Embers: Sequel to Crash and Burn

It was late in the morning, almost noon, when Jacen finally woke Anakin and they got ready to go get Anakin’s clothes and then head over to the medical center. Anakin showered quickly and put on one of Jacen’s spare shirts and pairs of pants, because his were dirty and stained. He noted as he did that Jacen was still bigger than him, but at least he could wear the same pants if he wore a belt with them.

He wondered, briefly, if Jacen had any feelings left for him at all, or if it was just a general idea that he had to be nice to other people, especially other Jedi, that was making him act. Anakin didn’t dare ask, and he didn’t dare probe through the Force to read Jacen’s thoughts, so he kept thinking about it over and over with a shield erected in his mind to keep Jacen from being able to read his own thoughts.

They were mostly quiet on the way over to the even more neglected apartment complex that Anakin lived in – well, used to live in. When they got there, Anakin said, “I’m going up myself.”

“You’d better be ready to fight back if he pulls something else,” Jacen said. “Otherwise, I’m going with you.”

“It’s all right. He’s probably still asleep and if he’s not then he has a hangover.” Anakin took the rickety lift to the right floor, and found when he got there that he didn’t even need to unlock the door. It had been battered and broken open, and the entire apartment was a mess.

“Dyar?” he called out hesitantly. Nobody was there. He saw a few marks scored into the plaster walls, though, and noticed that the bedroom window was broken. Signs of a struggle were everywhere. Either the police came and hauled Dyar and the intruder away – unlikely – or whoever had been shooting at him the previous evening had managed to catch him. Anakin didn’t sense that the person was still around, though, so he stuffed his clothes into a bag, picked up a few credit chips that he found on the floor, and went back to the exit floor.

“He’s gone,” Anakin said to Jacen. “I guess he made a disturbance and someone came and picked him up.”

“You’re better off without him anyway,” Jacen said.

Anakin glanced over at Jacen, and wondered if there was anything more to what he said than the words themselves, but again, he didn’t want to ask. I’m not supposed to be thinking like this, he thought. I’m supposed to be trying to make it on my own now, and Jacen is just being nice and helping me out for a little while. There’s nothing between us anymore.

He had to sit in the waiting room at the medic center for an hour and a half, but then he was called in, and laid out on a sterile white table while a pair of droids worked on him. He lay still with a few bacta patches stuck onto his wounds, and he felt a pinch here and a pinch there while they arranged the bone in his nose into its proper position. A knitting instrument buzzed and burned, and then one of the droids pulled off the extra bandages and pasted a new one over the new cut that ran from between his eyes to his nose tip. “Do not take it off for three hours,” the droid warned, “or it might leave a scar.”

Anakin agreed, and when he went to the checkout area, they asked him for a hundred fifty credits in payment. He handed over the twenty that he had, and then told them to bill the rest to the Jedi Order. After identifying himself by his ID number and matching up his fingerprint, he was allowed to leave, and Jacen took him back to his apartment.

“Thanks for letting me stay here last night,” Anakin said while Jacen made a pot of caf and pulled out a loaf of bread to make lunch. “But, um, I really can’t stay for too long. I was going to go back to Mom and Dad’s place for a little while and then talk to Luke about getting my own set up.”

“You could do that,” Jacen said absently. “But they’re busy, and there isn’t a whole lot of room over there for you.”

“Where else am I supposed to go?” Anakin wondered.

“You could stay here for a little while,” Jacen said. “It’s boring and I don't have anything to do, here by myself. I have a little bit of money saved up – I’ll just get a new couch, and sleep there, and you take my room for a few weeks.”

“Jacen, I really don’t think that’s a good idea.” Anakin shook his head and sat down on the couch, then flipped on the holoviewer and started changing channels, hoping that he would find something interesting to watch.

“Why not? Because of what happened before?”

There wasn’t going to be any easy way around the conversation this time, and Anakin took a deep breath and steeled himself for it. “It’s awkward, living with you, even for just a week or two or three. I keep thinking about all the stuff we did when we were younger, and those thoughts don’t just go away. And then I can’t think of you the way I ought to. You’re my ex-boyfriend. Could you go back to Hapes and live with Tenel Ka for a month?”

