lunch break
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In a rare stroke of luck - or, more accurately, bureaucratic alignment - Cody has leave at the same time as Wolffe, and they manage to talk Fox into taking a break for once in his life to join them for lunch.
Cody also uses the opportunity to finally make good on his promise to Kenobi to introduce him to his batchmates in a non-professional setting - Dex’s, in this case. He hasn’t yet decided if he’s going to regret this decision. Wolffe already knows Kenobi, to an extent, and they at least seem to like each other. Cody thinks that Fox and Kenobi will either despise each other or get along like a LAAT on fire, on fire part emphasized. Reason: they are both pains in Cody’s ass and he, unfortunately, still loves them.
He and Kenobi arrive at Dex’s early and claim a booth in the back; they sit across from each other and Kenobi allows Cody the seat that faces the door, since he has the Force and Cody just has paranoia. Wolffe arrives a minute or two late grumbling about traffic. Cody graciously does not make fun of him for being unable to account the hell that is getting anywhere on Coruscant into his travel times.
They make small talk - about the war, of course, because what else do any of them do with their lives - while waiting for Fox. After ten minutes without even a hint of his presence, Kenobi orders them a large basket of fries. Cody gets himself a milkshake and then resigns himself to the losing battle of keeping Wolffe away from his straw.
Wolffe could ask Dex for his own straw, or even his own milkshake. He does not, because Wolffe is an ori’vod and a bastard. Cody respects Dex too much to start a fight in his diner, but he resolves to make Wolffe spar with him once they’re back in the barracks.
It hits minute fifteen with no sign of Fox. Cody shares a look with Wolffe. They reach for their comms in sync.
If Fox does not respond to their pestering by the time it reaches minute twenty, they will write him off as a lost cause and enjoy lunch without him.
Minute eighteen arrives. There is no response to either of their messages, but there is a flash of familiar red through the windows of the diner’s door. Two flashes, in fact. Cody raises an eyebrow.
Fox and another Coruscant Guard commander that Cody doesn’t recognize slip into the diner with surprising stealth, given that they’re in full armor and there’s a bell above the door. Cody scrutinizes them as they approach.
They’re both limping, though the unfamiliar commander only slightly; Fox’s is much more pronounced even as he tries to hide it. When he reaches their booth, he lifts his arm gingerly to remove his helmet.
Wolffe greets him with, “What the fuck happened to you?”
This is a fair question. There is a large bandage plastered across the right half of Fox’s face, stretching from just beneath his eye to his chin. The rest of his visible skin is so bruised it looks like he went hand-to-hand with a commando droid.
“He got mugged,” the unfamiliar commander offers when Fox stays silent. “I’m Thire, by the way.”
Thire takes the seat beside Kenobi and leaves Fox to the fate of sitting next to Wolffe. He has a mullet, but he makes it look good, so Cody doesn’t hold it against him.
Fox sits, reluctantly, and finally graces them all with the deadpan scrape of his voice. “He’s my babysitter.”
Thire’s smile is as sharp and bright as a vibroblade in sunlight. “Yes. Sorry for joining your lunch without notice - we had to make sure Fox wouldn’t get into any more fights along the way.”
“This was not my fault,” Fox growls.
It is, obviously, an old argument. Kenobi interrupts before it can begin again.
“We’re happy to have you,” he says. “Have you been to Dex’s before?”
Thire blinks at him. He does not comment on the unusual presence of a Jedi in their midst, unlike Fox had, many times, when Cody had first broached the topic. Even now, Fox does not seem very pleased that Kenobi is here.
“I’ve had his food a few times,” Thire responds, which is a non-answer. Cody has become very good at noticing them in his time working as Kenobi’s right hand. “It’s good. This is the real reason I went with you,” he tells Fox.
Fox, eloquent as ever, flips him off.
Dex arrives to take their orders. He greets Fox and Thire with familiarity and does not comment on Fox’s injuries.
When he leaves again, Wolffe keeps the ensuing quiet from stretching into awkwardness by turning to Fox and saying, “I'm serious, vod. What in the depths did you do?”
Fox waves a hand. “Blacked out. Woke up on the lower levels. Got jumped. They got in a few lucky hits,” he gestures to his face, “before I killed them.”
“Just a normal Centaxday, really,” Thire adds faux-cheerfully. “What about you guys? What have you been up to? Besides the war, of course.”
