This story is based around a TIE fighter pilot from
Star Wars
. I have tried to keep the nerdiness to a minimum and you don't have to like - or even know - anything about
Star Wars
to enjoy it. I hope!
This story contains gay sex, although not a great deal of it, I must admit. It also doesn't really have a happy ending.
If you want a quick stroke story, or one with oodles of sex in it or, at least, a beautiful love story where the protagonists live happily ever after, I recommend you click off this story and look elsewhere and I thank you for your time.
And so, with that over:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
* * * * *
I'm going to die.
The realisation first hit me like a turbolaser blast, almost making me cry. Not that crying was going to do anything; just waste more precious oxygen and speed up my impending end.
That was earlier. Before I accepted what was coming.
It's a strange thing about dying - especially when you know it's coming. We're all going to die, of course. Some species in the galaxy have lifetimes a dozen times longer than humans, maybe more. But death comes to us all in the end.
You do everything you can to avoid it. Do the right things. Exercise in the right way. Eat all the right foods. Sleep well. Don't play with the traffic in the hyperspace lanes. But in the end, you will cease to be and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it.
And, when you accept that your death is not only inevitable, but imminent, it does strange things to your mind. There's the initial denial, of course, followed by anger and grief and sadness. But, ultimately, you come to a kind of peace with it.
Which is where I am now. I am going to die. And there is fuck all I can do about it.
At least I'll die where I'm happiest; in the cockpit of my TIE/In Space Superiority Starfighter (ooh, fancy!)
It's a bullshit name, of course. Don't get me wrong; the TIE is superior to most ships that the so-called Rebel Alliance have got, even those damned X-wings. But it's built from parts discarded as being unusable in a half-decent ship and is - basically - a flying death trap.
With no shields, wings as flimsy as cardboard and a power system that has a tendency to overload and explode if you push it even a little too much, it's cheap for a reason. But that's why the Empire love them. A decent factory can push out TIE's at a rate of a dozen an hour; each one a little ball of flying death. And, cheap and flimsy and poorly put together as it is, I love it too.
I've flown this particular TIE for over a year now and it is as familiar to me as my own body. Some pilots like to modify their ships and spend hours when they're not on duty tweaking this and that and tinkering with things best left alone.
Many of those pilots are dead. A tweak done badly can fail at the worst moment and, before you know it, your stabiliser has folded like a paper cup and you're spinning out of control into the nearest piece of debris; ending your life in a pretty little fireball.
Or they get shoved into a stock fighter for some reason, forget, push the controls that little too far and die not even knowing what went wrong because the new Ion control unit they've installed in their other fighter is much newer than the cast-off piece of shit in this one and it gives out, short-circuiting the power modulator and sending it into an acceleration loop until the engines blow themselves up in a much prettier little fireball.
I've not changed my fighter at all and, only now - at the end - do I regret that decision. TIE interiors are boring as hell. Compact. Functional. About as exciting as having a tooth extracted. And dull, dull, dull.
No. I won't look at that. Look forwards. That was always the best bit. Seeing the blanket of white stars on the velvety blackness of space. Space is beautiful, really. And as a last view? Well, there are a lot worse!
* * * * *
I joined the Imperial Training Centre on Carida when I turned thirteen. My name is Maraz Jaxxon and I had grown up on Chandrilla, the son of a minor noble who made his money in wine and spent his money on women. My mother had died when I was still a tiny child; I have few memories of her. She seemed happy enough although, learning as I did how my father was a womanising arsehole I wonder whether this was an act.
I didn't get the chance to ask her. She was killed in a "speeder accident"; an explanation I accepted until I was about fifteen when I came to the realisation that if my father hadn't actually killed my mother he had had more to do with it than the official story told.
By this time, I was well on my way to joining the Imperial Navy and was on a path that would lead me to being some kind of bridge officer; probably a navigator - my skills lent themselves to that sort of position. I dismissed my father's poor attempt to get in touch with me and threw myself into my studies. I excelled and I heard that I was soon to be pressed into the Officer Training Program in a new facility run by the Kuat Drive Yards where the best of the best learned all there was to know about how to run a Star Destroyer.
But I wanted to fly. Ever since I had seen a squadron of TIE's go over a passing-out parade on Carida a few months after I arrived, I had been obsessed with them. Through sheer persistence - and the fact that a number of promising candidates had betrayed the Empire and fled to the Rebel Alliance - I got my chance to take part in TIE simulation exercises just before my sixteenth birthday.
I had natural skill and decent reflexes and I was soon at the top of my class. I would soon be given the chance to take control of my own fighter; I was just a step away from my dream.
And then that stupid bitch, Mon Mothma, almost fucking ruined it for me. She want all crazy and started making a whole raft of unfounded allegations against our beloved Emperor. She even blamed him for a riot on the planet of Ghorman, completely ignoring the rioters and blaming the Imperial security forces for being forced to put it down.
