#foxquinlan

They have the room for the night. Fox has the mark of a pillow on his face, and his regulation hair is messy, the curls still damp. He offers Quinlan his gloves wordlessly, and watches him patiently while Quinlan slips them on, the leather familiar and loathed at once. When Quinlan reaches out for him, Fox lets him tug him closer, closer, until he’s leaning over Quinlan, chest against chest, their thighs touching. 

He still tastes like the hotel’s chalky toothpaste. Quinlan chases the taste into his mouth, closing his eyes, Fox’s skin buzzing where they touch, smooth between the scars. 

Fox pulls away. He blinks, shaking himself, flushed. His eyes are hot, and his lips are shiny with spit. 

“I want to show you something,” he says. 

Quinlan raises his eyebrows. He lets himself smile, makes it as wide and smirky as he dares to.

“Oh?”

Fox stares at him for a beat, eyes flat, his reluctant amusement a thrum that travels from the place where his hip touches Quinlan’s to Quinlan’s chest: it makes its home there, right under Quinlan’s breastbone. Fox leaves the bed with quiet feet and ignores Quinlan’s groan. He knows Quinlan will follow, because he always does, off the bed and through their room door and out of the hotel and to his swoop bike. He lets Fox drive, curious despite himself, holding onto Fox’s hips while they go down, down, down, deeper under Galactic City’s surface.

Quinlan’s lived in Coruscant most of his life. He spent the better part of his teenage years roaming the lower levels with Obi-Wan and the others, getting in and out of trouble: the first time he broke his nose, he was trying to jump off a moving tram on Level 4000; the first time he got blackout drunk was in one of Coruscant’s half-wild parks. When he thinks of home he thinks of Coruscant—not the Temple, and certainly not Kiffu.

Fox knows this about him, and sometimes Quinlan thinks it’s one of the reasons he allows himself to spend time with Quinlan at all, his innate suspicion of anything not clone-shaped losing the battle against his curiosity, against the hunger he carries within his bones. Quinlan’s favourite commander loves Coruscant despite himself, and Quinlan’s self-aware enough to know that one of the reasons he entertains Fox’s little trips is the hope that, someday, that love may touch Quinlan, too.

Aayla’s commander is a hard man to read.

He’s pleasant enough. Polite and competent and professional. Nicer than Commander Cody, quieter than Commander Ponds. Not as charismatic as Skywalker’s captain.

Quinlan used to think the man didn’t like him. There was something in the way Bly watched him, always keeping his distance, his brown eyes lacking the warmth he looked at Aayla with. He kept himself hidden behind heavy shields, mind locked tight and disciplined, and smiled at Quinlan without opening his mouth.

He finally understands that day in the Senate building, Quinlan wearing proper Jedi robes for the first time in weeks and Commander Bly wearing his dress greys. They cross paths in one of the many hallways and corridors that bore through the Senate’s lower floors: Quinlan’s leaving, and Bly just got there, and Commander Fox is waiting next to the lifts, arms crossed and bucket on, bored and tired and impatiently waiting for Quinlan to get on with it, reluctant fondness threaded all over his Force signature like aurodium thread through silk.

Bly smiles when he sees his brother: it changes his face. He grins, his serious eyes go small and warm, his careful distance disintegrating. He crosses the corridor in three quick steps to stop in front of Fox, and Fox takes off his bucket, smiling back, and for a few, rushed seconds they’re in a world of their own, heads bent together, foreheads brushing against each other.

Quinlan blinks, and it’s like he can see them as they must have been not so long ago—young and more innocent, in that hellish water world where they were made.  

The memory isn’t anyone’s, but Quinlan doesn’t doubt for a second that it is a true one—it’s just them, flashing bright in the Force, jumping through time and space to fuck with Quinlan’s synapses. He shakes himself, dizzy and annoyed, and when Bly steps away and turns to look at him, his face once again the mask Quinlan’s used to, he smiles as wide and fake as he can make it.

At his brother’s back, Fox rolls his eyes; Quinlan’s smile twitches and he has to work to keep it from turning sincere. Fondness blooms and catches, like fire or some kind of tick, and Quinlan thought he was too old for this, too old and too bitter, but apparently he was wrong. 

Commander Bly blinks, glances back at Fox, and Fox—freezes. He puts his bucket back on, but they all know it’s too late. Bly’s smile changes. He raps on his brother’s pauldron with the backs of his knuckles and starts making his way to an open door at the end of the corridor, glancing now and then back at Fox over his shoulder with bright eyes.

Quinlan sighs. He stops in front of Fox, and for a beat he just—looks at him. Faceless and featureless in his red and white plastoid shell, but so alive. 

“You’re late,” Fox says after a beat, vocoder crackling. Quinlan tugs on his elbow, just once, and Fox starts walking, steps quick. Quinlan falls into step at his side, their arms brushing.

“I know and I’m sorry,” he says, a rare show of honesty that catches them both by surprise.

Fox says nothing for a long beat, but Quinlan can feel him staring, even with his helmet facing forward. 

“You’ll make it up to me,” Fox finally says.

Yes. Quinlan thinks he will.

No one told Fox the outside world was so kriffing loud. 

He focuses on the way the dry dirt of the path feels under his boots and nothing else. Not on the feeling of the sun on the top of his head, or on the sweat running down his back and under his shirt, or on the hot, prickling feeling of the tender skin on the back of neck slowly burning. He pays little mind to the smells—green dry things and dust and his own sweat, tibanna and hot metal, melting plastoid and burnt rubber—and he doesn’t listen to the birdsong or to the loud, loud buzzing of the insects, or to Vos’s slow and careful steps right behind him.

