Chapter Text
Were Cody a braver man, he might ask about it.
And that’s all you can really describe it as too; ‘It.’ Rumours fly in the Grand Army of the Republic, and as Cody sits nursing his fourth or fifth something of the night—whatever alien shit he had not the mental fortitude nor the kriffs to give to turn it away when pressed into his wanting hand—neon purple liquid swirling about the ice in his glass, he can hear them, the boys, igniting the spark of rumour in mutterings between giggles and drunken hiccups. In his peripheral—he’s sat lounging in a chair tilted onto its hind legs with its back against the wall—he sees his brother Charger (aptly named for his ability to always end up with dead power-packs back on Kamino) grinning sharply, spilling something that promises to be particularly disturbing into Shortstack’s ear. By the way Shortstack’s jaw has dropped and Brick’s pounding the table in a fit of uncontrollable laughter, it is most definitely something Cody doesn’t want to know about.
It surprises him sometimes, even though it shouldn’t by now, the imaginations of his brothers. He’s a singular guy multiplied 3 million times over, stretched into trillions of cells from a singular strand of DNA (hair or skin, he often thinks), pulled from what was possibly the blandest, grumpiest, single-minded bastard in the galaxy. Jango Fett was a hunter. He was strong, determined, wild, stealthy, almost evil in his tactical genius. All of these things he was well known for. He was not known for being funny. Or even well-humoured.
However, Cody’s not fresh off Kamino—a Shiny. He’s earned his paint, his scuff marks. The dent in his left pauldron he’s particularly proud of. He knows, perhaps better than any other clone brother, the individuality of the mind. Not a mutation, according to the General he serves, but a soul in the Force—the ka’ra he thinks the trainers called it once, when they thought themselves out of earshot, but it’s not a direct translation anyway. He’s seen no proof of this ka’ra, but he’s seen the Force.
He’s seen It.
And it frightens him that he knows It to be True.
The General—Kenobi—reassures him and his 212th brothers often, to the best of his ability at least, for how do you explain the colour green to a man born blind, but Cody, for all that he’s far from a Shiny, was raised in the stark-white halls of Kamino. When you’re bred and trained to follow orders, how do you react to a power with no master? The clones follow the General-Jedi, the General-Jedi follow the Force (the Senate really, but Cody knows there’s a bitterness there), so who does the Force follow? It’s the ultimate higher power—God of Gods—and It lives in Cody. Lives in all things, so says Kenobi, and Its will is unknowable, untenable by all except the Darkside, though it is the life of a Jedi to interpret and manipulate its will into being.
Through his existential crisis—kriff, he’s such a shitty drunk—his ice has melted, his brother—blonde buzz cut; Rex—is closing his other hand around a new glass filled to the brim with a foamy golden beer. He swallows the last of his watered-down purple drink in a single gulp, shivers through the sour aftertaste that tickles his throat and tongue, and toasts his overflowing beer against Rex’s own.
“Oya!” Rex’s voice sloshes as much as his beer does, foam soaking the cuff of his body glove.
“OYA!” comes an answering call from most of the room, drinks toasted in solidarity to varying success. Cody thinks, as he watches Fives hauling Echo up onto a table whilst belting out the beginnings of a popular space shanty, that he should probably call it quits soon for all of the boys as their marshal commander, but he can’t quite reach the part of his brain that cares. He shrugs, smirks through his own, “Oya,” and pulls from his glass.
“Beer ’stache, beer ’stache, Cody’s got a beer ’stache,” chants Wolffe, typically a gruff no-nonsense man. Cody wipes his upper lip with his sleeve. His glove is due a wash, anyway.
There’s not a general or commander Jedi in sight at this clone gathering; there’s boys from all walks of the GAR, but mostly the 212th and 501st battalions, and the little crew in Cody’s corner—the only splash of other in this sea of white, blue, and orange paint. Monnk, in his brown-and-navy kit, is quietly arguing with Kix, words passing between them that Cody can’t hear over the din of a couple dozen other voices identical to theirs, until Monnk slams his half-empty bottle onto the table. It wobbles. Monnk’s wobbling too, ass half out of his seat and flailing arm coming down hard onto Kix’s shoulder.
“Look, you weren’t there,” he spits.
“No duh,” slurs Kix. “You- you bantha-karking fish boys do all your fighting in the water. Should get your damn bucket seals checked; clearly leaking sea water into your skull.” It’d be funny if the delivery weren’t so pathetic, but Cody spares his overworked brother a wry smile.
Monnk’s glare tightens. “Hardy har. Get karked,” he says, shoving Kix’s shoulder. To Kix’s credit, the utterly shit-faced medic does little more than rock back before settling once again, elbow on the table and cheek resting on his palm, head turned to his conversation partner. His eyelids are drooping with exhaustion and a sleepy haze only brought on with alcohol or hardcore painkillers.
“You know what I mean,” Monnk finishes.
“No, I don’t. None of us brothers know anything about that voodoo-Force shit. I know you sat through the same flash-training as me. You ain’t that special, Commander.”
