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The day that Piett ends up as a dragon starts off fairly normal. There’s a successful ground mission to the ice planet of Belmaris that has Veers messaging Piett to bitch about how much he hates cold planets. The investigation of the volcano Force Temple goes well, with no traps sprung and Veers handles the securing of the Flame Essence since no one trusts Vader to do it himself.
However, Anakin decides to investigate the golden crystal upon their return to the Lady and R2, who has vivid memories of the time he and Piett had been swapped bodies, steals it from him and leads the former Sith Lord on a merry chase around the engine room.
[The Blue One has left the engine room, the Lady tells the Dark One, because she also remembers the last time the Dark One had access to an artifact and the Loyal One’s body had been far too limiting in comparison to the body of durasteel she was used to commanding.]
R2 had not, in fact, left the engine room however and comes out of hiding as soon as Anakin leaves.
Which is just in time for Piett to trip over him, touch the artifact in just the wrong way, and start glowing with a silvery light.
When it clears, there is a dragon with scales the same color as the Lady’s walls wound through all of the available space in the engine room.
Piett sneezes a bolt of fire, recoils from it, and very promptly smacks his head against the ceiling.
“Admiral?” Scraps asks hesitantly, which is when Piett realizes that his redheaded security lead is pressed between his wing and the wall.
A good deal of awkward shuffling ensues to tuck the boy under his wing instead. Baldwin shows up to check the alert the Lady has been sending out just as Piett manages to get Scraps laying down against his side.
The Chief Engineer also finds himself very promptly and delicately lifted onto Piett’s back.
He shrugs, clambers over his Admiral’s scaled back, and balances on one of the muscles connecting the wing to the body as he fixes one of the patches where Piett’s transformation damaged the machinery.
“At least it wasn’t a tooka again,” Solo offers as he surveys Piett’s sheer bulk twenty minutes later.
Piett, who is currently:
a ) a dragon,
b) filling the entirety of the engine room,
and
c) currently unable to talk due to being a dragon,
gives him an irritated look and puffs a pointed little jet of fire in his direction.
“Fair point,” the smuggler concedes, having narrowly dodged having his hair set on fire. “I’m going to go get Leia.”
But he only makes it three steps until he’s knocked back by Piett’s tail. Scraps waves at him from beneath Piett’s wing and Solo spots the Chief Engineer sitting against one of Piett’s foreclaws. “Are… are you hoarding people?” he asks incredulously.
Piett studiously doesn’t look at him even as he also nudges the Corellian beneath his wing.
(He is absolutely hoarding people. Solo’s idea of the scope is just… a bit off.)
(Currently, it’s everyone aboard the Executor.)
The lights flicker with the Lady’s amusement.
Piett turns his head away, tucking his head under his wing. Then he nudges Solo into leaning back against the silvery scales of his side.
The smuggler falls asleep against the warm, faintly moving ribs.
Which means he misses a meeting he set up with Leia.
It takes her ten minutes and some help from the Lady to track him down. She stops short in the doorway when she nearly walks into the silvery leather of a massive wing. “What?” she asks, mildly confused.
Then Leia reaches into the Force and finds… Piett’s familiar signature. “Admiral of mine?” she asks.
And a massive head lowers itself to her eye level. One of Piett’s large hazel eyes blinks at her in deliberate slowness.
“Oh Force,” she says faintly. Her distraction is all the opening Piett needs to knock her down next to her lover.
She tries to stand back up and a heavy tail lays itself on top of her legs. “Piett,” she says, “let me up.”
The tail doesn’t move.
“Admiral mine, I have work to do today,” she tries, brushing against his mind. “You know this.”
No. My People. Safe.
Any further argument doesn’t go much better than that.
Veers comes striding into the room half an hour later. “Piett, the Lady’s been flashing your face and this room on my datapad. What’s wrong?”
Then he stops and stares at the large dragon in front of him. “That… would be a problem. That’s you isn’t it Piett?”
He receives a slow blink. Veers steps closer and reaches out with a gloved hand. Piett’s nose nudges into his palm. He skritches along the scales and gets a headbutt to the sternum. “What happened?”
Piett pulls away to give him a look.
“Can’t talk?” the General asks, running a hand further down his friend’s head.
The snout under his hand dips into a nod.
“Lord Vader?” he asks. And then he has to use all of his iron control to bite back laughter at how accurately Piett’s dragon form pulls off Piett's signature annoyed head tilt.
“General!” Leia calls.
“Princess?” he asks, ducking around Piett’s head to find her.
“I didn’t mean come and find me,” she says, exasperated. “Now you’re stuck too.”
“Stuck?” he asks, turning around sharply to scan for a threat.
“Dragons hoard, General,’ she says. “And you are one of the most important people in his life. I hardly think he’s about to let you leave if he won't let Han go.”
He turns to face the door and stops short at the massive hazel eye only inches from his back. “Firmus,” he sighs.
Firmus-the-dragon gives him the best innocent look a dragon can.
(It’s not very good.)
(Dragon faces aren’t built for emoting military blankness or badly hidden mischievousness.)
“Oh, for the Godess’s sake Firmus.” He plants his feet to avoid being pushed back toward the wing the Princess and her smuggler were laying under. “I have trooper drills in an hour, I can’t stay here!”
“He would like me to remind you that the Admiral is capable of canceling drills on his ship if he’d like to General,” Leia says after a moment where Piett stubbornly doesn’t move.
“The Admiral is a karking dragon who can’t talk at the moment!”
Piett makes an indignant little huff as Leia laughs.
“I don’t think that really makes a difference to him, Veers,” Solo calls without opening his eyes.
Veers’s first escape attempt is made three minutes later and is thwarted by Piett dropping his massive head onto Veers’s chest to keep him from leaving.
“You aren’t going to move, are you?” he asks after a long moment of staring up at the amusement-shaded ceiling.
“I should think not,” Leia says. “He seems to think it is revenge for your aid of Henley in his last ‘medical oversight’.”
Solo starts laughing with his face pressed against the cream silk of his Princess’s blouse.
“You were trying to walk out of medical on a leg that was broken in four places!”
Piett huffs and ignores him.
“... Stop laughing at me Solo.”
Of course, because Correlians are contrary creatures by nature, Han Solo only laughs louder.
(In the end, Piett is only persuaded to release his ever growing hoard by sending in Dr. Henley.)
(This works for two reasons:
Because Piett would rather die than admit affection for the Doctor who would likely use it to wrangle him during his next medbay visit
And
Because Henley manages to convince him that it is unhealthy and dangerous for humans to be kept in an engine room, not to mention the lack of food, refreshers, beds, and entertainment.)
(He lets them go reluctantly and mournfully until Luke, who had spent the entire debacle studying the artifact responsible (that he had stealthily summoned from the room while Piett was distracted by an unwitting Veers), managed to reverse the process.)
(Piett refuses to look Scraps or Solo in the eye for days afterwards.)