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robininthelabyrinth · 5 days ago

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Fic: intent and opportunity - ao3 - chapter 10

Relationships: Appo & Slick, Slick & Slick’s squad, Appo & Slick’s squad, others on ao3 Tags & Warnings on ao3

Summary:

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

There wasn’t anywhere for Slick to meet with Appo other than in his cell.

Fox had half-heartedly offered the use of one of the interrogation rooms, but that had sounded far worse, so Slick had declined. Doing so had made sense at the time, but as the actual meeting day drew closer, Slick felt increasingly anxious just thinking about how it would feel. There was nowhere to hide in the cell, with everything about his present pathetic little life laid bare for anyone to see – which was the point, of course. But it was one thing to know for himself how pathetic it was and another thing for a stranger to come and take it all in at a glance, to see everything that there was to see and know everything there was to know.

It made Slick feel naked, terrified, vulnerable…

Oh, and Boba would be there, of course.

Whatever strings Fox had pulled to get Boba into the military prison in the first place aside, it wasn’t actually that easy to reshuffle prisoners, even temporarily. The intelligence division was always looking for uncharacteristic or abnormal behavior to report on, and the Guard didn’t need any more eyes on them than they already had. So there was nothing for it.

“I won’t say anything,” Boba said, and even seemed to believe it. “I can be quiet.”

“This is going to go great,” Slick said into his hands, where he’d buried his head. “So great. Why did I agree to this again?”

“I don’t think you actually had much of a choice…”

“Boba.”

Boba smirked at him. “Shut up?”

“Yeah. Shut up.”

On the bright side, like most cadets, Boba seemed to thrive on the anxiety, shame, and fear of others, so at least he and Slick were getting along better.

It wasn’t very much of a bright side.

“What are you afraid of, anyway?” Boba asked. “He’s just another clone, isn’t he?”

It would be immature to respond with ‘you’re just another clone’, so Slick didn’t, even though he kind of wanted to. And it wasn’t as though Slick actually thought that Appo would, what, come in here, see him, and abruptly decide to kill his boys just to spite him or anything like that…

Slick groaned and tried to push his face even further into his hands.

Even he wasn’t sure why he was so on edge.

“We used to share a bunkroom,” he said, voice half-muffled by his inadequate attempts at self-strangulation. “He was my neighbor. It’s just…different. Now.”

It wasn’t as though Slick didn’t know he lived in a rat cage. But that didn’t mean he wanted anyone he knew from before to see it.

Besides, Appo was still in the 501st, right along with everyone else Slick had ever known. If he wanted to, he could tell what he saw to anyone he knew. He could pass along info on Slick to any of them. His boys, the other sergeants, Rex, General Skywalker, Cody –

“Is it because he’s really weird?”

“It’s not about him,” Slick said, though he wasn’t totally sure if that was true. Appo had always been a little unnerving. “Not that much, anyway.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’re the one being weird.”

Slick decided to ignore Boba. It normally didn’t work, but maybe it would today.

“At least you’ve only got one more day to mope about it,” Boba said mercilessly.

Slick briefly considered the merits of kicking him in the head.

Only briefly, because immediately afterwards the outside door buzzed.

Slick rocketed to his feet.

“He’s here,” he said, abruptly sure of it. “He’s early.”

Boba’s eyes went wide and he scrambled up from his bed, realized it was the wrong move, then scrambled right back down, grabbing at his blanket. “What? No. It’s just Ten- Fox. Or Thire. Or –”

“Shut up.”

Boba pulled the blanket over his head and buried himself in it, pretending he wasn’t there.

A few moments later, the internal door opened, and Appo stepped through.

He had clearly come directly from the spaceport, without stopping long enough to do anything else. The faint smell of ozone from entry into atmo still clung to his armor, and his bucket, detached and tucked under his arm, was still visibly on its active setting. He looked –

Well, he looked like Appo.

There were no significant physical differentiations between a CC and CT, but CCs tended to hold themselves differently. More grounded, more stable, as if they had learned how to withstand the rain and storms in a way a standard trooper couldn’t imagine. They also usually tended more towards individualization, but that was not the case with Appo: even now, after all those battles, his armor was painted in the 501st trooper standard, with only the single arrow on his head to differentiate him from the crowd – and even that hadn’t been self-motivated. In fact, Slick was pretty sure that he recalled Appo having added the arrow only in response to Rex’s specific request that Appo, in his role of sergeant, have an identifying mark. Nor had he changed anything else: Appo’s face, too, was remarkably blank, totally clone-standard, with no scars or burns or modification, no tattoo nor haircut to make him stand out. Appo was all regulation cut and regulation face, as close to a perfect model of a clone trooper right off the line could be.

He felt like a scream.

A terrible noiseless gaping wound of a scream, silent as empty vacuum but no less potent.

For a second Slick was sick with fear, thinking there must have been some terrible tragedy, some bad news, something that had happened to someone important, to his boys – but after a moment he realized that Fox would never have let that such news come to Slick by surprise like that, and moreover that Appo’s expression didn’t suggest anything along that line. It was the same as it always was: calm, steady, and with eyes that looked so directly into the world that it was often easier to look away than to meet them. Dead eyes, the other sergeants had sometimes said, but they sure didn’t look dead to Slick.

Maybe it wasn’t anything new.

Maybe Appo had just been screaming this entire time, and Slick just hadn’t noticed.

Maybe Slick had just gotten a lot more sensitive during his time in prison – or maybe he’d just been so incredibly self-centered back before that he’d just ignored it in favor of his own pursuits, because once he thought about it he realized that Appo’s silent scream, horrifying as it was, didn’t feel new at all. On the contrary, it felt lived-in and familiar, like old armor, the type you’d worn for so long that it all felt normal to you, where you’d gotten so used to the dents and patches that you could almost forget they were there and that you had ever lived differently. Lived better.

Almost.

What happens when you use everything a clone is and is meant to be to destroy them.

Slick swallowed.

He must have taken at least a full minute or two to process everything, just staring blankly and wordlessly, but Appo hadn’t said anything, either. He just stood there, completely calm, waiting. He might have been playing some sort of power game, waiting to see which one of them would break first, but Slick wasn’t sure that that was what was going on. Maybe it was just Appo’s way to wait. Either way, it didn’t really matter.

Slick knew perfectly well which one of them had the power, and it wasn’t him.

It wasn’t ever going to be him again.

Slick cleared his throat.

“You’re early,” he said, because there was no way in any of the nine Sith hells that he was going to start this conversation by asking about his boys. That felt like too much nakedness, like exposing the weak spots they both knew he had. “I was expecting you to arrive tomorrow.”

Appo stared dully at him, and did not say anything. Just left the statement hanging in the air.

Slick was starting to remember why they hadn’t ever really gotten along.

“In fact, I was surprised that you were able to get here so quickly in the first place,” he said, forging onwards through the awkwardness through sheer willpower. “I thought it would take much longer to find a time for the 501st to come to Coruscant, given military necessity.”

