Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

With Boil and Waxer headed back to base, Scrapper’s the only one still in the field. Cody twists his speeder in the direction of the last blinking red dot on his navcomp and starts pinging their short-range radio channel. Bones had sworn up and down that the planet’s strange electromagnetic radiation wasn’t harmful to humanoids, but it’s been hell on their communications network, and the sandstorm edging up the horizon has been making things worse in a way even Cody hadn’t anticipated.

When he finally gets a responding ping, he has to tuck a sigh of relief between his teeth before he pulls open a voice channel. “Scrapper. You find anything?”

“Not yet, sir,” Scrapper reports through the harsh chop of static. “Weird emag over here, though.”

“Set a marker, and we’ll come back. That storm’s coming up too fast for comfort.”

Cody hears a burst of static that might be covering a curse. “Commander, we can’t leave yet. The general—”

“Can take care of himself until the storm blows over,” Cody says, as much to himself as to Scrapper. “Stay where you are. We’ll go back together.”

Cody coaxes his speeder forward with an eye on his navcomp, and he scowls when he sees Scrapper’s red dot still moving away from him.

“Scrapper, I’m serious. I’m worried about the general, too, but we’ll be of no use to him if we get lost out here. Stay where you are.”

“Huh?” he hears beneath the now-omnipresent static. “I’m… not moving, sir. I swear.”

And Scrapper’s a stubborn ass, but he isn’t a liar. Cody frowns, tapping at the screen of his nav. Far in the distance, flashes of blue and white lightning are just barely visible in the light brown depths of the roiling sandstorm, and the ground is starting to rumble. When he looks back at the screen, the red dot he’d thought was Scrapper is heading right for him.

“Scraps, you got a lock on base?” he says, tense.

“Yeah, why—”

“Go.”

The last thing Cody hears through the static is the rev of an engine, and he spares a second to be grateful that his men know how to follow orders when it counts.

He turns his own speeder parallel to the storm, doing some quick trig in his head to see if he can get close enough to where he thinks their base should be before the storm hits. On the navcomp, the markers have started shifting like the mirages atop this planet’s vast and twisting sands. Scrapper’s marker is closing the distance between them quickly, too quickly for a speeder, and Cody spins the throttle as far back as it can go. He doesn’t know what that marker actualy is, but every instinct he has is telling him he doesn’t want to find out. When he looks up, there’s nothing on the horizon except the storm, even though Scrapper had apparently been close enough for short-range comms. 

Cody has the sinking feeling that he’d underestimated the situation. The planet hadn’t just been interrupting comms, he thinks, but rather actively, intentionally changing them somehow.

He leans into the acceleration of his speeder, clicking his back teeth to cycle through his visor’s infrared and tactical modes, and he drops his rangefinder down to see if he can’t manually locate the base’s signal. The speeder thrums beneath him, pushed to and past its limits, and there, on the edge of the storm, he can just barely see—

The ground gives way beneath him, his speeder, and the darkening sky.

It’s like being pulled through a wormhole of sand. The ground caves in around him, sucking him down and in, and down and through, and then Cody is in freefall alongside crumbling stone, a rain of sand, and the heavy tumble of his speeder. He pushes himself away from the latter on instinct, and he manages to get enough distance between himself and the vehicle before they hit the ground. He lands on the broad plane of his upper shoulder and rolls through his impact, coming to a dizzy halt a few feet away. 

The speeder has no such training. It splinters into scrap with an awful wrenching screech, and Cody winces as the noise echoes in the vast cavern of the room he’s fallen into. After that, he can’t hear anything beyond the constant pitter-patter of sand down the walls. He lies there in the dark, panting to catch his breath, and sorts through a mental checklist of his injuries. His fingers curl, his legs straighten, and his lungs expand, so. It could’ve been worse. 

He stumbles to his feet and stares around in a blackness so complete that even his night vision can’t pick up a light to amplify. A series of blinks activates his headlamp, and he sighs in relief when the light flickers on, grateful that it hadn’t been damaged in fall. Ten feet away, he can’t say the same for the speeder or its other cargo. His packs are scattered around the wreck, and there’s blood steaming off the metal cylinders connected to the twisted hunk of metal that used to be the engine, and there’s more pooled on the floor. 

Kriffing hells, he thinks, and he starts separating the clean and unharmed packs. Almost four gallons of water survived, and he has enough ration bars to throw a feast for Ghost Company, but. 

Well, best to focus on himself for now. The navcomp screen of the speeder is broken into bits of jagged transparisteel, so it’s no help, and the GPS on Cody’s wristnav is showing only a calm and static-filled sea. The storm must be directly overhead.

He starts consolidating the surviving rations into a single pack for transport, and he’s almost finished when the proximity alarm pings his HUD. The warning light indicates movement behind him, but nothing is up on video. His breathing stills, and he pretends to reach for another ration bar before grabbing his blaster and drawing it as he whirls, aiming down the long hallway behind him.

Sharp blue eyes glitter in the darkness beyond the beam of his headlamp. Cody sighs in relief and holsters his blaster.

“Sir,” he says gratefully, and General Obi-Wan Kenobi steps into the light.

"Good to see you too, Commander," Obi-Wan says, smiling, and Cody can see real joy in the soft curves of his shoulders. 

"Kriffing hells, have you been down here this whole time?" Cody asks, glad that at least the “search” part of his search and rescue mission has been a success.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Obi-Wan walks over to the speeder and stares upwards at the collapsed hole in the ceiling, one hand on his slightly dusty beard, and Cody shines his headlamp up to get a better look himself. The rubble has completely caved in on the hole, blocking any view of the sky above, and Cody fears any additional shifting would bring the rest of the ceiling down on top of them.

Obi-Wan appears to come to the same conclusion and shakes his head. "I will admit to some surprise at how very handily this place has managed to keep me within its grasp."

That explains, at least, why Obi-Wan had missed so many rendezvous points, but it doesn’t bode well for Cody’s chances of helping his general find a way out.

“Have you found the Jedi artifact?” Cody asks.

“No luck there either, Commander. All I found was the same phrase we read in the Jedi Archives before we left: ‘acts of mercy will set you free’,” Obi-Wan quotes. 

Honestly, being set free seems to be of more importance than an ancient, powerful relic at this point. Worry seeps into Cody’s relief. Obi-Wan’s been in this temple for at least three days, possibly four, and he hadn’t been in peak form when the mission started. And now that Cody’s looking, he seems a little gray even in the bright light of Cody’s headlamp. 

"Sir, is there anything alive down here?" he asks.

Obi-Wan gives him a wry smile, clearly understanding the real question. "Not even a rat, Commander."

It’s enough to make Cody want to start cursing all over again. Jedi can sustain themselves for far longer than the average human, but their power is not infinite, and Obi-Wan looks like he’s running into the firm and finite lines of his limits.

“I’m sorry, sir, but,” he trails off and gestures to the bloodied remains of his speeder.

Obi-Wan shakes his head with a gentle smile. "Don't be sorry, Cody. It brought me to you, didn't it? So it wasn't a complete waste."

Cody pulls his pack up higher on his shoulder, filled with the desperate kind of resolve. “Let’s get moving, then. We need to get you out of here.”

“We need to get us both out of here,” Obi-Wan corrects, but he turns and follows Cody as Cody leads them out of the antechamber he had fallen into.

The wind of storm is a distant and echo-filled howl beyond the confines of the buried temple. The force of it shakes the ceiling such that sand falls in miniature cascades from the interlocking sandstone blocks, and Cody is unsurprised to find an intersection fewer than thirty feet from the scene of the crash. The hallway to the right has a lightsaber burn on its corner, and Cody guesses that must have been the direction Obi-Wan had come from.

“Taking every left, sir?” Cody asks, and Obi-Wan nods.

“I’d started out making choices by instinct, but I decided to take a more methodical approach after the first few hours. I will admit… I do not feel as though one or the other made much difference.”

Cody’s wristnav still shows a monochrome field of static, and Obi-Wan shakes his head when Cody raises an eyebrow at him.

“The Force is about as useful as your nav down here, I’m afraid. I can’t feel anything.”

“Methodical it is, then,” Cody says, and he steps down the hallway to the left, moving into an ancient and unknown danger, unafraid even in the emptiness with Obi-Wan behind him.

Obi-Wan fills the silence with tales of other heroes lost in mazes, and he trails off after one about a Mandalorian ship captain using a ball of string to find his way out of an old Trandoshan mining prison. The stories had last for a few hours at least, but his voice has dwindled to a rasp, and Cody claims fatigue and calls for a break.

The crinkle of a ration bar wrapper seems overloud in the dismal silence of the temple, and it’s a chore to keep the ever-falling sands out of his water canteen. Across the hallway, Obi-Wan looks even more wan and gray than he had before, but there’s no point in calling attention to it. Obi-Wan knows. 

When Cody offers him one of his canteens, Obi-Wan politely pushes it away, and he stumbles slightly when they get back to their feet.

Cody's his heart flips in his chest at the sight of Obi-Wan’s weakness. “I’m sorry, sir, about the supplies."

“Not your fault, Cody,” Obi-Wan responds. He pushes a hand through the auburn waves of his hair and leaves his forehead streaked with sand. “It won’t seriously affect me for another day or so. We can wait until tomorrow before—before worrying overmuch.”

Well, at least Cody’s chrono works. Around the time night is falling outside, he stops them both again and settles against the wall. Obi-Wan sits next to him, cross-legged in meditation, and the edge of his knee that brushes against Cody’s hand is frigidly cold, even through two layers of clothing. 

Cody had been planning to sleep for four hours, but after that, he sets his timer for two, and he wakes up groggy and already tired of the endless series of left, left, left dragging them through the temple.

“What do you think it means by acts of mercy?” Cody asks around what should be sunrise the next day, and Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan says. “We know that only a Jedi should be able to access the device, but I’ll admit that I’d settle for merely accessing an exit at the moment.”

Cody looks over, swallowing. It’s rare to hear that sort of defeatism from his general, even when it’s couched in humor. Obi-Wan’s skin looks taut and drawn, and his color is a worryingly waxy gray.

“Obi-Wan,” he says, as soft as he can, and Obi-Wan closes his eyes.

“I know.”

It’s enough to force Cody to gather his courage, there in the dark, because there can be no better time or place for the discussion of the taboo than a forgotten temple cut off entirely from comms. Still, he thinks, biting his tongue. Best to come at the matter sideways.

“Sir, I. I’ve always wondered why the Jedi are forbidden from drinking from humanoids.”

Obi-Wan’s fond smile means that he’d been expecting this question for a few hours now, and Cody swallows a sigh of relief.

