I just wanted to say that I am absolutely loving your ‘intent and opportunity’ fic!!
Genuinely the story and the characters in general are living in my head rent free like I had never really had an opinion on Appo and now I am obsessed with him
Thank u for sharing your writing!!
Thank you!!! I'm so glad you're enjoying :D I have been having SUCH a good time writing it...and also it's quickly turning into possibly the longest thing I've ever written, somehow. I'm very excited to see what everyone thinks of all the fun stuff I have planned
I am a strange person craving an IWTV/SVSSS crossover of the Akasha the ancient vampire queen and gendercidal maniac vs. Tianlang Jun the heavenly demon emperor with weaponized blood variety.
Shen Yuan and Daniel Molloy is off to the side somewhere critiqueing the terrible internet power fantasy of it all.
Of course, the rest of the crews are also around. Somebody's going to get swallowed un-alive by a gigantic snake before the day is done.
Probably Armand for being a jealous asshole.
He was hanging around hearing Shen Qingqiu described as an Immortal Master and decided to put it to the test, not because SQQ is bitching-and-bonding with Daniel, and certainly not because SQQ's husband/devoted disciple is right there getting headpats and sneaking kisses behind a fan and being all the things Armand lost or never had.
Anyway.
Mind you, he's lucky Zhuzhi-Lang got to him first. ZZL will eventually regurgitate him when SQQ asks, and he'll ask because Daniel would get upset if his maker dies. But if LBH had gotten there first, well - Armand in three or four pieces on the ground is more of a challenge.
Tagged by @lyouwish and @victoriousscarf for the last line challenge
Appo begrudgingly supposed that Cody might have been going somewhere with his nonsense after all. The reports certainly suggested that there was some benefit to inspiring a moral crisis of conscience in an enemy, even if it ultimately resulted in no change in outcome for them.
After the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.
“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick -“
(when the GAR’s most blindly obedient clone starts following in the footsteps of its first clone traitor, the galaxy starts to change)
chapter under the cut
“But what am I supposed to do with all of them?”
High Kakistarch Dysticus Margeinlis was a twitchy, nervous, anxious wreck of a Mordageen. Unusually bulky, with muscle clearly shaped for looks instead of indicating any level of strength, he wore the regalia of his office (marks of shame on Mordagon, for the most part) very loosely, as if he hoped that they would one day fall off and go away without him having to take any affirmative step to make it so. This could be said to summarize his entire philosophy of ruling and, indeed, of life. The rare times he actually made a decision tended to be motivated by his love of gambling, a love that existed only when he thought he was likely to win; any level of uncertainty, by contrast, made him start to sweat profusely and speak very quickly, his already irritating voice escalating into a shrill whine.
Unfortunately for him, he was also terrible at estimating any sorts of odds.
Having worked with the High Kakistarch a few times on administrative matters that Anacrid had declared himself too junior to authorize, Appo had concluded that Dysticus was perfectly suited to his position as Mordagon’s "worst possible option".
“Nothing,” Appo said dully. Perhaps he would have previously mustered up some level of patience with Dysticus, or at least scraped up the bare minimum of respect necessary for a natborn authority figure, but he had used up all of his available emotions. “You don’t have to do anything with them. They are not your concern. They are free to do as they like.”
“They’re my problem because they're on my planet. As citizens of my planet, no less! A whole dank farrik battalion of clones –”
“A standard GAR battalion is twenty times the size.”
Dysticus paused his rant, not having expected an interjection. “A what?”
“They are not a battalion,” Appo explained. “They are five percent of a battalion.”
“Oh. Well, there’s still a lot of them! An awful lot of them!” Dysticus continued, having clearly realized that Appo (or "Kal" as Dysticus had officiously judged himself intimate enough to call him) wasn’t planning on adding anything of actual value to the conversation. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re not exactly what I’d call the calm and sedate type! I don't care what type of training or engineering the Republic says they've got. In the end, they're still clones of your boss, and, no offense, Jango Fett is the biggest asshole I've ever met!"
Appo genuinely had no idea whether Sergeant Skirata would have taken offense at such a statement. He certainly did not, and would not even if he’d been functioning at full capacity. Since at present he was mostly going through the motions of duty because the alternative was even more unthinkable, he was particularly unperturbed.
Unfortunately, Dysticus took Appo’s silence as agreement and continued enthusiastically to expand on his theme with a number of derogatory epithets covering Prime, clones, the Republic at large, Mandalorians in general (his dear friend “Kal” obviously excepted, being an unusually fine specimen, etc. and so forth), and, for that matter, his own planet of scumbags, smugglers, and ungrateful skrug-suckers that had recently nominated him to stand for a new term of office (his appeal was pending).
“– and anyway, just so you know, Anacrid tells me they’ve already started making trouble!”
“I didn’t say that!” squeaked Anacrid, who was required by both parties to be present for all meetings and utterly miserable with it. “I just said they sent a note!”
“A note asking to do work!” Dysticus threw his hands wide, as if that had made his point. “The only thing more dangerous than a soldier is an unemployed soldier, and the only thing worse than that is an unemployed soldier with a work ethic! Now tell me, Kal, what am I supposed to do with them?”
“Give them work.”
Dysticus spluttered. “Work! Work! I don’t have any work to give out! The only proper jobs on the whole kriffing planet are at your A- your Aurek – Aurek-oh-oh – at your company! And I’ve already promised those to people!”
He paused, as if waiting for Appo to say something.
Appo didn’t see that there was anything in his statement requiring a reply.
The silence stretched on awkwardly for another few seconds, but as Dysticus was constitutionally incapable of winning a face-off with a rodent let alone any higher order species, he unsurprisingly broke first.
“I mean, I suppose I could give them some other work,” he grumbled. “Some shady stuff, if they aren’t feeling too honorable or anything. Sithspit, do clones even care about things like that? How would I even start to know something like that..?”
“I’m sure we could find something,” Anacrid put in hastily before Dysticus could distract himself with another rant. “There’s always a big job somewhere, right? Something someone needs a few bodies for and isn’t feeling too picky…”
He paused, and his already slightly bulbous eyes went even wider as if he had just realized something terribly wrong with what he had just proposed.
“Not that we’ve got to use them for anything like that,” he said very, very quickly. “There’s no rush, no –”
“That’s a great idea!” Dysticus exclaimed, clearly having (somewhat more slowly) gotten the same idea, only to sail straight over whatever Anacrid’s reservations against it were. “Some of them have got to know how to pilot, right? We can give them the secondary smuggling routes! The more routes we have people on, the more likely the product makes it through the blockade, that’s the way it goes. Am I right or am I right?”
“High Kakistarch, with all respect, I don’t think that job is entirely the right fit –”
“Why not? It’s perfect. They’re perfect! The drop-off’s in Mandalorian space anyway, isn’t it? These clones, they already move like they’re Mandos. Just dig out some cheap durasteel, tart it up, cover the faces, everyone’ll think they belong there – no one’ll ever even have to know we were involved –”
“Boss,” Anacrid hissed. “He’s a Mandalorian!”
Appo continued to wait for someone to address something relevant to him.
“Oh, Kal doesn’t care,” Dysticus declared grandly. “He’s a stone-cold bastard only in it for himself. Can’t imagine he’d have signed up for the Republic army if he wasn’t! We’ll give you a cut of the proceeds, Kal, just as long as Fett doesn’t hear about it. You won’t tell him, will you?”
“No,” Appo said, and cut the call.
He didn’t want to think about Slick right now. Or Prime, for that matter, even if he was too dead to care.
He didn’t want to think about anything right now.
Appo got up and started walking. He had duties to attend to.
Well, sort of. He was technically only on half-days at the moment - that had been the price Kix had extracted from him in exchange for the sedative Appo now required to sleep and not telling command exactly how badly he was doing. Kix had originally wanted Appo to go on full medical leave, but Appo had explained that a complete absence of work, currently his sole motivation for continuing to get up in the morning, was likely have a counterproductive effect.
Kix had not liked that. He had liked Appo's requirement that he come up with a different reason for his leave even less.
(Mourning wasn't an acknowledged reason for leave, not for clones. Anyway, it couldn't be mourning because Appo's boys weren't confirmed dead, Kix. Protocol dictated -
Appo, you are my patient. Please stop making me want to punch you. I know you well enough to know you're doing this on purpose.
Fine. The real reason couldn't be shared because General Skywalker would try to talk to Appo about it, and then Appo would have no choice but to attempt to use the General's lightsaber to put them both out of their respective miseries.)
Kix had put down "post mission stress" as the reason, and he'd looked sour about it the entire time.
While this unfortunately did not prevent General Skywalker from hunting Appo down to provide his misguided form of sympathy and comfort, it did mean that Appo was spared from having to discuss the fate of his boys. The subject of their little chat remained focused on the general untrustworthy bastardry of Captain Tarkin and his overall wrongness on all subjects, ever, and specifically Appo himself – and furthermore, that Appo should, while absolutely taking whatever time he needed to recover from the mission, definitely not lose any sleep over Tarkin’s threats about talking to the Chancellor, as General Skywalker had his own connections there that he would most certainly employ in Appo’s defense.
Appo politely requested that General Skywalker not take any affirmative action on his behalf, as there was always the chance that Captain Tarkin might simply decide to drop it.
“Unlikely,” General Skywalker muttered darkly. “He’s the type of bear a grudge, if I had to guess…are you sure? I don’t mind calling the Chancellor –”
Appo reiterated the lack of necessity. For good measure, he reminded his General that he had stopped talking to the Chancellor for a little while over the whole Senator-on-the-Venator thing.
“Oh, the Chancellor isn’t the sort to make a fuss over something like that. He’s a good man. I’m going to talk to him when we get back to Coruscant anyway, so it wouldn’t be any trouble to –”
Appo firmly restated his position on the subject.
“All right. If that’s what you want.” Instead of leaving, General Skywalker shifted his weight from side to side, for a moment resembling the awkward adolescent he had been at the start of the 501st’s deployment more than his usual present façade of unbridled confidence. “Uh, Rex said that you were going to help on the – uh – internal investigation –”
“I will devote my full efforts to identifying any leak that might put Senator Amidala at risk,” Appo reassured him. “Pending Captain Rex’s approval, I will also share with you any leads that the investigation generates.”
“Thanks, Appo. I appreciate – hey, what do you mean ‘pending Rex’s approval’? Why wouldn’t he approve?”
“Given the narrow group of potential custodians, the identification of any lead whatsoever may be tenuous, implausible, or politically sensitive, sir. It would be inappropriate to risk spontaneous action based on such uncertain footing.”
“In other words, I leap before I look and you don’t trust me not to overreact and stab someone important,” General Skywalker said dryly. “C'mon, Appo, I'm better than that -"
"Even on matters relating to the Senator?"
General Skywalker's face abruptly crumpled, despite his best efforts to maintain an insouciant demeanor. He was no doubt remembering all at once that he was no longer in such a privileged position vis-à-vis the Senator now that she had put an end to their romantic entanglement.
Appo ruthlessly quashed the spark of empathy that sprang up within him at the reminder of how much it hurt to be rejected by those you loved, no matter how reasonable, logical, or entitled their actions might have been.
Why do you have to be –
"Yeah, well, maybe so," General Skywalker mumbled, and swiftly made up an excuse to leave. Likely to return to the training salles that he had been haunting in an effort to be so physically occupied that he could temporarily forget about the situation – which had still not been fully resolved, according to a highly bitter Sabé, but which appeared to be rapidly heading to a “once and for all” crescendo as the Resolute’s planned return to Coruscant drew near.
Apparently the “we can still be friends” stage was proving painful to the General and Senator both, and the Senator had proposed a temporary cessation of all interaction to allow them both a chance to “heal”.
General Skywalker had presented his arguments against that state of affairs, insisting that there was no reason they couldn’t simply behave like adults, and the Senator had agreed to take the idea under advisement. The two of them therefore existed in a state of horrifically awkward limbo in which they would alternatively act as though they were either the closest of companions or else total strangers, but in all cases and at all times awkwardly and viscerally aware that they had previously engaged in sexual relations they now wished to deny.
Appo had inquired with Sabé whether now would be a good time to offer his services in navigating bureaucratic systems with respect to processing their actual on-file divorce. She had laughed until she’d cried, said, “I see why Cordé likes you so much”, and then finally suggested, gently, that he give it a little bit longer before raising the suggestion.
Appo suspected she was right.
“Orange rations again? You’ve got to be kidding me,” the clone down the hallway said to his fellow. “Aren’t we near a processing site? They’re doing it on purpose –”
“ – keep dreaming about bugs,” another one confided in a friend. “The big gristly ones –”
" - hear we're going back on the front line after the escort ends. Maybe even join in a counteroffensive -"
“A bounty? On a clone? Echo, I love you, but you’ve clearly been awake for two shifts too long –”
"You won't believe this, but scuttlebutt says -"
Appo continued walking, trying to ignore the people around him. He had been persistently experiencing the feeling that his consciousness was not tied to his body, but rather floated a step or so behind, rendering him overly sensitive to noises and input he would typically have been able to filter out as background. Every single sensation felt like a physical assault: the light was too bright, his perfectly fitting kit somehow too tight, and everyone's voices were far, far too loud.
It was highly unpleasant. But it was still better than thinking about -
Rejected.
"It'll be good to get something real again. Not more of this half-assed barely-even-bodyguards taxi speeder escort shit -"
"- then the Mon Calamari said to the Aves -"
"I don't know, I think the new specs are a beaut. Certainly a step up from the last version -"
"Please, a vigilante protecting clones is less likely than a nerf learning to surf -"
" - seen the holonews? They're saying -"
Appo diverted his path briefly to take several deep breaths.
It was not effective in stopping the feeling of escalating distress, but it was useful in maintaining ongoing equilibrium in the face of ongoing stressors, or so the Mandalorian medic that had originally taught it to Appo had said.
Of course, the medic had said lots of things, and on matters unrelated to medicine had not always been right. Appo had been grateful to them for teaching him how to manage his intrusive thoughts, but confused by the way the medic had seemed to think that providing help (as per their profession) established some sort of standing positive relationship between them. It had not involved any sort of expectation of behavior on Appo's part, at least, which had been a relief - even back then, before everything, Appo had already known that he would only have disappointed.
The medic was one of the reasons Appo had a list.
Thire had helped Appo with the list, the first version of it. He had felt very strongly about it, arguing spiritedly with their batchmates that being a trainer's favorite created no obligation on the side of the clone. Sure, it might generate some feelings, clones were only human and kindness was rarer on Kamino than a day without rain, but a clone should never allow themselves to be so deceived as to think that mere favor indicated genuine care. Certainly not anything as mutual as friendship.
Appo had considered the question at length before concluding, regretfully, that Thire was right. After all, for all their kindness, the medic had never even bothered to tell Appo their name.
Still, that didn't mean Appo wasn't grateful. On medical matters, the medic had been most helpful.
"Hey, boys, I've got a datapad! Come look -"
Why did people have to be so loud?
Appo diverted his path and avoided the group of troopers crowding around each other to more effectively gawk.
It wasn't just the painful noise or mourning-induced misanthropy. Appo had duties to attend to. Important duties.
When he had nothing else, he still had duty.
Take Rex's investigation, for instance. Appo had positioned himself in an important supporting role primarily with the goal of acting as an impediment, but in fact the work had proven unexpectedly compelling. With such a limited group of suspects to focus on, Appo had been able to really devote himself to diving into previously unexplored levels of detail, tracking every outgoing call or communication or possible leak.
None of it had gone anywhere, not unless there were unexpected legs to Rex's latest harebrained suggestion that the Chancellor's personal Chief of Staff had actually been pursuing a side line in Separatist information dealing instead of the more probable, albeit more horrifying, possibility of carrying on a flirtation with the head of the Senator's personal bodyguard. Still, studying the way information flowed - like water seeping through all defenses to reveal unexpected cracks - was interesting, insofar as anything was, and Appo had the suggestion noted down to target in his next deep dive search.
Of course, that wasn't all he was doing.
Not A000040. That project, precious as it was, was being left untouched at the moment. Appo had briefly entertained and then dismissed the self-indulgent lie that he was avoiding it to minimize the risk of drawing Rex's attention to it during this time of heightened scrutiny. He had known too well that that was false.
No, Appo was avoiding it because working on it made him think of his boys, and thinking about his boys was enough to trigger a panic attack. Quite literally, even: Appo had been rendered nearly insensate with sobbing the one time he had tried to open up the files, only to discover a new program the enterprising Chopper had developed that was designed to identify, locate, link-up with and reallocate funds from inactive project accounts (anything not drawn upon for the duration of the war, at minimum) that had presumably been given a source of funding and then forgotten. It was precisely the sort of creative thinking channeled into practical ends that Appo most appreciated, and he had known at once upon looking at it that Chopper had made it for him.
So no.
No A000040. Not right now.
At least not until Appo had received final confirmation of his boys’ fates. Official verification had been oddly elusive to date, tormenting Appo with the infinitely miniscule sliver of hope that at least some might have survived - he did not dare contemplate the possibility of all. Hope and then disappointment would only strike him all the worse. Though even a partial loss would be devastating, as he cared so much for them all…
"Riven," Appo said, catching sight of his fellow sergeant. "Walk with me."
He didn't bother asking if Riven was free. It was clear that he was, given the way he'd been tucked in a corner with Hester and Oodles. They were all standing next to the caf machine holding cups of what should probably have been caf in their hands, though noticeably the smell emerging from the mugs was suspiciously closer to the output of the Resolute’s illicit sill.
Anyway, Appo's schedule had Riven listed for downtime right now.
Riven peeled himself away from the others and jogged to catch up with Appo, who had continued on his way down the hallway.
"Hey, Appo," he said. "Have you heard -"
"I've arranged transfer orders for your boys," Appo interrupted, not at all in the mood for the inanities of standard small talk. "The new squad."
The half-smile on Riven's face disappeared at once as he settled back into sober focus. "Transfer orders? To where? They're doing better, but they're still not battle ready. You've seen it yourself."
