#data exfiltration | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

em1i2a3 · 4 months ago

Text

Hole in the Earth

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Mutant!Fem!Reader

Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI, Angst, Smut, Panic Attacks, Mentions of Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Loss and Death, Age Gap (not mentioned but there are assumptions of an age gap if you squint a bit, there’s no full acknowledgment ), Mentions of Blood/Bleeding. The warnings for smut specifically; p in v sex (unprotected, wrap it before you tap it though!), fingering, oral (fem receiving), Praise kink if you squint, light choking (nothing too serious though), Bucky talks you through it (wink wink nudge nudge)

Author's Note: I wanted to do an actual series for this original character, but I didn’t feel like committing to something so big with my job, so I thought I’d stick to a one-shot format for this one. I know some things may not be totally accurate (this is my first time actually putting something out there that is based off of the MCU, I changed things up a bit, but not extremely, at least I hope lol.) Hopefully y’all enjoy though :) .

Word Count: 13,347 (Talk about slow burn eh? Seeing this word count made my jaw drop when I checked it at the end. What an extravaganza lol)

Some people filled silence with noise—small talk, jokes, distractions, awkward anecdotes, laughter even.

But you and Bucky?

You never needed words.

Your partnership had formed without much thought, an unspoken decision, a quiet inevitability. No one ever sat down and said, "You two should work together," but after everything—after the turmoil from the snap, all the loss, all the grief, and the way neither of you truly fit into what remained of the team anymore—it just happened naturally.

You had both come back to a world that had existed without you for five years. It was like a blur to you. It felt like nothing had happened until you saw the people you loved had aged significantly since the last time you had seen them, or you had lost them by that point.

To deviate from you Bucky had spent decades as a ghost, lost in time, fighting to take back something that had been stripped from him, and the five-year disappearance from the world felt like an eternity. You had heard him mention in passing that it was as if he was in a room with nothing but white around him, and he was all alone. Not only that but when he returned it took him a long time to adjust to the new normal.

Steve was gone.

Natasha was gone.

Tony was gone.

And you?

You were still here, stuck in a limbo between mourning and moving forward, existing in a place that didn’t feel like home anymore. Sam tried to make things easier, tried to be a stand-in for Tony, but it was no use, you told him to stop early on in his attempts, and he respected the request.

Bucky somehow understood your loss better than most of the team, even though he had returned to the same ruins you did. He didn’t bother you with the questions everyone else had when you came back to the compound, he gave you a nod of acknowledgement and tiptoed around you like you were a bomb that was going to explode at any moment, which was something that you ended up preferring.

So when the missions started up again, when the world needed something resembling the Avengers to step forward, it was an unspoken agreement—you and him, always paired together. You knew you wouldn’t be able to handle anyone else other than him.

It worked though.

The both of you kept things mission-focused and ignored whatever was happening outside of that. He never brought up your past, and you never brought up his, and even when there was downtime during the mission you stayed quiet, waiting in silence until you needed to step in.

But now?

Now the most recent mission had gone to hell, and you were stuck alone with him in a safe house, forced into a kind of closeness you had never prepared for.

The mission was supposed to be simple.

A HYDRA facility hidden beneath an abandoned city block, data that needed to be extracted, an easy exfiltration plan. When Sam had explained it you felt like you were having Deja Vu because of how many missions had been like this.

The plan had been clear—

Infiltrate.

Extract the data.

Get out.

You never made it past step two.

The power core in the lower level ruptured, sending a shockwave through the entire structure.

The explosion came too fast, too strong, it wasn’t something you prepared for at all.

You had barely made it to cover before the heat ripped through the walls, short-circuiting everything electronic based in the area—including the Neural Stabilizer locked around your throat.

You had felt it immediately.

The pulse of static in your bones, the electricity surging through your limbs with nowhere to go, the sensation of drowning in yourself. You laid on the cold metal, breathing in through the pain that echoed through your entire body, attempting to calm your nervous system down before things got out of your control.

"You alright?" Bucky called from the level above you.

You had forced yourself to swallow the panic as you raised your head to look up to where he was, only seeing his shadow at that point.

"I’m fine." You replied.

A lie.

Because you could feel the stabilizer glitching, flickering between control and chaos, the red warning light at your throat blinking erratically. It didn’t go unnoticed by Bucky though, even though you wished it had.

“Are you sure?” He asked, watching you struggle to push yourself up from the metal, seeing a pulse of faint blue static running across the floor. You closed your eyes tightly.

”Yes. I’m positive. Just cover me so I can get to you, then we can get the hell out of here.”

You had to push forward.

Because you had no choice.

Because if you didn’t keep moving, neither of you were getting out alive. But if you had a choice you would’ve stayed right where you were.

By the time you had escaped the facility, hot-wired a car, and driven two hours through the backroads to the nearest safe house—your entire body was on fire with unstable currents flowing through your blood. You were in such agony holding everything in that you had almost collapsed onto the ground when you exited the car.

Bucky had watched you run towards the cabin, observed the way you almost broke the doorknob and locked him out all within seconds. By the time he had entered the cabin you were out of his sight, and barricaded inside the washroom.

When you slammed the door closed you immediately turned on the dim light of the enclosed space, stripping off your tactical gear with shaking hands, leaving you in just a pair of shorts and a white tank top. You threw your utility belt onto the counter beside the sink, trying your best to catch your breath, feeling a burning sensation building inside your chest, clawing at the bones. You braced yourself against the porcelain sink, bringing your eyes up to your reflection, looking at the red glow of the Neural Stabilizer flashing on your neck, each pulse more erratic than the last.

Tony had promised it would always work.

Now it was failing as you stood there.

You reached up to touch the fried titanium of the neck plate, feeling the warmth radiating off it, as the light above you glowed brighter for a brief moment before returning to its normal state. That was the only warning sign you needed to kick yourself into high gear. You opened up your gear pouch, fumbling through the various tools you had, until you found what you needed. The tiny utility screwdriver, the one Tony had told you to keep on you at all times. You thanked your past self that they actually listened to him for once.

“It’s just for backup, kid, but if you ever need it, don’t panic. You got this.” You could hear his voice in your head, you could picture the moment he gave it to you and you reluctantly threw it into the gear pouch, making sure he witnessed you do it.

You pushed the memory out of your head and forced yourself to focus, returning your gaze back to your reflection, stretching your neck out so there was enough lighting. Your eyes trailed over the grooves of the metal, finding the space where the first latch would be. You shifted again, turning your head to the side before bringing the screwdriver to the first screw that secured the panel—

———

"Hold still, Sparkplug," Tony muttered, adjusting the metal band around your neck so that it was fitting snugly against your skin, "You fidget more than Peter, and that’s saying something."

You sighed, tilting your chin up, watching him work in the reflection of the mirror.

"Feels like a shock collar." You commented, digging your nails into the palm of your hand.

"Yeah, well, better than the alternative." He replied, looking at you out of the corner of his eye, before returning his gaze to the stabilizer. "Unless you like turning every elevator ride into a death trap." He added.

You scowled.

"It’s not that bad."

"Tell that to the toasters and light bulbs you murdered last week. You know I think I stepped on some of the broken glass you forgot to sweep up." You felt your lips tilt slightly at the joking tone he took.

"That was an accident."

"Yeah, and I’m accidentally a millionaire genius." He tightened the clasp on the metal, sliding his stool back to examine his work. "Alright. Try not to electrocute me when you test it out."

You hesitated, looking at the stabilizer in the mirror, seeing the signature blue glow that Tony had in his chest piece now reflecting off of your very own Stark Industries creation.

"You’re sure this will work?"

Tony’s smirk faded slightly, his expression softening at the worry that laced your voice. You had come a long way since he had taken you under his wing, but he knew you still struggled with keeping the power under wraps, it was evident by the way everything would short circuit even when you were feeling happy, it trapped you. When he designed the stabilizer all he wanted was for you to feel normal, and this was the one thing that he was confident in providing.

"Yeah, kid." His hand rested lightly on your shoulder. "I’m sure.”

“And what if it malfunctions?” You questioned, your hand now tracing the ridges of the titanium.

”I’ll be there to fix it…I promise Y/N. I wouldn’t let it get to that point anyways. Routine maintenance will prevent that I’m sure.”

Back then, you had believed him.

Because Tony always kept his promises.

———

Your hands trembled as you worked on the stabilizer, the screwdriver slipping between your fingers while you twisted it into the second latch. The sharp edge of the tool had sliced against the sensitive skin on your neck three times at this point, and the droplets of blood began to stain your hands. The faint pain began to curl into itself, causing the lights to brighten once again, only this time it remained that way. The tips of your fingers began to veil themselves in the mesh-like glow that slowly stretched along your skin, another bad sign that you needed to get yourself under control.

Your breath came in shallow, panicked gasps, watching the red light blinking faster and faster with each mistake you made, almost as if it was in sync with your pulse.

You couldn’t do this, and there was no doubt that by the end of this, you would have a hazardous explosion waiting to happen. You wouldn’t be surprised if you’d take out the whole town.

You were going to—

"Breathe, kid." Tony’s voice warned.

You couldn’t help but remember the video he had left in your inbox, dated the day before his death. You hadn’t looked at it for three weeks, you weren’t ready to see him at that point, you were grieving, but the day that you decided to click on it to listen, and to watch…You knew it was going to be seared into your memory.

———

Tony sat at his workbench, rubbing a hand over his face, scratching at the stubble on his chin almost in frustration. His hair was a little longer, a little messier, and the exhaustion on his face was worse than you’d ever seen it.

"Alright, kid. If you’re watching this, then congratulations. You survived. You came back. And I…Well…I didn’t, unless you are watching this for fun, which is absolutely weird, but whatever.”

A pause, he sighs, licking his dry lips, trying to search for what he was going to say.

"Not that I’d know, obviously, because I made this before all the very bad, end-of-the-world war type stuff went down, but I’d like to think I got to go out in a blaze of glory."

His lips tugged up, but there was no humor behind it.

"Which, by the way, is something I told you not to do a thousand times, so let’s not make this a trend, okay?"

You had let out a choked laugh, tears already stinging at your eyes. He took another pause, shaking his head.

"Five years." He exhaled hard, tapping his fingers against the desk. "You’ve been gone for five whole years, and I gotta tell you, kid, it’s sucked. Like, really sucked. We have this whole ‘Save the World’ initiative going on, and I keep looking around thinking, ‘Where the hell is my electric gremlin when I need her?’ But no. You were gone. Taken just like that."

He snapped his fingers, inhaling deeply through his nose, trying to control his voice.

"And that?" His tone dropped lower, something raw scraping at the edges. "That was a real bitch."

You pressed a hand against your mouth, trying not to break down, trying to keep yourself as composed as you could.

"You left, and everything was just… quieter. Too quiet. No more blowing out the lab’s power grid on purpose because you got pissed at me. No more stealing my coffee and blaming it on Rhodey. No more dumb science debates about whether or not your powers count as a renewable energy source. Just… nothing."

His fingers curled into a fist, hitting his knuckles lightly against the workbench.

"I miss you, kid. And I know I didn’t say it enough when I had the chance, so I’m saying it now."

A sharp inhale. There was a cut in the footage. Now his position had changed, and he was standing.

"You’re back though. And I need you to listen, alright?"

You sat up nodding, even though he couldn’t see you.

"This thing?" He said, tapping a Neural Stabilizer on his own throat.

"Yeah, I made one for myself. No, I don’t need it. But you’re a visual learner—or maybe you just don’t trust me unless I put myself in your shoes. Either way, I made one so I could show you how easy this is to fix."

He sighed.

"Anyways, let’s be real. If this thing is flickering red, that means something bad happened. Maybe you got hit by an EMP. Maybe you took too many hits in a fight, and someone broke it. Maybe the universe just hates us both equally, who knows. But if it’s failing, that means you’re going to short-circuit because your body won’t know what to do with all the excess energy. And when you short-circuit, so does everything else around you. That means streetlights, security systems, Wi-Fi—" he gestures around him with his hands "—you know, everything people actually need to function."

You sniffled, pressing your fingers against your lips.

"So. Let’s fix it before you blackout an entire city block, huh?"

His eyes softened, something warm but worn behind them.

"You got this, kid. You always have."

A pause.

"Alright. First step—pop the latch. Gently put the screwdriver into the large metal coil, it should be bright orange if the stabilizer is malfunctioning due to the overheating. Twist it counterclockwise. And whatever you do, do not—"

——-

You pressed too hard.

The screwdriver slipped, and another sharp sting burned across your neck, the blood now dripping down your neck and soaking into the tank top you wore.

"Shit." You muttered, your fingers flying to your throat, wiping off the blood as much as you could, your pulse hammering throughout your entire body, as the crimson liquid smeared across your skin.

Before you could even process the impending pain, the Neural Stabilizer’s light turned off completely.

Without missing a beat a violent pulse of static erupted outward, a crackling, jagged burst of energy tearing free from your body.

The lightbulbs overhead shattered, raining sparks and broken glass onto the tiles, lightly cutting up some of your exposed flesh. The mirror fractured down the middle, sharp cracks splintering outward, but not fully falling off the surface.

The entire safe house went dark, the fridge cut out, the security system fried, the cell towers blinked offline. In the kitchen, Bucky sat at the rickety dining table, thinking about whether or not it would be a good idea to try to come in and help. Even after the power surge, he was still on the fence about going and intruding on what was happening in there, not out of fear, but out of what he might have to do to get everything under control.

Inside the bathroom, the only light left was coming from you, and now the soapy smell that had once filled the room had been taken over by the crisp smell of ozone, as if a rain storm just occurred.

Your reflection in the mirror flickered, illuminated by the uneven, stuttering glow of electricity crawling over your skin. Tiny spiderweb cracks of raw current slithered up your arms, twisting beneath the surface, licking along your fingertips, wrapping around your body, almost like it was a reunion. The stabilizer narrowed the current down significantly when it was on, without it there was no regulation.

The charge had nowhere to go. It buzzed, and coiled, desperate for an escape, trying to find something to attach to. Your body felt too full, like a live wire wound too tight, ready to snap apart, and now the pain was truly starting to settle in, deep inside your bones, causing your blood to curl.

"No, no, no—"

You repeated, slamming your hand against the countertop. A sharp crack of static arced outward, splitting the porcelain, hairline fractures splintering in front of you.

Your breath hitched in your throat, as every muscle in your body seized.Your heart pounded painfully against your chest, erratic, frantic—

Then the doorknob rattled.

"Hey."

It was Bucky.

"You okay?"

The words barely registered with you, it sounded muffled, drowned beneath the buzzing that rang through your ears. You could feel your pulse spike violently, as panic slammed through your ribs like a live wire.

You couldn’t answer the simple question.

Couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t stop the charge from rising once again.

The electricity under your skin wouldn’t settle, wouldn’t stop expanding, the raw static skittered along your body, flaring out in thin veins of uncontrolled current.

"I—" you croaked, holding onto your chest, trying to stabilize your voice from shaking.

The door creaked open.

And before you could even react, the barricade was removed from between the both of you.

Bucky stood in the dim blue glow, still dressed in the majority of his tactical gear, minus the weapons. The glass crunched under his boots as he stepped into the washroom, his sharp and guarded expression softening when his eyes locked onto the scene in front of him.

His gaze flickered over the shattered bulbs, and the fractured mirror, and when he breathed in the smell of static tickled his nose, almost like someone had taken chlorine and mixed it with metal.

Then his eyes landed on you. Your trembling hands, your shaking shoulders, the way your body twitched with the electric currents still pulsing beneath your skin, his eyes watched the glowing cracks spread along your arms. He could see in the lighting that your neck was bleeding, and that your stabilizer was practically fried. At this point, he concluded that he in fact didn’t know where to start.

”Y/N…” His voice was dripping with concern, trying to piece together what he could do.

You tried to speak, tried to tell him to go away but all that came out was a gut-wrenching sob, the panic and fear sinking its claws deeper into your ribs.

"Hey, you need to breathe," Bucky instructed his voice low, calm, and even. But you couldn’t. Couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t pull yourself back from the static buzzing inside your skull, it was mind-numbing. The only thing that snapped you out of your haze was the crunching of glass beneath Bucky’s boots, as he stepped towards you.

"Don't—" You snapped, desperate to keep him away. "I can’t— I can’t shut it off…Just stay…Stay back Bucky." Your hands trembled, as your arms locked up, the muscles tightening, like a cord was wrapping around them. The crunching noise stopped, but the buzzing in your ears didn’t, as you leaned your body on the sink, moaning through the stinging pain that ran up your spine.

”Listen I can’t just leave you in here like this, what can I do to help?” You could feel your knees go numb while you were trying to contain whatever was building up to release next. You braced yourself against the counter, cushioning the drop to the ground as much as possible. Your bare knees felt the impact of the glass as the sharp edges dug into the thin flesh, a grunt escaping your throat, while you were attempting to shift slightly to the side before putting all your weight on the front portion of the counter.

”Just go away.” Was all you could muster to say through your short sobs of pain, “Please just go.” You begged, tears now streaming down your cheeks, as you put your forehead onto the edge of the porcelain sink, letting the cold temperature even out the heat that was radiating off your skin.

Bucky didn’t move, didn’t heed your request to leave, instead he crouched down, and sat on the glass-covered floor, with his arms resting on his knees. He watched you closely, noting how your body would tremble every couple of seconds, or how the static that covered every exposed area of your skin buzzed lightly at any sign of movement.

”Please leave.” You choked out again, barely above a whisper. Bucky sighed, his jaw clenching at the rawness in your voice. The last-ditch effort to push him away before anything worse happened, before you hurt him.

”I’m not going anywhere Y/N…It would go against my better judgment.” He replied, clenching and unclenching his vibranium hand, contemplating. He knew what he needed to do, but had no clue how he would execute the plan without you possibly lashing out at him.

He glanced back up at you, watching as your grip tightened on the edge of the sink, another strangled whimper escaping into the room. You were already so far gone at this point that there was no way you were going to come back without additional help, at least that’s what Bucky was starting to conclude from what was transpiring in front of him.

Another burst of static snapped out from you, slashing against the mirror, fully breaking the reflective pieces, hearing the shattering as it fell into the sink, splintering, leaving small superficial wounds on the tips of your fingers, lines of red blooming across your knuckles. You didn’t even register the pain.

Bucky barely flinched, because at this point he wasn’t going to wait anymore, and now that you were distracted he took the opportunity. Quickly he brought himself forward and wrapped his vibranium arm around your waist, pulling you against him with more force than he intended. Your back collided against his chest, and immediately you could feel your body locking up in his grip as his other arm wrapped around your waist to try to stabilize you so you weren’t thrashing on the glass-covered ground. You could feel your lungs seize up.

”Let me go!” You twisted violently in his hold, as you dug your nails into his right arm, trying to loosen the restraint he formed around your body. You slammed your back into his chest, attempting to wind him, but it was no use, Bucky was a solid unmoving force at this point, and he remained locked around you. Another fresh stream of tears ran down your cheeks. He could feel your body heating up against his as he adjusted, trying to get you to stop thrashing.

”Bucky, please…” Your voice cracked, a sob tearing from your throat, feeling another burst of static snapping around you, at whatever was near, it was lashing out until it found Bucky’s arm, as the blue static slipped into the limb causing the vibranium to light up. A crackling wave of electricity ran up each plate, filling the thin gaps between each one. This realization only made you thrash against him even harder.

”Y/N I’m fine! Stop it, you’re not hurting me.” He insisted, tightening his arms around you once again as you began to shake against him. “Look,” He murmured. Through the haze of your panic, you forced yourself to focus, your gaze trailing down to the arm that was clenched around you. The shock and static wasn’t building, or lashing outward, it was being absorbed. Bucky could almost feel your body relax at the sight, even though you were still wheezing and breathing too fast.

”It’s not hurting me.” He repeated again, but all you could hear was the buzzing inside your skull, it was deafening. Your vision blurred as you made small attempts to push him away, even though it was of no use, he didn’t budge. He was steady, controlled, and unfazed, as his ears tuned into the way you were breathing, the panicked wheezing.

