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When Cody Fett opened his window to lean out and breathe in the cool Autumn air, he didn’t expect to be greeted with the sight of a man standing on a fire escape railing three stories up.
Cody was fast, for sure, but by the way the man was leaning, he knew he only had moments. So half way out his own window, he mustered up his desperate voice, and shouted up:
“Hey, wait, you don’t want to-!” And then the call died in his throat as the man merely. Dropped.
The apartment that Cody shared with Rex may not have been in a skyscraper, but Coruscant had always built up rather than out, and they’re a long way from the ground.
The man’s fiery hair flaps in disarray in the gush of wind that falling causes, before something glimmers along his back, shining in the sunrise.
Wings.
Huge, translucent, dragonfly-like wings.
With a buzz they draw the man up short, and with the angle of his body he turns and zooms along the patch of sky between their apartment building and the looming grey structure across from it.
In the time Cody’s thudding clay heartbeat returns to normal, the man has flown out of view.
Awkwardly, Cody wriggles back into his apartment, dazed.
With a little swoop of jealousy burning through his guts, he shakes the man from his brain, and doesn’t imagine how the delicate wings would feel beneath his hands.
>ï< >ï< >ï<
The Fett family is a walking warning for the use of magic in creation. They were proof of what one could get with a mix of necromancy, transfiguration, and a dash of desperation.
Jango Fett was a desperate man. Desperate for a perfect son, after his biological one had run away and his wife had died.
He had taken to clay, to stories from elders, to carving with hands and later tools, staring into a mirror to shape a large nose and a proud brow.
Jango Fett made sons of golems.
Men of clay that, once fired in a chamber filled with spells of transmogrification, gained life.
But they never came out perfect.
The first-made, Fox, had always thought Cody would be the perfect one.
Until his face cracked.
Jango had grown negligent, left his son's form too dry.
And once the boy had broken, it was Fox that gently gripped a chin and sealed the cracks of Cody’s face with a golden porcelain sheen, then set his brother’s form in the horrid wonderful kiln that birthed them.
Wolffe had been their second brother, his eye improperly set, the clay never becoming flesh.
Rex had come after Cody, his clay from a different source. But Jango had hated the yellow-white of him.
Cody asked somewhere between his own giving of life and Rex’s, how Fox hadn’t been perfect. There were no visual anomalies, no difference in his form than Jango’s.
Fox’s smile had been tight,
“One day you will understand, but perfection can’t be made. I wasn’t right the second I spoke.”
>ï< >ï< >ï<
Golems are made to protect families. They’re not supposed to be living thinking things that make their own choices.
So while most people are disturbed when they learn what the Fett brothers are, the men themselves can’t fight the desire, the almost innate need, to help others.
Fox started out as a cop, before realizing the amount of corruption within the force. He pivoted to pursuing his law degree, and became friends with a private investigator before opening a practice that did far too much pro bono work.
Wolffe had somehow fallen in with a kind Arabic man, one who seemed about as ancient as the sands of time, and together they ran a foster home on the edge of the city.
Cody’s brother had struggled with concern that the children would be scared of his missing eye and the scarring that came later when he had desperately attempted to carve out a space for a replacement, but they were enamored with him and his mysterious partner.
Cody and Rex, affectionately called “the twins”, stuck together and became fire fighters.
Though, they might’ve had the upperhand over more human and fragile people. They didn’t burn after all, because they were already baked.
>ï< >ï< >ï<
Cody’s afternoons involved a stop at the coffee shop two doors down from the firehouse every time there wasn’t a call out.
He drinks the hot tea even during the stuffy Coruscanti summers, enough that Wolffe compared him to one of the tea pets that Plo Koon owned.
Despite his near daily trek, it seemed that between one day and the next, he’d missed a new shop popping up.
His feet must hold all his curiosity because his next step is off his usual path and through the front door of “The Living Force”.
It’s as if he has been transported into a jungle that is also a flower shop. Large potted plants, small trees, and growing orchids. A collection of strange desert plants that appear to be rocks. A precarious stack of colorful pots flanked by painted metal lizards.
And deep in the back of the shop, a glimmer that drags Cody in.
“It’s you!” Cody watches those translucent wings tremor with the quietest hum, and a huff as the man turns sharply,
“Have more inane things to say?” The man stops and blinks in confusion, his eyes the clearest blue that Cody had ever seen.
“Oh, hello there. Excuse my tone,” The man brushes off his hands, Cody only just noticing the dark rich dirt coating his palms and lining his fingernails.
“No, I’m sorry to surprise you, it’s just— you live in my apartment building.” And the men stare at each other for a moment, before the pale face beneath red hair begins to turn as rosy pink as the plants around him.
“You saw me this morning then?” His voice has a lovely almost lyrical quality to it, and his fingers twisting together can only be described as adorable.
