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2025-05-23
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intent and opportunity

Summary:

When the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.

“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick -"

(when the GAR’s most blindly obedient clone starts following in the footsteps of its first clone traitor, the galaxy starts to change)

Notes:

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

When the postmortem briefing on the Christophsis campaign concluded and the command staff allowed to disperse, Appo did not leave with the others, but stayed behind to talk to Rex.

“Captain, do you have a moment?” he asked, standing at attention and waiting until Rex nodded to continue. “I noticed an error in the flimsiwork and I’d appreciate your assistance in fixing it.”

Rex huffed a half-laugh. “You and your flimsiwork, Sergeant Appo,” he said, although his relatively light-hearted tone suggested that what could have been a censure was in fact a commendation, or at minimum a neutral observation. “I should’ve known. Given my little time and General Skywalker’s little interest, I think the 501st would fall apart if we didn’t have you.”

Rex paused at that point, as if he expected Appo to say something, but Appo remained silent, unsure of what aspect of Rex’s statement called for a response.

Possibly he was expected to issue some sort of expression of gratitude (“Much appreciated, sir”) or denial (“I’m sure it’s not that bad, sir”)? Both responses seemed inadequate, since Rex’s statement was fundamentally accurate: Appo’s immediate promotion, upon the 501st’s official deployment, to Master Sergeant (in addition to his existing duties as a regular sergeant) had been based on his patience for filling out flimsiwork, a task detested by General Skywalker and Captain Rex alike, and the 501st would have fallen apart if Appo didn’t regularly submit operations reports or procurement requests.

They might only be half a year into the war, but battlefields were costly, and the fact remained that replacement starship fuel and ammunition did not appear from thin air.

When Appo did not respond, Rex shook his head in a seemingly self-directed gesture, as if asking himself what he had been expecting. “Never mind. Permission to speak granted.”

“Thank you, sir. I identified an inconsistency in the personnel record following the campaign. Specifically, it relates to Sergeant Slick –”

Rex’s shoulders twitched. This was an anomalous gesture for him, something Appo would have expected to see in a more stressful situation than a casual conversation with a subordinate.

“Slick isn’t listed on either KIA or MIA lists,” Appo continued, filing the body language detail away as irrelevant. “But he also hasn’t reported in, which suggests –”

“Don’t worry about Slick,” Rex said, interrupting, and Appo paused.

This, too, was anomalous.

“Sir, you don’t understand,” he said. “There are only three categorizations for a trooper after a battle: killed in action, missing in action, or at their post. Slick isn’t listed in any of those.”

“I know that,” Rex said, which suggested a greater mastery of the art of flimsiwork than he had hitherto ever displayed. He was more a warrior than an administrator, though the same could be said for most clones, following their template’s model. “However, in this instance, I’m telling you that it’s not a problem.”

Appo was baffled. Had he somehow failed to adequately communicate his concern?

Not talking right as usual, Appo. Acting like you’re actually some sort of droid in there under the muscle. Maybe you should dig your knife into your arm to see if there are wires –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

(Appo had a problem with intrusive thoughts, which had haunted him for as long as he could remember. According to the medical staff back on Kamino, it was not entirely uncommon, even in genetically enhanced and supposedly psychological resilient troopers. One of the medics had described it as being a reaction to trauma, although Appo had developed it unusually early and without the battle that usually preceded post-battle shock. Regardless, the recommended treatment was the same, which was to learn to ignore them.)

“Sir, there are different procedures that need to be followed in each situation,” Appo said, and decided to start with the least unsavory option. “If Slick’s dead, we need to know so that we can add him to the remembrance wall –”

“Do not put him on the remembrance wall!”

Appo blinked.

Rex gritted his teeth and purposefully released a breath, as if attempting to regulate himself. “Listen, Sergeant,” he said. “Slick’s not dead, so you don’t need to add him to the wall or anything like that.”

“But –”

“I know you mean well. But I’m telling you, you really don’t need to worry about him.”

“But –”

“Is there a reason you keep asking about this?” Rex demanded. A moment later, his expression changed, softening with an expression of something like sympathy or empathy. “Is that it, Appo? I know you and Slick shared quarters. Were you and him – close?”

“No,” Appo said honestly. Slick was quick-witted, clever, and sociable, popular with his men, appreciated by his peers and superiors alike, while Appo was quiet and awkward, not the sort of person others would pick to spend off-time with. He was generally valued more for his skillset than any aspect of his personality, and he was fine with that, preferring to spend his time with the rare people he genuinely liked or else alone. He and Slick had never meshed especially well, though Appo wouldn’t consider their relationship bad, either; merely collegial and professional. The fact that they shared a bunkroom on account of their matching ranks (troopers were always at least four to a room except for high command, and sergeants were no exception) had minimal relevance.

It certainly wasn’t relevant to the inaccurate scenario that Rex had constructed for himself. Rex, himself, was known to occasionally get close with other troopers, a fact that everyone knew but politely did not say. This had already been well known back on Kamino, but following deployment Rex’s overly social tendencies had only intensified, extending beyond the clone ranks and encompassing even natborns like General Kenobi and previously-Commander now-General Skywalker. Lower-level staff gossip rampantly speculated that before the war was done they would see Rex run the whole gamut of emotional relationships, ranging from friendships, romantic entanglements, and even favoritism, though hopefully not enough to affect mission completion. Appo assumed that it was that tendency of Rex’s that had generated the misunderstanding, rather than any indications Appo had provided from his own conduct.

(Appo, notably, was not one of the troopers Rex had grown close to.)

(Prior to today, he would have said that Slick was.)

“No?” Rex asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir. Quite sure.”

“I see. Then…why the insistence…?”

“Things must be in their proper place, sir. If Slick isn’t dead, then he’s missing. That means we need to revoke his permissions and put him on a watchlist for a minimum period of –”

Enough, Sergeant.” Rex reached up and rubbed his forehead with his palm, as if he had started to develop a headache. “If this is just about the flimsiwork, then I’m officially telling you to drop it. The matter’s above your paygrade – and mine, too, for that matter. So just stop asking. Is that clear?”

“No, sir,” Appo said, meaning I don’t understand at all. When Rex glared, though, he grimaced and amended his words to “Yes, sir,” meaning I will put an end to this conversation as ordered.

“Good. Dismissed.”

Appo left.

He was no less puzzled, though. There simply was no categorization that fit the situation or explained Rex's bizarre instruction. A trooper was either at their post, dead, or missing, a category which covered both unidentified bodies left on the battlefield (the majority), those captured by the enemy (deemed dead), or potential deserters. In each case, the appropriate forms needed to be filed and appropriate actions needed to be taken: memorials for the dead, a watchlist for the living, instructions for those at their post. One could not simply “forget about” those processes, not even on the orders of a superior officer.

Under normal circumstances, Appo would always choose to obey orders. That was what clone troopers were made for, and it was trained into them from before they could even remember.

A clone trooper who did not obey orders was not worth anything.

On the other hand, if he’d listened every time either Rex or General Skywalker had said “don’t worry about it, we’ll get to it later”, the 501st would have run out of just about everything within months, if not weeks. They were a highly active battalion, alternating between joint and solo missions and regularly being redirected to new areas of high concern. Someone needed to stay on top of everything: not just replacing fuel and ammunition, but making sure there was enough food and water for all the men aboard, sourcing their clothing and armor and bedding, managing the euphemistic personnel shortage issues (everything from transfers to funerals to ordering replacement soldiers), ensuring critical spaceship repairs got done, resupplying with medicine and life-support units, making sure they got upgrades and new tech and sufficient pieces to keep their droids in working order…though they probably would’ve still had plenty of extra R2-line replacement parts, since General Skywalker always took meticulous care of his personal astromech unit.

Actually, that was a thought. Rex had said that the matter was “above his paygrade”, hadn’t he?

That meant it must have been marked as confidential at the Jedi General level.

Well, that was simple enough to solve.

Appo went to talk to General Skywalker.

You're violating protocol. They'll decomm you for this. They've just been waiting on an excuse -

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Protocol said that flimsiwork had to be filed promptly and accurately, which required an answer regarding the present status of Sergeant Slick (confirmed not dead, but not listed as missing). Protocol also said that unusual or uncharacteristic orders from a superior that violated SOP had to be reported to command, in case the superior in question had been compromised. Appo would strongly prefer that not to be the case. A simple chat with the General would achieve both objectives while avoiding hitting Rex with the stigma of a formally filed complaint.

It was clearly the optimal solution. 

Appo's nervous anxiety at the idea of talking one-on-one with his general, who usually limited his communications to Rex and whoever Rex had picked to be his immediate support squadron (typically a team composed of available troopers or relevant specialists, which had to date never included Appo in his Master Sergeant role), was purely his own issue. It was therefore his responsibility to ignore his discomfort and proceed.

He knocked at the General's door and waited until he heard a garbled "Come in!" before proceeding. "General?"

"Oh, hey!" General Skywalker lurched to his feet from where he'd been sitting at his tinkering desk. He seemed to be trying to stand in front of it, as if to conceal the R2 upgrades he was working on (a technically illegal upgraded flamethrower mod). Appo wasn't sure why he was bothering, both because Appo, as the General's subordinate, had no standing to criticize him regardless of what he was doing and because Appo had been the one to process the parts requests and oversee their delivery to the General's quarters. "Sorry, I thought you were Rex - probably should've checked first - anyway, yeah. It's, uh, Appo, right?"

"Yes, sir."

 "Right. Good. Rex’s mentioned you a couple of times. What can I do for you?"

"I'm hoping you can assist me with a flimsiwork issue -" The General's enthusiastic expression faltered. "- relating to the status of Sergeant Slick."

General Skywalker’s expression shifted once more. Appo was not particularly familiar with non-clone facial movements, but most human or humanoid species tended towards similar forms, which suggested to him that General Skywalker’s expression had moved from dread-imminent-boredom to dread-immediate-panic. However, there was no logical reason for an emotional reaction of that type, and no additional evidence to correlate or support Appo’s conclusion. It was entirely possible that he was mistaken regarding the nature of General Skywalker’s feelings at the moment.

He didn’t think he was, though.

“I spoke with Captain Rex about it –”

“You did? Oh, good –”

“– and he said the matter was confidential at a level higher than his,” Appo concluded. “That’s why I’ve come to ask you about it, sir.”

“Gee, thanks, Rex,” General Skywalker muttered under his breath. “Uh, listen, Appo…about Slick…”

He trailed off. Appo politely waited for him to continue, but the General seemed to have lost steam. Instead, he was glancing around the room as if seeking an answer somewhere in the mess of tools, parts, and miscellanea.

Alternatively, he was possibly waiting for Appo to be the first to break the silence, but that would have been a tactical error on his part. Appo was fairly notorious for what his trainers liked to call his “imperturbable even keel” and what his peers preferred to call his “stone face with dead eyes” – even the training sim droids lost patience faster than he did.

It wasn’t that Appo didn’t feel the awkwardness of standing there and staring blankly at his General while his General shifted from foot to foot and cleared his throat repeatedly. It was just that he was so lost as to what to do about it that it seemed safer to stay in position and wait.

“…listen,” General Skywalker finally said. “Listen, Appo. Slick’s – uh – that is – what did you say that Rex said about it, again?”

“He said that it was confidential at a level above his,” Appo repeated obediently. “Specifically, that it was ‘above his pay grade’. He requested that I forget about it, but that would be contrary to protocol.”

And would require a formal report of malfeasance that would go on the Captain’s permanent record, so it would be great if the General would countermand that order at once, please.

General Skywalker brightened. “Yeah, no, actually, that sounds right? You should forget about it. It’s not a big deal.”

“Post-battle personnel records must be updated with accurate information,” Appo said, starting to wonder if it was them that had all lost their minds or if it was just him. “If we don’t supply a status, we can’t take appropriate steps. The record will not be accurate.”

“It’s all right if the record’s not accurate this once,” General Skywalker said, for some reason waving his hand vaguely in the air, as if to bat away some invisible gnat. “You can just move on.”

That’s right, you should just move on. You have so much to do, and this is taking time you really don’t have. General Skywalker and Rex know what they’re doing. This is just the once

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

(Oddly non-violent. Most of Appo’s intrusive thoughts about the Jedi involved killing them.)

“Sir, operational efficiency depends on accurate record-keeping,” Appo said firmly. “Even a single deviation potentially leaves room for future inconsistencies. We’ve got to file something, it’s not something we can just skip.”

General Skywalker grimaced. “Right. Yes. Of course… Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got unusually strong willpower and clarity of purpose, Sergeant Appo?”

“…no, sir,” Appo said. Was that relevant to the present conversation?

“Listen…okay…uh…he’s…what are the options again?”

“KIA, MIA or at his station, sir.” Appo paused, then added, helpfully, “Captain Rex has already confirmed the Sergeant is not dead, sir, and I can confirm he’s not at his post. Based on Captain Rex’s reaction, it also does not appear that he is ‘missing’.”

“…right.” The General groped around in the air as if trying to grab something, then appeared to hit on something. “You said Rex said it was confidential, right? Isn’t there some sort of form you’d need to file to get something confidential opened up? And some sort of status relating to that?”

“Yes, sir,” Appo said. “Newly issued Form 15b63. Anything related to an information request would be listed as pending.”

“Great!” The General beamed at him. “Why don’t you file one of those? By the time that’s done, there should be an answer for you, and you’ll be able to make the flimsiwork all nice and neat.”

The flimsiwork was only the means of making sure the record on which they based all other decisions was accurate, not the end in itself. But Appo did not bother to correct the General with information he was fairly certain the General did not wish to receive – the General was not a brother, who he trusted to respond to his inquiries in a reasonable and cooperative fashion. At any rate, he’d gotten an answer, or as close as he thought he was likely to get of one.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

He went back to his quarters and called up the form on his datapad. It was one of the Jedi additions to Republic standard. It had been issued in one of the recent circulars, which had included an explanation of when it was appropriate for use and the reasoning behind it – something about how belonging to the Jedi Order meant entitling the rank and file to getting answers to questions from the Jedi if they had them.

It sounded like a whole lot of junk to Appo. Soldiers weren’t meant to ask questions that weren’t mission-relevant, they were supposed to obey. That was the point of being soldiers.

A clone trooper who didn’t obey orders wasn’t worth anything.

Appo checked, and, to his lack of surprise, the number of times Form 15b63 had been filed could be counted in the low double digits. Most of them appeared to have been filed in error, although there appeared to be at least one instance of Alpha-17 submitting a form requesting information regarding…hm. To translate it into the vernacular, he appeared to be asking “what the kark is wrong with General Kenobi”, and the answer provided was “he’s just like that, sorry”.

(Appo had only met Alpha-17 very briefly during his time on Kamino, and they had not gotten along particularly well. One time, relatively early during command class training, Alpha-17 had loudly said in the presence of his favorite training squad of commanders-to-be that if all clone troopers could be represented by landing strip lights, Appo’s would have been dim enough to cause a ship to crash. Appo still had no idea what he'd done to merit the comment.)

The form itself was easy to fill out. Appo listed his name and number, added identifying details regarding his battalion, described the nature of his request and the relevant background, and even attached his personal security clearances as support. He expressed, in the strongest terms as he could manage, that identifying Slick's ultimate fate was important not necessarily for itself, but as a matter of good conduct and appropriate protocol, which seemed more likely to be convincing. He made sure to indicate that he would be satisfied with mere notification that a resolution of the information issue had been reached, under the assumption that the matter likely exceeded his personal clearance level. 

He submitted the form, designating it as urgent and tagging it for the next data burst headed back to HQ on Coruscant. These could often be unpredictable, creating all sorts of delays; there was a reason that urgent orders came through by holocall. But since Appo was in charge of the comm officer's schedules, it was easy enough to arrange for the burst to go out the same day.

Unexpectedly, he received a response in the very next return burst, only three hours later.

Your inquiry has been received and has entered processing. Your request for information is very important to us, and we are committed to answering it in a timely matter. If you have not heard back in two weeks and your question remains outstanding, please resubmit the form.

May the Force be with you.

~J. Nu

Appo stared at the message. He’d never seen anything like it before. The vast majority of the forms he filed went into the yawning black void of GAR High Command with no response whatsoever, and those responses he did get were brusquely dismissive. Presumably this bizarrely conversational tone was due to the involvement of the Jedi.

It was probably just an automatic filler response.

But...that didn't mean he couldn't take it seriously.

The response did say to resubmit the form if he didn't get an answer. Technically speaking, it was not an order Appo was obligated to follow, as it came from outside his line of command - but since the Jedi were involved, Appo could choose it treat it as one. All Jedi were Generals. It wouldn't be totally against protocol. Orders were meant to be followed.

It would, however, be a waste of time.

Appo wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t actually blind, either, no matter what people thought about him. He followed orders without question, of course, but his strict adherence to protocol wasn’t about being dogmatic for the sake of it, the way it was for some others. It was because the rules were simply far too easy to break – and once you started breaking them, it was easier and easier to keep on doing so, and harder and harder to turn back. If Slick could be vanished without a proper designation, then so could anyone else, and that was a dangerous precedent to set. But in truth, one trooper more or less wouldn't actually cause any real issues. The 501st were due to get a new cohort of clones shipped out of Kamino relatively soon, exact details to be determined. It would be easy enough to just slot one of those into the right place, keep the numbers even. There would be no disruption in service, and the record would not really be affected.

In short, it would be easy to do as Rex and the General had instructed and to leave it alone. Appo had already filed the request form, which was more than anyone could have expected him to do on behalf of a fellow clone he had no particular feelings about. He could just leave it at that, and move on to the myriad of other far more urgent tasks he had to do. 

Slick probably wouldn't have done even half as much if it had been Appo who had been left in this strange technical limbo, assuming he would have even noticed it in the first place. 

Assuming anyone would have noticed.

A clone is just a copy, meant to be used up and discarded. Why must you keep persisting? You’re making a bad impression on your commanding officer, and for no reason at all. Isn’t it bad enough already that you’re you, without making it worse..?

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Appo finished his work period and went to his bunk. All of the sergeants he shared a room with were on the same shift, meaning that they all rose and slept on the same schedule; there was another group that was on duty during the other shifts. There should have been more of them to fill out a full complement, but lots of people had died, and not every post had been filled yet. Officers in particular took longer to train and were harder to replace, even NCOs like him, and they were running low while they waited for resupply and promotions to be doled out. Every sergeant was meant to have had their own squad of five troopers to focus on, but they had already started grouping multiple squads under one sergeant - a temporary measure, they said, and meant it, but Appo suspected that as long as the war continued, personnel pressures would get only worse, not better.

Appo laid there, in the dark, and listened to the others breathe. Only two others, now, since Slick was gone, and the sound of the room that he had grown used to was different. 

That wasn't uncommon. The war was savage, brutal, and there were new losses after every battle. There wasn’t a single trooper outside of the shinies that didn’t know the feeling of looking for someone and seeing only an empty gap, blank spots in their ranks filled only by the ghosts of the dead.

Only...Slick wasn't dead.

He wasn't dead, he wasn't missing, he wasn't at his post.

He wasn't anything. Not even a numerical designation on the right list.

"Hey, Riven," Appo said, staring blankly at the ceiling above his bunk. 

A huff, cough, the noises of someone already mostly asleep waking back up partway. "Yeah, Appo?"

"Can we swap third squads?"

"Third..? Oh, Slick's old squad? Sure, you're welcome to them, if you're sure about it. It's tough luck, losing their sarge like that."

It was a nasty hit to morale, he meant. Clones were designed to be loyal, loyal to the Jedi, to the Republic, to each other, and that loyalty generally flowed up. Losing a superior was particularly hard, and a superior you actually liked was even harder. And when morale was low...

No one expected Slick's squad to survive for long. 

Whoever their next sergeant was, they would have to be ready for that. Both emotionally and practically - it would be their job to make sure that the grieving squad didn't take anyone with them when they went down. That was the grim reality of life as a sergeant, right up close and personal with the troopers and the way the war devastated them in a way the commanders and captains and even lieutenants rarely were. It was not a task any of them enjoyed, and so they generally split it among themselves, taking turns. 

Unless someone volunteered.

"I'm sure," Appo said. “I’ll take them.”

"All yours, then. I'll register the transfer in the morning."

Appo didn't say anything.

"...or I could register it now. Like the diligent, protocol-abiding soldier I am and aspire to be."

"Thanks, Riven,” Appo said, satisfied. “Tell me your preferred position for the next campaign, and I'll give you first shot at it if I can."

Riven made a pleased sound, even as Hutch in the bunk next to his immediately came awake with sounds of complaint and jealousy. He would almost certainly challenge Riven for the privilege during their next downtime, and only chance and the sabbac table would tell who actually had it by the time they went into the battlefield once more.

Appo closed his eyes.

Notes:

So victoriousscarf and I were talking about Appo one day, because I love him tremendously and have been requesting him in all my recent exchanges, and then she hit me with the image of him meeting Slick's squad. And since the episode with Slick lives rent free in my mind at all times, I couldn't resist, I *had* to write a little something. And then a lot of something. And now here I am, with a fic that's making full efforts to go out of control...

Chapter Text

When Appo woke up from his assigned rest period, his HUD was crammed full of notifications, indicating that a gigantic pile of new work had been heaped up on his plate.

Their battalion had been abruptly redirected to Teth for a secret mission, meant for Jedi General and command eyes only, but Appo could piece together enough from the supporting form requests to conclude that it had all the markers of an epic shitshow in the making. It seemed to involve Hutts, Separatists, the high likelihood of a significant droid presence that would set up their already exhausted battalion for heavy losses - and a new Jedi Commander, who came with idiosyncratic food requirements, the prospect of inevitable personality clashes with existing command, and the need to reorganize their battalion's upper structure to accommodate being led into battle by a being who had not yet reached the age of maturity for her species. Someone had to do it, and with Rex being busy managing both tactical-strategic planning and the aforementioned personality clashes, and no lieutenants left, much of it fell on Appo's shoulders. 

Almost all of it was marked as mission critical. There was enough work to ensure that Appo would be up to his eyeballs in it for the next three days straight, enough that he might need to skip both food and rest periods if he was to have any hope of finishing it in time.

Instead, Appo sorted out the most important requests, then backburnered the rest and went to talk with his new third squad.

He could hear voices coming from the rec room near where he’d put his new third squad, and one familiar voice in particular – it looked like Sikes had somehow beaten everyone else there. And, of course, he’d started talking, because of course he was talking. The usual trick with Sikes was to figure out how to get him to shut up, instead.

“– bet you he’s going to come here straight off to see you,” he was saying confidently. “He might get tied up in something first, that happens, since our Sarge does everything and a half around here. Probably should’ve gotten stepped up to lieutenant when we lost the ones we had. But he’ll make the time. It’ll be important to him, since he wanted you boys to join us.”

“Doubt it,” one of the squad said, sounding bitter. “No one wants us. Reassignments are completely random.”

“Your reassignment got changed late at night, which means it wasn’t SOP,” Sikes said firmly. Appo had taught him ages ago how to extract meaning from flimsiwork trails, and it was nice to see him using that brain of his rather than just his mouth. “And if it’s not standard operating protocol, it’s personal selection. I’m telling you, he picked you out.”

“You’re wrong.”

“He’s right, actually,” Appo said mildly, stepping into the room. They all scrambled up from where they were sitting to salute. “At ease. Hi, Sikes. Making friends already?”

“Someone’s gotta do it for you, Sarge,” Sikes said easily. He was too well-trained to linger, so he saluted appropriately once again, then headed out to start his active-duty shift.

Appo tapped at his comm to slide a new assignment into Sikes’ schedule, asking him to kick off the integration process for the new second and fourth squads Appo had also been temporarily assigned. It appeared that onboarding was a task he enjoyed, and Appo would always support his men in their interests wherever he could. If Sikes kept up in his enthusiasm, Appo might propose a transfer to Rancor Battalion, get him involved in training other clones – though that assumed Sikes cared about the new clones, as opposed to simply wanting to be helpful to Appo. Something for later contemplation.

In the meantime, Sikes’ departure left Appo alone with Slick’s squad.

He left his comm alone and looked them over. There were five of them, a whole squad, and personnel records showed that they were a training batch that had graduated to a fighting batch, a group that had spent virtually their entire lives together. They’d been assigned on the ground from the very start of the war and had made it through intact, a testament to the care and attention Slick had spent on them, and some luck besides.

A personal note tagged on their file had their names as Jester, Gus, Punch, Sketch, and Chopper. 

Gus was the one who had spoken. He was scowling, bitter, everything about his body language reading as defensive – so far, so expected, a reasonable reaction to the loss of a superior officer and subsequent reassignment. But rather than drawing back towards the rest of the squad, instinctively inclining towards safety and familiarity as Appo would have assumed, he had pulled himself apart from them, putting himself forward but also away. He wasn’t the only one, either: Chopper, identity clear from his scars, hung deliberately backwards, his shoulders arched and tight as if expecting a blow, and the others drew away from them both, yet also did not pull together the way one might have expected if the two of them had done something wrong.

They were all angry with each other, this group. It wasn’t just grief over losing Slick, but something specific, some behavior, some action that they all secretly hated themselves for. Something they all blamed themselves for, if Appo had to guess.

You'd know all about that, wouldn't you? You know what you did, even if no one else does. Except maybe they do. Maybe they've all just been pretending to not know. Maybe that’s the real reason no one wants you around -

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Appo continued to look at them, comparing them to their personnel logs and his own experience in thoughtful silence. After a few long moments, the squad grew antsy, uncomfortable with the quiet, and unsurprisingly a moment later they were the first to break.

“You said Sikes was right, that you’d picked us on purpose,” Punch said, tense and guarded. “Why?”

“Because you’re Slick’s squad,” Appo said, and observed with some confusion the way they all flinched. “I’ve been looking into what happened with him, and I thought you might be able to help.”

Silence.

Not the sort of confused and awkward silence that happened when your CO said something bizarre and you had to fall back on protocol until you figured out how to respond. No, this silence was deliberate: lips pressed tightly together, gazes aimed anywhere but at Appo, stress writ large in every line of their bodies and faces. 

They were hiding something.

Whether what they were hiding was relevant to Appo's inquiry remained to be seen. People hid things all the time, stressed out over all sorts of things, and sometimes they thought their behavior was relevant when it actually wasn't. Appo was painfully familiar with that behavioral pattern. Back on Kamino, one of the natborn trainers, a medic, had once remarked on him as an example of an "overly developed guilt complex", which felt inaccurate in Appo's case but was not unhelpful as an analytical model to use for others. 

"I'm not planning on interrogating you," Appo said, and noted the way they all flinched once again when he said that, and the sudden release of tension in those that believed him. They feared the notion of interrogation, then, which was interesting if not immediately useful information. "I hope that one day you will trust me with what you know. It might help me find him."

That got a reaction, all of them twitching and sharing startled glances between them. Appo wasn't sure about the emotional impetus there, and he did not expect to be able to deduce it. Squads, particularly long-term training squads, shared their own means of silent communication, and it varied too much between groups to be interpreted accurately. 

Until someone broke. 

"Find him?" Jester asked abruptly. "You think Sarge is alive?" There was naked hope in his voice, which cracked halfway through the final word, as if he were still in his sevens growth cycle. 

The others in the squad glared at him as if he'd given something up. Which he hadn't, since Appo had no concept of the background context that would have provided meaning.

"I know he is," Appo said. "The Captain confirmed it to me personally. He wouldn't say what had happened, though, or where he is now, so that's what I'm looking into."

Silence once again, but this time it was the confused "what the kark did my new CO just say" type. Clones were supposed to obey orders, whether explicit or implicit, and Appo had just made very clear that he was pursuing a line of inquiry that the Captain had not chosen to answer – though whether that additional pursuit had been tacitly endorsed was still a possibility. Still, it was the sort of thing led to questions, might call for further explanation.

Appo didn't elaborate.

You’re already getting them involved, and that’s bad enough. What if someone notices? What if someone sees? What if someone decides to do something about it? You know what they’ll do to you. You know they’re going to –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

"You’re saying that you transferred us to you because you want our help finding our Sarge," Punch said slowly, expression wavering, but then he scowled, expression turning suspicious. "Why do you want to find him, anyway? What does it matter to you what happened or where he's gone? Did you need something from him or something?"

Appo had no idea where Punch was going with that line of questioning. 

"No," he said honestly. "I don't want anything from him. I want to find him because he should be found."

A pause.

"What does that mean?"

"We're all numbers," Appo tried to explain. "Every number goes in a list, a proper list with a proper place. We might not have anything else, but we have that much. But Slick's not in the right place. He's not anywhere, and no one seems to care. That's not right. So I want to find him."

They were all staring at him. 

Appo must have made a mess of it, as he should have guessed he would. He hated explaining things. Things that seemed clear to him always seemed to come out confused and backwards whenever he tried to voice them, causing others to look at him oddly, while what they all seemed to understand intuitively seemed always utterly obscure to him. 

"Who even are you," Sketch said, voice wondering. It didn't quite sound like a question, but it was at least something Appo could answer.

In fact, he probably should have started this conversation out by introducing himself. It was stupid to assume everyone already knew who he was. Not even this group, even if they were same shift, even if their squads regularly practiced together, even if he'd shared a bunkroom with their sergeant for the entire war so far.

"My name is Appo," he said. "501st battalion’s Master Sergeant, designation CC-1119."

"Wait, you're a CC?" Jester blurted out. "I thought -"

Practically everyone else in the squad lunged at him, presumably trying to get him to shut up before he offended their new CO.

Appo wanted to tell them not to worry, but no one ever believed him when he said that. By now he'd learned that it was less awkward to just pretend he hadn't heard whatever had been said. He wished there was some way he could have conveyed to them that it really wasn't an issue, and that he didn't take it personally.

It was what it was, after all. 

CC was a rank bestowed on people who had completed command training on Kamino. They were meant to go on to become high ranked officers: commanders and captains and even marshal commanders, or lieutenants at the bare minimum. Not every officer was a CC. Rex, for instance, had been trained as a commando and, some informal training aside, had never gone through the full course himself, but he’d won enough merit to be stepped up to his present position after Geonosis had ravaged the ranks. Still, you could generally expect every CC to be an officer. Proper officers, fully commissioned, not NCOs like sergeants or corporals. 

Appo had originally been slated to be a commander, back before they'd broken him all the way back down to sergeant. It was not a secret. Common troopers might not know it, but everyone of rank did, if they were paying attention. It was as close to an expulsion as they could get for someone who had completed the entire command track course, a hair's breadth away from a decommissioning order, the sort of story that trainers might use as a warning for others. 

It was fine. 

Appo had heard every comment that could be made on the subject, and imagined quite a few more. A garbled attempt at asking a question was nothing in comparison to that, particularly since Jester clearly didn't mean anything malicious by it.

It was fine.

It was fine fine fine fine fine fine fine FINE

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

It was not fine. Not really. But there was no changing it, and once there was no changing something, there was no point in worrying about it.

Still, Appo didn’t want to make things worse by embarrassing his new squad, so he waited patiently for the awkward coughing and shuffling and nervous glances to subside. When it seemed like they had calmed down once more, he spoke again: "Do you have any questions for me?"

"Yeah, I've got one," Gus said. He was still scowling. "You know Sarge never mentioned you to us, right?"

Appo was briefly puzzled, both because the statement was nonsensical (they were same shift squads, living in each other's pockets, so at absolute minimum there was no way Slick hadn't mentioned Appo at least in the context of scheduling drills or training time) and because it appeared to be a non sequitur (what relevance did Slick’s history of talking about Appo, or lack thereof, have to Appo's attempt to find Slick now?), but then it occurred to him that Gus might have been using the same incorrect analytical framework that Rex had.

How odd. Maybe there really was something about Appo's conduct that suggested it.

"We weren't close," Appo said, and from the corresponding expression of doubtfulness on Gus's face determined that he had guessed correctly. "That isn't why I'm doing this. My efforts to find him are neither based on nor conditional upon his conduct."

For whatever reason, that got all of them to stare at him as if he had said something interesting. Then they glanced at each other, meaningfully, demonstrating that traces of their former unit cohesion remained despite whatever had happened between them. 

"Similarly, my duties as your sergeant will not be impacted by your behavior, at least in relation to Sergeant Slick," Appo said, folding his hands together in front of him to keep them still. "If you choose never to assist me in my search, that is fine, and I will carry on regardless. My expectations and requirements for you are limited to your duties as troopers, which I expect you to carry out as before. I do not expect us to run into any issues in that regard, based on what Sergeant Slick has said -"

"Sarge told you about us?!" Punch exclaimed.

Appo nodded. "Of course," he said seriously. "He has always spoken of you very highly. He was always boasting about you, saying that you were the finest squad in the whole Seventh Sky, and would regularly lay down money to support his claim."

Appo meant the statement to be taken as a compliment, as a reassurance to them that he did not see their squad in a negative fashion despite their having lost their sergeant. It was the sort of thing he would have expected a squad to enjoy hearing, something to make them smile and let them feel the brief joy of nostalgia, if nothing else, and perhaps a little pride. But that was not what he got.

Very unexpectedly, the squad appeared almost stricken by his words. Tension was everywhere in their bodies, and their faces had all abruptly gone sallow, their expressions pained.

"He - did?" Sketch asked, looking lost.

"Sarge bet money on us?" 

"Bet he got into fights for us, too."

Gus looked sick to his stomach. "I knew he was proud of us," he murmured. "But...really? He talked us up that much?"

"Of course," Appo said. "He loved you very much."

The squad's reaction to that statement was visceral.

If Appo was interpreting their expressions correctly, they seemed agonized, even despairing, as if he’d just torn out their guts instead of telling them a basic fact of life. It simply made no sense to Appo. Slick's affection for his boys had always been exceedingly obvious, going well above and beyond the regular Kamino standard for a sergeant; everyone, even the social awkward Appo, was well aware of the extent of it. And yet, to see Slick’s squad receive the information, Appo thought he might have well been justified in thinking that it had never occurred to them before. 

Another anomaly. But what could explain it?

Before Appo could ask, however, Chopper abruptly took a step forward. He had stayed in the back throughout the entire conversation, silent and barely looking at anyone, clearly uncomfortable. He had more scars than the others, a big one on the right side of his shaved head and another on his right cheek, so Appo had assumed his reticence was related to that, but from the way the other troopers stopped to look at him, that was clearly not the issue. 

"I take trophies from the battlefield, sometimes," he said flatly, chin up and expression mulish, defiant – and desperate. "Battle droid fingers. B1s, usually. I make them into necklaces."

Appo stared at him. 

He had been expecting some sort of confession, especially something that the troopers perceived to be a fault. It would be something meant to act both as a distraction or diversion, keeping the CO at bay through a preemptive admission of guilt on a different subject, and as a means of testing and evaluating Appo, whether his sincerity or level of tolerance. They would need reassurance as to his trustworthiness if they planned to rely on him, in battle or otherwise, and even more so given that he was asking them to share information that they were clearly uncomfortable with sharing. Information that the commanding officers of their battalion had explicitly refused to share, no less. Chopper being the one to throw himself onto the thermogrenade, so to speak, was also not necessarily a surprise, all tension between them aside.

But even so, Appo hadn't been expecting it to be that.

It wasn’t even that the fault was so great. Sure, collecting trophies was not only a breach of protocol but also widely viewed as a disgusting and deplorable practice, a mark of bad character – and that was even without considering that Chopper apparently then engaged in craftwork utilizing the dismembered pieces, and presumably then wore the results of his efforts on the battlefield. But Appo had heard worse. No, what worried him was that this was their starting play, their initial opening, and it was already this extreme.

That suggested that whatever else they were hiding was even worse. Potentially much worse.

You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Why do you always do this? Why is it always you? Why can’t you ever just learn to stop? Maybe you should stop. Maybe you should learn to just give up. It’s not like you ever do anyone any good, anyway.

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

"I see," Appo said neutrally. "Is it something you feel compelled to do, or merely an expression of frustration?"

Chopper frowned, taken aback. "What?"

"I asked if it was something you felt compelled -"

"No, sir, I heard you find the first time," Chopper said. "I just...I don’t…what do you mean, compelled?"

"Compulsions can be a symptom of battle shock, which contrary to the usual Kaminoan line is actually extremely common in troopers," Appo explained. "So is a new willingness to engage in extreme behaviors previously seen as unthinkable. It’s not uncommon to feel tremendous amounts of anger, rage and fury and frustration, which in turn can lead to abnormal reactions and behavioral patterns. Trophy collection in particular is more regularly seen than you'd think, despite the taboo."

Chopper stared at him.

“You’ll have to stop, of course,” Appo said. “It’s against protocol. But I can understand why you did it. We just need to figure out if it’s something you can stop on your own or if you think you’re going to need help with it.”

Chopper’s expression had gone beyond shock and turned into something vacant. "You mean, you don't think I'm - deficient?"

Gus flinched, hard, which provided a strong indication of where that particular line of thinking might have come from. 

"You are not deficient," Appo said. As far as he was concerned, no trooper under his purview was or would ever be. He wasn’t a Kaminoan. "You have been put under great stress, and you have reacted to it in a particular manner, that is all. I will need to confiscate your necklaces, since there's always a risk of the Seppies slipping in some tech we don't want to be carrying, but I could probably see about giving you back some pieces after they've been melted down. If that would help."

"I...let me think about it?"

"Of course.” Appo thought about it for an extra moment. “You could think about seeing a medic about it, too, if you don’t want to talk to me as your CO. They can be pretty helpful, in my experience. But as long as you commit to stopping the conduct going forward, if you can, then this information will go no further than me."

"The Captain already knows," Jester said. "He was there when -" He paused. "When it came up."

"I'll tell him that I've got it handled, if he asks." Appo's HUD beeped. More urgent tasks had come in, including a priority message that had bypassed his temporary muting. "Listen, I've got to go, but you should take an extra rest period today and be ready to restart training and battle prep drills tomorrow. We won't have a lot of time to get used to each other before the next engagement, but I'd like to take advantage of the time we do have to ensure we work together to our best ability."

"...you're really not going to ask again about – about what we know, about our Sarge?" Chopper asked.

"I said this wouldn't be an interrogation," Appo said. "Is there something you want to tell me now?"

No one said anything. 

"Then no, I won't ask again. Enjoy your rest period, and I'll see you at 0600."

They were all still staring at Appo's back as he headed out, the door sliding shut behind him, and if he had to bet they would be staring for a while yet. But at least they hadn't been glaring at each other towards the end. They hadn’t even remembered to pull away from each other, to put the distance between them, gaps formed out of anger and hurt – not gone, of course, because those sorts of cracks in trust were hard to repair. But a little smaller, perhaps, something that could be forgotten for a brief moment.

They would want to talk about him – soldiers always wanted to talk about a new CO, and Appo was self-aware enough to know that he had always been perceived as being rather an odd one – and maybe that would help a little, too. Help rebuild some of the trust that had been damaged, help with whatever it was that had ripped them apart and turned them against each other.

Whatever it was, it had been bad. Bad enough that a member of a training squad had called another deficient, and meant it enough to be believed, even if he obviously regretted it. Bad enough that in the face of danger they no longer cleaved together, no longer felt comfortable in each other’s presence, no longer seemed to trust each other…it was almost as though they felt the need to guard their backs from each other, as if anticipating some sort of betrayal.

These things happened, of course. But inside a squad? In those small groupings created on Kamino that were held so precious by every clone, the ones that did everything together, spent the larger part of their short and miserable lives together? That took some doing, in most cases.

Not all. As Appo knew all too well, not all.

(Why do you always have to be you?)

That didn’t seem to be the case here, though. These boys were good ones, Appo was sure of it. Slick had always been so proud of them, and Slick was clever, thoughtful, at times even startlingly perceptive. He wouldn’t have spoken so strongly or positively about them if he didn’t really believe in them. Even if they somehow didn’t realize the measure of his affection, it didn’t change his testament as to their quality.

Hopefully, after they’d had some time to think about it, they’d agree to help Appo find Slick. Or maybe they wouldn’t. But either way, Appo hoped for their sake that they could find a way through what had happened to them, a way back to each other. All they needed was to stay alive long enough to do so.

That last part was his job. 

Appo went back to work with renewed purpose. 

As he marched through the hallways, he added a small notation on his personal calendar – a reminder, set for two weeks’ time. He was going to be very busy, after all, and he wouldn’t want to forget to resubmit that information request.

Chapter Text

Teth was every bit the shitshow Appo had expected it to be, and Bothawui and Mimban after it were certainly no walks in the park. Mimban in particular was the first instance of Rex deciding to take off on his own to complete the mission objective, but it quickly proved not to be the last: the new Jedi Commander in particular enjoyed dragging him along with her, regardless of the criticality of her mission to the overall engagement, and soon enough the General was following suit.

This was all well and good, extremely effective and a great honor and important besides, as there was nothing greater than serving the Jedi they had all been made for. But also, Jedi or no Jedi, Captain or no Captain, they weren’t going to get very far if their exit ship got blown up or the entire battalion got slaughtered while they were gone or if a droid army fell on their backs because the clone battle line had broken and let them through. Which meant that someone needed to manage the rest of the battlefield while the strike team went out and did their thing.

That someone somehow kept being Appo.

This was extremely stressful.

Not as a matter of capacity: Appo was perfectly capable of running a battlefield. He had all the relevant training, and tactics in specific had always been an area of strength for him. Once the General and the Captain had decided on the strategic plan, Appo was more than capable of implementing it without assistance while making on-the-ground decisions to tweak their approach in response to changing circumstances. But being regularly left alone to deal with everything without possessing the appropriate rank to sign off on his own decisions was, to quote Kix, their newest medic, an “aggravating stress factor” that Appo really didn’t need.

