Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Grievous’ assault on Kamino was difficult for everyone, Jedi and clones alike. For the Jedi, it was a callous attack against the vulnerable young clones—not yet soldiers, not yet combatants, but rather, children. For the clones, it was a strike against their home. 

Perhaps, Obi-Wan thinks with some consideration, not a happy home—but a home nonetheless. A home where their younger brothers reside, many of them still defenseless. That would shake anyone.

But possibly no one has taken the attack quite as hard as Cody.

Obi-Wan had been on Ryloth when Waxer and Boil had rescued the young twi’lek girl, Numa—the same child who now adorns their helmets. He’d seen their care for her, felt their immediate and utter devotion in the Force. It had shone so brightly. It was wholly consuming.  

Obi-Wan could have powered entire solar systems with the gravity of their love.

It was a worthwhile reminder, for a Jedi. Attachment is dangerous. 

The Jedi must love in moderation—love all life, equally. With power such as theirs, each act must prioritize the greater good, less they risk sacrificing the many for the few.

Watching Numa grip Waxer and Boil’s hands in each of hers, calling them nerra, and feeling their overwhelming desire to guard, protect, cherish, Obi-Wan had needed to ruthlessly crush the answering ache it had opened up in his chest.

It has always been his greatest failing as a Jedi. Attachment.

He’d always had to work so very hard to temper his attachments. He’d never come so close to Falling as he had when he’d loved Satine—loved her with everything in him and known that, if she had only asked, he’d have surrendered everything he’d ever wanted just to stay at her side—or when he’d lost Qui-Gon. 

Force, a decade and half-a-dozen mind healers since and Obi-Wan still aches for Qui-Gon. He’ll still sometimes turn a corner and expect his Master to be there, waiting with a private half-smile, towering over everyone in the vicinity, and the absence of him kicks Obi-Wan straight in the chest.

Shamefully, his struggles with attachment had continued throughout his time as Anakin’s teacher. But at least then, he’d had the support of his fellow Jedi Knights, the Temple mind-healers, and the Masters.

Those same resources are… inaccessible to him now. War has spread all of the Jedi thin.

(And truthfully, Obi-Wan has been struggling since the start of it.)

It is impossible to work and live and fight alongside someone, impossible to lay down your life for them and find that they are willing to do the same, impossible to mourn as one, and not love them.

So, yes, Obi-Wan loves his men. He loves every single one of them so dearly.

(Sometimes, he loves them so dearly that he thinks it might rip him apart.)

As the days of the war drag on, the losses growing ever steeper and the triumphs ever more brilliant, he finds it harder and harder to love them in moderation—to love them as a Jedi should. Most days, it is a battle of inches, measured in increments thin as fingernails. It is a battle that Obi-Wan must continue to fight, nonetheless.

The troopers have no such compunctions and it makes it all the much harder.

The clones truly own nothing but their devotion to one another. They cling to their attachments tightly, painting the names of their most cherished brothers on the inside of their chest-plates, on the backs of their vambraces, kept close always . They love with ferocity. Attachment.

And Obi-Wan knows that some of his men carry his name inside their armor. 

The battle of inches shrinks to centimeters with every passing day.

Obi-Wan has not seen Cody since the Negotiator was redirected to Kamino to assist in the battle against Greivous’ forces. He’d joined the fray on his own almost as soon as they hit atmo.

No, it isn’t until much, much later that he finds Cody again.

If the sound of sobbing wasn’t enough to draw him in, the sheer strength of panic and desperation being projected certainly would be.

He really had just been wandering aimlessly—the battle had concluded hours ago, Kamino well into its night cycle, and all that remains to be done are clean-up operations and the recovery of casualties. Obi-Wan was only intending to take a momentary break from the effort, seeking out a quieter portion of the cloning facility, near deserted and largely untouched by the fighting, when he’d felt the first ice-cold spray of desperate panic against his shields.

His first thought is that the fighting had reached this area after all, and that someone—possibly a youngling by the shape of their distress—has been injured and alone this whole time, crying out for help with no one around to hear.

Obi-Wan picks up the pace, rushing through the blank white halls, drawing nearer and nearer to the sound. So driven is he by his fear of the worst (he’s seen far too many young corpses today, and all with the same face, the same face he—) that he doesn’t even notice the distressed, young presence is not alone until he’s already opened the door.

Cody is crouched on the ground, his upper-armor discarded, a child folded tightly into his arms. The boy is small— tiny , even—strangely thin for a Fett-clone that age, although Obi-Wan admits that he does not have much experience with the younger clones. 

The boy is sobbing in great, heaving breaths, the utterly ruined and plainly hysterical kind of crying that is largely unique to children.

In an instant, Cody’s eyes snap to Obi-Wan’s own. They stare at each other for a moment that stretches into an eternity. Cody’s grip imperceptibly tightens around the boy, his cheek pressed flush to the side of the child’s head, and the blatantly protective display—protective against Obi-Wan— hits him like a physical blow.

Whatever this is, Cody does not trust him with it.

Obi-Wan swallows, steps further into the room—an empty classroom, of some sort—and closes the door after himself. Very few lights are on, but now that he is looking more clearly, looking beyond his shock, Obi-Wan realizes that the child’s hair is a pale, silvery white, a fine dandelion fuzz.

“Udesii,” Cody is murmuring, quiet, his eyes never leaving Obi-Wan’s. There’s a challenge in them, even though the soothing cadence of his voice never stops. He is projecting so strongly into the Force that it’s like a physical siren: I will not be moved. 

“You’re alright, I’ve got you,” Cody continues as the boy sobs, pressing ever forward as if he could crawl inside Cody’s chest if he just tried hard enough.

“But we won’t be,” the child hiccups. 

Cody closes his eyes, brief, like the words are a physical blow. They cause acute pain, rippling around his Force-signature as surely as a blaster wound would. 

Obi-Wan takes a breath, centers himself and his intent, and projects to Cody, how can I help?

His commander’s eyes snap open at once, wide with shock. And Obi-Wan had thought—had always thought—that his bond with Cody was strong, that they trusted one another implicitly. But, gods, if Cody truly believes that Obi-Wan would take a sobbing child from his arms, if he believed it enough to react with such surprise to Obi-Wan’s genuine desire to help , he has been so terribly wrong. The thought that there is anything Cody would not trust him with—

It hurts.  

“Crosshair, breathe,” Cody soothes, one hand rubbing slow circles against the boy’s—Crosshair’s—back, the other hand holding him firm to his chest. “Udesii, vod’ika, I’m here, I’ve got you, it’s going to be okay, ori’haat.”

“You can’t!” the boy shouts, shoving ineffectually at Cody’s chest—he doesn’t let the boy go very far at all. “You can’t promise that we’ll be okay, because we won’t be! When you leave—” and then, he stops altogether, the boy realizing that Obi-Wan is there. 

His fear is immediate and powerful, sour in the Force. Utterly silent, the boy cuts himself off and freezes, his expression going carefully blank all at once, even as tears continue to slip down his face.

Obi-Wan realizes he’s looming and slowly crouches as Cody has. He offers a tentative smile, but Crosshair isn’t even looking at him. His eyes are fixed straight at the floor, unseeing. Feeling helpless and lost, Obi-Wan glances at Cody, who catches his gaze and holds it as easily as he always has.

He is grim-faced. Upset. Afraid.

“It’s alright, Cross,” Cody says, soft. “This is my General. Ner Jetti, vod’ika. Do you remember what I told you about my General? Gar morut'yc.”

But wherever Crosshair is, it’s far away from here. A carefully still face, eyes locked on nothing discernable, holding himself so tensely that Obi-Wan is afraid he’ll hurt himself; the child is clearly disassociating and it’s just as clearly Obi-Wan’s fault.

With a soft sigh, Cody carefully rearranges the boy in his arms, guiding Crosshair to place his arms around Cody and rest his head on Cody’s shoulder. He murmurs quiet assurances throughout the process, a combination of bastardized Mando’a and Basic that Obi-Wan has come to recognize as the clones’ own sort of dialect. Most of it is said too quietly for him to hear. He catches the important pieces, though.

I’m here. You’re safe. I’ll keep you all safe. Rest.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says softly once he’s stood, Crosshair gathered carefully in his arms. He makes a subtle hand motion, a sway of the fingers—the same signal they’ve used to indicate troopers that might need an extra nudge through the Force to sleep after a great trauma or in times of stress. There’s very little he can offer—not without knowing more—but this, at least, is simple. 

Cody swallows. With a sharp nod he presses a kiss to the side of the boy’s head. “I’ll be here when you wake up, ori’haat.”

It is the work of a moment to nudge the already over-exhausted child into sleep. As Crosshair settles fully in Cody’s grasp, no longer resisting with tense, locked-up muscles, Cody sags too, as if invisible strings have been cut.

Obi-Wan aches to hold him, but this is not a boundary he can cross without consequences. He settles for a gentle touch to the arm and watches impossibly tired eyes flicker up to meet his own.

“How can I help?” Obi-Wan asks, softly still, even though there’s no reason for the quiet—it’s quite difficult to rouse someone so deeply asleep.

Cody blows out a breath, more of a hiss than anything. “I don’t know,” he admits. “They… lost someone today. Someone important.”

“‘They?’”

“After Geonosis,” Cody begins, staring sightless at something far, far away, “the Kaminoans started experimenting with more... dramatic enhancements. Increased strength, sensory perception, memory, sight… Most weren’t successful. But…”

Obi-Wan swallows and stares down at shock-white hair. Now that he’s looking for it, the markers of a Fett-clone are all there. The same skin-tone, the same bone structure (albeit soft with young age), the same eyes… it’s all there.

“But some were,” he concludes.

“Yeah.” There’s a ragged edge to Cody’s voice, something that Obi-Wan can’t say he’s ever heard before. “Some were. Four were. And they aren’t—” a breath, like he’s shoring up defences, and Cody continues, “they aren’t popular with the Kaminoans. Only a handful supported the project to begin with. And they’re different. They can’t be trained the same way and some of the other cadets are unkind to them. Difference isn’t… isn’t easy on Kamino. And the enhancements weren’t without cost.” 

 “Cody…”

“Some of the Kaminoans don’t think they’re worth it.” A laugh, devoid of all humor, “Most don’t think they’re worth it. Most are cruel. But I didn’t have to worry that one day I’d come back and they wouldn’t be here, because Ninety-Nine was here. He was the first of us to be noticeably different—different with no obvious utility —and survive.”

And with only those words, Obi-Wan knows immediately who Cody is talking about. He’d come across some of Anakin’s ARCs, Fives and Echo, in the early hours after the battle. He’d seen the body they carried with them, reverently. He’d felt their grief and had ached for their loss .

“Force,” he whispers.

“Ninety-Nine looked out for them.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan ducks his head, searching for his Commander’s eyes. He shifts his grip, squeezing. Grounding. “Cody, what is Crosshair afraid of?” 

Survive, he had said, and Obi-Wan has a horrible feeling that Cody did not mean simply surviving his physical ailments.

Cody swallows. The Force rolls with tension, with struggle. “We don’t talk about it.”

“Cody,” he pleads, “Let me help.” Obi-Wan has seen so many bodies today. So many of them painfully young— too young. So, so young.

“Crosshair is immunocompromised,” Cody says, voice shaking with a subtle thread of tension that rings as loud and clear as a bell to Obi-Wan’s ears. “Hunter gets migraines—these awful, debilitating things and he’ll just collapse. Wrecker has chronic pain because of how quickly his body grows. Tech has ‘behavioral problems’—tics he can’t control—and poor eyesight.”

There’s nothing but agony—complete and utter agony in Cody’s eyes when, finally, he meets Obi-Wan’s stare and says, as ice cold as the depths of the Kaminoan ocean, “Rex’s entire batch was decommissioned because they came out blonde. The longnecks don’t need an excuse. They never have.”

Oh, gods.

Obi-Wan takes a staggering step back.

“Does ‘decommissioning’ mean what I think it means?” he manages after a long moment. He does not want to know. He has to know.

Obi-Wan’s voice is utterly foreign to his own ears. It is the voice of a different man—of someone that has stumbled into a nightmare where children that deviate from a rigid norm are put down like defective products. 

Please. Please let me be wrong.

“Yeah,” Cody whispers, a terrible confession that cuts Obi-Wan to ribbons. “It does.”

He’d known how some of the men are with younglings—known from Waxer and Boil how sharply those attachments can form with little-ones. Sith hells, the men were raised to be protective, so much so that Obi-Wan has often wondered if their protective drive was not written into their very atoms, some intrinsic part of their DNA. 

