New Place, New Beginnings - Gray Tale, A Star Wars Rebels Story - NovelsTime

Gray Tale, A Star Wars Rebels Story

New Place, New Beginnings

Author: Abstracto
updatedAt: 2025-10-29

I figured the whole "let's start a business" thing would be a slow burn. A marathon, not a sprint. We'd spend weeks, maybe months, crunching numbers, scouting locations from a distance, and generally dipping our toes in the water before even thinking about jumping. I was prepared for a long, drawn-out campaign of subtle persuasion.

Turns out, Vasha wasn't the "dip your toes" type. When she decided to do something, she was more of a "cannonball off the high dive" kind of person.

She proved that when she came home late one evening, looking more energized than I'd seen her in months. There was a frantic, excited gleam in her eyes that had nothing to do with a successful repair and everything to do with a new plan.

"Found a place," she announced, dropping a greasy bag of takeout on the counter and practically vibrating with energy. "Two blocks from here. Old cargo depot that's been empty for a year. The space is perfect. High ceilings, reinforced floor, separate power grid..."

"Wait, you actually went looking?" I asked, my half-eaten space-noodle forgotten.

"Of course I went looking," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You don't land a deal by thinking about it. There's a catch, though." She pulled out a flimsy datapad, showing me a grainy picture of a large, warehouse-like space. "The whole building's getting a power conduit refit. We can't move in or start setting anything up for another eight days."

Eight days. It wasn't a bad thing. It gave us a buffer. Time for Vasha to sell off the backlog of repaired tech we had piled in the living room, which would give us a nice chunk of starting capital. Time for me to dive into the local junkyard networks online, figuring out who sold what and for how much. And, most importantly, time for her to officially quit her soul-crushing dockyard job.

It also meant that my dream of reclaiming the couch was, for the foreseeable future, completely shot. The apartment was still a disaster zone of parts and tools. My nights, for the next week at least, would continue to be spent with me as the little spoon, tucked securely in Vasha's arms.

Hey, I wasn't complaining. My previous life had been a long, lonely dry spell. I'd almost forgotten the simple, profound comfort of using a perfectly-sized pair of boobs as a pillow. And Vasha's were, to be frank, top-tier. S-rank. The kind of glorious, soft cushions that could probably solve galactic conflicts if deployed correctly.

My nights, for the next week at least, would continue to be spent with me as the little spoon, tucked securely in Vasha's arms.

But my curiosity, a restless and often stupid thing, had recently fixated on a new frontier. Her lekku.

Lying here, with one draped over my shoulder like a silken scarf, my mind started racing with questions. They looked soft. Deceptively so. The skin was smooth, the shape elegant, but I knew they were prehensile, controllable appendages. They were muscle. How could something made of muscle have that same yielding, plush quality as her chest? It didn't make sense. Was the texture the same? Was it a different kind of softness entirely? The engineer in my brain, now repurposed for... this... needed data.

My theory was that they had to be good pillows. Maybe even better pillows. But a theory is useless without empirical evidence.

Which led to my current predicament.

I was the little spoon, my head resting comfortably in the valley between her breasts, my back flush against her stomach. Her steady breathing was a warm, rhythmic presence behind me. Her lek was right there, an unconscious invitation resting on my collarbone.

My hand, tucked between our bodies, began its slow, treacherous ascent. This was purely for science, I told myself. A simple tactile test to resolve a biomechanical paradox. My fingers, moving with the stealth of a spy droid, crept upwards.

They made contact. Just a light brush against the smooth, cool skin.

Vasha's entire body went rigid in an instant.

A sharp, shaky breath hissed through her teeth, and the lekku whipped away from my touch like it had been zapped with a cattle prod. She shivered, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with being cold.

"Hey," she mumbled, her voice thick and drowsy but with a sharp, warning edge. "Hands to yourself, gremlin."

My face flushed hot in the darkness. I buried my head deeper into her chest, my voice muffled. "M'sorry... just curious."

"Curious is fine," she murmured, shifting to press me even closer, a clear message to stay put. "Grabby is not." She let out a long, slow breath, the tension easing slightly. "They're... sensitive, kid."

I knew that now. Oh boy, did I. My brief experiment had yielded a very definitive, very embarrassing result.

"But they looked so soft," I mumbled pathetically into her sternum, a complaint born of thwarted scientific inquiry. "Like... pillows."

