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Fox takes a long, slow drag of his cigarette. The little ember at the tip lighting up, shadowed by neon signs and fumes and blaring sirens and blinking speeder lights. The balcony’s old, the varnish of the railing crumbling in some places, the metal underneath rusting. Lazily, he thinks about the whole balcony failing, going down in the void, crushing to the floor underneath—he finds he doesn’t really care if that happens.
In the distance, he can see an old industrial sector, the moldering duracrete exposing steel ribs and vertebrae, bones jutting in the hazy half illuminated darkness. Left there to rot, like what passes for life in the lower levels, entire sectors living by neon lights and scraps of hope, moving within the city, building her, feeding her. Not that it’s going to be enough. Nothing is ever enough for Galactic City. Not the lowlifes, not the poor, not the children, not the Jedi, not the Senate. Surely not the clones.
Propped against the railing, he catches a glimpse of one of the GAR spaceports and part of the 212th barracks—Cody’s still in the Outer Rim; his absence a knife in the guts. The Acclamator-class ships getting refueled and restocked. The blinding lights, the patrols - Fox should really check again next month’s patrol schedule - the distant screech of metal on metal. Another drag, a memory. Maybe: a dream. A nightmare, really.
Between the fumes and the synthetic stone and the metal and the misery and the getting spat on because he was created in a lab—sometimes Fox wishes to be back to the blood-dripping nightmare that was his first real encounter with war. White armor made rusty by dust, the mess, the screams of his men all around him and inside his bucket. The barked orders, the pain, the bodies everywhere. Bugs coming out of fucking nowhere to drag them to hell. Saving everyone he could, sending some of them to their death. Gaining more than a couple of medals for that. For honorable and brave actions in the Battle of Geonosis. A shiny new rank insignia. Most decorated officer in the GAR. What a load of banthashit. Now he has to deal with hate crimes, gangs, slaver rings, a criminal underground flourishing in the corruption of the Senate. Arresting cartel bosses just to get them out the day after because they have a friend of a friend who is a Senator’s cousin and Fox’s hands are tied and he has to follow orders.
Orders keep you alive. Orders sometimes keep you dead with just a mimicry of life going on. Fox is dead. He died on Kamino, long ago. He just keeps going through the motions. His job doesn’t exist. Coruscanti citizens don’t exist. His men don’t ex—no, they are the only thing that exists, along with the city. They’re dead, of course. Some of them already know, some don’t. The city is dead, too; she too still goes through the motions. The motion of eating them. Crunching their bones and their souls. Not that clones have a soul, of course: they’re clones.
Fox shifts. Lets the sounds of the city tackle him, making his skin tingle and his veins shiver. Glimmick music at his back, pulsating—his bones vibrate uncomfortably with the thudding bass. Someone - a trooper, one of Bacara’s boys - shouts slurred catcalls. The rumble of the duracrete flesh of the giant under his feet tries to call his attention, ancient and new and decomposing and reviving. Fox snorts out a laugh despite himself. The borders of his vision waver, tarnished. The stench of speeder exhaust, food grease, garbage and cheap alcohol makes his stomach lurch, bile rising up his throat. Spit pools in his mouth, bitter from the smoke. Fox swallows. He’s sweating, his armor feeling suddenly too tight and too loose at the same time.
Maybe she’s alive. Maybe she’s the only living thing in the entire galaxy, and everything is just a ruse to keep her fed and growing. Maybe she hates them. Maybe she loves them. Fox is too smart to believe that anything Galactic City wants and feels makes any sense to sentients. As if the concepts of wanting and feeling could really apply to her. She’s definitely a she, though. Why, Fox doesn’t really know. He just knows it. The certainty a dull, aching presence in the back of his mind. It’s about power, maybe. All the she he has met growing up had absolute power over him—the cold voice and colder eyes of Kaminoan scientists, calculating if he were to be decommissioned. And Coruscant has absolute power over the crawling underlings living in her sprawling insides, termites in the hive. Always moving, always working, always dying.
His head hangs low, his upper body leaning on the balcony. The cigarette still lit. For a moment he feels it: the bright flash of pain, the hiss, the smell of ash and burning flesh—what is another scar? Instead, he brings it to his chapped lips. Takes a drag. Keeps it in his lungs till he feels they’re going to collapse. Exhales with a shaky breath. Looks down: if he vaulted beyond the railing it would be air whistling around him, his heart in his throat and then—and then.
