SW Gray Tales 19: Mishap Due to Distractions(R18+)

The "long talk about boundaries" was less of a talk and more of a one-sided lecture from Vasha, punctuated by my pathetic, well-timed nods. The final agreement was a treaty negotiated under duress. I was allowed to continue my "tinkering," but under a strict set of Vasha-approved safety protocols.

No live power connections without her supervision. No touching anything that looked remotely like it could explode. And absolutely, positively no more all-nighters that left me looking like a zombie loth-cat. I was, she reminded me for the tenth time, a child. A very weird, scarily smart child, but a child nonetheless.

The protocol droid, DT-73, became a permanent, and surprisingly helpful, fixture in the apartment. But one fixed droid wasn't enough. My engineer's soul, now fully awake and hooked on the drug of psychic repair, craved more. I needed a new project.

In the days that followed, instead of launching a direct campaign, I employed a more subtle tactic: pathetic, wistful longing. I'd sit near the workbench, tracing the empty circuits on a spare datapad. I'd sigh dramatically when DT-73 successfully performed a task I knew it couldn't have done a week ago.

Finally, Vasha cracked. "Alright, what is it?" she asked one evening, putting down her fork. "You've been moping around like a droid who's lost its favorite oil can."

"It's just..." I started, looking up from my bowl of stew. "Fixing DT-73... it was fun. The most fun I've had since..." I trailed off, letting her fill in the blanks. "...since I got here." I poked at a piece of space-potato. "It felt... familiar. Like solving a puzzle. I miss it."

Her expression softened. The tough mechanic facade melted away, revealing the Vasha who had taken in a stray kid from the market. She saw the genuine spark of excitement in my eyes when I talked about motivators and logic circuits—a spark that was usually reserved for a warm meal or a new blanket. It was the first time she'd seen me truly passionate about something that wasn't just basic survival.

"You really enjoyed it, huh?" she murmured.

I nodded vigorously. "It's the best! All the little lines and pulses... it's like a secret language. I want to learn more." Then I played my trump card, the one that wasn't about me, but about her. "You get so frustrated with the broken stuff from the docks. Maybe... maybe if you brought some of the really hopeless parts home, I could help you figure them out?" I looked at her with wide, earnest eyes. "I could be your secret weapon."

A slow smile spread across her face. This wasn't a business proposal; it was a kid wanting to share his favorite toy. A very strange, very complicated toy, but a toy nonetheless.

"My secret weapon, huh?" she chuckled. "A seven-year-old with magic repair hands." She shook her head, a look of fond exasperation on her face. Then she shrugged, a gesture of surrender. "Why not? It's not like they could get any more broken."

"And hey," I added, as if the thought had just occurred to me, a perfect, innocent afterthought. "If we actually fix something... we could sell it, right? Maybe get you out of that quota-hell dockyard job."

Vasha's smile faltered for a second, the practical reality of the idea hitting her. She looked from my hopeful face to the gleaming chrome of DT-73, then back again.

The prospect of financial freedom was a powerful motivator. The idea of her seven-year-old ward having psychic repair visions was, understandably, a bit harder to swallow. But she'd seen the proof standing in her kitchenette, washing utensils while wearing an apron.

After some token resistance and a classic Vasha safety lecture—equal parts fire and guilt—she finally caved. She agreed to bring home some small, "hopeless" components from the dockyard. Just for a test run.

A few nights later, she made good on the deal. The workbench was cleared, tools lined up like soldiers, and the smell of burnt circuitry lingered in the air. Vasha placed a scorched motivator on the table like they were ritual offerings to some very tired, possibly drunk, tech god. Then she grabbed a crate, crossed her arms, and gave me a look that said I regret everything, but also go on, impress me.

"Alright, genius," she said, pulling up so close that her elbow almost knocked over my precision lens. "Show me this magic trick. And remember the rule: If it sparks, I tackle you. Hard."

She was half-joking. Probably.

I nodded and tried to focus, but her presence was... loud. Not in sound, but in how the room suddenly felt like it had shrunk by half. She leaned in, trying to get a better look at the fried logic board I was holding. That was the mistake. She shifted, and—gods help me—her breast landed right against the side of my head.

My brain shorted out. Completely. There were supposed to be protocols, mental barriers, practiced layers of discipline I'd built over months. This was supposed to be a clean, professional demo. Show off a little focused Hyper Perception, wow her with some elegant psychic circuit-mapping, nothing fancy.

