Chapter Text
If someone was to ask Marshal Commander Fox when his life trajectory was derailed, he’d have to say that it happened on an early Taungsday morning, two years into the war. Specifically, when Jedi General Luminara Unduli and Jedi Commander Barriss Offee entered the Senate building.
It wasn’t an immediate derailment. But that was the first moment that something clicked in a way that should’ve set off alarm bells, the first moment that the track of his existence was upset. It wouldn’t have been notable, except for the fact General Unduli and Commander Offee aren’t supposed to be on Coruscant yet, Fox knew that fact off the top of his head. He kept a close eye on his batchmates, so he kept a close eye on the 41st Elite Corps, and the 41st Elite Corps were very much still supposed to be on Umbara.
But unless his eyes and his bucket had been lying to him, that had very much been General Unduli and Commander Offee entering the Chancellor’s office.
General Unduli, if possible, had seemed even more somber than usual when she swept her way into the Chancellor's office. Her nod of greeting was barely more than a twitch, and it stood in stark contrast to Commander Offee behind her sending a small smile at the Guards on duty.
It was odd. It was out of place. But it would’ve been ultimately unremarkable, if not for what happened after.
Three hours after Fox noticed, and disregarded General Unduli and Commander Offee entering the Chancellor’s office, he catches a flash of black flowing fabric out of the corner of his eyes.
The blur of movement is just unexpected enough that Fox immediately straightens up, training his eyes on the hallway. People who weren’t Guards rarely came down to the Guard headquarters in the Senate building, and no Guard would wear fabric with movement like the fabric that just flashed by.
Slowly, Fox inched himself forward, until—
Huh. That’s Jedi Commander Barriss Offee standing by the wall, arms crossed.
That’s unexpected.
For a moment, he considers doing nothing about it. Approaching Offee will be awkward, and talking with her will be excruciating, and he really would rather take the nap that he had scheduled.
But Gree would want him to keep the Commander out of trouble, and despite their faltering communication as the war went on, Fox still cared about what Gree wanted.
Kriff.
His desire to avoid Offee isn’t because Offee herself is unpleasant or anything. She’s the opposite, honestly. She rarely deviates from being perfectly polite, and when she's around Gree, sometimes she even has a sense of humor. It's not because he can't do work around her either — Offee is prone to silence in a way that makes her very unobtrusive.
It's just that walking corpses are awkward to be around, when the corpse doesn't know its upcoming fate. It's just that Barriss Offee is the kind of girl that Fox is expecting to find dead.
It's nothing personal. Nothing insulting, even, many of the best people that Fox knows are people that he often expects to find dead. Thorn, for one. Senator Organa, for another. It is simply a fact of life, as undeniable and true as any other — Coruscant orbits a singular star, the Senate is corrupt, and Barriss Offee is the kind of girl that tends to turn up as a corpse before reaching old age.
Barriss Offee dying young wasn't technically inevitable. But at the rate the war was going, the odds were against her surviving for long. The kid needed someone to have the time to open their damn eyes and recognize the signs, but no one was looking, because Offee was sweet and polite and smart and mature, and she deflected concern with a calm steadiness that Fox hadn't developed until he was assigned to Coruscant.
He wondered, sometimes, if Gree would notice. Gree had been the one who saw it back on Kamino, he'd been the one who involved Alpha 17 regarding Fox himself, after all, but that was years ago. That was before Gree was a Commander with lives relying on him. That was when Gree had time to sit and think and contemplate and get in the business of everyone else.
Gree wasn’t assigned to the Coruscant Guard. Gree’s job never became a game of thinking and watching. Gree doesn't have time for that anymore.
He isn't going to notice.
General Unduli is the next logical step. General Unduli is the kid's mentor, after all. General Unduli is theoretically the person who spent the most time with Offee.
But that's theoretically, because General Unduli had shown her trump card too early, and the Chancellor kept her close because of it. She got missions, sure, just like how High General Fisto got missions, but they were carefully chosen, with no rhyme or reason behind them. Once, at 79's, Commander Monnk had drunkenly mused that it seemed like the Chancellor was intentionally minimizing the public's reach to non-human Jedi by assigning them to the most backwater planets in the galaxy. It was the kind of stupid statement that had Monnk getting cut off immediately, but it had nevertheless taken root in Fox's mind, a weed he couldn't dig out.
