Chapter Text
The first thing Serra Vey became aware of was that she had a body, and it was deeply unhappy with her.
This was not, historically speaking, unusual. Her body had been furious with her on a semi-regular basis for over two and a half years. But there was the ordinary fury of sleep deprivation and blaster grazes and armor that was never quite right in the shoulders, and then there was this — a deep, cellular outrage.
She opened her eyes and immediately regretted it. The light was a personal attack. She blinked and opened them again, slower, giving her pupils a fighting chance.
Ceiling. White. Medical-grade lighting panels, diffused to be gentle, which meant someone had adjusted them for a patient, which meant she was the patient, which she'd already known because of the body situation, but it was nice to have visual confirmation.
She was in a bed. An actual bed, with actual sheets, which meant she'd been pulled from the bacta tank and transferred, which meant enough time had passed for that to be the medically appropriate next step. How long had she —
"Serra."
Obi-Wan's voice was close, from her left. The controlled quality of it told her several things simultaneously: He'd been here a while. He'd been waiting. And he was managing something behind his relief that he did not want her to see yet.
She turned her head. It took more effort than it should have. Her neck muscles felt like they'd been replaced with wet rope.
Obi-Wan was sitting in a chair beside the bed. He looked terrible in the way that Obi-Wan Kenobi looked terrible, which was to say he looked exactly the same as always except that the lines around his eyes were deeper and his beard was slightly too neat, which meant he'd been grooming it compulsively, which meant stress.
"Hi," Serra croaked. It was a very unflattering croak, like a swamp creature emerging from hibernation.
"Hi yourself." Obi-Wan leaned forward and pressed a cup of water into her hand. Her fingers closed around it with the grip strength of a sleeping youngling. He helped her drink. She was going to be embarrassed about that later. Right now the water was the best thing she'd ever tasted.
"How long?" she croaked again.
"Seven days."
"Seven —"
"You were in the tank for six. They moved you to the recovery suite yesterday evening. You've been sleeping since."
Seven days. She'd lost a week. The thought sat heavily in her chest, displacing the air that was already having trouble getting there. Seven days of war she hadn't fought, briefings she'd missed, decisions someone else had made, people who'd needed —
"Stop," Obi-Wan said, reading her face with the accuracy of nearly three years' practice. "Whatever you're calculating, stop. Everyone's fine. The war waited."
"The war does not wait."
"The war made an exception. Drink more water."
She drank more water. Her throat loosened by degrees. Her body continued its grievance proceedings.
She tried to sit up.
Pain arrived, centered and emphatic, in her lower left torso. It wasn't sharp — the bacta had seemingly done its work on the acute damage — but it was present, a deep ache that radiated outward from a point just below her left ribs.
The memory surfaced in pieces: the throne room floor rushing up, Maul's eyes widening, the black blade completing its thrust, the startled oh when her breath left and didn't come back. She remembered the heat. She remembered looking down and seeing the Darksaber through her body, black light edged in white. She remembered Maul's face.
She remembered saying I'm sorry.
"How bad?" she asked.
"You're alive, which the surgical team considers borderline miraculous." Obi-Wan's voice was even but his hands were not quite still in his lap. "They've repaired what they could."
He paused.
"Obi-Wan."
"Your spleen took a direct hit."
"How direct?"
"There isn't one anymore."
Serra stared at him.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she could feel him meaning it. "The damage was too extensive for bacta to regenerate. They’re cloning a replacement."
"My spleen is gone?"
"Yes."
"Maul vaporized my spleen."
"I wouldn't use the word vaporized —"
"What word would you use?"
"…Destroyed is technically more accurate."
"Vaporized sounds better. If I've earned anything, it's the right to choose the verb." She lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling. "I don't have a spleen. That's — I need a minute."
"Take several."
The door opened then. A woman entered — middle-aged, dark hair threaded with gray and pulled back tight, surgical whites, a medical insignia on her shoulder. She had a scanner in one hand and was reading the room's monitors before the door finished closing behind her.
Then she looked at Serra, saw the expression on her face, and turned to Obi-Wan.
“General Kenobi, I told you to call me when she woke up. You told her about the spleen, didn’t you?”
