Chapter Text
It was a whim from the start that took Fox’s hand from the desk and set it on his datapad. He personally, did not process payroll; it was his job to check the boxes, sign the stubs, and send them off up higher to the senate to be processed and sent out to personal accounts. He kept track of the budget for the guard and for the Chancellor’s offices, but about a year ago, following the untimely slaughter of his compatriot in the GAR office, he’d taken over this duty for two legions.
He didn’t ask for this. But like it or not, he was a three-legion man in accounts these days, and he did not appreciate Tracker and CT-8907’s immediate evacuation of the Office of Finances when he went there to file his rounds of bi-monthly complaints from said troops of men.
He was just doing his damn job, troopers. And if they were good at theirs, then the bi-monthly complaints would take half the time they claimed it did to process.
A great deal of money ran through his hands was the thing. Whim, however, was something more than money.
It was much, much worse.
Whim made money into more of a headache than it had any right to be. Fox should have known better. Asking questions always got you burned in these parts; whim was rewarded with migraines. Migraines bloomed into full-out aneurysms.
“So?” Young Captain Rex asked with a smile reserved for the sheepish and good-natured. “How much?”
Kote also watched on with his scrawny, un-armored ass parked on the corner of Fox’s desk. His arms were folded. His expression was low, but lax.
Fox met his eye. No one else’s in the room. Only Kote’s.
Kote’s spine twisted as he pulled slightly away from the desk in concern.
Young Rex noticed the tension growing. Everyone did. Bly removed his stupid feet from the corner table he’d clambered his whole being onto.
“So?” Wolffe repeated as more of a threat than a question. “How much, trooper?”
Fox stood up and Kote stood with him.
There were barracks on Coruscant; holding barracks for troopers returning from off-world parts. Only so many people could be stationed on Coruscant at a time. The city couldn’t absorb several million clones, so there were stations throughout the galaxy. Higher level units were stationed on Coruscant. Those troops that worked directly under their generals were there, kept close to the Jedi Temple in case said generals had to depart from their leave in hasty fashion.
The Temple was a stone’s throw from the barracks that housed commanding officers.
It was an honor to be assigned CO barracks. They had several; there were four floors, each with four large rooms with amenity spaces. The first and second floors even had private dwellings for those who needed them or requested them, but everyone else slept wherever the fuck they’d found a bunk.
It was maybe a little unfair, but the moment Fox had been promoted, he’d claimed floor three, room two for his batchmates. They were coming, he’d felt it. And when they came, there was no question. Room Two, Floor Three became a happening place.
Their batch of troopers were a group of stupidly competent, outrageously defective troopers who hid those quirks like their fucking lives depended on it. Because their fucking lives depended on it.
The second anyone realized that the Commanders in Room Two, Floor Three were a gaggle of needlessly independent individuals, they’d all be sent packing back to Kamino, destined for the table and the straps.
Decommissioned.
It was an unacceptable fate.
Their batch refused to go gentle into that dark night, though. It was what made them so damn good at their jobs.
Among their lot, it didn’t matter that Kote was an inch shorter than the average trooper with a dopamine boost system wired to deception rather than praise. No one gave a shit about Wolffe’s bouts of aggression or Fox’s endlessly cyclical thinking. Bly could paint his nails and lips and pierce his ears and wear whatever the fuck colors he wanted.
They were buddied up, all of them—buddied up and raucous and always, always fighting as the Force intended brothers to be.
Others outside of Room Two, Floor Three hated them, but Room Two, Floor Three didn’t care.
Others could hate how they ran their ships, how they kissed senatorial ass, how they caught jedi eyes and received jedi smiles and preferential treatment—it didn’t matter.
Fuck ‘em, Room Two, Floor Three said. This is our family. You want in? You work for it. You hate us? It’s because you wish you were us.
And troopers, according to various trusted sources from above and below, spoke often of how they longed to be but a fly on the wall in Room Two, Floor Three—
The Room Where Things Happened.
This was where Fox delivered the news the datapad offered him.
Kote sat crosslegged on his bunk, peering down at Fox curiously like the tooka creature he was. He held his knobbly ankles tightly between two hands. Baby Rex, still new to these quarters, clutched at his knees below Kote’s bunk, on the very edge of Monnk’s.
“That can’t be right,” he said.
“The numbers don’t lie,” Fox told him, trying not to be too gruff to the kid. “It’s the same, month after month.”
