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The ship isn’t a venator, but its design was dreamed up with similar intent. Much like how Bly’s purge trooper armour is a sick perversion of the white clone trooper armour he’d been wearing the last time Rex had seen him. The almost reflection only adds to the wrongness of the entire situation, the hallways almost, but not quite, what Rex expects, the precise layout strange when it feels like it should be familiar.
The change in Bly is more disquieting than the ship. If Rex hadn’t seen the golden tattoos across his cheeks he could never have been convinced that this was Bly.
He still can’t fully quiet the doubt that it isn’t. A lot can change in a person in eight years, but this is more than a person should ever change.
Bly’s boots echo as he strides down the corridor, Rex following at a distance, as though three metres will be enough to save him if this is a trap. Bly doesn’t say a word—has said only a handful since Rex had agreed to come here—and that only makes Rex hate the ship more. Ships of this size aren’t meant to be so quiet, aren’t meant to be so empty. They are living breathing things, their crew willing life into them.
This one is dead, hanging in space with a gouge in her side. There’s no hum of the engine under their feet, just the desperate emergency lighting powered by the final gasps of the back-up power supply. Her crew died along with her or abandoned her soon after she was hit, leaving her empty.
Except she isn’t empty. Not quite.
Rex had only heard about it, never seen it himself. For the first few months of the war the Alpha ARCs had been put into cryosleep—put on ice they’d called it—when not actively needed. Prolong their useful life span and avoid the more spirited of them from creating issues. It hadn’t lasted long; they were always actively needed.
There had been whispers that the Empire had brought it back, keeping their purge troopers unconscious until they were let out to hunt. Rex had hoped it was a rumour.
“Where are we going?” Rex regrets asking, the shattering of the silence worse than the silence itself.
Bly doesn’t turn around. “There are three storage locations along the port side of the ship. If Cody was stored starboard side then he’s already dead.”
Rex hates the term storage.
Whatever left the gouge in the ship’s side would have broken the atmosphere within, the pressure popping along in the exposed sections before the internal doors slammed shut, saving the rest of the ship. It would have at least been a quick death. The purge troopers in cryo wouldn’t have ever noticed, wouldn’t ever know they’d died.
Rex might not know these ships, but Bly does; he moves through them with the same confidence he’d walked through venators. He belongs here as much as he had there. Rex doesn’t. Not anymore.
Cody must belong here too.
Why is Rex here? Why did Bly seek him out when he clearly doesn’t need the extra set of hands?
Rex had asked and it went unanswered.
He follows Bly down another grey hallway. And then another. All indistinguishable from the last. If this is a trap, Rex has walked right into it. He’s trying to keep track of the twists and turns, but if he needs to run, Bly—and any Imperials waiting for him—will be able to out pace him on their home turf with ease.
Ahsoka hadn’t wanted him to come and had wanted him to come alone even less. Nothing about this situation made sense. Bly couldn't be trusted. The bait was too convenient.
She was right.
But Bly had said Cody, and Rex was helpless to not go.
Bly leads them to a solid blast door. There’s a room just to the side of it with a large durasteel window and the abandoned signs of a guard post. No weapons have been left behind, but the racks for them are empty against the wall. There’s a mug on the desk by the control console, whatever was in it long gone, replaced with mold crawling up the sides and spilling over the rim.
It’s the most alive thing in this place.
The cameras are out, most of the screens black, the others flickering sadly as the emergency power abandoned them in favour of more important things.
Bly kicks the chair to the side and doesn’t sit, leaning over the console. It still works, but it lags and stutters its way through even simple processes. Bly types in a long string of manual codes—not just scanning his ID chip. He’s not supposed to have access to this or he’s covering up his involvement. Whose ID is he using? Who else knows he’s here and cares enough about Cody to allow it?
“Why did you find me?” Find us. Rex had been with Ahsoka when the message had reached him.
Bly’s helmet doesn’t turn, and under it, Rex imagines that Bly’s eyes don’t even glance at him.
Bly is younger than him now, the time spent on ice slowly building up to put years between them. Rex’s knee aches from an old injury, and his back twinges if he’s too careless with it. He wouldn’t trade bodies with Bly. Bly wears his fewer years heavier, the lines on his face betraying years of frowning.