Appo had indeed observed it with his own eyes. Riven's new squad – Lief, Rocket, Max, Aspic and the gaping hole where their fifth, Ironside, had once been – was no longer unable to get up in the morning, and no longer gazed at each airlock as if wishing they could just walk out, but the fighting spirit had thoroughly gone out of them. They grew fretful at the sight of their standard issue weaponry, training brought them no joy, and panic attacks or depressive episodes remained common. Despair and the exit ramp were only a few small steps behind them, and Appo knew too well how often a recovery took you backwards before you could continue forward.
Appo could hardly blame them. They had been a mixed squad already: all of them survivors, the whole batch recombined from the remnants of their original squads. They had overcome that dreadful hurdle, dug themselves out of the pit of low morale and managed to rebuild a bond with others who had similarly survived, only now they had once again lost their sergeant and a fellow batcher, too. And under particularly terrible circumstances, too…
Just like -
Intrusive thought. Rejected.
Focus, Appo.
"I've made arrangements with a division of the Coruscant Guard," he said, opting not to explain that the arrangement in question consisted only of his original high-level discussions with Fox, who was very unhelpfully not answering his comm for even long enough to arrange anything more concrete or specific. "I anticipate that we will be returned to the front line after our leave on Coruscant, and it would be best to get them out before that happens."
Out of time and better options, Appo had input the authorization for the transfer order under the symbol that was meant to indicate a Guard captain (they didn’t seem to actually exist). It was shoddy work, by his standards, since it presupposed the existence of the Strategic Redeployment Procurement division before he’d managed to confirm that it had been formed. Still, the Guard records were in such a disastrous state following their decimation that any timing discrepancy would undoubtedly be assumed to be an error and rapidly wiped clean the next time Guard command did their reconciliations.
He still wished he'd done it better, though. Cleaner, neater, more accurately. Though that would require Fox or Thire or any of the Guard to answer their comms already…
They're avoiding you on purpose. They have bad news, and they know it'll trigger you - that's the only reason for their silence. Because they know you can't handle it. They know –
Intrusive thought. Rejected.
"The Guard? Are you sure?" Riven chewed at his bottom lip. "I never got the impression they were having an easy time of it back there - and they're usually pretty elite, too. Shock troopers, mostly. Would they even be willing to take them?"
"Yes."
"Yes as in - oh, yes to both. Right. Right, you said the orders were already being processed…” He shook his head. “The Guard. Right. Hey, you know someone in the Guard, don't you?"
"My batchmate."
"Right." Riven exhaled. "You sure about this?"
"The Guard is in charge of supporting the Senate and HQ in addition to their standard duties. Your squad will be primarily or even exclusively focused on flimsiwork support, at least in the first instance," Appo explained. "And afterwards, once an appropriate interval has elapsed, I have arranged for them to be retransferred to a more appropriate deployment."
Namely, Mordagon.
Mordagon, and freedom.
"That sounds - yeah. That could work." Riven looked deeply relieved. "Thanks, Appo. Both for putting it together and for the heads up. I'll go tell them that this is in the pipeline…and what about you? You doing okay?"
"No." Appo observed Riven's frown. "I've already spoken with Kix."
"Yeah? And what'd he say?"
You know this doesn't work if you refuse to talk to me, right? I'm trying to help. But you have to let me.
"Nothing of value," Appo said shortly. He had explained to Kix that the full issue causing him such distress was highly classified (unlike what had happened with his boys, which was public enough for speculation), an argument Kix had found particularly disagreeable but which was nonetheless true.
"How about your batchmate? The one on the Guard, what's his name -"
"Thire."
"Thire, right, Thire - wait, like the commander?"
Appo decided not to answer that. It wasn't that Riven was foolish or oblivious; he'd just gotten so used to rooming with Appo that he'd forgotten about the whole CC thing.
Leaving Riven behind, Appo continued on his path, trying to review all the things he had to do. It was oddly difficult. Everything kept slipping away…he was tired, perhaps. He was sad, and he was tired.
He briefly considered the mess hall, but decided against it: there were too many people in there, most of them crowded against the projection screen that was supposed to be used for mission critical internal comms but which had been sliced and tuned to a holo channel instead. It would be unbearable.
Though surely Appo should be getting used to the unbearable by now. Hadn't everything lately been unbearable? Had he done anything recently except suffer, and worse, suffer alone?
No boys. No plan. Not even Thire. No calls from anyone on Coruscant: not Thire, not Fox, not even Boba…
Appo diverted his steps yet again.
This time, though, he went deliberately to a private room, locked the door, and called Doom.
He had expected a wait - Doom was a commander, after all, and far too busy to casually answer personal calls - but to his surprise, Doom answered almost immediately.
Equally surprising was the fact that he wasn't wearing his bucket.
Doom almost always preferred to wear his bucket. He'd broken his nose during a training accident. The medic reviewing it had nonchalantly told him that it would never be the same again, a permanent disfigurement; it had caused their whole batch quite a few sleepless nights, all of them terrified that Doom would be decommissioned as a result of his irreparable injury. In the end it had all been fine, as the medic had undoubtedly known and told the Kaminoan supervisors: it had healed without any impairment in function, with the only difference being that it was no longer quite the same shape.
Of course, among clones, a (permissible) difference from the standard like that was immensely prized. Doom had immediately been catapulted up to the top ranks of the clones deemed the most attractive by the wider clone population, a place he continued to occupy and disdain. Unfortunately his refusal thereafter to casually show his face had not helped. Doom had reported, resentfully, that it had only been seen as adding an appealing "mystery" to him.
Thire had found it hysterically funny.
Doom, being a stubborn bastard, had refused to change his approach one bit.
"What happened?"
That was Doom all over, Appo reflected appreciatively. No time wasted on small talk.
"Doom," he said. "You're not wearing -"
"I am at dinner," Doom cut him off with the explanation. "But what about you? You are not well."
"No," Appo said, surprised. "How did you know?"
"You called me."
Right. Appo - generally didn't do that.
How strange. Normally whenever Appo thought about reaching out to anyone, especially his batchmates, he agonized over the decision. He questioned and second-guessed himself, reminded himself that he was only a sergeant and they commanders, tormented himself with the knowledge that they were better off without him and he was simply too selfish to let them go - but not this time.
Appo had felt bad, he had wanted to talk to Doom, and so he had called him.
No more thought to it than that.
How strange.
"Appo? What's wrong?"
And all of a sudden Appo was choking on the flood of feelings that welled up from his chest and filled his throat.
"I am -" The words wouldn't come. "It's not -"
"Tell me."
"There's nothing you can do." Appo's hands were shaking again. Unhelpful. "I don't know why I called. There's nothing you can do to help me."
Doom hated being helpless. He hated it. Appo didn't want Doom to feel bad.
"I am pleased that you called," Doom said. "Even if I can do nothing. Even if I will feel frustrated. I do not care. Tell me. Please."
"They still haven't sent the official confirmation," Appo blurted out, because that was the easiest. "They still - I have to have it. I can't file anything for them without official confirmation. And it has to be me that processes it, I have to be the one, I want to be. It's the least I can do for them before he reports me and - "
"Hold up, stop. Appo, stop. You're spiraling. Official confirmation of what?"
"My boys," Appo said, and he had been numb all morning and he wished he still was. It would be better than this. "My boys. My Aurek and Besh squads. I assigned them - I ordered them - they were on Coruscant. As Senator Amidala's escorts -"
"The explosion," Doom said, and his face twisted with grief. Grief and understanding. As a commander, Doom lost men every day. Good men, beloved men.
Knowing that didn't help.
"There's no official confirmation," Appo explained. "So I can't process it. The flimsiwork, I mean. I haven't - I'm going to be reported. There was a mission. The Citadel, Lola Sayu -"
"I heard about that. You, Cody, a handful of troopers and three Generals escaped an inescapable prison and reconquered an entire Seperatist planet."
"I stalled," Appo said miserably. "Captain Tarkin - he ordered me to sacrifice my men, and I stalled, and he knows I stalled, and now he's going to report me to the highest levels. They will punish me. And then I won't be here to process the death notices and I need to be here to process the death notices -"
"The overall mission was wildly successful," Doom pointed out. "Any accusations of malfeasance on your part, which I supremely doubt, will not be heeded given the overall result. They don't court-martial people after a victory, Appo. They just don't. Not for anything less than active treason."
Was Appo engaged in active treason? It seemed unlikely, given everything he knew about himself, but at this point he was so distraught that it didn't seem completely out of the question. Maybe he was and just hadn't noticed, somehow. But then it wouldn't be active treason, would it? Passive treason at best. Was passive treason even a thing? Had standing by and letting Bossk hit Tarkin count? What about all he was doing with Slick and the others –
"Appo. Focus. I can see that you're spiraling again. You need to stop."
"I can't," Appo said. "Stop, I mean. I can't stop thinking. Not like normal. Normally I stop thinking and keep moving, but this time it's the opposite. I can't stop thinking. I know it's highly unlikely that they survived, but no one has confirmed they haven't. So there's hope. But on the other hand, if they survived, why won't anyone confirm it? It's good news. People like to share good news. So why won't Thire take my calls? Which means it's got to be bad -"
"Thire?" Doom interrupted. "Thire won't take your calls?"
Appo nodded, despondent.
"Now that is simply not right," Doom said firmly. "Thire would never reject your calls unless he was in crisis or under orders."
Appo considered this. The notion seemed seductively accurate.
"Yes," he agreed. "But then it must be orders. From Fox, perhaps? Fox hasn't been answering either -"
"Which Generals are located on Coruscant right now?" Doom asked.
Appo stared at him blankly. He had no idea. He supposed he could go look it up -
"That was not directed at you, Appo," Doom clarified. "I'm asking my Jedi."
Appo felt a faint chill run up his spine. "Doom," he said. "They're not in the room with you, are they?"
"No," Doom said, and Appo was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when he continued: "I know you prefer privacy, so I went into the sonic to take your call."
Appo didn't even know what to do with that. Doom had been having dinner with his Generals and he had interrupted it just to take Appo's stupid useless call that didn't even have a military reason to use as a pretext -
"Appo. Spiraling."
"Justified spiraling."
"Not justified. Trust me to know how to manage my Generals - you have the list? Let me see…" A thin very obviously non-clone hand and arm briefly dipped into the holocall view range, holding a datapad. Appo wondered if having a heart attack was a reasonable reaction. "Gallia, Mundi, Vos…Vos? What’s Faie's general doing on Coruscant?"
"Knowing Master Vos?" A softly accented voice replied. "Being a jackass, probably."
"Tiplar, that's not kind."
"No, Tiplee, but it is accurate."
"Generals," Doom said firmly. "Please. This sonic isn't big enough for the three of us."
The two Mikkians laughed. A moment later, Appo heard the sliding sound of a shutting door.
"They're gone now. You can stop looking like you're going to keel over."
Appo wondered what it was like, knowing a General that well and not wanting to kill them. Or maybe Doom did and just suppressed it better? Or maybe close quarters made him want to kill them more. It seemed impossible to say. Appo mostly didn't want to kill General Skywalker these days, or at least not with his conscious mind. But the occasional intrusive thought seemed inescapable…
"I worked with Faie's general before," Doom said, and Appo dragged his scattered thoughts back together to focus on him. "Do you recall? With the -"
"I recall," Appo said hastily. He didn't want Doom talking about the Emberlene mission, or the origins thereof, when his Generals were within earshot. "What about him?"
"He's a maniac for confidentiality. Everything under highest levels of secrecy. You remember, I told you. If he's back on Coruscant in his capacity as investigator, I would wager he's gone to ground with the Guard, and locked down all their comms just in case."
Appo thought of Tarkin and winced.
"How would we know?" He asked. "If that's the case…"
Maybe Thire wasn't avoiding him. Maybe it wasn't because of bad news. Maybe his boys -
They're dead and you know it and it's all your fault. It always is. Why do you always have to be -
"Leave it with me," Doom said, even as Appo savagely chased away the intrusive thought. "Just don't – it would be superfluous to tell you not to let it bother you, so I will instead request that you avoid thinking about it until I can get some results. Doom out."
Appo hadn't even had a chance to tell Doom about the rest of it.
Not about Tarkin, about lying to Generals and Cody, Rex's investigation and Appo's role, Slick and how he might be the first addition to Appo's list in forever, Prime…
Maybe Appo should have led with that.
No, then the Jedi might have heard it, and Appo wasn't sure he was quite ready to face up to actually talking with another General after his chat with General Skywalker. Really, it was very rude of Doom to not tell Appo that he'd been just a room away. How was he supposed to strategize without intel?
Appo would just have to find someone else to tell.
In the meantime, he would go start working on that deep dive for Rex. Or maybe he'd take Kix's advice and take some downtime. He could do some training, perhaps, or get in some blaster range practice…
Or maybe not.
The range was full to the brim with troopers, all of them cheerfully congregating and chattering with one another. No one was being especially loud, but the sum total was deafening. And no one was even shooting!
Ridiculous.
Appo resentfully hunted for another quiet place, only it seemed that nowhere was safe. General Skywalker had clearly authorized far too much downtime in the lead-up to their leave on Coruscant. Just because there was nothing much to do right now – the 104th was taking point on Lola Sayu, with the 212th and 501st present as support, and even the stupidest Separatist general wouldn’t take on three clone battalions all at once – didn’t mean that all discipline had to be set aside. The victory party (an especially rowdy joint effort with the other battalions) had already been held. They should be paying attention to their duties. What would command think?
Appo caught sight of Rex in the middle of one of the crowds of clones in the war room. He was standing at the least professional version of at ease Appo had ever seen on him, splitting his attention between gawking at the screen, scanning the room at large as if to confirm everyone else was also seeing what he was seeing, and nodding along as Fives waved his hands frantically in Echo’s face as if to convey his meaning more effectively. Commander Tano was there, too, hanging on Hardcase’s shoulders to get a better view of the holonews presenter floating over the main table.
Appo sighed.
Unwilling to stay lest Rex catch his eye and gesture for him to join, an invitation he would be obligated to accept regardless of his lack of interest, he turned away once again. Perhaps he should just go catch up on some rest. If nothing else, it would make Kix happy…
His comm buzzed just as he returned to his (blissfully empty) room.
He checked it and frowned: he was being hailed by someone from – the 21st Nova Corps? What? Did Appo even know any Marines?
Still, there was no reason not to answer. At this point, Appo would talk to just about anyone to avoid having to deal with the hubbub, so he might as well talk to a Marine.
But the figures that appeared on the projection were not Marines.
Appo’s heart rate abruptly kicked into high gear.
“– I can’t believe he went through our window,” Thire was complaining to Fox. “That window is supposed to be reenforced!”
“And he’s a Marine,” Fox retorted. “He probably did it using nothing but his hard head.”
“Don’t let Bacara hear you say that.”
“Bacara can suck my – Appo!”
“He’d better not,” Thire growled, and turned to look at the projection. “Appo, did you have anything to do with the Marine that threw himself head-first through our window in order to give us this comm?”
“Only indirectly,” Appo said. “I spoke with Doom. He said you not answering my calls was likely due to a comm silence order –”
“Of course it was!” Thire looked almost offended by the suggestion that it might be anything else. “General Vos put us under external blackout, internal calls only. It's been an absolute nightmare. Do you know how many messages we process for external battalions in the normal course – ?"
"Thire."
Thire blinked, having not expected an interruption, and looked back at him. "Appo?"
"Thire," Appo said again. "Thire, tell me. Tell me -"
His voice cracked.
"My – my boys – the explosion – are they – "
"No!" Thire stood up abruptly, leaning forward across the desk as if he could reach out to grasp Appo. "No - Appo - they're okay. They're alive."
Appo's legs gave out. With a clatter of plastoid he found himself somehow on the ground.
"They're alive," he echoed stupidly. "Alive. All of them? Are they - were they hurt?"
"Their ship diverted before the platform exploded," Fox said. "They were in full kit. Even had jetpacks. They were all fine - well, Slick got a cut on his head, but it was nothing. He's fine. They're all fine."
"Your boys are still on mission," Thire said. "Undercover, so they’re not on our approved comm list. You want to talk to Slick, maybe? We can get you Slick."
"Yes," Appo said. "Please. I - Thire - they're really okay? All of them?"
"All of them," Thire reassured him. "All fine, all alive. I'm sorry, Appo. I didn't realize word had spread. I would have -"
"Done nothing," Fox interrupted. "Don't blame yourself. First you were in the Senate, then we were both with the Chancellor, and after that there was Vos breathing down our necks. There wasn't any time. Appo understands."
Appo did. He nodded.
Thire still looked dissatisfied.
That was because Thire was wonderful. He always was, but he was even more wonderful today, because Appo's boys were alive. Alive! Alive and well!
For one blissful moment, nothing else in the galaxy mattered but that.
Then the comm flickered briefly, and the projected figure of Slick shimmered into view as he joined the holocall.
"Fox," he hissed. "There are so many people here.”
“No shit,” Fox said. “Hall of Records’ front hall is open to the public and it has a big screen. You’re probably getting half the layer in there.”
“More like the nearest three layers – oh, hi Appo. Have you heard the news?”
“Yes,” Appo said gratefully. “You and all the boys survived.”
Slick blinked owlishly at him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and then grimaced. “Oh, no. Have you thought we were dead this whole time?”
Appo nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Thire said again, and kicked Fox when he opened his mouth. “I can be sorry even if there was nothing I could have done to change it.”
“I’m not sorry because I had no idea,” Slick said. “Anyway, I wasn’t talking about that. Appo, have you seen the news news? About Chancellor Palpatine?”
Ah.
Yes.
That.
“A consortium of journalists just published an exposé accusing him of embezzlement!” Slick waved his hands, briefly looking exactly like Fives had earlier. “Embezzlement and corruption and conspiracy – Chancellor Palpatine! Of all people! They’re saying they have evidence, too, though the details are still pretty light –”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Appo said. “It’s fake.”
Fox snorted.
But Thire sat up somehow impossibly straighter in his chair.
“Appo,” he said. “Appo. Would you like to elaborate on exactly why you think the allegations against the Chancellor are fake?”
