On Obi-Wan’s next pass, Cody catches Obi-Wan’s hands in his own. They both know why Cody has to be the bait, and they both know why Cody has to be the one to spring the trap. No; something else must be why Obi-Wan’s smile is shaped like grief. 

Obi-Wan curls his hands in Cody’s. He smiles and makes to pull away, makes to apologize for the imposition, but Cody tightens his grip. He thinks he knows why the robes sit so awkwardly on his frame, and it isn’t because they’re wool instead of plastoid.

“Thank you,” he says, and he means it. “But I can’t wear these. I’m not the Jedi here, and you aren’t done being one, so don’t… don’t consign these robes to charity just yet, okay? You’re going to get us out of this like you always do. So quit mourning . This isn’t over. And neither are you.”

Obi-Wan’s wide blue eyes shift from shock to rueful, sheepish acceptance.

“Ah,” he says, and Cody wonders if he’d been a step ahead of Obi-Wan for once. “Point taken.”

Cody releases Obi-Wan’s hands, intent on unfastening the belt wrapped around his waist, but this time Obi-Wan is the one who refuses to let go. He holds Cody’s eyes for a long second, searching for something Cody can’t fathom, then smiles.

“You know, you would make an excellent Jedi,” Obi-Wan announces, solemn even as his eyes twinkle, and Cody feels a shiver run from the bottom of his neck to the root of his spine. He wouldn’t, he thinks immediately. Obi-Wan is the Jedi, and Cody’s just—

Well. He's more than just a clone; the last few days have broken the very idea of "just a clone". But still, he thinks. That doesn't mean he could be a Jedi. His heart rebels against the thought.

The intensity of Obi-Wan's serene blue gaze is penetrating, overwhelming. Cody’s eyes can’t hold that blue. His eyes linger instead on the tufts of white hair at Obi-Wan’s temples, on the deepening crow’s feet, and somewhere in those well-loved lines he realizes that, if Obi-Wan defines a Jedi, then Cody can't meet that definition. Force sensitive or not, Obi-Wan has always turned the other cheek, endlessly, to the universe.

Cody couldn't. Not when it comes to Obi-Wan. Love wells up like clear water in Cody’s chest, and he thinks about how many worlds he would burn just to keep this one man safe. 

"No," Cody replies at last, his voice hoarse with honesty. "No, I wouldn't.”

Art drawn by the Three-Fold-Symmetry (@montmorillon on Ao3). ID in alt text.

The tension between them twists and remelts: it alloys itself into something thinner but more flexible, bending instead of breaking. Cody feels his devotion settle back in his chest, a hearthfire instead of an inferno, and his whole world narrows to the feeling of Obi-Wan’s hands on his. Cody wants to turn in Obi-Wan’s arms and dare Obi-Wan to maintain his hold. 

But Obi-Wan lets Cody’s hands go.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan starts, and there are a million things that could fill the silence that follows. Cody waits, holding his breath, until Obi-Wan smiles that rueful little apology smile of his. 

“Will you do me a small favor?” Obi-Wan asks, stepping back, and Cody knows it wasn’t what he’d planned to say. 

“Anything.”

“There’s… an old habit I had, once. I used to observe it with my master before a battle rife with uncertainty.” He chuckles, reminiscent. “I tried it with Anakin, but he never had the patience. I know there is no luck, only the Force, but in the absence of the latter we may as well try for the former. It wouldn’t take long, regardless.”

They don’t have long, not if they want to get a few REM cycles in. When Cody was fresh out of Kamino, he might have thought about staying awake until operation start, but now he knows the importance of even a few hours of sleep in a situation like this. 

Still. He’s sacrificed more sleep for less than a favor to Obi-Wan, he thinks.

“Sure. Let me change.”

Removing the robes doesn’t take nearly as long as putting them on. In the cramped refresher, Cody folds the leggings, the undertunic, the overtunic, the obi, and the belt into neat squares. His hand lingers on the belt before snagging the lightsaber clip looped through the outer leather band. He’s carried Obi-Wan’s lightsaber at his waist before, for a whole week once, and that, at least, feels correct.

Good, even.

His spacer clothing doesn’t fit any better than the robes did, but at least they don’t weigh so heavily on his shoulders. The jeans won’t be comfortable to sleep in, but he doesn’t want to waste time stumbling around for clothes in the dark. 

When he steps out of the fresher, Obi-Wan is sitting on the edge of the bed with his legs folded beneath him. His hands are relaxed on his knees, open and empty, and Cody mirrors him as best he can on the other bed. Meditation was a common excuse on the Vigilance when the troopers were trying to cover for Obi-Wan. Cody had never been sure if the practice was actually a necessary part of being a Jedi, or if Obi-Wan had used it to eke out a few moments of calm in chaos.

The lotus position that Obi-Wan sits in so easily is impossible for Cody. He shifts on his hip bones, springs digging into the meat of his thighs, and fights to keep his balance.

“Do whatever’s most comfortable,” Obi-Wan says, a smile in his voice, and Cody crosses his legs with relief. “Alright, now, take my hands. You may need to move a little closer.”

At first, Cody doesn’t think the length of their arms could span the chasm between the beds, but then his fingertips reach the tips of Obi-Wan’s. He curls his fingers, pulling Obi-Wan closer, and he almost tips over when the bed beneath him moves. The casters, still unlocked, roll with angry creaks as Cody flexes and pulls himself closer.

The beds collide with a soft thump, and Cody grins. “Close enough?”

“Perfect,” Obi-Wan says, and his eyes crease into half-moons. “Now, close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. In, and out.”

In, and out. If Cody’s honest, Obi-Wan’s breathing is easier to focus on. He tries to match the ocean rhythm of it while ignoring the discomfort of his mattress and the comfort of Obi-Wan’s hands in his. There’s an itch between his shoulder blades that worsens as sweat drops down his back. The old radiator along the wall kicks on with a rattle. He wants to find meaning in this, but he doesn’t know what to expect.

Obi-Wan would probably say to not expect anything at all.

“Let your thoughts come,” Obi-Wan murmurs, “and let them go. Be present. Breathe with me, Cody.”

In, and out. Cody tries to let his concerns for the mission wash over him and wash away. Everything that was loud starts to quiet into white noise. The radiator fades, and his body relaxes. A speeder whizzes by in a pendulum swing of engine thrumming, and then it’s gone. When Obi-Wan breathes in, there’s air in Cody’s lungs, and when he breathes out, there’s—

There’s—

Obi-Wan’s hands tighten on his, a spasm of surprise, and Cody falls back into awareness.

“Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, and his pupils are little black urchins in a pale blue sea. “Cody, did you feel—”

“Yeah,” Cody says, startled, because he had. He’d felt Obi-Wan, closer even than the foot of space between them. He’d felt Obi-Wan the way he had once, what seems like ages ago: a golden, shimmering rush against his consciousness, as if the weight of Obi-Wan’s regard pressed against his soul. “Was that? Are you?”

“No, I,” Obi-Wan says, and they aren’t having a conversation, not really, but Cody doesn’t know how to put what he felt into words. Obi-Wan frees one of his hands to flex it in mid-air, turning it this way and that as if he might be able to see the Force in the thin blue veins running over his tendons.

Obi-Wan puts his hand back in Cody’s grip, and Cody nods and closes his eyes in perfect concert. They need to do that, whatever it was, again. They breathe together as seconds bleed away into minutes, but Cody can’t get back to that peaceful mindset he’d fallen into. The feeling is gone. Cody knows, somehow, that it won’t come if he chases it. 

When searching for a faint constellation at night, you won’t see it if you’re looking directly at it.

“Sorry, Obi-Wan,” he says, and Obi-Wan just sighs and shakes his head.

“I’m grateful for that glimpse, regardless,” he says. “For a single second, I’d—I’d felt it again. The Force, with all its eddies and whorls, pushing, trying to get back to me.”

That’s not even close to what Cody had felt, and he doesn’t know what to add. He’d felt Obi-Wan in the Force, he thinks, but Obi-Wan is all he’s ever known of the Force.

“Why now?” Obi-Wan asks, his hands heavy in Cody’s. “Why here? …Cody, did that—did it feel like what you’d mentioned before?”

“Yeah. It felt like you,” Cody answers. He couldn’t describe what exactly Obi-Wan feels like in the Force, but he knows Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan, in any universe, in any form, will always feel like home. 

A dozen questions lie on the tip of Obi-Wan’s tongue, and Cody is almost close enough to count them all out. He stays still beneath the full bore of Obi-Wan’s assessment, and, stars. Stars, he knows this is a mystery they need to solve, but he can’t focus with Obi-Wan looking at him like that, holding his hands like a lifeline, and leaning in and in and in.

Cody wants to kiss him. Suddenly, immediately, he knows: he wants to kiss Obi-Wan. 

They don’t have the time, he thinks. They don’t have the time to sort through this, either. He opens his mouth, but Obi-Wan sighs before he can interject.

“I know,” Obi-Wan says. “I know. I only—well. Perhaps we ought to think of this as only more of that hope I promised you earlier, hm?”

It’s a light-hearted dismissal, but when Cody starts to pull away, Obi-Wan’s breath hitches, just slightly, just enough. 

And it’s enough to make Cody brave. He doesn’t know what combination of factors just allowed Obi-Wan that glimpse into the Force again, but he knows he’s one of those factors.  He knows where he belongs, where all his angles and sharp edges fit with snug purpose, and it’s next to Obi-Wan.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asks, his soft voice loud in the quiet room, and Obi-Wan’s sigh this time is one of relief.

“If it wouldn’t be a terrible imposition,” Obi-Wan says. His voice is enviably steady.

“I told you I would,” Cody reminds him. He untucks the blankets from the mattress corners on his bed and reaches for the ones on Obi-Wan’s, grateful for something to do with his hands as he talks. “At the very beginning of all of this. I said I’d be wherever you need me to be.”

Obi-Wan smiles. “And you are, as always, a man of your word.”

They finish their preparations in silence, setting alarms and turning off lights, before curling next to each other in the conjoined beds. Obi-Wan lays a gentle hand over the drumbeat of Cody’s heart, and this time, Cody covers that hand with his own. It isn’t something they talk about; it isn’t something there are words for. Cody feels their breathing settle into a subconscious rhythm, and he wonders if Obi-Wan can hear their hearts beat in time. In that twilight space that divides waking and sleeping, there’s something warm and golden flowering between them.

It isn’t much, and it’s barely there, but barely counts.

Cody sinks into it, into the hope that the light carries with it, and he dreams he has wings.

Chapter Text

Cody snaps awake in the cool pre-dawn darkness exactly three minutes before the alarm will sound. Obi-Wan hasn’t moved much in the night; his body rests evenly on his bed, though his hand is still flattened over Cody’s chest, and Cody’s hand still blankets it. The five points of Obi-Wan’s fingers press into the soft cotton of Cody’s shirt, and he wishes they would leave marks. He doesn’t know what will happen on the other side of this. If they succeed in taking Lott down, will they return to Coruscant to search for a treatment for Obi-Wan? Will another Jedi take control of the 3rd Systems Army while Obi-Wan undergoes whatever tests the Temple medics can devise?

Cody wonders if the Council will give Obi-Wan the choice of what to pursue, just as he knows he himself won’t have one.

The clock ticks closer to 3 am local, and Cody closes his eyes again. He won’t contemplate what might happen if they fail completely, but a half-success has its own tragedies. Serving alongside Obi-Wan has been one of the few saving graces of the war. If they can’t get anything more out of Lott—if they can’t find a way to get Obi-Wan’s powers back—Cody will have to serve with another Jedi.

The thought burns. He can’t imagine giving anyone else command of the 212th. Cody wasn’t on Umbara for Pong Krell, but there’s a reason his armor paint isn’t symmetrical any more. He keeps Waxer’s tasset on his right thigh, and Boil wears the other half of the pair on his left. It’s a memorial and a reminder both.

And, honestly, even if the new general weren’t secretly a Sith, no one could match Obi-Wan. Cody won’t settle for anything less than the best for his men.

He tightens his grip on Obi-Wan’s hand at the thought, and Obi-Wan blinks awake just as their wrist comms sound. 

“Rise and shine, hm?” Obi-Wan asks, voice scratchy with sleep. 

He dislodges Cody’s hand on his with a gentle shake, and Cody, for a single, selfish second, wants to put his hand back. He wants to press Obi-Wan back to the mattress and turn their alarms off, to try to be content with their lives: to be anonymous and alive and together in this Outer Rim city with its water showers and its printing warehouses with real paper. What would it be like to worry about paying rent and making dinner instead of galactic peace and the lives of millions? How would it feel to curl together on an uncomfortable mattress every night instead of worrying about fraternization regulations or the perils of attachment?

He shoves the thought away as quickly as it occurs. He wouldn’t last an hour in that world without tearing his hair out, he thinks, swinging his feet over the far edge of the bed.

Obi-Wan wouldn’t last a minute.

“Timer set?” Obi-Wan asks. The last inch of the DC-15S’s stock is visible past the top of Obi-Wan’s pack, and Cody can see the sniper attachment outline in the canvas. Cody snaps Obi-Wan’s lightsaber to one of his belt loops. It’s tempting to try to make a new plan, to put their respective weapons back in the right hands, but deception is the name of the game. He’ll have to settle for the smaller pistol tucked into a shoulder holster beneath his stolen leather jacket.

Lott’s been one step ahead of them this whole time, after all, and Cody doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. Their details have to be perfect. 

“Timer set,” Cody says, tilting his wrist comm to show the blinking 10:00 synced with the one of Obi-Wan’s. “Radio silence unless there’s an emergency, and even then—”

“—Pips only. I know, I know,” Obi-Wan teases. “I helped you write those regs.”