“Five credits,” Bly said like a song. “Five credits. Someone do math: how many times over do we get paid five credits?”
“12,” Rex said without missing a beat. “12 times over, Sir.”
Bly quirked a brow at him in amused admonishment. Rex curled his fingers into fists and his chest into himself.
There were no ‘sirs’ in this place. Names only.
“That can’t be right, though,” Rex continued. “My general spent sixty credits on a replacement part for his arm the week, last.”
“Well, wherever he got the money, it’s not from the senate or the general fund,” Fox said.
There was a long pause. Bare feet and socked ones shifted uncomfortably all around.
“They must receive an allowance from the Order,” Kote said.
Many nods were given.
“How much, then?” Rex asked up at him.
Kote tipped his head and just stared into Rex’s eyes endlessly, the way he did when people asked him questions that made him want to swallow them whole with their own ignorance.
This was otherwise known as his ‘thinking face.’
“No way of knowing without intrusive measures,” he determined.
“We gotta ask one,” Bly translated for Rex.
Rex snapped his head in Bly’s direction in alarm.
“Just? Ask one?” he asked.
Bly shrugged.
“Until Kote is done calibrating, that’s what I’m going with,” he said.
All eyes returned to Kote who was indeed still calibrating. All eyes abandoned Kote.
“No one’s going to answer that,” Rex pointed out.
“Untrue,” Thire said to the wall, curled away from everyone else so that only his blanket-covered back was visible.
Fox thumbed at him in agreement. Ponds lifted himself from laying on Thire’s legs.
“The jedi are oversharers, Rex,” he said gently.
“Serial oversharers,” Thire said to the wall.
“At least ours are,” Wolffe tacked on. “My general told me once that he makes daily schemes to get himself through the week. Shit like ‘gonna get a coin in that shoe’ or ‘gonna make Windu say melon.’”
“Monnk told us that Fisto’s got their whole unit singing whale songs now,” Fox added.
“Yoda’s got a list of favorite lineage members,” Thire said to the wall. “Kote’s general is close to the top by merit of being the best at coming back when his name is called.”
Rex stared with huge eyes.
Fox quirked at brow at his innocence.
“Skywalker’s almost certainly shared something with you he wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “But have you ever tried asking on purpose?”
Rex opened his mouth and then snapped it closed. He tried again with the same result.
Finally, he landed on, “Isn’t that out of line?”
The room filled with scoffing barely the second after the last word left his lips.
“They’re all mud walls blinded by their own filth,” Bly said. “Aayla—who is perfect in every way, by the way—thinks that I naturally smell like spice bark and leather.”
“Kote has been courting his general for two years, Rex,” Wolffe added.
“One day, the mighty will fall,” Kote said mechanically.
“Two years,” Wolffe emphasized. “They don’t notice jack shit. Their basis of normal is so far removed from socially acceptable behavior, they think that anything that isn’t actively trying to kill them is done out of good will and innocent curiosity. Even the best of them.”
Rex crammed his hands into the meat of his thighs and stared at the swallowed forearms that remained. Everyone waited. He had volunteered himself, like it or not.
“Maybe the Commander,” he mumbled.
“Atta boy, Rex,” Wolffe said. “You go ask her. We’ll be here when you get done. Break it up, girls. Meet back here in an hour and twenty.”
Fox went with Rex. It was only right that the newcomer got hardened, experienced back-up. Fox didn’t know if Tano was a tough nut to crack. Some of the padawan commanders were, mostly by merit of not knowing what was going on around them. They acted like children, especially when they were on leave.
Tano was to be found this time with a gaggle of other padawan-commanders, all puttering around in the Jedi Temple’s back exterior courtyard. There was little in the courtyard besides a few planter boxes that thrived with squat, fat ferns. More delicate plants grew around their bases, and each planter was surrounded with a concrete bench that wrapped around the girth of their bases like the thick belts the jedi themselves wore.
The planters were not of interest to the padawan-commanders. They had colonized an emergency exits’ set of steps with handrails. They clambered and lounged all over them, chattering amongst themselves with mini-datapads visible in all hands.
Fox didn’t dislike the padawan-commanders.
He just couldn’t kept track of who the fuck was who and who belonged to who and why they were all so smiley all the time.
Rex’s Commander Tano was to be found at the very foot of the stairs, painting her fingernails and blowing on them while another of her class read out a holonet story to her and her friend. Rex cleared his throat as they approached; Tano’s eyes flicked up and, in the space of a second, a sharp smile burst across her face.
