Archive of Our Own

Rex had a plan.

It was, by the standards of things he planned, remarkably simple. No troop movements, no flanking maneuvers, no contingency trees nested four layers deep. Just three people, one bar, and a night off that all of them needed more than any of them would admit.

Step one: Get Cody off the Negotiator.

Step two: Walk into 79s.

Step three: Pretend to be surprised when Serra Vey was already there.

The beauty of the thing was its simplicity. Rex had watched Cody grind himself down for weeks after Umbara — not in any way that showed on the surface, because this was Cody, and Cody would sooner eat his own helmet than let anyone see him falter. But Rex knew. He knew it in the way Cody rechecked reports he'd already approved, in the extra beat before he answered questions, in the careful, measured control that had always been Cody's default but had lately become closer to a locked door.

The Negotiator had been in orbit over Coruscant for four days now — refit rotation, hull patching, system overhauls, the slow unglamorous business of putting a warship back together after Umbara had tried to take it apart. Cody had thrown himself into the refit schedule like it was a personal enemy. He hadn't set foot planetside once.

Serra was down there. At the Temple, her own post-Umbara rotation. They both knew the other was here. Neither had commed. 

Which was the other half of the problem. Rex had watched this particular dance for three days before deciding that someone had to end it, and it clearly wasn't going to be either of them. Cody missing Serra was something Rex could identify only by its negative space — the comm Cody checked and then set down without replying, his gaze drifting to the 17th's berth markers on the fleet status board before snapping back to his own work.

So. The plan. Simple.

Rex had commed Serra that morning. "Cody hasn't left the ship in four days. 79s, 2100. I'll get him planetside. He doesn't know you're coming."

The pause before her reply had been telling. "Why doesn't Cody know?"

"Because if I tell him you'll be there, he'll find seventeen refit tasks that suddenly need his personal attention. You know that."

Another pause, longer. Then: "He does do that."

"2100. Wear something without a rank insignia."

"Rex, I don't think I own anything without—" She'd stopped. Laughed, quiet and slightly embarrassed. "I'll figure it out."

Now it was 2045, and Rex was standing in the doorway of the Negotiator's operations center watching Cody review refit manifests as though going off-duty were a form of surrender.

"Drinks," Rex said.

"Mm."

"79s. Tonight. You're coming."

Cody didn't look up. "We're mid-refit. I've got the consolidated supply reports from—"

"You've been reading the same datapad for six hours."

"It's a long report."

"Cody."

Cody lifted his head. Rex just looked at him, arms folded, because he was fully prepared to stand in this doorway until one of them died of old age.

"Come for one hour," Rex said. "You can bring the datapad if it makes you feel better."

Cody set the datapad down slowly. "Fine. One hour."

"That's the spirit."

Rex stepped into the corridor and checked his comm.

On my way. See you soon. — S

Sent twelve minutes ago. She was probably already there.

He pocketed the comm and smiled.

79s hit Serra Vey like a wall of sound and heat.

She stood just inside the entrance, jacket pulled close, and let her eyes adjust to the low amber lighting while the noise broke over her in waves — laughter, shouting, the arrhythmic thud of music she didn't recognize, glass on metal, a dozen conversations layered over each other until the words blurred into a single, vibrating hum.

There were clones everywhere she looked. Off-duty troopers in armor or blacks or civvies, crowded around tables and along the bar, standing in loose knots by the walls. She'd known this, obviously — 79s was their bar, the one place on Coruscant that was genuinely, uncomplicatedly theirs — but knowing it and standing alone in the doorway while the crowd pressed and shifted around her were two different things.

She tugged at the collar of her jacket. Civilian clothes felt wrong. The jacket was broken-in leather she'd owned since her Service Corps days, and the shirt underneath was just a shirt, but being without armor felt wrong, like a missing limb. No utility belt. No lightsaber at her hip. She'd tucked it into the interior pocket of the jacket, a hard line against her ribs that she was hyperaware of every time she moved.

You're fine. You're meeting Rex and Cody. Find a seat, order a drink, wait.

She edged through the crowd toward the bar, murmuring apologies to shoulders and elbows that didn't hear her. A clone with a 96th tattoo on his neck glanced at her as she squeezed past, did a visible double-take — woman, not clone, civilian, huh — and went back to his drink.

She found a gap at the bar between two occupied stools, wedged herself into it, and caught the bartender droid's photoreceptors with what she hoped was a confident wave and not the desperate semaphore it felt like.

"Corellian whiskey," she told it. "Neat."

The droid poured without comment and slid the glass across. Serra wrapped both hands around it and checked her comm.

Haven't left the ship yet. Cody found a supply problem. 15 behind, maybe 20. Sorry. — Rex

Twenty minutes. Fine. She could do twenty minutes.

She took a sip of the whiskey. It was cheap and burned going down, sharp at first, then almost sweet. She took another sip. The music was still too loud and there were still too many people and she was still the only non-clone face she could see, but the whiskey was helping.

