Crash and Burn

Jacen rubbed his weary eyes with his less grimy hand and tossed away a blood-soaked scrap of tent flooring with the other. Eight hours gone by, but he was finally done. He pulled the now-dry metal cup from a heap of ashes that used to be a second fire, boiling water to sterilize his mending needle and a few lengths of fiber carefully unwoven from another long strip of torn fabric. A row of even stitches held the edges of Anakin's wounds closed, and many dozens more mended lacerations to organs and interior tissues. Those would have to be taken out, later, since the fibers wouldn't actually biodegrade for decades.

He shuddered and crawled to Anakin's side. A few shattered bone fragments lay on the ground, and Jacen kicked them away. There should have been an easier way to help Anakin, but all he knew was that he had needed to act quickly, and he did, and so the immediate danger had passed. At least now hew knew that Anakin wouldn't bleed to death. He was too exhausted to think about it further, so he lay next to the younger man to keep him warm, and, in Jacen's mind, better protected. He slid his arms around Anakin's chest and pulled him very gently to his own. Anakin's heart beat weakly, but steadily and slowly. Jacen forced himself to relax then and fell asleep by the waning fireside.

The sun was overhead and the fire long gone out when he woke up. There was no sound but the wind's low mourning call and his own breaths. He felt his belly knot up and he grabbed Anakin's hand. Pulse still there.

"Unghh." Anakin began to stir and squirm, and he opened his eyes at the same time his peaceful sleeping face twisted into a grimace. "Where am I?"

"If we knew that, we'd be a lot better off," Jacen said. "Still on our remote planet."

Anakin tried to sit up, but his back arched and he mouth opened to let out a cry that he just barely held back. "What happened?" he moaned.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

Anakin frowned and averted his eyes. "Leaving you to fight Lord Welk."

"The woman who was with him chased you down and beat you up. She's dead now, and won't hurt us again, since the walker queen ate her. I cut off Welk's arm and he ran off and left the planet. You had two broken ribs and one of them was in four pieces. I had to cut them out, and the other is held together with canvas roping. Try not to breathe too deeply, because I knotted the strings good, but you might stretch and weaken them and make them break."

Anakin carefully pulled his shirt up a few inches and touched the stitched line with his fingertips. "Sithspit. It hurts. I'm going to be walking a lot faster with a shot of seradine."

"Oh, uh. See, that's the thing; we don't have any seradine. We'll just stay put until you've healed enough that we can move."

"What are you talking about? There should be four syringes in the first aid kit, and a roll of bacta patches."

"Anakin, we don't have a first aid kit. Welk destroyed it."

Anakin blinked twice at Jacen. "He what?" Then Anakin dropped his head and seemed to shrink into himself. "He must know something we don't, then. He left us to die here or he'd have done it himself."

"Nobody's going to die," Jacen said firmly. "We just need to let you rest for a few days and then pick up and go towards the equator."

Anakin scowled and tried to climb to his feet, but he stopped when he was laid out on his belly, arms straight out but unable to bend enough at the hip to rise to his knees. "Ahh - all right. I guess I'll keep working on splicing the pod wires."

"No, you need to put yourself into a healing trance right now. Your left kidney was cut and smashed badly, and a piece of bone cut into your intestine. It's all bound up now, and I cleaned out the leakage as well as I could, but it might take more than that to kill the last traces of bacteria, and your kidney is going to be dumping toxic stuff back into your blood if it doesn't heal up fast."

Anakin accepted the makeshift blanket Jacen held out to him and put his head down. "I thought there wasn't much time to waste before winter sets in, and I might be able to get the wires put together when we stop in the evening. Maybe we won't have to wait out the cold times."

"Anakin - uh, that's the problem. Welk put a bomb on the pod as he was on his way off this oversized asteroid, and it's kind of not there anymore except for a black smear." Jacen pointed toward the few pieces of the escape pod's hull that still stood, or rather, lay. "What you see here around the fire stones is all we have."

Horror crossed Anakin's face. "No, oh, no. It's gone? Everything's gone?"

"Not everything. We still have my lightsaber, one water keg, most of the tent, a knife and cup, and the mending kit. Plus our binoculars."

Anakin turned his head to the ground. His shoulders trembled, and when Jacen tried to put his hands on them, Anakin batted him away.

"You let Welk escape," Anakin accused. His face was red, and the thin skin around his eyes redder. "Why, Jacen? Why didn't you kill him?"

"I couldn't! You were going to get your skull crushed in a few seconds and I had to leave him-"

"You just said a walker ate that bitch with the blaster! What's the real story, Jacen?"

"Watch your mouth, all right? It's true, I didn't kill her, but I did disable her. I didn't know the walker was so close. I cut off her legs so she couldn't stomp on your head and then the walker queen snapped her head off."

