#i'm from the american south and I experienced a desert for the first time last week

[galateagalvanized]

Also how about Codywan for either 36 or 42 on the writing askmeme?? If you want ☺️

42. Braiding the other’s hair

Cody had never understood the idea of a dry heat.

He knew the physics, of course: no humidity means the atmosphere holds less heat, and there’s less heat transfer from air to skin. Knowing the physics is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely to walk from the blistering heat outside and into the cool shade of the adobe.

The air inside is baked but not sweltering, and Cody just stops to breathe, grateful, suddenly, for the simple fact of shelter from the sun. Obi-Wan looks up at him from the floor, surrounded by a minefield of the electronic parts that were once a functioning hydrator.

“Any luck?” Obi-Wan says, and there’s a smile playing at the corners of his lips that says he knows the answer.

“Plenty of luck, but none of it good.” 

Cody reaches up to tug the scarf down from around his face and sighs as he shakes the sand from his boots. They make a point not to go out between 10 and 3 for exactly this reason: it’s too hot to think, let alone get work done, when the suns are beating directly and mercilessly down.

Barefoot and scarf less, Cody carefully picks his way through the scatter of electronics radiating from Obi-Wan. He has to carefully move a coolant hose and a thermostat to make space to kneel, and even then his knees end up pressed against the sides of Obi-Wan’s hips. 

“Careful,” Obi-Wan says when he hears the parts being nudged out of the way, and Cody doesn’t tell him that Cody’s always careful. Fixing things was always Anakin’s specialty, and the pang of memory hurts Obi-Wan more than any simple frustration could.

Cody watches Obi-Wan’s progress for a few minutes, just catching his breath and cooling down. His Jedi’s fingers aren’t quite as nimble as they used to be after almost a couple years of brutal heat and frustrating, slogging labor. The minuscule screws holding some of the fans together might be stripped, and Obi-Wan’s working them free with no small amount of effort or whispered cursing. 

He keeps having to pause, too, to push his hair out of his eyes and away from the parts he’s holding almost to his nose.

“Cyare,” Cody says, reaching out to hold Obi-Wan’s hair back from his face. The strands are soft and a little damp with sweat, and the thickness of it makes Cody wonder, again, why Obi-Wan doesn’t want to clip it short. 

Obi-Wan had said something glib about disguises when Cody had offered to cut, but Cody thinks it’s really something to do with the war. Obi-Wan’s hair had been halfway to Qui-Gon’s length when the war started, but a war makes for a poor barber. That auburn hair had gotten caught in Obi-Wan’s chest armor clasps and in his vac suit seals, and then it had gotten cut.

The war’s over, Cody thinks, and Obi-Wan tilts his head back into the light pressure of Cody’s fingers.

“Yes?” Obi-Wan asks, and Cody has completely forgotten what he was going to say.

“Let me braid this for you,” he says instead. “Just to keep it out of your eyes until you’re done.”

Beneath the curve of his fingers, he can practically feel Obi-Wan mulling the thought over, rolling it from side to side before sighing. 

“Alright,” Obi-Wan says. “But I do remember what happened to Crys, so please keep it neat.”

Cody’s already tugging pieces of Obi-Wan’s hair into sections, pulling groups between his fingers. “Crys’ terrible brassy dye job could only ever be improved.”

There are more rivers of white and gray running through the auburn than there were, Cody thinks clinically. It glistens in the bright yellow glow of midday, and he can’t help but run his fingers over them, suddenly and intensely grateful that his Jedi has lived to see the white grow in. He can’t help but hope, viciously, desperately, that Obi-Wan lives for decades more. That he lives until the white runs rampant, until his bones creak in the mornings, until he has managed to live through more days than the universe ever intended to give him.

“Cody?” Obi-Wan says softly, and he reaches a hand back to rest on where Cody’s have frozen at the end of a neat Naboo braid. He’s woven a rope, he thinks nonsensically. A rope to tether this man to himself. “My dear, you’re shaking.”

It’s abruptly too much.

“I love you,” Cody chokes, and he can’t help but bend forward, far enough to rest his forehead against the newly bare skin at Obi-Wan’s neck. “Stars, I love you so much.”

Obi-Wan turns so that he’s facing Cody. Now that the curtain of his hair is pulled back, Cody can see every golden fleck in his madder blue eyes. He gathers Cody into his arms, headless of the shifting of the hydrator parts, and Cody reaches up to twist one hand into the delicate crisscrosses of the braid he built. To hold onto his tether, to weave himself as tightly around Obi-Wan as he can.

“I love you, too,” Obi-Wan says, and his voice is full of an understanding as gentle as moonlight on the sands. Like shade from the sun: a true respite in a dry heat. “I love you too.”

Send me a ship & a prompt from here, if you’d like!