Crash and Burn

Without any evidence of day passing into night and back to day, Jacen couldn't tell how long he had been trapped inside his dirty corner of the Sith starship. Welk had taken back his watch, and even if Jacen still had it, he could not have craned his neck around to look at the time. He guessed, from the stiffness in his legs and arms, that five days had gone by, but it could have been seven... could have been twenty...

The only good thing that had happened was that Inferna had stopped activating the nerve device that he was tied to. There was no reason for it that he could determine; his muscles burned and ached enough to distract him and keep him from being able to concentrate on the Force, without any added effort on their part. Not once had he been able to pull himself free, and the pole went from the floor to the ceiling, making it impossible to climb up or down and get away from it.

Anakin's body glistened in the harsh artificial light, drenched with bacta from his brief immersion. His first few batches of wounds had sealed, but he still left faint red marks from fresher ones any time he made contact with the sheet spread over his hard table. There was a thin metal rod, the diameter of a pupil, threaded through a small cut in the table and through a freshly punctured hole near Anakin's belly button. He lay still, but Jacen could hear the effort in every one of his labored, pained breaths.

The bacta tank was as much a curse as a blessing. Without it, Anakin would need many days to recuperate from his injuries without dying. But now, he had been mistreated six times, and rapid healing made him healthy enough for another attempt in only hours.

We'll get out of here, Jacen thought. They weren't completely able to meld their minds into one, but in the rare times that they were both lucid, they could speak to each other in the Force.

Why are they doing this, Jacen?

I don't know. But I'm going to find a way to get us both free.

Anakin coughed and dropped out of the telepathic connection. Jacen yanked his arms, which did nothing except perhaps tighten the knots over his wrists even more.

Darth Inferna glanced at both of the boys, then muttered something about scanning equipment and walked out through the side door. Jacen sagged backwards to conserve his waning energy. With Welk watching over them, there was a better chance that now might be their time to make a run for it. He knew that he was weakening, from lack of food and being kept mostly immobilized, and Anakin was even worse off than he was.

Welk silently paced and studied the pole controller. Jacen worked slowly, waiting for Welk to turn his back to him and face Anakin before he twisted his hands. He felt them sliding roughly over his skin, millimeter by millimeter, scratching and scraping as he pulled out of them.

Searing pain ripped through his body for a few seconds, and Jacen gasped for breath when it faded. He had a dull ache in his head from where it had struck the metal pole. "Hold still and I won't have to hurt you," Welk growled.

Then there was nothing - nothing but pain and waiting. He closed his eyes and thought of happy times, from adventures on Yavin 4 to recent stolen moments on this planet. Now and then Anakin touched his mind, and comfort flowed in both directions. Don't lose hope.

Jacen had halfway worked his right hand out of his bindings when he again felt the now-too-familiar sensation course through every nerve. It was not exactly like an electric shock, nor was it exactly like heat; it was more of a tight vibration, escalating into a painful tingle, then thousands of miniature explosions that began but never ended. He squirmed and pulled, but nothing helped.

"What do you want, Welk?" he moaned. "I don't know anything about Dantooine. Probe my mind. We don't have any information you need!"

"I want to sleep, and I want you to stop being trouble," Welk snapped, and sat down against the wall.

Jacen twisted and groaned. Sweat dripped into his eyes and stung them, a new overtone to the bolts ripping their way through him. When he pulled himself as upright as he could and stretched out his neck, he could touch his tongue to a water bottle suspended from the ceiling. He could quench his thirst, little by little, but he couldn't put out the acid fires that burned him from the inside out.

He felt powerless. The Force was still with him, but he couldn't use it. His mind was too full of fog and lightning to focus on even the simplest Jedi trick.

Something cool and light touched his stomach. He felt a little bit of the agony dim and dull, and gentle hands took the edge off as they rubbed up and down his aching body.

"Anakin?" he asked hoarsely. "How did you..."

