Fox is curled up small and quiet in Cody’s arms. Cody strokes his back and runs his fingers through the hair that hasn’t been wrapped up in bandages. It’s sticky with bacta and blood. He hopes the bandages can come off soon. Fox needs a shower.
Fox needs so much more than a shower.
Fuck.
There’s nothing you can do about the past, he reminds himself, but the thought doesn’t keep his stomach from turning at the thought of the things he said to Fox, the way they’d just shut him out, the way Fox had looked up at him from that dusty battlefield with blood streaming down his face and said Kote, I’m so sorry and please forgive me and I don’t want to die alone.
Fuck fuck fucking shab fucking son of a shitting bantha. Cody’s never letting any of his brothers go again. He’s never letting a natborn touch any of them and he’s never, never taking a natborn’s word over a brother’s.
He hates being like this, it’s been a long time since he’s been this vulnerable, but when the General comes into the room he clutches Fox closer and has to swallow down the urge to make him leave. Fox tenses and Cody slows his petting to a more soothing pace. Obi-Wan makes eye contact. Cody blinks at him and he blinks back.
“How is he doing?” Obi-Wan asks, dropping into a chair a ways back from the bed. He hasn’t come close to either of them, not since Fox, freshly concussed and still riddled with shrapnel from the explosion, had pulled a blaster on him in the field.
Cody sighs, readjusting his arms around Fox and resting his chin atop his head. “Stable. Ty says it’s a Grade 3, but no lasting damage.”
Obi-Wan just looks at him, letting the situation hang silent in the air between them. Fox is asleep again before Cody finds the words for any of it.
“He. They, the senators, they.” Cody huffs. “We disowned him, General. We disowned him and he didn’t have any sort of family to back him up, he didn’t have anyone else to go to and I didn’t know—”
“Cody,” Obi-Wan interrupts. He takes a deep, slow breath and Cody follows it. Calm washes through the room. “It isn’t your fault.”
“General—”
“No, listen. I’m not saying you did nothing wrong. I’m not saying that the Commander wasn’t hurt because of things you said.” Cody winces. “I’m saying that you had no control over the rest of Fox’s life. You had no way of knowing what was going on in the Guard.”
“That doesn’t change what I did.”
“No, but it changes what you’re responsible for.”
Cody shakes his head. “All due respect, General, but I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about.” Fox would be so horrified if he heard Cody talking this way to a natborn.
Obi-Wan sighs and leans back in his chair. In Cody’s arms, Fox shifts and mumbles something against Cody’s chest. “Easy, kih’vod,” Cody hushes him. “I’ve got you.”
Carefully and quietly, Obi-Wan moves his chair closer to the bed. Cody watches as he rolls up the sleeves of his robes and presents his wrists to Cody, inside-up.
“For whatever reason, I’ve never scarred as easily as the vode, and they’ve had twenty years to fade, so I’m not sure if you can still see them,” Obi-Wan begins, pointing to a place a few finger widths below the palm of his right hand, “but there are scars here on both arms.” Cody squints. He sees them. They’re wide and gnarled, and there are no stitch marks on either side. “I was enslaved once, when I was thirteen.” Obi-Wan looks up at him. Cody says nothing. “When Jedi turn fourteen, if we haven’t been chosen for padawanship, we age out of the possibility of Knighthood and are given a variety of options for our future. I was not claimed in time.
“The Council and I decided that the Agricorps would be a good place for me. I was placed on a transport to Bandomeer two weeks before my fourteenth birthday. Things went wrong. I was captured. As a consequence of the Council’s choice to send me away early, I suffered terribly. I don’t believe my enslavement was the fault of the Council.”
Cody hums. “Still, they sent you away early.”
“Yes,” Obi-Wan concedes. “They did. Master Windu still apologizes for the incident at least once a year,” Obi-Wan chuckles. “They had no way of predicting, and thus, no way of preventing what happened. Every day, people make mistakes. Sometimes, they’re terrible. Often, nothing much comes of them, but every once in a while, a mistake meets a misfortune and becomes a tragedy.
“It is not your fault, Cody. You could not have known.”
