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It was the swearing that woke Cody; tones of fearful desperation, denial, and anger mingled rolled together.
“ Hang on ,” a voice commanded after the curses, a voice that refused to be ignored, a voice that ordered, infused with power.
“Hang on! I refuse…. You obeyed me so many times Commander, Commander, you need to hang on and that’s an order!”
Cody knew no more.
He floated in a current of nonsense thoughts and sensations. Something was burning nearby. There was something cool and wet against his forehead. There was a voice, following him into his dreams, gibberish that made no sense. Later, he saw his General, tearing open a bacta capsule with his teeth, something wild in his eyes.
Consciousness came back slowly and Cody catalogued what he could perceive. He was on a bunk, he recognized the feeling of the plank pretending to be a mattress under his back. He was hurt, the left part of his torso a pulsing, throbbing mess. He had been looked after, if not totally healed: the tickling of drying bacta was unmistakable.
He opened his eyes.
Over him, the ceiling was grey metal and the lamps were off, but natural light came through a breach in the hull, and he saw lush vegetation beyond. He turned his head. Next to his hip, there was a red head; his General sleeping, half kneeling, half sitting near Cody’s bunk. He tried to move his hand to wake the General but it was too difficult and he passed out again.
Later, Cody would ask Obi-Wan how long he had stayed between death and life, and Obi-Wan would let him see the hull where he had carved little marks: ten long days while Obi-Wan had cared for him, buried Cody’s brothers that had been with them in the shuttle, and foraged for food.
It was the longest Cody had been away from another vod.
The Commander needed another week before strengthening enough for a few steps out of the ship. They went to the cairns his General had built for his vode. Crude, lightsaber-cut stones marked their resting places and the General had carved their names and the marks of their helmets into the stone.
Hollow-head, Pitchlow, Edged and Baddye.
Four more brothers marching away, four more brothers Cody couldn’t help, couldn’t save, for all he was the highest ranked clone in the GAR. They sat on a boulder near the graves a long time and for once, the General stayed blissfully silent while Cody grieved.
After a while, Cody couldn’t watch the cairns anymore and turned his attention on their surroundings. They were in a deciduous forest. The ship had gouged a long trench in the treetops and earth in the pilot’s desperate efforts to transform a crash into a landing.
Poor Baddye. He had been a good pilot and a good brother.
It was almost miraculous the fire from the shuttle hadn’t sparked a forest fire and burned the two survivors.
“It was raining,” Cody suddenly said, “I had forgotten, there was some sort of storm with violent winds and the motors were already hiccupping.”
Obi-Wan nodded and stayed silent.
“Why are we still there? The GAR should already have sent help.”
“The entire nose of the ship suffered tremendous damage in the crash. The beacon itself didn’t survive and the comm system is dead. We’ll need to be patient. They have a lot of systems to search, more than I, in fact, can bear to think of, and this planet is in the middle of nowhere. That’s probably why it was never colonized.”
Stranded. While his brothers were dying by the hundreds.
“I’m ready to go back inside,” Cody said to his General, who immediately propped him up on his shoulders.
That night, for the first time, he refused the gruel the Jedi had made; half mashed rations, half grains the General had forraged, with a side of grilled arthropods found inside some tree stumps.
“How are you sure you aren’t poisoning us?” Cody still found the will to ask.
“The Force is a wonderful way to detect poisons,” said the General, grimacing, “but it isn’t an indication for the taste. Still, we are almost through with our rations and we need proteins.”
After changing Cody’s wound dressing, he asked:
“We don’t know how long we’ll be here. I really would appreciate if you stopped calling me Sir. And I can almost hear the capital of the word General in your head.”
“Those stranded together should be on a first name basis, eh?”
“Something like that.”
“I will accept if you share the bunk with me. This is ridiculous for you to still be sleeping on the floor when you’re the one working every day to procure us water and food.”
Silence, then “And I’m the one they call The Negotiator . Yes, Comm…Cody,” Obi-Wan agreed with a smile.
Cody moved on the bunk to let Obi-Wan join him. It wasn’t designed for two people and Cody choked on a yell when the other man’s elbow touched his side, while trying to find how to place the two of them.
“I’m so sorry. Perhaps I should -” Obi-Wan immediately said.
“No, let me. Have you never bunked with another Jedi? We did that all the time on Kamino when we were children. Roll on your side.”
Cody settled in the same position, curling up around the other man’s back. Later, he would probably find that a terrible idea but right now, he was exhausted enough that the contact seemed heavenly. The ginger man was warm and solid, the comfort of being skin-to-skin too reassuring to pull away.
