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1.
“This can’t keep happening,” Jango says despairingly. He’s said this almost every year for the past twenty-five of them.
“Well,” Cody slowly replies, looking down at the squalling baby on their doorstep, “what’s one more mouth to feed when you’re already feeding thirty?” He, too, has said some variation of this line for just as long, but it’s tired now, no longer the lighthearted joke it started as when the eighth Fett brother arrived.
He bends down to pick through the blankets the baby is swaddled in, finding a card with spidery handwriting tucked between the folds. There is only one word written on it: the witch has named the boy “Boba”. Cody grimaces and sincerely hopes the bubble tea craze disappears by the time the kid starts kindergarten.
“Cody,” Jango sighs deeply, and his attention snaps up to his father’s weary face, because the quiet defeat in Jango’s voice is new. “I’ve been changing diapers every day for thirty-two years. I’m going to qualify for my pension in five. By the time this kid graduates high school I may well be dead already, and if I’m not, Fox will probably have stuck me in a care home.”
(Cody bristles. Over his dead body; he’s looked after his younger brothers since he was ten. He can take care of his aging father too.)
Jango ignores Cody’s scowl and goes on, sadly, “What happens when they keep coming, Kot’ika? Are you really going to waste your life cleaning up after my mistakes? You’re already thirty, now. You should be building a home, starting your own family.”
The younger Fett takes a deep, steadying breath through his nose. They’ve had this argument a hundred times before. Instead of starting it again, Cody picks up Boba from the cold ground and carefully hands him over to Jango.
“I’ll put up the posters, Buir,” he says. There’s a crash from upstairs before he can add anything else, so he takes that as an excuse to turn on his heel and see what Echo and Fives have broken this time.
2.
The posters are cheap photocopies printed on highlighter orange and pink paper. They read:
WITCH WANTED. Curse to be broken. Please contact Fett family at 01XX-XXX-XXX. Apply in person at Concordia Café or Fett Laundrette, 212 Old Sundari Street.
Cody hands a thick stack of posters to every brother he can chase down above the age of thirteen, with a roll of tape and a stern warning not to goof off. Only Crys is exempt from his campaign of terror - instead, he instructs the permanently online fourteen year old to post the same advert on every message board he can find.
They’ve done this each time a new brother turns up on their doorstep for the past decade, with less hope of success every year. His brothers grumble and complain about the waste of time, but they obediently spill out into Tipoca City on a cold February Saturday anyway, lest they face Cody’s wrath - nobody wants to be punished with cleaning out dryer 14.
3.
When Cody appeared on Jango’s doorstep on a sweltering July day, he already had two older brothers.
Fox, who had just recently learned how to talk in sentences longer than three words, was disappointed that the witch hadn’t named Cody after an animal too. Wolffe’s only opinions at the time related to just how much he hated potty training.
Cody doesn’t remember what it feels like to be the youngest child. By his third birthday, Ponds and Bly were already toddling behind him, and Monnk turned up a month later. By his tenth birthday, he had eight younger brothers, and his father had realized that the sons weren’t going to stop coming.
4.
Cody’s days go like this.
At 6AM, he gets out of bed and goes down to the Concordia Café at the bottom of their apartment building, where he helps himself to a cup of coffee. Bly will already be there, breakfast for all thirty two Fetts ready - he’s in charge of the family restaurant from midnight to noon, and Ponds takes over from noon to midnight. Gree will shuffle in at 6:15 for his own coffee, before relieving Monnk from the laundrette next door for the morning shift.
At 6:30, Cody will check his intricate spreadsheet system for the day’s events, and plan accordingly. The teenagers are responsible for themselves, and Jango looks after the babies and toddlers too young for daycare, but every brother in between needs to be dressed, washed, fed, and delivered to school on time.
From then until 8AM, he performs the complicated daily dance of accomplishing this feat, making sure homework goes in the right bags, Bly’s packed lunches are distributed, and all of them have their seatbelt on. Then he delivers his brothers in the small bus Jango bartered off a pensioner’s home, the older kids to school first, the younger ones to kindergarten after.
By 9:30AM, he’ll be back at their apartment building - Jango meant to rent most of it out when he bought it, originally, but now the first four floors are taken up with Fetts, and only the top two levels have tenants - where Cody will do the chores his younger brothers have neglected, until it’s time for his own shift in the laundrette at 11, so Gree can get to his other job at the museum.
Ponds delivers him lunch during his break around 2PM, and then Gregor, Stone or Bacara will come to relieve him around 3, depending on the day, so Cody can drive to school and kindergarten again, occasionally ferrying brothers to after-school activities along the way - Hunter to Boy Scouts on Tuesdays, Wrecker to junior wrestling on Wednesdays, Echo to his programming club on Thursdays and on and on.
Then it’s home again, where Cody chases them to do their homework before marching his brothers downstairs to the Café to eat whatever Ponds has made for dinner at 6PM sharp.
Cody stays down there for the dinner rush, waiting tables until they close at 10PM. By 11:30 he’s passed out in bed.
Sometimes he’ll go out for a drink on Saturday nights on the rare occasions his old army buddies are in Tipoca. Sundays, supposedly, are his own, but more often than not he ends up entertaining his brothers, taking them to the zoo or the park or the cinema.
It’s a lot. He knows it’s a lot, he sees the worried looks Jango and his brothers give him.
But who else is going to do it?
5.
It’s just Cody’s luck that on the one day Waxer has food poisoning, leaving him to cover both the laundrette and front of house at the restaurant, an entire bus load of Mandalorian grandmas descend upon the Concordia Café.
The ba’buirs insist on speaking only Mando’a for the “authentic experience”, passing around the few menus they have printed in the spidery script of Jango’s homeland between themselves. Rex looks like he might cry; apart from a handful of overseas army tours, most of the Fett brothers have never set foot outside of Kamino, and though Jango did his best to teach his first few sons their mother tongue, by the time Rex arrived on his doorstep he’d long since given up. Cody’s Mando’a is passable, at least, so between running next door to unstick jammed dryers and seating their lunchtime regulars in the dining room, he eventually manages to take all of the old womens’ orders.
They try to pinch Rex’s cheeks every time he brings a plate over, cooing copikla ad’ika, mesh’la gemas. Cody steps in from his post at the front to help serve the women after one too many panicked looks get sent his way.
But though he seems grateful for the save, Rex nudges Cody with a sharp elbow as they pass each other by the kitchen.
“Kote, that fancy lookin’ guy’s been standing there for five minutes,” he hisses, tipping his chin in the direction of the register.
“Shit,” Cody curses, craning his head for a look. There is indeed a man there, dressed much more elegantly than their usual clientele, his eyes roaming around the dining room critically. Goddamnit, Cody thinks, and quietly prays that today of all days hasn’t brought them another surprise health inspection. He dumps the plates down and dusts himself off, hurrying over.
“Very sorry for the wait, sir,” he calls, quickly grabbing a drinks menu and a list of specials from the shelf under the register desk. “Lunch rush, you know how it is. Can I get you a table?”
“Hm? Oh, no, I’m actually here about the job,” the man replies distractedly, digging a crinkled but familiar pink photocopy out of his pocket; WITCH WANTED.
Cody’s brain stalls out.
What.
Slowly, he puts the menus aside. He gives the man a long, pointed look up and down. They’ve had pranksters respond to their posters many times, but with his beige, Burberry trenchcoat, immaculate beard and hair, and his neatly pressed navy suit, the man doesn’t look like a con-man or a witch. He’s handsome, but not ethereally so, and his eyes are a perfectly normal shade of gray-blue, hair trying its best to get to ginger but mostly remaining in the realm of brown. Rex peers over at the two of them curiously when he walks by, attempting to eavesdrop with a plate of tiingilar in each hand.
“You’re telling me that you can break the curse,” Cody asks flatly, barely a question.
The man doesn’t react to his disbelieving tone in the slightest, still looking around the restaurant with a faint frown. “I am,” he responds breezily. “Tell me, the witch that cast this curse - was she from Dathomir, by any chance?”
Rex drops both plates.
The shocked silence after they shatter is deafening. Ponds abandons the grill to stick his head out from the kitchen. Cody thinks his heart might have stopped beating. Jango has told them the story of how he travelled to Dathomir to find a witch who would make him sons many times, but as far as he knows, none of them have ever discussed it outside the family. There’s no way this man could have simply guessed that fact.
Cody opens and closes his mouth like a fish before he finally manages to rasp out a “Yes.” The stranger nods to himself like this makes perfect sense, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “How- how did you know?” asks Cody.
That finally gains him the man’s full, piercing attention. “My dear,” he says, pityingly, “it absolutely reeks of ichor in here.”
Cody doesn’t know what ichor is, but he doesn’t get a chance to ask, because Jango chooses that moment to come downstairs.
“I heard a crash,” he announces, in a tone implying whoever caused it is about to get chewed out. Rex still hasn’t picked up the broken plates; he’s staring at the witch in shock. Jango frowns, following his gaze to the register. “We good here?”
The man backs up a little as Jango makes his way to Cody’s side, trying to subtly cover his nose with a hand but utterly failing to do so politely.
“Ah,” he says, trying not to breathe in, “it’s you the curse is on, then.”
Jango doesn’t faint, but it’s close enough that Rex rushes over to catch him with a chair.
6.
He speaks with the received pronunciation of a silver screen Coruscant star.
He tells them that his name is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and that he is a witch from a coven that calls themselves the Order of the Jedi.
He claims that the Jedi are a benevolent order, and it is his sworn duty to assist where he can.
Once the lunch rush is over and all the ba’buirs are gone, he sits Jango, Cody, Ponds and Rex down at a table in the back of the Café’s dining room. Then he makes a complicated gesture in the air with his fingers, and a pad of paper along with a basic biro pen fall from thin air into his waiting hands. He asks Jango to recount his story in full and settles in to take notes, as if conjuring solid objects from nothing is a perfectly ordinary part of his daily life.
Cody can’t stop looking at the pen and paper held between Kenobi’s finely manicured fingers. He keeps expecting them to blink out of existence.
“Alright,” Jango starts slowly, scrubbing a hand through his short gray curls as he considers where to begin. “It was thirty two years ago now. I’d heard about the witches of Dathomir during my time in the army - heard they could make anything you wanted happen, for the right price. Me, I’d always wanted a nice big family of my own, a few sons, but no interest in finding a partner, so I bought myself a plane ticket and spent months in the swamps searching for these witches.”
“You couldn’t have adopted?” Kenobi asks without looking up, writing his notes in some kind of looping shorthand Cody’s never seen before. “Surrogacy? IVF?”
Jango wrinkles his nose, crossing his arms over his chest defensively. “Too messy. Too expensive. And I wanted them to be mine - really mine. Anyway, I found the coven - they called themselves the Nightsisters. They took me to their leader, a woman they called Mother Talzin-” Kenobi takes a sharp, alarmed breath through his nose at the name “-and I told her what I wanted. She smiled at me, said she understood my desires. That they called her ‘Mother’ for a reason. She agreed to make me the sons I wanted, on the condition that I keep the names she gave each of them.”
“And the real price?” the Jedi interrupts, raising his head. “A name wouldn’t have been all of it.”
Cody’s father shuffles uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t…fully remember,” he admits, voice lowering. “There was some kind of ritual. They were going to take something from me, but whether it was my soul, or my blood, or my…I don’t know. They made me drink this potion. I remember it glowed. Might have been green. When I came to, I was alone in the middle of a swamp getting bitten to death by mosquitos.
“I went home, not sure if it had worked. But there on my doorstep when I got back to Tipoca City was Fox, crying his little heart out, as pink and wrinkly as any newborn. Then the next year, like magic, Wolffe just appeared on the stoop out of nowhere. And a year later came Cody, and then Ponds, and Bly, and they just…they just never stopped. Suddenly I’ve got twelve kids to feed and debts up around my ears trying to keep them clothed and housed, fuckin’ social services sniffing at my door, so I left the boys with my sister and went back to Dathomir to find Talzin.”
Jango shakes his head with a sigh. “Tried a few times but I never did find her again. Sometimes, I think she agreed to cast the spell just to fuck with me, like the thought of me drowning in sons amused her. Now I’m past sixty and I’ve got thirty-one kids - and counting, if I don’t get this curse off me.”
Kenobi finishes his notes with a scrawled flourish, then leans back in his chair, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “If it was any other Nightsister, I could probably break the curse myself,” he tells them. “But Talzin…that’s a different beast entirely.”
He snaps his notepad shut and stands, giving each Fett at the table a polite nod. “I’m going to have to consult a specialist. Rest assured, I will be back within the fortnight.”
Then, turning and leaving the Café with his trenchcoat billowing behind him, Obi-Wan Kenobi is gone as suddenly as he arrived.
7.
He returns without warning a week later with a deathly pale, bald woman in tow. Faded black tattoos curve down from her mouth and over her scalp, emphasizing the deep scowl on her face as she looks over their modest restaurant with visible disgust. He introduces her as Asajj Ventress, a Dathomiri witch from the Order of the Nightsisters. She looks an awful lot more witch-like than Kenobi does, dressed in tight black clothes accented with knife-like silver jewelry - in contrast, he’s wearing a light blue peacoat this time, over a similar navy suit to the one he wore on his first visit.
They sit Jango down in the kitchens of the Concordia Café and hem and haw over the older man for a long time. Cody’s father looks between them nervously.
“Well?” Kenobi asks her eventually. “Can you break it?”
Ventress gives their subject one last considering glance, before she hums. “Yes,” she decides. “Quite easily, actually.”
“And it won’t affect my sons?” Jango interrupts.
“They’ll be fine,” she drawls dismissively. “There just won’t be any more of them. The more important question is,” she turns to Kenobi, eyes hungry, “what are you going to give me to do it?”
He folds his arms with a sigh. “I assume you already have something in mind, my dear.”
“Bacta,” Ventress demands, and Kenobi immediately starts to groan loudly. “Twelve gallons.”
“Absolutely not,” the Jedi retorts. “It will take me a year just to make six, and finding the ingredients alone…! Be reasonable, Ventress.”
She rolls her eyes, but seems to relent. “But you can guarantee me six gallons in a year’s time?”
Kenobi rubs at his face, eyes closed, thinking hard. Cody holds his breath. He’s not sure what for. Then the Jedi sighs again, and holds out a hand to the other witch.
“From the next full moon to the thirteenth after that,” he says. “It will be ready then.”
“Deal,” Ventress smirks, shaking Kenobi’s hand in agreement, and Cody guesses it’s safe to relax.
The two witches herd every Fett other than Jango out of the restaurant, insisting they close for the afternoon. They claim that Ventress needs the space for her spell, and though they aren’t happy about it, Jango’s sons all dutifully shuffle out. Ponds shrugs and goes upstairs to take a nap with his unexpected day off.
It takes the witches long enough that Cody drives to the school and back again to pick up the youngest kids. Rex leaves for his evening classes at the community college; the teenagers trickle in and start to whine and complain when 6PM comes and goes and the door to the Café is still locked. Pizza nights are an expensive affair for the Fett household, but without the industrial size kitchen of the restaurant downstairs there isn’t much Ponds or Bly can do to feed them all, so Cody sighs and sucks up the hit to the family bank account and orders twenty pies, explaining once again that no, it’s not a prank, yes, they really do want twenty, fine, he’ll pay in advance if he must.
At 8PM, the witches finally emerge.
Ventress looks tired but smug at a job well done. Jango seems okay, if a little shell shocked, gray curls sticking up every which way. It’s only when Cody looks over at Kenobi that his heart starts to sink - the witch’s expression is preoccupied, brows knitted with worry and fingers tugging at his beard compulsively.
“The curse has been broken,” Ventress purrs proudly to the brothers crowding around the Café doors, hands on her hips. She turns to the Jedi with a sharper look, threatening, “thirteen moons, Obi-Wan. If my bacta isn’t ready the spell will be reinstated.”
“Yes, my dear, I know,” Kenobi agrees wearily, giving her a little bow from the waist. “Thank you for your assistance.”
She disappears in a puff of green smoke to gasps and shrieks from the crowd around her, but Cody is too concerned with the sinking feeling in his gut to pay the brazen display of magic much attention - he sidles up to Kenobi.
“Something wrong?” Cody asks him under his breath.
The witch glances up at him with exhausted, sea-blue eyes. “Not wrong, exactly,” he murmurs. “But if I could perhaps speak to you and your father in private…?”
8.
“In order to complete this transaction with Ventress,” Kenobi tells them, pacing back and forth in the dark of the closed Café, “and in order to keep the spell from returning, there is something that I am going to require from you.”
“Of course,” Jango agrees, far too cheerfully for the dread Cody feels closing in on them. “You’ve more than earned your reward. Name it.”
The Jedi pauses in his pacing, giving the older man a long look, heavy with something Cody can’t place.
“One of your sons,” Kenobi announces, and the younger Fett feels more than sees his father freeze where he’s sat beside him.
“What?” Jango wheezes.
“I need one of your sons to live with me for a year,” the witch elaborates, tone clinical, resuming his pacing with his hands clasped behind his back. “They will be required to sleep with me a minimum of once a month. You may decide amongst yourselves which son will come with me, and the hours they spend in my home can be negotiated, but the sex can not.”
“Sleep with you!?” Jango shouts. “I’m not going to-!”
“That’s fine,” Cody slaps a hand over his father’s mouth, giving Jango a significant look. The older man’s eyes remain stormy with outrage. “That’s. That’s fine, we’ll. We can figure it out.”
Kenobi nods, brow knitted unhappily. His pacing takes him to the windows, where he squints up at the night sky. “Very well. You have until…let’s see, the new moon is next Thursday…until next Saturday to decide.” He conjures his notepad again and scrawls an address on it, tearing out the paper and handing it to Cody. “I will expect one of you to move in on that day. Goodnight, gentlemen.”
He leaves with another of those polite little bows, and, unlike Ventress, walks out and away into the dark street like an ordinary human.
“Kote,” Jango growls warningly, and Cody sighs from the bottom of his lungs.
“You want this to be over, don’t you?” he points out. His father grinds his teeth in response. Cody looks away to stare blankly into the shadows curling around the corners of the dark restaurant. “There are twelve of us over the age of majority. Thirteen if we’re counting Kix, which I’m not, he’s only just turned eighteen. You’ve got a handful of queer kids in that number. Buir, at least one of us can do this - especially if it means breaking the curse for good.”
Jango is silent for a long time, save for the noise of his clenched jaw creaking with tension.
They sit there without speaking until the older man abruptly stands, chair scraping the floor. “I need to feed Boba,” he announces gruffly. But he pauses by the door to the apartments upstairs, posture shifting uneasily as if he can’t make himself go.
“Make sure all the boys are home tomorrow night,” Jango instructs him at last. He doesn’t look back at Cody. His shoulders slump with defeat. “Family meeting. Nine PM. Close shop early.”
Then he stomps up the stairs. Cody sits and rubs his temples.
9.
Jango folds his thick arms over his even broader chest and sighs very deeply through his nose, frowning down at the table in front of him.
“If any of you are in the closet, or are into men, and you haven’t told me,” he begins, “now would be a fuckin’ great time to do so.”
All of the Fett brothers over the age of nineteen are gathered around the biggest table the Concordia Café has. They shuffle awkwardly in their seats and very pointedly do not look at Waxer. Cody can’t help cutting a small glance at him - his younger brother has gone pale. Called it, he thinks morosely. There’s no way Waxer spends that much time in his bedroom with his unfortunately named friend Boil for it to be platonic.
“You’re seriously going to do this,” Fox snips from next to Jango. The oldest Fett brother has made a rare appearance for this family meeting, fresh from court in the dark suit and red tie he wears while prosecuting criminals on behalf of the state. He’s going gray prematurely and there are thin glasses perched on the edge of his nose that weren’t there the last time he saw him, Cody notes. “You’re seriously whoring out one of your sons to a witch for a year?”
Jango’s folded arms tighten around himself with anger, but Bly intervenes before it can explode out of him.
“I mean, I’d do it,” he grins easily. “Kenobi’s a damn good looking guy. Wouldn’t exactly be a hardship, if you know what I’m saying. If I wasn’t engaged to Aayla-”
He’s met with a chorus of groans and glares from around the table for this supremely unhelpful contribution. Their father cringes in his seat, meanwhile. Cody knows that Jango has no problem with having queer children - he came out to him more than thirteen years ago, and his Buir has never been anything but supportive. It’s just that Jango would rather not hear about sex or romance at all. He is perhaps the most aromantic, asexual human being that Cody has ever met. Hence his deal with Mother Talzin - no genitals needed.
