Archive of Our Own

Cody was two hours into the day’s inspection when he got the sign that things were truly going awry.

There had been indications of this direction, when he had clocked heavy concealment charms inlaid in the company ID-badges when he presented his own credentials. A technically legal, but excessive measure for a facility operating at a level-two security protocol at most. Not to mention the loaded look Cody caught the Team Manager sent the Chief Operating Officer while showing him around the lobby before the opening conference. Or the way a cluster of people literally turned tail at the sight of him and his distractable guides during the walk-around.

It was that point that Cody decided to give Team Manager Garth Harkon the slip on the thirteenth floor. In his defence, he didn’t so much give Harkon the slip as wander off without being noticed. (It was not…technically best practice, but when it comes to the magical branch of workplace safety ordinance, there was a degree of forgiveness for justified deviations from protocol.)

When he ducked into the first office he came across, Cody really knew things were about to get messy. Across the bank of disordered desks, ostensibly set aside for a research team, he saw a worryingly familiar shock of red hair.

“Absolutely not.” Cody said, despairingly, thinking of the paperwork this would entail. He then guiltily checked behind him to see if he had been followed, and let himself into the office more fully.

“Safety Officer Fett,” the menace greeted. “I heard there was an inspection today, I had hoped it would be you.” He was clearly on an infiltration, dressed in the business casual style favoured by the middle management mages of today’s company, Henderson Magyk Solutions. Cody eyed the satchel likely brimming with stolen evidence, and sighed.

“You are the most complicated part of my job,” Cody informed him mournfully, making a note on his report. (Securely attached to his department-issue clipboard, overlaid with a standard privacy charm, because Cody didn’t fuck around.) He had, of course, come up with a notation for Ben by now—to streamline the process—but it would still be a nightmare once he was back in the office. There would be at least four forms to find and file in triplicate, and those would then sulk around the office in that way technically-correct-procedurally-complex-paperwork did, before Lin down in Records sent one of her juniors down to snatch and ferret them away, never to be seen again.

“Now, darling, don’t be like that,” Ben said, still standing on the window ledge with a screwdriver in hand. He still had yet to spare a glance over his shoulder, just kept working at the joiners, lit by the midday light as it cut through the nearby office towers.

Cody gripped his clipboard tighter, seeing the shape of Ben’s intentions and trying desperately not to do that maths. Trying not to think about the physics, the calculations of distance, speed and impact. They were on the thirteenth floor, and Cody had walked across tiled concrete when he entered the building this morning.

“This is reckless, irresponsible, and— that is not how you remove a warding screw of that type!” Cody hissed, interrupting himself and moving closer. “You need to unscrew it twice and then you can dispel the enchantment. If you dispel first you risk leaving traces in the groves of the screw.”

Ben paused, said, “I do so love our little chats,” and then swapped tools, heeding only the most specific of Cody’s advice. It was clear that Cody should have kept his mouth shut because in moments the window pane was coming off in Ben’s arms, and he was lowering a leg (a long, toned leg; the shape of which was desperately apparent from the way that the fabric of his suit pulled as he moved) and then the other down to the floor so he could gently place it against the wall. (Cody was not thinking about the strength necessary to hold such a large pane of glass. Or if he was, it was only because regulations suggested that this was a task more safely shared between two, to lower the risk of bodily strain or material breakage.)

“That’s not up to code,” Cody blurted, as he watched Ben clamber back up to attach a tether to a hook he must have installed himself. None of it was: neither the rope he was unspooling, his carabiner, or the hook itself were up to current regulations. Cody knew the specifications, they likely wouldn’t kill Ben by plunging him to his death. They were all just strong enough for someone of his approximate weight, but there was a reason that clause 13B-J18 of the Construction Equipment—Hoists Magical and Otherwise guidelines demanded better, more expensive, products. “You shouldn’t—”

“You are a very good man, Safety Inspector Fett,” Ben interrupted, flashing him a brief smile even as he checked over his gear once (not the recommended twice, with a buddy, that protocol and good sense would demand) and started to get into position.

Cody made an unprofessional yelp of protest and alarm, when Ben leaned over to check the ground beneath the window a single hand holding him in place.

“You should check the potion lab,” Ben said, after climbing onto the ledge once more. His hair was catching in the wind now whipping past the open window. Cody’s heart was somewhere in his throat, pulsing an uneven, panicked tempo.

“I’ve already checked the—”

“The one in the sub-basement,” Ben said, pointedly.

Cody swore feelingly. Because there wasn’t meant to be a sub-basement, and sub-basements meant ley lines and ley lines meant, inevitably, explosions. Or worse.

He then cursed again, extensively, as he watched Ben hurl himself out of the window.

Cody surged forwards, crossing the room in seconds, grabbing a hold of the ledge of the window, watching how Ben plummeted and then soared. His tether clearly modified with some kind of buoyancy enchantment. Not Maximillian’s, but something in the same order.

Which was good, Cody told himself, as he glanced up at the subpar, but altered equipment, because it meant that whoever Ben was working for wasn’t sending him out into the field with entirely inadequate equipment. It was also good because Cody didn’t think he’d have the emotional strength to go write up this company for illegal potion lab infractions after seeing Ben plummet to his death.

The man was a menace, but Cody did not wish him any harm.

Quite the opposite, if he was being honest with himself.

Cody watched with (an attempt at) detached interest as three security guards piled into the door too late, both to catch Ben and to see where down the street he slipped off to. They turned to glare at him, and Cody took no small pleasure in shrugging as he wrote down the breach in security before he demanded to be taken to whoever was in charge and shown the sub-basement.

The way the small group of belligerent guards guiltily froze, looked at each other and gulped was confirmation enough.

But Cody was paid to be thorough.

The first time they met, Cody was not frustrated by Ben.

He didn’t know his name, and was labouring under the mistaken belief that the man was an employee at the cauldron factory he was out in the countryside inspecting. Which may have been part of the reason why.

Cody had just done his initial walk through, and had almost finished checking in with the various heads of departments. Leaving just conversations with quality control specialists and workers on the floor to go, when someone walked over to him with a cup of coffee.

