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If Plo had known about the chips, he’d have never brought Wolffe with him to arrest the Chancellor. If Plo had known about the chips, they’d have been removed long ago.
If Plo had known about the chips, Wolffe wouldn’t be lying unconscious behind him, mind empty as death.
Palpatine was a Sith, and Plo would fight with all he had.
The wound in his side ached, Wolffe’s blow had been entirely unrestrained, but he could not let it hold him back, not with all the lives on the line, not with Wolffe and Fox both unable to fight.
Palpatine’s sabre bit deep into his leg, and his struck deep into Palpatine’s chest.
Plo fell to the floor, and dragged himself back slightly, closer to Wolffe. To his side, crumpled against the desk, was Wolffe’s younger batchmate, Commander Fox. Plo believed he could see the young clone’s chest rising and falling, but he could also see blood where his head had hit the desk. He managed to reach Wolffe and pressed a finger to his neck, feeling for the pulse.
Wolffe was alive.
He was alive and Wolffe was alive and Fox was alive.
And Palpatine was dead.
They'd done it.
The Guard would be safe now, they were getting supplies and medics, they’d be reunited with the vode they’d been cut off from, they’d get all the good things they deserved and...
Plo gasped.
The feeling that tore through the room was dark, rushing from the floor and the walls into the centre of the room, and he heard himself scream along with the cries in his mind.
Below him there was agony, sudden and sharp, and his son’s minds screamed in tandem with the sudden jolt of pain across the Guard.
He didn’t know what this was, what was happening.
All he knew was that it had something to do with Palpatine’s death, and that it was bad.
Sinker and Boost’s minds had gone totally silent, he couldn’t sense them.
He couldn’t sense them.
Through the intense mental pain, a pain so similar to one he’d felt before, facing down the Malevolence, he reached for his bonds.
Wolffe's was intact. Silent but intact.
Comet’s was intact but in agony.
Warthog’s was there, frantic and worried.
No.
He reached the frayed ends, where Sinker’s had been severed. Where Boost’s had been torn.
His twins...
What had just happened, what had done this, what was this?
What had happened to his sons!
“Plo!”
His backup.
“They need medical attention. Palpatine is dead. And someone needs to check on the Guard.”
Kit bent in front of him, checking his leg, and Ki-Adi knelt to check Fox’s head wound, while their Commanders, Monnk and Bacara, conformed Palpatine was dead, each knelt at his side.
He wasn’t sure if it was the darkness in the office or the burn of the broken bonds, but the warning came too late. He noticed too late that both commanders’ minds had gone as blank as Fox and Wolffe’s had been.
He didn’t have a chance to call out a warning, and Kit’s force winked out suddenly, dropping against Plo, head smoking. Ki-Adi fell at the same time, crumpled next to Palpatine's desk.
And then they both stopped, standing to attention, weapons holstered.
Plo had never felt so sick than he did in that moment, as Palpatine stood.
Stood and brushed himself down and smiled, eyes a burning sulphur yellow, before rolling his shoulders and the yellow turning back to their natural colour.
He poked at his clothes, the charred hole, where Plo had driven his sabre home, before looking around the room, strolling over his desk and pushing the poor Commander Fox away from it with his foot, before leisurely stepping over Ki-Adi's body with something like disgust and turning to the two commanders still standing at attention.
“Well done, good boys. Doing exactly what you were Ordered first time. If I had time I'd let you give these two defects a lesson.”
Plo couldn’t respond.
Palpatine was the Sith.
The clones, all of them, could be mind controlled with a word.
Palpatine had been dead.
Ki-Adi and Kit were dead.
Sinker and Boost were dead.
Too many of the Guard below were dead.
Palpatine was alive.
He'd been dead, and now he was alive and that darkness, Sinker and Boost and so many Corries and he was alive and they were dead...
This... this was beyond anything they’d known Sith could do.
Far beyond.
And Plo still couldn’t feel the Sith’s darkness, he couldn’t feel it.
He was staring right at it and he couldn’t feel it.
Palpatine reached forwards and grabbed Kit’s tendrils and hoisted his body off of Plo’s lap, dropping him to the side.
There was nothing Plo could do, even if he could null his own pain enough to walk he wouldn’t be able to get to and carry both Fox and Wolffe out, and he couldn’t forgive himself if he left Wolffe to this.
Wolffe would never forgive him if he left Fox behind.
And that was assuming he could make it out with either one of them. He couldn’t... he couldn’t walk.
Even without Kit’s weight holding him down, he couldn’t walk.
He was trapped.
“Now this is a mess, how am I going to fix this, Master Jedi? How am I going to fix this?”
Plo wasn’t given a chance to answer.
.
.
.
Plo woke in a cell.
It was cold and dirty and his leg was screaming.
And the world was empty.
A collar sat heavy on his neck.
He needed to assess.
He was in a cell, he had a Force supressing collar on his neck and cuffs on his wrists, he was leant against a wall sitting up, there was someone against his...
Comet.
Stripped to his blacks, missing his prosthetic arm, tucked into Plo’s side, having clearly slotted himself under Plo’s arm despite the cuffs, shivering.
Alive.
Breathing.
He looked up from his son’s tear stained, sleeping face, lips blue with the cold, and immediately turned back to it, bracing himself, then looking again.
That monster.
Five bodies hung from the wall, suspended by a rope under their arms.
Skin discoloured with death.
Three he didn’t recognise, two with regulation hair and one with blue waves, but the other two, the two he didn’t want to look at but couldn’t tear his eyes from.
Two red stripes.
A short grey cut.
His twins.
Plo squeezed Comet a little tighter, shivering.
It was so cold.
Forcing himself to look past the bodies, and kriff he was pretty sure there were more as he went further along on each side, he noticed cell doors. Both sealed and barely visible at his current angle. He couldn’t see if the one on the left was occupied, and the one on the right had a boot, but he wasn’t sure if anyone was wearing it.
And above those cells, more bodies, more clones. No wounds that he could see, but dead all the same.
That monster had done this. He didn’t know how. But he’d done this. Murdered them, murdered so many clones.
Murdered Ki-Adi and Kit.
And if he was here, then Palpatine had covered it all up.
The galaxy probably believed him dead, his troops, his children, all to be drafted into that monster's clutches.
His musings were drawn by the glow of a screen and the music of a Republic announcement.
He almost didn’t look, not when he could see through the screen to the bodies of...
He focused on the screen, on Palpatine.
On Commander Fox, stood perfectly at attention behind him.
“Two nights ago, I was witness to a vicious Separatist attack. They had infected one of our Clone Commanders with a virus, via his prosthetic eye, and used it to turn the clone into a puppet of their control. What followed was a great tragedy, the loss of three Jedi Generals before the other clone commanders present, including my own Commander Fox, managed to halt the attack. All the clones involved in my defence are recovering well, and we have been assured that the virus has been nullified, including creating an antivirus for all future prosthetics we provide. We must learn from every tragedy and we must destroy these monsters who seek to infect and murder our defenders, take away their will and turn them into the same mindless droids they use to fight. This is why today I am approving the motion for an increase in finding, and the creation of a new military research facility.”
Plo hung his head as the footage cut out, the last sound being riotous applause.
So that was it.
The lie was in place, the truth covered up.
The commander back in the hands of a Sith.