Work Text:
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” he says, patience finally breaking. “I’m just having a few bad days, is all. I’m not stupid.”
The hand that had automatically reached towards him as soon as he moved to get up from his chair stops.
“I know,” Cody says quietly. He settles down again, but his eyes track Obi-Wan as he moves into the kitchen of his tiny quarters, feeling restless and confined.
So maybe he’s still moving more slowly than usual and occasionally stumbles, when he’s tired? That’s normal, everyone is like that when they’ve been stuck in the infirmary for too long. All that lying around ruins the muscles. And maybe he can’t spend all day training with his men and then do the behind-the-scenes work at night like he’s done ever since – well, ever since he finally got out of the creche, really. Maybe he ends up falling asleep over his datapads and waking up from not quite nightmares.
Not that anyone needs to know that.
He’s fine. Sidious is dead, the Kaminoans are no longer a threat to them through the vod’e, Anakin’s doing really well – and he feels a brief warm spike of pride in his brother-son – and everyone is safe and well. Not like his dreams at all.
The only real thing that he’s needing time to adjust to is his new arm, and honestly Anakin did such a wonderful job in building it that he forgets it’s any different most of the time. Only when he knocks it into something and it registers as pressure rather than pain does he notice that it’s made of metal.
And it’s really useful for cooking, too, when he turns off the heat sensors. No wonder Anakin had always just held things in the campfire when they were on campaigns.
Not that I’ve really gotten to use it anywhere but wasting time around here, he thinks sourly. They won’t let him out without a minder, usually Luminara or Mace or sometimes Plo, and even here, Cody is always watching him or tucking a hand under his elbow or asking where he is when he’s literally just on the other side of the wall and he literally saw him walk there five seconds before and Obi-Wan is done.
It’s bad enough that someone is shadowing him all the time, but even having to endure Quinlan bouncing off the walls and playing horrible music at all hours would be better than having to see everything he has ever wanted so close and knowing that it’s nothing but an illusion. As soon as whoever is in charge clears him for full duty, Cody will be off, back to the 212th or helping his brothers rebuild Kamino or even maybe leaving entirely, going off to join the hunt for Sidious’ successor or the small but growing number of vod’e who have formed a relief corps to try and rebuild the planets that were the most devastated by the war, and this façade he is putting up for some reason, of playing house with Obi-Wan and pretending like he does it because he wants to be there, will be gone.
He’d been relieved for the first hour or so when he had come fully out of his dissociative fit – which had lasted for weeks, apparently, so much longer than it ever had before how had he let it get so out of control? he was better than that – and learned that while he had spent the first bit of it in the infirmary, most of the time he had been kept in his own room and Cody had been his primary caretaker. It made sense. The others were far too busy to waste time looking after him all day every day, and Cody was the only other person who knew him well enough and who he trusted enough to allow that close to his body while his mind was drifting.
Obi-Wan leans on the counter to take some of the weight off his aching muscles and once again flicks over the short explanation that Mace had given him when he crashed back into his body. It’s just as unsatisfying, embarrassing, and vaguely humiliating as it has been the last thirty-four times he’s thought about it.
About two months since they defeated Sidious, give or take because nobody had thought to actually check things like dates for weeks afterwards in all the changes, and he was not actually there for most of it, mind floating somewhere high and quiet while his body was led around like a puppet, having to be told to eat and sleep and bathe and everything else. He has a sense of how everyone treated him from the way that Cody acted in the first day or so after he came back, how he literally couldn’t take a step without a hand gently closing around his wrist or slipping around his elbow like a slack leash ready to pull taut at the slightest hint of resistance, the way he had automatically narrated everything that was happening around him and what he was doing in a quiet but firm voice.
The person he loved more than anyone he had ever loved before, the one he wanted never to even guess there were cracks in the face he let everyone see, had been the one who saw all of them and right through to the mess beneath and Obi-Wan might kind of want to die.
He knew, rationally, that any chance of actually continuing to be any kind of presence in Cody’s life once the war was done was very, very small. Not even as a work partner or a close friend, much less a romantic relationship – for one, he had no idea what Cody thought about asexuality, or if he even knew what it was, and trying to explain that he literally did not feel sexual or romantic attraction, but alterous instead, and that it could still be so strong that sometimes he felt like he was choking on it, and just as valid and loyal and passionate as normal people’s attractions, just in a different way with different boundaries – well, he’d still barely gotten his own head around the entire concept through furtive holonet searches and a book or two he’d finally gotten his hands on in the last few months Before and could barely explain it to himself, much less anyone else, much less anyone else he still wanted to keep a friendship with at the end of it – how to explain that he’d really, really like to marry him, yes, and live together for the rest of their lives but absolutely no sex would be involved because he just can’t do it, not even for him, was that even something fair to ask of someone else, why was he like this, why was he always broken –
Obi-Wan snaps back into himself when his hand gives a warning tremor, and he realizes that he’s holding on the to the edge of the counter so tightly it’s almost broken.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Cody says, as if he’s summoned him, sliding into his line of sight and tilting his head towards a chair.
