Chapter Text
Force, Ben says, looking out at lush green planet outside.
“Good, General?” Cody asks, taking it as a no when Ben doesn’t reflexively correct his use of the false title.
Instead, Ben shrugs expansively, and Cody snorts.
“You know,” he says, watching Compass direct the men in preparing the hangar. Luke is standing beside them, but sticking close to Brisk who he has been subtly shadowing to with an intensity that suggested he didn’t fully trust Ben’s promise that they wouldn’t be leaving anyone behind. “We could always leave. They’ve probably not spotted us.”
Kissing the side of Cody’s temple— in front of all the men! Ben says, “Don’t tempt me, Commander. I’m trying to be a better man.”
There is a clunk of the Vigilance landing, and Meter calls out a helpful but unnecessary, “Docking successful” over the comms system. The bridge is operating with a skeleton crew, with almost everyone is piled into the hangar to get a look at the Jedi Order. By Cody's eyes they look about what he expected, a large diverse group of robed-figures patiently waiting near a landing strip. He'd probably feel far more nervous if Ben hadn't talked through all of Ferus' assurances one night while he was fretting, Cody had never met the man but anyone who Fox trusted was someone Cody would at least listen to.
“Besides,” Ben says, reaching out to tousle Luke’s hair, “I reckon we’ve got about thirty seconds to drop that gangplank before they board us by force.”
“We’ve repelled one piratical boarding, we could take them,” Cody says, already signalling for Boil to open her up.
“Ben, there are Jedi out there,” Luke says, wonder in his voice. He is nearly vibrating with excitement, detaching himself from both Brisk and Ben. “So many Jedi.”
“Let’s have that be out back up,” Ben says wryly to Cody, as they follow Luke forward. “Alas we forgot about an attack from with in.”
Luke hardly waits for the door to open before he is out like a shot, charging down towards a handsome male Nautolan standing at the front of the overwhelming welcoming committee, chirping out a greeting that they were too far away to hear and launching himself at the Jedi. They can hear Luke’s squeals of delight when the Nautolan catches him and twirls him around, starting to introduce Luke to the robed Jedi around them.
Next to him, Cody watches as Ben go through possibly every emotion on the spectrum, a hand in his beard, looking pleased, fond, devastated, hopeful, embarrassed, worried and finally amused. It happens over the span of seconds, and had Cody not made such a project of studying Ben’s expressions, he’s not sure he would have caught them all.
“No sense of self-preservation, that one.” Ben eventually observes, waving—almost shyly— at some of the people on the ground. They wave back with the caution of people trying to coax a wary creature closer.
“C’mon, this isn’t going to get less awkward the longer we wait around,” Cody says, starting to guide Ben down. A handful of his officers follow behind, as planned. As he walks, he picks out some familiar faces in the crowd, unarmoured but safe and well. Ponds, Bly, Gree. All of them, alive and okay. Those karking nightmares, Cody thinks as he catches their eyes, letting him think they were dead all this time.
They reach ground and there is a moment of hanging indecision as they look at the crowd around Luke and the crowd looks back at them.
“Rex!” Someone shouts and Cody turns to see his brother stagger as the sound of the voice hits him. He watches as something unseen levitates Rex’s bucket up and away, before a Togruta woman is sprinting past them towards Rex. Leaping her way up onto the walkway and tackling Rex, who had very quickly signed a desperate stand down to Fives and Echo.
Rex’s face, before Cody’s view is obstructed by the enthusiastic kisses the Togruta lays on him, is joyous and disbelieving. He can see Rex say something, but they are too far back at this stage.
Still caught between his waning panic, shock and the primordial urge to rib his brother, Cody glances back at Ben who thumps him kindly on the back.
“Well that certainly explains a lot,” Ben observes. “Cody, did you know Rex had a Jedi girlfriend?”
“I mostly certainly did n—”
A voice roaring “Cody,” interrupts him.
“Oh fu—” Cody manages, before he is lifted up and squeezed.
“Wolffe?!”
“Aye, you absolute bastard,” the dead-man growls, “What nonsense do you call this?”
“You’re alive?!”
“Of course, I’m alive,” Wolffe scoffs, as if Cody hadn’t been the one to tow the smouldering remains of the 104th’s dirigible back to the shipyard for scrap. “What could kill me?”
“Me, you fucker” Cody grouses, still aloft, “I grieved you.” Cody can’t help but feel embarrassed, he’d been so prepared to support Ben during this reunion and they’ve barely made it planetside and he and his men are the ones making a spectacle of themselves.
Wolffe has the good grace to look abashed, and finally puts Cody back down. While Cody was being ambushed, Ben had been subsumed by the Jedi who Luke had been introducing himself to. “Ah yes, unfortunate that.”
