Chapter Text
Obi-Wan had been knighted more-or-less alone, without pomp, ceremony or celebration. His friends had been elsewhere, and when they finally had arrived, Obi-Wan was too depressed to want a party and too busy to attend one even if he wanted to.
His resignation from the order, he expected, would be more or less the same. Anakin was still in transit from Ryloth, Cody was in prison, and everyone else was ruinously busy trying to keep the Republic from falling apart. Riyo Chuchi’s nomination of Obi-Wan for the position of chancellor, which had gone through the day before, had only made things worse.
He folded his robes carefully, set his lightsaber on top of them, and then thought better of it. He couldn’t hand Master Yoda the whole pile; it would make it look like he was asking him to do his laundry.
Just the lightsaber, then, and someone would have to come get the robes along with the rest of Obi-Wan’s belongings at a later date.
He hadn’t quite shut the door behind him for the last time before he had an armful of teenager.
The night before, Ahsoka had stormed out back to her own quarters. She had not understood – or rather, had understood but did not accept – the fact that Obi-Wan had to resign from the order to be considered as Chancellor even if he wasn’t the final choice.
Ahsoka still wanted to tell him to stay, but she knew she couldn’t ask.
“I’m getting a hug too.”
Behind Ahsoka, what seemed like half the order and most of the 212th had crowded into the hallway, backed in shoulder-to-shoulder. To her it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they would all come, but to Obi-Wan, who had never considered himself particularly beloved (he was blessed to have Anakin, and that was enough) it was baffling.
True to his word, Quinlan did give Obi-Wan an enormous hug when Ahsoka let him go, and Boil did the same after, and Satine emerged from behind Waxer and pressed their foreheads together a long moment.
He might have left the order for her, once, but they would have come to hate each other if he had. They worked best as people who had fierce passions entirely separate from the other. Now, he was leaving it for a greater reason than either of them could have imagined all those years ago. It had not seemed then like Obi-Wan Kenobi, consistent failure, could ever amount to anything much, though Satine’s faith in him had always been remarkably unyielding.
She let him go into a firm arm-clasp from Mace, many friendly touches from the 212th, and a wry pat on the shoulder from Madam Nu, before he came, at last, to kneel before Yoda. The crowd formed a circle around them, packed in tight. It was such a strange place for so solemn a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said. “I’ve always had the impression you went to rather a lot of trouble to secure my place in this order, and-”
“Hmph!”
The blow from Yoda’s stick caught him on the upper arm, and Obi-Wan stifled the sound of shocked pain.
“Master!”
“A fool, you are,” he advised Obi-Wan. Around them, the crowd listened in oppressive silence. “Good, I saw in you, and wished to see nurtured. Led you away from this Order before, your good nature has, and diminished you, it has not. Challenged us, you have, to be better than we might have been alone. Right, I was, to say you had a place here; regret it, I do not, and will not. Instead, thank you, I will. Know, I do, that sacrificing much, you are.”
He took Obi-Wan’s lightsaber, when Obi-Wan offered it, and bowed to him, a shallow movement that cut deep in Obi-Wan’s chest.
Obi-Wan passed through the crowd, surrounded by those he loved and yet alone. None of them could follow him where he was going – not the Jedi, not the clones, not even Satine, bound to Mandalore and its needs for the rest of her life.
Outside the temple, in among the media and the guards and the civilians, Padmé held out a hand. She was not sure if he would take it; she had already cost him so much.
There was nothing to fear. His hand was tight on hers as he let her lead him away from the only place he had ever called home.
Ten days later, with a slim margin of four percentage points over Lott Dod of the Trade Federation, they elected him Chancellor of the Republic.
--
They still looked at Fox with suspicion when they released him, even though the charges had been trumped-up at best. It didn’t really bother him any more. When they offered him his possessions back, the armour he’d been wearing at his arrest, he told them he didn’t want it. Instead, he walked out in the soft tunic Breha had left for him, and found a moment later that he had his arms full of Alderaan’s Senator, who had refused to be Vice Chancellor of the Republic in favour of Riyo Chuchi because he knew he’d ruined his reputation for moderation by fighting for Fox.
“Really it should be Padmé,” Bail had said in the call where he’d told Fox, “but I don’t think they’ll give anyone from Naboo any sort of power for a long time.”
Of course, it was going to be a much less powerful position soon. Kenobi had already promised that one of his first acts as chancellor was going to be to do away with all of the bastard’s self-serving wartime powers.