Obi-Wan used the Force to spread the thermal blanket from the emergency pack over their bodies.
“Good night, Cody,” were the last words the Commander heard before sleep took him, more restful than the last days.
Time passed. Cody healed. He was strong; mind, body, and soul forged to endure. At first, limping to the graves was the limit of his capabilities, but day after day, he went further. He occupied his days tinkering with the surviving electronics of the ship: everything that had been in the cockpit was a lost cause, but he succeeded in repairing an analyser, cannibalising pieces from other instruments.
“I’m impressed,” Obi-Wan confessed, “It would have been so out of my skill-set we only could have used that thing as the ugliest art assemblage in the galaxy.”
“We used to smuggle some parts out of the training halls,” Cody said, “on Kamino. We tried to assemble them in new, original ways when the lights were out. We wanted something that would be ours.”
“If someone had told you, you would one day use it to avoid food poisoning on a lost world.”
“Not that I don’t believe in the Force as a poison tester, but I remember the green berries you brought once and the symptoms…Oh Stars, the symptoms,” Cody teased, and Obi-Wan laughed, not vexed in the slightest by this allusion to what had not been his finest moment.
Cody began to systematically analyse and categorize everything he could put his hands on, as a way to occupy himself. Flowers, mosses, roots, bark, leaves… He had begun as a way to help their survival but it was a peaceful, interesting activity.
He found some bark they could boil to produce a mild analgesic, some flowers that could help with stomach aches, some hard nuts that cooked inside the ashes of their fire made the tastiest snacks he had ever eaten . . . .
He began to name them, because calling them “ that blue flower that grows next to the stream, not the one in the north, the one in the west, and perfume the middle sized edible grey rodent stew really well ” or “ the nuts with the indentation in the middle that we found on the tree with the heart-shaped leaves ” quickly became exasperating. His collection grew quickly and he liked working on it in the evenings, while Obi-Wan carved bones into small, useful objects like spoons or new buckles for their belts. He added fishhooks and arrowheads to his carving habits, once he had become good enough to make them small and sharp enough.
The evenings were the most peaceful part of the day, working side by side in front of the fire, a pile of nuts between them.
“You know, when the war is done,” the redhead said one day watching Cody working on analyzing some new roots, “you could perhaps pursue studies in botany.”
“Not sure it’s the place for a clone.”
“You’re a man. And like all sentients, you should have the possibilities to make your own choices. I know the Order is guilty of - ”
“You’re guilty of finding yourself between a rock and a hard place, and making the less terrible choice, sir.”
“Weren’t you supposed to call me Obi-Wan?”
“Not when you’re a self-sacrificing idiot that takes blame for things outside your powers.”
Obi-Wan shook his head in fond exasperation, humpf-ed and grumbled, but accepted the verdict.
They stayed. They hunted, they foraged, they passed the time in training in hand to hand against each other.
“Are you sure you aren’t using the Force?” Cody would ask, his pride bruised, his friend’s thighs around his neck, when he had been thrown on the grass for the tenth time.
“You’re too used to sparring against your brothers. I know I’m not strong enough against you in terms of pure muscle, so I use the fact that I’m more flexible. You need to learn to guard against that.”
“Obi-Wan, I’m pretty sure some of the holovids the men are always smuggling into the barracks start like that!”
The Jedi’s laugh was clear and strong, resonating against Cody. He shifted his hips to be sure his friend wouldn’t feel the effect that sound, and their proximity, had on Cody. Obi-Wan had the grace to pretend he hadn’t noticed. Cody learned fast and ten days after that, he and Obi-Wan were more evenly matched.
“The problem is that you lean too much on your flexibility,” Cody pontificated, sitting on the Jedi’s strong back, blocking his arms and Obi-Wan would groan and protest: “I don’t sound like that!” Cody pressed a little more of his weight on the body under him and the Jedi groaned with a very different tone. Cody was up so fast he might as well have teleported and made a conscious effort to ignore how red Obi-Wan’s face was when he stood.
They stayed and Obi-Wan carved them some wood swords and began to teach Cody everything he could learn of lightsaber dueling without the Force to augment his motions. It was fun, it was sometimes violent, it was a good way to forget for a few hours the number of tallies on the hull of the ship, marking their impromptu three-month vacation. Makashi was Cody’s favorite because balance and footwork were easily acquired talents, not like two meter vertical jumps without a run-up!
