Chapter Text
Fox’s soulmate was a messy person. Well, not that messy in the grand scheme of things, he supposed, compared to someone like Bly’s soulmate. But they lost things easily. He found things on Kamino all the time, but there, he was never sure what was his and what belonged to other people. The only things he always knew were his, even from a young age, were the political documents. There were other things – mens and womens clothing, both human, jewellery, styluses and pens, that he couldn’t say with any confidence were his or not. But everyone who knew Fox knew that political treatises and documents were probably his, in the same way that trashy romance novels always belong to Rex.
“Treatise on Mid-Rim Mining Regulation,” Cody read, and slapped it down on Fox’s bunk. “Fell out of your locker, vod.”
Fox was starting to wonder if the Kaminoans would give him a filing cabinet if he asked politely enough.
--
“Breha, have you seen my mining treatise?”
“Not yet! Have you seen my slippers?”
Bail stuck his head through the half-open ‘fresher door to look at his wife. “I haven’t. And that broach of your mother’s never turned up either.” It was something he’d been keeping a particular eye out for over the course of several months
Breha turned her head to meet his eyes, considering, before looking back in her mirror. “Well, either we’re the victims of an extremely protracted and very weird theft.”
“Unlikely.”
“Or one of us is lying.” Breha said it with joking amusement, not with any real suspicion.
“Also unlikely.”
“Or we need to consult an expert to figure out if it’s possible that at least one of us has an additional soulmate.”
Breha was on just the same page he was. Thank the goddess. Bail wouldn’t have known what to do if she hadn’t been. “I’m sure I can find time to consult the Republic Archives when I’m on Coruscant. If anywhere has mention of it, it’ll be there.”
“Good,” Breha told him, leaning into the mirror to apply her mascara. “I can talk to my grandmother. She might know something.”
“Wish me luck in finding time to balance archival research and this year’s senate sessions. The Seperatist Crisis is worse than ever, I think.”
“At least you have that new Senator from Naboo coming to back you up soon. I liked most of the policies she mentioned in her speeches.”
“True. But somehow, even with new support incoming, I have a bad feeling about this session.”
--
On Coruscant, the profile of things Fox found changed dramatically. As the Commander of the Guard, he went from sharing bunkspace with dozens of brothers to just one: Commander Stone, whose soulmate was the guard’s other commander, Thorn. Later in the war, Fox would swap their bunking so Stone and Thorn would be together, while he shared with the un-soulmated Commander Thire. Each of these arrangements, for different reasons, lead to the same outcome: Fox finally had space where he knew that everything he found belonged to him. Unfortunately, the sheer business of his new position meant that he was rarely in his own room enough for it to help as much as he would have liked. He still found things in the hallways and offices and Senatorial Pods that he had no idea who they belonged to.
Very occasionally, things were marked, monogrammed, or otherwise clearly identified as belonging to particular senators or their staff. Somehow, by a cruel whim of the universe, this was never the case for things that appeared in his room. Fox kept a list of the tally for each Senator or their office. It had a few other pieces of data on it, including any names he’d ever found on documents before coming to Coruscant – fifty-odd Senators, usually documents with multiple names on them – and whether or not he knew that the people in question already had soulmates, like Senator Amidala did.
Currently, the top of the list was actually held by the office of the Senator for Herdessa. But as far as Fox could tell, this was largely because one of her aides was willfully disorganized and, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t have a soulmate to receive their frequently lost property. This issue plagued the entire guard, not Fox in particular. Second place was also likely a dead end: the Senator for Alderaan, Bail Organa’s office. Organa already had a soulmate to whom he was married, although Fox supposed it could have been one of his aides.
There were four aides, a policy consultant and a secretary in the Organa office, and Fox had turned documents in to all of them, and never to the Senator himself. But once, he was working unusually late, around one in the morning, and found a file, tucked under a bench in one of the Senate hallways.
‘Appeal to the Judicial Committee on Reforms to GAR Internal Investigations’ read the title of the report. Under this, it bore the names of a couple dozen worlds and their senators. When Fox flipped past the title page, he found this copy was marked up, and, important, had the Alderaanian crest embossed on the inside cover.
Mentally adding one to the tally, Fox trudged back upstairs to leave it under Senator Organa’s door. But, to his surprise, the light remained on in the Senator’s office. So, instead, he knocked.
“Come in,” an unfamiliar voice called, with some surprise in its tone. Fox opened the door to find Senator Organa, sitting at his secretary’s desk surrounded by datapads, flimsiplast file folders, and empty caf cups.
“Senator.”
“Commander,” Organa acknowledged, with some shock. “What can I do for you at this hour?”