“I could if I had to,” Jacen mused. “And if she would let me. I don’t really think she would, though. I’m the one who left her, not the other way around.”

“And you’re the one who left me, too.”

Then there was silence while Jacen thought about that and Anakin waited for the words to sink in fully. Jacen finally said, “I hope you don’t think that had anything to do with you. I just thought there were too many risks. If you were, uh, Jaina, it would have been the same thing.”

“Risks of what? Risks of your reputation?” The floodgates were opened now and Anakin wasn’t going to be able to get them closed until the flow had gone down to a trickle, and the best he could do was try to keep the word storm from becoming a tempest. “That’s awfully convenient of you, isn’t it? You break up with me, and then you turn right around and marry Tenel Ka, you have a daughter, and then you break up with her and get a divorce. Then you can live in denial for the rest of your life and everybody else thinks you’re just such a good Jedi Knight, so dedicated to the Force that you can’t bother yourself with relationships, when the truth is that you really do like men and you just don’t want anybody else to know about it.”

“That’s all you think it was about?” Jacen shot back. “No, maybe I’m not out of the closet yet, but I didn't have a reason to be entirely in it in the first place. I really did love Tenel Ka and I still do. I just don’t think I love her that way anymore. If I ever did, beyond when I was young and stupid and just doing what everybody expected of me. With you, there’s a whole other thing wrong with it. We have the same parents. We’re supposed to be brothers, not in each other’s pants.”

“‘We’re supposed to be’ is a long way off from ‘we were.’”

“You think I’ve forgotten?” Jacen cut his turkey sandwich with a lot more force than was necessary. “I was thinking about you every damn night on my honeymoon, and every damn night after. Why do you think it took us four months to conceive Allana? Because my eyes saw Tenel Ka and couldn’t even appreciate how beautiful she was because the rest of me was wanting to be with you.”

They were quiet for a long time after that. Finally Anakin gathered his courage and said, “What about now? Are you over it now?”

“I might be,” Jacen said.

“Yeah. I might be too.”

“No, you’re not.”

“And I don’t believe you are, either.”

Once again, the awkward silence filled the room, until each of them was about half done with their sandwiches and snack bags of crisped tuber chips. “Doesn’t matter,” Jacen said, without needing to refer to the topic at hand – their previous relationship – because it was clearly on both of their minds. “We’re adults, and we know how to control ourselves. Think about what’s at stake. The reputation of the entire Jedi Order. There are some people who already mistrust us; we don’t need to be thought of as sexual deviants, too.”

“You feel guilty about loving me,” Anakin accused.

“Yeah, maybe I do.”

“Nice to know that I mean less than you than your kriffed-up conscience does.”

“Anakin, don’t get all passive-aggressive with me.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. If I wanted to be bossed around then I would have gone right home and begged Dyar to forgive me.” Anakin stood up and put down his plate. “I’m going to Mom and Dad’s. If I’m going to be treated like a kid, it might as well be by my actual parents.”

“No.” Jacen caught Anakin’s arm, lightly enough that the other man could have pulled away if he really wanted to. “I don’t really know what to say to you. There’s a lot of stuff between us that we haven’t resolved. But that doesn’t mean we can’t resolve it now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I still love you, Anakin, and I still want you. I know we can’t pretend the whole world doesn’t exist, because it does now. You have to remember that it didn’t nine years ago, when we were trapped far away from here, and we thought that we were going to be stuck there for the rest of our lives. The mistake we made was trying to continue our relationship after we were rescued, instead of just accepting that it was a good thing while it lasted but that it couldn’t last.”

“Still wouldn’t be able to forget,” Anakin said.

“No, I suppose not.” Jacen stared off at an invisible point on the wall. “Do you ever wish that Jaina hadn’t come and picked us up?”

“No. I hated Cee Vee Two. It was cold, and it had a lot of bad memories with the good ones.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Listen, here’s what we’ll do. You stay here as long as you need to, and when you don’t need to anymore, then you go wherever you want to go. And we’ll just pretend that nothing ever happened between us that probably shouldn’t have.”

“All right, but it doesn’t really work that way.”

“It does if you tell yourself long enough.”

“That’s what you want to do? You want to forget all about me?”

