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Fox curses his very existence on days like these. CCs don’t get the blessing of a set routine. There’s downtime, just enough to get the allotted hours of sleep and rest for efficient brain and body development, but now that they’re nearly done with all the basics, the rest of their day is filled with whatever trainers decide to experiment with at that point in time.
CCs are meant to be the best, capable of surviving and surpassing anything thrown at them.
Yeah, tell that to ‘37 whose brain matter painted the walls of the latest killing house run because one of the trainers decided to use live ammo again. Banthashit, all of it.
Cursed with being singled out to run extra laps - apparently he had ‘looked insubordinate’ while he had been just standing there - Fox is the last to stumble into the barracks.
It’s quiet. The CC batch have already crawled into their pods to sleep, or maybe crawled to bunk in someone else’s because some of the pod doors set into the wall blink with lights that signal them as empty.
The sound of the door swishing shut behind Fox garners an unfamiliar noise from one of the closed pods.
Kote’s. Of course whatever let out that terrified squeak is there.
Fox has no energy left for this. He needs sleep, and he won’t get any if he has to wonder what exactly his brother is risking decommissioning for.
“Whatever it is, put it back.” Fox warns.
For all that he pretends otherwise, he has a good guess about what it is that Kote has dragged in.
This isn’t the first time Kote would have tried to sneak a cadet into the CC-batch-01 barracks, though it was Wolffe who did so most often. For all that he was only third-oldest, the gruff clone had the heart of an ori'vod and the breath to constantly deny it despite all proof otherwise. On the other hand, Kote, Fox was sure, simply lacked any critical thought beyond keeping his brothers safe, every single batch included.
So, when he kicks the pod panel to make it open, he expects someone from the CC-batch-02 barracks, maybe even CC-batch-03’s. At worst, maybe one of the CMO trainee batchers that seem to follow Kote and Bly around like ducklings.
A young cadet who can’t be much older than three is a bit of a surprise, but not much. The fact that he appears to have been sobbing his heart out not a minute ago is somehow even less of a shock.
What does, in fact, make Fox pause, is how the cadet looks.
Blonde. The cadet’s dark curls are streaked with bronze and gold.
The fact that such a deviation from the clone-standard exists is not exactly a miracle.
Fett, in a way that occurs very commonly to those born in the mandalore system, is mutt skirting the far end of the label of near-human. He’s such a mess of genes that most of them simply don’t result in any outward pathology or their expression cancels out. At best it is noticeable in nothing much beyond sharper senses, improved endurance, and apparently a bite strength that could dent durasteel, though only Alphas are old enough to actually manage that one.
(Nobody knows how the oldest batch tested that, or why, and nobody dares ask.)
Yet cloning isn’t a perfect process and the kaminiise sure like to tamper. Sometimes things take time to show. More than one species in the galaxy has odd growth stages - togruta go through many sets of progressively sharper teeth, some nautolans entirely change color, just to name a few.
At the age of five, Fox’s batch found that their hair started coming in gray. It hadn’t been much - a strand here and there, a growing splash of salt-and-pepper by Kama’s temples, the spreading shimmer of off-white on One-Two’s nape, a progressively lightening sweep of silver over Aiwha’s brow.
It had been enough.
Fox was lucky, some would say before he tried to punch their teeth in. His hair began to pale later than the rest of his batch, late enough that the Kaminoans had already been noticeably watching for defects, late enough that nobody else but him could even try to hide.
It was Aiwha who found it first, the tiny sliver of white at the roots, right in the middle of his hairline. It was One-Two and Cub who thought to steal the ink that they used to stain the blunt blades during training so marks would show on pale plastoid. It was Kama who helped him scrub the freshers clean after their first mess of an attempt at a dye-job while O’Four and Fennec stood guard outside.
He was lucky - his hair stayed ink-black and he had a couple points more on their urban combat strategy modules, just enough to receive commendation from a trainer.
Fox was lucky, the last left alive because if the Kaminoans hate deviance a lot, they hate waste more.
Silent genes, they told him, as he stood alone at parade rest in a barrack that was full just that morning and tried not to scream.
He wonders what test this cadet’s batch failed.
“Anyone else left?” He asks Kote’s newest stray. Sure, the barracks aren’t spacious - that would be wasteful, even if the CCs are meant to be superior product - but they could surely hide away another one, maybe two.
