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catboydogma · 2 months

Note

Ur taking prompts? Could I request some fox angst? loved CTHONIC

this is (checks notes) two and a half years late but i finally did it, fellas. thank u for the prompt anon (yes i am taking prompts feel free to send prompts) and i'm glad u enjoyed chthonic!

cross-posted to ao3

wc: 2244

notes: gen, mild language, angst with a happy ending, cody's in here too, fluff, i'm gonna be honest this turned out less angsty than i thought it would but i hope it still fills your heart, anon. not quite hurt/comfort but something adjacent

1800.

Fox rubbed his eyes. He glanced at the time again.

1801.

The numbers were lying to him. They had to be lying to him. He’d been in this office reviewing mission debriefs and time sheets and finalized schedules—version 5.2.7 final final, no, really, recent final, Commander Thorn’s version—for an entire year. But the time said he still had two hours to go before his shift ended—and he could leave all the datapads and shit in his office—and go down to 79’s to talk to Cody. This was the first leave the 212th had actually been allowed to dock dirtside and not be immediately recalled for some emergency to whatever “biggest catastrophe of the tenday” the Senate found on the docket. Cody had said something about Kenobi threatening to go spare if they didn’t get at least half their actual promised leave. Fox had thought—but hadn’t said anything, in a noble and selfless show of self-restraint—that maybe Kenobi should be allowed to go spare, just this once, just to see what would happen. But it was likely that would happen anyway; the Third Systems army was notorious for a royally fucked deployment schedule.

1805.

Shit. Fox stifled a yawn and scrawled his signature across the bottom of another datapad before stacking it onto the “finished” pile. Or, in this case, the “for some little shit Corporal to cart to Stone” pile.

He would finish these forms. He would get the whole priority stack done. Then he would clean his teeth. Do something about his hair. And he would go out.

1807.

Prime’s cock. Fox was going to die here buried by a pile of datapads and formwork. Seppies didn’t have anything on the fucking roaches that ran Senate InSec. Fox longed for the days of being a snotty little Lieutenant and not knowing anything about SCI evaluation forms or whatever fresh torture admin was cooking up next. They did this to torture him—personally—specifically Fox. They were doing this with malice in whatever shriveled stones InSec personnel passed off as hearts.

His comm pinged. Fox slapped a hand over it, then lifted it to check the sender ID.

1810.

CMC212-2224: I have been detained by Cpt Howl and Gen Kenobi. ETA 2030. I have been informed that this is quote an intervention unquote. I will keep you apprised.

Fox almost laughed—then grimaced as it turned into a yawn. He could only imagine what that conversation would look like.

CMC000-1010: Fine. Dont bring the jedi

CMC212-2224: Defamation and slander.

Fox snorted. Kenobi was rubbing off on his vod. Possibly in more ways than one—if barracks gossip was to be believed.

Well, if the illustrious Marshal Commander Cody was going to be late, then maybe Fox had time to rearrange his schedule a little. He could clock out later than planned—and if he clocked out later than planned that meant he had a new slot in his schedule perfectly sized for a little nap. The strange fever-nightmares had been getting worse lately. More lurid. As wartime litigation and political corruption weakened planetary agencies—and with the other hand, strengthened the GAR—taking on CorSec’s duties had given the Coruscant Guard longer shifts and less resources. One would think that as the GAR grew and shit got added to the Guard’s plate they would get authorized for more personnel and greater expenditures—but that kind of calculation was what PerSec was for. Supposedly. Not that they did much but embezzle shit. Mm, embezzlement. Maybe there was untapped potential to be had in that avenue of strategy. Fox pushed his datapad into the pile and blearily set an alarm to ring in fifteen minutes.