He thinks about his brothers. The fucking shovel he needs to love them. Matching snarls and sneers, biting teeth. The ruthless competition. Cody’s little runt, all blond hair and doggedness, bright-eyed and drinking in everything Fox teaches him—Fox will never admit how much caring is nested in his heart. Growing up with them. Being separated. That awkward adolescence phase when the planes and dips of a muscled back were enough to get a hard-on going and the closest thing to sex without actual fucking was beating the shit out of each other. The training. Being handed a blaster at two. Learning hand to hand combat at three. Understanding through live exercises that one day they would have to send other men - brothers - to their death and bear that responsibility without breaking. Breaking all the same. Stitching themselves up, together in the rawness. At five… Dred Priest and Isabet Reau. Nothing more can be said about that. Fox still has nightmares about the battle circle. About beating the other cadets till they couldn’t get up anymore. His guilt a swarm of maggots devouring the flesh of his emotions, sleepless nights and screaming awakenings. He would do it all again. The alternative was worse than death. He did it for Rex. He did it for his brothers. He wants to break all their teeth, the shits. Brawl with them in that stupid shitty clone bar until they’re all bloodied knuckles and split lips and broken noses. Hug them so tight their bones break. Hold them and never let go. He wants them out of this planet. Wants them to never leave him again. Wants them safe. He knows no place is safe.
Fox shakes his head, brain rattling inside his skull, migraine pounding with the viciousness of a pissed off rancor. He’s dehydrated. He’s drunk. He’s tired. He really really really wants to kill himself. Become another sacrifice on the altar of—this. Metal veins, steel bones, dislocated encrypted synaptic nodes, duracrete guts, an open rotting carcass, always dying and always renewing herself, closing gaping wounds just to tear open new ones, misery seeking the solace of the sun.
Coruscant is calling him, all-encompassing and incomprehensible. Whispers in the dark, when he tries to sleep. Sometimes she makes him think about Kamino’s ocean. The fury. The total lack of common ground. Hunger. At least Kamino has never really offered any hope. Coruscant… many troopers get here thinking they are going to have a boring life, far from the front. Those are the ones who get eaten first: killed by gangs. Killed by some lucky asshole with a knife—you spend your life hearing praise about the glory of the battle just to die in a dark alley that smells like piss and vomit. Sometimes they just disappear. Bodies never to be found. No mark. No trace. No nothing. Some—some are sent back to Kamino. Fox sends them back to Kamino. Looks at the request forms and often he just doesn’t have any leeway, any loophole in the regs he can jump through—so he puts his id code in and approves it and sends one of his subordinates to die. Or worse. It’s always difficult to look at his hands afterwards. It’s difficult to look at them now. He left his gloves with his helmet on the table inside the bar. Ugly, scarred things, his hands. Cuticles bitten to the point of bleeding. The nails are too long, like his hair, curling around his ears. A scab on the knuckles of the right hand. Fox frowns. How—? Ah. That morning, he punched his office wall. He can still see the request module on his datapad. The trooper was still a shiny. Barely out of Kamino. He wasn’t even ten yet. Did Fox really do that? Not him. Can’t be, can it? A weight in his gut, ice in his bones. The—his hands shake.
Shivers down his spine, breath caught in his lungs, a whirr in his ears, tunnel vision. He wills himself to swallow the panic attack down before it takes root in his body, black tendrils in the fibers of his muscles and the holes of his bones. He has been trained his whole life to command; parts of it still fucking suck. It still is lonely, the rank an abyss between him and his men. He’s here, face and hands and armor and everything else tinted acid green and hot pink from the neon sign. His brothers are light years away. Years of space, kilometers of time. His brothers are inside his chest, curled around his heart; inside his atria and ventricles, inside his own very flesh and blood. He wishes he could cut and bleed out the pain and the longing. He wishes he could cut and feel lighter. He wishes he could cut. He wishes—
Cigarette in his right hand. Blaster pistol in his left hand. Fox ponders it. DC-17. A good weapon. The weight: a comfort. The trigger: more than an acquaintance. He could be blinded and still take that weapon apart and back together in a matter of minutes. An eternity trickles by. It was just five seconds, at most. He’s drowning. He’s flying. He’s not really moving. He’s just going to put his blaster in his mouth and pull the trigger. He’s going to kill every single fucking senator in the rotunda. The city keeps whispering, murmuring things he doesn’t really understand in languages that don’t really exist anymore - maybe never did - with a rhythm that doesn’t really make much sense. A beat. A poem never beginning. A metamorphosis never ending. A fractal repeating itself over and over and over and over and over and—his head hurts. Images he can’t really see occupy his field of vision. Every building. Every rotten corpse of whatever lies there. Shadows cast by old lamps and blinking emergency light. Rusting pillars dating to the age of the Old Republic, that stood for centuries before his decanting and will stand for centuries after his demise. Creatures corrupted by darkness and pollution and hunger. Water pipes, gold of the lower levels. Secret gardens—plants and mushrooms that survive even hate itself. The entire structure of every level, an anthill of skyscrapers and shafts and landing pads and factories. Down down down down down down down down to the ground surface of the planet, choked and darkened. Every joy and sin and blistering hope crawling under his skin burrowing inside his bones—why is hope so fucking painful he wants it to just stop. Fox is inside but also outside inside the city inside himself inside the aching soul of whatever this planet even is he is something else entirely he’s not from here he comes from water and to water he’ll be back he just wishes to be buried alongside his brothers please just let him have that small mercy—Fox blinks, and the images stop. They’ll be back. She’ll be back. She always comes back. Coruscant won’t tolerate being ignored.
