#cwfkb2023

Pffffiuuuuu... I didn't thought I would finish it in time but I did! *fist pump*

Just in time to thank the @codywanfirstkissbingo 's mods for such lovely prompts and to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and/or Winter's Holidays!!!!!!!!!

Big love sent to everyone!!!

💖❄🎄💖🌞💖🎄❄💖

No eye contact. No disappointment. No polite courtesy he didn’t know ground into the mud beneath his boots because he looked at someone and saw flecks of gold in their eyes. 

The Jedi had explained it to them after that first battle, their eyes directed towards the clones but not looking at them, politeness patchworked together into something functional and it had been appreciated more than they would know. Helmets on, filters activated, and there’s an alarm system hooked up to the entrances to the lower levels in case someone who isn’t a brother strays into their bunkrooms. They were made to be soldiers, to adapt, they could adapt to this. 

The current battlefield is not Cody’s favourite. 

Too much mud for their standard equipment for a start, a helpful piece of information that could have been communicated better by a brother in shades of umber, russet, sepia, but no. They got to find out along with the sheer amount of droids they were meant to fight as they spilled out of the transport ships and onto a planet that squelched with every step and covered everything. Cody hates it. Hate is a new emotion, sparking a solid red with little variation at the edges and Cody reaches for it with both hands. Better that he stains his palms red with hate than with the futility of cutting himself to pieces on the ruined shards of his helmet. 

Cody lies flat on his back in the mud and tastes copper in the back of his throat. Every breath is shallow from necessity, the mud smells solid, damp but warm and Cody hasn’t decided on if he likes it or not. Choking is a risk with his current position but he can’t move, not yet. He’d shot the droid that had gotten a hit off on him, some huge hulking twisted sparking slag heap of metal in one uniform silver shade that had nearly vanished amongst the stinking clinging mud. He hadn’t seen it. There would be more who wouldn’t see them. 

Colours mean nothing when they can't help them. Might as well peel them away and give them soulmates to try and balance the cosmic scales.

Pointless thought to indulge in, peeling wires out of their casing to twist them into fresh shapes, but the blow to his face has shaken them free and Cody isn’t sure if he has a left eye anymore. There’s the pulsing pain of it echoing through his teeth and his bones, a deep thrum that reverberates in his chest like he’s standing next to an engine roaring in full-throttled fury. Nothing else exists except the pain and the thought screaming back against the tempest. 

If Cody had a soulmate, if he had another person he could love like he had been made, devotion  coded into his genes along with every other adjustment the Kaminoans had decided on, who would he choose? Prime had bargained away an army for a child so how could Cody, made in his image, not love just as fiercely, with every piece of him. 

Cody thinks he is halfway in love with the man he would have chosen to be his soulmate already.

Most of his brothers are too.

They were made for the Jedi after all, how could they not love them?

There’s a shout from somewhere, maybe to his left, or it could be his right, Cody’s heart skipping a beat in its battered and bloody cage. He blinks his single working eye, his vision blurred carmine, crimson, sanguine, and Obi-Wan leans over him. He’s kneeling to his side, one hand resting on Cody’s chest and he wishes he could feel it, bruise in the imprint of Obi-Wan’s palm so it lasts. His hair has fallen free from the neat braid he had pulled it into hours prior, copper cascading across his forehead and shoulder. 

“Are you alive?” Obi-Wan asks, desperate, frantic, the words running into each other in his haste. He pauses, pulling a breath in through bared teeth, and his gaze focuses on Cody, then into him. There’s the sharp scent of ozone in the air, a distant sense of burning stars collapsing in one themselves and Cody isn’t made to hold this knowledge but he tries. He grins up at Obi-Wan, tasting iron and mud and he tries.

Obi-Wan sags against him, a decaying ruin finally learning it should have relaxed eons before, curling forwards and pressing his forehead to the back of his palm. His other hand is close enough to Cody’s shoulder for him to feel the movement when Obi-Wan’s fingers curl, supporting himself on a fist instead of a flat palm. Cody wants to speak, to tell him about the droids and their uniform colouration, an absence in the Force that Obi-Wan may not be able to see, won’t know about. He twists his face a fraction to the side, pulling a breath through his nose as he unseals his mouth. Blood coats his teeth, his tongue, a fresh trickle working down his neck. 

