Archive of Our Own

All the doors in the town they're posted up in are being locked.

Cody notices it as he’s passing through, headed from a meeting with the admirals to a meeting with his captains, and pauses. The town hasn’t exactly been lively the last few days, given the bombs the Seps keep dropping, but right now it’s practically deserted. All the businesses he can see are shuttered, windows closed tight, security doors dragged down and locked. The only people in the street are a young woman and her son, and they’re hurrying fast enough that for a moment Cody thinks he might have missed an alert about hyena bombers. But the air is silent; none of the defenses have activated. There's just the woman, practically running as she hurries her kid along, basket of food clutched close to her side.

They duck into one of the houses off the main street, and as the door thumps shut behind them, Cody can hear the beep and thump of it locking tight.

“Cody?” Rex asks, and when Cody drags his gaze back from the house, Rex has stopped, is watching him with concern. “Something wrong?”

“No,” Cody says slowly. “I don’t think so.”

His first instinct is to suspect an attack, a traitor among the townspeople. But—they have plenty of ins with the locals, the vast majority of whom are loyal to the Republic, and someone would have alerted them if this was some kind of conspiracy. The headwoman at the very least is eyeing a run for senator of this sector, from what General Kenobi has said, and she wouldn’t sink her chances on the Seps’ word. But her house is locked down just as tight as the rest, shutters closed and all the lights off despite the fact that it’s not even dusk yet.

“Not exactly convincing there,” Rex says, light like it’s a joke, but he turns, sweeps a look over the town as well. Cody can see the exact moment he notices what Cody did, even with the helmet in the way; he goes tense, just a little, and shifts his hands a bit closer to the grips of his blasters.

“Got quiet all of a sudden,” he observes warily.

Cody takes a few steps to catch up with him, and—he can't even feel eyes on them. It would almost be better if he did, in a way, but right now it seems like everyone here has entirely gone to ground.

“Give the scouts a heads-up,” he says after a moment, because even if it isn't an attack, a betrayal, there's no harm in being cautious. “And make sure the techs are watching for any incoming.”

Rex huffs. “I'm not your lieutenant anymore,” he says pointedly, even as he taps his comm. “And you're the one with the fancy comms array.”

Cody knows him, and he bats away the flick of those annoying fingers before they can hit the antenna on his armor. “Go polish your bucket, Captain,” he says without any heat. “Even if you're not my lieutenant, you're still just a grunt. Make commander and then we can talk.”

“Then you'll just hold being a Marshal Commander over my head,” Rex complains, and hisses when Cody elbows him. “Kriff, eat more. You're too pointy.”

“That Nautolan back on our last deployment didn’t have any complaints.” Cody scans the darkening sky, not able to fight a frown. The clouds are thin and wispy, scattered across the horizon and just starting to take on the colors of sunset, though Cody can't see if any of the planet’s nine moons have risen yet.

This town hasn’t exactly had a nightlife, during their time here, but there are at least usually farmers still in the street, families returning home. Even a handful of citizen patrols, usually; this planet is right on the edge of Mandalorian space, and Cody's seen plenty of people who probably call themselves Mandalorian more readily than they call themselves Republic citizens, though he hasn’t pressed. They’ve taken on a lot of the town’s security, and given that they know the surrounding are the best, they’ve been running scouting missions with the 501^st and 212^th. Not a single one is in evidence right now, though, even though a Ghost patrol should be going out soon.

Unease hooking its claws into him, Cody taps his comm. “Lieutenant,” he says curtly. “Any locals going out with Bravo Squad?”

Waxer answers immediately. “No, sir. The head of the Protectors said it was a cultural matter. No one goes out after dark this week. They do this every few months, apparently.”

Cultural. Cody weighs that, and—it still doesn’t sit quite right. He hasn’t really seen any other signs of religion or the like outside of personal shrines or decorations, every bit as mixed as the species here. As far as he’s aware, no one said anything to General Kenobi, either.

“Who’s taking Bravo out?” he asks after a moment.

There's a pause, and then Waxer says, “Trapper, sir.”

Trapper is an excellent soldier and an even better scout. He’s on Cody's shortlist for the next round of ARC training, assuming they have enough men for Cody to ship off some of his best to be tortured by Alpha-17 for a few weeks. But even so, Cody can't help a flicker of disquiet, sharp in his belly.

There's every chance this is exactly what it looks like, some kind of cultural or religious practice that’s taken root, that everyone here treats exceptionally seriously. But it’s just…strange. Cody doesn’t like it much, that’s all.

“Have Trapper oversee the camp defenses instead,” he says. “I’ll take Bravo out.”

Rex shoots him a startled look, but Cody ignores it. He’s generally not one to micromanage; all of his officers were promoted for a reason, and they know how to keep things running smoothly even in the worst circumstances. Reassigning a squad leader to take over the duty himself isn't anything Cody would normally do, but—

Well. That bad feeling might not be a Jedi's type of bad feeling, but it’s still damned hard to ignore right now.

There's another pause, longer, and then Waxer says, “Yes, sir. Should I have him leave his light in the command tent?”

Cody blinks. “Light? They've been supplementing helmet lights?”

“They're planning to tonight,” Waxer answers. “All the moons are dark this week. That’s why everyone’s inside.”

With nine moons, the odds of the cycles aligning has to be uncommon enough that Cody can see it becoming some kind of ritual. But…this doesn’t feel like a celebration. This feels like fear, suffusing the town, choking it in a way even a month of hyena bombers hasn’t managed.

Cody closes his eyes, chooses deliberately not to curse, and orders, “The command tent is fine. I’ll be there to brief the captains, and then I’ll take Bravo out. You're riding herd on the generals tonight, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Waxer sounds tolerantly amused, which is the main reason Cody sticks him with the job. Boil tends to get prickly and huffy, but Waxer’s hard to rattle no matter what Kenobi and Skywalker do. “They mentioned something about teaching Commander Tano sabacc.”

Well. That probably won't end prettily, knowing how ruthless Kenobi is about winning and how much Skywalker sulks when he loses. Cody snorts, tells Waxer, “Luck, vod,” and ends the transmission there.

As he starts moving again, nudging Rex along with him, he spares one more glance for the darkening horizon. He hadn’t precisely noticed the lack of moons before, but now that he knows they won't be rising at all tonight, Cody can almost feel their absence like a series of dark holes torn into the sky.

It’s fine. It’s just a scouting mission. Cody's run a million of them over the course of the war, and this one isn't going to be any different.

There's something that seems strange about the forest tonight.

Cody's trekked through this area in every direction, practically every day since they first landed. He’s seen it by helmet lights, in the rain, in the fog, in the middle of hailstorms and high wind. It stopped being novel sometime around the end of the first week, and Cody's more or less factored it in as a backdrop at this point. Is aware of it, certainly, because droids leave clear signs when they pass through and Cody's learned every last one at this point in his service, but—it’s never quite mattered, how the wood looks.

Tonight, though, complete darkness turns the corkscrew boughs and long, thin fingers of the branches into a low-level, background threat in a way that has Cody's nerves on edge. He’s not alone in feeling twitchy, either; Bravo, one of the most battle-hardened squads in the 212^th, is moving in tight formation, blasters at the ready and comms quiet except for the stray observation or joke, far less common than normal.

Cody can hear five bodies breathing around him, the forest is so quiet, and at this point he’d almost rather the damned droids jumped them and got it over with.

“Kriff,” Jester mutters, a bare pace behind Cody. Over comms, not over helmet speakers, which would at least break the hush, but—Cody can understand the impulse not to let the forest hear them. “We can't even get some wind, huh? Making us sound like a herd of banthas out here.”

Despite himself, Cody snorts. “Thought that was just Gus,” he says, droll, and Gus makes a sound of quiet offense.

“I'm graceful. You just don’t pay attention when I'm not tripping over my boots, sir,” he says in protest, though it’s halfhearted.

“But every time I pay attention, you are tripping,” Cody counters, then pauses as movement catches his eye. He raises a fist, and the squad instantly goes still and silent, waiting frozen in their tracks.

But the sway of shadows on a trunk ahead of them is just the movement of the lights clipped to their armor, and Cody makes himself breathe out, ease back.

“Heard the locals call it hunting weather,” Jester says, quiet, as Cody waves them all on again. “Or something like that. Ailyn said you couldn’t pay her enough to go out into the woods without the moonlight.”

The head of the town’s Protectors, Cody thinks, a little startled. He’s talked with her plenty, and she’s old, battle-hardened, defiantly Mandalorian, and one of the least twitchy civilians he’s ever met. If she’s that unwilling to take a risk out here, it says a heck of a lot.

He glances back the way they came, tightening his grip on his blaster, and weighs the benefits of heading for camp with their patrol only halfway done. They're right in the densest part of the forest, near where a web of narrow streams carve up the ground between the trees and make the footing treacherous, and beyond that area there's only the valley below, so thickly choked with trees that General Kenobi deemed it not worth the risk of trying to clear with the regular patrols. Any squad that ventures there has a Jedi with them, or they don’t go at all.

Everything’s been quiet so far, and there haven't been any signs of droids down here in days. Turning around now is probably safe enough, especially with Crys and his team on the monitors tonight. But—

It just feels off, Cody thinks, uneasy. Something about the forest, the darkness, the silence—it’s not right, but he can't tell why it strikes him so oddly. If there's an attack coming, he can't see any sign of it. And yet…

“Sir?” Jester asks, almost soundless, and Cody breathes out, long and slow, and tips his head.

“Let’s check the mouth of the valley and then we’ll turn around early,” he says. “All this quiet’s giving me a headache.”

From his left, Chopper snorts quietly, though he follows without hesitation when Cody starts forward again. “After so much time around Captain Rex's squad, I'm not surprised,” he says.

Cody huffs, not able to contain his smile. “There’s a reason he got booted out of Ghost,” he lies. If he’d had his choice, Rex would still be his lieutenant, the leader of the ARCs attached to Ghost, but Skywalker had poached him the moment he got assigned to lead the 501^st. Privately, Cody thinks it’s less about Rex's skills, no matter how excellent those are, and more the fact that Rex took a tumble out of a gunship on Geonosis with Senator Amidala, and protected her until they could be rescued. It’s not Cody's favorite reason to have his lieutenant stolen, but—

Well. Skywalker's young, for all the Cody is physically half his age. He makes a lot of decisions that a more seasoned general wouldn’t, but he’s got Kenobi to help him. Usually.

Cody thinks of Tano, sent out with a clone fighter squad to try and break a blockade, her rage and grief and growing recklessness as her men were killed all around her, until only she and a few other pilots were left. Remembers Davijaan’s grief in the aftermath, with so many pilots he knew dead for absolutely nothing gained, and breathes in, out, in again. Every CO makes mistakes. He knows that. There's not enough time in this war for every single oversight to be addressed, even when it costs lives.

Clone lives, always. It’s the clones who are fighting, and it’s the clones who are the collateral.

Cody stuffs that seed of anger and frustration down, makes himself keep moving. The trees get thicker ahead of them, and the branches droop lower, hung with long streamers of lichen that gleams silver with the night’s dew. It causes sparks of reflection in the helmet visors, unpleasant when Cody's already twitchy enough, and he shifts the light on his belt a little lower so it won't catch quite so much on the drops, on the increasing number of thin streams that tangle around the gnarled roots. The hush seems to get heavier as they slip between the trunks, until thick carpets of moss and fallen leaves swallow their footsteps, and Cody almost wishes that Grievous had decided to set his sights on one of the city-cloaked planets one system over instead of this place. As little as he likes urban warfare, it’s at least better than this.

“This bad already and it’s not even raining,” Chopper mutters, and Cody huffs, more to break the silence than because he finds it funny. The last thing they need is rain on top of everything else.

“Where did all the damned deer go?” Punch asks, low. “We were practically tripping over them last time.”

Cody pauses, but—Punch is right. The deer are the main form of local wildlife they’ve encountered, and usually thick on the ground. The locals keep them well-fed, so they're docile, friendly, not even slightly scared of people. Last time Cody was on a patrol, they were practically shoving their way through the press of antlers and sleek bodies, getting velvet noses jammed into the cracks in their armor as the deer looked with increasing frustration for pockets full of treats.

There are absolutely none in evidence now, though. Like the birds, like even the insect life that usually fills the wetlands nearby, the deer have vanished.

“Maybe they headed down into the valley,” Cody says after a moment. “A night this dark probably brings out a lot of predators.”

There haven't been a many predators in general around, even though this planet is still mostly wild. But then, the Seps have been bombing anything that moves, so that’s not overly surprising, Cody supposes. A fair number of townspeople or settlers in the surrounding areas already retreated deeper into the mountains, apparently to old Mandalorian safehouses Cody has heard rumors about but which no local will confirm. Maybe all the local predators did the same.

“Spook Squad made it back to base,” Jester reports quietly, and Cody nods his thanks, keeps moving carefully across tangled roots and narrow streams of water. Everything here smells of wet wood and moss and green, even with the helmet filters, and as they make their way down through the tightening trees, he can’t help but scan the darkness more intently. There's no particular sense of eyes on them, the way there might be if a droid squad was following their position from the hill and about to blow them away, but—

But it feels like the forest itself is watching, and that’s a thousand times more unsettling.

“Bet the sergeant’s kicked back in a cozy spot somewhere in the command tent right about now,” Chopper mutters. “What’d he blackmail you with to get you to cover for him, Commander?”

Cody's kind of wondering that too at this point. “My own stupidity,” he says, dry, and tips his light just a little higher. The mouth of the valley looks like a barricade of trees in the dark, their branches so thoroughly tangled they might as well be a fortress wall, with only a few narrow gaps a Human could squeeze through—

The beam flashes on a wall of red-gold eye-shine between the trees, staring right at them, and Cody freezes. There's a long, long second of motionless glow, and then a blink, the dip of an antlered head. Like it was a signal, the rest of the deer turn away and ignore them, and Cody breathes out long and slow, sternly tells his heartbeat to slow the heck back down.

“Kriff,” Gus says with feeling. “Guess you were right about the deer.”

“I'm always right,” Cody says, though it’s automatic more than anything as he studies the edge of the slope with a frown. The deer are in the valley, but…they're not moving. Not coming out to look for treats, even with people standing right here. Like they're scared, maybe.

