Character disclaimer is at the beginning of the Zero Chapter.

Whew, back again… these chapters just keep getting longer. Don't fret, though; we're almost done with all the exposition.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment; you keep me honor-bound to finish this fic. : nod: A few folks asked about Falco; don't worry, he's coming up soon. (I think he gets a half chapter next time around...)

And now for something completely different:

SPECIAL DISCLAIMER (UPDATED!)

The term for Peppy's subspecies, "Pandoran," the related word "Pandora" used in reference to his home planet, and the concept of this species being naturally empathic, are all entirely copyright to Vixy Reinard pseudonym, a talented author who wrote two famous Star Fox pieces roughly a decade ago. (She's on here somewhere under the name "Ganesh"; see if you can find her!) She recently contacted me (Hi!) and graciously gave me permission to use the Pandoran concept and terminology.

That said, here we go again…

"When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze, and touches with her hand the summer trees, perhaps you'll understand what memories I own." Ella Fitzgerald, Early Autumn

Chapter 3: Peppy

The sunset skimmed the ground with orange rays and cool grey shadows. They pointed me westward, away from the base. All the trees along the avenues of the downtown area glowed gold with the light and the season.

The warm air that circulated between the tall buildings of Corneria City was dry and gentle. It felt good on my fur; a familiar, comforting feeling, but it couldn't do a damn thing for my heart.

We were just coming into the first days of autumn. These were the most beautiful days of the year, I used to think. The sort of days when it was understandable for pilots to skip duty and go flying for the fun of it; hunting the thick fall storm clouds that littered the sky, following the sun as far afield as they dared.

In my younger years, I had delighted in this season like no other. No disciplinary threat could hold me back in the fall when the sun was low in the west and the trees started to change.

I was especially fond of flying over the orchards north of the city limits. I would stoke my radar to be sure the area was clear, then open up the throttle of my old two-engine Aleter and tilt the axis until I was flying inverted, the orchard over my head and the sky under my feet. The colors of a thousand different trees would blur together in waves like the surface of the sun, filling my vision all around as though the ship wasn't there at all.

I would take my hands off the control yoke and let myself be hypnotized for those few precious seconds.

Maybe this was the magic my people believed in – maybe there was something secret to the world, after all, I would wonder to myself.

I can still remember the way it felt to half-believe in the metaphysical, and to be ashamed of it.

I became the annoyance of every superior officer, readily agreeing to my duties one minute and vanishing the next. I had cases of euphony, the empathy sickness specific to my breed, at the worst possible times. I was useless when it happened; I always had to sit somewhere quiet and wait for it to go away.

Our commanders didn't understand. I didn't really expect them to, I suppose. They took my fits as excuses to stay out of the cockpit, and they made sure I regretted each time I tried "pulling that stupid trick."

I'll admit, I was a little reluctant to begin my daily duties, maybe. Maybe a little slow. Definitely shy. I didn't have many friends, and I didn't fit in too well with society in general.

I wasn't what they considered an average soldier. I could fight, but I never seemed to have the heart to defend myself. I could fly, but I stayed tightly in the training formations, and never dared to take point.

It was generally understood that I was a coward.

And when I failed at anything, my drill masters and commanding officers swore up and down that a Lag – and a Pandoran, no less – had no place flying defenses for Corneria. "Nothing between the ears," they said. "Druid," and "Primitive," too.

Those were the higher days of canine ethnocentrism. We all had to deal with it, I told myself. The discrimination, the rough gestures – it was a part of being non-Lylatian. I never thought I'd let it get to me, but it did, really. It took me years to realize how bitter the foolish words of inconsiderate people had made me.

Thankfully, James McCloud was always there.

He was from my home system, Key. A non-Lylatian, but he had the respect of every dog on the base, nevertheless. Maybe it was because he was canine to some extent. Maybe it was just his personality.

Either way, I was proud to be his friend.

