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Cody is a measured man. Born to a fast intelligence that lends itself to a pattern of decision making that while swift, is rarely wrong. Its a rare skill.
Many people think themselves to be competent decision makers when under pressure but most, are not and it is for that reason, that Cody has gotten to where he is today. He is alive, thanks to his own good decisions.
Against the odds, he lives and breathes as a grown man, he has a roof over his head and food in the cupboard and yet, he knows that however well it's served him up until now, he is not going to make the smart decision here. As he watches Obi Wan sleep, stretched over the sofa like so many times before, Cody knows he has no choice but to discard logic in favour of sentiment.
No matter what ideals Cody works to foster within himself, there will always be a layer of caution, of fear, coating his bones. Fear is dangerous, it can blind you to the consequences of your actions, it can blind you to the pain you load on to others.
Cody knows the cost of such a thing well. Because Cody, had been raised by a man who never quite took an eye away from his rear view mirror and in spite of his own many efforts, that's the kind of raising you can't ever quite leave behind.
No matter how far he walked, it dragged behind him all the same. A curling suspicion born not from Cody himself and so never quite his to touch or, to drop in pursuit of something better fitting. Placed there by some other hand, it had never quite sat at home within Cody and yet, remained there all the same.
Clinging to his very shadow but always just out of his grasp. He could reach for it and it would almost brush the pads of his reaching fingers. Yet, despite the alieness of the thing, its unclaimed nature, he could never quite walk away from it. Never left behind in the locked cabinet of his past, it followed him, always.
Up until now, this cloying remnant, had been overlooked. It had something of an influence no doubt, these things always do. And it was there through everything of course, a weight that could not be left behind, Cody carried it with him always. Every moment Cody lived, he lived alongside it, a shadow you can't quite see, just in the corner of your eye, a figure just out of the frame in every photograph. It was with him always and yet, it went quite unnoticed.
To carry something day in day out like that, it isn't a weightless burden and this shadow, was no small thing but it went unnoticeable in the light of him. Cody as a man, was more than the sins of his father. The burden he carried remained with him every hour of every day, but to look at him? You wouldn't see a thing. He simply outshone it, relegating his shadow and anything trailing within to some small insignificant thing. The thing in his shadow remained just, beyond notice. Cody simply eclipsed it.
And had anyone managed to see past the shining supernova that was the rest of him. Well, should they manage to look past all of that and still see, there, on a razors edge, the slightest remnant of a shadow and within it, the whisps of something else, well even if they got that far that thing would remain unrecognisable, untranslatable. And this is because, the thing that Cody had been hauling around all these years, at its root, was one of those things that you only recognise once you've Known it. So, it would remain unseen and unknown by everyone Cody had ever met. Right up until. Well.
Against his better nature, Obi Wan Kenobi knows a life spent looking behind and he knows it well. It went against all that he wanted to be, all that he strove to be, but had Obi Wan ever known Jango Fett, they would have found within each other, a common denominator. A string woven through each of their lives of the same shade.
For Cody, this represents a danger. To choose to love Obi Wan is the choice of a fool and Cody is no fool and yet, he'd do it again, he'd do it every time.
The substructure behind the blot on Cody's shadow, the shade he must drag behind him wherever he goes, is simple. To love is to know that someone must always leave first, and to live is to know that loss is something you'll never be able to outrun.
The man who would eventually age in to the man who would, thereabouts and with a certain unwillingness, raise Cody, knew loss intimately from a young age. He lost everyone he loved again and again and again. By the time Cody came round, he had hardened himself against love and any loss it might bring.
Jango refused to love because to love, is to open yourself up to loss. He maintained a void, a gaping maw, between himself and anyone who might inspire love. a valley formed first by the crack of grief and then painstakingly maintained through Cody's childhood.
Jango worked hard to avoid love for he knew that loss, was unavoidable. But, while he might have been able to distance himself from any further buy ins, he was unable to avoid the consequences of any love he had carelessly thrown about, unaware of the consequences, in a previous life.
Jango was constantly haunted by those he had once loved and by the grief that remained now they were too far gone to be loved. He felt them constantly, lined up behind him, judging his every action.
