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weyrwolfen · 7 months ago

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Caveat Emptor: Chapter 1 - Mens Rea

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Commanders Fox, Thorn, Thire, and Stone

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, loss of autonomy

I will be posting future chapters here on Tumblr and here on Ao3

“… require to complete your mission?”

Fox’s right hand hovered over his left vambrace. A light was flashing on the right side of his armor’s control panel, signaling the completion of some task. He’d been typing something…

Little gods, his head hurt.

“CC-1010, what do you require to complete your mission?” the same voice, a very familiar voice, repeated.

“Thorn?” Fox asked, looking up. His vision was blurred, but not so severely that he couldn’t make out Thorn, Stone, and Scav lined up on the other side of his desk, all three fully armored and standing at precise parade rest.

Thorn’s shoulders dropped ever so slightly, and he asked, “You back with us, Fox?”

Fox would have liked to answer, but his head was pounding viciously in time with his pulse. His stomach heaved, and he tore at his helmet, pulling it off with shaking hands.

Someone shoved a wastebin on the desk in front of him, just in time to catch the mess as his stomach violently emptied itself.

Thorn cursed a steady stream of invectives in at least three languages. Someone pried Fox’s helmet out of his grip, and a gloved hand landed on the back of his neck, heavy and grounding. He had no idea who it was, and he wasn’t exactly in a position to look up and check at the moment.

Ration bars and nutrient slurry had about the same texture going down as they did coming back up, but the accompanying stomach acids bit at the back of his throat and burned inside his sinuses where some of the vomit had taken a decidedly unwelcome alternate escape route. All of that would have been unpleasant enough, but Fox was much more concerned with the way every move, every twitch, sent burning agony searing behind his eyes.

Something metallic pressed against the side of his neck. There was a quiet beep, a soft hiss, and then a wave of tingling cold.

The pain receded, dragged down by a now-familiar cocktail of powerful painkillers, anti-nausea medications, and stims to try to counter the mental fog and artificial exhaustion caused by the other two. Fox locked his knees, hands braced on his desk to either side of the wastebin to stop them from trembling too obviously.

He karking hated his men seeing him like this.

Scratch that, he just karking hated this. Full stop.

Fox spat in the bin, trying to clear some of the taste from his mouth. “How long?” he asked, throat raw and voice correspondingly hoarse.

“Four hours,” Thorn answered somewhere off to Fox’s left. “We think.”

Four hours. Not so long, all things considered.

Four hours during which his highly-trained, highly-competent body was up and wandering around Coruscant, doing kark even knew what, utterly outside of his conscious control.

Fox forced himself to keep breathing slowly and evenly, clamping down on the sick horror that was creeping down his spine. He really ought to be used to this by now. It certainly happened to him enough.

“Here,” Scav said, voice no longer filtered through his helmet’s vocoder. The hand on Fox’s nape vanished, and an open canteen appeared in his slowly clearing field of vision.

He accepted it, took a small sip to rinse out his mouth, and spat again. A drop of blood landed in the bin, bright red against the rest of the yellowish mess and empty stim wrappers.

“I’m bleeding,” he admitted flatly. They’d been tracking his symptoms for a while now, trying to figure out what the kriff was going on. The headaches and nausea were getting consistently worse. The blood was new though.

“Let me see,” Scav said. It wasn’t a request.

Fox straightened, stance unnaturally stiff to counter his lingering unsteadiness, and gestured vaguely towards his face. Scav just pressed his lips together in a thin, unhappy line before fishing a few squares of sterile pads out of his medkit.

“Here,” he said, handing Fox the pads. “Pinch your nostrils closed with that and tip your head forward. Not backward. You’ve already puked once today.”

The look Fox leveled at Scav was scathing.

The medic just stared back at him, thoroughly unintimidated and unimpressed.

Maybe Fox was slipping. Maybe the shakiness and wastebin of puke on his desk was detracting from his usual ability to intimidate his troopers. Or maybe the Kaminoans electroshocked any kind of reasonable fear response out of medic-track clones. Who even knew at this point?

Fox pinched his nostrils closed and tipped his head forward, glowering out from underneath his lowered brows.

Scav ignored him and instead turned his attention to pulling the liner out of Fox’s wastebin and tying it off. Thank kriff for that.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Thorn asked, hands gripping the back of the chair on the opposite side of Fox’s desk.

Did they really need to do this standing? Stims or not, Fox’s head was swimming.

