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The grate in the floor dug into his knees, sparking sharp, needling pain up his legs and along his spine with every twitch of his muscles. An invisible, unfathomable weight pressed down on him, slowly yet surely crushing him as he struggled against it to keep himself from also falling to his hands.
The prowling beast in front of him didn’t deserve the respect of kneeling before him, let alone crawling on all fours like a dog.
“Why are you here?” The crackle of the vocoder was frustrated, the modulated rasps echoing through the chamber. “What reason has my Master sent you to me?”
This was the third time he’d been asked, and that tiny, vicious part of him wanted to bare his teeth and snap. But disobedience had been beaten out of him since he’d been a tiny cadet, with respect and loyalty threatened into his very marrow. He was the perfect soldier, the prized product out of millions made, sold and traded like a showcase nerf at auction.
And so he stared up at the looming, inky shadow that was Darth Vader, his golden Taung eyes reflecting back at him from the polished lenses carved into the eye sockets of the cold, cruel mask looking down at him. He wasn’t afraid of the mask or the creature trapped inside, nor was he scared of the death breathing down his neck.
No, he mostly just hated the Sith towering over him and his stupid karking games.
“The Emperor deemed my skills to be better use under your command.” The answer was devoid of emotion as the previous two had been, staring back unblinking into the eerie, smoky glass. Dead, like the empty, soulless husk like the good little slave they wanted him to be.
He could speculate the reasons the Emperor sent him to Vader’s feet, knowing the inevitable that beat its mourning drum in time with his heart. There had been no further use for him on Coruscant- what had been left of the Guard after Order 66 for those who had still been on planet and not on assignment were almost all dead or gone now- replaced with natborns who wore nicer armor, bore sleeker weapons, and marched with the cocky assurance that they had been hand-picked by the Emperor’s favored to guard the Empire’s rotted heart.
He was a relic from a time the Emperor wanted his budding Empire to forget, and like all broken toys, he was tossed aside to the one person who would most likely kill him in the most painful way possible, far away from any scrap of hope that may have lingered behind on Coruscant.
The only hope that Fox bore were with the ones who’d vanished or never returned from their off-world missions during Order 66, that perhaps they managed to get out alive and were living their best life somewhere far away from the hellscape they’d spent years trying to defend for naught. Or that they at least died with dignity out from the decaying bowels of that wretched planet, died seeing the stars free from the smog-filled skies, died with grass under their feet and the wind against their skin, died with the warmth of the sun cradling them as they slipped away-
Fox was going to die with metal in his knees and torn apart by a rabid Sith Lord in a windowless room on a Star Destroyer he couldn’t name, but at least he was no longer on Coruscant.
“I tire of your feeble lies.”
The weight pressing down on him suddenly lifted, but only so the invisible noose to catch him round the throat and wrench him almost off his knees, forcing him into a painful angle of looking up at the hostile entity before him as Vader oozed into every crevice of his vision as his heavy boots clomped ever so closer. The Sith was practically on top of him, towering like some dark, ominous skyscraper during a midnight blackout.
“Your emotions betray you, Commander.” The unseen noose tightened until Fox audibly gagged at the pressure against his throat. “If you refuse to tell me, then I will simply take it.”
Fox knew what was coming before the indescribable pain ripped through his skull. A thousand sharp fingers clawed their way into his brain, blurring the present with glimpses of what had past his gaze seconds, minutes, days, years ago. Vader slammed his way through whatever natural defenses Fox may have had, scouring and tearing with uncaring ferocity in a single heartbeat.
But in that weightless, split second of a moment of consciousness and agony, between one heartbeat and the next, Fox gathered up one specific memory, took it in his metaphorical hands, and shoved it right back at Vader with the same vicious heartlessness and rage that choked both their lungs.
The one thing that he knew would make the monster that was Darth Vader, the Jedi Killer, the Destroyer of the Republic, hurt.
“I’m alright!”
“You are certainly not!”
The evening sunlight was pouring in through the windows, painting the apartments in brilliant oranges and yellow hues as Fox helped Ellé lower Senator Padmé Amidala onto the elegant settee. Monte é looked equally ready to give the Senator a good tongue-lashing, but Sabé was already on the case, hands on her hips as she glowered at her friend.
“I’ve just been feeling a little under the weather, Sabé,” Padmé tried waving off, only for the glower to intensify.
“For three weeks?! Padm é, I love you, but you’re an idiot.”
“You need to see a doctor,” Monte é put in her own two credits before Sabé could combust, giving the Senator her own disappointed look. “What if it’s something serious? Slow-acting poisons have similar symptoms to common illnesses, as you should know.”