"Pulled it out," Anakin whispered. Now that Jacen could see - although his focus was still shaky - he saw the bright-red puncture under Anakin's rib. Only a tiny trail of blood had tricked down to his hip bone, though, and at the moment, Anakin was the stronger of the two.

"Untie me. Please."

Anakin's lips left a trail of kisses across Jacen's mouth and cheek, and then he disappeared. Anakin lifted Jacen's wrists and his fingers pulled feebly at the tight knots. Jacen felt the ends of the ropes scratching him as they swung, though, and knew Anakin was making progress.

Jacen heard a cry behind him, and his hands fell back against the metal cylinder. Welk was awake now, and kicking Anakin. "You weren't supposed to move, boy," he growled, and threw Anakin to the floor.

Anakin grunted and tried to pick himself up, but Welk's health and relative state of restedness made him more powerful than the younger man. But Welk only took on the part of a common bully, with punches and kicks, and then he put a pair of stun cuffs on Anakin's wrists and shoved him down near the wall.

"Kneel," Welk snarled. "And don't move, unless you want fresh bruises."

Anakin obediently fell into a kneeling position, with his face to the wall and his back almost to Jacen. Then Jacen noticed long, pink stripes on Anakin's back, running from his shoulders to near his waistline. Inferna had made a series of vertical cuts the day before and then peeled strips of skin away in an alternating bar pattern. The exposed areas were healing, but still raw. A few scars overlapped, though, as though they had been stripped away more than once.

Jacen wanted so much to break away and go to Anakin that it hurt more than anything his body was feeling. He did the best he could to focus his thoughts into a careful embrace and sent this to Anakin.

Anakin hugged him back.

"What is going on in here?" Inferna swung open the side doors and marched in, and as she did, she cast a disapproving look at Welk. "Anakin was not supposed to leave the table - but I see that you were able to trap him. Hmph. A mistake not made is better than a mistake fixed."

She took the controller away from Welk and clipped it to her belt. This belt was light brown, contrasting with her black bodysuit, and made of thin strips of leather.

Inferna caught Jacen's eye and gestured toward her new accessory. She stepped lightly over the smooth floor towards him, with a mischievous smile on her face.

She unclipped the controller again and removed the belt. Jacen braced himself for the strike, and the stings along his hip and side barely registered. But then she lowered her mouth towards his ear and whispered mockingly, "One hundred percent genuine Jedi hide."

Anakin's shoulders trembled, and Jacen vomited water and bile. He jerked around in his restraints, ready to rip his hands free and close them around her neck even if it meant he had to break his own knuckles to pull them out. However, in his moment of rage, his twisting actions tightened the ropes again and he was stuck.

"When I get out, I'm going to kill you!" he shouted.

Inferna fastened the belt around Jacen's waist. "I think you enjoy his skin against yours more than you'd want it against mine," she said. "And your anger is rather unbecoming for a Jedi Knight. Almost worthy of the Sith if we were interested in you."

"Might work better than what we've been doing, though," Welk said. "If he calls out more with the Dark Side than with his feeble powers then it might reach..." His voice trailed off under Inferna's withering glower.

Jaina. Jacen fought off another wave of nausea and began the strenuous task of calming himself and sorting through clips of thoughts. He now understood why he and Anakin had been captured and why the Sith took so much effort to torture them. They were laying the men out as bait for Jaina.

Which meant that Jaina must have been a credible threat to them, and the war was not anywhere close to lost.

Somewhat comforted with that new knowledge, Jacen breathed deeply until his heart slowed, and then he slowly closed himself off from the Force. He wasn't sure he trusted himself to use it after his outburst, and even if he could, the Sith Lords had their ways of keeping him incapable of extricating himself. Better to passively accept what they threw at him than to risk drawing Jaina into a trap.

But what about Anakin?

