Chapter Text
Chapter One
Seventeen years before the battle of Yavin, the Empire took control of the mountains of Commenor for its Chrysopaz mines.
They were welcomed by the mine operators, and occupation of the eastern hemisphere began.
Thousands of refugees fled the cities for the west, many of them families with children.
One camp held a secret threatening the lives of hundreds.
For eight years, the Galaxy had been at peace. The Empire was gone, the Rebellion victorious. The New Republic had been built from the ground up and finally, it felt as though the Galaxy was healing from all the tyranny the Empire had put them through.
Cody had not been a part of the fight in nearly thirty years. Defecting from the Empire led to a path he hadn’t expected, but looking back it was one he would never regret taking. As he knelt in the dirt of his flower bed, tending to the ryoos that had begun to blossom now spring on Naboo had come around again, he felt nothing but content for the life he had made for himself.
The small homestead just a short way outside of Theed City was not the first choice Cody had for home, but the farm cottage he had been gifted by Bail Organa when he settled down had been lost when Alderaan was destroyed. He had been very lucky to be offworld when Alderaan was lost, his decision to visit brothers in the Outer Rim a spur of the moment one made when a small voice told him they should get away. Afterwards, Naboo had become home, credits saved over the decades and now backpay from the New Republic paying for the house he spent his days taking care of.
It was a peaceful life, a simple one, perfect for an old man just trying to live out the rest of his days with loved ones.
Trying to occupy his mind to stop it from wondering about the what ifs and the should haves.
A loud slam came from the house. Cody looked over his shoulder.
“Is that you, Ben?”
No response.
“Ben?”
Nothing.
Cody got up, his knees protesting at the movement. He took off his gloves and placed them on the nearby garden chair, and then carefully began to make his way up the gently sloping cobble steps up to the house. When he got to the top of the garden, he headed for the door and carefully slid it open. The door entered into a small dining area, with a kitchen connected to it on one side and an archway to the lounge on the other. Stairs were hidden just by the archway but before Cody could even take a step, a figure rounded the corner. Tall, auburn hair, blue eyes, ever so much the copy of a man long gone-
“Oh, by the Force!” the man exclaimed, nearly dropping the bag of groceries in his hands. He tore headphones off of his ears, music echoing from the devices. “Don’t do that!”
“I did call your name, many times,” Cody remarked with a smirk. Ben rolled his eyes but he smiled, walking past Cody and heading for the kitchen where he placed the bag on the counter and started to empty it of its contents. “I thought you were leaving today too?”
“No, Papa, I’m leaving for Coruscant tomorrow,” Ben told Cody, “Etta had to leave today to get the shuttle to Keren because the journey is so long. She tires a lot easier now.”
“Yes, poor thing, the baby is really taking it out of her.”
It was strange. At the beginning of the war, Cody never thought of himself having a future outside of being a soldier. Now he was a father. He was going to be a grandfather soon. Things truly can change.
“Did you get around to clearing out the spare room?” Ben asked, his head in a cupboard.
Cody winced. His silence must have spoken volumes because Ben leaned around the open cupboard door and gave him a pointed look, brow raised, lips frowning disappointedly. “Papa,” Ben sighed, “you said you would clear it out this week. The baby will be here soon!”
“I-I know!” Cody said, “I was going to do it today, I just got a little distracted, is all, with my gardening.”
Ben rolled his eyes fondly, shaking his head. “You and your gardening, “ he said with a smile. He put the last of the groceries away and closed the cupboard. “Come on, we might as well make a start before tea.”
Up the stairs they went. Upstairs was where the entryway sat, with two rooms off to one side and two off to the other. Ben and Etta’s bedroom was next to the office they set up for when the two of them worked from home, whereas Cody’s bedroom sat next to a room which was, to put it honestly, nothing more than storage for old junk. Things Cody had kept over the years that he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. When Alderaan was destroyed, they lost everything except their lives and the few things they had packed for their trip offworld.
