#this is like. codywan on tatooine (evil version)

[cabezadeperro]

Friend!! How about Rex/Anakin with “destination”?

hi len!!! i'm sorry this is weird and cryptic and mostly just rex thinking

revenge of the sith au; kind of established relationship.

---

Anakin is always so happy to see him. 

Rex stops the bike and climbs down, his back yelling at him all the while. His former general is watching him from the door, arms crossed and shoulder against the doorframe. His hair is longer than the last time they saw each other, and it must be a good day, because Rex can’t find the cane anywhere, and the brace on his left leg isn’t missing any obvious pieces. Anakin Skywalker treats his body as an unending work in progress: he tinkers and obsesses over its parts, new and old, and it’s partly out of frustration, partly out of genuine interest, and Rex has learned to tell the way the wind blows by the way they look.

It’s harder than he once thought, reading him. He used to think of him as—loud, obvious. In your face. And he is, and he very much isn’t, at the same time. 

Tatooine’s harsh midday light has its own weight. Rex tugs higher the cloth around his neck and starts pushing the vehicle towards the shady back of the small house, where the hangar is. Anakin watches him, blue eyes darker in the shadow of the house, and after a beat he comes out to help. He smells like dust and sweat, like everything else does, and between the two of them they make short work of the whole thing: while Rex’s securing the vehicle to the ground, Anakin’s tugging the tarp in place, dancing around each other with the ease of familiarity. 

This is still easy. When they’re quiet like this Rex can let himself believe that the past two years never happened.

Afterwards, they walk into the house. It’s deep under the ground, dark and almost cold: Anakin told him once he still remembered his mother’s teachings, and then he fell quiet and disappeared into the cellar and Rex did not see him again before he left.

Anakin’s hovering. He watches Rex while Rex starts shedding off layers by the door, sand pooling around his boots. He can see the way Rex limps, the grimace of pain when he jostles the blaster burn on his left arm. He wants to touch, but he has learned to wait.

He’s lonely there. He enjoys the solitude but the loneliness eats at him from the inside out. Rex is the only one who seeks him out, the one who visits with food and books and news of the galaxy. He has made a rule for himself: Anakin is never the goal: Rex only lands on Tatooine when he’s on the way to somewhere else.

And the thing is: Anakin could leave. He’s clever, he’s resourceful: he could build himself a thousand ways out. The fact he doesn’t, the fact that he chooses to stay, and that he has chosen to be alone—well. It might be the only reason he’s still alive.

Rex doesn’t know how or what happened, not exactly: he did not ask, and no one has told him. But he saw the recordings, he talked to some of the survivors of the attack on the Jedi Temple. He’s met Kenobi as he is now, and he was there when Ahsoka had her heart broken.

He doesn’t think he has forgiven Anakin Skywalker: he doesn’t think he can. But he still visits, and he still allows himself to touch and be touched in turn, and sometimes, when it’s been a few months and it’s deep into the night and he’s alone on his cot, Rex finds himself missing him, missing this: the house in the desert and the mess and the dark and the feel of cool synthflesh fingers walking down his spine.

Anakin watches him, quiet and still. He’s lost weight, and he feels huge, overbearing. Too tall, his shadow too deep against the whitewashed walls. The weight of his attention is a special kind of smothering.

Rex places his boots against the wall, side by side, and steps into his orbit, eyes closed, heart beating hard and fast inside his chest.

[snowywinterevenings]

WIP Wednesday

A bit from the prologue for one of the next big projects after Starflowers and Vines and A Necessary Evil are finished.

Pairing: Codywan

Rating: This part has no spice.

Summary: Sithywan learns to travel between universes.

Obi-Wan decided he didn’t hate Tatooine as much as he thought as he watched the couple at the stall below selecting which fruit to take home. It was a rare and precious thing to have fresh fruit on such a barren world, but they had clearly befriended the merchant. He heard her say something smart, earning laughs from both of the men, and Obi-Wan felt his chest tighten. He couldn’t watch. It hurt too much to feel the warmth of the sun but know that it was not meant for him.