"There's nothing wrong with you, Pep," he'd tell me after fights with our commanders, "It's part of our generation, and theirs. The systems are coming closer together now than ever before, and there's bound to be a couple of fights like this as we all get used to one another. It'll all be different in a few years."

"You say that so easily," I'd laugh.

"Because I believe it," he'd reply.

I could tell by his voice that he meant it.

I wasn't afraid to be myself in front of James. He took my Pandoran intuition seriously during training, no questions asked. Even when my senses turned out to be wrong, he never doubted me. I never had problems with euphony around him, either. I could focus.

And he, in turn, confided in me. James was probably the most frenetic person in the world, but you would never have known it from the calm exterior he showed everyone.

I learned all his troubles and kept them secret.

He was eager to be a soldier, but dreaded the uncertainty that lay in conflicts ahead. Would Corneria really complete a galactic federation, or would there be a war to fight? We had no idea in those days. Expect the worst, hope for the best, live for the moment; it was the motto of our entire generation.

James had difficulty talking to pretty girls. Whenever we all went out drinking, he'd stick close by so I could guide him through introductions, should a young lady take interest.

I couldn't help but laugh whenever he froze up, staring at some lovely woman across the room, and tugged on my sleeve for something to say. Maybe it was odd for me to be the one playing the go-between when James was usually so much more sociable, but it definitely helped my confidence.

Injustices, no matter how petty, no matter who they happened to, angered him like nothing else. I'd find him steamed about something unfair, and we'd spend hours in philosophical discussion on whether or not the universe could really be more good than bad.

We always agreed it had to be at least 51 percent good.

However closely we had been friends during our cadet years, we were all the more so when graduation came around.

James came to my quarters right after the ceremony, before I even had a chance to change out of dress uniform.

"Peppy, I'm applying to start a team. I want you to be my second-in-command."

"W-what?" I was stunned. "When are you applying-…"

"Tonight. Right now."

James had scored high in our class; he had the privilege of a few years sabbatical before he was expected to fly in the force. Then again, it was James, after all. Never before had a pilot been so dedicated to his calling.

Damned if I was going to let him go it alone…

We went to General Asher's office that night, and were officially recognized as the "Star Fox" team the next day. I never did figure out where James got that name from; probably never will.

A two-man team wasn't in keeping with Corneria's standards, however, and we were given one week to find a third pilot. It didn't take James long to track down an old acquaintance from our home star system who had finished training on Papetoon.

Pigma Dengar was his name. He had already been working as a mercenary pilot for a few years, doing "delivery work for hire," as he put it. We all knew that meant "smuggling," but James trusted the guy, so I put my doubts behind me.

It was the biggest mistake of my life.

One autumn, I showed James how to fly over the orchard. Pigma wasn't very fond of practice; we left him behind and went out to practice beyond our designated airspace, where no-one could reprimand us for clandestine maneuvers.

Flying inverted was a dangerous exercise in those days. The standard issue Aleter craft was the only ship that could do it in-atmosphere, and few pilots saw the need to attempt it, anyway. When I told James I knew how to hold a position of inversion, he was eager to learn. We practiced a few times together, and then James decided to be a smartass – or maybe it was a mistake? – and threw his axle too far past ninety.

That was the first barrel roll ever performed in the Cornerian military. We both took up the technique and practiced the hell out of it whenever and wherever we could, scaring brass and shaking up the formations of teams that flew with us. Pigma figured it out too, eventually.

The secret of flying over the orchard, however, remained a secret between James and myself for quite some time. James only ever showed it to one other person, in fact; Vixenne Reynard, who became Vixenne McCloud in short order.

"Vixy," we called her. She worked at the base, assisting the metacommunications operator while finishing graduate classes at Corneria City University. She was brilliant and beautiful, and James was completely smitten with her.

I was fortunate to be present the first time they met. Sergeant Pepper, a former commander of our cadet class and a good friend, introduced them to each other in the hall as though by accident. Personally, I think he was waiting for a chance to match them up. Pepper was a good fellow like that.