“I can’t,” Padmé stressed as she began to start pulling the several hundred pins out of her hair in frustration, Ellé quick to kneel down and start carefully unclasping the many ornate linkages of her dress. “Doctor Array is one of the few doctors who is naturally immune to the Naab-Oor Plague and his help to the health of an entire planet is paramount above my own. And you know how the doctors here are. So much of a sniff of a good story, and they’re selling it off to the highest bidding media company!”
“What about the Jedi?” Ellé suggested, but Sabé was shaking her head.
“The Chancellor’s latest defense policy has forced all but two of the Jedi Healers to the battlefield,” she stated with pinched lips. “And there’s already questions of our integrity to our people among the other Senators. There’s rumors that Padmé’s less of Naboo’s Senator and more of the Jedi’s Senator.”
“Which is ridiculous,” Padmé griped, tossing a pin with a little more force than necessary and causing it to bounce off the settee and onto the floor. “They are defending the Republic and our allies! They deserve a say in the military policies voted on the floor if we’re going to conscript them and make them struggle against their own beliefs.”
“Other factors don’t help, Pads,” Sabé pointed out, and the handmaidens passed a knowing look between them as Padmé deflated in her seat with a sigh, the previous fight leaving her.
Fox already knew of the Senator and General Skywalker’s relationship. Padmé might be a touch more subtle, but Skywalker wouldn’t know subtlety even if it bit him, and Linkup had spent many hours scrubbing holofeeds to prevent a leak of any kind.
Regardless of the status of their relationship- whether it be friends with benefits or something more serious- discovery of it would be detrimental to everything they’d been trying to work towards in getting their proposals passed along in bettering the lives of the clones- both during and after the war.
The Jedi had few allies within the Senate- losing one would effectively ruin both theirs and their troopers’ futures within the Republic.
Fox didn’t know if they knew he knew. Sabé, he reckoned, had a suspicion- she was far craftier and sneakier than any of the other handmaidens, and he didn’t doubt for a second that she’d thought of the holofeeds as well and found them devoid of scandalous meetings. But he wasn’t going to say anything- it wasn’t his job to notify them of the secrets he knew, only that he kept the Senator- and other Senators- safe.
“I’m calling my CMO,” he stated, booking no room for argument as he was already tapping away at his wrist comm. “Nearly fainting after extended period of known illness is a safety risk I am not willing to take. Sir.”
“Not to discredit your medic, Commander, but are they discreet?”
Fox settled Sabé with a cool look as he sent the message with one last click.
“No disrespect to you, sir, but I find your lack of trust with my men insulting.”
“Its fine, Sabé.” Padmé reached over to capture her friend’s hand, giving it a squeeze as she smiled softly. “I trust the Commander’s word. If he says his medic will keep quiet, then I believe him.”
“And he will,” Fox reaffirmed. “And not just because he’s mute.” He grimaced as three pairs of wide eyes swiveled to him. Thorn always said his jokes needed work. “Geonosis. He’s recovered. You can trust him.”
It was barely ten minutes later had him ushering in the imposing form of Hacksaw in full kit through the apartment door and into the room, a medical bag slung over one shoulder and bucket tipping just a hair to the left towards Fox before facing the women at large.
“This is CMO Hacksaw,” Fox introduced in lieu of any sort of verbal response from his silent medic, before ignoring the proper etiquette of conversation and gesturing towards the Senator on the settee. “Your patient is there.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met before,” Padmé gave him a warm smile, shifting as if she was about to stand but a single blank stare of Hacksaw’s bucket had her changing her mind and merely offered out a hand. To his credit, Hacksaw didn’t hesitate, his large palm dwarfing her dainty fingers. “Please, feel free to take your off helmet here. This goes for you as well, Commander.”
Hacksaw tilted his head towards Fox, who sighed in the safety of his bucket one last time before reaching up and breaking the seal.
The clones had leapt at the chance of creativity the moment they’d stepped off Kamino, but Fox and Hacksaw had been one of the few in the Guard to resist the urge to go wild with piercings and hair colors. Fox already stood out with his Taung eyes, and while he kept his hair reasonably short, had opted to only get an ear cuff instead of any loops, hoops, dangles or whatever other crazy jewelry the galaxy possessed. Hacksaw had been a holdout for ages, but now his hair had grown enough from its buzzcut to curl and provide the beginnings of some unfortunate bucket hair.
Both of them had delved into tattoos, however, as they were easy to hide under their kit, and Etch did impressive work.
Fox lingered back as Ellé rose to allow Hacksaw to take knee before Padmé, explaining to him all the symptoms that Padmé had been experiencing, and the Senator trying to downplay it. Monteé collected the many hair pins off the settee to give the medic more workable space as Sabé eased away to stand beside Fox’s shoulder.