Kark it, he was still the commanding officer here. He was going to sit down before he fell down.

“I left Disc in charge of security for Senator Leshro’s press conference to respond to a report of outages affecting the cameras in Thesh 16,” Fox said, lowering himself into his chair. The worn, battered thing was more comfortable than it had any right to be. “I spoke to Odal, something about rodents chewing on the wiring. Someone commed me…”

Whatever these lapses really were, they always started with a comm. That had been the first thing they’d recognized. To date, it was just about the only pattern they’d been able to pin down related to these incidents.

It was difficult even thinking about it. Fox’s mind tried to gloss over the gap, slither away from even considering it. As best as they could tell, these blackouts started as soon as Fox arrived on Coruscant, but it had taken months for him to even recognize that something was happening. They’d been infrequent at first, sporadic, but they were picking up in frequency and duration as time went on.

He should have reported the lapses to the Chancellor as soon as he had realized what was happening, but something always stopped him. The same self-preservation instinct they’d all learned back on Kamino, where hiding weaknesses of any kind was necessary to their survival. Sheev Palpatine smiled at all the right times and said all of the right words, but every time Fox was in the man’s presence, he left in a cold sweat. It was irrational; Fox couldn’t identify a single piece of solid evidence to explain his body’s involuntary reactions. But there were only two things he trusted without thought or question: his instincts and his brothers. Everything else had to earn it.

Especially natborn politicians with gentle smiles and cold, sharp eyes.

And so Fox had instead informed a select number of his brothers.

As it turned out, he wasn’t the only one experiencing missing time and unexplainable inconsistencies in his reports. His lapses had just been happening more frequently than the others’.

The fact that he was not the only one had sunk Fox’s initial idea for how to fix the situation. A single death among the Guard’s commanders could be made to look like an accident. But all four of them would be nearly impossible to conceal. And even then, it wouldn’t guarantee that the underlying threat had been removed. If they were all already compromised, then there was no telling how extensive the problem was.

And if anyone outside of the Guard learned about their situation, chances were good they’d all be decommissioned en masse. His own death Fox could accept. But not the deaths of all the brothers under his command.

So they investigated. They’d had no other choice. None of them had been trained for it, but on Coruscant, they’d had to learn. As more and more duties were piled on their heads, they’d had to learn fast.

But finding any actionable leads proved to be difficult.

As the most frequently affected, tracking Fox’s actual movements seemed like a critical first step. However, it rapidly became apparent that one of the first things he – or rather CC-1010 – did when he received those comms was to deactivate his armor’s recording devices. The three times they’d tried hiding a tracking chip or recording device inside Fox’s armor, CC-1010 had removed them, too.

Fox was fairly certain that the others had figured out another way to keep track of his movements. They never said anything concrete, and he made sure to not ask.

Now, if he could just remember something. Anything.

Four kriffing hours. There was no telling what he might have done.

Scav was talking again, words buzzing against the edges of Fox’s wandering attention. He needed to focus, but the meds were making it difficult.

The meds. Sure. Not like a command-track clone would be weak enough to disassociate in the comfort and security of his own office.

Medical scans. Scav wanted permission to perform a medical scan, to check Fox for additional injuries.

Fox nodded.

It took a few minutes for Scav to run his tests and interpret the results. Minutes Fox didn’t want to admit he needed to re-engage with his surroundings.

The others just stood guard, Thorn at Fox’s side and Stone blocking the door.

Fox was mildly dehydrated and his blood chemistry was beyond irregular. The scanner flagged Fox’s brainwaves as ‘anomalous,’ whatever that meant. He had a variety of minor cuts and contusions scattered across his body, but who on base didn’t? There was nothing concrete in those scans, nothing actionable. Scav still wanted Fox to report to the medbay for observation after the other two commanders were done with him.

There was no point in arguing. At least no one tried to object when Fox gathered up a stack of datapads on the way out of the room. The work of running the Guard didn’t disappear just because Fox’s body took the occasional ‘involuntary side-mission.’

Fox was just steady enough on his feet to march down to the room they converted for their off-the-books investigation, buckets back on as an unspoken message to any passing Guard that they were not to be bothered.

When they arrived, Fox put his own codes into the security panel and pushed his way inside. Anyone searching for blueprints of the building would only see a small broom closet surrounded by storage rooms too full of shelves and crates to make it obvious that their dimensions didn’t quite match the ones recorded in the official floorplans. And if any trespassing natborn did get a little too nosy for their own good, the door panel would return a rather benign-looking error message and send out a security ping in response to anything other than a Guard commander’s personal codes.

