Crash and Burn

Crack! Pop! From somewhere in the distance, echoing between the mountain ranges, came a sound like a high-powered slugthrower expelling a round of ammunition. Jacen raised his head and slowly stood up - it wasn't an easy task, not these days, when the process of planting his hands on the cave floor and pushing himself upright was even more painful than reclining on the inadequate padding of the fur rug beneath him.

No Imperial troopers worth their salt would be carrying slugthrowers. He didn't know of any active New Republic detachments that used them, either, and he was sure there weren't any sport hunters on the planet.

He stuck his head out of the cave, and when the chilled wind struck him, he noticed that the air was not just a cold gust, but one that stung, with tiny bits of snow and ice that had melted and re-frozen.

"Anakin," he said, and gently shook him awake. "The ice is breaking up."

Anakin rubbed his weary eyes, clear circles of blue in yellowed and bloodshot "whites." He had been sleeping more and more, even after the peak of cold had passed, and now looked like he was a walking avatar of death. Which was only a figure of speech, since Anakin wasn't even walking. He had tried to follow Jacen on brief hunting expeditions, sometimes successfully and sometimes being more of a strain than what little help he could offer, but over the last few weeks had not even tried to move more than to shift positions on the rug and reach feebly for a piece of briefly boiled bark.

"Where are we going to go now?" Anakin asked. He managed to sit up, but his posture was poor, and his chin dropped to his bony chest. The two halves of their robe, both wrapped around him, hung from his shoulders as if from a coat hanger.

"We'll watch where nature tells us to go, and follow it. Unless it's over the mountain range without rain, and then... then we think of something else."

"Couldn't we stay here? There are a few trees that grow when it's warmer. You cut down the trunks yourself."

"There aren't enough. We came here in the autumn, and when it's spring, it'll all be very different on the other side of the mountains. Maybe even comfortable."

"You've been saying that for months now... do this and it'll be just like a vacation, do that and we'll be fine, wait a little while and we'll live like kings. Instead we're running from one death to another. I can't do it anymore, Jacen."

Jacen put his hand on Anakin's dry, brittle hair, which had dulled from a rich, dark brown to a mousy color, like a glass of stale creamed caf mixed with dirty seawater. "Yes, you can. There isn't any other choice and you're not just going to throw in the towel. Isn't this what we've been doing all our lives, anyway - running a step and a half ahead of death?" He sighed. "The Force feels different now - so many connections have been dropped. I can't feel anyone in it anymore, except Jaina, and she's faint. Like a little speck of a star on the other side of a nebula, almost invisble. The galaxy needs all the Jedi that there are, and that means us, too."

"Still don't know how we're going to get home."

"We'll get strong again, and then try to solve that puzzle, all right? It'll wait. We won't be any good to anybody if we're this exhausted."

Anakin nodded, then leaned on Jacen fully and chewed on a small piece of bark. His injured kidney had shut down and the remaining one couldn't filter out all the protein waste he was getting from a meat-based diet and the breakdown of his own tissues when food was scarce. Jacen had cut down every thin tree he could find - there weren't many - and stripped them of bark for Anakin to suck on; there weren't any other sources of sugars or starches and if his second kidney failed, he would die. Jacen was relieved that Anakin was at least able to sit up now, although he had a long way to go if they were going to make another journey.

They huddled in the cave for a few more days, even as the snapping of the thick ice sheet got louder and louder, and their cave companions started to wake. The biggest of the beasts, who was standing on spindly legs after his long hibernation, sniffed the air, then sniffed one of his sisters, and then he walked out of the cave. The others began to follow him, leaving the boys undisturbed but alone. The cold set in again, worse without the extra body heat to drive it away, but Jacen and Anakin wrapped themselves in layers of clothes and pelts until the ice outside their own home began to shatter.

Jacen the began to cut lengths of pelt, an inch wide and two meters long, then used them to tie the stripped tree trunks together. The trunks were only about as wide as a human leg, and now mostly dry, but they were still heavy and difficult to move, so his progress was very slow until Anakin came down from the cave, with shaking arms and just enough strength to tie the makeshift ropes. Jacen hauled the small logs into place and they fastened them together to make a sheet of wooden logs.

