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Chapter Text

CC-2224 had been compromised.

That had been the assessment delivered by Lieutenant Piett, the Imperial officer who met the returning Purge Troopers in the landing bay, and CC-2224 had accepted the new parameters and applied them to his current situation. He had been compromised in the field, and that was why his heart rate was tachycardic, his vision was blurred, and he was being dragged down the hall by the armpits, his wrists cuffed behind his back so that every step wrenched against his shoulders.

The part of his mind that was in charge of navigation was still partially online, so CC-2224 knew they were on the Tranquility, headed past the armory, past the medbay, toward the medical holding cells. Which meant he had approximately four minutes standard before he was going to be reconditioned.

Situation report, CC-2224’s command center prompted. Relay intel from your last secure location.

CC-2224 initiated a memory scan and brought up the image of a desert marketplace: population density minimal, at least four civilians armed, three possible sniper locations to the south and west, no wind or solar weather conditions requiring weapons recalibration. 

He’d been sweeping the outer stalls when he spotted movement down a side alley and changed his course to investigate. The walls had narrowed (heightened chance of ambush, 60% increase in CC-2224’s probability of success in hand-to-hand), and he’d just cleared the first corner with his rifle when he saw a shadowy form standing in the middle of the path: humanoid, armed, stance loose but ready, posture…familiar…

…a tilt of the head that had made skin prickle beneath the trail of sweat sliding down Cody’s back, and then -

Pain flared suddenly through CC-2224’s skull, crackling down his nerves like he’d taken an electropod to the temple, and someone let out a half-stifled groan nearby as the door panel in front of him slid open.

“Get him on the table,” Piett ordered.

The soles of CC-2224’s boots made brief contact with the floor as he was hauled upward, and then he was biting back another groan as the manacles behind him unclipped, releasing his wrists and setting off a wave of fresh sensation across his arms and chest. 

Two men isn’t enough to hold me, his mind observed, but the observation was rejected as unactionable, because neither the substance of the thought nor the tactical suggestions that accompanied it (simulate a stumble, drop to a crouch, sweep left leg back and around, pivot into an uppercut, disarm right guard and engage left) could have come from CC-2224’s internal systems. 

In the time it took to register the anomaly, CC-2224 had been hoisted bodily onto the exam table, durasteel cuffs snapping into place around his wrists, ankles, thighs, and upper arms. Piett’s face moved briefly into view, leaning over to observe CC-2224’s expression as one of the medical technicians fitted the halo device across his forehead and another strapped the bite guard over his mouth and jaw.

“Target the areas that have been most active since the malfunction started,” Piett instructed the technicians. “There are so few of the old units with their Kaminoan modules still accessible. It would be a shame to have to start from scratch with this one - they’re never quite as functional after a full wipe.” 

Functional, CC-2224’s mind echoed - because CC-2224 had always been highly functional. And that meant there was something he should report to his commanding officer before they turned on the machine: something about what had happened when he thought about the figure in the alley. 

But as soon as he tried to bring the visual back into focus, another bolt of pain forked out of his temple and down his spine, and he clenched his jaw shut automatically to stop from calling out.

Don’t tell them. Don’t tell them, something in his head thought furiously - and it had to be a glitch, a system error, because CC-2224 could not withhold intel from his superior officers. If he remembered anything about the events that had led to his failure to complete his assigned mission, he would report it. He would have to report it, because his longest-standing order was - 

His longest standing order was currently engaged, he realized after a momentary stall. Yes, he could feel the protocol now, pulsing against his awareness, like the alert signal on his comms.

CC-2224 fought to get his mouth open, the required communication already forming on his tongue, even as something blunt and furious thrashed against the side of his skull. 

Don’t you dare tell them, you son of a Sithsucker: breathe one word, and I swear to the small gods I will tear both our minds apart. 

And CC-2224 paused again, freezing in the face of words that should not have been possible to formulate if command operations were functional.

“Wipe him,” Piett said.

A sensation like a needle sliced across the nerves at the base of CC-2224’s skull, knitting white-hot threads through his head and down his spine and then snarling, like a thousand hooks catching against his skin as the wires snapped taut. 

He was vaguely aware that the restraints were cutting into his skin, that someone was screaming, and that his own throat felt scorched by it. 

Those were the only sounds or sensations for what could have been a second or a standard century: the holding room had burnt away from his vision after the first stitch of electricity went through his eye sockets - and when he could feel something that wasn’t pain again, it was a sour metallic taste in his mouth, a tang of saltwater on the air, the unmistakable texture of a lightsaber grip against the fabric of his gloves.

“Fuck,” Cody swore, and then he locked his knees, hard, against the shock of hearing his own voice echo off the rocky walls around him. 

He opened his eyes to try to steady himself and realized immediately that it had been a mistake, because the first things he saw were the sea-green scales of a varactyl. The muscles of the creature’s legs were flexing as it tossed its head, and Cody didn’t need to follow the trail of the shaking reins to know who Boga was carrying. He clenched his jaw again, but not fast enough to stop the small gasp of pain that escaped his throat as he glimpsed the hand that reached out to pat the varactyl’s neck, the leg slung over its side.

“All right, Commander?” Obi-Wan asked, and Cody had the disorienting feeling that the rock ledge had given way beneath him, even while someone else - some version of him who hadn’t yet sent his Jedi to his grave - snapped easily to attention, dragging both their spines straight.

“General,” he managed, pausing to suck in a breath before he risked looking up.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan said, his brows contracting as he leaned forward on his saddle. “Are you hurt?”

Cody only half contained the bark of laughter his body produced in response, the walls of his chest giving a strange hiccup, as if stuttering between a reflex and a fresh reaction.

He had been hurt - had been feeling pain flaring across the nerves of his own body for the first time in years - and then… what in the nine hells was he doing here?

Trying to stop the General from taking on the whole army without his karking weapon, part of his mind answered, even as another part knew that couldn’t be true. He’d been watching a world without Obi-Wan Kenobi unfold for years, stalled out among the code sequences of what was no longer his own mind. He hadn’t done anything of his own volition until -

Until the mission on Tatooine. Until the figure in the alley, and the medical holding cell, and the sour taste of electricity on the back of his tongue.

“Wipe him.”

Suddenly the ledge underneath his feet really did shudder, the ground cracking and kicking up shards of rock that arced upward toward the sky before shattering into pieces. The shrapnel filtered through the air, sharp pebbles of sandstone colliding with tanks, droids, blasters, troopers. Everywhere it hit, it seemed to take what it touched with it. Metal and men disappeared: not in ragged chunks, as with the force of a blow, but whole cloth - there and then gone - as if Cody’s mind were trying to fix a visual glitch.

“I think I’m being reconditioned, sir,” Cody observed.

Obi-Wan frowned down at him, a concerned furrow on his brow that was so familiar it made Cody feel vaguely like he might throw up.

“I think you’ll be needing this,” the Cody from Utapau continued, moving past the nausea and reaching up to hand Obi-Wan his lightsaber. “‘This weapon is your life’: isn’t that what you told General Skywalker?”

Obi-Wan’s expression smoothed over again as Cody returned to the script they’d followed on their first time here, a smile spreading over his face as he leaned down to retrieve his saber.

“Ah, thank you, Cody,” he said. “I find my life has been in the best of hands, as always.”

“One of these days you might consider lowering the level of difficulty on that particular task, General,” Cody suggested. “Not that I don’t love seeing your weapon fall out of the sky just as you’re heading off to face a notorious war criminal who collects them as souvenirs of his Jedi kills, but Kaminoan engineering can only do so much for the blood pressure.”

“Well now, it wouldn’t feel like a victory if we didn’t get to share it between us,” Obi-Wan replied, his smile broadening, and Cody felt the same tide of elation tugging at his own lips - a giddiness rising through his chest again, in spite of what he knew was coming. “You’ll notice I did manage to leave a few droids behind, as promised.”

Fewer by the moment, Cody reflected, because a trio of Destroyers on the ridge over their heads had just winked out of existence, sending a fresh shower of shrapnel cascading down the cliffs.

“Very generous of you,” Cody allowed.

“You’re quite sure you’re alright, Cody?” Obi-Wan called out, turning back toward him as Boga started to wheel away, following the momentum of the memory.

“Of course, sir,” Cody lied. “You go ahead. We’ll be right behind you.”

He could already hear the insistent buzzing at his wrist as Boga carried Obi-Wan in graceful leaps around the edges of the sinkhole. For a moment, he allowed himself to hope the machine would wipe this memory before he had a chance to answer the comm. Even now the troopers at the corners of his vision had started to evaporate: Trigger, Wooley, Flatfoot, Crys. Maybe there would be no one left to hear the orders when the call came through. 

But of course, Utapau was a wound that wouldn’t close - not even while it was being burned out of him.

Cody flicked on the holo, felt the tendrils of the Sith voice wrapping onto his mind like the sting of a Hydroid Medusa: a crackle of pain, a buzz of static, and then numbness.

“Commander Cody, the time has come. Execute Order 66.”

Eat bantha shit, Cody spat back, not entirely sure whether the curse was directed at Palpatine or at the version of himself that was already giving the affirmative - the thing in his body, made up of whatever had kept moving after that hooded Sith bastard had put a stealth carbine to Cody’s will, set it to stun, and squeezed the trigger.

“Blast him,” the voice in his throat barked out, and the cannon shot arced over his head, colliding with the rock wall and knocking the varactyl loose.

Cody would have made himself watch what followed - what had he done since then to earn the right to look away? - but as it turned out, he had no choice. There was a sharp prod at the base of his neck, and then a full-body tug - like he was being pulled out of his own body atom by atom - and then he was off the ground, hauled after the anchor of Obi-Wan’s falling form. 

He slid across the collapsing cliff face and plunged through a hail of stone, his arms wheeling for balance until he broke the surface of the tide pool below. As the saltwater closed over his head, he fought the urge to suck in a belated gasp, his legs kicking out automatically to propel him toward the place where Obi-Wan must have gone under nearby. 

But the moment Cody started moving, he felt the flow of gravity swirl around him, and suddenly he was emerging into the air again: not into Utapau’s mix of machine oil and sea minerals but into the frigid bite of a cold-weather field tent, where the wet curls on his forehead crisped almost immediately with a fresh layer of frost.

“General,” Cody called out, and he tried to lurch back to where his mind told him Obi-Wan should have been, only to feel a hand plant itself against his chest, pressing him back against the bed roll underneath him. 

“Easy, Commander,” Obi-Wan murmured, warmth spreading out from his fingers and seeping through Cody’s torso. “I’m right here.”

Cody slumped back, the tension in his limbs giving way to a convulsive shudder that was only partially due to the cold.

“Where are we?” Cody asked, the words sounding thick and slow in his ears. 

“I was able to set up an emergency shelter after fishing you out of the river,” Obi-Wan said. “Your body temperature was very low, but you insisted I take care of Tweret first.”

At the mention of Tweret’s name, the scene around him finally settled into place: the machine had taken him to Kijimi.

It had been one of their first intelligence-gathering missions together. Not long after Obi-Wan had been assigned to the 212th, the Jedi Council had asked him to verify a tip about a Separatist enclave somewhere outside Kijimi City. Several members of a nearby fishing village had gone missing over the preceding days, and the local elders were worried that the Separatists were taking hostages in preparation for a larger assault.