“Y/N, you have to breathe…Can you feel me breathing?” He asked, trying to hide the urgency behind his voice, adjusting again so now he was able to see the side of your face, and the way your pupils were blown out. His damp hair tickled the side of your face, as he leaned forward trying to make sure you were practically cocooned in him, almost mimicking an emergency blanket in a way. You could feel yourself trembling in his arms, as his right hand came up to intertwine with yours, guiding your palm to rest flat against your chest, right over your heart.

“Y/N, focus on me…If you can hear me, focus on my breathing.” He instructed, holding you closer to him so your back was directly pressed into his chest. You could feel his body rise and fall against you, even, measured…A slow inhale, a gentle exhale.

”Match me.” He whispered, his warm breath sticking to the exposed skin of your shoulder. You attempted to breathe in as deeply as he did, feeling a burning sensation creep up along the sides of your ribs. The exhale came out fast and uneven from you, but Bucky didn’t rush the process, as he took in another breath, his chest expanding against your back. You attempted to take in another breath, but this time it came a little easier, even though it still felt like every bone in your body had its own personal vice grip around it. Black dots began to pebble into your sight, feeling a numbness washing over you.

“Good…Now let it out.” Was the last thing you heard before your vision went dark.

------

The first thing you heard when you regained consciousness was music.

Soft and slow, floating through the air in a smooth jazz melody, rich with nostalgia. The mellow voice of the crooner was claiming he would never smile again, as the lyrics gently carried over the hum of the muted trumpets, the backup singers harmonized the man's sorrow while the serenade continued. It felt like a lullaby that was meant for another time.

Then everything else began to settle in; the bed beneath you, the rough comforter scratching against the backs of your legs. The blanket on top of you pulled up to your neck, enveloping you in its warmth. A dull ache lingered in every area of your body, your hands were sore, your face felt swollen from the crying that you had done, and it felt like if you attempted to move you would throw up. But at least your breathing was finally stable. No longer ragged or filled with panic. It was a relief in a way.

The music continued as your ears caught the sound of a soft tapping in rhythm with the song. A gentle exhale released into the room. Bucky. Slowly, you forced your heavy eyelids open, as the stucco ceiling came into your sight, the dimmed emergency lights providing a soft hue to the space. You tilted your head up so your chin was settled on your chest, noticing that you were still wearing the white tank top that was now stained with your blood. The way you were able to move your neck with such ease also made you realize that you didn’t have your stabilizer on, which brought on another concern, as you laid your eyes on the sight before you.

Bucky sat at the kitchen table, illuminated by his cell phone, which was leaning against one of the salt shakers, the light casting shadows along his jaw and cheeks. His hair looked damp and curled in on itself like he was fresh out of the shower, and you had noticed he wasn’t in his regular combat gear. Instead, he had on a black, form-fitting long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of matching cargo pants. He was so lost in what he was doing that his gaze was practically glued to the table, and you could tell he was fiddling with something that you couldn’t particularly see. You tried to lean up onto your elbows to try and catch a glimpse of what he was doing, only to have your knees scream out in pain when you accidentally bent them. A hiss escaped your throat, automatically breaking Bucky’s concentration on what he was working on, as his head snapped in your direction, putting down whatever he was working on to pay attention to you.

“Take it easy. You still have glass in your knees.” He informed, hesitating to tell you that he hadn’t pulled out the shards when you were passed out. You groaned at the sentence, your body dropping back against the pillow, as you reached up to massage your head, trying to mend an impending migraine.

“I feel like I’ve been through a few rounds with a freight train.” You said, closing your eyes tightly at the sound of the rawness of your voice.

“Well…That’s kind of what happens when you go nuclear on yourself.” He muttered, leaning back in his seat, his gaze locking on you as you dragged your hands down your face. He nervously tapped his fingers on the table, biting the inside of his lip, “You scared me y’know.” The words fell from his mouth before he could even stop himself, the admission causing you to let out a ragged sigh.

“It wasn’t my intention to do that.” He shook his head.

“Intentions don’t mean much when you’re screaming for me to go away and you’ve caused every light bulb in the place to explode.” You could hear the control he had on his voice, the way he took his breaths so that his words didn’t waver. He was bothered by what you had done, there was no doubting that, but you had never heard him speak like this before.

“Are you honestly going to pick a fight with me right now? Could this not wait until the glass gets taken out of my knees?” You snapped, as your body began to slowly heat up. He scoffed at your suggestion, shaking his head in disbelief.

“No. It can’t wait, because the second I come to help you’re going to avoid the conversation.” You rolled your eyes.

“Jesus Christ Bucky. I get it.”

“Do you?” He questioned. You clenched your jaw as you pushed yourself up so you were able to look at him, to hash this out before it killed your partnership. Your knees seared at the quick movement while you settled on the bed, but you shoved the pain aside, keeping the tensity in your eyes.

“I don’t know what the fuck you want me to say. Do you want me to say sorry I didn’t tell you about the stabilizer breaking as I was attempting to not fucking explode around you?!” You shot back, squeezing your hand into a fist, trying to hold in the static that began to line your skin again.

“I want you to say you trust me. Because right now it doesn’t feel like it, and if we’re going to continue working together, I need that reassurance.” You looked up from your hands, catching his hardened gaze, seeing the betrayal in his eyes.

“You know I trust you.” You stated, watching as he shook his head, and stood up from his seat.

“Do I? Because you don’t act like it. Do you remember what just happened an hour and a half ago? You had plenty of opportunity to tell me what the hell was going on and you refused. I had to come in and see you in absolute shambles, do you understand how that felt?” Your eyes followed him as he paced.

“I didn’t want you to see me like that, you made a choi-.”

“I chose to take care of you!” He snapped, his voice raising in volume, the reaction making you flinch, not because you were scared, but because he had never yelled at you like that. “That’s what any teammate would do. But you make it impossible unless it’s forced on you, which is what I had to resort to. Do you think that made me feel good?” He asked, looking over at you, his eyes shimmering in the light. The guilt hit you harder than any punch you had taken, truly realizing how much pain you had put him in. You could see the way his hands twitched at his sides, remembering the way he was holding you and restraining your movements, reliving the moment over and over again as you fought against him.

“I-I was afraid I was going to hurt you Bucky, that’s why I was fighting you. I didn’t want to hurt you, or even worse kill you…” The words were heavy when they left your lips, “You may think you’re invincible, but you could’ve died…And then what? I lose another person I care about?” You could immediately see his eyes soften at your words and the way that your voice was shaking and cracking as you attempted to keep it steady. He held your gaze, keeping his spot at the side of the table, but now he was holding the edge of it, leaning on it for support. You could see the frustration in his eyes draining away with every moment that passed as he connected the dots.

“So that’s what this is about?” He asked softly, the sharpness from earlier being replaced with something gentler, caring. He ran his hand through his hair,“...You do know I’m 106 years old and have gone through way worse than a little bit of electricity right?” You were surprised by the sudden change in his tone, detecting the trail of humour that laced his words.

“And that this new arm…” He lifted his vibranium hand into your line of sight, flexing his fingers, letting the dim light catch against the matte black material “Doesn’t allow you to hurt me correct? The material just absorbs it. You saw it when I showed you in the washroom, you even stopped fighting me when you saw it. It doesn’t have a voltage limit or anything so…I don’t think it would’ve been possible for you to kill me. Does that help cure your worries?” He asked, letting the question hang in the air, leaning against the table again. You let out a slow breath and nodded, but you didn’t reply, you just let the intensity of the argument die down. The jazz music faded in again now, filling the silence for a few beats until you absentmindedly replied to him.

“You’re 106?” His lips pressed into a firm line, thrown off by the abrupt shift in conversation.

“That’s all you got from that speech I just gave you? Really?” You shrugged.

“I mean…You carry yourself pretty well, you don’t look a day over 100.” You said, tilting your head to the side to feign consideration “Mmm, actually maybe I would even go as far as saying you could pass for 90.” He shook his head at you, but you could see he was fighting a smile from appearing on his lips, as he reached up to rub the stubble on his face.

“Absolutely ridiculous.” He wasn’t annoyed, nor frustrated, it sounded like he was relieved, because neither of you wanted to admit it, but you didn’t like where the conversation was going, the both of you didn’t want to fight over something like that, you were supposed to be partners. The weight of the argument was settled, and you both were thankful for that. You let some time pass, just to allow each other to come down from the adrenaline until you cleared your throat.

“I’m sorry by the way.” You said quietly, earning a soft sigh from him, he opened his mouth to interrupt, but you held up your hand to stop him, “I didn’t mean to shut you out. You had every right to be angry with me, and I shouldn’t have fought you, I should’ve just allowed you to help me.” Bucky nodded, his blue eyes locking onto yours again.

“I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to yell at you, I lost my temper…And I didn’t mean to scare you. I wasn’t mad, I was just-.” He paused for a moment, inhaling deeply “I just didn’t like seeing you like that.” Your fingers tightened around the blanket at his admission, but you nodded as well to acknowledge you heard him. You let the moment breathe, still feeling the lingering guilt of how angry he had been just a few minutes prior, but what sat in your chest was how bothered he was by your pain because it wasn’t about the outburst itself, it was about what it meant. The way he snapped was his way of trying to convey that your well-being was important to him, and even the thought of that made something in you seize up. So much for keeping the partnership strictly mission-based I guess, you thought as you shifted on the mattress, only to be reminded of the searing pain coming from your legs.

“Now that we’re done arguing…Do you mind taking the glass out of my knees now?” You asked, cringing at the sharp burning sensation that radiated throughout your kneecaps with each slight movement you made to try and get yourself in a better position to attempt to ease the pain, to no avail.

“Oh Jesus, yeah of course. Sorry.” He replied sheepishly as if he had forgotten about what he had said at the beginning of the argument. Bucky worked with a quiet urgency, collecting the first aid kit, and a basin to put the shards of glass in, stopping for a moment at the table to pause the music on his phone before picking up your stabilizer from where he had been sitting. When he had turned back to you he could see the look of surprise on your face, as your eyes trailed over it, seeing the familiar blue glow that indicated it was fixed.

“I figured it wouldn’t hurt to attempt to work on it while you were passed out,” He explained, looking down at the curved titanium while he made his way over to the bed, “Don’t really know if I actually fixed the thing, but it’s not glowing red or anything so I’m assuming I made a bit of progress.” He shrugged, as he sat down in front of you, settling the first aid kit down before handing the stabilizer over to you, feeling your fingers brush against his gently, watching you take it from him with a small smile on your face. You looked at it closely, your fingertips buzzing in anticipation, the cool weight of the titanium almost bringing you a wave of relief. You felt around for the familiar latch at the back of the stabilizer, clicking it open with a gentle hiss, your eyes glancing up to meet Bucky’s blue irises.

“It’s looking promising.” You joked, seeing his lips turn up slightly, before tilting your head back to expose your neck, brushing your hair aside. Carefully you aligned the stabilizer against your throat, settling it into place as the soft hum of the hydraulics pulled the device together, allowing it to lock around your neck. You rested your hands against the edges of it, waiting for a moment, allowing it to calibrate. Bucky watched you, trying to see if there was any sign that he had messed up somehow, thinking about the wires he cut and shifted when he began his attempt on fixing the thing, hoping to god it wasn’t something important. A beat of silence passed over the both of you quickly, being quenched with a soft exhale.

“Seems like you actually did it.” You informed, turning your head from side to side to ensure everything was properly secured.

“You sound surprised,” Bucky replied, feigning offence.

“Hmm. Tony made this thing idiot-proof, so I’m a bit taken aback by your…Skills.” His eyebrows raised at you, shaking his head as he flipped open the first aid kit.

“It’s not like I have an arm that’s state-of-the-art technology or something like that.” He shot back, sarcasm dripping from every word he spoke while he collected a few alcohol pads, tweezers, and gauze from the inside of the container. “Now…Ready to play Operation?” He asked jokingly.

“Just what I need, Bucky Barnes playing surgeon.” You replied, adjusting your position so that your knees were bent between the both of you, pulling the blanket off carefully just in case any of the glass had accidentally caught on any of the fibres. When the damage came into your line of sight you could practically feel your stomach twist and turn into knots. The blood was dry and streaked in the crevices of your knees. Tiny shards of glass embedded themselves like fractured stars in the thin flesh that lined the bone, glinting under the soft light. Some pieces were deep, surrounded by angry red welts where your body had begun trying to reject them. Others sat more superficially, barely hanging on but all of it looked raw, swollen, and painful. You could feel yourself get lightheaded just by looking at it.

“I think I’m gonna be sick.” You announced, throwing yourself down onto the mattress, the back of your head hitting the pillow, “I can’t look at it.”

“You’re telling me out of all the things you’ve seen, this is the thing that does you in?” He commented, “Now that’s disappointing.” You groaned, putting your arm over your face.

“It’s different when it’s my blood.” He let out a small laugh, the bed shifting under his weight as he adjusted, positioning his vibranium hand between the bend of your left knee to keep it still, the coolness causing you to tense up.

“Alright, I’ll go slow. Ready?” You nodded, keeping your face covered, attempting to hide the blush that began to rise on your cheeks, feeling him pull out one of the smaller pieces of glass, starting easy. He dropped it into the steel bowl, dabbing the blood off your skin with gauze, as he continued his feat, getting close enough that his breath fanned over the wound. You shut your eyes tightly, another sharp jolt of pain shooting up your leg, your other hand digging into the comforter beneath you.

“God damn it Bucky.” You hissed, your knee jerking involuntarily, his grip keeping you steady.

“Almost got it, just hold still.” His voice was soft, focused on grabbing onto the tip of the glass that he had been pulling out seconds before, the slow meticulous movements bringing you to the brink of screaming

“Okay. I need you to talk or something. Distract me before I start destroying the place please.”

“What do you want to talk about?” Bucky asked with hesitation, another piece of glass clanging against the steel bowl.

“Tell me something you liked…Before everything. Something you miss maybe.” He hummed, going for another shard of glass.

“Music…And dancing too I guess.” You took your arm away from your face, pushing yourself up onto your elbows, looking at him with your eyebrows raised.

“You? Dancing?” For a brief moment, he glanced up at you with a smirk plastered on his lips.

“What? You don’t believe me?” You shrugged.

“I just can’t picture Bucky Barnes on the dance floor, were you like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever?” His brow furrowed for a moment, confused at what you were referring to.

“Saturday Night what?” You let out a breathy laugh.

“You’ve never seen that movie?” He gave you a flat look, returning his eyes to your knees, taking out another piece of glass and wiping the droplets of blood that slid down your skin.

“I’ve been frozen in ice, brainwashed, and playing assassin for half a century. You think I’ve had time to watch movies?” You leaned back a little, resting your weight on your elbows.

“Fair point, but it’s a classic Bucky. The disco music, the bell bottoms, the gyrating.” You reminisced, watching as his lips pressed tightly together.

“Pretty sure I was not gyrating on the dancefloor.” He commented back, another piece of glass joining the pile as he moved to your other knee, his hand leaving your skin briefly before mirroring the same position with the other leg.

“So what kind of dancing did you do then?” A smirk appeared on his lips, his eyes crinkling, showing off what little wrinkles he had.

“Ballroom, Swing if I was feeling fancy.” You grinned.

“Very nice.” You could see his cheeks dusting red slightly, as he dropped another piece of glass into the bowl, wiping your knee.

“What can I say…I had the moves.”

“Had?” He glanced up at you, his teeth showing slightly now, a genuine smile appearing on his face, something you had not seen before from him.

“Careful, it sounds like you want to find out.” The way his voice dropped made a satisfying shiver shoot up your spine, but you kept your expression neutral, lifting an eyebrow at him.

“Oh yeah? You offering to take me out dancing Bucky?” He shrugged, shifting in his spot to get a bit more comfortable, latching onto another piece of glass.

“Maybe.” Glancing up to see your reaction, noticing that you were blushing as well. You shook your head at him.

“Please, if we ever went out dancing you’d throw me around like a ragdoll and I’d end up concussed.” He laughed deeply, returning his eyes to your knees.

“Nah...You’d be good, I can tell.” You squinted at him.

”Oh yeah? And how exactly did you come to that conclusion?” Bucky smirked, his hand shifting to adjust your leg, the tweezers grabbing on to another glass shard.

”You move well. Quick on your feet, and you can keep up with me.” You scoffed at his comment, your body tensing as the pain from your knee was slowly building up again.

”You make it sound like fighting and dancing are the same thing.” He hummed, distracted from the conversation for a brief moment. You glanced at him, noticing that he was holding his breath as he pulled the large shard of glass out, bringing the cracked and bloodied piece up to your sight, a satisfied smile on his face.

“Well, they’re not all that different. Both are about timing. About knowing your partner.” Bucky replied, his voice low and smooth. Another clang echoed throughout the room while he grabbed a fresh gauze pad to press down onto the weeping wound. You swallowed, shifting against the mattress, trying to ignore the warmth that crept up your back.

”So what, you’re saying we’d make a good dancing pair?” You could feel the way his fingers flexed at the question, his cold vibranium thumb running over the bottom of your knee. He didn’t look up right away, still applying pressure on the wound that continued to slowly bleed.

”I think we already do.” He murmured, lifting his gaze to meet yours. You could see the way his eyes scanned over yours, the way that his jaw clenched just for a split second. An unwavering heat crept up the back of your neck, flushing your chest and the surrounding area of skin red.

“Yeah? What makes you so sure?” His eyes never left yours as he adjusted his grip again, letting his fingers freely brush against your skin, as if he didn’t realize what he was doing.

”I know how you move, and you never have problems following instructions when you’re given them.” Your fingers twitched against the sheets, the words sinking into you. He wasn’t wrong, not one bit, but it was the way he said it, and the way his breath hit your skin, the sensations were crowding you at that point that it was starting to become increasingly difficult to keep yourself cool.

”Sounds a bit cocky if you’d ask me.” He dropped the tweezers into the bowl, throwing the saturated gauze on top of it, as he wet his bottom lip with his tongue.

”Not cocky, just observant, that's all.” His voice was low, sultry, you didn’t know if he meant for it to come out so soft, but it still made you feel motion sickness. Before you could even stop to think about what you were going to do, you reached down, your fingers holding the back of his bicep, gripping onto the cool vibranium through the sleeve of his shirt as you pulled yourself up.

The second you entered his space, his eyes were locked onto yours, wide and searching, like he was surprised you decided to pull that little move. You could feel the warmth radiating off of him now, and you were hyper-aware of how his chest rose and fell now that you were closer to him, the shallowness of his breaths coming to your attention almost immediately.

“What are you doing?” He asked, looking over at your hand sliding up, gliding over the curve of his shoulder. His hand remained behind your knee, as the other one gripped the mattress beside him, unsure if he should reach out to bring you closer. You tilted your head forward, your lips dangerously close to his, as the both of you exchanged breaths.

”Getting comfortable.” You whispered, watching his jaw tense at your words, his fingers twitching against your skin. He tilted his head back slightly, letting out a sigh.

”You don’t want this, Y/N.” Your brows furrowed at the hesitancy in his voice, but before you could protest he continued, “It’s been a long time…Since I’ve…” He paused, looking back at you, “I just don’t want to disappoint you.” You could hear the vulnerability in his voice mixing with embarrassment, as he avoided your eyes still. Slowly, you slid your hands down the front of his shirt, feeling his chest tense up beneath your touch as your fingers gripped the fabric gently.

“You won’t disappoint me Bucky,” His hands flexed at your words like he was battling with himself as he returned his eyes to yours, allowing the both of you to really look at each other. You had never noticed the way his eyes glistened in the light or the way his pupils ate away at the blueness of his irises.

You shifted onto your knees, being mindful of the ache, but ignoring it in favour of attempting to bring yourself closer to him, as you slid your fingers upward, tracing the outline of his collarbone. Carefully, you moved, sliding yourself into his lap, feeling his body stiffen beneath you, his hands coming up to hold your waist out of instinct. Your fingers curled around the chain of his dog tags, feeling the cool metal in your hands, as you leaned in, letting your lips ghost over the rough stubble along his jaw.

