Chapter Text
Fox keyed in his code on the doorpad and entered his private - and locked - office to find Quinlan Vos already inside. This was not ideal but also not surprising, unfortunately.
Vos looked up from where he was rearranging items on Fox’s desk and brightened. “Commander Fox! What a nice surprise.”
Fox took off his helmet for the sole purpose of ensuring that Vos got the full force of his glare. “It’d be a shit intelligence operative that was surprised to see me in my own office.”
Vos’s smile didn’t dim, because Vos was physically incapable of being offended. “Are you calling me intelligent? Should I be flattered? I feel like I should be feeling flattered.”
After several months of Vos’ particular brand of conversation – or what passed for conversation in his mind – Fox had gotten used to this type of inane dialogue. Against his will, but here they were.
“If you ever find something I’ve said about you to be flattering, then you definitely misheard me.” Or willfully misinterpreted him, which was the more likely scenario. Fox stepped past Vos towards his desk chair, using the bulkiness of his armor to his advantage. “Move.”
Vos sighed dramatically and flopped into one of the chairs Fox kept in the office for meetings. Fox could not honestly say that he had ever witnessed Vos sitting in a chair. Vos frequently used chairs, but not in any way that could be categorized as “sitting.” He reclined or lounged or draped himself over furniture, never sitting down like a normal person.
Vos seemed to be favoring the “reclining” category today, and slid down so he could stretch his legs out.
Fox saw his intention in his eyes before he even started the motion, and Fox preempted him with, “If you put your feet up on my desk, they will be removed from your body.”
Vos sighed as if he were the one being inconvenienced, and moved instead to snatch a bag from Fox’s desk. Fox hadn’t really registered it when he walked in. It was a small bag, made of some type of flimsi and displaying a logo on one side.
Fox watched, curious despite himself, as Vos poked around in the bag before removing something small and popping it into his mouth. Apparently Vos has escalated to bringing snacks into Fox’s office.
Fox wasn’t entirely sure what the snack was, exactly – if pressed he’d have said some type of bread – but it didn’t matter, anyway.
“Was there a reason you needed to break into my office again, or is this just a fun new snack-eating location for you?” Fox asked, sliding his smaller portable datapad to the side of his desk so he had more room to work on his data terminal.
Vos pulled another – sphere? – out of the bag to eat. “No, I did actually have something to talk to you about. The snacks are just a fun bonus. Blood sugar levels, you know.”
Fox did actually turn back towards Vos at that. Vos was, despite all appearances, actually competent, at least when it came to his job. It was the only reason Fox had tolerated the breaking and entering for this long. If Vos really did have something to tell him, then it was probably relevant.
Fox raised his eyebrows, an unspoken request for Vos to continue.
Vos tossed his locs behind his shoulder in an obnoxious little motion, and ate another. “Well,” Vos started, speaking with his mouth full. “Do you remember when I was looking into those warehouses on Level 3156?”
“Sure.” At the time, it hadn’t been the type of investigation that would concern the Guard, but that must have changed.
“So, I finally tracked down the missing delivery driver, and I found him in a bar, so I just had a bit of a casual conversation. The things he said about the warehouses probably wouldn’t interest you, but the things he said about his superiors in that delivery service definitely would.” Vos slid a datachip over towards him.
Fox took it. Knowing Vos, it had critical intel that would’ve taken the Guard another month to collect. The intel was most likely sourced from smugglers and dealers, but Vos’s intel had always checked out before.
“What’s on this?” Fox asked.
Vos took a moment to chew another one of the snacks from the bag and then said, “Records of delivery schedules for the past six months.” At Fox’s look, he added, “All ethically obtained!”
“Ethical” was not a synonym for “legal,” but Fox let that slide for the same reason he let most things about Vos slide. Vos was unconventional, unprofessional, and frequently bothersome, but there was a noticeable increase in the Guard’s case clearance rate since Vos decided to involve himself. And a noticeable decrease in harassment from the Coruscant Security Forces, but Fox hadn’t yet discerned whether that was directly related to Vos’s inexplicable appearance or not.
Fox put the datachip in the designated desk drawer, but was distracted by Vos’ odd snacks. The bag was deceivingly small, for how many discrete food items it seemed to contain.
Vos had also decided to forgo gloves for this meeting, which was out of the ordinary for him. The reason why quickly became obvious.
The food items had some sort of glazed coating that was getting all over Vos’ hands. It was probably sugar-based, if it was as sticky as it looked.
Vos noticed him watching and winked, then stuck one of his fingers in his mouth to suck the sugar residue off. He then repeated this process with all of his other fingers. Slowly, and thoroughly.