Bly had put his helmet back on the moment Rex had confirmed he was who he claimed to be. Rex hopes never to see his face again.
The blast doors grind in their frame, but screech open.
Bly walks past Rex without a word and Rex can only follow. The storage room beyond the blast doors is hopeless as Rex had feared. Down both sides of the room are rows of cryopods, each with a large glass window, all containing a body.
Almost all are red.
“Take the left,” Bly orders as if he’s still a marshal commander and Rex is still a captain.
Rex obeys.
The first three pods are red, three corpses abandoned to rot. None of them are clones. The fourth is white, the figure inside it as still as her dead neighbours. She must be breathing, but Rex can’t see it.
Halfway down the row one of the glass panels has been shattered, the body inside slumped forward, limp in the bindings that hold him in place. It’s not Cody, but Rex can’t look away. The body looks like it’s melted, decayed unevenly, the pod preserving parts of it and not others. What’s left of its skin is grey and clinging desperately to bones that seek to shed it. Gravity has pulled it downward, stretching it in ways Rex didn’t know skin could be stretched.
There’s holes in its stomach, where the weight of its own skin has proven too much. The organs behind it bulge up against the tears. Rex has seen intestines before. They were always fresh. They never looked like that.
He wants to see its face. He doesn’t want to touch it. If he has come all this way just to find Cody’s corpse…
His stomach rolls and he looks away.
Bly has already finished the right side, crossing to the left side and working back towards him. Rex’s legs fight him as he takes a step away from the body, but he makes himself walk up the line towards Bly. Of the two dozen stored in this room, only three are still alive.
“He’s not here,” Bly says with a finality that makes it clear he has no interest in discussing Rex’s unease.
They go out the same door they came in from, leaving the dead to rot and the rest to… To what? To sleep until the ship’s power fails and they… Will they wake up? Will they die without even knowing it?
Rex can make peace with Cody’s death—he’s done it before—but Cody going down without a fight is unacceptable.
Bly leads them back into the maze of corridors. By the time Rex set foot on his first venator he already knew the layout, had been working through simulations of them for years. Bly moves with that same familiarity.
“Why was the ship abandoned?” he asks. Bly doesn’t slow down, doesn’t acknowledge him in any way. Bly was a marshal commander the same as Cody, carried as many secrets as Cody did, signed off on the same awful things that Cody did.
Maybe Bly hasn’t changed as much as Rex feels he has, maybe Rex just never knew him that well to begin with.
They bypass the lift, taking the cramped stairs down, each tread narrow enough that Rex’s boot sticks over the edge threatening to slip. Rex keeps his hand hovering by the railing. Bly doesn’t.
The stairs give way to another indistinguishable corridor. The large numbers printed on the walls at major intersections might mean something to Bly, but they mean nothing to Rex.
Ahsoka was right; nothing here adds up. Why isn’t Bly on ice? Who woke him up and let him loose when the Empire doesn’t want him here? What does Bly need Rex for?
Every question leads to two more.
“Why are you here, Bly?” Rex asks.
Nothing. Bly gives him nothing.
There’s still people alive here. It would be so easy to come and collect the survivors. To collect Cody.
Why is Bly here? Why is Rex here? What is his plan? What is he going to do if Cody is dead? What is he going to do if Cody isn’t? If this is a trap it’s unnecessarily elaborate. Bly could shoot him or capture him without all this. If they just wanted him away from Ahsoka they’ve already accomplished that.
Why drag him out to the carcass of a ship that not even the Empire wants.
Rex stops. “Why abandon the ship?”
Bly keeps walking.
“Bly!” Rex’s pulse rushes in his throat, the dread that’s been lurking since Bly’s message sticking in his chest. “Bly!” he yells again. The thud of Bly’s boots don’t break rhythm. He doesn’t even slow down.
Bly’s familiar face is as much a distraction as the familiar aspects of this ship. Bly is stood with the entire awful Empire looming behind him, an incompressible maw that has its teeth locked around Bly and would love to get a bite of Rex.
Rex curls his hands into fists. He should walk away while it's still an option.