"She asked," Obi-Wan replied, spreading his hands in a posture of mock innocence.
"They always ask." The doctor shook her head. "General Vey. I'm Dr. Aran. I led your surgical team." She pressed the scanner to Serra's wrist without waiting for a response. "Here's the full picture. The Darksaber cauterized the wound tract, which is why you're alive. The trade-off was extensive thermal damage to the surrounding tissue. In addition to the spleen, we repaired parts of your stomach and pancreas, and regrew your tenth and eleventh ribs. The deep-tissue recovery and strengthening of your abdominal wall muscles will take time, and the cloned organ replacement will take approximately seven weeks."
The assessment was complete, precise, nothing omitted and nothing softened.
"In the meantime," Aran continued, "you're immunocompromised. You'll fatigue faster. You'll catch things you wouldn't normally catch. Think of it as a system running without redundancy."
"Got it," Serra replied faintly. The engineering framing helped.
Aran clipped the scanner to her belt. "I've assigned a medical droid unit, MD-4, to continuous monitoring."
A small, squat medical droid, blue-gray with a single optical sensor, rolled out from the corner where it had been waiting. It stationed itself beside the bed and beeped once. It sounded faintly territorial.
"Hello," Serra said to it uncertainly.
MD-4 beeped again in acknowledgment, and possibly warning.
Aran tucked the datapad under her arm. "You're healing well. The work now is patience. I'll be back this evening to check on you."
She left. MD-4 remained, its single eye fixed on Serra, already logging. Serra blinked at the abrupt departure and then turned back to Obi-Wan.
"So who's running the Sixty-Fourth Corps?"
"Jet has operational command. He's in contact with the Council."
"Oh. Of course." She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to put the pieces together. No spleen. Jet in command. Seven days. "Obi-Wan."
"Yes?"
"Why are there guards outside my door?"
The silence that followed was very, very specific.
Serra opened her eyes. Obi-Wan's face had done the thing it did when he was preparing to explain something she wasn't going to enjoy — a micro-adjustment of the jaw, a blanking of the eyes that looked like calm and was actually bracing for impact.
"Ah," he answered.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the beginning of one."
"The beginning of an answer to 'why are there armed Mandalorians outside my room' should probably not start with 'ah.'"
The door opened again.
Cody walked in carrying a tray with two cups on it, and the universe stopped being about anything else for approximately four seconds, because Cody was not in armor.
He was in soft clothes. A dark undershirt, military trousers, boots. No pauldrons, no helmet, no plastoid between him and the rest of the world. She'd seen him out of armor before of course, but not like this. Not in a medcenter room on a foreign planet, unshielded, with circles under his eyes that told her he'd been sleeping badly.
He saw that she was awake and stopped in the doorway. The tray in his hands did not move. His face did not move. But she watched his shoulders drop a fraction of a centimeter.
"General," he said.
"Commander," she said, and her voice cracked on it, the stupid swamp-creature croak betraying her, and she was going to be embarrassed about that too, later, in bulk.
He set the tray down on the side table. One of the cups was caf. The other was tea, Obi-Wan's preferred blend, which meant Cody had been here long enough to source Obi-Wan’s preferred blend, which meant —
She was stacking information. Guard at the door. Cody out of armor. Obi-Wan's compulsive beard. Tea and caf on the same tray, a small domestic detail that implied proximity and routine.
How long had Cody been here?
"How long have you been here?" she asked.
"Five days," Cody said flatly, like he was reporting casualty figures.
Five days. He'd come to Mandalore. He'd left the 212th, left his post, crossed however many sectors of active warzone, to sit in a room and watch her float in bacta.
"Jet?" she asked.
"Sent me himself. His exact words were 'go, before I have to explain to her troops why their General is dying and her people aren't there.'"
"I wasn't dying."
Cody looked at her. It was a very brief look, and she conceded the point.
"So," Serra said, glancing between the two of them. Obi-Wan at the window. Cody at the wall. The tray between them like a negotiated border. "Someone's going to explain the guards. And the —" She gestured at the general situation. "All of this. The face you're making." This to Obi-Wan. "The face you're not making." This to Cody.
"Perhaps we should wait for —"
The door opened a third time.
