Chapter Text
“Don’t forget to monitor the hyperdrive,” Hera said. “It’s been overheating recently, even though Chopper claims he fixed it.”
“Got it,” Zeb said, nodding. “Hyperdrive.”
“Oh, and you’ll want to make sure you flush the exhaust vents every once in awhile. Otherwise, the filters get clogged, and it’s a total mess to clean.”
“Will do. Every hour.”
“That should be everything. But you can always call me if something looks off. Don’t worry about waking me up or anything.”
“It won’t come to that,” Kallus said. “We’ll take good care of your ship.”
Hera nodded solemnly as she wished them both goodnight, and the cockpit doors slid shut behind her.
Zeb turned to Kallus and smiled. The fuel tanks were full, the hyperdrive coordinates were calculated, and the rest of the crew was fast asleep in their bunks. After several weeks off-base, they were finally headed home, and Zeb and Kallus finally had a moment to themselves.
“You know why they call this a cockpit?” Zeb whispered into Kallus’s ear.
“I haven’t the faintest clue.” Kallus leaned back, stretching his legs apart as Zeb’s hand slid from the hyperdrive lever to his thigh and then teased a finger along the waistband of his pants, tugging gently at a belt loop. “But you seem to know.”
“I have an idea or—”
“One more thing,” Hera said, bursting back through the doors and jolting the two apart. She stood obliviously between them, her fingers dancing over the control panel. “The fuel gauge. It’s been acting up lately, so don’t trust it.”
“Are you saying we’re going to run out of fuel?” Zeb said.
“No, no. Definitely not. I checked the levels before we took off; we’ll make it back to base safely. But I thought you should know in case the instrument readouts looked strange.”
“That’s very helpful,” Kallus said, crossing his legs awkwardly. “We’ll make a note of anything unusual.”
“Thank you both so much,” Hera said, placing a hand on Zeb’s shoulder and squeezing it tightly. She looked exhausted. It had been a grueling mission for all of them, but Hera especially; ever since picking up their cargo, they’d been relentlessly pursued by a rogue bounty hunter, and after nearly two full rotations of near-constant manual flying, they’d finally shaken their pursuer, but Hera paid the price. She hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time since they’d become airborne.
“Get some rest, Hera,” Zeb said, gesturing to the door. “You’ve earned it.”
She nodded, and before the doors had even fully shut behind her, Kallus was in Zeb’s lap, each of them hungrily reaching for the other. Kallus wanted to kiss Zeb everywhere at once, but he also wanted the same from Zeb, and no matter how tightly he ran his fingers through Zeb’s fur or pressed himself against Zeb’s muscular torso, they weren’t nearly close enough. Too many layers of fabric separated them; Zeb’s hands tugged open Kallus’s belt and unbuttoned his pants, while Kallus slid his hands under Zeb’s shirt, both of them fumbling awkwardly in the constraints of the captain’s chair. Nearly falling over, Kallus finally stood up to yank his pants all the way off, tossing them over the hyperdrive lever as Zeb undid his own buckle. Breathing hard, Kallus stopped and stared.
“What?” Zeb said. “Is something wrong?”
“No, you just look really hot in that chair without your pants on.”
“You like what you see?”
“I’ve thought about it so many times.”
“Then get over here,” Zeb said, pulling Kallus into his lap. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
“Yes, captain,” Kallus said, groaning softly as he relaxed down onto Zeb. He wrapped his arms around Zeb’s neck as they began to rock, gently at first, kissing each other sweetly, and then more urgently as the rhythm increased. Zeb clamped a large, purple hand over Kallus’s mouth, muffling him as he began to moan more loudly, but he didn’t stop, lifting Kallus by the hips, pushing him against the control panel, and fucking him harder now.
Kallus let go of Zeb and leaned his head back, an uninterrupted stream of fuck fuck fuck fuck flowing from his mouth, and his hand blindly searched for an edge to brace himself against. He knew Zeb was close, and he flailed his hand wildly, grabbing at last onto something solid. He felt the lever shift, and suddenly the cockpit dropped into darkness before the emergency lighting came on, throwing an eerie red glow over everything, and the distress beacon began to wail.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Zeb said, frantically slamming the lever again and trying to deactivate the signal. “Karabast, karabast, karabast.”
“Try that one over there,” Kallus said, sliding off of Zeb as he pressed another button. A code input appeared on the screen of the navicomputer.