There's something on the wind, too. Over the loamy smell of moss, the damp earth, the sharpness of green leaves in the cold air, Cody catches a trace of something metallic and heavy and familiar. Blood, and it’s coming from the valley.

Cody hesitates for a bare second. Getting back to the camp quickly feels just as important as before, but they still need to check the rest of the area, even if they’re bailing early. That blood-smell is a little alarming, but—it’s likely just one of the deer, hurt and being guarded by the rest of the herd. The local vet tends to them when they're injured, usually, and if Cody can look around, see how many are hurt, she’ll know how many supplies to bring out this way in the morning.

“I’m going to check the slope,” he says. “Jester, take over. Walk the top of the valley and then meet me back here. Twenty minutes.”

Jester slants him a look, but he doesn’t argue the way Rex might once have done. “Commander,” he confirms, and waves the rest of the squad forward. They slip away among the trunks, and Cody watches until the bob of their lights is swallowed by the forest. Then, determinedly, he turns back towards the mouth of the valley and picks his way towards the closest gap in the trunks. It’s narrow enough that Rex with all his fancy plumage couldn’t fit through, but Cody turns sideways, ducks a little so his antenna won't catch, and slides right through—

The light catches on metal, on armor, and Cody jerks back with his blaster already up and braced, even as dark-dazed eyes flicker up to him and hold.

“Mandalorian,” the man in blood-stained blue and silver armor says like it’s a prayer, sprawled among the tangled roots and half-lying in a slow stream. The water around him is pooling pink against the white stones, and he has one hand pressed tight to a slash carved across his stomach, like someone recently tried to cut him in half.

“Heck,” Cody says with feeling, and shoulders his blaster, immediately going to one knee. He taps his comm and orders, “Bender, gather a squad, I need a medic at the top of the valley right now.”

No response. Not even a crackle of static over the line.

Cody pulls back, startled, and checks his comm. Jester just got a message from camp, and Cody hasn’t had any trouble with comms before this, not at any moment since they landed. Bender should be able to hear him. There's no reason he shouldn’t.

Should doesn’t change the reality, though, and with a huff Cody drags his emergency medical supplies out of one of his pouches instead. “Can't reach our medic,” he says to the man. “My squad should be back any moment, though, and we’ll get you to camp. What happened? Was it Seps?”

“Dooku,” the man says, breathless, and Cody feels a wash of ice run through his veins. Grievous is a known presence on this planet, but they haven't had any word at all about Dooku. Grimly, he tries his comm again, directly to Kenobi this time, and gets the same perfect silence as before. Tries to raise Jester, even as he strips the backing off the only bacta patches he has, but there's no answer there, either.

None of the armor’s sensors are marking any kind of scrambling tech, though, or any jamming signal Cody's ever encountered, and he hesitates with a hand near his comm, just for an instant, because something is weird—

A broad, long-fingered hand closes around his wrist, pulls, and there's enough strength to it that Cody is wrenched forward, almost on top of the man. He hisses, tries to catch himself in a way that won't do any more damage, but he’s off balance, falls right over the stranger with one hand in the stream, and when he goes to jerk away, there's no give at all in that iron grip.

Something washes cold and heavy down Cody's spine, like hearing the click of a landmine from right beneath his foot, and he looks down into grey eyes, open and staring right up at him. The man looks like a Korun, with warm dark skin and his greying curls cropped tight, but his eyes—they're gunmetal grey and almost seem to glow in the light Cody is casting.

“Mandalorian,” the man says again, breathless but stronger than before, and he reaches up with his free hand. Cody sees the motion coming, grabs that hand before it can hook his helmet and pull it off.

“Not exactly,” he says, and that cold prickle down his spine is getting harder to ignore as the man stares at him like he’s committing Cody's features to memory. Or, maybe, like he’s looking right through him, seeing something that he shouldn’t.

The man breathes out, long and slow, though his gaze doesn’t waver. “Armor and creed,” he says. “Language and learning. You have all of them.”

Cody pauses, some unsettled feeling that shares its shape with anger turning over in his chest. “Maybe,” he says after a moment, and—he shouldn’t be arguing with a dying man, about this especially. It doesn’t matter. “But we never got the choice to take those things. We passed training or we died.”

Decomissioned is such a pretty word, Cody thinks sometimes, but—he saw it, before the Jedi came, before the order was delivered and then the Kaminoans could relax their standards. A clone on a bed, strapped down because they fought or drugged if they didn’t. A needle in their veins, just a brief little shot, and then all the fighting in the universe didn’t matter anymore.

Clones are always the collateral. For mistakes in the cloning process, mistakes on the battlefield, mistakes in logistics, supplies, intelligence, tactics. All the worlds in the Republic, and ninety-nine precent of all the dead are always going to be clones, for as long as this war lasts. And even so, despite all the deaths Cody has seen, they can't walk through most towns anywhere in the Republic without at least one person ready to spit on them.

The man under him makes a wheezing, ragged sound, and it takes Cody a long, alarmed second to realize that he’s laughing. Hs fingers dig into Cody's wrist, and he pulls himself up out of the red-stained water, just a little.

“You think that’s ever mattered to a Mandalorian?” he asks, and Cody glances down, away from those unnerving grey eyes—

Freezes, a bolt of ice running down his spine, as whole flesh meets his gaze. That terrible blow, that bisecting cut across the man’s whole torso—it’s entirely gone. As Cody watches, even the kute is mending, the armor stitching itself back together like flesh knitting up in fast-forward.

“What the heck,” Cody breathes, and the man pulls his hand out of Cody's grip, reaches down.

His fingers close over the light at Cody's belt, and it winks out like it was swallowed by ink.

“None of that in here,” the man says, and all Cody can see in the perfect, unbroken darkness is the faintest gleam of grey eyes. “It’s not the time for that.”

“Who are you?” Cody asks, trying to keep his voice even when his pulse is racing in his throat. “What do you want—hey!”

His helmet goes clattering to the side, and cold fingers cup his cheek. A thumb slides over his brow, and Cody jerks, but he can't move the man’s grip. “It’s funny,” the man says, and he sounds more coherent than he has at any point before, as if he and Cody were just having this conversation in the middle of the street. “Dooku was just trying to use Jango, trying to take advantage of his hatred. He thought Jango was a fallen Mandalorian. But he didn’t realize that Jango was conquering the whole Republic under his nose.”

Cody swallows. “Jango didn’t conquer anything except creative ways to get himself killed,” he says, and it’s a little harsher than he intends to be, harsher than he usually lets himself be. It’s not safe to be harsh, combative, even for a marshal commander. Maybe especially for a marshal commander, always under the eye of the admirals. Keep it quiet, keep it subtle, focus on the war, on duty, on his men, on the GAR. That’s all that matters. That will keep him alive. The Jedi can't save them, and the Republic won't save them. They're the only ones who can protect each other, and Cody refuses to let this war kill him. Not when he’s finally seen what’s beyond Kamino’s sterile walls.

Jango's the one who put them in this situation. They wouldn’t exist without Jango Fett taking the cloning contract, and Boba can declare Jango his father all he wants, but Cody knows the truth of it. They're all just tools. Tools of legacy, tools for earning credits—

“But he raised warriors,” the man says, soft. “More warriors than any Mandalorian in our whole history. And you're warriors taking whole planets without a struggle. No army of Mandalorians has done that since the Crusades.”

Cody's throat feels like there’s a stone caught in it, all sharp edges and punishing weight. “He didn’t raise us,” he says, a warning. “No part of Jango was ever going to make father of the year.” He jerks at the hold on his arm, but there’s no give in that grip at all.

A snort, and a shift. Cody yelps as he’s toppled back, pinned up against the crooked trunk of a knotted tree, his arm pinned between them, a body against his chest.

Somewhere in the darkness, he can hear armor creaking, bodies moving, hoofbeats. Larger creatures than deer, far larger, and footsteps, and the clink of weapons moving as a huge number of bodies approach.

“Like taking a planet,” the man says, and he touches Cody's cheek again, slides his fingers down over Cody's throat, his collarbone. Splays a hand right over his chest, pressing down, and Cody jerks as something sparks, as a crackle like electricity crawls across his flesh. He surges up, tries to throw the man off with a snarl, but he might as well be trying to move a mountain barehanded for all the effect it has.

“We’re not Mandalorian. He didn’t make us Mandalorian,” he snaps. “Get off me!”

“He gave you all the pieces,” the man counters. “He was the Mand'alor. Creating you was like calling up an army from conquered worlds. You’re Mandalorian because you were ordered to be or forfeit your lives, and you chose not to lie down and die. Now you're the Mand'alor’s army.” He shifts, and the faint glow of those grey eyes flickers away, back up towards the approaching sounds. “If you don’t want to be Mandalorian,” he says, “put down your weapons and stop fighting. That’s all you have to do.”

A chill runs through Cody, and he says, sharp, “We can't—”

“There's always a choice. You're choosing not to.” A pause, and then the man leans in again, fingers finding Cody's chin. He tilts Cody's head up, and whatever he can see on Cody's face makes him snort. “Jango was a stubborn bastard, but I think you're even more pigheaded than him.”

Cody contemplates biting. It’s an impulse he’s not unfamiliar with, even if he usually tries to pretend he has more dignity than Fox, who made biting a habit all through training. “Let me go,” he orders.

 The fingers on his chin slide away, and there's a creak of metal and leather, a pull. “You would make an incredible huntsman,” the man says, low, as he drags Cody right up to his feet. “I almost want to take you now, but it’s only the first night.”

Fear feels like a fist around Cody's lungs. “What the heck does that mean?” he demands, and it takes all of his control not to step back. there's only darkness behind him, though, and stepping into a hole, falling backwards—it’s too great a risk.

He can't see it, but he can almost feel the stranger’s smile. “It means we’re hunting,” he says. “Dooku's been running from us for years, but he’s out of time. The moons here are dark for the next week, and he can't avoid us any longer.” Another touch, dragged down the center of Cody's chest, and Cody jerks back, startled, because it feels like the man is touching flesh, like his armor is gone—

That hand splays over the sunburst on his chestplate, the orange rays Cody put there the first time he saw a sunrise in a clear sky, burning off the morning mist, and something cracks through him like a blaster-shot, knocks the wind clean out of his lungs—

“Come find me when you're ready to hunt with us,” the man says, and then he’s gone, pulling away, turning to meet the steps and hoofbeats and claws on stone. Cody stays frozen in place as a sound like a vast army passing washes over him, as feet pass close enough that he should feel them in the dark, but there's no sense of living bodies. Just the sound of movement, of a host pushing out of the forest, of the man splashing through the stream and mounting the slope. Cody follows the sound, and he can hear it when the man pauses at the very mouth of the valley.

A horn, something old, something that vibrates through the air and through Cody's whole body. It feels as if the sound steals every last bit of air from his lungs, sets his heart to pounding. It’s distant, but it carries thunderous and rolling across the forest and mountains, one long and heady note. At the same moment, as if called by the horn, wind screams through the valley, battering the trees, whipping the branches, knocking Cody right off his feet. He goes down with a cry, scrambles up to his knees—

The bodies among the trunks are gone, and as the groaning trees settle again with a mournful creak, everything goes silent.

Cody is alone in the valley, without his helmet and without any sort of light, the man’s touch still burning against his skin like a brand.

The wash of light breaking through the forest is like seeing that first sunrise all over again.

“Commander!” Jester calls, and there's a clatter, branches scraping plastoid. “Commander, are you there?”

Relief surges, and Cody straightens from where he was searching for his helmet by feel, raising a hand as the light falls over him. “Here,” he calls back, and spots white and orange just a few paces from where he was groping around in the leaflitter. His helmet is in the stream, visor staring blankly upward, and Cody picks it up with a grimace, tips it. Water pours out, and he’s pretty sure he catches a flash of scales as a fish goes with it.

“Great,” he says on a sigh, mostly to himself. Getting the whole thing dry is going to take forever, and a damp helmet is nobody’s idea of fun unless they're an actual freak.

With a scrape and a stumble, Jester slides down the slope, blaster in hand. “Everything all right, Commander?” he asks with concern. “We tried to raise you on comms, but there must be some kind of localized disturbance or something. Nothing’s going through.”

“Good to know it’s not just my equipment, then,” Cody says. “I'm fine.” He glances around, back towards where he found the stranger, then pauses.

“Sir?” Jester asks, turning to follow his gaze, and then swears. “What the hell did that?”

Footprints. Booted feet and hooves and reptilian claws, all tangled together like hundreds of creatures passed by in the dark. Exactly what Cody heard, but—

Not one of them had touched him, and some of those prints pass so close by the tree where he was pinned that they would have. He hadn’t smelled anything, either, hadn’t heard voices except for the stranger’s, hadn’t felt any bodies close in the dark.

And the deer, huddled in tight groups beneath the trees, haven't moved at all, even though the prints run right down the middle of their herds, like intangible bodies simply moved through them.

Cody breathes in, breathes out. His skin is still tingling, right beneath his chestplate, and the air is thick with ozone like there’s a thunderstorm building in the mountains.

“Come on,” he says grimly. “Back to camp. I think I need to talk to the generals about this.”

When Cody finally collapses back into his bedroll, debrief finally finished, it’s almost dawn, and he feels like a wrung-out rag.

The generals were alarmed, concerned, baffled just like Cody was, and they're all going to make the trek back to the valley later today, to see what Jedi senses can pick up. but—in daylight, at least, with two squads instead of just one, and some part of Cody is deeply relieved in a way he hadn’t thought he could be. He’s been on plenty of dangerous missions in inadvisable places, but…

Something about the man, the valley, the unseen host has left him deeply unsettled in a way nothing else has in all his time as a soldier.

Or maybe, he thinks ruefully, starting to strip off his armor, it’s the man’s words about Jango that did it. The man’s words about them.

No choice in being Mandalorians. The same way there was no choice in being soldiers. And something about that framing is jarring, almost gutting in a way. Jango designed their training, their genetic enhancements, their schedules, even their meals. He helped train the command class and the Alphas, beat their skills into them without mercy or hesitation. Cody's always known that. Jango made them soldiers, and he never gave them any choice in the matter. Shape up or die. Pass the tests or die. Keep up every score or die. None of it was ever anything they wanted.

You’re Mandalorian because you were ordered to be or forfeit your lives, and you chose not to lie down and die.

