Chapter Text
Key, one of the guard’s pilots, was soulmates with the senior aide to the Senator for Alderaan. Three days after figuring out that they were soulmates, they had a courthouse wedding with droids for witnesses and vanished to parts unknown. This was, legally speaking, desertion, and necessitated a full investigation to attempt to apprehend the two lovebirds. To say that nobody’s heart was really invested in the search was an understatement. Key was the only one of her batchmates left, and finding her soulmate was just about the only good thing to happen to her in two years. If running away was what it took to keep her alive, then nobody really begrudged her that. Still, the Chancellor had requested an investigation, and an investigation he would have.
Fox didn’t handle the matter in person, mostly, but it would hardly have been appropriate to have one of his subordinates interview a senator on a criminal matter. And so, when the time came, Fox sat down with Senator Organa himself.
Or, rather, Fox sat down. The Senator hovered around his office for a few minutes before offering Fox a cup of caf. It seemed that, perhaps as an apology for all the hassle, Senator Organa was on a personal campaign to caffeinate the entire Coruscant Guard. He and his aides had been offering caf to everyone who came to return things to their offices or question any of them. Fox still found entirely too many of their things, even with Key and Lady Pretores out of the picture, and they’d finally surpassed the disorganized Herdessan Senator for the honour of the top of his Lost Items list.
“Sugar, no cream,” he said, in response to Senator Organa’s question. The Senator quickly turned back to finish preparing the caf, and brought both cups over to his desk.
“I imagine this can be resolved fairly quickly,” Organa said, seeming almost too relaxed. “I don’t have anything to tell you about where Juana and Key might have gotten to.”
‘Don’t have anything to tell’, not ‘I don’t know’.
“Of course, the Senator for Alderaan would never aid and abet criminals.”
Organa’s too-relaxed expression morphed into a quite genuine grin. “Naturally. And I’m sure the Commander of the Coruscant Guard is putting in his most thorough effort to apprehend these dangerous criminals.”
On principle, Fox didn’t think too highly of defectors. If one of his own had gone to the separatists, he might have killed them. But this was something altogether different, and everyone on the guard knew it. This was desperation and a glimpse of hope, not cowardice, and certainly not treachery.
“And I hope you don’t doubt my resolve to eliminate the threat,” Fox said, as he very deliberately put away his datapad of notes and took a sip of the caf.
That cheeky grin on Senator Organa’s face was just about the best thing he’d seen all year.
“Of course. If you knew that Juana’s mother happened to be the youngest child of a Mandalorian Countess, with familial holdings on Mandalore, you would immediately act to negotiate with the Duchess for the repatriation of your missing pilot.”
No wonder Key had been so confident in her ability to run away.
“It’s a shame that I don’t know about that. Of course, even if I did, the Duchess of Mandalore is very much opposed to the Republic’s war, and would no doubt kick up quite a fuss. It would be more trouble to everyone involved than a single soul is really worth.”
“I’m sure that single soul was worth quite a great deal to Juana. She’s never been a person to do anything in half measures, in all the time I’ve known her.” His tone was reassuring, and Fox abruptly realized that Organa was, in his own subtle way, trying to assure Fox that Key would be alright.
“Isn’t that what soulmates are for? To be someone who values your soul?” Fox’s question was largely hypothetical, but he’d been idly musing the matter over, lately. He’d been on Coruscant for what felt like a lifetime, and had made very little progress in identifying his soulmate. The Alderaanians were at the top of the list, and everyone left in their office had a soulmate who was listed, dead or alive, on their personnel files. The Herdessans had two possibilities, but neither of them matched the unique fashion sense of Fox’s soulmate. He’d knocked dozens of people off the list, and didn’t feel any closer to an answer than before.
Organa, who had a soulmate himself, said, “I prefer to think of it as a partnership. Every relationship has a give and a take in it, an exchange. With your soulmate, it’s easier to give, and the things they give you have more value. The act itself is a metaphor, in a sense. Do you have a soulmate yourself, Commander?”