”It’s been a long time for me too.” You admitted softly, your breath warm against his skin, his fingers gripping you just a little tighter, feeling your lips press a gentle kiss on his neck. His breath left him slowly, his vibranium hand coming up to cup the side of your face.

”Yeah?” His voice filled with uncertainty, as you pulled back to look down at him, nodding, threading your fingers into his damp hair.

”I also don’t know what I’m doing half the time either,” You replied, tilting yourself forward, bringing your lips close to his, “But I know I want this…And I know I want you.” You admitted, closing the space between the both of you, your lips meeting his. Bucky let out a sound that was a cross between a sharp inhale and a groan, as his arm slid around your waist wrapping around you so your body was flush against his chest. His thumb traced along your cheek as he leaned up, trying to basically crawl into you.

The kiss was tentative at first, slow and meticulous, like he was memorizing the feeling of your lips against his, the way you pulled on his hair, and the small moans that escaped into the air as he kept you pressed against his chest. A soft hum vibrated from your throat when his lips parted just enough to deepen the kiss, your tongue meeting his in a battle for dominance.

Bucky was the first one to break the kiss, overwhelmed by all the sensations that were hitting him at the same time. He rested his forehead against yours, catching his breath, as his arm tightened around you, trying to steady himself. You opened your eyes, your hands coming up to hold his face, pulling back to look at him, seeing the softness in his stare, like he was in a daze.

”You sure it’s been a while since you’ve done this?” He let out a laugh, shaking his head.

”Yeah, I’m positive.” He replied, his eyes scanning over your swollen lips, “It’s muscle memory I guess.” You smirked at him, your thumbs dragging over the stubble on his face.

“I think you just know what you’re doing.” You whispered, your compliment causing him to blush.

”You flatter me…” Before you could respond, Bucky shifted, his arm tightening around your waist as he moved forward. In one fluid motion, he eased you down onto the mattress, his body following closely behind, blanketing you in his warmth, anticipation thrumming beneath your skin, your legs wrapping around his hips. He braced his weight against his vibranium hand, as his eyes traced over every detail of your face. Your fingers curled over the neckline of his shirt, pulling him closer to you so that he could capture your lips with his again, his body pressing against yours in a way that sent a pool of heat into your lower stomach. He savoured every moment, feeling the way your legs tightened around him, pulling him even closer to you, the heat of your body surrounding him like a shield of sorts. It was intoxicating to the point where it made his head spin. You arched into him instinctively, dragging your hands down to the hem of his shirt, slipping them beneath the covering so that your fingers could dance across the muscles of his stomach, feeling them twitch against your touch. He let out a stuttered breath as he broke the kiss, leaning back so that he could pull his shirt off for you, throwing it to the side in one smooth motion.

The dim lighting of the room casted shadows over the hard planes of his chest, accentuating every defined ridge of muscle he had. Your eyes drifted to where flesh met metal, to the seam where his vibranium arm connected to his shoulder. The skin around it was littered with thick scarred tissue, jagged and slightly raised. You couldn’t imagine how many procedures he had been put through to get him to this point, but all you could think about was the pain he must’ve gone through. You continued to look him over, his dog tags catching your eyes for a moment, your hand reaching up to grab it gently.

”You’re staring,” He commented, his hand wrapping around your wrist, feeling your pulse bounding against his fingertips.

”It’s the first time I’m seeing you like this…Give me a little grace.” You joked, running your thumb over his name on the dog tag. He allowed you to take your time with him, knowing that he would probably do something similar when the roles became reversed.

“I didn’t take you for the sentimental type.” He murmured, his voice quieter than before, reserved for such an intimate moment.

”I’m just trying to memorize all of it.” You replied, letting your hand fan out over his chest, the steady rhythm of his heart pulsing against your palm. His lips parted for a moment, almost in disbelief that you liked what you were seeing, as he brought your hand up to his mouth, gently kissing the back of it, keeping his eyes on yours. His vibranium fingers raced absentminded circles along the skin of your exposed hip, his thumb brushing along the hem of your tank top, hesitating to make his next move. You sat up slightly, giving him the go-ahead to pull the shirt off of you, feeling the cool metal graze against the sensitive flesh of your ribs, as you raised your arms above your head allowing him to remove the top with ease, watching him throw it off the side of the bed. His gaze dropped to your body, roaming over every expanse of skin he could see, as you laid back down on the mattress, putting yourself under the spotlight this time.

Just like Bucky, you had your own set of war wounds, only they were caused by your own hands. The marks on your skin were not ordinary bruises, Bucky had never seen anything like them before, and the level of concern behind his eyes made you speak up.

“They’re Lichtenberg figures…People get them when they’re struck by lightning, and well…You can connect the dots as to why I have them of course.” They branched across your torso in breathtaking patterns, thin fractals of darkened reds stretching from the center of your chest and curling down your ribs, sprawling out like frozen lightning, captured in the canvas of your body. Some of the marks ran deeper, more defined, where the energy had burned through your skin with more force. Others faded into the natural warmth of your body, barely there but still visible under the dim light of the room. His eyes roamed over them, committing the patterns to memory, as he reached out with his right hand, hesitating for a moment.

“Do they hurt?” You looked up at him, shaking your head.

“No. There’s so much scarred tissue at this point that the area is pretty much numb.” You explained, feeling his calloused fingers trailing over the patterns on your torso while his vibranium hand remained on your hip, holding you still. He hummed, leaning forward to place a gentle kiss against your collarbone.

“They’re beautiful.” He whispered, his breath hitting the shell of your ear, your heart immediately swelling at his words, feeling his lips pecking along your shoulder, as his hand continued to trace along the etched fractals, moving up towards your breasts. He pulled back for a moment, breathing against the little wet marks he had left on your skin, cooling them down before returning to his exploration, kissing over the swell of your breast, his lips parting against the sensitive flesh, sucking just enough to leave faint red marks behind. You tensed beneath his touch, arching your back towards him, his fingers digging into your hip, pushing you back down against the mattress, his lips turning up into a smile against your skin.

“Stay still.” His voice vibrated against you, feeling his fingers trailing down the side of your rib cage, his lips gently making their descent down your sternum, his teeth grazing down the pathway, sending a shiver up your spine, your fingers finding their way to his hair, carding them through the damp strands.

“You’re making this hard Bucky.” He glanced up at you, his blue eyes darkened with lust.

“That’s the whole point.” He replied, continuing to trail down your stomach, his stubble scraping down your skin, before kissing right above your navel, “I want to take my time with you.” He whispered, bringing his right hand down to hold onto your thigh against him, the rough callouses causing goosebumps to rise beneath his touch. You tugged on his hair, feeling him move even lower so his lips were right just above the waistband of your shorts, his head tilting up to look at you. You held his gaze, your chest rising and falling with each uneven breath you took. A smirk played on his lips, and without breaking eye contact, he pressed a slow, deliberate kiss just above the fabric, his stubble scraping against your skin in a way that sent a delicious ache spreading through you.

“Can I take these off?” He asked gently, his fingers playing lightly with the waistband, teasing you when his thumb dipped below it for a fraction of a second before returning to its spot.

“Yes…Please.” Your voice sounded so desperate, choked up with tension, feeling him hook his fingers around the fabric before slowly pulling them down your hips, then down your thighs, only moving away from you to remove the shorts from your body completely, letting it join the increasing pile of clothes that began to form on the floor. His jaw clenched at the sight of you in front of him, your body laid out beneath his, completely bare except for your underwear. His hands moved slowly, as he grasped the back of your thighs, his thumbs pressing gently into your skin. You reached for him, your fingers tracing up his forearms, craving for him to return to where he had been just moments ago, the anticipation winding tight in your stomach. He leaned back down towards you, bringing your legs up over his broad shoulders, pulling you closer to him as he settled between your thighs, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of your knee, the warmth of his breath sending a shudder through you. His grip on your thighs was firm but careful, as his mouth moved up towards your underwear, his stubble scraping lightly against your skin, leaving a whisper of friction that only added to the tension that coiled deep in the core of your stomach. Your fingers tangled into his hair again, pulling gently, wordlessly begging him to continue. You could feel him smile against the skin of your inner thighs, enjoying how desperate you were becoming.

“Bucky.” You whispered, your voice breaking with such need that it almost burned through your body. He looked up at you, his darkened eyes gazing into your soul, reading you like you were an open book. His lips parted slightly as his right hand left the top of your thigh, skimming his fingers over the damped fabric of your underwear.

“So impatient.” He murmured, trying to keep his voice from wavering, attempting to keep the dominance in his tone, even though it was becoming harder and harder with every shaky breath you took. His lips brushed over the fabric, breathing out against your arousal as your thighs tightened on his neck, a soft moan escaping your throat.

“Bucky, please…” You begged, your fingers pulling on his hair, the teasing pushing you over the edge. A smirk ghosted across his lips at your pleas, and then with an agonizing slowness he hooked his fingers into the fabric of your underwear, dragging it gently to the side, baring you to him completely. His eyes flicked up to yours, his pupils blown out enough to where you were almost unable to see the ring of blue that surrounded it, and in that moment, you could see that he was as desperate as you were. Then finally, he pressed his mouth against you.

The first touch was barely there, a soft kiss placed deliberately beside where you needed him the most, to tease you, before his lips parted and his tongue dragged up your slit, not wanting to hinder himself any longer. Your head fell back against the pillow, a choked gasp escaping your lips at the sensation and warmth of his mouth wrapping around your clit, humming at the way your thighs flexed against his face, rubbing against his stubble. His tongue continued to circle against the bundle of nerves, his eyes burning into your skin, watching as you arched your back, grinding yourself on his mouth, wordlessly begging that you wanted more. His right hand slid up to your core, coating his fingers in your arousal before slipping two of them in with ease, looking at the way your mouth dropped open as he curled them inside you, finding a pace that matched the way his tongue worked against your clit.

Your fingers continued to tangle deeper into his hair, but before you could pull, his vibranium hand wrapped around one of your wrists, pulling it away gently, feeling him pin your arm down against the mattress beside you, sliding his fingers down to intertwine with yours. The contrast of the heat that was pooling in your stomach and the cold of his hand sent a shiver through you, heightening every moment, every touch, and every movement he made against you, unraveling you piece by piece.

Your heartbeat pounded in your ears, the pressure in your lower stomach growing unbearable, his increasing pace pushing you closer and closer to the edge. He could feel the way you clenched around his fingers, and how you trembled beneath him, rocking against his mouth.

”Bucky-“ His name left your lips in a strangled breath, your gaze returning to his, realizing that he had been watching you this entire time, enamoured by your body and the way it reacted to him. His grip on your hand tightened, grounding you to the moment, your legs clenching around his head again just as his tongue flattened against you and his fingers curled a little more inside you, picking up the pace. For a split second he took his mouth off you.

“Let go for me sweetheart.” He instructed, his voice laced with such need and devotion that you could feel your entire body tense up, feeling his mouth returning to your clit once again, his tongue working against you with such purpose that all the air in your lungs ceased to exist. Your thighs twitched against the sides of his head, his lips wrapping around your clit with a slow and deliberate pull, which caused the tension in your stomach to snap.

A sharp moan tore through you, as he pressed his face against you even more, allowing himself to feel the way you shuddered beneath him. The air crackled faintly, as static danced along your skin, noticing the way Bucky’s arm plates flickered a light blue for a brief moment. His grip on your hand tightened, and his movements didn’t falter, allowing himself to slow down just enough to guide you through the aftershocks of your orgasm, until your body finally relaxed against the mattress, utterly spent.

Gently he pulled away from your soaked core, pressing a wet kiss to the inside of your thigh, before removing his glistening fingers from you and sitting up slightly. His lips were slick with your arousal, and the expression on his face was something between pride and awe, as he crawled back on top of you, caging your body in his warmth.

“You were incredible.” He whispered, pressing a soft kiss to your lips, the sweet reminance of you being tasted on his tongue, “You did so good.” He added, bringing his fingers to your mouth, watching as you sucked the rest of your arousal off of them, your tongue carefully flicking against them.

“Christ.” Was all he could manage to say, as he slowly pulled his fingers from your mouth, letting them drag down your swollen lower lip, watching the saliva glisten over the reddened skin where you had been biting. The hard outline of him pressed against your thigh as he shifted above you, bringing his mouth to yours again, wanting to savour every kiss you gave him. His dog tags grazed the middle of your chest, cooling your overheated skin which now had a faint film of sweat forming on it, as you let out a soft moan when he rolled his hips against your aching heat, pressing hard so you could feel him. Bucky pulled away from the kiss, almost with a disappointed look on his face, a moment of realization shining in his eyes.

”Shit…Y/N I don’t have condoms.” He whispered, putting his forehead onto your collarbone, breathing heavily, trying to steady himself. You smirked at his despair, as you laced your fingers into his hair and tugged it so he could look at you.

”I have an implant, Bucky.” You informed, watching the relief wash over his face, a long sigh escaping his lips.

”Thank god.” Was all he could say before sitting back onto his knees, moving quickly to rid you of your underwear and himself of his cargo pants and boxers. You couldn’t help but giggle at his eagerness as he shifted his weight to take everything off all at once, and also just enough to knock the first aid kit and the metal bowl of glass right off the bed.

The sharp clang causes the both of you to freeze, as Bucky’s eyes flicker over to the mess before returning to you, waiting for your reaction, watching your hand come up to cover your mouth to stop a laugh from escaping it.

“Real smooth.” You teased, hearing him let out a breathless chuckle.

”Not my best moment.” He admitted with a crooked grin, rubbing the back of his neck, bringing his hand over to touch your thigh. You reached up to wrap your hand around his forearm, before pulling him towards you.

”I find it kind of endearing that you’re all nervous and flustered.” He let out a quiet laugh, as he settled between your legs once again.

“You make it hard to keep my composure.” Your fingers skimmed up his arm, feeling his bicep twitching beneath your touch, while he adjusted himself against you, bringing his vibranium hand up to your throat to hold it gently, tilting your head up to meet his eyes before his mouth captured yours again in a hunger filled kiss, feeling your hips raising to meet his, in a silent plea. A low groan escaped him as his length grinded against your wet heat, attempting to hold himself back for just a few moments before he got lost in you. He pulls away from your lips again, leaning back so he can line himself up with you. Your eyes trail down to his cock, seeing that it’s already glistening with precum, the tip a light red, practically begging to be seated inside you. He’s way above average, and the way he pumps himself in his hand almost makes you come right then and there. He could see the lust in your eyes, the way your mouth opened just a little at the sight in front of you.

“You sure you can take me sweetheart? You’re already shaking.” He pointed out, a teasing smile coming up on his wet lips.

“I need you Bucky…Please…” The words fell from you in a whimper, as his vibranium hand slid from your throat to cup the side of your face.

“Okay, okay, I won’t tease you anymore…Relax for me.” He whispered, as he aligned himself with your entrance, coating himself in your arousal. You could feel yourself clench around nothing in anticipation for him, feeling as he gently pushed into you, the delicious stretch was just enough to make you gasp, and tighten around him, your eyes closing to take all the sensations in at once. Bucky leaned onto you, his lips brushing against yours.

”Look at me,” He ordered softly, “I want to see those pretty eyes while I’m inside you.” You moaned at his comment, bringing your half-lidded, pleasure hazed gaze up to meet his, as your jaw went slack, feeling him pushing deeper, inch by inch.

“That’s it,” He praised, “You’re taking me in so well, and you’re so fucking tight…All for me.” He was breathless, continuing to move slowly, his pelvis finally meeting yours when he bottomed out. He gave you a gentle kiss, like he was rewarding you for listening to him, a soft moan escaping your throat. Your walls fluttered around him as he drew back a bit before thrusting forward, hitting a spot inside you that made your vision blur.

”Oh my god Bucky…” You whimpered, his hand coming up to hold just above your stabilizer, a smile coming up on his lips as he repeated the same motion, pulling the same reaction from you.

“There you go,” He coaxed, “That’s the spot, isn’t it?” You could only nod, your nails digging into his shoulders, dragging them down his back.

”Say it, sweetheart…Tell me how good it feels.” He whispers, his breath hitting your lips as he continues to move, pulling out just a little more, bringing his hips to yours again just a little harder, eliciting another gasp from throat.

”You feel s-so good.” Your words caught on the sheer pleasure of the way he filled you, your fingers digging into the muscles of his back.

”That’s my girl…You were made for this weren’t you?” He asked, grinning from ear to ear, savouring the way you writhed beneath him, reacting to his movements and words. He pressed another kiss to your lips, pulling his hand from your neck, and sliding it down between the both of you to press just above your pubic bone. The added pressure made every movement of his hips feel like explosions throughout your body.

“You feel that hmm? How deep I am inside of you?” Your walls clenched around him, as your eyes closed again, another strangled moan escaping into the room, your nails dragging across his skin again.

”Bucky, o-oh my god.” Was all you could manage to say, your legs locking around his waist, your abdomen tensing beneath his touch. He began to pick up the pace, the both of you exchanging breaths and gasps into each other's mouths, as he nipped at your bottom lip gently.

”You’re so fucking perfect.” He praised, feeling your fingers curl into his hair, trying to ground yourself against the overwhelming heat of his body grinding into yours. His lips traveled along your jawline, pressing open-mouthed kisses along the column of your throat, sucking the sensitive skin, putting a mark on a spot that would be visible to everyone, snapping his hips against yours, earning another cry from your lips.

“I love fucking hearing you.” He whispered, devouring every reaction you gave him, your walls clenching around him, throwing off his rhythm for a moment as he brought his face back up to yours. “You’re so fucking close, aren’t you?” He asked, watching you nod frantically, unable to focus on the task at forming words. He removed the pressure he was placing above your pubic bone, only to bring his fingers to your swollen clit, pressing against it. Your body arched against his, as he began to draw tight, slow circles around the bundle of nerves.

”Come for me Y/N…Let me feel it.” His voice cracked, his breath ragged. Before your brain could even register his words the pleasure ripped through you, as your body shook beneath his, your nails now digging into his flesh, causing him to gasp at the sharp sting. Your vision was blurred, and you could’ve sworn you felt a few tears fall out of the corners of your eyes as you clenched down harder on his cock, another static pulse igniting from you, wrapping around Bucky’s arm and fading out quickly. He kissed you again, consuming you completely, bringing his hand back up to your neck just to hold it, feeling your pulse beneath his fingertips, picking up the speed of his thrusts, the pace becoming rougher and more desperate. You grabbed onto his vibranium hand, gasping for air.

”I’m gonna fill you up so much that I’m gonna be dripping out of you for days.” He growled, tightening his grip on your hand, as the burning tension in him finally snapped, the hand on your neck tightening for a brief moment, his body stiffening above you. He let out a long groan against your lips as he spilled into you, bucking his hips towards yours to push the warmth of him deeper inside, fulfilling his promise. The weight of him sank against you as his head dropped to the crook of your neck, kissing any portion of skin that he could reach.

A minute passed, maybe more, as the both of you laid there, catching your breath, while he softened inside you. He kept his hand at your neck, his thumb idly tracing over your pulse, while his vibranium fingers remained intertwined with yours, not wanting to pull away just yet. You tilted your head back against the pillow, as you let out a breathless laugh, breaking the silence that had settled between you. Bucky lifted his head slightly, eyebrows raised, his lips twitching at the corners.

”What’s funny?” He asked, as you turned your head to look at him, amusement dancing within your tired eyes.

”That tone you were using was so fucking hot.” You could see he was amused by your admission.

”Really?” He asked, his smirk growing wider and wider.

”Yeah…I mean I knew you could be confident, but that? Holy shit Bucky.” He laughed at the way you were rambling.

”I didn’t know you liked being talked through it like that, I was just kind of filling the silence.” He responded, watching as your eyebrows raised.

”THAT was filling the silence?!” He shrugged.

”Just got creative. It was really easy too, cause you looked so pretty under me.” He complimented, pressing a kiss against your lips, you hummed.

”Well consider me very appreciative of your sudden creativity.” You murmured.

”I guess I’ll have to add it to my sex repertoire for next time.” You raised your eyebrows at him.