Teeth clenched, he takes a step after Bly. Then another.
He has to know if Cody is alive. Bly has the access codes. If Rex tries to wake Cody up without them, that might be what ends up killing him; if he isn’t already dead.
The only choice he had in this was following Bly here or not. He can’t make demands now.
He doesn’t hurry to catch up, trailing behind, glaring at the back of Bly’s helmet. The brazenness of how they move through the ship is unsettling, Rex keeps expecting to hear voices, to have to duck into cover as guards pass. The crew just left. They left and didn’t spare a thought to the people in cryosleep.
Bly stops at the next turn, half turning back until Rex catches up. Rex almost stops, just to be petty, but even that feels like giving Bly what he wants.
Only when Rex is almost within arms reach does he start walking again.
“Politics,” Bly says, perfectly neutral. “That’s why it was abandoned.” The tone is wrong coming from his mouth. He used to be sardonic and sharp. He was funny until he’d say something vicious and cutting and he would meet Cody’s eye and Cody would grin back. Now he’s… He’s a purge trooper and little else.
“What sort of politics?” Rex asks.
“There’s only one kind,” Bly says, and even that is flat, not a joke, just a statement. “The Inquisitors are an arm of Vader and Tarkin wants to weaken him.”
They’ve just pawns. Cody and Bly, two of the finest Kamino ever trained, and they’re just pawns.
“So he refuses to send help? And fuck the people inside?”
“Is it so different from before?” Bly asks.
Yes. No. Rex isn’t sure he still remembers how it was before.
After Cody has hunted down whatever Force Sensitive the Empire had sicced him on did he walk these same corridors? Did they remind Cody of the venators like they remind Rex? Did he resent being put on ice? What sort of man has the Empire twisted him into?
“Is that why you’re here? Politics?” Rex asks, though it does little to quiet the buzzing in his skull.
Bly doesn’t answer, which quiets it better.
“Do you think you can placate me with empty answers?” he demands. He wants to reach forward, to grab Bly and shove him against the wall, to beat that superior blankness off him.
It’s not a fight he’s confident he’d win.
“I don’t need to placate you,” Bly says.
Then why talk to him at all? “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me,” Rex says.
For once, Bly’s silence feels a little like victory.
The guard station by the next cryo storage is an exact copy of the one above. The console even has its own mug, this one left on the opposite side. Bly types the codes too fast for Rex to consider trying to memorise.
The door to the room jerks open, but comes to just as an abrupt stop. Bly types on the console, but the door stays put. They have to turn sideways to enter, the edges scraping over their armour.
There’s more white pods in this room, but not by much. There’s no need for discussion this time, Rex takes the left and Bly takes the right. Rex avoids lingering, avoids meeting the eyes of the living and dead bodies. It works until the last pod on his side, one white pod after too many red.
He’s a clone.
He’s not Cody.
He looks more like Bly than Rex, younger, but with a heaviness to his features that betrays the sort of life the Empire has given him. The glass is cold under Rex’s hand. Many of the half of the 501st that survived the final days of the war ended up as purge troopers. Did Rex know this man?
Does Cody know him now?
Bly isn’t moving quietly, but his appearance at Rex’s side startles him. He wrenches his hand off the glass with an unexplainable embarrassment.
Bly spares the clone only the briefest glance before turning away, heading back towards the door.
“You’re going to leave him?” Rex asks, his voice pitching up in dismay. The room throws it back at him, bouncing off the space and echoing twice before finally fading.
“It isn’t Cody,” Bly says. He’s almost at the door.
“So?” It’s a clone. It might be one of Rex’s men. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
Bly turns, one hand on the crack in the door. He’s so hard to read with his helmet on, but Rex can feel the condescension all the same. “Do what?” Bly asks. “Are you going to take him back with you to your little Jedi friend?” Rex’s blood goes to ice in his veins. Of course Bly knows about Ahsoka, but the confirmation sits like lead. “No?” It’s the most emotion Bly has had since they set foot on this ship, his neutrality broken by scorn.
“You could take him back to the Empire,” Rex says, throat dry. Can Rex allow a purge trooper to go back to the Empire knowing what he may end up doing?
