Chapter Text
The streets of New Kaon are thronging with life: endless and dirty and loud. Cody misses the clean lines of the Vigilance like he would a missing limb; they’ve been trawling through the inner city grime for far too long without even a firefight to keep things interesting.
One step forward and one step to his right, Obi-Wan is starting to look like he could use a firefight, too. People part before him like water around a stone as he moves forward, focused and serious. He’s wearing a tan leather jacket and jeans instead of his robes, and he’s keeping his head down and his arms tucked in, but Cody wonders how anyone could think this man is simply part of the crowd. As if in answer, Obi-Wan slows his pace until he and Cody are walking side-by-side, and Cody takes the hint. He deliberately curves his back, ducks his head, and starts dragging his feet. It’s a posture that would’ve earned him latrine duty when he was a shiny, but it transforms him and Obi-Wan into two weary commuters, side by side, returning home after a long day.
Lately, it seems less and less like Obi-Wan is merely acting the part.
“No luck today, then, sir?” Cody asks.
Obi-Wan’s response is a rough bark of a laugh.
“Only bad luck,” he adds, tilting his head towards Cody and keeping his voice low. “It would help if I truly knew what I was looking for. This city has so much life and, somehow, even more lowlife. I must have uncovered five different weapon smuggling rings in the wharf alone this week, but nothing along the lines of what the chancellor is worried about.”
“Five? That’s—concerning.”
Obi-Wan waves a hand through the air in front of him, easily dismissing the danger associated with coming into contact with five highly armed cartels on his own. The perks of being a Jedi, Cody supposes. “No, it’s fairly common this far out. There’s less oversight from the Republic, and people here know that the best ticket off-planet is to build something that they can sell to either army. Honestly, I do sometimes wonder how much of our technological advancement has been merely the byproduct of the pursuit of a bigger, better bomb.”
Cody eyes his general, concerned.
“Sir?”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Obi-Wan says. He drops his arm, clearly wishing he could fold his hands into the wide sleeves of a Jedi’s robe instead of his tight zippered pockets. “Just getting cynical in my old age.”
It’s a weak excuse at best. The idea of Obi-Wan being old is absurd; he has had an air of timelessness to him since Cody first joined the 212th three years ago. This far from Coruscant and outside of his robes and his role as a negotiator, though, Obi-Wan is less untouched by time. He had seemed unscathed by the war for so long, but here, at last, the veneer of ‘omnipotent sage’ has been at least partially chipped away.
As Cody watches, Obi-Wan covers his frustration by running a hand through his hair and then bringing it down over his face with a sigh.
“Alright, don’t tell him I said it, but this would be easier with Anakin,” Obi-Wan admits. As they maintain their slow progression through the city, Obi-Wan turns to give Cody a wry, sympathetic smile. “And if he were here, you wouldn’t have to run a quarter of the GAR from a warehouse basement while also playing Jedi nursemaid. I’m sorry again for this mess, Cody.”
“Don’t be sorry, sir. I’ve run more with less,” Cody says.
A harried-looking nautolan cuts between Cody and Obi-Wan, his head-tresses curling up at the ends in either anxiety or frustration. When the two of them come back together, Obi-Wan’s thoughts are clearly far from here, seeking out worlds and people galaxies away.
Cody pauses, wanting to be delicate. Obi-Wan had been trying to direct the conversation away from Anakin, but. “You’re worried about him. About General Skywalker.”
With visible effort, Obi-Wan pulls himself back into the debris-strewn streets and smoke-filled air of the city.
“As always,” he says. “One lasting impact of raising a padawan, I suppose.”
Cody stays quiet, patient. He knows what it is to worry generally about a younger brother, and he also knows that this isn’t it. As the silence stretches on, Obi-Wan sighs again.
He’s been doing that more, too.
“I’m more worried about the chancellor, actually,” Obi-Wan admits at last. “Calling Anakin back at the last second, forcing the 212th to scramble to provide back-up… I can't imagine what could've been so important that he had to disrupt a month’s worth of planning, and the chancellor wouldn’t tell the council when we asked. And now we’re out here, kiloparsecs into the Outer Rim while the war ramps up near the Core worlds, and this mission of ours is starting to feel more and more like a wild goose chase.”
It’s more dissatisfaction with the chancellor than Cody’s ever heard from his general, and something about his tone makes the hair on the back of his neck rise.
"Would you happen to have a bad feeling about this, sir?"
Obi-Wan just smiles, wry and humorless, and he jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans in an attempt not to fidget.
"Something like that," he agrees. "But what else is new, these days?"
He looks so tired, and his hair is falling lanky and unkempt into his eyes. Cody makes a mental note to stock up on the gold-brand tea Obi-Wan likes so much. They don't get many resupply shipments this far out, but he can't help with Obi-Wan's mission, and he can’t bring Obi-Wan’s former padawan down from his new reckless heights. But he can requisition tea, at least, and he can encourage Obi-Wan to slow down.
"General, you should get some rest. Even you have limits," Cody tries, wishing he had some Jedi mind tricks of his own. They're within sight of their temporary base, where a million and one new things are waiting for Obi-Wan's consideration. Cody won't have any chance to convince Obi-Wan to rest once they enter the doors, though he knows he hardly has any chance now.