The Guard’s slicers did good work, and all of them knew when to refrain from noticing things around base.

Fox had never meant for things to go this far, involving more and more of their men in this deception, but they were all in too deep to course correct now.

There was a medical cot situated in one corner of the space. Fox made his way towards it, placing the datapads on a nearby table before turning to face his brothers, hands out and palms up. Waiting.

Thorn and Stone worked over Fox’s body like it was an active crime scene.

Maybe that was what it was. Maybe that was exactly what Fox was.

They dusted his plate for fingerprints and swabbed his gauntlets for chemical residues. They misted him from bucket to boots with luminol and sampled anything that fluoresced. They imaged and tweezed, bagged and tested. All according to cobbled together CSF protocol, all completely off the books. The terminals they were using weren’t networked with the rest of the base. The equipment had been reported as damaged and disposed of in the Guard’s official inventories or ‘borrowed’ from CSF surplus.

Data started to roll in, providing disturbing hints, but no solid answers.

His blasters’ charge packs were at 87% and 92%. They should have been full.

There was blood on his gauntlets, just a single drop nearly lost against the red paint, and even less than that on his right pauldron. The sample on his hands tested as clone-standard. It was most likely his own, probably from his nosebleed earlier. The sample from his pauldron was human but lacked the genetic markers of a Fett clone. To get any more detailed identification, they’d need to run the sample through the CSF’s database, and that would require some creativity and the help of one of their slicers.

In addition to the blood, Fox had traces of chemical accelerants on his hands and greasy soot on his kama, something organic and too degraded from the heat to properly identify.

They brushed all sorts of fine particulates out of the treads of his boots, fibers and foodstuffs and flecks of plascrete. Some of it was identifiable – the red filaments were consistent with the carpeting in several of the hallways in the Senate dome, the keratinous ovals were shed massif scales, the brown grains were crystals of instant caf powder – and some of it was not. Fox doubted any of it would be useful, but Thorn and Stone bagged and tagged it all anyway, storing it away for later reference, just in case.

Then his armor came off and they started the same process on his blacks.

More blood, more chemical residues. Two silver hairs, human or near-human in origin.

Then on his skin.

The entire process was invasive as all kriff, but no more so than their medical screenings had been back on Kamino. At least here, he had datapads of busywork to distract himself from the poking and prodding, swabbing and sticking.

At least he was safe among brothers he trusted.

“Huh,” Stone said thoughtfully. “Thorn, come here.”

Fox looked up from the requisition forms he’d been signing and found his brother hovering in front of him holding a small UV stick next to Fox’s cheek.

Thorn, who’d been entering something into the terminal, immediately dropped what he was doing and walked over to the exam table.

“What does that look like to you?” Stone asked, passing the stick from left to right in front of Fox’s face.

Fox’s eyes tracked the light for a moment, and then took a moment to assess Stone’s scrupulously neutral expression and Thorn’s badly concealed fury.

“Don’t touch it,” Thorn finally said, turning on his heel and going back to the desk.

Fox caught Stone’s eye. “Tell me,” he said, tone just shy of a direct order.

“There’s an oval-shaped bruise here,” Stone said, fingers hovering near Fox’s left cheek without actually touching. “And four more here,” he continued, shifting to Fox’s right cheek and down towards the underside of his jaw. “They’re too faint to see under regular light just yet, but the spacing suggests–”

“A handprint,” Fox interrupted. Someone had grabbed him by the face, palm over his mouth, and squeezed hard enough to bruise. Why? He took a deep breath, ruthlessly stamping out the instinctive need to raise a hand to his cheek to press down on the bruising so he could feel it. He could imagine several dozen different scenarios for how he might have gotten those bruises, each worse than the last. “Any idea whose?”

“Standard human to near-human digit number and configuration, no evidence of claws or other anatomical markers,” Stone reported, keeping the report strictly professional. “We’ll need measurements to be sure, but I’d guess a hand on the larger end of medium human-standard. And there is some kind of residue coating each fingerprint.”

Thorn was back with a recording device in hand. “I need images before we try pulling samples,” he explained unnecessarily. Fox knew perfectly well how this all went.

