"People push at him. Two different people try to pickpocket him three different times in the first five minutes, and it doesn’t get better. Cody lets the crowd move him, goes where it will take him—he’s not in a hurry. He’s there to do a job, and he knows it won’t take him long.
He has in his datapad the station blueprints, and that means he could redraw them from memory if he needed to—but he’s been doing this job for long enough to know that places like this change and grow organically. That they are not so much metal and glass structures but living colonies, superstructures made from durasteel and living, breathing flesh. They have their own rules, their own cycles and seasons, and the key to surviving them is learning how they work. Who’s the heart, where are they, and what would happen if someone were to put a blaster bolt in them.
Cody’s been told more than once in the past year that his employers like him because he doesn’t ask questions. They seem to think he doesn’t ask because he doesn’t care, but that’s not exactly the case.
He doesn’t ask questions because he doesn’t know how. Once upon a time, opening his mouth would have meant he’d have lost his mind forever. He learned to put things together. All of them did. And all of them are—were—very good at it.
But Cody may have been one of the best, in the same way he was the best at so many other things."
for the dvd commentary? idk why im just like. i like this bit! very much! from the hitman cody fic
well i didn't think this through. i now need to reread my own stuff. disgusting.
ngl this part is actually kind of funny because you have: weird psychogeography stuff, the relationship between you, your body and your immediate environment, the violence inherent to that relationship, clone trooper trauma (tm) and also cody being low key weird about all of those things. it's like most of my star war fic interests in like. 150-200w?
i might be wrong about this, but i think part of the goal when i was writing this was. trying to show in very little words how cody relates to his new world: to his past and to his present, to his job, to his role in the general galaxy, and also to this specific place without making it very infodump-y and/or boring and without taking him/the reader out of the situation.
it's also worldbuilding, i think, but without being obvious about it: i wanted to tell you about this place by showing you how cody feels about it, by showing how he relates to it and the people who live there.
and i think it also does a good job at showing how comfortable cody is in his new role: he might not like his job very much, but he knows he's good at it, and he enjoys this knowledge of his own. competence? quite a lot. like the world (his old world) has ended, and despite it all he has found a way to make a living in the galaxy and a certain degree of independence and he's able to move and work and be good at his job and apply his knowledge and training in new ways. and he likes that! he doesn't like the fact that he enjoys it but he does.
i also like thinking about how the way the clone troopers were raised would affect them and the way they behave and approach stuff. cody has learned to not ask questions in most contexts because doing that is acknowledging that there is something you can't find out on your own--and sometimes that's fine, but it usually implies (in his tiny messed up brain) that you're not good enough at your job. and if you're not up to standard you're very literally fucked.
hello send me an ask with a paragraph or something from one of my fics and i'll ramble about it // hitman cody