“Have you considered that you simply don’t taste good?” Obi-Wan teases, and Cody raises an eyebrow until Obi-Wan relents.

“Oh, alright. The truth is, we aren’t actually forbidden to drink from humanoids,” Obi-Wan admits. “We are only forbidden from killing them. It’s when you drink from someone to such excess that you kill them that you cross the Rubicon into the Dark Side. Even if done by accident, if you drink someone’s lifeblood—well. It imbues you with powers beyond any Jedi’s reckoning, but it is an act of murder that cannot be taken back. It changes you.”

Cody hums, contemplative. Even in the sanitizing light of Cody’s headlamp, Obi-Wan looks a little more awake while teaching, so Cody asks, “How so?”

“It’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to do it again. Your body craves it: the power, the violence. Power of all kinds has always been an addiction, but for a Sith, the addiction is far more physiological than psychological.”

Obi-Wan looks pensive, then, and Cody wonders about the rumors of Count Dooku being one of Obi-Wan’s teachers. He wonders who Dooku killed, and if it was on purpose.

If he regretted it.

“Your eyes change color, too,” Obi-Wan adds, breaking the tension. His own madder blue eyes twinkle in the dim light. “And I’d hate to have to re-coordinate all my outfits.”

A bit of dust shakes free from the ceiling, and each mote is a white ember hovering in the windless night. Cody looks through the sparse cloud of it to where his general is folded cross-legged on a floor that hasn’t seen footsteps in a millennia or more, looking for the words he needs. 

Looking for what Obi-Wan is truly worried about.

“You wouldn’t kill me,” Cody says, and he only sees Obi-Wan’s flinch because he’s looking for it. There, in the twitch of his shoulders, in the white of his knuckles, lives the rawness of Obi-Wan’s fear. “Obi-Wan, I trust you. You wouldn’t.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says. There’s a wellspring of even words and impeccable logic lined up for his next breath, neat rows of arguments waiting for their marching orders, and Cody does not want to hear them.

“Strategically, it’s our best option,” Cody interrupts. “This is a Jedi temple. It was designed for your people, so you have the best chance of figuring out the exit, and I need you conscious for that.”

Obi-Wan’s lips press into a thin white line above the auburn edge of his beard. “ Well, strategically, your wellbeing is at least as important as mine, Commander. Eventually, the storm will let up, and you have a much better chance of connecting to the 212th than I have of finding a way out of here. Your comms knowledge is significantly greater than mine.”

“You wouldn’t leave me unable to use it.”

“I—” With a huff, Obi-Wan turns to the side, but Cody knows he won’t lie. Cody just keeps looking him, as steadily as he can, and waits. 

Obi-Wan takes a breath he doesn't need. 

"I’ve never drunk from a human before, so I do not exactly have first-hand experience with the aftereffects," he says. There’s an edge to his voice that sounds a lot like fear and a little like hunger. "I couldn't guarantee your safety. It's too much of a risk."

"A greater risk would be your starvation. Look, it wouldn't have to be much. Just enough to keep you on your feet until we're out."

Obi-Wan's face twists into a familiar stubborn blankness, and his lack of immediate response means that Cody's getting close. He's seen Obi-Wan negotiate too many times not to know when to press his advantage.

"I sign off on the requisitions for the entire Third Systems Army," Cody says. "I know exactly how much blood the Jedi need, and I know exactly how much blood a clone can safely lose. This is the right call."

At that, Obi-Wan hesitates, and Cody holds his breath. Check, he thinks, his heart pounding. 

"We shouldn't," Obi-Wan says. It’s a far cry from can’t. 

And Cody could continue to argue and rationalize—he could take another leaf from Obi-Wan's book and offer a compromise, say they could wait another twelve hours and make the decision then—but he doesn't.

Instead, he says, "Please, Obi-Wan," and Obi-Wan closes his eyes. 

The hall is quiet around them for a long, quivering second. The sounds of the storm are very distant here, and sandstone walls arc above them in austere solemnity. When Obi-Wan at last looks at Cody again, Cody can see in those gray-blue eyes a new kind of resolve.

"Okay," Obi-Wan says. "Okay."

Cody feels the tension rattle out of his body when he exhales, his breath stirring up more puffs of dust, and then he grins. Obi-Wan won’t be able to see it through his helmet, but he gets the feeling Obi-Wan knows anyway.

“Good,” Cody says, “because my back-up plan was shoving a straw in my neck and leaning temptingly against a wall, and I feel like this will be more dignified.”

To Cody’s delight, Obi-Wan snorts a laugh, startled out of his worry. “It wouldn’t have been your best counter strategy to date.”

“Would it have worked?”

“No. But I would have appreciated the effort.”

They trade smiles, small but real, and Cody feels so much more solid with a plan in front of him. The Jedi archives had had aerial photographs of the temple before it had been buried, so Cody knows the labyrinth can’t be more than a square mile in area. He has enough rations to last another two days at least, and if Obi-Wan doesn’t get any weaker, they can traverse the full length of the labyrinth in that time. They can get out, get to the 212th, and go home.

“Good,” he repeats. “Good. Then—now?”

Cody is well-trained and well-practiced in the art of logistics for the entirety of the Third Systems Army, but he’s never had to schedule getting his blood drawn by a Jedi.

His response is a softening of Obi-Wan’s smile.

“Give me another three hours,” Obi-Wan says, hedging, and that’s far fewer than the twelve that Cody had been expecting. It makes Cody suddenly, viscerally glad that Obi-Wan has already agreed to drink from him. A shiver goes down his spine, and he doesn’t know whether it’s due to anticipation or the reality of a very-near miss.

“Three hours,” Cody agrees, and Obi-Wan rolls his eyes when Cody sets a timer on his wrist chrono.

Despite Obi-Wan’s best efforts, three hours pass in a series of hallways in the same monotonous pale sandstone, crumbling in the wake of time and neglect. Cody’s wrist buzzes as they’re turning away from yet another dead end, and he can’t help but bite his lip as he draws to a stop.

Ahead of him in the darkness, Obi-Wan stops as well. He had set out at a faster pace than Cody had seen from him since falling into the temple, but his determination had been no match for his fatigue. His skin is even more wan and gray, and his spine folds itself into a shallow curve far from its usual straight line. 

Cody wishes only that he’d argued for two hours instead of three. He digs his fingers into the grooves on his helmet that release the neck seal, and he lifts it free with only a second’s hesitation. The bright circle cast by his headlamp moves down the wall like a setting sun as he places his helmet carefully on the ground.

“It’s time, then,” Obi-Wan says, and his eyes are dim blue embers when he turns. 

“Yeah.” 

Cody reaches for the clasps on his armor before either he or Obi-Wan can think better of this, approaching the problem in the same way he would a battlefront. The best point of access is, according to all media, the neck, so he’ll need to remove both his armor and at least partially unzip his body glove. These are—these are all things he can do. He twists his head to check one of the snaps holding his cuirass together, and when he looks up again, Obi-Wan is in front of him, chest to chest.

"Let me," Obi-Wan says, and Cody swallows.

Obi-Wan knows the proper order, because of course he does. Cody’s couters, vambraces, rerebraces, and cuirass all join his helmet on the floor in quick succession, set down with loving care. Dressed only in his leg armor, Cody turns without a word so Obi-Wan can find the zip snugged into the top flap of the body glove’s collar. 

Here, at last, Obi-Wan’s quick and clever fingers hesitate.

“You’re sure?” Obi-Wan asks, and Cody nods. The darkness of the temple feels like a liquid thing, spilling into the spaces between them, and Cody wants to move closer just to block it out. Obi-Wan had been very sure that there is nothing alive in this ancient labyrinth, but Cody can’t help but tense with the conviction that something, still, is watching.

The click-click-click of the zipper sliding down echoes through the long hallway. The sweat on Cody’s bare back starts to evaporate into the cool, dry air immediately, and he shivers at the sensation. His armor is a comfort, it always has been, and he can’t help but wish he could do this with it on.

When the zipper reaches the bottom of his ribs, Obi-Wan stops, and Cody’s heart can’t withstand another effort to stall. He opens his mouth to protest, but Obi-Wan uses his grip on the zipper to tug Cody back towards the wall.

“Wait, we should do this sitting down,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody scoffs, trying to shake the tense anticipation out of his lungs.

“I’m no wilting daisy, Obi-Wan. The Seppies have done far worse to me than you will, I’m sure.”

There’s a faint glimmer of blue in the dim light beyond the headlamp’s beam as Obi-Wan rolls his eyes.

“It’s not a question of your pain tolerance, Commander. A Jedi bite is not so simple as a piercing of skin,” Obi-Wan says, pressing on Cody’s shoulders until Cody goes, grudgingly, to his knees. “There are components in our saliva that are intended to help, ah. Make our victim more pliant.”

At that, Cody twists his head until he can raise an eyebrow at his general. “Pliant?” 

Obi-Wan settles against the wall with his legs spread and his knees bent, his feet planted on the floor, and he pulls Cody backwards until Cody’s back is flush with Obi-Wan’s chest. 

“I believe there’s a genetic component that informs the severity of the reaction,” Obi-Wan says. Cody can feel the soft exhale of Obi-Wan’s words stir the fine hairs at the back of his neck. Goosebumps rise from the surface of his skin, forming a continuous mountain range from his spine to the the wing of his shoulder as Obi-Wan pushes the fabric of his blacks towards Cody’s shoulder.

And usually, Cody pays careful attention during Obi-Wan’s teachable moments, but his focus is somewhere on the floor next to his armor. Obi-Wan is so close, and his skin is so much colder than usual, and Cody is about to donate blood in a very specific way. 

“Yeah?” is the best he can offer.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan says, and there’s a wellspring of fondness in the words. “I doubt anyone has a record of Jango Fett’s reaction to a Jedi bite.” 

“Excessive amounts of violence, probably,” Cody says. He feels Obi-Wan’s answering laugh rumble through the scant air between them, and Obi-Wan’s thumb is ice cold where it runs over the curve where Cody’s neck meets his shoulder.

“As good a guess as any. Still, best to be prepared.”

“I’m not going to faint." Cody has fainted twice in his life, once from blaster wounds and once from suffocation during a training bout with Alpha-17, and he's not about to add a third tally. “And I’ll stop you if I need to.” 

“Mmm.”

Cody wishes he could see Obi-Wan. He wishes he could check the height of Obi-Wan’s shoulders and the white of his knuckles; he wishes he could measure the bow of his spine. But perhaps he doesn’t need to know those things to know that Obi-Wan is terribly, awfully afraid. He just needs to know Obi-Wan.

