Bail fic??? 👀
;)
It feels, unflatteringly, like being seventeen again, overindulging and regretting it. Bail’s whole head throbs, and there's an unpleasant knot in his stomach that could turn into nausea if he moves too fast. Bail’s whole body feels sore, compressed and stretched-out and overused, and he strangles a groan, face-down on dirty duracrete that reeks like Coruscant's lowest levels.
And then, loud, familiar, a voice says, “Let me go, that’s my father!”
Leia, Bail thinks, and the alarm that jolts through him is vicious and sharp-edged and draws blood. He thinks of Vader with his hands on Leia, of Leia being tortured by the man who provided her genes and then murdered her mother, and he rolls up before he can even begin to think better of it. There's a taste of ashes in his mouth, light-spots burned into his vision, and he can't quite make it to his feet before the world lurches and hands grab him.
Not Imperial hands. Careful, a little wary in how they hold, but they keep Bail upright on his knees as the world swims, and he gets a hand up, braces himself on slick-smooth armor and goes still, realizing there's a stormtrooper bare inches away from him.
“Let go!” Leia snarls, and there's a rush, a blur of white that’s stopped halfway.
“Just wait, lady,” a voice says, modulated through a helmet, and Bail closes his eyes, tries to steady his breathing. He isn't carrying a blaster; Alderaan is a peaceful world, with weapons few and far between, and since Padmé—
Bail’s breath hitches, shakes out of him. Vader had Leia, and all Bail can think of is Padmé with bruises all around her throat.
“Take a minute,” a terse voice says, right up close to him. No helmet, but—the voice is familiar. Familiar in a way that makes something still, deep down in Bail’s chest. He looks up—
Coruscant Guard red, but not the uniform, identical red of the stormtroopers assigned there. Clone Guard red, no two sets of paint alike, and the man watching him from bare inches away has Jango Fett's face, young and lined with care but not with the accelerated age of every clone trooper Bail has seen.
The paint is familiar, too, just as much so as his face, and Bail knows this man is years dead, mourned him and what he had once been, but—
“Commander Fox,” he says, dazed, because there's no broken neck, no windpipe crushed by Darth Vader's grip, none of the scars Fox gained murdering Jedi after the Empire’s rise.
This is a man lost almost twenty years ago, reappeared like a ghost in the wake of Alderaan’s destruction, and Bail has no idea what’s going on.