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They’d stuck Cody in a private room at the far end of one of the corridors of the medbay. It’s almost quiet—a rarity for such a busy base—but that just makes Rex’s footsteps seem offensively loud. He knocks, pauses and then quietly cracks open the door.
Cody’s room is lit by a single, glaring bulb. The harsh light bounces back off the white walls and floor, chasing away any shadows that might have sought refuge there. It’s unnervingly familiar.
The bed is empty.
Rex pushes the rest of the door the rest of the way open, stepping into the room. His heart thuds ominously. It had only been two days since he’d convinced Draven that the pair of guards stationed outside Cody’s room was as unnecessary as it was insulting. If Cody’s gone— If he’s—
The chip is gone. Cody promised Rex he’d play nice with the Rebellion. There will be an explanation.
Cody doesn’t have much—his black armour had been confiscated along with his weapons—but he’s managed to leave a mark on the room anyway. His sheets are kicked down to the end of the bed, twisted into a tangled mess, dirty clothes falling off the chair in the corner, filmsi struggling to share space with mugs on the table by the bed.
One of the mugs is new since this morning.
Rex checks the fresher. It’s as empty as Cody’s room.
Maybe he’d had the chip in too long. Maybe he’d gone back to the Empire. Maybe he couldn’t forgive Rex for taking so long to find him. Maybe he’d—
“He’s on the roof.”
Rex jerks around.
One of the doctors looks at him, brows raised, mouth turned up in a slightly teasing smile. Rex stares back stupidly before what she said sinks in and he laughs, rubbing bashful at the back of his head. She’s not wearing the same boots that he is, heavy even if years of use have softened them. She wouldn't have stomped her way down the corridor like he had.
He can’t remember her name, though he should—he’s spent a lot of time with her recently.
“Sorry,” Rex makes himself say. “Thank you. I thought he was on bed rest?” Bed rest was a nicer way of saying Cody was confined to his quarters until the Rebellion decided what to do with the leader of Vader’s Fist. No one was fooled.
The doctor’s smile widens, showing a flash of pointed teeth. “Yes, well, my patient and I agreed that some fresh air would do him some good. He promised not to exert himself.”
Rex keeps his snort to himself. It was reassuring that at least that hadn’t changed—Cody could still smile charmingly and convince people to make exceptions for such a polite man. Rex wishes she hadn’t been swayed. He wants to know where Cody is.
“Thank you,” he says. “Cody was starting to get restless.”
“I’m very aware of that,” she says. “Make sure he’s keeping warm.”
She’s turned out of the room before Rex thinks to thank her. She hadn’t touched anything in the room, only coming to talk to Rex.
—
It’s not a cold evening, but on the roof there’s no shelter from the wind. Rex shivers. He pulls himself the rest of the way out of the hatch up, the wind rushing to test his balance. He barely wobbles, but he keeps away from the edges.
Cody hasn’t taken the same approach.
He’s perched on the edge, a blanket around his shoulders, a lumpy, ugly thing, but big and warm. Wolffe had made it in record time and then had Rex give it to Cody on his behalf. Cody had taken it gratefully and hadn’t asked why Wolffe wouldn’t deliver it himself. It makes Cody look small, legs crossed, arms tucked around himself, being eaten by the huge blanket.
Somehow he still doesn’t look anything less than what he is.
Cody turns, already almost smiling—who else would come up here looking for him?—and then looks back to the slowly sinking sun.
Rex makes himself walk closer, but stops still out of reach. He tries to tell himself it's his fear of heights that held him back and not that he’s on Cody’s right side. He could go around to his left, but then Cody will know the tattoo bothers him, and he doesn’t want that. It’s a stupid game. Cody already knows.
“Sit down or fuck off,” Cody says, conversationally. “I’ve had enough Rebels looming threateningly over me this week.”
Rex can’t find it funny. He sits, still back from the edge, still mostly behind Cody. That just makes him turn, face twisted into a scowl, the red of his purge trooper tattoo breaking from its perfectly straight line down the side of his face to follow the creases.
Rex shuffles forwards and doesn’t look over the edge.
