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Chapter Text

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Any war that is won overnight had either never begun, or is still in progress, and is being suppressed by the winning side. The Rebellion’s fight for freedom in the galaxy has not ceased since their victory in destroying the Death Star. Day and night, Imperial troops scour the galaxy for any trace of insubordination and have driven the Rebels into hiding once again.

Covered by snow storms and interference on the icy world of Hoth, a group of freedom fighters lead by Kanaya Maryam and Feferi Peixes lay in wait in their base.

Her Imperious Condescension has not addressed the recent surge in activity publicly, but her impatient apprentice, Lord Sufferer, eagerly deploys squadrons of probes to find a young Jedi opposing him. Their menacing, steel bodies search planets far and wide for the red blooded troll….

-

Many cultures have a concept of afterlife. In almost all of them, there was a place for good people and a place for bad. John didn’t have faith in anything but his friends, but when that hallway turned black, the door slammed shut, and the airlock behind him started to count down, he began to wonder if dying hurt and where he’d go. How long did it take to die in the vacuum of space? Was the computer chip in his pocket worth dying for?

The blackness surrounding him was absolute to the point it almost seemed solid. His lungs tightened momentarily so he pulled his inhaler out of his boot pocket and inhaled deeply. If he was going to die, at least have it be by something cool.

If he could have it his way, though, he wouldn’t die at all.

A few beeps sounded through speakers. Droid speak. Two minutes till airlock automatically unsealed and all of its contents would be spewed into space. John took a deep breath. Two minutes. Plenty of time for Nepeta and Equius to get him out of there. Equius would jimmy the lock and Nepeta would be waiting for him and they’d get this damn communique back to HQ and they’d all laugh about it. It’d be cool.

His hands groped blindly for the wall. It was a small room. Eight feet by, what, twelve? Probably. He found the door he’d come into and tapped uselessly at the dead touch screen that had let him in moments ago. What had happened to the power?

He stumbled forward, bracing himself too soon in the darkness and winced when his wrist hit the door at an awkward angle. The floor shook and the walls vibrated.

“Nepeta…?” he called to no one. He knew no one would answer but- a minute thirty, thank you emotionless droid beeps- but it was a comfort to know that she was still on the ship. It was just an Imperial cargo cruiser, nothing fancy, and the only way in or out was the damn airlock so she couldn’t have left.

“Fuck!” John yelled as the whole airlock shook so violently he was thrown off his feet. He slammed to the floor painfully. His ears rang. He became increasingly aware of a pressure forcing his body to the side of the room. He let the force move him and tried to stay calm in the darkness.

It was supposed to have been a simple mission. Steal the ship from Corellia, hack it for any leftover Imperial correspondences, and fly back to Hoth. It didn’t matter that Corellia was halfway across the galaxy. John, Nepeta, and Equius had become a kind of three man Special Forces unit after the Battle of Yavin known as ZEL. Nepeta came up with the last name acronym. It was that or JEN. They traversed across the galaxy stealing information and infiltrating anything Empire related that they could get their hands on. Go to Corellia, scrap a few ships, and relay info back to base. Simple.

Of course, they hadn’t expected that the ship they had stolen had a drunken crewman passed out in a cargo hold. They really didn’t expect that crewman to put up a fight, and they really really didn’t expect that the crewman had sent out a distress signal before Nepeta shot him. The resulting firefight was not worth the two or three emails they scrubbed the hard drive for. Still, it wasn’t anything that the three of them couldn’t handle. They’d dealt with worse before.

But on the way back to base, the weird stuff began to happen to the ship’s main computer. John and Nepeta knew that Equius was more of a structural troll than a malware one, but they never expected him to accidentally leak a virus this awful into the ship.

John was convinced the damn thing was haunted. He told them he would not live through one of those amazing sci-fi movies where the ship tries to kill the crew. Nepeta had asked him if he meant shitty sci-fi movie and the conversation ended with John sulking, but, lo and behold, the ship was trying to kill them.

One minute.