His brain feels like shards of glass. Thoughts mirroring themselves over and over. An endless shimmering labyrinth of impressions and musings, memories and dreams—he doesn’t know if they’re all his. With deliberate slowness, Fox brings up his right hand to his mouth. Carefully, he puts his gun in the holster. Feeling every muscle and tendon contracting and moving, a perfectly working machine of muscle and bone and sinew. Soft pain blooms when licks the bleeding cracks of his lips - the sudden craving for a kiss - then feels the teal butt of the cigarette between them. Corellian tobacco. Smuggled, of course. Clones can’t have cigarettes. They couldn’t really have alcohol either, but who gives a shit when there’s a war going on and getting blackout wasted prevented troopers from eating their own blasters. Inhales a breath, letting the air pass through the slow burning leaves, smoke flooding his mouth. It tastes ashy and aromatic, kind of woody. It rasps his palate, down to his throat, scratchy with soot. Heat in the wet red trees of his lungs, ashy veil coating teeth and tongue. He keeps it inside, just for a couple of seconds. To chase away the fear with the warmth. It doesn’t fucking work. Exhales, woody and ashy smell flowing outside his nose.
He rolls his shoulders, looks at the cigarette. Halfway finished. His head still pounding. The alcohol rising, making the pounding somewhat fuzzy at the borders and yet meaner. He feels kind of jittery. His fingers twitch. He wants to move, and he doesn’t. His heart feels out of place inside his ribcage. It wants to be out of it. His mouth cottony. He really should drink a glass of water or three. He really wants another shitty Abrax cognac. Sleep sounds nice, too. Despite the genetic engineering and the training, he still needs the shut eye. Fox knows his sleep will just haunt him as his wake. Maybe he should ask the Jedi for something. A drug. Some Force-shit trick. Maybe if he nurses that bottle of Corellian whisky he has in his office till he can’t remember even his batchers’ names, he’ll get to sleep without dreams and nightmares and murmuring cities in the back of his mind.
A step away from the railing. His vision swaying a little. Fox closes his eyes for an instant. Takes a deep breath, the air acrid and humid and warm. Sweat trickles down his neck, wetting the collar of his blacks. He can’t do—he can’t. Something warm and wet traces a line on his cheek, rolling on the old scar bisecting his upper lip. More lines of warm and wet saltiness. The cigarette hanging loosely between his fingers. Fox opens his eyes, vision blurry. Flicks away the cinders. Repeats the ritual. Bring the cigarette to his lips. Inhale deeply. Keep it inside for less than a second. Exhale. The tears don’t stop. Periwinkle was just a fucking shiny—the thought flashes, lightning in a storm. Guilt crawls up his throat with bile and all the cognac and cocktails he drank that night. He swallows everything down. Bile alcohol spit tears. His hands tremble and his knees threaten to buckle under the weight of his shame. Fox turns to look at his left, to the speeder platform, head swimming.
Far away, the Jedi Temple shines, illuminated in the Coruscanti night. The closest thing to a mountain in Galactic City—built on a mountain, in truth; the other mountains invisible, covered in concrete, durasteel and glass. The spires beacons in the darkness. Fox never went to the Temple. Periwinkle did, once. Diplomatic assignment. Said it was the loveliest place on the planet. That it had actual gardens and fountains and everything smelled good and felt peaceful and the Jedi were so damn nice. A step forward. The duracrete under his feet is pockmarked, mold growing in the cracks. The surface was a mess; dirty, spotted with rainwater, smeared with food stains, and splattered with vomit—a grim tapestry of known and unknown substances. Fox can’t look at the Temple anymore. The whispering begins anew, tiny sharp talons on his nape digging in his cerebellum, clawing at the inside of his skull. Coughs, breastbone hurting in a way that’s both familiar and awful. Fox hates this city. Hates it in the same way he hates his brothers and he hates his subordinates. That is: he doesn’t hate her at all. That is: Fox would bleed dry if it meant something. That is: there’s something sacred here. That is: Fox will hold onto this with his teeth even if it brought nothing but ruin.
He rubs his eyes with his left hand, calming down his shaky breaths. Does his best to eliminate the traces of his tears. Doing it feels like a crime. Tries to swallow the sudden dryness of his mouth. Turns again, looking at the alley near the cantina. A group of men is smoking outside, laughing and shouting nonsense between themselves. A couple is making out pressed on the wall. Another is fucking behind the trash cans, their noises muffled by the music and the shouting and the general mess.
Bring the cigarette to his lips. Inhale. Less than one second inside. Exhale. Fox drops the spent butt to the ground and puts it out, grinding down with the sole of his boot. Sighs. Goes back inside. The war is not finished with him. Coruscant won’t ever be finished with him.