No, he didn’t hate Tatooine, so often a place of refuge for his counterparts, but part of him hated their happiness, hated them for having what he did not, hated them for existing in a galaxy a little less cruel than his own. He wished them happiness anyway, knowing he could not begrudge them that, not when he knew a loss they did not. He hoped that neither of them ever experienced that pain, that their love for each other grew every day for years and years to come, never flickering out.

—

The next world hurt even more, watching them walk out of Dex’s hand in hand on a Coruscant that was actually working to become the heart of the Republic instead of a monster determined to shred the galaxy to pieces.

—

A small stone carved with a sunburst sat at the back of a garden, and Obi-Wan could feel the crystal still mourning beneath the dirt and grass, buried in the hands of a lover long gone. It was not unlike the small glade in his universe where afternoon sunlight illuminated the final resting spot of his beloved each day, and he briefly longed to go back, to build himself a little home with a garden on that uninhabited world just as this version of him had done.

But there was no going back, infinite universes between them now. He did not get to choose his destination.

—

A ghost tormented by the Empire lived surrounded by Cody’s brothers, all of them protective of their haunted general.

He took revenge for one who could not, one shattered to pieces by war and grief.

—

A broken man in the desert watched over a little boy who looked suspiciously like a young Anakin. Despite the twin suns beating down on him, Obi-Wan could not feel the warmth of the sun in that universe and did not linger.

—

Twins, the boy who resembled Anakin, and a girl with a wicked smile and Padmé’s dark hair, chased each other through the woods. He watched as his love scooped the girl into his arms and the boy came to stand at his feet, a happy family of four bound together by the most horrible of circumstances.

—

Scorch marks and shattered rocks worn down over the last few years told a terrible tale on Utapau, one that had no survivors.

A violent end awaited a suitless Vader, bested as always by his need to prove himself to a ghost.

—

He freed a purge trooper from the clutches of the Empire and whispered for him to go to Tatooine where the tether to his counterpart in this universe told him he had made his home. He pressed a kiss to his temple, just above a small bandage as his love stirred slowly to wakefulness and vanished back into the shadows.

—

Perhaps if he stirred trouble in dozens of different realities the Force would stop him, or everything would collapse in on itself. Oblivion would at least ease the ache in his chest.

—

Vader died at his hand twice more. He wondered how so many of his counterparts had been so soft on Mustafar.

—

Grumpy blue eyes met gold with distrust, but they did not turn down information about the Empire so easily gained. The press of a blaster against the base of his skull, and a brush of sunlight warmth, however brief, made him wish for his love to pull the trigger.

They let him go instead, and he moved on to the next galaxy, another universe where they were gone, rebel husbands killed early on, martyrs now buried beneath an intricate carving of them fighting side by side on the field of battle. The cold stone under his fingertips did not hold the warmth of the sun.

—

It took months, sometimes, to find the truth of some universes. Some never gave up their secrets. He stayed longer in some than others, watching, helping, wondering, and aching.

“What are you searching for?”

Ahsoka, always suspicious and trusting, posed the question beside a campfire, dozens of worlds into his journey. He knew the answer, but he could not speak the words aloud.

“I hope you find peace. You deserve it.”

He didn’t deserve anything, especially not what he sought when he had failed to protect it the first time.

—

He never staggered into the new world in the same manner as the last. Mirrors, windows, water, any reflective surface could become a gateway between worlds, and it was not always an easy transition between universes. He had nearly drowned, startled passers by, and on two very memorable occasions fallen from a significant height. Both times he had been glad to feel the Force sing through him when he reached out to stop himself from plummeting to his death.

It seemed drowning or freezing to death were what he would be forced to contend with upon sliding into his next world, and he hoped as he hammered his fists against the thick sheet of ice above him that this was not some terrible introduction to an even worse reality. When slamming his fists against the ice did nothing, he pushed with the Force, gasping desperately for air when it finally cracked and gave way against his fingertips and allowed him to breach the surface. The howling wind and raging snow that met him were no better than the icy water out of which he dragged himself, and he reached out into the Force, hoping desperately that he had not been dropped into the middle of some hellscape from which he would be unable to escape.

The faintest hint of sunshine warmth answered, a tiny beacon in the heavy darkness, and Obi-Wan set a course to it like a moth to flame