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The door to the auxiliary cargo bay slides up with a groan. Quick footsteps follow, and then the door slams back down with far more speed than its finicky motor can usually handle. Cody looks up from the shipping logs with a frown to see his general slumped against the shut door, his shoulders heaving with exertion and his hair a frizzy auburn storm.
Cody’s shock is quickly overwritten by concern. Are they under attack—? But no, Obi-Wan hasn’t drawn the lightsaber swinging at his hip, and whatever panic drove him here appears to have receded, replaced with pure exhaustion. Obi-Wan’s tunic is slipping off of his shoulder, and he readjusts it half-heartedly before bending down to adjust one of his boots.
“...Sir?” Cody asks, wondering why Obi-Wan is ignoring him.
Obi-Wan visibly startles, and that, even more than the mussed hair and the panic, makes Cody reach for the gun at his hip. Cody has never surprised his Jedi before, not once, not ever, not across three years and hundreds of deployments. Something has gone terribly, horribly wrong, and Cody can’t even imagine what it is.
“Sir? Is it the Seppies?” he asks. His heartbeat quickens. The storage area they’re in is near the back of the ship, half a mile from the bridge, and if the Seppies are attacking, he doesn’t like the idea that both of the 212th’s commanding officers are currently surrounded by towers of freight containers instead of combat readouts. His helmet's off, sitting to the side because reading a datapad through the HUD overlay gives him a headache, and he glances from Obi-Wan to it and back, wondering if he's missed a comm.
The look Obi-Wan gives him cycles rapidly from fear to surprise to curiosity.
“Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, and the doubt in his voice feeds the concern growing in Cody’s gut. “You’re… you’re okay?”
Cody drops his hand from his weapon. Whatever this is, it doesn’t seem like one of the problems that can be solved with blasterfire.
Yet.
He frowns, eyebrows drawing together, and he quells his own panic as he sets his datapad down on one of the nearby crates. A solid thirty feet separate him from Obi-Wan, and although he wants to cross them, his instincts tell him to stay where he is. Obi-Wan was running from something; Cody gets the uncomfortable feeling that Obi-Wan is ready to run from him.
“Yes,” he says slowly, carefully. “Should I not be?”
Across all that space, Obi-Wan runs a hand through the sweaty, frazzled cloud of his hair and only succeeds in making it more of a mess. “No. Yes? Maybe. I’m not sure.”
The panic in Cody’s gut grows teeth, claws at the lining of his ribs. Obi-Wan being surprised by Cody’s presence, running away from a problem, and now tripping over his words? Cody is heavily considering the idea that he’s suddenly been transported into an alternate universe. The only thing stopping him from considering a shapeshifter is the fact that a shapeshifter would surely try harder than this.
“Sir, I need you to tell me what’s wrong,” he says, battlefield calm, and he can’t help his relief when Obi-Wan pulls the tattered remains of his usual dignity back over his shoulders.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says. “Of course. Commander, as far as I can tell, everyone besides you on this ship is now truly, madly, deeply in love with me.”
The day before, a witch had set a trap for the clones, and Obi-Wan had sprung the trap. Her coven had been distantly related to the original Nightsisters, and her Force powers were nothing like any of the Jedi had ever seen before. Apparently, whatever it was, Jedi generals as far away as Coruscant had been able to feel the pull of some new dark power.
Palpatine had responded to news of the threat with uncharacteristic speed.
"This power could be a threat greater even than that posed by the Sith," he'd said. "At no cost can this adversary be allowed to succeed. We must do whatever it takes to preserve the sanctity of the Republic."
Obi-Wan and the 212th had been en route that very hour.
And then, after they'd managed to gather real intel, her plan had seemed laughable. Childish, even.
"Can the Force really make people fall in love?" Cody had asked, staring at the blurry images their scouting nanodroids had managed to acquire. Despite the romantic intent of the spell, the photos had been a testament to the macabre. There were damp brushes made of what looks like human hair beneath bloodied runes on the dull yellow walls and two broken trooper helmets collecting sand and dust in a corner, each painted with chipped 42nd green. The black visor was cracked on one of them, and the pattern of light beyond hinted that there might still be something inside.
"No, but it can make quite a mess," Obi-Wan had answered. "It can make people believe they’re in love and convince them to behave in a manner they never would."
He had stroked his beard, his well-water eyes clouded, then shook his head. "I don't know much about this kind of Force user, but she has clearly acquired an enormous amount of power. I'd rather not find out exactly what she can do with it."
Even moving at maximum speed, they'd almost arrived too late. The witch had been rounding the corner on the spell's last syllable when Obi-Wan's bright blue blade had punched a perfect circle through her heart.
At the time, everyone had been relieved, if doubtful that her plan to make every clone fall in love with her—to take up arms in her name, to launch a thousand starships on her behalf like a modern-day Helen—would even have worked.
Now, Cody retracts his doubt.