It wasn’t something Obi-Wan had ever questioned. It simply was; the older clones often assumed a more parental role around the younger generations. He’d thought he had understood the scope of it.

He hadn’t understood a thing.

Not until Kamino.

They hold onto children tight, as tight as they can, because if they don’t —

Well. Every single clone knows personally what it is to lose a youngling.   

Cody escorts him to another quiet wing, down another winding set of identical bleach-white halls, empty save for them. They don’t speak as they walk. Obi-Wan can’t account for what may happen if he were to open his mouth.

Crosshair remains asleep in Cody’s arms as they travel, leaving Obi-Wan to carry the discarded pieces of his upper armor. He very carefully does not glance at the list of names painted on the inside of his chest piece. 

Plausible deniability is important.

Eventually, they reach a wide door, at which Cody pauses. He shoots Obi-Wan a wince, and murmurs, quiet, “They can be… a lot.”

Obi-Wan practically raised Anakin. He is very much prepared for children that are a lot. And Cody needs him. (These children need him.)

He gives Cody what he hopes is a reassuring smile.

Before Cody can move for the door’s control pad, it slides open from the inside, revealing a cadet-sized clone with hair just barely long enough to tuck behind his ears, curling stubbornly underneath his earlobes. There’s something wild in his eyes—something frantic in his Force-signature.

“Cody!” the boy exclaims, all relief. “You found him!”

“Hunter,” Cody says, smiling at the boy with such fondness that it makes Obi-Wan ache, deep in his chest. 

All this time, Cody has had siblings in danger—little ones that he cares so, so dearly for—and Obi-Wan had never known. He’d never known how much the clones have to lose—how much they have to fear.

Hunter’s eyes flit nervously to Obi-Wan. He quickly snaps to attention, a regulation-tight salute. The sight of a child so young snapping to military attention fills him with a rising nausea. 

“General,” the child says, voice unwavering but something undeniably nervous about him in the Force. A child so small has not called Obi-Wan “general” in many, many years. It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like a stab wound.

Obi-Wan crouches to meet Hunter’s eyes directly. “Hello, Hunter. It’s nice to meet you.” He does his best to smile, even as his heart aches. “There’s no need for ranks.”

Hunter’s dark eyes dart quick to Cody’s and back again, wary. “What do I call you then, Sir?” he asks, frowning far too seriously for a boy so young.

“You can call me whatever you’d like,” Obi-Wan promises, although he knows this too-wary boy is likely to not believe him.

“Are the others inside?” Cody asks.

“Yeah,” Hunter confirms, still eyeing Obi-Wan with no small amount of confusion. “But… Wrecker’s having a bad day.”

They quietly follow Hunter back into the room, Cody holding one of the boy’s hands. He seems younger than Crosshair in the Force, if not by much.

The more Obi-Wan sees of the space, the more his heart sinks. It does not appear to be any sort of standard bunk room or nursery—instead, it appears to be a medical facility. 

Each bed they pass is a medbed, large enough to fit three or more children comfortably shoulder to shoulder. Various equipment hangs from wall-mounts, from blood pressure sensors to IV hookups to full scanners. There is no privacy to be found—not a single curtain to pull between the beds—and an abandoned silver tray of needles and syringes idles in the corner, as if shoved there and subsequently ignored.

One of the medbeds has been pushed into the far back corner of the room, the headboard and a single side flush against the wall—a slightly more defensible position, Obi-Wan notes. This is the only bed that is occupied. 

Two boys, one large and one much smaller, are pressed close together. The larger of the two is closer to the wall, laying with his back flush against it, his red-rimmed eyes clenched tightly closed. Pain bleeds off of his Force-signature freely. 

The smaller boy sits with his back propped up against the head of the bed, a data-pad balanced on his knees. The faint blue light of the pad reflects in the lenses of his goggles. He scrolls every-so often with his free hand, the other clasped tightly in his brother’s.

As they approach, the boy in the goggles—Tech, Obi-Wan assumes, from Cody’s description—glances up at them, expression openly thoughtful.

Hunter says, relief evident in his voice, “Cody found Crosshair,” and releases Cody’s hand to scramble up onto the end of the bed, back to the wall, placing the larger boy’s feet gently in his lap. 

“Cross’s back?” the larger boy slurs, cracking one eye open, searching. He must be Wrecker, by process of elimination.

“Hey, vod’ike,” Cody murmurs, so very soft, and gently lowers the sleeping Crosshair down next to Tech, who obediently shuffles over to make space. Cody then leans over the bed to place a hand on the side of Wrecker’s head, gently.

“You’re Jedi General Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Tech announces, peering around Cody.

Obi-Wan smiles. “Yes, I am. And you're Tech?"

Cody eases back on his heels, simply watching, and something terribly fragile and warm blooms through him in the Force. Obi-Wan struggles to name it anything but hope. 

Tech blinks, surprised, and nods. "How did you know?" 

The weight of the boy’s full attention is staggering. Obi-Wan eases himself down onto the abandoned bed across from the one housing the four boys. 

"Cody told me about you," he offers. 

It is, technically, truthful. They don't need to know that said telling only happened minutes ago, nor that even then it only occurred because Obi-Wan went sniffing around where he wasn’t wanted. 

Any other words are delayed as a spike of pain shudders through the Force. Wrecker flinches, curling into himself and his brother, stifling a sound like a sob. Tech and Hunter stiffen, both immediately diving over their brother to comfort and hush in turn, something awfully desperate about it. Cody is much the same, reaching over the tangled pile of children again, soothing, "Udesii, Wreck'ika."

It's like watching Ghost Company close ranks over a perceived threat. It's natural. Instinctive. One of their own is hurting and vulnerable, and Obi-Wan is the outsider in this room, the unknown variable. He knows this logically. 

It does not mitigate the shock of it.

"Hurts," Wrecker sobs, teeth clenched, forehead pressed tight into Tech's side. It's easy, looking at their Force-signatures, to identify Tech and Wrecker as the youngest of the bunch. It's easy, too, to feel the instinctive way Tech responds to his brother's pain, little hands knowing where to fall in order to best soothe invisible hurts. 

They're babies, Obi-Wan thinks, shattered completely by the knowledge. They're children and they're so practiced in protection—in a sort of caretaking that no child should have to learn.

And Cody, too, who moves among them like a creche master moves among the little ones in their care—with complete and utter belonging, with practice, with care. Their pain cuts him, deeply. 

And Obi-Wan was not trusted with these hurts. For all that Cody—for all that he — 

Obi-Wan stands again, moving carefully closer to the bed. He touches Cody’s shoulder, briefly, gently.

They've always been able to communicate with a baffling amount of ease. Even since their earliest days together, there's always been some sort of intrinsic, non-verbal connection between them. A turn of the head here. A flicker of the eyes. A look , matched effortlessly over a battlefield. Understanding without words needing to be spoken. Here is no different.

After a moment, Cody swallows. "Wreck'ika,” he murmurs, “the General is going to try and help, okay?"

Obi-Wan squeezes his shoulder briefly, and says, quietly, "Just 'Obi-Wan', please." 

Carefully, with Hunter and Tech's eyes drilling into him, Obi-Wan helps Cody shift Crosshair—still deeply sleeping—into his lap. Tech is small enough that, once Crosshair has been moved, Obi-Wan can easily perch at the edge of the bed and reach for Wrecker. He brushes a careful touch across the boy’s sweat-damp face, hyper-aware of the eyes on him. 

He's done this more times than he can count. Force-healing was never a specialty of his, but transferring another's pain to himself? Shouldering just a bit of it, just enough to bleed off into the Force, providing the suffering relief? This is a skill he'd learned early, on the blood-soaked dirt of Melida/Daan. It is not one Obi-Wan has ever allowed himself to forget. 

Wrecker’s every muscle is alight with an ache so acute, it leaves Obi-Wan briefly breathless. He's far too old now to quite remember his own growing pains, but he knows they were nothing like this. This is more akin to getting hit by a moving speeder. This feels like going hand to hand with Grievous for a round or two. 

But Obi-Wan is practiced with pain. He bares it with comparative ease and releases what he can, rubbing absent circles across damp skin. 

All at once, Wrecker sags against the bed with a sound of pure, animal relief. "Oh," he exhales, bleary and surprised. 

"Wrecker?" Hunter asks, concerned. 

"'S gone," he murmurs, eyes already drooping with exhaustion. "'S better."

Obi-Wan can't hardly blame him. It's been quite a day, for all of them, and there's clearly been a heavy emotional toll taken on these children, as well. They've lost someone , Cody had said. Their grief is a near tangible thing. 

Wrecker fumbles, catching Obi-Wan gently by the wrist as he tries to pull away.  

"Rest now," Obi-Wan suggests. "It's alright. We can do that as many times as you need."

The boy staring up at him with tear-swollen eyes is brimming over with wonder and gratitude. He is so, so young. Littler, even, than Anakin was when he fell to Obi-Wan’s care. Perhaps seven, maybe eight, as the Clones would measure these things. About three or four years-standard.

"Thank you," Wrecker murmurs, already drifting off.

Tech reaches over him, extracting something carefully from under his side and against the wall. It's a plush toy—a dark nuuna with red head tails and button eyes. He carefully places the plush between Wrecker’s sleep-lax arms before settling back down at his brother's side.

Noticing Obi-Wan’s gaze, Hunter explains, hastily, as if he expects Obi-Wan to protest, "Wrecker needs Lula, to sleep." 

"Of course," Obi-Wan soothes. Hunter eyes him with suspicion. Force. 

"How'd you do it?" Tech asks. "Was it the Force?" 

"Yes," he says, grateful for the distraction.

He meets Cody's eyes, briefly. There's something like relief in them. Something hurt , too.

"It's a Force technique for alleviating others' pain,” Obi-Wan explains. 

"How does it work?" 

"Tech," Hunter interjects, a warning. 

"It's alright," Obi-Wan offers him what he hopes is a relieving smile. "I don't mind. Although, I'm afraid it would be a bit hard to explain without being Force-sensitive yourself.”

With a frown, Tech asks, “Why?”

“Well, think of the Force as an additional sense, like sight or hearing. You can imagine it’d be fairly difficult to explain the color ‘blue’ to someone born blind, or describe a piece of music to someone born deaf.” Obi-Wan explains. “It’s difficult to describe what, to me, is an intrinsic part of the world and how I move in it to someone that does not have those same senses.”

After a thoughtful pause, Tech replies, “Difficult doesn’t mean impossible.”

Obi-Wan can’t help but smile. Clever.  “No, of course not. I suppose I could always give it a shot.”

They talk for long enough that Hunter eventually drifts off, Cody gently intervening to lay the boy out more comfortably when he drops off. Even as Tech wavers with clear exhaustion—and Obi-Wan can’t blame him, they’ve all had a difficult day—he persists in asking questions, all startlingly insightful and challenging. Obi-Wan has not had such in-depth discussions of Force-theory since his days as a knight.

After the third time Tech yawns with enough power to pop his jaw, Obi-Wan draws their discussion to a close.

“Why don’t you get some sleep? We can continue talking in the morning, if you’d like.”

“Are you sure?” Tech asks. It is clear that he doesn’t quite believe him.

“I promise,” Obi-Wan says. “I’ll even see if I can find you some of those readings I was talking about. I’m sure digital copies exist somewhere on the net.”   

Tech’s eyes sparkle behind the slightly-tinted lenses of his goggles. (It makes something kick in Obi-Wan’s chest.)

“Sleep,” Cody encourages, leaning forward to give Tech a gentle keldabe. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Cody?” Tech asks, catching him by the wrist. “What will happen to Ninety-Nine?”

Cody sucks in a breath, shallow, through his clenched teeth. Obi-Wan excuses himself from this conversation, standing and walking to the other side of the room, over by the lab counter where the centrifuge and other equipment lives. However, the space is not large, and any perceived privacy is just that—perceived.

“Some of Rex’s ARCs were with him, when he marched on. They’ve got him,” Cody offers. It’s a pale comfort.

“There was chatter of an autopsy over the Kaminoans’ comm frequency,” Tech reveals. “I… do not think he would want that. He should be cremated, with the others.”

A soft sound as Cody no doubt shifts on the medbed, most likely pulling Tech into an embrace. Obi-Wan does not turn to look. It isn’t his place. 

His chest aches.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Cody murmurs. “Please, get some rest. I’m not going anywhere.”

But you will, Obi-Wan thinks, and hates himself viciously for it. And I’ll be the one to take you, because I am your General, and you are my Commander. 

He had never known what his men left behind.

They end up sitting on the floor just outside of the room where the so-called “Bad Batch” are housed. The floors are just as hard and unforgiving as they look, the walls just as cold. They rest there in weighty silence for long moments, Obi-Wan deep in thought, Cody scrolling through his comm.

