Work Text:
A man stood upon a bridge over churning water, facing the firing squad.
It was difficult to breathe. It was impossible to move his hands, tied behind his back with familiar cables that caught on the ridges of the body glove. Black and white spots danced in front of his vision, bursting into light like stars before dying before they were swallowed by the dark.
The water spitted and roared, the spray hissing upwards before returning to the water. It moved in rhythmic, intense motions: a hissed rise and a careful retreat, a hiss and fall.
He heard a man call ready.
His heart was seizing strangely. Not from fear. His throat tightened, cutting off his air.
He heard a man call aim.
Why has nobody ever…
A man called fire.
The man felt a terrible impact in his chest, an explosion of crumpled pain. He jerked back, foot slipping on the greasy metal, and with a dizzying lurch the world upended itself and the man fell downwards.
The forest of foam-covered rocks in the sea underneath hit his neck in just the wrong way, and the man felt his neck shear and rip.
Fox sank.
Fox broke for air.
He coughed, spitting out mouthfuls of stale water and hacking up flecks of bile. He struggled upwards, swimming upwards and pulling himself out of the water so he could gasp and wheeze. He bent his knees and tried to swim up, but when he unbent them his feet touched hard tile.
Fox opened his eyes, still coughing, and blearily squinted and looked around as the water cleared from his eyes.
Three children were staring at him, all different species but dressed in identical little white outfits. The Rodian’s jaw dropped. The human gaped at him. The Dug dropped their little red ball, sending it spinning on the floor.
“Uh,” Fox said. A stream of water hit his back, dripping down his legs. “Sorry.”
Another stream of water hit his back, and he turned around only to see that he was standing in some sort of unnecessarily nice fountain. The kind you’d see in one of the million Senate building courtyards, supposedly atmospheric. He looked down, and saw that the water went to his shins. What the…
“Are you a ghost?” The Rodian asked, high and reedy.
Fox scanned the area, finding only more fountains. And more fountains. And more fountains. Why the fountains ? Why were there identically dressed children playing in here? Was this a warehouse for fountains? That didn’t even make sense.
“Sure, whatever,” Fox said, not listening at all. “How do I get out of here?”
The children gaped further. Fox had the feeling he should say something more reassuring, but he wasn’t wearing anything other than his bodysuit and he felt horrendously exposed. He stepped out of the fountain, shaking himself off and brushing the water out of his hair.
“A Force ghost!” the human cried furiously. “I knew they were real!”
“But clones aren’t Force sensitive,” the Rodian pointed out. “How would -”
“He’s here , isn’t he?” the Twi’lek said reasonably. “So it has to be the Force.”
“Sure, whatever,” Fox said, uncaring. “Do you have a direction out of here?”
They all pointed unanimously west. Fox thanked them, and started walking.
It was five minutes before he escaped Endless Fountain Hell and climbed a broad marble set of steps before he realized he was in the Jedi Temple. He had already guessed as much. You only ever woke up in fountains if the fountains were in ridiculous locations.
He checked a large shadow clock projected onto an alcove and with a sinking feeling in his gut he realized that he had to be at work in an hour. Not enough time to get back to the dorms, shower, and change. Shit.
He’d have to go straight to the Senate building from here. It would only be about twenty minutes. Fox set off down the hallway, dodging the streams of running children or shambling elderly people. None of them paid him any mind, the sight of a clone unremarkable in the Temple even if he was dripping wet, and Fox somehow made it through the cavernous yet austere hallways into the grand entrance and passed by the red cloaked guards through the main doors.
He glanced back one final time to check the clock, squinting over the sea of dismembered skeletons and rotted flesh, and saw that he was already running ten minutes behind.
Fuck.
Riding the air trolley to the Senate building without his helmet or armor was a humiliating experience, and the only saving grace was the fact that the vast majority of Coruscant had no idea what a clone actually looked like, much less Fox. Which was pretty impressive if you thought about it - Stone called it the Coruscanti Guard’s best kept secret. The key was to never interact with a natborn off the clock, which Fox already excelled at.
It was slightly more embarrassing getting his way into the building without his identification card, but Fox glowered any questions away and gaslighted his subordinates into believing that they, somehow, had done something wrong. By the time he took advantage of the locker room shower, thumped his head against the wall a few times, and buckled on the spare armor kept in his locker, he just barely slid into the break room at 0900. He normally got his caff at 0830 so he could avoid the break room crowds, but he should have thought of that before he woke up in a fountain.
The room was already crowded with slacking Senate Guards, helmets dumped on the rickety table and chatting among themselves as they drank from biodegradable cups. Fox pushed past them, ignoring the inane chatter (“Did you hear we’re executing the Princess?” “ Finally !”) in favor of glaring another subordinate away from the last cup in the pot and stealing it for himself.
“Commander! Finally decided you’re good enough for morning caff?”
Fox grunted, downing the cup as fast as possible. Stone just grinned at him. He was leaning against the counter, scrolling through a library datapad with his helmet buckled to his belt.
“Hey, I’m reading the weirdest biography. It’s about this famous anti-war satirist from Lothal. He’s really popular over there.”
Beside them, Lee thumped the other industrial caff pot with the palm of his hand. “Stupid hunk of garbage. What, they can afford their thousand cred brandy but they can’t buy us a decent fucking caff pot?”
“What’s a satirist?” Fox asked. He didn’t read much. Or at all. He read too many forms every day already, he preferred to spend his free time staring at a wall.
Stone just shrugged. “It means he makes fun of war and calls it stupid and a waste of time. Hey, easy for him to say, right?” Fox grunted. Natborns. “But get this. This guy’s so dedicated to talking about how stupid war is that he follows it around! He decides to hop planets and travel to Jakku to watch their Gold Revolution. Just to get more material for his book!”
The caff pot rattled, and with a thunk the front panel of the machine fell off. Lee abruptly stepped back, looking pointedly in another direction. “Uh - someone broke the caff pot?”
“And then he disappeared ,” Stone said with a final flourish. “He was never seen again . Isn’t that ironic? I bet he died in that revolution. The Gold Revolution was really bloody, you know. It’s actually fascinating, that planet used to have bodies of water before the bombs -”
“You read too much,” Fox said.
But Stone just laughed, straight white teeth flashing. Every clone had perfectly straight teeth. Another edit - Prime’s teeth had been a little messed up. He said that it had been from getting socked in the face one too many times. Fox suspected that he hadn’t wanted to admit that he wasn’t genetically perfect.
“Try the murder mysteries,” he said. “Even rereading them is fun. It’s comforting, you know? The same thing happens every time. No surprises!”
“Our lives don’t have any surprises,” Fox said. He crumpled the empty cup and dropped it in the disposal, listening to the whirr and grind as the cup was ground into compost. “Make sure Squad 1 takes patrol route Besh instead of Alpha today, and assign Squad 4 to the war effort charity function.” Stone snorted. “I’ll be supervising the Senate conference today. Don’t let Thorn around Senator Aurek this time.”
From where he was rapidly shoving a ration bar in his mouth on the other side of the room, Thorn called, “He’s an asshole!”
“Nobody cares!” Stone yelled back.
“Back to work, everybody,” Fox said, and that was that.
Generally speaking, Fox had better things to do than guard duty. He especially had better things to do than bland Senate supervision duty, which in practice meant standing there looking like taxpayer dollars. But his orders had been clear regarding ‘security’ and ‘potential Rebel agitation’, so Fox organized his men and conducted the needlessly thorough security checks and triple secured all protective measures. It wasn’t as if he had formwork to do.
Fox stood in the back of the cavernous Senate hall, standing in front of the entrance to the main walkway and boarding ramps to the pods. All other exits and entrances were covered, and he had two other squadrons patrolling the premises. Of course, nobody had found anything. Sometimes Fox just felt like meaningless security theater, but most of the Senate was theater anyway. All it meant was that the masquerade had swallowed him and his men whole.
The politicians nattered on about so-and-so and this-and-that. Across the hall, Fox saw Mack block a furious woman in a white dress from entering. Fox’s mind drifted to organizing the next day’s patrol routes. He would have to split Stuart and Longstreet up next time. Those two couldn’t focus in a squad together. Every time they shipped out a new batch Fox could swear that they grew more and more immature and unskilled. Kamino’s standards were slipping.
Finally, the votes were cast - one side won, one side lost, both sides were unhappy - and the Senate broke for recess. An alert popped up on Fox’s comm, alerting him of the next meeting in his schedule, and he gave some final instructions to his men before heading for the Supreme Chancellor’s office.
It was a familiar walk, and Fox zoned out for most of it. The office was humbly located in the exact center of the Senate building, on the same floor as every other Senator’s office was located. His secretary was even placed among the others, although she had a certain intensity about her that marked her as unnervingly important. There was little to differentiate the office from the others except the isolated winding hallway, carpeted in dark red with weird portraits of other chancellors. They were a colorful mix of characters up until around one hundred fifty years ago. Afterwards, every following Chancellor was human.
Aype and Jubal were on guard duty that day, and they both saluted as Fox approached. He saluted back, relieving them, and knocked with three sharp raps on the thick wooden door. He waited for the buzz of the doors unlocking before letting himself in.
Lord Sidious was staring out the window, his back turned to Fox. The wide, oblong window peered out over Coruscant, sitting squarely at a comfortably luxurious position in the world teeming with sentient vermin. Fox stepped forward, the red carpet muffling the sounds of his boots and leaving his footsteps completely silent. He walked up the wide stairs, coming to a halt in front of the gleaming duracrete desk. He saluted sharply, although Lord Sidious couldn’t see it.
When Lord Sidious spoke, his voice was low and quiet. Forceful, every word spoken with great purpose. “At ease. Any interesting updates, Commander?”
“No, my lord.” Fox lowered his hand, although he remained at attention. “Skywalker and the 501st returned from Devaron last night. The 501st took heavy casualties, yet the battle was successful.”
Lord Sidious hummed. “I understand Anakin made a costly mistake during that battle.”
“Yes, my lord. The factory exploded prematurely. The reports of the battle will be disseminated to the Senate tomorrow.”
“Quash that. Blame the factory explosion on Seperatist aggression. That should silence some of the doves for now.” Lord Sidious swiveled around, staring at Fox for the first time. He didn’t make any more facial expressions than Fox did. “My future apprentice walks his path admirably. It seems all of the players have committed to their sides, Commander.”
“Yes, my lord.”
A corner of Lord Sidious’ mouth ticked upwards. “Where would you say your commitments lie, Commander?”
“With you, my lord.”
“Is that truly the right word for it?” Lord Sidious swiveled around again, looking out the window. The sight of Coruscant was the same as ever, like those toy hurricanes in clear plasteel boxes. Shake it and it bursts into movement, exactly the same every time. “Commitment implies a decision. Some would say just one, but I would name that a promise. Some would say a never ending series, renewed every second, but I believe that model does not account for inertia. I believe perhaps a commitment is a choice made so many times it no longer feels like a choice.”
Okay. Whatever. “Yes, my lord.”
But Lord Sidious just smiled again, the motion cutting shadowy grooves into his face. “Forgive me, Commander. I must be boring you. But everything bores you, doesn’t it?” Fox struggled to reason if that was a rhetorical question or not, but Lord Sidious kept speaking. “We will have to see where little Anakin’s choices lead him. I trust they won’t bore you.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You’re dismissed, Commander.”
Fox saluted. “Yes, my lord.”
“My, you’re an uninteresting conversationalist.”
In the end, Fox got out of his meeting with the Chancellor ten minutes early. The extra time was welcome - he always got a massive headache around this time of day. Caffeine withdrawal.
In a depressing display of weakness, he made another trip to the break room for caff. It was a routine endeavour, albeit one taken in the privacy of his office. He felt oddly self-conscious about it sometimes. He had that meeting with the Chancellor three times a week and he walked out with a killer headache and a weird feeling in his gut every time. The man was annoying but not noxious. Maybe Fox just hated the stench of natborn.
One of the pots had an ‘out of order!’ note taped to it, so he jammed his thumb on the other one until it started spitting out turgid black caff into the pot. Two other clones were in the room, eating lunch and talking quietly amongst themselves.
Fox turned to look at them. “Am I an uninteresting conversationalist?”
They both stared at him, dumbfounded. Finally, one of them asked, “Who told you that ?”
Left unsaid: who was brave enough to tell you that? “I don’t know.”
“Bet it was a Senator,” the other clone said. “No respect, those guys.”
“Yeah, one of the Commander’s worth twenty of them!”
“Sucking up won’t get you anywhere,” Fox said, grabbing his caff.
The rest of the day was spent in his office, filling out form after form after guard rotation after service request after bodyguard request after a depressed missive from Cody regarding General Kenobi’s liver. Would you send out the word that he’s not allowed in any more bars? He’s annoying when he’s drunk and he’s always drunk. Fox sent a persnickety message back about how the police were not babysitters, but he sent out the order anyway. Anything to make Obi-Wan Kenobi suffer. He would feel slight guilt for the blatant un-favoritism, but the Supreme Chancellor encouraged the meaningless suffering of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He said it built character. Sometimes Fox worried that the man had fucked the Chancellor’s wife or something.
At 1500, somebody sharply rapped at his door before buzzing themselves in. It was Stone, smiling cheerfully and holding two cups of caff. Fox didn’t look up from his comp, but when he held out his hand Stone deposited the cup in his hand. When he took a long swing, he found that it somehow tasted better than the kind he made for himself - but Stone’s caff was always like that.
“Boring, boring, boring day!” Stone said brightly. “The men will complain for hours that they aren’t out there on the exciting battlefield like our brothers.”
“They think the battlefield’s exciting?” Fox asked wryly, taking a long drag of the caff. “It’s a week of marching and waiting around before ten minutes of fighting.”
“The other starship always flies smoother.” Stone took a sip of his own caff, leaning against the doorway. He knew that if he came in and sat down Fox would complain about him disrupting his work. So he always stood at the doorway, just to give them both plausible deniability. “Hey, you’ll never guess what Stonewall said to Aype this morning -”
Blah blah blah, clone grudge matches, blah blah blah, did you hear about what happened to the Ersos? Shame!, blah blah blah, I think I have this weird growth on my back -
“Can I ask you a question?”
“If it’s about your growth I don’t care.”
“Hah, hah.” Stone took a final drag of his caff, draining it before crumpling the cup. He used too much force, practically squeezing it into a perfect ball. “Anyway, so you know I’ve been reading all these biographies and nonfiction and everything. Interesting stuff! And there’s this whole genre just of war novels. Fiction, nonfiction, for adults, for kids, everything. And obviously they talk about famous planetary Civil Wars and whatnot - there’s this entire series on the 100 latest Mandalorian Civil Wars, fascinating - but that’s not what most of the books are about!”
“Usually there’s only civil wars,” Fox said flatly. “Nobody found that the censure from the Republic for having a militia over whatever percent of their population was worth it. Much less a military.”
“The last two years excluded,” Stone agreed. But he was growing a little excited, making a sharp gesture with his hand. “But that’s not what they talk about! They always talk about these grand, sweeping interplanetary conflicts. Like the Mandalorian Conquests, or the Jedi-Sith Wars, or the Yuuzan-Vhong stuff. But those conflicts haven’t existed for five thousand years, not since the Mandalorian Empire fell. The Yuuzan-Vhong were probably fifty thousand years ago, but here we are still writing books about it. These things don’t happen anymore -”
“The last two years excluded.”
Stone waved a hand. “Obviously. But I was thinking about all of this while on guard duty today -”
“You should think about guard duty while on guard duty.”
“Do you think natborns wanted this to happen?” Stone asked, speaking over him. “You know, do you think they - like - read all these books and listened to all of the Mandalorian pop music and learned about how cool these things were - and they wanted some of it for themselves? Do you think they missed it? Do you think they need it?”
A long silence stretched between them. Fox and Stone just looked at each other, letting the words hang in the air bearing down upon them.
Finally, Fox said, “I’m trying to decide if that’s seditious or not. Get out of here before I make a decision.”
Stone got out of there. Of course, Fox was bluffing - Stone’s words were not seditious at all, because whoever designed the rules and outlined what was and was not seditious could have never planned for a clone who was just a little too into history for his own good. Or the good of the GAR.
Fox should ban books or something. He made a note of it in his to-do column. Kamino already highly restricted what media the clones were allowed to consume (almost none), and most of the clones on active deployment had better things to do than spend all day with their noses stuck in literature (Cody, for example, read instruction manuals for fun). Only the Senate and Coruscanti Guard had this problem, because only they had reliable and unfiltered holonet access. Philosophy was a disease. Definitely ban the holonet.
The workday ended eventually. Fox closed out his work for the day at 2100, finally freeing himself of police reports and orders for anti-riot gear. He showered again, grabbed his now strangely smelling body glove, and headed for the back exit to the speeder shuttle pick-up points. His men passed him in the hallway, the night shift exchanging for the day shift, and they saluted or nodded at him as they passed by. Senatorial aides, seeing the influx of clones, hugged the walls.
As Fox walked through a back exit, he passed by a figure sitting on a sleek durasteel bench. She was wearing a white dress, and had her hair arranged in the typical ridiculously ornate hairstyles half the Senators seemed to wear. She was leaning forward in her seat, every muscle coiled and tight, staring blankly at the opposite chrome wall.
She was counting under her breath, relentlessly. As Fox walked past he began to hear her low voice whispering under her breath, and as he walked away the sounds continued.
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy two. One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy three. One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy four…”
And on, and on. Fox kept walking, and caught the speeder shuttle just as it was taking off.
He entered the dorms without processing it. He washed his body glove in a fugue. He walked past the men yelling and chatting and wrestling in the hallways. He walked past the soldiers preparing to go out for drinks, and past the one clone with his nose pressed against a datapad. He straightened his room, looked at the work he had yet to do, and looked around for something he did for fun. He found nothing.
And, bored, he fell asleep.
Fox broke for air.
He coughed, spitting out mouthfuls of stale water and hacking up flecks of bile. He struggled upwards, swimming upwards and pulling himself out of the water so he could gasp and wheeze. He bent his knees and tried to swim up, but when he unbent them his feet touched hard tile.
Fox opened his eyes, still coughing, and blearily squinted and looked around as the water cleared from his eyes.
Three children were staring at him, all different species but dressed in identical little white outfits. The Rodian’s jaw dropped. The human gaped at him. The Dug dropped their little red ball, sending it spinning on the floor.
“Hm,” Fox said. A stream of water hit his back, dripping down his legs. “...sorry.”
He turned around only to see that he was standing in the exact same fountain as yesterday. He looked around only to see that he was in the same obscene fountain warehouse located squarely within the Jedi Temple - which, in retrospect, was probably for serene meditative reasons.
“Are you a ghost?” The Rodian asked, high and reedy.
“Not really,” Fox said, not listening at all. He climbed out of the fountain, shaking himself off like a wet dog. “Does this happen a lot?”
The children gaped further. Guess it didn’t. Fox would be surprised too if the same person (perhaps) climbed out of a fountain during their regularly scheduled morning playtime twice in a row.
“A Force ghost!” the human cried furiously. “I knew they were real!”
“But clones aren’t Force sensitive,” the Rodian pointed out. “How would -”
“He’s here , isn’t he?” the Twi’lek said reasonably. “So it has to be the Force.”
“You should tell your adults that there’s something wrong with your fountains,” Fox said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” the children chorused as one. Creepy Jedi motherfuckers.
This time, it was much easier to leave the Jedi Temple. The place was a maze, and only Fox’s experience with it the first time let him escape without losing two hours to its back hallways. He contemplated flagging down a Jedi to let them know that their fountains likely needed maintenance, but when he checked the shadow clock he saw that he only had forty five minutes before work. He’d submit a maintenance report from the Senate - he still had Captain Nemo’s personnel logins.
