Chapter Text
Anakin lost things all the time, throughout his teenage years. Padmé did, too. There was a regular stream of packages between Naboo and Coruscant to return various misplaced items. They both had the easy certainty of people who knew that, no matter where they put something down, it would turn up eventually, in the hands of their soulmate.
“I will tie that boy’s lightsaber to his hand, if I have to,” Obi-Wan said, after the sixth time in seven years that it had been returned from Naboo, compliments of the Queen.
Quinlan patted his shoulder sympathetically. “I’m sure he’s only a little more trouble than Aayla was at that age, if you factor in everything. At least Anakin hasn’t discovered boys yet.”
“And Aayla doesn’t have a soulmate. I’m sure it all balances out.”
“Didn’t,” Quinlan corrected, almost absentmindedly.
The interruption caught Obi-Wan off guard. “I’m sorry?”
“Aayla didn’t have a soulmate when she was my padawan. She does, now. As of six months ago, actually.”
“Oh?” That was new. It was rare for soulmates to have such a wide age gap as this indicated. Since the average person started losing things to their soulmate in the crib, perhaps a few years later for cultures that didn’t give babies anything to lose, Aayla’s soulmate must have been at least a decade younger than her, more likely two.
“Mm. They’ve lost a pair of underpants and a bar of soap so far, but she’s sure.”
Something in Obi-Wan’s chest had grown tight. “Probably platonic, then. If they’re so much younger than her.”
Quinlan shrugged. “You would think that, wouldn’t you? But the size of the underwear suggests a human or near-human adult. It was almost like a miracle from the Force. She was knighted, and a week later she was finding strange underwear on her bed.”
“Whereas you didn’t need any help from the Force to find strange underwear on your bed after you were knighted.”
He gave Obi-Wan a playful shove, but something in his expression grew more serious. “If you need someone to talk to Anakin about being a Jedi with a close soulmate, I’m not really your man.” Quinlan’s soulmate had died in a speeder accident as a child. “But I could ask Tholme to talk to him. Him and Master Saa do alright.”
Obi-Wan shook his head. “It’s alright. He’ll be alright. Padmé has a good head on her shoulders. I can tell that by the quality of the political treatises that wind up in my couch cushions.”
Quin smiled at him. “Well, if Aayla needs any advice, maybe I can send her to Anakin. He probably went through all the stages of a normal soulmate identification.”
Actually, from what Obi-Wan knew, Anakin’s childhood had mostly been marked by having the expensive, fancy things that Padmé lost stolen by the people who enslaved him. But he had good enough sense not to share those too-private details with Quinlan. “Force preserve us from Anakin trying to give anyone advice. Send her on to Tholme.”
--
And so the years passed. Some people marked the passage of time in inadvertent gifts from their loved ones. Some people marked it in years since those gifts stopped. Obi-Wan marked it in days until Padmé would arrive on Coruscant to assume her seat as Senator. Every pilot flying the Naboo-Coruscant route was going to have to tighten their belts with Anakin and Padmé on the same world again.
“To the election of Senator Amidala, and the removal of one of my friend’s many worries,” Bant said, and raised her glass to him.
“Don’t worry,” Obi-Wan returned, “I’m sure Anakin will find plenty of new and exciting things for me to worry about soon enough.”
He wished, sometimes, that Bant could have been his soulmate, the way she and Garen shared a platonic bond. But other times, the whole business of having a soulmate, the losing and the finding, seemed a terrible amount of bother. It wasn’t even happening to Obi-Wan, and it bothered him.
But of course, that was before, true to his word, he found himself saddled with a pile of new and exciting worries in the shape of a galaxy-wide civil war. Compared to that, Anakin and Padmé’s penchant for losing things seemed like a rather trivial matter.
--
Lots of clones had soulmates. The trouble was telling what, exactly, belonged to whose soulmate. If you found something in your bunk, sure, it was probably from your soulmate. But if you found something in the ‘freshers, or in the hallway, or in a training room? It was impossible to know whether it was yours or someone else’s, because there was always, always a vod around.
