Celebrate the Clone Wars

could you write something about obi wan swimming with the gar around, please? your stories are so cool to read ;~;

Hey, anon - I found this ask buried in my inbox and I do need to apologise for taking so long to get to it. My schedule’s very irregular and so I write in short bursts when I have the time.

I’ve got an idea for this that works for @celebrate-the-clone-wars‘s 22/8 Writing Wednesday prompt Rival, so I hope to make up for the lateness of my reply.

Blasted Freezing

Cody’s expression settled into one of grim expectation as he flicked an eye over his assembled troops; line after line of men stood exactly at attention. Each of them was arrayed for war exactly as they should be, the lower half of the GAR standard-issue black thermal undersuit sufficing in the absence of GAR swim trunks.

All of them stood straight-backed and proud, not a single shiver breaking through their bare torsos.

Cody took a breath of the frigid air. Released it in a cloud of mist. “I trust you understand your orders,” he said simply, voice ringing out over his men. “Make me proud. Make General Kenobi proud.”

“Oh, Cody,” a mild voice interjected, “Need we be so serious?”

“Of course, sir,” Cody replied immediately, turning on the spot and offering a crisp salute, despite the lack of - well, any uniform at all - on his upper body.

General Kenobi raised an eyebrow as he approached - dressed in standard Jedi trousers, with his cloak wrapped securely around his shoulders. His bare feet curled pink on the frozen ground. Behind him, the river rushed on, edged with icy mists, barely melted a week ago. The opposite bank was a hazy line in the far distance beyond deep, ice-blue water.

It looked, for lack of a better word, absolutely blasted freezing.

“Well, Anakin’s hardly doing the same,” the general said, throwing a cursory glance back over his shoulder; a hundred metres or so down the bank the 501st were gathered in rank upon rank just as the 212th were, but there the similarities ended; whoops and and laughter drifted over to the 212th on the cutting wind, and there was an audible cheer as General Skywalker approached barefoot and clad like Obi-Wan and threw off his cloak, baring his admirably impressive litany of battle-scars to the cold air of late winter.

Cody could hear Fives and Echo completely losing it.

A snort among his men.

He turned a quick eye back onto his men, and caught Waxer and Boil’s expressions smoothing over a moment before they succeeded in doing so.

Cody held their innocently blank gazes for a long moment, before turning back to his general.

“Prospects, sir?” he murmured.

“Oh, I’d say the odds are pretty much even,” General Kenobi says, in that unaffected manner of his. “But I’ll be leaving the men in your capable hands, Cody. I’ll be going on ahead.” His blue eyes settled on Anakin, who seemed to be in the process of leading the 501st in some sort of chant.

Cody coughed politely. “Friendly rivalry, sir?” he said with a hint of a grin.

The general turned his head to glance back at Cody, a spark of challenge in his otherwise placid expression. “Precisely.”

Cody didn’t need to look at the the 501st to know General Skywalker was staring back at Cody’s general with a similar expression; that was Kenobi and Skywalker for you.

Speaking of which, Cody was very much looking forward to collecting his dues should he win his wager against Rex. The first man to touch the far bank, they had agreed privately; the prize, a favour owed.

A favour owed when one’s generals were Kenobi and Skywalker was a dangerous and useful prize indeed.

General Kenobi gave his men an encouraging smile and began to stride towards the midpoint between the two parties, cloak flapping at his heels. In the distance, General Skywalker’s golden-brown head slipped out from among his men to do the same.

There rested a little hover-platform directly between both groups of men. Kix and Coric stood back-to-back there, both grimacing a little at their generals. Each was weighed down by a heavy backpack of equipment and medications on top of thermal armour; the platform itself was loaded with dozens more grey packages. Cody supposed that to a company medic, exercises like these were the height of folly.

Kenobi and Skywalker nodded to each other in that somewhat mischievous, almost-insulting anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better way they had with one another whenever the two had a friendly score to settle, and looked to their medics.

General Kenobi’s cloak fluttered to the ground, exposing his own impressive collection of white-pink scars on his pale skin.

Coric’s shoulders lowered as though in a sigh, but he raised the flare gun in his right hand and pointed it towards the sky.

“First complete party to shore,” he yelled, voice raw in the whistling wind. “Ready. Go!”

The two generals were gone before the completion of the last syllable, with that inhuman speed that all Jedi possessed.

Cody was moving even as the flare streaked into the sky. Behind him, he heard the whine of the hover-platform starting up and the roar of his men as they followed, bare feet stamping into the frozen ground of the bank as they threw themselves into the river after him.

It was-

It was-

General Kenobi would say slightly chilly. General Skywalker would say blasted icy. Cody would-

Well.

He gritted his teeth against the nerve-paralysing burn of the freezing water and soldiered on, body moving with that ingrained rhythm that Kamino training taught all their soldiers.

One-two-three-four-breathe-one-two-three-four-

Ahead, Kenobi and Skywalker’s brown and gold heads fought to pull ahead; Cody knew his general could cut through water as sleekly and efficiently as an Aiwha in stormy Kamino seas, while Skywalker, on the other hand, swam as powerfully as a waterborn krayt dragon, if such a thing existed.