“Anakin, I’m not Dyar. You don’t have to start the theatrics. Save it for the stage.”

Anakin was crumbling inside. He’d put up a few pillars to hold up the ceiling and give himself some breathing room, but now those pillars were buckling under the pressure. “Jacen, please don’t kick me out. I need you right now.”

Jacen put down his plate and looked Anakin over. “I don’t want to be your rebound. Look what happened last time you had one; you ended up stuck for seven years with a guy who’s really not worthy of you.” He put his arm around Anakin and pulled him close. “I’m not going to kick you out. But you do need to grow up a little bit, get some self-control. You might be a Jedi Knight, but you still have to work on dealing with your emotions instead of just letting them run free.”

“You mean my feelings for you.”

“That, and the fact that you’re almost breaking down in my living room.”

Anakin nodded, took a deep breath, and slowly regained his composure.

The first day was the roughest, and after it was over, Anakin felt himself beginning to settle into a routine. He got up, got ready, and then he and Jacen would go down to the Jedi Temple, where Jacen taught a class of trainees, mostly around the age of nine or ten, about using the Force to pick up emotions and even thoughts of animals. Anakin, for the most part, spent the time working on building and equipment maintenance. They would go home at the end of the afternoon and have dinner and watch holovision, and then Anakin would retire to Jacen’s room – without Jacen – and go to sleep.

It worked for all of six days – one week, one day – before Anakin made a mistake. It wasn’t so much a mistake, he reasoned later, as his subconscious directing him. But he took a shower right after he got home. That in itself wasn’t anything important, and he could rationalize his act. He’d gotten splattered with some oil, and it didn’t smell very good, so he wanted to get it off his skin and out of his hair as fast as he could. Plus, he didn’t want it to spoil Jacen’s sheets with something as banal as machine oil. So he went in, and washed everything off, and when he was clean and he’d towel-dried his hair, he walked right out of the bathroom. His clothes were still in the bedroom, and he figured that it didn’t matter if Jacen saw him. After all, they were both men, and it wasn’t as though he had anything that Jacen didn’t have, or even that Jacen hadn’t seen before on him.

Anakin folded the towel and laid it out on the bathroom counter before he walked out. It was a short walk down the hallway from the ‘fresher to the bedroom, and Jacen might not have even seen him if he hadn’t been needing to use the ‘fresher himself and wondering what was taking Anakin so long. Jacen almost ran into him and then he pulled back, and took a long look – a bit longer than he probably should have. “Anakin, what the hell are you doing? Go get dressed.”

“Come on,” Anakin said, a little bit embarrassed and a little bit annoyed. “It’s not a big deal. You’ve seen me before.”

“That was a long time ago,” Jacen muttered, and pushed past on his way to the ‘fresher.

Anakin went right to his room, but he didn’t actually get dressed right away. He pulled out his clothes and looked them over – the same old shorts that he usually wore, unless they were in the laundry bin, and then he’d wear his other ones. Instead, he sat on the bed and waited, not sure exactly what he was waiting for.

Jacen appeared in the doorway in just a couple of minutes. “This isn’t going to work,” he said.

“What isn’t going to work?”

“When I said that we were just going to forget about everything – well, it’s not that easy. We’re not just going to forget.”

Anakin shrugged his bare shoulders and leaned back until he was laying on the bed. The pillowcase had been washed once, and now most of the familiar scent was gone from it – but not completely, because some had seeped into the pillow stuffing itself. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, but drawing attention to his toned body, now laid out on the bed in the dim light to be easily seen in shadows and light casts, must have been part of it. “No, I guess not. And that means we’re going to have to do something about it.”

“Maybe you should just get ready and go on home,” Jacen said. “Go to Mom’s house. I’m sorry, but I don’t think-“

“Jacen, you’re the one who was talking about self-control. Maybe you ought to get some.”

“And you ought to stop tempting me,” Jacen shot back.

But it was really too late. Jacen was already tempted, and part of it was his own doing; he could have just gone back to the living room, but he had to go down to the bedroom that used to be his and was now Anakin’s, hoping to see the other man there and in the stages of getting his clothes on. Or, better yet, not begun, and now that he had found what he was unknowingly looking for, he didn’t really know what to do with it.

