Just here for the clones.

The comb, then, spotted when Wolffe had permitted himself ten seconds to stand still and breathe. At first glance, he’d thought the pale shard to herald a body he’d failed to rescue and his stomach had knotted, before releasing as he focused and realised what he was seeing. Then the comb was in his hand.

A pretty thing, carved from the bone of some animal or other, and decorated with flowers that had been carefully stained purple and pink. The tines were wide spaced and flat, and when Wolffe tested one with his thumb, it had the expected amount of give. A wing-comb, definitely, though Wolffe hadn’t seen any being on-planet with wings.

For a pet, maybe? A big damn pet. The thought made him laugh, imagining something as big as a clone in a cage, singing or twittering on a perch.

He sobered. If what Fox had insinuated about Coruscant was true, then maybe the idea wasn’t as far fetched as Wolffe would have hoped.

Fox. Wolffe pressed the tines with his thumb again. Everything made him think of—

“All clear over here, sir?” Sinker asked, ambling toward Wolffe with an easy stride that the twitching tips of his wings belied. “We’re about done if so, General Koon says.”

“Ready to go,” Wolffe confirmed, as he slipped the comb into a pouch on his belt.

He felt Sinker’s attention linger on the action, the pouch, but for all Sinker’s ebullience, he knew when to keep his questions behind his teeth. Wolffe adjusted his shoulders, which did nothing to ease the ache from the weight of his sweaty wings, and nodded sharply.

“Let’s get out of this blasted greenhouse.”

Aboard ship, after debriefing with General Koon, and sticking his head into the trooper’s rec room to make sure everyone had their wings on straight, Wolffe made a tactical retreat to his bunk. There, for the first time in what felt like cycles, he shed his armour and unbound his wings, groaning with relief as he did. A handful of speckled grey feathers scattered to the floor; Wolffe swept the deadfall under his bunk with the tip of one wing. The droids could sort that later. He had better things to do than clean.

For once, Fox answered his comm on the first try. Wolffe used to try and figure out the time on Coruscant before calling, but Fox’s schedule made no sense, so Wolffe had abandoned the brief charade at politeness and called whenever he could.

“You look like haran,” Fox greeted, grinning with all his teeth, his face for once bare. Movement and jostling as he got comfortable in— Wolffe had lucked out! Fox was in his bunk. “Everything copacetic?”

“Long and sweaty day. We can’t all be tasked with top secret canapés and mission critical opera.”

Fox barked a laugh. “Shut your kriffing face about my canapés. You’re just jealous.”

Every day, Wolffe longed to receive a search and rescue mission for Coruscant, with orders to pull his siblings out of the city planet and take them anywhere else at all. Whenever the 104th cycled through to 000, he’d whisper to Fox about extraction, pressing promises and kisses into Fox’s impeccably groomed feathers, still somehow softer than down. Fox only laughed. Every time, he laughed. Wolffe didn’t take the reaction personally; anything other than laughter would’ve been too vulnerable to voice on Coruscant.

Wolffe could be vulnerable enough for both of them. He couldn’t do much for Fox, not from out in the black, but he had learnt that. Like he had learnt how to show Fox how much and in what ways that Wolffe thought about him, wished for him, when they were separated by parsecs upon parsecs.

On his bunk, Wolffe curled one of his wings in front of his face so that Fox could see the spread feathers. Then he raised the new comb toward the comm, as if offering Fox the handle.

“Got this today—“

“‘Rescued’, was it?”

“—and thought of you.”

Fox’s mouth snapped shut. Wolffe couldn’t confirm due to the low resolution of the comm, but he imagined Fox’s pupils dilating, the way he’d seen—the way he’d caused—so many times before. Fox licked his lips and shifted, as if settling more fully for the show, and tilted his chin. Even the poor resolution of the holo didn’t disguise the hunger in his gaze.

“Go on, then. Show me what you think of me,” Fox said. A challenge. A plea, if he had been any other vod.

Wolffe bared his teeth behind the shield of his wing, and touched the tines to his feathers.