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It took four standard days before Cody could sense the color of the sun.
Of course, he would never be sure, afterward, whether what he’d sensed had actually been the burnt vermillion of Horuset or whether it had been some kind of hallucination, brought on by the power of suggestion and the constraints of their situation. The problem had started midway through a scouting expedition: he and Obi-Wan had gotten pushed off course while trying to avoid Separatist cruisers and had drifted into the edges of the Stygian Caldera. Hours later they’d run suddenly into a patch of dense darkness that raised the hair on the back of Cody’s neck and made Obi-Wan swear viciously.
“Kill the lights,” he’d hissed in a low whisper. “And cut all the engines.”
As Obi-Wan would explain later, he’d been acting on a hunch - one born of an old legend about an ancient being that was perceptible to most sentients only through its relative impermeability to light. It hunted, the stories claimed, by following steady sources of electromagnetic waves, and at least one space crew that had gotten trapped in its miasma was said to have survived by powering their ship down to nothing but essential life support and waiting for the darkness to pass. It had been on the strength of that story that Obi-Wan chose the measure that saved their lives.
At the time, however, Obi-Wan hadn’t dared risk any more of an explanation than he could communicate to Cody through the careful tap of their field code against Cody’s hand.
“Threat level high. Full stealth protocols. Maintain close contact.”
Cody had tapped back an affirmative, not yet realizing how thoroughly his world was about to narrow to those small planes of contact, the anchor points the two of them made between their fingertips and palms.
It didn’t take long for Cody to grow dependent on the touch. Without the running lights of their ship, the darkness imposed by whatever hunted the Caldera was a near-total blackout. And the whir of the essential life support was so low and nondescript that Cody sometimes wondered whether he could really hear it at all, or whether his brain was just filling the sonic vacuum with the recycled background noises of his memory: rain and waves, the hum of a hyperdrive, the syncopation of blaster fire, the wash of close-packed voices all tuned to the same starting pitch.
Sensory deprivation. It could be therapeutic in small doses, the trainers on Kamino had explained, and maddening in longer ones, which was why it was one of the many forms of torture Cody had been trained to undergo. But he’d never been put in the deprivation tank for longer than twelve hours at a time. And even if he had been training himself not to reach for Obi-Wan for a much longer period than that - using an ad-hoc system none of the long necks had warned him he would need - there was no way to comm Rex or redesign the requisition protocols or run until his legs went numb or any of the many tactics he’d designed to get himself out of his own head.
By the second day, Cody was having to fight to let go of Obi-Wan’s hand after every exchange of code, pressing his fingers against the rougher surfaces of the control panel and resting the toe of one boot tightly against Obi-Wan’s heel to keep from losing him in the dark.
Obi-Wan was having a slightly easier time of it, as he suggested in imprecise battle signs, because he could draw on the sensation of the Force. It wasn’t like seeing or hearing, but it could redistribute some of that perceptual weight, and Cody found himself tapping the first question before he even knew whether it was possible to answer it.
“What can you feel where we are?”
Obi-Wan paused, then tapped back a response slowly, using the system for spelling out words in Basic a letter at a time.
“Young stars are frost crystals forming on transparisteel.”
And for a moment, Cody could almost see the dense, icy cloud of it: the frozen fractals starting from the cool point of Obi-Wan’s fingers, pooling outward before contracting back into a bright, radial burn.
It gave Cody something to hold onto in his mind - a fresh image to lay over the dark stretch where his memory told him the viewport must be - and he started compiling a list of other objects he could put in position, rationing them out so as not to exhaust the mental exercise too soon.
“A moon in orbit,” Cody tapped an hour later, and Obi-Wan tapped back: “The taste of black melon and the sensation of rolling in sleep.”
The coordinates were imprecise, and they weren’t always shared: sometimes Obi-Wan would refer to a food Cody had never eaten, or to a perfumed plant that Cody had only seen on flash-module training. But the work of mapping their way toward a sensory note that was solid enough to grip was its own kind of satisfaction - like translating a particularly dense sentence into another language.
Their fingers adapted to the alphabet quickly, so they varied the surfaces of their communications, letting their hands drift toward the sensory nourishment of new stretches of skin, new angles of muscle and bone.
“Breathing,” Cody tapped on Obi-Wan’s forearm.
“Placing your palm on tidal water,” Obi-Wan answered against Cody’s shoulder. “And the bloom and fade of pigment in a flower over time.”
“How much I want some karking caff,” Cody asked on the bend of Obi-Wan’s ankle.
“A concussion grenade,” Obi-Wan replied on the nape of Cody’s neck. “You’re projecting that one very loudly, my dear.”
And maybe that was why the next word Cody tapped was “me” - on what he guessed must be day five, when his list of options was running low, and when he hadn’t yet thought through the forms an answer to that query might take. But his hand was cupping Obi-Wan’s face, he realized - his fingers spanning the crest of Obi-Wan’s cheek - and it was too late to take the question back: it had already sunk into his general’s skin.
Obi-Wan didn’t answer immediately, and when Cody felt the pressure of his fingertips again, they were wrapping around Cody’s own, drawing Cody’s hand down until his knuckles were brushing across the seam of Obi-Wan’s lips.
Cody felt his breath catch, the soft scrape of Obi-Wan’s beard against his skin lighting up his nerves like the path of a meteor, its afterimage bright and pulsing in what had only looked like empty space.
Days later, after they’d drifted back into the glow of starlight and Cody tried to remember what exactly had happened next, he wouldn’t be able to recall with any certainty whether Obi-Wan had tapped the words - or where - or if they’d simply taken shape, somehow, in the receptive place that Cody had been holding open in his thoughts. But the words themselves he never forgot, not through all the years he spent inside his mind or out of it.
“The way a sunrise will suffuse a clear sky or shock a clouded one: the first ray of light I see after any length of darkness.”