Regardless, he wanted to blame General Unduli for how little Offee was within her grasp, how often Offee was making a nuisance of herself with the various anti war meetings she'd recently started attending. He did, to an extent. He blamed General Unduli the same way he blamed himself, for all the times he stood guarding the Chancellor while a shiny got in over their head. He blamed General Unduli for her crime of being too much like him, her crime of being whip smart and sharp and knowing it. The Chancellor wouldn't have taken such an interest in her if she'd been a little more boring, a little more ignorant of her own abilities. She wouldn't be one of the Chancellor's advisors if she'd kept her head down, bit her tongue. She wouldn't be busy in the Chancellor's office all the time when she was on Coruscant if she'd just blunted herself when around him, taken her edge of cleverness and swallowed it down until she was no more interesting than the streets they walked on.
Fox himself wouldn't be on Coruscant if he'd just bitten his tongue and pretended to be the nothing he was trained to be.
But neither of them knew how to do what was good for them, so instead, Fox stood silently outside the Chancellor's office, and hated General Unduli for the way he always felt complicit to her padawan's probable upcoming death when around her.
General Unduli's job was to consider the possible branching consequences, it was impossible to avoid thinking like that when she was around. But Fox tried not to think too hard about the greater implications of things. It wasn't beneficial for his productivity levels.
Talking to a teenager oozing agony and angst wasn’t going to be beneficial for his productivity levels either.
Kark.
Fox took a moment to duck back towards the Guards’ front desk. Always good to go into a combat situation with all possible intel, and Lt. Swan was very skilled at finding intel.
"Hey Swan, any reason we've got Gree's Commander lurking around down here?"
A pause, typing sounds. Then— "No, sir. General Unduli and Commander Offee received emergency authorization to leave the Umbara campaign early for an unspecified medical issue, but that’s all the details that are available.”
"Is General Unduli still with the Chancellor?"
"Yes sir."
Huh. Even more perplexing. It would make sense, if Offee was meditating in some doorway, her usual passtime when she wasn’t in the room of the meeting itself, but she wasn't someone prone to loitering in the Senate building besides that. She certainly wasn’t prone to walking around it, to making the journey down to the Coruscant Guard headquarters.
Fox looks back at Offee. She doesn’t look particularly troublesome at the moment, which means very little. Senator Organa certainly never looks troublesome in the moments before he gives a speech that gets twenty assassins on his tail.
Still. She’s liable to do more harm out there than she would in here.
He goes to greet her.
“Commander Fox,” Commander Offee greets upon seeing him, not quite smiling. "Ahsoka’s with the 501st, and the 501st have been sent to Kiros," she says, presumably as an explanation for her presence. It’s not a good explanation. She’s never been down here before, with Commander Tano present or otherwise. "I apologize if I am interrupting."
"Not at all, Commander," Fox says, and resigns himself to not getting to take a nap that day. "How was Umbara?"
Commander Offee's expression twists at that, her face scrunching up in a look that Fox would call disgruntled on anyone else. Fox blinks in surprise.
"... Unpleasant," she bites out, sharp. It's a tone he's heard brothers take after disastrous campaigns, taken himself too many times.
It's not a tone he thought Jedi were capable of taking.
Well, it does make sense. She was on Umbara, after all, and Umbara had been a karking disaster.
It wasn't the first campaign to be a disaster. It wouldn't be the last. But the fact that Umbara was technically a success didn't make the friendly fire casualty sheets any easier to look at. And Fox would bet credits he didn't have that it was behind Offee's uncharacteristic tone.
If this was a brother, he'd give them the night off — if he could — and alert their commanding officer. Occasionally, if it was a brother who was another Commander, and he couldn’t order around, he'd change his strategy and drag them either to 79's, the barracks, or in Wolffe's case, the Jedi Temple.
Considering the fact that Fox knows General Unduli is with the Chancellor right now, he suspects that bringing Commander Offee to the Temple would be counterproductive. The barracks are an option, still an option, but…
- He knows for a fact that Gree is on an escort mission with General Yoda.
- He doesn’t know anyone else in the 41st Elite Corps well enough to know if they could handle… this.
Which means the barracks are out.