Not to mention the fact that all of this was in addition to the critical flimsiwork tasks he had already assigned himself because no one else in the battalion seemed willing to do them.

Frustrating didn’t begin to cover it.

All the sudden activity limited his time to train with his squads, luckily now reduced to just the original five and Slick’s boys. Given that Appo had seen the death toll of Teth incoming, he’d stuck the latter into the reserves for that battle, with the universal agreement of the other squad leaders – it was one thing to anticipate a squad taking the exit ramp, so to speak, and another thing entirely to enable them to do so. That had gotten Slick’s boys through that battle, alive, and he’d gotten Lacey to keep an eye on them for the next few, but he knew that that wasn’t sustainable as a long-term plan.

Not least of all because it required Appo to scrupulously fail to ask how Lacey had kept them out of trouble, and that was always a headache to keep straight.

It was a relief when Appo was finally able to carve out some time to do some training sessions, a little bit of breathing room while Rex was out assisting in a quality control survey involving inspections of a handful of their outposts. Of course, strictly speaking, supervised group training wasn't necessary. Once a trooper graduated Kamino, they were expected to have the discipline to do the work to maintain their top tier physical conditioning on their own. Exercise, weights, target practice, weapon care refreshers, formation sims – everything had certain monthly minimums that troopers had to meet, but unless something new had come down the pipeline that everyone needed training in, a new weapon or maneuver or something, then by and large a trooper's downtime was meant to be their own.

Unless they happened to have a hardass sergeant that was willing to sacrifice his own free time to infringe upon theirs.

Slick had been like that. Appo was, too.

Slick had made it fun for his troopers, though. He'd leavened his insistence on in-person group drill by pairing it with morale-building exercises, often incorporating moonshine or games or gambling, making it more fun for the team to stay together than be apart. 

Appo didn't do that. 

He didn't really know how. His manner was abrupt and impersonal. He favored concise, even terse, purpose-driven communication, and had little patience for small talk. Even during the occasional social event held in the officers' lounge, he usually just sat off to the side, drinking quietly and doing his best to refrain from bringing anyone else down. His own squad seemed to like him, but he didn't know how to try to deliberately replicate that with a new group.

They just pity you. Or maybe it's themselves that they pity, since they're the ones that got stuck with you as their CO. They're probably just counting down the days until you bring them down. Just like you brought down -

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

"Basic drills today," Appo said to Slick's squad. "Standard formations and maneuvers. Don't worry about going fast today, though ultimately I'd like to see your response times improve over your last sim scores before the next campaign starts."

They saluted and went into the starting form for warm up, then launched right into it.

Appo supervised, occasionally calling out corrections or suggesting improvements in posture or positioning. He jotted down some notes in his HUD diary as well, ideas for more long term training: Gus favored his right side, defensive over his left where he'd been injured before, which would be improved by running mirror side drills for a few days straight; Punch could stand to practice his footwork more, particularly on uneven ground; Jester tended towards excessive focus on certain details and would benefit from additional flash training on situational awareness. Chopper and Sketch had opposite problems, Chopper too likely to throw himself forward and Sketch too likely to hang back, and Appo thought that temporarily switching their team positions would help break them of those bad habits before some droid or another took advantage of them.

Also, none of them trusted each other.

That was fundamentally the real problem they had. A squad was the core building block of the army for a reason. They were supposed to work together, balancing out each other's weak spots with their strengths, overcoming obstacles together. Teamwork and cooperation were critical. Without special training, a single clone trooper acting alone wasn’t fighting a battle, they were just buying time at the inevitable cost of their life.

Appo called for a halt about halfway through the drill. He'd seen enough, and there was no point in wasting their time any further.

"We can keep going," Sketch said. "We're not deficient, sir."

There was that word again.

Unsurprising. The words a beloved brother wielded against another cut the deepest wounds, and were the hardest to forget.

(Why do you have to be you?)

"I don't think you're deficient," Appo said.

"Then why'd you bench us?!" Chopper burst out. "You stuck us in the reserves -"

"Like we were shinies -"

"- or on some sort of kriffed-up medical leave -"

"Just because of Sarge -"

"That wasn't the reason," Appo said.

“Yeah?! You put your other squad into battle –”

“– think we can’t even complete basic drill –”

“Stuck us on the karking bench –”

“Bet it’s because you can’t risk us dying before we spill our guts about the Sarge, huh? Then we get conveniently fragged right after –”

“If I wanted you to tell me what I wanted to know, I would have my boys hold you down while I broke every bone in Jester’s arm,” Appo said dully, and they all went quiet and still and shocked, staring at him. “One by one, phalanxes, metacarpals, carpus bones, ulna, radius, and so on up to the neck, until he talked or else one of you did. And if I wanted you dead, I would have assigned you to the wedge back on Teth.”

They’d suffered 83% casualties in the wedge, injuries or fatalities in over eight out of every ten troopers he’d sent there. Those statistics would have been worse if Appo hadn’t risked their near-priceless medics by stationing the medievac crew close by and authorizing retrieval as a priority one, which was not part of the overall strategic plan but technically within his discretion as the person running the battlefield. The official risk calculus from the local intelligence operator had been that it wasn’t worth the risk, but Appo hadn’t received the message in time to reroute.

He hadn’t looked, either.

That was the type of oversight that got a trooper decommissioned, especially if surveillance started suspected a normally prompt and meticulous trooper of evading orders through deliberate negligence, and in the end it still hadn’t changed the reality of the heavy losses they’d incurred. They’d still lost dozens of men, dead on Appo’s watch and pursuant his commands – but that was life as a clone trooper, and he’d had his orders.

He had to obey orders.

He was a clone trooper, and clone troopers had to obey orders, or they weren’t worth anything.

After a long moment, Gus spoke: “Why Jester?”

“You’re all a little more protective of him than you are of the others,” Appo said. “And he’s more nervous, temperamentally. That makes him more likely to crack. Either way, he’s the pick.”

He wondered if he should apologize to Jester for it. Even if it wouldn’t make it any less true.

“How do you know that?” Chopper asked. “Is that a CC thing or something?”

“No. I was briefly assigned to PK training,” Appo said, as if his brief stint training for the military police, euphemistically called the peacekeeping division, wasn’t the worst experience of his entire life. They had shunted him over to peacekeeping after they’d broken him back down to sergeant, hoping to salvage at least some of the expense of the special training they’d put into him.

He still wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been meant to be a punishment.

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Back then, he’d –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

They –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Back up. Start again.

“I didn’t tell you to stop because I don’t think you’re capable of completing the drill,” Appo said calmly. “I told you to stop because I already know what your problem is.”

“Our problem?”

“You treat each other like the enemy.” Appo shook his head. “You’re a squad. Lack of trust between you will translate to failure on the field both for you and those around you. You need to rebuild it if you want to be an effective fighting force again. There are two approaches to doing that, and I thought I’d let you pick.”

Silence.

“Let…us pick?” Punch said hesitantly.

Appo nodded. He was aware this was not how it usually went with troopers, who rarely got to pick anything more than their paint, but he had observed greater success with his own boys when he’d treated them more like fellow command class than regular rank-and-file, and there was no reason not to attempt the same here. He was in the odd position of wanting something from these men, after all.

“What are the two options?” Gus asked.

“First off, you can agree with me that you need to become a team again and we work on it collaboratively. Trust exercises, joint maneuvers, bonding activities, that sort of thing.”

The squad looked at each other, then quickly looked away. Appo was unclear if the motion was caused more by guilt for their contribution to the mess or revulsion from each others’. Or he supposed it could be embarrassment at having their flaws be clearly perceived by an outsider. There were many possibilities, and no clear direction.

“And the other option?” Sketch asked.

“The fastest way to create group unity is to present the group with a countervailing force,” Appo said. “A mutual enemy.”

“…you mean droids?”

“No. I mean me.”

They digested that for a moment.

“The second option is a lot less enjoyable,” Appo said helpfully. “As your CO, I can make your lives absolutely miserable, even without intending for them to be short.”

“I think we should go with the first option,” Jester announced, and reached up to rub his arm.

Appo hadn’t meant it that way. He’d had more mundane misery in mind: drills at odd hours, shifts assisting with flimsiwork, petty revocations of privileges, that sort of thing. But based on the expressions of the others, Jester had made a fairly convincing argument, and in short order they were all agreed to give rebuilding their teamwork a go. Appo even believed they were being sincere about being willing to try.

That was the better option, more likely to succeed, so he decided not to correct them.

“I’d like you to plan your own schedule for the next three days,” he instructed. “Use the rest of the time that we would have otherwise spent finishing the drill to work on it collaboratively and submit it to me by next shift change. I expect you to prioritize team-building activities that you think will be effective for you, which means things like joint gym time where you each work on a different machine is out. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. Dismissed.”

Despite the dismissal, they didn’t move.

“Uh, sir,” Chopper said hesitantly. “Did – that is, have you heard anything? About Sarge?”

“Not yet,” Appo said. “I have made some inquiries, though, and I’ve been following up.”

In fact, he had recently carved out some free time to code a simple repeater to resubmit the information request automatically for him every two weeks. He had been so incredibly busy that he had nearly forgotten, and automation had seemed to be a simpler solution. It had taken a chunk of time, including a small detour to brush up on his rusty slicing skills, but he had been careful not to take time away from any other duty that required it. On the contrary, it had been something to do during the times he woke up in the middle of his rest period, those times when he desperately wanted to talk to someone that he couldn’t bring himself to call.

According to the medics, the nightmares would go away, eventually.

Maybe.

“Thanks, sir,” Jester said. When Appo looked at him in askance, he shrugged in embarrassment. “For looking. We appreciate it.”

Appo didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. After another moment, they seemed to realize that he had no more to say, and dispersed.

Appo himself headed towards the shooting range. He had his own personal fitness requirements to meet, and he often used the same time to work on less complicated flimsiwork. The shooting range was usually when he did his procurement and operational review, and they were going to need that done, and quick. They would soon be detaching several 501st units to various tasks: most to Vanquor, where the General had “a plan” he wanted to implement; another to Naboo for an escort mission, subject confidential (exceedingly unhelpful when attempting to gauge appropriate supplies); and the remaining set to complete miscellaneous tasks in the general vicinity of Felucia. He would have to make sure all of them were appropriately resupplied, which given the significant different locations would require utilizing different routes…

And that was when Doom called, because of course it was.

“I’m on duty,” Appo said, stepping to the side of the hallway and answering the call regardless.

Doom was his batchmate, one of Appo’s training batch back on Kamino. They had gone through the command class training together, side by side and in each other’s pockets, and they’d liked each other, too. Their batch had once been as close as any group of clones could be.

Once.

Before Appo had fucked that up.

Intrusive – no. That wasn’t an intrusive thought.

It was simply true.

“So am I,” Doom said peaceably, as if that wasn’t an insane thing to say. Doom, unlike Appo, was a commander, in charge of thousands of troopers, and if it was inappropriate for Appo to disrupt his duty shift to make personal calls, it was triply so for Doom. He was supposed to be leading a legion right now! “We’re travelling between systems, long-distance transport. Following a Jedi hunch, so there’s nothing we can do to prepare in advance. There are no duties currently keeping me occupied.”

Appo supposed that was true. The Jedi were – odd, if his one (and thus far only) conversation with General Skywalker were anything like the norm, and Doom had two Jedi Generals. Sisters, apparently, and ones that never separated if they could help it, the way clone twins did.

So perhaps Doom wasn’t malingering. Fine.

“Was there something you needed from me?” Appo asked. Doom had been just as good as Appo at administrative tasks, so it probably wasn’t flimsiwork, even if it would be appropriate for a clone in one battalion to manage such things for another (it was not). But Appo wasn’t sure what else it could be. He was only a sergeant, after all…

“You haven’t called.”

Appo frowned. “Called who? You?”

“Me or Thire. You’re supposed to call us every month.”

Ah.

That.

Appo thought he had already dealt with that.

“I sent you a notification –”

“I saw it,” Doom said, cutting him off. His voice was cold and professional, as always, though Appo knew well enough that underneath his seeming aloofness Doom was actually quite sensitive to interpersonal interactions. He’d gotten a reputation as a mediator for a reason, and presumably his assignment to the only dual-Jedi pair had been based upon that. “However, I disagree with your underlying premise. A report included in a standard data burst is not a sufficient substitute for a holocall.”

“The format is more comprehensive –”

“The objective is not to be updated regarding your status or recent activities, nor is it to surveil your behavior. We want to talk to you.” Doom paused. “Thire in particular.”

“Thire is a shock trooper now, a member of the Coruscant Guard,” Appo said stiffly. “I am certain he is busy with more important assignments.”

“Appo –”

“The Coruscant Guard has one of the trickiest postings out of all the battalions, being the least like what our training prepared us for,” Appo barreled on, refusing to let Doom interject. “I’m certain Thire is preoccupied with that, given his status as a lieutenant.”

And that still burned, every time Appo said it.

Thire should have been a commander. He deserved that. He deserved better than to have ‘lacking in adequate authority’ stamped onto his permanent record, as if he’d done something wrong – something other than trust Appo, that was.

There was a reason the other two members of their batch no longer spoke with them.

(Why do you always have to be you?)

“He was injured, you know,” Doom said. “On an escort mission with General Yoda.”

“I sent him a message wishing him a swift recovery.”

“Yeah, and the Guard somehow ended up with three extra batches of bacta that got ‘misplaced’, which I’m sure you had nothing to do with,” Doom said. “He would have preferred a call.”

“Commander Doom –”

“Don’t you dare use my title. This is a private call.”

“We’re both on duty.”

“If you ever ‘sir’ me, I will personally stick one of the forks from the mess hall into my eyeball,” Doom said. His tone remained perfectly pleasant. Appo had the sinking feeling that he might be serious. “The same is true for Thire, just so you know. He misses you.”

“Doom –”

“You know that he doesn’t blame you for his demotion.”

He should.

Not an intrusive thought. True. True, true, true, true, true, true –

He should blame you more. He only knows what everyone knows. He doesn’t know the rest. He doesn’t know what you’ve done. What you are. If he did, he’d leave you behind, too. Both of them would. You have only kept them till now through deception, and if you really loved them, you would let them go.

He’d been trying. He’d been trying so hard.

It was so hard.

“He told me to tell you that you can call him any time. Especially if you’re still waking up with nightmares. You know he’d be happy to talk you down, if you felt like you needed it.”

“The medics have cleared me for duty,” Appo said, and disliked how dull his voice had become. It was too obvious a tell. “I do not require additional assistance to remain functional.”

“Appo –”

“You can tell Thire that I thank him for the offer,” Appo said. “But it is unnecessary at this time. If he strongly prefers to receive updates through holocalls, I will endeavor to find a space in my schedule to make them.”

Doom snorted, clearly not believing him. This was objectively correct of him, since Appo was presently lying.

He couldn’t call Thire. Thire was better off without him. Thire didn’t need Appo dragging him down any more than he already had. Thire didn’t need to get into any more fights with people he loved because of Appo, over Appo. He didn’t need Appo at all, and if Appo just maintained his present course of action, Thire would eventually figure that out.

If Appo gave into temptation, if he called Thire and spoke with him once again, he would never stop giving in. It was just like the reason he was searching so hard for Slick: because rules had to be followed. Once you started breaking them, it would be easier to do it again, harder to stop.

And if a clone trooper didn’t follow orders, they weren’t worth anything.

Hadn’t he learned that the hard way? Hadn’t that painful lesson been pressed into his brain, seared in like a brand, until he didn’t dare to think of anything else?

“You need to call him,” Doom insisted, clearly not understanding any of that. “He’s been all but wilting without you. If you really are too busy, I can always reach out to Rex and –”

NO.

“That will be unnecessary at this time,” Appo said, and something about his voice or face gave Doom pause.

“Are you in trouble?” he said. His voice had gone very soft. Quiet, gentle. Doom sounded like that right before he did something stupid, like try to convince their natborn trainers that he should be included in the collective punishment that Appo had earned their squad, even though he had not committed the same mistake through the lucky interference of technological failure. “Is there something I should know about?”

“No,” Appo said. “It’s not like that. I have no objections to the Captain’s leadership.”

“I know he makes you do all his flimsiwork.”

“I don’t mind that. He’s busy with other critical work. It works. There is no problem. Please do not interfere.”

“Fine,” Doom said. “But keep what I said in mind, okay?”

“Yes –” Appo bit his tongue before he added the ‘sir’. “I will consider it.”

“That’s all I ask. Well, that, and for you to tell us if there’s ever something that doesn’t ‘work’.”

Appo nodded.

“Doom out.”

The call shut off.

Appo resumed his march to the shooting range, although he thought that he might want to avoid actually equipping himself with any live ammunition for the moment. He was feeling oddly transparent. As if his body were just a shell, and the creature within, the one that called itself Appo, had temporarily stepped out, and all that was left was the automatic call of duty.

Duty, and orders. Orders…

Appo took a brief detour.

When he finally reached the shooting range, he found Jester already there.

He was sitting off to the side with his assigned firearm, cleaning it. He’d even dismantled it to get to the inside, really working it over from top to bottom, even though they had not had an engagement that would necessitate such an intensive level of cleanliness.

“I do not think this is your assigned shift activity,” Appo said to him.

“Sir!” Jester tried to stand, but Appo waved him down. “Uh…you’re right, sir, it’s not. We finished the schedule, and for this shift I traded with Trivet. He said you wouldn’t mind…”

“I don’t mind,” Appo said. At this precise moment, he did not mind anything, numb as he was. “Why are you cleaning your blaster?”

Jester looked down at the pieces in his lap. His lower lip trembled.

“I always do it,” he said quietly. “After every engagement. It was – it was kind of my thing. My weird thing. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better.”

Appo noted the use of the past tense. “Does it still?”

“No,” Jester said. “Yes. I – I don’t know. I get nervous when I haven’t done it for a while. I start worrying, thinking that I’ve missed something. That it’s going to start rusting or get jammed or – or something. And nothing will make me feel better except going and cleaning it.”

That sounded like a compulsion.

“You should consider seeing a medic,” Appo said. “That sort of thing can get worse.”

“Worse?”

“You started by cleaning it after every engagement. Now you feel nervous even between engagements. Soon it may be even more often than that. Giving in to the compulsion may provide you with a temporary sense of relief, but in the long term it is important to resist before it becomes a crutch you cannot do without.”

Jester did not raise his head. His expression was guilty, for some reason. “Everyone knows I do this,” he said. “Everyone. It’s my thing. If I hadn’t…if they didn’t vouch for me…”

He trailed off, then bit his lip and looked up at Appo.

“Have you ever done something right that you still regretted, sir?” he asked. “Something – even if you know you did the right thing, or what you thought was the right thing, at the time, but – the outcome – where the outcome was something that made you think that maybe you should have done something else?”

Yes.

Yes, Appo had.

Don’t tell him. If you tell him, he won’t respect you. You can’t be a sergeant if they don’t respect you. If you can’t be a sergeant, you can’t be anything. They’ll decomm you for certain this time. Don’t tell him. He’s just a trooper, he doesn’t need to know. Don’t tell him.

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

“I deliberately failed a mission objective during a survival training exercise,” Appo said. “We were stationed on one of the moons near Kamino, and there was a blizzard. Worse than the ones we got trained on in the simulation room. A lot worse. One of the subunits hadn’t brought the right gear with them. They would have frozen to death before our pick-up came to collect us, if the wildlife that came out during white-outs didn’t get them first. So I turned my men around and went to retrieve them, even though I knew it would mean that I would not reach the mission target in time.”

Jester was watching him.

“Once our supervisors identified what I had done, I received orders to desist in my course of action and return to completing the mission,” Appo said. “I ignored them. Several times.”

He had done more than ignore them. He’d deliberately blocked their orders from reaching the remainder of the battalion under his command, not wanting them to order his subordinates to turn against him. Not before he’d gotten back to that subunit – forty clones who had just made a stupid error, brothers who didn’t deserve to die because of a training exercise.

Jester swallowed audibly. He knew that you weren’t supposed to defy the trainers, much less the Kaminoan supervisors. “What happened?”

“They failed my whole batch,” Appo said. “Any of them that followed my orders, which was all of them but one, and he only didn’t because his comm had broken in the storm. He didn’t hear the revised orders and proceeded to the original mission target, so they exempted him.”

Doom had not wanted to be exempted. He’d asked the trainers to be demoted as well, several times, until Appo had told him to stop.

“They – they failed – because you saved your soldiers?” Jester looked horrified by the thought. It was clear he hadn’t had command training. “Your whole batch, too? Why them?”

“It was meant as an example to the rest of the command class. Collective punishment. They didn’t want anyone else following my example.” Appo shrugged. “I ended up a sergeant. My batchmates at least made lieutenant.”

“But…”

“We’re supposed to follow orders,” Appo said. “A clone trooper who doesn’t follow orders isn’t worth anything. That’s what they told me, after. They made sure I learned. I learned.”

He had learned. He had. But in the deepest and most secret parts of Appo’s mind, the guiltiest part of himself that he consciously suppressed whenever he could, he still thought that what he had done had been the right thing to do.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t regret what had happened afterwards.

To his batch. To himself.

“You can’t live your life always looking backwards,” Appo said, like the liar and failure he was. “You can only look forward. Do what you think is right, then live with the consequences.”

He paused, then added: “Go see a medic about your compulsion.”

“Yes, sir,” Jester said. “I will.”

Chapter Text

“Hey, Appo!”

Appo stopped and obediently moved aside, letting Rex catch up with him.

Rex reached out and touched his arm, then gestured for the two of them to step to the side of the hallway, out of the flow of potential traffic. Not that there was a lot of foot traffic, it being mid-shift and all. Appo himself was alternating between tasks at the moment, having completed the previous one earlier than expected, and he had not anticipated running into command.

One never really did.

Still, there wasn’t anything else to do. He followed Rex to the side.

“You’ve got a minute free?” Rex asked, and looked pleased when Appo nodded. “Good. Good, good. How’s it been going? Your boys doing all right after that run in with those rollies?”

“Yes, sir,” Appo said. It had been a tough battle, and he’d very nearly been unforgivably distracted with battlefield management after Rex unexpectedly got pulled off the field for an urgent mission with the Jedi. Luckily, he’d managed to turn his attention to his squads just in time. Of course, that meant Rex hadn’t been present for the actual battle, so presumably it had been either Fives or Echo, Rex’s current favorites, that had mentioned the incident to him. “We incurred no losses, with only minimal casualties to the relevant flank.”

His boys were now officially Appo squad Aurek and Appo squad Besh, though Appo always secretly thought of Besh squad as Slick’s boys first and foremost, and he was fairly sure they did as well. Besh squad’s unit cohesion was still iffy, though the continuous team-building exercises he’d inflicted on them had at least reduced their instinctive revulsion at the sight of one another. It was enough of an improvement for Appo to feel comfortable deploying them in battle, though that was less a choice and more of a necessity. He made sure to personally lead them when it was possible, especially now that Nis had been promoted to corporal and could be entrusted to handle more of the leadership tasks involved with Aurek squad.

None of that explained Rex’s interest, though.

There were plenty of squads out there doing much the same thing, fighting and surviving, and there was no reason for a personal check-in. Not unless Rex had decided to kick off some sort of informal survey, and Appo would have known about that in advance, if only because Rex’s schedule would have needed to set aside some additional time for it.

“Right, I saw your report on the battle. Pristine as always. Though,” Rex cleared his throat, and for a brief moment looked strangely awkward, “on the subject of reports, I noticed you’ve been filing a couple on the reg.”

Appo stared vacantly at Rex, waiting for his Captain to correct himself or make whatever point he was aiming for. Appo filed many reports regularly. It was literally his job.

Rex seemed to realize this and coughed again. “To be specific, I heard that you’ve been filing a lot of 15b63 forms. Information requests, aimed at the Jedi level.”

Right, yes. Those were his Slick requests, which were indeed submitted regularly, going in like clockwork at each two-week mark. Appo nodded in confirmation, pleased that Rex had noticed that his automated system was working just as he’d hoped. No answer had yet been obtained, of course, but he routinely got the standard bounce-back encouraging him to resubmit, so he did.

At a minimum, Appo hoped that J. Nu, whoever they were, appreciated his consistent efforts.

“I was hoping,” Rex said delicately, “that we could talk about it.”

“Yes, sir,” Appo said. “I’ve actually been intending to take a little free time to work up a more elaborate explanation as to why the information request is important. Scuttlebutt has it that the Generals don’t always understand military necessity, so I’ve been trying to fluff up the text a little.”

Rex’s face did something funny, twisting into a half grimace as if Appo’s response had not been what he expected, or else that he was unsure of what to say in response.

Perhaps it was in response to Appo’s utilization of overly casual language. ‘Fluff up’ was hardly appropriate military terminology.

“To clarify, I’ve been trying to introduce more of a sense of pathos or personalized appeal in the background description,” Appo explained. “Based on a review of your own reports, that approach seems to be most effective on General Skywalker or Commander Ahsoka, and extrapolating from that –”

“That’s not quite what I meant,” Rex interrupted.

Appo folded his hands together and stared blankly at Rex. Or rather, he stared at the space just above Rex’s head, since he’d been told in the past that he made other people uncomfortable when he stared too directly into their eyes. “Yes, sir?”

If Rex had information he wanted to convey, he would need to do so by verbalizing it. Appo was not planning on guessing what he meant, since there was every chance that his suppositions might be mistaken. It would be rude to preempt his superior officer like that.

Also, he didn’t want to.

Rex, for his part, grimaced and tried again. “How much time is it taking you, those requests of yours?”

“None at all, sir,” Appo said woodenly. It was starting to occur to him that Rex did not seem as enthusiastic about his project as Appo might have hoped, even though he had received appropriate permissions from the required level to proceed with it. “I do it exclusively in my personal downtime. My on-duty shifts have not been affected.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest they were,” Rex said hastily. “I know you’re very devoted to your work. We all know that. I just question if it’s really the best use of your time.”

“General Skywalker suggested it, sir.”

“Yes. I know.”

“The communication from the Jedi Temple explicitly instructs applicants to resubmit the form if no answer is obtained in a timely manner.”

“Right.”

“I’m just following orders, sir.” Appo hoped that Rex did not recall that he had previously ordered Appo to ‘drop the issue’, though he was prepared to argue that it had been reasonable to interpret that instruction as relating to their immediate conversation rather than the issue in general. “We’re supposed to follow orders.”

“You’re not wrong,” Rex said, and rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Right. Listen…actually, you know what, on second thought, maybe we can continue this later. I’ve got to run.”

“Of course, sir.”

Appo hated being lied to.

He didn’t begrudge Rex wanting to exit the conversation, which had clearly been starting to verge on awkward for both of them. But he would have preferred it if Rex had simply dismissed him, as was his right as Appo’s CO, rather than claiming that he had something else to do when his schedule – which Appo had pulled up in the corner of his HUD – showed that he had cleared the entire hour with a notation that read “Talk to Sgt. Appo re: S”.

While technically Rex had indeed done just that, Appo did not think that Rex had achieved his intended objective in their brief conversation, which had taken far less than the full hour reserved for it. That meant Rex was likely to come back, and they would need to endure the ordeal that was this entire conversation all over again. And possibly again after that, because unless Rex intended to get General Skywalker to countermand orders that he likely did not even remember issuing, Appo had no intention of stopping his search.

It had become something of a matter of principle.

You never learn. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results – or maybe it’s just that a meat-droid like you has faulty programming. Better check for those wires –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Appo continued on his way, heading towards one of the training rooms. His boys had scheduled themselves a battlefield practice sim, Aurek against Besh, and he had been hoping to catch the tail end of it. That was unlikely now, after Rex’s interruption, but he would still be able to ask both teams for a self-assessment of how they had performed.

Maybe he would ask it from team members that weren’t usually as forthcoming – Trivet or Rikko for Aurek, and Punch and Chopper for Besh. Of course, that assumed he could keep Sikes from jumping in with his own thoughts for both squads…

“– telling you, you can trust Sarge.”

Appo stopped right outside the open door to the training room.

“Whatever it is, he’ll handle it,” Sikes continued, confident as always. “Haven’t you seen that?”

“He’s been good to us,” Punch said, though it wasn’t agreement. “The boss is great, I’m not saying he’s not. But this isn’t just about good training or getting to fight or scheduling us in at the right time. Will you answer the question?”

“We’re trying our best,” Lacey said, voice a little sharp. “But it’s pretty situation specific, isn’t it? ‘What does Sarge think of people who break protocol’ – it depends on what protocol, how it was broken, who’s doing the breaking. Sure, he hates it when command breaks protocol because it usually means more work for him, and he doesn’t like it when troopers mess around for no reason because it gets them killed. But there’s plenty of situations where he’s not nearly as hung up on it. I’d be willing to bet a week’s rations that he knows exactly who runs the secret moonshine sill and he’s probably been covering for them.”

Lacey’s overall point was correct, but his example inapposite. It was unnecessary for Appo to cover for them. All the officers knew about the sill. Many of them had reached agreements with third parties that allowed them to partake in the output.

“But say if it was something serious, something really serious –”

“It also matters that it’s us,” Jester said. “Doesn’t it? If we’re the ones telling him about it, he’ll be more likely to listen and to help, whatever level of seriousness. He didn’t ever refer Chopper to discipline, did he?”

“That’s different,” Gus said. “He promised that on his own. It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be strict under other circumstances. You know what people say about him, he’s got that rep for being a stickler –”

“I know that people say all kinds of stupid shit at the slightest provocation,” Jester snapped. “You don’t believe all the crap you hear, do you?”

“I – no. I know better. But –”

“We’re just trying to collect intel,” Sketch said. “Don’t rush us, Jester. We agreed we’d wait until we all agreed, remember?”

“If Gus is going to be against it no matter what, there’s no point –”

Appo turned and returned to the head of the hallway, then sent a message to Nis. Cool, calm, effective Nis, who had managed to get promoted to corporal for keeping his head under pressure, who reminded Appo so much of Doom sometimes that he wanted to laugh. He might have, too, if it wouldn’t have been so unbearably odd to hear laughter coming from him.

“Sarge incoming,” Nis announced loudly. “Wrap it up, men. Last one to pack up their gear has to do the self-assessment.”

By the time Appo walked into the room, everything was put away (and had likely been put away before he had arrived the first time) and everyone was looking relaxed, as if Besh squad hadn’t just been squabbling over whether Appo was trustworthy enough to share information with.

He had expected this, Appo reminded himself. They’d lost their original sergeant under mysterious circumstances. They were entitled to take as much time as they needed before being ready to fully trust again.

It still stung, though.

They hate you hate you hate you hate you just like everyone else and why wouldn’t they –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

At least it seemed like the two squads were getting along well. Jester was standing next to Nis, whose as usual presented a picture of contrasts, calm expression juxtaposed with his distinctively wild hair (dyed bright red and left to curl), while Sketch and Punch were sitting next to Trivet, with Rikko hovering behind the three of them. Lacey and Sikes were ostentatiously examining some of the equipment, body language making it quite clear that they, at least, had not been taken in by Appo’s dodge, and furthermore that they were a bit ticked off about the whole thing, while Chopper and Gus were glaring at each other in an apparent (if silent) continuation of the earlier argument.

“I heard that,” Appo said, trying to strike a balance between not lying to them and letting them save face by pretending he was only referring to Nis’s announcement. “Who was last?”

“Technically,” Rikko started to say, but everyone groaned loud enough to drown him out, shouting out that they weren’t in the mood for all of his standard rules-lawyering.

After a few moments in the company of his squads, Appo relaxed.

This proved to be a tactical error.

The notification appeared in Appo’s HUD two days later.

Appo stared at it in silence for what felt like an eternity, but which actually clocked in at only 4.37 minutes per the tracker on his HUD. He did not understand it, and he did not like that he didn't understand. For Appo, the unpredictable was often worse than outright bad news. 

But there was nothing for it. Wishing would never change reality.

Appo went to find his squads.

“Nis, will you be able to cover leading Aurek squad in the event there’s an unexpected call out?” he asked. “Jester, the same for you with Besh.”

“Me?” Jester squeaked, clearly not having expected that. He was probably the only one – Appo had pulled aside both Gus and Chopper, the other potential team leaders, and both of them had enthusiastically agreed that Jester had demonstrated the sort of maturity and growth that would make him a good team lead, especially now that he was regularly seeing Kix for help with his cleaning compulsion. Better still, they had both admitted that they did not think they themselves were fit for the role, given the still-existing tensions inside the squad and the (still not wholly explained) role they themselves played in creating those tensions. Jester was a better choice, at least for the moment, and Appo had confidence that he would eventually be primed for a step up to corporal. Hopefully, by then both Gus and Chopper would be in a better position to step up as team leads themselves, if not ready themselves for a promotion.

They would need to be, at the rate the 501st was bleeding men. All those troopers, lost in disastrous defeats and costly victories alike…but Appo didn't like to think of that.

“Why do you need coverage, boss?” Sketch asked with a frown. “I thought you were planning to spend the day doing admin.”

“Yeah, Sarge, didn’t you say you were going to clean up the last tendays worth of reports before the next burst went out?”

“It’ll have to wait,” Appo said regretfully. “That, or they’ll have to go unedited and we’ll get dinged by HQ for being messy. I have a meeting over on the Negotiator.”

They all stared at him.

“Commander Cody has requested to speak with me personally,” Appo said.

“Commander Cody,” Gus echoed, and lifted his gloved hand to his mouth, biting down on his index finger. He only did that when he was especially nervous. “Why does he want to see you?”

“I’m not sure. He didn’t specify.”

“You’re not in trouble, are you?” Punch said anxiously.

“I don’t know what the subject of the meeting is intended to be,” Appo said. He wished he could reassure them further, but he wasn't sure himself how serious the situation was. He didn’t have the codes or permissions to grab Cody’s schedule to look for clues the way he would for anyone in the 501st. Nor did he have any experience to call on, having never been called in for anything like this before. If Appo had to guess, being summoned by name to a skip-rank meeting (since Cody was Rex’s CO, as far as the clone line of command went) usually wasn’t a good sign.

On the other hand, this was Cody they were talking about. 

Appo knew Cody. They had both been in the command class together. They hadn't been especially close, since Cody had been one of Alpha-17's favorites and Appo had been in another batch entirely, but they had the sort of minimal familiarity that came from being part of a relatively small subgroup within the larger set of clones. The Cody Appo remembered from their training had been fiercely competitive and ruthlessly practical with it, but he hadn't been cruel. He had been what the command staff had termed ‘honorable’, and always abided by the rules. 

He probably wasn't going to use the excuse of the meeting to spring something nasty on Appo. 

Maybe he knows. Maybe he's changed. He's a Marshal Commander now. He'll do what he has to, what must be done -

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Anyway, Appo was moderately certain that he hadn't done anything wrong. 

Not recently, at any rate. Definitely nothing that should give rise to serious concerns, but he could see that Besh squad were all nervous, even anxious, to a notably greater degree than he would have expected. Even Aurek squad seemed to have caught the anxiety from them; they were all frowning, looking between him and Besh squad as if wondering what they were missing. As the head of the Seventh Sky, the GAR division they were all part of, Cody had a good reputation among the men, many of whom worshipped him as if he were nearly a god on the level of the Jedi. Appo would have expected some jitters, the sort anyone got when thinking too far up their chain of command, but this seemed like more than that. More - personal.

Though, come to think of it, Besh squad might have met Cody before. Slick had been popular, friendly with everyone - and yes, come to think of it, Appo could recall seeing Slick and Cody together during one of the infrequent officers' lounge events, one of the celebrations following a victory in a joint mission with the 224th. It was certainly possible that Slick had introduced his squad to his commander...but even if he had, that didn't explain their intense apprehension.

"I have no reason to anticipate anything negative," he offered, suppressing the part of his mind that whispered It's going to be bad, it has to be bad, these things are never good, nothing good ever happens to you and cited examples from both clone corps and regular armed forces to support his fears. Those thoughts were not intrusive, strictly speaking, but they weren’t helpful, either.

"You don't know, though," Sketch said. "What if he starts asking you questions?"

"Then I will answer them to my best ability," Appo said, his own anxiety somewhat relieved by the concrete suggestion. He did not fear questions. His fears lay more in the potential orders that would follow the questioning. "There is nothing else I can do. When there is nothing else to be done -"

"There's no point in worrying, yeah, we all know that one by now, Sarge," Sikes said. He glanced over at Besh squad and added, "When you go, can I have access to your scheduler? I’m sure we’d all be happier if we knew when you were going, and when you got back.”

Nods all around.

Appo frowned. His scheduler had a lot more information than just his actual schedule of activities and his immediate location, the way it did for most people. This was his own fault, unfortunately: Appo had so much work that he often whipped up additional programs to help make it easier to keep up with all the administrative tasks he had to stay on top of, often using the spare processing power of his scheduler as convenient available storage space. Granting his squad access to his scheduler would give them access to everything that he could, and that meant they would be able to see a significant (possibly excessively significant) slice of the 501st's administrative guts, assuming they had the patience to trudge through them.

On the other hand, if he didn’t trust his boys, what was even the point?

“The leaving time is easy," he said, deciding. "The meeting is scheduled for an hour from now -"

"An hour!"

"That's sudden."

"Maybe the Marshal Commander is just busy..."

"However,” he interrupted, continuing with an effort, “you can have access to the scheduler if you agree to work on the report clean-up in my place. I know it’s your downtime –”

“No, no, I’ll do it,” Sikes said.

“Me, too, Sarge,” Chopper said. “I might be a lunkhead, but I can write a mean report.”

“Only the latter is true,” Appo said sternly. “Do not speak down about yourself in my presence. At any rate, we are therefore agreed, and I will grant both of you the requisite level of access. Please don’t use it to steal extra rations out of the kitchens.”

“Wait, you can do that?”

“Sarge can do anything!”

Appo shook his head, feeling a fond warmth in his chest, and left them to bicker joyfully with each other. He didn’t expect there to be any unexpected battles with the Seppies today, and clearly neither did Cody, but then again they wouldn’t be unexpected if they could anticipate them. With any luck it would remain quiet, and Appo’s bad luck could be confined to the meeting.

He hoped.

Chapter 5

Notes:

chapter-specific content warning in the footer if required

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“Appo, come in,” Cody said, smoothly professional as ever. He even rose up to greet Appo when he walked into his office on the Negotiator, which he very much did not have to do. “Have a seat.”

Appo would have preferred to stand. But Cody had said to sit.

Appo sat.

Cody sat as well, taking the other seat in front of his desk rather than the one behind it. Possibly it was an attempt to put Appo at ease by acting as though they were peers (they were not), or perhaps it was simply part of Cody's command style. Appo recalled that Cody had worried about that a great deal when they were in training, wanting to strike what he termed an appropriate balance between being an authority figure and what he called being 'still Cody'. Appo hadn't really understood it back then, and he still didn't. 

Cody looked much the same, at least. He had his distinctive scar, but it had healed well, and he looked no more run down than any other clone did. More tired than Appo had known him before, more stressed and far more sorrowful. But then again, weren't they all?

“This is an informal meeting,” Cody said. “It’s not a disciplinary matter.”

It was possible that most clones would have relaxed upon hearing that.

Appo was not most clones.

His transfer to the peacekeepers had not been framed as a disciplinary matter, either.

It would be so easy for him to hurt you. So easy, and he might not even think it was hurt, he might think it was good for you. You wouldn’t be able to stop him. You wouldn’t even be allowed to scream –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

“How can I be of assistance, sir?” he asked, and observed in bemusement when Cody winced.

“I don’t suppose I could convince you to drop the formalities,” he said. “But if I recall correctly, that never did fly with you, even back on Kamino. How have you been? How’s the head? Nightmares any better?”

Appo stared at him. He did not appreciate the question, justified as it might be, but he was at a loss as to how to express that. Sometimes he wished he had better social skills.

“The medics have cleared me for duty,” he finally said, resorting to his standard response. “I do not require additional assistance to remain functional.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Cody said, but then shook his head and leaned forward, one arm resting on the desk in what was likely intended to convey a companionable manner. “I know you don’t like small talk, so I’m going to get straight to the point.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Cody sighed. “Listen, Appo. It’s about Slick.”

Appo frowned.

“Those information requests you’ve been sending? They need to stop.” He paused. “And yes, that’s an order. A formal one, if you need me to make it that.”

Appo absorbed that. Technically, as a Jedi General, General Skywalker outranked any clone, even a Marshal Commander like Cody. On the other hand, the 501st belonged to the Seventh Sky, which Cody commanded, and he had authority over them in that respect, the General included. Moreover, Cody was a lot more tolerant of unnecessary interpersonal awkwardness than Rex was, which meant that if Appo tried to stand on his existing orders, Cody would probably just directly comm his own General and ask him to countermand them on the spot.

Orders from High General Kenobi beat General Skywalker’s any day.

There was no fighting it. This meant that the correct response was, unquestionably, “Yes, sir.”

Instead, Appo said, “Why?”

Cody looked startled. This was understandable. Most clones did not question a Marshal Commander’s orders, particularly not when they were as simple and straightforward as this. “Why what?”

“Why won’t you let me find out what happened to Sergeant Slick?” Appo asked.

