Chapter Text
Morning glories are a flower common to humid, deciduous climates on a widespread variety of planets. They are deceptively hardy flowers with root systems that survive through the winter and bloom yearly in warm seasons with a variety of bright colors. They are edible for many species and can be used in food, teas, or topical ointments. These different colors signify different things to many cultures, but nearly omnipresent are those for the most common variations: blue for strength, yellow for new beginnings, white for rebirth.
Obi-Wan was running late. He was—no. Obi-Wan checked the time on the newly-omnipresent datapad in his hand. He was just barely on time, no thanks to Anakin. He ran a hand through his hair, grimaced at its length, and hazarded a few tugs at his tunics and obi to make everything lay flat.
The new Commander of the 212th Attack Battalion of the Grand Army of the Republic was waiting at a textbook-perfect parade rest in the massive, echoing hangar bay of the GAR base. Obi-Wan’s first harried impression was that he looked like a statue, as much a part of his surroundings as the X-wing fighters and docking cradles.
The helmet turned to him and the illusion shattered. Obi-Wan went for a handshake. The Commander threw a salute as perfect as his parade rest had been. They stared at each other like that for a startled moment, and Obi-Wan found himself grasping at the very last straws of his remaining composure.
“Ah,” he said, scrambling to recall the informational pamphlets that had been distributed among the senior Knights. “At ease.”
“General Kenobi,” the Commander said. He deliberately stepped out of parade rest and tilted his head in a stilted nod.
“Commander.” Obi-Wan looked down at his ‘pad, still uneasy over the long lists of serial numbers the GAR had listed on its rosters. “2224. Is there anything else you’d prefer I call you?” He looked back up at the Commander, then swept a hand in front of them in an invitation to keep walking. The Commander fell into step just to the right and behind him; Obi-Wan kept restraining aborted half-twitches, unsettled.
“Some find it easier to abbreviate it to the last two digits, sir,” the Commander said. His Force signature was carefully guarded and Obi-Wan stamped out the urge to brush against it with his own in greeting. This was the man he was to be working with for… the foreseeable future. Such a faux-pas this early would not do.
“Right,” Obi-Wan managed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let his frustration spool out of his chest, where a well of anger had started to pool. The entire situation was, to put it kindly, fucked beyond repair. Putting his foot in his mouth so early in the game would not help matters.
“Many have no form of address other than serials, sir.”
“I see. Thank you for letting me know, Commander.” Obi-Wan flicked through the rosters one more time and made a few administrative changes. “For some reason, the system wouldn’t let troopers log names or edits, but that should fix it.”
“I can think of a few reasons, sir,” the Commander said placidly, and Obi-Wan had, like a Tatooine sunrise, the sudden and beautiful realization that he and the Commander would get along just wonderfully.
“Surely it is just an operating glitch,” Obi-Wan hazarded. “IT need not get involved in such a minor… systems repair.”
“Surely,” the Commander said in the same bland tone. He looked at Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan looked at him.
“How silly of the GAR operative procedure. In the future, any such repairs and diagnostics can be handled… in-house, as it were,” Obi-Wan told him. The Commander’s helmet tilted, just a fraction of an inch, and Obi-Wan felt the entire weight of the Commander’s regard settle upon him. He could only just see a hint of the Commander’s eyes behind the darkened visor. “In the name of efficiency.”
“Of course, sir,” the Commander said. His gaze shifted; Obi-Wan felt the heft of his attention slide away, back to the rows of gunships waiting quiescent in the hangar before them. He felt, terribly, like he’d just passed some sort of test. “ETA to Kuat shipyards is thirty-six hours, twenty-two spent in hyperspace. The 212th battalion and 7th Sky are already shipside assisting as needed. Diagnostics predict we should be up and running in a further twelve hours. Do we have any new orders, sir?”
“Mostly hurry up and wait. Our marching orders are officially to Christophsis, after Kuat. Other than that—not much,” Obi-Wan admitted, fighting the need to apologize.
There was a careful balance to be found between self-assurance and knowing when or how to ask for help, in planned combat. He’d never fought in anything of this scale—no one he knew had, for the galaxy had not faced a war of this scope for centuries—but he had previous experience to draw upon.