“Well, Fox is out too then,” Monnk points out. “We all know about the ring he bought for Senator Chuchi.”
Fox crosses his arms over his chest with an irritated sniff, looking remarkably like Jango as he does so.
The phone in the middle of the table cracks to life. “I’d be up for giving it a try, but no way I’m getting any leave in the next seven months,” Wolffe comes in over speakerphone, line muffled and hissing from his post in Geonosis.
“Rex is too young,” Ponds complains. “Why’s he here?”
“I’m twenty! I’ve been in relationships, I’ve had sex before,” Rex snaps defensively. “And I know for a fact that there are virgins older than me at this table.”
“Guilty,” Gregor shrugs, smiling guilelessly. “Sorry guys, I’m as ace as Buir is.”
Jango can’t get any lower in his chair than he is already, but he makes a valiant effort at it.
“Kenobi’s too old for you,” Ponds insists to Rex.
“Oh, so you’re offering to do it then, old man?” Rex scoffs, and that’s when the yelling starts.
Cody sighs and drums his fingers on the table, considering each of his remaining brothers in turn while they argue. They can’t afford for Ponds to do it, they need him in the restaurant kitchen too badly. Rex is too young, no matter how much he wants to help. Waxer won’t want to leave Boil. Monnk is gone for four months of every year on research missions with his scuba team - Kenobi won’t accept that. Gree, Bacara and Stone are all straight, as far as Cody knows, and he suspects that Gree is trying to work up the courage to ask out his coworker at the museum, Luminara. Which really only leaves…
“If I did it,” Cody says, and the shouting stops immediately, eleven pairs of eyes in identical shades of amber snapping in his direction. “If I did it, could you guys handle everything without me?”
Their father scrubs a hand over his face tiredly. “Probably not,” he grunts. “You’re the only one who-”
“No, no, wait,” Bly stands up suddenly, chair squealing against the floor. “Cody’s onto something here.”
“The teenagers could stand to pull their weight a little more,” Stone points out.
Fox frowns. “Their college applications-”
“-Aren’t going to be affected by having to dress and feed a little brother or two in the morning,” Bacara interrupts. “We all know Cody’s bi, and he’s dated more guys than girls.”
“God knows you need a holiday,” Monnk adds cheerfully. Then, because all of his brothers are little shits at heart, “And to get laid.”
“It’s not like Cody couldn’t come over and help out during the day, right?” Rex says thoughtfully. “He can’t expect you to be there in his house twenty-four seven, surely.”
“We’ve all got access to his psychotic spreadsheets,” Waxer tells Jango. “So long as he keeps them updated for us, we should be good.”
The phone crackles with a gusty harrumph. “Only if Cody’s okay with this,” Wolffe insists. “I know this ain’t what any of us would choose in an ideal world, but you’re not just doing that self-sacrificial bullshit again, are you, Kot’ika?”
Everyone turns to stare at him intently. Cody shrinks in on himself under the scrutiny, looking over to Fox for help.
The bastard only raises one arched, unimpressed eyebrow in response.
“I mean,” Cody swallows roughly. “He is pretty good looking.”
The brothers gathered around him cheer and whoop loudly enough that the younger ones upstairs get woken up.
10.
On the Saturday that Cody is set to leave, Wrecker, Crosshair, Tech and Wooley are all sobbing uncontrollably. He gives the Domino twins a withering glare, because someone told the younger kids that Cody was going to get eaten by a witch today, and he’s pretty sure he knows who. They stare back at him sweetly, the very picture of innocence.
Hunter and Howzer, who are both old enough to know better than to believe anything Echo and Fives say without first consulting a more trustworthy brother, are unsuccessful in their attempts to convince their smaller siblings that the twins are dirty, filthy liars. Cody scoops Tech and Wooley up, one on each hip, while Wrecker and Crosshair cling to his legs and get snot all over his jeans.
“Look, I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?” he tries, somewhat desperately, bouncing the kids in his arms. “Nobody’s eating anybody. We can go to the playground, get some ice cream, how about that?”
On the other side of the room, Jesse, all of eight years old, slowly shakes his head with his arms crossed, disappointed in his older brother for this blatant attempt at bribery. Cody scowls back knowing full well that Jesse egged the twins on.
“Bags are in the car!” Boost calls, Sinker stumbling up the stairs after him. The grinning teens give Cody matching sloppy salutes. “All packed, present and accounted for, sir!”
“Great,” Cody says sarcastically, dumping a toddler in each of their arms. “Take these and do something to distract them, would you?” Hunter and Howzer manage to peel Wrecker and Crosshair off his legs, only for Wrecker to mash his face against Howzer’s chest and bawl even harder.
“There, there,” Howzer says, monotone, patting his younger brother’s head robotically. He wrinkles his nose at the puddle of snot growing on his shirt. “Gross, Wrecker.”
“I’ll be home again tomorrow, I’m not dying!” Cody calls over his shoulder as he leaves, for all the good it will do, climbing into the blessed silence of his beat up old car.
11.
It’s a twenty minute drive from their apartment building to the address Kenobi gave him. Where the Fetts live on the inner edge of the Tipoca City suburbs, the Jedi lives on the furthest outskirts - literally. Cody arrives at his destination to find a bungalow backing onto the pine forest that surrounds the city. It’s a white, unassumingly modern house at the end of a cul de sac, nothing magical about it.
You can do this, Cody thinks sternly, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders like he’s about to enter a boxing ring, rather than move in with a lover he’s barely even spoken to, and never once touched. It’s only a year. This is for the family, you’ve put up with worse for them. This is for Buir. He heaves himself out of the car before he can lose his nerve, loading up with all of his bags at once like a pack mule, and marches up the driveway to face his fate.
The man that opens the door is dressed so differently that, for a moment, Cody is sure he has the wrong house. His feet are bare, legs covered with dark, clinging yoga pants, and an oversized, black, knitted sweater hangs loosely off his frame. The nails on both his toes and fingers are an inky shellac-black, one hand cupped around a turquoise, crackleglaze tea cup, steaming with something herbal. His hair falls forward over his forehead, no gel to hold it in an iron grip. But the gray-sky eyes looking back at Cody are the same, at least, and that pervasive air of elegance tells him that this is indeed Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Cody can’t help thinking that he finally looks like a witch is supposed to.
For a brief moment, Kenobi looks as nervous as Cody feels. Then his eyes light up with recognition, and a relieved smile blossoms over his face so lovely that Cody’s mouth goes dry.
“Hello there,” he says warmly, stepping aside and beckoning his new housemate in. “Cody, wasn’t it?”
“That’s me,” Cody confirms, shrugging awkwardly. He walks in and-
…suddenly finds himself walking out into the cul de sac? Cody blinks, trying to come to terms with the space time continuum that just broke before him.
“Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kenobi apologizes, stepping out after him with his free hand fluttering anxiously. “The wards on the house totally slipped my mind - I don’t get many visitors, you see.” He waves his tea cup out of existence, replacing it with a small silver knife. “I realize this is terribly rude to ask a houseguest straight away, but would you give me a few drops of blood?”
“Uh,” Cody wheezes. “I…guess?”
“Just a small prick,” Kenobi promises, taking one of his hands between his own cool palms and pressing the sharp tip of the knife to Cody’s index finger fast enough that he barely has time to feel it. He scrapes the blood that wells up from the cut onto the edge of the blade and turns back into the house, murmuring something that makes the door glow with blue runes.
“Try now,” he says, smearing the blood in the center of one of the symbols.
Cody shakes his head and wonders if this is all going to seem normal by the end of the year. This time, though, the house lets him in, and he stumbles inside, weighed down with his bags.
“Just dump those anywhere - shoes off, if you wouldn’t mind,” Kenobi tells him, retrieving his tea from whatever nether plane he sent it away to with a sketchy gesture of his fingers, and Cody gratefully lets everything slip from his shoulders onto the hallway floor. “Shall I give you the tour?”
12.
Kenobi’s bungalow is a small place - the hallway opens up onto an open-plan kitchen and living room, with a single bedroom and en suite bathroom off to the side. They look like something out of an Ikea catalog, tidy and Scandinavian, and something in Cody sings at the thought of living without fear of stepping on the sharp corner of a toy or wading his way through misplaced dirty laundry. There’s a wood fireplace in the living room with a large, flat-screen TV mounted above it. The longer he looks around the place, the more he notices old, leather bound books, candles in glass lanterns, and tiny plants in mismatched white ceramic pots hidden on every surface and in every corner.
The more interesting rooms reveal themselves at the back of the house, where the Jedi has added two extensions. To the left, there’s a conservatory that acts as a greenhouse, filled floor to ceiling with plants that he warns Cody not to touch on pain of death. Literally. Some are carnivorous, poisonous, or both. The door from the greenhouse out into the forest has a catflap - Cody’s mind immediately jumps to children’s stories of witches with black cats and familiars, but he keeps these thoughts to himself, wary of offending his host.
To the right, Kenobi has added an utterly incongruous structure made of slate-gray brick that he calls his potion room. The room is lined with racks on racks of dried ingredients, cabinets and glass bottles stuffed wherever they’ll fit, with a cluttered workstation shoved against the wall nearest the door. Between the furthest two walls an enormous cauldron hangs from under a chimney vent, suspended from chains. It’s heated by a fire from underneath, but nothing seems to be feeding the flames - no coal, no wood, no oil.
Something is already bubbling away inside it.
This, Kenobi tells him with quiet pride, is bacta.
13.
Negotiations begin at the kitchen table.
Kenobi produces a written list of talking points, and Cody’s chest goes warm and pleased at the sight of it - perhaps because it’s precisely the sort of thing he’d have prepared in advance himself, the sort of thing his brothers have always teased him mercilessly for. Maybe they’ll get along better than he thought.
“Alright,” Kenobi taps his fingertips together anxiously, “we’ve been over the plants, that’s the most important thing if you’re going to live here - don’t touch them, don’t eat them, don’t even try to get closer to smell them. I’m going to be in awfully big trouble if one of them kills you.”
“Understood,” Cody nods.
“Actually, on that note, I’d better label everything in the refrigerator,” the witch mumbles, more to himself. He frowns in its direction. “The milk jug is- well. It’s not milk. Don’t drink it. And maybe steel yourself before opening the freezer if you’re squeamish, I’ve got a bag of assorted eyeballs in there right now.”
“For…eating?” Cody asks, dreading the answer.
“No, no. For the bacta. They’re much too bland to make a meal out of,” Kenobi waves the thought off. “Now, for the hours I’ll need you around - you’re free to do with your day as you wish, but I’d like you here in the evenings. It will be best for the spell if you’d share my bed. Don’t worry, it’s plenty large enough for two.”
Something in there snags oddly in Cody’s brain, but it’s quickly overridden by a more pressing concern for his brothers. “The Café doesn’t close until 10PM. That okay?”
The witch strokes at his beard thoughtfully. “I suppose so, if you don’t mind going to bed a bit later. I’m a little on the nocturnal side myself, to be honest.”
“I need to be there for my shift in the laundrette at 11AM, but I can leave the morning school run to the others,” Cody offers, and Kenobi accepts this with a nod, making a note of it alongside his talking points.
The witch sighs. “Here’s the awkward bit, I’m afraid; I am going to require you to sleep with me on every full moon. If you could refrain from masturbating the day beforehand I’d be most obliged. On the night, you can have my mouth, my cunt, or my arse, but you have to-”
“Sorry, sorry,” Cody stops him, blinking wide with surprise. “Did you- did you say your cunt?”
“Yes,” Kenobi says impatiently, irritated with the interruption rather than the question. Huh. Cody supposes he must be trans, then? Unexpected, but not a problem. “Do pay attention, this is very important. It doesn’t matter which part of me you want to fuck, but you must finish inside me, understand? The recipe is very specific on this point.”
Something slots into place in Cody’s mind with all the grace of a piano falling from a third storey window.
“The recipe,” he repeats slowly. “And you keep using that word, ‘require’. Am I…not here for you, then?”
The witch stares at him like he’s suddenly started speaking Mando’a. “What?”
“I thought I was here as your payment?” Cody rephrases.
“What? No!!” the Jedi draws back, face paling with horror. “You all thought- what, that I just wanted a Fett to fuck for fun?!”
Cody shrugs, because…well, yeah. Kenobi buries his face in his hands and groans, low and agonized.
“Oh, hells, no wonder your father was so- nnnghh. No. I told you, I’m a Jedi. We don’t ask for compensation!” He lifts his head, making an unusually complicated symbol in the air that produces a thick, well-loved, leather bound book heaving with post-its and bookmarks. It falls with a slap onto the table in front of him. The witch flips through it frantically, landing on a particular spread and pushing the book over to Cody. “Look, here,” he says. “This is what Ventress wants in exchange for breaking the curse.”
The pages are open on a recipe for bacta. It’s a potion, obviously, but Cody remains unclear on what it is or what it does. The recipe is…long, is his first impression, with ingredients divided up by what’s needed every month, and instructions under each of these sections so complicated that he can’t even begin to hope to follow them. Some of the ingredients are familiar, like crushed mint and juice of aloe vera, but others are more esoteric - he spots one line calling for ten goldfish hearts, another for the shed skin of an adder.
But the first two lines of every month are the same; human seed, spilled in a lover during full moon’s night, minimum ¼ teaspoon, followed by 20 grams pure silver.
“...Huh,” Cody says. “And it has to be the same lover every time?”
“It’s more potent if it is,” Kenobi mumbles, most of his face still covered by his hands. The color has come back to his cheeks, but now there’s too much of it, red with embarrassment. “That’s why you have to share my bed and home. It helps trick the spell into believing we’re really lovers.”
“Wait…this says it makes twelve gallons,” Cody notices, raising a suspicious eyebrow at the witch. “I thought you told Ventress you could only make six?”
A twinkling blue eye peeks out from between Kenobi’s fingers. “She doesn’t need to know that though, does she?” he smirks. “If I’m going to spend a whole year on a potion, I’m certainly going to keep some of it for myself. Bacta is worth a small fortune.”
“Ah, I see,” Cody nods to himself, folding his arms. His lips twist into a teasing smile despite his best efforts to keep a straight face. “So that’s your angle. Making money off my bodily fluids - for shame, Kenobi.”
It surprises a laugh out of the witch, some of the awkwardness leaving him at last. “I think you can call me Obi-Wan in my own house, my dear,” he says with a smile. “I won’t lie to you - it will be nice to have company. And you are very handsome, so I’ll certainly be benefiting here. But the leftover bacta is too valuable to sell to just anybody. The Jedi will make sure it goes where it’s needed most.”
There are a few more discussion points on Obi-Wan’s list - they decide that Cody will buy his own groceries, since he’ll be eating lunch and dinner at the Concordia Café most days anyway, and apparently the witch won’t be home on new moons, so he’s welcome to stay with his brothers on those nights - but by the end of it, Cody is beginning to think this year might not be so bad.
“Is there anything else you wanted to clarify?” the witch asks at last.
He thinks. There is one thing; Cody shuffles in his seat uneasily. “Are you, uh. Going to be taking any other lovers while I’m here?”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan blinks, surprised. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I suppose it wouldn’t be very fair to you if I did - you’ve given up your usual life to come stay here with me instead, after all. So…I won’t; I’m all yours for the year it seems.”
Cody nods, unexpectedly relieved by this. He decides it’s for STD concerns and declines to examine the feeling any further. “Okay,” he says, “I mean, I’m not expecting to either, so. Monogamy it is?”
“Better for the spell anyway,” Obi-Wan agrees. He gives Cody’s hand a pat and then wanders away in search of more tea.
14.
Cody (17:38) So
Cody (17:38) Turns out I’m not here for Kenobi?
Cody (17:39) I’m an ingredient for a spell
Rex (17:40) what??!? he’s actually gonna eat u??!
Rex (17:40) shit, do u need us to come get u??
Cody (17:40) No, dummy, it’s for that stuff Ventress asked for
Cody (17:41) He needs my jizz to make it
Cody (17:41) Wild, right?
Rex (17:43) …
Rex (17:44) …………
Rex (17:45) i hate u so much for telling me this
Rex (17:45) why couldn’t u burden fox with this knowledge instead
Cody (17:45) Tell Buir I’m not the reward, will you? :)
Rex (17:46) i would sooner die
Rex (17:46) don’t u ever ask me for anything again
Cody (17:47) :)
Rex (18:32) …
Rex (18:32) ok i made bly tell him
Rex (18:33) buir wasn’t reassured, he thinks ur gonna get ur soul sucked out of ur dick or something
Cody (18:34) Sounds like a pretty good way to go tbh
Rex (18:34) i’m never gonna be able to look at u the same way again bro
Bly (18:40) Attachment: IMG5052.gif
Bly (18:40) Nice.
Cody (18:41) Have I ever once spoken about Aayla this way you degenerate
Bly (18:42) Degenerate?? I’m not the guy providing jizz on tap
Cody (18:43) Cleaning out dryer 14’s looking pretty good to you right now, huh?
Bly (18:43) …Fuck
15.
Cody looks at his phone screen again; two in the morning.
Obi-Wan is asleep on the other side of the bed. It’s spooky how still the witch is - he’d stuck a finger under Obi-Wan’s nose half an hour ago just to check that he was still breathing, relieved to feel little puffs of breath.
He rubs at his face, far too awake. The bed is comfortable; there’s a skylight above the bed, but no moon out tonight, and they’re far enough from the city center that it’s not light pollution keeping him up, either.
The problem, Cody supposes, is that it’s too quiet. He can’t hear Crys’s video games through the thin wall that separates them. There are no baby brothers waking everybody up with demands to be fed or changed. Nobody is sneaking down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Monnk isn’t crashing around in the living room while he gets ready to open up the laundrette, laughing too loudly with Bly as the cook gets up to prep for the breakfast menu.
He considers getting up to jerk off in the bathroom, just to tire himself out, but he’s not particularly horny, too anxious and homesick in this new place to try forcing it. He turns onto his side to stare at the man beside him instead.
In two weeks, the moon will be full, and Cody will be fucking him. He tries to imagine it, and thinks Bly might be right - no hardship at all. Obi-Wan really is pretty; his eyelashes are pale, just like his skin, falling gracefully over his cheeks as he sleeps. Does he like sex, Cody wonders, or is this all a chore for the witch? He’d called Cody handsome, but he’d seemed fairly blasé about being fucked - it doesn’t matter which part of me.
Cody’s mind wanders back to Obi-Wan saying my cunt in his precise, Coruscant accent, and finally feels himself start to stir. It’s been years since Cody last felt the wet heat of a pussy around him - if he’s honest with himself, it’s been years since he’s had any kind of sex with regularity. Co-parenting nineteen of his younger brothers hasn’t been particularly conducive to his relationship prospects, and he’s been getting by with messy, one night hook-ups once or twice a year since his last disastrous attempt at dating five years ago.
Cock thickening just enough that he thinks it might be worth a try, he silently creeps into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. His right hand around himself is familiar, at least, even if this house isn’t. He lets his mind wander where it will; it takes him to those eyelashes, to beetle-black fingernails. Imagining the long fingers they belong to around his prick instead of his own. Imagining his spend clumping together pale eyelashes, matting down Obi-Wan’s beard. One shining blue eye cracking open to look up at him as the witch licks his pink lips clean.
He comes faster than he expects.
When he’s washed off his hands and cleaned himself up, he sneaks back into bed. Obi-Wan hasn’t moved at all, dead to the world. Exhausted, Cody finally passes out next to him.
He wakes, once, on autopilot at 6AM, body clock telling him it’s time for the school run. Sometime in the last few hours the witch has shuffled into Cody’s side, face mashed up against his arm. It’s raining, as it almost always is in Kamino, the noise tapping at the skylight soothingly.
It’s warm and cozy enough that he manages the rare feat of sleeping in.
16.
Cody leaves the witch asleep in bed when he drives back into Tipoca the next morning.