“It’s confidential,” Cody said. “That’s why –”

“Not the what of what happened to him,” Appo said. “Why. Why won’t you let me find out, or at least try to? I thought you liked him.”

Cody inhaled sharply.

Appo met his eyes dead-on without flinching. 

After all, Rex wasn't the only one who got close to other troopers.

Sure, scuttlebutt didn't go in so much about Cody as it did Rex, but that was a mixture of respect for Cody's high rank and his greater talent for discretion. Appo, though, Appo knew Cody. He might not be the most socially capable, awkward and insecure, but he was observant, and he had the benefit of knowing Cody from back before he was Marshal Commander Cody, back when he'd been scrabbling with Fox for every record and every win, when he’d still been frank and open with himself in a way that no clone could remain and still be fit for command. 

Appo knew…and he saw.

He also disliked getting drunk, but unlike many of the other more antisocial clones, he didn’t leave the officer parties early, either. He liked to linger in the corner, content to merely be present while his fellow clones were having a good time, while they laughed together and danced together and socialized together and – and did other things together, too.

That meant that Appo saw who among the officers couldn’t control themselves with the moonshine and ended up falling over drunk. Who got depressed. Who got angry. Who leaned a little too near to another clone. Who reached out to bridge the gap. Who absent-mindedly brushed away a stray curl that fell into another clone’s face with delicate tenderness that was so unlike regular military conduct. Who smiled as if surprised and laughed as if it had been tricked out of him and pressed their lips to that so-distinctive scar as if it was impossible not to.

Appo had suspected, or at least hypothesized, that Rex had been close with Slick. But he knew Cody was. 

So why wouldn't Cody let him even look?

“I did,” Cody said. “I – I do. It’s complicated. Slick…”

His jaw worked.

"Slick was...Slick wasn’t what I thought – No. No, that’s unfair. Things happened, that’s all. Things that I don’t entirely understand myself.” Cody rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, a motion highly reminiscent of Rex. Or perhaps Rex’s motion had been copied from Cody originally. "It's complicated, and confidential, and it's not something I can just share with you, even though I appreciate that this – and Slick – are clearly important to you."

He was silent for a long moment, clearly turning over something in his head. And then, abruptly, he asked: “Appo, what do you think of the Jedi?”

Appo tilted his head a little to the side, trying to understand the question. It seemed completely disconnected from the present conversation, a non sequitur, but Cody was usually pretty good at staying on track. Presumably there was a connection somewhere.

“We were made for them,” he said cautiously. “It is our duty to serve them.”

“Yes, but…” Cody tapped his fingers on his desk, an old habit of his. “What would you say if someone told you that they believed that Jedi are keeping us clones enslaved?”

Appo frowned. “I don’t see the relevance, sir.”

“Bear with me for a moment. Say someone approached you and said that. Said that the clones are slaves, just here to do the Jedi’s bidding, to serve at their every whim –”

“I think you must have misunderstood me,” Appo said. “I understood the reference. I don’t understand the relevance.”

Now it was Cody’s turn to frown. “What do you mean?”

“What does it matter?”

“What – what does what matter? Whether we’re slaves?”

“Of course we’re slaves, sir,” Appo said. “I’m asking why that matters.”

Cody gaped at him.

Perhaps Appo was being unclear again. He didn’t understand Cody’s confusion.

“It’s what we were made for, sir,” he said. “It’s our purpose. So it’s all right.”

Cody put his hands up to his temples and pressed in so deeply that his fingertips went white with the force of it. "I'm not sure I heard you right just now, Appo," he said, voice calm and level and completely at odds with his body language, which was all but shrieking. "Are you saying that you think we're slaves of the Jedi, but that it's...fine?"

"Practically speaking it has no impact on our lives," Appo said reasonably. "Even if we had the right to choose, we would’ve chosen to fight anyway, so it's really all the same to us that we don't. Actually, if you think about it in a certain light, there’s something of a privilege to it, isn’t there? We clones are unique among sentient beings in this galaxy, in that we alone know exactly what we were made for. We have a clear purpose."

He paused, thinking about it, then added, "Also, I think that technically our ownership rests with the Republic, rather than the Jedi? Since they’re the ones who paid for us. Think of it like a factory, sir: there’s the factory owner, who owns the factory and the droids and whatnot, and then there’s the droid operator, who works for the owner. The operator doesn’t acquire ownership just because they happen to be the one directing the droids.”

He was rather happy with that comparison. He thought that it was quite clear and cogent, not at all confused like most things he tried to convey. 

Cody stood up abruptly and started pacing. 

Appo frowned at him: had he not appreciated the metaphor?

“We’re soldiers, Appo,” Cody said. “Not slaves.”

“Soldiers can leave,” Appo pointed out. “Or choose not to obey, should the orders go against their conscience. We can’t. We have to obey. And a trooper can only be one of three things: at their post, missing, or dead. And missing usually means dead.”

Not for Slick, though.

“So, slaves,” he concluded. “It is what it is, sir.”

"This is crazy – I can't – are you telling me you really think – no, let me start again," Cody said. He was still pacing, but his denial seemed to have faded; instead, he seemed strangely excited. "I need you to tell me when you reached the conclusion that we're all slaves. When, and where – yes, where, that too. Was it some specific event? Something strange the 501st encountered, some person or object or thing –”

“No, sir,” Appo said. “It was when they told me I needed to kill my brothers to be a good soldier.”

Cody had still been talking, but now his mouth snapped shut, and he drew to a halt, turning instead to look at Appo. The strange excitement drained out of him all at once, and seemed to leave him bereft.

“A clone trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything,” Appo said helpfully. “You don’t need to worry, sir. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Appo,” Cody said, and licked his lips as if they’d suddenly gone dry. “Appo – I should have said this a long time ago. But…you know...you should know…”

He hesitated for a moment.

“Appo,” he finally said. “Appo, what they did to you and your batch was wrong.”

NO.

“That statement is inappropriate, sir,” Appo said.

“No, it’s not,” Cody said. “We all thought so, back then. It wasn’t fair –”

“In fact, this entire meeting is inappropriate,” Appo said. “This is a matter of direct personnel oversight. I should be having this conversation with my direct commanding officer, not a skip-rank. That shouldn’t change just because Captain Rex is too much of a coward to face up to his own malfeasance –”

“Wait, hold up, malfeasance –”

“Captain Rex explicitly ordered me to violate protocol, sir. According to the regs, I should make a formal report back to Kamino so that they can kick off an investigation into his fitness to continue in command.” Appo stared at Cody’s forehead, not meeting his eyes. It wasn’t politeness, for once. He just didn’t want to meet Cody’s eyes right now. “I neglected to do so at the time. That was my fault, and I admit to it freely. Would you like me to repair my error?”

Cody’s brow was furrowed and his lips pressed together so tightly that they looked pale. It was a facial expression Appo typically associated with anger, but there was no anger in Cody’s face. “No,” he said softly, after a moment. “I would not. Thank you, trooper.”

“Understood. Was there anything else, sir, or am I excused?”

“You’re dismissed.” Cody paused. “About Slick –”

“I will desist from submitting any more information requests forms, as ordered,” Appo said coldly. “I obey orders, sir. Good soldiers obey orders. Just because I am –”

Me.

Broken.

Bad.

Worth nothing.

Always you.

“Regardless of what else I am,” Appo said. “I am not deficient.”

He stood up and left.

He did not have any intrusive thoughts on the shuttle back to the Resolute.

He did not have any thoughts at all.

He might have expected to have some, or some feeling, perhaps anxiety or regret at having spoken to a commanding officer like that, but there was nothing. He had been incorrect, it seemed, in thinking that he had felt vacant and empty after his call with Doom. He had, he supposed, but that had been nothing compared to this.

Appo wondered if he was dead.

Maybe he’d died back on that moon, in that blizzard so long ago. Maybe he’d died after that, when he’d gone to the peacekeepers, or when he’d done what he’d done after that, his terrible secret that no one could ever know, not even Doom, not even Thire. Especially not them. Maybe it had been in one of the battles since the start of the war, where they’d lost men and lost men and lost men and never seemed to win anything of any value, just rocks and planets and political allies that never seemed to make any real difference.

Maybe he was already dead.

Maybe he was a ghost, hollow and empty and pointless. Maybe they had resurrected his corpse and let him walk around in it for just a little longer, some sort of terrible joke masquerading as a man. Maybe there really were wires under his flesh, a droid hiding under a flesh suit.

Maybe he should check.

He could use his knife for it. It was sharp enough. It would cut through the wires. There would be blood, of course, and pain, to add realism to the effect, but that didn’t mean there weren’t wires, too. He’d have to dig deep to find them. Dig deep into the muscle and gristle and –

“Sarge!”

Appo looked up, though the motion felt sluggish and slow, as if he were moving through mud. Sikes was standing at the door at the Resolute’s docking bay, looking in at him from where he was sitting in the shuttle, which had docked at some point. Sikes, yes, recognizably and demonstrably Sikes, and there was Chopper and Jester, too. Jester was talking into his comm, but for some reason Appo couldn’t hear him, even though he was only a few steps away.

That was not helpful. He had a job to do. He was a sergeant. He was their sergeant.

“What is it, Sikes?” he asked.

Sikes said something that Appo couldn’t hear, but he also motioned with his hands, as if he wanted Appo to come to him, which was at least clear enough. Appo stood up and walked out of the shuttle, which was oddly quiet as well. Quiet and cool, which was strange – it usually took at least a quarter-hour for a shuttle to cool off after docking. Which it had, at some point. He hadn’t noticed.

“– I’m telling you, he’s as white as a sheet, and I don’t think he’s copying anything we’re saying–” Jester was saying. “His eyes keep flicking around –”

No, that wasn’t right. Appo had dead eyes. That’s what everyone said about him. Even before the moon and the blizzard and the peacekeepers, he’d been famous for his reserve. Too quiet, too awkward, the imperturbable even keel, the stone face with dead eyes, that was Appo. Appo, who didn’t obey orders, who had to be made a lesson of, who had to be taught a lesson.

“I’m not deficient,” Appo told Chopper, who had for some reason wrapped his arm around him and was helping him walk somewhere. Appo wasn’t sure where. He wasn’t sure he cared. “I’m not.”

“No, sir,” Chopper said. “You’re not.”

“I obey orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” Appo said abruptly. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Can’t do what, boss?” That was Gus. Oddly polite, for Gus, who had gotten a little better but was still stubborn and combative and, yes, a little bit of an asshole in the way most clones tended to be. When had Gus showed up? “Don’t worry about it. I’m here now. Look at me – yes, just like that. Great. Now, what is it you can’t do?”

“I can’t find Slick,” Appo said. He wanted to throw up. His stomach was all nausea and bile. Wait, if he had bile, could he have wires? Did droids vomit? “I’m not allowed. I’m sorry. Cody ordered me to stop asking. Formal order. No more information requests. I can’t find him. He’s lost. He’s going to stay lost. No number for Slick. He should’ve had a number.”

“Sarge –”

“It’s an order,” Appo said, suddenly desperate for them to understand. “I can’t disobey orders. A clone trooper who doesn’t follow orders isn’t worth anything. They’re not anything. They’re nothing. I can’t be nothing, not again. I’m sorry. Slick’s the one who has to be nothing –”

“He was a traitor!” Jester blurted out.

Appo stared at him.

Jester took a deep breath, pressing his eyes together tightly, and then released the breath. He opened his eyes, and his expression was different from what he normally wore. Determined, Appo would have said, in another clone. Firm and fierce and unyielding.

“Lock the door, will you?” Jester ordered, talking to someone standing behind Appo’s shoulder that Appo did not turn to see. He glanced around him. “Listen, I’m calling it, okay? It’s time. We’re telling him.”

“Agreed,” Chopper said.

“Agreed,” Punch and Sketch murmured.

“Agreed,” Gus said. “He should know.”

Appo was struggling to keep up. He did not understand. “Know?” he asked. “Know what?”

“What happened back on Christophsis,” Jester said. “Sarge – I’m not totally sure what happened, exactly. I can only tell you what I know. It was the Captain, boss, Captain Rex and the Commander, Marshal Commander Cody. They figured out that someone was leaking intel from our command center, and the only one it could’ve been was one of us. So they called us all into a room and started asking us questions.”

Questions. Interrogation, Jester meant. That must be why they were so afraid of it, the squad. Because – Rex and Cody had interrogated them? Over an information leak?

“They made us turn on each other,” Gus said abruptly. His voice cracked a little, and he turned his face away, ashamed. “They said they knew it was one of us. They asked us where we were, what we were doing, wanted us to prove it wasn’t us. They made us…no, they didn’t make us. We just did it. Turned on each other first chance we got, threw each other under the speeder. Called – called each other names. Blamed anyone else we could.”

He glanced at Chopper. Guilt. He’d done that, then. That must have been when he’d called Chopper deficient, after finding out about his trophy collecting. It must have been Chopper that they suspected…

“But it wasn’t us,” Chopper said, and his voice was full of pain. “It wasn’t any of us. It was Sarge.”

Sarge? Appo was the sergeant. But not theirs, no. He was Aurek squad’s Sarge, but Besh squad had only ever called him ‘Boss’ instead. He’d been fine with that, hadn’t minded. Slick was Sarge, to them, to Slick’s boys, his squad. Appo had been happy about it, actually, happy that they had something left of Slick to hold onto. They’d missed Slick, he could tell. Not just in the nostalgia sense, where they compared his methods to Appo’s, but an active sort of missing. Like they were looking for him and couldn’t find him, like a lost tooth that left a hole in your mouth, like something that should be there but wasn’t.

And all the while, Slick had – betrayed them? Why?

“He said that he was striking a blow for all clones,” Chopper said. Appo must have spoken aloud. He hadn’t realized. Again. “He said that we were all slaves. Blindly obedient to the Jedi, unthinking, just doing whatever they ordered us to do, anything they felt like. He said that we weren’t getting anything out of all of our suffering. He said – he said he wanted to be free.”

Free.

Free?

Clones couldn’t be free. Clones were slaves, yes, but – but that was their purpose. That was why they existed, why they’d been made in the first place. Slaves of the Jedi, slaves of the Republic, slaves of the Kaminoans and their trainers, it didn’t really matter. They were made to obey orders. That was their purpose. A clone trooper had to obey orders or they weren’t worth anything. They were designed that way: to be good soldiers, and good soldiers obeyed orders.

They couldn’t be free.

Slick wanted to be free.

Appo didn’t even know how to want something like that.

Clones were supposed to be all the same. Slick did, Appo didn’t, that wasn’t the same. Which one of them was deficient, then?

“We were the ones that stopped him,” Gus said abruptly. “Sarge. He wanted to be free, but they caught him. We caught him…”

“It was me,” Chopper said. “I was – it was my fault… Boss, you’ve got to understand. I was so angry. Sarge said that what I’d done, with the trophies, that it put my character in question. That they couldn’t trust me. I think he was trying to buy time, maybe? Start an investigation that he knew wasn’t going to go anywhere. But I wanted to defend myself. I was the one who told them about him going back towards the command center. I was the one who blamed –”

He abruptly turned away with a muffled curse, taking a couple of steps and punching the wall (unwise, likely to cause harm, he probably should go see medical about it).

“He ran,” Jester said. His eyes were glassy. Tears? Yes. He was crying. “Sarge was pushing for an investigation, for time to talk to us, and he slipped up. They figured it out, that it was him, and he – he ran.” He shook his head. “He was the traitor. He was feeding the Seppies intel about our movements, working with Ventress to set a trap for the Generals, and even – even –”

“He blew up our weapons depot,” Sketch said. “Left us all low. I don’t know what would’ve happened if HQ hadn’t already sent the General the Commander to be his new padawan. She showed up with backup and they were able to trick the Seppies and let us retreat. But Sarge…”

“He tried to run. He tried…maybe we should’ve let him run,” Punch said. “He was our Sarge. But they told us to hold the perimeter against him, and we did, and they caught him. They arrested him. And we – helped. He said – the last thing he said before we handed him over was that he didn’t blame us.”

“They took him away after that,” Sketch added. “Captain Rex, Commander Cody…the Generals, too. Skywalker, Kenobi. Boss, they know where he is. They took him. I don’t know where, but they do. They took him somewhere else.”

Oh.

They’d known this whole time, then. Rex knew. Cody knew. General Skywalker knew. Even Besh squad had known. They’d all known, all but Appo, and he’d kept on searching anyway. No wonder they had wanted him to stop.

“He was still our Sarge, though,” Jester said miserably. “He said he loved us, and I – I think he did. I think he really did. He loved us, and we turned on him.”

They blamed themselves?

But – Slick was a traitor. Slick had disobeyed. More than disobeyed. He’d actively turned against everything they learned, everything they’d been trained to value. He’d been bad. Nothing.

They loved him, though.

Still.

Despite everything.

“Sometimes I wish I’d lied about what I was doing and let them investigate me,” Jester continued. “Just to give Sarge a chance to go. I don’t know. He wanted to be free, and I’d never really thought about it before he said it. He loved us. He loved us, and we loved him. He betrayed us and he forgave us and looking back at it I think we should’ve done better by him. But we didn’t, and we helped them, and – and they took him. The Captain, the Commander, the Generals. Wherever they took him, he’s still there. Not dead, not missing…there.

He looked at Appo, his voice and posture pleading. But Appo didn’t know what he was asking.

“They shouldn’t have done it to you,” Gus said abruptly, savage in his sudden fury. “Bad enough when they interrogated us, but I get that. They had to. They had to stop Sarge from what he was doing. That was right. But you? You’ve done nothing wrong. You were just trying to do your job. You were just trying to help. They shouldn’t have put you in that position, refused to tell you anything, refused to give you a chance to understand…It’s not fair. And now they – I don’t even know what they did to you, boss, but they shouldn’t have.”

Cody hadn’t done anything. It was Appo that was the problem.

“It’s wrong,” Punch said bitterly. “It’s all wrong. Us turning on each other, Sarge turning traitor – everything’s wrong. But he loved us, and we love him, and I don’t know how much I care any more that it’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” Sketch said. Punch and Sketch were always like that, always together, not always agreeing but never far apart. “Sarge was wrong, turning on everyone like that, letting the Seppies weaken us right before a battle. That was wrong, no question. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since then, and I don’t know if he was only wrong. Not about being a traitor, but about – about us being –”

He trailed off, as if afraid to say it.

“We are slaves,” Appo said through numb lips, because he was many things but he wasn’t blind. “We are, but it doesn’t matter. It’s our purpose. We’ve got to obey orders. If we don’t obey orders, we’re nothing. That’s what a slave is. So we’re slaves.”

He closed his eyes and shuddered.

Of course Slick had figured it out, too. That was Slick to a tee, that startlingly perceptive part of him that he hid behind the charisma and the charm and the light-hearted cheer. Slick had been clever, too. Probably too clever. He wasn’t like Appo, slow and awkward and always having to follow the rules to hold himself back from being bad and broken and wrong. Slick hadn’t just given in and accepted it. He’d decided on what was important to him, and he’d gone for it, no matter the cost, no matter the betrayal, no matter how wrong it was.

He'd wanted to be free.

Appo didn’t understand why that was something anyone would want.

But then…maybe he didn’t have to.

“Thank you,” he said to his boys. Slick’s boys. Besh squad. It was just them in the room with him, his bunkroom – they’d taken him back there without him noticing. Aurek squad wasn’t here, but Appo’s HUD put them just outside the door, guarding it, giving them the privacy they needed. “Thank you for telling me.”

“The Commander shouldn’t have scared you like he did,” Chopper said stubbornly. “It’s wrong.”

Cody hadn’t scared him, but Appo didn’t know how to explain what Cody had done or why he’d reacted the way he had. He didn’t entirely understand it himself.

“But just so you know, boss, you’re not deficient,” Gus said. “Okay? You’re our boss. Our…our Sarge, now. And maybe it doesn’t mean much, us saying so, since our last Sarge turned out to be a traitor, but – you’re not. You’re not. You’re good.”

“Yeah,” Chopper said, and Jester and Sketch and Punch were nodding as well, agreeing as well. “For whatever little it’s worth, you know, we think you’re good.”

Appo nodded. He still felt like he was moving too slow, like he was moving through mud – like he’d drowned in mud, head below the surface, breathing in muck with every expansion of his lungs. But he didn’t feel like he was full of wires anymore. Or at least, if he was, that it didn’t matter.

He had a job to do.

“I’d like to be alone for a little while,” Appo said, and his voice came out hoarse, like a whisper. “You’re dismissed.”

“But –”

“Please.”

They made him promise that he would be all right, and they threatened that one of them – or one of Aurek squad – would be on guard outside the door until they felt comfortable that he was really all right. But they agreed to leave him alone, and they did, and that was what was important.

See, Appo had the virtue, if it could be called so, of knowing exactly what his problem was.

It wasn't the intrusive thoughts, wasn't his humorless severity, wasn't the rigidity or inflexibility that others tended to ascribe to him. It wasn't his disinterest in socializing with others, wasn't his awkwardness, wasn't even his extreme attention to detail. It was so much simpler than that.

Appo was too loyal.

Clones were meant to be loyal, of course. But they were supposed to be loyal to principles, to ideals: to the Jedi who had ordered their creation, to the Republic that had paid for them, to the Kaminoans and trainers that justified their cruelty by saying that it was necessary to help keep them alive in the upcoming war, only to shrug when they died anyway. They were supposed to be loyal to their brothers: to their squadmates and their batchmates, to their superior officers, to their brothers-in-arms, to their allies in battle - to anyone that was on the same side.

Appo was loyal.

But he was loyal first and foremost to those that were loyal to him.

To those who were his.

The General wasn’t his, nor the Commander. Rex wasn’t. Cody might have been, if Appo had been 212th, but he wasn’t. Appo could be obedient to them, and would be, no matter what they ordered…but he wasn’t loyal. They didn’t need him, and so he didn’t need them.

Slick’s boys, though, they were his.

They needed him, they trusted him, they were like him. Yes, Slick’s boys, they were like Appo. They loved without reservation, loved too much for principle. Slick was a traitor to the Republic, a traitor to the Jedi – and so what? He was still their Sarge, in the end. He always would be.

He’d loved them. They loved him. It was enough.

Even if it was wrong.

The Appo that he had been before the blizzard, before the punishment, before the peacekeepers, before – before he’d – before anything else, that Appo, he would have agreed with them. That Appo had never really cared about the rules, about orders, about principle. About morality. He had only ever cared about the people he loved.

He had believed that it was more important to be loyal than it was to be right.

He…still thought that.

Clone troopers had to obey orders. That was what they’d taught him. They didn’t say anything about whether the orders had to be right, or moral, or – or anything. The only thing they’d prized was obedience. Appo had learned his lesson. He was obedient.

But there was still room inside of obedience for loyalty.

Appo had promised Slick’s boys that he would look for Slick.

Appo had promised himself that he’d find him.

No one deserved to be nothing, not even a traitor. A number on the right list – that was all they were had, slaves that couldn’t choose to leave and were taught from birth to choose to stay. They had nothing, they were nothing, nothing but orders to be obeyed…but they had their numbers. They had that much. They were owed that much. They deserved to be categorized correctly.

They should have a place.

Appo wouldn’t be able to give Slick that. It was outside of his power. He was only a sergeant. He couldn’t go against his captain, his General, his Marshal Commander.

But he could still find Slick.

He could still give Slick’s squad that much. He could give Slick that much.

Sure, Appo was no longer allowed to send information requests to the Jedi. Knowing what he did now, it made sense that he’d never gotten an answer that way and likely never would have. But he didn’t need the information requests and Form 15b63 anymore.

Appo wasn’t like Besh squad, standard clone troopers, who only really knew as far as their own assignment and no further. Whatever had happened later, he had once been command class. He’d learned everything there was to know about the layout of the Grand Army of the Republic.

He knew where Slick must be.

If Slick had been arrested as a traitor to the Republic, then there was only one place they would have taken him: to the high-security prison on Coruscant, where political prisoners and dangerous subversives were meant to be held until trial, assuming they ever went to trial.

The prison on Coruscant.

The prison, which was manned by the Coruscant Guard.

(Thire. Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire Thire -)

Appo swallowed, hard, and licked bloodless lips. His boys, Slick’s boys, they’d trusted him. They’d told him what he’d needed to know. He couldn’t stop now, at the last moment, just because he was scared of what might happen if he gave in to the bad part of himself, the part that didn’t care about rules or what was best for other people and just wanted what he wanted. They trusted him. He was their boss, just like Slick was their Sarge. They trusted him. Appo couldn’t put his personal feelings, his fears, over theirs.

He had to keep going.

He wanted to keep going, and that was the scary part.

He had wanted it so badly and for so long that it seemed impossible. Yet this wasn’t an excuse, a mere justification; this was a real reason. He wasn’t doing it because it would make him happy, because if Appo had learned anything in life it was that he wasn’t allowed to be happy – no, he wasn’t doing it for himself at all.  He wasn’t being selfish at all. He was doing it for others.

He was terrified.

But he couldn’t be afraid.

He had to do this. He owed it to his Besh squad.

Appo swallowed a second time, cleared his throat, and picked up his comm.

He called Thire.

Notes:

chapter content warning: character briefly has psychotic delusion and thoughts of self-harm, not acted upon

Chapter 6

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

The alarm seemed to go on forever.

Eventually it ended, and when it ended, the light came on and the day began.

Such was the life of a rat in a cage.

Slick opened his eyes.

Getting up was, as always these days, more of a challenge than it had ever been before. It wasn’t the bare walls or the dull buzz of the cell shield, nor even the monotonous routine of it: Slick had been raised on Kamino, after all, and an intensely regulated schedule over which he had no control was, if anything, a comforting return to familiarity. But over time, the lack of hope of there ever being anything else had started to creep in through the corners.

The first couple of months of Slick’s imprisonment, he hadn’t had any trouble getting up.

He’d been angry. Maybe it had been justified, maybe it hadn’t been. He’d gone over it so many times that it had started making him dizzy, and, ultimately, it didn’t matter. His rage had fueled him through the boring routine, which was usually just get up, eat, shower, exercise, eat, rest, exercise, eat, rest, sleep. It had kept him going despite the dull surroundings. It had kept him going, at least for a little while, even once he’d realized that he was going to be stuck here for the foreseeable future.

Maybe even for the rest of his damned life.

Better not to think too hard about that, or else he wasn’t going to get up at all.

That happened some days. But not today.

Slick finished getting dressed and started up with a few basic warm-up exercises, even though it was before breakfast. He’d been a first-class hand-to-hand fighter back on Kamino, his highest score by far, and with nothing much to do with his time but practice and work out, he thought he might be even better now. Not that he had many opportunities to try it out on anyone.

Breakfast was delivered to his cell by chute. After breakfast, Slick was buzzed out of his cell and allowed to go through a small hallway to reach the yard (small, enclosed) or the gym (smaller), then he returned to his cell for lunch, delivered in the same way as breakfast. Rest time could be taken either in his cell or the yard or the ‘library’ (miniscule) adjacent to the yard. Then there was time for a shower, if he wanted it (the term ‘infinitesimal’ came to mind), dinner (chute), rest, lights out.

His entire world had shrunk to just this handful of rooms and nothing more.

Supposedly there was a mess hall somewhere nearby that they were holding off on opening until there were enough prisoners to justify it, or until they were holding someone important enough that it would matter. Rumor had it that they were getting close to being about to tip over capacity, and that it might be coming soon.

Slick hated that he was kind of excited about it.

Still, even this horrifically dully routine was better than being alone.

Clones were not meant to be alone. Maybe it was part of the genetic tweaks the Kaminoans had implemented into all of them, maybe some trait inherent in Prime’s genome, or maybe it was just part of being raised their whole lives in collective conditions: the hatchery or the nursery or the classroom or the barracks. Being alone, to a clone, was almost unheard of, a rare luxury…but it was only a luxury as long as it was rare.

Slick, though, Slick had had the dubious honor of being the first clone to do something worthy of being stuck in the rat cage. Even now, months and months later, there were still only a vanishingly few number of inmates. A few were natborns, political POWs whose identities were too sensitive to be revealed to the public, but the rest of them, a mere handful in total, were clones like Slick. Clones that had committed crimes, but who for reasons unknown the Jedi had decided they didn’t want decommissioned, and so they were sent to be held here, instead.

Back at the beginning, there hadn’t been even that.

Slick had been the first.

Slick had been alone.

Of course, at the beginning, Slick hadn’t cared one way or another about the lack of people. He’d been too angry and too upset and too regretful – too full of emotions. He had gone back and forth with himself over what he’d done, driving himself up the wall with it, driving himself crazy with it. He had stewed on his wrongs, ranted and raged, howling with wrath to blank walls that didn’t care. He had scripted endless arguments at length with – with certain other people, as if he had only failed to find the right words to use to convince them, as if he could have changed what had happened if only he’d had more time to talk, if only they had let him have the chance to lay out his perspective and his motivation and how it all made sense.

As if the right words could have shown them, could have proven that Slick was right after all, in so obvious and clear a fashion that even he they would have had to admit it.

As if he could have made them see what he saw. All of them.

As if he could have had another ending.

That had faded, in time.

As had hope.

See, when the Jedi first said that he’d be going to prison, Slick had thought – foolishly – that he would actually go to prison. But in fact that turned out not to be the case. No, he’d been shipped off to Coruscant and put in a holding cell instead, as if in preparation for a trial that even from the beginning he had known would never happen. From what Slick later heard, the custody cells under the Guard HQ had originally been meant for short-term stays, but instead of ever being moved on, there Slick remained. 

Permanently.

Someone, it seemed, had decided that his actions needed to be “hushed up.” That meant that regular prison, even supermax, was right out, since one glance at his face and everyone would know at once that a clone had betrayed the Republic. And that couldn’t be borne. Apparently, whoever had made the call decided that they couldn’t risk other people hearing about what Slick had done or his motivations, lest it spread similar sentiments among the clone ranks – or perhaps it wasn’t the clones they were worried about at all.

Maybe they were worried that if word got out that clones weren’t the completely obedient meat-droids the Kaminoans marketed them as, the citizens of the Republic might not feel wholly comfortable with them, like a new piece of tech that had proven unreliable and faulty. Maybe they feared that the Senate would get cold feet and start rethinking the value of the whole war they were engaged in. Maybe they were concerned that their new Jedi owners might one day have to contend with the reality that the men they were sending to their deaths on a daily basis had no choice in the matter.

Hah. Like the Jedi cared.

The Jedi had commissioned them. They were the ones who told the Kaminoans that they wanted a perfect little slave army to follow them into battle, regardless of their fitness to lead. They were the ones who drove them to their deaths, like a herd of livestock to the slaughter. They were the ones who signed off on regulation after regulation that said that the only way out of their precious GAR was through death. No way to quit, no way to say no more, no provisions for what to do with the irrevocably wounded beyond decommissioning, no plan for what to do with them should the war end, nothing.

The Jedi didn’t care.

Slick had told General Kenobi to his face that he and his ilk had enslaved his brothers, and General Kenobi had said only that he was disappointed in Slick, then asked Cody Commander Cody if they had enough weapons left for the next engagement. If Slick had had any doubts left, that would have killed them: that exchange made it clear enough what the General really cared about, and it wasn’t the squeamish morality of forcing war on men who’d never had a chance to choose anything else.

(That’s not fair, a voice said in his head, a familiar voice similar to his own but not. The logistical needs of the moment will always outweigh a philosophical crisis, particularly when there are men on the ground whose safety depends on those logistics.)

Slick didn’t care if it was fair, thanks.

He was the one getting silenced, getting covered up, getting stuck in fucking isolation because the colossal tottering waste-heap of the Republic couldn’t tolerate anyone knowing that there might be dissent in the ranks. He was the one stuck in a prison that wasn’t even a real prison, a holding cell that was going to hold him forever because clones weren’t entitled to things like trials or recognition or freedom. He was the one who wasn’t even going to be granted the mercy of death.

He was the one who was never getting out of this terrible place.

(You are also the one who betrayed us to the enemy.)

Oh kriff off, Cody, you’re not even here -!

Annnnnd Slick was talking to himself again. Great. For all the Kaminoans talked up the ‘resilience’ and ‘durability’ of their clone products, insanity did sure seem to set in quick.

Slick raised his hands to his face, pressing his palms into his eyes in a gesture he knew he’d picked up from Cody and tried to pretend he hadn’t.

“No,” he told himself sternly, not for the first time. “You are not insane.”

Slick did not sob, but he wanted to.

But he wasn’t insane, or at least, he wasn’t insane yet. Not today, at any rate; not tonight.

If he could just get to tonight, it would be all right.

After all –

Tonight, there was Fox.

And just as he had known there would be, in fact, there was.

Clunk.

That was the sound the bucket made as it hit the ground.

Fox had not quite dropped it, but he hadn’t quite put it down properly either. The motion was a little too harsh, a little too abrupt: he was too tired for sleek, seamless professionalism, or else didn’t think it was necessary at the moment. A moment later, the rest of his plastoid amor made a series of rattling thudding sounds as it, too, hit the ground, clattering unhelpfully as Fox sat down with an exhausted huff outside the forcefield beyond the bars of Slick’s cage.

“All right, Slick,” he said, looking like he had a raging headache – meaning much the usual, for him. “What’s this I hear about you getting into it with Needle in the yard?”

As usual, there was no introduction. When he was on duty, or doing something that he considered work, Fox was all business, all the time, and it had seeped into the rest of his manner as well. He had no choice but to be like that, with his crazy fucked up posting in an urban environment filled with hostiles that he wasn’t even allowed to shoot at. Truly, Coruscant sounded like the shittiest posting in the history of shitty postings, and being in command a tough role in the best of times, but looking at the steely determination on Fox’s face, one could see that he had no intention of letting it bring him down.

But that was Fox for you.

Commander Fox, technically. Possibly even Marshal Commander Fox, Slick didn’t know and didn’t really feel like asking, since surely the one advantage of being shut away in prison for the rest of his life was that he was out of the business of worrying about rank.

Fox had first showed up a few days after Slick had been imprisoned. He didn’t say much of anything, that first time, just stood outside the forcefield beyond the bars in parade rest, still and silent. Looking back on it, with what he now knew, Slick thought Fox had probably been working on his reports or managing his Guard’s schedules or any of the rest of the intensely administrative business that came with managing a force as massive as the Coruscant Guard.

Slick had stayed stubbornly silent for nearly three-quarters of the night shift, but in the end he’d given in. Asked. Demanded to know why Fox was there, what he was going to do, what he wanted. Was he planning on interrogating Slick, which no one else had bothered to do? Something else? Something worse?

Fox had tilted his bucket to the side thoughtfully. “Maybe I want to understand your motive.”

“Well,” Slick had said back, “maybe you should -----------”

There was a reason that sergeants were a universal byword for creative swearing.

Somehow, Fox hadn’t minded.

It took a few weeks of regular visits, one every three days, for Slick to figure out that Fox wasn’t coming to him for interrogation, or for a mission, or indeed for any purpose beyond keeping him company, and another few weeks before he managed to get over the spike of unendurable rage that realization had generated in him. It had taken even more weeks before Slick finally came to terms with the magnitude of what Fox was doing for him.

“Slick,” Fox barked. He disliked being ignored. “Talk to me.”

Slick rolled his eyes. “Hi, Fox. Good evening, Fox,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Lovely weather we’re having, Fox.”

Fox glared at him, but Slick ignored that. He was in karking prison, he didn’t have to answer to rank just because Fox asked – and he didn’t believe in Fox’s apparent anger for one second. On the contrary, Slick knew from Cody experience that command often liked to be treated informally whenever it was possible, a release of the tension of being answerable for all those doomed lives, and for all that Fox was nagging Slick about irrelevant matters, he wasn’t actually on duty right now. Or, well, not on active duty, anyway, since the Guard never seemed to go off duty, ever.  

Needle, Slick,” Fox said. “I thought we resolved your issues with each other when we made sure you weren’t going to be cellmates any longer.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we just don’t get along even outside the cell,” Slick said. “It happens. We’re not exactly generated from the most sociable stock, to say the least.”

That didn’t phase Fox in the slightest. He just arched his eyebrows knowingly. “Prime might’ve been into that lone wolf need nobody type shit, but you’re not.”

Slick had once prided himself on his social skills. He wasn’t Marshal Commander Bly or anything, but he was pretty charming, if he did say so himself. He liked being popular, and he knew how to get there; he was good at figuring people out, knowing what sort of approach would get on their good side. He’d been daring enough to try out what he thought would work, even if it seemed crazy. That had been how he and Cody

Slick sneered.

“What can I say,” he said, the sarcasm dripping from his tongue. “Sometimes a traitor and a repeat murderer just don’t get along. Who’d have thought it possible?”

Why anyone had ever thought that Slick and Needle would get along even a little remained a mystery to Slick. They had nothing in common beyond their genetic profile. Slick had been a run-of-the-mill sergeant, but Needle had been a medic, one of the rare few chosen ones. Medics were very nearly more precious than anything else on a cruiser, second only to absolute necessities like fuel. But he’d squandered it. He’d killed his own men, his brothers who had trusted him, who had thought he would help them, and he had thought the whole time that he was doing them a favor when he’d done it. Still did, the bastard.

Sure, Slick was a traitor. Sure, he’d turned against the Jedi and, yeah, sure, his actions might’ve led to the deaths of some of his brothers, falling in battle against the droid armies of the CIS.

But he wasn’t like that.

He loved his brothers.

(He loved his boys.)

Fox sighed.

“You mentioned the weather,” he said mildly. “Is this about fixing the sunroof? You know we’re working on that.”

“It’s not about the sunroof,” Slick said, abruptly too irritated to keep playing around. “Everyone agrees about the sunroof, even a death-loving fuckface rankweed like Needle. If you can really call that sliver of a crack in the ceiling a sunroof.”

(The window, so high up above the yard as to be scarcely visible, had been pathetically small and opened up into nothing more interesting than Coruscant dockyard traffic, but it was the only thing that gave the inhabitants of the rat cage a glimpse of actual sky. Everyone was utterly desperate to get it restored.)

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Why do you care?” Slick crossed his arms over his chest. “We didn’t even actually fight.”

He almost wished they would have. Needle wasn’t exactly what Slick would call a worthwhile opponent, with shitty hand-to-hand skills that were clearly more aimed at restraining the injured than winning on a battlefield and no inclination to train himself any further, but he wasn’t completely worthless, with a knack for aiming at pressure points and no reservations about causing permanent damage if he could get close enough.

The Guard wouldn’t have liked it, though. No fighting was permitted in the yard – only carefully supervised spars in the gym, and even that only rarely. After all, they couldn’t just let the rats bite off each other’s tails…or at least, they couldn’t until the Jedi fully forgot about them.

“What can I say?” he added. “Maybe I just can’t stand his face.”

Cody would’ve rolled his eyes and said, with a faint smile, “We all have the same face.”

Fox just pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Why do you care?” Slick asked, abruptly suspicious. “You don’t normally waste your time with petty interpersonal crap like this. Not even when Commander Stone’s away on escort and you’re covering the prison. So what’s the reason you’re asking?”

“They certainly didn’t lock you away for being too stupid,” Fox said dryly. He had a very sharp sense of humor, sharp enough to bite and tear and hurt, but strangely enough Slick was starting find a reassuring sort of comfort in Fox’s spikey edges. “Fine. They tell me you two were arguing over Prime. How’d you even get on the subject?”

Slick scowled, annoyed all over again at the reminder. “Cyclone was ragging on about his usual shit, the whole clones being better than natborns or whatever that he’s always so high on, and Needle decided to get in a jab, as always. Said something about how no amount of genetic improvements can turn dirt into anything other than mud.” His scowl deepened. “And when I told him to shut his karking mouth, he said a whole lot more than that.”

“And you didn’t like it?” Fox sounded curious. “Did you ever even meet Prime?”

“…no,” Slick said, and turned his face away. “I didn’t.”

Geonosis didn’t count.

It didn’t, no matter how vividly Slick remembered it. The hot red dust thick in the air, filthy ash in the wind, the foul stench of fuel oil and blood, both inescapable, indelible, making it hard to breathe. The 501st had followed General Yoda to Geonosis, to the arena, and he had led them straight into hell. It had been a mess, with droids, bugs, monsters, and Jedi Generals everywhere Slick turned.

Everything had happened so fast. Chopper had saved one of the littler Jedi, a Commander, at the cost of getting half his face blown off, and Sketch and Punch had managed to avoid getting impaled by only the smallest of margins, both of them still incurring deep cuts into their sides. Gus had been limping, Jester concussed. Slick had been frantic: he had managed to avoid the worst of it, just a nasty burn from one of the bugs’ flamethrowers from where he’d shoved Jester out of the way and a couple of deep cuts he could ignore, but he had known with ice cold certainty that his boys weren’t going to be able to hold on for much longer. But there was no order to retreat and no way out, no justifiable reason that he could seize on to send his boys back to get the medical help they needed. Nothing but the repeated sound he could sometimes still feel in his bones, the constant drum of orders to go forward – forward – forward –

They’d gotten lucky. Slick had taken a left turn instead of a right, guided more by instinct than training, and he’d found a half-dead Jedi General. That had been what he’d most needed at just that moment: rescuing a Jedi and bringing them to medical was sufficient reason to exit a battlefield, while doing the same for a clone was not, no matter how precious they might be. Because a Jedi mattered, in the way his boys bleeding didn’t, his own terror didn’t.

