Chapter Text
The general’s eyes are syrup when they open and shut, open and shut. Lethargic is the word that Beric writes in his report, but syrup is the real one. Cody knows syrup.
It’s thick. Unctuous . It pours over itself into ribbons, glistening, oily ribbons. A single swallow won’t manage it all. It needs two swallows.
That’s what the general’s eyes are like under the wicked glare of the light positioned right over his head.
Unctuous.
Thick.
He blinks like his eyes leak tar instead of tears. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t see. A curve of glistening spittle has taken over the corner of his mouth. And yet Cody knows somehow that this is him.
The general.
His fingers curl damply around the last two of Cody’s own on his right hand. They fit there, soft, hot, and damp. The general blinks at him without words, somehow speaking them into Cody’s ears anyways.
Help me . Help me .
He cannot make himself take his fingers away, no matter how much his stomach churns at the sight of this—this—insult The gaping eyes, the drooling mouth. The brow crumpling more and more by the second as the general’s eyes fill with clear tar.
He can’t move from the shrapnel and the pain.
His hand tries to tighten around around Cody’s last two fingers, but they can’t.
They can’t.
The general’s eyelid begin a sluggish descent to their matching bottoms and pull the softness of his forehead down with them into a grotesque scrunch of pain and screaming vulnerability.
“Commander,” Beric says as a wail finally catches up to the gestures the general has been fighting for minutes now. “Get the General.”
He has to wrench his fingers away.
The wetness of body heat sticks to his hand as he swerves around shoulders and boots planted and half-obscured by smoke. The heat is suffocating. Cody only remembers belatedly to shove his helmet on.
His legs have lost their earlier fatigue; they carry him through the men from the back to the thick middle, to the thin front where the smoke is so heavy that the only light visible through its haze is colored. Red blaster and yellow blaster bolts lights up the smoke as lightning does storm clouds. Their thunder is the rata-tat-tat of slug fire and machinery.
Far up ahead, a flash of green fury goes up and then down.
Cody grabs shoulders left and right to help propel himself forward. People shout at him as he goes. They call him ‘crazy’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘out of your godsdamnned mind,’ and maybe he is all those things.
Maybe.
It doesn’t really matter, because looming beyond them, looming beyond all this smoke is something far more devastating:
Failure.
The green light slashes the air inches away from Cody’s hand. He rips it back and nearly staggers when a hand erupts from the blue noxious clouds and seizes him under his helmet, right up against his throat.
Cody clutches at the hand gripping the very edge of his chest plate as it tries to force him back.
“General,” he shouts over the din. “GENERAL.”
Blue eyes emerge from the blue smoke with blotched yellow and miserable purple stuffed into their corners and the bag underneath them.
“What’s the matter with you? Get back ,” The General shouts.
“Commander Kenobi’s been shot,” Cody barks.
The grip at his chest plate goes absolutely still.
“Sir,” Cody pleads. “Sir, he’s—“
The General’s bird-like gaze rips away from him back towards the army just through this smokescreen, and something like ringing begins to fill Cody’s ears.
“Get back,” the General says. “Get back to him, Cody. Keep him for me. Don’t let him die.”
The dread that followed Cody to this very spot, which has been strangling his throat every second the General’s knuckles have brushed it, dissipates.
He can follow orders.
“Sir,” he says.
“GO.”
“SIR.”
This time, when the shove comes, Cody takes it as the first step forward.
The General (small) is wail-screaming when Cody crashes back into the medical tent. Beric is nowhere to be seen, but there are two medics and three injured men crowded around the General’s stretcher, trying to hush the boy’s gushing, strangled sobs.
Cody shoves his way through them and drops down to a knee to assure their General (small), that he has returned.
“He’s coming,” he promises, sweat dripping from his jaw to the shell of his helmet.
The General’s body seems to rock rapidly in place as he stares into Cody’s visor with wet, sticky eyes and half-opened mouth.
“He’s coming,” Cody says again.