No problem, she typed back. I'll grab a spot.

She looked around for a table. There were none. Every surface in the bar was occupied, and the standing crowd filled the gaps between them. She was going to be at this bar for twenty minutes, alone, surrounded by several hundred soldiers, none of whom she knew.

She took a third sip of whiskey and focused on the grain of the bar top. Wood-print laminate, scratched and ringed with the ghosts of old glasses. Someone had carved initials into the surface near her left hand — CT-6632 — and she traced the numbers with her fingertip and wondered who he was and whether he was still alive, and then she stopped wondering because that was a door she couldn't open tonight.

"You waiting for someone?"

She looked up. The clone on the stool to her left had turned toward her. He had close-cropped hair and a thin scar along his jaw and his eyes were warm. 

"I'm meeting friends," Serra explained with a chagrined smile. "They're running late."

"Their loss." He nodded at her glass. "Can I buy you another while you wait?"

The correct social response to this was… she actually didn't know. Was he being polite? Was this a clone custom? Was he flirting? She couldn't tell. He was smiling, and it seemed genuine, and she was alone and the whiskey was already half gone.

"That's really nice of you," she said. "Sure. Thank you."

He flagged the bartender. "Two more of whatever she's having." He stuck out his hand. "Haze. 13th Battalion."

"Serra." She shook his hand. His grip was firm and brief and exactly like every other clone handshake she'd ever received, and the familiarity of it loosened the tension she felt in her shoulders. "What brings you to 79s tonight?"

"Shore leave. First time off rotation in—" He thought about it. "Longer than I want to count. You?"

"Same, more or less."

"You military?" He gave her civilian clothes an assessing look, like he was trying to place her.

"Bit of both. I do engineering work. Attached to a ground unit."

"Yeah? Which one?"

"Oh, you know." She waved vaguely with her glass. "Infantry."

Haze smiled. "Narrows it down."

She laughed, surprising herself. "Sorry. I just — it's my night off. I'm trying not to talk shop."

"Fair enough." He clinked his glass against hers. "To nights off."

"To nights off."

They drank. The second whiskey was smoother than the first, or she was adjusting. The noise of the bar had shifted from overwhelming to almost ambient, a warm buzz at the edges of her awareness. Haze asked her about engineering and she told him about load-bearing calculations in prefab bridges and he listened with the focus clones gave to anyone who took them seriously.

Two of his brothers materialized behind him within five minutes. One leaned on the bar beside Haze and said, "Who's your friend?" — guileless and blunt, as if subtlety were a concept he'd heard about but never personally encountered.

"Serra," Haze said. "She's an engineer."

"Chopper," said the new arrival. "And that's Fuse."

"Hi." Serra gave a small wave. Fuse, who was quieter, nodded back.

"You're not a clone," Chopper observed.

"No," Serra agreed.

"Don't get many nats in here."

"I'm meeting friends. They're late."

"How late?"

She checked her comm. No new messages. "Getting later."

Chopper turned to Haze. "We should keep her company. It's the decent thing to do."

"I was already keeping her company," Haze pointed out.

"Well, now there's more of it."

Serra bit her lip to keep from laughing. The three of them arranged themselves around her section of bar with practiced ease from being used to sharing small spaces, and Chopper started telling her about a card game that had gone catastrophically wrong on their last deployment, and she leaned in to hear him over the music, and the tight knot of anxiety in her stomach quietly untied itself.

Rex checked his comm for the sixth time in four minutes.

2119. Twenty minutes late. Serra hadn't replied to his last message, which either meant she was fine or she'd already left. He was choosing to believe the former.

The problem — the specific, maddening, utterly Cody-shaped problem — was currently bent over a supply terminal, scrolling through an inventory manifest that had flagged a discrepancy of forty crates of tibanna gas between what the 212th had received and what the GAR's records showed they'd been shipped.

"It's probably a clerical error," Rex said, for the third time.

"Forty crates isn't a clerical error. Forty crates is either theft or incompetence, and either way it needs documentation before—"

"Before we go have a drink. Yes. Agreed. Document it tomorrow."

Cody looked at him. The look said several things simultaneously, chief among them: Since when do you care this much about getting drinks?

Rex held his gaze. Since always. Move it.

Cody turned back to the terminal. "Five more minutes."

Five minutes was not going to be five minutes. Rex had served alongside this man for the better part of the war, and he knew exactly what Cody's "five more minutes" meant. It meant I will be done when I am done and your impatience is noted and irrelevant.

He stepped into the corridor and typed fast.

Still on the Negotiator. Make that 30. I'm so sorry.

He stared at the screen. Three dots. Then:

All good. Found the bar. Having a drink.

Rex exhaled. That was fine. That was manageable. Serra Vey, alone at a bar, having a quiet drink. Nothing could go wrong with that.