Instead, I panicked. And when I panic, I overcompensate.

The focus beam I meant to form did more than just wobble—it collapsed entirely. What came out was a full-bubble burst: a wild, uncontrolled flare of awareness that expanded to its max range of two meters in every direction.

And Vasha, unfortunately, was dead center.

Normally, when I used Hyper Perception around people, I filtered them out. I'd trained myself to only register the living force inside them—that warm, emotional glow that marked them as alive—and ignore everything else.

Partly because it was hard to get structural readings from organic matter anyway. Something about living tissue always came through fuzzy, like trying to scan through radiation or static. And, honestly? I didn't want to know more than that. It felt gross. Intrusive. Wrong.

But this time... this time, those filters didn't got to help cuz just a sudden boobies to the head was enough to evaporate all my focus.

Because the second my perception slipped the leash, everything flooded in. Every barrier I'd built to keep living bodies safely fuzzy, respectfully abstract, just dissolved. 

Her clothes may as well have not existed. I felt through them. Not in some vague emotional way, but in raw, high-definition spatial data. Skin, soft and smooth, warm with her heat. The supple swell of her breasts, one still pressing against the side of my head like an unintentional accusation. But now more than just aware of the pressure—I felt the entire contour, the weight, the subtle, responsive give of flesh. 

The way her nipples were subtly tightened under the fabric, likely from leaning forward into the cool air of the apartment or maybe—gods help me—curiosity that came for but a second, but by the time I could squash it down...

It had already done what it needed to.

The details hadn't stopped there.

My bubble mapped the curve of her hips, the taut lines of her thighs where she'd perched on the crate. I could feel where her inner thighs brushed, where fabric bunched, where warmth gathered. Her body had shape and texture, from the sleek definition in her calves to the gentle dip of her lower back. 

I felt the subtle tug of her breath as her chest rose, the shift of balance in her spine, even the rhythm of her pulse beating just beneath her collarbone.

And I hadn't even meant to.

This wasn't some deliberate act of voyeurism. It was sensory overload, delivered all at once, like having my hands and thoughts inside her without ever meaning to move. It was immediate, visceral, invasive, and utterly, stupidly intoxicating.

My mouth went dry. My hands stopped moving. My whole body locked up like a machine fed the wrong voltage.

And she—Vasha, completely unaware of the full-blast, 360-degree psychic groping I'd just accidentally performed, was still looking at the datapad, mildly unimpressed. Her breast shifted slightly against my temple as she leaned a fraction closer, completely casual, completely oblivious.

"You going or what?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

I might've whimpered. I'm not sure.

Inside my head, alarm bells were going off. This was bad. This was so bad. I had the entire topographical map of her body burned into my psyche like a cursed architectural blueprint.

The worst part? My mind, accostomed to prcocessing high amount of sensory information cause of the practise I had been doing, didn't forget so easily. Not quickly. Every inch of her stayed in my awareness like an afterimage, flickering at the edge of my concentration, threatening to resurface the second I let my guard drop.

I tried to pull back, rein it in, rebuild the filters—but that kind of fine control required focus, and Vasha's body was still inside the radius. Still warm. Still ridiculously detailed.

Still touching me.

I swallowed, very slowly. "Uh… slight misfire. Might need to recalibrate."

She narrowed her eyes. "Define misfire."

I made the mistake of glancing at her chest—purely out of reflex, purely innocent. My perception flared again. The sensation of her skin under her shirt, the firm weight of her curves, the electric hum of her proximity—bam, all back, in hideous, glorious detail.

I clamped my eyes shut. "I… can't concentrate."

"What's wrong? What happened?"

I took a breath. God, this was so dumb. "Your boob," I blurted. "It's on my head. It's distracting."

She froze.

Silence.

Then that smile happened—slow, mischievous, eyes lighting up like she'd stumbled onto a live wire she really wanted to poke.

"Oh, really?" she said, voice soft and dangerous. "This is distracting?"

Panic hit hard. Abort. Backpedal. Lie, deflect, anything. But she moved before I could even form a response.

Her hand slipped behind my head, fingers sliding into my hair with a softness that made my spine straighten on instinct. Then, casually, she guided my face right back into the danger zone.

Boom.

