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The dunes might forget, but they do not forgive.
Sands shift to cover past sins, to hide a person if they’re still for long enough. With every storm the dunes are remade, the planet is reformed; new contours and ridges and valleys each time the winds howl strongly. There are no witnesses to this remaking. Beings with any sense seek shelter, wait out this force as it makes its way across the planet, respectful, or something like that, of its power. Those that find themselves caught amongst the shifting sands do not find their way out. For a moment the planet moves around them, and then they are swallowed, consumed, torn apart.
Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that the dunes do not leave witnesses.
For some, the storms are a remaking. The annual cycle moving not with the suns, but with each new storm that remakes the dunes. Transience is a fact of life, the world shifts and shifts and with each new landscape new things are uncovered, or hidden. Nevertheless, it is known that the dunes are vicious. The dunes do not forgive.
Cody first heard this story from an old Twi’lek woman who sold him a Jogan fruit and then tried to sell him flowers that he had considered for longer than he should have. He had asked her, as he always did, about the hermit that lived out in the dunes, but she had shaken her head, told him the stories of those that had secluded themselves amidst the dunes were to be forgotten.
People go out there for good reason. Whatever chases them there should be forgotten – we can’t give them what they’re looking for.
He had paused, slightly, turning the fruit over in his hand. It occurred to him that he had never bought fruit for himself, before. Then he had asked, despite himself, what it was she thought people went out there looking for.
She shook her head, The what doesn’t matter. People out there want to forget – to be forgiven. She had smiled then, as if she were remembering a long-ago sadness. Least we can do is let them be forgotten.
Something in his expression had prompted her to continue, because then she had told him the story. That the dunes remake themselves, that people can be caught amongst them, reshaped or buried. That those out there hope, one day, that they will be forgotten enough to be forgiven. Again, she had smiled sadly. The dunes are not cruel – but they are their own. They cannot be used like that. They might forget, but they do not forgive.
---
For the first time since hearing the story, Cody thinks he might be beginning to understand it.
Understanding comes in the form of vicious clouds of sand that pull at the edges of his clothing, powerful enough that he has to keep tucking stray fabric into the folds of his clothes to stop himself from being torn apart. He glares behind his goggles, attempting to put one foot in front of the other in a way that keeps him moving westwards. Since the storm picked up it’s been getting harder and harder to know which direction west is, and now he is struggling to see even his own feet. The suns that he had been using for guidance have been obscured behind shifting clouds of sand, casting his whole world into an artificial dusk. The only light that slips through the heavy clouds is dulled and brown, the kind of light that might have been soft in abstract, but like this only serves to make him feel impossibly trapped, as if the sky itself is collapsing in on him.
Still, because there is nothing else to do, he struggles forwards. The sand is beginning to battle its way into the gap between his mask and goggles and it bites against his skin. He grimaces, pulling up his mask in an attempt to dispel the sand. Despite his efforts, it still creeps in through some impossibly tiny gap, propelling itself against him over and over in a with such force that he stumbles.
It is this stumble that makes him pause. He hasn’t been walking for that long, has he? It’s too soon for exhaustion to have claimed his body. He makes to move again, and then stops. The suns must have set, somewhere above him, because all at once he realises how cold it is. How much the darkness seems to be closing in on him.
He shakes his head, sharply, as if to banish the sudden feeling of exhaustion that seems to have settled about his bones. He knows what he is here for. There are unfinished things for him, here amongst the sand.
Then, the world tilts, and falls into darkness.
---
There is soft light on the horizon, golden with the promise of daybreak, and he watches it, transfixed.
There is a hand at his shoulder, gloved and armoured and even from the weight alone he knows it instantly.
There is a voice, quiet now, speaking words that he can’t quite remember.
There is, somewhere behind him, a war --
Cody wakes suddenly.
He stares up at the barrel of a gun and grimaces. At the other end of the gun is a man, goggles pulled up onto his head and mask down against his neck, dressed much the same as Cody is. The first thing he consciously notices though is the gun; it is old, enough that he can’t identify the model, and seems only to be damaged as an unavoidable product of age. He half wonders what there is out here, so far away from anything, that requires such a well-kept weapon.
The man watches him. Cody watches how his hands seem to tremble, just a little, as he grips the gun.
