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Fox is dying.
He can feel it in the way that his blood oozes out of the cracks in his armor, staining the ground red. He feels it in the way his bones ache, and how it hurts to move, or to even breathe.
His comm crackles, but only static makes it through. The poor thing's too busted to pick up any transmissions, and he can't even pick up an arm to answer it anyway. It's a miracle that he's still concious, but he won't be soon.
His head is spinning now. Giddily, he wonders, if anyone will miss him. His Corries will, that's for sure. He doubts most of the senators would. Burtoni might be dissapointed at the loss of a high-grade specimen. His brothers... well, it's been too long since he's been in contact with any of them, with the whole war going on. He never shows up to their gatherings at 79's, either. It's not like you can miss an absent brother who already wasn't there.
Dying all alone in an alleyway on a Taungsday night. Fuck, he's pathetic. The thought makes him laugh bitterly, and that makes his chest hurt even more.
There's a whispering ringing in his head now, something all jumbled up and hard to parse. That's okay. Even the noise itself is just comforting. No one's noticed him, still, even though he's sure the whole alley must be flooded with his blood.
So Fox lays there staring up at the building lights in the underbelly of Coruscant; delirious from the bloodloss, he can almost pretend that the lights are stars, like the ones they'd see on the nights Kamino decided to calm down, just for a while.
"Look, it's a shooting star! You have to make a wish now, Fox!"
Wishes. Hah. He hadn't believed in them when Bly told him about them as cadets, and he wasn't going to start now.
If he did, though...
"...Wish I could keep my brothers safe," he rasps, as the tail light of a speeder zooms past his vision. Stone and Thorn and Thire try their best, but Fox is the one that takes the brunt of the Chancellor's cruelty, redirects decomm and recon orders and beats off the grubby hands of senators from his men. It's a grueling task that he would never wish on anybody else.
Fox wants to, needs to keep them safe from the very thing that they were mean to protect, even if it'll grind him down into nothing but a husk.
There's a soft laugh in the wind, amongst all the whispering inside his head. It almost sounds like the rush of traffic, now. Over and over again, it tells him to rest. Rest, and trust that Coruscant will keep him safe.
Kriff it, he's tired. The city can keep his dying corpse forever for all he cares.
Fox closes his eyes.
(Something in his mind twists, and something in his head loosens up as the sound of traffic rises to a crescendo until it's all he can hear.)
-----
Unexpectedly, he wakes up.
Everything aches—it's like he's gone through another growth spurt, with the way that his bones complain. His skin feels too tight, itching like it's been stretched out and his muscles are sore.
The whispering still lingers in his head, the constant stream of noise matching the sound of busy traffic during rush hours, but it's not... annoying. If anything, the sound is comforting, accompanised by a strange weight that presses gently into the back of his mind.
He doesn't question the feeling. It's not hard to guess what—or rather, who—it is.
Alpha-17 had said Kamino was alive, back in their training days.
He'd describe the planet as tempermental and wild, that it loved the clones more than it's own indifferent scientists, and through the brewing storms and crashing waves and crackling thunder, it would talk to him. Him and the other Alpha-classes, because they were it's favorites—they were the very first of the clones raised on Kamino, after all. And Kamino had loved the other clones too supposedly; but the Nulls were Skirata's boys and the later clones were the Alphas' kih'vode, so Kamino never latched onto them in the same way.
So naturally, it wasn't much of a long shot to imagine that Coruscant was alive in the same way. That it cared enough about Fox to bring him back from the brink of death. Planets were selfish like that, but when you're a floating rock in space that's been around for well over a millenia, it's probably deserved.
But really, of all the billions of sentients that the planet could pick, why Fox? This planet has no taste. Or maybe it does have a taste, and it's taste is specifically unappreciated clone commanders who are overworked to the bone and surviving from sheer spite and 4 cups of caf on the daily. Who's to say? It's not like he can figure out the eccentricities of a natborn senator, let alone a whole karking planet.
It seems to laugh at that, but it doesn't really offer him an answer or anything. Figures.
Fox pulls himself up from the ground, dried blood sticking everywhere on his armor, his blacks, and even in his hair. It's going to be a bitch to wash out, he thinks sullenly, as he picks up his bucket. Drenched in red, he might be mistaken for the ghost of a clone come back to haunt the city.
The thing hums delightfully at his assesment, the sound not dissimilar to the buzz of electric neon lights, and Fox remembers that he did, infact, die.
"That's fucked," he says aloud to no one in particular, and the city responds with roaring traffic and clattering bins that mimic laughter. He shakes his head in exasperation as he reseals his helmet, muffling the commotion of the city down to a bearable level.
He feels rather than hears Coruscant's voice, a bright-loud-chaos making itself at home in the cracks and gaps of his helmet as it begins to whisper.
Go. Go back home to your Guard.
Fox is more than happy to oblige. The faster he can get back to them, the sooner he can reassure them all that he hadn't been kidnapped or tortured or left for dead or some combination of all three, and then get back to doing important work like walking in circles around the Senate Rotunda and filling out paperwork that shouldn't even be in his hands.
The feeling in his head pokes him past busy streets and empty maintenance tunnels, makes him scale upwards on ladders and pipes and crawl through sewer grates and the vents between levels. No one acknowledges him through it all, despite the very bloodstained armor he's wearing, except for the mousedroids that live between the walls. Even then, they just chirp cheerfully at him before skittering away.
