Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

DroidBoy6969:
ok, like, I get why everybody is talking about the tits. I really do. don’t get me wrong, they’re great tits!! but that ass needs some appreciation too! Just LOOK at it! the MUSCLES, the ROUNDNESS, the TIGHT AS KARK PANTS—it has EVERYTHING

TallMannSpotted:
@DroidBoy6969 YESSS I want to be those pants <3 <3 <3

whats_love090992:
@DroidBoy69 if this is a non-tits appreciation post, I’d like to give an honorable mention to the arms and back. Hot damn. I want him to pick me up and snap me in half like a 2x4. And that v-line in the front… *chef’s kiss* Perfect. Phenomenal. Breathtaking.

xXx_R4nc0rD3str0y3r_xXx:
@DroidBoy6969 get out of here butt boy this is a tit-man only site!!!!

[See 21938451 more replies]

Unfortunately_YourMother:
everyone unfollow me right now this is going to be the only thing I’m gonna post about from now on. fuck. shit. Ohmygawdzzz

kenobis_glistening_abs444:
HUGE W for the war effort that this absolute UNIT is out here serving the people, if u know what I mean ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

KittyqueeN:
No joke, I just clocked out for like an hour watching this guy run on repeat. the kriffing bounce is like… hypnotic. Literal drool down my face rn. I can feel the heft of those bonkers in my SOUL

dontlookatme.:
b…boobies…

cock_expert_420001:
Look, I’ll pay any amount, PLEASE more content like this @TheRepublic. I could feel myself becoming roughly 50% more patriotic just watching this compilation

ZDprofessional:
YESSS YES YES YEEEAAAS!!! OHHH MY GODS. OH MY GODDSSS BROOOOO!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!! YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I ALSDGJDkjfifherALSDGJKHAG GRRRRRR!!!!! GRRRARRAARRRGRGRG! BRGRGRGRaaaAAAAAARRAR!GGRRGAA! I’M CRAZZY IM CRAZY IM CRAZY. YOU HAVE NO IDEAA YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!!!!!! sorry ok. I’m normal now. cool tits.

NautilaRulz:
@ZDprofessional Dude.

TiLeavesComments:
@ZDprofessional somebody get this fine gentlebeing some water. they’re about to die of Thirst

RyurayguYuhahyrrararr:
@ZDprofessional rabies core

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H00tH00tMutherfarker:
I can’t believe this is real. What are they FEEDING this one to make knockers like that??? He’s got some Enormous Boobs. Absolutely Perfect Pecs. A Rockin’ Pair of Hooters. A Prize-Winning Set of Black Melons. Some Tasty Teats. A Couple of Family-Sized Milk Jugs. Some Bountiful Baps. Some Gorgeous Gazoingas…[read more]

JustSomeGuy:
Listen, I get that everybody is horny about this, but I’d like to say that this trooper is like, actually NUTS. I went back to the OG video and timed it, he was in a dead sprint for like a full HOUR. The next time you’re out of breath climbing the stairs, remember this man’s existence and weep in shame.

NotMyOrder:
Clones really do be built different…

Drgahamne14156994:
Hello, I’m Dr. Garm Hamne. I’m a doctor from Corellia and earn 600k annually. I’m looking for a sugar baby who…[read more]

TheCommenterrrrrr:
Screaming crying throwing up I need him to choke me

RRoller:
This is fake. You bantha-brained morons are falling for a government plant. This has sphotoshop written all over it.

N3varG0naGiv3:

@RRoller It’s OK bro, just count backwards from 10 while you inhale the copium. It’ll be over in a snap :)

U_Up?:
@RRoller because that’s what I’D do if I was trying to sphotoshop a government-approved thirst trap into looking so good it brainwashes the minds of millions. I’d make the trooper running laps in the back of the vid busty enough to belong in an art museum instead of using editing magic to make the group of buff, sweaty men duking it out in the foreground look like living gods. what a totally reasonable conclusion you’ve come to

Nvr_Gn4_Letudwn:
@RRoller bruh just grow up and admit you wanna fuck him so bad it makes you looks stupid XD

[See 348079 more replies]

FoShadeDingKing!!:
Damn where do I gotta go to spend the night with one of those

10.2 billion views. 900 million comments. 22 million replies just to the top comment.

Fox scrolled numbly through the replies. He’d read a thousand of them by now. Fox could count the number of comments unrelated to his creatively-worded assets on two hands.

“…Fox?” Thorn peered at Fox, concerned. Their fingers waggled seekingly over the top of the holopad. “Hello? Anybody home?”

Fox didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to the screen.

The long necks developed three million units of clones during initial production. Each unit was the size of a battalion, containing an average of 580 members. Mathematically, that meant almost two billion clones were out roaming the galaxy somewhere.

The amount of beings who had watched this video alone was over five times the adult population of his Brothers.

And the views were still climbing.

“Look, can you just get him off of me?” Thire complained from somewhere underneath Fox. “His giant armored ass is turning my ribs into calcium powder.”

Suddenly, the tablet was tugged away from him. Fox instinctively yanked against the thieving force, only for the datapad to be released suddenly, making Fox smack the pad into his own face.

Fox rubbed his smarting nose, tearing his gaze away from the comment section to glare irritatedly at Thorn. “What the hell was that for?”

“You had your spiraling face on,” Thorn deadpanned. “And you’re crushing Thire.”

“Tubie,” Fox tsked at Thire, but obligingly rolled off the commander.

Thire flipped him off. Fox didn’t bother responding, opting to turn on his side towards the wall and curl up around the tablet—a preventative measure against any further attempts at dirty thievery.

“Can I have my holopad back?” Thire whined.

“Be grateful you got your ribs back,” Fox rebutted, having already returned to frantically skimming holonet comments.

There were around ten thousand Senators on Coruscant at any given time. Close to five thousand of them had “subtly expressed interest” in Vod’e, one way or another. For each one of those Problem Senators, there were well over 150,000 nat-borns… titillated enough by the sight of Fox’s bare chest to leave a blatantly horny comment on a public video streaming service.

Thorn peered around Fox’s shoulder. “What are you looking at?”

Fox couldn’t even begin to answer that question, considering he wasn’t sure himself.

Fox felt like someone had switched off the function in his brain that allowed him to draw evidence-based conclusions. It was as if he had lost the ability to thread connective tissue between steps in his logic. He only had facts: The commenters on the video were publicly bolder in expressing their desire than a Senator. They outnumbered his Brothers five times over. They all wanted him.

“It’s just a bunch of nat-borns thirst-posting about the Vod from the Clone Fights thing a week ago,” Thire answered with an alarming degree of casual confidence, considering his response made no Force-damn sense at all.

Fox slowly turned to side-eye Thire, and found Thorn matching his level of incredulity.

“The nat-borns are what? ‘Thirst-posting?’” Thorn shook their head, “Thire, is this one of your nat-born holonet things?”

“They aren’t my nat-born holonet things,” Thire argued. “I don’t karking own them!”

“Mhm,” Thorn’s eyes crinkled amusedly at Thire’s irritation, “sure.”

Thire stared up at the ceiling as if a higher power could witness his exasperation. How silly, Fox thought. There are no gods who can see us here.

Fox could feel each individual synapse fire off in his brain as it struggled to piece together the situation.

Fox had a particular collection of data: new numbers and old experiences. Usually, these two facets of information were Fox’s lifeblood. They let him make predictions and decisions on how to best act to keep his Vod’e safe. However, at the present moment, they might be conspiring to kill him and dump his corpse down an industrial trash shoot.

It simply could not be the case that the old experiences could be applied to the new numbers. It was a simple proof by contradiction: if Fox’s usual experiences with nat-borns were applicable to this new, mind-bogglingly huge group of nat-borns, then there was simply nothing to be done. He would fail to protect himself and his Vod’e no matter what. The odds against them would be too big, and Fox would be too small. And since that could not be the case—not now, not after all he’d done to keep them safe, not after everything they’d been through together—then it was not the case.

Fox refused. Fox denied. Obviously, so obviously, there was another explanation. Fox just had to dig deep, deep, deep down and find it.

Then, in a brilliant moment of word-association, the answer came to him.

“Oh.” Fox’s whole body un-tensed, pure relief flooding his being. “I get it now.”

“Uh,” Thire blinked at Fox quizzically. “…You do?”

Fox nodded serenely. He understood now.

“Great,” Thorn said, “can you tell me what you get? I have no idea what’s happening here.”

“‘Thirst-posing,’” Fox chuckled knowingly. He had everything figured out. His enlightenment was euphoric. “It’s a joke.”

Thire’s brows raised in query. “Hmm?”

Fox waggled the holopad in the air above him. “It’s just like your ‘shit-posting.’” Fox ignored Thire’s annoyed exclamation that shit-posting didn’t “belong” to him. He felt a floaty smile overcome his face. “It’s all some weird, karked-up nat-born joke. It’s not supposed to make sense.”

“Uh…” Thire took in Fox’s expression warily. “Not make…sense? What part about it doesn’t make sense?”

Fox sprang into motion, jumping from his curled fetal position to his knees with the tablet pushed into Thire’s face. Thire swiftly leaned away, so Fox helpfully adjusted the datapad even closer to his youngest commander’s eyes.

“This part,” Fox rapidly tapped a particularly ridiculous comment. “This person wants to be trapped in a headlock and asphyxiate via tit-smothering.”

Thorn choked out an “excuse me, what the kark?” somewhere outside of Fox’s tunnel vision.

Thire glanced quickly between the holo-tablet and Fox’s delighted expression, cringing. “Uh… yeah. That’s pretty standard for—”

“And this person—” Fox scrolled intently to another reply “—wants to pay eighty thousand credits for a picture of a clone’s face!” Fox cackled at the mere thought. He then abruptly stopped, because he realized he was laughing at nat-born jokes. Nat-borns (with very limited exception) were never funny. Fox should get ‘Quito to check his head again. Thire was looking at him like he would agree.

Fox turned the tablet to re-read the comment, just to make sure he’d comprehended it correctly the first time. “And if the holopic includes their ankles, they’d bump it up to a hundred!”

“Eighty—One hundred thousand—!” Screeched Thorn in the distance. Was he getting further away? Weird. “What the shit is happening with your holonet, Thire?”

“Actually fuck off, Thorn,” Thire snipped, even as he stared at Fox like he’d suddenly transformed into a wild rancor out to feast on clone flesh.

“I know!” Fox laughed. Maybe Fox laughed a little too hard for a little too long, based on the frighteningly concerned look developing on Thire’s face. “I know.”

“And sure, there’s probably a small percentage of freaks who’d actually seek out a Vod to snap their spines like a stylus—” A small percentage like… what was one percent of ten billion, again? Years of rigorous assessments had Fox’s brain immediately jumping to process the math—ten billion, a 10 followed by nine zeros, and finding one percent was as easy as moving the decimal two places to the left—

Actually, no. No no no no no no—

Fox grit his teeth against the sudden spinning of the room. Executive decision: no more math today.

“—But the non-freakish majority of nat-borns—” were the majority of nat-borns non-freaks? Unlikely. Fox felt his heart rate spike dramatically as the thought crossed his mind. He repressed it, but not soon enough. “—don’t actually want to be paralyzed for life or smothered to death.” Probably. He hoped.

“That’s…true,” Thire said carefully, as if cautious about what trouble he’d find by agreeing with Fox. “A lot of what people say on the holonet is hyperbole. I guess it is kinda funny… finding the most ludicrous way to say how hot they find somebody makes comments feel more comical instead of, like, super gross—”

“Ha! Ha ha ha!” Fox interrupted, his grin turning frenzied. He reached over and tapped the younger commander on the nose. “No!”

Thire rubbed the tip of his nose. “…‘No,’ what?”

“‘No’ as in ‘wrong!’” His brothers winced at his volume. Was he being too loud? Osik.

“Wrong.” Fox repeated, quieter. “Because that part is also fake.”

Thire eyed Fox, looking more alarmed and uneasy than ever before. Fox nodded sagely back, glad that he could clear up the younger commander’s confusion.

“…‘Fake?’” Thire agitatedly raked his hands down his face. “I feel like I might regret asking this… but which part of what I said is fake? The hyperbole thing? That the comments are supposed to be funny? I thought that’s what we just agreed on!”

