Chapter Text
Cody was standing guard at a solid metal door on a ship. He could feel that they were in hyperspace by the ever so subtle hum of the engines beneath them. Across from him stood a shiny in odd-looking armour. There must have been a slight redesign. By mutual agreement, neither of them spoke.
Through the door, Cody heard screaming, an unfamiliar voice rising high before breaking into faint sobs. He wanted to turn around, to investigate, but his body would not obey. He could only stand, ramrod-straight, and scan the hallways for potential intruders.
There was a gurgling, choking noise, and then silence. The door swung open to reveal two human men in officer’s uniforms – admirals, by the look of their insignia, though Cody didn’t recognize either of them, or what, exactly, they were supposed to be admirals of. After them strode a tall man in solid black armour with a mask that almost, but not quite, looked like a skull. His breathing caught and rasped, and he spoke through a vocoder to the admirals.
“It would serve you well, in the future, to bring informants of this nature directly to me. Which are the troopers that brought them in?”
One of the admirals gestured at Cody and the shiny. “These two. We thought it best to keep the information… in the family, so to speak.”
The masked man turned to them, examining with a near-clinical eye. “There is an old adage, admiral. ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Four of you know what happened here. Decide who will die.”
Cody couldn’t react, couldn’t make his body move, as the redheaded admiral drew his sidearm and shot him in the chest.
--
Cody woke, in his borrowed bed in the barracks on Coruscant. His heart was racing, pounding in his chest. He breathed shallowly until he could calm himself, forcing air to the bottom of his lungs with careful breathing. He’d only meant to doze off for a minute or two before heading down to 79’s. As it was, the buzzing of his comm told him he’d slept longer. Kark. Cody pressed the palm of his hand to his eyes, trying to rub away the awfulness of his dream. It was the third too-real dream he’d had in the last couple of tendays, and Cody didn’t like it. He had gotten used to the idea that, in the GAR, unexpected things were almost never good news. He feared, profoundly, that these dreams, the unsettled and nauseous feeling they left him with, would become more frequent.
There were vode who were made sick by war. Maybe all of them would be, eventually, even though Jango had been selected for the role of their progenitor because of his sturdy stock. But Cody hadn’t ever thought it would happen to him. Dying had always seemed a more likely fate than that. What would he do, if the dreams robbed him of what little sleep he got until he became unfit for the title of ‘Commander’? What would he do if the fear crossed into his waking life, making his hands shake at crucial moments and turning him into a liability on the battlefield?
What if, one day, the madness in his mind made the terrible, unthinkable thing that he’d done in that first dream into reality? What if one day he looked at the General and–
It didn’t bear contemplating. Cody was no Jedi, and, much as the dreams terrified him, they were just that. Cody was more likely to be struck dead by enemy fire on his next mission than he was to ever betray his duty. He had to believe that of himself.
Forcing it out of his head, for now, Cody grabbed the commlink, tapped out a quick message to Fox that he was on his way, and headed for the door.
--
The trouble was, really, that while the first too-real dream had been just as awful and panic-inducing as the third, the second one hadn’t been, at least, not on the surface. Instead, it had been nice, warm and gentle and many other good things that Cody never could have imagined. It had been painful because, in every too-aware second of it, Cody had known it wasn’t real. The conversation had been ominous, perhaps implying suffering or danger, but the moment had been soft in spite of that.
In the second dream, General Kenobi had been curled on that very same borrowed Coruscant Commander’s bunk, head in his hands, and Cody had been stroking his back, comforting him. It was physically closer than they had ever been in waking life when neither of them was injured. The Jedi’s robes had been rough, but when the General finally shrugged the robe off, the tunic underneath had been smooth under Cody’s palm.
Cody had spoken without any control over what came out of his mouth, like watching a holofilm from the inside. All three dreams were defined by this lack of control and of context. “Commander Tano is a strong kid. She’ll survive.”
“She should do better than just survive.” The General’s voice had been filled with a terrible sadness.