Once he hit the entryway he glanced back one final time to check the clock, only to see a hallway of dismembered skeletons.
Fox gaped. The hallway was littered with them, thrown carelessly aside with snapped necks and piled on top of each other. A group of little children’s remains, cleaved in two or jumbled together until they were one indistinguishable mass, were shoved loosely against a wall. A larger body, desiccated, was lying on top of a smaller one, as if they had tried to shield them. The air stunk heavily of tombs and ruin, the ghostly stench of blaster bolts and cauterized fresh hitting Fox’s nose heavy and pungent.
Then he blinked, and the sight was gone. The group of children were walking in a group, holding hands and laughing as a harried padawan tried to herd them. The knight and padawan pair looked to be arguing about something - from the sounds of it, about sneaking out to see a new girlfriend. The air smelled like standard purified and recycled air.
Fox rubbed at his eyes. Fountains had too much chlorine.
He grabbed the first speeder he saw to the Senate, sitting on a hard molded durasteel chair and dripping water in slow rivulets onto the floor. Coruscant whipped by him, hyper-real and faded, and as Fox brushed water out of his hair he found himself looking at the skyscrapers just a little longer than usual. Maybe he was just trying to scrub that weird hallucination out of his eyes.
The skyscrapers looked...nice. They arched upwards like a clone jokingly reaching up to brush his fingers against the top of a door frame, their sides burnished and clean like the winding halls of Kamino. Nothing about them was friendly, but something about their solidity was reassuring. It was comforting, which made Fox uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, he had to make his way into the Senate building without his identification card again. Fortunately, neither of the guards on duty seemed to notice, and Fox’s embarrassed glower scared them away from any questions or emotional security in their own competence. He rushed through the locker room shower, stared at the wall for a minute trying to see if there was blood on it, and buckled on the freshly laundered bodysuit and suit of armor in his locker. He sniffed the bodysuit. It didn’t smell freshly laundered. Maybe he’d submit a maintenance report for the Senate launderers.
He slid into the breakroom silently wishing into existence nobody noticed that he was showing his face in the breakroom with everybody else twice in two days. It paid off this time - nobody gave him a second glance, too wrapped up in their own exhaustion or drinks.
Fox pushed past them, ignoring the inane chatter (“So where do you think clones go when they die -
Fox stopped short, turning around in confusion. The clone - Stonewall, leaning against a wall and chatting easily with Tuco - was stuffing a ration bar in his mouth, easy as anything as he contemplated his mortality.
Contemplated his mortality ? Who did that?
“I mean, we can’t go to the same place as everywhere else,” Tuco pointed out reasonably. “Most religions that believe in an afterlife incorporate a review of your choices made in life. I don’t think I’ve made a single choice in my life. Maybe we go wherever, like, droids go.”
“I’d be pretty fucked up if droids went anywhere. Our brothers kill a shitton of those guys every day.”
“Well, they kill a shitton of us.” Tuco nodded thoughtfully as Stonewall conceded the point. “The Alderaanians believe that death is the first step in ascending a heavenly mountain. You ascend the mountain, and once you reach the peak you can look out over the whole world and your whole life. They say if you’ve made a beautiful life you see a beautiful world, and if you have led an ugly life you see nothing but fires and ruin.”
“Then what? Do you stay on the mountain?”
But Tuco just shook his head. “Nah, if you do that then you stay a ghost and you start haunting people. You’re supposed to jump into the heavenly lake at the base of the mountain. If your life created beautiful things, then you float to the top of the lake and you get to live in that good world you made. If your life created ugliness, then you just sink to the bottom.”
“So what happens if you’re us?” Stonewall asked.
“Maybe you just keep falling.”
Fox opened his mouth, then closed it. Talking about the afterlife and death felt seditious somehow. He should ban it. Yes, that sounded right.
Dazed, Fox retreated to the caff pot, only to see that a subordinate had always stolen the last cup in the pot. He robotically made another pot, watching the turgid black liquid sputter and cough.
“Commander! Finally decided you’re good enough for morning caff?”
Fox slowly turned to see Stone, grinning easily at him. He was leaning against the counter, scrolling through a library datapad with his helmet buckled to his belt.
“That’s it,” Fox said. “I’m banning books and the holonet.” He might let them keep holomovies, since they were restricted to strictly propaganda anyway. Stone looked wounded, so Fox leaned in and hissed. “If the men are contemplating their own deaths we have a problem.”
But Stone just stared at him blankly. “We have an average life expectancy of six months once deployed.”
“Congratulations,” Fox said, “you’ve found the problem.”
“You know what this reminds me of?” Stone asked. “This weird biography I’m reading. It’s about this famous anti-war satirist from Lothal. He’s really popular over there.”
“So I’ve heard.” Fox looked around the break room, unable to fight a strange tingling on the back of his neck. He would say it felt like he was being watched, but he felt watched every second of his claustrophobic little life, so that wasn’t it. It felt more like he was being noticed. That was uncomfortable. “What’s the point of satirizing war, anyway? If he wants to stop it, he’d do more good on the front lines.”
Beside them, Lee thumped the other industrial caff pot with the palm of his hand. “Stupid hunk of garbage. Decrepit and obsolete it shambles on, much like the lumbering corpse of this parodic Republic. With all the money they save from our slave labor, you’d think that they can buy us a decent fucking caff machine.”
“You know,” Stone said, “I don’t think he really wanted to stop it at all. I think he just thought it was interesting. A lot of satirists like to talk about stuff they think reflects ‘the sentient condition’.” Stone made air quotes around the word, confusing Fox greatly. “Maybe he just thinks sentients are dumb, and that war’s the dumbest thing a sentient can do.” He brightened. “In fact, this guy’s so dedicated to talking about how stupid war is that he follows it around! He decided to hop planets and travel to Jakku to watch their Gold Revolution. Just to get more material for his book! And then he -”
“Disappeared?”
Stone blinked in surprise. “How’d you know?” He paused a second in thought, working through it all. “Maybe calling war stupid and then following it around is the dumbest thing a person can do...like performance art, almost…”
Fox deeply wanted to tell Stone why he’d been late the last two mornings. Stone was a thinker, disconcertingly intelligent - a useful thing in any officer pushed to the brink on the battlefield, occasionally problematic if the officer had too much time to sit around and read books. He might know what to do. But that would involve Fox admitting that he had been late twice in a row for work, and the sheer embarrassment kept his mouth shut.
“You have to admit our genesis is a ridiculously convoluted series of events,” Jex heckled from the other side of the room. Fox jumped slightly, on edge. “Like, what the fuck, Prime? Just get a surrogate.”
“Or, like, adopt?” Rys said to him. “That level of obsession with your own genetic perfection and purity is kinda -”
“Fascist?”
“Well, he’s in good company.”
“I can’t believe the Senate bought all that crap about the Jedi placing the first order,” Thire said, taking a long drag of his caff. “If they had enough money for that , they’d have enough money to split financially from the Senate. And if they had enough money for that, they’d be on vacation in Scarif right now.”
“Uh,” Rys said, “not Scarif.”
“Oh. Right. Shame.”
“I’ve decided that I personally detest the intricate, confusing, and downright bizarre series of events decades in the making that put me here , now , right in front of this hunk of junk -”
“I don’t know,” Hound said, almost randomly. “It makes perfect sense to me.”
Everybody quieted and stared at him expectantly.
“Well?” Rys said, “what is it?”
Hound opened his mouth.
“Back to work!” Fox barked, ending the conversation right then and there. Behind him, the caff pot rattled, and its front panel fell off.
Nothing was going right today. Bad enough that he had woken up in the bottom of a fountain again. Now his men were speaking nonsense, distracted beyond their duties. If this kept up, he’d have to start taking disciplinary action. Fox held a tight zero-tolerance policy on lack of discipline. He expected strict discipline in his men, and it was a guiding ethos behind both the Senate guard and the police force. His life would be a lot easier if the Senate had just a little bit more discipline. Maybe Coruscant as a whole. Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he fantasized about every sentient being in Coruscant abiding by a rigorous schedule and perfectly obeying every one of the government’s many rules. Everything would be organized, and nobody could bother him.
When Fox double checked his schedule, he found it depressingly similar to yesterday. Guard the Senate meeting for the next two hours, one hour meeting with the Chancellor - those meetings could always just be emails - and then formwork the rest of the day. At least he wasn’t getting blown up all the time. Small favors.
Fox jammed a bucket on his head, mindlessly organizing his men and sending their patrol down the cavernous Senate hallways flooded with harried aides and every variety of species in the galaxy - or, at least, every variety of species on a planet where they politically and numerically outnumbered humans. He lead the procession down the hallways, already plotting out the new patrol routes for the squadron, when he found himself in a nightmare scenario.
“Guards!”
Fox stopped short, the men behind him stopping too. It was a short woman in a white dress, breaking away from a conversation with another senator and rudely walking directly away from them to stalk down the hallway towards Fox. The senator didn’t seem to notice she was gone, but Fox was forced to stand up straight at attention.
The woman had a cherubic face with a tight, nasty expression - par for the course with senators. It took Fox a second to recognize her. It was the same woman as yesterday, mindlessly counting on that bench. She didn’t look mindless now. Instead, she seemed to be on the warpath.
“Guards, I demand an escort to the Senate chambers this instant.” Her roving, bossy eyes skipped over Fox’s men and landed straight on Fox, honing in on him as the leader. “Are you the captain? What’s your name?”
“Captain Fox, ma’am.” He made a gesture at Mack, who stepped away from the formation and nodded. “My officer can escort you to the Senate chambers now.”
The woman leaned to the right, glaring furiously at Mack. “You’re the guard from yesterday. What’s your name, officer?” Mack glanced around, uncomfortable, and the woman scoffed. She turned back to Fox, who was silently cursing Mack out. “He’s no good to me. You’re the only one I’ve seen around here who pays attention to anything. You’re escorting me. Lead the way, Captain.”
Mack was getting Mas Amedda’s guard duty for a month. Fox saluted sharply. “Yes, ma’am. This way.”
He gave the hand signal to his men to continue on without him, and with misplaced confusion they did so. He’d be five minutes late to his posting, but it wasn’t as if his men could chew him out for it and it wasn’t as if anybody else would notice. He was forced to turn and head in the opposite direction from where he had been going, aiming for the main senator’s entrance instead of the guard entrances. Out of pure dedication to keeping to his important schedule, Fox set off down the hallway at a quick clip and forced the woman to almost jog after him.
Horrendously, the woman tried to make conversation with him. “You’re a little short for a stormtrooper, aren’t you?”
Fox grunted. They were all short. It wasn’t as if he cared or anything, but Captain Rex bitched incessantly about having to crane his head up to talk to General Skywalker. Fox liked to send him charts for the adult heights of Togruta women, montrals and all, just to piss him off.
“And a terribly interesting conversationalist,” the woman said dryly. Wow. First time he’d heard that one. “Not that anybody here is an interesting conversationalist. I swear, the Senate is stuffed to the gills with enough mealy mouthed, soft headed, walking Chandrila roundworms that I hardly get any interesting conversation when I’m awake, either. Normally if I talk loudly enough they stop ignoring me, but my usual tactics aren’t proving effective.”
Fox grunted, and walked faster. He mentally stored away the Chandrila roundworm comment. That was actually pretty good.
The woman was craning her head around the hallways as they wove around churning streams of sentients. Their boots clicked almost inaudibly on the glossy white tile, softly complementing the off-white walls. They were panelled with rich velvet tapestries every few meters, cutting up the white with red fabrics and intricate patterns dripping opulence. The woman eyed them interestedly, even stopping to stare at a few before quickly catching back up.
“There’s quite a bit of aliens here,” the woman said, loudly and rudely. “And some truly beautiful art I’m sure was burned to shreds a long time ago. Your Senate’s quite impressive, Captain Fox.”
“It’s a jewel of the Republic, ma’am,” Fox replied rotely. Your Senate? Strange woman.
The strange woman barked a harsh laugh. For somebody so small and dainty, with a gentle white dress and a stupid hairstyle, she had a laugh like an alcoholic Wookie. “You sound like my father. Did they teach you the right words to say, Captain? Or were they encoded into those protocols they taught you in the factory?”
Something strange prickled at Fox’s skin. The woman was staring at him, even as she practically barreled through the hallway in an effort to keep up with his steps. Her eyes didn’t skip over him, or pass through him, or glaze over him. If it wasn’t for the helmet, Fox would swear that she was looking into his eyes. It was the same unsettling feeling Fox always had whenever he had to escort a Jedi. As if they saw you.
Fox didn’t want to know what a Jedi saw when they looked at him.
Finally, Fox managed to dredge up the right words. “The Senate Guard is a highly trained, elite force tasked with your safety. Ma’am.”
“What a clumsy evasion of my question. Do people not ask you many questions, Captain Fox?”
“Do you ask everybody you meet this many questions?”
The minute he said that he regretted it. It was far beyond the handful of stock responses he gave senators, and it was only when he went off-script that he ever entered trouble. But the woman just laughed, a light and quick scoff that somehow spoke of both amusement and complete derision.
“I believe you know much more than you say. You must see everything that happens in this building. Why wouldn’t I question somebody with such an interesting perspective?”
For some reason, Fox thought of the Chancellor smiling at him. “I have nothing to share that would be of interest to you, ma’am.”
The woman looked forwards again, seemingly dismissive. “You’re right. I’ve heard this song before. Honestly, I was expecting something a little more…I don’t know, hellish? Demented? Torturous? This is simply the kind of torture I get paid for.”
“Sometimes something is only tortuous once you get used to it,” Fox said.
The woman looked at him sharply, big brown eyes narrowing, but Fox strategically chose that moment to arrive at their destination. The large durasteel doors opened and closed as streams of senators filed in, pressing their ID badges against the podium in front and waiting for the light to flash green before the doors opened.
He brought them both to a stop, the woman almost tripping over her feet at the abrupt end. “Here you are. It was a pleasure to meet you. Let us know if there’s anything else you require.”
“I’ve never heard a more insincere expression of gratitude in my life,” the woman said curtly. She looked at the door, crossing her arms. “I said escort me, not dump me at the front. Let me in through the door and I’ll release you.”
Fox automatically moved to open the door for her before halting as the protocols marched through his brain. Slowly, he said, “For security purposes, I’ll ask that you admit yourself into the chambers.”
The woman rolled her eyes, as if Fox was being purposefully obtuse. “My identification is twenty minutes across the building in my office. It’s not worth being late to this vote because of a technicality. Just let me in.”
“I’m afraid we have to abide by protocol, ma’am. For security reasons.”
“I think democracy is a bit more important than protocol, Captain. Will you simply let me in? We’re wasting time with all this arguing.”
Very, very slowly, something clicked into place in Fox’s brain.
“You’re the woman who tried to sneak into the Senate chambers yesterday.”
“I wasn’t sneaking ,” the woman who tried to sneak into the Senate chambers yesterday sneered. “I was attempting to attend an important vote and take my place as senator before I was rudely intercepted by one of your men. It was a very routine endeavour.”
“You need identification to enter the chambers, ma’am.”
“And you need to get your eyes checked,” the woman retorted. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m her royal highness Senator Leia Organa!”
Royalty. Yikes. Nobody cared, lady.
“Wait,” Fox said, “is this why you wanted a guard? So I could open a door for you?”
“Of course not,” Leia shamelessly lied. “It’s very important I attend that vote, Captain. Everything depends on my ballot in there. You’re letting a little - a little bureaucracy get in the way of democracy!”
What was the difference? “Why is your attendance vital?” Fox asked. “What’s so important about this bill?”
Leia stared at him. Something changed in her face. It didn’t soften, but it didn’t harden. It just shifted. Maybe into something a little more desperate. Not lost, but turned around and left to find her own way home.
“I don’t know,” Leia said. “It’s just important, that’s all.”
“If you don’t know, it can’t be that important.”
“It’s important ,” Leia insisted. “I have to fix it, I have to help -”
“It’s just legislation, your highness. It’s not meant to help.” Fox straightened, nodding sharply. “If you continue attempting to access restricted areas, the guard will be forced to remove you from the premises. If you excuse me, I have to return to my post.”
“Never trust a stormtrooper,” Leia condemned, but seeing as Fox didn’t know what that meant he didn’t really care.
In the end, Leia didn’t attend the Senate meeting. Fox did.
He stood in the back, playing his part in the security theater. Meaningful and important, preventing upstart princesses from entering rooms they weren’t allowed in. She wasn’t a real senator. She probably just thought she deserved to attend because some nothing planet with a GDP less than the net worth of one of these senators pretended to do what she said. She was about as important to these proceedings as Fox was, and somebody else probably paid just as much money to place them there.
But she had been so furious. So certain that this was important. Certain in her own importance, certain in what she was owed, but certain in something else too. Arrogantly sure that she was the only person who could help - but equally sure that something needed help.
Well. There was a chance this might become Fox’s problem. It was within his duties to check. It was his job to prevent problems.
For the first time in his two years attending senate sessions, Fox opened up the routine mailed brief on his comm and leafed through it. He listened to the senators argue, and argue, and argue.
The argument seemed to be split between what Fox privately thought of as the two parties. There were real parties - about one hundred seventy two and counting - but Fox didn’t know anything about those. He only knew two.
The Chancellor’s side. And the other one.
Fox mentally called them ‘the Dissidents’. He also mentally called them idiots. They hated banning perfectly reasonable things, like books or independent news. They negatively impacted the war effort, of course they had to go.
They grew smaller every session. Fox didn’t pay attention, but he didn’t have to. It was the same every time. You had a senator loyally vote against every bill that increased the reach of the state and decreased freedoms. They didn’t like prolonging the war and they wanted to end it as quickly as possible. They wanted autonomy, and they’d fight for it. They loyally fought against each bill that opposed these values - so, most laws that the Chancellor had personally guaranteed would hit the floor.
At first. Then a very reasonable bill would appear on the floor. It would be called ‘Save All Babies’ bill or something. It would advocate for saving the war orphans or what the fuck ever. Only some kind of baby killing idiot would vote against it, and the bill had come from one of the guys on the Dissident’s side anyway, so of course the Dissident would vote for it. And they wouldn’t really notice the little clause in there that surrendered certain planetary property to the Republic - or if they did, they couldn’t remove it. Think of the babies.
They thought they were voting to promote the Dissident’s agenda. They were, or they were at first. Then they started voting for Dissident bills that the Chancellor had subtly placed on the floor. Then they started voting for the Chancellor’s bills that fit in with their platform, or didn’t contradict it too badly. Five steps later, they were on the Chancellor’s Party, and the Dissidents shrank by one. Every time. One by one.
These efforts paved the way for the less subtle bills. That was the one on the floor today. It was called, sure enough, the Loyalty Act. So far as Fox could pick out from the debates, speeches, and briefings, there were four main parts of the bill.
It expanded the government’s ability to look at records on an individual’s activity held by third parties. It expanded the government’s ability to search private property without notice to the owner. It widely expanded the reach of Republic intelligence agencies. And it legalized a wartime tactic that Fox was very familiar with - tap and trace searches.
Basically, it allowed the government to destroy privacy and root out any dissenting voices. Fox watched in bemusement as Senator Organa empathetically disagreed with the bill, braying something about the death of liberty and privacy. Other Dissidents murmured in agreement. Members of the Chancellor’s party reminded everybody that planets were losing money out there ! There were traitors within the Republic ! And the traitors…were costing them money !
That wouldn’t do. The bill passed. Everyone clapped.
In the end, Fox still didn’t see the big deal. The Loyalty Act passed every week in here.