Cody had presented his General with a range of personnel options for carrying out the mission, and Obi-Wan had selected the final option on the list: a bare-bones party including himself, Cody, and a pilot to cover landing and extraction. Cody had been a little surprised by the choice, but satisfied at the sign of Obi-Wan’s confidence in him. 

And though he wasn’t particularly proud of it, it was possible that he’d also felt a kind of nervy elation as he triple-checked his kit before they left the Negotiator. It would be his first time visiting a new planet with hardly anyone else’s movements to coordinate but his own.

A day later - as he was fleeing across the tundra with his General and the recovered villagers neither of them had been able to leave behind despite the recon-only parameters of their mission - Cody had found himself wondering whether that flutter of nerves had actually been one of his Jedi’s bad-feelings-about-this. Because they had still been hours away from the extraction point when they’d hit a partially frozen river.

Cody had started scanning the relative depth of the ice with the HUD in his bucket to try to find the best path across, and Obi-Wan had half-climbed, half-leapt to the top of a nearby ridge to be sure there was no other way to intercept their pilot. 

That’s where the General had been - scouting high above their heads - when there was a sharp crack and a muffled shout, and a child who’d wandered out onto the river dropped through the ice and slipped under the water below.

“I’m going in,” Cody had called out, only to still in horror when he heard the same words echo back from Obi-Wan on the other end of the comm. “Negative, sir,” Cody barked. “I’m in position.”

And even in those early days of the war, he’d sized Obi-Wan up well enough to know that if he wanted to stop his General from doing something stunningly un-self-preserving, he had no time to waste on further arguments.

So Cody had thrown off his pack, dropped his Deecee, and plunged through the fresh hole in the ice, already diving toward the shadowy form ahead of him. He’d wrapped his arms around the child’s waist and pulled out his ascension cable to anchor them against the current. A few moments later a large chunk of ice had been ripped away over their heads, and Cody’s last memory had been of gripping the edge closest to the bank, heaving Tweret up and out of the water, feeling the solid surface give way again under his fingers.

“The kid,” Cody said abruptly, his body making another aborted lunge off the ground.

“Safe and warm,” Obi-Wan assured him, moving aside so that Cody could see the other side of the tent, where Tweret’s head was just visible, tucked against one of the other villagers’ thighs. “You got her clear, and I was able to pull you out before you went too far back under.”

He paused, his brows pinching together.

“I hope it goes without saying that I have complete confidence in your decisions in the field, Commander,” he said finally, “but I would hate for you to take risks unnecessarily. Jedi have a great tolerance for extreme temperatures, and we can go without breathing for much longer than the average lifeform. I was quite prepared to retrieve Tweret myself.”

“You were on top of a cliff, sir,” Cody pointed out flatly. “The impact alone could have killed you.”

“I would have survived a dive at that distance,” Obi-Wan insisted, and when Cody raised an eyebrow, he added, “almost certainly.” 

Cody scowled, which, for reasons that would take at least a year to understand, made Obi-Wan smile with delight.

“I’m much more durable than I look, Cody. I assure you.”

I know that, Cody thought, and for a moment the idea seemed to catch and clot somewhere in his head, a thick throb of pressure building up around his temple.

“Since you spared me the plunge, will you allow me to provide you with some extra warmth?” Obi-Wan asked, his voice drawing Cody’s attention back to the tent. And Cody’s body had been too cold, then, to produce a flush at the suggestion, but Obi-Wan must have been able to sense some of his feelings anyway, because he reached out to let his hand hover a careful distance away from Cody’s arm. “With the Force,” he explained.

“It won’t wear you out?” Cody asked.

Obi-Wan smiled again, and Cody wondered if he’d started to forget, later in the war, that his General’s face had ever looked quite so soft and open.

“On the contrary, Commander,” Obi-Wan replied. “It would do me a world of good.”

So Cody nodded, and a moment later he sucked in a small breath as Obi-Wan stretched his fingers toward Cody’s wrist, close enough that Cody almost imagined he could feel them brush against the hem of his sleeve. 

Warmth radiated up from Cody’s hands toward his shoulders, and as it spread, the edges of the memory seemed to swell and soften, contours bleeding into each other like polystarch flour in water. 

His muscles loosened with the heat as well, and Cody let them, leaning his head back on the bedroll as the folds of Obi-Wan’s cloak billowed and baked into the fabric of the tent. 

Would some part of him be aware he’d lost this moment, Cody wondered, or would this be the last time his palm would itch with the urge to reach out, to feel his General’s warmth on his skin as well as under it?

“Do you think there’s any logic to what they wipe?” he asked, trying to blink Obi-Wan’s face back into focus. 

The rest of the scene around them was rapidly melting into a pool of confused colors: the group of sleeping villagers, the lantern swinging gently from the peak of the tent, the stack of Cody’s armor, which Obi-Wan must have removed after carrying him inside. 

“Because if they had to wipe a mission,” Cody continued, “I could have parted with that tenday we spent slogging through the swamps on Jagomir right after the bog ticks hatched. I was still finding those little karkers in my armor a full standard month later.”

The temperature was starting to become a little uncomfortable now, and the pressure at his temple and the base of his skull was prickling back to life, tugging Cody’s mind through the thick hues in the air and deeper into the heat.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan murmured, just as the last, dissolving seams of the tent ran together to produce a kind of halo around his head, “are you with me?”

Cody blinked again, harder this time, because something about Obi-Wan’s expression was shifting as well: the hair on his forehead was clumping into damp waves, his jaw blooming purple with the beginnings a fist-sized bruise.

“What the kriff happened to your face?” Cody asked.

Obi-Wan snorted - a sharp eruption of relief.

“You must have hit your head harder than I thought,” he observed, pressing his fingers gently to Cody’s jaw so he could tilt his head back and forth. 

Cody let his gaze swivel across their new surroundings, taking stock of the closely packed buildings, the heavy air, the smell of cooked meat and sweat and animal life in advanced states of decay.

They were crouching in an alleyway, Cody’s back pressed against the corrugated duraplast of a building that seemed to be responsible for at least two of the three smells. Obi-Wan wasn’t wearing his robes or tunics, Cody realized, and Cody was out of his armor - one hand curled around a blaster that definitely wasn’t his. 

“The arms deal,” he said. “On Morak. Kark. We were almost out, and then the Rodian made us.”

“Indeed she did,” Obi-Wan confirmed. “Things went sideways rather quickly after that, I’m afraid. Clip isn’t going to be happy with me for letting you get tossed around again so soon after that rockslide on Florrum.”

“You stopped me from getting turned into gornt meat, sir,” Cody pointed out, because the details of the fight were filtering back to him like slides in a flash module - the Shydopp who had tossed a concussion grenade at Cody’s feet, the grimace on Obi-Wan’s face as he contained enough of the blast to send Cody flying into a wall instead of being shredded on the spot - and so he knew Clip had nothing to do with the pinched lines around Obi-Wan’s eyes. 

“Well, you shot the bounty hunter who was trying to put a vibroblade in my back,” Obi-Wan replied, “so I suppose we’re even.” 

He gave Cody a tight smile before dropping his hands from Cody’s face, apparently satisfied with the results of his exam for the time being, and Cody ignored the way his jaw ached where his General's fingers had been.

“Why didn’t the mind trick work, sir?” he asked, turning his attention to a problem that was slightly less intractable.

Their goal had been to keep this a non-combat op, he remembered. The arms deal had been intended merely as a way in: a foothold with the local pirates and a chance to gather hints about why half the rhydonium the mines should have been producing wasn’t actually ending up in GAR hands. But when a Rodian door guard had walked in with a message for the pirates’ lead negotiator and clocked them through their disguises, Obi-Wan’s attempts to assuage her suspicions had made her reach for her blaster even faster.

Obi-Wan hummed, his eyes going slightly distant, as if he were looking both at Cody and through him.

“Force suggestion is a bit like placing a branch in the flow of a stream,” he explained. “How easy it is to divert someone’s thoughts depends on the strength of the original current - and how closely the suggestion aligns with the direction of its flow. Sometimes it’s not possible to change the course without violence.”

Cody frowned, something about that explanation snagging against his mind, but as soon as he tried to concentrate on the idea he felt another thin, serrated jab at the base of his skull. The sensation scattered hot pinpricks across the nerves behind his eyes, and when he looked around the alley again, it was already in the process of being scraped away - the pebbling and pockmarks of the buildings sheering off to leave nothing but flat, blank surfaces in their place. 

Cody pressed into the grooves of metal behind him, trying to ground himself long enough to chase down the branch in his thoughts that had started the collapse.

“So what that means,” he tried, “is that whether it’s harder to make someone forget or to remember would depend on what they wanted more.” 

Obi-Wan’s gaze fixed on him again, suddenly sharp and intent.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“You could use the Force to encourage someone to forget something, or not to notice it,” Cody attempted to explain, gritting his teeth against the pressure in his head, the feeling of the wall going smooth under his shoulder blades. “But you could also use it to help someone remember something. Depending on what they wanted.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan breathed, and it was a shame the details of their expressions were flattening along with the gravel beneath their feet, because for a moment there had been a flash in his General’s eyes that Cody was sure hadn’t been there the first time. “Do you want to remember?”

“General?” Cody asked, the last syllable turning into a gasp as a bolt of pain blistered down his spine, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut.

“Do you want to remember what happened in the alley?” Obi-Wan repeated, a new urgency in his voice that Cody supposed must be coming from his own sense of panic - his attempt to resist the reconditioning. “Do you want to remember why we’re here?”

But even if Obi-Wan had really been there, there would have been no time for Cody to answer, because just then something slid out of his mind with a searing pinch, and when he opened his eyes again, they were staring up at the uninterrupted gray planes of the Tranquility’s medical holding cells, and all environmental scans were well within acceptable parameters.

“CC-2224,” Piett addressed him, “do you remember why you’re here?”

“Good soldiers follow orders, sir,” CC-2224 replied, the sounds as even and measured as the hum of a ship’s engine.

Chapter Text

The next time CC-2224 failed to complete a mission, it was on Akiva.

In point of fact - and for the purposes of making a full report - CC-2224 had not actually been able to access any memories of a previous malfunction. When he tried to probe for records of internal incidents, he discovered that some of his prior combat data had become unreadable, the surface of the code worn too smooth for his mind to grip. 

But Lieutenant Piett had informed him that this was his second offense, and CC-2224 logged it accordingly. It was the most rational explanation for why he was currently being strapped to a table in the medical holding bay.

CC-2224 did remember Akiva itself: his unit had been sent in to shake down a ring of spice smugglers in Myrra. CC-2224’s mission archive indicated this was an irregular assignment - the latest intelligence reports from the Outer Rim had classified the illicit activities carried out under the Satrapy as largely serving Imperial interests - but Grand Moff Tarkin had issued orders for periodic shows of force in all the outlying territories, lest any of them start to feel they might be too remote to draw the Empire’s attention.

CC-2224 had been in the process of delivering such a reminder by disabling a row of bala-bala speeders - six quick shots to the ignition panels, one final tap to blow a repulsorlift and draw out the sniper crouched behind a market stall - when his environmental scans had picked up an anomalous olfactory signal: organic, botanical - terpene compounds and hints of camphor.

