#ive been hoarding cc for years almost exactly for this moment.

[ssspringroll]

Okay. Challenge accepted.

If EA wont give us another spore game, i'll do it myself.

[grumpyhedgehogs]

those who are left behind (share the grief between them)

Summary: Cody goes to find Rex. Ahsoka finds him first. AO3. Part 2 of “scraps” series. Part 1. Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Warnings: Grief/mourning, canon-typical violence.

Cody tries to find Rex.

It’s the only thing he can think of after he manages to get off the Death Star--a feat in and of itself, as he knew it would be. He’d had a couple close calls; he knows he was on the list to be transferred to a teaching job for new initiates, and clones as a whole were kept under close watch. Too many of the vode had killed themselves or disappeared or went berserk and killed their commanding officers. (Cody thinks about those brothers now and wonders how crazy they really were.) He’s not sure if he was under closer observation than most post-Order 66, due to his place at Kenobi's side for years; those memories are hazy, and upsetting besides. Obviously Vader didn’t think he’d be more of a problem than anyone else now, because even with the close watch Cody’d been able to slip security and hitch a ride on a stolen emergency shuttle with little fanfare. The fiasco with the droids weeks earlier taught everyone exactly how much the Empire let slip between the cracks.

The lightsaber was tempting. It still is. But Vader keeps it in his secure chamber, hoarding it like a Krayt dragon. Cody didn’t even try.

So he gets away and goes to find Rex. Rex, who had told him about the chips. Rex, who Cody had dismissed. Rex, who was made commander and promptly had everything else taken from him with Order 66. Rex, who Cody had seen hide nor hair of during his tenure as CC-2224. Cody tries to find Rex.

Ahsoka finds him first.

He's on some backwater planet, somewhere bleak and angry looking; drab grey roads and trees with no foliage against a blood-red sky. The people here live in hovels and call themselves lucky. Cody closes his eyes as he leaves the tiny fishing market on the edge of the docks. The smell clogs his nose and makes him want to retch, but for a moment he can almost feel the weight of Obi-Wan’s hand on his shoulder. He can picture the exact curl of Obi-Wan’s mouth, the twitch of an eyebrow as he tells Cody to find the beauty in the small things. The people here are born with silver scales lining their cheekbones, their fingers webbed with thin, iridescent skin that catches the light just right and turns to millions of colors. There are children who actually play in the street here. There are no stormtroopers raiding the stalls. Happiness comes in small packages, Obi-Wan would say. Cody exhales the smell of dead fish and wraps the robe tighter around himself.

It was probably too big on Obi-Wan by the end; it fits comfortably around his shoulders, and although Obi-Wan was a little taller, he certainly wasn't wider than Cody even on the best day. He’d slimmed down during the war too; they’d had few rations going around in the hard times--it was always a task getting the general to eat when his men were going hungry. Cody nearly put him on an IV a couple times.

The robe covers what’s left of his stark white stormtrooper armor well enough. He’d stripped the leg armor off immediately, stole some fatigues from a clothesline when he’d landed on the first planet he could find and slipped those over his blacks. He’s been planet hopping for a while, chasing rumors of rebels and crossing imperial battlegrounds. They’re burial sites now. Cody doesn’t know enough about the Force to do more than read the fallen their last rights and ask them to be well as they pass on. Every place is the same; empty, except for bones. The Mando’a prayers spill from his lips easily but his voice is rusty and Cody usually settles for a silent vigil instead. There are so many dead.

After the first graveyard, Cody stripped off as much of the white paint from his vambraces as he could. It’s a shoddy job, but it’s the best he can do. Paint is a luxury he can’t afford. Cody doesn’t have a credit to his name.

He bows his head to the small woman who pushes a package filled with row after row of tiny fish into his hands and chatters at him in an unknown language. Places like this, even as untouched by the Empire as they seem, know hardship. The people here are kind. Obi-Wan would be proud to have met them. Cody tries to be proud too, but his chest is so hollow now. The robe flutters and whips against his knees as he walks away.

