Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Fox, for the second time that night, drags himself back into wakefulness. It takes him a little less time to realise where he is and what has happened to him than it had done previously. He closes his eyes as the memories come back to him.

Scipio. There had been an attack, he had been injured, and he was now at the mercy of a medical team.

The situation is both familiar and not, all at once.

The smell of disinfectant is familiar. The sound of medical equipment is familiar enough. Fox has seen what he’s hooked up to and is pretty certain that it’s more advanced than anything the guard has ever been provided with, but after some time all the beeps and whirs blend together and he can almost imagine that it’s the same kit when he closes his eyes.

The unfamiliar is not something he can imagine away, however, and it outnumbers everything else.

The faces of those who care for him are not the same as the one he looks at in the mirror each morning, for a start. That’s probably the most glaring difference, the one that’s the most difficult to ignore when he’d like to pretend that he’s actually safe in the guard headquarters.

There isn’t anyone that he recognises at all. There is certainly nobody that he can trust.

Fox grimaces at the thought, and then again as the wounds across his torso throb. He hesitates to press the button that will bring the medics – the strangers – to his bedside.

At least the wave of pain that wracks his body gives him some indication of what must have woken him this time. Fox smiles – because this is another point of unfamiliarity. The most important one of all, and unlike the natborn medics, one that actually brings him some comfort.

When Fox had dreamt this situation only days ago, it hadn’t been him laying in this place, it had been Thorn. Some version of Thorn that hadn’t been moving, the medics unable to revive him.

A Thorn that had been too dead to feel any pain.

Now, Thorn is still alive and well on Coruscant, unaware of any danger that he may (or may not, the cynical part of Fox whispers) have been in. No matter what the cost might have been to the senator – or to Fox himself for stepping into his brother’s shoes – the mission had been a success, Fox decides.

Fox drifts again, smile still spread across his face.

—

It’s not pain that wakes Fox up the next time. It’s not even the lurch of the ship coming in to land, because the thrum of the engines can no longer be felt at all when he finally manages to grasp awareness for long enough to get a gauge of his surroundings. They must have arrived on Coruscant some time ago.

No, it’s another bad feeling that wakes Fox up now, one not unlike the kind that had preceded his nightmare about Scipio a few nights ago.

Fox isn’t having a nightmare now. Fox is wide awake, heart suddenly beating as fast as it might in a firefight, dread paralysing him in place on the bed despite his instinct always being to fight in the face of danger, not freeze.

The door to his room slides open with a hiss.

The figure silhouetted in the doorway is not one that brings Fox any comfort in the face of the sourceless dread. If anything, it causes it to increase tenfold.

Fox swallows the fear down, doing his best to look attentive and respectful as the Chancellor makes his way into the room. The various wires and medical devices in the way somewhat impede this attempt, but the Chancellor doesn’t seem to care, moving so that he can stand over Fox while the doors lock shut behind him.

“You’re not the one who’s supposed to be here,” Palpatine says lightly, deceptively lightly, breaking the silence that hung heavy over them both. “I very specifically tasked Commander Thorn with the mission to Scipio, and yet here you are, suffering in his place.”

Fox isn’t quite sure how to respond to that. He hadn’t known that the Chancellor had asked for Thorn specifically, or, more importantly, why he would.

Slowly, the pieces click into place. Fox’s many recent slip-ups and failures, ranging from minor issues to the escape of an entire Jedi padawan, and the threats of punishment that had seemingly never been fulfilled… and his nightmare. His nightmare with the same horrible clarity of all of the others that he’d had in the past that had come true.

‘Suffering in his place’, the Chancellor had said, and there was the truth of the matter.

He had intended for Thorn to die on Scipio. He had intended to take Fox’s brother away from him.

Now it’s rage that Fox is swallowing back, something biting that wants to emerge as an insult or perhaps even a threat of his own. The fear, however, isn’t completely gone, and the same instincts that had woken him stop the words in his throat.

“Why did you take his place?” Palpatine asks, apparently oblivious or uncaring of Fox’s realisation. “There was no reason for you to leave Coruscant.”

When Fox doesn’t immediately cough up an answer, he narrows his eyes and Fox can feel the man’s focus fall on him in an almost physical sense. Fox can’t help the flinch that follows.

“Did you have an offworld informant? Did you intercept one of my private communications?”

