Chapter Text
The ingot was oddly warm in his gloved palm, seeping through the synthleather as gravity settled it down heavy against his fingers. The flashing lights of the Lower Levels’ club they had just busted and arrested all its occupants danced off the naturally smooth surface, displaced by darker grains as if it were hewn from wood rather than metal.
Fox lifted his head to stare at Line on the other side of the crate, who stood there holding onto the cover in slackened fingers and for once in his life almost as still as a statue. He didn’t need to see under the bucket to know that the trooper was gawping, knew that every other Guard who had partaken in the raid was staring, frozen in place as the multi-colored lights whorled and shifted around them despite the music having been cut off over an hour ago, reflecting off the black curve of their visors.
The ingot slipped from his grasp.
The resounding ring reverberated through his very bones as it struck the neat stack of dozens more of identical ingots in the crate, the sound both sweet and somber in a way he heard no other metal make. It was deeper than the screech of durasteel that he could feel in his teeth, kinder than the tinkling of the Sa’waithi silver made thin and delicate on Senators’ wrists and necks as they flaunted their wealth. It thrummed like the resonating hum of an ancient bell in his chest, causing every hair on the back of his neck and along his arms to rise.
“Kark,” Thorn whispered from across the room, barely picked up by his vocoder as he breathed out the single curse. It stirred the rest of the Guard, unsticking their feet and slowly creeping and circling closer, enough to surround and look but keeping space between them and the crate.
It wasn’t the first time they had to deal with something unusual. They’ve been breaking up smuggling rings and illegal trade dens since the beginning of the war, and as it progressed, the more bold and brazen the people became and their products beyond illegal. Fox had thought he’d seen it all- from the almost literal mountain of Spice to the near fifty slaves huddled in a single room made to host maybe four people. He’d seen slugthrowers, homemade explosives, drugs from all across the galaxy, animals both large and small- at this point he believed himself entirely immune to the insanity of the underworld.
Nothing had prepared him for finding beskar.
It wasn’t even a little amount. The hover-pallet it was on was an industrial grade, and the crate’s dimensions large enough to host well over two hundred of the thin bricks of metal. There was no identity stamp on the ingots or the crate, and he knew there would be no paperwork in the mess of the club. Whoever brought it in could've bought the entire level of Coruscant with it, but it was far too late for the poor sod. The crate and its contents had well and truly become government property the moment the Guard had barged into the club.
There was so much that could be done with this amount of beskar. Fox was privy to far too many conversations where he’d been nothing more than a piece of décor in the background that were better described as shouting matches and arguments as various Senators and the Chancellor and nat-born military officials tried to coax and cajole the neutral Mandalore into providing beskar for the war effort. For an infamous metal, there wasn’t much known about it in the greater galaxy other than it’s one of the best. There were hundreds of theories and experimental designs still in the hypothetical stage because of the lack of resources, and he’s heard more than one person bemoan the fact that the Duchess was putting most of the repurposed metal from armor into buildings. Even Fox thought that Duchess Kryze was karking insane for spitting in the face of thousands of years of history, and he wasn’t even technically a sentient being. He knew from his days as a cadet and the feeble grasp of Mandalorian culture purely through osmosis alone that beskar was best in a warrior’s hands, even if most of the Cuy’val Dar didn’t have pure beskar pieces or were pure durasteel. Even the Prime’s had been an alloy, although purer than many others, but it didn’t make the same sound when struck like these ingots.
But this amount of beskar right in front of him could change so much. The war was dragging on and on, and the direction of the Republic was getting yanked by the ankles further into the dark. The galaxy was getting crueler, more hostile and vicious, and while his brothers up in the stars dreamed of a life after the war, here every single Guard could see the bleakness yawning out before them. This beskar could save so many of their brothers, could actually strike hope into the Guards’ shriveled little hearts that the war could end.
But…
It would never reach their brothers.
