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Cody blinks up at the man straddling his torso, his breath ragged but there and that was an improvement over five minutes ago. “Just throw me straight back into the river. Please.”
The medic, because he couldn’t be anything else with the speed he had thrown himself after Cody, down the embankment, just laughs, folding forward to press his forehead to Cody’s chest. There’s a moment of respite, something Cody desperately needs and is rarely offered even when he’s recovering from lightly dying, and he grabs at it with both hands.
There’s a faint tremor in the mud beneath him, the deliberate footsteps of some mechanical behemoth echoing through the network of tunnels that carve through this planet like a network of veins. On one side, the river thunders past, a faint spray spattering onto Cody’s bare skin, exposed through the tears in his blacks, the spaces where his plastoid armour had buckled beneath the strain. The water’s dark, mud and silt streaked through it from higher ground, higher battlefields, and Cody tips his head to one side to spit out the overwhelming brackish taste in his mouth. It wouldn’t be suitable for drinking for weeks, something they’d need to keep in mind if the campaign dragged out any longer.
“Dying men don’t usually have such a good sense of humour,” the medic says as he straightens, making no move to shift from his perch across Cody’s hips. He’s dressed strangely, no armour like the clones had come to expect from civilians and their Jedi leadership, but his tunic is dark and reinforced, belted at the slight divot of his waist. There’s a patch sewn onto his left shoulder, a symbol Cody doesn’t know but recognises all the same.
Cody shrugs as best as he can. His fresh collection of injuries is beginning to claw against his nerves once more, a shrieking line down one thigh, a complimentary chorus high in the knotted muscle of his shoulder. “Maybe I’m the exception. You should throw me back in the river, just to be safe.”
The medic pouts, honest to the stars, pouts , his eyes impossibly blue as the expression wavers into a grin that’s slightly too wide, too many teeth on display. “Am I so terrible that you keep trying to get away from me?”
“Not you.” Cody tries to grab at one of the pouches on his belt and runs into the immediate problem of the man’s thigh. The other man is warm, surprisingly so given that the clones run several degrees hotter than the galaxy at large, and Cody doesn’t draw his hand back immediately.
There’s some minor blood loss happening, he’ll blame that.
The medic laughs once more, softer this time, and he shifts his weight sideways completely, settling himself to kneel next to Cody. The mud squelches beneath his calves, his mouth drawn into a tight line as he fights back a shudder. It’s a strangely familiar gesture and it takes Cody a moment to place where he’s seen it before, his thoughts unspooling back to Kamino. There would be machinery in place for the same tasks they were set — refilling the growth media for the tubies, emptying the waste tanks that lurk in the lower levels, an endless moving of crates from one storage room to another — but it had been their tasks to complete, an extension of the contract that had brought them into existence. They would wear the same expression the medic does, a stubborn insistence on their place in the universe being there and now.
“So,” the medic prompts, cupping his fingers just beneath Cody’s chin and turning his face towards him. “If it’s not me, then what is the hurry?” He repeats the gesture on the opposite side of Cody’s chin, turning his face away, and Cody allows the motion, an aching helplessness coring into the hollows of his bones.
“I have some questions for you first.” Cody reaches for the pouch on his belt once more, unimpeded this time by strange medics fishing clones out of the river. The fabric is still damp, the supposed waterproof coating doing worse than nothing as it holds the water stationary and freezing until Cody disturbs it, soaking his hand and into his blacks beneath. His spare com lights up as he draws it free, a distinct chirp emitting as it begins to connect to the network boosters in his armour. Those, at least, should be more waterproof than the rest of him. Karking intel and the gaps big enough to pilot a ship through.
The medic looks delighted .
The universe must have a strange fascination with Cody to have him so thoroughly dissected down to the impulses humming through his veins and then to throw this man at him.
Cody’s helmet is a distant memory as he pushes himself upright, mud cloying and thick at his back, the medic leaning forward to support him. There’s the lingering scent of iron as he does so, heavy enough to coat Cody’s tongue and he swallows back a tang of bile. On his mouth, his lips, there’s a faint taste of something else beneath the sour brackish water. He didn’t think this planet had anything that could be classed as floral vegetation, just the standard creeping vines that hide droids and cliffs alike. Cody focuses on the man next to him instead of how exposed he feels, a wound freshly tore open with his face bare.
“What’s your name?” Cody asks, hooking the com over his ear. It’s still connecting, a low whirr poking against the side of his skull, but he can ignore it for the moment, letting the sound wash over him like the distant rush of the river and the ping of blaster fire high above him.
“Call me Ben. Ben Kenobi.” Ben smiles, lopsided once more, his eyes focused on Cody’s face.