“Well, look who it is,” she sleezed in a spot-on impression of General Skywalker, “You come crawling back for my approval, Rex?”
“No,” Rex said.
Tano’s smugness dropped off her face and left behind only a scowl.
“I have no need of troopers today," she harumphed with a head-toss.
Her fellow padawans all followed suit, despite no knowing a damn thing about the circumstances. Fox wanted to squash their lumpy little heads.
“I had a question, Commander,” Rex said.
Tano cracked open an eye of curiosity but didn’t deign to lower her haughty nose.
“What kind of question?” she asked.
Rex fidgeted. He stammered. It took everything in Fox’s repertoire of training not to roll his eyes.
“A practical matter, sir,” Rex said. “Apologies to interrupt your leave.”
Tano and her posse of terrors softened their defenses. They began to return to their earlier, leering activities, this time focused on Fox who made himself appear as a statue. He would not fall for their immaturity and trickery. He was better than this.
Two started whispering to each other and pointed at him.
“You couldn’t ask Skyguy?” Tano asked. “I guess it’s loud in the workshop, yeah. I’m avoiding him, too. What’s up, Rex?”
Casualness flooded in and swallowed up all former traces of faux-hostility. The padawan-commanders bumped hips and elbows and settled in to hear Rex out as one undulating mass.
“Sir,” Rex said awkwardly.
“Out with it, Rex,” Tano said immediately, apparently used to this from him.
“Sir. How much are you compensated for your war efforts, sir? Or rather—the jedi in general. You are compensated, correct?”
Fox observed the crowd for signs of weakness and got only ambivalence.
“I think he’s asking how much we get paid,” the young lady with green skin next to Tano whispered to her.
“We get paid?” Tano asked back.
One of her fellows bopped her on the montrals from behind. They hissed and ripped a pair of pinched fingers across their throat.
Fox had to say: now, he was intrigued.
“No, no,” one of the three human padawans interrupted, “I think they mean mission allowances.”
A collective ‘ohhhh’ ran through their group.
“We get 25 credits a week for missions,” Tano piped up cheerfully. “Masters get 40 credits.”
Fox’s brain turned off.
“25?” Rex repeated.
“Yeah. For us.”
“And 40?”
“Yeah, for Masters. Why do you ask, Rex? Did you guys need a loan?”
25 credits. Per week. In a warzone.
A meal in most places was 10 credits.
That didn’t—
No, Fox wasn’t imagining things. She’d said 25, and she was sticking to it.
“We don’t, no,” Rex said. “We were just, uh, wondering. We didn’t see much set aside for the jedi in the general fund and just, uh, wanted to make sure that you were being appropriately compensated.”
The padawans blinked as a singular mass.
“What’s a general fund?” one of them asked.
Fox wished to cradle his head.
“A general fund is a lump sum of money set aside for necessary expenses,” he explained.
“Oh,” Tano said. “I think—did—I think maybe there was some talk about that a while ago. But I didn’t get it if I’m honest, Commander. When people start talking money, I sort of tune out.”
“Same,” one of the other kids said.
“Same.”
“Yeah, me too. We don’t have budgeting until next year.”
“If we even see next year,” one of the children said with a sigh.
“Hey,” Tano said. “Shut the fuck up.”
There was a pause and then suddenly everything erupted into absolute chaos.
“Ahsoka,” Skywalker moaned, dragging a greasy hand down his face.
“HE STARTED IT,” Tano roared from where Fox had her dangling and kicking in his grip.
He swore he’d have bruises up his wrist and thighs tomorrow. Toes that boney needed to be banned by the Republic.
“I’m sorry, Commander,” Skywalker told Fox. “I wish I could say they know better, but I’d be lying.”
“He STARTED IT.”
“You’re an ass, Ahsoka Tano—”
“You say that to my face, Milo—”
Rex’s grip on the other kid migrated quickly from his upper arms to his gut to halt the boy’s lunge. Fox couldn’t say that keeping Tano off her feet was exactly easy either. She began making a noise like a guttural, stuttering engine in the back of her throat. The other padawans crowded around Skywalker, half-hiding behind his tall, gangly form.
“Snips,” Skywalker ordered, “Drop it or be dropped.”
Immediately, the movement shaking Fox’s arm halted. Tano hung from her tunic furiously instead, glowering.
“He’s bad for morale,” she announced, pointing at the offender. “And ought to be punished.”