He took the hope and crushed into stardust under his heel before it could fully be realized as Fox stared at the glimmer of colored lights across the rippled faces of the ingots. He’d been in this business since the beginning of the war, and he understood how things worked. Items that were seized by the Guard were to be inventoried and reported, then were to be quarantined in one of the warehouses by the spaceport until redistribution or disposal by the Coruscant Security Force. Unfortunately the CSF had their pockets greased by many hands, Senators included, and the Guard were powerless to stop any of it as stolen artifacts waltzed out of the warehouse to be seen on a shelf in someone’s office days later. This beskar wouldn’t last an hour before it would magically vanish, and he’ll probably end up finding a stupid statue or the Chancellor dressed in robes made of beskar threads.
No, Fox settled with a curl of his fingers, fisting them into his palms as if to chase away the inexplicable vibration of beskar-on-beskar from his veins. He refused to let this metal be used so trivially. He wasn’t a Mandalorian despite the Prime’s origins, wasn’t a sentient person with a heart or soul, but the song of beskar was primordial, and he couldn’t bring himself to see it be twisted into something so… so inane and unappreciated as a novelty and a flaunt of wealth and connections by the bastards on high in the Rotunda.
“Put the lid back on,” he managed to ground out to Line, who slapped the cover over the ingots as if the whole thing had caught fire and he was trying to smother it. Fox turned his head to look at every single Guard present, his hard stare conveyed in the tense lines of his shoulders. They practically lived in their armor, could read each other as easily in them if they hadn’t been wearing their buckets at all. And every Guard straightened to attention under Fox’s gaze that silently screamed at them to pay attention!
“You saw nothing,” he ordered them, a near growl in his throat as he made sure to look into every visor. “This crate does not exist. Its contents do not exist. Am I clear?”
“Sir, yes sir!” a dozen voices responded as one. Fox weighed their sincerity before giving them a quick jerk of a nod.
“Get back to work.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Thorn hissed across their private comms as the others scurried off to continue inventorying the remaining contraband. “We can’t keep it, Fox.”
“Of course we’re not keeping it. I’m not an idiot.” Fox closed his eyes in the safety of his bucket, hoping to squash down the beginning needles of a headache that was tingling right in the middle of his forehead. “We have to return it to the proper hands. Mandalorian hands. And I have an idea of who to give it to.”
Thorn was silent for a long moment.
“Do you think they’re still there?”
“They were there last week,” Fox admitted with a grunt, toeing at the pallet’s controls to set it to Follow Mode. “Pear caught a glimpse of one on his way to the growbeds heading further down. If they’re not… well, I got some ideas.”
Both he and Thorn made a face under their buckets. Hopefully it wouldn’t come down to their sparse few other options.
“You’re going alone.” Thorn didn’t voice it as a question, and Fox could feel the silent judgement on the back of his neck as he started to navigate the hover-pallet through the trashed dance floor. He understood Thorn’s silent jab- Fox had made it abundantly clear that no one was to travel alone and to always be at least in pairs. Yet Fox was always breaking that particular rule. It made the other Commanders thoroughly unimpressed, and there had been times when they sicced Hacksaw on the case, with the muted medic slinking into place beside him with the silent grace of a predator without him noticing every single time.
“You know why.” Fox paused at the sloped ramp that led to the street above, turning to face Thorn. “If I don’t come back by morning shift, please don’t come looking for me.”
“Oh, we’re looking for you all right,” Thorn drawled with an audible glare to his words. “Just so we can laugh at your stupid kriffing corpse.”
Fox couldn’t help but bark out a laugh.
“String me up in front of the Chancellor’s office and I might forgive you.”
“Naked.”
“I’ll have to haunt your ass after that.”
Shaking his head, Fox began the ascent up to street level, the thrum of the hover-pallet trailing after him as he climbed higher and higher, leaving the broad form of his oldest Commander in his wake, never knowing whether this would be the last time they would see each other alive or not.
“Stay safe,” came the whisper across the comms before Coruscant devoured the signal.
The quiet “you too” was lost to the inside of a bucket.