Tragically few senators both remembered to address Fox by his title and were actively trying to help him do his job. “Nothing. I just came to bring you this. I think someone from your office must have dropped it somewhere.”
He passed the folder to Organa. “Ah. Thank you. I had wondered where this went. I’m very sorry for the number of times guardsmen have had to return lost documents to our offices in the last few months.”
There was an awkward moment, after the exchange, where neither of them knew exactly what to say. Eventually Fox asked, “what are you doing here at this hour, Senator?”
Organa seemed to grow focused as his mind returned to thoughts of his work. “Ah, yes. Don’t worry, it isn’t an all too common occurrence. But there’s a vote tomorrow on whether or not to reinstate the mandates of the Jedi Corps. I think that, on balance, the servicemembers do more good at their original roles in the Corps than they do trying to assist in the GAR. Particularly the Agricorps. Letting their work fall to the wayside is only buying ourselves trouble later. They’re far more successful than any sort of army in preventing conflicts, purely by reducing desperation. General Kenobi had the Jedi Archives pull documentation on Agricorps success rates in the last twenty years and-”
He stopped, abruptly. “I’m sorry, I must be boring you. Thank you for bringing this back. I hope you’re able to head home soon and get some rest.”
It wasn’t boring, exactly. But Fox had more than enough things to worry about as it was without trying to consider what Jedi who weren’t generals were supposed to be doing.
“I think you’ll have a hard sell trying to convince people that the army keeping them safe isn’t the most important thing right now, Sir.”
Organa looked down at his documents and back up at Fox. “Yes, you’re right. But the Agricorps is keeping them safe. They just don’t see famine as a threat because almost none of them have ever experienced it.”
“Then I guess you just have to make them see it as a real threat,” Fox told him, and was surprised to see a slight smile grace Organa’s lips. Perhaps it was what forced him to press on. In his time at the Senate, he’d learned far too much about how it operated and how politicians thought. “It needs to seem real to them. That it’s their worlds that might starve. Their people who might be hurt.”
“You’re exactly right, Commander. I intend to do just that.”
Fox had turned and was very nearly out of the door when Organa called after him, “would you do me the favour of telling me your personal name?”
“It’s Fox.”
Organa’s smile grew fuller. “Goodnight, Commander Fox.”
“Goodnight, Senator Organa.”
--
Breha had a lot of long mornings and long nights as Queen of Alderaan. There was a lot to be done and, with Bail off in the Senate, only her to do it. They had both always supported the other in their political endeavours, but having the Senator and the Queen married to one another always caused there to be an overwhelming amount of work in their household. It was especially bad with the war on. Although Alderaan itself remained mostly untouched by fighting, Bail had been unable to make it home for any significant stretch since the beginning of the war. Breha missed him.
Fortunately, they were soulmates. Whatever strange thing – whichever unknown person – was having an impact on their bond at the moment, there was still that initial connection between Bail and Breha that brought them together. There were the little things, when she found his jacket thrown over her chair, or received a package back from Coruscant containing one of her scarves.
One morning, Breha found herself sitting at her desk, with that morning’s stack of briefings in front of her, and, to her surprise, found a warm cup of caf in a neutral white mug already sitting on her desk.
“Flora, did you make caf already?”
Her assistant rolled her chair in front of the door to make eye contact with Breha. “No, your majesty. And that wasn’t there when I arrived this morning, either.”
In that case, it had appeared when Breha was already in the room. She let herself laugh, a little. “We are aligned with Coruscant Standard Time at the moment, so it’s morning there as well. And an unlucky one for Bail, it would seem.”
She took a sip of the caf. No. Not for Bail. He always took his caf black. This had sugar in. She didn’t correct herself to Flora, but she did make a note of the fact in the list she and Bail were sharing.
What We Know About Soulmate X:
- Loses very few things
- We didn’t start losing things to them until at the latest CRC 7946 (Age: 11? Unless not human)
- Species at least one foot (lost sock)
- Species wears socks
- Knows how to fold flimsi birds (possibly learned from Bail doing same?)
- Is probably on Coruscant (Breha’s lost earring turned in to Coruscant Guard)
- Drinks caf with sugar
It was a pitifully short list. But every journey had to start somewhere. For now, Breha cradled her neutral white mug in her hands and issued a quiet thank you to the universe for whatever might come of this.
--
“Where is that kriffing caf? I am having a long enough morning as it is!”
Thire, in the interest of keeping the peace, passed his cup over instead of answering.
