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He thinks all the time about if things could have been different.
If they could have been slower.
If they could have been softer.
If they could have swirled and melted together like milk into the dark depths of the tea that his general holds in front of his face like a prayer in itself.
He thinks about what it would take for things to be different. For the constant motion to slow. For the boots to have a break from the dirt.
He thinks about wearing clothes that aren’t made of plastoid or plastoid fibers, that aren’t white or black.
What if, he wonders, they had time? What would he give to have a little more time?
The closest he comes to holding the hand that feeds him is when he hands it back its own electric pulse.
General Kenobi smiles at him and says ‘thank you, dear. Where would I be without you?’ and Cody is choked by the sensation of oncoming doom.
His general is dead.
Cody comes to himself and sits down on the hard ground among the horror of battle to find a pile of stones scattered by the corpse of a beast where his general is meant to be.
His general is dead.
His general is dead.
Cody gave the order.
Cody gave the order.
It echoes through his head over and over as the minds around him clear and horror begins to spread.
They, all of them, the tens of thousands of men Cody is meant to protect, they have all been hollowed out. That feeling grows greater and grander until it erupts into screams among the men. Cody hears it over his comms. He hears it around him on the ground.
The sound morphs into a rising rush that sounds like a roar and nothingness at the same time.
Tears break free from Cody’s eyes. He is helpless to stop them as they plummet from his face to the broken soil that this mass tragedy—this atrocity—has taken place on.
The Republic has fallen. The weapons have killed all their generals. They have killed the hands that fed them, the bodies that curled around theirs and treated them like humans.
Cody cannot swallow for the marble that has become lodged in his throat.
They get up. They are rounded up. Cattle, now. No, not even that. They’re fodder. Rank and status are cast aside as they are lined up back on the ship.
Cody’s tears are slapped from his face. His hair is shorn. Everyone’s hair is shorn. Everyone cleans their armor until it is spotless. Not so much as a scrape of paint will be tolerated, inside or out.
Inside or out.
Cody weeps as he chips away the cheerful yellow that he wore with pride.
Gone is the sun.
Their armor is taken from them—all of them. Their sobs and cries are ignored. They are beaten for resistance.
They are fodder.
They are fodder.
Cody cannot stop crying.
He lays on his side and watches his pulse in his wrist on the bunk he has been given. It isn’t his bunk. The empire tells them that they don’t own things anymore. This bunk is a station that Cody is to be in at the hours listed in red on its pipes. He is to be here and horizontal between those hours. The lights will stay off. No one may leave without the permission of the natborn guards at the door. Those guards check them all in by number.
CC-2224 has been assigned Bunk 87.
CC-2224 has an affinity for the color yellow.
CC-2224 has resisted reprogramming for a month now, and so he will now be sent to be decommissioned.
His pulse has slowed such that CC-2224 can no longer see it through the skin of his wrist. He blinks slowly at it and feels like his body is sinking into this bunk. Like a baby, his heart yearns. It wails. It screeches.
It wants something that will not come. Warmth. Tightness.
It wants Shaak Ti and her rocking. It wants to be cradled in her arms where the world feels small and safe and away from here.
CC-2224 will be decommissioned. Cody misses this life already.
CC-2224 forgets, and it is such a comfort to forget. He opens his eyes and stands on his feet. Clothing is placed into his hands. How he knows how to put it on is a mystery. How he knows when to leave the room, how to eat, how to sleep—it is all floating and swaying around him.
He is greeted by the Emperor.
He is called a loyal soldier.
He receives his orders again and goes to an assigned bunk. Bunk 87. The lights in this barrack go out at 23:00 sharp. No one may leave without the permission of the natborn guards after then.
CC-2224 has lived a long time for his people. His hands are covered in dry, loose skin. His back aches hour to hour. He finds walking long distances that he had once traversed with ease to be breath-taking—a challenge that he has not expected, although he never forgets what lays beyond his bunk.
He never forgets. Not for long, anyways. He has been trained and retrained dozens of times. Now, the Empire has given up on him. A commander no longer. He is the last clone to amble around this vessel. The others were fodder. They forgot who they were. Many of them willingly. Anything to make the pain, the guilt, the horror end.
