Chapter Text
CC-1010– Fox, his name is Fox. Fox is finally dead.
Death, or rather, what comes after it, turns out to be a dark, cramped space. Silent, except for something that might be a mimicry of the whirr of hyperspace, or is maybe just a ringing in Fox’s ears.
There are no brothers here. He had not expected there to be. Can’t think of any that don’t deserve to be marching on, except himself.
This hell is familiar. Being left nothing to do except to think, trapped inside his own mind, was a torture which had gone stale while he was still alive. Being dead was uncomfortable. All the too-long sessions in the Chancellor’s office during the war had been worse. Watching Jedi after Jedi after Jedi fall to his blaster, fall thanks to commands he couldn’t stop his mouth from issuing had been far, far worse.
Comparatively, this is fine.
And if it isn’t, well. Fox more than deserves that.
His legs ache terribly. He has been dead for a while now. Days, maybe, if time even exists here. His arms have begun to hurt too, though he can move them sometimes, a bit. There is slightly more room for his upper half than for the lower, in the dark, claustrophobic place that is the afterlife.
He hasn’t been moving his arms much, even though he can. Maybe they’d hurt less, if he moved them, but they feel wrong now, too-short and oddly proportioned, and every time he becomes too aware of them it drives him a little bit more mad.
So Fox sits very still in his own, private sector of the hells, drifting increasingly often into a pleasant sort of semi-unconsciousness. It’s a little like starvation, maybe, except that doesn’t make sense. Dead people can’t die again, even if those people are only dubiously people at all. There’s no second death he approaches with his stillness. What a stupid idea.
Maybe Fox prefers that barely conscious state, anyway. He doesn’t have to think, when he fades into it. Doesn’t have to remember commander execute order sixty-six and they’re begging for mercy and pleasepleaseplease no, but his legs don’t stop carrying him forward and readyaimfire.
He lets his head thunk back against the wall behind him. Is wall the right word, here? Does he care?
The best thing about that little shit Skywalker having killed him is that Fox hadn’t had to continue trying to find a way within the programming to kill himself. The worst thing about the stars-damned bastard having killed him is that now Fox knows very definitely that he’ll never have the pleasure of wrapping his hands around the little banthakriffer’s throat and wringing the life out of him.
Oh, but a dead clone can dream. Fox has always been good at that. Sitting back, seeing things etched into his eyelids that had never really happened, or never would. Great at seeing brothers as they had been, as they were, and after they were gone.
So special, the chancellor had cooed once, Fox lying on the floor of his office shaking between bolts of electric Force banthashit. If Fox really were special though, maybe he could have done something about that. A better term, he thinks, is kriffed in the head. It’s more apt. He’s dead, and he’s kriffed in the head, and he’ll never see his brothers, or anything again, trapped as he is in the inky nothingness of being dead.
Fox is dead, and the void has been dark for a long while.
It’s not unreasonable, then, really, that when the darkness and silence and solitude disappear, invaded by brightness and comm chatter and a Mandalorian, of all damned things, that he lashes out. It’s not unreasonable, it’s really not, he’ll insist later.
But now, suddenly, he is occupied with lunging teeth first towards said Mandalorian, whose hand, visible in the sudden light, has strayed too close to Fox’s face. They curse, yanking their hand back and away, and Fox snarls and does not let go because kark whoever this is, actually. Being dead was bad enough without being interrupted at it.
He’s dragged out of his little hell-corner head-first. That is, the Mandalorian falls backward amidst their flailing and Fox is pulled along, unfolding like a cloth doll full of sharp teeth. Seeing all of him, they panic even more, which is rude, and then they’re carefully, very deliberately, moving to calm down, sitting with their legs crossed, the hand that Fox still has captive held out, deceptively lax.
Their visor is accented light blue. Blue vams too, but yellow pauldrons. Unpainted, otherwise. The natborn equivalent of a shiny.
“Su’cuy, verd’ika,” they say. “Could you let go, please?”
It’s been a very long time since anyone spoke Mando’a in his vicinity, much less to him. He startles, looking up at them. The helmeted face of an enormous Mando looks back at him. Everything around Fox seems really, inexplicably big, now that he’s looking, and it’s all very bright. It’s a lot louder out here too, now that he’s not… physically trapped? Or rather, now that he’s trapped in a new, more familiar way, crowded by a seemingly kriffing endless supply of mandalorians– natborns– who move closer, until the one Fox is chewing through signals with their free hand for the rest of them to stop. Even then, they stop too close. They are speaking over his head, rapid, the language familiar but the words slipping from him as he tries to grasp them.
He can hear his own breathing, loud and ugly. Fox isn’t supposed to make noise like that. He needs to run, he needs to hidehidehide, and the stars are screaming but he is frozen in place.
“Verd’ika, I need my hand back,” the blue-visored Mando says, pain audible through their vocoder. But Fox can’t move, couldn’t even if he wanted to. Not until he sees their other hand moving towards him fast and Fox is throwing himself back and out of the way, lightning-quick. There’s a crack, then pain blossoming from the back of his head as it collides sharply with durasteel floor.
Shitshitshit–
“Damn it, Myles–” he thinks he can hear someone say, but the darkness is back and the sounds are dimming again and Fox is once again lost to unconsciousness before the words even have a chance to compute.