"You think she completed her spell," he concludes, and Obi-Wan nods, as tightly wound as the springs on an AT-AT's forelegs.
"I think that she completed it, and I think that, when she died, the spell’s focus passed to me," he says. "A lot of the old Force magic works that way. To the victor go the spoils, et cetera."
He runs a hand through his hair again, realizes he's fidgeting, and then tucks his hands into the wide bells of his sleeves. "My apologies, Cody. I must admit that I am somewhat at a loss for what to do. I had to run; I didn’t want to hurt anyone, even accidentally.”
Baffled, Cody asks, “How would that even happen?”
Even in the poorly lit space, Cody can see a pale pink blush dust the tips of Obi-Wan’s ears and spread across his cheeks.
“Wooley kept trying to kiss me,” he admits, and Cody’s fascination with the blush is subsumed beneath a burst of anger so hot and sharp that it hurts to swallow back down. Obi-Wan continues, aggrieved, “And I don’t know where Crys managed to find flowers on a spaceship, but the only thing worse than their smell was Scrapper reciting his poetry. Commander, I'm sure he meant well, but it has never been more clear that Kamino’s training had a significant dearth of training in the arts.”
“Wooley tried to kiss you?” Cody repeats, half-strangled.
"Wooley and the half of the 212th who weren't trying, poorly, to sing me love songs," Obi-Wan says.
Cody's hands twitch back towards his blaster before he manages to reassert a hold over his emotions to realize something strange. “They—wait, then how come I’m not affected?”
He doesn’t feel any different than usual, he thinks. Certainly no new inclination towards poetry or horticulture. When he looks at Obi-Wan, he feels only the same things he always feels: the warm surge of affection and appreciation that he’s been handling since before their first engagement on Ryloth. It’s the same as always; nothing new.
Obi-Wan’s eyes sharpen as he casts an assessing look over Cody.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we should find out. You could be—”
He’s interrupted by the sounds of someone trying the door, fighting the lock, then, when that fails, knocking. The quick succession of clanks echoes oddly in the crowded cavern of the cargo hold.
Cody looks around the dim and dismal space, the rows and rows of black, fluted containers and the insufficient running lights built into the floor along the thin passageways between the stacks. If there hadn’t been a massive discrepancy between their shipment transfer records and Coruscant’s for the third time running, Cody might never have known where this place was.
He’s pretty sure whoever’s knocking shouldn’t be here.
When Obi-Wan nods at him, he moves towards the door. Obi-Wan ducks behind one of the container towers just as Cody reaches the locking mechanism and unfastens it.
The door starts shuddering up the second he does, revealing the hallway beyond by slow inches, and Cody is shocked to see faces peering through the foot-tall gap between the floor and the rising door.
“Racer? Longshot?” he asks, dumbfounded, and they scramble to their feet and into salutes as the door continues to rise. Behind them, twenty or so troopers from every discipline are staring at Cody with a mix of disappointment and fear.
“Sir!” they say in unison. Some of them are craning their necks, trying and failing to be subtle as they try to peer around Cody into the blank darkness behind him. It’s mind-boggling. Cody is starting to see why Obi-Wan was so unnerved; he’s having trouble believing what he’s seeing even now.
“Is there a problem, troopers?” Cody asks, and it’s a relief when their attention snaps back to him.
“No, sir!” they say, but they don’t move. They stand ramrod straight, looking at Cody while flicking their eyes to the space behind him, and Cody raises an eyebrow.
Longshot cracks first.
“Sorry, sir, it's just,” he says. “Did the general come by here?”
Cody moves to more fully block the doorway. “What do you need him for?”
He watches with alarmed fascination as a wave of embarrassed shrugging rolls its way through the assembled troops. They’re acting more like undisciplined shinies than a group of hardened veterans, looking anywhere but Cody’s eyes and shifting their weight from foot to foot.
Cody’s other eyebrow rises to join its partner, both of them nearing his hairline. In his silence, the men squirm.
“I was worried about our supply chain issues,” he says after a minute of letting them stew. “But apparently I should have been more worried about command chain issues. You all have direct reports, none of which is General Kenobi. Anyone attempting to pester the general without going through the proper channels—without going through me— will be on latrine duty from the time we land on Cato Neimoidia until General Yoda himself gives them a pardon. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes sir!” they shout, shoulders snapping back into straight lines, but they still don’t move. Cody’s mouth twists, wondering if he's actually going to need to assign disciplinary measures, when another ripple goes through the troops in front of him. He can see the pupils of those without helmets blow wide, and, for the others, he sees their armor tremble as their breathing quickens.
What the fuck.
He feels movement at his back, and he realizes that they must have caught sight of Obi-Wan. But why would Obi-Wan come out now and blow his cover? He thinks back through his words and sighs. Obi-Wan is almost certainly seconds away from reassuring the men that they can come to him with anything if they think it’s important enough.