They worked for several days, for as long as they could before the winds finally cut through the skins and cloth and chilled them too much; by the time the raft was finished, there were no more large chunks of ice floating in the river, only pieces no larger than Jacen's head. They had finished just in time, too, because they ran out of food the day before Anakin tied the very last knot on the speeder-sized raft.

"Let's hope it's seaworthy," Anakin said. He pushed the wooden square out onto the water and watched the wet end of it float.

"You doubt my building skills?" Jacen asked playfully, to hide his hurt and annoyance.

"Not much." Now the raft floated easily on the river, tethered only by a single rope. Jacen saw the rope start to strain, so he quickly climbed on board. This made the wood sink slightly, but their dry surface was still several centimeters up. He crawled to the far end, making the raft tilt so much that his end was submerged by a finger length, until Anakin came on to balance the load. Jacen still rode lower in the water than his skeletal brother did, but he no longer had near-freezing water seeping into his fur cloak.

The river flowed towards the west, for kilometer after kilometer, slowly picking up speed as water flowed down the mountains and into the valley. Jacen caught a few fish and green-blue algae strands, and they ate what they could find and drank the water, which had only a hint of salt in it now. Anakin was sick at first, with his delicate systems thrown off balance by the new foods, and Jacen tended to him as well as he could while fighting off his own cramping and other discomforts. They passed through that, too, and adjusted to the changes.

Days passed, phasing into weeks, and the bitter cold became a chill. The river turned where the mountains were lower, and began to branch out, with distributaries pulling some of the water flow in different directions. Their small raft followed the main river, crossing through the divide carved between two of the mountains, until the water finally emerged on the other side of the range.

At first, Jacen thought there was nothing but a vast dry expanse of desert, or at best clay soil. When the mountains were far behind them, though, and the rocky ground gave way to the pale brown fields, he saw the short, strawlike grasses up close and hills with sticks poking out of them much farther away.

After they passed the fourth distributary, Jacen slid off the raft and started to pull it with one arm as he swam with the other. The water was cold, but welcome on his skin; he could move in it without pain, without the cold stealing his breath and turning him blue. "Help me get the raft to the side of the river," he said. "We'll stop here."

Anakin looked hesitantly at the moving water, and at Jacen, whose teeth were chattering. After a moment, he scrunched his face, though, and jumped in. The two of them together were still not strong enough to haul their raft until Anakin closed his eyes and began to levitate it to the junction of the river and land.

Jacen put his hand on Anakin's shoulder. "Never mind - let it go," he said. "We really don't need it - look over there." He pointed to more trees, these ones taller and more like the ones they saw when they first landed. They had more branches, though, branches with leaf buds on them, and there were even more trees closer together towards the far-away hills. The worst of their ordeal was over now, at least for that year, and they'd reached a safe place to stay for the next several months.

They let their raft float away, reluctantly, feeling that it was somehow akin to burning a bridge. Even if it was, though, they had at least waited until they reached the other side. Both had grown stronger on their trip, at least after the first week. Jacen's gums and fingernails weren't bleeding anymore, and Anakin had finally stopped wasting, and even rebuilt a small amount of his lost muscle through stationary exercises while they were floating on the river. There hadn't really been much else to do to fight the boredom. He had a little less bone, a little more muscle definition now. Jacen noticed it; he wanted Anakin to be healthy and strong, because he loved him - and yes, the sight of Anakin reclining on the raft, cloak open and shirt torn down the middle - made Jacen think about climbing over him to explore every ridge and line of that healing body with warm fingertips. But if he did, it would have tipped the raft over - and that, he told himself, is why he didn't.

They pulled themselves up onto a muddy bank, shivering and wet. Jacen stood and looked around at where they had finally ended up. Still not much in the way of food, but after gnawing on bark and raw, frozen animal flesh and then on fish and algae strings, even edible leaves and shoots would have been a meal fit for a Corellian king. He put his arm around Anakin's shoulders and they walked towards the nearest of the trees.

