Archive of Our Own

On the first, they'd met with such a combined fervor that it ignited between them like a wildfire, the kind that leaves a landscape devastated in its wake. They'd come together in Fox's private quarters in the GAR barracks— old and ugly, unremarkable and uncomfortable but for that it had a horizontal surface and a locked door, and that was all they really needed besides each other. 

Fox had made a sound like a sob when Cody pressed him down to the bed, licking deep, wet, and deeper into his mouth with months worth of wanting it and Cody had echoed the sound right back. They'd always been the same, matched from their scores throughout training down to their fucking personalities; their viciousness, their acerbic humor, and yeah, their weaknesses and comforts, too. Of course, Cody had needed it just as bad as Fox had—the animal comfort of it. The sheer relief of their proximity, finally. 

They’d brought each other to emotional, spine-melting, toe-curling orgasms—practiced hands on familiar bodies, racing down a well-known path—before collapsing into a damp heap, Fox spooned along the length of Cody’s spine, clutching him close. Cody held on equally as tight and felt grounded.

"They trained us so well for everything else about the fucking war," Cody would rasp in the afterglow, tracing mindless patterns on Fox's skin with his nails, scratching just enough to show faint red lines, "but they didn't bother to train us how to be apart from each other. Or how to die next to each other." 

It was morbid. He meant every word of it.

Cody would never share a thought like it with anyone but Fox. (His General would earn the honor later, but not now. He hadn't yet. This was early days, still.) 

"That's because we weren't meant to get attached," Fox muttered into the skin behind Cody's ear, slightly garbled from how tightly he was pressed up to Cody's back. He'd clung like the glue the medics use to sew men back together; like he was trying to fuse them into the whole entity they were supposed to be. 

"They were wrong, vod," Cody kissed the words into the top of Fox's bruised and battered hands. (He was taking and giving hard hits even through his gloves to have such marks, and Cody had wondered about it at the time but not enough.) 

"I'll keep coming back to you," Cody had eventually picked up the conversation's sentiment if not the exact thread, because Fox can hold a silence like no one else. "K'oyacyii, Cyare.” 

Their second meeting some months later had been... less ideal. It was the first real misstep of so, so fucking many in a campaign Cody didn’t know he was waging until it was too late.

Cody had arranged to be in Fox’s private quarters by the conclusion of his shift. He’d tapped Thorn for the intel ahead of time. It’d been so long since he and Fox had exchanged more than a quick check-in—Me'vaar ti gar? and an answering oyayc. K’oyacyii over comms—let alone had a moment to call. Cody had wanted to do something mischievous, something a little like the trouble they used to get into on Kamino together, but with a whole lot less risk—something to distract, because kriff knew he needed it; and they’d always, always been the same. 

Fox had been four hours late; Cody had been upset, and frustrated with Fox’s complete and uncharacteristic lack of a reaction. 

“I missed you,” Cody had said, frustrated, tired, wanting to say something much harsher. Why did I come here if you weren’t going to be here? If you were just going to ice me out, even when you bothered to show up?

“I know,” Fox had replied. It had sounded like an apology. Cody was too distracted by the smarting hurt of it—of the acute yearning for that something between them that neither of them quite had the opportunity to have anymore—to realize it was an apology. (It was the only one Fox knew how to give.)

They hadn’t done more than sleep beside each other that night—and Cody remembers clinging so, so tight and it still not feeling like enough to hold them together. They ate a quiet breakfast together in the GAR barracks before Cody had been called away to the Jedi Temple on urgent business.

The hurt was little, in the grand scheme of things, but their time together was so rare and the enormous distance between them let it smart. Let it turn into a bigger scab than needed grow at all. 

The third time Cody saw him, an even longer stretch of time had passed since the last interval between their infrequent visits. Time had grown a series of red flags around Fox, flags Cody didn’t want to see.

Fox was thinner than Cody had ever seen him with bags under his eyes like bruises and new, little silver hairs creeping out from his temples. Fox had done what Fox always did when hurting, when vulnerable, when he felt backed into a corner and on the defensive.