Then he speaks, his accent is not one that Cody can place, though he’s sure that it isn’t native to Tatooine. He remembers hearing another story in the market – people come to Tatooine to disappear.
“Who sent you out here?”
For a moment that leaves him feeling genuinely foolish, he blinks up at the man, “Who the hell are you?”
“What? I’m -- No.” He gestures with the gun. Amateur, Cody thinks. He speaks as if he is remembering some prior strength, “I’m the one with the weapon. What are you doing out here?”
With every moment of returning lucidity Cody is more and more aware that he could best this man, escape from the cave and wander out into the dunes again. He considers the prospect for a moment; likely it’s not been long enough for the storm to die down, this man clearly isn’t a professional of any sort. Quickly, he decides that it’s safer in here. In a way that he never would have done before, he allows his curiosity to get the better of him.
He answers honestly, “I’m looking for someone.”
The man’s whole body tenses, and so Cody amends, “Not you.” He wants to ask what it is the man thinks is waiting for him, out in the dunes, but that seems like a question more likely to get him shot. Instead, he says, “I must have gotten lost in the storm. I have no idea who you are.”
His body relaxes, just a little, but the gun is still pointed at Cody. “How do I know that?”
Cody resists the urge to raise his eyebrow, to answer with something like, if I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, “You think I would have come out here to kill you unprepared and in the middle of a storm?”
For a moment, Cody watches his expression shift. Then, he lowers the gun.
Cody stands, wincing as his body objects to the change in position. He surveys the space they’re stood in; it is little more than an overhanging of rock, sequestered from the outside storm by a sheet of metal that groans against the bolts holding it in place each time the wind pulls against it.
Not wanting to take his eyes off the man, whose gun still hangs loosely from his hand, Cody asks, “How did we get in here?”
“There’s a passage behind you. It takes you back into the valley. We’re halfway up the cliff, here.”
Cody hums, begrudgingly impressed. Loathe as he is to admit it, it was a tactically sound place to settle. As he’d answered the man had begun to relax a little more, and Cody paused a moment longer, hoping that such a pause would lead him to drop the gun. After a moment, in which Cody did his best to look as peaceable as possible, the man places his gun on a low outcropping of rocks within arm’s reach.
Indulging his curiosity once more, he asks, “Why are you out here?”
The man laughs, low and humourless, “Why is anyone out here?” With practiced ease, he pulls off his goggles and mask, dropping them besides the gun. Then he slumps down, back against the wall. “Atonement, forgiveness. Hiding.”
Cody nods slowly. Carefully, aware of his aching body, he sits down opposite the man. “Have you managed it?”
The man looks up, his eyes heavy. For the first time since waking up, Cody sees something that he recognises.
“Have you?”
For a moment that aches deep in his chest, Cody holds his gaze. Then, he drops it. His answer goes unspoken but they both understand, speaking it into existence would not change the past.
His face shifts, as if thinking to smile, before he says, “The storm will hold up for another few hours. Rest here.”
Cody narrows his eyes. He is not so much as a fool as to trust this man, to sleep.
The man shakes his head, “Rest. Not sleep.”
He sighs, they both know he has no alternative. Pointedly, Cody pulls off his mask and goggles, dropping them unceremoniously on the cave floor beside him.
---
The storm battering against the metal sheet at the mouth of the cave has become a distant noise, no less present but tuned out by Cody’s mind. Instead, his focus has shifted to the man sat across from him. Or rather, his focus has altered slightly, as if viewing an optical illusion. At some point he hadn’t consciously realised he’d stopped looking for signs of a threat, and instead was noticing something else.
The man was cleaning his gun, concentration devoted to his work. He navigated the weapon with practiced ease, hands steady as they removed, cleaned, refitted, each part. He worked with what might have been mistaken for reverence, to anyone that lacked Cody’s well-trained eye. Instead, Cody recognises the sorrow in his actions.
“Who was it?”
The man’s gaze snaps up, against the weapon his hands still. “He -- My sibling was killed. I wanted justice.” He shook his head, “Revenge.” A pause. Cody watches the way his gaze flickers down, a little to the left. “I killed the wrong man.”
Cody nods, acknowledgment or understanding.
Silence stretches between them, warping the cave beyond recognition and back again. Then, breaking the silence, the man asks, “Who did you kill?”
