Inspired by this imagineyuorotp prompt: "Imagine Person A of your OTP walking downstairs at 4AM to find Person B making chocolate pudding because they've lost control of their life."
Vette woke to the sound of clanking. Rubbing her eyes, she followed it down the cramped hallway, coming to a stop in the doorway of the small galley.
She rubbed her eyes again and blinked. Standing at the counter, with a bowl of something unidentifiable in one hand and a large spoon in the other, was Pierce.
"What is that?" she asked. The bowl was full of brown glop. It smelled okay, but it looked like he'd scooped it out of a sewer.
To her surprise, he didn't startle at the sound of her voice. Must be all that military discipline, or whatever. "Pudding."
She eyed it dubiously. "If you say so."
Pierce stirred the concoction and didn't reply. Vette looked away. That circular motion was hypnotic. "Isn't it kind of late?"
He gazed into the depths of the pudding as though it were a particularly disgusting sort of scrying bowl. "What am I doing?" he asked.
"Looks like you're trying to kill a bowl full of mud."
"Smart people avoid the Sith. Not me. I asked to stay on." He stirred harder. A glob of pudding splattered against the wall.
Vette ignored it. "You did?"
He grunted. "I joined black ops 'cause I didn't want to be bossed. Now I'm under a Sith's thumb. By choice."
"Isn't everybody under the Sith's thumbs? At least we got a decent one," she pointed out.
He didn't respond. That was a good sign, Vette told herself.
She pressed on. "We don't have it so bad. What's the worst that could happen?" she asked. "Well, she could go crazy from the Dark Side and kill us all. But besides that."
"Lots of opportunity," Pierce said thoughtfully. The stirring slowed. "Be coming in right at the top."
"Leader of the strongest army the Empire's ever seen. You said it yourself."
He gave her a sharp look. "You heard that?"
Oops. Vette gave herself a mental smack in the forehead. What good was stealth if she couldn't keep her mouth shut? "I hear everything."
"What did you do, crawl through the ducts?"
The sooner they got off that subject, the better. "I'll be staying, too. Could be fun." She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. Thinking about the future wasn't something she did often - she was too busy jumping from place to place, from surrogate family to surrogate family - but she'd been lying awake nights wondering where she wanted to go after her time on this ship was up. She hadn't realized the answer was nowhere until she'd heard it come out of her own mouth.
"Yeah?" he said, turning to face her.
"Yeah." She paused. "I was just hanging on until something better came along. But I think...this is something better. I like it here."
"I do, too." He took the spoon out of the bowl and popped it in his mouth, then spit it out with a strangled ghkk.
Vette patted him sympathetically. "Come on," she said. "Let's go rearrange Captain Cranky's office. He hates that."
He slung a meaty arm over her shoulders and they headed down the hall, turning off the lights behind them. The pudding lay abandoned.