The stray shakes his head.
Well, kriff.
He lived through this, he should know what to say, but instead he just knows what won’t work. ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, it just doesn’t cut it. ‘That’s kriffed’ is correct, but everyone knows that anyway. ‘Good luck’ is something the cadet will certainly need, but it rings empty.
“I’m the best at sharpshooting and urban tactics among these idiots,” is what he settles on, “1004 can probably recite both the regs and hyperspace routes from memory and Bly knows how to get extra points in field triage even if he says he hates the modules. Understood?”
Kote is looking at him funny, but Fox doesn’t pay him any mind. He just stares down the stray, watches something in those eyes turn from surprise to understanding.
The stray nods.
“Good, now keep it down.” Fox turns away.
He tries for dignified, but laying down onto his bunk comes as more of a collapse than anything controlled. Screw recoil, screw blaster training, and screw whichever bastard trainer decided to put hand-to-hand right after that block. The mattress beneath him is hard and presses against every single one of his bruises. He still has to fight not to melt into it and pass out then and there.
The blonde is still watching him. So is Kote, but now Fox can see something there that passess for pity.
He’ll have to stab the bastard extra hard whenever the right training slot permits it.
His thoughts must show on his face, because Kote huffs and rolls his eyes. “Get your beauty sleep, Fox.”
“He better be gone by morning,” he warns before he punches the controls to close the pod. It rattles shut into the wall like the slab of a morgue, just as dark too.
Fox shuts his eyes to block out the blinking red of the controls, draws the thin blanket over his head, and tries to sleep. He tries not to place pessimistic bets on whether the mutie will make it to the end of the month before the longnecks change their minds.
He fails.
*****
Surprise of the century - CT-7567 makes it through one week, then another.
‘67 isn’t even sure how, or why. No, he knows why - he passed a sharpshooting module on his first try and his batch did not. Then he passes the next, and the next, and has to pretend his new batch doesn’t watch him with pity in their eyes when the idea of an upcoming test is sometimes enough to make him retch.
Lucky them, with reg-black hair and many more chances. ‘67 only has this single one, he knows, because the rest of his batch failed theirs. He can’t even check if their scores had been lower than his anywhere else either, because the longnecks are already reusing their numbers on tubies.
Saves server space in their systems, that some vode can’t be saved.
The members of the batch he got thrown into don’t get it. He doesn’t quite have the words to tell them why he has to be the best, the first, the one exceptional in the eyes of the already excessively strict kaminoan standard.
Bootlicker, Sevens calls him and ‘67 punches him in the face just like Wolffe taught him. Then he does what he wishes he could do forever - he runs.
The CC-batch-01 barracks are quiet when he slips in, nearly deserted. The CCs don’t exactly have rec time, not when the kaminiise demand excellence in those they have hand-made for their roles, but that doesn’t stop them. ‘67 had seen 1138 disappear into the vents more than once and he knows Kote has figured out how to slip into the maintenance tunnels behind the wall panels because he had complained about how the Nulls once caught him sneaking around.
They apparently didn’t snitch on him because he threatened to tell the Alphas where their contraband stashes were. When two of the alphas caught Kote a week later, he told them he’d snitch on their stashes to the Nulls.
‘67 isn’t sure if Kote is a genius or suicidal, but he thinks Kote is awesome all the same.
Kote is not in the room, though.
The pod that houses ‘04 (and often Bly and Colt too whenever they wanted to cuddle with their favorite clone-shaped pillow - or victim, according to ‘04 - no concept of personal space, those two) is the only one that has the indicator light shining to show that someone is asleep inside. The uppermost pod by the right corner is open, though ‘67 can’t see if someone is there at the moment. If the way the vent nearby is missing screws, probably not.
That leaves only ‘26, who is slumped over his own bed sideways, head hanging off one end and legs off the other, snoring softly, and Fox.
7567 can’t help but freeze when those slightly off-shade eyes land on him, assessing. Fox always looks at him like that, like he’s looking for weakness. Not like a kaminoan or a trainer, ‘67 thinks, but maybe more like the Alpha-class that sometimes run cadets through a training sim. Looking for faults, but not failure.
“Could have gotten your headshots more centered,” Fox says, because somehow he always knows what almost lost ‘67 his perfect marks.