Cody stared. Swallowed. Searched desperately for a word that might do Obi-Wan justice. “My --” Words caught in his throat, as he tries to speak each one it falls away, leaving nothing but an empty ache. He shakes his head, “I didn’t mean to.”
Even to his own ears, his voice sounds small. In a way that, if it had not come from his own mouth, he might not have recognised the sound.
The man hums, Cody’s own acknowledgment, understanding, returned. He goes back to cleaning the weapon.
---
He has been walking, directionless but purposeful, for the better part of a day when he sees the house. It appears suddenly on the horizon, almost unnatural in its isolation amongst the sands. Still, he makes his way towards it. The suns are just beginning to set and his exposed position, the dunes stretching out around him with nothing expect the house in sight, is beginning to make the back of his neck itch.
Now granted a goal, he makes his way towards it, resolutely refusing to consider the idea that the whole thing is a mirage conjured by the heat and his growing exhaustion. He walks with newfound purpose, glaring into the sun that is just beginning to disappear behind the house. The falling light outlines the building in an almost blinding orange, throwing everything but its silhouette into darkness. Now well-versed in the folk tales of Tatooine, Cody can’t help but pause for a moment to consider the building and the creeping feeling that is beginning to curl up his spine.
After a longer moment than he will willingly admit to anyone, he shakes his head and begins walking towards the building again.
---
When he reaches the house, the lower sun is just beginning to dip below the horizon. It is the time of evening that might have been beautiful, if he had paused with enough presence of mind to appreciate it. The light pours out across the sand, catching it in a way that paints the whole world in golden tones. It is a soft kind of light, its edges clouded as the suns linger on the horizon, and it speaks of memories half-forgotten.
Cody doesn’t notice the sunset; though, almost as if in answer, there is a soft light visible through the window that faces him.
He raises his hand to knock at the door.
For a moment, there is silence in the house. The kind that is noticeable because the occupant has suddenly stopped in shock, making the occupied quiet of before suddenly noticeable. Then, as Cody peers through the window to try and catch a glimpse of what might be happening inside, there is again the sound of movement. The door opens.
Standing in the doorway is an older Togruta woman, her clothes are the dull browns of Tatooine and seem as if they have been patched together time and time again, though just enough to stop them falling apart at the seams. They are in fitting with the house that she occupies; once well-made, cared for, but has since fallen into disrepair as if the person that maintained it has since moved on.
The gaze with which she regards him, though, is sharp. He almost shifts uncomfortably under it, before he remembers himself.
She eyes him for a moment longer, then says, “It’s getting dark. You’d better come in.”
He nods, grateful but unsure if she was expecting a reply, and follows her inside.
The house’s interior is much the same. Well-made, and now neglected. He enters into a large room, whose existence seems to centre around the circular table that sits in the middle of the floor. It is a heavy thing, made of a dark wood that he doesn’t think is native to Tatooine and makes him wonder where it might have come from, who it was that brought it here.
“Here,” She gestures at one of the chairs littered around the table, “Sit.”
Cody sits, choosing the chair that looks the least like it might collapse from beneath him. Still, it creaks ominously as he settles into it. He watches the woman look between him and the two empty chairs beside him, for a moment, she seems as if she is looking years into the past. Cody shifts slightly and the chair groans in response. Her gaze snaps to him.
“Ma’am --” He begins, unsure where he intends to finish his sentence, only that the way she looked into the empty space beside him made something in his chest ache with familiarity. He runs a hand through his hair, dislodging the sand that has settled there, it falls away like a fine rain that patters to the floor around him. He tries again, “Ma’am, I was wondering --”
“There’s nothing for you out here.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
She shakes her head, sudden and decisive, “Not here.”
“Ma’am --"
“You only lose things out here!”
She says it sharply, in a way that makes Cody pause. For a moment, he watches her, the way she does not look at him when she speaks but at the empty chairs around a table that is too large for the few chairs that remain. He remembers what he thought might once have been a garden by the door that he entered through, most of the beds had been empty but a few plants still curled up through the soil, yellowed with drought. He watches the way she looks at him, with sadness but not cruelty in her eyes.
“Please,” He says at last, “I’ve lost everyone else.”