Obi-Wan turns to Cody with a smile, but Cody can see the lie of it in the growing swatches of white at Obi-Wan's temples and in the slight shake to his fingers. Bones needs to start limiting his stim packs.
"The Force will sustain me, Cody. I'll be fine."
The door to their temporary base opens with a wave of Obi-Wan's hand, revealing a set of dark, disused hallways that he ushers Cody into. And that’s what Cody remembers most clearly from that last glimpse of Obi-Wan before he went missing: watching the affection in his eyes bleed into exhaustion as the moonlight painted his features wan and gray.
When the orders had first come in to relocate the whole 212th to New Kaon, Cody had been unconvinced of the necessity of the mission. He had been even less convinced of the necessity of the 212th’s intended role. Assigning any of the regular troopers to espionage seemed like a bad use of good resources.
“It’s peak inefficiency, yes,” Obi-Wan had said, smiling knowingly at Cody’s frown. His calm blue eyes had sparkled through the steam rising from his tea cup. “Unfortunately, the Senate won’t let me do this alone after Jedi losses on Saleucami. Anakin can’t come, and the senators seem to think there is a one-to-one conversion ratio for Jedi and attack battalions, so the 212th is his replacement. I would never doubt the abilities of our men, but I recognize that this isn’t quite the kind of recon that Ghost Company is renowned for.”
“We’ll do whatever you need us to, of course,” Cody had said, unsure of everything but that. “It’s just—sir, clones aren’t meant for undercover ops. We’re hardly inconspicuous.”
Obi-Wan had snorted, but he was serious when he put his tea down and pushed a datapad across the desk.
“Commander, you can do far more than what you were meant for. And let me assure you that most people on a planet as far out as Devisiun wouldn’t know you from Padme, let alone be able to identify you as a clone. Core World politics are far from here, and the Republic has been quite sparing with any propaganda showing your actual faces.”
“Face, singular,” Cody had corrected, deadpan, and Obi-Wan had laughed again.
“Yes, well. I know that isn’t true,” Obi-Wan had said. His eyes had tracked the curl of Cody’s scar even as he handed Cody a datapad. “Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking for assignments.”
The datapad had opened to a list of deployments, and Cody scrolled through them. It quickly became clear that Obi-Wan had ensured as minimal a disruption as possible for Cody’s ongoing operation plans for the Third Systems Army: most of the people assigned to Devisiun were from the 212th’s SysOps division and could do their analytics anywhere with a reasonably good computer. Obi-Wan had already requisitioned use of a sensitive compartmented information facility in New Kaon for encrypted comms.
“…Sir,” Cody had said after reading through it twice. “We may not be Jedi, but we’re not exactly useless in a fight. Why haven’t you assigned anyone to the actual op?”
Obi-Wan’s smile hadn’t reached his eyes. “I’ll tell you planetside, Commander. For now, I’ll ask for you to trust me.”
And Cody had, because trusting Obi-Wan had been the easiest thing in the world.
Right now, the only thing Cody can trust is Obi-Wan’s ability to get into trouble.
"Ping him again," Cody growls, and Crys hits the exact same series of commands that he's been using for the last twenty minutes. The screen pulses a serene blue, and the white line at its center stays flat. Crys looks up at him with a frown.
"There's no response, sir,” Cry confirms. “He's not responding."
"Those are two different things," Cody snaps, fists clenching on the console.
He stops and takes a deep breath, centering himself on the facts of the situation instead of the panic creeping up his spine and through his lungs. There's no reason to overreact; Obi-Wan can take care of himself, obviously. He's missed check-ins before and has always been fine.
But he’s only once left base without telling anyone. Cody grits his teeth at the memory of Mandalore—of his general recounting, polite and bloodless, exactly what had happened with Maul—and focuses on the data.
“Sir!” One of the new recruits calls, pushing through the crowded control room to press something into Cody’s hands that Cody would recognize deaf and blind. “Sir, we found the general’s lightsaber!”
Cody can’t find a single word as he blinks down at the lightsaber in his hand. His mind feels like it’s been submerged into the dark, tumultuous depth of Kamino’s oceans: empty of light but full of danger. Obi-Wan has dropped his saber in the field before, but he’s never left it behind. Cody knows his general doesn’t need it to be dangerous, that Obi-Wan didn’t leave the living Force behind, but some primal part of Cody hates the thought of his general without a tangible weapon or Cody at his side.
There's silence in their makeshift command room, and he feels dozens of identical eyes staring at him and awaiting orders. Standard operating procedure dictates that he should wait until the operative misses a second check-in, but, well. Cody doesn't know if he's just spent too much time around Obi-Wan lately, and he hates that he's even thinking these words, but: he has a bad feeling about this.
"Alright, squad leaders, form up," Cody says, pushing all emotion to the very bottom of his chest as he curls his fingers around the saber. "We'll search the city by quadrants, then by city blocks. Everyone in teams of two. Crys will forward each pair the optimal search pattern based on city infrastructure and population densities. Check-in with him every half hour. The first squad has fifteen minutes to prepare; the second will leave fifteen minutes after that, and so on. No armor. Keep your heads down and your radios on; you know the general. He could come waltzing back in here any second, wondering about all the fuss."