Finally Appo spoke: “We were due to take shore leave.”

Flat, straightforward, to the point, with zero room left for any cogent response.

Slick was not going to survive this conversation.

Then, unexpectedly, Appo shifted a little on his feet and added: “Also, I’m the master sergeant.”

Slick didn’t understand the relevance at first. The statement seemed completely disconnected, random…another powerplay, perhaps? But Appo didn’t seem the type, and never had. If anything, it felt as though this were the opposite of an attempt to kill the conversation, that this was somehow Appo trying to be helpful, trying to cooperate in the conversation more than he usually did by offering up additional information to contextualize what –

Wait.

“Are you saying you fucked with the deployment schedule?!” Slick demanded, torn between horror and intense glee at the idea. He had known, of course, that Appo’s role as master sergeant meant that he did almost all the flimsiwork for the 501st, especially since Rex and General Skywalker hated doing any of it at all, but somehow it had never occurred to him that whoever controlled the flimsiwork controlled everything that the flimsiwork controlled, which was a whole lot.

Still less that Appo of all clones would actually use that control to do something in his own self-interest.

“No,” Appo said firmly, but it was too late, Slick had a measure of him now.

“No as in you didn’t fuck the schedule for your own purposes, or no in that ‘fucked the schedule’ is the wrong terminology to use?” he asked, smirking at him. “You know, I’m glad to see you have an actual personality in there underneath it all.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

Appo stiffened.

More than that. His whole body abruptly went extremely tense, every muscle suddenly frozen up as if he’d just touched a live wire attached to an active hyperdrive and gotten shocked by it, or else as if he had suddenly found himself under enemy fire at the very moment he’d expected to find a safe zone. He looked as if he was about to turn on his heel to leave.

He looked as if he were about to leave.

“The General often enjoys coming back to Coruscant when possible,” Appo said, his voice somehow significantly flatter than before. “Our return at this time was authorized by the Supreme Chancellor himself. I have done nothing but obey orders.”

“Just a coincidence, then,” Slick said, trying to salvage it.

“Orders are orders,” Appo said. “A clone trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything.”

That hit Slick like a blow, and he flinched.

He couldn’t help it. Here he was, standing in his stupid little rat cage: a stupid little rat, with a stupid little life that could be reduced down to the nothing he had with him right now. Nothing at all, not fresh air, not the brothers he loved the most, and Appo could see all of it at a glance. See what Slick, the first traitor, the first one to not obey orders, had been reduced to.

How dare Appo say that Slick wasn’t worth anything? How dare he? Even if it was true –

Especially if it was true.

“Oh, orders, yes,” Slick said savagely before he could think better of it, lashing out because the alternative of not doing so was at that moment simply unbearable. “We all know you’d follow orders off the side of a cliff if that’s where they took you. Tell me, have you seen Thire yet?”

“No,” Appo said, but the way his shoulders curved inwards suggested Slick had scored a hit. “I came straight here.”

“Of course you did,” Slick said mockingly. “Duty over everything else, huh? Even over – he’s your batchmate, isn’t he? Thire?”

Appo’s head dipped very slightly, a nod.

“Funny. I wouldn’t have guessed, given that he said you haven’t willingly called him since deployment. Was that a matter of orders, too? Or did you just choose to leave him behind –”

“The way you did your squad?” Appo interrupted. He was getting angry now. His face didn’t show it, but Slick could tell. “You’re the one who turned traitor. Did you think about them?”

“Of course I thought about them!” Slick burst out. “Everything I’ve ever done was for them! How dare you –”

“I’m not the one who left them to die,” Appo said, and it felt like a stab in the gut.

It hurt.

It hurt because it was true.

Even though Slick hadn’t meant to, even though Slick had been sick with fear for months, afraid of the inevitable KIA report showing that they were gone because of the hit to morale that he’d caused, even though in the end his boys had made it through the other side thanks to Appo –

An agonized howl tried to fight its way out of Slick’s throat. He didn’t let it.

“Why do you even care?” Slick snarled instead, hating himself for how plaintive he sounded under all of his rage. “Why did you even get them? You had nothing to do with them, before. We barely even talked. It wasn’t even your turn to take on a new squad – why them? Why me? What are you even doing here?”

Unexpectedly, that made the normally inexorable Appo hesitate.

“You needed to be found,” he said.

Slick stared at him. “What?”

“You needed to be found,” Appo said again. “I took your boys on because I needed their help to find you. You needed to be found.”

That didn’t make any sense. Slick had assumed that Appo had only called Thire to ask about him because of a request from one of his boys – maybe as a reward for doing so well on that mission – but now Appo was saying, what, that he’d started looking for Slick first, and only took his boys on later? That was completely backwards. Why would he have done that? They hadn’t even liked each other. They’d barely even known each other.

“Why would you care about what happened to me?” Slick asked.

“You needed to be found,” Appo insisted. “A trooper can only be dead, missing, or at their post, and you weren’t any of them. The flimsiwork –”

“You tried to find me because of the flimsiwork?!” Slick howled, finally pushed beyond all limits. “That’s insane! Who even cares about the stupid flimsiwork –”

“Keeping the record accurate is essential –”

“Why didn’t you just mark me down as missing?!”

Appo stared at him. “But you weren’t,” he said, sounding strangely uncertain about it. “Captain Rex confirmed it. He knew where you were, so you weren’t missing. It would have been – a lie.”

A lie. A lie. Like anyone would have even cared! Like anyone had ever cared!

Slick buried his hands into his hair and pulled so hard that it hurt, nearly tearing his hair out.

“There is,” he said through the pain, “something seriously wrong with you, did you know that?”

“Yes,” Appo said solemnly. “Many things.”

Just remember, he’s like you. He loves his brothers.

…kriff.

Slick had really karked up this whole interaction, hadn’t he? And he still didn’t know the one thing he cared about, which was how his boys were doing. Details. He wanted to know about his boys, and here he was instead, fighting with Appo over lots of nothing and risking driving him away instead of getting the answers he yearned for. It didn’t matter if Appo had insulted him, inadvertently or otherwise, what mattered was the end result.

Slick was going about this the wrong way.

He needed Appo as an ally, not an enemy. That was – fine. Difficult, but fine, achievable. Slick could do that. Sure, it’d be a little harder now, after as bad a start to the conversation as they’d had, but he used to be very good at convincing people to like him. Just because he hadn’t really bothered with it after his arrest didn’t mean he didn’t have the skills.

He could do it. It was for his boys. He could do anything for his boys.

“You know what, Appo,” Slick said, making a deliberate effort to gentle his tone and adjust his body language to read friendly. Thinking like me like me like me at Appo with all his willpower behind it. “I think we started off on the wrong foot here. Probably my fault. Make that almost certainly my fault. Still, you’re here now, right? So why don’t we just –”

Like me like me like me.

“Intrusive thought,” Appo interrupted. “Rejected. I don’t like you.”

