Crash and Burn

The smell of sour meat was thick in the air, and as much as he wanted the temperatures to go up as the sun continued to rise, for their health and to dry out the strips of game bird laid out over tent cords, Jacen was grateful that the weather didn't listen to him. It was too cold for the smell to really make him feel sick, instead of just taking away his appetite. No breeze blew through to take it away, though, and he knew he'd have to be a lot hungrier before he'd eat much of the dark orange poultry.

The danger of impending death had passed for Anakin. There was also no sign of Welk, and Jacen wondered exactly who Lord Welk was with and how much they knew. Were they busily laying a trap, or was the entire planet the trap? Worse, had they decided to press on with plans so great and seemingly unstoppable that they didn't care what happened to the boys, as it would be rendered moot in a short time?

Anakin walked stiffly across the space Jacen was staring into, towards the center of the campsite. He held a stick over their fire. He'd speared a thick cut of meat with it and let it cook as he slowly turned it over. "You look better," Jacen remarked.

Anakin nodded. "I don't feel as bad now. It still hurts, but I'm walking."

Jacen only smiled and readjusted the cording that he'd tied to two broken stakes. Boredom had already started to set in, and Jacen didn't want another argument. At least for the past few days they'd gotten along, although he didn't want to repeat the reason. Anakin had been fully dependent on Jacen, and Jacen was too busy to think much. They didn't talk, and thus they didn't disagree and start shouting. But now there wasn't as much to do except wait until they could start their move, since Anakin was largely tending to himself.

Jacen's mind kept wandering - to Jaina, once so close to him no matter where they were, now unreadable; to their parents, who might not know what happened and think they were in the clutches of the Stellar Imperium or even dead; last and longest, to Tenel Ka, the Jedi among the younger Knights best suited to wilderness survival, even with the lower part of her left arm missing. She was his closest friend except for Jaina, and Tenel Ka had been more than a friend; she was everything short of his lover.

If he never saw her again, she would move on with her life. She would continue her studies and do what she could to push back the Stellar Imperium; when all was done, she would find another man. Another Jedi, or perhaps a Hapan that she was able to tolerate and whom her mother, Queen Mother Teneniel Djo of the Hapes Consortium, agreed was not as likely or able as most others to turn the palace courtyards into an assassin's playground. He suspected she would be hurt, and would mourn, and then put it behind her. She wasn't one to brood over the past, and he wouldn't want her to. But who, really, would really be troubled by their deaths? Their family, but who else? Jacen couldn't think of many, and far fewer for him than for Anakin even then.

Jacen felt useless, especially stranded as he was. He never knew what to do. Follow the Force - but that was so vague that he didn't always know what the Force was saying, and even that was not as strong as it was. How was he supposed to obey the commands of something that he was having more and more trouble connecting to at all? All he could do was look at his track record; when he followed his head, they got into trouble, and when he pressed forward with hawkbat-brained ideas, it was better. Easy enough to see, but he couldn't stop thinking and just run on impulse. That was how people fell to the Dark Side, wasn't it?

Day by day, he thought to himself. None of this matters if we don't see tomorrow.

Anakin finished roasting his dinner and pulled it away from the fire to let it cool. He walked, still with an awkward gait that put most of his weight on his right leg, over to Jacen's strung cords and sat down. "What did you find on the troopers?" he asked.

"Not much," Jacen replied, and waved his hand at the small pile of treasure that he'd scavenged from the remains of the twenty-four dead troopers. "Another knife, one working blaster, two power packs, and Welk's cloak and wrist chrono. I don't trust it not to have some kind of transmitter in it, though, so maybe we should take it apart and rebuild it. And I found the troop leader's boots. They pinch my toes together too much, but I think they'd fit you." He pushed the pair across the dirt in front of Anakin.

Anakin leaned forward and pried off his boots. Jacen tried to help him, but the look Anakin gave him could have frozen a lake into a skating circle, so he stopped interfering as Anakin struggled to twist into the right positions. Finally, the boots came off, and Anakin let his feet air out for a few minutes, which made Jacen retreat closer to the jerky strips. Finally the younger man grabbed the shorter boot, which was singed at the top, and stuffed his left foot into it. He laced the black shoe tightly up past his ankle, and put on the other.

He looked at them uncertainly before trying to get up. Their black, minimally flexible surfaces hid a layer of armorsteel and lead plating inside, with shallow armorsteel cleats on the bottom, the cleats matching the pattern of small cuts on his back, face, forearms, and the inner part of his left thigh. Anakin was very lucky that the original wearer had missed a little bit when aiming between his legs and that she ended up striking him with the metal-weighted toe. Still, despite her off-kilter timing, these were the weapons that almost killed him.

"You survived, Anakin," Jacen said. "You earned the right to wear them."