When Fox left the senate floor it felt almost like breaking for air in a mysterious fountain. Boring place. The kind of boredom that pressed down on your chest like heavy stones and made you wheeze for breath. That kind of bored.
Just like yesterday, Fox robotically started walking towards the Chancellor’s office. He let his feet make the trip as his mind wandered, trying in futility to pull it in any direction other than Princess Leia and failing. He’d never seen anybody work so hard and so blatantly to be a security risk. He ought to inform the real senator of her planet, hopefully so they could inform her parents and he’d never have to stare into her weirdly huge brown eyes again.
What was her planet? Fox wound his way through narrow hallways with blood-red carpets. She never mentioned. What was her last name, Organa? Like Bail Organa? Did Bail Organa’s wife have any secret cousins? Maybe she was from a planet in the Alderaanian system. Maybe Organa was the Antilles of last names in that area.
The thought made something cold and awful creep down the back of Fox’s neck, like someone was trailing a cold finger lightly across his skin. It made him shiver, and he shrugged his shoulders harshly to throw off the sensation.
But as he grew closer to the Chancellor’s office, it grew worse and worse. He began smelling something putrid, thick and rich, like spoiled dairy force-fed into your throat. Every inch of his skin felt seen and noticed. Was it hard to breathe? Why was it hard to breathe?
Fox began gulping deeper and deeper breaths before forcing himself to calm down. He turned into the portrait hallway right before the Chancellor’s door, and he found himself freezing at the mouth of the hallway. His legs felt stuck to the floor, as if they were bolted down. He tried moving them, but it was harder than moving a cannon.
Something awful pressed down on Fox. It felt bad. It felt so bad. It was evil. It inflated the scream that lived in Fox’s chest, ballooning it until it wanted to violently explode out of him. It wanted to rip him into shreds, personally , and it wanted Fox to use his own hand to do it.
It hated Fox. It didn’t care about Fox. It loved Fox. It was Fox. Fox was it.
Fox stared down the hallway, eyes unfocusing and focusing until it appeared that the hallway was warped and twisted. The portraits loomed down over him, mouths stretching into cruel smiles, baring their opulence like teeth.
Fuck this. These meetings could always be emails anyway. He needed to call his men, get them down here and tell them about the…the evil monster in the walls. The evil monster living behind the walls, scraping its fingers across the rich wood panelling. That seemed right. They could exterminate it, pull it out from thin air and kill -
“ - interesting updates, Commander?”
Fox lowered his hand. He had been saluting. “Lord Vader and the 501st returned from Devaron last night. The 501st took heavy casualties, yet the battle was successful.”
Lord Sidious hummed, reclining in his elegant black chair. Behind him, a gaping plexiglass window curved its jaws around Coruscant. “I understand Lord Vader made a strong showing during that battle.”
“Yes, my lord. The insurgents and their sympathizers were successfully uprooted. All records of the village on Devaron will be destroyed.”
“Don’t worry about that. Publicize the destruction. Point a few cameras. That should silence some of the dissenters for now.” Lord Sidious swiveled around, staring at Fox for the first time. He didn’t make any more facial expressions than Fox did. “It seems we have an unexpected player at home today, Captain. The princess is proving to be more interesting than first anticipated.”
“Would you like me to remove her, my lord?”
“No, no need for that. She’ll meet her end soon enough.” Sidious leaned back in his chair, soft yellow eyes glinting in the dim lighting of Imperial Center. “What about you, Captain? What’s your impression of the princess?”
Fox thought about this very, very carefully. Finally, after great deliberation, he said, “She seems like an only child, my lord.”
Lord Sidious cackled lightly, like acid rain falling and sizzling on stone. “Indeed. She comes from a soft-hearted family. But even a droid can give its master a shock or two. Not anyone can resist Lord Vader’s mental interrogations, or a torture droid’s tender mercies. The… sophisticated defenses she’s displaying are almost a lost art. I wonder how she learned them?”
Maybe they were taught in princess charm school. Fox didn’t fucking care. This meeting still could have been an email. “I don’t know, my lord.”
But, of course, it had been a rhetorical question, and Lord Sidious had always swiveled around in his chair to stare out the window into the bustling and colorful Coruscant. “You’re dismissed, Commander.”
Fox saluted. “Yes, my lord.”
“My, you’re an uninteresting conversationalist.”
In the end, Fox got out of his meeting with the Chancellor ten minutes early. The extra time was welcome - he always got a massive headache around this time of day. Caffeine withdrawal.
He decided to skip the mid-day caff break this time, strangely paranoid that he’d walk into the break room to see the men standing around talking about something ridiculous again. He couldn’t handle that kind of headache right now. What if Mack had accidentally picked up one of those anti-war pamphlets? What if Stonewall wanted to convert to the highly devout and oddly candle-filled religion the Twi’leks practiced? He couldn’t take that chance.
He sat down at his desk instead, locking the door securely before taking off his helmet. He found himself gasping for air, eyes stinging, as if he was breaking the surface of a badly maintained mystical fountain. His ears popped with a change in pressure. The taste of burning flesh lingered in the back of his tongue, like old war rations.
Fox retreated to his comp and formwork - where, even if things weren’t easy, at least they made sense.
The first thing he did was send a very pointed email to Captain Nemo about his plumbing issues, complete with a small note at the bottom inquiring about any hypothetical skeletons in the lobby. He received a curt email back promising that he’d look into it (“I’m not sure that counts as a plumbing problem, Fox”) and that the lobby, as of the time of writing, was blessedly free of skeletons (“We haven’t killed the Jedi yet, I think the magic fountain is making you hallucinate”).
Fox stared at that last line in the email for a long moment. It made his mouth taste like cauterized meat. He deleted the email, and forgot all about it.
Something was still wrong with his head. Fox popped two headache medications, kept neatly in a large bottle in his desk, and went back to his formwork with an odd desperation. He found himself reading through all of it this time, absorbing it like he absorbed the bill in the Senate hall. Just like in the Senate hall there were no surprises, nothing unknown or new, but he couldn’t stop himself from reading them anyway.
The newest missive was from the head of the RIC, the Republic Intelligence Commission. It was lengthy and very congratulatory regarding the passing of the important new bill! This should really increase our efficacy as an organization. Attached is a list of prominent figures we’re investigating for anti-Republic activity. Would you and your men search their homes for us? Thank you! Expect their arrests the week after the bill officially goes into effect.
Sure. His pleasure.
Another report, this time on the transfer of a new platoon to the Coruscant Guard. They came attached with another hefty budget increase, likely liberated from the Coruscant Police’s old budget. Right underneath it was yet another email from the head of the police union complaining about how the clones were taking their jobs, the police weren’t doing anything more strenuous than giving parking tickets anymore, why are you taking jurisdiction over half our cases, etc. Fox deleted that one. It was the same thing every time.
Gett, the head captain of the Coruscant Guard, had sent him a report on the latest suppressed protest. Thankfully, there was no property damage this time, but some of the protesters had sustained injuries and when is that new riot gear getting here? A few images had made it onto the holonet, but their slicers wiped them pretty quickly. Fox reassured him that it should be arriving in a month, if the press asks then say that your men were defending small businesses, and gave orders to start finding excuses to arrest identified protesters three to four weeks after the protests.
Gett also sent a funny image of a tooka in a box. Fox gave it a thumbs up.
At 1500, somebody sharply rapped at his door before buzzing themselves in. Foxed looked up from his comp, irrationally jumpy, but it was just Stone smiling cheerfully and holding two cups of caff.
When he took a long swing, he found that it somehow tasted better than the kind he made for himself - but Stone’s caff was always like that. Why? Did he put more care into it - used better caff, bothered with creamer and the right temperature? Did he know caff secrets that Fox didn’t?
“Boring, boring, boring day!” Stone said brightly. “The men will complain for hours that they aren’t out there on the exciting battlefield like our brothers.”
“The other starship always flies smoother,” Fox said wryly, taking a long drag of the caff. Then another - he was really feeling the lack of caffeine today. “If Wolffe did my job for five seconds he’d shoot himself.”
“No arguments from me. How’s Wolffe doing, by the way? We’ve been worried about him since he lost his battalion.”
Fox halted, cup raised to his lips.
“I don’t know,” Fox said. “We haven’t talked since it happened.”
“Really?” Stone asked, surprised. “I thought you and that group were super close. You, Cody, Fox, Bly…I hear the groupchat gets insane.”
Fox wouldn’t know. He had muted it months ago when it got too annoying. He hadn’t spoken to any of them outside of work purposes for…
“I’ve been busy,” Fox said lamely. “The Chancellor’s been pushing us hard lately.”
Nobody expected any different from him. It didn’t matter. Clones weren’t even really supposed to be friends with each other, although of course Kamino had been utterly unsuccessful in enforcing that.
But, strangely and suddenly, there was an empty spot in his chest. It didn’t feel like he had lost anything. It felt more like he was looking around for the first time in a while, and he had just noticed that something had been lost a long time ago.
“Oh, well,” Stone said cheerfully. “It’s not as if it’ll matter for much longer. Hey, you’ll never guess what Stonewall said to Aype this morning -”
Blah blah blah, clone grudge matches, blah blah blah. Fox checked out, lost in thought as Stone nattered something about the Ersos. Today had been irrationally exciting. Nothing had been different - it was practically identical to yesterday - but something about it had felt different.
Fox had exciting days. They happened. Sometimes he put people in front of firing squads. That was exciting. But, somehow, this kind of excitement just made him so much more bored.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“If it’s about your biographies I don’t care.”
“Hah, hah.” Stone took a final drag of his caff, draining it before crumpling the cup. He used too much force, practically squeezing it into a perfect ball. “Nah, they’re just making me think about stuff. About how there’s just this whole genre of war novels. Fiction, nonfiction, for adults, for kids, everything. And obviously they talk about famous planetary Civil Wars and whatnot - there’s this entire series on the 100 latest Mandalorian Civil Wars, fascinating - but that’s not what most of the books are about!”
“Stone, I told you, I don’t care.” Fox went back to his comp, thumping on the display harder than strictly necessary. “Of course the natborns need war. This isn’t a matter of philosophy or sentient nature. You don’t need books to tell you that.”
Stone paused, unreasonably surprised. Maybe just surprised that Fox had been paying attention yesterday. “What do you mean, ‘ of course ’? If it’s not their nature, what is it?”
“It’s the economy,” Fox said, short and brutal. “Do you have any idea how much money parts of the Republic are making from the other parts? Ten percent’s scalping the other ninety percent. Do you know how high the Chancellor’s approval rating is? Higher than any other Chancellor in the last three hundred years . He’s going to get re-elected until he dies. If you just look at the numbers, then it all fits together. What doesn’t make sense about that?”
After a long moment, Stone finally said, “But we aren’t numbers, Fox.”
A long silence stretched between them. It made Fox uncomfortable, so he retreated to what was comfortable.
“I’m trying to decide if that’s seditious or not,” he said bluntly. “Get out of here before I make a decision.”
Stone got out of there. Of course, Fox was bluffing yet again - Stone’s words were not seditious at all, because whoever designed the rules and outlined what was and was not seditious could have never planned for Stone, in all of his strange sympathy and obscure kindness.
Fox was definitely banning books.
The workday ended eventually. Fox closed out his work for the day at 2100, finally freeing himself of uncomfortable questions and strange subordinates. He showered again, grabbed his body glove that still smelled weird, and headed for the back exit to the speeder shuttle pick-up points. His men passed him in the hallway, the night shift exchanging for the day shift, and they saluted or nodded at him as they passed by. Senatorial aides, seeing the influx of clones, hugged the walls.
Distantly, Fox heard yelling.
Fox picked up the pace.
He burst into the concourse of the Senate building, breaking into the gaudy and ornate semicircular room stained with ancient mosaics and sweeping windows overlooking the kingdom. He had been expecting a scene or a disturbance, some sort of widespread unrest, but all he saw was a single short woman yelling in the face of Senator Bail Organa.
“Now you listen to me! I am your daughter ! Don’t you dare ignore me like this! Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
But Bail Organa was checking his comm, leafing through his schedule and appointments, and he wasn’t looking at Leia at all.
Fox was flabbergasted. The man should have been looking for help from the four different Senate guards stationed around the room, but it was like she wasn’t even there. Leia wasn’t that short, and she was almost impossible to ignore.
Even more inexplicably, none of his men were calming her down or escorting her from the premises. They just stood, stiffly at attention.
“I expected better of you!” Leia yelled. She was standing far into his personal space, head craned up and shaking a finger at him as if she was his disapproving aunt instead of daughter. Daughter ? How did that work? Bail Organa was about Kenobi’s age, while Leia had to be a little younger than Fox’s physiological age. “I expected this from those ridiculous senators and the numbskull guards and this whole damn building, but from you - look at me !”
Fox looked at the guard nearest to him. “Guard! Help the senator!”
But the guard just looked blankly back at Fox. “Sir? Which senator?”
As Princess Leia yelled in the face of a man who did not seem to see her, as Fox stood among his own men who saw nothing wrong with an unnatural situation, Fox began to consider for the first time that something funny might be happening around him.
He strode forwards, ignoring Leia’s caterwauling so he could stand in front of her. He gently pushed her backwards, and it was only once Fox stood almost directly in front of Senator Organa that he noticed Fox was standing there.
“Captain Fox?” Senator Organa asked, surprised and wary. “May I help you?”
“Sorry, sir. Just investigating a disturbance.”
They both stared at each other as Leia fumed behind him.
Slowly, Senator Organa said, “What’s the disturbance?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to investigate it,” Fox said plainly. “Good day, Senator.”
“Oh, this is real rich,” Leia said, as loudly as physically possible. For the first time, Fox considered that she might not always be this loud. That maybe she had been yelling into a void, desperately straining to hear if anybody called back at her. “So he pays attention to the stormtrooper but not me? Real delightful -”
“ What is going on?” Fox asked curtly, as he pulled her away from the scene into a relatively secluded alcove. He didn’t want to be caught talking into the air. It was an incredibly rude way to treat a princess, but Fox was beginning to think that Leia wasn’t a princess of anything. “Is this magic?”
Leia crossed her arms, shaking his hand off. “What would I know about magic? Do I look like a Jedi to you?”
Yes, Fox didn’t say. “Why can’t any of them see you?”
“Because this is a light-forsaken dream meant to terrorize me.” Leia sniffed loudly, holding her nose up in the air. “If this is the Empire’s idea of torture, then you can turn around and tell the Emperor that I’m hardly impressed.” Something clearly occurred to her, and she gasped. “Are they going easy on me?”
“Uh, ma’am -”
“Are they holding back because I’m a nineteen year old princess?” Leia had clearly never been so scandalized. “That’s despicable. I’m an enemy combatant .”
“I’m not -”
“They never take me seriously,” Leia said furiously. “The Senate acts like I’m Dad’s intern. The Rebellion keeps trying to turn me into a mascot. They never even let me onto the boarding parties. Alderaan is an indispensable part of this Rebellion, and I’m almost ready to take over my father’s role! Now even the Empire is treating me with kid gloves? Well, I never -”
“I can torture you if you want, your highness,” Fox burst out, aggravated beyond measure. “If you’ll excuse me saying so, I am relatively certain that I am not a dream. And I’m equally certain that you couldn’t be Bail Organa’s daughter.’
“Not in this time,” Leia said, patiently and nonsensically, “but in reality -”
“Sounds like you need to accept that this is reality,” Fox said bluntly. “I don’t know what’s happening with you, your highness. I can give you a personal escort to the Jedi Temple if you need mystical wisdom. But you are disrupting the peace of my Senate building and aggravating my staff. I have to ask you to leave.”
Leia stared at him. Just stared. She stared at him like a Jedi did: through his helmet, penetrating his armor, straight into the empty space known as Fox lying within.
Finally, she said, “Why are you the only one who can see me, Captain?”
As if he knew? She was the one convinced that she was the expert on the situation. “I’m the only one who’s noticed a lot of the weird things happening today. I’m sure that’s a perfectly -”
“What weird things?”
Fox opened his mouth, then closed it. He was glad she couldn’t see his embarrassingly stymied expression, but somehow he had the sense she knew anyway. Finally, he weakly said, “Nothing…extraordinary. Just little things. The past two days. Like you.”
“And?” Leia asked, drilling into him and tearing him open. “Has anything else unusual been happening?”
“...ma’am, I’ll assign a guard to give you an escort to the Jedi Temple. You can submit a petition for aid there.”
“A guard that can’t see me?”
“...I will escort you. Tomorrow.”
Leia just sniffed, walking out of the alcove and straightening her thin dress imperiously. She drew her white hood back over her head before turning and looking at him with soft brown eyes that reminded him so much of somebody he couldn’t name. Looking at him like that, she seemed like someone else. Someone sad.
“This stupid torture dream isn’t going to convince me I’m somebody I’m not. And this lame ghost impression isn’t going to convince me that I’m helpless. Nobody carries us up the heavenly mountains. If you’re so content letting something tell you what to see, what to think, who you are - and if you’re just so happy with your silly little helplessness - then good day , Captain!”
She turned sharply on her heel and strode off back into the main concourse, chin held high even though there was nobody around to notice her pride but Fox.
Then she stopped and turned around, calling out to him.
“And come find me when you realize the blindingly obvious, will you?”
Fox watched dumbly as she disappeared into the crowd, and for the life of him he could not discern if it was literal or not.
In the end, he went home.
He waited twenty minutes for the next speeder shuttle and spent the trip home in a fugue. He entered the dorms without processing it. He washed his body glove in cold and running water, pressing his fingers on the washer and feeling the churning vibration. He walked past the men yelling and chatting and wrestling in the hallways, the combination of identical timbers forming a familiar symphony. He walked past the soldiers preparing to go out for drinks, colorful and laughing, and past Stone with his nose pressed against a datapad. He straightened his room, looked at the work he had yet to do, and looked around for something he did for fun. He found nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. There was nothing . Nothing he enjoyed, nothing he even liked. His life was work and he didn’t like work. He didn’t even find satisfaction in it anymore. It was simply what had to be done, and Fox was simply the one who had to do it. He had no joy, no meaning. He held no convictions that he wasn’t programmed with. He had no beliefs that he had developed himself. His only drive was to make sure that the Senate operated in a clean and orderly manner, and to guarantee that nothing threatened the safety of the Republic. He couldn’t care less about the methods he used to achieve this. He just liked order.
He lay down on his bed, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think of a woman who still cared. He tried not to wonder how long he would have gone walking as a ghost within the halls of the Senate before anybody had noticed at all. Before he had noticed.
And, disturbed, he fell asleep.
Fox broke for air.
He coughed, spitting out mouthfuls of stale water and hacking up flecks of bile. He struggled upwards, swimming upwards and pulling himself out of the water so he could gasp and wheeze. He bent his knees and tried to swim up, but when he unbent them his feet touched hard tile.
Fox opened his eyes, still coughing, and blearily squinted and looked around as the water cleared from his eyes.
Three children were staring at him, all different species but dressed in identical little white outfits. The Rodian’s jaw dropped. The human gaped at him. The Dug dropped their little red ball, sending it spinning on the floor.
“Okay,” Fox said. A stream of water hit his back, dripping down his legs. “What the fuck.”
It was Fountain Hell again. Of course it was Fountain Hell. He turned around just to double-check the fountain - same goddamn fountain - and turned around to reassess the children. Same goddamn children. Same ball . The same kid was holding the same ball in the same way, dropping it just like he did the last two times, letting it bounce twice on the ground before rolling to a stop…
“Are you a ghost?” The Rodian asked, high and reedy.
“Yes, I’m a Force ghost of every clone soldier killed on the battlefield.” Fox stepped out of the fountain, shaking himself off. “Why are you surprised to see me every time ? After the third time, wouldn’t you be - I don’t know, used to it?”