“Never hurts to refresh.”

The lingering laxness of the witching hour hangs over Cody’s head once more. He can’t help but hover by Obi-Wan as he opens the door. A dozen feelings crowd his throat, but none of them are tied to any syllables or sounds he knows.

He swallows them all down and says, “Good luck, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan pauses halfway through the doorway, one hand on the frame, and he looks over his shoulder with one side of his mouth quirked into a smile. Cody can see there’s no such thing as luck on the tip of his tongue.

“...You too, Cody,” he says instead, and Cody starts the countdown.

Ten minutes isn’t a long time to set-up any sort of overwatch position, but Obi-Wan had been confident that his initial reconnaissance on the warehouse would serve him well. He and Cody had picked a vantage point based on sight lines, ease of access and egress, and the level of obscurity from anyone walking the warehouse floor. Cody had scouted out the best pathway up to it earlier, and he walked it enough times earlier that he feels like he could close his eyes and see the exact path Obi-Wan is walking now. So ten minutes isn’t a long time for set-up, but it’s enough.

Ten minutes is, however, a very long time to wait. 

He moves the beds apart then back together, tucks the sheets beneath the mattresses, and checks the timer approximately every second. Warfare is often described as ‘hurry up and wait’, but Cody must admit that he hasn’t had to do too much waiting lately. He’s gotten out of the habit.

When his timer finally sounds, he’s already halfway out the door. The hallways of the hotel are quiet; even smugglers and bounty hunters tend to sleep through 3 am, apparently. The night draws close around him, the air damp with gathering dew and oddly fresh. The nighttime air lacks the daytime’s metallic tang, and the moonlight on the other side of the windows shines clear and blue onto the empty, trash-ridden city streets. It’s a far cry from the muggy brown of her sister’s light in the daytime.

He keeps his head down as he cuts through the streets. There’s no need to obscure the path he walks, not now, not when he’s trying to be noticed. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber swings against his hip as he moves, and it’s a strange yet familiar weight. If he can’t have his armor, Cody decides, the lightsaber is a close second for battlefield comfort. It’s been in his hands often enough before this.

Only two other people pass him, both heading in the opposite direction. They have their hoods drawn over their faces, and Cody glimpses the blue and white stripes of a togruta’s montrals on one. Neither of them make eye contact or slow down, even for a second, besides. He keeps an eye on the rooftops as he passes, but no motion or glimmer of scope gives a lookout away. 

The path to the warehouse’s front entrance is clear, too. For a second he considers doing more reconnaissance, scouting the windows or simply using a different door, but. He’s pretending to be a Jedi, he thinks, and not a single Jedi he knows is anything like subtle.

When he tries the front door, it opens at a touch of his hand. The dust motes inside hang like frozen white embers in the gentle cascade of moonlight. Cody scatters that dust into whirlwind eddies as he walks forward with a confidence he doesn’t feel. The shadows of the warehouse around him curl across the floor and the walls, but the only dangers they hold are mouse droppings. The wind gusts outside, and the roof rattles lightly until it settles back down.

Cody walks forward until he stands in the falling moonlight beneath one of the skylights. One of the catwalks above him bisects the pale white rectangle, and he almost thinks he can feel the way the stripes of the railing cast dark shadows across the pane of his face. He is where he should be, and, somewhere in the recesses of the roof’s beams, Obi-Wan is hopefully watching him back. 

All that’s left is for their villain to show, Cody thinks grimly. 

He and Obi-Wan said 4 am over comms, so he may simply have longer to wait, but there’s a chance there’s nothing but sunrise to wait for.  There were so many potential points of failure: maybe Marj was only relaying information to the Separatist spy and not Lott; maybe Lott had stopped listening or caring about their comms; hell, maybe Lott had already given up on recapturing Obi-Wan and is half-way to Antilla by now.

Behind Cody, the front door opens.

The sodium-orange light from the streetlamps outside spills onto the warehouse floor like tiny pieces of confetti. The man who walks into the warehouse nearly eclipses the doorway. The light behind him drowns behind his mass such that he is more easily defined by his shadow: a monolith of a man, so large that Cody can’t help but take an instinctive step backwards. The man has to duck his head so that the curve of his two black horns will clear the doorframe, and when he walks into the warehouse proper, he seems to reduce even the vast open area of the warehouse floor to nothing.

The vest he’s wearing is perfectly white, pristine in the moonlight, and the black pocket square in his breast pocket is a flawless triangle above the welted seam. 

“Ah, Commander,” Lott says. “Imagine finding you here.”

His voice is faintly musical and of indeterminate accent, and although he speaks softly, it reverberates through the duracrete floor. There are no windows on the first or second floors, so Cody can’t check for any more of Lott’s cronies. He doesn’t hear anything, but that doesn’t mean much in a facility as secure as this one. It’s easy to soundproof walls without windows. 

“Lott,” Cody says, and he wishes he had an earpiece hooked to Obi-Wan’s radio. He wishes he had words in his head that were not his own. 

Lott’s hooves clack against the floor as he steps further into the warehouse space. His eyes are jet black in the solid red pane of his face, and he watches Cody with detached curiosity. There is no fear in him, only a scientific desire to observe. Cody holds his ground; he prefers a counterattack to striking first.

“You aren’t surprised to see me,” Lott says. “Do you have something you want to say to me, perhaps?”

Cody has plenty of things he wants to say to Lott, sure, but none of them would help the mission. He and Obi-Wan had rehearsed this piece, too, but adrenaline is coursing through Cody’s veins. Lott is head and shoulders above Cody and more than three times as broad, and the cold intelligence in his eyes makes Cody feel as though nothing he could say would ever change Lott’s mind.

Obi-Wan would say something clever, Cody’s sure. Obi-Wan would smile his most charming smile, tuck his arms into the bells of his sleeves, and say, I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. Shall we try again?

But Cody isn’t Obi-Wan.

“We’ve both been deceived,” Cody says. “The spy you’ve been working with is a Sith.”

Lott’s hooves come to a halt at the edge of where the entranceway meets the factory floor. His eyebrows raise in polite interest.

“Truly? Then yes,” he allows. “We were both deceived. But one of us more than the other, I think.”

The emptiness of the silence between them is electric with danger. Cody feels like he’s captaining a ship through an asteroid field with no long range sensors; he is feeling his way through death in the dark.

“Why are you here?” Lott asks at last. The second half of his question goes unsaid: you aren’t here to kill me. He holds no weapon, and the line of his suit is straight and clean. But there’s just something about the weight of him, the gravity of his presence, that makes Cody think a blaster shot would glance right off his shoulders like water off a duck. Perhaps he is wearing a self-contained forcefield; perhaps he has his own snipers set up. 

“A trade,” Cody says. “I’ve got information that you’d be interested in, and—and some things you’ll need for your research. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I know you need a Force-sensitive to do it.”

“You’re offering Master Kenobi back to me?”

“No.” Cody tucks his wrist comm behind his back. He’s about to go off-script, and he’s sure Obi-Wan isn’t going to like this plan either. “I’m offering myself. If you’ve been researching the Force, you know Force sensitivity isn’t genetic. And if you’ve been researching the GAR, you know there are two ways for someone to be promoted to the rank of commander. You need a Force-sensitive, but you don’t need Obi-Wan. You can use me . Fix my master, and I’ll come with you. I’ll do whatever you want.”

He swallows beneath the weight of Lott’s consideration. The silence between them surges back in like a tide, and Cody has a second to be relieved that the angry pips he was expecting from Obi-Wan don’t jar it. 

Lott tilts his head a bare milimeter to the side. “And why would I agree to that?”

“Some people here think you’re trying to do the right thing,” Cody says, and even if he doesn’t believe it, he doesn’t discount the idea that Lott might. If he’s trying to get justice for his sister, it isn’t impossible. “And Obi-Wan… he’s the best of us. He’s what every Jedi should be. If anyone would be able to do more, to do better — to do the right thing— with the Force, then it’s him.”

Cody’s heart pounds in his chest, and his fingers twitch towards the lightsaber at his side that he doesn’t even know how to use. The moonlight doesn’t catch in Lott’s eyes.

“You love him,” Lott says simply, as if there were no other conclusions to draw, as if that were the full summary of Cody’s argument.

Cody stays silent. It isn’t something he can contradict, but he hopes like hell Obi-Wan thinks Lott’s just grandstanding.

Lott walks away from the shadow of the lowered ceiling above the entranceway and onto the warehouse floor. The red of his skin shifts blue and pink where the light hits it, and the jagged scars on his horns mar the otherwise polished sheen of their matte black keratin. Cody can’t help but think, with the perfect intuition he sometimes finds on the battlefield, that Lott has made a final decision.

“You make a compelling argument, Commander,” Lott says. “And a Sith spy in the Republic is, indeed, a cause for concern.”

The click-click-clack of his hooves echoes through the high-ceilinged room until Lott comes to a halt ten feet from where Cody stands. He’s in Obi-Wan’s line of sight, now, Cody thinks. No matter which way the cards fall, they can at least take Lott down.

“Unfortunately, I do not believe you have the full picture,” Lott says.

“And you do?”

“Mm.” Lott’s smile lets through a brief hint of very, very white teeth. “You know, Commander, I’m beginning to believe that you also wish to ‘do the right thing’, so I’ll give you some of that picture for free. The man who commissioned this research desired a method of increasing a Force-sensitive person’s ability to manipulate the Force.”

“They what?”

The new information drops into the base Cody’s stomach like a lead ball. Cody and Obi-Wan had considered three possible motivations for Lott: justice for his sister from the Separatists, the same justice but from the Jedi, or, simply, to complete his experiment and sell the resulting weapon to the highest bidder. But none of this is matching up. Had something gone wrong with the serum? Was Obi-Was supposed to gain more powers, not lose them?

…But why would a Sith ever risk making the Jedi’s most powerful master more powerful?

“I don’t doubt your conclusion regarding a Sith,” Lott says, and there’s a gentle reassurance to it that is at odds with his stature. “My commissioner promised to send me a Force-sensitive for my experiment with the stipulation that I kill them after determining the serum’s effectiveness. I failed in this, clearly. Perhaps that failure triggered the explosion that so preoccupied the local news a few days ago… But it doesn’t matter. I had never intended to kill Master Kenobi. I needed to see the results of my experiment through.”

His words are hypnotically soothing despite their content; his voice and his demeanor are so soft and objective that terror recedes. For a second, Cody grasps at hope. If Lott had not known he was being advised by a Sith, if the goal hadn’t been to take Obi-Wan’s powers away, then perhaps there is room to negotiate. Cody had known that Lott and the Sith spy had had different goals, but he’d assumed that the spy had primarily been manipulating Lott. 

He hadn’t considered the reverse.

“Then you should make the trade,” Cody presses, honing in on that last admission. “Me for information on how to fix Obi-Wan. Trust me; it’ll be a lot easier than trying to find him right now.”

Lott’s smile, limned in the faint white-blue moonlight, is oddly fond. “A spirited argument indeed, Commander. Unfortunately, there are two problems with your hypothesis. The first problem is that I know you aren’t Force-sensitive.”

He takes a single step to the left with all the elegant courtesy of a visiting dignitary, and the warehouse doors begin to creep open.

“The second problem is that I’ve already found him.”

Cody can’t move. He feels as though the duracrete beneath his boots has pulled him into the floor, as though it has seemed into the space between his joints to lock him into place. Five of Lott’s cronies push a bound Obi-Wan before them, each with a pistol trained on his torso, and Cody can’t do anything more than blink in shock. His hands are hand-cuffed behind his back, but his feet are free, and there are red lines radiating from his mouth that look like residue from a gag.

Well, Cody thinks with the kind of dry gallows humor that is a panicked brain’s last resort. This explains why he never heard any angry pips from his wrist comm when he proposed the trade.

Fuck. Things have gone wrong with their plans before, but he’s not sure they’ve ever gone this wrong.

On the other side of Lott, Obi-Wan tosses his head to get his lank bangs out of his eyes. 

“Ah, hello there,” he says, and he rolls his eyes when one of the goons jabs their blaster into his side. 

“Master Kenobi,” Lott says with equal courtesy. “So glad you could join us.”

“So glad to have been able to, ah, make it down,” Obi-Wan quips, flicking his eyes up to where his hiding spot had been, and Cody cannot physically take much more of this. Bad enough when it’s just Obi-Wan doing his little song and dance; he can’t stomach two of them. Not right now.

Kark it all, he needs more time. He’s never been good at thinking on his feet. Give him a week’s worth of intel and white boards and he can rout any Separatist army; give him a split-second decision, and he’ll jump on top of General Grievous.

He has to keep Lott talking.

“How did you know?” Cody asks. He’s gambling that Lott, with all his cool intelligence, wants to show off. If he didn’t, he would have killed Cody and bundled Obi-Wan back to his ship. Cody tears his eyes away from Obi-Wan and, desperately, tries to think.

“That you weren’t a Jedi?” Lott asks, turning back to Cody with satisfaction. “I’ll admit that your conversation earlier did have me doubting myself. Your service record is public knowledge; it did not seem far-fetched that you were promoted so quickly because Master Kenobi here saw Force-sensitivity instead of tactical brilliance. I’m sure it would be something the Council would want to keep quiet, too: a clone Jedi? Why, then they’d have to grant you citizenship, Commander, and the bureaucratic nightmare that would follow isn’t something they’d want to handle during the war.”

Cody blinks, a little stunned. Is that what would have happened? Is that even possible?

“But you gave yourself away quite early. Even an inexperienced Jedi would have his own lightsaber,” he says, nodding at Obi-Wan’s lightsaber on Cody’s hip. “Even a Jedi using a blaster would have set it to stun. And, perhaps most damning: the locks in that building were purely physical, yet you had to melt through every last one instead of using the Force.”

