#all the goblins in my brain ceased all activity until I bled out this fic

[letitrainathousandflames]

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 3.9 K

Character: CC-2224 | Cody, CC-5052 | Bly, Aayla Secura (mentioned)

Warnings: Major Character Death

Additional Tags: angst, drinking, suicide, grief, order 66 aftermath, major character death, post traumatic stress disorder - ptsd, canon divergence

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Section Nine, Paragraph Twelve of the Clone Army’s Code of Conduct:

Should a unit, hereby referred to as “Clone”, suffer malfunction and self-destruct, their superior officer, preferably their Commander, must carry out cleanup of the remains and have your medic issue the following report:

“Clone trooper [insert number identification] has suffered a sudden illness and the medical team onsite was unable to resurrect him. The Clone Trooper’s time of death was [appropriate designation of time and date of the occurrence]”

Mental malfunctions are a non-standard deviancy from the norm, as all clones are design to withstand any amount of stress. Therefore, the body of a clone deceased in such manner must be immediately removed from the scene and shipped back to Kamino for further analysis of its anomalies.

Cody wakes up at what he is certain to be three, maybe four in the morning, which means he has only two or one more hour to sleep before he has to wake up, cranky and exhausted, only to then force his equally cranky and exhausted men to get up themselves as well.

Something feels weird. A buzz in the back of his brain. General Kenobi had once mentioned that, while not all beings could wield the Force like Jedi and Sith did, it did surround every living creature, even those as unusual as clones.

He would often say, too, that the creeping shiver Cody would feel up his spine whenever they set foot in a dangerous place could very well be a manifestation of the Force itself. A warning that reached the very core of his being.

Cody finds himself in the mess hall minutes later, dressed only in his blacks and boots, too tired to care for the proper use of uniform attire even though he was the Marshall commander and should lead by example. His commlink is still in his pocket, just in case any kind of emergency pops up. It’s not like anyone would be awake at this time anyway, not after that endless campaign in Cato Nemodia from which the 2224 had finally returned.

He realizes he’s wrong when he sets foot in the mess, only to see captain Rex sitting at one of the tables with a steaming cup between his hands. Rex is as careless as Cody himself, dressed in his Blacks and boots, his cropped blond hair a couple of inches longer than the Captain would usually keep it.

“Codes.” It’s murmured at him with a nod, and Cody takes a moment to fill his own cup before sitting in front of Rex “Sleepless?”

Cody nods, taking in Rex’s features. He looks positively shitty, bags under his eyes, five ‘o’clock  shadow darkening his features and a gaze that said Rex was more sleep than awake at the moment.

Cody is pleased that he hadn’t seen a mirror in a long while, because he can’t be really sure he’s looking any better than that. Odds are that he’s looking even worse. He nods instead of answering, and Rex sighs.

“Heard you got captured. Are you alright, brother?”

A quick memory flashes through Cody’s head. The crack of a whip, screamed threats. Two of his fingers being pulled too far back until a nauseating crack came, followed by Cody’s own ragged yelling.

“Had worse.” He shrugs, downing a big gulp of too-bitter caf “General Kenobi got to me before they could quite get started.”

A troubled look passes through Rex’s expression, a slight tremor of his right cheek. Cody had seen the scars on Rex’s back in the showers, and he was honestly relieved that the men who captured him had only a bantha leather whip. Whatever those Zyguerrians had used on Rex had cut him almost all the way down to muscle tissue.

“Want me to fill in on anything for you tomorrow?” Rex offers, looking down to his cup “My general will be busy with, uh... some security detail duty for a senator so I’m mostly free.”

Cody shakes his head, drinking another sip with a grimace.

“Nah, I’m good. Life goes on, vod’ika.”

That was the last conversation he had with Rex before he got shipped away along with Commander Tano.

Before Order Sixty-Six happened.

-

Cody sits on that very same chair, looking at the empty space where Rex had been sitting on that very night one year ago. So much had changed since then. The Republic, now the Empire. The Chancellor, now his Emperor. His targets, now the men that had once been the generals leading his army.

It’s a sleepless night once more, this time due to the recurring dreams of his first – presumably dead – Jedi target. Obi-Wan Kenobi, falling from an incredible height, crashing into the waters below, disappearing in its depths…

Why does he keep thinking about it? He’s starting to look like-

Cody’s commlink rings, and he picks up the call.

“CC-2224…” he starts, trailing off once he recognizes one of his brothers’ voice; one that would often call him with questions they were never meant to ask themselves, or anyone else “Ah, it’s you.”

“Hey Cod- CC-2224.” Says CC-5052, sounding just as tired as the time demands one to be “Can you do me a favor? I won’t be able to take the men to that incursion on Dantooine.”