Cody refrains from rolling his eyes. Soft-hearted Jedi will be the death of him.
“Troopers! Dismissed!” he bellows, and, at last, the assembled troopers scatter down the hallway, looking over their shoulders with longing and frustration in every inch of their faces. Cody spares a second to be grateful that their fear of him still outweighs whatever spell’s got a hold on them and steps back into the relative safety of the cargo hold. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpses bits and pieces of white armor and pressed gray fabric hovering around the corners of the hallway, as if the men are just waiting for Obi-Wan to walk out.
The door slides shut when he’s far enough in the cargo hold, and he shakes his head.
“Stars above,” he says, running a hand over his face in disgust. Obi-Wan falls into step with him as he moves to pick up his datapad and tuck his helmet under his arm. “You weren’t kidding.”
“They’re clearly under an extremely powerful compulsion,” Obi-Wan agrees. “Their actions are far from their fault.”
Cody has been around Obi-Wan for long enough to know that it’s a reproach in the thin guise of an observation, and he does roll his eyes this time. “If I hadn’t yelled at them, they’d have swarmed the hold. You can coddle them when they’re back to normal.”
Obi-Wan looks at him again, that slow assessing look, and Cody holds his shoulders straight under the scrutiny. “Something else wrong, sir?”
“No,” Obi-Wan says. “It's only—you truly aren’t affected, are you?”
Cody searches his feelings again, unsure of what to look for, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. Obi-Wan is still beautiful, sure, but he’s honestly a little less beautiful than usual with his hair full of cowlicks and his face overrun with the awkward creases that gather whenever he thinks too hard.
“I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary,” he says.
“Then that’s where we should start,” Obi-Wan says, and when he moves further into the cargo, Cody follows. “If we can determine how you avoided the spell, perhaps we can apply the same fix to the rest of the men. And we should learn more about this magic she used, if we can.”
It's a good plan, but then, it's Obi-Wan.
“Agreed. Where to?”
In front of him, Obi-Wan has found one of the tall ventilation shafts that redistribute the heat from the hyperdrives to the remainder of the ship. A wave of his hand causes the bolts holding the grate to spin themselves free from the wall, and Cody catches the grate when it starts to fall.
“We need a holotable and a few datapads at a minimum,” Obi-Wan says, already starting to slide through. “My office will suffice. The door will hold, at least, even if the sounds will be less than ideal.”
Cody fits himself into the ventilation duct as well, and he winces as his chest armor scrapes against the durasteel. There’s a new gouge in the sunburst on his chest, a vivid white scar through the orange, and he huffs as he steps out to unbuckle his chest plate and pull his helmet on instead.
“We’ll go to mine,” he says, carrying the armor over one arm as he goes through. The hollow-vent echo of the vocoder makes his own voice sound strange to his ears. “I’ve got all of those, and this day’s bad enough without having to listen to the men caterwaul over the deep blue of your eyes.”
“Don’t forget the sunset of my hair,” Obi-Wan says from down the vent.
Cody snorts.
“And the pain in my ass,” he calls back, and his general’s laughter bounces along the vent shafts back to him.
They make it through the maze of vents and maintenance droid tunnels to the officer’s quarters. Two hallways from his quarters, though, Cody has to fist his hands in Obi-Wan’s tunics to pull him out of sight of an oncoming patrol. Cody had seen the patrol’s frequency signatures in the ship map he’d pulled up in his helmet’s HUD, but he’s surprised all over again that Obi-Wan’s usual ability to sense people appears to be on the fritz.
“Sir?” Cody whispers as he tugs Obi-Wan into a different hallway. He doesn’t want to ask ‘what’s wrong with you’, but he can feel even his ironclad professionalism start to fray with frustration. If he’s going to build a strategy, he needs all the intel he can get. “Is the spell interfering with the Force?”
Cody isn’t sure anyone else would notice Obi-Wan’s guilty twitch, as if he’d hoped Cody wouldn’t notice something was different, but. There isn’t much about Obi-Wan that Cody doesn’t notice these days.
“...No,” Obi-Wan admits at last. “I’m intentionally cutting myself off from the men’s Force signatures.”
Cody hadn’t even known he could do that. He glances back, incredulous. “Why?”
This time, Obi-Wan doesn’t bother to hide his grimace. “The emotions of the men are… overwhelming. With hundreds of people crammed into the hallways near my quarters, each broadcasting painfully sincere affection and, ah, more than affection, I thought it might be a kindness to myself and to them for when this is over.”
It isn’t too difficult to read between the lines, and Cody balks at the idea that Obi-Wan’s Force radar been overwhelmed by something like sexual tension . “Are you—do you—were you picking up specifics?”
If Obi-Wan is able to pick up detailed sexual fantasies involving him, Cody will find the nearest airlock. Damn. And Cody hadn’t thought this day could get any worse without a Separatist invasion.