“Kid,” Skywalker sighed.
“You’re naïve, we’re all going to die. I saw it. I had a vis—”
“NO ONE CARES, MILO,” Tano droned loudly over him. “NO ONE FUCKING—”
“Ahsoka,” Skywalker snapped. “Commander, you can drop her. I’ll take it from here.”
Rex wrung his hands on the trek back from the jedi courtyard. Fox waited until they were once again inside before reaching out and giving him a squeeze on the back of the neck.
“You did good,” he said.
“We started a feud among them,” Rex said. “The Order will never forgive us. The padawans are—”
“Hopelessly violent and endlessly stupid, just like their masters,” Fox said. “Good for them. We already knew this. What’s interesting is that they get paid. 25 credits, Rex. Mission allowances. Where do they get that money?”
Rex turned puppy eyes back onto him as he turned the landing’s corner first.
“At least its more than 5,” he said.
Kote was finished calibrating by the time Wolffe recalled the think-session to order. He’d laid himself out flat on his back and was staring up, unseeingly, at the room’s rafters with his hands folded neatly on his chest.
“Pad,” he said.
Wolffe lifted him and his mattress up a good ten inches to retrieve the confiscated datapad he’d stuffed under there the night before, when he’d finally had enough of Kote flashing images of different types of birds at him and spelling their names.
Kote took the pad peacefully, like it had not been nigh-thrown down mere inches from his head. He began typing. He said nothing as everyone assumed their designated positions on and between the two rows of bunks.
“The jedi receive a weekly sum of 25 to 40 credits,” Fox reported. “Commander Tano provided this information and was backed up by comrades.”
“But payroll says 5 each,” Bly said.
“Payroll says 5 each; all deposited into the same account,” Kote announced to no one in particular.
“You heard Payroll,” Wolffe said.
“Maybe it goes to the Jedi Temple’s donations’ fund?” Ponds tried.
“If it goes to the Temple, then they can’t use it, which defeats the purpose of paying them to start,” Fox pointed out.
“Well, maybe—”
“Ahsoka called their payment their ‘mission allowance,’” Rex said. “It sounds like the Temple distributes funds to jedi who are currently on assignment.”
“40 credits, though?” Bly asked. “We get paid more than our generals.”
“Oh, jedi never have any money,” Monnk, a new addition to this conversation, pointed out.
“Yeah, man, that’s literally the problem,” Bly told him. “We get our 60 credits. They get 5 from the Senate and then I guess? 40? From the Temple? We’re still earning uhh—”
“Twenty-five percent,” Rex said.
“Twenty-five percent more than them,” Bly finished. “They’re our generals.”
“They’ve taken a vow of poverty,” Monnk said.
“How much does your jedi earn?” Bly asked.
“Why would I ask him that?” Monnk shot back.
“He’s a council member for the jedi. They must pay him the big money.”
“I’ll ask my general,” Wolffe said. “There’s gotta be a scale or something.”
Kote hummed and rolled over onto his side to rejoin the land of the living.
“My general is new to the council,” he said. “We can compare.”
At dinner, they hatched a scheme. It wasn’t complex. Mostly, the jedi ate in their communal temple halls, but occasionally, they could be seen out and about, eating food from the local market.
Given Fox’s current understanding of their finances, he couldn’t help but feel some kind of way about the fact that jedi went out and spent their cent-credits on fried noodles with cabbage. Two servings, of course—always two. There were padawans to feed.
As it was the day before the weekend, the masters with their padawans were out in the city in droves. Kote had no problem wading through the crowds of departing troopers, traders, and breadwinners in the night-market. His ease in the city transferred to all them awkward bastards, who would usually be bumbling around the natborn-strewn roadway, trying to remember how to walk without armor.
Fox kept a hand on Rex’s shoulder as they followed Kote over to one of the food stalls popular with jedi.
General Kenobi was standing at one of the raised tables beside the stall with General Vos, both holding leaf-made pockets filled with steaming red, saucy meats and vegetables. They chatted, gesturing with little wooden picks, at each other.
Kote popped up beside Kenobi and startled the shit out of the guy.
Rex made an involuntary sound of concern. Fox kept his grip tight on the kid. Baby had to learn the tricks of the trade, no matter how much like insubordination they appeared. Wolffe ducked ahead through the crowd and purposefully went to the stall owner to buy a sack of meat and veg to make Kote’s appearance look even more natural.
