Work Text:
The Senate Rotunda was built upon the exoskeleton of its past, emerged out of its deadened shell to gleam bright under the open sky and burying its previous rendition. Its discarded forms were closed away, barred from the public and forgotten by the Senators who graced the current halls with all the pomp and frill as their predecessors.
The entrance had been a simple, nondescript door in the depths of the maintenance corridors. It opened into a rusted lift that creaked and groaned as the gears ground through years of crusted grease and dust and lowered the lift into the gaping abyss below.
The door wasn’t on any blueprints on file, nor were the endless, empty corridors beyond it. There were no signs to point it out, no warnings or barriers. The only knowledge of the place was by word-of-mouth, whispered in hushed tones and shifting eyes as if waiting for something to leap at them. Ghost tales of hearts being torn away from bodies without a single injury on the exterior, of half-forgotten ancestors who spoke of corpses having flesh torn away from their bones and witnesses who’d scream and scream and scream, who’d claw at their faces and gouge out their eyes, or those who’d stare into space with face pale and bloodless, who’d throw themselves off buildings to their demise when they were left unattended for a single moment.
There were no reports to back up these claims. And yet…
And yet…
Fox hadn’t known the door existed, that the levels to the Senate were deeper and more extensive than he’d been led to believe, not one to believe in the gossip and rumors of the natborns who entertained themselves on fiction. The Chancellor had been the first to bring it up, abash in that he’d forgotten about the door and the halls beyond it. He was positive, regardless, that no assassin or Separatist sympathizer was using the space, but if Fox would be so kind to ease an old man’s worry and check anyway, he’d been most thankful.
And as a good little soldier, Fox complied.
The small headlamp on his bucket scraped a golden beam across textured walls, his footsteps echoing and echoing until they were swallowed by the black void around him. The minimap in the corner of his HUD kept track of where he’d been and mapped where he was going, but it provided little comfort as the halls stretched out into a patchwork maze of unknown. The Phase I armors lacked the night vision that the Phase II offered, but Fox couldn’t wish for what wouldn’t help him now, and so it was just him and his tiny headlamp against the endless wall of darkness.
He’d gone deep, Fox knew, from the way the architecture had warped and shifted with every level he descended, climbing down stairs and lowering himself through lift shafts. The walls here had once been red with golden-accented marble, but the stone had been pitted and blackened by soot and blasterfire long since cold. The farther he walked, the deeper the scars of conflict bared themselves to him, the feeble little light on his bucket deepening the shadows of long scours sliced across columns.
The red, white, and gold of the hallways faded and disappeared under the effects of a fire lost to time. The fire must’ve been hot, causing the very marble to warp under the intensity and metal decorations to melt into dreary tear tracks down the walls.
The hairs on the back of his neck had been on end since he’d stepped onto the lift, the sweat trickling down his spine ice cold despite his HUD reporting the ambient air temperature being only four degrees cooler than the upper floors. No amount of sweeps with his headlamp revealed any footprints in the dust and ash, not even the smallest of rodents or insect activity detected, and yet...
Fox sees it everywhere.
It weaved languidly out of the edges of his vision, just beyond the fringes of the meager beam of light his headlamp provided. It danced slow and lazy in the rotting halls, slithering along the walls ahead of him and loomed towards the ceiling behind him. Yet when Fox turned his light to chase it, it is nowhere to be found, not a wisp or puff of dust to be found.
The Darkness was everywhere.
And it wouldn’t leave Fox alone.
The simple audio feature on his HUD detected no outward sounds after cancelling out the sound of his own boots, but the Darkness whispered in Fox’s ear. It was distant at first, inaudible and unintelligent, but then it was so close to him he could almost feel a breath tickle against his ear despite his bucket being firmly on his head and the seal engaged.
J’us aras sisiyi, auj karis.
He’d nearly pulled his blaster out of his holster, half turned on a knee-jerk reaction until realizing where he was. There was nothing down here, no signs of life, no droids or even a functioning power outlet. The solitude was getting to him, he told himself, angrily shoving his blaster back into its holster and turning his headlamp forward once more. It was dark, he was alone, and he’d been down here for several hours now.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he whispered to himself, the vocoder muted so that his words were all to himself.
Nevertheless, the Darkness laughed at him, not in sound but by something that curled around him and through him, sending chilled fingertips across his skin.
He ignored it, repressing the involuntary shudder as he continued his trek. Somehow it felt as if he was walking in circles despite the minimap showing him moving forward in one continuous line of a seemingly endless hallway. The walls were so black with soot that it swallowed the small light, the sharp edges melted into misshapen lumps of stone and twisted metal. Each step of his boot caused a puff of ash to curl tiny tendrils into the air, blackening the polished white plastoid as if the Darkness was slowly but steadily staking its claim on him, devouring him inch by inch without him realizing it.
Which was ridiculous, because there was nothing down here, and it was just soot.
Ri hurnidiw j’us niti kaj nayir nindz sos ûtusamsi j’us is ri rayisadni, ki ditona.
Fox found himself approaching a dead end, manned by what used to be a statue but was now a twisted blob of material, what used to be its face frozen in a dripping mass like hardened wax of one of those fancy stick candles he’d seen in one of the Senator’s offices. The damage done inside this section of the old Republic Senate was almost indicative of a firebombing than a simple fire, but no amount of flash training from Kamino and his cram studies of Coruscant on his way to his posting provided no clue as to a time period or war that had brought the battle to the heart of the Republic itself.
All he knew that the fire had to have been raging hot, and the attack had been catastrophic.