Bail’s hand had come up to rest on the small shaved patch where they’d removed his control chip.
“Does it look terrible? I thought I might shave the rest of it, maybe do a pattern or something?”
“It’s perfect,” Bail told him, a little soppily, and let Fox pull out of the hug to press their foreheads close, Mandalorian style, for a long moment.
He couldn’t keep a smile, the same stupid smile he’d worn that first day, off his face. After he’d drunk his fill of the touch, he drew back a little, extending a hand to Breha to draw her into the embrace, because she’d been his lifeline in so many ways, these last weeks, and he had no words for that kind of personal kindness from a natborn who wasn’t his soulmate.
She was smiling at them, and when Fox met her eyes, it grew into something with a mischievous victory to it, the smile of a sabacc player who was about to reveal a perfect -23.
Just like that, he knew her heart as he knew his own.
--
Quinlan had been itching to get off Coruscant since before the assassination. He’d never liked it there, and thought, with the wisdom of hindsight, that some part of him might have been sensing the Sith’s presence for a very long time.
He’d met Aayla on Ryloth a lifetime ago, on a day that was one of the happiest of his life even if it had been a horrible ordeal for her. She’d been so infinitely precious then, and she still was, tackling him with a shout of “Quin!” as he came off the shuttle.
She’d gotten new ribbons for her lekku, the black sharp against her skin. Somehow, though it had only been a few months, she seemed older, more certain in herself.
“How’s your man?”
“Well, one of them is right over there, because he’s a gentleman who walked me here. The other one is the sort of asshole who says ‘how’s your man?’”
Quinlan offered Bly a friendly wave and received a very excitable one in response.
Under her breath, Aayla said, “I read Mandalorians exchange armour when they get engaged and married but I think he’d hate that so I just bought him a bracelet instead.”
She’d been saving the confession so she could see Quinlan’s jaw drop in person, and she laughed at him when it did.
--
Depa bought a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate Obi-Wan’s election, but in the end they waited tense weeks to drink it as the debate over the clones went ahead. It was one of the most stressful things she’d ever seen, and staying calm enough to teach Caleb through it all had been a nightmare. He was a delightful child, who wore purple and blue stickers against a soulmate match in a way that had definitely been inspired by Skywalker’s padawan, since it was a Togruta strategy rather than a human one.
Every night, after Caleb went to do his homework and go to bed, Depa watched the day’s events on fast-forward, grimly amusing herself with the high-pitched voices, and it was only after treacle-slow weeks of this that at last they had a verdict that let Depa set the bottle on Mace’s table.
“It’s not over,” he said.
“Isn’t it?”
“Dooku’s waiting for something. I don’t like it.”
“Easier to fight a man than to fight a war.”
Mace shook his head. “There’s nothing easy about fighting him.”
“It’ll be easier when we do it together.”
That, at least, was true enough.
--
“I don’t want to be a soldier,” Echo said. The bunks were very quiet, but nobody was sleeping. “I’m good at it. Karking brilliant. I just don’t want it.”
“Alright,” Fives said. He didn’t know what he wanted at all. It was one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to him, and the best too. Like finding his soulmates, a little.
--
Everyone in the 501st knew about the General and Senator Amidala. Their soulmate bond was common knowledge, and their romantic relationship, though slightly more secret, was near enough.
There was a karking difference between that and watching Anakin pick her up and spin her like they were characters in a cliche holodrama. When he set her down, she rubbed the side where his metal hand had clasped a little too deep and muttered about bruises tomorrow, but she was still grinning, a free and happy expression, threaded through with victory like Rex had never seen.
They were back on Coruscant, Cody was so close, now, and they were as much their own as they had ever been, and Anakin was saying something about how Amidala should twirl him next time, and Rex couldn’t keep a smile off his face either.
It clicked for him and for Padmé at the exact same moment, her eyes going wide with shock, and Anakin glanced between them in bafflement for a few seconds.
Finally, he asked Padmé, “you did it?” She nodded, that look of victory stronger on her face than ever, and he said, “oh that is wizard.” And pulled them both into a hug that made Rex understand what she said about the bruises.
--
S-
Shit’s going to go down. Not sure when, not sure where, but I don’t like it. It’s not how we fight. Get a new Jedi or something, that’ll even the odds.
