Chapter Text
Fox jerked up, which was strange because he thought he had been falling.
He shouldn't have known he was falling, because he had also thought he'd already been dead. There weren't a lot of other ways to take Vader dropping in front of someone, hand outstretched, rage in every line of his body, the power of the Force hitting like a physical blow. But, though death should have been instantaneous, he could have sworn he had felt himself going down, had fallen somewhere strange for a second, white lights stretching over the blackened abyss, but then his knee had hit the edge of one of those lights, discovered it was solid, and then he'd gone spinning off the ledge.
Expect now he wasn't falling, he was sitting up, almost banging his head on the ceiling, flailing out in the total darkness, hands hitting the side of something. The space he was in was small. He could sit up so long as his back wasn't straight, and he could touch either side if he spread his hands out.
It felt awfully familiar, in a way that made his chest hurt, the thought only making the panic worse. He slammed a hand out, finding the latch by muscle memory. The bunk almost instantly slid out of the wall, because clones had to be prepared for anything, at any time, and the Kaminoans had no time for bad engineering.
He hadn't been back to Kamino since he shipped out the first time, and he was pretty sure the cloners had promised them your bodies seed the stars not and you'll come back here when you die.
He couldn't breathe.
He sat in the bunk he'd slept in for years, after they'd been shuffled in to the new barracks when they were five years old, because they were the oldest clones, and the infrastructure had been built around them. Only, there should have been new clones here, new bodies to be eaten up by the newly declared Empire. He sat in that bunk, knew it through long familiarity, and still couldn't breath. The room hummed around him, the way Kamino always hummed, the sound of storms distant through the walls, the lights in front of the bunks dimmed, brighter light spilling out from the locker bays underneath.
Turning, he scrambled for the ladder, because he'd been assigned the top pod, and had gloated to Ponds and Neyo below him about it. Now, he desperately regretted that, fingers lax on the rungs as his foot slipped and he almost fell right off.
Falling, he should have been falling—
On the ground he staggered, shoulder glancing off the metal of the ladder as he went for the lockers, half convinced that the locker wouldn't open, and that would finally break the strange dream he was in. Something had to be off, something had to be wrong, and then he would figure it out—
But the locker, the one assigned to the top bunk of the row, opened at his hand, revealing the training clothes of a cadet, a practice helmet, and stuck in the back, the little roll of flimsi he'd taken from the shooting range the day he'd finally beaten Cody's high score, the type of personal possession that read like rebellion to the Kaminoans, the type of thing he wasn't supposed to have—
“What are you doing?”
He froze, fingers on the edge of the target, slowly turning his head to find another clone standing there and staring at him, in the red on red uniform of the older cadets. He looked like he couldn't have been older than eight, right on the cusp of a final, painful growth spurt, but already standing like he knew exactly how to use his body to achieve his goals.
And Fox just stood there, hand still in his locker, other hand holding the door open, and stared.
“Ten-Ten?” the cadet asked, and Fox wheezed, lungs finally expanding, but not wanting to actually draw in any air. “It's the middle of the night. You need to be asleep.”
On a world of identical men, Fox still would have known him anywhere, scar or no, just by the tilt of his voice, his stance, the way he always seemed to look at Fox. “Cody?”
He hadn't talked to Cody since before the war ended.
It had not been a comfortable, nor particularly warm conversation.
It had been a kriffing shitshow of a conversation, their whole relationship crumbling under the weight of the war.
He would have regretted that more, if he'd known that was the last time they'd ever talk, because he was going to kark up an order and Vader was going to snap his neck with the Force. Why shove a mind control chip into a whole people's heads if the person doing it didn't want them to follow orders literally? He'd even been thinking of Cody, the little part of his brain that remembered any of his brothers, as he stood in front of the Jedi Temple.
Cody jerked his head back, looking even more disturbed. “What—why are you calling me that?”
Fox finally stopped, looked down at his own hands, smaller than they should have been, and then down at his own red cadet's uniform, and felt the world spin around his head. He stumbled sideways, dropped to his knees, and heard Cody suck in an alarmed breath. “Ten—”
“Stop,” Fox said, holding a hand up. “Don't—don't talk.”