Cody had been there since four in the morning; the chrono-spells on the Italian-made machinery were locally set at time of construction, and the owners were evidently too cheap to pay for a temporal caster to come and fix them. Cody had made a note of it, but while a fine and later sanctions may incentivise the owners to pay for the correction down the line, they wouldn’t fix the fact that it was nine in the morning and he had already had been at it for five hours. The idea of more caffeine actually made him want to cry in relief.

Cody was a professional, so he only politely thanked the man, noting distantly that he was striking, with a shock of red-auburn hair, a well maintained beard and a thick pair of glasses. He was wearing an ill-fitting lab coat, with an ID badge that read, “Ben Kennedy,” marking him as a member of the research team. The coffee was not the worse he had on the job, which meant it was only terrible rather than abysmal. Cody still gulped it down gratefully.

As Cody did so, he had followed the progress of the man who brought it to him across the factory floor. He had watched with mild curiosity as Kennedy’s copper hair cut through the sea of greys—the slate cauldrons, the slick lab flooring. Cody had jerked in surprised when Kennedy had tripped as he approached the door. To catch himself, Kennedy had flung an arm out, and in doing so his elbow had gone through one of the cauldrons. One of the cauldrons in the part of the room waiting for its third round of steadying charms, revealing it to be far below the thickness standards set by the code agreed by Occupational Spells, and Hexes Administration and the Guild of Alchemists.

Cody had sighed, made a note on his clipboard, finished the coffee and called for the floor manager, ready to find out just where the blame for this bit of industrial malfeasance lay. Cody had to work to tamp down his personal satisfaction: he hated when companies pulled this shit, but he, by equal measure, enjoyed little more than calling them to task on it.

In the aftermath, Cody had thought about the worker who brought him coffee and handily, if inadvertently, exposed the defects in the production line. Ben Kennedy had not appeared among the workers Cody interviewed later, nor in any of the ledgers for the day, but a company that was fudging its production was often fudging personnel records, and as the man who had, unwittingly or not, exposed the company secrets, Cody was not surprised if Kennedy had made an expeditious exit.

When, two months later, Benjamin Whitley, a similarly striking red-haired senior researcher at the magical beasts husbandry institute that Cody was inspecting, dropped a vat of feed and revealed the startling inadequacies of the pens of the griffin enclosures, Cody was more than a bit suspicious. Though he was hardly one to presume physical similarity necessarily meant a single thing.

His glancing encounter a mere week later with a Benny Otterlin at one of the biggest artificer firms in the province, during an uncontrolled outbreak of alchemist’s fire in a testing suite, landed Cody squarely in a place of aggrieved concern and grateful frustration.

After that, Cody rarely went a month without catching sight of Ben—as that seemed to be his name, or at least his most favoured pseudonym—at one of his job site inspections. And much like three years of prior experience had honed Cody’s ability to take a constellation of small signs and read in them the growing likelihood of a severe infraction; Ben’s presence became a portent of a job about to reveal some unanticipated level of fuckery.

Taking the man’s insistence at turning up at some of the worst offenders Cody was sent to investigate, and his notable failure to face any sort of official sanction that Cody knew about as a sign, Cody reckoned he was some kind of government man like himself. And duly made note of his presence and contributions, in a vague gesture to inter-agency support, while flagging requests for further information to better his own best practices.

It took Cody four months of polite queries to accept that if his superiors had any idea of what agency or institute Ben was working for (no private undertaking could beget that kind of consistent access to companies of this calibre), they were not willing to inform Cody. It took him three to establish his own protocols and filing shorthand for Ben-related shenanigans on an inspection. By month six, Cody knew that he wasn’t the only safety inspector to encounter Ben, but he had a far greater likelihood (at least 4.8 times more).

Cody carefully read nothing into that fact.

Some days Cody would tell people that he did the work he does because of how he came into being.

He would implicitly or explicitly talk about how the cloning labs of Kamino were a workplace that went wrong. No oversight, no care, and no sensible protocols in place. Magic pushed past its limits. Most people knew something of the duplication spells run amok, of the hundreds of more-or-less identical men (and women once the magic started to get really creative with its understanding of “cloning”).

It was a simple story that people could understand. Cody did his work to try to stop a case of workplace magical meltdown of that scale ever happening again.

Cody was glad he and his siblings existed; at his core he was pleased to be alive. But that did not make up for any of the rest of it, the tubes, the neglect, the instructors, the experiments, the time-bomb enchantments soaked into their brains in an attempt to make them useful to someone. A trap only discovered when an unknown whistle-blower got some higher power on the National Mage Council involved and got them out of there in time.

Other times, when he was feeling both more and less honest. Cody would tell people he did the work he does because it was a job, a well-paying one that used his skills and used them well. He would tell them that he believed in the work of the Occupational Spells and Hexes Administration, and that he was the best at what he did so why would he not. 

The truth was somewhere in between.

Despite what hack matchmakers, hiring managers and basically anyone out there would tell you, there was no reliable way to tell how much magical ability someone had. Not by looking at them, not by testing them; not by family lineages or genetic manipulation; not by how many degrees from the storied magical academies they held. Not even by the magic you have known and personally witnessed them to have done.

There were of course patterns, commonalities, and tendencies towards magical ability. A well-trained high-wizard from one of the illustrious families was likely to be able to reliably perform a simple summoning ninety-nine times out of hundred. But there was no reliable way to know whether you were in the hundredth time until things started to go very wrong. Not for certain. Not in a way that could truly be relied upon.

Because a person’s level of magical ability was innate, unknowable and constantly fucking shifting.

Cody wished more people would acknowledge and understand this. The way that someone brimming full of magic could, for moments or even full days, have less magical ability than needed to fill a thimble, and vice versa. The number of horrible accidents that occurred because a system or protocol was built around the absolute confidence that someone’s magical ability was (a) knowable and (b) consistent, was staggering and the source of Cody’s tension headaches. Not more so than corporate greed and cutting corners, but as a related ill.

Magic got depleted, magic got inflamed, magic could shift with someone’s hormone cycle, mood and the position of the fucking stars. Magic was especially dependent on how tired, over-worked and stressed a person was, which had led, in Cody’s work, to all manner of workplace accidents.

Magic and clones, was another matter entirely. Cody isn’t quite sure when the truism about the declining potency of charms over more than three duplications became sacrosanct certainty that cloned beings couldn’t be magical, but it had been a defining fact of his existence after Kamino.