(And he's not taking Commander Offee to 79's. He values his limbs, thank you very much .)
Kark.
"Considering what I’ve seen from the after action reports, I imagine so," Fox says after a moment, reevaluating his approach. "Let's talk in my office. Follow me."
Fox jerks his head in the direction of his office, and takes off. Offee will follow. He's certain of that, at least. She’s not one of Rex’s troublemakers.
Sure enough, Offee follows, sullen but carefully attempting to hide it behind a veneer of politeness. She walks half a step behind him, steps so light he can barely hear them,
He doesn’t speak again until the door has slid shut behind Offee.
“You want some caf?”
“Oh! Oh, uh, no thank you,” Offee says, looking like she’s scared to touch anything. Fox resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Is there any chance— could I have some water?”
Fox blinks. Recovers. “Yes, of course. Feel free to take a seat, Commander.”
It only takes a moment for Fox to transfer some of the water from the coffee machine into a cup, and when he turns back around, Offee has taken a delicate seat on one of the chairs across from his desk. The chairs weren’t usually in his office — he liked to dissuade people from staying in his office as much as he could — but they’d been dragged in by Thire the day prior when they were working on requisition forms, and he hadn’t gotten around to moving them back yet.
Offee accepts the water with a murmured thank you, and Fox nods, sits down, and activates the comm unit in his helmet, says “Swan, make sure no one bothers me unless someone is actually dying.”
“Heard, Commander,” Swan’s sardonic voice replies after a moment.
“Good man,” Fox says, before cutting the connection. Then, with only a moment of hesitation, he removes his own helmet. There’s a pang of discomfort with the motion — by removing his helmet in the presence of a natborn without prior authorization, he’s breaking the protocol that he himself wrote — but if he’s hoping to get any actual information from Offee, she’ll have to be at ease, and a helmeted trooper puts no one at ease.
And Force freaking fishsticks, Offee certainly isn’t at ease right now. She’s cradling her water cup with two hands, a motion that surely would be more comforting if she was holding a warm caf mug, instead of lukewarm water in a shitty cup, but it’s far from Fox’s place to judge the Jedi. She’s got her eyes firmly fixed on the cup, as if it holds the answer to all of life’s questions. She’s very determinedly not starting conversation.
Force, Gree is going to karking owe him for this.
“What’s bothering you, Commander?”
“I… nothing…?” Offee tries, eyes darting upwards, but her attempt to brush it off is betrayed by the lilt at the end of her statement. Usually she’s better at lying than that. Fox doesn’t dignify that with a response, just raises one eyebrow at her, a silent suggestion to rework her attempt. She takes it, thank the Force. “I was at Master Luminara’s meeting with the Chancellor and… and….”
She trails off. It doesn’t take much work to figure out what she’s not avoiding saying
“General Krell?” Fox guesses.
“Master Krell,” Offee confirms. “I… I….”
Fox casts his gaze to the caf mug on his desk, in an attempt to let her take her time finding her words. He’s not certain if the caf in the mug is still edible, but with his advanced metabolism, he probably could take the chance, right? There’s nothing floating on it. It’s probably fine.
"He was a traitor," Offee finally says, and there's a certain weight to the words that wedges uncomfortably into Fox's brain. Regardless, he looks back up at her. "One of our own, and he was a traitor, and he killed the people relying on him, and I liked him. I liked him! He was kind, and he taught us katas at the temple, and… he's a monster." She pauses, looks down at her water, takes a sip. “He’s a monster. And I didn’t even notice. I was there, and, and I didn’t spend much time with him, but I still didn’t even notice.”
“Yeah,” Fox says, mouth suddenly dry. "Yeah. That tends to be how these things go, unfortunately," he says, carefully weighing his words to make sure he doesn’t say something that sends the kid out of control. "No one gets in a position to commit atrocities without making people like them."
"It's wrong!"
"I agree." Fox pauses. "Can't do osik about it, though."
A pause. Then—
“That’s what the Chancellor said.”
“What?”
“That’s what the Chancellor said. That he couldn’t do anything about it. He said that it was a tragedy . That it was unfortunate .” Offee spits out the words like they’ve burned her. There’s a ferocity in her words that has him instantly on edge, an anger that’s much too reminiscent of the anger that Senators have after they lose a bill.