The pressure pinning John to the wall increased again. His breaths came in small, labored gasps. He tried to reach his hand into his boot for his inhaler, but it was glued to the wall. G force. Oh shit. His eyes widened as the realization hit him. Nepeta and Equius were landing the ship before the airlock opened. Were they even close enough to Hoth to do that?

He tried to think of the view from the last window he’d looked out of before the death computer had separated them, but his mind came up blank. Well, not entirely blank. He, involuntarily, was suddenly thinking, “Record scratch. Freeze frame. Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.”

“Shut up, brain!” he yelled out loud and tried again. He had grabbed the hard copy of the communications and shoved them in his pocket. They were untouched by the virus, as Equius had downloaded them before overriding the mainframe. Geeze, he was a worse hacker than Karkat.  No! Focus! Windows!There had been red flashing lights and sirens. They hadn’t gotten a horror movie virus that played games with them or offered riddles, no; it had just been a plain old malware bug that thought of them as intruders. At

There had been red flashing lights and sirens. They hadn’t gotten a horror movie virus that played games with them or offered riddles, no; it had just been a plain old malware bug that thought of them as intruders. At first, they just overrode the system for a few days, but towards the end of the trip home, they’d gotten sloppy.

John tried to face palm as the memory flooded back to him, but the force of gravity wouldn’t allow the ignominious display. Nepeta and Equius were having an impromptu feelings jam in the cockpit, so he’d gone into the cargo hold to give them some privacy. Sometimes it was hard, working with the moirails. That’s when the lights cut out and the auxiliary power started up. He’d run into the first room he saw, like an idiot, and that room had happened to be, wow, the airlock!

But did he see a window in all this? What had the cockpit looked like?

Thirty seconds.

He screamed. He couldn’t think with all the shaking and the deafening noise! What if they weren’t landing? What if they were crashing? He screamed and closed his eyes, which did nothing in the darkness. He tried to relax his body for the moment of impact. Stiff body means broken parts. But he knew that some impacts meant broken parts no matter how relaxed you were, especially if you weren’t buckled into a seat and were being forced into a metal wall.

Twenty seconds.

There was a jolt. His head slammed back into the wall behind him and his sitting body popped up like a rocket and crashed back down hard. They were still falling, but the G forces had slacked. Were they slowing their descent?

Fifteen seconds.

He heard a hum over the ambient roar. His pilot brain identified the hum as spoilers (stupid name for a thing, but he supposed it was shorter than slowy-downy-flappy-things) rising on the wings. The pressure on his chest subsided even more.

Ten seconds.

More noises. What was that, backward thrusters? Did this thing have parachutes? Hoth is cold, how thin would the atmosphere be and how would that affect them?

Variable after variable affecting a situation that John could do nothing about flooded his brain. He couldn’t help it. Flying came to him naturally, and although he loved flying in space, nothing beat good old air. His fingers twitched to grab a yoke and try to land the ship. He lived in those moments. Apparently, he died in them as well.

Five… four… three….

Equius’s voice crackled to life over the speakers. It was hard to hear him over Nepeta’s screaming in the background. “Be strong, John! Hold on!”

“To wha-“

The hatch opened. John didn’t know whether to be stunned by the brightness first, or the cold, or the air being sucked out of his chest. His body was ripped from its seat against the wall and flung towards the painfully bright opening. The craft listed to the side, like it was trying to throw him out. He screamed as he slid towards the gaping white mouth waiting for him. They were still far from the ground. The math happened in his head while the craft listed again and threw him into the back wall. The motion was akin to a pancake being flipped. He had almost fallen out into the icy void before the floor tilted and slung him to safety.

It was around the point of inertia when the guess work concerning atmosphere, size of a cargo vessel, equalizing pressure, and angle of descent formed a number. They had to still be somewhere between a thousand and two-thousand feet up.

Another violent list, except in the same direction as before. John was thrust to the ceiling. Another whack to his head, this time face first. Blood that gusted from his nose was whipped away in the frigid wind. His glassed cracked but somehow stayed on his face.