"And you won't kill a person, even a Sith Lord! We'd have a chance of getting home but you let Welk go, and he's made sure neither of us leave this place alive. You should have decapitated her yourself after cutting Welk somewhere more vital than his kriffing arm. Like maybe his chest cavity. Jaina would have done it. You know what? If I have to be stuck here with anyone, I wish it was Jaina!"

Jacen stood up. "Some thanks this is! You were about to get killed, and I thought saving you was more important than cutting out Welk's guts."

"You wouldn't have done that, even for me. We can't keep playing by your rules, Jacen, because nobody else does. This planet doesn't, the Stellar Empire doesn't, and the Sith sure don't."

"I am not going to call on the Dark Side. Not for anyone, even me or rude little boy who insists that the Force is just a tool instead of a dangerous power."

"You're afraid of it, aren't you? You're afraid of making a mistake and having people say 'Look what Jacen did.' So you make bigger mistakes because you're so full of yourself. If you have to kill someone, then you have to! Uncle Luke did it. Mom even did it. And it might not be too late for us if we - you - stop being so damn stubborn. Welk might come back, and if he does, then we can kill him and take his ship."

Anakin's words made Jacen want to reach out and smack him, and he might have, if Anakin wasn't already badly hurt. "Accidentally taking a life, if it really is an accident, might be excusable. But now you're planning to twist the Force into something to help you kill Lord Welk?"

"Before he gets us! What do you think he wants to do with us - play sabacc? They'll take us, kill one, and torture the other until he breaks. Then he dies too."

"All right, we'll try to steal the ship, but he stays alive unless he gets into a tangle that he can't get out of that isn't our fault. Maybe he could be brought back to the light, and even if not, what separates him from us if we'll just stamp him out without a second thought?"

"That you don't want power. You want to serve and protect. But we can't do either one here and you let Welk take away our best route out!"

"I'm trying to protect you," Jacen countered.

"Maybe I'd need less help if you'd do your part before things get desperate. That's been our story from the start. You won't use the Force to shoot TIE pilots, you won't kill Welk with your lightsaber. It's like you've already decided that you're going to die, and let the Sith win, and you're just afraid to die alone!"

Jacen turned halfway around and closed his eyes. Frustration and despair washed over him. "Anakin, I was up all night trying to keep you from bleeding out the last of your life, and I've been trying to help you from before we even broke through the atmosphere. And if I thought we had no chance then I'd have just let the Sith take me, wouldn't I?"

"You did!" Anakin shouted. "You did give yourself up once!"

"Only so you could get away! I fought back when they were ordered to kill you. Can't you shut up and quit accusing me of being the cause of all our problems for once? To hear you tell the story, I'm worse than the Sith Apprentice!"

"You think that or worse of me." Anakin made a face and sucked in his breath sharply, with one hand at his side, and whatever he was going to say fell away. He was in too much pain to continue a shouting match, and guiltily he realized he did owe Jacen, even if Jacen was the one who was partly at fault for his condition. It wasn't intentional. "Do you think that woman was was the Apprentice? There's always two Sith, and maybe more Dark Side adepts."

"Doubt it. She didn't have a lightsaber. I think Welk might have been Darth Trefitz' apprentice. Now he's got an apprentice somewhere, but the troopers died too quickly for one to be him. I'll go back out and see if there's anything left to loot, any information or supplies to find, but most of it is probably gone. The fire spread a good square kilometer." Jacen put his hands in his pockets, and then sniffed the air. He wanted a bath; it was three long days since his brief shower aboard the Silent Runner. It would have to wait another day, though. He went on, "Welk could actually be the apprentice, for all we know. The Stellar Empire hardly blinked when Trefitz was killed; there could be another, stronger Sith somewhere in its ranks."

"If there is, I hope we don't have to face him," said Anakin. "We might not have enough strength to fight a full Sith Lord, even together, with the way the Force has been clouding and muting. We could practice a lot in the meantime and get better with our skills, but something tells me you won't do that, and I can't make you."

There he goes again! "I don't want to turn out like our grandfather did. And there's nobody here to help set us straight if we start to stray."

"I don't want that to happen either. Don't you think I have more reason to worry than you? Emperor Palpatine's spirit touched me before I was even born. I carry Lord Vader's name! But I'd be nothing if I didn't even try to use my powers the way they're supposed to be used. They're here for us to help people with, and we might have to do stuff we don't like. That's the price we pay."

Jacen shrugged. "I don't know. If we're not careful we could cause a lot more damage than we'd prevent."

"Did you tell yourself you couldn't take out my broken rib because you might cut a major artery?"

"I was scared of that. I made sure to go slow, and be extra careful."

"See? So be extra careful about when and how you use the Force. You can help me heal faster that way, too. I'm asking you to."