Heat. Softness. The overwhelming, impossible warmth of her chest against my cheek. Every nerve in my face lit up. Her scent wrapped around me—clean floral soap, hot metal, and something unmistakably her. I couldn't see a thing. Just the subtle press of fabric against skin, and beneath that, all the vivid detail I already knew far too well thanks to the earlier psychic flare.

I made a muffled, desperate sound—somewhere between a protest and a plea. It was probably meant to be her name, but it came out more like, "Vvvshhaaa!"

My arms twitched like they wanted to do something, but it sure wasn't push her away. My whole body had gone into system shock. Heat rushed to my face like someone had dumped fuel on my embarrassment and struck a match.

And she laughed.

Low and warm, chest vibrating softly against my forehead. I felt her amusement. She was enjoying this. Too much.

After what felt like a full hour compressed into five very long seconds, she let go. Her fingers gave my hair a teasing ruffle—like I was some overheating kitten—and she stepped back with a smug, victorious look on her face.

"There," she said, all fake innocence and wicked grin. "All better? Got a clear signal now, sparky?"

I stared at the logic board like it was a lifeline. Took a few deep, sharp breaths. Tried not to think about anything soft, warm, or floral.

That whole incident—boob-on-head, accidental download, and all associated sensory data—went straight into the mental vault labeled DO NOT OPEN. EVER.

Vasha pulled over her crate and dropped onto it with a practiced flop, one brow raised. Her posture said impress me, but her eyes asked, you alive in there, genius?

I nodded stiffly, jaw tight.

Right. Showtime.

Whatever emotional wreckage I was currently crawling out of could wait. I still had a demonstration to deliver. Time to be a professional.

A professional who may or may not have a full-body memory of his best friend's curves baked into his skull like a damn schematic.

No pressure.

I shut my eyes, took a breath, and dove in.

First, Hyper Perception—threading it into the dead motivator like a wire through a busted console. My awareness wrapped around the internal structure, mapping out where the thing had failed. Then I switched to Psychometry, reaching for the emotional residue, the echo of what this hunk of metal had felt in its final moments. 

...

...

A dull throb settled behind my eyes. The usual psychic hangover. I pulled back, blinking the haze away and opening my eyes led me to met her intense gaze.

"Okay," I said, my voice coming out a little breathless. "The main timing crystal is miscalibrated. It's off by a tiny fraction, not enough to flag on a standard diagnostic, but it's causing a cascade failure in the boot-up sequence. Also, there's a weak solder joint on the secondary logic board. It only fails when the unit heats up, which is why it would test fine when it was cold." I leaned in, pointing to a spot on the casing. "And the real killer... there's a microscopic metal shaving, probably from the factory, shorting two contacts on the main processor. It's almost invisible."

Vasha's eyebrow arched. "A metal shaving? Kid, you can't possibly know that."

"I do," I said, holding her gaze.

She stared at me for a long, silent moment, the seasoned mechanic in her warring with the woman who'd seen me repair a droid with 'visions'. With a sigh that sounded suspiciously like a surrender, she grabbed her toolkit. "Fine. But if I take this apart and find nothing, you're on dish duty for a month."

I didn't have to watch her verify my claims step-by-step. I just sat on my stool while she worked, the apartment filled with the soft clicks of her tools. Her initial skepticism slowly melted away as she grunted in surprise, first finding the weak solder, then confirming the miscalibrated crystal with her most sensitive instruments. The final nail in the coffin of her disbelief was when she peered through a magnifier at the processor and let out a string of curses in her native Twi'leki that I didn't need the Force to understand were highly colorful.

She put the motivator back together with a strange, reverent quiet. When she was done, she connected it to power supply, her hand hesitating for a fraction of a second over the activation switch. She took a breath and flipped it.

A clean, steady hum filled the silence. The green indicator light glowed with the warm, happy light of a thing that was working perfectly.

There was a moment of silent that was becoming more and more awkward for me. Say something, would you!?

She slowly sank onto the crate beside her, her tools forgotten in her lap. She wasn't looking at the motivator. She was looking at me.

And the look in her eyes... man. It wasn't just surprise or even awe. It was the kind of look you see on someone who just watched a loth-cat sprout wings and start quoting ancient poetry. A look of profound, universe-breaking confusion that stripped away her tough mechanic exterior and left her looking completely and utterly vulnerable. It was the look of someone whose fundamental understanding of reality had just been shot, stabbed, and then tossed out an airlock.