“And she will in time.”
General Kenobi had made an utterly pitiful noise before pulling his head from his hands and leaning back against Cody. For once, Cody’s body had done exactly what his mind had wanted, and he had wrapped his General in his arms. The General’s head was tucked just under Cody’s and he could smell his shampoo. It was something more pleasant than the standard-issue GAR stuff, which had a tendency to go a little stale and smell like rubber. This scent was slightly warm and sweet, like nostalgia for a place he’d never been.
“We failed her.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Cody’s body had asked, though his mind was equally curious to uncover what the topic of this imagined conversation was.
Since apparently even in Cody’s dreams, the General had a certain depressing self-flagellation to him, he said, “the entire Order. Or the entire Council at least. But me most of all.”
“Why you most of all?” Once more, Cody’s mouth had matched his thoughts, and he’d wondered momentarily if he had gained control over his dream-self’s speech.
“Because I knew she was innocent, and I went along with so much of it.”
“You objected.” Cody did not know why he had said that.
“Not enough. But you’re right to press. It is deeper than that. I was her, Cody. In every way that mattered. I know exactly what it is to be rejected by the order. I’ve known that since I was a child. I should have told her. I should have gone after her. I almost did, but Plo stopped me.”
“Then that’s on him, not on you. But she’s gone, not dead. Every credit I have says Anakin has a way to contact her. Call and tell her now.”
“It won’t change anything now.”
To Cody’s immense shock, he’d pressed a kiss to the top of Obi-Wan’s head. “If you knew it wouldn’t have changed anything to have told her then, would you have?”
After Obi-Wan had nodded, Cody said, “so go call General Skywalker. My credits are riding on it.”
“You don’t have any credits.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to do it out of the goodness of your heart. And for what it’s worth… he probably could use a kind word from you too.”
“He shouldn’t feel guilty,” Obi-Wan had said, with the most confidence he’d shown in the entire dream. “Anakin did better by her than I fear I could have done in his place. Certainly, better than Qui-Gon often did by me.”
Cody had given him a gentle shove. “So go and call him.”
And that was where the second dream had ended.
--
It seemed to be a live music day in 79’s, which Cody hadn’t been expecting. Four clones, none of them immediately familiar to him, had assembled a small stage and were playing fairly passable music. The crowd was thicker than usual, sweaty and drunk bodies pressing together in the dim light of the bar. The increased numbers were either a consequence either of the music, or of the 501st and 212th’s presences on Coruscant, or both. Fortunately, since Cody was meeting with Fox, there was never any trouble finding a more secluded booth to pile into. Most of the regulars here were Fox’s subordinates, and they knew better than to interrupt him off duty.
Fox was already there, sitting tucked far in the back as he’d promised in his message to Cody and already nursing a second pint. Across from him was another friendly face, drinking something pink and frothy.
“What’s that osik?” Cody asked, and slid into the booth beside Rex.
Fox answered the wrong question. “That’s Lt. Synth and the Three Tunes. Don’t tell them it’s osik, Synth makes the best caf in the GAR, even if the synthophone is not one of his many talents.”
Cody hadn’t even noticed the music was bad. He hadn’t had a lot of time to figure out what kind of music he actually thought was good. Rex, who knew Cody the best of anyone in the galaxy, understood the question and said, “this osik is on discount. It’s not a cocktail, it just comes in this colour. Some kind of Ryl thing. Anyways, nobody wanted it so I thought I’d try.”
Rex had been spending entirely too much time with his General. “And how is it?”
“Sour,” Rex admitted, after a moment. “Want to taste it?”
“No,” Cody replied, but did so anyways. It was worth the way he gagged at the taste to see Rex laugh and feel the three of them slip into an easy banter that was too often absent in the rest of Cody’s life, when he was surrounded by subordinates and superiors, rather than by equals.
