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Darth Sidious considered himself a patient man. You did not orchestrate a galactic war, manipulate entire governments, and engineer the collapse of a thousand-year-old Order without patience. Patience was one of his greatest strengths.
Which was why he was perfectly content to wait. The Jedi grew weaker every day. The Senate grew more dependent. The war dragged on exactly as intended. The clones obeyed. The Republic frayed.
Palpatine sat behind his desk and smiled. Everything was going according to plan.
Several levels below the Senate District, Commander Fox sat in a dingy office above an illegal gambling den. He was eating noodles from a carton. A criminal kingpin sat handcuffed to a chair nearby. The kingpin was crying.
Fox checked something off on a datapad. "Excellent."
The kingpin stared. "You've destroyed my entire organization."
"Yep."
"You replaced my lieutenants."
"Yep."
"You've been feeding me false intelligence for eight months."
"Yep."
"You stole my money."
Fox paused. "...Technically the Republic stole your money."
"You are the Republic!"
Fox pointed with his noodles. "See, that's where things get confusing."
The kingpin started sobbing again. Fox went back to eating. Everything was going according to plan.
The funny thing about Fox was that most people assumed they understood him. That was their first mistake.
Fox looked straightforward. He looked like the sort of man who solved problems by punching them. Which, to be fair, he often did. He was blunt and perpetually exhausted. He spoke in short sentences. He stared senators into silence. He had all the subtlety of a concussion.
Or so people thought.
The reality was considerably more dangerous. Because Fox had spent years on Coruscant navigating politics, dealing with crime syndicates, surviving an environment where one careless mistake could destroy lives. You didn't survive that by being blunt. You survived it by becoming smarter than everyone expected.
Nobody expected much from a clone. That suited Fox perfectly fine. One of his favorite hobbies was allowing people to underestimate him.
Senators did it constantly. Jedi occasionally did it. Crime lords practically built their lives around it. Even the Chancellor did it. The man saw clones as tools. Useful tools, sure. Valuable tools, of course. But tools nonetheless.
Which meant he never really looked at Fox properly. Not the way Fox looked at him.
Fox noticed things. He always had. He noticed which senators suddenly became wealthier after voting for military contracts. He noticed which officials stopped making eye contact after receiving private communications. He noticed which criminals were connected to which corporations. He noticed who lied, who cheated, who stole, who murdered.
Most importantly, he noticed people. And once Fox noticed someone, it was almost impossible to hide from him again.
Which was turned out to be rather unfortunate for Darth Sidious. Because, eventually, Fox noticed him.
The thing that tipped Fox off was nothing more than a growing pile of tiny inconsistencies. They were all little things, but strange things nonetheless. Things that bothered him.
Individually, they meant nothing, but together they formed a rather unfortunate conclusion. Fox hated conclusions. Conclusions usually meant paperwork.
Eventually Fox found himself sitting alone at three in the morning surrounded by datapads. His caf had gone cold hours ago, but the city lights still glowed beyond the office windows. Everyone sensible was asleep.
Fox was not sensible. He stared at the evidence. Then stared harder like that would make it change. "...Huh."
That was all he said. Just: "Huh."
Because this particular conclusion was pretty impossible. So impossible in fact, that Fox spent the next three hours trying to prove himself wrong. He failed. Repeatedly.
The more he dug, the worse it became.
The connections were carefully hidden, brilliantly concealed. But they existed. And once Fox saw them, he couldn't unsee them.
The Chancellor was involved. Deeply involved. To the point that he was not just involved, he was responsible. For things that should have been impossible.
Fox leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He thought briefly about screaming, then decided against it.
He called Commander Thorn.
"Commander?" Thorn sounded half asleep.
"Wake up."
"...Why?"
"I think the Chancellor might be evil."
There was a very long pause. "...Like politically evil or evil evil?"
"Working on narrowing that down."
“Update me then. I’m going back to sleep.”
“Right. See me when you wake up.”
“Copy that, Commander.”
Palpatine never noticed. That was perhaps the most embarrassing part.
Because while Fox investigated him, Palpatine remained completely convinced everything was under control.
Why wouldn't he be?
The Jedi trusted the clones. The clones trusted the Jedi. The chips remained hidden. Everything was progressing exactly as it should.
He even checked occasionally, just to be certain. Every report looked perfect. Every medical record appeared normal. Every inspection came back clean.Exactly as planned. Palpatine smiled.
Commander Fox smiled too, but for entirely different reasons. Because every report Palpatine received had passed through Coruscant Guard channels first. Every. Single. One.
Fox had learned years ago that if you controlled paperwork, you controlled reality. And Fox controlled a horrifying amount of paperwork.
"Commander."
"Yes?"