That worked for a few seconds longer than he expected, Cody frowning at him like he'd never seen Fox before in his life, despite the last four years shoved at each other's side. They had not been batch mates, had not spent their earliest years together, but they had been some of the earliest clones behind the Alphas marked for special leadership training, shoved together with the other Command candidates.
At least, if Cody really was eight, then it would have been the last four years.
Fox felt dizzy again, leaning forward to wrap his own hands around his neck, thumbs up under his chin.
“You need to get back into the bunk,” Cody whispered, crouching down in front of him. “Before someone—”
“Notices?” Fox asked, because he could remember variations of this conversation, different years back on Kamino.
“It's the middle of the night,” Cody repeated, only he wasn't Cody, not yet, because they weren't allowed to pick out their own names. That wasn't going to come until later, not officially. Some of the cadets had already started whispering to each other, the idea of naming themselves, of picking something no one could take from them that would be wholly their own. They didn't have any other possessions.
Fox remembered that Cody had liked those whispers, had always gotten a pensive look on his face when he heard them, had put his head together with Wolffe on occasion and talked about the names of generals in their history texts, of their trainers, of the few Mando'a words they'd learned by accident during training, hoarding them with their brothers. But it was too early for him to have named himself, that was a whole year away.
“Someone is going to come if they hear us moving,” Cody said, more urgent.
Dropping his hands from his neck—holding it wouldn't have helped if someone broke it with the Force anyway—he shoved Cody back. He felt warm, solid, and Fox wheezed again before he could help himself. “I'm fine, leave me alone.”
“Fine?” Cody repeated in disbelief.
“You go back to your pod if you're worried,” Fox sneered, even though he did not want Cody to leave. He wanted to wrap his fingers in his shirt and pull him close, because if he was real, that would mean something. That would mean something insane, and Fox had never had a Jedi. He'd never had to deal with the insane on the regular. He'd listened to the stories the others brought back and figured at least half of it was made up osik.
Cody did not budge, still staring at him, and that felt strange, all that intensity in his eyes without the scar curling around there. “Why did you just call me Cody?”
“I don't,” and Fox couldn't meet his eyes. “I don't know. It just felt right.”
“It felt right?” Cody asked in even greater disbelief, and Fox still had his hands tangled up in his shirt, kneeling on the ground while Cody crouched there.
“Doesn't it feel right to you?” Fox asked, and his voice cracked, and he would be far more embarrassed about that if he hadn't just died, if he hadn't been missing Cody week after endless week since the whole world fell apart, and in all the endless weeks before that too.
“Ten-T—”
“Don't call me that,” Fox snapped before he could finish.
“It's your designation,” Cody said, eyes dark as he watched him. “You're the one who keeps saying the idea of names is stupid.”
And Fox had said that, loudly, often, dismissive of Cody's desire for uniqueness and possession of one simple thing, had teased Gree and Doom and kriffing Bacara about it too, because if you really wanted to stir up shit and get hit, Bacara would oblige.
Bacara might seriously take a piece of you off if you pissed him off enough, and that at least made talking to him interesting, when he bothered to be around at all.
He hadn't seen Bacara more than once since the war started, the marines swinging by Coruscant for a week and just never coming back for leave again. He'd decided not to read anything into that, even if he was pretty sure Bacara wanted him to.
“Times change,” Fox said, and he tried to pry his fingers off Cody's shirt, tried to at least lean back, but his body refused to move.
His neck ached.
“It was four hours ago, Ten-Ten,” Cody said dryly.
It was, from all appearances, six years ago.
“A lot can happen in a few hours,” Fox said.
“You two,” a new voice said, Neyo appearing at the bottom of the ladder, but not stepping off onto the ground. He glanced at them, taking in the way Fox knelt, Cody in front of him, with a blank expression. “Back. Now.”
And they looked back at each other, because snapping to obedience from a trainer was one thing, but following Neyo's orders was an annoyance. Meeting Cody's eyes, smirking at him, like they were sharing a joke at Neyo's expense because they weren't moving very quickly, might have been the first thing that calmed him down since he hit whatever it was in that dark place, and fell into the black nothingness below it.
He thought he might have seen someone standing there, the memory going through him with a jolt, hand outstretched, but they were glowing and he couldn't see their face.
He hadn't remembered them at all until that moment.