They stayed and Obi-Wan carved a big log of wood into a crude table with his lightsaber and engraved it with a spiral of little squares.
“What are you doing?” asked a curious Commander.
“You’ll see,” Obi-Wan answered again and again, when the vod asked again, seeing the Jedi painfully carve some small bones with their crude tools.
One morning, it was ready. He had even used crushed leaves and berries to colour the small bones figures, waiting on the log.
“It’s a game,” Cody understood finally, seeing the bon-...seeing the pieces on the board.
“It’s called the Princes and Thieves game, on a moon named Senali, that I visited long, long ago with my Master. I thought it would help on rainy days. Sit down, I will teach you the rules.”
They stayed. Cody learned old Jedi poems and tried meditation, and Obi-Wan finally learned the story behind his friend’s name and dozens of little anecdotes about his strange childhood on Kamino. They played Princes and Thieves, sometimes late in the night with only the crude moulded candles that Cody made from the tallow of the biggest animals they hunted and talked about everything. Of course, Obi-Wan had seen more planets than Cody, and the ones Cody had seen had often been burning at the time, but Obi-Wan was always happy to learn more about the culture the vode had developed. And if sometimes Obi-Wan’s gaze stayed too long on Cody during those times, the Commander had gotten very good at not noticing.
They stayed. Cody hunted with his blaster first, with a makeshift bow after he ran out of ammunition. He invented small traps to catch tasty rodents. Together, with great difficulty, they searched how to preserve the skins of the animals, because they had a total of three outfits for the two of them and it was becoming an urgent necessity to procure more. Cody tried basketry with a red, strong vine that crawled under trees in the most humid part of the forest. It was a painstaking craft but he had nothing but time and they needed more ways to store things. Even if his baskets were more functional than beautiful and he needed a lot of attempts before succeeding in making the bottom strong enough.
They stayed and they stayed and they stayed, until warm colours touched the trees.
They tried to pretend it wasn’t a problem, probably far too long, huddling together under a pile of furs.
“Do you hear the wind?” Obi-Wan asked one night. It was a stupid question, but a good opening for the discussion they needed to have.
Outside the hull, there was a burst of noise as the wind picked up again.
“If the weather doesn’t get better, we’ll suffer from the cold,” Cody said against Obi-Wan’s back. He saw goosebumps on the back of the redhead’s neck and tried very hard to not ask himself if it was the cold, or his breath that raised them.
“There are limits to what our fire and the furs, or even the Force, can do for us.”
“Perhaps we should move,” Cody proposed after a few seconds, “the hunting is becoming a problem: animals are smarter than us, a lot of them are already hibernating, or have…what’s the term?”
“Migrated?”
“Yes, that. And finding nuts or other plants we can eat, it pushes us to forage farther and farther away every day. I fear soon there will be only bark to help us pass the winter.”
They packed up two days later. All their clothes, dried meat they had prepared on the fire, pouches of nuts and dried berries, the analyzer, and of course, their individual comms that would capture the signal if a Republic ship entered the atmosphere. As another precaution, Obi-Wan carved their intentions and the direction they would take into the hull of the shuttle and then they began their long travel south, sleeping in caves when they could, or against trees, grumbling about the cold and the rain in a nest of humid furs.
They should have left earlier. The days were growing steadily shorter and they needed to stop in the evening when they still had energy, to prepare the camp and gather wood. It was long. Hard. Obi-Wan insisted that The Handmaiden’s third nipple was not a civilized marching song, contrary to the opinions of the bounty hunters who had trained Cody.
Then, after the third day, Obi-Wan completely switched his position and started to song it too, and to add lyrics, dirtier than anything any bounty hunter had ever thought of!
After months at their camp, Cody was more than ready to see other valleys, other sceneries. Even with the lack of comfort, it felt good. Like shedding some part of their past. The further they went from the shuttle, the less he felt like a stranded Commander and the more he simply felt like Cody.
In the evenings, he observed Obi-Wan patiently carving them a travel set of The Princes and Thieves game. The light of their fire always set red and gold undertones in his beard and hair. With his furs, Obi-Wan looked nothing like the composed Jedi Master he had been on Coruscant. He looked so much more alive, flesh and blood instead of myth and legend.
Cody analyzed the plants he had picked up during the day, finding more and more new species as they went south, or practised his needlework. The first time, it had been only to mend his tunic, but he had discovered that he liked it, like most patient, meticulous tasks. He had a fur quiver for his arrows and he had embroidered it with the markings of his helmet, using large tendons from a big ungulate. Now, he was working on one of their fur blankets, embroidering small starbirds on the border.