Now Cody found it difficult to get rid of anything, no matter how small.
“I really don’t know what we’re going to do with all of this, Papa,” Ben mused as he began to pick up the odds and ends of the messy spare room. A trinket here, a datapad there, boxes upon boxes of items Cody wasn’t even sure he remembered he owned.
“Most of it will fit in the attic, surely.”
“Papa, it needs sorting and most of it needs throwing away,” Ben sighed, “I mean, just look at this… old greetings cards from years ago, clothes you don’t wear anymore, two- no, three datapads that broke Force-knows when-” he gave a small huff, “-I know we lost everything when Alderaan was destroyed but this is all junk.”
“I know, ad’ika , I just… it is difficult to let go of things.”
It is difficult to let go of the past.
Especially when that past didn’t want to let go of you.
Ben continued to shuffle everything around, but all of a sudden, he froze. His hand hovered over an object he uncovered from under scraps of loose flimsi that had fallen from their folder. “What is it?” Cody asked his son, stepping forward to see what Ben was staring at when…
It was a book. Not a flimsi one, but one made of real paper, held together inside a thick hard cover that was barely clinging to life. The outside was a dark green, with peeling gold embellishments meant to make it look like a valuable artefact of ages gone. On the cover sat writing, with real ink pen, faded from years of being traced over by the one who wrote it.
Jetii Adeat .
A distant look overcame Ben’s face as he carefully lifted the book from its hiding place. “This deserves better,” he said, holding the book out to Cody, who took it from his son’s hands, “it doesn’t deserve to be hidden away. They don’t deserve that.”
The book was heavy in Cody’s hands, heavier than usual.
“...You’re right,” he said eventually, tucking the book into the crook of his arm, “let me put it on the shelf and then we can properly start.”
He left the room before Ben could respond.
Hours later, in the dark of night when he could hear his son snoring lightly from across the hall, Cody found himself awake. Sitting on his bed, blankets pooled in his lap, the book lay tauntingly before him. He hadn’t touched it in years, not since Ben came home from the rebellion. Not since… well, just not since. He never forgot about it, nothing like this could be forgotten about in a million lightyears, and yet it lay there, closed, because Cody couldn’t bring himself to open it.
It only survived because something had told Cody to bring it with him that day, when he and Ben left Alderaan with a single packed back each off to visit some old friends. He tucked the book into his bag and brought it with him across the Galaxy, and when news of Alderaan’s destruction came, he could only hold it to his chest protectively as though the mere thought of it having been on the planet at the time would make it disappear from his arms.
His hand trembling, Cody opened the cover.
The entire thing was written in Mando’a, so only he or one of his vode could read it. The first page was blank, a deliberate choice, and the beginning pages were a complex scrapbook of writings and cut out images and old documents, but then… names. Photos. Real ones, not holographs. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Each one assigned a number, each name and number memorised, each face committed to memory. He couldn’t forget them even if he tried.
Name, number, age, photo.
Name, number, age, photo.
Name, number, age, photo.
Hundreds and hundreds of them.
All of children.
Force sensitive children.
When he went AWOL, Cody expected the Empire to go after him. He expected to end up in hiding in the far Outer Rim, where no one had even heard of the clones or the Empire or of who he was. He never expected to be working for Senator Organa on Alderaan.
Bail had heard of his defection through Senator Chuchi, and he found Cody on Coruscant trying to hide in the lower levels and find a way offworld.The Empire had yet to put a warrant out for his arrest, and Bail helped get him offworld to Alderaan where he would, for the time being, be far from the Empire’s eyes as they had mostly left the planet alone due to Alderaan’s outward support of the Empire. There was surprisingly little Imperial presence there, even in the capital city where Cody now resided and worked.