Their first lines of defense were Watchmen, pieces of the Explorer Corps, and diplomatic Knights: those used to conflict and de-escalation. They only made up a small portion of the Jedi, albeit a larger percent of those living in the Coruscant Temple. Many Jedi had never even seen combat and only used their ‘sabers for katas and knighting ceremonies: the Agricorps, the Medicorps, the Jedi artisans and Jedi tradespeople and Jedi archivists.
Obi-Wan shuddered to think what might happen if they failed. They were the front and only line, the first and last defense between the Separatists and Obi-Wan’s home.
There were no viewports in the trooper transports between Coruscant and Kuat. Obi-Wan’s last glimpse of his home was the Temple in silhouette as he boarded, one last glance over his shoulder before the bay doors shuddered to a close.
Most of the troopers had gone from Geonosis to Kuat, or else straight from Kamino to Kuat. Obi-Wan sat across from Cody in their nearly-empty transport, strips of ghostly lighting turning the Commander’s plastoid from white to grey, and wondered at the speed with which this had all happened. It felt… it nearly felt like the entire galaxy—no, that wasn’t right. It felt like the Republic, like the Senate had only just been waiting for the start of it all. Like they’d been lying in wait and ready to spring into action even before the secession.
The first flower Obi-Wan hacked up on the bridge of the newly-named Negotiator was a marigold. Thankfully, this one didn’t come with roots—those were always the worst, leaving his throat sore or abraded for days after—and was relatively small. He’d felt the rattle in his lungs when as he’d first walked through the shining halls of the Venator, the soft-spun stoppage of petals and stem in his chest.
It was, Obi-Wan thought as he folded the little flower away into a handkerchief, not a bad one to christen the Venator with. The bright color of it nearly matched the shade of his battalion, a warm orange-gold that had no place in the cold maw of hyperspace.
“General?” the Commander was standing a few feet away, visor fixed on Obi-Wan. He could see his own reflection in the mirror dark of it; he thumbed at a speck of blood at the corner of his mouth and flashed the Commander a sanguine smile.
“Alright, Commander,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. Just a slight cough.”
It was the first lie he told Cody, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
One of the few spots of color aboard the Negotiator were the General’s quarters. Cody found this out the hard way about two tendays into hyperspace on their way to Christophsis. The General’s prediction of “hurry up and wait” had been painfully accurate. Most of Cody’s time was taken up by reports and organization and the endless hole of coordinating with Triple-Zero and the Senate. The General did what he could to ease the way but there was still friction. No plan survived first contact with the enemy.
The door to the General’s quarters slid open before Cody had the chance to comm ahead. He stopped and stared, a cold prickle working its way up his spine. The General was conservative in his use of the Force but he wielded it with the same ease that Cody did his DC-17.
“Ah, Commander,” the General said from deeper within his quarters. Cody knew they were larger than the average trooper’s, even larger than his, but that wasn’t what froze him to the spot.
The General’s quarters were bursting with flowers. The little tin cups they were all supplied with were scattered around in clusters, small flowers with lacy froths of petals bobbing in the water within. There was a faded, chipped mug on the folding table at the center of the General’s quarters; a spray of all different flowers sprouted from it, blue and violet and startling brass. Cody took a step further in, then another, and suppressed a twitch as the door slid shut behind him.
“Punctual as always,” the General said. He didn’t look up from where he was studying the ‘pads spread across the folding table. There was a handkerchief by one hand, wadded up. A faint bloom of crimson was spreading and dulling across the off-white fabric. His General’s voice was rough again, breathing hitching unsteadily as Cody took another few steps towards him. His vitals—spread out across Cody’s HUD—were fine. Stable.
“Transferred the expense reports like you asked, sir,” Cody said, taking his helmet off and saluting.
“Ah, thank you.” The General looked up at Cody and smiled, pale eyes crinkling at the corners and mustache twitching. His tabards had been pulled off. Cody could see them through the door left ajar to the General’s sleeping area, tossed carelessly across a crisply-made bed. It didn’t look as if it had been slept in for the last several rotations. “At ease, Commander. You have perfect timing. There seems to have been a clerical error on HQ’s end with the last ten’s advisement, and I wanted to be sure I wasn’t the only one seeing this…”
“Of course, sir,” Cody said, already resigning himself to a long, sleepless night. Sometimes—all the time—it seemed like the clones and the longnecks were the only ones that had been prepared for war. This was one of a hundred little errors on the part of their central operating system and yet another thing added to the pile of work to keep the General—and more importantly, Cody—from a full night’s rest. Or what passed for it in the deep of hyperspace.
