I'd love to hear about what might happen after The Art of Happenstance, especially with it's kind of promising ending? (or if, after everything about the chips gets fixed, maybe they could get to have the amazing Force-enhanced sex they deserve)
Or, something for Set The Bone Straight (which I think was actually the first fic of yours I read!) because they're both just so sad, and almost stubbornly hopeful (but mostly sad). Please tell me if they get to be sad old men together.
Alright, here’s the first of three (3) “what comes next” prompt fills for The Art of Happenstance. Thank you so much for the prompt, Brigit!! And without further ado:
Cody wakes to the thinning mist of mid-morning and blinks away the haze of deep, deep sleep. It takes more effort than usual. He feels the way he does when he’s been in bacta for days, having to reorient himself to having arms and legs and lungs.
But he isn’t in a bacta tank or just leaving one. He’s somewhere else entirely, breathing unrecycled air and staring at non-fluorescent light. The sky overhead is a vague, watery blue beyond the mist and lit by a single, glowing sun. Between him and the overarching sky, luminous pink leaves the size of a grown man stretch out from red- and black-striated cliffs, and Cody can hear the dull roar of a waterfall somewhere in the distance. He sits up slowly, careful of the pounding in his head, and finds himself stripped down to his blacks. A red-orange sand that matches the cliffs covers the black fabric where he’s been lying, and the ground to either side of him is interspersed with patches of green moss and curling lichens.
Combined with the soft white-blues of the stream winding its way past his seat, the colors of this world are a refreshing rainbow compared to the endless yellow monotony of Utapau.
He looks around, trying to get his bearings. Utapau had been a single-sun system, though, and he’d hardly gone sight-seeing. Perhaps this is a pocket of paradise in that sandstone desert. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s missing something, though. There’s something he’s forgotten, but, of course, he doesn’t know what it is.
When he places his hands flat on the sandy ground and starts to push himself to his feet, a glimmer of gold on his left hand catches his eye. A gold band wrapped around his pinky sparkles in the sunlight, and it stretches like a gossamer fishing line straight through the air as if someone has thrown a hook and caught Cody’s hand.
He looks up, eyes tracking the shimmer of gold, and finds Obi-Wan at the other end of the line.
His general is perched cross-legged and bathed in sunlight on one of the big flat rocks by the water’s edge. Cody can only see his back, straight and unbowed as always, but his imagination can easily supply the rest. Obi-Wan meditating with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his laps had become a familiar image over the course of the war.
The course of the war, he thinks again. But the war is over. The war is over, and—
And—
And they lost. Grievous, the chips, and the order all come rushing back, and Cody’s shoulder twinges in phantom, remembered pain.
They must be dead, Cody realizes suddenly. It’s the only possible explanation. In fact—it’s the only rational outcome of what happened. Even Obi-Wan would’ve been hard-pressed to survive against the full might of an army, let alone an empire, let alone with a mindless killing machine zip-tied in his backseat.
Cody can only hope that Cody wasn’t the one who killed him.
The realization of their deaths carries with it a menagerie of feelings as wide-ranging as the colors of this afterlife. Grief, he recognizes. Remorse. And, if he’s honest, there’s a bit of relief, too. If this is the afterlife or the Force or whatever, it’s a lot nicer than he’d thought it would be. And Obi-Wan’s here, which is the only thing that matters, in the end.
The thought sends a frisson of fear through Cody’s spine. Is that Obi-Wan? Or is that some facsimile built from the fragments of his soul to comfort him in death? But even as the panic blossoms, it fades. Whatever bond they’d built through the war has persisted even in death, and Cody can feel Obi-Wan’s bright and familiar presence even here and now. It’s stronger, if anything; Cody can feel it everywhere, not just in the back of his head.
He picks his way over soft and shifting sands to sit next to Obi-Wan, basking in the sun and the foreign sensation of, for once, not having anything else to do. For years, he’s said he could rest when he was dead, so.
So he’s going to rest. If any of the gods up here want to ask him for a mission report, they can shove it.
Beside him, Obi-Wan shifts slightly from his meditation. Cody watches him open his eyes and smile.
“Ah, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, warm and fond. And then his eyebrows furrow in confusion. “…Wait. Cody?”
He looks so sweetly concerned, with his head tilted and his blue eyes creased, that Cody can’t help but reach over to slide one hand into Obi-Wan’s greying auburn waves. He can’t help but palm the back of Obi-Wan’s head and pull him close, to cup Obi-Wan’s jaw with his other hand, and to kiss the frown from Obi-Wan’s mouth. They’re dead, Cody thinks, joy creeping in as he tilts his head for a better angle. Nothing’s stopping him, not any more, and he’s wasted enough time waiting.
After a second’s hesitation, Obi-Wan kisses back with equal determination, and licks into Cody’s mouth as he deepens the kiss.
Stars. Stars. Cody feels a moan rattling in his chest.