Obi-Wan believes that he will most likely be the one to break the silence, although he has no clue as to what he might say. But it is Cody who surprises him once again.

“I’m sorry,” he says, abrupt as a blaster-shot. Obi-Wan is not sure that he’s ever heard Cody apologize to him before. And he can’t even fathom what he’s apologizing for.

“No, dear, it’s alright,” jumps out of his mouth without any conscious input. But he knows, as soon as he’s said it, that it is true. Perhaps Cody is apologizing for keeping this from him—both the boys and, well. Decommissioning. “There’s no need for an apology. I understand.”

Cody turns to face him, expression pinched. “No, there is. I’m sorry that I never said anything. I trust you, Sir, I really do. All of us do. But we’ve always had to be so careful about these things. It wasn’t— isn’t —something that any one of us thinks about hiding. It just… is.”

It shouldn’t have to be, Obi-Wan thinks. I’m so sorry that this was allowed to continue for so long, he swallows.

“Cody,” he tries, and finds himself reaching out, helpless not to. He brushes a careful touch to his Commander’s arm, fingers clasped as gentle as he can manage on the exposed stretch of blacks between the separate plates of his armor. Obi-Wan tries, desperately , to put aside the small sound that Cody makes.

“I will do everything in my power to make sure that this practice stops immediately.” They’re paltry words, in the face of such a horror: children, culled for their differences. 

He thinks of the haunted quality some of his men carry—of the shadows that linger in their eyes. Obi-Wan had thought those shadows were cast by the never-ending horrors of war. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the source of the shade began far, far earlier than that. He can’t stomach the thought.

“Sir,” Cody says, stutteringly. Nothing else follows.

“I want to help,” he affirms. “Please, let me try.”

“Alright,” he says, eventually. There is such impossible emotion in his eyes. Obi-Wan must look away—can only look away—lest he do something unwise with the twisting in his gut.

Obi-Wan sets off to find Master Ti almost immediately, leaving Cody with the promise to delegate as much of the relief efforts to the rest of the 212th and 501st Command. Cody deserves some time with his little brothers and they deserve the time with him, too. 

He finds her in the heart of the recovery effort, using the Force to aid troopers in clearing away rubble from out of a hangar. Icy wind and rain blows in through the open— demolished, rather—bay doors, swirling in through the dark of night invisibly before catching the floodlights and falling like white blaster-fire. Over the din of the ocean below, the howling wind, and the calls of troopers, it is rather difficult to pull Master Ti aside.

Eventually, Obi-Wan manages, and they make their hurried leave.

The togruta Jedi turns to him, a question on her lips, before Obi-Wan projects in the Force: not here. Is there somewhere more private we can go?

Expression serious—no doubt reading some of his grim intent in the Force—Master Ti briskly leads him down the winding identical paths of Tipoca towards her quarters. It takes a small eternity, winding through and around the havoc that the battle has wreaked. They stop many times to assist with various things.

Kamino is not as vibrant in the Force as it usually manages to be. Clinical, yes, but inevitably full of the sheer life of thousands upon thousands of sentients living together, growing together, being together. Now there is a hush, both literal and metaphorical. The Force has gone pale with pain and mourning.

Obi-Wan has walked these halls in an era that seems to be more than a lifetime ago. Gossip was everywhere, the halls abuzz with the clones’ chatter and curiosity at the sight of him. Troopers, he’s come to learn, are notorious gossips. Now, the tune these halls hum is a funeral procession. 

Master Ti’s quarters are predictably sparse. Obi-Wan has long since learned that Qui-Gon was a bit of an aberration for a Jedi—his quarters were always teeming with houseplants. There is little difference between Master Ti’s quarters and Jango Fett’s quarters which Obi-Wan had visited once upon a time. It lends itself to a sense of deja vu.

“You seem unsettled, Master Kenobi,” she says with a gesture for Obi-Wan to take a seat on one of her couches. 

“I confess that I am, Master Ti. I’ve recently learned something rather disturbing and I wanted to bring it to your attention immediately,” he explains. Part of Obi-Wan already feels more settled for being in another Jedi’s presence. Surely, together they can manage to do something. “What do you know of decommissioning?”

“Ah,” Master Ti says, a single, short sound that Obi-Wan cannot truly parse. “I’ve long fought the Kaminoans on this practice, to no avail.”

He balks despite himself. “What do you mean, to no avail?”

“We are not able to outright demand that the practice be stopped altogether,” she explains, calm and collected. “The Kaminoans see it as a matter of good business practice, and any attempts to interfere with this reflect poorly on the Republic at large. From their perspective, we are removing their ability to exercise good discretion over their ‘product’. It is an overstep—one we simply cannot afford if we wish to stay on Kamino in any capacity.”

“You cannot be serious, Master Ti. Captain Rex of the 501st was nearly decommissioned for his hair color,” Obi-Wan stresses.

“It is not as if we have no say. I have been able to intervene on behalf of many of the clones in my time here,” she replies, expression stern. “I understand your distress, truly, I do. There is not a day that goes by where I do not advocate for the clones to be seen as the individuals that they are. But the Jedi’s position here is... precarious.”

“So precarious that we cannot prevent the culling of children?” 

Master Ti frowns, her expression carved from stone. “My work here allows the Order to advocate on behalf of all of the clones that come through these halls. It is unfortunate, Master Kenobi, but if we were to truly fight Kamino on this, we risk everything else we have been able to do for them.” She reaches for him, gently taking his hands and squeezing—a motherly move. “I know that it is difficult, but we must put aside our emotions in service of a greater good.”

Obi-Wan can only swallow, throat gone dry.   

“We have neither the leverage nor the backing to challenge the Kaminoans here. The Senate fought the appointment of a Jedi representative in any capacity and without the possibility of a Separatist attack, it is likely we would have been denied outright,” she continues. 

“How often do decommissions occur?” he asks, not as Obi-Wan, but as the Negotiator. He has to put aside his emotions to continue this conversation. He simply can’t have it any other way.

At this, Shaak Ti only sighs. Her sweeping montrals bob as she, solemn, shakes her head. “This is information I suspect is being censored from me. The capacity in which I am allowed to operate is that of training. There are many files which are barred to me.”

“And is this an acceptable loss?” The detached, clinical language makes his own skin crawl. He thinks, sharply, of Crosshair and the way he had sobbed in Cody’s arms. He thinks of Tech’s bright eyed wonder and cunning. “How ever many clones, extinguished, for the safety of the rest?” 

“The war takes a cruel toll on all of us,” she replies, somber, as if this is sufficient.

We must put aside our emotions for the sake of the greater good.

The rest of the conversation passes in a daze. Obi-Wan agrees to meditate on things, politely refusing Master Ti’s invitation for a joint meditation. They speak about the recovery efforts, the lives lost in the battle, and what may be next for Grievous and Ventress. Obi-Wan drifts through it all. He’s long ago mastered the art of appearing present for a conversation when he is anything but.

It’s less than an hour until sunrise—or, what counts for sunrise on Kamino—by the time he leaves her quarters.

“Master Kenobi,” she calls, oddly soft. Her smile is gentle and kind when she offers, apropos of nothing, “You have a big heart. Your troopers are lucky to have you.”

He scrapes out a polite nod for her before heading on his way.

As the post-Ryloth debrief had drawn to a close, Waxer had lingered still. The coordination efforts with Mace’s Lightning Squadron had the meeting running long and most of the 212th Command were eager to leave—even Cody was in a rush to hit the freshers and wash off that clinging Ryloth dust—but Waxer had stayed. He’d even waved Boil ahead, telling him he’d catch up.

“Is everything alright, Waxer?” Obi-Wan had asked. 

A small, rueful smile had crossed his face. He hadn’t made any move to sit, so Obi-Wan remained standing as well.

“Did you know,” Waxer began, uncharacteristically subdued, “that all of us clones are made sterile?”

Obi-Wan had found it difficult to swallow around the lump that had rather suddenly occupied his throat. “No,” he offered, tentative. “I did not.”

“They say that it’s for the sake of ‘intellectual property’ and claim disputes. Our genetic material, in its altered form, is owned. It’s theirs, legally. Any child of a clone would be, too. Or at least, that’s what they told us,” Waxer explained. He huffed out a sound that approximated a laugh. “It just about crushed me, when I found out.” A half-shrug. “I’d always wanted to be a parent. Have an adika or two. And then I just…” his voice catches, “I saw Numa—”

There are boundaries that Obi-Wan has always been careful not to cross. There are lines that he has drawn for himself, marching-orders for his battle of inches, and careful tactics.

He’d pulled Waxer into a hug, anyways.

His lieutenant had gripped him tight, but not tight enough to bruise. It’s the kind of man Waxer is. Gentle, even when he’s hurting. 

“What will happen to her? Is she going to be okay?” Waxer had whispered, ragged and aching, as Obi-Wan held on to him.

“She’s with her family,” Obi-Wan replied. He wondered, idly, if it was possible to bleed internally for the people you love. “There’s talk of stationing a battalion on Ryloth more permanently. She’ll be alright.”

“What if it’s not enough?”

Obi-Wan hadn’t had a satisfactory answer for that.

He finds Cody exactly where he left him.

He’s fallen asleep sitting upright, bucket on to disguise the slight lolling of his head. Obi-Wan can’t be fooled by the trick—he can feel his Commander sleeping lightly through the Force.

How many times has Obi-Wan watched over this man, keeping an eye out to ensure his sleep is as peaceful as can be? How many times has Cody done the same for him?

Maybe it’s natural for clones. Maybe the sleeping vigils begin early out of fear that a brother will go missing, never to return, in the night.

“Fuck,” he curses, softly.

Unfortunately, it does not make him feel any better. More unfortunately, it wakes Cody, even as quiet as Obi-Wan was.

“Sir?”

There’s no use for it. With a sigh, Obi-Wan joins him, sitting with his back against the wall. They are close enough to touch. He feels exhausted, suddenly. Exhausted in a way that ten hours of battle can’t quite accomplish. Just thoroughly, utterly drained.

“Politics,” he manages, gesturing vaguely. “I have been told that decommissioning is a matter of politics.”

It’s quiet in this hall. When Cody removes his bucket, the faint hiss of the pressure seal is plainly audible. His eyes, when Obi-Wan turns to meet them, aren’t anything but forgiving.

“You tried,” Cody says. “That’s more than we usually get.”

Fuck.

Obi-Wan scrubs a hand over his face, rough, aching in a thousand nameless ways. But I didn’t try, he wants to protest. I asked and was told no. I asked and was told to check my attachments, to temper my emotions. 

“Obi-Wan.” He can count on one hand the number of times Cody has called him by his name, not his rank. Most of those instances were out of anger—when he’d done something or another that his Commander deemed reckless enough for a full-name chewing-out. This is not anger. This is another beast entirely.

Cody is still looking at him, still pulling at all these nameless hurts in his chest with nothing but his eyes, when he says, heart-breakingly soft, “Thank you.”

He stands and clips his bucket to his belt. Obi-Wan cannot fault him for his shaking hands. When Cody rises and keys open the door to the room at their backs, Obi-Wan does not follow. The door closes softly after him, as Cody goes to his brothers.

His brothers that Obi-Wan cannot protect.

His brothers who might not be here whenever Cody next returns.

Hunter and Crosshair and Tech and Wrecker. Rex, nearly, and the clones of his batch whose names Obi-Wan does not know. Countless more, no doubt. Who remembers their names? Does Shaak Ti? 

Obi-Wan’s men, whose lives are defined by war... His men, whose childhoods are stolen, accelerated so that they might be brought to the battlefield sooner, so that they might die for the Republic they’ve never known... His men, who have hardly imagined an after for themselves... His men, who have lost so much already...

How many of his men have little brothers in danger? How many of them want children of their own? How many of them will die before Obi-Wan himself, whether it be by battle or by their accelerated aging?

In the room at his back, perhaps Cody is taking one long look. Perhaps he is memorizing their faces or the way they lay tangled together.

Perhaps.

“Don’t thank me yet, Cody,” Obi-Wan manages, although there is no one around to hear him.

There once was a scholar, neither Jedi nor Sith, that believed love was a ladder.

This scholar proclaimed that, at the most basic level, love was cultivated for an individual being. Whether that being was a friend, a lover, or a family member, the soul recognizes something beautiful in them and loves them for their beauty.

But the scholar also believed that love is able to progress beyond this stage, allowing the individual to recognize that there is beauty in all beings, and love them, too. 

Perhaps attachment is not an anchor, but a ladder.

(Or, perhaps, attachment is not love at all.)

The Jedi are to love in moderation, never placing the good of the few over the good of the many. 