“Unfortunate?” Cody repeats, unimpressed, clocking Boil, Waxer, and Brisk joining him on the ground, Rex and the 501st were still halfway down with the Togruta woman, though they seemed to be talking now.
“There was some… mess with the Admiral I was assigned,” Wolffe says, as Cody checks in with Ben who is looking overwhelmed but pleased as he hugs and gets hugged by the people around him. He seeks Ben's eyes and only lets himself relax when he gets a signed all-clear to assuage his worry. “He kept sending us on suicide missions, we decided to fake our own deaths before his attempts took.”
Cody sighs, unable to blame Wolffe for the decision, but wishing his brother hadn’t been quite so dedicated in selling the accident.
“Who’s in charge here,” Ben says, emerging ruffled and overwhelmed from his greetings. He knows there is a thick quality to his voice, and he can’t seem to stop smiling or glancing at those around him — Aayla, Depa, Yoda, Kit, Quinlan, they were all alive— even as he attempts to summon some degree of authority.
“That would be me,” someone says, Mace. He is rising from where he had been crouched, engaged in a serious looking conversation with Luke (though even odds it was Mace meeting Luke’s enthusiastic retelling of their adventures with his usual sombre focus).
“Mace,” Ben greets, dragging the man in for a hug that could generously be described as crushing.
“Obi-Wan,” Mace says, correcting himself to “Ben” when the hug ends. “I thought Ferus told you to be discrete, and I’m pretty sure I told you to lay low.”
Mace is teasing, in that deadpan way of his, unchanged even after a decade and Ben feels home in a way he didn’t trust he’d ever get again.
Still, for form’s sake, Ben sighs. “I tried. They—” he gestures to Cody’s men who had slowly started to disembark, gathering in small groups around other clones and some of the friendlier looking Jedi, “—insisted on following us.”
Mace hums, unconvinced.
“Anyways, before we get—” he waves a hand again this time trying to encompass the hubbub going on around them, “I’ve—we’ve some strategically useful gifts.” Beside him, Cody and Quinlan break their conversation (interrogation), one to nod his approval, the other to cock a brow.
“Oh?” Mace says, intrigued.
“Yes, Crys?”
Crys and his deputy join them, having carefully made their way down from the Vigilance with their crates of evidence. Konstantine and the Pirates were still in the brig, but Ben got the sense that Whisker especially wanted them off his dirigible.
“I believe,” Ben says, handing Mace the summary report Crys had prepared because he is a wonder, “there is evidence here that you and your allies in the Rebellion might find very interesting.”
Mace takes the file, and Quinlan abandons Cody to read over his shoulder, that Mace allows to him without comment suggests there have been some very interesting personnel changes in his long absence.
“Certainly enough to prove that Palpatine is controlling both sides of the war,” Ben says, still marvelling at how much they had gathered when they’d laid it all out. He hadn’t been mad at Cody for following Luke’s instincts all those weeks ago, but now he could only be grateful, it had been a windfall. He’s not sure how much the Order already knew already, but it had taken speaking to Ferus before this part started to tesselate for Ben. “We also have—uh… an admiral? The presumptive General of Cody's battalion until they decided to make a personnel change. Very much Palpatine's man. And a band of pirates?” Ben adds, “Unsure of their actual tactical usefulness, but we have them on our hands…”
“Oh, Ben” Quinlan says, thumping him on the back, hard, “it’s been boring without you.”
The Tantive lands on the main landing dock at the temple with decidedly less fanfare than Ferus understands greeted Ben, Luke and the Vigilance —Luke had excitedly shown Leia, who in turn had excitedly shown Ferus a play-by-play. Still, there is some form of a welcoming party. So when they disembark, Leia pulls Ferus and her father down the gangway towards the gathered Jedi.
Ferus had not entirely forgotten that this was Leia’s first time meeting so many Jedi, but her excitement underlines it for him. For all that any Jedi routing through Alderaan would sneak into the palace to greet the Princess and her parents, he knew she had been desperate to meet more of them.
She slows as she gets near, an uncharacteristic shyness taking hold for a moment before she spots some familiar faces. And then she is dropping their hands and launching herself at Depa, Quinlan and Mace in turn. Her three favourite visitors.
“So quick to abandon you,” Fox observes, amused as anything, when he and Thire come up behind.
“That’s loyalty for you,” a familiar voice, unheard in person for a decade, says.
“Luke!” Leia shrieks, leaping from Mace’s arms and pelting towards her brother, crashing them both to the floor with the strength of her enthusiasm, as Ferus smiles and greets Ben with a hug. Next to him the way that Commander Cody hauls Fox and Thire in for a hug seems decidedly more bruising, and to involve far more curses and complaints.
