Crash and Burn

Jacen trudged through a pile of writhing water weeds as he made his way to the end of the long cavern, at an unknown time in an unknown day. He only turned on the wrist chrono when he actually wanted to check the time and date now, because it was running low on power and couldn't recharge its power cell from sunlight. They had been traveling for eight weeks, and although the path was slow, he couldn't help but think that it was faster and safer than climbing overland and they should be getting near to the end. He hoped they were, at least.

He kicked away a weed that wrapped around his ankle, and kept moving. Water weeds were carnivorous, and although the few that managed to dig into his skin the first time he encountered them were too small to do much more than bite out tiny chunks of his calf with their Tralusian flytrap teeth, he knew not to let a pile of larger ones smell his blood. His hip wounds had finally healed, although they wouldn't close in the wet environment until Anakin passed the lightsaber blade over the long scratches to seal them.

Jacen had even more respect for Anakin and his earlier ordeal after that taste of agony, and he didn't want to cauterize a relatively small cut, but the upshot was that he had to walk quickly or else the weeds would surround him and tear him apart. He was almost glad to get into the deeper waters in the center of this unusually large cavern, where the weeds couldn't reach him.

"We've got another passageway to get through," Anakin said. "Does this ever end?"

"Eventually," Jacen said, but he was beginning to wonder. Were they just going around in circles? No, because the stormfins have to end up somewhere for safety and get back to their starting place after a time, but I don't really know what much about their life cycle. Can they mate, lay eggs upstream, then travel downstream and leave the eggs behind to hatch the next generation?

All he wanted to do now was get out of the darkness. He was surprised that neither of them were hosting parasites - none that they knew of, at any rate. They'd been in warm dampness for over a month and a half, going on two months, yet hadn't had any serious infections or digestive problems, once they got used to the new diet. Still, they both smelled like the river, which wasn't pleasant - a bit fishy, a bit like mildew, a bit metallic. The metallic taste in their mouths grew worse, and when Anakin complained of it too, Jacen held up the lightsaber to take a better look at Anakin's gums. They were starting to bleed, and Jacen guessed his were too. They hadn't had a nutritionally complete meal in three months.

At least it's getting a little easier to get through these tunnels, Jacen thought. He estimated that he'd lost about seven kilograms and Anakin perhaps ten. They caught fish that they knew to be oily and heavy, and were learning to eat it with less preparation time, which slowed down their wasting, but they were still getting bony.

Jacen felt it when he threw his arms around Anakin; hipbones, bars for ribs, a waist needing new holes punched in his belt. At least Anakin's return grip was still strong. "Anakin," Jacen said, "do you know what today is?"

"No," Anakin said. "You've been hogging the chrono."

"Eighth month of the twenty-eighth year following the battle of Yavin," Jacen said teasingly. "Of course, that's Galactic Standard, and doesn't mean much here..."

"Give me that!" Anakin grabbed Jacen's hand and pulled the chrono in front of him, then pressed the side button that turned it on. "Twenty-second day!"

"Happy birthday, Anakin." Little Anakin was eighteen years old now, finally, after three harrowing months when they weren't sure that either one was going to make it. Confidence had built up recently, though so had weariness, and Jacen took a moment to remember how good it really was to be alive. Even if it would have been better if they were home, with their parents and Jaina and their friends, and a blazing rum cake slathered in sucre whip.

Anakin grinned and splashed Jacen, then swam out towards the perimeter of the cavern as fast as he could. Jacen chased after him, and caught him with an even bigger splash that sent murky water all over Anakin's hair and face. Anakin stood in the waist-high water and put his hands up in mock protection of his face, and in one smooth motion Jacen had him pinned up against the wall.

"Don't get cocky," Jacen said playfully, then let him go. Anakin then moved so slowly that for a moment Jacen was worried that he'd accidentally hurt him. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing." This came in the tone of voice reserved for the nothings that were quite something. "I just... I... Are we ever going to get home?"

