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People dance and sing on the forest floor. The music is loud enough that it carries high up into the trees, mixing with the sound of jubilance and laughter. Cody has no intention of joining them. He leans on the railing of one of the tree top platforms and waits. He can feel the rumble of the drums in his chest, but the music is muffled and distant despite its volume.
There’s hearing aids built into his helmet, but it’s hooked onto one of the struts of the railing.
He can’t see much either, lights where the Rebels have lit torches, blurry shapes where large groups congregate, but in the dark he can’t pick up much more than that, and certainly not at this distance. His helmet helps with that too.
But the fresh air is nice, and it forces people to see who he is. Not just a man in purge trooper armour in their midst while they celebrate the death of the Empire, but a clone in purge trooper armour. One who is old and falling apart. Those with enough clearance will know exactly what that means, and those without can probably guess.
Leia had clasped his hands between hers and said she was glad he’d made it out rather than thanking him. She inherited her father’s tact — her real father, not the husk of a machine that had died up on the Death Star.
She’ll be down there, with her brother, and he’s curious to know what Amidala’s other brat came out like, but not enough to put back on his helmet to seek him out in the crowd.
The vulnerability would once have been intolerable, but he’s been living in the belly of the beast for decades now, one cracked coded message away from revealing him as a double agent. Cody is long past being scared.
Vader had kept him very close at first, long after Cody had been too slow to keep up; betrayal from the only person from before the war that Vader had been able to keep would have been a delightful final twist of the knife.
It would have been nice to have a chance to tell him that before he finally died.
Three shapes move along the bridge to the platform he’s set up on. He can’t make out even the species in the poor lighting and he can only hear well enough to know that they stop talking abruptly when they take him in.
Cody gives them a bland smile, the kind that used to make Kenobi give him one of those unimpressed looks, because he knew they were mocking even if the people on the receiving end often weren’t sure.
They don’t stay, turning back the way they came. They say something to him, but he doesn’t hear it and he doesn’t ask them to repeat themselves.
He’s not here to make small talk. He’s here because Leia had also told him that there was another clone on Endor. She hadn’t been able to give him their name — her tone had been apologetic even if the words had never left her mouth — but Cody’s decided to be the optimistic sort in his old age, at least in this.
If Rex is here, he’ll find Cody sooner or later.
Cody’s not sure what comes next. He’s always known what comes next, but he fears he might finally have run out of wars to fight in. He doesn’t have much faith in peace, but it doesn’t need to last long to outlive him.
He breaths in the heavy air, the barest hint of smoke filling his lungs.
He can be patient. He’s been waiting for decades.
“I saw a man looming in PT armour and figured there was no way it wasn’t you,” Rex grunts, leaning on the railing, thankfully on Cody’s better side. And Rex is an old man too, he knows to speak clearly.
He’s bigger than Cody now, carrying more weight and his voice has roughened with age and grief. But he puts himself in Cody’s space like it’s been days and not years, bare forearm pressed up against Cody’s armoured one.
“Glad to hear I can still loom,” Cody says. Rex is close enough that he can make out most of his face, though the details are blurry. Cody’s never been one for beards, but he likes how Rex wears it. Even if he can’t really see it, Cody knows his blond hair will have gone as white as Cody’s own. His fingers twitch to put his helmet back on and take a proper look.
“Drink?” Rex asks, offering him a mug filled with something strong enough to burn the back of Cody’s nose.
He could take it, one drink wouldn’t hurt, but he scoffs instead and shakes his head.
“Too busy brooding to have a drink with an old friend?” Rex asks, nudging Cody’s shoulder with his own.
“Can’t,” Cody says, and smirks a little. “Stims.” He could give the whole story, but he likes making people ask.
Rex takes the bait, same as everyone.
“Stims?” he asks.
Cody sighs, and straightens his back, stretching it until it pops. “They needed me to keep up with men half my age — whichever way you want to count that — so they pumped me full of the good stuff until my heart gave out. They patched that up—” they’d ripped a heart out of a younger clone and stitched it into his chest instead “—just to start over. By the time they realised my liver wasn’t holding up either I was too old to be worth the extra effort.”
There’s something deeply satisfying about the expression natborns pull when Cody makes them level with how much he’d sacrificed for their cause.
It doesn’t look as good on Rex’s face.
Rex really looks at him, taking in the new scars and the way he favours one leg. The way he cocks his good ear towards Rex when he talks and the way he squints when he looks much further than a few metres in front of him.
And that’s just what he can see.
Rex looks good, healthy and strong, but Cody suspects there’s plenty there he can’t see either. He wants to see it.
“I’m sorry,” Rex says, because he always cared too much. He had too much hope not to take every wrong personally.
Cody’s forgotten how to talk to people likes. Or rather, he’s forgotten how to talk to people he doesn’t have at least some contempt for.