‘67’s fists clench and it’s only then that he realizes how his knuckles smart with the promise of bruising. Maybe he hadn’t learned from Wolffe as well as he could have. He hides his hands behind his back before he can think better of it, standing up straighter like he would at roll call.
Fox snorts. It’s not a kind sound, but the CC had never been kind to 7567. Bly looks at him with pity, Wolffe with wary acceptance, Kote tries so hard to help, but Fox only ever looks like he expects ‘67 to be better. Strangely, it hurts less.
Fox sighs.
“I’m bored,” the CC says, not quite a lie but ‘67 knows better, then a command, “We’re sparring.”
They spar until the bell rings, a 30-minute warning for lights-out, and Fox kicks ‘67 out of the room, mocking his footwork. If Fox has already spent half the time correcting his mistakes instead of actually sparring, they never talk about it.
*****
They don't talk about it. They don't even talk about not talking about it. It just… happens.
Fox helps the stray with astronav. He tosses a smuggled ration bar at his head when the cadet is curled up in Kote's - Cody's, now, just to piss off Prime - bunk because his test scores in wildlife survival slipped two digits from stellar and pretends that he hasn't done something similar in Pond's pod over advanced first aid lessons just a tenday ago. He makes fun of him and makes derisive jokes about kings and egos and golden crowns and pretends not to see how it only makes the cadet smile and relax when he treats his clear disadvantage as something other than a landmine.
The stray chooses a name. Rex, to mock Fox's mocking. It’s months after Cody first dragged him into the CC barracks and his hair has settled into an uniform golden blonde, as light as it will get without losing all pigment altogether.
"That language is dead," Fox replies after Rex explains his reasoning, "Just like you should be."
He ignores the aghast looks from the CC batch because the stray pounces and then he's too busy throwing Rex over his shoulder.
The stray says nothing when he catches Fox in the middle of the night standing in front of the fresher mirror, carefully checking the roots of his hair. He says nothing about how Fox's hands tremble when he finds a new sliver of gray.
The stray calls him Old Man the next morning. Fox trips him on their way down the hall.
That afternoon slot, when Fett actually deigns to train the CCs himself, Fox just so happens to mention Rex's perfect scores when goading Wolffe on the sparring mats.
"I got assigned to ARC training," Rex whispers like a confession two days later, shaking and somewhere between delighted and horrified.
"Well at least our Rough Draft can do something right," Fox replies and then kicks Rex off Cody's bunk so that he can put his legs up.
Rex grabs his foot to pull him to the ground and Fox gets to attempt fratricide instead of having to calm a panic attack, so he considers it a win.
“Congrats on being a bigger expense to the republic,” he’ll tell him later, because that’s what survival is about here - being too expensive, too good to replace.
Rex pats his shoulder in thanks and hits the bruise he just put there. Fox squeezes the ring of blue he left on the stray’s bicep in return and calls it even.
After all, he hates the little shit, no need to get attached to the dead man walking. He tries to tell himself that, he really does.
*****
Rex hates the cold, conniving bastard that is CC-1010. He repeats that to himself. His life would be better without the teasing and the criticism and the fingers that keep poking at all his failures and tender spots until he gets better, calluses over.
Nevermind that he is currently carefully massaging ink into his hair despite all the sleep this task is making him miss.
“Okay, that should do it,” Rex says and taps Fox’s head sharply to punctuate his point.
One golden eye cracks open to glare at him but the CC says nothing. He’d probably jab him in the gut on a normal day, but currently both of Fox’s shoulders are slathered in bacta and half-immobilized in bandages. Today, Fox only moves his foot threateningly, as if considering whether he should kick Rex; he’s done it before
He wouldn’t dare, though, Rex knows. It’s the middle of the night cycle and here they are, crammed together in one of the CC barracks freshers, with nothing keeping them company besides the faint glow of a bucket’s flashlight attachment set to the lowest power setting. Around them, no sound but the faint whirr of ventilation, Wolffe’s snoring in the other room, and the static of Kamino’s near-constant rain.
Fox only looks at him for a moment longer before his eyes close and his head tips to rest more heavily against his hand. Rex double-checks the timer - five more minutes - and lets himself sink to the ground. He rests his head against Fox’s knee and it only takes a couple of seconds before fingers start carding through his short-cropped curls.
The silence isn’t as much comfortable as it is simply exhausted. Rex wants to sleep, but survival comes first, so he fights to stay awake even as keeping his eyes open becomes a losing battle.