“I can’t keep covering for you, CC-5052. Get your act together for once. I don’t need more slacking clones now, with all this talking of phasing us out of active duty. Nothing’s stopping the brass from just kicking us all out in the street and replace us with those volunteers, and we need to show that we are still as useful as we were back in the clone wars.”

There is a pause, so long that Cody wonders if 5052 is still on the line. Then…

“Cody…” another drawn out pause “Don’t you ever think that what we did was…?“

“Silence!” Cody hisses, face tightening in anger “Kriff, 5052, how many times do I have to tell you not to talk about your- your deviant thoughts over the comms?! Just- Just hang up, get to your bunk, go to sleep…”

“I’m not at the base.” The drawl on the clone’s voice is much clearer to Cody now. he isn’t sleepy, he is drunk “I’m not coming back.”

Cody is aboard a transport headed to the location pinged from the other clone’s commlink within minutes, knowing that the missed sleeping hours are gonna be sorely missed at the meeting later that day.

He walks into the cheap hotel, places a hand on the grip of the blaster on his holster to get the flustered desk worker to let him in without a warning, climbs the creaky stairs and tests the old mechanical lock on the door, noticing it is unlocked.

He can hear the voice of a woman inside the room. His hand goes to his blaster, unfastening his holster. He slowly pushes the door open as its hinges whine in protest, and then he realizes that the voice isn’t clear enough to be a person’s. It is a recording.

“fifty-two?” he calls out, stepping in the room “Don’t waste my time, I have a meeting in three hours and I should be asleep.”

His eyes quickly assess the small room, his gaze being drawn to the small holoprojector placed on top of the desk in front of the opposite wall where an armored clone sits. The desk is pretty much covered in over a dozen bottles of different cheap alcoholic drinks, some of them tipped on their side, almost all of them either empty or half-empty. The shards of a bottle that must have rolled over are littered by the left side of the desk.

The old blinds are drawn on the window at the end of the room, shrouding the place in darkness. The only sources of light are the semitransparent blue hue of the holoprojection, and the rectangles of light cutting into the room through the broken horizontal blinds.

Cody walks further in, now recognizing the woman in the recording, a tall, blue-skinned twi’lek dressed in a brown headpiece, pants, a short top, and an open cloak. The recording seems to have been made with the camera of a trooper’s helmet, judging for the medium quality of the projection.

Cody knows the woman. She had been a Jedi General during the Clone Wars, and became a traitor to the empire near its very end. Her assigned clone battalion as successfully carried out her elimination in Felucia exactly one year ago.

“Alright, so we have Korin, Mar’eti or T’aleh. Which one do you like best?”

The twi’lek is grinning at the person filming her, and a clone’s laugh comes in response.

“Any name you pick will be good.”

The Twi’lek laughs at that, shaking her head and reaching her hands towards the camera. The image shakes, and the camera is moved until it is placed at their bodies’ height, most likely a crate, given the background that seems to be the weapons’ depot of a Venator-class Star Destroyer.

“Are you sure you’re okay, love?”

The clone, now helmetless and in view of the camera smiles brightly. His cheeks have yellow-colored tattoos and his hair is shaven close to his scalp.

“I’m still getting used to the thought that I’m going to be a father. It’s… it’s incredible.”

The twi’lek laughs again, this time nervously, her hands dropping to her stomach.

“I don’t know what we are going to do.” Her smile falters, vanishes “How are we going to raise a child in this war?”

The trooper gently cups her face in his hands, pressing a delicate kiss to her lips.

“Don’t worry about that. The war will be over before our kid arrives. We’re closing in on the Seppies, this whole mess is almost over, and our baby will grow up in a peaceful galaxy.”

There is a small beat of silence, and the twi’lek raises her arms to hug the clone, huffing out a long sigh.

“I won’t abandon my duty as a Jedi. I can’t. Even after the war is over, I will still be a Jedi. You understand that, don’t you, Bly?”

The clone pulls back just about enough to look down at the Twi’lek’s face and nod.

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“I might be called to aid others all the way across the galaxy, and I can’t refuse.”

“We will follow you wherever you go. Me and our ad’ika. We’ll make this work. Haven’t we made this work so far?”

“Commander?” another clone’s voice pipes up from afar, and the clone hastily grabs his helmet, placing it back on his head and cutting off the recording

“Just a moment, trooper!”

The recording stops there, and a different one starts. The background is different this time – colorful trees and leaves all around the Commander’s vision of the same commander.

“I have a bad feeling about this.” The Twi’lek says, looking around warily

Hundreds of clones seem to be lining in formations, preparing to an attack. AT-STs are being prepped and yelled orders fly through the air.

“We’ll be fine.” The Commander says, placing a gloved hand on the Jedi’s shoulder, his voice then dropping to a whisper that crackles on its way out of his vocoder “Aayla. Cyare. Please let me lead this time—”

“No.” the answer is firm, the Jedi’s eyes sharp and her posture commanding “I will lead.” Her voice then drops to the same whisper, barely audible among all the noise muddling the recording “There is no one else I’d trust to have my back, Bly. I know you’ll always keep me safe.”