Cody is a defective clone. The Kaminoans have said so. They told Vader. They tell Vader, every time he gives the order for Cody to be taken back to them.
They are doing things to Cody’s head that make him afraid.
They are doing things to his body. His throat is raw after every visit and he knows he must have been screaming, but he doesn’t know why.
Darth Vader tells him, time and time again, that he is a credit to his people, but when Cody looks around, he sees no people to be a credit to.
The words are hollow. Cody is kept on this vessel as a teacher. This is his role.
He teaches the natborns how to be troopers. The orders forbid him from removing his helmet. He stands in place for hours, at attention, and commands the new troopers through their lessons. When the first batch is done, they break and Cody stands at attention as they move around him in waves, off to go eat their midday meals.
The next batch of troopers takes their place. Cody is allowed to adjust his feet. These troopers are older. He commands them through their lessons. They are familiar with him. Some of them shout his number at him. He ignores these calls and maintains the pace of the lessons.
They may call him whatever they wish. He knows his name, and it is Kote.
The sun is sinking, but it has not yet set.
One day, his knees shake when he stands at attention in front of the troopers. They only shake for a few moments. The world becomes a black rush after that. Afterwards is all silent.
He opens his eyes to people moving his body. White armor. Helmets clatter as they hit the floor. He gave no order for the helmets to be removed.
“CC-2224? CC?”
He finds it difficult to move his body, to even so much as blink. The world is no longer black. It is syrupy and warm.
“You have to help him,” Someone says.
“Stand down, trooper,” one of the trainers that Cody stands alongside says. “CC-2224. Get up.”
Cody tries to move his limbs, but he cannot. Every second brings greater darkness.
“CC-2224. This is an order. Get up now.”
“He is your senior officer. You can’t talk to him like that.”
“Stand down, trooper. That’s an order to you. CC—”
“He’s hurt, sir. We need to take off his helmet.”
The click of a pistol is one that Cody knows, even through the dark. He tries to make his body move its limbs. They are so heavy and stiff. His eyes want so badly to close.
“Piece of shit.”
Aid comes in the form of a jerk on the front of Cody’s chestplate. It is intended to lift him, but because he cannot help it in this endeavor, it struggles and then swears.
“The fuck is the matter with you? Hey. CC-2224. Useless old—”
Cody knows the boot is coming, but he just doesn’t know from where. His breath escapes him when the side of his helmet collides with his head.
Blackness takes over in an instant.
He wakes up on his bunk. His wrist hangs stiff over the edge. It is all he can see. He is cold. His skin prickles and writhes against the feeling, but nothing comes of it. He is still cold.
He is still cold.
“CC-2224?”
There is something on his arm. It is held there with a papery stripe of white.
“Is it safe for him to be up there? There’s no one on the bottom bunk. Can’t you move him?”
“CC-2224 is assigned bunk 87.”
“You keep saying that. Look at him. He’s old, man. How does he even get down from there?”
“He gets down just fine. This is his bunk.”
“There’s no one else in here. It’s a fucking ghost town.”
“Listen, trooper. These are the orders.”
“But there’s no one else here.”
“Before last year, there was, actually. Three of these bastards.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. So let me get this straight. You were assigned to, what, keep three old geezers from shitting their beds? You take them to the commode?”
“For your information, no. The troopers in this room are under orders and curfew.”
“There’s no one here, shit for brains.”
“—and I have been tasked with keeping the place in order.”
There is a sigh.
“Man. He’s dying. Just—just let him sleep on the bottom bunk.”
“He’s just a clone.”
Cody closes his eyes before the hollowness overtakes him.
CC-2224 is dying. His body is too far gone. His fingers are cold, he is told that he has lost weight. Standing now feels like mounting a summit. He cannot stop shivering.
And yet there is someone who moves around his bunk, constantly, constantly arguing with the guard on duty. Cody hears him jabbing barbed comments into the man’s soft spot. He feels a warm hand brush his cheek.
“Hey, C-24,” a voice by his head says. “You cold, sir?”
Cody is freezing. He cannot answer the question, however. There is no talking in the barracks.
“Let me get you something warm. Do you want to try to eat?”
Cody wants only to stop shaking.
“He’s not going to answer you,” the guard sneers. “He only answers senior officers.”