Before he’d left for the warehouse this morning, Cody had thought: their details have to be perfect.

But their details had been flawed from the start. 

All of Cody’s anger and helplessness rises in his throat, scraping the tender flesh with all its jagged edges. Damn it. Damn it. What else is there? What else is there to try? Cody’s eyes drag, almost unwillingly, to Obi-Wan’s face. In a storm, the ship seeks its harbor; the moth seeks the flame. 

But Obi-Wan’s expression is one of intense concentration, not fear, and the goons around him are watching Cody and Lott’s back and forth like an intense game of mesh’geroya. 

Cody clenches his teeth. He said earlier that he trusted Obi-Wan to get him out, and he still does. He turns back to Lott and leans into being a distraction. “At least tell us why you’re doing this. Is it about your sister?”

Lott’s gaze shifts from detachment to interest, but it’s the interest of a collector finding a moderately rare specimen: lofty, curious, but passing. “Oh, you did do your research. In a way, yes. She was quite the Jedi, I hear. Hm… I was there when she was born, you know. And I was there when she was taken away.”

Ice runs through Cody’s veins. That’s it, then, he thinks. Lott’s after revenge, but not against the Separatists. “If this is about taking revenge against the Jedi—”

“Revenge? Against the Jedi?” Lott laughs, and for a brief, terrifying second, there’s madness in it. “Ha! What small-minded thinking. No, no; I don’t begrudge the Jedi their child soldiers. I know that you taught her everything we could not. No, what I begrudge, Commander, is a universe that gave Milara—gentle Milara, foolish Milara—access to the Force, when it should have come to me.”

Shadows seem to draw closer to him. He gathers the night to himself like a cloak, his eyes widening in his anger, and the force of his personality sends echoes of energy through the room. “I was older, stronger, faster, and smarter by far. With the Force, I could have changed the galaxy.”

He pauses, and his demeanor shifts from an impersonal stone wall into something with teeth. His words drip disdain. “All she could do was die.”

The battlefield is evolving almost too fast for Cody to keep up, and he trades a bewildered glance with Obi-Wan. All of his strategies are turning wild and incomprehensible in the face of this new information. 

“Then, why?” Cody asks. The rest of the warehouse drops away from him, unimportant. He isn’t asking just to keep Lott talking now. He’s asking because he has to know why this one man would take everything from him, everything from Obi-Wan, and care so little for the collateral. “Why would you make something to take away Force sensitivity if it was something you wanted for yourself?” 

Lott’s eyes are as cold as the durasteel on Hoth when they look at Cody. “You give yourself away again, Commander. The Jedi would have taught you the importance of balance.”

If there weren’t a piece of Cody that is always, always focused on Obi-Wan, he would have missed Obi-Wan’s sharp intake of breath. Obi-Wan’s eyes are trained on Lott, and every atom of his body strains forward against the hands holding him back. 

Lott smiles. “I see Master Kenobi understands me.”

He holds his arms out, and from within the long fall of his black sleeves, he produces a small vial for each hand. In one, a violently orange one the color of sunset; in the other, a blue that burns like a lightsaber blade. 

“What the right hand giveth,” Lott says, tilting his right hand so that the blue slides from end to end, “the left hand taketh away.”

The orange is familiar, Cody realizes. It’s the same color as the light they’d used on Obi-Wan to keep him down. It’s the same color as the serum they’d injected him with.

Then, that means the blue—

“No, wait,” Obi-Wan says. Cody can only hope he’s finished whatever it was he was trying to do before this bomb dropped. “No, this isn’t right. The will of the Force can be difficult to understand, but it is not for us to decide—”

“Oh, yes, the ‘will of the Force’,” Lott laughs. “You might as well say the ‘will of gravity’, or the ‘will of electromagnetism’. Perhaps to you the Force is ineffable and undefinable. Perhaps, like the first sentients watching an eclipse and crying for their gods, you fear the wrath of something you do not understand. But I am a scientist, Master Kenobi, and I have made your Force run in harness.”

His sneer pulls his lips down below his fangs, and the depth of the emotion on display is more terrifying even than the jagged edges of his teeth. “Revenge is for children. I am correcting injustice on a galactic scale. With these two serums, I will build a universe far greater than anything you or your Order could ever even dream of.”

He tucks the orange vial into one of his many pockets, and he withdraws a syringe exactly like the one that he had used against Obi-Wan and loads the blue vial.

“Shall we perform another experiment, then?” he asks conversationally, pulling it up to his own neck. “Which will is stronger: the will of the Force, or mine?”

Cody barely sees it happen.

In one moment, Obi-Wan is still bound by hand-cuffs and the unforgiving grip of two of Lott’s lackeys, and in the next, one lackey is on the ground and the other’s blaster arm is caught between Obi-Wan’s chest and bicep. The lackey starts firing, panicked at being held, and Obi-Wan pivots without unleashing his hold so that the lackey’s shots head straight for Lott. The red burn of blaster fire bursts apart into blue as it collides with the personal force field that Lott’s wearing, but the protection isn’t perfect. Lott staggers backwards, hoofs screeching against the duracrete as he slides.

Obi-Wan squeezes the arm in his grip until the lackey drops the blaster with a shout then throws his elbow directly into the man’s nose. The man’s head snaps backwards with a spray of blood, and Obi-Wan dives to the ground for the dropped blaster in time for the other lackeys to realize that they’ve lost control of the situation. Cody pulls his blaster pistol from the shoulder holster tucked beneath and fires off a couple of shots before they can even get their guns. They scream and scatter, and, well. At least they’re still untrained and undisciplined, Cody thinks. That’s one thing that’s gone right.

When Obi-Wan stands up, stolen blaster in hand, Cody turns back towards Lott. If that blue serum can give someone Force powers, then he doesn’t need Lott alive. If he can get that vial and get Obi-Wan out, then he can blow the whole warehouse and Lott’s sorry crew to kingdom come.

He could fire at Lott, whittling down the forcefield until it breaks, but he wants to capitalize on the element of surprise. That syringe is the only thing standing between Cody and making his general safe again, and Cody doesn’t want to give Lott any time to use it or break it. He doesn’t have to win a fight; he just has to wrestle the syringe away.

Lott’s not so big, Cody tries to reason as he races forward. Cody’s managed to launch himself on top of Grievous before; how much bigger can this guy be, really? 

Cody has a split second to realize his mistake before Lott shifts to his hind leg, drops the arm not holding the syringe, and slams it into Cody’s chest with all the speed and brute force of a falling tree trunk. Cody barely manages to stop himself from going down on impact. He’s winded, though, and he thinks he heard his ribs creak in protest.

Fuck, he thinks, resisting the urge to put a hand on his side as he backs away and starts firing again. No man that big should be able to move that fast, but Cody isn’t willing to test that theory again. He stays out of reach, watching thunder clouds of anger gather across Lott’s face as he keeps firing and Lott keeps flinching back.

Over the repeating song of blasterfire and the zing of bolts being absorbed by a force shield, a shout rings out. 

“Cody!”

When he looks over, Obi-Wan has taken down another of Lott’s lackeys, but more are starting to edge through the front door to the warehouse. His shirt is singed from a bolt to his shoulder, and his jacket is in tatters on the floor. He looks winded and fierce, wielding a blaster as well as any brother of the 212th, and Cody loves him beyond words: awfully, singularly, desperately.

But even Obi-Wan couldn’t stop the small army that’s trying to come through that door. Cody fires another couple of rounds at Lott, and between one stagger and the next, Cody points his wrist comm at the door frame, locks it to the signals of the detonators for the explosives in the entryway, and makes eye contact with Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan dives for the warehouse floor with his arms over his head, and Cody triggers every detonator he’d locked onto. 

The ensuing blast takes out the doorway, the lackeys inside of it, and puts a wall of flame between them and the army. Cody waits for a split second to make sure that Obi-Wan’s still breathing, still moving, and then turns to Lott. Cody’s next shot makes the force field flicker; the one after makes it fade. When Obi-Wan comes to stand next to Cody, his blaster tip doesn’t waver from Lott’s center of mass.

Behind them, the fire is spreading up the walls, hot and crackling. Smoke starts filling the warehouse, and Cody’s eyes smart. It’s more fire than he’d been expecting, he thinks, and it’s spreading fast enough to catch some of the other placements. P, in this case, had definitely been plenty.

More than plenty.

The fire may be at Obi-Wan and Cody’s backs right now, but the light of it reflecting in Lott’s black eyes and the curl of his horns burns just as hot. Lott tries to move forward, and Cody fires a warning shot just over his shoulder. It singes the white fabric to brown, and Lott freezes.

“Give up,” Obi-Wan says. His soft voice can barely be heard over the roar of the flames licking their way up the ceiling. “Give us the syringe, and we can end this. No one has to die here.”

Cody knows the Jedi have rules against shooting an unarmed opponent, but he has no such compulsion. If Lott puts one finger wrong, Cody will shoot and dive for the syringe as it falls. 

At this point, he’d almost prefer that.

But Lott pulls his hands up to the height of his shoulders in a classic gesture of surrender, and Cody can see the electric blue of the serum glinting from between the fingers of his right hand.

“Well played,” Lott says. “Very well played. But, yet again, you’ve failed to consider one small factor.”

He lets his right hand drop, the syringe balanced on the tips of his fingers, and he tosses it towards them in one easy motion.

In the same instance, a massive, catastrophic wave of force slams into Cody, knocking him backwards and closer to the flames spreading across the wall behind him. He floats, weightless in the air, before slamming into the unforgiving ground. There’s a thud and a shake next to him, and he glimpses auburn hair and the tan corner of Obi-Wan’s jacket. Cody lurches to his elbows and his knees, coughing, and he looks up to see Lott towering over them.

“I told you I was a scientist,” Lott says from above them, wreathed in fire and smoke and moonlight. “Did you truly think I would leave any variables to chance?”

With his face scraped raw against the duracrete, Cody at last recognizes this feeling. The pressure Lott had exerted earlier hadn’t just been from his overwhelming personality; that had been a Force presence . It gathers around him now, as thick and overbearing as Ventress’ and Dooku’s combined, and Cody chokes on more than the smoke gathering in the air.

Lott had already injected it, practiced with it, and trained with it. Lott has the Force.

With effort, he staggers to his hands and knees, to one knee, and to his feet. Next to him, Obi-Wan wipes away the blood trickling down his nose and into the auburn of his beard, and Cody’s hand goes, on instinct, to the lightsaber at his waist. 

Obi-Wan catches his lightsaber without looking away from Lott, and he ignites it and shifts into the opening stance of Soresu with the easy grace of tens of thousands of hours of practice.

He spits blood and what looks like a broken tooth to the side, and he says, “Okay. Then show me what your will can do.”

Lott stares him down, and anger and satisfaction war on his face at the challenge. Around them, another packet of Cody’s explosives goes off, and the walls creak with tension. The rows of windows at the very top of the warehouse walls flicker orange and red as the fire spreads. Far below them, Lott reaches into his jacket to pull out a black lightsaber with a curved handle. Cody recognizes it from his sister’s obituary, and anger licks in his chest as hot as the flames on the wall.

The blade, when ignited, is just as blue as Obi-Wan’s. 

They leap together in a maelstrom of sparks. Cody sees Obi-Wan waver beneath the sheer, unimaginable strength of Lott’s blow, and Cody can’t help but wonder if Lott’s already learned how to use the Force to augment his movements. He’s never had the Force, and Obi-Wan’s never spoken of a Jedi’s training; is it natural? Is it something you have to be taught?

Regardless, Obi-Wan starts to dodge and deflect far more than he counters. His impeccable lightsaber form, at least, is something that must be learned. Hundreds of thousands of hours of training show their worth as Obi-Wan flows from kata to kata with the same terrifying speed Cody has come to expect from him. Each deflect, parry, and riposte is perfectly angled and timed to redirect all of Lott’s strength away from Obi-Wan’s body and to the floor. Obi-Wan doesn’t have to be stronger, not like this; he just has to be better.

He remembers what Obi-Wan had said about his midichlorian count days earlier, when they had reviewed the results of Bones’ tests: these are close to my usual number, although that’s never been very high. Obi-Wan has been training his whole life to fight people stronger than him in the Force, Cody realizes. 

It’s paying dividends now. 

Then Lott slams Obi-Wan to the floor with another Force-driven shockwave, and Cody pulls his blaster back into position and curses himself for getting distracted. There’s a reason Jedi, even the inexperienced ones, are notoriously hard to kill. He fires a few blasts at Lott and is unsurprised when the man deflects them with a few flicks of his wrist. That’s one difference, then; Obi-Wan could have returned each blast to Cody’s center of mass without a second’s thought, but Lott has to focus on defense. 

Cody takes advantage of this, maintaining a steady wave of blaster shots as he circles around to Obi-Wan. He covers Obi-Wan with his body as Obi-Wan staggers back to his feet, sways, then shakes himself back into steadiness.

“Find that syringe,” Obi-Wan says, his voice a harsh rasp in the thickening smoke. “I’ve got this.”

Cody nods and shrugs his jacket off, pulling it over his mouth as he heads back towards the growing flames by the entranceway. The smoke is mostly gathered at the top of the thirty-foot ceiling, but the air on the ground floor is heating up as well. The root of their strategy hasn’t changed; if they can get that vial and get out, they can call the Council and the rest of the GAR down on Lott’s head. They wouldn’t have to worry about the Sith spy catching wind of Lott’s developments, Cody’s sure. A Sith wouldn’t want anyone to have the power Lott claims to hold.