Carefully, Fox replies. “The phrasing of non-soldiers sometimes leaves something to be desired.”
“Yeah,” Offee says, bitterness clear in her voice. “Yeah. It does leave something to be desired. You know, the Chancellor claimed that he tried to reason with Kamino about the trooper’s fate,” Offee continues, and Fox does not say fat kriffing chance that actually happened, but he certainly thinks it. “But then he said that it was a ‘malfunction’ that allowed Trooper Dogma to take action, and that the ‘malfunction’ required addressing. That it was a matter of product quality control for the Kaminoans.”
Huh. Fox wonders if Offee learned the trooper’s name from the Chancellor, or if she hunted it down herself. Considering what he knows about the Chancellor, he’d reckon it’s the latter.
“What does that mean, Commander Fox?”
“What does what mean?”
The look that Offee sends him makes it clear that she’s been spending too much time with Gree.
“What does it mean that it was a matter of quality control? How are they going to address it?”
Fox sighs, looks away from Offee. He does not want to have this conversation. There is no part of him that wants to have this conversation. “Commander Offee—”
“The ability to take action in reaction to an active threat is not a mistake in quality control. That is a basic fundamental aspect of being a living species. I’m a healer, Commander. You can’t ‘correct’ a basic fundamental aspect of life. What is going to happen to Trooper Dogma?”
Fox takes a breath, closes his eyes. "He'll be executed."
"What?"
"That’s how they’re going to address the issue. Execution.” Fox opens his eyes, forces himself to look at Offee. She looks cartoonishly horrified. In another situation, it would almost be funny. “He killed a Jedi General without proper authorization, kid. He's being brought to Kamino for execution and posthumous examination, so they can figure out what went wrong to allow for that to occur."
Offee looks like she’s feeling sick to her stomach. Fox wishes he had the energy to feel the same. “Listen, kid, the trooper knew what he was risking. We all know what happens if we act against a superior officer’s orders. It might not be fair, but the trooper— but Dogma knew what he was doing.”
“But he shouldn’t have been risking that!” Offee shoots back. “He’s a soldier, and part of being a soldier is having the responsibility to refuse to follow unjust orders. He might have taken it a little farther than simply not following orders, but he still deserves a trial, at the very least!”
“We’re clones, ma’am,” Fox replies.
“And what exactly is that supposed to mean?” The careful danger in Offee’s voice has Fox wincing as he tries to find his next words.
‘Commander, we aren’t the typical soldier. We’re weapons, and we’re wielded by the Jedi. A weapon that harms the person who wields it is… well… it’s not functional. It’s not useful.”
Offee’s lip is quivering. "But— but nothing went wrong! If, if you’re weapons to be wielded by the Republic, then he didn’t harm his wielder, because Master Krell was a Separatist!”
Fox blinks. “That’s… creative reasoning,” he says after a moment.
Offee bristles. "Don't look at me like I don't know what I'm talking about."
Fox's lips quirk into a smile, small but real. "You're sweet, kid. And I wouldn’t say that you’re wrong, either, your reasoning is… completely out of the box, but solid. But that doesn’t matter. Dogma isn’t getting a trial, so there’s no one to hear your arguments.”
The girl is practically vibrating in her distress, her voice shaking as she speaks. “So that’s it?”
Fox sighs. “The galaxy kind of sucks.”
Offee falls silent. She looks back down at her water cup, takes a small sip. She looks—well, she looks rather like a kicked tooka. Despite himself, Fox feels a twinge of regret for being the one to put that expression on her face.
Kark.
"Commander, what can you do about it while still maintaining optimal efficiency?"
Offee whips her head up. "What?"
Fox shrugs. "What can you do about it without getting locked up forever? That's kind of what it comes down to, right now."
Offee stares at him, then stares at her hands. For a moment, he thinks he's gotten to her. For a moment, he thinks she's going to be realistic and practical about this, look back up at him and declare her intention to do something logical and pragmatic and un-Jedi-like.
For a moment, he forgets why he's convinced that she's going to get murdered before the end of the war.
Then she looks up at him, eyes gleaming with the kind of idealist determination that he sees in Thorn, in Senator Organa, and he realizes that he’s made a horrible mistake.