There was, Appo had discovered, a place beyond fear.

Beyond terror, beyond doubt. The worst had happened - or something that at present felt like the worst, but probably wasn't because the universe always had a still-nastier ace left to play - and with it came a sense of calm. It would be wrong to describe it as peace, as it bore only the most superficial similarities to that true sweetness; it was only as akin to it as death was to sleep. That calm - the false calm of the eye of a storm, perhaps - provided a temporary sense of control, a surety in one's self, a beautiful and terrible clarity in which the path forward was abruptly clear and following it easy. It allowed and enabled heroic acts, even or perhaps especially those of self-sacrifice.

Appo wouldn't put it past the Kaminoans to have programmed it into clones deliberately.

Still, artificial or natural, the feeling was real.

Organize your thoughts, Appo. Make it simple.

In short:

The General, an authority, had discovered their plan -

Inaccuracy. Rejected.

The General, an authority, had discovered Slick. Discovering Slick did not necessarily equate to a discovery of the plan. However, lying to a General was impossible - quite difficult -

Inaccuracy. Rejected.

Focus, Appo.

Appo had lied to Generals before, and quite successfully, too. He could attempt to do so here, but the risk of getting it wrong was too great. Without a distraction available, the General would insist on answers, and while Appo might (maybe) be able to answer cogently, there was no guarantee the others would be sufficiently capable of backing him in a lie. Not out of lack of faith - Appo rather thought he could count on all the clones present in the room to support him, which was both a surprise and a sign that his list really did need to be updated - but rather simply because clones were notoriously poor liars, except when telling the truth. A single weak link among them would give it all up. Anyway, there was insufficient opportunity to coordinate an agreed upon response with the others present. Most people took anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to recover from a stun shot, but Generals in general usually clocked in at the three to eight minute range. Barring unusual circumstances, General Skywalker was typically even faster.

Moreover, even a successful lie was simply not worth the risk. Right now, the General was predisposed to believe Appo, treating him as the reliable source he had always sought to be (excluding some omissions). A lie would squander that trust and win them nothing but a small amount of time that would be insufficient to solve any of their problems - and that was if it didn't fail, as it most likely would.

No, they could not lie.

Therefore, the only course of action was to minimize the harm that came with telling the truth. With that goal set, the path forward and the immediate next step became clear, almost laughably obvious.

The Coruscant Guard could not be blamed.

The plan and the blame were the 501st's, and no one should take the consequences due for it but them. Slick and Appo, Appo and Slick - them, and no other. It was Slick who had lit the fire, Appo who had spread the accelerant; the Guard had at best done nothing more than stay out of their way. If there was punishment to be had, it should come to them and them alone.

Certainly not to Thire.

Certainly not to Fox.

(Boba was arguable.)

With that clear path in mind, Appo did not bother to join the frantically whispering assembly of Slick, Fox, Thire and Boba - though why they were whispering, he had no idea. Thire had immediately ordered a complete clearance and shutdown of all comms, records and personnel entry to the hallway in question, and never mind how suspicious it would look to General Vos later on. They could have yelled their lungs out without anyone hearing them, even if they'd really been trying. Either way, though, there was no point in trying to talk to them. It wasn't necessary.

Talking to the General was necessary.

Appo went over to General Skywalker's supine body, squashed the habitual The Jedi is vulnerable, kill him! now! and waited.

He did not wait long.

"No need to worry, sir," Appo reported, even as the General snapped out of an apparent stupor into sudden action, lurching to his feet with his lightsaber flying into his hand as he settled into the prelude of the first form of his preferred fighting style. "It's all under control."

He did not anticipate that his words would act as anything other than empty noise, a buffer to stall the way between the General and imminent (if probably justified) violence. To his surprise, however, the General actually listened: he straightened up out of his attack posture and even briefly lowered his lightsaber, before seeming to abruptly remember that he hadn't received an answer about anything.

"What happened?" he demanded. "Someone here stunned me -"

"That was Boba, sir. It's been confiscated."