Hold on a moment.
“Are you really practicing your Ryl right now?” He shakes his head a little as Fox finishes drawing the equivalent for Orenth among his curls.
“Shut up,” Fox says, as eloquent as ever, as his foot taps a single warning right at the level of Rex’s kidneys.
Rex does, for the moment. Then,
“You forgot Thesh.”
Fox does kick him this time.
Rex hates the bastard.
He could just walk away, leave the idiot to struggle if he’s so high and mighty. Instead he gets up to help wash the ink away.
*****
Despite how much he has prepared for war, for serving under the jedi to defend the republic, Fox has never prepared himself for that moment to come.
It’s Cody that nudges him away from where he’s debating on whether ingesting the purple nutrient goop is really worth not being hungry. A quick jerk of his head guides Fox’s gaze.
There, a jedi.
There, death.
The jedi are the closest the vode have to myths and legends, to gods. Jedi are the standard by which Kaminiise measure the capabilities of the clones.
The jedi are a standard whose limits Fox has yet to learn and yet he already knows that there is some in which he is lacking. Kaminiise may have missed it, but will the Force?
He’s not the only one on the firing line.
The CC table is already abuzz with low whispers and quickly flashing hand signs, but it all goes quiet and still when he stands up.
“Wolffe can have my portion,” he says and walks away. He is too well-trained to bolt.
Rex’s adopted batch is not well-trained enough, clearly - they meet the announcement of jedi presence with cheers and a million questions even as Fox snaps at them to suit up.
“Don’t disappoint me,” He snaps at them, mostly the one before him.
Rex glances at the trooper helmet in his hands, then at Fox’s hairline.
He had been in too much in a hurry to grab his own kit, on the way. He jams the helmet over the golden mop of hair before the stray can say something stupid. He looks just like the rest like this, in shiny white plastoid that won't do shit against blaster bolts and will do even less against sabers.
To conform here is to survive. Fox alone in the room stands in training reds.
Command takes the fall, after all.
“Don’t die today, that’s an order.”
He walks much more calmly to fetch his own kit and tries not to flinch when he passes a man in brown robes.
*****
All the sims could not have prepared Rex for the moment of stillness as they all line up to climb into gunships that may have to carry back their corpses, if the jedi will even care enough to keep them.
This is not the first time he’s marching to a probable death. Live fire drills, killing house runs, trainers’ getting creative with exercises. Rex has once had to lay still in a sniper nest as a vod nearby slowly choked on his blood. Trainer Ralee had always been a crack shot and a sadistic one to boot.
Still, that was scheduled, that was routine.
This is the first time he might die in a place other than Kamino. It feels different. Important, maybe, if a clone was ever allowed to be, or experience, such a thing.
He blinks a sequence and a comline opens.
Though he is among common troopers at this deployment, some ARC benefits do still apply. One of the command-paint helmets at the head of a nearby platoon turns in his direction by the smallest fraction.
“Why did you do it?” he asks, because he has to know, because he might never get to ask it again. “Why help me?”
“I’m a CC, it’s my purpose to keep you idiot CTs alive,” Fox says and then, because he’s still the same he’s always been, even at death’s door, “You were a convenient practice dummy.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“If it makes you feel better, consider it a favor.”
“Can I pay it back with yellow ration cubes?”
“Live and find out.”
Then the gunship doors open and the line goes silent.
By the time Rex gets a moment to breathe back to Kamino, battered and bruised and sent right back to conclude the last of his ARC training modules, the CCs that made it out of the Geonosian haran are already scattered among the stars.
*****
Fox thrives in Triple-Zero.
The Coruscant Guard is a mission set to fail. Fox has always been good at keeping up appearances, clawing out excellence and pushing it out into an unfeeling veneer.
He's a survivor. He's now Marshal Commander. He's the Coruscant Guard.
The Corries are judged by standards that never get explained and failure means death, and that is so familiar that it almost makes him homesick. Or maybe just sick.
So Fox sets higher standards, stricter rules, because if you know a challenge you can meet it.
Armor painted the same conforming way except for when it's purposefully not. Shifts and routes and squads polished to perfection, any slip-up noted and to never be repeated.
When he tells his Corries to go, they go. When he tells them to jump, they ask how high because unlike natborns, he'll demonstrate it himself instead of leaving them to guess.