But, perhaps, this is a false choice. Perhaps the good of the few leads to the good of the many. Perhaps it is only through the love of a few that it is possible to recognize the humanity of the rest—to know that they, too, are just as deserving.

Anakin, alongside a handful of troopers from the 501st, has already been called away, even before the recovery effort was truly begun—something about a mission on personal request from the Supreme Chancellor.

Most of the men, both 212th and 501st, who fought the previous day’s battle on Kamino chose to remain in Tipoca city rather than return to their ships for the night. Obi-Wan could hardly blame them. The attack on their home—for lack of a better word—has seen many of the men shaken, not just Cody. They’ve stayed to provide help through the long and gruelling night, clearing away rubble, patching leaks, tending to the dead and injured.

Obi-Wan runs into Crys and Longshot, first.

“Ah, gentlemen,” he calls, easily drawing their attention. Both members of Ghost are still in full armor. Crys is wearing thick gloves, wet with quick-repair plaster all the way to his elbows. Longshot is attempting to direct his efforts while simultaneously holding the ladder steady. “Have either of you seen Helix, by any chance?”

“General!” Crys greets. There is a stim-patch adhered high on his neck, his pupils dilated in a manner that suggests he’s been working far beyond his limit for quite awhile now. “Not sure. Best guess is that he’s down in medical harassing the droids,” he adds.

“What’s wrong? Are you injured?” Longshot frets.

“Oh no, nothing of the sort. I just need his help on a project. Crys, I could use your expertise as well.”

“Sure thing,” he acquiesces easily. His gloves, when he strips them into a nearby bucket, make a wet, sodden smack . “What’s the project, Sir?”

“I am going to do something very ill advised.”

Crys snorts. “What, more than usual?”

“General, are you… sure that you’re okay?” Longshot asks.

Obi-Wan takes a brief moment to check in with his body. There are no new pains of any kind—certainly nothing out of the ordinary after engaging both Grievous and Ventress. In fact, he feels significantly lighter, more energized. The twisting in his chest that has become a fixture throughout the war has all but vanished.

“I feel just fine, Longshot. I assure you, Helix already gave me a thorough going-over after the fighting ended,” Obi-Wan gentles.

“Sir it’s just… well. Your eyes are different,” Longshot rebukes, still frowning in thought.

Obi-Wan blinks. Yes, well. That could hardly be avoided . He just hadn’t thought anyone—besides Shaak Ti—would even notice. But his men are always surprising him.

“Come with me,” he says. “I’ll explain once we have Helix. And Crys? Tell your best slicers to be on stand-by.”

They fall into step with him as he continues towards the med bay.

Crys asks, already re-bucketing to use his in-built comms, “How many?”

Obi-Wan hums. “All of them.”

Not all that dive from cliffs make a running head start. Sometimes, the fall is only a natural progression.

Sometimes, it is done as easily as breathing.

The medbay is a site of controlled chaos. A handful of Kaminoans and droids mingle, passing back and forth between cots and performing all sorts of tasks. Helix, predictably, is found at the very heart of the mess, engaged in a fight with a rather opinionated emdee droid. When he spots them, he waves them over, stripping his gloves as he goes. His standard grey scrubs are splattered with dark, dry blood.

“General, are you dying? You never visit medical of your own volition,” he teases, but there’s a real undercurrent of worry to his words. He’s sporting dark, heavily defined bags under his eyes.  Just like Crys and Longshot, Helix has most likely not slept since the 212th were called in. 

“No, nothing of the sort, Helix. I just need your assistance on a rather delicate matter,” Obi-Wan soothes, gently steering him away from the patients and into a relatively quiet bed space. He draws the curtain after them, for all the good that it will do.

“What’s going on?” Helix demands. After a beat, his eyes widen. “Sir your eyes—”

And, truly, Obi-Wan really hadn’t known his men paid quite so much attention to the color of his eyes. It would be amusing, if it weren’t for the circumstances.

“I won’t attempt to hide it from you all,” he begins, heart hammering in his chest. For all that he knows this was his only option, he can still feel the shame of it keenly. “I can no longer call myself a Jedi,” he admits.

All three of his men rear back as if slapped.

“What?” Longshot hisses, voice low.

“Truthfully, I’m not sure what I can call myself, now. I’m hardly Sith,” he adds, because it feels particularly important to emphasize that much, at least.

Just as Jedi are not simply Force-sensitives, Sith are not simply Darkside users. The Jedi are a religious order, a doctrine that one must opt into, just as much as the Sith are.

No, Obi-Wan has only rearranged his priorities in such a manner that has allowed him to tap into his emotions. One could argue that doing such is an inherently Darkside tactic. It certainly isn’t very Jedi. Where the Jedi immerse themselves in the currents of the Force, learning to bend and move in the way that it flows, what Obi-Wan has done is quite a lot like drowning.

Except, the rush of water into his mouth and nose is all too welcome, for with it comes the power to act.

“You what?” Helix echoes, disbelief written plainly on every line of his face.

“If you want no part in this, I will not force you,” Obi-Wan stresses. “Please trust in that, if nothing else.” And then, well. There’s nothing for it. He must make some sort of attempt to explain the culmination of over a year’s worth of denial and steadily-building devotion.

“Tonight, I have learned things about Kamino that have fundamentally altered my perception of this war and my part in it.” He forces himself to take a breath before moving on. “I say this knowing fully that what I am suggesting is treason, and if your conscience calls on you to arrest me, I understand.”

“Sir—” Crys whispers harshly, an aborted motion towards him, all shock and dismay in the Force.

“I intend to take control of Kamino,” Obi-Wan declares.

It is, in many cases, best to rip the plast off as quickly as possible.

Longshot blinks. Crys snaps his mouth shut with an audible click. Obi-Wan can hardly blame them. These things take time to process, after all.

It is Helix who recovers, first. Medics are always a step ahead of the rest of them mere mortals.

“Why?” he whispers, although, if maintaining discretion was not a problem, Obi-Wan has the impression that he would be shouting. Possibly shaking him by the shoulders violently, too.

“I learned about decommissioning,” he says, frank, and watches the color drain from his men’s faces. “And I will not stand for it. This is not a popular opinion among Republic representatives. And I simply cannot entertain the trappings of politics where your lives are concerned. I will steal every last member of the GAR if I must, but I will not let another child fall.” Obi-Wan laughs, rueful and short. “I suppose this makes me a terrible Jedi, but I’m finding that I don’t quite give a fuck.”

Silence rules in their tiny carved-out space while the rest of the medbay buzzes on, unawares.

“My batcher was decommissioned,” Helix murmurs, eventually. His eyes are fixed flat on the floor, his hands clenched tight enough at his sides that his knuckles have gone bone-white. “He didn’t have a name yet. Neither did I. I don’t even remember why he was taken. Only that he was and he never came back.”

“We thought the Jedi knew,” Crys confesses, voice cracking, words nearly tripping over themselves in their haste to escape. “We thought—”

Obi-Wan, for the first time in a very long time, does not crush his instinct to draw one of his men in close. He folds Crys into his grasp, armor and all, and holds on, just as he had done for Waxer nearly a year ago. In a word, it feels right.

He knows by the way that Crys goes lax in his grip, breath trembling out of him, that it is.

(How could this choice have ever been wrong?)

“No, my dear. I can assure you that I did not,” Obi-Wan promises. He smoothes down Crys’ long hair, sticking every which-way after the sweat of the earlier battle.

“Is it even possible?” Helix blurts. “To take Kamino?”

“All things are possible through the Force,” Obi-Wan replies.

He does not stop to think whether or not he maintains the right to use the old Jedi adage, anymore. 

There are far more important things to devote his attention to.

Within three hours, they have a plan.

Obi-Wan calls an officer’s meeting and allows Crys, Helix, and Longshot to coordinate other 212th members they believe would be assets to the discussion. The 501st are more of a risk, simply by virtue of the fact that Obi-Wan does not know them. All fifty three chosen members of the 212th assemble on the bridge of the Negotiator. As it becomes necessary, more and more men are folded in.

By the time Cody finds them, they’ve already gotten the ball rolling. Their meeting of four turned fifty three turned nearly eighty by the final headcount has only just started to disperse when he enters the bridge.

“Sir? I received your transmission and came as soon as I could,” Cody says. He casts a glance around the bridge. Some of the men who don’t know their Commander as personally as others look wary. Mistrustful. The Marshal Commander’s reputation as “the hardest hard-ass in the galaxy” precedes him.

“It’s quite alright,” Obi-Wan soothes as best he can, projecting his voice just a tad bit more than usual.

It’s happened enough times now that he is braced for it, when it occurs. When Cody gets a glimpse at his eyes, he lurches forward, hands outstretched as if he might catch Obi-Wan. His immediate surge of concern is so strong it’s practically palpable in the Force. It tastes like blaster-fire on Obi-Wan’s tongue.

“I’m alright, Cody,” he adds, gentler, as his frantic Commander reaches him.

“What happened?” Cody hisses, voice dropped low so as not to be overheard. He’s already trying to man-handle Obi-Wan towards an idling chair, no doubt intent on forcing him to rest and siccing no less than three medics on him.

Obi-Wan loves him. He allows himself to hold onto the feeling rather than release it. 

Being ruled by one's emotions is said to be a great weakness. He finds that his love for Cody—for all of his men—only provides him strength.

With a signal to Helix— all clear, proceed— he negotiates Cody over to the side, away from those that might overhear his reaction. Something deep in his gut prompts him to reach for Cody’s hand, thinking only of the grief and forgiveness in his eyes hours ago. 

And he tells him.

When he’s finished, Cody only says one thing. The emotion in his voice is unchecked, enough to break Obi-Wan’s heart if it hadn’t already broken a thousand times over.

“Why?”

“There are many reasons, my dear,” he says. Every ounce of fondness he has for this man is all but leaking out of him at the seams. Obi-Wan has never been big enough to contain all of it. You have a big heart, Shaak Ti had said, but she hadn’t really understood. His heart has never been big enough to contain all that he feels and he’s spent his whole life desperately trying to fit things bigger than himself into a space impossibly small.

He finds it immensely freeing to no longer have to try. He feels lighter. Steadier. 

Ironically, it is only now that he has Fallen that he finds true balance.

Obi-Wan cradles the side of Cody’s neck in his hand, thumb tucked neatly under his jaw. Cody goes still all over at the contact.

It is the most striking pleasure of Obi-Wan’s life, to hold him such. Even if what he feels for Cody goes no farther than this for as long as either of them may live, it would be enough. Holding him here, just like this, is enough.

“But the most important reason is love,” Obi-Wan confesses. “I have loved you for a very long time, Cody. I have been attached to you—to all of you—in ways unbecoming of a Jedi for just as long. And if I am not able to protect you and your brothers as a Jedi, then I find I don’t particularly want to be one any longer.”

Cody’s voice, when he speaks, is nothing more than a harsh rasp. “I can’t ask this of you.”

“Oh, my love,” Obi-Wan murmurs, and brings his other hand up to join the first, cradling Cody’s face between them like he’s wanted to do a hundred—no, a thousand times before. “There’s no need to ask for something freely given.”

Cody makes a sound suspiciously like a sob and gasps, overwhelmed, “General—”

Obi-Wan clicks his tongue. “I think you’d really ought to start calling me ‘Obi-Wan’, considering I'm about to commit treason against the Republic. Not really General-material, that.”

It has the desired effect of eliciting laughter from his dear Commander, as shaky a thing as it is. They stand there breathing together in the aftermath of it. 

It feels as though he is looking— truly looking— at Cody for the very first time. A brilliant mind, a fierce devotion, a protective older-brother, a wellspring of love deep enough to drown in. He is the kind of beauty that consumes one, utterly.

He’s the kind of beauty that one Falls for. 

Somewhere off to the side, Boil groans theatrically. “Just kiss already you karking idiots!” he shouts, hands cupped around his mouth for maximum effect.

The troopers that are still lingering erupt into giggles. Waxer turns and smacks Boil upside the head, hissing something about “taking the romance out of everything” and “ruining a perfectly good vibe, di’kut!” but Obi-Wan isn’t paying attention. He can’t, really.

Not when Cody surges forward and does such an admiral job of occupying every single iota of Obi-Wan’s brain-power with his warm lips, wet mouth, and clever tongue.

When they break for air—unfortunate, really, because Obi-Wan would like to continue kissing for the next ten thousand years, give or take—Cody’s handsome face is ever-so-slightly darkened with a flush. It makes Obi-Wan's heart kick powerfully in his chest, beating like a wardrum.

They are still clinging to one another when he asks, breathless and a tiny bit awkward, “What’s the plan, Obi-Wan?”