The ground had to be closer now. A thousand feet? Five hundred? John grabbed onto one of the metal bars crisscrossing the ceiling that now served as a floor, and looked over his shoulder out the airlock. The white of the snow made the landscape flat. He had no idea how far up they were, only that the air was getting easier to breathe, even if it’s chill burned his lungs.

The ship rolled again and John held on for dear life. The open airlock now dropped straight into the snow and ice. It was close. Three hundred feet? The ship continued to roll and John was forced to change positions and cling to a metal bar on the wall. Two hundred… one hundred….

He refused to close his eyes as the white mass of land rushed up to meet them.  He held on through the initial impact but made the mistake of loosening his grip before they had stopped.

It happened so fast that he didn’t even realize he’d fallen out until the snow drift ate him. He convulsed in the cold, his open jacket and signature mechanic overalls ill equipped to face such extreme temperatures.

Panic began to wrap itself around his throat. His thrashing became more frantic as the snow closed around him. Suffocating darkness once again.

He couldn’t help it. He screamed. He’d stayed calm through the crash but he couldn’t do this. He screamed and tasted blood in his mouth when he paused for breath. Breath. Couldn’t you run out of oxygen when you’re buried in snow? He kept screaming. He didn’t know what to do. There was no snow on Tatooine. There was no snow on Tatooine. There was no snow on-

“John!”

His name was muffled through the snow.

“Nepeta!” he screamed. His voiced cracked as he started to fail again.

“Don’t move!” Equius yelled. John didn’t heed the advice. The adrenaline coursing through his body wouldn’t allow it. Rationality didn’t exist to him at the moment.

“Johnny,” Nepeta’s voice called out to him. “I know you’re purrty scared right now but you need to stay still!”

Her voice was calm and loud. He tried to listen. He stopped flailing but couldn’t stop shaking violently. In the eight months, the three of them had been working together, they’d saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion. He trusted them. He tried to take a deep breath.

The black snow above him started to lighten. He heard digging hands and labored grunts coming towards him. A huge, gray hand finally found its way to his sleeve and yanked him out of the snow. As soon as he was free, Nepeta threw her arms around him. Her right arm was bleeding, but not as bad as Equius was. John could see the little bits of glass still in their flesh. The windshield.

He said nothing as Equius hoisted his 280-something pound body like it was nothing over his shoulder and started walking. Nepeta’s face was close to his own as they trudged through the snow… wherever they were going. They left a trail of blue, green, and red spots.

“I messaged the base as soon as we… erm… landed,” Nepeta said in-between licking the back of her exposed hand. John saw her specially made, retractable, clawed gloves hanging out of one of the pockets on her long green coat. The hem of the garment dragged in the snow.

She looked up at him earnestly with her big green eyes and continued, “Mew, me, and Equius are going to be fine, I’m pawsitive.” John only had the energy to nod. Before he knew it, they had trudged back to the crashed ship that had thankfully turned itself into a warm, warm blazing wreck.

John shuddered in relief as they sat him down as close to the fume heavy flames as they dared. The three didn’t speak as the feeling returned to their extremities. After a few minutes, Nepeta gently grabbed his chin and wiped the blood off of his face. John coughed.

“So what happened on your end?”

For some reason that made all of them laugh. It’d become a common phrase between the trio. You get separated, and that was always the question you ask when you reunite. It had become a kind phrase that meant more than it said. It meant ‘I’m okay now. How are you holding up?’

Equius papped Nepeta’s shoulder. “We were just talking in the cockpit when the ship went crazy,” he said.

“When the killer virus went crazy,” John corrected.

“I simply overrode the security protocols incorrectly; we weren’t in a science fiction period piece, Egbert.” Equius adjusted his cracked, square sunglasses. John rolled his eyes and let Equius continue.

”We had no way to open to the airlock, so we began a rapid descent.”

“Really,” said John, “I hadn’t noticed.”

Nepeta swatted his arm playfully. “We’re all safe meow! Look!”

They turned in the direction she was pointing and saw the three Rebel soldiers on tauntauns riding towards them. John sighed in relief and pushed his aching body to his feet. He smiled when he noticed that one of the riders sported a sword sheath at their side.

