Name A Star

Title: Name A Star
Author: Eleventh Guard
Characters: Jacen Solo/Anakin Solo
Summary: On the last night that the Solo brothers spend alone together, they share their thoughts, and much more.
Author’s Note: This takes place during New Jedi Order: Star by Star, except the end, which takes place during Legacy of the Force: Exile.

Jacen tossed and turned in the too-hard bed, and for a moment he let his thoughts drift towards the bed itself and critique it. He had to be well-rested; they were leaving for Myrkr in the morning, himself and his two siblings and many other young Jedi, and he knew that they weren’t all going to come back. They’d have a better chance of completing their mission, and they’d lose fewer members of the strike team, if they all had proper nutrition and proper sleep before leaving. Jedi or not, it took less effort and energy to get comfortable on a mattress that was comfortable on its own merits, and effort and energy were things he couldn’t exactly spare.

It was easier to blame the bed for his nervousness than to blame the real causes.

The room darkened as the last of the glowrods blinked off. Now there was no light except the faintly glowing numbered keys on the wall panel, right next to their door on the old transport that was taking them to the Lady Luck. He expanded his awareness, just a little bit; Jaina was two rooms away, already sound asleep, and Anakin had just turned off the water in the tiny ‘fresher unit.

The springs jostled Jacen when Anakin climbed into the bed. He dimly remembered, through his dazed, not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake state that Anakin kicked. Jacen buried his head under his small pillow and tried to push everything out of his mind – the mission, the cramped room, the argument they’d had earlier in the day.

They lay in silence for several minutes. Jacen kept to his half of the narrow bed, and Anakin kept to his, and they managed to maintain the half-meter of space between them. The whoosh and low, rapid clicks of the aging air scrubbing machine were the only sounds, except for barely detectable breaths and an occasional creak from the bedframe.

Jacen felt something not-right in the Force, and he didn’t recognize it at first for what it was. Then it resolved into a clearer picture: fear. Not just apprehension, but real, raw terror, surrounded by a faltering shield that couldn’t quite keep it hidden from him.

Anakin was lying completely still, and anyone else might have been fooled into thinking he was asleep, but Jacen knew better. He was forcing himself to breathe in an even pattern. Jacen rolled over onto his side and propped himself up with one elbow, and he saw the skin around Anakin’s eyes twitch, once.

“Anakin, I know you’re not asleep,” Jacen said.

Anakin’s eyes popped open and he tried to glare at Jacen, but he hadn’t had time to adjust to the near-complete darkness and his gaze missed Jacen by several centimeters. “No, m’not,” he mumbled.

“Well, you need to. We’re disembarking in nine hours.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Anakin snapped. “I’m trying. I just can’t sleep.”

“Whatever’s in your mind, can’t you get rid of it? You’re the one who told me that we can’t have any reservations about what we’re going to do. We just have to do it; get in, kill the voxyn queen, and get out if we can.”

“We can’t have any reservations tomorrow. I didn’t say anything about today.”

Jacen shifted on the mattress, moving closer to Anakin. He wanted to take that fear away and tell Anakin that everything would be fine, the way he would have done when they were younger, but neither one was naïve enough to actually believe it. “What’s the matter? You seemed fine earlier.”

“I had a vision.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing. Nothing I want to talk about.” Anakin rolled over, facing away from Jacen, and he pulled the thin blanket tightly around him.

“It’s easier to carry a burden if you’re sharing it,” Jacen pointed out. “We can’t be keeping secrets. They’ll all be known when we link minds, anyway, and I’d rather know now than be surprised.”

Anakin looked over his shoulder, then settled onto his back. “Fine, Jasa. You want to know what I saw? I saw our mother, and she was mourning. Mourning one of us. I don’t know who it was – you, me, or Jaina. Might have been all of us.”

“It’s fear, Anakin, not a real vision. And even if it is real, it might not have anything to do with the mission. Maybe it’s fifty years from now.”

“She didn’t look any different, Jacen.”

“Maybe five years, then.”

“Stop it. Stop trying to make stuff up to make me feel better. This is real, and somebody is going to die.” Anakin lowered his voice, even though nobody could hear him except Jacen. “I hope it’s me.”

Jacen grabbed Anakin’s shoulder. “No, don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true. I don’t want to have to have your death, or Jaina’s, hanging over my head all my life. It would be my fault because I’m the one leading the strike team, and I even knew that it would happen and didn’t stop it.”

Anakin didn’t try to pull away from Jacen, though, and Jacen moved closer, until he was pressed against Anakin’s side and his arms were around the younger man. “Shh. We’re all going to do the best we can, and the important thing is that we’re saving lives. We all know that it’s dangerous, and that we might not survive. Anybody who has a problem with that isn’t coming.”

“I don’t want to lose either one of you,” Anakin insisted.

Jacen pulled Anakin to himself and laid one hand on the back of Anakin’s head, fingers stroking wet hair and combing through them, fingertips brushing Anakin’s scalp. “You won’t. If anybody dies, blame the Yuuzhan Vong. You didn’t lose anybody.”

Anakin didn’t say anything more, and Jacen pressed a soft kiss to his forehead. They held each other in a mutual embrace, and Anakin touched his cheek to Jacen’s. Jacen felt the rapid, pounding heartbeat through their clothes, and opened a Force link between them, to draw off the fear and take it into himself. What he found was a mix of fear and desperation; feelings of futility. “We will finish the mission,” Jacen said. “No matter what happens. That’s what this is about – making the galaxy safe for everybody else. We can’t ask for more than that.”