He'd just close his eyes. Just for a few minutes. Then he could finish the rest of this shit. Just a few minutes and…

In the absence of that awful din someone had been making, static quiet rushed to fill Fox’s ears. He sighed and rolled his head from side to side, working out the ache in the back of his neck. The silence was oppressive and heady now that the racket was gone—that high-pitched ringing and squalling had really been getting on Fox’s nerves. Thank the Force someone had finally silenced their stupid alarm.

Alarm.

Fuck.

Every muscle in Fox’s body seized in panic. He jolted upright and swayed dangerously close to falling out of his chair, vision still blurry from a hazy combination of waking and exhaustion. The office was dark. The screen of his datapad cast a dim blue glow into the room, picking out incongruous details: a scuff on the edge of his desk, the underside of an open drawer jutting out of the filing cabinet, the gaping mouth of a half-empty caf mug.

“Heck,” a vod muttered behind him.

There was only one idiot in the GAR who still swore like a cadet.

“Shit,” Fox slurred. He groaned and slumped back down against the desk, breath hissing out of him. “Shit. How long—what time?”

“Just past 1900.” Cody righted a stack of datapads that Fox had nearly knocked over and squared the edges of the stack with the right corner of the desk.

What a freak. No, wait. Past…

“Fucking—” Fox squeezed his face between his hands and rubbed the heel of his palm into an eye until it felt bruised and hot. He’d had one job tonight. He hadn’t even managed to clear his damn inbox yet. Stupid, stupid. He should have known better than to close his eyes like that on the job. And this was the one window of time he could see Cody without a war table between the two of them, or a room full of Admiralty and Jedi watching and assessing and—

“Think you had the right idea with this,” Cody said, scrubbing his knuckles over the top of Fox’s head and through his curls. Fox watched Cody in a stupor as he peered into the open filing cabinet and shuffled its contents around so that the drawer finally closed properly. The pile of spare bits of gear and discarded pieces of armor that had accumulated on Fox’s only other chair—he was going to get around to tidying the office one day, mark his words, and then the chucklefucks who kept leaving their shit around the room would really be sorry—got a similar treatment.

“Coming all this way just to see if I’d fallen down a maintenance shaft or some shit must have been a real bitch,” Fox muttered, rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. There was dried drool on his chin. Fucking mortifying. “Sorry to disappoint.” Cody still had time to go back out, probably. If not to 79’s then maybe to whatever other hole his troopers were slumming it in while they were on leave.

“Figured something came up.” Cody’s voice was even as he peered into the caf mug on Fox’s desk. His nose wrinkled slightly. Fox, whose Cody translator was rusty but still functional, took this to mean that Cody was disgusted beyond words by the dark rings of caf stains and thick layer of dust that filled the bottom of the mug. “If you had wanted to blow me off you would’ve found a more offensive way to do it.”

“Yeah, well.” Fox stared at a scuff mark on the top of the desk while Cody organized a row of styluses by size and weight. Sorry for ruining our plans was out of the question. I missed you and I’m sorry I’m a fuck-up, nope, definitely not. For some reason, you should go have fun and hang out with your troopers or your Jedi or whoever, rain check, but not really, I know you’re busy, I’m busy, this fucking sucks was just as impossible to try and say. Please stay, I don’t care if you ruin my filing system with your freak-ass bullshit, just stay and keep talking to me… fuck no. Absolutely unacceptable. “Got a lot on my plate. You’re gonna have to wait a bit on the obscene singing telegram. You know how the red tape is.”

“Looks it.” Cody surveyed the half-lit office with a dissatisfied slant to his mouth. On anyone else it would have been sarcasm. On Cody, it felt like vindication. “Got a headache from 79’s. Your boys have a cosy set-up in the breakroom down the hall. Figured I could put my boots up and get some shuteye if nothing else.”

Fox blinked, still trying to rub the sleep from his eyes. The nap had been one that had left him dead to the world, and dredging himself back up out of it was excruciating. And it had left him exhausted, too. There really was no winning this shit. “I bet your ARCs snore like a rancor, too.”