Serra was on her third whiskey and her ninth clone.

She hadn't meant to collect them. It had just… happened. Chopper had introduced her to Spike and Handle, and then Fuse had flagged down a brother named Throttle from across the bar who had "an engineering question she might be able to help with," and now she was standing at the center of a loose semicircle of off-duty troopers with a borrowed stylus in her hand and a bar napkin covered in diagrams.

"The problem isn't the power cell," she said, smoothing the napkin flat and sketching rapidly. "The Z-6's thermal coupling is designed for burst fire. Three- to five-second intervals. When you run it sustained, the heat sink can't cycle fast enough and you get thermal runaway in the barrel housing." She tapped the napkin. "But if you shim the coupling with a durasteel washer, it creates a micro-gap that lets the heat dissipate laterally instead of building in the chamber."

Throttle was staring at the napkin like she'd handed him a letter from the Force itself. "That's — you can just do that? With a washer?"

"Standard hardware kit. Takes about ten minutes. You'll lose maybe three percent muzzle velocity, but you'll gain sustained fire capacity of—" She tilted her head, calculating. "Twelve to fifteen seconds before you need to vent."

"I've been fighting with that gun for two years," Throttle said slowly. "Two years."

"Yeah, the manufacturer specs assume burst-fire doctrine. Nobody reads the thermal tolerance data because it's in an appendix that's labeled wrong." Serra shrugged. "Bad documentation. The bane of my existence."

"I think I love you," Throttle said.

"Get in line," Chopper muttered, and several of the others laughed. Serra smiled and didn't hear it. She was already drawing a second diagram: the ventral heat channel, where a careful bend in the exhaust manifold could shave another two degrees off the cycling temperature.

The crowd around her had grown without her noticing. It wasn't just Haze's group anymore. Word had traveled as it traveled in any group of clones, quietly and fast, and now there were troopers drifting over from other tables, drawn by the improbable sight of a woman in a leather jacket explaining weapons thermodynamics on a napkin. Some came for the engineering. Some came because she was pretty and civilian and smiling and there weren't a lot of pretty, smiling women in their lives. Some came because their brothers were there and where brothers went, you followed.

Serra didn't notice the size of the crowd because she was bent over the napkin and talking about heat dissipation and radiantly happy.

A hand appeared at the edge of the group and then its owner: a trooper who looked somehow newer than the others, despite having the same face. His hair was regulation-short and unmodified. No tattoos. No scars. He stood at the fringe of the semicircle, hunched slightly, trying to take up less space.

"Hey." Serra spotted him over Throttle's shoulder. "Come on in, there's room."

The shiny blinked and looked behind him, as if she might be talking to someone else.

"You," Serra confirmed. She smiled. "What's your name?"

"Uh — Scuff, sir. Ma'am." He corrected himself quickly. "Sorry. I don't — is it ma'am? For civilians?"

"Serra's fine."

He edged into the group. Haze shifted to make room without comment. "This is my, uh. First time here. Off-base, I mean. First time off-base."

"Well, welcome to 79s," Serra said. "Can I get you a drink?"

He stared at her like she'd offered him a personal transport. "You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." She flagged down the bartender droid. "What do you like? Whiskey? Ale?"

"I don't... know. I've never had any."

"Start with the ale. It's gentler." She ordered it, and when it came, she put it in his hand and watched his face as he took the first sip — the slight widening of his eyes, his mouth working around a flavor he had no reference point for, the tentative second sip that said he'd decided it was good.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"It's..." He considered. "Warm?"

"Best description of ale I've ever heard."

Something changed in the circle after that. Serra didn't feel it because she was asking Scuff about his training rotation, listening to him stumble through an answer about live-fire exercises with genuine attention, but the veterans around her felt it. 

She'd pulled the youngest, most nervous person in the room into the center of the group and made him feel like he belonged there, and she'd done it without thinking, like it was automatic, like it was just what you did with someone who was new and scared.

Haze caught Chopper's eye across the circle. 

Chopper raised his glass slightly. Yeah. I see it too.

More drinks arrived. Serra lost track of who was buying. She'd bought two rounds and been bought at least three, and the whiskey had settled into a warm glow behind her sternum that made the bar feel smaller and more manageable, the faces around her less like a crowd and more like people.

The clones told her stories and competed, with escalating creativity, to make her laugh, which wasn't hard, because they were genuinely funny, and Serra's defenses against genuine warmth had always been made of flimsi.

A trooper whose name she'd already forgotten was telling her about his CO — "Absolute disaster, I'm telling you, the man couldn't read a tactical map if you tattooed it on his face" — and Serra made a very careful, very neutral expression and said, "That sounds frustrating."

"Frustrating? He walked us into a box canyon on Felucia. A box canyon. A Togruta grandmother could've read that terrain—" He stopped.

Serra touched his arm. "I'm sorry."