Fox steered Rex that way and handed him off to Bly so that he could join Wolffe in this endeavor.
They missed a good chunk of the conversation but came in with steaming goods at a natural lull and were greeted with polite enthusiasm by Vos and Kenobi.
“Generals,” Fox acknowledged with a nod.
“Commanders,” Vos said back with a spreading smile and a much lighter dip of his head.
“What is this?” Kote asked Kenobi, holding the pick Kenobi had given him with some kind of curly white and maroon thing on the end it.
“Octopus,” Kenobi said. “I think you’ll like it.”
Kote stared at him with zero affect. He flicked his eyes down to the pick’s captive and then back up to Kenobi’s pleasant, pale countenance.
“I disagree,” he said, offering the stick back to Kenobi.
For the briefest moment, Fox swore that Kenobi looked crestfallen. Vos’s smug smirk grew even wider.
“More for us,” he said brightly.
“More indeed,” Kenobi said. “They are very generous here, you know, Commander?”
He gazed into Kote’s face with silver strings of hope in his eyes.
“Affirmative, sir,” Kote said.
Wolffe trapped his face in a hand and shoved the procured food into Fox’s arm until he took it into his custody. Apparently, this scenario merited a two-handed exasperation response.
And to be fair to all parties involved: Kenobi and Kote’s dance of forbidden romance was thwarted at every turn by both his and Kote’s unwavering commitment to inscrutability.
“Sir,” Kote said, apparently determined to take a crack at breaking that armor anyways, “I have an inquiry I was hoping that you could provide assistance with.”
Kenobi’s head cocked like a dog’s. Vos leaned his weight onto the tall table and flashed a disgustingly knowing smirk Wolffe and Fox’s way. He appeared to be moments from winking. Fox shifted so that there was more space between them.
“Assistance is my middle name, Commander,” Kenobi said pleasantly. “Fire away.”
“Sir. We have noticed some discrepancies in payroll, sir,” Kote said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that won’t do. Can you provide more detail on the discrepancies?”
“Of course, sir. There are no discrepancies among the troopers at this time—outside of the usual clerical mistakes. However, in review payroll records, we noted that jedi combatants and strategists did not receive their full compensation this month, sir,” Kote said.
Kenobi stared.
Vos rolled his eyes and began picking through his packet of food. The streetlamp over their table seemed to brighten, as did the lights of traffic and storefronts around them as the city’s sky dimmed.
“Hm?” Kenobi said a solid two beats late. “Apologies, Cody, my mind is wandering as of late. You know, we are off duty now, so ranks are dropped. Please feel comfortable speaking freely.”
This perpetual game of verbal footsie never got less excruciating. Fox had to busy himself with poking at hot cabbage to keep from gagging or blurting out something he might later regret.
“I think the commander has noticed the GAR’s best kept secret,” Vos interrupted before Kote could go in with a slightly altered version of events. “Which is that the Senate pays us like ass.”
Kenobi stiffened and then visibly forced himself to settle. His grip on his food seemed to become self-conscious.
“You needn’t worry about such things, Cody,” he said. “The Temple is in negotiations with the Senate for—”
“The Senate thinks that we impoverished jedi ought to live off air and water,” Vos broke in. “They say that if we do our jobs, then citizens of this great republic will be more than inclined to donate to our poor, pitiful Temple to keep us fed and clothed and fighting gallantly on their behalf.”
“Quinlan,” Kenobi hissed. “That’s not true, and worse, it is uncharitable.”
“I tell you what,” Vos continued to Wolffe and Fox without chagrin, “The last thing I want after two weeks slipping in blood-bathed mud is to come back and have to break my back for a guy just to fix a hole in a boot.”
“Ignore him. We are taught from a young age to be self-sufficient,” Kenobi said. “It is a testament to the public’s faith in the Order that we are able to carry on as we are without complaint—”
“Literally nothing has changed for us, I don’t know if you know that,” Vos said. “We’re getting not a cent-credit more than we did before the war. We, of all people, deserve fuckin’ hazard pay. And if it wasn’t the entire Order that had to put up with this shit, I would say we ought to unionize.”
“The Order is our union,” Kenobi snapped at him with uncharacteristic heat that sent Fox’s eyebrows soaring. “The Order has asked—the council constantly tries, Quin.”
“We can’t afford splints,” Vos shot back. “We’re one bomb away from disaster. We can barely afford to vaccinate the younglings—”
“But we can afford it and they are vaccinated.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Because you’re saying things that don’t make sense. It is not the Jedi way to ask for more than is given.”