Bo-Katan Kryze walked in without knocking, because apparently Bo-Katan Kryze did not knock, as a matter of principle or personality or both. She was in half-armor, sidearm holstered, hair pushed back from her face. She looked like she'd been running on caf and tactical efficiency for the better part of a week.
She eyed Serra, assessing. Serra blinked back at her.
"You're awake," Bo-Katan said.
"Apparently."
"Good. We're out of time." Bo-Katan pulled a chair to the foot of the bed, sat in it backwards, and crossed her arms over the backrest. "How much do you remember?"
"Throne room. Maul. The —" She touched her side without thinking, felt the bandage under the gown. "Getting stabbed."
"You remember killing him?"
"I remember the parts immediately before and after. The middle is…" She searched for the word. "Compressed."
"That's fine. The middle is what matters: You killed the wielder of the Darksaber in single combat on the throne of Mandalore in front of witnesses. The blade passed to you by combat right. Every faction on this planet knows it. Half the galaxy knows it. And the Republic Senate has been asking pointed questions for four days."
Serra's brain, still foggy from a week of bacta and whatever painkillers were currently circulating in her bloodstream, tried to keep up.
Stage one: the Darksaber. The ancient Mandalorian weapon. Maul had stabbed her with it and she'd killed him and the blade had —
Stage two: combat right. The Darksaber passed by combat. Whoever defeated the wielder claimed the blade. The blade carried the right to —
Stage three…
"No," Serra said.
"Yes," Bo-Katan replied.
"No. I don't — that's not — I was saving Satine! I wasn't claiming anything. I was falling off a balcony with a lightsaber and hoping I aimed right."
"Your aim was fine. The politics are the problem." Bo-Katan's voice was dry but not unkind. "A Republic general holds a legitimate claim to the Mandalorian throne. During a galactic civil war. On a neutral world. The Senate sees leverage. The Separatists see a provocation. My people see either a hero or an invader depending on which clan you ask. Your Jedi Council sees a headache they don't want."
Serra fought the urge to whimper and didn’t entirely succeed. "I don't want the throne."
"What you want doesn't enter into it. That's the problem."
"It should enter into it! It should be the primary consideration. I'm the one who —” Serra looked at the ceiling. The ceiling offered no geopolitical solutions. "Can I give it back?"
“To who?” Bo-Katan replied drily. “Whoever took it from your hand would be seen as the puppet of the Jedi and Republic.”
"Okay. Can I… break it?"
"You could try. It's survived a thousand years, multiple wars, and Pre Vizsla. I wouldn't bet on a Jedi with a gut wound."
"Can I lose it? Accidentally? In a very deep lake?"
“We don’t have any lakes.” Bo-Katan sighed and leaned forward. "Look, the claim exists whether you pursue it or not. It's attached to the Darksaber, and the Darksaber is attached to you. You can't give it away. You can't destroy it, because apart from the fact that it's a thousand-year-old cultural artifact, the act of destruction would be read as an insult to every Mandalorian alive. And you can't pretend it didn't happen because half the witnesses have already talked and the other half posted it on the HoloNet."
Serra stared at her. "Someone put it on the HoloNet?"
Bo-Katan nodded. "A Nite Owl with a helmet cam. She's been disciplined."
"She's been — what does ‘disciplined’ even —" Serra pressed both hands over her face, which pulled at the wound in her side, which made her hiss, which made both Obi-Wan and Cody shift forward simultaneously, which she noted through the pain.
"So I'm lying in a bed on Mandalore without a spleen," she said through her fingers, "and I accidentally own the most politically volatile weapon in the galaxy."
"Yes," Bo-Katan confirmed. "That's the situation."
"This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I was stabbed seven days ago."
"The stabbing is actually part of it."
"I am aware that the stabbing is part of it, Bo-Katan!"
A smile flickered across Bo-Katan's face, the acknowledgment that Serra's response to existential political crisis was precisely the response she’d been expecting from the woman who'd come through the waste lock.
"There's a solution," she said.
The room shifted. Obi-Wan straightened at the window. Cody, at the wall, went still.