“I know they’re fake,” Appo corrected him. “Because I’m the one who framed him.”
After the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.
“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick -“
(when the GAR’s most blindly obedient clone starts following in the footsteps of its first clone traitor, the galaxy starts to change)
chapter under the cut
Boba refused to sit next to Slick on the shuttle.
This was because he was still sulking ostentatiously about having been made to leave his so-called “spoils” behind. And all that even though Slick had promised (against his better judgment) to tell the Guard to go back and get that horrible speeder for him later…maybe alongside an industrial grade power washer, or possibly those bugs that ate rust, whatever. Assuming there would be anything left of the thing once all the rust gone.
Maybe Boba would be less in a snit if Slick had managed to keep himself from verbalizing those thoughts. Or Commander Offee from outright sniggering at them.
Anyway, Boba would just have to get over it. And he would, too, because the public shuttle they were riding in was so tiny that Boba’s grand declaration just meant that he was sitting directly across the aisle from Slick, and even that he only managed to do because the shuttle was, at this level and time of night, completely deserted other than its droid operator. But also unlike Boba’s thing, riding in this shuttle wouldn’t require the Guard medics to give them three dozen new inoculations.
Given the options, Slick would have assumed that Commander Offee would have gone to sit next to Boba in some sort of solidarity, based on their brief time working together, but instead she had chosen to sit next to Slick. Worse, given the way she kept squirming in her seat and stealing glances at him, Slick had a terrible premonition that she’d chosen to do so because she wanted to talk to him.
“It’s not true, you know,” she said abruptly, not long after the shuttle took off on the first leg of its long and winding journey back to the higher levels. “What Boba said, I mean. About me not being able to heal.”
Slick squashed his desire to groan.
It was one thing to go around advertising his good listening skills to fellow clones, he reflected grimly. But Jedi? No. Even if it turned out he was wrong about them – which was a subject he continued to not think about – he still wasn’t about to get back on good terms with them. And that certainly didn’t include chatting with some random Commander!
…a random Commander who was putting herself out of her way to help them. To help clones, specifically.
Ugh. Fine.
“Okay,” he said, non-committal. “I’m sure you’re fine at it.”
Commander Offee winced. “Well, no,” she said. “I’ve been having some – problems. Recently. With healing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t. It’s just, you know, the Dark Side. It can’t heal. That’s what Madame Nu told me: it’s powerful, but it can’t heal. I didn’t know that. I mean, it’s not that I went there on purpose or anything, but if I’d known it would impact my healing, I would have…I don’t know. It’s just been hard. All that suffering – all those troopers I tried to save but couldn’t, all of them hurt, dying –”
“Commander Offee –”
“I hate that title!” she abruptly snapped, her temper suddenly spiking. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I don’t want to be a Commander, I want to be a Padawan again – or a Jedi knight, one day, maybe even a Master. A healer! I want to be Healer Barriss, not Commander Offee! But no one ever listens. It’s not proper hierarchy. I know. I know! You don’t have to say it. I know it’s pointless and hopeless and stupid, but for once I’d like it if someone would just call me by name and not by –”
“Barriss,” Slick said pleasantly. “Why don’t you calm the fuck down?”
Commander Offee (or Barriss, apparently, since Slick was definitely not calling her ‘Healer’ anything) stared at him with wide eyes.
At least she wasn’t ranting any more.
Kark, maybe Slick really had been infected with Dark Side or whatever. That temper spike of hers felt an awful lot like the sort of thing he’d been struggling with ever since he left to go find Boba…no, earlier. Since he’d seen his boys again, at the very least.
“That’s never worked before,” Barriss said, sounding a little dazed. “Gree never – he’s never called me Barris. Not even when I asked.”
“You’re in his line of command,” Slick pointed out. “It’s hierarchy, just like you said. They flash respect for hierarchy into our heads from before we can walk, and that’s assuming it’s not actually embedded in our genetic codes or wired into our brains or something. Assuming this Gree of yours is in your battalion –”
Which he almost certainly was, and just as certainly was more highly-ranked than Slick really wanted to think about. The only Gree he’d ever heard about was the commander of the 41st Elite Corps, but he was really hoping she meant someone else.
“– then he probably feels twitchy just thinking about addressing you informally. Good soldiers follow orders and all that.”
“You’re calling me by name, though.”
“Yes, well, I’m not a very good soldier,” Slick said shortly. “And I’m not in your line of command. You’re nothing to me, so I can call you what I like.”
That was very much not how it worked, actually, but technically speaking Slick had forfeited the right to be in anyone’s line of command when he’d committed treason. Being put onto the Guard’s roster as a technicality didn’t change that. Nothing would ever change that. Nothing would ever change what he’d done, what he was.
“I told you he was cool,” Boba muttered from across the aisle.
Slick glanced at him. Boba hadn’t uncrossed his arms or straightened out of his sullen slouch, which suggested that Slick hadn’t been totally forgiven yet.
“Slick,” Barriss said abruptly. “Would you let me try to heal you?”
That got his attention back on her.
“Wait, hold up, you want to heal him?” Boba demanded, then seemed to remember they were on a public transport. He got up and stomped his way into their side of the shuttle, all three steps of distance, then sat down next to them, dropping his voice down low. “Slick, I thought you said those injuries were superficial!”
Oh, not this again.
“They are,” Slick said reassuringly. “I even had a doctor look at them. Got bacta and everything. No need to worry, not you, not anyone else –”
“So you’re saying someone else was worried?!”
Slick was developing a headache. And no, Boba,it was not from the shrapnel.
“Maybe we should stop somewhere,” Boba said, because apparently he was just as much of a damned mother nuna as every other clone in existence. “Find a doctor – a real doc, I mean –”
“I meant mind-healing, you overgrown nerf turd,” Barriss shouted, then similarly realized that she shouldn’t be loud. “He’s fine. I mean, mostly fine, anyway. Physically. Head wounds just look nasty. But that’s not the point. I don’t want to heal him heal him, I want to do some mind-healing on him. That’s what Madame Nu has been helping me with, working on breaking me away from the Dark Side influences I’ve encountered and help ease my connection to the Force. It made me feel a lot better. Calmer, more myself…”
“And that’s what you want to do with me?” Slick asked, interested despite himself. Mind-healing didn’t sound fun, no doctor stuff ever did – there wasn’t a clone alive that didn’t simultaneously appreciate medics and want to be nowhere near them when they were doing their business – but if she could help him ease off on the Dark Side stuff...that didn’t sound so bad.
Maybe he could even stop being such a dumbfuck all the time.
Maybe this whole thing was a bit like the time that he and about half the 501st had caught a bad case of Tethian flu. He’d been sick as a dead fish; it had turned him into a complete sluggard, utterly unlike himself, almost unrecognizable – but it hadn’t lasted. As soon as the medics had figured out what it was, they’d gotten the right medicine shipped in right away, and as soon as Slick had had a full course of treatment he’d gotten back to himself.
Maybe there was a way to do that here. Maybe he could go back to how it had been before, back before the riots, back to who he’d been on Christophsis and Geonosis before it all.
Slick was really warming to the idea. Acting weird because he’d been hit by some bizarre Jedi plague would explain so much, and better yet, that meant it wasn’t his fault..!
“Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t help but notice…well…” Barriss shrugged. “I don’t blame you, for whatever that’s worth. If I’ve been walking too close to the line just from empathizing with clones, then actually being one..? And I mean, Boba said you think it’s – like slavery.” She shuddered. “I can understand why you’d be angry.”
“Angrier and angrier,” Slick agreed, though he didn’t quite understand what that had to do with anything. He’d have to ask Fox later on, maybe he knew something more about Jedi stuff than Slick did. “Boba, remember the riots? I think this is related to what happened then. Like – contact poison.”
“I wasn’t on Coruscant for the riots,” Barriss said. “But they must have been terrible. The Temple’s shielded, but a lot of people still suffered.”
Hah, Slick had known there was something stupid and Jedi about it!
Really, Barriss was proving quite useful already. Maybe he could ask her about the Dark Side stuff, how to best get rid of it – or maybe how he, a clone, had managed to catch it in the first place. Maybe he could even ask her about Ventress –
No.
No, that was a stupid thought. There was nothing to ask about, anyway. Slick’s dreams weren’t real. They couldn’t be real. They were nothing but the manufactured results of his distorted subconscious, that was all. Bizarre and inexplicable nonsense, nothing more than the wayward results of some flaw in his digestion. That was it. After all, why else would someone like him dream about being trained as a goddamn Jedi?
Well, Sith, technically. Since Ventress was the one doing the teaching and all –
No. No. There was no point in thinking about it any further. Slick had betrayed his people once for Ventress, and that was it. Once. To think that he might be doing it again every night in his dreams – it wasn’t worth thinking about. It wasn’t worth thinking about, because it wasn’t happening.
They were all just dreams.
Anyway, everyone knew clones couldn’t be Force sensitive. Everyone knew.
“I won’t try to heal you without your consent,” Barriss said. “But it might help, a bit. I mean, not much, I’m not a real healer yet, I’m just a trainee. No promises that I can do anything at all, and even if I can, it won’t – fix it. Only you can do that. But the techniques Madame Nu taught me have helped me a lot, and maybe they’ll help you.”
“There aren’t any side-effects, are there?” Boba asked. “You’re not going to accidentally scramble his brain like some sort of ice spider omelet –”
“Don’t be gross, Boba.”
“I was just asking, spot-face.”
“They’re traditional Mirailan tattoos, you little –”
“Yes, you can do it,” Slick said quickly, before he could think better of it or second-guess himself. “But only if you do it right now. There’s always a risk other people might get on at the next stop, and we don’t want an audience.”
There were always slavers to worry about, after all. The only thing more enticing than some kids out with minimal protection would be if one of those kids was Force sensitive.
“Okay,” Barriss said, turning back to him. “That’s fine. I can do it right now. Just…”
She raised her hands to hover over his temples.
“I’m going to need you to close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Yes, like that. Now exhale. Inhale again. And now let me in –”
It was probably too late for second thoughts, Slick reflected, no matter how nervous and regretful he was suddenly feeling. Sometimes there was nothing for a bad decision but to keep charging ahead.
He didn’t know what Barriss meant, though, about letting her in. Let her in where? In his head? How was he supposed to do that?
Though there was a weird sort of feeling around him. Like standing outside on a brisk day in Kamino, supervising his boys’ exercises and being hit by a gust of unexpected wind, suddenly chill –
“It’s not working,” Barriss hissed, more to herself than anything else. When Slick cracked his eyes open, he could see that her own were closed, and her face twisted in disappointment. “It’s not – no. I won’t fail. Not like I failed all of the others. I’ve just got to try harder –”
The wind got colder. Not just a brisk day any more, but the lead-up to one of Kamino’s storms.
A hurricane, about to break.
“Hey, hey,” he said, a little alarmed. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
“No, I can do this. Just let me try, I can do it. I can –”
“Gree’s the one who likes ancient aliens, isn’t he?” Boba suddenly said. “I knew I heard that name before! The Gree, Gree. Fifty-two used to complain about how much he accidentally picked up from him every time they sat together. Hah, I knew I’d remember eventually!”
Slick tried to convey with his eyes that Boba’s little revelation was not exactly well-timed.
Except maybe it was, because the cold wind was faltering, now. The tension was fading, the pressure in the barometer slowly climbing back up to fair weather levels…it even felt warm, now.
Warm, and not like wind at all. More like jumping into a pool of water after a blizzard sim on one of Kamino’s ice moons, one of the few times that Kaminoans had determined it worthwhile to let them have baths instead of showers or sonics in the interests of efficiency. They’d all luxuriated in it for as long as they’d been allowed to.
It felt like that. Like the joy that followed the hurt.
Like chasing away a case of the chills he hadn’t even realized that he had.
“Like this,” Barriss murmured. “It’s like this.”
Yeah, Slick figured as much. Clearly he really had gotten a case of Dark Side from somewhere, and with no inoculations or nothing. He hadn’t even realized that was a risk. Really, the Jedi needed to be a lot more careful about that sort of thing –
There he went, blaming the Jedi again.
Fuck.
Slick always did that. He had done that from the very first, from as far back as his horrible nightmares had started, even before Ventress – meeting Ventress had only confirmed thoughts he’d already had, though he was starting to think that she might’ve done something to encourage them, at least a bit. Blame, blame, blame, that’s all he did, and he did it reflexively, without thinking. Exactly the sort of thing he didn’t want to do.
Exactly the sort of person he didn’t want to be.
That wasn’t who he was. Not him, not Slick. That knee-jerk instinctual creature, lacking in logic, lacking in anything but rage – that wasn’t the person he’d been when he’d been at his best, the person Cody had thought he was, the person Cody had praised for cleverness and strategic thinking. The person Cody had been able to love, the one Slick had always doubted but who he’d always secretly wanted to be. The person Cody had made him feel like he could be.
The person he’d chosen to be, when he’d agreed to the plan alongside Appo.
Yes, that was right. Slick had chosen. He’d decided, back then, that he wasn’t going to let himself just wallow around in anger and blame and shame and guilt. He was going to do something active. Move forward. Be better than what he’d been before.
He was better than that. He had to be better than that, if there was any chance of making the plan work, of seeing his boys free and safe at last – of seeing all clones free at last, free the way he’d wanted to be. He’d decided to be better, chosen to be better, chosen who he wanted to be –
Barris grunted, and the warm feeling all around Slick got a whole lot stronger. Not hot or anything, just – more all-encompassing.
Cleansing.
A moment later, she pulled her hands away, and the feeling became less intense, though it didn’t disappear entirely.
“Thanks for the assist at the end,” she said, and Slick blinked owlishly at her. “Who’s Cody?”
Boba burst out laughing.
Barris abruptly blushed. “You don’t have to answer that,” she said quickly. “Sorry, that was grossly inappropriate of me. I shouldn’t have said anything. Mind-healing involves being very close in the Force, and sometimes thoughts can slip through when they’re very strong – but you’re not supposed to say anything. It’s supposed to be private! But I heard that name, as clear and loud as if you were projecting it, and then suddenly you were really doing it, going along with me. Not just being healed, but healing with me, helping me just as I was helping you, shaking off the Dark and – wait. Wait. You don’t mean Commander Cody, do you? Not Master Kenobi’s Commander Cody –”
Boba was now cackling even harder.
Stupid slagger.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Slick said, with what little remained of his tattered dignity.
“But he’s so strict! I mean, we’ve only worked with the 212th once, but you see him in all those holos next to Master Kenobi being all disciplined and professional and stern –”
Boba was going to break a rib if he kept going like that.
“How about we go to a new subject,” Slick said through gritted teeth. His face felt hot, and he really hoped it hadn’t gone red or anything like that – that would be embarrassing. He wasn’t some cadet just Boba’s (apparent) age, going through his first crush.
He was something a lot more pathetic than that, but he was not thinking about that.
“I mean, obviously it’s fine if you like that sort of thing –”
“New subject. Barriss, you were telling us about –”
He groped around for a subject that was literally anything else in the galaxy.
Anything.
Anything.
At this point he was willing to consider bringing up the Ventress thing –
“Tell me more about that Vos guy,” Boba suggested, still opening sniggering at Slick so hard that there were tears in his eyes. “What’s he got against clones? And tell me more about that psycho thing he’s got.”
“Psychometry. Don’t pretend you don’t know the word, Boba. I saw you tricking that slaver, I know how good a memory you’ve got –”
“You only saw that because I had to cover for how bad you were at lying. Aren’t Jedi supposed to be good at diplomacy? And don’t say that lying and diplomacy aren’t the same thing, we all know they karking are.”
“…it’s still called psychometry. Anyway, I don’t know much about any of it. Psychometry I think is done by touching things with your bare hands –”
Slick begrudgingly conceded that Boba could, on occasion, earn his keep, particularly when he kept peppering Barriss with questions and drawing her attention away so that she wasn’t able to resume the subject of Cody.
Which, good.
Because Slick wasn’t talking about Cody. Or thinking about Cody. And he certainly wasn’t taking strength from his memories of Cody, because that would be stupid beyond belief. Just as it would be stupid to think that because his boys had forgiven him that maybe, just maybe, Cody might also one day –
Not the time, Slick, Slick reminded himself. You keep that line of thought to bunk hours only.
…fuck, Slick was pathetic.
It would be one thing if he spent his bunk hours thinking about the (admittedly fantastic) sex he and Cody used to have, or even his old brooding fantasies about being proven right or at least justified in his actions, but nooooo, Slick didn’t even have that level of self-respect. He spent his time mooning over a doomed fantasy of forgiveness, even though he knew that Cody didn’t take betrayal lightly. Not even little ones, much less –
No, if Cody thought about him at all these days, it was only because Slick’s actions would have hurt him so deeply that he couldn’t forget or put it aside. He wasn’t thinking about Slick the way Slick was thinking about Cody. Still thinking, after all this time.
Slick was so kriffing pathetic.
(The worst part, though, was that Slick was starting to wonder if he even cared about how pathetic it was. If it wasn’t better to just give in and admit it to himself that he was exactly that sort of pathetic, and to admit what it meant about how he felt about Cody, about how it might be more real than he’d ever allowed himself to think it was…)
“Slick! You found him!”
That startled all three of them: they had only just disembarked from the shuttle and fought their way out of the crowds at the transport depot, and Slick had been anticipating (dreading) an interrogation from an eager-eyed Barriss on the relatively short walk to Guard HQ. But no, that was a Guard already there – that was Thorn, even, rushing up to meet them.
He looked stressed.
“Come with me, quick,” he commanded. “Boba, we need to get you into clean-up right away.”
“What’s the hurry?” Slick asked, getting concerned. “Fox said that General’s ship wasn’t arriving until 0600, and it’s only –”
“The inspector lied,” Thorn said flatly. “His ship arrived at 0200, and he came straight to HQ, demanding we kick off the interview now –”
“Why didn’t you call and tell me, then?! I still have the comm –”
“We can’t,” Thorn snapped. “The new General’s obsessed with secrecy. He put us all under complete lockdown as soon as he came in. Everything’s top-level classified, no comms of any sort going out without his approval, it’s all under monitoring…why do you think I’ve been waiting for you here? Fox has been stalling him in hopes you’d show up, telling him we need extra time to wake Boba up.”