"Boba - Boba Fett?!"

Oh, right. The General hadn't known about that, either.

"What's he doing here? And Slick! Slick's here - Boba's here - wait. Is Boba's dad here, too?"

Slick choked audibly. Boba grimaced volubly. Appo suppressed a sigh: had these two really managed to hold off a Jedi investigator? One of them clearly had a Jedi's luck.

"No, sir," he said, and decided to stop while he was ahead on that one.

Unfortunately, that left a gap that someone else, someone clever, could exploit.

"Sergeant Slick and Boba Fett were both remanded into custody on Coruscant after their arrests," Fox said. His voice was steady and unhurried, even smooth. Reassuring. Convincing. Fox had charisma, when he chose to use it, and if he wanted to he could wield it as efficiently as any General with their lightsaber. He would do it now, given half a chance.

Appo had no intention of giving Fox that chance.

Floating securely in his sea of clarity beyond panic, Appo knew what Fox was doing, and it was wholly, completely, and utterly unacceptable. The Kaminoans had like as not bred sacrifice into their bones, all clones all alike, but Appo would be damned if he let Fox throw himself under a speeder that Appo had already earmarked for himself.

"It was during my time with the Guard that I met with Slick," he said, fitting his words in as if they belonged in the story Fox had been about to weave rather than an undermining of it. "We agreed to work together on a flimsiwork project, which has led to their current status."

The General actually did lower his lightsaber at that point.

"Flimsiwork," he echoed, looking baffled. "Flimsiwork…you know torture isn't approved of in the Republic, right? Especially if he was already in prison."

The joke, such as it was, fell flat.

In fairness, the General was still staring at all of them with wide hurt eyes that looked as though something had shaken loose in his understanding of the world, and as if he half-suspected that they had done it to him on purpose.

But that was General Skywalker for you, Appo thought to himself with an incongruous burst of affection: not effortlessly witty, no, just a little too emotional to pull off General Kenobi's insouciant flair no matter how he tried. But he was sincere. Sincere and genuine, as poor a dissembler as any clone, and that was better. He was far better off making inspirational speeches about how much he cared for his people than he was at the dry, distant and aloof persona he sometimes sought to adopt.

Strange, the things one thought of right before the end.

They're going to kill you hurt you tear your apart -

Yes, yes, of course they were. And it would be fine as long as Appo could ensure Thire and his boys were kept out of it.

"Sergeant Slick voluntarily agreed to accept the assignment," Fox interjected, once again trying to seize control of Appo's narrative. Stupid self-sacrificing overly kind bastard. Didn't he know that as Thire's best friend, there was no way Appo could let him go down for this? "Boba consented to support him. The project they're working on is highly sensitive -"

"The Coruscant Guard accepted my request to supervise the project with less than full information regarding its content," Appo interrupted. It was true, too: neither Fox nor Thire had learned the full extent of the plan until later. "General, responsibility for their presence here is wholly mine. I will –”

“Can’t we just kill him?!” Boba interrupted. He looked upset, though it was hard to tell if it was due to the nature of the conversation or just because his requests to have his stunner returned had been denied on the basis of his being too much of a dumbass for weapons right now. “It’d be better for everyone! For us, for everyone we’re going to help…even that girl he’s stalking!”

“Stalking?!” General Skywalker reared back as if he’d been slapped. “What the – I’m not – how dare you?! I would never hurt Padmé!”

“Yeah? That’s not what I heard,” Slick said. He was upset, too, in that viscerally clear manner of his that left no doubt that he was upset about the General specifically. “You were just talking about how you were going to force her to be with you even if she didn’t want to.”

“I never said that. I didn’t! All I said was that I needed to fight for her –”

“It’s not fighting for someone if you’re not welcome,” Slick said snidely. He was glaring as if he’d forgotten that the General could cut off his head with the lightsaber that was still in his hands and face no consequences for it. “Pretty sure that’s usually called ‘an invasion’.”