He is all too happy to tell him. 

Chapter Text

Cody hadn’t ever put much thought into the whole “accelerated aging” thing. It wasn’t ever something worth considering, not when everyone around him moved through the world at the same pace he did—the Longnecks and the trainers didn’t count to him much in the same way that the clones never counted for them.  

There was Boba, but Boba was removed from the rest of the vode in the same way that Fett himself was. If Cody ever saw him, it was behind a sheet of transparisteel.

In any case, Cody hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t had much reason to, really. Not until after deployment. Deployment and—well.

Obi-Wan.

Cody hadn’t known what to think of the General. General Kenobi was a passable tactician, a good orator, dignified like no one else Cody had ever met. Cody hadn’t managed to catch sight of the man on Geonosis, that first fateful day, not like Rex had. Cody was too busy trying not to bleed out. But, if the rumors were to be believed, General Kenobi was a good fighter, too.

It wasn’t until their first major battle that Cody looked at him and saw something else, something beyond just another natborn superior officer, something beyond General and dangerously close to Obi-Wan.

They’d been separated for a great deal of the fighting. It didn’t make much sense to have both commanding officers in the same exact place—still doesn’t; one lucky hit and the whole battalion is kriffed. So there Cody had been, running around the newly-secured position like something deranged—not at all like the collected, composed commander he’d been trained to be—because his kriffing general wasn’t answering his damn com and no one had seen him since the worst of the fighting had ended. He’d been gunning for the hastily-constructed med-tent, boots crunching noisily in the dirt, expecting the worst.

He’d found the General, alright. Just not at all how Cody had imagined finding him.

The man’s beige and brown robes were soaked through with red blood. His sleeves were pulled up, baring bicep, gathered all the way up around the shoulders, and red blood was streaked up to his elbows. The blood looked especially stark on Kenobi’s pale skin, as bold as neon signs in the dark. He was straddling an emergency med bed—straddling the trooper on top of the bed— both hands pressing down hard onto an oozing gut wound that Helix was frantically packing with gauze around Kenobi’s hands. 

“You’re doing great, Punk,” Kenobi was saying as he pressed down with all his weight, elbows locked and flushed white visibly. His fascinating orange-red hair was in complete disarray, a huge sweaty flop of it hanging down into Kenobi’s face. “Just keep breathing for me,” he said, smiling as if this was all just another day on the job. 

Punk had barked out a laugh that sounded far wetter than it had any right to. “I’d do a lot more than just that for ya’, General,” he’d managed.

“Ah,” Kenobi had mused, and that smile tilted towards flirtatiousness. How it could, under these circumstances, Cody couldn’t fathom. “You come by your name honestly, I see.”

Punk had wheezed out a laugh only to be interrupted by Helix’s harsh demand for a medication Cody couldn’t pronounce or recall the name of. Something for clotting, maybe. Something to glue up the hole in Punk’s gut.

Punk had pulled through, despite the grim odds. He’d needed a full dunk in bacta to regrow the chunk of his spleen that had taken an unlucky shard of shrapnel, but the General had made sure he’d gotten it. 

Cody would later piece the story together from the dozens of disbelieving vode who’d seen it happen. Kenobi had held Punk together through the tail end of the battle through sheer force of will. He’d calmly delivered post-battle orders to the lieutenants and sergeants around while his hands stifled the rush of blood from Cody’s vod’s body, unwilling to let Punk go—just a shiny, then. Another un-notable one among thousands, not yet the tech-expert he’d later become—become because Kenobi had made sure he lived.

And that was only the start of it, of the General becoming Obi-Wan becoming… something else entirely.

It was the way the di’kut always fought right there out on the front lines , practically naked without armor, his lightsaber a swinging arc that marked the very first line of their attack and defense. It was the way he would sit with the battle-fatigued men—even the shinies—and offer whatever comfort or solace he could. It was the strange way that he was a snob about tea but would drink the blackest, sluggiest caf by the gallon before he’d even think about lying down for a full eight-hours rest. 

They talked more, Cody and Obi-Wan, as the war progressed. If there’s one thing about war that the Kaminoans and the Cu’vayl Dar never prepared the clones for, it was all the space they’d have just to talk. The old adage, hurry up and wait turned into hurry up and make small-talk. 

They talked about life at the Temple and life on the Negotiator and the bantha-shit insane stunts that only ARCs could get into. They talked about the General’s former padawan, Anakin—although Cody refused to think of him as anything other than Skywalker, given that he’s also a General—and how Anakin had been giving him premature greys since the very day of his knighting. Eventually, Cody even talked about Rex and admitted much of the same. 

Slowly, Cody’s General became human. He went from something alien to approach with caution to someone who had stupid, frivolous opinions about tea and persistently chilly hands and feet. He became someone who had an annoying, reckless little brother who they worried about relentlessly, and someone who held good men’s hands while they died—someone who remembered their names.

After the General stumbled away from their first tangle with Grievous, his collarbone fractured, his right wrist shattered, concussed to the point where Helix was fretting about real lasting brain damage, Cody had needed to swallow and swallow and choke around something too close to panic for comfort.

They’d never find another Jedi General that cared about them this much—they’d never— Cody would never—

He’d comm’d Fox, even though they were nowhere close to being on the same time as Coruscant, because Cody always called Fox when the world was caving in around him, because back when they were fresh out of the growth-tube Fox was the only one that had ever understood—

And Fox had answered, because that is what they do, and had said, “Like Bly wasn’t already bad enough, you had to go and fall for yours, too.”

“I haven’t—” Cody had spluttered, furiously red in the privacy of his tiny, too-cramped bunk, even though there was no one else there to see. “Fox.”

“Of course you have, osi’kovid.”

But Cody still hadn’t believed it. Cody hadn’t realized. Not until Ventress. Not until after Ventress, when Cody had spent more time pacing around the medbay than he’d ever spent before, waiting for the General to wake up from whatever Force-assisted psychic recovery osik that the Jedi had insisted on. 

He hadn’t even understood then— only later, when Rex had shuffled him away from Kenobi’s bedside and to his own quarters and Cody had whispered, more desperate than he knew he could even be, “We could have lost him.”

The revelation had nearly taken him out at the knees.

War doesn’t leave time for things like this. It never has. Cody had loved Fox—still does love Fox—fiercely and they’d still ended up half a galaxy away from each other fighting different battles entirely, able to connect over com only once every few weeks if they got lucky. Loving Kenobi—it wasn’t— couldn’t be anything, not least of all because of their positions, but because of who they are.

A clone and a Jedi. 

Cody had never felt the sting of the vode’s accelerated aging until then. Not until he’d realized how desperate Kenobi made him—not until he realized how utterly gone he was for a man he could never even admit to wanting, let alone having.

For the last year, give or take, Cody has watched his General—watched his men with his General as they each began to fall for him, this brilliant larger-than-life man who made them feel precious and unique—and known.

You are so much of my world and I am only the smallest fraction of yours.  

The truth of it—the shitty, awful, fecking truth of the whole ugly matter—is that Cody is a clone. He and many of his brothers love Obi-Wan— this mad-man who keeps losing pieces of armor like other people lose socks—and for each one of them that loves their General, there are a thousand others who have loved him first. Clones’ lives are so pitifully short in the face of all the living tha Obi-Wan and other natborns have done. There are those who have loved him for so long that Cody and his brothers weren’t even a collection of cells in a tube when the loving started. Any claim they have on Obi-Wan ends when the war does.

Although they might be his, he was never theirs.  

But if it is all they can do to keep this brilliant, impossible man alive to see the end of this thing, then so be it. It’s a far worthier cause than any other Cody has been told to die for.

Crys’ team of expert slicers are in charge of phase one of The Plan.

Many attempts were made to name The Plan, most of which were spearheaded by Wooley and 212th ARC twins (and perpetual pains in Cody’s shebs) Suck and Blow. Although many names were pitched—including Operation Kark Kamino, Operation Decommission THIS, Operation Make Fett Roll in His Grave, and Operation Obi-Wan 2.0, the Reckoning —none were unanimously agreed upon, leaving The Plan to be known only as The Plan.

Phase one of the Plan will see all external communications brought simultaneously offline. Not only will Tipoca City be on blackout, but the entire planet of Kamino. Obi-Wan is only slightly disturbed to learn that this has long been a common fantasy among the vode who are more technologically inclined—Cody, having been ori’vod to Tech and batchmate of Fox, has already gotten all the exposure therapy anyone could ever dream of.  

Still, for others, an explanation is warranted.

“Well, you know how you sometimes daydream about precisely how you’d go about doing a mutiny, even if you don’t really want to do a mutiny and probably never will? It’s just like that,” Crys explains, casually dismissive of Obi-Wan’s (and others’) somewhat horrified faces as he taps away at something on a pad. 

“No vod, no I do not,” Waxer replies as Cody barks out, affronted, “Excuse me?” he can feel his eyebrows climbing on his own head, helpless to stop them. Tipoca City is one thing but a mutiny is another.

Deedee, Punk, and Gidget, all senior members of the 212th slicing and communications team, wave off their protesting.

“It’s a thing, vod,” Punk says.

Punk is really the most senior out of all of their com’ n’ tech team. Cody would have given command of the team to Punk, if Punk hadn’t threatened to desert over it.

“You give me command of anything more than my own damn self and I will desert, Cody, don’t try me. I could settle down in the outer rim with a gorgeous little arm-piece and live out my life in obscurity with three tookas, I could, don’t push me to it,” Punk had warned. “You promote me and suddenly no one trusts me with the good contraband anymore. I hope you know that this would be the death of me, Cody.” But still, Punk is always the first one to jump in and start herding cats when things go to hell.

Not leadership quality his shebs, Cody thinks. But Crys is fantastic, too. The 212th is spoiled for talent.

“Codes,” Crys says. “We could really use your adika , on this. Haran knows the kid has spent more time in the longnecks’ systems than anybody.”

Cody’s instinct is sharp. No. Absolutely not. He will not bring his adiik anywhere near this. But, haran, the Commander portion of him that is still able to compartmentalize knows the truth of what Crys is saying. He knows how good Tech is because Cody is often the one that has to remind Tech not to do anything too obvious that will get him decommissioned while Cody isn’t there to protect him.

Punk must read some of this on Cody’s face because he gasps, delighted. “We’re gonna’ get to play with Tech’ika?”

Cody levels a stern pointer finger at Punk. “I have decided nothing,” he snaps.

Punk proceeds to contort himself, draping his body half-across the planning table like a Kaminii eel, his neon-orange hair flopping into his face. “Pleeeeaaaaseeee, Cody?”

Obi-Wan laughs. Cody’s almost startled by it, really. Obi-Wan allows himself to do that so rarely in front of them. In fact—Cody can’t even remember the last time he heard Obi-Wan laugh so genuinely.

Maybe he wasn’t allowed to, before. (And, well. If that’s the case, Cody might be starting to rethink his positive-stance on the Jedi Orders’ doctrine.) 

Cody shoots him a look that he hopes says, Sir, please stop encouraging this, without actually moving his lips at all, and trips up again on the gleam of gold that meets his eyes where there should be blue.

Crys sighs and says, thoughtful, “It’s true, Codes. Kid can run circles around us. And he knows this place better than anyone. We haven’t been on-planet in what, well over a year? How many upgrades could a system as big as this go through in that time? A dozen, at least.”

Cody scrubs a hand harshly over his face. He hates it. Hates it like he hasn’t ever hated much else, save for Dooku, Ventress, and Grievous’ awful kriffin’ voice. 

“Fine, but that means you’re watching the rest of the batch, too. And they go nowhere near the fighting, do you understand me?”

“Clear as day, Sir,” Crys salutes, jauntily, hauling Punk upright off the table by the back of his blacks.

At least he can keep them close, like this. There’s probably no safer spot for them than on the Negotiator. Cody can even squirrel them away in his bunk and let them get some sleep somewhere where they can drop their guard—although he’s under no illusions as to whether or not they will actually sleep if there’s action afoot. Now that he’s thinking about it, if he were to sequester them away in his quarters, three-fourths of them would end up crawling around the vents in an hour, flat.

“Waxer, Tripper, Punk, bring them on board as soon as we adjourn. If anyone stops you, say the General authorized them to get a full tour,” Cody orders.

“Are three men really necessary to retrieve four boys, Cody?” Obi-Wan asks. He seems more amused by Cody’s protectiveness than anything else. Even so, it’s a battle to force his defensive bristle back into the box he keeps it in.

Obi-Wan knows about them and he Fell to keep them safe. He wouldn’t take them from you for caring.