He does not want to, but apparently his body can’t quite break the conditioning of doing what Cody says and sits down for him.
He’s done.
“Go,” he says, perfectly calm, “away.”
Cody stills, where he has been doing . . . something, his back turned.
“Go away,” Obi-Wan repeats, still quiet. “I’m not stupid and I’m not hurt. I can take care of myself. I know my limits. I need space.”
“Healer Che says you need –”
“I know what I need, Commander, and Healer Che isn’t here. Get out.”
Obi-Wan has had his eyes fixed on a spot on the table he’s sitting at – did he have a table before? that certainly looks like a burn mark from Anakin building something at it, so he probably did – and he doesn’t look up as Cody breathes, in and out, tight and setting off danger all along his spine. Cody is angry.
Obi-Wan knows he can’t take him in a straight fight, even before he was this tired and weak. But he has the Force, he can hold him back long enough to get the door between them and burn the lock out so he can’t force it open, he can make him forget he was there and get away, distract him with some random tantalizing thoughts planted in the front of his mind. One of those has always worked before when Qui-Gon was obsessed.
“I’ll go,” Cody says, too calm. “But someone will be by to check on you every few hours. That’s not negotiable.”
“I don’t think you’re in any place to be telling me what is and isn’t negotiable, Commander,” Obi-Wan hears someone say. It sounds like his voice.
Ten minutes later, he is alone.
~
Maybe wanting to be alone was a mistake, he admits seven hours later. He’s paced the entire length and width of his quarters eighty-seven times and everything hurts. He’s got a headache again and can’t remember the last time he had something to eat.
Eating is kind of a waste, anyway. Someone else has to need it more than him.
~
It’s been fifteen hours since Cody left him, not that he’s counting or noticing or anything like that, and Kix has been by twice to check . . . something, words sharp and clipped even more than usual for medics and taking as little time as possible, as if being in Obi-Wan’s presence is intolerable to him.
Fair enough, Obi-Wan concedes. I can’t stand myself either.
~
He stares out the window at the water and wonders what it’s like to not be so anxious he’s jittery. It’s been eighteen hours and he can’t tell where Cody was sitting on the chair anymore. The cushion’s fluffed out again as he watched.
~
It’s weird, going from crawling through a dark tunnel barely big enough to fit inside, lit only by lightsaber, Kit shuffling in front of him and someone he doesn’t remember behind, and scraping his palms on the rough floor and feeling absolutely exhausted and filthy in robes that haven’t been clean for days and the body armor beneath stiff and scratchy, to suddenly being in a block of watery sunlight in soft clothes and his head resting on the shoulder of the center of his world, wrapped up safe like he hasn’t felt since he was a literal child. And having only the blurriest and most general of ideas what happened in between.
Obi-Wan presses himself further in the corner of his dark bedroom and tries to remember how to breathe.
It’s not the tunnel, Sidious is already dead, there’s no sense in getting all worked up for a battle that already happened how broken is he that he can’t enjoy peace now that it’s finally here and they’ve worked for it for so long.
His fingers wander across the smooth cold floor searching for a lightsaber that isn’t there because he hasn’t just dropped it while crawling down that tunnel and come up against a blanket instead. He twists it into a lump and presses it against his chest and feels the pressure ease a little.
It’s not the same as being safe, but it’s a mockery of it and so it will do for him.
~
He vaguely remembers hearing that recovery isn’t a straight line from someone once. Probably after one of the times he was stupid and got hurt when he was little.
Right now his line of recovering from . . . whatever, life? feels like a hyperspace evasion route plotted by a drunk paranoid pirate.
It’s light again and he’s hiding under a bed with one of Cody’s shirts he found forgotten half under something clutched to him like he’s drowning and it’s the only thing saving him from going under for the last time and it’s so fucking pathetic he doesn’t even know what to think about it.
~
Kix hauls him out from under the bed and makes him sit upright, muttering angrily under his breath the entire time as he pokes and prods and does whatever things medics do. Obi-Wan tries to hold still and not flinch and focus on what he’s saying.
“ – lot of nerve, di’kut darjetii, sitting there all wrapped in his stuff when you’re the one who threw him out –”
He tries to let go of the shirt, but his hands don’t want to. Kix has a point. He doesn’t deserve to feel safe.