The trooper looked down at her hand on his arm, then up at her face. He blinked twice, fast, and swallowed.

"Yeah," he said softly. "Me too."

The conversation drifted after that. Serra let it drift. She'd learned a long time ago that the best conversations happened when you stopped steering. Somewhere after her fourth whiskey, the engineering napkins got tucked under a glass and she found herself talking to a trooper named Riggs from the 41st who had been listening from the edge of the circle for twenty minutes without saying a word.

"So what do you like to do? When you're not—" She gestured vaguely at the ceiling, the walls, the war. "All this."

Riggs looked at her like she'd asked him to explain the color blue. "What do I like?"

"For fun. Off-duty. Hobbies."

He thought about it for what felt like a long time. "I watch holodramas sometimes."

"Any good?"

"There's one about a detective on Nar Shaddaa. It's terrible."

"Terrible good or terrible bad?"

"Terrible terrible." A minuscule smile. "I love it."

Serra grinned. "What about reading? Do you read?"

"Reports. Tech manuals."

"Those don't count."

"They don't?"

"Have you ever read something just because you wanted to?"

Riggs shook his head slowly, like the concept was actually unfamiliar. Around him, a few other troopers had gone quiet, listening.

Serra leaned her elbows on the bar. "Okay. There's this really ancient poem called The Siege of Vallenhall. It's a war epic. Soldiers holding a fortress through a three-month siege. But it's not really about the siege. It's about the people inside the walls. What they talk about at night, what they're afraid of, the friendships that hold them together when everything else is falling apart." She paused. "There's a whole section where they build a catapult out of kitchen supplies."

"Sounds heavy," Riggs said. But he hadn't looked away.

"Parts of it are. Parts of it are really funny. And the ending—" She caught herself. "I won't spoil it. But it earned every page that came before."

Scuff, beside her, was leaning forward. "Is it about clones?"

"It's about soldiers. Thousands of years before clones existed. But I think—" She chose her words carefully. "I think you'd recognize the people in it."

Riggs nodded. His expression changed, in a way that was difficult to name.

"I've got a copy on my datapad," Serra said. "Give me your comm channel and I'll send it to you."

A charged silence opened up around them. Chopper looked at Haze. Haze looked at Fuse. Three troopers behind Serra exchanged glances so loaded they could have been classified as ordnance.

"You want," Riggs asked slowly, "my comm channel?"

"To send you the poem. It's long, so it's easier to read on your own datapad than trying to—"

"She wants his number," someone muttered.

"His comm channel," Serra corrected, not turning around. "For the poem. Why, is there another way to send it?"

"I'll take a copy too," Chopper said quickly.

"Me too," said Haze.

"I want one," Scuff said immediately.

"Oh, this is great." Serra pulled out her comm unit, visibly delighted. "Okay, everyone who wants it, give me your channels and I'll send it tonight. Actually, I should make a group list so we can discuss it after—"

She started collecting comm channels with brisk, cheerful efficiency, tapping each one in while half the circle quietly lost their minds around her. Several troopers who had absolutely no interest in Old Republic poetry suddenly found themselves volunteering their contact information.

"She has no idea," Fuse said quietly to Haze.

"None," Haze confirmed. He gave Serra his comm channel anyway.

After she had everyone’s channels, she checked her messages. Two from Rex.

I am so sorry.

And then, three minutes later: Heading to the hangar now. We ARE coming. I promise.

She typed back, one-handed: Hnestly? Take yur time. Im having fun.

She put the comm away and turned back to the circle, which had swelled to at least fifteen troopers, and picked up the engineering napkin, which was now covered on both sides and had spawned two companion napkins, and said, "Okay, who asked about the DC-15A's recoil buffer? Because I have thoughts."

It was 2147 when Rex broke.

He'd been watching the minutes accumulate like a debt he couldn't pay. Forty-seven minutes now. Forty-seven minutes since Serra had walked into a clone bar alone in civilian clothes, and every minute that passed was another minute she was sitting there by herself or, worse, not sitting there by herself, and he couldn't decide which possibility concerned him more. They hadn't even left the ship. The shuttle ride alone was another fifteen minutes.

Cody had found the source of the tibanna discrepancy. It was, as Rex had predicted, a clerical error — a transposition in the refit manifest that had duplicated one entry and deleted another. A mistake that could be fixed in thirty seconds and documented in five minutes and that Cody had spent forty-seven minutes tracking down because Cody did not leave problems unsolved. It was one of the things that made him an extraordinary commander. It was also one of the things that made Rex want to throw him into a wall.

"Cody."

"Almost done."

"Cody, we need to go. Now."

Cody looked up. Rex was standing in the doorway with his jacket on and an expression that was urgent, but not combat-urgent.

"What's wrong?"

Rex made a decision. He had kept the surprise through sheer force of will, and the surprise was now actively working against its own purpose, and there was a point where operational flexibility meant abandoning the plan for something that worked better.