“I believe I’m supposed to be the one doing the questioning here,” retorted Fox, but he answered anyways, “and no, I don’t know who my soulmate is, but I do have one.”
“Are you looking for them, then?
Fox had been looking nearly his whole life for clues. He hadn’t realized that not looking was even an option until he figured out that Cody did have a soulmate, and was just being stupid about it. “I am.”
“In that case, Commander, I wish you very happy hunting.”
Fox let himself smile, just a little. Organa looked quite delighted by it. “I’ll try my best. By the way, if any well-wishes happened to be able to reach the Ladies Pretores, I, as the Commander of the Guard, would certainly not wish them both my most sincere congratulations on successfully finding each other.”
“Oh, of course not. I certainly wouldn’t pass the message on, suspecting that Lady Key would be relieved to know that she had the support of her brothers in spite of her unannounced flight from Coruscant.”
“Never.”
They shared knowing smiles. It was a shame, Fox thought, that Organa himself had a soulmate already. Even in their few interactions, he was by far one of the best Senators that Fox had ever met.
--
Breha set foot on Coruscant for the first time in years with a sense of relief. She hated the noise and polluted air of the capital, but not nearly as much as she hated the anticipation. The moment was here, now, whether she wanted it or not.
An armoured clone awaited her, when she got off her ship. Unnecessary, with her personal guard, but Bail had requested this greeting specifically, through the proper channels, to give Breha a chance to meet their possible-soulmate on her own terms.
“Welcome to Coruscant, Queen Organa. It’s been requested that you be provided with an escort to the Senate building.”
He had the same voice as his siblings, of course, but somehow it made her more nervous. Had Bail’s request worked? Was this him?
“Brilliant. Thank you, Commander…”
“Fox, your majesty.”
And it was. Breha forced herself to breathe normally. “Breha will do, or Queen Organa, if you prefer formality. My husband speaks highly of you.”
And he had even before he was certain that Fox was their soulmate. She remembered Bail telling her about the guard commander who’d advised him on his Agricorps proposal in the middle of the night. He’d been surprised, then, by how quickly someone with ostensibly no political training had reached in seconds the exact solution that Bail himself had spent all night puzzling out how to execute. It was so very Bail, to have his crush start with someone’s quick strategic mind. It was the foundation of his attraction to her and, she mused, of his longtime purely theoretical crush on Obi-Wan Kenobi.
They spoke a little, on their walk together to Bail’s office. Fox, once Breha convinced him that she really wasn’t interested in standing on ceremony, remained a mostly reserved person. In that way, he was rather like Breha herself. Quiet, a lot of the time. Dignified, where it counted. But with an ability to be anything but in some contexts. Breha discovered this last facet of him when she brought up the topic of Padmé and General Skywalker’s not-so-secret marriage.
“They’re the biggest morons in the Senate if they think they’re getting away with this,” was Fox’s official verdict. “We all know they’re soulmates. Half the Guard has seen them kissing in the hallways. My little brother Rex says that Skywalker’s droid once went a little haywire and showed the entire 501st the wedding video.”
“Skywalker can hardly be blamed,” Breha defended, for no particular reason other than that it was funny to say. “After all, he learned subtlety from Obi-Wan, who is the worst kind of unsubtle: a man who thinks he’s very subtle and clever.”
“Cody is probably the only person in the galaxy who finds General Kenobi a subtle flirt, so I suppose they’re made for each other.”
Breha might well have continued with the gossip and the banter if not for the fact that they’d reached the door to Bail’s office. “Would you like to come in, Commander?”
He looked at her oddly. “I’m sure you have more important things to do than gossip about the Jedi.”
Oh, certainly. She hadn’t been able to plan a trip to Coruscant just for this. A queen had unavoidable demands on very nearly all of her time. But this was important, for reasons far deeper than her desire to plumb the depths of the GAR’s fraternal gossip network.
“I’m only as busy as you are. If you wanted to come inside with me, you would be welcome. I haven’t even had a chance to ask your opinions on art yet.”