He half expects the apartment building to have burned down in the twenty hours he’s been gone, but no, there it is, same as ever. He pokes his head into the restaurant - there are a good amount of customers around for Sunday brunch, and Waxer gives him an excited wave from across the dining room when he spots Cody, but he’s called away by one of their notoriously fussy regulars before they can speak.
Cody makes his way upstairs, bracing to be immediately piled on by little brothers. Instead, he’s met with-
“Fox?” Cody blinks.
His oldest brother looks up from the dinner table the family have long outgrown eating at, giving Cody the sort of look one might give a piece of gum stuck to their shoe. For Fox, this almost counts as affectionate.
“Kote,” he greets, pushing his thin glasses up his nose. The older teens are clustered around him at the table, and the only other brother in the room is Boba - Fox has one foot on the baby’s rocker, keeping it bouncing steadily.
“Cody! You’re still alive!” Kix cheers. Thorn, Thire, and Hound look up from their textbooks curiously.
“Heads down,” Fox snaps. They obey immediately - Cody’s punishments have nothing on his older brother’s merciless disciplinary tactics. Only Kix keeps grinning at Cody, immune to all threats now that he’s accepted a full ride scholarship to medical school. (Fox was so proud that he cried. It’s the only time Cody’s ever seen him shed a tear.)
“Where is everyone?” Cody asks, helping himself to a soda from the refrigerator before joining them. He scoops Boba out of his rocker, bouncing him gently in his arms with a “hey fella.”
“I made Buir take them all to the library,” Fox sniffs. “There is a severe lack of critical thinking in this house, if the rumors of you getting eaten by a witch are any indication. My hope is that reading will cure this.”
“...Fox, Wrecker is in first grade. Crosshair only just learned his alphabet,” Cody points out disbelievingly.
“Tech can read,” Thorn pipes up.
Fox forcibly twists the teen’s head back down to his textbooks. “Tech is a savant. Unlike you, so keep reading. I’ll be quizzing you on this case study in five minutes.”
Both Thorn and Thire want to follow Fox into law - a fact the eldest is unbearably smug over - but Hound has his heart set on veterinary school.
“How’re your applications going?” Cody asks him.
Hound sighs dramatically. “I don’t know whether I want to go to Felucia State or Naboo-U. Felucia has the best reptile module, but Naboo’s intern placement program might be better in the long run.”
“You won’t have a choice if you don’t get into them first,” Fox snaps. “Stop distracting him Cody. Thorn! Three minutes.”
Cody snorts but shuts up, giving Boba a finger to grasp at. Kid’s got a good grip already. He sits and keeps Fox and the teens company for their study session, just silently enjoying having his brothers around him. Boba is easy to keep quiet when he starts to grizzle, sucking down the bottle of formula Cody makes him with gusto.
There’s only so long Fox can keep four teenagers’ attention on a Sunday though, so when Thire fidgets one too many times for the older Fett’s patience he shoos them all out to get lunch downstairs.
Cody turns to follow, but an iron grip digs painfully into his shoulder before he can.
“You,” Fox hisses. He spins Cody around to face him - his older brother only has an inch or so on him in height, but Fox certainly makes the most of it, looming menacingly.
“Oh,” Cody says, “ohhh, I get it now. ‘Study session’, huh? I’ve been gone for one night, Fox, I’m fine. You didn’t have to come check up on me.”
“You make sure it stays that way,” Fox growls, looking his younger brother up and down critically. What he thinks he’s going to see, Cody has no idea. “Tell that witch of yours that if he damages a single hair on your stupid, fat head, I will bring the full force of the law down upon him, and no magic will be enough to save him from my wrath.”
There are times when Cody genuinely pities the defenders Fox goes up against in court every day. This is one of them. He can’t say he doesn’t feel loved, though.
17.
His brothers get so fed up with his fretting about their first school run without him that they practically kick him out of the house that night. Yes, they all know who’s dressing who, yes, Cody, they know Jesse needs to pack his gym clothes tomorrow, no, Cody, they haven’t forgotten that Fives and Echo need to return their permission slips for the field trip next week.
He drives back to Obi-Wan’s house feeling surprisingly bereft. It’s weird not to be needed. It’s an even weirder thought that the endless stream of brothers has been stopped; one day, Boba will graduate, and they’ll all have grown up. Job done.
Cody pulls up in the driveway, looking lost. The witch opens the front door to greet him before he’s even locked the car.
Obi-Wan smiles at him with a warmth Cody’s not sure what he’s done to deserve, hair ginger for once where it’s haloed by the yellow light of the living room. He doesn’t quite manage to hide the relief on his face that Cody has come back - it didn’t even occur to him that the witch might have worried. Obi-Wan asks him about his day and offers him a cup of tea - darjeeling or assam, my dear?
Oh, Cody thinks, oh, heart rate increasing minutely, and he slowly begins to understand what Jango’s been telling him all these years.
18.
These are the things Cody learns about Obi-Wan, during his first seven days with the witch:
Obi-Wan has enchanted his TV, and it now receives a truly obscene number of channels live from all around the world. Despite the choice this affords him, his favorite things to watch are reality TV shows involving humans wandering around “haunted” houses. Somehow, these are always on, and he always finds them, no matter the time of day. He derives a truly baffling amount of glee from watching them stumble around pretending to be scared. He tells Cody it’s because the ghosts are “right there”, and Cody chooses not to pursue this line of questioning any further for his own sanity.
Obi-Wan is not actually creating the things he conjures up, most of the time - he is simply moving existing objects from place to place. He has some sort of pocket dimension where he keeps more important possessions, like his potion book, but when Cody uses that term to describe the place he wrinkles his nose with disgust.
Obi-Wan sings to his plants in the greenhouse when he thinks Cody can’t hear him. He sings in a language Cody doesn’t recognize, lilting, sad things that sound like lullabies. He gets very flustered when caught doing this, more so when Cody tries to compliment his singing voice, forcibly changing the subject as quickly as he can.
Obi-Wan does not have a cellphone, or a computer, only a landline so old it has a rotary dial.
Obi-Wan does not know what the purpose of a laundrette is. He apparently cleans all of his clothes with a spell and a particular twist of his fingers. Cody has to explain to him what he does for four hours every weekday in the Fett laundrette. This is also how he learns that Obi-Wan has led a fairly sheltered life, in human terms, growing up among other witches in the Jedi coven and raised mainly by his Master, who either died or turned himself into an oak tree - Cody is unclear on this point. Obi-Wan’s stories can be rambling and hard to follow.
Obi-Wan does not have a cat, or any other kind of familiar, but Cody soon finds out what the catflap in the greenhouse is for anyway.
19.
Things are always quiet on Tuesday nights and the incessant Kaminoan rain is coming down hard, so Cody leaves the Concordia Café a little earlier than usual to make the slow drive to Obi-Wan’s.
He knocks when he gets there, everything still too new, too unsure of his presence in the witch’s life to walk right in, but there’s no answer. The door is always unlocked - Obi-Wan has full faith in his wards to keep people out, which concerns Cody somewhat, but it’s useful enough at times like this when he pokes his head in and finds the place dark and empty.
Changing into some sweatpants and a sunshine-orange t-shirt, he makes himself at home on the couch. After ten minutes of scrolling through the witch’s TV, he manages to find the channels in Mando’a. Something to keep in mind for another day, he thinks - could be useful for brushing up on the language - and he leaves a game show on for background noise while he sets up his laptop, opening up the family spreadsheets and navigating to the medical tab.
Boba needs registering with their local doctor, and all the vaccines and check-ups that come with a new baby. On that note, Tup is past one year old now, so he’ll need his MMR jab soon. Crys could probably do with a dentist appointment - Cody’s caught him drinking far too many of those sickly sweet energy sodas late at night, and he’s certain the kid has cavities. Then there’s the more complicated matter of Tech - Cody, Jango and Fox all suspect the three year old is autistic, and if they can get him assessed before he starts school, all the better for his chances at getting whatever help he might need.
He’s scrolling through various websites and forums on the subject when a clattering noise suddenly comes from the greenhouse.
Cody freezes.
Fuck but I hope that’s not one of the plants with teeth, is his first thought. Then he remembers the catflap and cranes his head over the back of the couch, wondering if he’s about to meet a familiar after all.
Instead of a cat, there’s a soggy, wet fox staring back at him.
“No,” Cody says, dumping his laptop on the cushions, “no no no, you’re not allowed in here,” he tells it. The fox seems unimpressed by this, taking a moment to give the human in front of him a remarkably flat look before it shakes its fur out, getting water all over the greenhouse floor.
“C’mon, shoo,” Cody tries again, waving his arms in an attempt to herd it back. “Out!”
Then the fox gets up on its hind legs, and in the space of two seconds Obi-Wan is standing there in front of him.
A very wet, very naked Obi-Wan.
“This is the welcome I get in my own house, is it?” the witch sniffs, settling his hands on his hips and doing nothing at all about his very wet, very naked situation.
Cody gapes, unsure how to even begin processing this. Because not only has a fox just shapeshifted into a man before his eyes, but Obi-Wan is, one, gorgeous, and two, has a cock between his legs, and Cody has no idea how to phrase I thought you were trans, what happened to having a cunt in any kind of delicate or respectful manner.
He realizes he’s staring with a jolt of embarrassment, quickly turning away to face the living room. “Sorry! Shit, sorry, I- I thought you were a…uh, real fox?”
“You needn’t worry, my dear,” Obi-Wan tells him, and from the corner of his eye Cody sees the witch pull down a black robe from a hook by the door, apparently there for this exact purpose. “If it was a wild animal, it wouldn’t get past the wards.” He brushes past Cody as he walks into the house, combing his wet hair from his face and making his way over to the kettle. “You’re home early today. Everything okay at the Café?”
His legs are long and pale, and his robe is short, hem only just touching the midpoint of his thighs. Stop looking, idiot, Cody shakes himself out of it. “Hm? Uh, yeah. Just a slow night, that’s all.”
He retreats to the couch, where he can hide the interested line of his prick pressing against his sweatpants under the laptop. The words on the screen no longer hold any meaning, no matter how hard he forces himself to look at them, look at the screen, not Obi-Wan, cut it out.
The kettle boils, but Obi-Wan puts his tea cup down without filling it. The witch sighs softly.
Then he turns around, walks over to the couch, plucks the laptop out of Cody’s hands and straddles his lap without so much as a by your leave.
“Uh,” Cody says intelligently, blinking up at the blue eyes boring into his own, only inches away. He’s getting Cody’s sweatpants all wet.
“You’re going to have to look at me eventually, you know,” Obi-Wan says solemnly. “Am I unattractive to you?”
Cody swallows, the noise loud despite the TV still filling the silence. “No. No, that’s not-”
Obi-Wan shifts his hips, getting more comfortable, pushing up against Cody’s- “Ah,” he says, a look of understanding blossoming over his face, “I see.” He adjusts his weight again so that he’s not squashing Cody’s erection, sitting back a little so that he can consider the expression on the burning red face in front of him with a perplexed frown. “You needn’t be embarrassed, darling. Our first full moon together is this weekend - things will go much smoother for us if you desire me, don’t you think?”
He can only give a helpless little shrug in response to the witch. The proximity is doing nothing to help him think straight - Obi-Wan isn’t warm, exactly, skin still damp and clammy with rainwater, but he’s a pleasant weight in his lap, black robe parting dangerously around the thighs straddling Cody’s own. It would be as easy as breathing to slip a hand between them and find naked skin, a fact Cody’s cock seems to be acutely aware of.
“Perhaps,” Obi-Wan murmurs softly, slowly looping his arms over Cody’s shoulders as if he might spook, “we ought to practice,” he smiles conspiratorially, eyes half-lidded, “if you’re so scared of me.”
Cody huffs. “Not afraid of you, witch,” he says, with bravado he doesn’t feel.
Obi-Wan leans close enough that their noses brush together, raising one eyebrow as if to say prove it. So Cody does.
He kisses the witch with a hunger that surprises them both. Sometimes, you don’t realize you’re starving until that first bite of food, and fuck but it’s been a while since he last had someone else’s tongue tangled with his own. The witch’s beard is softer than Cody’s has ever been, in his past misguided experiments with facial hair, mustache ticklish. He tastes like the raindrops still dripping down from his hair - Cody tangles his fingers in the wet strands at the back of his head to guide the other man where he wants him.
Obi-Wan goes easily, humming against Cody’s lips with a pleased tone. His hips twitch restlessly in the human’s lap, doing nothing to dissuade the stiff prick trapped underneath them. Cody’s hands slip down to his damp thighs, tugging the witch closer until Obi-Wan’s own slowly filling cock bumps up against Cody’s stomach.
“Thought you, uh,” Cody gasps, pulling away for air, “said you had a cunt?”
Obi-Wan tilts his head like a confused puppy - no, Cody corrects himself; like a fox. His eyes are too sharp and wild for a dog to ever be an adequate comparison. “Oh,” he says, “oh, you thought I was…?” The witch laughs breathlessly. Then he takes one of Cody’s hands, guiding it under the dark robe and between his legs. “Darling,” he purrs wickedly, “I’m not even human.”
A frisson of fear shivers up Cody’s spine. It only makes him harder. He swallows roughly, reaching out blindly and touching; his fingers meet a cock, soft, delicate skin stretched over the witch’s shaft, damp at the head. Trailing downwards, he finds no testicles. Instead, the base of Obi-Wan’s cock protrudes from a pussy where a clitoris should be, and behind it, wet, slick lips that he drags his fingertips through.
The witch moans softly, tipping forward to capture the human’s lips once more, punctuating his kisses with nips and bites that start gently and get sharper the longer Cody strokes at him, grinding down with increasing impatience.
One of Obi-Wan’s hands slips under the waistband of Cody’s sweatpants, brushing the tip of his cock, and-
…and Cody panics.
“Wait,” he chokes, suddenly drawing his hands back, shrinking into the couch cushions. “Wait, sorry. I- I’m sorry-”
The witch draws away too, surprised for only a moment before he smiles at the human gently. “Too soon?” he asks, a note of apology to his tone.
“Yeah, just.” Cody gulps. “Something like that, yeah. Sorry.”
“The fault was my own,” Obi-Wan reassures him kindly, slipping sideways off Cody’s lap and onto the couch. He digs around in its crevices, eventually coming up with the TV remote. “Want to watch something instead? I think Most Haunted: Chandrila should be on soon.”
Cody stands up, grabbing his laptop and using it to cover the hard-on still persisting in his sweatpants without an ounce of subtlety. “Think I’ll just, um. Go to bed, actually.”
“Alright,” Obi-Wan says easily, already flipping through channels. “Goodnight then, my dear.”
Cody shuts the door to the bedroom, throwing his laptop down on the sheets and heading straight for the bathroom with a desperation to get a hand on his cock he hasn’t felt since he was fifteen. He shoves his sweatpants down, fucking his fist, knowing that Obi-Wan is probably fully aware of what he’s doing and working himself over all the harder for it.
The fingers on his free hand are still sticky with the witch’s slick. He brings them to his face, breathing in the heady scent clinging to them, and comes all over himself like a teenager. The whole episode is over in less than a minute.
“Fuck,” he curses quietly through his teeth, irritated at the mess even as he trembles through the aftershocks. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
He’s going to have to bring these clothes with him to work to wash at the laundrette tomorrow. He goes to bed and hopes that Obi-Wan doesn’t notice that his shirt is now yellow instead of orange when the witch finally turns in.
20.
“Aw come on!” Hardcase cries out in protest. “It’s only one detention! And it wasn’t even for anything bad, I just forgot to do my science homework. It’s not like I got in a fight!”
Cody holds out a bucket to the eleven year old wordlessly, unmoved by his pleas.
Hardcase snatches it from the older Fett’s hand with a scowl. “Jeez you’re cranky this week. What’s your problem, huh?”
“Keep talking, see what happens,” Cody tells him. “Go on. Let’s find out which dryer you’re cleaning out next, shall we?”
The kid grumbles and stomps off, muttering uncharitable things about Cody’s hair under his breath. Hardcase pulls on his rubber gloves, making sure to give them a loud snap when he gets to dryer 14.
Cody sighs, pinching his nose between his fingers. Maybe he is being a little hard on them all. The first full moon is tomorrow, and he knows he’s taking out his nerves on the brothers around him, unintentional though it may be. He heads into the backroom to get a few rolls of quarters from the safe - the coin exchange in the front could probably do with a refill.
He couldn’t sleep last night for worrying. What if the spell doesn’t work? What if it turns out he’s not actually human? God knows what Talzin did to make all of them, he may well turn out to be some sort of golem. Will Obi-Wan kick him out and find another lover? Or will he give up and let Ventress reinstate the curse? At this point, Cody’s not sure he could bear the disappointment on his father’s face if another baby brother turned up.
And what if Cody panics again? It’s not that he didn’t want Obi-Wan to touch his dick. The witch is hot as hell, after all. He was just afraid of embarrassing himself - for good reason, judging by his performance in the bathroom afterwards, he’s sure he would have come all over the witch the moment Obi-Wan got a firm grip around his shaft. What if the opposite happens? Cody doesn’t think he’ll have trouble finishing, but he’s been so anxious over the last few days that it would be just his luck.
He walks back into the laundrette to find Hardcase hanging limply from 14, upper body in the dryer drum.
“Hardcase,” Cody scolds, deploying his most devastating I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed voice.
“It’s stinky,” Hardcase’s voice echoes from inside the dryer. “It’s so stinky that I died.”
“What a shame,” Cody says flatly, and walks away to fill up the coin exchange.
21.
After Cody has to bite his cheek for the third time to stop himself from bellowing at the twins, he concedes that it may well be better to just leave the Fett residence early. Echo and Fives have been particularly trying on his patience today, yes, but there’s no need for shouting; that’s on him and his nerves about tonight.
Obi-Wan doesn’t greet him at the door when he gets home. He finds the witch in his potion room, bent over a miniature cauldron on the workbench, very carefully dropping a pungent liquid into the brew with a pipette. He’s making a contraceptive, he says - one dose should last him all twelve moons. Cody elects to leave him to it, not wanting to screw up the witch’s process. This whole thing started to stop any more Fett babies from arriving. God knows Cody doesn’t need to be the cause of another.
The problem now is that he has nothing to do until night falls. Maybe he should have tried to put up with the twins’ tomfoolery a little longer. He watches TV for a while, but he’s too twitchy and restless to concentrate. He paces about in the living room, and then realizes that he can pace just as well outside - there’s a whole forest behind the house he’s been ignoring. It’s a suitably distracting endeavor, if only because he has to pay attention to his surroundings to avoid breaking an ankle on a stray tree root. He walks out and away from the bungalow in a straight line for what seems a very long time, just breathing in the moss and the sap and the dew around him, until the sky above him starts to pink with sunset, and then he turns around, following his footprints home.
Cody stands outside the greenhouse with his hands on his hips and looks up at the moon - only just peeking above the horizon of the trees - as if it’s caused him personal offense.
The door creaks open behind him. “Cody?”
He turns, greeting Obi-Wan with a tense smile. “All done with your potions?”
“No babies happening here,” the witch confirms. “Why don’t you have a shower? I’ll be with you in the bedroom soon, I just need to get the silver.”
Cody gives him a little salute, following Obi-Wan into the house to do as he’s told. There’s no point getting dressed again after, but the thought of waiting in the bedroom naked makes Cody uncomfortable - he settles for a fresh pair of underwear, flopping back on the bed to stare up at the skylight and tapping his fingers against his ribs anxiously.
“Well hello there,” Obi-Wan purrs from the doorway, blocking the light from the living room. Cody twists his head to the side; he watches the witch walk in and place a small, silver plate on the bedside table. It’s about half the size of a CD, the metal wafer thin. Obi-Wan crawls onto the bed and straddles Cody’s thighs, the same way he did on Tuesday, eyes raking up and down his body appreciatively. He reaches out with one hand. “May I?” he asks quietly.
Cody’s not sure what he’s agreeing to, but he nods anyway. It turns out to be ticklish fingertips, lightly tracing over his skin. He watches their path with his breath caught in his throat. Obi-Wan’s black nails are stark even in the gloomy light of the moon, disappearing in and out of the clouds above them. His wandering hands take him over the thick knot of scar tissue on the left of Cody’s face, then down to the matching ones on his arm and torso.
“Where did these come from?”