That’s not entirely a lie, enough of the truth for it to feel solid beneath the thin veneer of paint and flimsiwork. When they’d first left Kamino and been exposed to the universe at large, emotions had been tricky to read on natborns. Harder still from humanoids who shared the same basic framework they all did, noses thinner or broader, brows thicker or thinner or non-existent, because they didn’t look right, they didn’t match how a brother would look. There’d been training packages upon training packages about their weaponry, simulations for every kind of battlefield and ambush scenario, but nothing about what it meant if a natborn bares their teeth and keeps their eyes wide, the disgust that could be transmitted with barely more than a twitch of muscles in the cheek.
So, Cody learnt.
It wasn’t easy, but Cody is exactly who had been made to be and everything he had torn from the fabric of the universe to be his, so he rose above it, gasping and choking but surviving.
Ben lies with a smile, nearly as easily as the other man breathes, and even the knowing is more of a feeling than anything Cody can project onto the wall of the ship and circle in red paint. ‘Kenobi’ is a ridiculous enough name that it would be easy to find on the holonet or any semi-functioning database that the Senate could construct so that would be the best choice to lie about, except this man, this ridiculous civilian medic who is the middle of an active warzone and throws himself after a random clone who made one misjudgement on the steepness of a mountain, isn’t lying about it.
“Good to meet you, Ben,” Cody says. He holds out his hand, biting back a laugh at the situation he has fallen into. There would be a new section of the training module because of him, he’s sure of it. “I’m Cody.”
Ben’s hand is warm against Cody’s. A thick band of calluses spans the base of his fingers and a ridge indents the line of his thumb, the placement familiar enough to the medics Cody is used to.
“What are you doing here, Ben?” Cody maintains his grip on Ben’s hand, shifting slightly to press his fingertips against the delicate network of veins at his wrist. His pulse is strong, steady,
and Cody hopes a foolish desire that it stays like that. It isn’t often that he meets beautiful strangers who aren’t trying to kill him, his brothers, or the Jedi General he has been assigned to because Alpha-17 has a scar in the shape of Cody’s teeth on his forearm.
Ben brushes his free hand over his thigh, smearing a line of dark mud over the paler fabric. “I’m a medic and I can be helpful here. Otherwise, I go where the universe calls me.” His grin sharpens, some old hurt passing just beneath the surface before it’s submerged once more.
“Admirable,” Cody murmurs. His comm ticks into the second stage of transmitting, the whirr sharpening into a series of clicks as it begins to connect with the secure channels. Not long now before he will need to be on the move again, unknown medics or not. “What did you do after you pulled me out of the river?”
“What do you remember last?” Ben leans forward, his gaze locked onto Cody’s face. It’s a deliberate study like Ben is trying to catalogue the minutiae that would distinguish Cody from his brothers in every way except for relying for the scar that curls around his eye and crosses over his temple.
Cody can’t remember ever being looked at like that.
“There was a hollow beneath the vines, packed full of the things so it read as solid on the scan and from a quick visual assessment.” Cody shrugs, the motion pulling at the jagged line of his ribs, the torn-open crevasses of his armour. “It made my descent faster than intended and I landed in the river.”
All of the currently active clones could swim. It had been a near necessity given the crumbling ruins of Kamino’s towers, the lower levels with only rusting hatches between the faux sterile quarters allocated to the early batches and the ocean outside.
Ben’s answer is conversational, a gentle remark as if it is nothing more impactful than the weather being discussed. “You landed in the main current with stunning accuracy. A few more moments or if you hadn’t been as strong a swimmer and you would have been lost to the river before I could even try to help you. For your records, you were unconscious and not breathing when I pulled you out so I performed manual breathing to get the water out of your lungs.”
“Manual breathing?”
Ben’s smile softens slightly, his gaze wandering away from Cody to the river as his cheek indents making the expression lopsided. “It’s also called the kiss of life.”
Cody blinks. There is definitely not a training module for this situation.
“It does seem like we are doing everything out of order,” Cody murmurs, squeezing Ben’s hand once more before he releases the other man. “You kiss me before you even know my name.”
Ben huffs out a quiet laugh, covering his face with both hands. His grin is just visible through the gap between his hands, some relief from an ancient table given flesh and warmth, and Cody wants a kiss he can remember. Ben speaks from behind his fragile cover, his eyes glinting at Cody behind the bars of his fingers, “I will confess to some curiosity as to why you threw yourself into the river in the first place.”
The decision had been tactically sound at the time but now, with a few mouthfuls of river water coating his stomach and Ben’s attention finally tuned, the explanation felt fragile, easily dismissed. Cody’s shoulders lock into place, his hands still in his lap, his posture sure and perfect once more. It hurts, a dull twist through exhausted muscles, but he had been made for this.
In his ear, his comm hums, connecting to every feed thrown over the planet and the few fragile connections snaking their way back to Coruscant. One channel flickers, demanding his attention, and Cody opens it with a blink, scanning over the furious contents.
