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It’s easy to forget just how young the clones are.
Obi-Wan is guilty of it slipping his mind in the muddle of it all. It’s not a kind thing, war, and this one specifically is less kind than most. He sees in the vode the way the Force curls brightly around each and every clone and holds them like a flame in the wind. Cody, beside him now, deecee muzzle flashing as they press on together through the mess, is the brightest of all, not just for his proximity but for the fact his light never seems to waver.
He has to forget how young the clones are when the orders come in for the next grueling campaign.
He has to forget that the vode have never seen peacetime to know what they’re missing.
He has to forget how urgently the Force points Cody out to him when sending him into battle knowing it might be the last thing he ever asks Cody to do.
It’s easy to forget how unkind war is, when forgetting is the only way to get through it.
The mess this time is a bastard of a campaign on Feltis Minor. Even the terrain fights them, sucking mud and bogland pulling at their legs and thick ropes of plant life tugging at everything else. The droids are retreating, it is ostensibly a Republic victory, but the 212th have suffered astonishing losses. The mud is not the only thing impeding them as the remains of the battalion finally reach a clearing and can catch their breath. Obi-Wan doesn’t need to look at Cody to feel the fight leaving him just as the droids vacate the battlefield, or to sense the rolling boil of emotion his commander is currently holding at bay.
It’s a well-built dam Cody has constructed, but maintaining it is costly, and erosion is inevitable.
Later, once camp is set up, wet and horrible though it is, Cody ducks under the flap of Obi-Wan’s tent to say, thickly, “We lost over one hundred and fifty men, General.”
Four LAAT/is tumbled into the swamp on the way down, hammered by lucky shots from the clankers.
The intel was wrong, outdated maps and climate records neglected to mention a change in the Feltis Minor’s ecosystem; what was meant to be dry scrubland was half-submerged swamp peppered with sinkholes that were impossible to detect. Men drowned before they even fired a shot.
The 212th began this entire campaign on the back foot, and it only got worse from there.
A normal status report would require a thank you, Commander, or a follow-up question, or, if particularly benign, the offer of conversation, some tea perhaps if Obi-Wan had got the camp kettle on, but there is no room for levity on this world, and the camp kettle is still packed away tightly in a waterproof container. Cody, still in his muck-covered armour and face hidden by his helmet, is grief made ambulate, only standing on two legs because the plastoid is holding him up more than anything else. It is testament to how utterly wrung-out Cody is that when Obi-Wan puts down his pad and reaches for him, Cody just goes.
He’ll apologise for it later, Obi-Wan promises himself, and so will Cody, all proper and professional and dying of mortification once the sting of today’s tragedy has numbed and he realises being held by his general was unorthodox at best. But right now, Cody hangs heavy in his arms, bucket-visor pressing sharply into Obi-Wan’s shoulder.
Obi-Wan waits out the storm, for Cody’s sobs to ease, arms wrapped tightly around him until he can stand a little more strongly.
It’s just comfort. A moment, then two. Obi-Wan says, after several more, “Let’s get this off, Commander, if you’re staying.”
Cody shifts and shuffles from his arms, sheepish and sad, and removes his helmet. His cheeks are streaked with tears, skin blotchy with grief. Obi-Wan, compelled to push unorthodoxy to its limit, lifts his hands and wipes the tears away with the pads of his thumbs. They are replaced almost instantly by fresh ones, and Cody has a crumpled expression on his face that’s not quite a smile and not quite not.
“I’m afraid I’m a lost cause tonight, General.”
“Oh, hush,” Obi-Wan says with as much fondness as he can manage without pushing it. “You just need a good night’s sleep, and it will be more bearable in the morning.”
“I doubt that,” Cody says, but he doesn’t leave.
“Well,” Obi-Wan sighs, because Cody is right, “one can try to hope.” They sit on the cot, shoulder to shoulder, mud on the sheets and sore eyes blinking.
“I’m just so tired, sir,” Cody says quietly. “Not just from today, but from all of it.”
He’s being deliberately vague, but Obi-Wan hopes that even in their short acquaintanceship Cody has come to understand that Obi-Wan doesn’t consider much to be treasonous, and if he did he’d have to turn himself in first of all for thinking what he thinks about Cody. Nothing untoward, just the turning over of a memory from the day in his hands like a faceted jewel when sleep evades him. Cody’s smile over firstmeal, perhaps. The way the light from the war maps bounce over his hand as he points out some strategy. The way Cody looks at him in general, focused and curious, but he never manages to stay awake long enough to unwrap it fully. Perhaps he is afraid to. Perhaps whatever it is that has Cody sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, weeping for his lost brothers, is too fragile to look at directly.
“You will get through it,” Obi-Wan hears himself saying. “You will bear it.”
You have no choice. None of us do.
“And if I can’t?” Cody’s voice is a tremulous thing, courage spent. Obi-Wan is for an instant so incensed that anything could make someone as radiant as Cody doubt himself that he can’t make his tongue form an answer.
“Then we’ll sit here until you can,” he says, after a beat. It really is all he can offer Cody. He cannot undrown his brothers, or pull the ships back from their nosedives, or mend broken backs or knit together skulls or push the wails of the dying back into their mouths and close their jaws. He has to press on. They all do.
He lifts an arm and Cody slumps enough to the side that he fits under it. “I’m sorry,” Cody murmurs.
“Whatever for?” Obi-Wan looks at the ground, and not at Cody. If he turned his head they’d be nose to nose and that is unorthodoxy at its seam-stretching limit.
“For this,” Cody says. “For being tired.”
“Hush,” Obi-Wan says again, tugging him closer. “A good night’s sleep.”
Cody sniffs and folds his face into the side of Obi-Wan’s neck. It’s a while before his quiet sobs fritter themselves away into sleep.
Obi-Wan twists his head to look at him, then, where there is no danger of seeing in Cody’s eyes the same need that he knows burns in his. He’s so young, face soft and eyelashes damp with tears, but he looks peaceful, unworried. A rare sight, a falsehood, but Obi-Wan will think about it when his own rest is rarer still.
He keeps Cody upright under his arm, until he can no longer sense Cody’s doubt and fear and weariness, only his dreams.