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Today’s meal is the same as always. A selection of gray and beige, specially formulated to provide the optimum nutrients required for a trooper to perform his duty, screwed down to a budget with no room for a bit of flair.
Rex pokes at a cube of sad looking protein, and makes a face. Next to him, Captain Ordo dunks the one shining light of the meal — the bread — into his soup, and shoves it in his mouth in an inelegant but efficient approximation of eating. Rex glances away, and stares off into the middle distance as he stabs the protein cube with his fork.
“Don’t let Skirata see you unhinge your jaw like that, he’ll send you to elo-fucking-cution lessions or something,” Rex says, mostly uninterested.
“Etiquette.”
“Huh?”
“Etiquette. Elocution is speech.”
Rex grunts, and puts the cube in his mouth. Tastes like damp fresher roll that’s been dunked in a swamp.
“Whatever,” Rex says, around the mouthful.
“I’ve got five minutes to get this down and then get over to temporary holding, got a couple of ARCs to escort.”
“What are you escorting ARCs for?” Rex asks, distracted. He doesn’t look in Ordo’s direction. Commander Cody walks through the door, joins the queue for grub, and Rex lets his gaze follow along as Cody moves down the line.
“Couple of them got caught going at it… you know. At it, at it. Shebs stuff.” Ordo replies, and Rex’s eyes snap away from where they'd been firmly affixed on Cody’s fatigue clad ass, back to Ordo and his mouthful of gruel. “Sending them back to Kamino for reconditioning.”
Rex sucks in a deep, calming breath, and counts to ten. It’s fine. They’re fine. They’re smart about it. They’re—
“Yeah, I know it’s karking creepy,” Ordo says. He must have interpreted Rex’s loud inhale as disgust, rather than mild panic, which. Thank fuck for that. “Unnatural shit, don’t know why some clones want to fuck each other. Could you imagine? Be like screwing your brother.”
For Ordo, maybe. Ordo grew up in a tight knit group of Nulls that barely knew anyone but each other and Skirata and his nat born ideas for the first five years of their lives, going off to other planets and experiencing far more than the rest of them at a much younger age. Rex’s experience was a bit different. Rex grew up in a class of a thousand, most of whom he couldn’t tell apart beyond the designation stamped on their fatigues. Rex didn’t see anything beyond Kamino until he was ten. Rex went through puberty getting boners to a particularly nicely flexed thigh, or someone soaping up their asscrack in the showers.
He’s not gonna say any of that to Ordo though.
“Yeah, fucking unnatural,” he mutters.
Ordo buggers off then, with an abrupt goodbye and the scrape of his tray, and then a few seconds later, his seat’s taken up by someone else.
“What did Captain Pompous want?” Cody asks, as he shuffles in his seat and goes about setting his station up just the way he likes it. Precisely lined up with the edge of the table, cup placed neatly in the round dip in the tray and not on the plasteel of the tabletop. He picks up a spoon and scoops up some mash.
Rex loses his train of thought for a moment, mesmerised by Cody’s scrunched up eyebrows and pink tongue that dips out of his mouth to lick up a bit of food that didn’t quite make it in.
Cody grunts in follow-up, and Rex jerks back to attention.
“Uh, nothing in particular.” Rex’s heart races in his chest. “Just um, you know. Likes to remind the rest of us he’s all high and mighty.”
“Truer words were never spoken.”
Rex stabs another protein cube, dunks it in his mash, then sticks the lot in his mouth and chews. Cody eats his meal one bite of each different texture at a time, never mixing.
Rex asked Cody once, when he was lying naked in Cody’s rack on the Negotiator, still coming down from having his brains sucked out of his dick, how he found the balance. So precise in everything, so organized, so detail oriented, but able to flip a switch at a moment's notice and go from the Plan A to Plan Wing It. Cody told him it’s all about order.
If you know you’ve planned for all eventualities, and it still goes to shit, you always have your own sense of order to fall back on.
Rex had told him that didn’t make any sense. Cody told him to get fucked, that it did, that Rex spent too much time around General Skywalker. Like it’s Rex’s fault.
Then he’d crawled under the blanket and wrapped his hand around Rex’s cock and licked up Rex’s neck and well. Rex didn’t think a whole lot after that.
“He’s sending a couple of ARCs back to Kamino for reconditioning,” Rex blurts out, without thinking.
“Oh?” Cody asks. “Why?”