Slick grimaced at the idea of Fox having to lie straight to a Jedi’s face – much less a Jedi investigator with the skills Barriss had described – and looked at Boba, who looked equally perturbed. Boba glanced back at him and nodded, clearly agreeing with the course of action required, but oddly enough he still looked a little hesitant.
“I can watch, if you like,” Slick offered. He didn’t even know why, or why he thought it might help if he did, only that he suddenly really wanted to be there for Boba, somehow, even though Barriss had made perfectly clear that he shouldn’t be anywhere in the vicinity of General Vos. “It’ll be in the interrogation rooms, right? There’s a hookup in the monitoring booth next to the cells, I can watch from there –”
“Yes!” Boba said, then looked embarrassed at how quickly he’d agreed. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind. You know how tricky they can be, Jedi –”
“I don’t care where you go,” Thorn said pleasantly in the voice of someone who had transcended beyond standard stress to a brand-new level not yet discovered by sentient beings, “as long as Boba gets to the interrogation room right now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Barriss said to Slick, but she was looking stressed, too. “Where’s this monitoring booth? We need to go, quick. If Master Vos is already here…we can’t risk running into him in the hallways.”
Definitely not.
Slick went double-time. The monitoring booth was small, and currently deserted – a sign of the Guard’s current state of understaffing and overwork, probably, which made the Chancellor’s decision to cull their numbers even crazier – but Barris looked intensely relieved to see it.
“Yes, that’ll do – oh good, there’s even a chair on the outside. I’ll sit here. You go in, Slick. Go inside, and don’t come out, no matter what. Remember, we can’t let Master Vos see you.”
“Will it really matter that much?” Slick asked, a little bemused. “I might not be in regulation kit, sure, but if it’s just a passing glance – I mean, I’m still a clone –”
“He’ll know,” Barriss said ominously. “Slick, that’s the whole point. It gives it all away, if he knows you’re a clone.”
Slick was no longer following Barriss’ logic, but the urgency of her tone was very compelling.
He slipped into the monitoring booth and shut the door behind him. Locked it, and even shoved a chair in front of it, for all the good that would do against a determined Jedi – not that he expected General Vos to try to barge his way in or anything. There wasn’t anything even in the monitoring booth, which barely even resembled its function. It looked more like a maintenance supply closet than anything else.
In fact, it had probably been a maintenance supply closet, once, before the Guard had retrofit it with all those monitors to try to make the Guard HQ a bit more like the long-term prison it had never been intended to be.
“– appreciate your assistance in this matter, Commander,” a deep non-clone voice was saying from one of the screens, drawing Slick’s attention. The camera was angled badly, so it didn’t show who was speaking, only Commander Stone standing stiffly in full kit. “My commander received these analytics regarding some unusual battalion battle statistics from one of his colleagues, one he trusts, and my own battalion’s intelligence division has verified both the source data and technical logic. Still, to the extent the Coruscant Guard has access to any additional information…”
“We’re not experts on spreadsheets, sir, but we’ll do our best,” Stone said, voice crisp and disinterested. He received the datapad and glanced down at it – and then, oddly enough, tilted his head just a fraction to the side. “Who did you say you got these from again, General?”
“I didn’t. Now, which way is the interrogation room?”
“Follow me, sir.”
Stone moved out of the view of the camera, denying Slick a glimpse of (presumably) General Vos. Not that he thought he’d have long to wait: it looked like Stone was bringing the General down the same hallway Slick had come in through, which meant that as soon as they turned the corner, they would be –
“What are you doing here?” the same deep voice asked sharply from just outside the monitoring booth. It made Slick jump a little, even though he had been anticipating it: the voice was generally pleasant, but there was something almost unnaturally cold in it that he hadn’t expected from the sound of it on the camera. “This is no place for Padawans to fool around.”
“Good day, Master Vos,” Barriss said. “You may not remember me –”
“You’re Luminara’s. Who, if I recall correctly, is still on the front line, which means there’s even less reason for you to be here – unless she benched you.”
“I have been seconded to Coruscant to act as an assistant to Madame Nu,” Barriss said, and now her voice had dropped into something cold as well, a frigid formality, slow and stately and more drawn out than her regular voice. “And given that your battalion is also on the front lines, General Vos, maybe I should be asking you what you’re doing here.”
Vos huffed out something meant to be a bark of laughter but that came out far too harsh. “Oh, well, that’s an easy one. I’m here because it turns out a personal request from the Chancellor’s old protégé in the Senate to kick off a pointless wild reed-goose chase is considered important enough to call off a mission that might be the key to ending this whole damn war.”
He did not sound pleased, by which Slick meant that he sounded not-pleased in the way his dreams of Ventress often sounded not-pleased. Was this really the guy the Jedi wanted to interrogate Boba? Was there something wrong with them?
Just when Slick had started to wonder if they weren’t that bad after all, too…
“Still, kid, you should be back in the Temple,” Vos continued, and his tone had softened a little, losing a little of its bitterness in favor of genuine concern. “The way you feel in the Force, it’s not good –”
“I’ll tell Madame Nu of your concern,” Barris said, and sat down on her chair so pointedly that Slick could hear the screech of the chair’s legs as they dragged against the ground. “And you should consider taking your own advice, Master Vos. A Jedi that feels the way you do should be in the Halls of Healing, not in the field.”
Another snort. “That depends very much on the field in question. Fine. I don’t have time for this. When you’re done, you and your little friend get back to Madame Nu and the Temple right away, you hear me? This isn’t a safe place for half-trained Padawans.”
“Understood, Master Vos,” Barris said, not giving an inch. “May the Force be with you.”
Vos didn’t bother with a reply.
A moment later, he appeared on the monitor in front of Slick: a tall dark-skinned humanoid, with bare arms but gloved hands, Kiffar gold on his face and in his dreadlocked hair, striding purposefully through the hallways in the direction of the interrogation room where Boba was waiting with a grumpy expression.
So this was General Vos, the Jedi investigator.
Slick found himself pitying whichever clone commander had gotten stuck with this asshole.
Cody Appo would probably be able to tell him who it was and how well the match was going. Maybe General Vos was better with his own clone staff, though Slick doubted it. Before he’d been taken away, he’d heard things trickling in from some of the other battalions, ones that complained about their Jedi Generals being nothing like what they’d been led to expect. Nothing about Vos specifically, but others. Jedi that weren’t nearly as kind or thoughtful or even competent. Many of the clones in the rat cage seemed to come out of those battalions…
“Who’s this scrungly nerf-herder?” Boba demanded the second Vos walked through the door. “I don’t want to talk to him! I don’t talk with Jedi scum.”
They’d somehow managed to give him a quick buzz cut before shoving him into the prison uniform, with the overall impression making him seem even younger than usual – especially against the bare-bones backdrop of the interrogation room, which had nothing but two chairs and a table. Knowing the Guard, that was probably on purpose, and judging by the way Vos’ eyebrows went up and the corners of his mouth went down, it was working. He didn’t seem any more pleased by the idea of having to interrogate a child than Boba was to get interrogated by a Jedi.
“You’ll talk to me, kid,” Vos said, grimly resigned. “The sooner you do, the sooner I can leave, and then we’ll all be happy. My name is Quinlan Vos –”
He extended his hand over the table as if offering to shake. His bare hand, because at some point in the hallway he’d pulled off his gloves.
“Don’t care, don’t want to know,” Boba said, very pointedly sticking both of his hands under his armpits and slouching down deep in the chair. “Get away from me, creepoid. You take one more step into my airspace and I’ll report you.”
“Report me?” Vos echoed, clearly amused. He forewent the second chair and sat down on the edge of the table. “To who, the Temple?”
“Tabloid journos,” Boba said promptly. “They’ll follow you so closely that you’ll never take another piss in peace again.”
That got Vos to laugh. A bark of real laughter, this time, rather than the resentment from earlier – and hey, actually, now that Slick thought about it, this must be more of that whole Dark Side infection stuff. He could sort of see it now that he knew what to look for: that lingering coldness, the extra edge of nastiness, the coiled feeling of anger…
Vos was definitely doing worse than Barriss, though. He felt almost like Ventress, or at least Ventress as she’d been when Slick had first started dreaming of her. She’d been less like that recently, though that was probably just him forgetting about what she’d really been like.
Yeah, that had to be it. No other explanation that Slick was willing to stomach would fit.
“Cute, kid, very cute,” Vos said. “You know, you remind me a bit of an old buddy of mine. One that grew up into a rule-following boring old fuddy-duddy –”
“You take that back,” Boba said, horrified, and Vos all but cackled.
For his part, Slick felt a sense of intense relief. He’d been worried about how this was going to go, what with Barriss’ warnings and Vos being a Jedi investigator and all, but maybe that had been premature and unnecessary. Boba was holding his own quite well, playing up the brat to the hilt…
Well, Slick assumed he was playing it up. It was entirely possible that this was just natural Boba.
“He’ll be offended to hear that he’s now scaring small children,” Vos said, grinning toothily. He hopped off the side of the table and went around to drop himself in the other chair. “I look forward to telling him…which I’ll do once we’re done here.”
“Yeah? Just say the word, we can be done here any time.”
“Unfortunately, no,” Vos said, and he sounded genuinely regretful. “You haven’t given me quite enough yet.”
“I haven’t given you anything!”
“Haven’t you?” Vos reached into his pocket and pulled out his gloves. “I already know you have contacts on the outside.”
He slid on one glove with a snap.
“Contacts that warned you about me, specifically. About what I can do. My hands, my abilities.”
Next, the other glove.
“I also know that you’re remarkably confident for a little boy all alone in prison.” Vos was still smiling, but the sharpness had come back into it. “The only part of your little act that isn’t bravado is the fact that you’re not afraid. Not afraid – and not trying to see if you could leverage this meeting into a bargain to get you out. Which I would’ve otherwise expected from a kid as smart as you.”
Boba remained silent, glaring mulishly.
That was smart of him. Slick supplied the language instead.
Not that cursing was doing anything to make him feel better. This was bad.
This was really bad.
Slick recanted all his earlier far-too-premature relief. This Vos guy was good. He’d gotten all of that out of Boba from, what, two minutes of conversation? And all that without even using the psychometric abilities Barriss had warned them about.
Worse, in another minute, Vos would ask the obvious next question about the most likely source of both Boba’s information and sense of security: namely, the Guard. Everything either Slick or Boba had ever done was impossible without their implicit support. Without their permission, there would be no visitors, no active datapad to make calls with, no Jedi safehouse to stay in, nothing. Not even Boba's original reassignment to room with Slick.
Vos would ask about the Guard, and Boba would need to deny the connection. Convincingly. If he couldn't throw Vos off the scent, they would be in a bad position. Not quite sunk, but…bad.
As a General, Vos would be able to requisition records, tapes, logs, the works. The Guard would no doubt take action to try to destroy anything too immediately damning, but there was only so much they could do without incriminating themselves further. Vos would still be able to find out enough to screw them. He'd find Fox, who knew too much, and Fox, while improving, was in no state to blame himself for yet another loss of hope. They couldn't risk it. And even if they managed to shield Fox from discovery, Vos would at minimum be able to find out that Slick was Boba’s cellmate. Maybe even see his number repeated on the Guard roster.
If that happened, they would need to cut Slick out of the plan at once. Either by trapping him back in the rat cage or by coming up with a fantastic cover story, though Slick didn't know what that could be.
Slick didn't want that. He really didn’t. He didn't want to give up being part of the plan, the one source of hope he has started to rely on…but there wouldn't be a choice. He'd have no choice. Because that outcome, however miserable for him personally, would still be better than the alternative.
Better than Vos looking too closely at what they’d been doing.
Better than Vos paying attention to the ship full of Guard that had just been sent to Kamino.
Because if Vos looked there, he’d find Appo. And if he found Appo…
If he found Appo, they were all sunk.
“Something like that makes me wonder,” Vos said. His deep voice was soft, even gentle. Sympathetic. He put his elbows on the table, all nonchalant and careless as if he wasn't the most dangerous person in the whole base. "Makes me think about who exactly your contact might be, Boba. Who they are…and why they haven't gotten you out of here yet."
Here it was.
Slick could see Boba getting tense, anticipating the questioning. Reasonably so. Everything depended on what happened next.
"You know what I think?"
Vos's voice was still friendly. Thoughtful. Confident. Pointed.
A lightsaber aimed at the neck of the Guard. At Fox. Fox and Thire and Stone and Thorn and all the regular troopers below them -
"Safety."
…what?
"It's a big galaxy out there, isn't it," Vos continued. "A man can make a lot of enemies. Enemies that might hurt people he loves, just to hurt him. But that's only a risk if they can reach those people. If those people aren't somewhere secure. Somewhere…unexpected. Say, like - a discreet Republic holding cell."
Boba stared at Vos, his lips pressed tightly together.
Slick stared at the monitor.
"It's good reasoning," Vos said. "But not very good for you. Isn't that right? Everyone else is out there doing important things, but not you. You're going to spend all your time here. Safe, yes. But alone."
He'd missed it.
Slick couldn't fucking believe it. Vos had somehow missed it.
He wasn’t thinking about the Guard at all. He thought Boba’s contact on the outside was Prime.
Which – wasn’t ridiculous, given the rumors that had been floating around. In fact, Vos’s theory made a certain amount of sense, a brilliant tactical scheme that Slick would have completely believed Prime to be capable of. The only flaw was that whole hypothesis was based on the idea that Boba would fade into obscurity: one prisoner among many, a kid who'd taken a swing at someone too far above his cert level, a nobody that no one missed or thought about.
But Boba was Boba. As long as there were clones around him, how could that be?
Even a reg trooper like Slick, who hadn't really known anything about Prime beyond his name and basic reputation, and certainly hadn't known anything about Boba specifically – he wouldn't have been able to see a cadet in prison without doing something about it. Look at Cyclone and Needle and Frame and all the rest in the rat cage; they were all the same as him. They’d been welcoming to Boba, albeit in their own horrifying ways. Casually protective, helpful, even without knowing any part of the story.
And that wasn't even counting the commanders, the ones like Fox who had once known Boba personally…
How could Vos have missed that?
Of course, Slick supposed that thinking about them required Vos to think about clones at all - something he seemed deeply reluctant to do. Barriss had said that her master had told her that Vos had once said that clones gave him a bad feeling, though he couldn’t identify any actual issue with them or their service. For someone as sensitive to instinct as a Jedi, that would probably be enough to make him veer away from them, even in his thoughts.
A blind spot.
"Well, kid?" Vos prodded gently. "How close am I?"
Slick tensed up again. It was too early to be relieved: Vos might be on the wrong track for now, but that didn't mean it would last. He'd already picked up so much from so little. If Boba couldn't keep him from catching the right hyperspace lane -
"You're a spy," Boba said abruptly.
Vos's eyebrows went up.
Slick's went up right alongside his. He had no idea where Boba had gotten this ridiculous line of thinking, or where was going with it. And it was ridiculous: everyone knew the Jedi were generals, not intelligence agents. Why would Vos be a spy?
"My dad told me about spies," Boba continued. "He says you change your face even better than a changeling, and you use real parts of yourself to do it. That's what makes you dangerous. Because it's real, but also a lie."
Boba wasn’t wrong, but he was still being ridiculous. Why would anyone use a Jedi as a spy, even one as clever as Vos? The Jedi could always be spotted a light-year away, all of them practically radiating their Jedi-specific weirdness. And even assuming that there were Jedi that decided to waste their talents by moonlighting as spies, who would they even spy on? The Separatists? Everyone knew the Seppies only relied on their own people, trusted subordinates and droids, neither of which could be infiltrated by sentient beings. There wasn’t anyone else. No one but machines, Seppies, Sith –
Sith.
Oh kark, Boba was right.
Vos had all but admitted it earlier, hadn’t he? When speaking to Barriss, his references to being abruptly pulled from heading out on a mission that he believed could stop the war – to the appropriateness of his being out on the field, even while being as sick with the Dark Side as Barriss seemed to think he was – of it depending which field –
Vos was a spy. And not just any spy, he was pretending to be a Sith.
…kriff. Slick officially knew too much.
That was never a good thing when spies were involved.
"A spy? Me? How interesting," Vos said. His smile hadn't changed one bit, still friendly, and that was terrifying. "What makes you think that?"
Boba ignored him.
He just crossed his arms over his chest and slouched down even further in his chair.
"My dad told me how to deal with spies," he said, and shut his eyes tightly, as if signifying that he would no longer continue the conversation.
If only it were that easy.
"Your dad told you," Vos repeated thoughtfully. "Interesting indeed. Sure, let's talk about your dad."
Boba pressed his lips together, but didn't open his eyes or respond.
Good kid.
Slick was so stressed out that he vaguely regretted letting Barriss heal the Dark Side out of him. Feeling mostly normal came with an unpleasant sense of clarity, whereas he felt like at this moment he could really benefit from some of that blindly arrogant confidence he’d felt earlier: that narrowed vision that let him see nothing but despair and react with nothing but rage.
Probably the same thing putting the blinders on Vos right now, actually, now that Slick thought about it.
"I've heard a lot about Jango Fett," Vos said. "One of my friends was the one who met him -"
"Killed him, you mean," Boba spat, clearly unable to resist, but he quickly re-shut both eyes and mouth a second later.
"Not really, though I can see why you might feel that way. But you know, that wasn't the first time I'd heard of your dad. He had a hell of a reputation. A famous bounty hunter -"
"The best."
"Sure," Vos said agreeably. "That was certainly one of the things that got bandied around back then. There were plenty of people out there willing to swear that Jango Fett was the galaxy's finest bounty hunter…of course, they also said that he'd died. Almost twelve, thirteen years ago."
Boba snorted disdainfully.
Vos chuckled, agreeing. "Funny thing was, even though there was a persistent rumor that he was dead, there was also a persistent rumor that said that he was still out there. People who said they'd seen him on a job. Hired him. Even a few that claimed to have teamed up with him, if you asked around in the right circles. Like that buddy of yours, Bossk."