Jango's once gamble, to love and be loved, now dragged behind his every step. He had once loved and so, he had lost. Now, he knew to avoid the trappings of love, but he could only ever be too late, he had loved and he had lost them all. Jango once let himself love and thanks to that, he carries a spectral version of that love with him, always.
Jango, he keeps one eye, always, on his rearview. Lost but never forgotten. He couldn't save but one and now, he will never be free of them. They hate who he has become but they remain. They spit and curse at him, yet he still can't quite tear away his gaze, he loved them and so he is trapped.
The reward of those who leave first, is to never have to know the hurt of being left behind. The phantoms chained to Jango, know little of the heavy blow of loss that love opens one to.
They can therefore, never understand Jango's choice, to reject that. To those that were once loved by Jango, his refusal to love, is an anathema. The people in Jango's shadow recognise the man he is now, as nothing less than a monster. Every hour of every day Jango is followed by those who left him behind and every hour of every day they rip his back to shreds. He has willfully become a monster, a disgrace to their teachings.
The boy they loved and who loved them in turn, now denies that simple boon, to a child. A child with Jango's eyes.
Children need love to grow, and it's something that can be given freely. But this boy does not know that, the place in his life that might contain that love goes empty. A cold room in a dark cellar. The phantoms that follow Jango see this child a victim of a cruel man. He owes that boy love and yet he denies him, an aberration.
They make their displeasure known. They shriek and they howl and they claw at him. But Jango stays his course, even amongst rattling chains. He perseveres because their unrelenting presence, that only proves his course true.
There is a boy sat next to Jango, curled up around himself in the passenger seat. He does not know Jango's pain and he never will.
Jango will not chain him with love and so he will always be free and for Jango, that is a prize worth almost anything. Freedom, is rarely freely given. You have to bleed for a thing like that.
Jango may not love but he would do almost anything for this boy. Even if he might never say it, lest it be mistaken for something in the same beat as love. For his son, Jango would curse each and every shadow, act against every instinct all to save him from this fate, all to save him the trouble of love.
Jango turns away from the revolt building, always, at his left shoulder, so that this child might have the opportunity to live a life free of regrets, with a shadow empty of ghosts. Jango will take the fury of the dead, for this boy, he'll take it all and the child will be better for it.
One day Kote will turn away from his father and he'll walk and he'll walk but he'll never look back and that, is enough.
The shadow that haunts Cody does not take the shape of Jango, but it might as well. Its there because of him. Cody does not miss Jango, not really. Not in the way one should miss a parent.
Maybe sometimes, in the dead of night, he recognises the empty place Jango once took. Maybe in the deep pitch of such a night, when even the moon has withdrawn and clouds shield him from the stars, Cody might prod at that emptiness, the way one might prod at a new injury, to try and determine the shape of it.
He doesn't miss Jango, but maybe he might not quite know how to feel about him not being there. Cody can't really miss the feeling of having a parent who didn't quite meet the brief. Jango was cold and he didn't afford Cody the love and affection all children deserve, when he was alive, his presence served only as a reminder of what Cody didn't have. What Jango wasn't. Cody doesn't truly want that back. Doesn't want him back.
And so that is why, as in life, in death Jango is noticeably absent from Cody's shadow. He does not follow behind, as his own parents once followed behind him. Thanks to Jango, there is only a hollow. Cody is left with a shadow following him that isn't anyone at all. It's an absence, of what might have been and it doesn't really serve him at all.
Empty space doesn't have a mouth and so it can not speak, Cody can not ask it for advice. All the same, sometimes, as if bouncing off the walls of an empty room, he gets something like it, in the form of an echo. Sometimes, from within the void a part of Jango leaks out, quite without Cody's permission.
The whisper that is left of Jango Fett, says that to love is to lose. To choose to love is to step in to a life where one day your past lives on in the rear view and you have to walk on without it. Still, you'll find yourself having to keep an eye on the mirror just so you don't forget who you were. Once you've loved, you can never fully take your eye off the rear view mirror for your love lives there and you can never quite leave it.
The echoes say that sometimes you have to betray the memory of those you love in order to survive. Sometimes its the only thing you can do to keep going. To live. To stay alive. A dead man can not forgive, so know that this betrayal will never be forgotten. You might Honour them by feeling the burn of the righteous anger that you deserve, as you have earnt their fury even if they are no longer here to give it. There is no escape from this if you open yourself to love, so turn from it and be free.