Oh, Fox had most certainly not cleared up the confusion with his vod. Well, that was easily fixable.

“Fake as in…” Fox let out a laugh that sounded hunted even to his own ears. “Look, nobody actually wants to fuck people they see in videos, right?”

Thire’s brows shot to his hairline. “What.”

“Right!” Fox confirmed. Thire exchanged an utterly mystified glance with someone outside of Fox’s line of sight—probably Thorn. Understandable, since Fox was equally befuddled by the concept of people wanting to have sex with completely inaccessible beings.

“I mean, I suppose if the person was there in the room, it would make sense,” Fox admitted. “Because you can have sex with people who are bodily present. Not with people behind a screen. Because that would be physically impossible.”

Thire opened his mouth and held up a finger like he wanted to object but couldn’t decide what he wanted to protest first. After a moment of stunned silence, he let his finger drop and his teeth clack shut.

“And I know it’s pretty easy to forget, since we have to witness those rat-assed Senators dick around in their Sphere of Losers all day,” Fox rolled his eyes for emphasis here, “but not every nat-born is actually irrational enough to think that they can kark somebody through a holopad.” The Marshal Commander gestured to the holopad full of horny nat-borns. “Clearly, this is all a bit.”

“…A bit?” The 501st must have been in port, because there was an echo in the room.

“A bit.” Fox confirmed, folding his arms frustratedly. “A falsehood in the name of comedy. A joke. A jape, if you must.”

“What,” Thire asked, brow raised teasingly. “All of them?”

Fox nodded very seriously. “Correct.”

Thire blinked. Fox blinked back, slower.

“…Every nat-born who commented on this video?” Thire clarified, eyeing the view count.

“Anyone who implies they can kark a person through a holo that isn’t even in real time,” Fox scoffed.

“Okay, wait. Let me see if I’m getting this right,” Thire rubbed his temples to soothe a headache. “In your mind, when people on the internet say they want to kriff somebody they find attractive in a video… they’re always just kidding?”

Fox shrugged. “Most of them, yeah.” An utterly negligible and almost certainly distant minority of thoroughly senseless nat-borns aside… there could absolutely not be billions of people who had the desire to “physically interact” with Fox.

Fox tried to conceptualize billions of nat-borns. Or, hell, just one billion nat-borns. One billion, standing shoulder to shoulder, crowded along the 100-lane highway right in front of Corrie HQ. If Fox stood on top of Guard headquarters and looked out over them all, he wouldn’t be able to see anywhere close to the edges of the crowd. The Guard themselves officially numbered just under 2,500. If Fox’s secret squads were thrown into the mix, including non-combatants, the Corries were around 4,000 strong.

Fox barely smothered a cascading giggle that crept up his throat like bile. What was 4,000 compared to one billion? Unfortunately, Fox had already turned off the math portion of his brain for the day, so he supposed he’d never know.

“I—” Thire valiantly attempted to regain control over his words. “…Fox. I am sure people realize they probably won’t ever kriff the people they watch online. That doesn’t mean it’s completely a joke when they say they want to—they—” Thire cut off with a frustrated sound. He rubbed his face again. “Obviously, they use the videos for other things. Things that aren’t sex, but just… sex adjacent.”

Fox nodded in agreement, forcibly requiring his sense of calm. “Like advice.”

“No—” Thire near involuntarily punched out the denial in the same beat Fox finished speaking before cutting himself off with a wounded whine. Thire turned his head away as if he couldn’t bear to look any longer. “I—I don’t know if I can fucking do this,” he mumbled to himself.

“What? They do!” Fox insisted. “Are you going to stand there and tell me that during all that time you’ve spent browsing, you’ve never come across a Passive Training Demo for Karking on a holosite before? Even I know those videos basically make up half the holonet!”

“‘Passive Training Demo for Karking—’” Thire repeated Fox’s description as if he had to solve it like a riddle, before his eyes widened and he began shaking his head in denial. “Fox, no. You can’t be talking about porn.”

Fox snorted. “Thire, they might call it some cutesy nat-born name, and it might all be wrapped up in a few layers of bantha-shit so it doesn’t look Kamino-clinical, but that’s what they are. They’re Training Demos for nat-borns. For karking.”

“I’m going to fucking cry.” Thire threatened.

“It’s literally what they’re for!” Fox defended. “They tell nat-borns how to kriff each other. It trains them for what to do if they’re in the field and encounter specific scenarios—like what to do when you engage with a Twi'lek, or a Wookie—”

“‘The field,’” Thire echoed with horror. “Oh gods—Fox, porn is not military training for sex!”

“No, it’s civilian training for sex,” Fox corrected snidely. “Which is why it’s so kriffing indirect with the orders, since nat-borns get pissy when they get told clear instructions for some Force-damn reason—”

“Porn is not training, Fox!” Thire interrupted with a sweep of his hand, clearly fed up. “Sure, sometimes there is… advice you can get out of it, but that’s a secondary objective at best.”

“Fine, oh wise master of the holonet,” Fox snarked, “then what is it for?”

Thire stared at Fox. “…You want me to explain what porn is for?”

Fox folded his arms and stared the younger commander dead in the eye. “Yup.”

Thire made a sound that was a cross between choking and a squawk. “Fox. You have to know what it’s for! Half of your own Force-damn criminal empire is about trading it!”

“If the GAR wants the directions for impressing whatever nat-borns they convince to fuck them, then that’s their business.” Fox sniffed derisively at the thought of actively training to solicit nat-borns for sex on purpose. “There’s no accounting for taste, though.”

“I’m—!” Thire pinched the bridge of his nose, growing further incensed by the second. “There’s no fucking way you think that’s why they want—”

“And, by the way, I’m hearing a lot of complaining and not enough explaining.” Fox smirked. “So get to it, explanation boy.”

“Fox!” Thire sputtered. “You are functionally a mob boss! You are The Ori’Vod! You should not need me to explain what porn is for to you!”

“Do you know how arguments work?” Fox scoffed. “You’re the one who’s saying I’m wrong, and now you need to prove why you’re right. An explanation on your end is required.”

Thire gaped like a fish. He glanced around the room like he was scanning for exits, and fumbled his opening counterclaim for a solid five seconds. He looked pleadingly in Thorn’s direction and obviously received no helpful response.

Thire warily turned back to Fox. “This… is a prank, right?”

Fox raised a brow in answer.

The younger commander drooped defeatedly.

“It’s when you—you need it to be able to—it’s…” Thire searched for words, before completely giving up, “…for jerkin’ it.”

Fox raised both his other brow so they matched. Oh.

Somewhere in the far distance, Thorn facepalmed. Hard.

Thire glared over his shoulder. “You could fucking help me you know,” he whisper-yelled. Fox rolled his eyes, but graciously allowed Thire to flagrantly cheat at arguing by running to Thorn for help, even though they weren’t even here.

Thorn snorted loudly. “I’m never on the holonet. I’m not touching this.”

“Yeah, but you know what porn is for—!” Thire hissed. And then he abruptly stopped, terror creeping into his expression. “…Do you know what porn is for?”

“What? Of course I do,” Thorn retorted, bemused.

“Oh thank the little gods for that,” Thire breathed. “I could not handle being the only commander in the room who knows what porn is for—”

Thorn smirked audiably. “It’s for training, obviously.”

“You shut the hell your mouth right now!” Thire yelled. “I know you know it fucking isn’t!”

Thorn was perfectly smug. “Not sure what you mean, vod. Did you not know the vids were just for training? Kind of a ‘cringe,’ as your holonet people like to say.”

“AUGH!” Thire shrieked. “For kriffs sake, they’re not my holonet people! And I’ve heard you use ‘cringe’ properly before, Thorn.”

“Oh, have you now?” Thorn laughed. “Sounds like a skill issue, if you’ve heard it that often.”

“I’ll kill you.” An infuriated gleam entered Thire’s eyes. “I’ll kill you, and they’ll never stop finding your body—”

“Alright, that’s enough.” Fox sighed. “I think I see what’s going on here now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Thire asked hysterically, several octaves above his usual speaking voice. “Please, what totally reasonable conclusion have you come to now? Enlighten me, Fox.”

“Thire,” Fox started gently, “you don’t need to be embarrassed, alright?”

Thire leaned away from Fox, assessing him warily. “I don’t… think I need to be, no.”

The Marshal Commander nodded and tried his best to project his sincerity. “Listen, there is nothing wrong with still needing the tutorials—”

Thire’s jaw dropped. Thorn wheezed, then coughed loudly into their hand.

“—but after enough times, eventually you’re going to know what to do without looking at the manual.” Fox shrugged casually. “In my opinion, I say take as much time as you need to figure it out. There’s no pressure—it’s not like the trainers are breathing down are necks about this—”

The younger commander shrieked. Threw up his head and both hands, pleading to absent deities: “Oh my fucking Force!”

“—But just because the tutorials are a requirement for you right now, that doesn’t mean it will always be like that, or that everyone else is the same way,” Fox continued. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might be incorrectly assuming your extremely niche experiences are universal and misinterpreting the true purpose of nat-born sex education—or ‘porn,’ sorry.”

Thorn was belly laughing, one fist shoved against his mouth to muffle the sound, the other pounding full force against the dorm wall.

“This is terrible!” Thire buried his hands in his hair and pulled. “I hate this so kriffing much!”

“But the fact of the matter is,” Fox continued, ignoring Thire’s dramatics. “Once you’ve memorized the instructions, you will no longer need ‘porn’ as a guide. It basically becomes obsolete.”

Thire wasn’t looking too well. His hands were fisted in his hair, the lines of his face tense. His eyes were round, trained on Fox, as if he were watching a particularly gnarly speeder crash and was incapable of looking away. And were those tears threatening to form? Osik. Fox really had tried to be as gentle as possible in his explanation, too.

“Porn,” Thire breathed shakily, like he might actually cry. “Is not. Training!”

“Thire,” Fox soothed, “it’s okay—”

“No it’s not!” Thire exclaimed, borderline unconsolable. “For kriffs sake! Porn is for getting off! It’s not just there to tell you how to masturbate, or how to fuck people! If it was just karking instructions, then why do I—why do people jerk off to videos of nat-borns having sex? At stuff that has nothing to do with deeces, even!” Thire jabbed his finger violently at him. “Why is that, Fox?”

Fox scrunched his face at Thire, starting to feel some second hand embarrassment. He really hadn’t needed to know that about his vod. But for the sake of extending the argument and avoiding the dreaded realm of math, Fox would endure.

“Thire,” Fox said with the patience of a Master Jedi, “how in this Force-forsaken galaxy could a holoprojection get anyone off if it wasn't telling them how to do it better? Obviously it doesn’t matter if a video is playing stuff on a screen or not, it’s always just going to be you and your hand. It’s the exact same situation, physically, so how would it feel any different?”

Thire looked at Fox for a long, long moment, body tense, mouth pursed, finger still jammed into the air. But ultimately, he let his hand fall limply back down to his side without a fight.

“Yeah,” Thire mumbled numbly. “I give up.”

Fox nodded, satisfied with Thire’s submission to his superior logic. “As you should.”

“You win the conversation, Fox!” Thire did some semi-enthused jazz-hands to mimic confetti. “Congratu-fucking-lations.”

“As if the outcome was ever in doubt,” Fox sniffed.

“I didn’t even wanna have this kriffing conversation in the first place,” Thire muttered self-soothingly.

“Neither did I.” Fox informed his vod primly. “Now that we’ve cleared up all our misconceptions about the Karking Training Demos—”

Thire whimpered.

“—oh, fine,” Fox rolled his eyes, “the ‘porn.’ In any case, we can get back to my original point.”

Thire stared at Fox. Fox stared right back.

Thire broke first. “…And? What was your point?”

Fox looked askance. “I was hoping you remembered.”

Thire sucked in a breath and started to make minute yet very intense strangling motions with his hands. “Fox—!”

“You were saying it was all a bit,” Thorn piped up helpfully. “‘It’ being the nat-born thirstiness comments and whatnot.”

Fox snapped his fingers. “Right! Thank you, Thorn. Amazing work, as always.” Even when Thorn wasn’t here, he was still so on top of it. Phenomenal.

Thorn bashfully accepted the compliment. “I try.”