Fox heaves himself up through another vent, layers of dust now joining the blood stuck to his armor. It seems insistent that this is the way he should go.
The din of the city muffles the rather loud thumping of a fully grown clone crawling through the vents, and blearily, Fox wonders why he's humoring a feeling in his head. The feeling in his head just laughs at him, in a way that's light and teasing before nudging him further along the vent.
"You know," he says wryly, "I don't think anyone would appreciate seeing a clone crawling around in their ventiliation system."
The prescence in his bucket just shrugs, somehow, before pointing him towards a shaft that leads straight down.
"Absolutely not."
It pushes at him again.
"I don't know where that leads," he hisses.
This way, it insists, pushing at him again. You're almost there.
He makes a frustrated noise, smacking his head against the floor of the vent. "You're as bad as Cody is," he mutters, pulling himself forward.
It cackles gleefully at that.
Peering down the vent shaft, Fox quietly takes note of what he can see. There's a grey duracrete floor, and the sound of footsteps, but not much else.
"You're sure about this."
Yyyyes. Yes yes yes.
Fox heaves another sigh. "I better get a hot, steaming cup of caf after this."
Black, double-shot, it offers. Exactly the way he likes it. How the fuck does a planet know the way he likes his caf? It should be focused on other things. Like squashing the rotten, heartless, vapid demalgolka masquerading as members of high society into a fine paste.
It grumbles indistinctly; something about 'interference', 'sith', and 'the will of the Force', whatever the hell that means. Fox decides that he doesn't want to know.
He crawls down to the shaft until he can twist himself into dropping feet first, before crashing through the flimsy metal grate with a bang.
Someone shrieks as he crashes right through, rolling along with the momentum to stand back out.
"Commander Fox?!"
His gaze snaps over to the voice, and the troopers at the desk stares back at him uneasily.
It occurs to him, after a beat, that he does infact recognize this room.
Prime's ballsack, has he just been thumping around the vents in the Guard Headquarters?
"You could've just led me to the door," he complains, and it cackles with delight.
"....Sir? Are you alright?" one of the troopers—Halcyon, maybe—asks uneasily.
"Don't worry about me," he grunts, waving a hand. "How long was I gone for?"
"Seventeen hours, sir," another trooper—Combo—pipes up.
Osik. He could've used that time to get work done, instead of dying in an alleyway and then scurrying through the city like a wild animal.
"Thorn's going to be so pissed," he grumbles.
"He's already pissed," Combo says, and Fox just groans.
-----
Thorn is downright furious when Fox stumbles into the barracks, shouting things at him like "how could you, you fucking di'kut" and "we all thought the worst had happened"; and then when he was done being mad he had started crying. Crying. And all Fox could do was stand there in stunned silence as Thorn held onto him, still in full kit and still covered in his own blood, sobbing about how scared he had been and how awful those seventeen hours were.
"I've had blackout missions longer than that," he points out, and Thorn scowls, punching him in the shoulder.
"Not the point, vod," he huffs, wiping his eyes and finally stepping back to take a proper look. "You look like shit."
"Bleeding out in an alley in the lower levels will do that to you," Fox comments dryly, and Thorn snorts.
"Alright, fair. Don't think I'm not taking you to Fascia after hearing that, though."
"I feel fine," he protests as Thorn pushes him out of the commander's barracks and toward the medbay; he hears Thorn's exasperation as he sighs, and gets the feeling that his second-in-command is rolling his eyes at him.
"You say that all the time," he points out, "regardless if you actually are. Especially when you've gotten injured."
"Lies."
"Fox, you literally said you bled out and then immediatedly said you were fine."
"Lies and slander."
"It's not slander if it's true, you big karking tubie," Thorn snarks, before peering over Fox's shoulder to yell: "FASCIA! Our dikut'la commander thinks he's immune to stab wounds again!"
"Don't shout in my medbay!" comes the response as the medic in question approaches them, brow furrowing as he takes in the state of Fox's armor. "Sithhells, vod, what the kriff happened to you?"
The best he can offer is a shrug, and Fascia sighs, gesturing to the nearest cot. "Armor off, Fox. Seriously, how'd you manage to paint it all red?"
"Apparently, he 'bled out in the streets'," Thorn helpfully pipes up, snapping off the latches of Fox's pauldrons and stacking the pieces to the side.
"You could at least get it right," Fox huffs, twisting to undo the straps of his chestplate. "It was an alleyway, not a street."
"You bled out?" Fascia's voice is sharp, tinged with worry and something that wasn't quite anger.
"I got better?" he offers, releasing the seal on his bucket to pull it off.
"The fuck do you mean 'you got better'-" Thorn's voice dies mid-sentence and Fascia inhales sharply as Fox puts the bucket next to the rest of his armor.
They're staring at him in a mix of shock and worry.
Something's wrong.
Wordlessly, Fascia hands him a mirror, and oh, fuck.
The reflection that stares back at him is, for the most part, normal, if not absolutely covered in blood. It's the same white streaks in his hair, the same scarred face, the same exhausted clone that he has always been.
It's the eyes that are different.
What stares back at him is not brown with fleck of taung-gold, but jet black pools of shadows, with specks of citylights reflected in them.
Mine, Coruscant whispers, as Fox realizes that his eyes are no longer his eyes but rather the skyline of the city-planet at night.