The children looked at each other, squinting furiously.
Finally, the Twi’lek offered, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a ghost.” The other kids nodded in agreement. “You’re just confused because you’ve been haunting our Temple for centuries .”
“He’s a Force ghost!” the human cried furiously. “I knew they were real!”
“But clones aren’t Force sensitive,” the Rodian pointed out. “How would -”
“He’s here , isn’t he?” the Twi’lek said reasonably. “So it has to be the Force.”
The first time. The first time. The first fucking time .
“The Force is definitely involved,” Fox said, dazed. “The Force is… definitely …involved. Listen, can I speak to your adults?”
The children were very happy to shepherd him to their adult. Apparently, they had a creche master who was currently sitting at the doorway to the ‘Room of One Thousand Fountains’, which was apparently the name of Fountain Hell. Fox decided to keep calling it Fountain Hell. He was a Pantoran in a sticky apron with a friendly face, relaxing in a chair and reading a datapad.
“Why, hello,” the creche master said, putting aside his book when the children cheerfully presented a bedraggled Fox. “Did something happen to your armor? Are you alright?”
“He’s the ghost who lives in the fountain,” the Twi’lek said seriously. “He’s haunting us for the crimes of the Republic.”
Fox extricated himself from the children, advancing on the now slightly concerned crechemaster. “Your fountains are broken.”
“Oh, no!” The crechemaster said, in the exact same tone of voice he used to talk to the children. “Did a fountain spill water on you?”
“You don’t understand.” Fox wiped water out of his eyes, heaving deep breaths. “I’ve - I’ve been seeing an invisible woman and all of my men are talking about philosophy and the caff pot broke twice and the Chancellor’s office is evil and your fountains are - they are not working properly.”
The crechemaster and the children stared at him.
“Okay,” the crechemaster said slowly, standing up. “Why don’t I take you to see Captain Nemo. Anji, can you run and get our friend a towel?”
“I already told Nemo to fix the fountains and he didn’t do anything!” Fox cried, throwing up his hands. “ What day is it !”
The crechemaster told him the day.
Fox stared at him.
Anji ran off to go fetch a towel.
“That can’t be right,” Fox said blankly. “That was three days ago. It’s supposed to be Zhellsday.”
“Why don’t we get you to see your commanding officer,” the crechemaster said. “Does that sound alright?”
“What’s the date,” Fox asked.
The crechemaster patiently told him the date.
Fox looked down at the Rodian blinking up at him with gigantic eyes. “Can you independently confirm the date?”
“Uh, I think so?”
If the small child told him so it had to be true. Fox struggled hard to process this.
Finally, all Fox could do was say, “Do you have anybody very wise around? I need a consultation on the Force.”
Thankfully, they were in the Jedi Temple, which was full of wise people who wanted to get rid of him and get him away from children very quickly.
Within ten minutes - Fox checked the shadow clock, saw that he was going to be late without a doubt, did not care - they had given Fox a calming drink and sat him down in front of some ridiculously decrepit old monk. He was so old that it made Fox anxious, as if he was going to keel over with a heart attack at any second and everybody would blame him.
They sat across from each other, on two chairs pulled out from one of the little stone tables that dotted further down the main concourse. The crechemaster had left to go fetch Captain Nemo, still under the impression that Fox was even remotely supposed to be here. Around them, Jedi sat sipping tea and talking lightly amongst themselves. On the far end of the group of tables, two padawans were arm-wrestling as other kids crowded around them and hooted with delight.
The sight disoriented Fox to the point of nausea. He had seen that scene a thousand times on Kamino. The two human boys arm wrestling could have been Bly and Wolffe. For just a second, he could have sworn they were - but then they were padawans again, braids swinging across their cheeks, as another padawan scolded them for teenage hubris.
Fox sat across from the elderly master, whose frail hands delicately clasped a porcelain teacup. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“The first thing you have to know,” Fox said seriously, “is that I’m not a bad person.”
The master’s eyebrows were so furry that they obscured his eyes, and his beard was so bushy and long Fox couldn’t see the tilt of the mouth. He was nothing but tissue skin and hair.
“I’m not a good person either,” Fox continued. “I know that. But I’m not a bad person, because I’m not a person . Sure, I do bad things. I recognize that. I know I’m the head of a branch of government that will turn completely towards totalitarianism within the next year. I’ve shut down the free press. I disappear people. I don’t give them all trials. If the Chancellor asks me to assassinate a senator on the downlow I make it happen. Stuff like that. But it’s not like I chose to do any of those things. I just do whatever they tell me. I have no morals, but even if I did it wouldn’t matter. It’s not as if I can quit my job. If I refused to do anything the Chancellor asked me to do he’d decommission me. Do you understand my position here? It’s a difficult position.”
The master blinked at him. Maybe. His eyebrows definitely twitched.
“You need to know that I don’t really care about this. I feel no guilt or shame. When I die, I will walk to my death with my head held high. I have no regrets. But two days ago, some things started happening. And now it’s like - like I’m aware of things again. My men are saying things that are making me think , and stuff keeps happening in my life that makes me feel wrong , and I keep on seeing these visions of this Temple just coated in - in skeletons. Old corpses and blood. But I know that’s not a hallucination, because I know that will happen . How long have I known that’s going to happen? I didn’t know that I knew that!”
The master put his teacup down. Fox waited with bated breath. The ‘Jedi Genocide’ thing was a bit of a revelation - a revelation he had just had, roughly two seconds ago - but it had to mean something, right? What if he asked for detail? Fox wasn’t supposed to give any details, he literally couldn’t. Maybe he could pantomime -
“So what’s your problem, young man?”
“Did you hear a word I just said?” Fox said blankly.
But the old man just hummed and nodded. “You are feeling a great disturbance in the Force.”
“I’m feeling pretty fucking disturbed, yeah!”
“You must find equilibrium,” the old man said. “Peace. Only then will you experience the world with a clear heart.”
“A clear heart ?” Fox cried, incredulous. “There’s an invisible woman walking around the Senate building bellowing like a tauntaun, sir, it’s kind of hard to find peace lately! Does the Force have a lot of invisible women? Is all of this normal for you?”
“Invisible women do happen sometimes,” the master agreed solemnly. “Have you attempted meditating on the matter?”
“You are the worst !”
Before Fox could accelerate the schedule on the Jedi genocide, Captian Nemo finally arrived with two members of the Jedi Guard. Fox stood up immediately, and saw Captain Nemo visibly recoil with shock. He had been expecting one of his men drunk as a skunk - not the Commander of the Coruscant Guard. Fox didn’t blame him. He felt like an officer drunk as a skunk, and was mildly surprised to find himself the Commander of the Coruscant Guard.
“Captain Fox? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me,” Fox snapped. He pointed empathetically at the old man, still hanging out on his chair. “Tell him that invisible women are real!”
Captain Nemo stared at him, then at the old man. Then back at him. He looked Fox up and down - at the limp towel by his feet, at the drops of water still clinging to his skin, at his body glove without armor.
“Why don’t we speak privately?” Captain Nemo asked.
It was easy to find a private place to speak in the Jedi Temple. The place was mostly empty, and was mostly empty every time Fox stepped foot inside the cursed place. Nemo didn’t bother shutting off the security cameras or guaranteeing that they couldn’t be overheard - he just dragged Fox into a small room, filled with enough incense and candles and cushions that he understood it was meant to be a private meditation room.
“Okay,” Nemo said, crossing his arms. “I would ask if you’re drunk, but I’ve never seen you touch a drop of alcohol in your life. What’s going on, Commander?”
Fox remembered a single line in the bottom of an email.
“Are we going to kill the Jedi?”
Nemo didn’t miss a beat. “Yes? Why?”
Fox and Nemo stared at each other. Fox wanted to die, significantly more than usual.
“Just wanted to double-check,” Fox said, dizzy. “Couldn’t remember if it was next week or the week after, you know how it is…sorry, and on whose orders are we doing that?”
“The Chancellor’s,” Nemo said, the same way he would answer ‘who is the most annoying old man alive’. “Fox, are you feeling alright? You need to take time for medbay if you’re sick. We can’t let the Commander of the Coruscant Guard be seen having a breakdown.”
Right. Optics. That was important.
It wasn’t until Fox said it that he knew. It wasn’t until he understood that he could know. “It was the plan all along,” Fox said, excruciatingly slowly. “Militarize the police by replacing them with soldiers loyal only to him. Plant an entire clone corp in the Temple. Place us as the leaders…the leaders who had always known, and were programmed not to notice…”
Of course Fox knew. Of course he knew. He had always known. He just hadn’t cared.
“Yes, yes, we’re the Emperor’s right fists, we enact his will on Coruscant, all hail,” Nemo said, as if this was something they both said every day of their lives. “Is the Jedi Temple really the place to be running around shouting this? You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?”
“I never had fucking first thoughts!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Nemo reached out and clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder. “We’re on the winning side. It’s an honor to serve the Empire.”
“Yes,” Fox said, “it is.”
And it was.
Fox barely remembered boarding the trolley to the Senate building. He stared out the window in a daze, watching Coruscant whirl around him. He was shredding himself into pieces, desperately scavenging for anything inside him that could make sense out of this.
Yes, they were going to kill the Jedi. That had always been the plan. The Jedi would stand in the way of the Sith Empire, which was bad, so the Jedi had to go. It was extremely simple. It was so simple that Fox had never paid much thought to it.
That wasn’t a surprise. Fox didn’t pay much thought to anything. He did his job and he did it well, and that took up too much of his brain to worry about extraneous things. Things like why the caff pot broke twice in a row. Or why Stone kept telling him the same story over and over again. Or why women were invisible sometimes.
Did Fox have moral qualms over the genocide thing? No, not really. A soldier did what a soldier had to do. Qualms wouldn’t change the reality. And Fox didn’t feel emotions that weren’t useful.
Useful. Useful! Other people didn’t have to be useful all the time! Natborns got to like useless things, like opera or wine or sex. Natborns got to pick where they worked and do things they cared about. Fox didn’t. Fox was an ‘uninteresting conversationalist’ so obviously he didn’t deserve -
“Holy fuck,” Fox said. “The Chancellor’s a Sith Lord.”
The grandmother next to him smacked on her candy.
This revelation did little to change Fox’s reality or situation, even if it was somewhat depressing and also explained a few things. From what Fox could tell, the Sith were the Nega-Jedi and they didn’t like each other. That was probably why he had that thing against Kenobi, who was so obnoxiously Jedi that he was probably compensating for something. It also explained why he was constantly rigging the war, and why they were gunning so hard for that dictatorship thing.
Why hadn’t Fox noticed this? The man had introduced himself as Lord Sidious when Fox was first assigned to him. Probably magic. Probably the same kind that made Leia invisible. Ugh. Jedi. If Fox could ban magic, he would. The Chancellor had the right idea about that.
Fox dreamed wistfully of a galaxy where magic was illegal before he started remembering those child corpses and feeling weird about the whole thing. Maybe if they just fined magic…a light prison sentence, maybe…
When he showed up at the Senate building without his armor again he was too far gone to be embarrassed about it. He walked past his guards at the gate without stopping, took another shower, banged his head against the wall again, grabbed his backup armor, and in an act of severe tardiness he slammed into the break room.
The room was already crowded with slacking Senate Guards, helmets dumped on the rickety table and chatting among themselves as they drank from biodegradable cups. Fox pushed past them, ignoring the inane chatter (“Did you hear we’re executing the Princess?” “ Finally !” -
Fox stopped short, rotating on his heel to look at the two clones. It was just Stuart and Longstreet, chatting idly as they sipped caff and avoided their workday. It was a solid thirty minutes after Fox had arrived here the last two days, were they still goofing off?
“What was that?”
Stuart looked at him, eyes wide and obviously terrified that he was somehow in trouble. Longstreet, less afraid of death, just took a sip of his caff. “We’re executing the princess?”
“What princess?” Fox demanded. Not - “Princess Leia?”
“What does it matter?” Longstreet asked blankly. “We execute a lot of people. Why’s a princess more important than a brother?”
“Yeah,” Stuart said, taking a thick bite out of a ration bar. “I was on the squad that executed Jay. It was awful. All he did was desert. How can you desert something that you never even signed up for?”
Fox took a step backwards, horror washing over him like a cold tide of water. “Jay abandoned his duty as a soldier of the Republic. He was a traitor. We don’t show sympathy for criminals.”
“They were just mad he ran off with Republic property.” Longstreet yawned widely. “Jay wasted tax dollars so he got the axe.”
“Isn’t it a bigger waste of tax dollars to kill him?”
“Yeah, but if you don’t kill him, then more are gonna run away.”
“You aren’t supposed to say that,” Fox said weakly, “you aren’t…”
But they were back to talking amongst themselves, as if they couldn’t hear Fox at all.
Near them, Stonewall leaned against a wall and stuffed a ration bar in his mouth as he chatted easily with Tuco. They were smiling and laughing with each other, easy as anything.
“So,” Stonewall said, “where do you think clones go when they die?”
“Stop contemplating your mortality!” Fox barked. “Who even does that, anyway!”
But they ignored him. They were all ignoring him. “I mean, we have to go to the same place as everyone else,” Tuco pointed out. “We’re as sentient as the average human is, just with some extra brainwashing. But none of us exactly come from a real culture or religion, so it’s hard to tell. It’s weird to not even have something as basic as that.”
“Maybe we can make something up,” Stonewall said. “Why not, right? It’s all the same anyway.”
“I’ll drink to that, brother.”
Fox stumbled to the caff pot. It was half-full, and he robotically poured himself a cup in the desperate hopes that the journey from the pot to the cup would magically transform it into moonshine. But when he lifted it to his lips, all he tasted was caff.
It was bitter and turgid. Thick and sludgy, clinging stubbornly to leftover warmth and gently spreading over his tongue. When’s the last time he tasted his caff?
“Commander! Finally decided you’re good enough for morning caff?”
Fox slowly turned to the side. Stone just grinned at him. He was leaning against the counter, scrolling through a library datapad with his helmet buckled to his belt.
“Hey, I’m reading the weirdest biography. It’s about this famous anti-war satirist from Lothal. He’s really popular over there.”
“Are you really?” Fox asked, dazed.
Beside them, Lee thumped the other industrial caff pot with the palm of his hand. “Stupid hunk of garbage. What, they can afford their thousand cred brandy but can’t buy us a decent fucking caff pot? But of course they can’t, right? That would involve recognizing that we’re sentient beings, with wants and desires and hopes. That we laugh and shave and feel tired in the morning. Admitting that to themselves is way more expensive than a freaking caff pot.”
Fox reached out and grabbed Lee’s arm, slowly lowering it. “You’re going to break the pot if you keep thumping it,” he said, feeling fucking insane. “Just - just leave it alone. If you stop rattling it then it won’t break.”
“But it’s already broken,” Lee complained. “All I’m doing is pointing that out.”
“Pointing out that something’s broken breaks it,” Fox said, completely nonsensically yet strangely desperate. “Don’t you get that? If you just don’t use the caff pot, then you don’t have to worry about it being broken.”
Lee just stared at him blankly. “What if I want caff?”
“Too fucking bad!” Fox shoved his cup at Lee. “Here, just - just take mine. Whatever.” He whirled around, facing a disturbed Stone. “And don’t you dare tell me about your literature!”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Stone swore up and down. “Hey, are you okay? You look kind of washed out.”
And, for some reason, that made Fox sag with relief. At least Stone was talking like a person. At least he wasn’t…going on and on about something obscure and seditious and terrifying. At least Fox wasn’t agreeing with him .
He leaned against the counter next to Stone, far closer than he had yesterday or the day before. “Something’s wrong,” he said weakly. “Something’s just - something’s been wrong for a while. And it’s never bothered me before, but I keep waking up in this fountain, right, and -”
But Stone was just staring at him, confused beyond measure, and Fox found himself faltering. He found himself wondering. His men spoke with honesty they had never dared display; voiced thoughts that they were all normally too intelligent to think. It was a weird, demented, awful warping of his brave and loyal soldiers - or maybe their everyday lives were warping his soldiers into something they weren’t, and this was who they really were. Fox didn’t know anymore. He didn’t trust anything anymore. It was objectively the worst feeling he’d ever experienced, and he had an unpaid service position in the Galactic Senate working for a Sith Lord.
“Stone,” Fox said, frozen beyond measure, “am I a bad person?”
Stone stared at him. Finally, with excruciating slowness, he finally said, “Do you care ?”
“I mean. No?”
“Then why are you asking?”
“I don’t know,” Fox said, freaking himself out. “Should I care?”
“Define should,” Stone said, taking a sip of his caff. “If you’re having a mental breakdown you should go to medbay. Tell them that it’s a gut problem, though. If a clone has more than three mental breakdowns they tend to disappear mysteriously.”
“It’s not that mysterious,” Fox said blankly. “We just quietly move them to a posting that’ll get them killed within the month. The Republic has no use for faulty product.”
They both stared at each other.
“To answer your question,” Stone said, “no, I don’t think you’re a bad person. Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” Fox said. “If you’ll excuse me.” He clapped Stone in a professional yet brotherly manner on the shoulder. He was a good man. Perhaps, if Fox were to be so bold, a friend. He wouldn’t be that bold, though. “Make sure Squad 1 takes patrol route Besh instead of Alpha today, and…you know what. Whatever. Do whatever you want. Let Thorn around Senator Aurek. I don’t care!”
From where he was rapidly shoving a ration bar in his mouth on the other side of the room, Thorn called, “He’s a fucking creep who treats me like a droid! He called me an ‘it’!”
“You can’t do anything about it,” Stone yelled back. “So nobody cares!”
“I can arrange an accident,” Tuco muttered into his cup. “That’s what we did with that senator from Eriadu, right?”
“That’s right,” Longstreet said warmly. “We blamed that one on a Seperatist attack, didn’t we?”
“Sure did. Felt good.”
“He was a threat to the safety and operational ability of the Senate Guard, which is a crime punishable by death,” Fox said testily. He believed very strongly in this. “We simply expedited the matter, which we have the legislative right to do.”
“Can we expedite Mas Amedda? He’s an asshole.”
“Sure!” Fox yelled, throwing up his hands. “Let’s just kill whoever we want -”
“Awesome!” Tuco said.
“ - but being a dick is not illegal.” It was the other way around, frankly. “Sometimes, men, life is just - it’s just hard. All the time.”
Lee raised his hand, sloshing his caff. “Is it hard sometimes or all the time?”
“Life is nasty, brutish and short,” Fox said, talking over him, “and that’s just something you have to cope with. Then you kill a lot of Jedi. Then you die. I don’t know what’s not clicking here. There’s nothing you can do about it, so just - give up!”
Everybody stared at him. Lee sipped slowly at his caff. Stuart finished shoving a ration bar in his mouth, blinking porgishly at Fox.
“But you’re always telling us to problem solve,” Tuco said reproachfully. “Or getting another guard to help you fix the problem. Whatever happened to problem solving?”
Problem solving. Problem solving. Finding someone who knew more about the situation than you did. Making somebody else deal with the problem. Problem solving!
“Stuart, you’re a genius,” Fox said - a new sentence. “Everybody have fun at work today. Or don’t, I don’t care, you’ll still have to do it. Thire, you’re in charge.” Thire pumped the air as everyone groaned. “You won’t see me again today but you’ll definitely see me tomorrow, which doesn’t exist. Fox out.”
Everyone saluted, somewhat confused, and Fox only barely refrained from running out the door.
