Work Text:
Alpha-17 would have denied having a favorite until his dying breath. He would have denied it under interrogation, under torture, at gunpoint, or to his own reflection.
Favorites were for natborns, and got people killed.
Alpha didn't have favorites. He had cadets who would survive and cadets who wouldn't. Cadets worth investing time into and cadets who wasted oxygen. It was simple.
So no. Alpha-17 did not have favorites.
He merely happened to remember CC-1010's serial number years after he'd forgotten thousands of others. He merely happened to know where the cadet was stationed. He merely happened to read every report that mentioned him.
It was completely different.
"CC-1010 started another incident."
Alpha didn't even look up from the datapad in his hands. The instructor standing before him looked exhausted enough that Alpha briefly wondered if he'd been assigned to 1010's training company all week.
"What kind of incident?"
The instructor sighed a long-suffering and resigned sigh. "The smart kind."
That got Alpha's attention. Smart incidents were always worse than violent ones. Violent cadets were easy. You punched them, threw them into extra drills, and make them run until they regretted their life choices. Problem solved.
Smart cadets?
Smart cadets became officers. Or revolutionaries. Or both.
Alpha accepted the report and began reading. Then he read it again. Then a third time.
CC-1010 had apparently organized a betting pool among three training companies.
That in itself wasn’t unusual. Cadets gambled on everything. Marksmanship scores. Obstacle course times. How many times an instructor would swear during inspections.
What was unusual was that the betting pool had somehow exposed an instructor who'd been skimming rations. The instructor had been obviously removed and the ration discrepancy corrected. The betting pool had since expanded.
The thing was that no one could prove 1010 was responsible. Everyone knew he was responsible anyways. Including Alpha.
The boy had a talent. And Alpha wasn’t talking about leadership. Plenty of cadets could lead. Plenty could command. Plenty could inspire loyalty.
1010 had something different.
He understood systems. Not how they were supposed to work. How they actually worked. That distinction was very important.
Most clones looked at a wall and figured out how to climb it. 1010 looked at a wall and figured out who built it, why they built it, where the weak points were, who benefited from it existing, and whether knocking it down would be useful. That was dangerous.
The people who truly shaped the galaxy were rarely the strongest. They were the ones quietly moving pieces behind everyone else's backs.
When Alpha discovered what CC-1010 had named himself, he almost laughed.
Fox. The name fit.
Foxes were clever and survived, no matter the cost. They didn't win fair fights, didn't stand proudly at the front of a charge with banners waving overhead. They slipped through cracks, adapted, waited, and outlasted.
The name told Alpha everything he needed to know.
Then the war began. The clones scattered, and the galaxy exploded. Alpha lost track of most of them.
That happened. The GAR was enormous and the war endless.
Alpha expected great things from Fox’s batchmates.
Fox?
Fox was harder to predict. Because Coruscant got him.
When Fox was stationed there, Alpha thought it was a waste. So did everyone else. The Guard wasn't prestigious. They had no grand campaigns, no major offensives, and no heroic last stands. Just paperwork and bureaucracy.
Essentially, Coruscant was a place to bury competent officers.
Still, every so often, reports crossed his desk.
Just as he’d expected, Commander Cody distinguished himself under Kenobi. No surprise. Captain Rex became one of the Republic's finest officers. That was also expected. Commander Wolffe terrified everyone. That too was predictable.
Commander Fox?
Commander Fox became a problem.
Alpha first heard about it from another ARC. "The Coruscant Guard commander threatened a senator."
Alpha hummed noncommittally. "Good."
"That wasn't the concerning part." Now Alpha looked up. "The senator apologized."
Alpha considered this carefully. "...Interesting."
Then came another report. And another. And another.
The Guard was becoming increasingly strange. Where previously the station had been a catch-all for clones deemed useless, it now had the reputation of dangerous competency.
Troopers stopped disappearing and the supply shortages mysteriously corrected themselves. Corrupt officials started developing a healthy fear of red armor.
Alpha heard stories, most of which sounded ridiculous.
Commander Fox rerouting resources around Senate committees. Fox threatening logistics officers. Fox somehow keeping Guard casualty rates lower than statistically possible.
The kind of stories that should've been exaggerations to grandstand.
They weren't.
The Guard changed slowly at first, but by year two people started complaining. The Guard was becoming difficult. The Senate hated them, logistics hated them, military administration hated them…
Alpha considered all of that to be an excellent sign.
Then came year three, and suddenly every report involving the Guard became twenty times more confusing than it had been previously.
Apparently decommission orders went mysteriously missing a lot. Personnel files went missing even more. There were now medical transfers that technically shouldn't have happened. Clones who should've disappeared continuing to serve.
Alpha recognized what was going on instantly, and then promptly laughed so hard his sides hurt. Fox was saving people through paperwork fraud.
Alpha found it infinitely more impressive than traditional heroics. Any idiot could charge a battlefield. It took a particular kind of genius to weaponize bureaucracy.
Then Quinlan Vos appeared, and the reports got stranger. Apparently a Jedi had attached himself to the Guard, but nobody understood why.
Alpha thought he did.
Vos was many things. One of them was curious. And curious people inevitably found Fox, because Fox collected secrets the way other commanders collected commendations.
Then Palpatine died.
And suddenly every weird report from the previous four years made sense. The pieces just clicked together.
Everyone else focused on the assassination, but Alpha knew that was a mistake. Killing Palpatine wasn't the impressive part. Any sufficiently motivated person with a blaster could kill someone. No, the impressive part was everything before it.
Four years. Four years of quietly building a battalion that questioned authority. Four years of teaching clones to think. Four years of protecting troopers from systems designed to consume them. Four years of making sure his men survived long enough to realize they deserved better.
By the time Palpatine died, the Guard had already been dangerous for a while. The only reason it had taken anyone by surprise was because they’d been looking in the wrong places.
Years later, Alpha read a report discussing post-war reforms. Specifically, clone rights. It granted them things that would've been impossible a decade earlier: a declaration of sentience, legal protections, citizenship.
When people speculated why, they usually brought up contributing factors like political pressure, Jedi advocacy, and public opinion.
Alpha always snorted at those idiots. They'd missed the obvious answer. None of it would've happened without Fox.
While everyone watched heroes like Skywalker and Kenobi save the Republic in public, Fox had spent years underneath the Republic loosening every bolt holding its worst parts together.
The galaxy remembered heroes. Remembered the generals and the legends.
Alpha knew better. AThe galaxy was usually changed by people willing to do ugly work where no one was looking. People willing to stand in the background and never receive recognition.
And of all the clones Alpha had ever trained—Fox had always been the best at disappearing into the background. …right up until the moment he stepped out of it and shot the Chancellor of the Republic, that was.
Even later, someone finally asked Alpha directly. "You always knew, didn't you?"
Alpha frowned. "Knew what?”
"That Fox would change things."
The old clone considered the question, thinking about a sharp-eyed cadet who watched everything and said almost nothing. Then he shrugged. "I knew he'd cause problems."
The trooper laughed. "That's not an answer."
For the first time in the conversation, Alpha allowed himself the smallest hint of a smile. "Sure it is."
Because in Alpha-17's experience, the men who changed the galaxy were always the ones who looked at the way things worked and immediately started asking why. It just so happened that CC-1010 had been doing that since the day he was born.