A hand lands, warm and comforting, on Cody’s armored shoulder. When he turns, he meets that gold-gaze again. The color may be different but those eyes are the same ones he’s loved for months, now—forever, maybe. He can trust him with this.

He forces a breath out, steady and measured, just like they were taught to do as cadets. “You don’t know the Batch, Si—ah, Obi-Wan,” he corrects. “They’re about as prone to trouble as you and as reckless as Skywalker, to boot. If I was really smart, I’d send four.”

No other parts of the Plan can begin until Crys’ team successfully brings everything offline. Only then, can they move to the second phase: securing the children.

“Sparrow, Rockstar, your team will be securing the nursery and the decant room,” Cody says, drawing their attention to the highlighted section of the map. “Risk and Psych, your team will get to the cadets. The biggest challenge there will be getting them to believe you that this is really happening. Think you’re up for it?”

Psych and Risk exchange a look. Risk grins and says, “Let me choose the men I take and we’ll be just fine.”

“Done,” Cody acquiesces. “Helix and Steady, your team will secure the labs. Keep the longnecks there alive. I don’t care who they are or what they’ve done—we need them to show us how to reverse our accelerated aging. Helix, are you good to take point on that?”

Helix tilts his head to the side, cracking his neck with a pop, and grins all full of teeth. “C’mon Codes, like I haven’t been working on it since the third month of the war. I’d be offended if you didn’t let me.”

“That long?” Obi-Wan asks, surprised. Helix shrugs, suddenly much more cowed about it.

Helix spends every cycle working tirelessly to pull brothers back from the brink of death—often tragically losing them only to have to get right back up and do it all over again because there are always others . The thought of him surrendering what few moments of rest he’s able to eek out to toil away at this thing had kept Cody up at night. Hells, of course it had. But Helix was willing—intent on it, even—and couldn’t be talked down from that ledge no matter how much Cody had impressed upon him that it wasn’t necessary.  

Obi-Wan crosses the miniscule distance between himself and Helix.

“Sir?” Helix says, uncertain.

He takes Helix’s face in his hands, much as he had to Cody only an hour previous.

“You, my dear,” Obi-Wan says, his voice slow and deliberate in the way that means each word has been carefully, thoughtfully chosen, “are perhaps the most selfless person I’ve ever had the fortune to meet.” Helix’s breath catches. Cody can’t hardly blame him. His has, too. “You are brilliant, Helix. Completely brilliant. And I’m sorry that I never noticed how much you sacrifice—”

Helix’s eyes grow wide and he says, abrupt, “No, it’s not—It’s not a sacrifice. Not if it’s the vode.”  When Helix swallows, Cody can see his throat bob. The whole bridge has gone silent, all eighty-something of them held utterly still. “And not if it’s you,” Helix finishes, words soft but somehow loud enough to reverberate around the bridge like the ringing of a gong.

Obi-Wan’s eyes shutter closed, his breath escaping him on a rasp, like he’s just taken a blow. He doesn’t drop his hands, but his head hangs for a moment. When he opens his eyes, they are a brighter gold than before, nearly glowing.

“I cannot fathom what I’ve done to deserve the way that you feel,” he admits. “There’s so much I should have done differently—so much I should have done sooner.” Helix—and Cody—both open their mouths to protest, but Obi-Wan stops their words with a shake of the head. Helix lifts his own hand to cup Obi-Wan’s where it rests on his cheek. “You’ve had so much taken from you all. You deserve the world and I,” a watery inhale, fragile. Obi-Wan’s hands tremble against Helix’s skin. “I can’t give it to you. All I can give you is mine. I hope that you won’t resent me for—”

“Stop,” Cody intervenes. He steps forward until his hand can cover the nape of Obi-Wan’s neck, the skin cool under Cody’s hands. “It’s not as if you had much of a choice about the war, either.” 

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says, rueful, “There’s always a choice.”

“And you made the best one available,” Punk interjects. His arms are crossed over his chest, his eyes sharp. “I won’t speak for anyone else, but I sure as kriff don’t regret that you’re our General. You’ve only ever tried to do your best by us, sir. The Senate’s fuck-ups are not yours to claim. Let the bloated, rich, bigoted assholes who have never once seen a day of combat in their lives own their own shit. Don’t you relieve them of that.”

“I—”

“You,” Punk overpowers him in sheer volume alone as he steps in close, the three of them triangulated around Obi-Wan like a strange constellation, “saved my life. That’s because of the choices you made. And you’ll excuse me for not thinking that’s a bad thing.”

Obi-Wan sways, leaning back into Cody like the words hurt, like he can hardly stand through the barrage.

“You went back for us,” another voice says. Blow and Suck have muscled their way forward amidst the crowd, Blow’s hand on Suck’s shoulder, and he looks at Obi-Wan like Cody does. Like Helix and Punk do. “It was our very first battle and we were nothing but a liability,” Blow continues. “But when we got separated—when we lost contact—you came for us, when it would have been better for the mission if you hadn’t.” 

“You said you could feel us,” Suck adds. “I’ll never forget that. When you pried the door off that kriffin’ LAAT, you said you felt us and asked if we needed a hand.” 

“We thought we were dead but you—” Blow cuts off, unable to finish. 

“—you weren’t ready to let us go yet,” Suck says. 

“So you’ll have to forgive me, too, for not regretting that you are our General,” Blow concludes, his jaw set firm. 

Helix turns his head just enough that his lips graze Obi-Wan’s hands. Obi-Wan does not startle, but rather, he holds deliberately still. Cody can feel him tense every muscle, pressed to his back as he is. Helix captures his wrist, holds it right where it is, and places a kiss against the tender skin of Obi-Wan’s palms.

It strikes Cody, suddenly, that Obi-Wan is startlingly brave. And it’s not just the sort of bravery that allows a man to charge into a hail of blaster-fire, or allows him to smile in the face of his enemy. No, it’s a different sort of bravery entirely to look directly at something you want but will not allow yourself to have and to hold yourself on that precipice indefinitely.  

Cody tucks himself in closer as Punk gathers up Obi-Wan’s free hand for a kiss of his own. With his chin on his General’s shoulder, Cody closes his eyes and decides to be brave in this way, too.

“We’ve always known you loved us,” he admits. It’s true. Cody thinks it’s a simple truth; the kind of thing that Fox could read just by hearing his voice over com. Even before he knew it, he knew it, because he saw Obi-Wan hold Punk together under his hands and saw him a thousand other times, too. Cody’s blindness has always been in the choice to close his eyes so he wouldn't have to see what he knew was there. Self-protection.

“The things we’re afraid of—it’s all just instinct. Habit. We know you wouldn’t—couldn’t punish us for who we are. Not as a Jedi, and not now.”

“I love all of you,” Obi-Wan confesses, desperate, suddenly, like a sob. Cody regrets that his current position doesn’t allow him to see Obi-Wan’s eyes but he doesn’t dare move, even as an admission he never could have anticipated—never would have demanded—turns his knees to putty. “I love all of you so dearly, but I don’t—I can’t—” Obi-Wan’s head turns from Helix to Cody. To Punk and Wooley. Longshot and Blow and Suck.

“You don’t have to,” Cody says, answering a question Obi-Wan would never dare ask. He knows that Obi-Wan would never dare imply that they are, in any way, to be measured against one another. He’s gone to bat for them a hundred times against officers, Senators and now other Jedi who do.

When Obi-Wan turns to face him—an awkward twist of his neck, given their positions—Cody brushes a kiss that’s barely more than a peck across his lips. It’s not even enough for a taste. But Cody remembers how Obi-Wan tastes from not too long ago. He tastes like the very notion of home.

“Believe it or not, we do understand the concept of sharing,” Boil drawls from where he’s leaning against the map display, all casual confidence and teasing swagger. Waxer, again, delivers a loving smack to his riduur, just upside the head.

Helix snorts. “It’s sort of hard not to when you’ve got the same face that a million others do.”

There is a long and heavy pause. Obi-Wan is still against him—holding his breath. It lasts a moment more until, all at once, he relaxes. 

“After,” Obi-Wan breathes. “After we take Kamino… I’d like to revisit this.” He leans forward, sways enough towards Helix that the bastard catches him for a peck of his own, right above the line of his beard. “With anyone that wishes to. No more and no less.”     

And when he turns, again, to catch Cody’s eyes, Obi-Wan’s eyes are glowing.

Cody has seen other Sith up-close. Obi-Wan’s eyes are not the blood-shot madness of Dooku or Ventress, nor are they cold. They’re just— his. Obi-Wan’s eyes. But they burn 212th gold.

Fett had only ever said one thing to them—to any of them—directly. Sure, he was content to call them livestock while he watched any number of them get their shebs kicked across the training salles and back, but he didn’t talk to them.

He did only once, just after the inception of the first command class. Fett was observing their combat training that day with his customary ten-degrees of separation, a looming spectre on the observation deck that towered two stories above their heads, even as the Kamiini towered over his own. It was always mystifying, how Fett could stand next to a Longneck and not seem small. It was just something about him.

Fett never seemed small—not next to anyone. 

Cody had gotten pinned down during a demonstration spar with their trainer of the day. No matter how much he'd thrashed, squirmed, strained with all his power, he was stuck brutally to the mats underneath the weight of solid beskar. He was pinned completely by the strength of his own damn shame. Fett was watching, dispassionate and distant as always—watching Cody wriggle like a vod fresh out of the tube.

In that moment, he was a creature of spite and nothing more. Cody twisted. He sunk his teeth into the vulnerable flesh of the trainer’s arm, just where the protection of a vambrace ended and the tough weave of kute began, and he held on, tasting blood, when the trainer yelped and tried instinctively to wrench away.

Fett had laughed .

“There’s your army, right there,” he’d said to the Kaminiise, but for once, he’d been looking right at them. “There’s your kote.”

The blood that had smeared down Cody's face was wet and hot. All he could taste was iron.

The trainer had slapped him across the mouth—hard enough that Cody had been bruised for a day or two after. Even that hadn’t smarted like Fett’s words.

Your Kote, he’d said, and h e’d been talking to the Kaminiise. Fett had never once claimed a single one of them as his. Not beyond Boba. They were nothing to Fett. Nothing at all. 

In the aftermath, it was Fox who had pounded on the door to Cody’s sleeping pod until he was forced to reluctantly open it. Cody will claim, until the end of time, that he only opened his pod because Fox was making such a fucking racket and would not stop until he got what he wanted or got both of them in trouble.

But really, he opened it because it was Fox. Fox hadn’t picked his name. And, unlike Wolffe and Ponds, he hadn’t had his name picked for him by a vod. Fox had been named by Reau. 

“You wear your boots in your pod? Disgusting,” Fox had said immediately upon becoming visible. “Budge over.” And, without waiting for a response, he had clambered in beside him and hit the controls to close the pod. They were just small enough at the time that this was still manageable and not wildly uncomfortable.

Fox knew what it was to be singled out by someone whose notice you both craved and loathed. Reau was good at what she did. Reau also pitted vod against each other in what amounted to death-matches for sport.

Fett wasn’t Reau. Fett was somehow something worse. 

“You are what you are. What they think you are doesn’t change that,” Fox had told him, practically crushing Cody down into the sleeping pod, his warm, sweaty hands around Cody’s head. 

Cody would save those words for years. And, one day, he’d give them to his adiik. 

“Who are you calling?” Wrecker asks, shoving his way practically into Cody’s lap. He’s having a better day today, pain-wise, but his eyes are still red and puffy.

Cody steadies him, lets him settle with his back against his chest. He dedicates an arm to the cause of trying to hold Wrecker still enough that the kid doesn’t end up bruising himself on Cody’s armor while he uses his other to continue queuing up the dozens of encryptions needed to connect to Fox privately. Cody has never been more grateful for his vod’s paranoia.

“I’m calling Fox,” Cody tells him. 

While the com cycles through, he glances up at the other end of the room where Crys and Punk are sat on either side of Tech, all three of them armed with pads and speaking at approximately twenty-thousand words per minute. Crosshair hovers anxiously behind them while the rest of Cry’s team buzzes around the appropriated conference room. 

Cody resolves to keep an eye on that. Crosshair tends to bite. 

Hunter has an enormous pair of headphones on—donated by Crys for the cause of keeping Hunter from being overwhelmed by the sound of so many busy vode —but sits up at the sound of Fox’s name. The headphones clearly aren’t as effective as they’d hoped. Hunter braces one hand on Cody’s shoulder and leans up on his knees in his chair, peering at the com on the table.

“Fox? Can we say hi?” Hunter asks.