Fox had never asked a natborn for help in his life, and he had intended on dying without ever asking a natborn for anything. They were incompetent, lazy, and stupid. There was nothing a natborn could do that a clone couldn’t, besides live past fifteen or disobey a Jedi. But he had betrayed enough convictions today that one more didn’t seem to matter, and Fox could use whatever anchor in this raging storm he could get. Even if that anchor was nothing but rage and entitlement in a miniature package, complete with delusions about both the nature of reality and her own importance, it was better than nothing. Fox strongly believed in the value of ‘better than nothing’, mostly because he knew what nothing looked like.
The most immediate problem was finding Leia. Ghosts didn’t exactly appear on command, and invisible women didn’t exactly have offices. He could break into a single man search pattern, but the building was far too large for that tactic to be remotely effective. The routine next step would be to track down the target’s usual…haunts…but Fox hadn’t had the opportunity or the desire to collect much information on her movements. All he knew was that she enjoyed yelling at Bail Organa and sneaking into Senate meetings.
The Senate meeting that would start momentarily.
Fox picked up the pace, filtering easily between hurried streams of senators and aides. A guard couldn’t be caught running for anything less than an emergency, mostly because it tended to imply something was wrong and panicked people. The last thing Fox needed right now was attention. So he settled for a speedwalk that turned his rhythmic steps into a brisk trot, and kept up the pace as he strained to catch the sounds of shrill screeching.
He didn’t hear it, even when he skidded to a stop in front of the hall entryway that Leia had been trying to sneak into yesterday. He now recognized it as the entryway for the sector where the Alderaanian pod was located. She had undoubtedly been trying to sneak onto Senator Organa’s pod. Or maybe she was trying to intercept her father, however unlikely the prospect might be.
Maybe all invisible people were insane, Fox thought grandly. Maybe the act of being unseen and unheard knocked a bolt loose and shook you apart until you crumbled into so many moving parts. Fox had always felt solid, built upon stone instead of roiling waters, but for some reason he had begun doubting that lately.
She wasn’t yelling, so he almost didn’t see her. But when he stopped and scanned the thick crush of politicians, he finally saw her: sitting down on the ground, knees tucked up to her chest, glaring furiously at every politician who fell under her mighty gaze. It was the pose of someone who had given up and started sulking their way through the situation, but in Leia it just looked like a coiled predator biding their time.
She saw Fox before he saw her, and when he turned to meet her eyes she was already glaring at him. He couldn’t help it: he pushed through the crowd to approach her, sending the senators scrambling away from him as if his rifle was hot to the touch.
“Good morning, Captain,” Leia said crisply, as if she was not sitting invisibly on the floor. “Come to arrest me? I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line.”
Fox stopped in front of her. Every ounce of fire and conviction of him slammed against a duracrete wall - not quenched so much as stifled, raging and spitting and barely restrained. Be courteous. Be polite. Be professional. Be obsequious. Do what they say. Do what he says. Don’t you know you’re talking to a senator? Don’t you know who you’re talking to?
But he didn’t. He had never known. He had never cared.
Something in Fox had ripped open, and he had found a dying voice inside gone unnoticed for years. It was weak, throttled from years of frantic suffocation, but he heard it now.
Who would she tell?
Who would she tell? Nobody could hear them talking. She couldn’t report him. She didn’t even think any of this was real. Whoever Leia was, however important and righteous she was in the place where she belonged, in this time and place she had no role and no meaning.
“I am one of the highest ranking clone troopers in the GAR,” Fox said, vibrating slightly. He needed more caff. “There are only a small handful of other clones the same rank as I am, who I rarely talk with anymore. Nobody likes me because I order the executions of their friends. Everybody I interact with on a daily basis is either my subordinate or a natborn. I have not said a genuine, unfiltered word to another sentient being in months. But you are - you are going to listen to me. I am going to talk, and you - you are going to listen!”
“Uh,” Leia said.
She was nothing to Fox. And Fox was nothing to her. In that strange second, that was the best thing in the whole damn galaxy.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Leia jerked back a little, blinking. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me!” In a moment of insane and unapproachable insanity, Fox wanted to take his helmet off. It felt obscene, but Fox wanted to feel the damn recycled air on his damn face. “What the fuck is happening? Am I - am I in some kind of time loop ?”
“Maybe you are,” Leia said frankly. “ I’m in a dream. But yes, the dream is repeating. If that was your question. You’re very different from yesterday.”
“Then obviously your dream isn’t doing a good job of repeating,” Fox snapped, somewhat nonsensically. “It’s all fucked up. My men are - they’re acting insane! I’m acting insane! Are you going to fix this or not?”
“Am I going to fix this? As if it’s my fault?”
“You’re the invisible one!”
“Have you ever considered that I am the victim in this scenario?”
“For the last time, you are not being tortured!” If anything, Leia was here to torture him . “You and your - invisibleness - is ruining my life. So cut it out.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Leia said venomously. “And how do you suggest we do that, Captain? What’s the plan?”
“You’re the person,” Fox said lamely. Somehow, it seemed to come down to that. He didn’t know why. He just knew that it did. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“You must be joking.” Leia stood up, primly dusting off her crumpled and messy dress. Her buns were frizzy and messy, as if she had been sleeping in them. “I’m an influential member of Alderaanian nobility, the youngest senator in the Imperial Senate, and a respected leader of the Rebellion. I give orders to my soldiers with a cool head and a keen eye.” This was a very insecure woman. “But if I understand correctly, you’re the commander of the Senate Guard and the Imperial Center Guard. I’d say you’re more than qualified to wipe your own ass, Captain.”
Fox opened his mouth, then closed it. He felt like a beached fish, but Leia seemed to draw that out in him. “Equals, then.”
“Until the Rebellion officially gives me a military ranking, nominally,” Leia said seriously. “But I will insist on Marshal Commander. So I will outrank you.”
“Is this important to you?”
“Of course not,” Leia lied. “It’s simply Rebellion ethos to recognize our most valuable members for their vital contributions.” She glanced at the door to the Senate, which had long since locked shut. Fox would still be able to enter, but the Senate meeting was now underway and locked to any late arrivals. “I have a working thesis.”
Finally . Fox sagged in relief. Natborns were good for something. They had so many thoughts all the time, they must have great practice at making plans. Not good at executing them, but that’s what Fox was for. “What’s the idea?”
“The key to my release is that Senate meeting,” Leia said seriously. “You let me into the meeting. I cast my vote. I block the bill. And my act of legislative rebellion will puncture the Empire’s hold over my psyche and I’ll be freed.”
Fox stared at her. She stared back, duracrete in her convictions. Fox still did not know what the Empire was, or why she was speaking in the past tense, but he had bigger holes to poke in her rhetoric.
“That’s fucking stupid.”
“You know, I am real sick of your -”
“And I’m real sick of your obsession with legislature! What’s the point of that bill?” Fox gestured harshly at the door, where they could faintly catch the murmured sounds of debate. Of course, he already knew how it would end. But he didn’t need a time loop to tell him that. “Do you even know the bill that they’re debating in there right now?”
Leia crossed her arms, little expression twisted unpleasantly. “I would if you had allowed me inside the hall. The fault is on your shoulders.”
“You know what. You know what? Fine.” Fox walked towards the door, pressing his wrist comm against the button and listening to it click open. “Come with me. Just listen for five minutes. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
The hall was, obviously, exactly the same as yesterday. The two men guarding the door gave him confused looks, but he just mysteriously yet importantly waved them away. Leia just rolled her eyes and slid away from them, leaning against the back wall as he went to join her. They were standing on the long catwalk that stretched along the circular wall of the Senate hall, which stretched out at ready intervals to the loading docks for the Senate pods. Lifts punctuated the catwalks, ready to lift senators from floors one to twenty. Fox was of the private opinion that there were too many senators and too many planets, but nobody asked him anyway.
The debate was exactly the same as yesterday, and Fox silently pulled up the brief on his comm before showing it to Leia. She read it at lightning speed, her eyes widening the further she read. She looked back to the speaker’s podium, boasting some senator or another from the Chancellor’s party passionately arguing for the sanctity of his pocketbook.
“The Liberty Bill,” Leia breathed. “This is - Fox, this bill was huge!” She turned to him, eyes wide and shocked. “This bill was the death knell for the Republic! Once the Emperor installed the bill, his secret police -”
“You do know that’s me, right?”
“That’s hardly your fault,” Leia said, casually and quickly, as if it didn’t make Fox’s breath catch in his chest. “His secret police started disappearing dissenters after this. Protests became practically illegal. He could do anything under the name of ‘protecting the Republic from Separatists’. It was a disgusting infringement on true liberty.” She turned back to the speaker’s pod, eyes narrowing in pure disgust and hate. “Of course the torture dream is showing me this bill. He’s rubbing my face in this. Showing me that there’s nothing I can do about the death of democracy.”
“What are you talking about?” Fox asked blankly. “This bill passed 1357-166.”
Leia stared at him. “I’m sorry?”
“ Everybody voted to pass this bill,” Fox said, slow and careful. He felt a little as if he was ruining her life day party. “Alderaan, Chandrila, and Naboo voted against it. A few other places. But that was it. Lord Sidious didn’t do anything besides get it on the floor. The senators did the rest.”
Leia kept staring. Finally, she said, “But there were conscientious objectors to the war.”
“Yeah, who all joined the Council of Neutral systems. The only argument’s now if we want to end it quickly or drag it out. Any argument against the bill’s useless. Everyone’s chosen their sides.” Fox looked back over the Senate hall. Lord Sidious’ man had retreated, and Bail Organa took the stage. “They just don’t know yet that there’s only one side.”
He and Leia silently watched Bail Organa speak passionately against the bill. He made a good showing. Useless, but stirring. Leia watched him in stunned silence, still and stiff where she was already moving or yelling or waving her arms about.
“It’s not useless,” Leia whispered harshly. “It’s not.”
“You’re absolutely correct, Princess,” Fox said, with faux gravitas. “Your single vote among two thousand other votes will absolutely foil the decades of planning by the most powerful man in the galaxy. Who’s also a Sith Lord.” He looked back at Bail Organa. Somehow, even among the thousands of sentients in a yawning cavern, he still seemed larger than life. “It’s easiest if you don’t resist.”
That pissed Leia off. She stepped away from him, face twisting in comfortable outrage. “Your shit attitude is why that bill passed in the first place! Democracy isn’t supposed to be easy , Captain! If politics was so easy everybody would do it. It’s struggle and pain, but it’s worth fighting for. You wouldn’t understand.”
Fox gestured broadly at the hall - at his men, standing at attention. “Is this worth fighting for?”
But Leia just stared him down, chin jerked up to look him in the eyes. “I don’t do it for them. I do it for the billions of people across the galaxy who suffer every day under totalitarian rule. I do it for him .” She jabbed a finger at Bail Organa, still speaking passionately and uselessly. “He never gives up fighting for democracy, even when the odds are impossible. My mother never fails to put her people first, even when it puts herself in danger. How can I call myself their daughter if I don’t do the same?”
Somehow, for some strange reason, Fox found himself speaking. “Do you do it for clones?”
But Leia didn’t even hesitate. How could she not even hesitate? “You were the first people to suffer under the autocratic rule of the Emperor. I can’t do much for you now, but you all deserved far better than what you were forced to do. Every sentient being has the inalienable right to hope, Captain. I think you may be the first person the Emperor ever truly robbed of hope. It’s a little pathetic.”
Fox froze. He didn’t know what to say.
He was scared. Leia wasn’t allowed to say that. Fox wasn’t allowed to hear it. The words would break something - maybe break everything. They would shatter whatever fragile truce Fox had made with the galaxy. Whatever precarious balance he maintained, the careful tightrope he walked just to wade through the haze of nothingness and boredom.
He didn’t know what to say, or maybe he just didn’t know how to be brave enough to say it. Fox wasn’t very brave. He didn’t have to be. But Leia was, in her weird and stubborn way - born from a lifetime of forced bravery, the kind of life that gave her disturbing flippancy about possible torture scenarios. Whatever life a Rebellion and an Empire gave you.
So Fox did the most insane thing physically possible. It felt like the only thing to do.
Fox took off his helmet.
“Do you want to get drunk?”
As it turned out, Leia knew where her father stashed the brandy in his office.
The Senate meeting would not end for another three hours. The entire hallway of senator offices was abandoned, and once Fox turned off the security cameras and triple locked the door to Bail Organa’s office they guaranteed themselves absolute privacy. Which was good, because Fox was absolutely stealing this man’s shit and drinking in his office. He would be trespassing, if Fox didn’t have explicit powers to search any senator’s office at will. Three cheers for the Liberty Bill and all its ilk.
When you think about it, Fox thought grandly as he collapsed into the ridiculously comfortable visitor’s chair in front of Bail Organa’s ridiculously ornate wooden desk, he was the most powerful man in the Senate. He could go wherever he wanted so long as he pretended he had a good reason. He could do whatever he wanted so long as nobody caught him red handed (metaphorically). He had the complete confidence of the Chancellor, who likely believed that Fox hadn’t had an independent thought in his life (which wasn’t true - puberty had been rough). He could shoot dead any damn person he wanted, and he could make up a perfectly compelling reason after the fact. His men, who wanted to kill more people, would enthusiastically back him up.
When you think about it, really think about it, Fox wasn’t…he wasn’t…
“I am the Senate,” Fox mused out loud, instead of the other thing that he definitely was not. He held out a glass. “Top me up.”
“Do you drink? At all?” Leia threw herself down in her father’s chair so easily that Fox was finally convinced that she really was his daughter. She popped open the brandy, hidden cunningly inside of a statue, and served herself and Fox. That tickled him, for some reason. He was always the one serving people. “Because you’re holding that glass wrong.”
“It’s not as if these assholes ever give us any of their thousand cred brandy,” Fox bitched. “It’s like they think we run on motor oil.”
Organa was better than the rest of them, to the point where it was both a little pathetic and explained a lot about Leia. It explained the way that she had asked his name before anything else, the way she talked to him like he was a person, the way she split her father’s brandy in his ornate office with him. It really was a nice office, with the clear thumbprint of the elegant and naturalistic Alderaanian style. There was a long painted screen stretching from one wall to another depicting Mt. Aldera in reserved brushstrokes, and strategically placed blooming white flowers decorated empty spaces. Leia had obviously been in here dozens of times, and she relaxed easily in front of the wide bookshelves stacked with law journals and plush carpeting. It almost made Fox feel like he belonged in a place like this - like he was meant to be sitting in a visitor’s chair splitting a drink with a senator, instead of standing stiffly by a door being seen and not heard.
But Leia just smiled at him, clearly amused despite herself. “You have a very emotive face, you know that? Seeing you all so young is quite strange, like I’m walking inside a holo.” She held up her cup, making a small gesture, and after a second Fox belatedly realized he was supposed to smash them together. Judging by her wince, he might not have done it right. “To our good health. And Alderaanian rosefruit brandy. You can’t find this stuff off Alderaan, you know. We don’t even export it.”
“I’ll have to go visit one day,” Fox said. He carefully imitated the way Leia drank it, taking a confident sip. He promptly spat it back in the glass. “Eugh! It’s vile!”
Leia downed the whole thing before thumping it back on the table and pouring herself another. “Pussy.”
Fox resentfully took another sip, letting it scald his tongue. It tasted different from caff and water, which were the two main drinks he had. It was richer, deeper. There was an awful sour tang that hit his tongue immediately, and another pungent smear hitting the back of his throat soon afterwards, but in between those he could have sworn he caught a taste that felt just a little like flowers.
Wait. “Young.” Fox looked up from his glance, watching Leia casually kick her boots up on the rich wood. “When we’re young - okay, it’s time for you to explain what you mean by all of that. Are you saying you’re from the future ?”
“No, I’m saying you’re from the past.” Leia sipped at her brandy, but this time Fox didn’t miss the slight grimace after drinking. “I’ll debrief you. Simply put, I am a prominent leader in the Rebel Alliance against the totalitarian dictatorship that is currently subjugating our galaxy. I was on a routine diplomatic - alright, I was helping some of our agents steal some shit, when my cruiser was intercepted by an asthmatic cyborg. He is currently torturing me for the location of my Rebel base. I don’t believe he’s doing a very good job, as I’ve never once felt compelled to betray my comrades.” She slammed her glas down on the desk, sending the fancy styluses rolling across the desk calendar. “That’s a simple summary. Do you understand the situation now, Captain?”
Hm. It all tracked, except for the asthmatic cyborg bit. But that part didn’t seem very important. “How far in the future would you say you’re from, approximately?”
“The Empire was founded about two weeks before my birthday,” Leia said, in a stunning yet characteristic display of self-centeredness, “and I’m nineteen. So perhaps about twenty years. I’m not certain, but you’re standing in the dying heart of democracy.”
Fox took a long sip of his own brandy, thinking the situation through.
Finally, he said, “I think it’s Force banthacrap.”
“Oh, it is not.”
“Think about this from my perspective,” Fox argued, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the desk so he could point empathetically at Leia. He had already explained the last few days to her, together with a lot of incredulous arm waving and yelling, but she had been disgustingly unimpressed by the total upheaval of Fox’s life. “I keep mysteriously waking up in fountains in the Jedi Temple. I work for a Sith Lord who’s definitely been fucking with my mind for years. I’ve had visions of things that haven’t happened yet. People have been saying things that they couldn’t possibly know - things about you , princess. It’s Force time nonsense. It’s…messing with the time stream. Or whatever.”
“That’s not how the Force works,” Leia said, in a mockery of patience. “It’s a mystical energy field that surrounds and binds us -”
“Oh, what would you know about it?” Fox snapped. “You said we killed all the Jedi, and I’m already suppressing information about them. I bet you don’t know shit about the Jedi.”
Leia opened her mouth, then closed it. She furiously drank her brandy. She tapped one of her father’s desk toys, sending a small series of balls clanging against each other.
Slowly, Fox said, “Leia. What would you know about the Jedi?”
“Nothing,” Leia lied, drinking her brandy.
“Leia.”
“I don’t, I swear! My father was a good friend to the Jedi, but he hardly discusses them over the dinner table.”
One ball hit another hit another, and one little push sent a ripple of movement throughout the entire line.
“...you aren’t a Jedi, are you?”
“Oh, don’t be daft,” Leia snapped. She smacked her fingernail against one of the balls, sending them clanging furiously against each other. “Imagine. Me. A Jedi! I certainly haven’t. It hasn’t even come up. I don’t even think about the whole thing. My father never even lets me touch a lightsaber. Everybody picks things up here and there.” She reached out a hand and grabbed the balls, stilling them. “I’ve had tutors. Who hasn’t?”
“You’re Force sensitive, aren’t you.”
“I simply don’t see how that’s relevant,” Leia said promptly.
“It’s a little relevant, Leia.”
Leia sighed obnoxiously, leaning her head back and staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not. It’s not relevant to anything. All it does is inconvenience me. Tutor after tutor as a child teaching me nothing but how to pretend it isn’t even there. I forget about it most of the time. It doesn’t affect my life, especially since I’m not allowed to gamble anymore.” She paused for a second in thought. “Is this information being tortured out of me? Because I can’t imagine that the walking air conditioner got this far into my brain without picking up on that. ”
“If there’s one thing I know about the Force,” Fox said, tactfully omitting that there were only about two things he knew about the Force, “it’s that it affects your life. That’s what this has to be. It’s some kind of…Force sink. You’re using your Force powers -” Leia scoffed. “ - you’re using your Force powers to - to astral project -”
“Astral project!”
“ Astral project your way into my life,” Fox finished triumphantly. “That’s why everything’s fucked up. You’re ruining everything with your magic. And I bet I’m the only one who sees it because I am just - just corrupted with evil Sith magic.”
