Chapter Text
That edict and ephemeral threat delivered, Obi-Wan insisted on Cody resting for the remainder of the day.
“That’s unnecessary. We can start immediately,” insisted Cody, recalling with some intrusiveness one of the imaginary Jaijax monsters which had been an ambush predator disguised as a piece of furniture with a mouth. This did not seem so unreasonable now that the divot his body was making in this plush mattress was threatening rapid evolution into vertebrate digestion.
“Nonsense, you’ve had a long day—”
“It’s barely noon.”
“—Right, basically dinner. And it’s still raining. We’ll have a bit of a break in the downpour tomorrow and it will be a long hike. Can’t have you over exerting yourself. Here, have a blanket.”
The blanket from the bed wound itself around Cody’s shoulders in a manner that quickly shot over the boundary of comfort into outright swaddling. By the time Cody managed to struggle out of it, Obi-Wan had disappeared, leaving naught but a few auburn feathers in his wake.
One of them was decently long, dark auburn for the most part, with creamy speckles near the barb. It was nearly the length of Cody’s forearm and perhaps the softest thing Cody had ever felt. A far cry from the cracks on his knuckles that had only just taken notice of the humidity to start healing, or the thick ridged calluses on his palms.
After a moment’s hesitation, he fished his bucket out of the trunk at the foot of the bed and tucked the feather around the inside curve where his forehead would rest. Cody deserved some kind of souvenir for this farce.
Half an hour later, Cody—thinking he heard a noise from the hall—opened the door to find a small stack of flimsi novels perched neatly on the tiles.
—
The next day, Cody managed to haul himself out of bed before Obi-Wan arrived with his daily breakfast allotment and The Linens. By the time Obi-Wan pushed open the door—at precisely the same time as the previous days—he had changed out of his sleepwear into one of the many sets of loose, comfortable tunics and trousers Obi-Wan had stacked in the closet, and settled into a demure parade rest near the window. It was the kind of thing he’d liked to affect for the Mandalorian generals, which was always regulation perfect and inspired in them a deep suspicion they couldn’t punish him over.
Naturally, Obi-Wan ignored this with an effortless, “How were the books?”
Cody paused his perusal of his breakfast tray, and hastily swallowed a mango cube. He opened his mouth to answer and then found he could not summarize the state of his mind.
There had been three in total, all from the same author, and—surrendering to familiarity—he’d picked the one that had a soldier on the cover. He’d been expecting something trite and overblown, and had instead found a brisk and clever satire of a woman disguising herself as a man to join the army, only to find that her entire unit was doing the same.
Cody, who had spent almost the entirety of his life reading dense tactical briefs, dry training manuals, and historical holopedia entries, had not realized that writing could be funny or poignant. He felt a kinship with the woman, slighted over something she had no control of, risking her life for her brother, and the incomprehensible nonsense of her government bound to the whims of an idiotic god.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Obi-Wan’s ears swivelled intently in Cody’s direction, and finally settled on, “Acceptable.”
“Excellent! That author is exemplary and there are a great many more once you’re finished with those three. Here, you’ll be needing this,” Obi-Wan said, all his attention returning to the vacated bed he was having paroxysms of joy over re-dressing like some kind of pervert.
Cody opened his mouth to ask what ‘this’ referenced, and was assaulted by a ball of fabric catapulted to the face, which unravelled into a poncho and accompanying bucket hat.
They were made of an incredibly soft and light woven material that logic dictated would hold up like wet paper, but did not tear even a little bit when he tested an edge. The outer layer had an odd slippery texture that suggested some manner of waterproofing, and it felt pleasingly warm just in his hands. Upon the back was an inelegantly woven pattern that, with the best of intentions, probably started out as a collection of tookas and now resembled some sort of mass extinction event.
All these positives it had going for it, and yet it was still a hideous bile yellow-green.
“Is there some kind of predator I'm warning away? Or should I just consider this enemy action,” Cody said, yanking the poncho on and then cramming the bucket hat onto his head.
“Please recall that I am colour blind,” Obi-Wan said at once, smoothing down the new lilac bed cover over the pale yellow sheets. Ponds had inflicted enough art theory on Cody—when they had rare access to armour paints—to recognize a complementary colour pair.
