“And all the stars that scream” “there are no happy endings” “what endings find us happiness”
“And all the stars that scream” would be a codex fic where Rex finds out what happened to Cody on Utapau and the aftermath, and ends in Rex going to Kamino in a royal snit to try and de-brainwash his husband. Unbeknownst to him, Cody’s no longer under the influence of the chip and is training the latest batch of stormtroopers. He’s bitter and lonely and depressed and hates what he’s doing. Sure, there was no glory in war, but he was fighting for a cause, fighting for honour and safety. There’s none of that in the Empire, and now he’s just training a bunch of kids who are freshly kidnapped and scared and he has to show them how to fight and he just can’t take it anymore. The Empire gets hold of Rex and tortures him in front of Cody, and Cody can’t do anything but watch and scream as his husband is slowly killed in front of him.
Eventually, the rebellion (and Ahsoka) comes to rescue them because Rex got a distress beacon out before he was captured and they get to a safe planet, but it’s too late to save Rex. He gets his happy reunion with Cody, but he dies in his husband’s arms. His last words are probably something sappy like ‘the stars were never as beautiful as you’ (because I like tying fic titles into dialogue for some reason), and Cody joins the rebellion and fights for all that Rex tried to save him from
(and now I’m sad and I want to write this. It’d probably be a multi-chapter epic with a giant playlist and fanart or something)
I thought about turning “There are no happy endings” into my usual obianidala with Obi-Wan moping post RotS but I’ve written three and posted two of those and it’s utterly fucking typical for me, so I’d say this would either be Vader reminiscing about the war and how happy he was and how he fucked it up, or it could be force ghost! Padme looking at Vader and Obi-Wan moping and murdering.
If we went Vader, it would start with Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padme waking up together and having a peaceful morning with the twins and Ahsoka dropping in and it’s all happy. And then Vader wakes up feeling slightly unsettled, like something from his past’s just come out of his head and whacked him on the helmet, but he ignores it and goes about his day. He keeps seeing things in the corner of his eye though, like there’s a kid following him around the ship. He just shrugs it off because there’s stormtroopers to intimidate and a death star to build, but it keeps him wondering about what really happened to Padme and Obi-Wan and their kids (he can’t be certain, but in those last dreadful moments before Padme’s force blinked out entirely he felt two children). Eventually he confronts Palpatine about it and Palpatine goes all torture-dark-lord-etc on him.
If we went Padme, the fic would open with her death, and seeing Qui-Gon in the force. He’d probably tell her what’s going down and she sits and watches over Luke and Leia and Obi-Wan (she can’t make herself even think about Vader in the early days, can’t think of the man he used to be and the monster he’s become), and eventually figures out what Ahsoka’s doing and helps her set up fulcrum. She’d appear to Luke and Leia a few times, she’d try to talk to Obi-Wan but he’s probably crawled into a bottle or something at this point and is therefore passing off her messages as hallucinations and ignoring it. Vader, on the other hand, is so desperate to hear from anyone from his family, so he imagines Padmé everywhere even though she’s not. Padmé sees what’s going on and tries to snap Vader out of the dark but it doesn’t work, and she tries to help Obi-Wan but it doesn’t work either and the fic ends with her bemoaning her husband’s fates and being sad I guess (thus the title, ‘there are no happy endings’. If I was actually gonna write this fic, it would be called ‘(there are no) happy endings’ just to drive the angst home).
(Oh no I kinda wanna write this one as well)
“What endings find us happiness” would be an au where Anakin didn’t fall, Padme didn’t die, Obi-Wan didn’t go off moping in the desert, and (most of) the clones listened to Rex and Fives and took out their chips. Fives survived because Fox had his guns on stun (like they were supposed to be) and so he was only knocked out; he was around for Anaxes and getting Echo back.
Mustafar plays out differently, with Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting a fallen Barriss, and as they’re barely escaping with their lives, Padme goes into labour. They end up at Polis Massa with Bail and Yoda etc, when the truth comes out about obianidala’s relationship. Yoda tells Anakin that Ahsoka is most likely dead, but Anakin insists that he can still feel her in the force. There’s an epic screaming match between Obi-Wan and Anakin, who are all for going off and looking for survivors, and Yoda, who wants everyone to go into a nice quiet exile.
Anakin ends up pinching a ship with his spouses and tiny children (Bail offers to look after them for a while and they very nearly take him up on it) and heading to the Mandalore system to try and find Ahsoka and the clones. Padme suggests that they check Utapau to see if Cody’s alive (and not under the 66 trance as well) but Obi-Wan can’t face it and Anakin’s freaking tf out about Ahsoka so they ignore Utapau for now.
