Work Text:
I was a billion little pieces
'Til you pulled me into focus
Astronomy in reverse
It was me who was discovered
Sleeping At Last: Venus
It was the rainy season on Felucia and it had been raining off and on for over a week. Alpha-17 had grown up on Kamino, some of his earliest memories were of the rain but even he was feeling damned sick of it after a week straight. It made walking his patrols absolutely miserable but the parameter needed to be checked and he needed to verify just how close the river was to overflowing its banks.
His armor and body-suit protected him from the downpour but it couldn’t save his poor boots which felt like they were being sucked down into the mud at times. Mud that was smeared all the way up to the hem of his kama and lower body. There was also mud caked in his damned jetpack and all down his back thanks to the spill he’d taken when the riverbank had given out from underneath him and he’d very nearly been dragged into the raging river. It had been a combination of dumb luck and reflexes that had saved him as he grabbed desperately for a tree limb which had managed to support his weight as he’d struggled and slithered back up the embankment onto the more solid muddy ground. But in doing so, he’d wrenched something in his shoulder and now it was aching something fierce.
The only good thing about the torrential rain was that almost every sane creature and people were inside and Alpha hadn’t seen so much as a hint of any other sentients on his patrol. When they had first come to Felucia almost two years ago, there had been Jedi hunters and various clone troopers combing the forests looking for Jedi and deserters.
They had withdrawn eventually when they’d been unable to locate Alpha or Shaaki Ti and the rest of their motley group of younglings but they hadn’t let down their guard yet and Alpha didn’t intend on doing so any time soon.
If you had told him two years ago that he’d be eeking out a miserable existence hiding renegade Jedi while the rest of his brothers and fellow clones ran around the galaxy brainwashed and trying to kill their former commanders, Alpha would have scoffed incredulously and possibly punched someone in the face for even suggesting such a thing.
Yet here he was skulking in the mud trying to keep a bunch of runaway Jedi younglings and a few half-trained padawans alive. At least now they had actual huts built up into the ancient trees, when they had first come to Felucia they’d been living truly rough in a cave system.
Shaak Ti had forged an alliance with the native Felucians though and they had shared some of their building techniques and technology so they now had a series of homes nestled up into the boughs of the trees overhead.
Alpha had never been allowed to play like normal nat-born children did but he knew the Jedi younglings had been excited about the prospect of living in tree houses. So while he didn’t understand their excitement, he could appreciate the finer points of the defensibility of their new home.
They didn’t have to worry overly much if the river flooded its banks as it was apparently wont to do during this time of year. Nor did they have to worry about the feral rancors that roamed the jungle which put Alpha’s mind at ease somewhat.
What didn’t was Shaak Ti making noises about trying to tame a couple of them because apparently, the native Felucians used them as war mounts? Because he didn’t have enough stress in his life, constantly worrying his damned Jedi was going to get eaten by wild rancor in some misguided attempt at taming one sounded like so much fun.
Alpha couldn’t say exactly when he’d started to think of Shaak Ti as his Jedi. Especially considering he’d been so adamant once upon a time at never serving under one particular Jedi. He’d wanted nothing to do with the mad monks and generally viewed the entire Jedi Order with barely veiled contempt.
Unlike the Standards that had followed them, the Alpha Class ARC’s were as close to Jango Fett’s unaltered genome as you could get and it showed in their obstinate attitudes and unwillingness to fall into line. Alpha-17 had been infamous for his borderline contemptuous attitude towards the Jedi. But unlike the CC’s and CT classes that followed, he’d seen the Jedi for what they were, somewhat reluctant perpetrators of a deeply flawed system that robbed the clones of basic rights and where they were considered the property of the GAR rather than sentients in their own rights.
This wasn’t to say all Jedi embraced that system eagerly or even mistreated the clones under their care. He’d met plenty of Jedi who treated clones respectfully and not like they were simply chattel or property. Obi-Wan Kenobi came to mind as perhaps the one Jedi he might have almost considered to be a friend before Operation Knightfall had happened.
And even then that was dicey and could have simply been a false sort of intimacy brought on by their shared torture at Ventress’s hands. Though if he was being honest with himself in his heart of hearts, he’d definitely taken note of Shaak Ti long before they’d fallen in together on the run with a couple of renegade Jedi padawans.