The shadows curled in the corner of his eye as he paused, lingering and shifting as if dancing in the fringes of his tiny light. He ignored them, instead turning about-face, ready to follow his trail back to the last branching corridor. Soon he’ll be heading back and out of this place, happy to tell the Chancellor that there were no intruders and he couldn’t find another entrance in that could warrant a future walk-through.
There were no footprints in the dust behind him.
The HUD decided right then and there to flicker black.
Darkness leaked into his bucket.
“For fuck’s sake,” he cussed, knocking his fist into his bucket, trying to shake the cheap wiring back to life. The screen flickered, but there was no success.
The air down here was stale as Fox cracked the seal to his bucket and lifted it off his head, the burned offerings of the past so old it no longer smelled like ash and fire. The headlamp was still functioning, providing some sort of comfort as he tilted the bucket over in his hand, scowling as he picked at wiring.
“Come on,” he whispered to his bucket, watching the HUD inside with an intense gaze as he wiggled various wires, trying to find the fault. “Come on, you stupid fucking thing.”
Ru unsin j’us zo satsas.
His breath was coming out in visible clouds, the corridor’s cold air sinking between every crack and crevice of his armor, creeping through the threads of his blacks to bury into his bones. His fingers were starting to stiffen, his hands aching in that sense of being exposed to extreme drops in temperature, but that wasn’t possible, the ambient temperature had been mild just seconds ago, he was sure of it-
Soot settled around his ankles, climbing higher and consuming swaths of white plastoid in its wake.
The HUD flickered again, the screen coming to life for a single moment before dying once more. He wacked the bucket against the wall, which caused the HUD to suddenly blink to life.
“Yes!”
The HUD died after several seconds.
It took the headlamp with it, plunging Fox into Darkness.
“No-!”
Rasiz Nu nayir shiyi tudimi. Ros zo tors.
The Darkness swallowed him whole.
Something grasped at his jaw in a beskar grip, strong and unyielding as sharp talons dug into his skin, uncaring as it gouged rivers of scarlet along his cheek. He barely had time to gasp before it was wrenching his head to the side so harshly something popped along his neck, yanking him upward until his toes were no longer touching the floor.
And then razor-sharp teeth sank through the collar of his blacks.
It tore into the crook of his neck with the searing, scalding heat of a brand, lighting every nerve and vein on fire. Fox tried to breathe, to scream, but he was burning from the inside out, his lungs suddenly filled with embers as he choked on smoke that clogged his throat, digging and ripping and tearing.
The Darkness was in him, around him, consuming him with every bite of flesh as it tore and rendered muscle and bone. No amount of armor stopped its maw of teeth from ripping into his shoulder next, blood dripping hot rivers against his icy skin and painting his armor with a crimson that could never be polished clean-
A heavy hand slammed against his chest.
Fox’s throat was raw, his ears ringing- he’d been screaming, Fox realizing belatedly as he choked on his own breath, his fingers scrabbling uselessly against plastoid. The hand was a sudden anchor in the turbulent sea he’d found himself drowning in, and he latched onto it with the will of a dying man wanting to live, gasping as he tried to remember how to breathe.
The hand soon became an arm attached to a broad, strong shoulder, which trailed up to a familiar face with bright amber eyes staring down at him without an emotion on his face. Hacksaw loomed over him, the medic’s gaze boring into Fox’s own sudden clarity.
Fox sucked in a breath, holding it despite his heart thrumming against his chest like a caged bird, then exhaled, long and slow.
“…’m ‘wake,” he managed to croak out, his fingers slacking off Hacksaw’s arm and dropping down to his sides with a soft thump. Hacksaw regarded him silently, gaze roaming over Fox’s face for a moment before the pressure eased off his chest.
The hand didn’t remove itself fully, though.
Fox was silently grateful.
“W-what?” Head lulling as he looked around, he tried to grasp at the familiar threads he was seeing. He was in the Guard’s tiny medbay, the other cots thankfully empty. The scent of clean tickled his nose, and the reassuring weight of his armor was absent. His blacks had been stripped from his body, a pair of loose sleeping trousers pulled on, but Hacksaw’s hand was a heated balm against his bare chest as he pulled in another deep breath.
“Patrol Seven found you in one of the maintenance halls in the Lower Senate.”
Fox rolled his head to blink up at Thorn, who moved to stand on the other side of the cot, the long section of his hair coming out of its bun and strands of hair falling into his stormy eyes. A concerned crease had made itself at home between his brow, and his mouth was twisted into a worried frown.
“You were positively soaked in blood, Fox,” Thorn continued, and Fox stared stupidly up at him. “Your own blood. Even Hacksaw confirmed it, and you were at dangerously low levels. But the thing is, there wasn’t an open wound in sight. Not even a fresh scar. Missing for almost eight hours, turning up in the Senate with blood loss and delirious- where the hell have you been?”
“I-“ Fox’s voice crackled in his throat, taking in Thorn’s expression and then looking over at Hacksaw. “I’d been with the Chancellor. He wanted me to do a quick check down in maintenance, and… and…”
The memories slipped away from his fingertips, slithering out of his touch like one of Senator Amidala’s silken dresses. No matter how hard he tried, the only concrete memory he had was him walking down the maintenance corridors that were part of the Senate patrols. But he couldn’t remember where he’d gone after that, or how he’d end up with blood all over his armor and blacks.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, a sense of unfathomable terror suddenly seizing his lungs. “I don’t know.”
And in the deep recesses of his subconscious, right next to all the dreams he knew he had but could never remember upon awakening, the Darkness laughed.