“Man, shut the hell up,” the kind person snaps. “This isn’t about you. Turn around and mind your business.”
The shaking part of Cody finds that hysterical. If he wasn’t so cold, he would laugh, and it would feel so nice in his trembling chest.
“You wait here,” the kind person says. “I’m gonna get you something hot.”
The kind person’s accent changes often. Cody hears them and a companion once. And the next day, there are multiple companions, all jeering at the guard when he tells them that there is no talking in the barracks.
They tell him to ‘shut the fuck up’ time and time again. It becomes a joke in itself.
Cody likes it.
He’s allowed to like it, for now, anyways. So he likes it and he likes the blanket that the kind people have laid on his body. He can bury his face under it and breathe and it traps the heat. It muffles sound too, so that he doesn’t have to hear the full pity in the voices of the kind people who have brought it.
There are, he thinks, four or five of them. He doesn’t recognize any of their voices, but they know him, so they must be troopers. Young troopers. Maybe junior cadets. Maybe seniors. He isn’t sure; natborn ages are confusing.
“I heard once that the clones had actual names,” one of the voices says by him.
“Our guy is Jobbo, then,” a voice answers.
Many throats laugh. Cody opens his eyes under the blanket.
“Or CiCi,” someone else says.
“Maybe Strikes.”
“Clover?”
“Boot.”
“Tire.”
“Kote.”
The voices stop.
“HEY,” the guard snarls into the room. “You knock that shit off. You know the fuckin’ rules, trooper—”
The voice is cut off. Cody does not know why, but the sound of springs tangs out from the bottom bunk and the pipes of the bunk squeak as someone climbs onto the edge and leans their elbows on the edge of Cody’s mattress, mere inches away from his head. The old, packed material sinks in around their weight.
“What did you say, Commander?” the voice asks softly.
Gently.
Like a ‘thank you, dear.’
“Kote,” Cody breathes in the breath of that ‘thank you.’ “My name is Kote.”
A hand lays its weight on top of the blanket that covers his head.
“You do have a name,” the owner says.
There are ten of them—junior troopers. They rotate who spends time in the barrack. Cody knows this now because he has gained the strength to lift his head again. He does not know the junior troopers; he has never seen any of their faces.
They don’t know him either; they have only just seen his face.
They bring food that Cody has to refuse. His diet is regimented. He cannot eat in the barracks. The junior troopers bring him food anyways and tell him to eat it when the guard isn’t looking. They beg him to with pleading faces.
Cody asks them to please not do this. This is how he ends up being forced to forget things.
He does not want to forget. Every time, he wakes up hoarse, you see.
The junior troopers go white as he explains, at their insistence, what it means for him to ‘forget.’ They say that it is cruel. They ask why he is the one who must endure this, and Cody can only look from them to the rest of the bunks and the barracks and back.
There is no one else left, he tells them.
He is alone.
He is the last clone trooper on this vessel. The tears sting his eyes as he thinks of the affects that still sit on the bunks. There are not many, but you cannot take a toy bear from a trooper who has already died.
There is nothing left to give. There is nothing left to take.
They ask him why he has not died himself, and he has no answer. He only knows that the Kaminoans have done something to his head. They’re always working on his head. They’re always taking his blood. He’s afraid of them; he can admit that now that there are no brothers left to pretend for.
“Why are you still here?” one of the juniors asks with a voice full of sympathy.
Cody has no answer for this boy either. He does not know why he is here. He is too sick to train now. He is too frail to fight. He can barely move his body to get off the bunk. Although he refuses to take Ponds’ place underneath, he sees the youths’ logic in asking him to do so.
He does not tell them that the last he laid there was to hold Ponds’s hand while his breath shook in his chest.
Cody does not want to sleep in a grave. He already sleeps in a cemetery.
So instead, he begins to ask them questions.
Why are they here? Why do they abuse the guard? What has led them to this vessel?
Many have been raised to become stormtroopers. They lost the means to be anything else; their parents thought that this would be their way out of lives otherwise dripping with uncertainty.
They abuse the guard because he is ‘a dick.’ There is no difficult answer there.
“You’re not going to die, C-24,” one of the girls says to him. “You’re our favorite teacher.”
Cody points out that he is a terrible teacher and the youths laugh at him.