Cody hopes like hell for that, but hope alone has never done shit for him. His brothers, though? He can rely on them for anything. In front of him, the ARCs fire off salutes, and their commitment and concern keep their backs straight and their movements sharp.
Five minutes after the first group leaves, Cody slips out the side entrance with nothing but his comm on his wrist, his Deece in a shoulder holster, and Obi-Wan’s goddamn lightsaber in his jacket pocket.
He hates this city, but he knows it well. Although the clones had been unable to accompany Obi-Wan through the winding streets of his espionage pursuit, they'd been able to help him keep his cover. Obi-Wan had been correct that people didn’t recognize the clones as clones, so they hadn’t recognized the fact that the person accompanying Obi-Wan to and from “work” were, in fact, different people altogether. That way, SysOps for the third systems army weren’t disrupted, no communication stream had all of the puzzle pieces of Obi-Wan’s whereabouts, and there was always at least one brother on stand-by to help.
Cody knows Obi-Wan, so he knows that the most likely explanation for Obi-Wan's disappearance is that Obi-Wan had found something yesterday and decided to get a little closer to it today—without telling anyone, of course, and for some godforsaken reason without his lightsaber. Obi-Wan’s intended routes were ears-only and discussed only with the brother on stand-by duty that day, which means that Cody is in the best position to retrace Obi-Wan’s steps. He doesn’t know why Obi-Wan hadn’t told anyone that he was leaving; he only knows that Obi-Wan likely had a good reason for venturing out in secret. If Obi-Wan’s in deep cover, Cody will do what he can to keep that cover intact until the risk to his general’s safety outweighs the risk of blowing the mission.
And, if that happens, he’s made sure that half of the men on-planet are already on the streets to help.
The front organization that the 212th are using in the city is the production center for a jazz magazine, and the stares of Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes on various posters follow him as he makes his way into the building. Although the front organization is fake, the innards of the warehouse are real. Cody dodges heavy printing presses as he makes his way through the maze of assembly lines and piles of what look like paper—real paper, not flimsi: a sign of how outdated this backwater is—waiting patiently for ink.
The smiling faces and increasingly bizarre brass instruments make for a cheerful atmosphere, but the true value of the warehouse is the warren of tunnels connected to the basement floor. The city had once been split in two, each dominated by a separate warring power, and this building had been a mainstay for the resistance that had spanned both halves.
The Republic had bought it a year ago in preparation for the Separatist invasion of Devisiun that never came.
Cody quickens his stride to just shy of a jog. The basement passes by in a blur of adrenaline, and he slips through a heavy durasteel bank door that, fortunately, swings open at his touch. The tunnels had been built over a period of twenty to thirty years of resistance; the older ones are shored with stonework, but as the rebels' operations grew faster than their funds, they had to prioritize speed over quality. The newer ones are packed with clay over duracrete, and the one to the wharfs has a dirt floor that retains the soft imprint of Obi-Wan’s boots. The tunnel path starts climbing when the soil beneath Cody’s feet starts turning to mud. The ladder at its end takes him up twenty feet, and he emerges into air at the top so stained with salt and grime that Cody is reminded vividly of the aiwha roosts on the edges of Tipoca City.
The smell of rotting fish and ocean air tells him he’s at the warehouses a few miles inland of the docks, which, honestly, seem as good a place as any to hide a weapons cartel, biological or otherwise. The overwhelming sea stench could cover even the extensive quantities of Tibanna gas involved in particle-beam artillery. It’s a near-barren piece of land, just far enough from the city’s shopping district to lack commercial value and just far enough from the wharf to be useful for shipping. The railyard, too, is close enough to fill the air with the rumble of engines and horns, so suburbia has put its roots down elsewhere.
Alright, he knows that this is the quarter Obi-Wan had set out to investigate yesterday, but he doesn't know much more than that.
He pulls Obi-Wan’s lightsaber from his pocket and stares at it, at the gleam of durasteel and the warm butter glow of polished brass, and he wishes it knew him as well as he knew it. It’s warm in his hands from his pocket but nothing else. Perhaps a Jedi might be able to use it to find Obi-Wan, but no matter how much he asks for help, it doesn’t feel like anything more than a metal weight.
“Kark it all, General,” he mutters as it tucks it away. The harsh calls of the wharf-side gulls drown out the sound. “Where are you?”
Any outward display of urgency might give away the game, so Cody keeps his hands jammed into his pockets and walks unhurried through the street grid boxing in warehouses of every shape, color, and degree of structural integrity. He slows down a few times, squinting down the narrow corridors between shoddy buildings, but he doesn’t stop until he’s at the edge of an alley like any other, in front of a dumpster the same as every other rusted tin can in the district.
And yet.
Alpha-17 had always stressed that instinct was driven by a subconscious awareness of more detail, and Cody sees no reason to doubt that now.