“The jedi must eat,” Vos said definitively. “Everyone must eat.”
Kenobi shook his head and sighed.
“But if the Senate had its way, then we were simply learn to photosynthesize for their convenience,” Vos continued to inform Wolffe. “In the meantime, we’re supposed to run year-long missions while donations are drying up because people think that donating to the GAR does the job for both troopers and higher command.”
“Stop,” Kenobi snapped.
Vos just stared at him. Kenobi’s gentle eyes had left the area. In their place were balls of ice.
“Let’s not talk about this,” Kenobi said.
Vos’s brow lifted in the tell-tale sign of a man about to pick a fight he didn’t care if he won.
“Master Yoda is working tirelessly on our behalf to persuade the Senate of the Order’s needs,” Kenobi said before he could open his mouth. “Do not disparage my great-grandmaster in front of me, Quinlan. I will not stand for it, regardless of what morsel of truth you may unearth. If you have no respect for me, at least have it for our elders.”
There was a pregnant pause filled with transport horns blaring and Kote taking an experimental bite of octopus from Wolffe and Fox’s shared leaf-packet.
Neither jedi dropped eye contact.
“I do respect you,” Vos said, serious for once in his life.
Kenobi’s lips seemed to disappear beneath his mustache.
“More than our elders,” Vos said.
Kenobi abruptly set his half-finished food on the table and started to walk away. Kote’s eyes widened; Wolffe jerked in surprise. Vos groaned out loud.
“Obi-Wan,” he called at Kenobi’s back. “Don’t be like this. Come on, come back. Obi-Wan.”
The general checked both ways and crossed the street; he set off towards the Temple without another word. Vos lolled his head in a wide arc.
“Dramatic ass,” he grumbled.
“Why don’t they compensate you?” Wolffe asked flat out. “This is unfair. Troopers make more than the jedi—even cadets.”
“Ugh,” Vos groaned. “It’s a mess. Sort of—so we, as jedi, are a collectivist type of organization. We shelter our own, feed ‘em, clean ‘em, clothe ‘em, and provide medical care. To accept payment for following the will of the force to act in the interest of the greater good goes against jedi principles and so on and son on. I don’t argue with this, of course. But what has become clear over the last few months is that we are being used by certain members of the Senate to give the impression that these campaigns must be carried out in the name of the greater good. And I, for one, didn’t sign up to be walking propaganda, you know what I mean?”
Vos smiled a smile that was all teeth and bitterness.
Fox could understand now why he took such a hard stance.
“The general does not disagree with you, surely,” Kote said.
Vos’s head swiveled over to latch his complete and total attention onto him. Kote met the gaze and held it, not giving the guy so much as an inch. Vos huffed.
“We agree. He just gets offended when people talk shit about Master Yoda,” he said.
“Oh?” Wolffe asked. “Are they close?”
“Ehn. Sort of. It’s complicated, but if you must know,” Vos drawled, turning his sweeping dark gaze onto Fox for no good reason at all. “Yoda is the reason that Obi-Wan was trained as a jedi knight at all.”
Even Kote couldn’t hold his poker face through that one. Fox glared at those eyes trying to draw him out. Vos made them crinkle in friendly fashion at their corners.
“We all have people like that in our lives,” Fox said. “I will not begrudge him this. Alpha-17 is the one who trained our batch and, like Kenobi, we have nothing but respect for him. He is the one who brought us to where we are today.”
Vos sucked in a loud breath and let it out as he pushed off the table and began collecting his and Kenobi’s abandoned food.
“Alpha-17,” he said as he folded the leaf-packets onto themselves. “Yes, I remember him. He was Cody before Cody, wasn’t he? Big fucking guy, yeah?”
“That’s the one,” Fox said, watching the methodical, practiced folding going on in front of him.
“Yeah, they gave him a bonus after what he went through,” Vos said. “Obi-Wan went through it with him. No one gave him so much as a second glance after he filed the report. And it wasn’t the first time. Funny how we’re taught to melt, isn’t it, Commander?”
Yeah.
Real funny.
“You may want to drop all this; it’ll never be anything but ugly,” Vos said. “If you’re really determined to make a difference, maybe poke a few bears and tell them to donate directly to the Temple. At least that way, we can afford to have the padawans’ winter cloaks made. Good night, gentlemen.”