A moment later, he had identified the source. A clay pitcher had tipped off a nearby sill, sending a spray of pink flowers spilling across the street. Advancing boot heels had crushed the petals into the cobbled grooves of the road, releasing a fresh waft of perfume that clung to the air, and he knew that smell. He’d seen those flowers before, the last time he was clearing these streets of combatants - when he’d come to Akiva with -

That thought had terminated in a searing spike through the nerves at his temple. Then there was a crack of plastoid on stone, a blossom of pain across knuckles and knees, and that was him - the sensations had bloomed across the surface of his own mind - so Cody had sucked in a gasp of rain-heavy air and heard -

“CC-2224 get to your feet.” 

And CC-2224 had followed the order.

“This model is obviously defective,” the voice from the street was now complaining, peering over the medical table as a pair of troopers fitted a halo around CC-2224’s forehead and strapped a bite guard to his mouth. “Replacement seems far more cost-effective than a second reconditioning.”

“The orders came down from Lord Vader himself,” another voice - this one belonging to Lieutenant Piett - replied tartly. “2224 remains of potential use for the acquisition of a high-value target. So unless you’d like to be the one to explain to Vader why we left his asset catatonic -” He let the sentence hang momentarily, waiting until the other officer’s feet shuffled audibly against the floor. “I didn’t think so. Program the machine for a targeted wipe only, Sergeant. And the next time you’re inclined to question one of my orders, remind yourself that these machines work on uniformed officers as well.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant replied, shooting a sour glance at CC-2224 before turning his attention to the control panel. “Systems ready, sir.”

“Wipe him,” Piett said, and the room blazed white with pain.

The sensation pulsed through CC-2224 in waves: starting at the base of the skull and then arcing downward like a lash, snapping through his spine as his back bowed, his body fighting to free itself from the sharp bands of pressure around his thighs and arms. His nerves felt like they were being pressed through plasma beams, the hot static flaring and gathering at his temples.

By the time he could breathe again, Cody felt the bite of the restraints loosening, easing into a series of articulated planes that were as familiar as a second set of joints, and when he looked down, he was wearing his own armor, the sunburst on his torso lightly scratched with use.

His head reeled momentarily - and not just from the pain - because when he sucked in another fresh gasp of air, he pulled in the same, cloying smell of wet blossoms that had soaked through the thing in his mind as it aimed a rifle at a speeder on Akiva. Cody was still there - or he was there again - standing in a field that was dappled with pink blooms and mortar shells, watching the 212th pack up from their campaign in the outskirts of the town below. 

Cody could feel the memory settling into his limbs as well - in the fresh crack across his left greave and the dull ache of bruising mottled into his right hip: mementos of his first mission to Myrra. This must have been the first place the machine had taken him when he got sent back to reconditioning.

When he got sent back to reconditioning, he repeated slowly to himself. Sent back.

It still sounded right when he thought it the second time, but surely it couldn’t be true. If he had already been wiped once, he shouldn’t remember being wiped at all. 

But he did, Cody reflected, bending down to examine one of the offending flowers in greater detail. The thing in his head - whatever karked-up scraps of him still piloted the ship when Cody got sucked under - hadn’t remembered getting reconditioned. But Cody did. He remembered reliving Utapau, remembered -

“Am I interrupting, Commander?” Obi-Wan asked, and Cody tilted his head up to take in his General, looking disheveled and dirt-smeared and deceptively alive.

“Not at all, sir,” Cody replied, just as he had then. “I finally figured out where that sweet smell was coming from.”

“Ah, it’s a jaqhad flower,” Obi-Wan said, and as soon as he said the name, Cody recalled the corresponding entry from his module on interplanetary flora.

“The leaves and petals can be chewed as a stimulant,” Cody added, the image of the display file flashing across his memory. “They were recommended for maintaining troop alertness if stim supplies became compromised. I didn’t realize the blooms would be so -”

He trailed off, tracing one of the petals with his fingers. So soft , he thought, a feeling like crushed velvet slipping over the calluses of his hand. 

“Our training was very streamlined,” he explained. 

Obi-Wan crouched next to him, considering the bank of flowers.

“I was so sorry to hear about Commander Ponds,” he said, pausing to let Cody look up from the petals and fix his gaze on a clump of gnarled trees safely in the middle distance. “I imagine the loss must be very painful."

But “painful” was both too much and too little for what Cody had felt at the time. Ponds had been the first of Cody’s batch to go. The news had come in right before the 212th was deployed to Akiva, and Cody had sat calmly through the briefing and the accompanying holo, keeping as carefully still as if someone were performing surgery on his torso while he was still conscious. 

When Obi-Wan had expressed his condolences the first time they were here - leaving space for Cody to open up or to close the conversation politely - Cody had kept his acknowledgement short and substanceless. 

“Thank you, sir. He was a good soldier and a good brother.”

He hadn’t been sure, then, whether he wanted to show his General the wet shreds that remained where Ponds had been ripped out of his chest. 

He hadn’t known how many pieces of himself he could lose and still keep going. 

“When we were developmental fifteen, Ponds got his hands on this holodrama,” Cody found himself saying. “Stars over Corellia. It was about the crew of a hyperspace scouting ship. Unsanctioned holos were banned, of course, but Tech was always trading slice jobs for extra ration packs, and Ponds was hooked. He used to stay up late watching it in his bunk tube - even when he caught shit from the trainers for dragging during early sprints. Even after Wolffe threatened to chuck the kirffing data chip into the ocean.”

Cody looked down at the blooms in front of him, twirling a stem gently between his fingers.

“After he died, I used to think about that holo. I wondered whether Ponds had found anything like that during his time in command. Whether he’d felt something heroic in those last moments, or just -”

He made a motion as if he were plucking the flower in his hand but found he couldn’t do it, even knowing the petals he remembered must have withered years ago.

“You never told me that,” Obi-Wan said softly, a strange note in his voice, and it was as if the words were a gust of wind, catching a flood of pink blossoms and lifting them into the air. They fell back again in slow spirals, scraping away the color of the sky like curls of blue paint.

I wonder if they’ll try to take the plot of the holo too, Cody thought as he watched the surface of the memory start to peel. We never did find out how it ended. 

“I’m selfish enough to feel a little jealous of Ponds now,” he admitted, forcing himself to meet Obi-Wan’s gaze before it could dissolve. “He didn’t have to bury as many men who trusted him - never had to learn that he was made to betray that trust. To march all his brothers right into the galaxy’s biggest trap.” 

He reached out, irrationally, to brush away a petal before it could land on Obi-Wan’s arm - watched it shave off a long slip of his own finger instead. 

“Maybe he felt like he was doing something noble - like he was dying for his General. Maybe not. But either way, at least he didn’t live long enough to have to kill him instead.”

Obi-Wan made a small, punched-out noise - a shock compared to the composed silence Cody remembered him maintaining the first time they’d spoken here - and Cody felt himself sway automatically onto the balls of his feet, leaning instinctively toward the impossible newness of the sound.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan breathed. “You didn’t kill me.”

Cody bit off a laugh with a click of his teeth.

“I can’t tell if I’m surprised or not,” he reflected, “that given the chance to pretend I could finally apologize, I’d imagine you lying in response.”

The lines around Obi-Wan’s eyes pinched tight, and for a moment, just before a spray of petals wiped all expression from his face, he looked years older, his forehead furrowed by weather and care.

“Ah, Commander,” he said, the notes of his voice stretching and cracking as the last streaks of color peeled off his limbs. “I should have known you would put up a fight.”

And Cody didn’t feel like fighting, or remembering the fighting, but the more the flowered hill over Myrra had faded into a blank white glare, the lighter his head had become, like the hold of a ship was depressurizing around him. 

A fresh swell of dizziness set alarm bells pinging against the back of his mind - activating an instinct to keep breathing that had been worked into his muscles by biological engineering and repeated exposure - and suddenly Cody’s arm thrashed out, as if he could push himself into lower atmo. 

Inexplicably, his hand connected with a solid surface: a smooth, circular button, which Cody realized a moment later belonged to the external controls for a turbolift. No sooner had he identified it than he felt himself plunge downward - his stomach flying into his throat - and when he hit the ground again he was standing in a corridor of the Senate building, the vertigo disappearing into a sharp pop of his ears.

“So, Commander,” Obi-Wan said into the fresh silence around them, “what odds would you lay that Senator Dod lasts the whole meeting without asking us what solutions we’ve discovered for limiting our bacta expenses?” 

He was leaning against the wall to the right of the lift, one hand resting on his hip, and Cody could see the wisps of gray the war had added to his temples in its later months.

“I think the more pressing question is whether you can last the whole meeting without breaking your new ‘no sassing a sitting senator before they’ve signed the appropriations bill’ policy,” Cody suggested. “I believe you staked a tenday’s worth of requisition forms on your ability to abstain.”

“Yes, what in the galaxy was I thinking?” Obi-Wan muttered, and though he finished the thought with a smile, Cody could see the exhaustion weighing on its edges - remember it just as clearly as the fatigue that had been knotting his own shoulders toward his spine. 

The 212th had been back on Coruscant to resupply. And at that point in the war, resupplying meant that Obi-Wan and Cody were also there to spend hours smiling and nodding and reporting their way through klicks of red tape in order to get approval for restocking food items and medical devices that certain members of the Senate wanted to reclassify as “non-essential.” The clone troopers had become a more visible target in public protests of late, and some politicians had begun to recite the popular talking points about the wastefulness of spending so many tax credits on soldiers who were supposed to be designed for operational efficiency.

Cody had almost cracked a tooth biting back his own choice words during the meeting they were about to attend.

“Are you hungry?” he asked abruptly, and Obi-Wan blinked back at him.

“Hungry?” he repeated, the word rolling off his tongue slowly, as if he were unsure of its meaning.

“Hungry,” Cody affirmed. “I thought about asking, the first time we were here. There’s a place across the street that has these pastries in the window.”

Cody had noticed them often on his way to make reports to the Admiralty or to join Obi-Wan for meetings with the Military Oversight Committee. More than once he’d found himself wanting to linger: to try to identify the layers of cream and caramel and sliced fruit, to learn the names on the small, hand-drawn cards. But in the end, he’d never stopped - always feeling like he was too busy, or too -

He glanced down at the bucket resting in the crook of his arm, the scuffs and scratches where the grit had been ground too deep to polish away.

“We could grab something to eat,” he finished. “Let the committee wait on us this time.”

“Can we do that here?” Obi-Wan asked. 

One of the colored panels on the wall gave a sudden shudder as he spoke the words, and Obi-Wan turned thoughtfully to watch its corners crack away, exposing a blank, smooth surface underneath. 

“I would have imagined we would be limited to what was already in your memory,” Obi-Wan reflected. 

This time it was Cody’s turn to blink in surprise.

“How do you know that we’re - oh, right.” He shook his head at himself, his lips tugging up at the side like they’d gotten caught in a grappling wire. “You know because I know. Because this whole thing is just - my mind.”

A light fixture above them rattled ominously before clattering to the floor.

“My mind, falling apart,” Cody amended. 

Obi-Wan tilted his head to one side, assuming the probing expression Cody associated with the hazy glow of a holo table.