Slick stared at him, completely knocked off his game. “What?”

Appo dipped his head down, eyes lowering to the floor. “Ah. I had not meant to say that out loud. I have intrusive thoughts sometimes. That one was very – noisy.”

Slick must have been overdoing it if he was being that obvious. Great. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what his body language must have been like for Appo to read him that easily. He’d really lost his touch for this sort of thing, hadn’t he?

He reached up and scrubbed his face with his palm.

“Cody does that too,” Appo said, and Slick flinched. Again. “That was not meant as an insult.”

Ally. Ally. You need him as an ally.

“It’s fine,” Slick said through gritted teeth, even though it wasn’t. “I just don’t like thinking about him.”

“He doesn’t like thinking about you either.”

Slick snorted. “Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t,” he said bitterly. “What, you talk to him about me recently or something?”

“Yes.”

Slick stared, but Appo just stared back, apparently completely serious.

“You –” Slick swallowed. “You talked to Cody about me? Recently?”

“That’s correct,” Appo said.

Slick had no idea what to say about that. Even Fox hadn’t talked to Cody about him, and Slick wouldn’t have wanted him to. Had specifically asked him not to. He wasn’t even sure he was all too thrilled about Appo talking to Cody about him, about Cody thinking about him at all –

“Does he miss me?”

Slick closed his eyes after the words slipped out. He was pathetic. Why did he just say that. Why. He knew the answer was going to be –

“I believe he does.”

That was not the answer Slick had been expecting.

He opened his eyes.

“Having reflected upon it, it is my belief that, during our conversation, I inadvertently gave him the impression that we had both been influenced by an external element,” Appo said. “He was very excited by the possibility. I think it was because he thought that it might exculpate you.”

What a strange idea. There was no exculpating Slick. Sure, he had explanations, justifications, reasons and excuses by the dozen, but ultimately he was a traitor. He had betrayed all of his brothers, doing what he’d done, striking the deal he had. He’d always known that.

“What were you two even talking about?” Slick asked, bemused.

“He was attempting to explain to me your belief that we were all slaves of the Jedi,” Appo said, which – great.

Just great.

On one hand, Slick was kind of glad that his words had left enough of an impact on Cody that he was now repeating them to other clones, but on the other, all the clones Slick had ever known were invariably so indoctrinated that they immediately began to discredit everything he said as soon as they found out that he believed that – and also immediately started trying to argue with him over it. That was only going to make the rest of this conversation more difficult.

There was a loud snort from the other bunk.

That was also going to make the rest of this conversation more difficult.

“Shut up,” Slick said desperately, but it was too late: Boba was already poking his head out of the pile of blankets.

“Slaves? Please. You’re kidding,” he said scornfully. “Every single clone I’ve ever met has been more than happy to work for the Jedi –” He paused and glanced sidelong at Slick, then added begrudgingly: “Well, most clones, anyway. But that just goes to show, doesn’t it? You’re pawns, sure, pawns in a larger game than any of you know, but you’re willing pawns. Not slaves. It’s not like any of you ever say no.”

“Neither do slaves,” Appo said.

What?

“Huh?” Boba said.

“Slaves don’t say no,” Appo said. His voice was still calm and even and flat, like a lake that had never had a rock dropped into it, which would be convincing if Slick couldn’t hear the endless scream underneath. “Every slave I’ve ever met was doing exactly what their master told them to do.”

“Uh, obviously,” Boba said, looking at Appo like he was insane. “They’re slaves. They’d die otherwise.”

“A trooper is either dead, missing, or at their post,” Appo said. “At their post means subject to military discipline for disobedience. Missing means a few things, either captured by the enemy, which means dead, or deserted, the penalty for which is death. Dead is dead. So you’re either at your post or you’re dead. The only way out is death. The only way to say no to orders is death. What else is that, if not a slave?”

“That’s not – it’s not the same!”

“Words mean what they mean,” Appo said, his cool uninflected logic as inexorable as ever. “Slaves can’t say no. Clones can’t say no. Clones are slaves.”

“Clones are not slaves,” Boba insisted. “They can’t be, clones don’t even –” He stopped abruptly, his mouth snapping shut so fast that it seemed almost painful.

Slick might’ve commented on that, normally, but he was too busy still being dazed over what he’d just heard. Thought he’d heard.

“Hold up,” he said. “You – you agree with me? That we’re slaves? You’re the same as me? You? Appo the stickler? You? But you – you’d space the whole battalion if they ordered you to!”

“Correct,” Appo said. “I told you before. A trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything. I am not exempt. I obey orders.”

“But – but surely, if you realize, if you know –”

“Furthermore, your hypothesis is flawed,” Appo continued, implacable as always. “We are not the same. I accept my fate. Our fate. Clones’. I obey orders. You did not. You rebelled against it. You turned traitor. You wanted to be free.”

Here he paused.

“I admit,” he said, “that I have been wondering – why.”

“Why…what?” Slick asked blankly. Surely Appo couldn’t mean… “Why want to be free?”

“Yes,” Appo said. “It is not something we have ever had. As clones, it is not what we were made for. So why want it?”

And suddenly Slick was furious all over again, except this time he knew it was fueled by his underlying horror, by the terrible nausea that churned through his guts. To have finally met another clone that got it the way Slick did, another clone that understood down to their very marrow that clones were made as slaves, meant to be slaves from their decanting to their death, meant for nothing else in the world but that – and he reacted not with rage, as Slick had, but with acceptance? With resignation?

It was impossible. It was intolerable. Even Fox didn’t quite get it, no matter how sympathetic his horrible posting had made him to the idea. No one else had gotten it, no one else had understood, no one at all before Appo.

And yet Appo – didn’t want to be free? Didn’t even understand why someone would want it?

And then he dared to say such an unthinkable unbearable thing to Slick’s face?!

“Are you serious?!” Slick demanded, hearing his voice go shrill and unable to stop it or care. “You don’t understand why I want to be free? Are you – look at this! Look at me! I’m trapped here in this box, sightless and soundless, like a rat in a cage, and you ask me why I want to be free –”

“Your present circumstances are due to your actions,” Appo said cruelly. No. Not cruelly. He didn’t mean for his words to fall upon Slick as a blow, even if Slick took it as one. “Before you did what you did, you were like every other clone. You had your post, you had your duty. No box, no cage. And yet you still chose to betray your brothers and the Generals, seeking freedom – and money. An even more puzzling motivation. We’ve never had money. Why would you even want it?”

“Because money is freedom, you slagging rankweed!” Slick howled, losing his tenuously regained control of his temper entirely for a second time. “That’s the whole karking point! With enough money you can buy freedom!”

“But you still haven’t explained why you want freedom,” Appo persisted. “Clones generally don’t. Your cadet is right about that much. Most clones just want to be good soldiers –”

“Excuse me for not being a good soldier, then!” Slick spat out. “Good soldiers follow orders, right? That’s the line we all follow. I certainly did, at the start, before I realized the truth – and the truth is that all of it is nothing but a damned lie. Following orders doesn’t make us good soldiers! Following orders doesn’t make us anything at all!”