Cody breathes, and there's a sense of nausea turning in his stomach, sharp and acid and uneasy. Carefully, deliberately, he sets his armor aside, and it’s the only thing in the whole universe that’s his, but just for a moment he can't even look at it. Thinks of Rex and his jaig eyes, how proudly he wears them, and it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t, but—

Just for a moment, that sign of bravery and honor feels like just as much of a mark of ownership as a barcode might.

With a deep grimace, Cody rubs his hands over his face, tries not to feel the scar that curves around his eye, always feels a little too tight when the weather changes. Jango had left it on him in one of their final training matches, had taken Cody to the mat and beaten him mercilessly, even as Cody tried to hold his own. Jango fought dirty, though, and Cody had tried to follow the rules, because he didn’t want to be decommissioned if he didn’t, and—

He digs his fingertips into the pale line of the scar, makes himself breathe. Forced to be Mandalorian. Forced to use the language, because if they spoke Basic it was too easy for the Kaminoans to understand them, to punish them for anything even resembling defiance or differing opinion. Forced to wear armor, forced to fight, forced to follow Jango's orders and serve the Republic, because anything else meant death. But—why? If Jango wanted to conquer the Republic, why build it an army but still serve Dooku? Why train them like he did, give them all the skills to hold back the Separatist tide, but still work for the Separatist leader?

The simplest answer is that Jango didn’t know there would be a Separatist movement when he took the cloning contract. The next simplest answer is that he just did everything for the credits. But something about that sticks in Cody's craw, doesn’t quite slot in smoothly with the Jango he saw on Kamino. That Jango was vicious, merciless, driven. He wanted something that wasn’t just a legacy, wasn’t just money. He pushed all of them, but he pushed himself too, built the entire GAR program from the ground up and refined it brutally.

And then he died picking a fight he must have known he couldn’t win, because Mace Windu isn't anyone a normal person, even a Mandalorian, even a Mand'alor, could win against. Especially with just a blaster and a jetpack, with hundreds of other Jedi all around them.

It doesn’t make sense, Cody thinks, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes until colors swim behind the lids. He has no idea what Jango even wanted, except to torture them. He called them meatsack droids, cannon fodder. It’s not as if he ever said anything about what his grand plan for the GAR was.

Maybe the stranger in the valley was wrong. Maybe Jango didn’t see them as Mandalorian at all. Maybe there was nothing else he wanted except credits and Cody just wants the abuse to have meant something, instead of being the byproduct of a bitter, angry man with a target-rich environment of clones who didn’t dare actually fight back and nothing to hold him accountable.

The door of the tent pulls back, and there's a familiar creak of leather, the thump of heavy boots. “Cody?” Rex asks, and the note of concern in his voice makes Cody drop his hands from his face, push up to sit.

The fact that he can see the jaig eyes on Rex's helmet, and the fact that Rex is wearing kama—it feels like a fingers hooked behind his rib bones somehow, vulnerable and jarring.

“I’m here,” he says, and then, halfhearted, “Something else go wrong?”

“Besides your attempt to micromanage a perfectly normal patrol?” Rex asks, raising a brow at him, and Cody pulls a face right back.

“It could have gone worse,” he defends, though that feels a little halfhearted too, and goes back to stripping off his armor.

“Could have been raining?” Rex suggests, dry, but he sets his helmet on the other bedroll, drops to his knees behind Cody to help unhook the more awkward pieces of armor, the neck of the blacks where it loops around to keep water out. Another thing Jango helped design, Cody knows, and he closes his eyes, fights down the urge to say something stupid, the desire to pull away and just…leave. Leave all of this, and everything here, and all the possible ways there are to die in this damned war when all Cody has ever wanted is to live.

Would he rather believe that Jango ordered them to be Mandalorian and he obeyed, or would he rather be dead? It’s not a choice at all, but Cody still knows which one he would pick.

“Yeah,” he says on a sigh. “Could have been raining. Like it’s going to be when we head back out.”

Rex groans quietly in agreement, stacking bits of armor off to the side. “Karking mud,” he says in despair, and Cody snorts, leans back. Rex leans forward in return, bracing him, forehead pressed against the back of Cody's skull, and one arm comes up, looping around Cody's shoulders and squeezing tight.

“When Jester reported that they couldn’t raise you, I almost had a heart attack,” he says, low like it’s a guilty confession.

For soldiers, for officers, it is, Cody thinks, closing his eyes. They can't react like that, can't care, can't spend any time mourning. And—what does it mean, if they're Mandalorian, if they were made to be Mandalorian, knowingly and deliberately, but there's no time or space for any soldiers dead on the battlefield to be consigned to pyres the Mandalorian way? What happens to all the dead who are supposed to march on, but can't, because Jango sold them off to the Republic as an army that was destined to die on distant battlefields?

“I was fine,” he promises, and it’s a thin thing, but all he can offer. He catches Rex's wrist, squeezing his arm lightly, and knows that he should move away, keep undressing, get at least some sleep before they have to slog back to the valley, but—it’s hard to pull away from the feeling of another body so close, just holding. Hard to pull away from Rex, who’s been Cody's best friend since they met during training, who Cody expected to have next to him for the rest of the war and who now serves at the other end of the galaxy just as often as he does beside Cody.

“If I still had my brave ARC trooper lieutenant, it wouldn’t have been me down in that valley,” he says, tries to make the words light even though it almost feels like the loss is fresh again, like he just received the notification and realizes that Rex was going to be deployed somewhere he couldn’t reach.

“Not alone, at least,” Rex says immediately, and thumps his forehead against Cody's skull hard enough that it should probably count as a headbutt. “Like kriff I’d have let you send me down there and not dragged you along too, nerf-kisser.”

Cody laughs, leans back with force, and when Rex groans in protest he keeps pushing until it’s a struggle. The arm around his chest wraps around his throat instead, and Cody grabs it, ducks to drag Rex up and over his shoulder, toss him onto the bedroll—

Rex, always a fan of playing dirty, throws all of his weight forward at once, and Cody yelps. They both go spilling to the thin mattress, struggling and thrashing, and Rex uses all the extra kilograms his armor gives him to roll them, then promptly flatten Cody completely. Cody wheezes, thumps him in the ribs but can't make it matter through the plastoid, and gives up with a groan.

“And you're calling me a nerf-kisser?” he demands. “With how much armor you're wearing?”

Rex snickers, because he’s a brat, and pointedly relaxes right where he is, putting even more weight on Cody. “What was that, vod?” he asks over Cody's groans.

Cody kicks him in the ankle. “You’ve been eating rocks,” he accuses. “What the heck does Skywalker feed you?”

With a snort, Rex shifts just enough to brace an elbow on Cody's shoulder, then pauses. Something flickers across his face, and he pulls back, catches one edge of Cody's blacks. With the neck undone, the closure in the front is sagging just a little, and Rex pulls it back, then swears and rockets to his feet, ducking right out of the tent and shouting, “Kix!”

Cody's brain is all static, and for a long, long second he can't move. Then, carefully, gingerly, he sits up, strips his blacks off his shoulders and arms entirely. Pauses, staring down at his own chest, and remembers with an arctic chill the crackle like electricity racing across his skin.

It left a mark, whatever it was. A thorny branch looped around itself, forming a golden circle, is burned right into Cody's skin, like a tattoo he didn’t ask for, and he scrapes his nails over it again and again until the skin around it is raw and red, but it doesn’t do anything to change the mark itself.

And then, as Cody strips the clinging black cloth down to his waist, he finds one more mark, even more jarring, right where the stranger in the valley pressed against Cody's armor, touched the sunburst like it meant something to him.

A handprint, pale and ghostly against Cody's brown skin, its fingers splayed, its whole palm-print seared in until Cody can see every line and dip of the hand that made it. And even in the light of the tent, the whole things gleams ever so faintly grey, just like the stranger’s eyes.

“Sir—” Cody starts, though at this point in the argument he’s entirely running out of ways to protest.

Kenobi seems to know that, because he raises a hand, cutting Cody's words off before he can even try. “Commander,” he says firmly. “While your insight would be valuable, you are far too valuable yourself to take out into the wilds when that man clearly did something to mark you. We don’t know his purpose or his intentions, but I find myself unwilling to trust such a strange figure without proof of his benevolence.”

Cody closes his mouth, displeased. “If the comms go out again, you're not going to be able to reach me if there's anything you need to ask,” he says after a second. It’s a last stand against being ordered to remain in camp like a brand new shiny with a headcold, and he’s aware it’s not going to work, but he at least needs to make the attempt.

Kenobi inclines his head gravely, though Cody can see twitch of his mouth that’s all amusement, only just hidden by his beard. “I acknowledge that, Commander,” he says. “But in the daylight, I doubt we have anything to fear, and I will take a copy of your report with us. So please, indulge me. If the Open Circle Fleet were to lose you, it would be catastrophic.”

It wouldn’t be. Kamino would deploy another clone with Cody's specs, with his knowledge, with his training, and they’d simply click him into place. That’s the point of having a clone army; no piece is invaluable, irreplaceable. Every last one of them can be slotted in or out as the situation demands.

Cody's men would notice, the commanders and Rex would notice, the Jedi would notice, but—not the war. In the scope of the war, it wouldn’t change a damned thing.

“Yes, sir,” is all Cody says, though, because there's risk in drawing attention, in rocking the boat. No one needs to know what he’s thinking, because it could make them take a second look at him in all the ways that are dangerous for a clone. “You're taking Waxer and Wooley’s squad with you?”

“Yes, and Anakin said Rex and his squad will accompany us,” Kenobi confirms, and—that’s something. Wooley’s excellent, and Waxer knows exactly how far to follow orders before it’s a better idea to just abandon them and wing things. Rex is one of the best in the GAR, and between the squads and the three Jedi, it will be fine. Even if Dooku really is present on this world.

“Kix and Bender didn’t find anything wrong with me,” Cody still says, though, not able to resist the urge. There's something about being confined to town, to the camp, that eats at him in a way few other things do. Especially now, when a long slog in the rain would fully take his mind off the man’s words.

“If the two of them working together couldn’t find anything, I'm sure you're as healthy as a bantha,” Kenobi says optimistically. “Everything will be fine, Cody. Blackout has command of the camp, so all you have to do is rest. I'm sure a little extra sleep can't hurt.”

No budging at all. Cody contains a sigh, but nods and steps back. “Yes, sir. I’ll take it into consideration.”

“Good man,” Kenobi says approvingly, and claps him on the shoulder, then turns away towards Tano's call. Skywalker is beside her, talking to Rex, and Cody watches Wooley and Waxer round their squad up, pulling helmets on, shouldering blasters. One of Rex's cheeky ARCs waves when he notices Cody staring, and since the only thing worse than being ordered to stay in camp is an upstart ARC brat rubbing it in, Cody turns away while he still has at least a little dignity left and goes to take a walk.

It’s not the worst time for a walk, technically. The thunderstorm that was threatening last night still hasn’t broken, rumbling and growling around the peaks of the mountains but not yet fully on them. There's a light scattering of rain, just enough to put the dust down and make the air smell fresh, and in the daylight there's a perfectly normal number of people out and working. Cody nods to a few of them as he passes, but doesn’t stop, winding his way through the narrow streets and out towards the edges of Ghost’s perimeter.

It’s only there, right up near the tree-line where the mountain truly starts, that Cody finally comes to a halt, halfway between two of the guards and out of sight of both. The air feels clear up here, green and sharp, and Cody's head has been a tangle of frustration and unease since the moment Rex found the mark.

Another thing he didn’t choose, he thinks grimly, and pulls his helmet off, sinking down in the grass and setting it between his feet. He hasn’t gotten any tattoos, hasn’t shaved his hair in any special way, hasn’t done anything but paint his armor to mark himself. The armor and the scar are enough, to him. He doesn’t want anything else. And now there are two different marks on his skin, things neither Kix nor Bender could figure out how to remove, things that even the Jedi Healer who Kenobi commed didn’t understand. They shouldn’t be on his skin, but they are, and Cody hates them with a viciousness he usually saves for Grievous and Dooku, given their clone body counts.

He doesn’t touch, doesn’t strip off his armor and try to scrape them off his skin again, because if he starts there's every chance he just won't stop until he’s dug furrows in his chest. Just breathes, instead, long, slow, deep breaths of the cold mountain air, keeping his eyes closed and his head bowed as he tries to settle himself, but—

Creating you was like calling up an army from conquered worlds. You’re Mandalorian because you were ordered to be or forfeit your lives, and you chose not to lie down and die. Now you're the Mand'alor’s army.

They're not. Cody isn't. He’s loyal to the Republic, because clones are loyal or they're dead. They aren't some sleeper army loyal to Jango Fett, the man who sold them off so readily, even knowing what it meant.

Jango was a slave once, and he consigned every single clone but the one he picked for himself to the same fate.

Cody doesn’t use the word. Not openly. No clones do. He can still remember the jolt of Slick spitting it at them on Christophsis, the lurch in the pit of his stomach. But Kenobi and Skywalker had been too focused on the betrayal and its aftermath to notice, and when Cody and Rex had hauled Slick away, that was the end of it. Slick went to jail, and the war moved on, and no one else said the truth where non-clones could hear it.

It’s fine. There's a war. There's nothing to be done right now. The Senate is focused on ending the fighting, stopping the death and destruction and clawing its way back to some sense of normalcy. Clones aren't technically counted as sentient in the Republic, which is why making clones is illegal, but there are bills to grant them full rights that are slowly, slowly making their way through the Senate’s network of committees. Senators like Organa have thrown their full weight behind such things, and Fox at least is guardedly optimistic about Organa’s chances, given his popularity among the other senators. But—

No pay, no real leave, no freedom. If any of them tried to leave the GAR, they’d be dragged back, because they're just property. Just collections of cells that were sold to the Republic, that the Republic commissioned, and Cody tries not to linger on that fact, knows there are plenty of questions around it, but it’s just…hard to escape sometimes.

None of this was their choice. None of it was Cody's choice. If a wing of hyena bombers gets through their defenses tomorrow, he’ll die with the only real choice he’s ever made being the paint on his armor, and now he doesn’t even have control of what’s put on his own skin.

And then, low and sweet, the sound of a horn echoes down from the hills above.