His official capacity was “Administrative Assistant”, but it was just a fancy title they slapped on some official documents to wave at nosy busybodies wondering why a clone was working in the government. It was easy enough to claim Cody as an honourably discharged former-GAR soldier who can no longer fight due to an injury that was hired by Senator Organa for his expert defense skills, trusting him to protect the Queen and Princess when Bail himself was offworld even as he did paperwork every day. Not that Cody did much defending of anyone; he split his time between assisting Bail with his slowly sprouting rebellion, and sending Rex names and contacts of other vode defectors looking to join the Clone Underground.
“Boo!”
Oh, and babysitting.
Cody didn’t even need to glance down to see who it was that was standing before him, so small she barely came up to his knees. Instead, he just put down his datapad on a nearby desk and, without any effort at all, scooped up a giggling princess and slung her over his shoulder.
“What’re you doing here, cadet?” he asked the laughing girl.
“Wanna play!”
“Ah, no can do, kiddo, not today,” Cody said, moving the girl so she was upright in his arms instead, “I gotta work.”
The girl pouted. It was an adorable pout, and one that didn’t work on Cody because he’d had years of his brothers giving him the loth-wolf eyes trying to get what they want. Rex was the worst at it, normally trying to get out of trouble.
“Co-teee! Please play!”
“It’s Co- dee , and sorry, Princess, but I gotta do some work for your dad.”
“Noooo.”
“Yessss.”
“Leia, are you bothering Cody again?”
Both Cody and Leia’s attention turned to the door, where Bail was standing with an amused smirk on his lips. Leia buried her head in Cody’s shoulder, throwing her arms around his neck.
“I wanna play with Co-tee!”
Cody rolled his eyes playfully.
He’d met cadets on Kamino less clingy.
“She’s no trouble, sir,” Cody insisted, his hand coming up to rest on the small of the girl’s back as he spoke. Cody liked Leia a lot; she was a bright light that Cody was sorely missing from his life, and every time he saw her as he walked the palace, every time she went out of her way to see him throughout the day and ask to play, he felt his whole day improve. There was something about her that felt familiar, safe, like how he felt with the cadets back on Kamino before the war, like how he felt with his vod’ike growing up in Tipoca City, like how he felt whenever he walked through the temple and watched a group of younglings go running past on their way to lessons, having not yet had to witness the war the way the padawans had,
He liked Leia. She was safe.
“If I am not allowed to address you as ‘Commander’, anymore, then you cannot address me as ‘sir’, Cody,” Bail remarked with his usual friendly smile.
“Well, unlike myself, you still hold a rank, sir ,” Cody remarked back. The small part of his brain admonished him for speaking the way he did to a superior - being raised on the vigorous abuse regime of his training as he had was difficult to shake - but Bail wasn’t just his superior, he was his friend, and friends don’t have those sorts of boundaries.
“My dear, please, there is no need to be so formal when it is just the two of us. You may call me Obi-Wan, or Ben if it makes it easier.”
Cody shook his head. Now was no time for such memories.
“Ranks are useless if they do not hold power to change,” Bail said sadly, his hands clasping behind his back as he pulled his lips into a tight grimace, “I have always been in the minority within the Imperial Senate but what little influence I did have is slipping away, I fear more and more people are losing themselves to the lies the Empire are telling them.”
And wasn’t that the truth. Cody knew first hand what those lies could do, what the manipulation of people’s minds did to them.
He had shot his General, after all.
A small hand came to rest on his temple, gentle fingers tracing over a small silver scar Cody sometimes forgot was even there. The former commander turned his attention back to the little girl in his arms, who had the sweetest smile and a kind, trusting look in her eyes. She patted his face again, and Cody wasn’t sure how she knew what he was thinking, but she did.
He pressed a kiss to her hair.
“Hey,” he said to Leia, “wanna help me with some stamps?”
“Yes!”