Jacen agreed, and Anakin slipped into a healing trance while Jacen did his best to repair the battered tent and then to gather what food he could. He didn't want to stray very far from the campsite with Anakin weakened and unaware of his surroundings, so he barely found enough nuts for one day, but that would have to do for then.

The next morning, Anakin burned with a fever, and Jacen stayed at his side except to fill the water keg. A brief search through the Force found inflammation and infection in a few of Anakin's internal cuts, but the bacterial growth was controlled. Anakin had increased his own blood flow to the area, allowing his white blood cells to do their job, and although there was some swelling of his tissues, he otherwise seemed to have the situation under control. Jacen lent him some of his own strength and roused him every six hours to have something to drink.

Jacen woke from a deep sleep in the night by something grabbing his arm. He pried Anakin's fingers off and sat up. "What is it?" he asked.

"I - I don't know." Each word was forced, breathy, as though Anakin was trying not to panic and his endeavor was partly failing. "Something stabbed me."

Jacen pulled Anakin's shirt up, and felt a warm wetness as he did. One end of Anakin's broken rib poked through skin and stuck up by two centimeters, leaving a fairly long tear behind it. "Something ripped your rib back open. I guess... the roping wasn't that strong after all."

"Ja-a-cen!" Anakin dragged the name out to three syllables in something between a screech and a whine. "Most of the - strength - of the strands - is in the - weave."

What do I do now? What? "I don't see any of the stitches torn - not except two, anyway. Just your simple fracture is a compound fracture now. I don't know any other way to keep the ends together, not without bacta. Unless I blunt the ends so they don't cut you anymore."

Anakin's eyes went wide with terror. "What? How?"

"Uh... I have my lightsaber. I could go through and cauterize the wounds, too. Anakin, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought what I did was going to help."

"It - did." Anakin was breathing very shallowly, and he winced with every breath. Jacen could see by the firelight that his face was pale and he was trembling. "Do what - you have to."

"All right." Jacen sighed and shook his head, then quickly took up his lightsaber and a knife, to use to expose the other end of the broken bone. "Put yourself out, Anakin; you don't want to feel this."

He waited until Anakin didn't respond to a pinch on the back of his hand, then sliced open several of the stitches he'd put in the day before. Jacen had gotten as far as finding the buried bone and was busy delicately cutting away non-vital muscle tissue when Anakin's body jerked, and the boy threw his head back and made a loud, piercing cry.

"No! Don't move!" Jacen withdrew the knife with only minimal additional damage, and managed to wrestle Anakin into stillness. "Let me finish, Anakin," he said. "Make noise if you have to, but stay still!"

Blood smeared across Anakin's lips and teeth, and Jacen saw the wound where he had bitten through his lower lip. "Don't do it - Jacen. Please!"

"You're bleeding too much for me not to." Jacen got up and pulled the tent pegs free, then quickly stomped them into the ground like the vertices of a rectangle with Anakin in the middle. He completely collapsed the tent, frantically, not caring if he damaged it or not; adrenaline gave him the strength he needed to rip out the ropes that held the tent poles, he then brought the ropes over, without unraveling them.

Anakin shouted and squirmed when Jacen tied each of his limbs to a peg, and even more so as Jacen continued his work, though then the squirming manifested only in the tensing of his muscles. Jacen activated his lightsaber and neatly burned away the jagged ends of Anakin's rib, then held the blade close enough to the torn flesh to burn it and force the closing of blood vessels that were cheerily pouring forth their contents. Pale smoke billowed up and stung Jacen's eyes and nose, making his eyes water and tears roll down his face even more than they already were. The charred smell made him nearly throw up, and sizzles made a low background noise that crackled underneath the sound of Anakin's obscenities, screamed and drawn out.

When he was finished, he tossed away the lightsaber and untied his patient. "It's over. You'll be all right," he whispered, and pushed Anakin's sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes.

"Should have done that the first time," Anakin rasped. His entire body was shaking and damp as he fought off pain-induced shock.

Jacen nodded and held a cup of warm water to Anakin's mouth. "I'm sorry I had to put you through that. I wouldn't have if there was a way around it."

Anakin wearily settled down and hugged the ground. "I know."

"You don't hate me, then?"

"No. I just said that when wanted you to put that damn lightsaber down. I'm glad you didn't listen." He smiled tiredly but gratefully when Jacen wrapped wet rags around his chafed wrists and ankles.

"From now on, we watch out for each other more," Jacen said. "I - I'll do whatever it takes to keep you safe. As long as I don't have to use the Dark Side. I know you're watching my back."

"All right. Thank you." Anakin was too exhausted to talk much more, so Jacen helped to draw off some of the lingering soreness in his freshly seared wounds until Anakin fell asleep. Jacen himself was too shaken to fall asleep until three hours passed and his eyelids grew too heavy for him to hold open.