Chapter Two:
Fix
(Sapiosexuality)
Warnings/Tags: Sapiosexuality (Attraction to intelligence), Size Kink, Double Agents doing Double Agent things, Thrawn gets hot under the collar for big brain, Hints of Daddy Kink but really a Sir Kink, A/B/O elements but not really a full A/B/O fic.
Grand Admiral Thrawn
Part One of Three
Thrawn's P.O.V
The new Imperial Cadet did not appear much at first glance. Standing at only five-foot-one, it was simply the jolt of her profuse human colouring that first drew Mitth'raw'nuruodo's gaze down the line-up of analogous cadets to her at the end of the auditorium.
In a troupe of ashen-faced, jumpy, grey sallow uniformed faces, the shock of her red hair, pink skin, and unnaturally bright green eye was almost blinding.
She was smiling too.
Dimpled, cheerful, she smiled in a sea of shuffling uneasy feet.
A week.
That was all Grand Admiral Thrawn had given Cadet Hemlock Potter on that first look. One week.
The jovial ones always burned themselves out too hard, too fast, and too carelessly. A quip could not save you from a phaser bolt, as a smile could not stop a Hyperdrive malfunction, as eyes, no matter how brilliant in hue, could not blink away an advancing fleet blockading a planet you needed to strip mine for resources.
The Imperial Academy was no place for people like her, and yet every year they applied thinking glory was in their short-sighted reach. It would chew her up as it had the innumerable others, and spit her out by the weeks end, back into the murky streets of Coruscant or whatever dark avenues she had come skulking in from.
One Week.
Thrawn, after attending the welcoming ceremony which coincided with his debriefing back at central command, left not three days later on board the Chimaera, and sooner still forgot all about the colourful woman grinning in the bleak crowd.
He had rebels to quell on Lothal, an insurgency to stamp out, and an Empire to consolidate. That left little time for meandering thoughts. Then, two months after that first glimpse, he received a holo-comm in his private quarters from the Academy board. Cadet Potter had been promoted, and stationed upon his vessel, the Chimaera, of which she would board when they docked at Lothal.
Brigadier General…
In two months, the woman had gone from modest Academy Cadet to Brigadier General…
How?
From the documents sent with her recommendation she appeared to be more a common street scrapper than an efficient commander, light on her feet as she was quick with her punches. By the Makers, she had been officially reprimanded on record her second day in the Academy for a bar brawl, and she was only, by the reports, twenty-one, the youngest to ever be awarded the title of Brigadier General in the Empire, and-
And then Thrawn saw her aptitude tests.
Cadet Potter was nothing less than a prodigy. While her Linguistic, Natural and Intrapersonal intelligence needed sharpening, they still proved to be… Malleably high enough to become quite keen under the correct sort of tutelage, and her Logical-mathematical, Spatial, and Interpersonal aptitude was off the charts. Literally, in some of her assessments. She had broken the computing system for her Three-dimensional-Navigation examination.
Cadet Potter was born with a piloting helm in hand, the examiner had written.
Thrawn had been Commander of the Chimaera for little less than a decade, and he had never seen such results before. Neither had he seen a score sufficient in the Chiss Ascendancy to match Cadet Potter's marks.
Apart from his own, of course.
It was all very… Unexpected, yes. Unanticipated in a way Thrawn was not used to foreseeing. His predictions were typically intricately crafted multitudes of carefully fashioned indications interlocked into a greater whole that was commonly precise.
A dagger.
That was Thrawn's mind. A razor-sharp dagger meant for slicing arteries and not blindly stabbing until the victim stopped breathing.
In short, he was very, very rarely proven wrong on first glance, as he had never missed a man's artery with his knife before.
Cadet Potter had done just that, proved him wrong in all the ways Thrawn believed he couldn't be proved wrong in.
Whether she, or anyone else, knew of that fact remained irrelevant.
Thrawn knew it, and Thrawn, sitting in his private chambers, could not for the might of the Ascendancy figure out exactly how she had done it.
Her Cadet uniform had been wrinkled. She had not tried to take the time to phaser-press her attire for the opening ceremony. If so, such lack of time-management skills should mean that her studying would be highly erratic and brief-
At 3 standard hours into the early twilight of a new galactic day, Grand Admiral Thrawn signed off on her transfer to his vessel, sending another holo-comm to his Security officer to prepare a transit pod for her arrival on board three days hence.
He needed to know how she had done it.