At their fifteenth meeting, Cody almost didn’t notice Ben.

In fairness, he had other things on his mind.

“What would a clone know about magic?” A snide voice had muttered while Cody was doing his check of the monitoring enchantments of the potion bottling plant, and finding them woefully inadequate. The voice was from a distance, but all Occupational Spells and Hexes Administration safety officers entered inspections with sense enchantments engaged: keenly looking, listening, and even sniffing out any infractions.

Cody didn’t freeze, didn’t spin around and shout, he swallowed and breathed through the rage, making a mark on his report about bigotry in the workplace—to be followed up by a rights, diversity and respect official—and turned back his focus onto the next set of enchantments.

Before he could, he heard a body thud to the ground. When Cody turned, he spotted the man who had been casting offensive comments about clones on the floor looking startled and outraged. Cody thought he spotted a flash of red hair in the eddy of bodies, some surging forward, some flowing backwards.

Cody told himself firmly that he must have imagined it, but as he walked over to the newly prone man to quiz him on whether he had tripped on something, or fell because of clumsiness. (Relevant, in case of floor and trip hazards!) The surliness of the glare that met him told Cody another story entirely; the man wouldn’t — couldn’t— admit that he was pushed. After a long minute of pointed silence that Cody luxuriated in, he tutted and wrote the man and the company up for another instance of workplace endangerment.

Later, Cody would find a note tucked into the pocket of his coat. The one left at reception, allegedly  tamper proof. The note, polite and to the point, directed his attention to the real shift schedules for the plant. Later, he would confirm that the handwriting matched the various sheaths of fraudulent documents Cody kept on file from Ben’s various aliases, which would tell him who precisely he had to thank for both his report and the defence of his honour.

When Cody (after sighing, making an overtime request, and turning backwards) unearthed the actual shift schedules, he found a company underpaying and overworking its workers, on the path to a major magical flare-up or slip-up of some kind. He is unsure if his whistleblower had slipped him this note before or after the incident, but he let himself believe the two were related.

It was nice to live in a world, even for a moment, where someone was dedicated to defending the honour of a working clone.

He had heard comments like it before, they all had. That the clones were without magic, and that this was evidence that their existence was a perversion to the natural order of magical society. To wit, duplication spells could duplicate sentience or magic, never both. Or so people liked to tell themselves.

Clones were beings without magic, beings without utility to magical society and therefore shouldn’t exist, or some fallacy to that effect.

Cody was unsure where the rumour came from; he had his suspicions given how Alpha and Fordo had spent months teaching them all not only how to wield magic, but how to wield it quietly. Despite rumours to the contrary, clones did have magic.

Most of them did at least. Like with any population, Cody and his fellow clones had a range of magical ability. Most of Cody’s siblings—at their baseline—had enough for simple potions; others could wield it impressively and extensively enough to give them all cloaking spells for their magic, some could barely manage a basic charm.

To date, outside their own numbers, probably some five dozen people knew how much some clones had. Mostly partners, new family members and trusted colleagues—Aayla, Numa, Kit, people they knew they could trust.

Cody would never venture to guess what Ben knew, but when, Cody knew it had been him all but defending Cody’s honour, he still started to count on him as someone to be trusted.

Even if he clearly took risks and actions that were a danger to himself, and Cody’s ability to write up a report for the inspection in under half a day.

After that first job, the analysts at the office had gone back for a closer look at the files and finally unearthed Ben Kennedy’s dossier. He was a relatively new hire in the alchemical properties research team, there just shy of a fortnight before he spectacularly revealed the structural weakness of a batch of cauldrons to Cody.

At the time, Cody had decided that it was even odds a case of fortuitous clumsiness or subtle protest. He wouldn’t be surprised either way. New hires and old hands were always useful to his inspections. By turns new hires were outraged by the state of their new workplace or unfamiliar enough to reveal its weaknesses; while old hands were bitter and fed up, annoyed by new management principles. They were both useful to Cody’s work.

By now it was clear this was not the case for Ben, who was apparently some kind of professional troublemaker. There were office pools among Cody’s level and below, and a telling silence among the supervisors, which in itself was telling.

For all that his interference helped Cody uncover new and impressive levels of corporate workplace fuckery, the danger that he was putting himself in, implicitly on behalf of his employer, was starting to not only worry Cody, but gall him professionally.

Cody was doing a follow-up inspection, on behalf of a colleague whose mat-leave had come in a week early, the twentieth time he encountered Ben on a job.

This time, Ben was the one who met him in the lobby of the corporate offices.

They blinked at each other for a moment, hands stretched to shake.

Ben recovered first, gripping Cody’s hand and shaking it once, firm, dry, exceedingly professional. He then took Cody’s ID badge and gave it a careful study. When he glanced up, actually confirming that Cody’s ID-photo matched, the fucker, Cody couldn’t help but cock and eyebrow at him. Unrepentant, Ben met his eyes steadily, but Cody caught the small smile twitching at the corner of his lips.

“Welcome to Organa, Olin and Farr, Safety Officer Fett,” Ben greeted. “My name is Kennedy Bellington.”

Cody fought and lost the fight not to frown at that, this was a new blatant level of lying, even for Ben. The rest of the sentence then caught up to him.

“Organa, Olin and Farr?” He repeated, glancing down at today’s clipboard. “My paperwork has the name as…”

“Recent merger,” Ben said breezily, “I am a temporary hire as the firm undergoes some pretty major personnel changes.” Unsurprising given the original report from Aayla’s inspection, “fucking dire,” had been how she described it to Cody.

“How temporary?” Cody asked, a grim certainty falling into place.

“Oh at least a week,” Ben confided, beaming back, totally unphased by being caught out.

“And you in particular were hired…?” Cody said, a scent in the air.

“There was,” Ben said leading him into a conference room, where a broad older man and a younger slighter man in a pair of exquisite suits were sat waiting, “a desire to have someone with some familiarity with inspections of this kind, after the last report.”

“I see.” Cody said with what he thought was measured calm. “I’m sure they are grateful to your expertise and experience.” He almost wanted to make a comment about Ben looking familiar but they were already in the conference room.  

