Work Text:
It was all down to Thorn.
Fox was the Marshall Commander, but Fox wasn't a people person. He was rabidly defensive of his vod'e, his troops, his vod'ike, but he wasn't merely uneasy with talking to natborns, he was barely comfortable talking with his own batchmates.
Thorn was a people person and more than that, he was interested in the natborns. Because while many of the Cuy'val Dar had been terrible, some had not, and if you'd sidle up to the right ones just right, they'd say interesting things with a perspective none of the clones would have, or could have because they were so different.
So, Thorn pushed the envelope, just a little. Poked around the edges and found the occasional member of CorSec or the Senate Guard who'd be willing to talk to a clone.
It was that poking around the edges that found the information that CorSec and the Senate Guard weren't nearly as incompetent as they appeared, instead they'd suffered budget cuts until the well-trained older members couldn't handle training the new ones. Until they didn't have the resources to cover various areas that the Coruscant Guard got called in to handle.
Thorn also learned, before Fox, that they were very ill-trained to be a police force.
So, it was Thorn who made contacts, found out how it was supposed to work, and acted as a go-between to ensure that security and policing on Coruscant got handled properly.
It was Thorn who found out that the trained reflexive reticence and stiffness of a clone going to attention was disturbing to natborns, who without ever seeing a human face, just armour and a faceless helmet, couldn't help but read it, not as respect or even fear, but as stone-cold uncaring. A droid-like void of emotion. And while Fox felt safest in that shell, it was Thorn who saw the trap and against Fox's advice, brought the nine-year-old shinies out without their helmets on to meet the CorSec shinies.
Thorn's act of playing go-between finally brought a meeting between Fox, the Senate Guard and CorSec. The three COs of the three security force entities finally met, circled each other and came out of the meeting with respect for the skills and domains of the others.
It was that meeting that inflamed CorSec in particular against the Senate, because they were a police force that, among other things, tried to halt slave trade when they could. They were limited by laws and budget, but they tried in between the other work of policing. They'd found the clones to be human. Not some sort of biological droid, but human. Unpaid humans doing the work of paid sapients, with a literal fear of euthanasia hanging over them.
The Senate Guard were the ones with the most contact with the Coruscant Guard on a day-to-day basis, though, and they were won over by Thorn's careful balancing act. Where Fox would storm in and get the job done by hook or by crook, Thorn would arrange. He would meet the others halfway, delineating lines who who did what, where and when. It smoothed the friction between the groups, though as Fox learned the ropes of the Senate they deferred to him more on security issues because of his unerring and unswerving competency.
Through it all, though, they all deferred to Thorn in the end, as the one who could walk the line between the natborns and the clones, understanding both because he could talk to both.
When the blackouts started, without an explanation the Guard's medics could find, it was Thorn who reached across the gap to the other security groups. Those groups reached back with resources the Coruscant Guard did not have, quietly arranging for serious medical investigation under the table.
That was how they found out, eventually, about the control chips. Finding clone after clone with tumours, leading to surgeries to remove them out of a concern the tumours were the cause of the blackouts only to discover upon dissecting them that they weren't tumours at all, but computer chips of such longstanding presence that the brain had grown around them, accepting them like a tree grown around a fence until the chain link was a part of the tree.
It was when they'd been sliced that they finally found the answer in the more than a hundred orders, hardwired into the chip, to be voice activated only by Palpatine.
And Fox sat Thorn and his other commanders down and said, “We need to take him out.”
And Thire jokingly said, “We need to take the whole system out.”
And Stone in all seriousness said, “We can't just take him out because if we don't have proof that affects natborns they're not going to care and we'll be decommed for treason.”
Thorn duly went to his natborn compatriots and asked them how to depose Palpatine given that there was no evidence that could be used against the Chancellor besides the chips that could so easily be hidden, dismissed or declared a third-party conspiracy to implicate the Chancellor.
It was a strange, slow process. The clones had memorised the orders on the chips, duly doing as ordered and recording what happened (which was never as incriminating as they'd hoped). The investigation wended its way slowly outward, intercepting the security forces and spies of other systems, pulling in Alderaan and Naboo's terrifying competencies, Corellia's frequently corrupted intertwining with criminal consortia, Quinlan Vos' Jedi Shadows.
Vos had normally been unpleasant and smarmy in the extreme, but the day they brought the chips to him, it all evaporated with him explaining that he'd known the clones were a threat, but hadn't been able to figure out how until the chips. Now that he knew, the fear that had been wearing at him had an explanation and a direction and the generous, funny and still-troublesome Jedi ceased to be a source of fear and anger and became a friend.
Through everything Thorn or the vod'e under his direct command, vetted for their understanding of natborns, were the ones in meetings with security, spies, police and politicians.
Thorn was the one learning the politics from doing, not observation alone, and Thorn was the one doing the delegation.