He’d noticed her innate kindness in dealing with every clone she’d encountered. It had been her who had put a stop to the Kaminoans’ indiscriminate culling of entire batches of cadets just because of a few genetic abnormalities or because they didn’t match the exacting cloner’s ideals of a perfect creation.
She’d been the one to stay his hand when he’d been willing to commit wholesale destruction of the embryos of his unborn clone brothers during the Battle of Kamino. He didn’t know if he could have lived with himself if he’d been forced to go through with it. On one hand, the idea was an abomination but at the time, the idea of the Seppies gaining an entire legion of clones they could potentially weaponize against the Republic had been just as unthinkable.
Thankfully, he hadn’t had to perform that gruesome duty. And what remained burned in his memories like an indelible mark was the memory of the warm, assured weight of her hand on his arm. Those long and graceful fingers that he’d seen capable of so much vicious, deadly violence had curled around his wrist and he’d stopped. Either because he’d been so surprised by her presumption or something else he couldn’t name at the time, he didn’t know. It was perhaps the kindest touch he’d known in his relatively short life up until that point because Stars knew there wasn’t a lot of kindness to be had amongst the Kaminii or the Cuy'val Dar.
And honestly, he preferred it that way. Kindness only got you killed as had been abundantly proven when the clones had turned on their Jedi commanders and begun to kill even those who had been nothing but kind and friendly to them.
It had been just a lucky chance that Alpha-17 had been deep behind enemy lines when Order 66 came across the wire. He’d been radio dark and never gotten the command and once he’d finished with his mission and actually stopped to look around, he realized the universe had gone karking insane.
Clone Troopers were murdering Jedi, the Republic was dissolved and suddenly in its place some trumped-up Empire was installed. Every instinct Alpha had begun screaming at him that something was wrong so he’d fallen back on his training and rather than rushing into the fray had gone underground to buy himself some time to try and make sense of the madness brought on by the death throes of the Republic.
He watched with unabated horror as the clones all disappeared into the homogenous sea of white that made up the brand new Stormtrooper corps. He’d watched them meltdown the lightsabers of hundreds of Jedi while proclaiming them the villains, that they’d been trying to betray the Republic and it made no karking sense.
That Shaak Ti had found him when she had was nothing short of a miracle. Being the clever creature that she was, she’d somehow puzzled out that there was something embedded in the brains of all the Clone Troopers. She’d taken the seemingly mad ravings of a broken ARC Trooper and had figured out the time-bomb sitting in the brains of all the clones.
Her story had sounded absolutely mad at first, but in the face of how insane everything else had become, he’d reluctantly agreed to let a med-droid examine him. Shaak Ti had said Fives had been raving about chips in his brain. That all the clones had a behavioral chip in their brains and it had taken two different scans before the droid had managed to locate said chip.
Once Alpha had learned there was some kind of behavioral modification bio-chip in his brain he’d insisted they remove it right then and there. The idea someone else could dictate his actions, could quite literally re-write his own will and self-determination was nightmarish and had made his skin crawl in revulsion.
It had taken almost nine months before Shaak Ti had felt comfortable telling him the entire sad tale of ARC Trooper Fives. He hadn’t a hand in training that particular trooper, his training had fallen onto Blitz and the remnants of Rancor Battalion though he had of course heard about the clone’s mental breakdown through the proverbial grapevine.
Fives had been seen as the worst sort of failure amongst the ARC’s, both because he’d cracked but also because he’d tried to assassinate the Chancellor himself. Alpha had reluctantly found himself having to reassess his thoughts on the deceased ARC after that.
He’d been doing that a lot over the last few years. Had to reassess what he thought he knew about just about everything in the universe and he didn’t care for it. Ironically, the only firm and settled thing in his life was Shaak Ti. She’d been the unmovable rock that centered all of them.
Alpha finally made it back to the location of their camp and eyed the rope ladder they used to gain access to the canopy overhead with no small lack of trepidation. This was going to karking suck but he’d powered through far worse and pulled on the hidden line that would free the ladder from the stump it was normally wrapped up around to keep it hidden from view and caught it as it fell down.
Thanks to the rain, the rungs were also slippery on top of everything else but with some colorful cursing and a few slips, he managed to make it almost to the top of the ladder when a familiar hand reached into his view in a silent offer to assist him the last few rungs. His pride battled with common sense for about a nano-second before he accepted the assistance and Shaak Ti helped pull him up the last two rungs and to his feet.
She was stronger than her slender build led one to believe and while he’d stop being surprised by that fact, there was still an almost primal part of his psyche that enjoyed and approved of that knowledge.