Thire dragged his hands down his face miserably. “As long as I didn’t sit through that karking conversation for no Force damn reason…”

“Actually, you were standing through it,” Fox informed his vod, ignoring the sour look he got in return. “But yes, to summarize: the video is a joke, the comments are a joke, and when the nat-borns say they want to go find and fuck a Vod in response to the video, they can’t be telling the truth, because they’re lying for comedy.”

“Sure, why not?” Thire sighed numbly. “You’re so right, Fox. Who could possibly think otherwise.”

“Exactly!” Fox might have been a little loud just then, but he’d just had the best epiphany and couldn’t bring himself to not address it.

Thire rubbed his ears, cringing. “Osik, Fox, easy on the volume—!”

“And actually—” Fox grinned and nodded to himself enthusiastically, “actually, it tracks. It’s completely in line with all the other stuff nat-borns think is funny. In fact, it’s so exactly like all the other stuff they consider ‘entertainment,’ that it’s impossible for it to not be a joke. I mean, sex and violence?” Fox laughed here for emphasis, but it came out sounding far more like a shriek than intended and made his vod jump. “They might as well not know the karking difference!”

Thire stared for a good five seconds in horrified silence.

He pointed at Fox, but turned to Thorn. “Okay, what the kark is going on?”

“Me?” Thorn fired back incredulously from somewhere, “I just got here! I know the least of what’s going on of anyone in this room. It’s your holonet.”

“It’s not my—I don’t own—!” Thire grit his teeth and began making more hopefully subconscious strangling motions with his hands.

“Just—” Thire stomped over to whatever distant land contained Thorn and leaned in close to the older vod, putting a hand on their shoulder and pulling their ear close. “You are the Fox Whisperer,” he hissed lowly. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but that—” Thire gestured vaguely in Fox’s direction, where he was on his knees hugging the tablet tight to cover his chest. The datapad jostled slightly from the force of Fox’s uncontrollable giggling. “—is a Fox’ed Situation if I’ve ever seen one. So get whispering, whisper-boy!”

And with that, Thire retreated to the edge of Fox’s awareness while shoving Thorn into center stage.

“Hey Thorn,” Fox greeted.

Thorn sighed, “Hey, Fox.”

“Nice of you to come back,” Fox said.

Thorn did the brow-raising-lip pursuing expression he favored for humoring Fox. “Come back from where?”

“From wherever Thire is now,” Fox clarified.

Thorn instantly plastered their face with a pleasant but blank expression. It was the kind of face Thorn liked to wear when he very suddenly realized the puddle they expected to be able to walk right through was actually deeper than he was tall and colder than the depths of space but couldn’t show it in front of the Shinies. “I see.”

“Thorn,” Fox was vibrating. “Thorn.”

Thorn was blank. “Mhm?”

Fox angled forward like it was a secret, and Thorn put a halting hand on Fox’s shoulder when he’d gone far enough to lean out beyond the bunk’s threshold. “Nat-borns are so dumb, Thorn.”

Thorn closed their eyes, suddenly sad. “Yes. They are.”

“Imagine,” Fox gasped, he was laughing so hard, crushing the datapad tight against his chest, “imagine actually thinking someone could need to kark a person they see on a screen so bad that they’d go out an’ find a clone to choke them to death about it?”

“Mhm.” Thorn gently maneuvered Fox back away from the edge of the bed. “I think it would be nicer to imagine it laying down, instead.”

“—And it doesn’t make logical sense!” Fox continued, caught up in the rhapsody of figuring out the grand mystery that was stupid nat-born behavior. “No one thinks that you can physically fuck people through a screen! No one would actually do any of this! No one in this comment section means anything they’re saying!”

“Fox?” Thorn tried, almost desperate.

“None of this is real,” Fox smiled distantly. The Commander felt far away from his body on the material plane. It was nice. “It’s not something I have to deal with because nothing is real.”

“Do you see what I mean?” Thire whisper-hissed from someplace irrelevant.

“Shut,” Thorn chirped, smile turning brittle, “the fuck up!”

“Yeah,” Fox echoed, “shut up, Thire! You left so neither of us can hear you anymore.”

“Oh, gods,” Thorn muttered to himself. “I really thought you were just fucking with him. This is much worse than I thought. Osik.”

“It is pretty bad, huh?” Fox acknowledged. “Nat-born jokes… are the karkin’ worst.”

Thorn sagged. “Yeah—”

“They’re never funny,” Fox complained, gripping the datapad tighter. “And they always—always gotta be on my Vod’e. We always gotta be the entertainment.” Something hard gave way under Fox’s fingers.

“Oh-kay!” Thorn interjected, suddenly much closer and gently prying the tablet out of Fox’s crushing grip. “Let’s take a break from the holonet for a bit, actually.”

Fox let him take the holopad, because what more did he need it for? There was nothing on it that affected him. There weren’t actually ten billion people gunning for Fox in a sexual capacity. It’s all just a joke and everything was fine. It’s not real and nothing can hurt him.

But now that the pad was gone from his grip, attention was drawn to his shaking hands. Fox clenched his fists, willing them to stop trembling. When that didn’t work nearly as well as he was aiming for, he stuffed them under his thighs and out of view. If he couldn’t see the problem, then it was almost certainly not within his jurisdiction.

Fox swallows and his throat is dry. He should get some water.

Actually, yeah. Water sounded really kriffing good.

“Hey, hey, udesii vod,” Thorn’s hand caught on his chest, stopping Fox from getting his karking water for some Force-forsaken reason. “What are you trying to do right now?”

Magnanimously, Fox revealed the extent of his brilliant plan: “Gettin’ water.”

Thorn stared meaningfully at the way Fox was putting almost his entire weight on Thorn’s hand, and how his Commander had stopped Fox from leaving the bed face first. Which, honestly, wasn’t fair at all. Fox was fully planning on catching himself long before hitting his head and then dragging himself listlessly across the dorm floor for just a little bit. A temporary but effective solution to the inconvenience of Fox being too dizzy to use his legs.

Couldn’t a man pathetically drag himself on his stomach to his door every once and awhile just for the fun of it? It was prime enrichment for a Corrie Guard. Fox was prioritizing his mental health.

Thorn thinned his lips. Not a good sign. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Fox affirmed. “M’ thirsty.” Fox blinked at himself, and felt more giggles burbling up from his throat at his unintentional reference. He swallowed them back down. They tasted acidic. Nat-borns really were a bad influence, especially in the comedy department.

Now Fox had the taste of bile on the back of his tongue and a dry throat. There has never been a better time, Fox thought, trying to get up once again, to get some karking water.

Thorn yet again physically thwarted Fox’s attempt to leave the bed and get his karking water. “Why don’t you lie down and let Thire get some water for you, vod?”

“What? Ow—!” Thire yanked his shin away from Thorns swift boot. “Uh—yeah! I can get some water.”

It was nice of Thorn to offer for Thire in the younger vod’s absence, but, actually, Fox currently needed to be doing something. He couldn’t believe he wished he had paperwork to finish right now.

“No,” Fox pushed forward, “No, I have to go.”

“Okay,” Thorn offered placatingly, “okay, we’ll go get some water.”

And with that, Thorn finally let up Fox to go get his karking water.

“Oh, hey Thire,” Fox greeted as Thire came back from wherever he had been that wasn’t with Fox. Thire hooked an arm under his shoulder and hauled him up, with Thorn mirroring him on the other side. “Have a good time?”

Thire’s mouth said nothing, but his everything else said ‘not at all.’

“That’s too bad,” Fox responded.

(Thorn’s lips were pale with worry.

“Why the hell would you show him that?” Thorn hissed through Thire’s internal com.

“I didn’t show him,” Thire whispered defensively. “I explicitly tried not to show him.”

“Not well enough.” Thorn grumbled back, readjusting their grip on their ori’vod as he stumbled drunkenly. Thorn had shoved Fox’s helmet on before stepping out of the dorm, but Thire could still see Fox’s ashen, numb face in his mind’s eye.

“How the kark was I supposed to know he’d have a reaction?” Thire shot back, not meeting Thorn’s eyes.

“You know how he gets with nat-borns!” Then, they sighed. “But… I get it. I thought… you’d think with Fox wanting General Vos around so much, he would’ve gotten a little better about nat-born stuff…”

…But there are some things you don’t just ‘get over,’ Thorn didn’t need to finish.

Thire chewed his lip, and looked away.)

Fox, Thorn, and Thire walked down to the commissary. Well, Thorn and Thire walked, and Fox was frog marched down the hall due to his ongoing spell of dizziness.

With a Commander on either side of him, they formed a horizontal blockade as they made their way down the narrow halls in a stunning display of competence from over half of the Coruscant Guard's highest ranking command staff. Fox let out another delirious giggle as a pair of wide-eyed ARF troopers heading the opposite direction flattened themselves against the wall to let the command trio pass by.

Finally, they got to the officers’ commissary. Thorn and Thire released him to shoo a couple confused and alarmed underlings out of the room, letting Fox make a beeline for the faucet.

Fox got his karking water. The Marshal Commander grabbed a metal bowl from the lowest shelf of the cupboard and stuck it under the tap, sightlessly watching the brownish water overflow onto his gloves.

Thorn turned their attention away from the closing door behind the retreating underlings, eyes going round upon spotting Fox with his brown water.

“Fox wait—!”

Fox did not.

The water tasted like rust and anti-freeze. He threw it up immediately. Thanks, Coruscant.

After Fox stopped vomiting and the medics were able to cram a frankly excessive amount of medications down his throat, Fox became very busy hunting down the idiot nat-born(s) who had carelessly redirected untreated water into Corrie HQ’s plumbing. Mercifully, he had absolutely no time to think about the video or the nat-borns who enjoyed it at all. Who would have thought Fox would ever be grateful to the looming, oh-so distracting threat of space dysentery?

At the end of the day, the plumbing wasn’t fixed. Neither was Fox’s life.

Fox’s profound sense of denial lasted until he was trying to fall asleep that night.

Fox stared into the dark. The horrid, chalky texture of space hepatitis antibiotics lingered on his tongue. He could fall asleep to escape the sensation, but that meant opening himself up to a new set of equally horrible problems.

As the artificial sunlight faded to nothing on Coruscant, Fox had long since progressed into jumping at the long casted shadows spawned from HQ’s narrow windows. When Fox passed close enough to the front desk, the non-Vod’e voices echoing from the public lobby made every muscle in his body lock up, stopping him in his tracks. He spent the rest of the day taking routes through winding, hidden backrooms of the ancient building, peering out windows and vent grates, glancing furtively over his shoulder for sudden mass-invasions of nat-borns.

His paranoia followed him into unconsciousness, where he tossed and turned, visions of two billion copies of Orn Fre Taa hunting him through the halls of Corrie HQ.

He’d startled awake with his heart racing twice now. The only reason Fox didn’t leap out of bed and start running like his pursuers had followed him into the waking world was due to Stone’s steady, unconscious weight pinning his arm and shoulder to the berth.

Both Hound and Thorn were on duty during Fox’s sleep shift, meaning the dorms were under capacity with three Vod’e to four beds. Despite this, Fox still somehow found himself tucked between Stone and the wall.

A part of his fogged mind had picked up on how at least one of his commanders was always inexplicably present in the room with him that day, but acknowledging their hovering would also mean acknowledging why they felt the need to do so. And, honestly, Fox would rather die.

He forced his glued-open eyes to blink. They were so dry he could hear his lids slide shut over his eyeballs. Ugh.

Fox would rather die, but it was looking like he might be forced to accept the death. He didn’t know if he could live like this.

The comforting pressure of Fox’s vod at his side, metaphorically throughout the day and physically at the present moment, was just enough to compress Fox’s scattered grey matter back into the semblance of something functional.

And Fox knew that was exactly what his commanders were trying to do. Protecting him from his own fried brain. Fox hugged the arm thrown over his chest just a little tighter. His vod’e were so considerate, Fox was actually kind of annoyed about it. Without them, Fox was just bloody chunks in shark-infested water.

He knew from experience that how his commanders had handled him distancing himself from reality—keeping an eye on him, preventing things from violently snapping him out of the delusion—was the best option, for him and for the Brothers around him. It didn’t mean he had to like it, or that he didn’t struggle to not feel ashamed at needing the help when he was the one who should be mentally present enough to provide for his vod’e.