Jacen spotted a little gray blob not far away, surrounded by - a red blob and more little gray blobs. It was then that he noticed a few large walkers a few hundred meters behind the six-legged objects - which must have been baby walkers. The babies, about waist-high at the shoulder, were busily tearing apart the carcass of something bigger but slower that wasn't able to get away from them.

"I almost wish the Imperials would come back right about now," Anakin whispered.

Jacen nodded, and wondered how many walkers were on the planet, and what the odds were that the adults were the same ones that they had met the year before. Even if they were the same, would they remember Jacen and Anakin? Probably not... but at least the babies were full, and many wild animals wouldn't make a kill unless they felt threatened or were hungry.

The walker queen left her semi-shady space underneath a partially blooming tree and began to cross the distance between their resting place and Jacen. He swallowed hard and stepped in front of Anakin, which made Anakin clear his throat and step in front of Jacen. "Back into the water?" Anakin suggested.

"Not deep enough," said Jacen. "They can stand in it. I don't know if walkers can swim, but they don't need to since the river is only about three meters deep."

Jacen held his lightsaber and was ready to use it, if needed, but he didn't sense any immediate danger coming from the queen. She felt similar, in the Force, to the one that they had met before winter began, and when she was close enough to them, she lowered her head to them and sniffed.

"That's her," Jacen said, and he let out his breath.

The walker queen let both of them climb onto her back, and let them down near the two dozen baby walkers. The babies, more agile than the older, larger walkers, rolled on the ground and bumped each other over, then chased each other around in circles.

One of the baby walkers had a small horn in the middle of her forehead, about as long as Jacen's pinky finger and as wide at the base, though it tapered to a point. She was the one that snatched up a piece of meat that two others were tugging at, each refusing to let the other have it, and Jacen then noticed a scar-like circle at the queen's forehead. The little one was probably going to be the new walker queen when she was bigger.

The baby marched up to Jacen first. She smelled him and looked at him, then looked back at her mother and roared. The queen roared back, and the baby walker extended her neck and pierced Jacen in the shoulder with her horn.

Jacen clapped his right hand over the wound and held his lightsaber in his left, ready to defend himself against a second attack, but the baby just turned around and walked away, ignoring him. He sank into the Force, in an attempt to find out if there was any immediate danger in his body - venom, disease. He found nothing except a little bit of a color marker that would attach itself to growing skin cells, so that his scar would include many cells tinted blue.

"Jacen, are you all right?" Anakin asked worriedly.

"I think so. The baby queen just marked me as part of the tribe, that's all."

Anakin smirked at that, but his face fell when the little walker looked back over her shoulder and spotted him. Soon he was grimacing from a stinging but not very serious wound in his left shoulder. He pushed the pain away - it was much milder than many things he had gone through in the past several months - and followed her to the loose circle of young walkers around their fresh kill.

"Didn't I tell you that we were eventually going to find a place to live that wouldn't be as bad as the wasteland or the ice caves?" Jacen remarked.

"Yeah, you did." Anakin leaned against Jacen and put his arms around him. "I was sick and weak and didn't know if I was going to make it for very long."

"We did make it, and that's what matters." As he snuggled closer to Anakin, though, he felt an eerie feeling of being watched, and when he looked up, another baby walker was staring at them.

This one was another girl, hornless, and she radiated hostility, but without intent to kill. Jacen couldn't really read what her intentions were, except that he didn't think that either he nor Anakin were in severe danger. Moderate danger - that was a possibility. But neither the queen nor king nor up-and-coming queen seemed to notice or care.

She looked at Jacen, then at Anakin, then at Jacen again, looking for some information that sight, sound, and smell didn't provide. Then she paused for a moment before charging at Anakin.

Anakin tumbled to the ground, breaking his fall in a way that would prevent most injury, and when he climbed back up he only had a few small scrapes and scratches. Jacen extended his hand to help him, but as soon as he did that, the walker charged again, and this time she bumped Jacen over and sat on his legs as if to claim ownership.