“I won’t know how much time he has to talk until he jumps on. Once I make sure he knows everything he needs to and if he has time, yes,” Cody negotiates. Hunter settles back down with a very serious face—the face an adika makes when they’re trying to seem adult—and tugs at Wrecker until he acquiesces to Hunter’s silent demands. When they’re both standing, they make their way over to Crosshair, who is still playing at being Tech’s extremely-protective shadow. 

“Cody,” Fox greets as soon as the line connects. His voice is staticy and distorted. Cody adjusts his ear-piece. 

“Are you able to talk?”

“No, I just answered for the pleasure of hanging up on you.” Fox’s eyes have deep circles underneath them—so deep that they look like his lack of sleep has gained a physical form and punched him in both eyes. “Yeah, I can talk. You’ve got three minutes.”

“You’re alone?” Cody clarifies.

A pause. “Yes, and I just turned on my jammer. What’s going on?”

“Any vod that needs to get off of Coruscant, put them on a ship heading to Kamino right now. If you have any troopers on duty in the Dome, call them to HQ.”

“Cody, what the shab—”

“Fox, Obi-Wan fell. We’re taking Kamino within the next three hours,” Cody interrupts.

Fox’s face gives nothing away. Most vod don’t have a passable poker-face; they rely on their buckets to hide what they don’t want to give away. Usually, the Commanders and other officers are better about schooling their expressions because they spend the most time around natborns in high-command, many of which are put-off by the expressionless faces of clone helmets and ask for their men to go bare-faced whenever possible. But no one has anything on Fox’s poker-face.

He’s silent for a beat that Cody cannot help but count. They’re on a schedule. Then, flat, “You’re serious.”

“He found out about decommissioning. Fox, most of the Jedi don’t know. We’re moving to take Kamino now, while most of the Kamiinni are still out of Tipoca and licking their wounds and before the 212th gets other orders. As soon as word gets out, you’re going to have a karking riot on Coruscant. Send any vod that needs to be sent away to us now. Our intent is to establish Kamino as a vod-controlled territory,” he explains and watches Fox’s face remain impassive. 

“Can you trust him?” he asks, sudden and unflinching.

Cody blinks. “Vod—”

“Can you trust Kenobi?”

He forgets, sometimes, that the Guard does not have a Jedi. He forgets that Fox is not Wolffe—practically his General’s adika in all but blood—nor is he Bly—all but married to Secura—nor is he Ponds—who worships the ground Windu walks on. Fox has never had a Jedi—a good Jedi—to rely on. On Coruscant, it’s just the Guard, and their enemies are everywhere. Their allies are vanishingly sparse. 

“With everything, Fox,” Cody answers, his heart pounding away like a drum in his ears.

Across the way, Obi-Wan pokes his red-orange head into the room, gold eyes glinting under the light. He passes Punk with a gentle touch to his lower back that has Punk smiling up at him and makes his way through the crowded conference room towards Crys, a question in his eyes. He’s wearing his half-armor again—the armor he hasn’t worn since the very first months of the war, claiming things like damaging the Jedi-image publicly and maneuverability— shoulder bells, rerebrace, sharp-pointed couter, and vambrace. Under the customary layer of his beige Jedi-tunics, he’s wearing a clone-model body glove that climbs his thin, pale neck like a shadow. 

Wrecker notices Obi-Wan first, and bounds over to say thank you for yesterday at a volume decidedly not suited for indoor spaces. Crosshair follows, glaring. His arms are crossed over his chest and his expression is wary. Cody is watching carefully for the appearance of the blaster pistol Crosshair lifted off of Waxer when he wasn’t looking.

It does not show. Obi-Wan easily sinks into a crouch that brings him eye-level with Wrecker and Cross. The smile he offers the boys is easy and real and so very right on his face.

Fox sighs—a crackle through the open com line, a sound lightyears away. “Alright. But you better know what you’re doing, Codes. If this goes wrong…”

“I know,” Cody offers. He does. It isn’t enough to capture the buzzing under his skin or the lightning-strike tingle down his spine when Obi-Wan turns just enough to meet Cody’s eyes across the conference room. He doesn’t know how to explain that this will happen—that this will succeed.

It feels like destiny. It feels not only right, but just.  

It feels like the Force is with them.    

The 212th was stopped on Coruscant to accept a dozen new squads. The requisite paperwork having been signed, the proper materials off-loaded, and the General having stolen away to enjoy some tea with Master Ti, there was nothing left for Cody to do but wander the halls. 

Having seen the wider galaxy, having run for miles in full kit on a planet teeming with droids, having laid on his back in the dirt and the sand and wondered if this was how he died, Kamino felt foreign to him. It had felt like a dream that someone else had a very long time ago.

For a harrowing moment, at the end of one hall, Cody had thought, dizzyingly, that he was watching Fett stride down the corridor, nevermind the fact that Fett had been dead since the first battle of Geonosis.

For a single, heart-stopping moment, Cody was small again. Cody was out past curfew, Fox at his side, and they were sneaking through the quiet, sterile corridors and trading kisses in the dark. Fett was rounding the bend and if he were to catch them— 

“Cody!” As Cody had blinked, the shape at the end of the hall had resolved—not into Fett, but into 99. A smile overtook Cody’s face without conscious input and he’d strode forward to meet him for a clasp of arms. “I’m so glad I found you,” 99 was saying, all in a rush, his breath coming short and strained like he’d been moving at a pace unadvisable for his lungs. 

99 had led Cody to a part of Tipoca City that clones rarely had access to. Part of the medical ward—but closer to the labs than to the tubies or to the medbay—there was a room with massive, Kaminoan-designed doors that boasted a complex digital lock.

As the door swished open, 99 anxiously fiddling with his own hands in front of the keypad, a small figure had come barreling out, brandishing a metal tray like a blunt instrument. Cody’s body had taken over, soldier’s instincts moving for him, and the tray was wrenched away from the attacker, colliding with the opposite wall with a sharp metal clang. Cody had the assailant pinned under his knee in a heartbeat. It took a ragged moment before the words 99 was shouting filtered through.

The assailant was a cadet, wriggling and snarling under Cody’s pin like his life depended on it.

“Crosshair!” 99 had begged. “Stop, please! This is who I was telling you about! This is Cody.”

Cody couldn’t fathom why 99 had been telling cadets about him. Cody couldn’t fathom why 99 said his name like it was something that was supposed to matter to this kid.

“Don’t need help from any reg!” Crosshair—the cadet—had snarled. And then he’d— 

He’d bitten Cody. 

Right on the arm that held him down. Right where Cody had bitten that trainer whose name he couldn’t recall, this many years and campaigns later. The bite that had earned him a name. 

Cody hauled the scrappy thing—Crosshair—up by his fatigues, which fit him too loosely and were clearly self-hemmed at the corners. He’d cuffed the kid’s ear gently for the bite, because the adika looked like Rex had when Cody had absconded with him—like a cornered animal, lashing out in its desperation and equally likely to bite you for your kindness as it would be to bite you for violence. 

Crosshair, 99 had explained, had three surviving siblings. They were all experimental units that had been genetically modified for some unknown purpose by the Kaminoans. They were ruled defective—all four of them—and slated for immediate decommissioning. Crosshair had an immune deficiency disorder and a form of albinism that turned his hair shock-white and patches of his skin milky-pale. Hunter—a shy little thing that clung to 99 and did not let go—had seizures and migraines. Wrecker had a chronic inability to concentrate or sit still for any period of time and suffered from bouts of debilitating pain as a consequence of his enhanced size and strength. Tech spoke infrequently and only to a trusted few and boasted behavioral and physical tics that he seemed helpless to control.

“I’d hoped, given Rex, and given your position, that you…” 99 had trailed off. Cody hadn’t needed him to finish.

“Adika,” Cody had said, dropping to his knees until he was closer to Crosshair’s height. “What are you good at? What are you best at?”

Crosshair had frowned at him, expression severe. When he’d spoke, his voice was raspy and wet, like he’d recently had a nasty cough. “I can shoot.”

“Show me.”

The Kaminoans never did anything without a reason. Compassion was not part of their equations. Cody knew this. He’d known it since he’d fought, tooth and nail, against Rex’s decommissioning—keeping his vod’ika with him at all times until he could convince one of their trainers to take interest enough to take Rex under their wing. The things that mattered to the trainers and the Kaminoans were demonstrable skills and strengths. Nothing more. Not dreams or smiles or laughter. Just how good you were. 

Crosshair had a brilliant, almost supernatural aim. Hunter could pinpoint a malfunctioning practice droid in a set of two hundred just by the sound it made. Wrecker could rip durasteel apart like flimsiplast. Tech did things with computers that Cody could not even begin to follow—and the wriggly little osik was impossible to keep pinned on a mat. 

They practically made their cases on their own. Cody just needed to put enough pressure on the longnecks to make them listen. 

“I’m not your vod,” Crosshair had hissed at him, when all was said and done. The others had hugged Cody—except for Tech, who didn’t like hugs all that much and had opted for a keldabe instead—but Crosshair had just lingered until 99 had ushered the other boys away. 

Cody’s heart ached. “What will it take to prove to you that I am, Crosshair?”

Cross’s face, pale from the exertion of the day, his sharp-eyes sunken into his skinny face, had crumpled up with anger at the vulnerable tone to Cody’s voice—a deeply protective creature scenting weakness in the water. 

“Nobody gives a kark about us but 99. You’re not any different than the rest of them,” he’d spat.

Cody had taken a deep, centering breath. “Do you know what the gai bal manda is, Crosshair?” 

“No.”

“It’s the traditional Mandalorian adoption vows.”

Crosshair’s eyebrows had gone up. “We aren’t mandos. We aren’t even people.”

Cody set his bucket on the ground and motioned him closer. “We are people. Just because the longnecks and the trainers don’t recognize it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” Cody swallowed, words sticking in his throat. “You are what you are. What they think you are doesn’t change that, Crosshair. And you’re right—we aren’t Mandalorian. We’re Vode. And they aren’t the same, but they’re similar. And one thing that we’ve kept as Vode is the gal bal manda. It binds a parent to a child. It means, ‘I know your name as my child.’

“I have to leave, Crosshair. My vode need me. The Republic needs me, too.” Cody hit the release on his cuirass and exposed the inner portion of his chest plate, baring the names scrawled inside to Crosshair’s eyes. “But my most important people? I keep them with me, always. See?”

Crosshair krept closer, warily, and peered at the names. Cody’s batchmates, Rex, Waxer and Boil, General Kenobi. Cody took a breath. “If you’d like, I could add your names here. And I could say the gai bal manda.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could offer. That, and his com code, which 99 had already accepted in case of any emergency. 

“You actually mean that,” Crosshair had observed, some of the tension leaving his jaw. “You want to adopt us. And put us there.”

“Only if you’ll allow me.” 

“And it means you’ll come back? For us?” It was a small crack in an otherwise well-crafted facade—the child that Crosshair is poking through the rough-hewn edges of a young soldier. Cody had reached out and pulled him close. Crosshair and gone—stiffly, but he had gone.

“I can’t promise that I will. The war takes vode every day. But, no matter where I am, I can promise that you will always be with me, and if I say the words, you will always have that part of me, too.”

Tentatively, Crosshair had gripped him back, little fingers worming into the spaces between his plates, seeking neoprene body-glove below. Had anyone but 99 ever held Crosshair like this? Or was Crosshair, by virtue of being the ori’vod to his batch, the one that did the holding?

Cody held on tighter and thought, with everything he had I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. He’d never questioned his duty before.  

“Okay,” Crosshair whispered. “You can say it.”

And Cody had. 

After Fox, Cody calls Rex. Rex promises to alert his ARCs that are still planetside. “Don’t die, Cody,” he makes him promise.  

“Don’t let Skywalker go off the rails until we’re done.” 

“Cody… are you sure this is the right thing?” Rex asks just before signing off. “All of the good we’re doing for the Republic…”

“We can still do it, vod’ika. We can. But this way, our vode at home will be safe, yeah?” Cody tries to impress upon Rex, his loyal little brother, how important this really is. Cody was never going to have any issues with Fox—Fox has been wanting to watch the system burn just for the fun of it since the very first month of his deployment on Coruscant. Rex was always going to be the tougher sell.

“And you’re sure Kenobi isn’t… manipulating you? Like… Sith-stuff?”

Tech is on Obi-Wan’s shoulders in order to reach a bit of wiring on the beacon that will effectively place Kamino on communications black-out. He’s smiling. So is Obi-Wan.

“I’m sure.”

The Plan goes off without a hitch. It isn’t until three hours past the launch-point of the mission that anything goes awry. The tubies are secured. Jango’s genetic material is secured. The cadets are secured. All but one exit out of Tipoca city has been secured. All that’s left is the green-light from Medical, General Ti, and the final transport.