Fox is shivering against him, even wrapped in blankets and Cody. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Leave the guilt to those who intentionally hurt him, Commander. Force knows they don’t feel it often enough.” Obi-wan places a hand on Cody’s shoulder and squeezes gently. “Ty will be around in a short while to check on you two. Get some rest.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cody wakes in the middle of the night cycle with a dry mouth and a headache and a crick in his back and shaking, too-warm hands clutching at the front of his blacks.
“Cody,” Fox hisses into the dark. “Cody, you have to leave, he’ll find you, he’ll hurt you…”
“Fox?” He blinks the sand out of his eyes and squints blearily into the semi-dark of the medbay. Fox is sitting up next to him looking two gusts short of a hurricane and grabbing frantically at his clothes. “What’s going on?”
“Kote, vod, you have to leave,” Fox repeats, voice still slurred from crack in his skull. “Leave now and no one will know.”
Cody’s own head spins with the effort of catching up to Fox’s paranoid rambling. “Fox, we’re safe, vod. We’re on the Negotiator. We’re safe.”
“What? No, no, Cody, you have to leave. It’s not safe here.”
Cody catches Fox’s hands in his own. “Breathe. We’re safe. We’re not on Coruscant. I’m not going anywhere.”
For a long moment, Fox is silent. He watches Cody with wide dizzy eyes. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips. Then, he whispers, “Why are you here?” and the first tear slips down his face.
“Oh, vod, I’m so sorry.” Cody pulls Fox into a crushing hug, too tight for the injuries covering both of them but too loose to convey everything he needs Fox to know. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”
Fox wriggles out of his grip, shoving himself to the edge of the bed and nearly falling. “I don’t, Cody, I can’t—I want to talk to Thorn.” He pulls at his hair and then at the loose edge of a bandage, dodging Cody’s fussing hands. “I need to speak with Commander Thorn. I need to make a call to Coruscant.”
“Fox…”
“Cody, please.”
“Alright.”
And so Cody ends up sitting in General Kenobi’s vacated chair, pretending to do datawork while Fox makes a midnight call to a distraught Commander Thorn. Fox can’t remember much minute to minute and probably won’t be able to for another twenty four hours, when the bacta starts to kick in, but Thorn’s patient and kind and Cody’s so glad he’s been with Fox since the war started.
“Everything’s alright here,” Thorn reassures Fox. “We’ve got it covered until you get back.”
“Okay,” Fox croaks. “Okay, alright.” He’s clutching the comm link like if he tries hard enough, he could reach through the projection and touch Thorn. Their faces have the same lines.
“Can I talk with Commander Cody for a couple minutes?” Thorn asks. Tactful, Cody thinks. He’s been trying to get Fox off the call for a few minutes now, ever since he started nodding off in the middle of sentences, but Fox isn’t having any of it. “I just need to clear a few things with him.”
Finally, Fox concedes, and Cody decides it’s probably best to have this conversation out in the hallway.
“How is he?” is Thorn’s first question. He’s frowning through the comm, expression severe despite the bedhead and the bruise blossoming over one cheek.
“He’ll be alright,” Cody says, “but the impact cracked his skull and he’s got a few burns from the explosion itself.”
Thorn sighs. “But you can treat it. Is he going to get a full immersion?”
“We can arrange for it, yes.”
“Then do it. Six hours at least. Hemlock will send his file and the orders over.” Thorn glances off to the side and there’s the sound of tapping. “You’ll have it by oh-seven-hundred shiptime.”
“Thank you.”
“Hmm. Fox told me he was on the ground when the bomb went off. He was supposed to stay shipside.”
“There was an administrative issue. We needed another CO. He wasn’t the only one pulled in at the last minute.”
“He was hurt.”
Cody opens his mouth, but Thorn beats him to it.
“I don’t know if you knew that or not, but I really don’t care. He was hurt and you sent him down there and now he’s got a cracked fucking skull.”
Cody says nothing.
“Go take care of my brother, Commander. For whatever reason, he feels better when you’re around. K’oyaci.” Thorn cuts the connection.
“...K’oyaci.”