"Is it illegal to edit military records?"
Fox looked up. "No."
Tinkerer relaxed. "Oh good."
Fox returned to typing. "It's only illegal if someone notices."
Tinkerer stared at him. "I don't think that's how laws work."
Fox laughed. "It’s how they work on Coruscant."
Another thing people thought about Fox was that he wasn't ambitious. He was.
Just not in the normal way. He didn't want power. He wanted leverage. And, contrary to popular belief, those were completely different things. Power made people targets. Leverage made people useful.
Fox preferred useful. Which was why the Coruscant Guard somehow knew everything.
A senator sneezed in the wrong direction? Fox knew. A crime lord changed accountants? Fox knew. A Jedi skipped lunch? Fox knew.
How? Nobody knew, not even the Guard. At this point most of them assumed Fox simply materialized information directly from thin air out of spite.
"What do you mean you know?" Thorn stared across the briefing room.
Fox looked up from his datapad. "I know."
"How?"
"I have sources."
"Who?"
Fox looked offended. "If I told you they wouldn't be sources anymore."
"Commander."
"Thorn."
"Commander."
"Thorn."
Thorn stared at Fox. Fox stared back. There was a moment of silence.
"I hate talking to you."
Fox smiled. "That's reasonable."
Fox controlled an alarming amount of information. Not intentionally at first, in fact, it just sort of happened. One security network became three. Three became seven. Seven became twenty.
At some point Fox accidentally developed an intelligence empire. Nobody, including Fox, was entirely sure how this had happened. It had just simply grown.
He had informants in the Senate. Informants in criminal organizations. Informants in shipping companies. Informants in local governments.
Half of them didn't even realize they were informants, they simply complained near Fox often enough. And Fox remembered everything. Which made him terrifying.
Then came Fives, and with him, the chips. Which was where Palpatine's plan should have succeeded. Instead, it ran directly into Fox’s waiting hands.
Fives arrived with evidence, and Fox listened. Then immediately locked down the building. Because apparently unlike everyone else in the galaxy, Fox considered "secret brain implants installed in every soldier" to be a significant issue.
"Am I overreacting?" Fox asked.
"Yes," Thorn replied.
"Excellent." Fox stood up. "Let's overreact harder."
And that was essentially the end of Palpatine's victory.
Because while the Sith Lord believed his greatest strength was manipulation—Fox's greatest strength was paranoia. Paranoia won.
The chips began quickly and quietly disappearing. One battalion. Then another. Then another.
Whenever Palpatine requested updates, everything looked normal. "Any unusual medical procedures occurring within the GAR?"
Fox smiled pleasantly. "No, Chancellor."
Technically true. At that point chip removal had become so common it wasn't unusual anymore.
Palpatine nodded, satisfied, and Fox almost laughed.
The trick to lying successfully, Fox had learned, was confidence. People believed certainty. And Fox was extremely certain. Especially when he was actively committing fraud. Force, Fox loved technical truths. They were his favorite kind of lie.
Years later, after Sidious had been exposed and his empire reduced to ashes before it could truly begin, historians would spend decades trying to understand what happened.
Because on paper, Palpatine should have won. He was smarter, more powerful, better connected. Overall, the man was just better prepared. Everything had favored him. And yet he’d lost.
Not to a Jedi Master or a well meaning senator. Certainly not to some ancient prophecy. But, very embarrassingly, to Commander Fox.
The explanation frustrated everyone. Especially because Fox himself seemed completely unimpressed by it.
"How did you stop him?" people asked.
Fox frowned. "I didn't."
"You absolutely did."
"No."
"Fox."
Fox sighed. Then set down his caf. "Look." Everyone leaned closer. "He spent decades planning how to manipulate the Jedi." A nod. "The Senate." Another nod. "The Republic." Another. Fox shrugged. "But he never planned for someone checking his paperwork."
There was a long silence as everyone present waited for something else, anything else to follow that. There wasn’t.
"...That's it?"
Fox looked offended. "Do you have any idea how many villains are defeated by paperwork?"
"...No."
"A lot."
And honestly that might have been the funniest part.
Darth Sidious had built the greatest conspiracy in galactic history. A masterpiece of deception, a spider web spanning planets, a plan decades in the making. And it unraveled because one sleep-deprived clone commander saw a few inconsistencies, narrowed his eyes, took to what amounted to a red-string covered conspiracy board, and wound up being right.
Fox had been named after a trickster animal. Not a warrior like Wolffe, or an avenging angel like Kote. A trickster.
Palpatine spent years believing he was the one moving pieces across the board. He never realized someone else had reached over and stolen several right off.
And by the time he noticed—if he ever noticed—Fox was already three moves ahead and laughing.