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In his defense, Commander Fox had not planned to kill the Supreme Chancellor.
He had planned to finish three hundred and twelve pending reports, reject six Senate requests, yell at a lobbyist, and maybe—if the stars aligned and the Republic stopped being a complete wreck for more than five seconds—eat something that wasn’t rations.
Instead… well. Things escalated.
Nobody was entirely sure what the final straw had been. There had been a lot of straws. Years of them. A whole bale of straws, if you would.
Years of impossible schedules, of understaffing, of Senate hearings where clones were spoken about in the room but never to. Years of Palpatine smiling and saying things like our brave men while simultaneously reducing Guard budgets and expanding Guard responsibilities. Years of watching exhausted shinies get transferred in and come out different. Years of Coruscant.
The Chancellor was always there in the background. He became a staple of Fox’s life, as something to prepare for. Fox quickly became suspicious of him. So eventually, Fox did what Fox did. He investigated.
Without telling anybody, of course, because if you told people things on Coruscant they became rumors, and rumors became reports, and reports became problems.
Then he found something.
Nobody ever really explained afterward. Not even among themselves. The story changed depending on who you asked.
According to Stone, Palpatine accidentally revealed himself while trying to intimidate Fox. According to Thorn, Fox snapped after being told to resubmit leave requests for the third time. According to Thire, the Chancellor attempted something weird and Force-related. According to Fox, “That’s classified.”
Regardless of who you asked, the end result remained. One dead Chancellor, one absolutely destroyed office, one red lightsaber, and the Coruscant Guard Commanders staring at their commander.
Nobody spoke for a long moment as Fox stood there, breathing heavily, staring at the body.
Stone looked at Fox, then at Palpatine, then back. “…Commander?”
Fox looked up.
Stone gestured. “…Did you just… kill the Chancellor?”
Fox blinked and looked at Palpatine’s corpse. “Yeah.”
There was another long silence. Thorn squinted. “…Do we arrest you?”
Fox thought about that. “For what?”
Okay, so they were going this route then. Fair enough.
“…What do we do with the body?” Thire asked hesitantly.
Stone looked upward, thinking hard. “Body chute?”
Everybody slowly turned.
The body chute was officially an incredibly deep maintenance disposal system. Unofficially, it was just an endless hole. Nobody knew how deep it was, and nobody really wanted to know either.
Every Guard trooper had been threatened with it at least once. Every Guard commander had joked about it. Nobody had ever actually used it. Until now.
Thire looked nervous. “I always thought that was more… uh… symbolic.”
Stone looked at the other three. “You wanna find out?”
Ten minutes later the most powerful man in the Republic disappeared into a bottomless pit. They looked over the edge and watched the body fall in silence.
Stone slowly dusted off his hands. “…Well.” A pause. “That’s it then?”
Fox stared at the pit, thinking. The pit stared back. Thire looked at Fox, then at the hole, then at Fox again.
Stone crossed his arms. “…So.” Nobody answered. He tried again. “Are we supposed to do something?”
Fox blinked. “About what?”
Stone stared. “The Chancellor.”
Fox looked at the pit and thought about it. “What about him?”
Stone gestured vaguely at the maintenance shaft. “…He’s dead.”
“Yeah?”
Thorn frowned. “…Commander.”
Fox looked over to see Thorn looking deeply concerned. “Sir, someone’s going to notice.”
“Nah.”
There was a long silence as the other three commanders stared at him.
“…Are you in shock?”
Fox thought about that for a moment, and checked internally, only to find that, actually… no. He wasn’t. Which was strange. He probably should be. He had just killed the Supreme Chancellor. That felt like something a person should react to. Instead—
“I think,” Fox said slowly, “it’s time to celebrate.”
“Celebrate?” Thire turned his head and Fox could practically hear the barely contained excitement in his voice.
Fox nodded. “Celebrate. Thorn,” he turned to Thorn, “get anyone you can find. We’re going to 404.”
404 was a notoriously difficult to find bar, tucked away in the back alleys in one of the lower levels. It was also one of the seven bars on Coruscant that served clones at all. It was technically run by an ex-bounty hunter named Mara, but the Guard overlooked that part in favor of the alcohol.