Sometimes, though, it was impossible to miss. “Oh no,” Bly said, voice growing faint, “oh no, she didn’t.”
“She didn’t what?” Fox asked, coming up on his knees to stick his head over Bly’s bunk. Upon seeing whatever it was that Bly was seeing, he echoed, “oh no, she did.”
Cody finally looked up from his training manual. Bly’s face and ears had flushed dark and he had his head buried in his hands.
“His soulmate left him a note,” Fox announced, delighted in a mischievous way that meant an opportunity for teasing or gossip had arisen.
Bly was one of the rare clones who everyone was completely certain had a soulmate. She seemed to lose a decent amount of things, and had since they were children. But she’d never managed to lose something with real information on it before.
“She lost some flimsi?”
Fox shook his head. “No. She stitched words into her underwear. Into every single pair of her underwear, presumably, because you can’t lose something on purpose, you have to wait and lose it by accident.”
“Osik. She didn’t.”
Bly, mumbling into his hands, said, “it gets worse. She says that she didn’t even know she had a soulmate until I lost my underwear three months ago. I guess before that… everything else I had to lose had already been hers to begin with.”
It was hard to lose anything when you didn’t own anything to begin with. The only things that most clones could really call theirs were either part of their bodies – tattoos, piercings – or gifts from their soulmates.
“Does she say anything about herself?”
Bly shook his head. “No. Probably a risk to personal safety to lose stuff with real information. Just that… she looks forward to meeting me.”
For the moment, Bly seemed too embarrassed by the fact that his soulmate was teasing him to realize that his vode were going to tease him about this for the rest of his natural life. It was a good thing he already had a name, or they probably all would have called him ‘Pants’. Actually, kriff it, Cody might call him ‘Pants’ anyways. It really was just too good an opportunity to pass up.
And that was how it was, for years. It became obvious who had a soulmate outside – Bly, Wolffe, Fox – and who had a vod for a soulmate – Waxer and Boil, for two – and who either didn’t have one, or didn’t have one they could identify – Cody, for one – and as they trained, and worked, and kept their heads down, they tried not to think about that.
Cody found some things, over the years, but never in his bunk. He found robes in the ‘fresher and a weird rock in the weapons room and a rather lovely blue and silver flower, which he was sad to give up to the collection of unidentified-soulmate-stuff. Once or twice he found things that definitely belonged to other people’s soulmates, a sock with a note on it for Bly and a binder full of flimsi about hyperspace trade protocols for Fox. That one was exciting because it had a few dozen names on the inside cover, one of whom might, possibly, be Fox’s soulmate.
And then the Jedi finally showed up to collect them, and Geonosis happened. Cody didn’t go. He stayed on Kamino and waited, knowing that somewhere out there in the universe, his vode were dying.
Still, in spite of his remaining on Kamino, something very odd did happen to Cody. Once, not long after everyone left, he was walking the halls and, at the exact same moment, him and a vod’e who was too young to fight – 6, maybe – spotted a flash of silver in a corner.
“Hey!” Said the vod, and grabbed the object, pulling it forth. “Woah.”
Suddenly, he was holding a beam of light. Cody had never seen it before and he knew exactly what it was.
“Turn that off, immediately!” The kid looked disappointed, but did as he ordered. “Come on, vod’ika. We’ll turn this in to collections.”
“But vod! It’s probably one of ours, right?”
Cody’s heart twisted. “And if you find anything else obviously belonging to the same person, you can go back and claim it. Protocol’s protocol.”
Someone here had a soulmate who was a Jedi. Cody, who was fairly certain he didn’t even have a soulmate, knew it wasn’t him.
--
“I have a gift for you, Obi-Wan,” Shaak Ti said, holding out to him a drawstring bag with the very familiar dimensions of a lightsaber.