“You’re late, I was beginning to become worried.” It sounded more like a statement of fact than a chastisement which was the only reason he didn’t bristle at her words.
“Ran into some difficulties on the trail.”
“I sense you are in pain, what happened?” She wore the hood of her cloak pulled up over the tips of her montrals which helped shield her from the downpour somewhat as she led him to the structure that served as her primary living quarters. Originally, they had shared the small hut along with the rest of the foundlings as it had been the first structure they had built but they’d expanded since and Alpha had moved into his own quarters over a year ago.
He’d been surprised at the time how hard it had been to fall back asleep without the sounds of half a dozen other people breathing nearby. It’d been like he’d been a cadet all over again and once he’d gone back to sleeping alone all over again he’d been surprised at how much he missed those sounds.
A part of Alpha just wanted to retreat to his quarters to get cleaned up and to lick his wounds but bitter experience taught him it was easier to just follow Shaak’s lead and just go with it. She didn’t even argue as a normal person did, she’d just present all manner of logical arguments as to why he was being stubborn and countered him at every turn until he finally gave in and he was just too damned tired to argue today.
“Wrenched my shoulder, it’s nothing.”
“Hmm, allow me to be the judge of that?” She said all silky serenity which didn’t bode well for him. “Will you take off your armor so I can look at your shoulder? You can clean it while you tell me about your patrol.” Shaak Ti knew him too well was the problem and she knew he was detail oriented and anal-retentive enough to want to ensure he cleaned out the mud and muck from his gear before anything else.
Alpha felt a flash of something akin to irritation at that less than subtle handling but the truth of the matter was, his shoulder was bothering him something fierce and if she could do anything to fix it, what was the harm in that? With that slightly suspect logic, Alpha undid the mag-locks holding his cuiress in place and started to carefully remove pieces of his upper-body armor.
“I’m making a mess on your floor.” He pointed out with a grimace when he noticed he’d tracked muddy footsteps across the floor.
“It is a daily occurrence at this point, do not worry about it. We will clean it up later.” The Jedi shrugged it off and moved over to the chest where she kept a variety of items including a small medical kit. “Tell me about your patrol? How did you injure yourself? You don’t seem anxious so I’m assuming you didn’t come across anyone?”
“It was a dumb rookie move,” Alpha admitted unhappily and set the last pieces of his upper armor down in the neat pile he’d started near the corner of her room. After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled off his helmet as well and set it down on top of the neat pile. Unlike his own quarters, she’d made some effort to try and personalize her space. There were colorful pieces of fabric hung up along with some plants housed in the rough-hewn bright native pottery. “I was trying to gauge how close the river was to overflowing when the embankment collapsed beneath me. I caught myself but messed up my shoulder in the process.”
“Do you think it will overflow its banks soon?”
“If it continues to rain like this? Probably.”
“We should call everyone back then, I think it will be safe to suspend patrols for a few days until things calm down a little bit.”
Alpha immediately bristled at that suggestion and shot her an unamused look over his shoulder at her. Shaak just laughed quietly at the mulish look on his face.
“My friend, we will be crawling with rancors and all manner of other large predators trying to escape the deluge if the river overflows its banks. If there are any Imperial patrols out there, they will have a truly bad day. We are safe for now. And now is the time to heal and recover our strength.”
Alpha heard the lightness of her footsteps as she approached though he knew she only did that for his benefit. When Shaak Ti went on the hunt, you didn’t hear or see her coming. She was an apex predator from a species who were naturally gifted predators.
But she understood his own paranoid quirks and that was a kindness he appreciated about her.
“I am going to touch you now, okay?” That was another thing he appreciated about the Jedi, she respected his dislike of casual touch and didn’t touch him without his permission. He’d never been a particularly big fan of beingly overly tactile or familiar with others but the torture he’d faced at Ventress’s hands had scarred him in more ways than just the physical. It had taken him months before he’d been capable of not tensing whenever someone got within a foot of him.
The violent urge to lash out at any perceived threat was still overpowering at times. Unfortunately, the padawans Shaak Ti had snuck out of the Temple didn’t respect his boundaries nearly as much as she did. In those lean first months, he’d woken up with a child curled up against him almost nightly both for warmth and because they had seen him as a source of protection.
They’d never seen the clones who murdered their peers and their Masters unmasked, had only known the horror of their helmeted faces. It had been so traumatic to some that Alpha had gotten into the habit of taking off his helmet whenever he was at the camp despite its crippling effect it had on his situational awareness.