I guess the speech could’ve been worse. Better you tell the whole republic that our “greatest virtue” is valuing the individual – it should have been ‘individual warrior’ – no matter their soulmate status than for them to believe it was whatever that shit the Kaminoan was spouting. What the fuck were they on about “the Mandalorian tradition of forbidding soulmate bonds among warriors” anyways?
BK
--
When the Senate building had last been significantly renovated, some seventy-odd years ago, the Chancellor’s office had been temporarily relocated to what was normally a suite assigned to significant visiting ambassadors, usually those of candidate-worlds for the Republic. In a gesture of temperance, Obi-Wan had chosen to have his own office there, though he could in truth have had his pick of the empty offices of Separatist senators.
Palpatine’s office, with its dark spells, lay empty and sickening. Obi-Wan had not wanted that shadow lying over his own tenure any more than it already did.
But it would have been dishonest to pretend that he was not, at his heart, driven by a single thought: How could he ever ask Anakin to set foot in the room where a master Sith had, with Obi-Wan’s implicit consent, conducted a years-long, sickening grooming process?
He and Anakin had tried to talk about it a few times, but it was almost impossible to have that conversation half a galaxy away, when they couldn’t see true smiles or tears beyond the staticky filter of a holocall. He missed feeling Anakin in the Force, whether that was the blistering sunlight of his anger or the ticklish static of his amusement.
For the last few hours, since he’d entered the atmosphere, Obi-Wan had started to feel a steady warmth in the back of his mind, but he didn’t dare turn fully to face it, yet.
“No, Mother Prime Minister,” he said, to the woman on the call that had prevented him from meeting Anakin at his arrival. “Shili will always be one of the Republic’s most valuable worlds, but just as we oppose the off-world Togruta slave trade – and we do. In fact, I’m going to have your information about that investigated personally, immediately – we cannot in good conscience allow practices we’ve banned under anti-slavery laws precisely because they convene the natural rights of sentient beings to be continued under the authority of member worlds. Regardless of who the subject is. I’m sorry for the disruption this may have caused you. You are, of course, free to appeal on the basis that individual practices do not convene the Senate’s ruling on this matter, but I was voted into this office with the understanding that I intended to oppose the practices of slavery in all its form, legally sanctioned or not.”
“I’m sorry this conversation couldn’t be more productive.”
Obi-Wan hadn’t thought it would be, really, since ‘tough-on-crime’ had been one of her primary campaign slogans, but people always had the ability to surprise you.
“So am I,” he said, “and I do hope to have an answer for you about your missing colonists shortly.”
More diplomatically, she said, “I’m sure, going forward, we can find more common ground on… other matters.”
“I would be interested to hear your thoughts on anti-corruption investigations in the Navy, if you had the time?” The light at the back of his mind was growing brighter. “I think we may have over-run our time, and I’m sorry to say I have a meeting immediately after this, but would you care to speak again about that matter sometime next week?”
“I’ll consider my schedule and let you know,” she said, and they exchanged pleasantries that totally ignored the hour they had just spent categorically disagreeing with every belief the other had about the order of the galaxy, before disconnecting.
Anakin was always bright, in his mind, in his true smile, and in the Force, sometimes with burning fury, sometimes with blazing light, and sometimes with simple power. It was hard, until he looked directly, for Obi-Wan to know which was which, and so it wasn’t until his secretary said, “Jedi Skywalker for you, Chancellor,” and Anakin walked into the office, that Obi-Wan knew for certain what he was feeling.
There was rage, certainly, and regret too, churning deep in Anakin, but more than that, overlying all of it, there was a force of love that nothing could match.
“Anakin,” he said, rising to his feet, and watched a subdued version of Anakin’s true smile overtake his face, blistering with fondness.
“Hey,” he said, and, after an awkward pause, “missed you.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to meet you, the Mother Prime Minister of Shili wanted to meet and-”
“Padmé already told me it was her fault,” he said, and crossed the room to give Obi-Wan a tight hug that was everything he’d been missing for weeks.
For a long while, they said nothing at all, as Obi-Wan relaxed into the old security of their bond, and felt Anakin doing the same. It was so different now that Anakin was grown, entirely in good ways. The war had, in one of its rare blessings, allowed them to rearrange themselves as equals, co-generals who shared their burdens between them.
“Have you been eating?”
Obi-Wan blinked at him. “What?”
“The Chancellor’s schedule is a nightmare. Are you making sure you find time for meals?” At Obi-Wan’s blank stare, he added, “block them into your schedule every day. Put them down as something other than what they are, if you have to, like a meeting with Bail or Padmé, but make sure they’re there.”