"Shut up about Bossk."
"He got arrested with you on Florrum, didn't he? But then he broke out. Left you behind." Vos was watching Boba carefully, for all that his tone and body language suggested careless disinterest in the subject of their conversation. "He's doing okay, you know."
Boba crackled open his eyes again - just a little - and squinted. "He is?"
"Yeah. One of my contacts saw him on Jabriim, doing a little information trading. Even approached him about a job, but that didn't work out. Seems like Bossk got himself a long-term commission."
"Good for him," Boba said sullenly, and shut his eyes again.
"That’s interesting too. A long-term commission. Bounty hunters usually don't like those types of things. Mostly because of all the restrictions. Boss's orders come first, freelancing limited to when there's time or nobody's paying enough attention… In fact, that's what your dad did, isn't it? When he was on Kamino."
Boba didn't respond. He tried to slouch even further down his chair, only to accidentally pass the point at which that was comfortable (or balanced) and had to sit himself back up.
He kept his eyes firmly shut.
"It certainly explains all the contradictory rumors. The only thing I don't understand is why your dad even signed up in the first place."
"Money," Boba scoffed, opening his eyes again, and Slick groaned at how easily he was being goaded. Thire has been right about Boba being unable to resist when Prime was mentioned. "Obviously. Money, and me. Everyone knows that's what he got."
"That's right. Money, and you. A son, an heir, and more money than most people can even dream of…but that still doesn't answer the question. What does your dad want?"
"To make his way in the galaxy," Boba said fiercely, and he'd forgotten all about keeping his eyes closed. "That's all he wants! He keeps saying it, but you slaggers never listen. My dad just wants to be free -"
He stopped abruptly.
He looked suddenly horrified, for some reason, as if he'd said something wrong.
"That's not quite the Jango I've heard of," Vos said, and Boba flinched. "There's something he wants more than freedom, isn't there?"
"No – no. He does – he would – Being free is important. It’s true!" Boba insisted, but his voice was weak, uncertain, conflicted. As if he wanted to believe it, very badly, but couldn't quite manage it fully, because it wasn’t true. Because a man who wanted to be free didn’t voluntarily sign up to lock himself into Kamino, not even if he occasionally broke the rules and left. Because Boba wasn’t talking about Prime, not entirely, or at least not the real one that had lived in reality rather than the one that lived in Boba’s head. Because Boba was actually talking about…no, Slick wasn’t going to go there. Boba wouldn’t want him to. "It is true. It's just – he's got other things he's got to do first, that’s all! He's got to get his revenge, but after that he definitely would have –”
Boba realized his mistake.
His mouth snapped shut, but it was too late.
"Revenge, huh?" Vos said, and Boba stared at him mutely, with wide open eyes. "That's reasonable. Your dad's been through a lot. I can see why he wants revenge."
"I didn't say that," Boba said quickly. "I didn't, that's not what I meant. I just meant -"
"Your dad used to lead one of the factions back on Mandalore, didn't he?" Vos interrupted. "After what's his name, Jaster Mereel died."
"That was a long time ago!"
"It was a spy that did Mereel in, if I'm remembering my history correctly. A spy that set your dad up, too. Killed most of his men, the only family he has left, and selling him into slavery -"
"You shut up about slavery!" Boba yelled, and he tried to get up out of his chair, only to be tripped back down by the power cuffs at his ankles. "You shut up about my dad!"
Vos was unmoved.
"Long way down," he said. "Going from would-be King of Mandalore to a slave is a hell of a fall."
"It's Mand’alor, you scumsucking nerf brain." Boba was glaring with all his might. "There's no such thing as a king on Mandalore."
"Same thing, surely."
"No! A Mand’alor isn't meant to rule his people, he's supposed to lead them, in glory and honor and - and hey! Why are you asking about a Mand’alor anyway? What's it to you? You're no Mandalorian." Boba scoffed. "If you were, you'd already know all of this."
Vos was smiling again.
"You're right," he agreed. "I don't know the differences. There hasn't been a real Mand’alor candidate for a while now, other than that Death Watch lunatic, so there was no real reason to learn…but that's not true anymore, is it?"
Slick had a brief moment of déjà vu. Where had he heard that phrase today?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Boba insisted, except he was insisting so strongly that a deaf man could have figured out that he was lying. “I don’t know anything about Mandalore.”
“No?” Vos asked. He was still smiling. “So you wouldn’t think anything of it if I told you that Duchess Kryze has publicly questioned the legitimacy of the government previously headed by Prime Minister Almec?”
“I don’t care,” Boba said. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.”
“Sure. What if I told you that Pre Vizsla issued an open challenge to your dad for a one-on-one duel?”
“I don’t care! I don’t care!”
“You aren’t worried about your dad at all? The Death Watch have been known to employ cutthroat tactics…”
“Like my dad would fall for any of that,” Boba said scornfully. “He could beat any stupid Death Watch slagger with his hands tied behind his back…not that I care. Because I don’t! I don’t care about any of them! I don’t care about Kyrze or Almec or Pre Vizsla or –”
Slick was a karking idiot.
Slick was an idiot to such a degree that even his extensive vocabulary of curses wasn’t going to be sufficient to describe how much of an idiot he was.
Déjà vu – it wasn’t kriffing déjà vu at all. He had heard the phrase about having other choices from earlier, and it had only been earlier today. Technically yesterday.
It had come right before he’d thought to himself: Pre, Kryze, Almec – who’s he talking about? Am I supposed to know who they are or something?
Pre Vizsla, Duchess Kryze, Prime Minister Almec. Figures of importance in Mandalorian politics, which wasn’t something Slick would have any reason to know about. Nor would anyone talking to him have any reason to expect that he would know anything about them.
Unless, of course, they didn’t realize they were talking to him.
How long had Slick been pretending to be Prime? How many of his mannerisms had Boba specifically modeled for him, habits he’d then picked up and incorporated into his own? How long had he known, courtesy of Thire, that there were hordes of people around the galaxy spreading rumors left and right about the apparent not-death of one Jango Prime?
Sure, everyone knew about clones. But it wasn’t very likely that any of the slagheads in the Coruscant underworld had ever seen a clone up close and personal when they weren't wearing full kit and acting according to civilian-interaction protocol. Even if they had, Slick’s style of movement had trended considerably away from clone standard, as that commando had observed…and, of course, most clones weren’t likely be swanning around Coruscant wearing fancy blaster-resistant Nabooian cloth that felt like clouds and probably cost more than Slick did.
Clothing of the sort that only a rich man would own.
Like, say, a man who'd just gotten five million credits.
Slick was such a karking idiot.
"I wouldn't know anything about any of that," Boba said. "I've been in prison, remember?"
He put far too much stress on the word. Slick winced.
But Vos just nodded. "Yeah, in prison. Nice and safe, out of the action, where no one will hurt you."
"I'd shoot anyone who tried. I can take care of myself!"
"I bet you can," Vos said soothingly. "You're quite capable, after all. Your dad trained you up right."
"You bet he did! I can do lots of things!"
Slick had no idea where Vos was going with this tactic, but he didn't trust it one bit. Least of all because he knew exactly how susceptible Boba was to being buttered up.
"Yeah? You can shoot a blaster?"
"And hit every time, too!"
"Onboard cannon?"
"Any type!"
"Any good with a vibroblade?"
"You bet I am!"
"Hand to hand?"
That was actually something Slick had been working on with Boba. Sure, Prime had trained him originally, to be sure, but Boba hadn’t been full grown by the time Prime had died, and he'd grown since. There hadn't been the chance for Prime to teach Boba the versions more appropriate to his new reach and strength. It had been Slick instead…
Luckily Boba only hesitated for half a heartbeat before confidently asserting that he "couldn't be beat", which was so blatant a lie that even he begrudgingly amended it a moment later by adding "by most people, anyway".
"You sound like a real asset," Vos said admiringly. It even sounded genuine - he probably really did mean it, too, the slimeball. The best liars always did. "Someone with those types of skills shouldn't be stuck here when you could be out there watching someone's back."
"No kidding," Boba said. "I'd be twice as useful as -"
Vos' comm buzzed.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Vos snarled. "A priority alert? Now?"
Yeah, that was fair. Who the hell would interrupt right when Vos was clearly in the flow?
Not that Slick wasn’t grateful for the interruption.
"You were trying to trick me!" Boba exclaimed. He'd finally gotten it. And just in time, thankfully. "You wanted me to tell you where - who - you wanted me to tell you stuff!"
"Yeah, and you were right on the verge of spilling your guts, too," Vos grumbled, but he pulled out his comm. "What in the galaxy could possibly be important enough to…"
He trailed off and just stared mutely at his comm.
And kept staring, too, even as the seconds ticked by and Boba's glare slowly changed from fury to curiosity.
"What is it?" Boba finally asked.
Vos's head shot up, as if startled out of a stupor.
"I've - I've got to go," he said. His voice, which had been smooth until now, was uneven and almost choked up. He got up and lurched towards the door. "I've - this can wait. Guard! Guard - let me out, and give me a speeder. This place is to remain under lockdown until I give the order – Guard! Where's that speeder?"
After the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.
“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick -“
(when the GAR’s most blindly obedient clone starts following in the footsteps of its first clone traitor, the galaxy starts to change)
chapter under the cut
No one spoke in response to Slick’s demand. But they did all turn and look inwards, eyes fixating on one small, occupied table towards the back of the joint.
Reeka Shimm turned out to be a Chadra-Fan, which meant, ironically enough, he really was a rat – or a bat, anyway. Rodent in appearance, a little over a meter tall, with a furry face, big flappy ears, and a squashed nose, Shimm chittered and twitched as Slick walked up to him. He’d clearly made an effort to look intimidating, draping his torso and waving arms in bands of metal that looked vaguely like ammobelts but were clearly not, but he wasn’t really pulling it off.
Maybe he managed it better when there wasn’t six feet of furious clone in his face.
"Hey hey hey, what about negotiating?" he squeaked. "I can’t just tell you things! What about payment? Terms? Deals? The Guild -!"
"Do I look like I'm in the mood to negotiate?" Slick snarled, slipping into his Jango mode more by instinct than anything else. It was how he dealt with outsiders these days, aggressive and arrogant instead of the affable if oily charm that had once given him his name, and it suited the black mood he was in much better. "Boba Fett. You've seen him. I want to know where."
"I'm not saying I have or haven't! Maybe I know a little something, not saying I don’t, but I've got my reputation to consider. A man dressed as fine as you should know that you don't get something for nothing, right?"
Slick put both hands on the table and stared the shrimpy little runt straight in the eye. He was dimly aware that everyone was still staring at him – that he was almost certainly making an already bad reputation for clones into an even worse one, that he was being reckless almost to the point of suicide – but through the haze of his anger and fear he couldn't bring himself to care.
“Enough of this,” he growled. What would it take to get through to this guy? "You will tell me what you know."
Shimm stared at him. "I will tell you what I know," he echoed in a dull sort of voice, presumably having been scared out of his wits. A moment later he recovered: "Only for you, though! Consider it a special! And only because I'm going to sell the news about you next."
Oh, please. Like anyone cared about Slick.
"Well?" he demanded. "Boba?"
Shimm held his little clawed hands up in surrender. "Yeah, I've seen your kid. Only five, six hours ago! He was fine, him and that little girlfriend of his."
Boba was fine. Boba was fine, he was alive, he was okay. Slick wasn't going to be too late.
Boba was going to be okay.
The all-encompassing rage drained out of Slick all at once. Fuck, kark, kriff, and every other profanity he'd ever learned: Boba was going to be okay.
Unlike, say, Slick, who had stormed into a criminal cantina almost completely unarmed.
Kark.
What was wrong with him these days?
"Bet you didn't know about that part," Shimm cackled, seeming to misunderstand Slick's sudden silence. "Pops never do, in my experience. Certainly mine never did! One minute your pup's a little pinkie, next minute they're old enough to be out chasing tail all over town…heh. Makes me nostalgic. Bet your Boba never told you about her! Cute little Mirialan, about his age or a couple of years older, big into the black..?"
Slick scowled to cover his confusion. Boba had certainly never mentioned knowing any Mirialan, even though he'd been more than happy to share information about Bossk. Had he been keeping her a secret..?
No, that was ridiculous. What was Slick thinking? Boba had been in prison, same as Slick. It was far more likely he'd met this junior-age Mirialan after he'd left to find Slick.
(In which case, Slick supposed it was a case of ‘well done, Boba’? Most clones took a lot longer to reel in a prospective partner – Slick and Cody's spontaneous if somewhat shady affair aside – and they usually had the benefit of familiarity with another clone going for them. Hooking a natborn was presumably a higher degree of difficulty…though that assumed Boba was interested in hooking anyone, which was an unsubstantiated assumption for any clone.)
"Where are they?" he asked instead of answering.
"Getting into trouble, mostly.” Shimm sniffed. “Nosy brats. Bad enough they were bumbling around asking for intel on that Senator’s assassination, which is way hotter than even I want to get involved with, but then they blew up poor Makk’s business deal for no reason – and didn’t even take his money, either! They gave it all to the chattel they let go. Told ‘em to use it to get their slave chips removed or some trash like that –”
“Good for them,” Slick said shortly, not especially interested. He could see how one went from fighting slavery (clones) to fighting slavery (general), and as expected Boba could be spectacularly competent when he put his mind to it, but doing stuff like that also put Boba’s life at risk – and right now, Slick’s only priority was to find Boba and get him back before the Jedi rained down consequences on the heads of both Boba and the whole Guard along with him.
Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe the Jedi aren’t like that. Maybe they’re the way General Kenobi and General Skywalker seemed to be, the way you thought they were just faking. Maybe Jedi only hurt you if you hurt them, fight you if you fight them, the way they did with you, or with Prime –
Nope. Still not thinking about that.
Slick folded his hands in front of him the way that Boba had told him Prime used to do. He’d found that it helped him calm down, and he liked to think Prime had once used it the same way. “Enough chatter, Shimm. Where are they right now?”
Shimm spat out a location and level number. Luckily it was still high up enough to be functioning on the basic Coruscanti grid system, nightmarish as it might be, and that meant Slick would be able to use a map to find them.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey!” Shimm yelped when Slick turned around to go do just that. “Wait – one question – a few questions – you owe me –”
Slick scoffed.
“Fine! No debts! No debts! I know you lot are weird about those. Just tell me, hmm…what happened to your head? You’re looking a little rough, with the bacta bandages and all.” Shimm did a weird little shimmy, waving his hands a bit. “Sayyyyy maybe a bounty got the jump on you..?”
“I’m not hunting bounties,” Slick said. Where would Shimm have gotten that idea from?
“No bounties, no bounties, right, right, got it. But clearly you’re still doing something that gets you a face full of the type of spark trails you only get from real high-grade top-tier explosives –”
Slick left.
Both because he had no idea what Shimm was getting at nor any interest in finding out, and because he was on a deadline. He had to find Boba – Boba and this Mirialan kid, apparently, and he had to do it before the Jedi investigator arrived. Or before the next slaver decided to shoot back when the kids decided to free more slaves.
Were cadets always this troublesome when left unattended?
Of course, cadets weren’t the only thing that was troublesome.
Someone from the cantina had decided to follow Slick out. They were hanging back a little, trying to be subtle about it, but a few turns and swerves made it was obvious they weren’t just coincidentally heading the same way as him.
That meant trouble.
Familiar trouble.
Slick had heard this story before, plenty of times. From Fox in particular: he was always going on about having to warn visiting GAR battalions to buddy up before heading to Coruscant’s middle or lower levels lest they find themselves on the wrong side of a mugging or worse. Even before that, back in the 501st, there had been stories about clones getting jumped the second they let down their guard, even on purportedly friendly planets – which Coruscant was not.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen to him.
No: Slick was still burning.
Still cold.
If someone wanted to come at him, then fuck it, let them. He wasn’t taking it lying down. If they wanted a fight, he’d give it to them.
In fact, he was itching for a fight.
Slick waited until there was a large crowd passing by for him to blend with, then abruptly ducked off into a tiny little side street that was more overhang than free space. He waited – waited – waited –
“Haar’chak,” a deep voice swore. “Where’d he go?”
There.
“Looking for me?” Slick drawled, stepping out from behind the follower from the cantina.
The being in question spun around, hands flying to their blasters as if they thought he was about to ambush them. They were heavily armored, wearing full kit and even a face-covering helmet that wasn’t totally unlike the usual GAR – oh. Oh, of course.
It was a Mandalorian.
Great.
Prime had been a Mandalorian, and most of the Cuy’val Dar, too, but the vast majority of clones didn’t know much more about Mandalorians beyond that basic fact. Maybe command did, Slick didn’t know, but the rank and file? No way. Some of them still found the implied connection interesting, even compelling, while others thought it irrelevant – but either way, it hadn’t mattered very much when they were on Kamino. And after Kamino…well, there had been more opportunity for clones to follow their interests then, within the confines of their military duties, but it hadn’t taken very long for word to spread quickly through the entire GAR that a significant chunk of the Mandalorians felt strongly that Prime’s status meant absolutely nothing about the status of clones themselves. Felt violently, to be more precise.
“Yeah, you. I was looking for you,” the Mandalorian said, trading nervous surprise for cockiness. They had a sigil on their pauldron that looked something a bit like a lopsided herf, like some sort of bird or something. For some reason the word shriek-hawk kept coming to Slick’s mind like something out of an ancient flash-training he’d already mostly forgotten, but he had no idea if that was accurate or what, if anything, it signified. “Wanted to have a little chat, you and me. Because it seems to me you’ve gotten to thinking you’re better than you are.”
Oh yeah, this was about clones.
Karking natborns. Just couldn’t let a clone live, could they? No matter that they were free and clones weren’t, never mind that it was the clones out there dying on the front lines in their place, no. No, it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. They had to get their stupid little feelings hurt just by a clone existing in the vicinity.
Slick had already been angry enough, when he’d been afraid that something had happened to Boba. But this made him even angrier. This new anger felt cleaner, more righteous, but even though he knew that that was where the lie was, he couldn’t stop himself.