Fox froze. Vos rarely had his hands on display at all, always covering his hands and wrists with different sets of gloves, and now here he was licking them. It was obscene. And unsanitary. And disgusting. And obscene.
Vos tilted the bag towards him. “Want one?”
Fox shook himself just a little, to clear his head, then frowned. “I don’t even know what those are.”
Vos goggled at him like he’d said he didn’t know what water was. “What? The doughnut holes? You’ve never had doughnut holes?”
Fox looked at him blankly. “Why would I know this? And they’re all spheres.”
Vos’s entire being crumpled, shoulders slumping. He blinked at Fox, wide-eyed. “Because they’re the best thing to ever be created in a bakery? And calling them ‘doughnut holes’ just means that they look like what’s missing from the centers of doughnuts.”
This information made the situation more confusing, not less. “Why don’t they just keep the center bits with the original doughnuts? Why are ‘doughnuts’ missing something from the center anyways?”
“Fox.” Vos looked at him beseechingly. “Please, please please please tell me that you’ve had a doughnut before.”
“No? Do I look like I have time to visit bakeries?”
Vos made a wounded noise. He sounded more gut-punched than the time Fox had helped him patch up his actual stab wound.
He held out the bag more insistently. “This is an injustice that cannot stand. You need to try it, immediately. Right this second.” He shook the bag a little for emphasis.
Fox didn’t reach out to take one. “They probably don’t have any nutritional value, if they’re leaving sugar all over your hands.”
“Nutritional value?” Vos scoffed. “Nobody eats doughnuts for nutrition. That’s not what they’re for.”
“Then what are they for?”
Vos shook the bag in his direction again. “You’ll just have to find out for yourself, won’t you?”
Using Fox’s need to know everything about everything, always, against him was cheating. Fox gave Vos a look that he hoped conveyed this sentiment, and finally reached into the bag to select one of the…doughnut holes.
He brought it closer to inspect it, and realized that it had already made his fingers sticky with sugar glaze. Fox looked back at Vos, betrayed, but Vos just made a smug “well, go on then” gesture. Fox rolled his eyes and then ate the entire thing in one bite, like Vos had.
Fox fought to keep his face neutral, and only succeeded because of his extensive experience speaking to politicians.
It tasted like-–
Fox didn’t even have a good comparison. This was, without question, the best food item he’d ever had in his life.
He’d been somewhat correct in that these things belonged somewhere in the “bread” category, but this was nothing like any bread Fox had ever eaten. It was light and was sweet on its own, without even taking into account the sugar coating the outside. They must have been dipped in sugar, creating a thin shell around the excellent bread.
Fox didn’t want to add any fuel to Vos’ dramatics, though, so he finished chewing and said in response to Vos’ eager anticipation, “Sure, these are pretty good, I guess.”
Vos’s mouth twitched, holding back laughter. He held the bag out again. “Would you like another one?”
Fox tried not to seem too eager in his immediate lunge for the bag, but wasn’t sure he succeeded.
Vos let him take another one, then set the bag down on Fox’s desk. “Here, we can share,” Vos said, then tore part of the bag open so that the doughnut holes were more accessible for both of them.
Fox made himself wait until he had fully chewed and swallowed the second doughnut hole before he grabbed a third. He ate the third, then looked despairingly at his hands. Bits of sugar were making his fingers stick together. There was no way he could go anywhere near his datapads like this.
Vos ate another one, then said, “You know, licking the sugar glaze off your fingers is an essential part of the doughnut hole experience,” and went on to do exactly that.
Fox’s gaze caught again on Vos’ bare hands for just a moment before he remembered himself and gave Vos a baleful glare. He opened one of the cabinets behind his desk in which he stored a stack of towels – you never knew when they’d come in handy, what with Hound (and accompanying creatures) being a regular visitor to this office – and selected one of the smaller ones. He looked directly at Vos while he wiped his hands clean on an actual towel, like a civilized person.
Vos was unfazed. He leaned back in the chair, then decided that this was unsatisfactory and instead turned enough to allow one leg to hook over the arm of the chair, leaving his whole body turned at a 45-degree angle.
Vos leaned the rest of his weight against the other arm of the chair and said, “Are you available to continue our conversation about open cases, or should I give you two a moment alone?” He gestured between Fox and the bakery bag to make his meaning explicitly clear.
Fox didn’t bother acknowledging that. “Are you referring to the warehouses still, or a different case?”
“Other ones,” Vos said. “The delivery guy wasn’t the only person with interesting gossip this week.”
They made their way through the rest of the bag while they discussed the criminal underworld of Coruscant.
And if Fox realized, later, that Vos let him eat almost every single one of the remaining desserts, well, it wasn’t anything that he needed to remark upon.