“All set here, General!” An ARC Trooper yells somewhere from behind them

The Jedi places a hand on the Commander’s chest, smiling softly.

“May the force be with you.” before he can reply, she is turning around to march ahead “Alright, troopers, follow my lead!”

The commander sighs heavily.

The recording stops once more. A new recording starts, at a clearing of the same colorful woods, the commander and his men slowly trailing behind their general.

“It’s so quiet.” Bly mutters “Where have they run off to?”

Their general stops, gesturing at her men to do the same.

“Be careful. There’s something wrong here. I can feel it.”

A commlink rings, and the commander presses the blinking button on his gauntlet. A voice, raspy and all too familiar to Cody pours from the speakers over the ears of the Commander in his helmet.

“Execute Order Sixty-six.”

With trained muscle memory, the Commander raised his DC-15 rifle, the gesture echoed by the other six troopers of their assault squad as they moved in sync to form a semicircle behind the Jedi General.

“Good soldiers follow orders” he whispers almost too quietly for the recording to pick up

A large flying alien creature cawed from somewhere behind them as it crossed the gold-tinted skies, and the Jedi turned around with a startle, he eyes going wide at the sight of her men and the aim of their weapons on her.

The general attempts to raise her lightsaber despite the horrified shock taking over her features.

She doesn’t have enough time to power on the weapon on before something bright and blue flashes out of her own clone commander’s rifle, whistling through the air to strike her right between her shoulder blades at her heart’s height.

Her body is jerked forwards, her arms flying up as the second bolt hits her on the ribcage, the lightsaber slipping off her grip as a pained scream is punched out of her.

Two more bolts strike her on the back and shoulder, and Bly fires another just as she stumbles forward, her protective shirt smoldering brightly over her back as the fourth bolt hits her there.

She falls down on her chest, one hand shakily and uselessly trying to reach for her lightsaber, and the men keep firing over and over, blaster shots hitting her middle. Her arms. Her legs. Her lekku, which slowly cease all movement. They keep firing until the only movement from the fallen Jedi are the occasional twitches caused by the electricity charges from the blaster bolts.

“T-Target eliminated” the Commander says with an almost unnoticeable stutter “All of you, let’s rendezvous at the alpha location, we must assist the other troops. We can’t stop until every jedi is dead and accounted for.”

Nodding, the men turn away, leaving the ground of their massacre behind. The commander lingers for a moment, his breath catching and coming out in a stuttered, heavy exhale.

Then he leaves.

The recording loops back to the first video, where Aayla Secura is trying to get Commander Bly to choose a name for their unborn child. Cody walks closer to the desk, his gaze now looking past the blue light of the projecting and further to the man sitting at the desk.

CC-5052, known as “Bly” during the Clone Wars, watches Cody with weary eyes, the semitransparent projection floating between them from the small device placed on the table between several empty bottles of various alcoholic drinks. Cody stops in front of it, removing his helmet and placing it by a cluster of purple-tinted bottles. He, too, is fully dressed in his kit except for his gloves and helmet.

Bly’s elbow is resting on the arm of the chair, his hand supporting his chin, while his other hand rests on his lap somewhere out of Cody’s view. He gives him a drunken smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, which are reddened and swollen.

His eyelashes are wet and there are dried trails of tears down his tattooed cheeks.

“Hey there, Codes.”

 “You need to come back to base.” Cody oders dryly.

“Told you I’m not coming back. I can’t.”

The recording has reached the moment where the troops are about to move out, and Cody ignores the audio overlapping over CC-5052’s words, pretending he cannot hear the trembling that underlines his own voice.

“You are a Commando clone, CC-5052, same as myself.” Cody says the words he had been told since his infancy back at the sterile white walls of the Kaminoan laboratories in Tipoca City “We can endure anything, and we do not deviate from our duty.”

He swallows down thickly, the sound of the blaster that had killed Aayla Secura along with the life growing inside of her echoing through the speakers of the projector on top of the table.

He had heard Bly’s confession of his anguish over having killed her during the issuing of order sixty-six multiple times. He had always told Bly to keep those thoughts to himself, and to never let their superiors hear these treacherous words.

But only today he truly understands the whole picture. There was more to his relationship with the deceased Jedi than that of a duty-bound trooper and their general.

Still…

“We will not have this conversation again – the Jedi were traitors” Cody presses on “and a threat to everything we fought for. They had to die.”

Good soldiers follow orders, whispers the Bly in the recording.