"Captain McCloud, this is Vixenne Reynard. Ms. Reynard, Captain James McCloud."

And just like some old movie, their eyes locked and that was that. Vixy finally smiled and looked away shyly. (I had to kick James to break his stare.)

You could tell Pepper was proud of himself for getting the two together; his tail wagged for the rest of the day.

To make a short story even shorter, I was the best man at the wedding. They were engaged and married in "less time than the moon takes to rise," to pardon the colloquialism. They'd met in autumn; it was still autumn when we all left the chapel.

He thanked me at the reception.

I asked him why.

"I proposed to Vixy over the orchard," he explained, "upside-down, the way you showed me."

"Christ, James, you took her up in an Aleter? It's a one-man craft!"

"Yeah, had her sitting on my lap the whole time," and he smiled that mischievous smile that I can still see, sometimes, when I think hard about it.

"But wasn't she frightened?"

"Hell, no. She loved every minute of it!" and then, in a mock whisper, "I'll tell you, Pep, she's good. Think I should have her lead the team?"

I had to laugh at that.

James and Vixy were indeed quite a pair – anyone could have seen it in the way they spoke to one another; the way they walked together; even in the way they argued with each other. Neither could best the other in spirit or determination, and every fight ended with mutual forgiveness.

They would be happy for the rest of their lives, I thought then.

I had been so certain of it.

I suddenly had to sit down. I'd reached the park between the base and Fox's apartment, and thankfully there were benches. I settled onto one and tried to refocus.

The autumn wasn't beautiful for me; not anymore. This wasn't the happy season that it had once been. I was plagued with memories – formed so long ago, but so omnipresent in my own mind – that weren't fit for recalling.

It had been a bitterly cold autumn morning when a black plume of smoke rose up through the still, silent air. It was coming from the apartment complex where Cornerian soldiers with families were housed – where James and Vixy lived.

We could see it from the observation tower on the fifth floor of the base, but we were too far away to have heard the blast.

James swore that he'd heard it, regardless. I think he felt it, too.

He knew Vixy was dead.

It was a bomb. Someone had set it up to explode when the ignition of the McCloud family's car was turned on. Investigators later determined that it was some sort of an indiscriminate attempt to kill Cornerian soldiers, those days being the height of hostilities with the last outer planets.

They never identified any suspects. James had a suspect of his own, but he never found any evidence to give to the police. He told me who he thought it was, and even I have to admit I found it a little far fetched at the time.

I expect he told Fox, too.

Fox McCloud, born James Fox McCloud, Junior, was only three years old then. He'd been far enough away from the blast to survive, at least. Emergency crews found him curled up in the apartment stairwell, confused and calling for his mother. The explosion had rendered him temporarily deaf, and he'd been struck across the arms and face by shrapnel.

The doctors decided from the injuries that he had been close enough to see everything.

I sat with James in the hospital all that day and night. It was all I could do to just sit there, quiet and helpless, while my leader grieved for his wife and anxiously awaited news of his son.

Surely, this would be the worst day of all of our lives, I thought. Please, whatever god might be up there, don't let anything worse than this ever occur…

Towards the end of the evening, Fox was finally released from care.

A nurse brought him out to where we sat. He looked pitiful; I remember feeling a powerful, generalized shame about myself and my world, that a child should ever have to wear so many bandages.

James picked him up and held him tightly.

I knew then that James would be alright. He had his son to look after, and he was far too strong to give up when someone was counting on him. It would be difficult, but not impossible.

It was another Autumn, five years later, that saw the proud Star Fox team take off for an unusual recon mission past Sector Z. We were glad to have our first serious run in months; tired of all the drilling and training. James was determined to take every mission they would give us, no matter the risk.

This one was supposed to be simple.

Our three ships broke though the outer limits of the Cornerian atmosphere, together for what would ultimately be the last mission of the Star Fox team. We had been ordered to take remote readings of activity on the surface of Venom, a massive planet that orbited at the exact apogee of Corneria.