“Droids.” Cody spits, doesn’t make it past the shattered edge of his helmet. It’s warm, everything is warm. Hurts too much to be dying so this is existence, pain and love braided so closely together it isn’t worth tearing his fingers to shreds to separate them. He loves Obi-Wan. He is in pain. Both things are true. “Droids in the mud.”

“Oh, Cody,” Obi-Wan sighs. He pushes himself upright, his shoulders curling like a scavenger picking over a corpse, no change in pressue on the hand still resting on Cody’s chest.

Cody never thought his name could be beautiful. Functional and his, yes, but not beautiful. If Cody could choose, he would pick Obi-Wan. He has chosen Obi-Wan in every way he is able to. 

The mud clings to Obi-Wan, the bottom of his robes sodden and dark and umber. It doesn’t suit him, the outskirts of Cody’s single edged vision blurring out of focus as he tries to take all of him in. He raises himself up, turning towards Cody and reaching out to the broken line of his helmet. His brow furrows, which isn’t an uncommon expression on him but it isn’t normally directed at Cody, this concern or exasperation painted over Obi-Wan’s features. He can’t fully make out which with one eye and a head full of spiking agony.

Obi-Wan leans closer and Cody should stop him, should press himself further into the clinging mud. But he doesn’t. Obi-Wan’s touch hurts, a swift redirection of Cody’s attention back to a place he’s trying to forget, but he leans into it, breathes through the flashes of sage, burgundy, cobalt in front of his eyes as his jaw grinds shut. 

“Still there,” Obi-wan murmurs, his fingertips cool against the crater of Cody’s face. “There’ll be a scar but it will heal.”

Obi-Wan is closer than Cody realised, not a respectable arm span between them, the distance assessed and calculated and refined in countless messages volleyed between the battalions. No, he’s close enough to kiss, nose to broken and bleeding nose. Cody could. He wants to.

He doesn’t.

There are fault lines of silver beginning to run through Obi-Wan’s hair, clustering at his temples, but the majority is copper and russet, bronze and fawn. His freckles are similarly mismatched , the one beneath his eye dark compared to constellations over his arm, a scattered handful visible where his tunic gapes at the neck, cream woven with bisque and all stained dark with sweat and mud. He is every colour Cody wants to remember and this must be a gift, this ability to see colour from the moment they open their eyes because they love too strongly to be denied this small kindness. Obi-Wan leans up, closer still, and kisses Cody’s forehead. He remains there for a moment, breathing through his nose in sharp shallow puffs, before he retreats.

Obi-Wan’s mouth is red, a sharp line cut into his jaw from Cody’s helmet and blood beads from it, beginning to drip from his chin. “I’ve repaired the damage as best I can, blunted the pain too. I—” Obi-Wan blinks, pulls in a breath through bared teeth. “Cody.”

Cody doesn’t move, isn’t sure he’s still alive and this isn’t some pretty trick his dying brain has thrown at him except for the thudding of his heart in his ear and the stickiness of blood drying on his skin. 

“You have such beautiful brown eyes. I didn’t realise that before,” Obi-Wan says and Cody knows. 

General Rules

We're sure you are familiar with the rules of bingo, but just to be certain everyone is on the same page, to get a bingo you must fill five prompts in a row. That row can be vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Fill all the prompts on your card and that's a blackout!

Get as creative with your kisses as you want but they MUST BE A FIRST KISS between Obi-Wan and Cody in some capacity. 

Prompt fills should be new works, meaning that they should not be part of an ongoing work-in-progress. Sequels and prequels to already-finished works are welcome! 

Posting Dates

Participants have the entire month of December to post bingo fills! Sign up around the time of this announcement and you will have a two month creation window before December 1st rolls around.

You can either post to our collection on ao3 and/or on tumblr but we do ask that you please tag us @codywanfirstkissbingo AND tag your post with #CWFKB2023 as we don’t want to miss anyone if tumblr drops the ball. 