"Of course we are. There will be a way. Somebody is going to come looking for us. Either the Stellar Imperium is waiting to put down other trouble and they'll be on their way when they can come back, or someone in the New Republic is going to get the information on where we are and come out to find us. One way or another, someone is coming in a ship and we'll be able to leave."

"What if whoever comes can't find us? Like now."

"Uncle Luke wouldn't let a search mission go on without a Jedi who would know where we are."

Anakin shook his head and leaned against the wall. "You're not getting it, are you. I can't feel much of anything anymore. The Force is here, and I can use it, but when I look out to find other people - there's nothing. Not even a little tiny spark. I used to be able to know that Mom and Uncle Luke were alive - but I don't even know that anymore."

He didn't say the rest of what he was thinking, but Jacen didn't need to hear the "I'm scared" to know that was what was meant. "Dad got out of carbonite," Jacen pointed out. "We're going to get out, and we're going to go home. I don't know when that's going to be but it will happen - if we keep on working towards it. Now let's go on and see where the end tunnel goes to."

Anakin pulled himself out of his brief funk, or at least appeared to, and Jacen felt a slight tug on his mind when it was time to swim through the passage, a you're not alone. They made it through without any special trouble, though, and emerged on the other side - another of a long string of such caverns, some traversible by tunnel, others by short weathered falls.

Jacen avoided the bubbles of gas coming up from one particular spot - heat vents - and swam out further. At first, he thought that his senses were being thrown off, but the further out he went, the more he knew that the water really was getting colder as he paddled away from the vents. "We're almost to the end of the river!" he cried. "At least, I think we are!"

The waters tumbled gently down a rocky slope and curved off to the right. Jacen hurried to the bend, and to his surprise, he saw the walls brightening, as though there was another light source than the luminescent mushrooms and other fungal growths in the chambers. Whatever it was, it was small, but he was sure it was the end of the tunnel...

A freezing breeze stole his breath for a moment and left him shivering. He continued on, then climbed up to a dry place and continued to make his way towards the light without getting into the cold waters. Fifty meters ahead, the churning river stopped moving, and they halted where they were, clinging to the rocks and shivering, waiting to dry off so that their clothes wouldn't freeze to their bodies and leach out more heat.

"Maybe we sh-should stay where we are," Anakin said. His teeth chattered as he spoke. "It's too c-cold out there for us."

"We're still going to have to go out for food," Jacen pointed out. "There aren't as m-many fish now as there used to be. They're all heading out to, to wherever the r-river goes to. And it might still be liquid under the ice layer."

"Then we'll stay where it's warmer and just go out for food. We don't need to freeze to death."

They ended up spending the rest of the night in the cavern - Jacen saw the light slowly dim and then go out completely, but their clothes still weren't dry. It was morning before they tried to go on, arms and legs all shaking from having clung to the rock face for so many hours. Jacen didn't dare go down into the cold water now, and he just wanted to rest, rest his legs on something, even if it was ice. He wrapped Welk's cloak around himself and kept going, slowly, until he reached the ice and passed the first several meters, where it was thin. The thicker ice beyond easily supported him and he stood there, hands stuffed into his pockets, and concentrated hard on floating the cloak over to Anakin. Anakin caught it and wore it as he made the final stretch of his lateral climb before joining Jacen on the ice sheet.

"The opening is pretty small," Anakin said. He folded himself deeper into the cloak and pointed forward without uncovering his hand. "It's big enough that we'll get through okay, and we have your lightsaber if we needed to cut the hole bigger, but I'd say the ice is frozen two meters deep at the end.

"Only about one meter, and not frozen beneath that." Jacen sighed. "And if there's more water coming in behind us, it's only going to freeze higher. No way to go but forward unless we want to cut our way out."

Anakin gave a half-hearted smile and nodded. "Whatever you say, Captain."

"What? Am I wrong?"

"No, you're right, and we need to move on - I just wish we didn't have to. It was comfortable back there."

"As comfortable as sitting in a dirty pond," snapped Jacen. "And we were going to run out of fish. It would not have been better for us to stay a few caverns back; what if the water freezes so much that no more can flow out, like the ice going all the way to the floor, and it would back up and drown us?"