Bits of brick and mortar have crashed to the ground from where the entrance hallway has caved in. Cody picks his way over the smoldering debris and the crumpled bodies of the lackeys they had dispatched earlier, hunting for any glimmer of blue. He walks through the trajectory of Lott’s throw earlier and crouches down to sift through rubble. If it’s rolled into the flames, or covered by the debris, or—

Wait, there. There.

Cody has to wrap his hands in his jacket to shift a burnt piece of durasteel rigging away, but once it’s out of the way, he can grab the syringe. It’s remarkably unharmed. There are no cracks in the transparisteel vial that he can see, and even the needle has stayed unbent. Cody stands, turning back towards the fight, when an explosion to his right sends him back to his knees. The burst of fire blinds him, and he throws an arm over his eyes on instinct as the floor shakes below him, as the walls creak around him, and as, above him, something cracks. 

Two of the three catwalks anchored to either side of the warehouse walls come crashing down with a scream of snapping durasteel. A shower of metal shards and molten debris descends as the catwalks smash into the duracrete below, and another surge of adrenaline pulls Cody back to his feet. 

Obi-Wan, he thinks as he squints through the smoke and the warped metal. Where’s Obi-Wan?

A flurry of blue plasma blooms within the blaze. Beyond the mangled mess of the ruined catwalk, Cody can see Obi-Wan still matching Lott blow for blow, blade against blade, and Cody’s heart is in his throat even as he revels in the sight. Obi-Wan may not have the Force, but that’s never been what defined him or his skill. Even with Lott’s size and power, Obi-Wan is still holding his ground. They’re almost evenly matched.

Almost, but not quite.

From what Cody can see, Obi-Wan can’t seem to get beneath Lott’s guard. It isn’t a matter of the Force; Lott’s reach is simply apocalyptic. Lott’s arms and legs are covered in the shining red scorch of lightsaber burns, but Obi-Wan hasn’t yet landed a hit on Lott’s core. Without the Force to give height to Obi-Wan’s jumps or speed to his swings, Obi-Wan can’t get over or under the swing of Lott’s saber. That, and Cody can tell that the exhaustion of the past month is taking its toll on already weary muscles. 

Obi-Wan’s only human, Cody thinks, but that’s all Obi-Wan’s ever been.

A blaster won’t be much help to him, Cody realizes. The two of them are moving too fast, dancing around each other and the debris, and the overheated air has painted mirages across all of Cody’s sightlines. He draws it anyways as he starts looking for a path around the burning catwalk, moving along its length and looking up every other second to watch the war.

In the end, Obi-Wan makes a single mistake, but a single mistake is all it takes. Obi-Wan dodges another Force blast, rolling to his right, but his ankle twists beneath his weight. He stumbles, teetering on unstable ground, and then Lott snaps a kick across the line of Obi-Wan’s upper back. The crack of the connection echoes even through the crackle of flames, and Cody can’t even shout as Lott deactivates his saber. 

Obi-Wan tries to struggle to his knees, but Lott drives his elbow into the space between Obi-Wan’s shoulder blades, and Obi-Wan goes down and doesn’t move again. 

The flames separating Cody from Obi-Wan rise higher. Cody starts firing with one hand while looking over his shoulder, gauging how much space he has. If he can get enough runway, he might be able to clear the mangled steel girders of the catwalk. He can make it, he thinks, backing up. He has to be able to make it. He has to.

In front of him, Lott bends down. When he straightens, he’s holding Obi-Wan in the air by his wrist—by the wrist attached to the hand still clutching desperately, miraculously at his lightsaber. It’s still lit, a beacon of blue in the growing dark.

Cody freezes, finger off the trigger and one foot in the air, because every part of him knows a threat when he sees one.

Lott puts one arm around Obi-Wan’s unresisting, dangling body and holds Obi-Wan’s back to his own chest like a shield. Holding Obi-Wan’s weight with that arm, he moves his hand from Obi-Wan’s wrist to cover Obi-Wan’s hand on the saber, and he uses that grip to angle the lit blade towards Obi-Wan’s throat. Obi-Wan struggles, jerking his chin away from the burning plasma, and his other hand scrabbles against Lott’s vest and pants pocket. He could drop the saber, but Lott hardly needs it to kill Obi-Wan. 

Obi-Wan clearly wants to keep a hold on the one weapon he has left, for as little good as it’s doing him.

“Commander,” Lott’s voice booms. “Perhaps now I might consider a trade.”

Fuck, Cody thinks, blindsided. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“Let him go,” Cody says, scrambling for ideas and finding only panic. “He’s injured, just. Let him go. I’ll leave the syringe right here, and you can go. Just—please—”

You love him, Lott had said, and Cody can’t even begin to pretend otherwise. He’s done a lot of pretending these past few days, but that’s out of his range.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says, raising his head. Even at this distance, Cody can tell that his eyes aren’t quite focused. His voice is a fraying thread. “Wait.”

“Stop, it’s fine, just. Be quiet.”

“It’s too risky,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody fights down hysterical laughter. 

This is why he’d make a terrible Jedi, he thinks. He’d let Lott go free in a heartbeat to save Obi-Wan’s life. The galactic repercussions of bargaining with a man who can give and take Force-sensitivity at will are nothing to Cody right now. He can sort that out tomorrow, when Obi-Wan’s soaking in a bacta tank and on seven days of mandatory leave. He can weather all of Obi-Wan’s disappointment, all of Obi-Wan’s pensive frowns and head shakes, so long as Obi-Wan is alive to give them.

Cody holds the syringe out like a peace offering and ignores his general. “Let him go. And it’s yours again. Just—just give him back to me.”

Lott, still keeping Obi-Wan’s back pressed against his chest as a shield from Cody’s blaster, curls his lip in disdain and victory both.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan repeats, a plea and an admonishment both. Cody wants to close his eyes, but he wouldn’t be able to escape the sound. He doesn’t want to hear Obi-Wan’s rationales, he doesn’t want to hear about the greater good, and he definitely doesn’t want to hear how Cody needs to put the galaxy first.  

He doesn't hear any of that. Instead, he hears: “Cody, I’m sorry.”

Obi-Wan must have had more of a grip on his lightsaber than Lott had anticipated, because when he uncurls the fingers of the hand caught in Lott’s grip, the blade drops. It deactivates once it’s out of his right hand, and he catches the unlit blade in his left. With a deft series of motions, he spins the hilt into the reverse grip Commander Tano favors, thumbs the activation switch, and ignites the saber with a familiar hum.

But Cody doesn’t see the blade. The saber is on, its hilt pressed to Obi-Wan’s side, but Cody doesn’t—he doesn’t see—

Lott’s face, visible above the jut of Obi-Wan’s shoulder, freezes. He chokes, black blood bubbling out of his red, red mouth, and only then does Cody realize where the blade has gone.

Lott staggers backwards, dropping Obi-Wan. Cody watches, mute with horror, as the blue blade appears in the gap between their bodies: pulling its way up and through Lott as Obi-Wan falls forward, having pierced through Obi-Wan’s side to reach Lott’s heart.

All sound in the warehouse deadens. Cody’s vision darkens at the edges and grows darker. His brain is quiet, empty, and he’s moving before he ever consciously tells his limbs to move. All he is is autonomous motion. His heart beats; his lungs expand; and his legs carry him up and over and through the flames to Obi-Wan. If the fire touches him, well. 

He can’t burn more than he’s already burning. 

Reality snaps back into place when he has his knees by Obi-Wan’s head, when he has one hand beneath the tender curve of Obi-Wan’s skull and sees Obi-Wan’s eyes move, so slowly, to lock on his.

Cody pulls Obi-Wan's jacket open with shaking hands. Below the curve of Obi-Wan's ribcage, a few inches above the jut of his left hip, is a blackened, perfect one-inch circle. The fabric is melted around it, as shiny as the wound beneath, and it isn't bleeding. Stars, it's just—it's a hole. A hole where part of Obi-Wan's lower abdomen should be. 

Cody's jacket is still folded over his arm, and he tries to tuck it over and around the wound, but he doesn’t know if it will do any good when there's no blood. His combat casualty training didn't include lightsaber wounds. 

“Obi-Wan,” Cody says, and his voice is hoarse from screaming things he doesn’t even remember. “Obi-Wan.”

If he ever knew any other words in Basic, he’s forgotten them now. 

With apparent effort, Obi-Wan takes a deep breath. The smoke has filled most of the upper half of the warehouse by now, but at least the air by the floor is still mostly breathable. 

“Lott,” Obi-Wan manages. “Where’s—”

Cody hears the crunch of glass, and he turns to see Lott collapse into a heap behind him. Lightsabers cauterize as they go through, but the wound across his chest is massive. The cauterization has broken in dozens of places, and it's leaking black blood that shimmers in the firelight like an oil slick. The smell of sulfur twines with the smoke. 

Even with a chasm sunk into his chest, Lott still bares the jagged edge of his fangs and struggles to his knees. When he draws a small repeater from his jacket, he leaves black stains across more of the white fabric of his vest. Cody crouches over Obi-Wan, trying to shield his Jedi with his body, but Lott barely seems to notice. He is swaying, covered in blood and ash, and his wide eyes glint with firelight.

“No! No,” he growls in a voice like brimstone. The black of his irises are perfect circles roving across a sea of white. “No one else could do it right. Only I could ever—”

As he raises his blaster, its point shaking and shivering in the overheated air, and his first two shots miss.

His third hits one of the pockets of C4 that Cody had used to line the back entrance.

Another explosion rocks the building as it ignites. The duracrete rolls, cracking into tectonic plates, and when the shockwave knocks Lott forward, he doesn’t move again. 

Cody curses, watching as the other entrance is engulfed in roaring, licking flames. The vast array of explosives in the basement haven’t caught yet, but it’s just a matter of heat and pressure and time. With the building heat and decreasing integrity of the building, there can’t be much time left.

Cradled in Cody’s lap, Obi-Wan coughs, then winces as the cough pulls at his wound. Cody runs his free hand over Obi-Wan’s hair, brushing it away from his forehead, and tries to strategize. The ground floor exits are all caved in, and most of the catwalks connected to the sides of the building are either on the floor or encased in so much fire that they’d melt Cody’s shoes to the durasteel. He looks up, but the remaining catwalk dangles in the dead center of the warehouse floor, and, beyond that, the only exits are the skylights dripping moonlight through the smoke. 

You’d have to be a Jedi to reach them, he thinks, and he realizes he’s still holding the blue syringe in his hand.

“Obi-Wan,” Cody says, and he isn't just saying the name this time. Even if it doesn’t help them escape, the Force has healing powers, right? It could heal Obi-Wan. “I’m going to use this on you. Okay? Hold on.”

With shaking hands, he levels the tip of the needle at Obi-Wan’s neck, trying to remember where the injection site had been before, but Obi-Wan wraps bloody fingers around Cody’s hand.

“Let me,” Cody says, but Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“I couldn’t jump us up,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody knows that Obi-Wan had seen the same skylight solution that Cody had. “I’m too—I couldn’t. I wouldn’t heal fast enough.”

And damn it all if Cody didn’t know that already, but. But they don’t have another choice. They are surrounded on all sides by flame and falling debris, and he thinks that, above all, a commander should know when the battle is lost. 

At least this way, Obi-Wan would die a Jedi and Cody would die at his side: exactly the way it was always meant to be.

“But you could,” Obi-Wan rasps, and his meaning takes too long to register in Cody's brain. “You could use it. Get out. Leave me.”

His fingers pull weakly at the syringe, but Cody won’t budge. 

“I can’t,” Cody says, and his voice breaks in a way that has nothing to do with the smoke. “I can’t. You’re the Jedi.”

“Not much of one,” Obi-Wan says, smiling weakly. “Cody. Strategize. One of us should survive.”

Cody is shaking as badly as the building. 

“But it shouldn’t be me,” Cody stresses, because it was never supposed to be him. He’s one of three million, but there is no one like Obi-Wan. “It has to be you. Obi-Wan, you’ve never asked for more than I can give. But I can’t. Obi-Wan, please.”

Beneath them, the floor vibrates. The hollow glow of fire is descending, and they don’t have much time.

From Cody’s lap, Obi-Wan lifts one shaking hand to draw his thumb across the top of Cody’s cheek to the bottom of his scar, smiling sadly all the while.

“Oh, my dear," he says, and Cody catches his hand and leans into the touch. “My dear, you have so much more to give… than just what was given to you.”

“Not this," Cody begs. “ Please . I can’t. Obi-Wan, I—you—”

Obi-Wan closes his eyes. Cody’s hand on the syringe wavers, and his other hand squeezes Obi-Wan’s fingers as tight as he can.

“Okay,” Obi-Wan says. His voice is barely a thread beneath the crackling of the flames around them. “Okay, Cody. Then. Let me.”

He folds his free hand around the syringe, and Cody lets it go with a choked sob of relief. Obi-Wan will get his Force powers back, Cody thinks, and at least Cody will have set the universe to rights before he dies.

Obi-Wan holds Cody’s eyes, as serious as Cody’s ever seen him, and then one corner of his mouth quirks into a smile. He slides his hand from Cody’s cheek to the back of Cody’s neck, tilts his head to the side, and with a soft exhale, he pulls Cody into a kiss.

Their lips are dry and cracking from the heat, and Obi-Wan tastes like little more than ash and sweat, but. But that’s Obi-Wan. He’s kissing Obi-Wan. Every thought leaves Cody’s head at once as he leans in closer, kissing back as best he can despite the angle and the danger pulsing ten feet beneath them. 

Everything but the press and slide of Obi-Wan’s lips on his drops away. Obi-Wan opens his mouth to press his tongue against the seam of Cody’s lips, and in the wake of that benediction, Cody barely feels the needle slide in.