“Ferus,” Ben greets, voice rough, “Dear boy it is so good to see you properly. I cannot thank you enough, we— this wouldn’t have happened without you.”
Swallowing, Ferus says, “It’s so good to have you back.” And trusts that Ben understands all he is saying.
Bail also gets a hug from Ben, while Ferus goes to greet the Council.
“You’ve certainly been busy,” Mace says tonelessly, and Ferus has learned finally not to balk at the teasing. “You've done well. Siri is cross that she’s not here, she wanted me to tell you that: just because you found a long-lost Jedi and helped solve a mystery, it is no excuse for abandoning your plans to meet up with your former Master.”
Ferus chokes on a laugh, and makes a note to connect with Siri, even as he has to duck and dodge Quinlan’s attempts to mess up his hair and press him for details.
“There’ll be a full council meeting later,” Mace continues, ignoring Ferus fighting for his life to keep Quinlan from ruining his carefully combed look. Unsaid but implied: after Luke and Leia were in bed. Some conversations were not for children to overhear, no matter how capable. Yavin tended to not have as many younglings as either of the other two temples: less of a tactical decision than an outcome of the spread and growth of the Order from the initial evacuation.
Ferus oversees moving his, Fox and Leia's possessions out of the Tantive, watching as Leia and Luke refuse to detach for longer than five minutes, and Fox finds himself interrogated by his brothers and Ferus' colleagues.
When Ferus stops, Fox quickly ends his conversation to join him. "I hope you know that nobody other than that Vos guy has had anything but the kindest word to say about you."
Ferus flushes, "Don't worry, they are only waiting until you are in too deep before they start in on the embarrassing stories." It is little comfort that Fox merely looks intrigued.
“We should go. Sire—” Captain Antilles says, having come back from his briefing with the non-Jedi corps at the temple.
Bail finishes his chat with Mace and Ponds, comes over to Leia to grab her into a huge hug, stroking her hair. “I’ll be back soon, my love. Train well with Ferus and your brother. Stay safe.” It had been a hard decision for Bail to leave Leia, they were meant to have this time together, but Bail ultimately had decided his duty to the Rebellion necessitated the hopefully brief separation.
Leia clung hard to her father, but loosened her grip to swat at Quinlan, who would be accompanying Bail on the trip and must have made a comment of some kind.
“We should also leave,” Ahsoka says, walking past Ferus trailed by a number of clones in blue-painted armour, who must be Captain Rex and some of his men, heading over to where Thire was speaking to some of the clone commanders. They would be heading to Coruscant, Thire to meet up with Breha, Ferus is unsure what work Ahsoka and her new squad of men had planned, he assumes he'll be filled in during Mace's council meeting.
Thire gives a serious nod, before extracting himself from a discussion with Gree and Ponds. He stops by where Ferus and Fox have been talking quietly, dragging Fox up for a glancing hug before tugging Ferus in for his own one.
“You look after him,” Thire instructed, half-joking, half-not.
"I'll do my best," Ferus offers, which seems to satisfy Thire.
Ferus understood that the supplies were needed over at Echo base, that they were expecting them and had planned to have them within the month, and that Breha had a very tight window in which to work. It just seemed so sudden, to go from weeks in the close quarters to a departure.
The two dirigibles take off, within minutes of each other, and then it is just them, most of the rest heading back inside to get on with their lives and duties in the temple.
There is a little hand that situates itself in his, and when Ferus glances down it isn’t Leia like he expected, but Luke. When he glances over, Leia is sat on Cody’s shoulders, bossily telling Ben something. He looks bemused but is nodding seriously along with whatever she is saying.
“Hello there,” Ferus says.
“Hi!” Luke says, “We’re having dinner now, all of us. You should come.”
He starts walking Ferus towards the temple, snagging Fox’s hand without a word and pulling him along now. Ferus watches Fox follow along unthinkingly, before taking a second glance and realising that the other twin was proprietarily moving him along. Ferus wonders whether this comfort comes from Leia’s fondness bleeding through or some native friendliness in Luke. It doesn't seem to matter to Fox, who smiles down at Luke and says, "What adventure do you have planned for us today?"
Three Months Later
Thorn is looking drained and miserable when Stone finds him in the office they had claimed for themselves.
The surviving two Commanders of the Coruscant Guard.
Filling in for Fox had been a pleasure when they thought he was getting a break from the horrors of Coruscant, but after the news reached them of the accident with the Senator’s dirigible, the work became suffocating.
Distantly, Stone knew to be grateful that Organa’s widow, Queen Breha as she signed her missives, had used some of her political goodwill to have to embassies not only maintain but increase the assistance they were offering the Guard. But as it was he felt like he was drowning. In guilt, in work, in the feeling he was starting to lose Thorn in the way he’d been losing Fox, as meetings with the Chancellor became an unavoidable reality of their now formalised duties.