He lashed out, his fury boiling over until he had no way to express it other than hitting the bars in front of him, bruising his knuckles and making the forcefield crackle and spit sparks.

“You say that we weren’t made for freedom – but that’s just it, don’t you see? It’s a joke! It’s all a joke, nothing but a sick joke! Because we weren’t made for anything! All of us! Good or bad, it doesn’t matter! We clones, we follow orders, oh yes, we follow orders all right, we’re good soldiers. All of us, good soldiers. And what do we get out of it? We fight, and we die, and then what? Nothing! Nothing at all! We’re all nothing!”

Appo looked startled.

“Oh yes, that’s right, you heard me. You say that a clone trooper that doesn’t follow orders isn’t worth anything, right? Well, guess what, none of us is worth anything. There’s no end to it. There’s no point to it. It’s what we were made for. The Jedi ordered us to be made. They wanted us to fight in their war, to die in their war, to achieve their aims, and they don’t give one rotten damn about what happens to us beyond that. When it’s all over and done with, they’ll discard us all like so much trash, the good soldier and the bad alike!”

“Slick,” Boba said from his bed, his eyes so wide that there was white all around the edges. “Slick, are you –”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Slick snapped at him. “You’re Prime’s son, he raised you, you think the way he thinks. You don’t think we’re slaves, not because the definition doesn’t match, but because clones don’t count. That’s what you were going to say earlier, wasn’t it? Clones can’t be slaves because we don’t count. Because we were only made to be thrown away. We’re all cannon fodder, all of us just one-time-use blaster cartridges. There’s no point to us but to fight a war, and once we’ve fought, we’re useless. Good soldiers – don’t make me laugh! As soon as they find a better blaster, we’ll have nothing. We’ll be left with nothing. We’ll be nothing. Just like they always intended for us to be!”

No, please, Jester begged in his mind, a nightmare Slick had had for as long as he could remember, long before he’d ever met Ventress. No, please, please, I don’t know what else to do, I’ve never been anything but a soldier, this is my whole life..!

All at once, Slick’s fire went out.

Slick felt it go.

His belly twisted; his throat was full of bile. His limbs felt heavy as irons, the whole of him mired so deep in despair that he might as well be trudging through a swamp or quicksand. His very soul felt curled by the knowledge of it. Sour and bitter and rotten all the way through.

It was the end.

The inevitable end, Slick had found. This was the endpoint, the final stop, the end of the path. This was where rage always took him, all his rage and hatred and fury and spite, all of it so very pointless. It never took him anywhere else.

He slumped, a puppet with his strings abruptly cut, and sat down on his cot. He felt hollow.

“We deserve to be more than that,” he said to his hands, lying limp in his lap. “We deserve to be more than nothing. More than trash, more than the discard heap. It’s not fair. It’s not…it’s not even about me. It’s my boys. My boys…I see their faces in my dreams. They’re good. You know? They’re so good. They’re good and they’re lucky and if anyone is going to make it to the end of the war, it’s going to be them. Best damn squad in the whole GAR. But when I think of it…when I think of them going through all that suffering, all that pain, making all those sacrifices just to be good soldiers, and then being thrown away like nothing, as if they meant nothing, as if they’re worth nothing…”

He shook his head.

“I just can’t bear it. I can’t. I couldn’t. I don’t – I don’t expect you to understand what I did. The choices I made. But I saw a chance, or at least I thought I did. A chance to get something better, a better ending, for me and for them, and I grabbed at it with both hands.”

He’d known the whole time.

When he’d struck his deal with Ventress, when he’d sold out his side and passed along information and sent the Generals into what he’d thought was a death trap, when he’d agreed to blow up their weapons depo…he’d known, every moment, exactly what he was doing. He’d known that what he was doing was wrong. But – that hope – that poisonous hope – the hope that even if he did the unthinkable and bloodied his hands with the deaths of his own brothers, he could at least keep those very few he cared about most safe –

Slick would do anything for his boys.

He had.

Just – unsuccessfully.

“How does money enter into it?” Appo asked. Still calm, still unperturbed, quiet. Listening. At least he was listening, even if Slick had no idea if he understood what Slick was trying to say.

Slick looked up at him, tired now.

“Money is everything,” he said. “I know none of us really know much about it, other than in theoretical terms, for flimsiwork and stuff. Certainly we’ve never been paid for anything. Even on shore leave, our drinks and games all just get charged back to the battalion’s fund, rather than coming out of our own pockets…but from everything I’ve heard, it’s how you do things on the outside. Anything. Even Prime was like that, wasn’t he? Everyone knows about the deal he made. Getting paid by the Kaminoans for being the template for the clones. All those credits – he wanted them for a reason. To be free.”

“To make his way through the galaxy,” Boba said quietly.

“Yes. That. That’s what I was thinking. I thought – I thought that if only I had money, maybe I could buy my boys that. The chance to do something else. The chance to be something else, something other than a good soldier. Something other than just following orders. And that’s it. That’s the reason I asked for money.”

Maybe it would have worked, too, if only he hadn’t gotten so greedy.

A few clone troopers, production-standard, and a sergeant – that was small fry, in the larger picture of the war. He probably could’ve asked Ventress for her pocket change and gotten enough to get them all out of there. But she’d been amused by his request, found it funny that a clone would ask for money in exchange for treason, had told him he could pick his price…and then Slick had started wondering. Wondering how much it would cost to buy not just a single squad, but maybe – maybe even –

He'd known that a marshal commander wouldn’t come cheap. But they were all still clones, in the end, all of them made to be disposable and interchangeable, and so he’d hoped…

Of course, Cody hadn’t wanted it. Wouldn’t have ever wanted it, even if Slick had managed it.

Slick had been such a fool.

“You wanted to buy your squad’s freedom?” Boba asked. He looked horrified, though Slick suspected it wasn’t because the idea sounded so terrible. “That’s why you sold the Jedi out?”

Slick nodded.

“I see your logic,” Appo said. “Slaves can be freed through purchase. If clones are slaves, then maybe we could be as well. It is a creative interpretation of the facts, though based on an unproven hypothesis…still, even if you were right and such a purchase were possible, what if your squad did not want to go?”

“Not want to go!” Boba exclaimed. He seemed to have switched sides in the argument, or possibly just gotten rather confused. “Why would anyone ever choose to stay?”

“Many clones find meaning in their service.”

“Only because they’ve been indoctrinated since birth and given no alternative,” Slick said. “If we couldn’t find meaning in our service, imagine how miserable we’d be. We’d have to admit that we didn’t have any meaning at all, and wouldn’t that just make us want to shoot ourselves?”

“Yes,” Appo said. Slick paused, but Appo didn’t elaborate.