As if Cody’s scepticism existed as a separate entity in the room—colour matching a venomous reptile—Obi-Wan then uncurled a wing and revealed a neatly folded knit blanket, in purple and yellow naturally, tucked in near the shoulder joint, which he draped across the wood storage chest at the foot of the bed.
Cody gave it a flat look. “What colour is that?”
“Teal,” Obi-Wan said immediately, as yellow pillows fluffed themselves at the foot of the bed.
The knit blankets were a new strategy in the hygiene siege. Yesterday had been one in shades of green, patterned with the rough suggestion of leaves. It was currently folding itself in the corner and tucking itself safely back under Obi-Wan’s wing, and with some dawning horror—as Obi-Wan carefully adjusted the new blanket’s artful folds across the trunk and plucked off a piece of fluff with his claws in obvious pride—Cody began to suspect Obi-Wan might have made them.
“There are two colours,” Cody pointed out uselessly.
“Are there really?” Obi-Wan said, sounding astonished, as if the zigzag pattern of the knit stitches was not perfectly spaced and uniform between the two colours, as if even complete black and white color blindness wouldn’t have been capable of picking out the wildly different saturation values. “You learn something new every day.”
Cody was certainly learning a great deal.
“Ready?” Obi-Wan asked brightly.
For all that Cody had campaigned for this release from monotony, he felt a sudden dread. “Yes.”
—
“And over here you can see—”
The last hour had taught Cody a great deal about the native ecosystem of this planet, which was all very interesting and good, but mostly only useful for knowing what carnivorous flower’s delicate root system he’d destroy with digestive acids if he could not master himself.
Wheezing, Cody did not permit himself the vulgarity of putting his hands on his knees and relieving himself of his breakfast, but the morning’s Suspect Fish—version blue tuna, half of everything he’d eaten the last few days had been blue—certainly felt like it wanted a rematch with Cody’s teeth. They’d been walking for about an hour, Obi-Wan leading the way trailing both Cody’s wilting meat sack and a small hovercart carrying full bags.
The hovercart was an ancient piece of tech, barely more than a slab of durasteel attached to a couple of anti-grav emitters that looked original to its invention date some three or four centuries ago. It was one of those pieces of machinery that looked like it would bring down the property value of a waste facility, but would probably outlive Obi-Wan, Cody and the nearest white dwarf star. Obi-Wan had insisted that Cody should sit on the cart if he felt he needed to. Naturally, the idea was repellant.
“All right back there?” Obi-Wan called back, his tone light, a little amused, a good thirty meters up the path with his attention caught on some ground cover full of tiny white flowers.
He’d flattened himself down onto his belly, chin in the grass so that his nose was close enough to smell them. It brought to mind a tooka, minus the wiggle, and was unreasonably charming.
“Fine,” Cody wheezed, playing his part in the fifth repetition of this call and response but unable to hide the exhaustion in his voice this go around.
He was upright enough to spot Obi-Wan’s instant change of body language—a slight puff up of his feathers and the fur along his spine and throat as he looked up and back around at Cody—but could only manage a weak, “I’m good,” before Obi-Wan sprang to his paws and bounded back down the trail towards him.
He closed the distance in less than three seconds, in two enormous leaps with a slight glide at the end—wings whipping out with a snap— to land with a whisper near Cody.
Cody didn’t even have time to flinch before Obi-Wan was beside him, bringing with him a short, powerful breeze as he circled Cody, looking him over.
“Let me grab the cart,” Obi-Wan said.
“I’m just catching my breath,” Cody tried. He couldn’t tell if his racing heart was from the exertion or the sudden jumpscare.
Funny how a week of snarky meals had affected his threat assessment instincts.
Obi-Wan considered Cody. There was little humour in his expression.
Funny how fast you could adapt to such wildly different non-humanoid behavioural markers. “We’re very close, would it truly be so bad to sit on the cart?”
“I can make it,” Cody insisted.
He couldn’t really articulate why he was being so stubborn, or even why he was having so much difficulty. It had been over a week—a significant chunk of time with clone healing factor—and his bones weren’t even broken. He’d managed a whole war without significant injury, and all his biggest wounds he’d been able to work through: the scar on his face, lacerations, blaster bolt burns just nicking him. He’d never been brought so low that he couldn’t double march ten clicks at the drop of a bucket.