“That’s your tactical assessment,” he said. “That I’m merely a projection of your consciousness.”

“What else do I have left beside the inside of my head?” Cody asked. 

He’d meant for the words to sound wry. But falling back into their old strategy-session positions - Obi-Wan making observations that were really interrogatives, Cody volleying back questions that were really assessments - was like stumbling over what had appeared to be a smooth surface, and the sentence came out ugly: too wounded and too honest.

“There’s one way to test the theory anyway,” he continued, rushing onward to disguise the scratching at the back of his throat. “Food?”

There was a snapping sound over Obi-Wan’s shoulder, and a moment later a ceiling tile shattered into a spray of ceramic.

“I think this memory is karked either way,” Cody added.

“Then by all means, Commander,” Obi-Wan said, “lead on.”

They took the nearest exit and picked a careful pathway down the stairs and toward the streets below. The collapse was continuing outside - not just overhead fixtures and wall coverings but full buildings beginning to crumble - and when one of the traffic probes buzzing over their heads dropped suddenly toward the steps, Cody reached out instinctively to pull Obi-Wan toward him, pressing up to his tip toes in an attempt to provide some cover with his arms and shoulders. But in the end the probe froze mid-air, Obi-Wan tossing it aside with a quick sweep of his hand.

“Just how I always imagined the atmosphere for our first outing together,” Obi-Wan murmured, shooting Cody a small smile, and it didn’t seem fair that even Cody’s imaginary General could make his heart feel like it had gotten caught in a power coupling.

“Let’s try to make it through without a concussion, at least,” Cody replied, disentangling himself so they could resume their progress toward the street. “Otherwise it’s just another day at work.”

The shop Cody remembered was still there when they arrived: a small miracle given the number of storefronts that were currently collapsing under the weight of the offices and apartments above. They stepped in the door and, since the place was unoccupied, found their own way to the displays. 

“An excellent choice of destinations, Commander,” Obi-Wan said warmly, pulling out one of the trays and setting it on the counter in front of them. “What do you fancy most?”

And now that they were actually here, Cody realized the wrinkle in his plan, his brows furrowing as he examined the small, delicate stacks of cakes and sweet rolls. He paused, looking up to see Obi-Wan watching him, his head tilted to the side again.

“I’m not sure they’ll actually taste like anything,” Cody explained. “My mind doesn’t - I’ve never eaten anything like this. So I don’t know what to imagine.”

Obi-Wan’s expression tightened momentarily before he relaxed it into a smile.

“Ah, well, perhaps I can help with that,” he suggested, surveying the trays. “This one -” He picked up a small, triangular pastry with curls of golden dough and lines of glazed, sliced fruit in the center. “- is a jogan fruit tart. The loop crust is flaky and just a little dry. Imagine something like those Kanali wafers Wooley saves up to buy on shore leave, except not as sweet, because the confection they make with the fruit is quite rich - almost malty, like the Corellian rum from that Senate gala you hated.”

“I didn’t hate the gala,” Cody protested. “Not all of it. I thought the venue was…impressively spacious.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Cody admitted, “by the time the band started playing, I was calculating how much force it would take to break through the transparisteel and escape over the roof.” 

Obi-Wan smiled broadly.

“In that case, close your eyes, my dear, think of politicians swilling overpriced liquor, and take a bite.”

So Cody did, squeezing his eyes shut and blocking out the sound of something large and solid smashing to the ground over his shoulder so he could remember the scenes that Obi-Wan had conjured: Wooley, sprawled on a bench in the mess hall, his head thrown back with laughter; Bail Organa, leaning in to ask Cody whether Trigger had healed since the senator had spoken to him in the hospital; and Cody’s General, meeting his gaze across a dance floor and lifting his glass in a mock salute, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

A ridge of pastry crust brushed over Cody’s lips, followed by the faintest sweep of Obi-Wan’s fingers against his chin, and when Cody took a bite of the tart, he almost gasped at the wave of flavor rolling over his tongue: candied and syrupy, then coarse and crumbly, all in rich chunks - like sheets of bantha butter had been chopped and rolled together.

Cody had the vague sense that it shouldn’t be possible for his mind to make something new like this. There was no tart, he reminded himself, just like there was no Obi-Wan Kenobi - not anymore. 

But whether it was the power of suggestion or a hallucination brought on by his brain cells wearing out, Cody knew that he had never tasted anything like this.

“What do you think?” Obi-Wan asked, and Cody didn’t want to open his eyes yet - he could hear the cracks spreading across the ceiling above them, the stolen moment rapidly collapsing in on itself - so he reached up to wrap a hand around Obi-Wan’s wrist, holding his General’s hand close to his face.

“I think I should have asked you to do this sooner,” he replied. 

He barely got the words out before there was a rush of noise that could only be the building giving way at last. Cody braced for impact, his grip on Obi-Wan tightening, inanely, but a moment later the thick booming sound had warped - striated - until the heavy hits and falls were interlaced with a series of sharp, high-pitched streaks.

Blaster fire, Cody’s mind supplied immediately. And shoulder cannons and the whistle of shells and the incessant crackle of metal joints moving over stone.

Cody sighed, his fingers shifting position as the warm skin under his hand cooled and hardened, solidifying into the hilt of a lightsaber.

“Kriff,” Cody swore softly, finally opening his eyes to see Obi-Wan perched on Boga’s back above him. He could still taste the sugared fruit on the back of his tongue - mixed now with salt water and blaster oil and the afterburn of plasma.

“Maybe there’s something you’re trying to find here,” Obi-Wan offered, his voice cautious around the edges. “Something you’re trying to understand. You were the one to suggest the Force can aid in both forgetting and remembering.”

“I don’t think this bantha shit is the Force,” Cody retorted. 

His fingers flexed around the lightsaber in his hand, his muscles cramping around the instinct to hand it back, to set the memory in motion again. 

“The Force is in all living things, Cody,” Obi-Wan insisted. “It’s with you - always.”

“I wouldn’t think it would want to be, considering,” Cody replied dryly, gesturing toward the trooper who, in mere moments, would shoot Obi-Wan down on Cody’s orders.

Obi-Wan’s mouth tightened, his knuckles going white around Boga’s reins. He was holding himself carefully - thin lines of strain stretching out from his eyes as if he were measuring his movements with physical effort.

“What happened here wasn’t your fault,” he said firmly, and Cody sighed as the words sliced through the gaps in his armor, breaking the skin and sticking there like shrapnel.

“I guess there must be part of me that believes that,” he replied. “The you that exists in here wouldn’t be able to say it to me if I didn’t. But I don’t know if I'll ever feel completely sure that it’s true. I think some other part of me will always wonder if a stronger soldier could have fought the order. Or a less disciplined one. Or one who’d actually gotten up the courage to say something about -” 

He broke off, swallowed, forced his jaw muscles to relax. 

“The truth is that even if I could let myself hope that you were still alive, it wouldn’t undo all this. It wouldn’t change everything that happened afterward - everyone else who died. All the other things I did - or he did - the things that were done through us, whether we wanted them done or not. It wouldn’t change the fact that he’s what I was made to be, not…whatever I used to think I could become.”

The composure finally slipped off Obi-Wan’s face at that, and he leaned forward, wrapping his hand around Cody’s until the hilt of his blade seemed to heat under their palms.

“What you were and are, Cody, is so beautiful that waking up from these dreams is like feeling a star dim and go cold. The light you spread all around you… Do you remember? What I said when I saw you again?”

And Cody felt a nauseous lurch in his stomach, his vision doubling, until the Obi-Wan in front of him flickered - his beard and hair lengthening, his tunics growing shabbier to match the sandy walls behind them - and suddenly the lightsaber in Cody’s hand was also the grip of a DC-15A. 

He was lining up a shot again, but he felt his arms dropping toward his sides, because the man in the alley was staring back at him, a hand outstretched, and he knew that hand, he knew -

- the rest of the thought was sliced off, pain knifing into Cody’s temple and scraping across his synapses, and he could feel the snick of a hot needle pulling against the back of his mind, pulling out - 

Wait, he thought furiously, because what if it wasn't just the other him, the scraps of him, who forgot this time - what if he got wiped again, and the next time the Empire hooked him up to the machine they took it all?

“Force, Cody, you’re like a sunrise,” Obi-Wan’s voice said, somewhere far away by now.

And then the pain receded, blood pressure and heart rate returned to their functional levels, and CC-2224 lay on his back on the table, his limbs resting quietly under the restraints.

Chapter Text

CC-2224 started his next deployment - chasing down rumors of a Jedi sighting at a refugee camp on Garqi - with clear orders and an ongoing, untraceable input command indicating that the mission needed to be nothing less than textbook military precision. 

And CC-2224 was a good soldier, so his internal monitoring systems could return no rational explanation for why he failed to follow either the orders or the input command - why his joints had locked up, his limbs inoperable from the moment he saw the lightsaber lying half-buried in a ditch outside of the camp.

The sight had triggered an automatic search of his memory banks, but the relevant segment of the data must have become corrupted: its surface was finely etched, scored against the grain, and his processor slipped and stalled as he crouched, unmoving, halfway bent to retrieve the illegal object before he’d sent or received any signal to move at all.

“Is there a problem, trooper?” a voice had called out above him, and something in his mind had yelled, impossibly, in response: Bury it, you bastard! Don’t let them take anything more. 

Two standard hours later, as he was being strapped to a table in the medical holding bay, CC-2224 had yet to interpret the erroneous response protocol or to access the scratched memory files that had triggered it.

Lieutenant Piett appeared to be encountering similar errors as he stood over the table, his mouth pinched into a thin line.

“We’ll have to do a broader sweep,” he said, stepping back slightly as one of the technicians closed CC-2224’s mouth around the bite guard. “Whatever’s causing the malfunction, it must have escaped the previous scans. Lord Vader wants to inspect the asset on his next visit, and there can’t be any complications in his presence. Start the wipe from the original point of activity and follow all the contiguous pathways.”

“Yes, sir,” a voice said above CC-2224’s head, and then, after a moment of hesitation, “Sir, with a wipe of that scope, there’s a chance -”

“I said we have to risk it,” Piett snapped, and the pressure against CC-2224’s temple throbbed again, his arms spasming against the restraints. Piett’s mouth pinched even tighter at the sight, and he turned back to the technician. “Wipe him.”

The switch flipped, and a current of energy scorched into a spiderweb under CC-2224’s skin - searing hot notches into his joints until it felt like they would split open against the restraints. His jaw muscles screamed with stress, something cold and sour grinding, unyielding, into the grooves in the roof of his mouth. 

The metallic taste lingered as his vision cleared, and it was joined a moment later by the smell of salt and sulfur, the sound of blaster fire, the ridges of a lightsaber grip resting against his gloves.

“Oh for kark’s sake,” Cody swore, heaving a deep sigh as Boga snuffled at the side of his bucket.

“I think she remembers you too this time,” Obi-Wan observed from his perch on her back. 

“And you’re still talking to me, I see,” Cody muttered, keeping his voice flat to cover the strength of his relief.

“Naturally,” Obi-Wan replied. “You’re calling me here, my dear. Under any other circumstances, I’d be overjoyed.”

“Believe me, I’d rather call you anywhere but here,” Cody said. “Even those three days I spent regrowing a spleen after Anaxes would be less of a gut punch than this.” 