Anakin grinned and climbed slowly to a standing position, then took a few careful steps. The heavy boots felt cumbersome despite their lack of expected bulk, weighing over five kilograms apiece. "These would make a person's legs strong, that's for sure," he said. "That woman must have had these boots for a few years. Or ones like them, since these look new."

"Massive calves and quads," Jacen agreed. "That's why she kept kicking you and didn't fight as much with her fists - her strength and weaponry was in her lower body. The Stellar Imperium knows what it's doing with equipment and training."

"We've seen that... but then, the New Republic knows what it's doing, too."

Jacen raised an eyebrow. "That I'm not so sure of. It's pretty badly organized sometimes. Mom complained about it to Dad sometimes, and I know you heard her."

"Then we're going home to help out, at least on the Jedi end of things," said Anakin. He retrieved his dinner and started eating, and made a face as he chewed and swallowed a small piece. "Was this all you could find? Nothing that doesn't taste and feel like rotten burned rubber?"

"Leaves, a few more nuts, but nothing with enough protein and iron to keep our strength up. Especially since you lost so much blood." Jacen sighed and took a tiny bit of the thinnest, dryest slice he could find and tried not to make a face as he forced it down.

They used Welk's cloak as a blanket that night, stretching it over both of them as they huddled together. Finally a light breeze began to kick up, but at night was a bad time for it, and Jacen's fingers began to get numb. He curled up as tightly as he could under the cloak, and found that it only made matters worse, so he pressed himself to Anakin's back and warmed his hands between the two of them.

"It's a good thing we're both guys," Anakin said sleepily, "because if we weren't, and we were on Yavin 4, Tionne would be yelling at us."

We're not on Yavin 4 and Tionne isn't here, Jacen thought, but he only murmured agreement and wrapped the cloak more tightly around them. And he liked being so near to Anakin - not in any sexual way, the way he might feel about being alone with Tenel Ka or even to an extent Alema, but it was a comforting feeling. He wasn't alone and that every slight movement, even a breath, gave him that evidence. While the jagged rocks chilled any skin that came into contact with them, Anakin was warm and smooth, even through the rags of his blue shirt.

Jacen wrapped his arms around Anakin and held him closer. He noticed that his younger brother's ribs, which had always been faintly visible if Anakin went around without a shirt, were even more prominent than usual. He could feel them through the ripped fabric; probably from water loss, since it hadn't been long enough for starvation to really hit either of them. Jacen ran his hands up and down the ridges, skipping over the bottom left side and finally settling on Anakin's muscled waistline. Jacen's hands could span from one side to the other, but just barely.

"Jacen?"

"Huh, what?" Jacen immediately slackened his arms and let them fall loosely, one limply on the ground under Anakin and the other draped over him.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Just making sure that we're not going to freeze." Jacen yawned. "You're getting thin, and that's not going to be good when we have to settle in for winter."

Anakin snorted, but leaned back and laid his left arm over Jacen's, then intertwined their fingers against his stomach. "Don't get frostbite," he whispered.

In the morning Jacen untwisted himself from Anakin and started packing up the campsite. He wrapped the frozen, half-dried meat in a cloth scrap and hoped that would be good enough to keep it from spoiling. He also tried to arrange everything into a single package that he could strap to his back, but wasn't sure that the cords were strong enough to keep everything secured. The walkers, if he could have convinced them to be load-bearers, had already gone south, and there wasn't any time to try to build a wooden wheelbarrow with only a lightsaber and pair of knives.

"I guess there's no reason to come back here," he said, and stared at the blackened circle where their pod used to stand. "We'll go to the stream and follow it as far as we can every day. If we have to leave the stream, we only go for two days and then turn around if there's no other water source."

"Ice or snow would be enough," Anakin said. He held his washed flight jacket over the fire and periodically touched it to see if it was dry enough to wear. "We could melt it."

"If you see any, then let me know, but right now there's nothing except the stream, and it's already started to freeze over."

Jacen finished gathering all their supplies, a good seventy kilos worth, but Anakin took about half of it and started tying it up into a smaller pack with a length of cord. "I'm carrying everything for the first few days," Jacen said. "It's going to be hard enough for you just to walk the distance we need to go."

"I'm fine," Anakin said. "I'm as strong as you are and you don't need to be carrying everything yourself. I'll do my share."

"It's not a matter of you doing your share. As someone close to me once said, it takes less time and energy to be cautious than to deal with the consequences of not being cautious."

"Tenel Ka said that. And she's not wrong, but I'm not a baby and I'm not a cripple, so I'm carrying half of our stuff."

"We'll see how long that lasts," Jacen said. "You've got about thirty-five kilograms to carry over many kilometers. And don't... never mind."

"Don't what? Don't levitate it? If it's that necessary to get near the equator before we freeze to death, then isn't that kind of unimportant?"