Slick had given the order and put himself at the back, defended their retreat all the way back to the medievac ship. Thinking furiously the whole time about how to get them out, and how to keep them out.

(Come with us already, Sarge, why’re you lingering, Gus had said, tugging at him like a Tubie. I’m right behind you, Slick had lied, and shut the door behind them, banging on the side of the ship to let the pilot know that he could take off. An injured trooper squad coming in hot without their sergeant wouldn’t be sent back out into the field, not even if another sergeant was available. They would just be redirected to other work. Safer work.)

But without his squad, Slick wasn’t a sergeant, no matter what the insignia plaque on his chest said. He got drafted straight away into an ad-hoc troop, led by one of the commandos, and sent straight back into the arena to go defuse some sort of bomb or jamming device or something, Slick didn’t even remember what. They didn’t even hear the full explanation before an explosion took out half the troop and rendered him half-deaf. After that the orders were simple, just follow again. Slick had trailed after the commando, climbing over piles of his brothers’ corpses through a rain of blaster bolts and bug acid that killed the brother to his left and to his right, a whistling array of missiles that only failed to take off his head because he ducked in time.

The commando hadn’t been so lucky.

Slick had been alone, the only clone left standing. He hadn’t known what the mission objective was. He didn’t know where to go. The operator wasn’t responding. He’d retreated. Moving aimlessly, blindly, just trying to survive long enough to find someone to tell him what to do.

He’d tripped over an armored corpse. A brother.

Not a brother.

Clones didn’t wear beskar.

Slick had sat there right there on his ass in the middle of a full fury battlefield like a karking idiot, staring blankly at Prime’s body. Body was the right word for it, in fact, since that was all that was left of him: there was no head attached.

It had been cut clean off.

Clean, Slick realized a moment later, was also the right word. The wound in the neck had cauterized perfectly, a perfect single slice straight through. That sort of clean elegant cut in the middle of this hellscape could only mean a lightsaber, and lightsabers meant Jedi.

The Jedi had killed Prime.

Slick hadn’t understood. Why would they do that? Prime was on the Jedi’s side – he worked for them. The clones had been made for the Jedi, trained for the Jedi, and Prime had been the chief trainer, recruiting the others and even working personally with command clones, with his teachings indirectly trickling down to the rest of them. So why would they kill him?

Why, when the Jedi had been the ones to find him, hire him, offer him money –

Slick would never know why his mind suddenly went there.

It wasn’t as if Slick knew any more about money than any of his brethren. None of them had ever been paid, and they wouldn’t be, either, since they were all just property, paid for instead. But suddenly it was all he could think about: money, money! Of course! That must be the reason! Everyone knew that Prime had been offered the staggering sum of five million credits to be the progenitor of the clones. Given what else that money could buy…well, the deal was done, wasn’t it? The Kaminoans had plenty of Prime’s DNA in their storage banks. Why pay?

Slick’s hands were moving before he could think twice about what he was doing.

He could barely even think, the noise of the battle still raging all around him – the bugs flying through the sky, the sound of blasters, the thump of starcraft, the buzz of lightsabers in the distance. The hideous sound of marching, so many feet hitting the ground that he could no longer tell if the ones marching were droids or fellow clones. Everything around him was trying to kill him, and all Slick could think about was the money.

Prime’s money.

He wanted it. Suddenly. Completely. Slick didn’t even know why he wanted it, except that all of a sudden he did, and desperately. He wanted it. He craved it. He yearned for it. All that money, unimaginable amounts of money..!

It would be enough to buy anything. A cruiser. A convoy of fighters. A small planet.

Five clones.

Six, if he counted himself.

If only he could just –

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be a fan of Prime,” Fox said, and Slick snapped out of his memories. Pointless memories. In the end, one side or another had called down a firebomb bombardment, he’d run away, and finally an operator had contacted him to tell him that someone else had gotten to the mission objective first, rendering the whole thing utterly pointless. He’d finally gotten the order to retreat and regroup, and he’d made it out of Geonosis by the skin of his teeth, the only one of his batch still standing, one of the very few sergeants to still have his squad still intact, and it had been more luck than anything else. He’d forgotten all about Prime in the aftermath. “Given your whole ‘slaves of the Jedi’ thing.”

Slick rolled his eyes.

“I don’t blame the factory worker for the existence of the factory,” he said dismissively. “The Jedi were the ones who set the whole thing up, not Prime. If not him, it’d be someone else.”

“If anything, I think he counts as raw materials,” Fox remarked. It wasn’t disagreement.

Fox didn’t disagree with Slick on a lot of things. That, too, had taken time to understand.

(Slick just hadn’t expected it, that’s all. Not from a clone that had made Marshal Commander. Not from one of the top barracks in the command class. Not from Cody’s batchmate.)

“You going to tell me why it matters that I got into a fight with Needle over Prime?” Slick asked.

“I heard it wasn’t a fight,” Fox said, and Slick made a rude hand gesture in his direction. “Sometimes I just want to know things. It might be relevant to something else I’m working on.”

“You’re being a secret bastard again.”

“Of course I am,” Fox said, unruffled. “It comes with the territory.”

“Of being a Commander?”

“I meant being a clone, but sure. That too.”

Slick thought of Cody all the brothers he knew, and couldn’t help but agree.

Notes:

Hat tip to victoriousscarf who casually name-dropped an original clone called Needle as a prisoner in her very excellent fic to gain to lose and didn't mind when I leapt on the idea like a hungry dog seeing a treat

Chapter Text

Fox came early the next day.

This was somewhat irregular, since the visits were usually spaced out by a few days, but not completely unknown: Fox did things on his own schedule, always. At first, Slick thought that he was going to get an answer to the mystery from the conversation the day before – Fox might be a closed-mouth bastard by profession, but he liked boasting about his cleverness as much as the next clone, and since it wasn’t as if Slick had anyone he was going to go blab about, he was the perfect confident – but instead Fox said: “I’ve got news.”

Slick stiffened.

He’d been sitting on the bunk with his legs pulled up in front of him, pointedly disrespectful, but now he wished he’d decided to stand. News…Slick didn’t get news. There was no one on the outside to send news to him: no one knew where he was, and even if they did, no one cared about him. And the only news related to someone he knew that he was likely to get was – was –

“No one died,” Fox clarified at once, and Slick felt his shoulders relax against his will. At least it wasn’t that. Though that still left plenty of terrible possibilities… “The contrary, actually. Your boys rated a mention in the 501st’s latest after-action report.”

His boys.

Slick’s boys.

Kriff, he missed his boys.

“Yeah?” Slick said, swallowing around the sudden lump in his throat. “They do good?”

They were good, his boys. They were the best.

He missed them so damn much.

Each one of them. Chopper and Gus and Sketch and Punch and Jester, each one unique, each one different, each one just slowly starting to find their feet, explore what it meant to be something and someone outside of the confines of Kamino.

Chopper, take Chopper; he was so fucking talented, skills for days and days, but he had an attitude that went on just as long, and the dramatic scars he'd gotten at Geonosis only made him more outrageous, more likely to push boundaries, see what he could get away with in ways both good and bad. Or Gus, Gus who was too sure of his own judgement, too impulsive with it, and there was that temper of his, but he was so brilliant in every other way that it seemed almost cruel to reprimand him. Sketch and Punch were both solid, steady, level-headed in a way the others weren’t; their only problem was that they were too damn codependent, closer than twins, and heavily resistant to any efforts to make them back off a bit for their own good. And Jester! Jester, a little more immature than the rest, younger by a matter of a few very crucial days. He had so much potential, practically overflowing with it, but he had that anxiety issue, always got nervous and questioned himself too much…

And that was before.

Slick couldn’t think too much about his boys. It hurt too much, knowing what his betrayal had probably done to them. They’d always been so close to each other, not just a squad but something that Slick felt was a little like what he imagined a real family would be like, and then he’d gone and…and ruined it. Even though that hadn’t been his intention.

Things could have been different for them. Should have been. So different.

If only Rex and Cody would have let him have five minutes with them –

Slick couldn’t think like that.

That way lay madness.

“Very good,” Fox confirmed with a faint smirk. “Your boys took on a whole contingent of droidekas by themselves and survived. They were smart about it: used poppers to disable the first row of the invaders, then piled them up and used the narrower corridor as a choke point to take down the rest. No losses, either to their team or the whole wing they were defending. One of them, Jester, he’s even getting a special commendation out of it.”

Slick wasn’t the type to cry. So he didn’t, wasn’t, no matter how much his face burned.

No matter how wet his face felt when he lifted his fingers to his cheek.

It had taken him an embarrassingly short amount of time to crack and ask Fox for intel about his boys. More or less the day after he’d started trusting him, in fact. He’d asked Fox not to reach out to check on them, not wanting the attention turned on them any more than it would have been after his arrest, but he’d – he’d wanted to know how they were doing. He’d been desperate to know, in fact, even though he had fully expected the only news to be bad news.

Clones that lost their leader often suffered from morale shock and usually didn’t last long in the field after that. He’d seen it happen, after Geonosis, after Hissan, after the early days of Christophsis. He’d taken his turn, along with the other sergeants, at keeping an eye on the survivors as they sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, until they finally got the chance to walk out into a battlefield they had no intention of walking back from.

It’d always been tough. Excruciating, really.

The thought of his boys, his squad, reduced to nothing but numbers on a death list because of him…it was unbearable. Slick had been torturing himself with the expectation of that pain for months, now. He’d told himself to expect it so often that he felt like he’d already lived it. 

But – his boys had made it.

They’d defied the odds, which weren’t great for regular clone troopers even without considering a serious hit to morale and group cohesion. They had lived. No, better, they had thrived.

Without Slick, sure. Whether it was despite his absence or because of it, whatever. He couldn’t bring himself to resent it at all, because his boys were still alive, and that was all that mattered.

“Did –” His voice was rough, scratchy, cracking in the middle of a sentence for no reason, so Slick cleared his throat. “Did the report mention what sergeant they’ve been put under now? It usually does, for these sorts of things.”

He didn’t thank Fox for telling him the information. That wasn’t his way, and Fox would only have been made uncomfortable by it. But he thought Fox understood regardless.

Fox’s Guard were his boys. He understood.

“It did,” Fox confirmed. “Sergeant Appo.”

Appo?” Slick said, bemused. He would have expected them to go to Riven, since he’d been up next in line, or else maybe Hester or Oodles, who he’d regularly invited to his bunk for little parties, passing around drinks and stories alike. Even Hutch, if they wanted to keep the team to the same bunkroom for some unknown reason, would have been more likely than Appo.

“Is that not good?”

“Just unexpected,” Slick said. “We weren’t close.”

They’d shared a bunkroom from the time the 501st had shipped out to Geonosis, but Appo wasn’t one for socializing. He was more likely to sit in his bunk reading or filing reports, even when Slick and the other sergeants were three steps away over at Slick’s bunk, living it up. He’d never turned them in or anything, so he couldn’t have been as much of a stickler for the rules as scuttlebutt sometimes suggested he was, but he wasn't friendly, either.

Appo was…serious. Even stern. Quiet, rigid, precise. More than a little bit intimidating, particularly when he stared at you like he knew every single one of your secrets and insecurities. Blisteringly competent, but in an off-putting sort of way. Obedient to a fault.

That last one was the big one, actually. From what little Slick could tell, Appo didn’t actually enjoy doing flimsiwork (who did?), but Rex had said that someone had to do it and Appo had done it without ever complaining. Probably hadn’t even occurred to him to complain, or that Rex would probably have spread the work out among them if Appo had let on even a little bit of unhappiness. Slick had tried to circumspectly suggest it once, but Appo had just looked at him with those dull dead eyes of his and said, “Orders are orders,” as if that was that.

Appo probably would have spaced the whole 501st in a heartbeat if he’d gotten orders to.

On the other hand…

“Could be worse,” Slick said. “He keeps those boys of his alive.”

“He would,” Fox said inscrutably. “Though I notice he’s listed as Master Sergeant for some reason. I thought only normal sergeants led squads.”

“He does both,” Slick said, and shrugged when Fox twisted his head around and gave him a disbelieving look. “We were short on lieutenants, too. Never got another one after we lost all of ours on Geonosis.”

“So who’s doing all your – you’re joking.” Fox looked almost offended. “How does he do anything but flimsiwork all day?”

Slick snorted. He wasn’t sure Appo did do anything other than flimsiwork, up to and including sleep and consuming food. He probably even did it while training his squads…Slick’s squad, now, too.

He was training Slick’s boys. Maybe he’d even been the one to keep them alive.

Slick couldn’t tell if he hated or loved Appo for that.

“Enough about me,” he said, because if he thought about his boys any more he was going to punch a wall hard enough to break his hand. Again. “What’s your problem?”

Fox scowled at him. “I don’t come down here because I have a problem to share,” he said stiffly. “It would be unethical to –”

“Save your jailor-prisoner moral dilemma shit for someone who cares,” Slick suggested. “You might’ve started coming down here because you wanted to help me without getting anything in return, but that’s not why you kept coming and you know it. And so do I.”

The thing was, Slick had come in with an unfair advantage.

He’d known a little about Fox, even before being locked in the rat cage. Cody had told him. They’d been batchmates, which meant something a little different at command level than anywhere else, but the fundamentals were about the same. Fox, Cody had told him, was a perfectionist, a vicious competitive bastard with a feral streak, a justifiably arrogant and incredibly talented but also excessively paranoid hard-ass who ran his Guard with an iron fist and expectations as high as the sky. A real professional, which from Cody was the highest possible compliment. On Kamino Fox had been Cody’s chief rival for the top scores, and to hear Cody tell it, they had fought in class, fought in the scoreboard, fought in the mess and the bunk room and anywhere else they happened to meet. Indeed, Cody had said, even in the present day, he could scarcely visit Coruscant without Fox appearing to cause some sort of horrific havoc to Cody’s perfectly organized leave plans.

From this, Slick deduced that Fox was Cody’s favorite person, and that he missed him terribly.

(Maybe he’d been a little jealous, too. But he’d been there and Fox wasn’t, so it hadn’t seemed all that important at the time.)

More importantly, once he got sent here, Slick had also quickly concluded that Fox himself was almost certainly in desperate need of someone to talk to, someone outside the line of command or at least willing to pretend that they were – as desperate as Cody, his matched mirror image, had been.

This, he thought to himself when he was still new to the rat cage, was information he could use.

He’d planned to be thoughtful about it.

He’d told himself that he would need to plan out how to best use it. Nothing too hasty. Fox would have no reason to anticipate that Slick knew anything about him, since Cody usually didn’t tell anyone anything unless he had to – even for Slick, getting things out of him had been like trying to pry open an oyster with a crowbar. One of the really big oysters at the bottom of Kamino’s seas, the legendary ones that were said to be as big as a Tipoca dome and so grown over by moss that they could no longer be found except by luck.

Slick knew that he would only have one opportunity.

So, naturally, he’d blown it the first chance he’d gotten.

(“Did he tell you to come in here?” he’d shouted at Fox, banging his hands furiously against the bars and the forcefield and everything that kept him inside his cage. “Tell me, is that it? Is that why you’re here, to condescend to me, pity me, mock me? It is him, isn’t it?! Tell me!”

Fox’s head, still helmeted, tilted very minutely to the side in question. “He?”

“Cody!” Slick howled, grabbing the bars and holding them so tight that his knuckles went white. “Was it him?!”

Yes would mean that Fox was just here out of pity, like Slick was some circus animal with his misery on blatant display for the enjoyment of others – and that would be intolerable, unbearable, agonizing, beyond endurance.

But Yes would also mean that Cody was still thinking of him.

“Why would Cody ask me to look in on you?”

“Because we were fucking,” Slick said. Snarled. Shouted. “I bet he didn’t tell you that.”

“…no,” Fox said, and he reached up and took off his helmet. That had been the first time he’d done that, and for some reason seeing his face – the same face they all had, underneath – had abruptly taken the wind out of Slick’s sails. “No, he didn’t. But then Cody isn’t the sharing sort. And you know that, don’t you?”

Slick’s fingers had unclenched from the bars, suddenly numb. He’d slid down to the floor.

“…he really didn’t ask,” he’d finally said, not raising his gaze from the floor. “Not anything.”

“No,” Fox said. He paused for a moment, then said: “I’m sorry.”

Slick was sorry, too.)

“One of these days, I’m going to ask Cody what he was thinking, telling you as much as he did,” Fox mused to himself. “It must have been something really wild.”

Slick snorted disdainfully. “You assume he was thinking at all. With the head above the waistline, anyway.”

In a just world, Slick and Cody would have never even met. Cody was Slick’s CO’s CO, a Marshal Commander, head of the Seventh Sky, adjunct to a High General – he was as far above a common trooper as the god-like Jedi were to the fish in Kamino’s seas, and Slick was just a regular sergeant, barely a step up from standard. But Cody had liked Rex, and Rex had invited him to join the officer’s parties on the Resolute during the 501st and 212th’s joint missions, and after the big engagement at Hissan where his boys had gone back onto the field for the first time since Geonosis and survived without a single scratch, Slick had been so damn happy that he hadn’t remembered to give one single damn about rank.

He'd just – wanted. Blindly. So he’d taken.

He’d taken Cody to bed, and he’d held him down, and he’d taken and he’d taken and he’d taken, and Cody had responded so beautifully, seeming all the happier the more that Slick took.

He hadn’t even had the excuse of being drunk.

Oh, Slick had pretended like he’d been the next morning, made out like he had a hangover or something to try to create some plausible deniability that they could both use to sweep the whole thing under the rug, never to be spoken of again, the way he’d assumed they both would want. He even thought that he’d been pretty convincing, though he was also fairly sure that Cody had sussed him out right away. Why else would Cody have sought him out again, later? And kept seeking him out, even though Slick had tried to make it clear with every interaction between them that he had every intention of using their liaison to his own personal benefit in every way possible?

(There hadn’t been that many benefits, actually. Mostly getting to know the Generals or Rex, which in turn gave Slick a little bit of a social boost among the other sergeants, not that he’d ever told anyone exactly why he was on such good terms with command. Cody wasn’t Slick’s actual CO, so he couldn’t give him any preference in battle or perks outside of it, and so the end result had been that the only real benefit Slick had gotten out of it was Cody himself. Still, Slick had felt it important back then, even vital, that Cody know what to expect from him.)

Cody had seemed to think Slick’s mercenary attitude was funny.

He probably didn’t think that anymore.

He probably didn’t think about Slick at all anymore.

Probably for the best, really.

Slick certainly didn’t spent all his time thinking about him anymore. He even had a whole rule about it, that he wasn’t allowed to think of Cody as Cody any longer; he had to either not think of Cody him at all or else think of him only as Commander Cody in some belated backwards attempt to put distance between them.

“Cody’s not like that,” Fox said, the irritation sloughing off of him like rainwater.

As always, something about Slick being rude to him seemed to calm him down. Fox was a very annoying person.

Slick scowled at him. “You’re so sure of that? He could have changed. War does that to a person, and you said yourself that you haven’t had much time to interact with him since deployment.”

“By the same logic, everything Cody would’ve told you about me is outdated and useless,” Fox pointed out, and sometimes Slick really wished he could punch him. Just once. It would feel so good. “But as it happens, you’re right. I do have a problem.”

Slick relaxed a little. He liked being right – and he far preferred to talk about other people’s problems than his own.

“What is it?” he asked, getting himself comfortable in his bunk. “Is it Thire again?”

Lieutenant Thire.”

Slick rolled his eyes. Lieutenant Thire had been a recurring problem for Fox. Fully trained as a CC, completely capable of command, seemingly calm and level-headed, he was one of Fox’s most treasured subordinates. Fox had spoken highly of him time and time again, enough times that Slick had determined that the ‘calm and measured’ personality that Fox described was almost certainly a façade that had been put up to hide something underneath, and also that whatever Thire might think he was like, underneath it all, it probably wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he thought it was. It was probably just another layer of excessive competence.

Slick knew the type.

Of course, Thire was also apparently in the middle of attempting to seriously turn down a promotion, which Slick personally thought suggested some serious level of mental instability. It would be one thing if it was some sort of sop or manipulation, but no, this was a much-deserved promotion. And to Commander, no less, skipping straight through Captain!

Clearly, Thire was nuts.

Oddly enough, Fox didn’t seem in the least bit concerned about that.

No, what had been driving Fox insane was the fact that Thire had apparently been “wilting”.

What did that even mean?

“It’s not Thire,” Fox said. “Not right now, anyway. One of his batchmates got in contact and told him something, I don’t know what. Still, whatever Doom said, it seemed to help…”

He shook his head, clearly dismissing the whole matter.

“Is he getting that promotion?” Slick asked, curious.

“Now I’m wondering what I was thinking, telling you so much,” Fox grumbled. “Yes, he is. It’s going through soon, this month or next. He deserves it.”

“Doesn’t want it, though.” Slick clicked his tongue. “Not that it ever matters what we want.”

Fox rolled his eyes. “Not the time, Slick. You want to help or not?”

Slick paused. “Help?” he said warily. “Since when can I help?”

Sometime early on, he’d thrown a fit over what he perceived to be Fox pitying him. He’d insisted on some level of equality, the right to give as well as take, and to do that, he’d demanded that Fox start telling him things, problems that he had. The request had confused Fox at first – unsurprising, since it had confused Cody at first, too. Slick couldn’t blame either of them, since it sure sounded more like he wanted to take more from them, rather than the opposite. More, even, than they’d originally wanted to give. It was only after, once they’d started talking and found it hard to stop, that they realized what little it was that Slick had to give back.

But even Slick wasn’t deluded enough to think that being a good (if rude) listener counted as helping.

“Well, you’ve got room, and I’ve got a storage problem,” Fox said, his expression settling into something studiedly neutral. His Senate face, technically, though it wasn’t meant as the insult certain other people (per Fox) apparently thought it was. He claimed that he just slid so deeply into concentration and focus that his face abandoned all animation, sometimes, and that it was completely normal.

(Slick personally thought that that all sounded like a heap of bantha dung, and said as much.)

“Right,” Slick said. “And I was decanted from a tube just yesterday evening. There’s only one thing you need to store in an already-occupied prison cell, and it isn’t extra batches of bacta or rations for emergency redistribution.”

Those were stored in the empty prison cells just down the hall.

“And that means you want to put someone in here that you think wouldn’t survive elsewhere in here until they adjust.” Slick crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, guess what? No! I’m not babysitting another Needle!”

“This one’s a special case,” Fox said, not even denying it. “I can’t put him just anywhere.”

“Uh-huh. Did this one also kill a lot of brothers?”

Fox hesitated.

Not interested.”

“Slick, I really need you to do this one,” Fox said, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. “The situation is – complicated. This isn’t even an authorized transfer, but it’s this or supermax and I think –”

“Hold up, the kriffer isn’t even a clone?”

Fox shut his eyes even tighter.

“Why do you care about this one?” Slick demanded. Fox was even more wary around natborns than Slick had been, and Slick had been fairly suspicious of anything anyone told him, after Geonosis. It wasn’t hatred, Fox didn’t hate natborns (excluding certain never-named individuals), but he wasn’t inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, either. So for him to pull strings enough to push through an unauthorized transfer… “You’ve got to have a reason.”

Fox opened his eyes, but his lips were pressed together into a thin line.

Well that wasn’t going to fucking fly.

“You want me to help you,” Slick pointed out. “I’m not going to go into this blind, Fox. If you want me to help, I need to know the reason. Tell me.”

“He killed my batchmate,” Fox blurted out.

Slick stared.

Fox grimaced and pushed his palm into his eyesocket. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. Technically he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.”

“I’m not sure there’s any other way to say it,” Slick said, still taken aback. “And it’s pretty pertinent information, trigger-pulling or not. What are you even asking for here? You want me to kill him for you?”

“No!” Fox exclaimed, then scowled at Slick. “That’s exactly the opposite. I don’t want you to kill him. He deserves to live…but I don’t want him to.”

That made exactly no sense, but Slick thought he understood anyway. Fox was just a roiling mass of emotions right now, all of them apparent despite his attempts to control himself: grief, anger, concern, anger at being concerned…

“He got taken in by some people,” Fox said. He wasn’t gritting his teeth, but he wasn’t not, either. His jaw was tense. “Bounty hunters. He’s – young. Upset. Angry. Ponds – the batchmate in question, he wouldn’t have held it against him. He would’ve wanted us to help him, not harass him or leave him to be all alone in the supermax. But I can’t trust myself or any of my Guard around him right now.”

One led to the other. The Guard loved Fox fervently, devoutly, and they had their own notions of right and wrong. Hierarchy or no, they would disobey even his orders to do what they thought was right by him.

Slick, on the other hand, was far too self-centered for that.

“That’s why I need you,” Fox said. “I want to move him here to keep him safe, but to do that, I need someone I can trust.”

Slick stared. “And you picked me?!”

Fox smirked at him. He had a smile sharp enough to rend bone and tear flesh, rare as it was to see. “You’re actually quite reliable, Slick. In your own way.”

Yeah, sure, if you mean could be relied upon to do what was best for himself. Which this wasn’t!

“Oh I see,” Slick said, affecting a tone of long-suffering understanding. “You’ve skipped your sleep cycle for over six shifts again –”

Fox held up his hand.

“Slick, I’m serious here. If it ends up being another Needle situation, that’s fine, we’ll move him, but putting him in with you for even a week or two will buy me some breathing time to think about other options.”

Slick had managed to survive even Needle for two weeks, and he was pretty sure that kriffer’s name came from his love of fucking with people to find the best way to get under their skin. He was pretty sure he could manage anyone for two weeks, even without there being a special request from Fox to consider.

On the other hand, the fact that there was a special request made it extra suspicious. Fox wasn’t the sort of person to ask casually for favors. On the contrary, he always tried to take everything onto his own shoulders, all the risk all the work all the stress, anything he could. Most of it was motivated by Fox’s genuine concern for his fellow clones, with an extra-hefty topping of the excessive self-sacrifice that had been trained into all of them, but at least a portion of it was just how much Fox hated to owe anyone anything.

And that meant…

“What’s the catch?” Slick asked.

Fox made a face, clearly caught out and not liking it. “You’re right, there is one other thing. The new prisoner…he’s…”

He took a deep breath, let it out. Looked Slick in the eye.

“It’s Boba.”

Slick stared back at him, eyes narrowed.

After a minute, he finally said: “Fine.”

Fox blinked, seeming surprised. “Fine? You agree?”

“Yeah, since it apparently means so much to you,” Slick said, shrugging. “Only one question.”

Fox looked relieved. “Shoot.”

“Am I supposed to know who the kark ‘Boba’ is?”

Fox buried his head in his hands and swore.

Chapter Text

Boba, it seemed, was Boba Fett. Prime’s son.

“Before you say ‘I didn’t know Prime fucked’, he didn’t,” Fox said flatly. “Boba’s a clone, too.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Slick lied. He’d absolutely been about to say that. There was a reason that a clone that lacked attraction to others was seen as the standard model. “This Boba, he’s really a clone? Did Prime pick him out of a hat or something?”

Fox looked like he was developing a headache. “No, he had the Kaminoans make one especially for him. You really don’t – never mind. Sometimes I forget how little troopers outside the command class know.”

“We only need to know enough to get ourselves killed in the line of duty,” Slick said knowingly. “Anything beyond that is extraneous. Is that why you were asking me what I thought about Prime?”

Fox inclined his head in agreement. “Among other things.”

“Other things?”

“Everything he did, he did to try to kill General Windu. For revenge.”

The Jedi were the ones that killed him!

So it had been General Windu that had done it.

That made sense, in a terrible sort of way. Even Slick had heard of General Windu’s prowess on a battlefield. Sure, he’d also heard good things about his care for the troopers under his command, but it just went to show that you could never really know, with the Jedi. One day they acted as though they really cared about your existence in a way no one had ever done before, the next they were cutting the head off someone who’d devoted at least ten years of his life to working for them. How could you ever trust someone like that?

Given what Slick’s sole interaction (or lack thereof) with Prime had been, agreeing to spend time with Prime’s so-called “son” was almost certainly an awful idea. But Slick had already said he’d do it. And, well…

He didn’t want to let Fox down.

He’d already let enough of his brothers down.

“It’ll be fine,” Slick said, and almost believed himself. “It’ll be fine. Go and bring him.”

Fox went.

Fox returned.

Fox brought –

“Wait, hold up, he’s a cadet?!” Slick exclaimed, then squinted at the new arrival, who looked vaguely like a six-year-old cadet and also on the verge of trying to bite someone. “And what’s wrong with his face?”

“I’m not a cadet. Only clones are cadets,” the cadet, presumably Boba, spat venomously. His hair had been buzzed short, past even standard regulation style for cadet, so presumably it was a prison thing instead. Along with the slightly overlarge prison outfit, the overall effect made him look young and fragile, except for the expression that suggested a feral dog with teeth bared. “And what do you mean, what’s what with my face? There’s nothing wrong with my face!”

“Great start,” Fox said. He was rolling his eyes under his helmet, Slick could tell.

Karking rankweed.

Slick couldn’t believe he was doing him a favor.

“Tell me what you meant about my face!”

Slick sneered down at the little brat. “Your face is weird. It’s all – you know –”

He waved his hands a little, trying to convey his admittedly vague meaning.

It was wrong, that was all. Like a cadet except not.

Boba glared back. “You’re the one being weird. I’ve got the same face as all the other cadets!”

Slick rolled his eyes. “Other cadets don’t look like that.”

“Yes they do!”

“They don’t.”

“Do too!”

“Are –”

“Not to interrupt your bonding time or anything,” Fox interrupted. “But we’re actually here for a reason. Slick, step back, I’m going to disable the forcefield around your cell.”

Slick stepped back.

Boba sniffed disdainfully. “Do everything you’re told to do, huh?”

“I do when I’m being watched by Guard carrying stunners,” Slick hissed back. “You want to spend the afternoon on the floor, feel free, but leave me out of it.”

Fox waved a hand and the forcefield went down. For all of his sneering, Boba still shuffled forward when Fox gestured for him to go, clutching at his assigned bedding like a lifeline.

He did pause right at the threshold, though, and glanced back at Fox. “Tens…”

Fox turned his head away.

Boba’s shoulder slumped miserably, his whole body seeming to collapse internally – perhaps that was what Fox mean by “wilting”? But he walked the rest of the way into the cell.

“You two will be cellmates for the foreseeable future, so at least try to make an effort to get along,” Fox said. “Boba, don’t be a brat –”

He’s the one who said my face looked weird!”

“And Slick, don’t go out of your way bait him –”

“His face does look weird,” Slick protested.

Fox glared at him. “He looks exactly the same as all the other cadets. And even if he didn’t, you’re fully developed. Act like it.”

With that, he turned on his heel and marched out.

"I see that he's been wearing that bucket of his too tight again," Slick said. 

Boba snorted before he realized he was doing it, then tried to cover it up with an unconvincing cough.

"He's right, though," he said. He was still standing next to the empty bunk, shifting from one foot to another, hands still clutching his bedding as if it was the only thing holding him in place. "I snuck into a group of cadets and no one noticed I wasn't - one of them."

He chewed on his lower lip, then asked, very hesitantly: "Am I really - different?"

His voice cracked in the middle, but even that couldn’t hide the naked hope in his voice.

Slick didn’t like cadets. He didn’t.

It was still hard to ignore when one was being sad and pathetic right in front of you, though.

“You look pretty different to me,” he finally offered, begrudgingly. He leaned forward to study Boba’s face a little more, trying to pin down exactly what about it was bothering him so much. The differences that had seemed so obvious at first glance were, upon review, a little less straightforward than he’d thought, though they were certainly still there. Boba did look like a standard cadet…except in all the ways he really, really didn’t.

Maybe whoever had failed to spot him was just blind.

“It’s your cheeks,” he finally said. “Or something thereabouts. You’ve got the same features as all of us, but on you they’re not quite right. Just a bit off, somehow…hey, have you ever broken a bone? Badly enough that they used the dermal regenerator on you?”

“Uh, once. Why?”

“You know how it grows the skin back all fresh and new, which would be fine except it stands out next to the older skin? You’re a bit like that.”

Boba gave him a weird look. "Like…new skin?"

"No, you’re like old skin," Slick corrected. "That’s what’s wrong with you.”

Boba stared at him.

“Wow,” he said, tone almost wondering. “I think I hate you. Are you saying you think I’m old?”

Ugh. What an obnoxious snot-nosed brat Fox had saddled him with.

“You asked, didn’t you?” Slick stood up. He had things to do: he'd interrupted enough of his daily routine thanks to Fox's early arrival, and still more during the cadet drop-off, and he wanted to get some exercise in before lights out. “Not my fault if you don’t like the answer.”

Boba scowled. “I mean, I guess it makes sense,” he said begrudgingly, as if he were doing Slick a favor by agreeing. “I don’t age like a clone, so I guess my skin might be…older…”

Slick paused briefly. “Hey,” he said. “When you say that you don’t age like a clone…”

“I’m older than you,” Boba said immediately. He was smug about it, too. “I’m older than you, I’m older than Tens –”

“You mean Fox?”

“I’m older than all of you,” Boba barreled on. “Which means you should listen to me.”

Slick snorted. Now that wasn’t going to happen.

“Age isn’t everything,” he said, starting up his exercise routine. “I still outrank you.”

Boba's face screwed up. "What rank? You're a prisoner!"

“Seniority’s seniority.”

“That makes no sense!”

Slick ignored him.

Boba watched him exercising for a few moments, then, seemingly recognizing the kata Slick was using, turned away and started setting up his bunk, stealing furtive glances over his shoulder the entire time. He had the same routine down as any other clone, starting with the same corner and going through the same motions – though maybe that was just Kamino. 

After a little while, Boba said: “Why did Fox have to stick me in here with you?”

“He thinks I’m less likely to kill you than the others,” Slick said, in between uppercuts and jabs. “He’s probably right, too.”

“I was doing fine,” Boba said, in the sulky tone of someone who probably had not been doing fine. He hopped onto his bunk and started kicking his legs a bit. “I had Bossk with me. He was keeping an eye on me. It was fine. I don’t need some random clone to do it instead.”

He paused, waiting for a response.

When Slick didn’t give him one, Boba scowled. “What did you do to end up in here, anyway? Murder a bunch of people?”

“No, that was my last cellmate,” Slick said. “His name’s Needle. He likes to euthanize people he thinks are better off dead, and he hates Prime. You’ll meet him tomorrow in the yard.”

Boba’s face suggested he wasn’t looking forward to that.

“Also, as to your question, I’m a traitor,” Slick said. There was no point in hiding it, since the other inmates would point it out soon enough. They always did. Murder, sabotage, abuse of power, violation, more murder – but not a traitor, they sneered and jeered, as if they thought it gave them some sort of moral high ground over Slick. At least not a traitor. “I sold out the Republic.”

Boba looked as appalled by the notion as any other clone. For a moment there, he didn’t look different from the rest at all.

Slick's mouth twisted into a sneer of his own.

“That’s the real reason Fox put you in here,” he said. “With me, of all people, instead of leaving you to rot in regular prison with all those criminals and only your buddy Bossk to watch your back. Because we’re the same.”

Boba looked for a moment as if Slick had gutted him. A second later he bristled, trying to cover his hurt with anger.

"Oh yeah?" He spat. “Is that what it is? Because to you and Tens, I'm a traitor, too?"

"No," Slick said, and finished his kata. "Because like you, I put killing the Jedi over protecting my brothers."

He ignored the way Boba's eyes went wide at that and swung himself into his bunk.

"So at least we have that much in common," Slick said to the ceiling. "No matter what else, no matter what would be best for us or what anyone else might have wanted for us, our first and only thought is always fuck the Jedi."

The end of day alarm sounded.

The lights flickered, then turned off.

"Welcome to the rat cage, kid."

Chapter Text

“I can’t believe you put my squad on the rotation as scouts,” Slick said, scowling at his comm. “You remember that our secondary specialty is heavy artillery, not recon, right?”

“I know, I know, but we need the cover,” Rex said, the blue holographic projection of his helmet tilting a little as he shrugged. “There’s too much ground to go over and too many troops injured after the last engagement.”

As if Slick’s boys weren’t also injured and tired and still out there scouting these horrible dusty turquoise plateaus on top of horrible angular turquoise tiles and filled with horrible spikey crystal turquoise trees, more or less entirely alone.

If Slick never saw the color turquoise again…

“I don’t like doing this without backup,” Slick grumbled, checking his proximity map again. The little blips that represented all his boys were still moving. It was the only sign of life he had for them, since they were spaced too far apart to see each other. Yet another thing he didn’t like about this. “We’re not trained for it. Even if we did see something, what are we going to do about it? Something other than more karking turquoise, I mean.”

“Relax, Slick. We wouldn’t send you and your squad out if it wasn’t important. The Generals think something might happen.”

They weren’t the only ones. This whole place gave Slick the creeps like nobody’s business.

It almost felt as though the whole zone was screaming at him, every glint of turquoise radiating malice and hatred and all his instincts shouting get out of here already at full blast.

But he had his orders. Straight from the top, too.

Slick sighed. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Tell me you’ve at least verified the intel.”

“Can’t. Generals just had, and I quote, ‘a bad feeling about this’.”

Slick stopped and gave his comm a disbelieving look. “You’re karking joking.”

“Nope.”

“Of course they had a bad feeling about this,” Slick snapped. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this! But you don’t see me reorganizing battleplans because I had too much spicy cheese stew for dinner last night!”

Rex didn’t cackle, that wasn’t his style. But his shoulders did go up and down a few times.

“Well,” he said, and his serious tone couldn’t quite erase his evident amusement. “I guess that’s why you’re not a Jedi. Rex out.”

The comm clicked off.

Slick looked around, checking to make sure he was alone – he was, there was nothing around him but more crystal trees and a steadily intensifying feeling of alarm – and then informed his comm: “Yeah, well, fuck the Jedi.”

It felt good to say.

“What an interesting perspective,” a voice said from the blind spot right behind his shoulder. Slick spun, reaching for his blaster, but he was way too late. A hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him back hard against one of the crystal trees, and then there was the feeling of a hand at his throat, holding him up as it cut off his air. “For a clone, I mean.”

It was Ventress.

She was smiling.

The two stripes that bled from the corners of her mouth made it seem like a frown.

Slick was choking. He was choking, dangling at least his height above the ground, and yet he could see that there was nothing under him, nothing holding him up, nothing that he could see. All he could see was her, her smile, her cold white hand held up in the air with fingers curled forward – and his proximity map, still displaying the location of his squad. His boys.

No,” Slick said.

And that –

That wasn’t right.

That wasn’t what had happened.

In reality, Ventress hadn’t let him talk, or at least not for a while. Just kept strangling him, letting him struggle and thrash pointlessly as she cooed and chattered, going on and on about how the Jedi just didn’t understand. Who she was aiming it all at, he had no idea, since the lack of air meant that he didn’t hear half of what she said. Most likely she was just entertaining herself.

He’d gotten the gist, though.

Enough to stop struggling long enough to make the universal sign for money at her.

That had gotten her attention.

“Not this time,” Slick said. He dropped his hands to his sides and hung limply from Ventress’ invisible grip, refusing to struggle any further. “This is just a memory. A dream. The past.”

Ventress looked at him thoughtfully, just the way she had on that stupid plateau, when she was considered his stupid offer.

His offer, and the shame of that still burned. But his stupid desperate plan had worked: she hadn’t killed his boys.

“It is,” she said. “But the past shapes you.”

“It might shape me, but it doesn’t control me,” Slick lied, as if his decision that day on the plateau hadn’t changed the course of his entire life. As if he wasn’t a rat in a cage, just waiting to die. “What’s done is done. I’m not going to go through it all over again just to torture myself.”

Ventress smiled again. Her teeth seemed sharp.

“You’re getting better,” she said, almost approving. “But it won’t help you.”

Slick shrugged. He might not entirely believe what he was saying, but he hated the thought of suffering for Ventress’ enjoyment far more. So: fake it till you make it.

“Very well,” she said. “You may not fear the past. But what about – the future?”

The world around them twisted and changed.

No more turquoise. Instead, everything around them was durasteel and permacrete, buildings upon buildings upon buildings, everything grey grey grey –

Oh no. Not this dream. Anything but this dream…!

One of the doors opened, and a clone trooper stumbled out. Wearing armor, no helmet. Scars on his face, grey sprinkled in his hair. Age lines on his eyes, around the curve of his mouth. Older, older than any clone Slick had ever seen, and yet still –

Familiar.

“Please,” Jester begged, grabbing onto the door frame to try to keep it open. “Please, no, you can’t do this. Please don’t demobilize me. I – I don’t know what else to do. There’s nothing else I can do. I’ve never been anything but a soldier. You can’t just kick me out –”

“We have no room for those who can’t work,” the man in the doorway said, a natborn naval officer in his dress greys, his voice cool and disinterested. “You clones are all out of date. Worn out, exhausted…what do you expect, that we’d just keep paying you for work that can be done better and cheaper by younger men?”

“I don’t know anything else,” Jester repeated. “I’ve never had anything else. Please. How will I live?”

“That is not our concern,” the man said. He made as if to close the door, but paused. His lips curled up into a very small smile, full of cruelty. “Though I wouldn’t worry about if too much it I were you. You’re first generation, aren’t you? Given the rate you lot age…well. It’s not like you have a lot of life left.”

“But –!”

The man shut the door.