“You say that, but when people get tired, you always decide that you need to catch your breath,” they tell him.
“You don’t yell at us.”
“You’re not a bully like the rest of them are.”
Cody does not understand, but that is because he has not been allowed to be with the natborns on the ship. He has never eaten in their hall or slept in their barracks while they are in them. He is kept here until the natborns have finished using the facilities, and then he is allowed to set foot in those places. There was a time when there were enough clones that facilities were mixed, but that time passed long, long ago.
He, of course, does not tell the youths this. They are already angry on his behalf about things that none of them can change.
There is one girl who climbs up onto Cody’s bunk with him. She invades his space to read while her companions talk among themselves down on Ponds’s bunk. She often brings with her an extra blanket. Cody does not argue against her presence. The heat has not returned to his limbs. When the youths leave, he is the lone source of it in these barracks.
He must take what he can get.
One day, he feels the girl climb up onto the bunk and sit down, but no chattering accompanies her into the room. Cody turns his head to find this young woman with tear tracks pulling dark trails down her cheeks. She wipes them away and tells him that she is sorry.
She didn’t know where else to go. She didn’t bring a blanket either. She’s sorry.
Cody reaches out and touches her knee, then turns back over and closes his eyes. His bones ache today. He wants to dream of sunlight.
The girl sniffs and whimpers. She swears and slowly slouches until Cody can feel her knee touching the blanket covering his back. He allows it to remain where it is.
The girl cries harder.
Cody is taken down from his bunk. He is not awake fully until his arms are aching in the grip of two guards who half-march, half-carry him down the hallway.
He knows what this is. He knows where he is going.
He learned long ago that crying out was useless, but he tries anyways on pure instinct.
It is still useless.
He wakes hoarse with eyes hovering over his face and in that moment, he screams so loudly that the faces draw back.
He fights the bonds that hold him to the bed. He fights them and fights them and screams again as long fingered hands flatten themselves to his chest. He is told to relax.
He kicks instead.
Over his body, bags are exchanged. He balls his fist and crams his elbow into his side. It is forced out. It is forced open. Pressure pins his head back and his limbs down as he struggles to break away.
Then it all abandons him, but so does the fight. His chest rises and falls in deep undulations. He can hear his own gasping. His finger tips are cold.
They are so cold.
He tries one last time to scream as the figures above him blur out into soft shapes.
It doesn’t work.
He wakes up on bunk 87, but there are no junior troopers in the room. Instead there are four guards, two inside the barrack entrance, two outside.
Cody feels fear rising in his lungs. He moves his hand and stops there.
His hand.
His hand is old and leathery with loose skin on its back. He watched as it aged. He is used to the urge to pop his fingers. He is used to watching the veins come closer and closer to the surface.
This hand that is clutched in the bed now is smooth and tan. He turns it over to see its palm. Its muscle and skin is tight and firm.
He scrambles back until his back hits the wall on the other edge of the bunk and stares back and forward between both of his palms.
They are his palms. He can feel them. He can move the fingers on them. But they are not the right palms.
“Wh—”
“The Commander is conscious,” one of the troopers at the door says into a radio.
Cody’s head snaps his direction.
It does not hurt. He reaches up to touch his face. His fingers trail over the skin, over his scar; the tissue over it is smooth. Its edges are tight, but not so tight that it puckers, pulling more than its fair share of wrinkles into the corner of that eye.
His chest heaves with his breathing. He looks down his shirt. Rucks up his sleeves. His heart throbs and his gums are smooth around the base of his back teeth.
“What happened to me?” he asks his hands more than the guards. “WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?”
“The commander is agitated,” a trooper says urgently into his radio.
Cody buries his fingers into his hair and feels softness there. He cannot see it, but he can see the hair on his forearms and it is dark brown. Unbleached. Un-gilded.
“CC-2224,” one of the troopers orders, “You are to remain in your bunk until Lord Vader’s arrival.”
Rage surges like waves as realization takes over.
Lord Vader stands before Cody with a ruined body and asks him between puffing, hissing breaths, how he has found the latest therapy.
Cody explodes.
Never before did he realize how hopeful he was that he would soon die. Never before has he felt so helpless. The only natural process he could depend on has been snatched from his fingers. He is again a young man. His accelerated aging factor has been ‘cured.’