“I’m sorry?”
She offered him a smile. “I’m not your soulmate, don’t worry. The cadets on Kamino have a policy of collecting soulmate objects when they aren’t clear whose soulmate it’s from. Usually these things sit in storage until a clone figures out that it belongs to their soulmate, or until it returns itself to the original soulmate. It’s really quite amazing, and I don’t think they need any intervention from us to help figure it out. I liberated this one because it didn’t need to sit in storage; I thought you might want it back.”
He already knew what it was before he drew from the bag a lightsaber that he’d carried for nearly a decade. A weapon he’d last seen not on Kamino, but on Geonosis.
“Shaak…”
Her expression softened. “Congratulations, Obi-Wan. You have a soulmate. If it makes you feel better, I saw one of Plo’s drinking straws in there too, but I think I’ll leave that for him and his soulmate to figure out.”
Obi-Wan clutched the familiar hilt in his hand, and felt everything he’d ever believed about himself shatter around him.
He would have liked to talk to Quinlan about it, or Bant and Garen, or maybe even to Aayla, who was in a very similar position but had known about it for much longer. But there was a war on, and Obi-Wan didn’t get to choose who he was going to see. In the end, he gritted his teeth, and went to Anakin.
To his credit, his padawan didn’t laugh at him. There was a green silk scarf and a gold bracelet sitting on his bedside table, and as Obi-Wan spoke, he reached over and fidgeted with the scarf.
“What am I going to do now?”
Anakin wove the scarf between his metal fingers. “Take up jar’kai?”
“Anakin!”
His padawan huffed a small laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s just… if anyone in the galaxy deserved this sort of miracle, it’s you, Master. All those years of teasing me for having Padmé find my lightsaber, and here you are. With two lightsabers to your name.” When Obi-Wan didn’t respond to the jab, he added, “this is a good thing, Master. Really.”
“I had become rather used to knowing I didn’t have a soulmate.”
“Of course you did,” Anakin said, uncharacteristically sensible. “Who wouldn’t? But now you know that you do. And they’ll make you happy. Meeting Padmé was the best thing in the galaxy.”
Obi-Wan thought of Satine, whose soulmate had once tried to kill her for the restoration of traditional Mandalore. “It’s never a sure thing.”
He leant forward on his knees, wrapping the scarf around his wrist in such a way that it covered the line between flesh and metal. “Of course it isn’t sure. Nothing is ever sure. But look… I thought that Padmé would resent me, for being her soulmate. Because she’s basically the most amazing person ever and she lost so many things that were so valuable and I couldn’t hold on to any of them for her. Because that’s what soulmates are supposed to do, right? Hold on to the things you lose. I failed that. But she didn’t resent me. She didn’t resent me, because she’s my soulmate and sometimes even if everything goes wrong, it can work out.”
“But should it? The power dynamics implicit in having a clone for a soulmate…”
Anakin shrugged. “So maybe it’s platonic. Or it isn’t. Just… do what regular people do when they know they have a soulmate. Learn to stop counting your belongings and trust that everything will turn up eventually.”
--
Cody’s general didn’t have a soulmate. This was obvious by the sheer amount of lost property of his that managed to turn up in Cody’s possession. Usually, as it happened, in the middle of battles. Cody had returned his lightsaber – not the same one as he’d found on Kamino – what felt like a dozen times, and his robe at least twice as often.
“Ah, thank you Cody,” General Kenobi said, plucking the lightsaber out of his hand. “Who found it this time?”
The answer had been Waxer once, Rex once, and Boil twice, but this time, like most times, “me again, sir.”
Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at him. “How many is that now, Commander?”
Cody forced himself to meet his eyes. “Too many, General.”
The expression on his General’s face was a mystery, utterly unreadable. “Cody–”
Both of their comms went off at once, and the conversation was forgotten about.
--
“You teased me for six times in seven years,” Anakin said, perched on the wing of his personal fighter. “How many is that now, Master? Six times in seven months? And you’re still not sure?”