Jester staggered back, staring blankly: first at the door, and then at the flimsiplast demobilization notice crushed in his fist. “No,” he whispered. “No – no – no –”

He burst into tears. Sobbing, heaving, gut-wrenching tears that wracked his whole body.

And Slick –

Slick woke up screaming.

“You’ve got issues,” Boba said from his bunk.

Slick sat up in bed, still trying to catch his breath. He hated that dream. Hated, hated, hated it.

It always felt so real.

Fucking Jedi. If it wasn’t for their carelessness, their lack of planning, their indifference, maybe he wouldn’t have had to suffer time and time again through that dream, or the others like it. Maybe he would’ve reported in on what happened with Ventress instead of choosing to go through with their deal. Maybe –

The past doesn’t control me.

Slick took a deep breath and unclenched his fists. Calm. He had to stay calm. Ventress liked it when he was angry, and he wasn’t going to give her (even if it was only his own dream’s representation of her) the satisfaction.

“Is it the war?”

Slick glanced at Boba. “Is what the war?”

“What you were dreaming about.” Boba was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest. “It sounded bad, so I was wondering, you know. If it was – the war.”

“No,” Slick said, and scrubbed at his face. “It’s not the war. It’s what comes after.”

Boba frowned.

“Let’s hit the showers,” Slick said. “They’re usually free this time of day.”

Boba was up within seconds. “They are? I thought we could only go in the evening!”

“They’re better in the evening,” Slick corrected. “The droids come in to do the wash cycle during midmeal.”

Boba scrunched up his nose, clearly getting what the problem would be.

“Still, it’s an option. Never know when someone might need to wash right after waking up.”

“Because of cold sweats?”

Yeah, Slick wasn’t touching on the possible other reasons there.

Move,” he snapped, and Boba bounced up. He’d gotten more compliant over the past few days, at least – he’d spent most of the first night pretending he wasn’t sobbing into his pillow and most of the first day alternating between a tremendous sulk and lashing out with all sorts of “I can handle myself! Leave me alone!”

Slick had half-heartedly listened to him, figuring that it was just like Chopper and his attitude (though…hopefully not just like…) and that some respect would do more than hovering, and of course Boba had managed to end the day by nearly getting hustled into a corner with minimal surveillance by one of the nastier inhabitants of the rat cage, one of their few natborns, a kriffer who thought they were untouchable because they were (nominally) an important person awaiting trial.

Slick, who’d never paid the slightest attention to their strutting around like a peacock alternating promises to “put in a good word” with threats of what’d happen if they were crossed, took tremendous pleasure in putting them down. He’d felt so cheered by it that he’d even kept up a running commentary of the moves he was doing, the way he’d once done when his boys were watching.

(Boba had waited until Slick was done to inform him that he totally could have handled it himself, even though he begrudgingly noted that he was “better with a blaster”. With that established, he’d then spent the rest of the day quizzing him on the close grappling moves.)

Day two had gone much the same way, only with Boba trying to storm off to a different part of the yard as if he could pretend Slick didn’t exist, followed by him running into Needle and Cyclops and promptly fleeing right back just to avoid them. Slick didn’t blame him.

Day three had started much like the previous ones, right up until Slick had offered to show him some more of the moves (largely out of boredom) and Boba had exploded, first with yells and then, when Slick just started ignoring him, with tears.

Day four was worse.

Boba had woken up with questions.

And Slick, bored to stupidity, had made the mistake of answering him – which had then opened the floodgates.

(“What Jedi did you try to kill?”

“General Kenobi and General Skywalker.”

“Whoa…how?”

“Sold them out to a Sith.”

“Huh. Did it work?”

Obviously not.”

“Will you –”

“Time for a new subject!”)

(“What rank were you, anyway?”

“Sergeant.”

“That’s low, isn’t it? I’ve never met a sergeant. Well, a clone trooper sergeant, anyway. I knew some of the trainers, one of them was a sergeant…”

“Did he tell you what they say about sergeants?”

“Huh? No. What do they say?”

“------------------------------------------------------------------------”

“I don’t think even my dad knew all of those!”)

(“I miss Bossk.”

A long pause.

“You’re supposed to ask me about Bossk now.”

“What if I don’t care about Bossk?”

“But he’s really cool!”

“But I still don’t care.”

“What do you care about?”

“…money.”

“Oh! That’s just like Bossk. See, Bossk is –”)

On the other hand, Boba had also gotten into a fight with Needle and ended up biting him in the arm. That counted for a lot in Slick’s book.

They visited the showers, ate breakfast, and had just started settling the debate over whether to go to the yard, the library, or gym with a game of aiwha-scientist-fish (Boba claimed that it was called “lizard, toad, snake” on planets other than Kamino) when the outer door buzzer went off.

Slick turned to look at the entrance, frowning. It was the wrong time entirely for Fox to visit, and it wasn’t like they got any other visitors in this wing…

(He still grabbed Boba’s wrist to dissuade him from trying to change from aiwha to scientist while his back was turned. Nice try, kid, but Slick had never lost this game before and he wasn’t about to start now, attempt at cheating or no.)

The person who entered was one of the Coruscant Guard. Not Fox, with his so-distinctive coloration, but not a regular Guard either, since he had command stripes. Not as many as Fox. A lieutenant – or at least, he was for now.

This must be Thire.

Thire (presumed) marched forward into the generally empty hall and came to a stop right in front of Slick’s cell. He settled into an at rest pose and then – said nothing.

He just stared.

At Slick.

Slick stared back, waiting for Thire to explain why he was there. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing there in perfect parade rest, but he was just bubbling over with barely leashed emotions – practically vibrating with tension, seething with anger and concern and jealousy and rage and fear and sorrow, so many that it was impossible to tell which one was primary.

The silence stretched.

Eventually, Slick broke. He’d never been good at waiting people out.

“All right,” he said gruffly. “What’s your deal?”

“Just wondering,” Thire said. “About you.”

Slick arched his eyebrows skeptically. “Me?”

“I’m trying to figure out what’s so special about you.”

Slick didn’t think there was anything particularly special about him. Other than, well –

“I am a traitor,” he said dryly. “That’s pretty unique, or so I hear.”

“Your method, yes,” Thire said, as if that didn’t raise more questions than it answered. “But that’s not enough. Fox might be a sucker for the competent and pathetic, but you’re not quite enough of either of those, and you just being a traitor wouldn’t be enough for Fox to keep coming down here even after the cells started filling up.”

That was true. Fox didn’t come down to visit Slick out of pity for a clone left alone, not anymore.

Fox came because he needed a listener. Fox came because he needed someone who hated even more than he did, so that he wouldn’t startle anyone with his own rage. He needed someone outside the hierarchy, so that he needn’t fear weakening morale when he shared his concerns. His fears. His suspicions.

So, this was about Fox. That was fine. Slick had long ago prepared himself for –

“What’s your relationship with Appo?”

…not that.

“Appo?” Slick asked, bemused. “Appo?”

Yes. CC-1119. Master Sergeant Appo. 501st. Tell me: what was your relationship with him?”

“Uh,” Slick said, entirely out of his depth. “We didn’t really…have one? He was a sergeant from the start, even though they stepped him up to master sergeant right away, so he was in my room. Next bunk over. We didn’t really talk much…”

Because Appo was an antisocial bastard at the best of times.

“And when we did talk, it was mostly about logistics, scheduling, that sort of thing…”

And that was it. Except, of course –

Slick swallowed hard.

“He’s the one who got my boys.”

Up to that point in the conversation, Boba had been half-hiding on his bunk, not actually concealing himself in any way but very careful not to move, either, deliberately minimizing his presence to avoid drawing Thire’s attention. But now he suddenly popped up like a bug out of a bunker and said, indignantly, “Wait, hold up, your boys? You have boys? Who are they? Can I meet them? How does a clone even have boys?”

Slick gave him a weird look. So did Thire.

“I was assigned them? Like usual?” he said. “My boys, they’re my training squad. I’m a sergeant. We all have one.”

Boba stared, blinking, and then abruptly his cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

“Never mind,” he mumbled, and buried his face in his pillow.

Weird kid, that Boba.

Maybe it was the lack of genetic alteration or something.

Slick turned back to Thire, who had calmed down from his earlier emotionality. Slick was still unclear what had caused it in the first place, or what had made it go away, but he preferred Thire this way: less seething jealousy, more curiosity.

“Your boys, huh,” Thire said. “You had a good relationship with your squad? And you betrayed them anyway?”

“I never meant to betray them,” Slick spat out, his anger abruptly spiking white hot – but no. No karking anger. Not on a day after a Ventress dream. She always wanted him angry, furious and hateful, and he hated her, so he didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t be. Even if only out of sheer spite. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down, and then another. Another.

Finally, he said through gritted teeth: “What’s your point?”

Thire was watching him thoughtfully, still in that protocol-perfect parade rest right in front of the cell.

“Maybe it’s the loyalty,” he mused, clearly not talking to Slick. “Appo always appreciated that. He was always loyal.”

“Too loyal,” Slick said, and Thire’s fist suddenly hit the forcefield in front of the cell bars at full force, making it crackle and spark and causing both Slick and Boba to jump and scramble back away from the hissing field on pure instinct.

“You’re right,” Thire said, voice absolutely calm and relaxed as if he hadn’t just done that. “Appo’s far too loyal. Always has been.”

He paused.

Then he added, very gently: “It’s rude to say it, though.”

“Right,” Slick said, suppressing the Sir yes sir! that immediately tried to jump out of his lips. He was a prisoner. Rank didn’t count. He regularly mouthed off to Marshal Commanders. He was not going to sir some random lieutenant. He really, really wasn’t.

That being said, this was the Thire Fox was always worrying about? The one he wanted so badly to protect? The one he thought might be wilting? What the karking Sith hells was wrong with him?! Sure, Slick had figured out from the way Fox talked about Thire that he was leaving out some key details, the sort of things that fell into a friend and commander’s blind spot, but he hadn’t realized Fox had left out Thire’s entire personality.

Especially since Fox had to have known. Because Fox was like that, too. A giant mess of howling emotions buried under the perfectly controlled exterior that was all he let outsider see. A feral creature composed of deep-seated grief and defiance, pretending at all times to be tame.

It was when the emotions underneath the mask disappeared that you needed to worry.

It seemed that Thire was in fact an excellent pick for Guard commander.

Though – speaking of which –

“Why not Captain?” Slick blurted out, then grimaced. He hadn’t meant to ask that.

Thire looked at him oddly. “How’s that?”

“Captain,” Slick said. He was already committed, so he might as well go on. “Your promotion, I mean. You’re a lieutenant now, and you’re being promoted to Commander. Why skip Captain?”

“I’m already trained for command at a higher level,” Thire said. “Fox requested it, special.”

Slick stared at him.

Something niggled at his brain.

“Does the Guard not have any captains?” he asked.

He didn’t know why he asked that. It was just one of those weird bursts of inspiration he got sometimes, an intuition that led him in a completely unexpected direction. And in fact, the suggestion was objectively insane. Why would the Guard not have any captains? That wasn’t how the GAR worked. There was a hierarchy. No matter what battalion or legion or division you were in, clones could expect the hierarchy to work roughly the same: troopers, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, commanders, marshal commanders. Even the specialist roles usually fit into one or another of those roles. So if there were sergeants and lieutenants in the Guard, and Slick knew there were, there had to be captains, too.

Unless…

Unless all the captains assigned to the Guard were off doing something else.

Thire looked at Slick.

“I see why Fox likes you,” he finally said, not answering the question. “You’re smart. Anyway. You want to see Appo.”

Slick frowned. “I do?”

“Not that smart,” Thire said dryly. “Yes. You do.”

“…I do.”

“In person,” Thire clarified. “No calls, no holos, no comms. An in-person meeting, right here. That’s what you want.”

“Why are you saying that Slick wants something when it’s obviously something that you want?” Boba demanded. He had raised his head and was looking offended, presumably on Slick’s behalf. Slick rather wished he wouldn’t.

Thire’s helmet silently turned to stare at Boba.

Boba braved the heavy gaze with a set jaw and a glare.

“Fine,” Thire said eventually. “You’re right. It’s what I want. Need. I need Appo to come here. And since, for the first time since deployment, Appo has finally willingly reached out to me and it was about you, well, you can fucking well guess how I’m going to get him here.”

The volume of Thire’s voice had risen steadily through the course of the sentence, although, frighteningly enough, his tone remained perfectly level. If it hadn’t been for the volume or the content, it would have sounded like Thire was politely providing some senator with directions.

“So noted,” Slick said, very cautiously. Thire’s emotions were roiling wildly under his surface calm, intense and fiery – not negative, necessarily, but everything he felt he felt very strongly. It was a feeling not unlike being in the vicinity of an unexploded bomb…albeit one with its own working bomb technician that was at all times very carefully keeping it in line. “Anyway, it’s not a problem. I don’t mind. I want to see him. I want to ask –”

His voice caught in his throat. He had to cough to clear it.

“I’ll ask him to bring word about your boys,” Thire said. His voice was gentle again, but genuine this time. Not the tone he’d used before, full of menace. “Getting anyone outside the Guard into the military prison is tough at the best of times, but…we’ll see what can be done.”

Slick nodded, not trusting himself to say anything, and turned his face away.

He heard Thire leave, the door buzzing as he let himself out.

After a few moments of continuing to stare at the wall, he heard Boba make a noise.

He didn’t turn to look.

“My dad,” Boba said from behind him. “He also – he called me his boy. When he was talking about me to others. That’s why I thought – when you said –”

He paused.

“Do you love your squad?”

Slick punched the wall.

He hadn’t meant to. He had stopped, early on, when he’d realized it was starting to slide into a pattern, a bad habit. He was an excellent hand-to-hand fighter, and it would be stupid to hurt his hands, and so he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t. He wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t.

Especially not now.

His boys had survived, he reminded himself. His betrayal hadn’t killed them. They’d gone on, onwards and upwards, thriving even under the most difficult conditions. Appo had taken them in, made them his own, and they were doing well with him. They were surviving. They were alive.

That was what mattered. That was all that mattered.

Slick missed them so damn much.

But he was here, through his own actions, and they were there, and he’d never want them to be here no matter how much he missed them. They deserved better than that. They deserved everything the world could give them – everything Appo could give them – and now Appo would be coming here, in person, and Slick would be able to tell him as much.

That would be good.

He could do that much. Maybe nothing more than that, trapped rat in a cage that he was, but – he could that.

But Boba had asked a question.

“Yeah,” Slick said, and hated how his voice wavered and cracked as he spoke. “Yeah. I love my boys. They’re – they’re good. They’re real good. Best – best squad in the whole damn GAR. I’m – I’m really proud of them.”

He turned back.

Boba was sitting on his bunk with his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. He looked quiet, for once. Less angry. Just – thoughtful. He was looking at Slick.

“Can you tell me about them?” he asked.

So Slick did.

The next morning, a note was delivered to their cell along with breakfast: Appo had agreed, and the meeting was set.

Slick felt almost sick with anticipation, anxiety and hope mixing in equal measure, but he forcefully reminded himself that a meeting being set didn’t mean it would happen soon. As soldiers, their every movement was governed first and foremost by the needs of the military, dancing to the tune of the war rather than their own desires. The 501st was an active battalion, always needed somewhere. There was no telling when they would have the chance to make their way to Coruscant.

Slick braced himself for a long wait.

“So I hear you’re meeting with Appo next week,” Fox said the next evening.

Slick stared at him. “Next week? Already?”

Fox smirked at him. “Five days from now, technically. I’ve already signed off on their arrival plans.”

“That’s quick,” Boba observed.

“That’s insane,” Slick corrected. “Five days? An admiral can’t scratch his own ass in under two, much less turn around a Venator – and forget reassigning a battalion! Even if we got colossally lucky and they’d just finished a battle, that wouldn’t impact their next assignment!”

“The 501st often has reasons to visit Coruscant,” Fox said vaguely. “Slick, a word. About Appo.”

Slick frowned at Fox. “Sure?”

“Can you…” Fox hesitated. “Just – be whatever your version of nice is.”

Slick arched his eyebrows. “You know Appo?”

“Of course. He’s a CC.” Fox glanced at Boba, just the barest little flicker of the eye because officially the two of them were still definitely not talking, and clarified: “He was originally trained as a commander, in the same class as me. That was before they broke his whole batch.”

Slick had heard of that, if indirectly. It had mostly come up in the meanspirited jokes about failure made by some of the other sergeants, who hadn’t been overly impressed with a CC showing up out of nowhere – and, if Slick had to guess, terrified of the notion that a clone not unlike themselves could mess up to the degree that a demotion like that would be called for.

No one had wanted to dig into what exactly had happened. They could have, if they’d wanted to, it had been clear that the information was publicly available…but no one had wanted to.

They’d just made jokes, instead.

Slick hadn’t made any of the jokes himself. But he hadn’t done anything about them, either.

“Did I know him?” Boba asked, which made Slick grimace. The age thing would never stop being weird.

“Probably not,” Fox said, though he was still looking at Slick instead of Boba. “He wasn’t in our barracks. And he was always pretty quiet, even back then. Shy, I’d say. A bit literal. But still – warm. Friendly. Not…what they later made of him.”

Slick thought about the Appo he knew. The only description that sounded anywhere near fitting was “literal.”

“Made of him?” he asked. “Was it – reconditioning, or something?”

Slick was almost afraid of mentioning it, the nightmare that was only ever whispered of between cadets and trainees, but to his surprise Fox just snorted. “If there was a reset button that could turn a clone into a perfect soldier, I’m sure it would already be part of basic training,” he said dismissively. “No. Appo wasn’t reconditioned. But he’s what happens when someone decides to use everything a clone is and is meant to be specifically to destroy them.”

“I don’t understand,” Boba said, and Slick was glad because it meant he didn’t have to admit that he didn’t either.

Fox’s face did something strange.

“I don’t think any of us really do,” he said. For some reason, he was lying. “Still, Slick, when you meet with him, if nothing else, remember that at his base Appo is like you.”

“Like me? how?”

Fox’s lips twisted into something bitter and regretful. “He loves his brothers.”

Chapter Text

There wasn’t anywhere for Slick to meet with Appo other than in his cell.

Fox had half-heartedly offered the use of one of the interrogation rooms, but that had sounded far worse, so Slick had declined. Doing so had made sense at the time, but as the actual meeting day drew closer, Slick felt increasingly anxious just thinking about how it would feel. There was nowhere to hide in the cell, with everything about his present pathetic little life laid bare for anyone to see – which was the point, of course. But it was one thing to know for himself how pathetic it was and another thing for a stranger to come and take it all in at a glance, to see everything that there was to see and know everything there was to know.

It made Slick feel naked, terrified, vulnerable…

Oh, and Boba would be there, of course.

Whatever strings Fox had pulled to get Boba into the military prison in the first place aside, it wasn’t actually that easy to reshuffle prisoners, even temporarily. The intelligence division was always looking for uncharacteristic or abnormal behavior to report on, and the Guard didn’t need any more eyes on them than they already had. So there was nothing for it.

“I won’t say anything,” Boba said, and even seemed to believe it. “I can be quiet.”

“This is going to go great,” Slick said into his hands, where he’d buried his head. “So great. Why did I agree to this again?”

“I don’t think you actually had much of a choice…”

“Boba.”

Boba smirked at him. “Shut up?”

“Yeah. Shut up.”

On the bright side, like most cadets, Boba seemed to thrive on the anxiety, shame, and fear of others, so at least he and Slick were getting along better.

It wasn’t very much of a bright side.

“What are you afraid of, anyway?” Boba asked. “He’s just another clone, isn’t he?”

It would be immature to respond with ‘you’re just another clone’, so Slick didn’t, even though he kind of wanted to. And it wasn’t as though Slick actually thought that Appo would, what, come in here, see him, and abruptly decide to kill his boys just to spite him or anything like that…

Slick groaned and tried to push his face even further into his hands.

Even he wasn’t sure why he was so on edge.

“We used to share a bunkroom,” he said, voice half-muffled by his inadequate attempts at self-strangulation. “He was my neighbor. It’s just…different. Now.”

It wasn’t as though Slick didn’t know he lived in a rat cage. But that didn’t mean he wanted anyone he knew from before to see it.

Besides, Appo was still in the 501st, right along with everyone else Slick had ever known. If he wanted to, he could tell what he saw to anyone he knew. He could pass along info on Slick to any of them. His boys, the other sergeants, Rex, General Skywalker, Cody

“Is it because he’s really weird?”

“It’s not about him,” Slick said, though he wasn’t totally sure if that was true. Appo had always been a little unnerving. “Not that much, anyway.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’re the one being weird.”

Slick decided to ignore Boba. It normally didn’t work, but maybe it would today.

“At least you’ve only got one more day to mope about it,” Boba said mercilessly.

Slick briefly considered the merits of kicking him in the head.

Only briefly, because immediately afterwards the outside door buzzed.

Slick rocketed to his feet.

“He’s here,” he said, abruptly sure of it. “He’s early.”

Boba’s eyes went wide and he scrambled up from his bed, realized it was the wrong move, then scrambled right back down, grabbing at his blanket. “What? No. It’s just Ten- Fox. Or Thire. Or –”

Shut up.”

Boba pulled the blanket over his head and buried himself in it, pretending he wasn’t there.

A few moments later, the internal door opened, and Appo stepped through.

He had clearly come directly from the spaceport, without stopping long enough to do anything else. The faint smell of ozone from entry into atmo still clung to his armor, and his bucket, detached and tucked under his arm, was still visibly on its active setting. He looked –

Well, he looked like Appo.

There were no significant physical differentiations between a CC and CT, but CCs tended to hold themselves differently. More grounded, more stable, as if they had learned how to withstand the rain and storms in a way a standard trooper couldn’t imagine. They also usually tended more towards individualization, but that was not the case with Appo: even now, after all those battles, his armor was painted in the 501st trooper standard, with only the single arrow on his head to differentiate him from the crowd – and even that hadn’t been self-motivated. In fact, Slick was pretty sure that he recalled Appo having added the arrow only in response to Rex’s specific request that Appo, in his role of sergeant, have an identifying mark. Nor had he changed anything else: Appo’s face, too, was remarkably blank, totally clone-standard, with no scars or burns or modification, no tattoo nor haircut to make him stand out. Appo was all regulation cut and regulation face, as close to a perfect model of a clone trooper right off the line could be.

He felt like a scream.

A terrible noiseless gaping wound of a scream, silent as empty vacuum but no less potent.

For a second Slick was sick with fear, thinking there must have been some terrible tragedy, some bad news, something that had happened to someone important, to his boys – but after a moment he realized that Fox would never have let that such news come to Slick by surprise like that, and moreover that Appo’s expression didn’t suggest anything along that line. It was the same as it always was: calm, steady, and with eyes that looked so directly into the world that it was often easier to look away than to meet them. Dead eyes, the other sergeants had sometimes said, but they sure didn’t look dead to Slick.

Maybe it wasn’t anything new.

Maybe Appo had just been screaming this entire time, and Slick just hadn’t noticed.  

Maybe Slick had just gotten a lot more sensitive during his time in prison – or maybe he’d just been so incredibly self-centered back before that he’d just ignored it in favor of his own pursuits, because once he thought about it he realized that Appo’s silent scream, horrifying as it was, didn’t feel new at all. On the contrary, it felt lived-in and familiar, like old armor, the type you’d worn for so long that it all felt normal to you, where you’d gotten so used to the dents and patches that you could almost forget they were there and that you had ever lived differently. Lived better.

Almost.

What happens when you use everything a clone is and is meant to be to destroy them.

Slick swallowed.

He must have taken at least a full minute or two to process everything, just staring blankly and wordlessly, but Appo hadn’t said anything, either. He just stood there, completely calm, waiting. He might have been playing some sort of power game, waiting to see which one of them would break first, but Slick wasn’t sure that that was what was going on. Maybe it was just Appo’s way to wait. Either way, it didn’t really matter.

Slick knew perfectly well which one of them had the power, and it wasn’t him.

It wasn’t ever going to be him again.

Slick cleared his throat.

“You’re early,” he said, because there was no way in any of the nine Sith hells that he was going to start this conversation by asking about his boys. That felt like too much nakedness, like exposing the weak spots they both knew he had. “I was expecting you to arrive tomorrow.”

Appo stared dully at him, and did not say anything. Just left the statement hanging in the air.

Slick was starting to remember why they hadn’t ever really gotten along.

“In fact, I was surprised that you were able to get here so quickly in the first place,” he said, forging onwards through the awkwardness through sheer willpower. “I thought it would take much longer to find a time for the 501st to come to Coruscant, given military necessity.”

Finally Appo spoke: “We were due to take shore leave.”

Flat, straightforward, to the point, with zero room left for any cogent response.

Slick was not going to survive this conversation.

Then, unexpectedly, Appo shifted a little on his feet and added: “Also, I’m the master sergeant.”

Slick didn’t understand the relevance at first. The statement seemed completely disconnected, random…another powerplay, perhaps? But Appo didn’t seem the type, and never had. If anything, it felt as though this were the opposite of an attempt to kill the conversation, that this was somehow Appo trying to be helpful, trying to cooperate in the conversation more than he usually did by offering up additional information to contextualize what –

Wait.

“Are you saying you fucked with the deployment schedule?!” Slick demanded, torn between horror and intense glee at the idea. He had known, of course, that Appo’s role as master sergeant meant that he did almost all the flimsiwork for the 501st, especially since Rex and General Skywalker hated doing any of it at all, but somehow it had never occurred to him that whoever controlled the flimsiwork controlled everything that the flimsiwork controlled, which was a whole lot.

Still less that Appo of all clones would actually use that control to do something in his own self-interest.

“No,” Appo said firmly, but it was too late, Slick had a measure of him now.

“No as in you didn’t fuck the schedule for your own purposes, or no in that ‘fucked the schedule’ is the wrong terminology to use?” he asked, smirking at him. “You know, I’m glad to see you have an actual personality in there underneath it all.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

Appo stiffened.

More than that. His whole body abruptly went extremely tense, every muscle suddenly frozen up as if he’d just touched a live wire attached to an active hyperdrive and gotten shocked by it, or else as if he had suddenly found himself under enemy fire at the very moment he’d expected to find a safe zone. He looked as if he was about to turn on his heel to leave.

He looked as if he were about to leave.

“The General often enjoys coming back to Coruscant when possible,” Appo said, his voice somehow significantly flatter than before. “Our return at this time was authorized by the Supreme Chancellor himself. I have done nothing but obey orders.”

“Just a coincidence, then,” Slick said, trying to salvage it.

“Orders are orders,” Appo said. “A clone trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything.”

That hit Slick like a blow, and he flinched.

He couldn’t help it. Here he was, standing in his stupid little rat cage: a stupid little rat, with a stupid little life that could be reduced down to the nothing he had with him right now. Nothing at all, not fresh air, not the brothers he loved the most, and Appo could see all of it at a glance. See what Slick, the first traitor, the first one to not obey orders, had been reduced to.

How dare Appo say that Slick wasn’t worth anything? How dare he? Even if it was true –

Especially if it was true.

“Oh, orders, yes,” Slick said savagely before he could think better of it, lashing out because the alternative of not doing so was at that moment simply unbearable. “We all know you’d follow orders off the side of a cliff if that’s where they took you. Tell me, have you seen Thire yet?”

“No,” Appo said, but the way his shoulders curved inwards suggested Slick had scored a hit. “I came straight here.”

“Of course you did,” Slick said mockingly. “Duty over everything else, huh? Even over – he’s your batchmate, isn’t he? Thire?”

Appo’s head dipped very slightly, a nod.

“Funny. I wouldn’t have guessed, given that he said you haven’t willingly called him since deployment. Was that a matter of orders, too? Or did you just choose to leave him behind –”

“The way you did your squad?” Appo interrupted. He was getting angry now. His face didn’t show it, but Slick could tell. “You’re the one who turned traitor. Did you think about them?”

“Of course I thought about them!” Slick burst out. “Everything I’ve ever done was for them! How dare you –”

“I’m not the one who left them to die,” Appo said, and it felt like a stab in the gut.

It hurt.

It hurt because it was true.

Even though Slick hadn’t meant to, even though Slick had been sick with fear for months, afraid of the inevitable KIA report showing that they were gone because of the hit to morale that he’d caused, even though in the end his boys had made it through the other side thanks to Appo

An agonized howl tried to fight its way out of Slick’s throat. He didn’t let it.

“Why do you even care?” Slick snarled instead, hating himself for how plaintive he sounded under all of his rage. “Why did you even get them? You had nothing to do with them, before. We barely even talked. It wasn’t even your turn to take on a new squad – why them? Why me? What are you even doing here?”

Unexpectedly, that made the normally inexorable Appo hesitate.

“You needed to be found,” he said.

Slick stared at him. “What?”

“You needed to be found,” Appo said again. “I took your boys on because I needed their help to find you. You needed to be found.”

That didn’t make any sense. Slick had assumed that Appo had only called Thire to ask about him because of a request from one of his boys – maybe as a reward for doing so well on that mission – but now Appo was saying, what, that he’d started looking for Slick first, and only took his boys on later? That was completely backwards. Why would he have done that? They hadn’t even liked each other. They’d barely even known each other.

“Why would you care about what happened to me?” Slick asked.

“You needed to be found,” Appo insisted. “A trooper can only be dead, missing, or at their post, and you weren’t any of them. The flimsiwork –”

“You tried to find me because of the flimsiwork?!” Slick howled, finally pushed beyond all limits. “That’s insane! Who even cares about the stupid flimsiwork –”

“Keeping the record accurate is essential –”

Why didn’t you just mark me down as missing?!

Appo stared at him. “But you weren’t,” he said, sounding strangely uncertain about it. “Captain Rex confirmed it. He knew where you were, so you weren’t missing. It would have been – a lie.”

A lie. A lie. Like anyone would have even cared! Like anyone had ever cared!

Slick buried his hands into his hair and pulled so hard that it hurt, nearly tearing his hair out.

“There is,” he said through the pain, “something seriously wrong with you, did you know that?”

“Yes,” Appo said solemnly. “Many things.”

Just remember, he’s like you. He loves his brothers.

…kriff.

Slick had really karked up this whole interaction, hadn’t he? And he still didn’t know the one thing he cared about, which was how his boys were doing. Details. He wanted to know about his boys, and here he was instead, fighting with Appo over lots of nothing and risking driving him away instead of getting the answers he yearned for. It didn’t matter if Appo had insulted him, inadvertently or otherwise, what mattered was the end result.

Slick was going about this the wrong way.

He needed Appo as an ally, not an enemy. That was – fine. Difficult, but fine, achievable. Slick could do that. Sure, it’d be a little harder now, after as bad a start to the conversation as they’d had, but he used to be very good at convincing people to like him. Just because he hadn’t really bothered with it after his arrest didn’t mean he didn’t have the skills.

He could do it. It was for his boys. He could do anything for his boys.

“You know what, Appo,” Slick said, making a deliberate effort to gentle his tone and adjust his body language to read friendly. Thinking like me like me like me at Appo with all his willpower behind it. “I think we started off on the wrong foot here. Probably my fault. Make that almost certainly my fault. Still, you’re here now, right? So why don’t we just –”

Like me like me like me.

“Intrusive thought,” Appo interrupted. “Rejected. I don’t like you.”

Slick stared at him, completely knocked off his game. “What?”

Appo dipped his head down, eyes lowering to the floor. “Ah. I had not meant to say that out loud. I have intrusive thoughts sometimes. That one was very – noisy.”

Slick must have been overdoing it if he was being that obvious. Great. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what his body language must have been like for Appo to read him that easily. He’d really lost his touch for this sort of thing, hadn’t he?

He reached up and scrubbed his face with his palm.

“Cody does that too,” Appo said, and Slick flinched. Again. “That was not meant as an insult.”

Ally. Ally. You need him as an ally.

“It’s fine,” Slick said through gritted teeth, even though it wasn’t. “I just don’t like thinking about him.”

“He doesn’t like thinking about you either.”

Slick snorted. “Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t,” he said bitterly. “What, you talk to him about me recently or something?”

“Yes.”

Slick stared, but Appo just stared back, apparently completely serious.

“You –” Slick swallowed. “You talked to Cody about me? Recently?”

“That’s correct,” Appo said.

Slick had no idea what to say about that. Even Fox hadn’t talked to Cody about him, and Slick wouldn’t have wanted him to. Had specifically asked him not to. He wasn’t even sure he was all too thrilled about Appo talking to Cody about him, about Cody thinking about him at all –

“Does he miss me?”

Slick closed his eyes after the words slipped out. He was pathetic. Why did he just say that. Why. He knew the answer was going to be –

“I believe he does.”

That was not the answer Slick had been expecting.

He opened his eyes.

“Having reflected upon it, it is my belief that, during our conversation, I inadvertently gave him the impression that we had both been influenced by an external element,” Appo said. “He was very excited by the possibility. I think it was because he thought that it might exculpate you.”

What a strange idea. There was no exculpating Slick. Sure, he had explanations, justifications, reasons and excuses by the dozen, but ultimately he was a traitor. He had betrayed all of his brothers, doing what he’d done, striking the deal he had. He’d always known that.

“What were you two even talking about?” Slick asked, bemused.

“He was attempting to explain to me your belief that we were all slaves of the Jedi,” Appo said, which – great.

Just great.

On one hand, Slick was kind of glad that his words had left enough of an impact on Cody that he was now repeating them to other clones, but on the other, all the clones Slick had ever known were invariably so indoctrinated that they immediately began to discredit everything he said as soon as they found out that he believed that – and also immediately started trying to argue with him over it. That was only going to make the rest of this conversation more difficult.

There was a loud snort from the other bunk.

That was also going to make the rest of this conversation more difficult.

“Shut up,” Slick said desperately, but it was too late: Boba was already poking his head out of the pile of blankets.

“Slaves? Please. You’re kidding,” he said scornfully. “Every single clone I’ve ever met has been more than happy to work for the Jedi –” He paused and glanced sidelong at Slick, then added begrudgingly: “Well, most clones, anyway. But that just goes to show, doesn’t it? You’re pawns, sure, pawns in a larger game than any of you know, but you’re willing pawns. Not slaves. It’s not like any of you ever say no.”

“Neither do slaves,” Appo said.

What?

“Huh?” Boba said.

“Slaves don’t say no,” Appo said. His voice was still calm and even and flat, like a lake that had never had a rock dropped into it, which would be convincing if Slick couldn’t hear the endless scream underneath. “Every slave I’ve ever met was doing exactly what their master told them to do.”

“Uh, obviously,” Boba said, looking at Appo like he was insane. “They’re slaves. They’d die otherwise.”

“A trooper is either dead, missing, or at their post,” Appo said. “At their post means subject to military discipline for disobedience. Missing means a few things, either captured by the enemy, which means dead, or deserted, the penalty for which is death. Dead is dead. So you’re either at your post or you’re dead. The only way out is death. The only way to say no to orders is death. What else is that, if not a slave?”

“That’s not – it’s not the same!”

“Words mean what they mean,” Appo said, his cool uninflected logic as inexorable as ever. “Slaves can’t say no. Clones can’t say no. Clones are slaves.”

“Clones are not slaves,” Boba insisted. “They can’t be, clones don’t even –” He stopped abruptly, his mouth snapping shut so fast that it seemed almost painful.

Slick might’ve commented on that, normally, but he was too busy still being dazed over what he’d just heard. Thought he’d heard.

“Hold up,” he said. “You – you agree with me? That we’re slaves? You’re the same as me? You? Appo the stickler? You? But you – you’d space the whole battalion if they ordered you to!”

“Correct,” Appo said. “I told you before. A trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything. I am not exempt. I obey orders.”

“But – but surely, if you realize, if you know –”

“Furthermore, your hypothesis is flawed,” Appo continued, implacable as always. “We are not the same. I accept my fate. Our fate. Clones’. I obey orders. You did not. You rebelled against it. You turned traitor. You wanted to be free.”

Here he paused.

“I admit,” he said, “that I have been wondering – why.”

“Why…what?” Slick asked blankly. Surely Appo couldn’t mean… “Why want to be free?”

“Yes,” Appo said. “It is not something we have ever had. As clones, it is not what we were made for. So why want it?”

And suddenly Slick was furious all over again, except this time he knew it was fueled by his underlying horror, by the terrible nausea that churned through his guts. To have finally met another clone that got it the way Slick did, another clone that understood down to their very marrow that clones were made as slaves, meant to be slaves from their decanting to their death, meant for nothing else in the world but that – and he reacted not with rage, as Slick had, but with acceptance? With resignation?

It was impossible. It was intolerable. Even Fox didn’t quite get it, no matter how sympathetic his horrible posting had made him to the idea. No one else had gotten it, no one else had understood, no one at all before Appo.

And yet Appo – didn’t want to be free? Didn’t even understand why someone would want it?

And then he dared to say such an unthinkable unbearable thing to Slick’s face?!

“Are you serious?!” Slick demanded, hearing his voice go shrill and unable to stop it or care. “You don’t understand why I want to be free? Are you – look at this! Look at me! I’m trapped here in this box, sightless and soundless, like a rat in a cage, and you ask me why I want to be free –”

“Your present circumstances are due to your actions,” Appo said cruelly. No. Not cruelly. He didn’t mean for his words to fall upon Slick as a blow, even if Slick took it as one. “Before you did what you did, you were like every other clone. You had your post, you had your duty. No box, no cage. And yet you still chose to betray your brothers and the Generals, seeking freedom – and money. An even more puzzling motivation. We’ve never had money. Why would you even want it?”

“Because money is freedom, you slagging rankweed!” Slick howled, losing his tenuously regained control of his temper entirely for a second time. “That’s the whole karking point! With enough money you can buy freedom!”

“But you still haven’t explained why you want freedom,” Appo persisted. “Clones generally don’t. Your cadet is right about that much. Most clones just want to be good soldiers –”

Excuse me for not being a good soldier, then!” Slick spat out. “Good soldiers follow orders, right? That’s the line we all follow. I certainly did, at the start, before I realized the truth – and the truth is that all of it is nothing but a damned lie. Following orders doesn’t make us good soldiers! Following orders doesn’t make us anything at all!”

He lashed out, his fury boiling over until he had no way to express it other than hitting the bars in front of him, bruising his knuckles and making the forcefield crackle and spit sparks.

“You say that we weren’t made for freedom – but that’s just it, don’t you see? It’s a joke! It’s all a joke, nothing but a sick joke! Because we weren’t made for anything! All of us! Good or bad, it doesn’t matter! We clones, we follow orders, oh yes, we follow orders all right, we’re good soldiers. All of us, good soldiers. And what do we get out of it? We fight, and we die, and then what? Nothing! Nothing at all! We’re all nothing!

Appo looked startled.

“Oh yes, that’s right, you heard me. You say that a clone trooper that doesn’t follow orders isn’t worth anything, right? Well, guess what, none of us is worth anything. There’s no end to it. There’s no point to it. It’s what we were made for. The Jedi ordered us to be made. They wanted us to fight in their war, to die in their war, to achieve their aims, and they don’t give one rotten damn about what happens to us beyond that. When it’s all over and done with, they’ll discard us all like so much trash, the good soldier and the bad alike!”

“Slick,” Boba said from his bed, his eyes so wide that there was white all around the edges. “Slick, are you –”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Slick snapped at him. “You’re Prime’s son, he raised you, you think the way he thinks. You don’t think we’re slaves, not because the definition doesn’t match, but because clones don’t count. That’s what you were going to say earlier, wasn’t it? Clones can’t be slaves because we don’t count. Because we were only made to be thrown away. We’re all cannon fodder, all of us just one-time-use blaster cartridges. There’s no point to us but to fight a war, and once we’ve fought, we’re useless. Good soldiers – don’t make me laugh! As soon as they find a better blaster, we’ll have nothing. We’ll be left with nothing. We’ll be nothing. Just like they always intended for us to be!”

No, please, Jester begged in his mind, a nightmare Slick had had for as long as he could remember, long before he’d ever met Ventress. No, please, please, I don’t know what else to do, I’ve never been anything but a soldier, this is my whole life..!

All at once, Slick’s fire went out.

Slick felt it go.

His belly twisted; his throat was full of bile. His limbs felt heavy as irons, the whole of him mired so deep in despair that he might as well be trudging through a swamp or quicksand. His very soul felt curled by the knowledge of it. Sour and bitter and rotten all the way through.

It was the end.

The inevitable end, Slick had found. This was the endpoint, the final stop, the end of the path. This was where rage always took him, all his rage and hatred and fury and spite, all of it so very pointless. It never took him anywhere else.

He slumped, a puppet with his strings abruptly cut, and sat down on his cot. He felt hollow.

“We deserve to be more than that,” he said to his hands, lying limp in his lap. “We deserve to be more than nothing. More than trash, more than the discard heap. It’s not fair. It’s not…it’s not even about me. It’s my boys. My boys…I see their faces in my dreams. They’re good. You know? They’re so good. They’re good and they’re lucky and if anyone is going to make it to the end of the war, it’s going to be them. Best damn squad in the whole GAR. But when I think of it…when I think of them going through all that suffering, all that pain, making all those sacrifices just to be good soldiers, and then being thrown away like nothing, as if they meant nothing, as if they’re worth nothing…”

He shook his head.

“I just can’t bear it. I can’t. I couldn’t. I don’t – I don’t expect you to understand what I did. The choices I made. But I saw a chance, or at least I thought I did. A chance to get something better, a better ending, for me and for them, and I grabbed at it with both hands.”

He’d known the whole time.