This must be heaven, heaven at last, although Cody doesn’t know how he came to deserve it. The sun is on his back; his Jedi is in his arms at last; and neither of them has nowhere else to be. At some point, he’ll need to step back, to put all his feelings into words. They were saving all those conversations for after the war, but Cody will take Obi-Wan’s enthusiasm as a good sign for now.
They have the rest of eternity to talk, after all.
Cody pulls back eventually, though he keeps his hands where they are, reveling in the closeness.
“So,” he says, breathless and panting into the warming air. “How’d they get us?”
Obi-Wan blinks at him, confused all over again, and then he laughs in realization.
“Oh, Cody. Dear, we’re not dead. Not yet, at least,” Obi-Wan says.
Cody pulls his hands back but doesn’t shift away; he can’t exactly take the kiss back, and he doesn’t want to. He isn’t convinced.
“How can we not be dead?” Cody asks. “If we’re not dead, where are we?”
Obi-Wan reaches up to twine his fingers with Cody’s left hand and pulls it down from his neck to rest on his bent knee. He smiles again, smaller but softer for it. “Well now, that… that, I don’t actually know.”
Cody puts his ‘death’ theory back on the table and opens his mouth to argue for it, but Obi-Wan pulls their twined hands up first, staring at the golden thread connecting the last finger of both their hands.
“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, but he doesn’t say it like eureka. There’s shock in his voice and disbelief in the purse of his lips. He twists their hands from side to side. When he pulls their hands apart, the string stretches to match the distance. Likewise, it shrinks when he brings them back together.
Cody lets him twist Cody's fingers however he wants, content to be the latest in a long line of Obi-Wan’s scientific curiosities.
“Cody,” Obi-Wan says at last. “Cody, I think we’re dream-sharing.”
“Alright,” Cody says, trying to roll with the punches. He's still not sure they're not dead, but didn’t question it when the Force did useful things like give him a mental GPS marker for Obi-Wan’s location and threw Obi-Wan’s lightsaber at him from time to time, and he feels like that served him pretty well.
Obi-Wan, though, seems less accepting. “Hm. I thought it was a myth. Something from a fairytale.”
“Fairytales aren't exactly what I’d call reliable intel,” Cody says dryly, and Obi-Wan laughs again.
“Well, there hasn’t been a documented Force bond in thousands of years. I think we have to work with what we’ve got, my dear.”
Don’t they always. Cody looks around the world they’re in with new understanding. If this is a dream, it’s the most realistic one Cody has ever been in. The sun on his face is almost as warm as Obi-Wan’s hand, and the rock he’s sitting on is hard and a little cold with the residue of some unseen recent night. The water burbles cheerfully as it falls in random patterns, spraying rainbow droplets into the air.
Obi-Wan reaches for him. He presses two fingers to the curl of Cody’s scar and slides his thumb along the curve of Cody’s cheekbone as Cody leans into it.
“You must have reached out to my dream, searching for some safe haven. The chip is in your body, not your soul,” Obi-Wan says. “So your soul came to mine.”
That, at least, makes sense. In beneath the crippling, terrifying crush of the dark, Cody had known to seek out Obi-Wan. And, however shockingly, it had worked.
He looks around again, wondering how long they have, and can’t help but marvel at how beautiful the dream is. Perhaps the Force is giving them a vision of another planet, or perhaps the realism is powered by two sets of thoughts instead of one. He smiles, wondering if they’re parallel-processing a realistic dream into being.
Even the clouds drifting overhead, lazy and feathered at the edges, are flawless representation of reality. He watches them meander past and remembers Obi-Wan teaching him how to meditate on late, tired nights with the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Let your thoughts come, and let them go, Obi-Wan had said. Like clouds in the sky.
“…So, even in your dreams, you meditate?” Cody asks, and Obi-Wan snorts.
“I, well, not usually. I haven’t been sleeping well,” Obi-Wan admits. “I probably fell asleep meditating, and my brain picked up the slack.”
“I knew you did that sometimes.”
Obi-Wan laughs again. “Yes, yes. Just don’t tell—”
He cuts himself off with a visible swallow, then looks away.
Anakin rings, loud and empty, in the mind space between them.
It makes Cody sober immediately, and he glances over with care. “…Obi-Wan. If we’re not dead, then what did happen?”
With halting words and caught breath, Obi-Wan explains that he hadn’t been able to go find Rex as planned. The Temple had sent out a distress call, he apologizes, and he had had a sense that something had gone terribly, awfully wrong.
“The Jedi were dying across the universe,” Obi-Wan says. “I had—I had to go.”
Cody nods; he knows. He’s always known that Obi-Wan would put his duty first, before Cody and certainly before himself, and he has never expected any less.
Obi-Wan explains everything up to the moment he found a security recording in the Temple before his voice breaks. And Cody needs to know, but he doesn’t need Obi-Wan to tell him. Running on instinct, he reaches out to the golden warmth of Obi-Wan he can feel through the Force bond, and as best he can, he asks to be let in.