Jango feared loss and it made him cruel. It made him avoid the one thing he might have had to give. Cody was raised by an absence. A shape where a man might once have been. It made Cody's life hard, it made his life difficult. He inherited that fear and it haunts him to this day.
But when Cody stood there at the end. Grown, but with a lot more growing to do for sure, he looked back just the once, before he set out on his own.
He looked back and he saw a little boy, curled in to himself in the passenger seat of a car, a pantomine of comfort. A boy, wanting only one thing and if he got it, even once, he'd hold it tight to his chest with both hands and never let go. A boy knowing, with a surelty that should be foreign to a child, that such a thing could never be. Those eyes will never look at him as they do the rearview. There is a life playing out behind Jango and he can never quite let go of it. There was a time when Jango had a home back there and when he looks back, his eyes remember carrying a softness that has not visited since. Jango buried those eyes the day he buried his family, Kote will never know them.
Behind Cody is a little boy with a cruel past, hoping for a kinder future that isn't coming. A boy with Jango's eyes, curled up beside him. Between them an unpassable chasm and on the boys other side, lights passing him by. That boy watches those lights blur as they rumble along, and he wishes for a brighter future. Wishing on the shine of a street lamp, for a better life that isn't on its way, not for him.
Cody looked at that little boy till he couldn't anymore, till he had to close his eyes and breathe around the void that was threatening to open up in his chest. And then, he opened his eyes and he turned away. There is no salvation that he can deliver for that child. He'll struggle and he'll suffer, but he'll survive. All so that one day, he might stand here, at the end of one life ready for the beginning of another.
Cody doesn't need to look back to know that life is going to carry on being tough for that boy. He doesn't need to look back to know that he'll carry on living in spite of it. It'll be tough, it'll be a struggle. And then, at the end if it all, alive in spite of it all, alive in spite of Jango. Kote will hand over that hard earned life, so that Cody himself might live. His eyes don't need to be glued to the rearview to know that's what'll happen. It'll happen whatever Cody does. It'll be the same no matter where Cody is looking.
That little boy is going to live a life that is hard right up until the end and then, he'll be gone. Cody doesn't need to mourn him, he has no need to drag along a ghost, because that little boy will always be gone. Kote is both gone forever and he will always be waiting for him wherever there is a mirror. Cody can never leave him and he has no need to look behind because Kote's fate can never change. He died so that Cody might live.
And so Cody, had taken a step forward and then another. He didn't look back once, but he remembered that boy. When the opportunity presents itself, he gives another the compassion that nobody had afforded Kote but which he had deserved all the same. A small comfort to a stranger before he carried on. He walks forward and forward, his memories are heavy, they weigh down his steps. He does not forget them , lightening his load, but nor does he sink back in to them, losing sight of the road ahead.
There is no changing the past, it has happened. But those static events, that story with a forgone conclusion, they don't have to remain tragic. The ending doesn't have to be an end. Sometimes an ending can be a beginning too. Sometimes an end isn't really an ending at all, just a change of perspective.Cody carries his past and he remembers and then he reaches within himself and he tries to do better. He doesn't get it right every time, people rarely do, but he keeps trying. He asks what the world that little boy lived in needs to be better and then he digs until he finds it. Cody works on bettering the world around his feet and he works on bettering himself.
He looks within himself for what his childhood couldn't teach him and then he trains those atrophied muscles. He learns mercy, he learns forgiveness. He is good at what he does, but he will always strive to do better and that in itself, is a rare skill. To try and then to keep trying, until you are something closer to who you want to see in the world. As Cody lives on, he learns compassion and he practices until it is a reflex.
Sometimes he meets people who are similarly minded. He doesn't seek them out, he just comes across them one by one or sometimes in threes. And once they get to know each other they introduce Cody to their friends and for the first time, Cody feels as if he's in a kinder world. He isn't of course, it's just he's around people who want to help and he gets to see them helping every day. Maybe its some kind of emotional gravity that people who want to help are drawn together or maybe in another life they might have just passed each other by and in this, they have a common goal and so they stick.