“It’s no good,” Zeb said. “I don’t know the code to deactivate it. Only Hera and Kanan have that.”
“Fuck.”
They both dove for their clothes, with Zeb having the advantage of having never gotten fully undressed in the first place, but Kallus was less fortunate. He barely managed to yank his pants back on—forget underwear, no time—before Hera came running into the cockpit, her eyes wild and frantic but not yet awake.
“What’s going on?” she said, her voice thick with sleep. “What happened?”
“Um, false alarm,” Zeb said, stepping to his left and covering Kallus’s abandoned underwear with his foot. “Pressed the wrong button, you know.”
“My hand slipped,” Kallus said, painfully aware of his unzipped pants. “Not used to these controls yet.”
“What button were you trying to press?” she asked as Kanan, Rex, and Sabine emerged from their cabins, pajama-clad and confused, blinking themselves awake in the low strobing light.
“What’s wrong?” Sabine asked. “Are we under attack?”
“No, there’s no attack,” Zeb said, waving his hands frantically. “False alarm. Back to sleep, everyone.”
The long-range transmitter crackled to life, displaying an incoming message from the air traffic control tower back on Yavin IV.
“Ghost, do you copy? This is Base-1, receiving your distress beacon. Do you copy? Over.”
Zeb lunged for the receiver, but Hera beat him to it.
“We copy, Base-1. We’re alright. False alarm, apparently. Over,” she said.
“Copy that, Ghost.”
The transmission ended, and Hera folded her arms. “You two, stay here,” she said, gesturing to Zeb and Kallus. “The rest of you, back to bed.” Sabine, Kanan, and Rex began to shuffle out when Ezra finally appeared, looking disoriented.
“What’d I miss?” he said, looking around the cockpit. “What’s wrong?”
“Just these two,” Sabine said. “Who apparently don’t know the difference between a distress beacon and—you still haven’t answered. What exactly were you trying to do?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hera said, herding them out into the hallway. “Go back to bed.”
The others trudged off down the hallway, and as soon as the three of them were alone again, Hera turned and glared. Hera was a master at that, simple but firm in her discipline, and Zeb and Kallus bashfully stared at the ground.
“Really?” she said, hands on her hips. “You couldn’t wait two more hours?”
In recent memory, Kallus had found himself in all kinds of situations that warranted lying to his superiors: to Colonel Yularen, Governor Pryce, Grand Admiral Thrawn. These had been matters—quite literally—of life and death; had his deceit been exposed, he risked execution, but he had always managed to maintain a cool detachment to his work, focusing not on his anxieties but on the mission at hand. The Empire was efficient that way; he hated it for its grueling disregard for human emotion, the way its machine bulldozed any feeling aside and filtered everything instead through one question: does this action maintain the established order, or does it not?
But the Rebellion? Things were different. He still didn’t fully understand how the crew made decisions or what factors they weighed before choosing a course of action. There was no real way to quantify emotion, and right now, his emotions were a jumbled mess, leading him in circles, and he saw no clear way out of the thicket. The front of his pants felt uncomfortably tight—still!—and he missed Zeb. Yes, they were standing right next to each other, but that’s not what he meant. He didn’t have an answer to Hera’s question: yes, he could have waited, but also no, he couldn’t have. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to explain it to Hera, but he couldn’t even explain it to himself.
“Sorry, Hera,” Zeb said. “We’ll be more careful next time.”
“Garazeb Orrelios, there had better not be a next time, so help me—”
“That’s not fair,” Zeb protested. “What about that time I walked in on you and Kanan in—”
“My ship, my rules.”
Zeb, more comfortable with breaking rules than Kallus, grumbled, but Hera ignored him.
“And as I recall, we didn’t wake up the entire ship or activate the distress beacon. You can do whatever you want when we get back to base, but until then—”
“Okay, okay. C’mon, Sacha, let’s go.”
“Not so fast,” Hera said, stepping in between them and the door. “I want every inch of this cockpit scrubbed clean by the time we land, or you can explain exactly what happened to the rest of the crew and why you woke them up in the middle of the night.”
They knew Hera wasn’t joking, and Kallus and Zeb scrubbed for their lives, attending to every knob, dial, gauge, and lever on the control panel. When the Ghost landed back on Yavin IV, they both collapsed into bed, too tired to even shower.
“Soon,” Zeb whispered. “We’ll do it soon,” but Kallus was already fast asleep.