A hip checks his shoulder without mercy. The medic shoves Cody out of the way and kneels down with a hypo in his hand. The General sees it happening before Cody does and lets out a cut-off screech that turns into an eerie tearing noise.
Everyone lunges back at the sound.
The General recoils from them the same way they recoil from him. Both eyes have gone totally black. His mutilated arm falls lifelessly over his hip and side and hangs grotesquely behind him as a broken wing.
The medic recovers fastest and attempts to step in a second time with the rapid pain relief plunger clutched in his hand.
The General smashes his eyes closed and lets out the loudest tearing, hair-raising hiss that he can from his young, shredded throat.
Beric explodes from the ether behind the medic to seize the hypo out of their hand. The medic doesn’t need asking, they swap places and Beric begins half-shouting,
“Baby boy, baby boy. You gotta calm down, honey. This is gonna make it hurt less.”
The General leans so far back that his shoulder blades are nearly crushing the arm behind them. Beric lurches forward to stop him and, for his trouble, receives a sudden flurry of violence.
Even Cody did not expect the snap of teeth.
“ Commander ,” Beric snaps in a tone laden with fury and irritation.
It is not the right thing to do in the moment. Cody will rub Beric’s shoulder later when he can’t close his eyes without seeing the boy’s sudden expression of terror. But it is what it takes for Beric to be allowed in close enough to sink the needle into the boy’s shoulder.
The General cries out and writhes, fighting and hissing all over again until the hypo’s vial is empty of its painkiller.
Once the deed is done, Beric falls back and Cody steps forward once more with his ripped gloves held out in front of him. His last two fingers are on display, shown to the boy to remind him that Cody comes in peace.
But this is too much.
Today is too much. Yesterday, too. And the day before that, and the day before that—all those times when Cody has failed to do the one thing his general asked of him.
Protect the little General.
Skywalker will come for him first.
The tears start out of confusion, and then grow bitter with fear.
The General tries to escape them by pushing himself back with what strength is left in the only functional arm he has. He tumbles off the stretcher into the dirt and lands right on his broken wing.
His cries grow in intensity with purple pain that died into smoldering embers. Before Cody can get to the other side of the stretcher, he has crawled underneath it and curled himself into a ball with the broken arm stuffed at its very core, the rest of him tucked around it, heaving and weeping.
Heaving and weeping. Like the seas on Kamino.
Sickness surges in Cody’s stomach.
The men around him stand and rush away at the arrival of more wounded at the tent’s entrance flaps. Only Beric remains, a hand splayed against the back of Cody’s shoulder.
“Just try to keep him from moving,” he says. “When he cries himself out, get him topside of that thing.”
He jerks his chin towards the stained stretcher. Cody doesn’t nod. Beric leaves him with their dove and its brittle bones.
Cody is there when the General throws back the medical tent’s flaps. A bevy of dead-on-their-feet medics shoot up from the ground with new energy.
There is blood on the top of the General’s cheekbone. The whole side of his face is so swollen that it very nearly seals his eye shut, but he gives it no heed and stalks through the incoming medics with a frantic, wild pace that no one in this battalion has yet witnessed.
Quickly, the medics, the wounded, and Cody realize that they are standing in the way of a biological imperative.
And if they try to interfere, then woe be it upon them.
The medics part. Cody stands.
The General sees none of it. He stops in front of the empty stretcher and without missing a beat, rips it back, sending it clattering to the ground behind him. Underneath it, the little General’s ball of a body snaps awake. Despite a heavy blanket of exhaustion and medication, the little General rolls half-over into a defensive snarl.
The General towers over him.
The strange wideness of his gaze surveys the boy as if he has never seen him before. He cocks his head.
The little General’s blue eye become blacker and blacker as he stares right back up in total silence.
The next motion is fluid, it is a dip and a scoop that all seems to happen at once, the way that the great long-necked marsh birds catch fish.
