Chapter Text
Quinlan walks with the senate building at his back, armfuls of flimsiwork and datapads carefully balanced in a way that doesn’t completely obscure his view. He nods to a group of Jedi investigators going the opposite direction. They’ve all got a lot of work to do and not enough hours in the day to do it so he doesn’t stop to chat, but he does spend a moment to appreciate the sight of so many Jedi back on Coruscant.
Before the end of the war he had been starting to doubt he’d ever see so many of them in one place again.
True, the Jedi Order has been in a state of controlled chaos since the discovery of the chips and all the repercussions of that day, but Quinlan doesn’t regret any of it. He has his family back (or as much as it as he will ever be able to get back).
Distraction from his more unwelcome thoughts comes in the form of his arrival at the guard headquarters. The troopers outside already know him well, and quickly let him through.
Making his way down the corridors, he makes an attempt to greet everyone that he comes across, but between balancing everything and the obstruction to his view this becomes a bit of a tricky task. Until, that is, someone reaches around him to take half of the boxes away.
“Thire!” Quinlan exclaims, grinning at the clone as he steps into view. “Just the guy I was looking for!”
Thire doesn’t grace him with a response outside of a shake of his head.
“Where’d you get all this from?” Thire asks as he stumbles through the door to the command offices. “I thought you said you were gunning to dodge the flimsiwork.”
“If you’re looking to palm it off on us, think again!” Thorn chips in, even as he clears a space for it all. “Drop it off at Commander Bootlicker’s door if you have to, he’d probably thank you for it.”
Quinlan shakes his head, dropping the smile. “Not this time, actually. Commander Fox is actually the last person I’d like to give this footage to.”
The looks of confusion he receives at that prompt him onwards, “Thire, you were aware that I was keeping tabs on certain individuals in the former chancellor’s office near the end, weren’t you?”
Thire nods, still confused.
“Well, the Jedi in charge of the ongoing investigation into his affairs asked me to look into some of them again. When I did, Sidious’ personal doctor – the one we had already interviewed – came forward with new information.”
Quinlan can’t help the grimace that passes over his face. “He wouldn’t give me much to go on at all. Just shoved a droid and some half-answers at me, and left it at that. Said that this should explain everything. Helpful, right? But I don’t like the implications of some of the things he said about the commander, not one bit…”
He trails off, looking down at the shell of the droid and the various other datapads and boxes of flimsi. It’ll be a lot of work to sort though with nothing but a bad feeling to go on.
“Where’d the doctor get the droid from?” Thire finally asks. “It doesn’t look like it belongs on a med team.”
“He said he picked it up after ‘the clone’ was sent back down to you guys. Made excuses about wanting it for his research, saved it from being destroyed. I recognise it. I saw it following the marshal commander around all the time while he was up in the senate building. I…” Quinlan sighs. “I wanted to see if I could get anything off of it. I figure, maybe it could shed some light on the commander’s time upstairs.”
At that Thorn gets to his feet, not saying anything one way or another, but still taking the time to look the droid over.
“I’ve already had a look myself,” Quinlan spoke up again. “Its code is definitely beyond what I can crack, and the temple’s specialists are stretched too thin with everything else going on. So, I found myself thinking, what team of slicers do I know who might’ve been recently left to sit around with nothing better to do…?”
Thire and Thorn look up at him, unimpressed.
“We do still have a lot of work to get on with even with the chaos your lot are causing,” Thorn starts, “and I don’t see why you’re worrying so much about TenTen. Unless you think this might contain evidence towards him knowingly assisting the old dead bastard?”
Quinlan thinks back to the last time that he’d seen Fox working up in the senate building; thinks of the way that Fox had held himself perfectly still whenever he wasn’t needed for something, and the bags under his eyes on the rare occasion that Quinlan had seen him with his helmet removed – and the glimpse of something dark and violent that he’d scraped from a touch of Fox’s armour, months before the discovery that the chancellor was a Sith, that he’d never had the chance to figure out the source of.
“Maybe it will,” Quinlan answers with not quite a lie.
Maybe it will uncover something that the Jedi investigators hadn’t picked up on during their interview with the commander after Sidious’ death. Or maybe it will explain why Fox hadn’t looked as the rest of the former chancellor’s favoured few had done in the wake of the man’s demise: famous, well fed, and frantic with the source of their good fortune dead and burned.
—
Quinlan leaves the clone commanders with the droid to decode, and sets off to do some research of his own in the meantime. He has spent enough time around the commanders now to know their opinions of Fox with great familiarity – understandable hostility on Thorn’s part, and that same wary confusion that Quinlan leaned towards on Thire’s – but not much from the rank and file.
One of the older troopers of the guard talks about how when they’d first been deployed on Coruscant it had only taken Fox a few weeks for him to decide that they weren’t worth knowing and “fuck off up to the heights of the senate”.