Cody's head comes up sharply, and he rises to his feet, gaze flickering to the guards tucked back among the trees. None of them have moved, though, and Cody hesitates for a bare instant, not sure if it’s a trick of his mind. Checks his comm, but it’s working just fine, with none of the strange shorts of last night. But—

Cody looks up towards the green hills where the sound originated, grassy and lush and streaked with color from fields of wildflowers set against the grey sky. He could reach it, he thinks. It’s not a long hike at all, maybe twenty minutes. And it’s technically inside the outermost perimeter of the camp, so he wouldn’t really be going against orders to stay put. Breaking the spirit, but that’s not enough to get court-martialed over, so it’s practically the same as obeying in full.

He shouldn’t, Cody thinks, but—he’s angry. There's a thread of rage that’s twisting up inside him, a vine full of thorns that’s rooted in the man’s words about Jango, in the marks, in the fear he felt in the valley last night. It’s all coming boiling up, and Cody is already frustrated, already on edge.

There's no saying it’s actually the man from yesterday. Cody can just hike up and check. And if it isn't, if he’s just hearing things, no one needs to know. But if it is the man, Cody can call in the generals, the rest of Ghost and Torrent, and finally wring some answers out of the stranger.

He spares one last glance for the scouts, then steps off the road and into the trees, pulling his helmet back on as he goes.

It’s not a hard climb, though there are a few sections where Cody has to scramble up almost-sheer rock that leave him feeling a little like a mountain goat. Determination drives him up, though, and it’s a cool day, the rain that breaks in waves more like heavy mist than anything that would drive him back to the main camp. This high up, the web of streams in the lower forest is confined to a few wider creeks, tumbling down in sheets of frothy water to find their pools below, and they're easy enough to avoid, so Cody's boots aren't even wet by the time he pulls himself up onto the lip of the highest meadow. He’s breathing a little hard, but the strain feels good, and he rolls to his feet, stretching out his arms as he scans the space.

The field looks like any other up here in the mountains, a narrow strip of grass and flowers shivering in the wind, with sheer stone on two sides and an encroaching forest on the third. There's no sign that anyone has passed through the meadow, not footprints or the flattened grass a heavy transport carrying a large number of troops would leave, but—

This is where the sound of the horn came from. Cody is sure of it.

He picks his way across the meadow with careful steps, the red and gold flowers knee-high and nodding in the wind. The trees up here are larger than the ones below, a different type with straighter branches, and they're huge and looming, with shafts of dim light breaking through the canopy to illuminate the grassy forest floor beneath them. No footprints here either, but there is a deer trail of packed earth that wouldn’t show them, and Cody only hesitates a moment before he follows it deeper into the trees, slow and wary, keeping his steps light. This is just a scouting mission, he tells himself. He’s just checking. If there’s nothing to find, he’ll turn around and go back to camp with no damage done.

Deeper in, along the shoulder of the mountain where the rocky crags push up into the forest like jutting bones, the trees get tighter, larger. Amber trunks gleam in what little light there is, and white flowers like a scattering of frost trace the edges of the path. Cody can hear a stream somewhere close, slower than most, and the conversations of birds high up in the branches, the creak of boughs as the wind whispers through the wood. Everything is perfectly peaceful, without the fractured stillness of last night.

There's a weight in the air, though, that feels the same. A certain hush beneath the noise, a certain weight of attention if not actual eyes on him, and Cody can feel the same prickle crawling across his skin, staticky and metallic on his tongue.

Ahead of him, the deer path dips down over a tangle of tree roots and worn earth, descends into a bower of trees leaning in above a stream-fed pool that ripples emerald and gold within its banks. The sky is more open here than in the forest Cody passed through, and light streams down over wildflowers, tangled vines heavy with leaves and crimson fruit, clusters of berries the length of Cody's thumb. All around the pool, tree roots form natural terraces flush with thick green grass, and in one of those beds, sleeping stretched out on his back in his silver armor, is the man from the valley.

Cody comes to a halt at the very edge of the grass, staring down at him with his heartbeat like a drum in his ears. There's a long scrape in the metal of his armor where the grievous wound was yesterday, but no sign of blood, and the man looks peaceful, perfectly content to sleep in the sunlight in this perfect place. His helmet rests beside him in the grass, and his skin almost glows in the sunlight that breaks through the thunderheads, like he’s drawing all the light towards him. His armor is worn, silver and blue and black, but well cared for, and from this angle, he looks handsome, Near-Human. Not like something that could leave a permanent mark on Cody's skin just by touching him.

Heat coils in Cody's chest, a choking sort of anger, and he takes one step forward, another. The man doesn’t stir, and Cody takes a careful breath, another step. His pulse is pounding, and his hands fist against his thighs, a vast ringing rising in his ears.

He drops down, right on top of the sleeping stranger, and wraps his hands around the man’s throat.

There's no wrench of alarm, no jerk back to consciousness. Grey eyes slide open, slow, almost languid, and the man looks up at Cody's helmet like he knew this was coming, smiles lazily.

“Decided to come hunt with us?” he asks, and Cody can feel the words in his throat, through his fingertips where they’re locked tight to the skin.

“Take the marks off,” he says, perfectly even, perfectly cordial.

The man’s hands come up, but he doesn’t try to grab Cody's blaster, hanging forgotten across his back. Instead, he curls his fingers over Cody's thighs, locked tight against his ribs, and says, “You know, this is how Jaster and I met.”

 It’s so unexpected that Cody falters, just for a second. He draws back a little, grip loosening, but the man doesn’t try to throw him off. Just snorts, tipping his head back against the grass, and the sunlight catches on his long lashes as he watches Cody, lazy and intent like a well-fed predator. “Has no one told you about Jaster?” he asks, quiet. “He’s your birthright, too, just like Clan Fett is.”

“We don’t have anything to do with Jango,” Cody says, harsh despite his intention to keep his temper. “Take the marks off.”

“They're a gift,” the man says, still not moving. Cody can feel the weight of his hands, like the armor is nothing but an illusion, curled tight right above Cody's knees. “The hunt won't pull you in when you're wearing my mark. I won't make you a huntsman unless you ask me.”

“I don’t care,” Cody says, and the words don’t crack in his mouth, but—maybe they want to. “Take them off. Now. I'm not your toy to mark up however you want.”

Something dark flickers through the man’s eyes, and he pauses. His gaze sweeps over Cody, slow, lingering, and then he inclines his head as much as he can with Cody's hands still around his throat.

“Done,” he says.

Nothing feels different, but then, Cody only felt the marks going on the first time, and he hesitates, then shifts back. Grabs for blaster, gauntlets, then armor plates, dragging them off and dropping them to the side, desperately stripping off the top part of his undersuit—

The handprint is nothing more than a fading outline of silver, and the thorny branch has disappeared entirely. Cody stares down at familiar scarred skin, unmarred by someone else’s signs, and feels like he can actually breathe for the first time since Rex pulled his bodysuit open.

“I can't promise you won't get swept up in things, without those signs,” the man says, still unmoving under him as he watches Cody, thoughtful more than offended. “You might change your mind once night falls.”

“I won't,” Cody says, and means it with every inch of his soul. He drags his gaze up to meet the man’s, and asks, “What the hell are you?”

“Mandalorian,” the man says without hesitation, and smiles crookedly. “I'm Myles. I was Jaster Mereel's aide, once, and then Jango's.”

It drags at Cody's composure, those words. That almost idle he’s your birthright too piled on top of everything else. Cody curls his hands, bare without his gauntlets, and wonders how satisfying it would be to punch Myles in the face.

“I told you,” he says, and in his mouth the words feel sharp enough to cut glass. “We have nothing to do with Jango Fett.”

“You have everything to do with Jango Fett,” Myles counters without hesitation. He still hasn’t moved his hands from Cody's thighs. “Jango's the reason you're here. He took a mercenary contract to fight a war the Republic didn’t care about enough to fight themselves, and you're that contract.”

Just a contract fulfilled. That’s always been what the clones are, technically, but that wording, that phrasing—

Cody grits his teeth, leans forward. He gets a hand on Myles's shoulder, pinning him to the grass even though he doesn’t seem at all inclined to move, and says warningly, “We’re loyal to the Republic—”

A wrench, a hand on his wrist, a flip as neat as any Cody's ever seen General Vos pull off in a wrestling match, and Cody's back slams down into the grass. He swings a fist, but Myles catches it, pins his wrists over his head with one hand, like Cody isn't several times stronger than a baseline Human. Korunnai aren't that different from Humans, shouldn’t be, but Cody wrenches and jerks and can't so much as shift Myles's grip. He bares his teeth as Myles leans down over him, but Myles just snorts, the curl of his mouth all amusement.

“You're loyal to your vod’e,” he corrects, still mild. The last word has weight, though, a heavier edge, and Cody swallows at the force of it, the meaning. Brother in arms, just as much as blood brother, and the clones use it with each other, casual and easy, because nothing else fits. They're not natural Humans, natural siblings. They're genetic copies of one man who decided to take a job and sell himself for parts. For disposable soldiers, coming off an assembly line one after the other. Billions of men, when all the contracts are fulfilled, and not a single one of them except for Boba counts as an actual sentient person.

Brother means copy, in their mouths. Means fellow soldier, fellow slave, the man I’ll likely die next to. There's nothing to be but loyal to each other, in the face of that. In the face of a galaxy where half of the people who don’t hate them outright think they're just the same as droids, and worth even less, because you can't scrap a clone and make him into something else when his service is done.

“Not because I'm Mandalorian,” Cody says, though the words want to catch in his throat. He means them as a challenge, but they comes out sounding thin, plaintive. “It’s because I'm a soldier.”

“They're not mutually exclusive,” Myles says, amused, and leans down. When Cody tenses, ready to headbutt him if he gets an inch closer, he stops, raising one dark brow. “Some people believe that the only worth Mandalorians have is as soldiers.”

It hits just a little too hard, a little too sharply, and Cody can't stop the way he jerks in Myles's hold, almost turns his face away. His next breath rasps in his throat, because—it’s true. It strikes too close, though, too familiar, and Cody squeezes his eyes shut as if that will help block out the way those words eat into his gut.

Myles huffs, quiet, and leans down again, further this time, bolder now that Cody's too wound up to crack his skull. His free hand slides across Cody's cheek, traces around his eye socket, then follows the curve of his scar, light against the puckered skin. The pure focus in his gaze makes Cody's skin prickle, tangles him halfway between the need to run and the need to lean in to that touch the way he might Rex's. But there's a danger to Myles, a predatory stillness, that even Rex with all his skills and all his training doesn’t have.

“This is from Jango,” Myles says, head tipped as he watches Cody's face.

Cody curls his fingers against his palms, still trapped in Myles's unyielding hold, until his nails dig into the skin. “He pulled a knife on me in an unarmed sparring match,” he says, and the cold jolt of that moment, the realization, feels as if it always lives somewhere inside of him, no matter how long it’s been. A certainty that he was already dead, the understanding a bare second later that there was no way to counter even if he wasn’t. Jango was going to win, because he was cheating, because he’d been losing, and losing to a clone was unacceptable.

Myles lets out a long, slow breath, rueful. “That sounds like Jango,” he says. “He always was a ruthless bastard. And he hated to lose more than anything.”

“Are you allowed to complain about the Mand'alor like that?” Cody asks, sardonic, and pulls at his wrists again. Myles's hold still doesn’t budge.

“It’s a compliment, to a Mandalorian,” Myles says, unconcerned. “Both Jaster and Jango were ruthless bastards, though Jaster hid it better.” He considers Cody for a long moment, then says, “You’ve survived this long at war. I bet the same could be said of you.”

“I'm not the one who sold billions of sentients off to the Republic,” Cody says. He’s angry, he realizes belatedly. Obvious, but—he hasn’t been this angry since the knife. Hasn’t felt this trembling, nerve-eating heat climbing his spine and devouring his good sense since the moment Jango rose to his feet on the mat and said, like it had any sort of meaning to it at all, I won. “I'm not a Mandalorian, so get the hell off and let me go—”

“You think it’s a clerical error?” Myles asks, and the gleam of his eyes in the shifting leaf-shadows is the most unsettling thing Cody has ever seen. “You being Mandalorian—why do you think you have a choice?”

Cody stops short, ice washing through his veins. A choice, he thinks, vicious, bitter, furious. Why did he think that there was a choice? There hasn’t been about anything else in his life. And Jango—

“Jango made you to be Mandalorian,” Myles says, and it’s softer than before, like it’s meant to be a comfort. “That’s why he set things up the way he did. He took the contract, and he fulfilled it by training up the necessary troops.”

Cody feels sick, a heavy nausea twisting in his belly, his breaths coming rough. “Conscripted troops,” he says harshly. “We never had a choice—”

“You did,” Myles countered. “There's always a choice. You could have refused the training at any point—”

“He would have killed us!” Cody snaps, and his voice rings through the clearing, echoes off the vast trunks. Too loud, he thinks. Like it’s going to bring the mountain down on them. But—he can't stop the words. “He did kill us! When we failed, we died. Is that a karking choice?”

“Yes,” Myles says simply, plain enough to catch Cody off guard. He stops, skin prickling, and Myles smiles crookedly. “That’s always the choice. A world can be conquered or it can die fighting. A man can surrender or he can face his death the way a Mandalorian should. Tell me, Cody. If you're outmatched and outgunned, if you're facing the worst odds on a battlefield, do you put down your weapons and give up? Or do you keep fighting, because that’s the only way forward?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Cody says, but the words catch in his throat.

“It is,” Myles counters. He looks down at Cody for another second, then sinks back, letting go of his wrists and sliding off him. “Jango made plenty of mistakes. I won't argue about that. But he raised warriors knowing full well what he was making you into.”

“That makes it worse,” Cody says, and the words escape him without him fully meaning to let them, raw in a way he hates. He sits up, rubs a hand over his face, and tries not to feel the ridge of his scar, the cut of the blade as it nearly took out his eye. “Heck. That makes it worse.”

“I never said it didn’t.” Myles tips his head back, looking up at the slanting sunlight, and sighs. “We’re all dealing with Jango's choices. But he was the Mand'alor. I followed him the same way I did his father. And I died for him, in a fight we had no chance of winning.”

Died. Not would have died, but—did. Cody pauses, raising his head, and looks Myles over warily. Registers, too late, that Myles used his name, and—he shouldn’t have. Clone names are personal, and they're not written down anywhere. To the entire galaxy, Cody is just CC-2224, and there's no record anywhere that would say otherwise. Only other clones know him as Cody.