With about as much noise, too.

But then Cody caught a flash of close-cropped gold in the corner of his eye as he swivelled his face out of the water to gasp in a breath.

Rex.

Oh, Cody was not letting him win.

He growled into the current and redoubled his efforts, pushing every screaming muscle in his body further: pain was temporary, as was the gasping cold in his lungs that seeped into every bone.

He even forgot, temporarily, about the generals.

He and Rex were neck-and-neck now, and Cody was hazily aware every time he gasped in a breath, water stinging at his eyes, that his men were behind him, yelling, mixed in with the 501st.

Rex was close enough that Cody glimpsed the spray of bubbles every time one calloused hand rotated out of the water, the water at his feet white and frothing. But now each breath was pain and the water no longer so much cold but numbing, sucking strength from him with every stroke, and Cody yelled into the water and he redoubled his efforts and-

His hand slammed into dirt; what had seemed freezing under his bare feet barely a few minutes ago now seemed almost warm in comparison to the water.

Cody pushed himself out of the current on hands and knees and bit back a scream as the wind hit.

A hand clasped his forearm; the hold of a brother-in-arms.

He looked up into his general’s gaze the same moment the man pulled him firmly out of the water and wrapped a thermal blanket much like his own around Cody’s shoulders.

A few metres away, General Skywalker was doing much the same thing for Rex.

Cody opened his aching jaw and gasped, despite the chattering of his teeth, “Wh-who won-”

The water had frozen General Kenobi’s hair into russet-brown spikes, and limned his beard with droplets. His eyes, though, held the same humorous glint as they always did after a well-executed duel with General Skywalker. “You and Rex, or General Skywalker and I?” he said, voice completely even despite the needling wind.

Cody opened his mouth. Closed it.

His general clapped him on the shoulder. “You both touched the bank at the same time.”

Rex’s head whipped over to them even as General Skywalker laughed.

“And you, sir?” Cody enquired as General Kenobi moved to the edge of the water again, pulling out the first man much as he had with Cody. The first line of men had reached the bank by now; Kix and Coric were moving forward with cups of hot caf and armfuls of thermal blankets.

“Oh, I think Anakin knows,” the general called over his shoulder as he heaved a sopping Waxer to his feet.

“You try growing up on a desert planet!” General Skywalker’s indignant yell drifted over, from where he was surrounded by shivering members of the 501st.

Cody hid a grin behind the rim of the mug of caf Coric shoved into his hand, and gave the medic a look when Coric pointedly whispered, “Try to get something warm in you before you lose any toes, sir.”

Cody shook his head and moved amongst his men, patting shoulders and necks and offering words of praise. As the the numbers of men emerging from the river began to lessen, Cody badly wished to enter the tents pitched a little further up the bank to change out of his damp clothing, but he found himself drifting over to Rex, instead.

The captain was stood watching the generals, one hand clasping his blanket closed.

“We’re standing at one to the 212th and none to the 501st at the moment,” Cody said, congenially.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Rex replied, grinning. “The last two haven’t come up yet.”

“Ah, well,” Cody murmured as he watched the last few stragglers struggle their way to shore - mostly shinies by this point. It was plain by this point that there would need to be extra training - enough time had elapsed to show the need for that.

“Coric will love you for that,” Rex said, as though he read Cody’s thoughts. “Ice water races and extra winter training. Imagine his expression.”

Cody winced. An angry medic outranked every person in the GAR, saving perhaps Generals Windu and Yoda. However…

“Aren’t you going to give your men extra training, too?” Cody said.

Rex shrugged, then grinned in a flash of white teeth. “Probably.” He frowned a little as he squinted at the last two men, metres from the bank. “Definitely,” he amended.

The second-last man slammed his hand onto the bank.

The last followed him a moment later.

Cody narrowed his eyes against the wind as he scrutinised the latter.

Rex was smiling.

“Oh, Landlock,” Cody growled, “When that di’kut said he was named that I didn’t think he meant it literally.”

“General Kenobi’s humour seems to be rubbing off on you.”

“Shut it, Rex.”

They turned and headed up to the tents together. Ahead, the generals were walking shoulder-to-shoulder, and Kenobi’s laughter was a rare, musical thing that danced on the wind. Skywalker’s smile widened another notch as Kenobi reached up and ruffled his hair, flicking water out of Skywalker’s long water-darkened hair.

“Good match,” Rex murmured, and held out a hand to Cody.

Cody smiled and clasped Rex’s forearm, their hands, so similar yet so different, wrapping warm and secure around each others’ wrists.

“Good match,” Cody repeated. “Vod.”

“Well, the 501st did win-”

“Not if you look at the generals-”

“That’s not the point and you know it, Cody-”

“That’s always the point-”

END

Thanks for reading, :) It’s been a few weeks since I had time to do a Writing Wednesday prompt and this was marvellously fun to write!

For more GAR shenanigans try The Inter-System Kenobae fanclub. My masterlist has more.

My fanfic masterlist

FFN profile and stories