“We certainly are,” the older man said, standing up and shaking Cody’s hand. “Bail Organa, you must forgive us the chaos, Safety Officer—”

“Fett.” Ben supplied.

“Safety Officer Fett, Ferus and I are still getting our legs under us. Hopefully, Mr. Bellington has explained that our firm has recently acquired and merged with Clovis, Farr and Amedda.”

“He has,” Cody allowed, shaking Ferus Olin’s hand next. “Though he didn’t specify how long….”

“Today’s Tuesday,” Olin said, glancing at Organa, and now that Cody looked at him there was a slightly manic air to him. “So just over a week now.”

“Ah,” Cody said, unthinkingly, “my condolences.” All three of them laughed at that, Organa’s a strong loud laugh, Olin a short, sharp snort, and Ben’s a warm chuckle.

“Quite,” Organa agreed. “I believe we tried to reschedule this visit, but I think we caught the transition of Safety Officer Secura’s maternity leave.” That would explain it. “Nevertheless, I believe this is only a follow-up inspection, and I hope you will be satisfied with the changes that we have made, have put into motion based on SO Secura’s initial report.”

“I hope so to,” Cody said, he shuffled through his paperwork. “I believe that the concerns were mainly around the breakrooms and the paralegal floor. Particularly around improper charms.” That was putting it mildly, the charms that Aayla had found, went past Unsuitable and Unsafe work environments and nearly landed in criminal culpability.

Organa looked severe as he said, “Yes, those have been dealt with.” He waved Cody off, “I know you can’t take our word for it, and please take as long as you want ensuring everything is up to code now. I’ve told the staff new and old to make themselves available to any questions. Ferus and I want to make sure that this is a safe workplace going forwards.”

It ended up being, all told a remarkably painless process. The changes had been, or were certifiably being applied, the illicit charms of focus, energy and concentration that had been engraved in the chairs of the paralegal offices had been removed entirely to Cody’s great relief. The workers he spoke to reported that the symptoms of weariness, fatigue and headaches that had first brought Clovis, Farr and Amedda to their attention, had faded amid the new leadership. While the lounge areas were undergoing extensive renovations, the contractors — a firm that Cody had some passing familiarity with— made themselves and their schematics available to his inspection.

There was even a charm worker on hand who was updating the approved charms throughout the office, and took the opportunity of Cody’s walkthrough to verify that the approved revisions would still be up to code.

Cody almost felt bad for having to take this on from Aayla, she would have loved to have seen such a tremendous change from her initial scathing report. Even Ben, walking menace to Cody’s peace of mind, was a painless part of the process. As charming as ever but not obstructive in the slightest, he had clearly prepared for this role faultlessly and connected Cody to all the places and people he needed to speak to. If only legitimate company representatives could do such a good job.

He did, Cody noted, make sure that they were never alone throughout the process, hindering Cody’s ability to demand what the hell his game was, why he was such an inuring nuisance and so forth. Either Organa, Olin, or another employee was always there. Cody couldn’t be too mad about it, Ben had shown himself impressively capable of eel-ing away from Cody’s questions in the past, and he didn’t rate his ability to force the man to answer in a hotbed of lawyers.

After the final conference of the day, where Cody spoke to Ben, Olin, Organa, and a handful of representatives from across the firm (no sign of Farr then or throughout the day), he found himself finishing early and making his goodbyes, baffled at how easy the whole process had been.

Cody sat in his work truck for a full five minutes, debating trying to catch a word with Ben before giving it up for a bad job and driving back to his own office to get the paperwork filed.

Of course, given Cody’s luck it only took until his next job for him to have another chance to speak to Ben.

Only, this time Ben was the opposite of the composed comfort he had shown at Organa’s offices, or quite frankly dur any of Cody’s previous experiences with him. Cody spotted him in a breakroom, some distance away from the heavy industrial magic of the processing floor. There was a harried look to him when Cody walked into the breakroom of the warehouse depot, that eased only when he spotted Cody.

The job had already been a bad one, with Cody finding extensive evidence of careless storage of numerous volatile spell, potion and enchantment components being stored without the requisite shielding, distance and safety protocols. The penalties this place was accruing were almost impressive in scope. Cody had already had to move to the back-up pen stored with his clipboard.  

The sheer relief on Ben’s face when he spotted Cody had Cody walking over there, without thinking. Only remembering to throw out a likely excuse of “Can I interview one or more of these gentlemen at some point?” to the representative as an afterthought. Ben was at a table, with two ex-military looking men, enchantments bristling from their acrylic uniforms nearly looming over him. There was a faint whiff of an altered-pay-me-no-mind charm sewn into the fabric of Ben’s boilersuit, but it was clearly not up to the scrutiny.  

“Gentlemen, I am Safety Officer Fett, I was hoping to get some testimonies about the efficacy of the magic shielding on this level of the building. Would any of you have a moment?”

With a polite pause that looked like it pained him, Ben, spoke up, “If neither of you gents is interested, I know I am a relatively new hire but I have some experience from my last workplace and would love to give some feedback.” He said it with an air that was likely trying to land on worker-trying-to-snatch-a-few-minutes-of-break-before-hitting-the-floor-again, but the slight edge belied that attempt.

Cody worked to keep his face blank, giving professional disinterested workplace inspector, like he could not care less either way which of them decided to offer their dubious insights.

When, grudgingly the other two men indicated for Ben to go ahead, Cody walked Ben back to the meeting room that had been made available for his use.

“Thank you for taking the time, Mr.—” Cody said, taking his seat and indicating for Ben to do the same.

“Kris Broadman,” Ben said, flashing his latest ID-badge.

“Great Mr. Broadman, talk me through your comments.”

And then Ben was off, enumerating the protections in exhaustive detail.

“—I’ve also been noticing—”

Here, Cody cut Ben’s almost impressive spiel off with a coughing fit. He looked at the representative who had been frowning in the room with them the whole time, and gaspingly said, “—don’t suppose you could get me some water?”

With an acid look at the eminently reasonable request that even he could not deny, the representative took himself off, buying Cody and Ben probably five minutes.

“That’s the best I can do for you,” Cody said, mildly. He shouldn’t, but there was an air of menace in this place that made Cody distinctly uneasy, and whatever he thought of Ben’s cavalier approach to his own safety and general procedure, he didn’t want anything to happen to the man.