There was genuine concern in his voice. “How long have you been worrying about this?”
“Anxiety fixates in weird places sometimes?”
Anakin was worried for him. “I thought you might be… upset, with me. I know my doing this will require a lot of you as my soulmate and as a Jedi.”
“You’re making every Senator in the Republic trek all the way over here every time they want to talk to you just so I can see you at work sometimes without stepping in that office. You do a job we both know you never wanted and are taking on because you care about us – me and Padmé and Cody and Bail and, I don’t know, Satine probably – too much to do anything else. And you’re wondering if I’m mad at you for it?”
There wasn’t much to do but shrug. “There’s an accessible lift. Not everyone has to trek all the way.”
Anakin hugged him again, for a long time, true smile hidden by the angle, but visible to Obi-Wan in the fierce affection that radiated off him in the Force.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I have done things you shouldn’t forgive. Leaving you with him was-”
“No.”
“No?”
“He would have wanted me to blame you. It’s not happening. Kriff him.”
Anakin was all force of will, at the heart of him. When he decided to fight a battle, or a war, there wasn’t much stopping him.
“Alright,” Obi-Wan said, “Kriff him,” and was treated to a burst of delighted laughter.
--
Ahsoka let herself be buried in a squirmy pile of what seemed like half the 501st. They were out of their armor now, freed from the painted stars that matched hers, but they loved her just the same.
--
It turned out that the process for deciding what would happen to a man who had – without a doubt – killed the Chancellor of the Republic involved a lot of paperwork.
“That’s because there isn’t really a process,” Padmé said, “they’re just making things up to seem like they have one.”
Padmé sat with Rex as he filled out page after page, her own work on her lap, as he fought to prove that he was the person who, in the absence of a soulmate, should be considered Cody’s next of kin and legal proxy. Later, she accompanied him to meetings with Cody’s lawyers, wearing her status as Rex’s soulmate like it was a badge of honour. They fought to get him the right to see Cody, but they were stalled, at every turn. Even Obi-Wan, who had been forced to step completely away from the proceedings to preserve judicial independence in the Republic, could not make them let Rex into the prison. The lawyers brought news, assured him that this was as much for Cody’s protection – there had been more than one assassination attempt by Palpatine’s allies – as it was to punish him, but that was all they could do.
In the end, with Ahsoka and Anakin on one side of him and Jesse and Kix on the other, he saw Cody for the first time in months at the trial itself. He stated his name – Cody, not the number – for the record, and registered his plea of not-guilty by reason of self-defense, and it was the first time Rex had heard his voice unaltered by shitty old microphones in all that time.
From there it took days, for the evidence and the deliberations of the jury, before Rex was standing in a generic lobby, waiting for them to let Cody out, a free man, the same as all of them were.
He wore civilian clothes, and, rather than the solemn black glazed half-mask he’d been given for the trial, a worn white fabric mask, patterned with curling leaves.
His hands were in his pockets, playing at casual, as if it wasn’t the most Rex had ever seen of his face except for a few awkward showers where Cody had glowered the entire time.
“Well?” He said, as if Rex might say something different now than what he’d said in every one of their calls.
“You’re a karking idiot,” Rex told him. “Never scare me like that again. Saving the entire galaxy once is enough, you can stop now.”
He shook his head a little, in disbelief, but Rex could see the shape of his smile through his lacy mask. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t let Kenobi rope you into anything else stupid.”
“Like you never let Skywalker get you into trouble.”
“We share a soulmate, we’re stuck with each other now.”
Cody would have been uncomfortable hearing Rex mention having a soulmate, once, and a piece of him still was. It was clear on his face. But instead, he said, “guess you’ll have to keep him out of trouble.”
“Or you’ll have to keep me out of it.”
“I’ll try,” Cody repeated, affecting a put-upon voice, but he let Rex press his forehead to his, grounding himself in the reminder that they were both there, scars under their hair and documents in Rex’s bag marking them as wholly their own.
--
Barriss Offee tried for her knighthood three months to the day after Obi-Wan Kenobi resigned from his. She was the first Padawan to attempt it after the war; others were ready, or nearabouts, but many were reluctant to step away from their training after so many long, hard years. They had not had a chance to truly learn what it meant to be a Jedi in times of peace.