“I’m ready,” he says, injecting his words with as much calm certainty as he can. “Are you?”

The icy trail of Obi-Wan’s thumb stops, pressing firmly into the raised line of the muscle above Cody’s shoulder blade.

“No. No, but. Try not to hold your breath, my dear.”

Cody tilts his head to the side, breathes in once, lets it out, and waits.

The first thing he feels is the wet slide of Obi-Wan’s lips on his skin, and he can feel his heart start to pick up its pace. He winds a tight leash around his breathing, tracking its pace as closely as he would an incoming missile, and he still almost loses the thread when he first feels two pinpricks, impossibly gentle, against his neck. He expects Obi-Wan to call a halt to everything again, or to wait, or to ask for Cody’s permission a third time, but—

Obi-Wan slides in, as smooth and easy as setting a LAAT/i down on Naboo. Cody’s body welcomes him easily, and it feels nothing like pain.

A rush of euphoria crashes over him like a wave, and another, and another, until Cody is drowning in a wash of pleasure. He has a single second to blink, too overwhelmed to even react, before every single one of his muscles collapses like a dam giving way. 

“Oh, fuck," he manages to stutter out, and then he sags into Obi-Wan’s gentle hold. He struggles against the current, trying to fight his way to the surface, but the pleasure is riptide. His head lolls to the side instead, baring his neck further, and he feels Obi-Wan’s pleased hum in every bone in his body. His eyes fall shut without his permission, and his vision is bursting with colors and sparks. He can’t breathe, he can’t think; he can only hold on as Obi-Wan sucks him down. 

He reaches a hand up, blind and seeking, to curl his fingers into the soft auburn waves of Obi-Wan’s hair, and he doesn’t remember where they are or what they’re doing. His whole body vibrates like a plucked string. A white heat is building in the base of his spine, flowering into an inferno.

“Obi-Wan,” he says, because the only thing he wants is more of this, more of Obi-Wan, forever. “Fuck, Obi—Obi-Wan.”

That inferno hits his chest, racing through his veins and leaving nothing but pleasure in its wake. Cody screws his eyes even tighter shut and tightens his grip on Obi-Wan’s hair. He’s never felt anything like this, by the stars above and below, and it’s incredible.

“Please,” he stammers, on the very edge of losing himself in the sensation entirely. He is lost; he is found. He is in free-fall at the heart of a dying sun. “Please, I’m—”

And then, awfully, horribly, cruelly, Obi-Wan pulls out.

It feels like the hyperdrive engines cutting out mid-warp. The euphoria drains out of Cody’s veins in an instant, and its sudden absence cuts Cody’s strings. He sags into Obi-Wan’s arms, unable to hold his head or chest up, and the blackness that swallows him doesn’t contain a single star.

Art commissioned from MarieMarion on Tumblr. Posted here with permission. ID in alt text.

He wakes up to the feeling of warmth all down his back and left side and a vague bruise of pain on his neck. His focus is still shot, blurred and indistinct, and struggling towards wakefulness is an uphill battle. The ground beneath him feels like it’s moving in vertiginous waves, unstable and shifting, even though he’s lying down. When he opens his eyes, the darkness over him is just as complete with his eyes open as it is with his eyes closed.

Before he can panic, he feels gentle fingers settle over his eyes, and he hears a voice that he would know even in death, as intimate to him as his own heartbeat, say, “Shh, Cody, it’s okay.”

“Obi-Wan?” he rasps, settling back, because if Obi-Wan’s here, then everything’s ok.

There’s a soft click, and the hand covering his face warms to a rosy red before lifting away. Obi-Wan’s face comes into focus above him, his brows pulled together in concern and his mouth creased into a frown, and every line of his face is so dear and familiar that Cody can’t help but smile up at him. The harsh white light of Cody’s headlamp does him no favors, but Obi-Wan’s face has never needed help being beautiful.

And then he spots the specks of blood reddening the auburn of Obi-Wan’s beard, and memory comes back to Cody in a rush. Oh, stars above, he’s in Obi-Wan’s lap. He fainted in Obi-Wan’s arms. He tries to sit up, and Obi-Wan presses an unyielding palm to his chest.

“Steady there, Commander,” Obi-Wan says with a tinge of exasperation. “We’re in no rush.”

“Sir?” Cody asks, because treating this like a mission might be the only way he can knuckle through his embarrassment. He can’t believe he fainted. He can’t believe he missed—whatever there was to miss. His memories of the experience are equal parts vivid and fragmented, like torn pieces of a supersaturated photograph, and he’s trying not to look too closely at the details. 

He fainted. At some point, he’s pretty sure he moaned.

Fuck.

“You’ve only been out for a few minutes,” Obi-Wan says, and the valleys between his eyebrows smooth into flatter plains as Cody blinks into alertness.

After a quick mental inventory, Cody realizes that he doesn’t feel too bad. He’s a little dizzy and a little disoriented, but it feels more like the aftereffects of passing out than severe bloodloss. But if Obi-Wan had been so thirsty, then, “Why’d you stop?”

Obi-Wan coughs. “I, ah. I thought you were asking me to.”

And Cody remembers having his fist in Obi-Wan’s hair, riding the edge of something that he realizes had felt uncomfortably like an orgasm, and he must have plenty of blood left in his system because it all rushes to fill his cheeks.

“I, ah,” Cody says, and he doesn’t add that he thinks he was pleading for the exact opposite. Obi-Wan’s earlier words— perhaps you simply don’t taste very good —come back to him, and he wants to ask how he tasted. He wants to ask if Obi-Wan would ever try it again, but he swallows the words the same way he swallows the impulse to tell Obi-Wan to finish what he started. “I wasn’t.”

Obi-Wan laughs, a little huff of amusement, and he runs his hand over the sweat-damp coils of Cody’s hair. “Yes, well, once the blood settled and I was able to feel your Force signature again, I realized that, but. That was after I’d withdrawn, and you were already unconscious.”

The fact that Obi-Wan hadn’t even been able to feel Cody’s Force signature is like a blaster bolt clipping the air by his ear: a devastating near miss. Cody swallows, wondering exactly how close to the edge Obi-Wan’s stubborn resolve had brought them. According to the Jedi-training on Kamino, that’s the last thing they lose before losing consciousness. He must still be starving, if he’d let it get that bad.

When Cody tries to sit up this time, Obi-Wan helps him. He’s dizzy enough to need to lean on Obi-Wan for balance, and he’s grateful when Obi-Wan uses the Force to pull one of Cody’s canteens from the pack and into Cody’s waiting hand. 

He starts with slow sips of water, careful not to guzzle it, and does another mental walkthrough from his toes up. His legs are still bruised from the speeder crash; his heart is beating hard but slow; and his mouth is dry with adrenaline of dehydration. His head is full of dissipating clouds.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m good. We can keep moving.”

“Well, fortunately, there isn’t far to go,” Obi-Wan says, and when Cody glances at him in confusion, he nods to the far end of the hall. 

The dead end from earlier is not as dead as it used to be. The wall that had rebuffed them is missing, and a raised dais is set in the center of the newly opened hallway. A glowing red stone the size and shape of a kyber crystal is set in the center of a three-foot pillar, throwing faint rainbows refractions onto the surrounding walls. The light from Cody’s headlamp just barely reaches beyond the dais, but it catches on the welcome shapes and shadows of stairs.

“Acts of mercy,” Cody realizes, and he feels more than he sees Obi-Wan nod.

“Yes. This temple must have been designed to keep the artifact from a Sith. Few would offer to save a Sith, and no Sith would have stopped in time.”

Cody does look at Obi-Wan then, searching not for the kind blue he knows is still there but for Obi-Wan’s acknowledgment of the fact that nothing about him has changed.

“You did,” Cody says. “You stopped, even without my help.”

The floor beneath them is uncomfortable, hard sandstone, and spirals of dust fall in short bursts from the cavernous walls above them. Cody’s blacks are still pulled down on one side, dotted with blood, but it’s GAR-regulation fabric. Bloodstains wash right out.

“I did,” Obi-Wan admits, soft in the scant space between them. His smile is grateful, and his eyes are creased into fond, rueful half-moons. “Thank you for believing in me.”

Cody looks back as steadily as he can despite the blush heating a line from his ears to his cheeks to the bridge of his nose. “You might doubt yourself, Obi-Wan, but I never will.”

They stand without another word. Obi-Wan helps Cody strap his armor back on, careful of the shining scabs at the curve of his neck, and then shoulders the full weight of Cody’s pack with enviable ease. When they reach the dais, Obi-Wan extends his claws and, without ever letting the artifact touch his skin, plucks the crystal from its setting and puts it into the lead container he has strapped onto his belt. The last spark of red light vanishes as Obi-Wan screws the lid on, and the column and dais sink back into the floor until this section of the hallway looks exactly the same as every other.

Kriffing Jedi magic, Cody thinks, stunned, wondering just how much of the maze had been shifting around them as they had walked. They could have spent weeks taking left turn after left turn and never walked the full maze.

The staircase is a spiral up and up and up, each stone stair crumbling a little but firmly set into the wall, and it leads them to a landing beneath a hatch that Cody expects to be covered in sand. When he reaches up to undo the bolts and prepares to pull it free, though, only a small shower of sand accompanies the bright yellow spill of sunlight.

“Oh,” he says, wondering and grateful, and he catches Obi-Wan’s smile before his Jedi pulls his hood over his head. Obi-Wan might not be strong enough to stand in the full sunlight just yet, but. They’d both been strong enough to get out.

The instant they climb out onto the sands, their comms are flooded with increasingly frantic messages from the 212th, and Cody can’t help but laugh. He looks over at Obi-Wan, grinning, and their eyes meet beneath a gentle blue. They’re free.

It hits him then, suddenly and surely, that whatever magic controlling the temple below had been wrong. That was no act of mercy. Obi-Wan would have gladly, instantly chosen his death before killing Cody. In a hundred thousand universes, in every universe that exists, there is no incarnation of Obi-Wan that would have killed Cody. Hell, Obi-Wan had been so terrified of even the possibility that he had almost chosen death regardless. 

He hadn’t know what Cody had known, because, of the two of them, Cody knows Obi-Wan. Cody knows his hopes and his fear and his white knuckles and his sparkling madder blue eyes, and baring his neck is the least of all things Cody would do for him. Obi-Wan sinking his teeth into Cody’s neck had not been an act of mercy, but one of trust: trust that, in that instant, Cody knew Obi-Wan better than he knew himself.