”You want there to be a next time?” He laughed at your shock, as his hand tightened around yours.

”Oh Y/N, if you give me a few minutes to recover that next time will come really quickly.” He commented, earning a loud laugh from you.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes smut #winter solider x reader #sebastian stan #marvel fanfiction #james buchanan barnes #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky smut #angst #angst with a happy ending #sebastian stan characters #james barnes x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #Spotify

1K notes · View notes

weyrwolfen · 4 months ago

Text

Full Circle

Rating: M

Characters: Gen, Commanders Fox-centric, minor appearances by Darth Vader, Jocasta Nu, Yoda, Thorn, Thire, Stone, Cody, Rex, Kix

Warnings: major character death/suicide (not permanent, but still, mind the tags)

The whole fic can also be found on Ao3 here.

Summary: Fox had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that the ‘stars’ in this place weren’t actually stars. They were more portals. One of them had to be the one he needed. He just had to keep trying.

The Temple was quiet.

Of course, CC-1010 would not have expected it to be otherwise. The 501st had been thorough in executing their orders.

And if there was something disquieting about that thought, something that twisted in CC-1010’s guts like it wanted to tear up and out of his throat, then that feeling was oddly muffled. Distant.

Everything felt distant these days. Distant and uncharacteristically slow. Thinking about much of anything felt like wading through murky waters. It was… concerning. CC-1010 knew he was not performing to his highest capacity, but something was preventing him from doing so. Any attempt to consider the problem in any detail was proving difficult. His thoughts scattered whenever he tried, and that left him distracted and even more unfocused.

It was easier, when he was given some specific task to perform. He could drown his disorganized thoughts in simply doing.

Standing on the steps of the Jedi Temple with his brothers, holding a silent perimeter wasn’t providing adequate distraction. CC-1010 couldn’t help thinking that he was overlooking something important, that he was supposed to be doing something.

You shouldn’t be doing any of this. This is all wrong. You are all wrong.

CC-1010 twitched, just a small, involuntary muscle spasm.

What had he just been thinking?

It must not have been terribly important.

His vambrace was flashing with an incoming call. When had that happened? He hadn’t noticed the alert in his HUD. He’d have to get its programming checked when he returned to base. For now, he accepted the comm request and said, “CC-1010 here.”

“CT-12-6168. We have encountered a bag of what appears to be Jedi artifacts,” came the response. CC-1010 immediately placed the trooper, the leader of one of the squads he’d set to patrolling quadrant one of the Temple’s perimeter. “It was not here the last time we canvased this position,” the segreant continued. “It may have been dropped by the fugitive.”

CC-1010 had not been given specific instructions about what to do in this situation. Deciding how to handle it without direct orders was a struggle.

“Bring it here,” CC-1010 said, sending the trooper a data ping with his current location. He could set the items aside for Lord Vader to review after he apprehended the fugitive.

Mentally passing the responsibility up his chain of command eased some of the tripwire tension that had been humming in CC-1010’s mind.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

“Sir, yes Sir,” CT-12-6168 said, and CC-1010 cut the connection.

CC-1010 went back to scanning the Coruscant skyline, watching for any disruptions in the traffic beyond their patrol gunships. The airspace around the Temple had been shut down since the attempted coup, but it was possible that the fugitive Lord Vader was currently tracking hadn’t come alone. CC-1010 had been ordered to increase the Guard’s existing presence on the ground and in the air, in the event some unknown conspirator was waiting to attempt an exfiltration.

CT-12-6168 arrived a few minutes later, carrying a large, fabric bag well away from his body. He looked, for all the galaxy, like he was expecting some type of venomous creature to spring out of the brown burlap and attack him.

That was probably a reasonable response. Force artifacts were notoriously dangerous and unpredictable.

As for CC-1010, he was simply curious. It was a long standing failing of his.

It was not CC-1010’s duty, to be curious about who their mystery fugitive was and what they were doing inside the Temple, but he found that he could not help himself. The structure had been closed by order of the Emperor himself, because the Jedi traitors had left behind traps throughout their stronghold, Force artifacts and worse. It was a matter of public safety. A thief, if that was what their mystery fugitive was, would have to exhibit a pathological lack of self-preservation instincts to risk entering the Temple, despite the rumors of untold Jedi treasures which had spread after the Order’s treachery had been revealed.

In any case, the Guard had been specifically told to back Lord Vader in this search, keep the perimeter secure, and to leave the Temple’s interior to the experts.

“This way,” CC-1010 said, gesturing for CT-12-6168 to follow him down the Temple’s long staircase, to where they’d left a few LAAT/le patrol gunships in reserve, in the event a strike team was needed. It seemed like the most reasonable place to store the artifacts, at least until they could be handed over to Lord Vader.

CC-1010 nodded to the troopers manning the mobile communications center his men had set up in their field command center. They were listening to all of the chatter across this entire mission, keeping an ear out for any signs of trouble.

The ships were just beyond the bank of terminals. CC-1010 pointed towards the closest one and said to CT-12-6168, “Stow it in the evidence lockers in that one, I’ll tell CT-77-4182 and CT-6556 to keep an eye on it.”

CT-12-6168 hesitated before nodding smartly in lieu of a salute – his hands were rather occupied with the bag of artifacts after all – and turned on his heel to head for the ship.

CC-1010 typed a quick message into his vambrace and sent it off to the ship’s two pilots. When he looked up again, he noticed a metallic glint on the ground. That was odd, he certainly hadn’t noticed it before. He stepped closer to get a better look.

It was some kind of small coin or amulet made of silvery metal with gold accents and colored enamel. It featured a long-tailed bird, gold and cream, chasing, or maybe being chased by, a gray and red bat.

It was almost certainly a Jedi artifact. Perhaps the bag CT-12-6168 had been carrying had been torn? CC-1010 most likely shouldn’t touch the thing. There was no telling what it might do, and if the fugitive had undertaken the objectively insane risk of stealing it from the Temple, it was most likely highly valuable, highly dangerous, or most likely, both.

CC-1010 shouldn’t touch it, but he also couldn’t just leave it here either.

The decision was made for him, when the sound of an explosion tore through the relative peace of the empty Temple.

CC-1010 picked up the amulet without further conscious consideration and rose to look back to the troopers at the communications station.

“What’s the comm chatter?” he asked the closest trooper, who happened to be CT-414-622.

“Squads in quadrant four are under attack, Commander,” CT-414-622 said, looking up from his terminal. “They say… They say it’s a Jedi, Sir.”

A Jedi. Their mystery fugitive was a Jedi.

“All right,” CC-1010 said, trying to adjust the strategy for this encounter in light of this new data. “Tell them to hold out. Reinforcements are on the way.” He dropped the amulet into one of his belt pouches and took off at a sprint towards the closest LAAT/le.

The 501st had been thorough, but obviously not every Jedi on Coruscant had actually been inside the Temple when Order 66 had gone out. CC-1010 and his men had been tasked with chasing down rumors of survivors and executing any they found.

It would have been useful if Lord Vader had actually warned any of them in advance though.

CC-1010 stumbled as he reached this ship, the critical path his thoughts had been taking shattering before it could turn truly treasonous. The disorientation lasted only a second though.

CT-12-6168 was still inside the LAAT/le, along with the full team of troopers assigned to the gunship. “Sir, what’s the situation?” one of them asked, as CC-1010 pulled himself up into the troop transport compartment.

CC-1010 opened a direct comm line to all of the pilots on the reserve ships and answered, “There’s a Jedi attacking our perimeter. Get us in the air!”

Identifying the exact location of the attack was straightforward enough; there was a plume of smoke rising from around the sloping corner of the vast, pyramidal structure and CC-1010 could hear the sound of blaster fire, even over the gunship’s engines. He used his command override to listen in on the confusing chatter of the ongoing battle, trying to parse out what was happening. It sounded like there wasn’t a single Jedi, but two. One was a human or near human woman and the other was cloaked, making a more positive identification difficult.

CT-32347 volunteered his own set of monoculars to CC-1010 when their ship swept wide around the Temple, bringing the ongoing battle into view. “What is happening down there?” he asked, while CC-1010 scanned the chaotic scene.

The troopers were following their established protocol for dealing with an isolated and encircled Jedi, mainly massed blaster fire. It wasn’t perfect, and often exacted a high cost in casualties, but it was the most reliable way for troopers to overpower Force wielders.

“Looks like the lady Jedi’s just about done. That’s good at least,” CC-1010 said, setting aside considering the number of his troopers’ bodies strewn around the landing until the threat was passed. “Now about the other…” swinging the monoculars up towards the gaping hole in the Temple’s outer wall.

Something froze in CC-1010’s chest, when he saw the second figure, batting away blaster fire with his lightsaber.

His red lightsaber.

“Oh no,” CC-1010 said, more to himself than to his brothers.

Had he not passed along the details of Lord Vader’s appearance to his men? He had not received orders to do so, but that would have been the obvious thing for him to do, when taking the field with an unfamiliar natborn in a key position of authority.

He hadn’t.

Why hadn’t he?

Because no one ordered me to, and good soldiers follow orders.

“Get us over there now!” CC-1010 shouted to the pilots. Maybe he could salvage this situation.

“Roger that, Sir,” came the immediate response.

CC-1010 used his command override to open a line to all the troopers in the immediate area. “All units! Cease fire on target on the Temple wall. He’s one of ours. Repeat, cease fire on target in the Temple!”

The blaster fire ceased immediately, CC-1010’s men following his orders without question. Their ship was able to sweep close, swinging parallel to the wall.

Lord Vader jumped well before CC-1010 would have deemed safe, bridging the distance with seeming ease and landing with enough force to jar the equilibrium of the gunship. The black helmet, so different from the clones’ own armor, gave the impression of murderous intent.

“Commander, why did you not provide your trooper with my description?” Lord Vader asked with cold precision as he straightened to his full, imposing height.

CC-1010 should have been able to find some answer, some excuse to appease the Emperor’s representative, but his lack of appropriate action was inexcusable, even to himself. “I… I didn’t expect anything like this to happen, Sir,” he found himself stammering. “I just didn’t think.”

Lord Vader reached out a hand, fingers clenched as if to grab, and it felt like the air itself tightened like beskar bands around CC-1010’s throats. He lifted one hand in instinctive defense as he felt his boots leave the gunship’s deck.

Vader’s hand closed sharply into a tight fist.

Pain exploded in CC-1010’s neck. He barely registered the sickening crunch, because he suddenly couldn’t feel anything at all, below that all-consuming agony.

He instinctively tried to suck in a gasp of air, but nothing happened. He couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t breathe!

Lord Vader waved his extended hand with an almost casual disdain, and CC-1010 found himself fully airborne, sky above and plascrete below spinning, but there was nothing he could do to slow his fall, nothing he could do lessen the force of his landing. The edges of his vision were starting to darken as he continued to fight for air, but his body was not responding to even his most basic commands. He couldn’t move at all, as the ground rushed up to meet him.

~*~*~*~*~

That final impact didn’t come, but everything went suddenly very dark. Alien stars shone overhead, constellations no one on Coruscant had ever seen.

Commander Fox took his first free breath in what seemed like a long, long time.

He used it to scream.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox had no idea how much time had passed. Somewhere along the line, he had torn off his helmet, and twisted his fingers into his hair, pulling well beyond the point of pain.

He remembered.

He remembered everything.

Isolated missions during the war, assassinations and thefts and sabotage and blackmail. He had so much innocent blood on his hands. Civilians. Children. His brothers. And all of that was before Order 66 and everything that had followed.

Each memory was sharp edged with a clarity he hadn’t felt since he’d received that order.

Some part of Fox, some small and shameful voice, wished for that mental fog to return. He didn’t want to know, to really understand the depths of his crimes.

His throat felt raw from screaming, his gasping breaths came ragged and painful.

At some point, he’d rolled onto his side into an instinctive, defensive curl. He’d turned his head so that his forehead was pressed against the hard surface beneath him. In full kit, the position was starting to aggravate the old injury to his right hip, a souvenir from a speeder bombing which had never quite healed correctly. The pain helped in some perverse way. It gave Fox something to focus on in the present, instead of drowning completely in his memories.

He eventually let go of his hair, once some level of rationality returned to him. The loose strands he’d torn free stuck to his palms, and he reached shakily for his throat.

Not broken, not anymore. How?

Somehow, that mystery was still the least of Fox’s present concerns.

It was so obvious, now that he could think clearly, that something had taken control of his mind. The horror of it made his skin crawl and bile try to creep up his throat, bitter and stinging. Something had worn him like a suit of hollow armor, moving his body and using his brain while smothering his independent thoughts and will.

Maybe that should have alleviated some of Fox’s crushing guilt.

Instead, it only added to it.

He should have been able to resist that kind of influence. If he’d been stronger. Better.

Fox had always excelled in any task given to him. He’d had near perfect scores during his training, always ranking at or near the top of his cohort. His assignment to Coruscant had been a blow – confined to a single planet, far from the fighting – but the Kaminoan representatives had always said that they only sent their best troopers to serve the Senate.

More likely, it had been a sop to Fox’s ego. Just something to keep their defective product in line until it was time to…

Until it was time.

It was very difficult to tell how long he lay there, silent now and aching both mentally and physically. Nothing here seemed quite real.

It was the voices that eventually dragged him back to himself.

Fox eventually became aware of the quiet whispers, fading in and out of his hearing. Some of the voices were familiar, some not. Senators, and Jedi, and random Coruscanti citizens, and Fox’s brothers.

So many of Fox’s brothers.

That was what finally convinced him to drag himself up off of the ground, even if the effort it took to do so felt monumental.

He didn’t see any of his brothers. He didn’t see anyone.

What he did see made next to no sense.

He was sitting on a bridge or path of some kind. It felt solid, but it shouldn’t have been. It looked misty, ephemeral, and it glowed faintly white. He could see stars all around him, above and below, and the realization that he was suspended above that void by nothing but the whims of this ribbon of inexplicably tangible light made Fox’s stomach try to heave.

He couldn’t look at those stars, not without making his head start to spin. So he tried to focus on the bridge itself.

Just the bridge, and only the portion of it immediately in front of him.

Fox breathed through the dizziness and nausea, waiting until he felt more in control of himself (and wasn’t that a laughable goal, in retrospect). Finally, when he didn’t feel quite so much like puking or screaming again, he let his eyes follow the bridge’s path as it arced further away from his current position.

It extended on out of sight, forking erratically into innumerable side paths. Some disappeared off into the void, but others led to oddly glowing disks, framed in white, that hung suspended above empty space.

He swallowed the taste of bile again and tried very hard not to consider the physics of any of this.

Where was he?

The voices whispered around him. Laughing, crying, soothing, concerned. He couldn’t quite make out the words though, no matter how much he tried to focus on them. Perhaps if he could find their source?

Fox finally managed to push himself to his feet, picking up his helmet as he rose. He felt stiff and sore, especially his hip and his neck.

His neck, which had cracked and splintered, crushed to shards of bone and shredded tissue by Vader while Fox’s men had looked on, as trapped in their minds as he had been in his own.

Don’t.

Don’t think about that.

Fox forced himself to pull on his bucket. It flickered to life, but his HUD readouts only displayed a combination of error messages and gibberish. With no better plan, he just started walking in the direction he was already facing, not thinking about his crushed spine. Or about the vast emptiness of deep space beneath his feet. Or about what might have been responsible for seizing control of his and his brothers’ minds.

He knew. He already knew. And he’d killed the brother who’d tried to warn them all.

Fox took the first branch off of his path, turning towards the closest of the impossibly suspended discs. Light flared under each footfall.

The ring was quite a bit taller than Fox and framed in concentric circles of white light. There were strange patterns between the rings. They had a regular kind of irregularity that suggested writing, but Fox could not recognize the language, much less read it. At first, he couldn’t see anything inside the glowing ring – just a void blocking out the distant stars – but as he got closer, figures started to take shape.

B2 battle droids, dozens of them dropping down onto what looked like a landing platform, optical sensors glowing in the dark of the surrounding night, and beyond them…

“Let’s move! Hurry!”

Fox knew that voice almost as well as he knew his own.

“Thorn,” Fox whispered, stepping even closer to the glowing disc.

Thorn was dead, gunned down with his men by overwhelming numbers of droids on a mission to Scipio. Fox had read the report enough times to commit the whole of it to memory. He’d seen the holos.

Which made this all feel very, very familiar. He could hear the blaster fire, could almost smell the vaguely metallic ozone the bolts of plasma left in their wake.

One by one Thorn’s men, Fox’s men, fell. From this distance, it was hard to tell the details of their armor apart. Had that been Kori? Margin? Seeker? Leaf? So many Guards had died on Scipio, and while Thorn’s death had apparently warranted a detailed description, the others had been batched together as a footnote to the formal report.

Just a list of numbers for Fox to memorize.

Fox’s heart ached. He didn’t want to watch this, but it felt like penance. Watching was all he could give his brothers. He could bear witness.

He pressed his hand against the disc, but instead of a solid wall or screen, as he’d been half-expecting, the surface gave way, parting under his fingers like liquid.

Fox didn’t think. A moment of wild hope flared in his chest, and he threw himself forward.

Passing into the disc felt unnatural in a way Fox didn’t quite have the words to describe. Time stretched, the air clung to the surface of his armor like gel and his own body felt distant and unreal for a moment.

But then the galaxy snapped back into existence and Fox staggered onto the landing platform on Scipio, the skyline of the Intergalactic Banking Clan’s stronghold rising behind Thorn and his last remaining men.

Fox drew his twin blasters and started shooting.

His attack took the battle droids completely by surprise. B2s were more heavily armored from the front, but Fox had plenty of vulnerable targets to choose from on their backs. He made sure each shot counted; he’d always been an excellent marksman.

Some of the droids turned to face him, taking some of the pressure off of Thorn and his men.

A blaster bolt grazed against the outside of Fox’s arm, leaving a trail of fire in its wake at the juncture between his spaulder and rerebrace. He kept firing, giving grudging ground as more and more droids turned to target him.

It wasn’t enough.

Thorn’s Z-6 rotary blaster tore through the droids’ ranks, even as the last of his troopers fell, but that wasn’t enough either.

Fox saw the first bolt hit Thorn’s chest, moments before another one tore through his own side.

Thorn didn’t fall. Not immediately. He kept fighting, swinging his Z-6 like a club to take out just one more droid.

How could Fox do any less?

In the end, it took three direct shots to the chest to take Thorn down.

Fox felt one tear into his own cuirass, burning through his chest. This time, not being able to draw breath felt almost familiar. He fought to keep shooting, knowing it was pointless. The next shot hit the weak point between his cuisse and poleyn, collapsing his leg out from under him.

The final bolt tore through his throat.

Of course it did.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox woke on the same bridge, in the same void, looking up at the same alien stars wheeling overhead.

This time, he did not scream.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox’s second attempt was a little more reasoned.

To all of his senses, the events on Scipio had seemed to be real. The injuries he had sustained there had certainly felt real, even if all evidence of them had disappeared once he’d found himself back here.

And if that experience had been real, then there might be an opportunity here.

Even considering the prospect of time travel seemed insane, but that had been Thorn. It had. And that meant that for a few minutes, Fox himself had been in the past.

How many times had Fox heard, “With the Force, all things are possible,” from one Jedi General or another? He had always assumed that was just some cryptic nonsense to say, to avoid answering awkward or inconvenient questions, but perhaps there was something more to those words.

The most logical course of action was to investigate several potential portals, if that was what they could be called. Wormholes? Windows? The name didn’t really matter.

The point was, once he scouted several potential options, he could attempt to enter one that seemed the most likely to land him somewhere, or perhaps more accurately some time, where he could actually effect real change.

Ruling out the portal that led to Thorn and Scipio tore at Fox, but logically, one commander dropped into that battle would not change the end effect. His previous actions had been guided by emotion and instinct, not logic.

The next portal Fox investigated showed a scene of the Jedi Council, meeting in their chambers. Fox only recognized some of the Councilors in attendance, and he had thought he had been familiar with all of them, throughout the war. They were discussing someone named Sifo-Dyas, who had been suffering from vivid if unreliable visions.