White light images, then UV. Adhesive peels, then chemical swabs. The chances they could pull a usable print off his Fox’s skin were next to nonexistent, but measurements of the bruising and chemical analyses of the residues might prove useful.

What were the chances?

Thorn and Stone took blood sample, saliva samples, sweat swabs, kriffing urine, but they finally let Fox get into a set of clean blacks and his thoroughly decontaminated plate. Thorn stayed behind to keep running analyses while Stone delivered Fox to the medbay along with the first round of test results.

It took very little bullying from Scav to convince Fox to take a real water shower in the medbay’s ‘fresher. Fox felt unclean, in every possible interpretation of the word.

His usual room was ready and waiting for him, thin scratchy sheets turned down like a sad attempt at kriffing five-star penthouse hospitality.

Scav made an appearance right about the same time Fox had started approving the updates to the Guard’s patrol schedules. The medic ran an IV and hung what he swore was just a saline drip above Fox’s cot.

It wasn’t only saline. The sedatives kicked in when Fox was only half-way through his stack of prisoner-transfer requests.

Medics were meddling shabuire. All of them.

“Fox, wake up.”

The voice sounded distant and muffled, like Fox was hearing it through water. He was usually a light sleeper, but the vague, dark dream he was having seemed resistant to letting him go completely.

“Kriff, how much did Scav give him?”

“Enough to keep him under for a full eight hours.”

“So, enough to kill a mid-sized bantha. What can you give him to get him back on his feet?”

That sounded like Thire. Maybe. But Thire didn’t have red-shot, yellow eyes.

“That’s really not a good idea. His bloodwork is still a trash fire.”

“We don’t have a choice, it’s the Jedi calling.”

“Kriff. Right. Hold on.”

Fox drifted, not really awake and not really asleep, something like dread tugging at the edges of his consciousness. Finally something prickled along his senses, tipping the scales towards wakefulness.

The dull, throbbing ache behind his eyes reasserted itself. It was nothing in comparison to before, of course, but deeply unpleasant all the same. The sound he made was half protest, half dire threat.

“Rise and shine,” a familiar voice said, full of easy sarcasm and false cheer. Thire.

“Get karked,” Fox said, but his voice sounded rough and still half-drugged. He cracked his eyes open and glared at Thire.

That earned a brief snort of amusement. “There’s my cheerful commander.”

“I can and will kill you.”

“Hold that thought,” Thire said, craning around to look at something off to Fox’s right. “I need the room.”

Fox turned his head to the side and caught sight of Clave, Scav’s second, backing out of the door and shutting it behind him with an audible click.

It took some doing, but Fox managed to shove himself up into a sitting position without tangling himself in his IV line. “I take it there’s a situation,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

The false front of teasing fell away, leaving Thire’s expression suddenly grim. “The Jedi council has requested your presence in the Chancellor’s office at your earliest convenience.”

‘At your earliest convenience’ was quite the loaded phrase. Fox could only assume that it meant, ‘Drop what you’re working on and go now.’

“Why the Chancellor’s office?” he asked, scrubbing a hand across his eyes. His blacks were still in reasonable shape, folded on the shelf next to his neatly stacked armor, which Thorn had scrubbed down to the molecular level yesterday. Fox could be presentable and on his way in a few minutes, just as soon as the lingering sedatives lost their fight with the new influx of stimulants in his bloodstream.

It was a kriffing wonder of Kaminoan engineering that his liver hadn’t given out months ago.

And Thire still hadn’t answered Fox’s question.

He looked up and found Thire watching him, expression gone impossibly darker. Fox was about to snap at his subordinate commander when Thire finally answered.

“The Chancellor is missing.”

The words sent Fox’s stomach into freefall, but Thire wasn’t done speaking.

“It looks like you might have been the last person who saw him yesterday.”

That didn’t make any sense, unless…

“I didn’t have a meeting with the Chancellor yesterday,” Fox said, voicing the obvious protest even though he already knew what Thire was going to say. He balled his hands into fists on top of his scratchy sheets.

Something in Thire’s eyes looked anguished, but his voice was as even and steely as before when he said, “Yes, you did.”

AN: This is something of a sequel to Clocking Time, not that you need to have read it to understand this one. Just call it the logical next step when you're in the jaws of a rabid plot bunny.

#caveat emptor fanfic #star wars fanfic #tcw fanfic #clone wars fanfic #the clone wars fanfic #commander fox #commander thorn #commander thire #commander stone #coruscant guard

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