Lord Vader tells him that this is a gift, but Cody knows that he will not kill him now because he needs him, so he throws himself out of his bunk and slams a fist into the man’s helmet so that he knows what Cody thinks of his ‘treatment.’
He spits on the helmet and tells Lord Vader that he is always grateful to serve and warns him that if there are not guards placed in each of the grave-beds in this barracks, then he is going to break every system on this vessel.
He will not rest until Vader is in the same agony that he has placed Cody himself.
There are ten junior troopers, and they gather around Cody’s fun new digs.
It is a cell. He sits behind the glass wall with his legs stretched out in front of him wearing new clothes. They are the black, stretchy top and bottoms that slide under armor. Cody’s armor is black now. It has been for a long time, but when the armor was set before him the day before, he kicked it so hard it slammed into another officer’s knee.
He is ‘ornery’ these days, the guards say. He is a ‘problem.’ He ‘keeps defying curfew’ and ‘becomes aggressive’ when he’s worked out that he’s successfully made eye contact with a guard.
Hence the new digs.
The junior troopers gasp in shock at the fat that fills out his facial features and the thick muscle around the cordy veins in his wrists. He sits with his legs askew and his chin down. He has been told that he is not allowed to talk to the troopers. If he speaks, he will be punished.
The girl who sat on his bedside and cried asks through the glass if it is really him, C-24.
A guard tells her that Cody cannot answer her.
Cody tells him to fuck off and die. And no, actually, he isn’t C-24. He is Clone Commander Cody, Kote, with the 212th. His general is named Obi-Wan Kenobi. And he is not, nor has he ever been, the dog of Anakin Skywalker.
The guard tells him to get on his knees. Cody tells him to put a foot inside this cage. The guard again tells him to get on his knees.
Cody stands and lifts his chin.
“Make me,” he says.
They do.
The junior troopers are terrified of the man who is no longer curled under the covers they bring. They are frightened to see all that Cody was once and is again. In his face, they see no softness, only defiance. Darth Vader has told Cody that he can kick and scream and cry, but he is not leaving this ship. He will not die in some fool’s heroism. He will not die period, Darth Vader tells him.
He must be studied first. He is a miracle. The accelerated aging factor was clearly a mistake. The Kaminoans should have introduced a transition into a reduced factor after the clones hit a certain level of maturity.
Cody tells him to go rot in the shallows of whatever acid bath wreaked havoc upon his body.
His general is Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Darth Vader tells him never to speak that name.
Cody tells him, just as he has told anyone who speaks to him, that his name is Commander Cody of the 212th and his general is Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The junior troopers tell him quietly that his general is Darth Vader, and Cody shakes his head.
“My general is a good man,” he tells them, over the guard’s piercing shriek. “He is gone now, but not as long as I remember him. And I remember him. I remember all of them.”
The junior troopers ask what it means to be a ‘good’ man. Cody cannot tell before he is again forced to his knees.
The girl is the one who brings the others. The vessel is flooded in blood red light. Alarms scream.
The girl smashes the lock on the glass and deactivates the currents running through it.
Cody wastes no time in getting up and shattering the glass with a kick that feels as natural as breathing. The junior troopers haven’t thought much beyond ‘run.’ Cody, however, has had days in this place. Now that his body is no longer obsessed with finding and making heat, he has had days upon days of clarity.
He has ten kids.
And then he has a gun, courtesy of his best friend, the now-noseless guard.
And then he has a ship, courtesy of an attitude problem he no longer cares to hide. He pushes the last kid in and looks up to make direct eye contact with a gleaming shadow of a man.
Across the chaos taking place in the hangar, Vader throws out a hand and begins to curl its fingers.
Cody takes aim.
With both hands, fuckface.
Cody now has ten kids, a vessel, a head full of imperial knowledge, and an axe to grind. He bites at the kids’ ankles until they get ahold of themselves and realize that they sure have committed treason. They are collectively weak-kneed about it until Cody reminds them that if they don’t do something about their treason soon, there won’t be enough of them left to stand trial for it.
They need to find someplace to stay.
“But where?” one of them asks him.
“We follow the Force,” he tells them.
The junior traitors do not understand. Cody points out the windshield of their vessel.
“That way,” he says.
“But why?”