Another portal revealed an unfolding battle. From the towering foliage, Fox was fairly certain he recognized Felucia. Shinies in unpainted armor fought and fell and died, but Fox couldn’t even place which of the battles on Felucia this one was, much less how he might affect its outcome.

One portal, notable because the circular scene it held was further framed by a glowing triangle of light, looked out over a scene of distant gunships, engaging with oddly long-legged walkers in a snowy wasteland.

The next revealed one of the vast cloning chambers on Kamino, columns of Fox’s little brothers glowing faintly in the dimmed lights of the planet’s night cycle.

None of them seemed particularly promising.

Fox continued to search, even risking some of the paths that arced so steeply down that he’d had concerns about falling into the empty void around him. He hadn’t; his feet had remained firmly planted on the ribbon of intangible light.

It made no sense.

Nothing here made any sense. He’d have to figure out the rules of this place as he went, and apparently that included reinterpreting basic facts of the material universe, such as gravity.

At least it gave him something to focus on other than his returned memories and how, precisely, it had felt to die. Twice.

Finally, he found one portal that seemed promising. It was one of the rare ones that had a triangular pattern framing it. Instead of runes or other recognizable writing, jagged, branching patterns that reminded Fox of lightning forked from each corner of the triangle towards the inner of the portal and the concentric rings of light surrounding it. Inside, Fox saw his own office, at Guard headquarters. Inside, Thire was sitting behind Fox’s desk, going through a stack of datapads.

Fox trusted his subordinate commanders more than anyone. This would work.

It would.

Fox took a deep breath and reached a hand out towards the surface of the portal. Again, it gave way under his fingertips.

This time, the transition seemed to be easier.

Easier for Fox perhaps.

The way Thire leapt out of his chair might have been humorous, if not for the way his blaster also seemed to materialize in his hands.

“Identify yourself,” Thire snapped. Except that didn’t sound like him. The voice was right and the armor, but there was something almost robotic about his tone that hit Fox as subtly wrong.

Fox held his hands up and out to his sides, pointedly away from his own blasters. “It’s me, Thire,” he said in an intentionally calm, even tone of voice. “It’s Fox.”

The blaster didn’t waver.

“I identified CC-1010’s body myself,” Thire said flatly. “Who are you, and how did you retrieve his armor?”

CC-1010. Not Fox. They’d never used designation numbers amongst themselves, at least not before the Order had gone out. And then that had been all any of them had used for a good, long while.

It hadn’t immediately occurred to Fox that the portals could travel forward in time as well as back. Then again, it was difficult to tell how much time had elapsed while he’d been… wherever he’d gone. Maybe this was the present?

Thire pointedly flicked the settings on his blaster from stun to kill with his thumb.

Right.

“May I remove my helmet?” Fox asked, trying to improvise in the same calm, placating tone of voice he used to deal with hostage situations and irate Senators.

Thire’s head jerked incrementally in a sharp nod.

Fox moved slowly, making sure to keep his hands well away from his utility belt and the weapons stored there. Finally, he released the seals on his helmet and lifted it up, off of his head.

He was hoping that Thire would see his face and recognize him.

That wasn’t what happened.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, it wasn’t like he hadn’t personally had to deal with Clawdite impostors and other shapeshifting species, working in the Coruscant underworld.

“I’m going to give you one last chance to drop the act and identify yourself,” Thire said, the artificial flatness of his tone giving way to something resembling real anger. “You’re already dishonoring his armor, I’m not going to let you do the same with his face.”

Kark, this had been a mistake. “Thire, I swear, it’s me–” Fox started to explain, but he never got the chance to finish.

The blaster bolt hit him just above and between his eyes, a perfect shot.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox came back to himself, flat on his back with his HUD reading error messages and nonsense in his helmet’s augmented vision.

Time. Fox didn’t just need to account for people and places. He also needed to account for time.

How the kark was he supposed to do that?

~*~*~*~*~

“Cody, I need you to listen to me!” Fox yelled into his internal comms.

The other troopers on the transport had barely noticed the addition of another body in the packed compartment, and the red warning lights made Fox’s paint blend in with the 212th gold surrounding him.

That, or they were just distracted by the bombardment happening outside of their faltering ship. An explosion had already torn away the door from one side of their transport, revealing the wind-sculpted spires of rock and barren stretches of sand.

They were on Geonosis – well above it, technically – and the landing wasn’t going well.

“Fox?” Cody’s voice crackled in Fox’s ear. “I wasn’t aware that the Guard had been called in on this.”

The next ship in formation, barely visible beyond the press of troopers, exploded spectacularly. Their pilot swerved, tipping sharply to avoid the fireball. The angle thankfully didn’t throw anyone out of the gaping hole in the side of the ship, but it did slam them all together against the internal bulkhead of the transport.

Fox tried to answer, but the maneuver had sent two brothers crashing into him at speed. His chest ached, and each breath only sharpened the pain. Long experience told him he’d cracked at least one rib.

It took the lot of them a moment to get their feet back under them, and the way the ship was continuing to swerve and drop certainly wasn’t helping matters.

“Fox? Do you read me?” Cody asked again, the signal flickering in and out.

“Long story,” he finally managed to gasp in reply. “And not important right now. We need to talk, once we’ve both got boots on the ground.”

If he survived to get boots on the ground.

“Right,” Cody answered. “I’m sending you the coordinates for my current position. Stand by.”

Fox breathed a sigh of relief, which sent sharp pain stabbing through his chest.

Maybe this was going to work.

The ship exploded before Fox ever received the coordinates.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox’s first instincts had been correct, trying to insert himself into an ongoing battle was a losing proposition.

But it seemed like most of the portals that lead to his brothers only featured battles.

He supposed that made some kind of inconvenient sense.

He was going to have to try something else.

~*~*~*~*~

“Senator Amidala, you cannot report this to Chancellor Palpatine,” Fox said, trying to keep the alarm out of his voice. “He has been compromised,” he hedged, because the truth was too terrible, too ridiculous to be believed.

“Alright,” the Senator said, making a placating gesture with both of her hands. She was using the same calming tone of voice on Fox that he’d previously tried using on Thire. Thire from the future. It wasn’t any more successful this time, now that the tables were turned. “Maybe we should just sit down, and you can explain?” She gestured towards the couches on the far end of her office.

Something was off about her body language. Fox’s eyes flickered towards the couches and then returned to the Senator, who was still standing stiffly behind her desk.

Her desk.

There wasn’t an indicator light on her work terminal, that would have been unforgivably obvious, but Fox recognized the subtle, recessed panic button for what it was.

“Karking Sith hells,” he said, reaching for his own blaster.

Senator Amidala fumbled with her voluminous skirts, no doubt reaching for one of the blasters he wasn’t supposed to know she regularly smuggled into the Senate building underneath her elaborate dresses.

She needn’t have worried.

The door to her office slid open, revealing a squad of Fox’s own Guards.

He regretted that they would have to witness this.

Fox angled the blaster under his own chin, taking care that it would tear through his brain in such a way as to make this as quick, clean, and painless as possible. He was not going to let himself be dragged in front of the Chancellor.

Especially not given his fresh, sharp memories of exactly what the Chancellor did, whenever Fox displeased him.

This was the less painful option.

Senator Amidala’s eyes widened, and her mouth opened to voice some kind of warning or protest.

Fox pulled the trigger.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that the ‘stars’ in this place weren’t actually stars.

They were more portals.

One of them had to be the one he needed. He selected an arcing bridge he hadn’t tried previously and started walking.

The first portal he encountered revealed a scene of a small garage, littered with tools and speeder parts. Commander Tano was crouched in front of a half-disassembled speeder bike in a set of civilian coveralls, installing what looked like a new dampener for the vehicle’s repulsorlift system.

The next portal overlooked one of the many desert planets of the galaxy, Fox could not begin to guess which one. A single sentient, swathed into anonymity by dusty, brown robes, rode an eopie across the shifting sands.

The one after that featured Darth Vader fighting a human or near-human Jedi Fox did not recognize. They were in some kind of factory or refinery, dimly lit in reds and oranges. Steam obscured parts of their fight, but it was obvious that the blonde Jedi was overmatched. Vader almost appeared to be playing with him.

Another showed Fox a view of a rather seedy-looking bar, filled with the kinds of sentients he’d expect to be in and out of holding cells on the regular. Several of them were playing cards, most of them were drinking. In the back corner was a single clone, sitting alone. He had a cup of some liquid or another cupped in his hands, but he wasn’t drinking it. His beard and hair were both grown out, messy and unkempt, but Fox felt like he should recognize this brother.

Maybe that one?

~*~*~*~*~

“You’re too late,” Kix had said. His voice had sounded dead. Haunted. “They’re all dead.”

When the bar fight had broken out, two drinks and a great deal of miserable conversation later, Fox didn’t bother to put much effort into defending himself when a highly inebriated pirate took offense to… something.

He hadn’t even managed to get much in the way of useful intel out of Kix. The former 501st medic clearly wasn’t tracking well, and he’d seemed to think that Fox himself had been some kind of hallucination.

This clearly wasn’t the correct choice.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox woke up in a holding cell, head aching from the stun bolt. He hadn’t been quick enough.

There was no point in cursing about it now. He needed a plan to get out of here and try again, but it looked like Thorn had ordered him stripped of all of his weapons and thoroughly searched.

Fox had earned his name honestly though. He could be creative, when the situation called for it.

~*~*~*~*~

This wasn’t sustainable, but Fox had no idea what else to do. He had to keep trying.

~*~*~*~*~

The trick about Coruscant was that the actual ground of the planet was so far below its current surface, it was easy to forget that it was even there.

Most of the time, new construction fully walled off the lower levels, providing the illusion that the buildings only went up so far.

Other times, the levels disappeared down, out of the range that natural sunlight could penetrate.

When Fox jumped to avoid the CSF agents chasing him, he fell for a very, very long time.

~*~*~*~*~

The opportunity had looked too good to pass up.

High General Mace Windu stood over Chancellor Palpatine, purple lightsaber drawn.

Obviously the General had not emerged from that fight victorious, given how everything had gone afterwards, but in that moment, he seemed to have the upper hand. Maybe Fox could tip the scales, if he intervened?

The lightsaber tore through Fox’s armor before he’d managed to get more than two rounds off.

He wasn’t sure if either one had hit their target. The burning agony carving through his chest was too distracting.

Fox managed to turn his head, trying to see who it was who had stabbed him in the back.

General Skywalker’s eyes were wide and wild and flickering with a sickly yellow color.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox had never put much stock into the concept of an afterlife. He knew that many sentients believed in such a thing, and some of those belief systems provided a cornerstone of many if not most cultures. It had all seemed like something that was very distant from Fox’s lived experience. Some kind of eternal essence which could pass into greater realms of punishment or reward after death seemed like something reserved for real sentients. Not clones.

For the first time in his artificially foreshortened life, Fox really considered the concept.

Being isolated from his brothers, trying to save them and failing over, and over, and over again. That certainly seemed like some cultures’ concept of hell.

He’d lost count of how many times he had died at this point, either by his own hand or something else’s. It just wouldn’t stick.

Unless, of course, he was actually dead, and all of this was some kind of elaborate form of punishment.

Maybe none of this was real.

Maybe there wasn’t any hope.

Obviously he couldn’t die on the other side of any of these portals. No matter what happened within the worlds beyond the portals, he always seemed to reappear here with his gear in the same state it had been the first time.

He could fire as many bolts as he wanted. Here, his blasters returned to an eighty-seven percent charge on his left weapon and ninety-three percent on his right.

The carbon scoring would disappear from his armor. The blood and cuts would disappear from his blacks. His HUD would report the same nonsensical gibberish.

It was like none of it had happened, like none of it mattered.

And now, he was starting to suspect he couldn’t die inside this place either.

He’d sat down on the bridge in front of the first portal he’d found, Thorn’s portal, with a half-formed idea of just letting himself waste away there. He had no food and only a small, mostly-empty canteen of water on his utility belt. It wouldn’t take that long, with his heightened metabolic needs.

Dramatic? Possibly. He just couldn’t summon up the motivation or energy for anything more proactive.

Except that had been a good long while ago now, and he had yet to feel even the slightest bit of hunger. He had slept, even if doing so took some effort even with how exhausted he always felt, but he woke feeling much the same as he had before, except with no concept of how much time had elapsed.

He hadn’t even dreamed.

Maybe that was a small mercy.

In the portal, Thorn rallied his men and died, rallied his men and died, rallied his men and died in a repeating cycle.

Finally, feeling strangely detached and almost numb, Fox angled himself away from the portal and let his legs hang over the edge of the bridge. Maybe that wasn’t the safest of positions, but Fox found he couldn’t summon up enough energy to care. He just looked down, far past his scuffed boots, and really considered the void around him.

Surely he wouldn’t fall forever? He’d eventually hit something. Surely.

A flicker of color in the periphery of Fox’s vision caught his attention. He turned to look, even if the movement was slow and listless.

There it was again, just a flash of green and white, then another of red and a gray so dark, it was nearly invisible against the void.

Nearly.

The prickle of vague interest was just barely enough to get Fox back on his feet and moving for the first time in a while.

The possibility that he might not be alone here was worth investigating.

Anything different was worth investigating.

It took some time, and a few wrong turns, to find a bridge that took Fox closer to the distant flickers of color. It didn’t help that his targets were constantly moving.

He considered the possibility that this was a trap, that he was being led into an ambush of some sort, and found that he couldn’t quite bring himself to care.

Finally, after a stretch of time which might have been a few minutes or several hours, Fox caught his first clear sight of his targets. The slash of green and white came to rest on the white frame of a nearby gate.

It was a bird, some type of convor. It was perched on the circle of light which ringed the portal.

The outer, triangular frame made for a fairly plain design in comparison to some of the others Fox had seen. This portal featured neither script nor decorative figures, just one glowing triangle containing a single circle of light.

A flash of red and gray settled above the bird: a strange-looking bat, which landed near the apex of the white triangle of light that surrounded the circular portal. It crawled up to the point, held on with its clawed feet, and let itself hang down, the tips of its pointed ears nearly brushing the bird’s head.

The convor turned to look up at the bat and then pointedly, it seemed, side-stepped to avoid the contact.

The bat stretched out its wings, almost lazily invading the bird’s space again with the tip of a clawed, membrane-bound digit.

Fox didn’t have a great deal of experience with wild animals. The rats and other vermin on Coruscant hardly counted. Still, he was pretty certain that the behavior he was witnessing here wasn’t exactly normal.

“Who are you?” he asked, even though it felt a little silly, trying to talk to a pair of animals.

It was at least as silly, to assume any animal he encountered here could be expected to be ‘normal.’ It was worth a shot, and there was something about both of them that seemed oddly familiar.

Both the bat and the bird cocked their heads at him, twin movements that seemed equal parts query and assessment. Then, as one, they craned to look down at the portal beneath them.

Taking the hint, Fox looked into the scene.

It resolved itself into a swamp.

Fox couldn’t see any sentients, much less any sentient-built structures. Some type of reptavian swooped across the portal, mouth opening to screech shrilly.

Lovely… Fox would lay credits on it smelling like an open sewage pit.

“Am I supposed to see something here?” Fox asked, looking up at the two animals. “Or do you want me to go…” He trailed off.

The convor was still there, blinking slowly at him.

The bat was gone.

He looked up and around, starting to turn to see if he could determine where the second animal had gone.

It didn’t take him long to find it. The karking thing swooped down and scratched at Fox’s visor.

Fox staggered backwards, hands raised to instinctively (pointlessly, given his helmet) protect his eyes.

Except his boot didn’t meet solid ground behind him, and he found himself falling backwards into the gel-like membrane of the portal…

And then further, into a sludgy pool of fetid water.

It wasn’t one of his more graceful, dignified moments. Fox flailed wildly, trying to keep from sinking, trying to get the kriffing bat off of his visor so he could actually see what the kark he was doing.

The bat screeched loudly before launching itself off of Fox’s face and into the air. It disappeared into the trees before Fox could even seriously consider drawing his blasters and shooting the karking thing.

Fox twisted over, found his footing, and managed to drag himself up and out of the water, trailing streamers of algal slime and muttering an unbroken stream of threats, invectives, and profanities all the while.

He was soaked through and through, and the water smelled exactly as he’d predicted.

At least the shock of it all – the bat, the water, the kriffing reek – seemed to have momentarily shaken Fox out of his detached, listless fog.

A quick visual of his surroundings didn’t reveal any immediate threats. Then again, a whole battalion of clankers could be hiding in the heavy, oppressive mists, and Fox would never know it. He aimed for the closest patch of elevated ground, hoping that it was at least moderately drier than his current position.

It was, but only barely.

Fox did his best to survey the area, if only as another quick threat assessment, but his HUD was tossing out a whole new suite of error messages and the zoom function for his optics wasn’t responding.

Given that the worst thing that would happen to him if he was eaten by some karking swamp monster was waking up back in the portal-strewn void, he finally just pulled his helmet off to wipe the worst of the muck off of his visor assess the damage.

It… wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Baseline clone armor was sealed against moderate moisture, but it took specialty gear to stand up to full immersion. Fox hadn’t exactly needed that build, being stationed on Coruscant, and his kit was protesting the mistreatment.

He found that he couldn’t blame it. He was hot, and wet, and there were things clinging to his plate. He was fairly certain they were some kind of leech.

It had been a while, but it wasn’t like a clone trooper could just forget his flash training. He didn’t have much in the way of wilderness survival gear on his utility belt, but his canteen did have a standard filtration system built into the lid, and given the ecology of this place, posting up in the branches of one of the nearby trees was going to be wiser than trying to improvise any kind of shelter on the ground, at least at first.

Food might require some experimentation. Hunting wouldn’t be much of an issue, but Fox was unfamiliar with the flora and fauna on… whatever planet this was. With his luck, he fully expected all of it to be poisonous.

Fire was also high up on his list of priorities, because the heat, insect-discouraging smoke, and food preparation angles far outweighed any risk of attracting unwanted attention in Fox’s admittedly skewed hierarchy of needs at the moment.

Normally he’d been concerned about his lack of anything resembling a first aid kit, but perhaps involuntary immortality had a few perks.

And signaling for help was just laughable at this point.

It took some effort to get the water-logged scraps of wood and swamp grasses to light, but they’d all been trained on how to bypass the safety features on their blaster cartridges when required, and a little chemical accelerant got the whole process moving along nicely.

The local vines could be used as rope substitutes with a minimum of processing, and Fox set to work peeling off his armor and hanging the plate up to dry next to the fire after evicting any unwanted passengers.

The brown, slimy, legless things were definitely leeches. Those went straight into the fire.

He kept his utility belt on, mostly because he wasn’t about to let his blasters out of arm’s reach, but the kama went up on one of the vines alongside his plate. His helmet took a little more work. Some of the muck had gotten up into his filters, and flushing them out with just a canteen of questionably-filtered water was a karking task.

In all that time, the largest living thing Fox spotted was another reptavian, whose entire wingspan was shorter than Fox’s arm, and some kind of aquatic serpent or eel, which had seemed far more interested in chasing one of the local frog-correlates than anything Fox might be doing up on his marshy hillock.

By the time the light conditions under the thick canopy darkened from ‘presumably day cycle,’ to ‘incipient night cycle,’ Fox’s filters were more-or-less functional and his blacks were probably as dry as the local climate was ever going to allow.

He was also hungry.

Very hungry.

It was as if all of the time spent in the strange in-between place, where hunger and thirst didn’t seem to exist, was catching up with Fox. He’d have to deal with that tomorrow, if he wanted to remain somewhat functional. In the meantime, he could tide himself over with one of the powdered supplements he kept in one of his belt pouches.

Except when he went to fish it out, his fingers hit a small, unfamiliar object first. He pulled it out, curious.

It was a metallic disc of some sort, ornately decorated with a very familiar convor curled in matching flight with a similarly familiar bat.

Kriff.

He’d forgotten.