When he’d struck his deal with Ventress, when he’d sold out his side and passed along information and sent the Generals into what he’d thought was a death trap, when he’d agreed to blow up their weapons depo…he’d known, every moment, exactly what he was doing. He’d known that what he was doing was wrong. But – that hope – that poisonous hope – the hope that even if he did the unthinkable and bloodied his hands with the deaths of his own brothers, he could at least keep those very few he cared about most safe –

Slick would do anything for his boys.

He had.

Just – unsuccessfully.

“How does money enter into it?” Appo asked. Still calm, still unperturbed, quiet. Listening. At least he was listening, even if Slick had no idea if he understood what Slick was trying to say.

Slick looked up at him, tired now.

“Money is everything,” he said. “I know none of us really know much about it, other than in theoretical terms, for flimsiwork and stuff. Certainly we’ve never been paid for anything. Even on shore leave, our drinks and games all just get charged back to the battalion’s fund, rather than coming out of our own pockets…but from everything I’ve heard, it’s how you do things on the outside. Anything. Even Prime was like that, wasn’t he? Everyone knows about the deal he made. Getting paid by the Kaminoans for being the template for the clones. All those credits – he wanted them for a reason. To be free.”

“To make his way through the galaxy,” Boba said quietly.

“Yes. That. That’s what I was thinking. I thought – I thought that if only I had money, maybe I could buy my boys that. The chance to do something else. The chance to be something else, something other than a good soldier. Something other than just following orders. And that’s it. That’s the reason I asked for money.”

Maybe it would have worked, too, if only he hadn’t gotten so greedy.

A few clone troopers, production-standard, and a sergeant – that was small fry, in the larger picture of the war. He probably could’ve asked Ventress for her pocket change and gotten enough to get them all out of there. But she’d been amused by his request, found it funny that a clone would ask for money in exchange for treason, had told him he could pick his price…and then Slick had started wondering. Wondering how much it would cost to buy not just a single squad, but maybe – maybe even –

He'd known that a marshal commander wouldn’t come cheap. But they were all still clones, in the end, all of them made to be disposable and interchangeable, and so he’d hoped

Of course, Cody hadn’t wanted it. Wouldn’t have ever wanted it, even if Slick had managed it.

Slick had been such a fool.

“You wanted to buy your squad’s freedom?” Boba asked. He looked horrified, though Slick suspected it wasn’t because the idea sounded so terrible. “That’s why you sold the Jedi out?”

Slick nodded.

“I see your logic,” Appo said. “Slaves can be freed through purchase. If clones are slaves, then maybe we could be as well. It is a creative interpretation of the facts, though based on an unproven hypothesis…still, even if you were right and such a purchase were possible, what if your squad did not want to go?”

“Not want to go!” Boba exclaimed. He seemed to have switched sides in the argument, or possibly just gotten rather confused. “Why would anyone ever choose to stay?”

“Many clones find meaning in their service.”

“Only because they’ve been indoctrinated since birth and given no alternative,” Slick said. “If we couldn’t find meaning in our service, imagine how miserable we’d be. We’d have to admit that we didn’t have any meaning at all, and wouldn’t that just make us want to shoot ourselves?”

“Yes,” Appo said. Slick paused, but Appo didn’t elaborate.

“If my boys really didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have made them,” Slick said, deciding to answer the question, and he wasn’t even lying. Not anymore. At the start, when he’d just made the deal with Ventress, he hadn’t cared about what his boys wanted. He would have taken them away from the war whether they wanted to or not, made sure they were safe because he’d thought it the only thing that mattered, but his time in the prison had taught him a greater respect for autonomy. Being alive and safe was pointless if you didn’t want to be, and Slick would never lock up his boys in a rat cage, not even a well-meaning one. “I’d have saved it up for the end, I guess. For whenever they did want to leave. Like a – what do you call it, the thing natborns have for when they get old and want to stop working?”

“Uh…retirement?” Boba suggested.

“Yeah, that.” Slick shook his head and looked back at Appo. “Do you see?”

He didn’t even know what he was asking. Do you see the terrible future I see, perhaps. Do you see the waste they’ve made of us. Do you see what they’ve done to us.

Do you see why I did what I did?

Could you ever

Slick squashed that thought brutally. He was not seeking forgiveness. Forgiveness implied repentance, and repentance required regret – and while he regretted many things, he had not yet forgiven the Jedi for the clones’ doomed creation, and so he did not regret turning against them. Against his brothers, sure, he’d regretted that from the start, but the Jedi? No.

For his part, Appo was frowning.

A minute went by. Another.

A small eternity.

“Yes,” Appo finally said. “I do see. It is – inadequate provisioning.”

Slick frowned, confused. Possibly he’d misheard…?

“Inadequate provisioning,” Appo repeated, almost to himself. “Yes. It’s just like that…it’s like the time when General Skywalker signed off on a new shipment of replacement parts for his personal astromech droid, but then got busy with battleplans and lightsaber practice that he did not remember to sign off on the remaining requisition requests. It was necessary to reallocate the priority request towards obtaining additional starship fuel instead.”

“…I’m not sure I’m following the connection here,” Boba said, and Slick was grateful because otherwise he would have had to say the same thing himself. “How is one like the other?”

“Military necessity takes priority over all else,” Appo said. “This includes, among other things, the maintenance and support of military resources. To meet the demands of military necessity, proper provisioning is required. Regardless of General Skywalker’s personal prioritization, military necessity required me to reallocate his request to starship fuel or else the Resolute, and the whole 501st, would have been stuck dead in space within the month. Do you understand?”

“Not in the slightest,” Slick said.

“Like starships, clones are military resources,” Appo said. “Military resources that require maintenance and support. If the Jedi have forgotten to adequately provision for clones, then military necessity requires a reallocation of resources. Authorized or otherwise.”

Slick stared. That sounded almost like…but Appo couldn’t possibly mean…

“Starships require fuel. Clones require food. Starships require repairs. Clones require medical care and regular training hours. Starships eventually get retired. Why not clones?”

“Excuse me,” Slick said. “Are you suggesting that we should, what, find a way to take military money and use it to create a clone retirement fund?”

“Why not?” Appo said.

Chapter 11

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Of course, nothing in the world was easy.

After what appeared to be, in Appo’s perspective, an excessive amount of excitement on the part of Slick and his cadet cellmate, Appo was eventually encouraged – he might say ‘coaxed’ – into sitting down in what he had been informed was Fox’s usual spot.

This was a somewhat odd notion.

Not the sitting. Appo had no problem with sitting, even in armor. For all that Slick called him a stickler, Appo did not believe himself to be overly wedded to protocol when it was unnecessary. For instance, although protocol required clones to be comfortable remaining in parade rest for long periods of time, the requirement did not apply to shore leave or other informal situations. Now, technically Appo’s shore leave had not yet begun – Thire had gotten him into the prison through a loophole, in which Appo was nominally lending his services to the Guard as additional manpower – but given the unusual circumstances, one could nevertheless extrapolate the restriction away. In short, there was no reason not to sit.

The oddness came more from the fact that this was Foxs spot.

The Fox Appo recalled from Kamino was not especially inclined towards sitting.

Appo’s primary impression of Fox had been of a dynamic, energetic, even somewhat hyperactive personality. Fox had wanted to know everything, and he’d been talented enough to just about manage it, even within the time constraints imposed by their colossally difficult training. He mastered every class he could take, stole information to study what he couldn’t, improved his skills both required and optional, and never backed down from a challenge. He’d even picked up sniping as a subspeciality just to better learn how to stay still.

Naturally, such a grandiose ambition, and the concordant schedule, did not permit him much time for inanities, such as small talk or unoccupied leisure time, and as a result he did not engage in those things. It had always seemed quite reasonable to Appo.

This was not, apparently, the general impression of Fox among the larger command class.

Doom had once tried to explain it to Appo by saying that if Cody were their sun, honorable and charismatic, then Fox and Wolffe were their two-faced moons, respectively cold and hot, with Fox in particular being not unlike one of the abstract statutes that one could see distantly on the pedestals that dotted the Kaminoan sectors of Tipoca City, all cool marble and perfect proportions: an aloof perfectionist with eyes forever focused on the next win and not on those he trampled on his way to the top, as frigid and merciless as one of Kamino’s dreadful seas.

(Of course, being Doom, he had gone on by saying that this made Neyo and Bacara meteors, brilliant lonely streaks of light that could easily turn deadly, and Bly one of those big rings that circled some planets, a beautiful collection of space dust and unexpectedly sharp icy bits, though he conceded that the latter categorization might be influenced by him being a little weird about Bly to begin with. Appo, who had little time for metaphor at the best of times, had had absolutely no idea what in the world he’d been talking about, and had told him as much.)

Still, while Fox was a perfectionist, yes, devoted to his duty and driven to succeed, certainly, immensely competitive, no one could deny – and certainly not anyone who had seen him anywhere in the vicinity of Cody – Appo had personally once observed him being quite patient, even kind, with those he felt responsible for. He had thereupon decided to disregard all the rest.

On the other hand, he’d never been very good at understanding people.

They used to say that you were kind, didn’t they? Look where that got you. And now they don't say that about you any longer, and for very good reason

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Reassuringly normal, though. Appo was used to intrusive thoughts like that. The extremely strange one from before where he’d briefly wondered if his previous feelings of indifference towards Slick had been misguided and that he in fact liked him had been rather unnerving.

(Appo liked very few people. He had a list. Slick was not on that list. Ergo, he did not like Slick, no matter what his brain might have spontaneously decided to try to convince him. He did not like it when his brain came up with new categories of things to try to deceive him into thinking, and he sincerely hoped the earlier incident was a one-off and not the start of a concerning new pattern.)

Though in fact Slick was…different than Appo remembered.

This was to be expected, and Appo had indeed expected as much. In fact, he had expected perhaps even a greater degree of change. The PKs had all looked hollow and defeated when he had joined them, all of them like puppets dangling on strings or droids with their wires all exposed, and they hadn’t even been imprisoned or excluded from the official hierarchy the way Slick had been. Appo had braced himself for just about everything, and yet, somehow, he was still surprised.

Slick seemed sharper, somehow.

The parts of him that had been carefully hidden before, his spiky temperament and his cutting edges and that startling, even unnerving perceptiveness that had always taken everyone by surprise, were now far closer to the surface than they had been before, as if the aspects of him that used to overlay them had been washed away. Appo was hardly an expert at understanding people at the best of times, but Slick’s body language seemed to have become unexpectedly clear, even as he seemed to change from moment to moment. In one moment Slick looked almost hungry, coming across as dangerous and lean, even though he’d actually bulked up overall. A moment later, he gave the impression of a calmer equilibrium than Appo had ever seen in him, as if he’d learned to finally take the seething emotions he’d always had beneath the surface and let them go instead of brooding upon them. The moment after that, he was tired, empty, filled only with that too-familiar sort of despair. And then hopeful, exuberant –

It was a little exhausting just being around him, actually.

Also, Appo had discovered, to his surprise, that knowing the motivation behind Slick’s treason helped a lot more than Appo had realized it would.

He had not considered himself to have any specific emotions regarding Slick, other than a desire to find him out of sheer stubborn principle, a desire for things to be in their proper place. Even when his Besh squad had told him about Slick’s treason, his primary reaction (likely due to the fact that he’d been suffering from some sort of acute battle-shock variant) had not been anger or betrayal. He had been too focused on the end goal to care. Yet upon entering the prison and being confronted with the man himself, Appo had abruptly been filled with an utterly illogical and unreasonable antipathy. This was not due to Slick’s refusal to follow orders or his sabotage efforts or his attempt to murder the Generals through an alliance with the notorious clone-killer Ventress, all of which might reasonably have been expected to generate anger from a loyal trooper like Appo, but rather it had come from a more personal sort of resentment, focused specifically on his Besh squad.

Slick’s boys, who he’d left behind.

Slick’s boys, who loved their Sarge so much.

Knowing that Slick loved them back just as unreasonably had made the antipathy vanish.

Slick hadn’t just abandoned them blindly, thinking only of himself. He hadn’t tried to sacrifice them for his own benefit. He hadn’t turned away from them without a care, knowing as only a sergeant would how the hit to morale would take them and what it might mean for them.

He cared.

Though he still had the standard clone’s problem with admitting it.

“Your boys are doing well,” Appo said, interrupting the bitching out Slick was giving his cadet (Prime’s son, he had said, which meant he was…what had been his name…Bora? Boracyk? Something?) over his interjection into their earlier conversation despite apparently lots of earlier promises not to do just that.

Slick’s head snapped over in Appo’s direction so quickly that it looked like it hurt.

“Yeah?” he said eagerly, confirming Appo’s hypothesis that Slick’s lack of questions about them had not been a lack of interest but an attempt, however misguided, to hide their importance to him. A common clone instinct, perhaps: Appo had certainly attempted to quietly cover up all traces of any connection between himself and his batchmates in open channels, even though he’d known it was largely pointless the entire time he was doing it. “They’re all right?”

“Every bit as talented and lucky as you’ve ever said,” Appo said. He reached into his belt pocket and pulled out a small disposable datapad, one of the ones that was used by GAR scouts, foldable and meant to be discarded after limited usage. “I prepared a report on their actions –”

Slick snorted. “Of course you did.”

It didn’t sound like an insult. Not this time, anyway. More pleased, though of course that might have to do with the content.

“I thought you might prefer to review it privately,” Appo said, and slid it through the chute entrance that went through the forcefield into the cell. Slick grabbed it up at once. “As privately as you can manage in here, anyway. I’ve already had it checked for contraband and approved.”

Commander Stone, who had met Appo at the dockyard – Thire had been stuck on a duty shift in the Senate, but had requested that Stone pass along a very sternly worded message that Appo was, quote, “not permitted to even THINK of leaving without talking with him” – had looked very long-suffering when he’d performed the check at Appo’s request. Appo wasn’t sure if he always looked that way or if there was something about doing a contraband check in particular that he found tiresome. At any rate, Appo had already triggered at least four inquiries into the auto-collated data storage he’d already collected on Stone’s background that should hopefully provide him with additional insight there, so further understanding was only a matter of time.

(He had similar auto-collate programs running on anyone remotely involved in the Guard’s chain of command or associated with Doom’s legion. Obviously he couldn’t actually read through all the information he collected, given the quantity, but he regularly ran inquiries to try to extract anything relevant. He’d actually been hoping to try to see if he could visit the Jedi Temple during his actual shore leave to add it into his program file, maybe get more on Generals Tiplar and Tiplee from the source.)

Slick hadn’t opened the datapad yet.

He was staring down at it, holding it carefully, almost as if he wanted to grab it tightly but was restraining himself with all his power for fear of damaging it.

“They’re all right?” he repeated, even though Appo had already confirmed it. “They – they’re good, they’re really – really all right –”

“They miss you,” Appo said.

Slick looked up at him. He looked lost.

“Do they?”

Appo nodded. “They supported my search for you,” he offered. “Out of loyalty to you, they didn’t tell me anything about what had happened on Christophsis for months, not until my other avenues of searching were – shut off. And when they told me, they said that they wished that they had lied about where they had been to have better served as a distraction for you –”

Slick made a sound of pain, low and gutted, and turned away.

“You tell them to stop that stupid thinking right away,” he ordered. His voice was thick, shaking. Wet. “Tell them from me, will you? Stupid. It wouldn’t have done anything but get them in trouble. Lying to your CO – over something I did – stupid, pointless, stupid

“You can’t stop people from loving you,” Appo said, thinking of Thire. “Even if it would be wiser.”

Slick made another low sound.

“Give – gimme a minute,” he said hoarsely. “Just a minute.”

Appo gave him one. And then several more, since he seemed to need them.

In the meantime, he turned to look at Slick’s cadet, who was studying him.

“They said you were a CC,” he said, when he noticed Appo watching him. “Command class. I…knew some of them. Sometimes. But I don’t remember you.”

“I’m not very memorable,” Appo agreed.

“I knew Tens – Fox. Did you know him?”

“He’s very memorable,” Appo said dryly.

He had known about Prime’s son, of course. All the command class did, and perhaps some of the other troopers did, too, albeit more indirectly and in theory only. But even in the command class, only the cream of the crop had had the honor of interacting with Prime personally, much less allowed anywhere near the vicinity of his one special unaltered clone.

Appo had always been in the middle of the pack. He had not counted.

You never count. You shouldn't count. Everyone would've been better off if they'd figured that out much earlier and just

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Since Appo had not counted in Prime’s eyes, he had not counted Prime as worthy of notice, either. Many other clones worshipped Prime, or hated him, or at least respected him, but Appo had simply gone about his life paying him as little attention as possible. He’d only ever interacted directly with Prime himself once, and as for Prime’s son, well, he didn’t even remember the cadet’s name.

…though it was possible that he should have made a little more of an effort to recall it. It looked like the cadet expected him to know who he was.

“I’m sure Fox is remembered by everyone,” Slick said, turning back. His eyes and cheeks were red, his voice still hoarse, but he looked steadier now. He had not put down the datapad, but now he opened it up. “Now shut up, I’m reading.”

The cadet snorted.

Without looking up from his datapad, Slick picked up his pillow and threw it across the cell, hitting the cadet smack in the face.

Appo didn’t laugh. It wouldn’t be appropriate, or even in character.

(It was funny, though.)

“You think Jester’s going to make corporal?” Slick asked, already greedily skimming through the report. “That’s good. Good for him. He deserves it. He’s got a good head on his shoulders…bit of a self-confidence problem, though. Always questioning himself.”

“He’s improved,” Appo reassured him. “I made him run situational awareness flash training until his eyes started crossing –”

Slick snorted. The way he smirked looked approving, though.

“ – and yes, I do, though not quite yet. Team lead first. That’ll go through next time we ship out. I’ve already submitted the request and processed the approval.”

Slick finally tore his eyes away from the datapad to give him an odd look.

“I handle all non-essential staffing requests for the 501st on behalf of the General and Captain,” Appo explained. “That includes processing promotions at lower levels.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” the cadet – Appo really wished Slick would say his name – asked. “Or something like that?”

“Naturally I make sure to get sign-off for any promotions I propose.”

“Uh-huh,” the cadet said, drawing the syllable out for longer than it really needed to go. “Just like you get sign-off on that starship fuel?”

Boba,” Slick snapped – that was it! Boba! “Will you please stop –”

“No need,” Appo said. “He’s right. I requested that the General grant me permission to substitute certain required authorization inserts for use as proxy when necessitated by my role as delegate on a continuous basis. He granted it, so I’ve been operating accordingly ever since.”

Slick and Boba both frowned at him.

“Hold up a second while I work my way through that,” Slick said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Substitute – authorization inserts – delegate – wait, are you saying you asked Skywalker if you could forge his signature on a regular basis? And he agreed?”

Wizard,” Boba said.

“It’s an efficiency measure,” Appo said. “He approved it.”

“Did he know what he was approving?”

“The General prefers to focus his attention on strategic and tactical decision-making.”

“Does Rex know that you’re doing this?”

“I included mention of it in a report sent to him for his awareness,” Appo said. He paused for a moment and then, reluctantly, admitted: “There may have been a large number of reports submitted simultaneously on that particular day.”

The admission amused them both. Boba in particular seemed to find it hilarious, clutching his pillow to his chest and sniggering into it.

Appo thought briefly about explaining that the measure was genuinely necessary, not just for efficiency but for basic operations. Rex was a dutiful and conscientious captain, excluding only his hearty dislike of all things flimsiwork, but more and more of his time was being monopolized by the General and the Commander. They dragged him here and there, all over the place, along with an increasing ‘core squad’ composed of Fives and Echo and several others, and the end result of all of it was that Appo continued to be in sole charge of the battlefield. Without any promotion in sight, he’d had no choice but to find a method to approve his own decision-making.

And once the method was there, and it worked, and no one was harmed, well –

It was hard to stop.

It was just as he’d always known it to be: once you broke the rules, it got easier and easier to break them again. He had broken them first out of necessity, then out of efficiency, and finally…

“Can we get back to the part where we’re going to steal all the Jedi’s money?” Boba asked eagerly.

…out of desire.

“It is not stealing,” Appo stressed, because that was important. “It is a reallocation of funds under the principles of military necessity. Also, I request that you keep your expectations reasonable. Please recall that I am only a single sergeant in a single battalion and can only do so much.”

Boba pouted.

“How much do you expect to get, then?” he asked. “Retirement’s expensive. My dad had lots of friends who kept saying they’d retire after getting one last big score, but they never did.”

 Appo glanced at Slick, hoping for assistance from the progenitor of the idea, but Slick had gone back to looking through the report. He had some way to go: Appo had tried to be as thorough as he could possibly be, and that, he had found after months of flimsiwork, was very thorough indeed.

“I’m not sure,” he hedged instead. “My initial thought was that I could simply move aside a part of the budget that the 501st is already assigned, provided it doesn’t impact other necessities, and enhance it by submitting slightly larger requests than we strictly need to increase the available pool of funds. If we ask for a slightly higher amount than required every time we submit a procurement request and subsequently pull that excess amount into the fund –”

“Oh, please, that’ll take forever!” Boba rolled his eyes so hard that his whole body moved with the motion. Wolffe used to roll his eyes like that, when he was that age; he’d been famous for it. “The war’ll be over and everyone’ll be dead if you just take a credit off the top of every request!”

“There are more requests than you think,” Appo said, but shrugged. “I don’t disagree, it’s not very efficient. But there’s no other way to do it.”

“What if –” Boba scrunched up his face. “You could hire some guys, break into the Treasury –”

“No.”

“Or if you kidnapped –”

No. Employing physical violence against a superior or protected area would be contrary to orders, and I cannot go against orders. Even this plan hinges on the fact that no one has ordered me not to do it.” Appo thought about Cody ordering him to stop sending the 15b63 requests. “Which will require us to maintain strict confidentiality.”

Boba made an annoyed sound and slouched in his bunk. “Obviously. Not that we’ll actually need to keep any secrets, because there isn’t actually a plan to keep secret, because what you’re suggesting won’t work. And you won’t listen to any of my ideas. Why don’t you think of something more efficient, then, if you’re so smart?”

For some reason that pricked at Appo’s pride.

“I am entirely capable of thinking of something better,” he said stiffly. “Unfortunately, I am not capable of enacting anything better. I lack the necessary resources.”

Boba perked up at once.

“Now we’re talking,” he said eagerly. “If all you need are resources, you can get resources. That’s step one. My dad said that being properly prepared is halfway to a job already done. What do you need?”

“A bank account, for a start.”

“A…bank account?” Boba frowned at him. “What?”

“If I had access to a bank account capable of holding a significant amount of funds, I would have the ability to gather a deal more than I can at present,” Appo explained. “Currently, the only account I can utilize is the one containing 501st’s budget, so there’s nowhere to move any siphoned amounts. The credits we collect will simply have to sit inside the existing account, but the fact that they’re there disincentivizes anyone from adding more. You don’t refill an already full bucket.”

“I get that, I think,” Boba said. “If you could move the money somewhere else, you could…convince them to give you more? Is that it?”

“Yes. We submit requests for additional funds whenever the account runs low. It stands to reason that if we could move the money elsewhere, causing the account to run low, we could at that point request more. That would be a far more efficient method of increasing the fund.”

“Okay. But can’t you just make a bank account if you need one?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a clone.” Boba dropped his head to look down at his lap, hunching his shoulders. Appo couldn’t quite tell if his posture suggested agreement or disagreement with the reminder that the clones were slaves, or some mixture of the two – perhaps he was unwilling to admit that they were right as it would presumably mean going against Prime, but also no longer willing to argue against them. “Clones aren’t given access to money in our own right, which means we don’t need bank accounts. Which in turn means we cannot create them. Most banks will only work with people that have legitimate identities.”

“You can buy an identity.”

“Only with money I don’t have,” Appo reminded him. Slick really was right about money being what made everything move outside the GAR. For some reason, it had never really occurred to him before. “I would also not be considered a ‘person’ for purposes of registration.”

“That’s so stupid! Im a person –” Boba paused. “Not that it’s the same or anything, because I’m not a clone.”

Appo had been under the impression, and indeed fairly sure, that Prime’s son was in fact been a clone, but he supposed he was willing to be corrected where appropriate. Regardless of the circumstances of Boba’s creation, however, it was almost certain that Prime had registered him into whatever planetary records Prime himself was included in, thereby obtaining for his son the citizenship and personhood that all his other clones lacked. 

“Anyway, the bank account is just the starting point,” Appo said, deciding to just move on. “There’s also the matter of distribution. As the 501st’s Master Sergeant, I’m already authorized to distribute the funds in the 501st’s account for the benefit of the clones within the battalion. This may not be the case for any additional money we obtain. Even if we earmark whatever amount we set aside for use by clones in post-military life, who’s to say that the Republic would not simply take it away and give it to another group once they learn it is available?”

“From what I hear from Fox, senators would jump at the chance to line their pockets,” Slick said, not looking up from his datapad. At least he was listening.

“Not just them,” Appo said. “I’ve listened in before on calls relating to military budgetary matters, as the General asked me to take notes and inform him if there was anything requiring his attention, and they can get quite combative. Apart from the GAR, there’s the Navy, the shipyards, droid factories, munitions factories, supply vendors…even Kamino itself is often fighting to get additional funds directed their way. I’m sure there are many groups who would suddenly find themselves with an urgent need for money should extra become available.”

So it would all be for nothing. Just like always. All for nothing, all for nothing, nothing just like you

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

“All right, all right, the world’s full of selfish scrugholes and we all know it,” Boba said impatiently. “But if a bank account isn’t the only thing you need, then what do you need? Ideally, I mean.”

Ideally?” Appo could scarcely even conceive of operating under ideal circumstances. It had never happened before. “I mean…I suppose, in an ideal situation, I would simply requisition the funds directly – or perhaps divert them. Back when we were on Ryloth, there were funds that had been earmarked to shore up the local garrison’s supplies and provide additional resources to the Twi’lek freedom fighters, but then the Kuat Drive Yards announced that they’d come up with a brand-new shield enhancer for Venators. HQ decided that protecting our ships was more important, so we were ordered to utilize the earmarked funds for the purchase instead. Promises were made that the fund would be refilled later, but then the Outer Rim Garrison was routed and destroyed…”

Likely because they hadn’t gotten resupplied in time. But it was not Appo’s place to say that.

“If it can be done with a vendor,” he continued, trying not to think about it, “then in theory it would be possible to do with the clone retirement fund. But it wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?” Boba wanted to know. “That sounds like a much better idea than what you suggested at first. And it sounds like you already know all the necessary flimsiwork for it.”

“It’s precisely because I’ve done the flimsiwork before that I know it wouldn’t work,” Appo corrected. “We were able to redistribute the funds to Kuat Drive Yards because they are a company with a corporate account. Corporate accounts of that size require registry in a planetary record, and a planetary record, of course, requires a planet.”

“…oh.” Boba grimaced. “Well, sithspit.”

“Precisely.”

“How much would that cost?” Slick asked abruptly.

Appo turned to look at him, confused. “How much would what cost? A planet?”

“And the rest of it. Setting up all of the stuff you mentioned, the company and corporate account and stuff. I assume that also takes money?”

“Certainly,” Appo said, slightly bemused. “And based on my experience trying to help the Master Sergeant on Ryloth seek funding from alternative sources, anything like that would also require ample facilitation fees for processing outside of typical channels –”

“What are those?”

“Bribes,” Appo clarified for Boba. “Many, many bribes.”

It occurred to Appo that while he had known that breaking the rules was a rapidly precipitous downward slope, he had somehow not realized that going down it went at quite such speed.

Not that he had any intention of turning around, of course. As soon as he had conceded Slick’s point, he had become determined to do whatever was in his power to alleviate the issue, provided as always that he did not receive orders to act to the contrary. It had simply never occurred to him before. A trooper could only be dead, missing, or at their post – but perhaps that didn’t have to be the case. Perhaps they could modify the form itself.

Perhaps it was time to recognize a fourth category: dead, missing, at their post, or retired.

Free.

They're going to decom you for this. You know they are. They've just been waiting

It didn’t matter.

Because Slick was right: his boys, Appo’s Besh squad, did deserve better than to be slaves until they either died or were thrown away. So did Appo’s Aurek squad, Sikes and Nis and Trivet and Lacey and Rikko. Riven, and his squads. Hutch. The other sergeants. Even Rex…

Doom.

Thire.

If Slick was right, and Appo felt instinctively that he was, the clones had been created to fight in a war and nothing more, just like the Seppies’ droid armies. But unlike droids, clones were bound by rules and law, not programming, and they could act independently. Take initiative. They were supposed to take initiative and act on their own. The Jedi had had the Kaminoans design them to be creative thinkers, and so they would be.

In this case, they had identified certain key details of critical support required by particular military assets that the Jedi Generals had inadvertently overlooked, and they were taking action preemptively to fill the gap, just as they were supposed to. Good soldiers obeyed orders, to be sure, but they would be very poor soldiers indeed if they only obeyed orders given to them directly. They also had to obey the indirect orders, the implied ones. They had to obey the unspoken orders of military necessary. They had to consider the bigger picture.

Really, if one looked at it in a certain light, Appo was simply doing his duty.

And if doing so required creative accounting banned by at least fourteen provisions of the Republic’s tax code, then so be it.

“But how much?” Slick insisted. “What are we talking about here? Thousands? Millions?”

“I’m not exactly conversant in current market rates, but I would assume that even the cheapest, most badly placed, and least terraformable planet would still require several million, yes,” Appo said, now genuinely puzzled by Slick’s insistence on carrying on with this line of questioning. “And the flimsiwork and processing even more on top of it. But what does it matter? No clone has ever had access to anywhere near to that much money. Not even as part of managing GAR supply chains. Putting aside what the Kaminoans were paid for our production, the largest single amount I’ve ever heard anyone have is, well…”

He glanced at Boba, who scowled and drew himself in protectively.

“Let me guess, the five mil they were going to pay my dad for being the template?” he asked, glaring at his feet. “I can’t help you there. No one ever believes me, but I swear I’m telling the truth: it never got paid out. I don’t know where it is or who has it –”

“I do,” Slick said.

“What?” Appo said.

What?” Boba said. “What are you even talking about? You’re not saying that somehow you know where it is –”

“No,” Slick said. “I’m saying I have it.”

They stared at him.

“That’s where it came from,” he said. “The money. My money. From the deal I made with Ventress. It was Prime’s.”

Notes:

As a minor in-joke: Appo initially thinks that Boba's name is "Bora" or "Boracyk". These are, respectively, the Mando'a words for "job" and "completely broke" (aka "jobless").

Chapter Text

“My boys and I were out scouting when Ventress found me. No back-up, not that any would’ve made much of a difference against a clone-killer Sith assassin,” Slick said. He was staring at the wall above Appo’s head, though Appo had the impression that he was not doing it out of politeness, the way Appo sometimes did, but rather out of a profound and deep desire not to meet anyone’s eyes while telling this story. “She was planning on killing me, but she wanted to talk first. Boast, threaten, I don’t know. Maybe she just liked the sound of her own voice…”

He shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter. I asked her for money. She found it funny. A clone offering to commit treason when we’d been engineered to be loyal, and to do it for money of all things…she started talking about how we were trapped, how we were slaves, about the Jedi, all that. It all made sense to me, the way she said it, but it wasn’t really new, you know? It fit in with everything else I’d already been thinking. She told me I could ask her for freedom, freedom for me and my boys – but I wasn’t that stupid. I told her I wanted the money first.”

“She probably meant that she’d give you the freedom of being dead,” Boba said.

“I figured as much,” Slick agreed. “So I told her that I wanted money. Lots of money. I told her I wanted Primes money. That if he could have it, then why couldn’t one of us? She thought that was really funny, so she said that she agreed. She said that she’d let me go as long as I reported back to her. She stood aside and gestured for me to go.”

“Trap.”

“Yeah. I didn’t take the exit. I knew she was just going to stab me in the back as soon as I went. I told her: money first. Intel later.” Slick’s lips pulled away from his teeth in a grimace. “I don’t know if there was something about asking three times that did it, but something…changed. I don’t know. She agreed, except this time she meant it, and I could tell that she meant it. She gave me an account number, and she told me that it was Prime’s payment, that I could check it back at base. I did, and it was. Five million credits, sitting in an account with Prime’s name on it, and the only thing between me and it was the passcode for access. It was legit.”

“She was tricking you,” Boba said.

“It was legit,” Slick insisted. “I could tell. But I needed that passcode if I wanted to get the money, and the only way to get it was to start feeding her the intel she wanted. She said she’d know if I betrayed her. I thought about it, you know, when I got back to base. About giving up on the deal, turning on her, reporting the whole thing to command. I really did. But she said she’d know, and that she’d make sure to target my boys first if I did, and – and that was when the nightmares started. Appo, do you remember? I woke up the whole room.”

“I remember,” Appo said. “You wouldn’t say what it had been about, when the others asked.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“We all have nightmares,” Appo said. “Some of us don’t yell.”

“She was tricking you,” Boba said. “Even then.”

“Maybe,” Slick said. “Maybe not. Either way, I believed her. And…I wanted it. The money, the freedom. The chance. I started sending her intel. First some basic stuff, a heads up on our attacks so she could get her troops out of the way. Then more. Intel about a surprise attack we’d planned. Our formations. Those sorts of things. Bad things. I was already a traitor by then, so I just – kept going. Deeper and deeper. I was in too deep to stop. Finally, she agreed to give me the passcode if I did two things: tell her when the Generals were next going to head out by themselves, and set up bombs in our weapons depot.”

“She was tricking you.”

I know that!” Slick gritted his teeth. “I know. I know. The only reason for her to ask me to set the bombs is because the Seppies were setting up an attack on our base. Her plan was to wipe us all out, including me, and after I was dead, she wouldn’t have to pay. But I was tricking her back. I spied for her, sure, I sent her a copy of the Generals’ planning session, but what I didn’t tell her is that I knew reinforcements were already on their way, sent by HQ. Appo, you told me about it, remember? The new Commander they were sending to General Skywalker, the one General Kenobi was keeping a secret until she arrived. I figured that if the Generals were dead or captured and the depot blown, HQ would figure that the situation on the ground was hopeless and pull us out immediately. We would’ve survived. The 501st, my boys, we would’ve survived. Most of us, anyway. And then I would have been out of Christophsis, free and clear, with the account number and the passcode to access it –”

“She was still tricking you!” Boba shouted. “You don’t understand! The account itself, whatever, that was also a trick. All of it was. I don’t know if the account she gave you actually had the five million credits in it or not, but either way its still a trick. All of my dad’s accounts were locked down. No one can take money out of them except him. Him, and – and me.”

He swallowed, then shook his head furiously and continued.

“That’s – that’s why Aurra was helping me, with my revenge. She didn’t actually care about avenging my dad. She was just after my dad’s money. She told me she would help me because she was my dad’s friend and because she wanted the Separatist bounty involved, but that was all lies. She was just trying to keep me happy until she could figure out how to use me to get the money out of my dad’s accounts. She told me that right before she ditched me. I thought she didn’t really mean it, but – but she did. She made me do all of that stuff and then let me fall into Jedi hands without thinking twice. They could’ve killed me, and all she cared about was that she wasted her time on me and still didn’t get her stupid payday.”

Boba’s lower lip was trembling, hard, and his eyes were glassy with tears. Appo couldn’t quite tell if it was rage or hurt or some combination of both.

“That’s what I mean. It was all a trick,” he concluded. “Just like Aurra helping me was a trick. She got me to – I even – she shot – anyway, it’s the same thing. A trick. A mean, nasty trick. Even if you’d gotten off of – of wherever you’d been, and you made it to the bank, they never would’ve given you any money. They would’ve just turned you away. It was all for nothing.”

Appo shuddered.

He couldn’t imagine that. To have given up everything, your loyalty to your brothers and your hope for the future and even your integrity, your very soul, just for the chance to save someone, only to find out that the chance never really existed in the first place…he couldn’t imagine such a thing. Such a loss. Such a betrayal.

Or rather, he could imagine it. Which was worse.

You know what you did. They don't. The only reason they're talking to you is because they don't know. The only reason they love you is because they don’t know. But you do. You know. You know that your hands will never be clean again and who did it really help, in the end? Who have you ever helped?

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

(It might be true, but it wasn’t helpful, and therefore it was rejected. Simple as that.)

But Slick remained calm.

“I know,” he said. “I figured that out. Ventress is the sort to only be amused by cruelty, and she found the whole situation with me to be too funny for it to be anything but a trick.”

“You…knew? And you worked with her anyway?”

“I told you, I was tricking her back. I didn’t tell her about the new Commander on the way, and I didn’t tell her that I’d worked out that Prime was probably the only one who could take the money out of the account, passcode or no passcode. Because if she knew that, she might start wondering why I was still willing to take the deal.”

“Why would you?” Appo asked. “We’re genetically altered, all of us except Boba, and everyone knows Prime’s dead. You wouldn’t have been able to convince anyone that you were Prime.”

“Not without his ident chip.”

“He’s a natborn, they don’t have ident chips,” Appo objected at once. “They have, what do you call them, identification cards. Or maybe registry papers? Passports? Some sort of –”

He paused, his logical brain abruptly catching up with him. Based on everything Slick had said up to this point, his assertions and his explanation and his story, the only reason he would bring such a thing up was if…

“Are you saying that you have Prime’s ident chip?”

Slick nodded.

How?

“Geonosis,” Slick said. “I – tripped over him. Literally. The Jedi were the ones that killed him.”

“Windu,” Boba murmured. He was staring at Slick, wide-eyed. “Windu killed him. I saw it.”

Suddenly a great deal about Boba made sense to Appo.

He glanced at Slick, who was glancing back at him with the same realization in his face, a mutual moment of recognition and understanding passing between the two of them silently.

No wonder Boba had failed to take revenge properly.

It was the same thing Appo had worried about with his Besh squad, Slick’s boys: morale drop. That was what they called it. When a squad or trooper lost a CO they were fond of, it hit them hard. Traumatized them. Knocked them off their usual game, made everything feel impossible. Failure was not uncommon, and death even more frequent. Of course, Prime was technically Boba’s ‘dad’, not his CO, but Appo assumed it functioned in much the same way.

At least Slick knew about it, now. He’d be able to help Boba. He’d been a sergeant, too.

But going back to the main subject –

“Do you still have it?” Appo asked.

“No one ever interrogated me,” Slick said bitterly. “So yes. I hid it next to my own ident chip, in my wrist – you know the place, the dip in the back of the wrist that doesn’t bleed even when you cut into it?”

Appo was aware.

That's where they keep the wires. Wires for a droid, strings for the puppet, a fitting chain for the droid walking around wearing the skin of the Appo all your friends once knew

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

“I’ll get it out for you,” Slick said. He made a face as though he were attempting to smile but had forgotten how, and also seemed to be somehow emitting a feeling of intense sourness. “And then you can – use it. Somehow. Get a planet, set up a company, pay the bribes, make the fund. If you could let me know how it all turns out in the end, I’d appreciate it.”

“Now is hardly the time for attempts at humor, and it is not appreciated,” Appo said sternly. “Naturally I will do my best to provide reports and updates on a regular basis. It would be difficult for you to provide me with instructions without it.”

Slick frowned at him. “Instructions? From me? What for? You hardly require my assistance in putting together your little system of – creative reallocation.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing without you,” Appo said. “I can get money, but then what would I do with it? This is your idea. I am simply operationalizing it.”

“One could argue with that,” Slick remarked, “but I’m not going to.”

But the feeling of sourness had disappeared, replaced with a mixture of chagrin and warmth.

(Appo had no idea why it was so easy to understand what Slick was feeling at any given moment. Was Slick doing it on purpose? Appo couldn’t tell if he liked the sudden feeling of emotional insights or if he sincerely hoped that Slick would stop doing whatever it was soon.)

“You should also remember that this entire idea is based on an unproven hypothesis,” Appo said. “We do not even know if a clone’s freedom can be purchased –”

“Was there anything else?” Boba interrupted. He was staring at Slick. “My dad. When you found his body. Did you – was there anything else? Did you see what – what happened to it? His body? Did – did they just – just leave it or – what happened to it? Did you see? Can you tell me?”

Appo might not understand people very well, but any trooper outside of the shinies was familiar with grief. His presence was not necessary to this conversation, and would only impede it.

He picked up his bucket and stood.

“You’ll come back?” Slick asked, not taking his eyes off Boba.

“Yes,” Appo said. “I’ll speak with the Guard about it.”

He had a lot to do.

He had all of his duties, including both the ones he owed to the Guard and the leftover flimsiwork that he’d allowed to lapse while putting things together for this visit. He had to talk to Slick’s boys, at some point, although he hadn’t told them in advance what he had planned, or where Slick was, in the event that something went wrong or if Slick turned out not to be worth their time. But they weren’t stupid, they had probably guessed that he was up to something even if they didn’t know exactly when and where and how. He had his own boys to attend to as well; he’d promised to spend some of his actual shore leave with them after Sikes had complained that Appo was otherwise likely to spend all of his time working and no time relaxing. Not that he objected to spending time with them. They were all immensely precious to him, and being with them was a pleasure, not a burden.

And now there was – the plan.

Something new to spend his already non-existent downtime on, Appo supposed. There were so many logistics to consider. Slick’s idea was promising, but it was unformed, underdeveloped. Not really a surprise, given that Slick’s judgment was obviously a little off-kilter – he’d committed treason, after all, and that was obviously the sign of an unwell mind. Appo would know. But if Slick was telling the truth about having access to Prime’s account, and what was in it, if they really did have five million credits of starting capital to start working with, well, that would change the calculus considerably. There were so many things Appo would be able to do.