“I’m not sure I have any.”
She hadn’t really been expecting any. Arts education was usually the first thing to go in systems that trained children for one very particular purpose, like the GAR’s cloning program no doubt had. But this was just the in she needed. “That’s the very best kind, you know. The rest of us spend years unlearning the opinions of others before we form any for ourselves. There is an exhibition of the Nabooian Lake Country School on at the Coruscant Arts Gallery at the moment. You could join me there, if you like.”
He flustered, a little. Her propositioning had not been subtle. “I’m sure you’d rather take your soulmate.”
It was a fight to keep her expression neutral. “Oh, Bail is always invited. But a fresh perspective would be nice. He and I rarely agree about art, and so he doesn’t voice his opinions as much as he used to. For a man who is an artist himself, if you can count nervous flimsi-folding as art, he has remarkably little artistic taste.”
It got exactly the reaction she was hoping for. Bail had lost so many of his little birds and other odds and ends to her over the years – there was a collection in her personal office that he didn’t know about – that there was no way Fox hadn’t received any himself.
“I, uh-”
Breha swung the office door open. Bail, fortunately, had been possessed of the foresight to give the rest of the office the afternoon off. “Would you like to come inside, Commander? I think the three of us have a great deal to discuss.”
He seemed frozen, rooted in place. “I thought you were Senator Organa’s soulmate.”
“I am,” Breha said, simply, “but you didn’t really think that he was the one losing all that jewelry, did you?”
“I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Everything is impossible until it happens. And it has happened. So you’d better come inside and we can figure it out from there. I can finally pay you back for that cup of caf you gave me all those months ago.”
Breha took his hand, and dragged him inside, closing the door behind them.
--
“‘Cody is the oblivious brother,’ he said. ‘Cody didn’t recognize his soulmate when he got a clue to the face’, he said. ‘Cody doesn’t know the meaning of subtle,’ he said. Bold karking words from a man who had a ring with the seal of House Organa on it in his bedside table for a year and a half and didn’t think to ask his colleague Senator Organa about it.”
“Thire is a traitor and I’m going to kill him and however many more people it takes to stop a word of this from spreading.”
“Too-late, vod. Bly knows already and the rest of the GAR will hear about it in the next tenday. He’s more than entitled to revenge, after all these years.”
“Bly won’t do that. He knows that I want to keep this private, for now, and he never gossips when it really is important.”
“As I pointed out, Bly doesn’t need to mention any specifics about who your soulmate is to humiliate you for being an idiot.”
“Kriff you, Cody. I’m going to tell him that you were behind ‘Pants’ all along, you osi’yaim.”
“He won’t believe that. I’m the sedate and uptight one, or haven’t you heard?”
“How you and General Kenobi keep that reputation is one of the galaxy’s great mysteries. Does he mass hypnotise people? Is that how it works?”
“That’s classified.”
--
Breha couldn’t stay on Coruscant for long. She wished, for the first time in her entire life, that she could have. Usually, when she missed Bail, she wished that he could be home on Alderaan with her, but with Fox, for all that Breha was increasingly desperate to bundle him up and carry him home, Coruscant, not Alderaan, was the place where they’d met. Breha had romanced Bail the the green hills and snow-crusted mountains of her childhood. The time she shared with Fox was woven through the bustling streets of Coruscant, under the neon lights and the constant noise of speeders rushing and honking at each other. It wasn’t a romantic setting. Breha didn’t particularly mind, to no one’s shock more than her own.
Fox didn’t have a lot of time off. Clones, he said, weren’t really expected to need such human things as rest and relaxation, and unlike his siblings in the GAR proper, Fox never received anything so pleasant as ‘shore leave’. But he had a few hours, here and there, and as Commander of the Guard he could set his own schedule within certain limits. They found the time, in evenings and mornings and in the middle of the night, for dinners, for quiet observance of Coruscant’s orange dawn, for whispered secrets and promises.