It was the amulet he’d picked up back on Coruscant, right before he’d died. The first time.

He hadn’t been thinking straight at the time; everything had felt distant and muffled. And then, of course, there’d been the fight with the Jedi.

And dying.

And waking up in some kind of space- and time-warping portal nexus.

And then dying again.

And again.

Maybe he could be forgiven for forgetting.

Fox turned the thing over in his hands, but the back was decorated with the exact same image. Upon closer inspection, it was possible that the animals’ eyes were actually made with some kind of crystal or precious stone. They both flashed and glittered in the firelight: pale green and blood red.

He still had no idea what the artifact might be, but he had some suspicions about what it might actually do.

He wondered, if he threw the thing into the swamp, would he die and actually stay dead this time?

The thought was tempting, but Fox still found himself folding his fingers closed around the Jedi talisman and tucking it safely back into his belt pouch.

He could always throw it away tomorrow. Or the day after that.

Fox did drink the metallic-tasting supplement from his pouch before suiting back up in his semi-dry armor. The smell was regrettable, but he’d rather have the protection than not. His HUD was working again, at least a little. All of the networked systems were still sending out ‘seeking connection’ errors, but the night and heat vision functions were cooperating, which was kriffing useful. He was able to see well enough to gather up a respectable collection of kindling before full dark.

He was tired, and hungry, and even more sore than usual. He had no proximity sensors he could use to provide any warnings, no brothers to take turns on watch. The situation was far from ideal.

He dragged a half-rotten log over to the fire and sat down on it to wait out what he was sure was about to be a very long night.

~*~*~*~*~

When dawn arrived, Fox added a few extra sticks to his fire to keep it going in his absence and then started searching his surroundings for a likely tree. It took a couple throws to get the grappling hook to catch correctly, but once it did, Fox was able to scale the ancient-looking, vine-festooned tree he’d finally selected.

He’d been hoping he’d spot something in the distance, some sign of civilization, to give him any idea where he was or where he should try to go. A trail, a structure. Anything.

Instead, he just saw more trees, more mud, and more murky water.

Finally listening to the gnawing in his guts, Fox picked his way carefully back down to the ground. He’d developed something resembling a half-formed plan to shoot one of the local reptavians, clean and cook it over his small fire, taste a tiny sliver, and then wait a few hours to see if he’d managed to poison himself.

Instead, he karking near leapt out of his own skin when an unexpected voice greeted him right as he reached the base of the tree.

“Interesting guests, I have been receiving…,” the sentient croaked, sounding terribly familiar and wholly out of place.

Fox whirled, both blasters already in his hands and trained in the direction of the voice, but he froze immediately, once he spotted its source.

“Here to kill me, are you?” asked a rather shabbily dressed General Yoda, who was sitting on Fox’s log and poking at Fox’s small fire with a long branch. He had a gnarled walking stick settled across his crossed legs and no other sign of an obvious weapon. Even so, the Jedi sounded unconcerned, almost amused, at his own question.

“No,” Fox said, memories of transports full of body bags, some quite small, making his hands shake as he lowered his blasters. “No, Sir.”

Never. Never again.

“Hmm,” the diminutive Jedi said, seemingly to himself. “Strange you feel in the Force, young Commander Fox. How came you, to my home?”

Normally, Fox didn’t much trust natborns. Normally, he would go out of his way to avoid confiding in anyone except his brothers. But this situation was far from normal. There had to be a reason why those two strange animals had led him to this place, and Fox owed the Jedi a debt he could never repay.

“It’s… a long story, General,” Fox admitted after a moment. “And I don’t understand most of it.”

“Time, have I,” Yoda said, rising from his seat and giving Fox a disconcertingly knowing look. “And food enough to share.”

~*~*~*~*~

The stew General Yoda served him smelled like lower-level gutter-sludge. Fox was fairly certain the round things in it were eyeballs.

It might have been the best thing he’d ever tasted.

Perhaps that was just the hunger talking.

The General had served himself a smaller bowl of food, but he hadn’t touched any of it yet. Instead, he was sitting next to the small hearth inside what Fox would charitably call a hovel, tending to the fire.

He also, pointedly, hadn’t actually asked Fox to relate any of what had happened to him or how he had come to be here.

Fox should probably slow down. He’d had high society table manners and diplomatic protocols drilled into him on Coruscant. Natborns had delicate sensibilities about those points of etiquette, and Fox had been good at playing their games.

Not here. Not now.

Fox just kept bolting the food away. It didn’t matter. None of this mattered. Worst case scenario, the General would just kill him, and then he’d wake up back inside that void. This way, at least he’d die with a full stomach.

“Now then…,” General Yoda finally said, when Fox had polished off the last of the questionable stew from the overly-large serving bowl. “A story, I was promised.”

Fox had been expecting the question. That had been the stated deal: a debriefing, for food and shelter. But he still wasn’t entirely certain where he should start. Obviously he needed to start at the beginning. But, what was the beginning?

Fox finally decided to start with his summons to the Temple. With Lord Vader, and the hunt for the fugitive Jedi, and the bag of dropped artifacts.

He managed to describe his first death without choking on his own words.

He related how he had woken up in that strange void, with its impossible bridges and its light-rimmed portals.

He described being in control of his own mind again, of remembering.

General Yoda’s ears dropped at that, and his eyes widened with some emotion Fox could not begin to name. “Not your own, your mind was?” he interrupted, speaking for the first time since Fox had started this debriefing. The question was obvious in his tone.

“No, Sir,” Fox said, eyes dropping to the table in some kind of futile attempt to conceal the wave of shame that came along with that admission. “At least, not completely.”

The General remained quiet, lost in his own thoughts. He still hadn’t touched his own bowl of stew, and the thick broth was starting to congeal.

Fox stared at the half-empty bowl without really seeing it, letting the silence stretch. This wasn’t exactly a topic he was keen to elaborate upon, even though he knew that he would be asked to.

“Know how this control was accomplished, do you?” General Yoda finally asked. He sounded worn down and even more ancient in that moment.

“Not completely,” Fox admitted, tone sounding flat and dead even to his own ears. “There was… is… a control chip in all of our heads.” In Fox’s head, still, even if it wasn’t active at the moment. He clenched his fists to keep from reaching for his scalp, like that would do any good. It wasn’t like he could dig the thing out with his bare hands. “The details were suppressed.”

Suppressed for the public safety, Chancellor Palpatine had said. To prevent panic among the ranks. General Ti had agreed, and Fox had followed their orders like a good soldier. Like a droid.

“But I can’t think of any other explanation. It has to be the chip, Sir.”

“Remember that incident, I do,” the General admitted. “A device to inhibit aggression, the Kaminoans claimed.”

Fox could not quite suppress the flinch, at the role he himself had played in that incident. He could have stunned that 501st ARC trooper. Should have, given the Guard’s operational procedures. Yes, the ARC trooper had drawn a blaster on his men. Yes, he’d been acting erratically and had seemingly taken General Skywalker and Captain Rex hostage. Yes, he’d apparently attacked the Chancellor.

Yes, Fox had been exhausted and under a great deal of stress.

None of that mattered.

He’d been sloppy. He had assumed instead of checking.

He had no excuse.

His brother’s blood was entirely on Fox’s hands, and now he couldn’t bring himself to even think the trooper’s name.

Fox looked up, driven by some desire to see judgment in the General’s eyes. Condemnation. He deserved it. He deserved all of that and more.

Instead, he saw his own self-recriminations reflected in the Jedi’s wizened face.

“Woke, you did, in the World Between Worlds,” General Yoda said, shying away from that revelation. “And then?”

“Then, I went through a portal, and I died,” Fox said, almost savagely. The details didn’t matter. “And I woke up back where I started.”

“Tried other portals, did you?” the General asked.

Fox just jerked his head in a small, sharp nod.

“Many portals, you tried?”

Fox hesitated before answering, “I lost count.”

The General sighed, a long, quiet release of tension.

“Meditate on this, I should,” he finally said, picking up his walking stick from where he had propped it against the table. “Continue this story later, when better rested are you.” He gestured towards a basin of water situated near the hearth, and then to a nook Fox had not previously noticed. It was larger than the area he had pegged as General Yoda’s own cot, large enough for Fox himself to use. Oddly, there was already bedding arranged in there which seemed to have seen recent use. “First watch, I will take.”

And with that, the diminutive Jedi Master hobbled out of his hut and out into the swamp.

Fox took the order for what it was and obeyed. Moving around the room was awkward; the structure clearly hadn’t been constructed with human-standard dimensions in mind. Fox managed to stack his armor neatly against the wall, next to the nook General Yoda had indicated. Without any obvious task or immediate threat to keep him distracted, it was impossible to fully shut out the memories and self-recriminations. His hands were shaking by the time he made it over to the basin, but he did manage to at least splash some water on his face.

He was good at this. Obeying orders without question or complaint. The perfect soldier. The perfect droid. Maybe that was the real reason why he’d been assigned to the Guard.

The thought left him feeling ill.

Sleep was a long time coming. When he finally managed it, he dreamed of dying.

~*~*~*~*~

The General had been waiting with another exceedingly large bowl of the same beige-colored, lumpy stew when Fox woke.

This next part of the debriefing progressed much the same as the last had. Fox kitted himself out in his armor, sat back down on the floor next to the low table, and then ate the food offered to him with a single-minded intensity that bordered on rudeness. The General waited until the bowl was empty, and then the interrogation began.

“An item you have,” General Yoda said, taking a small bite of his own food. “Sings loudly, it does, for those who can hear.”

Fox’s hand drifted to his utility belt and the Jedi artifact stored there. He wasn’t expecting the pang he felt, as he pulled it out of his pouch. He’d been considering tossing it aside… yesterday? Two days ago? It had been something like early afternoon when he’d finally managed to fall asleep, and there was daylight filtering in through the hut’s windows now. He had no clear idea how long he had slept, but he got the impression it had been a good, long while.

He suddenly didn’t want to give it up.

Nevertheless, Fox knew his duty. He placed the little talisman on the low table and slid it over, closer to the Jedi. There had to be a reason why he’d ended up here. Perhaps this was it.

General Yoda reached out a hand as if to take it, but at the last second, he paused, ears slanted as if in thought or perhaps to listen to something Fox couldn’t hear. Finally, the General placed his hand on the table without touching the artifact and looked back up at Fox.

“Old legends there are of these beings,” he said with a quiet kind of intensity. “Very old.”

“You recognize them?” Fox asked, curious.

“Siblings they are. One Light and one Dark. The Ones, the creche tales called them,” General Yoda replied. “Always fighting, back and forth, and the balance of the Force swings with them.”

That didn’t make much sense, and Fox was fairly certain his lack of understanding had little to do with General Yoda’s unusual syntax.

“Guide the Force, did their fight, or guide their fight, did the Force?” General Yoda mused, looking out of one of the small windows of his hut. “Unclear if truth or myth, these stories are. A great debate, it was, in my youth.”

The coin remained on the table between them. The two eyes, green and red, twinkled in the firelight.

“I saw them,” Fox finally said.

“Hmm?” General Yoda said, looking back at Fox with something like surprise.

“I saw them,” Fox repeated. “The convor and the bat. They were in the void with me; they guided me to this portal.”

The General looked at him, surprise crinkling his already lined brows. “Real, they are,” he finally said, expression melting into thoughtful consideration. “Work together, the Ones do, only when irreparably damaged, the balance of the Force becomes.” He waved a three-fingered hand towards the talisman, “Keep it close, you should.”

Fox reached out a hand, but then he too hesitated to pick it up. Surely a Jedi would have a better chance of actually succeeding where Fox had been continuously failing? “Shouldn’t you take it?” he finally asked.

The General’s laugh sounded anything but happy. “Use it, I cannot. Bound to you, it is. Until your task is done.”

That sounded thoroughly ominous.

Fox carefully picked up the artifact and looked down at it. From this angle, it looked as if the convor was about to seize the bat in its talons. But if he turned the coin just so, the bat became the apparent hunter, and the convor its prey.

“Forgotten, I had, how voracious a clone’s appetite could be,” General Yoda said in a lightly teasing tone of voice. The humor seemed forced, but it did lighten the mood in the cramped hovel. “Gather, I must, to replenish my stores. Help, you may.”

Fox slid the artifact back into his belt pouch and secured the flap.

~*~*~*~*~

As it turned out, the reptavians were edible.

“Good for rendering glue, the membranes are,” General Yoda said, when Fox went to cut away the leathery wings.

For someone who hadn’t lifted one clawed finger to either take down the flier or process its carcass, the General certainly had a lot of opinions on how Fox was performing the tasks.

Not that Fox voiced any of those thoughts. He just rolled up the sleeves of his blacks and got to work.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Fox said instead, cutting up the animal’s midline to remove the viscera. “What year is it?”

General Yoda hummed for a moment in thought. “Lost track of time, I have. More than twenty years, it has been, since the fall of the Republic, and the rise of the Empire.”

Twenty years…

Fox lowered his hands, afraid he might nick the animals guts and taint the meat.

“Is he still in power?” Fox asked, not bothering to explain who he meant.

“Emperor Palpatine?” the General asked, apparently rhetorically, given that he did not pause to hear an answer. “Yes. Doubt he will ever die, I do, without assistance.”

Sith hells, the Chancellor had seemed older than time back during the war. Twenty-some-odd years later, he had to be ancient.

Fox went back to working the reptavian’s organs loose from its body cavity.

“Then I guess we’ll have to assist him,” he said after a while, tugging loose much of what appeared to be the animal’s digestive tract.

“If that is our destiny, assist him, we will,” the General said, and then added critically. “Good eating, those are, if prepared correctly. Keep them as well, you should.”

Of course.

Fox flipped his knife around until he held it by the thoroughly bloody blade. Then he turned to offer it to the General with an arched eyebrow and a pinched expression Stone would have described as ‘pissy.’

“Thank you for offering to demonstrate the proper technique,” Fox said with a cloying, faux-politeness that would have gotten him shipped back to Kamino if he’d ever turned it on a Senator.

But what was the worst the general could do to Fox? Kill him?

Fox was well beyond the point of curbing his tongue for fear of that.

And there was something profoundly freeing about dropping the karking act, if only for a moment.

“Observing, I am,” the Jedi announced, grinning just wide enough to reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth. “And well, you are doing. No need to step in, I see.”

~*~*~*~*~

Days passed slowly in the trackless swamps of Dagobah.

General Yoda continued asking Fox questions and then disappearing into the swamp to ‘meditate’ on the answers. Fox kept hunting, kept cleaning the game (badly, according to General Yoda), kept eating the General’s questionable cooking, and kept having nightmares, each more gruesome and disturbing than the last.

Mostly Fox kept thinking. There was much to think about and many empty hours during which to do it.

The entire war had been a trap for the Jedi.

That much was obvious, at least now that Fox had time to really consider all that he had learned during the war and after it.

All his brothers’ suffering, all of the deaths, all of it had been in service to that one goal.

So where had it all gone wrong? If he really did have the power to change the past, when should he go to have the most effect? When the first clone had been decanted?

Fox couldn’t accept that.

And even if he’d been willing to sacrifice all his brothers for some nebulous concept of a greater good, how would that actually work? Fox could smother an infant Jango Fett in his crib, and the Kaminoans would simply employ some other mercenary to complete their contract.

Or the Chancellor would secretly fund two droid armies instead of one.

Or some other kriffing twist Fox hadn’t even considered.

The closest thing to a turning point he could think of was his own shooting of that 501st ARC on Coruscant.

Fives.

He’d learned something about the chips. Not everything, obviously. He’d initially meant to warn the Chancellor about them after all, which was almost funny, in an incredibly dark way.

So, what? Should Fox try to find a way to stop his past self from pulling that trigger?

No, because by that point, the Kaminoans had already known that the secret of the chips had been compromised.

So Fox would have to go earlier than that.

He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened on Kamino, which had led to Fives learning about the chips, but it had been wrapped up with an incident with another 501st trooper, who had shot and killed General Tiplar during the battle of Ringo Vinda. Whatever had happened there had threatened to reveal the entire conspiracy.

The GAR had tried to keep the incident off of the holonet, pass it off as a tragic accident, but the rumors had run rampant, on Coruscant and beyond. And the Chancellor would have read the real reports, of course, just like Fox himself had done. He would have been watching the ensuing events very closely.

Earlier then.

Oh.

Now there was a thought.

~*~*~*~*~

“Know where you must go, you do.” General Yoda seemed to appear out of nowhere in the swamp just as Fox made it to his feet.

Kark, Fox thought. How does he do that?

“I believe so,” Fox admitted.

“Then concluded, our time together is,” the General said, looking out over the thick mists rising over the swamp. “And on your way, you must be.”

Fox pulled off his helmet, this would be easier without it. Less likely he’d kark something up and suffer for it.

“I cannot thank you enough, General,” he said.

“Very little, I did,” General Yoda replied. “Good for reflection, I have found Dagobah to be. Clarity of mind, I find here. You as well, it seems.”

“I’m not sure what happens after I…” Fox trailed off awkwardly. “I mean, you might have to clean up, after I…”

“Die?” the General asked, finishing Fox’s awkwardly truncated explanation. “Mentioned that, you have.” As imperturbable as his words had sounded, General Yoda’s ears still drooped with sorrow. “Too many of your brothers’ deaths, have I witnessed. Not eager to see another, am I.”

“I wouldn’t say no to some privacy,” Fox offered. It wasn’t exactly that he cared, at least not for himself, but he did not want to inflict any additional suffering on this Jedi. Not if he could avoid it.

“Yes… Very well, Commander Fox,” General Yoda said with grave nod that was almost a bow. “May the Force be with you.”

Fox waited until the General’s slow, shuffling footsteps faded back in the direction of his small hut. Then he drew one of his blasters and did what he had to do, hopefully for the last time.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox woke on his back. Constellations of distant portals wheeled overhead.

When he sat up, he found the convor waiting for him, just beyond his booted feet.

The bat was nowhere to be seen.

“Can you lead me to a specific portal?” he asked, hoping that the General’s old stories were correct, that this convor wasn’t just a strange bird.

It fluffed up its feathers and tilted its head to one side like it was listening expectantly.

~*~*~*~*~

“Captain Rex, this is Commander Fox. I need you to report to the communications center.”

There was a significant pause, during which Fox hardly breathed, but Rex finally answered, “I’m en route, Commander.” After another, shorter pause, he added, “I look forward to an explanation regarding what you’re doing off Coruscant, and how you made it onto my captured enemy base without any of my men noticing.”

Fox breathed out slowly. He realized he’d been bracing for even more hostility from Cody’s little protégé. They’d never been particularly close, but none of the events which had really soured their working relationship had happened yet.

Fox hadn’t arrested Commander Tano.

He hadn’t shot Fives.

Not yet. Not ever.

This would work. It had to. “I will be happy to debrief you on the situation, but this meeting needs to be for your ears only.”

The protracted silence that request earned spoke volumes.

“Captain, I will simply ask that you hear me out before taking any… drastic action,” Fox finally added, because he knew perfectly well that nothing he was currently saying or doing was engendering much in the way of trust.

Neither would the mess he’d created on the floor of the base’s communication center.

“Understood, Commander,” Captain Rex replied, and if his tone sounded tripwire tense and more than a little dubious, Fox couldn’t really blame him.

When the guards the General had stationed outside of the communications center let Captain Rex enter, he made it all of two steps into the room before stopping in his tracks.

At least he didn’t immediately pull his blasters.

When he finally did look up to meet Fox’s eyes, Captain Rex’s expression was studiously blank. His posture, even with his helmet tucked under one arm, had a deceptively loose look that suggested he was prepared to dodge or strike at a moment’s notice. “I look forward to hearing that explanation, Sir,” he said in an impressively even, unassailably professional tone of voice.

Pong Krell’s blaster bolt ridden corpse lay on the floor between them.

Fox’s own stance was a picture perfect parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. He’d left his own helmet, both blasters, and all four of his knives in plain sight, on top of the communications console, out of easy reach. Rex clearly noticed that too, eyes flicking over every inch of the room, assessing the situation before coming back to rest on Fox himself.