“I don’t need specifics to not want to feel the weight of hundreds of bespelled persons wishing they could bend me over the war table, Commander,” Obi-Wan says mildly, and Cody’s ears burn red.
He’ll take that airlock now.
“Right,” he says, resecuring his bucket and moving to take point through the hallways. “Of course. Right.”
They don’t meet any other patrols or members of Obi-Wan’s massive new fanclub on the way to Cody’s quarters, and Cody can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when his door slides shut behind them. His room isn’t large by any means, but it has its own couch and small conference table for meetings, and, most importantly, the only other person with unfettered access is already inside.
“Safe,” he says, putting his armor into its slots in the far wall. “Or safe enough.”
When he looks back, he finds Obi-Wan slumped into one of the conference table chairs with his eyes closed. As good as it is to see him willing to let his guard down near Cody—to relax that veneer of perfect, implacable Jedi—Cody worries. Beneath the revealing overhead lights of Cody’s quarters, he looks exhausted. Neither of them have gotten much sleep lately; this is just one more disaster on top of a very large pile.
He hovers between the table and the caf-maker, wondering if he has any more of Obi-Wan’s favorite tea. “You okay?”
Obi-Wan cracks one eye open with the hazy reticence of a crocodile in one of Cato Neimoidia’s endless poison swamps and smiles.
“Yes. Apologies again, Commander. I was only taking the chance to relax my shields a bit now that we’re out of the thick of things. They are difficult to maintain.” The corners of his eyes crease into crow’s feet as his smile softens. “Everyone is far enough away to be muted. I can only really sense you in any detail, and you are, as ever, an island of calm in a sea of chaos.”
Cody does his damnedest not to think a single damn thought about his dick, Obi-Wan’s dick, or any combination of their dicks together. Despite the ‘don’t think about the pink elephant’ of it all, though, it isn’t hard. Looking at his tired general, all of Cody’s current fantasies about getting Obi-Wan into a bunk center around eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“I do my best, sir,” he says, too-soft by half, and he’s saved from trying to think of something to say next by his comm chiming with a priority call from one of the staff officers. Cody hovers over the accept button until Obi-Wan nods.
Boil’s face appears in the running blue lines of a hologram.
“I don’t know what you did, chief,” he says without preamble, “but my boys are gettin’ real close to planning a mutiny.”
Cody blinks in surprise. He was half-expecting a request for Obi-Wan’s location. “A mutiny? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Boil says. “Something about the general. And that’s not the only weird thing; it seems like everyone’s distracted and jittery today. Have you noticed?”
A scraping sound makes Cody look up, and Obi-Wan taps the chair he’s just kicked out with two fingers. He moves to sit in it, fully aware that Boil can now see both of their faces.
“Oh, General,” Boil says with faint surprise and none of the desperate fervor that Cody had seen in the other men. “You two did notice, then?"
“Very much so, Sergeant,” Obi-Wan says. “We appreciate the warning, however. You mentioned that most of the men seem distracted, but is anyone else… undistracted?”
“Waxer’s with me,” Boil says, and Cody sees the curve of a bald head appear in the blue lines of the hologram for a brief second. “He’s the one who told me to comm you.”
“I see. Would you both forward us the names of any other troopers you find who seem unaffected?” Obi-Wan asks, leaning forward. “We’re looking for common threads.”
On the hologram, Boil snaps a salute. The edge of Waxer’s elbow appears as he does the same. “Will do, sir.”
“Thank you. Dismissed.”
Cody looks up as the hologram winks into a blue spark and dissipates between them.
Obi-Wan’s hand is stroking his beard, and the light of curiosity has overridden his tiredness for the moment.
“You, Boil, and Waxer,” he muses. “The command staff?”
It’s always a joy to see Obi-Wan chewing on a mystery, even when they’re in the thick of that mystery themselves. Cody ponders the idea for a second himself and then shakes his head.
“I don’t think our ranks were any protection. The CCs are not physically different from the CTs, and besides, Waxer worked his way up from private.” Cody shrugs. “But we could promote everyone to sergeant and see what happens. Might stop that mutiny."
Obi-Wan chuckles. “Best wait for more information, I think. Three data points can make a line at best, but they do not make a trend. In the meantime, let’s see what we can pull together on the ritual.”
They grab a datapad each and, with the familiarity of long practice, settle into their work. Obi-Wan sifts through the intel they had gathered prior to the operation and pings the archives at the Jedi Temple for their records of Force magic, searching for any details regarding what ritual was used and if it’d been stopped before. Cody gathers all the images and sounds they recorded during the operation itself and attempts to recreate the scene of the cave they’d found her in.
Other Jedi are able to confirm that, whatever this is, it hasn’t affected any brother outside of the 212th. After telling them the 501st is fine, Anakin laughs so hard his holoprojector falls off the table, and all Cody and Obi-Wan can hear are the seal honks of his laughter for a solid two minutes.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan chides. “Anakin, this is not funny. Anakin!”