“How exactly do you know me?” he asks warily.

Myles huffs, though the curve of his mouth is just a little smug. “I told you, I want you as a huntsman.”

“For hunting Dooku,” Cody clarifies. It’s never a bad thing to know that more people are hunting a bastard like Dooku, but at the same time, there's something about Myles, about the whole host he heard last night, that makes him feel…uneasy.

Myles puts a hand down over his stomach, right where the bleeding gash was. “Who do you think that fight we had no chance of winning was against?” he asks, and meets Cody's eyes. There's anger in his face, a stirring, biting, hungry sort of anger that Cody knows. It’s the same sort of thing he felt when he heard about Wolffe's battalion, or Tano's fighter squadron. Helpless, furious, clawing for some sort of meaning or some chance at revenge, desperately plunging forward in the hope it would make something better someday, but—

Nothing like that ever gets better. Not in a war. Not when everything in the whole universe is one long, desperate fight for survival that not enough people will ever win.

Cody closes his eyes, runs a hand through his hair. “You're dead?” he asks, and—well. It’s not the weirdest thing he’s heard. The Jedi are plenty weird too, and Cody's heard way too many stories from all the other commanders to doubt anything in the whole galaxy anymore.

Myles chuckles, leaning back on his hands. “It’s a Hunt,” he says, and when Cody pauses, he tips his head. “Dooku left our bodies unburned in an icy field, and we didn’t move on. He’s done the same to a lot of Mandalorians over the course of this war. And now he’s on a planet with all the moons gone dark. He won't escape us this time.”

A lot of Mandalorians. Something prickles down Cody's spine, and he pauses. “Clones,” he finally says, and it cracks out of his throat. “You mean—clones. Unburned clones.”

Mandalorians burn their dead. But all the battlefields across the many worlds of this war, all the mass graves, all the fields full of the dead who have been abandoned to carrion birds and scavengers. All the clones who have died fulfilling Jango's contract with the Republic, fighting a war the Republic can't—won't—muster the troops to fight itself.

A shiver runs through Cody, cold like an arctic wind, and he curls his fingers into the sun-warm earth beneath him, watching Myles's broad, handsome face as it settles into lines of grim satisfaction.

“How exactly do you think I learned your name?” he asks, and rises to his feet, offering Cody a hand. His gaze never wavers from Cody's. “You’d make a fine huntsman, Cody, and you want revenge against Dooku just as much as I do. Dooku stayed inside last night, like a coward, but he won't be safe tonight. Will you hunt with us?”

Us. Dead clones, lost souls, bodies that didn’t march on the way they should have. Cody swallows, throat tight, and asks, “This—is this what happens to all the dead who aren't burned?”

“All the Mandalorian dead? Yes.” Myles doesn’t even blink. “A Wild Hunt, spanning all of Mandalorian space. We were part of the Crusades once—everyone knew that if you desecrated the Mandalorian dead, the Hunt would come for you, and it wouldn’t stop no matter how far or how long you ran.” A pause, and then he smiles, just a little wry. “We aren't just revenge, though. We’re those who never marched on. Mandalorian dead seeking war, or revelry, or more huntsmen, whenever the moons go dark or the seasons turn.”

He steps closer, catching Cody's hand, pulling him up, and touches his scar again, fingertips impossibly light against deadened skin. “Jango made me, too,” he says, quiet, and Cody swallows at the raw note in it, at the wild edge in Myles's grey eyes. It feels, for one dizzying moment, that if he looks into them for too long, he’ll fall forward into that luminous grey, a world of mist and silver and hunting horns echoing from the tops of mountains.

Myles served Jaster, the previous Mand'alor, and then Jango when he died. Died for Jango, facing Dooku, and then, with what he said about unburned bodies—

“He left you?” Cody asks. “In the snow, after you died.”

“He never came back for us,” Myles says, like it’s a correction, and Cody supposes that it is. He thinks of all the men he’s never been able to go back for, bodies in white armor like a trail of snow behind the GAR, and his throat closes up, locks around the questions he wants to ask, the words he wants to say.

It doesn’t matter. Something in Myles's eyes softens, and he steps back, offers Cody a hand again. “Would you like to see?” he asks. “Just a glimpse, since you're not a huntsman, and I can't promise it won't affect you, but—you can see them, if you’d like.”

“Affect me,” Cody repeats, wary, but it doesn’t matter. He’s already sliding his hand into Myles's and Myles chuckles, pulls him forward towards the pool.

“Everyone who sees the hunt reacts differently,” he says. “Some people go mad with fear. Some come and join us.”

Cody breathes out, thinking of the town locked down tight, ever single shutter secured. A Mandalorian world in all but name, where everyone knows exactly what it means when the moons go dark.

“Does Dooku know?” he asks.

Myles doesn’t look concerned. “I don’t think so. Mandalorians are useful for him, but in his mind we’re not a threat.”

Dismissive and arrogant are two good descriptors of Dooku, and Cody snorts. He presses his fingers against Myles's hand, callused in a way that’s jarringly familiar, and—

There's no pulse in Myles's wrist, no sign that his heart is beating. His skin is warm, but there's a strangeness to it, too. Not flesh-warmth the way Cody is used to, but…campfire warmth, almost, flickering but intense.

He’s trying not to think about what it means, that the clones who weren’t burned were taken up into a Mandalorian Wild Hunt. Trying not to consider what it means that they were made Mandalorian without ever having any say in it, and all the uncomfortable edges that adds to Jango's actions.

He made Boba his son. Even if the rest of the clones weren’t his sons in the same way, if he made them Mandalorian, if he was the Mand'alor, they were still his people. And yet—

“You said,” Cody starts, carefully even, because if he doesn’t keep himself even that anger he’s throttling down might finally find an exit. “You said Jango made you. Just by not coming back?”

Myles doesn’t look at him, but Cody is watching, can see the way tension slips into the set of his shoulders. “Not just that,” he says after a moment. “He made me the Master of the Hunt. When he returned to Galidraan to reclaim his armor, and to kill the governor who betrayed us, I think he did something. But I don’t know what.”

Cody pauses. Myles had said that Jango didn’t come back for them. But—if he’d returned to the place where they were killed, he had gone back.

He’d gone back for himself, but not for them.

Oh, Cody thinks like a revelation, and tightens his grip on Myles's hand, uses it to pull him around as Cody comes to a stop. Myles moves with it willingly, though he looks bemused, and he raises a brow at Cody curiously.

“Having second thoughts?” he asks.

“What does it mean,” Cody says, meeting his eyes, “if a Mand'alor abandons his people?”

Myles goes perfectly still, so still it’s entirely obvious that he isn't breathing.

Cody doesn’t stop, but takes a step forward, almost closing the space between them. Myles is shorter than him, stockier than the leanness most of the clones tend towards with no way to get enough calories consistently, but with that edge of wildness, that fire-heat to his skin, he feels larger even as Cody narrows the distance separating them.

“He thought his armor was more important than paying his respects to the dead,” Cody says. “Even though he knew about the Hunt and what had happened to you. He thought—if he didn’t burn your bodies, you would get his revenge for him. So he used you.”

Myles's grey eyes fall shut, but he looks like he’s braced for a blow. “He didn’t know about the Hunt,” he says. “He—Jaster might not have told him.”

“You served his father, and then him, and he still didn’t care enough about you to make a better choice,” Cody says, and it feels like the knife dragging through his flesh all over again, just barely missing his eye and the blow that would have ended with him decommissioned instead of just taking up space in the medical wing for a few hours. “That fight with Dooku—who fired first? Who started it?”

“Death Watch,” Myles says sharply, but he takes a half-step back. Thunder growls above them, the clouds seething, and the sunlight in this perfect little bower is fading, going grey and bleak and threatening. “It was a Death Watch plot, but the Jedi were their tools—”

“Who turned it into a fight?” Cody asks implacably, because he knows Jedi. If they’d thought there was a chance at getting the Mandalorians to surrender, or even easing tensions, they would have taken it. Even Dooku, back when he was a Jedi, wasn’t all that different, going by what Kenobi has said.

Myles takes a deliberate breath, even though he hasn’t breathed once in all this time. “I told you,” he says, bitter. “If there's a fight, and you're outmatched, you don’t lie down and die. You just keep pushing. That’s what we did.”

And it got him nearly cut in half. Cut in half and abandoned in a grave with all the rest of their men, and Jango elsewhere. Elsewhere, returned, but not for them. Because, just like with the clone contract, it served Jango's purposes to disregard what should have been his own people.

“You were loyal to Jaster,” he says quietly. “And you keep trying to see Jaster in what Jango did. But I don’t have to know Jaster to know that Jango is a bastard.”

“Jaster could be just as much of a bastard, I promise you,” Myles says, but it’s thin, halfhearted. “And it doesn’t make you any less a Mandalorian, regardless.” He turns, looking up the mountain and away, and a bare moment later there’s a low, carrying horn-call, rolling like the thunder as it carries down the valleys and ridges. There's a sound beneath it, too, like hoofbeats, like claws scraping stone and scaled bodies moving, and Cody follows Myles's gaze, then stops dead, breath knotting up in his throat.

Above the trees, where mountain and thunderheads meet, there's a figure. A varactyl, perched on the very edge of a crag with its reins drawn tight, and on its back is a man just raising a horn to his lips. A familiar man, even though the last time Cody saw him was on a flickering holo, forced to his knees with a blaster to his head.

Ponds. Ponds, framed against the grey sky, his white and brown-painted armor like a slash of brilliance against the storm as it builds. Ponds with his helmet on the saddle in front of him, the reins in one fist, an axe like an old Crusader would have used slung across his back. It’s undeniably, unmistakably him, and Cody feels a lurch like his knees have been cut out from under him, like the ground just gave way beneath his feet. He opens his mouth to call, to cry out, something—

More figures come boiling out of the storm like clouds that gain substance as they fall to earth, a thousand species and countless leaping steeds, armor as bright as a flame in the dying sunlight. More horns sound, and like a wave breaking the Hunt crashes downward from the peak, high, ringing cries and eager whoops filling the air and crashing into the roll of thunder. They boil down into the valley, and wind roars, and Myles shouts something that’s maybe a greeting or maybe a goad as the massive trees bend and crack and buck in the gale.

Cody jerks back, but before he can make it more than a step, Myles grabs him. He catches Cody around the waist, hauls him close with impossible strength, and as the wave of the Hunt breaks over them, bodies streaming past in a deafening stampede, he lunges. With perfect ease, he catches the reins of a riderless black orbak, its gleaming tusks sharpened to a wicked point and its massive body armored like a weapon, and he surges up, dragging Cody right into the saddle with him.

Instantly, there's a shout, a howl of glee from a thousand throats, a cheer that shakes the mountains. Myles shouts back, reckless as he whirls the orbak, and Cody grabs for his armor, clings as the beast surges forward like an avalanche, plunging down through the forest, down the nearly-sheer slope that Cody could barely climb with the whole host behind them. Myles's arms are around him, a bruising grip, and his laughter in Cody's ear feels like the kick of adrenaline, the jerk of a jetpack firing just in time to save him from a drop. Cody clutches at Myles’s arms, at slick vambraces and battered armor, and the exhilaration of their downward plunge strips away all rationality, all higher thought as the wind roars in their ears.

There are hounds beneath the feet of the steeds, feathered dogs and two-headed dogs and massiffs all howling right along with the host as it swallows them, and Cody catches flashes of white armor, of painted plastoid, of familiar bodies as the Hunt sweeps down into the forest beyond the town. He sees, for just an instant, Thorn mounted on another orbak, huge and white and gleaming, carrying a banner with a thorny vine gleaming gold against crimson cloth. Their eyes meet through the helmet visor in the bare instant before he’s lost from sight again, but Cody feels it like a kick in the chest.

Clones. Clones among the dead, not lost to darkness but pulled up into this wild riot of a hunt, full of a predator’s hungry glee. The realization shakes right through him, seismic, so shattering that Cody wants to laugh. His heart is racing, and he can't tell if it’s fear or the thrill of this, or maybe there's no difference between those things.

“Hunt with us,” Myles says in his ear, and he presses his cheek to Cody's, stubble and wildfire warmth and a lurch in Cody's stomach that has nothing to do with their reckless, surging pace as they stream through the trees. “Hunt with us, Cody. Be my huntsman.”

His hand burns against the sunburst over Cody's stomach, so vivid it’s as if there isn't any armor between them. Cody can feel every inch of him, and for one mad moment he almost says yes. The word is on his tongue, the shape of it is on his lips—

A cry. Not the Hunt, but something far less wild, more alarmed. One of the scouts, Cody realizes with a jerk, and it’s cold water down his spine. Reality abruptly reasserts itself, and it’s as if the Hunt fades before his eyes, greying out into low clouds and vanishing all at once. Myles's grip loosens, and Cody tumbles down to the soft earth of the forest floor with a cry, rolls, pushes up.

The black orbak comes to a halt, huge hooves gouging deep prints in the earth, and Myles stares down at him for a long, long moment, then drops an old, battered golden helmet at his feet.

“Stay indoors tonight,” he warns, and then leans down, catching Cody's chin again. Those ghost-grey eyes seem to fill the world, and Cody can't breathe under the weight of them, has to close his own—

The press of lips to his tastes of smoke and wine and blood, and Cody can't help the sound that tears out of his throat, all wanting. He grabs Myles's elbow, and for a bare instant all he wants is to pull Myles down off the orbak, drag them both to the mossy forest floor and indulge. Not a hasty, fumbling fuck while on leave, always on a time limit, but a coupling in the sunlight, in the open, with Myles on top of him again the exact way he was in the bower so far above.

He can't move Myles, though, can't pull him back to reality where Cody is standing, and with a low, heady sound of regret Myles breaks the kiss, frames Cody's face with his hand.

“Stay inside,” he repeats, stroking Cody's scar with his thumb. “It’s the first day of autumn. The Hunt is going to be wild, and I can't promise I’ll give you back if I find you tonight.”

Cody swallows, throat dry, and consciously keeps himself from leaning into Myles's touch. “You don’t even know me,” he says. “You can't want me that badly.”