“You okay, Vod?” he asks, tapping their foreheads together and moving behind Thorn so he can retie the braid that has become a mess over the hours he’d been working.
Thorn sighs which Stone supposes is answer enough, “Queen Organa is coming by, she says she has something—”
Oh kark, that was almost cruel, Stone thinks, but doesn’t say as he smooths out the new, neater braid he has plaited for Thorn. The dye in his hair was still bright and golden-lovely, so things were not entirely dire as far as Stone’s scale for Thorn went.
The comm system crackles to life, “Sirs, the Queen is here.”
Squeezing Thorn’s shoulder where it has tensed back up, Stone leans over the desk and responds, “Send her through, Jar. Thanks.”
“She’s an escort?” Jar says back, sounding panicked.
“Him too,” Stone says, pleased to see that Thorn gives a little smile, barely more than a quirk of the lips, but it is something.
“What do you reckon,” he asks in the twenty seconds they have before the Queen enters, “already moving on to some hot strapping young thing?” The senator of Alderaan, was by all accounts a very good man, whose death was probably a loss for the wider galaxy. But Thorn hadn’t smiled fully in months and Stone wasn’t above throwing a dead Senator under the dirigible to get Thorn to laugh.
That gets him the ghost of a smile, but no response. Possibly because there is a knock on the door.
“Please come in,” Stone invites, keeping on his feet and moving to welcome Queen Breha and her guard, an armoured, masked man. He looked a bit taller than a clone, and wore armour in the colours of the Alderaan standard, made of better metals than the cheap stuff the Guard were outfitted in. The bodyguard nods to them both, before taking a position by the door and Queen Breha of Alderaan comes in closer.
“Commanders Thorn and Stone, thank you so much for meeting with me,” she says. For a grieving woman, slender but taller than them both, the Queen seems stronger and more stable than Stone expected. “I’m so sorry about your Commander Fox and Captain Thire—” Stone observes a slight movement in the bodyguard, “—my husband and daughter spoke highly of their heroism before…”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Stone says, voice catching.
“I wanted to bring you these,” she offers two greaves, identifiably Fox’s and Thire’s. “They were salvaged from…”
“I understand,” Stone says, taking them off her delicately, trying not to look too closely at Thorn as he does so.
“And there is this,” she turns and is handed what looks like a novel. This she hands directly to Thorn, “I was told you enjoyed reading, and I thought an early copy of this book would be of interest.”
Of all the things? Stone thinks crossly, but holds his tongue when Thorn accepts the book with a nod of thanks.
“We should be off, but gentlemen, I’m having a dinner at my embassy tomorrow evening, before I leave again for home. I think you should both come.” Stone doesn’t think that is very likely, and opens his mouth to say as much but Queen Breha interrupts him, “Take a read before you decide. I think you’ll find the book most interesting.” And then she winks and leaves."
Her bodyguard hangs back, seeming to look at them both, before he signs—in their code—read.
Stone splutters, standing to follow him and demand how he knew their codes, but Thorn’s hand stops him. “Vod,” he says, voice shaky with what it takes Stone a moment to recognise as joy, “look.”
So Stone looks at the book, recognising it as a romance—with an armoured figure that bore a vague resemblance to a clone’s armour, looking to the foreground where a fully robed figure with a gleaming sword stood—before the title and author sink in. “The Commander’s Jedi?” he reads incredulously, “By Ferus Olin?”
“That bastard,” Thorn says, leaning over the desk, shaking. “Those bastards.”
“What?” Stone asks, alarmed, even though he’s pretty certain Thorn is laughing.
““Realising that he can no longer trust the King he serves, Commander Vulpo of the Knight’s Guard sets out on a mission with his trusted lieutenant, joining up with a Duke seeking to return peace and order to the planet. While traveling, the Commander meets a mysterious man who speaks in riddles and seems to be connected to a long forgotten order of monks, the Jedi.
As they travel, Vulpo and this mysterious man find not only trust and love, but secrets that will change their planet forever."” Thorn stops reading the blurb and looks at Stone expectantly.
A reader of detective novels primarily, Stone looks back at him uncomprehending.
Thorn sighs, already more animated than Stone has seen him in weeks, and flicks through the book to find a small note that reads: Go to the dinner, there are plans afoot — F.
“They’re alive, Stone.” Thorn says smiling. Properly, for the first time in weeks.
“Those bastards,” Stone says, catching himself on Thorn’s shoulder as he staggers with relief. It goes unsaid that they will be joining the Queen of Alderaan for her dinner and likely whatever plans she, Fox, Thire and whoever else have in the works.