“Shut up, Anakin.”
But the truth was, Anakin was right. The evidence piled up and up, but Obi-Wan never found a single thing of Cody’s – or of anyone else’s – in return. He was increasingly starting to wonder if it were possible for him to be Cody’s, but for Cody not to be his.
--
Rex pounded his fist on the table hard, once, to get everyone’s attention. As all of 79’s turned to him, he said, “Come on, vode. The floor is Fox’s, for now.”
Fox set his glass down on the bar and stood. “Thank you, Rex. Now, it’s a rare occasion these days that all of us are in the same room together, even if some of us had to be here by holocomm.” He raised a glass to Wolffe, who nodded. “But this is a rare occasion in general. And it’s not the only thing ‘in General’.” Bly already had his head in his hands, which was an excellent sign of how the evening was going. “I was asked to give this speech because I was a witness to the excellent moment when our very own brother, Pants, was given that very name.”
And so Fox told the story, Bly sinking lower and lower in his seat as he went, and the crowd getting more and more rowdy.
“And now, siblings-mine, our dear, shame-faced, awkward brother, is marrying this very woman. Tomorrow! Assuming he doesn’t drop dead right here in front of us.”
“I have a sneaking suspicion,” a too-familiar voice cut in from the doorway, “that Aayla would prefer it if he didn’t.”
The entire bar, nearly as one, turned to stare at General Kenobi and General Vos in the doorway. Vos raised a hand and offered them all a single, sarcastic wave.
Obi-Wan continued, “good evening, gentlemen. Welcome to the portion of the evening where, as is twi’lek tradition, the bride’s family kidnaps the groom.”
One of Bly’s men put his hand up. “Sir, are we supposed to resist this kidnapping?”
Vos laughed. “No, Pitch. Not unless he’s marrying her against his will. It’s just considered good luck for one soulmate to ‘find’ the other before the wedding. You know, that old legend where if you end up losing yourself, your soulmate will find you. All very silly, very romantic.”
Fox raised his glass. “To Commander Bly “Pants” Secura.”
Cody raised his glass, along with his brothers, and echoed the toast. General Vos dragged Bly off, but, to Cody’s surprise, General Kenobi stayed and ordered a drink. He sat with Cody, Fox, and Wolffe’s hologram. Rex, who’d been with them, wandered off to chat with Kix about something.
“So,” the General asked, tone friendly and light, “Bly’s known about Aayla for a long time.”
Everyone relaxed when they realized he wasn’t here to talk about the war. “Yeah,” Fox said, “as long as any of us can remember, anyways. It was hard to tell what stuff belonged to which brother, sometimes, but with Bly it was always pretty distinct, and she lost a good amount of stuff. More than my soulmate does. I can never figure out what’s theirs any more, working at the Senate. I find documents and papers all the time, just like I always did, but now they’re usually supposed to be there.”
“I remember when Aayla first found something of Bly’s,” the General said, leaning back in his seat in a way that made Cody painfully aware of how attractive he was. He wished, sometimes, that the lightsaber he’d found on Kamino was the General’s. But it wasn’t. He’d found General Kenobi’s lightsaber so many times and it was not the one he’d found on Kamino.
“That must have been a shock for her,” Wolffe said, rather mildly.
The General nodded. “It was. For all of us. There have been an unusually high number of Jedi in the temple in the last forty years or so who never had soulmates, even as children. The general consensus among us was that we were merely unlucky, but, well, it turns out all of us were rather luckier than we knew.”
“Us?” Cody found himself asking, hoping and not hoping all at once. He had no evidence that he even had a soulmate, but he thought about that lightsaber he’d found, all those months ago in that hallway on Kamino. Surely, if Obi-Wan named the Jedi who had vode for soulmates, the owner of that blade would be on the list. They would be. And if anything Cody had ever found belonged to his soulmate, he was sure it was that.