The effect is immediate. The Force blossoms into every aspect of Cody's awareness: a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense all at once. Even the ravaged, burning warehouse around him appears overlaid with new colors, with the eddies of life itself, and in and around him is a presence as familiar to him as his own voice. It feels like warmth and fondness and so, so much love.

Obi-Wan, he realizes. He can feel Obi-Wan.

No. 

It shouldn't be him. It shouldn't be him at all. Damn it. Damn it, he can't take this out of his blood any more than he can put it into Obi-Wan—so—

In Cody's arms, Obi-Wan collapses backwards, but in the Force, Cody can still feel the thread of his life. It's weak, but it still responds to the push and pull of Cody’s will. Cody reaches out like he did when they were meditating, grasping for familiar ground, and he feels it when he manages to hook his mind into Obi-Wan’s. The bond between them, a mere trickle before, surges like a river released from its dam. Within the shared space of their minds, Cody pulls Obi-Wan’s fading light into the stream. 

Even a river can’t quench a desert, Cody thinks, but it’s a good start.

From the bond, Cody feels thoughts and ideas wash over him that he knows aren’t his own. He grabs onto them, curious, and he gets an impression of emotions and sense-memories that all have the echo of Obi-Wan’s gentle but firm tutelage. It’s a lesson, Cody realizes. A lesson from when Obi-Wan was younger, when he first learned how to jump with the Force.

To jump.

He looks up, through the clouds of brown-black smoke, to glimpse clean moonlight shining beyond the skylight above.

Strategize, Obi-Wan had said.

He picks up Obi-Wan’s lightsaber and clips it to his own belt. It isn’t his to keep, he thinks, but it is his to keep safe.

While crouched on the floor, Cody slides his arms beneath Obi-Wan’s shoulders and the tender crook of his knees. Obi-Wan’s limp body is too light in his arms as he stands, and he ignores the feeling of Obi-Wan’s protest in the Force. There isn’t a universe in which he leaves Obi-Wan behind. He stares up in trepidation. Obi-Wan is easier to carry with the Force, but he still needs to make a fifteen-foot vertical jump while weighed down. New strength wraps around his muscles, but new fear nestles in his heart. He can’t do this, he thinks. He isn’t a Jedi. He isn’t a Jedi, and he can’t do this, he can’t.

But he has to.

Obi-Wan’s head lolls in Cody’s grasp, and Cody pulls him tighter to his chest. He tilts his arms so Obi-Wan’s head is over his heart, just as it was that first terrible night, and he moves to stand fifteen paces beyond the bottom of the one remaining catwalk. It’ll be just like jumping on top of Grievous on the Negotiator, but a little further. And a little further than that.

The smoke is at head-height now. Cody can feel the Force filtering the air for him as it slides through his lungs and drops into a crouch. 

Then he stops thinking, and he starts running.

Through the bond, Cody feels Obi-Wan, even on the edge of consciousness, help guide his movements. He moves faster now, and easier, and when he bends his knees at the start of his jump and snaps up, it’s exactly like he’s flying. His body cuts a clean arc through the air, weightless, effortless. The catwalk is there to greet him, and he barely clears the railing before slamming knees-first into the durasteel grate. The metal suspensions scream a protest as they strain against the sudden impact, and the whole catwalk sways as it considers joining its brethren on the floor.

At last, it settles.

“Fuck,” Cody says, a cold sweat gathering on his forehead despite the heat above, around, and below him. The durasteel beneath his knees is hot enough to burn through the fabric of Cody’s jeans, and Cody staggers to his feet. The fire isn’t the danger up here, though; the smoke is. It’s almost impossible to see through at this level, and Obi-Wan, even unconscious, starts coughing. 

The skylight is only ten feet above the catwalk, but Cody has to break it. He could never shatter transparisteel with his body, he knows; not even a real Jedi could. But this is an old city, he thinks. It has printing presses for actual paper and showers with actual water, and it might not have transparisteel for its windows.

If it’s glass, it’s breakable. If it’s not, they’re dead.

Obi-Wan’s presence is getting weaker in Cody’s mind. In his arms, the moonlight spinning through the window and the gathering smoke paints lines of shadows on Obi-Wan’s sweat-soaked face. Cody pulls his body tighter into his chest. He wishes he could pull Obi-Wan straight into his ribcage, to nestle him behind a fortress of bone next to Cody’s heart and protect him with every resource Cody has to his name, but he can’t. All he can do is keep going.

He wraps his mind around Obi-Wan’s mind, wraps his arms around Obi-Wan’s body, and drops into a crouch. The catwalk spans the length of the warehouse, but there’s only one section of it that crosses beneath a spotlight. He starts moving, barely breathing, and he puts every hope he has into his muscles, his tendons, and his bones, and he jumps.

He tucks his head down over Obi-Wan and tries to hit the ceiling with the firm ridge of his shoulders and upper back. Half a second after his jump, his body slams into the skylight. The collision feels like an undoing, like a severing, like his body hits the glass and his soul keeps going. The impact rattles his brain in his skull and vibrates through his teeth. Across the bones and muscles of his back, he feels the window flex and bow out, and then—then—

The glass shatters around him. Jagged fragments catch on his clothes as he breaks through the skylight, shooting through the air as glass bursts free around him. It tinkles like rain as it falls, and Cody collapses into it as he lands on the tin roof. He moves away from the broken skylight, pulling vast lungfuls of clean air into his overheated, smoke-scarred lungs. 

Obi-Wan is safe in his arms but nothing more than a quiet golden thread in the Force. Cody doesn’t trust his feelings, not like Obi-Wan always said to, and he has to press his fingers to the tender space on Obi-Wan’s neck beneath his jaw. Cody can barely feel anything over the chaos of his own stampeding heart, but his shaking fingers at last find a weak but steady pulse.

He chokes back a sob and presses his forehead to Obi-Wan's, pushing more of that glowing golden something through their bond as he does. Obi-Wan’s pulse beats a little stronger in response

“Stay with me,” Cody whispers, wishing he knew how to make it into a Jedi mind trick. “Please. Just a little longer.”

He staggers to his feet and pulls Obi-Wan close, and the Force soothes the rampant hurts in his limbs and ligaments. He needs—medical supplies. He needs some place close by with medical supplies and a low profile so they can recover before the universe comes calling. 

There's only one place to go, really.

Cody turns to make his way west as the sun rises over the city, and the billowing smoke behind him clouds the dawn.

Chapter Text

The streets of New Kaon below are almost deserted, but not quite. Cody makes his way along the rooftops of the clustered warehouses instead, leaping gaps between buildings that he’s sure he couldn’t have made without Lott’s strange serum. Although his landings aren’t as soft as Obi-Wan’s tend to be, he doesn’t stay in one place long enough for anyone to look up and see him. He only has a vague idea of the right direction he needs to move, but his top priority is to get himself and Obi-Wan as far from the warehouse as he can before it blows. 

After he’s been running for fewer than five minutes, he hears a noise like a venator class starship crashing onto a planet’s surface. The roof he’s on rolls in undulated waves beneath his feet—once, twice, and a smaller third time—and then a burst of hot air and debris hits his back. Behind him, the plume of gray smoke has become a blackened mushroom of atomized duracrete, rising into a sinister imposter nestled between soft white clouds.

Sirens start almost immediately.

Cody hunches his shoulders and looks for the nearest fire escape. Obi-Wan flinches and cries out as Cody shifts him in his arms to start the descent, but he doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t wake up as Cody checks to make sure his gut wound isn’t bleeding, and he doesn’t wake up as Cody hurries through the awakening city. 

He doesn’t wake up, but his chest keeps rising and his heart keeps beating, and Cody will take what he can get. 

The city isn’t laid out on a grid system, so Cody doesn’t know how far he travels before he finally finds a familiar street. He certainly doesn’t know how long it takes him to find a familiar cross-street. All the time he’d spent memorizing this part of the city, back when this was an ordinary mission on an ordinary backwater, saves them both. Two people spot him before he manages to hunt down the manhole cover that leads to one of the jazz warehouse’s tunnels, but he is beyond caring about secrecy.

Bones had left medical supplies when he’d come by earlier to treat Obi-Wan, and Cody can only pray that some of it’s still there.

Getting Obi-Wan down the ladder is exactly as much of a painful, terrifying chore as it was the first time, but the Force helps. He can't float Obi-Wan down with a flick of his wrist and, worried about the lightsaber wound, he can't sling Obi-Wan over his shoulders like he did before. His descent is slow, careful, and one-handed.

The light from his wrist comm is thin and watery in the dark of the tunnels, but he doesn't need much. His boots stick in the dull damp mud gathered on its surface. He skids a couple times on the uneven incline, preoccupied and moving too fast, and he has to force himself to slow down before he trips. Some part of his brain knows that, if Obi-Wan’s made it this far, he’ll probably be ok, but his ability to accept risk on behalf of Obi-Wan’s health, always low, is close to zero right now. 

Between watching the uneven ground in the faint light of his wrist comm and the rise and fall of Obi-Wan’s chest, Cody doesn’t see the figure at the far end of the tunnel until it’s too late to hide his approach.

He freezes. The little light he has reflects briefly in what he knows, instinctively, is the scope on a DC-15S. He can’t draw his weapon with Obi-Wan in his arms, and he can’t risk a firefight for the same reason. That’s a brother, almost certainly, but who?

And is it someone he can trust?

He curls his arms so that Obi-Wan’s face is tilted into Cody’s chest. He can’t do much about the burst of auburn hair, but it’s so covered with ash and soot that the red only shows in thin threads within the white and gray.

At the movement, the person blocking his path clicks the flashlight on the DC-15S into brilliance, and Cody squints through the blinding white flash. Spots shimmer in his vision, blocking whoever’s behind the rifle, but he still hears the sharp intake of breath.

“Commander?” the man says in the distinct voice of a clone. Whoever it is, he sounds like he’s seen a ghost. “Sir, is that really you?”

Cody’s vision returns enough for him to catch a glimpse of familiar paint, but he doesn’t relax just yet. “Trench. Is this a mutiny?”

“No, sir, of course not,” Trench says, but his grip doesn’t waver on the rifle. Cody would be impressed by the discipline if he weren’t staring down a blaster barrel with his general unconscious in his arms. “But Sergeant Boil said—”

“Take me to Boil, then,” Cody says, stepping forward. He doesn’t know exactly who he can trust, but he’d bet his life and Obi-Wan’s on Boil being loyal. And he knows Obi-Wan needs medical attention; the immediate threat of smoke inhalation supersedes the more distant threat of one of the clones in the warehouse being in league with the Separatist spy.

“Yessir. Wait, is that—the general—”

The barrel of the gun shifts, and, on instinct, Cody spins to block Obi-Wan with his body.

But Trench had just been moving to strap his blaster onto his back so he could open the door behind him. He doesn’t waste any time grabbing a ring of metal keys from within one of his belt compartments, and his hands don’t shake as he finds the right one. 

Cody bites back a sigh of relief. He can’t continue to suspect every single member of the 212th of high treason; he’ll go mad, and he’ll never get Obi-Wan to safety. He doesn’t know how many of the 212th are behind this door, though. The warehouse is large, but not infinite, and he feels an immediate pang of fear that the explosion days ago took out more than their base. 

Who had set off that bomb? Had Crys figured anything else out?

“Sir, what happened? Is the general okay?” Trench asks, his key scraping in the ancient durasteel lock. 

Cody shifts Obi-Wan a little higher. Even with the Force, a full-grown man is a heavy burden, and heavier still when weighed down with love. 

“No, he’s not,” Cody says honestly. “Is Bones here?”

“Yeah, of course. I’ll tell him—”

“No comms,” Cody snaps, panic surging again in his heart. There might be another leak in the 212th, but there is definitely a leak in their comms. “They’re compromised.”

Trench gets the door open, and the sterile white light of fluorescent bulbs spills into the tunnel. He looks at Cody with grim understanding.

“We know, sir,” he says. “We know.”

By ‘tell Bones’, Trench had apparently meant, ‘sprint ahead and shout in the direction of their makeshift medbay’. Cody follows at a more sedate pace, wary of jostling Obi-Wan more than he’s already been jostled, but Obi-Wan starts to shift anyway. The golden thread connecting his mind to Cody’s flickers, then grows, and he shudders awake in Cody’s arms. He blinks into pained awareness as Cody carries him into the warehouse proper.

“Ah. Ah, Cody, set me down. I can walk,” Obi-Wan murmurs, pain gathered in the thin twist of his mouth, and Cody doesn’t waste energy rolling his eyes.

“No, you can go back to sleep,” Cody says. “We’re home.”

And that wasn’t what he intended to say, but he realizes that it’s what he meant. He can feel the pulse of hundreds of souls above and around him, similar in their focus and drive but each distinct lights in the Force, and those are his brothers. In response to Trench’s calls, the lights start moving, spilling into the portion of the warehouse basement that leads to the tunnels. The paranoid part of his brain wants to shield Obi-Wan, to keep any potential leaks from seeing the general alive, but he knows these lights. He feels their joy stark in the Force, buffeting him from all sides. Surely—surely none of these men are traitors.

Cody’s breath catches in his chest at the feeling of his brothers’ relief. He’s home, he thinks, and so is Obi-Wan.

“Commander!” someone shouts—Wooley—and then, “General!”

The cry is taken up by another, and another, and their worry and relief assaults Cody just as surely as their words. He needs mental shields, he thinks as he tries not to stumble, but he isn’t sure he’d even want to shut this out. Beneath the wave of their love and loyalty, all his concerns about potential traitors melts away. These are his brothers; this is their general; they have nothing else to fear.

In his arms, Obi-Wan manages a wave and a tremulous, “Hello there,” and it sets all the men off again.