Now and then the wind changes and Fox can taste smoke, their crashed ship still burning behind them and the white sun of this world making it burn harder, longer. They left Fox’s armour there, the bright white plastoid shell blackened and cracked by the heat, but Fox misses it. He misses his bucket and he misses the way it made keeping the world away so much easier.

He spent most of the war in Coruscant, in Galactic City. He knows not how to navigate this brave new world, with its bright sharp smells and its illegible noises.

Vos stops. Fox pauses a few seconds later, blinking under the harsh sunlight, and looks up at him. Vos is staring at him, and it’s been five years but he has changed very little. His skin is darker, his hair longer and grayer, and there are more scars on his bare arms, new lines on his face, but he still looks at Fox the same way he used to, hazel eyes warm and guarded and like Fox’s the only thing in the world.

Fox looks away, over Vos’s shoulder. His head still hurts from the surgery, and he’s both overwarm and too cold, dizzy with thirst. 

Vos frowns. He exhales, frustrated, and then there’s a hand around Fox’s wrist and Fox lets himself pulled away and deeper under the trees by the path, the cool shadows under their branches sudden and soothing on his burnt skin. 

He lets himself be pushed to the ground, and then he accepts Vos’s canteen, takes a sip of cold water and then another before giving it back. 

Fox has been trying not to think. Not about the past few days—Vos, caught; Vos, gone from his cell; the med droid and then darkness—and not about the past few years either. If he starts, the weight of his mistakes will drag him down, and Fox—Fox has things to do, first. 

He hasn’t felt human in a very long time but he doesn’t need to, to do the things now knows he has to do.

“We will rest here,” Vos says, hoarse rough barely audible under the insects and the wind and Fox’s own beating heart. “Wait until the sun’s lower.”

Fox says nothing. He leans back against the trunk at his back and listens to Vos take a seat by his side, close enough to touch but keeping his distance.

He wants his bucket back. It never made it any easier, not thinking about Vos, but Fox misses the illusion of security.

Fox doesn’t like being in the Jedi Temple. It’s too clean, too empty. It’s huge: it was clearly designed with thousands of beings in mind, but every time Fox has to pay them a visit, his steps echo through never ending empty hallways that are full of golden light and dust motes and not much else. 

That’s a lie: he finds other clone troopers, sometimes, as out of place as Fox himself, or he crosses paths with bands of younglings, usually guided by knights too soft to be in the front lines or masters who have one step on the grave.

The kids always wave at him, their little faces innocent and perfectly ordinary, and Fox does his best to hide how uncomfortable he feels in the depths of his mind and answer their greetings with a nod, with a smile when he feels up to it.

Fox doesn’t like going to the Temple, but when he’s called he obeys. He fits the meetings into his schedule the best he can, and then he grabs a speeder and drives through Coruscant’s always jammed airways. In the past year and a half, he’s had to visit once or twice a month, and by now he knows the way by heart. 

That afternoon it’s raining, the sky dark grey and heavy, and Fox goes around the back after receiving permission to land and leaves his bike in the hangar he’s begun to find familiar.

He’s tired. His head always hurts when it rains like this, and he hasn’t been sleeping well, stress and the pain of a thousand little bruises that never seem to completely heal making the act of closing his eyes and slipping into unconsciousness seem almost impossible.

The technician in charge of the hangar is a very young padawan, Rodian and extremely serious. They must be barely over sixteen in nat-born years, and Fox waits impatiently while the teenager checks their datapad and logs in his name and designation.

The hangar is almost empty. There’re half a dozen starfighters in different degrees of disrepair waiting to be fixed in some of the bays, along with a very dusty ETA-class shuttle and a lartie with the worst portrait of General Secura Fox has ever seen in his life on the starboard side. Fox rolls his eyes under his helmet.

“That’s all, commander,” the little Rodian says. Fox turns back to them and nods. He takes off his bucket and puts it under his arm. The padawan’s eye stalks shudder, and suddenly Fox understands: they’re very anxious. “Thank you--thank you for your patience.”

Fox makes himself smile.

“It’s fine,” he says. “Thank you.”

The kid bows, awkward and too fast, and then hurries away. Fox sighs. 

“Good job. You didn’t make anyone cry this time.”

Fox closes his eyes. His hand twitches over his bucket, but he doesn’t put it back on--that would be admitting defeat. He turns to look at Vos over his shoulder and lets his impatience show on his face instead. 

“Sir,” Fox says. Vos waves a hand lazily from THE hull of one of the fighters. He looks--well. Vos looks as he always does. Disheveled and rough around the edges, as if he had just got there. 

Fox didn’t see him arrive. Then again, he never does. Vos is like a ghost--Fox’s yet to find a door that’ll keep him out. 

“Commander,” Vos replies, falsely serious. He drops from the starfighter and approaches him. Vos stops in front of Fox and knocks his knuckles against his pauldron. “Nice. New armour?”

Fox has to raise his chin to look the Jedi in the eye. 

“Yes,” he says. He checks the time--he has ten minutes to reach the conference room. “Do you have anything relevant to discuss with me, sir? Or are you here just to tell me that I look pretty?”

Vos blinks. Fox doesn’t let himself look away or swallow--he’s terrified, though. He can’t believe he just said that. Vos isn’t one of the bad ones, but he’s--they’re in the middle of the Jedi Temple. Fox cannot afford this kind of thing. He waits for a few seconds, his stomach in knots, his eyes tracking the minute changes in the expression on Vos’s face.

The Kiffar doesn’t look offended, though. He just looks--well. Baffled isn’t the word. Fox watches him open and close his mouth once--no words come out. 

Fox tilts his head.

His chrono beeps. Seven minutes and a half. He’ll have to hurry.