The General smiled. “At least a dozen Jedi, all told, although I haven’t seen confirmation that changed for everyone. It did for Aayla, and Master Koon.” Everyone looked rather pointedly at Wolffe. “And myself, of course.”
All eyes were on him, Cody’s heart was somewhere lodged in his throat and he found himself forced to speak past it. “I didn’t know you had a vod for a soulmate, sir.”
He looked rather rueful. “Yes, well. I didn’t know either, for many years. Whoever it is is the most meticulous person I’ve ever met. I haven’t found a single thing of theirs that I’m aware of. Not once.”
“That’s a problem for all of us, Sir,” Waxer said, dropping into the seat Rex had vacated. Boil stood at his shoulder. “We don’t have a lot of things to lose.” Then he frowned. “Hang on, if they never lose anything, how do you know they’re a vod?”
General Kenobi smiled. “Something I lost was returned to me. After more than three decades of complete silence, I’m sure you can imagine how surprised I was to have a lightsaber I’d lost on Geonosis returned to me from Kamino.”
A deathly quiet swept over the room as everyone who’d been eavesdropping on their conversation – which was most of the bar, in fact – turned to look at Cody. They all knew the story. Everyone had been intrigued by a clone finding a lightsaber during the battle of Geonosis. Popular assumption, until General Ti had claimed it from storage, had been that whoever it belonged to was dead. Cody hadn’t allowed himself to believe it. Couldn’t allow himself to believe it of the one thing that had felt so utterly and completely his.
Once more, he made himself speak. “That lightsaber, Sir?”
Obi-Wan glanced down at the blade on his hip. “No. I’d already made this one by the time the other was returned to me, and it felt… wrong, in some way to pick it up again. Perhaps I’m saving it for a rainy day, so to speak.”
“You lose this lightsaber enough that it’s probably best you have a backup.”
Cody’s throat was so dry. He took a sip of his drink but since it was alcoholic it didn’t really help. The General had to have noticed how oppressively quiet the room around them had become.
General Kenobi leaned forward, brilliant eyes fixed on Cody with the same intensity he gave to Ventress or any of their other foes. He was utterly terrifying like this, and utterly wonderful, too. “And yet it always finds its way back to me, somehow.”
Cody was going to die, right there and then. He was such a complete and total idiot. How many times had he handed that blade back to its rightful owner? How many times?
“Get a room you two,” Wolffe said, and the tension in the room broke, just like that, as everyone started to laugh. Against the backdrop of vode laughing, Cody found, suddenly, that General Kenobi’s hand was in his, and he was being pulled to his feet.
“Is this another kidnapping, sir?” Waxer called, as they fled the bar together.
“He’ll be returned to you in one piece,” Obi-Wan promised, and then he dragged Cody out into the night.
--
“I was right, Master! You owe me so much for this.”
Obi-Wan grabbed Cody’s blaster from the ground and fired the first shot directly into the chest of the droid in front of him.
“Now is not the time, Anakin!”
There was a gold bracelet around Anakin’s wrist that seemed a little too tight even on the loosest setting. The light glinted off of it as he spun his lightsaber artfully through a row of droids. “Maybe a double date?”
“Not ever, Anakin.”
--
That was the wrong lightsaber, Cody realized, abruptly. Maul hadn’t noticed that Obi-Wan was holding the wrong lightsaber, but Cody knew both blades well enough to tell the difference, even at this distance. It was his old one, the one he’d lost on Geonosis. The question was: why?
You couldn’t lose things on purpose. That was one of the essential rules of soulmates. But Obi-Wan had found it very easy to lose his lightsaber in battle a dozen times before. Why not now, when it would be useful?
Come on, Cody thought, come on.
He felt a familiar cylinder pressed against the side of his boot, and nudged the Duchess of Mandalore, his co-hostage, with his shoulder. Fortunately for all three of them, she was a perceptive woman who, for all her peaceful ways, had seen a great deal of war and violence. Critically, unlike Cody, her hands had been cuffed in front of her
“Ah!” The Duchess exclaimed, dramatically, and collapsed to the ground, covering the lightsaber with her body.