He’d been in crashes before. Why was this taking so much out of him?
Obi-Wan demurred, but he stuck close to Cody for the rest of the hike, and said nothing when Cody stumbled ten minutes later and caught himself on Obi-Wan’s flank, and then left his hand there to take his weight.
The fur there was as soft as the feathers, and the heat of Obi-Wan’s body warmed Cody’s hand. He felt the rhythmic thud of a massive heart through his palm, the powerful flex of muscle, and an odd peaceful feeling settled through him as Obi-Wan opened a wing over Cody’s head. True to his prediction, most of the rain had stopped for the day, but there was still a little bit of a drizzle, enough to leech away heat.
About fifteen minutes later, the path left the forest and opened up onto an enormous valley.
As Cody’s eyes adjusted, he saw… an ocean. Smaller, funny coloured. The waves were green and gentle, and lacked the hallmarks he was used to. The smell of brine to start. No crash of water breaking against his ears. No gradual transition of land to water, and Cody had a brief moment of vertigo, finding himself in the surf before he realized…
It was grass. Waist height, the rich shade of green Cody associated most closely with embellished tourist propaganda and holo-photography manipulation.
An ocean of grass.
Obi-Wan said nothing as Cody stumbled forward, letting the tops of the grass tickle at his palms, loop his thighs, boots sinking into rich, spongy dirt as he drifted into the tide. He found a rock to sink down on, watching the play of wind ripple and whisper through the blades like a dance, overcome by an astonishment that surprised him. It was just grass, and yet it called forth the same awe a true ocean did, the large-scale kinetic play of energy, constantly roiling.
Obi-Wan joined him, trailing trenches of grass pushed down by his large paws, sweeping wakes with his tail. When he reached Cody, he sat back on his haunches and considered Cody.
“It does bear a remarkable resemblance to water doesn’t it?” Obi-Wan asked, after a few long moments of silence. “We call it the emerald sea.” He paused, then added, “I’ve noticed you enjoy the view of the ocean from the window,” with the kind of neutral tone that could easily be dismissed as a simple statement of fact and not an invitation to conversation if Cody so wished.
For all his particulars, Obi-Wan hadn’t tried even once to set the pillows back at the headboard since Cody had switched himself around. Had only fluffed them, and placed them back, gentle, at the foot of the bed.
Cody considered what to say. He didn’t ever talk about Kamino. Anyone he would feel safe discussing it with already knew everything he had to say. Everyone else had been natborns and thus untrustworthy. The question became, was a dragon trustworthy?
Obi-Wan had been… kind to Cody, in a way that was so counter to all of Cody’s well built schemas about non-clone sentients. He had fed and clothed Cody, but had not asked for payment. He was intensely preoccupied with Cody’s well-being, but had not interrogated him about why he had crashed in the first place. Cody had been the one to force the issue of accepting his labour in recompense and even then Obi-Wan mostly seemed bemused about the insistence, as if this was a whim he was indulging until Cody grew tired of it and stopped, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that there now existed a debt Cody wasn’t sure he would ever be able to pay off.
The spectre of nat-born ‘fairness’ had been a cocked blaster for Cody’s entire life. You did not expect food without work. You did not expect healing without credits. Running every day towards their deaths was the only reason they had a bunk to return to, and so many of them had been floundering without the war. And yet here was a dragon, alone, responsible for the upkeep of a massive facility by himself, tending to Cody’s every need as if that was simply the nature of things. If Cody was hungry, he must be fed. If he was injured, he must be healed. If he did not wish to speak, then he must have privacy. There was no question about expectation, and the absence of it gave Cody the abrupt and alarming urge to fill the silence with the only thing he would pay with, bits of himself.
In the end, who would he tell? What secrets could Obi-Wan pilfer from Cody that could be used against him? Whatever Obi-Wan’s goals were, they were centered on this planet. Cody hadn’t heard a single hint that Obi-Wan would ever leave. And at the end of the day, he wasn’t really a nat-born was he. Not the way they meant.
What was the harm?
“The facility where I was made was on a water planet,” Cody settled on. From the corner of his eye, he saw Obi-Wan’s ears slick back. “You’d look out the window and see nothing but the ocean. All the landmasses had been flooded centuries ago. The storms were terrible. On bad days, the waves could reach the flight platforms, and if they grabbed you, you were dead. They wouldn’t spend resources saving cadets that should know better.”