I felt a low chuckle vibrate through her chest. "Yeah, well," she said, and I felt the lekku move again. This time, it deliberately, playfully, wrapped around my offending hand, trapping it gently against my chest. Its grip was firm but soft—a living, prehensile restraint. The very texture I'd been curious about was now the thing holding me captive. "These pillows have a strict 'no-touching' policy. Got it?"

My trapped hand twitched.

The boobs were fantastic, yes. But the lekku... oh, the lekku were a whole other level of transcendent softness. I have no idea why it took me so long to realize it. They were right there, draped over her shoulder every day. It was a goddamn heresy that I'd overlooked their potential for six months.

I was completely, utterly surrounded by warm, soft, alien woman who had just neatly disproven and proven my theory in the same breath.

"Got it," I squeaked.

She laughed again, a soft, sleepy sound. "Good."

The lekku didn't unwrap. It just stayed there, a warm, silken manacle, holding my hand hostage until we both drifted off to sleep.

...

...

The eight days passed in a blur of fried circuits, ration-bar breakfasts, and the surprisingly comforting weight of a Twi'lek arm slung over me in the middle of the night. Our apartment had officially crossed the line from "cluttered" to "hazardous material storage," but every broken motivator and scorched logic board was another rep in my psychic gym.

The practice was paying off. My Hyper Perception was getting seriously jacked. The two-meter bubble of awareness I'd started with was now more like a two-and-a-half-meter bubble on a good day. More importantly, I could hold the state for longer, dipping in and out of an object's history with a finesse that felt less like getting hit by a psychic freight train and more like targeted data retrieval.

The real level-up, though, wasn't just in the space-wizardry. It was in my actual brain. As I picked apart more and more tech, I started to see the universal language underneath it all. Turns out, electronics are electronics, no matter what galaxy you're in. The fundamentals were the same: you had power lines, you had things that resisted the flow, things that stored it, and things that channeled it. Sure, their versions were ridiculously advanced—hyper-capacitive flux chillers instead of simple capacitors—but the role they played in a circuit was the same. Yeah, bitches, basics can be advanced too.

My engineering brain finally had a framework to work with. Any piece of alien tech was just a combination of these familiar basic components, plus one or two "black box" core parts that operated on some kind of sci-fi physics I hadn't learned yet. But you didn't need to know how the kyber crystal focused energy to understand its function in a lightsaber schematic. You just needed to know: input energy here, get a laser sword out there.

I was getting into the flow of it, a deep, intuitive understanding building with every repair. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a breakthrough, a new tier of understanding just waiting for me to kick the door in. I didn't know what it was, but I could feel it humming just beneath the surface.

So, with my sensory powers and my education humming along nicely, I decided it was time to face the music. It was time to tackle the weakest link in my training chain, the lagging, pathetic runt of my Force abilities: telekinesis.

The good news: I was making progress. I wasn't improving backward, at least.

The bad news: my forward progress was so slow it could have been measured with a geological survey.

I spent hours sitting on the floor, sweating and glaring at that same stupid river stone. The sheer mental effort it took was staggering. It felt like trying to bench-press a bantha with my brain. But after days of grueling, mind-numbing effort, I achieved a new personal best.

I could lift the stone.

A single, pathetic, wobbling millimeter off the floor. I could hold it there, vibrating with the sheer force of my concentration, for a solid twelve seconds before my head felt like it was trying to reject my skull and shut down completely.

It was infuriating. It was humiliating for a guy who had been training for like months only to do this pity level of floating...damn you Force, I am not even going to be able grope titties from far away, much less fight with any inquisitor.

Through the third and seven sister didn't have titties anyway...

----

"I thought we were just getting a shop or something? You didn't tell me anything about moving home!?"

The words tumbled out of me, a mix of shock and confusion. I was standing in our apartment—or what was left of it—clutching a hydrospanner like a lifeline as Vasha, with the focused intensity of a demolition droid, systematically packed our entire existence into crates.

She paused, a stack of my worn flimsiplast manuals in her arms, and gave me a look of genuine surprise. "Oh, kriff," she breathed, the manuals tilting precariously. "I didn't? I swear I did." She gestured with her head towards the chaotic piles. "I mean, it's the only way this works, kid. Paying rent for two places on Lothal? We'd be eating nutrient paste for a year. This is a package deal."

I stared at her, my brain struggling to catch up. "Package deal?"