The rest of the morning went as such; Cody and Leia sitting at the desk Bail had set up for Cody in one of the offices, filling out paperwork and printing them off onto sheets of flimsi. The sheets were more a formality than anything, and in Cody’s opinion, a complete waste of resources, but with each document ready to be signed and stamped with a big red stamp by Leia in the top left corner, just a little bit more work was done setting up a way to help with a fight Cody never knew he would be fighting in.
He thought his fight for freedom would end with the Clone Wars… he was wrong.
Then again, all he ever knew was fighting. It made sense that he would continue to do so.
“Red stamp, blue stamp,” Leia said to herself, slamming the stamp down on the corner of the flimsi sheet, “me stamp-” she slid the page over to Cody, who picked up a second stamp - this one blue - and did the same in the other corner, “-you stamp!”
The girl giggled again. She was always so happy.
Cody’s datapad beeped. He picked it up from the desk and… paused. It was a notification on one of his private message channels, an old one. One he hadn’t used in three years since the Clone Wars ended. In truth, he only added it to the datapad out of habit. It was used by the commander batch of the GAR to send messages to one another coordinating campaigns and just checking up on each other, the entire thing encrypted and password locked. It wasn’t foolproof, of course, there was always a way to get into anything, but it had been private and unmonitored by officials.
Cody used it most to keep in touch with Rex whilst they were separated, wanting to make sure his little brother was okay when he couldn’t be there to protect him. It was Rex who messaged him, but he didn’t use words. He used dadita , a Mandalorian code made up of dots and dashes that was drilled into the commanders by Prime himself.
“Kote, assistance urgently needed on Commenor. Meet me at listed coordinates ASAP, It’s about the jedi.”
It was that last part that made Cody freeze.
The jedi were gone, killed by the vode, slain by the very blaster once used to protect them. They were betrayed, murdered, none escaped.
At least… Cody didn’t think that any escaped.
Yet here was Rex asking for his help for something to do with the jedi.
A tug on his sleeve pulled Cody from his thoughts. Leia was staring at him expectantly, a sheet of flimsi in front of him, waiting for the blue stamp.
“Oh! Sorry, princess,” he said, grabbing the stamp and dutifully stamping the page, slipping it into the ‘Completed’ pile.
“Co-tee okay?” She asked him, looking up at him with big brown eyes. He gave a nod and ruffled her hair, messing up the long curls in a way he knew she loved.
“I’m okay, I just got a message from my brother,” he told her, “he wants me to go see him.”
“Co-tee gonna go ‘way?”
Was he? Rex asked for his help, it seemed genuine. No one except for the command batch - and Rex, their little adoptee - knew that his name was Kote . It wasn’t something he advertised. It took him over a year to tell Obi-Wan, his best friend, because he didn’t share it with those he wasn’t close with.
But he and Rex had not seen one another since Rex got Cody’s chip out nearly a year ago. He had a whole team of their brothers with him, why did he need Cody’s help?
He wouldn’t ask unless only Cody could do something.
“Yeah, I’m gonna go away for a bit, not long!” He hurried to reassure the little girl, whose face fell, “just for a little while. I’ll be back before you know it!”
“Promise?”
“I promise, kiddo.”
He didn’t need to convince Bail to let him go, in fact the senator was more than happy to see him taking a break and getting offworld for a bit, even if it did seem to be to help his brother with work instead of relaxing. So that evening, Cody packed a bag and headed for the spaceport. Commenor wasn’t far from Alderaan, the journey only taking a little over a standard day in hyperspace. In that time Cody had responded to Rex’s message letting him know he was on his way and continued with some of his work on his datapad. He didn’t sleep much, but he rarely slept nowadays anyway.
He landed at the spaceport early into the morning, departing the ship with little fuss. There were no Imperials around, no banners hung from windows or stormtroopers marching patrols. In fact the place seemed rather peaceful, if not a bit busy. It was rather chilly, and Cody wrapped his coat and scarf around himself tighter to block out the wind as it blew through the spaceport.