“That’s fine. Do you...do you need me to take off the body suit as well?” He asked voice going a little rough with uncertainty and something that almost felt like nervousness. Alpha wasn’t ashamed of his body or the scars that marred it but this was Shaak Ti.
She was beautiful and deadly and so far out of his reach the idea of being disrobed in front of her almost felt...perverse. Alpha wasn’t blind, he knew that somewhere along the way he’d become emotionally invested in Shaak Ti and the rest of their wayward charges and he knew he harbored emotions for the Jedi that were inappropriate for a lowly clone to harbor.
“If you are comfortable with that, it would certainly be easier, especially if we need to apply some bacta to the area.” Shaak Ti’s hand touched his uninjured shoulder lightly and she squeezed it companionably.
Alpha shot a look over his shoulder at her and the patiently encouraging look on her face was almost too much to bear in its own right. She must have seen something in his eyes or his expression because her smooth brow twitched beneath the ornamental headdress she always wore. He saw the way her pupils dilated much like a Nexu that had spotted something juicy and that involuntary hunter’s instinct wasn’t helping matters. “Are you alright, Alpha?” She asked, perhaps worried that she had pressed his boundaries too far.
“Yeah, just, give me a moment.” The thought of Shaak Ti’s slender fingers touching his bared flesh was like something out of his more racy, shameful fantasies. The Kaminii had tried to engineer the clones to be the peak of human militaristic efficiency but they were still red-blooded human men with desires and urges.
In a lot of ways, Alpha had always resembled Jango Fett and shared many of his antisocial traits including a surly distrust of almost every person in the universe so he’d never particularly hungered for human companionship like so many of the clones. Even friendship hadn’t particularly appealed to him and his fellow first-generation ARC’s had mostly felt the same way. It made them highly self-efficient but terrible cogs in a wheel which was why the Kaminoans had bred out a lot of their more lone-wolf tendencies in the newer generation templates. They’d been bred to be more docile than their ARC predecessors who shared too much of Jango Fett’s less than stellar personality traits.
But even Jango Fett, the biggest shabuir in the galaxy hadn’t been immune to craving human connection in the end. Boba’s existence proved that point.
Still, that didn’t make the feelings he was harboring for Shaak Ti any less inappropriate or uncomfortable.
With no small amount of reluctance, he unsealed the top portion of his blacks and started to tug it off. Pain flared through his shoulder and chest as he struggled to tug it over his head. Shaak TI intervened in the end and helped assist him when it became apparent his range of motion was compromised.
It was galling but he kept his frustration to himself. That first touch of her fingers against his bare skin had him flinching even though he knew it was coming. Shaak Ti had no doubt been expecting that reaction because she kept her hand there and smoothed her thumb against the crest of his shoulder soothingly much like one might try and soothe a startled animal.
“I’m going to take your shoulder and rotate it, let me know if anything hurts.” She grasped his arm with her free hand and positioned it at an angle as she tested his range of motion. Everything was going okay at first, as she maneuvered his arm inwards and to the side but when she started to lift it up and back he felt a flare of pain.
“There,” Alpha hissed and it took every ounce of his self-control to not flinch or try and yank his arm back away from the painful positioning.
“Very well, relax please?” Does it hurt when I do this?” She tucked his arm inwards and rolled his shoulder back without trying to lift it or angle it in any way.
“No.” The exam continued from there but he kept finding himself becoming distracted by the warmth of her hands on his skin. Her fingers were callused and warmer than his own natural body temperature. Clones tended to run a few degrees hotter than baseline humans but Togrutas apparently ran apparently hotter than even clones. Everything about the situation should have been unpleasant but he found himself being lulled into a dangerous sense of false security.
“I think you have injured the ligaments but I think some bacta and putting your arm in a sling for a day or so should fix it up in quick order.”
“Is the sling really necessary?”
“Do you have some hot date to get to?” She teased lightly and he could see her smile from the corner of his eye.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alpha growled, automatically bristling in the face of that teasing.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t tease you about that. I know how much you sacrifice to stay with us.” Something akin to guilt briefly flashed across the Jedi’s face and she stroked his shoulder in silent apology before reaching for the med-kit and the precious tube of bacta. It was hard to get resupplied and normally Alpha would protest he didn’t need it but the idea of being out of operational order for days or even weeks was more stressful than worrying about how they were going to trade for replenishments of their bacta supply.