Obi-Wan looked at him sharply, but something in Cody’s posture must have warned him against questions, so he only said, tone mild, “That’s a terrible shame.”
Cody snorted. Wasn’t it just.
“The trainers were no help. A group of us started making up stories about sea monsters to warn off the younger cadets. The waves became tentacles, thunder became roars, that kind of thing. We told them we were living on a tooth and if you didn’t want to be eaten, you didn’t go out onto the landing pads where the tongue could get you.”
Obi-Wan made an interested noise. “Tooth?”
With some hesitation, stemming mostly from embarrassment, Cody said, “At first the monster was licking its chops and we were all just bacteria running around in its mouth. That didn’t go over well, so instead it had lost its tooth chomping down on the back of a giant aiwha—think a flying whale. Then people started arguing about the logistics of why the aiwha was still there, since presumably if it had survived the attack it should have flown off. Briefly it was because the aiwha died and the tooth was stuck in a giant bone, but that caused nightmares. So it was changed to a rock an aiwha had used to trick the monster into biting, and now the monster was stuck trying to get its tooth out of the rock.”
Cody paused. He hadn’t talked about those stories in a while, and they seemed much sillier than he remembered as a cadet.
“The instinct to prod at a hole in the gums is very strong,” Obi-Wan agreed, then hummed, added, “Clever,” and lowered himself down onto his belly, so his head was of a height with Cody’s. He crossed his forelimbs at the wrists. “Mythology has a certain weight about it that logic struggles to match.”
Cody snorted. “Got away from us after that, took on a life of its own. Monsters became spirits, became little gods, became a big one. Then she didn’t eat you anymore, just took you to rest in her palace. She was greedy for us. Wanted us all to herself. Still dangerous but…”
But there was already so much fear on Kamino, and trying to create it themselves just made life more miserable. Manufacturing monsters for the outside world left cadets caught between a terror they knew and a terror they didn’t. Why not have a death that welcomed you with open, eager arms. It was a different kind of danger to be so coveted. You still had to resist her, but it became a badge of honour that you’d stay for your brothers instead of going to her.
And for those that couldn’t, there was a sort of freedom in throwing yourself into her care, knowing your waterlogged meat would never be found and recycled.
“There’s something beautiful about such a great power that loves you so,” Obi-Wan murmured, as if hearing Cody’s thoughts. “That peace and love await you. Even if you have to resist it every step of the way.”
Cody glanced over at him, but Obi-Wan was just observing the valley, so Cody turned back and enjoyed the view for a while longer.
The mesmerizing dance of the grass was interrupted by a single large amphitheatre at the deepest part of the valley. It consisted of a central flat plain surrounded by a ring of large pillars, each with a hat of petal-like stone wings providing shelter from the rain. The intended design seemed to lean towards some type of flower but they mostly looked like a deferred argument between a mushroom and an umbrella.
In clumps beneath the stone umbrella-mushrooms were what seemed to be masses of cotton clumped together like a quilt.
Cody had a moment to wonder about that incongruity, seeing an ocean foam cap on grass, before Obi-Wan levered himself off his belly back to his haunches and whistled.
Screech was perhaps the better descriptor. It was a shriek of a noise that erupted into existence without warning or build up, high pitched and piercing, as if sound alone could be shot from a cannon with the precision of a sniper. It nearly gave Cody a heart attack and lasted barely an instant of active production, but seemed in a hurry to bounce around the valley and then report back.
Dozens of dozing heads popped up out of the quilts in the distance to look in their direction.
There were two recognizable shapes to these heads.
One shape was puffy and short. These puffy heads produced puffy bodies as animals scrambled to hooves, collectively resembling what amounted to a many legged cloud.
The second shape was slim and pointed and rose high into the air upon a tall periscope of a neck, which breached the foam cap of the herd with active malice. These angular, white heads upon their long, white necks produced sleek bodies and muscular legs. Black crescent claws—on feet and stubby wings alike—were visible even at this great distance, as they picked up their feet to give chase. Even from that far away, Cody could tell they would tower over him, though they were still quite a bit shorter than Obi-Wan.
Cody gaped.
