Chapter Text
The holomap of the Christophsis blockade painted the bridge in shifting blue light, the crystalline arcs of Separatist ships hanging like blades over the tiny icon that marked the Negotiator. Officers murmured updates, fingers skimming controls, boots soft on plasteel. It was a familiar rhythm, almost soothing in its predictability.
Cody stood at his post near the tactical display, helmet clipped at his hip, gaze sweeping the room with the absent efficiency of long habit. The general’s voice flowed in the background, measured and calm as he traced an approach vector through the projected blockade.
“If we hit this gap between the frigates and swing wide, their return fire will be staggered. We can bring the 212th down here, in the lee of the crystal formations, and pivot into the canyon system before they can adjust firing solutions.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s hand drew a clean arc through the hologram, the light clinging to his fingers for a heartbeat before it broke. His robe sleeve fell back from his wrist, revealing the pale line of an old scar and the subtle tension in the tendons beneath the skin. Cody noted the details without meaning to. He always did. It was how he stayed alive.
He was already plotting routes and contingencies in his head: gunship deployment waves, artillery staging, fallback positions along the crystal spurs below. The general’s plans were rarely simple, but they worked. You learned to trust that.
Then Obi-Wan’s hand stopped.
Not the deliberate pause of a man reconsidering a variable. It was sharper than that, a sudden lock, fingers frozen mid-gesture. His breath caught on the start of a word and never finished it. For an instant Cody thought some new piece of bad news had hit the bridge and they had all somehow missed it.
“General?” he asked, automatically.
Obi-Wan did not answer.
His eyes had gone past the holomap, past the bridge, fixed on a point that did not exist in this room. Cody watched the color drain from his face, watched the pupils dilate. The faint, constant hum of controlled presence that Cody had come to recognize as the general’s baseline simply vanished, as if someone had cut a cable in the Force he could not feel.
Then the blood appeared.
It welled from Obi-Wan’s nose and along the corner of his right eye, a vivid line against pale skin and cream tunic. The sound he made was not a word. It was a quiet, wounded exhale.
The bridge stilled. Conversations died. Even the officers who had never seen a Jedi up close recognized something was violently wrong.
Cody moved.
He reached Obi-Wan just as the general’s knees gave way. The weight that dropped into his arms was total, boneless, as if someone had removed the animating principle from inside the man and left only flesh and fabric behind. Obi-Wan’s head tipped back against Cody’s chestplate, eyes open, but sight turned inward to some horror no one else could see.
“Medbay, now,” Cody snapped, his voice low and sharp, but it was Rex who got the order off first, already raising his wrist comm.
“Kix, bridge. Priority one. It’s General Kenobi.”
The bridge parted for them. Cody gathered Obi-Wan up, one arm under his knees, the other steady along his back, keeping the head supported. The general was lighter than his presence suggested. Too light. Cody could feel each narrow bone through the weight of robes, could hear every shallow, uneven breath.
He did not look at the faces of the crew as he carried their general through them. He kept his eyes on the lift doors ahead, on the steady rectangle of light that marked escape toward treatment, toward answers he did not have.
In the lift’s quiet, the routine noise of the bridge cut away, the intimacy of the situation settled like a physical pressure on Cody’s shoulders. Rex stood beside him, one gauntleted hand braced against the wall to steady the slight, constant sway of the car.
“What in the seven Corellian hells was that?” Rex whispered, the anger in his tone aimed at the situation, not the man bleeding on Cody’s cuirass.
Cody searched for language that did not exist in his training.
“I don’t know,” he said, the admission scraping on the way out. “It has happened before. Never in front of a full bridge crew.”
Rex’s head snapped toward him. “Before? And you didn’t file a report?”
“He forbade it,” Cody answered, gaze fixed straight ahead. “He recovers. He insists it is a Jedi matter.”
He remembered the first time he had seen it, months prior, in a quiet corridor after a drawn-out campaign. Obi-Wan slumped against a bulkhead, fingers trembling as he wiped a thin smear of blood from his upper lip, the other hand pressed to his temple. The look he had given Cody when the commander rounded the corner and froze was not fear. It was shame, raw and unguarded. A plea wrapped in authority.
It is a burden of foresight, Commander. One I must bear alone. Your discretion, please.
Foresight. Not illness. Not weakness. A Jedi thing. Cody had taken the order and folded it into the same compartment where he kept his own nightmares and the questions he could not afford to ask.
Now it was open on the bridge for everyone to see. The general bleeding from the face, collapsing in his own war room.
The lift doors hissed open. Bright medbay light spilled over them, antiseptic and harsh.
Kix met them halfway, medscanner already humming, footsteps precise and fast. His eyes widened, but his hands did not hesitate.