“Thank you,” Ben said, standing, he was already starting to cast a cloaking spell. It was an elegant thing, underlaid with a brute power that Cody blinked at. It was also an almost reckless use of magic, for a concealment that would be stripped away by each of the many layers of security in this place.

“Good luck,” Cody found himself saying, to the space where he could no longer see Ben. He had no idea if the non-visible Ben acknowledged him in any way, but there was a longer than expected delay between the spell and the door opening and Ben making his exit.

Cody’s guide was less than impressed by him having finished up with Ben by their return, but Cody just shrugged. He moved swiftly through the rest of his walkthrough; he had enough to be getting on with in his report, and while he didn’t actively feel threatened, he would rather get out and to safety sooner. The general distracted hum of the office had taken on a particular note of violence the moment his company representative had returned to find Ben gone only worsened things.

When Cody finally escaped to his truck, he threw himself into the seat. There was a thrum of magic, and he, taking a wild chance, quickly set off. Cody tensed as he passed through each gate of outer security until he was out on the road and tearing away.

After five minutes with no headlights in the mirrors, he cleared his throat and said to the seemingly empty car, “We’re clear.”

There was an expectant pause, before Cody could feel the ripple of a spell being thrown off and a mussed looking Ben appeared in the footwell of the backseat.

“You didn’t think you rated a seat?” Cody asked, glancing back briefly in the rearview mirror.

“Didn’t think I should risk them seeing the impression on the cushion.” Ben said, sounding winded, after a moment. Befoe taking the chance to scramble into one of the seat, diagonal from Cody. It made him feel a bit like a taxi driver, but it wouldn’t have been safe for Ben to try and scramble to the front either.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Cody found himself saying, for lack of anything else to contribute.

Ben barked a laugh, “Quite right, Safety Officer Fett.”

“Where am I taking you?” Cody asked, already starting to tee up his questions about what the fuck Ben’s whole deal was, now that he had him in a private enclosed space.

“Are the main OSHA offices still off Fourteenth Street?” Ben asked starting to sound bleary. At Cody’s affirmative, he murmured around a yawn. “There’s an office building, same intersections on but on twelfth. Fuck off big tree outside.”

He then leaned his head against the window and seemingly passed out. Cody would have doubted it, it seemed almost too convenient a way to avoid Cody’s many pressing questions. But he had seen Ben burn through a lot of magic even before he left the building. And reapplying and keeping a high level concealment charm like that for the time– almost an hour and a half — that it had taken for Cody to get through the rest of the walkthrough, was almost unthinkably draining. Let alone the kind of opening charms that Ben would have needed to get through Cody’s warded truck.

Now that Cody was thinking about it, he was quite frankly amazed and no small bit awed by the display of magic he was now realising Ben had just pulled off. It put some of his actions — namely throwing himself out a window with subpar, if charmed equipment into a slightly more understandable— light, but the part of Cody that understood why good practice required backups to human magical might still worried.

Whenever a set of lights gave him the chance, Cody stole looks at Ben, taking in his crumpled uniform, the bruises around his eyes. Magic of that extent always took a toll, but Cody reckoned he was seeing signs of deeper exhaustion. Whoever Ben was working for was sending him on more and more dangerous jobs, with less and less protections and preparation. If he knew a damn thing about Ben’s work he could ask about work hours and overtime, but he would be pressing into the unknown.

Still, Cody took him to the specified street, dubious of his chance of finding the right building until he spotted the truly magnificent tree in front of 1217 and pulled in. He was just turning around to try and rouse Ben, when a group of four people, led by a handsome black man in a suit with a purple tie hurried out.

The team of four wrenched the passenger door open, and Cody would have objected by he could see the signs of them checking up on Ben and could sense the comforting warmth of second-hand healing and energy spells. The black man made his way to Cody’s door and politely waited for Cody to roll down his window.

“Safety Officer Fett,” he said, which Cody didn’t love as far as these things went. His ID badge was safely stowed in its usual place away from sight. “Thank you for bringing him home. We had agents getting ready for an extraction, but your help kept the situation contained and our man safe.”

“That should be your job,” Cody said hotly, before catching himself. He breathed in an angry breath before continuing more measuredly, “I don’t know what work you do here, but I have been unimpressed with the standards of safety I have seen this man equipped with as he undertakes reckless work.”

The man didn’t object or flinch, merely met Cody’s eye and nodded, almost serenely. “Thank you for your assessment and assistance, Safety Officer Fett. This won’t be forgotten.” And then he left. During the exchange, Ben had been bundled away, now well enough to make eye-contact and offer Cody a tired wave from the quickly closing glass doors. He seemed to be having a tired but unconcerned conversation with two of the four people who were escorting him in.

Part of Cody considered throwing the car into park and following them in, and demanding answers. But, he also, by this stage in his career had enough experience with various workplaces to spot the signs of both security protocols beyond his clearance and vague proto-governmental connections. Not somewhere he wanted to blunder into without invitation, credentials or preparation. So, once Ben was fully gone from view, Cody drove to his own office, filled out and filed his paperwork before going home to Boga and a strong mug of sleepy tea.

His efforts to seek information out about whatever the fuck kind of work was being done over at 1217 Twelfth Avenue hit the kind of bureaucratic roadblocks that confirmed for Cody he was dealing with something arcanely governmental and deeply confidential. He dropped Fox an email with what he had found and what questions he had, but knew he would probably not hear back for at least ten business days. And then Cody tried to focus on work.

The next week, Cody didn’t see Ben once. But on his third and final job of the week that was pretty much the problem.

Once more, he had been assaulted with an immediate sense of foreboding when he stepped onto his latest worksite. Ostensibly a mining processing firm, Mustafar Inc., had layers of overkill magical security were not particularly promising. The alarm bells really started to go off when the company representative met him for his credential check with his own ID that wreaked of hastily cobbled together speed.

Even more concerning the name and all the paperwork named his representative as Ben Kenobi. Ben was a common name, but there was distinct pattern to Ben’s assumed names, and identities, and Cody’s internal alarms were going off. He kept his eyes peeled throughout the walk-through keeping it perfunctory as he searched for a likely place. Eventually he spotted a conference room that seemingly had a rotating guard on it.