He is not kind, but he keeps them alive.
Any trooper with specialized training finds themselves in the role of an instructor. ARCs, ARFs, technicians, medics, slicers, many more all lose sleep bringing others up to speed with efficiency that rivals flash training.
Every lesson, every test score and skill assessment are cataloged by Fox in detail so meticulous some would call it obsessive. The documentation is filed and slipped away between menial reports.
The next time a decommissioning request hits his desk, Fox denies it.
"Kamino doesn't produce CTs that could efficiently replace these units." He tells the livid senator. "I'm afraid the specialized education would be too great of an expense for the current Republic budget. Rest assured that appropriate corrective action will be carried out instead."
They can't disprove him.
That evening, he slaps the dead men walking on their shoulders and congratulates them for being incorrigibly massive wastes of republic funds. As for corrective action, they don't show their buckets in the senate for two days. They deserve their short leave, in Fox's opinion, that senator really was a massive bastard.
"We would die for you," Thorn says at some point. He's laying on the cold tile of Fox's office, because he's concussed and is sure that the medics won't look for him here.
(Fox has already comm'd Suture and Biohazard and given them the all-clear.)
"Live," he orders, "I don't have time for the paperwork."
And if he pulls a double-shift because otherwise Thorn going on his rounds would probably end with him falling off a walkway in a daze, it's only because he has no time to replace the commander, nothing more.
*****
Rex jumps from campaign to campaign and then back to Kamino.
Command training, this time. He thinks he is prepared for it, following at the heels of CCs for as long as he had.
Alpha-17 crushes those expectations.
The CCs at least respond to his messages of complaint with support.
Fox sends back a voice message that is a solid minute of uninterrupted laughter. It is followed by a document that ends up as a detailed description of how to kick out A-17’s weaker knee during a spar.
Of course that ends with Rex being singled out as the favorite, which means extra training. So much extra training.
This time, Fox’s voice message is three minutes long.
Going back to the front lines almost feels like mercy, even if the general Rex is to serve under forgets the limits of mortal men on the daily. Yet Rex is good at adapting, at running head first into a challenge because to hesitate is to fail is to die.
He's a dead man walking, why not have fun along the way?
He wrangles his legion into something that might just survive the impossible that Skywalker keeps leading to their doorstep, and then he wrangles his general into learning common sense so that it stops happening quite so often.
(Well, he wrangles Cody into talking to his own General who then levels Skywalker with one reproachful look over holo and suddenly Rex’s word carries twice the weight, which, eh, close enough. Hero With No Fear? No, it’s Hero With One Fear and that fear is named Obi-Wan Kenobi.)
He gets specialist troops and jetpacks and ARCs on his roster. Soon, the 501st is all but gloating about their success rate.
When he’s tired of the headache in the middle of leave, he sends that headache to the Corries.
He receives a total of two messages from Fox by the end of it.
The first is a simple ‘Do better’ that follows a picture of what he recognizes as his 501st boys in standardized corrie kits laid out all over the room, clearly too exhausted to do anything but sleep while the corries themselves, battered and bruised where pale plastoid doesn’t hide away the toll of their work, all pose around them. Two of the enterprising corrie vode are already uncapping markers for some good old fashioned drawn-on-the-face shaming.
The second comes fifteen minutes later - ‘I’m keeping these’ with another holo. From the four troopers happily napping in a pile behind the drunk tank rayshield, two are ones Rex recognizes as his most troublemaking ARCs.
‘Please do,’ he sends back.
He’ll remark on the irony just a year later.
*****
It goes like this - the guard does their job well. They do their job well because to step out of line is to die.
They do their job well, even when they can’t remember doing it.
Dazed and bruised, some come back with no memory of why they left their patrols.
No Corrie walks alone - this morphs from a strong suggestion to a rule written in blood.
It’s Command that loses time, then.
That’s alright, that’s why Captains and Sergeants are never who the kaminiise assign, but are instead volunteers taking over those CT numbers. It’s volunteers that paint their armor into something different, something to catch attention, so step in the line of fire.
Command takes the punishment, that’s another rule they all pretend not to know.
There is so much the guard pretends not to know.
Command pretends not to see troopers following, just out of sight. They pretend not to notice when their weapons vanish for a day or two, just forget to borrow something else until they are returned.
The guard takes care of their own.