Because, Cody tells them all with a giddy heartbeat, they’ve got to get arrested.
Cody gets them arrested like the professional that he is. He stands before all his damn kids and tells the officers that they have information that their princess would be interested in. He insists. The officers don’t believe him, but they take him and the kids off their ship all the same and march them all to a cell.
Its walls are not glass. Cody sits on the floor, crosslegged and surrounded by his baby traitors. He keeps his chin up and they tuck in close around him and follow his lead.
The daughter of Bail Organa steps into his cell hours later, backed by the stoic faces of people who Cody has never met. He does not fear her or them.
“Who are you?” Bail Organa’s daughter asks him.
She is a slight little thing. Cody looks into her eyes and sees the strength of her father, Bail.
“My name is Kote,” Cody says, holding that penetrating gaze. “I am the Marshall Commander of the GAR’s 212th battalion. I am a clone, and my general is Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Organa’s daughter’s eyes blow wide.
“You’re a clone?” she asks.
Cody bows his head in a nod.
“You’re too young to be a clone.”
He weighs that with his head.
“You came from the Empire?”
“We came from the Empire,” Cody says, gesturing to the junior traitors. “These are my students.”
“Students?”
The girl who once cried on Cody’s bed turns his way. He meets her eye and lifts a hand to lay on the nape of her neck, where her knee once pressed into his own back.
“They are my students,” he says again. “And they have had enough of living lives chosen for them.”
Cody has ten kids and two brothers who have made it farther than anyone could ever have imagined. Wolffe and Rex explode into joy when they see him. They too, are old. Their skin is dry on their hands. Rex has grown a white beard. Cody will never let him go again. He holds him and holds him and holds him and Rex buries his face into his neck, leaving it warm and wet with tears.
When Rex finally pulls away to look at Cody, Cody does not let him take away his hands.
He wants to hold him for longer.
His little brother.
His baby brother.
Rex does not object to being squeezed once again.
He is so warm.
Wolffe joins them, and he too, is warm.
Cody will see them through to the end. He crosses his heart. He will take care of Rex when he can no longer bounce around as spry as he is. He will hold Wolffe in his arms the way he held Ponds.
Bly.
Thire.
Fox.
He held all of them, and he will hold these two as well, even through streaming eyes and kissed knuckles.
Rex pinches his cheeks and shakes his face and asks him what happened to him to keep him so handsome. Cody tells him that he would not wish it on anyone, but the fact is that he was returned to Kamino.
Rex and Wolffe go quiet. They understand. Finally, finally people who understand. Cody wants to hold them forever. He doesn’t want them to die. He doesn’t want to be alone in a mausoleum ever again. He feels terrible for abandoning those ghosts. Those spirits. He left them.
Wolffe catches his face in his hand and smooths tears from his eyes into the skin under them.
He tells Cody that it isn’t his fault. Nothing is his fault. He tried so hard. He held out for so long.
Cody has forgotten what it is like to be held. He leans his cheek into his brother’s hand.
Wolffe holds him.
Rex holds him.
He’s finally got them, too.
Cody ends up with ten kids and one goofy-looking one that he’s got on loan from Rex. The goofy one is the last jedi they’ve got left. Cody will follow him. He tells the baby jedi this, and the baby jedi stares at him with a half-open mouth of wonder. He informs Cody that he is very tall.
Cody stares into Rex’s soul while he makes excuses for the kid. He explains that the boy is Anakin Skywalker’s son. Cody does not believe this due to a lack of asshole-energy floating around the kid’s general being, but Rex insists, so Cody must gave him at least an inch.
Rex thanks him for it and gently asks Luke to tell Cody about Ben.
The stars align.
Luke talks about his uncle, a tall man with silvered hair and a face perpetually bemused, like a content tooka. He talks about how his uncle herded bantha on their home planet of Tatooine. Whenever Luke was in trouble, it was always Uncle Ben who came to herd him back to safety like he did his cattle.
Uncle Ben had a funny accent and a particular dislike of Luke’s droid companion. He had blue, twinkling eyes and a knowing smile, and Luke always knew he was full of secrets. When Ben found Luke and showed him that he was a jedi, Luke couldn’t say that he was surprised. That was just who his uncle was. That was exactly the kind of thing that he would do.