The logic was sound and Fox was pretty damn proud of it, but Leia just frowned at him. “This building has thousands of senators and you think you’re the most evil thing in it? If that was true, then I’d be having a drink with the Emperor right now.” Fox grunted as he conceded the point. “Besides, my father told me that the clones didn’t go evil until later. You probably have a year left of being boring left in you, so use it well.”
“Wait,” Fox said, “what?”
“Well, nobody who knows the full story is exactly telling. All I know is what my father told me.” Leia put her boots on the ground, leaning forward to match Fox’s pose. The desk and chair should have been comically too large for her, but somehow it seemed to fit just right. “The clones were the loyal soldiers that served under the Jedi before they turned on them. The Emperor labelled the Jedi ‘traitors’, and the clones immediately began executing them. Between that and the raid on the Jedi Temple, almost no Jedi survived. That’s the day the Republic fell and the Empire rose. I was born shortly afterwards.”
Hm.
Fox rolled the information over in his mind before he realized it. “Execute all Jedi…that’s one of the Orders, isn’t it?”
“The what?”
“There’s chips in every clone’s brain.” Fox was well aware of them, even on a conscious level. The worst part about conspiracies was cleaning up after them. “They have override codes written into them. Should the low-grade programming fail -” and it did, frequently, such as in Dogma’s case. “ - the high-grade programming takes over. Order 66’s the execute all Jedi one.”
Leia stared at him incredulously. “And you didn’t think anything of this?”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Tell someone, for a start!”
“And what would they do about it?” Fox asked. “The minute word got out that somebody knew about it - and it has - I would have to kill them - and I have . All that would do is kill whoever I told, then kill me.”
“There’s always something you can do,” Leia said furiously. “All you do is roll over for the Emperor!”
The brandy was beginning to slosh around Fox’s head. His tongue felt heavy and numb, and the world was tilting gently back and forth. That was what he would blame it on. That was the excuse he would use. He would use the excuse on no one, and nobody would ever ask the culprit. But he needed to excuse it to himself - even now, even here.
“Yes!” Fox cried. “Yes! Dammit, yes! How can a princess understand what a slave’s been through? No matter how powerful the slave, or how young the princess? I know I’m the - I’m the villain of whatever story you’re the hero of, but I needed help too! You ever think about that? I needed someone to save me too!”
Leia looked away, lips pressed together, and they sat in silence in the seat of her family’s grandeur.
There was a hoarse rasp on Fox’s throat, and he could not place the overwhelming sadness and despair in his chest. It felt new, but he knew that it was very old. It was as old as he was, from the first time he was a little boy lying in a bunk desperately wishing for a tomorrow that was different from the last.
But that day never came. Nobody ever came for Fox and his brothers, and no wars were waged to free them. Nobody fought to save them from their fate. Their six month life expectancies. Their helplessness. Their futures encoded within Order 66.
When Leia looked back at him, Fox was struck by an incredible sadness he had never seen in her before. It ran deep, drawn from the same vein as her anger. “I’m sorry.”
Fox hunched his shoulders defensively. He fought the urge to shrink against the chair, to drag his finger across the table like a child. He felt like a child. Stripped raw, reduced to nothing. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Don’t be daft, of course not.” Leia’s bow lips pressed in a thin lie, big brown eyes crumpled at the edges. “But I’m sorry. The Republic failed you. What they did to you was inhumane, and they used an innocent person to do their great evil. If I had been there…if I had been there, it would have never happened.” She glared furiously down at the curling whorls of the desk, full of righteousness. “I always fight injustice wherever I see it. I would have known something was wrong. I would have done something about it.”
“If you had been an adult during the Clone Wars, you would have been a Jedi,” Fox said, exhausted. She would have been one of the best, too. He could tell. “And you would have gone along with it just like the rest of them.”
“No,” Leia said, “not me.”
And he believed her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fox said, instead of thinking about it - instead of visualizing Jedi Knight Leia Organa, wielding a purple lightsaber with a great grin on her face as she decimated her enemies in battle. She would have been amazing. “You weren’t there. I probably died only a little after you were born. We never met. None of this happened.”
“I don’t know.” Leia looked up at him, expression crumpled. “We met here, didn’t we?”
And they had.
Why did that mean something, despite everything? Why did hearing one person, just one person, tell him that what they did to him was wrong mean so much? Why did one woman’s certainty call forward something in Fox, and why did her care jolt something loose in his frigid and static heart?
When he looked at Leia at her ridiculous buns and her crumpled white dress, she felt like the only important thing that had ever happened to him. The one thing that nobody had orchestrated, that nobody had commanded him to do. The only pure accident in his galaxy.
She wanted to protect him, and nobody ever had.
“It was nice to meet you, Princess Leia,” Fox said, “despite the circumstances.”
“This is the most pleasant torture experience I’ve ever had,” Leia agreed.
Somehow, for some reason, Fox had to anxiously add, “You know that you’re a princess and I’m legally a nonsentient, right?”
“Who gives a shit about that, we have bigger problems.” Leia clapped her hands, standing up from the desk. She didn’t even sway or stumble, even though Fox belatedly tried to steady her. He’d babysat a hundred drunk senators, but she didn’t even seem tipsy. Where did she put it all? “Enough lazing around. It’s time to investigate. I want out of this torture dream and I will bust my way out of my own subconscious if I have to.”
“You are not going anywhere without me.” Fox stood up too, stumbling only a little bit. “There’s a - fucking Sith Lord in this place. I gotta make sure you don’t get blown up.”
“This is literally a dream,” Leia said, baffled. “And there’s always a Sith Lord in this place. What’s got your armor in a knot?”
“I - I - uh.” Fox felt himself flush. “There’s this thing about clones.”
“Uh huh.”
“And I - uh - there’s very sophisticated clone programming, and brainwashing, and just kinda hyping each other up, you know - about Jedi -”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Fox thought of a purple lightsaber and a scene of carnage. He thought about the quiet and simmering jealousy that he had never once vocalized. He thought of an emotion that wasn’t any of that, that was strange and unnatural, that could never have been programmed or defined. An emotion chosen.
“Nothing. Let’s just get going.” Fox looked at his comm, blanching. “Let’s get going now . The Senate’s going to take a recess soon, and Organa’s going to pick up some papers from the office.” He should know - he’d seen it three times. “And there’s still my meeting with the Chancellor in an hour - fuck!”
He and Leia looked at each other.
“Let’s skip that meeting,” Leia said.
Fox grabbed his helmet. “Way ahead of you, let’s go.”
They broke back into the belly of the Senate, Fox fastening his bucket back on his head the minute they stepped into the hallway. Leia gave him half a look as he did it, but before he could begin to decipher it she had already turned away.
They set down the hallway in a fast clip, easily waving past senators who didn’t see Leia and whose eyes skimmed over Fox. A few of them tried to stop him (“Captain, there’s a disturbance on level three, I think I saw a homeless person”) and waste his time with meaningless bitching (“Captain, I have a complaint about Senator Whytemore”). Fox, who unfortunately wasn’t being tortured, stopped and stood and nodded as Leia groaned impatiently behind him.
“We’ll get right on that,” Fox said. “Yup, yup.”
The senator squinted at him, amphibian jowls flapping. “Captain, are you alright? You seem a little…”
“I think there’s a disturbance on level three. I’ll take my leave, sir. ”
“Wow,” Leia said from her spot at his elbow, rolling her eyes, “it’s as if this is your first time showing up at work drunk. Clone pigs really are a different breed than human ones.”
“What are they going to do,” Fox said, “fire me?”
Leia cackled. Fox smiled, although she could not see it, because she could not see it. But she knew anyway.
After they dodged two routine guard patrols, three more senators who thought whatever they had to say was important, and Fox drank some water and had some food, they were finally left standing in the main concourse of the Senate building, letting the tides of sentients wash in and out. Fox stopped and waited on Leia, who hadn’t stopped twisting her head around trying to take in the entire Senate building.
“It’s so much more beautiful than mine,” Leia said. “What a load of crap. It’s like the Empire hates anything beautiful. It’s all about ‘austerity’ and ‘rejecting Republican excess’. It wouldn’t kill us to have a few rugs in the place.”
“I would love to tear some of that crap down.” Fox shrugged as Leia narrowed her eyes, offended. Another senator tried to get Fox’s attention but he pretended he couldn’t hear them. “Half of the art in this place is stolen and the other half was used for money laundering. Most of the statues are carved in a NeoMandalorian style just so we can pretend to be a more impressive empire. It’s all ostentatious wealth flashing and thousand cred brandy.”
“You just don’t know how good you have it,” Leia said waspishly. “I know the rich profited off the backs of this democracy - your back - but it’s a thousand times worse in the Empire. Do you have any idea what percentage of Imperial military equipment is made by slave labor?” She paused a beat, glaring down hard at the ground in thought. “One hundred percent of the Republic military is slave labor. Dammit. I wonder when the Republic truly died. It was far before now.”
“And I’m certain politicians like you have been saying that every year of the Republic’s existence.” Fox looked around, skin prickling. The time for his appointment with the Chancellor was growing closer, and he couldn’t help but feel as if he should be far away when that happened. “I have an idea. Let’s go back to the scene of the crime -”
“Wow, you are a cop.”
“ - and investigate the fountain in the Jedi Temple.” As he spoke, Fox slowly warmed up to the idea. “The Jedi were completely useless to me, but you’re a magician. You can use your psychic powers to…sense the origin of the disturbance.”
Leia crossed her arms. “You think the origin of the disturbance is in a cheap decoration?”
“It’s the origin of my disturbances.”
“Ugh! Fine. I’m doing this under duress. I fucking hate the Imperial Palace.”
“ Imperial Palace ?”
But that really shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Leia gawked at the air trolley, loudly calling it ‘retro’, but Fox imitated everybody else and ignored her. He felt like an idiot sitting in full armor next to royalty on public transportation, but Leia clearly wasn’t even thinking about that. Her nose was pressed up to the window of the trolley instead, gaping at every passing thing.
The trolley was new, and its aerodynamic hull gleamed as its insides smelled slightly like piss. It was always crowded with people, at every moment of the day - near rush hour it was always entirely people in business wear suitable for the hub of the galaxy’s government, but now it was far more sparsely populated with the homeless and the poor. They came upwards to panhandle sometimes. Fox was cracking down hard on the practice. Hopefully once the Empire rose they could impose official segregation between the levels.
For some reason that thought made him stop short. He was well aware that the only point of limiting movement between socioeconomic levels would be fascism. There was a lot of appeal to the idea. There would be a place for everything, and everything in its place. He struggled actively to think of a reason why it could possibly be bad.
But fascism was also, technically, what had created and then ruined Fox’s life. Maybe creating Fox - creating the war - was no different from shutting down the free press or arresting protestors. And Fox was well aware that something like him should never exist.
Leia was still staring out the window, eyes fixed to the standard scene whipping by. Fox craned his head, trying to follow her line of sight. It wasn’t anything special. Just the same buildings, the same advertisements.
She prodded at the window, pointing out an office building before it disappeared. “That flower shop became an office building when I was a teenager. I would buy flowers for Daddy from there. Is that a park? There isn’t supposed to be a park there. Wow, all of the restaurants are different.”
For just a second, Fox tried to see Coruscant as she saw it. It was impossible, obviously - he didn’t know what Corscuant looked like in the future, although he could take an educated guess. But maybe, if he unfocused his eyes and tilted his head, he could see it.
The stores and restaurants stacked on top of each other like building blocks, walkways and speeder docks loaded with people embarking and disembarking. At these highest levels everything was in the sky, but there were more than enough arching lattice pedestrian walks crowded thick with people struggling valiantly to swim towards their lunch breaks. There were so many different kinds of people, all shapes and sizes and types. Some of them held baby carriages; some wore overly large headphones. Others carried boomboxes; others walked arm in arm with each other and laughed. There was something vibrant about it, the spontaneity shaking up the hurricane box and creating a different storm every time.
Leia drank it in, eyes wide, and somehow Fox found himself watching her instead.
Fox poked her in the arm. “Why is it bad to arrest homeless people?”
“Are you serious ? Criminalizing homelessness is nothing but an excuse for police brutality, feeding for-profit prisons, and proliferating the war on drugs -”
And Leia talked his ear off the rest of the way to the Jedi Temple.
The bright side of being one of the leaders in a galactic conspiracy with an entire battalion of sleeper agents was the fact that they generally trusted him. He shepherded Leia in through one of the back guard doors, said something to the Temple Guards about witness protection, and broke into the main concourse of the Jedi Temple as quickly as possible. Four times in three days was far too often for him, and the entire situation was a little awkward now that he knew the comprehensive list of protocols for hunting down fugitive Jedi, but Fox was talented at strategically forgetting things and he used the skill with abandon.
Leia stuck close to him, which satisfied a weird part of his brain. She was gaping, face frozen in shock and awe at the ostentatious sight. She stopped frequently just to look around, marvelling at the gorgeous windows letting the light streaming in. But she mostly stopped to look at the Jedi.
There weren’t many of them, but when they hit a high traffic area she stopped in her tracks and stared. Fox screeched to a halt next to her, immediately opening his mouth to urge her forward, but when he saw the expression on her face he closed it. It was pure wonder. More than walking through the halls of history, and more than seeing a time long gone. For Leia, it was as if she was walking through legends and fairy tales.
Jedi surrounded them, a gentle stream that was nothing like the hectic and self-important business in the Senate. There were children, running around and laughing or marching in neat two-by-twos holding each other’s hands. Elders talked to each other quietly with furrowed brows, but roving gangs of padawans still shoved at each other and yelled. It was the exact same scene as yesterday, and the day before that - the exact same scene as Fox had ever known - but he knew from the expression on Leia’s face that she had never known this. That it was a story someone had told her a long time ago, and that she had never truly believed it was real until now.
For some reason, Fox found himself speaking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should have had this.”
Leia snapped out of her reverie, turning back to Fox. There was something lost and distant about her, and it was almost disconcerting. Leia was never lost - but she was a long way from home. “I - no, don’t be daft. I’m very weak in the Force. They never would have even noticed me.”
“You know that’s not true.” Fox watched the Jedi pass by, swerving easily around them as their eyes glazed past. It felt appropriate: Fox didn’t belong here. Not yet. “If things were different you could have grown up in this Temple. If you were born just a few months earlier, you might have even died here.”
Leia’s lips tightened and she looked away from him. Fox found himself shifting closer to her, his plasteel armor bumping up against her thin dress. She didn’t seem to mind. “This was never my path,” she said harshly. “I knew I couldn’t be a politician and pursue the Force at the same time. I chose the life of a politician. If I had chosen the Force, I would have spent my life in hiding like the rest of the Jedi. I’m not living like that. I don’t need the Force to fight. And it would have hurt my parents so badly.” She fell silent, watching a padawan cheerfully talk their master’s ear off before they disappeared around a corner. “I haven’t thought about the Force in years. I haven’t felt it in a decade, maybe. I don’t think about these things when I’m awake. But here, in this - in this dream, in this place…I don’t know.”
She felt it. Fox wondered what it felt like. It wasn’t as if he could know.
“You shouldn’t have had to pick between the Force and survival,” Fox said. “It’s not fair.”
“I don’t give a bantha’s ass what’s fair or not!” Leia snapped, crossing her arms petulantly. “Nothing’s fair! Life’s not fair! You know that as well as I do. We just - we just get on and deal with it and we fight back. If you’re sitting on your ass complaining about fair and unfair then you aren’t on your feet fighting it!”
“I know,” Fox said, “I know.” For some weird, obscure, terrifying reason, he put a hand on her back. It was the first time he had ever voluntarily touched a natborn. “You just shouldn’t have to fight all the time. That’s all. Neither of us should.”
Leia was silent for a long second. Her face was scrunched tight, in a manner seemingly identical to her angry face but instead seemed a little like she was trying not to cry. She didn’t shrug off his hand.
“Come on,” Fox said, gently pushing at her back, “we have to go descend into hell.”
Leia didn’t share his opinion that Fountain Hell was terrible. She was actually rather impressed with it - making noises and craning her head everywhere to take in as much of the cavern as possible. Because it was a cavern. Fox couldn’t see any walls, and the arched ceiling coated in dripping ivy and vines gave the impression of a soft canopy with a bright blue sky lurking just out of sight. But he supposed that ‘Cavern of a Thousand Fountains’ might sound too much like it was in the bowels of hell. Personally, he still wasn’t impressed. Flowers were flowers. Wrought iron benches and gentle running waterfalls were benches and moving water. The endless soft babble of water and the laughter of children gave him a headache. At least the Senate was quiet.
“I wonder if there’s really a thousand fountains in here,” Leia wondered out loud. “Or if there’s only seven hundred seventy two and they just assume that nobody would stop to count them.”
“Do I want to know what Sidious did with this room?” Fox asked dryly.
But Leia just shrugged. “Mom and Dad never allowed me to go inside the Imperial Palace. Even during mandatory events! It took years just to wear them down to let me go visit Imperial Center.”
“Wonder why.”
“ Honestly , Fox,” Leia said, in full condescending princess mode, “as if I’d let the Imperial death sentence on my innate psychic powers stop me from conducting seditious and treasonous warfare in the Emperor’s back yard?”
“You know,” Fox said, “on second thought, I’m glad you never had a clone assigned to your command. You would have driven him crazy in a day.”
“You’re keeping up just fine,” Leia said brusquely. “Now follow me, I’m smelling something remarkably pungent and I believe it’s your fountain.”
Fox wondered if Leia knew that her ‘sense of smell’ was actually the Force. He wasn’t going to point it out to her. He was thinking about other things. A strange corner of his mind was obsessing over the purple lightsaber idea. He’d only ever seen General Windu with one, but he could steal it from General Windu, right? It was legal for him to seize property without cause now. He could do that.
She lead them unerringly through the room, waving between aisles and avoiding wandering pairs of Jedi chatting quietly between themselves. They all wore heavy brows and walked with bowed shoulders, but Leia didn’t falter in her pace. Fox thought that some of them looked half-dead already. Maybe the genocide had started two years ago, and this was its twilight as the Jedi slowly withered away.
Fox recognized it immediately. It was the first time he’d walked towards the fountain instead of walked away from it, and as a result it seemed to hold a different character in his mind. He had half-expected it to look sinister, to carry some aura of Darkness or Light, but it really did just look like a fountain. A circular pool, its depth reaching halfway up Fox’s forearm - usually - with a pump in the center that sent water continuously bubbling up in a steady column that rose and fell with the crests. The area around the column rolled back and forth in smooth waves, but near the edges the water didn’t even ripple. It was remarkably boring. Fox was a little disappointed.
They stood in front of the fountain and stared at it. Leia glared at it very fiercely, as if it was in her way in the hallway and she refused to move first. The fountain squatted stubbornly in front of them, unmoving and seemingly nonmystical.
“Well, that’s remarkably boring,” Leia said finally. She kicked it experimentally and somewhat vengefully, only to grimace. “I’m a little disappointed, honestly.”
“What about the Force?” Fox demanded. “What does it say?”
“The Force doesn’t say anything to me,” Leia snapped. “I haven’t even felt it in a decade!”
“What do you think this is ?” Fox cried incredulously. “You’re the one astral projecting with your psychic powers -”
“Oh, please -”
“ - and making weird shit happen! Is there a rule that the Force can only inconvenience and not - convenience or something?”
“This isn’t the Force, this is just a very evil torture dream,” Leia snapped. “I’m beginning to think that this is only going to end when Darth Vader gets tired of me!”
Darth Vader - where had Fox heard that before? Where…
But Leia was crumpling, and Fox cautiously put his hand on her back again so he could steer her down to sit on the rim of the fountain. The stone lip only reached up to Fox’s calf, but he sat down next to her anyway.