"Serra's at 79s," he said.

Cody froze, his hands motionless on the terminal.

"She's been there since 2100," Rex continued. "I set it up. Surprise drinks. The three of us."

Cody's expression didn't change. "You didn't tell me."

"Because you would've found a reason not to go."

Cody didn't argue the point.

"She's been there for forty-seven minutes," Rex said. "Alone."

"Alone," Cody repeated.

"In civilian clothes. At a clone bar."

Rex watched Cody do the math. The math that involved Serra Vey in civvies, without rank insignia, without the social armor of her position, sitting alone in a bar full of men who shared a face but not a single one of whom would recognize her.

Serra, who was warm and curious and listened like every word mattered.

Serra, who smiled at people and didn't notice when they couldn't stop looking at her afterward.

Serra, in a room full of soldiers who hadn't spoken to a woman who wasn't giving them orders in months.

Cody reached for his jacket.

"The manifest—" Rex started, just to be difficult.

"Can wait." Cody was already moving. He paused at the door, newly focused. "Forty-seven minutes?"

"Forty-eight now. Plus fifteen for the shuttle."

Cody walked faster.

By the time the door of 79s opened, Serra Vey had collected twenty-three clones, four napkins full of engineering schematics, a list of troopers she’d promised to send poetry to, a semi-permanent seat at the bar that the crowd around her defended with territorial ferocity, and a warm, fizzing happiness that reached all the way to her fingertips.

Rex saw the crowd first.

He registered it tactically and then his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized the crowd was centered on a specific point at the bar, and the specific point was Serra, and she was surrounded by more off-duty troopers than he could quickly count (several of whom were leaning in with body language that could charitably be described as very attentive), and she was laughing.

He stopped walking.

Cody stopped beside him. Rex watched his face.

It was — Rex would think about this later, much later, and decide it was one of the most honest expressions he'd ever seen on Cody's face. Just open, for a fraction of a second, while he stood in the doorway and watched the woman he loved light up a room full of strangers who clearly didn't know who she was.

Then the mask came back, smooth and seamless. Rex shook his head, grinned, and started pushing through the crowd.

Cody followed.

Serra was mid-sentence when the crowd shifted around her. She looked up, found Rex, and her whole face changed.

"Rex!"

She set down the glass. She set down the napkin. She crossed the three steps between them, and Rex had just enough time to register that Serra Vey was about to hug him in public before she did exactly that — arms around his neck, chin on his shoulder, holding on tight.

"Hi," she said into his shoulder.

"Hi." He hugged her back, laughing. "I see you made friends."

"Your brothers are lovely. Did you know the thermal coupling on the Z-6 is specced wrong? Nobody talks about it. It's a scandal."

"I'll alert Command."

She pulled back, beaming at him, and Rex watched her gaze shift over his shoulder and find Cody and he knew, instinctually, what was about to happen.

She moved past him to stand in front of Cody.

“Hi,” she said softly. Then she put her hands on the sides of Cody’s face, rose up on her toes, and kissed him. Full and unhurried and impossible to mistake for anything else. Like she'd been missing him for weeks and had just enough whiskey to stop pretending she hadn’t.

The nearest conversations died mid-sentence.

Cody didn't move for a full second. His hands stayed at his sides. His posture was rigid — the reflex of a lifetime of discipline, of protocol, of Commander Cody does not do this in public, Commander Cody does not lose control, Commander Cody does not—

Serra started to pull back.

And Cody's hands came up and settled on her waist and he pulled her in and kissed her back.

Haze stared. Chopper stared. Twenty-one other clones stared.

"Hang on," Chopper said slowly. "Is that—"

"That's Commander Cody," Haze said.

"The Commander Cody?" Throttle's voice climbed an octave.

"How many Commander Codys do you think there are?"

Throttle looked at the woman who had redesigned his rotary cannon on a napkin, who had bought him drinks and asked about his training and listened to his answers like they mattered — and then he looked at the most famous marshal commander in the Grand Army of the Republic kissing her in the middle of 79s. He set his drink down on the bar very carefully, as if it might explode.

Scuff, the shiny, tugged on Haze's sleeve. "Is Commander Cody important?"

"Kid." Haze rubbed his face. "Commander Cody is the reason half of us are alive."

Scuff looked at Serra with renewed awe. "She has good taste."

Serra broke the kiss. She looked at Cody, her thumbs still resting against his cheekbones, and smiled.

“Hi,” she said again, a little breathless.

“Hello.”

Her gaze slipped past his shoulder to the surrounding clones and Rex watched the realization arrive.

“Oh,” she said. “That was in public.”

“Yes,” Cody confirmed.

She considered this. Her hands remained firmly on his face.

“I think I’m slightly intoxicated.”

“I would agree with that assessment.”

Serra looked up at him. Cody’s hands were still settled around her waist, and despite his steady voice, the tips of his ears were turning red. She slid her hands down to his chest, but didn’t step back. 