One of the younger troopers doesn’t think they’ve ever actually met him in person at all.
This prompts one of the other members of the guard to boast that they have – they’ve seen him while they’ve been out on senate duty, following the senators around like a good little lap dog.
“If we didn’t have Commander Thorn sticking up for us,” they say, “he would have probably rolled over and let them do anything they wanted to us. He forgot his roots, up there.”
Quinlan doesn’t make any comment. He leaves them to it, and moves on.
It’s the last person that Quinlan talks to that actually echoes any of the concerns he has about the commander. The chief medic says they’ve only seen Fox a couple of times since he was returned to the guard and that yes they are also worried, actually. Fox is too thin for his armour, didn’t anyone else notice? Apparently the commander has tried to bulk it with fabric bunched around joints, but it doesn’t do a good enough job when he’s walking. Sal has been trying to get him to come to the medbay for weeks without much luck. Does Quinlan think he might stand a better chance?
Quinlan thinks back on how evasive Fox has been throughout the few brief encounters they’ve had over the months, and wonders the same.
—
Fox is the last stop on Quinlan’s rounds. The commander’s office is in a different part of the building to the others, though this at least is not because of any hostility on their part – the coruscant guard headquarters was cramped to begin with, let alone with new people needing office space. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that Fox’s room has ended up with something of a ‘shunted out of sight’ feel to it. Something a little difficult to put into words, even as it resonates fairly clearly through the Force.
The door is ajar when Quinlan arrives. He waits for a group of troopers to walk past before sticking his head in, squinting into the low light.
Fox is sorting through one of the cabinets at the back of the room, datapads spread out around him with his back to the door. Quinlan goes to announce his presence, then hesitates.
At a glance, through the Force, Fox appears calm. Then Quinlan squints at him, and realises that the calm actually seems like a fragile thing, like something that had been broken then pieced back together again. An imperfect image – or an optical illusion, something you wouldn’t make sense of unless you stared at it for a while.
Quinlan isn’t given that while. An alert comes across his comm and he has to drag himself away.
As he goes, his thoughts don’t leave the commander. The other Jedi, the ones who’d interviewed Fox after Sidious’ death, had reported similar findings from their glance at him through the Force. It reeked of a carefully projected facade – a lie. But what, exactly, was the commander lying about?
—
Quinlan arrives back at the main guard command offices the next evening to grim expressions. He doesn't need the Force to tell him that something has happened.
“What’s wrong?” he asks immediately.
Thire freezes, before turning slowly to face him. “That’s not something that’s going to be easy to pin down,” he says, after a moment. “We’ve sorted through the doctor’s holo records and notes, and cracked the droid. The findings are… not pleasant watching.”
Quinlan frowns. “What did you find?”
Thire shares an uneasy glance with the rest of the group.
“We haven’t been through all of it, but we’ve highlighted some of the more important parts from both the doctor’s notes and the droid.”
“We’ve put the footage together for you in chronological order to the best of our ability,” one of the clones on the slicing team speaks up. “It wasn’t easy, given that some of the data had been corrupted – and the repetitive nature of some of the footage.”
Quinlan doesn’t like the sound of that, if the footage is supposed to be unpleasant.
“It would be easier for you to look through what we’ve already got yourself,” Thire says. “We haven’t finished going through all of it – and it only goes back a few months from when Palpatine was discovered. Someone must have been manually deleting it before that.”
“It isn’t pretty,” the other clone speaks up again, “but you – the Jedi, the Republic – you promised to give us a voice, and this could be the evidence that the senators need to get the clone rights bill–”
At that, Thire interrupts. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he says. “Our priority should be the marshal commander, for now. Will you help, Vos?”
That tells Quinlan all he needs to know in terms of whether the footage will be incriminatory towards Fox as Thorn had predicted, or confirm some of his own worst suspicions. He nods.
“Give me what you’ve already sorted. I’ll get started right away.”
—
Dr B. T. Kenmell
Log A
The doctor sits in front of a camera, his workspace clear of clutter except for a stack of notes to his right. He begins by describing his day, before moving on to other topics.
“Today I worked on the chancellor’s clone again. It has begun to require medical attention more frequently than the Red Guard does, which is impressive given its clerical position.”
He pauses.
“One possibility that I have considered is that it was put in this position because it was found unsuitable for frontline duty. I suppose that even with the Kaminoans boasting of perfection, a few defects have to slip through the gaps.”
Vos leans back, pausing the footage for a moment before continuing with the next of the holovids. If this was put in place to set the scene for him, then he doesn’t like to think of what might follow.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording A
The first of the holovids sourced from the droid shows Fox in his office. Not his current office within the guard headquarters, but his office up in the senate building. There are similarities; the stacks of datapads, the boxes of flimsi, and the general state of barely-organised chaos.