Miraculously, the 212th manages to swarm Cody without impeding his progress through the halls. En masse, they shepherd him to where Bones has apparently been prepping a makeshift medbay in one of the editorial review rooms. 

“Make space!” Bones bellows, and anyone between Bones and Cody clears out in double-time. “In Death’s name, Commander, what have you done to yourselves this time?”

The current of real concern beneath his harsh words is so familiar, so dear, that Cody can’t help but smile, hopeful and helpless. Bones’s grumbles and Obi-Wan’s protestations blend together as they have a hundred times before as Cody sets Obi-Wan down on the cot Bones waves at. He gestures for Cody to pull the layers of fabric covering Obi-Wan’s stomach away, and Cody pulls away the layers of jackets with his heart in his throat. If it’s started bleeding, or if he’d missed a secondary wound, or—

Bones, bless him, doesn’t even hesitate. He uses a pair of scissors to cut around the fabric melted into the wound’s surface and doesn’t look up as he calls out.

“If one of y’all ain’t already woke Helix up, you’re all getting booster shots for Melvaran mud fleas next week.” He loads a drug canister into his hypospray with a threatening click. “And trust me, those side effects aren’t pretty.”

Two sets of footsteps take off at top speed down the hallway outside.

Obi-Wan chuckles, then winces. Bones bats his hand away before he can reach for his stomach and waves his hypospray in Obi-Wan’s face.

“Hold your horses. General, I need to put you back under for this.”

Even from a few feet away, Cody can see Obi-Wan clench his teeth.

“Oh, I’m sure some bacta—”

“Bacta might regrow skin and cauterization might stop bleeding, but neither can fix peritonitis. You need a laparotomy, and you don’t need to be awake for it,” Bones says bluntly. 

“I—”

Cody moves forward to put a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder and press him back down. 

“It’s ok,” he says, and he pushes the depth of his certainty through the Force. “I’ll be right here.”

It’s something Obi-Wan’s said to him, done for him, dozens of times, and he keeps his word as much as he can after Obi-Wan goes under. Helix arrives in short order, and his and Bones’ combined glares and gripes about sterility send Cody into the adjacent office. Still covered in ash and dust and blood, Cody goes. 

Bones had known Obi-Wan’s secret for days, after all. Nothing’s going to happen to Obi-Wan on his table.

The office looks like it might once have been a dark room. It’s long and narrow, and there are folding tables set up along one of the long walls with hollow rectangular stains. Metal strings are held by screws in the duracrete, and a deep single-spigot sink is rusting in the corner. A metal chair is folded up against the wall, and Cody shakes it out and sinks into it with a sigh. There’s still so much to do, he knows. He needs to figure out why the 212th are here; he needs to figure out what more they know about the communications compromise, because maybe Crys and Boil have already found their mole. He needs to know who set the bomb in Obi-Wan’s quarters, and he’ll need to figure out how to get his general’s Force powers back.

He’ll need to figure out what to do with his own.

But for a moment and no more, he sits. His general is in the best hands he knows, safe for a few hours at least, and he breathes in one shaky breath after another as he tries to relax a single bare inch.

He gives himself five minutes, and then he goes to call for Boil.

Boil pulls him into a hug the second he sees Cody, and Cody hugs him back with fierce strength. The edges of Boil’s armor dig into the tender bruise along Cody’s ribs, but he doesn’t care. He just holds on a second too long, grateful for the warm reality of the sensation, before stepping back.

“Good to see you, sir,” Boil says in a vain attempt at calm, and Cody has to swallow his own rising emotions. Boil had clearly thought the explosion had taken both Cody and Obi-Wan with it. He’s glad that, for once, the war has brought Boil something other than tragedy.

But he needs to know about the bomb. If Boil hasn’t found the leak, then Cody needs to take Obi-Wan and run the second Obi-Wan’s well enough to walk.

“You too,” Cody says around the lump in his throat. “Boil. Who set off the bomb?”

Boil doesn’t have many details, and Cody is surprised to remember that the base explosion had only been a few days ago. It feels like a lifetime ago; like he was a different person then, shedding his skin. When Cody presses him on the comms compromise, Boil’s mouth twists into a grim line. It hadn’t taken much forensics to discover that the explosion had been caused with GAR equipment, and it had taken even less to determine which clone had swiped into the weapons locker, and grabbed as many tibanna gas canisters as he could carry plus one photon grenade.

“We can’t figure out why,” Boil says, more puzzled than hurt. “Slick at least had money as a motive when he betrayed us, but… this was a suicide mission. You and the general have always had the devil’s own luck, clearly, but there was no way Scrapper could’ve expected to survive. So why'd he do it?”

“Scrapper?” Cody asks, ice in his veins. It doesn’t make any sense; Scrapper had been one of the very first at the gate to welcome Obi-Wan home. He was decanted without a cruel bone in his body. “Scrapper—I’ve never even seen him angry. I’ve never seen him—he loves the 212th. He loves the general. Why would he…?”

“Wish we knew, sir,” Boil says. “Wish we knew.”

He tells Cody how the 212th has spent the first day sifting through rubble. They were looking for anything that could be salvaged, he says, but Cody can hear what he isn’t saying: they were looking for him and Obi-Wan. A few other troopers had been injured in the blast, but fortunately, the general’s quarters had been on the other side of the barracks. The only fatality the team managed to confirm had been Scrapper himself.

And if Scrapper’s dead, then their one confirmed traitor is no longer in play. Is that it, then? Or are there any others?

Cody can see the same doubts reflecting in Boil’s eyes as he continues explaining. When the 212th hadn’t found any bodies after a day, Boil had an inkling that Cody and Obi-Wan might have survived, but the explosion had been catastrophic. He couldn’t have known for sure.

“I’d been debating comming the Council about you when Crys pulled me aside. He showed me the report he’d pulled together for you, and he’d kept pulling that thread. There was a call, an hour before the explosion, that was from Coruscant —”

“To base, yes,” Cody says, but Boil shakes his head.

“No. Directly to Scrapper’s personal frequency,” Boil says. “Someone from Coruscant called him and him alone, and then he tried to kill the general. We don’t know why, and we don’t know if there are any other—other sleeper agents in the 212th. We cut all long-range comms and decided to focus on finding you if you were still alive. At least this way, any other traitors in the corps can’t get their commands.”

“Smart,” Cody says, stunned. He’s grateful, all over again, for the solid bedrock of his brothers. There’s a reason why they’re the best army in the galaxy, and Boil has proved that all over again these past few days. Cody and Obi-Wan have a little more time, then, before trying to uncover any other treachery in the ranks.

“Now that that’s out of the way, can you tell us anything else about what happened?” Boil says.

Cody grimaces; he isn’t looking forward to writing this mission report, but he knows he’ll have to tell the 212th something. When he opens his mouth, though, he feels Obi-Wan wake up, groggy and pained, in the other room.

On instinct, his whole body turns towards where he knows Obi-Wan is, and Boil’s brows crease in confusion until Bones calls for Cody through the door.

“Oh,” Boil says, and Cody doesn’t know how to begin explaining this . “Oh. No, I get it. I’ve spent time with Bly and General Secura, remember?”

Boil grins at him, unbothered, and Cody makes a note to shake Bly down for details later.

“Go on, Commander,” Boil says, standing up and giving Cody’s shoulder a friendly shove towards the door. “I can hold the fort for another few hours yet.”

Bones is still bustling around the room when Cody enters, but Obi-Wan is, for once, patiently reclining on his cot. The end of the cot is pressed against the wall, and there are enough pillows sandwiched between Obi-Wan’s back, the cot, and the wall to let him sit up without straining his core. He’s bare-chested but for a clean wrap of white bandages holding bacta packs to his abdomen. Cody tries not to let his eyes linger on the coarse patches of red hair scattered across Obi-Wan’s chest, and especially doesn’t follow the trail that winds further down.

“Sir,” Cody says, because Bones is in the room, but he relents when Obi-Wan, even as disoriented and drugged as he is, frowns. “I—hello, Obi-Wan.”

It takes more than three syllables to startle Bones, but he does snort over by the sink. 

“Bacta will handle the rest. He’ll be fine, Commander,” Bones says, and he has an eyebrow raised as he turns. “But no, uh, vigorous activity for a while.”

For some reason, this last is what makes Cody blush. 

“I’ll refrain entirely from leaping out of buildings for at least a week,” Obi-Wan promises, drawing their attention away from the heat spreading rapidly up Cody’s neck.

“Two,” Bones says, and Obi-Wan grins.

“Deal.”

Cody still doesn’t know how to wield the Force with anything but the finesse of a sledgehammer, so he isn’t surprised when he tries to check on Obi-Wan’s health in the Force and Obi-Wan rolls his eyes. Obi-Wan’s glow is brighter, he thinks. He doesn’t have the words to describe what the Force feels like—all his metaphors are as effective as crayon drawings of sunsets—but Obi-Wan feels better. A warmer, healthier light shines from him now.

He still mentally shoves more of whatever light he has towards Obi-Wan. It feels like trying to quench a desert with a garden hose, but he doesn’t think it’s hurting anything . 

Or, at least, he hopes so. On the other side of the room, Obi-Wan startles. They blink at each other, questioning, and they both jump when Bones kicks a chair over to Obi-Wan’s bedside.

“I’m giving you an hour, Commander,” Bones says, stomping to the other side of the room. “One hour, don't try to haggle, and then both of you are getting some real sleep. The saber missed his liver, but he’s still gotta regrow part of his small intestine, and there’s smoke damage in his lungs that will take more time to heal.”

“Of course,” Cody says, sitting, and he doesn’t look over when Bones shuts the door quietly behind him.

In the gentle fall of silence, he takes a moment to just look at Obi-Wan. The bags beneath his eye are the soft pink-purple of a bruise, and Bones hadn’t managed to shake all of the plaster out of Obi-Wan’s hair. The rest of him is the same, though. True white runs through his beard and gathers at his temples, and thin lines of laughter and wisdom radiate from the corners of his madder blue eyes. The mole on his forehead is still just off center, and there’s still a wrinkle between his eyebrows that never falls flat.

Obi-Wan just lets him look.

“Thank you, Cody,” Obi-Wan says at last, and Cody wants to put his head down on the cot beside his general and just breathe. They’re home, his brothers have held the line, and Obi-Wan is no longer knocking, however gently, at death’s door. They’ve survived this far, he thinks. He and Obi-Wan, against all possible odds, pulled ahead.

He has no idea what Obi-Wan is thanking him for, but other questions take precedence.

“Are you okay?”

Obi-Wan smiles. “I am. Or, at least, I will be. And you?”

Cody scoffs and crosses his legs, settling into the chair. “ I’m fine. I'm not the one who stabbed myself with my own lightsaber."

“Oh, come now, don't be cross,” Obi-Wan protests, as indignant as if he hadn’t been unconscious in Cody's arms just a few hours ago. “It was a calculated risk.”

“Calculated on what?”

“Past precedent, of course,” Obi-Wan says. “I’d been stabbed there before.”

Stars, Cody thinks. Stars. Being horribly, wretchedly, incontrovertibly in love with this man is such a pain in the ass. 

He snorts, shaking his head, and then the absurdity of it all sends him into choked laughter. He bends forward to put his head in his hands, wondering if part of him has finally snapped and too tired to care. Seconds pass, and then he feels careful fingers slide through the tight coils of his hair in a soothing back and forth.

“You know, Cody,” he hears, “I think I was right. Whatever comes next, you do make an excellent Jedi.”

Cody straightens, a protest on the tip of his tongue, but Obi-Wan is smiling at him so sweetly that he stops. Earlier, he had been bothered by the implication that he might ever be able to replace Obi-Wan in the Force. But that isn’t the problem, Cody realizes. Obi-Wan, who has always defined himself as Jedi, still hasn’t untangled Force sensitivity from Jedi ideals, and he hasn't untangled 'Jedi' from the goodness that comprises who he is. Obi-Wan's goodness is not contingent on the Force.

And Cody’s new Force sensitivity has done nothing to stop him from being horribly, terribly attached.

Obi-Wan’s hand had dislodged when Cody moved, and he reaches for it now.

“Whatever I am, it isn’t because of Lott’s serum,” Cody says, curling their fingers together. “And whatever you are, it isn’t because of the Force. You aren’t just my general, and you aren’t just my Jedi. You’re more than what was given to you, too, Obi-Wan. You—you’re—”

How can he possibly describe what Obi-Wan is to him? Basic is as insufficient to describe this feeling as it is to describe the Force. Both are vast, impossible, and words are so small.

Cody swallows. What is he to Obi-Wan, then? “Was the. When you kissed me before, was that just to distract me?”

Obi-Wan’s mouth quirks up at the corner, and his eyes twinkle. “Do I distract you, Cody?”

“Obi-Wan,” Cody says, exasperation in every syllable, but there isn’t fear in it. He can feel his answer in the Force, all that warmth and fondness, but he wants to hear Obi-Wan say it.

“No,” Obi-Wan says, the tease in his voice softening into sincerity. “No, I meant it when I kissed you. In fact, I wouldn’t mind trying it again.”

Cody’s heart stutters as joy, overwhelming joy, crashes into him, sending aftershocks through his ribcage. He leans over Obi-Wan and hesitates an inch away, hovering. His eyes drop to Obi-Wan’s lips, uncertain still, and he sees Obi-Wan’s eyes crease with laughter. Obi-Wan opens his mouth to say something undoubtedly unhelpful, and Cody cuts him off with a kiss. 

It is, Cody finds, his favorite new super power to date.

When Cody pulls back to catch his breath, he’s delighted to see a faint blush highlighting the freckles run rampant over the bridge of Obi-Wan’s nose. He has a million things he wants to say, a million promises to make and a declaration underlying each one, but those can come later, he thinks. They have a lot of ‘later’ left.

