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Mid Captain Ufsa’mak’ro was many things.
He was an officer of the Expansionary Defense Fleet– hardworking, dedicated, loyal while maintaining his integrity. He was a citizen of the Chiss and a cousin of the Ufsa – a Zroth before that – and he did everything in his power to protect that status, to bring honor to his family back home. He was a son and a brother; he was an uncle and a friend; he was smart and capable, and he never quit.
He was not a morning person.
He’d been conditioned to get up early, sure– everyone who joined the CEDF either got with the early-bird program or got out quickly. Most expeditions into the Chaos relied on a strict adherence to an oh-five-hundred to two-zero-hundred schedule, and he didn’t dare complain (lest their lower crew get any kind of dissenting ideas) – but his time off was a different story. Shore leave on Naporar found him in bed far past the sunlight streaming through the windows, relishing in the warm heat trapped underneath his sheets. It was his favorite way to wake: slowly coaxed from slumber at his brain’s own pace.
… well, almost his favorite. This, of course, was first: the gentle scratch of Thrawn’s fingers at the roots of his hair, working through the bedhead tangles with a practiced ease that never hurt. The steady thrum of Thrawn’s heartbeat beneath Samakro’s cheek– sometimes underneath the layer of a soft sleep shirt, other times only obscured by the pleasant coolness of Thrawn’s bare skin. A distant rustling hardly audible to his sleep-addled brain– often the pages of a bound art book being turned or scrawl of Thrawn’s pencils in his sketchbooks.
Samakro still wakes slowly on these mornings – he’s still rising from sleep the way bubbles rise to the surface of the ponds on Celwis – but it’s different, somehow. Waking up next to someone- to Thrawn - softens the edges of reality, keeps him pliant for longer than strictly necessary. He’s inclined to stay in bed beyond any needs: to burrow them both under the covers until Thrawn startles with that achingly rare laugh of his– a bright, gentle sound that Samakro thinks of bottling up.
He’s inclined, most of all, to keep them ensconced in the sheets as he wakes, body twitching as it comes to life until Thrawn abandons his books, looking down at him with a painfully earnest expression that Samakro would move the stars and Beyond for. Samakro can shift their bodies with the languidness of sleeping muscles, pressing Thrawn deeper into the mattress and fastening their mouths together– a sloppy, open-mouthed connection that brings the most beautiful gasps from Thrawn’s lips.
By the time either of them can rise from the covers, the sun is always near high noon, shining with the blinding ferocity of a star that pays no mind to the cherished comforts of each of its rays. Samakro sees those rays the clearest on his weekends off– it’s in the soft smile that Thrawn reserves only for him, tucked into these moments like the bookmarks between the pages of his novels.