Chapter Text
Fox wakes up to darkness.
His head aches abominably, and there's a wet, dully throbbing spot right over his right eyebrow. He reaches up to touch, expecting blood. Or rather, he tries to reach up and comes short. Metal clinks, and his movement is aborted harshly. Are those chains, he thinks incredulously.
The darkness surrounding him is not total; there are a few thin slivers of light from several feet away, perhaps shining out from underneath a door. He is supine, and whatever is underneath him is hard and cold. He tries to move the rest of his body and flinches violently when the aborted motion is enough to trigger a sensor and dim emergency lightning flickers to life. It verifies what he'd suspected - he is, in fact, tied up, and not by binders, but by good old-fashioned metal chains. They cross his chest, circle uncomfortably tight around his neck and hold his hands and feet to the - table? stone slab? - he's lying on. He's barefaced and in his blacks. He feels naked.
Fox fights down the panic that's trying to crawl up his throat and instead focusses on the weak light illuminating the dimensions of the room he's in. Fox hates being confined. He's adapted to enclosed spaces (his bucket, the sleeping tube on Kamino, vode piling atop of him), but restraints touch some animal part of him that wants to snarl and claw and bite, hurt whatever or whoever's in reach and just--just get away, get free. Instinct won't help him; he's been better trained than this.
The room is good sized. By that, Fox means it's bigger than his office and even bigger than the bunkroom he shares with Thorn, Thire and Stone. Walls and ceiling appear to be massive; the surfaces he can see look whitewashed, clean and almost sterile. He turns his neck even further. He's lying on what seems to be a carefully hewn stone slab of some dark red, almost black mineral that's at what he estimates to be the height of a regular desk. The floor is dark, industrial tiles of either artificial stone or ceramics. There's a glinting circle surrounding him; it looks like a ring of silvery metal inlaid into the tiles. He squints. Further away, at the back of the room, seems to be a work area. A handful of status lights - are those consoles? - blink dimly. He thinks he sees shelves and furniture.
At the other side of the room, there is a heavy door Fox is willing to bet his weekly caf ration on is blast-proof.
Somehow, the room excudes privilege. This is no lower-level slave holding pen. He shivers.
There's no armor-shaped pile in either direction.
Fox stills, listens. The lack of sound proves what his other senses have already told him - there isn't a single lifeform anywhere in this room.
His head is killing him.
He groans and bites his lip, hard. The sharp pain distracts him from the pounding, stabbing throb that seems to fill his entire head and press against his eyeballs from the inside.
He blinks, tries to focus.
He has no idea where he is, or how he came to be here... wherever "here" is. The last thing he remembers--
He smacks his head against the unyielding stone surface underneath him.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.
Instead of helping him concentrate and remember, it only adds to his headache. He swallows frantically, manages to not throw up, but only just.
There was a vote regarding one of the numerous, seemingly inexhaustible amount of bills regarding the war effort. He and the rest of the troopers on the Senate shift provided security. For once, there was a distinct lack of assassination attempts or attacks by bounty hunters. At the end of the Senate session, he got to send his men back to the barracks, and the Chancellor asked him to-- to--
Dank farrik, why can't he remember?
He grits his teeth and almost immediately stops doing so. Also a bad idea.
He remembers standing in Palpatine's office. Everything after that is... a void of nothingness.
He gives his shebs a mental kick. There'll be time for that later. Also, a visit to medical will have to wait. First, Fox needs to get rid of the chains and get back to base, back to--
He aborts that train of thought. Yes, his riduur'e will be frantic. No, thinking of them trying to mount a search for him while fulfilling their duties as well as Fox's will be a nightmare.
He raises his head as much as the chains allow him to. The loop around his throat tightens a little and digs into his skin. He leans back down a couple of degrees and barely avoids choking. His fingers reach for a couple of links of the chain. It's chillingly cold and heavier than lightweight steel or aluminum. His fingernails don't find purchase on any of the rings. So, no way of prying open the chain.
He pulls with both hands.
This time, he chokes for real. There's a sharp taste on his tongue, and then there's a vile mix of caf and stomach acid dripping from his nose and mouth. He turns his head and hears it falling onto the floor. The resulting coughing fit leaves him light-headed. Not a good combination with his headache.
