Chapter Text
CC-2224 has always been fighting.
For as long as he can remember, that’s all there’s really been. He eats, sleeps, and fights when ordered to, and there’s nothing else. No comfort, and no rest other than what’s necessary for his continued function. There’s always some rebellion or another that the Empire needs crushed, or a Jedi that needs hunting down. Even if a small whisper in the back of his mind hisses in denial at his actions, he obeys his orders. Good soldiers follow orders after all.
But when death comes for him at the end of a red bladed saber, and CC-2224 finally remembers what else there was before this monotonous routine, he stops fighting for the first time in his life and simply allows death to take him. He deserves it. He closes his eyes and uses his final moments to pray to the manda, to the force, to whatever god that may be listening to a soulless being like the one he’s become, that he can be with his vode again, wherever it is they may go. If they’re marching on, or finding peace in the force like the Jedi would speak of, he wants to be with them.
The Jedi.
CC-2224– Cody, hates himself in the final moments where he remembers. Loathes what he was forced to become, what he did. What they all did to the only people who treated them like real living beings, the ones who fought alongside them, as forced into the manufactured war as the clones themselves were.
He regrets the things he did for the Empire, wondering why he suddenly lost all that he was and finally became the flesh-droid he and his vode had long despised being called. He sees all the faces of those he killed. Human. Alien. Man. Woman. Child. Jedi. Brother. He’d shot at his own vode, the ones that hadn’t been with the Empire, the ones who rebelled. But how had they resisted what he’d fallen to? How had they remained whole while he’d become a shadow of himself? He's been a weapon and not a man for far too long, and he can’t understand why.
It doesn’t matter now, though. Darkness creeps into his head as everything else falls away. It doesn’t even hurt anymore, the pain turning numb as his body gives up along with his mind. Death’s supposed to be cold, he thought, but he strangely feels warmer than he has in years. It’s like being wrapped in an invisible blanket as he lets himself lose consciousness for the last time, despite knowing he’s been left on the dust-covered floor. Just discarded broken equipment.
His final thought is of his former General, and the smile he’d given him moments before Cody had ordered his death and watched him fall over the cliff’s edge. Of the screaming pain that had come from the small part of himself still remaining, buried way down under the Emperor’s control. And desperately, he hopes that wherever he’s going, Obi-Wan is there, too.
Even if he doesn’t deserve him...