Thrawn's P.O.V
Thrawn stood on the Command deck of the Chimaera, before the holographic star charts, mind turning as he mentally plotted the Rebel cell's movements across the cluster, hot on their trail from where he had rooted them out of Lothal.
Holding his hand out silently, he waited for the holo-pad to be placed within his palm. Officer Tusban did not hand it over, as he naturally did when Thrawn did the age-old movement.
Cadet Potter-
Brigadier General Potter, nevertheless, turned from her own station at the helm console and held the holo-pad out.
It did not matter.
Thrawn took it.
Thrawn glanced down.
Thrawn scowled.
"And what is this, General?"
General Potter had been aboard his vessel for the entirety of two days.
Forty-eight standard hours.
Apart from the perfunctory greeting as she boarded, a clipped welcome before he was forced to retreat back to the strategic console, so close to rooting out the Lothal insurgents, Thrawn had not seen much of their new addition. Despite being a Brigadier General, her first months on active fleet duty would be under Lieutenant Lomar as her supervisor, and the two, him and her, had very little reasons to cross paths.
He had felt her presence though, in more ways than one.
Mostly unpleasant ways.
A trip to the Hyperdrive had unearthed her impact in moving the Hexophilenine cells from their customary place in the drive slot were, now, dismantled into pieces and reassembled in tubing and wires, crammed hastily on top of the compressor coil, and Thrawn had very nearly sent the order for her to be thrown out the nearest air lock.
If he lost track of those Rebels now because some upstart human had the notion of a thought for once in their sorrowful lives-
Tampering with an Imperial vessels Hyperdrive was a court martial offence and-
And the engines had begun to run at thirty-three percent faster levels.
One hasty fix with a welding bolter, and the Chimaera, according to his Navigations officer, was now the fastest in the fleet by a large margin.
By the end of the two days, she had edited the security code of the main computer, adding a complex defence layer to encrypted archives, moderated the lag on their phaser systems so the Chimaera now shot seven times quicker without the cool down period of the feroxide modulators, condensed the enciphering cryptograms of holo-communications so their messages reached twice the distance without interference, and, according to Lieutenant Lomar, had found the time between this madness to implant herself in the chiefs lobby, cooking up a pastry dish she had called Treacle tarts.
Of which most of the crew quickly became aficionados of.
Thrawn had always been two steps behind her, only arriving on scene when she had already concocted her plan, executed it, and had long since left. Only her scent had lingered in her wake, almost overpowering to his Chiss senses, mulled like sweet fruits, spice, like Catabar peppers, and something sleek and cold that somehow reminded Thrawn of the sweeping glaciers back on Csilla.
Home.
Her scent reminded the exiled Chiss of his home.
Nevertheless, glancing down to the holo-pad within his hold, those things had been easy to overlook, easy to excuse. Intelligence needed creative outlet, careful pruning and room to grow. He was willing to give the new General a fair amount of... Leeway, if it meant the Chimaera would inherit a extraordinary asset in the process.
This, however, was something else.
Across his own personal pad containing his observations on the Rebel war efforts, notes that had taken him months to construct, was red-lettered scrawling's.
How she had somehow programmed the holo-pad to show up red at all was a wonder all on its own.
Across his charts, his graphs, his diagrams, everywhere.
The girl in question shot a cavalier glance over her shoulder, gaze falling to the pad in his hand, the pad straining under his tight, strong grip, and she-
Of course, she smiled.
"Oh, that. I fixed it."
Thrawn blinked, a cool wash of-
Surprise? Shock? Something cold and prickly trickling down his spine, lapping at the bottom.
"Fixed it?"
Carelessly, she turned back to her own control panel, typing away at whatever extravagant show she was up to now, shrugging.
"Yes. One generally uses the word fix for things that are broken or wrong made right or whole."
There was silence in the small strategy boardroom, Lomar, Pyrondi, and Yve momentarily stopping their own tasks to cautiously glance between the Admiral and the General.
"And, General, if you would enlighten me on how my effort was broken or wrong?"
She kept her back to him, shoulders lax, hips loose on her stall.
If she had been a Chiss, the clear dismissal would have been an outright challenge.