Rex looks at him with as much weight as he can manage. Even raises an eyebrow.
Cody takes a sip of electrolyte drink. “Right, got it.”
“Yeah.”
“You coming to my quarters tonight? We have that plan to draw up for Arkanis.”
Which they can absolutely do in one of the conference rooms, rather than sequestered in Cody’s nice little private Commander’s quarters. Cody’s expression isn’t subtle. Come to my room and fuck my brains out hangs unsaid in the stuffy mess hall air. Rex squirms in his seat. Cody keeps staring, expectant.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Rex. Get over it.” It’s bitchy and snappy and comes with an eyeroll and a loud, thunking elbow to the table. “For a self declared pragmatist, you sure are irrational sometimes.”
And sure, yeah. Rex probably will get over it because this isn’t the first time he’s heard about other clones being sent return to sender for the same thing, but for now he’s having a bit of a moment. So he sits there in silence and eats the last of his meal.
“Any idea who it was?” Cody asks, after a few long minutes.
“Nope.”
Cody doesn’t say anything in return. Rex finishes his lunch, mutters a quiet see you later, and takes his tray to the recycling station before heading off to his afternoon duty roster.
It’s not that he’s forgotten about the conversation with Ordo by the time he pushes the call button for Cody’s quarters, more that he’s been too busy to dwell on it.
And then when the door slides open and Cody’s standing there in nothing but a jock strap and a pair of socks, it all comes flooding back.
“I think we should go over this in one of the conference rooms, I need the viewscreen.”
Cody scratches his chest, and shrugs. “Alright, if that’s what you want.”
It’s not what Rex wants. What Rex wants is to push Cody down on the rack and have his way with him. This morning, he’d been quite looking forward to coming all over Cody’s face and licking it up, but now here he is. Reneging.
Cody starts pulling clothes out of his footlocker and is half way through tugging on a pair of pants when Rex decides he’s best to do the waiting inside rather than out in the corridor. The door slides closed behind him with a quiet hiss, and then the only sound is Rex’s own breathing, and the scrape of fabric on skin.
“You’re being stupid, you know,” Cody says, as he hops on one foot to straighten one of his socks. “We’re all gonna die anyway, may as well enjoy it while it lasts.”
Rex snorts. “Speak for yourself.”
“Statisticall—”
“I don’t care about karking statistics, Cody. I’d rather go into each battle thinking I’m going to make it out again, thanks. Just because you’d rather see the canteen as half empty doesn’t mean I have to.”
Cody flicks at an invisible piece of lint on his pants. “Okay, that’s fair.”
“Since when did you get so defeatist, anyway?” Rex asks. Cody’s usually so relentlessly optimistic. Ready to convince anyone they’ll make it out alive, even when the odds say it’s about as likely as rainfall on Tatooine.
Cody shrugs, and pulls on his shirt. He opens his mouth to say something, then seems to think better of it.
Rex stands by the door with his arms crossed and his lips set in a firm line. It’s not that he’s mad, he’s just kind of… sad. Gloomy. Really wants to grab Cody by the collar and mash their faces together but he’s kind of backed himself into a corner now and needs to stick to his blasters.
Cody shoves his feet into his boots, grabs his datapad, and grumbles a quiet let’s go, come on. Rex stops his hand right before it slaps the control panel for the door.
“Wait I—”
“Listen, Rex. It’s okay,” Cody interjects, and pats him on the chest with the back of his hand that holds the datapad. “I get it, it’s fine.”
“No it’s not—”
“I love you, you know,” Cody says, suddenly, with lips twisted into an ironic little smile and sad eyes. “And it’s fine if this is just getting off for you, but this… I’m not afraid. Because this is something for me, and I’d rather let myself feel it than spend whatever life I’ve got just… waiting to die.”
Rex’s heart jumps up into his throat. His skin prickles and sizzles under his fatigues, his hair feels like it’s standing to attention, and he turns back the chrono in his brain a few moments.
He grabs Cody by the collar, pulls him close, and presses their lips together in something that’s half sweet and half filthy. Cody shivers against him, tears his wrist out of Rex’s hand, and slips his fingers over Rex’s scalp.
“I uh…” Rex starts, then swallows a thick glob of spit that’s caught in his throat. He’s not good at being like this. Open. Vulnerable. Whatever.
He clears his throat.
“I love you too, you fucking dickhead.”