“I don’t think I am,” Cody says, and Rex drops his head, rubbing at the back of his neck, not looking at Cody. Cody exhales through his nose.
“Take your pity and choke on it,” he tells Rex, and that has Rex jerking his head up to look at Cody again. Cody might be unsocialised, but he’s still effective at getting what he wants. “This was my choice.”
He doesn’t care much about the Rebellion or the new republic they’re going to build from the ashes of this empire. He did what he set out to; he fucked over the people who fucked over him and his brothers. He might not have known exactly how much it would cost him, but he’d have given even more — would have chewed off his own arm if that’s what it would have taken — just for revenge.
“I’ve never pitied you,” Rex tells him, earnestly enough that Cody can’t help but believe him. Rex was never much of a liar, which is probably for the best. If he’d been able to turn that sincerity on at will no one would have been able to deny him anything.
Cody never had anyway.
“This was always our lot in life,” he says, but a little softer now; he doesn’t want to hurt Rex. He’s had a lot of time to think, and he’s not sure there’s all that much difference in who’s holding his leash, whose cause his people are dying for. “I could have left.”
If he’d known where to find Rex maybe he would have.
Then again, maybe not. Bly was with the Empire, and Davijaan, and so many others. Maybe knowing where Rex was would have changed nothing.
“It sounds like it cost you a lot,” Rex says, and if it’s not pity then it must be something else. He looks down at the mug he’d offered to Cody and then takes a sip from it, mouth twitching at the strength of it.
“It did,” Cody admits. He aches everywhere, and the list of meds they pump him full of just to keep him going expands every year. He’s going to have to talk to someone about sourcing those now his usual supplier is otherwise occupied. “I also helped do that.”
He gestures up at the sky where he watched the wreck of the Death Star float before he removed his helmet. Some of it will never escape Endor’s orbit.
Rex still looks unconvinced, but he does stare up at the sky, his familiar profile hitting Cody in a way he doesn’t know what to do with. He hadn’t let himself dwell on how much he’d missed being around clones.
He shoves the feeling down again before it swallows him whole.
“My choice or not,” he says, and then coughs to push the lingering thickness from his voice. “I think it’s only fair that in exchange I get to make them all feel very guilty about it.”
Rex half smiles at him, that same smile he used to give whenever he thought Cody was being an asshole but was, by his own admission, endeared by it anyway. Cody hadn’t been waiting for Rex, and he certainly hopes Rex hadn’t been waiting for him. He did hope sometimes that they hadn’t missed their chance.
Rex takes another drink from his mug, sighing in a way that’s more a massive shift of his shoulders than sound. There’s not much space left for them to share but Cody inches closer. He could push. He could rip whatever confession that’s lodged in Rex’s throat out into the open, and if it was anyone else he would.
But it’s Rex. And, for him, Cody can relearn how to be kind.
The wind catches on Cody’s hair, carrying ash and that oh so specific smell of blaster fire. Cody won’t give up his blasters, but maybe he will never fire one again.
Rex shivers, and perches the mug on a post to wrap his arm around himself. The one pressed up against Cody’s stays where it is.
“I sat out most of the war,” Rex says, softly, like it’s an admission of guilt. “I didn’t mean to. I tried at first, but I just… Fuck, Cody, I was just so tired.”
“We didn’t owe them anything,” Cody says, and once he came to that conclusion he’d never stopped believing it.
Rex stares out over the crowd celebrating below them. The blurring fire is beautiful, even if it’s just smears of colour across a mass of darkness. His helmet might magnify everything, and provide him with night vision and clarity, but for now at least this might be better.
“I didn’t know you were a double agent until Ahsoka told me,” Rex says, and that must be the heart of what Rex was apologising for. “I might not have owed them anything, but I think I owed you more.”
“You should have what, Rex? Stormed Imperial High Command and snatched me up from the jaws of the Empire?” Cody wants to laugh, but he can almost picture it. “You wouldn’t have made it, and I wouldn't have gone.”
Rex lets it stand like that. He tucks it back away with all the other regrets he never learned to let go of. Cody exhales and clicks his tongue. If Rex hasn’t learned by now, he never will.
“I missed you,” Rex whispers. Cody doesn’t hear it, not really. But he’s been expecting it, and he follows the way Rex’s lips shape the words.
“You need to speak up,” he says anyway, throat dry from more than just the smoky air. It hurts, both to have done the missing and to have been missed. It’s also a chance he didn’t think he’d ever get.
“I said I missed you, Codes,” Rex says, louder this time, loud enough that two small birds abandon their branch overhead. It hits about the same the second time. Cody wants to make him say it again; and he could, Rex would say it over and over if Cody asks him to.
“I missed you too,” he says, because it feels only fair.