There’s no sign of a scuffle in the alley, and there’s nothing else in or around the dumpster to indicate that Obi-Wan might have been this way. There are a lot of six-eyed, many-legged creatures two-feet tall crawling in and along the alley’s walls, seeming to thrive on the accumulated moisture and grime. They’re avoiding him, though, and they’re avoiding an air-conditioning vent by the dumpster. Every square inch of the alley has been scratched, chewed, or overcome by mold, except for this piece. There’s a thin line of clear space above the vent, too, in the amorphous shape of an air plume. Shouldn’t there be more mold growth next to a moist air vent?
Cody eyes the critters as he moves further into the alley and crouches next to the vent, pushing a fingernail into the seam between the metal grate and the cool duracrete of the wall.
It pops out easily. Inside, the duct is as clean and chrome as something cast yesterday.
“Alright,” he tells the many watching eyes behind him. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes with my general, tell Boil he gets command.”
He’s grateful for his lack of armor for the first time since this horrible mission started as he crawls through the ducts, not remotely sure if he’s just wasting his time or blowing their cover. His instincts have got him this far, though, and the weight of the lightsaber at his side reminds him of what he has to lose.
Even without armor, crawling through the vents is difficult, and crawling through the vents quietly is next to impossible. Cody stops every few feet to listen, but he doesn’t hear a single sign of life beneath or above him. He’s about to turn around, mind already ticking through other possibilities for his general’s whereabouts, when the familiar melody of Obi-Wan’s voice narrows down the possibilities substantially.
“Come now,” Obi-Wan is saying, and even though it’s smooth and cajoling, there’s a slight tremor to his voice that immediately puts Cody on edge. “Surely there’s been a misunderstanding.”
Through the metal fins of the nearest air vent, Cody can see Obi-Wan on one side of a sterile lab lined with chemical hoods and various pieces of inscrutable chrome machines.
Nestled against the far wall, a steadily-clicking projector is splashing a strange orange light all across Obi-Wan’s front, and next to it is the biggest devaronian that Cody has ever seen. His chest looks wider than the doorway behind him, and his deep red skin and scarred, curling black horns keep catching little motes of the orange light. He straightens the clean lines of his lapels as Cody watches. He is so intimidatingly huge that it takes Cody a second to even notice that he isn’t alone. There are six grunts in light armor around him, all clutching their blasters and shaking with the nerves clones had trained out of them as toddlers.
On paper, this should be easy. On paper, this should already be over.
And yet.
Obi-Wan is smiling his negotiator’s smile, full of confidence and calm, but Cody can see that something’s wrong in the curve of his shoulders, in the slight hitch of his breathing. There’s something very wrong, too, in the sickly orange glow making him shine. Is there sweat gathering at Obi-Wan’s temples? Why isn’t he using the Force?
“I see our intel was right, for once. Many little mice in our maze, but we’ve managed to catch the rat,” the devaronian says, and his hooves make a click-click-clack on the duracrete floor when he steps forward. His voice is soft and theatrical, as if he’s narrating the opening to a play. “What good fortune we’ve had today. Imagine my surprise when the only thing I was missing was a Jedi, and one walked right through my front door.”
“A Jedi? Oh, no, of course not,” Obi-Wan says with the perfect hint of disbelief in his voice. “I’d be a poor Jedi, surely, with no laser sword and no mind tricks. There’s been a misunderstanding.”
Cody inches towards the vent and sneaks his vibroblade out from his back pocket. It can cut through a super battle droid’s neck plate on full power, and he doesn’t think it’ll have trouble cutting through the aluminum wings keeping the vent on. The blade’s hum blends in with the loud electrical thrum coming from the projector as he cuts.
The devaronian waves someone forward, and a spindly man in a silver lab coat appears from behind him, so small that Cody had missed him completely. The scientist walks towards Obi-Wan with a syringe held in front of him like a sword, and Cody’s breath catches. What is that? A tranquilizer?
Obi-Wan doesn’t move. Why isn't he moving?
Cody hesitates, weighing his options. This could all be part of Obi-Wan’s plan, and if he interferes, he might ruin a lot of work—especially if Obi-Wan’s still trying to convince this group that he’s not a Jedi. But that needle is getting closer, and even if sacrificing Obi-Wan’s well-being for intel is in Obi-Wan’s playbook, it isn’t in Cody’s. His general’s safety comes first, always.
He gives Obi-Wan one more second to react, then two, and then he kicks open the vent and swings down, landing with a thud on the unforgiving duracrete floor.
Everyone in the room stares. The grunts are open-mouthed, and even the devaronian creases his eyebrows in faint alarm. Surprise locks the whole terrorist cell into inaction as they wait, confused, to see what Cody will do next.
Unfortunately, Cody didn’t plan that far.
Out of the corner of his eye, Cody sees the orange light glinting off the syringe still too-close to Obi-Wan’s throat. He has Obi-Wan’s lightsaber in hand before he can think better of it.
“If you’re looking for a Jedi," Cody begins, improvising rapidly from what he’d heard. The lightsaber sings on with a vibrant hum, and waves of power pulse from the blade to warm his face. “Then you’ve found one.”
The awful orange light swings from Obi-Wan to Cody in an instant, and it feels like nothing at all.
“Cody!” he hears, but he’s focused on acting like the biggest and only threat in the room, trying to distract them all so Obi-Wan can get away, and the bright combination of the lightsaber and that strange projector leaves afterimages on his skull.