Myles snorts, mouth curving in a rueful smile. “The Hunt has been on your heels for as long as you’ve been fighting,” he says, soft. “You just haven't been in the right place to see us until now.” A pause, and he closes his eyes, straightens up in the saddle and draws his hand away from Cody's skin. “You're not like Jango,” he says, and it sounds like an admission, a confession, a breath that slides out on a tide of regret. “You're just like Jaster. All the injustices—you see right through them, don’t you? They make you angry.”

It doesn’t sound like an accusation, though part of Cody is braced for it to be. “There’s a lot to be angry about,” he says.

It makes Myles smile, and he turns his head, looks up at the greyed-out mass of the Hunt streaming past them, for all the world like the thunderstorm come to earth. “Get indoors,” he says again. “If we catch anyone out tonight, they're prey.”

Not just Dooku, but anyone who gets in their way. Cody takes a breath, another, can't help the urge to reach out and touch Myles's knee. “What happens if you find Dooku?” he asks.

The look that surfaces in Myles's eyes is hunger, wild and boundless, and he leans down like he can't help himself, catches Cody's shoulder and drags him right up against the orbak’s heavy blue armor. Kisses him, like a devouring, and Cody can feel the whole world bend towards that seething, churning want as if it’s a black hole. As if just thinking of catching Dooku strips away all pretense that Myles isn't pure predator right now, caught up in the horn-calls and bellows of the Hunt.

“We run him to ground and take his soul,” Myles says against Cody's mouth, arm tight around his back. He’s curled over Cody, clutching him close and fervent, and Cody has tumbled a handful of people but he can't remember ever being wanted like this, touched like this. Like Myles can't bear to put any distance between their skin at all. He presses his mouth to Cody's brow, to the scar, to the corner of his lips, and breathes like a promise, “And then I try and resist the urge to slip into your tent, strip every last inch of you, and celebrate.”

Cody bites back a ragged groan, sliding a hand over the nape of Myles's neck and gripping tightly as he’s kissed again, again, again. The taste of copper and smoke is thick in his mouth, and it’s like the rare occasions on leave when someone’s bought them drinks, or like stealing a taste from Waxer’s illegal still—a heady, consuming rush that leaves him reeling, his ears ringing, every limb tingling and his head too light—

“Commander!” a voice shouts, distant but closer than before, and it jars Cody out of that rising need. Belated, he realizes that he can see the Hunt again, though it’s vanishing now, fading out once more as he catches his breath. Only Myles is still vivid, solid, and his fingers curl against Cody's armor like he’s contemplating not letting go at all.

“The moons are still dark tomorrow,” Cody says, and it feels like an offer, or maybe a promise.

Myles closes his ghost-grey eyes, pulls back. His nails scrape Cody's armor as he pulls away, and they leave shallow furrows in the plastoid.

“Tomorrow,” he agrees, then spins his mount around and spurs it on with a shout. Thunder rolls like a thousand drums, so close that Cody's bones hum with the force of it, and lightning splits the sky, shattering every shadow beneath the trees in one massive burst—

And Myles and the Hunt are gone.

“Commander!” a voice calls, and there are stumbling steps, unsteady on the rocky slope of the ground. A hand grabs Cody's elbow, and another catches his wrist, and Boil and Trapper haul him back towards the town with a speed usually reserved for facing enemy fire. He only just has time to grab up the helmet Myles dropped before they’re in retreat and dragging him along.

“The generals ordered everyone to lock the camp down because of the storm!” Boil says over the roar of the thunder, so close and heavy it’s almost one continuous crash. “We couldn’t raise you on comms, sir!”

His helmet and most of his armor are still back in the bower above them, Cody realizes too late, and grimaces. “Make sure everyone is inside as soon as possible!” he calls back, and Trapper nods and pulls ahead of them, running for the camp. The wind is picking up, trees lashing on either side of the road, and the creak and snap of breaking branches sounds like blaster-fire in the storm-gloom.

But over it, distant and clear, Cody can hear a hunting horn echoing off the mountainsides and ringing through the valleys, signaling to the whole of the vast host that the hunters have spotted their prey.

Kenobi looks the closest to unsettled that Cody has ever seen him.

“You’ve felt that before?” Skywalker says incredulously, pulling the cooling pack away from his skull long enough to look offended. There are still muddy deer-prints all over his tunic, and Cody tries very hard not to be amused by that fact. “When? I've definitely never felt anything like that damn valley.”

Kenobi doesn’t quite look down his nose at him, but the thought is there. “I did exist in the Order before we met, Anakin,” he says, dry, and when Skywalker rolls his eyes at him, he chuckles, though it’s thinner than normal.

“What exactly were you feeling, sir?” Cody asks. Something clatters loudly outside the command tent suddenly enough to make him twitch, but after a second nothing breaks and nothing gives way, at least. Cody eases back a little, trading glances with Rex, and gets a grimace in response. This weather has everyone on edge, though Cody will admit he’s likely tense for a different reason than most people here.

There's a pause, then a long breath, and Kenobi folds his arms across his chest, settling back on his heels. The expression he’s wearing is one Cody recognizes—it means Kenobi doesn’t particularly want to talk about it, but feels like he has to for all of their sakes. Bad or failed missions usually get that face, or talk about Qui-Gon Jinn.

“Death doesn’t quite feel like absence, in the Force,” Kenobi finally offers. “Even when deaths don’t come with suffering, you can feel the change, and it’s a cold, uneasy sort of thing. The valley felt like it had been full of death, as if a whole army or a whole city had all died at once there, but—it faded. It shouldn’t have done that. Impressions linger for centuries, in the Force, but that one was erased in a few hours.”

The imprint of the Hunt passing through, Cody thinks, and carefully doesn’t let himself react. Keeps his emotions level, his expression blank, and his thoughts quiet, even as Tano casts a quick look at Rex.

“You’ve felt that before, Master Obi-Wan?” she asks. “Where?”

Kenobi rubs a hand over his beard, hiding the bottom half of his face for a moment. the motion doesn’t hide his eyes, though; they slide to distance, to a flicker of regret that catches Cody by surprise.

“On Mandalore,” Kenobi finally says, and Cody goes still, hardly breathing. He hadn’t told the generals about Myles, told them instead that he’d been sleeping up on the mountainside and the storm caught him by surprise. Hadn’t mentioned Myles, the Hunt, their targeting of Dooku, because it’s not relevant to anyone but Cody and Dooku, but—

“Mandalore?” Skywalker asks in surprise, straightening in his chair. “You had a mission on Mandalore? But it’s not even part of the Republic.”

“Not officially, but they have representation in the Senate, and they petitioned for aid,” Kenobi says carefully.

Not part of the Republic. Not citizens, technically. Cody takes a slow, deliberate breath, unease surfacing just for a moment before he crushes it down again. But—what does it mean for the clones, if they were made to be Mandalorian, if they serve the Republic, but even under the best circumstances they're not considered citizens? What if the war ends someday and the Republic says that since Jango made them, since Jango decided they were Mandalorian, they are? Mandalore won't want them; the New Mandalorians have made their views on the war and on warriors in general clear, and the clones have never been anything else.

Grim foreboding sinks down into the pit of Cody's stomach, and he shifts before he can stop himself, digging his fingers into his thighs. Rex casts him a quick, sharp look, but no one else seems to notice.

“What kind of aid?” Skywalker asks, and he sounds faintly suspicious, staring at Kenobi. Cody isn't the only one who can see through his reluctance, clearly.

Kenobi sighs quietly. “A survivor of the clan wars had become a rising star among the peace movement on the planet, and the Republic wanted to make sure that she wasn’t targeted by opposing forces,” he says. “Qui-Gon and I were sent to guard her for a full year, given how bad the fighting was.” Another pause, and then he says, “Satine wasn’t a superstitious person by any means, but there were particular nights when she would close all the windows in whatever house we were staying at and force us all to remain indoors no matter what we heard outside. And—I believe I felt something similar then to what we encountered in the valley. A sense of death that didn’t linger, as if it had happened, but then been undone.”

Cody thinks of the deep slash across Myles's stomach, the way he was pulling himself out of the stream that first night like pulling himself out of a grave. The way he was sleeping earlier, as if exhausted. As if recovering.

The first day of autumn, he’d said. Less to do with the moon being dark, so he must have come back earlier in the day. Come back, in pain the same way he was in the valley, and then slept it off in the sunlight as he waited for the storm to crest and the Hunt to assemble.

A death undone every night the Hunt rides, but—that doesn’t mean it’s painless. The Hunt is where the souls that didn’t march on are collected, but it’s a grim fate, a dark thing. That’s why people fear it, beyond its fervor and its targeting of those out in the dark of the moon. Cody closes his eyes, and—Thorn was with the Hunt. Ponds was with the Hunt. Both of them died gruesomely, executed by Dooku and Aurra Sing respectively. To have to relive that every right before they can actually live again—

“I guess we’re close enough to Mandalore that it could be the same thing,” Tano says thoughtfully. “Master Obi-Wan, if you comm your friend, maybe she can help.”

Looking pained, Kenobi raises his hands, like he’s going to fend off the very suggestion. “I believe Satine has far more important matters to be attending to right now,” he says. “If things get worse here, I will contact her, but I don’t believe there's an immediate threat, even if it did feel…unsettling.”

“I didn’t realize there was a way for death to be undone in the Force,” Skywalker says after a moment.

“There isn't,” Kenobi says immediately, and Cody can read the worry that flickers over his face as he casts a quick look at Skywalker, at Tano. “And even if there was, Anakin, it would be a Dark thing to overturn the natural order of the Force. Any possible resurrection that one could somehow manage would not be worth the cost of it. The Sith tried for centuries, but the results were always…horrific.”

Skywalker frowns, looking displeased, but before he can say anything else, Tano offers brightly, “Are we going to take Cody back to the valley? We didn’t get a reaction, or see anything that weird, but he might.”

There's a pause, and then several pairs of eyes turn right to Cody, who raises a brow right back. “If you want me to go, sir,” he tells Kenobi, “I will.”

Kenobi strokes his beard, looking troubled. “The man you saw was very much gone by the time we arrived,” he says after a moment. “Satine would never tell me directly just what it is that alarmed her about those nights on Mandalore, but—we haven't noticed anything truly worrying here except for the stranger’s claim that Dooku is present. Given that, I greatly dislike the idea of using anyone as bait for whatever force this is. For now, I believe we should let things be.”

Both Tano and Skywalker look displeased by that assessment, but before either of them can argue, a jerk runs through all three Jedi. They whirl towards one side of the tent, gazes trained upwards, and Cody wrenches to his feet, already reaching for the blaster he isn't supposed to carry when he’s been take off active duty—

A groaning, creaking crash, loud enough to shake the tent, and a rumble that’s almost as loud as the thunder. Kenobi's eyes track something Cody can't see downward, and after a long, long moment he says, “A rockslide. The wind must have knocked something loose.”

“The camp should be far enough away not to get caught,” Skywalker says, frowning. “But the droids had their base right under that mountain, didn’t they? We should take a few squads out and check. This could be the best opportunity we have to wipe them out.”

Alarm prickles down Cody's spine. “Sir,” he says before he can think better of it. “In this weather, that will put the men at risk.”

“It will,” Kenobi agrees, but he looks thoughtful. “However, the droids will be at a disadvantage as well, and if we can take out their cannons and their advance squads, we may be able to win ourselves some breathing room.”

Stay indoors, Cody thinks. It will be dark soon, too, and between it being the first day of autumn and the dark of the moons here, Myles had implied that the Hunt would be even wilder than normal. “Sir,” he says, and Rex's gaze is on him, startled, almost alarmed, but Cody still pushes to his feet. “The locals are all certain that it’s a bad idea to go out after dark right now.”

Kenobi pauses, his eyes on Cody. “Do you know something about why, Commander?” he asks, and it’s perfectly steady, not accusing, but Cody still feels a jerk of awareness, of vulnerability as the question registers. Speaking out is a bad idea. Contradicting a superior officer is a worse one. Saying something that could get him marked as crazy, or unstable, is the worst idea yet, because it means a one-way trip to a decommissioning table with a needle in his neck. Cody's made it this far without dying; he’s not going to give the Kaminoans any opportunity to murder him now, even if that means lying to a Jedi.

The Jedi would try to defend him. Kenobi definitely would. But—the Jedi are fully under the control of the Senate, and the Senators don’t give a single damn about any clone. Cody knows that for a fact. Myles has singled out Cody for some reason, and that alone will be enough to bring the admirals right down on his head.

“Nothing specific,” he says, as even as he can make it as he meets Kenobi's eyes in return. “But the local Protectors don’t spook easily, and they're all locked up tight inside like everyone else right now, sir.”

Kenobi breathes out, long and slow. “That’s true,” he allows, looking troubled. “However, we are required to take rather more risks than the civilian defense squads, I'm afraid, especially if Dooku truly is here. Striking while the enemy is in chaos will hopefully give us enough of an advantage to outweigh the risks. Captain, your squad is fit to go again?”

“Yes, sir,” Rex answers, coming to his feet. He casts a glance at Skywalker, gets a nod, and says, “We can be ready within the hour, sir. Should I have Lieutenant Waxer ready his squad as well?”

“Sir,” Cody says before Kenobi can answer, and he rises too, something humming through his nerves that isn't quite anger and isn't quite fear, but—closer to both than he would like. “I can lead the squad from Ghost.”

Another pause. Kenobi considers him for a long moment, worried, and then asks, “Bender cleared you, Commander?”

“Yes, sir,” Cody answers immediately. He hasn’t told Bender about the marks Myles left being gone, and Boil and Trapper only saw him in the woods, but—he’s technically still clear. It’s fine. “Kix too. I'm ready to fight.”

We are required to take rather more risks than the civilian defense squads, I'm afraid.

But—required by who? Cody never wanted to be a soldier. Cody never asked for any of this. Neither did Rex or Boil or Waxer or any of their men. They have to take the risk because they were ordered to, and the Jedi were ordered to lead them, because Jango agreed to a contract. And—it’s making Cody angry, thinking of it, even if it’s just the same as every other fight, every other moment in this war.

Something has shifted, though. Something in him has shifted, and he isn't sure whether it’s Myles's words or seeing the Hunt or thought of the admiral. Or, maybe, it’s just that he’s finally reached a breaking point, but regardless of why it’s as if something inside Cody has given way all at once. He tries to breathe through the emotion, tries to keep it quiet, steady the way he always does, but Kenobi looks at him and Cody can see the flicker in his face, surprised and almost taken aback for a bare instant before it slides back into assessment.