No one checked his chain code, which he found rather odd, but it meant he just walked out of the spaceport and into the city without anyone stopping him, which was always good. The city itself was lively, colourful, well-kept and full of people bustling about, going on with their days without a second thought to those they walked past. Waiting for him just outside the spaceport, leaning against a wall, was Rex. He had on a long poncho that hid his body, but sticking out where he had his arms folded over his chest were his vambraces from his armour. The former captain smiled when he spotted Cody in the crowd, kicking off of the wall and closing the gap between them.
“Good to see you, Kote ,” he said, the two of them coming together in a tight and firm hug. Cody couldn’t help but knock his forehead against Rex’s gently.
“Good to see you too, vod’ika,” he replied, “now what’s going on?”
“Not here, it’s not safe,” Rex told him, nodding down the street, “got a place down this way we can talk.”
Rex led Cody through the city, but the further away they got from the glamorous city centre, the more and more the city around them began to change. No longer did there seem to be bright lights and clean streets. Instead, condemned buildings and littered roads took their place. Graffiti marked walls, abandoned trash and other debris blocked paths, windows were boarded up and yet eyes peeked out at them. The disparity of wealth was obvious and it made Cody’s heart clench when he saw down a side street children huddling around a lit fire for warmth. People still lived here, people still went about their day, but the change in appearance was a stark difference.
“Here we are,” Rex announced after a while. They came up to a bar, likely the only thing in business in that sector of the whole city, with a neon sign announcing “rooms available” by the door. Rex stepped inside and Cody followed. It wasn’t empty, but no one looked their way, not until Rex approached the bar and the bartender behind it gave him a nod.
“Rexy, how ya’ been?” The man, a besalisk, said with a smile.
“Had better days, Ronan,” Rex told him with a shake of his head, before he gestured to Cody, “Ronan, this is my brother Cody, he’s gonna be staying with me for a bit.”
“Ah, helpin’ with ya… situation?”
“Here’s hoping.”
Cody watched the whole interaction unfold with a pinched brow, but he reached forward to shake one of Ronan’s hands when it was held out to him.
“Good to meet you, Cody, any friend of Rex’s is a friend of mine,” Ronan said, before turning back to Rex and lowering his voice. “Your togruta friend, she’s over in the back corner.”
Rex gave a nod and beckoned Cody to follow. They made their way through the bar, past patrons of varying stages of drunkenness despite it not even being midday planetside yet, heading towards the back where booths lined the walls. In one of those booths, a familiar face sat waiting with a drink in her hand.
“Ahsoka!” Rex called. Ahsoka’s head snapped up. She had a scowl on her lips but it disappeared the moment she saw Rex and Cody heading her way.
“Cody,” she said with a smile, getting up from the booth. Without hesitation Cody put his backpack down by the table and pulled the former jedi into his arms, hugging her tightly. Something in his chest softened as he held her close, a part of him relaxing knowing now that his jetti vod’ika survived the order. Rex had been with her that day but stayed quiet about her fate, and Cody never asked him, not wanting to make him relive any bad memories.
There were no good memories from that day. Even the way Obi-Wan smiled at you on Utapau is corrupted now.
“Ahsoka, vod’ika , it’s so good to see you alive,” Cody said softly, only letting go when Ahsoka began to pull back from the embrace.
“You as well, when Rex said you were coming I didn’t quite believe it.” The jedi admitted.
“Well, here I am. How are you?”
“Unbelievably angry.”
The three of them sat down at the booth. Ahsoka scooped up her drink and had a sip, the amber liquid sloshing around in the glass. Cody almost went to take it from her before he realised… She was twenty years old. She had only been seventeen when he last saw her…
“With the Empire taking over the mountains on the eastern hemisphere, it’s only a matter of time before they occupy the entire planet,” Ahsoka said, “I doubt we have any more than a few months, at the very most, before they reach the city, then it could be just days until the camp is found and raided.”
“Camp?” Cody asked. Ahsoka nodded.