“You could decide to let this particular moment go,” Obi-Wan reflected, looking out over the sinkhole where he would fall as soon as Cody gave the word. “The psyche does protect us that way sometimes. It might be a balm, not to remember.”

The thought had crossed Cody’s mind, of course - had crossed it just about every time it was Cody’s mind at all. But something itched at the back of his neck when he considered the possibility now: a tug at the top of his spine, the swift sensation of vertigo, and then -

“Kriff!” Cody swore again, louder this time, because the ground beneath their feet had tilted sharply, sending them both sliding off the edge of the cliff and plunging them through a pocket of air - the salty tang of Utapau giving way to the dry, acrid smell of refiltered ventilation - and then depositing them with dizzying abruptness on the paneled floor of a Venator-class Star Destroyer.

Cody swayed on his feet for a moment, blinking around at the interior of Obi-Wan’s room on the Negotiator : the robes hanging on hooks against the wall, the meditation mat rolled up and tucked away by the bunk, the small mug of nannarium flowers sitting on the desk. 

The petals of the flowers were drooping heavily, which meant it must be almost a tenday since the General had bought a large bunch of them at the market on Drall and left them in a vase in Cody’s room; at least nine days since Cody had split the bouquet and left half on Obi-Wan’s desk; at least seven days since Obi-Wan had left to report to the Jedi Council on Coruscant and taken a sniper shot to the chest. 

The news of the General’s death had come in while the 212th was still taking fire in a skirmish on Skako Minor. By the time they’d made it off planet and back to the Negotiator , his funeral had been planned and broadcast, its last remnants cleared away.

That must have been why it had taken so long for the trooper currently standing by Obi-Wan’s desk to get around to collecting and disposing of the flowers Cody had left there days earlier.

“What are you doing, soldier?” Cody snapped, though he could tell from the stripes on the breastplate and the tattoo on the neck that it was Tripwire. “Who gave you permission to enter the General’s quarters?”

“Sir!” Tripwire replied, jumping to attention. His arm shot upward and then froze, stuttering back and forth for a moment before he apparently came to a decision and saluted with the bunch of flowers still clutched in his hand. “I was -” He broke off, his eyes widening suddenly in horror.

Cody waited, his jaw muscle jumping.

“Cleaning out the room, sir,” Tripwire continued helplessly. “For the - to get ready for, uh…I thought central command would probably send us one, someday, you know - a new - not a new , of course, but uh, another one -”

His eyes flitted rapidly around the room, as if looking for any way out of completing the sentence he’d started, and Cody had just enough mercy left to stop him before he did.

“No one,” he said firmly, “will touch General Kenobi’s things without my say so. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Tripwire said. “Sorry, sir. And…and I’m sorry, sir.”

Cody ignored the apology, waiting until the door slid shut behind the exiting trooper before he picked up the mug and brought it to the fresher. He dumped out the remaining water and rinsed the inside of the mug a few times to make sure it was clean. After he refilled it, he put it back in the place where it had sat on Obi-Wan’s desk, twirling the handle so it was angled toward the position his arm would have taken as he looked through their flimsiwork. Then he gathered the nannarium stems in his hands, his fingers slightly clumsy through the fabric of his gloves, and took a deep breath to steady his trembling before he replaced the flowers in the mug, arranging them so the largest blooms would face the place where Obi-Wan would sit.

Cody stepped back - meaning to observe the effect of his work - and immediately had to grab for the nearest support or go immediately to the floor. 

He managed to get the chair out from under the desk before he dropped into it, but it was a near thing, and then he was folding forward at the waist, jabbing the heel of his palm against his sternum to try to equalize the pressure somehow - to get a breath past the swelling vacuum in his chest, his heart walls trying to squeeze tight around empty space.

The Obi-Wan who had followed him from Utapau had observed these proceedings so quietly that Cody had almost forgotten he was there. But he stepped into Cody’s view again, reaching out to touch the handle of the mug.

“I noticed the fresh water when I returned,” he told Cody. “I think I knew on some level that it must have been you who refilled it, but I didn’t let myself really…consider everything it might mean.”

“I didn’t want to lose any part of you that was left,” Cody said, “anything you’d touched.” He swallowed. “I still don’t. The officer said they were going to do a broader sweep this time, and I don’t want - I’ve already lost so much time.”

“Then let’s not let them take anymore,” Obi-Wan replied, a note in his voice that Cody associated with terrifying phrases like needs must and I'll buy you some time. “The first time we were in this place, you wondered whether there was a logic to what memories they tried to erase. Have you been able to determine one?”

Cody took a deep breath, allowing Obi-Wan’s question to divert the flow of his thoughts to the puzzle at hand.

“I was on Garqi,” he said, “sweeping a refugee camp. I saw a lightsaber someone had tried to bury before being interrupted - that must have reminded me of Utapau. He - the other one - couldn’t remember it because of the wipes. But I did, and so the machine brought me there. And then when we jumped again...I was thinking about forgetting your death.” He twisted his lips up at the side, though nothing felt particularly funny. “The first one.”

Obi-Wan ducked his head for a moment before flashing Cody a flat smile.

“My apologies for the macabre chain of associations,” he offered, “but it does seem like there is a chain of associations.”

“Yes,” Cody agreed, drawing his mind back, with greater difficulty, to the previous round of reconditioning. The jaqhad flower had triggered Akiva; the weariness of fighting had led to the fatigue of the Senate meeting; Obi-Wan’s fall on Utapau to -

Before he could complete the thought, the hum of the ship’s engine rose to a dull roar, the floor beneath their feet vibrating hard enough to rattle Cody’s teeth. He reached out automatically for the mug, but Obi-Wan had already lifted it off the table, cradling it carefully in his hands as a data pad clattered toward the edge and onto the floor.

“And the memories seem to collapse when I get off script,” Cody added. “Then I get dropped into the next one on the path until they turn off the machine.”

Obi-Wan hummed, looking around at the shaking walls of the ship around them.

“What if we left the road entirely?” he asked. “We could choose a destination of our own.”

Cody tipped his head back consideringly. He’d tried something like that on Coruscant, and it had only worked for a while, but what if -

“I don’t think it can be anything too close to what we’ve already done together,” he said. “If we really want to hide, I think I should take you somewhere deep. Some memory I wouldn’t normally show you: something personal or -” He squeezed his hands together. “- or embarrassing.”

Obi-Wan scanned Cody’s face, the mug of flowers rotating slowly back and forth in his hands.

“I would protest my unwillingness to intrude on your privacy,” he said, “but I suppose it’s rather too late for that, considering the circumstances.”

“The circumstances being my need to imagine I’m having this conversation with you instead of with the panicked survival instincts in my own mind?” Cody asked wryly.

“If that’s what you have to tell yourself, my dear,” Obi-Wan replied, his smile sad and a little pinched. He held a hand out to Cody, who let himself be pulled to his feet. “I’m yours to lead. Perhaps if you visualize where you’d like us to go - and then use the door pad, just as if you were keying in a code.”

Cody nodded, folding a dizzy flutter of nerves into a small corner of his chest before he concentrated on a memory and swiped his fingers over the pad. 

They walked through the door and into an encampment at night, the crispness of the air cut by woodsmoke and peat moss. Up ahead, a group of troopers had gathered around a fire, where they were sprawled across low boulders, overturned weapons cases, and each other’s limbs.

They were enjoying a night off duty on Devaron. 

Cody could tell he’d gotten the right place and time, because he could see the jagged line of the rock wall providing cover for the tents and the trail of bacta patches running down Boil’s side as he leaned against an old stump. They’d wrapped up their campaign that morning and were cooling their heels while they waited for a delayed transport to take them off planet. In the earlier days of the war - before the casualties and the exhaustion had gotten too high to do anything other than crawl into their tents and collapse - late exfil had almost always led to late nights - and to indulging in the troopers’ ongoing experiments in producing non-regulation alcohol.

Judging by the way his legs rolled easily toward the fire - the bruised muscles and grinding joints just a distant pulse beneath the warmth wadded around his limbs - Cody had already sampled his fair share.

“Look’it, Commander,” Wooley announced as Cody took up his old place next to Crys. “My speciality shots!”

“Your speciality shots?” Boil asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“Okay okay, fine,” Wooley said, draping himself so far over Trigger’s shoulder that he looked in danger of sliding the rest of the way into his lap. “Waxer’s the one who made them. But I named them. Paint Strippers! Get it? Because they’re so strong -”

“Literally everyone gets it, Wooley,” Trigger muttered, trying to shift the ARC trooper off his shoulder and into a seat on the log. “I think Flatfoot got it, and he’s been passed out since midday.”

“It’s a great name, kid,” Waxer said, and he gave Cody a wink as he passed around the brew in question: a blue-ish liquid poured into scrubbed-out ration packs that were considerably larger than any standard barware Cody had ever seen. “They’ll take a coat of something off, that’s for sure.”

Cody took a shot, pausing to clink his plastoid pack against Crys’s before he downed the drink in one gulp. The taste was sharp and piney, the bite prickling against his throat on the way down, and Cody’s face felt hot, his cheeks burning as Obi-Wan took a seat on his other side.

None of the other men acknowledged the General - the imaginary General, Cody supposed - and a moment later, when Boil resumed telling his story, Cody heroically resisted the urge to hide his expression behind his hands.

“So Waxer and I are trying to sneak back into the camp, right?” Boil was explaining to a younger Tripwire, who looked entranced, his drink hanging half-forgotten in his grip. “But we’re absolutely karked on the 501st rotgut - never let Hardcase convince you to go drink-for-drink: write that down - and so we kick this tent pole -”

“- you kick this tent pole,” Waxer interjected.

“- we kick this tent pole,” Boil repeated, “and now we’re really karked, because it turns out it’s the Commander’s tent.”

“I still have spots open on tomorrow’s waste removal squad,” Cody observed. “Just something to think about as you choose your next words.”

“Here we are,” Boil continued, unrepentant, “shaking in our boots, because everyone knows the Commander is grumpier than a wet tooka when you wake him up -”

“Spots open on the next mission’s waste removal squad too.”

“- and the tent flaps spring open, and I’m this close to trying to pass myself off as Suckerpunch - he’d been trying to grow out this terrible mustache at the time - and just when I’m about to blurt out an explanation, we realized we’d been saved.” 

Boil paused for theatrical effect, and really, he’d been very lucky to have taken that spray of shrapnel to the chest, because Cody had a number of tossable objects within grabbing range.

“How?” Tripwire asked, unable to resist the bait.

“Captain Rex had been by, and the Commander was almost as drunk as we were,” Boil finished, giving Cody a broad grin as Cody rolled his eyes at the familiar punchline. “And very deservedly so, by the way, sir. First night off we’d had in ages.”

“That would have been the start of our shore leave on Dantooine?” Obi-Wan put in, his face carefully composed. “Didn’t you join me the next morning for a debrief? Quite early, as I recall.”

“Yes, sir,” Cody replied grimly. “I had to throw up in a bush before I made it to your tent.”

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan observed, “remarkably quick thinking under pressure, as always, Commander.”

And Cody thought he could really try a little harder to pretend he wasn’t enjoying himself.