Something about Leia’s pose was familiar. Leaning forward, body tightly coiled, but eyes distant. She looked a little like -
The woman. The woman, the first day of this - the woman who had sat on that bench and counted and counted. He would wonder how in the stars he didn’t recognize her if it wasn’t for the fact that the answer was obvious. Or maybe the answer was more mundane - that woman had an air of hopelessness and despair about her that Leia had never once shown, no matter how bad things got.
It would make objective sense if being tortured had depressed Leia a bit. But somehow Fox didn’t think that was it.
Very slowly, Fox said, “I’m not the Jedi here.”
“ Senator .”
“I’d feel more reassured in this situation if you were a Jedi.”
“Tough luck.”
“Thanks,” Fox said dryly, but he sighed anyway. “So how is Lord Vader extracting the information, then? Annoying you into giving up?” Leia didn’t say anything. “Is he waiting you out?” Leia didn’t say anything. “If he’s using me to trick you into giving up the Rebel base then he chose the wrong person. I’m hardly a trustworthy face.”
Leia didn’t say anything.
“Leia. Do you really think this is the torture?”
The fountain bubbled behind them, one soft note in a symphony of water and peace. Fox couldn’t feel it. Sometimes, in his better days, he thought that he had a kind of serenity. That he was at peace with his life, and that he had accepted it. But maybe he had just given up. He wondered what true peace would feel like. Would it sound like the rise and fall of dying voices? Would it smell like this fresh water?
When Leia spoke her voice was quiet. It was relatively novel, and almost disturbing. “So what do you think it is? I’m definitely not astral projecting at you.”
“It’s not really my job to think, ma’am.”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” Leia snapped. “It’s not your job to tag along after the Rebel princess, but you’re doing it anyway.”
He would put it more in terms of ‘pulling damage control’, but he wasn’t suicidal enough to say that. Instead, he said, “I’m a little sick of my job.”
Despite everything, Leia smiled. “Are you quitting?”
“I’m turning in my gun and my badge,” Fox drawled. “If you give me a decent wage I’d run after you all you want.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Anybody can hold a gun and shoot. I need someone with a good head for filing.” Leia stretched out her legs, looking over the cavernous gardens. “Thirty seven good men died delivering the plans into my hands today. Maybe if I just had a lightsaber, I could have saved them.”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” Fox said. “Not against Lord Vader.”
She shook her head firmly. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no use in wishing things were different. Maybe that’s all this strange dream is. Just a wish I was somewhere other than the Death Star, with someone who I could help instead of kill.”
Somehow, Fox found his voice. It felt raspy and strange, as if he was veering so far off-script that he no longer knew the play he was in.
“But you can’t help me.”
“And you can’t help me,” Princess Leia agreed. “A fat lot of good this Force thing is!”
That was true. It never seemed to help anybody, not really. It protected Jedi on the battlefield, but it never kept them out of it. It helped the GAR win battles, but it didn’t prevent the wars. The Jedi spoke of it as a benevolent Force that protected the good and punished the bad, but if that was true then Fox had to be part of the bad. All he felt was punished.
“Princess,” Fox said, feeling like an idiot, “do you think the Force wanted us to meet?”
Leia turned to look at him, big brown eyes clear and crisp. There was a sadness deep in them, but Fox now knew that they were always sad. “Why? What would this possibly matter?”
“It mattered to me.”
There was something inside Fox. He didn’t know what to do with it. There had never been anything inside of him before. Or maybe there used to be something inside him, but Sidious had taken it - or Kamino, before that. He had always thought he had been born without it. Had they taken it from him? Could he take it back?
“Every person I fail to save matters,” Leia said. “You matter to me too.”
“Leia…”
But she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was looking into the water, enraptured. Fox felt a bit like an overly sentimental idiot who had no idea how to be normal about having a friend who did not work for him. But she wasn’t even paying attention to him. She was just staring into the water, as if she was unable to tear her eyes away.
“It’s my father,” Leia whispered, eyes wide. She leaned in closer, bending over the rim of the fountain to stare into the crystal depths. “I see his face. Mom too. They’re looking for me…”
What? Fox looked into the fountain too, but all he saw was his helmet reflecting back at him. “Nothing’s in there. It’s just water.”
But Leia wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She was just leaning forward, further and further over the fountain, until Fox could see almost her entire body reflected in the water. “Mom! Dad! They’re looking for me, Fox, we have to go find them!”
“Leia, there’s nobody there.” Fox put a hand on her shoulder, gently trying to tug her backwards. “You’re seeing things. It’s Force nonsense.”
It was like she couldn’t hear him. She reached out her hand, light and dainty, her fingertips skimming the surface of the water. “Mommy! Daddy! Please !”
Her image rippled and distorted, and Fox watched in horror as her hand dragged itself into the water. The water was sucking her in, pulling her into the wrist, the forearm, the elbow -
“Leia!”
Fox grabbed her shoulders, trying to pull her away, but it was too late. With one final tug Leia toppled headfirst into the water, and Fox went with her.
Fox sank.
Fox woke up.
Fox stared at the ceiling of his dormitory.
Well. That was over!
Relief crashed over him like a wave. But not a wave, because he was perfectly dry and in his sleep clothes and in his fucking bed .
Fantastic! Wonderful! Great! He bolted upright, unable to fight a huge and uncharacteristic grin on his face that he knew made him look slightly deranged. No Fountain Hell today! No hell of any kind today!
Why didn’t he think of it earlier! Stepping out of the fountain put him in that weird mirror galaxy, so stepping back into it put him back inside! It had been a simple, straightforward, and easily solvable problem the entire time! And he didn’t even use violence! Normally solutions were only simple if they used violence!
Fox scrambled out of bed, already grabbing his blissfully dry body glove out of the hanger and pulling it on. He’d take a shower at the office. His dorm was exactly the same as it always was: everything arranged in exact regulation order, with a large stack of datapads waiting on his desk. He still had to take care of those. Enhanced interrogation techniques didn’t approve themselves, and -
Fox halted, still pulling on his body glove. With a cold sinking feeling, he realized that he was now entirely aware of his daily life and he couldn’t exactly go back to forgetting about it.
On some level, he had expected everything to go back to normal. The bubble would burst, everybody would return to talking about ordinary and non-frightening things, and Fox could continue on with his routine unhampered by awareness or discomfort.
And everything had gone back to normal. His dorm was his dorm, and there were no amnesiac children in sight. But he still knew.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do all of this if he knew. Maybe Leia could use her Force magic and -
Leia was also gone.
Fox finished pulling on his body glove, carefully strapping on his armor. He tried hard not to think about the process too much. He fought to get into the zone, sinking into the comfort of the automatic routine. It didn’t come as easily as it once did, but that was alright. He’d get back to it in time. He had a year left to practice.
Fox stood in front of the door and took a deep breath, fastening his helmet on his head. Its familiar weight comforted him, made him stand up tall and look straight. He took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway.
Fox walked through the front doors of the Senate building, ready to resume his life.
Fox stopped.
Wow. He was really jumping back in the saddle of the zoning out thing. He didn’t even remember leaving the dorms. Or taking the trolley. Or getting here. Or -
Fox looked around.
He was in the Senate building. He would recognize the characteristic circular lobby anywhere, opening up into the central concourse. The winding hallways that branched off into routes towards the speeder garages and the gigantic rows of lifts taking you from floor one to three hundred. Senators were even roving around, hustling from place to place with their bedraggled aides trailing after them. This should have been comforting, or at least only existentially depressing in the normal way.
The mosaic was gone. The giant mosaic, covering the floor of the lobby and depicting some sort of important moment in Republic history - gone, replaced by duracrete. Fox looked up and surveyed the walls, and found no statues or tapestries. The walls were pure grey, pockmarked only by regularly interspersed red banners. Right in front of Fox, in the nook where a giant statue of Whoever-The-Fuck normally flexed, there was a giant grey banner depicting the insignia of a black cog.
“Oh, fuck this .”
Fox discovered a few things very quickly.
One was that nobody could see him. This was probably for the best - there were no clone troopers around, and he couldn’t see a single Senate Guard. There were plenty of soldiers who looked a little like clone troopers, but their armor was ridiculously stupid and their discipline was atrocious. When Fox followed one towards the guard break room - his break room - and watched them take off their helmets, he saw a stunningly offensive array of fresh natborn faces. Some of them were blonde. It was disgusting.
They only had one caff pot - the exact same caff pot that the Senate Guard used. At least there was that.
The second thing was, of course, that there were no clones. Fox wasn’t surprised by this. Twenty years later (because this could only be Leia’s twenty years) meant forty years later in clone years, and there was no reason to keep around decrepit soldiers. Maybe the best clone officers were still enlisted, meant to train younger soldiers, but the vast majority had probably been decommissioned ten years ago. Five at best.
That was what they got. A life of service. The sacrifice of their free will, of their thoughts, of their names. Another ten years of waking up every day and doing it all over again before quiet decommissioning. That was what Fox had worked so hard for.
He had known. Fox had an expiration date, and it was probably whenever Lord Sidious grew tired of him. His men had already lasted longer than most, and none of Fox’s years of hard effort and toil had ever been meant to help or protect them. The only person he had ever helped was Lord Sidious, and in that respect Fox’s life had ended in great success.
Mobs of senators and workers pushed past Fox as he wandered through the building. He even recognized some of them. Little had changed there but for the fact that almost every alien was gone. It was a sea of disturbingly homogenous human faces, boasting flapping jowls and smoking fat cigars. Their clothes still stunk of wealth, but the fashion had turned simple and elegant rather than ostentatious and gaudy. The overworked aides still had holes patched in their shoes, and the brandy remained in the hands of the senators. Men in unfamiliar uniforms marched the hallways, tight and well-tailored grey with short caps, and Fox watched in fascination as they saluted to each other. Natborns in the military. How…pathetic.
Fox stood in the middle of the Imperial Senate, watching the mob push and pull and course by him. He craned his head and drank in the entire concourse, trying to catch sight of it all, trying to memorize every feature. Just the same, stripped of all pretense. That was all this building was: stripped of pretense. Stripped of nonhumans. Stripped of color and light. Stripped of Jedi and clones and hope.
Fox saw the fruits of his labor, and for the first time in a long time he stopped to taste it. The flavor burst rotten on his tongue, sick and sour.
Something barrelled into him.
Fox stumbled backwards, instinctively reaching out and catching the figure that crashed into him. He looked down and, for the first time he had stepped into the Senate, found a great source of relief coursing over him, because it was Leia.
She was dressed exactly the same. Exactly the same - white dress still crumpled after days of wear, twin buns still frizzy and frayed. She was holding a datapad and a stylus, and when Fox looked behind her he saw two other aides attending her skitter to a halt.
And Leia looked at him, both his hands on her shoulders, and Fox looked back.
“Captain Fox,” Leia said, “this is a surprise. I assumed you were dead.”
Fox looked around again. The two aides were looking at Leia, clearly confused. Another senator was obviously checking her out in a very disrespectful manner. They could see her. They just couldn’t see him.
“I assumed I was back home,” Fox said frankly. “Do you know what’s happening, your highness? I tried checking the date, but your calendar is some sort of fucked up.”
“Yes, it hasn’t made sense for a while now. Don’t worry, we’re back right where I left off.” Leia carefully pushed his hands off, and he let her. “Did you wake up in your room and then walk through the Senate doors? That’s what kept happening to me. I would wake up in my cell, find the door unlocked, escape - only to walk into a fucked up Senate building. It got quite frustrating after the first few times.”
“I can imagine,” Fox said, dizzy. “What are we going to -”
“Senator Organa?” The aide behind Leia piped up anxiously. “Is something wrong? Why are we just standing here?”
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Leia told her, as if she was knocking on Leia’s office door instead of standing in the middle of a hallway. She turned back to Fox, all professionalism and calm. “I admit this is rather strange. However, I can assure you that things are perfectly fine.”
“ Perfectly -”
“As you can see, I am back in my own time and place,” Leia said crisply. “Everything’s back to normal. I’m sorry you’re a Force Ghost, but that simply isn’t my problem.”
“ Isn’t your - it’s sure as hell my problem!”
“I would help you if you were real, but you aren’t. I’m certain you’re just an…imprint or something. You aren’t the first ghost of a friend I’ve failed to save, you know. You’ll go away eventually.”
“What about the torture, Leia!” Fox cried. “Weren’t you being tortured? How’d you escape the Death Star?”
But Leia just stared at him - big brown eyes blank and uncomprehending. An awful cold feeling began to creep down Fox’s spine. “Seeing as I’m not being tortured right now, I imagine that’s been dealt with.”
“But you are being tortured! This is just some demented new level of torture!”
“I thought you didn’t believe I was being tortured.”
“I - agh!” Senators pushed past them, unconsciously avoiding Fox without even registering him, and to Fox’s surprise he found that it drove him insane. He was always invisible, he was always overlooked, but something about being truly nothing, in a world where he was probably long dead, made him feel scraped raw. “I don’t know! But this can’t be the real Senate building, Leia. The real Senate building doesn’t live in fountains!”
“Neither do clones. Now if you excuse me, I’m late for a Senate meeting. We’re voting on a very important bill today, and my vote will be crucial.”
She trotted away, boots clicking down the hall as her aides rushed to keep up with her, and Fox couldn’t help but resentfully shout after her. “If someone asks you where the Rebel base is, don’t fucking tell them!”
But she didn’t hear him, or at least she pretended that she couldn’t, and Fox groaned. Nobody could hear him, so he groaned louder. “I’m not a freaking - agh!” Fox thumped the heel of his hand against his helmet, frustrated beyond measure. “I’m not a freaking ghost! I’d know if I was -” He stopped short, deflating. “...I could be a ghost. How would I know. Fucking magic.”
Fox watched Leia walk away from him. No help from that front.
So be it. Nobody had helped Fox since Wolffe secretly helped tutor him on marksmanship when they were seven. He could get through this on his own. He’d check out the Imperial Palace, try to find Fountain Hell again. Leia wouldn’t be able to do anything even if she wanted to - it wasn’t as if Fox had been of any real help to her. She could barely acknowledge her magic existed, much less use it - how could she do any different when her life had depended on her repressing it?
If this was a torture chamber, it was the weirdest one Fox had ever seen. And it didn’t explain why Fox was here. If anything, he would be on Lord Vader’s side in the situation.
If this was Leia using her magic to enter Fox’s world as a ghost - maybe as some psychic way to evade the torture - then why was he in hers ? What was so powerful that Leia had dragged him back with her? What torture was so great that she had begun pretending it wasn’t happening, that she had shut her eyes and ears to it? What pain was too great to face?
What pain had left her so desperate that she clung onto her only friend and dragged him through with her?
Fox set off at a run.
He didn’t bother dodging the senators. They parted as he approached, running as quickly as he could throughout the familiar winding halls. His boots thumped in smooth regularity on the duracrete, a perfect echo to the rhythmic march of stormtroopers. They passed him by, neatly arranged in two white lines, rifles propped up against their shoulders, and Fox ran as far as he could away from them. Away from that fate, away from that future.
He made his way to the same doors that Leia had tried to trick him into opening. She would have no trouble opening them today. He slipped in after an entering senator, pushing him aside without even stopping, and he slide inside the Senate hall just as the doors closed with a final thunk. The Senate was in session.
It was just as Fox remembered it. In its own way. The architecture was the same, and the hoverpods were anchored to their walldocks just as always. Senators were still milling around taking their seats, and without missing a beat Fox started pushing through the crowd, looking for the Alderaanian pod. It should be on this level, R-45…or was it R-54? Shit!
The buzzer sounded, calling the Senate meeting to order. Fox had never felt a single emotion standing in a Senate hall, but now his heart was pounding. Something was wrong. Something was wrong, and Leia was in danger and she didn’t know it, and something in his gut was pulling him inextricably towards her with an urgency he couldn’t understand.
A chorus of voices sent Fox stumbling to a halt, spoken in eerie unison. It was an ethereal choir, thousands of voices speaking unnaturally in sync.
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy five.”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy six.”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and seventy seven…”
Counting. Leia’s counting. More counting?!
By the time Fox saw Leia’s pod, it was too late. It was already flying towards the speaker podium, one short girl standing tall and proud in the front. Fox watched in horror as it docked securely on the station, the holoscreens flickering to life to show her giant holoimage to the entire assembly. Fox heard her ratchet up the microphone so she could be heard over the counting.
“My fellow constituents,” Leia spoke over the crowd, ignoring the fucking obscenely creepy chanting, “it is an honor to speak before you today. I ask for silence -”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and ninety one.”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and ninety two.”
“I ask for silence ,” Leia thundered. “As I speak to you today about an important topic. It is regarding hope. It is regarding the creation of hope. Hope is the ray of light in the darkest times, and its light is often provided only by the sacrifice of many and untold suffering. Hope is the promise that our suffering has meaning. No matter how many liberties and freedoms are ripped from us. No matter how low things become. No matter how many of our friends and loved ones we lose. When suffering suffocates us, hope relieves the burden. This Rebellion is built on hope!”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and one hundred and five.”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and one hundred and six.”
“But the rich and powerful don’t need hope - stop fucking counting ! - they don’t need it!” Leia banged the podium with her fist, burning with her righteous light. “They have security! They have money in their pockets, a roof over their heads, the assurance that no matter who is in power they will always persevere! Do you know the difference between the Republic and the Empire? Do you know the difference between today and yesterday? It’s delusion ! It’s farce ! The rich and powerful are no longer pretending that they do not control us! But it is their mistake - because when the hood is ripped from our eyes, when we see the galaxy as it truly is, we discover how to fix it!”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and one hundred and twenty one.”
“One billion five hundred thirty five thousand and one hundred and twenty two.”
“Shut up!” Leia screamed. “Shut up, shut up! My family knew the truth! We knew the truth you were too scared to admit! My parents knew the truth of the Republic and they still believed in it, they always fought for a better Republic! They knew it had value, that democracy had worth, that their children deserved a better galaxy! That I deserved a galaxy where I did not live in hiding, live in fear! That brave men deserved a galaxy where they could choose to lay down their weapons, to live a true life! And you rejected them! You rejected them! You sold them out! You let this happen! It was you! It was all of you!”
Fox stood frozen - unable to help Leia, to reach her. He was beyond help too, left to roam the Empire’s halls as the ghost of the Republic. Leia yelled at the Empire to change the past, but the obscure choir continued chanting that mysterious number that rose higher and higher.
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
“ Shut up !” Leia screamed. She was bending over, pressing her hands over her ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
“You killed them!” Leia screeched. “You killed my Mom and Dad! You killed my planet! You, and everyone like you, and I hate you, I hate you - shut up ! - I hate you -”
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
Fox remembered something. Something that, of course, he had always known.
“Please,” Leia sobbed, “please, please - Mom, Dad, please help me - Mommy, Daddy!”
Fox couldn’t help it. He screamed too, desperately aching to be heard over the crowd. “Leia! Leia, I’m here, it’s Fox - Leia, it’ll be okay!”
Something splintered. Fox wasn’t sure what it was.
“Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two.”
“Mommy,” Leia sobbed, “where are you, Mommy!”
Something cracked. Maybe it was the Senate, or maybe it was Fox, or maybe it was the whole damn world.
“Mommy, Daddy, I need you -”
“ Leia !”
And everything burst apart.
Three billion two hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred and seventy two was, of course, the number of people who had been on Alderaan when it exploded.
Fox wasn’t sure how he knew this.
It probably no longer mattered.
The number of people on Alderaan likely no longer mattered to anybody at all except Leia Organa.
“Any interesting updates, Commander?”
Fox stood in the Emperor’s throne room.