“Refugees, of a … specific kind. We thought they would be safe here on Commenor until we could find them homes in the Outer Rim, but then the Empire took interest in the mines and…”
“We could do with your help, Cody,” Rex told him, “any help, really. There’s hundreds of them, and they’re in more danger than anyone else.”
“I’m happy to help, of course, but who is it we’re helping?”
That, it turned out, was a lot easier to show Cody. They didn’t stay for long at the bar, instead leaving on the speeder parker just a little way aways. Rex stayed behind, something about needing to make some calls, but Ahsoka had Cody load boxes upon boxes into the back of the speeder before they set off out of the city, into the vast countryside that spread for miles and miles. Through fields, forests, past rivers and lakes, the city disappeared entirely from view behind them and before Cody knew it, they were turning down an almost invisible dirt road that led to a town.
No, not a town, a camp.
A fence stood tall around the encampment, makeshift shelters set up inside once abandoned buildings. It looked to be a factory of sorts, perhaps one that took advantage of the river nearby for its hydro energy. The place was falling apart now. People were everywhere, moving out of the way so the slowly crawling speeder could come through and make a stop outside one of the large warehouses.
Cody got out of the speeder. He looked around at the people. They were huddled together for warmth, many hiding from the elements underneath tarps suspended to make shelter. Children ran around in tattered clothes playing with one another whilst adults watched on with sad smiles. There seemed to be more children than adults, the more Cody looked.
He had seen refugee camps throughout the Clone Wars. Cody and his men had assisted Obi-Wan with relief missions just as much as they fought on the front lines. In the past he had delivered needed supplies, handed out food and blankets, assisted the medics with patching up injuries. This was nothing new to Cody; war caused circumstances that no one should ever have to see let alone live in, and here he stood once again in the middle of it all.
“Here,” Ahsoka called, getting Cody’s attention. She had a crate in her hand which she passed to him. “These are medical supplies, they’re the most urgent. Quinlan’s inside.”
“Wait, Quinlan as in…”
Ahsoka walked right past Cody at a brisk pace, her own crate in her hands, so Cody hurried to follow her. Through a red door she went, revealing a makeshift medical centre where children and adults alike lay on cots on the floor in varying states. On the edge of one of the beds speaking to another adult was yet another familiar face, with tanned skin and yellow tattoos.
“Quin!” Ahsoka called out, getting his attention. Quinlan excused himself and stood up, hurrying over to them where he had an odd look on his face. A mix between anguish, anger, and a bit of distrust. “This is-”
“Commander Cody, I know,” Quinlan folded his arms over his chest. He glared Cody’s way and something in him made Cody want to look away, but he held his gaze. “Why did you bring him here?”
Ahsoka rolled her eyes. “He’s had his chip removed, Quinlan, he’s one of us now,” she said. Quinlan only continued to glare. He did, however, take the supplies from Cody’s hands and walk them over to one of the doctors who was working on a patient.
“You’ll have to forgive him,” Ahsoka said to Cody, who turned his gaze to the young lady, “given the circumstances, he’s a bit distrusting of clones right now.”
“I don’t blame him,” Cody replied. He wasn’t very trusting of himself, even with the chip gone. He didn’t blame Vos for holding a grudge.
After all, Cody did kill one of his best friends.
They continued to unload the supplies from the speeder, taking them where they needed to go. Food to the kitchens, blankets to the shelters, clothes to those who needed them. Children cried for their parents, parents cried for their children. Hollow faces stared out into nothingness. Despite the laughter of children finding joy in even the darkest of times, there was no happiness to be shared around the camp.
Yet the place felt so… powerful.
A feeling enveloped Cody the longer he stayed there, a feeling he recognised but never with such… despair. Everything around him was amplified, from the feelings of the people to the chill of the wind. Everything was colder, darker, bleaker.
As he handed out blankets, something knocked at his boot. Cody looked down to find a ball had been kicked his way. A shout in a language Cody didn’t know drew his gaze up to where a group of children were standing, watching, waiting.