“No,” Bly says. “That isn’t an option.”
Of course it isn’t; Bly isn’t supposed to be here. He can’t return with a clone on his heels. Except…
“But you’re going to try to take Cody back?”
Bly’s visor stares at him, nothing in him moving, his amour perfectly still. Eventually, with a careful deliberateness to each word, Bly says, “Not immediately.”
That’s why Rex is here.
“You think I’ll give him up? If he leaves with me you don’t get him back.” Rex will die before that happens. Bly might be able to kill him here, but not when Rex can choose the terrain.
Bly drops his hand from the door, and despite the slowness the movement is startling. “Cody has been in cryo for a long time.”
How long? How long has this ship been here? What happened to leave it in this state? The Empire is an opaque thing, the monstrousness of its actions covering its inner workings. Rex has never felt more like an insect cowering in its shadow.
“He’ll need time to recover,” Bly says. It’s enough to make it very clear what he believes Rex’s role in all this to be.
Rex laughs, a hollow bark that is too loud in a quiet ship. “You think I’ll play doctor and then let you take him?”
“Once he’s recovered, he’ll return of his own volition.”
Cody wouldn’t go back. Rex knows him. He wouldn’t go back.
Bly is unwaveringly certain.
The pit in Rex’s stomach grows denser, a dying star threatening to drag Rex into it.
Bly nods his head at the clone behind Rex. “Would you like me to wake him up?”
Rex looks at the clone, his lax face still wearing a frown. He can’t bring a purge trooper back to Ahsoka, not one he can’t trust the loyalty of.
Can he trust Cody’s loyalty?
“No,” he says.
Bly steps through the door. He’s waiting several steps away when Rex squeezes through after him. He doesn’t look back when he starts walking again, and the questions that had felt so oppressively urgent before wither and die.
Rex has avoided thinking about what would happen if they found Cody. It had been one of the first things Ahsoka had said. Even if Cody is alive, why would Bly let him go without a fight? Rex has acknowledged that it was a compelling point, and then dutifully ignored it to avoid the risk of it convincing him not to go.
It was Cody. He had to go.
That Bly is going to let him take Cody without a fight only makes Ahsoka’s warnings more dire. Bly has no doubt that Cody will return. All Rex has is hope that he won’t.
Rex hasn’t spoken to Cody in more years than he ever knew him. Bly’s known him longer, and probably worked alongside him right up until the ship was damaged.
The final guard station lacks the mug and has a body in its place. There’s not much of it left. Rex finds himself grateful.
There’s a large red mark across the floor pooling from a crack in its skull at their temple. The blood has long since evaporated away, but the messy stain remains. There's a corresponding hint of red on the corner of the control console. They must have fallen when the ship was hit and caught them at just the wrong angle.
It’s an underwhelming way to die.
Bly steps over her.
Rex doesn’t follow him, leaving Bly at the control console, standing by the door, heart hammering, sweat forming at his hairline.
Cody will be here. He has to be.
The door shudders open a few centimetres and stops. They’ll be another way in, ventilation or power lines. They can blast the door open if they have to, oh so carefully for a ship this unstable. They can—
“Pull that side,” Bly says, grabbing one half of the door and heaving.
Rex has been in too many battles to get stupid when scared, but Cody always had a particular effect on him. The door is heavy and stubborn, but Bly’s side is creeping open and Rex won’t be outdone. It strains his arms and shoulders but the door drags in its frame. Something in the mechanism crunches, it lurches and then comes to a hard stop.
Bly is through the gap before Rex has rebalanced.
Seven of the pods are still white, all but one clustered together on one side of the room with a single red pod in the middle. Rex looks once at the lone white pod—a tall, pale man with a boyish face—and crosses to the rest.
Cody looks like he could be sleeping.
“Stubborn fucker just won’t die,” Bly says, with warmth Rex didn’t know he was still capable of flooding his tone.
Cody has new scars, a burn under his ear and across his jaw, and the small scattered lines that come from being too close to something exploding without a helmet. He looks young and old just like Bly does, each of the fewer years he’s been awake taking more from him than they took from Rex.
He has the same furrow between his brows he would wear when he slept on campaign, but rarely when he slept on a venator.