Something in Shaak Ti’s words stood out to him but he didn’t understand why. Maybe it was the strange edge he heard in her voice but he found himself turning so he could pin the Jedi with a serious look.
“It’s not a sacrifice.”
She froze, momentarily surprised by his statement.
“It’s not a sacrifice, my place is here.” He was tempted to say it was his duty, that would have been the proper clone response but Alpha knew it was so much more than that now. Even if Shaak Ti had ordered him to leave, he wouldn’t have.
Her expression softened and those expressive violet eyes gleamed with more emotion than he’d expected to find.
“Oh, Alpha.” Shaak Ti telegraphed her movements with more than enough time for him to move away as she reached out to cup his scarred cheek tenderly and he stood there as meekly obedient as an eopie.
There was a part of him that demanded he pull away, to put some distance between them but it was drowned out by the larger part of him that craved that tender contact. Even knowing how inappropriate it was, even knowing there was no way in a million years she could return his feelings for her because she was a kriffing Jedi.
There was no happy or satisfying ending to this tale, it was doomed from the start.
And he needed to get that through his thick skull.
“I know it is selfish of me but I am glad you chose to remain here with us.” Shaak confessed softly as she stepped a little closer. He could smell her now and feel the warmth of her skin radiating into his own. There was a very visceral part of him that ached to close the distance between them, to pull her close but the sad fact of the matter was, he wouldn’t have the faintest clue what to do from there.
Sex or physical attraction had never been a driving factor for him. He knew plenty of brothers who sought out the company of any willing woman, man, or alien that struck their fancy but that had never interested him overly much.
There were whispers and rumors that the Prime had been very similar in that regard. He’d been content to walk his path alone without a lover or even friends to walk beside him. He’d been the epitome of a lone wolf right up until the point he’d decided he wanted a legacy. Boba Fett had been part of his price for donating his DNA to the creation of Alpha and the rest of his brothers.
If he’d been more well versed in the universe he might have had the proper term for himself and why he generally didn’t long for the same level of companionship or romance and sexual gratification so many of his brothers sought out. Until Shaak Ti, he’d barely even known or cared what his kad was for much less wanted for things he wasn’t allowed to want. For the most part, it was easy to ignore this thorny, uncomfortable wanting but today he found himself forgetting why he wasn’t supposed to crave these things.
But it was hard to remember that fact when the lovely and deadly Jedi stepped in and gently pressed their foreheads together in a mirshmure'cya and he found himself wondering if she understood the significance of that gesture. Or if she was simply copying what she’d seen the younger clones and cadets do.
“Shaak…” Her name felt foreign on his tongue and he knew his voice was gritty and rough as he formed the unfamiliar syllables of her name.
“I know, just...allow me this for a moment, please.” She said, equally quiet and shaky sounding as her eyes drifted closed.
Because apparently, he couldn’t deny her anything, he stood there still and barely willing to breathe as this strangely intimate moment dragged out. After a moment’s hesitation, he brought up one hand and dared rest it at her waist right above the swell of her hips.
Alpha marveled at how delicate the bow of her ribcage felt beneath his hand but he also knew that deceptive delicacy was belayed by a hidden strength that could decimate him if he overstepped his bounds. There was a gibbering voice of panic at the back of his head screaming at him for daring to presume even this much, for daring to touch her in such a way.
But Shaak Ti didn’t object to his presumptuousness, in point of fact she seemed to approve because the hand that had been resting so sweetly against his cheek moved to curl lightly about the nape of his neck.
Having someone else touch that vulnerable spot triggered a combination of confused alarm and something else that flared up within the clone. It felt nice even as it warred with his own innate sense of paranoia.
He sensed they were standing on the razored edge of a precipice, ready to tumble off into the void beyond but whether either of them worked up the nerve to take that final step was the question.
In this regard, his own inexperience counted against him and he found that realization somewhat vexing. Alpha wasn’t used to feeling out of his element. He was confident in nearly everything he attempted or did but in this, he was finding himself in over his head in waters much deeper than he was prepared to tread in.
“Shaak…” He started again and this close, he could feel the head to toe shiver that ran through her slender frame. Alpha’s fingers tightened briefly in an abortive squeeze against her hip.
“I know…just…” She whispered back and there was an almost silent plea in her voice. One he found himself responding to without even consciously understanding what she was asking for. In the end, instinct outweighed lack of experience, and those last few fateful inches that existed between them melted away.