Venom was the last bastion of anti-federation sentiment in the Lylat system, but a woefully underdeveloped place. A sudden increase in imports of high-end mechanics put Cornerian intelligence on alert. They wanted to know what was going on at local latitude 43, longitude 81, and they needed a few ships to serve as temporary satellites. Our small, three-man team was the perfect size for the job.

We would take a few shots of the surface, sweep the radio a few times, and be on our way back.

Or so we thought.

Pigma had done his homework. He figured anyone who could afford to bring millions of dollars worth of manufacturing equipment to a planet like Venom would pay a good price to keep his operations safe from Cornerian eyes. He was motivated by money, after all, and Corneria didn't pay its pilots very much.

Neither James nor I saw it coming.

As soon as we had set orbit high above the surface of Venom, he fired a single shell of Nova-class ordnance at close range. The resulting EMP blast wiped out our weapons and navigation immediately. Pigma had crippled us both.

I was too stunned to react. I heard Pigma's voice over the radio, laughing like a maniac. The hum of his weapons, charging and still active, built up in the background. He was going to start firing at any second.

James's voice cut through on a different frequency.

"Peppy, retreat! If your engines are active, pull back now!"

We both turned our ships in unison and made for open space, but Pigma's orders from his new employer apparently went beyond breaking up the mission.

Someone on Venom wanted us dead.

I realized immediately that we weren't up to speed. The secondary string of reactors that gave Aleters speed through deep space had been knocked out by the pulse, and it only took Pigma a few moments' chase to catch up with us.

I tried every evasive maneuver I knew, but without speed, it wasn't making much difference. Pigma struck us mercilessly, again and again, draining our ships of the energy we were throwing into the shields. If the shields gave out…

James yelled at him, cursed him; tried to keep his attention. One of his reactors was still online somehow, and it made him a little faster than me. He could dodge, and he could barrel roll to throw off laser fire. I couldn't.

Pigma wasn't distracted for long – he caught on to James's plan and decided to finish me off first. He was a good shot, the bastard, and with my wings set and my engines choking, I was an easy target.

He focused his fire directly onto the canopy of my cockpit – a "mercy shot," ironically, intended to kill a pilot without all the drama of life-support failure and asphyxiation. My shields thinned out and buckled before my eyes, the glow of the lasers superheating the track glass right above my head.

At that point, I took my hands off the controls and closed my eyes. It was over, I figured, and I was determined to die without showing the panic that I felt. The longer Pigma wasted time on me, the better chance James had of getting away.

But James didn't run.

I heard a sickening crash. My eyes snapped open to witness James's ship, moving backwards slowly with the remains of the force he'd used to ram Pigma. I could tell by the damage to Pigma's Aleter that James had been aiming for the cockpit.

He'd just barely missed.

I could hear Pigma swearing wildly over the radio as he fought with his damaged ship. The laser array sparked and failed; he couldn't fire at us anymore. He was on half-engines, and his left wing wasn't responding to any controls.

In his rage, Pigma yelled something incomprehensible at us, turned, and fled.

I couldn't have cared less; I was far more concerned about James.

I immediately knew he was in bad shape; his shield generator flickered with arcs of electricity, and it looked like both engines were out.

He was drifting.

I tried to raise him on the radio; no response.

"James, wake up!"

Nothing.

He started to drift faster. Lights on my console let me know that I was drifting, too.

Suddenly, I saw why Pigma had run.

In our desperate attempt to escape, we had ignored our headings and radar. Now we found ourselves at the very edge of a vast plain of space between Venom and Sector Z that twisted and warped around a supermassive anomaly. It was some sort of impossible error in physics, a thing so capable of destruction that whole moons and exterior asteroids had vanished into it. Cornerian scientists had no name for it, so they called it what it most resembled: a Black Hole.

And we were being pulled in.

"James, can you hear me? Get your engines back online; we need to get out of here!"

The answer, quiet and resigned, scared me like nothing else.