There is silence for a moment, and Cody tries, desperately not to hope.
At last, she nods slightly. “There’s a hut a little way west of here. I’ve heard stories --" She pauses, seems to consider him a moment longer, “There’s a man out there. They call him Old Ben.”
For a moment, he stares at her. And then the words register, sudden and overwhelming as a blow across the jaw. He gasps, a half-formed thing that is almost a sob, though he isn’t sure if it is a product of shock or relief. Ben. It had been Obi-Wan’s code name as long as he’d known him. Obi-Wan. Another shuddering gasp, and he raised a hand to his face as if to stifle the sound. Something about it is too raw, too intimate to be shared.
His chest aches with relief; it is a physical thing, painful as he struggles to breathe through it. Before him, his hands shake and he clasps them together in an attempt to impose some sense of order onto himself.
When he speaks, his voice wavers too, just a little, and he has to try once, twice, before the words obey him. He looks at the woman, hoping that, impossibly, the extent of his meaning can be conveyed in his gaze.
“Thank you.”
---
The first time he sees Obi-Wan again he is a figure with the suns against his back, featureless and silhouetted. The sands beginning to stir at his feet make it difficult for Cody to differentiate between the man and the desert in which he stands. And still, he knows.
It’s impossible for him to name exactly what it is that allows him to identify the man. The way worn robes fall against his body, the lilt of his walk. The bone deep ache that settles in his chest at this simple recognition. Then he steps forward and Cody sees blue eyes and a face carved by time and winds. He smiles, the ghost of something from long ago, but imitation enough that Cody recognises it.
He lurches forward, forgetting that between them is sand and something like a lifetime. Still, still, Obi-Wan moves forwards to meet him. They stand facing each other, close enough to touch and neither one of them quite brave enough to close the gap. Here, within arm’s reach, the years feel acute and Cody aches with it. It is as if he’s lost a limb, a lung, as if someone had reached into his chest and pulled out his heart. He wants, desperately, to claw at the hole in his chest that the act has left, as if somehow this would return his heart to its rightful place.
It is all he can do to stand, to not allow his gaze to drop from Obi-Wan’s.
At last, it is Obi-Wan that reaches across the space between them with a gentle hand that brushes against the edge of Cody’s jaw. The thumb that presses warm against his skin is calloused, reshaped by time, and the sensation of it makes him want to weep.
This is the feeling of late nights spent together, of vulnerability that was too much for the battlefield, for other beings to observe. It is the same sensation that made him want to weep, a little, all those years ago.
Here, he cannot help the feeling that claws at his chest, that threatens to rise from his throat as something much too close to confession. Instead, he rests his hand against Obi-Wan’s neck, the sand lodged in his collar rough against his fingers. He pulls their foreheads together, joins their bodies, their breath, as one.
---
Later, they sit together over a cup of tea. Seated side by side on Obi-Wan’s bed, because he has only one chair, because neither can bare to move beyond touching distance from the other. For a long time, neither of them speak. There is too much between them, impossible to put into words. As if they fear that words, lending shape and weight and form to the things that followed them here, will render all of it a dream.
Cody leans back against the wall behind Obi-Wan’s bed, his body aching after days amongst the dunes. He watches Obi-Wan, his head turned to face him from where it rests against the wall of the hut. His earlier assessment was right, Obi-Wan has been aged by Tatooine; his hair is streaked with grey in a way that it was only beginning to suggest by the end of the war, the lines about his face have deepened and set as time has passed. It is strange to be comparing Obi-Wan to a memory, for the man to be beside him allowing him to perform such a feat. Cody finds him familiar and unplaceable all at once. This is an Obi-Wan who has aged and changed without him, who he has now found and been tasked with reconciling his memory of the man with the reality that sits beside him. He decides, noting that the blue of Obi-Wan’s eyes is still bright with a soft sort of brilliance, that such a task might be difficult, but it is one that he will gladly undertake.
“How did you find me?”
Obi-Wan turns to him, and Cody considers him for a moment longer before he gives his answer. “The people of Tatooine tell stories. I listened. They weren’t exactly subtle.”
Obi-Wan hummed, it was a sound that Cody had gotten used to hearing, years ago. “That’s not an answer.”
He begins to smile, “No.” Then, pushes, just a little, “Maybe you didn’t hide as well as you thought.”