Cody stands there, looking down into the pale eyes of his general’s padawan—Kenobi’s nephew, Kenobi’s last hope—and he adds Luke immediately to his collection of young traitors who must be protected at all costs.
The stars align once again in a year’s time, when Cody is free of his probation period and most of his junior traitors. Half of them, at least. The rest are attached to him; he can’t help it, he is a charismatic person at heart.
He leaves the traitors with Rex and Wolffe and heads out to meet with his eleventh problem child.
Luke has all but disappeared from view in the greater scheme of things. His sister does not know where he is. Nor his friends. He has no other family to speak of. But what he does have is a freakishly bad-tempered droid. Cody tracks R2-D2 and finds baby Skywalker in the midst of building a temple. It looks little like it is supposed to. Cody rubs mud from the young man’s cheeks as he explains this.
Luke’s shoulders fall. His eyes are the color of tears as he looks to his creation.
He has never seen a jedi temple. He will never see one. The chance was taken from him, and Cody was a part of it.
He tells Luke that he’ll help him; he remembers what the temple looked like.
Luke sleeps curled up on his side at night, twitching and whimpering in his personal darkness. Cody has grown used to his struggles in the last few weeks of their acquaintance. He finds that if he drags a cover onto Luke’s shoulders, he will settle somewhat. He does it now and watches the boy’s breath start to even out already.
He is a hard worker, Luke is.
Unlike his father, he does not consider himself to be a master of anything. He tells Cody that he just wanted to be a pilot. His chin drops as he clutches at his wrist. Cody wishes that he had something to say to Luke to make him feel wanted by this galaxy.
Luke has no one besides his droid, not really. His friends and his sister are far away from him, not fully understanding what he is trying to do, even if they are supportive of him. The people who raised him are gone, their land and bodies are salted and burnt.
Luke smiles to himself as he works and sings and laughs at seemingly nothing. He is hope alive. A flame of a person. When Cody returns from a few days out on his own, he hugs him like he has been gone for years. Cody strokes his hair and wonders if this is a penance or a gift.
He has reunited with his brothers. And yet he feels like he must look after this boy. The two refuse to meet in the middle.
Until Luke starts talking to himself.
Luke has always talked to himself, Cody had a few heart-pounding moments about it earlier in their acquaintance, but one day he starts just...talking to himself. In a fuller, more serious sort of way. He begins responding to things as if someone has said something. He laughs at silence. He tries to pick out notes to a song as if someone is conducting him.
At night, he is fine. Completely normal. Cody badgers him to eat something that isn’t shaped like a bar, and he stuffs a handful of grass in his mouth in petulance. Then next day, he is at it again.
Chatting, chatting, chatting.
Cody finally bites the bullet and asks him who he’s talking to when they are both knee-deep in muddy water, liberating clay from the bank of a river to use to waterproof the foundation of the temple.
“It’s Ben,” Luke says.
Cody doesn’t understand.
“Ben talks to me,” Luke tells him. “He’s a ghost now, but he hasn’t left. He and Master Yoda talk to me—Ben more.”
Cody’s heart jumps into his throat. Eventually he will have to tell Luke. He sighs. There are so many bullets to bite that he’s sure that they are chipping a hole through his teeth.
“Your Ben is my general,” he says.
“Shut up.”
Luke’s ways of expressing awe never fail to confound Cody. Cody carries on clawing at clay while he idles.
“Are you for real?” Luke asks him.
“Why do you think I’m out here with you?” Cody asks him sharply.
“Thought you liked me.”
“Ehn.”
Luke beams at him and drop back into the river with a splash.
“Rex told me stories about my father, but no one tells any stories about Ben,” he says. “’Course, I know him, so it’s a little different.”
Cody surveys him and thinks.
He has no stories in his head about his general, only feelings. He’d once wished for more time so that he could find the right words to tell his general, without licking his lips or swallowing nervously, that nothing would bring him greater happiness than to run away with him, to kiss his lips, and make his eyes develop deeper and deeper crow’s feet at the corners.
“It is a little different,” he agrees.
“Ben’s never mentioned you.”
He is hurt, Kenobi is. Even in death, he withdraws into himself when a thumb is laid atop one of his soft spots.