“I loved her.” Says the CC-5052 in front of him, and under the faint blue glow of the projection, Cody sees the glistening of the tears brimming in his eyes, trailing down his cheeks “I- I loved her, and we were gonna-- She was—”

An ugly, anguished sound comes through CC-5052’s - Bly's - gritted teeth, and suddenly the stoic mask of numb exhaustion drops, being replaced by an expression that is so twisted in agony, it reminds Cody of those he had seen in the battlefield on the faces of men whose limbs had been torn off by landmines and no amount of anesthesia could put an end to their pain.

Bly sobs, bringing to his eyes a hand that rattles against his brow with how hard it shakes. The pained noises being punched out of the clone between every sharp intake of air begin to die out as his breathing becomes more and more ragged.

A stuttered breath hisses out of him as he drops his hand, and he raises his swollen eyes to Cody again.

“I c-can’t do this anymore.”

Cody stares at him, at the hollow eyes and broken expression in that face that is a mirror of his own, and the two sentences that keep haunting his dreams.

Thank you Cody.

Blast him!

“You have to.” Cody says, the commanding tone slipping from his voice and giving place to a plea instead “You need to.”

Because a clone commander can withstand any kind of stress.

Even the horror of carrying out orders that changed the entire galaxy and the structure of their army and robbed them of the generals that would actually put themselves in the line of fire to protect them, even though they were nothing but expendable clones.

“I have nothing left, Cody. Nothing.” it’s like the words are being pulled out of Bly like shrapnel, fresh wounds being opened with every tug “I’ve served my purpose…”

The hand he’d kept resting over his lap, out of view from Cody’s gaze because of the desk between them is raised into view, along with a blaster in its grip.

“…and I hope you can find yours, brother.”

Slowly and without a hint of hesitation, Bly brings the muzzle of the weapon to the underside of his chin. Cody’s eyes widen, icy dread pooling in his core and sending a shiver up his spine, his entire body stiffening in tension as he understands what is about to happen.

“Bly— Hey, listen to me!” he tries to think through the distinct click of the blaster being cocked; he has to stop this, has to do something, anything “Bly, put the blaster down, now--”

“Never gone, only marching away…” Bly whispers with the faintest hint of a smile

“DON’T--”

The sharp whistle of blaster fire echoes in the room as a flash of bright blue illuminates the scene for an instant, Cody’s unprotected ears ringing loudly over the thudding of his own spiking pulse.

Bly’s head whips back with the blaster’s shock, a smoldering, perfect circle letting out smoke on the wound under his chin. His hand drops, the weapon slipping from his fingers and clattering to the floor with a dull thud.

Cody stands there, breath shallow and cut off by small gasps as he tries to fight the instinct to just turn around and run away from this nightmare. His stomach clenches in nausea, and he covers his mouth with his hand.

He stares at the lifeless body of a brother with whom he had shared many battles and down times with, a man he had trusted with his life and who trusted Cody with his. A man who had been birthed from a tube like him, had blasters instead of toys since he was five like him, scientists instead of a family like him.

A good soldier who had followed every order. And that had killed him.

Cody doesn’t know how long he stands there, petrified, the recording of General Aayla Secura’s short-lived dream of having a child with the man she loved looping so many times that Cody could recite it from memory, and then looping enough for Bly’s words to dissolve into a cadence of joy, tension, and resignation, joy, tension and resignation, joy, tension and—

Cody walks carefully around the desk, standing close by Bly’s side. He is supposed to report the self-termination immediately and wait for the Kaminoan staff in Coruscant to retrieve the body. He is not supposed to interfere in any way.

Bly’s eyes stare vacantly into nothing, brown and formerly full of life, shaped exactly like Cody’s. After a small moment of hesitation Cody reaches up to close them, his gloved hand lingering for an instant on Bly’s face.

He had failed him. He had failed his brother.

He thinks of Rex, whose helmet was the only one not found in the mass grave of former 501st clones in a distant moon. Could he be out there, still alive? His own words to Crosshair in front of the memorial of the clone troopers who had died in service of the Republic - and later the Empire - come back to him.

Do you know what makes us different from battle droids? We make our own decisions. Our own choices. And we have to live with them too.

Cody moves his hand to rest over Bly’s chest, on the stillness of his heart.

“Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum, Bly, ner’vod.”

He straightens himself up, finally stopping the recording and removing the memory chip from the device, placing it in one of his belt pouches. Someone should keep Bly’s story and keep it from being forgotten.

Swallowing thickly around the lump forming in his throat, Cody picks his helmet up from the desk, placing it over his face with its expressionless mask of carved white and turning his back on the scene.

The armor would help him up until some point, and then he would do well to change out of it. The outline of a plan begins to take form in his mind. Safe locations, away from the Empire’s ever-watchful gaze. Old friends that might show mercy on him in spite of what he had become.

A hope, faint and delirious, that his former general might still be alive and willing to forgive him for what he had done.

Bly was right. Cody had to find his purpose. And he had to start now.