And then she gave that speech - you know the one - where she declared herself as being against the Empire. Some say that was the start of the Rebel Alliance. I don't know. Maybe they're right. All I know is that, as a Chandrillan, I was regarded as guilty by association.
I was dragged out of my bunk in the middle of the night and taken to an interrogation suite. Over hours and hours I was asked questions about my loyalty to the Empire and what I thought of Mon Mothma and how likely I was to run away and join the Rebellion.
But my faith in the Emperor has never wavered and my loyalty to him knows no bounds and soon it became clear - even to my biggest detractors - that I was a true fanatic to the cause. I was released without charge and returned to my barracks. Several people from my planet were also released - many with warnings - and many more were never released at all. Traitors.
This incident didn't set me back too much and, only a few months later than I had hoped, I first stepped into my first TIE/In. It was like falling in love. I was smitten from the first. I took that ship on a test flight and it could not have gone better.
Within weeks I had undergone my own passing-out parade and was assigned to the
Death's Head
, the newest Star Destroyer in the fleet at the time, barracked up with many other pilots and, whilst I was still - technically - a trainee, I was welcomed on board by my colleagues and I have never looked back.
I finally threw away my trainee status within days of my arrival on the
Death's Head
when we were involved in a minor skirmish near Bimmisaari with a group of Rebel pilots in their Y-wings. TIE's are much quicker and have a much smaller turning circle than Y-wings, which are old and should be retired, but there were a large number of them.
I got my first kill when I dropped in behind one of the Y-wings and took out his starboard engine. Even though Y-wings have shields, they aren't designed to hold off the kind of battering my turbolasers were giving them and they flared out followed, moments later, by the engine. Moments after that, something went funny inside the Y-wing as various systems overloaded and it blew up right in front of me.
"Nice shooting, rookie," came a voice through my comlink. It belonged to my group leader, Group Commander, Corran Farr, a man whom I knew by name but nothing more. I had never met him face to face, only briefly in the hangar when he was already dressed in his flight suit with his helmet on.
"Thank you, sir," I responded and I intended to say more when another Y-wing appeared almost right in front of me, spinning to try and escape from a TIE fighter behind it. Instinctively, I pressed the firing button as I roared off behind this new target and, moments later, it too exploded.
"That was mine," came Farr's voice again.
"You snooze, you lose, sir," I responded with a typical Chandrillan retort.
"Whatever, rookie," Farr replied. "But when we get home, I'm claiming that one."
"Over my dead body, sir," I laughed back.
"That can be arranged," Farr said, but I could hear in his voice that he was only joking. At least, I
hoped
that was what I could hear!
The rest of the skirmish went about as well as could have been expected. The Y-wings may have outnumbered us, but we were faster, more manoeuvrable and had a greater determination to survive. The Emperor used to say that TIE pilots were so good because of the lack of shields on their ships meaning that we had to be braver. I don't know if that's true, since I've never flown a ship with shields, but whatever the reason, the entire group was destroyed for the loss of only two of our own.
I got another kill towards the end of the battle and returned home to the
Death's Head
as a hero and, more importantly, no longer considered as a rookie.
Once the Deck Officer had, finally, finished with our debriefing, we were released to the showers. All of us, that is, except for Commander Farr, who got called over to discuss some minor infringement or other or... I don't know. Whatever it was, I didn't care.
I went off to the showers and stripped down and got cleaned up. It doesn't matter what sex you are, all TIE pilots shower together and I have seen more tits and pussy and cocks than you've had hot dinners. It's odd but, when you're showering together, sex is the last thing on your mind. Or at least, it's the last thing on my mind. I just want to clean the grime and sweat off me.
The inside of a TIE fighter has no life support system (another expense the Empire can do without, thank you very much), so you have to wear a full flight suit or - frankly - you'll die. The upside of this is that the flight helmets have lots of useful information scrolling across in front of you on a see-through HUD that might, just, help keep you alive. The downside is that you sweat like a fucking Hutt in the midday suns on Tatooine and you fucking
stink
when you get out.
I finished the shower and began to towel off. I love the showers. I love the feeling of the water as it cascades down on me, tiny drops hitting my skin like a million tiny needles. I enjoy them so much that I always take too long in there, but I don't care. It's a rare moment of complete freedom that isn't ruined by the stench of my own sweat in my flight suit, so fucking sue me if I like to indulge every so often.
As usual I had been in the shower longer than anyone else and, not long after I got out of the showers the rest of my flight had exited the locker room. I finished with the towel and grabbed my boxer shorts from my locker. When on duty, you have to wear your flight suit, which is not pleasant after a few hours although at least, unlike a Stormtrooper, you don't
have
to wear your flight helmet unless you're actually in your TIE. But when off duty, you can wear simple, nondescript clothing that isn't technically allowed by regulation but since everyone does it, no-one says anything. I've seen everyone in skivvies - I even saw a Grand Admiral dressed in them once - so no-one is going to reprimand me.