Thorn looked at him for exactly one second before his whole face changed into the particular kind of vindictive joy only Coruscant Guard commanders could manage when something had finally gone right for once. “Understood.”
He was already reaching for his comm before Fox had finished speaking. “Anyone with lungs and functioning legs,” Thorn barked, voice suddenly bright in a way that was almost alarming after years of hearing him sound one irritated report away from collapse. “Barracks, five minutes. No, I don’t care what you’re doing. Yes, this is a priority. If you’re bleeding, put a shirt over it and move.”
Fox and Stone stared at him. Thire, after a long beat, looked from one to the other and said, very carefully, “…Are we really doing this?”
Fox looked at the body chute, then back at Thire. “Yes.”
The energy around them seemed to shift. Fox felt it first, the incredulous lift, the impossible sensation of something loosening in his chest after years of being tight from the sheer anxiety that came with a Coruscant position. The Chancellor was gone. The Chancellor was dead.
Stone let out a sharp breath that was dangerously close to a laugh. “Oh, I am absolutely getting blackout tonight.”
Fox blinked at him. Stone pointed at the body chute with the deep satisfaction of a man who had just discovered the universe was capable of mercy. “We put him in the chute.”
“We did.”
“And now we get to go drinking.”
“We do.”
Thire was already halfway to the door. “Do we need to secure anything first?”
Thorn looked up without breaking stride. “Only our alibis.”
Thire nodded immediately like that made perfect sense, which, given the last few years on Coruscant, it did.
Fox watched them moving around him and realized they all had the same expression. It was something almost feral. They had been living under the Chancellor’s shadow for so long that the absence of it felt like standing up too fast.
Fox could feel it. The pressure that had lived in his shoulders for years had not disappeared so much as shattered. He rolled his neck once, very slowly, then looked at the others. “Let’s get moving before I change my mind.”
Thorn barked a laugh and pointed at him. “You hear that? Commander says party.”
Stone was already unlatching his formal upper armor as they moved through the abandoned Senate halls. “He had me from ‘get drunk’.”
Within ten minutes, the Coruscant Guard was moving in a controlled, highly criminal, deeply joyful formation. Helmets were traded for jackets, civilian coats, hoodies, leather, anything that would keep them from attracting too much attention in the lower levels.
Fox changed the fastest. He had done this enough times in the past few years to know exactly how to disappear into Coruscant when needed. He wore black clothes, with a loose coat over it, and his favorite fingerless gloves. His curly hair was let loose atop his head, and the silver hoop in his ear glinted briefly when he turned his head.
Stone noticed immediately. “When the kark did you pierce your ear?”
Fox touched it reflexively. “Last time I was drunk. Hound talked me into it.”
Thorn grinned. “It looks good, you should thank him.”
Fox gave him a flat look. “Fat chance.”
Thire, somehow already in a better mood than he had any right to be, called, “Worth a shot!”
Fox snorted.
Getting to the lower levels took longer than it should have, because every time they turned a corner, another Corrie showed up.
Fox had not expected the Guard to spread the news this quickly, but in retrospect that was idiotic. There were clones everywhere. There were always clones everywhere. A secret in the Guard was only a secret until the nearest exhausted trooper heard it and decided his brothers needed to know.
By the time they reached the service descent, there were twenty-three of them. By the time they hit the lower lift, there were thirty. By the time the doors opened into the alley network, there were forty-seven. Fox had no idea where half of them had come from. He didn’t care.
The lower levels always felt different at night. The air was heavier down there. Literally. It was thick and greasy with heat from old pipes and broken vents. Neon bled through steam in wavering colors. Metal walkways groaned beneath boots. Somewhere nearby, a generator wheezed along with their steps.
The surface of Coruscant had been built to impress. The lower levels had been built to survive. And survive they did.
404 sat where it always sat: hidden behind a maintenance alley, down a corridor that looked like nothing important had ever happened there and never would. The sign above the entrance was small, flickering, and half-broken.
404
BAR FOUND
Fox admittedly found that joke funny, though he would forever deny it.
