Fox tags along on a smuggling bust one (1) time and subsequently wishes he’d never been decanted.
Well, he’s arrested the perp a lot more than just one time, actually, but that very first tackle into a chokehold and electrocuffs more than sufficed to turn the fates against him - the fates, and Cody, the insufferable twat. They’re not actually even batchmates, the lot of them, and going by numbers Fox was decanted long before them (long as in seconds or minutes, no one actually knows), but Seventeen put them all in a training room together and then stupid kriffing Kote looked him up and down, nodded, and hasn’t stopped calling him vod’ika since.
“Why is one of the Republic’s most wanted criminals asking to speak to you, vod’ika?”, Cody asks, without any preamble, almost making Fox cut the holocall on principle. He would, if General Kenobi wasn’t right there next to the little shit. “And why do I not like his tone?”
Fox has to resist the urge to close his eyes and scream, making do with a deep sigh instead. Force curse the day Cody decided to adopt-nap him, and Wolffe following suit immediately. “Weequay, shifty eyes, stupid fucking pirate bandana?”
Cody’s eyes narrow suspiciously, and Kenobi’s eyebrows raise simultaneously. It’s more than a little creepy.
Fox rolls his eyes so hard he sees stars. “Tell him he can go space himself, unless he wants me to do it for him. And then tell him that if he sends me fuzzy fucking socks again I might just hunt him down and do it anyways.”
Past the slide of the door, Thorn’s unmistakable cackle reaches Fox. And Cody, going by the narrowing of his eyes. “Don’t tell him that, ori’vod, he’s probably into that”, Thorn calls out, gleefully, and Force Fox really should’ve kept this to himself in the first place.
He would’ve, actually, but the constant stream of strange presents into Guard headquarters is hard to miss. It was Alderaanian chocolates, last week, which Fox pawned off on the Shinies. A box from a store with a blacked out label before that, which he launched out the window with burning ears before Thire could get a closer look at it.
“Actually”, Thorn continues, happily, “I don’t think it matters much if you do tell him anything - it’s not like the Commander has been the most graceful courtée, and that hasn’t done anything to discourage our favorite smuggler.”
“Marshall Commander”, Fox hisses, because he’s a pissy bitch, and then, because all professionalism has gone out the window anyways, “This is why Stone is my favourite.”
Thorn’s wounded gasp is lost over Kenobi’s thoughtful hum, and Cody’s patented I’m-going-to-do-something-incredibly-stupid-and-you-can’t-stop-me glare. “That would explain why we have Hondo Ohnaka accosting our troopers about your flavour preferences concerning fruit candies. But the one asking to speak to you is Cad Bane, Marshall Commander.”
The string of curses Fox lets out at that is loud enough to have Mauler stick his head in the com room to ask if everything is alright, and Thorn roll on the floor with howling laughter.
Force curse the day he ever slapped electrocuffs on Hondo Ohnaka, and double-curse the one he threw Cad Bane to the floor with a scissor leg takedown.
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Ponds was the oldest.
He knew he was given to Seventeen to train because the Kaminoans wanted to prove a point. They thought Ponds too soft. Too generous. Too anxious. Too caring.
He was not what the Kaminoans thought Seventeen wanted for the individual training program. They had set both of them up for failure.
Seventeen had looked at him for a long while on their first meeting, his eyes hard and assessing. Then he had simply nodded, and gestured for Ponds to follow him.
Ponds learned very quickly that he was good at keeping the morale high. Good at keeping everybody's heads in the moment. Good at building bonds between other members of his squad.
He was given little brothers. All three of them brimming with energy, anger and potential. So much potential, that the Kaminoans didn't even know what to do with them anymore.
They just needed someone to calm them down. To gather them together. To teach them how to stop and think. How to follow each other's every move and work as a one, unified front.
Ponds learned how to teach them all of that. He learned how to lead them, and they learned how to lead from him.
Ponds was the oldest.
Fox was the youngest. He was short and slight, with scores that kept climbing up every single day and eyes that seemed both incredibly intelligent and deeply frightened.
Ponds knew that Fox was given to Seventeen to train because the Kaminoans wanted to prove a point. Fox was smaller than the rest of them. He wouldn't be able to keep up with the training. His scores would start to fall, and thus prove that the individual training didn't work, that they should all just get back in line.
Ponds was the oldest. Fox was the youngest.
They both had something to prove.
In the end, they did both prove themselves. Fox's scores kept getting higher. Ponds kept his little brothers in order.
(Ponds was the oldest.
He was always meant to be the oldest. The one who kept the rest of them in check, the one who had the last word.
So, when Cody back from Coruscant with fury in his eyes and treason on his tongue, Ponds sat him and the rest of them down.
Let's take a moment and think, he told them, and lay out the rules.
Ponds was the oldest.
He had been given little brothers, and he had loved them enough to make them and himself Commanders.)
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