"If you had checked the Holo-net you would know that an hour ago that Rebel cell we're tracking hit a docking station in the outer-rim by the alert posted. Seven starfighters were reported missing, along with one scout ship. Your files were still working under the assumption the cell was piloting transport shuttles, meaning your calculations for speed and trajectory was off. You also forgot to account for the lead pilot too. A Twi-lek called Vernuc. He used to do speed-racer circuits on Tatooine that got him in trouble on Barlon, where he was arrested and spent three years in jail. He's more a nip in-nip out sort of guy. He won't pilot the cell into full frontal battle. If you corner them as you were planning, Vernuc would simply flee to the nearest cluster port and jump away. We need to come in at their side, not their front or back. Pincer them between the gravitation wells of the two pulsar stars that the cluster has within its system. It will slow them down fast enough to catch up and capture."
Thrawn glanced down to the pad, flicked his thumb, and watched the writing flicker by.
The red markings spanned the breadth of the entire file, elaborate, multifaceted, and the math was… Sound.
Perfect.
That cool wash of prickly tension rinsed to burning fire that ignited in the dark depths of his belly. A torrid, incinerating kind of fire that sank low and burned high, down to his loins and up to his throat.
Want.
Aching, burning want, Thrawn belatedly realised.
"And you did all this is the last standard hour?"
A scoff was his answer.
"No, I did that in fifteen minutes. I've been doing this for the last hour."
Thrawn lowered the holo-pad, though his grasp on it did not diminish.
"And this would be?"
More.
He wanted more.
Everything, from modulators to Hyperdrives to Cyphers and red-chicken scrawlings, Thrawn suddenly wanted it all.
General Potter, however, seemed rather put out by his question, spinning in her seat finally to meet him head on, scowling herself, huffing.
"I'm trying to make a gravity-well bomb, if I didn't keep getting interrupted. Now can I get back to actual work, Sir?"
Thrawn-
Thrawn groaned.
A rumble, archaic, primal, the sort of moan that the old Chiss of their histories used to make before entering Ruts or Heats before the age of suppressants and mental discipline.
It shocked him. Astounds, truly, and it lasts longer than proper, and is deafeningly loud in the small chamber for the higher ups of the Chimaera.
It was that word, he thought. Sir, pressed so tightly together, bitten almost between the white teeth, softened only by the lips and a whisp of air.
It's the rest too, Thrawn acknowledges. Gravity-well bombs were far outside the reach of the Empire currently, and it had taken the Chiss Ascendancy three generations to perfect their own, and…
And, Thrawn predicted, General Potter would have one in her dainty, tiny hands by the weeks end.
What else could those hands make?
What theories could they create?
What impossibilities could they stroke-
Fortunately, it was taken as an aggravated growl by the three other witnesses.
Lieutenant Lomar straightened at his desk.
"Tone, General. Aboard this ship you will give proper respect to your commanding officers. Do I make myself clear? Now your dismissed until evening shift, where you will come to my office and spend the period cleaning out the repository ports."
General Potter flustered, Thrawn's Chiss infrared gaze perceiving the heady blush coiling up her exposed neck, blooming on the apples of her cheeks in brilliant colour.
How far down did it go?
"But I'm nearly finished and-"
Lieutenant Lomar bit back.
"Dismissed."
A moment, and then the General was logging off her system and marching for the door, stalling momentarily only to nod stiffly in Thrawn's mute direction.
"Sir."
The murmur of the mechanical door opening and shutting concealed Thrawn's own hiss to the human ears around him, and he, himself, missed the sound of metal and glass cracking.
"Admiral? Are you feeling alright?"
Lomar, again, spoke, and Thrawn's gaze snapped to him, locking, scrabbling to assemble what little shreds of coherent thought he had left.
Burning.
He felt as if he were burning still.
"Impertinence has little consequence to me, Lieutenant, as long as it does not interfere with duty."
Lomar, almost pointedly, skimmed down to Thrawn's hand, and his gaze followed suit.
The pad was broken in his hands.
He was bleeding blue on the black screen.
Thrawn unfurled his fingers, warmth flooding back into the numb digits, and gently placed the pad down on the table before him with a bloody and cut hand.
"I forget my own strength sometimes. Excuse me."
Yve spoke up for the first time that meeting.
"Do you wish for me to retrieve another-"
"No."
Thrawn cuts in, red eye darkening.
"But Lomar can send General Potter to my office this evening rather than dispatching her to clean the storage deck. I will speak with her about… Etiquette."
Woo or Boo?
A.N: I hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and are looking forward to what's coming. If you would like to feed this poor hungry trash goblin, don't forget to drop a review! All prompts are welcome, no matter how short or long.
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