General Skywalker was glaring back as if he, too, had forgotten. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t – you don’t know us. Me and Padmé, it’s different. We’re different. We’re –”

“You’re not anything according to her.”

 “You don’t know that! You weren’t there! You didn’t – the way she said it –” But the General was faltering now. His earlier confidence had been shaken, his mania subsiding into the lack of surety that was more typical of his behavior in every arena but physical combat. Appo couldn’t tell if it had been the shock of the stunner or Slick’s scolding, but even he could tell that General Skywalker no longer believed in what he was saying – no matter how much he wanted to. “I’m saying it wrong. It made sense earlier, the first time, but this time it’s just…I’m saying it wrong.”

Appo sympathized.

He didn’t agree with anything the General was saying, but he sympathized with his frustration.

“If you’d been there, you’d see it my way.” The General wasn’t even arguing any longer. He was all but begging, looking at all of them as if they could tell him that space wasn’t dark and vacant, and also make him believe it. “If you’d been there – if you’d heard what I heard – you’d understand. You’d see. You’d agree with me –”

“Actually, the 501st’s betting circles are essentially unanimous about your relationship with the Senator being permanently over,” Appo said. He didn’t mean to be unkind, but these sorts of things had to be shut down quickly and thoroughly. Allowing someone to continue to maintain an unrealistic delusion had no good end – and unlike Slick, the 501st had been present for the entirety of the relationship collapse. “But if it makes you feel better, they don’t agree with Boba, either. The odds on the whole thing ending up as a murder-suicide are down to 80/1.”

The General stared at him.

Actually, everyone in the room was staring at him. He wasn’t sure why. Did they think Appo didn’t gamble or something? That would be absurd. Everyone on a starship gambled, and clones more than most.

“The – they think – that I –” The General was stuttering in his horror. “You all think I – I wouldn’t. I’d never. I would never, ever, ever hurt Padmé!”

The odds had actually only identified General Skywalker as the would-be murderer three-quarters of the time, since the Senator had her own temper, arsenal, handmaidens, and a plethora of devoted fans on the Resolute. Still, before Appo could explain, Slick snorted loudly.

“Never, huh,” he said with a sneer. “Never, ever, ever. I bet you even think you’re telling the truth. You’d never hurt her. Just like I never thought I’d betray my brothers.”

General Skywalker flinched.

“That’s you,” he said. “Not me. I wouldn’t hurt her. Never. I wouldn’t.”

“Of course you wouldn’t want to,” Slick said scathingly. “You think you’re doing it all for her, don’t you? That’s how it starts. First you think you’re doing what’s right. Then you know you’re doing something wrong, but you tell yourself that it’s all right because it’s for the right reasons. Then you start getting defensive. Why doesn’t anyone understand? Why don’t they trust you? Can’t they see that you mean well? And then you get angry. Because you’re just trying to help them, and they just aren’t listening…”

He laughed. It was a horrible, jagged sort of sound, full of glass edges aimed inwards to rip out your guts, and Appo remembered again that he really didn’t like being able to so clearly interpret Slick’s emotions.

“But yeah, sure, it’s me, not you. Just me, Slick, Slick the traitor. Well, guess what! I only turned traitor in the first place because I wanted to save my boys. Because I love my brothers. And where did that get me? Chopper still won’t look at me. Jester pretends it never happened so hard that he can’t be reasonable about it, and the other three are somewhere in the middle – and as for my brothers that I loved so much, how many of them are lying dead back on Christophsis because of what I did? Because of intel I leaked?”

He took a step forward, and General Skywalker took half a step back, his lightsaber now so loosely held in his hand that it was on the verge of falling.

“I used to hate Rex and Cody for arresting me,” Slick said. His eyes were fixed on the General, and his expression was fierce aggression and self-loathing in equal measure. “Now I know that I’m lucky they did before I really did frame Chopper for my crimes. Before he ended up in the rat cage instead of me, before I got the whole 501st killed, before my boys could face the horrors I had in store for them, and all of that shit because I couldn’t accept that their wants mattered more than what I wanted for them. No matter how good a thing is, it’s nothing but a burden if it’s unwanted. I had to go to prison to learn that, and even now I keep on very nearly forgetting. And you say it’s just me?”