“The next one I get, I’m simply sending the entire Force-fucked thing back to the Senate,” the General said. His voice was crisp but the edges of his Inner Rim accent blurred with exhaustion.
“Internecine warfare so early on, General?” Cody asked and watched the General’s mustache twitch again in another smile.
“Something like that.” The General sighed and braced his hands against the table, elbows locked and fingers splayed across the worn surface. The ‘pads lit his face up from below and washed the color out of his beard, turning it a lighter auburn and deepening the hollows of his eyes. Cody traced the bridge of his nose with his eyes and wondered just how many times his General had managed to get his nose broken for him.
He turned the ‘pad so that Cody could read the blue-white lettering filling the screen. Cody stepped closer, a quick one-two that brought him just close enough to brush elbows with the General. Or, at least, brush the General’s elbow with the outer edge of his cowter. He blinked once, twice, leaned further down, and squinted.
The General let out an amused huff of breath and moved away, something clacking together in the narrow kitchenette the officers’ quarters were provided with. Cody split his focus between parsing through the dense, formulaic paragraphs of text and watching out of the corner of his eye as the General dumped flowers and water out of two cups and started up some sort of kettle.
“Here.” Cody pressed a knuckle to the ‘pad and edited the entry. “Whoever entered this is using a filing system incompatible with the one the GAR uses. It’s an easy fix, if this is the only one like it.”
He looked up at the General. The General looked back at him, still in the process of rinsing two tin cups out as the kettle came to a rolling boil behind him.
“Commander,” he said, “would you believe me if I said that every form we have received in communication with the Chancellor’s office in the last week has been using this outdated filing system?”
“Well, sir,” Cody said, manfully wrestling back a rising tide of incredulity. “I believe you, sir, but I make no promises towards my feelings on the matter.”
“I wouldn’t ask such a thing of you regardless.” The General fussed about with a tin of tea bags before setting a cup down on the foldout table near Cody’s elbow and another on the other side. He took a seat there, wiggling his cup from side to side on the table to stir the hot water around inside it. “Let it steep for a few minutes, then pull out the tea bag. When we spoke yesterday you mentioned you didn’t have a preference; I took the liberty of picking something I thought you might enjoy.”
Cody looked down at the cup. There was nothing in it but dark-colored water and a little paper bag filled with dried plant bobbling about. He couldn’t help but remember though—he had an excellent memory—the flowers the General had poured out of it had been a bright, lurid red, like blood upon snow.
This set a precedent for the rest of the campaign. The General and Cody minded themselves in public; they had their own images to tend to, and protocol, and the reg book that Cody sometimes thought had been coded into his copied DNA. But in private—off-duty and in the General’s or Commander’s quarters—he didn’t have to mind himself.
The destruction of the Malevolence brought two things: a call from Wolffe, pale and wavering with the distance between them, and the harrowing ordeal of calling the General by his given name.
Just us, Wolffe said. He was holding himself stiff and rigid. Cody reached out and touched his fingers to Wolffe’s chest. Wolffe reached out and Cody knew he was doing the same, brushing against Cody’s miniature, and wishing for something they could never guarantee—to hold and be held.
“I’m so sorry, Wolffe,” Cody said past the broken glass in his throat. It hurt, to see loss, even after the shock of the first few campaigns. Even after their training on Kamino, when a failed assessment could mean an entire batch culled.
Just us, Wolffe said again, quieter. Boost. Sinker. Comet. Master Koon. I wish it hadn’t been me, Cody. I wake up and I think it was a bad dream, but the entire—I think I see them everywhere. I don’t—I can’t—
“I know,” Cody said nonsensically, and even though he didn’t—he’d never had his entire company wiped out in an instant, just like that—it seemed to help. Wolffe was quiet when he terminated his end of the holo-call but he wasn’t holding himself so stiffly, and Cody could see a hand on his shoulder—not a vod’s, but one with three digits and the beige sleeve of a Jedi General.