“Shrapnel,” Cody shrugs. It’s not his favorite story to tell, but he’s surprised the witch hasn’t asked about the scars sooner, really, so he rattles off the abridged version. “I was in the army for two years, joined up when I finished school. I got caught at the edge of an IED blast in Saleucami. Left pretty soon after. I got lucky - it’s not like I got shellshock, or PTSD, or saw anyone die in that explosion. Nobody got hurt apart from me. But I just…didn’t want to risk it happening again, with worse outcomes. Not when I had so many little brothers waiting for me back home.”
The witch hums consideringly. He presses his lips softly to each scar, working his way up from the one under Cody’s ribs to the one on his face. His beard tickles even more than the fingers.
“C’mere already,” Cody murmurs impatiently, guiding Obi-Wan down by the chin so that he can kiss him properly. He doesn’t want to talk about the army, or his scars. Not when there’s a handsome witch crouched over him and his stomach is full of butterflies.
Obi-Wan smiles against his lips, curling his tongue out and licking into the younger man’s mouth with a languidness that makes Cody shiver. He bunches his fists in the witch’s black sweater, pulling at him until Obi-Wan’s body is a warm weight settled atop his own that he can grind up against. Slipping his hands under the fabric, he explores smooth skin, fingertips skating over ribs and muscle until they find both nipples - he pinches, lightly, coaxing the nubs into stiff peaks, and the witch moans into their kiss, the stiffening cock trapped in his leggings pushing insistently against Cody’s own rapidly swelling prick.
Obi-Wan sits up, tugging his sweater off and throwing it to the floor carelessly. “What will it be tonight, then?” he asks breathlessly, looking down at Cody with his eyes half-lidded and lazy.
Cody stares up at him, too awestruck to speak. He’s seen the witch’s body before, that night he transformed in the greenhouse, but this time he feels bold enough to look - really look, dragging his eyes over pink nipples and his fingers through the dusting of ginger hair on Obi-Wan’s chest, trailing them down his stomach where another patch disappears into his leggings. He smooths one palm over the witch’s cock, outlined against the dark fabric, kneading at him while he finds his voice.
Cody swallows, throat clicking loudly. “I thought, uh. Your mouth, maybe?”
Obi-Wan smiles at him in a way that makes Cody feel like he’s just told a genie his first of three wishes, like he’s getting his cock sucked now whether he likes it or not. The witch hooks his fingers over the waistband of his leggings, tugging them first below his pink, heavy prick, and then down the rest of his long legs - the clouds part for just long enough that Cody notices he has pale freckles all over his skin, before the moon disappears again and the room dims. Obi-Wan somehow manages to undress elegantly; Cody feels an awful lot less coordinated when the witch reaches to pull at his underwear, wriggling his hips to help get them off like a fish out of water.
Still, Obi-Wan takes in the sight of Cody’s cock weeping with precum against his hip, flushed dark and purple and full, with an infinitely pleased expression, murmuring “There you are, my darling.”
Then, with none of the grace previously displayed, he spits wetly into one hand and wraps it firmly around Cody’s dick. The human gasps at the sudden pressure, bucking up into his grip. A fresh bead of precum oozes from his slit, quickly smeared away and over his shaft. Cody looks down, watching the witch’s fist work him over, and those black nails and long fingers around his dick look exactly as good as he had imagined.
“Did you jerk off yesterday?” Obi-Wan asks, like they’re talking about the weather and not his masturbation habits, like he isn’t leisurely stroking the stiff cock in question.
“Not- not for the last three days,” Cody tells him, beginning to pant. He shrugs bashfully. “Too nervous.”
The witch gifts him with a soft smile. “It’s only me, my dear. But at least you’ll have a nice big load for my potion ready, hmm?” Filthy. Cody shudders, cock twitching tellingly in Obi-Wan’s hand. His smile turns into a sharper grin. “Oh, you like that, do you? The thought of me using you? Milking you for your spend whenever I need it?”
The human moans pitifully, knowing there’s an embarrassed flush spreading over his face and chest, because yes, fuck yes he likes it. “Not gonna,” he gasps out, “not gonna be able to use any of it,” Cody whines at a particularly devastating twist of the witch’s hand, hips jerking, “shit, ah, if you don’t get your mouth on me soon.” He can feel his balls trying to draw up already, tight and aching.
Obi-Wan laughs, leaning over Cody to give him one last kiss, dirty and wet, before he crawls backwards down the bed. His hands smooth down Cody’s thighs as he goes, lowering his upper body to the bed with his tongue curled out. He presses the flat of it to the base of Cody’s cock, dragging it up in a long, slow lap to the head, before sucking just the tip between his kiss-bruised lips. There’s nothing in the world that can stop the whimper Cody lets out at the sight. Obi-Wan’s mouth is warm, tongue kitten-licking at his frenulum, curling around and over and down when the witch dips his head, lips widening to suck down more of Cody’s shaft.
The witch makes no attempt to be delicate about it - it’s sloppy, just the way Cody likes it, spit escaping down Obi-Wan’s chin, humming around the cock stretching his mouth between messy slurping noises. Cody can feel his thighs tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing, toes curling with pleasure. Part of him wants to let go, not wanting to make the witch work for any longer than he has to; another part of him wants to hold off from blowing his load as long as possible, to enjoy this to the full. Another is desperate to see Obi-Wan’s mouth filled with cum. Realistically, Cody knows he’s not going to have much choice in the matter, the rhythmic stroke of the witch’s tongue too much, too good.
The clouds part, filling the room with moonlight, and Cody takes his initial assessment of the witch back. In the pale blue haze of the full moon, he is ethereal, beautiful between Cody’s legs, cock down his throat. The witch glances up at him, his eyes seeming to glow in the strange light.
Cody comes. He groans, low and loud and overwhelmed, spilling messily into Obi-Wan’s mouth with twitching hips. His lover holds still, suckling softly to coax him through his climax.
Obi-Wan sits up when he’s done, throwing out one hand in the direction of the bedside table and holding the other to his closed lips. The silver plate he brought in earlier floats into his fingers; he brings it to his mouth and very neatly spits Cody’s cum on it.
Then he gets up and leaves.
Cody blinks at his retreating form. “...Obi-Wan?” he calls uncertainly. He forces himself up onto wobbly legs, staggering after him. He finds the witch in the potion room, holding the silver plate above the cauldron as if in offering and murmuring something low under his breath. At the end of the incantation he slips the plate into the bubbling concoction - the cauldron belches with a sudden burst of smoke, color brightening for a moment before it simmers back down.
“There,” Obi-Wan sighs with relief, dusting his hands off needlessly. He turns to Cody with a tired smile. “It worked. One down, eleven to go. Well done, my dear.”
“Oh,” Cody says, feeling awkward standing there naked with his softening cock still wet and sticky. “Right. You too…?” The witch leads him back to the bedroom. Obi-Wan lies down and stretches, feline, blinking up at the full moon above them sleepily. His cock is flaccid now, but. “Do you want me to, um. Do something for you?” Cody offers, feeling guilty.
The witch laughs softly. “That’s quite alright. I’m sorry, darling, it’s not you - the spell just takes it out of me, that’s all.”
“Sure,” Cody says, lying down on his side next to him. He makes a mental note to be sure to get the witch off first, next time. It’s only polite.
“If you really want to do something for me, I’d love a good post-coital cuddle,” Obi-Wan decides, twisting his head to the side to grin at him. “Only if you’re offering, though, of course.”
The human snorts with amusement, opening his arms in invitation. The witch scoots into them with a pleased sound, burying his face between Cody’s pecs, and he wraps his arms around the Jedi. Perhaps it’s better that this is all Obi-Wan wants; he’s feeling pretty wrung out himself after that orgasm. He dips his head to press his nose to the witch’s soft, straight hair - it smells like menthol and fresh sweat, something comforting about it that doesn’t do anything to make Cody less sleepy.
“So,” he yawns, “if you’re not human - it’s always gotta be me on top?”
“Only for the bacta,” Obi-Wan murmurs, pressing a suggestive smile into Cody’s skin. “Outside of full moons…who knows, hm?”
22.
Today, Cody has - in this order - trapped his thumb in a dryer door, burnt his finger on the grill, spilled a customer’s drink order and dropped all of the menus that live under the cash register.
Clearly, he’s distracted.
Despite his body wandering around on auto-pilot a twenty minute’s drive away in Tipoca City, Cody’s mind is still firmly in Obi-Wan’s bed. He’d woken up that morning with the witch still snuggled in his arms, warm and sweet, snoring softly. If it had been anyone else, in any other situation, Cody would have kissed him awake. He would have rolled the witch onto his back for a round two, disappeared under the covers to get his head between those pale, freckled thighs. He would have licked Obi-Wan open and-
“Cody,” Rex snaps, clicking his fingers in front of his older brother’s face. Cody startles.
“Sorry,” he blinks, “what?”
“Table five wants their check,” the blond tells him impatiently. “What is it with you today?”
“Nothing,” Cody reassures him, digging out table five’s order so he can punch it into the register, “I’m fine.”
Rex squints at him suspiciously, but Ponds dings the bell in the kitchen before he can push it. Narrow escape; Cody sighs heavily. He delivers table five their check with his blandest customer service smile, all the while thinking about Obi-Wan and everything he didn’t do this morning.
Because it’s not like that between them. He’s there to help the witch make his potion, so they can pay off Ventress, so no more little brothers arrive on the family doorstep. And then, in a year’s time, they’ll go their separate ways. Cody will move back into Jango’s apartment building. Obi-Wan will…well, he’s not really sure what the witch usually does, actually. Sell potions? Wander the land searching for pitiful souls to lift curses from? Whatever, Cody won’t be there, is the point.
Outside of full moons, who knows, the witch had said, just before Cody had fallen asleep. What the fuck does that mean? Is Obi-Wan open to sleeping together outside of their initial arrangement? Is this a roommates with benefits kind of situation? And more importantly, could Cody keep it casual if it were? He doesn’t trust himself not to catch feelings - not with a man that funny and weird and beautiful - but he’s not sure he could say no to it, either. Obi-Wan is the most interesting thing that’s happened to him in years.
“Oh, gross!” Rex suddenly gasps.
Cody blinks at him. Then down at himself, just in case; there’s nothing to see, though.
“I know what this is,” Rex hisses, low enough that the customers can’t hear them. He points a finger accusingly at Cody. “You got laid last night. This is post-hook-up Cody! You slept with Kenobi! Come on, man, why do you keep doing this to me? I don’t need to know these things about you.”
“I didn’t say a fuckin’ word!” Cody says disbelievingly, scowling at the blond with offense.
“Next time just take the day off, jesus,” Rex huffs. “Go and- I don’t know, tell Bly about it, he’s the sort of freak that wouldn’t mind listening to your gushing. You’re a mess.”
“Genuinely not a single word,” the older Fett insists, gesturing angrily. “I have not said a thing.”
A customer waves at them hopefully from table seven. Rex gives him one last, withering look in parting. “Cody, Kote, brother mine,” he says flatly, “you don’t even need to.”
23.
After their first full moon together, Obi-Wan develops a habit of following Cody to bed at night. This might be endearing, if he didn’t wait until Cody has turned off all the lights and gotten comfortable under the covers to suddenly ask him personal and intrusive questions.
He thinks this might be an attempt on the witch’s part to get to know him better. Perhaps Obi-Wan thinks the dark is conducive to deep discussion. It’s not annoying, exactly, but the timing can be irritating on the nights it leads to a long conversation, leaving Cody cranky and sleep-deprived in the morning. He starts going to bed earlier in anticipation of this; he doesn’t think Obi-Wan notices.
“Do you have friends you see?” Obi-Wan asks the first time he follows Cody to bed.
Not really. He hasn’t spoken to anyone from high school in years. He has his army buddies, but they don’t pass through Tipoca all that often, spread out over Kamino. Maybe it seems sad from the outside, but Cody doesn’t really need friends, with as many brothers as he has. They’re all such different people, he can talk to at least one of them about anything. He’s not starved for company (only for sex and romance, but he doesn’t tell the witch that.)
“What do you do in your free time?” the witch asks three nights later.
What free time? Or at least, that was his answer when he lived with his brothers; he’s been watching an awful lot of TV since he arrived at Obi-Wan’s house. Maybe he should take Fox’s advice and go pick up a few books from the library, now that he has the breathing room to read some.
Cody spends a lot of his time updating the spreadsheets that keep the Fett family running like a well-oiled machine. It gives him an obsessive compulsive sort of satisfaction to see everything neatly laid out and organized by color. He also not so secretly enjoys collecting coupons and hunting for bulk discounts, which is useful for a family of thirty-two. He likes browsing online for opportunities that will help his brothers - scholarships for the older teens, themed summer camps for the younger ones. Lectures on Mandalorian archeology for Gree. Baking competitions for Bly.
“Do you do weight training?” Obi-Wan wonders out loud, tracing an appreciative, hungry finger over Cody’s thick biceps.
No. He just lifts a lot of heavy shit every day. Things in this category include: little brothers, bags of laundry the size and weight of little brothers, tables, and boxes of ingredients for the restaurant.
“Why did Wolffe call you Kot’ika on the phone today?”
It’s a nickname Jango gave him when Cody was ten. Kote, Kot’ika, his Buir’s little glory; it was Cody who sat down and turned the family’s dire situation around. Budgeting has always come easily to him, even at ten years old - it’s just addition and subtraction. More in, less out. By Cody’s logic, everything out had to bring something in too. This is how the restaurant and the laundrette started. If they’re going to bulk buy industrial amounts of food, they may as well buy enough to sell some at a markup and make their money back. If they’re going to buy a washing machine big enough to handle a pile of clothes the equivalent weight of a horse, why not wash other people’s dirty laundry too and charge for it? His father had been so overwhelmed with sons and debts that he hadn’t even minded his preteen third-born taking over the family finances, almost pathetically grateful for the help.
“What’s your favorite color?”
Seriously? Are we in kindergarten? It’s orange or yellow, Cody guesses, shrugging. At least he gets to sleep in good time that night.
“Who’s your favorite brother?”
“I don’t have one,” Cody tells Obi-Wan. The witch looks deeply skeptical about this. It’s sort of true, he explains; he doesn’t have favorites, but there are brothers he has more history with than others. The brothers on either side of Cody - Fox and Wolffe, Ponds and Bly - those were the siblings he played with most as a child. The ones that came after were too small, too large a gap in age between them to really get on as children. Cody sometimes feels more like an uncle, or even a substitute father, to the ones even younger than that. Each of the oldest brothers has what Wolffe calls their “ducklings” - younger brothers who have latched on to them for whatever reason. Fox has Thorn and Thire. Cody has Gregor and Waxer. Wolffe has Boost and Sinker, always trotting along after him and begging the army sergeant to play soldiers with them.
The exception to all of this, Cody tells Obi-Wan, is Rex.
There was a year where no babies turned up. It had filled Cody with a strange sort of melancholy, when they all thought for a moment that the stream of new brothers had finally stopped. Then along came Rex in the following spring, with his odd blond hair as bright as Auntie Arla’s, and Cody had maybe loved him just a little bit more than the other babies. Maybe.
(Later, Obi-Wan works out that there was a full solar eclipse the year that no new sons showed up. It’s as good a theory as any.)
24.
Just as he said he would at their initial meeting, Obi-Wan goes out for the night during the next new moon.
He leaves the house wearing strange clothes he calls “formal wear”, black tabards neatly tucked into an obi over several robes arranged in immaculate layers. He’s meeting his coven, he says, and then kisses Cody on the cheek and tells him not to wait up, disappearing into the forest.
Cody decides to stay in the bungalow, too lazy to move his toiletries and clothes back to Jango’s apartment for just one night, even if he does miss his old room sometimes. He goes to bed and thinks nothing of it when Obi-Wan still isn’t back the next morning, driving into Tipoca to go about his usual day.
By the time he arrives home, the witch seems to have returned, lights on through the windows, and he opens the door to find him prowling restlessly around the living room. He can’t have been back long, and he definitely hasn’t slept since the last time Cody saw him - he’s still wearing his robes, though the obi and the tabards have been discarded over the back of the couch, and the remaining layers are in disarray. Obi-Wan greets Cody distractedly.
“...You okay?” Cody asks slowly. “Coven meeting go well?”
Obi-Wan blinks at him with a faint hmm?, and that’s when Cody notices his eyes - the witch’s pupils are little pinpricks of black in a sea of unusually icy blue. What the hell do the witches do on new moons? The younger man frowns and wonders if he’s high on something, but god only knows what. He doubts it would be drugs in the sense that Cody knows them.
“Oh, yes, it was fine,” Obi-Wan says distantly, “I’m just going to…”
He doesn’t continue that sentence, or give any indication of where it was going. Instead he wanders into the greenhouse. Cody decides that this is probably witch shit he doesn’t need to get involved in, leaving him be, and goes to change into some more comfortable clothes. The witch will probably wear himself out and crash in bed soon enough, if he hasn’t slept, so Cody settles on the couch and turns on the TV. He finds himself in a sea of Corellian channels, unable to get back to the Mandalorian game show he’s slowly becoming addicted to.
Behind him on the cushions, Obi-Wan’s discarded robes smell of incense. It’s not unpleasant, but it does add to the image in his head of last night’s coven meeting involving some sort of secret, occult ritual.
While Cody channel hops, the witch continues pacing behind him, from the greenhouse to the living room to the potion room and back again in twitchy, irritable circles. Five different paranormal reality shows go past on the TV screen, but none of them tempt him into settling on the couch. Eventually Cody gives up and leaves it on a documentary about Rodian wildlife; he’ll have to ask the witch how to get back to the Mando’a channels when he’s not in such a weird mood.
No sooner does he get comfortable, though, than Obi-Wan suddenly drops to his knees in front of him.
“Can I…help you?” Cody raises an eyebrow at him.
“I want to suck you off,” Obi-Wan informs him with wild eyes.
“Okay, that’s it, what are you on?” Cody finally asks, throwing his hands up. “Are you drunk? Are you high on something?”
“No,” the witch insists, wrinkling his nose with annoyance. He shuffles a little closer, leaning his elbows on Cody’s lap. “I’m perfectly lucid, I assure you.”
“There’s something up with you,” maintains Cody. “You’re twitchy as hell tonight. What did you get up to with those witches of yours? Should I be jealous here or something?”
The witch rolls his eyes. “If I’d been sleeping around behind your back, I wouldn’t be sitting here asking for your cock in my mouth,” he tells the human dryly. “And I’m not twitchy, it’s just- magic.”
“Magic,” Cody repeats flatly.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says, dropping his cheek onto Cody’s thighs morosely, “it’s the new moon, it makes me- I get all- just, full of energy, and magic, and power, and there’s nowhere for it to go.”
Cody considers this with a frown, reaching out to stroke Obi-Wan’s hair back from his forehead. It makes the witch squirm. “And…what do you usually do? With this extra energy.”
“Fuck, sometimes,” the witch tells him. “Go and find someone or something that will take me to bed. Or I’ll use it for a particularly taxing spell, like a portal far away.” He looks back up at Cody hopefully, and this close, he can see that the witch’s irises are glowing, slightly, moon-bright. His hands have started to creep up Cody’s thighs, kneading at the muscle there rhythmically. “Please, darling? Let me make you feel good?”
Sighing, Cody relents. “If it will help you,” he tells Obi-Wan, knowing full well that he’s giving in for purely selfish reasons. He’d been expecting to suffer alone with his right hand until the next full moon - it would take a stronger man than Cody to turn down Obi-Wan’s mouth around him.
The witch scrabbles excitedly at the waistband of Cody’s sweatpants, tugging them down to his knees and then throwing himself forward to press sloppy, sucking kisses to the younger man’s testicles. His desperation is infectious; blood sinks to Cody’s cock like a stone, so fast that it leaves him a little lightheaded. He’s still only half-hard when the witch takes him between his lips, coaxing him to full mast in the wet, comforting warmth of his mouth.
“Fuuuck,” Cody curses, head dropping back into the cushions. “My dad thinks- shit, yes, like that - thinks you want to suck my soul out of my dick, you know.”
Obi-Wan almost chokes himself on the cock in his mouth, laughing. He pulls off just long enough to grin up at him, spit trailing from his mouth to Cody’s shaft in lewd strings. “I’d certainly enjoy the attempt.”
