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Unexpectedly, Cody wakes up.
It’s slow at first. He’s groggy and disoriented and grief-stricken, though he can’t quite place why until his eyes finally open and focus on the figure next to his bed in the med bay.
“No,” he breathes. “No!” Cody struggles against the covers, trying desperately to get away, and instead finds hard metal straps holding his limbs down. Confusingly, this soothes him a little.
“Cody,” his beloved’s voice, which should not be here, reaches him. “You’re alright, please, relax.” A hand finds his arm and a thumb softly rubs back and forth across his skin.
He opens eyes he didn’t consciously shut. “Obi-Wan,” he whispers. His voice cracks, though he can’t tell if it’s with emotion or from intense dryness. Had he been in bacta?
Obi-Wan uses his free hand to guide a water cup to his mouth and help him drink. “I’m here, darling, I promise. I’m not going anywhere.”
When he feels like his voice is strong enough, Cody speaks again, oh so tentatively asking, “What happened? I don’t understand.”
“You were brilliant, my love,” Obi-Wan whispers. “You warned me what was about to happen, and I used the Force to put you to sleep. You’ve been in a stasis for three days- first, so we could run tests and determine what happened, then for emergency surgery, and then for recovery.” After a fortifying breath, he continues. “The surgery was to remove an inhibitor chip in your brain. Near as we can tell, it was placed there by the Kaminoans exceedingly early in your development- along with all the members of the 212th, so we assume this was the case for most, if not all, your brothers.” He looks off into the middle distance, eyes unfocused. “I… I felt it in the Force, when the chip was activated. Your presence is like the sun, and it was as if that sun had been covered by a thick, dark cloud.” His eyes find Cody’s again, now full of untold sorrow. “I felt my tethers to the other Jedi snapping. I can’t be sure how many weren’t warned in time, but I know it was… devastating.”
Cody can’t breathe. How close had they come to disaster in their own battalion? And how much worse must it have been everywhere else?
Obi-Wan notices his panic and helps him through it enough that Cody can gasp out, “What else?”
Through the haze of awful emotion, Cody feels a flare of fondness for his general, who knows that what he needs now is not to be left in the dark but to be told the whole, terrible truth. It’s a horribly small comfort to see how well Obi-Wan knows him, but he clings to it with both hands as Obi-Wan explains everything they know at this point.
As soon as Cody was asleep, Obi-Wan ordered a halt on all incoming communication from anyone outside Ghost Company. With the help of Waxer and Boil, he managed to get the whole battalion back on their venator within an hour and Cody was rushed to medical. Since Cody alone had been tasked with distributing the deadly order to their men, Obi-Wan was safe- for now.
The inhibitor chips have horrific instructions all relating to deception and murder. For the briefest moment, Cody worries that the loyalty of him and his men can be called into question, but Obi-Wan readily assures him that the nature of the chips makes it abundantly clear that the treachery runs far deeper than the troopers, that even as Cody had told him he would kill Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan had known Cody would never.
Their men are already mostly dechipped, and those that aren’t are scheduled to be soon. As soon as that’s the case, they’ll make contact with Coruscant to figure out the status of the rest of the GAR, the war, and the galaxy as a whole. In the meantime, Obi-Wan has meditated in the Force enough to know that a few of his Jedi contacts are most definitely still alive- Vos, Aayla, Ahsoka- though there are many he’s unsure of, and he hasn’t been able to discern the status of any other clones.
Cody doesn’t dare ask after Rex, and Obi-Wan doesn’t mention Anakin. He tries not to think about it.
“I fear we are entering a new, darker era,” Obi-Wan says gravely. “The Republic is likely scrambling, at minimum, and there’s surely a power at play we’re currently unaware of. Someone had to know about the chips and how to activate them, and there are precious few people who’d have the power necessary to pull this off.”
Cody swallows hard. “I think it might not be as much of a mystery as you’re expecting.”
Obi-Wan looks sharply into Cody’s eyes. “What do you know?”
“I recognized the voice who gave the order.” Cody shudders and breaks their eye contact. “And it makes a lot of things make a lot more sense, suddenly.” He takes Obi-Wan’s hand, which had still been rubbing soothing patterns into his forearm, and squeezes tight. “It was the chancellor.”