“ – I told him no good would come of it, but no, what do I know, he’s all ‘the General this’ and ‘the General that’ and ‘he smiled at me today and I think I would literally jump into a sun to see it again’ and between him and Bly I honestly don’t know which is worse. And you!” Kix prods him in the shoulder with a hard finger and Obi-Wan can’t stop the flinch, eyes snapping to attention on Kix’s face.
Kix looks . . . not as angry as he thought he was from his words?
“Don’t think the entire 212th didn’t notice you flirting with him. Pair of idiots, both of you, talking in circles around each other and giving completely the wrong impressions. You might be hurt, but I’m still mad,” he says with a glare, and Obi-Wan bows his head on reflex.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, not understanding why Kix is angry but wanting to placate him before something bad happens.
“You’d better kriffing be. Not that he thinks he has a right to anything because he was the only one you’d let near you, but you can’t spend the better part of months cuddling up to him and calling him pet names and proposing to him every fucking time we put you on the good painkillers and then turn around and act like he’s less than the battlefield mud the second you start feeling good enough to be around other people again. At least be polite about it! We have feelings too!”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, because that’s generally what angry people want to hear.
“We’re not toys for you to practice on.”
“No.”
“We were literally conditioned from birth to obey you, and it’s not so hard to take it a step further when we actually met you and start loving you as well.”
“Yes.”
Kix startles slightly and gives him a confused, worried look. “Yes what?”
It’s then that Obi-Wan realizes that before those last two words, Kix’s mouth hadn’t been moving.
I was hearing his thoughts, he realizes. But that hasn’t happened for ages – my shields are up aren’t they – yes – they’re not enough --
The white noise that he has heard as long as he can remember is gone, and in its place, now that he pays attention, is a deep ache like a bruised rib and the endless chatter of thousands of minds.
The other Force-sensitives stand out like floodlights, the vod’e like sparks. Anakin is a sun and there is a little star near him that can only be his child. One of the lights is flickering in and out like it isn’t really here but isn’t really not here either.
Obi-Wan reaches out with both hands, metaphorically, and grabs for the slippery almost-gone crechemate bonds he has, and he feels the ocean-swell of Luminara’s thoughts and the deep current of Quinlan’s like he has not felt since he was small and holding their hands as they struggled to make him understand what a crechemate bond even was.
He feels their shock and then their rising excitement as they notice him and just stops for a moment to feel them there, to know that he is finally free, and then turns his attention to the only real bond he has. It’s always looked sickly and weak to him, but now that the white noise is gone it’s so brilliant it’s painful and so strong he folds in on himself as Cody’s emotions rush in on him in a sudden block of anxiety and misery.
He’s standing before he realizes what he’s doing and Kix snaps something, sounding alarmed, before hurrying to follow.
It turns out to be a good thing that Kix is there, because he navigates the halls with his eyes half-shut and fighting to keep track of his sense of Cody through the fog of other minds he gets slammed with as soon as he steps out of his quarters, and without Kix to guide him he’d definitely have walked into more than a few walls.
Even as loud and intense as the bond is, all the other voices almost drown it out.
Is this what Anakin feels like all the time? he wonders, and then abruptly spins around and almost faceplants into a door.
It’s closed, but Cody is behind it. He eyes it miserably and sags against it, abruptly too tired to do anything else. His head is spinning and not just from the massive sensory overload.
Kix reaches around him – oh, he’s holding him up – and knocks on the door.
After what is a small lifetime, it opens, and Luminara is there, but he can’t focus on anything but Cody right now and he eels past her and across the room that is far too big for walking to where Cody is curled up on a window seat with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and with puffy eyes and tear tracks down his cheeks and a blank look of shock.
Obi-Wan leans on the window seat and stares intensely at his Cody. “I’m an idiot,” he says.
Cody raises an eyebrow and starts trying to unwind himself from the blanket. Someone has trapped him in it very well.
“I can feel you. I couldn’t feel anyone, ever before. Now I have everyone but I have you most of all.”
“Why did you bring me my shirt?”
He honestly hadn’t noticed he was still holding it. “It’s safe,” he tries to explain. “It’s home, it’s you. I’m sorry I told you to leave. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Cody’s defeated the blanket and is standing up, sliding his hands beneath his elbows, and it’s familiar but where it had been unbearable before, now he can sense the intent behind it, and the affection he can feel with every heartbeat makes something cold and tight in his chest start to relax.
He’s not playing house. He’s not there because he thinks he has to be. The care in his touch and the warmth in his voice isn’t a façade.
“Love you too,” he says, leaning into Cody’s arms, and holding on as tight as he can. “I broke it, I can feel it all now.”
And they are home.