He laughed again, and this time he jabbed a finger straight into General Skywalker’s chest.

“It’s not just me,” he said. “It’s you, walking right after me. And I hope for your sake that someone stops you, too.”

The General was still staring. His eyes were still wide and hurt and horrified, and there was now nothing left of the absolute certainty that had motivated him before.

Finally he swallowed.

“Save your boys,” he said. “Save them…from what?”

“From you, obviously!” Boba burst out before Slick could answer. “That’s why we’re going to save them! All of them!”

“What? Save who? From what?”

“The clones, you slaghead! We’re going to save the clones from being slaves of the Jedi.” Boba’s expression was as fierce as Slick’s, and he jerked his thumb towards his own chest in an inverted echo of what Slick had just done to the General. “And when the clones are all free, then I’m going to go and free all the rest of them too! No one should be a slave!”

Appo had not had any real expectations about how the General would respond to finding out about the plan, not beyond his terror and fear at the expected punishment that he thought would be inevitable. Even so, he wasn’t expecting the General to react to Boba’s grand proclamation by abruptly sitting down, a clatter of armor and thud of cloth as he fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut, as if his legs had suddenly decided they could no longer support him. Even his lightsaber had fallen, clattering to the ground and rolling under a nearby vent, completely forgotten.

“That was my dream,” General Skywalker said.

…what?

“Freeing the slaves,” the General continued. His face was turned towards Boba, but his eyes weren’t focused on him at all. “I was your age. Younger. That’s why I wanted to be a Jedi in the first place.”

He pressed his hands to his eyes to hide the sudden wetness.

“I wanted to free my mother,” he said, and his voice was wet, too. “Her and everyone else, all the people I knew back on Tatooine. I was going to go back to free them…but I never did. I didn’t go back, and she died. She was killed before I ever got the chance to see her free.”

Had anyone else known that General Skywalker’s mother had been a slave?

Appo glanced around, but Slick, Thire, and Fox all looked as dumbstruck as he felt. Apparently Appo really should have taken up General Nu’s offer to learn more about his own General when he’d been back at the Temple, rather than focusing just on Doom’s…

Also, since when did Jedi have mothers? Appo had always gotten the impression that they didn’t. Not biologically, of course, since the Generals were all natborns, but most of them acted like they were every bit as creche-raised as clones, coming from nothing and having only each other. It seemed a little unfair for the General to suddenly pull a mother out of his back pocket now, suddenly more like Boba than he was like them.

“And my dad died before he ever got paid. So what?” Boba said, indifferent and selfishly cruel as only a cadet could be. “They say my dad was a slave once, too. But he still sold himself to Kamino for the chance to be really free, and he never got that. All he got was me, because Mace Windu killed him before he could get what he was owed. And you know what, that was the worst thing that’s ever happened, ever, but unlike you none of that means I’m going to give up!”

“I didn’t give up,” the General protested, pulling his hands away to reveal eyes that were reddened and cheeks that were wet. “I had to be trained as a Jedi first – and anyway, there’s a war on now! I had to focus on that first!”

“Of course you did,” Fox said suddenly, and his tone made it clear that he’d just realized the same thing that Appo had. “Of course you did, General. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do both, right?”

Appo met Fox’s eyes from across the room. It was very brief, little more than a check in, and Fox glanced back, then flicked his own gaze over to Thire, with Appo following shortly behind. It was barely anything, none of them wanting to give anything up or be too obvious about it, but those few moments were enough to make Appo aware of the utterly bizarre sensation that he, Fox, and Thire were all thinking the exact same thing at the exact same time, all of them somehow logical processing machines all functioning in perfect parallel.