Well, there’s nothing for it, Fox thought grimly. He wasn’t getting to sleep, so he might as well bite the bullet and start developing a game plan the way he should have done the instant he’d discovered this cluster-kark.

Move over, crippling fear and denial: It was Marshal Commander Time.

Step one, assess the damage.

Fox… did not know the extent of the damage. But conveniently, there was someone in the room who could find out for him.

Fox gently pried his vambrace out from under Stone’s backplate. As expected, his vod remained dead to the world. Slept like a stone, that one. (Hound had two bottles of moonshine bet on that being how they got their name. Fox knew it was because their batch had once mistaken Stone’s astoundingly bald head for a boulder during stealth training on Kamino. Stone had promised him three bottles of moonshine if he kept it secret until the bet ran its course.)

Even though his armor and blacks were thermoregulated, Fox still experienced the unpleasant sensation of the far-too-cold dorm air leeching the heat away from his formerly buried arm. Corrie HQ had an on-again off-again relationship with its air conditioning unit. The AC was older than Yoda and desperately needed to be replaced, but the idea of the nat-borns in the Senate shelling out credits for “clone comfort” was actually laughable, so the temperature wasn’t being fixed any time soon. Most Vod’e slept in their armor on nights like these to keep away the pervasive chill in the air, a barrier between them and the building’s bare metal interior sucking the heat from their bones.

Still, some Vod’e still managed to make the best of sleeping in their chronically lumpy armor—Thire, for example. The commander had developed a bad habit of watching videos on his helmet until he drifted off. Fox turned his senses to Thire, just barely still awake in the bunk below, undoubtedly doom-scrolling through his terrible nat-born internet posts.

Perfect. Step one-aurek, get Thire to tell Fox the extent of the damage, was off to an excellent start.

Fox crept over his bunk-buddy, and Stone predictably continued to snore like a flock of loose chainsaws in a cyclone. Fox always found it funny that the quiet vod was loudest when asleep. (Another good karking reason to sleep in armor: the helmets muted external sound. The fact that Fox could still hear Stone through the noise canceling on both their helmets spoke to the monstrous loudness of the commander’s snoring. Honestly, Fox might’ve needed to sleep with his helmet on even if he had three blankets and a bunk on the other side of the building because of Stone.)

Fox silently crawled head-first down the side of the bunk. When Fox’s head was about level with Thire’s, he held his position upside down in a mimicry of how he’d startled the commander earlier that day.

After far too many oblivious seconds, Thire jolted, finally locking his visor onto Fox’s upside-down one. That man, Fox thought exasperatedly, was far too engrossed with nat-born entertainment for his tastes.

Fox’s eyes narrowed at Thire, incredulous. “I should give you a hundred more years of Awareness Training. That reaction time was abysmal.”

“…You have to stop being upside down.” Thire said with paper-thin calmness, completely ignoring Fox’s very serious threat. “It’s not good for my health.”

Fox flicked his hand at the younger vod. “Scoot.”

Thire scooted closer to the wall, leaving a nice, Fox-sized space.

Fox gripped the underside of the top bunk and pulled himself from his perch. He started to lizard-crawl upside down into position, fingers, and then boots, hooked into the underside of the squealing bunk railing.

“Oh kark, Fox—” Thire made some moves very obviously meant to protect Fox from falling and breaking his neck.

“Knock that shit off,” Fox irritably batted the young commander’s grasping hands away. “I’m not—my head is… better. From earlier today.” Fox averted his eyes from how dangerously close he was to addressing one of his least favorite topics. “I’m not going to fall.”

Thankfully, Thire backed off. Fox maneuvered himself with perfect dexterity, going smoothly from clinging to the bottom of the top bunk down directly onto Thire’s bed. See, Thire? Fox was perfectly capable again.

Now the two of them sat, armored sides pressed together, both staring at the darkened wall of the dorm in awkward silence. Fox idly rubbed his gloved hand on the ridge of the bare spring mattress. Alpha-17 would have had his hide if he saw Fox that way, his armor on in bed—he’d read Fox and his Guards the riot act about “unsanitary conditions” and “military hygiene,” just to give them shit for anything. But in Fox’s humble opinion, armor in bed was only nasty if you ever slept in the aforementioned bed without armor. Or had actual sheets to get dirty.

Gods, thought Fox. The galaxy had to be karked if he was actually missing that old bastard Alpha-17, now. Fox wondered if he was truly that desperate for an ori’vod to help him get his shit together.

Something grabbed his heart and squeezed. Fox breathed in, and out. And then again to combat the tightness in his throat.

“I—” Fox started.

“So—” Thire said at the same time. “Uh. You first.”

“…Thanks.” Fox croaked. “Right.”

It was fucking Marshal Commander Time. Not Crying Time. Crying Time was always scheduled after Marshal Commander Time. Marshal Commander Time had a series of steps to follow, and Fox was still on Step 1-a: Get Thire to spill his guts.

“I’m sorry,” Fox blurted. “For earlier today.” Osik. That was not step 1-a. That was nowhere near being step 1-a. “I was… really out of it.”

“Oh.” Thire paused for just a heartbeat, processing. “No, Fox. You don’t gotta apologize for that—”

“Yes, I do,” Fox bit out, and kriff, he guessed this was step 0: own up to the fact there was an emerging disaster caused entirely by him, and apologize for his brain being AWOL for an entire day instead of fixing it. “There was an emergency today and I was karking out of it. I was a burden to you and the others because you had to follow me around all day to keep me from getting myself killed.”

And, shit. This was not avoiding the topic Fox would really prefer to ignore. Force damn stupid emotions, getting in the way of his Marshal Commandering…

…And now Thire was directing a bunch of sadness his way. Kriff everything.

“You’re not a burden, Fox!” Thire exclaimed quietly, mindful of their setting. “We have these support systems for a reason. They’re for when anyvod needs help. Including you.”

Fox pursed his lips and said nothing, not quite able or willing to circumvent that particular argument. Out loud. It would set a bad precedent, see.

“Fox,” Thire said exasperatedly, entirely unsatisfied with his silence, “you designed the Vod’e support system for this kind of thing. You literally can’t complain.”

It was true. Fox designed the systems for when Vod’e needed emotional support. However, he hadn’t intended for his creation to be turned around on himself. Technically, the Corrie Mental Health Support System couldn’t be implemented for Fox as it was for other Vod’e: he was simply too high ranking, too visible.

After all, if Fox were any other Vod besides himself, his Support System would have dictated he never set foot in the Senate building again. He should have been sequestered to a secret squad or even the ANB Ward ages ago according to Protocol. The nat-borns didn’t notice much, but they’d notice if the Marshal Commander himself disappeared off the face of the planet.

It was his commanders who took initiative to extend their modified version of the Support Protocol to Fox, and they protected him whenever he got so wound up his brain popped out of his skull from the pressure. Gods, what would he even be without them?

However. Fox was not one to back down from a challenge. He crossed his arms and pouted. “I can complain about anything, fool.”

“Fox…” Thire admonished.

“Thire,” Fox snipped back in the same tone.

Thire didn’t rise to the bait, softening instead and oozing a bunch of stupidly sincere feelings into the air. “You’d do the same for any of us.”

He didn’t know how to explain to Thire that, as Marshal Commander, as an ori’vod, Fox needed to be on top of his own brain. He was standing between his Corries and the vileness of Coruscant. It made his gut churn to think about leaving his Vod’e to the wolves because he couldn’t get his act together.

Shame curled in Fox’s gut, and embarrassment heated his neck and throat. Gods, today had been a nightmare for him. He’d had an episode at the worst possible time. He’d spent the day off in another world when he should have been gearing up to protect his Corries from the huge new threat. It was pure luck nothing had happened already.

“I don’t—” Fox cleared his throat a little to disperse some of the building tightness in it. “I didn’t really want to talk about this.”

“Alright.” Thire relented easily. “What’s up?”

“I need info.” Fox began. There. That was a good start on step 1-a.

“…Sure thing.” Thire responded warily. “Not sure what I could tell you that you don’t already know, though. You know literally everything about me. I’m pretty sure you know the strategy I use to brush my teeth.”

“Scrubbing in the front, circular brushing in the back, tongue and roof of mouth last,” Fox rattled off automatically. “That’s not even a challenge, Thire. We all got taught to do it the same way.”

“…Oh yeah,” blinked Thire. “I forgot about that.”

Fox rolled his eyes, making sure the motion was clear even from under his helmet, even as a small, amused smile crept onto his face at the younger commander’s antics. Messing with Thire truly was far too much fun.

“Well,” Thire huffed. “I don’t know what I can offer you, then. Clearly, you’re omnipotent.”

“The word you’re looking for is ‘omniscient,’” Fox corrected primly.

“See!” Thire jabbed a finger into Fox’s visor. “You know all the things!”

“Ha,” Fox laughed jadedly, thinking of his mission. “Not all the things.”

Fox sighed, and moved his hands under his head. It gave him an excuse to stare up at the mattress of the upper-bunk instead of at Thire. “You understand nat-borns.”

Silence. Then, Thire sat up. Springs creaked in protest, and suddenly a was visor peering down at him bemusedly, undoing all of Fox’s hard work to subtly avoid looking his vod in the eye. “I do?”

“Ok, well, no.” Fox admitted ruefully. Who could understand nat-borns? “I meant your internet nat-borns.”

Fox could sense Thire’s eye twitch from under his bucket. “…I’m gonna lose it.”

“Ok, ok, I’ll stop.” Fox relented. The bit had worn out its welcome. For today. “But seriously. I need you to do a threat assessment.”

Fox could feel Thire squinting down at him. “A threat assessment… on the holonet?”

“On the entire thing?” Fox felt his own eye twitch. “I sure karking hope not.”

“In that case, I’m going to need something a little more specific to work with here.” Thire flopped down on his side, which released a horrible screech under his weight. The younger commander bent his elbow propped his head up on his hand, attentively waiting for more detail.

Ok, that was fine. Fox could be specific. “Unknown number of possible assailants, possible upper limit of ten billion—”

Thire stared, mouth ajar. “Oh my gods?”

“—Physical capabilities and strength of motivation unknown—”

“Wait wait wait, hold on.” Thire motioned frantically with his free hand to pause. “Back up, what are you talking about? Ten billion people? How could ten billion people be attacking us? All at once? When? Why? What the fuck?”

“Thire,” Fox said seriously. “You understand their kind.”

“That—answers literally nothing?” Thire goggled. “What is ‘their kind’—who is attacking us?”

“The nat-borns from the holonet?” Fox shot back rhetorically. He could scarcely believe Thire couldn’t follow Fox’s very clear implications. They’d both been looking at the same video earlier, hadn’t they?

“Damnit Fox,” Thire groused. “For the love of the Force, use more than five fucking words when you’re explaining osik. What nat-borns? Which part of the holonet? When did you interact with them? Why the kark would they be attacking us?”

“The ones who commented on the video!” Seven words. A 40% increase from five words. And would you look at that, Fox was able to do math again. He was wondering when that skill would return to him.

“Holy karking kriff,” Thire grit, as if on the verge of losing it entirely. “Fox, I love you, but please—please. Start answering in ways that don’t require, like, a dozen prime-damned followup questions! What comments on what video? Why are nat-borns attacking us over a video in the first place?”

In a merciful decision to spare Thire from more confusion, Fox pulled his datapad from a compartment in his armor and pulled up the requested video link, turning the pad for the younger commander to view.

“…Oh. Huh. That video.” Thire stated after about a minute. “Okay. I wasn’t really expecting to circle back around to this.”

Fox squinted over the tablet at Thire, finding that hard to believe. Sure, The Video Incident had been over twenty hours ago, but Fox’s every waking moment had been consumed by the consequences since. It baffled Fox that Thire could forget so easily.

“Why would people—ten billion people, specifically—be attacking us over this video?” Thire pressed. “Why us, the Corries, specifically? We’re not even in this video!”