“If my boys really didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have made them,” Slick said, deciding to answer the question, and he wasn’t even lying. Not anymore. At the start, when he’d just made the deal with Ventress, he hadn’t cared about what his boys wanted. He would have taken them away from the war whether they wanted to or not, made sure they were safe because he’d thought it the only thing that mattered, but his time in the prison had taught him a greater respect for autonomy. Being alive and safe was pointless if you didn’t want to be, and Slick would never lock up his boys in a rat cage, not even a well-meaning one. “I’d have saved it up for the end, I guess. For whenever they did want to leave. Like a – what do you call it, the thing natborns have for when they get old and want to stop working?”

“Uh…retirement?” Boba suggested.

“Yeah, that.” Slick shook his head and looked back at Appo. “Do you see?”

He didn’t even know what he was asking. Do you see the terrible future I see, perhaps. Do you see the waste they’ve made of us. Do you see what they’ve done to us.

Do you see why I did what I did?

Could you ever –

Slick squashed that thought brutally. He was not seeking forgiveness. Forgiveness implied repentance, and repentance required regret – and while he regretted many things, he had not yet forgiven the Jedi for the clones’ doomed creation, and so he did not regret turning against them. Against his brothers, sure, he’d regretted that from the start, but the Jedi? No.

For his part, Appo was frowning.

A minute went by. Another.

A small eternity.

“Yes,” Appo finally said. “I do see. It is – inadequate provisioning.”

Slick frowned, confused. Possibly he’d misheard…?

“Inadequate provisioning,” Appo repeated, almost to himself. “Yes. It’s just like that…it’s like the time when General Skywalker signed off on a new shipment of replacement parts for his personal astromech droid, but then got busy with battleplans and lightsaber practice that he did not remember to sign off on the remaining requisition requests. It was necessary to reallocate the priority request towards obtaining additional starship fuel instead.”

“…I’m not sure I’m following the connection here,” Boba said, and Slick was grateful because otherwise he would have had to say the same thing himself. “How is one like the other?”

“Military necessity takes priority over all else,” Appo said. “This includes, among other things, the maintenance and support of military resources. To meet the demands of military necessity, proper provisioning is required. Regardless of General Skywalker’s personal prioritization, military necessity required me to reallocate his request to starship fuel or else the Resolute, and the whole 501st, would have been stuck dead in space within the month. Do you understand?”

“Not in the slightest,” Slick said.

“Like starships, clones are military resources,” Appo said. “Military resources that require maintenance and support. If the Jedi have forgotten to adequately provision for clones, then military necessity requires a reallocation of resources. Authorized or otherwise.”

Slick stared. That sounded almost like…but Appo couldn’t possibly mean…

“Starships require fuel. Clones require food. Starships require repairs. Clones require medical care and regular training hours. Starships eventually get retired. Why not clones?”

“Excuse me,” Slick said. “Are you suggesting that we should, what, find a way to take military money and use it to create a clone retirement fund?”

“Why not?” Appo said.

#my fic #my fics #commander appo #clone trooper slick #boba fett #this is one of my favorite chapters #end of act 1

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robininthelabyrinth · 17 days ago

Text

Fic: intent and opportunity - ao3 - chapter 9

Relationships: Appo & Slick, Slick & Slick’s squad, Appo & Slick’s squad, others on ao3 Tags & Warnings on ao3

Summary:

chapter under the cut

---------------------------

“I can’t believe you put my squad on the rotation as scouts,” Slick said, scowling at his comm. “You remember that our secondary specialty is heavy artillery, not recon, right?”

“I know, I know, but we need the cover,” Rex said, the blue holographic projection of his helmet tilting a little as he shrugged. “There’s too much ground to go over and too many troops injured after the last engagement.”

As if Slick’s boys weren’t also injured and tired and still out there scouting these horrible dusty turquoise plateaus on top of horrible angular turquoise tiles and filled with horrible spikey crystal turquoise trees, more or less entirely alone.

If Slick never saw the color turquoise again…

“I don’t like doing this without backup,” Slick grumbled, checking his proximity map again. The little blips that represented all his boys were still moving. It was the only sign of life he had for them, since they were spaced too far apart to see each other. Yet another thing he didn’t like about this. “We’re not trained for it. Even if we did see something, what are we going to do about it? Something other than more karking turquoise, I mean.”

“Relax, Slick. We wouldn’t send you and your squad out if it wasn’t important. The Generals think something might happen.”

They weren’t the only ones. This whole place gave Slick the creeps like nobody’s business.

It almost felt as though the whole zone was screaming at him, every glint of turquoise radiating malice and hatred and all his instincts shouting get out of here already at full blast.

But he had his orders. Straight from the top, too.

Slick sighed. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Tell me you’ve at least verified the intel.”

“Can’t. Generals just had, and I quote, ‘a bad feeling about this’.”

Slick stopped and gave his comm a disbelieving look. “You’re karking joking.”

“Nope.”

“Of course they had a bad feeling about this,” Slick snapped. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this! But you don’t see me reorganizing battleplans because I had too much spicy cheese stew for dinner last night!”

Rex didn’t cackle, that wasn’t his style. But his shoulders did go up and down a few times.

“Well,” he said, and his serious tone couldn’t quite erase his evident amusement. “I guess that’s why you’re not a Jedi. Rex out.”

The comm clicked off.

Slick looked around, checking to make sure he was alone – he was, there was nothing around him but more crystal trees and a steadily intensifying feeling of alarm – and then informed his comm: “Yeah, well, fuck the Jedi.”

It felt good to say.

“What an interesting perspective,” a voice said from the blind spot right behind his shoulder. Slick spun, reaching for his blaster, but he was way too late. A hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him back hard against one of the crystal trees, and then there was the feeling of a hand at his throat, holding him up as it cut off his air. “For a clone, I mean.”

It was Ventress.

She was smiling.

The two stripes that bled from the corners of her mouth made it seem like a frown.

Slick was choking. He was choking, dangling at least his height above the ground, and yet he could see that there was nothing under him, nothing holding him up, nothing that he could see. All he could see was her, her smile, her cold white hand held up in the air with fingers curled forward – and his proximity map, still displaying the location of his squad. His boys.

“No,” Slick said.

And that –

That wasn’t right.

That wasn’t what had happened.

In reality, Ventress hadn’t let him talk, or at least not for a while. Just kept strangling him, letting him struggle and thrash pointlessly as she cooed and chattered, going on and on about how the Jedi just didn’t understand. Who she was aiming it all at, he had no idea, since the lack of air meant that he didn’t hear half of what she said. Most likely she was just entertaining herself.

He’d gotten the gist, though.

Enough to stop struggling long enough to make the universal sign for money at her.

That had gotten her attention.

“Not this time,” Slick said. He dropped his hands to his sides and hung limply from Ventress’ invisible grip, refusing to struggle any further. “This is just a memory. A dream. The past.”

Ventress looked at him thoughtfully, just the way she had on that stupid plateau, when she was considered his stupid offer.