To save them both all trouble, Cody ends the call and Anakin’s seal honks with it. But when he looks over at Obi-Wan, he can’t help but grin.
“I mean,” he says, knowing he’ll catch shit for it, “it’s a little funny.”
“Oh, not you too.”
He shrugs, still grinning. “If the Seppies win the war because a fourth of the GAR is too busy writing you love poetry, it’ll at least be something for the history books. And hell, that might be the only way Scrapper gets published.”
Obi-Wan snorts, waves a hand to dismiss the subject, and they fall back into their work with lighter hearts.
During an op, the clones’ helmets record flat video and sound through their helmets. It makes it easy for the op control team to get situational awareness across a broad field, and if they need to give specific directions to anyone, they can quickly assess what can and can’t be done for any trooper. The medical team use the video to assist with any hot zone casualties they can’t reach in time, and the command staff use the video in their post-op review to see what went wrong.
Cody downloads all media data from the op, snaps an editing tool to the processor on his helmet, and pulls it on. The helmet’s HUD brings up the wide array of flat videos, and Cody uses a series of hand and eye gestures to select and move the ones he wants. Even with substantial help from the ship’s AI, it takes a lot of time to stitch the flat videos into a 3D hologram of the cave. Video done, he then strips out the moving images of the clones and uses the editor to match up the environmental recordings and strip out any clone radio chatter.
When that’s finished, he can look through the HUD on his helmet and see the entirety of the witch’s den, all its runes and sigils perfectly replicated while the low, soothing words of her chant hum through his speakers.
“I’ve got it,” he says, pulling his helmet off, and Obi-Wan looks up with a nod.
“Show me.”
Cody sends the file to the table's holoprojector and, with a swipe of his fingers, projects the 3D video file to the walls of his quarters. His bunk, the table, and the fresher door are still visible through the shimmering projected images, but the rest of his quarters are hidden beneath an overlay of dull pink sandstone and glowing green lights. The projection warps at the edges of the walls, making them seem much further out than Cody knows they actually are, and Cody can almost imagine he feels the sweltering desert heat.
The witch stands frozen in the center of the room, feet from where Cody and Obi-Wan sit.
"Hm," Obi-Wan says, and Cody can almost see him rifling through his own memories and fitting them into place when he stands. “Well, it’s just as unsettling in hologram form. Even the echoes feel… wrong.”
“Wrong, sir?”
Obi-Wan approaches the witch’s still form, moving easily through the projection of the ray shield around her to stare into her eyes. Cody wonders what questions Obi-Wan would ask her if he could.
After a moment, Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Yes. Wrong. It’s a terrible thing to take someone’s will from them, especially when it comes to love.”
He lifts a hand up to the holograph, the pad of his pointer finger resting over her heart where his lightsaber blade has yet to burst through. “It leaves a scar on the Force. I can feel it still.”
Cody doesn’t feel anything from the projection around him besides a vague sort of disgust at the lack of hygiene. The idea of losing his will, on the other hand, sparks a new kind of fear. The incident with Tup is its own still-bleeding scar. They never did find out what really happened.
“I’m glad it was just a love spell, honestly,” he says.
“Hm?”
He shrugs, trying to cover his genuine discomfort with something more casual. “It could be worse. Everyone could be trying to kill you instead of sleep with you, sir.”
Obi-Wan huffs a laugh, but his shoulders tighten with a new sense of purpose. Cody wonders if his mind is in the same place Cody’s is.
“Very true,” he admits. “More impetus for us to sort this out and stop someone from trying again. Alright, will you start the simulation?”
“Of course.”
But before he does, he pulls up a holomap of the cave system and shows Obi-Wan the orange dots that indicate where the main infiltration force is, where their reinforcements are, and, perhaps unnecessarily, the little blue dot that is Obi-Wan himself.
"We don't have video of the cave until soft contact," Cody explains. "And I figured we should start at the very beginning."
The dots on the map wait, patient and still in orderly rows, until they all surge forward at once on some unheard signal.
"You were in the control room, right?" Obi-Wan asks. His eyes reflect the blue of the map hologram as he watches, intent.
"Yes, but I don't think that’s why I’m unaffected. Waxer's the one leading the secondary infil here, and Boil was even closer when the spell ended. He was… here, ready to stop her from going down this auxiliary access tunnel."
"Hmm. Very well. When do we first make contact?”
With a flick of Cody’s fingers, the video around them—all the videos stitched together, that is—start playing. Only one piece of the collage moves at first, then more join in as more troopers and their video cameras enter the space. Cody can’t help but watch it with a critical eye, assessing his own strategy for flaws.
“We couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t drop the ritual and fight,” he says, pacing the room and shaking his head at the way part of the squad is hesitating instead of charging her. “Tactically, she made the right choice. If she’d finished the ritual, it wouldn’t have mattered how many men were surrounding her.”
He looks up to find Obi-Wan staring with intense concentration at the witch’s lips, standing close enough to kiss.