Cody and Ghost (minus Helix and Crys) are leading Obi-Wan through the winding, empty halls of Kamino, racing to lock-down the last of the transports out of the city when Obi-Wan stops them with a single hand outstretched.

“Something… enormous just happened,” Obi-Wan admits, turning to Cody with wide, gold eyes. Force shit, Cody concludes. Half-frantic, Obi-Wan turns and says, “Longshot, get Helix on the line, now.”

But Helix is already calling them.

“We need Obi-Wan in the Labs ASAP, Commander,” Helix is saying before any one of them can even so much as tell him the line is connected. Cody is already redirecting aurek-squad to secure the last transport as they change direction, running for Helix’s position.

“Sitrep?” Cody demands.

“There are biological chips in our fucking heads, Cody. And only Nala Se knows how to deactivate them.”

They run. There’s nothing else to be done but run. There are a million questions to ask but no time to ask them and Cody will not stop moving until Obi-Wan does. Obi-Wan is running like the gates of Hell itself are at his heels. 

They run for a lifetime and for no time at all, hearts pounding, blacks going slick with sweat. 

"Master Kenobi," a voice rings out from around the bend. Obi-Wan halts them with a hand just as Master Ti comes into view, her montrals and markings a splash of color across the white and silver background of Kamino. There's a certain cautiousness to her voice behind the serenity all Jedi masters cultivate. "Stand down."

Her lightsaber is in her hand, unlit. Cody shifts his grip on his blaster and wonders when that will change—when Obi-Wan will cross the indelible line between ally and enemy. His General-turned-something-else stands eerily still, eyes trained on the Jedi Master without a hint of hesitation or fear.

Over coms, Cody hears Longshot relay to Helix that there has been a small delay. Helix confirms that he’ll hold the position. It’s all background noise to what is happening right now, in front of their eyes. 

“Master Ti,” Obi-Wan offers—a very simple greeting for something that feels anything but simple. All at once, Cody is furiously grateful that Ghost is composed of older-generation troopers; those who were brought up in the days before the Jedi even knew about them .

As if Cody has spoken it into being, a few decorated troopers approach Master Ti from behind, clearly intent to support her in whatever conflict comes next. Cody can only identify Colt by glance—he does not know the names of the others.

“Blasters on stun, boys,” Cody breathes over coms. 

"This is not the way," Master Ti says to Obi-Wan, her voice gone firm with her conviction. “The powers of the Dark Side are a lie, Obi-Wan. Surrender now, while the damage can still be undone.” 

"Says who?" Obi-Wan replies with a smile. 

They meet in a clash of lightsabers so severe, it’s as if a physical shockwave radiates out from the point at which their blades meet. Ghost dives for whatever paltry cover can be found, trading fire with Master Ti’s men.

They have their blasters set to stun. Master Ti’s men do not.

Cody expects the conflict to be longer than it is. He’s so used to longer engagements that a scuffle with a Jedi and three other vode in the hallway takes him by surprise in its brevity.

Master Ti is a Jedi Master, but not one who sees conflict on the regular—not like Obi-Wan has. It takes him only minutes to disarm her of her lightsaber and hold her still long enough with the Force that Cody is able to stun her. He hits her twice with the stun, unwilling to chance togruta stamina and Jedi luck. 

Colt throws himself into the fight with an enraged roar, only to be deftly interrupted by Obi-Wan, who subdues him with startlingly gentle efficiency.

“No harm will come to her,” Obi-Wan says as he holds Colt, thrashing, to the floor. He has to be using the Force—Cody knows from experience that he can easily pin his General in a fair spar. Yet, for all Colt bucks and thrashes, Obi-Wan remains unmoved. 

Colt barks out a laugh that sounds more like a curse than anything. The other two vode have already been stunned and are being secured into binders alongside General Ti.

“I know what a Sith looks like,” Colt spits. “I never thought you would be bastard-enough to Fall, Kenobi.”

Boil tears his bucket off his head and stalks forward, his jaw a rigid line. “He fell for us, chakar! There are slave chips in our karking heads!” it explodes out of him in a fury of words, a near incomprehensible-growl. “The longnecks put slave chips in our brains and spent our whole lives indoctrinating us so we wouldn’t fight back because they knew if we ever did, they’d karking lose. Don’t you get it? Kenobi did this for us. And meanwhile, what does Master Ti do? She lets cadets get decommissioned as a matter of karking politics!” He punctuates his outburst with two precise stun bolts. Colt will undoubtedly be feeling it tomorrow.

Boil stands there, blaster outstretched, chest heaving as he pants. Waxer steps forward, placing a hand on his riduur’s shoulder, only to be roughly shrugged off. 

“We’re fucking slaves,” Boil continues, hands shaking. “Only slaves get chipped. This whole time… All that osik about protecting the Republic… Fuck.” He places both hands—including the one holding his blaster—over his face and sinks to a crouch, shaking.

Cody has seen men break down before. It still rattles him, every time. 

Obi-Wan sinks to match Boil's height, barely inches away, but still does not touch. “It wasn’t for nothing,” Obi-Wan murmurs, softly, answering the unspoken agony in Boil's voice. “It wasn’t for nothing, Boil.”

Carefully, Obi-Wan eases Boil’s hands away from his face and lifts his discarded helmet into his line of sight. The little cartoon twi’lek girl stares at him, smiling. Boil hisses out a sound through his teeth, something caught between fury and grief. “The battles you fought still matter. They will always matter,” Obi-Wan says. "Regardless of the circumstances of your creation, the people you saved were real. The lives you protected matter. It wasn't for nothing." 

Their coms crackle to life, breaking the heavy silence. “Status?” Helix demands.

“We’re coming,” Cody says. He meets Obi-Wan’s eyes over the bow of Boil’s head. Cody can tell that Obi-Wan doesn’t want to leave him, but Boil is a liability after a breakdown like that.

“We’ll stay and watch over them,” Waxer announces, taking it out of their hands entirely. “Go to Helix.” 

They do.

There’s an expression that Cody can only describe as numb horror on Helix’s face. He’s bent over a computer, the blue-glow of the screen reflecting in his wet eyes. A few feet behind him, three troopers, including two of Rex's ARCs—the boys from Rishii, Cody notes—have their guns trained on Nala Se, who is bound tightly with binders.

Obi-Wan approaches Helix at the consul and Helix flinches backwards, his eyes wide. Obi-Wan stops, frozen with a hand half-outstretched, and the lab is silent but for the sound of their breathing.

“We’re a trap,” Helix says, his voice wrecked like he’s been screaming for hours. His eyes find Cody’s over Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “We’re a trap for the Jedi. We’ve—we’ve been a trap all along.”

“Helix?” Obi-Wan questions, still reaching out as if he could soothe him. Helix shudders all over and shakes head, taking another step back.

“There is a chip in our heads meant to override our free will. Upon—” his voice stutters, breaks, and starts again, “upon voice activation by the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, we are designed to execute the Jedi.”

Cody goes cold.

“There—there are Guardsmen in the Temple,” Helix croaks. “All of us— any of us— could be made to—”

“That’s impossible,” Obi-Wan breathes. Eyes flashing, he turns to Nala Se.

Cody has rarely seen Obi-Wan—or any Jedi—use a mind-trick. He saw Obi-Wan do so only once on a diplomatic mission gone sideways. He’d waved his hand in front of the face of a guard and the guard had simply let them walk past him and into the throne room where the Republic senator was being held hostage. 

This is nothing like that. There’s no hand wave. Just a hard, uncompromising look in Obi-Wan’s golden eyes and a curt, sharp, “You will tell me everything about the chips, starting with how to deactivate them and whether or not they can be removed.”

Nala Se simply opens her mouth and begins talking, as if there was never any other possibility at all. 

Cody should be shocked. Cody should be disgusted and horrified and maybe even lost to rage, like Boil. He should be leaning on his vode, like Rex's ARCs are leaning on each other. He should be devastated. Scared. Angry.

He is surprised to find that all that he is relieved . It spreads through his body like a chill—like standing out on the landing platform in the middle of a torrential downpour and getting soaked to the skin. Like the kind of cold that, when you come back inside, the change in temperature tingles across every nerve and penetrates down to your bones.

He watches Obi-Wan pull information from Nala Se with nothing but his words and his power and thinks, suffused through with this enormous relief, I could have killed you.  

As Helix types Nala Se’s codes with shaking hands into the terminal, I could have killed you and never even known why I did it.

As the beacon goes out that renders the chips dead—amplified, somehow, by something Obi-Wan is doing with the Force that makes sweat glitter at his brow and his lips turn pale with effort— I could have lost you and the adiik and my vode and myself and never known that I’d lost it at all.   

“It’s done?” he asks, as if from far away.

Helix nods.  “We’ll deal with the aging in the morning,” Helix adds. Cody realizes that he has no idea what time it is. It could be morning now.

“What do we do with Nala Se?” Longshot asks.

“Take her to the Negotiator and keep her in a holding cell," Cody orders. 

The kaminoan seems to come back to herself, all at once. She blinks her enormous, unreadable eyes at Cody. “Why would I help you?” she asks.

When Obi-Wan turns to her, still panting with the exertion of whatever he’d done to help deactivate the chips of the vode even lightyears away, his eyes are filled with rage. The danger of him rolls over Cody like a wave, pooling liquid arousal at the base of his spine. “You will,” Obi-Wan says, simply. You will.

Nala Se swallows as she is led away by a contingent of five armed vode.

Only when she is gone does Cody stride forward and capture Obi-Wan’s lips in his own. His heart beats to the drum of relief, I could have lost you, with every pulse. Obi-Wan opens under his lips.

He tastes of freedom.

One week after Kamino has been claimed, the vode begin negotiations with the Jedi council. In three days time, they will begin negotiations with the Republic Senate. These two entities are now separate once more. And it’s all because Fox—the crazy bastard—had decided to make everyone’s lives a whole lot easier by being a shabla  di’kut. 

As soon as the dust had settled and Cody had contacted each clone Commander with the news of what they had done and what they had uncovered, Fox had apparently armed himself with an old-fashioned slug-thrower, walked right into the Supreme Chancellor’s office, and shot him between the eyes without even pausing to think about it.

“He didn’t sense any danger from me because I wasn’t thinking about killing him,” Fox had explained, calm, as if blood spatter wasn’t still drying on his armor. “I was thinking about the hot bath I’m about to take and the bottle of Corellian champagne I am going to drink.” 

Fox is liaising for Cody on Coruscant, standing straight in front of the Jedi council while Cody, Obi-Wan, and Helix attend via holo. Thire told Cody over com message that he’s fairly certain Fox has not cleaned his armor since killing the Supreme Chancellor and is now wearing the man’s blood like some grim trophy. Cody isn’t sure that’s true but he wouldn’t put it past his Sith-murdering vod, either.

Shaak Ti is in her council seat, flanked by Colt. When they'd placed an unconscious Master Ti on a transport heading for Coruscant with a holo-recording explaining everything that had happened, Colt had demanded to go with her. He thought she'd have an easier time believing what had happened if he was there to break it to her. Colt had struggled to believe it himself. It had taken Helix dropping Colt's own removed chip in his hand. 

This morning, Cody woke up in a vod- pile that featured Obi-Wan at its very center.

This morning, Cody edged Obi-Wan until he screamed when he came, held pinned by Helix, Crys, and Punk as Cody rode him to completion.

This morning, Cody had showered with his former-general, and then helped him make pancakes for Hunter, Crosshair, Tech and Wrecker. 

Some of the vode will continue serving as a mercenary-army for the Republic as Dooku and Grievous are brought to heel. Some of them will stay on Kamino, continuing to train and care for the cadets and tubies and beginning to build a home out of the sterile walls. Some of them will become part of the Jedi order, helping the ExploraCorp and other Jedi-led relief efforts across the galaxy. Some of them will do other things altogether. 

Negotiations are still on-going. They won’t conclude for a while yet. Skywalker's wife—Skywalker himself having since left the Order after the news of Obi-Wan's fall, Palpatine's identity, and the chipped vode—has become a fierce champion for the vode's rights in the Republic Senate, campaigning tirelessly for back-pay among other things. 

There are so many pieces that have yet to fall together. But for now, the vode stands free in front of the Jedi council, and Cody's vambrace is on Obi-Wan's arm.

Cody reaches out and snags Obi-Wan’s hand in his own, just because he can, the meeting be damned.  Obi-Wan turns to him, a question in his gold eyes.

Nothing, Cody answers down the fledgling Force-bond that connects their minds. I just love you. 

Obi-Wan smiles.

You’re mistaken, my dear, he replies from the deepest part of Cody’s soul. That is everything.