He’s too strung out on magic to have much technique or finesse, bobbing his head up and down enthusiastically in a way that has Cody bumping against the back of his throat. The human groans, tangling both hands in Obi-Wan’s hair. It isn’t long before he forgets his manners, fucking into the wet heat surrounding him instinctively with aborted little thrusts.
Cody feels it when the witch gulps around the head of his cock, and that finishes it - he comes with a shaky cry, arching up off the cushions. Obi-Wan swallows every drop, sucking and licking relentlessly until Cody has to push his head away from his lap, overstimulated.
If the witch’s eyes weren’t glowing before, they certainly are now, bright as candles - he licks his lips, expression sex-drunk but far from sated.
“Liar,” Cody gasps as he gets his breath back. “That didn’t help you at all.”
“You don’t think so?” Obi-Wan teases, crawling up onto the couch. He pulls one of Cody’s hands below his strange robes and between his legs, guiding him past his stiff cock to the pussy below it. His fingers glide easily between the slick folds - shit, if Cody had known he was this wet he would have asked to fuck him properly.
“Tell me I can reciprocate this time,” he begs. “Sweetheart, please.”
The witch responds by tearing impatiently at his coven robes; Cody shoves him backwards into the cushions. He doesn’t need all the layers off, just the ones keeping his mouth from between Obi-Wan’s thighs. He manages to get the leggings and underwear down those pale, freckled legs while the witch’s robes are still tangled around his head and arms - Obi-Wan doesn’t see Cody leaning down, jolting with surprise when the younger man closes his lips around his cock.
It’s flushed a dark pink, damp and salty at the head with precum - he chases the taste, lapping at the slit while the witch squirms and wriggles under his attention. Cody eases a thick finger into his cunt with much more care, not wanting to hurt him, but Obi-Wan is wet enough that it slips inside with only a token resistance.
Finally free of his fabric prison, the witch moans, bearing his hips down for more - Cody’s hair isn’t long enough to pull at, dark curls buzzed short and neat, so he grasps at the sides of his head instead, tugging at the human’s ears to guide him where he wants.
Spoiled for choice, Cody alternates his mouth and hands between Obi-Wan’s cunt and cock. He laps hungrily at the witch’s pussy, enjoying the sweet, musky taste of his natural slick while he strokes the shaft above at a punishing pace, and then swaps, fucking him with just one finger while he sucks the witch’s cock. Obi-Wan’s thighs keep trying to close, before he remembers himself and spreads them as much as he can in the narrow space, and despite the hands pinching and pulling his ears this way and that, Cody can hear the witch panting loudly above him.
“What do you want?” he asks hurriedly when the thighs threatening to suffocate him start to tremble. “Come in my mouth, or with my tongue in your cunt?
Obi-Wan says mmmgghh, which clarifies nothing at all, but his fingers are pulling up, up insistently, so Cody swallows his cock down again, slipping an extra finger into his pussy this time. Just that minor stretch has the witch coming with a hoarse, broken cry, cum spurting hot and salty onto the back of Cody’s tongue while his walls flutter and squeeze around the fingers curled deep in his cunt. Obi-Wan shakes and shudders through his orgasm, heaving great lungfuls of air through his slack mouth.
“Wait,” he gasps, flapping a hand in the human’s direction before he can pull away, “wait, don’t swallow, I want- I want.”
Cody blinks up at him curiously, mouth full - the witch curls a weak finger into the collar of his t-shirt, tugging impatiently until the human follows, hovering on his hands and knees over Obi-Wan on the couch.
Shiny, black nails scrape through his hair, pulling his head down so the witch can lick his own cum from Cody’s tongue.
It’s disgusting. It’s all Cody’s going to think about when he jerks off from now on.
Finally getting his head between Obi-Wan’s thighs had his spent cock stirring with interest once more, but this on top of the exhausted, fucked-out sprawl of the witch under him has Cody fully hard again in an instant. He kicks away the sweatpants still tangled around his knees, throwing his shirt away with them for good measure, and strokes himself with a punishing fist, wanting nothing more than to complete this picture of debauchery by painting the witch with his seed.
“Let me come on you?” he asks breathlessly, one hand held out for balance on the back of the couch, the other jerking his cock frantically.
Obi-Wan looks up at him with lidded, lazy eyes, licking the taste of himself from his lips. “Anywhere you like, darling,” he slurs. He grins up at Cody sleepily, sticking his tongue out flat with a little aaah, and the younger man comes with a grunt, thick, pearly strings of cum roping over the witch’s neck and face. The witch jumps with surprise at the first hot splash of it on his skin, laughing, eyes closing with a happy little moan.
Cody collapses between him and the back of the couch, wheezing. It’s been more than a few years since he’s come that quickly in succession, and it’s a long few minutes before he gets his breath back to speak again.
“Tell me that wore you out,” he begs.
“My darling, I don’t think I can move,” Obi-Wan mumbles. His eyes have stopped glowing. Thank god.
They pass out together right there on the couch, still wet and sticky.
The next morning, Cody is woken by a very irate Gree on his phone, demanding to know why he hasn’t turned up for his shift at the laundrette.
25.
Cody meets Anakin during his fifth week living with Obi-Wan.
They’re both sprawled in front of the TV watching one of the witch’s interminable Most Haunted! shows when Obi-Wan suddenly launches himself up and into the kitchen, ripping open a loaf of bread and slapping ingredients on two slices like a man possessed.
“What the fuck,” Cody whispers, watching a block of cheese sail out of the refrigerator into the Jedi’s waiting hands.
A sparking ring of light crackles into existence in front of the fireplace just as Obi-Wan skids back into the living room with a fully assembled sandwich, neatly plated, garnish and all. The ring grows in size, bigger and bigger, until a tall man steps through it right into the living room.
“What the fuck,” Cody says, with feeling this time.
“Hungry, my dear?” Obi-Wan offers the plate to the man, eyes dancing with mischief.
“You’re not funny,” the newcomer tells Obi-Wan. “You have never once in your life been funny, and you never will be, old man.” He accepts the plate anyway, taking an aggressive bite and staring the witch down. He’s young, about Rex’s age, with shoulder-length dark blond hair and a scar running over one eye, dressed in a leather jacket, t-shirt and ripped jeans - all in black, as most people in Obi-Wan’s life seem to be.
Obi-Wan looks away first, which he will later claim is because he has manners and a houseguest to prove them to, and Anakin does not. “Cody, may I introduce Anakin Skywalker, my former apprentice. Anakin, this is Cody Fett. He’s helping me make bacta.”
“It’s a pun,” Anakin tells Cody, taking another violent bite out of his sandwich. “I’m from Tatooine. Get it? Sand, witch? He does this every time I come here.” Cody tries to find a response to this, mouth opening and closing, but the younger witch decides he’s not fast enough, turning back to Obi-Wan. “You see? He doesn’t think it’s funny either.” He grimaces suddenly, peeling the two layers of bread apart to peer between them. “What the hell did you put in here?”
“No idea,” Obi-Wan freely admits. “Tea?”
“Sure,” Anakin says, gesturing the plate away with a flourish of his hand. He makes himself at home on one of the armchairs. “Can’t be worse than your sandwiches.”
Cody glances at the new witch while Obi-Wan puts the kettle on. “...Every time? Really?” he asks.
“Every. Time,” Anakin confirms through gritted teeth, with the singular frustration that can only truly be felt by a-…oh. Yeah. That’s what makes this so familiar.
This is the moment Cody learns that Obi-Wan has a younger brother too.
26.
Their second full moon together finds Cody in his new favorite place - with his head between Obi-Wan’s freckled thighs.
The witch is laid out on his back with his legs spread wide, the very picture of decadence, loosely stroking his cock between a thumb and forefinger while Cody works. He’s been happily lapping at Obi-Wan’s pussy for the past ten long, dreamy minutes, parting the wet lips with the flat of his tongue over and over. Just the taste of his natural slick has Cody ready to burst, sweet and musky and smeared all down his chin, but he’s determined to make the witch come first, this full moon.
“Should I take this- ah, mm, do that again- to mean you want my cunt tonight, darling?” the witch purrs above him, reaching down with his free hand to scritch his sharp nails through dark, curly hair.
Cody groans low, pulling himself away with a final, sucking kiss to the pink labia. Where their first full moon together had filled him with nerves, now he’s just filled with desperation - he’s been dreaming of sinking his cock into the witch for weeks, now, and his patience has run thin.
“Gonna let me cum in you?” he asks in a growl, feeling almost drunk with arousal. The witch makes a delighted sound when he leans forward to kiss him hungrily, chasing after the taste of himself on Cody’s tongue. “Want me to fill you up, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” Obi-Wan gasps, reaching between them blindly for his lover’s cock to try and line it up, just as impatient. “A little help?”
Cody bats the witch away, taking himself in hand and giving the base of his cock a vicious squeeze. He sits up on his knees, shuffling forward until their hips meet and Obi-Wan’s thighs are splayed either side of his own. The witch is open and wet enough that Cody’s weeping cock sinks past the initial resistance and into the molten heat of him easily - Obi-Wan’s eyes fall shut with a moan at the stretch, head falling back into the sheets.
“Tight,” Cody hisses through his teeth, in to the hilt and pushing forward anyway just to feel the wet lips of the witch’s pussy pressing against his balls.
“Thick,” Obi-Wan imitates with a high, breathless laugh that Cody feels from inside him, walls trembling around his shaft with each chuckle. Weird. “Don’t hold back on me now, darling,” he begs, shifting back against the cock splitting him open with restless little twitches of his hips, trying to coax his lover into moving, and Cody is ever at his command.
He wraps his broad hands around the witch’s pale hips to hold him in place, fucking him with long, smooth strokes that draw fluttering sighs from Obi-Wan’s slack mouth. Cody’s taste in partners generally leans towards the masculine, but there really is nothing like the sweet grip of a pussy, the feeling even better without the plastic barrier of a condom. He’s never trusted his one-night stands enough not to use one, but he’d seen the potion Obi-Wan had made, and Cody trusts that he wouldn’t drink something that smelled that rancid if he didn’t have to, if nothing else. The witch’s cunt feels like softest silk around his cock, clenching erratically as he gets bounced gently up and down the bed by the snap of Cody’s hips.
“A-ah…Cody,” Obi-Wan whines, croaky, “Cody, ah, Cody,” repeating his name over and over, and hearing the witch calling out for him, his name, gets Cody hotter than any dirty talk ever could. He looks down, watching his cock dragging in and out of the witch’s pussy, shaft shiny and slick with Obi-Wan’s juices and- shit, he’s going to come too soon if he keeps watching.
Instead he leans forward to suck and lick at the thin skin of the witch’s neck and chest. The position forces Obi-Wan’s hips into a different angle, moans getting longer and louder with each fuck forward, neglected cock rubbing up against Cody’s stomach and leaving sticky little trails of precum. Closing his lips around a pink nipple and pulling it into his mouth with a hard, hungry suck, the witch’s cunt gets impossibly tighter, squeezing around the thick shaft forcing it open. Obi-Wan digs his fingers into the meat of Cody’s ass to haul him closer while he throws his head back and writhes.
The witch comes with a hitched, hurt little noise, full-body trembles shaking through him while he spills in wet strings over his chest. He squeezes his eyes shut and scrunches his nose when he climaxes, more of those short, gasping little sounds accompanying each spurt from his tip - Cody can’t help but think it’s cute, grinning down at him fondly even as he fucks the witch through it.
Satisfied with his efforts, Cody allows himself to sit back up, curling his hands under the witch’s thighs and starting a selfish, frantic pace, harder, faster, while Obi-Wan digs his black nails into the sheets and cries out overwhelmed ah! ah! ah!s with every thrust. Cody wants to come, and by the way his balls are feeling tight and heavy it’s not going to take long. He wants- fuck, he wants to fill the witch with cum, womb-deep, watch it ooze out of that pink little cunt and onto the sheets, wants-
A ragged groan tears itself from his throat at the first, explosive burst of cum from his slit, splashing into the perfect, wet heat around him. He tries his best not to bury himself to the hilt, knowing Obi-Wan’s going to need his cum to drip back out again after, but fuck is it difficult to resist. Cody whines with the effort, hips shuddering forward in shallow spasms he can’t control.
A clammy palm cups his left cheek, fingers brushing over the scar there, and he cracks his eyes open to find the witch smirking up at him, tousled and sweaty and tired.
“Good?” Obi-Wan asks, voice hoarse.
“Religious experience,” Cody gasps, choking down air.
The witch snorts. “Occult, I think you’ll find.” He wriggles around a little, careful not to shift Cody’s softening cock too much, and throws out a hand towards the bedside table to call the silver plate flying over. “You’re going to have to help me with this one, my dear.”
Collecting Cody’s spent cum is a far less elegant affair, this time - Obi-Wan holds his hips up to try and keep the seed inside until the younger man can angle the plate underneath him, where it bubbles out onto the silver with an obscene, squelching noise that sends the pair of them into helpless giggles.
Cody follows the witch to the potion room in solidarity, both of them standing there sweaty, naked and more than a little cold. The cauldron accepts the plate with another belch of smoke.
Two down, ten to go.
27.
Clearly, sex and affection are on the table, outside of full moons. The problem is that Cody doesn’t know how to ask for it.
The arrangement between them leaves him feeling wrong footed every time he mindlessly reaches out to touch the witch, like bumping into a glass wall he forgot was there. He’s not a shy man, as taciturn and stoic as he may seem sometimes, but he finds himself unusually tentative around Obi-Wan. And if just showing his fondness for the witch is hard, asking for sex is downright impossible - partly because he simply doesn’t want to bother the man with his needs, and partly because he’s afraid that once he starts, he’ll be asking every day.
Obi-Wan is freer with his affection: he curls into Cody’s side at night when they’re splayed out on the couch watching TV, runs absent-minded hands along the human’s shoulder blades when he walks past, and kisses the younger man’s cheek goodbye when he leaves on new moons. He pulls Cody against him, sometimes, while they watch the newest episode of Mando Mysteries, combing his nails through dark hair in a way that leaves the human putty-pliant and sleepy on his chest.
But even the witch seems to feel the odd barrier between them - Cody catches him looking, sometimes, from the corner of his eyes. He’ll turn his head, raising an eyebrow in question, and for a moment Obi-Wan will look like he’s about to say something…and then he’ll just smile, defeated, shaking his head with an it’s nothing, my dear.
They stumble across a solution to their problem almost by accident.
Cody wakes from a dream about the witch one morning, desperately hard and leaking precum profusely into his underwear. It had been…something about his bedroom at home, he thinks; he’d dreamt they were trying to fuck quietly, so his brothers wouldn’t hear them, but Obi-Wan had been loud and the bed kept creaking.
The bed is empty next to him, but there’s a warm spot telling Cody that Obi-Wan had been there just recently. He stumbles out of the bedroom still at full mast, finding the witch in the kitchen making tea. His sweater has slipped down his shoulder, leaving the white nape of his neck bare, and it’s too tempting a target for Cody to resist - he crowds Obi-Wan against the counters from behind, sleepy and needy, cock nestling between the cleft of his ass, kissing at the pale patch of skin and begging softly.
The witch hums with surprised interest, leaning into the warmth of the human’s front along his back.
Cody dry-humps him with a hand stuffed down Obi-Wan’s leggings until they both come right there in the kitchen.
Neck kisses become their silent signal, after that. It works well - if either of them isn’t in the mood, they can just smile and kiss the other’s forehead gently, and that will be that. It’s rare for Cody to refuse the witch, but there are days that work exhausts him, and he can barely even summon the energy to move from the couch, let alone fuck. Obi-Wan tends to turn him down when he’s too absorbed in a potion, sending him away with a distracted kiss to the cheek, but otherwise seems delighted by the younger man’s advances. It turns out Cody needn’t have worried whether he likes sex or not - the witch is a hedonist through and through.
And then there are the new moons, where the witch abandons their system altogether, having somehow lost every one of his inhibitions on the way home.
Obi-Wan returns from his next coven meeting in his fox skin, crashing through the catflap of the greenhouse and jumping onto Cody’s lap in the living room with a little yip. He transforms in a flurry of naked limbs, nails that might still be claws digging into Cody’s thighs.
“If you don’t have your cock in me in the next five minutes,” Obi-Wan informs him with wild eyes, near vibrating with trapped magic, “I am going to be very, very disappointed.”
What else is a guy to do, with an invitation like that?
“Sir, yes, sir,” Cody purrs, already pulling his shirt over his head. He’s been wondering what the witch would look like bent over the coffee table; seems like tonight he’ll get to find out.
28.
“What do you think?” Obi-Wan asks during the third full moon. “Anal, this time? Make a full sweep of it?”
Cody chuckles underneath him, brushing the witch’s sweaty hair back from his forehead. “Collect the whole set, huh? I’m up for it if you are.” Something about this night has them both lazy and languid - maybe the heavy rain skittering on the skylight above them, maybe the candles Obi-Wan has lit in the glass lanterns around the bedroom. They’ve been trading long kisses for a while now, losing clothes at a more leisurely pace than usual and grinding together without aim.
“Wonderful,” the witch purrs, sitting back on Cody’s thighs. “Just give me a moment to prepare myself, darling.”
He starts to make a gesture in the air, but Cody snatches both hands out to keep Obi-Wan’s wrists still before he can complete it. “What are you doing?” he frowns up at him.
Obi-Wan frowns right back. “...Preparing myself? Like I said.”
“Isn’t it more fun to do it the- well, the human way?” Cody suggests. At the witch’s blank look, he elaborates. “You know. Open you up slowly, with my fingers?”
“Why?” Obi-Wan asks, genuinely baffled. “Don’t you want to fuck now?”
Cody sighs, exasperated. “Just- just summon some lube for me and I’ll show you, how about that?”
Half an hour later, he has the witch shivery and overstimulated, three fingers curled deep in his ass, cum drying on Obi-Wan’s belly. His legs are still trembling where they’re squeezed around Cody’s sides.
“That’s why,” Cody tells him smugly, lining his aching cock up with the witch’s pink hole and finally sinking into the lube-slick heat of him. The noise Obi-Wan makes when he bottoms out; exquisite. Top ten moments of Cody’s life material right there.
He has to help the witch into the potion room afterwards - Obi-Wan doesn’t trust himself not to drop the silver plate.
29.
At the tail end of spring, Obi-Wan suddenly announces that he’s leaving for a week. The coven elders want him to take the younglings on a field trip. They’re going foraging, he says. The duty of teaching them how to find potion ingredients in the forest has fallen to him - which he seems to resent, judging by the look in his eyes, even if his mouth spouts a lot of bullshit about what an honor and privilege it is to shape young minds.
That’s fine, Cody shrugs. He’ll go stay with his brothers for a few days.
Cody packs up his toiletries and a change of clothes, and the next night after work, instead of driving back to the bungalow, he heads upstairs to the apartment building.
It’s strangely disorienting to be back. He’s not used to going to bed early anymore, so he wanders around in search of a brother to keep him company, and finds them all occupied. All the youngest kids are asleep - except for Boba, who Jango is pacing with in the kitchen, bouncing the baby along to an old Mandalorian war chant. His father doesn’t want company, he wants Boba to go the fuck to sleep. The twins definitely aren’t asleep - Cody can hear them giggling in their room - but they’re supposed to be. The teens are all cloistered in their bedrooms, and Cody dare not trespass on those curséd grounds.
It’s not that his family is displeased to have him back - it’s just that they each have their own set routines. Cody had one too, before.
He barely sleeps a wink that night. Was the music from Crys’s video games always that repetitive? Did the vents outside the restaurant always hum and rattle that loudly? He’s finally drifted off when Monnk slams the door on his way down to the laundrette, startling Cody awake again with a jump. Boba and Tup take it in turns crying all night, with a special guest appearance from Wooley around 5. At 6:30AM, preparations for the school run start, and Cody dutifully drags himself out of bed on decade-long auto-pilot. There’s no need; the system he left behind runs like a well oiled machine, all little brothers fed, dressed and accounted for by the time Gregor drives them away at 8.
He gives up and stays at the bungalow alone for the rest of the week.
Obi-Wan’s house is quiet, for the most part, except for one instance of a plant trying to escape from the greenhouse. Cody’s not sure if it’s one of the poisonous ones, but it’s definitely one of the plants with teeth, so he just watches its long, agonizing wriggle through the catflap and away into the forest with a deeply unsettled frown.