The change of topic is not graceful. Cody exchanges a look with Kenobi. Kenobi raises an eyebrow. Cody raises one back: no, it is not normal for Fox to show up looking awful - this awful, at least. Something bigger is going on here.
“You blacked out?” he asks for both of them.
“It's fine,” Fox dismisses. “Happens to everyone at some point, right?”
He is full of shit and he knows it. Cody tells him so.
More diplomatically, Kenobi adds, “I am curious by what exactly that turn of phrase means, at least in this instance. I’m sure you weren’t drunk, but just to be clear—”
Thire laughs. Fox sighs. “I was not drunk.”
The two of them look at each other and proceed to have a conversation that consists entirely of facial expressions. Gone are the days when Cody could do that with his batchmates; they don’t spend enough time together now, and the only people he can read that well anymore are Rex and Kenobi. He has no idea what Fox and Thire are saying to each other.
Finally, Fox says, casually, “I’ve been losing time since about six months into the war.”
All of Cody’s attention snaps to him. The war has now been ongoing for over two years. This is not what he was expecting to hear at all; Fox has never even hinted at it before.
“Ah,” Kenobi says delicately.
“And you’re just mentioning this now?” Wolffe asks with far less grace.
“Well, I kind of hoped the problem would go away on its own,” Fox shoots back dryly. “Clearly, that didn’t happen.
“I started losing time six months into the war,” he starts again. “A few hours, a day. A few days.”
“The worst one was over a week,” Thire inputs quietly. Fox acknowledges him with another dip of his head.
“Every time, I’d wake up somewhere on Coruscant, usually in the lower levels, with no idea how I got there. If I had all of my gear still on me, it was lucky, and if I was uninjured, it was even luckier. After a few months, I realized I wasn’t the only one this was happening to.”
“It’s all of the commanders,” Thire explains. “Fox and I have them the most often, followed by Thorn. Stone only gets them rarely.”
“So that’s why you look so bad,” Wolffe surmises.
Fox chuckles, low. “Yeah. Woke up way further down than I should’ve been with half my armor gone and in the middle of some natborns kicking the shit out of my body.” He scoffs. “They should’ve made sure I was dead first.”
Cody, Wolffe, and Kenobi all grimace, though the latter’s expression is likely for very different reasons.
“You said you killed them to get away?” he asks. “How many of them were there?”
Fox frowns. “Not sure; it was all kind of a blur, and my memories are always shit after blackouts, anyway. Five, give or take.”
“And you killed them,” Kenobi repeats. “All of them?”
“Yes.”
Wolffe shakes his head, somewhere between fond and amused. “Of course you did, Fox’ika.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fox and I were the top of the entire command class on Kamino,” Cody explains for Kenobi’s benefit. And, as much as he hates to admit it, “He graduated with the highest score in hand-to-hand combat sims.”
At peak condition, a handful of natborns would be laughably easy for him to take down. This time, he was injured and disoriented and obviously paid the price, but Cody still isn’t the least bit surprised that he came out of that fight on top.
“I see,” Kenobi says, nodding. “You must be a very formidable fighter.”
Fox smirks. Somehow, it just makes him look tired. “I am.”
There’s a rumble of that old, bitter anger in his voice. He hadn’t been happy to find out he’d been assigned to Coruscant instead of the frontlines they’d all trained for their entire lives. Clearly, his opinion has not improved.
Wolffe clears his throat. “Do you know what’s causing the blackouts? Because they sound a little fucked up, vod.”
Thire and Fox exchange a look.
“Well,” Fox says, and then does not elaborate.
“We have...theories.” Thire glances around and lowers his voice. “As far as we can tell, the blackouts only happen after one of us has a meeting with the Chancellor.”
Well, indeed.
Dex sweeps over with their food. They all gratefully take the excuse to process what was just said. Kenobi looks like he’s bitten into something sour, but the expression fades as he takes the first bite of his nerfburger.
In the awkward conversation lull that’s arisen, Thire adds, “I think Palpatine is a Sith.”
Cody jerks his head up and stares. Kenobi chokes.
“Oh?” he manages, strangled.
Wolffe recovers first. “That’s a pretty fucking big accusation.”
Thire shrugs. He and Fox are both eating like they’re starving; Cody takes another, closer look at them and notes the sharpness of their cheekbones. A warning bell pings belatedly in his head.
Kenobi has recovered his dignity. “Yes, it is. I assume you have evidence, or at least suspicions, to back it up?”
“I’ve been around Sith before,” Thire explains between bites. “I was there on Rugosa when General Yoda stopped Ventress from assassinating the Toydarian king. I know what they feel like. The Chancellor feels the same way.”