“But we will find a way to get your powers back,” Cody says, “I promise.”

Obi-Wan’s expression slides from dazed to thoughtful, and then Cody feels something like a very polite knock from Obi-Wan’s side of their mental link.

He blinks, jerking back.

“Obi-Wan?” he asks, because he doesn’t want to make any assumptions.

Obi-Wan’s fingers flex where they’re twined with Cody’s. When he speaks, he sounds cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless.

“When I woke up, I thought… I thought I could hear the Force again, faint, but there. And earlier, when you were talking to Bones but looking at me, it got louder.” Obi-Wan reaches up to run two fingers over the curl of Cody’s scar. “Cody. Did you ever wonder how you could feel me in the Force?”

Cody shakes his head. “No, not really. I didn’t even realize that was you, not until it was gone.”

“And I didn’t know you could feel me there, but,” Obi-Wan huffs a laugh, then runs a hand over the curve of his mouth and the fall of his beard.  “I had been concerned, previously, that I was very close to inadvertently forming a Force bond with you. I had been attempting to keep more distance from you in the Force, but… if you’d already been able to feel me, clearly I’d failed. A bond had already formed, and I had no idea.”

Obi-Wan takes a deep breath. When he looks over at Cody, there’s a sheen to his blue eyes that makes Cody’s heart clench. “Force bonds run two ways. I think—I know this sounds absurd, but—I think, this whole time, you’ve been carrying my link to the Force for me through our Force bond. And, now that you have your own connection… I think you’ve been, slowly, giving it back.”

“You—” 

Bones had said no vigorous activity, but Cody’s mind spirals with possibilities. What would it take, he wonders, to measure how much Force sensitivity a Jedi has? Could they chart an increase? Can Cody be doing more?

He asks, but Obi-Wan can only theorize.

“I haven’t tried to move anything just yet,” he admits. “I’m not sure if I could. Perhaps a little nudge, the smallest push. It wouldn’t be much, but. It would be something.”

Something, Cody thinks, is more than they had before. He opens his mouth to say so when his comm goes off.

It doesn’t strike him as odd, not at first. His comm has gone off millions of times over the course of the war, and his hand is halfway to the activation button before he realizes that his wrist comm should be off. His wrist comm should be off, but he’d turned it on to lure Lott into the warehouse, and in his panic over saving Obi-Wan, he’d never turned it back off.

He stares down at it, paralyzed by indecision. “It’s high command.”

“You should answer it,” Obi-Wan says. There’s steel in his voice. “Cody, it’s fine. If it’s actually high command, then we have information they need to know. If it’s our traitor, then lie and give us enough time to get everyone out. Beyond orbital bombardment, there’s nothing they can do to you in here.”

Cody nods, his heart thumping like a rabbit’s foot in his chest. There’s a terrible, gaping fear in his chest that seems at odds with the situation, and he can’t help but wonder if this is what Obi-Wan would call a bad feeling.  

With his fingers hovering over the call button, he slips back into the adjacent room he’d been in earlier. He leaves the door cracked just enough to see Obi-Wan, then clicks accept.

Blue light shimmers into being above his comm, coalesces into focus, and Cody finds himself staring at the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic.

“Chancellor Palpatine,” Cody says, forgetting himself in surprise. “Sir.”

“Ah, Commander Cody. We’ve been so worried.” 

Palpatine sounds relieved and pleased to see him, but Cody is still on edge. Something isn’t right, he thinks. Something is very, very wrong.

“Apologies, sir. We were attacked,” he says. Somehow, he knows he has to stick to the truth. “We’re still trying to recover from our losses.”

“Of course, of course. And what of General Kenobi? Have you… ah, recovered him?”

Palpatine’s voice is like an oil slick, colorful and smooth, thick and obscuring. It’s a direct question, Cody realizes, but he can’t think of a way to avoid it. He can’t—

He’s out of time.

“No,” he lies, straightening his shoulders and falling into parade rest. “Not yet.”

Palpatine’s smile only grows wider. “A shame. A true shame. But, if you do see him, will you do something for me?”

Palpatine leans forward, and his voice goes low and resonant as he says, “Commander Cody, execute order 66.”

The words are a livewire through his skull. He feels them hum, lighting all his gray matter up with a hundred megavolts of electricity. His spine snaps into a perfect line, and the whole world, at once, goes very clear.

On the other side of the room, someone cracks the door one more inch. Bewildered blue eyes peer through the opening.

Palpatine’s projection glances over his shoulder, and his smile is tinged with the satisfaction of a hunter with a successful kill. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” he says, and the projection vanishes.

Cody lets his arm fall, blinking at the man on the other side of the door. He has his orders, he thinks. He has his orders, and good soldiers follow orders.

His right hand goes to the little repeating pistol in his shoulder holster. He’s moving as if through heavy water, as if he’s watching himself move from behind two-way glass, but he knows exactly what he needs to do. He needs to draw his pistol. 

He needs to shoot it.

“Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, opening the door wider. “Cody, what’s Order 66?”

Cody draws his blaster, and it’s a flimsy excuse for a weapon against Force-sensitives, but it’s all he has. 

“Order 66,” he says, and he feels the words form in his mouth as disconnected from their sound. He levels his blaster at Obi-Wan’s chest, but Obi-Wan doesn’t move. “Any and all Jedi-affiliated Force-sensitives must be executed for treason against the Republic.”

Something in him howls, tearing against the walls of his already bruised rib cage. Something in him burns, then breaks.

And then, something in him says: Obi-Wan isn't Force-sensitive.

And something else says: Cody is.

He swings his blaster from Obi-Wan’s center of mass to point, unerringly, at the soft jut of his own chin. Obi-Wan’s eyes widen as he lunges, shouting something Cody can’t hear, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but following the order.

He gets his finger on the trigger and, without a second’s hesitation, squeezes.

Just as the trigger sparks the ignition, an invisible force nudges the gun a half inch to the left, and the shot screams heat and pressure past his left ear. Cody snaps his head down, because that was the Force. That was the Force, and—

He doesn’t have time to complete the thought. Obi-Wan is on him, throwing an elbow into Cody’s solar plexus and scraping a heel down Cody’s shin, and he wrestles the gun from Cody’s hands as Cody gasps for air he can’t pull into his lungs. His left ear echoes a vast, ringing chorus, and Cody has his orders, he thinks. He has to follow his orders.

“Sorry, darling,” he hears Obi-Wan say as he clicks the phaser to stun. “Looks like you’ve got a few years as a Padawan yet.”

The stun hits Cody in the dead center of his chest, and he drops into unconsciousness with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Cody wakes up with a pounding in his head like a bantha herd. He groans, squinting against the light that floods his senses when he tries to open his eyes. A warm hand settles over his face, blocking off the light, and Cody wants to struggle, but. He knows that hand, he thinks, though he doesn’t know how.

“Shh, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, and his voice soothes Cody into relaxing into the mattress at his back. If Obi-Wan’s here, it must be fine. “You’ve just gotten out of brain surgery.”

On second thought, that doesn’t sound fine at all. Had something gone wrong with the… surgery? Had the surgeon damaged his memories? Cody reaches out, expanding his other senses, and when he feels Obi-Wan like a small sun in the Force beside him, his memories come rushing back.

“The chancellor,” he says, and fuck. Fuck. “It was the chancellor. How did he—what did he do to me?”

To him, Cody realizes, and to Scrapper. Scrapper would never have turned on the 212th, and Cody would never have turned against Obi-Wan. Is mind control a Sith power? Can they control someone’s mind through their voice alone?

Obi-Wan moves his hand, and, acclimatized to the light, Cody opens his eyes fully. Auburn hair and high cheekbones resolve themselves into Obi-Wan’s well-loved face, and Cody wants to wake up to that face always.

Everything else about this moment, however, he could do without.

His mouth is unbearably dry, and his next question dies as a dry rasp in his throat. Obi-Wan helps him sit up, wincing as he does, and passes him a cup of ice chips.

“Slowly,” Obi-Wan chides, and Cody’s tired, fried brain can’t wrap around the enormity of what they’ve just discovered. The chancellor—a Sith lord—a spy for the Separatists? That seems impossible, so why?

And how?

“What did he do to me?” Cody croaks again, because nothing makes sense. Why would he ever even consider killing Obi-Wan? And how did he know what that order meant?

Obi-Wan reaches for him, but his fingers don’t curl along the line of Cody’s scar like they usually do. They seek Cody’s other temple, at the edge of Cody’s hairline. A bandage is taped there, pressed flush to his skin.

“Not just to you,” Obi-Wan says. “To all of you. Cody. Fives was right.” 

The chips. The goddamn chips . The Kaminoans had called them inhibitor chips, but they weren’t inhibiting violence at all. No, Cody realizes: they were inhibiting souls.  

The implications for the war, for the creation of the clones, span an impossible distance, but Cody can’t think about that right now.

“Can we take them out of the others?” Cody asks.

Obi-Wan takes his hand in his, and Cody knows what his answer will be before he says it. 

“No, I’m sorry. It’s too well-hidden. We only barely managed to find yours, and that was due in large part to the fact that the chip wasn’t the only thing in your head.” Obi-Wan waves his hand in an imitation of a Force push, and Cody blinks at him. “The Force is in there, too. Our Force bond showed me where you were, and, critically, where you weren’t.”

Then, the entire 212th is compromised until they find a scan that can find the chip. They don’t have that kind of time, though. Cody fights not to clench his fists. Palpatine will want to check Cody’s progress soon if he hasn’t already, and they can’t risk Palpatine panicking and deciding to trigger his kill order in all of the clones spread across the galaxy. This is the logic puzzle they created for Lott on a grander scale, spanning galaxies and trillions of lives, and Cody feels like they’re skating the edge of a black hole.

They have to take out Palpatine, he thinks. No Palpatine, no kill order. But how? He’s not just the chancellor of the Republic; he’s a Sith lord with power enough to keep the entire Jedi Council in the dark for decades. Cody looks up at Obi-Wan, crunching numbers and coming up with impossible odds. Obi-Wan’s Force powers have the approximate weight of a doorstop, and the most Cody has done with his is run. 

But their lack of powers didn’t stop them before, Cody thinks. And, impossible odds or not, this isn’t a battle they can avoid.

“We have to stop him,” Cody says. “We have to.”

Bold words from a man too weak to even sit up, but Obi-Wan just nods, as if he’d come to the same conclusion while Cody was under.

“Yes,” he says, and, though his voice is light, there’s steel in it. “Yes, I think we must.”

“But how?”

Even if Palpatine thinks Obi-Wan or Cody or both are dead, the element of surprise isn’t enough to turn the tide in their favor. Neither of them could defeat a Sith on their own, and they can’t risk the 212th anywhere near a man that can turn them into mindless killing machines with a word. They could contact the council, but Palpatine doesn’t need a vulnerability in their comms to get access to the call records; he’s the chancellor. He has access to everything by the power of his office.

They need something else, Cody thinks. Something to level the playing field; something to give them a chance, however small.

Obi-Wan reaches his free hand into one of the pockets on the dust-covered jeans he’s still wearing, and whatever he grabs fits completely in the palm of his hand.

He brings it out, and Cody sees a few bright flashes of orange between the gaps in Obi-Wan’s fingers. Cody remembers seeing Obi-Wan clutch at Lott’s vest—he remembers how Obi-Wan had been able to pickpocket a small fortune by the donuts stand, how he’d snagged a scarf and face paint when they first hit the streets—and his eyes widen as Obi-Wan opens his hand.

The other of Lott’s vials, the one containing the same orange serum that had taken away Obi-Wan’s powers, rests in the center of Obi-Wan’s palm.

Obi-Wan grins. “Oh, I have a few ideas.”

-

—

-

Cody feels Obi-Wan at the door before he hears the soft knock. 

The door opens automatically a second later, and Cody shifts his body on the couch like a flower turns to the sun. With a small fanfare of footsteps on the hardwood, Obi-Wan rounds the corner. His hair is frizzing slightly, and his robes hang heavy and dark with sweat over his chest. He undoes the belt at his waist and starts pulling his robe away as he walks, dripping with weariness, and Cody makes room for him on the couch. 

Once he’s stripped to his undertunic, Obi-Wan lays his outer robes over the armrest and collapses onto the cushions. He twists his neck from side to side, and the resounding cracks make Cody look over in alarm.

Obi-Wan gives him a rueful shrug and laughs. “There are definitely some things that take their toll, even with the Force mostly returned to me. But we’re sure we’ve checked every nook and cranny of Lott’s ship, and we’re equally sure it’s empty.”

“It’s done, then?” Cody asks, putting one arm over the back of the couch in an open invitation. Obi-Wan tucks himself into the hollow space that Cody has created, and his skin is warm and sweat-slick from the oppression of the Coruscanti sun and the unflinchingly open air of the Jedi shipyard. Cody curls an arm around Obi-Wan’s shoulders despite the way Obi-Wan’s shirt sticks to him and pulls him close.

“Done,” Obi-Wan confirms, the words vibrating against Cody’s chest, and Cody’s heart fills with equal parts relief and regret. He knows that it’s better for all of Lott’s research to be destroyed, but he can’t help but mourn the loss of a powerful weapon against the Sith.

The serum that he had stolen from Lott had been the only reason they had succeeded against Palpatine, and its effectiveness had been difficult to forget. Obi-Wan’s experience with Maul had shown that a Sith can hold onto their powers and life even when cut into pieces; Sith are hard to kill. Kriffing hells, Obi-Wan hadn’t even been sure that the serum would be effective against someone as powerful as Palpatine. A powerful Sith is more than capable of stripping a poison straight from their bloodstream, and Obi-Wan and Cody hadn’t had extra serum or Sith for testing purposes.