Anakin’s mouth covered Jacen’s before Jacen could say another word. It did nothing to soften the tension – if anything, it made the frantic energy sharper and more concentrated into the small space around them. But then it was more manageable when so confined. Jacen felt the heat of Anakin’s body so close to his own, a heat that served as a palpable reminder that they were both there, both alive.

Jacen jerked backwards, almost breaking Anakin’s hold on him, and as soon as he did, a cold descended upon him. It was something more than the draft from the air conditioning unit, something that chilled him down to the bone. He clung to Anakin again, feeling warmth return to his body, and kissed him back.

He was briefly horrified to discover that he was breathing faster every time the kiss broke, and that it didn’t break often. His pajama pants suddenly felt too tight, too constricting. His cock pressed painfully into the neatly stitched seam. A seam that was meant to move, but not to stretch, lest it weaken the fabric and shorten the life of his pants. Underneath his fleeting thoughts, though, he felt his own life, stronger than ever. He couldn’t get hard if he was dead. And Anakin couldn’t shift against him and slip his tongue into Jacen’s mouth, warm and wet and tasting faintly of mint leaves, if Anakin was dead. They were there, together, in the here-and-now.

Jacen stroked Anakin’s back, along his angular shoulder blades and down the small ridges of his spine. He felt muscles underneath a thin layer of soft skin tremble, and he rubbed them in circles until they began to relax. “I’m here,” Jacen whispered. “I’m here.”

Anakin twitched as though he was uncomfortable, though, and when he settled himself down, his erection was pressing into Jacen’s hip, obvious despite two pairs of shorts and two pairs of pajama pants between them. “Jasa… I’m sorry, it’s not what you think…”

“What am I thinking, then?” Jacen didn’t know if Anakin could read what was going through his mind, but it was a tightly braided stream of wrongwrongwrong and stayclosedontgoaway. The energy in the room, the impending doom that they couldn’t seem to escape, was surrounding them both like a dark cloud and only hearing Anakin’s voice and feeling his body’s strength and motion kept it from smothering him. “Let go. We both need to let go.”

They clung tightly to each other, desperate to make that thick, tarry darkness lift. It was strangling them both. Anakin shifted and seemed to be struggling with himself, against the conflict between a need for physical relief and the idea that he couldn’t do it here.

They linked minds again, and then there weren’t any secrets. For the few moments that they could stand the complete openness, they were like one mind in two parts, and there was nothing left to hide. Burdens shared, burdens halved. When they drew back into themselves, Anakin was pressing his face against Jacen’s shoulder, and Jacen’s hand had slipped between the band of his shorts and his skin.

Release everything. Doubt, fear, shame, confusion. Jacen drew it out of him the best he could, concentrating the energy and pulling it away. There couldn’t be any lingering shame, lest it destroy the mind-meld when it was time for everyone on the strike team to share. “Don’t hold it all inside,” Jacen whispered.

He hesitated, but Anakin nodded and clasped his hand over Jacen’s, pushing it lower. They didn’t have the luxury of normal lives. There was nothing normal about leading a strike team on what could best be described as a suicide mission at the age of seventeen, nor about having metaphysical powers thrust upon them from a time before they were born, propelling them towards destinies that neither could choose. They didn’t know what would happen to them in the next days, except that it would move them closer to whatever those destinies were, and even love wasn’t strong enough to hold the fates back.

It could only make the journey a little easier.

Jacen closed his hand carefully over Anakin’s throbbing cock, rubbing the top with his palm and sliding his fingers up and down the underside. His thumb grazed sensitive spots and brushed against wiry hair, and Anakin began to thrust his hips, slowly at first, then with more force. Jacen took that as his cue to work more quickly, fingertips stroking the swollen head, smearing leaking drops over every centimeter of the thick manhood in his gentle grip. His own sexual energy increased, to the point that he found it hard to take in a breath that wasn’t ragged and gasping, but he didn’t want to break away from the other man yet.

When Anakin came, it was with a muffled moan, and Jacen barely heard it, too taken by the sudden release of pressure from inside of him as well. His whole body relaxed and he and Anakin molded together in a lazy embrace. Anakin seemed at peace, finally, and Jacen softly kissed him. No secrets, nothing hidden from the other’s view; he had seen Anakin’s intimate moments, and took part in them, and there was nothing left behind a mental wall.

“I’m going to die,” Anakin said, after a few minutes. He sounded sad, but not afraid. “I don’t want to be forgotten. I didn’t even live long enough to have my own children, my own legacy.”

“Even if anything happens to you, I won’t forget,” Jacen replied. “You’re a part of me, and a part of everyone who knows you.”

“Name a star for me. So that when you look up into the sky, you’ll know I’m watching you, and Jaina, and Tahiri, and everyone.”

“I will,” Jacen promised.

-27 ABY, on board the transport Whispering Dragon


…And he could finally recognize that the boy he had been, the optimistic, joke-spinning, animal-loving, kidnap-prone Jedi boy was dead, slain on the same mission that had claimed his brother, Anakin.

At last, understanding what happened, Jacen did not miss his younger self.

Finally, he slept.

-40 ABY, on board the Star Destroyer Anakin Solo