"I can't."

Our speed increased. I knew that at some point we would be pulled into contact with the actual "wash" of the Black Hole, a physical band of debris that would tear us apart. Once we were too close to the wash, there would be no turning back.

Weakened as we were, there wasn't much time left.

"For god's sake, James! Try! You have to try!"

"The controls are full black," he replied.

Full black. It meant there was no energy left in the ship's systems, even for the tiny LED lights on the cockpit console. It was only by some miracle that his radio was even functioning.

James was completely paralyzed, I realized.

He was going to die.

"Peppy, don't follow me. Get back to Corneria."

I couldn't answer. We were both drifting in faster by the second.

"Peppy, now. You have to turn around NOW."

"I don't want to," I muttered.

"I'm not asking you, this is an order. Turn around and get the hell out of here."

The intense nothingness of the heart of the Black Hole loomed ahead of us. No stars, no light, no reflections. It was perfectly black, perfectly empty. Small shards of space rock passed us by, accelerating towards their inevitable fate.

"James, don't make me…"

"Peppy," and for one last time, his voice was the strong, familiar voice that had lead me all my life, "Please don't give up now. Do you understand me?"

I didn't answer him, and I still regret it.

"Just… never give up."

The radio crackled into silence.

I turned my Aleter sharply and threw the engines into full, struggling away from that awful blackness behind me. It was harder than I thought it would be – I don't know what was pulling me back more forcefully, the gravity, or the thought of James quietly watching me leave.

Silver chips of ice and meteorite fragments slipped past my canopy, streaking through space like supersonic snow, falling into the void behind me. It wasn't long before tears clouded my vision and I couldn't see them anymore.

I turned back once more as soon as I was far enough away to afford a look. I scanned the area for hours, but I never saw James's ship again. He must have been destroyed while I had my back to him.

He died watching me run away.

It should have been me, I realized. It should have been my ship. I was the weaker of the two of us; I always had been. I was slated to die the moment Pigma pinned me down with his lasers.

James had a son to care for. He'd seen his share of troubles already – this shouldn't have happened to him.

And I let him die, watching me as I ran away.

I made a promise then and there, in that remote corner of Lylat, that I would make it up to him, as best as this world would allow a coward to redeem himself.

I would live for James' sake.

All the way back to Corneria, my failing ship slow and threatening to quit altogether, I repeated to myself all the sins that were mine, and that one chance I had to right them – I was dedicated to live for James.

It was my own secret; I would tell no-one.

I somehow made it back to Corneria, though I can't remember anything past the vicinity of Solar. I apparently pulled a terrifically bad landing and woke up the next day in the base hospital.

General Asher himself was there to ask me questions. Lots of questions.

What information did you manage to collect? What happened to your wingman? Where is your captain?

I answered everything numbly. I was determined not to show weakness. Not anymore.

The General finally left me alone with my sorrows. I stared at the ceiling for hours, repeating over and over to myself that which I had to do.

I had to live for James.

I never had really come back from those dark days the way Fox had. He had youth to help him, I suppose, and his father's courage.

And I… well, I had Fox.

How many days had it been since I'd slept in my own quarters, I wondered, or eaten at the mess hall? A week, at least.

We both knew it was the season. I would be able to stand on my own again once the last leaves fell and the heavy snows of winter dulled the pain in my soul. We'd been through this drill before; seven times, I noted.

This would be the eighth year since James had been killed.

Surely the memories of autumn wore heavily on Fox too, but he would never let me see it. He had grown up faster than was fair to a boy his age. I noticed him putting on a false smile for my sake more and more these days. He was sincere when he told me I could stay with him, I knew, but I felt childish for depending on him so much, and so obviously.

It was getting hard to keep track of who was looking after whom.

A leaf fluttered down and tapped my ear. Absently, I gazed up into the shadows of the leaves remaining overhead.

They'd all fall soon enough, I realized with a sigh. They'd get blown away, or pulled down in the cold storms that precede the snows. A few might hang on, stubbornly, but they'd all fall in the end.