His feet brought him to his General’s quarters before his own. He tried not to think too hard about that—nor did he think too hard about the way the door flashed open just before he knocked, and that the General was waiting at his little fold-up table with two cups of steaming tea.
“Alright there, Commander?” he asked gently.
“Fine,” Cody said, dropping into a chair and tilting it back onto two legs. The General made a quiet little tsking sound which Cody took to mean he should tilt his chair back even further.
“You’re unsettled.” The General swallowed with difficulty and sipped at his tea, one hand going to his throat.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Cody didn’t know what he wanted, not really, but the General always seemed to know. He was a discerning man, Cody’s General, and he always had an answer to everything, though they weren’t always the most helpful answers.
“Alright,” the General said, unusually quiet. He watched Cody wobble back and forth in his chair for a moment longer, tea sitting untouched between them, before he sighed again and raised a pale hand to beckon Cody forward. “Come here, then. Yes, over here, please. Thank you.” He tugged Cody to stand between his spread legs, holding each of Cody’s hands in one of his own.
“What?” Cody asked. The General didn’t answer for a moment, mouth downturned in thought. He was in a state of unusual disarray—hair sticking up on one side, tabards tossed over the back of his chair, obi half undone, boots kicked off by the door. Cody felt stiff and unsure in his own regulation body glove, armor stripped off and left in his quarters before Wolffe had called.
“You know,” the General said, still studying Cody like he was some kind of difficult text he had to translate, “you don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want. But I want you to know that if you do, I will listen. And if you don’t, then I still will. I would like to think that we’ve become friends, Cody, even if—if the circumstances have been less than ideal.”
“That is one way to put it, sir,” Cody said, a corner of his mouth crooking up against his will.
“And I think we can dispense with the formalities,” the General said, quieter now, “when we aren’t in the field. If—if I am not overstepping in saying this.”
“I feel I would be the one overstepping.” Cody looked down at where their hands twined together, the General’s ‘saber calluses against Cody’s blaster scars. “Obi-Wan. I would listen to you, too.”
“Thank you.” Obi-Wan squeezed both of Cody’s hands, skin dry and rough and slightly cool against the backs of Cody’s hands and his bared palms. “You should get some rest, my dear. We have a few hours yet of the night cycle.”
Cody straightened, pulling his hands out of Obi-Wan’s. He knew a dismissal when he heard one. “I’ll just—”
“I’ve a perfectly serviceable bed here,” Obi-Wan said blithely. He didn’t quite take Cody’s hand again, but he just—brushed the tips of his fingers against Cody’s palm. “You look dead on your feet, and your quarters are quite far.”
“They’re a three-second walk, sir,” Cody said, not quite believing his ears.
“Oh, yes, such a ways,” Obi-Wan said as if agreeing with Cody. He nodded and got up and suddenly they were much closer than—
Shit.
“Oh,” Obi-Wan said again, and Cody nearly echoed him this time. He found he couldn’t breathe as Obi-Wan reached up, touching the very tips of his fingers to Cody’s cheekbone—just below the scar a spray of shrapnel had left in one of his first engagements. “Do you… this is going to sound very silly, I’m sure, but you have the most lovely freckles, Cody. I hadn’t noticed until just now.”
“You do too, sir,” Cody said, unsure where—if anywhere—this conversation was headed. The General wanted to sleep with him. Oh, Force, the General wanted to sleep with him.
Literally.
“You’re too kind, Cody,” Obi-Wan murmured. His moustache twitched into one of the Kenobi Special Micro Smiles Cody had learned to read over the course of their work together. “Come on, then. I still have a bit of formwork to do, so the bed is free. It isn’t like I use it for much, anyway.”
“You don’t?” Cody bit back the sir that wanted to rise out of his throat, instead casting Obi-Wan a quizzical glance as he finally moved away. He was tired. Endlessly. The loss of Wolffe’s battalion—the knowledge that it just as easily could have been Wolffe and his battalion—was still heavy in his chest. He found he didn’t want to fall asleep and wake alone. Maybe that was why he’d sought out Obi-Wan’s quarters: a dangerous thought. Obi-Wan’s bed with its untouched sheets and crisp corners was starting to look more and more appealing.