“I don’t need special training or space magic to know that there’s something off about the generals,” Monnk snaps, practically nose-to-nose with Kix.
Cody’s listening with half-interest. His normally sharp gaze is slipping from brother to brother around the room, and he can’t really think straight anymore—and the smell of what he thinks is someone’s regurgitated bad decisions over to the left somewhere is distracting as all hell. He swirls his beer, sips it leisurely, pleased with the fog that’s settled over him without much of a desire to thicken it further. They’re a ragtag bunch of brothers—himself, Rex, Kix, Wolffe, Monnk, and Ponds, who seems to be either fast asleep or just eerily silent in his bucket—from different batches and battalions, with different specialties and ranks, but if there’s certainly one thing they all have in common, it’s that they all work one-to-one with their respective Jedi.
Balls deep in Jedi ass 24/7, 365, Fox had said once over holo-call.
Cody considers himself as much of a Jedi-expert as a Force-null can be at this point, and he certainly agrees with Monnk. He shudders, not from his drink nor from the cool air.
He knows what the Force does to Jedi. He knows from Kamino that they use It to enhance themselves—stronger, smarter, faster, better—like the clones themselves are enhanced. He know that It provides them with wisdom on the ass-end of vague, he knows that when they’re still like statues with their eyes closed that they’re talking to It, he knows that they can make things fly.
Cody also knows, and he knows that his brothers sat with him know it too, that there’s a lot more to the Force and the Jedi than what they’d learned on Kamino. More than even “space magic” can explain.
“We were on Kamino, right?” begins Monnk. “General Fisto said there’d been intel, got wind of some scout droids trying to come in water ways, so we go to check it out. As far as the Chancellor knows, it’s only one or two clankers—didn’t even need more’n a clone or two, maybe some backup just in case. We go check it out, but it turns out there’s half a karking battalion of aqua-droids waiting for us, and since the vode are stretched so damn thin across the entire galaxy, there’s only a squad of us and Fisto to cover the whole planet.
“We were utterly karked,” Monnk finishes.
Suddenly sobered, Cody rights his chair, lowers his feet from where they’d been resting on the table.
“How in Fett’s name are you still alive?” he growls.
Around the table, the boys are equally invested, except for Schrödinger's Ponds on Rex’s left, and Cody knows the subtleties of his own body well enough to see that more than a few brothers—all of them rumour-spreaders, surely, since Charger has shuffled an inch or two closer and he’s started at least three gossip trains in the last hour—have metaphorically swiveled their ears, perked up like loth-cats at the prospect of treats (he thinks Emmett’s ears, weirdly larger than the others’, but that’s genetic mutation for you, actually twitch).
Cody sets his eyes back on Monnk, wills himself in all his woozy glory to hold there, and he doesn’t need the Force to see the… disturbed feeling that permeates the air around his brother, though he looks the same as ever in body and expression. Cody just knows.
There’s that word again, flitting across his mind’s eye.
It.
Cody sees recognition, a flicker of grim understanding, in the eyes of Rex. Had Wolffe’s good eye been turned to him, Cody suspects he’d see it there too, and he even sees it in the way Kix’s bleary, half-lidded gaze sharpens through his drunkenness in the way that only an exhausted medic’s can like he’s just heard a heart flat-lining after a thirty hour surgery.
Sometimes, in that look, Cody knows he sees something more. Every day, more and more brothers will flick their gaze to Cody as they limp back from battle, General Kenobi beside them (decidedly a solid three kliks away from where he should be, but he’s learned not to question Kenobi kriffing off after communing with the Force), and in that second, he’ll spy a tendril of… something. His initial response lately, isn’t concern as it once was, but a long, shoulder-slumping sigh, because Kenobi’s Jedi antics are going to lengthen the post-battle reports and debriefs by a solid hour at minimum. Again. (Not from any amount of confusion on the vode’s part (at least not openly), and certainly not on the Jedi’s, but almost always because the Senate, especially the karking Chancellor, never seem to accept: “Why, Chancellor Palpatine, the Force was very insistent,” and, “No, I couldn’t convene with the Senate on this matter as I believe I was being shot at at the time,” as valid explanations).
They’re not at the point of the war where more boys than not have seen the Jedi do something… weird—or weirder than the kind of Force-use that even the blindest of Force-nulls can recgonise—but the 212th especially seems to be quickly approaching the line. Shinies who should’ve been massacred stumble back to base camp, glassy wide-eyed gazes locked on the General, jaws dropped open in a mixture of adoration and fear. They’ll exchange a glance with Cody as they pass, and in that second, he’ll see It.
Cody can’t call it a physical presence because it doesn’t appear to actually do anything, but he can see it all the same. A translucent inky-black something. Not a liquid, nor a gas, nor a solid, but it writhes of its own volition, passes over the gaze of his brothers like a kind of protective film in less than a second. Only in the eyes of vode who have seen It. And his body shudders, goosebumps and hair raising on his arms and neck. He thinks it’s the closest he’s ever come to actually seeing the Force.
He’s not supposed to see.
But he can. Somehow.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Monnk finally says, shaking his head.
“Try.”