“Gave me quite a scare.” Cody attempts to be nonchalant, placing his hands in his packets, suddenly aware that he is in the slightly bulky black cargo pants with their way too numerous pockets. And he had a screwdriver in his pocket.
“It was my shop’s opening day, you see, and I was running late. I don’t do it often.” The wings at the man’s back jitter again as if wanting to show off their skills more. The glitter of them inexplicably draws Cody in.
“Lovely…the shop that is.” Now his own cheeks felt warm, likely glowing from within like a heated pot.
“Oh, are you a plant lover?”
And that is how Cody ends up heading back to the station, not with coffee for himself and his brother, but arms full of a large rubber plant, its strange green leaves cool to the touch in the humid afternoon.
Rex was gonna kill him.
>ï< >ï< >ï<
He keeps the plant in the station, and it is the perfect excuse to occasionally have the shop owner, Obi-wan, come around and check on it.
Cody will admit to himself, and under abuse by his brother’s prodding hands, that he enjoys receiving the praise for how well he is keeping the plant alive in the corner of the firehouse.
He refuses to let the beautiful man know that it was mostly thanks to Kitt, his Naiad fire chief who made sure it stayed watered.
“You acted as though you expected someone else that first day,” Cody finally brings up a couple weeks into spending time bothering the shop owner.
“I had received some… less than kind words when opening the shop. I believe the quote was something along the lines of ‘you fucking fairy’,” Obi-wan buzzed his wings with a shrug,
“Not the most original cruel words.” And they had finally done it, dancing close to the edge of the things that were both commonplace and somehow taboo to ask outright. The “what are you?” that no doubt hung on Obi-wan’s tongue every time he stared at the golden lines crawling around Cody’s temple.
“I prefer the term Seelie.” The words were so easily given, but the trepidation was clear across those blue eyes (that looked more like a storm cloud today).
“I’d prefer to call you mine,” Slips out under Cody’s breath, though it seems Obi-wan missed it while he had turned to spritz a cactus.
“I’m a golem.” It falls heavier, like a clod of mud. Like Cody himself.
“Oh.” Those curious eyes search his face then sweep him up and down.
“I suppose I should thank whoever crafted you then,” And it's just flirting, but they both know- lying isn’t either of their fortes.
>ï< >ï< >ï<
Eventually, Cody takes Obi-wan to the coffee shop, and he orders tea for them both, because of course the perfect beautiful Seelie from his apartment building also has good taste in beverages.
Cody drinks his scalding hot, and the red-head just holds the cup in his hands, smiling as he observes the other man.
Cody opens up about his brothers and how much he loves them. He mimes Fox’s stiff upper lip and Wolffe’s intimidating squint. Neither man mentions the gap in his stories where maybe a better father would have been.
But then again, Cody hadn’t had a childhood. It was strange to wake up to a world fully formed and be expected to live out his days.
“My brother is a minotaur and my sister is a gorgon.” Is Obi-wan’s commiserating reply,
“And when my father was killed, I had to raise them both. It was difficult to navigate the different puberties.” And just as when Cody had spoken of Fox’s accomplishments or being the most attractive cloned face, Obi-wan’s eyes were soft when he discussed his siblings and their differences.
It was something that Cody had always looked for in a partner, and drove him to finally take a chance.
After, they ride the elevator up to Cody’s floor, where he holds the door open, staring back into the cramped box with unflattering lighting.
The Seelie is still the most beautiful thing Cody had ever seen.
“I’d like to take you on a date,”
A blinding smile and fluttering wings,
“Well, if you insist.”
>ï< >ï< >ï<
Anakin is not exactly everything that Cody had built up in his mind. Yes, the young adult is tall, towering on his sandy hooved legs, but he is also deceptively thin, and not bulked out as Cody had been expecting.
The fireman keeps his eyes averted from the hairless scars on part of the boy’s leg, and his mechanical prosthetic. And then Obi-wan is elbowing the man aside, all radiant in an open-back shirt, his wings as sparkly as the stars above.
It is almost strange to be picking up his date only a couple floors above his own apartment, and the ride on the elevator back to his own front door is full of giggles.
They sit at the two-seater kitchen table over a meal of spicy curry. Cody is thankful that the strange magic that coursed through the Seelie made him especially resilient, and he could keep up with the tastebuds of a man made from clay.
They retire to the couch, and Cody bridges the gap with his arm along the back of the couch, hand caressing the bare skin of Obi-wan’s back, enjoying how the translucent wings shined with rainbows like an oil slick every time they swayed to reflect the man’s enjoyment of the touch.
Obi-wan is the one that leans over for a kiss. At first just a brush of lips that quickly ends up with Cody on his back, staring dopily up at his own insectoid-angel.
“I’m so glad you flung yourself from the fire escape that day.” He sighs before dragging down the man into another kiss, loving the way the Seelie’s laugh feels against his lips.