Anger leads to hatred. Hatred leads to –
“I bet you do,” Slick said grimly. “I just bet.”
He didn’t add any descriptors from his extensive vocabulary of profanity. This piece of clone-hating scum didn’t deserve it.
“Yeah?” The Mandalorian came forward, giving up their stable footing and superior position in favor of swaggering in the manner of the stupid, arrogant, or possibly just young. Or maybe all three. “All right. So tell me, where’s your armor? Where’s the only thing worth anything about –”
Slick hit them.
He hadn’t been planning to, because fighting a Mandalorian was a bad idea even before you factored in the fact that Slick was doing it while armed with nothing but a vibroknife. But the idea that clones weren’t worth anything more than the shitty plastoid they were kitted out with and sent to die in just sent him red-hot with fury.
Fury, and stupid decisions.
Fuck, but Slick hated not being able to control himself. He’d been patient once, hadn’t he? He’d been even-headed under fire, able to plan when attacked and cornered with nowhere to go – even when there had been no way out, when it had been him against Rex and Cody and the whole 501st, Slick had been able to strategize. He’d been thoughtful, inventive, cunning, made and changed plans on the go, and it had almost been enough. But these days, it was different.
These days, Slick’s fury seemed to be too great to allow for any of his former intelligence, consuming all of his rational thoughts and leaving nothing behind.
The Mandalorian hadn’t been expecting it, so the first strike landed, but they were quick and well-trained, and so they dodged Slick’s follow-up. If they were smart, they’d get the fuck out of his face, back away to take advantage of the difference in arms between them and just shoot him down where he stood. There wasn’t anything Slick would be able to do to stop a blaster.
Unfortunately for the Mandalorian, they decided to try to fight back hand-to-hand instead.
The thing was, Slick was good at hand-to-hand.
Not just good. He was superb. He was pretty sure he’d been made sergeant almost entirely on the basis of that skill alone, even discounting his sociability scores. Even back on Christophsis, during the disastrous discovery of his treason, he’d taken on Cody and Rex together, and he’d beaten them both flat out. Since being put in the rat cage, Slick had had nothing to do with his time but train, train, train, and also spar with the other prisoners or the occasional Guard that needed a place to vent, which meant that he might be even better now than he’d ever been before.
This Mandalorian might wear durasteel instead of plastoid, and they might be good enough when going up against someone less familiar with grappling with armor, but fundamentally? They were no Cody.
Certainly not with those shrimpy little legs –
“Osk’kyr! Let go, you karking shabuir – argh!”
Slick smirked as he twisted the Mandalorian’s leg against their own armor in a way that he knew from personal experience to be highly unpleasant. The Mandalorian flailed, trying to get loose and likely to manage it in another second, but – oooh, look at that.
Looked like Cordé had been right after all: thigh holsters really were all the rage these days.
Slick drew the blaster that had been tucked away there, then let the Mandalorian go just long enough to aim a feinted kick at their head. That made the Mandalorian flinch back, ducking their head away to protect it, and that in turn let Slick drive an elbow into the soft spot between the bucket and chest armor revealed by the flinch. Knocked the breath right out of the Mandalorian, and that gave Slick enough breathing room himself to back up and square up for round two.
He was feeling a lot more confident now that he had a weapon of his own.
“Hu’tuun,” the Mandalorian hissed, scuttling up back to standing position. “You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?”
“At least I know how to win a fight,” Slick said, smug.
“I bet that makes you feel better about betraying your people,” the Mandalorian spat, and Slick was shocked into a flinch of his own.
How? How did the Mandalorian know? How could they know? Was it written on Slick’s face or something? ‘Traitor that sold out his brothers for money’ –
No, it was impossible. Unless this attack was less random than he’d thought. Was this targeted? Not a strike aimed just at any clone that could be found, but one focused on Slick himself…?
The Mandalorian laughed, low and dark. “Do you even care? I bet you don’t. I bet you’ve never even thought about them. All those people suffering, starving and dying while you’re out here playing around with all that money, sitting pretty –”
“You have no idea what I’ve thought,” Slick snarled back, the fury eating away at him again. Sometimes it felt as though it would keep eating and eating until there wouldn’t be anything left of Slick at the end of it. Like giving in would turn him into a rabid beast, unable to think or love or reason, unable to do anything but lash out and hurt people just to feel something.
Sometimes.
The rest of the time, giving in to the fury felt good.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, dar’manda,” the Mandalorian mocked. “Be honest with yourself. You don’t care one bit, or at least you don’t care for the ones that don’t care for you. If you actually cared, you would dosomething –”
“I am doing something!” Slick roared, and this time it was him that gave up a safe position in favor of rushing forward in a blindly furious attack. It was a mistake, he knew it was even as he did it, but he couldn’t help himself, and the only reason he didn’t rightfully get his head blown off as a result was because the Mandalorian tripped up over themselves trying to get away from him instead of counterattacking, as if they mistakenly thought Slick had actually had a good attack plan in mind. “You have no idea the sorts of things I’ve got planned. No idea. I’m going to take care of them, all of them, no matter what they think of me, and I don’t give one flying fuck if they’re going to be happy or ungrateful for it!”
Grapple, twist, slam. Dig fingers into pressure points through gaps in the armor. Kick the joints, avoid hitting the durasteel. Feint with a swing, kick instead. Knock them down and –
“Yield. I yield!” the Mandalorian said, panting, as Slick trained his blaster at their visor, right where the shot would be sure to penetrate past armor into skull and brain. “Fuck, enough! I yield already. It’s your win. Fair and square…you’re kriffing fast, you know that? Kriffing fast. Now let me up, old man. I’ll help you.”
Slick scoffed in disbelief.
“No, really!” The Mandalorian protested, holding up their hands in surrender as if showing sincerity. “I’ll be good for it. Haat. I was just testing you, okay? No, don’t look like that, I’m serious. You want me to kneel to show my sincerity or something? Let me up, I’ll do. I’m no hardliner, and if I was I wouldn’t be one for fucking Pre.”
They laughed, a strangled sort of sound.
“You don’t know what it’s been like, okay? It’s been nothing but this or sniveling and starving under kriffing Kryze or that demagolka Almec…but not anymore, right? That’s the whole point. They’re not the only choices anymore.”
…what?
Pre, Kryze, Almec – was Slick supposed to know who those were?
This Mandalorian was talking like Slick should know exactly what they were going on about, except Slick very much didn’t. And that meant one of two things: either the Mandalorian was completely crazy, or (and this was the bad option) Slick had missed something very important about this fight.
Neither was a very appealing option.
Either way, Slick’s time was up. He was still holding the blaster to the Mandalorian’s face, and that was unsustainable. He either had to pull the trigger or back off – there was no point in just standing around like this, not if Slick wasn’t willing to go through with shooting them.
Which he wasn’t.
He wasn’t. Slick was a highly trained soldier, perfectly capable of pulling just about any trigger, but he’d been trained to fight to protect people, not murder them.
Even if they were clone-hating assholes.
…assuming, of course, this Mandalorian actually was a clone-hating asshole, and Slick hadn’t just completely misjudged them the way he might have misjudged the Jedi.
Still not thinking about that.
He pulled up the blaster and climbed back up to his feet. “I don’t need your help.”
“You will,” the Mandalorian said, rolling off their back and climbing up as well. “Don’t think I’m just talking for myself. There are others, too. For something this big, you’re going to need –”
“I’m just here to look for Boba,” Slick said sharply.
“Sure, sure. That’s right now. I’m talking about the bigger picture. Long-term. Listen, I don’t know exactly what you’re up to, but whatever it is, we can help.”
We?
Slick glanced around – and, shit, we was right. The fight had lasted long enough for the Mandalorian’s friends to catch up with them, and all while Slick hadn’t noticed. There were four more Mandalorians drawing near, all in similar kit, and while they were holding up empty hands to indicate peace right now, Slick didn’t like his odds if they decided otherwise.
He took a step back, then another. Could he run?
“We can do more than you think,” the Mandalorian promised. It was hard to get a read on them even with all of Slick’s experience with body language of armor, but the enthusiasm was clear – and more than a little worrying. “We can help you get what you need, what you really need, especially if you’re going to win over the traditionalists. No, wait, don’t go. Listen –”
They never got to finish their speech.
The sound of the rapid-fire automatic that cut him off was loud enough to deafen.
Slick had once been heavy artillery, his secondary specialty along with his squad, so he knew that sound like the back of his hand. It had been loud enough back on the open turquoise plains and cliffs of Christophsis, but in the tight little spaces of Coruscant it sounded almost as if the entire planet had started tearing itself apart.
The Mandalorians and Slick both reacted instinctively, though on two completely different sets of instincts: the Mandalorians threw themselves back and down, trusting their durasteel-beskar armor to protect them from the onslaught as they tried to escape, while Slick froze in place, knowing that plastoid wouldn’t do shit and having no choice but to hope he was lucky enough that the person firing was a friendly that needed him not to move to avoid hitting him.
Not that Slick was even wearing plastoid.
But he was lucky, for once, because whoever was firing was aiming very purposefully between him and the Mandalorians, sending them scampering away with a “Okay, okay, now’s not a good time! We get it! But think about it!” while Slick just stood there and watched them go.
After another few seconds to drive the point home, the firing stopped.
Slick waited.
A few more seconds after that, a dark figure dropped down from one of the rooftops from across the street. It was a clone – no. Or yes? He looked like a clone, albeit a clone wearing all-black heavy-duty armor of a type Slick had never seen before, or at least he felt like a clone, mostly. A really weird clone…
“What a useless bunch of Death Watch chakaar,” the clone said, looking in the direction the Mandalorians had retreated in and shaking his head. “Rotten as a Kaminoan, in their own way. Ganging up on you after losing fair and square…and you’re not even an Alpha.” He tilted his head to the side, giving Slick the helmeted equivalent of a close up-and-down look, then whistled. “Forget Alpha, you’re not even an ARC. Not even a baby commando! Just a reg! Kark it, you’re not even an officer!”
“Nothing wrong with being a sergeant,” Slick said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say. Tongue-tied twice in a day – it was most unlike him, and not fun at all.
Luckily for him, for whatever reason, his statement made the clone commando shift away from feeling disdainful into something much more cheerful.
Slick’s silver tongue to the rescue again. Somehow.
“Nothing wrong at all, nothing at all,” the other clone said affably. “You know, you don’t move much like a clone.”
Slick bristled: what did that mean?
“Calm down. It’s not a bad thing. You’re just…how to put it…you’re slinkier than I’m used to with standard troopers. More muscle, less discipline. Good set of skills, though. But what are you wearing? That’s not clone standard. You lose your kit in a bet or something?”
“Explosion,” Slick said, because his prison clothes were as close to kit as he got these days. “This was all they had. What about you? That armor’s not GAR standard, not even for spec-ops.”
The clone commando laughed. “I’m on an unsanctioned mission, actually,” he said, still sounding cheerful in an increasingly psychopathic sort of way. Who admitted that sort of thing? Much less admitted it out loud?! “Had a bit of spare time after a job and I figured I might as well poke around to see if I can dig up the shabuir running around saying he’s Kal’buir.”
“…wish I could help,” Slick lied. He’d never heard of anyone called ‘Kal’buir’, so he couldn’t help, but also he had no desire to get involved. “I’ve got to go. I’m looking for someone, too.”
“Tell Boba not to end up with his head in a toilet again,” the commando advised, bewilderingly. “Good luck with the brat.”
And that was that.
Slick stared briefly at the commando’s retreating back, then shook his head and started moving again himself. To his surprise, his anger had burnt itself out at some point without him noticing, probably somewhere in the confusion of whatever had just happened – which was both good, because he could finally think clearly again, and bad, because he could think clearly again.
Including, say, about how stupid someone would have to be to do what he just did.
Sure, it was nice to be rescued, and by another clone at that. Clones usually didn’t get rescued, not unless there was a spare Jedi nearby…in fact, the confused mix of surprised pleasure at the experience was probably what had knocked Slick out of his rage. But it was luck, pure luck.
If the commando hadn’t been in the right place at the right time – if the Mandalorian had fought the way they should have, if they’d had either a little more experience or a little less desire to chat – if Shimm hadn’t folded so quickly –
Slick had gotten lucky.
He’d really let his anger get away from him this time. He was being reckless, too reckless. He couldn’t afford to act like that. He had people who depended on him. Appo depended on him, Boba depended on him. His boys depended on him.
If he hadn’t been so lucky…
No, there was no time to think about that now. He needed to find Boba.
The place Shimm had indicated to him was just ahead. Slick would start there and hope to find a trace of Boba, something he could follow. Maybe he could ask around or something. How many kids with that face could there be? Not counting all the cadets, of course, but there wouldn’t be regular cadets on Coruscant…
Kark, but Slick really hoped Boba was okay. Sure, he’d been okay a few hours ago when Shimm last got word of him, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was still –
“– you can’t just ignore everything I’m saying just because I’m a Jedi!”
Slick stopped cold.
A Jedi commander? Here? Why would a Jedi be –
“Uhhhh, yes I can. I totally can. I mean, you have a good point about the war being evil and all, but…”
That was Boba.
Slick put his palm to his face and pressed it in hard. Of course it was Boba.
“The war is evil! What the war is making the Jedi do is evil. We are meant to be peacekeepers, to follow the light, to heal, but instead all we’re doing is leading more and more men to die –”
“Clones. Also, clones that you Jedi have enslaved.”
“Yes! Wait, no. They’re not slaves.”
“Uh, yeah they are. Maybe they don’t think they are, but that’s just the brainwashing. Which you Jedi are also responsible for.”
“Don’t group me in with the others. I’m trying to do something about it.”
Slick turned the corner and leaned against the wall, watching in amusement as neither of the two squabbling cadets noticed he was there. They were both sitting more or less exactly where Shimm said they would be found, right in front of a decrepit looking central notification computer that they were obviously trying to download information from.
Lack of situational awareness aside, Boba looked blissfully like Boba, still dressed in the same outfit that Slick had left him in, though he had somehow managed to acquire an older-model blaster and a too-large ammo belt full of recharges that he’d slung across his chest, while his Jedi commander companion was in fact a young Mirialan dressed in black, with a patterned grey-and-black hood that wasn’t pulled forward enough to obscure her yellow face with black geometric tattoos sprinkled over her nose.
“Uh-huh,” Boba drawled, sounding unbelievably annoying – in other words, perfectly in character for him. “That’s not what it sounds like to me. It sounds a bit more like you were going to do something but then you chickened out when that professor of yours –”
“She’s a librarian.”
“– told you that blowing people up with bombs is wrong and instead you needed to go meditate your way into not feeling bad about the war anymore –”
Slick arched his eyebrows. Bombs? Jedi commanders must be having a more interesting time than he’d realized.
“That’s not what happened!” the Mirialan commander snapped. “Yes, Madame Nu asked me to be her assistant while she looks for a way to get the Jedi out of the entanglement with the Senate. That’s what led us to agree to act as generals instead of peacekeepers as we were meant to be –”
“Lapdogs are still lapdogs.”
“– and yes, she’s also working with me on meditation and focus techniques to keep me from being drawn into the dark side, but I’m only sticking with her because she agrees with me. She’s showing me a better way to get what I want, which is the Jedi to stop fighting this awful war. If she doesn’t help me, I’m going to go back to my first plan.”
“And you’re saying she’s not stalling you?”
“Resisting the dark side isn’t stalling. It’s important. The dark side…it affects you.” She shivered. “When you’ve been affected by the dark side, you think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re not. You’re barely even thinking at all. You’re just – hurting.”
…huh.
Come to think of it, that sounded an awful lot like what happened when Slick lost his temper these days. Was it possible for someone other than a Jedi to get Dark Side or whatever? Like some sort of communicable disease. Maybe he’d gotten infected when the Coruscant riots had happened, when he’d been hit by that feeling, all that pain and anger and panic. But if he had, what was he supposed to do about it?
Other than meditation. The way General Skywalker talked about it, meditation sounded super boring – and Slick had spent enough of his limited life bored as it was.
“Hurting, huh,” Boba said, sounding thoughtful. Maybe Slick would get lucky and he’d ask exactly the right type of question Slick needed him to. “Hurting yourself or others? Like others you care about?”
Or not.
“Both!”
“That sounds dumb. Why not just hurt others you don’t care about?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Well, maybe I don’t care how it works. I’ve got better things to do.”
The Mirialan rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh, sure, big man Boba Fett with his big important secret that’s soooooo much more important than anything anyone else is doing –”
“It is important! And who are you to talk, baby Jedi Barriss Offee who can’t even heal people right anymore –”
“You take that back!”
“You take yourself back!”
“Did you two really manage to blow up a slave ring?” Slick asked idly, watching in amusement as the two of them leapt nearly a foot in the air in surprise. “Without getting caught?”
“Slick!” Boba howled, forgetting all of his dignity in favor of pitching himself up and forward to grab Slick around the waist and holding him as tightly as any chokehold. “You’re alive! I knew you’d be alive! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it..!”
“Wait, this is your clone friend?” Commander Offee (presumably) asked, rising to her feet as well. “The one on the ship? With Cordé?! You can tell me if Cordé is okay!”
“She’s fine,” Slick reassured her. “Terrifyingly capable, especially at talking without pausing to take a breath.”
“You do know Cordé!” Commander Offee collapsed right back onto the ground, pulling her knees up and hugging them tightly. “Oh, I’m so glad. When I saw the explosion, I thought…well…well, you know what I thought. She’s really okay? I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I couldn’t even imagine. NotCordé! The thought of someone as sweet and nice and special as her getting blow up –”
She stopped, and her face twisted up as if she’d bitten into something rotten.
"Blown up," she mumbled. "Bombs. Oh, what was I thinking..?"
Yes, that was definitely the look of someone who’d tasted something rancid, even if it was just the reality of her own thoughts. The expression of someone taking a long hard sudden look in an internal mirror and not liking what she saw.
The aftermath of the cold slap to the face that was the bitter realization of your own hypocrisy.