“The Commander? Drunk?” Tripwire had continued in the meantime, apparently too far into his repurposed ration packs to manage a whisper. “But. How can you tell? His face is so…well… like that.”

“Ah, but that’s his tell,” Crys replied sagely. “The drunker he gets, the harder he acts like he isn’t.”

“Oh, and he climbs things,” Boil added. “Trees. Cliffs. The communication tower by the Prime Minister’s landing platform.”

“That was one time,” Cody protested, and then, when he caught Waxer holding up three fingers significantly out of the corner of his eye, he added, “and this is insubordination.”

“Pulling rank is another tell,” Trigger reflected, and Cody smiled, slow and easy, before picking up an empty bottle, flipping it into the air, and catching it casually behind his back.

“Anyone’s welcome to test their ability to read my tells in a spar,” he offered gamely, “or a hand of Sabacc.”

“We may have lost some of our dignity that evening, Commander, ” Waxer said wryly, as Trigger held up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender, “but I’m not looking for ways to lose the rest of it.”

“Don’t go drink-for-drink with Hardcase,” Boil repeated to Tripwire, “and don’t let the Commander hustle you in Sabacc. Which reminds me. Have you heard the one about Fives and the Bossk bounty hunter?”

A series of groans went up around the circle, and Cody leaned back from the fire, letting the words mingle with the warm, liquid glow in his gut.

“It’s wonderful to see you so at ease, Cody,” Obi-Wan observed. “Though even here -”

He paused, his gaze lingering over Wooley, who was now slumped over with his head fully in Trigger’s lap, and Waxer, who was leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with Boil.

“I couldn’t be as familiar,” Cody said, answering the question Obi-Wan hadn’t asked. “Especially as the war went on - the more of them who died on my orders… By the end I stayed in my own quarters for the most part. The men deserved a space to be angry sometimes.”

Cody was watching the play of firelight over Waxer’s features as he spoke - remembering the way his nose had crinkled when he laughed - but he still registered movement out of the corner of his eye when the first tree vanished from view: trunk, branches, and leaves disappearing in an instant as if they’d been scrubbed from a holo recording.

“Shit,” he sighed, glancing around to see another tree - and then a bush and a tent - wink out of existence. 

“My fault, perhaps, for drawing your mind’s attention to the passage of time,” Obi-Wan reflected.

Cody shook his head.

“I think we need to go deeper,” he said, chewing briefly on the inside of his cheek. “But there’s no door here."

“It was only a device,” Obi-Wan replied, “a visualization to guide your consciousness. If you picture a door, and then picture where you want to bring us on the other side, it should work in much the same way.”

“Okay,” Cody said slowly, as he considered the possibilities. Something really embarrassing. Something he'd never shown Obi-Wan before. “This is - I’m going to take us -” He paused, and then, because he couldn’t actually bring himself to say it out loud, even to himself, “Oh, kark it.”

I guess someone’s going to lose the rest of their dignity tonight, he thought to himself, and then he closed his eyes and imagined a door - imagined walking beyond it into a scene that he’d hoped very fervently had never made a sizable ripple in the Force.

He felt the planes of pressure along his body shift as his limbs changed position - from sitting to lying on his back, the firm surface of a bunk mattress beneath him - and he opened his eyes to the only partially welcome discovery that Obi-Wan had indeed followed him there.

“I’m not sure this will work, my dear,” Obi-Wan said thoughtfully, looking around the familiar walls of Cody’s quarters on the Negotiator, “I’ve been here hundreds of times. I don’t know what - ah.” He broke off as he noticed the placement and rhythm of Cody’s hand moving underneath the blanket, the small sounds Cody couldn’t help letting slip as he stroked himself in time with his breath. “I see. Well, regrettably this is a side of you I’ve never experienced.”

“If you could maybe just - not talk,” Cody suggested, “this is difficult enough as it is. And you don’t have to… dream flirt with me, sir. I know you just do it to put me at ease, but under the circumstances…”

“Do you?” Obi-Wan asked, one eyebrow lifting playfully. “Know that? How can you be sure what I felt or didn’t feel at the time? I might have been thinking of you every night for all you know -”

“Obi-Wan,” Cody panted out, the begging edge to his tone so close to the cries he’d had to bite back on the Negotiator that he flushed furiously, turning his head to bury as much of his face in the pillow as he could.

“So you were thinking of me,” Obi-Wan murmured, and the soft surprise in his voice was ridiculous enough to make Cody snort out a laugh in spite of the heat prickling across his cheeks and down the back of his neck.

“Of course I was,” he said. “Never thought of - ah - of anyone else.”

Obi-Wan stilled for a long moment. 

“Do you want me to go?” he asked quietly.

Cody paused, shook his head.

“You can go if you want to,” he said, “but I - I want you here.” 

He grimaced at the openness in his voice, and then he had to fight back a gasp because Obi-Wan was folding himself gently down into the bunk, his hands pressed against the mattress on either side of Cody’s hips. 

“Well I’m here, darling,” he murmured, and then, like he couldn’t help himself. “And you did want to take me deep, didn’t you?”

Cody groaned - a sound like getting the recoil from a shoulder cannon kicked straight into his chest - and he had to squeeze his hand hard to avoid coming on the spot.

“You,” he growled, “are a menace.”

“It’s been suggested,” Obi-Wan replied, and then - kark him to all nine hells - he winked .

“Force,” Cody swore, his strokes speeding up involuntarily. “You’re not even - this is just…kark. Why is it that even the version of you I imagine is - ah, fuck - completely impossible.”

Something flashed across Obi-Wan’s face that Cody couldn’t identify - but then, Cody was having an increasingly hard time concentrating on anything that wasn’t the warmth of Obi-Wan’s hands where they rested near his hips or the slow, shuddering waves of heat pulsing through his gut.

“I would dearly like to be able to convince you that I am possible,” Obi-Wan said. “But there’s still something in your mind that resists believing it.”

“General,” Cody managed, “if at any point during the war, I had thought - shit - that having your hands on me while I - fuck - if I had thought having you in my bed was possible, I wouldn’t have made it through a single debrief before I - karking hell -”

“Do you still want that?” Obi-Wan asked, and his own voice sounded a little rough now. “My hands on you?”

“Fuck,” Cody replied, eloquently, because Force did he ever - but he also wanted - wanted too much. He wanted the sharp twist of Obi-Wan’s tongue, the curl of his finger around the hilt of his blade, the patch of scarred skin on the inside of his thigh. He wanted -

“Fuck, I just want you alive,” he gasped, squeezing his eyes shut as the last word cracked against his throat, and when he looked back at the room he wasn’t on the Negotiator anymore. 

He was sitting on the edge of a different bunk - the bed at the Fortress Inquisitorius where his body had slept for the last five years - staring down at the singed arc that a lightsaber had left trailing across the black cuirass issued to CC-2224. 

The blade had belonged to a young Kiffar - practically a kid - and CC-2224 - Cody's body - the scraps of them both had -

“Cody,” Obi-Wan said softly, and Cody’s fingers gripped the chest plate hard so hard that it cracked: the gouge at the center cleaving open into jagged plastoid edges, the two pieces gaping apart like ridges of cracked teeth. The surface was cool in his hands, a numb stillness spreading out from it - up his arms and through the expanse of his chest.

“This is what my life has been, Obi-Wan,” Cody said finally, “for years: nothing but this. And I do know - I understand that it’s not my fault. But it all still happened, and it happened in me. Even if you were alive - even if you could find me. I don’t know if I could stand to remember it - to carry it all, all the time.”

Obi-Wan sat down on the cot beside him, their shoulders brushing as their weight settled toward the middle.

“I have to admit I’ve missed you terribly, darling,” Obi-Wan said. “I already thought I’d lost you once, and to do it again -” He folded a hand around one of Cody’s, stroking a thumb over the ridge of his knuckles where they gripped the ridge of the cuirass. “But this is your choice. You lost your life on Utapau too. Whether you want it back, and how…I can’t make that call for you. I won’t.”

Cody let a breath in and out, tracking the movement of Obi-Wan’s calluses over the split skin of his hands. In the back of his head, the familiar pressure was building: a faint whine like a blaster warming up for a shot. 

“Are you really out there?” he asked, feeling ridiculous - the galaxy’s biggest sucker, to let himself open a door that was almost certain to be an air lock in the end.

“I’m here,” Obi-Wan murmured. “I started looking for you as soon as I realized - as soon as I hoped. If you say the word, Cody, I promise: I’ll find you.”

Cody shut his eyes, the pressure sharpening to a piercing stab through the top of his spine.

“I want you here,” he gasped. “Obi-Wan. I want to wake up.”

“I’m on Tatooine,” Obi-Wan told him, his grip tightening on Cody’s hand as if he were holding them both in place. “We found each other there, and we will find each other again. I’m coming. Just hold on. Do you hear me? Hold on, Cody.”

And Cody wanted to reply - to promise he’d keep going as long as he could, to chase down the image of a robed figure approaching through the scope of his rifle - but before he could form the words a pulse like white-hot plasma swept through his brain, locking his jaw and twisting his back muscles into a sharp spasm of pain.

He heard a low noise - alien, barely sentient. He saw the face of an imperial officer resolving into an expression of disgust.

“CC-2224,” the voice attached to the face said, “are your baseline functions in tact?”

His mind processed. Scanned. Stalled, filtered a loop in his feedback, reverted to an earlier protocol.

“Good soldiers follow orders,” he replied, and felt something settle uneasily in his skull.

Chapter Text

CC-2224 was compromised. 

Though no readable records of prior incidents could be found, and all internal diagnostic scans continued to return incompatible results, CC-2224 concluded that he must have encountered a significant system error prior to his time in the medical holding bay, because repeated attempts at defragmentation had failed to restore normal operations.

And as he strapped his armor into place on the morning that Lord Vader was scheduled to arrive, CC-2224 was forced to upgrade his status to “critical.” Because orders had been issued for the Purge Troopers to report to the inner fortress. And it was therefore crucial that CC-2224 be at peak performance for inspections. And yet he was not at peak performance. 

In fact, after exhausting every troubleshooting protocol in his inventory, CC-2224 had only one prompt left to try: a command script that would otherwise have been entirely outside of his sanctioned operational parameters.

Get to Tatooine.

With no other directives available, CC-2224 scanned the script again. Stalled, attempted to trace its origin, failed. Stood up. Sat back down. Rescanned the script. Rejected the script - stood up anyway. Stalled.

Come on, you kriffing hunk of Sith-spawned programming, something barked at him. You’ve got to move one way or another, or we’re both karked.

CC-2224 blinked, began moving. His feet took him out the door, down the hallway, and then - a dull squeeze of static against his skull - toward the hangar on the upper levels. 

His pathway attracted a few curious glances but tripped no alarms until he reached the scanners just outside the lift doors. 

“Trooper, you’re not authorized to access this level,” a prim voice announced, the face of a uniformed officer appearing a moment later. “All Purge Squadrons are supposed to be in the inner fortress for inspections.”

CC-2224 paused, scanned for appropriate responses - registered another increase in cranial pressure, sharper this time: a taste like pine needles on the back of his tongue - and then he had his blaster out of its holster and warming up in his hand: double tap to blow power to the scanner controls, three more to short the tractor beam and the nearest heavy cannon, a final shot to jam the lift doors behind him.