Fox works diligently, in silence. The droid keeps watch beside him, recording the scene as the two of them pick through their work.
This footage seems innocuous enough, so Quinlan speeds it up. It’s only after he has skipped ahead a few times that he notices the timestamp and realises that he has been looking at many hours of consecutive footage, not footage recorded over the course of a few days. It paints the picture of a gruelling work schedule; gruelling and horribly monotonous.
This isn’t even the most concerning thing about the holovid, because as useful an insight as it is, the droid recording it is also seemingly there to assist with the flimsiwork – so what is it doing keeping tabs on the commander at all?
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording B
Fox is somewhere different this time. The droid follows him down a corridor, and into one of the other offices near the top of the senate building. Fox knocks, entering only after he eventually gets a response.
The senate guard coordinator is waiting inside. The exchange between the two of them is short and to the point, an obviously familiar thing for the both of them. Fox leaves with rations in hand, the coordinator sneering after him – also a familiar thing, from Fox’s complete lack of reaction to both that and the barbed closing remark.
Quinlan watches carefully, noting the ration pack – singular. The rest of the footage from that day, similarly to the previous set, does not show anything other than office work. This is the only time that Fox eats. Quinlan knows how much the clones need, even the clones within the guard who have been forced to take up roles without an active component. He thinks back to Fox’s thinner physique, and the medic’s remarks, and doesn’t like the conclusion that he comes to.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording C
The droid watches as Fox is stopped in the corridor by a senator, one that is recognisable as a sympathiser of Sidious. The former chancellor appears himself soon after, ordering Fox to make sure that the senator is “kept happy”. The commander doesn’t ask what that might entail. He merely nods, and gets to it.
The droid follows Fox around as he takes up the role of a servant for the rest of the day without complaint.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording D
The next location is another new one. Fox is holed up in a firing range, seemingly taking a rare moment away from the flimsiwork to get some practice in.
The question of which firing range he was in is quickly answered by the arrival of members of the Red Guard. Fox comes to a stop as they approach, returning the training weapon to its stand.
“I haven’t done anything for weeks now,” says Fox, unprompted and without context.
“We know,” says the nearest guardsman, “but a reminder of the consequences can’t hurt, can it? We can’t have you getting complacent.”
They shove Fox out of the firing range without any further explanation, and Fox… Fox just goes with it. His form is hunched over, resigned, as they lead him towards the training mats.
Quinlan pauses the footage shortly after that. Not only had it seemed like a regular occurrence as a whole, the Red Guard had seemed to not care that they were beating someone in front of a camdroid. Perhaps they weren’t aware of the droid’s functions, but given what the investigation team had uncovered already, Quinlan suspected that they had simply discounted any repercussions as a possibility at all.
The image of the commander, frozen in the moment of having the wind kicked out of him, is damning.
—
Dr B. T. Kenmell
Log B
“Why does this clone seem to possess no self-preservation instincts? I think this will be the next question I’ll frame any theories around. From what I have heard of the others, they should be able to avoid accidents far easier than this one does. The med-droids have been working on it far too often!"
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording E
Once again, the droid monitors Fox as they both work through flimsiwork in his office. Once again, it goes on for hours longer than a normal shift ever should.
Despite the apparent work of the med-droids, Quinlan notes, Fox is still favouring his left arm to work through the datapads, where previously he had been using his right.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording F
The droid follows Fox back to the senate guard coordinator’s office. This time when he is allowed in, however, the coordinator isn’t alone. A woman – seemingly one of his co-workers – is waiting there with him. The two of them leave Fox waiting at the door as they finish their conversation.
“Why are you doing this?” the woman asks, nodding in Fox’s direction.
“Why am I in charge of distributing his rations?” The man shrugs. “I was told he was causing trouble in the canteen. You know how these clones can get. You have to keep an eye on them.”
“That wasn’t what I was asking,” the woman says. “What I want to know is – why are you doing this for nothing in return?”
She turns to Fox with a growing smile, who blinks back at her obviously perturbed.
“What do you require?” he asks, still as polite as ever. “If you wish for assistance with datapads or office work…”
“Oh!” she laughs, “I was thinking something a bit more creative than office work.”
It’s at that point that the droid shifts, and the attention of both the coordinator and his friend snap towards it. The woman steps forwards, pushes it out of the office, and closes the door behind it. The droid remains outside, waiting for the commander, until late into the night.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording G
The next holovid has the timestamp of the following day, and shows Fox training with the Red Guard once more. This time they begin with legitimate sparring matches, but as the minutes go by and Fox falters time and time again, any constructive training that might go on is replaced by taunting. He makes one last attempt to get back up after his latest match, and his strength fails completely, laughter following him as he crashes back onto the mat.