Slick could relate.
He wouldn't, though. Similar position or not, Commander Offee was still a Jedi, and Slick didn't trust or like the Jedi one bit. He blamed them for – he – well, he'd thought they were to blame for - except maybe they weren't, and he'd been wrong all along and –
He wasn’t going to think about this, damnit. It wasn’t the time or –
Boba punched Slick in the stomach.
The hit was entirely unexpected. Slick hadn't even noticed Boba letting go and winding up, it had happened so fast, and it knocked the breath right out of him.
"What was that for?!" Slick wheezed, more affronted than injured. He couldn’t believe he’d let Boba get the drop on him like that. It was just plain embarrassing, letting his guard down like that! That was the worst of it, really, since the hit itself didn’t matter: Boba might have a strong arm, but it was still the arm of a six-year-old cadet.
"You ditched me!" Boba said accusingly – and correctly. "And you were acting all weird, and that was before I thought you'd died, you slagger. Do you know how worried – uh, I mean, do you know how annoying that was?!”
“Plenty annoying,” Slick agreed, ignoring the slip up. The mild irritation mixed with amusement and pride he had been feeling a moment ago had disappeared instantly in favor of shame. “And you’d be right to be annoyed, too. I wasn’t – I didn’t –”
Maybe Slick should’ve spent less time kicking his own ass about what he’d done and more time thinking about how he should apologize to Boba for it in a way that Boba would accept as real. Slick didn’t want Boba to think that he was condescending to him or pitying him or saying something just to appease him or anything like that, because it wasn’t like that at all. Slick had acted in a supremely fucked-up way, he regretted it, and he wanted Boba to know that.
He wanted Boba to know he meant it.
Slick abruptly remembered that Mandalorian from earlier, saying something about kneeling to prove their sincerity. Well, Prime had been a Mandalorian, right? That made Boba one, too.
So Slick knelt.
Boba’s eyes went wide as saucers.
“I was wrong,” Slick told him, direct and to the point. “I was wrong, you were right. I was acting weird and I was acting selfish, and I ditched you. Worse than that, I did it by jerking you around, and that’s on me. There’s no excuse that’s good enough, and none I can give. The only explanation I have is that I was so scared that I’d lose my boys again that I wasn’t thinking right.”
It was a shit apology. It was shit, and Slick knew it was shit, and that Boba was fully within his rights to tell him to go kark himself. But here he was anyway, kneeling and hoping with all his heart that Boba would be somehow able to feel that he meant every word he said.
“Oh,” Commander Offee mumbled from somewhere off to the side – Slick wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at Boba. “That’s the secret? But I thought – everyone thought – they can’t be – but clearly you are…oh, that makes so much sense. So much would change, if anyone knew. But that’s just it, isn’t it? They can’t know. I see now. That’s why it’s a secret.”
That all sounded less than promising, even possibly ominous given rumors about Jedi abilities to use their abilities to ferret out who-even-knew-what types of secrets, but Slick couldn’t pay any attention to her right now. Boba was the only thing in his eyes, the only one that mattered right now, and he still looked like he was chewing it over.
“So you were scared,” Boba said thoughtfully. “About losing them. I can see that…and what did you feel coming after me now?”
“Terrified,” Slick said honestly. “I mean, I knew you could handle the underworld, but I would’ve never forgiven myself if I’d managed to kark anything up for you, or if you never wanted to see me again because of it.”
Boba looked pleased.
“Well, that’s all right then,” he said complacently. “Terrified is good. And obviously I can handle the Coruscant underworld. In fact, just so you know, this is the third slave trade ring we blew up!”
Slick bit his tongue in time to manage not to yell something along the lines of How can one single cadet-sized clone manage to get into that much trouble in so little time?!
He had the feeling Boba wouldn’t appreciate it.
Though, speaking of trouble –
“You can tell me about it on the way back,” he said. “We’ve got to go. The Jedi have decided to send someone to interview you about your dad, some General Vos, and he’s coming now. Fox…”
Slick stopped there, hesitating. Commander Offee was right there, after all. How much did she know? How much had Boba told her? She had sounded rather disaffected from the Jedi at large, earlier, but that didn’t mean she was trustworthy. Did she even know that Boba was supposed to be in prison right now..?
“I’ll come with you!” Commander Offee declared.
“What?” Boba said. “No! This isn’t any of your business!”
“I can help –”
“No! I only agreed to work with you because we were both looking for answers about what happened to Senator Amidala’s ship, and we’ve got that, and that means we’re done. We don’t need you –”
“Master Vos doesn’t like clones,” she interrupted, wrapping her arms around herself and squeezing tight. Her pale yellow cheeks were flushed. “My master had a joint mission with him once. I stayed behind…but Gree told me that his clones were complaining about how much he didn’t trust them. Like he thought they were up to something – and if he’s been sent to be an investigator, he’ll be extra suspicious. You won’t be able to hide your secret from him without help. I can help.”
That sounded pretty compelling to Slick, personally. But he hadn’t been the one spending time with the Commander, so he looked to Boba.
Boba was scowling, which meant he probably believed her. “What do you know?” he demanded, and now he was crossing his own arms to better glare. “We’ve been doing just fine without any Jedi helping us…and what do you know about our secret, anyway?!”
“I won’t ask any questions,” the Commander promised. “But I know enough, just from being around you. Well, him. Jedi are sensitive to – I won’t say it. But just know that we can tell. And it’ll be even worse with Master Vos. He’s got psychometry!”
“You mean he’s crazy? Like killing people crazy?”
“What? No. No, he’s not a psychopath. He can sense the echoes of events just by touching things. And even beyond that, he’s very sensitive to the Force. It won’t help to try to hide, not if you’re in the same area he is. He could track a trace of the Dark Side through a maze while blind, if he had to...listen, I’m not judging, okay? But you will need my help if you want to get through this.” She swallowed. “You were right, Boba. This is big. This could change everything. Not just for you, but for lots of people…and there are clones I care for, too. Okay?”
Well, shit. It sure sounded like she’d figured out what they were up to – and from what, just being around Boba and then Slick for a while? That did not bode well for the future…though it didn’t explain how Appo had managed to keep General Skywalker in the dark for so long. Of course, he had that thing with the Senator that had been distracting him so effectively, so maybe that was the reason? Or some sort of CC training, maybe, Appo had said something at one point about a class they’d taken to learn about dealing with Jedi…
“Fine,” Boba said snippily. “Fine. You can help us out. But I’m the boss, okay? You listen to me. None of this stupid equal partnership crap anymore –”
“That’s fine,” Commander Offee interrupted again. “I don’t care. You can make the rules and give the orders if it makes you feel better. Though I’m still not getting into that thing.”
Boba scoffed, but nodded at Slick.
Slick wasn’t totally sure he knew where they’d landed, other than the fact that they were now apparently going to cart along a Jedi Commander who knew their secret, but he supposed that that was something they could deal with later. They had a deadline. Worse, Fox had a deadline.
“Right,” he said. “We need to go. We can get a shuttle –“
“We don’t need a shuttle!” Boba interrupted, appearing to abruptly forget his annoyance at having to spend more time with a Jedi in favor of intense excitement. “We have one. I mean, I have one. The last slave trader we busted had one, and now it’s mine – it’s right over there!”
He pointed.
Slick looked.
And then he looked some more, because there wasn’t any speeder where Boba was pointing. It was a corner of the shabby streets that somehow managed to be even shabbier and more unattractive than all the others around it, probably due to the presence of a big dumpster full of piles of scrap metal, each piece drenched in all the trash, waste, and filth one could imagine, and the whole thing incongruously topped with what looked like some sort of ancient steering apparatus that’d probably been around since the High Republic or something –
Wait.
No.
“Boba,” Slick said. “I know I’m sorry and feeling guilty and everything about how I acted earlier. But you’re not getting me to get into that pile of junk even if you put a blaster to my head.”
“Thank you,” Commander Offee said. “He wouldn’t listen to me!”
“You’re both a bunch of prisses! What’s wrong with it? It flies – look –”
He pressed some buttons on a comm that he had fished out of his pocket.
The rubbish heap – which, horrible as it was to look at, somehow managed to smell even worse – began to shake and rumble. After a few genuinely concerning sounds, it eventually got itself together and very slowly rose up from the ground, first the back and then the front –
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After the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.
“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick -“
(when the GAR’s most blindly obedient clone starts following in the footsteps of its first clone traitor, the galaxy starts to change)
chapter under the cut
"You've got to be kidding me," Slick said. "It's just a scratch!"
"Since it's such a minor injury," the doctor said peaceably, "it surely won't hurt you to sleep in the medical bay for one night."
Some "medical bay". The Naboo safehouse Cordé had insisted they go to after the explosion was more luxurious than anything Slick had ever seen before – five bedrooms, two dining rooms, the works – but even this palace of a place only had a single room set up for medical stuff. A very well-equipped room, sure, with a view of the Coruscant skyline that was by itself probably worth more than Slick and his batch put together, but still just one room. And since Slick wasn't injured enough to require the use of the bacta tank that was in there – and while they were on that subject, also, who the kriff had their own karking bacta tank on Coruscant, a place with at least three hospitals within easy speeder distance even if you discounted the lavishly equipped Senate facilities? – there was no reason at all for him to stay in there.
Slick was so bored. He was so bored.
He'd already been stuck "resting" there all day, and there was only so much mandatory R&R a man could take - especially a man recently released from confinement, and whose long-lost much-missed boys were right there!
Not that his squad was being extremely helpful at the moment.
"You did go into freefall without any armor, Sarge," Gus pointed out. He was hovering. They were all hovering, and all just because he'd been the only one of them not wearing protective kit during the mess that had been their unscheduled rerouting. "That's dangerous."
"The Jedi do it all the time," Slick growled.
"They're Jedi," the doctor pointed out. "You're not. And it's that head wound that worries me. They can be quite dangerous. And yes, before you say anything, such wounds remain dangerous even after medical attention, so the bacta patch and bandages on your temple is not sufficient to quell my concern."
"I'm a clone trooper," Slick tried to explain. "We're built to be hardy. Extra durable. We've got extremely hard heads -"
"I can most certainly believe that," the doctor said tartly.
"Sarge, maybe eat another ration bar?" Jester suggested, shoving a half open one at Slick's face. His obvious worry was definitely not helping Slick's case here. "Just a bite -"
"I've already had two, Jester. And dinner. And lunch!"
"But -"
"No. I'm not actually hurt, and even if I was, stuffing me full of food isn't going to fix it."
"You gotta understand it from our view, Sarge. It looked pretty gruesome from the outside…"
"Yeah," Sikes said. "Smoke and dust everywhere, debris falling from above, you being carted out in someone's arms half unconscious -"
"I was completely awake."
"- blood all over your face, just gushing out, almost as if it was your heart's blood -"
"It. Was. A. Scratch!"
"Okay, that's it," the doctor said. "You are now officially stressing out my patient. Everyone out!"
Everyone tried to complain, but the doctor – some veteran from Naboo who lived on Coruscant and got paid to keep half an eye on the safehouse in their spare time – hustled them all out of the room so fast that Jester, who had put the ration bar down at the foot of Slick's bed, didn't even have the chance to snatch it back up. Given that "all of them" included two full clone trooper squads in active duty gear, this was no small feat.
Of course, Slick didn't get to leave.
Ugh.
Begrudgingly he settled down and closed his eyes, figuring it made sense to try to get some sleep if he could swing it.
He hoped Appo was having a better time than he was, but given the whole Citadel deathtrap situation Slick was pretty sure he wasn't. At the very least he hoped Appo had made it out of there in one piece, because if this whole plan was going to rest on Slick's shoulders, it wasn't going to go anywhere fast, or possibly at all.
Kark it, Slick really shouldn't have left Boba alone with Appo's datapad. He didn't have any way to know if Appo was okay. He couldn't even call to ask Boba about it, since per Cordé's orders the whole safehouse was under absolute comm silence while the attempt on their lives (or, rather, on Senator Amidala's) was being investigated. Which also meant that he couldn't call to apologize…
Ugh.
What a load of -
"I trust you aren't dead, my little student."
Oh great. That was just what Slick needed: karking Ventress dreams.
He opened his eyes, feeling bitter as usual about his life and shit luck, and turned to look at her. Oddly enough, the surroundings hadn't changed into the usual dream landscape: no turquoise Christophsis, no dark twisted swamp, not even the vaguely featureless plain where Ventress sometimes insisted on doing what she liked to call their “training sessions.” Instead the setting remained exactly the same as before Slick had closed his eyes, the luxurious Nabooian safehouse medical room, only now there was Ventress herself sitting there, perched on the windowsill and gazing out indifferently at the magnificent view.
She looked different, too. She'd done something with her head and hair (as a disguise? a new style choice? Slick had no clue and was not going to ask), and she was dressed in something more substantial than her previously favored attire of raggedy bandages. The new get-up was dark, for one thing, and while it was still fairly tight it looked more like a standard bounty hunter's gear than what you’d expect to see on a Sith or a Nightsister witch.
Personally, Slick thought it was an improvement, but what did he know? He'd spent his entire life wearing uniforms and armor kit, then prison clothes. Luckily, it wasn't like Ventress was about to start asking him to swap fashion tips, and Slick certainly wasn't dumb enough to suggest it even as a joke.
"Well?"
Oh, she wanted an answer. Great. She was feeling chatty.
"I'm not dead," Slick said. "Nor will I be. Everyone is overreacting over a little tiny bleed because they've got nothing better to do."
"Good," Ventress said, ignoring Slick's color commentary as always. "You are not permitted to die just yet."
Yeah, whatever.
Slick decided to switch gears. "So glad I can live up to expectations," he said. "Of course, since I did such an excellent job of staying alive under such trying circumstances, there’s really no point in also doing training tonight…"
That finally got Ventress to look at him, albeit with an expression of disgust. "You're pathetic."
That wasn't a no.
"I'm okay with that," Slick decided, and settled further into what was really a very comfortable bed. Naboo had a good eye for quality. "Never nice to see you, bye now."
He pointedly closed his eyes again, though he wasn't expecting it to work. His subconscious was rarely kind to him, and when it was manifesting as Ventress, even less so.
Still, there was silence for a long moment. And then –
"I killed someone today."
"Oh wow, you don't say," Slick said dryly. "Could it be Taungsday again already?"
"He wasn't in my way," Ventress said, and she sounded so pensive and thoughtful in such an uncharacteristic way that Slick opened his eyes again and looked at her. "He was a senator, perhaps. Someone wealthy, anyway. Wealthy and powerful enough to merit an escort though the lower levels by a member of the Coruscant Guard. It was not wise, killing him. Doing so risks drawing attention to me at a time when my plans require stealth."
She fell silent.
"Okay," Slick said, unable to resist. "Then why kill him?"
Ventress remained quiet for long enough that Slick was starting to think she wasn't going to answer him, and then, abruptly, she did.
"He was going to kill the clone."
Slick blinked. What the kark did that mean? This dream was making even less sense than usual.
"He was buying illegal weapons," Ventress said. "Ancient ones, to add to his collection. The particular prize he was after was an old Mandalorian slugthrower. Guaranteed still functional. The seller asked if he wanted to try it out, and he agreed, and so they loaded it. But when the seller tried to offer him a target, he refused. Instead he ordered his escort to remove his helmet, and when the clone did, he put it into the clone's mouth."
She smiled thinly.
"Unfortunately for him, by the time he tried to pull the trigger, he suddenly discovered his arm was no longer attached to his body. He was most surprised, I'll tell you that."
Slick could imagine. Literally: it was as if he could see it happening right in front of him. The look on the senator's priggy arrogant face, a gross mixture of offended surprise and disbelief that anyone would dare strike him, imminently about to be wiped clean with the oncoming rush of agonized pain once he realized what Ventress' lightsaber had done to him.
It was rather gratifying, actually, to think of something like that happening to one of the beings that always seemed to be tormenting Fox's boys, especially one that had been himself on the verge of murdering one. Slick found a smile that echoed Ventress' appearing on his own face, cold and smugly pleased.
But…
"That doesn't answer my question," he pointed out, his curiosity overcoming the sick sense of satisfaction. "Why interfere at all?"
The self-satisfied smirk vanished from Ventress' face.
"The clone," she said haltingly. "That clone…he had the same haircut as you."
That wasn't too much of a surprise. Individuality was great and all that, especially with the way the commanders and trainers were always talking it up, but actually there were really only so many haircuts a clone could pick from that actually looked decent. A fade like his was relatively easy to maintain, comfortable under a helmet, and, in Slick's personal opinion, looked particularly snazzy with the facial features that each clone shared. It was a popular choice.
But why would Ventress care about that?
(Unless she really did want fashion tips, in which case Slick was screwed.)
"I spared the clone," Ventress said abruptly - which, what? Ventress the Clone-Killer did what? Why?! "I don't know why. Perhaps it seemed unnecessary. He had already resigned himself to his death…such a pointless death."
For once, Ventress wasn't as opaque as she usually was in Slick's dreams, a solid block of icy rage intercut with sporadic flashes of pain so dire they needed to be shared with others to be anything like bearable. Today she seemed almost - lost.
"He didn't even fight," she murmured. "He wanted to, but he didn't."
"Couldn't," Slick corrected grimly. What Ventress described matched up with some of the darker things Fox had shared with him, the way the Senate's corruption seeped into their treatment of the men sworn (forced) to serve them. Seriously, the Guard had the most shit assignment imaginable.
He supposed that was why he was dreaming about it.
"Tell me, Slick," Ventress interrupted his wandering thoughts. "Do you think he will tell the Jedi?"
"Your dead senator? Probably not."
Ventress snorted and rolled her eyes, her odd contemplative mood snapped like a twig. "Little bastard," she said, not without some fondness. "I meant the clone."
"I doubt it. The Guard don't have a General of their own, and after their experience with the Senate they're quite insular. Most of the time they steer well clear of the Jedi. I can't imagine them breaking that just to report this."
Ventress frowned at Slick.
"No Jedi? What silly fool tries to protect them at the cost of their own life, then?"
That one was easy.