Neither had Barriss, of course, but she had come to understand far greater things about herself in that time. She knelt on the smooth stones and breathed to draw the Force through her. She was as close to being the Jedi she had dreamed of in childhood as she had ever been. In those hazy hours of contemplation, when time stretched deep until every second felt like an eternity, she felt the heartbeat of Coruscant, and the sickness of it. So much corruption had taken root here, and such wounds did not heal easily. Spores of the same parasite had taken root elsewhere in the galaxy, and would continue to draw strength away from those who sought to do good in it.
Barriss had fought that blight with swords and she had fought it in a deeper place, sitting with some of the youngest clones and telling them it was alright if they never wanted soulmates, that they were already unique in the force, stars of differing compositions and velocities. In that moment, more than any other, she had been a Jedi. That was how she’d known she was ready for knighthood.
If she smiled truly, then, that was a matter between her and the Force.
The next day, with Master Luminara’s permission, she gave the braid of her apprenticeship to Gree.
--
On Dorin, Wolffe was the one who wore the mask and Plo’s face was bare, but they knew the truth of each other’s smiles just the same.
--
Nobody on Obi-Wan’s security team had wanted him to see Cody, but Anakin’s presence, lightsaber visible at his belt, calmed them enough that Padmé was able to usher them out of her apartment to wait outside.
The traces of Padmé’s life were strewn across the room in papers and abandoned mugs. She wasn’t herself particularly messy by nature, but queens never learned to tidy, and over the time it accumulated.
They were meeting here, on neutral ground, where Cody’s brother and Obi-Wan’s soulmate both lived some percentage of the time, in what seemed to be increasingly convoluted sleeping arrangements.
They had not seen each other, had not spoken, since the day of Satine’s speech to the GAR a lifetime ago. Obi-Wan had missed him sharply, a mix of shame, regret and loneliness all knotted together in his chest.
These last months, the universe had neatly arranged itself to remind Obi-Wan that he was loved, from Anakin’s forgiveness to Satine’s loyalty to Ahsoka’s trust to Yoda’s pride. And Cody, who deserved more than anything to feel the same, had been left utterly alone.
“The mask is new,” he said. It was as if he’d spent the prose of a lifetime and had nothing sensible left to give.
“Satine had her tailor send me a whole box in different colours.”
“Forgive me for presumptiveness if I say it suits you?”
The lace that webs itself over his jaw, held by loops behind his ears, was coloured like a sunset.
“I didn’t like it at first,” he said. “It wasn’t me. But I realized, when I was coming out of it after the surgery, I didn’t know if the helmet was me either, and I thought… well, at least this came from somewhere kind.”
Obi-Wan found his throat was tight, and his voice did not feel like his own. Cody, for the first time, was noticing nervousness in him, disassembling the image of Obi-Wan he had held so long in his mind and seeing a man.
“You deserve kindness,” Obi-Wan said. “I am… entirely sorry I couldn’t give it to you. You never should have been put in that situation.”
The apartment around them was very quiet. Obi-Wan hoped Rex, Anakin, and Padmé weren’t listening in, but he wouldn’t have bet a single credit – a thing he had many of, now, because the Chancellor was paid generously – on it. All three of them were nosy.
“You sent me Satine,” Cody said, but that wasn’t all he was thinking about. Obi-Wan had seen his misery and had wanted him to be free with his heart long before they’d known the extent of Cody’s un-freedom. Cody had not been kind to him, then, and Obi-Wan had never held it against him.
“She never goes anywhere she doesn’t want to. She likes you.”
“I like her.”
“Anakin’s going to Mandalore soon,” Obi-Wan said, “I’m sure you could catch a ride, if you wanted.”
“I might,” Cody agreed, imagining the ruined, empty landscapes that had never been his home, “if Anakin agrees to give me a ride back too.”
“You’d come back?”
“Well, you can’t come with me, can you?”
They both considered the fact that Obi-Wan had not ended this story free. Powerful, certainly, but not free. Obi-Wan thought that was the grand error of the Sith; they thought that their ambitions and violence made them free. Cody thought about the fact that Obi-Wan had done for him the thing he had tried, for so long, to do for Rex.
Cody didn’t have to make those kinds of choices anymore. Rex could have his soulmate and be safe. All of them could.
“Not yet,” Obi-Wan said, and his true smile crackled with possibility.
Cody knew it, just by looking. It was a mirror to his own, as he raised his hand and, as Satine Kryze once had, in a cave on Mandalore a lifetime ago, removed his mask.
“Oh,” said Obi-Wan, “thank you, Cody,” and the force of his joy redoubled.