The intensity of Fox’s squint multiplied ten-fold. Fox was a Corrie, and he had been in the video. Therefore, Corries were in the video. But if Thire had bizarrely, confidently claimed the opposite…

Fox could have smacked himself upside the head. The Shiny armor. Right. No one could tell the running Vod had been Fox—not even his own commanders, apparently. And how would they? Fox was rarely out of his armor—and never out of his blacks—around them. It was a habit he was considering putting more effort into breaking. Showing vulnerability to his loved ones—literally. But now… Fox wasn’t as sure.

Before encountering the video, Fox had been very pleased with the outcome of his shirtless gym adventure. He’d acquired two new ad’e—two new friends, and gotten some fancy, brand-spanking new self-acceptance of his semi-unique body. But in doing so, he’d also (potentially) caused an unacceptable danger. His actions could invite the population of the galaxy to assault his Vod’ike. If that happened… if someone got hurt because of this… how could Fox live with himself?

Had Fox leaned too far into his spite and desire for freedom? Had that caused this new threat? If so, it was possible Fox would need to dial back some of his openness. He loved how his new policy of sincerity brought him and his Vod’ike so much joy… but was happiness worth all of their safety?

Fox bit down on his lip and purposefully shook himself, stopping his train of thought before the stress got to him again. There was no point in thinking in hypotheticals until Fox actually understood the full scope of the damage. Cost-to-benefit analysis could wait until after he shook the relevant data out of Thire. Then, once he knew the scope and extent of the danger… Fox could decide what he could live without.

It was a small comfort that neither he nor his Corries had been directly implicated in the video. If his vod couldn’t tell what battalion Fox was meant to be from in the holo, then no way would a nat-born be able to. That alleviated some of the danger, slightly. But not all.

“At least ten billion nat-borns watched that holo.” Fox stressed. “Not all of them were invested enough to comment, of course, which is why my estimate is just an extreme upper limit. I’m hoping that we’ll only be dealing with just a percentage of commenters, maybe somewhere closer to nine million assailants.”

“Oh!” Thire let his body flop backwards onto the bed like his strings were cut. “Of course, a possible assailing force numbering somewhere between nine million and ten billion! What a totally reasonable range to work with! Haar’chak!”

Fox glared, letting the datapad drop down to his chest in exasperation. “Are you going to be helpful or not?”

“How the kark can I be helpful when I’m working with fuck all?” Thire complained. “I can’t do osik until you answer me. Why. The kriff. Would the people who left comments on a random thirst-trap holo of some completely unidentifiable Vod converge in the millions—or billions—on Guard headquarters?”

“They’re nat-borns.” Fox shot back with fire. He leveled the younger commander with a solemn stare. “They expressed interest in a specific Vod. We have Procedures for that, Thire.”

“…Oh my Force.” Shock strung through each line of Thire’s body. “You think—oh my gods, Fox. No, that’s not—”

“Besides, it doesn’t matter if the Vod is a Corrie or not. It doesn’t even matter if the clone is identifiable as an individual.” Guiltily, Fox squashed the hope he wouldn’t be identifiable as an individual. Fox’s safety, as usual, came at the price of his Brothers’ vulnerability. “A clone is a clone to these people.”

Thire flailed his hands like he was trying to stop a crashing speeder. “Holy shit, no—”

“The easiest access nat-borns have to the filming location, and clones in general, is here at Guard HQ.” Fox continued. “The other battalions are mobile, often with their locations classified, and have high Vod-to-nat ratio. We are uniquely vulnerable in ways the other Vod’e aren’t due to our continuous proximity to the Senate and copious amounts of nat-borns.”

Thire was aghast. “Fox—”

“If they want their hands on the Vod, or even just want some other Brother as a replacement, then we’re the first place they’ll look. And since they’re nat-borns, they probably won’t want to leave empty handed.” And the nat-borns would be leaving empty handed, even if it was the last thing Fox ever did. He determinedly struck his fist to his palm. “We have to prepare.”

“Fox—!”

“I just need you to tell me specific cultural information and which people are likely to act on what they say.” Fox pulled up his notes on the video he made with his TiTS while lying awake earlier that night. It was a ten-page list of bullet pointed words, each of which was awaiting a definition. “Additionally, there were some terms I saw while looking through the comments that I was unfamiliar with—for example, I can’t tell if ‘motorboat’ is an action or type of vehicle.”

Thire twitched. “Uh—”

“With so many potential assailants, we’re probably going to have to tweak the threat-assessment algorithm for the Senators. We’ll definitely need to allocate new threat tiers for new kinds of problematic nat-borns, though—there’s no way billions can fit into a set of categories intended for thousands, obviously.” Fox pulled up his contacts list and glanced over at his wrist comm in consideration. “To start, viewers located in other systems should be considered less immediate threats. I can get the Vod’e in the slicing department to run the data for how many are on Coruscant right now—”

“Fox!”

Fox stopped. Stone paused his snoring for one anticipatory second before continuing right on, dead to the world. Fox let out a breath.

“Fox,” Thire continued, quieter, but still intense. “Random nat-borns are not going to storm our base over that video.”

Fox remained silent. Thire attempted to bury his face in his hands, but was impeded by his visor, resulting in the younger commander frustratedly sitting up and ripping off his helmet to console himself properly. Thire radiated distress, but also… honesty. Fox took it in, uncomprehending.

“I—gods, Fox.” Thire breathed out shakily. “No wonder you were so karking terrified today, if you thought—stars above. You had me scared out of my mind for a sec there, too.”

Fox breathed in a deep, tense breath to retain his grip on himself. “Do you not believe these,” he calmly gestured with a datapad containing an array of commenters describing what they would do to Fox if they encountered him in graphic detail, “are indicators of impending nat-born action against us?”

“I understand why you’d think we’re in danger,” Thire said, which did not do overmuch to reassure Fox. “But trust me Fox, we are not about to be inundated with millions—or billions—of nat-borns. We are fine.”

“How could it be the case,” Fox began slowly, forcing himself to communicate calmly, so calmly, “that you believe we’re not under threat? There has been an incident that has drawn attention to us, and a large number of nat-borns have made specific, public threats against one of our own. We need to start planning immediately—this is nat-born attention on us on a scale we’ve never dealt with before.”

Thire shook his head. “They’re not threats.”

Fox’s head pounded as his anxiety ratcheted up 10 notches. Thire didn’t believe him.

“Hey hey hey, it’s alright,” Thire hushed. An arm wrapped around Fox’s shoulders and squeezed away the tension in them. “Just look at me, alright vod?”

Fox did so. Thire’s dyed-red hair and sad brown eyes were washed out in the darkness, but the caring crease of his face remained plain as day. “You came to me for a threat assessment, right?”

“Yes,” Fox agreed, dutifully not taking his eyes off Thire’s face.

“You trust my analysis of what’s going on, then?”

“Of course,” Fox nodded more vigorously.

“Then trust me,” Thire insisted, nearly pleading with Fox. “Trust that you came to me for a reason. Trust that I understand this terrain. It’s not the battleground you think it is.”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Fox nodded. He didn’t trust himself to manage verbal agreement.

“Thanks, vod,” Thire exhaled in relief. “I’ll explain as best I can.”

“Okay, first step.” Thire held up a single finger. “I’m going to show you that I understand exactly what it is you’re thinking and why you think it.” He held up a second finger, but bizarrely, not one from the same hand. Fox went cross-eyed trying to see both hands on either side of his head at once. “Second, I’m going to tell you exactly the information you’re missing that led you to draw your very wrong and horrifying conclusion. Just hear me out until then, okay?”

Fox refocused to nod once in agreement.

“Okay. So.” Thire used both of his oddly-positioned index fingers to point at Fox. “From your perspective, there’s really only one type of nat-born that talks about clones the way the holo commenters do, yeah?”

“…Senators,” Fox answered warily, intensely disliking Thire’s implication. Were there other, non-Senator situations where nat-borns talked about clones like that? Ones that Fox wasn’t privy to? A shudder rolled down Fox’s spine. There could be more situations just like the holo-video and Fox wouldn’t even know it. “Them and their little groupies. When else—”

“I’ll get there, vod,” Thire shushed. “When a Senator starts to compliment a Vod, emphasizing their ‘strong body’ or ‘dedication,’ or says they ‘want to get to know them better,’ there’s only one right thing to think, right?”

Fox crossed his arms to hide how tight he wanted to hold himself. “They’ll try and get them alone.”

“Exactly,” Thire confirmed. “They’re warning flags. Warning flags we have procedures for—that you developed procedures for.”

Procedures developed through far too much trial and error. Fox folded into himself further.

The hand on Fox’s shoulder squeezed reassuringly, but Thire did not pause in his momentum. “When a Senator starts targeting a specific Vod, what do we do to keep them safe?”

“Safe?” Fox questioned wryly. Nowhere on Coruscant was truly safe. Not for a clone.

“Well,” Thire hemmed, acknowledging Fox’s point, “what do we do to try and make it better?”

“…It depends,” Fox admits.

It did. It depended on how self-aware the hypothetical Senator was of their categorical shittiness. They could be oblivious, like Senator Alavar, who at one point had genuinely thought that coming on to a clone that had no legal way to rebuff their advances was a swell idea. These were the countless Senators and aides content to stew in their willful ignorance, the ones that thought they could “woo” Vod’e with no consideration for their status at all. They always threw up warning flags because they had the audacity to think of themselves as appealing, imagining their alien courting rituals forced onto the disenfranchised soldiers guarding their lives under threat of decommissioning could ever be authentically returned. Fox wanted to spit nails whenever he came across a trooper cringing away from the touch of a Senator content to pretend their “paramour” was merely shy and unworldly.

But as irritated as these types made Fox, he acknowledged that out of all the possible kinds of Problem Senators, they were easiest to deal with.

Avalar, like many who came after her, had been thwarted by a simple change in patrol scheduling. Sometimes, all it took to shake a nat-born of this variety was sticking the targeted Vod in a crowd until their identical armor patterns blended together.

Alternatively, if conditions were just right, they could even have a little fun with it. Fox had, on one highly memorable occasion, witnessed private Lovely oh-so-innocently ask what this “kissing” thing the nat-born spoke of meant, while offhandedly dropping the fact he was ten nat-born years old into the conversation. The offending senatorial aide had turned white as a sheet and nearly pissed themselves. Coincidentally, Fox had also nearly pissed himself—from laughter.

“What happens most often?” Thire asked.

“Oh,” Fox drummed his fingers. Most often, someone had to burn.

All too frequently, Fox had to deal with nat-borns like Coorr, or Merrik, or Orn Fre Taa, who were not laughing matters. They considered the clones’ status far too much—and, in fact, considered it to their advantage.

This type of nat-born didn’t always throw up warning flags. Often, they simply appeared, lying in wait, just outside of Fox’s peripheral, like the predators they knew they were. But when they did let themselves be known before causing real damage, the best case scenario was when it was because they couldn’t think themselves out of a paper bag. More dangerously was when it was because they liked to play with their food. They were powerful enough to let signs of their depravity show, just enough to taunt their victims with their impending fate. These nat-borns were in the game for cruelty’s sake, and took out their sadism on whichever unfortunate clone they could get alone.

But whether the nat-born was sadistic, stupid, or an ambush predator, the first step of dealing with them was the same.

“When one or more Senators target a specific Vod,” Fox smirked, “it’s time to break out the Special Files on them.”

The Special Files were Fox’s magnum opus. His baby. Fox had dirt on everybody, and the dedicated servers (conveniently liberated from several totaled star cruisers) stuffed in the bowels of Corrie territory cradled the proof that let him actually do shit about it. Thanks to Vos (little gods bless that utter nuisance), Fox even had dirt on the Chancellor—although it was pathetically limited compared to his usual standards. It was suspiciously hard to come by anything juicy on the little shit-weasle. If he wasn’t hiding something huge, Fox would eat his entire armor kit with a knife and fork.

“The Special Files.” Thire nodded, smiling a bit, probably reminiscing on the various ways the Special Files had gotten them all out of deep osik. “But what if it’s a new nat-born? One there hasn’t been any time to collect data on?”

Fox frowned. “Then we collect the data.” Not an ideal scenario, obviously. No one liked racing against the clock to gather intel, but needs must.

“And if there’s no data to collect?”

If they couldn’t find anything substantial in time to prevent a Vod coming to harm in time…

Fox scoffed. “Then we make something the fuck up.”

Blackmail didn’t need to be “real” if the target had enough enemies—it became real in the eyes of those who wanted it to be real.