The Chancellor doesn’t wait for a reply to any of his questions, but Fox gets the sense that he is getting all of the information he needs anyway. A headache spikes, joining the multitude of aches and pains across the rest of his body.

“Why did you do it, if you had no knowledge of the impending attack?” Palpatine hisses, and the words reverberate through Fox’s mind.

“I don’t know,” he replies honestly, the words spilling from his mouth before he can even try to think of a convincing lie (or figure out why he would want to lie at all). “I just had a bad feeling. And a worse dream. One that I knew could have come real.”

The Chancellor is silent in the wake of his confession.

Fox shuffles awkwardly in his bed, trying to put the weight off of the worst of his injuries and ignore the fact that the sense of dread that he’d woken up grappling with has now returned even stronger.

“How many of these dreams have you had?” Palpatine asks eventually.

Again, instinct tells Fox to lie, and again, he cannot listen to it.

Fox spills all of his secrets – all of the moments where his uncanny instincts have pointed him in the right direction, and all of the flashes of intuition that have led him to victory again and again – to the man who had attempted to order his brother to his death. Somehow it feels like enough of a punishment all on its own.

Chapter Text

Fox is in the process of fending off another clone medic – he has already been visited by two of them following his return from the natborns to their care, and he knows that this third one almost certainly shouldn’t be on shift – when the universe decides that he could do with one more headache in his life.

The doors to the medbay slide open just as Fox is suffering through yet another medscan. He ignores it, at first, expecting another member of the medical team.

“I told you,” Fox presses on, “I feel fine. The natborns healed me right up.”

If the natborns had been less-than-gentle while doing so then Fox didn’t see why he needed to tell the medics. And if the aftermath with the chancellor still had him jumping at shadows whenever he was left alone, then –

“Liar.”

For a moment the accusation has Fox freezing, expecting that he’ll turn to find the chancellor standing over him once more. Only for a moment, though, because if the voice wasn’t enough of a giveaway, then Thorn’s armour is impossible to mistake even with the slight blur to Fox’s vision that has bothered him since waking.

“I know that tone,” Thorn continues, “go with your gut, boys – oh, sorry Sal! Go with your gut, uh, people!”

Fox is prevented from disputing Thorn’s claim by the medics closing in around him, who apparently seem to agree with Thorn and make short work of administering more painkillers. They are, at least, more careful about it than the natborns had been, but Fox still curses them for the lack of warning.

Luckily he’s quickly distracted by Thorn settling beside him, grabbing his free hand and not letting go.

“Fox,” Thorn breathes, closing his eyes. “I thought we’d lost you! What the kark were you thinking?”

“Piss off, Thorn, I wasn’t planning on getting ambushed,” Fox bites – well, more like slurs, as the painkillers hit his system – out. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Thorn seems to ignore that last bit. “It sure looked like you planned it, going from the escort schedule that you altered at the last minute. Why would you do something like that?”

Fox is suddenly very glad for the excuse his wooziness gives him, fixing Thorn with a helpless shrug instead of a real answer.

At least he has the choice whether or not to share the truth this time. His head still throbs, painkillers doing nothing to stop the random spikes of agony, whenever he thinks back on the chancellor and all of the truths that he had spilled then – and all of the truths that he wants to spill now, to Thorn, and finds that he cannot. Some invisible something stills his tongue at the mere thought of sharing what the chancellor had told him.

Thorn shakes his head, oblivious to Fox’s dilemma.

“I saw the order for myself to join the Scipio escort mission before the schedule was altered,” he continues, “but by the time I made it back to base to ask you about it you were already gone. And then the reports came in and I thought you were never going to return, Fox. I thought you’d gone and killed yourself!”

When he stops talking he has to take a moment to breathe deeply, all the words having come out at once near the end of his rant. Fox watches as he seems to gather himself, looking away from Fox with a twisted expression as if he were the one hurting.

He was, in a way, Fox knew. He’d been in Thorn’s boots on more than one occasion.

It was agony to always be the one left standing while more of his siblings fell around him every day.

“You weren’t meant to be there, Fox,” Thorn quietly says after a moment. “It should have been me. Why wasn’t it me?”

All Fox can do is squeeze Thorn’s hand. Despite all of the missions they’ve faced and the cases they’ve solved together, this time there isn’t any good explanation that he can give him – not with the words stuck in his throat as they are. This time, both of them have to be left in the dark.