Once the shock wore off and the horror set in, Cody hissed up at Obi-Wan, “Those are Mandalorian war swans.”
“Halszkaraptors,” Obi-Wan corrected absently. “They aren’t actually native to Mandalore, they were introduced several thousand years ago.”
“As cavalry?” Cody asked, incredulous. “As a war crime?”
“As a gift.”
“Some gift.”
“Granted, I think they were presented as non-breeding specimens for a menagerie so it’s a mystery how they proliferated far enough for combat use,” Obi-Wan added, as a bag from the cart drifted across Cody’s field of view towards the dragon. “I guess they found a way.”
On Kamino you learn very quickly not to look away from an approaching threat, but Cody liked to imagine his dismay as a heat seeking projectile weapon directed squarely at Obi-Wan’s head. Visible from the periphery, all Obi-Wan did was flick an ear at him.
The first of the fastest puffy shapes broke from the rest and resolved themselves as individuals. They were six legged sheep, with two enormous spheres of black eyes, and white fur. They brought with them soft churring bleats and a thick animal smell that clogged the nose. Upon their heads were two long, fluffy antennae. Upon their backs were thick fluffy insect wings that looked too delicate and small for flight.
Upon Cody’s beleaguered mind and racing heart were the swans. They followed at a distance. Stalked would perhaps be the more appropriate word.
“I thought you wanted fodder for your crushing traps,” Cody said, feeling eyes upon him. He’d only ever seen holos, and if the stories were right, running was futile.
“They won’t hurt you, will you my darlings,” Obi-Wan said, cooing as sheep began to butt their heads against his flanks and circle about them like a soft whirlpool. He opened up his wings so that they might cluster close beneath them, and almost smacked Cody in the head doing so.
“Not them,” Cody said, getting to his feet, his best friend adrenaline tingling at his fingertips.
The swans had arranged themselves into the geometrical shape most popular with eliminating wind resistance and political enemies. Cody was already regretting not taking the chance to perish whilst unconscious and unaware. He was, perhaps, overeager in his desires for an exciting death.
“They won’t harm you either,” Obi-Wan said, his attention consumed by his puffy darlings as his giant paws delicately smoothed over their fur. Their wings flapped gently as they investigated Obi-Wan’s sides with their luxurious antennae. They churred in a precious way that Cody could not enjoy at all, seeing as murder approached.
“I disagree,” he said at last, as someone who had heard tales of this particular species and was assured that he was lucky it had been only that.
Obi-Wan made an exasperated noise. This was all the warning Cody received before a large wing curled around him and yanked Cody bodily into Obi-Wan’s side where he was hugged tight between feathers and a furry flank as the wing folded back up.
Already racing, Cody’s heart gave a small judder of surprise as the contrary urge to claw his way out of this feathery prison warred with the pragmatic desire to take cover, both of which were abruptly overcome by the third surprise combatant desperate to bring attention to the sheer size of this wretched dragon, and how easily Cody had been outmaneuvered. They reached a stalemate and, instead of anything productive, he said, uselessly, “Hey!”
“Apologies,” Obi-Wan said without sincerity. “I presume you understand what scent marking entails.”
In the suddenly dark, Cody allowed himself a scowl. As if he didn’t understand exactly what Obi-Wan was doing. “Swans don’t differentiate by scent. Birds have a famously underdeveloped sense of smell.”
“None?” Obi-Wan said, voice a little tart. “In the whole galaxy? Rebuttal, I have an excellent sense of smell and you keep insisting that I am a bird so perhaps you have your own logical inconsistencies to work through.”
What Cody—extremely briefly—thought was that it was… interesting to have someone act so quickly in his defense, whose solution to alleviating a perceived danger was to put himself into a vulnerable position. For all his immense size, there were not so many layers of fur and muscle that Cody wouldn’t be able to get at his heart with a knife if he had one. Either Obi-Wan completely discounted Cody as a threat—which was unwise, and didn’t strike Cody as likely—or he trusted Cody a great deal with his exposed flank.
Cody pushed the reaction that thought inspired and focused on the intense heat Obi-Wan radiated that, combined with Cody’s haggard breathing, was creating a humid environment within this feathery tent that was good for the sinuses and little else. All Cody could see were feathers, all he could smell was Obi-Wan’s fur, the earthy musk of it Cody was alarmed to discover had become familiar as it blocked out the smell of the sheep.