This holiday is a good thing, Cody tries to convince himself. He finally has the privacy to relax and do what he wants. Maybe jack off and watch some porn. The witch’s TV must surely have some interesting x-rated channels in the tens of thousands that it receives. The porn turns out to be unnecessary; he just lies on the couch and thinks about Obi-Wan licking his own cum off Cody’s fingers. His climax leaves him unsatisfied and lonely, and he doesn’t bother again.
But even if he’s alone, at least he can sleep, Cody tells himself. He’s come to enjoy the lack of traffic outside, the soothing tip-tapping of rain on the skylight in the bedroom in its place. He’s also come to enjoy Obi-Wan’s body warmth next to him, he realizes. He misses the weight of an arm or leg slung over him every night. He gives up and starts using the witch’s pillow after catching himself sniffing it wistfully one too many times. The smell of shampoo and beard oil that clings to it is comforting enough to lull Cody to sleep.
He tries calling Wolffe, one night, but his older brother can’t talk for long. He’s lost two men that week; the fighting in Geonosis has been heavy, recently, and a small, selfish part of Cody wishes he hadn’t called at all, more anxious over Wolffe’s wellbeing than he was before and just as lonely.
Six days after he left, Obi-Wan returns smelling of moss and rain, his coven robes caked in several different layers of dirt and grime. His hair seems to be matted down with algae, of all things.
Cody pulls him into a hug anyway. “Welcome home.”
“Darling, I’m getting mud all over you,” the witch laughs into his neck. “You can’t have missed me that much.”
“I did,” Cody tells him fiercely, too relieved to have him home to be self-conscious about it. “I missed you.”
The witch draws back, giving him an odd look, searching for something in Cody’s expression. He must find it, whatever he’s looking for - he blesses the other man with a fond smile. It’s quickly replaced by mischief.
“Well, you can come help me scrape all this gunk off in the shower, then,” he says, giving Cody’s cheek a self-satisfied little pat pat and then wandering to the bathroom, a trail of gritty, brown footprints marking his path.
Cody doesn’t even mind.
30.
It takes just over twelve months to make bacta.
It takes a little under four of them for Cody to fall in love.
31.
These are the things Cody knows about Obi-Wan, after four months living with the witch:
Obi-Wan is thirty-five years old. He carries himself with the drama and gravitas of a silent movie star.
Obi-Wan still gets embarrassed whenever Cody catches him singing in the greenhouse, but that doesn’t stop him from doing it when he thinks he’s alone. He manages to coax the witch into telling him about the songs; the language is Stewjoni - Obi-Wan was apparently born and raised overseas - and they are indeed lullabies. Cody asks him to translate one. The lyrics are about skinning a crow. He makes a mental note to never ask the witch to babysit.
Obi-Wan often forgets to drink and eat. He gets overly wrapped up in his books and potions, sometimes not coming to bed until dawn is already creeping over the horizon. When he complains about this to Ponds, his brothers start sending Cody home with leftovers. Obi-Wan eats the portions Cody serves him with an ease that leads the younger man to believe the witch is familiar with Mandalorian spices.
Obi-Wan loves Anakin beyond reason. But he will never, ever stop greeting him with sandwiches. There is always bread in the house for this reason alone.
Obi-Wan’s nails are naturally black, actually. The pink when he goes out is a glamor.
Obi-Wan comes to bed in his fox skin, now and then, burrowing under the covers with his cold, wet nose and curling up under Cody’s chin. He’s very soft, and very cute in this form, fur the same almost-ginger brown as his hair is when he’s a witch. Cody asks what it’s like, being a fox. Obi-Wan thinks about it for a long time, and then says simply, “big.” The world is very big, and he is very small. It sounds nice, Cody thinks.
Obi-Wan disguises himself in blues, browns and grays among humans - he thinks they’ll be put off by a lack of color. He likes his dark loungewear for home best; his more formal black robes are for official witch business only. Cody tries to explain to him multiple times what goths are. He doesn’t get it.
32.
(There are also things that Cody knows about Obi-Wan, now, that he will never share with anybody else:
The way that Obi-Wan seeks the warmth of Cody’s body out when he’s asleep. The way he presses his cold nose into Cody’s skin at night. The way that he gasps and moans differently, depending on whether Cody’s cock is in his cunt or in his ass - long and decadent, and high-pitched and whining, respectively. The way sweat looks beaded along his spine when Cody takes him from behind. The way he comes home from new moon coven meetings twitchy and strung out on magic, reaching for Cody with something bordering on desperation. The way his irises glow like moonlight when he climaxes sometimes.
The way he smiles at Cody afterwards, sleepy and sated and oh so smug. The feel of his sharp, inky nails carding through Cody’s hair. The way he likes to lie on top of Cody when they’re in bed, but always pulls Cody on top of him when they’re on the couch watching TV. The sound of his heartbeat under Cody’s ear.
The way that he looks at Cody sometimes, achingly fond, and for a moment - just a moment - he can fool himself into believing the witch might love him too.)
33.
On a rare night when Cody has successfully wrestled the TV remote away from the witch, fed-up with haunted houses, Obi-Wan suddenly sits up straight on the couch, alert as a predator.
“You okay?” Cody asks suspiciously. He doesn’t trust this not to be another ploy for the remote.
“Anakin is coming,” Obi-Wan announces softly, frowning into the middle distance at something only he can see.
“Oh,” Cody relaxes. The witch doesn’t move. “...Aren’t you going to do your sandwich thing tonight?”
“He’s upset,” says Obi-Wan, the line between his brows deepening. The witch shakes himself out of his stupor, turning to Cody. “Would you mind making his sandwich for me, my dear? Something he’ll actually like. Peanut butter and jelly, I should think.”
“Yeah, why not,” shrugs Cody. He takes the remote with him to the kitchen, though, just in case. Obi-Wan stands too, waiting by the fireplace, and the spark of a portal opening up in the living room starts to crackle just as Cody opens up the bread. A moment later Anakin stumbles out of the glowing ring with splotchy cheeks and red-rimmed eyes.
“Come to Mother,” Obi-Wan says grandly, with all the drama of an aging drag queen. He throws his arms open widely and waits.
Anakin falls into them with his entire weight, sobbing wretchedly into Obi-Wan’s sweater - the older witch gives a little oof as he catches his former apprentice, stumbling back. Cody digs the jelly out, fairly certain he doesn’t want to get involved in this meltdown. Whatever Anakin is crying about, his words are too muffled against his mentor’s shoulder to eavesdrop on.
“Oh, darling,” Obi-Wan sighs, rocking the boy from side to side, “Padmé is allowed to have other friends, you know? This jealousy isn’t healthy.”
Anakin sobs belligerently.
“No, Anakin, you can’t poison Clovis, someone’s bound to notice.”
A smaller, more petulant, and very nasal sob.
“...Alright, maybe just a little poisoning,” Obi-Wan reconsiders. “Just a very small one.”
“O-kay, I’m going to bed before I become an accomplice,” Cody announces. He walks over to the pair of witches, plated sandwich in hand. “Here, kid, get some blood sugar in you before you do something illegal.”
“Thangks Gody,” Anakin sniffles wetly, emerging from Obi-Wan’s sweater to accept the plate with streaming eyes. Cody gives him an awkward nod, throwing the remote down on the couch as he goes - he gives it one last regretful glance, considering whether he can kick the witches out instead, and then decides that might be uncharitable given the hysterics Anakin is in. The last thing he hears before he closes the bedroom door is the younger witch saying, “What the hell?? Why don’t you ever make me sandwiches this good?”
Obi-Wan stays in the living room with Anakin for a very long time, that night. Cody lies awake and stares up at the skylight, unable to get to sleep. It’s not that the witches are being noisy - except for one instance of Anakin raising his voice angrily and Obi-Wan immediately hissing a shhh at him. It’s just that…
It’s just that the event has given him an odd bout of homesickness. He traces his thoughts, trying to work out where it came from, and keeps coming back to the image of Cody’s witch throwing open his arms, swinging his younger brother comfortingly. It makes Cody miss his brothers. He misses doing the same for them, even if he doesn’t particularly miss the snot that gets all over his clothes.
But, strangely, there’s another, new ache in him alongside those thoughts. He wants Obi-Wan to be comforting his younger brothers. He wants the witch at home in Tipoca, with the rest of his family. He wants his family to welcome Obi-Wan the same way they do for Aayla and Boil and Riyo. Cody’s life is so neatly separated in two right now; Obi-Wan and Fetts, never the twain shall meet, etcetera.
He lies there and considers how to change this.
He thinks he’s got it by the time he hears the snap of a portal closing.
Obi-Wan frowns when he comes in and sees Cody turning his head towards the door. “You’re still awake? I’m so sorry, Cody, if I had known we’d been keeping you up-”
“Wasn’t you,” Cody waves him off. “Just. Thinking, you know.”
“I talked him out of the poisoning, if that’s what you’ve been lying here worrying about,” Obi-Wan calls from the bathroom. “Honestly, if he’d just ask that girl out properly, I’m sure she’d accept. There’s really no need for these histrionics.”
Cody snorts. He waits until the witch has settled down under the covers next to him before he turns over to face him.
“Hey,” he says softly, “do you want to come to a party with me?”
Obi-Wan responds with a wry smile, amused. “Am I going to be a magician for one of your little brothers? I’m afraid my rate for birthday parties is quite extortionate.”
“No, but I’ll keep that in mind next time Wrecker’s birthday rolls around,” Cody chuckles. “It’s my aunt Arla’s birthday soon. We usually make a thing of it, if she’s in town. Bly and Ponds set up a buffet in the restaurant for us. Everyone invites some friends and loved ones along. Was wondering if you’d join me for it.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan breathes. “I mean…your father wouldn’t mind having me there? The last time I saw him, I was demanding one of his sons warm my bed for a year.”
“I cleared up the misunderstanding,” he reassures the witch. “You’ll be welcome. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Well,” Obi-Wan says, hiding a very different smile behind his mustache, shy and pleased, “if you really want me there, I suppose I might be free.”
34.
Obi-Wan goes through three different outfit changes on the morning of Arla’s birthday party, until Cody finally gets fed up with his fretting and tells him to just wear black. It’s clearly what the witch is most comfortable in, but Obi-Wan insists that he’ll scare the children. Cody bets him actual goddamn money that Fox turns up in a black suit and tie, for the last time, black isn’t exclusive to witches, Obi-Wan, and they finally compromise on a black cardigan, a crisp white shirt buttoned up to the neck and some dark gray jeans twenty minutes after they were supposed to have left the house.
They take the car into Tipoca City, which Obi-Wan also doesn’t enjoy. He tells Cody that cars give him flashbacks to Anakin’s teenage years, but the human isn’t sure if the witch is going green because he’s carsick, or because he’s nervous about the party.
The Concordia Café is already heaving with guests when they arrive, the youngest kids running underfoot and somehow high on sugar despite the fact that Bly won’t be bringing out dessert for another hour. Cody’s adult brothers greet the two of them with enthusiasm, ushering them to the drinks table, where he can take a proper look around at who’s here - Boil is being transformed against his will into a human climbing frame for Jesse and Howzer, Aayla is helping her fiancé lay out canapés with Ponds, and Riyo is by the windows with-
Fox is wearing the goddamn suit and tie. Cody points at his older brother and raises his eyebrows meaningfully at Obi-Wan, making the universal gesture of pay up, bitch. The witch rolls his eyes and summons his wallet.
Some of those Mandalorian ba’buirs that keep descending on the restaurant like locusts have made it onto the guest list - Rex is skittering around the edges of the room warily, hands up and ready to defend his cheeks from pinches. Some fool has also allowed Fives and Echo to invite their friends Hevy and Cutup to the party, so Cody makes a mental note to avoid the punch. There will be hot sauce in it within the hour, if it hasn’t been spiked already.
He spots his aunt talking to one of the ba’buirs, sitting at a table and looking tired already. The Mandalorian women must be friends of hers. Arla is…delicate perhaps isn’t the right word; she’s as broad and stocky as her younger brother, with a long, wild mane of white-blond hair. But she’s had a difficult life - she’s been in and out of institutions over the years, plagued with periods of manic highs and terrible lows, made worse by the awful and frequently abusive men she used to latch on to. She’s a less tempting target for them these days, with thirty-one nephews ready to come to her aid, the grown-up Fett boys a threat in their own right.
“Happy birthday, Ba’vodu,” Cody greets Arla kindly, dipping his head to give her a traditional Mandalorian forehead bump.
“Kot’ika,” she smiles at him, crows feet deepening around her eyes. She looks better than she has in the past, he thinks. Happier. “And this must be your famous witch, eh?”
“Obi-Wan, this is my aunt Arla. Arla, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he introduces them. The witch gives her a polite but cautious nod of greeting. She laughs with the same booming chortle that Jango does, tugging Obi-Wan into a bruising Keldabe kiss. He rubs at his forehead with a wince once she releases him.
“Glad to have you with us today,” she tells the witch. “Little Kote here has been treating you well?”
“He’s a perfect gentleman,” Obi-Wan agrees, smiling wryly at Cody.
“Hope you’ve brought me a beauty potion for my birthday,” she grins, tucking her arm into Obi-Wan’s.
“Why, madam, whatever for?” the witch flatters her, tipping his head to the side with feigned confusion, and Arla bellows with laughter.
Cody gets roped into moving tables around, so he leaves the two of them to gossip, certain that Obi-Wan is going to come away from the conversation with several embarrassing stories about his childhood but willing to make that sacrifice if it keeps a smile on Arla’s face.
One chore turns into a chain reaction of them, though, as they always do - now that the tables have been moved, the chairs need to go with them. He gets bullied into taking Wooley upstairs to use the bathroom, because the kid refuses to use his potty down in the restaurant for reasons only known to the toddler, and then Bacara follows after them and swaps Wooley for Tup, begging Cody to give the baby a new diaper. This is his least favorite part of being an older brother, Cody thinks sourly to himself, booking it back to the party with Tup on his hip before anyone else needs changing.
Downstairs, he’s pulled aside by Monnk to meet his friend Kit, the captain of the scuba diving team his younger brother accompanies on research missions every summer. They very enthusiastically explain their cave diving plans in Scarif this year to him, while Cody smiles politely and tries not to grimace - the thought of being underwater in a dark cave hundreds of meters deep with nothing but a torch and an oxygen tank makes him want to shudder.
He then suffers through at least three excruciating rounds of small talk about just how much he resembles Jango with the ba’buirs, before the man himself waves Cody over, insisting that his son say hello to his old friend Zam Wesell.
It’s at least half an hour later before he gets a chance to find Obi-Wan again.
He spots him standing in the middle of the room looking poleaxed. Someone has put Boba in the witch’s arms. The baby seems confused by this development, squinting up at the strange adult holding him with suspicion. Cody hurries over to them, feeling guilty for abandoning the witch for so long.
“Cody,” Obi-Wan says, completely devastated, “Cody look at him. Look how tiny his fingers are!”
“I’m aware,” Cody replies, bemused. He gestures expansively to the brothers in the room around him. “You might not believe this, but I’ve seen a few chubby baby hands in my time.”
“I want one,” the witch says, staring down at the baby with a worrying amount of intensity. Boba starts to squirm nervously with a prescience that will serve him well in life.
“Buir might sell him to you if you ask nicely,” Cody suggests. “He’s got enough of us.” He plucks Boba from the witch’s arms before the baby can start to cry, giving him a little bounce.
“Better not,” Obi-Wan sighs sadly, eyes following after Boba with barely disguised longing, “he keeps glancing over at me like I’m planning to summon Satan in his kitchen.”
“Is that…something you can do?” Waxer interrupts from nearby. He and Boil peer at the witch with interest.
“Oh, I’m really not important enough that he’d take my calls,” Obi-Wan demurs with his usual sincerity. Cody shakes his head and goes to quickly find someone else to pawn Boba off on.
Rex intercepts him, making grabby hands. “Give. I need this child to shield me from pinches,” he insists. “His fat cheeks are gonna take the fall for me, yes they are, yes they are, isn’t that right, little man?”
Cody hands Boba over warily. “Don’t let the ba’buirs make him cry.”
“Him cry? What about me? My face is going to be bruised for weeks,” Rex complains.
“Yes, my condolences on being the pretty one,” Cody oozes with sarcasm. “Such a hard life you have.”
Rex smirks and mimes flipping long hair over his shoulder he definitely doesn’t have - his blond curls are buzzed down even shorter than Cody’s. The older Fett chuckles, intending to go back to Obi-Wan - he should really introduce him to all of his brothers properly - but when he turns around, Aayla and Riyo have intercepted the witch and are herding the surprised man towards the buffet tables with an insistence that makes Cody suspicious.
He’s right to be paranoid; a heavy hand suddenly lands on his shoulder, digging into the meat of it hard.
“No, come on, I haven’t even had a damn canapé yet,” he protests weakly.
“I require a smoke before the twins give me an aneurysm,” Fox announces, steering Cody in the direction of the emergency exit through the kitchen. “You will join me.”
“Think the cigarettes will cause an aneurysm before they do, buddy,” Cody grumbles, unsuccessfully trying to squirm out of his brother’s iron hold.
Fox turns him to the right, shoving the younger Fett roughly up against the brick wall of the apartment building by the dumpsters. “Then it’s a good thing I quit last month,” he sneers menacingly, and- oh goddamnit.
“For fuck’s- is this an intervention? Really? Today??” Cody throws his hands up. “Fine, let’s get this over with quickly. What are we intervening?”
“You’ve fallen in love with him, you stupid motherfucker,” Fox accuses.
“What,” Cody snaps impatiently.
“Don’t play dumb. The witch. I have caught you making soppy eyes at him on three separate occasions today. It’s revolting. But more importantly, it’s a fucking terrible idea,” Fox rants, releasing Cody’s shoulders so he can pace up and down the length of the dumpsters. “You’re only there for the potion, Kote. He’s kicking you to the curb after this! So help me god, you better tell me you know what you’re doing here, or I’ll-”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Cody interrupts blandly. It stops Fox in his tracks. “So? You’ll what?”
His oldest brother stares at him for a long moment, face screwed up in a complicated expression. “I’ll tell my baby brother he’s going to get his heart broken,” he says, unusually soft. He leans against the wall next to Cody, sighing. “And then I guess I’ll let him go do just that.”
“Now who’s revolting?” Cody jokes weakly, nudging his side with an elbow. His older brother starts to dig through his suit pockets, coming up with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. “Hey, no, you don’t need to do that-”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Fox growls, lighting up. He breathes the smoke out through his nose like an angry dragon. “I lied. These things are a fucking bitch to quit.” He takes another frustrated drag, before grumpily adding, “But Riyo wants me to try.”
“Yeah,” says Cody quietly. “That’s love, huh?”
Fox snorts. “That’s love.”
They stand there together in the grubby alleyway while he finishes his cigarette.
“Hey,” Fox says suddenly, “you think you’ve got a chance with him? For real?”
Cody shrugs. “Dunno.” He hesitates, briefly weighing the pros and cons of confessing his thoughts to Fox, of all people…ah, why the hell not. “Sometimes he…he treats me like we’re already together, I guess? The potion doesn’t need that. Does it make the sex easier for him, that way? Does he really feel something for me? Or am I just kidding myself here?” He shakes his head. “I can’t work it out.”
“Fucked up,” Fox grunts.
The emergency door swings open noisily, Bly’s head poking out after it. “Hey, shitheads! You better not be skipping out on my cake, I spent hours on this thing. Get back in here, I’m serving it in ten minutes.”
“Arla’s cake,” Cody corrects. Fox stamps out his smoke on the ground, swinging a comforting arm over his younger brother’s shoulder as they walk back in.
Spotting Obi-Wan in the crowd is easy, this time - he’s making little sparks of light and magic with his hands for the youngest kids. Crosshair looks deeply skeptical over the whole thing, peering around the witch to try and figure out how he does it, but Wrecker is about to lose his tiny little mind. The tableau brings a soft, secret smile to Cody’s face. Fox lets go of him with a retch, punching Cody in the arm hard for good measure.
His yelp of pain gets the witch’s attention - Obi-Wan turns towards the noise, and, spotting Cody, he brightens with a warm smile of his own, blooming over his face like a flower in the sun.
It’s a good day, overall.
