Work Text:
Cody tries to kill himself, once. Only once — he’s only allowed to try once before the option is taken from him.
There’s a mirror in the room that he’s trapped in. One that Cody knows far too intimately for his own liking. It’s the mirror that he sees when he wakes, that watches him through the day. The mirror that Obi-Wan likes to make him stare at himself in as he gets fucked — his powers holding Cody still, pulling open his eyelids and leaving him unable to so much as blink, until his eyes watered and stung. He has hated that mirror since the first time he laid eyes on it.
It takes one well aimed punch to break it.
He thinks, because Obi-Wan is away, because he heard Obi-Wan"s ship blasting through atmo, because Obi-Wan likes to play with his foes before he kills them, that he has enough time.
He is wrong.
The glass cuts at his hand as he grabs it, then cuts through his skin as he presses it to the hollow of his elbow with all the strength he can muster. The edge is not meant for cutting, it"s messy. Blood makes his hands slip. His instructors would chastise him for the sloppiness of the wound, for the inconsistent pressure, were any of them still alive to do so.
He drags it all the way down to his wrist. Blood pours down over his arm, viscous and metallic in the still air, but the wound doesn"t spurt like it would if he"d managed to hit an artery. It’s not deep enough. He"s raising the shard of glass to try again when a pealing knell, a ringing no punches through the force.
He thinks that, far away as he is, Obi-Wan can do nothing to stop him.
Once more, he is wrong.
Fuck you, he snarls into his mind. The fury that he feels at this one private moment being snatched from him gives him the force needed to drive the glass down again, knowing that this time it will dig deeper. Deep enough to end this once and for all.
Perhaps he is wrong about this, perhaps he is not. He doesn"t get a chance to find out.
His arm stops against his will, muscles pulling and spasming with the force of it. It"s like he"s hit transparisteel, where there was nothing but air a moment ago. He makes to pull his arm back, to try again, only to discover that he can"t move the arm at all. Either of his arms. With mounting horror, he tries muscle group after muscle group, from his toes to his neck, discovering that every single one of them is frozen in place. He can feel dread pooling in his belly, sour and dark.
That is not yours to take, Cody. The words ring through the force again, making his teeth ache with the anger he can feel soaking every syllable. He knows in his bones that wherever Obi-Wan is now, he"ll be finishing his games in order to return here, to punish him. To put him in his place. Half of him hopes that this time Obi-Wan will just kill him, though he"s realist enough to know that he"s unlikely to be that lucky.
There is still blood pouring down his arm, but it"s obvious to his practised gaze that it"s nowhere near enough to exsanguinate him before the wound starts to clot. The dread simmers low in his belly, and only grows as his arms start to move against his will — first his hands flexing, dropping the shard of glass to the floor, and then both arms raising themselves above his head where they still once again.
It"s a stress position, one he"s been put in before, and he can count fifteen minutes passing by the pain that blooms from his fingertips through to his shoulders, bone-deep and burning. Once he"s released from the position, he knows, the pain will linger in the limbs for a week or more. An ongoing reminder not to misbehave again. It has the added effect of putting his bleeding arms above his head, slowing his loss of blood even further. Every once in a while, a drop of blood will spatter from his hand onto his face. His bare cheeks itch with the sensation.
He doesn’t know how long it’s been, when Obi-Wan enters the room. He’s staring, sightless, at the floor, breathing through the pain. Not just in his arms, though those burn with strain as well as the pain of his injuries. But also his knee, which never healed quite right after a blaster shot, and throbs in time with his heartbeat, protesting his position kneeled on the floor. His feet and calves tingle and shock, squashed under his weight. His chest aches, weighed down with a bottomless well of sorrow. It has hurt every day since he was taken, every day since Obi-Wan fell.
The hand in his hair is a shock to his system, causes his carefully measured breaths to stick in his throat. “That was unwise of you,” Obi-Wan says through the air, in his head, melodic and atonal and Cody bites his tongue at how it feels, curling slimy and rank through his mind. Obi-Wan sounds calm, almost teasing, like his old self, and the discord is jarring.