In the half minute it took Cody to capitulate to this new reality, the whole of the herd had gathered around Obi-Wan and were gently circling the iceberg of his body. Cody could see little besides their cloven feet and hear little besides their churring.
There was an odd, moist tearing sound from outside Cody’s bolthole.
“Hold out your hand,” Obi-Wan said, his voice both muffled through the feathers and resonating through his barrel chest into Cody’s side, up to his head. It was an intensely strange experience, and once again brought into stark contrast the size disparity between them.
Cody did not wish to do so. The wing had created a little tent around Cody. The only bits of him that were visible were his knees, which were hidden from prying bird eyes by the whirlpool of sheep.
“Hand,” Obi-Wan insisted.
Cody stuffed his hands under his armpits. He would die with his limbs intact and warm thanks much.
“If the sheep like you, the shepherds will not hate you.”
Cody considered this.
With reluctance, he presented a palm from between a curtain of feathers. A hunk of melon—blue, of karking course—was placed upon it.
“Is this better or worse than the crushing trap?” Cody asked, as a tender velvet black nose investigated his palm and he had to lock down his reflexes not to flinch back. Obi-Wan hummed with consideration, a rumble of a noise that began in Obi-Wan’s throat and ended in Cody’s toes.
“Worse,” Obi-Wan decided, as the melon disappeared from Cody’s hand into an eager mouth and was replaced with fresh sacrifice. “The crushing trap has the advantage of speed.”
—
It took Obi-Wan about ten minutes of coaxing and then outright spiritual cliff pushing to get Cody out from under his wing. By then the swans had settled at a distance around the clump of sheep. Half of them had their heads tucked under their stocky wings, asleep. The other half were gently preening any sheep that wandered close to them, or breaking off from the rest to go collect a sheep that strayed too far.
A singular individual, larger than the rest, was eyeing Cody like he was a particularly juicy bug it was eager to crack open.
“Eye contact with her makes it worse,” Obi-Wan said, amused, proving himself a liar. What value were his vaunted promises of safety now?
Cody would have to deal with that later, right now he was settled into the grass, gently petting a soft sheep face as it idly investigated his hands with its antennae.
They were such odd animals, surprisingly docile and more like two different creatures stuck together than anything else. There was a marked division in the fur. About two thirds of it, from the rear end to the base of the fluffy wings situated between the front and middle sets of legs, the fur was wiry and thick, like a blanket.
From there to the head, the fur was a mass of dozens of little coiled mats, which made the animal look shaggy. When he plucked at one, thinking it needed to be untangled, it stretched and stretched, unravelling like a spool from the end connected to the body. The connecting fibers were finer than a hair from his own head, almost translucent.
His arm was not long enough to unravel it fully. When he let it go, it sprung back into the tightly coiled little bundle.
“They’re called bombovis, or silk-moth sheep,” Obi-Wan explained, watching Cody, body language at ease and perhaps a little amused. “We unspool those little swaddles to make silk, and the rest of it to make wool. There’s about a thousand meters of thread in each swaddle.”
That was the second time Obi-Wan had said we today, in regards to this world. Cody carefully sidelined that thought as he picked up the little bundle again. One of the dozens on this single sheep alone. It was about the length of his palm and barely the width of his thumb. He allowed his expression to communicate his doubt, which just made Obi-Wan laugh, loud, say, “It’s true! I’ll show you later after we shear them.”
This outburst did not stir the sheep, but one or two swan heads popped up and narrowed in on Cody, promising malice.
“Is that what we’re doing today?” Cody asked, aware that a timer was ticking away somewhere behind evil bird eyes.
Obi-Wan hummed, which prompted a chorus of churrs from the sheep in response. “Mmm, no. I wanted them to get used to you first. We’ll shear them tomorrow.”
Cody nodded, and continued petting a long black nose. The majority of the herd was a creamy white to beige but the coat on the sheep in his lap was decidedly more yellow compared to its fellows. Sun damage perhaps? Genetic variation?
“Do they have names?” Cody asked, thinking of other herds of mammals all in white.