35.
It’s a fucking terrible day.
He punctures a tire on his way in to the city. He’s already used the spare that came with his shitty old car, so Cody has to call a repair truck. Then Gree gets pissy at him for being late to his shift at the laundrette, where several more people get pissy at him afterwards when the coin exchange breaks - he’s happy to break their notes manually, but god forbid they have to speak to a human being. Later, he gets pulled aside by one of the kindergarten teachers when he picks the children up; both Tech and Crosshair keep upsetting the other kids. He tries to explain to the teacher that they suspect Tech might be autistic, it’s expected that he might struggle with social cues. She gets a pinched look on her face and suggests they have Crosshair looked at too - the boy has a remarkable lack of tact that frequently ends with his classmates in tears.
Cody tries to bring this up with him in the car. Crosshair insists that it’s not his fault they’re all stupid babies who can’t do anything without their mommy there to hold their hand. Cody frowns and ponders whether a lack of maternal figures in Crosshair’s life is to blame here.
Things settle down until dinner, when an enormous group of businessmen in town for a convention spills into the Café. They complain endlessly. The food is too spicy, the orders are wrong, the drinks aren’t strong enough. Privately, Cody wonders why the fuck they came to a Mandalorian restaurant if they can't handle heat - the cuisine of his ancestral homeland is nothing but spice.
And then, just when Cody thinks his bad day is over, he has the mother of all fights with Rex. He leaves the restaurant with the door slammed behind him.
Cody pulls over by the side of the road on his way home, pressing his forehead to the steering wheel and just breathing, very deeply, for several long minutes. He doesn’t want to take this rage home with him. Obi-Wan doesn’t deserve that. He thinks of the witch’s sunshine smile, and the anger falls to a low simmer. By the time he’s lifted his head, Cody is filled with nothing but bone-deep exhaustion.
When he finally gets home, though, he finds Obi-Wan outside, sitting on the front step. There’s a lit cigarette in his hand; he doesn’t look up at Cody’s car when it pulls into his driveway. The witch just sits, statue still, scowling faintly into the middle distance.
“Since when do you smoke??” Cody calls, shutting the car door behind him with a frown. He hasn’t seen a single cigarette in the house since he moved in.
Obi-Wan huffs out a frustrated cloud of smoke, glancing up at him under his furrowed eyebrows. “Only when I’m in a foul mood,” he admits.
Settling down on the step next to him with a grunt, Cody sighs, looking up at the stars doing their best to peek around the clouds. “Bad day too, huh?” he says. The witch peers at him curiously, waiting for him to elaborate. Cody waves him off. “No, no. You go first.”
Obi-Wan makes a tetchy sort of hum, finishing off his smoke while he gathers his thoughts. Finally, he draws himself up primly, and throws his cigarette away with an irritable flick.
“Anakin Skywalker,” he announces grandly, “has eloped with Padmé Amidala Naberrie.”
“…Wait,” Cody squints, “that politician he was pining over? Didn’t they only get together- what, three weeks ago now, was it?”
“Exactly!” Obi-Wan throws his arms up in outrage. “If he’s going to do something this stupid the least he could have done is invite me along. My own apprentice, Cody, and he doesn’t even ask me to the wedding!”
“Little brothers, huh?” he commiserates.
“Little brothers,” Obi-Wan agrees in a grumble. He tips to the side suddenly, head landing heavily on Cody’s shoulder. He sighs out an aggrieved gust of breath that tickles the skin of the human’s arm, leaving goosebumps behind it. “Though I seem to be a parent more often than not.”
“You’re telling me,” Cody snorts. He’s very proud of himself for not getting distracted by the smell of the witch’s hair so near to him (tea tree oil and thyme today).
“So?” Obi-Wan prompts, looking up at him expectantly. “Which little brother?”
“Rex,” Cody mutters unhappily.
“That’s unusual. I thought he was your favorite.”
Cody jabs at him playfully with an elbow, but the damn witch squirms out of the way like he can sense it coming. “I told you I don’t have favorites.”
“Yes, yes, you’re a fair and benevolent big brother,” Obi-Wan agrees. He retakes his place on Cody’s shoulder.
“We had a fight,” Cody admits quietly. “He was talking about quitting his evening classes. Said he’d just keep working in the family restaurant instead, maybe help look after the kids a little more, take after me.” He snorts and shakes his head. “I told him he was a fucking idiot. Told him not to waste his life like me.”
Obi-Wan frowns. “You regret staying with the family to look after your brothers?”
“No,” Cody corrects him hurriedly, “no, it’s- I don’t regret that. I’m good at it, at keeping the family organized and in one piece, I know I am. I even kind of enjoy it.” He looks up at the night sky, considering how to phrase it best. “I guess I just regret that I never had any big ambitions of my own. I tried the army just because Wolffe did. I helped Buir open up the restaurant and the laundrette, but only because we needed them to keep all the kids fed and clean and paid for. I just want Rex to have something outside the family, for himself.” He huffs, self-deprecating. “Guess I didn’t phrase it that well to him, though.”
He feels Obi-Wan’s hum vibrate through his arm. “It’s not a bad thing, to be without ambition,” he tells Cody. “I, for example, am a perfectly mediocre potion seller, and I shall be content to leave the big, flashy spells to Anakin until the day I die. So long as I’m happy, that’s enough.”
“Are you?” Cody asks. “Happy?”
“I’d be happier if my hellspawn of an apprentice had invited me to his damn wedding,” the witch snaps, but there’s amusement twinkling in his eyes now. “Rex would never. See what a good boy your brother is compared to mine!”
“You could always marry me,” Cody blurts out of nowhere. Fuck. Idiot. He rushes to add, “you know, for- revenge, or whatever.”
Obi-Wan barks with laughter. His heart sinks with disappointment. Is the thought of marrying him so ludicrous?
“Darling,” Obi-Wan says patiently, “if I didn’t give you a diamond ring and a full black tie event, your brothers would hunt me down for sport. They’d never let us get away with eloping.”
Oh.
He’s glad the witch’s head is still pressed up against his shoulder; like this, he can’t see the stupid, giddy smile that wobbles across Cody’s face. They sit quietly together for a while longer; eventually Obi-Wan lights another cigarette, and Cody pulls out his phone, drafting an apology to Rex.
“So, what, did Anakin knock her up or something?” Cody wonders out loud.
The witch slaps a hand over his mouth with a squawk of outrage. “Do not speak of such things, you’ll curse it into existence!!”
36.
On the night of their seventh full moon together, Cody doesn’t follow Obi-Wan into the potion room. It’s been a sticky, humid evening, the last gasp of summer in Kamino; he lies in bed and just breathes, heart still racing and skin tacky with sweat all over, and tries to work out why, months later, sex with the witch still feels like a religious experience every time.
Obi-Wan stumbles back into the bedroom on wobbly legs looking supremely well-fucked, with his hair sticking up at odd angles and love bites beginning to bloom into bruises along his shoulders. He flops down face first into bed with an uncharacteristic lack of grace. Cody snorts.
“Bacta all good?” he asks, still a little breathless.
The witch says mmff, which he takes to be positive news. Obi-Wan twists his head to the side to crack open one bleary blue eye, smirking tiredly. “As much as I appreciate the…thoroughness that you see to me with, my darling, it does make having to do the spell afterwards particularly exhausting.”
Cody scoffs. “Well I do apologize, your majesty,” he says, in a bad imitation of the witch’s accent.
Obi-Wan laughs and swats at him. “Do it better,” he demands, and then blatantly lies, “this isn’t even my real accent, it’s all an act. Come on, if I can fake it, you can too.”
“One shall endeavour to fuck with less vigour,” Cody informs him as snootily as he can manage. The witch laughs so hard it turns into genuine cackles, rolling onto his back, the better to clutch at his sides.
Cody grins at him and thinks, I love you, god I love you.
It’s too hot to sleep, too humid to move - when his chuckles die down, Obi-Wan makes a vague promise to use his magic to cool the room once he’s got his energy back - so they just lie there, staring up at the full moon passing over the skylight.
On the bedside table, Cody’s phone vibrates with an incoming call.
The witch twists his head to peer over at it curiously. Cody groans, feeling too sticky and sated to reach over him. If it’s important, they’ll call back. Eventually the vibrations stop, presumably going to voicemail.
It immediately starts to ring again. Cody frowns.
“Fine, give it here,” he grumbles, flapping a hand at Obi-Wan. The witch passes it over - the screen says it’s Rex. Cody taps at it, smushing the phone against his face. “Rex? You okay?”
“Cody,” Rex chokes, and the panic in his voice has the older Fett sitting up in bed immediately, ice lancing down his spine. “Cody, it’s Wolffe - he’s on a plane home right now, they’re taking him to the military hospital in the capital.”
“What?” Cody’s tongue feels like lead in his mouth. He gets out of bed on auto-pilot, struggling into his underwear one-handed. “What the fuck happened?”
“I don’t know, something about - an attack on an embassy building, they said? I don’t know if he got caught in the explosion, or if the building collapsed on him, or what, but- but Cody, fuck, we’re all going down there now. If we start driving in the next hour we might get there by the time the plane arrives. I know it’s the full moon, but-”
“Fuck the full moon,” Cody snaps, “text me the address, I’m coming.”
He hangs up, hurriedly pulling on whatever clothes he can find. “I’ve got to go,” he tells Obi-Wan, voice trembling, “it’s- fuck, where’s my- it’s Wolffe, he’s been hurt, I’ve got to-”
“Cody, wait,” Obi-Wan says, getting up from the bed with his hands held out placatingly.
“There’s no time, Rex said he-”
“Cody-”
“-I’ll be back tomorrow, I’ve got to get over to Kamino Capital now, I need to-”
“Cody,” the witch’s voice booms, echoing all around his skull, and Cody’s body freezes in place like he’s been turned to stone. He can’t even move his head to blink at Obi-Wan in shock.
The witch walks into his field of view, hands gently cupping Cody’s cheeks. “Dearest,” Obi-Wan says soothingly, very calmly, “I can get you there in the next twenty minutes.”
The hold over his muscles releases abruptly, and Cody stumbles in place. “What?” he rasps.
“I’m coming with you,” Obi-Wan says, in a tone brooking no argument. He starts to dig through his wardrobe for clean clothes. “I can help. We’ll use a portal, the same way Anakin does when he comes to visit. If you can tell me where the hospital is, I can get us within a mile of it.”
“You- really? A mile?”
Obi-Wan rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. “Yes. Now first of all, we’re both disgusting. We absolutely stink of sex. Stand still.” He takes a deep breath, using both hands to make a sigil in the air and muttering sounds Cody can’t distinguish under his breath. There’s an abrupt, fragrant gust of wind; it takes the sweat and cum clinging to his body with it, leaving Cody feeling dry and shower-clean.
“Alright,” Obi-Wan nods to himself, “put on something else - fresh clothes, please, I don’t have the energy for a laundry spell too.” Cody scrambles to obey while the witch shimmies inelegantly into the tight gray jeans and teal sweater he pulled out earlier.
Once Cody’s in his own blue jeans and his favorite orange and white hoodie, Obi-Wan instructs him to find the exact address while he gets some bacta from the refrigerator.
“Bacta- what? Why are you bringing bacta?” Cody frowns, tapping at his phone impatiently while he waits for Rex to text him back.
The witch gives him an odd look. “Have I really never told you what it does?”
He shakes his head.
Obi-Wan pulls out the quarter-gallon, plastic milk jug with DO NOT DRINK written on the side of it in sharpie from its home at the very back. “Well,” he says, “this seems as good a night as any to demonstrate it then, hm?”
The witch sets the jug on the kitchen counter. Then, he summons a kitchen knife, and stabs it right through the center of his hand.
“What the FUCK,” Cody yelps, dropping his phone.
“Ow,” Obi-Wan winces, looking down at the large pool of blood forming on the counter critically. “Unscrew the lid of that for me, would you? Should have done that first, really.” He pulls the knife out of his hand with just as little fanfare, angling his palm away to keep the wound from spurting blood all over his clean clothes.
Cody obeys with shaking fingers. Obi-Wan takes the jug with his uninjured hand, surprisingly steady, and pours perhaps a quarter cup of its contents onto - into? - the wound.
Within a minute, the hole closes up. Within two, there’s not even a mark - just a lot of blood that needs to be cleaned off every kitchen surface.
“It’s a cure-all,” Obi-Wan explains patiently, screwing the lid back on tight. “That’s what makes it so valuable. Broken bones, cuts, bruises, burns…sometimes even missing fingers and toes if you’re fast enough. Bacta fixes all of it.”
Cody takes the witch’s cool hand between his own, examining it with wonder. The blood is certainly real enough, still wet and staining Cody’s skin red. “It’s not a trick?” he rasps past the sandpaper in his throat. “You- you want to use this on Wolffe?”
“Of course,” Obi-Wan says warmly. “Now, come on. The address?”
37.
Twenty-three minutes after Rex’s phone call, they tumble out of a portal into a bush, but it’s a decorative bush only thirty feet from the hospital entrance in a city four hours away from Tipoca by car, so Cody considers it a pretty fucking big success.
A nurse smoking by the revolving doors rubs at his eyes. Cody and Obi-Wan are still picking themselves out of the foliage when he opens them again. He throws his cigarette away, looking at the pair of them with a queasy expression, mumbling about sixteen hour shifts as he heads back inside. They follow after him in a run, crashing into the receptionist's desk.
“Oh jesus,” she says, “are you two okay? Do you need someone right away, or can I get you some paper towels while you wait?”
“What?” Cody squints at her. Then he looks down and notices that both of their hands are still covered with blood from Obi-Wan’s little demonstration with the kitchen knife. “Oh, right, no, don't worry about that. I’m here for Wolffe Fett, he’s on a plane here from Geonosis right now. Do you know what time it’s scheduled to land? Can you tell me anything about how he’s doing??”
The receptionist looks at the blood doubtfully. “Listen, I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m really not authorized to share that information-”
Obi-Wan nudges Cody aside. “You want to tell us what time Wolffe Fett’s plane is landing,” he tells her, with an odd weight to his voice.
“I want to tell you what time Wolffe Fett’s plane is landing,” she repeats slowly. She looks down at her computer, clicking around for a moment. “Flight 3636 is currently scheduled to land at 0320 hours,” she informs them in a monotone.
“You want to tell us the information you have on his condition,” the witch coaxes gently, waving his fingers in a deliberate motion.
“Sergeant Fett’s last reported condition at 2354 hours was critical but stable. Injuries sustained include multiple fractures, burns, internal bleeding, possible eye loss and a punctured lung,” the receptionist drones.
“You’ll come and get us when flight 3636 lands,” Obi-Wan says, never once blinking.
“I’ll come and get you when flight 3636 lands,” she repeats. Suddenly a sunny smile comes over her face. “Please, feel free to take a seat, gentlemen.”
“Thank you, my dear, you’ve been most helpful,” Obi-Wan replies pleasantly, turning around to do just that.
“What the hell was that?!” Cody hisses under his breath. They pick a pair of plastic, neon orange seats near the vending machines - they all look as uncomfortable as each other, really.
“A little Jedi coven specialty,” Obi-Wan tells him, settling the jug of bacta in his lap. “We call it a mind-trick.”
“Have you ever done that to me?” Cody asks with a frown.
“Only once,” the witch shrugs. He tips his head to the side curiously. “Just before we came here, remember? When I made you stop moving in the bedroom.”
“Huh,” Cody says, leaning back to look up at the ceiling. He regrets it immediately, squinting in the face of the harsh fluorescent strip-lights he finds there. The witch gets up and wanders in search of a bathroom, muttering about finding some paper towels for all the blood as he goes, so Cody pulls out his phone to update his brothers:
Cody (01:58) I’m at the hospital now
Cody (01:58) Wolffe hasn’t landed yet
Rex (02:01) ?!?!??
Cody (02:02) You better not be texting and driving
Rex (02:02) fox is driving rn
Rex (02:03) wtf do u mean ur at the hospital???
Cody snaps a quick, blurry photo of the reception desk as proof and sends it over.
Cody (02:04) Attachment: IMG2224.jpg
Cody (02:04) Living that witch life, baby
Rex (02:05) shit, bro
Rex (02:05) shoulda had kenobi pick us all up
Rex (02:08) fox is mad u beat him there
Cody (02:09) Tell him he can suck it
Cody (02:09) And to stop speeding
Rex (02:09) how the fuck
Cody (02:10) I know he’s doing it
Cody (02:10) I can feel it in my bones
The witch returns with wet-wipes, remarkably pleased with himself for the effort, until Cody asks why he didn’t just conjure something. Obi-Wan buries his face in his newly clean hands. He really is tired. It’s Cody’s fault, of course, he fucked all the sense out of him. Of course, Cody agrees, scrubbing the dried blood from his skin.
They sit there and wait, slumping into each other’s side. The witch watches doctors and nurses scurrying to and fro with a sort of exhausted interest - he’s never been in a human hospital before. He makes Cody tell him how the place works. It’s an obvious distraction tactic to keep his mind off Wolffe, but Cody goes along with it as best he can anyway, until eventually he concedes that Kix is really the better Fett to ask about all this, and they both go quiet as they wait.
Obi-Wan huffs a laugh from his left suddenly.
Cody blinks at him. “What is it?”
The witch smiles at him tiredly. “Nothing, just- thinking that only an hour ago you were busy trying to make me come. Strange how quickly things happen, hm?”
He manages a small, exhausted smirk for the witch. Strange indeed.
“Guess it’s a good thing Rex called me after we were already done, huh?” he chuckles weakly.
“Cody,” Obi-Wan says softly, eyes sad and sincere, “it wouldn’t have mattered if we missed the full moon. Not for this. I’m not going to hang you and your family out to dry, if something happens. It might take some effort, but I’m sure if I really needed to I could barter a few gallons of bacta off witches in other covens.”
Cody stares at the witch next to him and aches.
“I love you,” he confesses quietly. “I love you so much.”
It’s not where he’d have chosen to confess - at two in the morning in a military hospital waiting room, with searingly bright, fluorescent strip lights burning their eyes - but it escapes out of Cody like smoke anyway, and he can’t bring himself to regret it.
Obi-Wan’s breath hitches. “Because…I’d help you pay Ventress…?”
“No,” Cody shakes his head, and everything comes tumbling out of him all at once. “I love you because you sing to your plants. I love you because you keep bread in the house just for the chance to piss Anakin off. I love you because you stick your nose in my armpit to warm it up when you’re asleep at night, and it’s so cold, why is your nose always so cold?? I love that you always ask me about my day, I love that you’re genuinely interested in my answers, even though they’re so fucking boring, because all I do is parent kids that aren’t even mine. I love living with you, I love the smile you give me when I come home to you, and it’s going to hurt so, so much when this year is up and you tell me to go.”
“Don’t go,” Obi-Wan says quickly, grabbing both of Cody’s hands with his own, and it’s only now that he notices that the witch has forgotten to hide his black nails in his hurry to help. “Don’t go then. Don’t leave me.”
Cody’s throat clicks loudly as he swallows, mouth dry. “You mean…? You want me to-?”
Obi-Wan grabs blindly at his hoodie, pulling Cody forward into a kiss with a hurt, desperate sound. It’s not the best kiss they’ve ever had - Cody’s mouth is too dry, and the armrests of the plastic seats are digging into them uncomfortably, and they’re both too exhausted to do much more than tremble and clutch at each other pathetically.
It’s certainly a kiss Cody is going to remember, though.
38.
By the time 3:20AM rolls around, Obi-Wan is leaning heavily against Cody’s shoulder, the jug of bacta cradled in his arms. His head keeps dipping forward precariously as he fails to fight off sleep. He’s used a lot of magic tonight, and Cody regrets that he’s probably going to have to ask him to use a little more before it’s over.
The younger man is too anxious to even consider dozing. The adrenaline is still keeping him wide awake. He keeps looking between the clock, his phone and the receptionist, foot tapping impatiently as he waits for something to change. Wolffe’s plane should have landed by now, and even the warming thought of Obi-Wan begging him to stay after the potion is done can’t distract Cody now.
The witch’s head suddenly dips sharply. Then it snaps upright, and he stares at something only he can see, far in the distance.
“They’re taking him to the operating theater now,” he mumbles. Then he shakes his stupor off, scrubbing at his face roughly to try and wake himself up. It makes his beard fluff out. “Once more unto the breach, my dear.”