Sometimes he meets those who for all their trying, have an emptiness inside them that they can't quite reason with. Who try to be better and fall somewhat short. Cody may not want to admit it, but Obi Wan Kenobi just might be one of those people.
Obi Wan is a compassionate man, but that compassion does not serve him, rather it burns to the touch. The world hurts him and yet he still tries to be kind. Trying to be kind isn't always enough, not when scar tissue warps the very root of the thing.
When Cody looks at him, he sees something that he suspects, the other man never intended to display. It's not obvious. There's just a certain twist, to his walk, his choices. One of those things that once you know its there, you know its there, but had you never caught it, you'd quite happily have lived your whole life unaware.
Obi Wan fears loss and that fear runs deeper than any other part of him. His loyalty and compassion can not outweigh it. Which is less of a problem for other people, but Cody knows this particular scar better than any other. When push comes to shove, Obi Wan will always run and Cody doesn't yet know staying well enough to be able to teach another. When it comes to arms, in the war of love and loss, Cody is an infant facing a dragon of maybes and yet still, it is a battle he intends to win. However, as he's yet to know how, he has little to share.
When Cody had decided; to allow love in to his life, to allow himself to expose the soft fleshy parts of his body and risk someone choosing to slide in a knife as if he were butter; he had rather hoped that he might find another type of love. The kind of love where they don't know your soul as if it were a mirror image of their own, with the same shape of scar tissue running through it, but are instead quite different and the two of you choose to get to know each other in spite of it. To put in the work and slowly build something. There is less risk to this form of love. They don't instantly look at you and turn you inside out, you get to know each other slowly and in doing so, wade in to a kinder love, together. It's something you build together and they never quite know the feeling of the bedrock of you, but it doesn't really matter because you don't need them to.
That gentler option, is not open to the two of them. They don't put it in as many words, but they both know that there's something to it. Though neither of them say it, Obi Wan knew Cody's deepest fears intimately from the first glance because Cody's fears are siblings to his own. Sometimes when Obi Wan looks at him, Cody feels raw, like his skin has been stripped bare. It isn't a comfortable feeling. Obi Wan could never not know Cody, and that may very well serve him in being Cody's undoing.
Sometimes, love draws out the very best in a person but Cody is learning that sometimes, it can bring only the worst. Obi Wan and Cody fear the same things which means that those fears are less easily dismissed. There is a jagged edge to the man he loves, left there by a too distant father figure and the deaths of too many friends. Cody doesn't know how to avoid its cut. Cody does however, know what damage Obi Wan's love can do to someone like him. He's met Anakin.
Anakin is not Obi Wans fault, but it is undeniable that he likely would not be the man he is without Obi Wans influence. The thing is, like Obi Wan and Cody, Anakin feared loss far before he ever met Obi Wan. But Obi Wans way of loving, the push and pull of it, was most definitely not what Anakin had needed. Circumstance left Anakin Skywalker in Obi Wans unsteady hands when they were both far too young to be facing such a thing.
Obi Wan had raised his brother because he loved him too much not to and Anakin was, at least in part, the way he was because Obi Wan had never been able to tell him or find a way to show that love in a manner Anakin might understand. Anakin was raised to feel a dearth of love in a home that only existed because of that love in the first place. Obi Wan loved him too much to let him go elsewhere, but had
not been raised to know how to show love. A different flavour of the same trial that bore Cody. Of course, unlike Anakin, Cody had no latent homicidal tendencies, waiting to flourish in such an environment.
Cody has known for a long time, that a childhood like his own, often leads to a parent like Jango. He knew it long before he met Obi Wan and learnt, first of his emotionally negligent father and then, of Obi Wan's own emotionally absent attempt at child rearing. And in knowing this, Cody has always known that he must approach his past as one does a snake, with a sharpened blade.
Cody will not become Jango because he knows all the ways he could become Jango, and he approaches each with brutal efficiency. Cody has had the grace of time, to find each of these paths and to sever each of the heads one by one. Obi Wan was not afforded this niciety, he was rushed in to not-quite- parenthood in the way one might be rushed aboard a life vessel, with little time to collect lost belongings. That is no fashion to approach a snake hunt and so, in Obi Wan and Anakin, the cycle goes on.