Senator Amidala seconded her handmaidens Dormé and Eirtaé to Thorn to act as emissaries where the clones could not so easily go. They taught Thorn a lot about governance and the Naboo political system of monarchical democracy. The Alderaanians that also joined them, passing through, gave anyone who would pay attention a grounding in legislation. All the spies taught the clones more about reading natborns and the hows and whys of their reactions to the clones (when Thorn talked to a pair of human twins and found out that natborns couldn't tell them apart either it was a strange sort of relief and puzzlement, because it meant the natborn inability to tell the difference between clones was actually not an anti-clone thing, exactly).
Bit by bit it all came together.
When they moved to take Palpatine into custody, “Sheev Palpatine, you are under arrest for treason, conspiracy, promulgating slavery in the Republic -”
Fox was interrupted by Palpatine's carefully constructed grandfatherly cover. “Gentlemen, I'm sure this is a misunderstanding.”
“There is no misunderstanding,” Commander Thicke of CorSec stated firmly. He proceeded to continue reading the extensive list of crimes under the Republic's laws.
Palpatine didn't hesitate, coolly pressing a thumb to the screen in front of him, clearly signing something with the thumbprint. He smiled as he stood. “With the passing into law of Senate Bill Number 17.287, the Chancellor, which I remain, may declare any change in governmental order he sees fit. Thus I do declare this republic to be an empire, with me as its head of state.” He stood. “And now,” with a flick of his wrist he held a pulsing red lightsabre, “I am merely acting to defend my person from dangerous interlopers.”
Quinlan Vos' shadow brethren crashed in through the window, engaging the Sith. It was a madhouse, Thorn taking cover and taking potshots whenever he could. Somehow Palpatine was still overpowering the Jedi, still blocking the shots, that had to be made carefully because no one wanted to injure one of their allies.
Dimly, however, Thorn recalled a lesson he'd spied on back on Kamino. Fett had been training the Alphas, and had been teaching them how to take down a Jedi. Thorn had been annoyed and puzzled, because they were supposed to be for the Jedi, why were they learning how to take them down?
None of that mattered now, because he had the same near-perfect recall of all his vod'e who'd made it past decommissioning.
“The most important thing,” Fett had told the Alphas, “is to get in under their kad – their sabres,” he corrected from the Mando'a mid-word. “If you can close with them fast, they can't bring the weapon down and you can get them in hand-to-hand. They rely most on keeping everyone far enough away to use the sabre and to use their Force. But if you get to close they can't hit you and can't focus on using the Force. The Force takes concentration, so move faster than they can think. Don't hesitate, just go.”
Thorn eased out from behind his cover, just enough to get a bead on the rhythm of the fight. Every fight had a rhythm, you just had to pick it out.
He started dodging and weaving closer and closer.
A gap appeared in Palpatine's defences. Not close enough yet, Thorn worked his way closer, watching for a that moment of vulnerability again.
There.
He dove forward, ducking beneath a swing, around the blaster shots, and slammed bodily into the would-be emperor. He was inside of the line of the sabres and didn't think, just reacted. Just let his training carry him through. Followed the path that Fett had shown the Alphas.
A broken neck later and he was standing over the dead Sith.
“All hail Emperor Thorn,” Vos said with a grin as he deactivated his 'sabre.
Thorn's eyes widened. “What?” he asked.
Vos' smile widened. “When I was a padawan, when I got into trouble I got assigned to copy old legislation out by hand as a punishment.” He shrugged. “You may be surprised to know it happened a lot -”
“Not surprised,” Stone muttered.
Rolling his eyes, the Jedi continued, “And there remain a few old laws on the books that haven't been expunged from before the time of the Republic. Based on the carry-forward of the ancient laws of the Coruscant monarchy, if a king accused of violating the trust of his position is killed in battle by someone attempting to dethrone him for those violations, that person becomes king – in short. So, it looks like Thorn is now king.”
“I'm good for that,” commented Commander Thicke.
Thorn was ninety percent sure they were kidding, but still. “But Fox-”
“Better you than me,” Fox said bluntly. “You don't hate everyone like I do.”
Ten hours later and between Palpatine's spontaneous declaration that the Republic was now an empire and some rapid-fire research making the most convenient precedent be Vos' referenced ancient laws, Thorn found himself installed as the Emperor of the Former Republic.
The first thing he did (after spending three hours arguing with his vod'e, the Jedi, the so-called Delegation of 2,000 and the commanders of the Senate Guard and CorSec that someone else should be in charge) was reach out to the Separatists, telling them that those systems that had initially wanted to leave would be declared free to go, they would negotiate the various territories that had been in contention since.
The second thing was declaring that unless a clone could be proven not sapient, they were to be assumed sapient and treated as such within Imperial territory.
The third thing he did was call the representatives of every system in the former republic that had monarchs as their heads of state and hash out a means of getting a vaguely democratic government out of it. That is, they pounded out a framework that could temporarily be used until elections for a new emperor in the idiom of Naboo's elected monarchs, and then dropped it into place with the intention of legislating more carefully. Thorn hoped that that legislation would be hashed out after he'd been replaced.
A year later Fox was laughing at him from the safety of the new home planet the Vod'e had been deeded by the Imperial Senate when the news came down that Thorn had been re-elected by a landslide for a six-year term.