--
Bail attended the wedding of Aayla and Bly Secura mostly by accident. He didn’t actually know either the bride or the groom, but Obi-Wan did, and he’d invited Bail to come for largely political reasons. It was good to have a clear senatorial presence in support of clones exercising their sentient rights. Senator Amidala was there, of course, but alone she could easily be discounted. Bail and Senator Mina Tills of Mon Cala together helped make it clear that this was an active recognition of the rights of clones to marry. Bail ended up spending most of the event with Senator Tills because, for the first time in the many years that they had known each other, Obi-Wan ditched him with no warning. Instead of spending the day with Bail, he spent it being joined at the hip with Commander Cody, his…
“Soulmate?” Bail said, with some incredulity, when Padmé told him. “I didn’t think Obi-Wan had a soulmate.”
“He didn’t,” Skywalker told him, leaning up against the pillar directly behind him in a way that made him look like a poster of a character from a bad teen holodrama. “He only realized after the start of the war. They’re both crazy organized. They only figured it out because Obi-Wan is physically incapable of holding onto a lightsaber on a battlefield for more than about thirty seconds.”
“Bold words, Knight Skywalker,” Padmé flirted, with a smirk. Bail had seen her carrying Anakin’s lightsaber before. She had a clip for it on all of her dresses.
Skywalker laughed. “Oh, he’s terrible. You have no idea. He just happens to hide it better.”
Senator Tills, looking very, very bored, stared off into the middle distance. Bail joined her in watching the happy couple as the Securas excused themselves from the party in their honour and fled into the night. Unlike her, though, he was consumed not by boredom but by expectation.
That night, he left a message for Breha to listen to when she woke up.
“Hello, my dove. I hope you’re sleeping, given the time in Aldera. Let me know when you get this. I have a sneaking suspicion that I knew how so many of my things have been getting handed in to the Coruscant Guard, and why our soulmate seems so much older than our timeline suggests. I think that they’re probably a clone.
“We’ll have to think more about how to go from here in the morning. I love you very much, Breha. Good night to me and good morning to you.”
--
Shortly after Bly’s wedding, when most of the guests had dispersed back to the war, Fox finally managed to corner Cody and press-gang him into dinner together. His brother had been undeniably slippery, in the days after the rather public revelation of his soulmate, and the only person who’d managed to actually get him to sit down and talk about it was, reportedly, Bly himself. Probably because he hadn’t actually witnessed the realization. Not even Rex had managed to collar the Marshall Commander before the 501st shipped out, so Fox took it as a personal achievement that he had managed the feat that had eluded Rex.
Of course, it helped that, for clones on Coruscant, Fox’s word was law. When he ordered a vod to report to his office, no matter how high their rank among their own men, they couldn’t say no. And so, he captured Cody and dragged him down to the mess hall, where they grabbed trays and went back to eat in Fox’s room. Thire, as luck would have it, was on shift for another four hours.
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” Cody said, when Fox motioned him to sit in the too-small metal chair at the end of his bed. Fox sat on the bed itself.
Bold words from a man who’d walked all the way here under his own power. “Oh? I have a hundred vode out there right this minute. Is your soulmate going to come rescue you?”
Cody gave him a very put-upon look. “Fox.”
“Kote.”
The put-upon look grew, if anything, more pronounced. “It’s private, Fox. And very new. There’s nothing to tell that you didn’t see for yourself.”
Based on the way they’d come into Bly’s wedding together, that wasn’t true at all, but Fox didn’t want to know anything about that. “I’m not here to ask you how he was in bed, vod. I’m here because I want to know if you’re happy. You deserve someone looking out for you, for a change.”
Cody had a habit of trying to look out for everyone else. It was rarely ever allowed to be mutual. So Fox, who was marginally older, tried to impose some of that whenever he could.
Cody, perhaps realizing he couldn’t win this fight, looked down at his terrible mess-hall dinner. “I’m glad it’s him. I wouldn’t have wanted it to be anyone else.”
“I guess that’s what makes you soulmates, isn’t it?” You weren’t supposed to want your soulmate to be anyone else. Manda or Ka’ra or Force willed you together for a reason, after all.”
Cody shrugged. “Obi-Wan says he knows people who’ve been hurt by their soulmates. Hurt by them. He says – and I agree – that where it counts, the choice is still ours. Of what we are to each other, and what we want to be. Just like any other relationship.”
Fox didn’t know who his soulmate was, but last week, they’d lost a piece of flimsi folded into the shape of a rose. He’d known for years that his soulmate practiced some sort of flimsi craft. Since they lost them all the time, Fox thought it was probably a form of stress relief. This one, though, had been written on. It read:
They probably won’t believe us unless we have real proof. How? Ask B.