"Ease up, Jacen, I'm not accusing you of anything." Anakin pulled the hood of the cloak as far over his head as he could, to shield his face from the winds and his eyes from the lights that got brighter and more glaring, trying to burn his eyes out of their sockets. He took a tentative step over the ice and let the cleats of his boots cut into it. The cutting motion was made easier by the heat of friction, all of Anakin's weight bearing down on a small metal surface area. He walked easily in them, more easily than he would have been walking if he still had on the rubbery boots he brought with him from the Silent Runner.

Jacen had a trickier time of it; he wasn't shrouded in a cloak that tended to billow up and get caught around his legs, but the cold cut through his shirts with sharper stabs and the bottoms of his boots were only slick rubber that offered minimal traction. He climbed up and slid through the small space between the ice and the rock around him, but before his heart could really start to race, he squeezed through and found himself sliding over a solid, smooth plane of white-green ice. Anakin followed and stood beside him, and they shared the cloak, huddled inside of it.

"We're going to have to find shelter," Anakin gasped. Jacen had to agree; the sun was right overhead and they were still chilled to the bone. They'd made it as close to the equator as was reasonably possible - the last few hundred kilometers weren't going to make much of a difference - and still found themselves desperate for warmth. Jacen looked longingly to the string of caverns - inside, he had wanted out, but now that he was out, he wished he could climb back in and stay there, with the darkness and the bad smells, but knowing he wouldn't turn to ice himself.

"You see anything?" Jacen looked around, but all he saw was a frozen wasteland, smooth, stripped of trees, if there were any. All that was left was an expanse of ice and the mountains rising up behind them.

"Mountains. Ice. We could make a hut out of ice blocks," Anakin said. "It would keep us out of the wind, at least, and ice reflects heat back a bit."

Jacen found a relatively smooth place two meters up on the mountain, at least big enough that they could set up a hut, and they quickly got to work cutting ice. Jacen warmed himself with the Force as well as he could, knowing that was just a temporary solution, and he used his lightsaber to cut thick ice blocks from the frozen river. Anakin piled them, and every so often Jacen climbed up to pass his lightsaber near the staggered bricks at a distance just enough to keep from completely melting the ice; he just wanted the bricks to melt into each other and refreeze as a solid shell.

By the end of the day, when the sun began to set and the frigid air became even more dangerous, they were done; the hut was shaped like a square with a top like a hollow hemisphere, and had a tiny door that they could push in or out and then seal back up. They lay down on the rocks, once more pressed tightly together, with the cloak draped over them.

"It's going to get even worse than this, won't it?" Anakin asked.

"I think so," admitted Jacen. "I timed how long it took the sun to get from the top of the sky to the horizon line, and I think we have another month or maybe month and a half of worse. Then we'll be at the coldest point of the winter and the planet's orbit will bring it a little closer to the sun again, and things will begin to warm up."

Anakin groaned. "Too bad we can't hibernate."

"Actually, one of us could, if the other stays awake. And that might not be a bad idea; you stay here and go into a hibernation trance so you can use your energy for staying warm. I'll hunt and wake you up to eat. We'll need food - heck, something has to be alive around here. Maybe everything else is hibernating too, and when I'm more focused I'll be able to find it."

"And bring back the pelts," Anakin said, his voice so thick with sleepiness that Jacen suspected it was fake.

"That - that too."

Because if I don't, we die. Using the Force to save oneself is the the way of the Dark Side - not in mere defense, but in aggression. I'm going to have to do that to animals, and then it's a small step to sentients, isn't it? But it's not just for me; it's for him, too.

Jacen held out his wrist and activated the chrono. Little green lights illuminated the inside of their hut, and he could see the outline of Anakin's face. The boy - man - looked like he was sleeping soundly, but Jacen knew better; there was something just a little off about the timing of his breaths.

"I know you're watching me," Anakin said.

"So what if I am?"

"Well, I was hoping you'd be going to sleep soon, and I thought if you thought I was asleep you'd go under faster."