For all that clones were identical in genetic make-up and flash-training background, all of them meant to march in time to the same set of regs, it was rare that any group aligned perfectly; that was why they had to be trained so thoroughly to work together. Appo in particular had always found it quite difficult to match his own aberrant thought processes to anyone else, his mind following different paths even when their conclusions reached the same ultimate result. Even Thire, who loved him better than anyone else, often couldn’t understand him without needing to ask for an explanation, and Appo was the same in return. Moreover, the divergence had only gotten worse after the peacekeepers: even the ones like Gree, clones that had been more similar to Appo than to the others, couldn’t or wouldn’t understand him then.

And yet.

At this precise moment in time, Appo felt sure that all three CCs in the room were having the same thought.

General Skywalker was gettable.

Maybe this didn’t have to be a scene of confession and punishment, each of them competing to make the final sacrifice for the others. Maybe, if they all brought the full collective power of their experience and talent and training in strategy and tactics to bear on solving the problem, maybe this could be a recruitment instead.

They just had to be very careful with what the General learned, and when.

“What do you mean?” the General, privy to none of this weird mental merger, asked. His own gaze had shifted over to focus on Fox, who seemed almost excited by the intensity of it.

“Slaves,” Fox said. “Clones. Sure, we’re not slaves in the traditional manner, bought and sold and – and implanted with slave chips.”

The break in his voice there had been impressively minimal.

“But that still doesn’t mean we’re free. You’ve heard the Senate debates, haven’t you? We’re not citizens of the Republic, we don’t have rights under the laws of the Republic. We’re all copies of one man, and that one man volunteered, while the rest of us aren’t considered sentient enough for our opinions to count. We were made to support you, General, you and the rest of the Jedi, but what if that wasn’t enough? What if there was a clone that didn’t want to fight any more?”

“A clone trooper can only be at their post, dead, or missing,” Appo said. “We discussed it once, sir, if you’ll remember. About Sergeant Slick? There’s no other option. A clone trooper has to obey orders or they aren’t worth anything, and the first order, before any other, tells us that we must serve.”

“But what if that wasn’t true?” Fox pressed. “What if there was another option? What if a clone could say no? If a clone could leave the GAR without being a deserter. If a clone could decide to go and live a quiet life, a life of their own choosing…that wouldn’t be so wrong, would it?”

“I – don’t you want to fight?” The General asked. “I mean – I thought –”

“Of course we do,” Fox said.

“Yeah, because we’ve been brought up to think nothing else,” Slick said. “No one’s ever offered us another choice before. Right now, if a trooper decides they don’t want to fight anymore, the only option they have is to die.”

General Skywalker looked stricken all over again.

“Generally speaking, most troopers genuinely want to serve, and find meaning in their service,” Appo said. “We have no interest in interfering with that, nor in damaging the Republic’s ability to defend its aims. We’re good soldiers –”

Are you really? Good soldiers follow orders.

“– but it seems to be in the general interest to ensure that the oversight regarding the lack of options for clones is repaired.”

The General was nodding.

The General was nodding. He was agreeing! He was with them!

Of course, they hadn’t gone into any actual detail yet, and they’d already seen demonstrable evidence that General Skywalker could convince himself into believing something without genuinely committing to it, or at least being susceptible enough to reason to be capable of being talked out of it. They hadn’t even started to explain the bit about the money – and that was assuming a former slave (freeborn child of a slave?) that had subsequently joined the Jedi Order in a student capacity had any more understanding of the concept of “retirement” than a clone did. And there was always a chance he might object to the illegality of it all…

“You should come with us,” Thire said abruptly. He hadn’t spoken until now, but that had been no surprise: Thire had a tendency to go mute under tremendous stress, losing his voice even though he did not lose any of his lethal capabilities, and it was at its worst when the stress was interpersonal. He didn’t have Fox’s ability to compartmentalize and keep talking, smooth and convincing even as he fell straight into despair, and unlike Appo his thinking was too normal to create massive uncertainties and misunderstandings that could be exploited later. Thire was just Thire, wonderful and glorious and brilliant in his own way. “We were just about to go try to find the contract. The clone contract, I mean, the one the Jedi entered into to make us. Surely that would show that we weren’t really meant to be slaves.”

