A/N: This one's a tearjerker. The same AU as chapter 2, Silent Laughter, and as such one of many possible futures of The Silent Song.
Also, as it is Memorial Day for the US at the moment, though I'm from Hong Kong - I think this is also a good moment to remember what realities The Clone Wars were supposed to reflect. I'm not from a place where we have Memorial Day events, much, but it is nevertheless good to remember.
Edit: Forgot to mention last time - if you want to listen to the playlist I made to match this story, you can go on Spotify and search for [Silent Measures (Eirian Erisdar)] or you can go to my tumblr and click the sidebar for links to my playlists, or if you want a list of the songs to search up on other platforms.
Six Hundred Bridges
If Obi-Wan could throw back his head and shout with joy, he would do so now.
Grievous is dead, and the end of the war is so close he can very nearly see it, through this thin veil of grey that had descended on the Force since the beginning of the conflict. It is there; he can almost reach out and touch the luminescent world on the other side – pure, untainted, like the light-drenched days of his early apprenticeship to Qui-Gon, before Ventrux, before the Cruorven, before the Sith rose and cleaved the galaxy in two.
As such, he sports a very wide grin indeed as Boga leaps back towards the thick of the battle proper. As he draws closer to the bulk of the 212th, he lets his elation spill up over his shields and along the close-to six hundred mental bridges that connect him to his men.
He projects the image of his final blaster-shot meeting Grievous's slimy insides, just to hit home the point.
A palpable roar rises up among his men, audible even over the screams of blasterfire. The tide of orange-yellow-painted troopers rears up and clashes against the Separatist forces anew, a plastoid-armoured wave of drunken victory, curled on the wind of their general's success.
Though perhaps it is Obi-Wan who is a little punch-drunk on victory, and not his troopers.
But Boga's echoing varactyl calls are certainly triumphant enough as she slews to a stop next to Cody, who grins up at Obi-Wan, all white teeth and battle-fervor, scar crinkling at the edge of his left eye.
Cody clasps his right gauntlet over his open left and raises them in a quick congratulations before detaching a familiar silver hilt from his belt and holding it towards his smiling general.
{Thank you,} Obi-Wan signs back, inclining his head with the second half of the movement to show more than thanks, but respect for a trusted second. {Let's win this battle and join up with General Skywalker on Coruscant,} he adds, taking the lightsaber with a grin.
"Yes, sir!" Cody says, snapping into a jaunty salute. Two years ago he might have been too much of a stickler for regulations to do so, but now he simply returns Obi-Wan's smile and jams his helmet back on his head.
Obi-Wan spies a spot on a higher level where his men are spread too thin, and flicks the reins, guiding Boga towards the cliffside as he activates his lightsaber. The comforting weight of the blue blade in his sword-hand does marvelous things to add to his happiness; there had been relief after Grievous was gone, but now, with his lightsaber in his hand again, and his men turning the tide of this battle in their favour, he is once more complete.
For a moment, the stone flute in his sleeve warms with the Force.
And then warmth leeches out of the flute the same time the river-stone tucked next to his chest flares in warning – it is like ice stabs him in the arm and in the heart at once, and he flings a glance over his shoulder back around the circular cliff to where his First is, to warn him–
But Cody is speaking to small hologrammed figure on a comm-disk, and as he speaks, it is like the Force recoils away from him, snapping back along a bond three years strong to whip Obi-Wan across the face.
Obi-Wan reels in place, in that one moment; frozen in denial too strong to do anything but watch, and feel.
Feel. As one moment becomes a hundred, and he is a prison in his own body, locked to his consciousness as one is incarcerated in a nightmare.
Through those last few threads connecting them, which are even now beginning to fray and wither away – Cody is screaming.
Cody is screaming.
Obi-Wan knows, with a detached sort of clarity that only the Force provides in moments of extreme shock, that Cody is not screaming physically.
And then almost six hundred bonds twist, all at once, men shrieking agony and denial, and fighting uselessly in minds conditioned to be ordered and not shielded, and how do you shield from something that awakens like a puppetmaster in your own mind and spears claws into your brain that whisper goodsoldiersfolloworders goodsoldiersfolloworders NO THAT IS NOT ME help me sir please help me I don't want to do this sir you're our General kill me please kill me KILL US KILL US-
Kill us.
Obi-Wan feels the beginnings of tears start up behind his eyelids – he is unaware of when he closed his eyes – as the last of the bonds snap away, leaving his mind raw, bleeding, a parent with his children ripped away from his side.
His mindscape falls silent.
And he hears the shriek of the plasma-cannon-shot lancing towards him.
Oh, Cody.
I forgive you.
A flash of unbelievable heat, a handspan in front of his face. He wonders if it will blind him, and render him like his friend, Huei Tori, but without even speech.
Boga screams.
He feels rather than sees her scrabble for the crumbling walls. Obi-Wan blinks the sable spots out of his vision, languidly, as he watches time flow past, millisecond by Force-slowed millisecond – gravel scoring bloody furrows in his hands, Boga twisting around, torturously slowly in mid-air, to shield him from the next blast–
And then she dies too, and he realises that the silence in his mind when his men left him, what must be barely two seconds ago in real-time – that was not silence at all, but simply a quietening.
This is silence.
He hits the lake below the sinkhole, and the world is for an instant all white foam, and cool, cool water.
No more fire.
That is good.
He imagines, in the eyeblink until the bubbles dissipate, that he is lost in the Force back in his favourite garden in the Temple, in the cool shade of a Muja tree tall and strong, with a blue-skinned Nautolan Jedi by one shoulder, and the gold-striped montrals of a laughing Togruta by the other.
And then his lungs begin to burn, and he releases the breath in a laugh, though he knows it is more a sob. His breath becomes bubbles – a visible laugh at last, though inaudible, in the lancing bars of sunlight that pierce the water around him.
He cannot be the only one, falling like thus.
Huei. Anakin.
Ahsoka.
Obi-Wan unfolds his rebreather, and places it in his mouth.
He breathes in the galaxy.
The Force cradles him, and fills the silence with a song. The glowlamps of his mind flicker to life, star-studded pebbles in a singing brook.
He clips his lightsaber at his belt, flips over on a current, and begins to swim towards the source of the song.
A/N: And that, my friends, is how Order 66 goes down in a TSS universe. No that it will or will not go down in the actual TSS timeline...but this is a possibility. Also, I'm starting to run out of prompts for Silent Measures so if you have anything you want filled in the timeline so far or any AUs of The Silent Song (even waaaay out there in other crazy fandoms), suggest something in a review or PM me.
One of you asked for a Pacific Rim AU of The Silent Song where Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are drift-compatible and so Obi-Wan can speak, in the drift. I don't remember who asked for this, so do drop me a PM or a message on tumblr if it was you.
So next up: Pacific Rim AU