--
They spent nearly two hours in blissful, easy company – marred only by the increasingly evidently dubious quality of Lt. Synth and his tunes – before Cody was forced to think again about his dreams. It was Rex, by this point visibly drunk, who brought up the matter.
“Hey Codes, did you tell Fox about that weird kriffing dream you had?” Rex only knew about the first one. The second had been too embarrassing to share.
Fox snickered. “I don’t want to hear about your kriffing-dreams, vod.” It was clear that he too was drunk by this juncture. There was a thud as Rex kicked him under the table. “Hey, watch it vod’ika. Drunk babies only get to kick me once.” Then he turned on Cody. “Well? What dream could you possibly have had weird enough that it needs to be brought up? You’re no jetii, your dreams aren’t special.”
“Jedi dreams aren’t always special either,” Rex pointed out, “Commander Tano has a recurring dream where General Grievous is making her write a biology final and she doesn’t have anything to write with.”
“This dream wasn’t weird,” Cody said, because it hadn’t been. “Just unpleasant. And I’ve had three in total now, Rex. All different things. What’s consistent is that they’re all extremely vivid, and without any sense of control. Like watching a play from inside one of the actors.”
Rex shot him a concerned look. “Were the new ones like the first one? I mean, was it the same sort of thing you saw?”
Cody filled them in on the most recent dream, as best he could remember, and glossed over the second one as, “General Kenobi was upset about something and we were talking about it. I didn’t understand any of the specifics.” Perhaps for the General’s sake, they both let the matter slide.
Finally, Fox asked, “and the first dream? The one Rex already heard about, since he’s apparently your favourite brother now?”
“You were never in the running,” Cody advised him. “And the first dream was more like the third one in that it was bad but it was just… it looked like any other mission we’ve ever been on. I was in my bucket and my body pointed at something and I gave the order to ‘blast him’, and we fired a cannon at some kind of beast on a cliff, and that was fine, and then I saw a flash of a lightsaber in the dust and a human body fell out of the sky along with the beast and I realized it was General Kenobi just before I woke up.”
Rex nudged him under the table. “That’s a nightmare for anyone. Worse than General Grievous’s math exams, even.”
“I thought you said it was a biology exam?” Fox questioned. Rex waved his hand. “This all sounds kriffing miserable, vod. But Rex is right. A weird dream is just a weird dream, and you’re probably making it worse by worrying about it.”
Cody hoped, rather desperately, that they were right. “I just… I don’t ever want to be the person I was in that dream.” Being the person he was in that dream where he’d comforted his General… that was a different matter. “I can’t let that happen.”
Fox, with a look on his face like he’d just solved some incredibly complex puzzle and was going to be smug about it later, said, “well, you said you gave the order to shoot your General, didn’t you? Not that you cracked and started taking pot shots at him. Do you think a single one of the 212th would follow that order?”
Cody’s troopers trusted him. They loved him. And he loved and trusted them in turn. But no matter how deep that love, he wasn’t the only person who’d earned it, over the last year and change. Not by a long shot. And if he’d raised his hand and given the order to shoot Obi-Wan, there wasn’t a man in the 212th who would have followed it.
“No.”
“So then,” Rex pressed, “you know that could never happen. Just a dream, vod. A scary, awful dream, I’m sure. But they were all just dreams. If you stop thinking about it as a thing that happens to you, it’ll probably stop happening.”
Fox hailed one of the servers. “Another round, and you won’t be up to dreaming about anything much.”
“Can’t. We still don’t know when we’re getting called out for our next mission. I can’t be hungover tomorrow in case we end up shipping out.”
“Two pints of whatever’s on tap,” Fox called, “and a glass of water and some wings for the old man.”
That evening, as he half-carried Rex back to bed, a quite drunk voice whispered in his ear, “you can always call me, if the dreams are bad. Any time, anywhere. Kark protocol.”
“I know.”
Rex grabbed his wrist. “Promise me.”
Perhaps because he was not entirely sober himself, Cody said, “I promise.”