Chapter Text
By the time the Negotiator reached the Lhorra system, half the 212th had collectively decided their Jedi was fragile.
Not in the battlefield sense. On missions, Serra Vey was terrifyingly sturdy: calm in blasterfire, precise with her blade, relentless when a position needed to be taken. But put her on a starship at a perfectly respectable twenty-two degrees standard and she dissolved into a bundled, shivering thing in too many layers.
Cody paused in the main hangar bay just to watch it happen again.
She stood hunched over a datapad, going through landing protocols with the deck officer. Over her standard Jedi tunic she’d added a long robe, then a borrowed 212th hoodie. Her fingers—slender, familiar from a hundred briefings—were wrapped around a steaming cup of something that smelled like spice tea and desperation.
“You’re cold again,” he said, more statement than accusation.
Serra looked up, green eyes bright and slightly embarrassed over the rim of her cup. “Hello to you too, Commander.”
He lifted his chin at the hoodie. “I’m going to start issuing those as mission-critical equipment at this rate.”
“It’s objectively freezing in here,” she muttered, tucking an escaped lock of hair back behind her ear. “Space is unnatural. Everything is wrong. The vents hiss at me.”
“The vents hiss at everyone, sir.”
“Yes, but they hiss cold at me.”
A passing trooper—Boil—slowed just enough to grumble, “It’s fine, Commander. You’re just small,” and kept going before she could retaliate.
Serra stared after him. “I am average height,” she muttered to her cup.
Cody huffed and rested his hands behind his back so he didn’t reach to warm her fingers the way he wanted to. “We’re all cloned off a man who’s two meters of gristle and armor, Commander. The reference point is skewed.”
She gave him a sideways look, the corner of her mouth threatening a smile. “You, at least, could admit it’s cold.”
“I could,” he agreed. “But then the men would know I have weaknesses.”
Her smile made it all the way out this time, settling in his chest like a small, stubborn sun. She ducked her head again and refocused on the datapad.
“It won’t be cold on Lhorra-7,” he offered. “Jungle moon. High humidity. You might even be warm for once.”
Serra squinted at the holoprojection of the green-and-blue sphere rotating lazily above the deck officer’s console. “Gorgeous,” she said. “And sticky. I’m going to regret ever complaining, aren’t I?”
“Almost certainly, sir.”
He thought nothing more of it. Just another volunteered piece of information in the strange, ongoing campaign to get their Jedi to stop freezing to death in space.
He had no idea that the jungle would solve that problem. Or that it would create several new ones he was profoundly unprepared for.
The planet hit him in the face the instant the gunship ramp dropped.
Hot. Wet. The kind of heat that wrapped around armor like a physical thing, instantly turning breath into effort. The kind of air that felt like it had been used by three other people before it got to his lungs.
Around him, troopers groaned into their helmets.
“Kriff me,” Waxer wheezed. “Who boiled the atmosphere?”
“Why is the air… touching me?” someone else complained.
Cody kept his shoulders square and his stride even, walking down the ramp like he wasn’t being slow-roasted. The jungle of Lhorra-7 opened out in front of them, dense layers of green and shadow, broad-leafed plants dripping with condensation, the calls of unseen creatures echoing through the thick air.
Behind him, Serra came down the ramp and stopped dead.
He turned, curious to see her reaction to the wall of sticky air.
She was just standing there, eyes closed, face tilted up, breathing deep like she’d just walked into a temple.
The heat hit her differently. He saw it in the way her shoulders loosened, in the way the constant little hunch she had on the ship just… vanished. The robe came off first, folded over one arm. She stripped with brisk, practical motions, boots braced on the ramp, unlayering down to standard issue Jedi tunic and trousers. By the time they’d finished the initial perimeter sweep, she’d shed the tunic as well, leaving her in a dark tank top and light combat pants rolled to mid-calf.
Cody only realized he'd stopped walking when Waxer ran into his back with a startled curse.
“Sorry, sir—”
“It’s fine,” Cody said automatically, eyes fixed on the subject of the collision.
Serra was a few meters ahead, sleeves of the abandoned tunic knotted around her waist, lightsaber clipped at her hip, hair twisted up into a loose knot that bared the long line of her neck. The dark tank top clung to her where sweat was already starting to trace damp lines down her spine. Her arms were bare. So were her shoulders. Actual, unarmored, uncovered, human female shoulders.
He had seen her without armor before. In the mess. In long briefings. In the training salles. At medical checks. In the rare, awkward intersection of schedule and trust that allowed a glimpse of her in a simple tunic instead of full Jedi regalia. But that had always been in the clean, cold light of the Negotiator, everything strictly compartmentalized, the undeniable fact of her body politely sorted under “irrelevant, move on.”
This was different.
The jungle light filtered down through the canopy, soft and green-gold, catching on the fine hairs of her bare arms, on the sheen of sweat already beading at her collarbone. She tugged at the hem of the tank top, trying to get air moving; it pulled tight across the curve of her chest in a way that made several nearby troopers audibly cough.
“Stars,” Waxer said in Cody’s helmet, voice gone weirdly reverent. “Commander’s… built.”
“Shut up,” Cody said, a little too quickly.
“I mean respectfully, sir,” Waxer added, not even trying to sound innocent.
Boil’s voice chimed in on the squad channel. “Respectfully, I think I’m dying.”
Cody wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose under his helmet. “We are not having this conversation over open comms.”
“Copy, sir,” came three guilty replies.
Serra turned back toward them then, one hand on her hip, brow lifted. “Everything all right back there?”