He wasn’t sure who actually initiated the kiss, it just seemed to happen as organically and almost inexorably as his next breath or the rise and fall of the sun. He’d never kissed anyone, had never really felt the urge to kiss anyone except for her, which he didn’t know what that said about how he was wired.
A clone shouldn’t want to kiss their Jedi yet here he was breaking every rule in the book.
It didn’t help that breaking those rules felt damned good either. Alpha knew his lips were chapped and rough but in contrast, Shaak Ti’s were surprisingly soft and even plush. And unlike him, she seemed to have some experience in such matters because she adjusted the angle somewhat and made everything so much better as she fit her mouth to his more firmly and gently coaxed him into deepening it further. The first hint of her sharp canines gently biting down on his lower lip should have been terrifying but the confused sensation it elicited in him had a quiet groan escaping him.
Her fingers tightened around the nape of his neck in response and he felt her nails dig in lightly in an unmistakably kneading gesture. Emboldened now, his hand skated up her side until his fingers skimmed the soft curve of her breast. Shaak Ti made an approving noise when he stroked his thumb along the sensitive underside experimentally.
It was his first time touching a woman’s breasts and the experience was wild. Alpha had spent most of his life surrounded by hundreds and thousands of his homogenous shaped brothers and his experience with female humans had been limited to the scant handful of them amongst their trainers.
But they, like the rest of their trainers, were god-like figures to be feared and respected. None were soft or approachable like Shaak Ti and he certainly never would have considered touching one of them in this way much less wanted to. He didn’t understand why she alone sparked this sort of confused need inside of him.
He discovered by accident that her lekku were apparently just as much of an erogenous zone as her breasts when he gripped it in an attempt to nudge it out of the way of his explorations only for Shaak to bite back a groan.
For a confused moment, he wondered if he’d hurt her because she broke to kiss to drag in a shuddery sounding breath.
“Shaak?” Alpha felt the need to check-in. His voice sounded rough even to his own ears and she nodded weakly before resting her forehead against his once again.
“It’s okay, they are just...sensitive.”
“Oh.” He should have thought of that. It was well known a twi’lek’s lekku were sensitive so it only stood to reason their distant cousins might be the same way. His brain was conjuring up multiple scenarios on how such a thing could be exploited. Both in the bedroom but also if he ever found himself facing off against a pissed off Togruta on the battlefield.
“Are you okay? Is this okay?” Trust Shaak Ti to see to the very heart of the situation and shine a light on it. Was he okay? Was this okay?
Alpha had to take a second to examine his own feelings, something he was pretty terrible at on the best of days. The guilty warning bells going off in his head saying he wasn’t supposed to be doing this were still there but much quieter now. Mainly because found he wanted this, was enjoying kissing her and the possibilities presented before them if they stepped down this particular path.
“Yeah, you?” He was a man of few words by nature but Alpha was finding it especially hard to string together a coherent sentence right now. Especially when she smiled at him in that slow, private way that had all semblance of coherence scattering from his brain.
“Yes but I think perhaps we should relocate to a more comfortable location.” It took him an embarrassingly long three seconds to catch her meaning and once he did, the enormity of what she was suggesting sank in.
“Shaak...I’ve never...I don’t...” For some ridiculous reason, he felt almost ashamed confessing his lack of experience. Maybe it was his own innate need to strive for perfection or just his own ego refusing to admit he might fail her in that regard but he found it harder than trying to choke down a mouthful of broken glass to get the words out. He was terrified she might get that soft, empathetic look of pity on her face she’d sometimes worn when dealing with the clones on Kamino when it became clear just how lacking their education had been in so many things. She'd directed that very same look at him more than once over the years and it galled him every time, his own ignorance shamed him and it would probably shatter his ego if she looked at him like that right now.
It wasn’t pity that he saw on her face but something akin to understanding and one hand rose to cup his cheek tenderly once again. “We will go at your pace, Alpha. Whatever you are comfortable with, I would never ask you for more than that.”
He was surprised to find just how much he believed those words.
Alpha was a clone who didn’t trust or believe anything easily but he trusted those words with almost unquestioning ease because that had always been a fundamental tenant in their relationship. Shaak Ti never asked more of him than he’d ever been willing to give and apparently that would hold true even as they took this giant step out of their comfort zones and into the unknown beyond.