“General?”
“Quiet for a moment, please,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody nods and falls into parade rest to observe.
After a moment, Cody watches Obi-Wan’s lips begin to move in near-sync with hers as the words of the ritual, filtered through the sound of blaster fire pinging off her ray shield, emerge staticky and incomplete from the projector’s speakers.
The words aren’t in any language Cody knows. Based on the intent look of concentration on Obi-Wan’s face, he’s willing to bet that this is one of the few languages that Obi-Wan also doesn’t know. In the simulation, Waxer’s infil team finally manages to take out the power generator for the ray shield, and the projected image of Obi-Wan flips around the green bolts of fire in her hands and ignites his saber through her heart.
The real Obi-Wan is standing so close to her that the hologram replication of his own blue blade pierces his chest as well.
“Play it again,” he says, and Cody does.
It takes another three rounds before Obi-Wan is satisfied that he knows the incantation.
“Enough to go on?” Cody asks, shutting down the program. The walls of his own quarters come back into view, comforting in their simple and familiar gray.
Obi-Wan nods. “Enough to go on. Will you send me still images of the sigils on the walls and your best guess of the order in which they were drawn?”
“Right away.”
When Cody sits down to compile the logs, his personal inbox chimes with a new message from Boil. The list inside is shorter than he’d hoped, but thirty names is still thirty more names than they’d had.
“Is that everyone who’s unaffected?” Obi-Wan asks, peering over his shoulder, and Cody props the datapad up on the table so that they can both read through the list. “Hmm. Less than I’d hoped, but more than I’d feared. You were right; whatever’s protecting you, it isn’t your rank.”
They both stare at the list in contemplative silence, each reading through the names again and again. There’s no obvious trend; there’s a man of almost every rank, division, and role in this list. In fact, the only thing that Cody can see that they have in common is—
Is—
He reads through the list again and feels his stomach sink. Oh.
Fuck.
“Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, looking over, and Cody supposes it was too much to hope that Obi-Wan wouldn’t sense his realization. “Cody. What’s the pattern?”
Cody swallows, uncomfortably aware, now, of why he’s unaffected. The part of his mind that’s playing out strategy knows exactly where this is headed, but he can’t think of any way around it. He’s locked on the rails to disaster.
And, like ripping off a bacta patch, he manages to admit, “They’ve all. They all have riduure.”
“Riduure?”
Stars, Obi-Wan’s accent is terrible. Cody resists the urge to put his face in his hands, but only just.
“They have spouses, partners. People they love,” he explains, and, so wrapped up in his own revelation, he realizes too late that he’s disclosing secrets that might not be his to share. He lifts his head in alarm, ready to defend his men, but Obi-Wan doesn’t look surprised or angry. He’s nodding, and Cody realizes that Obi-Wan must have already known about at least a few.
“That makes sense,” Obi-Wan says, stroking the fall of his beard. “If no spell is powerful enough to create love, then no spell could be powerful enough to subvert it. So we have Boil and Waxer, Sleeper and Trench, Trapper and…?”
“Trap’s got a lady on Caelondia,” Cody admits, and he’s brave enough to recognize that he’s stalling but not brave enough to stop. “They send each other letters. Real ones, on actual paper. It’s—it’s sweet.”
The same as always , he’d thought earlier. Stars, of course the spell didn’t seem to work on him. What would it have needed to change?
When Obi-Wan raises his eyes from the list to look at Cody, his gaze patient and searching, it takes every ounce of Cody’s willpower not to look away. Here it comes.
“And you, Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, his voice as soft as a Naboo spring. “Who do you have?”
And goddamn but Cody has felt more comfortable staring down starving gutkurrs than looking at his general right now. His mouth is dry, his heart pounds an irregular staccato in his chest. He’s not a coward, he thinks. And he was always going to tell Obi-Wan at some point.
Some point just happens to be now.
He grimaces and opens his mouth, but Obi-Wan beats him to it.
“No, wait, Cody, I apologize,” Obi-Wan says hurriedly. “You don’t have to tell me; I was vastly overstepping my bounds. Whoever they are, I’m sure they’re—”
“It’s you, sir.” Cody sighs. “I’m in love with you.”
In the shocked silence that ensues, Cody presses his lips into a thin line, frustrated with himself. He should’ve stayed quiet, should’ve taken the out. No one wants to hear a love confession in the middle of an op, especially not one admitted with an undercurrent of guilt like an uncovered sin. He was always going to tell Obi-Wan, but always after the war. At the very least, over dinner, perhaps with some candles and Corellian wine. Not like this.
His courage slips into regret, and he looks away. “Sorry. I know… I didn’t mean to add any of my own drama to the situation. I swear, it hasn’t and it won’t affect my work.”
Next to him at the table, Obi-Wan’s mouth goes from a perfect ‘o’ of surprise into a twist of exasperation.
