Thire's grimace is apologetic, but that doesn’t stop him from saying, “We’ve got a guy from that group of infiltrators who got rounded up last night asking to speak with command.” Fox waits, brow raised, because if every lowlife who wanted to talk to command ended up in his office he’d never do anything else. Thire knows that, too. If this guy rates a mention, there’s a reason. Thire's expression says he needs a vacation, and also someone else willing to play messenger. “He says he’s a Jedi, sir.”

The Republic hasn't had a standing army in over two thousand years. Even before the Reformation, there was no war on a grand enough scale to justify the expense. It feels like a bad joke, when the Chancellor decrees it, when the Senate allows it. The Jedi aren't a military. The Jedi have never been a military. They give Obi-Wan a battalion. They give him a battlecruiser, a Marshall Commander, they knight his Padawan. He looks over all the clerical minutiae a military runs on and wishes they'd given him a secretary. cody, obi-wan, and ghost company at the beginning of the war, learning to work together, trust each other, maybe even like each other

“What is that?” Thire asks, wrinkling his nose as Fox marches past him. He immediately turns to open a window. Fox snorts, lifting a boot to kick Thorn where he’s sprawled out on the couch. Thorn groans, but raises his head, and Fox jerks his head at him. “A Jedi,” he answers, and Thorn freezes, eyes widening.

Not even two days later, Fox revised his opinion. This wasn’t a disaster. This was a Grade-A, first order, fresh off the hot plate fuckfest. Fox’s day had gone something like this: lay in bed. Get up. Knock back some of the sludge in the mess masquerading as caf. Go through forms. Fill out forms. Bust open a closet in which the Senators for Uyter and Kinyen had both managed to get “stuck” in. Go through more forms. Fill out more forms. Get called up to the Senate dome to tell a Senator that no, the Guard did not address noise complaints. Find that the stack of datapads on his desk had somehow tripled over the last two hours. Despair at the state of his inbox. Etcetera, etcetera. And then.

“Commander,” High General Windu says, brows raised in suspicion. “This is the Chancellor’s office holo, is it not? May I speak with him?” Fox stares at the general, and then down at the black smudge on the floor where Palpatine’s body used to be. Slowly, subtly, he shifts so he’s standing on top of it. “Uh,” he says. “…No.”

The 501st and the 212th discover the GuardNet, a dark net site for social media for the Coruscant Guard. It's just the Guard, nothing weird posted there. Right?