what’s happening with Fox has different answers depending on your perspective
Bly set down the last comm-disc and dialed Cody. On the other discs, Doom looked up from repairing his armor, Bacara set down his datapad, and Wolffe stepped back into camera pick-up range.
Cody flickered into being on the comm, helmet and uppers off like Doom. Good, he was somewhere private and safe enough. Bly felt something in himself relax a little bit. The Nova Corps was still too much in the thick of things; Bacara had been reluctant to even take his helmet off. Wolffe was down to his black and obviously agitated; Bly was pretty sure Sinker and Boost were out of camera-range but still in the same room. When Wolffe got upset, he needed to know those two were safe.
Bly himself and Ponds had also taken off their helmets and uppers. Gree was in his blacks with a black Jedi robe around his shoulders; Bly still hadn’t gotten the story of that out of him. Stone still had his armor on so he could relay the conversation to Thire, who was on duty. Thorn was in patient robes; according to him, the healers said the Dark was lingering in his wounds and scars, like an infection. Three days in bacta hadn’t healed him anywhere as much as it should have, even despite the injuries he got from the clusterfuck of arresting Palpatine. He was having to heal the old-fashioned way, with near-daily visits from the senior-most healers to prevent the Dark from worsening his wounds.
Cody looked around, taking them all in. He settled minutely then glanced off-camera. “Come say hi, Rex.”
There was an aggrieved sigh as their blond vod'ika leaned into pick-up range long enough to wave. That got a tiny smile out of Bacara; Rex always was his favorite outside the Nova Corps.
Ponds frowned. “How’s Skywalker taking-?”
“Badly,” Rex interrupted. “He can’t decided if everyone is lying because his mentor couldn’t possibly be the Sith, or if Palpatine betrayed and used him. It’s exhausting. ‘Soka bit him.”
Ponds nodded. “Mace doesn’t think he should be in combat, but that Skywalker coming back to Coruscant would be even worse.”
“The High General isn’t wrong,” Cody said. “Obi-Wan is doing damage-control. He’s barely glanced at any of my plans before signing off on them. He usually at least reads them,” he added at Thorn’s curious look.
“Fuck this noise.” Oh, look, they’d reached the end of Wolffe’s patience. “What the kark is going on with Fox?”
Everyone looked to Bly, because for some Force-forsaken reason, they’d come to expect him to know how to translate Jedi Force nonsense into something usable. “To start, he’s in a coma. I know you already know that,” he said before Wolffe could interrupt. “There’s Dark lingering in his scars, like Thorn’s injuries.” At the confused looks from the vode not on Coruscant (except Wolffe), he elaborated, “Apparently the Dark Side lingers in injuries created with it, like an infection. It slows, and sometimes stops, healing.”
Everyone glanced at Wolffe and the very prominent scar on his face, despite a week in bacta.
“Fox was Palpatine’s favorite,” Thorn added, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “He got… damaged a lot.”
Tortured, Thorn meant. It was still too much of a habit for the Guard to downplay how bad everything had been. Bly knew he’d start crying if he thought too much on it. Sometimes he wondered how a clone who regularly cried when he got overwhelmed with emotion had made marshal commander.
“So he’s in a bad way, physically,” Bly picked back up. “The healers are doing what they can-”
“Master Che comes in every day to pull some of it out. She’s always slate with exhaustion when she’s done.”
Everyone off-Coruscant, except Wolffe again, looked to Ponds to translate what Gree said into something intelligible. “Master Che is a twi'lek, a little darker blue than General Secura.”
Nods all around; 'slate with exhaustion’ actually made sense with that context.
“So, he’d be in bad shape even without whatever else is going on,” Doom said, prodding them back on track.
“Yeah.” Bly let out a breath. “Okay, the next part involves a lot of Force-stuff. Apparently, Palpatine had been entrenching himself in the minds of the Guard-”
He wasn’t even slightly surprised to be interrupted by the four vode off-Coruscant all demanding more information and/or threatening Palpatine. No one ever took that bit of news well.
“Near as we can tell,” Thorn said when the noise started to die down, “he was mostly keeping up our morale, despite everything happening to us, and mildly improving communications. For day-to-day, anyway.” He shrugged. “Could have been worse.”
The Guard’s nonchalance about it never, ever helped. Bly still wasn’t sure if they did it on purpose, or if they genuinely thought they were being reassuring. But that statement caused another explosion of noise as even Ponds felt the need to remind the Thorn that 'could have been worse’ didn’t change that it was a deeply awful thing to do.
Gree snapped something in a language Bly didn’t recognize, cutting across the din. The meaning was clear enough when he repeated it and made a lowering gesture with his hand.
“He did it the most with the officers, more with the commanders than the lower ranking ones, and most of all with Fox,” Bly said when everyone quieted down.
“We have standing appointments with the mind-healers,” Thorn threw in.
“And Palpatine used that connection to basically steal Fox’s mind?” Bly hated how he wound up phrasing it as a question. But he still didn’t think he entirely understood what Aayla had told him about Fox’s condition, because what the fuck.
“I thought the chakaar was in Force-suppression cuffs,” Cody bit out.
“He is.” Stone didn’t elaborate. He wasn’t a talker like Thorn.
“He is,” Bly echoed. “According to Aayla that means that he’s both really powerful and deeply entrenched in Fox’s mind.” He didn’t tell them that the healers weren’t sure Fox could even wake up without Palpatine coiled into his mind, the demagolka had tied himself in so deeply. They didn’t need to be distracted by that while they were winding down the war.
(He was pretty sure Gree and Thorn knew; it was part of how General Unduli convinced Gree to stay instead of going back out to help his vode fight.)
Fox never strayed far from his owner. He wasn’t always within arm’s reach, but the two of them were always in the same room. Often, Fox curled up next to his owner, too tired to do more than chrr when he was petted. If he was awake to notice being touched.
He was just so tired. No matter how much he slept, he felt disconnected and drained when he faded back into consciousness. Always in his owner’s arms. Always hurting and distressed until familiar hands stroked him from head to tail and chucked him under the chin. Then his owner would feed him Dark little creatures, delicious on his tongue and nauseating on his stomach.