Cody kicked the ball back over to them. The children gleefully continued their game.
And around him, for just a moment, everything felt brighter.
“Ahsoka,” Cody asked as he grabbed the final crate, “what makes this camp so different from the others?”
Ahsoka’s lips pulled into a tight line. She looked him dead in the eyes.
“Every child here is force sensitive.”
“Forget the Empire, how will these children survive the winter?” Cody asked as he, Ahsoka and Quinlan stood by the speeder. They had finished distributing everything they had, helping where they could. Most of the refugees were inside receiving their rations from the kitchen, which consisted of little more than soup and bread.
“Well, most of them won’t,” Quinlan said darkly.
“There has to be something that we can do, some way to get these children off world.”
“We barely have the money or manpower to provide them with food, we cannot get them all offworld.” Ahsoka sighed, “We’ve been trying for months to find a solution, but there doesn’t seem to be one.”
It was a horrific thought. Refugee camps were already bad enough, but there had to be at least a thousand force sensitive children within this one camp alone. If the Empire found them, these children faced a fate worse than death. Cody had heard tales of the Inquisitors, Jedi hunters raiding towns and killing any surviving jedi. He had heard of bounty hunters taking children with high M-counts, not caring if the parents survived when they came for the child. It was barbaric, and part of the reason why Cody knew that what he was doing with the Empire was wrong. He only hoped he had managed to convince Crosshair of the same thing that day in front of the memorial shrine.
“How many children are there?”
“Well, that’s part of the problem, we don’t know exactly,” Ahsoka said, “there’s too many to keep track of with there being so few of us. In total we have nine Jedi who survived the massacre here. Including myself and Rex, that makes just eleven people trying to help hundreds. No matter how much we try, people come and go thinking they may be safer elsewhere.”
Cody let out a shaky breath. “Alright, first thing’s first, we need a list of everyone here. When we know how many we are dealing with, we can make a game plan. Is there anyone else you can contact for help?”
Ahsoka shook her head, arms folded over her chest, “my allies list is limited… I could try Bail, but he’s already setting up his rebellion and I don’t think we can risk this getting tied to anything official like the Alderaan government.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Cody told her, “at least we can find out if there is anyone he knows that can help us if he can’t help himself.” He looked around again and sighed. “We have to move these children somehow.”
“Says the man who arrived yesterday,” Quinlan remarked with a bite in his words.
“I’m not saying it’s gonna be easy, I’m just saying it needs to be done.”
“A mass transit of children, without money or chain codes or places they can go,” Quinlan scoffed, “how long are you here for? A week? Be realistic, Commander, we can’t give these people false hope.”
“Look, we… we have to believe that this might be possible,” Cody insisted, staring at Quinlan, “if we have a list of the children - names, ages, etcetera - we can figure out what it will take to get them offworld. Planets like Alderaan have a ‘No Questions Asked’ refugee policy, if we can get them there, we can get them safe passage to the Outer Rim.”
“If, if, you keep saying if!” Quinlan scoffed.
“Just… let me try. Okay, just let me try.”
Quinlan looked to Ahsoka, who was stroking her chin in a way oh so similar to how Obi-Wan did.
“Cody’s got a point,” she said eventually, “we don’t know how many people need our help yet. We can’t get them help if we don’t know how many there are.”
Quinlan rolled his eyes. “Well, while you’re doing that, I’m going to go and actually help these people.” And with that, he stormed off.
Cody couldn’t even blame him.
Ahsoka couldn’t help him, there were too many supplies that still needed to be gathered for the children. On his own for the time being, Cody got to work. He didn’t have his datapad, all he had was a small notebook and a pen he carried in his jacket for when he needed to write something down, but it was good enough. One by one, Cody went around to anyone who would speak to him, starting with those in the infirmary before venturing outside to the individual pockets of shelters where people were gathering, asking for names and ages of children in the hopes of gathering the scope of the situation.