Anakin is worse for this, as is Obi Wan himself, and that, is not something within Cody's power to fix. So the smart decision, would be of course to run. To chalk it up to an impossible wish and to go out in search of something a bit duller but without the sting. However, that is not the decision Cody has made. He walked in to Obi Wan's life quite willingly, at 5pm on a November afternoon and he's never found it in himself to leave. He just doesn't want to. Even when Obi Wan himself has no such qualms, swanning out of Cody's life whenever he finds something worth losing and strolling back in as soon as his fear is once again forgotten. All the same, Cody stays on the outskirts of Obi Wans own life, always.
Cody lives and he lives and he lives. He tries to do better each day even if his past will never disappear. There is a weight on his back, as there always has been. There's a fear that he carries day in day out, some days it's braver and he feels it stretch out, ice cold in his warm, warm blood. Cody tries very hard each day not to answer this fear, he acknowledges it for what it is and then tries to find it in himself to move past it anyway.
As he grows older, he grows smarter and braver, and more compassionate to beat. He helps people as he has so many times before. He does his job and he does it well and maybe it isn't the most rewarding of all the careers in the galaxy but it probably doesn't need to be. Sometimes you just do things to get by. Sometimes things can be rewarding just because they need doing and you can do them well. Sometimes you don't need to strive for perfect when good and satisfying suit you just as well.
Cody is a measured man, he knows that to carry on taking what little Obi Wan offers is the choice of a fool and yet he carries on all the same because he reckons he's figured out the shape and size of the risk and he's willing to do so to get what he wants. Cody wants whatever Obi Wan is willing to throw him. He wants the man in his life in whatever form he might find it in himself to take.
Cody loves and he can't regret it. It seems the kindest choice, to put that love out in the world. Love and compassion go hand in hand, of this he is sure. He can't regret it, but he does allow himself the acknowledgement, that loving Obi Wan is not a safe choice. Cody knows this. He does not need another Jango Fett in his life. The first did quite enough damage.
Cody is honest enough with himself to admit that in Jango's position, Obi Wan may well have made the same choices. He's honest enough to admit that wanting to do better doesn't always result in a fairer outcome. Jango didn't try to love Cody at all, in fact he went out of his way to avoid it, it was less than Cody deserved, less than any child might deserve. Obi Wan tried very hard to love Anakin and at the end of the day, the result was the same. Should Cody and Anakin Skywalker swap childhoods, they would likely still be the exact same people at the end of it.
Obi Wan is a repeating cycle in the shape of a man. He carries the same scars his own father carried and in spite of his best efforts, he left those same scars on the boy he raised. He is scared of the consequences of love and it leaves him running, constantly. Cody's lover is most usually, as absent from his life as his father ever was. Cody can't bring himself to hold it against him. Obi Wan tries and tries to be better which is more than Jango ever gave him. For all of Obi Wans faults, Cody loves him all the same, and that's the thing about love isn't it, you don't get to choose. It is not a good idea to love him, and yet he does.
With every step Cody takes, he carries a burden, within his own shadow. There are no ghosts there, only an absence. As Cody walks, the void in his shadow whispers to him. It tells him to fear love, to avoid it at all costs. It tells him that nothing is worth the cost that loss brings and with love, there is always loss. There has to be, because someone must always leave first and if there's love involved, it'll have nowhere to go.
With this weight, Cody can't help but worry sometimes, that he might be making a mistake, that the whispers from the hole in his shadow might be right and the consequences of his love might prove too heavy, when the chips finally fall. It is a fear that he has carried with him since he was a child. Its not one that can easily be shed. But Cody, he chooses each day, to love in spite of it.
Cody is sure, deep in his heart, that the whispers are right and that the cost of loving is always to be left behind, but he can't bring himself to care. Loving is dangerous, Cody knows this and loving Obi Wan, a man who's scars line up just so with Cody's own, is even more so.
And this, he thinks as he looks down on the sleeping infant, his cheeks round under eyes that Cody knows, in the light of day, are indistinguishable from his father's, this is a danger greater than all. Because Anakin will come for them, Cody knows this without doubt.
Anakin will not bear his child in the arms of anyone else, no matter how unsafe he would be at his father's side. The child snuffles slightly in his sleep, tucked safely in a cocoon of blankets in the drawer Cody had removed and repurposed, just a few hours ago so that Obi Wan might get some rest on the sofa.