He doesn’t look at Cody’s face either, looking down at where Cody’s knee pokes out from his blanket cocoon. Cody’s hair is buzzed short, like how Rex used to wear his own, like all purge troopers had to wear it. He’s dressed in Rex’s clothes, all a little too big for him. Cody’s lost weight, angles in his face sharpening and his skin sallower. Rex on the other hand is thicker in the middle than he’d ever been.
Rex thinks he should like it—he’d certainly liked it the handful of times when in a hurry to get dressed Cody had pulled on Rex’s blacks instead of his own. It’s hard not to see it for what it is though—proof that Cody doesn’t have anything of his own.
He’ll get Ahsoka and Organa onside. Between the three of them they can convince Draven to give Cody his armour back.
“Do you want to… talk?” Rex is unforgivably stupid.
Cody shakes his head. “Not yet. I’m not done thinking.”
It’s been almost eight days since the chip came out. He’d lashed first, jerking that same doctor who's so fond of him now into a choke hold. They’d had to subdue him. After he woke up for the second time he’d sat silently they explained what happened to him. Rex had watched from the other side of the base on a glitchy screen, Draven watching him almost as closely as they’d watched Cody.
Cody had cried when he saw Rex again, three days after waking up.
Since then he’d been almost as Rex remembers him, only quieter and perhaps a little more agreeable than before. He’d answered questions about the Empire, but dodged any that touched on his feelings about it all.
Over the edge of the building, the base is still alive and hard at work. Voices carry in the wind, engines rumble. Cody isn’t looking at any of it, squinting out into the pale sun, bleeding yellow into the clouds as it sets.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Rex blurts out.
Cody scoffs. “I know that. This isn’t guilt.”
That can’t be true. Rex doesn’t know what he’ll do if it’s true. Because he feels so guilty. For what he did with the chip, for what he did after it was removed, for all of it.
“Then why—” Rex makes himself stop. He’d thought about getting Cody back almost constantly, had built his life around making it happen. He hadn’t expected it to be so hard.
Cody clicks his tongue, and it barely feels like a mercy that Cody lets Rex’s aborted question go unacknowledged.
A speeder drives under them, spitting dark smoke that Rex can taste in the air. Cody sticks his head out over the edge. He’s not really watching but listening, and Rex adds more guilt to the growing pile for the flash of fear that Cody is gathering intel and not just bored out of his mind.
The Rebels are going to find Cody very useful if he lets them.
Cody sighs as the damaged speeder moves too far away, sitting back on his tailbone.
“All of my memories are tainted. I need to work back through them.” He adjusts himself, loosening up the grip of the blanket. “Recontextualise them.”
Rex remembers. He’d only been under the chip for an hour but after he’d been left dizzy and off centre, some parasite thoughts swirling in amongst his own. Cody has years. He needs time.
Rex needs him now.
“If not guilt then how do you feel?” he asks.
“Furious,” Cody says, and smiles. He stretches his legs out in front of him. He’s not wearing any boots, just a mismatched pair of some of Rex’s thickest socks. He holds his legs out straight, feet over nothing and then lets them swing down to rest against the edge of the building. His smile fades until it’s almost gone. “Violated,” he says and then the vulnerability is gone. “I’m not ready to talk about this.”
“I’m sorry.”
Cody was never very good at apologies, giving or accepting them. He shrugs, the mound of the blankets moving with him. Maybe Wolffe doesn’t need to come and see Cody, maybe the gift was enough and they understand what offering and accepting it meant for the other perfectly. Rex has nothing to give Cody that feels like enough.
He’s already given Cody everything he has.
“Can I touch you?” His mouth gives up the words before he’s ready.
Cody looks at him sharply. The tattoo makes all of his expressions meaner, makes them unfamiliar and strange on a face he should know. “Since when do you have to ask me that?” Cody demands.
Rex can’t answer.
Cody scoffs. His fingers are cold. He grabs Rex’s hand, putting it to his face and then tucks his fingers back into the depths of the blanket. Cody’s face is warm where his fingers weren’t. His cheekbone is more prominent than it used to be, his skin drier, but his stubble is as patchy as it always was, and Cody still leans into his hand like he always did.
Rex traces over Cody’s tattoo, a thick red line cutting through his right eye and down to his chin. It’s slightly raised from the rest of Cody’s skin. Rex runs his finger down the line where the tattoo joins skin. His eyes burn.