“Do you trust him?” she whispered, her eyes never leaving Padmé or Hacksaw as the medic swiped the medscanner over her before gently taking her hand for a blood sample.
Fox knew where Sabé was coming from. That terrible, soul-deep concern, love, and devotion, for a person so engrained into their very being that it would feel as if their heart were to be ripped out if something happened to them.
And yet… if it came down to the wire, to save the one she loved versus the lives of many, Fox knew Sabé would let Padmé go.
Fox knew, because he would do the same for Hacksaw.
“With my life,” he replied gravely, his own gaze never leaving the pair even as Monteé and Ellé helped Padmé ease out of the elaborate dress to relax in the much more comfortable, but still appropriately conservative slip she wore underneath at the silent direction of Hacksaw.
There was a slight furrow to Hacksaw’s brow- invisible to the natborns, but Fox, like much of the Guard, could read his microexpressions after years of living and working alongside him. It was almost a perplexed look, but he didn’t give away anything more as he held out his hands in silent request before he was given permission to feel along her abdomen where most of the complaints have been, the scanner running secondary tests.
The setting sunlight turned the medic’s curls into a rippling halo of fire as he tipped his head one way then the other in a tiny movement of confusion. His hands slipped away from her abdomen when the scanner chirped from its place on the settee, reaching to pull it closer to examine the results.
“What’s the verdict?” Padmé teased gently as Hacksaw looked over the readings. “Not dying, am I?”
Instead of a reply, Hacksaw flipped the scanner over to show the results to her.
Small hands cradled around the scanner, the medic relinquishing it to her with fingertips brushing as Padmé’s eyes roamed over the screen. Her smile slipped as her eyes grew round, her mouth opening and closing as speech left her as well.
“What’s wrong?” Sabé stepped towards the settee as Ellé and Monteé crowded closer as well, one moving around to the back of the settee as the other two moved to bracket on either side of Hacksaw. “What’s wrong with her?”
Padmé lifted her gaze to her handmaidens, her voice a little breathless in her shock.
“I’m… pregnant?”
The claws in his brain churned, the thick, icy, pressure against his skull started to slip. But the colors behind his eyelids remained, and Fox sank his own claws into the blackness, forcing yet another memory down the throat of the demon currently wrapped around his very mind and soul with the perfect precision he’d been touted for all the years of service.
Vader may tear and rend to hurt and maim, but Fox only ever shot to kill-
“I think it’s a boy.”
Padmé had been firm in keeping the news of her pregnancy under wraps, but it hadn’t been without its arguments. Fox had insisted that her usual Guards were to be warned, so that if anything happened they would know what to do. But that was more people in the know, more potential for the rumors to slip out, and Padmé refused to be treated any different. There had also been arguments of seeing an actual doctor or Jedi Healer, because despite how good Hacksaw was, he was still a medic and natborn babies were completely out of their usual wheel well.
The eventual terms hashed out between Padmé, her handmaidens, and Fox, were that there would be no doctors and no telling the other Guardsmen, but Hacksaw would be visiting her often for check-ups and even given her and each handmaiden his personal comm code to contact him if anything happened.
It was a miracle of Nubian tradition that kept the pregnancy, or at least the physical changes in Padmé being blasted on every news channel, as their fashion made it to hide the growing roundness. Something about protecting mothers of royalty when they weren’t voting in their own monarchs and keeping people from poisoning them or something, but all Fox translated it to was mothers going “mind your own damn business”.
The layers and creative draping had been peeled away today, leaving Padmé in a comfortable tunic that was raised up to just under the chest to expose her stomach as she laid on the settee with pillows all around her. Monteé was on the arm of the settee by her head, watching as Hacksaw prepped the state-of-the-art transportable ultrasound device he must’ve killed someone for because Fox knew the Guard never had one in stock before.
“Well I think it’s a girl!” Ellé called from the kitchen, the scraping of pots and pans and C3-P0 fretting how whatever they were making was going well and beyond what the recipe stated. “Mama always says that girls treat their mama’s well!”
“Pretty sure barfing your guts out every morning for weeks straight isn’t considered nice,” Monteé retorted with a very unladylike eyeroll before looking over at Sabé. “What do you think?”
“I think you need to help Ellé before she sets the entire building on fire,” Sabé replied dryly from the other end of the settee, Padmé’s feet propped up into her lap. Her point was only further supported by a loud crash and the increasingly panicked rambling of the protocol droid, causing Monteé to sigh and slip off the arm to flaunt off to the kitchen to the rescue.