Mine wasn't an act of mercy either, Cody realizes, reaching out to twine his fingers with Obi-Wan’s and feeling his heart pound sure and steady in his chest. He wonders if his blood is beating in Obi-Wan’s heart the same way, if it’s singing the same besotted song, because the temple was wrong about him, too. My act was an act of love.

Chapter Text

Venator-class starships don’t sleep, not really. The hallways are patrolled by neat sets of twos and fours no matter the hour, and the vivid white lights overhead never dim below blinding. Still, Cody thinks, nodding to the patrols he passes, the ship has something of a circadian rhythm anyways. Here in the drowsy space between third and fourth watch is a lull, a casual sleepy slowness, that he’s never been able to train out of his men. 

He passes the mess hall and sees the kitchens starting to switch from hot food to cold, at least until fourth watch comes in for breakfast, and he thinks about grabbing something before moving on. Only a month ago, he’d gotten into the habit of bringing two different sets of rations with him to his destination. Now, he isn’t hungry, and he worries that Obi-Wan is.

The route from the mess to his general’s quarters is well-known and well-trod. There are no viewports along this stretch of the ship, but Cody thinks he can feel the night pressing in through the durasteel. Anticipation of the coming battle hangs heavy in the recycled air. There’s an awareness throughout the ship that some sort of end is waiting for them at their destination, and it’s almost enough to make him want to don his armor over his greys.

He knocks on Obi-Wan’s door and enters in the same motion, sure of his welcome though still in awe of it, and his eyes fall on Obi-Wan immediately. The man is on the far corner of the couch with his legs curled beneath him like a lothcat, and all of his attention is caught by the datapad in his lap. The pad’s light is vivid in the dimmed atmosphere of the room, and the synthetic blue skates along the sharp panes of Obi-Wan’s face, catching on the wrinkles gathered at the corners of his eyes and the gray hairs feathering from his temples. A sweep of love touches down like a tornado in Cody’s chest, sudden and spinning, and he stays in the doorway, one hand on the frame, for a second longer. 

His feet carry him over to the couch, and, on impulse, he leans down and presses a kiss to the corner of one of Obi-Wan’s eyes. When Obi-Wan looks up, his smile has ragged edges.

Haggard, Cody thinks. Haggard is what his general is. It’s been a long war, overflowing with loss, and with no rest or respite as a counterweight. Even Obi-Wan’s heart, as vast and indomitable as it is, is not enough to hold the tragedies of this war.

That has not stopped him from trying.

“What was that for?” Obi-Wan says, and his smile is all fond welcome.

It would be easy to tuck himself into Obi-Wan’s side on the couch, to pull the blanket over them and trade half-finished thoughts on the battle plans they’ve been refining over the past week of travel, but that isn’t what he came here for. So he swallows, and he doesn’t mince his words.

“You looked tired,” he says. Obi-Wan blinks, clearly about to quip about his beauty routine, but Cody cuts him off. “I know the blood shortage across the GAR has been taking its toll.”

Obi-Wan startles, then closes his tablet and gives Cody his full attention as Cody moves beside him on the couch. 

“A little,” Obi-Wan admits. “But nothing I can’t handle. Have I done something to worry you?”

Cody shakes his head. “Not yet, but. You’ve struggled against Grievous even when fully prepared. It’s bad timing for a shortage.”

“Mm. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else we can do about it,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody doesn’t tell him he’s wrong just yet. “It isn’t really a blood shortage, you see. Many things bleed. There’s a chemical additive that keeps blood from degrading past the point of Jedi consumption even during space flight, but it’s also a necessary component for the meat-packing industry, and—”

“Obi-Wan,” Cody interrupts. He knows Obi-Wan’s rambling because he’s trying not to think about hunger. He knows, too, that Obi-Wan could have requested more of the dwindling reserves for himself due to the importance of this mission, and that Obi-Wan didn’t. He knows these two things well enough to not need a primer on the breakdown of the galactic supply chain. “Whatever the reason, I don’t want you facing Grievous at anything less than full power.”

That, too, catches Obi-Wan’s full attention. When he pauses to look at Cody, his eyes are the color of a well of clean water and just as impenetrable. Cody holds his ground in that eviscerating light so that, even in those unfathomed depths, Cody sees the moment when Obi-Wan realizes what Cody’s been guiding them towards.

“You want me to drink from you again,” Obi-Wan says, and he keeps his words free of any emotion but certainty.

There’s no point in denying it. “Yes.”

Cody doesn’t add anything about why else he wants it. Their relationship has evolved since the last and first time Obi-Wan drank from him, has grown roots and wings, but Obi-Wan’s teeth have been blunt against Cody’s skin in the intervening months. Cody had wanted, desperately, to feel them sharpen on his neck again, but he hadn’t wanted to push. He hadn’t been able to push for his own sake, he realizes. But he can push for Obi-Wan’s.

Next to him on the couch, still clustered together in the dim light and close warmth of starship quarters, Obi-Wan strokes his beard. He hasn’t said ‘no’; Cody’s heart pounds.

“It’s not just my strength necessary for this battle,” Obi-Wan says at last. This is also not a no. “I don’t want to trade my weakness for yours.”

Cody raises an eyebrow, because he wasn’t expecting Obi-Wan to argue the strategical merit. “I’d be fine. We still have a few standard days before we arrive, and it’s easy enough for me to rehydrate. Plus, you know I’m coordinating the battle from the rear guard. Losing a few pints isn’t going to hurt my ability to shout into comms.”

“Cody…”

“And,” he continues, “even if we lose Pau City, it won’t be nearly as bad as losing Grievous all over again.”

Cody isn’t going to beg, not again. It would feel like cheating, and although Cody has no qualms with cheating on the battlefield, he isn’t going to manipulate Obi-Wan. He wants this, but he doesn’t need it, and he has faith in Obi-Wan’s ability to both make the right call and defeat Grievous regardless. 

But still. The strategic aspect isn’t the whole picture. Cody hasn’t been able to sleep some nights, haunted by the memory of that night in the temple and the fear that he’d never once have that feeling again.

So he throws himself blindly, fiercely into the follow-through. “And I want—I want to try again. To feel that again.”

Obi-Wan does not need to breathe, but his breath catches anyways. Cody can’t fall into parade rest while sitting on a couch, curling close to his general, but his shoulders and spine straighten as if he could.

At last, the corner of Obi-Wan’s mouth curls up, wry. 

He says, “How could I ever refuse you?” and Cody grins.

“You never could argue with good tactics.”

It startles a laugh out of Obi-Wan, who keeps looking at Cody all soft and fond and raw at the edges until he stands. “Come to bed, then,” he says. “We might as well be comfortable.”

Cody’s heart sings a warbling, uncertain victory. With trembling fingers, Cody strips the shirt of his grays as he follows Obi-Wan across the scant space from the couch to the bed. He doesn’t want to presume, but he’s still, somehow, convinced that Obi-Wan will change his mind. The ship’s air is cold across his skin, raising goosebumps in its wake, and he feels strangely shy as Obi-Wan’s blue eyes cast unreflected light from the shadow of the bunk. His bare chest isn’t anything Obi-Wan hasn’t seen before, so there’s no reason for the shyness, but. He never did ask if he tasted good. He wishes he could remember more of that night in the temple—did Obi-Wan enjoy it, too? Or had it been a chore, necessary only for survival?

Obi-Wan tucks a pillow between the small of his back and the wall and then pulls Cody into the vee of his spread legs. Cody is wider than Obi-Wan but not taller, and when he sits in the cradle of Obi-Wan’s hips, back to chest, Obi-Wan manages to fit around him easily. He doesn’t know what to say; he is in Obi-Wan’s reach and capable hands, and he wants, as always, to follow his general’s lead. He breathes in, holds it, and he tilts his head to the side as he breathes out to give Obi-Wan room. 

The tension between them has sharp teeth. Cody has no idea why he’s nervous. He wants this. He’s done this before, and Obi-Wan would never hurt him, so. 

Obi-Wan is lukewarm at his back. His skin temperature isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it had been in the temple, but it’s a stark reminder of the importance of what Cody’s offering. Cody leans back, intent on giving Obi-Wan what warmth he can, but Obi-Wan’s hands stop him. They push him forward, and then they start to run cold and soothing over the hills and valleys of Cody’s back. Thumbs dig into his lats, his traps, and the knots gathered close to his spine, and Cody gasps. Between breaths, following the rhythm of Obi-Wan’s hands, he loosens his shoulders and back, his neck, and the anxious knots in his heart start to unravel as well.

“There you are,” Obi-Wan says, running his hands up and over Cody’s upper arms, and Cody abruptly realizes that he’d marched into their earlier conversation as if into battle. He’d been so worried about what Obi-Wan would say or think, so worried about the consequences of a ‘no’, that he’d worried Obi-Wan with the depth of his fear.

“Sorry,” he admits, unmoving. “I just. I wanted you to say yes. I was very prepared for you to say no.”

Obi-Wan hums, and the sound cuts through the air to vibrate across Cody’s skin. “In fairness, I considered refusing. I probably should, still, but my primary reason for refusal would have been—well. How much I didn’t want to refuse.”

And wanting is dangerous for a Jedi, but it’s still a relief to hear.

“I’m glad,” Cody says softly, and Obi-Wan’s hands stop their gentle motions over Cody’s shoulders. It’s enough to push Cody even further, because he doesn’t want to leave anything on the table. “I said I wanted this, and you, and I meant it. But I don’t know how much talking I’ll be able to do after you start. It was… overwhelming, last time.”

After they’d escaped both the temple and Bones’ untender mercies, they had discussed what had happened in bare, clinical detail. Cody had described the sexual nature of his reaction, and Obi-Wan had said that it wasn’t uncommon, not really, and the conversation had led to other, greener pastures. Still, the embarrassment Cody felt over being unable to control that reaction is present even now, even after having Obi-Wan’s cock in his mouth and his cock in Obi-Wan. 

Obi-Wan kisses the topmost knob of Cody’s spine and moves his hands to wrap around Cody’s hips and pull him close. The strength and the weight are reassuring.

“Then, can I help, during?” Obi-Wan asks. The words stir the fine hairs at the back of Cody’s neck, and Cody closes his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Yes. Anything you want.”

“You’re sure?”

Obi-Wan kisses from Cody’s spine to the crook of his shoulder, then up the line of his neck to hover over the steady drumbeat of Cody’s carotid. Cody feels a rebound of his pulse in the contact like an echo, and he wants to feel Obi-Wan’s heart beat in sync with his own.

“Yes,” Cody repeats.

Two pins prickle on his skin, delicate and almost imperceptible, and Cody imagines Obi-Wan’s elongated teeth resting on top of his skin with the graceful poise of a ballerina on pointe. He reaches one hand up to slide his fingers into the waves of Obi-Wan’s hair, thrumming with anticipation. Stars, stars. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to resist the bite this time, or if he even wants to try.