"What are you talking about? Why do you want to be awake while I'm asleep?"

"Because I can't kick you out of the hut at this hour," Anakin said in a strained voice. "It's not you, but my mind wandered, when you - when I lay down, and I was trying to get warm, I thought about Tahiri, and, um, it worked."

"That was smart of you," Jacen said, then realized what was meant. "Anakin, this isn't really a good time for you to put your hands down your trousers."

"I'm not sending you out. I just want you to go to sleep."

Jacen gave an exasperated sigh, then closed his eyes and lay down on the cold ground. He stretched the cloak out and lay curled up on one end of it so that Anakin could cover himself with the other end. He focused on regulating his heart rate and breath speed, slowly dropping both so he could drift off. One...two, one... two, one... two.

After a few minutes he heard Anakin shift around. A zipper was unfastened, and a few snap-style buttons popped. Caught between admitting he wasn't sleeping yet and frustrating Anakin further, or keeping the illusion and risk being caught awake, he chose to keep the illusion up. One... two, one...two.

It was harder to control the rhythm of his breathing when Anakin's was alternating between slow and fast with no discernible pattern. Jacen heard him spit, probably into his hand, and then there was the sound of skin rubbing wetly against skin. Anakin tugged at the cloak and draped it over his shoulders with one hand as he rose into a sitting position.

The Force was stirring around them, and Jacen closed himself off from it as carefully and unobtrusively as he could. He felt the fine hairs on his neck stand up, and goosebumps covered his arms - not just from the cold. The tension in the air thickened with each of Anakin's sighs, and for a moment Jacen felt like he was being thrown out, in a sense. Anakin's thoughts were surely of Tahiri, not Jacen, and in that he found himself... jealous? No, that couldn't be the right word; they both loved Anakin and were loved by him, but differently.

Jacen realized too late that he'd been holding his breath, interrupting his steady count. Anakin, however, continued on, lost in his own trance world, where in some ephemeral form someone else had come to join him and take him to pleasure and through the other side, back to reality. Jacen was only there as a visitor, and he noted uncomfortably that he really didn't want to intrude on Anakin's private moment, but it was too late to remove himself from it.

Anakin's sighing escalated into low moaning, and Jacen felt the light swish-swish of the cloak moving back and forth with every stroke. He willed his own hands to stay still, but there was so much energy in their small space that Jacen felt a flush start to climb up his neck and shoot sparks down his chest and into his belly.

Anakin suddenly cried out, groaning something that Jacen couldn't quite understand and might not have been standard Basic anyway. For a moment he thought he heard his name, and instinctively he sat up and put his hands on Anakin's shoulders. "What? Are you all-" Jacen cut himself off then, and scooted back as Anakin shrunk away from him.

"You weren't supposed to be awake," Anakin whimpered.

"Hey." Jacen gently took him by the shoulders again. "It's all right. Come here."

Anakin hesitantly turned around, then dropped into Jacen's waiting embrace. His hands started at the top of Jacen's back and then crept down slowly, then back up, and while they made their second pass his lips found Jacen's chin. Jacen's mouth met his before either had much time to think about it, and they held each other lightly in the darkness, passing gentle kisses back and forth. Jacen felt the dying sparks sitting inside him explode through his groin and he resisted the urge to straddle Anakin and let his body guide the next steps.

Jacen slid his face past Anakin's and pulled him closer, with one hand on the back of his neck. "Anakin, we have to stop."

"No, we don't," Anakin breathed. "Nobody's here, Jacen. Nobody's watching."

"You love Tahiri. I love Tenel Ka. And we'll see them again, maybe soon."

"Jacen-"

"Don't make this any harder on me than it is. Please. I don't want to tell you no, but there's a line we can't cross, and we can't keep moving it, either. This... this isn't natural."

"I know. I know. Jacen, I'm sorry, I-"

"Don't be sorry. Shh." Jacen placed his finger over Anakin's lips and guided him back to the ground, and once they both halfheartedly dissipated their excess energy into the Force only through their minds, they found rest.