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It’s an exhibition day again.
Fox has it easier than most—the tank he’s been lowered into is only that, filled with water and not liable to cause him too much physical damage.
Silver is helping with the blood draws. Fox had walked past him on the way to his own station, and his fellow Commander had been looking distinctly gray with how much Senator Burtoni had been extracting, vials of blood all lined up in neat vials for the interested to inspect—and perhaps even keep, if they were convincing enough.
Fox had only been picked for the draws once, and it had left him feeling so queasy that he’d thrown up what little he’d been able to choke down for the next day and a half.
Still, Fox would rather have been chosen for that than Silver—who, with his very visible mutation, has drawn Burtoni’s ire from the very first day the Kaminoan Senator stepped onto Coruscant. She always took more than needed, more than even the least ethical Kaminoan scientist would allow. It was like she thought she could somehow pull the mutation out of him with a needle.
After that first time, they’ve all managed to keep any of the more ‘defective’ vode out of her reach. But it means engineering things very carefully so that Burtoni will only request their assistance for the demonstration, rather than anyone else.
Which means Fox is in the tank, yet again, demonstrating—something. To be honest, he isn’t really sure what. Lung capacity? Durability? Fox isn’t a goddamn Marine. He went through the same diving training as everyone else, but he didn’t specialize in it. And he hasn’t even seen a large body of water since he left Kamino.
Right now, he’s still got his head above water—body tilted sideways to get enough room, of course, because nothing can ever be easy.
Burtoni approaches all too soon, leading an eager group of natborns who somehow haven’t gotten sick of this little trick, regardless of how many times she pulls it.
Her voice is faint, nearly imperceptible through the thick casing of the tank, but Fox is a clone—he has long been attuned to the sound of a Kaminoan’s voice, no matter how far away.
It used to be a matter of life and death, knowing when a Kaminoan was nearby—and it still is, in some ways.
“One of our better specimens…” She’s saying, gesturing towards him as he floats listlessly.
Fox wonders if he should be flattered. When he walked off of Geonosis with a handful of medals and a brand new posting, he’d never imagined that he would be walking into this.
She finishes her speech a moment later, eager to begin, and reaches into her long robes to pull out a button.
She activates it with little flourish, not even looking at Fox when the magnetized cuffs around his wrists suddenly pull him downwards, plunging him into the water’s depths. In seconds, Fox has been locked into place against the tank’s bottom, blood rushing to his head and water flooding his nose.
The timer has begun.
His lungs begin to burn within moments, but he’s too well-trained to struggle, knows exactly how long he can last before he’ll start suffocating.
Maybe it would have been better if Fox was really there, experiencing every pain and indignity as a present body.
But instead, he floats somewhere above himself, taking in the world around him as his body curls in pain.
The Senators outside his tank are blurry forms, a mess of color and twinkling lights, coalescing into some great beast in his vision.
They walk back and forth, a quiet murmur of sound. They look like sharks, circling around—and though Fox knows that they can’t all be the same natborns as time goes by, they all drip down into a monolith in his mind, just eyes upon eyes upon eyes all gazing into his enclosure, waiting for him to entertain.
Fox tracks them until the pounding in his head becomes too much, finally slumping as all his muscles untense. Somehow, that doesn’t make them hurt less—instead, the heaviness in his limbs feels like almost a physical weight, like it wouldn’t even take the cuffs to keep him to the bottom at this moment.
This isn’t really happening to him, Fox rationalizes. He is a breathing, living creation. The thing below him is a shell that he inhabits when he needs to touch the physical world. It’s attached to him, but doesn’t define him.
All sorts of things can happen to his shell—so long as he isn’t there to witness it.
Realistically, Fox knows that he can’t be under for more than forty minutes. That’s all he’s managed in the past—and Nightingale was quite displeased to inform him that he only survived that long thanks to their enhanced anatomy. She hadn’t advised him to not do it again; the Coruscant Guard was more realistic than that. It would happen again.
Forty minutes is the record. Burtoni knows it as well as Fox does.
But it feels like hours. Days. Like he’s never left the tank, like he’ll never leave it again.
The first time he’d been in the tank, he’d come out vomiting and shaking, had to be dragged back to base like a drunken Frontie on their first shore leave.
This time, he’s barely shivering when a hand plunges into the tank, yanking him up into the cool air. The cuffs disengage without much effort, but he still can't move his arms.
It’s Silver, of course—none of the senators would have stopped to help him out, and Burtoni didn’t dirty her hands with such things.
“We’re all done, Fox,” Silver says. His words are slurring, stumbling even as he pulls Fox’s arm over his shoulder, hauling him up. “Come on, it’s time to go home.”
Fox can’t do much more than loll his head, trying to put one foot in front of the other. His throat burns, his extremities are concerningly numb—but they’re going home.
They’re going home together. That has to be enough.