One of them catches a glimpse of the bruising down his back as he falls, a trail of fingerprints and other marks, and then the laughter turns to jeering.
As Fox manages to get to his feet and limp away, the guardsman debate amongst themselves in the background. One of them follows his progress with a more predatory look in their eye – but, still, they let him leave.
Quinlan has never felt more glad for a video to end as soon as that one does.
—
Dr B. T. Kenmell
Log C
Today I caught the clone in the act of trying to avoid the med-droids, for some reason that I cannot fathom. It had tried to patch its wounds itself, but obviously inadequately, because it was in with the droid team for a good while after I directed it to them.
It still won’t give me any good explanation as to how it ends up in this state over and over. It’s a concerning pattern – aren’t these things supposed to be fit enough to defend us in the event of attack?
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording H
The timestamp reads as the day following the previous recordings. The droid and Fox work in his office for the entirety of the day cycle and a good way into the night. Fox does not leave at any point to go and pick up his food allowance.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording I
The droid follows Fox into one of the grander meeting rooms of the senate. Chancellor Palpatine is there, issuing farewells to the various senators and representatives that had just been speaking with him, until the room has emptied out to leave just himself and Fox.
“I’ve heard complaints from the doctor about your composure, recently,” Palpatine cuts straight to the point as soon as the door shuts behind them. “He’s concerned about your work suffering as a result. Do you need a reminder of the consequences that you would face were this to ever become the case?”
Fox doesn’t reply verbally, but he does shake his head, eyes downcast.
“Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to get one of the other clones up here in your place regardless. I’ve heard only good things about the other guard commanders. They would surely do a better job than you.”
There’s a dead look in Fox’s eyes that Quinlan hasn’t seen budge over the course of the past few videos – which is concerning on many levels, and not only because the videos have been spread over a number of weeks. Quinlan had only seen the expression flicker for a moment, and that had been in the footage that he’d just watched, at the very clear threat to Fox’s brothers.
It inspires both dread and hope. There had still been something that Fox had managed to cling on to during his time in the senate, even if the people around him had only seen this as another point of leverage on the man.
Perhaps, after all of this has been resolved and the truth brought to light, he will be able to find it in himself to cling to that connection once more.
—
Dr B. T. Kenmell
Log D
”The chancellor recently gave me permission to involve the clone in my research projects. It would only involve taking blood samples, maybe running some physicals… nothing too extensive, for the moment.
“I am not entirely keen on involving it in more invasive procedures, regardless of what the chancellor might say. What if I killed– what if it wasn’t strong enough to withstand the testing? That would be potentially a very expensive mistake, given how steep the fines for damaging Republic property have become. No… best to hold back for now, at least until it has healed from whatever latest accident it has managed to involve itself in.”
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording J
The droid watches Fox as he sits in the corner of a small, almost-empty room that must be his senate quarters. For the first time throughout all of the holovids, Fox isn’t doing anything; not working, not sleeping, not anything at all. He’s just sitting, with his knees tucked up around him and his head in his hands.
The droid flags the footage.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording K
The following day, the droid follows Fox into another training session with the Red Guard that quickly turns violent.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording L
This time, Fox is back in his office. He’s shaking, almost imperceptibly, as he types out a response to something Thorn has sent up to him. For a moment the start of an apology is legible on the holopad that Fox works from, before he stops, the shaking now both more obvious and apparently uncontrollable.
The droid flags the footage.
—
Droid Designation: SD1010
Recording M
The following day, the droid follows Fox into another training session with the Red Guard that quickly turns violent.
—
Dr B. T. Kenmell
Log E
“It has been a few weeks now, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to– still haven’t had any reason to use the clone in any further research exercises. He… It seems to be struggling with its workload. Perhaps they are built with some kind of planned obsolescence and will need to be replaced.”
There is a long moment of silence.
“...or perhaps he just needs a break. These clones are all only human, after all. No amount of genetic alteration can change that fundamental fact.”
The doctor trails off after that, shuffling through his notes. He sighs, then reaches forwards to turn off the holocam, giving the camera a direct shot of the haunted look on his face as he does so.
The screen goes blank, and Quinlan finds himself staring back at his own reflection in the datapad; it echoes the expression of the doctor that had been visible on the footage only moments beforehand.
The doctor’s log is the last of the holovids that had already been flagged. The timestamp is from just a couple of weeks before the Sith’s demise.
The knowledge that there are more videos beyond these, that these only scratch the surface – and that what they’d recovered only went back a few months! – is enough to almost make Quinlan feel sick.
He isn’t. He steels himself, and gets to his feet. There’s more work to do, but first – he checks the time. It’s late into the evening by now, but if the footage was anything to go by, the marshal commander will still be awake and available for a conversation that was long overdue.