In a way, he thought he had more courage when he was much younger, because at least then he’d had the guts to do something about the desire that was now welling up within him, a tide that he could only hold back if he really tried to and the truth was that he didn’t even want to bother trying. After all, that evening had ended with them tumbling in each other’s arms on the cool grass on their prison planet, with the sheen of mingled sweat still covering them both, and he had actually been happy. A feeling that he hadn’t really had since his rescue. At that point, he’d known that their days together were numbered, and that he was simply in denial about it, hoping that he could stretch it out longer than it should have been stretched. And he also knew that it was a feeling he could never have again. One never forgot one’s first love, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t easy, if it was even possible, to find one later that measured up favorably when subjected to the comparison.

And now he was nineteen again, but with even less courage. And the ball was in his court again; he knew that if he crawled over to the bed and climbed up on it, that Anakin wasn’t likely to refuse him. After all, he’d been right; it was Jacen who broke up with Anakin, not vice versa, and Jacen guiltily had two thoughts; that Anakin was still in some way looking for him, which had led him straight to Dyar (and that turned out badly), and that it wouldn’t be fair for him to give Anakin exactly what he wanted, because he was in such a vulnerable state that he would easily accept it without thinking about the consequences.

Then Jacen had to wonder what the consequences were. Did it really matter anymore? The relationship that the two of them had had before the Stellar Imperial War was irrevocably destroyed. There was simply no way that they were ever going to be able to go back to the sort of platonic love that they had, not after they’d made love the first time – or even long before that, in the months that it was on both of their minds but they didn’t dare to do anything about it. Jacen realized that nothing would really change if they started where they left off, except that the old reasons he’d given for leaving Anakin the first time would still be there. It wasn’t just about him, even though he was very afraid of what people would say about him if they found out what they were doing. He also still thought that it wouldn’t be good for the Jedi if it became common knowledge that a number of them – even if that number was only two – flagrantly violated the customs and social mores of polite galactic culture on the whole.

But that was then, and this was now. Neither of them were green Knights anymore; they had a lot more experience, both in life and through the Force, and they would be a lot better now at hiding things from everybody else. They weren’t living with their parents, and even though Leia’s powers had come back to her and she was completely healed from the Force-nullifying plague that came through the planets so long ago, she would have no way of knowing what her sons did in their recreational time. Not if they were careful, and kept it confined to their own quarters.

“Jacen, make up your mind,” Anakin said suddenly, in a rare display of initiative. “I’m here, and you’re here, and there isn’t anybody else with us. You can take me now or you can just walk back to the couch and sleep alone. But you know what you want, and I know what you want, and you made a mistake by leaving once already.”

“Anakin, you just don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what? That you’re afraid of what people will say when they aren’t even going to find out?”

“I don’t want to live that way. I don’t want to have to hide things.”

“You hide all the time. You hide how much you drink, and you hide the real reasons that you left Tenel Ka.”

“What do you want me to do, Anakin? Air all my dirty laundry in the public square?”

“Nah. I just want you to kiss me.”

Jacen gave in. He really was lonely, and it was just a kiss. He didn’t really believe that it would stay there and not go deeper, but it was what he told himself to get started, and before he really knew what was happening, he was crossing the room and lounging on the bed next to Anakin. The blue eyes were the same, and the face was the same – mostly; a little bit smoother, maybe, now that the near-starvation that had plagued them over their first winter was long in the past. And Anakin had matured, just a little bit, enough that the last traces of childhood were gone from him.

Jacen leaned over and touched his lips to Anakin’s, and just like that, the years were gone; he really did feel like he was nineteen again, and he barely felt the sheets rustling underneath him as he shifted his position and kissed the other man harder.

Anakin threw his arms around Jacen’s neck, and now Jacen was lost in the moment. Didn’t take much, he thought, and that was his last real thought about life outside of that embrace; the feelings must have been much closer to the surface than he thought they were, because all it took was a tiny scratch before they were exposed. Jacen found himself straightening up until he was kneeling, straddling Anakin with one knee around each of the other man's hips, and he lifted his shirt over his head and tossed it to the side. Whether it landed on the floor or on the bed, he didn’t know, and didn’t care; it was off him, and that was all that mattered.