The General reaches his normal height again with the little General in his arms like he weighs nothing. The little General remains scrunched up in a ball, eyes still blown wide.
They both stare up and down, respectively, still as if they have only just stumbled upon the other.
Then the General leans forward and tucks his pointed nose into the spit and mud-matted hair behind the boy’s right ear, and the boy’s uninjured arm comes up to grab a fistful of the General’s long hair in return. The General breathes long and slow.
Long and slow again.
The grip in his hair slackens somewhat. The little General’s wide eyes begin to sink back into their earlier syrupy blinking. He opens his mouth, but can’t make words, only a soft, hoarse rasp that the General responds immediately to by knocking his head into the boy’s.
The boy goes quiet for a moment, then tries to make the sound once more. He gets another knock for his trouble. He gives up after that—gives up on the rasp, on the fistful of hair, on the tension in his bruised body. He goes limp in the General’s grip like he is a child three-quarters his age.
The General takes his weight like it is nothing for a long, tense moment. Recognition seems to overtake him—the biological imperative is soothed by the little General’s submission.
He lifts his face from the boy’s hair and takes in the state of his miserable grand padawan.
He nods, and without another word, leaves the tent with the boy laying limply in his arms.
Beric lets out a breath that allows his team of medics to follow suite.
“Gonna be a fuckin’ nightmare getting Baby Boy his next dose,” he says.
Cody’s new job, since the little General’s arrival, has been to make sure that the munchkin does not A) harm himself B) harm others or C) become kidnapped, and Cody is proud to say that he has managed all but the first so far.
This last encounter was a close call, and Cody sacrificed a glove and a half for it, but godsdamnit if he is not still the Commander of this force-forsaken unit. Skywalker can walk right to the edge of sith’s hell if he thinks Cody’s knees are going to quake in the face of that ridiculous mask of his.
Anyone can go around breathing on people if they are so inclined. What’s to fear in that?
The General reminds Cody in private quarters while he combs debris out of his hair that his job is to take the kid and run away from Skywalker in future. Away , is that clear, Commander?
It is.
Cody will simply ignore it.
“Sir,” he says.
“That’s not a yes, Commander,” General Jinn says testily, but not too testily. There’s a padawan sleeping on his bunk like it’s three-days dead.
“Sir,” Cody repeats.
“I don’t know why I bother.”
Cody allows amusement to wash over him and stands to attention once more.
“Beric would like Padawan Kenobi to attend his next appointment, General,” he says.
General Jinn squints at his comb. His crooked nose wrinkles.
“He isn’t ready for humans, yet,” he says.
Cody glances at the child on the bed. His head is buried in two layers of robes, definitely suffocating.
“I believe the issue is the arm, sir,” he says.
“Hm.”
“It might heal incorrectly.”
“Hm.”
“If it heals at all without treatment. Sir.”
General Jinn delivers a swift and dark look that tells Cody his usually infuriatingly unflappable General is still on leave. Might be on leave for a little while now. Might have deserted entirely.
“I will bring him to Beric when he can tolerate humans,” General Jinn says firmly.
“I will relay the missive,” Cody says.
He hesitates.
“General Windu has left a message as well,” he says. “He—“
“I know what he wants, Commander. Don’t feel obliged to answer it.”
“Sir, I understand that it is not my place, but we don’t mind having the commander in the unit with us.”
This is a lie. Cody has had nothing but migraines since Commander Tano delivered the little General to the Negotiator , but the alternative is, well, quite literally unthinkable.
“Perhaps,” General Jinn says, still combing his hair, “But he is triggering behaviors in me that I do not have enough medication to mediate. I cannot allow myself to forgo concentration for his safety. General Dooku is of a similar species. He can mind him more effectively with the 709th.”
Cody clenches his teeth at the thought of General Treason flouncing over here and snatching the little General up from his makeshift nest.
“You’ll forgive my ignorance, sir,” he says, “I thought the boy was part of your lineage—“
“Our lineage. General Dooku was once my own master.”