“Battlefield tactics,” he answers Ben, beginning to push himself upright. “Small difference of opinion on the quickest way back to the ship following an engagement and I’ve just won.”
“You nearly died,” Ben murmurs, but there’s no heat behind his words, no righteous fury to shake the stars from the sky, just an understanding. He must have siblings of a sort as well.
Mud clings to Cody’s thighs, his back, his hips, his blacks near unsalvageable as it begins a slow conquest through the seams of his armour, the dented hollows from blaster bolts. It’s cold, not unlike the river, and Cody curls his hands into fists, squeezing them tight until it aches.
“From here, it’s a straight ride down the river to your ship,” Ben says, pushing himself to his feet. It’s an infinitely more graceful endeavour than Cody could aspire to, the mud seeming to be repelled from him while it clings to every inch of Cody. “Would you like me to throw you in as requested or are you going to jump?”
Cody chews his cheek, the dull pressure echoing against the whirr of the com. Another message flickering through the channel from Rex, deliberately low quality and it would be a nondescript image to anyone else — a tangle of vines with bright purple leaves protruding from the central mass, slightly blurred due to the movement of the camera — and Cody flicks a message back to him, his eyes twitching minutely to activate the keys.
In addition to the vines that cocoon every inch of this planet, there’s an unusual interference that messes with their automated navigation systems in their helmets. Cody, as a benevolent commander and older vode, did not remind Rex of this fact before he spent the better part of their competition heading in the wrong direction. Any active assaults are, thankfully, on the other side of the planet even if the vibrations can still be felt.
“If you are heading to our base, I could travel with you?” Cody’s voice doesn’t tremble, he’s a good soldier, tries to be a good man in whatever framework the clones have claimed for themselves. Mysterious and a security risk as Ben may be, it’s a battlefield that envelops this planet, and the other man is neither Jedi or Trooper.
Something shutters behind Ben’s eyes, a fierce wanting banked in the same moment of its creation. He’s hungry for something Cody can’t name but denies himself it in the same motion. “I’ll have to decline, my dear. I have some unfortunate history with your General.”
Understandable. Cody had his own unfortunate history with his General. Qui-Gon’s reputation as a maverick was well-earned and only faltered minutely when impacting against Cody’s plans and procedures and enough flimsiwork to drown in.
“I can appreciate that,” Cody remarks dryly. Ben laughs once more, brushing his hand through his hair and frowning at the likely damp sensation of it.
“If you could, would you give him a message?”
“I’m not kissing him,” Cody answers immediately.
Ben recoils, an expression of wonderous horror splashed over his features before he collects himself. His shoulders twitch as he breathes out through his nose, his hands clasped in front of him. “A normal message, I promise, Cody. Could you tell him—“ Ben’s mouth flattens into a line, any expression on his face smoothed over into a perfect, placid nothingness. There’s a few statues scattered around the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and one of them impacts against Cody’s thoughts now, a weather worn curve of stone from a planet that no longer existed but somehow still resonates the same weary hesitation that Ben emits, the need to act when the desire has fled.
“Tell him that Kenobi says hello. Please, Cody?”
“Of course,” Cody replies.
There is little else to be said with their parting and Cody makes his way to the riverbank, pausing on the soft sloping edge. Spray impacts his cheeks, reality beginning to come back into focus once more. He turns back to Ben, a slight figure with the bottom of his tunic stained with mud, his hair dishevelled from the press of his fingers, and Cody presses his fingers to his mouth. He breathes once against them, his very lungs sore but manageable, and extends them to Ben before he jumps into the river. It’s only slightly fancy, tucking himself into a roll before he extends out with the minimal space he has, entering the water with barely a splash to distrust the sound of Ben’s laughter.
Qui-Gon is waiting for him as Cody makes his way into their camp a few hours ahead of Rex, with a spare set of blacks slung over his shoulder.
“The Force works in mysterious ways,” he says in answer to Cody’s raised eyebrow.
Cody shucks his armour quickly, peeling the damp blacks from his frame and drawing on the fresh set. One sleeve is frayed, a thin tear sewn up and beginning to come apart once more, and Cody worries at it as he redresses in his armour. “Got a message for you, General,” he says finally, rocking back into a wide stance, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Oh?”
“Kenobi says hello.”
Cody isn’t Force-sensitive, less than even the baseline they tested all of the clones with, but he senses something crack in Qui-Gon’s demeanour, some old hurt shattered so it can heal properly.
“Did he now?” Qui-Gon murmurs, clasping his hands in front of himself and walking back towards the centre of camp. Cody doesn’t follow him immediately, turning back to stare into the tangle of vines and partially exposed hills he had emerged from. He hopes Ben is looking back at him.