True to her word, Breha did take Fox to an art gallery, though not quite in the circumstances she’d originally planned. Fox couldn’t get time off in their regular hours.
“Fortunately,” Bail said, with a mischievous grin plastered on his face, “the Senator for Naboo has certain influence. The curator was more than willing to arrange an after-hours showing for her particular friends.”
Fox, who was sitting at Bail’s desk, hands folded politely in his lap, said, “I didn’t know I was a ‘particular friend’ to Senator Amidala.”
Breha asked, “did you tell her about… all of this?”
She knew that they’d been seen together, out in the streets of Coruscant, and her maids and assistants had brought her rumours already that one of her or Bail was having an affair, but the three of them had all been fairly private about the truth. There wasn’t a specific reason why, exactly, but it wasn’t anyone else’s business and Fox seemed to be a mostly private person. Breha could respect that.
Bail shook his head. “No. I just said that we wanted to take Fox. Didn’t say why. Padmé said, and I only slightly paraphrase here, ‘the guard’s workload really is appalling, the limiting of art as a province of the wealthy is a travesty, and of course, Bail, any time.”
Only Padmé Amidala. Breha thanked her lucky stars every day that Padmé had been elected Senator.
And so they went to the gallery alone with the curator in the stillness like nowhere else on Coruscant, and Breha had the joy of watching Fox’s eyes go wide. What was most remarkable about the Lake Country School was the scale of their paintings, the abstracted representations of Naboo’s natural beauty exaggerated and heightened and rendered all-consuming on canvases twice Breha’s height at the least. Some of the greatest paintings, it was said, had collapsed under their own weight and been lost to history. The best, of course, were actually on walls and other surfaces in Naboo itself, and had rarely been seen by offworlders. But these lesser great works were extraordinary enough, and Fox stared, looking as hypnotised as Breha felt, at their unworldly beauty.
She slipped her hand into his. “What do you think, my dear?” Breha and Bail were both still trying out pet names for Fox. Since they used them with each other, they wanted one for him.
“It’s beautiful.”
Bail, purely to be contrary, said, “I think it’s clichéd.”
Breha, who knew him far too well, waited until the curator’s back was turned before sticking her tongue out at Bail.
--
It took Fox time to settle into the fact that he had two soulmates. Two soulmates who were, respectively, the Senator and Queen of Alderaan. It was a strange and wondrous thing. They’d been worried, Breha had confided in him, that he wouldn’t believe them. But that had never been the source of Fox’s discomfort with the idea. In fact, the idea that it was two made sense of a great many things that he had never really understood about his soulmate, and the fact that one of those two was Bail made sense of a good many more.
No, the source of Fox’s uncertainty was something very profoundly human. He saw the familiarity of Bail and Breha’s relationship, the way it was worn in like a good pair of boots, not tired but familiar, improved by their long years together, and felt something twist in his chest. It wasn’t jealousy. Or, at least, it wasn’t jealousy of either of them. Rather, it was a certain envy for all the time he had lost. If he’d been someone else, chronologically the age he was biologically, then he could have had so much more time with them. As it was, he wondered if he could ever become so much a part of this thing as they were.
Bail and Breha both tried, very blatantly, to assuage this fear. Once the three of them had agreed that they were interested in seeing if this was a romantic soulmate bond, they were careful to offer him touch just as freely as they did each other, to meet his eyes often, to invite him into their longstanding jokes and traditions. They bared their souls to him in a way that Fox didn’t ever think another person had before. With his vode, Fox had always known their secrets and had never needed to ask. But with Bail and Breha, there were things almost nobody knew. Things that were his, now, just as much as theirs.
“I can’t have children,” Breha burst out, one evening, in the middle of a period of relative silence. It had been clear nearly from Fox’s arrival that she’d been working up the nerve to say something.
Fox had no way of contextualizing that feeling – he’d grown up in a place where no one had children or parents in any conventional sense – but from the look on Breha’s face and the way Bail’s hand tightened on her knee, that it was something that meant a great deal to her.