Once he had a sense of the space, Cody begged off from his tour, asking for a place where he could write up some initial notes. As he had banked on, they dropped him in an empty and out-of-the-way room a floor down from where he suspected they were stashing Ben.

Cody checked to make sure he was being left — the dubious advantage of whatever beehive Ben had set amongst these people was that they had negligible time and attention for Cody — and centred himself before drawing on his charmed glasses. They let him glance up through the floorboards above to confirm that Ben was there and alone, then, after doing an internal confirmation that he had, by his best estimation, magical reserves to safely perform the spell, Cody cast a transposition, bringing Ben down to him.

“Safety Officer Fett?” Ben asked, appearing bound on the floor of the room across from him. He sounded out of it and confused.

“I’ve just committed a rather major infraction of my duties as a Safety Officer of the Occupational Spells and Hexes Administration,” Cody admitted, coming over and using his charm-inlaid pen-knife to cut through the thick, military grade spell supressing ropes. “You may as well call me Cody.”

“I see,” Ben said dozily, letting Cody pull him up and staggering as the blood back rushed to his limbs. “Thank you?”

“Don’t thank me yet, let me see if I can get us out of here safely, and then you can thank me with some damn answers.” Cody said, and waited until Ben nodded grimly. “Good, okay, this will probably get quite uncomfortable, but I need to hold on to my shoulder until I say so.”

“Okay?” He was the kind of blearily that spoke to some kind of hex, which made Cody unsteady with rage, but he needed to project calm authority until they were out of here, lest he risk Ben himself giving them up. You never knew what lurking triggers an unethical caster would build in to a hex.

Cody took Ben’s hands, placed them behind him on either shoulder, walked to the outermost wall and cast the spell of intangibility that was his expertise with Ghost Unit. “This is probably going to feel…pretty terrible, but don’t let go of me.” And then, keeping his mind carefully blank and his magic steady, Cody walked them through the four walls until they were safely outside.

“Move quickly,” he said, walking Ben over to the car, and buckling him in. He took the wheel, engaged the rudimentary charm of confident passage that all OSHA staff vehicles had imbued each month, and headed to the exit. With more confidence than he felt, Cody drove up to the series of three barriers, breathing only when they had been waved through the last one.

He started to drive them to the building that Ben had directed him to last time, it was a good hour away. Ordinarily, plenty of time for a good questioning, but Ben still had that dazed look to him, so Cody left him to it, beyond pressing a bottle of water on him.

After thirty minutes or so, Ben seemed to rouse, groaning and dropping his head to his hands.

“Back with me?” Cody asked, keeping his inflection steady.

“Just abouts,” Ben said, voice thready. “I can’t thank you enough, that could have been rather bad.” He was tapping away at a phone, clearly updating his handler or boss or whoever was responsible for this madness.

Voice tight, Cody realised he was pissed, “That was bad. You promised me answers. Who the fuck is sending you into these situations without adequate protections.”

Ben looked faintly amused when Cody stole an angry gaze in his direction, and Cody barked, “Talk.”

“As you insist…Cody,” Ben said, voice quiet. “I am a Jedi.”

“And a Jedi is…?” Cody prompted when Ben didn’t continue.

“Ah, that is a question for the philosophers,” Ben mused, while Cody sighed, changing lanes, glancing behind him again to make sure they still weren’t being followed.

“And if a non-philosopher asks?”

“We are an ancient order of magic users who among other things are connected by our ability to share and pool magic between us.”

Cody shot him a brief, startled look, “That’s not—”

“Possible?” Ben asked wryly, “Well neither is clones using magic, but my stunning rescue puts that assumption to paid.”

Cody acknowledged the hit, but didn’t let Ben derail the conversation.

“It is a rare skill, one that few are born with. And even then it is a hard, and dangerous one to use. We have to train and watch ourselves, but in theory we are less vulnerable to running out of magic.” That did in fact explain some small part of the reckless way that Ben seemed to rely on magic, as if it was unthinkable that it could ever not be there when he needed it. It was an unthinking trust that only the very young or very stupid had, most adults learned that magic had real and dangerous limits.

“Although, if one of us ever lost control it could wipe us out,” Ben continued, ruefully. “That is why we train and work together.”

“Okay, let’s say for the moment I believe you. Being able to pool magic like that… I get why you may not need some of the same protections that are regulation,” Cody said,  “but what I don’t understand is why are you putting yourself in these dangerous positions in the first place.”

“The Jedi are a loose semi-religious group,” Ben said, “but we do have a more official wing, mostly known and sanctioned by certain branches of the government.” Cody winced at the damning vagueness there. “We work to protect the general balance of magic, the offices that I have been investigating had been showing signs of magical corruption, I was tasked with investigating them.”

Cody sighed, because that didn’t answer the question in the slightest. “I suppose you can’t tell anything more specific?”

“Not without prior authorisation,” Ben agreed. “Though if it is any comfort I imagine I’m about to get yanked off this kind of work. I am a bit too hot for undercover work at the moment.” Manfully, Cody didn’t make the obvious joke, he was still a bit too raw from the stress of the rescue to land on anything humorous.

They pulled in, a silence between them. Before either could venture to break it, the same man Cody spoke to last time stormed out of the building once more. Accompanied by a short, worryingly old man and a veiled woman in black.

“Oh fuck,” Ben said, with a wince when he spotted them. Cody would have been more concerned, but it was more in line with a child who knew he had broken a rule than an employee who needed intervention.  

The man got to the door, wrenched it open and pulled Ben out of the car with a firm hand on his shoulder. He first patted Ben down for injuries and then yanked him into a strong hug, “Mace,” Ben complained.

The man, Mace, sighed, “Obi-Wan, you are a nightmare and menace and off fieldwork for the next decade. My heart cannot take the stress you create.” He glanced over towards Cody and grimaced, “Safety Officer Fett, my thanks and apologies once more, I owe you yet another favour, and this time I will make good on it.”

“Come we must, news and action Agent Kenobi’s efforts will require.” The old ass man was saying, directing the woman in black to manhandle Ben away like a misbehaving kitten while Cody stared, feeling discomforted and forgotten. “Make haste we must.”