Obi-Wan hummed, and shook his head. “No. They don’t respond to names and I haven’t needed to keep track of individuals to that extent. They might have ones within their own minds, to differentiate each other, but they haven’t deemed fit to share that with me.”
His tone of voice suggested the presence of a grievous insult and ongoing suffering. How bravely he endured this hardship.
“This one is Lemon,” Cody decided, referring to the yellowish sheep in his lap, to which Obi-Wan whipped his head around to look at him, aghast.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
“Butter, then,” Cody said, and ducked with a snort as a wing swiped out over his head.
“If you feel compelled to name them, at least be dignified about it.”
“That one over there is Pillow.”
“Must you.”
Yes.
—
The next day involved a trek back to the valley armed with three hover carts, and many rough bags made of a spun fabric that was charmingly handmade. The strands were of disparate thickness and the weave was tight in some places and loose in others.
“Did you make these?” Cody was dubious, poking a finger through a hole. He assumed they had been manufactured by a particularly inattentive child, and while he would never be so gauche as to say this out loud, he did allow himself a faintly judgemental expression.
“Those were very early attempts. Do you suppose you could do better?” Obi-Wan groused.
In one of those charming little life coincidences, it was far easier for clones to adapt to industrial scale hydroponics than most nat-borns. Most people, even ones raised on a city planet like Coruscant, had vague and whimsical notions about agriculture. Plants grew in the ground on far away places, or they lived (and died) in charming planters at the will of inattentive bipeds. Dirt must be involved at some point in the process, was the general consensus.
Hydroponics, on the other hand, were tucked away out of sight, and had that vaguely unnatural quality of all technological innovation. Plants were hung in vertical sheets, under unforgiving grow lamps, as water trickled endlessly past neatly organized root systems. They produced a homogenous, nutrient dense yield which contained few parasites, and tasted like nothing.
Dirt? How filthy and inefficient. Kamino would never. Besides, the ocean was greedy with her mess. She scoured every little bit of it away to steal down to her coffers.
It meant that while Cody was often damp on Kamino, he didn’t truly experience mud or filth until he was an adult at war. He developed such a quick and intense hatred of it that the very first purchase he ever made, after his first successful bounty, was a bar of hard soap that smelled like sweet confections.
All that to say, it was a good thing that Obi-Wan packed multiple of his hideous ponchos as—by some small matter of happenstance—the instant Cody asked, “Would I have access to light, or should I assume construction takes place in the dark. With a blindfold,” his tail smacked Cody’s feet right out from under him and splatted him into the mud.
“Oh no,” Obi-Wan said, bland as paint as Cody fought against a sudden viscous and slimy vacuum. “Careful, the terrain can be difficult for bipeds.”
“You better eat me before I pluck out all your feathers,” Cody wheezed, mostly from having the breath knocked from him and a little from overall body pain. He was smacked in the face with the tufted end of Obi-Wan’s tail as he walked off, smug down the whole line of his back until Cody hurled a ball of mud at the back of his head.
The invisible magic diverted the first one, but not the second that followed a breath later in its shadow. It smacked wetly into Obi-Wan's face when he turned back to look.
Mud dripped down his muzzle, and Cody bit his lip, hard, not to laugh at the dumbfounded expression on Obi-Wan’s face, the way his fur and feathers immediately puffed up with indignation.
—
One poncho change later—and Obi-Wan dipping his whole head into a stream and then shaking the excess onto Cody—and an easier hike to the valley than the day before, found Cody back in the middle of the sheep herd.
The sight of the halszka heads popping up like turrets remained deeply distressing. Their eyes were black and threatening, but in the way that storm clouds on the horizon or floating point numbers were threatening. The danger was the problem of a future Cody who hadn’t yet seen the rounding error that had fucked over his bacta inventory order.
As with the previous day, the sheep quickly clustered around Obi-Wan, who had affixed two odd contraptions to his paws. They were gloves mostly in name only, with straps around the wrists and a singular sleeve that covered Obi-Wan’s foreclaws. Attached to these sleeves were slim metal spines, forming short combs of metal pointed back towards Obi-Wan’s face. Along the wrist straps were battery packs.
A little light lit up on the back of the glove contraption, followed by a low hum.
“Tooth brush?” Cody asked.
Obi-Wan curled a lip at him, exposing a long and very white incisor, which probably should have had some sort of chilling effect, but mostly only made Cody fight an eye roll.