He’s outside town limits, thinking about a campfire and shelter, when he hears it. There’s the scrape of a boot on rock somewhere above him in the hills that line the dirt road. He should have gotten off the path into the treeline when he’d had the chance. The hood is good cover from the light rain but it gives too much of the movement of his head away; by the time Cody whirls around, there is no one behind him. He scans the trees anyway and counts how many bolts he has in his blaster. He’d taken out those troopers on Florrum weeks ago. A couple of hunting trips when he couldn’t beg or work for any food in townships. He’ll have to make the shots count.

But before he can do more than pull the blaster from his sleeve, they're upon him. There’s a sound of ignition, one that has Cody thrown years into the past, and then a flash of white. A figure in dark clothes bears down on him with a white lightsaber, and Cody doesn’t mean to react how he does, he really doesn’t, it’s not red but—

But he’s spent years as a slave to a lightsaber wielder dressed all in black and he can’t do that again, not after watching Obi-Wan fall. He can't go back to the Death Star. Cody pulls his blaster and fires a shot, dodging to the left and then feigning a stumble, hoping to get around to the attacker's other side. The other fighter, also cloaked and hooded against the rain, is spry and wiry--perhaps female--and obviously trained. One of those Knights of the Empire they were talking about training? They dodge another bolt as Cody curses and then a second ‘saber lights up and--the handles are the wrong way around.

They’re holding their lightsabers wrong. Cody nearly does trip this time, only just scrambling back from a slice that surely would have taken his head off. As he does, the figure speaks.

“Where did you get that robe?” They hiss, and prepare to strike again.

“ Ahsoka?”

“Wh-- Cody? ”

“Oh, Force,” Cody says, feeling like he did when Longshot knocked all the air out of him during a sparring session. He pushes his hood down hurriedly. Rain splashes down his forehead, rolls off the end of his nose, fills his mouth. “It is you. You’re alive!”

He’d been so afraid of being alone.

Ahsoka, older and leaner and sadder than he’s ever seen her, lowers her own hood. One ‘saber stays in her hand. Good. “Cody. You’re...you.”

“I remembered,” Cody chokes out. It’s hard not to vomit when he thinks about it for too long. “Who I was, before the Order. I remembered.”

Ahsoka’s eyes are sharp. Her mouth is a thin line. “Good men lost their lives that day. Dead men walked among us for years afterward. I--I’m sorry for your loss, Cody. It has been a long time.”

“I’m sorry too,” Cody says. It tastes like ash in his mouth, like the pyre he should’ve given Obi-Wan and never got the chance to. “The vode weren’t the only people lost that day.”

She softens, if only just. The lightsaber is hooked onto her belt under her own robe. “It really is you. Come then, I have a fire.”

They settle around her campsite, small and remote, on a perfect vantage point, before she speaks again. Cody is waiting for her when she does. He unwraps the fish, ignoring the mud splashed onto the scales from their impromptu fight, and lays them out on a flat rock in the fire. They are too small to debone individually; they’ll have better luck eating around the skeletons and hoping for the best. (“If you kill my grandpadawan via choking on a fish bone I will never forgive you,” jokes the Obi-Wan in his head and Cody suppresses a snort.)

“The robe.” Ahsoka murmurs. Her lekku twitch, in apprehension or agitation Cody isn’t sure. The pit in his gut, always there, yawns wider. She’s Obi-Wan’s family. Next of kin. He by all rights should give it to her, but… “It has Obi-Wan’s Force signature infused in it, but I recognized that yours was different. I thought…”

“I’d taken it off his body.” Cody finishes for her. Ahsoka nods, grim. He nods too and flips the fish. “You’re almost right. He didn’t leave behind a body, just his lightsaber and the robe. Vader killed him; it’s what woke me up. Chip’s stopped working, I guess. Too old.”

“I felt him when he went.” Ahsoka’s eyes are far away when Cody snatches a glance at her. She sits, back ramrod straight, unyielding, steely. He thinks Obi-Wan would have been like this in the end; untouchable, almost. He was statuesque, carved from marble, right up until the moment he died. “His light went out; that day the Force got much darker.”

“Wasn’t sure it could get darker.”