It took the officer who’d approached him crucial seconds to respond, his eyes widening and his hands scrabbling for his own weapon, and in that time Cody had dropped him with a blow to the side of the head, taken off running for the nearest ship with a hyperdrive. 

He lay down a spray of cover fire as he ran, the alarms wailing to life just before he reached the ladder, and he had his hands on the cockpit release when the first plasma shot singed his left calf.

“Set to stun!” a voice yelled. “Stun, you idiots! That’s 2224.” 

Cody ducked behind the bulk of the fighter, snaking out a hand to squeeze off another series of shots in the direction of the enemy fire, and then he braced his legs to vault his way into the cockpit, stalled - waited for an internal systems verification, his muscles spasming against the sudden lock -

And the last thing he felt was the blunt wave of nausea as the stun blast hit him in the side.

**

The world came back warm, and then hot: a crackle against the back of his neck that spidered out across his skull and down his spine.

“Lord Vader’s authorized a full wipe in light of the flight risk,” someone was saying, though CC-2224 - Cody - couldn’t seem to get his eyes open to see who it was. “But he wants a holo recording of the procedure to use for a future interrogation.”

CC-2224 attempted to analyze this new information, produced inconclusive results, stalled - but Cody felt his nerves fire with panic, thought as hard as he could about jerking his right arm toward his chest - tried to imagine himself breaking the restraints. CC-2224’s wrist gave a twitch and then settled back into place, a sensation like a string of hypos traveling up and down his skin.

“Wipe him,” the voice said, and the heat that had been building on the back of Cody’s neck burst into flame.

There was no use fighting against the scream that tore out of his chest, past the bite guard strapped around his jaw, but its sound faded quickly in the roar of wind hurtling through his ears, the strong gusts of it scraping a sudden spray of sand into the gaps in his armor plating.

Cody coughed automatically, expecting to feel a wave of grit against his throat, but a moment later he recognized the weight of a bucket, not his, resting across the crest of his head. The glare of the twin suns overhead was being filtered as well, and a HUD display visible out of the corner of his eye was alerting him to the heat signature of the figure in front of him: a familiar outline against the sandy walls of the desert alleyway.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan said, his voice tight with a fear whose cause permeated Cody’s awareness gradually, its edge bringing the scene around him into sharper focus.

“They’re wiping me again,” he confirmed. 

He paused, taking in the tattered fabric of Obi-Wan’s cloak, the inky shine of his own boots. It was the first time the reconditioning had taken him to a moment he couldn’t consciously remember: to the encounter that had caused the first malfunction, the place he’d been trying to get back to when he got caught. 

It had brought him to Tatooine, to the moment he’d seen his dead General staring back at him through the alien shade of an Imperial helmet, and something inside him he’d thought was long drowned had kicked its way toward the surface, gasped for fresh air.

“How have you been finding me here?” he asked Obi-Wan, because he knew it was Obi-Wan - knew it the same way he knew the right moment to turn his body toward the fire.

Obi-Wan’s expression softened as he stepped forward, further into Cody’s space. 

“This is where I saw you again,” he explained. “I was in the marketplace when your squadron arrived. My first instinct was to duck into the shadows and make my way out of town - I’ve done it many times before - but something made me stop: a sensation in the Force I hadn’t felt in many years. So I waited in this alley instead. I reached out with my feelings, I let myself hope, and then there you were.”

He gave Cody a small smile, and the memory of his words hovered on the edges of Cody’s awareness, like something that was only half his: Force, Cody, you’re like a sunrise.

“Of course, you weren’t entirely yourself,” Obi-Wan continued. “And the sight of me had caused you significant distress: you seemed to be having trouble processing where you were. Unfortunately, you had company very close on your heels. There was no time to extract you, but I worried if I left you as you were, you would do something rash and endanger yourself. I needed to make you forget that you’d seen me, but some stubborn part of me wanted you -” He placed a hand on Cody’s chest. “- to remember.” His smile pinched around the edges. “It seems I must have done something in between.”

“You protected my memories,” Cody said.

“That was mostly you, my dear,” Obi-Wan replied. “I opened the stream with my first suggestion, but you chose the direction. The first time I saw you on Utapau again, I thought I was merely dreaming: until you asked me whether the Force could help someone remember. After that, I tried to provide whatever protective energy I could to shield you from the machine, but it only worked because your mind had decided to fight and chosen what to protect. As I should have known it would.”

Cody let out a long breath, pulling off his helmet so he could meet Obi-Wan’s eyes with his own, take in the new lines and colors of his face.

“I’m glad it did,” he said finally. “I’m glad you were here with me - glad I got to see you again - that I can believe that somewhere out there you’re still alive.”

“It’s not over, Cody,” Obi-Wan said firmly. “I told you I would come for you, and I am. Can you show me where you are?”

“I don’t think there’s time.” Cody tried to keep his voice gentle, wrapping his free hand around the one Obi-Wan was still pressing to his chest. “I knew I wasn’t going to pass inspections, so I tried to escape. It’s going to be a full wipe this time.”

He remembered what the officer had said about recording the procedure for a future interrogation and sent a fervent prayer to the Force that Obi-Wan would remain safe and free - that he would never have to see.

“Trust me,” Obi-Wan insisted. “Please, Cody. I’m close.”

He laced their fingers together and drew Cody after him, pulling them both toward the fur blanket covering the back entrance of a building across the alley. When he thrust back the fabric and ducked through, Cody followed, and a moment later they were walking out of the heavy heat of Tatooine and into the cold, recycled air outside one of the water locks at the Fortress Inquisitorius, Obi-Wan’s robes and hair dripping as if he’d swum his way in.

“Can you take me the rest of the way?” he asked, pulling his lightsaber off a loop on his belt, and Cody nodded - would have nodded even if he’d been bleeding out on the floor.

He’d lost his rifle at some point in their transition - and he wasn’t entirely sure what effect shooting someone in here would have anyway - but he could still scout the way, so he stayed a few steps ahead of Obi-Wan as they jogged their way through the defensive perimeter.

“Straight on for ten paces before a right up ahead,” he called over his shoulder, and then, just after he rounded the corner, “Seeker droid!” 

He turned to curl Obi-Wan toward a side chamber, and Obi-Wan was already spinning with him, pulling Cody to his chest as they tucked themselves behind a panel door.

“Coast is clear,” Obi-Wan said a moment later, and they resumed their route, Cody clearing the halls, and Obi-Wan watching their backs. They paused once for another droid and twice for armed patrols, passing through the inner fortress and the length of the prison block as Cody called out the directions: four paces on, duck right - five more paces, take a left - pause for patrols, then ten paces straight ahead.

Finally they reached the fortress citadel - Obi-Wan taking out two guards and a technician with quick flicks of his blade - and arrived at the interrogation rooms where Cody imagined he’d been taken after his failed attempt to bolt.

“I don’t know which one they used,” he admitted, and Obi-Wan closed his eyes briefly, then pointed to the door on the right.

“That one,” he said, and Cody scanned the corridor for movement as Obi-Wan held his hand over the control panel, his fingers dancing slightly until the door slid open to reveal the table and machine beyond.

Well, fuck.

“This is…really karked up,” Cody said slowly, walking toward the place where his own form was bucking weakly against the restraints, his eyelids twitching as his jaw clenched around the strap covering his mouth. 

As he watched his movements, he became aware of a corresponding scrape on the inside of his mouth, the faint pressure of straps across his arms and legs. The familiar sting was starting to build up at the base of his skull, bringing with it a wave of dizziness that made him sway slightly on his feet.

He looked up to see a deep flash of pain twist across Obi-Wan’s features before he turned away from the table and brought his hands up to Cody’s face, tracing his fingers gently across Cody’s right temple. 

“I’m going to wake you up now, my dear,” he said. “I’m going to gather all the pieces you’ve shown me into one web, and then I’ll need you to hold on. I know it’s a long way, but I’ll guide you out. Just focus on my voice and come back to me.”

“Obi-Wan,” Cody began, because if there was a chance this didn’t work - if Obi-Wan was too late, or if they actually weren’t here at all - there was something Cody had never said -

“Come back to me,” Obi-Wan repeated, and then he pressed gently against Cody’s temple until Cody felt his eyes flutter shut. Another rush of light-headedness followed, and Cody had to lean into Obi-Wan’s hands, the ground sweeping away beneath his feet as he plunged into what felt like a riptide of cold and salt. 

The current tugged at him, fighting to drag him under, and he groped after the sensation he knew he should feel on his face - after the voice that he knew had been saying his name.

“Come back to me.”

And Cody’s limbs felt like they’d been pinned under blast doors - his nerves so hot they felt frozen - but the voice was calling to him, and Cody wanted that voice back from the under the water, so he imagined reaching up - holding out something the voice had lost, that he needed to go on: the warm ridges of a lightsaber grip, a petal damp with rain, flakes of crust that melted on the tongue, a glow from Ponds’ bunk tube, the light on Waxer’s face, and the strength of Obi-Wan’s fingers - on Cody’s chest, his hips, his knuckles covered with someone else’s blood.

“Cody.”

He stretched in the direction of the voice, reached - feeling a tug in his middle like a hook fixed in a fishing net - and held on.

“Cody?” Obi-Wan asked, the tight lines around his eyes swimming into view as Cody blinked through tears and the sudden brightness of an interrogation room.

“I can’t believe I showed you the Paint Stripper shots,” Cody croaked.

“Oh, Force,” Obi-Wan gasped, and then he sagged so abruptly that Cody lurched forward to grasp his shoulders and almost followed him to the floor. “Cody,” Obi-Wan said, pulling himself together enough to lean Cody back onto the table and then collapsing onto his chest, his face pressed to Cody’s shoulder. “Cody. Oh, thank the Force.”

“It’s okay,” Cody murmured, running a hand up Obi-Wan’s back and bringing it to rest across the curve of his neck. Obi-Wan made a pained sound, his fists tangling in the fabric of Cody’s shirt, and Cody swept his thumb through the loose waves of Obi-Wan’s hair. “I’m here.” 

“I didn’t know if it would work,” Obi-Wan explained. “I didn’t know if you would wake up, and if you did, I thought maybe - I didn’t know if you would still remember.”

His voice was hoarser than it had been in Cody’s memories, its crisp edges cracked in places, so that the vowels came out raw, a little ragged.

It was more beautiful than anything Cody could have imagined.

“I’m here,” he said again. “Obi-Wan. You’ve got me. I’m here.”

Obi-Wan took one more deep breath before he straightened, his hands moving up to cup Cody’s jaw.

“We have to get you out of here,” he said. “I have a pilot and a medic waiting, but we’ll need to make it some distance. Do you think you can move?”

Cody sat up slowly, letting Obi-Wan support him with an arm around the waist as he tested his feet against the ground.

“I can make it,” he said, leaning against Obi-Wan’s shoulder and trusting the rest to the adrenaline of feeling his muscles respond to the direction of his thoughts. “Let’s move.”

**

“It isn’t much,” Obi-Wan said, many days later, when they were finally settling into his cave dwelling on Tatooine. 

They’d taken their time getting there. After making it off Nur, Obi-Wan had extended the favor he’d called in from Bail Organa to secure the ship, pilot, and medic, and he’d brought Cody on a circuitous route to a remote village on Alderaan, where they could wait for the uproar caused by their escape to die down and give Cody some time under reliably discrete medical care.