“I’m sorry,” Fox said, eventually. He hoped it was the right thing to say. And then, perhaps as an excuse, “this wasn’t really a part of the way I grew up.”
He wanted to ask if it had some cultural significance, but couldn’t work up the courage. Breha answered without him asking. “On Alderaan it’s not… shameful. But for a woman in my position, it really is expected to produce some sort of heir, eventually. And personally… I’ve always wanted children. We had been thinking about adopting, but…” she gestured around them at the ether, no doubt meaning the war.
Fox hadn’t ever considered the concept of raising children before. It hadn’t been a factor. But one thing had been on his mind lately. “If the war ever ends, I don’t want my vod’ike – my little brothers – to be raised the way I was raised. I don’t have any idea how to raise children, I don’t really have any role models to go by, but…”
Bail and Breha exchanged one of those looks that made them seem as telepathic as any Jedi. Bail said, “I think that idea deserves serious consideration.”
If he’d said yes instantly, Fox wouldn’t have believed he was honest. “It might not be possible. The Kaminoans are… touchy, about certain things. I don’t know what their contract says about leftovers. And even if it was, it might be cruel to break up batchmates – siblings, or, well, a closer form of sibling.”
Breha’s expression had gone from sad to dangerous. “Well, I can’t speak to the latter, but the Kaminoans are going to have another kriffing thing coming if they lay hands on anybody.”
Fox was going to have to tell her about the decommissionings very gently. “I don’t think that fight will end well for you.”
“Maybe not,” Breha said, “but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth fighting.”
It wasn’t that moment where Fox became sure of his place in their three-stranded bond, although it was one he would carry with him for a long time. The certainty came later, after Breha had been pulled back to Alderaan, in a moment that was quiet, not loud.
Bail is still in his office :/ read the first message from Breha. The second, just below it, said, I entrust you with this critical mission. Spring our B from this prison.
Fox only realized he was smiling stupidly at his comm when Thire groaned at him. “Living with you is going to be unbearable, isn’t it?”
Fox grabbed up his helmet. “You won’t have to put up with it any more tonight, Commander.”
“I think I actually hate you.”
It was ten minutes later, when Fox let himself into Bail’s office and found him drooling on top of his datapad, that he realized that he had a place here, for the rest of his life. There was a warmth in him that had nothing to do with the way he slung Bail’s arm over his shoulder to lift him and carry him out of the office.
--
Afterwards, when the war was over, Bail cursed himself a hundred times over for a fool. He had all the pieces to know that something was wrong. Every miserable detail of it. He knew that Palpatine was a tyrant in the making, he knew, from Fox, that Palpatine was different to the clones in private than he was in public and, most devastating of all, he knew that Fox was missing time. Just a handful of afternoons, always after meeting with Palpatine. But he’d always been so sure that it was just a mistake. That he’d fallen asleep somewhere. Bail had been arguing with him for months to go see a doctor, but Fox had been afraid of the consequences if it was serious and Bail could hardly argue that point.
But now, though. Now he felt so very, very stupid. “Do you think he’ll ever be able to forgive me?”
He knew that Breha was thinking ‘don’t blame yourself’ and ‘this isn’t your fault’. But what she said instead was, “My ship leaves for Coruscant in an hour. Will you be able to be there for him, until I can get there?”
Bail thought about the Republic collapsing around them. He probably could have been Interim Chancellor tomorrow, if he’d wanted it. It was tempting, in a way, to know he could use that power for good. As senior as he was in the Delegation of 2000, he would have had their full support. But then he looked down again at the message on his comm from Commander Thire:
Fox in for surgery at Jedi Temple now.
The Jedi had rushed him in as soon as the news of the Chancellor’s plan had been uncovered. Bail had been briefed about it only an hour ago.
He opened a new message thread, the one for urgent matters of the Delegation of 2000:
I will not be throwing my hat in the ring for Chancellor.
Aloud, he said, “I’ll be there. For however long it takes. See you soon, my Dove.”
Breha smiled for the first time since the start of the call. “Love you, B.”