"Yeah," she said, dropping the manuals into a box with a soft thud. "The place is a converted cargo-hauler's depot. The guy who had it before us was a freelance ship-parts salvager—a Devaronian named Kaelen. Apparently, he got a 'better offer' off-world, which probably means he skipped town one step ahead of a bounty hunter. Left in a hurry. The workshop in the front is huge, but the living space in the back is... cozy. About the same size as this place, maybe a little smaller."

My mind spun. Just this morning, my biggest problem was a faulty power converter. Now, I was moving. With a woman who made life-altering decisions and apparently considered the "informing people" part to be an optional extra.

It was the most Vasha thing ever.

The move was a blur of controlled chaos. Our personal belongings were laughably few, fitting into a single large crate. Our "work stuff," however, filled the rented grav-sled to overflowing. DT-73, in a rare moment of usefulness, managed to stack everything with a geometric precision that was both impressive and slightly terrifying.

By the time the twin suns were dipping below the horizon, bathing the city in a soft, dusty glow, we were standing in our new life.

The front workshop was everything she'd promised. High ceilings, a massive roll-up door that opened onto a quiet side-street, and the lingering, intoxicating smell of ozone and machine oil. The living space in the back was, as she'd said, cozy. A compact kitchenette, a fresher unit that looked suspiciously similar to our old one, and a small, open area.

I scanned the small, bare living area, a strange mix of relief and… something else… settling in my gut. No couch. No built-in bunks. Just empty floor space. A blank slate.

My own bed, a tiny, hopeful voice whispered in the back of my mind. The thought was so audacious it was almost intoxicating. The era of being the little spoon was over. No more nights spent pretending to be asleep while I was hyper-aware of every soft curve pressed against my back. No more waking up with a cheek squashed against the glorious, pillowy softness of Vasha’s chest. An end to the accidental, mortifying, and admittedly fantastic experience of getting smothered by boobs and lekku. It was a tragic loss for my inner twenty-something, but a huge victory for my sanity and my carefully constructed seven-year-old persona.

"Okay, last load's here!" Vasha's voice echoed from the workshop, jolting me from my reverie. "Need a hand with the last bit!"

The last bit? We'd brought in the tool chests, the crates of parts, our personal bags... what was left? I walked through the doorway into the main workshop, where the rented grav-sled was humming just inside the massive roll-up door. On it was... well, it was big. And lumpy. And covered by a heavy tarp.

"What's that?" I asked. "Did Kaelen leave his engine block or something?"

Vasha wiped a line of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, grinning like she'd just won the lottery. "Even better. You know how Kaelen was trying to sell off everything he couldn't fit on his freighter? Well, he said his bed was too big to haul and he'd just scrap it if I didn't want it. Apparently, his wife was a Togruta, and you know how they like to sprawl." She patted the tarp-covered monstrosity. "Sold it to me for twenty credits."

The hopeful little voice in my head whimpered and died.

"...The bed?" I squeaked, my own voice sounding very small in the vast workshop.

"The bed," she confirmed cheerfully. "It's barely used. Saved us a few hundred credits we definitely don't have. Now, grab a corner. This thing is an absolute beast."

Together, we wrestled the mattress and frame into the living space. Beast was an understatement. It was colossal. The thing took up nearly a third of the room, a magnificent, ridiculous expanse of soft, worn fabric. It wasn't a bed; it was a small continent designed for two people to comfortably get lost in.

I stood there, staring at it, my dream of a private bunk turning to ash in my mouth.

Vasha flopped onto it with a contented groan, bouncing slightly. "See? Perfect. Plenty of room." She patted the empty expanse beside her, oblivious to the existential crisis playing out behind my eyes. "And I don't have to worry about you rolling off the couch and breaking something. Which, knowing you, would probably be my rarest motivator."

So this was it. The nightly routine of getting smothered wasn't over. It had just been officially upgraded to a king-size bed with a permanent booking.

I sighed, the sound a quiet admission of defeat. My nights of private space and dignified solitude were a fantasy. My nights of being a human-sized tooka doll, however, were about to get a whole lot more comfortable.

Well, damn. At least the pillows looked bigger on this one.

____

A/N: You guys were right it seems, a single review seemed to had boosted the growth quite a bit (Or maybe it was the mass updates, or maybe both). Anyways, thanks a lot for the review Verdant_Sun, the next bonus chapter is for him.

And you guys really went all in to full smut huh? Well let me oblige the audience's demand with bareboning the next chapter even a bit. I will have it uploaded here in 5 minutes if you don't mind, gotta take advantage of the new update list hehe

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