Once more Ben— or was it Obi-Wan Kenobi?— was being bustled away from him, although this time the man himself shouted, “Thank you, Cody!” before disappearing from sight.

“Safety Officer Fett…”Mace was still there and Cody startled, glancing at him through the still open door. They considered each other for a moment, and then Mace climbed in, leaving the door open. “I understand from our conversation and from Obi-Wan that you have had some concerns about how we have been conducting our work.”

Faintly Cody nodded, finding his voice, he said, “The equipment alone, hasn’t up to safety standards, and —”

“It’s been a long day,” Mace said kindly, “I don’t need the full report now, but I would appreciate hearing a any recommendations and limitations you personally have observed. There are some… complexities about our status, but I will be in contact with someone at the Occupational Spells, and Hexes Administration to set up some kind of audit too.”

“Good,” Cody said, pleased, but still a bit off balance by the whole day. “I’ll have to check with my supervisor, but I’d happily give my feedback.”

“Excellent, we will be in touch,” Mace said, with a small incline of his head, and then he climbed back out.

“Wait,” Cody found himself saying.

“Yes?” Mace said, pausing in closing the door.

“Did you mean it about…” he searched for the name, “Agent Kenobi? He’ll be off fieldwork?”

There was a pause as Mace considered him steadily. “Yes, for a while, certainly. We can reconsider in a few months, but we will need to wait out this attention.”

“Good to know,” Cody said, feeling anything but.  

“I’m sure,” Mace said cryptically and then shut the door. Leaving Cody with nothing to do but to back to the office, report his breach of protocol, and take the mandatory week of suspension as the investigation into Mustafar Inc. went ahead without him.

By the evening of day three of his procedural suspension, Cody was not wallowing. But he had cleaned his whole house, started and put down no fewer than four books, and he was wearing Aayla’s gag gift — a pair of booty shorts that read OSHA-compliant — and his warmest knit jumper and socks.

So, he may have been sulking.

He would get over it, of course. But Cody didn’t do well with enforced idleness, he knew he couldn’t have handled the situation at Mustafar Inc. any differently, but the suspension still irked. (His supervisor had emphasised this was pro forma and wouldn’t affect his record, and yet…) To say nothing of the news about certain personnel changes at a still unknown organisation.

In many ways the knowledge that he would no longer have to keep an eye out for Ben—or Obi-Wan, he supposed—was good. Cody now wouldn’t run the risk of witnessing the moment the man’s luck ran out, he no longer would have to be distracted by keeping an eye out for a familiar face in the crowd. This was his job, he did important work and couldn’t afford to forget that fact.

But still, just for the weekend, Cody could indulge himself. And indulge himself he would, he had a pile of blankets on the sofa, a movie cued and a bottle of wine decanting on his coffee table. All he needed was his takeout and then he could lick his wounds, metaphorical and otherwise.

The doorbell went, and Cody hauled himself up and over to the door, tip already in hand. The guild for delivery people may have guidelines to protect the wages of its associates, but Cody knew better than to trust corporate compliance.

“Delivery for—” the person said as Cody opened the door to grab the food. But Cody had fucked up, exhausted from his week, enforced rest notwithstanding, and he saw an orange blur gun towards the opening.

He yelped, sticking a leg out in panic as Boga made a break for freedom. Boga, however, was a feline wise to Cody’s tricks and she cleared Cody’s leg with no issue. The delivery person, male, pale, uniformed, indistinct as Cody focussed in on his fleeing cat, leapt into action.

Quickly muttering a spell on the box of pizza, letting go and leaving it hovering as he went for the cat.

“Oh —” Cody called, “she’s usually not very—” He cut himself off, because scratchy, grumpy, particular Boga was purring up a storm in the hands of the delivery person, who had snatched her before she tore down the hallway.

“She’s a poppet,” he was saying as he walked back to Cody. “I think—”

“Ben?” Cody said, before correcting himself. “Obi— Agent Kenobi.”

“Co—Safety Officer Fett,” Obi-Wan echoed, still holding Boga who was still shamelessly purring and rubbing herself against his beard. Cody winced, at the title, he didn’t particularly feel like Safety Officer Fett at the moment.

“Why are you delivering my pizza?” Cody asked, eventually, after a long moment in which they both boggled at each other, charmed pizza still levitating between them.

“I—" Obi-Wan began, cutting himself off when Boga, bored of their stalemate, started to squirm in his arms. “Oh be still little one, I don’t want to drop you.”

“Come in,” Cody said, taking the pizza, dispelling the sturdy levitation charm with a careful flick of his wrist as he did. He gestured into the flat, inviting Obi-Wan in, turning around to put the pizza on the counter and give him space to come in. 

There was a choking sound and Cody turned, to find Obi-Wan, clutching Boga closer to himself. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes darted down damningly.

Ah. The OSHA-Compliant booty shorts. Paired with slouchy socks and Cody’s comfy jumper. There were probably worse ways this could have gone, something involving an awry enchantment, or another clone bearing witness, but Cody was hard-pressed to remember that.  He busied himself in the kitchen, letting Obi-Wan do what he would.

Obi-Wan came in, toeing off his shoes, walking in to the main living room, and gently placing Boga on the sofa.

“I did not know this was your home,” Obi-Wan said, at the same moment that Cody asked from the kitchen, “Tea?”

“Who’s home did you think this was?” Cody asked, even as he was putting the kettle on in response to Obi-Wan’s hesitant, “Yes, please.”. They were both looking anywhere but each other: Cody focussing on the tea, Obi-Wan giving scratching Boga’s chin more attention than the task demanded.

He shouldn’t have asked because his kettle, temperamental from his last foray into alchemical experiments, had taken to making a loud sulky whine as the water came to a boil. It prohibited any conversation, even if you raised your voice the kettle has been known to bubble even louder in retribution. Most of Cody’s friends and family knew not to try to talk over the tea-kettle temper tantrum, Obi-Wan was thankfully mulling over the question, and made no attempt to speak to Cody.

Of course, that then just let Cody stew in the fact that he still didn’t know a fucking thing about what was going on. Why Obi-Wa— Agent Kenobi was here, what and who he actually worked for. Still he wasn’t going to make a bad tea, so Cody prepared the two cups, floated them over to Agent Kenobi, casting a thermo-stasis charm on his pizza as he passed it in the hall.

