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The room they’re in is one of the biggest rec areas on the Resolute, aside from the training and gun ranges. Even so, Venators are relatively small for all the troops and crew they carry, and the room is packed wall to wall with troopers in various states of ‘gam.
Fives, draped over a coffee table behind Kix, hasn’t even bothered with boots. He’s barefoot, in his blacks. Echo, sitting at his feet, opted as usual for full armor, but looks rather like he’s regretting it now.
S. Sargeant Appo has taken point at the head of the central table, all the ranking officers having waved off the prospect of being a major player in this particular dumpster fire. He takes to the job with enthusiasm. He’ll make Lieutenant within a few months, probably.
“- what do you mean his astrological chart, he’s a dog -“ someone is saying.
“Can a zodiac sign even be your name?”
“What about ‘Other Padawan’?”
“What about Padawan Part Two?”
“- my batcher’s friend named himself after a day -“
“‘Padawan’ implies he’s a Jedi.”
“Like, the numerical date?”
“No, like Taungsday.”
“What’s wrong with Jedi?”
“- wrong with Jedi, I’m just saying that dog is a vod if I ever saw one -“
“Oh, Taungsday. I like that.“
So far, the meeting is going swimmingly, if by ‘swimmingly’ you meant ‘unproductive but generally entertaining mayhem.’ An average Torrent meeting, in other words.
They ought to put it on a warning label, Kix thinks. Permaplast it to every trooper’s forehead before shore leave. Come for trouble, stay for entertainment value, oya Coruscant Guard.
Jesse cuts a side eye at his smirk. “Do I want to know?”
Kix dismisses him with a handwave.
The two of them managed to get there early enough (and flexed their seniority liberally enough) to score two uncomfortable plastoid seats near the front of the room. Far enough, Kix thinks, that one might doubt if they were involved in such a woefully misguided decision, should things go to shit. But close enough to be involved, anyway.
“Attention, please!” Appo politely bellows. The room quiets marginally.
“We won’t choose a name by shouting them at each other. We will go around the room, one by one, and every trooper gets to suggest ONE name. Just one. If you don’t have a suggestion, or someone else took yours, pass on your turn. At the end, we’ll take a vote, alright?”
“Who’s keeping track?” Stack calls from the back.
“I will,” Echo volunteers instantly, waving a datapad in the air.
Appo nods, and the proceedings commence. In the middle of the room underneath the conference table, the subject of all the fuss is peacefully asleep. He’s belly up, tongue hanging out of his open mouth, and surrounded by full grown men splayed out on the cheap flooring around him.
About ten minutes after discovering Domino squad had smuggled the animal onto their ship, Kix had already come to terms with the fact that if anything happened to it, he would kill everyone responsible and then probably himself. So he can’t really judge.
“What about Jango?” The first trooper asks, to jeering agreement and laughter.
“We aren’t naming him after the Prime, that’s disrespectful,” retorts another.
“I don’t have a karking ounce of respect for Prime, vod.”
“I meant to the dog. Nobody deserves to be named after that sad sack.”
More laughter and shouting vibrates the table. Allegedly whatever they used to coat the durasteel walls on Venators was supposed to reduce echoes. Kix suspects that that was a lie intended to sell more Venators.
“What about Wookiee?” Halfofit asks next.
“That’s stupid and speciesist,” says Brix. “How would you feel if someone named their hairless womp rat ‘Human’?”
“Alright, alright, my bad.”
“Engineers?” Appo asks. The engineers are less a series of people than a cohesive hivemind of neurosis and lunacy, and thus, are usually addressed as such. Jesse figures it has something to do with them being down near the engine rooms all day, breathing in the fumes. Kix blames the General, who encourages unhinged mechanizations in the name of completing missions at every opportunity, and has thus nurtured the lunacy latent in every Engineer.
There’s some quiet discussion. Some laughter. Then Spout, who must be the hivemind’s designated voice for today, pipes up in his distinctive stutter. “We-we think uh. Uh. His name should be Sph-sph-sphere.”
Appo stares at them blankly, while a few guffaws break out from the more science-oriented people in the room. “I’m going to assume that’s an engineering joke that the rest of us peasants don’t understand and move on. Traph?”
“I pass.”
“Mo?”