Once they get to Mandalore, they find that Rex and Ahsoka have gone missing (and possibly the fake grave that they set up in the Ahsoka novel), as well as a dying Kix and a freaking out Jesse, with Fives and Echo nowhere to be found. Everyone freaks out and grabs the two survivors (despite the two clones involved in the chip debacle being 501, not many listened to Fives. A few removed their chips, and tried to protect Ahsoka when 66 went off but were gunned down. Rex and Jesse barely escaped with their lives, and Kix was shot several times while trying to save a brother) and they go off on a massive road trip, looking for everyone else. Kix recovers slowly in this time, but Anakin has to build him a prosthetic leg and he’s still in a lot of pain. Jesse usually refuses to leave his side.
They’re about six months into the ‘road trip’ (complemented with newborns, injury recovery, and the usual PTSD and nightmares combo that they all have) when they find Rex, who’s laying low somewhere in the outer rim. Rex has no idea where Ahsoka went after they parted ways, so they start methodically checking all the planets near Mandalore first, and then they get to Thabeska and find her there, about to head back to Raada to save Kaeden and Miara (they also find out about Bail’s rebellion at this point). Raada plays out pretty much the same. Ahsoka still gets her sabers, and Bail ends up hiding them on Alderaan until the proper rebel base is set up.
Once the base is set up and they’re monitoring Imperial chatter, they hear reports about two renegade clones causing trouble in the outer rim territories. They start to monitor those frequencies more carefully, and eventually hear of an attack on Kamino by these two. Obi-Wan and Padme, who become the commanders of that particular base, send Anakin and a squad of X-Wings to Kamino to extract the clones and help them out.
The clones turn out to be Fives and Echo, trying to rescue Cody and Wolffe, and any other clones, dechipped or not (Wolffe’s chip was damaged when Ventress took his eye, he managed to pull himself out of the 66 trance just after Plo was shot down). Anakin and his squad get them out with a couple casualties (Bly is still on Kamino when Fives takes out his chip, he sacrifices himself so that the others can escape because he can’t live with the fact that he killed his General, his riduur) and head back to the base.
There’s lots of tearful reunions when they get off the ship. Ahsoka immediately launches herself at Fives and Echo. Rex and Cody refuse to leave each other’s sides for ages, and there’s a very emotional conversation had along the lines of ‘I should have listened to you’. Cody and Obi-Wan have their reunion as well and that’s sad as hell.
Life goes on in the Rebellion, Kaeden and Ahsoka get married when they turn 20, and the twins grow up with X-wings for playgrounds and the sounds of air-raid sirens as a lullaby (some nights, when Padme’s waiting up for Anakin, who’s in an X-wing far above, engaged in desperate dogfights with the TIE’s that Palpatine sends, and Obi-Wan’s in the control room, she wishes she’d left her children with Bail or Mon. No child should grow up in a war zone. And then 3 year old Luke starts snoring in the bed beside her and Leia’s hair is in her mouth as her daughter does the octopus on her shoulder, and she thinks that she can never leave them no matter what). Other surviving Clones and Jedi make their way to the rebellion as well, until there’s a thriving community on an outer rim planet full of retired Clones and Jedi and their families.
A New Hope plays out differently: the twins have been trained (by Ahsoka and Obi-Wan and Anakin) and they know what they’re doing, and Luke and Ahsoka waste no time in grabbing some random smuggler off of tatooine and dragging him out to the death star, where Ahsoka and Barriss fight as Han and Luke rescue Leia. The twins help their older sister and get her (injured, but alive) onto the ship, and Luke joins the death star run while his parents and sisters are chewing their nails to the quick down in the war room.
Empire Strikes Back is much the same, including Luke heading to Dagobah because Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka decided they needed Yoda’s help to deal with Barriss. The Han and Leia arc plays out the same, and Luke still goes to rescue them and fights Barriss again.
Return of the Jedi is also pretty much the same as in canon, but it’s Ahsoka and Luke who go up to the Death Star and fight the Emperor and Barriss. There’s an emotional scene between Barriss and Ahsoka at the very end, where Barriss comes back to the light and apologises for what she did. There’s a party on Endor which turns into Wedge and Luke’s impromptu wedding; Han and Leia get married a few days later.
Everything is happy and nice and calm, no one dies, and nothing bad ever happens to them ever again the end.
(I also want to write this one as a full-blown au like what I planned modern au to be)