“Cody,” he says, and his voice is sad and oddly disappointed. “Cody, come now. That would hardly have been my primary concern.”
Cody’s head snaps back up, nonplussed. When he imagined this before, he always assumed Obi-Wan would react with a gentle rebuff and a subtle encouragement to join another battalion. In the best case scenario, Obi-Wan would respond with kind reassurances that Obi-Wan’s faith in Cody remains unshaken, not with—
Disappointment? Suspicion?
‘Would have been,’ Obi-Wan said, and Cody realizes what’s wrong.
“You don’t believe me,” Cody realizes. He blinks at Obi-Wan in shock, all the puzzle pieces of Obi-Wan’s reaction falling into place. “You think it’s the spell.”
Obi-Wan spreads his arms, apologetic but firm.
“It would make the most sense,” he says, and Cody wants to shake him. He’s overwhelmed by a sudden cascade of wants: he wants to prove himself, to kiss Obi-Wan the way he’s only ever dreamed of, to suck bruises into his neck he can’t deny, to get on his knees and show Obi-Wan exactly what he’s been hiding for three goddamn years. He wants to—
His throat clicks when he swallows. It wouldn’t help. Obi-Wan’s been hearing inane love declarations all day. No, if Cody wants to convince him, he’s going to have to use logic.
He has to treat Obi-Wan’s statement like any other hypothesis.
“No, it wouldn’t make sense,” he argues, leashing all of his emotions back down. “You said it yourself: I’m exactly the same as always. Everyone else who’s affected has been out of their head.”
The ghost of a smile touches Obi-Wan’s lips.
“Perhaps there is no magic powerful enough to make you act irrationally,” he teases, and Cody knows he’s trying to be lighthearted, to lead them away from the topic.
But Cody hasn’t come this far to back away now. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t know what the spell did or didn’t do; he only knows that there’s no force in this universe that could have possibly made him love Obi-Wan more.
“That’s bullshit. It’s far more likely that I love you than that I’m some magical exception to the rule,” Cody argues. And there, he said it again: I love you. Saying the words feels like undamming a river, letting every pent up thing flow free.
But Obi-Wan tucks his hands into the bells of his sleeves and refuses to bend.
“Not really,” he says, smiling a rueful little smile as if he’s letting Cody down easy. “You have always been exceptional. And I’m not an easy person to love.”
Cody grits his teeth and shakes his head, digging in his heels. There are a million things he wants to say to that, but only one of them matters.
“That isn’t true,” he says. “It’s been the easiest thing in the world, loving you.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes widen, his pupils pinpricks of black in a Kaminoan sea, but he doesn’t budge. His eyebrows draw downwards, and Cody wants to gnash his teeth in frustration. Beneath them, the ship’s hyperdrive continues to churn; air rattles the vents as it races above the hallways; and the lights hum with their constant fluorescent song. Outside, the universe keeps its pace.
Inside, Cody and Obi-Wan stare at each other with equal but opposite resolve.
They’re at an impasse, Cody realizes. The GAR at large might believe Cody and Obi-Wan are the most reasonable of the Jedi-Commander pairs, but he doesn’t think any of them know how stubborn he and his Jedi can be. They aren’t going to be able to talk this one through.
“We’ll just have to fix this, then,” Cody says at last. “End the spell. And then you’ll see.”
“Yes,” Obi-Wan agrees. Sorrow lies wet and heavy in his voice. “I suppose I will.”
It doesn’t take much work to break, in the end.
With their ship AI performing an image matching search on the sigils, Obi-Wan’s compilation of existing literature in the fields of Nightsister magic, and his surprisingly accurate transcription of the incantation, they are able to find the spell she used and how to resolve it. They’re very lucky that Obi-Wan is the spell’s focus; they find that only the focus can unravel it, and only by using the Force to break the connection. If one of the men had gotten in the killshot, Cody honestly doesn’t know what they would have done.
It would have been a very, very large wedding, he thinks.
“Do you need any spell components?” Cody asks, wondering if they need to draw the sigils upside-down or backwards on the walls. He stares skeptically around the room. “She used a lot of blood.”
Obi-Wan shakes his head. “No, but I will need something with clone DNA. Oh, put your knife away; I believe a hair should do.”
It feels silly, reaching up to his own scalp to pluck a hair, but he does it. He feels sillier than that holding the short black curl out to Obi-Wan and even sillier when Obi-Wan’s fingers linger after he reaches for it. Hesitating.
Cody wonders for a brief, hysterical second if he can ask for a lock of Obi-Wan’s in return.
“General,” he says at last, and for the first time in three years, the word feels wrong in his mouth. “Obi-Wan.”
Obi-Wan’s nostrils flare as he breathes in, his chest jolting, and Cody wonders how Obi-Wan could have never guessed how much Cody loved him. How he could have never seen the way Cody knows Obi-Wan’s body down to its smallest tells, all its little languages. How Cody knows what he’s thinking even now: that he believes he’s going to lose Cody’s love on the other side of this spell.