Godsdamnit.
“Do you not have another grown padawan, sir? The one who serves General Tholme’s team?”
“Feemor?” General Jinn says, finally looking up from his grooming. “You want Feemor to look after a padawan? We are trying to prevent theft here, Commander. No, Master Dooku will take him when he is well enough. He knows what to look out for anyways, should Anakin try to manipulate his and Obi-Wan force-bond from afar.”
Because he’s a traitor-in-waiting, Cody does not say.
“If you say so, sir,” he says. “I will note that me and the men will be sorry to see him go. It was nice having a Jedi commander around these parts.”
He watches the line of the General’s shoulders soften.
“I’m sorry, Cody,” General Jinn says. “I know I haven’t been myself as of late.”
Cody inclines his head in appreciation of the apology.
“Tell the boys in engineering they can play that racket of theirs,” General Jinn says.
“The canteen will be envious, sir,” Cody says.
“They can have theirs, too. Just not any higher than level 17. My nerves are not what they used to be,” the General says.
Cody follows his eye to the boy in his woolen nest. He waits. When the General shows no sign of speaking, he clears his throat. The General startles and pushes himself up to standing.
“Do you see this?” He huffs in a soft laugh. “One chick and I forget myself. Forgive me, Commander. Tell Beric I’ll put a sleep suggestion on Obi-Wan before I bring him down tonight. He can put away the falconry gloves.”
Cody stifles a smile.
“Will do, General. Sleep well,” he says.
Cody wakes to the sound of a hundred knuckles banging on his door. He stares at the ceiling over the tiny bunk in his office for several long beats before forcing his abs to lift him up.
He opens the door and finds a small congregation of medics with pleading eyes and hands.
“Help?” One of them asks.
Yes, the General brought the little one to the medical bay.
Yes, he put a sleep suggestion on him so that Beric didn’t have to take x-rays with a set of extended plastic grabbers and leather gloves.
Yes, their General has been called away to discuss important matters with the Jedi Council.
No, he left no instructions for what to do when the kid woke up from his sleep suggestion.
Cody sighs as the sound of ripping canvas greets him upon entry into the medical bay. The little General is standing up on one of the gurneys looking very much like a small man ready to pounce onto Beric and strangle him with his spindly legs for lack of sufficient arm-strength.
The second the little General sees Cody, however, his noise-making cuts out. Messily, he clambers off the gurney and hurries past Beric (non-lethally) and through the crowd of junior medics (without ill intent) to stand directly in front of Cody. He gazes up at Cody with his black and blue eyes.
He makes a small, round noise that melts the junior medics and causes an epidemic of face grabbing.
“Commander,” Cody acknowledges.
The little General makes his noise again and holds out his arms—including the one with the thick cast on it—out slightly, asking for permission to crush Cody’s guts and lower ribs into fragments of their former selves.
“No thank you,” Cody says.
The little General’s enormous liquid eyes direct themselves to the floor. He shifts his weight the same way he walks: silently.
“Are you harassing these good medics again?” Cody asks.
The little General shakes his head at the ground.
“I can’t hear you, Commander,” Cody says.
The little General bounces on his toes and mumbles a reply too quietly for human hearing.
“Commander?” Cody repeats for the third time, expectantly.
A whine accompanies the shame shuffle before him. What the little General wants is a hug. He wants to dig his bony arms into Cody’s kit and rub his fluffy head against Cody’s blacks so thoroughly that Cody has to invest in yet another lint-roller to get the down out of it.
This is bird behavior. Territorial behavior.
It is one of many impulses that the little General is learning to control. Cody often cannot believe that the General himself might have once been like this.
“I said I didn’t mean to,” Padawan Kenobi whispers.
“It is my understanding that your people have a whole lesson on intention and outcome,” Cody says.
The little general scowls and makes his gesture at Cody again.
Cody shakes his head.
“Come,” he says, “Leave these people to work. They don’t have enough leave to keep up with your antics.”