Mara, behind the bar, looked up the moment the first of them entered. She was a brunette human with a dry expression, practical clothes, and the sort of stance that suggested she’d personally evicted at least three other bounty hunters and one mob boss from her bar in her lifetime.
She took one look at the sheer number of red-armored clones filling her bar and immediately looked at Fox.
“What did you idiots do?”
Fox stepped up to the bar. He said, quietly and with a kind of grim delight he didn’t bother hiding, “We’re celebrating.”
Mara stared at him. Then at the army of clones now pouring in behind him like an approaching red tide. Then back at him. “Should I even ask?
The entire Guard immediately roared variations of no.
“Better not,” Fox said with a sympathetic smile.
Mara nodded. “Good enough for me.”
That, apparently, was all the invitation they needed. A surge of laughter went through the room.
Bar stools scraped. Boots thudded. Somebody in the back slapped a hand on the counter and shouted for the first round to be whatever would get the fastest results. Mara reached under the bar and started pouring before anyone even finished asking.
“Same as always?” she asked Fox.
Fox sat on the nearest stool. “Got anything stronger?”
Mara looked him dead in the eyes. “Interesting.” She poured him one anyway. Fox downed it in one go and set it back on the bar. She gave him a look, and leaned on the bar. She lowered her voice, “Seriously, what happened this time?”
Fox glanced over his shoulder at his commanders, at the crowd of his Corries packing into the narrow bar, at the bright, reckless energy coursing through all of them now, then back at Mara. “We killed the Chancellor.”
There was a pause. Mara blinked once. Then twice. Then set the bottle down very carefully. “…You what?”
Fox took the drink she handed him and repeated, with all the calm of a man discussing the weather, “We killed the Chancellor.”
Mara stared at him for a long moment, then she snorted. A second later she was laughing hard enough to lean fully on the bar. “Well,” she said finally, wiping at one eye, “that’s one way to solve the Republic’s issues.”
Thorn made a sound from somewhere behind Fox that suggested he was either in pain or trying not to choke on laughter.
Stone wheezed, “I like her.”
“You should,” Mara said immediately. “I’m right.”
The first round hit the table fast. Then the second came around. Then the third. The bar’s music got louder. Someone swapped the playlist to something old and aggressive and danceable in the worst possible way. A pair of corries who had clearly not had a night off in months started arguing over whether the song counted as war music or celebration music and then decided, with no further consensus, that it was both. Fox felt the noise swell around him.
He hadn’t realized how much of stress he’d been carrying until it disappeared. The constant, grinding pressure that had lived under his ribs for years and years and years. It’d been the thing that had made every breath on Coruscant feel slightly too shallow. The thing that had turned his nights into reports and his mornings into caffeine and his afternoons into strategic irritation. All of it was gone.
So Fox drank. And kept drinking.
At some point Thorn climbed onto a chair and started announcing that the Republic had suffered a fatal administrative error. Thire had gotten himself into a drinking contest with another Corrie named Catwalk, and was currently drinking him under the table. At some later point Stone pointed dramatically at the bartender and declared her the best citizen on Coruscant.
Mara replied, without missing a beat, “That’s because I don’t put up with the damn government.”
The whole bar howled with laughter.
The Force, meanwhile, was almost offensively bright in a pure, blistering, impossible way. The raw and unguarded joy rolling off the drunken troopers was seeping into every inch of Coruscant. In fact, there was so much of it every Jedi on Coruscant felt it.
Far away at the Temple, Master Yoda stopped mid-step and turned his head sharply. Plo Koon looked up so fast Wolffe beside him nearly crashed into his back. Mace Windu’s expression changed immediately from mild concern to deep, nearly baffled alarm.
Anakin, who was currently not deployed, was sitting in a corridor trying to process the consequences of his entire existence when he suddenly sat upright like someone had hit him.
His head snapped up and his eyes widened. “What the hell?” He muttered.
Obi-Wan, who had been standing nearby in a similar state of exhausted, post-battle contemplation, turned to him. “What?”
Anakin frowned hard, focusing on the sensation moving through the Force.