Thire scoffed right back. “That’s not exactly less work.”

“Didn’t say it was,” Fox shrugged. “The most believable rumors have a little truth in them—”

“—And that still means research.” Thire groaned. “So, so much research—just to report on it purposefully wrong! It should be illegal.”

“It is, actually!” Fox chirped. In the realm of the Senate, there was no scandal too great, no atrocity too horrifically inconceivable, that politicians weren’t willing to accuse their enemies of doing—so long as they could point to all the right ‘irrefutable facts.’ Which the Corries would cheerfully provide them. “And don’t think of it as reporting wrong. Think of it as reporting with creative liberties.” He inserted jazz hands for emphasis.

“‘Creative liberties,’” Thire echoed. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Yes,” Fox smirked. “And that’s an order.”

“Sir yes sir.” Thire rolled his eyes. “And when you get this creatively liberated data, what happens then?”

Fox grinned, sharklike. “Nothing that needs to be repeated in front of young ears.”

“Oh my Force,” Thire groaned. “I’m only, like, three years younger than you—”

Fox nodded solemnly, hiding his wicked smile behind his bucket. He reached out and caught Thire’s face in his gloved palms. “A baby.”

Thire puffed up like a tooka kitten and failed to yank his face away in the narrow environment. “No—”

“A toddling tubie,” Fox teased, slapping his cheeks lightly, “all dressed up in Ori’vod’s command paint—”

For want of an escape route, Thire surged forward, immediately gunning to shove Fox’s neck into the crook of his arm for a headlock. However, Fox did not survive Kamino’s most infamous command batch by losing impromptu wrestling matches.

After making enough noise to threaten the shitty bunk bed’s abrupt collapse, but notably not enough noise to threaten the cessation of Stone’s comically loud snorechestra, Fox had Thire wrapped up, clinging to his back like a monkey with the younger commander’s arms pinned at his sides. Thire gave up after a quick moment of futile struggle.

“Dank farrik, fine,” Thire groused. “I give.”

Fox laughed, releasing Thire’s arms up to dole out some Hair Ruffles. “Little baby. Little baby man.”

Thire groaned in misery. “You’re the worst.”

“Doesn’t stop you from being babiest.”

“Whatever.” Thire muttered. “I’ll be karking babiest, then. If it makes your baby feelings feel better.” His belligerent tone didn’t match how he latched onto Fox’s free arm and squeezed.

“It does.” Fox squeezed back. “…Thanks.”

Fox felt the way Thire tried to hide his smile. “Don’t mention it.”

“Anyway,” Thire continued. “That was actually a serious question. What specifically do you do next with all the dirt you collected?”

“Specifically?” Fox pulled his head back incredulously. “I need more details about the scenario to determine what exactly I’d do next.”

“Exactly,” Thire stressed. “Getting a Senator to back off, you can’t use the same tactic on all of them. Our defenses have gotta be tailored to each Problem Senator, individually. The blackmail, the political sabotage—kark, it’s almost like being a kriffing Senator.” Thire and Fox shared a snicker at that. The Corrie Guard, the clones’ collective Senator. Imagine.

“You have to know how to play the games they play, understand what moves would fuck things up for them, specifically, without raining down a metric ton of osik down on our heads. You gotta get it just right—pin the blame of a blackmail leak on a rival here, embezzle some funds into their personal accounts there.”

“Set enough distracting little fires to keep them running around headless,” Fox continued for Thire, “just enough to keep them from remembering they wanted a clone in their bed in the first place.”

“And if they don’t back off after all that,” Thire grimaced, “we dig deeper and kill their career, and try to get them recalled back to their home planet for a replacement Senator.”

Fox sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Risky.”

Fox didn’t like to do that one too much, as personally satisfying as it was. It ran a bigger risk of someone recognizing the pattern of scumbag Senators disappearing as soon as they target a clone, which would mean the jig was up—possibly for clones everywhere.

“It’s a gamble,” Thire admitted. “We can research the Senator we’re axing all we like and still not know who would replace them.”

True enough. Polling could be unreliable, especially with something as unpredictable as war scourging the political landscape. Even if their research definitively showed that the a specific individual would definitely replace the old Senator, and the new nat-born might seem be better on the surface, it was hard to predict how a person would react to the ability to abuse sub-sentient persons without any perceived repercussions until they were given the opportunity to do so. Sometimes, it’s better the devil you know.

“And looking into the nat-borns that might replace the current dipshit in place is also a shit ton of work.” Thire leaned his face mulishly on his hand. “Not being able to get rid of some Senator because the next guy from their system is definitely worse sucks shebs.”

“It does suck entire shebs.” Fox nodded in commiseration. “It sucks so hard for so long.”

“And it’s so much work,” Thire complained. “Just digging into their backgrounds in the first place is so much. The slicers, the stalkers, the eavesdroppers, the sad sacks that have to scout them in person—”

Fox nudged Thire playfully. “The cultural investigators.”

“I’ve heard they work the hardest out of the bunch,” Thire grinned. “And they’re the most handsome, and the best shots—”

“And they’re babiest.” Fox injects.

“And they’re babiest—hey!” Thire blindly reached back and smacked Fox’s helmet. “Not funny!”

“Agree to disagree.” Fox smirked.

“In your dreams,” Thire scoffed. “Anyway, even once we have all the data for the files, you have to do the strategizing of what data to plant when and where and how much—all to strike a delicate, highly individualized balance with each Senator. Most of that is stuff you have to do.”

“I get a lot of help,” Fox pointed out.

“Not with the risk calculation and strategy you don’t,” Thire argued back. “No one does it like you, vod. You always seem to know what to put where to get things to fall exactly how you want.” The commander shook his head in something uncomfortably close to awe. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Well,” Fox averted his hidden eyes. “I’m just the best, is all.”

“And then,” Thire ranted, “even after you’re done scaring the daylights out of them, you still have to keep tabs on them, set watches, move around patrols and minimize certain Brothers’ exposure to certain nat-borns—it’s a nightmare.”

“It is,” Fox hushed, reaching up to hand-comb Thire’s hair again. “Fuck those bitches so bad.”

Thire blinked. “Ah, osik. I was going somewhere with this.” Thire looked back at Fox apologetically. “Kind of just devolved into venting. Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Fox chuckled mirthfully. “You know I enjoy a good complaining session.”

“Glad you liked it, then.” Thire cleared his throat. “So. All that banthashit, just for one Senator. Imagine doing it for thousands.”

Fox groaned miserably. “I don’t have to imagine, vod. That’s my life.”

Thire side-eyed Fox. “Now imagine it for billions.”

Fox’s muscles, which had been gradually easing, sprang back to full tension instantly.

“Fox, sitrep. You with me?” Thire turned around fully, struggling to manage it in Fox’s tight grasp.

“Yup,” Fox ground out. “But keep talking before I lose it entirely.”

“When you saw these comments,” Thire put a hand over the holopad, “you treated each one like it was a Senator throwing up a red flag—which, if a Senator had said any of this shit aloud to a Vod, it definitely would be. So it’s totally understandable why you’d think that.”

“Of course it’s karking understandable.” Fox snapped. He hooked his fingers into Thire’s side armor, clawing into the mesh. “How else is there to understand it? You just admitted these—” Fox rapped his fingers on the tablet again “—are the exact warning signs the Senators always give before they try and kidnap a vod to a hidden sex-scandal dungeon-apartment somewhere and dump their body in a ditch when they’re done.”

“I never said they were the exact warning signs,” assured Thire, “I said they would be if they had come from a Senator. In person. But these people?” Thire covered Fox’s tapping fingers with his own and squeezed. “They’re not Senators, Fox. They’re The Public. The Online Public.”

Fox’s grip in Thire’s side spasmed.

Thire turned in Fox’s tightening hold until they were face-to-visor. He addressed Fox firmly, grounding. “When the press is bad enough for riots to whip up outside our door, what are the procedures for that?”

Fox could answer that easily. “Crowd control tactics, barricading, create and engage in chokepoints, grouping and pacifying—”

“And how is that different from the tactics used against Senators?”

Fox almost couldn’t respond to the question for how obvious the answer was. The differences between crowd control and precision political undermining were so vast, he had to pause for a moment to refine his answer into the simplest, most prominent difference before continuing.

“It’s not individualized, like how it is with Senators.”

“Exactly.” Thire nodded enthusiastically “It doesn’t matter who specifically shows up at your door when they’re part of a violent mobs rapidly approaching HQ.”

“You see my point, then.” Fox breathed out. “Nat-borns have a history of taking advantage of us and mobbing us. We have to prepare for it while we still can!”

“Actually, I think I see your point even less than before,” Thire replied, astounding Fox. “It’s always been true that nat-borns are easy to rile up. There’s way more dangerous anti-clone osik going around on the ‘net than accidental thirst-traps. We’re already prepared to deal with nat-borns riots just fine!”

“‘Just fine’ is relative.” Fox was dangerously close to chipping a tooth, he was grinding his teeth so hard. “And this is different.”

“Why?” Thire challenged. “How? For all the petty-ass osik nat-borns give us, they’ve never coordinated in the way you’re describing. They’ve never grouped up in the millions against us—hell, not even in the hundred thousands.”

“They haven’t yet,” Fox muttered darkly.

Fox was acutely aware of Thire’s hidden flinch. But then, the younger commander determinedly steamrolled over his own flicker of hesitance. “You keep claiming this is a mob invasion scenario. But tactically, you’re not treating it like one.”

Fox narrowed his eyes defensively. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I think you’re conflating two different nat-born responses into something terrifying and unrealistic.” Thire said outright, his forthrightness making Fox pause for just a moment.

“You’re—” Thire almost stuttered over the opportunity of Fox’s waver, “You’re mixing up Procedures.”

Fox’s head physically reared back in shock. Fox had fucking birthed the Procedures. Fox was the uncontested Mand’alor of any Procedures, anywhere. Mixing up Procedures was akin to mixing up his own ad’e.

“You,” Thire frantically doubled down before Fox could bite his head off, “are mixing up how we react when a Senator becomes interested in a Brother and how we react when clones get strong media attention.” Thire’s confidence grew with the steadiness of his voice. “You’re treating a crowd like a bunch of individuals instead of like a crowd.”

Fox felt a raging, hissing heat boiling up in his veins. Fox pushed away from Thire, ripping off his helmet to gulp down the frigid air of the dorm.

“You are treating each nat-born like they’re a Senator,” Thire stressed, not letting Fox escape reality. “But they’re not Senators, Fox. They’re just a bunch of random, horny people on the internet. They’re not that powerful.”

Fox pressed his rough, gloved palms into the hollow of his eye sockets, smothering anything that would dare to escape. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

Thire was right.

As soon as Thire pointed out Fox’s error, he knew the other commander’s words rang with truth. At the very least, Fox was misappropriating the behaviors of different threats. There was no point in holding on to denial—not for battle tactics, anyway. Wasting time, wasting lives, as the vod’e liked to say.

The realization the unstoppable, inescapable nightmare scenario Fox had conjured in his head was never in danger of happening at all was sudden as a smack in the face. Cool relief hit Fox hard, rattling his frame like a tidal wave, the fear and stress burning up his bones drowned violently.

“Five seconds in,” Thire coached. “Seven seconds out.”

Fox let him be walked through the breathing exercise. Eventually, his flush faded, and his heart rate returned to normal.

“Better?” Thire asked.

Fox breathed out slowly, one last time. “…Yeah.”

Fox had picked the wrong battle tactic. Fox hid his flush under his hands. He hadn’t picked the wrong tactic since he was five years old. Gods, Alpha-17 would kick his shebs if he ever found out.

Thire raised his eyebrows. “You understand that you’re not going to be drowning in an impossible task, data-scraping and individually profiling literally billions of holonet users?”

“Yeah…” Fox admitted. At least he could scrap the new algorithm idea. That would have been so much Force damn work.

He came out from behind his hands to eye Thire. “…I still think we’re going to have a mob on our hands, though.”

“We’re really not,” Thire sighed. “But this is progress.”

“If you say so.” Fox folded his arms. Riots weren’t ideal by any means, but they were much preferred to a flock of Senators.

“I do say so,” Thire retorted. “What would they even be rioting about?”