But it had worked. The serum’s ability to nullify Force-sensitivity had acted faster than Palpatine had been able to act to remove it. Obi-Wan had wanted to keep Palpatine alive, to capture him and try him, but Cody hadn’t been willing to take the chance. They had had enough evidence in the chips and the communications logs to prove Palpatine’s guilt, and Cody hadn’t wanted to give the man even one more chance to trigger one of his traps. Keeping him alive for even a minute longer was an unacceptable risk, no matter the Jedi’s rules against killing an unarmed man. Palpatine’s power and influence hadn’t come entirely from the Force.

And, well. Cody had already told Obi-Wan that he wouldn’t make a good Jedi. 

He’d meant it.

There had, initially, been some debate about keeping Lott's work for further research. The logistics of how they could secure who could use it and for what purposes, though, made it clear that the safest option was destruction. The Senate had just had one Sith revealed in their midst; faith in their security practices was, justifiably, low.

So they destroyed the serum they could find, and, today, they'll destroy his ship. As much as it stings, the Jedi will have to fight any other Sith the same way they always have.

There are a lot of similarly hard choices being made across the Republic. For the moment, the Jedi and clones are busying themselves with repairs, keeping their heads down while the Senate shouts itself hoarse across the capitol building. There are bills for the clones on the table, too, to grant citizenship and backpay, but Bail has warned them that they’ll take some time. Cody is, for once, willing to wait. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep his command after the GAR is dissolved, but the concept isn’t as terrifying as it once was.

“Cody?”

“Mm?” He’d been falling into a light doze; he’s tired himself.

“Do you still have any powers?”

Cody shakes his head. “I can still sense you, but not much else."

Obi-Wan’s face falls a little, his hand coming up to stroke his beard, and Cody squeezes Obi-Wan’s shoulders. 

“It’s fine, Obi-Wan. I don’t need the rest. If I can always find you, the only thing I have to worry about is finding your lightsaber.”

It does the trick; Obi-Wan laughs, settling, and Cody lets a comfortable silence fill the space between them.

Cody wonders if he’s been able to help the power transfer at all, if anything he’s done sped things along, but there’s no way to test it. He simply has to trust in the will of the Force, the same as everyone else in the Temple, and hope that their wills match up. 

They seem to, at least. Obi-Wan has been growing stronger every day, and Cody can’t help but think the Force is glad to return, at last, to its more diligent son. He wonders how long his own dwindling Force sensitivity will last, and he wonders how much he would have retained without the bond between him and Obi-Wan running fast and sure. He wonders, too, if it ever would have found its way back without that link. Perhaps Lott’s serum had an expiration date. 

It’ll be an ongoing experiment, then. 

In the Force, Cody feels Obi-Wan's tiredness cement itself into exhaustion, and he tugs Obi-Wan closer until he can tuck Obi-Wan’s head beneath his chin. He hums with satisfaction when Obi-Wan’s body relaxes as easily into him as Obi-Wan’s mind does. Cody had been a little flippant earlier, but he really doesn’t need much more than this: knowing that Obi-Wan’s here, healthy, and, as far as Cody can tell, tentatively allowing himself to be happy.

Cody is startled to realize that he’s happy too. Of all the things he is now that he never thought he’d be, ‘happy’ is nestled between ‘Force-sensitive’ and ‘in a relationship with Obi-Wan’ at the top of his list.

On a whim, he leans down to press a kiss to the thin wrinkles branching from the corner of Obi-Wan’s eye. Obi-Wan turns to him, surprised and fond, and Cody slides his hand from Obi-Wan’s shoulder into the soft, damp waves of Obi-Wan’s hair. Obi-Wan leans forward to meet him, and Cody sinks into a kiss that is soft and unhurried, gentle and sweet.

“You’ve done enough for today,” Cody says, murmuring against the smile he can feel spreading against his lips, and he privately thinks that Obi-Wan’s done enough for a lifetime. 

When Obi-Wan pulls back, his twinkling eyes creased into half moons, Cody’s heart thumps in his chest. The future spirals into a thousand different directions before him, and infinite different possibilities lie along those roads. Perhaps he won’t be a marshal commander; perhaps he’ll lose these last traces of Force sensitivity. Perhaps he’ll find something new and unthinkable to be, and that isn’t the terrifying thought it once was.

He leans in to kiss Obi-Wan again, to press him into the cushions of the couch with a firm nudge, and he swallows Obi-Wan’s bright burst of laughter as he does. He doesn’t know what the future holds, but he does know this: whoever he is, whatever he becomes, he’ll always love Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan’s mind wraps around his own, joyful and certain, and Cody can feel him echo the same soft promise into the warm golden space where their minds meet. 

The future has infinite possibilities, but so does Cody. So does Obi-Wan. 

And there’s nothing they can’t do, or be, together.

Chapter Text

1. The Setting

The city in which this story takes place is just as much of a character as any member of the 212th. New Kaon was quite a lot of fun to build, and there are bits and pieces of it from a wide array of sources. For anyone with a keen eye for geography, you might not be too surprised that I stole the shape of New Kaon straight from the San Francisco peninsula. (This might also explain the ever-present morning fog.) The piers are also from SF; Pier 39 in real life has incredible powdered donuts and plenty of tourist shops, and that low, haunting bark Cody hears on his way to the final showdown was from one of the sea lions you can find there on sunny days.

The warehouses themselves, the rail yard, and the broken waffle maker grid structure are from various other places I've been, and I won’t tell you where to find Marj’s pawn shop... though I will tell you that the large Palpatine cardboard cut-out was inspired by a frankly terrifying Jim Carrey cut-out.

The jazz warehouse is a different story entirely.

The front organization that the 212th are using in the city is the production center for a jazz magazine, and the stares of Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes on various posters follow him as he makes his way into the building. Although the front organization is fake, the innards of the warehouse are real.

Half the reason I made this bonus chapter was to take a moment to explain why, despite a large amount of incentive to use literally any other kind of warehouse, I picked a jazz warehouse. Yes, even knowing that Star Wars jazz is called jizz. This story was largely inspired by snippets from Thomas Rid’s Active Measures, which details information about Project LC CASSOCK. LC CASSOCK was an attempt early on in the Cold War by the CIA to push ideological confrontation generated through—you guessed it!—"free-thinking" magazines, newspapers, and brochures distributed primarily within East Germany. "Free thinking" was, in this case, jazz!! Art! Fashion! Is this not incredible:

For ten years!! For ten years the CIA funded jazz magazines and fashion brochures in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of East Berlin USSR supporters in a fight against state-controlled thought. I love history. I can’t include all of Rid’s book here, but it’s a fascinating read. New Kaon may look like San Francisco, but perhaps its true history will be more obvious now:

”The city had once been split in two, each dominated by a separate warring power, and this building had been a mainstay for the resistance that had spanned both halves.

2. The Plot

I’m not sure I have anyone this eagle-eyed in my readership, but if you’ve been with me since Art of Happenstance, you might be surprised to realize that the following line is not, actually, from Rapture:

The three henchmen in front of him all seem gobsmacked, averting their eyes and shuffling their feet. Only the ringleader, a massive Devaronian in a sharp white vest, seems unconvinced.

“No,” he says, raising a blaster, and his cronies scramble to follow suit. “No, I don’t think so.”

Yes, there’s Lott, all the way back in November 2020! Rapture started as one of the subplot of Art of Happenstance, if you can believe it. This whole story was originally the Antilla subplot (the one with the flowers)! But it started getting too long for Art of Happenstance, so I ended up having to cut it out and start over. I kept the clipping, though, and it grew into this, like a starfish leg becoming a whole new starfish. It's why the story starts with Obi-Wan losing his lightsaber on purpose and where the Force bond comes from.

The other thing I wanted to note about the plot is that, although on the outside it looks like Obi-Wan alone lost his powers, it was very important to me to put Cody in the exact same situation.

The Jedi weren’t meant to be generals, but the clones were never meant to be anything more than their soldiers. And here and now, in the dim light of a hotel lamp on the other side of the galaxy from the war, neither of them are anything they’re supposed to be.

Cody’s “powers” in this case are his command of his brothers and the resources of the GAR. When he’s on the run with Obi-Wan, he has exactly none of those, and he, just like Obi-Wan, has to figure out who he is without them. “Character loses the thing by which they define themself and their agency” is one of my favorite story archetypes, and I had to make sure I put Cody through that wringer, too.

3. The Villain

Oh Mr. Lott!! It’s always a little terrifying to put an OC in a story, especially to put an OC in a place of such power and importance. I hope you all liked my villain! I needed a very specific character archetype for this story, and I needed to be able to kill them off, so I had to start from scratch. Lott had to be a scientist, someone with no known motivation, smart enough to outsmart Palpatine (and thus definitely Cody and Obi-Wan), and sufficiently terrifying to convince the reader that Codes and Obes wouldn’t be able to simply “fight their way through”.

I always need my villain to be terrifying. I want all the air to leave the room when they're in it. I want the protagonists to have to work for their victory. I want that victory to be almost impossible from the get-go. I did my best to crank that dial to 1000 in Rapture.

The sodium-orange light from the streetlamps outside spills onto the warehouse floor like tiny pieces of confetti. The man who walks into the warehouse nearly eclipses the doorway. The light behind him drowns behind his mass such that he is more easily defined by his shadow: a monolith of a man, so large that Cody can’t help but take an instinctive step backwards. The man has to duck his head so that the curve of his two black horns will clear the doorframe, and when he walks into the warehouse proper, he seems to reduce even the vast open area of the warehouse floor to nothing.

I said I started from scratch, but I’ve been thinking of him as a mix of Lex Luthor (scientist & megalomaniac), Wilson Fisk (polite and demur until absolutely vicious and unhinged), and… Hellboy (mostly for his physical appearance & ironic sense of humor). I’m not sure if anyone googled “Greer Lott” to see if it was a Star Wars reference, but, alas, his name comes from short-lived pop culture phenomenon Blaseball. My friend and I saw that name, thought, “That’s a great Star Wars name,” and I never looked back. 

I really love how he turned out--especially his, "I could've changed the world. All she could do was die." line--and will probably bring him back for something later. If you ever need a villain for anything, let me know! Lott is free use hahaha.

4. Information Security

The idea of cybersecurity (or infosec, if you want to be pedantic) in Star Wars is so consistently hilarious to me that I had to work some of my own headcanons in. Anyone can hack anything! It’s the only universe in which the “hacked, I’m in” phrase might actually be relevant. R2D2 is more than 30 years old by the Original Trilogy, and yet his little scomp arm can still hack into imperial tech! Imagine not patching your shit for three decades!! Imagine!!

I tried not to put too much cyber in the story (leave your ego at the door, etc), but I’m happy to talk about some of the small cyber references I made—simulated annealing, asymmetric keys, trapdoor encryption, etc—if you’re curious. I mostly wanted to say (1) use a password manager, (2) update/patch your tech! And (3), to everyone that caught the “porg4J” reference to the log4J vulnerability, God bless you. That vulnerability had infosec teams across the globe scrambling for weeks to patch it. We appreciate your service and long nights!!!

5. Little Fanon Things

Here are non-canon things that are true across the entire breadth and depth of my fanfic universe:

But Obi-Wan shakes his head. “That's a common misconception, actually. Midichlorians are commensals, and they function as an indicator organism only."

First, the midichlorians are always indicator organisms in my fic. I think it’s a neat little solution to the “the Force is bugs?” issue raised by the prequel while still keeping all the canon events reliant on midichlorians intact!

“It was an eventuality we should have planned for. Honestly, out of three million of you, we probably should have expected more. All known sentient species have Force-sensitives, after all, and Force sensitivity isn’t genetic.”

Cody hums. He'd always wondered about Fives.

Second, Fives is always actually, actually Force-sensitive (unlike Cody, who, apart from the Force-bonds, is always as Force-sensitive as a solid brick wall in my stories. I really like him in the “everyman” role, so, no magic for him.)

Cody wasn’t on Umbara for Pong Krell, but there’s a reason his armor paint isn’t symmetrical any more. He keeps Waxer’s tasset on his right thigh, and Boil wears the other half of the pair on his left. It’s a memorial and a reminder both.

Since I’ve cosplayed Cody, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why he goes from symmetrical thigh stripes to single-leg thigh stripe after Umbara-ish, and I thought this was the most painful possible reason ;) you’re welcome! (the timing doesn't work out perfectly, but shh... shhhhhh)

6. Other References

For the Transformers nerds among you, the names are probably the most obvious; the Transformers comics series has a planet named Devisiun, and Cybertron has a city named Kaon. Beyond my everlasting love for Transformers, I picked these names because (1) Devisiun contains combiner robots who divide in two (as both Cody and Obi-Wan are divided), and (2) Kaon shares its name with the DJD’s communications officer, which is simply a hat tip to the main plot. In classic JRo mimicry, the number ‘113’ also crops up quite a bit in the story!

“That’s when you use the second equation,” Bric had said, clicking to the next slide, and his grin had been feral at the edges as he’d read it off. “Then, P = Plenty.”

There are also a few references to the RepComm books! Kamino’s Killing House is an obvious one, but I also stole Traviss’ affection for the phrase “P for Plenty” (though, I’m giving myself credit for taking the time to explain the joke so it's funny to literally anyone who isn't a combat engineer).

He holds his arms out, and from within the long fall of his black sleeves, he produces a small vial for each hand. In one, a violently orange one the color of sunset; in the other, a blue that burns like a lightsaber blade.

And, last but not least—the vials are orange and blue because my name is Chel, and although I only have one ‘L’ in my name, I couldn’t resist a small Portal reference ;) I think Lott and GLaDoS would get along haha. Cheers!