The images he finds are too terrible to put words to. The sorrow, the despair, the—the agony—he finds would have sent him to his knees if he were standing. He moves without thinking to wrap his arms around Obi-Wan, to pull Obi-Wan’s face into his neck and press his head to the side of Obi-Wan’s. Obi-Wan doesn’t make a sound; his breath doesn’t hitch, and he doesn’t cry out.
But the wetness dripping onto the skin of his neck is realistic, too.
Cody readjusts his grip so he can hug Obi-Wan tighter to his chest, wishing he could pull the man into his ribcage, to protect him with bone and keep him warm with the pulse of Cody’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” Cody chokes out, dipping his nose into the crown of Obi-Wan sun-warmed hair. “I am so, so sorry.”
They sit that like for long, interminable minutes that Cody doesn’t even try to count, and Cody tries not to worry about his own brother, trapped in Sith mind control.
At last, Obi-Wan pulls back. His eyes are red-rimmed, but his voice doesn’t waver.
“I’m sorry, too,” Obi-Wan says. He takes a deep breath, and within the Force bond, Cody can feel him tucking away his sorrow, parcelling it away for after. There hasn’t really been an ‘after’ for them, yet. “I don’t know about the other clones yet. When I spoke with Rex, the 332nd…”
There is, apparently, more tragedy to this story than Cody could have comprehended. He walks through Obi-Wan’s memories as if back in a trance, numb and distanced, and wonders how everything could have gone so wrong. So many of his brothers are dead, and almost all the rest are trapped in their own heads.
He’s still trapped too, he realizes.
Obi-Wan nods, catching the tail end of the thought. “We stopped by a medical outpost in a neutral zone, but their staff is limited. They’ve had to triage, but now that… well, they’re looking for the equipment they need to remove your chip,” Obi-Wan says.
There’s something about the way that he says triage that makes Cody poke into their bond again, asking for more information. A single image floats into his mind, but one is enough: a baby crying, and a woman dying. The emotions tied to it paint a cleaner picture than the memory. It’s woven with conviction, responsibility, and overwhelming amounts of guilt. Guilt and loss, and Cody wonders at how Obi-Wan has still not run out of things to give.
“Ok. Ok,” Cody says, pulling Obi-Wan back into his side. It isn’t even for Obi-Wan’s sake, but for his own. He can’t imagine carrying this much grief, and he thinks he’s opened enough fresh wounds for now. He can get the rest of the details later, when the chip is out of his head and he and Obi-Wan can carve out space to mourn. There will be enough hard decisions to come.
Stars. Stars. At least Rex made it out, he thinks. If any of them could figure it out, Cody isn’t surprised it was Rex. But, he thinks, no brother should work alone. Cody sets the thought aside; what each of them does next will be something they sort out after they’re both safe.
One step at a time.
They hold each other as the water falls past them, as the sun bakes the stones and the lichens bob in an unfelt breeze. At last, Obi-Wan pulls himself away again. His mind is calmer across the Force bond, though Cody isn’t sure if that’s due to Cody’s words or Obi-Wan’s usual durasteel grip on his emotions. Gratitude, warm and sweet, pulses through their bond, and the gold string between them burns just a little brighter.
“Thank you, Cody,” Obi-Wan says, and a little twinkle has reemerged in the madder blue of his eyes. “I’m glad, at least, to not be alone. I’m glad it’s you.”
It’s enough to make Cody reach for Obi-wan a third time, to put his hand back in the soft strands of Obi-Wans hair and pull them together. Cody kisses him, again and again and again, until a sun-bright simmer sparks in his chest. Without breaking away, Obi-Wan swings one leg over Cody’s lap and presses their hips together, confident of his welcome. Cody gasps, electricity shooting down his spine, and Obi-Wan licks into his open mouth with a smugness Cody can feel against his lips and in the Force bond thrumming between them.
And it’s incredible. If this is a dream, it more than Cody ever dreamed of when he thought about this, when he dreamed of Obi-Wan in his lap and Obi-Wan’s lips pressed against his. His heart sings its triumph. If there is a heaven, if Cody does ever get to see it, then he thinks it must be exactly like this: a suffusion of wet heat and pressure coupled with the press of love and quiet joy in their bond.
After a few minutes, though, Cody feels Obi-Wan shift uncomfortably on his knees, and Cody has to admit that his ass is going to sleep. Their moss-covered rock isn’t a featherbed, and the dream is apparently dedicated to reality even in this discomfort.
The sun overhead is turning egg-yolk yellow as it descends into afternoon. Cody pulls reluctantly back.
“Next time, dream us up a mattress,” Cody grumbles, and Obi-Wan laughs.
“I can do that,” Obi-Wan says. He leans in again, kissing the tender skin of Cody’s temples, his nose, and the corner of one eye before pressing one more kiss to the bow of Cody’s lips. As he does, Cody can feel himself start to drift from the dream and back into the waking world, back beneath the pull of the chip.
But, just as he slips away, he hears Obi-Wan’s smiling voice say, “I’ll see you there, darling.”