The second Obi-Wan sinks his teeth in, Cody stops wondering.

The feeling—there’s no describing it. It’s like plunging into a frozen lake, a complete and total shock to the senses, and Cody gasps just as he drowns. He’d spent a long time trying to remember the feeling, but this is nothing like what he remembered. It’s more intense, more overwhelming, and he is immediately sucked in and under and up. In the same way it’s difficult to remember the intensity of pain, he had forgotten the intensity of the pleasure. He knows it again now.

His fingers tight in Obi-Wan’s hair, and he feels himself moan more than he hears it. Every muscle in him cuts out, spent and unnecessary, and he goes from relaxed to boneless in Obi-Wan’s arms. Trying to think through this is as difficult as planning troop maneuvers on two hours of sleep and half rations, pushing through fatigue and the pull of sleep. It’s the most he can do to keep his breathing steady as Obi-Wan’s hum of satisfaction thrums through all the planes of his back.

He can’t open his eyes. He doesn’t remember closing them.

“Stars,” he manages to pant. Stars, it feels good, impossibly good, and shivers waves of sensation roll relentlessly through him in time with Obi-Wan’s swallows. Heat and tingling pressure run through him, pulling his core to his spine and going straight to his head. It’s like sex, but more—all-encompassing, wracking.

Consuming.

It would be easier to handle, he thinks, clenching and unclenching one hand in Obi-Wan’s hair while the other twists in the bedsheets, if it were a single sensation. But no, whatever it is, whatever nerves are being lit up by Obi-Wan’s saliva, by Obi-Wan’s teeth in his neck, they’re generating waves. Every time he thinks he might be able to swim to the surface, another one slams into him and knocks him back down to drown. They’re slowing in frequency, too, as if Obi-Wan is trying to give Cody time to think, or to get close, to get closer—

His hips shift upwards as he chokes on another cry. Obi-Wan’s fingers flex into Cody’s hips, holding him in place easily when his hips twitch again, and oh, that’s something else; that’s something else entirely. Against the starred night sky of his eyelids, Cody can’t help but imagine a different scene: Obi-Wan sinking into him in every possible way, with his teeth and his fingers and his cock, pinning Cody down and claiming him completely. He’d be filled, then, as filled with Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan is filled with him, and Cody’s hips try to shift again and can’t move an inch.

“Fuck,” he exhales, and he’s so hard in the pants of his greys that the line of the zipper is a bright line of pain. He can’t pull his mind back from the possibilities of what else Obi-Wan could claim, how Obi-Wan could bend his legs to his chest—could drive into him with teeth still secured in Cody’s neck—could take everything he wanted, everything he needed from Cody’s body, and, “Fuck, please. Please, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan’s fingers are warm again when they slide down Cody’s stomach, pop the button of his grays, and slide the zipper down with a soft snik . His nails scrape against the tight curls trailing further down, and Obi-Wan hums a question into Cody’s neck. 

At this point, the answer to most of Obi-Wan’s questions is ‘yes’, and the answer to the rest is ‘more’.

Cody lolls his head back to rest in the crook of Obi-Wan’s shoulder, seeing bursts of shrapnel and exploded ordnance in his mind, and brings his free hand up to lace with Obi-Wan’s over the thin cotton of his boxer briefs. Obi-Wan’s fingers squeeze once, then he drags their joined hands beneath the elastic waistband.

The first touch of Obi-Wan’s hand around his dick is a revelation, a rough benediction, and Cody is going to last much longer. Heat and pressure are twisting in his gut, and it feels like someone has overtightened screws in his spine. When Obi-Wan’s hand moves, matching the slow easy rhythm of his swallows and twisting on the upstroke, Cody’s whole body starts to shake and doesn’t stop.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed. Time is something that no longer applies to him, and Cody would be embarrassed at the strength of his reaction if shame weren’t also some distant and unknown thing.

On the next stroke—or the twentieth, or the hundredth, he doesn’t know—he chokes on a sob, and then another. He clenches his teeth, trying to keep the sounds tucked away, but they slip through anyways. And then, terribly, awfully, he feels Obi-Wan hesitate, and the only thought he can manage is: No . Not again . He uses his grip on Obi-Wan’s hair to keep him down, and he tightens his grip on the hand Obi-Wan is sliding up his dick.

“Stay,” he begs, more eloquent with his body than his words, and Obi-Wan does.

Their hands move faster, now, with precome smoothing the way, and Cody can’t help but distantly marvel at how easily Obi-Wan jerks him off. There are no awkward angles with Cody in Obi-Wan’s lap, and Obi-Wan thumb swipes over Cody’s slit with practiced surety. Obi-Wan’s other hand moves up Cody’s chest to circle one of Cody’s nipples, and Cody’s hips rock, unfettered, into the rhythm Obi-Wan is building below.

If he were close before, skimming the surface of the sun, he’s immolating in the center now. He doesn’t know how he hasn’t come already, and tears leak from the clenched corners of Cody’s eyes as he gasps for air and release. Obi-Wan’s teeth on his neck and hand on his dick are an onslaught, a possession, and Cody pulls another sob back into the bare cage of his chest and the overfilled outline of his body, and he burns.

Between one infinity and the next, between one swallow and one stroke, Cody at last tips over the edge. He comes with a ragged cry, overwhelmed and wrung out, and he collapses into himself like a star at last overcome by its own gravity: streaming colors into the dark.

Awareness comes back to him slowly. He floats to the surface gently, so content, satisfied, and so, so warm, that doing anything to make ripples in the peace is inconceivable. There is no concern; no hurry; no fear. He floats purely in the present, in some state simultaneous with past and future, where time has not yet come knocking.

Eventually, through the dimness, he feels fingernails running through the tight coils of his hair, a gentle humming in the air, and the warm bellows of a body beneath him.

He opens his eyes to find the lights in Obi-Wan’s cabin dimmed to a dusky twilight. The wall chrono is too far away to discern, and Obi-Wan’s wrist chrono is wrapped below the hand currently drawing soothing channels through Cody’s curls.

“Obi-Wan?” he asks. Thoughts are trickling through the gravel of his brain like water, but emotions still seem far behind. Absently, he knows he should regret passing out again, but shame slips from between his fingers like soapy water.

“Yes, dear,” Obi-Wan says, voice filled with fondness and with the strength that it lacked before.

It’s tempting to go back to sleep, then, with that confirmation of a job well done: mission success, worth a one-page report at most, but. There’s always more work to do. As he starts to struggle up, Obi-Wan’s free hand presses against his sternum, keeping him in place, while Obi-Wan presses a kiss to the faintly smarting bruise on Cody’s neck.

And with that, well. What else is there to do but settle in?

He glances down, intending to rearrange the sprawl of their legs, and he’s confused for a moment to see his stomach clean and the pants of his greys zipped back up. Right, he thinks, because he’d come. Because he’d come, and then he’d passed out immediately like some—some—

Embarrassment, that foreign import, comes flooding back in. Obi-Wan had done all of the work, and Cody had gone to sleep.

“Oh,” Cody says, and fragmented pieces of an action plan sprout in his mind like weeds. He should reciprocate, he knows, but he can’t feel any corresponding hardness from Obi-Wan at his back. How long had he been out? When he tries to turn around, Obi-Wan holds him down.

“Cody, please, stay still. You aren’t recovered,” Obi-Wan says, exasperation leaking into the fondness.

Words other than Obi-Wan’s name are still difficult to grasp through the haze, but Cody tries. “I can’t. I need to—you didn’t—”

When Obi-Wan finally parses what has Cody so concerned, he laughs long and hard against the uninjured side of Cody’s neck. 

"Only you, my dear," Obi-Wan marvels. "Only you could be so concerned about reciprocity with your blood in my mouth."

"Still," Cody says, hazy and not knowing why he's pressing the point, but Obi-Wan tucks his forehead against Cody’s skin and shakes his head.

"It'll take awhile for the blood to settle long enough for that to even be, ah, possible," he explains, and oh, right. Blood is a necessary component of… that. "I must admit, you were more right than even I realized about how low my reserves had become. I didn’t think it had gotten this bad."

Unsatisfied but content to wait, Cody leans back. With a few more of his mental faculties online, he can feel how much warmer Obi-Wan is at his back. It isn’t the only difference; Cody can feel Obi-Wan’s Force presence wrapped around him now, too. He had almost forgotten what that felt like. Even without being able to see Obi-Wan’s face, the man feels more real. More solid. He feels once again like the unrelenting, immoveable Jedi who had won Cody’s loyalty in the first few months of the war and the compassionate, considerate man who had later won his love.

In the dim light and post-orgasmic haze, Cody’s thoughts turn once more to the shortage that had washed the color from Obi-Wan. Three years of war, and a blood shortage vast enough to affect Jedi Masters only occurs at what could be the very end? Cody doesn’t think his general is the only one who has had to resort to taboo to survive. Bly and Secura at a minimum are supporting each other, and possibly Koon and Wolffe. He hasn’t seen any sign of blood-drinking in Rex, but Skywalker has been as hale and hearty as ever.

“Timing’s suspicious,” he says, and even with his untethered thoughts, he knows Obi-Wan will understand his meaning. “Suspicious, too, that the Chancellor and the Council let you go without supplies.”

“They did what they could with what they had,” Obi-Wan counters, diplomatic even while lying in a room, that Cody knows isn’t bugged. “But so did you. I must admit that I am… much better. I feel as though I have been a frog in heated water, and I have been pulled from the bath just as it neared boiling.”

His nails scrape through Cody’s curls again, then drift down to scratch at the hair scattered across Cody’s chest. He says, teasing, “So the Republic thanks you for your service, Commander,” and Cody laughs.

“Just doing my duty,” he grins, and he lets his mind drift off again. Stars, he’s glad this worked. He knows Jedi can be killed. He knows almost better than anyone that, though it’s difficult, it’s entirely doable. In fact, Cody has often wondered if keeping Jedi alive is not, in fact, the harder task. It’s amazing how many of the Order have survived without resorting to drinking from humanoids, clones or otherwise. How do Jedi even survive being born, if they aren’t born to other Jedi who know what to do?

He turns the question over in his mind. If the temple on Yllra had been the ideal place to discuss the taboo, Obi-Wan’s quarters must be a close runner-up, so he asks.

Obi-Wan hums, thoughtful. “Well, Force-drinkers aren’t born dead, so that helps with early child development.”

The casualness with which he says the words is almost enough to make Cody sit up. “You die?”