“Get up,” Maul commanded, and from the look of sudden pain that crossed her face, he struck her in the force. Obi-Wan started forward, but stopped as Cody met his eyes and shook his head once, ‘no’.
“I’m getting up,” she said, rather weakly, and, the very instant Maul turned around, the Duchess stabbed him in the back.
--
They arrived back on Coruscant, after the end of the war, to a scene of complete and utter chaos. Four Jedi Masters were critically wounded, though all were expected to live. The Chancellor of the Republic was dead, and he’d been a Sith. Anakin Skywalker had achieved a miracle previously heard of only in fiction. Nobody would have believed the story, if Master Windu hadn’t testified to the fact when they pulled him out of his bacta tank.
“The Chancellor opened his mouth,” Windu said, “and Skywalker vanished. Completely vanished. He showed up again half an hour later with Amidala in tow.”
“I’m sure Qui-Gon would have something very smug to say about the Chosen One, right now.”
Windu grimaced, and his left hand spasmed. The lightning had done terrible things to his nervous system, before he’d killed the Sith. “He’s already being smug for himself; you don’t have to do it for him.”
--
What happened to Skywalker would almost have been funny, if the idea of him having quite literally lost himself wasn’t so existentially terrifying.
“Do you think that could really happen to a… normal person? I mean, to a non-Jedi?”
Obi-Wan huffed a laugh, and leaned into the way Cody was carding fingers through his hair. “You don’t need to pretend Anakin is a normal person, even for a Jedi. He never has been, and his relationship with Padmé has always been unusually close. They both lose things very easily, and have since they were children. A particular miracle, given Anakin’s circumstances. Padmé’s been finding wires and bolts in her dress-pockets since she was ten.”
Cody wasn’t good at losing things, even now, knowing they’d always come to Obi-Wan, eventually. But Bly was, and Wolffe was certainly better than Cody, if not so easy in his happiness as Bly. “Could it happen to someone else who had a Jedi for a soulmate?”
Obi-Wan closed his eyes, pressed closer to Cody. “I doubt it. Anakin is uniquely powerful, he and Padmé are uniquely connected, but also… it is a rare thing to lose yourself so completely and totally as Anakin did in that moment. It must have happened to some fortunate Jedi before. The stories must have come from somewhere. But I hope, very much, that it never happens to anyone ever again. To be so totally absent from yourself that you could vanish…”
It was an awful thing to contemplate. Cody couldn’t even regularly lose his socks to Obi-Wan, let alone lose his entire person.
“Will he be okay?”
“I very much hope so. He will, I suspect, need a great amount of support. From Padmé most of all, but also from me, and from Rex and Ahsoka, if Satine will deign to return them to us.”
Cody was fairly certain his little brother was having an affair with the Duchess of Mandalore. “They’ll both be back in a heartbeat, if Anakin asks.”
“I think Satine has been good for Ahsoka, after what Barriss did to her. It seems a shame to break them up, now.”
It was a terrible thing, to be betrayed by your soulmate. Guidance on that was something neither Anakin nor Obi-Wan could have given her. “Something tells me that she and Rex will always be welcome on Mandalore, if they’d like.”
“Oh, Rex in particular,” Obi-Wan teased, amusement colouring his voice.
“So you picked up on that too.”
“I’ve known Satine for longer than you’ve been alive, you know. It was rather obvious.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you know exactly what she looks like when she’s falling for someone.”
Obi-Wan laughed, and turned around to kiss him on the lips. “They’re all going to be alright, you know. I really do believe that.”
Cody kissed him back before replying. “I do too.”
--
A year and a half later, Obi-Wan found a gold ring inside his boot. It was impossible to say whether it had turned up there by accident or on purpose.