"Fox," Slick said firmly. When Ventress shot him a doubtful look, he shrugged. "Maybe the other Guard commanders too, I don't know. But definitely Fox."
"Ridiculous," Ventress sniffed. "Expecting a clone to accomplish what even Jedi struggle with."
Slick didn't disagree.
"I cannot risk my plans with Savage and Feral," Ventress said, tapping her fingers on her cheek and looking thoughtful once again. "The Jedi must not discover that I am on Coruscant. But if they do not…if the Guard truly do not report such things…"
She trailed off ominously, then very unexpectedly smiled once more. A strange smile, less cruel than usual but no less sharp.
"It's only natural that I do not appreciate people harming what is mine," she said, sounding pleased as if she'd just convinced herself of something. "Even in effigy. Yes. It has been too long since I have felt the thrill of a hunt, even if only the inferior pleasures of one undertaken in defense of others…Recover soon, my student. I shall return soon to resume your lessons."
She turned and disappeared out the open window before Slick could tell her, yet again, that he would prefer not to have any more lessons at all. Karking Kamino: he couldn't even have proper nightmares about the Sith without it turning into the flash training session from Sith hell instead…
Weird, though, how Ventress had gone out the window this time. Normally in his dreams she vanished vanished, melting into thin air, rather than the more pedestrian (if still virtually impossible for anyone not a Jedi) means of going away. None of this walking off and leaving things exactly as they were before he'd fallen into this dream.
…he was dreaming, right?
No, that was crazy. Of course Slick was dreaming. He'd just had a chat with Ventress, of all people, Ventress the killer of clones, and he wasn't dead, despite his constant mouthing off. That meant this all had no choice but to be a mere projection of his subconscious.
Still…
No. No, that was crazy talk. This was a dream, and Slick could prove it.
He stuck out his hand at the ration bar Jester had left behind (possibly intentionally, now that he thought about it – it was a very Jester thing to do, trying to trick his Sarge into eating more by ‘accidentally’ leaving something that would otherwise go to waste in his vicinity).
"Move," Slick said to the ration bar. "Come on. I am you and you are me and this is all a dream, and in my dreams I can do Jedi shit. Move."
The ration bar jerked, then slowly rose up to float a few inches above the end of the bed. Then slowly, very slowly, almost begrudgingly, it floated gently forward until it was hovering over the wastebin.
When Slick flexed his fingers, it dropped down with a satisfying thunk.
So there. Totally a dream.
After all, everyone knew clones couldn’t be Force sensitive. Prime hadn’t been, so clones weren’t, and that was that. It was a rule clad in beskar, that great dividing line with the clones on one side and the Generals on the other, the Generals and all the sentient species in the galaxy that had the possibility, however remote, of producing Generals. It was so obvious a truth, so blatant and self-evidently a fact, that even the Kaminoans hadn’t bothered listing it as one of the potential deviations requiring culling. It had even been cited in the Senate as a reason that clones did not fall under the gamut of legal protections applicable to sentient species: they were copies of one person, who had voluntarily signed up, not a people.
Slick was a clone. Therefore, he was not and could not be Force sensitive.
Therefore, this was and had to be a dream.
Though for some reason he now felt extra tired…
The buzz of a comm unit woke him up.
Instinct more than logic had Slick reaching for the source of the sound, bleary and confused with the remnants of a wonderful if highly unrealistic dream where Cody held his hands and whispered I get it now, I understand, I see what you saw, I only wish it had been earlier over and over again. By the time Slick woke up enough to realize that he didn’t own a personal comm and hadn't since his arrest, he'd already found one in the leftover ruins of his clothes and answered.
Luckily, it was Fox who popped up.
"You look like one of Grizzer's chewtoys," Fox's little hologram told him.
"Don't you start," Slick said, immediately put out. "It's barely a scratch I got from some stray debris. Everyone knows head wounds bleed a lot. Where did this comm come from, anyway?"
"Thorn put it in your pocket while you were staring at the sky. And good thing we did, too, or else we would have had no way of telling you that we know you're still alive."
Right, of course. The Guard had stuck Slick with that tracker unit, so they knew exactly where he was. He'd been so stupid, leaving like that –
"Hold up, does anyone else know?" Slick asked, suddenly alarmed. "Cordé said that the Senator told her we had to keep quiet until a full investigation had been kicked off -"
"Don't worry, we figured it was something like that when you didn't surface. We've been covering on our end, telling everyone we don't have any official conclusions yet. But something's come up, and we need you."
Slick felt something cold slide down his back. "Appo -"
"Appo's fine. Word came in that Lola Sayu's just been reconquered."
"I thought they were on a rescue mission!"
"They were. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but it turns out that Appo's a bit of an overachiever," Fox said dryly, and Slick snorted involuntarily. You could say that again for sure…
A moment later, though, he sobered up, and the cold feeling transmuted into a horrible churning feeling in his belly: if it wasn't Appo, then there was only one other thing it could be.
"What happened to Boba?"
Fox made a face. "That stupid datapad, mostly. He saw the news."
The news? What -
Oh no.
The news about the explosion. The one that probably implied that Senator Amidala and all of her clone escort – the one unofficially including Slick – were dead.
No way Boba was taking that well.
"We're not totally sure what happened next. We know he left the safehouse, but he found a way to shut down our tracker not long after –"
Of course he had. Boba was brilliant, trained by Prime himself with all his best bounty hunter tricks, and he played his cards very close to his chest. He hadn't forgotten all about the Guard's tracker when just fucking off from the safehouse for no discernable reason. He wouldn't have done it lightly, not like Slick had.
He would have had a purpose.
"He went to go look for me?" Slick asked.
Fox's grim expression confirmed it.
"It's worse than you know," he said. "The Jedi just sent word that they're kicking off an official investigation into what happened with Senator Amidala, including sending one of their top investigators to Coruscant…but while he's here, he's also meant to be looking into whether Jango Fett is still alive."
Oh kark.
"He’s on his way back now, but he sent word ahead to the Guard that he wants to interview Boba as soon as he gets here. That would be bad enough, except at the moment…"
"Boba's not there," Slick finished, realizing exactly how bad it was. The Guard would be in big trouble if it was discovered that they'd let Boba go – and hadn't Slick just been talking in his dream about how wary the Guard was of the Jedi?
Not that Slick was spending any of his time thinking about the Jedi and their approximate level of trustworthiness, not since the whole thing with Prime and Fox and –
Listen, Slick had been busy, and he’d already decided not to think about it. So he wasn’t going to. Just like he wasn’t thinking about Cody. Or having strange dreams about Cody. Or –
No, Slick was definitely not doing that. That would be pathetic, so he’s not.
Of course, what he was doing instead was being absolutely pathetic in every other respect, up to and including bullying a cadet that trusted him into doing what he wanted and then ditching him with responsibilities beyond his level and then letting him think that Slick was dead while he ran off to get into who-knew-what danger all because Slick wasn’t there to stop him…
Kark it.
“I’m going to go look for him,” Slick said.
Fox looked unimpressed that it had taken Slick so long to realize it.
“Why do you think I called you?” he said impatiently. “Normally I’d send some of my boys, but we’ve got too many eyes on us at the moment and we don’t have time to wait until that eases off. Someone’s got to go find him and get him back to the prison before the Jedi investigator arrives.”
“How long do I have? When do you need him back by?”
“Yesterday would be ideal. Failing that, tomorrow at the latest.”
“Afternoon?”
“Morning. General Vos’s ship gets here at 0600, and there’s only so long I can stall a determined Jedi.”
Fox clicked off without saying goodbye, leaving only those ominous words floating in the air.
Great. No pressure or anything.
Slick slid out of bed, glanced at his clothes (ruined, thanks to the smoke, shrapnel, and a certain overenthusiastic doctor’s scissors), cursed quietly, then headed to the door. One of his boys should hopefully have a spare set he’d be able to pinch –
The door slid open.
Cordé sat on a chair right across the hallway, loosely holding a datapad in her lap.
Slick stared.
She held up the datapad. “I’m tracking any comms that come in or out of the house.”
Ah.
Before Slick could try to explain the comm (or, for that matter, his attempt at making a jailbreak in his underwear), she charged straight on: “Assuming this Boba of yours has gone down into the Coruscanti underworld to look for news about you, your best bet to find him is probably Reeka Shimm. Shimm’s one of the more reliable info brokers in the higher lower levels. He’s a scumbag, of course, but aren’t they all? In my experience he responds only to threats and flirting, so you probably want to go with the former. Not that you’re not cute or anything, but best to go with what you know best. And we’d better get you something to wear. Follow me.”
“We keep a number of extra outfits here in the event our people need to take refuge suddenly,” Cordé continued as she led him into another room. “It won’t fit as well as borrowing another clone’s spares, but the cloth will be reenforced against knives and blaster fire. Note reinforced, which does certainly not mean immune to. Just as no one is immune to blowing up a ship…well, maybe I am. Did I mention that this is the second time someone’s tried to blow up the transport I’m in while I’m pretending to be Padmé?”
Really? Maybe she should have warned her slagging clone escort about that tendency of hers.
“Anyway, you need clothes, and this’ll be better for going down into dangerous terrain. Besides, I’d really rather you not bother my escort any further. It’s adorable how much they love you, but I wouldn’t want them to get distracted from their duties.”
“They wouldn’t,” Slick said at once. “They’re better than that.”
“See? Adorable. Oh, I also don’t want you carrying any officially issued armaments down there. GAR gear is far too recognizable, even if it does end up on the black market sometimes. I can give you a vibroblade, maybe –”
“I’m just going to go find Boba and come straight back,” Slick interrupted. “I don’t need –”
“You can’t possibly expect me to look Jester in the eyes and tell him I sent his Sarge into danger without a single weapon.”
…was this what it felt like to lose an argument? Slick didn’t like it one bit.
“Anyway, the lower parts of Coruscant are simply unpleasant. I wouldn't be caught dead without a weapon myself - oh, good, I'm glad Captain Quallor's boots fit! I was hoping they would. Not to brag or anything but I've got an eye for sizes. Can I interest you in a sexy little thigh holster?"
"No," said Slick.
"Pity. It's all the rage these days. Like I was saying, there's trouble down below. It was bad enough before, but these days they keep cutting social programs citing the war, then shorting the troops citing social programs. Really makes you wonder where it's all going, doesn’t it? Anyway. Based on the urgency of your departure, I'm assuming you're concerned about your Boba taking care of himself?"
"No! Well, yes. He's - very talented, but -" Slick held up a hand to signify height.
"Oh, that's very bad, then," Cordé said, not unsympathetic but still brisk and practical. "A kid by himself? Slavers will be all over him like – you know what, I just ate, I’m not finishing that metaphor. Tell me, are you sure you won't take the thigh holster? Very sexy."
"Every time you say that I want to less."
"You clone boys are all too sensitive. No one on the Resolute agreed either. Spoilsports… Oh, there we go, all done. Very dashing."
Slick looked down at himself: layers of dark blue and dark brown and black, all dull enough to avoid catching the eye despite being made of some fabric that felt softer than clouds, while still being as warm and sturdy as any sets of blacks. It probably wasn't rated against vacuum, but it would certainly do the trick on Coruscant.
"…Sergeant?"
Slick looked up, his attention immediately drawn by Cordé’s unusually serious tone.
"There are a lot of people on Coruscant," she said. " A lot of hungry, angry people. Rightly or wrongly, many of them blame the war for their problems, and the clones, for better or worse, are the public face of the war. I know you're mostly worried about the danger to your Boba, but don't forget about the danger to yourself, too. Be careful down there."
"I will," Slick said, serious himself. He'd heard plenty of stories with similar warnings, whether from Fox and the Guard or even from some of his fellow prisoners who’d come in later in the war, and those had been before the riots that had affected him so badly. Coruscant was not a good place to be a clone. "In and out, as little trouble as possible."
He didn't promise that there would be no trouble at all.
The remnants of his earlier dream still lingered – not the one with Cody, but the one with Ventress. The Guard was bound by duty and brotherhood and fear of collective punishment to not fight back when threatened, but nominal membership in the Guard or not, Slick had no such reason for restraint. He wasn’t going to go out of his way to start fights, not with Boba’s safety on the line, but if anyone even thought about pulling even a fraction of what that dead senator had tried on Fox's Guard on him…well, Slick had no plans to take that lying down.
"Good. I'll tell your boys. Good luck!"
Slick found himself outside the safehouse and on a shuttle heading to the nearest cross-level elevator banks almost before he knew what was happening. Chatterbox or not, Cordé could be scarily efficient when she put her mind to it.
The outfit Slick had been provided with had a hood, which he kept drawn up as he went through the crowded bylanes, following the directions Cordé had provided for Shimm’s favorite haunt. It would’ve been easier if he’d had his own speeder, but it wasn’t like he could get one of those – things cost money outside the GAR, a fact Slick had known in theory and was now reminded of with grim regularity as he swiped his borrowed credit chip repeatedly just to get to his destination. The prices went down even more quickly than the level numbers, presumably because of the increasing poverty of the inhabitants, but Slick was in no real mood to think about that.
No: he was thinking about Boba.
It hadn’t been right, treating him like that, and Slick knew it. Harping about how much he trusted him, when he knew Boba was sensitive to stuff like that, then ditching him with the responsibility of supporting Appo without a second thought…the thing was, Slick did trust Boba. He trusted him more than he trusted a lot of people. He even trusted him with Appo.
It was the way Slick had done it that was the problem. Boba might be older chronologically, but he aged natborn-style; he still had the body and mind of a cadet. Slick, as a fully grown adult, was as close as Boba had to a superior officer right now, and that meant he had responsibilities towards him. He had to take care of him, respect him, support him – and under no circumstances should he use his greater authority or position of respect to manipulate him.
If Slick had seen a fellow sergeant do what he’d done to a squad member, he would’ve punched them. If it had been someone higher ranked, he would have reported them. If it had been a natborn…
Well, Slick didn’t know exactly how natborns worked. But for all that Boba could sometimes be more natborn than clone because of how he’d been raised, some things with him still felt familiar. The way Boba called Prime Dad was full of fondness and respect and admiration, a little like the tone Slick’s boys used when they called him Sarge – not all squads were that close, of course, and not every squad meant the affectionate nickname the same way his boys meant it for him. But all clones eventually found someone to be close to, whether it was their squad or their batch or a roommate or even just a friend. Everyone needed someone to have a relationship with that was more than just brothers in arms.
Not that Boba was at the point of calling Slick Sarge or anything like that. He wouldn’t do that, proud little slagger that he was.
Hmm. Maybe Slick should offer it up as an idea? Would Boba like that?
Nah, Boba would probably just tell him he was being weird again…
Assuming he forgave Slick for having been an ass to him. Or for apparently dying on him, when Slick knew how much Prime’s death had messed with Boba – ugh, really, no wonder Boba had run off immediately to find whatever information on Slick that he could, hoping against hope that he was still alive. And while normally Slick would confidently bet on Boba against the entire Coruscanti underworld, notwithstanding Cordé’s warnings about slavers and angry mobs, he wasn’t sure that Boba would be at his best right now.
Low morale, they’d called it. Battle-shock.
A euphemism, because they couldn’t say death-wish without sounding like they’d given up on them. Because there was no other way out for a clone, for a trooper that didn’t want to fight any more. Nothing to do but go out recklessly into danger and wait for the inevitable –
Not anymore, Slick reminded himself. Things are going to be different now. There’s going to be another way out for everyone, a way to freedom, and Boba’s going to be there to help get the whole thing over the line.
Assuming he doesn’t get his stupid ass killed first.
Assuming he doesn’t get killed because of you.
Slick gritted his teeth, trying to stave off the thought of it, but it was too late: the floodgates had opened. Boba dead, Boba reckless and then dead, Boba miserable and in pain in some too-tight place that was hurting him, and all because of Slick, who’d left him vulnerable. Just like he’d left his squad behind, vulnerable just the same, and the only reason they were alive was because he’d gotten lucky with Appo swooping in and snatching them up for himself – and it burned, a little, that Slick knew he had to be grateful for that.
He was in a thoroughly rotten mood by the time he made it to the address Cordé had given him, and not even the wonder of being out and free from the rat cage was penetrating through his misery and gloom and self-hatred. It had settled on Slick again like a miasma, that old weight he thought he’d shaken off when he’d decided to join Appo on their insane quest to free the clones.
It hadn’t been easy. Choosing to hope, to trust, to believe in something other than hatred and pain and wanting to lash out until everyone else felt the same pain as him – leaving that behind had been one of the hardest things Slick had ever done.
Falling back in was as easy as anything.
It was like slipping into a familiar set of blacks, worn from use until it fit him just right. Like the warmth of his tube back on Kamino, which had sheltered him for so much of his life. Like being on that cliff in Christophsis with Ventress, a place Slick sometimes thought he’d never really left.
Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to -
The place Cordé had directed Slick to was, outwardly, a shabby-looking cantina, dingy by design to hide that it was a central gathering place for all kinds of criminals. She’d suggested, when pressing the credit chip into Slick’s hand, that he start by going in and ordering a drink, hood up and presence obscured, to do a little bit of recon on the joint and then working out his strategy.
Slick had never been much of a recon guy.
He kicked the door of the place open and marched right in, dimly aware that his hood had fallen back onto his shoulders with the force of the blow.
“Where’s that rat-bastard Shimm?” he demanded from the room, which had fallen silent and turned to stare at him. “He’s going to tell me everything he knows about where Boba is – and he’s going to do it right now.”
The Hero of Three Faces is fanfiction crossovers, but it’s comic strips with stick figures, but they’re triangles.
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❌ Does this ship make any sense whatsoever by any reasonable metric
✅ Does the thought of these characters standing next to each other make you want to chew concrete and then break apart a nearby automobile with your bare hands
there's certainly something about a character that sticks to a very rigid moral code explicitly because they tried doing whatever makes sense at the time and it went horribly, horribly wrong, and so they have lost their trust in their own ability to tell right from wrong and have a genuine desire to not hurt people that they don't know how to live up to without effectively outsourcing their morality to something or someone else. and then the something else fails, because of course it does.