They walked a month before being stopped by a sea and then three days more before establishing a more permanent camp in an appropriate place, only ten minutes from a small spring. It fed a little creek, protected from the winds by ochre cliffs covered in small, fragrant bushes. The sea was a beautiful blue, almost as blue as the sky. They pitched their tent and prepared their camp.
“We should name it,” said Obi-Wan, when they had started the fire.
“Winter camp?”
“Not very original.”
“The Handmaiden’s fourth nipple.”
“Certainly not, you miscreant!”
“Villa on the coast?”
And Obi-Wan laughed and immediately carved a sign.
That evening, the Jedi fished in the sea with a makeshift spear while Cody collected some beautiful sea shells. He would put them on his brothers’ cairns in the spring, if they were still on this world. If they went back to the shuttle camp - he had ideas. The trench made by the ship hadn’t been filled with more than a little grass, perhaps he could plant some of nuts in the spring, see if he could propagate plants they ate. Obi-Wan had talked a little about grafting or stolons but the truth was that the Jedi was no botanist and his knowledge on the subject had quickly run dry. Nevertheless, Cody wouldn’t let that stop him. Yes, he had a lot of ideas.
After, he relaxed on the sand, savoring the last rays of sun on his skin and admiring the back muscles of the Jedi. Food was more difficult to obtain than when it only took a trip to the mess, but strangely Obi-Wan had filled out. More sleep, less responsibilities, and physical work that wasn’t being kicked around by Darksiders had done him good.
Obi-Wan came back smiling and laughing, droplets of salt water beading on his naked torso.
Cody’s breath caught in his chest for a few seconds until his body remembered the importance of proper respiration. Obi-Wan stopped a few meters from him, his smile gone, his expression serious. The entire planet seemed to hold its breath. Then he knelt between Cody’s legs. The spear and the fishes were abandoned nearby and with trembling fingers, Obi-Wan touched his friend’s face. They had been on this world for seven months and the GAR regulations, the Code that had regulated their lives seemed far away. Inconsequential, compared to the warmth of Cody inside their nest of furs, to the laughter of Obi-Wan catching their dinner.
Long fingers combed gently through Cody’s hair, longer than it ever had been. Keeping regulation-compliant hair was very low on the list of the Marshall Commander’s priorities.
Cody leaned in. The kiss was no more than a soft sensation, the idea of a kiss more than a kiss. He let a few seconds pass and smiled when Obi-Wan started the second one himself, coming alive against to him, his hands coming up to frame Cody’s face. It stayed slow and soft from kiss to kiss, gentle and tender and too precious to be rushed.
“Dinner!” Obi-Wan suddenly said and Cody’s brain derailed for a second.
“Dinner,” the Jedi persisted, “I want…I want you to be sure. Because that would be so awkward after. Because I wouldn’t…I would never…You’re too important.”
“Dinner,” Cody reassured.
The fishes were almost burned instead of simply cooked as they had great difficulties thinking of something other than the kisses but it was such a satisfying meal. After dinner, Cody took a walk. He wanted to offer Obi-Wan a moment to change his mind, if necessary. Their friendship had grown so strong over the months that it was already attachment, and going farther would complicate things so much when they went back.
He groaned inwardly to himself and tipped his face up, studying the stars. How was the war? His brothers? The Jedi? Nobody had come. Would they pass all their lives here, together? If he should be stranded with someone that wasn’t his vode, he had very good luck to be with Obi-Wan. They were at the mercy of the first virus nasty enough to defeat Obi-Wan’s Force Healing and always worried about food, but…but it was a good life, together. Some days, he didn’t think about the rest of the galaxy until dusk, when he saw the stars, and he always felt a little guilty about it.
His heart beating wildly, he collected some herbs that refreshed the breath and he made slowly his way back to the camp, munching on them.
Obi-Wan had put more wood in the fire and prepared their nest of furs closer to it than most of the time. He smiled when Cody entered the circle of light and they fell together.
Cody’s heart was ringing and happiness tasted like burnt fish and laughter. Happiness tasted salty on Obi-Wan’s skin, that Cody immediately mapped like he had the surroundings of the shuttle camp.
The galaxy could go on without them.
He would fight for it if a ship came one day, he would do his duty, pick up his blaster and his rank again, and fight, and die, without a whisper of protest.
Nevertheless, between his new lover’s legs, whimpering sweet nothings and sharing deep kisses, he could admit it to himself: Obi-Wan was worth a life on that lost world.