Slowly, he untangled his fingers, leaned back enough for Cody to stand. But that was the limits of his abilities, looking down at the ground instead of rising. “Come on,” Cody said, shoving his hand into Fox's face.
Fox thought about biting it instead of taking it, couldn't remember if that would have been the sort of thing he did as a cadet anymore. So he took it, let Cody haul him back up, and let Cody stare at him until he climbed the ladder first, like Cody was worried he'd just fall back to the ground without someone behind him.
“Go to sleep before you wake anyone else up,” Neyo said, already back in his bunk, the bottom one below Fox's and Pond's. Cody's was also on the top, right across from Fox, and Fox didn't want to close his pod again, didn't want to be in the darkness by himself. There were dim lights inside the bunk when they were closed, but turning them on would alert someone that a clone wasn't getting their allotted sleep.
Sitting on the edge of his own bunk, Cody stared at him.
“You're not going to sleep,” he said, like it was a statement and not a question, just something he knew, automatically, about Fox.
“I've not slept before,” Fox shrugged.
Cody did not move, barely blinked, before he sighed. “They hate it when we don't sleep,” he murmured, before he swung himself out, grabbing the ladder and then climbing onto Fox's bunk, making Fox startle and put his hackles up.
“They hate us sharing bunks more,” he said.
“If they catch us,” Cody said, and the pods were not tiny, but they were a tight fit with two almost grown clones.
Not that that had ever stopped two brothers, as far as Fox could tell. Clones shared their pods all the time, after bad training days, after the brutal nightmares they all seemed to have, or even just because they never got the chance to see their friends any other way.
Fox died.
He wondered if that counted as a nightmare.
When Cody shoved him, he went, turning on his side, because that was the only way to make something like this work. Cody hit the button to close the bunk without looking, and Fox closed his eyes rather than keep looking at his face.
In the darkness, he could hear Cody breathing, and very little else. The pods weren't sound proof, because that would be bad in case of some emergency, but they did dampen everything else.
Cody stayed silent so long, Fox really thought he was about to go to sleep without trying to worm anything else out of Fox, and Fox was counting his breaths to see if that would help his spiraling thoughts.
“Why Cody?”
“I don't know,” Fox murmured, because he actually didn't know why Cody had picked it. He thought it might have been some oblique reference to kote, trying to slide the Mando'a past their trainers. But Cody had never explained it to Fox, had just claimed it one day and dared anyone to not use it.
Cody went silent, and Fox was trying to remember the last time he'd been this close to anyone, for this long, Cody's breaths against his shoulder, skin warm through the fabric the cadets wore. It felt flimsy and vulnerable after getting so used to wearing thermo-regulated blacks and armor.
“Why'd you chose a name tonight?” Cody asked.
“Who said I did?” Fox snorted, tried to play it off.
“You got mad at Ten-Ten,” Cody said. “You haven't used my number at all.”
Fox went silent, hoped Cody would drop it.
The only thing Cody had ever dropped was their final conversation, called away by his Jedi General and gone, never to have the time to reach out again.
“Tell me your name, Ten-Ten,” Cody said, against his collarbone, and Fox almost hit the button to kick him out.
“Fox,” he said, because he didn't have anything else.
He felt Cody take that, consider it from all angles. “Thirty-Six is going to be annoyed you beat him to it. Especially after putting up such a fuss.”
“So don't tell him,” Fox muttered, even though he felt his hands clench, one arm under his head, the other awkwardly at his side. Cody was close enough without clinging to him again.
“Uh-huh,” Cody murmured, and at least some of his curiosity sated, he seemed to be drifting off.
Fox brought his other hand up, pressed it against his neck again, started counting breaths, and jumped when Cody shifted, throwing an arm around his side, settling down into sleep.
They'd all done this, but not for a very long time.
He breathed out, thought about the strange glowing lights stretching out to darkness, and remembered that there had been stars, in that strange place.
He could almost hear Taun We, who was hardly kind, but wasn't the worst, the benediction she would say sometimes, overseeing some bit of training or other.
“You will die, but the GAR goes on forever. From water you are born. In Fire you die. Your bodies seed the stars.”
His body had seeded shit all, he thought, almost asleep. But he had seen the stars, there at the end.
-
The next morning revealed that he was still there, on Kamino, and that somehow he'd forgotten a lot.