“Vibro blade shears,” Obi-Wan explained.
With some fascination, Cody watched as Butter was lifted from the ground by invisible hands. Her only protest was a short chur, a kick of the back hooves, and a flutter of the wings as she settled into a comfortable position.
From there, Obi-Wan cupped the beast in his large paws, moving it about with the same ease as Vod Ball when the gravity was off.
The process was this: first Obi-Wan made an exploratory skim of the fleece for an entry point with the less dextrous dew claw before slipping the vibroblade into the fibers near the hindquarters. Then he made quick work of slicing the fibers from the sheep’s skin as if a jacket was being removed.
Butter was posed this way and that, her many legs straightened and bent by magic as the comb bouldered over the hips and belly and back, until all that remained was the patch around the joints of the wings. It took about ninety seconds before a naked Butter was dropped back onto her six hooves. She scampered away towards one of the herd birds and was inspected with a beak before being shuffled under a wing. Without the wool in the way, her belly appeared bulbous. Was she pregnant?
“Yes,” Obi-Wan said, when Cody inquired. “They are getting ready to lay their young and need to be sheared beforehand. It is more hygienic for their nests, and allows me to check for pests the halszka might have missed.”
This was apparently the conversational opening Obi-Wan needed to start expounding on the legacy of this herd. The bombovis were one of the earliest domesticated species in the galaxy—Cody had never heard of them but considering the absolute dearth of knowledge he had about farm animals perhaps this wasn’t surprising—and through generations had grown larger and more docile, losing their ability to fly. They laid a clutch of about a dozen soft shelled eggs, and had a mutualistic relationship with the halszkaraptors, who laid their own eggs amongst the bombovis’s clutches. The sheep tended to both sets of eggs, and the halszka—who had crucially not been domesticated but were intelligent enough to work with dragons apparently and to submit to commands—protected the herd from predators and groomed the sheep of parasites.
“They also eat the unhatched eggs at the end of the season,” Obi-Wan added, to which Cody made a face.
Cody watched another three sheep denuded before Obi-Wan suggested, “Perhaps your enrichment could include collecting the fleece?”
Right, Cody had insisted on being put to work.
The shorn fleeces separated into two parts, the rug of wool from the hindquarters, and the mass of swaddles from the front. Securing them proved to be a bit of a challenge. Obi-Wan did not instruct him on the matter of appropriate collection, and the more Cody handled the fleeces, the more the swaddles separated into individual balls that scattered about the grass, and the wool mats dispersed into floating clouds.
The bags they brought managed a few fleeces but no more. Folding the swaddles into the woollen mats and tying them with a strap worked temporarily until Cody lifted one from the middle and the strap split it in half due to a thin spot. Rolling the fleeces into long cylinders left the awkward ragged edges produced from the crevices of the animal loose and easily detachable, which further spilled swaddles into the grass.
He was quickly surrounded by a snow of his own making, as well as an embarrassed temper as every plan of attack made the situation worse.
Eventually, having processed about fifteen sheep and mounding up the fleeces about Cody in a quiet assassination attempt disguised as an avalanche, Obi-Wan offered him one clue.
“The bags are for the swaddles, not whole fleeces. The wool you can just stack on the cart.”
Cody, arms full of disintegrating fleece, wool in his hair, swaddles snagging on his ugly poncho, experiencing a blizzard in the tropics and a truly farcical amount of incompetence, straightened. Slowly.
Several rapid cycles of fury and despair consumed him as he turned his head to look up at Obi-Wan. He couldn’t tell you exactly what expression he was making, only that it usually made shinies sprint away from him. But he could tell by the sudden tension in Obi-Wan’s shoulders, and the way his ears twitched, that it was only making Obi-Wan laugh.
—
That night, Obi-Wan set two bags on the trunk in Cody’s room in addition to the plate of fruit and fish and a jug of water on the side table.
Cody, sprawled out on the bed feeling as if his joints had fused and his muscles had turned to shale, thought nothing of it until several hours of improv character work as a corpse gave him enough energy to reach up over his head to drag one of the bags onto the bed with him.
His mind was foggy and empty from the work, but even what little there was left went quiet and still when he peeked into the bag and saw only Butter’s yellowish wool.