“I find it hard to sleep during the night cycle.” Obi-Wan touched the small of his back, just a cursory brush, but Cody found the sensation lighting all up and down his spine. “Go on. I’ll be right here, I’ll wake you before your shift. I promise the sheets are clean.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Cody protested. His feet moved him towards the open door and he peered into the room, hesitating at the threshold.
It was sparse. Clean. Obi-Wan was busying himself with rinsing their cups out. Cody could still taste the red-sweet tang of the tea he’d made at the back of his tongue. There were robes and tunics folded neatly atop the little chest of drawers in the corner and a kit full of little brushes and soft cloths left half-open next to it. Cody went in and let the door slip half-shut behind him once more. A shelf, hidden by the bed, held a collection of trinkets and kitsch—a cracked little teacup, odd rocks, a carefully-coiled braid woven with colorful string and beads, a tiny action figure in Jedi robes wielding a bright purple lightsaber.
It was awfully endearing. Cody toed his boots off and slid under the covers, feeling awkward and too-large in his skin. He glanced through the open door only once to find Obi-Wan sitting at his desk, half-facing Cody in bed but bent over a datapad that cast his face into a sickly pallor.
He woke only twice—the first time disoriented and heart beating out of his chest. He was choking on the vacuum of space, pulled apart by the piercing cold and drifting, drifting—
“Shh, Cody,” a voice murmured. Lips pressed to his temple, just above the dead-numb scar tissue skirting the edge of his orbital. He was pulled upright—it was pitch dark—and someone settled on the bed next to him. The mattress dipped under Obi-Wan’s weight.
“Wolffe,” he thought he said, or maybe he only thought it—Wolffe, he cried, chest burning and burning. His gaze had been so dull even over the blue static of the holocall. Everyone he’d known, every vod he’d ever commanded into battle…
“Safe,” the voice said. “As are you, Cody.” Warm arms thick with corded muscle wrapped around his chest and shoulders. The body heat along his side and back shocked him back to himself. His jaw itched. When he raised a hand to touch it he found wet tracks traced down the length of his face.
“You’re alright.” Obi-Wan’s thumb dragged across the sweep of Cody’s cheekbone and smeared salt-stinging tears all across his face. The pads and insides of his fingers were rough with callouses. He swiped at Cody’s face with his thumb, then middle and forefinger, then messily dabbed the backs of his knuckles all along Cody’s jaw. Obi-Wan’s affection was a clumsy thing in the dark. Cody thought he might have liked it better that way.
“Status?” Cody rasped. His throat felt like sandpaper. His chest was so tight he thought his rib cage might crack under the pressure and each jutting spire of bone pierce right through his lungs.
“On course,” Obi-Wan murmured. He was rocking them back and forth. The motion was so slight that Cody thought he was imagining it at first. “All quiet. Three more hours, alright?”
“Alright,” Cody said, already starting to slip. It was so dark that he couldn’t tell when he’d closed his eyes—only that Obi-Wan had started to hum something to him under his breath as he drifted further and further.
The second waking was brief. For only a few seconds, Cody was aware of the shaking of the body next to him—a quiet cough stifled into the crook of an elbow, the line of Obi-Wan’s spine hunched and curled in on itself, a near-silent sigh almost like a groan. When he uncurled there was a cloth in his palm. On the cloth were the lace-flimsy, whitespun petals of a crumpled handful of daisies. Their abbreviated stems were dark with clotted blood at the ends, the stamens soaked scarlet. He pretended not to watch as Obi-Wan uncurled further to ball up his bloodstained handful and toss it into the wastebasket just under the bed.
He couldn’t remember when he crossed the barrier between waking and dreaming. He thought he might have seen Obi-Wan holding a lacy froth of blood-covered baby’s breath. In his mind’s eye he watched Obi-Wan turn away again and again, on the bridge, on a campaign, in a red-lit lartie rocking back and forth with turbulence, coughing silently into a palm or elbow.
He felt Obi-Wan pull him close in his dreaming and whisper into his ear. Cody felt the tickle of petals against his skin. He reached up and climbing ivy starting to curl up and down his arm and throat.