“Bet my ARCs snore louder than yours,” Cody said promptly, which was a sucker’s bet. There was a reason Hound had gotten his name, and it wasn’t just because he was damn good ARF. “Lighting in here’s dismal.” He got his hands under Fox’s arms and heaved him out of his chair with a hup and no further explanation. The door to the hall got thrown wide open and Fox winced at the flood of harsh fluorescent light that stung his eyes and made him flinch back against Cody’s grip with a rattle of plastoid.

“Some of us have work to do,” Fox growled, but it was half-assed at best. Cody just tightened his grip on Fox and practically frog marched him down the corridor.

“Got a lot of work to do,” Cody agreed, which was a trap. Cody agreeing with anything was always a trap. “Got to get my vod’ika some real sleep.”

“I didn’t know Wolffe was on Triple-Zero.” Fox finally let himself slump into Cody, accepting his fate. Now that he was away from the looming piles of formwork and a to-do list longer than his vambrace—it was easier to convince himself that it could wait until tomorrow. At least some of it.

“Wolffe’s next,” Cody told him.

Ominous. Somewhat unsettling. Ah, whatever it was, Wolffe deserved it. Probably.

The break room was blessedly close to empty. A trooper was sat bolt upright at a far table, armor all on and hands in his lap. Fox was fairly sure he was sleeping; the helmet made it hard to tell, but figuring out how to sleep upright was vital skill number fucking one for Corries.

They traded stupid stories while Cody stirred instant coco into hot water. The caf machine in here was on the fritz again—that was probably for the best. The worn sofa in the back corner still had a heavy knit blanket thrown over the back—Fox couldn’t quite remember if this had been a gift or left here by General Gallia at some point, which was sometimes the same thing—that was warmer and softer than Fox remembered it ever being. He grudgingly peeled off most of his armor, in deference to Cody in his sharply pressed dress greys.

Did the vod know that clothing existed out of GAR supply stocks? Fox tried to imagine Cody in a pair of non-reg fuzzy socks or, hell, a big robe like something the Jedi wore. A fancy jacket. A little top hat—nope. He could practically feel his eyes crossing at the effort. It was most likely that Cody had gotten his undersuit surgically grafted to him at some point—so he was never out of uniform.

They curled together on the sofa and Fox threw the blanket haphazardly over the two of them. Fox’s muscle memory knew this much, even if his memories of the last time they’d been able to do this had grown hazy with time—memories of sneaking into Cody’s sleeping pod at night as cadets to sleep back-to-front so they had someone to reach for when the night terrors grew thick enough to choke on. Memories of bowing over each other in private when the fear rose—of not being good enough, of losing a batchmate to a cruel trainer or the exacting standards of the cloners or their own carelessness—those didn’t come from Fox’s head. They were carved into his bones, they were threaded in sinew and marrow.

“Thanks for coming,” Fox said. Finally—an acceptable substitute to the words that had been bouncing around his skull and tying up his tongue. “You were right, this is better.”

Cody tipped his chin in a short nod and pressed his shoulder into Fox’s a little harder. Then, because he was a petty little shit of the highest ranking: “Didn’t catch that second bit. Let’s hear it for the record.”

“You…are an ass,” Fox said loudly, right into his ear.

“Must be genetic,” Cody said. He oozed smug at Fox, even with his expression perfectly still. It was in the tilt of his head and the way he was still managing—somehow—to look down his nose at Fox.

“No shit,” Fox muttered. He barely managed to finish off the rest of his tepid coco before sleep was tipping him sideways once more, held secure by the implacable weight of Cody’s arm around him and the rhythm of his brother’s breathing soothing something in his chest—something Fox hadn’t even known was wounded and weary. Yeah, maybe things had turned out alright after all.

#commander fox #commander cody #angst #fluff #clone troopers #fic #tcw fic #coruscant guard #sw fic #a heat rash in the shape of the show me state #asks #this is so late fellas. i look at my ask box and i shudder in shame

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