“That’s understandable,” Cody says. “I nearly killed him.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have five years for me to explain, Lucas.”
“That’s not my name.”
Cody slaps Luke’s arm and points at their half-empty wheelbarrow to remind him of the task at hand. Luke flails his arms uselessly just under the surface of the water, pouting.
“I loved him,” Cody says.
Luke continues making little splashing sounds next to him.
“No, I love him,” Cody corrects.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not.”
“Then who are you telling?”
“He knows.”
Luke finally looks up from the water. He has streaks of mud in the shape of claws under his eye. He looks back at the silt and gets to work.
That night, Cody does not wait for his general. He is done with waiting. Done with trying. General Yoda used to say that there is only doing or not doing, there is no trying. Cody wonders if you have to be old to appreciate General Yoda’s wisdom.
He doesn’t wonder for long. He lays a coarse canvas blanket on Luke’s shoulder when he shudders in his sleep.
“I’m sure it’s a surprise, sir,” he says to the fire before them.
There is no answer. Cody is not deterred.
“The greater kindness would have been death, but alas, Vader was in charge of the choice,” he says.
The flames of the fire flutter in a breeze that neglected to be present for the earlier day.
“Did you smile on Tatooine?” Cody asks. “Did you laugh?”
He feels the coolness descend on him from above. He feels the brush of skin on his neck.
“I loved you, too,” a trembling voice says into his neck. Cody closes his eyes and lets his muscles relax.
“I love you, too” the voice insists, quieter now than it was before. “Cody—Cody. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t wait any longer.”
Cody leans his head back and feels the cool sweep of his general’s beard. He takes in a deep breath and lets it go.
“I always wanted more time,” he says. “But I should have asked the Force for more time for you.”
“I love you,” Kenobi says. “I love you. I love you.”
Cody wishes that his touch was warm, but they are long, long past the point of warmth.
“What would you have done?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Something absurd,” Kenobi says, finally sneaking into view.
He is an older man with white hair. His cheeks have thinned and become weathered, this Cody can see even without color to paint his face. Cody holds out a hand, and his general leans his faint, translucent jaw into it, both of them knowing that the touch will not satisfy.
“We would have matched,” Cody tells him. “The desert was not kind to you.”
“I didn’t go there seeking kindness,” Kenobi tells him, aging in reverse before Cody’s very eyes.
The years sluice off his pale ghostly visage like water, layer after layer, until he lifts his eyes and Cody rubs his lips together compulsively.
His general looks at him the way he had just moments before Cody last saw him in life. Cody feels the tears threatening. He doesn’t fight the one that slips out from the brim of its glass jar.
“I wish I could give you kindness,” Cody says, swallowing hard.
“I wish I could give you freedom.” Kenobi says.
Cody drops his eyes to the fire.
“Can you teach me how to forgive?” he asks. “You were always so quick to forgive.”
“If that is what you wish, my dear.”
The time for wishing is long gone.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he says.
“I will stay with you, then,” Kenobi tells him.
“You can’t. It’s not a good use of your time.”
“My time is endless now, Cody. The only thing I have committed myself to is keeping an eye on Luke. He gets lonely, poor boy.”
Cody looks to where Luke’s shoulder rises and falls and nods.
“Is that a ‘yes’?” Kenobi asks.
It is. Cody tells him so. Pressure surrounds him in a wave. It comes on cold and leaves warm and tingling. Somehow, he feels as though there are arms around his neck and a face pressing into his shoulder. The fire crackles up into the dark.
“You are always so kind to me, dear,” Kenobi says into the shell of his ear.
Cody can feel him tucked against his side, arms tangling with his own, as if he is solid. He is not, but when Cody looks his way, his lips tremble at the floppy hair mussed up against his shoulder.
“You are kinder, general,” he says.
“Obi-Wan.”
“Obi-Wan.”
“Or, if you like, you can call me Ben.”
Cody leans back and looks his jedi in the eye.
“Ben is a stupid fucking name for you,” he says.
The resulting laugh is warm enough to make Cody feel like he can feel Obi-Wan’s heart beating alongside his.
It is enough.
He will live out what years he has left, moving between the boy and his brothers and his little pack of traitors. And when it is finally his turn to pass, his hands won’t be empty.
There will be so many waiting for him. Including a guide.