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The strange thing about Obi-Wan Kenobi’s fall was that nobody knew exactly why it happened. There’d just been a series of increasingly alarming events that, taken together, made it painfully clear that General Obi-Wan Kenobi had finally looked at the Republic, looked at the Senate and the war, and decided he was done pretending any of this was salvageable. The galaxy, naturally, reacted with total composure.
How the Council found out that everything had gone catastrophically wrong was Anakin Skywalker stumbling into the Council chambers looking like he had just seen the Force itself catch on fire.
Mace Windu looked up immediately. “Knight Skywalker?”
Anakin’s face was pale and his hands were shaking. His mouth opened once, shut, then opened again like the words were heavy, “Master killed someone.”
As the Council burst into hysterical questions, Mace narrowed his eyes. “Clarify.”
Anakin swallowed hard. “He killed a Senator.”
The room went quiet as everyone tried very hard not to react before they had enough information to react correctly. Mace sat down heavily, then stood back up immediately. “Clarify further.”
Anakin dragged a hand over his face. “The Senator was arranging slave shipments through Republic territory and Master found out. They argued, and then there was a lot less Senator.”
Mace’s jaw tightened, and Yoda closed his eyes. “Hm.”
Anakin looked increasingly miserable. “It gets worse.”
Mace’s head lifted a fraction. “How?”
Anakin hesitated. Then, in the tone of someone who knew he was about to ruin everyone’s day: “He said the Republic isn’t reformable.”
The chamber went very quiet. Then Anakin added, because apparently the day could get worse, “And he stole a cruiser.”
Mace sat down again and put his head in his hands.
By sunrise, the official version of events had become a nightmare.
Master Kenobi had attacked Republic personnel. Master Kenobi had abandoned the Order. Master Kenobi had declared the Senate irredeemably corrupt. Master Kenobi had vanished into the night and taken a cruiser with him.
The Jedi were horrified. The Senate was terrified. The Separatists were confused. And the clone army was waiting for the order everyone assumed would follow. Find and capture Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Everyone assumed the 212th would be the first to turn on him. General Kenobi’s battalion knew everything about the man. They were his soldiers, surely they would be the ones sent to arrest him. Surely they would be the ones to put him in a box labeled problem solved.
Commander Cody got the emergency transmission while the 212th was still in orbit.
The words blinked across the holo:
GENERAL KENOBI DECLARED HOSTILE.
PREPARE TO PERSUE AND DETAIN.
Cody stared at it for a long time. Then read it again. Then again. His jaw tightened in increments so subtle only the people who knew him best would have noticed.
Boil noticed. “Sir?”
Waxer leaned in from the next seat. “Commander?”
Cody looked at the orders, then at the men around him. Then back at the orders.
Finally Boil asked the question nobody wanted to say first. “…Are we supposed to arrest General Kenobi?”
Cody looked genuinely offended by the suggestion. After a long, deeply thoughtful pause, he said: “Well… I guess we’re Separatists now.”
There was a long silence. Everyone in the ship stopped moving.
Waxer blinked. “What?”
Cody looked up, surprisingly calm. “The Republic just declared General Kenobi hostile,” he folded his arms, “the General has never lied to us.” The 212th nodded slowly. “He has never abandoned us or treated us like we were disposable.” A pause. “If he finally looked at the Republic and decided it was rotten, I trust his judgment more than I trust theirs.”
That got a stronger reaction. Boil grimaced, but Waxer looked thoughtful. A few of the others looked quietly relieved to have permission to say what they were already thinking.
Longshot cleared his throat. “So…” He glanced at the transmission again. “…are we like evil or…?”
Cody considered that, then shrugged. “We’ll circle back.”
The thing about the 212th was that they were not a battalion that mindlessly obeyed. They were built around Kenobi. Around their trust and the unspoken understanding that if the General was doing something ridiculous and previously thought to be impossible, there was probably a reason.
And if the Republic had decided he was a traitor after that reason happened to involve freeing slaves and killing a Senator, then perhaps the Republic was the problem.
The 212th vanished from the Republic’s tracking grids twenty minutes later.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi sat aboard a stolen Venator with a headache that could’ve put Mace Windu’s to shame. He was trying very hard not to think about the words I have fallen to the dark side.
It sounded absurd. Unfair, too. He hadn’t set out to become a Sith. He hadn’t even set out to kill a corrupt Senator. He certainly hadn’t set out to discover the Senator was part of a much larger rot.
And yet he had. And then he’d realized the war had been built on that rot. Then he’d found the neat little trail of hypocrisy running through the Republic and discovered, much to his own horror, that righteousness and fury had started to blur together somewhere along the way.
Now his saber was red, and his patience for the war was gone.
The bridge doors opened and Cody walked in. Obi-Wan blinked. “…Commander?”
Cody gave him the most infuriatingly calm salute in existence. “General.”
Obi-Wan stared at him. Then he looked at the ship around them, then back at Cody. “…how are you here? You shouldn’t be here.”
Cody’s expression didn’t change. “You left.”
Obi-Wan frowned. “Yes?”
“So we followed.”