"Well, you were late," she explained. 

"Supply manifest."

"Ah. Was it the tibanna discrepancy?"

Cody paused. "You knew about that?"

"I flagged it to quartermaster ops two weeks ago. Transposition error. Column F, row… 2,187?"

Cody stared at her. Behind them, Rex made a sound that he would later deny was a laugh.

"You could have mentioned that," Cody said.

“I sent a report.” She tilted her head. “You probably haven't read it yet because you were too busy discovering it independently.”

Rex laughed, and went to get a round.

Cody looked at the circle. Twenty-odd troopers looked back, a few visibly still trying to rearrange their evenings around this new information.

“Gentlemen,” Cody said. “Thank you for keeping her company.”

Cody’s voice carried the implicit promise that he meant what he said. Shoulders loosened. Drinks came back up.

Serra pulled Cody into the circle by the hand and introduced him to Haze and Chopper and Throttle. She handed Scuff a fresh ale and said, "This is Scuff, it's his first time off-base, be nice."

"I'm always nice," Cody replied.

"You are not."

The group laughed. Cody let himself be pulled in.

What followed was twenty minutes Rex would remember for a long time: Cody, off-duty. Actually off-duty. Standing at a bar with Serra's friends (because somehow, impossibly, she had made twenty-three strangers into friends in under an hour) with a whiskey in one hand and his other arm around Serra's waist while she argued with Throttle about barrel metallurgy.

Cody was simply present, leaning into Serra slightly when she made a point he agreed with. Nodding at Haze across the circle. Answering Scuff's questions about battalion operations with patience Rex hadn't seen from him in weeks.

The bar absorbed the shock. Clones talked, and word moved, and within ten minutes every trooper in 79s knew that the pretty woman at the bar was with Commander Cody. Opinions on this ranged from stunned admiration to quiet envy to a sort of warm, collective pride that made no logical sense but was felt universally: she chose one of us.

Rex was nursing his whiskey and watching Serra sketch on yet another napkin while Cody's thumb traced small circles on her hip when the door opened and a squad of troopers in 17th Legion teal walked into 79s.

Rex saw the armor before he saw the faces.

Gunmetal grey, so dark it was almost black under the bar's amber lighting, with teal accents painted over the top in sharp, deliberate stripes. It looked like armor that had been through something the original manufacturer hadn't planned for. Because it had.

Rex knew this armor. He'd served alongside it on Umbara, had watched it emerge from the tree line when the 17th surfaced after twenty-eight days underground, lean and quiet and carrying a campaign that had aged every one of them by years. He knew Commander Jet's posture at the front of the squad.

He also knew, with the sudden clarity of a tactical situation going sideways, exactly what was about to happen.

The bar was already reacting. Heads turning, conversations dropping, that lateral ripple of attention that moved through any room full of soldiers when a new variable walked through the door. It was in the way a 501st trooper at a corner table straightened on his stool, and two 41st troopers near the door exchanged a glance, and how the ambient noise dipped for just a moment as the room collectively processed what it was looking at. Every trooper in the GAR knew the story: the 17th had lived in caves for a month running guerrilla sabotage ops and eating bioluminescent fungus, while the rest of the army had written them off as dead. They’d saved the Umbara campaign and then they’d saved their brothers from killing each other in the dark.

Rex looked at Serra. She was bent over a napkin, stylus moving, explaining recoil dampening to Throttle while Cody's arm rested around her waist. She hadn't seen them yet.

He looked back at the 17th.

He set his drink down.

Oh no.

Jet saw her immediately.

His eyes tracked the room in the automatic sweep he couldn't turn off — exits, crowd density, sight lines — and they landed on Serra at the bar. In civilian clothes. Flushed and visibly tipsy. Surrounded by a knot of troopers from at least four different battalions. Leaning against a clone whose arm was wrapped around her waist.

Cody's arm. Jet identified him a half-second later by posture alone, which was distinctive even out of armor.

He glanced at Hotfix. Hotfix glanced back.

Neither of them said a word. They'd known since Umbara and the caves and the bad nights when Serra had murmured Cody's name in her sleep and neither of them had ever mentioned it to anyone else in the legion.

Hotfix's mouth twitched. So that's the guy.

Jet's jaw shifted fractionally. Not here.

Behind them, the rest of the squad was filing through the door. Gauge. Scar. Pebble. Ditto. Anvil, Torque, and half a dozen others in teal and gunmetal, blinking in the amber light, scanning for seats. Pebble's beard — patchy and uneven and worn with a pride that was inversely proportional to its aesthetic merit — caught the light as he turned his head.

Jet watched Pebble's gaze find the bar, find the crowd, find the woman at its center.

Pebble's face went through a rapid and deeply entertaining sequence: recognition, delight, confusion, and then, as his eyes dropped to the arm around Serra's waist, an expression Jet had never seen from him before:

Protective fury.