“Maybe I didn’t.”
There’s silence for a long moment before Cody next speaks, and when he does the words feel heavy, as if, even as he speaks them, he isn’t sure if this is a question that he wants an answer to. “Why did you let me find you?” Then, when Obi-Wan doesn’t answer, his eyes fixed on something on the opposite wall, he adds, “Did you know what happened?”
Again, Obi-Wan looks at him and Cody watches his face shift through emotions in a way he never would have seen before. “I know enough. Bail and I --" He shakes his head, “How could I not, Cody?” He laughs, and for the first time there is an energy to him, one that leaves Cody fascinated, a little frightened. “I thought I’d lost my mind when I saw you standing there in the desert. Honest to the Force, I thought all the years alone had finally taken their toll and I’d started to hallucinate. And then I saw you --"
“Obi-Wan --"
“How could I not?” His voice his soft and Cody’s chest aches with so many things that he might have needed a century to name them all.
“Obi-Wan --" He tries again, shakes his head because the words are not enough, will never be enough, and still, he has to try. Cody takes his hand, and for a moment is struck with the knowledge that the weight of it is the same, that branching across it are burn scars that were not there years ago. “I’m sorry.” He says, desperate, aware that there is something wretched in his voice, “I’m sorry.” Then, because even that is not enough, “I missed you.”
“Cody --” Obi-Wan looks at him with something heavy in his eyes, the thing that years ago Cody wished he hadn’t been able to identify. Obi-Wan brushes his thumb against Cody’s jaw and he leans into the touch. The motion is new and instinctive, all at once.
“I’m sorry.” Obi-Wan’s breath is soft against his ear, “For everything that happened.”
And then he kisses him. It is an imagined thing made real, and Cody makes a desperate little noise into the kiss. Obi-Wan is warm against his hands, as he threads them through his hair, seeks out skin beneath the folds of his clothes, at last rests them gently against Obi-Wan’s neck. Each time they pause, Obi-Wan taking the moment to look at him with impossibly blue eyes, Cody is half-terrified that this is it, that this will be the moment that they stop and realise that everything that is happening should be impossible. The moment never comes though, because each time they pause Obi-Wan waits just long enough to drink in the sight of Cody before him and then kisses him again, as if to spend time with their lips parted is to suffer some terrible fate.
Cody realises, some time after Obi-Wan has removed his shirt and begun to work a mark into the skin just beneath his collarbone, a little before the room begins to fall dark with the suns dipping beneath the horizon, that he has no memory to compare this to. He realises, slowly, and then with a sudden clarity that makes him still enough for Obi-Wan to look up at him questioningly, that this is neither the Obi-Wan of long ago nor the Obi-Wan resigned to years of solitude on Tatooine. As he hooks his fingers into Obi-Wan’s hair and tugs him gently towards him, close enough to kiss again, he realises that he might at last be seeing an Obi-Wan of the future.
He realises, as he watches Obi-Wan move about the kitchen preparing a pot of tea, parted from him just long enough to begin to be unbearable, that he sees himself in this future too. That, now, this future is a tangible thing, made real as he calls out to Obi-Wan, his voice soft but carrying in the small house. As Obi-Wan turns to him and smiles, in a way that is new, and hurts a little to look at but not because of any memory from the past.
Cody smiles at him in return, and he watches, with such fondness that he almost thinks it should be impossible, as Obi-Wan’s own smile glows bright in answer.
---
Some time later, months, he thinks, long enough that Tatooine has become a steady rhythm, Cody travels to Mos Eisley. He walks through the market streets with Obi-Wan’s fingers curled between his own, the weight of his hand is still a familiar and wonderful thing.
At a stall run by a familiar Twi’lek woman, he pauses to buy flowers, the deep orange of the setting sun, and it is here that he hears a new story.
The dunes might forget but they do not forgive.
The sands seem to stretch, impossibly infinite. Like this, it is impossible to imagine that a person might be alone out here, accepting isolation in such a setting would be a simple impossibility. To the practised observer, to stand amongst the sands and look out towards the horizon is an exercise in hoping.
To stand amongst the sands and look forwards is to know that somewhere there are others looking forwards too.
The dunes do not forgive, but they may help a person find it; in others, in themselves.