“We die around three or four, depending on the species,” Obi-Wan clarifies. “Suddenly, and without warning, our hearts stop. Force-drinkers spend a few hours dead, and then wake up, exactly as before, without breathing or a pulse. Our hearts only beat when we drink new blood,” he adds, and, true to his word, Cody can feel the steady thump of Obi-Wan’s heart against his shoulder blade. 

Cody settles back, newly aware that Obi-Wan’s heart is beating with his blood, and he swallows. He wonders if their two hearts are beating in time.

“It can be… hard, on the parents,” Obi-Wan continues. “They’re holding the body of their child in their arms, terrified that the child will become a Force-drinker and terrified that they won’t. And the child is not always thinking when they come back. The drive to drink is very strong, and the hour of waking is hard on everyone involved.”

“How hard?”

Obi shrugs with whole body, lifting Cody's easily with the simple movement.

"Less than it once was. Nowadays, it's fairly well known what has happened, and the parents or the communities call us. We are more prepared than they could ever be, to teach and train and feed, and most give us the child and their blessing," he says. 

None of Cody’s flash-training on Kamino covered this, but the Kaminoans hardly expected any of the clones to reproduce without a tube. Do natborns know more, then, about what makes a Jedi? Is it just in the cities, or are there lost children in the outer rim? The new strength in Obi-Wan’s voice has taken on the soothing cadence of a lecture, and if Obi-Wan is still willing to teach, then Cody wants to learn.

“How much worse was it, before the Jedi?” he asks, and he waits as Obi-Wan falls into a contemplative silence.

“It depends,” he says at last. "In communities that understood what had happened, the parents provided their own blood until another steady source could be found. In communities without that understanding… well. A Force-drinker at that age can survive for a couple of weeks on the blood that was in their body when they died, but not indefinitely. Before us, most children either died in their deprivation or destroyed their community in trying to survive. It’s why there are so many yellow-eyed Force-drinkers in legend; in many communities, the only way for them to survive was to become Sith.”

And that, too, makes enough sense to click into Cody’s understanding of the universe. He’s more aware of the passage of time, now, and he thinks that he’ll need to refocus on the upcoming battle soon, but there’s still so much that he doesn’t know. None of this information had been taught on Kamino. Most communities see the Jedi as benevolent supernatural saviors, powerful and conscientious and kind, who choose selfless action over violence. They are a mystical Force that Kamino had tried and failed to replicate through science. There were a lot of dead clones in their labs who never woke back up.

He has one last question, then. "Is there any other way to become a Force-drinker?”

Obi-Wan’s fingers still their soothing circles on Cody’s chest, then resume.

"No.” A current of sorrow undercuts his voice. “There are rumors of Sith being able to "turn" people, to kill them and bring them back, but I don't think it's ever actually been done. Some Sith have certainly tried, over the centuries. In the Temple archives, there are plays written about a Sith drinking the lifeblood of a dying lover, absolutely convinced they could bring their lover back as a Force-drinker, but… it just left them desolate. Alone."

The sorrow in Obi-Wan’s voice flips something over in Cody’s stomach, and he reaches up to lace his fingers through Obi-Wan’s free hand. He knows Jedi have a long lifespan; he knows clones have a short one. So he adds, just to hear Obi-Wan laugh, “Alone, and having to rework their wardrobe to match their eyes.”

And Obi-Wan does laugh, startled out of his reverie. “Yes, quite.”

They fall into a contemplative silence, then, accompanied by nothing but the slight rattle of the room’s air vents, the ever-present hum of the ships engines, and the steady drumbeat of Obi-Wan’s newly beating heart. Cody reaches up to grab Obi-Wan’s other hand so that he has a grip on them both, and he uses his hold to bring Obi-Wan’s arms around his waist. When he leans his weight backwards, he hears Obi-Wan’s sharp inhale, and Obi-Wan’s arms tighten around him. The blood’s settling in, then, Cody thinks.

“I’m glad the Force took you,” Cody says, and he shifts in Obi-Wan’s arms until they’re chest to chest and Cody is straddling the tops of Obi-Wan’s thighs. “And, embarrassing as it is, I’m glad Fett’s genes make it easier for you to take me.”

In the dim light, Obi-Wan’s blue eyes glitter with a new vibrance, and a hunger shines through that chases a shiver down Cody’s spine. Obi-Wan’s hands move to Cody’s waist, and Cody cants his hips forward to verify that, yes, his Jedi is hard beneath him.

Obi-Wan hums, distracted. “I looked into that, actually. There’s evidence that—ah, Cody—Jango was bitten on Galidraan by one of the Jedi he was trying to kill.”

Cody had been leaning forward as he rocked his hips, hoping to steal a kiss, but he stops at that. “He was? How did he manage to keep fighting?”

“It didn’t even slow him down. The gene must have been altered in the cloning process.”

And Cody wants to ask why, because this is a puzzle worth solving, but Obi-Wan is warm beneath and around him, and he owes Obi-Wan an orgasm, and he cannot muster any anger at the idea that the clones had been changed to even more perfectly suit the Jedi. He makes a mental note to factor the change into any battles involving a Sith, but for now, he is content to leave it for later.

“We’ll figure it out after Utapau,” he says, and Obi-Wan smiles up at him with unhindered joy. “And after this.”

He meets Obi-Wan halfway, pressing their lips together and kissing languorous and slow. When he licks into Obi-Wan’s mouth, a bright burst of copper slides across his tongue, and he can’t help but chase the taste. It’s proof that his strength is Obi-Wan’s, that his love is Obi-Wan’s; and that there will never be a shortage of either. 

It’s not a matter of reciprocity , he thinks, because there is nothing he wants that Obi-Wan has not already given him tenfold. No, it’s not reciprocity, or owing or owning: it’s simply a matter of loving, and being loved in return.

Chapter Text

As much as Bail is overjoyed to see his friend again, he knows Obi-Wan is risking a lot to come to Alderaan. And it’s not just his own skin he’s risking; he’s risking the secrecy of the rebellion, and that secrecy is the only thing that’s keeping it alive. Bail doesn’t know what has driven Obi-Wan to the royal palace in the dead of night, bringing what’s clearly a stolen freighter through the subterranean shipping lanes used by the rebel fighters, but he knows it isn’t good. 

Next to him on the bed, Breha is already calling for a medical team and two extra guard squadrons. He wishes he had time to press a kiss to the hollow behind her ear, to press his gratitude for her calm, collected action into her skin, but he barely has time to pull on a shirt and real shoes. His pajama pants are a little long, the soft weave having stretched out over time, and the hem sweeps the carpeted floor of the royal apartments, the smooth durasteel of the armory, and the rough-hewn rock of the makeshift rebel base they’d quickly carved out of the limestone caves beneath the palace.

He arrives just as the cargo door of Obi-Wan’s freighter opens, and Bail’s breath catches in his throat when he sees who steps through. There’s—there’s so much red—is that blood—

But it isn’t on Obi-Wan. Bail blinks, and the scene shifts into clarity. Obi-Wan is holding someone in his arms who appears to have gone three rounds with a rancor and lost. The man is broad and must be near Obi-Wan’s height, but Obi-Wan is holding him with no apparent strain even as he makes his way down the gangplank after it unfurls. 

As Obi-Wan moves, Bail sees, at last, the twin hopes of their rebellion edge out from his shadow. Luke and Leia Skywalker, each with the edge of one pant leg clenched in their tiny chubby hands, follow Obi-Wan. Their eyes are wide, scared but taking in everything, and Bail wants to take both of them into his arms. He loves them immensely, immediately. He is overwhelmed by the ocean-deep well of emotion that surges through him when he sees the spirit of Padme in the just of Leia’s chin and the soft curve of Luke’s shoulders. 

They’re so young, he thinks. A sharp and stinging love gathers in chest, a painful pressure, when he realizes that he knows exactly how old they are. Three times now, he’s scattered lilies into the Grijalva River while holding Padme in his heart. Three terrible anniversaries have already passed, each in a flurry of white petals and water droplets, and he wonders if the twins have ever had cake.

Obi-Wan approaches with purpose, but he keeps his strides short enough that Luke and Leia don’t have to run. The movement looks natural, well-practiced, and Bail can’t help but wonder at how fatherhood has treated his old and dear friend.

“Bail, thank you for coming to greet us yourself,” Obi-Wan says, as polite and unassuming as ever, even with children attached to his pants and a bloodied man unconscious in his arms. “I know it’s late.” 

Late, Obi-Wan says, as if it’s the hour of the night and not the risk to their nascent rebellion that has Bail worried.

“Of course, my friend. Of course.”

Bail gets the sudden and absurd urge to ask Obi-Wan if he can help carry his bags. When he glances down to see if there is any real way to offer his assistance, though, he can’t help but take a step back.

“Obi-Wan?” he asks, shocked, because the man in Obi-Wan’s arms has a face none of them will ever forget. He doesn’t understand. The clones had killed the Jedi. The clones had tried to kill Obi-Wan. It looks like this one had kept trying; his blacks are torn in more places than Bail cares to count, and although there are a few bacta patches along his chest and upper thighs, most of his wounds look hastily and insufficiently wrapped.

Bail jerks his gaze up to Obi-Wan’s face then back down to the man, trying to sort through this. Obi-Wan would never risk the children, he thinks, and he would never risk the rebellion if he could help it, so why—

“I’ll explain soon, but you need to trust me,” Obi-Wan says, and Bail nods. He can do that. He’s always done that. “Is there a hospital in the castle? A real hospital, with surgical equipment?”

“Yes, yes.” Bail signals to one of the waiting guards to hurry over, and he says, “Hadri will take you there. You’ll need a speeder, I think. One with a cabin.”

Obi-Wan nods, and Hadri half-jogs, half-runs towards one of the big roll-up doors on the side of the hanger and disappears through it. Once she’s out of sight, Obi-Wan fixes a smile to his face and cranes his neck so he can see Leia from around the body in his arms.

“Dearhearts, this is your Uncle Bail. I told you about him on the way here, remember?” 

Leia nods, and she shoves the hand that isn’t gripping Obi-Wan’s pant leg into her mouth. 

“Okay, and this is important, remember. I need you to go with—”

“Don’ wanna!” she warbles around her fingers, tugging the fabric in her other hand until Bail can see it stretch. She’s strong, he thinks with surprise. Extraordinarily strong. And strong-willed. “Wanna stay with you an’ Cody.”

Bail blinks at her, wondering who she’s talking about, when the name registers. The clone Obi-Wan’s hold tosses his head, his eyes moving rapidly behind his eyelids, and Bail recognizes at last the curlique scar snaking over his cheekbone and eyebrow.