"Satine and I have been talking," Bo-Katan continued. "The problem isn't the Darksaber. The problem is that you're not Mandalorian. If you were, this would be an internal succession, which is… manageable.”
Serra lowered her hands from her face. "But I'm not Mandalorian."
"Not yet."
The silence that followed lasted long enough for Serra to cycle through three separate emotional states and land on a fourth she didn't have a name for.
"You want — you want to adopt me?" she asked, disbelievingly.
"Yes. Clan adoption. Into House Kryze. Satine sponsors the petition, I second it. The ceremony's simple — oath of kinship, witnessed by the heads of at least two clans. Legally, it makes you Mandalorian by custom and by clan, which means the Darksaber claim becomes an internal Mandalorian matter. The Senate can't touch it. The Separatists can't leverage it. And you —"
"Become a Kryze."
"Become a Kryze. With all the protections and obligations that entails." Bo-Katan met her eyes. "You'd hold the Darksaber as a member of the ruling house. Satine remains Duchess. The neutrality holds. And the next time someone asks why a Republic general has a claim to the Mandalorian throne, the answer is: she doesn't. A daughter of House Kryze holds an ancestral weapon of her people."
Serra stared at her, mouth slightly agape.
"That's —" She stopped. Started again. "That's actually clever."
"Satine came up with it."
"Of course she did." Serra looked at Obi-Wan. His face said he'd been living with this idea for several days and had reached some kind of peace with it, but the peace was fragile and conditional.
"What does the Council say?" she asked him warily.
"The Council," Obi-Wan replied, "is being consulted. Master Plo has been helpful. Master Windu has been… Master Windu."
"So he hates it."
"He has concerns."
"He hates it."
"He has significant concerns, several of which are valid, and he has expressed them with characteristic —"
"He hates it a lot, Obi-Wan."
"Yes. But he's outnumbered, and Master Yoda said something cryptic about family being where you find it, which Mace took as endorsement and which may or may not have been."
Serra looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had no comment.
"I need to think," she said.
"Of course." Bo-Katan stood. Her chair scraped against the tile. "But you need to understand what you're holding, General Vey. The Darksaber passes by combat. Anyone who wants it can walk up to the holder and demand the right to fight for it."
"Anyone?"
"Anyone. Any time. No application process."
"But — but I don't have a spleen."
"The Darksaber doesn't care about your internal organs," Bo-Katan said dryly. "Most Mandalorians with any honor won't challenge someone who is injured. But most isn't everyone. And right now, every warrior on this planet with more ambition than restraint knows that the woman holding the most sacred weapon in Mandalorian history is lying in a bed.” She sighed. “Half of Mandalore saw the helmet cam footage. The other half heard about it. You might be as weak as a tooka cub, but that doesn’t matter to the people who see an outsider jetii sitting on Mandalorian sovereignty.”
"I can't — Bo-Katan, I can barely sit up."
"Which is why the adoption needs to happen fast. Once you're House Kryze, anyone who wants to challenge you is picking a fight with us." She paused. "That's different."
Serra looked at Cody. His jaw was set. His hands, resting at his sides, were not quite relaxed.
He'd been sitting with this for days, she realized. He'd been sitting, watching her breathe through a tube, listening to the political machinery grinding around her unconscious body and he hadn't been able to do a single thing about any of it.
"Fine. I'll — yes. Tell Satine yes,” Serra said. “Tell her I said yes, and also tell her that this is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me, and I was once a charhound."
Bo-Katan's mouth twitched, like she thought Serra was making a joke. "I'll tell her."
She left. The door closed behind her with a soft click that was somehow louder than anything that had come before.
Obi-Wan stood.
"I should speak with the Council again before the time zone differential makes Mace even less amenable." He squeezed her shoulder. His grip was warm and firm. "I'm glad you're awake."
"I'm glad I'm awake too. Mostly. I think."
"We'll talk more when you've rested.”
"Go yell at Mace," she said, making a shooing motion with her hand.
"I never yell at Mace."
"Go aggressively reason at him then. Same energy, more syllables."
He smiled and squeezed her shoulder again. Then he was gone, and the door clicked shut, and Serra was alone in a medcenter room on Mandalore with Cody.
The silence changed.