His offer, and the shame of that still burned. But his stupid desperate plan had worked: she hadn’t killed his boys.

“It is,” she said. “But the past shapes you.”

“It might shape me, but it doesn’t control me,” Slick lied, as if his decision that day on the plateau hadn’t changed the course of his entire life. As if he wasn’t a rat in a cage, just waiting to die. “What’s done is done. I’m not going to go through it all over again just to torture myself.”

Ventress smiled again. Her teeth seemed sharp.

“You’re getting better,” she said, almost approving. “But it won’t help you.”

Slick shrugged. He might not entirely believe what he was saying, but he hated the thought of suffering for Ventress’ enjoyment far more. So: fake it till you make it.

“Very well,” she said. “You may not fear the past. But what about – the future?”

The world around them twisted and changed.

No more turquoise. Instead, everything around them was durasteel and permacrete, buildings upon buildings upon buildings, everything grey grey grey –

Oh no. Not this dream. Anything but this dream…!

One of the doors opened, and a clone trooper stumbled out. Wearing armor, no helmet. Scars on his face, grey sprinkled in his hair. Age lines on his eyes, around the curve of his mouth. Older, older than any clone Slick had ever seen, and yet still –

Familiar.

“Please,” Jester begged, grabbing onto the door frame to try to keep it open. “Please, no, you can’t do this. Please don’t demobilize me. I – I don’t know what else to do. There’s nothing else I can do. I’ve never been anything but a soldier. You can’t just kick me out –”

“We have no room for those who can’t work,” the man in the doorway said, a natborn naval officer in his dress greys, his voice cool and disinterested. “You clones are all out of date. Worn out, exhausted…what do you expect, that we’d just keep paying you for work that can be done better and cheaper by younger men?”

“I don’t know anything else,” Jester repeated. “I’ve never had anything else. Please. How will I live?”

“That is not our concern,” the man said. He made as if to close the door, but paused. His lips curled up into a very small smile, full of cruelty. “Though I wouldn’t worry about if too much it I were you. You’re first generation, aren’t you? Given the rate you lot age…well. It’s not like you have a lot of life left.”

“But –!”

The man shut the door.

Jester staggered back, staring blankly: first at the door, and then at the flimsiplast demobilization notice crushed in his fist. “No,” he whispered. “No – no – no –”

He burst into tears. Sobbing, heaving, gut-wrenching tears that wracked his whole body.

And Slick –

Slick woke up screaming.

“You’ve got issues,” Boba said from his bunk.

Slick sat up in bed, still trying to catch his breath. He hated that dream. Hated, hated, hated it.

It always felt so real.

Fucking Jedi. If it wasn’t for their carelessness, their lack of planning, their indifference, maybe he wouldn’t have had to suffer time and time again through that dream, or the others like it. Maybe he would’ve reported in on what happened with Ventress instead of choosing to go through with their deal. Maybe –

The past doesn’t control me.

Slick took a deep breath and unclenched his fists. Calm. He had to stay calm. Ventress liked it when he was angry, and he wasn’t going to give her (even if it was only his own dream’s representation of her) the satisfaction.

“Is it the war?”

Slick glanced at Boba. “Is what the war?”

“What you were dreaming about.” Boba was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest. “It sounded bad, so I was wondering, you know. If it was – the war.”

“No,” Slick said, and scrubbed at his face. “It’s not the war. It’s what comes after.”

Boba frowned.

“Let’s hit the showers,” Slick said. “They’re usually free this time of day.”

Boba was up within seconds. “They are? I thought we could only go in the evening!”

“They’re better in the evening,” Slick corrected. “The droids come in to do the wash cycle during midmeal.”

Boba scrunched up his nose, clearly getting what the problem would be.

“Still, it’s an option. Never know when someone might need to wash right after waking up.”

“Because of cold sweats?”

Yeah, Slick wasn’t touching on the possible other reasons there.

“Move,” he snapped, and Boba bounced up. He’d gotten more compliant over the past few days, at least – he’d spent most of the first night pretending he wasn’t sobbing into his pillow and most of the first day alternating between a tremendous sulk and lashing out with all sorts of “I can handle myself! Leave me alone!”

Slick had half-heartedly listened to him, figuring that it was just like Chopper and his attitude (though…hopefully not just like…) and that some respect would do more than hovering, and of course Boba had managed to end the day by nearly getting hustled into a corner with minimal surveillance by one of the nastier inhabitants of the rat cage, one of their few natborns, a kriffer who thought they were untouchable because they were (nominally) an important person awaiting trial.

Slick, who’d never paid the slightest attention to their strutting around like a peacock alternating promises to “put in a good word” with threats of what’d happen if they were crossed, took tremendous pleasure in putting them down. He’d felt so cheered by it that he’d even kept up a running commentary of the moves he was doing, the way he’d once done when his boys were watching.

(Boba had waited until Slick was done to inform him that he totally could have handled it himself, even though he begrudgingly noted that he was “better with a blaster”. With that established, he’d then spent the rest of the day quizzing him on the close grappling moves.)

Day two had gone much the same way, only with Boba trying to storm off to a different part of the yard as if he could pretend Slick didn’t exist, followed by him running into Needle and Cyclops and promptly fleeing right back just to avoid them. Slick didn’t blame him.

Day three had started much like the previous ones, right up until Slick had offered to show him some more of the moves (largely out of boredom) and Boba had exploded, first with yells and then, when Slick just started ignoring him, with tears.

Day four was worse.

Boba had woken up with questions.

And Slick, bored to stupidity, had made the mistake of answering him – which had then opened the floodgates.

(“What Jedi did you try to kill?”

“General Kenobi and General Skywalker.”

“Whoa…how?”

“Sold them out to a Sith.”

“Huh. Did it work?”

“Obviously not.”

“Will you –”

“Time for a new subject!”)

(“What rank were you, anyway?”

“Sergeant.”

“That’s low, isn’t it? I’ve never met a sergeant. Well, a clone trooper sergeant, anyway. I knew some of the trainers, one of them was a sergeant…”

“Did he tell you what they say about sergeants?”

“Huh? No. What do they say?”

“------------------------------------------------------------------------”

“I don’t think even my dad knew all of those!”)

(“I miss Bossk.”

A long pause.

“You’re supposed to ask me about Bossk now.”

“What if I don’t care about Bossk?”

“But he’s really cool!”

“But I still don’t care.”

“What do you care about?”

“…money.”

“Oh! That’s just like Bossk. See, Bossk is –”)

On the other hand, Boba had also gotten into a fight with Needle and ended up biting him in the arm. That counted for a lot in Slick’s book.

They visited the showers, ate breakfast, and had just started settling the debate over whether to go to the yard, the library, or gym with a game of aiwha-scientist-fish (Boba claimed that it was called “lizard, toad, snake” on planets other than Kamino) when the outer door buzzer went off.