Obi-Wan stood there in silence while several years of Jedi training attempted and failed to prepare him for the actual sentence he had just heard. Then he said, because it was the only thing he could think of: “Commander, I have fallen to the dark side.”
Cody looked at him carefully, then asked, “Are you sure?”
Obi-Wan stared. He had never in his life wanted to scream so badly and so politely. “…Pretty sure.”
Cody nodded. “We’ll monitor it.”
That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. Because at that exact moment Cody’s commlink chimed. He answered it before Obi-Wan could warn against it.
There was a burst of static, then a very familiar, very irritated, voice came through. “Cody?”
Cody went still. “Fox?”
“Yeah, its me. Anyways, how does your Sith feel about replacing ours?”
Cody blinked and Obi-Wan stared at the comm. “What?”
There was a beat of silence from the other end. Then Fox said, with audible impatience: “Palpatine, keep up Cody.”
Cody’s face went through several very rapid transformations. “What.”
“The Chancellor,” Fox repeated, sounding like he was talking to a very slow droid. “For your guy. The evil one.”
“THE CHANCELLOR?!” Cody repeated, dumbfounded.
Fox sighed. “Yes, Cody, the Chancellor. Do try to stay with me now.”
Obi-Wan slowly turned. His brain was making a long, rattling noise somewhere deep in the background as he tried to process this information.
Fox continued, as if he were discussing supply shortages instead of the downfall of galactic civilization: “Long story short, the Chancellor’s a Sith, and I want to trade.”
Obi-Wan looked like someone had ripped the floor from under him. Cody’s expression had become the kind of blank horror usually reserved for battlefield reports and medical scans. “…I knew that man gave me a bad feeling,” was eventually what he managed.
Obi-Wan finally found his voice. “Commander.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you certain?” He asked, no, pleaded, desperately hoping this was some kind of mistake. Hoping for the reassurance that no, of course they hadn’t had a Sith Lord running the Republic.
Fox sounded almost insulted. “General Kenobi, I’m a clone commander, not an idiot. I’m quite sure.”
Cody made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh and lost it immediately. Obi-Wan closed his eyes in despair. Right. Of course.
Fox did not have the luxury of misunderstanding this. Fox had been placed and grown in what was becoming rapidly apparent to be one of the worst systems in the galaxy. He smelled out corruption the way a mastiff smelled blood.
The sheer absurdity of it all hit Obi-Wan like a speeder. A clone commander had uncovered the Chancellor’s Sith identity, and then, somehow, that same clone commander had just casually informed Cody of the truth in the middle of what was rapidly becoming a galactic emergency. And Obi-Wan himself had still kriffing fallen-
Obi-Wan started laughing. He didn’t mean to. It escaped him in one breathless, stunned burst that quickly turned into something between disbelief and the sheer impossibility of the whole situation.
Cody stared at him and Obi-Wan stared back helplessly. Then Cody looked at the comm again and said weakly, “Fox, you are never allowed to say anything like that again.”
“No promises. Anyways, I’ve got to go because I’m dealing with another assassination right now, but call me back if you decide you’re up for a swap.” And then the line clicked, and silence returned.
Obi-Wan straightened slowly, his mind suddenly very, very clear. If Palpatine was the Sith, then the whole war had been a lie. If the war had been a lie, then every casualty report, every manipulated policy, every order meant to break the clone army had a source. If that source had just been exposed by a clone commander with no patience for corruption then the galaxy had just been handed a way out.
Obi-Wan looked at Cody. Cody looked back. They understood each other with one horrified blink.
“Commander,” Obi-Wan said slowly, “I believe I may have to ask you to commit treason.”
Cody nodded, nonplussed by this declaration. “I already told the 212th we were Separatists.”
Obi-Wan stared. “You did what now?”
Cody shrugged and waved his hand as if clearing the air. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
That made Obi-Wan laugh again, helplessly this time. The 212th had not turned on him. They had followed him. The man they’d been expected to arrest had fallen, and instead of condemning him, they had trusted him harder.
And then Commander Fox had kicked the entire wasps nest over with one phone call because apparently he had recognized the Chancellor for what he was long before anyone else had. It was madness and yet, unfortunately, exactly the sort of thing that was about to save the galaxy.
Obi-Wan activated the ship-wide comms. “Attention all personnel.” He paused only long enough to ensure every listening clone aboard the stolen Venator got the point. “I regret to inform you that the Republic is, in fact, compromised. As you know, I have fallen to the Dark Side.” There was a pause as he tried to figure out how to say what he was about to. “And yes, Commander Cody is right. I do believe we will be helping the Separatists.”
Cody glanced at him, and Obi-Wan looked back with all the exhausted serenity of a man who had just become an enemy of the state and was now trying to decide whether to be proud of his own battalion or not. “We have come into the discovery that the Sith Lord manipulating this war is the Chancellor, and, as such, we are no longer serving the Republic.”
Obi-Wan took another deep breath. He had never in a million years expected this to be the outcome of his fall. “Our new mission is to kill the Chancellor.”
Cody smiled at him, and leaned over. “How are we gonna do this General?”
Obi-Wan closed his eyes. This battalion was going to get him killed. And, Force help him, he loved them for it.
“Here’s the plan.”