Chapter Text
Ahsoka sat curled up on a chair, reading to eat away the downtime she had as their star destroyer transited hyperspace.
The doors slid apart with a hiss.
“Hey Rex.” She greeted him lazily, not looking up from the page as he walked in.
He stopped abruptly, whatever he was going to say dying on his lips the moment he saw the much too steamy cover of the book she was holding. Rex made a face, stepped forward, and snatched it from her.
“Hey!” She swiped with her hand, trying to grab it back.
“Ahsoka, what is this…you’re 15 for kriff’s sake!”
He held it up in the air behind him where she couldn’t reach. If she wanted to, she could use the Force, but Rex knew she wouldn’t.
“And you’re- what? Twelve?” She got up and jumped for the book.
Rex made a dismissive sound, forcing air out his nostrils. He held it higher.
“Give it back Rex. I still outrank you!”
“Experience outranks everything, Commander Tano.” Rex smiled, a little mischievously. “And in my experience, this kind of stuff isn’t–”
“Oh you know, that’s the title of the first chapter.” She crossed her arms, smirking a bit as Rex’s face transformed in an instant.
“What? No, come on.”
She raised both white lines of her eyebrow markings and nodded her chin up, looking at the book.
Rex brought it down, opened to the first chapter, then shut it closed immediately and stared at the cover while Ahsoka’s face broadened into a grin.
“Who–” he demanded. His voice choked off when he saw the author’s name.
Rex shot a look at Ahsoka, who still looked a little pleased with her captain’s distress.
“I need to- excuse me.” He punched in a sequence on his wrist com and powerwalked out the room.
The mechanical doors closed, and Ahsoka heard his voice barrel down the passageway a few moments later.
“Wooolllffe!”
*
Rex sat on his bunk, back against the wall as he flipped through the pages in the semi-dark of the shipboard sleep cycle. He took a sip of water and snorted when he got to a particular paragraph.
“Hah- he wishes.”
He turned the page. This short story, if it could even be called a ‘story’ with the minimal amount of plot it contained, featured a red Togrutan Jedi and was set on- Kamino?
Rex slammed the book shut with a sharp intake of breath.
No. Absolutely not.
He tossed the book into the waste can, then stretched out over his bunk to get some sleep.
*
“Inspection time, boys.”
Rex walked over to the first locker and quickly went through it, datapad in hand.
“O-kay…looks good…” He made a small note on the screen and checked something off.
He opened the next locker, gaze immediately settling on an entire box of blaster polishing cloths packed onto a shelf in the least space-efficient configuration possible.
One of the men shifted behind him, boots scuffing the floor.
Rex narrowed his eyes. As he pulled the box out, something behind it slipped and dropped to the floor with a soft thwop. He looked down.
It was the book. Someone, or more likely a few people, had made creative alterations to the ‘interesting’ cover, but it was unmistakably that same book.
He shoved the box of cloths back into the locker and bent down to snatch up the book from the floor, expression shifting between anger and disbelief.
He spun around, thrusting the thing into the air beside his head as he rounded on an ARC now trying very hard to maintain military bearing.
“Where the kriff did you get this, Fives!?”