Fox could have tried dancing around the truth, twisting his words and presenting a more pleasing version of the facts to achieve his desired results. But Rex was smart, certainly smarter than the vast majority of Senators. Honesty, or at least one palatable portion of the truth at a time, seemed like the best strategy to employ here.

And if that didn’t work, then Fox could just start over and try again until it did.

“General Pong Krell is a traitor to the Republic and to the Jedi Order,” he said flatly, like this was just any other debriefing. “He was attempting to orchestrate a friendly fire incident between your men and several squads from the 212th. You will find that he has been sabotaging your communications equipment so that he alone can control the flow of information you receive,” Fox said, pointing to the panel Krell had been opening when Fox had stepped through the portal. “Confirm with Commander Cody that General Krell just reported to him that several squads of 501st troopers have been killed and their armor taken by Umbaran soldiers to facilitate a sneak attack on the 212th’s lines. Confirm with your own men that this has not actually happened. However, it is vitally important that General Kenobi not learn of my presence here.”

Fox paused, trying to assess how Captain Rex was reacting to all of this.

He didn’t have much luck. Fox, for all his experience with politics, investigations, and interrogations, still wasn’t able to get a good read on the Captain.

Rex did take Fox’s momentary pause to interject a flatly delivered question of his own, “What is your reasoning for not alerting General Kenobi?”

Normally, Fox appreciated competent, intelligent subordinates. This wasn’t exactly one of those times.

“General Krell trying to get himself recruited by a Sith Lord is the least of our concerns,” Fox finally said. “I know who Dooku’s master is, and once I’m done here, I’ll be reporting to Cody next, but no natborn can know. If word gets back to the Senate, we’re all dead. Including the Jedi.”

That earned a tiny, alarmed twitch of the Captain’s incongruously dark eyebrows.

“And you decided to bring this intel to me, in the middle of an active campaign, alone, because of our close, personal relationship?” he asked very dryly.

Kark, this was all going wrong. Fox had thought… Well…

“I owe you,” Fox finally said, and if the words were dragged unwillingly out of him, at least they were honest.

“You owe me?” Captain Rex repeated flatly.

“Some of your men are already tangled up in the situation,” Fox said, which had the benefit of being technically true. “It’s a long story.”

Captain Rex’s expression shifted ever so slightly. It was still difficult to read, but to Fox, he looked tired. Exhausted even. “And how did you get here?”

There just wasn’t a good answer for that one. “Force osik,” Fox finally said, giving up on finding any more eloquent way of putting it.

Rex just stared at him.

“That’s what Cody calls it, whenever he’s complaining about Kenobi and Skywalker to the other commanders,” Fox admitted.

“You’re serious?”

“Very.”

“And if I ask you to submit to a scan to confirm your identity?”

“I need to talk to your CMO anyway. So, yes.”

“Force,” Captain Rex finally said, every inch of his façade crumbling in that moment into something exhausted and heartsick. “Just, give me a second.” He pulled his helmet on and punched a code into his vambrace. He continued after a moment, clearly speaking to someone on his internal comms. “Kix, I need you to report to me in the communications tower,” he paused, listening to some kind of response, and then said. “No, just your medical scanner. And if you run into Dogma, tell him the General wants a detailed inventory of the captured Umbaran supplies.”

~*~*~*~*~

“I don’t think carnivorous plants have to worry about cholesterol,” Kix said dryly. “But that wasn’t exactly covered in any of the medical training modules on Kamino.”

“What about indigestion?” Jesse asked, watching the massive plant-correlate make short work of their grizzly delivery. “This can’t be good for it.”

“I’m sure the plant is going to be fine,” the medic said, sounding like he couldn’t quite decide if he was more amused or annoyed by the conversation.

Fox could relate. There was a specific kind of desperate humor that many troopers defaulted to, after having escaped unscathed from something that by all rights, should have killed them. Fox understood, but he wasn’t convinced that they were out of the woods quite yet. He kept looking back towards the base, expecting someone was going to question this flimsy plan and come out to see what half of Torrent, including two recently freed prisoners, and one unnamed trooper, kitted out in a recently surplussed and scrubbed set of unpainted armor, were doing in the middle of enemy territory, feeding a karking meat-eating shrub.

“Do I know you?” one of Rex’s other men said.

Fox turned to see who it was and couldn’t help but flinch a little.

It was Fives.

“No,” he managed to say in a reasonably neutral tone of voice. “Not really.”

It wasn’t even that much of a lie. Fox hadn’t known Fives. He’d just murdered him.

Fox looked away, surveying the area and hoping the ARC would catch the hint. The veteran members of Torrent Company who’d been selected for this covert mission ranged around the plant in a loose circle, angled so they could also keep an eye on the surrounding jungle. Rex was almost directly across from Fox’s position, keeping a sharp eye on the entire situation.

He and Kix were the only two clones in the 501st who knew who Fox really was. Pretty soon, Kix would know a whole lot more privileged information. Fox just hoped the medic was as trustworthy as Rex had said. He hoped Kix could lie better than either one of his commanding officers.

He hoped they could keep General Skywalker in the dark long enough to see this through.

Fox couldn’t quite get the memory of Skywalker’s unhinged, yellow eyes out of his head.

He had suspicions about that, but considering the company he was in, he kept them all behind his teeth. The 501st was unflinchingly loyal, and that had been used against them once.

Would be used against them.

Maybe never would be used against them, if Fox had his way.

Sith hells, this entire situation was beyond headache inducing. It was a trial, just keeping his tenses straight sometimes.

But maybe he could leverage some of his other memories to keep Skywalker distracted. Cody would have some thoughts on how best to accomplish that; he’d certainly worked alongside the 501st enough.

“So, how’d you get an invite to this little side mission?” Fives asked, still making an obvious effort to be friendly with the apparent newcomer to the group.

Fox forced himself to shrug in a fair facsimile of casual indifference. “No idea.”

Fives chuckled, but there was something forced about it. “You have a name, kid?”

That was a little funny, but in all fairness, Fox was kitted out in unpainted armor at the moment. Rex had given the set to Fox, and Fox hadn’t asked who it had belonged to previously. Misidentifying Fox as a shiny in this gear wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to make.

“Not yet,” he lied.

He’d always been very good at that.

~*~*~*~*~

Rex and Kix were tripwire tense. It was obvious to everyone in the room, even through their armor.

The Marshall Commander of the entire Third Systems Army leaned back in the chair he’d commandeered for his field headquarters in the Umbaran capital and eyed the three of them with a particular flavor of unimpressed judgment Fox knew quite well. He’d worn it himself enough times. It was one of the core, if unofficial, components of the command class training regimen.

“So, which one of you wants to tell me what is going on, other than a fallen Jedi General being eaten by a plant during his attempted arrest?” Cody asked, very dryly.

Rex and Kix shared a brief look and then turned to eye Fox in his shiny set of armor.

Not one to pass up an opening when it was as neatly presented as that, Fox went ahead and pulled off his borrowed helmet, relishing for one brief moment the look of utter surprise and confusion on Cody’s face.

His smile was grim, a little lopsided, and sharp enough to cut transparisteel. “We have a problem.”

~*~*~*~*~

“I pretend I don’t know where the still is, and in exchange Chem sets aside a few bottles for me to ‘confiscate’ during inspections,” Cody said, pouring a respectable amount of the amber liquid into the metal cup in Fox’s hands. “The flavor’s been improving with each batch.”

Fox took a ginger sip and almost spat it right back out. It tasted like speeder fuel. He finally did manage to gag the mouthful down, but not without a wheezing cough or two. Cody kept a mostly neutral expression, but the corners of his eyes crinkled up with suppressed laughter. Shabuir.

“Have him stop by Guard headquarters, the next time you’re on Coruscant,” Fox finally said, trying to maintain a little dignity even as his eyes tried to start watering. “Sieve’s recipe tastes pretty similar to some of the commercial stuff they serve at 79s.”

Cody lifted his own cup in a small toast and then sipped from it without even flinching. Fox honestly didn’t know how he managed it.

“So, control chips in our brains?” Cody asked when he was maybe halfway through his own serving.

They were sitting side by side on Cody’s cot, backs against the wall and feet hanging over the opposite edge of the bed. At least it was a private room – it had been some kind of multi-story office complex before the 212th had seized it and set up a temporary field command post in the space – with a locked door between themselves and any potential eavesdroppers or listening devices.

“Every single one of us,” Fox confirmed, staring down into the bottom of his cup. The moonshine had an evil coloring to it, yellow-brown with a kind of iridescent, oily sheen in the room’s artificial lights.

“You know we can’t do this alone, right?” Cody said, nudging Fox’s shoulder with his own. It was painfully reminiscent of so many similar, stolen moments back on Kamino. “You’re going to have to let the medics run with it. They’ve got their own networks, just like the commanders do.”

“Their networks are monitored,” Fox said, turning to give his brother a sideways look. “So are ours.”

“So we warn them and tell them to work with slicers to cover their tracks,” Cody said.

Rex had looked heartsick and betrayed, when Fox had first told him about the chips.

Kix had been furious.

Cody just looked determined.

“You’re not wrong,” Fox finally relented. This all felt like his responsibility, something he had to shoulder, but Cody was right. There were just too kriffing many of them to try to get this done without help.

“Did Kix already dig yours out?” Cody asked, taking another sip of his rotgut.

Fox snorted. “No, none of our medical scanners are high-powered enough to even see the kriffing things. By design, of course. We’re either going to have to tinker with our existing equipment or steal some civilian models just to get the exact target for the surgery.”

“Well, that seems like as good a place as any to start,” Cody said, slamming back the dregs of his drink and reaching for his bottle to pour himself a second serving.

Fox took another swig of the terrible swill and stared down at his scuffed, white boots.

“Cody,” he finally said, voice barely above a whisper. “There’s more.”

~*~*~*~*~

Fox told Cody everything. Everything, everything. The chips, and the Jedi, and his first death. The strange realm of portals and broken physics, his subsequent attempts to change things, and his many, many deaths each time he had failed.

The convor and the bat.

That future version of General Yoda.

All of it.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Cody had more than enough questionable booze to see Fox through the telling.

Cody didn’t interrupt Fox’s long and occasionally rambling explanation, and his initial, dubious expression faded first into alarm and eventually into something resembling horror.

By the time Fox got to the end of the story, he wasn’t sure how his brother was going to react or what he was going to say.

Cody stayed silent for a long time, obviously processing everything he had just heard. He finally looked over at Fox and said, “We need to get you some paint.”

~*~*~*~*~

Fox was introduced to the rest of the 212th as a new intelligence officer, recently transferred in from Kamino. Their brothers just accepted that at face value.

General Kenobi clearly had his doubts.

Fortunately for Fox, finishing the Umbara campaign and reporting back to both the Council and the Senate regarding the Krell situation seemed to be soaking up most of the General’s time.

Fox took to avoiding the Jedi like the man carried Denobian Hemorrhagic Fever. He remembered what General Yoda had said about the Force artifact. That it sang in the Force, whatever the kriff that meant.

And Fox wasn’t ever without the artifact.

He hoped there was some kind of proximity aspect to however that sense worked.

Otherwise this was going to fail before they even got started.

Cody told him he was being paranoid. He said he’d spoken to the General and everything was under control. He said Fox just needed to trust Cody on this.

Fox tried. He really did.

~*~*~*~*~

Cody was met at the door of his own medbay by a grim-faced medic with markings on his armor announcing his position as the CMO of the 212th.

“Is he cleared for this?” the medic asked, nodding his head towards Fox.

“He’s the reason we know anything about it at all,” Cody said quietly enough to not be overheard by the injured brothers on the nearest cots.

The head medic gave Fox a sharply assessing look before turning his attention back to Cody. “Follow me then,” he said, still without introducing himself.

Fox trailed after Cody, unclear on whether he was supposed to keep playing the role of a junior intelligence analyst and aide or not. It seemed safest to hang back at a respectful distance, just to keep up appearances.

The medic led Cody and Fox through the rows of cots, past brothers who’d been injured on Umbara badly enough to earn themselves an evac on the first ships off that awful rock. They entered a small office, where they found Kix and another 212th medic with their heads together, reading something on a dubious-looking, clearly non-regulation datapad.

The 212th medic, a scarred veteran with non-standard green eyes, glanced at his CMO questioningly, and when the lead medic jerked a quick nod in response, he said, “We found it,” and handed the datapad over to Cody.

Cody looked down at the ‘pad. From this angle, Fox could just make out a brain scan with an anomaly marked in lurid red.

“Do we have the equipment to remove it on board?” Cody asked, handing the datapad over to his CMO.

His medic looked down, the faintest beginnings of a scowl on his face.

“It should be a fairly simple procedure,” he admitted, “But we’re unsure how removing it will affect any volunteers.”

“What do you mean?” Cody asked, looking back and forth between the three medics.

Kix raked a hand over his short, elaborately detailed buzz cut and answered, “It’s positioned in a portion of the brain that could easily affect decision-making, personality. We don’t know if ours are currently active, or what might happen if we took one out.”

“They aren’t,” Fox said, glancing sideways at Cody to make sure he wasn’t stepping out of line. Kix might know at least a little about Fox’s real identity and mission, but the others certainly did not.

Cody just looked grim, but he didn’t do anything to suggest Fox should stop talking.

“If they were, we couldn’t be having this conversation,” Fox continued grimly. “It literally wouldn’t let you think about it.”

All three medics exchanged alarmed glanced. “Have you…” Cody’s CMO started to ask, suddenly cautious.

“Experienced it myself? Yes,” Fox answered dryly. “Which is why I’m volunteering for you to test the procedure. On me.”

“Tens,” Cody said warningly.

Kriff him, for suggesting they use that old nickname from Fox’s cadet days.

And kriff Fox, for agreeing to it.

~*~*~*~*~

It was such a tiny thing.

The medics had already run Fox through an entire battery of post-surgery questions.

What year was it?

How was he feeling?

What was the square root of 2601?

Did anything feel different?

What was his designation number?

Fox had glowered and refused to answer that last one. It was obviously a standard question for assessing the possibility of brain damage, but he wasn’t quite so stoned and groggy from the lingering anesthesia to completely forget his opsec training.

Cody had warned them off pressing Fox on the question.

Now the medics were running through a very familiar post-op briefing – incision care, potential complications to monitor – the usual.

Fox wasn’t really listening. He was just looking down at the small slip of tissue and Kaminoan tech which had been inside his brain. The medics had preserved it for later analysis on a standard pathology slide.

It was so small to have caused so much suffering.

He carefully set the slide down on the bedside table in his private recovery room with a hand that only shook a little, and asked, rather calmly he felt, for the lot of them to get the kark out and give him a minute.

He didn’t cry, and he didn’t throw up in the bedpan they’d left him, but it had been a close thing.

Cody, who was occasionally a far better brother than Fox deserved, ignored the entire, shameful loss of control. He just sat next to Fox’s medical cot, signing requisition forms on his datapad, and pretended to not notice Fox’s pathetic attempts to get himself back on an even keel.

“I’ve got the flight crews prepping three courier ships,” Cody finally said, once Fox wasn’t quite so close to hyperventilating like some karking battle shocked shiny. “We’re already being redeployed, so I’m not sure we can afford to send out more medics just yet, but at least it’s a start.”

“What?” Fox said, pretty certain that it wasn’t just the lingering meds and panic that were preventing him from fully following the conversation.

Cody set down his datapad and looked at Fox directly. “The medics are going over your post-operative scans and stats now,” he said. “As soon as they give you the all clear, I’m sending Suture, Lilac, and Myr out to start spreading the word to other battalions. The rest will stay here and start working through the 212th and the 501st.”

“Oh,” Fox said hoarsely. That was good… And also risky. He opened his mouth to say so, but Cody continued before he could get a word out.

“I’m also sending them with techs and slicers, to update the surgical pods and make sure everyone covers their tracks,” Cody said, with a dry, sardonic expression on his face as if to remind Fox that they’d both been put through the exact same information security training. “We’re being careful.”

“I know you are,” Fox admitted quietly, but all that hard-won trust hadn’t kept him from tucking the Jedi artifact into the waistband of his blacks before his surgery, just in case.

So much could still go wrong.

~*~*~*~*~

Fox dropped an intelligence packet, disguised as an intercepted Separatist communique, into the 501st’s databanks.

ARC trooper CT-1409 was alive. There were plans to hand him over to the Techno Union, to subject him to an experimental surgery that would graft his neural pathways into computers, compromising any and all Republic secrets that had been sealed away in the trooper’s mind. Such technology would represent a massive security hazard, and an overt alliance between the Separatists and the previously ‘neutral’ Techno Union was a clear and present danger to the Republic and the G.A.R.

It worked like a charm.

The 212th continued on to Kiros, and the 501st broke off to make an impromptu, ‘diplomatic’ visit to Skako Minor.

On the short term, it would keep Skywalker thoroughly distracted, so the 501st could continue performing surgeries without him noticing.

On the longer term, preventing that ARC from being turned against his own brothers was both a mercy and a path to preventing a lot of future deaths.

Of course, they still had to deal with Kiros, and then the mission to Zygerria itself, but Fox had a lot of experience dealing with sentient trafficking and very few qualms about killing every single slaver he could.

It turned out that slave chips, much like the clone troopers’ control chips, weren’t affected by EMPs, but the collars and electro-whips the Zygerrians seemed to prefer absolutely were. And maybe kicking off a slave uprising wasn’t discrete, but Fox found that he didn’t give much of a kark.

~*~*~*~

Fox was holed up in his small, private quarters, going over the highly-encrypted, vaguely-worded reports from Cody’s medics. Reading between the lines, their news was very good.

The 104th had sent out two additional ships, loaded with the medics they could reasonably spare from their search and rescue missions.

The 78th were in the middle of a slog of a planetary invasion, so they could only send out one of their medics at the moment. They’d try to send two more, once the campaign was over.

The 327th mustered up five.

If that recruitment rate held steady… Well, the math got a little sticky. There were a little over five thousand battalions in the G.A.R. With a conservative exponential growth rate based on their initial successes, doubling the number of medical teams out there every two weeks would cover all their battalions in a little over twenty weeks. Tripling their numbers dragged their time down to fourteen weeks. However, that didn’t include all of the smaller, specialized groups: the commando teams, the bomb disposal units, the heavy artillery brigades.

And that wasn’t even touching on Kamino itself.

Or the Coruscant Guard.

It was a good start, but there were just so many clones, spread across the galaxy.

The longer this dragged out, the better the chances that word would leak to any one of the Jedi, natborn officers, and political appointees that regularly interacted with the clones.

And that wasn’t even accounting for the time it would take each battalion to actually remove every single trooper’s chip. The 212th was making good progress, but there were only so many medics, only so many surgical pods, and only so many hours in each shipboard day cycle.

They had time, if the original progression of events held.

He had to believe that they had the time to see this through.

But staring at the numbers wasn’t filling him with confidence.

Neither was the glacial progress the 212th’s slicers were making decoding the chips themselves. Fox knew a few of the orders embedded in their brains. He did not know them all, and the possibility that something even worse than Order 66 was lurking in the code seemed high.

He was still staring at the reports and tweaking his statistics when his comm lit up, some untold amount of time later.

He checked the incoming code; it was Cody.

He accepted the connection, hoping against hope that Cody was alone. Fox wasn’t in the mood for playacting at the moment. “CT-1010 here,” he said, in case he would be overheard.

“Are you somewhere we can chat privately?” Cody said, forgoing the usual formalities he used when he had an audience.

“I’m in my quarters,” Fox admitted, shoving aside his datapad. He could stare at them for as long as he liked, the numbers weren’t going to change.

“I’m en route,” Cody said and immediately logged off.

Fox rubbed his eyes. He’d been in here all cycle, trying to find some angle they hadn’t yet exploited, to make his mission progress more quickly, more efficiently.

Of course he hadn’t made any appreciable progress, and in the meantime, he’d amassed a rather impressive collection of ration wrappers and other detritus. He swept the mess into his disposal unit and made a minimal effort to straighten up the rest of his small workspace. Cody was worse than a mother nuna sometimes, and Fox had no interest in being subjected to yet another lecture about taking better care of himself.