He got distracted staring at his face in the mirror, all the scars gone, cheeks rounder and younger, the scatter of grey already staring in his hair, standing out amongst his mostly dark haired brothers. He then missed the exact timing of the shower, several of the other Command candidates looking at him sideways as he had to rush to get back to his place in line, between Wolffe and Cody, and Wolffe kept looking at Cody like he would have the answers for whatever the kriff was happening.
Fox needed to think of them by their designations again, and did not actually want to. He tried to make sure he remembered most of them as they walked to the cafeteria, because if he messed one of them up during training, he'd never live it down.
He also needed even more desperately to focus, because Kamino was regimented in ways even the Coruscant Guard had not been, and with the shock slowly wearing off, he was going to have to deal with what in the twice-damned sithhells was happening.
Walking behind Cody, Wolffe behind him and Ponds right behind him, Fox tried to remember what happened next, hoping that today would be one of the days the command classes got their hands on the coveted datapads. Unlike the other troopers, they had built in study classes to learn history and more in depth tactical analysis, the kind of thing people making the orders needed. After all, they had been picked out for their initiative and creative thinking, and that had to be nurtured somehow.
If he could get his hand on a datapad, he might be able to figure out the exact date, which felt like a good starting point.
He kept almost tripping on Cody's heels, not used to walking at that exacting pace anymore.
A group of even younger cadets passed them going the other way, multiple squads squished together, and Fox barely registered them. While cadet classes were mostly segregated by ages, sometimes the younger ones came to either watch or participate in exercises with more experienced cadets. It wouldn't be the first time, and they only looked like they were a year or so younger.
But then one of them snickered at something the cadet behind him whispered, the cadet in front of him trying to shush both of them, because they weren't supposed to talk in the hallways, and Fox tripped. He tripped, because with the complete certainty he should not have been able to have, he knew the clone, almost past him now.
He'd met him once, before the day he shot him, the ARC trooper on Coruscant for a mission months before everything went so kriffing wrong. He shouldn't have been able to pick him out of a line up without his tattoo and beard, not just from a laugh, but he whipped around, eyes meeting the startled ones of Fives.
They both froze, the moment not able to stretch very long, because the cadet behind Fives pushed him, and Wolffe, behind Fox, lifted him up by grabbing both his arms, carrying him a couple steps and putting him back down solidly enough to rattle Fox's teeth.
"Was that the Command cadets?" he heard one of the younger clones whisper. "What did you do to them?"
"I didn't do anything," Fives hissed back, and that's all Fox heard, staggering forward and away from them.
Even Cody had looked back at him, truly alarmed now.
“Are you trying to get put in a retraining pod?” Wolffe hissed behind him, and Fox forced his back to straighten, his steps to even out, flicking a dismissive hand back at Wolffe.
“I'm fine.”
“Looked like you saw a ghost,” Bly said, and Fox was pretty sure it was Ponds who snorted, but he didn't turn around to look. That would really be seeing a ghost, and he'd been avoiding the thought ever since he slid down the ladder that morning, hearing Ponds' laugh near the lockers.
“You're acting weirder than usual,” Wolffe muttered.
“Kriff off,” Fox hissed back.
“That seems pretty normal to me,” Ponds said.
But when they entered the cafeteria, Fox caught Cody looking at him, in concern. He couldn't say anything though, because eating was timed even more precisely than the showers.
Fox messed it up again, shoving the last bite of food into his mouth even as everyone else stood up to their feet.
“What is wrong with you?” Cody begged, and Fox shrugged, instead of answering.
If he could explain any of this to himself, let alone to Cody, it might have started with I just saw the clone I shot in the heart, and I didn't feel bad about it then, but later it turned out he was the only one of us who got even closer to figuring out what was going to happen, and then we all might as well have died, shut up in the jaws of something much bigger than ourselves.
It might have started with I died, actually, but I think the Force has a sense of humor.
Then he might have said, I don't think the Force and I share a sense of humor. I'm not finding any of this very funny.
Instead, when Cody kept staring at him instead of where he was supposed to be walking, he grinned with all his sharp teeth and said, “Don't think this means you'll touch my scores today. I'm not going to be that out of it.”
Cody narrowed his eyes at him, and Fox breathed, and walked, and kriffed up the timing of getting his tray back into its slot.