Through the blinding light, he sees the devaronian motion for something. Cody is stepping forward with the saber when he hears two things in quick succession: a single gasp, wet and ragged, and the sound of knees hitting the duracrete floor. Something goes missing in Cody’s brain, some pressure: some extra, unknown sense. It feels like the loss of a limb, and it hurts.
The bastard by Obi-Wan had depressed the trigger on the syringe.
“Try not to kill him,” the devaronian says, waving his hand at Cody, and a flurry of blaster fire erupts from the hired men.
Cody manages to block one blast with the saber out of pure, adrenaline-fueled instinct, but the next one hits him as a searing burn in the shoulder. He hits the deck and starts rolling, careful to avoid the plasma blade that could cut him to pieces with a single mistake. Seven karking hells , he wishes he could get to Obi-Wan, but the best he can do for his general right now is to clear the room and double back.
All of the relief he’d felt in the air duct about not having his armor is long gone. One of the metal machines is in front of him near the wall, and he crawls behind it hoping that the chrome finish is more metal than paint. The lightsaber hums in his hand, and he pulls out his Deece with his left, momentarily grateful that he's carrying a DC-17 hand blaster instead of his usual heavy DC-15S.
If he gets out of this, he owes Rex an apology for mocking his taste in blasters.
The blaster fire dies down slightly, and he waits until he hears the first tentative footsteps towards his cover to roll forward, firing aimlessly with his blaster at the sound and swinging the lightsaber in front of him. It’s just like a regular sword , he thinks a little hysterically. A regular sword, but on fire.
One of the grunts falls to a blaster shot, then another, and then Cody is close enough to slide the lightsaber straight through the torso of a third. It cuts through skin and bone as easily as a vibroblade cuts through flimsi. It’s exhilarating.
It’s terrifying.
The projector goes down next in a sputter of sparks and the grating sound of dislocated fans still trying to spin. The room is dark without it, lit only by faint LED strips of emergency lights along the fume hoods and the exits. In their dim light, Cody sees the devaronian looking at him with calm detachment, looming and terrifying for his casual appraisal in a room full of bodies. Cody risks a single glance towards Obi-Wan and finds him in a crumpled puddle on the floor, limbs in an ungainly sprawl and his lank hair covering his eyes. The scientist that injected him is gone, likely cowering behind one of his machines.
Blaster still in hand, Cody fires it at the devaronian while lunging forward with the lightsaber. The monolithic man jumps back, absurdly fast for his size, and pulls up a wrist shield to deflect the blaster fire. He holds his ground easily, digging his hooves into the floor with an audible scrape.
The three remaining grunts in the room have dived for cover, and Cody casts a casual spray of fire over their heads to keep them there.
“We weren’t prepared for two of them,” a grunt wails, and the devaronian’s eyes tighten minutely. “Lott, the beam didn’t even work on this one. We have to regroup!”
The devaronian—Lott?—backs away in an almost stately manner from Cody’s approach with the saber, and Cody shifts his advance so that Cody’s in between these terrorists and Obi-Wan. There are few enough of them now that he might be able to grab his Jedi and beat a goddamn retreat.
The grunts are really starting to panic, and Cody's already-low estimation of them is dropping rapidly even as he's grateful for their disorder.
From behind a titration table, another one pipes up. “We can’t take on a fully powered Jedi, and he’s already taken out Omicron and Theta squads. Sir, we have to move!”
The appraisal in Lott’s eyes shifts to a clinical assessment. He seems so, so cold, and Cody shoves an animalistic, primal fear down in his gut even as he keeps firing and as Lott keeps blocking.
“Well done, then, Master Jedi,” the devaronian says, regarding him cooly, and Cody pulls the lightsaber into the opening stance he has seen Obi-Wan use so many times: his feet shoulder-width apart, the saber pulled up next to his face and running parallel to his chest, and his left hand held out in front of him in a taunt—although he’s never seen Obi-Wan use a blaster for the taunt.
He just needs to keep the façade up long enough to get these assholes out of the room.
The devaronian presses something on his wrist, and an opening appears in what had previously been the uninterrupted wall behind him. The grace with which he backs through the opening lets Cody know that this is a retreat and not a surrender. The grunts, cringing and desperate, scramble through it. Cody keeps firing through the opening until the wall seals back over, until he’s painted the faded durasteels with dozens of smudged black ovals, and then he’s vaulting over lab tables towards Obi-Wan.
The knees of his pants tear on the duracrete as he falls to the floor by his general. Unconscious but breathing, he registers blindly, pressing two fingers to Obi-Wan’s windpipe to feel the blood and air moving past. The injection site is a reddish, building bump on the other side of Obi-Wan’s neck, and Cody forces himself to make sure there are no other signs of bruising or swelling before starting to move him.
If he’s moveable, then any other first aid can come once they’ve gotten somewhere safe.
He clips his weapons onto his belt and starts bending Obi-Wan’s knees in preparation to pull his deadweight off the floor. Moving without thinking, he crouches to grab Obi-Wan’s clammy wrists, and he almost doesn’t let himself search for a pulse as he stands and pulls Obi-Wan’s body towards him. He uses Obi-Wan’s momentum to duck under his body as he pulls it across his shoulders, finishing with one arm around Obi-Wan’s left leg and the other around Obi-Wan’s left arm. With Obi-Wan’s weight settled over his shoulders, Cody rises from a squat to stand.