Inferna dragged Anakin back to the other end of the hallway and chained him to the floor with a heavy metal chain and lock. He could move around a few steps and could curl up on the floor to rest, but he was bound to an area only two meters in diameter.

Jacen already knew that every comparative kindness from these two came at a high price. This time, though, the price was not readily obvious. "Welk, make sure the elder Solo has enough water," she said. "And try to feed him a little bit, if he'll take food. If not, hook him up to an intravenous drip. Then lock the doors so they can't get out of the corridor without sounding the alarm."

"What do I do with the younger?"

"Leave him be. He'll last four, maybe five days without water."

"Then?"

Inferna gave Welk a don't be stupid look. "Then he dies."

Jacen waited for a few hours, wondering if this was a new way to confuse him and try to make him lose control. Anakin sat in the middle of the floor, curled up into a ball, and from time to time looked up fearfully at Jacen. But the hours dragged on into half a day, and nothing more happened.

Anakin could see out through the small windows in the doors, and he made a few motions and exaggerated facial expressions that told Jacen Inferna was asleep. Jacen nodded and took a deep breath, then tugged and tugged harder until he popped his hands out of their roping. He felt something break inside his thumb as he did so, but the sudden release of locked limbs was more relief than could be canceled by the minor pain in his thumb.

In a few minutes he was free, and he ripped off the offensive belt and dropped to a crawl. His legs were too stiff and sore to support his weight while walking and he didn't want to be seen. He carried the water bottle and slithered across the cold floor.

One meter away from the pole, he felt its power again, enough to make his arms and legs shake. He looked back at it, but instead of glowing brighter, its light remained dim and the pain it brought him fairly mild.

Two hand-steps later he had sagged against the floor. The pole was not responding to its controller, now lying on the floor near the doors, unless there was a second one. His next crawling hand-step confirmed what he feared; the further away from it the bottle went, the more it hurt him, even if not in direct contact. He had heard stories of such devices, slaved to crystals, that the Sith used to torment their captives. The entire bottle was made of crystal, and he had nothing in which to decant it.

Jacen struggled closer to Anakin, centimeter by centimeter, but eventually his body gave out under the assault, and he could not will his screaming muscles to pull him forward even a hairsbreadth.

He retreated back to the pole, frustrated, not quite defeated. Without the Force, there was no way that he could possibly get to Anakin, so he had to use it. The other choice was to let Anakin wither and die, and that was no choice at all.

Jacen telekinetically pulled the controller to him, and found that there was no way on it to deactivate the device, only to turn it power up. It occurred to him that eventually the ship's generator would run out of power, but that might not be for... years. Too long for it to help him save Anakin.

With other options shutting down, one by one, Jacen set out across the floor again. He reached the point that made his arms and legs lock up, then backed up a few centimeters and took a deep breath. Before he could give it a second thought, he threw himself forward.

He didn't learn the mysteries of the universe, but he learned what it might have felt like to be in the core of a sun. The corridor fell away from him, and its walls exploded into pure white. Somewhere, far away from him, a young man thrashed and cried out - but Jacen no longer had a voice or a body. He was not in agony; he was agony.

Time stopped for him, or maybe it spun onward too fast for him to know it for what it was. Did a moment pass, or was it a year? All directions were the same, and brought him back to the same point - the center of nothing. There was no release. There was no escape.

Currents blew his ethereal form back and forth, slamming him into an updraft of heat that vaporized him in an interminable millisecond, and then into a stream of ice-needles that wove their thousands of ways through him. The pain took his body and then began to steal his mind. There was no memory.

For a fleeting moment, he thought he had part of a memory, and he clung to it, the only thing that was stable. He thought he remembered a pair of eyes.

Anakin's eyes. Anakin.

Jacen couldn't get away from the pain, and knew, suddenly, that those eyes needed him not to fight harder - they needed him to stop fighting against the pain entirely. The blinding lights around him began to lose their intensity as he glowed to match them, and then he could see again - just shadows and faint grays and reds. The solid floor settled underneath him, and he raised his head.