"Commander." Pebble's voice was low and sharp. "Someone's got his arm around the General."

"I see that."

"We should—"

"Pebble."

But Pebble was already moving. He pushed through the crowd with his shoulders set and his jaw tight, gunmetal armor cutting a line through the press of bodies. Gauge fell in behind him on instinct, hand drifting toward a hip where his blaster would have been if he'd been carrying.

"Oh no," Hotfix said softly. He was delighted.

"Let it play," Jet said.

Anvil, beside him, had gone still. "You're not stopping him."

"No."

"Do you know something I don't?"

"Frequently."

The crowd between Pebble and the bar was thinning, clones stepping aside for the gunmetal trooper with the set jaw and the terrible beard, and Jet could see the moment of detonation approaching. He sauntered closer to get a better view.

Pebble reached the edge of the circle. He could see the back of the clone's head — regulation cut, no distinctive markings from this angle, just a trooper with his arm around Pebble's General.

"Hey," he said loudly. "You. Step back from the General, please."

Serra turned. "Pebble—?"

The clone turned too.

Jet watched Pebble's entire operational posture collapse in real time as he recognized the scar, the jawline, the flat calm that every trooper in the Grand Army knew on sight, because it had been on briefing holos and battle reports that most of them had studied in training.

Commander Cody raised one eyebrow.

Pebble stopped. His mouth opened, but whatever he’d intended to say appeared to have abandoned the mission.

"That's—" he started.

Cody waited.

"You're Commander Cody," Pebble said faintly.

"I am."

"You have your arm around my General."

"I do." Cody's arm did not move.

"Did you say General?"

The voice came from the circle. From Chopper specifically, who had spent an hour and a half with a friendly woman in a leather jacket who did engineering work, was attached to an infantry unit, and hadn't once mentioned being a Jedi or a General, or even the partner of the most decorated clone commander in the GAR.

Gauge arrived three steps behind Pebble. His attention swept the cluster of bar clones, reading their confusion. And then, because Gauge's instinct in uncertain situations was to establish facts, he said it clearly enough to carry:

"Yes. General Vey. 17th Legion."

Silence moved through the circle and surrounding crowd in concentric rings as the troopers who'd been eavesdropping passed the information back to the troopers behind them.

Haze recovered enough for speech first. His eyes moved from Serra to the squad of 17th troopers behind her and back to Serra.

"You're their General," he said incredulously.

Serra's damage-control instincts were kicking in under the whiskey, but not fast enough.

"Um, I was going to mention that," she said sheepishly.

"When?"

"...Eventually?"

"You let me buy the Jedi General of the 17th… who is dating Commander Cody… drinks," Haze said, each noun landing like a separate indictment.

"You offered—"

"You could have mentioned—"

"I was trying to have a night off!"

"From being a war hero?"

"I'm not a — that's not—" Serra turned to Cody for support. Cody's expression communicated nothing resembling help. "I'm just an engineer who—"

"Fought a Besalisk Jedi Master and pulled his lightsaber out of his hands," Gauge finished.

"Gauge. You are not helping."

"I'm being accurate."

Serra closed her eyes. When she opened them, Hotfix had joined the circle and was watching her with fondness, because he’d known her long enough to enjoy watching other people discover her.

"For what it's worth," Hotfix told the nearest shell-shocked trooper, leaning against the bar casually, elbows on the wood, "she's always like this. You never had a chance."

Throttle looked down at his annotated napkin. Looked up at Serra. Looked at Cody's arm around her waist. Looked at the napkin again, and his hand tightened on it like he was afraid someone might take it from him.

"She fixed my rotary cannon," he said faintly.

"She fixes a lot of things," Hotfix told him.

"And she asked for my comm channel," Riggs said quietly.

"For the poem," Serra said desperately.

Throttle clutched his napkin and looked at Hotfix with pleading eyes. "I told her I loved her," he whispered.

"How'd that go?"

"She didn't hear me. She was drawing a schematic."

"Sounds about right."

Serra was losing ground. She could feel it — the evening shifting under her feet, the warm, easy anonymity she'd been wearing all night peeling away to reveal the rank underneath. She'd been just Serra, who liked engineering and poetry and bought drinks for shinies who'd never had ale before. And now she was General Vey, and every face in the circle was recalibrating, and the distance was opening up. The distance that always opened up, the space between her and everyone else that her rank created whether she wanted it or not.

She tried to close it the only way she knew how.

"So," she said, facing the circle. "I should probably have mentioned the Jedi thing."

Nobody spoke.

"And the General thing."

Continued silence.

"But I'm not your General," she explained. "I command the 17th. I'm not in anyone's chain of command here." She pointed at Haze. "What unit are you again?"

"13th," Haze said.

"See? We’re fine. I'm just a woman at a bar."

"You're a Jedi General at a bar."