He'd arrived in the dead of night, hair dripping with rain as he had so many times before. Unlike every previous ocassion however, after Cody had left the soft cocoon of sleep to let him in, bare feet padding against the cool tile to lead him to the sofa, Obi Wan had unzipped his jacket to reveal a baby, sleeping deeply against his chest.
Cody brushes a gentle hand over Lukes soft downy hair, just long enough to show the slight start of a curl and knows, that there rests a place within him now, that will only be at peace if he knows that Luke remains safe and happy.
In only a few hours, the sun will rise and Obi Wan will attempt to flee once again. Cody knows this, he knows Obi Wans departures just as well as his arrivals. Obi Wan loves him, Cody knows this just as surely as he knows how deeply terrified Obi Wan is of that love.
Its why he must always leave, because he loves Cody and to him, that is unbearable. This time is different though, because this time, there is Luke. Cody allows Obi Wan his desertions, because he is sure that they bring comfort to the man and may be kinder to him than staying. If it is best for Obi Wan, then Cody will withstand his absence.
He can't convince himself however, that sweeping Luke away, would be best for Luke. Cody never figured himself a parent. He wouldn't have deliberately sought it out. But he knows, as surely as he knows his own name, that within a few hours of their acquaintance, he loves this child, he would move galaxies for him.
An unselfish kind of love, that had sprung up like a first shoot in spring, so surprising and yet so expected once its there. Something you hadn't even known you were missing until you have it. Cody had never figured himself a parent but now he's met Luke, he knows that he wants to learn.
Cody spent his whole childhood being warned against love and the danger it brings. That kind of upbringing, isn't easily put aside. To him, love is possibly the scariest thing he'll ever encounter and yet, having felt it, having known it, now, to love even for a moment, to bring that in to being and to allow it to walk the galaxy, it seems worth any cost.
Maybe he's wrong. Maybe at the end of it all, he'll be weighed down with grief when all of this love pouring out of him can't find an outlet. Maybe he'll pay twofold for everyone he's ever dared to love, being left time and time again until there's nobody but him. Just Cody and all his love with noone left to take it. Maybe he'll be haunted by so many ghosts that he'll look back on this and laugh and say 'to think i thought carting round that void was heavy, i simply didn't know the meaning of weight'. Maybe so.
But Cody, he thinks that whatever happens, it'll be worth it. Because to know that someone he is capable of loving could one day die having never known that love? Well that seems like a cost Cody can't bear.
So he'll put up with the rest, he'll live his later years in infinite sadness, weighed down with a grief born from all the love he can no longer give, carting around ghost after ghost, everyone he once had and then lost, he'll take it all and he can't imagine he'll have any regrets either. How could he? If he knows that each one of them, left the room first, for the last time, knowing that Cody loved them? Knowing that they were loved? And that to him, they were worth it. No, Cody can't imagine he'll ever regret that.
When he wakes, Obi Wan is gone. He can't bring himself to be surprised. What is surprising however, is that Luke, is very much not gone. There is no note, which might have been a politeness considering Obi Wan appears to have left him his not-quite-grandson not-quite-nephew to raise without even having asked if Cody was willing, but Cody can't quite hold it against him.
Obi Wan knows him too well. He was willing from the first time he laid eyes on Luke in Obi Wans arms and knew in his heart that no matter how much Obi Wan would try, Lukes childhood in his arms would match up to Cody's in Jango's. Sometimes, love isn't enough, not when you fear it to such a degree that you won't allow yourself to show it.
Obi Wan had shown his love for Luke the only way he knew how, by leaving him with someone he trusted to do right by the child and to show him the love that all children deserve. Anakin wouldn't be a problem, not with Obi Wan far away. Cody knew that Obi Wan's choice was a kindness, both for him and Luke, even if it was the type of kindness that left you bruised. And so, he bears it.
That morning, he watches the sun rise with Luke tucked in to the crook of his arm. It is the beginning of a new day, Luke sleeps on as gold bleeds in to blue and Cody takes the moment of peace for what it is. They've got a busy few weeks ahead of them but Cody reckons the two of them will manage it together.