Fox picks up his riffle and answers the chancellor’s call.
*****
Rex has seen clones die before. Of course he has, death has surrounded him since he was a tubie, and even before - cullings, training, war.
He has seen vode kill vode before.
Yet this is the first time he has seen it happen without a trainer forcing their hand.
Maybe that’s why he stumbles back from Fives in horror he cannot name and just…stares. Maybe that’s why he only snaps back into motion when one of the Corries not guiding away Skywalker goes to grab Fi- the corpse.
They cannot have Fives, they can’t-
Fox steps into his path like he is used to stepping between his men and danger. He steps into his path like Rex is the danger.
And oh does some part of him secretly wish it to be so.
He looks at his brother - and yes, it’s ‘brother’ still because his horror and grief has yet to turn to rage though he knows that it will, and maybe then he’ll be able to act instead of flounder - he looks at Fox and only one thing comes to his mind.
“Why? You could have done something, anything-”
Because this cannot be, something is wrong. Maybe he is asleep and this is all but a nightmare.
The black of the visor before him offers nothing but judgment. When Rex steps forward so does the brother before him until they are nearly chest-to-chest.
“What did you think would happen?” Fox’s voice comes, clipped and cold. “That I would just let him march on out of here after the osik he pulled?”
Maybe it’s wishful thinking or momentary madness, but Fox isn’t usually a man of many words. If that hadn't tipped Rex off, the fact that he knew - and truly believed once, and maybe believes still - that Fox would rather eat his own blaster than use it on a brother surely would have.
Especially since the same rifle that just shot Fives is now tapping at his chestplate. If it was to go off, it would shoot straight up into his jaw, point-blank.
It’s one of the first things a cadet learns, because they have blasters before they have toys - you don’t point a deadly weapon at someone you don’t intend to kill. That leaves two options, now - either Fox is happy to risk killing Rex if the rifle misfires, or the weapon isn’t capable of it.
He glances down. The safety is still off.
The Corries are moving Fives’ with more care than Rex has ever seen someone afford a corpse, even that of a vod.
“I’m not letting this incident go,” He warns.
“The Coruscant guard will conduct an investigation.” Fox replies, "Feel free to check in at your convenience."
*****
Rex comes barging into his office a few days later than Fox expected, yet much sooner than he would like.
It’s not enough time. Not long enough for him to come to grips with what he now pretends to not know, not long enough for him to plan, to figure out how to do his job and protect his brothers. He never has enough time, so it’s business as usual.
He gets an early warning, at least, cold reports from the guard not in the know and quiet words from the few who had been there when he aimed his rifle at a vod’s heart and pulled the trigger.
He’s always been a distrustful bastard. He’s never been happier that these past years he has stopped trusting even himself.
He tries to dredge up some amusement when Rex strides into his office and rounds onto the captain in the room. The blonde then does a double-take and turns towards Fox.
“What?” He asks, dumbly. The Captain currently wearing Fox’s armor gives a mocking salute.
“Strip,” Fox orders.
“What?” Rex asks again.
“You’re on patrol, trooper.”
Rex is too confused to dodge and fumbles his attempt to catch the helmet painted in the colors of a corrie grunt thrown at him.
Fox decides that he will send the recording to Neyo if he survives this. That man deserves some more blackmail material to cheer him up.
*****
When Rex marched into the Coruscant Guard barracks, the battalion-in-all-but-name was clearly well aware of what had brought him here. All the vode that crossed his path had their faces hidden and their weapons on full display.
An ARF trooper had been lounging against a wall by Fox’s office door. The massiff at his feet stared at Red with cold intent.
Vode an is a refrain often heard at the GAR, and the CG take it to a new level.
When they step out of the office, the barracks might as well be abandoned. Fox leads them through winding halls. The only trooper they pass as they finally spill into the Coruscant streets many levels down doesn’t look at them. Actually, he almost pointedly turns even further in the opposite direction.
“What the chancellor doesn’t know, the chancellor won’t mind.” Fox says. Rex tries to hear some gloating in those words, like the Fox he once followed through the darkened halls of Kamino after curfew.
He only sounds tired.
“So-” He starts, when the crowds start to thin.
How many levels down are they now? The people here are few, but they all stare at him with things in their eye he doesn’t want to name. At least they scuttle away when Fox turns his visor their way.