Cody could let this drop between them. He could turn his face from this and let it drop away, let Obi-Wan believe that it was part of the spell. Obi-Wan has said nothing that could even reasonably construe reciprocation, after all. Cody could let this go and hope that the love that’s so thoroughly taken root in his chest will eventually wither and die off, unreturned. He could wait until he has candles and Corellian wine.
He does none of those things.
Cody moves closer until there’s barely a handspan between their chests, and he says, “I’ve loved you for three years, Obi-Wan. I’m not stopping now.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes shutter closed. The delicate half-moon curves of his eyelashes fall softly on his cheeks, and he bends his neck just far enough down that a stray lock of his hair brushes Cody’s forehead. Cody holds his breath, somehow knowing that this almost-Keldabe kiss is the only liberty than Obi-Wan will allow himself, and he struggles to keep his own hope battened down.
“Step back, please,” Obi-Wan says, and when he opens his eyes again, they blaze with a white light so pure that, for a brief second, there isn’t a single shadow in the room.
Cody has to turn away, one hand flying up to cover his eyes. The magic moves like a wave floating up and through him, as if he were a ship raised and lowered on the ocean by a massive wave. It spills past him, surging through the rest of the ship. Cody chokes on the sudden fear that the magic might somehow wipe away his love, his real love, but when he manages to look at Obi-Wan again, the lump that’s sat in his throat for years hasn’t budged. The same exasperated fondness surges up and through his spine as Obi-Wan blinks the light from his eyes, and he grins with love and relief both.
“Cody?” Obi-Wan asks, and Cody knows what he’s asking.
“Check the rest of the ship first,” Cody says.
It might be a little cruel, but he doesn’t want to hear Obi-Wan try to argue that the spell might not have worked. When he says it again, he wants Obi-Wan to believe him.
To his credit, Obi-Wan doesn’t hesitate. His tunics, still dirty from the earlier chase, flare out behind him as he strides through the door to Cody’s quarters. Cody settles down at his table, opening his datapad more to pass the time than check messages. The hope he’d bottled up even more thoroughly than the love is rattling through him, growing teeth, drawing blood. Hope has never had feathers, not really; hope for clones has always been a dangerous, deadly thing.
He reads the same email four times over before he hears a knock at the door and calls for it to open.
On the other side of it, Obi-Wan looks about the same as he did in the cargo hold this morning. He’s a little winded, and his hair is frizzing away from his forehead.
Only a little less beautiful than usual, Cody had thought, and he’d been wrong.
“The crew?” he asks.
“Extremely embarrassed, but safe, and otherwise back to normal,” Obi-Wan says. He moves to the center of the room and waits there, holding himself as still as possible. Hope is dangerous for Jedi too, Cody thinks, and happiness is starting to spill out over all his edges as he, too, holds himself on the very edge of anticipation.
“The Force?”
“The same.”
“And me?” Cody asks, and Obi-Wan closes his eyes to focus.
“The same,” Obi-Wan chokes out at last. “Exactly the same as always. Cody, do you—”
“Yes,” he says, but there’s still disbelief hovering in the downturn of Obi-Wan’s mouth, so he adds, “I’ve loved you since Ryloth. Before Ryloth. Obi-Wan, I—I wanted to kiss you on Illum.”
Obi-Wan laughs wetly. “We were in a snowstorm on Illum.”
“That would have made it harder,” Cody admits, and he stands up from the table to meet Obi-Wan in the middle. “I want to kiss you now.”
He steps in close, and Obi-Wan’s hand comes up to cup Cody’s jaw while his eyes search Cody’s. He’s hesitating again, giving Cody an out even now.
“Still?” he asks.
And Cody rolls his eyes as he leans forward to kiss Obi-Wan exactly the way he wanted to on Illum, on Cato Neimoidia, in the depths of Antilla and the grime of New Kaon, and his heart feels like it’s going to burst right out of his ribcage with exhilaration and fear.
A second passes, then another, and then Obi-Wan slides his hand around to the back of Cody’s neck and presses his thumb into the sensitive space beside Cody’s jaw. He tilts Cody’s head into the kiss as he uses his other hand to pull Cody closer, and the kiss goes from sloppy and inexperience to smooth and good, stars, so good, hot and wet and more than Cody had ever even thought to hope for. He doesn’t notice that Obi-Wan is moving them until his back hits the wall, and Obi-Wan licks the gasp out of his mouth before biting down the line of his neck.
Obi-Wan pauses, his lips pressed to the skin just above the collar of Cody’s blacks, and Cody knocks his head back and tries to remember how to breathe.
“You’re in love with me,” Obi-Wan says, voice rich with wonder, and Cody gets his fingers into Obi-Wan’s hair and pulls him back up.
“As always,” he promises against Obi-Wan’s lips, and then he sets about proving it.