“Do you feel that?”
Obi-Wan blinked. “What is that?”
Anakin looked confused. “It’s-” He stopped. “It’s like someone’s happy. Really happy.”
Obi-Wan’s brows lifted. “Well, I imagine there’s a reason-”
“No, you don’t understand.” Anakin stared into the distance as if the answer might be written there. “It’s huge.”
Obi-Wan frowned. “How huge?”
Anakin looked genuinely lost. “Like fireworks.”
Obi-Wan went still. The Force was that loud? Though he could feel a distant echo of it now that Anakin had mentioned it, a bright, crackling pulse from below the city. Something had happened.
Back at 404, nobody was thinking about the Jedi. Which was probably for the best.
Thire had taken off his gloves and was now being aggressively competitive at darts with a Corrie named Vale. If Fox was a betting man, he would’ve placed all his credits on him. Vale was a man who was tired enough to be harmless but angry enough to be fun.
Thorn had managed to get everyone chanting something Fox only understood in fragments because the music was too loud and half of them were slurring already. Stone was laughing so hard he had to put his drink down before he dropped it.
Mara had somehow produced more bottles from beneath the counter like a magician performing a miracle for soldiers.
Fox sat at the bar with his drink in hand and watched all of it happen around him. For the first time in a very long time, he did not feel like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Mara leaned one elbow on the counter near him. “Does this mean you’re not going to have another one of your existential crises for at least an hour?”
Fox looked at her, face completely deadpan. “No promises.”
Mara laughed and Fox laughed right there with her. It surprised him enough that he had to look down at the drink in his hand afterward, as if checking whether it had done something to him. Maybe it had. Maybe that was the point.
Stone leaned over from his stool, wobbling dangerously. “Fox.”
“Hm?”
Stone looked towards the back of the bar where several Guards were already dancing badly. “You’re going to have to explain this eventually.”
Fox looked up slowly. “…No, I’m not.”
Thorn snorted. “They’ll notice at some point that the Chancellor is MIA, you know.”
Fox sipped his drink. His head buzzed pleasantly. “Let them.”
Mara looked interested. “Are you always this relaxed after regicide?”
Fox considered that. “No.” A beat. “I think this is my first time.” That earned another round of laughter from everyone around them. Fox smiled into his glass.
By the time the next wave of drinks hit, the celebration had become a full phenomenon. There was so much going on. Clones were singing badly, arguing about whose shift had been worse, and trying and failing to invent a victory toast.
Fox caught fragments everywhere.
“—never thought I’d see the day.”
“—body chute worked, didn’t it?”
“—good riddance.”
“—can’t believe this is—“
“—does this mean we get hazard pay?”
“—hangover tomorrow is going to be awful.”
“—I’m asking anyways—”
And underneath all of it, the thing nobody said aloud: we are still here.
Fox raised his glass at some point. Thire noticed first. Then Stone. Then Thorn. Then the rest. The room gradually quieted.
Fox stared at them for a long moment, drink held loosely in one hand. There were so many of them now. So many red armor plates and tired eyes and scars and hard lines softened by the fact that they had survived another day.
He thought of the body chute, and of the Chancellor’s last breath. Thought of every year before this one. He raised the glass a little higher.
“To being impossible to kill,” he said.
A roar went up immediately. Mara laughed and banged a bottle against the bar in solidarity.
The Force flashed again across the lower city, bright enough that the Jedi felt it even without trying. Anakin made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a curse. Obi-Wan looked at him. Anakin stared back, a little stunned. “Whatever’s going on, it’s loud.”
Back in 404, Fox set his glass down and looked around at his people. At Thorn, who was definitely planning something illegal with Hound and Nox. At Stone, who looked like he might cry any moment now. At Thire, who was now challenging someone else to an arm wrestling contest. At Mara, who was pretending not to be fond of all of them and failing badly. At the rest of his Guard, loose-limbed and loud and bright and alive.
They were free. Well, maybe not officially or permanently, but free enough for tonight.
Fox leaned back against the counter and let the noise wash over him. The future could wait. The Republic, for once, could wait. Tonight belonged to the Guard.