Clearly, the distinct paint of a commander -captain? lieutenant?- carries some weight here. How this reputation was earned is a question Rex knows will never get answered.
After all, the projected lifetime of the clones doesn’t exceed many statutes of limitation.
“No chatter on patrol,” Fox cuts him off.
A lift there, a staircase, even rappelling down a ventilation shaft that a medium-sized shuttle could fly through, at one point.
They stop by a nondescript door by an even more nondescript apartment. Two troopers are lounging in the shade of the doorframe. Their matte paint conceals them in the shadow.
The medic’s helmet tilts just slightly. After a minute, Fox’s inclines ever so slightly down.
Then the medic and the trooper are gone, just two corries on their circuit.
A click on Fox’s vambrace opens the door. It creaks and a cheerful voice from inside answers.
“So, does my crazy finally get graced with company again?”
Rex doesn’t tackle Fives in his haste to check him over, but it’s a near thing.
*****
Fox watches Rex as he and his stray ARC talk.
He doesn’t listen, because he heard it all before. He heard it in the half-delirious ramblings when Fracture was all but pinning the ARC to the bed, trying to measure the damage that Fox’s modified rifle had caused.
It was then that Fives’ survival had become more need-to-know than already before. He would be a brother-killer to the GAR all while the corries closed ranks around him.
The guard protect their own because Fox protects his own.
He heard it after, when the ARC was coherent once more and Fox had to explain that no, he cannot go back to his vode. Not now, maybe not ever.
He had sent the medic out of the room as a precaution. After all, Command takes the punishment. Luckily the ARC is far less set on fight-or-flight when not drugged out of his mind.
Now he watches as Rex takes it all in, meets his eyes when he looks his way, gaze full of horrified understanding.
The GAR was on the frontlines. The Corries were at home base.
Until this day, they had assumed it was the home base of the allies. They were wrong.
*****
“Remember that favor, Rex?” Fox asks.
It’s the middle of the night cycle and here they are, crammed together in the safehouse fresher, with nothing keeping them company besides the faint glow of a bucket’s flashlight attachment set to the lowest power setting and the bottle they had been passing between each-other. Around them, no sound but the faint whirr of ventilation, Fives’ snoring in the other room, and the distant rush of Coruscant's near-constant traffic.
There are many favors Rex can think of - anything from fast-tracked paperwork to contraband to 501st troopers let off with an informal warning instead of an arrest or demerit, all paid back with troopers assigned to replace Corries to give them a little taste of being on leave or crates of rations or ammo or newer armor somehow ‘forgotten’ during a resupply at Triple-Zero.
“Yes,” he says.
There’s one he has never managed to pay back. Two, now that Fox killed Fives on the Chancellor’s orders and left him alive for Rex’s peace of mind.
After all, it's Fox's job to keep idiot CTs alive.
“Good,” Fox says, squaring his shoulders, “I’ll need you to kill me.”
*****
Once, Rex had to lay in a sniper’s nest as a brother choked on his blood right by his side because Trainer Ralee was always a crack shot and a sadistic one to boot.
Now, Rex lays in a sniper’s nest and levels his sights on a brother’s throat.
If it hits, death will be slow and painful.
He hates the bastard, he thinks. He hates him with all the teasing and the criticism and the fingers that kept poking at all his failures and tender spots. He hates how he keeps secrets and never says what he means. He hates how he shot a vod without a flinch.
(He doesn’t think about how it got him here. He doesn’t think about how criticism was always sandwiched by praise and how ‘you can do better’ never rang with disdain but with unshakeable belief.)
(He doesn’t think about a brother, alive and staying that way. All of their brothers that, if he survives this day, will get a chance not only to stay alive but to live .)
What the chancellor doesn’t know, the chancellor won’t mind.
As the orbital mirrors shift on the hour. The sunlight glints off the windows of the senate dome.
Rex pulls the trigger.
A red flash.
Fox hits the ground.
A splash of red against an already red wall.
Fox hits the ground, but so does the chancellor who stood just behind him.
*****
Fox picks himself off the ground. There’s a corpse in front of him and his HUD blinking an alert about the faintest trace of carbon scoring at the top of his bucket.
He saves a holo. It’s for evidence, of course, not because his commanders will want it for their rec room dartboard.
Hey, maybe Cody’s stray isn’t so bad after all.
Though he still could have gotten the headshot shot a little more centered.