Chapter Text
Fox stares down at the body laying crumpled on the Rodian silk rug. There is a small dark stain trickling from the back of the Chancellor's neck.
Former Chancellor's neck, he amends.
His thoughts seem scattered. He feels scattered. Floaty, somewhat, as if he's on a starfighter that's lost it's grav control. It's odd. He's killed plenty of people and he doesn't remember feeling like this afterwards ever before. Of course, there's a hell of a lot of his life that he doesn't remember. Scars that hint at experiences he sometimes thinks he glimpses in his nightmares. Strangers who flinch and tremble when he passes by. Random names and phrases that make him go hot and then cold and his heart hammer against his chest as if it's trying to escape. He looks, he feels a good ten years older than all his batchmates, with his prematurely graying hair and strange scars and hair-trigger temper and ice in his heart, and yet the part that kills him is that he has no idea why.
He doesn't even really know why he killed the Chancellor. It's not like he planned it.
Fox had been standing there, letting the usual natborn stupidity wash over him like always while Palpatine nattered on about this and that, ignoring the constant pain in his head, when the static in his ears spiked overwhelmingly and suddenly the thought had bloomed in his brain as cold and crystallinely perfect as a snowflake, that whatever the Chancellor said next was going to result in the death of his vod. Not just that they would die, but that he, Fox, would be the one forced to kill them, and that he had to prevent that from occurring. And before he could even fully articulate that belief to himself, a dozen years of training and the instincts of one of the greatest bounty hunters in the universe had combined to have his fingers pulling the blaster from his hip and curling around the trigger without any actual conscious thought. Just instinct and pressure, and now suddenly a body cooling on the floor in front of him, robes framed by scattered flimsi and a paperweights, while his lips and fingertips numbly buzz.
"-ox! Sitrep, Commander Fox!"
His hearing kicks back in, as if he'd just switched his comms back on, and Thorn and Hound are in the room, deece's drawn, scanning for enemies. He's vaguely proud of them.
"I shot him," Fox says, lips still feeling cold and tingly, like the aftereffects of anesthesia.
"The assassin?" Hound asks, checking the cooling corpse for a pulse he definitely will not find.
Fox swallows. His mouth is dry. "The Chancellor," he clarifies.
He can feel their eyes on him, their spike of panic shifting from the professional to the personal. "Fox?" Thorn asks carefully. "Do you want to hand me your deece?"
They obviously think he's snapped, some defect finally making itself known. Who knows? Maybe it has. How else would you kriffing explain a voice in his head telling him to kill the kriffing Supreme Chancellor? Except, no, that's actually more kriffing sane than what actually happened. Shit. What if it happens again? What if suddenly his brain lets him know that Thorn or Hound or any other of his vod'e are going to betray him?
Fox fumbles at his holster, at his vambraces. "Kriff, kriff, take it, take it all. Get it away from me! I'm not safe!" His blaster is wavering wildly in the air, and he stares at his trembling hands as they betray him yet again.
Oddly, this just seems to settle his men. They take the weapons (he'd trained them better than to let an assailant keep a loose weapon, hadn't he?), but they don't wrestle him to the ground or stun him unconscious. Thorn grips his shoulder, hard, in the same way the Alphas used to do when he was a tubie; the way Fox in his turn used to do to the cadets. It eases the trembles, allows him to take what feels like his first full breath in ages. "I killed him. Fuck if I know why. I just knew I had to."
"Well. Fuck." Thorn says heavily. Fox knows what he's thinking, because he's thinking the same: decommissioning. There's a certain look the vod all get when they know a brother won't be coming back, and Thorn is very carefully trying to arrange his face so it doesn't show.
Hound prods the cooling body with a toe. "I know plenty of places to dump a body, down on the lower levels. There's this puffer-pig farmer, sometimes gives me bones for Grizzer ever since we found who'd poisoned his prize sow... anyway they'd definitely not ask too many questions if I showed up with a sack of food for them. They'll eat anything, puffer pigs will, bones and all."
"No," Fox is shaking his head before Hound can even finish speaking. "No, you do that, and they'll kill us all. They won't even fancy it up with words like decommissioning. I will NOT let you all die for my stupid karking actions" He holds his hands out, ready for the cuffs. "You take me in, maybe they can take it all out on me. I need the blowback to be only on me. Make it look good, vod. Just don't kill me. The Senate needs to be able to get blood for this."
Thorn stares down his nose at him. It is a stare that has been known to make hardened spice smugglers crack. "Vod, no offense, but if I wanted to serve under some noble, self-sacrificing di'kut, I'd transfer to the 212th. Now stop panicking and start thinking like the twisty bastard I for some unknown reason love."
It startles a laugh out of him, and that, more than anything else breaks through the haze and gets him thinking again. Okay, kriff, why not at least try? He's never not put up a fight about anything else in his life, why start surrendering now?
"He's supposed to be meeting with the Rodian senator this morning. People saw him come in to the building. We can't have him disappear from here. They'd be looking at us immediately. Maybe we can cancel the meeting? Make out that he got sick and went home. Splicer can probably put together some recordings to fake a voice comm. But what we really need is some way for a natborn to "see" him outside of the Senate building."
This would all be so much easier if natborns wore armor like the vod'e. They've definitely had a few Corries switch places with each other when someone was too ill or injured or out of it for their shift, and the natborns could never tell. He's heard the Jedi can tell them apart even without the armor, but they can do all kinds of freaky osik with their magic.
Little gods, Fox wishes he had magic powers. If he had magic powers right now, he'd just stand the Chancellor right up and march him out of here to his apartment and let him become somebody else's problem. Fox tightens his fist around the little gray isocahedron in his hand and feels the points jab through the fabric of his gloves, into his skin. There has to be a way to get out of this mess. He's always had to deal with his brother's messes, surely he can figure out a way out of his own. His head pounds along with his pulse so badly that he idly wonders if he's about to drop from an aneurysm and save them all the effort of saving his sorry shebs.
In front of him, Thorn stiffens and his blaster jerks up, shaking in a way he's never seen even when they were tubies. He's focused on something behind Fox. A dread rises up in the back of his throat like bile.
Somehow he knows exactly what he's going to see if he turns around, and he kriffing well does not want to see it, but his body doesn't seem to have gotten the message and just keeps moving his head to look behind him.
Oh kriffing karking shitting fuck.
Standing behind him, with a slightly vacant look on his face like he's debating which new demeaning task to assign them, is the very dead body of Chancellor Palpatine.