Bly finds somewhere on the side of the pod to wedge his foot, hauling himself up to reach some panel on top of it. He balances himself between Cody’s pod and the one next to it, prying the panel open and pulling out a small console attached to the pod by dozens of coloured wires.
Rex can’t do anything more helpful but stare, tears clouding his vision.
Bly types into the console and the screens along the front of the pod are filled with information—Cody’s heart rate, his temperature, other numbers that Rex can’t identify.
The ones he can look… Cody’s heart beating agonisingly slowly. Is that normal? It has to be normal.
Conflicting feelings crash into each other, joy swallowed by dread overwhelmed with relief then crushed by horror.
Bly drops back to the ground, deceptively quietly for a man in full armour. He looks over the screens and must get more from them than Rex did. “These are within tolerance,” Bly says.
“He always did get perfect health evals,” Rex says. It feels like a stranger using his voice.
The lever to open the pod is on the side. It’s so manual for such a complicated machine. Rex wants to step forward to pull it open, to be the one to bring Cody back to life. His feet remain locked to the floor and Bly doesn’t wait.
Bly pulls the lever down with none of the force opening the doors required. The pod whirs, the whole thing shuddering, steam bursting out from its vents. Cody doesn’t move, his eyes don’t open, as the pod bursts into life around him. One of the numbers of his vitals ticks up.
Cody’s alive. He’s alive and he’s leaving with Rex.
“Keep Cody away from the Empire,” Bly says, visor forward, his attention as locked on Cody as Rex’s is.
“I know.” Does he think Rex is stupid? Does he think Rex would get Cody back and then be so careless with his life?
“Keep him away from your Jedi too.”
Ahsoka is waiting for him. She won’t let him avoid her even if he wanted to.
Bly sighs, and Rex doesn’t know him well enough to know what emotion drives it. “Cody will come back to the Empire, Rex. The less he knows about your Jedi the better for both of you.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
Rex thinks he hears Bly huff. It might be laughter, if Rex even heard it at all.
Cody’s head lolls forward, hanging like the corpse in the first storage room. Rex jerks forward, but stops himself just as abruptly, still back from the pod. Cody’s fingers twitch, his chest rises and then falls. On the screen his heart rate starts to climb.
The front of the pod opens with a hiss, more steam billowing out. The restraints holding Cody in place side backwards into the pod. Cody falls into their arms, stumbling down from the pod, feet going through the motions of supporting himself, but lacking the coordination to actually do it. Between them, Bly and Rex lower him to the ground.
Cody’s skin is warm. Rex had expected him to be cold.
He’s heavy, head still hanging, his neck unable to support it. His toes and fingers curl, his eyelids flickering, but not opening. Rex shifts, hauling Cody’s body over his lap, balancing Cody’s head and shoulders against him.
Cody’s alive. Bly brought him back to Rex.
“Leave with us.”
“No.”
“Why not? What could possibly be keeping you there?”
Bly cups Cody’s face, his hands so gentle even encased in armour. “Politics,” he says, and sounds almost like himself.
“Bly?” Cody mumbles, words slurring. He blinks his eyes open, but stares unseeingly up, past Bly, past Rex. His arm jerks in Bly’s direction, but barely leaves the floor.
Bly drops his hand from Cody’s face and stands. He claps Rex on the shoulder and it’s not entirely friendly. He doesn’t look back, striding out of the room, through the door, and back to the Empire. Rex could follow him, possibly should. Demand answers, convince him not to go back to the Empire, plead to know why he thinks Cody will go.
Cody is slumped in his arms and he can’t let him go.
“No, Cody. It’s me. It’s Rex.” The tears that have been threatening Rex since he set foot in this room overflow, wet tracks running down his cheeks. The first hangs on his chin, the next catching up to it and sending both down into Cody’s hair.
Cody stares up at him, eyes slowly focusing on him. His expression doesn’t change. With slow, clumsy effort, Cody lifts one of his hands. His fingers brush across Rex’s face before Cody’s strength fails him and his arm falls back to the floor.
“Rex,” he repeats, uttering the name like a prayer.
The imperial seal is emblazoned across Cody’s chest.