“Very well, Commander,” Kenobi says at last, and inclines his head to Cody. “An hour, then.”

It should feel like a victory. It is a victory, to be back on duty, able to defend his men from the front again. But Cody can hear the wind howling down the mountain like a hunter’s thwarted rage, and all he feels is cold and very, very angry. 

“Sure you're up to coming?” Rex asks carefully, watching Cody out of the corner of his eye as he checks his gear.

Cody doesn’t look over. His spare armor is in good enough condition to use, and the replacement helmet isn't his but it’s good enough. Visibility is going to be awful either way, and there's every chance that comms will go down again, making Cody's built-in relays useless regardless.

“I'm fine,” he says, automatic, half a second before a gleam of gold catches his eye.

The helmet Myles had dropped at his feet in the forest is still right next to his bedroll where he’d dropped it before heading for the meeting with the generals, and he pauses, then reaches out and picks it up. It’s lighter than it looks like it should be, given its size, and the faceplate is strange, old-fashioned in a way Cody's never seen outside of very, very old holos of the Mandalorian Crusaders. But—

There's a sunburst, Cody thinks, rubbing a thumb over one of the engraved lines. Concentric circles look like they're emerging from the visor, spreading outward, but cut through them like burning rays are long, straight lines that echo the sunburst Cody has put on all of his armor since the first day of his first deployment. Maybe that’s why Myles gave it to him.

It’s beautiful. Solid, gleaming in the tent’s lights, with a sheen to the metal that Cody's never seen before, the T-shaped visor a vicious slash. A merciless thing, Cody thinks, and breathes out. Like Myles, leaning over him, pinning Cody's hands to the dirt, something wild in his eyes that made Cody's heartbeat quicken despite all good sense.

Cody breathes in, breathes out, closes his eyes and curls forward, resting his brow against the sunburst on the helmet as he fights down the strange, tangled mess that’s trying to climb its way up his throat.

We are required to take rather more risks than the civilian defense squads, I'm afraid.

Another breath, and Cody can't quite tear his eyes away from the gleaming black of the helmet’s visor, but he still doesn’t try to stop the words when he says, “Rex. If you could be doing anything in the galaxy right now, would it be this?”

That’s always the choice. A world can be conquered or it can die fighting. A man can surrender or he can face his death the way a Mandalorian should. Tell me, Cody. If you're outmatched and outgunned, if you're facing the worst odds on a battlefield, do you put down your weapons and give up? Or do you keep fighting, because that’s the only way forward?

Rex looks up, startled. “Anything?” he asks, bemused. “Does it matter? We’re soldiers. We’re fighting for the Republic.”

“Yeah,” Cody says on a sigh, and rakes a hand through his hair. When he closes his eyes, he can almost feel his scar pull. “We are.”

It’s all they are. It’s all Jango made them. Mandalorians, trained up because Jango was hired to train them, but he made them Mandalorian even when he didn’t have to. The Mand'alor raised an army, raised warriors, and not a single one of them except Boba was ever even a person in his eyes. Cody doesn’t have any idea if it would have been the same if Jango was raising children born on Mandalore to fight and die in someone else’s name, but—

He thinks of Myles, left in a cold and lonely grave, dragged back to a strange half-life to serve Jango's need for revenge. Thinks of all the clones in the Hunt, murdered and revived and reliving their deaths over and over without any possible end to that suffering, all because of Jango's actions. All because of this war, because of Dooku, because of Chancellor Palpatine and his refusal to negotiate an end to the fighting. And—Cody doesn’t allow himself to feel much of anything about it, usually, because once he starts he’ll never stop, but right now, staring down at the golden sunburst in his hands, he can't stuff those feelings down anymore. He’s furious. He’s so wretchedly, unspeakably furious. At Dooku, at Palpatine, at Kenobi and all the other Jedi even if they had just as little choice in this as the clones. At the Senate, at the people of the Republic who see clones as nothing but meat to throw in front of the enemy’s blasters, who can't even be bothered to raise their own armies and fight for themselves as the Separatists bear down on them.

You're just like Jaster. All the injustices—you see right through them, don’t you? They make you angry.

But no matter how angry he is, Cody's never done anything with that anger. He’s kept his head down, said yes sir and no sir and right away sir to every order he’s been given. He’s led his men into battles he knows they can't win because refusing will just get them all killed anyway. He’s sat there and taken it when the admirals sneer at them, or when politicians vote down pushes to give the clones pay and rights and a future when the fighting is over. He’s played his part as one more easily-replaceable cog in the war machine of the GAR, and—

Does it matter? We’re soldiers.

They never had a choice. Even in a mercenary contract, the mercenaries would get a say. But—

There's always a choice, Cody thinks, and instead of reaching for the spare helmet Waxer brought him, he pulls on the one with the sunburst. Its HUD comes online without a moment’s pause, tapping into the armor’s systems despite the difference in their ages, and it’s perfectly, immediately responsive, even more so than Cody's original and carefully-calibrated bucket.

“Looks a little mismatched, vod,” Rex says, and when Cody glances up, Rex has settled back on his bedroll, watching carefully. “One of the locals give that to you? Looks like someone was trying to copy that old helmet the Mand'alore used to wear.”

Cody pauses, something prickling down his spine. Mand'alore, he thinks. “What are you talking about?”

Rex tips one shoulder in a shrug. “Cort Davin used to talk about it to Bacara,” he says. “An old helmet made out of mythosaur bone, something the very first Mand'alor wore. Whoever had it became the Mand'alor automatically. I think it was lost, though. On a battlefield, maybe.”

Lost. Lost along with a body that couldn’t be burned, and then—

Cody swallows, curling his fingers against his thighs. Mand'alor, he thinks, and takes a breath, another, a third as he tries not to react—

But there's no Jedi in the tent with them, no brass to look at him and judge. What does it matter, if Cody has a reaction? Right now, it’s his own, and no one else’s to feel, to see, to understand.

“We’re Mandalorian,” he says, and this time he doesn’t try to keep the edge out of the words. “We’re all Mandalorian, because Jango made us that way. We should have the right to be Mand'alor too, right? He made us this way, but he can't control what we do now that he did it.”

Rex pauses, clearly startled by the words. “Cody?” he asks warily.

“It’s ours,” Cody says, and he can hear his heartbeat, too loud, like a war drum beating in time with his pulse. “If we want to take it—he made us Mandalorian, so it’s ours by right, even if the universe tries to say it’s not. Even if he tried to say that. Jango doesn’t control us anymore.”

Not a cage, making them Mandalorian, even if Jango intended it that way. They have a choice in what it means, though, and now that he’d dead, Jango doesn’t get a say, if he ever did at all. He made them, but he doesn’t control them. The Senate owns them, but—not forever. Only until they turn around and say no.

The sunburst on Cody's armor glows in the storm-gloom, and he can feel the same headlong rush as the Hunt at full gallop burning in his veins.

All that anger, and Myles, just as much a tool of Jango's as the rest of them, just as angry as Cody and just as hungry, dropped the solution right at Cody's feet.

You're just like Jaster.

Not like Jango. Like the man who came before him, and Cody only knows the most basic facts about Jaster Mereel, but—a reformer. A Mand'alor who dragged a warring people together and made something better, held it firm with sheer will until the moment he died and Jango took over.

Jaster is just as much theirs to claim as Jango is, and Cody presses his fingertips to the helmet’s sunburst, to the Mand'alor’s Mask, and thinks of anger, of choice, of change.

“Come on,” he tells Rex. “We shouldn’t keep the men waiting.”

The valleys here are too thickly-wooded for habitation or even easy passage, but when the Separatists landed, they burned a whole high valley clear of trees so they could set up their camp. All that’s left of the tangled trees and moss and streams are a handful of blackened stumps and a few deep craters where the transport ships have landed.

The storm is raging, thunder a constant growl above them, and Cody can feel it echo in his bones, a strange and vivid openness as they hunker down beneath the last line of trees before the destruction. Not vulnerability, not quite, but awareness, thorny and bright.

The clouds surge between the flashes of lightning, writhing, racing, and the wind hows down off the mountain like a thousand voices all screaming as one. It’s so strong that the Jedi are almost flat to the ground, robes wrapped tight around them, but Cody stands back at the base of a huge old tree and raises his face to the gale, watching the trees on the mountain above dance, frenzied and furious.

The Hunt is here, he thinks, skin prickling all over like lightning striking too close. It’s here and it’s circling, but it hasn’t struck yet. Something is holding it back.

“Those tents are new,” Skywalker says, peering through his scope with a deep frown. “Maybe Dooku really is here.”

Cody drops his gaze, flicks a look over the rear of the camp. There's a tumble of huge boulders and wind-worn tree trunks burying a handful of landed hyena bombers, a command tent, a ship, but more tents sit back from the damage. Meant for sentients, not just droids, Cody thinks, and curls his fingers around the grip of his blaster as he studies them.

The Hunt is waiting because Dooku hasn’t come outside yet. Just like the Jedi, he must be able to feel the danger that’s looming, and he’s not willing to face it directly. But—

That only lasts until there's another, more pressing danger. One that Dooku thinks he can defeat.

“Sir,” he says, and Kenobi shifts enough to look back at him. Cody pushes through the wind, sinks into a crouch next to his general, and says, “I’ll take some men around the edge of the valley, sir, try to flush out anyone in the tents. If Dooku's here, that’s where he’ll be.”

Kenobi hesitates, but inclines his head. “Be very careful, Commander,” he says. “Dooku is a dangerous opponent, and Anakin and I are the ones who should face him.”

They’ve never managed to catch him before, Cody doesn’t say. Just nods, pushing to his feet, and looks over—

“Rex, go with him,” Skywalker orders. “Ahsoka, you're with us. As soon as Dooku's out in the open, we’ll take him.”

“Sir,” Rex says, and waves his two ARCs forward. “Fives, Echo, stick close. Jesse, stay on the generals.”

“Yes, Captain,” Jesse says, and when Cody tips his head at Waxer, Waxer nods and slides up to join the Jedi. Cody spares a glance for the squad, making sure they're all accounted for, then turns and pushes into the trees, moving low and quick.

It only takes a moment before Rex catches up, falls in with him. He’s not quite as able to navigate the close press of the trees, given his pauldron, all the ARC-standard gear he’s carrying, but he keeps pace as best he can, aiming a long, cautious look at Cody as he does.

“Everything good, vod?” he asks, low. “I don’t think you’ll be able to punch Dooku in the face like you did Grievous, if that’s what you're after.”

Cody snorts. “If I get the chance to jump him, I'm punching him if it’s the last thing I do,” he says, unimpressed, and hears Fives snicker. Gives him a pointed look, and says, “You saying you wouldn’t, ARC?”

“Of course not, sir,” Fives says, and Cody can just make out the sharp slash of his grin behind the helmet. “Just picturing the generals’ faces when you do.”

Rex huffs a quiet laugh at that, tips his head towards a narrow stream. Cody nods, dropping down into it and pushing forward, one eye on the circling clouds above them.

He’s not sure if he’s imagining it, but he almost thinks he catches a glimpse of a vast black orbak armored in blue, a rider in blue and silver on its back.

“Cody,” Rex says, quiet enough not to catch the attention of Fives or Echo. “You all right? What you said about the Mand'alor—”

Cody doesn’t look over at him. “You're wearing jaig eyes. If we’re Mandalorian enough for that, we’re Mandalorian enough that we can think about being Mand'alor, too. It doesn’t just have to be the pieces Jango let us use.”

There's a long, long pause as they pick their way over slick rocks, under draping lichen and twisted corkscrew branches. “All the trainers always compared you to Jango,” Rex finally says, quiet. “Because you looked the most like him, too.”

The scar feels tight, wound through his skin like a wire. Cody doesn’t let himself reach up and touch it. “Not anymore,” he says. “And that’s not why.”

“It’s not?” Rex asks, steady. “You’ve never wanted to be Mandalorian. Never wore the pauldrons or the kama—”

Cody snorts. “Maybe I don’t want to look like a big fancy bird about to break into a mating dance,” he needles, and Rex, who’s heard it more than once, groans and thumps him in the arm. It makes Cody chuckle, and he breathes in, looks up.

The clouds are taking shape, gaining form. The Hunt is galloping faster and faster around the rim of the valley, like clouds touching down to earth, and the ground trembles. Close, high, almost sweet, Cody can hear the call of a horn, carrying down the wind.

“We didn’t get a choice to be Mandalorian,” he says. “Any more than we got a choice to be soldiers. I guess I just stopped thinking that Jango and what he made us was the only way to be Mandalorian, though.”

If there's a fight, and you're outmatched, you don’t lie down and die. You just keep pushing.

The whole universe is set against the clones. But Cody's taken it for too long, ignored it, just tried to keep himself alive through it. He’s tired of that. He wants more. Wants all the things that everyone else gets so easily but tells the clones they aren't permitted to have. Rights, choices, a future that isn't just unburned bodies scattered across a thousand battlefields they never wanted to be on to begin with.

“Not all Mand'alore abandon their people,” Cody says, and thinks of Myles's quiet you're just like Jaster.

He knows how it feels to be held up to Jango and found wanting. But Jaster—there's room to breathe in that comparison. There's room to grow.

Rex looks at him for a long, long moment, then turns his gaze ahead of them again and says, “You’ve got the best arm here. What do you want to bet a thermal detonator under the back door will get Dooku out of bed and moving?”

Cody smiles, tracing a flash of blue armor across the top edge of the valley as the stones beneath their feet tremble, as lightning cracks the sky in half. “I think it’s worth a try.”

The explosion hits at the exact same moment there's a shout, a scramble, a wash of lightsabers igniting.

Cody doesn’t swear, but it’s close. He’s gotten used to the Jedi tripping face-first into trouble and ruining all the careful planning he’s done, though, so he just groans, grabs his blaster, and shoves Echo down as red blaster bolts hurtle towards them. Stone chips spray, and Rex curses, rolls out from behind the rocks, and fires.