Will Cody remove it? Can he ask Cody if he wants to? If Cody wants his opinion can he give it?
“I still thought about you,” Cody says. “I was still me enough to miss you.”
“I’m sorry,” Rex says again. He lets his hand fall. Something terrible flickers across Cody’s face before being carefully put away.
Cody shrugs.
“Are we going to stay?” he asks.
We .
“Do you want to?” Rex says. It’s not a fair question, not when he can’t answer it himself. He’d worked so long with the Rebellion because he’d seen it as the only way to get Cody back. But he’s old and tired and so fucking sick of war. Can he warn Cody of that? That the half that want Cody punished aren’t the half he needs to worry about. Rex can’t watch the Rebellion use Cody like he let it use him.
“Maybe,” Cody says, in that way of his that makes it clear that he could lead a comprehensive brief on the topic if pressed. The sun slips lower, and the temperature with it, Cody’s breath fogging in front of him. “I’d like to get more of our brothers away from the Empire, though I’m not sure the Rebellion will accept my help.”
“That won’t stop you if you want to stay,” Rex says. He used to believe it. He used to think deep down that Cody was an unstoppable force and could conquer anything he set his mind to.
He doesn’t believe that anymore.
Cody looks at him out of the corner of his eye and Rex is terrified that Cody knows it.
“We have time to decide,” Cody says. We again. Rex swallows and tries to wrap it around him. “I still get headaches if I look at a bright screen for too long, I’m not going anywhere.” He pauses. “I’ve missed so many episodes of Legendbusters that I can’t catch up on.”
“Tragic,” Rex mutters. He’s not sure he means it as a joke or not but Cody laughs. He elbows Rex in the side though any force is muted by the thick layers between them.
Rex wants to kiss him. He should kiss him. He wants to reach into Cody’s blanket nest and find his hand. He wants Cody to be the man he was six years ago when he was solid and certain and had a determination that men would follow anywhere.
Rex wants to be the same man he was six years ago. He feels like a shell.
Cody was supposed to fix that.
It’s unfair to expect Cody to fix that.
He’s been drowning in this for years and he needs to talk about it, but Cody needs time and he—
“Rex.”
Rex takes a breath and shoves it all back down. It’s festering in there, growing and consuming and rotting in his chest. Cody doesn’t want to talk about this.
“Let's go back inside,” Rex says. “It’s cold.”
Cody scoffs and Rex bites back something foul tasting—Cody doesn’t get to say he doesn't want to talk about this and then act like Rex is a coward for avoiding talking about it.
Cody stares out over the sky, orange swallowed up by deep rich blue. He stares like he’s never seen it before.
He probably wasn’t scoffing at Rex avoiding talking, just at Rex’s fussing.
Rex looks down at the ground far below. He holds the drop’s eye for a second and then looks away, stomach heaving. He shuffles back from the edge on his ass.
Rex stands and offers Cody his hand. Cody is lighter than Rex remembers and Rex pulls too forcefully, but maybe Cody wants to be pulled. Cody stumbles forward an extra step, chest colliding with Rex’s.
He doesn’t really look like Cody, but he still smiles like him and moves like him and behind his gaunt face his mind is still racing just like Cody’s always was.
Cody’s blanket has slipped off one shoulder, catching in the bend of his elbow. It’s cold and Cody loved nothing more than complaining about the cold. Cody doesn’t complain. He also doesn’t move, staying in Rex’s space.
“Rex,” Cody says and doesn’t finish the order. Don’t ask. Don’t make me give you permission. Don’t convince yourself I’m someone else.
Rex collects the fallen corner of Cody’s blanket, pulling it back up around his shoulder. He flattens out the material and lets his hand wander over Cody’s neck up his jaw. He brushes his thumb over Cody’s lips and puts his palm to Cody’s cheek.
Cody smiles, and lifts his chin in a way that’s half challenge, half demand and if Rex has ever known anything it’s how to respond to that.
Rex kisses him. They don’t fit together in the same way, and it takes seconds that seem to drag to figure out how to adjust to it. Rex breaks away first, leaving Cody leaning after him.
They’ll talk. When Cody’s ready. Rex can manage. He’s been managing for years.
Cody’s mouth is half turned on the right side, and it tells Rex nothing of how Cody is feeling.
Rex hates the tattoo.