“They still want a Vod.” Fox’s gaze dropped down to the abandoned holopad. They still wanted him. “I guess the difference will be that instead of trying to kill us, the rioters will be grabbing at us to try and kark.”

Fox took a moment to bask in his relief. This was by no means a good situation. But tactically, their defense strategies didn’t need that much tweaking from any other kind of riot to keep his Vod’e safe. It cleared Fox’s mind exceptionally to be shown that the means of protecting his Siblings were right there at his fingertips—training, preparing, scavenging and stocking up supplies. Concrete steps and solutions. Thire really was a gem.

“No!” Thire exclaimed, mortified. “No one is getting karked!”

“Obviously not,” scoffed Fox. “We’re going to stop them.”

“No.” Thire scolded. “No one is going to try grabbing anyone. Over this, anyway.”

“They literally said they would,” Fox deadpanned. “People were asking where to find us.”

“You agreed they were being hyperbolic,” Thire pointed out.

“I was literally delusional!” Fox argued.

Thire stared.

“What?” Fox demanded.

Thire shook himself. “Sorry. That’s just the second time you’ve brought it up in one night. …Usually you never want to talk about it.”

Fox blanched.

“Sorry!” Thire backpedaled. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No,” Fox uttered around his stiff-feeling lips. “It’s alright. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

A wave of despair crested over Thire so strongly that Fox actually had to rock away.

“What,” Fox asked much more gently.

“Nothing!” Thire glanced away, chewing on his lip.

Fox gave it five seconds.

“It was my fault!” Thire burst. “I’m the one who let you watch that video! I’m sorry!”

Oh, absolutely not. “Nobody lets me do osik,” Fox snapped. “I’m the one who pushed to see it.”

“I should have tried harder to keep it away from you.” Thire’s shoulders slumped. “I sent you into a karking episode.”

“No you didn’t,” Fox protested vehemently.

“I could have locked the holopad,” Thire brooded. “I could have told you clearly it was something that could hurt you like that—but I didn’t.”

Fox sighed. “You couldn’t have known—”

“I did know!” Fox whipped around to stare at Thire.

Thire curled even further into himself at Fox’s intense gaze. “I… I had the thought. ‘This kind of stuff is usually bad for him’ is literally what went through my mind. For some stupid reason I just… I thought it would be different this time. So I let you take it.” Thire sniffed. “You’ve just been doing so well lately. I didn’t think. I should have known better—”

“Stop it!” Fox made himself to look Thire in the face, pushing through the intense desire to bury the conversation and never speak on the topic again. “It’s not your job to keep me from looking at ‘bad stuff,’ alright? My brain might shoot off to Wild Space occasionally, but I’m not a cadet you need to babysit twenty-four-seven. I made the choice to look at it, even though you warned me.”

Thire hugged himself tighter, biting his lip harder. Fox should probably find a way to stop him before he drew blood.

“My issues with nat-borns are not your fault, okay?” Fox choked on his words a bit, desperately trying to cough them up and out into the open where they needed to be to help Thire. It was Fox’s responsibility to control himself, not his vod’ika’s. “They were the ones who—who caused this.”

Thire still wouldn’t look at him.

“You guys are always saying… that it’s not something I can control,” Fox forced out through grit teeth. It was on Fox, but saying that wouldn’t help Thire right now. “But it’s not something you can control either. It’s just something we gotta work with as it happens, right?”

“…I guess you're right.” Thire peered up at Fox. Fox felt even more steam leave him at Thire’s mournful yet accepting eyes. “I’m still sorry, though.”

Fox shrugged weakly. “It happens.”

“No, I—” Thire stuttered. “I’m sorry for bringing it up. I know you hate talking about it.”

“It’s fine,” sighed Fox. “I don’t want to make you feel like you can’t talk to me about stuff that’s bugging you.”

“…Are you sure?” Thire asked, actually kriffing taking Fox up on the offer, which was not part of the plan. “You’re probably going to hate hearing this.”

Fox nodded determinedly. He’d stick to his word. Even if it sucked. For Thire.

“Look,” Thire sighed. “About all this holonet stuff… I never mentioned it to you because I didn’t want you to react the way you did earlier today.”

Fox’s heart sank instantly.

“I knew it would be hard to explain to you, and that you’d probably end up freaking out before I could finish showing you it was safe. I didn’t want to put you through that. Not when it wouldn’t help anybody anyway.” Thire laughed mirthlessly. “But, I guess it ended up happening anyway. Maybe it’s on me for trying to keep it all from you instead of ripping off the band-aid in a controlled environment.” The young commander shrugged, despondent. “I don’t know.”

Fox pressed his lips together, trying to hold back his instinctual response of taking the burden of the blame. It wasn’t Thire’s job to make sure his adult ori’vod could walk in a straight line.

“People making comments like this about a Vod…” Thire bit his lip. “I understand why you’re scared. But I promise you, this is different from what you’re used to with nat-borns. I know you’re probably freaking out on the inside about not knowing about this… seemingly sudden tidal wave of horny nat-borns, but that’s just sort of how the holonet is. It’s normal for them. Nobody in that comment section probably thought anything of it. Online culture, to put it plainly, is horny.” The young commander chuckled wearily. “And when everything is horny… nothing is.”

“But why the holonet? What about it makes people so…” Fox waved vaguely at the datapad, “…much?”

“Well, believe it or not, there’s a stigma nat-borns have around being horny in public.” Thire suppressed a chuckle at Fox’s scrunched, disbelieving face. “Yeah. It doesn’t seem like it in the Senate, right? But that stigma is why we can count vod’e being targeted by lone Senators or relatively small groups in the back hallways instead of at the main entrance in front of thousands of civilians.” Thire seethed bitterly. “Doing anything extensive in public is improper, after all.”

Fox snorted in disgust, which Thire echoed. Fox mentally reviewed the number of C4 packs it would take to blow the sink-hole underneath the Senate Rotunda and send everyone in it to the depths of the hell they made, just to feel better.

“But the holonet is public,” Fox pointed out. “The stigma doesn’t seem to be doing jack-shit to stop them there.”

“True, the holonet is open to the public, but it’s also perceived to be anonymous—even if most people can be ID’ed pretty easily with a little data scraping.” Thire grinned a little at the quirk which undoubtedly made his job hundreds of times easier. “Lots of nat-borns use it as an outlet for behavior that’s suppressed in other parts of their lives. Like, for example, expressing horniness.”

“So, what, nat-borns are just constantly propositioning each other over a bunch of holoscreens?” Fox questioned incredulously. “So much that to them it’s just… background noise?”

What would even be the point? It wasn’t like anyone could get anything out of anyone over a screen.

“Well—” Thire grimaced. “Yes and no. Nat-borns do kind of do that—maybe not to the point no one would blink an eye, but I wouldn’t say that’s not happening either. But that’s also not specifically what is going on here.”

Fox furrowed his brows, trying to parse Thire’s word-salad. “What.”

“Nat-borns say stuff like this,” Thire gestured to a comment on the tablet, “to illustrate when they find someone attractive. That’s not the same thing as planning to fuck them.”

Fox stared at Thire like he’d lost his mind. “The commenter you’re currently pointing at is asking for a clone to crush their head with their thighs like a black melon and kill them.”

Thire rolled his eyes. “That’s an expression.”

“Of what,” Fox rolled his eyes right back, “wanting to die?”

“That’s—” Thire cut himself off with a poorly suppressed groan of frustration. “Just… it’s showing attraction, okay? I know it’s weird, but when other nat-borns read this, they definitely know what it means.”

Fox stayed silent, still not quite believing.

“…It’s cultural?” Thire tried.

“…Yeah, alright.” Fox gave up trying to apply logic to nat-borns. Why in the Force damn fuck did he even still try. “Nats offer to kark by asking to be killed. Fine. Sure. Whatever.”

“Again,” Thire sighed, “they’re not asking to kark. They’re showing attraction.”

Fox huffed irritably. “What’s even the difference?”

“Haven’t you ever seen a nat-born that you would like to kark, but didn’t plan on ever doing it?” Thire firmly ignored the way Fox’s face screwed up like he’d bitten into a space lemon at the very mention of the word nat-born. “Like a Jedi or something?”

“A Jedi?” Fox reeled back, utterly aghast.

“Uh, yeah?” Thire confirmed, nearly breaking Fox’s brain in the process. “It’s… a pretty common desire? For Vod’e, anyway.”

“Why would anyvod want to kark a Jedi?” Fox sputtered.

“…Wait, really?” Thire’s eyes widened dramatically, like Fox was the one talking complete nonsense. “You wouldn’t want any of the Jedi? Not even…”

Fox waited for Thire to continue, but Thire was doing that annoying thing where he trailed off and expected Fox to complete his sentence for him.

“…Kenobi?” Thire finished weakly, realizing Fox couldn’t and wouldn’t partake in his bullshit conclusions.

“Kenobi?” Fox echoed, both brows shooting all the way up.

“Everybody wants to fuck Kenobi,” Thire defended.

“High General Kenobi?” Fox repeated, each syllable chocked full of disbelief.

Thire jammed his thumb into his own chest. “Even I want to fuck Kenobi, and I don’t even like men!”

“…You know, I expected this from Cody.” Fox muttered darkly. Rex had infected Cody with the ability to doggedly see the best in people long ago, and was thus not extremely surprised to hear the scuttlebutt report his batcher had his eye on a karking Jedi of all beings. But Thire?

“You’re not GAR, Thire. Not all the time. You should know better.” Fox shook his head. “They’re our superior officers.”

Fox already had to deal with Senators ordering them around like that. Even if the Jedi chose not to, the ease of how they could would still be there. Sure, your average GAR Vod probably couldn’t conceive of it with how devoted most Jedi were to their evidently non-Vod’e abusing religion—with how little time the average GAR Vod spent around Senators. But any Corrie worth their paint could conceive of it very, very well. The very idea of attempting to solicit sex from anyone who knew full well they could order Fox to put a bullet in his own brain at the drop of a boot made the commander break out into hives.

“That’s not what I mean,” Thire waved Fox’s highly justifiable disgruntlement away like an irritating insect. “I just meant… do you find any of them pretty?”

Fox’s mind unwillingly jumped to Vos. He thought of his stupid, impractical little outfits that categorically rejected sleeves. He thought of the thick gold stripe painting the bridge of his nose and curving over his cheek bones that was so often hidden under faux skin and copious makeup. He thought of the assortment of little matching gold decorations he wore in his dreads that caught the many lights of Coruscant and made the colorful beams into something worth watching.

Fox knew the answer. And yet, the question itself felt out of place. He raised a brow at the other commander. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Thire let his eyes rise to the ceiling, undoubtedly questioning the universe’s mandate that he continue this conversation, before firming up his patience and spelling it out for Fox clearly. “People feel the urge to have sex with people they find pretty.”

Fox rolled his eyes. Did his commander actually think he was a cadet after all? “Thire. I know that nat-borns prefer pretty people. It’s one of their bullshit status things.”

Thire did not move an inch, and yet Fox could feel all of his attention reconvene onto Fox in a single dizzying instant. “…Fox. Being attracted to attractive people is not a status thing.”

“No, it’s definitely a status thing,” Fox conveyed in his sincerest I know what I’m talking about tone. “Only fucking pretty people is something nat-borns try and do to demonstrate social dominance. It’s like gundarks picking mates based on tusk size.”

Thire slowly turned to stare at Fox, pinning him in place with his gaze.

“I’m right about this.” Fox folded his arms in front of him, not backing down from Thire’s unwarranted eyeballing. “Orn Fre Taa literally does it all the time.”

“…Physically,” Thire corrected himself, belatedly. “People feel the urge to have sex with pretty people, physically. It’s an actual physical feeling you can feel.”

“What? No.” Fox’s brows crinkled in bewilderment. “What?”

“It’s physical. Distinct.” Thire gestured in a circle to his abdomen without breaking eye-contact. “You feel it all up in your guts, and such.”

“No. No, that wouldn’t make any sense,” Fox explained slowly. “Being pretty doesn’t affect how sex works. You wouldn’t be able to feel it physically when someone is conventionally attractive according to kriffing society. That’s not how nerve endings work.”

Thire said nothing, continuing to stare at Fox with rising nervousness… and excitement?