His Jedi is far lighter than he should be.
Unnerved, Cody moves towards the door opposite from the wall Lott escaped from, trying to ignore the way Obi-Wan’s head lolls. He gathers Obi-Wan’s limbs in his left arm as he tries every button on the door pad, and he bites back a curse when the red light refuses to turn green. If he shoots at it, it could fail either open or permanently locked. If he searches the grunts behind them, one of them might be carrying a keyfob.
Damn. Damn . He could really use a conscious Jedi right now. A lightsaber would carve through the locking mechanism like—
Oh, right.
Obi-Wan’s lightsaber sings on with an expectant hum, and the metal of the door answers that hum with a satisfying hiss as it melts. Cody turns his body so Obi-Wan’s head is furthest from the spitting, molten slag until he can at last slide the door open. When he cranes his head as far to his left as he can, he can just barely see a trail of dark blood dropping like red molasses from Obi-Wan’s nose and into his mustache. Stretched as he is over Cody’s shoulders, it becomes immediately obvious when Obi-Wan starts to shake.
Cody doesn’t bother to bite back his curse this time.
He takes a right out of the hallway, following his instincts and a vague mental map of the twists he took through the ventilation shafts. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber makes easy work of every locked door, and Cody stops turning it off after the third one melts down. It doesn’t make sense that he hasn’t run into any other grunts or sentries. These people caught Obi-Wan; they can’t be this incompetent.
When he turns down a fourth hallway, lit saber held out before him like a beacon, he finds the rest: unconscious and trussed in the facility’s break room. This must be the other squads the grunt had mentioned, Cody thinks, and he stares down at the neat rows of dispatched men. So Obi-Wan had been prepared for reinforcements, but not whatever that light was.
“How did they get you?” Cody asks, more to himself than to his Jedi, but he feels a slight shift in the weight on his back anyways.
“Cody?”
Stars, his voice sounds like someone put it through a flour mill.
“Just hold on, General. We’re almost there,” Cody says. He’s not sure if it’s true, but it’s exactly the kind of lie Obi-Wan would have used. There must be some comfort in the familiar.
He backs away from the break room and restarts down the hallway. The adrenaline in his veins is petering out, but the relief that Obi-Wan can talk—that Obi-Wan still knows Cody’s name—carries him through the rest of the facility. By the time he reaches a massive door that looks more like it was forged from deadbolts than durasteel, Obi-Wan has woken up enough to tap at Cody’s shoulders and ask, with the politeness that never seems to burn away, to be let down.
Cody bends at the knees and tilts his torso, ignoring the twinge in his obliques, until Obi-Wan’s feet touch the ground. He straightens in time to catch Obi-Wan when Obi-Wan staggers, clutching his gut, and gives them both a second to breathe. Cody’s seen his general push through worse but not much worse, and Cody still has no idea what took Obi-Wan out in the first place.
“Ok?” he asks. Cody waits until Obi-Wan nods before he ignites the saber once more and slowly, painstakingly, carves a line through the last barrier between them and the outside world.
They emerge, blinking, into the bay. The watery pre-dawn light that brought Cody here has evaporated into something warmer and brighter, and it drips egg-yolk yellow across the surrounding tin roofs. From the outside, the lab behind them is only one of a thousand ratty warehouses on the edge of the city’s shopping district. The banality of it makes Cody angry, suddenly: a visceral, molten anger that he has to choke down before it climbs up his throat. His Jedi will not be taken out on some ignoble backwater, Cody thinks. High General Obi-Wan Kenobi will not be lost amidst these dilapidated relics where no one knows his name.
Cody can’t promise ‘never’, but he can promise ‘not here’.
He tucks Obi-Wan’s lightsaber into his jacket pocket and puts an arm around Obi-Wan, trying not to swallow too obviously when Obi-Wan leans into him.
“Steady, Commander,” Obi-Wan murmurs.
Laughter bubbles in Cody’s chest next to the rage and fear.
“Take your own advice, sir,” he says.
Stars, he just wants to set Obi-Wan down and check him for other wounds, to see what exactly they did to him, but he needs a safe space. He needs a plan.
What do you have? What do you need? he hears in Alpha-17’s voice.
I’ve got a semi-conscious Jedi, sir, and nowhere to put him , Cody thinks back.
If Lott and his crew are regrouping, then Cody doesn’t want to stop in the open long enough for them to catch up. He needs to get far enough away from the lab that, if Lott starts looking, the 212th will find Cody and Obi-Wan before he does. They’re in a part of town where people don’t double-take at someone wearing a pint of blood, let alone at two men staggering as if drunk at 8 am. Cody weighs the benefits of not drawing attention to themselves and the cons of no witnesses, and he turns with a sigh towards the seedier portion of the tourist district that overlaps the industrial section of the wharf.