True to his word, Cody knocked on his door just as Fox was suiting back up in his borrowed armor.

He’d painted it in meaningless bands and blocks of Cody’s orange-gold. It felt painfully disrespectful to the dead 501st shiny who had worn the plate before him. Paint was supposed to mean something, beyond just camouflage, and this set had been destined for Rex’s blue.

Fox had done it anyway. It was necessary.

“Force, Fox,” Cody said when he walked into the small officer’s cabin. “When is the last time you slept?”

That was a good question. Fox had been a little preoccupied since they’d left Zygerria.

“You can either deliver your bad news, or you can leave,” Fox said, dropping down on the edge of his narrow bunk, leaving the actual chair for Cody.

“Who said it was bad news?” Cody said, setting his helmet down on the desk.

“It’s always bad news,” Fox replied, knowing perfectly well that he was being dramatic and not really caring much. “Out with it.”

Cody sank down into the chair slowly enough to imply that he hadn’t been taking his own advice. “They found Echo.”

Okay. That was objectively good news.

“How is he?” Fox asked carefully.

“Alive.” Cody’s answer was as blunt as it was unhelpful. At Fox’s sour look, he did elaborate though. “He’s a little over half-prosthetic now, by body mass, and it’s very unclear how much of it was actually medically necessary. Senator Amidala read General Skywalker’s report in front of the Senate yesterday. She probably would have made less of a stir if she’d thrown a grenade.”

Fox snorted at that. Senator Amidala was rather fond of throwing grenades, verbal or otherwise.

“There’s talk about cancelling all existing contracts with the Techno Union and stripping them of their Senate seat,” Cody concluded, sounding a bit more somber.

There was the bad news Fox had been expecting. Because Force karking forbid that they ever receive any unilaterally good news.

This was going to get messy, not because the Techno Union didn’t deserve every gram of trouble that was heading their way, but because a huge percentage of the Republic’s ships and weapons were produced by their primary plants and subsidiary corporations. At the end of the day, Fox’s brothers still needed blasters, and charge packs, and starfighters to fight this karking farce of a war.

“Any idea who might be able to pick up the slack in production?” Fox asked. That had been the Emperor’s, then Chancellor’s, stated argument for retaining formal relations with the Techno Union the last time around. No one else could adequately equip the Republic’s war machine.

“Some of the smaller suppliers are pulling together a joint proposal,” Cody answered. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Fox guessed they would.

“Things are changing,” he said, staring down at the floor without really seeing it. “I don’t know how much my intelligence is going to help, moving forward.”

Cody snorted. “I can always use your intelligence,” he said with a small, crooked smile.

Fox just glared at his brother. “That isn’t what I meant.”

Cody just let his eyebrows slowly rise in a show of bland indifference. “I said what I said.”

Shabuir.

“We are being recalled to Coruscant though,” Cody finally admitted. “You said my General was ordered to fake his own death last time?”

“Yes,” Fox said, trying to dredge up memories of that whole clusterkriff. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that still happens.”

“I guess we will.”

~*~*~*~

General Kenobi did not fake his own death.

Instead, some anti-war protester actually did manage to assassinate Senator Burtoni and two ship manufacturers from Corellia, during a press conference on the supply negotiations.

Fox did not envy his counterpart that headache.

Frankly, thinking about that other version of himself – that younger Commander of the Coruscant Guard who was currently dealing with Senators, and criminal syndicates, and the occasional, inexplicable memory lapse – gave Fox his own headaches.

He’d have to deal with that looming cluster-kriff soon enough, but not quite yet. Cody had confined him to the venator during their visit to Coruscant, and Fox couldn’t actually argue with the logic.

The Guard couldn’t know about him just yet for the same reason they couldn’t know about the chips. If they knew, then the Chancellor would find out, and the whole ruse would be over.

At least the late, unlamented Senator’s death opened up an unexpected opportunity. General Ti along with four members of Rancor Battalion were set to escort the new representative from Kamino. Cody asked Fox to engineer an excuse, to send one of the 212th’s medics back with them.

Working with the medics to identify some kind of shipboard contaminant that would 1) utterly baffle standard G.A.R. scanners and 2) look like some kind of food chain mismanagement instead of a full on terrorist attack had kept him distracted from obsessing about his Guard and the festering knowledge that he was most likely failing them once again.

~*~*~*~

Events started to change in earnest. Cody leveraged Fox’s knowledge of that other future every way he could, but it was fast becoming irrelevant. Entire battles that had occurred in Fox’s timeline never came to pass, and others which hadn’t previously occurred spiraled into massive engagements.

And the 212th was generally deployed to deal with the worst of the worst.

The slicers finally managed to decrypt the chips, and it was just as bad as Fox had been expecting.

Order 66 was there, right where he’d expected it to be, but there were also orders for rounding up entire civilian populations and executing them, for performing mass political arrests and torture, for euthanizing the entirety of the G.A.R.

“Trust me to handle this,” Cody had repeated, and there had been something uncharacteristically pleading and desperate in his brother’s voice.

Fox said he would.

But the Jedi artifact stayed in his utility belt.

~*~*~*~

“Priority orders from the Jedi Council, Commander,” one of the communications officers, a trooper named Flux, said.

“Send them to my terminal,” Cody said, from the command position on the bridge.

General Kenobi had been recalled to Coruscant again, for kark only knew what reason this time, leaving the 212th more or less in the full command of its clone officers. That meant that Fox was able to be here on the bridge with Cody, looking out over Imbradil, a planet he’d never even heard of before and certainly not one that had been the focus of a major blockade in his previous life.

And that put Fox in a perfect position to see Cody’s shoulders tense up as he read the communique.

He flashed a hand signal that served as an open-ended query, but Cody just shook his head ever so slightly and signed back, ‘Hold.’

Then he punched a code into his terminal and started speaking.

“This is CC-2224, Marshall Commander Cody. We are under a full communications black out. All pilots, return to your hangers. All troopers are to secure personal comms using protocol 10.2. Inter-ship communications will remain open only between the commanding officer on each capital ship, and all external communication are to be redirected to me alone. I will be holding a command briefing in ten minutes to provide details on the situation, but as of this moment, we are pulling back from this blockade and going dark.”

Fox could just about envision every single jaw in the fleet hitting the deck. Certainly his had.

“Ember, you have temporary command,” Cody said, angling away from his terminal. “Flux, I need an inter-ship line available in comm room Besh 3. Then start shutting down our other systems. Wait to cut flight control until you get the all clear from our fighters.”

The twin responses of, “Sir, yes Sir,” sounded loud against the abrupt silence that reined throughout the bridge.

Cody nodded, expression scrupulously blank. “Tens,” he said, turning to look at Fox. “You’re with me.”

Kriffing right, he was. What the kark was going on?

But Fox rose silently and fell in behind Cody.

Once they made it to the conference room, Fox rounded on Cody, all pretense of junior officer deference fallen by the wayside.

“Cody, what the kark?” he asked harshly.

“You may want to sit down for this,” Cody said, sounding suddenly tired.

Kriff that strill osik. “I think I’ll stand.”

Cody pursed his lips in momentary frustration. “Suit yourself,” he said with a small shrug. “The Jedi Council, backed up by the Coruscant Guard, is moving into position to arrest Chancellor Palpatine on charges of high treason and conspiracy against the Republic.”

Fox just stared at him.

Cody’s expression softened just a fraction, which only made Fox want to bristle and snap at him more. Of course, that would require his mind to stop spinning long enough for him to form words.

“Your men are all de-chipped, and they are all read in on what to expect,” Cody said. “They are all as prepared as we could make them.”

“You told them. You told the Jedi,” Fox said, voice hoarse.

“Not all of it, just the parts I had to,” Cody said and then powered through, when Fox went red-faced, ready to fight. “Kenobi recognized you the day you arrived on Umbara, and he could sense whatever that artifact is you carry everywhere. I asked him to trust me, and he did. I asked you to trust me, too.”

He had, and Fox barely refrained from flinching.

Which of course just made him that much more furious.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Fox said, loud enough that anyone passing in the hallway probably could have heard him, sound-dampening be damned.

“Because I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t try to eat a blaster bolt the second you thought something might be going wrong!” Cody yelled right back, face flushing dark in a way that made his pale scar stand out in sharp relief.

Oh.

Well, kriff.

“Cody…” Fox started to say, all of the fight abruptly knocked out of him.

He hadn’t meant to put that on Cody. He hadn’t thought…

Well, clearly. He hadn’t thought.

“Save it. We can have this entire conversation once we’re safely in hyperspace,” Cody snapped, visibly trying to pull himself back under control. “Right now, I don’t have a lot of time before my other officers start comming in for the full briefing. You can stay and listen as long as you can keep it together.”

Thoroughly chastened, Fox sat down in one corner of the room. He kept quiet, even as Cody outlined the comprehensively insane plan he’d been piecing together right underneath Fox’s nose.

The artifact was still in his utility belt, but Fox tried not to think about it.

~*~*~*~

“I won’t do it,” Fox said into the semi-darkness. Cody had dragged Fox into his own quarters and corralled him onto the small couch in the corner of the room. It was more comfortable than it looked, not that Fox saw himself being able to sleep any time soon.

Cody himself was sitting up in his own bunk, reading kark only knew what. He looked up when Fox spoke, face illuminated oddly in the glow of his datapad.

“As long as there’s any hope, I won’t do it,” Fox repeated, watching Cody out of the corner of his eye.

Cody just stared at him for a moment before finally setting down his datapad. “Fox, there’s always hope,” he said tiredly.

Fox wasn’t sure he agreed with him, but there wasn’t any argument he could voice that wouldn’t hurt Cody even more.

Instead, he turned his head to look up at the ceiling of Cody’s quarters. He was tired, and the blankets Cody had stolen from somewhere were very warm. But he had too much weighing on his mind.

Not that there was a karking thing he could actually do about any of it. Not before they reached Coruscant, and by then everything of any importance would have already happened, one way or the other.

“Go to sleep,” Cody said, the hypocrite. Fox knew his brother had no intention of sleeping any time soon. “I have the watch.”

~*~*~*~

The holonet news feeds Cody allowed the carefully-vetted, fully chip-free slicers to access outlined what had happened plainly enough.

Republic Senate in Shambles: With the Chancellor Dead and the Vice Chancellor Arrested, Who Will Take the Reins of Government?

Lightning, Lightsabers, and Lies: Exclusive Footage from Inside the Senate Dome

The Jedi, the Sith, and Lesser Known Force Sects: Renowned Republic Historian Dart Myruck Provides Historical Context for the Explosive Allegations

Fox tried to read a few of the articles from journalists he’d determined to be more or less reliable in his past life, but the words kept swimming together. He couldn’t seem to focus.

One thing was absolutely clear though. The Emperor, the Chancellor, was dead.

They’d done it.

He’d done it.

Cody had rather forcibly handed Fox over to the medics, when his outburst of laughter had devolved into something strangling, uncontrolled, and far too close to tears.

~*~*~*~

“You’re sure they’ve been fully briefed?” Fox asked as the LAAT/i made its final approach towards the Jedi Temple.

“I’m certain,” Cody replied, calmly enough that Fox momentarily considered strangling him.

Fox couldn’t help adjusting his kama. His own armor felt strange again, foreign in a way it hadn’t since he’d first earned it back on Kamino, after wearing standard trooper gear for so many weeks.

The rest of the troopers on the transport were staring at him. Not that he particularly blamed them. It had become pretty apparent to even the most oblivious member of the 212th that whoever ‘Tens’ was, he wasn’t just some shiny intelligence operative, fresh off Kamino. But they’d respected his privacy, or at least they’d followed Cody’s lead, and they hadn’t pried.

He was sure there’d been an interesting betting pool about his real identity, though.

Given the way all of them were reacting, he was guessing that ‘Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard’ hadn’t been anywhere near the top of the runnings.

Kriff. It was also highly likely that he’d had to toss at least a few of them into his own drunk tank at some point. So that would be mildly awkward. For them.

Fox pretended to ignore them. He had other, more pressing issues on his mind.

They landed at the base of the Temple’s grand staircase, the same place Fox himself had told his men to line up their reserve ships while Lord Vader had hunted the fugitive Jedi.

The entire situation was starting to take on a distant feeling of vague unreality. The disorienting sensation only strengthened when the sides of the LAAT/i opened up to reveal their welcome party.

Multiple Jedi were standing there including Generals Kenobi and Yoda – not dead, not murdered – and four very familiar members of the Coruscant Guard.

Stone, Thire, and Thorn – who also wasn’t dead – and that would have been enough to make Fox’s head spin all by itself, except there was one last person with them.

Someone dropped a heavy hand on Fox’s shoulder, which made him tense in instinctive defense.

But it was just Cody.

“Come on,” Cody said, low enough that only Fox could hear him. “Don’t make me carry you out there. That would just be embarrassing.”

Fox shoved Cody’s hand off of his shoulder contemptuously.

The angle of Cody’s bucket conveyed deep amusement.

Fox ignored him.

The skies above the Temple were uncharacteristically empty when Fox finally hopped down out of the transport. It was eerily reminiscent of the last time he’d seen the sprawling complex, empty of Jedi and patrolled by hollowed out shells of his own men.

But the men in front of him didn’t look like they were being controlled by their chips. He knew them, knew their postures and mannerisms, as well as he knew himself. Which was funny, because one of them was himself.

Kark, this was weird.

Fox finally managed to put a little beskar back into his spine and walked over to his men. And himself. His younger self. When he got a reasonable distance away, he came to a stop and reached up to pull off his helmet.

The collective gasp was audible, even through their helmets’ filters.

“I heard a rumor that you’re the one who actually shot the shabuir,” Fox said, meeting the eyes on the other side of the very familiar visor.

His mirror pulled off his own helmet revealing a very familiar face. Maybe there was a bit less scarring visible above the collar of his blacks, and there was definitely less premature gray at his temples, but it was still Fox’s face.

This Commander Fox eyed him with an expression that would look neutrally polite to just about anyone else.

To Fox, it was surreal and just a little darkly amusing, to be subjected to his past self’s very familiar brand of suspicious scrutiny.

“I did,” his doppelganger confirmed, tilting his chin up in something like pride or maybe defiance.

“Good,” Fox replied with a sharp, crooked smirk. “If it couldn’t be me, I’m glad it was you.”

Someone, probably Thire, snorted loudly off to one side.

“Force karking hells,” Thorn said, breaking the awkward tension. “There really are two of them.”

Commander Fox, Fox-the-Younger, gave Thorn a sharp, warning glare, but he still sounded smooth and polished when he said, “I suppose welcoming you to Coruscant and offering you a tour of Guard Headquarters would be a little redundant.”

“A little,” Fox answered dryly, to cover the thick feeling that was starting to swell in his throat. Coruscant wasn’t home – honestly, kark this entire planet – but here, with his closest brothers, was just about the closest thing a clone could have to that ideal. “But I wouldn’t turn it down.”

~*~*~*~

The lavendar-skinned Jedi padawan led Fox to one of the small rooms used by the Archivists to perform interviews.

Not interrogations. Interviews.

It was better appointed than a Guard interrogation room. The chairs were more comfortable, and there weren’t any places to secure cuffs to the table. There weren’t any one-way mirrors, but there was a rather large amount of recording equipment.

The small differences weren’t enough to really set Fox’s mind at ease.

The padawan left him with a small bow. She was managing a fairly convincing front of serenity, but Fox could tell she was nervous around him. Maybe she hadn’t ever been around a fully kitted out clone trooper before, or maybe she could sense his own unease.

Maybe it was the artifact he carried. He’d been reliably informed that it was very loud in the Force.

Either way, her intimidation and anxiety set him even more on edge.

He’d only been in the Jedi Archives once before, to clear out the bodies in the immediate aftermath of Order 66.

He didn’t think he’d recognized that padawan, but some of the corpses had been exceedingly difficult to identify.

He felt ill.

He wanted to leave.

He did not.

The Senate was holding a vote right now, to grant clone troopers citizenship in the Republic and reparations for their suffering and service. His younger self was handling security, and Fox was more than willing to leave him to it. Actually folding him back into the hierarchy of the Guard was a logistical nightmare. And as Cody put it, having a spare, unencumbered Fox around to turn lose on any available problem had its own utility, if you could tolerate the ensuing chaos.

Cody was a shabuir. And it was hardly Fox’s fault that Cody had been asked to escort General Kenobi back out to Zygerria, to negotiate some kind of peace treaty with the provisional government there.

Before the bill went through, and all indications were that it would pass by a large margin, Fox had one last duty he felt he needed to perform.

The room’s one door swished open gently to admit a Jedi General.

Fox’s stomach, which had already been hovering somewhere in the region of his boots, plummeted through the floor.

This Jedi, he definitely recognized.

Not from the body cleanup, thankfully. But this woman was the elderly human or near-human Jedi that Darth Vader had been hunting through the Temple the day Fox had died the first time.

He stood quickly, rising to a rigid position of attention. “Ma’am,” he said, with a very formal salute.

She studied him for a moment, but instead of returning his salute, she gave him a polite bow, folding her hands in the sleeves of her robes. “Greetings, Commander,” she said. “My name is Jocasta Nu, and I am the Head Archivist for the Jedi Order. I am told you have a Force artifact that you would like to donate to the Archives?” She gestured gently for Fox to sit back down at the desk across from her.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Fox said, retaking his seat awkwardly. “I…” he hesitated, because this was most likely going to take a very long time and the probability of it ending badly seemed high. “I will also need to make a formal report, regarding the object.”

“Of course,” General Nu said with small smile. “Please give me a moment to set up my recording equipment.”

It did not take her long to turn on the room’s surveillance equipment and adjust it to her liking. All too soon, she was easing herself down into the chair opposite Fox, looking nothing like the warrior who had given a Sith and his men such trouble. “Now, would you please state your name for the record.”

He hesitated between answering with his chosen name or his designation number. Most Senators had preferred his number, or at least they had before Chancellor Organa’s series of investigations, impeachments, and arrests. Finally, he removed his helmet, set it to one side, and said, “I am Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard.” It felt like a small act of defiance.

The General just smiled encouragingly. “And the item?” she asked, folding her hands in her lap.

Fox hesitated again, but he was certain. It was time. The war was over. The Sith Lord was dead. The chips were being removed from all of his brothers, and the Kaminoans were being investigated for sentients rights violations. The clones were going to be granted citizenship and rights.

And he didn’t want to do this all over again. If he died now, he could do it with, if not a clear conscience, then at least some level of peace.

It was time.

General Nu just waited patiently, even though she did perk up with interest when Fox reached into one of his belt pouches.

Her expression shifted to shocked recognition when he placed the talisman on the table between them. The convor’s green eye and the bat’s red one winked in the room’s soft lighting.

He hadn’t seen either one of them, since his trip through that last portal. But then again, he wouldn’t, would he? Not if what General Yoda had said held true. They only worked together when the Force was thrown out of balance.

Which apparently wasn’t the case anymore.

“Commander Fox, I am quite certain that this item should already be in my collections,” she asked, looking up from the coin to meet his gaze.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

“And…” she hesitated, eyebrows rising with what might be cautious concern. “And did you use it?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he repeated, just as flatly.

“Well…” she said, taking a deep, obviously steadying breath. “Well, I assume you have quite the story to tell. Should I send for some water?”

“No, Ma’am, that won’t be necessary.”

“Well, then,” General Nu said, picking up a small datapad and a stylus, clearly intending to take manual notes. “I am very much looking forward to hearing your report.”

Fox nodded. He’d rehearsed what he wanted to say so many times, but that didn’t make starting the story any easier. “I died the first time in 7958 CRC, shortly after the formal conclusion of the Clone Wars, the execution of the Jedi Order on charges of high treason, and the formation of the Galactic Empire under the leadership of Darth Sidious, more publicly known as Emperor Sheev Palpatine…”

#star wars #tcw #clone wars #the clone wars #star wars the clone wars #commander fox #time travel fix it

28 notes · View notes