In spite of his twitching body and the waves of pain still coursing through every vein, Jacen raised himself into his crawling position. There was nothing more to fear; he could not be held back. He rode the waves all the way to Anakin's side, and then lifted the water bottle to the other man's mouth.

"I'm here, Anakin," he whispered, and then he turned Anakin to face him and they held each other.

"I thought you were dying," Anakin whispered back, as he put his head on Jacen's shoulder.

Jacen ran his finger across Anakin's parched lips. "Neither of us is dying."

"I'll be the final judge of that."

They both turned in the direction of the new voice. Inferna glanced from the men to Jacen's torture pole and then back to them, but wasted no more than a second before springing into action. She whipped out her lightsaber and immediately brought the blade down onto Anakin.

Jacen threw Anakin out of the way and hit Inferna's arm with a well-placed kick. She stepped backwards, slightly off-balance, and struck again, this time at Jacen.

However, the small moment of delay between her regaining her balance and swinging at Jacen's head was all the time he needed. He dropped into a crouch and grabbed at her saber arm again, well out of harm's way. His fingers squeezed until he felt the bones in her forearm snap, and she dropped the lightsaber.

The tables had turned. Now he was holding the thrumming handle, and the glowing red beam was his. "Unbind him," Jacen commanded.

Inferna wrapped her good arm around Anakin's neck. "I'll kill him first," she sneered, and squeezed his throat.

"Your strength makes you dangerous," said Jacen. "You're never exactly unarmed." He stepped to the side and thrust the blade forward, sideways through the Dark Lord's torso. When he withdrew it, she slumped backwards and lay dead on the floor. As she fell, the motes of pain shocking Jacen's nerves stilled and drained away, and he was left peaceful, though feeling empty. Welk was still a beginner and wouldn't be able to re-arm the nerve stimulation generator on his own - and even if he could, it wouldn't help him.

Jacen melted through Anakin's chains. "Come on. We have to find Welk." Anakin smiled at him, and followed as Jacen walked through the doors into the side room.

The walls began to vibrate as soon as they walked through, though, and a powerful shudder knocked them both to the floor. Bottles tumbled to the floor and shattered; the bacta tank sloshed around and some of its greenish fluid spilled over the edge.

In the small cockpit of the ship, Welk was in a panic. Darth Inferna was dead, and the Jedi were loose. Lumiya was never going to forgive him for this, unless, perhaps, he managed to kill Jacen, Anakin, and Jaina by himself. And he'd seen too much to believe that he could do that. The Solo twins were too much for him.

I've had enough. I'm going to get my daughter and take her into the Unknown Regions, where Lumiya can't find us.

He slapped the levers for emergency cargo detachment, and when the red lights above the levers turned green, he guided what remained of the ship into the sky and set his path for Coruscant.

Jacen and Anakin picked themselves up and watched the ship disappear. Jacen bit his lip, caught in the space between the joy of being alive and free and the despair of being stranded yet again. And this time, he was almost certain that the Sith wouldn't be back.

"Maybe we can build a comm system," he said hopefully.

Anakin didn't say anything, but nodded his head, and he squeezed Jacen's shoulder gently before starting to rummage through cabinets for useful supplies.

They found several boxes of ration bars and a medkit, as well as some clothes that had belonged to Welk. Jacen hauled Inferna's remains to the river and dumped them there, and then he wrapped Anakin's upper body in bacta-soaked fabric strips, held together with safety locking pins.

It was dark outside when Jacen sleepily laid out a pair of bedrolls on the floor. "I'd rather sleep outside," Anakin said.

Jacen agreed with him and brought the bedrolls out, between the familiar dirt and the stars above. He wasn't entirely surprised when Anakin stepped over the second stuffed mattress and settled down next to him.

"Love you, Jacen."

"Love you too, Anakin."

They embraced and fell asleep in each other's arms under the glittering sky.