“Oh,” Bail says dumbly. “Oh, that’s. He’s—he’s yours.”

“Not mine,” Obi-Wan corrects. “Not anyone’s. But he is my responsibility. Bail, I wouldn’t have brought him if he couldn’t be saved. The hospital?”

As if summoned, Hadri drives a speeder through the docking door. It’s a large one, with a full carriage and trunk, and Bail realizes that he didn’t tell her that only Obi-Wan needed a lift. When he glances down at Leia and Luke, though, and he sees tears welling in Leia’s eyes, he gets an idea.

“Darlings,” Obi-Wan says, his voice as haggard as if it has already weathered the tantrums he knows are coming. The kids are scared, Bail knows, and the worst thing to do right now would be to leave them with a stranger, no matter how kind. Leia is about to cry, and Luke looks like he’ll go off the second one of Leia’s tears fall. Obi-Wan thinks he doesn’t have any other option, though, so Bail kneels down next to the twins and cuts in.

“They can sit with me in the back,” he says once he’s on their level, and the twins stare at him with open distrust. “Kids, don’t you want to give Cody room to stretch out?”

He doesn’t know what Obi-Wan told them on the way over, and he doesn’t know how much of it was true, but it was clear they cared about Cody’s well-being. He looks each of them in the eyes, taking them as seriously as he can, and they look back at him with ferocious intensity. Seven sisters, Bail thinks, and that terrible, infinite love rises in his chest again. What would it have been like to be their dad instead of just a port in a storm?

Slowly, consideringly, the kids nod, and Bail’s knees creak as he gets back to his feet.

“Alright,” Bail says, looking back at Cody, “let’s—”

Cody shifts in Obi-Wan’s arms suddenly, his breath quickening, and a furrow appears between the thick black arches of his eyebrows. Bail’s hand drops to his gun, but Obi-Wan is faster. 

In a single smooth motion, Obi-Wan ducks his head into the soft juncture of Cody’s neck, and his white fangs flash as he bites down.

Bail freezes, riveted to the floor. His heart feels like it’s stopped beating in his chest. He doesn’t breathe. All he can do is watch as Obi-Wan, with his eyes closed, sucks once and swallows.

The tension goes out of Cody as if someone cut his strings. He deflates, suddenly even more limp in Obi-Wan’s arms than he had been while unconscious, and a moan rattles out of his chest as his eyelids flutter. The line of Obi-Wan’s throat moves as he swallows again, and again, and then he pulls away with a soft reluctant sigh. A second moan chokes off in Cody’s throat, held there, as Cody twitches then lies still once more. 

Bail blinks, breaking out of his paralysis, and he understands even less now. What just happened? When he checks on Cody again, he notices the neat rows of bite marks forming ruby-red constellations across the warm brown skin. How many times has Obi-Wan done that? And why? The way Cody had moaned made it seem painful, but Obi-Wan had never been one to prolong suffering.

“It would be easier, surely, to restrain him. Or stun him,” Bail says, still shellshocked. Maybe that was it: there’s no stun setting on a lightsaber, and Obi-Wan hates blasters.

But Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“I had no restraints that he couldn’t easily get out of,” he explains. “That ship’s more of a nursery than a prison right now, and honestly even ray shields would be little better than child gates when it comes to keeping Cody down. I stunned him as many times as I safely could, but...”

“You didn’t want to risk brain damage from repeated stuns,” Bail supplies as he opens the doors to the speeder, and Obi-Wan nods.

“I need his brain very much intact,” Obi-Wan says. He puts a hand over the top of Cody’s head with infinite care as he lifts his burden into the speeder and then slides in himself. “So I came to you. He’ll be fine once we remove his chip. If anything, he’ll simply be upset over missing out again.”

Bail wants to ask what he means, but then he’s busy helping Luke up into the seat behind Obi-Wan’s, climbing in, and then lifting Leia up with his hands beneath her armpits. He talks softly with the kids while Obi-Wan keeps Cody from rolling around turns and accelerations, and they tell him about the stars, about the nav comp, about hyper particles and warp speed and banthashit , which is almost enough to make Obi-Wan turn around. After minutes that feel like hours, Hadri pulls them up to the hospital connected to the palace complex, and Obi-Wan, with equally exquisite care, shifts Cody back into his arms. 

The twins climb out, on the edge of waterworks again, but Obi-Wan shakes his head. 

“I have to take him in,” he says, his musical voice low and understanding. “They can fix him here. But I have to take him alone, ok? Otherwise they can’t fix him.”

“I can show you the fountains,” Bail adds, and the kids turn to him. “Would you like to see the fountains? While we wait until Cody gets fixed?”

“And then we’ll come back?” Luke asks.

Bail nods and holds out his hands: one for Luke and one for Leia. By each and all the sisters, he hopes Obi-Wan knows what he’s doing. He hopes there’s something in Cody to fix.

“Of course,” he says. “We’ll come back when he’s fixed.”

Their chubby little hands wrap around three of his fingers as he starts talking about the fountains, about Breha, about how they can meet his and Breha’s children soon. 

He looks back only once. Obi-Wan moves towards the opening hospital doors, and he is as effortless and graceful as a mother cat carrying her child—with the equal application of teeth to the scruff of Cody’s neck.

Cody wakes up groggy. His neck hurts in a way that feels as if it had been familiar once. The rest of his body isn’t much better off; exhaustion bites into his bones. Waking up feels like swimming through fifty feet of water in full armor, each stroke bringing him closer to the surface while still threatening to drag him down. 

Opening his eyes takes an absurd amount of effort. He blinks once, and the world looks composed of colorless, blurred shapes. A second blink it into sharper clarity, and on the third, one of those shapes becomes Obi-Wan. When he sees Obi-Wan’s face, well-loved and well-known, for a second he thinks waking up in the Negotiator’s medbay. He’s been shot, and his general is about to scold him, however hypocritically, for his recklessness.

In the next second, he remembers that his general is dead. He remembers that his general is dead, and Cody gave the order. That Cody had watched him, satisfaction running through his veins, as his general fell to his death from a 300-foot cliff. 

He jerks backwards up the bed, terrified that he’ll do it again, that he’ll give another order like that, until something pulls his arm taut and holds him still. There are metal cuffs tying his wrists to the bed frame, and it’s more of a relief than anything to know that someone here knows that he’s a threat. 

There was something in his brain that was not him, he remembers. He doesn’t know where that something is now.

When Cody looks up, Obi-Wan’s madder blue eyes are burning with an unnameable intensity.

“Sir?” Cody asks, because whatever else is or isn’t true, Obi-Wan has never led him wrong before. He hesitates for a second because ‘sir’ feels wrong on his tongue. They’re alone in an empty room, and although Cody doesn’t know how long ago Utapau was, he knows they’re beyond ranks, one way or another. “Obi-Wan?”

The inferno of Obi-Wan’s eyes fades down to a campfire, warm and contained. The crow’s feet next to his eyes, already deep, crease further when he smiles.

“Cody,” he says, and he packs a prayer into those two syllables. A wet sheen glosses the burn of his eyes. He’s sitting in a chair pulled up beside Cody’s bedside, and he looks like he wants to put his head down beside Cody’s knees on the mattress. Cody, as terrified as he is of what might happen, wants to let him. “Oh, Cody. Thank the Force.”

“Obi-Wan,” Cody says again, and his voice sounds like it’s been through a flour mill. Obi-Wan. It’s a name he thought he’d never again have the honor of saying. “Are you—where are we? What happened?”

His memory feels like a LAAT/i after machine-gun fire: full of holes, and having trouble getting started. Had he really tried to kill his general?

Had he failed, and tried again?

The cuffs restraining him spring apart, and Obi-Wan takes his newly freed wrists between long and careful fingers. Cody lets out a shuddering sigh when Obi-Wan massages the bruised skin. The rest of his worries fade to the background. Stars, that’s Obi-Wan. That’s his general, alive. That’s his general, holding him like something precious, like something that deserves to be cared for. Cody feels a terrible tenderness prickle at the corners of his eyes and a vicious tightness in his chest. The extent of the nightmare he’s emerged from hasn’t revealed itself yet, isn’t real, but Cody can feel the weight of that knowledge waiting to drop down.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan’s says, and Cody’s shoulders straighten at his tone. It’s the tone that always accompanied a plan that, for any other team, would’ve been a suicide run. “Cody, oh, my dear. I know it’s hard. I know you just woke up, and you don’t know what’s happening, and I’m sorry. But I need you to remember. I need to know if they’re still looking for us.”

Before Cody can ask who ‘they’ are, before he can ask again where this room is, memories start filtering in. They come in bits and pieces, the scenes and the screaming, and Cody thinks it’s a mercy that he wasn’t awake for all of it. When Obi-Wan tells him it’s been three years, it’s a shock. Three years is an impossible length of time. The entire span of the Clone Wars, from Geonosis to Utapau, was three years.

Cody has been trying to kill Obi-Wan for longer than he’s loved him.

“Not you,” Obi-Wan says with fierce conviction. “Never you.”

Still. Still. Cody walks through memories that don’t seem like his own, and he remembers them as if they were scenes in a holovid, as if he were watching from the other side of a screen. He remembers the first few months best: putting down the rebellion on Kashyyyk, training natborns with Gregor and Scorch, and transferring to the Emperor’s flagship to swap his white armor for black. 

After that, it’s only snatches of horror. He remembers Palpatine calling in clone troopers who failed their missions and stepping into the grand hall later, listening passively to his next orders as desiccated corpses were loaded into a cart for the incinerator. He remembers, once, one of the inquisitors turning on Vader. He remembers her lightsaber slicing through the tubing on the back of Vader’s suit and the hissing as the blood pumping inside sprayed into the room instead, flashing into steam when it hit the saber.

He remembers being summoned to Vader’s command center, remembers that strange black egg hatching nightmare after nightmare, and he remembers being told to find Obi-Wan. To bring Obi-Wan back, dead or alive, or die in the attempt. Even in the strange fog of the chip’s control, Cody remembers being afraid, distantly, of failing. Of coming back and kneeling at Vader’s throne and going, as unresisting and limp as his brothers, to an ignominious death.

“They don’t know,” Cody says. “It was just me, and I got lucky. You weren’t easy to find.”

“No, I should hope not,” Obi-Wan smiles.

Cody tries to sit up, to apologize, but Obi-Wan pushes him back to the bed with a gentle but firm hand in the center of his chest. The movement shifts Cody’s clothes, and he realizes that he’s in soft cotton pajamas with a quilted duvet pulled up to his waist. Even though his chest is covered in bacta patches and linen wraps, this isn’t a hospital room. He had found Obi-Wan, he thinks, but then what?