"Who is currently off-duty and would like to finish explaining the recoil buffer—"

"And she's Commander Cody’s girlfriend," Chopper added, as if this needed to be appended to every sentence about her from now on.

"We haven’t actually discussed terminology—" Serra looked at Cody for help. Cody's expression offered none whatsoever. But his grip had tightened fractionally, a small, deliberate anchor that said I'm not going anywhere.

Gauge reached Jet at the edge of the group. He stood stiffly, visibly processing his General, tipsy and affectionate, in civilian clothes, in the arms of a commander from another battalion.

"You knew," Gauge said to Jet.

"Knew what?"

"About—" Gauge gestured at Cody and Serra.

"I don't know what you're referring to."

"She talks in her sleep," Hotfix offered. “That’s how we knew.”

"Hotfix," Jet said.

"What? It's out now."

Serra had gone red. Past the whiskey flush. Past the embarrassment of the rank reveal. Into a deeper, more structural red that she could feel in her ears and her throat and possibly her internal organs.

"I do not talk in my sleep," she said.

"Yes, you do," Cody said.

The correction was immediate, delivered with the same certainty he brought to supply audits and refit manifests and every other piece of information he considered settled fact.

Serra turned to look at him. Their faces were very close. Cody's ears had gone red again — a slow, creeping flush that started at the tips and worked its way down, visible even in the low bar light, and Serra had the hysterical thought that she had only seen his ears do that a handful of times before and that Commander Cody did not blush in public and yet here they were.

"And how," Haze asked, with the exquisite care of a man holding a live thermal detonator and trying to decide whether to throw it or set it down gently, "would the Commander know that?"

Cody said nothing. His jaw was locked. Serra could feel the tension in his arm where it touched her waist.

"We — there was a mission where—" she started.

"Stop helping," Cody said quietly.

"I'm making it worse, aren't I."

"Significantly."

Serra pressed her face into Cody's shoulder. It was not a strategically sound response to the situation. It was, however, the only response her body was willing to produce, because her face was on fire and her operational security was in ruins and the man she loved had just confirmed to a bar full of strangers that he knew what she sounded like while she slept, and if she looked at Haze's expression for one more second she was going to combust.

She felt Cody's hand press against her back.

Then Jet stepped forward and positioned himself between his General and the circle. He had done this before, in different configurations, across dozens of catastrophes both tactical and personal.

"Commander," Jet greeted Cody. His voice was perfectly, impossibly level, communicating nothing except to the people who knew him well enough to hear the hairline fracture where the amusement was leaking through.

"Commander," Cody returned.

The two commanders regarded each other across the wreckage of an evening.

"You owe me a drink," Jet stated.

"I remember."

"An expensive one."

"I said I remember."

Jet gave the barest nod and turned to the bartender droid. "Your best Corellian. His tab." He tilted his head toward Cody.

The bartender poured. Jet took the glass, held it up to the light, and drank. He didn't look at Serra, and he didn't look at Cody, and when he set the glass down and leaned back against the bar, the crisis was over.

Rex watched the evening resettle from his stool at the end of the bar, nursing a whiskey he'd barely touched, and let himself enjoy the fact that his plan had gone wrong in every possible direction.

By then, Ditto had arrived at Pebble’s elbow and taken in the scene. "So. Commander Cody."

"Yes," Pebble confirmed, staring into his drink.

"With the General?"

"Yes."

"Huh." Ditto considered this. "Makes sense."

"How does this make sense?"

"She always seemed like she was missing somebody." He tilted his head. "He seems like the type she'd miss."

"Her type?" Pebble gestured at the bar, at the crowd of identical faces. "We’re all the—"

He stopped and looked around at the dozen faces looking back at him. He closed his mouth.

"Never mind," he muttered.

The two groups were merging, with the gravitational pull of people who'd discovered they had something in common, which was Serra Vey, and the shared experience of having been completely blindsided by her.

Serra introduced the bar clones and the 17th troopers — Haze to Gauge, Chopper to Hotfix — and Rex watched the connections form in real time, soldiers recognizing soldiers across unit lines, the gunmetal armor drawing questions and the beards drawing comments and all of it settling into the universal language of brothers who had stories and drinks and nowhere to be until morning.

Pebble stationed himself at Cody's elbow with the air of a personal security detail who had grudgingly accepted the situation but had not fully stood down. He'd asked Cody three questions that were technically about operational overlap, received patient answers, and was now telling Scuff about Umbara with a veteran's gravity, which from a trooper with a patchy beard and six months of service was both absurd and genuinely moving.

Across the circle, Jet leaned against the bar beside Hotfix and nursed the expensive Corellian on Cody's tab. Serra had her arm through Cody's and was explaining something to a combined audience of bar clones and 17th troopers, her free hand drawing diagrams in the air.

Rex raised his own glass toward the center of the room.

"To operational security," he said, to nobody in particular.