He recognized it. Of course he recognized it. It was huge, an echoing empty chamber with nothing but a long and solitary walk towards a single throne. Red-suited Imperial Guards lined the door and the walkway, standing stiffly at attention with their staffs planted firmly on the floor. A giant red banner swung behind the Emperor, tilting gently in a nonexistent wind.
The Emperor sat on that cold durasteel throne, withered and vile. A soft robe black draped over his figure, the shadows cutting a cold smile through his sagging face.
He was old. Almost skeletal. For some reason, that startled Fox. The Chancellor had always been old, and a hard twenty years had only aged him. He still spoke of power, still lingered in waiting, but the familiar Lord Sidious that Fox had always known…
He looked old. A ghost, haunting his kingdom of graves. King of dead men.
What a triumph! What a victory! What an excellent end of Fox’s life, what a holy rest he had gone to. What a wonderful close to the Emperor’s story. No doubt he intended to live forever, and no doubt he could stagger along another fifty, hundred, two hundred years.
But he wouldn’t. Nobody who made their living trading in death could escape it. And everything the Chancellor had worked his life to build would result in an Empire that would crumble the minute those robes fell and his body decayed into nothing.
Leia’s democracy would prevail. Fox knew that now. Because the Emperor had only fools and traitors on his side. He had only men like Fox’s shell, and he had no men like Fox - Fox as he was now, burning with something that couldn’t be named or described. He had no young women like Leia, who was too alive to ever truly die. He did not fight tooth and nail for life, and as a result could never truly live it. And when his body followed his mind into the grave, there would be no true legacy to keep his kingdom shambling along.
“You’re just a man,” Fox said, in a strange and obscure wonder. He belatedly lowered his hand, falling out of his salute. His mask and armor was still on, and he had to fight the urge to rip the helmet off. “You were only ever - you’re just an awful old man.”
“I am the Empire,” the Emperor intoned. Even his voice was old: cracked, wheezing, dead. “I am more powerful than any person has been in one thousand years. I have unlocked death. I have destroyed life. What are you, Captain Fox?”
Fox opened his mouth, then closed it. The answer was obvious, but he couldn’t say it - not to him, not to prove him right. But he already knew.
“You’re nothing,” the Emperor said simply. “Your expiration date approaches, Captain Fox. Those you care for will perish with you. Even your princess has lost everything, and soon she will die too. You will die as you lived. As a shell. As nothing.”
“I wasn’t always like this!” Fox cried, an awful burning fury rising in his chest. “I used to be someone! I used to have friends, I used to laugh! But you got your hands on me and - and hollowed me out, so I was nothing but what you made me!”
“Yes,” the Emperor said, “isn’t it a beautiful way to exist?”
“You made me evil!” Fox cried, the fire burning and raging until it seared his throat. “You carved out everything inside of me and replaced it with you , and your evil! You gave it all to me, you and your Republic and your Kamino, and - it’s not mine! I deserved better!”
“But you will never have it,” the Emperor said simply, “so what matter is that? You are a ghost, calling to no one. You know as well as I do, Captain Fox. Your pain and death does not matter.”
“It matters to me!” The burning raged in him, but for some strange reason it didn’t consume Fox. It gave him a strange Light. It seared his tongue, but it only burned away the poison inside of him. “And it matters to Leia! Even if that’s the only thing that survives, even if my legacy’s nothing but this ruin - I’ll die knowing that I mattered!”
“And die you will, Captain Fox,” the Emperor said. “And die Princess Leia will. She will be executed soon. And when she dies, whatever paltry excuse for a legacy you have will be quenched forever. You and Alderaan.”
Fox stood there, hands curled into fists, and felt something burn away in him. It left him lighter. It gave a strange sort of a relief, a serenity born out of acceptance instead of denial. The turgid aura of the throne room could touch him no longer. The Emperor’s fingers rooting around in his brain could no longer hurt him. In this, strangely, he was free.
“I’m better than this,” Fox said.
Fox ripped off his helmet. He let it tumble from his fingers and fall on the ground, rolling far away. He turned and left. The Emperor did not stop him.
When he exited the throne room he found himself walking into the Republic Senate. Colorful, golden, and light. The statues flexed in front of him yet again, and the tapestries proudly boasted Republic history. The mosaic on the floor, depicting a historic moment in the Republic, shined up at him in fragmented glory.
He looked around, turning around completely so he could drink in the entire sight. Light still flooded in, the windows intact. For just one second, he saw what Leia had seen days ago: if not a golden democracy, then the relief that such a democracy had once existed. That it could exist again.
Fox found himself walking towards the break room, searching for his brothers. He saw no guards patrolling, no soldiers standing sentinel at their posts. It was only Fox, and he ached in loneliness. Would the break room be empty? Was he the only one left - the only reward of a lifetime of dedicated service to throwing every under clone in the meat grinder?
But when he opened the door to the break room, he saw every brother. Relief crashed over his head. They all had their helmets on, but they were chatting - talking - alive. He couldn’t make out anything they were saying, but he didn’t care. There was Mack, trying to sleep before his shift - Tuco, talking easily with Longstreet about something slightly seditious. Even Lee was there, staring fixedly at a perfectly functional caff pot. And Stone, leaning against a counter, staring into the distance.
Fox pushed past them, diving towards Stone. When he landed beside him it felt like anchoring at shore, like Wolffe was beside him with a hand on his arm helping him learn how to shoot. Finally good enough to join us -
“Stone!” Fox gasped. He grabbed Stone’s shoulders, knowing he had to look like a crazy person. “Stone! Stone, I’m a fucking idiot, I never told you - your caff was good! It tasted so much better than mine, and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t fucking figure it out. I figured it out, I want to tell you -”
But Stone didn’t move. He didn’t react. He just stood there.
Fox tried again, desperately. “Your damn satirist, Stone, remember? I really don’t give a shit, but I think I figured it out - why dipshit natborns are always writing about war. All your damn war novels, Stone, I think I know why.” Fox heaved deep breaths, gasping for breath. It felt like he couldn’t breathe. “They were hurt, Stone. War had hurt them. Life had hurt them.They were trying to warn people. Why else would you say something, if you didn’t want people to hear you?”
But Stone didn’t move. Slowly, with shaking fingers, Fox reached up and pressed the switch that detached Stone’s helmet. He carefully pulled it up and off Stone, letting it clatter to the floor with its own.
Stone had no face.
Fox stared at him in horror. His face was blank. There was nothing under the helmet. No eyebrows no eyes no nose no mouth no creases no smiles no - nothing -
He whirled around and grabbed Lee, ripping the helmet off his head too. There was nothing. Nothing, there was no face, there was no Lee - every face identical, every face the same. Every clone was nothing, and nothing was anything anymore.
Fox escaped the break room, pulling free of nothing, diving into the dark.
Leia was in the Senate hall.
She stood in the Chancellor’s pod. She didn’t notice Fox coming in, and she didn’t notice when he frantically yelled her name. But it was undoubtedly Leia, full and whole. Whole in the way that she had never been, not so long as Fox had known her.
Fox did not know what happened once you traumatized Force sensitives beyond repair. He was beginning to suspect that this is what would happen. That their horror and trauma would shatter the Force, twisting it and warping it until it submerged you and you drowned in its thick and roiling waters.
This despair had pulled her so deep into the Force that it brushed fingers with times long gone by and the dead. Leia had drowned herself so thoroughly she had surfaced into the world of the dead, where Fox and his brothers still walked. She had lost herself.
Maybe Fox really was a Force Ghost, walking in this shadowy and warped corner of the Force with her. Maybe she had called out, and Fox had answered. He didn’t know. But he liked the idea of that.
All of the Senate pods were empty, and nobody counted. There was no sound but the sound of Leia’s screams, ragged and hoarse and undying. The cavernous Senate hall sent the sound repeating, reverbering again and again until they echoed forward into the future. She didn’t stop for breath or scratch her throat dry. Unnaturally and unending, Leia twisted herself into pieces in her unimaginable pain.
Fox was standing on the main entry level, directly in front of the Chancellor’s pod. He took a deep breath and walked forward - directly off the walkway onto a loading dock, and stepping off the loading dock into the infinite pit below.
He didn’t fall. He kept walking. His feet echoed on the air, with a rhythmic click identical to the sound of stormtroopers walking down the Senate hallways. He felt the vertigo suck his gut downwards, but Fox was pretty good at not looking down. He kept his eyes on Leia instead, and kept them fixed on her until he gently stepped forward onto the rim of the Chancellor’s pod.
She had finally stopped screaming. She was just crying instead, hoarse and hitching sobs.
“Leia. Come on, it’s okay.”
But Leia just sobbed. She had collapsed to the ground a while ago, sitting on the cold durasteel and curled up in sobs. Fox carefully stepped onto the ground next to her, feeling the impact reverberate up his armor, and he crouched next to her.
“Hey, Leia. Come on. Listen to me. I hear that ghosts always have something valuable to say.”
That made Leia look at him, face ruddy and red. Her make-up had long since smeared, her mascara trailing in ugly streams down her face. She looked at him in confusion, as if she couldn’t understand why he was here. Which, of course, made no sense - why wouldn’t he be here?
She shook her head, voice hitching. “You aren’t a ghost. You’re here, everything’s here -”
“This is gone, Leia.” For some reason, Fox felt very calm. He was glad. The Lightness within him had given him a strange peace, and he wanted to share it with her. “You know it’s gone. You’re on the Death Star. You’re deep within the Force now, searching for something that is not here. You won’t find it, Leia.”
“But I have to,” Leia begged. “I have to keep looking. I found Dad, I just have to make him stay. I need him to come back. He left, and he won’t come back.”
“No, he won’t. But you’re still here.” He reached out, turning his palm up, and he watched Leia slowly take it. “I’m gone. My brothers are gone. This Senate hall, the way it used to be, is gone. But you’re still here. Your hope burns brightly, Leia. Your hope will carry you forward into the future. Your future. But you can’t make that journey if you stay here.”
“I don’t want to do it without you,” Leia begged. She clasped at his hand desperately, tears flowing incessantly and roughly down her cheeks. It made Fox sad. She would cry alone after this. He wanted to help, wanted to stay, but he knew that he couldn’t. “I can’t do this alone, I just can’t. I’m all alone now. You’re the only one - please, I don’t want to do it without you.”
“The ones we love never truly leave us. I’ll be with you in the Force. And you won’t be alone.” Fox spoke with utter conviction. He didn’t know where it came from. He didn’t know why he knew that he was speaking the truth. “There is another, Leia. There is somebody alive who will love you more than you can imagine. Somebody who’s the other half of you. You’ll be amazing together, I know it. But if you stay here then you’ll never meet him.”
“Everybody who loved me is gone,” Leia begged. “Please, Fox.”
Fox reached out a hand and, with care and caution utterly foreign to him, wiped the tears from her face. There was nobody left to do this for her now. She would have to be strong and brave after this, and all Fox could give her was a private moment where she could allow someone else to wipe her tears away. Maybe this person she was waiting for would do it for her. Maybe there would be more even than that - somebody who loved her enough to marry her. Her family wasn’t over.
“Reach out for him, Leia,” Fox said. “He’s already here. Don’t you feel him?”
A slow realization dawned across Leia’s face. Fox saw it happen. A light returned to her eyes. Ever since he met her, there had been a deep and terrible despair in her eyes, lost in the darkness. But, for just a second, he saw a spark of light and life.
She would be okay.
With slow and growing wonder, Leia said, “Yes. He’s here. I can feel him. He needs me.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Leia reached out and embraced Fox tightly, pressing her hand into his shoulder. She squeezed him as tightly as she could through the armor, as if she could draw Fox into herself, as if he wouldn’t go anywhere so long as he was in her heart.
Fox felt the Light within him, growing and growing and growing, burst. He felt it consume him. He felt it consume everything, and renew it all again, whole.
Fox rose.
Fox stood upon a bridge in a Star Destroyer, facing his executioner.
It was difficult to breathe. His hands scratched at his neck, catching on the ridges of the body glove, but they could find no purchase. Black and white spots danced in front of his vision, bursting into light like stars before dying before they were swallowed by the dark.
Darth Vader’s breath echoed throughout the bridge, hissing higher before falling. It moved in rhythmic, intense motions: a hissed rise and a careful retreat, a hiss and fall.
“You have begun to bore me.”
His heart was seizing strangely. Not from fear. His throat tightened, cutting off his air.
“My lord! The princess has escaped! She has a Jedi with her!”
Why has nobody ever…
The princess? Leia?
“So you disappoint me as well. Thank you for your service, Captain.”
The invisible hand squeezed Fox’s neck, and he felt his trachea crumple. Finally -
A blaster shot rang out, and Fox fell to the floor wheezing. His sight was almost completely gone, black spots dancing and spreading across his vision, but amidst the chaos and the battle he heard an almost familiar voice.
“Captain! Captain Fox, we’re here to rescue you!”
Fox smiled. Leia. He knew she would.
“Rescue? Princess, we have bigger problems than one damn stormtrooper -”
“Stop your relentless whining and help me!”
A white figure walked across his line of sight before disappearing into the black. A careful hand reached across his shoulders, helping him up. She was going to try and carry him out of here. She never would.
It felt like he was breathing through a straw. When Fox wheezed again, rattling and awful, Leia stopped short. Fox gestured for her to stop, and then gestured at his helmet. Carefully, with shaking fingers, Leia pulled off his helmet.
For just one second, he saw a heartbroken face. It made him very happy.
“Captain, you’re going to be just fine,” Leia said, “but we have to move -”
Fox shook his head, the movement sending everything spinning. Black finally descended over his vision, for what he knew was the final time.
He heard a lightsaber, and a somewhat panicked voice. That made him happy too.
He beckoned Leia closer, and he felt her reach out and wrap him in her arms. She put her ear up to his mouth, and Fox felt her hands tremble and clutch at him desperately.
A vision, days and days experienced in the final second before death. Fox didn’t know clones could have Force visions. But maybe princesses, caught in a despair so powerful that it created a black hole into the silver lining between death and life, here and there, then and now - maybe they could pull a dying man into the land of the dead with them. If they were lonely.
It was agony just to force the words out. Fox knew it would take all the breath he had. At that strange moment, it seemed like the most important thing in the world to say.
“Thank you for saving me,” Fox gasped. “Anakin Skywalker - Darth Vader. Save him too. Please.”
“Fox,” Leia gasped, “Fox -”
The dark took on a different nature. The air left Fox’s lungs, and no matter how hard they seized he could not draw more. Shouting echoed above him, lightsabers ringing with blaster bolts, and small hands clutched at him until he felt larger hands pulling them away.
“We have to go, we have to go -”
Leia went, and Fox left with her.
epilogue
Leia was a little drunk. In her defense, she had saved the galaxy.
Well, Luke had helped. Han would probably make a stirring argument that he had saved the galaxy, and that Luke and Leia had been admittedly a big help but really they would have never pulled it off without him. Luke and Leia agreed that Han had a big head, but Leia and Han agreed that Luke hadn’t done anything particularly exciting. The Emperor was the one who had struck the final blow on Darth Vader, and Darth Vader was the one who had thrown the Emperor into an air shaft and murdered the bitch. Luke hadn’t even killed anyone, Han pointed out. What kind of climactic showdown is that?
At that point Luke had blathered something about love and peace and saving people and returning them to the Light after like five tries and daddy issues, which made Leia pop open another jug of Ewok moonshine. Those guys knew their booze. She knew she had liked them for a reason.
She was a little drunk, which is why she had grabbed the glass bottle wrapped in five layers of fabric and carefully stashed in a locked safe underneath her cot. She had gone through the effort of asking one of the officers to bring it down with him when he landed on Endor for the insane rager that was exploding around them. He assumed that she was just busting out the really good alcohol in celebration. Maybe she was.
Leia sat in front of a dead pyre, long since burned to ashes. Luke sat with her. They hadn’t said anything to each other, and neither strictly had the intention. The sibling thing was already weird, and the sitting in front of your birth father’s pyre thing was already weird, and the whole damn thing was weird. Luke was the expert in weird, but Leia preferred the normal. Weird around her tended to go really weird.
It could have been weirder. Luke had four years to wrestle with the heavy burden of his parentage. It had made him stronger, wiser. More dedicated to peace, and to reaching out that helping hand. He and Vader had always had a complicated relationship full of pain and dramatic speeches, to the point where death via elevator shaft was likely the only way it could have ended. Leia had approximately two seconds to deal with it, but who was counting.
The sibling thing could have been weirder, too. But it wasn’t. She had always known.
She withdrew the brandy from her bag, along with two glasses. She carefully broke the seal, ignoring Luke’s curious look, and very meticulously sloshed it into her glass. She took out another glass and set it in front of her in the packed dirt, pouring a little bit into that one too.
“That’s some really fancy alcohol,” Luke said, like a peasant. “What kind is it?”
“Alderaanian rosefruit brandy.” Luke made an awkward little ‘ ohhh ’ sound, like everybody did when she mentioned Alderaan. It was quite tiresome. Almost as tiresome as her entire planet being dead. “Be quiet for a second.”
She raised the glass high, staring at the dead pyre. Ash littered the ground around it, but a cold jungle wind was already blowing, scattering it into the gentle air. The air stunk of fried electronics. Go fig.
“I didn’t do it,” Leia said, “but I helped. He’s saved. Same way I saved you. Not really saved at all. Sorry.”
She knocked back the brandy. She had gotten a taste for it after the years.
Luke stared at her blankly. “Who were you talking to?”
“Somebody only important to me. Don’t worry about it.” Leia screwed the cap back on, knocking back the other cup too. No use wasting good brandy. “Let’s get back to the party, we can sulk later. The Empire only falls once, you know.”
“Uh, Leia?”
“Five creds says Kes finally proposes to Shara. Those two are pathetic. Can you imagine making your unresolved sexual tension everybody else’s problem in the most awkward way possible?”
“Leia, look!”
Leia looked.
Four ghosts sat on a fence.
They were smiling at her and Luke. Luke brightened, waving at them. Waving at General Kenobi - smiling gently, looking as calm and at peace in death as he was facing down his execution at the hands of Darth Vader. Some awful goblin thing was sitting on his other side, and Luke waved happily to him too. As if he were seeing them in the mess hall instead of from beyond the grave. That boy.
A man stood by them, and Luke’s smile slowly faded as he put his hand down. He was a young man, handsome. Curly hair fell over his shoulders, and he was standing relaxed and easy against the fence. He was smiling shyly at Luke and Leia, almost in gratitude.
Luke stood up dumbly. “I need to - sorry. Hold on.” He looked back at her, lost. “Do you…?”
“Maybe one day,” Leia said frankly. “Not today. Tell him sorry.”
“He won’t mind,” Luke said. “I…sorry. Hold on.”
He walked over to the fence, and Leia watched Luke stutter through his first meeting with their father. His father, in a way - Leia had her own, and she would never be lucky enough to see him again.
Another figure leaned against the fence, arms crossed and unsmiling. Leia knew that Luke hadn’t seen him. Judging by the wry glances General Kenobi shot him, he did, but the figure didn’t look at him or pay him any mind. He was just looking at Leia.
Leia stood up. A wry smile rose on his face, and he shot her a sloppy salute.
She walked over. It was weird to see him shining in blue instead of painted in red, but somehow it suited him. He could hardly be mistaken for the 501st. She slowly hopped up on the fence next to him, her long and unbrushed hair falling across her shoulders, and kicked her heels against the uncarved wood.
“Purple lightsaber,” Fox said. “For me.”
“In your dreams.”
Fox laughed, light and unrestrained as it never had been in life, and they sat together in silence. Luke was speaking softly to his father, who gently reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. But Leia just sat there with Fox, because he had never been much one for talking anyway, and they watched the final ashes of the pyre fly far away.