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

They had to strike while the plasma was hot, before the General had a chance to calm down and think better of what he was agreeing to.

After all, the General was almost certainly not of high enough rank to be able to legitimately access a document as undoubtedly classified as the clone contract. They would have no choice but to break in and steal the information. And if the General participated in an act like that, then even if he later balked when he found out about Appo’s money collection or his Mordageen citizenship scheme, it would no longer matter. It would be too late for him to back out. He had already violated the Jedi code by marrying the Senator – another violation would surely count against him. Blackmail, while unsavory, would be on the table as a possibility.

“Master Obi-wan knows more about that than I do,” General Skywalker said, rubbing his nose. “All I know is that he found Kamino when he was looking for Jango Fett – did you know he tried to assassinate Padmé? Anyway, then my Master nearly got himself killed and Padmé and I went to Geonosis to rescue him…and after that it was the war, and no one’s had time to talk about anything. I don’t know. You think there’s a contract somewhere?”

“There has to be,” Appo said firmly. “It’s just like processing part orders, sir. There’s always a paper trail.”

“I don’t like you comparing yourself to machine parts,” the General said nonsensically, but for some reason everyone else in room started nodding. “But I guess it makes sense. You really think it’s an oversight? The clones –”

“I think it’ll be very educational to know what the contract actually says,” Fox smoothly overrode him. “What exactly the Jedi ordered and wanted when they made the order. Don’t you think it’s worth knowing that?”

That it would also reveal exactly how deep Count Dooku’s involvement in the creation of the clones went was not mentioned. Fox had been the best in their strategy class for a reason.

“I guess so,” the General said. “And I mean, if you want to know it, you should, right? It’s about you, after all…I wish Master Obi-wan had just told me all about this stuff, so that I could tell you. He never tells me anything.”

Appo resisted the urge to point out that no one was entitled to know something classified as need-to-know only, particularly when their rank was not high enough to actually need to know. There would be time for a discussion on the importance of hierarchy later, after General Skywalker had agreed to join them.

They needed the handle on him. He couldn’t be allowed to punish the Guard. He couldn’t -

“You know, actually, I have a better idea!”

General Skywalker beamed at all of them.

Fox only arched his eyebrows with an expression of inexplicable (and slightly disturbing) fondness on his face. “Oh?” he said. “What idea?”

“I can tell the Chancellor about it! He’s got so many war powers. If it’s just an oversight, he could just do an executive order to fix it –”

“No!” Fox blurted out.

The General frowned. “Why not?”

Because then they’ll see you. They’ll all look at you, and they’ll know you to be defective. Tarkin’s probably already gone to report you to the Chancellor, and if he hears any more about you now, he’ll be the first one to order your decommissioning –

Intrusive thought. Rejected.

Consider it logically.

General Skywalker liked the Chancellor, but Fox and Thire didn’t; this was only natural given his authority over them. The Chancellor had approved the decimation of the Guard at the behest of his advisors, which had not been a wise use of that authority. The Chancellor was friendly with Captain Tarkin, or so Tarkin claimed, and Tarkin did not like clones in general or Appo in specific. The Chancellor was the supreme authority to which all clones reported, including Appo, and Appo couldn’t bear to have someone like that looking at him –

That wasn’t very logical.

None of those reasons were valid reasons not to proceed. None of those –

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly tell the Chancellor,” Thire said.

Appo turned his head to look at him, and Thire’s expression was so calm and placid and innocent that Appo immediately identified it as him about to play a wicked trick on someone, the way he had once done to the trainers back on Kamino, the ones he’d disliked.

“In fact, I’m surprised you’d even suggest it, sir,” Thire continued. “I thought you liked him.”