He doesn’t hit Cody, doesn’t throw him to the ground or wrap his hands around his neck. In many ways, that would be better. Easier to deal with, at least. Instead, Obi-Wan tends to his wounds, cleaning them and stitching them and wrapping them with soft hands that he can barely feel on his arms over the ache of the stress position he’s still trapped in, helpless to move and alleviate the pain.
It’s only when Obi-Wan hums, pleased with his work, that the force that’s been holding him immobile finally releases him. He drops like a stone.
Obi-Wan"s voice rings through his head, clamps tight to the back of his neck like a physical weight. "You tried to take something of mine, Cody. Remember that you belong to me — your life belongs to me, just as your death belongs to me. You know that I have to punish you for this."
He knows that Obi-Wan will punish him for it. The only question is how he"ll decide to do so.
“Perhaps you need a reminder of who you belong to, hm?”
He has just enough time for a bolt of anticipatory fear to lance through him before, everything is black, and silent, and still. He blinks, but there is nothing. No sliver of light shining in from somewhere, no shapes in the darkness. Nothing. His ears strain to hear the slightest of sounds, but there is nothing. He wants to vomit, which is how he knows he is being moved — he can feel nothing against his skin. The pain, of course, stays. It’s all there is to feel, everything else is blank and black and still. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing around him, nothing touching him. Like he’s not even human, he isn’t even real, he—
Obi-Wan takes his mind, then. Because, of course, he owns that too.
For a time, Cody doesn’t exist. He can’t say for how long — time is for beings who have a consciousness to track it with. It"s peaceful, in a way. The pain of knowledge, of knowing what Obi-Wan is, now, what he"s done, seeping from his head like blood from a wound. Deadly, but cold and quiet. Like slipping under water. Like the peace he"d been chasing with glass gripped tight in his hand.
He only knows that his mind was taken at all when he comes crashing back into it with all the finesse of a bantha in heat.
He thinks he may be screaming, but with sound taken from him, he has no way to know for sure. It rips through him like a blaster bolt, tearing at him from the inside. Deeper than the pain in his arms, deeper than the fear and hurt that live inside his belly every day of this new existence. Deeper than every other pain he has ever felt — the agony of knowing that his very self isn’t his.
It had never been his, for all his General talked of individuality and self determination while he was still his General and not whatever it is that he has become. They never wanted it on Kamino, tried to drive it out of all eighty thousand of them. Never wanted it while he was fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in, but they grudgingly let him pretend. Because it was easy. Because he’d be replaced with an identical counterpart sooner rather than later. Because it doesn’t matter what meat thinks, as long as it does what it’s told.
For a time, with his general beside him, fighting until his body was exhausted and his mind quiet he"d thought that maybe, just maybe, he may have a chance to be someone in his own right. A person, not just a clone.
Then that was snatched away as well. Not just once, but again and again, every time Obi-Wan decides he needs to be reminded of his place. This pain doesn’t lessen with repetition — every time it burns anew, so overwhelming that it feels as if it will never end.
If Obi-Wan has his way, it never will.
When he fell, he killed the Jedi who were sent to fight him because he was angry — so angry that they couldn’t remove his pain. That for all their advice on letting go the pain kept coming back. Now it’s there, inside him, always there, always burning in his chest. He let it feed him as he cut into the people he once loved, who still loved him, then let the feeling wrap itself around his heart like thorns as he felt their pain feed his own.
He killed the clones sent to fight him in droves with fury, furious that they couldn"t see how angry he was, furious that they wouldn"t stop and that they were so tenacious — flinging themselves into his blade for nothing and it’s foolish, so foolish. They felt helpless as they died by his fury and he fed on that feeling. He no longer felt the emotion himself. He was in control and the world was in his palm. And he would remake it into something better. There was nobody in the galaxy who could stop him.
He killed the Separatist generals with glee, cold glee that now he could enjoy their pain, enjoy the deaths of these foolish, foolish beings who had dared to think that they were his equals. He felt nothing for the droids, but they too were destroyed. No more important than crunching leaves underfoot.
He didn"t kill Cody. Because he revelled in his pain — the pain of seeing him becoming this thing of fury and spite. And he wanted to feel more of it, wanted to taste it in all its shimmering forms. So he took him alive. The only one taken alive, of all who had been sent to stand against him. He took him, and he kept him. It wasn"t an act of mercy. He had no mercy left in him.