The little General puffs out his cheeks and side-eyes Beric over his shoulder.
The little General has what Commander Tano generously refers to as ‘fucking problems.’ This, Cody must admit, is a nice and tidy way to describe the myriad of odd behaviors the little General has begun displaying since Skywalker’s untimely departure.
What is nearly as unsettling as the aggressive behaviors is how no one seems to have noticed them until now.
The little General is confused. He is perplexed. He is absolutely bamboozled as to why things he has been doing for the last three years are suddenly no longer appropriate. The reactions to his hissing and teeth-clicking are no longer laughs or hair ruffles. He keeps being told where to be at all times, and his restlessness is no longer rewarded with freedom.
He’s stifled here in the 212th under his grandmaster’s strict and watchful eye, but he knows that he cannot leave it without risking the security of the Republic.
Cody doesn’t blame him for his frustration and occasional misbehavior. What he does wish to inculcate in this wild-eyed boy, however, is the same which the General wishes to: discipline.
“Cody?”
“Commander,” Cody says.
“Beric says you call me a general.”
“This is not a question, this is a statement. What information are you seeking here?”
The little General looks up at him and looks away.
“Why?” He asks.
“Why, what?”
“Why do you call me a general? I’m a commander.”
“You walk like a general,” Cody says simply.
He has the boy’s complete and undivided attention.
“Like Master?” He asks.
Gods, no.
“Like your grandmaster,” Cody says. “With a puffed out chest.” He holds his hand out in front of the little General’s and receives a smile.
Cody gives the ghost of a smile back. They keep walking.
The little General fought a civil war two years ago.
Skywalker was sent to mediate it and declared it hopeless. His new padawan disagreed.
Months later, Skywalker pried said padawan out of the mud and the blood and the muck and told him that he was coming back with him whether he liked it or not.
The little General screamed and fought to stay, but there was no one left to fight for. He was brought from that war to this one. Always a soldier. Always a little man with a war to win.
That’s why he’s a general.
But he doesn’t know that Cody knows, and if he did, well—perhaps he wouldn’t trust his padawan-sister as much as he does.
Cody passes the General’s fine toothed comb through the little General’s hair until it has trapped a good handful of loose white feathers in its teeth. As soon as the feathers fill Cody’s fist, the little General tears himself out of Cody’s arms to take cover in the woolen nest on the General’s bunk.
He glares at Cody with slits for eyes until Cody tells him to get out of there and at least pretend to be doing one of his lessons before the General returns from the war room.
The little General drags his feet.
Cody taps a foot until his unhappy charge is parked at the quarters’ small table, miserably holding a data pad.
“Shall I teach you to count, too?” Cody asks.
His little General huffs and puffs and turns on the pad to throw himself into his studies. Cody sits down across from him and reaches over the table to ruffle his downy hair.
His hand is immediately shaken off. Obi-Wan curls his lips at him and sinks his attention deep into the pad. Cody watches him for another few seconds before standing and announcing that he has work to do, so Obi-Wan will need to entertain himself.
“Leave the medics be,” he orders.
“You’re not the boss of me,” Obi-Wan snaps.
“I outrank you, little man,” Cody says. “Never forget.”
Obi-Wan stares at him and Cody stares right back all the way until the door closes. Through it, Cody hears the muffled call:
“I’m not little .”
The General returns from the war room and the next morning, Cody is surprised to come onto the bridge and find the little general holding the hand of the big one.
This is out of character. Unnatural even. The little General despises having his hand held, but Cody can see already that it is he who is doing the holding. Wide eyesstare over the boy’s shoulder at Cody in silence as those hot damp fingers of his dig marks into the flesh of the General’s hand.
This silence is a plea.
“Obi-Wan,” the General says.
The little General’s attention snaps back up to him. General Jinn cocks his head. The little General shakes his just barely from side to side.
“Padawan,” General Jinn says, dropping into kneeling in front of him, “It is for your own safety.”