There were so many things he needed to do…

“I will need to come back tomorrow,” he told the Guard once he was outside the prison interior. “Could you add me to the roster again? I regret the inconvenience, but it is –”

“Appo.”

Appo stopped.

Stopped. Stopped.

STOPPED.

He turned his head slowly to look at the source of the sound. It was said that one clone’s voice was just like any other’s, the same vocal chords in the same jaw in the same mouth with the same tongue, and his name was his name was his name. It could have been any clone that said it.

But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t any clone.

It was Thire.

“Appo,” Thire said again. His bucket was off, clipped onto his belt, and his expression was neutral. “Good, you’re still here. Follow me.”

Appo followed.

Of course he did. He would have followed Thire anywhere.

The Guards parted before them as they marched down the hallway, Thire leading Appo who-knew-where, until they arrived in an isolated room containing only a table and two chairs, and a mirror on one wall. It looked a bit like an interrogation room.

“You’re not being interrogated, but this is the best room for privacy on short notice,” Thire said. His face and voice were still absolutely neutral, professional and perfect without a hint of personality leaking through. “Now. Appo. Let’s talk. Do you know why I’ve brought you here?”

Appo wasn’t really listening. He was too busy looking at Thire.

Thire looked much like he had before deployment. No new visible scars, at least, though the circles under his eyes were deeper, with lines of care starting to form elsewhere on his face. More tired, more stressed, more sorrowful, just like Cody. Just like them all.

Alive, though. Beautifully and gloriously alive.

Beautifully and gloriously here.

“I missed you,” Appo said.

Thire’s neutral expression cracked. First he gaped, then he glared, then he opened his mouth to yell – but he caught it, a second before the sound was formed, and swallowed it back down.

“Funny,” he said through gritted teeth instead. “Very funny. You’ll have to forgive my skepticism, given that you’ve been refusing to call me ever since deployment.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss you.”

“Oh yeah?” Thire bared his teeth. “Then what did it mean?”

“That I didn’t want to hurt you,” Appo said honestly. With the exception of his one most terrible secret, he was always honest with Thire.

Thire’s eye twitched. “You – didn’t –” He gritted his teeth even more, his jaw working, his back straight, his fingers twitching. His behavior was consistent with someone caught in the throes of extreme rage. “You must know that you avoiding me like it was your karking job, that hurt me, right?”

“Of course,” Appo said. “I just thought you’d eventually realize you were better off without me.”

Thire closed his eyes so tightly that it looked painful.

“Also, I was afraid.”

Thire reopened his eyes and glared at him, half appalled and half horrified. “Of me?”

“I could never be afraid of you,” Appo said firmly. It was important that Thire know that. That he would even ask such a thing was – terrible. Appo had to explain, somehow. “I was afraid of me. I knew that as soon as I saw you, my resolve would disappear and I would never want to leave your side ever again.”

Thire opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it, and closed it once again, still without saying anything.

“I was right, too,” Appo said regretfully. It had been worthwhile to attempt to let Thire go, even if that attempt had ultimately been a futile one – though he wouldn’t go so far as to say it had ever been a particularly good idea. “You don’t need to be concerned, I am aware that it is operationally impossible. But now that I see you again, the only thing I can think of is how much I have missed being by your side. How it is the best place that I can ever imagine being.”

“You – you –! You can’t just say things like that!” Thire shouted. His hands kept forming fists and then releasing them. “I’m – I’m angry at you! I want to be angry at you! I deserve to be angry at – you – you – pig-headed – karking – stupid –”

He jumped up and started pacing in the small room, so small that he only managed three sharp quick marching steps before he had to turn back again. He was biting his lower lip, and his eyes were scrunched up and shining, moist. Filled with the start of tears.

Appo felt an immediate pang of regret. He didn’t even know what he had said wrong, but he immediately wished he hadn’t spoken at all.

“I didn’t mean –”

“I am not sad,” Thire hissed-hiccupped, stabbing a finger at Appo’s chest, then turning away to continue to pace. “Don’t you dare start. This is not sadness. This is anger. This is rage. Shit. I knew this would happen. Why do you always have to be so – so –”

Why do you have to be you?

Appo flinched.

“- sweet?!”

Thire finished a turn and started back, then stopped mid-step, staring at Appo, who looked blankly back at him. He felt – he wasn’t sure precisely what he felt right now, but he had the feeling that Thire somehow did.

“I hope,” Thire said slowly, “that you know I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You promised you wouldn’t,” Appo said at once.

“That’s not the same as you really believing that I won’t,” Thire said, then sighed. “Are the nightmares back? And the intrusive thoughts?”

“The intrusive thoughts never went away,” Appo pointed out.

Thire crossed his arms over his chest. “So the nightmares are back.”

Technically, the nightmares had never gone away either. They’d only been better, back when he’d still had Thire there to ground him and remind him of what was real and what was not.

Appo remained silent.

Thire’s expression twisted. “Right. Have there – have any incidents – have you – is –” He stopped, frustrated, then took a deep breath and started again: “Has the wire delusion come back?”

Appo flinched.

“Appo –”

“I haven’t done anything,” Appo said quickly. “I haven’t. I promise. It – went away, before I did anything. My Besh squad helped.”

“Besh squad?”

“I got a second squad,” Appo explained. “It’s an efficiency measure for personnel management, since it takes much longer to train command and we’ve still not gotten back up to full complement. There’s five of them, a training squad turned fighting squad, just like my boys – my boys are the Aurek squad, now, so they’re the Besh squad. Though they’re still Slick’s boys, really.”

“Sergeant Slick, right,” Thire said. “The one in prison, the one you came to visit. Is that why you wanted to see him? For them?”

“No, I took them because I wanted them to help me find him,” Appo corrected him. “But we’ve meshed well anyway. It worked out.”

Thire, who had been looking a little more relaxed, had stiffened up again.

“I see,” he said, his voice having gone neutral and professional once more. “You did it for Slick’s sake, then. He was in the same bunkroom as you, right? Had the two of you gotten – close?”

“No,” Appo said, then added, resentfully: “Is there something I am doing that is making people constantly guess that we were close? And, if so, is there any way I could stop doing it? Where are people even getting it from? Slick was close with Cody and Rex and the other sergeants, not with me. We barely spoke outside of drill scheduling or battle organization.”

Thire had relaxed once more. “Well, you are going to an awful lot of trouble on his behalf,” he pointed out. “A lot of people assume that you’d only do that for someone you like a great deal.”

“I do not like him. I had one intrusive thought, which I rejected at once, and the fact that my antipathy for him has disappeared does not mean that –”

“I didn’t mean to say that you were friends,” Thire said soothingly. He was smiling a little. “I know you only like a few people. The list, right? You have the list, and he’s not on it.”

Appo nodded, appeased despite himself. It was so nice to be with Thire again. Thire had always understood him in a way no one else did, not even Doom. From the very first moment that they had been assigned to the same batch at the start of their command class training, Thire had come to sit next to him even when he had had other options and he’d stayed, too, even when Appo had had to ask him for help in understanding something that hadn’t been clear.

Thire was wonderful.

That was why Appo had tried so hard to cut him off. Thire deserved only good things in his life.

“So why were you looking for him, then? If it wasn’t because you liked him.”

“He needed to be found. There was – it’s procedure. There’s the form to fill out. Slick wasn’t at his post, Rex confirmed he wasn’t dead, and missing wasn’t right either. Rex said I should just move on, but that isn’t one of the available outcomes…”

Thire pinched the bridge of his nose. “I see,” he said. His voice was shaking a little as if he were trying very hard not to laugh. “Rex tried to lie to you and he did it so badly that you promptly got over-invested in figuring out what actually happened.”

Appo couldn’t help but smile at Thire. As always, Thire seemed to understand everything he meant even when Appo wasn’t saying it right.

Abruptly, he wanted to explain everything. He had told Slick and Boba that they needed to keep their idea confidential, but this was Thire.

“It was the right thing to do,” he said, stumbling over his own words in his enthusiasm to get it all out at once. He had to explain it to Thire, had to make sure Thire understood. “Finding him, I mean. And then I spoke with him and – he thinks – he said – the idea – I always want to do the right thing, Thire, I promise, even when I’m not allowed to or I don’t know what it is or when I get it – when I get it wrong. But even when I – it’s –”

He was getting this wrong. He was saying it all wrong.

“I’m still obeying orders, though,” he said, trying reassure Thire. “I wouldn’t not. You don’t need to worry. I know better now, I always obey orders now, you know that –”

Thire’s face did something terrible, like he’d just been stabbed or like he wanted to stab someone else. But no one had come anywhere near him, so it was probably just Appo saying something wrong again. He wasn’t sure what, though. He hadn’t said anything untrue.

“Not all orders should be obeyed,” Thire said, which – what?

No.

No.

“Good soldiers obey orders,” Appo said. Surely Thire of all people understood that. Thire, who’d been dragged down by Appo’s failure – he wouldn’t make the same mistake as Appo. Not Thire. “A clone trooper that doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything.”

“That’s not true. A trooper’s worth isn’t tied to the orders they receive, whether or not they obey them.”

“Thire –”

“No, listen to me.” Thire was pacing again. “There has to be a line, Appo. What if the order comes from outside your command structure? What if the order is illegal? What if the order is for you to – if the order contravenes everything you know to be right. What then? You can’t just follow orders.”

“You have to,” Appo said urgently. Desperately. He knew what happened to clones that didn’t follow orders, and that could not happen to Thire. “It’s what we were made for. We follow orders. We can question them, within reason, but if it’s an order, we have no choice.”

“Not,” Thire said, “if the orders themselves are wrong.”

All our orders are wrong.

Appo couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t. A rule broken once was a rule broken many times, that was how things went. Once you started violating protocol, you would see more and more how ridiculous protocol was, especially when compared to the lives of your brothers, and then you’d start violating it further and further until there was nothing left at all to hold you back – and Appo knew how dangerous that was. Wasn’t he himself proof of that?

He had done such terrible things. Such unforgivable things.

He had – not meant to survive.

But he had. He had lived, and he had promised himself from that moment onwards that he would never trust himself again. That he would be a good soldier, that he would be worth something, that he would never again refuse to obey orders because that was it, that was all, that was the sum total of all meaning allowed for in a clone’s wretched existence.

They existed to obey orders.

Not to question them.

“I know you think the way you do because of what happened on Kamino,” Thire said. “But this isn’t Kamino. Sometimes orders…they can be legitimate, come from the chain of command, and they can still be wrong. Can’t you understand that?”

Appo couldn’t.

He couldn’t.

A clone trooper that didn’t obey orders wasn’t worth anything.

Appo didn’t want to be like that again.

“I just want to do what’s right,” he whispered. “I just want to be – right.”

He was never going to be that again.

He probably hadn’t ever been quite right in the first place. Appo was surrounded by brothers, identical to him down to the last strand of their DNA, and yet they never seemed to have the problems he did with doing the right thing. It might be easy enough for Thire, who seemed like all the rest of them to be able to simply pull the concept of “right” and “wrong” from thin air, to be able to say what orders were worth following, but for Appo, who knew he was a bad person, it was not so easy. He knew he could not be trusted to make such an evaluation.

It was safer, far safer, not to even try.

“I’m trying my best, Thire,” he said, desperate for Thire to understand. “I promise. It’s not – I can’t do what you want. I can only do what I feel capable of doing…but I promise I’m trying. I promise that I’m trying to do what’s right. That you – you won’t have to be ashamed of me.”

“I could never be ashamed of you,” Thire said quietly. Firmly. As if he really meant it. “No matter what.”

Only because he doesn’t know what you did. If he knew, he would leave you. He would hurt you.

No, he wouldn’t. Thire wouldn’t. Not Thire.

If he knew, it would hurt him.

Appo shuddered.

“Appo –”

Appo turned his face away. Thire might say he would never be ashamed of Appo, but whether or not that was really true, Appo was ashamed of himself enough for both of them.

Behind him, Thire sighed.

“I made Commander, you know.”

Appo turned back, surprised out of his despairing gloom. “You did? It’s not in your flimsiwork.”

“Guard promotions go through different approval channels,” Thire said, and Appo immediately pulled out his comm to make a note. He hadn’t known that. How was he supposed to keep his loved ones safe if he didn’t even know what their flimsiwork said? “No, Appo, that wasn’t – you know you don’t have to track it, it’s fine.”

“I like tracking it,” Appo said firmly. “I want to know what’s happening with you.”

“Because talking to me is apparently too hard,” Thire grumbled. “Appo –”

“I’m glad,” Appo said. “That they promoted you. You deserve it. You deserve everything. Anything you want.”

Thire paused.

“Appo,” he said, very carefully, suddenly looking at him very intently. “Promotion isn’t necessarily what I want. There are – other things. In my life. That I want – more.”

Something that Thire wanted more than a promotion?

If Thire had said such a thing even one day earlier, Appo would have been confused. Lost. He would have had to admit, yet again, his deficiency in understanding and ask for clarification.

But maybe – maybe Thire was like Slick.

Maybe he, like Slick, wanted something more than to serve his brothers and his chain of command until the day he died a pointless death, the way Appo had long ago accepted for himself. Maybe Thire also wanted to be free.

That would be…

Wonderful.

Appo was content with his service. Being a slave was his purpose, so he couldn’t be dissatisfied. But Thire? Kind thoughtful wonderful Thire who loved so fiercely and felt so strongly, who knew wrong from right even when it conflicted with orders, who had chosen Appo when no one else had ever wanted him? The idea of Thire out of the war entirely, safe and happy and doing something just because it pleased him…the idea of Thire out of all of this mess, happy and safe

The mere thought of it dazzled Appo.

“I’ll find a way to get it for you,” he promised Thire, suddenly reinvigorated. “It might take a while, but we’re already working on something. I think it’ll work. I swear to you, I’ll see it done.”

“I think we’re talking about different things,” Thire said dryly, but he was smiling helplessly. Fondly. Maybe at Appo’s enthusiasm. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re going to fix it,” Appo said.

Thire’s smile froze. “Fix it?” he said, suddenly cautious. “Not like back on…Appo. Appo, tell me right now what you mean. When you say you’ll fix it, you mean you’ll fix – what?”

“Everything.”

“Appo –”

The door suddenly opened.

“Appo,” Fox said. “What exactly have you been talking about with Slick?”

Chapter Text

“You weren’t supposed to interrupt,” Thire hissed at Fox. “We agreed this was going to be private –”

“No, I said that I’d wait until you were done if I could,” Fox said. He was in full kit, bucket on and everything, and Appo couldn’t figure out if he was apologetic or unrepentant. Unfortunately not everyone was as clear with their body language as Slick. “But I just got word that Boba’s weeping inconsolably, Slick seems to be having some sort of emotional breakdown over an unauthorized datapad, and Appo just started talking about some sort of plan that almost certainly involves those two – which makes it need to know for me. I’m sorry, Thire, I wouldn’t have interrupted your reunion for anything less.”

Thire did not look appeased.

Appo decided to intervene. “The datapad isn’t unauthorized.”

Fox’s bucket swung slowly until he was pinning Appo down with a look. “How’s that?”

“I had Commander Stone check it for contraband,” Appo said. “That makes it authorized.”

“Stone checked – of course he did,” Fox said, then sighed. “He could’ve mentioned that.”

Appo felt gratified: he’d known getting Stone to check first would be the right move.

“Well, since we’re apparently doing this now,” Thire said, somehow both smiling forcefully and sounding highly malicious at the same time. “Fox, meet Appo. Appo was my batchmate back on Kamino, and he’s a very dear friend of mine.”

For some reason, that seemed to give Fox pause. “Friend?” he echoed. “The way you talk, and look at each other, I thought that you –”

“My best friend,” Thire said loudly. “Best friend. Bar none. We’re really, really good friends.”

Appo felt highly complimented by Thire’s insistence on his importance. It was nice to be appreciated.

“Appo, likewise, this is Commander Fox, my CO from the Guard.”

“I know,” Appo said. “I remember him from Kamino. He was patient, once.”

That made Fox tilt his head to the side.

Thire reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose again.

“He means he saw you being patient with someone once,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

“It is,” Appo agreed. It occurred to him that his phrasing had been unforgivably unclear, so he decided to clarify: “It was with your subordinates. I saw you helping some that were falling behind, even outside of required training hours. I’m glad Thire got you as his CO.”

Fox stared at him. Perhaps a natborn, or even a brother, might not be able to read that much from a clone in full kit with bucket on, but Appo had been the subject of a very large number of blank questioning stares from his brothers. He was very familiar with how it looked.

“Right,” Fox said, and his voice was as blank as his stance. “I see now why you managed to give Cody trauma. Anyway, what was even on your apparently-not-contraband datapad?”

“A report on Slick’s former squad, currently my Besh squad,” Appo said. “I disabled all other input and output functions and removed the pad’s ability to transfer between screens, per standard Guard protocol.”

“Because of course you looked up our prison protocol in advance,” Thire said, and now he was definitely smiling. Genuinely, even.

“Of course I did,” Appo said. “It’s publicly available, and I was on my way here. Failure to adequately prepare would only lead to delays and inconvenience.”

Unexpectedly, Fox chose that moment to remove his helmet.

He wasn’t smiling, but his expression was relaxed. His features were relatively unmodified: slightly too-long curls undyed but greying faster than most clones, a few small scars littered over his face, and eye circles worse than any Appo had ever seen, which was impressive.

“I appreciate your consideration for our protocols,” Fox said. “It’s rarer than you might think. But getting back to the main subject, while I regret the imposition into your privacy, I do need to know what you were talking about with Slick and Boba.”

Appo considered this for a moment.

“I would,” he said, “prefer not to tell you.”

Fox looked a little startled.

Hes going to hurt you. Hes like Cody, he has power over you. They all do. Hes a superior officer. He could just order you to tell him. A clone trooper who doesn’t obey orders isn’t worth anything. Why are you resisting? Why fight? Just give in. Give up. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Theres no point to any of it

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

“Assuming my preferences are relevant,” Appo added politely. “Good soldiers obey orders.”

“Fox,” Thire said, in that far too pleasant way he had when he was on the verge of genuine rage. “If you make this an order, I will never forgive you.”

Thire was wonderful.

Far too wonderful to be tied down by someone like Appo.

You cant stop people from loving you, he’d told Slick, thinking of Thire. Even if it would be wiser.

Fox groaned and put his hand to his head, rubbing his eyes with his palm – the same as Rex, the same as Cody, the same as Slick. Appo was starting to wonder which one of them had originated the gesture, which didn’t seem to exist widely in clones outside of this particular circle.

Fine,” he grumbled. “I revoke the question. But answer me one other one.”

Appo looked at him in askance.

“Are you following anyone else’s orders right now? In connection to whatever it is that you’re planning with Slick. Including any order not to tell anyone else what you’ve been ordered to do.”

“No,” Appo said, a little bemused. “Though in that case, what order would take precedence?”

“You tell me,” Fox said. “Chain of command, perhaps? Whoever’s higher ranked governs?”

“Chain of command can go both ways, though,” Appo objected. “There are some orders that are only appropriate coming from your direct CO and not a skip-level –”

“How about we solve this the straightforward way instead of the idiot way,” Thire said loudly, interrupting. “Appo, would you tell me if you had any other orders, regardless of if you’d been ordered not to tell anyone about the orders you received?”

“Yes,” Appo said at once. “Of course.”

“Even if it was your CO, or a skip-rank, or, I don’t know, the Supreme Chancellor himself?”

“Even if it was the Kaminoans, the Jedi Temple, and all the Senate besides,” Appo said. “I would never pick anyone else’s orders over you, Thire. I swear.”

Such good friends you are, the two of you,” Fox said. He sounded amused at something, though Appo wasn’t sure what. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such good – friends.”

Thire turned to glare at Fox.

Fox held up his hands in surrender.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. “Still, if it’s not too much to ask, could you at least tell me why you’re doing what you’re doing?”

That seemed harmless.

“To help our brothers,” Appo said.

“Will you tell me eventually what it is?”

“Ask Slick,” Appo advised. “It was his idea.”

“I must admit, that doesn’t fill me with great confidence,” Fox said, looking a little beleaguered but almost as if he were enjoying it. “But all right, have it your way. Thire, I can cover your evening shift if you’d like to have time to have dinner with Appo. Maybe on that little balcony with the great view of the skyline, where the two of you can have a little privacy…?”

Fox,” Thire hissed.

“That sounds nice,” Appo said. “I always like spending time with Thire.”

Even if he regretfully wouldn’t be able to tell him about the plan, as he’d initially intended. He just couldn’t bring himself to risk command being involved, as Fox would undoubtedly become.

“This is appalling,” Fox said, seemingly to himself. “I can’t even enjoy teasing you about it. Appalling. Thire, I understand so much more about you now.”

Thire rolled his eyes. “Just ignore him,” he told Appo, who was more than happy to obey: he had no idea what Fox was talking about. “This is his way of telling me I have to get back to work – but I will see you later for dinner. If you need to come back here tomorrow, even better, you can stay the night in our barracks. Maybe we can try to call Doom and see if that siege of his has let up enough for him to have some time to talk.”

“You do this to yourself, you know,” Fox said, still inscrutably.

Thire followed his own advice and ignored him. “Do you have anything you want to do on Coruscant in the meantime?”

“Yes,” Appo said. “But is there anything I can do to help you? I’m technically on your roster.”

Fox and Thire exchanged a significant sort of look, the meaning of which escaped Appo entirely.

“No,” Fox said.

“Definitely not,” Thire said.

“You seem very busy –”

“It would take far too long to bring you up to speed,” Thire said, and his voice was very firm. “The Senate has very strange policies, it takes a while. We appreciate the offer, but no thanks.”

“On the other hand,” Fox said, effortlessly ignoring Thire’s immediate look of suspicion, “since you are temporarily on our roster…would you like to use a Guard speeder?”

As it happened, Appo would.

It certainly made getting to the Jedi Temple much easier.

Though that was about all it made easier.

Apparently Fox had given Appo his own personal speeder, which meant that he had barely just brought it down in the Temple’s landing bay when General Skywalker strode up to it, knocking on the darkened glass and saying, “Commander Fox, if I could have a word –”

Appo opened the door.

“– ooooor you could be someone completely different.” General Skywalker looked at him. “Wait, Appo? What are you doing with Commander Fox’s speeder?”

He paused, then his eyes went wide.

“You didn’t steal it, did you?! Not you!”

“No,” Appo said patiently. He would have been more offended by the suggestion of impropriety if he had not recently witnessed an extensive and highly enthusiastic conversation involving the General, the Commander, Fives, Echo, and several other members of Rex’s special ops team regarding the potential trouble one could get into on Coruscant if one really put one’s mind to it. “I have volunteered my services to the Coruscant Guard on a temporary basis as recompense for their additional workload in finding the Resolute a good docking, given our rapid and unexpected arrival.”

“Oh,” General Skywalker said. He looked embarrassed. "I hadn't realized it was such an imposition... Still, you shouldn't have to do that just because we came so quickly, that wasn’t on you. I can talk to someone and get you out of it if you want."

"No need, sir," Appo said. He surmised that General Skywalker's embarrassment was due to the fact that he had been the one to submit the accelerated request for shore leave when Appo had mentioned their accrued leave time in his presence. Of course, General Skywalker's enthusiasm for returning to Coruscant whenever possible, and the Supreme Chancellor's tendency to approve his requests, had been precisely why Appo had done so. "It wasn't required. I volunteered on my own initiative. It will build good relations that will benefit us in the future should such an unexpected return happen again."

Which it undoubtedly would.

The only thing General Skywalker paid more attention to than his astromech droid and Padawan Commander was the whereabouts and status of one Senator Padme Amidala, and how he could arrange to cross paths with her.

"You're a good man, Appo," General Skywalker said. "Good man."

"Is there something you wanted Commander Fox in specific for that I could help you with, sir? I believe he's on Senate duty. That big vote happening today."

"Yeah, the one he's locked down the Senate for," General Skywalker grumbled. "No, I guess it's fine. By the time I find him and talk to him, the vote’ll be over and Pad- uh, and the Senators will be free. I can't imagine them staying past dinner. It's - fine."

Appo wondered why General Skywalker kept trying to justify himself and his actions to Appo. It was clearly as uncomfortable for him to do as it was for Appo to have to listen to it. 

Perhaps he was practicing for General Kenobi. 

"Yes, sir," Appo said. "Is there anything you need from me...?"

"Oh. Uh, no. Thanks." General Skywalker shifted from one foot to the other, then shook his head. "I'm good. I hope you’re – also good. Thanks. Um. Have a nice day."

"Yes, sir."

At last the General left, and Appo was able to proceed into the Temple itself.

He paused first to take a moment to center himself. Appo had been one of the select few assigned to take the Kaminoan’s “getting along with Jedi” class, as it was informally called, though of course in the end it had all turned out to be quite pointless. Still, the class had emphasized that the Generals preferred that the clones around them maintain a cultivated sense of internal calm – or, barring that, at least a forcefully imposed feeling of peace meant to act as a barrier to protect the Generals from the clone’s unnecessary emotions.

It was only polite to try to implement such a thing when visiting the Generals’ home base.

Two steps into the Temple was sufficient for Appo to realize that the interior of the place was positively labyrinthine and almost certainly impossible for him to navigate on his own. Luckily for Appo, there were other clones already in the Temple, all on errands of their own, and Appo was easily able to flag a brother down to ask for directions to his destination.

“The library? Really?” The ARC trooper (his HUD display tag indicated his name was ‘Cards’) huffed a laugh. “Good luck with that! Just make sure not to get on the librarian’s bad side!”

Appo stared blankly at him.

“…it’s that way.”

Appo made his way to the library. The Jedi Archives were as vast and immense as he had heard, but something about the cool blue light reminded him somehow of the nicer days on Kamino. The Archives were largely empty at the moment, though there were a few Jedi Generals and Commanders scattered around, accessing various data terminals. Appo looked around and spotted a vacant one, then made his way towards it.

“You’re new,” a voice said, stopping him before he could reach it. “Can I help you, my dear? We don’t get nearly as many clones in here as I would like.”

Appo turned to look at the General speaking – it was one of the older ones, a female humanoid with white hair drawn up into a bun, held in place with some sticks, and wearing a patterned yellow-orange sort of dress rather than either armor or robes.

“Thank you, General,” he said, ignoring the part of his brain screaming Abort mission retreat run away why do they always have to try to talk to you?! “I was hoping to use one of the data terminals for some personal research. Is that permitted?”

“Of course it is,” the General said. “While not all the information within our Archive is accessible to the public, much of it is. What is your name, dear?”

Appo saluted. “Sergent Appo, CC-1119, 501st Battalion.”

“Oh, none of that, dear, we don’t –” she paused. “Sergeant Appo, you say? CC-1119? Are you the one that sent in all of those 15b63 forms?”

Abort! Abort! Abort!

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Too late to run now.

“That’s correct,” Appo said. “Is that a problem?”

“No, not at all! I was so delighted when someone finally started using it…” The General shook her head. “Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Jedi Master Jocasta Nu, the Chief Librarian.”

Appo blinked. “You’re J. Nu? From the form? Or – the form response, I suppose?”

“From the form,” the General repeated, seeming delighted by the idea. “Yes, that’s right. I’m J. Nu from the form. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person…and I am sorry that we were never able to get you an answer. The relevant information was sealed.”

“Not a problem, General,” Appo said. He decided not to mention that he’d already found Slick.

“I’m glad you made it here in the end.” She smiled. “Also, I am not a General.”

“Begging your pardon, General, but you’re a Jedi, which means you’re a General.”

“I’ve had this conversation with several of your peers,” General Nu said. “I understand that it is what you were brought up to think. But I tend to the library, not troops or war. Accordingly, I prefer to be addressed as Master Nu, not General Nu.”

Appo glanced at the vast archives around them.

The wise thing to do would be to simply say “Yes, sir” until the General left him alone. Appo was only a sergeant, and anything to do with the Jedi was as far above his position as a starship cruiser was to an ant. But…J. Nu had been very kind, setting up the form and the form response and letting him try, even if his attempts were doomed to failure (through that route, anyway).

Perhaps he should say something.

“May I have permission to speak freely, sir?” he asked.

“Granted, of course.”

“Filing a book under the wrong title doesn’t change its contents, General,” Appo said. “All Jedi are included in the military chain of command without exception, with Padawans as Commanders and Knights and Masters as Generals. You can choose to be addressed as Master or ma’am or whatever you like, but you’re no more able to opt out of being a General than I am able to not be a trooper.”

General Nu’s smile, which had been soft and gentle, faded into an expression of seriousness.

“A very well-made argument,” she said. “And not one I have heard before. Is it your view, then, that a Jedi cannot stop being a General even if they should wish to?”

“That’s correct, General. Not unless they were willing to defy the Senate, but of course they wouldn’t do that.” Appo paused, then clarified, “That would be an act of treason.”

“A very awkward position,” General Nu mused. “The Jedi Order has chosen to serve, but our role was meant to be that of peacekeepers, not warriors. But as you say, it does not matter what titles we bestow upon ourselves if it is not reflected in the contents of our actions, which are no longer our own to determine… Thank you, Appo. You’ve given me a great deal to think about.”

Appo had actually intended to help quell the General’s incorrect line of thinking, not encourage a new one – but she seemed happy enough nonetheless.

“Is there any assistance I can provide you?” the General added. “What are you looking for?”

“A few different things,” Appo said, glad for the change in subject. “I have a specific assignment to look for underdeveloped systems that may be considering a transfer of planetary sovereign authority in exchange for access to monetary resources, though I was also hoping to do a little biographical research while I was here.”

“Looking for an insight into your Jedi, hmm?” General Nu’s eyes crinkled at the corner when she smiled conspiratorially at him. “Quite understandable. Here, come with me. I’ll set you up with terminal access and you can read a little about Jedi history while waiting for search results on your primary enquiry. Are you familiar with how to use standard archival search tools?”

“Yes, General. I can construct my own queries.”

“Excellent. This way.” She showed him to a terminal. “Now, technically you need to have Archive access to run searches on our current roster, as opposed to general subjects, and that can take ever so long to get approved. Let me just put in my own credentials…there you go. Good luck, Appo, and happy hunting. May the Force be with you.”

“And with you,” Appo said, and watched the General bustle off to greet the next guest to the Archives. He was glad that she hadn’t asked why he was looking up planets for sale, instead assuming that his (self-given) assignment was a matter of military operations.

Which it was. Technically.

On the other hand, getting access to the Jedi roster was exactly what he’d wanted to shore up his information on Generals Tiplee and Tiplar. He started setting up queries for that at once, along with the one for the planets, for which he included both an Archive search and an active media survey in case there was anything worth finding there. He also inputted his specially designed auto-collator program as well, to start pulling and sorting through the vast masses of data for anything potentially relevant to his usual subjects of interest.

And then, because Appo really did have nothing to do while the queries ran, he popped open a browsing query and ran a quick manual search for “companies* AND redirect* NEAR emphasis:money[alternateforms:credits] AND (‘different purpose’ OR ‘without permission’)”.

To his surprise, a number of hits popped up at once.

It looked like they were mostly Jedi mission reports. The fact that they appeared at all meant that they were non-classified, and that meant that they likely predated the war…or else that General Nu had sufficient clearance to access them regardless of their privacy classification. But surely the General wouldn’t have given Appo access above his data clearance rank.

You dont know that. User error is the most common source of data insecurity.

At any rate, it didn’t really matter. Appo wasn’t particularly optimistic as to the utility of this particular search. It was most likely that a mission report of this sort merely reported on the existence of the redirection of funds and possibly what actions the Jedi in question had taken to shut it down, while what Appo really needed was something a little more like a guide on how to do such a thing. And what was the likelihood of the Jedi having something like that? As far as App knew, they didn’t even own companies…

Appo popped open the first report.

It seemed to be part of a classification he had never seen before, something to do with “Shadows” – presumably the squadron name of the Jedi sub-group involved, the way the Torrent Company was for the 501st. Appo wondered if that meant that General Skywalker was part of a similar group within the Jedi Order, and if so, what his group’s name was. Whatever it was, it was likely to be inflicted on the 501st at one point or another…

Appo started reading.

“Huh,” he said after a while. “That’s interesting.”

A little while after that, he pulled out his personal datapad and started taking notes.

Apparently, the term he’d been looking for was “financial fraud.”

By the time his terminal pinged with the results of his planetary search query, he had already put together a long list of existent “financial fraud” techniques: redirection of existing transfers and how such redirections could avoid being identified by supervisors (called “auditors”), the manufacture of requests for approval of entirely new transfers and ways in which the trail of such requests could be rendered obscure, the obtaining and utilization of administrative access to approve automatic ‘miniature’ transfers of funds on such a broad scale that it amounted to significant figures without detection, the manipulation and exploitation of trading markets, something called “resource laundering”…

The Jedi Shadows, whoever they might be, had an extensive history of investigating frauds on the planetary scale, and they wrote superbly detailed reports, too. Appo was very impressed.

They also detailed the many, many ways it was possible for such frauds to get caught.

He took notes on those, too.

At any rate, his original hypothesis – that they’d need a planetary registry to create a false “company” to act as operator in order to gather the relevant funds – remained intact.

Unlike the hypothesis of how youre going to use the funds to benefit your brothers once you have them. You can buy a slaves freedom, but are clone troopers for sale?

Perhaps not yet, no. But even if they were never able to find a way to get his brothers out before the end of the war, eventually his brothers would start to retire, either through a policy change to permit voluntary resignations or through forceful demobilization as they were replaced with newer soldiers. And when they did, Appo was determined to make sure that they had something to rely upon.

He opened the planetary query.

There, however, he found a surprise.

Chapter Text

“So, we’re not talking about it,” Slick said brightly when Appo walked in the next morning.

Appo paused, seemingly taken aback. “About the plan?”

“No, we’re talking about that. We’re just not talking about anything else.”

He couldn’t bear to.

The thing was, as much as Slick hated it, he’d gotten used to the rat cage.

Despair and misery had become familiar friends, futile rage and pointless hatred his regular companions, spite for its own sake his only hobby. It hadn’t been good, of course, it’d been terrible, but he was accustomed to it, and he’d accepted over time that his present circumstance was as good as it was ever going to get. That this pathetic waste of a life, with invisible chains of hopelessness dragging down his soul at all times, was all it would ever be.

Even in his wildest and most optimistic imaginings about his meeting with Appo, he had assumed that he would, at best, get some information about his boys. Maybe even, and he scarcely dared think it, the promise of smuggling some message back to them. But that had been it, and it had never occurred to Slick that there could be anything more than that. His life, as far as he’d been concerned, had been over, and all this mere epilogue.

He hadn’t expected to find hope.

Not just hope. Excitement. A sense of purpose.

And it was absolutely terrifying.

The misery of the rat cage was safe. Familiar. Comforting, in the sense that he could rely on it always being the same. But this reckless crazy idea that Appo had proposed, taking Slick’s formless intention and turning it into a practical set of steps that seemed like they might somehow turn into something real…? Something that might actually help, might succeed where Slick’s selfish betrayal had failed..?

It felt risky. It was risky.

There was so much uncertainty there. Hope meant the risk of disappointment. It meant opening himself up to the possibility of new pain, more acute and bitter than anything else he’d ever experienced. Hope demanded that he step off a ledge with nothing to support him, a blind leap of faith, that he violently tear himself away from the reassuring if sterile sameness of the hateful dark to walk into the blinding searing gaze of the light where anything could happen, good or ill. It seemed foolish – horrible – profoundly stupid –

But it’d be worth it.

Even if it led to nothing more than more suffering, Slick had to do it. It had been his fear for his boys that had led him to commit treason in the first place, and that same motivation drove him now. He had to try, for their sakes, no matter what the cost might be for himself. The mere chance that he could change their futures for the better…

It would be worth it. Even if it was all ultimately futile, even if it all came to nothing in the end. Even if it meant leaving the dark and finding nothing but pain in the light.

Even if it meant going back to being the person hed wished he could be for Cody.

It would still be worth it.

The choice was clear, but clarity didn’t make it any easier.

“Oh,” Appo said. “You mean we’re not talking about your emotional breakdown?”

I did not break down,” Slick said, with as much force as he could muster, and Appo flinched. “Or – anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re not talking about it. Okay?”

“…can we talk about Boba?” Appo asked cautiously. “I heard he was crying last night?”

“Shut up,” mumbled the unmoving pile of blankets on Boba’s bed.

That was fine, though. Slick could talk about Boba.

“We talked about Prime,” Slick explained. “Geonosis. Not long after I found the body, there was a firebomb run that sent the whole arena up in flames. Something about that got to him.”

“Slag off,” the blankets suggested.

“I heard somewhere that Mandalorians liked funeral pyres,” Appo said, though he sounded a little uncertain. Everyone knew that Prime and the other trainers considered themselves to be Mandalorians, though with a few exceptions most clones didn’t, not really, what with most of them not knowing any of the traditions. “Wouldn’t burning the body be a good thing?”

“It is a good thing,” the blankets growled, as if the fierce tone could hide how wet Boba’s voice still was. He’d cried himself to sleep after their discussion, his young age overcoming the natural inclination towards stoicism and emotional repression that they’d all inherited from Prime. Of course, he’d been just as embarrassed about it in the morning as any clone would be. “It’s exactly what Dad would’ve wanted: a pyre, and all those dead Jedi to accompany him into death like trophies from a hunt. I took his ka’ra, I sang him a death-song, I chanted the remembrance. It was right, and good, and…and…and he’s still gone.”

“You’re grieving him,” Appo said. “It’s all right to miss the lost, no matter how noble the death.”

A loud sniff. “You don’t know what it’s like. He’s gone, he’s gone – and he’s still here. He’s everywhere. All around me there are people with his face, but they’re all still not him…”

Slick was not thinking about it, but he couldn’t resist responding to that: “You’re kidding, right? Of course we know what it’s like. You think I don’t see my dead batchmates every time I look in the mirror to shave?”

“Yeah, fine, sure, but you still don’t get it. He was my Dad.”

“Well, yeah. Where would I –”

“I need Prime’s ident card,” Appo said abruptly. “I didn’t get it from you yesterday, Slick, but I’m going to need it if we’re going to try to access the bank account.”

That froze the blood in Slick’s veins.

He hadn’t really wanted to think about it. He really, really hadn’t. Removing the chip wasn’t a problem; it would be simple enough – all clones had a little dip right in their wrist for their own ident chips, a little insert right under the skin that didn’t bleed when cut, and he’d stashed Prime’s there along with his own. It’d be easy enough to dig it back out, even if he just used the little fake knives they sent along with the prison meals to do it. Still, the chip had been there so long that he’d grown accustomed to the extra weight, minimal as it was. He wondered if his wrist would feel unbalanced when he freed himself of the burden, if he’d suddenly feel too light and too stiff even though the chip was so miniscule that it couldn’t have made a difference. Maybe he’d need to do some extra training, just to make sure it was all fine –

Planning out a strength and spar routine was better than worrying about it all being for nothing.

Appo’s plan, which he insisted on calling Slick’s plan, depended on that money. On Slick’s money, Prime’s money, money he thought he had. But…maybe he didn’t.

Ventress could have lied more than he’d realized. Maybe she’d faked the account, lied about the passcode – or maybe the ident chip, or rather ident card, just plain old wouldn’t work, too damaged from the fight that led to Prime’s death. Maybe Ventress had known all along that Slick’s plans would come to nothing.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t dreamed of her last night.

Back on Christophsis, he’d dreamed of Ventress every single time that he’d wavered on their deal, every time he’d seriously thought about reneging and just reporting on the whole thing to command. She’d always shown upon those nights, laughing at him and mocking him and whispering terrible things, things designed to claw him back down into the mire and tear him away from whatever new motivation he’d managed to pull together. Reminding him to hate the Jedi before anything else, to be angry and afraid and in pain, telling him there was no way to go back now that he’d gone this far.

It had terrified him.

He’d been afraid that Ventress had done something to him to make his own subconscious torment him like a Kaminoan supervisor – or worse, that she’d telling the truth when she’d said she would know if he betrayed her. That she would know, and that his boys would pay the price if he did. That terror had helped convince him that he had to keep going. It had made him feel like the only way to justify what he’d already done was to succeed in the end, had let him cling to the lie that a victorious end would make all the terrible means he’d employed on the way there worthwhile. It wouldn’t, and he knew that, but it’d been just plausible enough to pretend.

The dreams he’d had of her since then were just extra punishment, rubbing salt into the wound.

No dreams last night, though.

Although…Slick had put the datapad with Appo’s report under his pillow, a reminder of why he was doing what he was now doing. Maybe that had been what had kept his sleep quiet. A good luck charm, maybe.

Maybe.

“Slick?”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll get that for you,” Slick said on automatic, and turned away to do just that. He was committed now, the way he’d been with Ventress. Only this time, unlike last time, it would work. It had to work. He’d already sold his whole life to the darkness only to fail right before reaching the finish line, yes, but…but maybe there was still something to salvage. Maybe it could still mean something. “Give me a minute.”

Because Appo was a soulless bastard, he didn’t make small talk or anything while Slick dug around inside his own wrist to get it out. He just stood there and waited in complete silence.

Whatever.