"It's never unimportant not to overuse and misuse the Force! But... I'm not going to judge you for it. You know your limits and if you start to slide into doing stuff that you really shouldn't then I'll catch you."

"Jacen, you promised you weren't going to do this anymore. You told me that we were in a bad situation and had to do everything we could short of actually hurting others to stay safe and get out. Now you're going to go back on it?"

Jacen put his hands on Anakin's shoulders and squeezed them hard. He stared right into his eyes and wouldn't shift his gaze. Anakin was the first to break eye contact, and he found a point somewhere on the ground to look at. "I'm not going back on anything," Jacen said. "If there's danger, and we need the Force to get out of it, then I'll use it."

Anakin met Jacen's stare again. "And you don't think that we're in danger now?"

"Well, I..." Jacen sighed, as though deflating. "You're right, but it's not really going to make me much faster if I do levitate the pack."

"Jacen!"

"All right, but for the first day, I'm doing it my way. Yours tomorrow."

They walked down their hill, and Jacen glanced back over his shoulder one last time at it. A part of him didn't want to leave; he had no idea where they were headed, and it was his guess that there would be a lot more wildlife there. They got lucky with the starving walkers deciding not to eat them after all; luck alone, even if they were the sons of Han Solo, might not get them out next time.

Then he shivered, and started looking ahead, waiting for the subtle marring of the partially frozen dirt that marked where they would find the stream. He and Anakin were both slowed down, Anakin by his still-healing injuries and Jacen by the load on his back, but they found the brook quickly and then followed it along its southeastern route.

Jacen fell a little bit behind, and his shoulders and back were straining. He was strong, but not used to carrying a full water keg. After an hour he took it down and dumped it out, saying that they could fill it later and didn't need it if they were so close to a water source. Anakin only blinked at him and shook his head, then continued along the path as Jacen raced to catch up.

Another two hours and he found himself unconsciously calling on the Force to help him balance the load, and to take just a little of the weight off. Suddenly, the entire pack seemed to float, barely connected to his body.

"Quit insisting on always doing things the hard way," Anakin said, then held out his hand and carefully lowered Jacen's backpack system until it was affected normally by gravity. "Don't make this any tougher than it has to be. You'll get stronger just from the walking and other work we're doing; you don't have to use this as a workout and you don't have to prove that you don't need the Force."

Jacen finally nodded, then concentrated on floating everything behind him. He felt like the gravitational effects of the planet on himself had just lowered, and he walked with more energy in his longer steps. "Race to the big tree?" Anakin proposed, pointing ahead to a particularly thick tree trunk that stood about five hundred meters ahead.

"Let's not," Jacen said.

"Come on!"

"I don't want to drop anything. Look, we're going to have plenty of time to play games. We don't know; maybe once we get to wherever we're going, the weather will be nice and warm and it'll be like a long vacation. But until we do get there, I'd like to focus on the journey and not do something dumb that could get one of us hurt."

Anakin rolled his eyes, but that was the end of it, especially when Jacen walked faster to pass him and elbowed him gently on his left side. Anakin was able to tolerate clothing over his bruises and burns and even light pressure, but not something striking him, and he yelped and pulled away. Jacen gave him a quick hug, to show that he meant no ill will, but only to remind Anakin that this wasn't the time for unnecessary antics.

They were only able to travel twenty kilometers that day, give or take two. Jacen wasn't pleased with that progress and had been hoping they'd average fifty to sixty, but Anakin couldn't go any farther - even though he insisted that he could and certainly tried until Jacen threw down his pack and refused to budge. They'd just have to make up for it later.

I wish I didn't have to be the leader, thought Jacen, because I really don't know what I'm doing. He wanted guidance from someone, anyone - Uncle Luke, his mother, even his father who had no experience with the Force other than what he could observe, the lone person in the immediate family who didn't have some form of those powers. He was beginningto feel like a lost little boy - and he was lost, but should have been able to handle the situation. He was a Jedi Knight; how could he have let things go so badly?

"What's the matter with you?" Anakin asked. He had already started to set up another primitive camp, setting up a circle of loose rocks.

"Nothing," Jacen said. "Just missing people, that's all."

"Me, too. But at least you're not all alone, right?"

"Right. And there's no way we're going to get separated."

"Not even when you send me out to get firewood? Because I know you're going to ask."

"That's fifty meters and doesn't count," Jacen said, and tossed his lightsaber to Anakin as he chuckled.

The first day of the long trek was over, and many dozen more lay ahead of them. Jacen hoped they'd make it alive and as healthy as they could, and that was all he dared hope for; he was already beginning to entertain the idea of finding an abandoned military outpost or something else that would allow them to put out a distress call, and didn't want to risk that great of disappointment when it didn't happen.

The stars were bright, with little cloud cover to block their light, and Jacen wondered which ones, if any, were systems he knew. If anyone out there was looking for them, or if they were really on their own.