He had to stand up to get rid of his pants, and that was a reluctant parting, but he suffered through it for the required twenty seconds, and then he was on top of Anakin again, thigh to thigh, stomach to stomach. Their limbs tangled together and they rolled onto their sides, with Jacen’s leg hooked around both of Anakin’s to pull him closer and keep him there. He could barely breathe, and gasped for air with his chin on Anakin’s shoulder.

“Back or stomach, Ani?” he whispered. Jacen’s voice came out more throaty and gravelly than he intended.

Anakin didn’t answer with words, but he twisted in Jacen’s arms so that he was lying on his back, and he dutifully lifted his legs and bent them, spread apart and fully visible to Jacen's hungry eyes. Maybe there had been a few changes in the years that felt like hours; there was no shame or hesitation now, except from Jacen, who knelt frozen for just a moment.

Jacen stretched himself across the bed and across Anakin at a diagonal and reached his hand towards the dresser. He grabbed the handle by a corner and pulled the top drawer open; there wasn’t much in there, just a pile of his own socks and underwear, and a pile belonging to Anakin next to it, and a small jar. He pulled out the jar and peeled off the plastic ring around the cap; why he kept the petroleum jelly there, he didn’t know, because it wasn’t like he had any inkling that he’d get to use it again. He’d been convinced that his days of romps in the sheets were over, and that it was just himself from here until the end of his life, whether that was ten years or a hundred. But now he was glad that he’d made the impulse purchase in the previous year, because he didn’t want to have to stop now to go to the store, and he certainly didn’t want to try to fuck Anakin while he was dry. He’d been taken that way himself, back when there really wasn’t any other choice, and it was fine, but he didn’t know what Anakin was used to and didn’t really want to think about what had happened with Dyar Leeds anyway.

He stuck his fingers into the thick and pliable gel and spread a thin layer of it over his own stiffened manhood. Even that sensation, his own hand, forced his breath out of him in an escaping sigh. He might have drawn it out even longer except that Anakin impatiently twitched underneath him, and so he stuck his slick fingers deep inside Anakin and worked them around for a few moments. Anakin drew Jacen closer, hands on Jacen's shoulders.

“Last chance to stop,” Anakin whispered.

“Not taking it,” Jacen whispered back, and carefully positioned his body against Anakin’s. He thrust forward, one precise motion, and then his skin was pressed tight to the other man’s and he was fully buried inside hot flesh.

Jacen held himself steady with his hands on the firm mattress, and pumped in and out with such speed and force that he was almost worried that he might be hurting Anakin. The only two reasons that he wasn’t actually that concerned were first, that the look on Anakin’s face was one of a man who had gone to heaven without actually dying, and the other was that he could use the Force to tell how he was doing. And the moment that he touched Anakin’s mind with it, he felt his own pleasure multiply and merge with Anakin’s, and after that, he was unable to think, but only move. Heat and motion converged; he couldn’t escape it, but only share it, and pulled Anakin’s head forward with one hand so that he could kiss him.

Anakin cried out and clutched Jacen’s arms tightly. His breaths came in ragged gasps, and his muscles contracted and relaxed through no will of his own. Jacen felt a strong ring of muscle grip his cock tightly and squeeze it; that was too much for him, already on the verge of orgasm, and it crashed into him like a tidal wave. He released deep inside Anakin’s body and pulled back out, now limp and spent.

Jacen opened his eyes and looked down. Anakin was staring up at him, expectantly, and settled into satisfied fatigue when Jacen reclined next to him. “Sleep here tonight,” Anakin whispered.

Jacen stroked Anakin’s damp hair and kissed him again. “All right.”

“I love you, Jasa.”

Jacen pulled Anakin against him and only held him wordlessly. In fifteen minutes, he felt like he’d undone almost nine years. He’d tried to pull away from the memories, only to find that they chased him down and covered him again. I wonder if this is what destiny is like, he thought. Or maybe if this is what destiny is.

His biggest mistake really was to push Anakin away, and he wasn’t going to make it again. They needed each other. Their lives had always been entwined and when they came together so long ago, there was no way to separate them without doing incredible damage to both.

“I’m not going to leave you this time,” he finally said. The thought of picking up where they left off filled him with both excitement and fear.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”