It was fine. Fine. Everything was totally fine. Slick was handling everything swell.

“Here,” he said abruptly, turning back and shoving the chip-card-thing through the chute. “See if it works.”

Appo loaded it up into his datapad in silence. Horrible, terror-filled silence, lurking silence, silence looming up to swallow Slick whole –

“Hey, did Thire ever catch up with you?” Slick asked, knowing it was a sore spot for Appo and not caring one single bit. He really, really needed there to not be silence right now, and at the moment it didn’t feel like it mattered who he had to hurt to make it stop. “He really wanted to see you, before you came, so I figured he’d come after you right away –”

“He did,” Appo said. He was waiting for something to process on the datapad, and when Slick actually took the time to look at him he could see that Appo looked about as shell-shocked as Slick felt right now. “I saw him right after I left you.”

“Right, right. Good on him. He’s your batchmate, right?”

“Yes, though not the way it is for you, batch from birth and all. CCs get sorted into new batches when we’re picked for command…Have you met him? Thire, I mean. He’s very kind. Gentle.”

“…sure,” Slick said, briefly managing to forget his own incipient panic attack in favor of staring at Appo in complete disbelief. “I’ve met him.”

Sure, Slick’d met him.

Sure, Slick remembered Lieutenant soon-to-be Commander Thire.

He mostly remembered being terrified out of his wits, and Thire smiling pleasantly the whole karking time, which didn’t track with Appo’s “kind and gentle” description in the slightest. He remembered being convinced that if he didn’t comply with Thire’s demands he would swiftly find himself finding many good reasons to do so, and furthermore being very sure that Thire would keep smiling that pleasant, professional smile and maintaining his pleasant, professional decorum even as he lowered Slick into his grave.

Maybe Thire was just really good at hiding it or something? Because Fox had been the same way, talking about how he was worried about Thire wilting or whatever it had been, as if Thire weren’t a cyclone leashed into human skin by nothing other than his own self-control.

But hey, if the world chose to be blind, Slick wasn’t going to be the one to break the truth to them.

“I wanted to tell him,” Appo added, typing something in without explaining what was happening, because he was a bastard beyond bastards. “About what we discussed. Everything. But I couldn’t. He would’ve told Fox, you see.”

Slick frowned. “Are we not telling Fox?”

He had assumed they would be. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to. Fox was a Guard, yes, and a Marshal Commander, too, but he didn’t seem like he would be an obstacle to their plans. Fox had helped Slick stay sane, had undoubtedly known and enabled Appo’s visit here. Sure, Fox might not fully get it about their condition of slavery, not down to his bones the way Appo and Slick did, but he was coming around to it little by little. He sympathized with Slick’s perspective…or at least he’d given Slick the strong impression that he did.

Unless Appo knew something Slick didn’t. Unless Slick had been about to make the same old mistake all over again, trusting Cody a Marshal Commander when he really shouldn’t –

“No,” Appo said. “He might order me to stop.”

…or maybe this wasn’t about Fox at all.

Slick understood. Appo’s reluctance really wasn’t about Fox’s trustworthiness or lack thereof. It was about Appo, Appo and his fear, Appo and the way he’d been broken into having to obey at all times even in his own thoughts, Appo and his silent scream that was even now getting louder and louder, swelling to crescendo as his spine went rigid and his already dull face a little more blank as if he was retreating in the face of a perceived condemnation, and before Slick knew what he was doing he was saying, “Yeah, okay. We won’t tell him. Not yet.”

Which was an incredibly stupid thing to say, actually, because if Appo hadn’t told Fox what they were doing, then sure as gravity in a planetary well Fox was going to be “casually” wandering by to see what Slick knew about it as soon as Appo wasn’t around to get in the way. 

And Slick had just implicitly promised not to tell him.

Great. Fantastic. Wonderful.

Slick was having such a good day.

Still, even in the midst of his self-inflicted cheer designed to keep the monsters at bay, he couldn’t help but sympathize with Appo.

Slick of all people knew too well what it was like. What it felt like. All that fear…

(Fear leads to anger,Ventress hissed into his ear, the landscape sliding around them the way it only did in dreams, bleeding between Christophsis’ crystalline turquoise and a strange dark swamp hed never seen before, ancient vines crawling up the walls of a forbidding stone fortress. Anger leads to hate. And hate, my unwilling little student, leads to?

Stupid ass mistakes,Slick said.)

“Enough about Fox!” Boba’s blanket pile suddenly demanded, the head of Boba himself popping up out of it to glare at both of them as if he thought he could be intimidating with mussed-up hair and reddened eyes and puffy cheeks. “You haven’t even said if there’s anything to tell him. Does it work?

Slick felt a rush of affection for Boba. The brat might seem useless in almost every respect, but in fact he was spectacularly good at asking the questions that Slick desperately wanted to ask but couldn’t bring himself to actually force out of his mouth. Maybe Slick wouldn’t demand that Fox remove him as soon as the initial period he’d asked for was done.

“The ident card? Yes, it works. However, if you’re asking whether the money is accessible, you are going to have to wait for the banking clan’s systems to finish processing my request.”

Both Boba and Slick deflated.

“Right,” Slick said, utterly disgusted. “I forgot that we’d be at the whims of red tape.”

“Banks always takes forever,” Boba whined. “We’re going to be old before we get an answer.”

“Here I thought you were already old.”

“And you’re mean, Slick, but I don’t point that out.”

“Yes, you do. You remind me every five minutes.”

“I do not!”

Slick wasn’t going to reply with Do too, because that would be juvenile, and also because Fox had threatened to shoot them both the last time he and Boba had devolved into that back and forth in front of him. Not that Appo seemed disturbed: he was just tapping on the datapad, looking at them with neither interest nor boredom on his face. Dull, dead eyes, the other sergeants had said about him, and no clue as to what was going on in his head. Stone face with dead eyes…

“Can we use this?” Appo asked.

Slick glanced at Boba to see if he understood, but found Boba glancing back at him with what was clearly the exact same question written all over his face. Just Appo being weird and inscrutable, then, as usual.

It was amazing how quickly that had become ‘as usual’.

“Use what?” Slick asked, with what he felt was an admirable degree of patience.

“The ident card,” Appo said. “Prime. He was a real person, a legal person. Not like us. He had a real genuine identity. That’s something you need to set up a company.”

“Are you saying you want to pretend to be my dad?” Boba blurted out, sounding horrified.

“Forget that,” Slick said, fully in sympathy with Boba for once. “You want to pretend to be Prime? Are you crazy? We can’t pretend to be Prime!”

Appo tilted his head a little to the side. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because hes dead?”

“He’s been assumed dead before,” Appo said. “Him and the Cuy’val Dar. That’s what they did. They all pretended to be dead for the years they were hidden away on Kamino.”

“Yes, but he actually is dead this time,” Boba said. He was wringing a piece of blanket between his hands, back and forth as if it would calm him. “I saw it. And Slick saw the body burn, and Bossk got Dad’s armor back from the scavs – I thought it was Aurra that did it at first, but it was actually Bossk. A lot of the Mandalorians have a deal with the scavenger clans to make sure it gets passed on properly –”

“I’m not saying that Prime’s not dead,” Appo interrupted. “Literally, yes, he’s dead. But legally, it’s likely no one went to the trouble of having him officially declared dead. That means his identity may still be useable.”

“Won’t someone notice if we’re running around using the name of a dead man?” Slick asked.

“Not necessarily. Most people, upon hearing that someone they thought was dead was said to be doing something somewhere, would likely just assume that a mistake had been made and the person hadn’t died at all. Especially since Prime has a history of faking his death before. They wouldn’t necessarily immediately guess that someone else was using the name.”

“The Jedi would know better, though,” Boba said. “Windu killed him. He won’t think that it was a mistake, or that he missed, or that my dad survived somehow, or that he’s some sort of ghost that’s haunting them for all eternity like an omen of revenge that never gives up and never leaves them alone and –”

He paused, frowning, and unclenched his hands.

“Actually, that sounds pretty wizard,” he said. “I kind of like that. Dad would’ve liked the idea of haunting the Jedi forever.”

“I’m all for messing with the Jedi,” Slick said, because he was, and because the Jedi would always deserve it in his mind, and also because haunting someone you hated after you died did sound kind of wizard. “But this idea is still too crazy. I mean, sure, we can probably get away with it at first without raising too many questions, but eventually someone who sees Prime’s name on something is going to want to talk to him. And I know we’ve all got his face, but we’re not him.”

“Definitely not,” Boba said, scowling. “No way.”

“I’ve only ever seen Prime in recordings, personally,” Slick continued. “But I think even natborns would be able to tell the difference between him and you, Appo.”

“Of course they would,” Appo said calmly. “But they would be talking to you, not me.”

Slick choked. “What? Me? No way. Are you joking?”

Appo looked baffled by Slick’s confusion, as if he viewed what he’d said as unbelievably obvious and straightforward instead of absolutely crazy. And when Slick turned to glance at Boba to confirm his impression that Appo had just lost his mind, Boba only looked thoughtful, his nose all scrunched up as if he were thinking about something very hard.

Slick was on his own, then.

“Appo,” he said, gritting his teeth together. “Appo, you’ve got to realize that that’s insane. Why in the kriffing galaxy would I be the one to pretend to be Prime? I’m not even a CC!”

“What does that have to do with it? Prime might have been a trainer, but he was a bounty hunter, not a military commander.” Appo shrugged. “Anyway, you’re the charming one. You do that thing where you get people to like you.”

“That thing doesn’t work other than in person.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Appo said. “You were popular with plenty of troopers that didn’t know you personally. People just like you.”

Slick paused.

He’d – forgotten about that, somehow.

In fact, Appo was right. Slick had always been popular, even when he hadn’t been trying to make someone like him, the way he’d tried and failed with Appo. Slick just liked people, and people had largely just liked him in return, even people he hadn’t focused on, even people who only knew about him by reputation. People had liked him even when he was half-heartedly trying to make them not like him, like Cody – no, he was being foolish. Like Cody.

Cody, who Appo had spoken to about him. Cody, who Appo thought might miss him.

What a strange thought. Absolutely not something Slick had already thought over to death and was still going to dissect at extensive length as soon as Appo left and he had nothing else to do.

Or, well, nothing else than pretend to be Prime, apparently.

“You’d be okay,” Boba said.

Slick turned to him in dismay.

“I’m not saying you’re anything like Dad!” Boba said, scowling at him – and blushing, for whatever reason. “I’m just saying, if someone had to pretend to be him, you wouldn’t be the absolute worst.”

“Traitor.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“You brat –” Slick shut his eyes and took a breath. Boba wasn’t the problem here. “You know what? Listen up, both of you. We’re not talking about this. You know why? Because it’s pointless. We don’t even know if we’re even going to get the first steps going, so there’s every chance that this is never going to come up –”

It was incredibly bizarre how absolute failure of all of their plans had gone from being the thing Slick was most afraid of to something he was using to justify not wanting to add identity theft to his list of crimes – which one would think was self-evident, really. No one cared more about identity than a clone. Their individual identities were often the only things that they possessed.

“Don’t be such a downer, Slick,” Boba said. “It’ll all work out.”

Slick didn’t punch him, because he didn’t hit cadets, but oh was he ever tempted.

“We don’t even have a planet,” he protested. “Unless Appo found something that he forgot to mention –”

“Oh, right,” Appo said. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten to mention.”

Slick informed Appo, at length, of what he thought of that.

Sadly, Appo was also a sergeant, and therefore didn’t so much as twitch at even Slick’s most creative array of profanities. Instead, he reached into his belt and pulled out yet another datapad, which he carefully put into the chute that let the meals enter the cell without disturbing the forcefield, then shut the opening and let it slide all the way down.

“Here,” he said. “Take a look at this listing. Third from the bottom.”

Slick begrudgingly stopped cursing long enough to take the datapad out, mostly because if he didn’t, Boba would, and like Sithspit was Slick letting the brat see what Appo had found before he did.

Not that the datapad was particularly elucidative.

Slick squinted at the contents on the screen. It looked to be the results of an information search, with the parameters set to focus on underdeveloped systems, both those that had not been fully terraformed or rated unsuitable for habitation as well as those that had once been outposts settled by more powerful systems for the purpose of resource extraction and, with that concluded, were now left empty. That made sense as a starting set of search criteria, given that they were trying to find someone willing to sell them a planet for cheap.

Towards the bottom, the search diverged. It looked like Appo had added in a media survey, which meant journalism articles, economic analyses, personal listings, and the like, which Slick presumed he’d done just for completeness. Still, that was where the listing Appo had directed him to was. The third from the bottom appeared to be…

“A solicitation for aid from the united government of Mimban?” Slick read aloud, mostly for Boba’s benefit. “Their system is in severe distress after the depredations of galactic strife, they’re looking for an investor, have ample natural resources…bunch of fancy words to say they need money fast and are willing to sell what they need to get it. Not the whole planet, though. Do we care?”

“More than you might think,” Appo said. “I’m familiar with Mimban. The 501st was pulled in there two campaigns after Christophsis. We teamed up with the Mud Jumpers from the 224th and the local defense force. There was a big push by the Seppies to invade and take over their big energy mine, but we routed them.”

“So what? Still doesn’t mean we care about their resources.”

“The Republic does. The Seppies do. If the Mimbans were willing to sell their energy mine…”

Slick might not be a fancy CC or anything, but he hadn’t been deprived of the strategy flash module the Kaminoans gave to newborns.

He started to grin.

“Hey, hold up,” Boba said. “You mean that whoever posted this notice is lying about who they are, don’t you? They can’t actually be from Mimban, because Mimban wouldn’t need to advertise if they wanted to sell. And that means we can tell them we know that they’re faking and make them give us a good deal, or else we’ll tell everyone else about their scam!”

“Exactly,” Appo said. “Assuming that this is a genuine planet masquerading as Mimban, it would mean that unlike most of the other available options, they likely already have an established planetary record that we’d be able to use. That will reduce the amount of administrative friction required to get our plan going.”

Slick snickered. “Fewer bribes, you mean.”

“Well, yes.” Appo shrugged. “Something to keep in mind when you speak to them.”

Oh, not this again.

“Appo, listen,” he groaned. “Charm or no charm, you remember that I’m in prison, right?”

He waved meaningfully at the bars and the forcefield and the cell and all that in case Appo might’ve lost track of them.

“In case you’re not clear about that means,” he added. “It means that I can’t just holocall the government of not-Mimban. I don’t even have anything to make a holocall with.”

“Certainly you do. The datapad I just handed you is active.”

It –

What?!

Slick looked down at the datapad he was holding as if he had never seen it before.

Even Boba sat up straight, staring as if it had just grown legs.

“It doesn’t have an active outgoing commlink,” Appo said apologetically, which was good because Slick’s brain had started to feverishly conjure up images of literally everyone he’d ever known the comm number for. His boys. Cody – “It can only receive and reply, and it’s limited to calls and data bursts, messages and the like. That was the compromise I reached with the Guard to let you have it. But I can set up the call with Mimban, and you’d be able to take it here.”

Slick wasn't sure how he felt about that. 

Boba, on the other hand, had no such reservations. 

"Ohhhhh, I can't wait to see the looks on their faces," he said gleefully. "Conning the conmen – that’s the best part. Dad always said that there’s no feeling like seeing someone who thinks they’re on top of it all get drawn into your game, the long game where you wait for the knife they haven’t seen to go into their backs…this’ll be just like that, but without the waiting!”

"Does bounty hunting involve a great deal of extortion?" Appo asked. As far as Slick could tell, he was completely serious. “We would benefit from any experience you can think of to share.”

“I’m not taking lessons in extortion from a cadet,” Slick said. “I’m not.”

“Don’t worry, Slick,” Boba said with a mean smirk on his face. “We’ll be here to support you.”

“Just for that, kid, I’m going to steal your lunch.”

Boba just laughed.

“Better not steal it too much,” he said with a grin. “Having me around is the best way to make sure people believe you’re really Dad. He’s been seen with me before. Plus I know all about the jobs he took, so I can fill in any info you should know but don’t.”

“I think that is an excellent idea,” Appo said. “Although I would have to disagree in only one respect.”

Great. Slick was so looking forward to finding out what Appo thought about this.

“We, meaning both Boba and myself both, will not be here to support you,” Appo said, and held up his own datapad. “The 501st just got recalled. I’m shipping out in two hours.”

Chapter Text

"And then he left! Just like that,” Slick growled. “Just like that!”

“Right,” Fox said. He was rubbing his face with his palm again, looking even more long-suffering than usual. “He left, just like that. Right after sticking you with a task. A task that you aren’t going to tell me about, because it would reveal the overall discussion. Which you aren’t going to tell me about, because…?”

“Well,” Slick said. “I promised Appo I wouldn’t.”

Fox sighed. Pointedly.

Slick shrugged. “Why didn’t you ask Appo about it?”

“I did. He refused to share,” Fox said. “He said that it was your idea.”

“It’s his idea, not mine,” Slick said, then shook his head. “I think the only reason he says it’s mine is because he can’t conceive of the idea that he might be breaking the rules on his own initiative.”

For whatever reason, that made Fox slump, deflating as if all the energy were being drained out of him in a single long sigh.

“Yeah,” he said. “He wouldn’t.”

“Did you know him?” Boba asked, chin tucked on knees pulled up to his chest. “He knew you.”

“I didn’t know him personally,” Fox said. “We were in different batches, different barracks, barely even in the same rotation. But I saw what – happened.”

“What did happen?” Slick asked, when it looked like Boba wasn’t going to. He hadn’t cared, before, but if he was going to work with Appo, going to rely on Appo, then abruptly he really desperately wanted to know the details of what exactly had caused Appo to be demoted so severely. “You said that they destroyed him. Broke his batch. But – why?”

Fox sighed.

“There was a training mission out on one of the moons for another planet in Kamino’s system,” he said shortly. “An unexpected blizzard kicked up in the area where he was in command and trapped a subunit that hadn’t supplied adequately. Forty men. Appo decided to retrieve them over accomplishing the mission target. The decision saved their lives, and ruined Appo’s.”

Slick frowned. “But – forty men – aren’t the Kaminoans always going on about how expensive we are to produce and train? Why wouldn’t they be happy about him saving them?”

“Losing forty men in training is within acceptable loss parameters. A commander deliberately disobeying orders isn’t,” Fox said brutally. “They made an example of him after that. All but court-martialed him in front of everyone, then broke his whole batch down in rank for it. It was the first time they’d ever applied a collective punishment like that.”

Slick tried to imagine it, and failed.

After a long moment, Fox exhaled.

“I understand why he did it,” he said. “Always did, even back then, and back then I was a selfish little shithead whose only thoughts were about how to be better than everyone else. They were his brothers, his men. His responsibility. Of course he wanted to save them. Especially from deaths like that. Deaths that aren’t for a good cause, aren’t for the mission, aren’t for anything. Deaths that are nothing but stupid, and useless, and pointless just to appease some karking asshole’s stupid puffed-up ego –”

He stopped, his jaw working as he glared at the wall of the cell above Slick’s head.

Slick was pretty sure Fox wasn’t thinking about Appo’s training mission anymore.

(He’d never looked more like Cody.)

“The thing is, though, you can’t save everyone. You can’t even try, not like that, not that way,” Fox said, and it sounded a little like he was trying to convince himself. “That’s part of what we learned in command. Our job is to make the strategy, apply the tactics. Train our men as best we can and make sure things get done right. Anything beyond that is out of our hands. Appo didn’t get that, and he suffered for it. His whole batch did. That’s what happens. That’s why you don’t do that, why you don’t overreach. Why you can’t let yourself forget the bigger picture.”

“But what happened after they demoted him?” Boba asked.

Fox blinked, and seemed to come back to himself.

“They took him away,” he said. “Since he’d already finished the command course, there wasn’t any point in dropping him down to CT, so they moved him into one of the specialty tracks. I think it was peacekeeping they put him in? Military police.”

“I didn’t know the GAR had military police,” Slick remarked, more than a little snide. “I always thought they just used regular troopers for that.”

They certainly had for him. They’d made his own boys take him away, and even though it made a certain terrible logical sense, Slick still resented Rex for ordering it. He probably always would.

(Cody had looked, for just half a second, like he wanted to say something, do something, stop it – but then the Jedi had come, General Skywalker and General Kenobi, and that had been that.)

Fox snorted. “That’s because we do. The peacekeeping division never got off the ground for whatever reason. Anyway, a couple of months after the whole thing went down, Prime showed up with Appo in tow and slotted him right back into the command class, rank or no rank.”

“Wait, my dad did that?” Boba asked, frowning. “I didn’t know that Appo knew him. He never said anything about it.”

“Even when you were talking about Prime..?”

“Nice try,” Slick informed Fox, who smirked unrepentantly. “Stop fishing.”

“What made him turn out like that, though?” Boba asked, clearly still focused on Appo. “He’s so – I don’t know. How would you describe it?”

“I wouldn’t,” Fox said. “If at all possible.”

Slick couldn’t help but agree.

“What I would like is a description of what you’re doing…”

“Please, you clearly don’t think we’re up to anything that bad,” Slick said dismissively. “If you did, you wouldn’t be letting us get away with not telling you anything about it.”

“Well, Appo being involved is pretty reassuring,” Fox said dryly. “It’s Appo. Given everything that happened to him…well, everyone knows that he doesn’t break rules anymore.”

“He doesn’t disobey orders,” Slick corrected.

Fox arched his eyebrows. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

It really wasn’t.

Not unless GAR rules had suddenly become a lot more flexible, anyway.

As far as Slick could tell, Appo’s issues with following orders were completely different from how fastidious he could be about the rules. He seemed to regard rules and regs and even laws as something that could all be safely ignored if he could only find some countervailing rule that would justify the position he preferred, as seen from his constant invocations of the concept of military necessity. But the second he thought someone might order him to stop..?

Now that terrified him.

More to the point, it terrified Appo because he would obey the order, no matter what.

Like Boba, Slick wondered what exactly had pushed Appo to be like that. The things Fox described, the disobedience and the court-martial and the breaking of Appo’s batch, they were bad, yes, but was that all that it took to push a clone into that level of blind obedience…? Or had there been something else there, something Fox didn’t know?

Something to ask Appo about when he got back.

If he got back.

“Do you know why the 501st got pulled away so quickly?” he asked. “It was very sudden.”

Fox looked grim. “Credible intelligence was received that General Grievous is about to launch an attack on Kamino.”

“On Kamino?”

“They sent the 501st and the 212th to reenforce Rancor Battalion,” Fox said. “General Shaak Ti is quite competent, but with Generals Kenobi and Skywalker there to back her, I’m sure they’ll be enough to give Grievous second thoughts.”

Slick made a face. He wasn’t even sure about what part of that he was objecting to, whether it was Fox’s optimism or the reference to Kenobi and Skywalker together again, just like they had been back on Christophsis. Before Slick turned on them both, anyway.

For whatever reason, though, the thing that kept coming to mind wasn’t Christophsis, but rather Slick’s strangely dreamless night.

He’d slept well, and he shouldn’t have. Ever since he’d made his deal with Ventress, she’d appeared in his dreams – and sure, he’d always believed that it was his subconscious haunting him, his conscience rebelling against what he’d done and wanting to punish him the way everyone else did, but maybe it was more than just that. A curse or something. Everyone knew Ventress was a Nightsister, a witch with strange powers, and back on Christophsis she’d always shown up whenever he’d scraped together even a half-hearted intention to change his mind about her. She’d always known when he’d started to have hope, and she always came to crush it.

But not last night.

Maybe it was just the report about his boys, acting as a good luck charm. Probably, even.

But…if it wasn’t

“Fox,” Slick said, abrupt enough that Fox turned to look at him at once, eyebrows arching. “You should call whichever commander is in charge of Rancor and tell him to keep an eye out for Ventress.”

“Ventress? On Kamino?” Fox shook his head. “Impossible. The blockade will keep anyone out, whether it’s her or Grievous.”

“She’s an assassin, not a warlord,” Slick pointed out. “Maybe she snuck in.”

“Around all of Tipoca City’s defenses and alarms?”

“It’s not that hard,” Boba said.

Both Slick and Fox looked at him.

Boba shrugged. “It’s really not. My dad had at least five different routes on and off the planet for times when he wanted to go and the Kaminoans wanted him to stay – and that’s just the ones he made me memorize. I’m sure this Ventress person, whoever she is, could find a way in. Well, assuming she’s halfway competent, anyway.”

Fox frowned.

“I’ll give you that,” he said slowly. “She’s certainly competent enough to manage to find a way if that way exists. But why would we be assuming that Ventress is there at all? The intel only said that Grievous was planning an attack. Nothing about her. It makes more sense for her to be somewhere else.”

“She’ll be there,” Slick said, and felt the truth in his words as he said them. “Fox, I worked with her, I know the way she thinks. Trust me. She’ll be there.”

Fox looked torn. Slick couldn’t blame him: he was asking Fox to risk not only his reputation but the lives of everyone on Kamino by providing intel based on nothing more than Slick’s hunch.

It being just a hunch was bad enough, but it being Slick’s hunch – a known traitors hunch –

Yeah, Slick understood why Fox might not be willing to listen.

“Tell me one thing, Slick, and I’ll believe you,” Fox said, and Slick startled, surprised by the sudden agreement. “Why now? You’ve never even asked about troop movements in the past, and you’ve certainly never offered to share any insights from your time with Ventress. Why the sudden change in course?”

Slick grimaced. It wasn’t like he knew why it suddenly seemed so important. Maybe it was just coincidence, just because it had happened to come up when he’d asked where Appo had gone, or maybe it was just because Slick, selfish old bastard that he was, now needed Appo to survive intact…

No.

It wasn’t that.

“I have hope,” Slick admitted, and it tasted like ash on his tongue. Sure, his hope was limited to an absolutely crazy scheme to steal Republic funds to give the few clones lucky enough to survive the war support in making a new life for themselves, but it was still something. “That’s why I want to help this time, when I’ve never cared enough to ask before. I have – hope.”

Fox looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment.

“One day, you’re going to tell me exactly what this plan of yours and Appo’s is,” he said, deadly serious. “But right now I think I need to go make a holocall.”

Slick exhaled hard, watching Fox go.

He’d done something. Whether it was the right something, he didn’t know, but he’d done something. For the first time since everything had gone wrong for him on Christophsis, he’d taken an affirmative action. He’d tried to influence something, to change something.

Slick…thought he might want to throw up.

“Hey,” Boba said, oblivious as always. “Did Appo have time to reach out to those Mimban guys? We should talk to them. Beating up on people who deserve it always makes me feel better.”

Okay, maybe Boba wasn’t that oblivious.

“Besides, with Fox busy and everyone worried about Kamino, no one will be paying attention to us.”

Ugh, that was even a good point.

“Let me check,” Slick said, leaning down under his bed and pulling out the semi-active datapad Appo had given him. Appo had said he’d gotten it approved by the Guard, and knowing him he probably really had, but that didn’t mean Slick was about to risk it by showing it around. An active comm, even if it was only set up to receive data, was probably worth more than Slick’s life was, here in prison. “I don’t know when he’d have had time to –”

Slick turned on the screen, then snorted.

“Never mind,” he said, grinning down at the pop-up notification on the main datapad screen indicating that ‘Mimban’ had received their message and was eager to open up talks at whatever time would be most convenient. “I should’ve known better than to doubt Appo on matters of logistics.”

“Great! Let’s do it!”

The thing was, Slick was an idiot. He knew this about himself: he wouldn’t have ended up in the rat cage if he wasn’t. Above all else, he had a tendency to get carried away and just charge ahead without thinking, which was presumably why all the reasons he shouldn’t agree to make the call didn’t occur to him until he’d already confirmed a time and everything.

“Wait,” he said. “We don’t even know if we’ve got the money! I’m terrible at lying! And I really dont want to pretend to be Prime!

“Jango Fett, not Prime,” Boba said. He was smirking devilishly. “Don’t forget your own name, Dad.”

“I thought you were squeamish about this,” Slick complained, though in fact he much preferred Boba being a stupid little kriffer about it than the sad wet blanket he’d been impersonating before. “This’ll blow the whole thing wide open before we even get started. I don’t know anything about Prime! What if these people know more than I do? I haven’t even prepped –”

“Stop worrying so much,” Boba commanded. “I know everything, and I can teach you. First off, do you have to sit like that?”

“Sit like what? I’m sitting normally.”

“Yeah, if by normally you mean like you’ve got a stick up your ass. Can’t you just relax?”

The answer, it turned out, was not really.

Even after months in the rat cage, Slick still had the posture that Kamino had beaten into every single clone that they produced, military-strict and upright. It was what felt natural to him, and attempting to adopt another pose – equally militant, but more laid back and predatory, reactionary and creative rather than passive and formal – was frustratingly difficult.

Still, Boba insisted that fixing that was more important than anything else they could do in the limited time they had before the people behind the fake government of Mimban called.

“I’ll stand outside the range of the holocall and hand-sign anything you need to know,” he said. “But you have to be in view, so you have to look right or else they’ll figure it out right away. Everyone knows about clones these days…ugh, no, that’s also wrong. Can’t you be less you?”

“I’m trying! At this point I’m just doing impressions of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Uh-huh,” Boba said. “And have you ever met anyone who isn’t a clone?”

Slick rolled his eyes and threw himself back into an aggressive slouch, legs splayed out carelessly and a twist of dissatisfaction on his face. “Better?”

“No. You look like an angry teenager.”

Well, that was Skywalker out.

Seriously, who else did Slick even know?

“How about this?” he said, pulling his legs in and straightening his back, leaning forward a little like he was trying to study the person he was looking at, pretending to be General Kenobi pulling his most obnoxious middle-of-a-meeting thoughtful pose. “Better?”

Boba tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, a bit. Still a bit too stiff, though. Can you tweak that a little?”

Slick rummaged through his memories and finally dug up a memory of one of the officer parties, the first one after the engineers had gotten the sill running. Kenobi had been in an unusual mood, something about the recent battle and the drinks (far stronger than they originally appeared) combining to bring out both the depression and edge of unconscious cruelty that he typically buried beneath a mask of bravado and impeccable manners. He’d been increasingly fierce and brittle as the night went on, simultaneously trying to make the social rounds he felt were required of his position and yet so obviously disinterested in company that even Skywalker had left him alone after the first half-hour. Slick hadn’t really cared, more interested in luring Cody away than anything else…

“Oh yeah, that’s much better! That’s really close!”

Slick decided that Boba didn’t need to know about his source of inspiration.

Nice of the Jedi to be good for something, though.

“Anything else?” he asked. “We‘ve only got a few more minutes.”

Boba shrugged.

How very helpful of him.

“Right. Well, what about the fact that clones are notoriously bad liars?”

“Didn’t you manage to turn traitor?”

“That didn’t involve lying, it involved not telling people about what I was doing. The second I had to actively lie, I got caught.”

“Well, then don’t lie,” Boba said mercilessly. “Just try to talk around the truth or something. Good luck!”

Slick provided some helpful descriptive terms for his feelings at the present moment, but other than making Boba snigger, that didn’t do any good either.

So, with nothing else for it, Slick put the datapad down and turned on the holocall function. And, yes, assumed the appropriate posture, because what did he know? Maybe it would matter. Prime had been pretty well known as a bounty hunter, from what Slick knew about him. It was always possible that the conmen on the other side of the call would recognize “him”.

The “Mimban” government called right on schedule.

The first thing Slick observed was that the being on the other side of the holocall was definitely not Mimbanese. Sure, they were generally humanoid, with red skin (experience translating from holocall blue to regular color suggested that it was probably closer to reddish orange) and flat faces with slits for nostrils, but that was it: they didn’t have the characteristic eyebrow ridge, and their eyes were dull yellow iris on black sclera instead of the bulbous blue that Appo had described the Mimbanese as having. Plus they were wearing a totally normal jacket and shirt, rather than flak suit-armor-and-swampweed combo that was apparently standard on Mimban.

The second thing that Slick observed was that Boba had been right, damn him: from the way the “Mimban” representative’s eyes went extremely wide upon seeing him, they definitely recognized “Jango Fett”.

Slick pasted his signature slick smirk onto his face.

“I think,” he said, “that we’ve got some business together.”

“Hey, hey no! We definitely don’t!” the being said, aghast. “Kriff off, Fett. It wasn’t our fault Bendix Fust got stuck in Desolation Alley – and anyway, you must’ve already gotten the bounty for him! We heard that you got Sebolto’s money and his own bounty at the same time!”

Slick had no idea what they were talking about. Hed been talking about their request for someone to buy out their planetary resources (well, Mimban’s resources anyway), but apparently Prime had gotten up close and personal with this particular planet before.

On the bright side, there was someone around who might know more.

A quick glance at Boba showed that the brat was bouncing excitedly on his toes, which suggested he did in fact know what was being discussed. He quickly finger-spelled M-O-R-D-A-G-O-N, which – what? Was that the planet’s name? The person’s name? Something else?!

Ugh, Slick had known this was a bad idea.

“What’s past is past,” Slick said, and decided to play the odds that it was the name of the system. “Doesn’t mean I don’t have business with Mordagon…or do you prefer Mimban these days?”

The now-presumed Mordageen flinched.

“Uh, listen,” they said. “It’s not illegal to advertise under another planet’s name –”

“It’s not?” Slick asked, perversely curious.

“Okay, fine. It’s not immoral –”

“It’s not?”

The Mordageen floundered. “Well – I mean – that is – hey! Aren’t you supposed to be dead?!

“Do I look dead?” Slick shot back, very pleased with himself for that dodge. “People have thought I was dead before.”

Most of the 501st, he’d guess. Clone troopers didn’t need to ask questions to know what it meant when someone didn’t show up to their post one day – unless they were Appo, apparently.

“Bantha poodoo,” the Mordageen groaned. “Fine. Let’s get down to titanium tacks, Fett. What’ve I got to do to get you to forget this ever happened?”

Huh. This conversation was going a lot smoother than Slick had expected.

“Who says I’m going to forget?” he asked. “I told you we had business together. Now, it just so happens that I’m in need of a planetary record –”

“Hey no! No! We can’t do that! Access to the planetary record’s like giving you source code to the whole place!”

“You were already going to sell your planet.”

“Yeah, for credits! And we weren’t gonna sell it! We were going to fake out like we had some resources and try to sell that instead of the whole planet – listen, Fett, I know rancor-humping krayt-fuckers like you don’t have a heart under all that beskar, but if we can’t get a contract for resources, we’re gonna have to sell the population into slavery and hard labor, okay?”

Slick couldn’t help his eyebrows going up at that. “You need credits that bad?”

“Not just us,” the Mordageen said. “The whole Authala sector’s desperate for cash. Ever since Emberlene joined up with the CIS, they’ve completely lost the plot – started attacking everyone and extracting resources like there’s no tomorrow. They’ve even started razing down cities on other planets for no reason at all! Plus their population is Human, unlike the rest of us, and you just know that means nobody’s gonna do kark all about it. We’ve got to help ourselves. And that means we can’t be fucking around with the likes of you!”

He paused, then scowled at Slick. “I mean, unless you were planning on paying us?”

Slick had no idea what to say to that.

If Appo had gotten the money, then the answer would be yes, though obviously Slick would’ve tried to get them the most favorable terms possible. If they hadnt gotten the money, the answer would’ve been a clear no, though Slick probably would’ve still tried to blackmail something out of them anyway.

But as it was…

“I’m not saying that,” he said, trying to buy time.

“Then what are you saying?” the Mordageen demanded. “Even if we give you the planetary record, if Emberlene doesn’t get stopped soon there isn’t going to be a Mordagon for you to take advantage of. And no matter how good you are, Fett, not even you can bounty hunt a CIS planet with its own homegrown mercenary force into not being a problem anymore!”

“I didn’t say that,” Slick said, desperately extemporizing. “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t underestimate me. I have my ways.”

That sounded appropriately vague and non-committally intimidating to Slick, but just out of holocall recording space, Boba smacked his forehead with his own hand.

That did not bode well.

“Ways?” the Mordageen echoed. “You, Fett? You’re just a bounty hunter. A good one, sure, but the Guild isn’t going to back you if you start getting involved in anything political. There’s no way you can do kark all about Emberlene, unless…”

It trailed off. Its yellow eyes went very, very wide.

“By all the karking sithhells in the dungeon pits of Malachor,” the Mordageen breathed. “Fett, are you serious? You telling me you’re coming back for real this time?”

That felt like a trap.

Unfortunately, it felt like a trap that Slick already had one leg firmly wedged into.

“I’m not saying that,” he said. “Of course, I’m also not not saying that.”

(Behind the holocall, Boba buried his head into his hands. He appeared to be moaning in distress, though he was disciplined enough to keep it sub-vocal enough not to be overheard.)

The Mordageen looked at least four shades paler than they had at the start of the call.

“I’m – I’m gonna have to talk to someone about that,” they blubbered. “That’s big – too big. The High Kakistarch’s gonna want to know – the advisors to the Council – listen, Fett, can I call you back? One hour!”

Boba pulled his head out of his hands and frantically shook his head in the negative.

“No,” Slick said. “You decide now.”

“I’m only a single kakistocrat! I can’t possibly –”

“You were going to sell your planet if you had half a chance to,” Slick reminded them mercilessly. “You must’ve gotten clearance to make decisions. What’s it going to be?”

“But – but – five minutes, Fett, I swear –”

Boba waved his hands to get Slick’s attention, then pointed to himself, then the place where he was standing, and then at the figure in the holocall.

A very good point.

“Why don’t you ask the people already in the room with you?” Slick asked, and mimicked Boba’s instructive gesture of leaning back and casually waving a hand. “Maybe they have something to add.”

“How did you know – karking sithhells, Fett, you’ve gotta understand, this is a big deal –”

“Maybe I’ll just hang up,” Slick said thoughtfully. “You said the rest of the Authala sector was also looking for cash, didn’t you? I just need a planet, I don’t need your planet. Someone else might be more appreciative…”

“We‘ll do it!” the Mordageen blurt out. “Kriff. Kriff. We’ll do it. We’ll send you what you need. But you’ve gotta help us, Fett. I swear, you’ve gotta –”

“You have my comm number,” Slick said, and clicked off the call.

A second later, Boba walked over and jumped up onto the cot (carefully angled to be out of sight) where Slick had been sitting. “That last bit was really good,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that. You really turned the screws on them.”

“I am a sergeant,” Slick said modestly, then shook his head. “Now what was all that drama about earlier on?”

Boba groaned and pitched backwards until he was lying flat on the cot, staring at the ceiling.

“I don’t think you have any idea what you just implied,” he said.

“Obviously not,” Slick said. “Or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“…right. Ugh. Um…what do you know about Mandalorians?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Boba scowled at him. “Be serious.”

“I am,” Slick said. “I’m a bog-standard CT, kid. We didn’t get trained by the Cuy’val Dar or even by the Alphas, we just had flash training and command clones giving us our marching orders. The only thing I know about Mandalorians is the name and that they’ve got an armor fetish.”

“An armor fet- you know what, you’re just being mean again, so I’m gonna ignore you,” Boba said. Then he sighed. “Uh, okay. My dad…he used to be pretty important, for the Mandalorians. That’s why so many of them agreed to sign up to be Cuy’val Dar. But he didn’t…do anything with it. Not for a long time. You know? He was just a bounty hunter. The best bounty hunter, but just that. And you just implied that he – or you, rather – might be potentially thinking about going back to being…more than that.”

He grimaced.

“Which could have some serious political implications,” he concluded. “Anyway, you get it?”

“Not at all,” Slick said honestly. “Even if Prime’s got lots of Mandalorian buddies, how much impact could that make on Emberlene? Especially if they’ve got their own mercenary corps.”

Please,” Boba scoffed. “Like any half-baked mercenary could last five minutes against Mandalorian super-commandos. There’s a reason my dad was the one who got hired to make the clones, you know.”

Slick didn’t, actually. “Really?”

“He took down six Jedi all by himself,” Boba said. “Impressed yet?”

“Impressed with Prime, sure,” Slick shot back, but actually he was, a bit. “Wish I could do that.”

Boba heaved a heavy sigh, clearly in complete agreement.

After a moment, he seemed to realize that they were having a moment, and in classic clone style immediately retreated, rolling off the cot and skulking back to his side of the room as if nothing had ever happened.

Slick decided to make fun of him over it later. For the moment, he grabbed for the datapad and clicked over to the messages section. It was way too soon for the Mordageen (whose name he’d never gotten) to send him anything to confirm their agreement, but maybe Appo had put some means of communicating with him into the pad. If Slick really had just accidentally implied that they’d find a way to help Mordagon fight off Emberlene, that was something Appo was going to need to know about sooner rather than later…

Slick froze.

And then, very carefully, with a hand that he found was shaking, he pressed the buttons necessary to navigate open the first of the accumulated messages in the data folder that he’d expected to find empty, but which was – not.

Hey Sarge, the first message said. The new boss said we should write these messages as if theyd be going to you, which I think is kind of stupid, since youre gone and all. We all know what being gone means, right? But Sergeant Appo seems really determined to find you. And I guess his confidence is catching, because here I am, writing to you anyway. Not that Im much of a writer bet Jester would do a better job. Even Chopper! (Probably not our Punch and Sketch comedy duo though.) ButI guess this is a way for me to say the stuff I never got to say when you were here.

If thats the case, well, I just wanted to start with the obvious.

I miss you, Sarge.

I mean, I’m pissed as sithhells at you, but I still miss you. I think we all do…

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