He found himself reduced once more to feeling like a wide-eyed, meek eopie but he allowed himself to be drawn in the direction of the bed and willingly sank down onto it as Shaak Ti stretched out beside him. He leaned into the renewed kiss eagerly and things spiraled out of control from there.
All in all? It definitely wasn’t the worst way to spend a rainy afternoon indoors he discovered.
Hours later though, he woke up in darkness to the renewed sound of thunder and the storm raging mightily. The great boughs the hut was built into almost seemed to shiver beneath its fierceness and Alpha attributed his wakefulness to that. The peals of thunder that kept rolling overhead almost sounded like artillery but after a confused, bleary moment he realized something was amiss.
He could feel the warmth of Shaak Ti’s body plastered against his back with her arm still draped over him in sleep just like she’d been when they’d gone to bed but he realized there was not one, but two other bodies pressing up against shoulder and chest respectively.
The fact his arm was now screaming at him in pain was probably in part because what he could only assume was a Padawan-shaped child had climbed into the bed with them and was currently pressed right up against it as they lay on his arm.
Alpha found himself at a total loss as to what to do in this situation. He was belatedly relieved that he and Shaak Ti had partially re-dressed now after their...bedroom explorations because that would have made an already awkward situation even worse but he found himself without any frame of reference as to what to do.
And he had no idea if this was a common occurrence or if Jedi children were just as terrified of storms as clone cadets could be. He assumed they were because, in the end, they were just children. He’d known plenty of his fellow vode who’d ended up sneaking into each other’s sleeping tubes in the middle of the night because they’d been scared by a particularly nasty storm.
The Kaminoans had disapproved of such things and it was a known secret that you had to be back in your tube by the morning lest you get caught and suitably punished or worse amongst his class of cadets and he’d always assumed it had been the same for the following classes. But Jedi children weren’t treated the same way as clone cadets he’d figured out over the years. They weren’t shouted at or physically reprimanded as clones were so for all he knew, this was perfectly acceptable behavior on their part to seek out a trusted adult for a source of comfort and reassurance.
“I can sense your disturbance, what is wrong, Alpha?” Shaak Ti’s voice was a bare whisper in the darkness.
“The child…” Alpha struggled to explain because where did he even begin? He felt a soft breath against the nape of his neck that might have been laughter and the weight that had been resting against his arm suddenly lifted away along with her hand which briefly lifted from where it lay against his stomach.
He had the sneaking suspicion she’d used the Force to move the sleeping pawadan and his suspension was confirmed when he heard the rustle of covers indicating she’d set the child down behind her on the bed.
“They are scared of the storm, they mean no harm. Go back to sleep.”
“But Shaak--” He was about to protest there was still the second padawan now curling more closely to his chest in search of warmth now that their companion’s warmth had been moved away. Alpha didn’t think they were awake because their breaths were still slow and deep indicating they were sleeping.
“Good night, Alpha.” Her amusement was plain to be heard in her voice and with one last press of lips against his neck, he felt her snuggle closer and her arm curl back around him leaving him well and truly trapped between her and the padawan.
He lay there in the darkness with the storm still raging on overhead and wondered just how he’d ended up in this situation. It was clear from Shaak Ti’s nonchalant response that this was accepted and maybe even expected behavior out of the padawans. Alpha even understood why they’d sought her out and in doing so, found him there instead. He fatalistically wondered if tomorrow morning he’d be fielding too-curious questions from the children wondering if he’d gotten scared as well and sought her out for comfort.
That eventuality was terrifying on multiple levels and one he prayed didn’t come to pass.
He was struggling with uncertainty about what he was supposed to do with his arm now. The pain had gone away along with the pressure of the child who had been laying on top of it but he didn’t know where to put it. It hurt to try and reach back or rest it on top of Shaak’s which had been why he’d had it laying out flat away from his body originally where there was no outwards torque on the strained rotator cuff.
Alpha finally settled for resting his hand on the mattress next to the padawan with his arm draped over the child. After a few moments, the child sighed quietly in their sleep and somehow snuggled even closer to him much to his baffled bemusement. He was still trying to figure out just what about him could possibly put a traumatized Jedi padawan enough at ease that they felt comfortable falling asleep near him when he ended up drifting off back to sleep himself, lulled by the unfamiliar warmth of two bodies flanking him.
The worst part of it was, despite the bum arm, it was some of the best sleep he’d had since they came to this miserable, rain-drenched swamp of a planet.