Worse, though - there had been not a single inch of give in the chains.
Fox gives into the urge and screams loudly inside his head. He can't allow anyone to hear him; it's much more likely that it'd alert his kidnapper than the rarest breed of Coruscanti alive - someone willing to get involved.
***
Half an hour later, his situation hasn't improved much. He needs to move periodically so the emergency light stays on. His stomach is empty. His head still feels like he withstood either a live-fire exercise on Kamino or a 'training session' with the Praetorial Guard and their disturbing fondness for electrostaffs.
Well, the chains won't give, so Fox's body will have to. He grins and can only assume that, to a bystander, it would look slightly unhinged. He presses his left hand against stone and dislocates his thumb. He breathes out sharply and manages to pull his hand through the loop of chain that used to fix it to the slab, then hurries to move it across his body before it can swell too much to be of use, and uses the minuscule slack in the chain to free his right hand.
***
Another half hour later, and Fox can finally sit up, the chain pooling harmlessly at his side. He pushes his thumb back in place and rubs his throat. What he wouldn't give for painkillers or a bit of bacta right now.
Well, he now has a whole (cavernous, institutional, creepy) room to explore.
***
Somehow, he expected some osik'la kriffery to happen once he stepped over the metal ring, but no force field shot up from it and attempted to cut him in half. He bravely resists the urge to poke at the ring (perhaps it's defective? or is it really just for decoration?) and steps closer to the door. Hoping he won't alert anyone - his kidnappers? - of his newly re-acquired freedom, he turns on the regular lighting and studies the door. It is exactly as he's thought - locked, fire- and blasterproof. The door mechanism should be right next to it, but without tools, Fox won't be able to get to it. He isn't in the mood for scraping through solid stone - and it is solid stone next to it - with his fingernails. Also, Fox isn't a slicer. He hopes he'll find another exit. He doesn't fancy his odds in circumventing an electronic lock of the caliber he fears might be installed here.
He gives the door the sort of look that makes shinies come to attention and even the occasional senator quail, turns on his heel and crosses over to the work area. He bets the dark consoles along the back wall include a comm terminal.
He has just passed the first piece of furniture - a lowboard apparently made of honest-to-gods wood - when a combination of instinct and experience saves his life.
Fox jumps back a step and directly in front of him an orange-colored force field springs to life, the crossing lines coming so close to his face that he feels it as an intense wave of heat. He curses vividly. His heart feels like it's trying to jump out of his chest. For a moment, he forgets about his headache.
That's a no on the work area, then.
***
The wooden lowboard is the only piece of furniture - aside from the stone slab, of course - that is inside the area Fox is allowed to roam. He feels like a scurrier in an animal testing lab. It contains a tray with a heavy, crystal caraffe and two corresponding goblets, a still-sealed bottle without a label with dark red liquid inside that Fox hopes is wine, a collection of branded nutrition bars an entire stratosphere above what the Guard is getting fed, a small fabric bag with hygiene products (including a body spray that Fox knows is all the rage at the moment and is sold for an obscene amount of credits), a high-end electronic pad that is biometrically locked, a pile of blank flimsy, two pens, four... no, five ancient books written in a hieroglyphic-looking alphabet Fox has never seen before, a pretty-looking octahedron made of pinkish-colored glass and brass, a plain cylinder in matte black, and other apparently solely ornamental items.
No comm unit. No tools. No water. No meds.
He decides "kark it" and absently chews on a ration bar that tastes better than the best caf Fox has ever had while he studies the ornamental collection of superfluous luxury. The bar is chewy, not chalky, and gets rid of the taste of vomit in his mouth. He rolls the octahedron in his hand. It's the size of a smoke grenade and seems to flash with light for a moment. Fox squints, looks harder. He can't see as much as a glimmer inside it at all. Perhaps it's an electronic... something? He can't see how it could be useful at the moment, but it might be worth a second look. He lays it aside for now.
Next, he fingers the cylinder. It's made of some kind of metal and despite that feels curiously light. It fits well into his hand. Fox finds himself petting it like he would a tooka and feels a moment of chagrin. He prepares to put it down next to the octahedron - who knows what it's for? - when his finger unconsciously toggles a small, hidden switch at the bottom.