“Sex… is an activity?” It wasn’t supposed to be a question, but at this point Fox was questioning reality itself. “That’s like… saying you feel the urge to go to the shooting range or spar with someone more because they’re pretty. It doesn’t have any bearing on anything. That’s ridiculous.”

“Oooh,” Thire breathed in realization. “Oh.”

“What?” Fox snapped.

“Okay,” Thire clapped his hands together, using them to hide his delighted grin. “I’m starting to see where we broke down in communication this morning. Cool. This is a good thing. Communication is so awesome. Wow.”

Fox glared, and Thire dutifully got the fuck on with it.

“So,” Thire said, barely keeping a lid on his inexplicable glee, “physical attraction is definitely a real thing.”

“I don’t believe you,” Fox said, dead-eyed with focus. “Continue.”

“A lot of people have the urge to have sex with people they think are pretty. Especially loud people on the holonet,” The commander chirped. “But just because they experience those physical feelings, it doesn’t mean that they actually want to have sex with the people that triggered them.”

Fox’s skepticism didn’t need to be spoken. It saturated the very air of the dorm.

“The reason I know this for a fact,” Thire pressed, “is because I feel the physical urge to have sex with nat-borns who are pretty.”

Fox stared uncomprehendingly.

“And so do a lot of other Vod’e.”

That sound? That was the sound of Fox’s brain breaking. Snapped, clean down the middle into two perfect halves.

“But…” Fox whispered, “why?”

“Some people just feel things like this,” Thire shrugged, like it was no big deal. “It’s just part of how we function.”

“Is it like that for everybody?” Everybody, except Fox, perhaps?

“No,” Thire said casually, but Fox could feel the younger commander’s excitement ramp up to full force. “Like pretty much everything else, people have tons of variations all over the place. Some people can feel it with lots of people. Some people only feel it for some people or in certain situations.” Thire’s eyes strayed to Fox in a way the vod probably thought was subtle. “And some people don’t feel it. Plenty of Vod’e don’t, either.”

Fox eyed Thire right back. “…Are you sure?”

Thire nodded in a manner just shy of eager. “There’s no right way to feel stuff. In some things, people are just naturally different from each other. Even the long-necks can’t control it.”

Well. Fox knew Thire wasn’t lying—not that he’d be able to anyway, not to Fox.

Fuck it. Fox decided he’d believe Thire and spare himself, for once.

“Okay,” Fox shrugged. “I guess I probably don’t feel it, then.”

Fox hand’s then flew up to cover his ears, fruitlessly attempting to muffle Thire’s piercing squeal. Fox blinked hard, waiting for the ringing to fade from his ears. “Ow.”

If Thire had suddenly developed super sonic powers, Fox would need to call up the bad batch and check on open positions for the team. A shame—he’d liked Thire while the commander wasn’t bursting his eardrums.

Stone snorted awake. “Whu-wzzat? Fire?”

“No. The fire alarm has been broken for months, Stone,” Fox spoke to the top bunk. “Go back to sleep.”

Stone dutifully grumbled and resumed snoring in less than five seconds. Fox felt a genuine stab of envy.

Thire threw his arms around Fox and squeezed the life out of him, which then had him feeling a genuine stab of pain from his chronically bruised ribs.

“Fox! Oh my gosh!” Thire’s beaming grin could have been visible from the outer rim. “Congratulations!”

Fox squinted back, bewildered. “…Thanks?”

Thire gave him another, even tighter squeeze and oh shit kark ow Fox’s ribs—

Fox made a sound like a swallowed frog and Thire hastily released him—but not without giving a calmer yet impossibly warmer smile. “I’m happy for you, ori’vod.”

Fox blinked. “Why?”

Thire shrugged, face still pulled into an intrinsic grin. “Always nice seeing my vod figuring stuff out, y’know?”

“…Thanks.” Fox looked askance, not really able to smother the strange smile that crept up onto his own face.

“So. Some people have got these little… ‘physical feelings’” Fox made liberal use of air quotes here, “that tell them when people are attractive?”

“No, it tells them when they find people attractive,” Thire corrected.

“…Right.” Fox acquiesced, not even bothering to attempt parsing the difference between the two statements. “And is this more of a stomach ache feeling or a stabbing feeling?”

“Some people say it feels like flying insects swarming in your guts.”

“…Okay.” Fox decided that probably meant it was closer to “stomach ache.”

“And how…” Fox visibly fished for the right word, “…compelled are people by these feelings to… follow through?”

“Fox,” Thire laughed, “it’s not mind control. People aren’t ‘compelled’ to kark every single person that sparks the feeling—it’s just… a feeling.”

Fox drummed his fingers, agitated by the vagueness of the explanation. He needed far more concrete data than that to decide if billions of nat-borns influenced by a ‘feeling’ he had no experience with weren’t a threat.

Thire placed his hand over Fox’s restless tapping. “How about this: since I happen to get these feelings with some people, I can just tell you about my experiences.”

“Oh,” Fox’s shoulders lowered a bit in relief. “Yeah. Okay, hit me with it.”

Thire jolted slightly in surprise, like he had not thought this plan all the way through. “Uhh… gimme a sec.” Thire tapped his chin in thought—his tell for when he was debating a course of action. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before Thire nodded decisively. “Okay, I got it. Do you know Amidala?”

“…Vaguely.” Fox side-eyed Thire, suddenly full of extreme dread.

“Well. She’s really pretty,” Thire said, cruelly confirming Fox’s worst suspicions. “Looks-wise, she’s a great example of someone who would be awesome to have sex with. I’ve totally felt attracted to her before.”

“But—she’s a Senator!” Fox sputtered. “And has such shit taste!”

Amidala, despite being a Senator, wasn’t terrible. Fox had his gripes with her—particularly a tall, angsty gripe that rhymed with Eyewalker—but he knew she wouldn’t purposefully hurt a Vod. Still, Fox had a strict policy: if they’re not legally touchable, they’re not ethically fuckable. And Amidala, though somehow managing to not be the scum of the earth sculpted into humanoid form, was still just as untouchable to a clone as any other Senator.

“I know,” Thire threw his hands up defensively, “that’s why I said ‘looks-wise.’ Logistically, it’s a terrible idea, and I’d die by angsty lightsaber stabbed through my asshole. Plus, I don’t know how I’d feel if she actually chose me anyway, since that means she probably thinks she can fix me.”

“She does have a type,” Fox smirked. He nudged Thire’s elbow. “For the record, I hope you make it out of this dump without getting to the point where Amidala starts making eyes at you.”

“Thanks vod,” Thire deadpanned, “but considering she hasn’t started looking at you yet, I think I’ll be safe for a good while.”

Fox snorted and smacked the other commander on the side of the head. “Don’t even joke about that.”

Thire stifled a snicker, trying to get back on track.

“But you understand me, right?” Thire asked seriously. “I feel attracted to her—but I don’t want her. I mean, I can acknowledge that a scenario with a fantasy encounter with no weird power dynamic issues or any infidelity murders going on might be pleasant, it doesn’t mean I think that it would actually happen, or that I’m making plans about doing it seriously.” The younger commander shrugged. “My body doesn’t care how bad of an idea it is—it feels regardless.”

Fox pursed his lips. He did, in fact, understand Thire. But Thire was also a highly disciplined clone commander, not ten billion random, highly variable nat-borns.

“Okay, it’s not a perfect example,” Thire acknowledged when Fox’s unsure silence stretched for too long, “but I don’t know how else to show you that there isn’t going to be a riot over this video. These nat-borns are just making these comments to express to show that they find this Vod pretty. That doesn’t mean they’re going to… act on anything.”

Pretty? Fox’s brain stalled, clotheslining itself on the utterly foreign concept. Fox, pretty? Huh? Fox? Pretty?

“Everything people say on the holonet is exaggerated.” Thire continued, ignorant of the steam leaking out of Fox’s ears. “The perceived anonymity encourages some strange behavior—but that doesn’t mean the things people do or say on it are directly translatable to how they act in real life.”

Pretty? Fox shook himself, compartmentalizing, scheduling his reaction for an identity crisis at a later date.

Thire tapped on the holopad, blessedly dragging Fox’s attention back to the conversation at hand. “It’s the principle of hiding behind a screen—it makes people feel brave.”

Fox supposed he could understand that much. In his experience, hiding behind screens while committing crimes was much easier than doing it in person, if somewhat less personally satisfying.

Fox folded into himself. “And what’s stopping them from choosing to act on their karking feelings and trying to take a Vod anyway?”

Thire gave Fox a hideously sad, pained look that was all-too-knowing. “Those Senators… they’re monsters, Fox. Even by the standards of other nat-borns. I know we all sort of know it, intellectually, that regular nat-borns aren’t exactly like them. But it’s hard to comprehend if you’re not a cultural investigator like me and my crew—you don’t see everything like we do. What they love and hate and share and fear, it shows who they are and what they’re about. And they’re not all about… that.”

“You’re telling me to rely on the good-will of nat-borns?” Fox asked incredulously.

“I’m telling you to rely on their established behavioral patterns and values as authenticated by me and my team,” Thire corrected firmly. “These nat-borns aren’t all Jedi-tier levels of good or some other nonsense. But they’re way closer in nature to people like Vos then they are to people like—” Thire cut himself off with a wince.

But Fox didn’t need Thire to finish. He knew how the sentence ended, just from the flavor of panic that had the younger commander cutting himself off.

People like Senator Dino.

Fox purposefully did not think of anything. If he didn’t think of anything, he didn’t have to try repressing the memory of helplessness, of mocking laughter and slimy, burning hands on his face—

“It just… really scares me, when you get like that.” Thire looked away again. “I didn’t want you to hurt again, so I just… never brought it up.”

“Osik,” Thire cursed at the crushed look on Fox’s face. “And I also don’t want you to feel bad over people wanting to protect you back for once!”

“How could I not feel bad?” Fox whispered. The cost of protecting a Brother was the safety of the ones doing the protecting, always. Everyone wanted to be the sacrifice—no one one wanted to be the one sacrificed for. Only the strongest elbowed their way into hoarding all the self-sacrifice for themselves. This was the way of clones. “Don’t you?”

Thire didn’t have a response to that.

Instead, the younger commander broke the silence with: “Do you believe me?”

Fox turned to him.

“It’s my job to keep my finger on the pulse of this stuff,” Thire anxiously picked at the corner of the holopad. “You delegated it to me when you made me chief cultural investigator, remember? I swear, I made sure it was safe.”

Thire peered up at him. “Do you believe me when I say that it’s safe?”

Oh, kark. Thire’s big, brown eyes looking at him sadly, expecting rejection, should have been kriffing weaponized by the Kaminoans if they had any brains hiding away at the end of their stupidly long necks.

Fox sighed, drained. “…Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Do you trust that if nat-borns were going to mob us for this, that I would already know?”

Fox nodded, embracing the truth. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Thire said, “okay.”

Fox opened his arms, and Thire fit himself into them, wrapping his own around Fox and squeezing back.

When Fox was about to doze off, Thire chuckled. “You know, when I first saw that video, and how the nat-borns were talking about it… I was happy.”

Fox blinked blearily, sniffling a yawn. “Happy?”

Thire nodded against Fox’s chest plate. “Yeah… mobs get whipped up into frenzies about us ‘cuz we never get any good press. The fact that they’re talking like that about the running Vod… it’s gonna be good for us Corries.”

“…How’s that?” Fox asked, hardly daring to breathe.

“I’ve never seen mainstream nat-borns talk about us so… positively. In any context.” Thire whispered, in awe. “Maybe… someone who was on the fence about us, who could have been spurred into being in one of those mobs one day, got a good impression of us instead, because they saw that video.”

“I hope people meme it into oblivion for the next ten years at least. I hope it lasts.” Thire sighed wistfully. “It would be nice to have some goodwill, for once. Just a little something to counterbalance the violence and the bad press of the war. The less nat-borns throwing bricks at patrols the better, right?”

Fox held Thire a little tighter. “Right.”

“Kriff,” Thire laughed. “I’d like to shake that Vod’s hand. They might have just made the whole Guard’s jobs five times easier. Them and their big fat tits.”

Something ballooned in Fox’s chest that felt suspiciously like hope. “Maybe.”

Maybe. This, too, was the way of clones.