Cody dipped his head, willing his voice to stay level. “Men are adjusting to the climate, Commander.”
She eyed the line of armored troopers, several of whom were trying too hard to look at anything but her. Her lips pressed together as if she were fighting a smile.
“It’s nice,” she said. “Not to be freezing for once.”
Waxer, brave idiot that he was, muttered just loud enough to carry, “It’s nice, sure, that’s one word for it—”
Serra’s head tilted. “Waxer?”
“Sir?”
“Run point,” she said sweetly. “Take Boil with you. Perhaps a brisk walk will help.”
“Yes, sir,” Waxer sighed, trudging past her with Boil in tow.
As they passed, Boil grumbled in a private channel Cody pretended not to hear, “You had to say something.”
“You were thinking it,” Waxer shot back.
Cody cut their squad line and shifted his attention to the portable base they were setting up in the clearing. It should have been simple: mark perimeter, set sensors, deploy prefabs.
It was simple.
If he ignored the fact that every time Serra reached up to help anchor a line or adjust a canopy tensioning rod, half the men within sight radius drifted a step closer then guiltily back. If he ignored that the black scales of his HUD feed tagged an uptick in minor accidents: a crate dropped here, a trooper misjudging a step and going ankle-deep in mud there. Nothing dangerous. Just… distracted.
If he ignored his own heartbeat, which had picked up a low, insistent drum behind his ribs that made every glimpse of her—laughing with a trooper, bracing a hand at the small of her back as she stretched—feel like a small ambush.
Heat, he told himself. Humidity. Dehydration. All perfectly measurable, explicable things.
Sure.
By the end of the first full day, the jungle had won its war against modesty.
Armor was necessary for patrols and combat, of course, but the rest of the time, regulations bent under the sheer weight of sweat. Troopers wandered base in blacks with the top half peeled down to their hips, undershirts soaked through and clinging, boots unlaced. It was like a temporary migration to a planet where everyone remembered they had skin.
And Serra—Serra was thriving.
Cody saw her in the mess at mid-shift, perched on a crate with a tray balanced on her knees. Tank top, combat pants, bare forearms resting on her legs, green eyes bright with some ridiculous story she was telling Waxer and Boil, who looked like they were getting extra oxygen just from being near her.
He could have stayed in the command tent, where it was cooler, where the air recyclers fought a losing but valiant battle. He came here instead.
“Commander.” He stepped up beside her, waiting until she looked up. “How are you finding the conditions?”
She wiped the back of her hand across her damp forehead, leaving a streak of mud. “I might never leave,” she said fervently. “I love it here.”
“Noted,” he said. “I’ll inform High Command you’d like all future missions to be in environments where fungus can grow on armor.”
Cody only realized he’d let that much dry sarcasm slip when Waxer snorted. Serra’s eyes crinkled at the corners.
“You joke,” she said, “but here I can actually feel my fingers.” She wiggled them in front of his face in demonstration. They were smudged with dirt, the veins visible under warm, flushed skin. He had seen those hands wrapped around a saber, steady and lethal. Now he found himself noticing the curve of knuckles, the delicate strength in the tendons, the way she flexed them unconsciously as she spoke.
She caught him looking, looked at her hands herself, then frowned suddenly. “Is this… weird?”
There was a beat where the entire table went very still.
Cody lifted his gaze, met hers. “Is what weird, sir?”
She gestured at herself, as if trying to encompass bare arms, thin fabric, damp hair escaping from its knot. “All this. I don’t usually… I know I dress like an old datapusher on the ship. It’s just—space is so cold. I didn’t think about the adjustment this would be for anyone else.”
Waxer made a strangled sound and immediately disguised it with a cough.
Cody answered carefully. “You’re adapting to the environment,” he said. “That’s sensible. If anyone has an issue, they can take it up with me.”
Her shoulders unhitched a millimeter. “So it’s not… inappropriate?”
He imagined, with vivid clarity, telling one of his men to walk up to Commander Vey and inform her that her bare shoulders were a problem. He pictured the look on their faces, torn between terror and genuine, baffled awe.
He almost laughed.
“No, Commander,” he said, the title coming out softer than it should have. “You’re perfectly within regs.”
“See?” she said to Waxer and Boil, as if there had been an ongoing argument. “Told you.”
“We never said—” Waxer started.
“Ahem,” Boil muttered. “We said some hypothetical people might be—”
“Distracted,” Waxer finished, then blanched.
Cody didn’t have to have the Force to feel Serra’s self-consciousness spike. She went very still on the crate.
“Distracted,” she repeated slowly. “Because I’m… what, not wearing a scarf?”
Her cheeks were already flushed from heat; the faint new pink at her ears was the only giveaway.
Cody wanted to shoot both of his troopers on principle. “Serra,” he said quietly, deliberately dropping her title, letting the sound of her name steady them both. She looked at him, startled. “We are professionals. The men will adjust. They would be distracted if you were wearing full robes. You walk into a room and they track you, robe or no robe. This is not new.”
Waxer, losing his mind, mouthed oh kriff at Boil.
Serra blinked, the weight of his words landing somewhere behind her eyes. “Oh,” she said, a little breathless. “Well. That’s… flattering.”
The table gave a tiny, collective flinch at the understatement.
She cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she said briskly, “the point is, no one’s going to get court-martialed because I finally stopped pretending I don’t have elbows.”
Boil muttered, “Elbows, that’s what we’re all staring at,” into his soup.
Cody stepped on his foot on the way to get his own tray.