"What in the name of the Emperor is going on?" Anakin demanded.

Jacen thought about that for a minute, and when he finally pieced together the girl's actions from what he could determine from her semi-intelligent mind, he fell back against the ground, hands pressed to his mouth to cover his laughter. "What?" Anakin pressed. "Tell me!"

"She's fighting you for me," Jacen explained. "I guess the girls fight over the boys."

"But I'm not a girl, and I'm not really a walker," Anakin snapped. "I'm a man."

"Tell it to her. And hurry - she's heavier than she looks, and she's sitting on my legs."

Anakin spent a few frustrating minutes using words, then gestures, then finally simple pictures sent with his rudimentary telepathy to the walker. She just stared at him blankly, in so what? fashion, and shifted her position, not really moving until Jacen pulled himself free from under her and Anakin touched his shoulder. Then she tried to bite Anakin's hand, but he pulled away just in time.

"Looks like there's only one thing I can do," he said, and stood stark-still for a couple of seconds, with his eyes closed. Suddenly, his fist shot out and caught the walker between right above her center eye.

She whimpered and stepped back before running towards Anakin again. He leapt out of the way and brought his leg down on her back. Because he was still wearing the heavy boots stolen months earlier from what was left of the Imperial troop leader, and had enough strength in his legs to lift them properly, he was able to gain quite a bit of momentum in his downward swing and the walker sank to the ground with a yelp.

One more time, she faced Anakin, snapping her two rows of small, sharp teeth, but when she saw that he wasn't going to back down, she lowered her head and went back to her lunch, defeated. "I guess I showed her," Anakin said trimphantly.

"You beat a little walker who's probably less than three months old," Jacen pointed out. "Still - thanks." This time, when Anakin sat down on the ground and put his arms possessively around Jacen, the baby walker just howled and marched up to a different walker to assert her self-appointed authority. It wasn't unusual for animals with an alpha leader to have other members of the group vie for beta status, and Jacen guessed that was, in part, what he was seeing. Besides the fact that he'd just been the prize of a fight - between Anakin and an infant walker. "You caught me now. What are you going to do with me?"

Anakin grinned and picked Jacen up, using the Force to compensate for the fact that he wasn't quite strong enough yet to easily heft sixty kilograms over his shoulder, and carried him a hundred yards away to a fairly smooth place on the ground. There he laid Jacen down and knelt over him, and lowered himself on top of him.

They pressed their lips together, and Anakin's tongue found Jacen's while his left hand found the space between Jacen's waist and the loose band of his tattered pants. Jacen tensed up, which made Anakin hesitate, so he quickly inhaled and grabbed Anakin's free hand. He guided it gently back to the gap underneath the faded gray-green fabric, underneath the shreds of once body-hugging short trousers one layer down.

Jacen lay still, except for a few ill-concealed shivers and rolls of his shoulders, while Anakin's fingers worked their way up and down the hardened length of flesh still trapped in his clothes. He fumbled for his buttons, and caught Anakin's eye; in a few moments both of them had stripped down to single-layer shirts and threadbare underwear.

Anakin climbed up onto Jacen's lap, facing him, and worked his magic in slow, deliberate strokes while their lips pressed together and Jacen held onto Anakin's shoulders. His hands rubbed lower and lower, over ribs and to the small of Anakin's back, until he was massaging the small but tight muscles in his buttocks. The lust was almost overpowering, desire increasing every second. "Anakin..." he groaned.

"Shh." Anakin covered his mouth with his own and pumped harder with his hand, a little faster, much faster. Jacen's ability to hold his reactions back was overwhelmed, and he let go of himself, falling into the tide of pleasure while clutching desperately at Anakin's body.

"How was it?" Anakin whispered as Jacen sank to the ground and tried to catch his breath.

"If I died right now, I'd die happy." He was sweating and his shorts were wet and sticky, but he didn't care. All he wanted was Anakin close by, and they lay side by side, letting the other cares of their lives slip away for the afternoon.