Dave Strider pulled back on the reins of his tauntan and looked down on John. He hopped off the animal and stood before his friend, silent. Finally, he pulled down the warm cloth in front of his face and smirked. “Hey there John. Long time, no fist bu-mp!”

His last word came out fractured as John flung his strong arms around his old, annoying, best friend. “I missed you, dude!” John declared as Dave said something silly about not being able to breathe.

“No hug for me?”

John turned around and ran into Jade’s arms. The giant girl lifted him up in her hug. She was looking good. The patch of hair on her chin was a little thicker and the white tufts of her ears were a little matted, and her smile was as radiant as ever.

“Good to see ya, Jade,” John smiled. She ruffled his hair and tapped his glasses before going over to lift Nepeta onto her shoulders. The two were joined at the hip when they were within ten feet of each other. Nepeta just seemed to naturally attract people with more muscles than they knew what to do with.

After passing around some warmer clothes, dog-girl and cat-girl hopped on their tauntan. Equius joined the other Rebel and John went with Dave.

“Looked like a pretty gnarly crash,” Dave said. “Watched it from one of our drones as you came in. Did you fucking fall out the side?”

John poked Dave’s side as they began riding. “You have no clue, my friend. We’ve got loads to catch up on!” John felt Dave laugh. He leaned a little closer to Dave’s ear. “I’ll tell you about my wacky space adventures if you tell me how far you’ve gotten with Karkat.” Even though Dave wasn’t facing him, he still waggled his eyebrows.

“I will shove you off this bipedal alpaca and you know it, Egbert, broken face be damned.”

John laughed and squeezed Dave’s waist. He missed him so much. They had only gotten to hang out in real life for a few months at a time before John was being deployed on missions with Nepeta and Equius. He felt like he hadn’t seen him in years, but really, it’d only been three years since they met face to face. He missed Karkat too, that cranky little goober. He wondered what he was up to.

“Hey, hey Dave.”

“What?”

“You know the Death Star?”

“I know of it.”

“They’re building another one.”

Dave whipped around to face John as best as he could. “You’re fucking with me?”

John shook his head and sighed. “We don’t know where, when, or how, but they are definitely working on one. That’s the information we crashed for.” He could feel the computer chip containing this little piece of information digging into his hip through his overalls.

Dave turned back to the snow and shook his head. “How unoriginal,” was all he said, and John smiled. It hurt his face, but he smiled.

Chapter Text

As much as Dave had missed John, having him bleed all over his jacket wasn’t really the kind of reunion he had been expecting. That crash had taken more out of ol’ Johnny boy than the bastard had in him. By the time their merry band of frozen cowboys had moseyed on back to base, Dave had one hand on his tauntaun reigns and the other one linked awkwardly behind him, trying to keep John steady. As meaty as his main man was, the adrenaline was wearing off, and it wasn’t hard to see how badly John had been damaged in the crash.

The med crew swarmed them as soon as they entered the base. John’s eyes rolled back into his head as the higher temperature made his brain think that it was okay to pass out. Dave tried to help Jade lift him off the shivering tauntaun, but just kind of ended up slugging him off into her arms.

“Sorry, dude,” he whispered as Jade slung him over her shoulder and carried him to the hovering stretcher. He watched them all walk hurriedly away with his friend. He ran a hand through his hair and watched his breath form a little cloud as he breathed out. What an entrance.

He turned to nag Nepeta and Equius about that sick landing, but they had already skedaddled off to other places, probably taking important information to important people.

Dave stepped out of the way of a couple tauntauns riders and leaned against a frozen wall. He shivered. Hoth was, by far, the worst planet he’d ever been on. Its cold wasn’t even the beautiful kind. He and Jade had been to ice planets where the weather looked like magic, or the frozen mountains would light up purple and green in the late hours of the day. There were definite upsides to being a smuggler. Along with traversing all the shitholes of the galaxy, every paradise they found made it worth it.

Here, though…. He frowned at the stark gray walls, the running men and women in thick beige coats, the ships crawling with maintenance crews in the hanger behind him…. There was something at stake here. It made his chest feel the way it used to when his brother stepped on his rib cage at the end of a fight. It wasn’t just the cold that made it difficult to breathe. It was the war. It’d been war for three years.