“Obi-Wan spoke once to me,” Ahsoka tells him after a long silence. She takes the food offered and nods her thanks. Cody’s heart is dead, has been since he left the Death Star, but he curls his fingers into the robe’s edges and listens anyway. He never stops hurting these days. “Through the Force, I mean. It was right after--right after. Just a fleeting thing, a feeling. He wanted to make sure I was safe, that I knew he--”

Cody doesn’t move when her words cut off. He knows. She knows.

It is like stripping off his own skin with a dull blade when Cody shrugs out of the robe and offers it up. “Here.” His voice is hoarse, tortured, not his own. “I just--you’re his family, but I can’t... please.”

Ahsoka is beautiful even when she cries. The robe looks worn, dingy in her hands, but she holds it close, like a child. She has to work hard to get the next sentence out. “You loved him.”

Cody nods. His face is wet too. “Still,” he whispers, almost inaudibly over the fire. “Still.”

“It’s yours,” Ahsoka promises. “Let me meditate with it, just once, and then--it’s yours. It’s yours.”

Ahsoka goes still; her shoulders stop hitching after a while, her cheeks dry, her breathing evens. Cody does not sleep, but he does drift. He knows she will not mind the salt water on his own face when she wakes. Obi-Wan would tell him to release his grief, perhaps that Obi-Wan is not worth it; Cody holds on almost greedily, bottles up the pain and sorrow and regret and keeps it with him, cold as ice in his chest.

He knows she comes back by the small cry that slips past her lips; she jerks in place, nearly toppling from her meditation pose. Ahsoka straightens again and clenches her hands in the robe, head bowed. “Alright?” Softly, softly. He knew her when she was just a child.

“Meditation is rougher than it used to be,” Ahsoka admits, and, reluctant, passes the fabric over in a bundle. “Thank you.”

“I miss him too.”

“What are you doing out here?”

Cody smiles without real feeling. “Following you. Or the Rebellion in general, I guess. Thought maybe I could find Rex that way.”

Ahsoka raises her eyebrows. “The Rebellion hasn’t been here for months; I’m just here checking up to make sure refugees we helped are still doing alright.”

“You guys got a head start on me.”

Her laughter is quiet, like Obi-Wan’s used to be. Cody looks away, twists his hands in the robe.

Wait.

He knows Obi-Wan won’t mind. He lost so many during the war anyway, went through them like tissue paper. It was a game among the 212th, who could find them on the battlefield first.

Cody looks up, eyes Ahsoka shrewdly. She’s taller, more muscular than she used to be. He’s no seamstress. “Scarf or sash?”

Ahsoka blinks at him. He presses his lips together and nods. “Sash. Won’t get in the way.”

The sleeve comes apart at the seams easily enough. Cody ignores her protest, and tears the other sleeve away too before pocketing one--someone else will want it, someone else who can hold vigil with Cody and Ahsoka both. Then he tears open the remaining sleeve and flattens it, before holding it out to her. “Through the belt loops,” he advises, blandly, like the tears on both their faces don’t exist. Her eyes are the size of dinner plates in her head. “Won’t get in the way when you pull your weapon.”

Ahsoka’s lips tremble when she takes the scrap of fabric. Cody doesn’t watch her loop it through her belt, taking the time to wrap the rest of the robe around his shoulders in a makeshift poncho; the hood hangs down his back still, and the ends of the robe are still long enough to cover most of his breastplate, some of the only trooper armor he has kept. There is a scratch on the shoulder from when an overconfident Jawa took a shot at him on Florrum.

Ahsoka gasps when he looks up. She gestures at his chest. “You…”

Cody splays his hand where she indicates, over the insignia he painstakingly etched into the armor covering his heart. The lightsaber was tricky to overlay on the 212th logo. It took him hours. He has a lot more time on his hands now that he’s not being controlled by the chip, though; it was worth it.

“Yes,” Cody answers. “I--I don’t want to forget again. Never again.”

Ahsoka reaches out and takes his hand over the fire that gutters low in their makeshift hearth. A thousand lives lie between them, and a thousand deaths. Her hand holds his so carefully. Cody squeezes back and feels Obi-Wan smile. “Never again,” Ahsoka vows.