Mimic

2. Vode An

Warning: Dehumanisation of and discrimination against the vode. References to past abuse of the vode. Brief mentions of slavery.

Vocab at the bottom again.

It's not a surprise when the war begins and Fox gets his assignment: Coruscant Guard. He looks at the two words for four seconds before deciding it'll take a day, tops, for someone to make a shorthand for it.

Cody claps him on the back and wishes him luck with the politicians, other vode make fun of him for getting the 'easy assignment'. Cody and Fox whack them around the head. Maybe Fox won't have to deal with the frontlines, but he's about to lead a singular battalion into the protection of a whole planet, working closely with the politicians who have the most power over them aside from the kaminoans themselves— the same politicians who will never admit clones can be sentient beings because that means paying them fair wages. Cody and Fox knew from the start any trooper on the homefront is kriffed. Their vode may not get that now, but they'll learn, some of them up close and personal.

As expected with years of training for this, Fox does damn well as Marshal Commander of the Corrie Guard— he overestimated with a day tops, Thorn coined 'Corries' within the first hour of their trip to Coruscant. It's not perfect, far from, but it could definitely be worse.

Fox is twenty-three, or eleven-and-a-half depending on who's answering, when the first batch of shinies comes from Kamino to fill the losses they've experienced. They're four months in and there have actually been fewer losses than Fox and Cody predicted, three to senators who felt the need to exercise their power over someone if their constituents wouldn't do as they wanted, six to Coruscant's thriving criminal underbelly, two missing presumed dead. What really hit them were the twelve they lost last week to a bomb targeting a Corrie transport. Cody and Fox knew clone troopers wouldn't be welcomed on this planet, but twelve to a hate crime is worse than they planned for.

The shinies he gets are a mixture handpicked by Alpha-Seventeen, following a strict protocol Fox and Cody spent years drafting. In short, Fox gets the bastards who can take it. Everyone else goes for the frontlines. The Corries are a battalion of stubborn assholes, emotionless pricks, and vode as tough as a bantha's hide or at least blessed with the ability to fake it. The latter is what he thinks Cab must be— all of eighteen or nine years— because Fox doesn't remember them being an asshole, isn't sure Mimic would've let them be that way. He guesses it's been a few years since Cab has had Mimic's influence, a lot can happen in a few years.

It feels awkward. It's not that Fox has avoided Cab since Mimic marched on, dying because Reau decided she should, but he and Cab were never that close (does Cab even do close? Aside from Mimic and maybe the rest of their batch? Maybe that's why they've been assigned to the Corries) and without Mimic tying them together, that never changed. He's pretty sure Cody kept giving them extra training classes, right up until the war started and free time became a pipe dream what with being Marshal Commander of the Third Systems Army and the Seventh Sky Corps and whatever other paperwork Fox's poor vod has to deal with now. Maybe Fox should call Cody, let him know Cab's with him.

"Commander," Cab greets, standing at attention in the doorway to Fox's office. He asked Cab here after a good hour of deliberating it at the back of his mind while he dealt with his own batch of paperwork— or is this one of the sheets he's doing for a senator because apparently undesirable workload is now the problem of the Corrie Guard?— and now Cab is here, as ordered. Fox isn't sure what else he expected.

"At ease," Fox gestures to the seat opposite his desk because it's a habit he needs to have for when senators come to dump work on him. There isn't a single trooper who's ever bothered to sit in the chair. It's a good thing too, the chair is the most uncomfortable one he could find; hostile architecture does exactly the job he wants. "Commander Thire will be giving you a crash course in the basics around here starting tomorrow."