Every piece of Fox wanted to know what those words meant. He wanted to know his soulmate. And yet it was a choice, too. His wanting that, in spite of the fact that he’d been made for war, was a choice. His wanting to know them was a choice. And if when he met them, he didn’t want, or they didn’t want, then that was a choice too.
“Any other sparkling pearls of wisdom from the Great Master General Kenobi, Negotiator of the Jedi Order?”
Cody flushed with embarrassment. “He maybe has a tendency to over-philosophise some things. But I don’t blame him. It’s been a lot to take in, for both of us. We both thought we were alone for so very long, and yes, maybe it was our fault, but it was hard not knowing. Of course he’s spent a long time thinking about what it all means.”
Fox had, too, if in far fewer and less impressive words than Kenobi probably had. “And you? No matter how we told you that you probably just hadn’t figured out what gifts were yours yet, you never believed us. What have you learned from all your obsessive wondering?”
Cody prodded at his Lumps of Unknown Grain with his spoon. It wiggled like jelly. “I’ve learned that sometimes, you really should just shut up and listen to what the universe is trying to get through your thick skull.”
Last week, Fox had found a pair of gloves that fit him just perfectly. The week before, he’d found a ring that didn’t even fit on his pinkie finger. The sizes on his soulmate’s clothing were never consistent. “And what if the things the universe is telling me are confusing?”
“Then maybe you should look at it from a different angle.”
“Ka’ra help me if you’re already starting to sound like him after less than a tenday as soulmates. What’ll it be like after a few years? ‘Mm, yes, how are you my dear brother Fox. How are all my most excellent friends in the Senate? I–”
Cody flicked the LUG with his spoon right into Fox’s face and said, “no one will ever believe you.”
--
“Can I ask you a question about Cody?”
Obi-Wan, half-asleep on the sofa in Bail’s office after a round of particularly brutal negotiations, blinked awake to glare at him. It was just like old times, before the war broke out. “You can tell Quinlan that I’m never settling his betting ring, and that the only person I’m telling if I ever get engaged is Satine.”
Bail, who was perfectly aware that the Duchess of Mandalore had her name down for a proposal ‘three days after the war ends’, wisely chose not to correct Obi-Wan’s assumption of her neutrality. She had a sabacc face sharpened against Obi-Wan in her youth, and Bail knew better than to cross her.
“It’s not about the bet,” Bail assured him, though he made no attempt at denying that there was one. “Truth be told, it isn’t really about you either. I just need your advice.”
Pulling himself up to a seated position and attempting to brush his hair into something closely resembling order with only his fingers, Obi-Wan said, “very well, then. Ask away.”
And so, for the first time, Bail sat there and spoke to someone other than Breha about what was really going on. She’d spoken to her grandmother, back when it first began, but otherwise, no one else knew. It had just been too awkward and embarrassing to announce that ‘no, actually, we kriffed it up and we’re on the market for a new soulmate’. Besides, with the war on seemed like the last time for personal considerations. But Obi-Wan, on that count, couldn’t judge them. He sat, and listened to Bail’s story with an expression of curiosity and sympathy.
“And so you think they’re on the guard?”
“It is the most logical conclusion.”
Just then, a knock came at Bail’s door, and, with his permission, a guard entered holding a datapad. “I’ve been asked to return this to you, Senator Organa.”
“Thank you, Rhys. Have a good evening.”
“You too, Senator. General Kenobi.”
They both waved him out, and Obi-Wan offered Bail an extremely gossipy raised eyebrow. “And is he?”
“No. That’s the problem.”
Bail pulled the list from his desk and passed it to Obi-Wan. “This is the list of all the guards who’ve brought things back to my office. It happens at least once every other day. Sometimes the things they bring are Breha’s, sometimes they really do belong to my aides. I have a theory that Lady Juana is actually also soulmates with someone on the guard, because she seems to have things found by them almost as much as I do. It’s a mess.”
“But,” Obi-Wan said, with a conspiratorial look on his face, “we know three things. The first is that your soulmate is highly ranked enough to delegate. The second, which I know and you are about to, is that the vode maintain lists of things found in common spaces and by whom for exactly this reason. Next time something of yours is found, you and Lady Juana should both ask to see the list. At least among the 212th and on Kamino that rule is inviolable, and I would be shocked if the Guard didn’t practice something of the same.”
That was very good to know, if only Bail could work up the courage to act on it. “And what’s the third thing?”
“The third thing is that, if they haven’t figure it out by now, your soulmate may be, as their siblings would say, a bit of a di’kut.”
“Bold words coming from you, Kenobi.”