They'd fought bitterly. Fox was like a veritable land-mine of barbs, criticism, and cruelty; Cody gave it as good as he got. They’d always excelled at fighting each other—both of them stubborn, mean, overachieving bastards down to the marrow.

Fox had called him “Marshal Commander” like it was an indictment, like it was an insult, like he’d never say Cody (let alone the reverently-whispered, achingly tender Kote).

“Coruscant changed you,” Cody had said, low and serious, and perhaps it would have been better if he’d shouted, screamed, or otherwise been karking unreasonable about it. Maybe if he hadn’t said it like he believed it, like he wasn’t just fucking angry and hurting, needing comfort Fox couldn’t give—because Fox needed it too, needed it just as badly if not more, and Cody had missed it through his own pain—just to have spared himself the memory of the little flash of agony in Fox’s eyes when Cody’s words had registered. 

Fox had shut his face down fast, icing Cody out in a second flat. He’d said, “You’re right, Cody. It did." And then, "There’s the fucking door.” 

And Cody hadn’t left. He’d pounced instead, dragging Fox down to the rough carpet of his office, kissing him like he was laying a fist across his jaw. Fox had kissed him back with equal ferocity. They hadn’t spoken a word otherwise, just gasps, moans, and yes’s, more’s, please’s. 

They hadn’t held each other in the aftermath. Cody had reached for it, had reached out to hold him, and Fox had turned away.

There were so many scars on his back that Cody did not recognize. 

He’d dressed in silence. Murmured what they always did, even when they were furious, fighting, whatever.

K’oyaci. And then he’d left him. 

And the final time—the blood-thirsty, vengeful now of it all—had been about Fives.

Cody had—in all honesty, Cody wasn’t sure what he was intending to do. But Rex was insensate in the weeks after Fives' death, and it was Fox that had taken the shot—Fox who took a vod from Cody’s vod’ika.

Cody had come to Fox looking for blood. He’d found it alright, but he hadn’t had to work for it. 

Fox was deliriously feverish when Cody found him, slumped over his desk in a puddle of bloody vomit, murmuring nothing but nonsense, eyes bloodshot and rolling in unseeing circles. A fever of 103, the responding medics had told him. A bleed in the brain, the med scanners had said. 

But nothing spoke louder than the chip the surgical team had found in Fox's fucking head.

By the time Fox wakes from his brain-surgery and bacta-dunk combo, Cody has had plenty of time to process—and plan. About thirteen hours, to be exact. Cody can get a lot done in thirteen hours with a holopad and some intel. As soon as he talks to Fox, he’s going straight to his General.

When he does wake, it's all at once: breath hitching, hands twitching, eyes snapping open.

“I’ve got you,” Cody says, and gets to watch those eyes lock on his own. 

“What,” Fox rasps. His eyes say, don’t. Don’t tell me the truth, please, it’ll hurt too much. Don't say a word.

“I wasn’t paying attention. I am now,” Cody says, squeezing the hand sans-IV. With the other, Fox is gingerly touching the plast over his surgical site, eyes widening with something like horror, something like oh fuck, like dawning understanding.

“Cody,” Fox keens, an agonized sound, and Cody crawls in the fucking bed. 

He carefully straddles Fox’s lap as his vod scrambles to bury himself in Cody’s chest, claw his way under Cody’s ribs, and Cody would let him, would keep him there if he could.

“Mhi solus tome,” he presses into Fox’s hair, and Fox wails to hear it. The keening cry turns into full-body sobs, hands clinging to Cody bruise-tight, and Cody rocks him through to the lullaby of, “mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde."

“You can’t marry me, you piece of shit,” Fox says when he’s finally cried himself out (it could be an hour or an eternity later) limp and exhausted in Cody’s arms. 

“Fucking watch me,” Cody replies, unbothered. 

“Cody, you have no idea what I’ve done. You can’t.” 

“Let me be the judge of that, Fox.” 

“I won’t survive it,” Fox whispers. 

“Let me prove you wrong,” Cody says, and means please; I love you.