There’s more he could say, and maybe he will, eventually. He could explain that learning Rex was alive had almost ruined everything. That he’d taken great pains to keep it from Vader despite the risk it put to his cover. Even believing that they’d never see each other again, Cody had taken pains to protect him, as best he could.
Rex huffs, smiles, and finally laughs properly.
“I don’t remember us being so fucking depressing,” he says, and he nudges Cody again, and stays pressed up against him. Cody can’t feel the heat through the armour, but he can the pressure, and it’s not quite the same, there’s no clicking of Rex’s matching armour against his, but it’s familiar enough that it aches. “When did we turn into such grouchy old men?”
“Speak for yourself,” Cody says. “I was having a lovely time skulking around up here on my own.”
“You’re accusing me of being the mood killer?” Rex asks, laughing. His voice has changed, deepened a little with age, and brought his laugh with it. “That’s rich considering I found you glaring people out of your personal space.”
“I didn’t glare,” Cody says, and he didn’t, trusting he wouldn’t need to.
Rex’s huff makes it very clear what he thinks of that. “You know people wouldn’t be avoiding you if you took the armour off.”
Cody snorts. He doesn’t tell Rex that the armour helps support his hip and that he still doesn’t feel like himself in natborn clothes. He offers up a different truth instead.
“Then I’d argue it’s serving its purpose perfectly,” he says, nostrils flaring in disdain.
“Hardly,” Rex says, unaffected. “It didn’t scare off everyone. I’m here.”
Cody twists his face into a leer instead. “Like I said: perfectly.”
Rex laughs, and looks down at his hands. If he blushes Cody can’t see it, but he suspects he does; Rex always blushed so devastatingly easily.
Two decades has changed a lot; but not everything. Cody shifts his arm, testing the waters, brushing the tips of his fingers over Rex’s. There’s no hesitation, but Rex’s response is cautious, turning his hand palm up — new scars there, raised and uneven down where Rex’s thumb meets his palm — so Cody can slot their fingers together. The desire isn’t new; the acting on it is.
Rex stares at their linked fingers, thumb rubbing over the ridge of the armour plate on the back of Cody’s hand.
“I’m only here because of you,” Cody says. “I wanted to see you again.”
Rex doesn’t seem surprised. How could he be surprised?
“I’m not sure how long I’ve got left in me,” Cody says, perfectly matter of fact. “I think I’m mostly held together by stubbornness these days.”
“You’ve got plenty of that to last you a good long while,” Rex insists, dragging up his own brand of stubbornness. “Stop trying to talk yourself out of this.”
“I already know what I want,” Cody says. “I’m making sure you know what you’re agreeing to.”
Rex moves closer, past that sweet spot and Cody’s vision blurs.
“What do you want, Cody?” Rex asks.
“What do you want?” Cody wants to hear it. Rex squeezes his hand.
“I want to know that I acted on whatever it was we almost had. I want to have one fewer regret,” Rex says, and maybe that’s why Cody loved him in the first place. Rex knew how to sidestep his bathashit, to let Cody win a battle for the sake of the war. Rex offers up vulnerability first, just so he can demand it in return. “What do you want, Cody,” he repeats.
“I want to have kissed you before I die.”
Rex’s beard is softer than Cody is expecting.
He’d been able to see from Rex’s silhouette the soft bulk he’d put on, but it’s another thing to get to touch it. Cody pulls Rex closer by his hips, wishing suddenly that he had taken Rex’s advice and removed his armour.
Later. They don’t have the sort of time they deserve, but they still have some left to waste like this.
Rex’s licks into his open mouth. He tastes of that awful shipbrew, he tastes like a clone, like Rex.
Cody wraps his arms around Rex’s waist, fingers digging into fat and muscles. The kiss is wet and loud and sometimes Cody gets hair in his mouth.
It’s the kind of kiss that’s worth waiting a lifetime for.
Rex is crying. Cody can’t see it, but Rex sniffs loudly enough that even he can hear it. Cody would like to mock. He’d like to tease until Rex forgets they’re old men and shoves him away trying to hide a laugh.
He can’t though. His own eyes are wet too.
Rex rests his forehead against Cody’s, their noses squished together.
“If I were a decade younger,” Rex tells him. “I’d fuck you up against that tree.”
“For what it’s worth,” Cody says, and slides his hand lower on Rex’s back until there’s no plausible deniability on what exactly he’s groping. “I’m pretty sure my dick still works even if the rest of me doesn’t.”
Rex lets out an unattractive snort of laughter, pressing his face into Cody’s neck. Cody still might not be able to see, but he can feel the heat of Rex’s blush just fine.
“Yeah, let me be the judge of that,” Rex says, and then pulls his face out to say it again, loud enough that Cody can make it out.
Cody will. They still have a little time, after all.