“Vitals?” Kix demanded.
“Breathing, irregular when it hit, unresponsive,” Cody recited, the data a lifeline. He laid Obi-Wan on the waiting cot with a care that felt out of place in armor, adjusting the angle of the neck, making sure the robe was clear of the monitors.
Kix worked. Electrodes, scanners, the efficient patter of assessments. The bloody residue was swabbed away, cataloged. The numbers on the monitor painted a picture that did not make sense: severe neural fatigue, but no active seizure, no standard cranial trauma.
“It’s like his entire nervous system spiked and then reset,” Kix muttered. “This is not any fit I know. It’s not a stroke. It’s…” He swallowed the curse that wanted to be there. “I have no kriffing idea.”
Rex pushed off a cabinet, rubbing a hand over his scalp. “So what, the Force decided to fry his circuits for fun?”
The word hung in the room. Force. The explanation and the barrier in one.
Cody stayed at the side of the cot, hands flexing uselessly at his sides. Staring at Obi-Wan like this felt like staring at the inside of a secret. The general’s face, absent the mask of command, seemed oddly young, lines smoothed by unconsciousness, but there was tension in the set of his mouth even in sleep. Whatever he was seeing had not been peaceful.
He had seen something. Cody could not phrase it more precisely than that. The collapse had not been random. Obi-Wan had been looking through them and into some future Cody could not imagine, and whatever had been there had hit him hard enough to knock him to the deck.
“This is killing him,” Rex said quietly, as if voicing a thought he had not meant to let out. “Even if it doesn’t finish the job.”
Cody did not answer. There was nothing he could say that did not feel like betrayal. He was a soldier built to obey, to execute plans given by others. The entire structure of his existence assumed the Jedi above him were steady, untouchable fixtures. What happened when the fixture cracked?
Then Obi-Wan’s fingers twitched.
Kix leaned in, watching the screens. Another tremor, this time in his arm. Then his eyelids fluttered. The blue eyes opened, focusing with disorienting speed. Awareness slammed back into them like something physical.
He saw Cody first, then Kix, then Rex.
“Oh,” he said softly.
The shame Cody remembered from the corridor was back, sharpened by the knowledge that this time, there were witnesses who were not bound to him by private loyalty.
“General, stay down,” Kix ordered, hand on his shoulder. “Your readings are a mess.”
Obi-Wan’s response was automatic. “I am fine,” he lied, pushing himself up on his elbows. His voice was raw around the edges, Coruscanti accent frayed by something he could not smooth.
“You are not,” Cody said, before he could stop himself.
The words landed like a blaster bolt in the quiet. Rex’s head tilted, watching. Kix froze mid-adjustment.
Obi-Wan’s gaze snapped to Cody’s. For a moment, the commander saw the thing behind the shame. Not weakness, not fear, but the echo of whatever had just dragged him down. A canyon of fire. Screams. The sense of inevitability fracturing. Cody did not see the images, but he felt the residue of their weight in his general’s eyes.
“I had… a lapse,” Obi-Wan said at last. “It has passed.”
“It knocked you out on the bridge and bled you in front of your legion,” Rex said flatly. “That is not a lapse, sir.”
Kix’s scanner chimed a soft warning at the spike in Obi-Wan’s stress markers. The healer ignored it for the moment, focusing on the man, not the lines.
“Is this what you meant before?” Kix asked, lower now. “When you insisted these episodes were a ‘Jedi matter’?”
Obi-Wan’s shoulders tightened. Cody could see the effort it took for him not to look away.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan answered. “They are visions. Premonitions of possible futures. They are… intrusive. At times.”
“At times, they knock you flat and nearly stop your heart,” Rex muttered.
Kix’s mouth was a firm line. “Whatever the source, General, your nervous system is paying a price. This is not nothing.”
Obi-Wan closed his eyes. “Kix, I appreciate your concern. Truly. But the content of the vision is what matters now.”
He swung his legs over the side of the cot.
“Sir,” Cody started.
Obi-Wan stood. For a heartbeat his knees threatened to repeat their earlier failure, but he caught himself on the edge of the bed, fingertips white against durasteel. He pressed the fingers of his other hand to his temple, as if pinning the memory in place, walling it off from the rest of him.
Then he smoothed his robe, pushed a breath through his lungs, and put the general back on, piece by visible piece. The transformation was not perfect. The cracks showed. But he did it all the same.
“Our blockade window closes in thirteen hours,” he said. “We have deployments to finalize and a Council to brief. You may accompany me, Commander, Captain. The vision pertains directly to the siege on Christophsis.”
The burden was back in his voice, riding under the calm. Cody had never heard anything more like a man walking into enemy fire on purpose.
He fell into step at his general’s shoulder.