If you’re posting on AO3 but want us to reblog your fill, please make a Tumblr post with the link and make sure to @ us and tag your post with #CWFKB2023. We’ll be checking the collection when tracking fills and making round-up posts with bingos and blackouts, but we will not be cross-posting every individual fill on AO3 ourselves if the creator has not made a tumblr post.   

Please include a screenshot of your bingo tag with the prompt fill indicated so we know which square you’ve filled!

Specific Rules

Fic: 100 words minimum per prompt fill. To be clear, the kiss itself does not have to last 100 words, though we'd be delighted to see that.

Art: One drawing per fill (digital or traditional). Different drawings can be on the same canvas/page if you so wish. Go wild with your compositions.

Podfic: Same requirements as fic. You can collaborate with someone writing a fic specifically for the event or find an existing fic that fills your prompt.

Fanmix: One song per fill- we'd love to see what songs give you codywan first kiss vibes. Try to match lyrics to your prompt but instrumental songs are cool too.

Other: Send an ask with your inquiry! We're more than happy to discuss expanding the fanwork pool to maximize creativity.

Ratings

You can post any work with any rating, but please abide by the appropriate rating/archive warning/tags on AO3 when posting there. When posting on tumblr, please warn for potentially triggering content in the tags and the header to the post, so readers can filter as needed. Anything spicy or explicit should go under a read-more tag, and please use a read-more tag if you’re posting a fic that is longer than a drabble (100 words) to be considerate of people’s dashboard feeds.

To help make this event a safe one for Codywan fans with any kind of photosensitivity, we do specifically request that you tag any and all flashing imagery with #flashing. If you're unsure what constitutes flashing, please see this article, or err on the side of caution for any image with: moving stripes or checkered patterns; strobe light, lightning, or explosion effects in any image or video; images of flickering light/sunlight on leaves/water; very fast cuts between images in a gif or video; rapidly moving images in an animation or gif set that stop and start or “stutter;” sparkle text or similar moving text effects; and images in an animation, gifset, or video that are in high color contrast to each other (for example, a gif set that cuts pink Barbie gifs with black & white Oppenheimer gifs to create a fast-moving contrast between the two styles.) 

The CWFKB mods' decision is final on whether your post/entry requires a flashing warning; they will contact you to ask you to update your tags if you haven’t already noted in your tumblr or AO3 post that your fill contains #flashing content. If you are not willing to use the flashing tag, even after being contacted by the mods, the mods have the right to decide that under-tagged flashing fills will be disqualified from the event.

Finally– with exceptions for the NSFW or #spicy and #flashing tags on tumblr– you have the right to choose not to warn readers in accordance with AO3’s “choose not to warn” option, but posters whose tags or ratings are deceptive or misleading versus the actual content may have their fills disqualified.

When in doubt, please contact the mods! The mods will contact you about any fill where the tags and ratings raise this concern, with a request that you revise and update your tags and warnings.

Combining Prompts

This is a low stakes event and we just want people to have fun! If you want to combine prompts that's totally fine, but we ask that you give each fill its own scene within the larger work. This means there should be a separate kiss for each prompt, even if the 'scene' is a series of types of kisses all in a row.

Swapping Prompts

Nearly have a bingo but there's that one pesky prompt in your way you don't vibe with? Go ahead and swap it with another prompt on your card. As all the prompts are randomly selected and not handpicked for participants; we understand there's a chance some of the prompts may not inspire you so we allow ONE and only ONE SWAP PER CARD. Use it carefully if you need it!

Behind the Scenes

This bingo is modded by tumblr users @dontbelasagnax @lttrsfrmlnrrgby and @notthestarwar. Since we're big fans of the previous codywan bingos, we felt the drive to bring the fun back for anyone else that has missed the event as much as us!

Our adorable profile picture was drawn by @anaclastic-azurite! 

You can actually find the public inception of this bingo event right here!

If you have any further questions after reading our rules, our askbox is open!

@swfandomevents

(NB: edited Oct. 9 to add "vertical.")

ahhhh almost done!! one more fill to go :) @codywanfirstkissbingo

Here’s my completed bingo card!!!!

But perhaps more entertaining to me is my planning bingo card, which I will let speak for itself 💀