“Saber. And we teach him to get it when Kenobi kriffing loses his.”
“What, you want to put Cody out of a job, now?” Fives retorts.
And the meeting goes on. At the end, the votes are tied between Benny, Padawan 2.0: Even Smaller, and Verd’ika. Not as bad as Kix feared, to be honest. A second vote puts Padawan out of the running. The third and fourth tie.
Eventually, enough troopers keep rotating out of the room for their scheduled shifts that Appo just calls a close, declaring they’ll convene again in four rotations to take another vote.
In the space of those four rotations, the Dog Name Vote becomes the number one topic of conversation in Torrent.
It makes sense. A trooper’s name is a big deal, especially if it’s chosen for them.
Kix’s twin chose his, curled into his bunk, their legs tangled, and whispering it like a secret between giggles. Keeli at the other end of the galaxy will always carry the name Kix chose for him in turn.
Names carry great weight for a people who don’t really have power over anything else in their short lives. So the debate over naming Torrent’s newest member will be hard-fought. Even if the member in question is a dog.
It all comes to a head when two troopers, wrestling lightheartedly in the mess hall to win the vote of a third trooper, accidentally tip over a table. Every meal on it goes crashing to the ground, and they take not a few other unsuspecting troopers on the benches with them. Kix observes the disaster from his vantage point two tables away. A crowd begins to gather, and Kix frowns in concern but stays stubbornly put, crunching his instaveg. If nobody’s screaming, he reasons, nobody’s injured badly enough to require interrupting his meal.
But the commotion attracts attention. Rex, timely as ever, materializes beside the disheveled (and rather sticky) troopers.
His “Explain.” leaves no room for argument.
Now, not telling the captain about the dog is one thing. He’s a busy man, and he can’t keep track of everything happening on the ship at once. But actively lying to his face? There isn’t a trooper in Torrent who’d manage it. Shamefacedly, the two troopers confess that there is, in fact, a dog - yes, sir, a living dog, but he hasn’t got a name yet - currently residing in the trooper barracks.
The look on Rex’s face is worth every bit of trouble they’re going to be in when he finds out that most of the officers already knew.
“So. This is the dog.”
“Benny,” Hardcase pipes up stubbornly from behind him.
Rex and As-Yet-Unnamed-But-Possibly-Benny regard each other. The latter’s tail hasn’t stopped thump-thump-thumping against the floor since Rex threw the door open and marched in. Paired with the fact that Rex hasn’t yet gone to General Skywalker, or ordered the dog’s immediate removal, this could be going very well indeed. Or very poorly, depending on where Kix stands on the hygiene issue at a given moment.
Rex shifts just a centimeter closer, and the the thump-thump-thumping speeds up, tail becoming a blur. The little mongrel’s entire body is vibrating with the effort of not launching himself towards the Captain, but someone, at some point, trained him. Probably a long time ago, given the dirt matted into his fur and visible ribs when they found him. He gazes up at Rex with those huge brown eyes, looking about as adoring as the shinies do when Cody takes a natborn to task over something.
Rex holds out one hand and the dog eagerly sniffs it and then sets to licking his gauntlet enthusiastically. He reaches up, scratches behind his ears, and the dog takes that as his cue to leap forward, gluing himself to Rex’s shins and wagging for all he’s worth.
When Rex crouches down and his usually-unreadable face breaks into a small smile, Kix knows instantly they’ve won.
“I take it back,” Kix declares on hour six of chipping old paint off the docking bay doors. “This was not fucking worth it.”
Jesse grunts tiredly in agreement, his eyes glazed over even as he keeps using the small blade to manually scrape and scrape and scrape. Behind them, Appo snores. Asleep in his chair barely before they’d hit hour four, that traitor.
All said and done, they did get off relatively easy. Most of the rest of Torrent is scrubbing fresher floors right now, or helping the Requisitions boys inventory. Ka’ra, inventorying . Even Brik probably couldn’t come up with a torture more nefarious than counting box after box of ration bars, toothbrushes, gloves. Their punishment, by comparison, looks rather tame. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
On the upside, there’s a big warm ball of fur waiting in their barracks for them when they get back. And there will be, for as long as they can possibly get away with it.
He can’t wait until General Skywalker finds out.