He’d memorized a map of the city before the mission, of course, but he’d hardly gone into the type of detail he’d need to recognize street names. Next to him, Obi-Wan trips on a broken piece of pavement, and Cody tightens his hold on Obi-Wan’s waist. Stars, if Obi-Wan had just taken Cody along—if he’d told anyone else where he was going—if Cody had just gotten there earlier—
What do you have? What do you need?
I need a Jedi that follows basic protocol , Cody thinks, vicious with worry, and then refocuses on finding any sort of safe harbor at all.
As they move, inching along, the grinding gears and humming engines of the warehouses transition into the lapping waves and blaring horns of the docks. Beyond that, they at last come to the row of seedy motels and seedier bars that always spring into being for the drifters that always blow into a trading port. The buildings stand like clusters of discarded milk cartons: yellowing towers collapsing in on themselves in the dirt. Cody pulls his Jedi into the alley next between one bar and the next.
Inside the alley, broken beer bottles and wrappers litter the alcove, mixing in with the snaking, heart-shaped vine that covers most of the surfaces near the wharf. The smell is awful, rancid and curdled, and it seems strong enough to wake the dead, let alone a semi-conscious Jedi. Cody pulls Obi-Wan over to a stretch of concrete that’s covered more with vines than with trash and lays him down.
He puts two fingers along the vulnerable curve of Obi-Wan’s neck and tries to to panic as Obi-Wan’s eyes close and don’t reopen. His pulse is thready but there, and his breathing is fast and shallow. The injection site is swollen and red, but there are no red veins standing out against the pale skin and no necrosis around the sight. Stars, but it honestly looks like a saline injection. Could the poison be slow acting? A neurotoxin? Something else?
Obi-Wan lists to the side, and Cody thinks he’s fallen unconscious until Cody raises his wrist to comm the 212th.
Faster than Cody would have guessed Obi-Wan could move, Obi-Wan slaps a hand over the comm.
“Wait.”
His usually musical voice falls flat in the dark basin of the alley, but it’s still a joy to hear. His eyes are thin slits of pale pink and dull blue.
Cody gently pulls Obi-Wan’s hand away.
“We’re gonna get you somewhere safe, General,” he promises. “Our boys are on the street already. Just let me call ‘em in.”
“No, that’s not,” Obi-Wan takes a deep breath, interrupting himself, and Cody waits. “I think our comms are… compromised.”
Cody keeps Obi-Wan’s captured arm in his hand and shifts his fingers until he can feel a pulse beneath them. He’ll wait, but he won’t wait long. Obi-Wan continues.
“There are things Lott—knew—that he couldn’t have known. It’s why I left. Like that.”
Obi-Wan pants with the effort of explaining. The slur in his words worsens as he goes, and Cody tucks all his frustration back behind his teeth. Are their lines compromised? Or is one of the men? He still remembers pinning Slick to the floor, sickened by the knowledge that he shared a genome with someone who would turn traitor. It’d been an important lesson, if a painful one, that someone could have his face and not his morals. He focuses back on Obi-Wan; no matter if the compromise is in their lines or their people, he needs to get Obi-Wan somewhere safe.
“But why would that affect my calling for help?” Cody asks. “Are you worried Lott will hear our location and try to finish us off?”
The devaronian had been huge. As confident as Cody is in his combat abilities, he’s not sure he could take Lott down alone.
“Quite worse than that, I’m afraid,” Obi-Wan says, the words spilling out of him in a breathy rush. “They’ll know their serum works.”
Cody freezes. His Jedi dying in his arms had seemed like the worst of all possible futures, but the fear in Obi-Wan’s voice makes Cody wonder if that lacks creativity. Obi-Wan Kenobi has never been afraid of death.
He asks, “What does it do, sir?”
He doesn’t bother asking Obi-Wan if he knows a cure; if he did, he wouldn’t be sweating out, pale and shaking, in Cody’s grip.
“I—well, I can—I can only conclude that they. That the serum, ah.”
It’s painful to see Obi-Wan lose all of his carefully cultivated eloquence, and it’s even more so to see him try to hold onto it still. The burnt and ruined armor of his charm is cinders in his mouth.
“Sir?”
“It strips a Jedi of their powers,” Obi-Wan says, looking to the side with a ragged exhale. “I can no longer sense the Force, or you, or anything, for that matter.”
The words don’t register at first. They are too strange, too impossible, and Cody can’t do anything more than stare, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, while Obi-Wan’s breathing becomes increasingly erratic. Cody pushes the rising panic back down his throat and feels it rattle, growing and growing teeth, in his gut.
Obi-Wan hadn’t used the Force earlier because he couldn’t. Is that why he’s collapsing now? Is he going through withdrawal? Can a Jedi survive without access to the Force?
Is it permanent?
Obi-Wan’s voice cuts through the whirlwind buzzing of questions flying through Cody’s mind. “Commander, focus. Regardless of my handicap, we have to prioritize warning the Republic without warning Lott. If he can’t find me or find proof… he can’t sell this to the Separatists.”
There’s a grim certainty to his tone that makes Cody angry; he knows this must be tearing Obi-Wan apart, and he still doesn’t quite believe it’s true. Obi-Wan closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and when he opens them again, there’s some warmth returning to his cheeks. Cody recognizes it as the last surge of adrenaline before a crash: a broken body’s last ditch effort to get somewhere safe before it gives out. He’s seen it many times, but he’s never seen it on his general.