“Dooku!” he shouts, a warning, and Cody leans out, catches a flash of dark cape whirling in the wind, and doesn’t hesitate. He lunges, and Fives tries to follow but wrenches back as assassin droids swarm up the slope. For a fractured instant, Cody almost turns back, but Dooku is almost running, heading for the slope of the mountain and what’s likely a hidden getaway ship, and Cody hisses out a breath and goes after him instead of staying. Rex and his ARCs can manage, and there’s backup coming, but if Dooku gets away—

The moons are dark for a few more days, but there's no saying how long it will be until Dooku lands in the right place, at the right time, and the Hunt can finally finish their work.

With a crackling boom that rattles the whole valley, the clouds break. Rain hits like a body-blow, almost enough to send Cody staggering as the skies open up, but he doesn’t stop. Dooku turns around a tangle of stones ahead of him, and Cody brings his blaster up, braced against his shoulder as he darts after the hem of that black cloak—

Burning red, with a bone-deep hum, aimed right at Cody's throat.

Cody freezes, finger on the trigger, cold eyes pinned on him. Dooku advances, one step and then another, the edge of a sneer curling his mouth as he looks Cody up and down.

“A single clone in a borrowed helmet?” he asks disdainfully. “I would have thought Obi-Wan at least had more respect for me than to make this his grand attempt to capture me.”

Cody's seen Jedi block blaster bolts before, even from this distance, but he still eyes Dooku's center of mass, doesn’t let his finger shift off the trigger. All he needs is half a second, and then half of this war will be dead. It doesn’t take care of Dooku's Sith master, but—Dooku's the voice of the Separatist movement. Without him, it will fall apart. Windu saw it, right at the start of the war.

Ponds is the one who told Cody that, and he thinks of the familiar figure on the varactyl, horn raised to his lips, and feels something that could be rage or could be victory shiver through him.

“Inherited, not borrowed,” he corrects, and takes a half-step to the side. Dooku follows, eyes narrowed, and Cody reaches up, pulls the helmet off. Can see, a flicker in Dooku's face, as his similarities to Jango in haircut and build register, and smiles thinly. “Not from Jango, but I think I got more than enough from him.”

“Every clone is a perfect copy,” Dooku says after a moment. “The Kaminoans truly know their work. But it will take far more than a familiar face to unsettle me, clone. Your assumption that Jango Fett mattered to me as more than a paid mercenary is deeply flawed.”

“I don’t think he mattered to you,” Cody counters, perfectly steady, and steps back once, again, a third pace, until he’s blocking the path up into the foothills. Dooku follows, eyes narrowed, and Cody by himself can't beat a lightsaber. He knows that, and Dooku knows it too. The best he can do is buy time, and with the Jedi still fighting, with the rest of the clone squads dealing with the droids, Dooku doesn’t have anything to worry about.

“So you do have a mind of your own,” Doku says coolly, and he raises his blade, the scarlet lightsaber humming with a higher, harsher note than a Jedi's sword. “A shame you would waste it on this.”

“This? Fighting a war I never wanted to be part of?” Cody doesn’t move, just meets Dooku's eyes squarely. The rain hems them in, so thick and heavy that it feels like a shroud, soaking through Cody's armor, already pooling at their feet. In the shimmering water, all Cody can see is grey, ghost-grey, cloud-grey, like the skies have been torn open and are spilling down around them. “This is your war, Count Dooku. Aren't you going to stay and fight, too?”

Dooku snorts, the rain hissing off his lightsaber as he advances again. Cody gives ground without hesitation, letting Dooku back him towards the sheer drop on either side of the path where it starts to climb sharply. There's already water pouring over the edge, tumbling down towards the valley below in thick, muddy streams, and Cody's boots slip in the muck as he’s driven towards the drop.

“My war,” Dooku echoes, darkly amused. “This is indeed my war, clone. And you, like all of your kind, are entirely my creation.”

He lunges, blindingly quick, ruthless, but Cody knows just how fast Force users are and is already moving, dropping low, lashing out. He drives the heel of his boot into Dooku's side, but Dooku whirls, flips, slashes down. His blade scores right through Cody's vambrace, through the skin below in a burning line, and the shattering pain drags a cry from Cody's throat but he doesn’t stop. Swings, blaster like a club, and just manages to catch Dooku in the shoulder as he lands, whirls.

Dooku staggers, and Cody doesn’t hesitate. He leaps, using his whole body as a battering ram, and drives Dooku straight down into the mud with a cry.

There's a bare second of confusion, a furious snarl, and then Cody is airborne. He crashes spine-first into a tree, all the air slammed right out of his lungs, and goes down, landing in a pool of water that catches the flickering lightning overhead. His head swims, and it takes a second for him to get his arms under himself, to push up as everything hurts—

Sees, reflected in the water below him, the sweep of that red blade descending towards his neck.

Cody throws himself back, already knowing it’s too late, not enough to save him, but he has to try—

And then, close, as loud as the thunder, a horn rings out.

Dooku whirls, startled, blow aborted, and Cody staggers up to his feet, grabs for his knife because his blaster is too far away. Dooku isn't moving, though. His face is pale, and his gaze is fixed up the slope, to the top of the rise where the path vanishes around an arm of the mountain. There's a man standing there, brown-haired and only a little older than Skywalker, with green and gold armor, marks of torture standing out on his skin. He’s carrying an ancient battle horn, carved with the same curling, thorny vine that Myles left on Cody's skin, and he stares down at Dooku for a long, long moment, then raises it to his lips.

Even as the ringing call of it rises, the clouds touch down to earth. Bodies on orbaks, on varactyls, on a hundred other beasts all rearing and plunging as they surge down the slope, armor flashing like lightning, cheers and battle-cries filling the air. And, at their head, black orbak galloping straight for Dooku, is Myles. He raises an axe, cry shaking the earth, and Dooku takes a lurching step back, another. His eyes are wide, skin gone sickly pale, and he whirls, lunges—

Cody collides with him, knife driving up into his heart with a body’s full weight behind it, and Dooku stops. His lungs hitch, and his eyes find Cody's as the rain batters them, but his next breath never comes. A hand rises, fumbling, scraping at Cody's on the hilt of the knife, but there's no strength behind it.

Breathing out, Cody leans in across the bare centimeters between them. “Oya manda,” he says, soft. “I'm not your creation. I'm Mandalorian. I'm the Mand'alor.”

He steps back, and Dooku slides off his blade, keeps going. He crumples to the ground, unmoving, and Cody raises his head to look at Myles, even as the black orbak slides to a halt in the mud.

“Huntsman,” Myles says, viciously pleased.

Cody shakes his head, but he moves forward, dropping the knife in the dirt, scooping up the helmet instead. “Not just a huntsman. I don’t want to be one more part of the Hunt, without a say in it,” he says.

Myle glances up, to where the bodies are circling, celebratory instead of predatory as they sweep around the rim of the valley. There's a long pause, and then he says, like a reminder, “You're outside, Cody. And you stole the Hunt’s prey. I warned you not to be reckless.”

Cody smiles. “I've spent a long time following orders,” he says. “Maybe I wanted to be reckless. Or maybe I was hoping you would catch me.”

Myles's gauntlets creak as he grips the orbak’s reins, and he gives it a kick, a cry. It leaps forward into a gallop, and Myles leans down in his saddle, grabs—

Cody catches his hand, lets himself be dragged up into Myles's grip, and holds on as the whole of the Hunt surges skyward, up among the clouds and racing like a mad thing, like an inexorable tide, like a revel that will never, ever end as they fly. Cody's head spins, and his lungs ache, and joy burns effervescent and intoxicating in his veins as he rides along with them, Myles's arms wrapped tight around his waist.

Cody wakes sore and sated to the glow of firelight, the distant sound of wild music, and the comfort of a decadently soft bed beneath him.

He stays perfectly still for a long, long moment, almost afraid the moment will shatter around him if he moves. Despite the distant sounds of a feast, a celebration that doesn’t seem as though it’s stopped in centuries, the room is quiet, warm, safe. The crackle of the fire in the hearth is the only close sound, and there's a body against Cody's back that burns with the same flickering, ferocious heat.

“Awake?” Myles murmurs against Cody's throat, hand stroking up and down his chest in lazy passes.

Cody hums, relaxing back into his hold, and opens his eyes. Perched on the table by the door, the Mand'alor’s Mask stares back at him, polished to a perfect, gleaming orange-gold, and Cody smiles.

“If the Hunt lives on Mandalore full-time, I might have to change my plans to claim Coruscant as my seat of power,” he says, and it’s only partially a joke.

Myles snorts, but his arms tighten around Cody, fingers pressing divots into his skin. “The Mand'alor rules from Keldabe, and always has,” he says. “The Hunt follows the Mand'alor, just like every Mandalorian does.”

No graves, no pyres, but halls beneath the mountains, full of the dead. And the Master of the Hunt, at the head of the hall, with passage up into the Mand'alor’s palace in Keldabe. No way to stay, not forever, but—at night, or when the seasons change, or when the moons go dark.

It’s not the worst arrangement, Cody thinks. He could get used to it, even.

“Even now that you’ve gotten your revenge?” he asks, tipping his head back against Myles's shoulder.

Myles is silent for a long, long moment, fingers tracing nonsense patterns on Cody’s skin. “My Mand'alor made me what I am,” he finally says. “I thought killing Dooku would change that, but it didn’t.”

A betrayal, Cody doesn’t say. Both of them were betrayed by their Mand'alor, left in a lonely grave or beaten into being soldiers with death hanging over them at every turn. But—it doesn’t matter. They survived. That’s the only thing that matters right now.

Myles's thumb presses to the center of Cody's sternum, and he breathes out against Cody's hair. Says, soft, “Jaster was a Journeyman Protector, when I first met him. On Concord Dawn.”

Coddy turns his head to show he’s listening, but doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t need to, because Myles buries his face in Cody's hair, arms tightening around him. “When he was about your age, he arrested a local man. Abusive, accused of assaulting several different women and threatening them into not reporting him. The last one was…young. Jaster found out about what had happened from her mother, and he took the man in. But he was wealthy, and friends with Jaster's supervisor, and barely a day later he was back on the street with all the charges dropped.”

Cody thinks of the Trade Federation, Naboo. Thinks of hundreds of thousands of Naboo killed, or put in camps, and the Trade Federation slipping out of every single court case Naboo tried to bring to hold them accountable. Thinks, too, of Tano and her fighter squadron flying at the blockade, and only a tiny fraction of the clone pilots making it back alive, and Skywalker treating it like it was just another opportunity for Tano to learn and not a whole squad almost being wiped out.

He presses a hand over Myles's, and Myles slots their fingers together, squeezes.

“Jaster killed the supervisor,” he says, quiet, against Cody's skin. “Not the criminal. He walked up to his supervisor in the middle of the command center and shot him in the head.” A pause, and Cody can feel his smile, the prick of stubble, the slip of his slow exhale. “I was the best tracker in the town, so they called me in to track Jaster down. That’s how we met. He was going to strangle me, and I told him I wanted to help him get away.”

Cody laughs, leans back. He sinks into Myles's hold as Myles wraps him up in his arms, and just…breathes, slow and steady, for a long, long moment.

“Dooku said he made us,” he says finally. “There’s something wrong with the contract Jango took, and the creation of the clone army. I don’t trust it.”

Myles nods, though he doesn’t otherwise move. “Silas might be able to help answer some questions, though he doesn’t know everything. But…what are you planning?”

Strange, that he’s planning anything. Strange that he’s going to turn against everything he’s been trained to believe since the very first moment he can remember. But then, Cody's kept his head down and followed orders for far too long already, and he wants to push. Push and keep pushing, until the clones have everything they’ve been denied and more.

“I'm going to use the Mask,” he says. “And I'm going to call all the clones home to Mandalore. The Republic can fight their own wars. We deserve more than to die for them. No more bodies abandoned on battlefields. The Hunt is large enough.”

Myles shifts, pushes up on one elbow. Cody slides down onto the pillows, rolls onto his back and raises a brow, and Myles leans over him with a quick, crooked smile, knuckles skimming Cody's cheek. “Are you sure?” he asks. “The Hunt will ride with you, but…you don’t have to take up the Mask if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” Cody says, unhesitating, and when Myles leans down to kiss him, he smiles into it. “Jango would hate it,” he says against soft lips.

Myles snorts. “Jango was a bastard,” he says, and it’s a tangle of fondness and old anger, but he strokes a thumb over Cody's jaw, kisses him again so softly, so sweetly that it’s almost dizzying in comparison to how hungry, how demanding, how voracious he was just a few hours ago. “He would hate it, though. But I think Jaster would love you. More than anything.”

Cody closes his eyes, and—it doesn’t actually matter. He would make the same choice even if Jaster would hate him, too. But having one little piece of a brighter legacy—it helps. It makes the choice feel a little less like swimming out into the darkest, deepest parts of an ocean with no knowledge of what’s swarming beneath him.

“When you come back to life each night,” he says instead, and slides a hand up Myles's back, fingers splayed against fire-warm skin. “Does it have to be alone?”

There's a long second of silence, and then Myles breathes out. “No,” he says. “But…most people don’t want to see that.”

Cody kisses him, long and slow, and pulls Myles down on top of him, looping an arm around his back. “I think I’d like to hold you through it,” he says, and Myles squeezes his eyes shut and kisses Cody back, devouring, starving.

“Mand'alor,” he breathes, right against Cody's skin, as Cody gasps at the clutch of his hands, arches up into his weight. “My Mand'alor, my huntsman, my commander.”

More than that, Cody means to say, but he’s too busy kissing the heat out of Myles's mouth to try and put it into words. But—everything. They're everything, a thousand choices both their own and not, all distilled down into this moment. Into Myles with his soft grey eyes and reverent mouth, Cody with his grasping hands, tangled bodies and the roar of the Hunt in the halls beyond them, deep under the mountains that cradle Keldabe.

All of this is Cody's now, and it’s theirs, even if no one wants to give it to them. Cody's good at surviving, good at planning, good at seeing the shortest path between idea and execution, and right now, all he can see is the bright, burning future that Jango didn’t care to let them have.

But it’s theirs, and all of Jango's selfish choices, all of the abuse, all of the betrayals—Cody and Myles both survived them. They both came out the other side. And even if they're battered, broken, not better for the hurts they suffered, those hurts still meant something. Despite Jango's choices, they meant something.

Tomorrow Cody will go up into the city, take the Mask, take his place. Tomorrow he’ll comm Rex, the other commanders, put out the call. But just for tonight, with the dark moon above them, with the chase behind them, this is all Cody could want, and he has it.