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It starts with a single report from the squad leader of a senate team. The report highlights an incident with one of the newer senators, someone who had taken over from their predecessor following a tragic accident that had removed the latter from their seat, and who had immediately become firm friends with as many of the Chancellor’s supporters as they could. This alone would have been a red flag, even without the report of misconduct as supporting evidence.
Fox takes precautions. He spreads the word, makes sure that his troops are ready to deal with the man should he ever try to involve them in some under-the-table dealing or another; all perfectly reasonable steps that should be enough to ensure his men are kept safe.
It isn’t enough.
The next thing to tip them off to the senator’s true nature isn’t a report, at least not following any incident within the senate itself. No, it’s not until afterwards, when a shiny is found hiding in the freshers with wounds that could only be attributed to their previous shift alongside that same senator, that anyone realises that something is wrong.
Getting the truth out of them takes some coaxing. They’re fairly fresh from Kamino, still clinging to that same carefully honed compliance that everyone arrives with, and so they’re reluctant to speak ill of any superior. They claim that the senator had been acting with good reason – that it was their fault they’d been injured. They’d obviously deserved to receive punishment for… something that they cannot clearly define, something mumbled under their breath about their conduct, or lack of compliance.
Fox cannot imagine this trooper showing a lack of compliance. He lingers at the back of the room as they talk, taking note of the badly-hidden fear in their voice. It’s a fear that haunts them all; that they might be deemed defective one day out of the blue and sent away.
That this shiny has already had to look that fear in the eye and try to come to terms with it should be unacceptable, Fox wants to say, but bites the words back down. He doesn’t need to say it. They’ve all realised by now that on Coruscant they will face the unacceptable and worse.
Fox walks away and makes a private note of everything. Then, he makes sure to take the next shift around the senator himself.
They make no move towards him that might fall under suspicion. Nor do they make any attempt to put any of the other more senior officers ‘in their place’ when they take over from Fox for the following few shifts.
It isn’t until almost a month later that the senator makes another move. It’s one of the older troopers this time that is caught at the wrong place after the wrong meeting, which is lucky only because it means that they don’t try to hide it, they just go straight to the medbay.
This time around, the injuries are worse. The bruising is more extensive, and there are cuts along the trooper’s face as if he’s had something shatter across his skin. It’s an escalation that Fox had been hoping to avoid – that they had all been hoping to avoid, he’s reminded as the medics get to work, grim faced as they fall back into an all-too-familiar routine.
This isn’t the first time that they’ve had to deal with abuse at the hands of the people they’re supposed to be protecting, and it shows in the practised words of reassurance and carefully telegraph their intentions.
Fox has his own experience to fall back on, too. He has dealt with nastier natborns in the past, but they’ve usually been the type to be swayed by honeyed words and gestures, or at least been content to take out any frustrations on himself when he has stepped in on another trooper’s behalf – on this occasion when Fox attempts to intervene, posing the usual argument that the senator will only be hurting himself if he continues to compromise the Guard, he’s scoffed at. When he informs the man that he’d happily bring the incident up with the Chancellor himself, the scoff turns to a laugh.
It’s at this point that Fox realises that none of the usual bluffs or bribes are going to work. The senator already knows the status quo within the senate, the unstated pecking order of which the guardsmen sit at the bottom. He can get away with anything he likes, and he knows it.
This realisation dogs Fox as the escalation continues in the form of more frequent incidents that land people in the medbay, or hiding injuries that should land them in the medbay. Nothing Fox tries to say or do will stop it. He has already spent countless hours looking into the legality of their treatment, and he knows that he’ll just be disappointed if he looks again.
(This doesn’t stop him from looking. He hopes, perhaps, that he might have missed some loophole or avenue of support that they could make a plea to.)
(He hadn’t.)
It’s usually the same handful of troopers that the senator targets, the unlucky few that the senator seems to have decided are his favourites. Fox keeps them as far away from him as he can, until the day that the senator manages to track one of them down on the opposite side of the building and leave them in a worse state than ever. The trooper in question isn’t usually one that tries to hide after a run-in with the man, but hide they do, the bruises and blood in intimate places painting a clear enough reason why.
Fox can see them shaking as they talk to the medic, curled in on themself. Ashamed. As if it had been their fault that they’d been put in this situation. As if they hadn’t been built to order and dropped into a world where they had no options other than to submit or die.
On that day, Fox looks down at the schedule on the screen in front of him, then powers the datapad down. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by moving shifts around, not anymore.
It will get worse, he knows, one way or another. Perhaps this man will gloat to his friends, share his little secret around until it becomes common knowledge that they can truly get away with ordering the Guard to carry out any orders they like. Perhaps he’ll just keep things to himself and pick another target.
Either option is unacceptable – not to those who should be protecting them, but to Fox himself, who stands staring out across the medbay now, imagining a world where the abuse this natborn directs at them is allowed to become commonplace.
Or a tantalising option for those looking at what to do with their soldiers after the war is won.
The new, acceptable standard.
Fox will not allow it to become the new standard. Fox has a duty to the Republic but he also has a duty to his siblings, and right now his priority is set on them. This senator cannot be allowed to operate any longer.
Leaving the medbay behind him, Fox thinks over his options. He could probably spend some time figuring out an elaborate scheme to disgrace the man or remove him from power through some other means. It would be feasible, especially given the level of access he has been given to the private lives of those in power – those who think that he would be incapable of even thinking of using that information against them – and the resources he has available as marshall commander of the Guard.
Fox doesn’t just want to remove the man from power, though. Fox thinks back to the trooper – the person, no matter how they might be defined by the law – in the medbay behind him, and realises that removing the senator from power would never be enough. He wants to remove any threat he might pose to anyone ever again.
The thought of working through the options at his disposal for disappearing the senator is vastly more satisfying than plotting his dismissal. It’s a temptation he cannot ignore.
Fox smiles grimly, pulls up the senator’s schedule, and gets to work.