Cody frowns at him. “What? How do you-?”
“Mr. Fett?” someone calls. Cody looks around - there’s a doctor in pale, blue scrubs coming towards them. “Hi there, you’re Sergeant Fett’s brother, right?”
Cody stands, nodding at the doctor anxiously. He doesn’t bother with pleasantries, immediately asking her, “Is he here?”
“They landed about a quarter of an hour ago. They’ve already got him prepped for surgery, so we’re taking him straight to the OR. I’ll be able to update you in a few hours when-”
“You want to take us to the operating room,” Obi-Wan interrupts suddenly, doing that subtle wave of his hand again, blue eyes boring into the doctor’s own.
“I want to take you to the operating room,” she repeats, hypnotized, and turns on her heel without a word. They hurry after her.
“You’re absolutely sure about this?” Cody hisses anxiously at Obi-Wan. “You’re sure it won’t do more harm than good? We’re not even scrubbed up, what if we-”
“Cody,” Obi-Wan stops him calmly. “We’re on a time limit here. Bacta can only ever help, but it’s not going to do Wolffe any favors if he crashes out during surgery before we can get it to him.”
The doctor leads them down several long hallways and a corridor they’re definitely not supposed to be in before she stops, still and quiet, in front of a set of heavy doors, her eyes glassy and her expression blank. Cody’s hands start to shake with fear knowing that Wolffe is just one wall away.
The witch closes his eyes, taking a deep, shuddery breath. “One more spell,” he mutters to himself. “Come on, just one more.”
Then he throws open the doors, forming a complicated sigil in the air, and his voice rattles like thunder around the theater with a “Stop.” The surgeons and anesthetists all freeze in place the same way Cody did at home. The room is silent but for the beeping of all the monitors Wolffe is hooked up to, and Cody hurries in behind the witch, searching out his brother’s still form on the operating table, and it’s-
It’s-
It’s so much worse than Cody realized, he-
His face, he can see Wolffe’s teeth through his cheek, just ripped open and he-
Why is his leg- his arm isn’t meant to-
And- and Wolffe’s torso, it’s all the wrong shape, swollen and sunken and what’s wrong with his ribs, wrong, wrong, wrong-
An agonized sob rips out of Cody’s throat - he hears it from outside himself, turning away from the awful sight of Wolffe with a retch. He covers his mouth with a hand. He’s going to puke, he’s- he’s going to-
“Don’t look, sweetheart,” Obi-Wan’s voice calls from somewhere above him, sounding very far away. “You don’t need to look, it’s okay. I’m just going to give him the bacta, and then we can go.”
Cody squeezes his eyes shut. He hunkers down on his knees in a squat, rocking himself and waiting for it to all be over. The witch narrates his actions softly as he works. Cody tries not to throw up. “Alright, I’ve got his mouth open, nice and easy. Two cups - one more, now - there, see? He’s swallowed it all without a fuss, it’s all gone down. It’s okay, Cody.”
A cool hand presses against the back of his neck. “We’re all done,” Obi-Wan reassures him in a low murmur. “Do you think you can get up for me? I can’t hold this spell much longer, my darling - please, Cody? Can you get up?”
The tremble in the witch’s voice stirs something in him into stumbling to his feet. “There, wonderful, thank you,” Obi-Wan says with naked relief, “you can keep your eyes closed - come on, I’ll steer you out of here, alright? This way.”
He loses time, he thinks. He comes back to himself in the waiting room, sitting on another terrible plastic chair. The witch is on his knees in front of him, peering up at Cody with concern.
“Are you with me again, dearest?” Obi-Wan asks him. Cody nods at him slowly, and he slumps like all of his strings have been cut. “Okay,” Obi-Wan sighs, “okay, good, that’s- I’m so sorry, Cody, I can’t…I need to…”
Cody startles into alertness just in time to catch the witch before he tips onto his side on the floor. “Sorry,” he croaks out, “sorry. It’s okay, Obi-Wan. Go to sleep.” He hauls the witch up onto the chairs - it’s not much more comfortable, but better he lies across them than the dirty linoleum.
Obi-Wan smiles up at Cody gratefully, and falls into a dead sleep.
39.
Cody blinks awake with a startled snort at the sound of Fox’s voice.
He rubs the crust from his eyes - he must have nodded off at some point. His phone tells him it’s a little after six in the morning, and Obi-Wan hasn’t moved a muscle from where he’s sprawled over the chairs, Cody’s hoodie stuffed under his head. He’d put it there because his neck hurt just looking at the witch, but now he’s cold and shivery without it.
Standing and giving his arms a brisk rub to warm them up, he looks around, finding Rex and Fox arguing under their breath by the receptionist’s desk with Boost and Sinker clinging to their legs like much younger children than they are, looking as bleary as Cody feels. Wolffe’s little ducklings; of course they’d insist on coming. He can only pray that the bacta has done its work and they don’t have to see their older brother the way Cody did.
“Cody, tell this moron that the I-42 does not go to Kamino Capital,” Fox insists when he sees his younger brother shuffling towards them like a zombie. “It’s a fuckin’ miracle we got here at all.”
Rex scoffs. “Listen, are you seriously blaming me for this? We still got here before the others, didn’t we? Cody, back me up here. We were on diversion, there were roadworks-”
“Aren’t there more important things to worry about right now?” he interrupts irritably, mouth wooly with sleep still. He smacks his lips a few times, trying to clear the awful taste from it. Cody turns to the receptionist, ignoring the appropriately chagrined fools he shares DNA with - there’s a new woman sitting at the desk now, glancing between the brothers anxiously. “Excuse me, is there any news on Sergeant Wolffe Fett?”
“He’s out of surgery now,” she offers. “They’ve moved him down to the recovery ward.”
“What?” Fox frowns, looming unintentionally. “Not intensive care?”
“S’what it says here,” the receptionist shrugs, shrinking back into her seat. “I’ll…call the doctor in to update you, shall I?”
“Thank you,” Cody tells her sincerely, ushering his brothers away before they can cause any more of a fuss. He sits down heavily next to Obi-Wan, one hand tangling in the witch’s hair and the other pinching at the bridge of his nose. “Someone get me a fucking coffee before I pass out here, huh?”
“Looks like your witch already did,” Boost says, peering around Cody at the man out cold on his other side. Fox walks away to jab at the coffee machine, a moue of distaste on his lips at the options it provides him. He doesn’t voice his disdain aloud, which is a testament to how awful Cody must look.
Sitting across from them with Sinker still clinging to his shirt, Rex squints at Cody and Obi-Wan suspiciously. His eyes keep going from the empty milk jug with DO NOT DRINK still scrawled on its side to the witch and back again, but he doesn’t immediately say anything.
“Hey, you two,” Rex nudges Sinker, tipping his chin at Boost, “go get some hot chocolate, okay? You can tell Fox he’s paying.”
The teens look at each other nervously, but slide off the hard plastic chairs to go and cling to Fox instead. Rex takes the opportunity to sidle up next to Cody.
“You’ve done something,” he accuses under his breath.
“Yup,” Cody agrees, popping the ‘p’ obnoxiously, too tired to deny it.
“Cody,” Rex hisses anxiously.
“Listen,” he says, rolling his head to the side to glare at Rex tiredly. “You didn’t see Wolffe when he came in, alright? If this works, we’re going to owe Obi-Wan our first-borns. All of us. Whether he wants them or not, he’s having them.”
This does nothing to soothe Rex’s anxiety, but he shuts up about it, channeling his energy into jiggling one leg instead.
By the time a doctor comes to update them half an hour later, Jango has arrived with Kix, Ponds and Bly. Gree is on his way with Bacara and Stone in the back of his car, currently caught in the same byzantine road diversions that Rex and Fox only narrowly escaped, but Waxer and Gregor have stayed behind with Monnk to look after the kids. Cody’s father gives the sleeping witch an odd look - he lies and tells his Buir that teleporting the two of them wore Obi-Wan out.
The doctor that comes to talk to them seems this close to ordering a full investigation of staff working too many hours, because something has gone very wrong here - by the report they were given when Sergeant Fett was carted off the plane, he should still be in surgery, not sitting up groggily in bed asking where the fuck he is. He’s being uncooperative, she tells them. He keeps trying to pull out his IV. Behind the scenes, the doctors are quietly panicking, trying to work out whether the paperwork was just filled in incorrectly, or got mixed up, and there really is a patient bleeding out somewhere without their knowledge.
Rex glances over at Cody with his eyebrows raised accusingly. Cody very pointedly ignores him, cradling his third cup of coffee with the calm of one who has reached enlightenment. Guilt is for mortals. Wolffe is awake, and Cody has ascended to a higher plane through the aid of sleep deprivation, caffeine and adrenaline.
They can go and see Wolffe one at a time, the doctor says, on the condition they don’t rile him up any further. He’s already swearing like a sailor as it is. He’s supposed to be resting and sleeping off the anaesthetic, but he won’t fucking stay down. The Fetts unanimously vote to send Cody in first, mostly out of pity - he’s been here for hours now. Kix promises to keep an eye on Obi-Wan while he’s gone, so he follows the doctor down the winding labyrinth of wards.
He hears his older brother before he sees him, bellowing for a nurse to come and take this goddamn oxygen mask away. Cody pulls aside the curtains around Wolffe’s bed with his heart in his throat.
“Kot’ika?” Wolffe blinks at him, in the same gruff voice as ever, protests dying away. The nurses sigh in relief behind them. He stares up at Cody, bewildered. “Is that you, baby brother?”
He’s not perfect - he’s bruised all over, still a little blood-stained in places, an oxygen mask over his face and a cannula in his arm despite his best efforts to the contrary, but his limbs are no longer twisted at strange angles, all his bones set where they’re supposed to be. His torso is bare, and that spot under his ribs that had looked sickeningly mushy and sunken before is firm with muscle. There’s gauze wrapped over half of his face where he’s now missing an eye, the bacta too late to save it, but at least that half of his face is there and not hanging open like- like-
Cody chokes on a sob.
“Kote…?” Wolffe calls softly, opening his arms wide the same way Obi-Wan does for Anakin when he’s upset, and Cody falls into them and weeps and weeps, letting himself be the little brother just this once.
40.
He returns to the waiting room with red-rimmed eyes to let his father have his turn.
Cody kneels on the dirty floor next to the unconscious witch, and whispers broken thank yous into his hair, Rex’s hand a comforting weight on his back.
41.
Fox calls on his executive powers of big brotherhood to decide that Cody has had enough. He’s taking him and his witch back to Tipoca and he won’t accept no for an answer. Besides, he has a court case to argue this afternoon - now that he’s finished chewing Wolffe out for scaring him half to death, there’s no reason to postpone it.
Cody doesn’t protest. The witch can’t open any portals in this state, and he wants to get Obi-Wan into a proper bed, anyway. He deserves that much.
With the aid of some smelling salts Kix bargains off a nurse, they manage to rouse Obi-Wan just enough to get him to stumble out into the too-bright, morning light and the back of Fox’s car. He sleeps the whole way to his bungalow while Cody just about makes it through his brother’s hours-long rant on the gray hairs his family is responsible for.
They arrive home just before Cody would usually be heading to the laundrette for his shift, and Obi-Wan doesn’t quite wake up then, either, his eyes half open and drooping. He mumbles incoherent thanks to Fox for the ride, slipping into what might be Stewjoni, and leans most of his weight on Cody, who guides the witch into the house and straight to bed.
Cody pulls the clothes off both of them, allowing himself one circular patrol of their home before he crashes too. The bacta for Ventress is still simmering away. There’s blood all over the kitchen, but that can wait - it’s been there long enough that a few more hours won’t make any difference.
Cody crawls into bed, carefully tucking the covers around Obi-Wan. No sooner than he lies down does the witch ruin his work, sleepily shuffling closer in search of a warm place on Cody’s body to shove his cold nose. He presses it into Cody’s chest with a pleased hum.
“Love you, Cody,” Obi-Wan murmurs, grasping at him blindly. “My Cody.”
It shocks him awake. He gathers the witch close, one hand curled protectively over the crown of Obi-Wan’s head, eyes watering. “I love you too,” Cody chokes past the lump in his throat, knowing full well that his lover has already fallen back asleep. “I love you too.”
42. Epilogue.
Ventress arrives on the evening of the thirteenth full moon in an ostentatious puff of green smoke. She stands in the middle of the driveway and calls Obi-Wan’s name like she’s there to challenge him to a duel to the death, rather than collect her payment. The witch’s neighbors in the cul de sac don’t appreciate this, twitching their curtains nervously.
Thankfully, no bloodshed is needed. Obi-Wan emerges from behind the safety of his wards with two shopping bags, three one-gallon, plastic milk jugs filled with bacta in each of them. The jugs had been Cody’s contribution, rescued from the Fett family’s recycling - growing boys go through an awful lot of milk. It seemed a waste not to use them.
Ventress curls her mouth into a sneer at the method of delivery, but the contract has been duly fulfilled, so there’s nothing for her to do but announce their business concluded and disappear in a slightly less threatening cloud of ichor-green.
The curse is gone.
True to her word, no more baby boys have shown up on Jango’s doorstep over the last year, and no more ever will. Cody spins Obi-Wan around their kitchen in celebration, laughing and kissing his face all over.
Before the witch would agree to let Cody move in with him permanently, Obi-Wan had insisted on dragging his human before the elders of the Jedi coven to check that he hadn’t accidentally enchanted him. He’d forced Cody in front of a severe looking man he referred to as Master Windu and a little green goblin (what the fuck) more wrinkle than witch named Master Yoda.
The goblin had taken one look at Cody and delivered a brutal smack to Obi-Wan’s shin with his walking stick, telling the younger witch off for wasting his time. Windu wished their relationship well, and then calmly disintegrated into a cloud of purple smoke. Cody would have written the whole thing off as a fever dream were it not for the steadily yellowing bruise on Obi-Wan’s leg over the next week.
Now, reassured that he fell in love of his own volition, Obi-Wan has allowed Cody to quietly fold him into the family, joining the Fetts for Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the many, many birthdays spread over each month. Cody has gradually met more Jedi, too - he spent a memorable Halloween with the witch and his friends Quinlan and Bant, and in early February Anakin took an apprentice of his own, an adorable young girl named Ahsoka who Obi-Wan must of course serve sandwiches to as well.
Tonight, though, they celebrate the end of the curse in private.
The thirteenth full moon finds them in their favorite place - naked together in bed, Obi-Wan kneeled over Cody’s prone body while he gently fucks the witch open on two fingers.
“What do you think?” Cody grins up at him. “Shall we start a new batch of bacta?”
“No,” Obi-Wan groans immediately, “I want my cauldron back. As fun as this has all been, I’m bored of squatting over silver plates.”
“Hmm…just going to let my valuable spend go to waste now, are you?” Cody teases, curling his fingers with a stroking motion and his smile turning sly. “Just let it drip down your thighs?”
The witch shivers, squirming around the digits deep in his cunt. “Sounds- mmgh, good to me. I shall be delightfully sticky.”
He decides that Cody has teased him long enough, batting his human’s hand away so that he can reach back for his cock instead. Obi-Wan sinks down on it with a long, low groan, letting gravity do the work. This has been their favorite position for the last month - with Obi-Wan on top, the witch can circle his hips and grind down all he likes, and Cody can plant his feet flat on the bed and fuck up into him as hard as he can.
Obi-Wan throws out one hand, pressing down heavily on Cody’s sternum to keep his balance, riding the human bucking into his cunt like a rodeo bull. With his other hand he strokes his flushed cock, eyes fluttering closed at the twin sensations. He tries to bear down, but Cody wraps his hands firmly around the witch’s hips, keeping his position just right - high enough that Cody’s cock drags in and out of his slick pussy exquisitely, but not too far that he’ll keep slipping out.
Even now, over a year after their first night together, Cody looks up at Obi-Wan with awe; it still seems inconceivable that this strange, beautiful man decided to keep him, let alone return his feelings. There’s no need to enchant him - he falls a little more in love with Obi-Wan every day all on his own.
He watches the way his lover’s head falls back with pleasure, the long column of his throat bared; the way his eyelashes cast spidery shadows over his cheeks in the moonlight; the way the pink, shiny head of Obi-Wan’s cock disappears into each pump of his fist; the way their bodies join just behind it, Cody’s balls slapping up against his ass when they meet. The sight of the witch’s dripping pussy swallowing him up is always too much to bear, but he never learns his lesson, and once again the younger man feels his testicles draw up tight too soon for his liking.
Cody comes first with a blissed out moan, arching up to sheathe himself balls-deep. His cock throbs with every pulse of cum the witch’s body pulls from him, and Obi-Wan whines loudly at the feel of it, hot and thick and deep in his core. The Jedi keeps bouncing and grinding on Cody’s cock while his hand twists and pulls frantically at his own prick, desperately chasing his climax. His legs are trembling that tell-tale way they always do just before he comes, so Cody bites his lip past the overstimulation to keep thrusting up with a snarl, fucking the cum that oozes out of Obi-Wan back into him, fingers a bruise-tight grip around his thighs.
The witch stiffens on top of him suddenly, eyes burning with that eerie, moonlight glow.
“Sweetheart?” Cody quickly stills, wondering if he’s hurt him somehow. “You okay, baby?”
Obi-Wan continues staring into the distance, making a faint keening sound in the back of his throat. And then, just as abruptly, his eyes squeeze shut and he shudders all over, curling in on himself, and Cody feels him come, spending over the human’s chest. His walls clench erratically around his lover’s slowly softening cock, slick rushing from his cunt to join the mess Cody’s already made in there.
Cody reaches out with worried hands to cup his palms over the witch’s cheeks, dragging his thumbs soothingly through the soft beard there. When the witch’s eyes open again, blinking down at his human with heavy eyelids, the glow is gone.
“I’m okay,” Obi-Wan says, voice trembling, “I’m okay, my love, I’m okay.”
“I didn’t hurt you?” Cody asks, easing him off his spent cock.
“No, no, nothing like that,” the witch assures him with a smile, rolling onto the mattress next to Cody and sprawling out on his back with an exhausted sigh.
“But something,” the human says suspiciously, squinting at Obi-Wan. His lover hums, non-committal. They lie there together for a moment getting their breath back, moon shining down on them. The sweat beaded on Obi-Wan’s skin sparkles like dewdrops in the blue light - Cody gently traces a finger along his stomach, making a damp line through them down to the witch’s belly button.
“Cody,” Obi-Wan says very slowly, “what would you say to just…one more Fett?”
His head snaps towards the witch’s face fast enough to give himself whiplash. “What.”
“That contraceptive I made on the first moon,” he reminds Cody with a wince. “It was only meant to last for twelve of them. I didn’t expect you’d still- well, that you’d still be here. It completely slipped my mind that we might need another one. And I’m afraid to say you may have just…hit the bullseye, so to speak.”
Cody stares at him with wide eyes. “How do you know?” he asks.
“I saw her,” Obi-Wan says wistfully.
“Her?” Cody repeats, eyebrows climbing up his forehead. A daughter…?
“She’s not going to look a thing like me,” the witch tells him with a distant smile, “she’ll be a Fett through and through, with hair like moonlight, just like Rex and Arla. Tiny, tiny little fingers and toes, even smaller than Boba’s.”
“A witch?” Cody asks breathlessly.
“Not a strong one,” Obi-Wan says, “but yes. A natural with plants. She’ll take after me that way.”
Cody turns to stare up at the full moon with a quiet huh. A baby girl. A daughter. He’s had his fill of raising sons and he’s not even a father yet. But a little girl to share with his witch…a little family all his own?
“Maybe,” Cody swallows roughly, “maybe there don’t need to be any more Fetts.” The witch’s face starts to fall, so he hurries on quickly. “But maybe there’s room in my life for another Kenobi?”
Obi-Wan blinks at him with surprise. Then he starts to laugh.
“Oh, darling,” he says pityingly, “with that many uncles to dote on her, I don’t think we’ll have a choice in the matter. She'll be a Fett whether we like it or not.” He looks at the human with devastating hope in his blue eyes. “Does that mean…you might want to keep her…?”
“Well,” Cody replies, a grin spreading over his face uncontrollably, “what’s one more mouth to feed when you’re already feeding thirty-one?”