“I’m safe here,” the little General insists. “I can fight.”
“It is for their safety, too,” General Jinn says, gesturing with the same hand that his counterpart is holding to the troopers in every corner of the ship.
This, Cody must admit, is a true observation even if it is an unfair one.
It is not the little General’s fault that Skywalker hunts him now. It is not his fault that Skywalker climbs into his dreams, climbs into his mind to pluck pieces of memory and leave him confused and forgetful, standing in doorways and suspicious of troopers who he knew well only yesterday.
What Skywalker is doing to the boy is what Palpatine wishes to do to Cody and every brother that General Traitor commissioned into existence. Observing the process in slow-motion on a natborn child is disturbing to say the least.
The 501st couldn’t bear to watch.
Rex wiped away tears when he brought the little General to Cody with a hand on his shoulder to guide him because the little General hates holding hands.
The little General forgot Rex first, for days and days, until Skywalker realized what he had the power to do. Then he remembered, but dissolved into abject terror at the sight of Rex, recounting only the terrible things he saw Rex do in the nightmares his distant master fed into his mind.
Detached from the 501st, the little General is safer. Skywalker doesn’t know these men well and has struggled to turn Kenobi against General Jinn, a member of the boy’s own species. But through the little General, Skywalker will soon learn the names of the engineers, the medics, the ARC troopers, the privates.
The General and Cody have tried to keep him with them so as to keep others anonymous and distant where possible, but it is a cruel thing to do to a boy—to interfere in his ability to form bonds with the people around him, to not even let him know the names of the people giving him high-fives and hypo injections.
Perhaps if the little General knew Beric’s name, he wouldn’t have thrown his broken arm over his hip. Maybe he wouldn’t have cried so pitifully in the medical tent.
Cody swallows and blinks back the burn of tears when his little General’s eyes land on him.
“We have to protect them,” General Jinn says. “They are our only allies now.”
The little General looks right into Cody’s eyes and nods.
General Traitor arrives to The Negotiator long after the evening meal, which General Jinn has taken with the little General in his quarters.
It is late.
The little General is so soundly asleep that General Jinn carries him along with his one bag of belongings out to meet General Traitor. Even in his sleep, the boy holds onto General Jinn’s fingers.
Cody’s heart hurts.
Kenobi should at least be awake. He should get to say goodbye. He deserves that small amount of closure for being the canary in this coal mine.
But there is no time or closure to spare because it is late, the little General is young, and there are still shards of shrapnel embedded in the bone of his arm.
“Qui-Gon,” General Traitor says in a warning tone.
“I am not in the mood, Master,” General Jinn says. “Just take him.”
“The sins of the student are not those of the master,” General Traitor says, “Nor are the master’s the student’s to bear.”
“If only we all really were so blameless,” General Jinn says. “Take him.”
“He could be yours.”
“I have ruined enough padawans for more than a lifetime.”
“He has bonded with you already.”
“He is too stubborn and righteous. I fear that Anakin has taught him attachment while we stood by.”
“Then who better to begin the process of unlearning with than a man who has lost and retrieved the Fallen from each generation around him?”
“You’re right, Xana is plenty old enough for a padawan,” General Jinn says.
General Traitor flattens his eyebrows at him.
“No need for threats,” he says.
“Fee, then.”
“Did I teach you these strong arming tactics? Did I do this?”
The General finds a smile in him and holds out the boy, who General Traitor accepts with slightly less grace. Cody knows why.
The little General is inhumanly light, but full of elbows and knees. His bones are porous like General Jinn’s—long and awkward like the General’s, too.
“May the force be with you, Master,” General Jinn says.
“May the force be with you, Padawan,” General Dooku says. “He will be safe. Afterwards, you should think on it.”
“Perhaps you should,” General Jinn says.
“Me? Oh, no. Four is an unlucky number.”
The little General vanishes and again, Cody becomes the 212th’s only Commander.