“I found you, but you stopped me,” he assumes. Then he grins. “You must’ve kicked my ass.”

Obi-Wan laughs and shakes his head, dropping his eyes to the mostly-recovered wounds on Cody’s arms. “You should give yourself more credit, my dear. It wasn’t an easy fight. You had traps, and you knew where and what the twins were.” 

He falls silent, contemplative, but his thumbs keep pressing soothing circles into the skin of Cody’s wrists. “My only saving grace was that I think, even under all that programming, you weren’t expecting me to bite you.”

“You bit me?” Cody asks, and his neck pulses with remembered pain. He feels the bruise deep in the muscle of his trapezoid, and blood rises in his cheeks when he realizes the implications.

“Repeatedly,” Obi-Wan admits, and there’s more relief in it than anything else. “I was worried about multiple blaster stuns interfering with the chip, and I knew this method had no, ah, long-term effects.”

“Just short-term blue balls,” Cody says without thinking, and Obi-Wan chokes on a laugh.

“Those are non-lethal, at least.”

“Maybe to you.”

When their laughter fades, silence falls in a gentle rain around them, close and comforting. The air between them softens with potential. Cody doesn’t know what else to say; he doesn’t know what else to do. There’s more he’ll need to remember and more he’ll need to process, but he can set that aside for now. He turns his hands to catch Obi-Wan’s, to hold what he had thought lost to him forever, and is content with that.

“I should go check on the twins,” Obi-Wan says with a tinge of regret in his voice, and Cody nods and moves to stand.

If Obi-Wan wants to protest that Cody still needs rest, he doesn’t. He helps Cody as Cody swings his legs over the edge of the bed and takes his first, halting, dizzy step in more than three years. They walk in silence through the large wooden door at the end of the room, and Obi-Wan only has to catch him once as he stumbles. They must be in a palace of some sort, because the rugs are plush under Cody’s bare feet, and gold filigree forms whimsical thatches of ivy curling along the walls. Ahead of them down the long, high-ceilinged hallways are rows and rows of arched windows set in elaborate iron frames, and the low afternoon sun casts rainbows on the floor as it scatters through the glass. Far off in the distance, perhaps through the walls and the windows, the cadence of conversation draws them forward.

Obi-Wan hesitates for a moment. His eyes unfocus slightly in the way Cody still remembers means he’s communing with the Force, and then he directs them down another hallway until they reach a wall composed entirely of windows. A balcony juts out on the other side to overlook a sprawling green courtyard with tall willow trees and the sparkling glint of dozens of fountains. A door sits in the center of the glass expanse, and when the door opens, the distant, muted conversation Cody heard becomes shouting and laughter.

Obi-Wan leads them through into fresh air and unfiltered sunshine.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan says, stepping up to the rail and staring at the courtyard beneath. There’s an old pain in his voice. “I wouldn’t have come here if I weren’t—quite desperate, I’m afraid.”

Cody swallows and moves to stand beside him. Below them, white and orange and pink flowers bob their sailcloth heads in a warm spring breeze, and children laugh as they run through the chaotic spray of a fountain set into the paving stone. Cody’s heart catches at the pure joy of the sound. There was very little laughter like that on Kamino, less during the war, and none in the darkness that followed. It’s hard to process, now, the paradise laid out beneath their feet. The children look happy, all four or five of them, and they turn in their sopping wet clothes to jump, screaming, on top of a man Cody recognizes as Bail Organa. There’s a woman in the shade of an orange tree only a few feet away, beautiful with almond-shaped eyes and intricately braided dark hair, and she throws her head back as she joins in the laughter.

Cody and Obi-Wan pause, lingering. There is a distance between them and the joy below that isn’t physical.

“I had to take them both,” Obi-Wan explains, and he sounds like he’s apologizing for something Cody doesn’t understand. “Bail offered to take Leia, but we both knew there was a high chance the twins would be Force-drinkers. And, though the galaxy is wide, it would be immediately obvious if the princess of Alderaan died before her fifth birthday and came back. She’d have been killed or taken to become an inquisitor, and I… I couldn’t risk that.”

Died , Cody repeats, remembering what Obi-Wan had told him years ago in the dim light of the Vigilance ’s general’s quarters. We die around three or four, depending on the species. Suddenly, and without warning, our hearts stop.

He looks at Obi-Wan, who is staring down at the scene below without seeing it. He looks as though he is watching something else entirely. 

“It must have been… hard,” Cody says, which must be the understatement of the century. It’s a drop of water in the Kaminoan ocean: a single starfighter in the fleet. 

Obi-Wan chokes out a laugh. “Hard, yes. They. They both went the same day, barely two years old, and so, so small. Twins to their bones, they went at almost the same time. I don’t know if that was better or worse, but. There was quiet in the house for the first time. That quiet was—”

He takes a deep breath, and Cody can see the muscles of his forearms flex even deep in the sleeves of his robe. His eyes are wet again. “It was hard.”

“How did you feed them when they woke up?” Cody asks, trying to remind him that they did wake up, that they’re running around laughing below, making enough noise to penetrate durasteel.

“Oh, I had a bantha farm,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody stares. “Yes, I know, but bantha have plenty of blood and plenty to spare. It was only as they got older that things became more difficult. It’s hard to keep things alive on Tatooine even without weekly blood draws, and even when you know what you’re doing… which I didn’t. We lost too much of the herd, and our neighbors became worried about a potentially infectious wasting disease. I assume that’s how you found us.”

Cody tucks himself in next to Obi-Wan, shoulder to shoulder, and offers what silent support he can. He wasn’t there for them before, trapped in his own body, but he can be here now. Obi-Wan trusts him. The chip is out. And he might not trust himself, but he trusts Obi-Wan. That’s always been enough.

Luke and Leia have broken into a game of tag with the children that Cody assumes are Bail and Breha’s, and he lets their laughter wash over him like the sunshine. He stretches his mind into a few of the dark corners of his brain, trying to fill the space of his body with himself again. He feels cramped, as if his soul has spent the last three years crammed into a milk bottle and someone has recently, gently, poured him back out. It isn’t a comfortable feeling; he doesn’t think he’ll be comfortable for a while, but it is still a luxury to stand still. It is a greater luxury to know that he is doing it because he wants to.

Obi-Wan is still watching the children play below, and it’s clear that he wants to go to them even while he wants to give them time to experience the childhood they’ve missed. 

“How long do you think we’ll be able to stay?” Cody asks. Even if he was the only one to find Obi-Wan on Tatooine, he knows the Empire has been placing more and more spies on Alderaan. Everyone knows it’s a risk to have Obi-Wan here, but if Alderaan is helping the rebellion, there might be an underground network they could use.

Obi-Wan startles and turns. “Oh, well. You’re free to stay however long you wish, I’m sure.”

For a man Cody knows is a strategic mastermind, Obi-Wan can sure be one hell of an idiot. 

“I’m not leaving you,” he says with a flat stare. “Not with two children. Not by yourself. And I can be a walking blood bag for the twins, if nothing else.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan snaps, affronted. “You’d be far more than that. You’re—ah, hm. I see. Dear, I only meant that you deserve the right to choose. You don’t have to keep following me. Take some time to think over what you want to do.”

Cody doesn’t need time. “I’m choosing you, Obi-Wan. I always will.”

At this quiet proclamation, Obi-Wan’s resolve wavers, and he shifts from righteousness to exhaustion in a thin, watery second. 

“We’ll be here for a few more days, at least,” he says at last. “Think about it until then.”

They stand there for a few minutes more as the afternoon sun slowly sinks to the horizon and as the children eventually tire and collapse onto the fresh green grass. Without speaking, Cody and Obi-Wan turn back towards the balcony doors. Tired, and bold because of it, Cody takes Obi-Wan’s hand in his, and they lean on each other as they make their way back to the small, comfortable room Cody had woken up in. 

It’s more of a guest room than a hospital room, he realizes, noting the door to the fresher and the smaller chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. It’s incredible to have things again, even borrowed things. He sits on the edge of his bed and looks up at Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan hesitates on the knife’s edge of sitting back down in the chair or walking to the door.

After a few seconds of silence, Obi-Wan nods, starting to pull his hand from Cody’s hold. “Get some rest, Cody.”

But Cody tightens his grip. “Obi-Wan.”

He pulls Obi-Wan’s arm until he has his Jedi standing in the vee of his splayed legs. He takes a second to look, basking in having Obi-Wan alive and close, until he lifts his free hand to clasp the back of Obi-Wan’s head. He tangles his fingers in soft auburn waves exactly as soft as he’d remembered, and then pulls Obi-Wan into a kiss.

Obi-Wan kisses like a man drowning, wholehearted and desperate, and Cody opens his mouth to the press of Obi-Wan’s with an overwhelming feeling of relief. He closes his eyes, giving as good as he gets, and the kiss is wet and sloppy and exactly what he needs. He loses whole minutes to this, the warm solidity of Obi-Wan’s body, and he shudders to feel a hint of fang nick his lower lip, to feel Obi-Wan’s tongue press against the hurt to soothe it.

At last, Obi-Wan pulls back, and there’s the faintest pink blush spilling across his cheekbones and buoying the freckles. Cody keeps his hand in Obi-Wan’s hair to hold him close and searches his well-loved blue eyes. They’re a little dull, with purple-black half moons stark beneath them.

“You’re hungry,” Cody chides, eyebrows raised.

Obi-Wan shrugs even as he licks his lips, chasing a taste. “I’m used to it. The twins were a priority, and then, well. It’s not so bad. I’m fine.”

Cody doesn’t drop eye contact as he mentally walks through the hurts and bruises of his body. Obi-Wan had said a few days have passed since the surgery, and bacta and IVs have left him feeling tired but whole. He can handle this.

“I know what your ‘fine’ looks like, Obi-Wan. Come on,” he says, and he uses the hand curled in Obi-Wan’s hair to pull Obi-Wan’s mouth to the unbruised side of Cody’s neck. He imagines that Obi-Wan can feel his next words vibrate through his throat when he says:

“Finish what you started.”

Obi-Wan shudders in his arms, almost a sob, and only a second later, Cody feels the teeth sink in. He clings to Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan presses him back against the mattress. A moan rattles through Cody’s chest, loud and unfiltered, as waves of something he never thought he’d feel again expand outwards from his neck. 

He closes his eyes. Under that rolling tide, beneath the satisfying weight of Obi-Wan’s body, he is lost. 

He is found.

Thicker than water,
Sweeter than wine,
Closer than heaven:
Your love and mine.