“Talk.” Cody instructed, taking a seat next to Boga, who made a cross little meep at being disturbed by the depression of the sofa cushions. She settled down easily enough when Cody dragged a thumb through her fur.

“Right, yes.” Agent Kenobi said, taking a seat in a nearby chair, gripping his mug of tea and taking a sip. “That’s perfect,” he said, with a small smile, but Cody caught his longing glance at the wine. Which, fuck, would have made this conversation easier, wouldn’t it?

“Explain why you are here.” Cody said, firm. He wasn’t going to let him squirrel away without explaining anything, again.

Agent Kenobi winced. “First, I should apologise, Safety Officer Fett. I did not know this was your home, and I obviously would not have tricked my way in had I known. I was given to understand that the person at this address had some critical information to my next assignment.

“I now understand this was a…small joke played on me by some colleagues.”

“On a Friday evening?” Cody asked, sceptically, and couldn’t resist adding, “And what happened to the actual delivery guy? Did you rob him for his clothes?”

Agent Kenobi glanced down at his pizza parlour uniform, sighed and ran a finger across his badge, a shiver of magic went out and Cody watched as the uniform transformed into an ordinary pair of jeans and a smart forest green cardigan. “I didn’t do anything to the man, merely intercepted him at the door and relieved him of the walk up to your door.”

“He just gave you my pizza?” Cody asked dubiously.

“I did give him a substantial tip,” a pause. “And I may have intimated that I was to be your date for the evening, and planned to surprise you.”

Cody didn’t let himself laugh or blush, but it took some doing. 

“As for it being a Friday, It was suggested that I was getting underfoot and should make myself useful.” Agent Kenobi said with a sigh.

“By coming to my door? How did you even know where I lived? And aren’t you off fieldwork?”

“I didn’t,” Agent Kenobi insisted, “I could have avoided this whole situation if I had known, I wouldn’t have walked into this trap.”

Cody took a long sip of tea to avoid getting offended at that.

“How did your…colleagues know where I lived then?” He didn’t feel threatened by Agent Kenobi, he had spent too long with Ben to not trust his safety to the man and his discreet inquiries about Jedi had been met by positive reports; but at the same time having him come to his door really was not particularly comforting.

“Safety Officer Fett, I don’t know how much you have been informed about the Jedi, but we do have our ways,” Kenobi said, with a wry smile that slipped when Cody didn’t let himself be amused. “However, I believe that a…brother of yours, Monkk, is acquainted with my colleague, Kit. I think that may be where they found out your address.”

“You know Monkk’s Kit?” Cody asked, baffled. Monkk had met Kit on one of his diving excursions. They had hardly believed the man could be real from the stories Monkk had told them, but they had to refigure some ideas when they finally met the man. “Is Kit a Jedi? No don’t tell me, I’m still trying to understand why he sent you here.”

Agent Kenobi sighed, taking another sip of his drink. “I was being stroppy and underfoot about being taken off the Corporate Acquisitions—” Cody choked on a laugh and Agent Kenobi smiled, “team, and Kit maybe texted his boyfriend to get your address.”

That actually made Cody feel at much greater ease. Some unknown semi-official organisation wielding unprecedently strong magic, Cody didn’t trust; one of Cody’s shit-head brothers meddling through their boyfriends, Cody could trust to, if not to resist from meddling, not cause him harm. Still, no point not taking the chance to gather more information. “I can’t believe you work with Kit.”  

“He’s on my team, we’ve been pushing after a particular case, me more so than most.” Kenobi explained with a sigh, “We’ve been looking into a series of companies controlled by a small group of powerful and dangerous individuals. It’s why things got so messy for me, I had done too many jobs that ended up being connected.”

Sometimes the best tactic was to let the interview subject keep talking, questions could divert them, so Cody only nodded, sitting on the eighteen questions that raised. “Obviously if I knew it would get me booted to another team, I would have been more careful. I didn’t want to stop see—” Kenobi shot Cody a guilty look, cutting himself off and clearing his through. “Hence the sulking.”

That was starting to sound promising. “Still. My address?” Cody asked, with studious innocence. “Why did Kit that would help?”

“I—”

“I mean really, going from harassing me at work, to following me home, this is the kind of thing that I would usually have to write up.” Cody said, neutrally

Kenobi looked at him with a startled and defensive air, before Cody said, “It is a shame I’m still waiting out my suspension.” And winked at him. Taking a risk on the idea that Kenobi had been as… fixated on him as he had been on the menace who kept turning up on his inspections. “I’m not sure if you heard, but I left an inspection early because some brave fool got himself in a workplace accident and I had to step in.”

“You absolute bastard,” Ben said, sounding thrilled and losing the tension that had been there since Cody had started his questioning.

“Agent Kenobi,” Cody said, grinning, “why would your colleagues send you to my home when you were in a bad mood?”

“Fuck off, Safety Officer Fett, call me Obi-Wan.”

“Alright, Obi-Wan” Cody said, standing up, walking around the coffee table and leaning over him, their faces tauntingly close. “But I’m only Safety Officer Fett at work, if you’d like to join me tonight for some food and wine, and tell me all about it, I’m going have to insist you call me Cody.”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan said, “I—” before clearly giving up on words yanking Cody down for a kiss.

For all the teasing, it was a careful thing, Obi-Wan’s lips gentle and careful against his, his hands almost politely resting on Cody’s back. It was all very respectful, until Cody took control, grabbing that hair that had been his signal on so many work sites that something interesting was about to happen and slotting their lips together more firmly. He lost himself in the rhythm of the kisses, tongue, teeth, breath and small murmurs all smoothing out into a pleasant thrum of yes.

Breaking away when his neck was starting to protest from the angle, Cody realised that Obi-Wan’s hands had made their way to Cody’s shorts, at some point, and were tracing the lettering by touch.

“Like them?” Cody asked, breathless and turning to give him a better look before grabbing a hand to pull Obi-Wan over to the bigger, more comfortable sofa, where Boga-dependent they could stretch out next to each other.

“I now understand why you were so insistent on all those OSHA regulations.” Obi-Wan said, sounding gratifyingly distracted as he let himself be dragged where Cody wanted him.