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On Coruscant, red is a very convenient colour. Against the dark of the lower levels that they've been ordered to patrol, they stand out. Alongside the Chancellor's guard, they blend in… as does their blood against their armour, spilled in the line of duty.
Always in the line of duty. No matter the cause.
The thoughts flicking through Fox's mind as he stumbles down the quiet service corridor all spiral into one, great, confusing mess. His eyes slide from the red of his armour, reflected in the tinted glass windows, to the red of the carpet. He's probably leaving a trail, but it won't matter. The lights down here are faulty – as faulty as he is, ha! – and anyone that might notice anything either won't care, or won't be in a position where they can afford to care. He's probably just walking more blood over pre-existing stains, after all, and in an hour nobody will be able to tell the difference between the old and new either way.
It's a familiar realisation. He doesn't linger on it. Although, maybe he should, at least in terms of the persistent bleeding, because it seems to be getting harder and harder to keep dragging himself in the direction of their headquarters, and that must be at least in some part due to the blood. Or lack of it.
Personally, he would sooner blame the blow to the head. Blood loss he was familiar with, had learned to manage, but a concussion was mercifully rare. It took the fun out of his punishments, he had been told, if he struggled to comprehend them.
There's a flash of movement ahead, and Fox forces himself to re-focus. For a heartbeat he falters, tries to regain his composure despite the exhaustion that is now dragging him down, because the colour is wrong. The figure that has entered the hallway in front of him is not clad in red, but blue, and therefore cannot be one of his guard on their way to help him home. In this case, anything that isn't red can mean danger.
Then, through his blurring vision, the image sharpens, and Fox almost lets himself relax again. It isn't a natborn approaching him – it is a vod. Whether they would consider themselves as such is another matter entirely, but Fox can't bring himself to care.
With the world tilting as alarmingly around him as it is, he has other priorities, such as not falling flat on his– oh, well, there he went–
Except, instead of crashing helmet-first into the floor of the corridor, his fall is interrupted by the clash of armour-on-armour. It doesn't cushion the impact entirely, but it does a good enough job that his injuries aren't aggravated any further, and Fox manages to leverage that reprieve to retain his grip on consciousness.
"Fox?" comes a voice from above him, and under his helmet Fox blinks. "Oh, Sith hells. That's a lot of blood."
The tone is familiar, beyond the fact that it is a fellow clone that is talking to him, and he cautiously twists his head to look up at the trooper that had caught him. Now that their helmet is right in front of him, it's easy to make out the markings: jaig eyes, painted blue.
Rex.
"Rex?" he echoes his own lagging thoughts. "W'ut are y'doing here?"
But Rex isn't listening to him. He's too busy talking into his comm unit, speaking too quickly for Fox to really focus on what he says.
"Hey," Fox tries again to draw Rex's attention back to himself, "listen, 's okay. Medic's'll patch me back up, no prob'."
And that does catch Rex's attention, but not in any good way, if the way that Rex tenses is anything to go by. Instinctively, Fox tries to raise a hand to comfort the younger vod, but finds the limb to be uncooperative. Then, when he tries to voice this fact, finds that his tongue has followed suit.
In fact…
The world swims around him, strength failing him entirely. Then, everything falls away into black.
—
"We were two minutes from picking him up ourselves. He would have been fine."
Voices drag Fox back towards consciousness. Coherent thought remains tantalisingly out of reach, but despite his weariness he slowly becomes aware of the presence of vode around him.
"Fine?!" comes another voice from nearby, far more agitated than the first. "It doesn't matter who arrived when, the only way he would be fine is if this had never happened to him at all! And apparently, this is something that was unavoidable. Unavoidable! In the heart of the senate! Nothing about this situation is fine!"
Fox feels himself drifting, unsure if he should make an attempt to cling to the words and try to wake up, or surrender back into sleep.
"Rex," the first voice speaks up again. "Come on. You're being unreasonable–"
"UNREASONABLE?!"
Well, that did make the decision much easier. Fox was far too tired to be dealing with any squabbling vode today, thank you very much.
Slipping back into sleep is a simple thing.
—
Fox doesn't wake up again for a long while after that. It's a cause for concern, but not for anyone except himself. Everyone else, apparently, had been quite content to let him sleep – at first, thanks to the threats levelled at them by Captain Rex (not that Fox believes that they would have listened to him in the long term, duty was duty, after all), but then thanks to the fact that his continuous presence was no longer a necessity.
He'd queried this, of course, but couldn't help but agree that it made sense, in the end. After all, it had been the Chancellor that had demanded Fox always be on-call, and with the Chancellor dead, who else was going to catch him taking a longer nap than usual?
Several hours longer than usual, in fact. Fox is still trying to blink the bleariness out of his eyes, and has yet to convince the medics that he's fit to leave the medbay.
He can't blame them, really. He also can't bring himself to push, not with his wounds aching as they are.
Fox sinks back into the pillows, and relishes in the fact that for once, it is not him or his fellow guardsmen that have to answer for the chaos currently overwhelming the heart of the senate.