Slick turned to look at the entrance, frowning. It was the wrong time entirely for Fox to visit, and it wasn’t like they got any other visitors in this wing…

(He still grabbed Boba’s wrist to dissuade him from trying to change from aiwha to scientist while his back was turned. Nice try, kid, but Slick had never lost this game before and he wasn’t about to start now, attempt at cheating or no.)

The person who entered was one of the Coruscant Guard. Not Fox, with his so-distinctive coloration, but not a regular Guard either, since he had command stripes. Not as many as Fox. A lieutenant – or at least, he was for now.

This must be Thire.

Thire (presumed) marched forward into the generally empty hall and came to a stop right in front of Slick’s cell. He settled into an at rest pose and then – said nothing.

He just stared.

At Slick.

Slick stared back, waiting for Thire to explain why he was there. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing there in perfect parade rest, but he was just bubbling over with barely leashed emotions – practically vibrating with tension, seething with anger and concern and jealousy and rage and fear and sorrow, so many that it was impossible to tell which one was primary.

The silence stretched.

Eventually, Slick broke. He’d never been good at waiting people out.

“All right,” he said gruffly. “What’s your deal?”

“Just wondering,” Thire said. “About you.”

Slick arched his eyebrows skeptically. “Me?”

“I’m trying to figure out what’s so special about you.”

Slick didn’t think there was anything particularly special about him. Other than, well –

“I am a traitor,” he said dryly. “That’s pretty unique, or so I hear.”

“Your method, yes,” Thire said, as if that didn’t raise more questions than it answered. “But that’s not enough. Fox might be a sucker for the competent and pathetic, but you’re not quite enough of either of those, and you just being a traitor wouldn’t be enough for Fox to keep coming down here even after the cells started filling up.”

That was true. Fox didn’t come down to visit Slick out of pity for a clone left alone, not anymore.

Fox came because he needed a listener. Fox came because he needed someone who hated even more than he did, so that he wouldn’t startle anyone with his own rage. He needed someone outside the hierarchy, so that he needn’t fear weakening morale when he shared his concerns. His fears. His suspicions.

So, this was about Fox. That was fine. Slick had long ago prepared himself for –

“What’s your relationship with Appo?”

…not that.

“Appo?” Slick asked, bemused. “Appo?”

“Yes. CC-1119. Master Sergeant Appo. 501st. Tell me: what was your relationship with him?”

“Uh,” Slick said, entirely out of his depth. “We didn’t really…have one? He was a sergeant from the start, even though they stepped him up to master sergeant right away, so he was in my room. Next bunk over. We didn’t really talk much…”

Because Appo was an antisocial bastard at the best of times.

“And when we did talk, it was mostly about logistics, scheduling, that sort of thing…”

And that was it. Except, of course –

Slick swallowed hard.

“He’s the one who got my boys.”

Up to that point in the conversation, Boba had been half-hiding on his bunk, not actually concealing himself in any way but very careful not to move, either, deliberately minimizing his presence to avoid drawing Thire’s attention. But now he suddenly popped up like a bug out of a bunker and said, indignantly, “Wait, hold up, your boys? You have boys? Who are they? Can I meet them? How does a clone even have boys?”

Slick gave him a weird look. So did Thire.

“I was assigned them? Like usual?” he said. “My boys, they’re my training squad. I’m a sergeant. We all have one.”

Boba stared, blinking, and then abruptly his cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

“Never mind,” he mumbled, and buried his face in his pillow.

Weird kid, that Boba.

Maybe it was the lack of genetic alteration or something.

Slick turned back to Thire, who had calmed down from his earlier emotionality. Slick was still unclear what had caused it in the first place, or what had made it go away, but he preferred Thire this way: less seething jealousy, more curiosity.

“Your boys, huh,” Thire said. “You had a good relationship with your squad? And you betrayed them anyway?”

“I never meant to betray them,” Slick spat out, his anger abruptly spiking white hot – but no. No karking anger. Not on a day after a Ventress dream. She always wanted him angry, furious and hateful, and he hated her, so he didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t be. Even if only out of sheer spite. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down, and then another. Another.

Finally, he said through gritted teeth: “What’s your point?”

Thire was watching him thoughtfully, still in that protocol-perfect parade rest right in front of the cell.

“Maybe it’s the loyalty,” he mused, clearly not talking to Slick. “Appo always appreciated that. He was always loyal.”

“Too loyal,” Slick said, and Thire’s fist suddenly hit the forcefield in front of the cell bars at full force, making it crackle and spark and causing both Slick and Boba to jump and scramble back away from the hissing field on pure instinct.

“You’re right,” Thire said, voice absolutely calm and relaxed as if he hadn’t just done that. “Appo’s far too loyal. Always has been.”

He paused.

Then he added, very gently: “It’s rude to say it, though.”

“Right,” Slick said, suppressing the Sir yes sir! that immediately tried to jump out of his lips. He was a prisoner. Rank didn’t count. He regularly mouthed off to Marshal Commanders. He was not going to sir some random lieutenant. He really, really wasn’t.

That being said, this was the Thire Fox was always worrying about? The one he wanted so badly to protect? The one he thought might be wilting? What the karking Sith hells was wrong with him?! Sure, Slick had figured out from the way Fox talked about Thire that he was leaving out some key details, the sort of things that fell into a friend and commander’s blind spot, but he hadn’t realized Fox had left out Thire’s entire personality.

Especially since Fox had to have known. Because Fox was like that, too. A giant mess of howling emotions buried under the perfectly controlled exterior that was all he let outsider see. A feral creature composed of deep-seated grief and defiance, pretending at all times to be tame.

It was when the emotions underneath the mask disappeared that you needed to worry.

It seemed that Thire was in fact an excellent pick for Guard commander.

Though – speaking of which –

“Why not Captain?” Slick blurted out, then grimaced. He hadn’t meant to ask that.

Thire looked at him oddly. “How’s that?”

“Captain,” Slick said. He was already committed, so he might as well go on. “Your promotion, I mean. You’re a lieutenant now, and you’re being promoted to Commander. Why skip Captain?”

“I’m already trained for command at a higher level,” Thire said. “Fox requested it, special.”

Slick stared at him.

Something niggled at his brain.

“Does the Guard not have any captains?” he asked.

He didn’t know why he asked that. It was just one of those weird bursts of inspiration he got sometimes, an intuition that led him in a completely unexpected direction. And in fact, the suggestion was objectively insane. Why would the Guard not have any captains? That wasn’t how the GAR worked. There was a hierarchy. No matter what battalion or legion or division you were in, clones could expect the hierarchy to work roughly the same: troopers, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, commanders, marshal commanders. Even the specialist roles usually fit into one or another of those roles. So if there were sergeants and lieutenants in the Guard, and Slick knew there were, there had to be captains, too.

Unless…

Unless all the captains assigned to the Guard were off doing something else.

Thire looked at Slick.

“I see why Fox likes you,” he finally said, not answering the question. “You’re smart. Anyway. You want to see Appo.”