“What do you think it’ll be?” Sabé asked as soon as Monteé was out of sight, a conspiring smirk on her face as she squeezed Padmé’s ankle. “I think it’ll be whatever it is he doesn’t want.”
“Of course you do,” Padmé sighed, but smiled, shaking her head. “I want them to be healthy and happy, whichever it may be.” Her smile faded a little, her hand coming to rest high just below her chest in an aborted move to rest it on her belly and into the gel Hacksaw was gently spreading across it. “I just wish he was here right now…”
Sabé gave her ankle another squeeze in sympathy, even though it was clear she didn’t care for General Skywalker at all. He was still Padmé’s husband, and the lightyears between them as he fought in a war he may never come back from must be a consistent worry in her mind.
It was one of the many reasons Fox himself didn’t like Skywalker, aside from being a reckless idiot who consistently put his brothers in danger. He refused to admit he was wrong, would flaunt the rules of his own Order and then not even have the decency to admit to the lies and secrecy. Fox didn’t know how their rules worked, but he knew enough of Jedi to know they wouldn’t be heartless enough to keep a husband away from his pregnant wife.
Did even his Togruta apprentice know? General Kenobi? Rex, perhaps, knew something, since those two were practically glued at the hip more so than Skywalker’s own student, but Rex wasn’t Skywalker’s supposed family.
It just wasn’t right.
“I can feel you brooding from here, Fox.”
Fox stirred from his thoughts from the large, obnoxiously plush armchair situated across at a diagonal from the settee.
It’d taken some time before he was comfortable enough to peel off some of his kit inside the apartment, where he could sit comfortably with chestplate, arms, and helmet stacked neatly at the doorway. Fox had been wary of being too close to Padmé after the incident with one of Torrent Company’s ARCs. He had been under the influence of some unknown substance, a fact only found in the bloodwork taken before the start of the autopsy, before several of the Chancellor’s Red Guard had swiftly ghosted in and taken the body away before Last could go any further.
Fox was mournful of having to kill one of his own brothers, but he refused to regret it. Recent policy had dictated that anyone designated as an assassin were to be faced with upmost prejudice. Too many past assassins and bounty hunters had escaped prison and caused more havoc, and it had been decided within the Senate that there would no longer be any mercy.
And Fives’ blaster hadn’t been on stun.
Skywalker had been furious, turning hostile to any Guard within his sights whenever he was planetside. Fox himself wasn’t popular within the rest of the GAR, but there were many still within the upper ranks that understood his position, understood that it was a lose-lose situation, and that there hadn’t been anything else that could’ve been done. And while Skywalker was pissed, Padmé had been more understanding, having been a queen to a planet under siege, that there would always be those “what ifs” and having to make hard choices and facing their reaching consequences.
“Sorry.” He uncrossed his leg from over his knee, placing both boots back onto the floor. “I’ll leave the brooding to Sabé.”
Padmé laughed, only to swallow it down behind a hand as Hacksaw gave her a Look. Sabé shot him a glare, but the corners of her mouth were twitching slightly.
“So Commander- boy or girl?” Sabé questioned as Hacksaw placed the scanner into the gel and onto Padmé’s stomach, his bright amber eyes fixated intensely onto the portable ultrasound screen as he slowly dragged the device across her skin.
“A pain in the shebs,” he grunted, causing both women to crack up and forcing Hacksaw to pull the scanner away and pointedly stare at Padmé until she settled down again, giving him an apologetic smile and a gentle touch to the slow curls on his head.
“Sorry, I’ll behave.”
“Like anyone believes that.”
Padmé tug her toes into Sabé’s thigh as Hacksaw returned back to scanning, her eyes alight with happiness and awe as the medic shifted and allowed her to hold the screen, angled away from Fox and Sabé so both Padmé and Hacksaw could see what was going on inside. She was practically glowing, vibrating with excitement as she took the first looks at her growing child-
Pain radiated from his back and shoulders, his head throbbing in time with his frantic heartbeat.
Fox was slumped against the floor where he’d been thrown across the room and into the wall, every breath seeming to rattle against his ribs and the sharp metallic taste against his lips as blood dripped down from his nose and coating his teeth from his bleeding tongue.
Darth Vader still stood in the center of the room, his mechanic rasps loud and shaky. The very air seemed to tremble around him, frost clinging to the metal floor and along the walls around his feet. Yet Vader stood there, poised with the terrible rage that boiled just under the surface. Not moving, not speaking, the only sound being the eerie rasps of his breathing.
And then he turned with a sweep of his armorweave cloak and stormed out of the room without another word.
Fox spat a glob of blood from his lips, baring his blood-stained teeth as he grinned, bitter and vicious.
Looks like neither of them would get what they wanted.