The next second, a laser blade ignites.
***
The laser blade is a beautiful, vibrant, dark red. Almost exactly Corrie Red.
He stares at it, enraptured.
It hums. Not a whine or a screech, a hum. Like the Mandalorian War Chants the Alphas taught them in secret, the ones Cody, Ponds, Bly and he used to hum when they cleaned their gear as cadets, practically only mouthing them so the trainers and the Kaminiise wouldn't hear. He misses his brothers. His head throbs anew.
He clutches it tighter. Unbelievable. This is a jedi lightsaber. And it's utterly, utterly beautiful.
The hum gets louder and somehow - more harmonious? His headache abates a bit. He strokes the cylinder - the sword hilt - again. He feels like he could curl up with it and pet it while it purrs in his lap like the stray tooka that visits Guard Central on most days. That Thorn has practically adopted.
The blade extinguishes just before Fox, in an unforgivable lapse of attention, puts a finger in front of the emitter side of the hilt. "Kark!" He almost drops it, but his hand can't seem to let go. What's a jedi lightsaber doing here, of all places? Does this room (this prison) belong to the jedi? Or, more likely, was the last prisoner a jedi? Fox feels nauseous again. If so, that is not a good sign for Fox's continuing life and health. Everybody knows that jedi don't like getting separated from their 'sabers. If a lightsaber is here and its jedi isn't--
He curls his fingers protectively around the hilt. I'll find who you belong to, he thinks fiercely.
He can't remember a single notice crossing his desk that refers to a jedi going missing on Coruscant. Coruscant is where the Jedi Temple is, where the jedi congregate, and study, and train, and raise their younglings. And somehow, avoid crossing paths with the Guard.
Unlike all of his brothers from the Command batches, Fox and the Coruscant Guard don't have a jedi general. Fox's immediate superior is Chancellor Palpatine--
Fox's headache flares up and stabs through his head violently. He almost drops the kriffing lightsaber and presses the thumb from his free hand into his left eye socket. The thumb, freshly reduced, burns like a blaster bolt and adds to the cacophony of hurts assailing his body.
A moment later finds him curled up on the tiled floor, the saber hilt pressed tightly against his chest. He uses his elbow to wipe some involuntary tears from his eyes and struggles to get up again. He still doesn't know who took him, to what end, and when said person or persons will return. He doesn't have time to waste. He has to get back to his cyare'se. He refuses to die, worse, to just disappear on them. He has to get out of here.
Somehow, his right hand ends up stretched out from his body, and the 'saber turns on again. The burning blade is still mesmerizing. The red is so bright and pretty. The hum is soothing.
Before he can lift the blade to unconsciously assume the ready position the trainers drilled into them during their sessions with the training kade, there is a slight sizzle. The tip of the plasma blade touched one of the tiles on the floor and-- melted a furrow into it.
Fox's poor, abused brain makes a leap. A lightsaber can melt pretty much anything but pure beskar, they've been taught.
Fox doubts all four walls are made of pure beskar.
He feels his heart lift and smiles. The hum seems to intensify for a moment, then his feet carry him almost by themselves to the wall opposite the blast door. He estimates the smallest radius he'll have to cut.
***
It's the middle of the night that Fox, bone-deep exhausted and staggering like a drunk, almost falls on top of poor Frills who's managing the reception desk at Guard Central. The sergeant only blinks at him and comms Stone who's apparently on shift.
Frills and everything around him have an aura. Fox blinks but his vision doesn't clear. His head throbs in time with his heartbeat. The lightsaber is clutched in his swollen left hand. Fox can hardly feel it.
He thinks dying right now would be less painful.
There's the hiss of a hypo. Visc'a shows up in his field of vision, the medic crouching over him, a worried frown on his face. Fox blinks. He's lying in Frills' lap, but Frills is moving him over onto Stone who's fallen to his knees at his side. He hears only every other word or so that's coming out of his cyare's mouth, but can identify Thorn and Thire's names. His left hand pulses. There's a song just at the edge of his spotty hearing. He's warm.
Fox smiles. He's home.