Slick frowned. “I do?”

“Not that smart,” Thire said dryly. “Yes. You do.”

“…I do.”

“In person,” Thire clarified. “No calls, no holos, no comms. An in-person meeting, right here. That’s what you want.”

“Why are you saying that Slick wants something when it’s obviously something that you want?” Boba demanded. He had raised his head and was looking offended, presumably on Slick’s behalf. Slick rather wished he wouldn’t.

Thire’s helmet silently turned to stare at Boba.

Boba braved the heavy gaze with a set jaw and a glare.

“Fine,” Thire said eventually. “You’re right. It’s what I want. Need. I need Appo to come here. And since, for the first time since deployment, Appo has finally willingly reached out to me and it was about you, well, you can fucking well guess howI’m going to get him here.”

The volume of Thire’s voice had risen steadily through the course of the sentence, although, frighteningly enough, his tone remained perfectly level. If it hadn’t been for the volume or the content, it would have sounded like Thire was politely providing some senator with directions.

“So noted,” Slick said, very cautiously. Thire’s emotions were roiling wildly under his surface calm, intense and fiery – not negative, necessarily, but everything he felt he felt very strongly. It was a feeling not unlike being in the vicinity of an unexploded bomb…albeit one with its own working bomb technician that was at all times very carefully keeping it in line. “Anyway, it’s not a problem. I don’t mind. I want to see him. I want to ask –”

His voice caught in his throat. He had to cough to clear it.

“I’ll ask him to bring word about your boys,” Thire said. His voice was gentle again, but genuine this time. Not the tone he’d used before, full of menace. “Getting anyone outside the Guard into the military prison is tough at the best of times, but…we’ll see what can be done.”

Slick nodded, not trusting himself to say anything, and turned his face away.

He heard Thire leave, the door buzzing as he let himself out.

After a few moments of continuing to stare at the wall, he heard Boba make a noise.

He didn’t turn to look.

“My dad,” Boba said from behind him. “He also – he called me his boy. When he was talking about me to others. That’s why I thought – when you said –”

He paused.

“Do you love your squad?”

Slick punched the wall.

He hadn’t meant to. He had stopped, early on, when he’d realized it was starting to slide into a pattern, a bad habit. He was an excellent hand-to-hand fighter, and it would be stupid to hurt his hands, and so he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t. He wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t.

Especially not now.

His boys had survived, he reminded himself. His betrayal hadn’t killed them. They’d gone on, onwards and upwards, thriving even under the most difficult conditions. Appo had taken them in, made them his own, and they were doing well with him. They were surviving. They were alive.

That was what mattered. That was all that mattered.

Slick missed them so damn much.

But he was here, through his own actions, and they were there, and he’d never want them to be here no matter how much he missed them. They deserved better than that. They deserved everything the world could give them – everything Appo could give them – and now Appo would be coming here, in person, and Slick would be able to tell him as much.

That would be good.

He could do that much. Maybe nothing more than that, trapped rat in a cage that he was, but – he could that.

But Boba had asked a question.

“Yeah,” Slick said, and hated how his voice wavered and cracked as he spoke. “Yeah. I love my boys. They’re – they’re good. They’re real good. Best – best squad in the whole damn GAR. I’m – I’m really proud of them.”

He turned back.

Boba was sitting on his bunk with his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. He looked quiet, for once. Less angry. Just – thoughtful. He was looking at Slick.

“Can you tell me about them?” he asked.

So Slick did.

The next morning, a note was delivered to their cell along with breakfast: Appo had agreed, and the meeting was set.

Slick felt almost sick with anticipation, anxiety and hope mixing in equal measure, but he forcefully reminded himself that a meeting being set didn’t mean it would happen soon. As soldiers, their every movement was governed first and foremost by the needs of the military, dancing to the tune of the war rather than their own desires. The 501st was an active battalion, always needed somewhere. There was no telling when they would have the chance to make their way to Coruscant.

Slick braced himself for a long wait.

“So I hear you’re meeting with Appo next week,” Fox said the next evening.

Slick stared at him. “Next week? Already?”

Fox smirked at him. “Five days from now, technically. I’ve already signed off on their arrival plans.”

“That’s quick,” Boba observed.

“That’s insane,” Slick corrected. “Five days? An admiral can’t scratch his own ass in under two, much less turn around a Venator – and forget reassigning a battalion! Even if we got colossally lucky and they’d just finished a battle, that wouldn’t impact their next assignment!”

“The 501st often has reasons to visit Coruscant,” Fox said vaguely. “Slick, a word. About Appo.”

Slick frowned at Fox. “Sure?”

“Can you…” Fox hesitated. “Just – be whatever your version of nice is.”

Slick arched his eyebrows. “You know Appo?”

“Of course. He’s a CC.” Fox glanced at Boba, just the barest little flicker of the eye because officially the two of them were still definitely not talking, and clarified: “He was originally trained as a commander, in the same class as me. That was before they broke his whole batch.”

Slick had heard of that, if indirectly. It had mostly come up in the meanspirited jokes about failure made by some of the other sergeants, who hadn’t been overly impressed with a CC showing up out of nowhere – and, if Slick had to guess, terrified of the notion that a clone not unlike themselves could mess up to the degree that a demotion like that would be called for.

No one had wanted to dig into what exactly had happened. They could have, if they’d wanted to, it had been clear that the information was publicly available…but no one had wanted to.

They’d just made jokes, instead.

Slick hadn’t made any of the jokes himself. But he hadn’t done anything about them, either.

“Did I know him?” Boba asked, which made Slick grimace. The age thing would never stop being weird.

“Probably not,” Fox said, though he was still looking at Slick instead of Boba. “He wasn’t in our barracks. And he was always pretty quiet, even back then. Shy, I’d say. A bit literal. But still – warm. Friendly. Not…what they later made of him.”

Slick thought about the Appo he knew. The only description that sounded anywhere near fitting was “literal.”

“Made of him?” he asked. “Was it – reconditioning, or something?”

Slick was almost afraid of mentioning it, the nightmare that was only ever whispered of between cadets and trainees, but to his surprise Fox just snorted. “If there was a reset button that could turn a clone into a perfect soldier, I’m sure it would already be part of basic training,” he said dismissively. “No. Appo wasn’t reconditioned. But he’s what happens when someone decides to use everything a clone is and is meant to be specifically to destroy them.”

“I don’t understand,” Boba said, and Slick was glad because it meant he didn’t have to admit that he didn’t either.

Fox’s face did something strange.

“I don’t think any of us really do,” he said. For some reason, he was lying. “Still, Slick, when you meet with him, if nothing else, remember that at his base Appo is like you.”

“Like me? how?”

Fox’s lips twisted into something bitter and regretful. “He loves his brothers.”

#my fic #my fics #clone trooper slick #ventress #asajj ventress #commander fox #commander thire #boba fett #clone trooper jester #clone captain rex #captain rex #going to start posting my fics on tumblr as well

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