Every silence between them had a quality, a texture. The silence in a briefing room before a mission had purpose and direction. The silence on a transport before a drop was compressed and electric. The silence in the officer's mess at 0300, when they couldn't sleep and the stars outside the viewport were indifferent — that silence was wide and humming.
This silence was that of two people no longer performing for an audience.
Cody hadn't moved from the wall. His arms were at his sides. His face was still holding that constructed neutrality, but the edges of it were softening now that the door was closed, and she could see what was underneath — she could see it, and it hit her in the chest with the force of a decompression blast, because underneath the composure was a man who had been terrified for seven days and was only now, only in this moment, allowing himself to stop.
"Cody," she whispered.
He crossed the room in two steps. His hands found her face — palms against her jaw, thumbs at her temples, holding her like she might disappear — and he kissed her.
It was desperate and slightly uncoordinated and his breath caught against her mouth and his fingers were shaking, actually shaking, Commander Cody whose hands never shook, and she kissed him back with whatever strength her wrecked body had and it wasn't enough and it didn't matter.
MD-4 gave an alarmed squeal somewhere in the room and then wisely shut up.
Too soon, Cody pulled back and pressed his forehead to hers. His eyes were closed and his breathing was ragged and his thumbs moved against her cheekbones in small circles.
"The pump," he whispered.
"What?"
"The pump." His voice was breaking apart, fragments coming loose, and she held still and let them fall. "In the tank. The circulation pump. It makes a sound. Every forty seconds. This — this click and then a hum. I counted. I counted every cycle for three days before Kenobi told me to sleep and I couldn't — the sound, Serra, that sound is going to be in my head for —"
He kissed her again. Softer this time, but no less urgent, and between the kiss and the next breath he whispered:
"Your hair. In the gel. It floats. Did you know that? It just —" His hand moved from her face to her hair, touching it now as if confirming it was dry, that she was here, that the gel was gone and she was real. "I stood at the glass and watched it float and I couldn't —"
"I'm here."
"I know."
"I'm here, Cody."
"I know." He sat on the edge of the bed, and his forehead dropped to her shoulder, and his whole body shuddered once, a single seismic release of everything he'd been holding, and she put her arms around him and it pulled at her wound and she did not care. She held him and he breathed against her collarbone in uneven bursts and the room was quiet except for MD-4’s grumbling.
She pressed her mouth to his temple. She tasted salt. Didn’t mention it.
"I couldn't reach you," he murmured into her shoulder. "In the tank. There's the glass and the gel and you were right there and I couldn't —"
"I know."
"It's not — I've watched men in bacta before. It's never —"
"I know, my love. I’m sorry."
He lifted his head. His eyes were red and his face was open in a way she almost never saw, the command architecture stripped down to foundations, and she touched his cheek with fingers that were still too weak to do much but he turned into her hand like it was the only solid thing in the room.
"Don't do that again," he whispered into her palm.
"Kill a Sith Lord?"
"Jump onto one without a plan."
"I had a plan."
"Your plan was to get stabbed."
"My plan was to not get stabbed. The plan failed, unfortunately."
"Serra."
"I'm not going to promise I won't put myself between someone in need and danger, Cody. That's not a promise I can make. You know that."
He did know it. She watched the frustration and the fear and the love collide in his face.
"Then don't make me watch through glass again," he said quietly, caressing her cheek. "Whatever you do. However it goes. Don't make me watch through glass."
She kissed him. It was softer now, the desperate edge gone, replaced by what felt like a promise she couldn't quite articulate and he couldn't quite ask for. His hand settled at the back of her neck. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.
MD-4 gave a pleased chirp that Serra’s heart rate had returned to a steady rhythm.
They stayed like that for a while, his forehead against hers, breathing each other's air.
It was the stillness that undid her.
Her brain had been running since the moment she’d opened her eyes — cataloguing, calculating, reading faces and measuring distances and building the tactical picture because that's what she did, that's how she survived. You wake up and you orient. But now there was nothing to orient to.
And in the quiet, with nothing left to solve, the thing she'd been outrunning caught up.