General Skywalker blinked. “Of course I do,” he said. “He’s a good man…what do you mean?”

“Well, sir, the Chancellor’s under investigation right now,” Thire said, still innocent as a freshly uncorked tubie. “I’m sure none of it will go anywhere, but there’s so much pressure on him already, isn’t there? All that politics. You wouldn’t want to drag him into some sort of unnecessary trouble when he’s already so stressed, would you?”

Huh. Thire really didn’t like the Chancellor. Appo hadn’t known that.

“Oh,” the General said, completely missing Thire’s clever use of questions to avoid actually saying anything. “I hadn’t thought about that. I guess you’re right. Padmé’s always telling me that I never think about the political angle of anything…I guess this means I can’t tell her, either?”

“That would be unwise,” Appo said, deciding not to point out that the Senator had told him not to contact her at all.

“We’re trying to limit the circle of people in the know,” Fox said. “It’s a complicated subject, and there could be implications for trooper morale. We should go to the Temple first, find the contract. Assuming it’s not a complete bust, you could think about who you can share it with. Someone like…hmm…how about Rex?”

Appo flinched.

Rex must not find out. If Rex discovers, he will ruin.

That wasn’t necessarily true. Appo was biased; he had never gotten onto the same track of thinking as Rex. Rex had never understood anything that Appo had wanted. He’d resented him for being the CC looking over his shoulder. Surely if General Skywalker, who Rex respected, told him about it, Rex wouldn’t object to it. Rex wouldn’t hunt it down. Rex wouldn’t rip it apart and say it wasn’t important and punish everyone involved – and Rex probably wouldn’t have done that even if was Appo he found it out from. He’d been trying, hadn’t he? He had. Rex had been making an effort to be kinder, to respect Appo’s opinions, to listen to him. To tell him he appreciated him. There was no reason to think that he would destroy the plan just because. There was no reason to think that he would try to punish Appo just because he was Appo’s direct authority, because he was the one responsible for Appo, because he was the one –

If you do not do it, one of us will, but we must make it worse to accommodate for your worthlessness. Watch. Watch me hurt them. Because of you. Because you are always you.

Why must you always be you?

You’re the one who brought the rest of us down.

Your fault, your idea, your stupid rotten ideas – if only I’d realized earlier that you were going to be like this, I’d have reported you long ago, and maybe they would’ve fixed you already!

Thire had punched Lock for saying that, Appo remembered distantly. Even though he’d never had any problem with him before, he’d hit him, and he’d hit him with intent to hurt. Thire was good at hurting people, when he wanted to. Zak had tried to help Lock, shouting that he’d been right and Appo wrong and Thire just stupid, and they’d been tangled up into a knot of pain that Appo had caused until Doom had torn the three of them apart. Literally: he had thrown each of them into a corner, and that had been the last Appo had seen of them because he couldn’t stay a moment longer in that room, in the chaos and havoc he had wreaked upon them. He’d thought it was better to leave them to recover in peace, without him, while he went onwards to his next destination. While he marched onwards, numb and unknowing, to the peacekeepers…

Appo didn’t like to think about the peacekeepers.

You were not meant to be safe. You were meant to be brave.

“– wish I knew why he was avoiding me,” General Skywalker was saying. Complaining? He sounded like he was complaining. “It’s not really like Rex, you know? I mean, actually, do you know? I don’t know how well you know Rex…”

“Not very well,” Fox agreed cheerfully. “Mostly by proxy. Cody talks about him, sometimes. Do you need help finding your lightsaber?”

“My – oh, right, no. I’ve got it.”

The General held out his hand and the lightsaber slithered out from under the vent, flying back to his hand.

“So we’re going, then?” Boba asked eagerly.

“We are going,” Thire said, perfectly pleasant, and for some reason Boba shut his mouth so hard it clicked. “You and Slick are staying here to continue filing. Possibly forever.”

“That’s right,” Slick said hastily, putting his hand on Boba’s shoulder. “Forever filing, that’s us.”