--
“Commander Fox, your partner is here to see you?”
That was uncharacteristically thoughtful of Thire. “Good man.”
The Jedi cadet, who was much more cheerful than the fierce general who had performed Fox’s surgery, grinned brightly. “Yes, Sir. He seems that much. Should I let him in? Master Che says it’s alright for you to have visitors as long as they’re restful.”
Thire wasn’t a particularly restful person, but he was more restful than, say, Bly. “Please.”
She nodded, and motioned to Thire through the door, and in stepped Bail.
“Oh,” Fox said, dumbly, as the cadet stepped outside, “my partner.”
Bail was a smart man, and he understood instantly where the confusion had occurred. “Thire told me you were here. I hope that’s alright. He’ll probably be going into surgery shortly, otherwise I’m sure he would be here. Master Ti mentioned to me in the waiting room that they’re prioritizing all the commanders, in case Palpatine or Dooku had some sort of backup plan, and the rest of the GAR will be going on complete comms blackout. She’s leaving now for Kamino to ensure your little brothers are safe. Breha is on her way, but in the meantime, I can fetch one of your brothers, if you would like.”
He was a smart man, and also very stupid. “If you can stay… I want you to stay. But I thought the Senate needed you.”
Bail, with a distant look on his face, took a seat beside Fox and folded his hands in his lap with as much delicate precision as one of his flimsi birds. “I’m one of a Delegation of 2000. There are literally thousands of people who can do what needs to be done in the Senate, right now. All of those people have my comm ident if they need me desperately, and I do, in fact, have a co-senator who can give my vote if needed. But until Breha arrives, I’m the only soulmate you have here, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be.”
“You love your work.”
He would never have been away from Breha so long if he didn’t. They might never have met.
“I hope it isn’t too forward for me to reply that I also love you. And I am so immeasurably sorry I didn’t see it sooner.”
Fox opened his hand and made a slightly grabby motion until Bail gave in and linked their fingers together. “Di’kutla riduur.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to marry you, Reynard.”
“And I don’t remember you speaking mando’a. But here we are.”
Bail ducked his head. “I, uh, may have asked Juana about terms related to the concept specifically.”
Of course he had. “And you lied to that poor baby Jedi to get here. What was she, all of six? Senator Organa,” Fox exclaimed, with mock horror.
Bail smiled, eyes growing warm and inviting. “That’s not a ‘no’ I’m hearing.”
“Of course not. You didn’t ask a question.”
“Of course not,” parroted Bail, “that’s Breha’s job. And it’s for later. I had a good friend place significant sums in Master Vos’s betting books on you getting married six months after Cody and Obi-Wan do.”
“So does a two-year engagement work for you?”
The smile grew blinding. “It just might, at that.”
--
They were sitting together again the next day, Fox propped up on his pillows and feeling much better, when Breha finally arrived. In her pocket she carried the very signet ring that had languished so long in Fox’s bedside table, resized to fit his finger and with the sigil amended to be a personal crest variant with a Fox’s tail curving beneath the Organa crest.
“Cody is literally never going to let me live it down if I get married with that ring.”
Breha smiled at him, and finished placing the ring on his finger. “You aren’t. It’s an engagement ring. You can pick the wedding ring yourself.”
“He still hasn’t actually said yes yet,” Bail stage-whispered to Breha.
She gave Fox a hopeful look. He relented almost immediately. “Yes. Of course. But we’re keeping it under wraps until Cody works up the nerve to ask Obi-Wan. I want to watch him squirm and ask Bly for proposal advice.”
“Of course,” Breha agreed and, practically brimming with happiness, she told him, “You’re going to love Alderaan. It’s quiet. And you have to meet my Grandmother. She was the first person we told about you.”
For the first time in years, they were looking towards a future that was real, that was happening to them. “And you have to meet my brothers.” He considered his own words. “Actually, that might take a while. More than one of them at once will not be good anywhere ‘quiet’.”
“Don’t worry,” Bail told him, “we have plenty of time.”