Cody had been here for five days, and he hadn't been able to reach her and she hadn't even known. She'd been nowhere — suspended, absent, gone — while he was right there, awake and watching, believing there might be a version of the galaxy in which she never opened her eyes again.
"Oh," Serra whispered.
And then, to her absolute surprise, she started crying.
Her breath hitched and her vision blurred and her throat closed up and then her face was against his neck and she was shaking and she couldn't stop.
"I didn't know," she managed. "You were here, and I wasn't even —“
"Hey." His arms came around her, careful of her left side. "Hey. I'm here."
That just made her cry harder. He held her tighter, one hand cradling the back of her head, and she let herself be held. It was terrifying and it was an enormous relief.
MD-4 beeped softly.
The crying tapered the way it had started. She breathed against his neck. He breathed against her hair. His hand moved in steady passes along her spine.
After a while, she sniffed and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. She managed to take a breath that stuttered only once.
"Well," she said, her voice still thick. "That was unexpected."
"You've lost an organ, gained a political crisis, and are being adopted by Mandalorians." He paused. "I'd cry too."
"You did cry."
"I went first so you'd feel comfortable."
She laughed. It was watery and it pulled at her side. She pressed one hand against the wound and placed her other palm flat against his chest, over his heart, and felt it beating.
"Okay," she said. She cleared her throat. Then cleared it again, because the first attempt didn't take. "Okay."
She wiped her eyes one more time, straightened against the pillows, and when she looked at him again she felt more like herself. Then, because she was Serra and her brain never fully shut off, she said: "You and Obi-Wan."
He pulled back slightly to look at her. "What about us?"
"Something happened. This week. Between you."
His jaw tightened. It was subtle, but she'd been reading that jaw for years.
"It was a long week," he said, unhelpfully.
"I know it was a long week. I'm asking about the specific shape of the long week. Because I've been awake for an hour and I've already clocked the fact that when you're in the room together, he stands at the window and you stand at the wall and the distance between you is one point five meters wider than it normally is."
Cody regarded her. She raised an eyebrow back at him, though the effect was probably diminished by her puffy eyes.
"You measured," he said finally.
"I estimated. I'm very good at spatial assessment."
"It's not —" He stopped and rubbed the back of his neck. "He blames himself. For this." His hand gestured at her body, at the bandage, at the absent spleen. "He thinks he brought you here and you paid the price."
"He didn't bring me. I came."
"I told him that."
"And?"
"And he heard me, and he agreed with me, and then he went right back to blaming himself, because that's what he does." He paused. "I might have told him he was being self-indulgent."
Serra stared at him, mouth agape. "You told Obi-Wan Kenobi he was being self-indulgent?"
"I told a general who was sitting in a hospital room blaming himself for a decision made by another general that his guilt was unproductive and potentially disrespectful to the woman who made the choice."
She winced. "Those were your exact words?"
"Close enough."
"How did he take it?"
"Badly. Then well. Then badly again. It's been a cycle."
Serra thought about it for a minute and then asked, quietly, "Are you angry at him?"
Cody was silent a moment too long. "I'm angry at how much he needed you to come,” he answered.
That was a very carefully built sentence.
Serra smoothed the blankets across her lap and then looked up at him again. “Are you angry at me?”
He shook his head emphatically and touched her cheek again. “No. No, cyare, I’m not angry with you.”
Serra’s breath caught. Cyare. He'd never — they didn't —
She exhaled. Her side ached. Her body was a ruin. She was going to be adopted by Mandalorians, possibly tomorrow. The man she loved had told Obi-Wan Kenobi to stop being dramatic, which was either the bravest or the most foolish thing he'd ever done.
"Cody."
"Yes?"
“You picked a fight with the man who taught Anakin Skywalker how to hold a grudge.”
"I didn't pick a fight."
"You told him his grief was disrespectful."
"His guilt. Not his grief. Grief is — that's different. That's—"
"Cody."
He stopped and looked at her. She smiled at him.
"Thank you," she said softly. "For coming."
"Where else would I be?"
He said it simply, as if the answer were obvious, as if crossing sectors of an active war zone to sit beside a bacta tank and count pump cycles for days was the natural, unremarkable response.
Love rose in Serra so fiercely it almost hurt. She laced her fingers with his and held on.