Kenobi’s raised eyebrow betrays his incredulity. “Forgive me for presuming, but as far as I’m aware, none of the clones are Force-sensitive.”
“This is true.”
“So how is it that you can sense the Dark side on Chancellor Palpatine when none of the Jedi ever have?”
“Maybe he doesn’t bother shielding himself around us,” Fox mutters. He doesn’t look up from his food even when everyone’s attention swings to him. “Trust me, he drops all his other facades, too.”
Thire scoffs. “Yeah. He hates us and he’s not subtle about it. Stone jokes that he’s getting off on our misery.”
He seems to remember who he’s talking to and grimaces. “Uh. Sorry, sir.”
Kenobi does not seem to register the apology and has abandoned his food entirely, lost in thought. Cody passes him a napkin before he can press his fingers to his temples and get grease in his hair. He nods absently in thanks.
“A Sith controlling the Senate,” he murmurs to himself, with an expression like he’s connecting several dots and is severely unhappy with the picture they make. “Well, then.”
Louder, to Thire, he continues, “You do realize I’m going to need something more substantial than your word if I’m to bring this to the Jedi Council.”
Thire and Fox look at each other. Another wordless conversation commences. Wolffe, meanwhile, turns to stare at Cody; what the fuck? his raised eyebrows ask. This, at least, is not hard to understand. Cody shrugs back.
This is not the kind of bonding between the two sides of his life he had anticipated. He is honestly not sure if he’d prefer the possible-friendship possible-immediate-hatred or the sedition.
“I could just shoot him and see what happens,” Fox finally says.
Cody sighs. Wolffe presses a hand to his face. He has never looked more like an ori’vod.
“Please don’t,” Kenobi says, pained. “That could go incredibly badly if you’re wrong.”
“We could ask,” Thire suggests.
This is only marginally better than Fox’s idea.
Cody turns to Kenobi. They have done stupider things before and ended up with perfectly satisfactory results.
“I’ll turn on my helmet cam,” Fox adds. “Is that good enough evidence for you?”
Kenobi pauses and then shrugs like it hurts him to do so. He does not say no. The great negotiator has run out of will to argue; Cody never thought he’d see the day.
<><><>
It is less than twenty-four hours later that Thire, Fox, and a third Coruscant Guard commander that Cody doesn’t know come stumbling up the steps of the Jedi Temple. Thire is clutching Fox’s helmet against his chest. The third commander is carrying Fox himself and yelling for a medic.
Cody does not personally witness that spectacle, but he is there a few hours later in the chamber of the High Council when Thire gives his report. The third commander - Thorn - is with Fox in the Halls of Healing, having refused to move from his sentry position by Fox’s bacta tank. Cody hasn’t even seen him yet, with how quickly the Council meeting was called; all he knows of his batchmate’s condition is how long the list of injuries is.
“Sir, have you heard of the Sith?” Fox’s voice, distorted slightly by the recording, asks.
Palpatine chuckles. It sends chills down Cody’s spine in a way it never has before. The holo wavers, once, before Thire gets control of the shaking in his hands.
“Of course I have, Commander. Who hasn’t, in times like these?”
“Are you one of them?”
It is times like these that Cody both curses and loves Fox’s bluntness. Naked shock flashes across Palpatine’s face before he can control his reaction; the mask of the kindly old man does not return. The Jedi murmur at the poisonous anger in his eyes.
The recording stays steady. Thire does not shake, and neither does Fox, even in the face of darkness.
“An interesting question indeed, Commander. Let’s make sure you don’t remember it.”
Lightning bursts forth from his outstretched hand. Fox falls. The recording glitches and cuts on the edge of his scream.
It is only years of training that keep Cody from flinching. Thire’s knuckles are white on the helmet when he lowers it back to his side.
“Is that enough evidence for you?” he asks quietly, looking at Kenobi but directed at the Council entirely. Yoda’s ears droop. “Sirs?”
It seems it is. Cody has never seen the Jedi Council formulate and mobilize a plan so fast.
Fox is still in the bacta tank, but they let Thire take his slugthrower. The questions have already been asked, and he shoots first.
The Chancellor - the Sith Lord - dies quickly and loudly.
Afterwards, the Force is lighter than it has been in decades, or so Cody is told; he can neither confirm nor deny it, but the war is over, and he imagines the foreign joy he feels at this realization is a similar sensation.
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