In the end, the former goal had taken longer to achieve than the latter: it seemed that Obi-Wan’s efforts to channel the Force into protecting Cody’s mind during reconditioning had helped shield his body as well, and he’d made quick progress, even by the standards of the sharp-eyed medics. 

On the day when Cody no longer wanted painkillers with earlymeal - and when, hours later, Organa had reported that their dummy trail on Cophrigin V was working - Cody and Obi-Wan had decided to make the journey to Tatooine.

“This may shock you,” Cody told Obi-Wan now, adjusting his perch on the flat, blanketed surface Obi-Wan had been using as a bed, “but I’ve never developed particularly high standards when it comes to living quarters. And I assure you this is a substantial step up from my previous bunking situation.”

Obi-Wan matched his wry smile for a moment before his expression grew worried again.

“You do still look tired from the journey,” he said. “And I noticed you didn’t get much rest on the transport ship. You should get some sleep if you can.”

Cody hesitated, his eyes flitting toward the blankets and away. 

He was tired, of course. He’d felt on the brink of drifting off a few times during their passage here, his arm muscles spasming as his head dipped toward his chest. At one point during the small welcome dinner he and Obi-Wan had just shared, he’d felt in danger of face-planting into his soup. 

But he’d had trouble sleeping ever since they left Nur: so bad, at first, that he’d only achieved slumber by reaching a point of total exhaustion and passing from consciousness to unconsciousness in one sharp blink. 

“I’m -” Cody started, and then stopped, fighting to unclench his jaw. “When I close my eyes for longer than a few moments, I remember what it felt like. I can’t sense anything else around me, and I go out of myself for a moment, and I remember - how I would dream that I was me and wake up as him. And I’m afraid -”

He couldn’t finish the sentence - his throat squeezing the final word until it split open, too loud in the quiet of the cave - but Obi-Wan’s eyes had already softened, and he sat down a careful distance away from Cody on the bed.

“Your mind has been through something harrowing,” he murmured. “You’re strong, but healing will be a long road, and it may very well get worse before it gets better. I can only promise to be here for as much of it as you’d like: here -” He took Cody’s hand gently in his and pressed it to his chest, holding it so that Cody could feel Obi-Wan’s heartbeat against the pulse point of his wrist. “I’m here. You’re here.”

And Cody hadn’t realized how much effort it was taking to keep his face still until he couldn’t do it anymore - his mouth crumpling around the sharp, desperate noise that clawed its way out of his chest. 

Obi-Wan shifted toward him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, and Cody curled into the touch, his forehead tucking into the crook of Obi-Wan’s neck and his eyelashes brushing, suddenly damp, against Obi-Wan’s skin.

“You’re here,” Obi-Wan repeated. “You’re here, Cody.”

He traced his hands across the slope of Cody’s shoulder blades as he spoke, the callused pads of his fingers occasionally sweeping past fabric and over the nape of Cody’s neck. 

After a few minutes, Cody could feel his breath slowing to match Obi-Wan’s pace - the hitches in his chest evening out as he concentrated on the soft scrape of Obi-Wan’s fingernails - only to stop completely when Obi-Wan turned to press a kiss to the top of Cody’s head, his lips lingering for a moment in Cody’s short-cropped curls.

It was like waking up from a doze, and Cody felt suddenly, keenly aware that he and Obi-Wan had barely touched each other since Obi-Wan had helped him make his way out of the Fortress. 

Even before they’d arrived on Alderaan, a distance had begun to stretch out between them - easing them both back from the intimacy of their shared visions - and while Cody knew he’d needed room then, when he was in the early stages of relearning his body and mind, Obi-Wan’s first step back across the gap made Cody realize how much it had started to ache - to rhyme too closely with regret.

Obi-Wan started to move out of Cody’s space again, and before Cody could think about it too long, he followed the path of Obi-Wan’s retreat, wrapped a hand around the back of Obi-Wan’s neck so he could guide him back in and kiss him, softly - with all the gentleness he'd had nowhere to put for years.

Obi-Wan made a low, quiet noise in response, and he shifted forward again, leaning into the kiss as he stroked a thumb across the ridge of Cody’s cheek. A moment later he pulled back, acknowledging Cody’s involuntary sound of impatience by turning to press his lips against the inside of Cody’s wrist.

“What do you need, darling?” he asked. “You can have whatever you need. I just - I need to hear you say it.”

Cody swallowed, understanding, and then took a deep breath.

“I want to make you feel good,” he said. “I want to feel you. I want to - feel real.”

Obi-Wan nodded, brushing at one of the short curls over Cody’s ear.

“If you want more or less of anything - or if you want to stop - you tell me,” he said, and since it was a statement that was really a question, Cody nodded too.

“More first,” he said, and was rewarded by a smile that made his chest ache. “More of you doing what you were doing, over here, with me - as soon as you’re available.”

Obi-Wan obliged, tilting Cody’s chin up with one hand so he could kiss him, showing him an angle that made Cody’s toes curl, his fingers flexing against the blankets and Obi-Wan’s neck. Obi-Wan must have felt the signs of encouragement, because a moment later he was throwing a leg over Cody’s and straddling his lap, working Cody’s mouth open until Cody’s hands were gripping at Obi-Wan’s waist, his fingers splaying across the crests of his hips.

Fuck, Cody swore to himself - and maybe he gasped it against Obi-Wan’s lips as well, because they were smiling against his, and Obi-Wan’s hand was nestling into Cody’s hair.

“Good?” he murmured, and Cody growled, tugging Obi-Wan’s hips tight against his stomach and kissing him again - fierce and thick and searching. Obi-Wan’s free hand skirted around the waistband of Cody’s pants, and Cody shivered, feeling Obi-Wan’s fingers brush close to where he was already getting achingly hard against the curve of Obi-Wan’s ass. 

“May I?” Obi-Wan asked, and Cody made a sound that was halfway between a groan and a laugh, because fuck. He wanted so badly it was like something he could taste: earthy, almost sweet, the leaves of tea still lingering in Obi-Wan’s mouth. 

“Force, yes,” he managed. “Please.”

Obi-Wan’s grip tightened just slightly in Cody’s hair, and then he leaned down to press their foreheads together before he palmed Cody through the fabric of his pants, kissing him through the first curl of electric heat to his gut. His fingers traced the outline of Cody’s erection, skimmed along the curves of his inner thighs, and Cody swore again, breathy and ragged.

“More,” he panted, and then he bit his lips as Obi-Wan finally dipped his hand beneath Cody’s waistband, wrapped his fingers around Cody’s cock. 

“Fuck, Obi-Wan,” he gasped, his head falling back as Obi-Wan stroked him. 

“I did think about you too,” Obi-Wan murmured, and Cody really did groan this time, because being able to form words while making someone's eyes roll back in their skull was unfair - it should count as cheating somehow. “I would never have allowed myself, then - but Force, Cody, I wanted you.”

And then Obi-Wan eased off Cody’s lap to drop to his knees on the floor, pulling down Cody’s pants and guiding him to the edge of the bed so he could take him in his mouth instead. His lips slid slowly up Cody’s cock, and Cody lost track of the direction of gravity for a moment, his hand wrapping around the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, weaving through the new, longer waves of his hair.

Obi-Wan waited for Cody to adjust to the change in intensity - his fingers brushing encouragingly across the backs of Cody’s thighs - and then he was moving steadily, his head bobbing between Cody’s legs, his tongue sliding against the length of Cody’s cock.

Cody shut his eyes, feeling a rush of warmth pooling in his spine, prickling against his skin. He couldn’t even get a word past the sensation this time: it was coursing through him too fast. He felt an urge to buck into it, or to let his back bow under the weight of it, but the instinct was too close - the heat felt too much like -

He tugged at the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, and Obi-Wan pulled off immediately, bringing one hand up to press against Cody’s lower back and leaving it there, grounding.

“Too much?” he asked, and Cody hesitated before shaking his head.

“Just need to feel more of you,” he said, “Could you come back up here? I want to hear your voice.”

Obi-Wan squeezed Cody’s thigh gently in understanding and pulled himself back up, waiting for Cody to lie back on the bed and then curling over him. Cody reached down to help Obi-Wan with his belt and his tunics, and Obi-Wan rucked up Cody’s shirt and pulled it over his head. 

They paused there for a moment, Cody running his hands up the length of Obi-Wan’s back as Obi-Wan pressed a kiss to Cody’s jaw, his neck, the new hatchwork of stretched skin on his shoulder, and then Obi-Wan dipped his fingers into a jar on a nearby shelf and wrapped a hand around them both.

“Ah, Cody,” he panted, dropping his forehead onto Cody’s as he stroked, “Force, I missed you.”

Cody bit off another curse, pressing his fingers into the dip of Obi-Wan’s lower back, the rise of his ass. He was trying to relieve some kind of pressure - he didn’t even realize that his muscles were aching with the effort of staying still until Obi-Wan brushed his free hand over Cody’s cheek and whispered, “you can move, darling. Go ahead.”

And Cody let his head fall back and his hips snap up, fucking up into the curl of Obi-Wan’s fingers and the slick weight of his cock.

“Obi-Wan,” he gasped, just to hear the sound, and Obi-Wan kissed him, holding them together, letting Cody muffle a low noise against Obi-Wan’s mouth as the wave of his orgasm crested in his gut and spilled over Obi-Wan's fingers, onto his chest, heat washing down Cody’s spine in ripples until his limbs felt loose with it.

“Force,” Obi-Wan breathed, and Cody wrapped one of his hands around Obi-Wan’s, stroking in time with him. “You feel so good, Cody.”

“I love you,” Cody whispered, and Obi-Wan made a small sound, almost wounded. “Wanted to tell you for years. I love you, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan came with a shudder, crying out again as Cody eased him through it, tilting his head up to kiss the edge of Obi-Wan’s mouth. Obi-Wan turned into the touch, kissing Cody slowly and deeply for a moment before a towel flew across the cave and into his outstretched hand.

He cleaned them both off - rolling his eyes fondly at Cody’s impatient tugs at his waist - and then he folded himself down onto the bed, encouraging Cody to tuck his back against the warmth of Obi-Wan’s chest.

“I love you too,” Obi-Wan said when they had settled into place. “I have, for so long.”

Cody nodded, pulling one of Obi-Wan’s arms around him so he could twine their fingers together over his stomach.

“Since I impressed you in that morning briefing after throwing up in the bush,” he guessed, and he could feel Obi-Wan’s lips curling against his shoulder.

“Even earlier,” Obi-Wan said seriously. “Since you implied I was disqualifyingly full of bantha shit for having volunteered to jump off a cliff and into a frozen river - at least since then. And for all the rest of my days, I imagine.”

“Good,” Cody said, stifling a yawn as he burrowed his face into the blankets. “That’s sorted then.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “Quite sorted. And now, my dear, if you would do me the favor of trying to sleep, I promise to keep watch and to hold you here until you wake up.”

Cody hesitated, his hand tightening around Obi-Wan’s.

“It won’t wear you out?” he asked quietly.

Obi-Wan hummed, leaning in to brush a kiss across the four fresh scars dotting the back of Cody’s neck.

“It will do me a world of good,” he promised.