Not everyone was willing to speak to him. Some had seen him with Ahsoka and were happy to answer his questions, hope glimmering in their eyes that made Cody’s stomach churn. Others either walked away or just refused to say a word, and some unfortunately didn’t know any Basic and so couldn’t understand what he was saying. However, as the hours passed Cody was able to get many names written down. Numbered as he went, the gravity of just how big this was began to become clearer. The amount of names jotted down took up pages and pages.
It was awful.
Having been a commander, Cody got to visit the temple on Coruscant often when the 212th was planet-side. He even knew the code to Obi-Wan’s quarters. When he had a spare moment between meetings, he would be found outside in the courtyard just people watching, and watching the younglings play - happy and carefree - was one of the things he loved most. The children here were that same age. The cadets on Kamino were the same age, at least physically.
A part of Cody wondered how much else he had missed. He could blame the chip to start with, for his blind loyalty to the Empire that threw everything he knew into disarray, but then he started to question things despite his chip still being in his head. He began to question if what they were doing was right after all, if maybe the Empire was in the wrong, and yes he deserted, but had it been too late? Was the damage already done? Children were being hunted for something out of their control, for something they were born with. Cody played a part in that. Blame the chips all you like, it doesn’t change that for a year, he blindly followed orders.
The first thing he was taught by Obi-Wan was to stop blindly following orders, and yet, he forgot all about that.
With another name added to his list, Cody thanked the woman he had spoken to and stood up from his crouch. He turned away and flicked through the pages. Half the book was filled by now. He sighed; there were still more people to speak to.
Cody went to head on to the next place when he spotted Quinlan walking his way. All afternoon the shadow had followed him around the camp, either in plain sight or hidden away. Cody only knew he was there because he was once a Marshall Commander and he knew what it was like to have sneaky siblings that tried to one-up you. The jedi walked over to him, nodded to a nearby building, and then walked inside, a clear order to follow. Cody followed him.
“I have been wondering… why would you undertake such a task for people who you owe no allegiance to.” Quinlan stated.
Cody let out yet another sigh - he had been doing that a lot. “I didn’t choose to shoot on my general,” he explained, “we had chips in our brains, they forced us to comply with the order.”
“Yeah, I know. Rex told me all about them. No, what I want to know is why you are so insistent on helping us,” Quinlan folded his arms over his chest, “So, why are you doing this?”
His question caught Cody off guard. Why was he doing this? Was claiming it was the right thing to do enough justification? Had it been anyone else asking, maybe yes, but Cody knew what Quinlan Vos was like from their meetings during the war. He wasn’t so carefree now, hardened by tragedy, yet he still cared deeply for his people just as he had done years ago when they first met. No, Quinlan could see through Cody, and he was asking a question Cody wasn’t sure he had the answer to.
“Well,” he began unsurely, “... on Kamino… we were trained for one thing: to fight for the Jedi. None of us knew that we had orders in our brains that would make us turn on the very people we were raised to fight for. …When the fog cleared and I realised what I had done…” Cody’s shoulders slumped, “he was my best friend. And I gave the order that had him shot from a cliff. He fell into the water below, no one could have survived that.”
Curse the tears that began to gather. Cody turned away and angrily scrubbed them from his eyes. He took a few deep, shaky breaths. “I’ve seen what the Empire can do. I’ve helped them do it. There are children here, living in fields, in the open in-in-in the mud. The worst of winter is yet to come and under threat of Imperial invasion at any moment. If they’re found… what they’ll face is worse than any order I’ve ever had to follow. I have seen this, I… I cannot unsee it. And because I may be able to do something about it… I must. At least try.”
Something about what Cody said, something in those tumbling thoughts, seemed to be what Quinlan was looking for. He gave a sad smile, nodded, and held out his hand. Cody clasped his forearm firmly.
“We’ve got work to do.”