His Force powers are gone, really and truly, just. Gone. Cody remembers what he had felt with the syringe went in—no, he remembers how he knew that the syringe had gone in. The extra, unknown pressure, that warm and patient light… that had been Obi-Wan.
“Can’t return to base,” Obi-Wan continues. “If Lott’s hacked our comms, he could know our access codes and send a fire team. I won’t recklessly endanger the men by limping back just to lick my wounds in air conditioning.”
Cody knows Obi-Wan well enough to know where he’s going with this. Obi-Wan wants Cody to leave him in some seedy motel so that Cody can head to base and send an SOS to the Jedi Council.
And it’s a good plan, but, “I’m not leaving you, sir. Not like this.”
"I'll be fine," Obi-Wan lies. At Cody's glare, he amends it to, "I'll be fine until you can—can warn the Council. Get back-up."
Cody is still holding Obi-Wan’s wrist, and he can feel the pulse beneath his fingers hammer unevenly. Every missed beat feels like the stuttering kickback of a semi-automatic SR-12, beating a bruise into his chest.
“You can warn them yourself, sir,” Cody says, firmly pushing his questions to the side. What he has and what he needs are still the same; nothing will be helped by more questions.
“No. This is bigger than either of us,” Obi-Wan says, a single spark of his usual fire flaring back to life. “Commander Cody, your priority has to be the intel right now, not me. That’s an order.”
Cody turns his head to look at Obi-Wan, at the stubborn glint in his jaw and the pain gathered in the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and he thinks that the only thing he wouldn’t do for this man is leave him behind. He holds Obi-Wan’s clouded gaze as he raises his comm to his mouth and clicks his back teeth to turn it on.
“I found the general,” he says, and the chorus of cheers almost manages to drown out the alarm running riot on Obi-Wan’s face. Cody continues, “He’s still in deep cover for his mission. He took a few hits, but he’s going to stay on the hunt. My RTB is two hours. Recall all hands.”
He turns the comm off with another click of his teeth and raises an eyebrow at his general.
“You can court martial me after we survive this, sir, but I’m getting you help, and I’m getting it now,” he says. The corner of his mouth twists into something distantly related to a grin, and he adds, “As far as I can tell, I just have to wait until you pass out again, and then I’ll be the commanding officer in the field anyways.”
The glimpse of fire in Obi-Wan’s eyes wanes, but the stubbornness remains.
“Commander, I,” he starts to say, but his body seizes up before he can get the admonishment out, all of his muscles going taut and rigid at once and tipping him over.
Cody moves to catch him with one arm against his chest and the other supporting his back until Obi-Wan untenses. With Obi-Wan in his arms, Cody figures that’s enough sitting and talking in a dark and nameless alley, and he hauls them both to their feet.
“Not to base, I know,” Cody says before Obi-Wan can waste any of his energy on a reminder.
The walk back to the tunnel entrance is stumbling and slow. Cody is hyper-aware of any sound that isn’t a gull call, and Obi-Wan seems less and less aware of anything at all. Fortunately, most of the denizens of this section of the city are still sleeping off the previous night. The few people that cross their path are just as reticent to be seen or in just as much of a hurry as Cody is, their heads down and focused as their feet shuffle over the cracked concrete. The sun is almost directly overhead, shining an odd burnt yellow over the smog of the wharf, and Cody can’t help but tug Obi-Wan along a little faster as the thin wisps of clouds start to clear.
Obi-Wan doesn’t argue any more. His earlier adrenaline has evaporated like the last traces of mist, and Cody is practically carrying him as he fades in and out of consciousness. Cody is so overcome with worry that he can’t even be relieved by the time he gets to the manhole covering the ladder down to the tunnels. Going down the ladder with Obi-Wan on his back is an exercise in patience and balance and one heart-stopping slip, but eventually Cody has his Jedi safely away from the city’s cold light and colder eyes.
He sets Obi-Wan against one of the tunnel walls to slide the manhole cover back over the entrance, and when he returns, Obi-Wan is completely asleep. He doesn’t wake up even as Cody lifts him into his arms and halfway jogs through the tunnels, watching Obi-Wan’s chest rise and fall more than he watches where he puts his feet. The basement of the printing warehouse is silent in its welcome but at least familiar, and Cody swallows as he walks through the wrought iron machines and their empty, abandoned pages.
At the back, there’s an ancient breakroom he’s only been in once. The couch there might be more mildew than foam cushioning, but it’s wide enough even for Obi-Wan’s long legs, and Cody lays him down with enough care that he hardly even disturbs the dust. After a second’s thought, he shrugs off his ill-fitting leather jacket and folds it beneath Obi-Wan’s head. Obi-Wan’s bangs fall across his eyes, the copper strands turning lank and rust-red with sweat, and Cody combs them back with shaking, awkward fingers before turning to walk away.
He makes it two steps before turning back, and two more before turning back again. With all his courage pushed to the outline of his ribs, he unsnaps Obi-Wan’s lightsaber from his belt and tucks it into Obi-Wan’s unresponding hands.
It’s the one thing he can put back where it belongs.