Accountant!Quinlan
This Going Nowhere Fast short is an excerpt from Anti-Sith Roadtrip, the as yet unfinished sequel to Cold Calling the Jedi Order, found here
Fox would like it to be stated for the record that he did not like math. He has seen the Cadets that like math, the ones that get excited about astronav classes and flimsiwork filing. He has, purely incidentally and along with what he was actually there for, liberated those exact cadets from various storage rooms and closets on Kamino after hours. This did not mean, however, that Fox was not very good at math. He intends, and succeeds, in being good at everything, except for beating Cody at hand to hand, but math was easy for him in a way that most things weren’t, bleeding into tactics and sharpshooting, and right now apparently, whatever it was that Jedi got up to.
He tugged at the collar of the spacer's shirt to adjust how it lay over his blacks and stepped further into the mess area. The Sex Jedi, Vos, had unpacked the raggedy duffel bag he’d been carrying when he arrived onto the deactivated darjek table. It was a mess of Flimsiwork, Datapads, fueling slips, loose flimsi in varying conditions, including a few that looked as if they’d been submerged in water and then ironed flat again, and an actual nerfhide bound ledger labeled in Huttese. Vos didn’t acknowledge him but Fox knew he knew Fox was there. Sure, Fox had been nearly silent when he’d arrived and Vos hadn’t looked up from his inspection of a datapad that seemed to have violet blood crusted into all its seams and ports, but their emotions when Master Siri’s friend Quinlan had been revealed to be named Master Vos, had apparently been loud, whatever “loud” meant when it came to Force osik, so the sensing thing was corroborated.
Fox circled the table, inspecting the haphazard piles without touching them. It looked mostly like logistics, sorted by date, approximately, and then by goods and communications.There was a separate pile of weird nickknacks and random flimsi at Vos’ elbow that Fox knew better than to try and disturb, but he knew flimiswork, and he knew the best way to find out what the Sex Jedi was actually up to when he wasn’t telling clones he talked sentients off for money was to help. He was pretty sure that Vos shot him an amused glance through the dreads obscuring his face when sat down and started to gather up a particularly precarious stack of mixed datapads to read through, but he didn’t object, and that was basically permission.
Half an hour of work later, with Fox unravelling the basic details of what looked like a gun smuggling operation, and Vos making a few little gasping noises as he worked through his pile of odds and ends and either put them away or passed them to Fox for him to smugly file with the rest, Vos made a noise of interest and his attention flicked to the door. A few seconds later Fox caught the sound of footsteps, and fixed his posture from where he’d started to relax after nearly a month being told they didn’t need to be at attention, at the same moment, Vos slouched into a nearly horizontal position on the bench. Even as he ruthlessly prevented his amusement from leaking into the angle of his head and shoulders, Fox hoped desperately that his Jedi osik was picking up his appreciation for Vos’ participation. In the next moment, Wolffe rounded the corner, still looking absurd in the natborn clothes he’d stolen from Ferus instead of wearing anything that fit. He froze in the doorway, taking in the scene.
For all Wolffe was a di’kut, he was not, actually, stupid. The expression on his face, a mix of quickly stifled curiosity and alarm, proved that he’d accurately assessed the situation as unprecedented and volatile, though the latter probably only because Fox would take measures if Wolffe ruined this for him. Fox lifted the flimsi refueling receipt and smoothly and precisely placed it with the associated records that it was blatantly contradicting. Without Fox even needing to acknowledge him, Wolffe made an abrupt about face, and immediately exited through the exact same door he’d entered. As he left, the bottom of his still too tight shirt rode up enough to expose a sliver of skin at the small of his back.
With the five minutes that had bought them while Wolffe gathered reinforcements, Fox relaxed enough to glance over at Vos and made eye contact for the first time, almost startlingly easily considering the comical slouch that Vos had affected. Vos flashed him a wide grin and the pile of obviously suspect paperwork Fox had been assembling while Vos did Force Osik with his collection of garbage lifted from the table and into Vos’ easy reach. Fox watched its trajectory until it had settled into Vos’ outstretched hand before returning to his ramrod straight posture and starting to read his next datapad while he waited for Wolffe to return with Ponds, and maybe Cody, if they thought this was a situation that needed to be “handled,” not that Fox would allow it to be.
The next ten minutes of reconnaissance went about as Fox expected. There were only two entrances to the room, and both he and Vos could see them from where they were sitting, thanks to an inconspicuously angled scrap of polished metal from one of Vos’ piles. The jury was still out on whether Vos needed to be able to see the slightly warped shapes of Ponds and Wolffe skulking around behind them to know what they were up to, but Fox appreciated it. He ignored them to maintain his overly formal posture, because, even if they weren’t undetected, they were at least silent, and also Fox knew it was freaking them out.
Eventually, Bly arrived, wrapped up in Jedi robes and looking only slightly less stupid than Wolffe, and made the mistake of questioning the situation out loud.
“Uh, Fox?” Bly asked, tangling his fingers in the hems of his sleeves and sounding close to panic. Fox decided to reward his initiative with a smoothly mechanical turn of his head and stared blankly into Bly’s eyes.
“Yes.” He answered, without any inflection and had to suppress his meanest grin as Bly blanched. Ponds took advantage of this "distraction" in order to steal the most recent pile of flimsi that Fox had organized, and if they didn’t go back exactly how they’d started, Fox was going to fill his bucket with natborn seasonings while he slept.
“Are you doing accounting?” Wolffe blurted as he read over Pond’s shoulder. At this, Vos sat up, taking his feet off the table and propping his chin on his elbows as he looked past Fox to where the three of them were gathered around Fox’s proof that the gun runners were also being scammed.
“The Jedi are a monastic order, money means little to them.” He said, in the most deadpan serious tone they had heard from him in the whole time he’d been on the ship, which was how Fox knew he was kriffing with them.