What horrible wisdom.

I stood up and straightened my uniform jacket. My back creaked, and my neck was stiff. I was 36 years old, but I felt truly ancient in those days.

No more memories, I told myself. Put them away for the day, Peppy.

A faint roar overhead caught my attention. I looked up to see a formation of "explorers" draw their thick contrails through the chill October sky, spanning the gap between the concrete skyscrapers that framed my view. There were 20, perhaps 25 of them: a massive squadron by my standards.

They were returning to the base after a hard day of doing absolutely nothing.

I shook my head in disgust.

It wasn't the fault of the squadron, I knew. It wasn't the military, either. Politics and politics alone was to blame for the sad state of the Cornerian forces.

The Lylat system was ready for a long-awaited age of peace. Political tensions demanded mutual disarmament, and in a show of sincerity, the Cornerian superpower had already begun shedding its armor by the ton.

Planes were being decommissioned and disarmed, bombs dismantled and the metal sold to civilian scrap yards. The vast Cornerian navy was slowly being lifted, one ship at a time, from local waters, freighted away to Aquas and Zoness to explore the oceans there. Combat training was eliminated from every recruit's curriculum, replaced by lectures on diplomacy and cultural awareness. The defense budget was swept up and deposited wholly into the new Exploration Fleet, as they named it.

Look at us, Corneria was saying to the rest of the galaxy, see our non-threatening new social model of intergalactic exploration. We're coming in peace – let's all play nice.

How could they be so stupid? I asked myself every day, it seemed. Each new recruit who couldn't fire a blaster, each young officer who applied the "diplomatic model of conflict resolution" to a brawl in the barracks, each eager young face who diligently pressed his uniform and shined his shoes every night; whenever I saw them, I felt sick to my stomach.

If a single force decided to sucker-punch Corneria now, they'd all be dead in a heartbeat.

There were no soldiers anymore, I had come to realize, just explorers. Scientists and daydreamers in uniform. Throwing themselves trustingly into a world woven of purely wishful thinking.

I'd voiced this opinion to more than one higher officer, but all I got back from the top brass were expressions of zealous confidence in the "new-progressive exploratory model" and flak from politicians.

"You're just a warmonger," one senator replied to me on fancy white stationery, "and there'll be no place for you in the new age."

I wrote to him a second time, and told him in no uncertain terms that war was the last thing I wanted, but I'd seen too much of it to fall for the promise of easily-obtained peace.

He never wrote back.

I shook off the frustration and added it to the sad memories in the back of my mind. Another thing you can't help by thinking about, Peppy. Try not to worry about things you can't change.

I resumed my course down the sidewalk, towards the old McCloud family apartment. I had just dipped a little too deep into my troubled heart, and I was eager to meet Fox for dinner, per our custom, and forget about all the old worries.

"That's right," I said to myself, and my heart lightened ever so slightly, "No more thinking. Off to see Fox."

The sun was almost fully set, now, and the streetlights were beginning to blink on. It was harder to tell what season it was in the dark. Soon it was all mute, grey pavement in a black and white world, leading me around the city to a place that never seemed to change and the last real friend I had left.

I was a lot steadier by the time I reached the ninth floor. I wondered what dinner might be tonight, shuffling along the carpet that lead to Fox's poor, abused front door. I couldn't keep from smiling every time I saw it; he was still practicing that old move, eh?

As I approached, however, I picked up an unfamiliar voice from inside. Someone sounded angry.

No, not angry… and that quiet place in the back of my mind that felt the thoughts of others started to stir.

Someone was being persistent, and someone else was being downright obstinate. There was a definite difference.

Both of them were just a little scared, too. Scared of what, I wondered?

The yelling stopped.

I shook my head and smiled. Whatever was going on, I wasn't about to let on that I'd heard anything.

It was time for a traditional "hello," whether Fox was ready for it or not.

next chapter: The Fox and The Hare