“Hadn’t we won it already?” said a sarcastic, soft voice in his ear.

Dave’s sword was at Rose’s throat before he could stop himself, but she was ready. In fact, she’d known exactly what would happen, like she always did.

The sword rang out when it came into contact with her reinforced steel knitting needles. They glared at each other vehemently for a moment, their breaths mingling between their faces. Rose smirked, and Dave rolled his eyes. They were behind his glasses, but Rose could always tell.

“You heard?” he asked, sheathing the sword and leaning back against the wall.

Rose shook her head and pulled her fluffy, fur lined, purple coat up over her ears. “I’ve told you a million times, Dave. I can’t read your thoughts; I just know what you’re thinking.”

He kept his eyes on the scurrying Rebels around him. “What’s the difference?”

She laid a hand on his crossed arms. “The difference is, I may not know how you phrase it, but I know you desperately feel a need to get out of here.”

He nodded. Rose was an annoying, flirtatious, batshit crazy, psychic lesbian. She knew how to get under his skin because she was in his brain. He was still trying to figure out how he could hate that so much and love her as much as he did at the same time. He’d never say that, but he was pretty sure she already knew.

“I can’t leave, though. With Snowman looking for me? Hiding out here and kicking a Stormtrooper in the ass every once in a while is the best option.“ He sighed as he looked around. “Even if I’m not much use.” Normally, he could pretend not to look at someone and his glasses would do the rest, but Rose, with her purple eyes and sly smile… she’d know. Why pretend around her? “Besides, Jade is up to her furry ass in science here. The Rebels need her.”

Rose took her hand off his arm but scooted closer. “You talk like you’re not one of us.”

He shrugged. “I’m only good in a fight.”

“So you’re only here to fight? No other reason for you to stay?” Her voice pulled dangerously at the end of her words. She was shaping them into something nasty. “There isn’t a specific person you’re hoping will notice you? Hmm?” He didn’t have to look at her to see her lip curl.

He pushed off the wall and pointed a gloved finger into her smug, two-inch winged eyeliner and a tube of black lipstick face. “He has nothing to do with this.”

Rose waggled her pierced eyebrow. “So it’s a he?” she asked innocently.

Dave was about to tell her that she knew damn well it was a he. They’d only been talking about him for the past three months in the quiet mornings when neither of them could sleep. He opened his mouth as soon as she did to refute what she knew he was about to say, when her face fell. Her eyes focused on someone behind him.

He whirled around to meet Kanaya rushing up to them. “Have any of you seen Karkat?” she asked breathlessly. Her angular features were distorted with worry. “Rose?” She looked to her girlfriend for help. Rose shook her head and went to pull Kanaya in her arms. Kanaya let her embrace her for a moment but pulled away quickly, fixing her hair.

“Has he not come back yet?” Rose asked. Kanaya shook her head. Dave had never seen her lose her cool until she and Karkat began their moirallegiance. After that, her placid demeanor was occasionally broken with worry as Karat disappeared, off doing something stupid, as no doubt he was doing right now.

“He didn’t report in,” Dave told her. She nodded and took a breath.

“Will you find him, please?” she asked calmly. If Kanaya was ever flustered, it was only ever for a moment. She trusted those around her, and everyday Dave wished he could do what she did. He nodded and he meant it. Her worry had set off a series of alarms in his mind. Why was Karkat still on patrol? It was getting dark soon. What if something had happened? What if he was dead?

He felt Rose’s hand on his arm again and his breathing steadied. “Darling, I’ll be with you in a moment,” he heard her tell Kanaya. He was faintly aware of Kanaya thanking her and turning away. He heard something else, and then realized Rose was snapping in front of his face.

“Dave?”

He shook his head. “I need to go grab a tauntaun,” he said.

She nodded. “I can’t see him,” she told him. Her face fell a little as she said it. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault. She always blamed herself when something happened. It was never her fault. If she could read his mind, why didn’t she know that?

“It’s all cool, dude,” he said patting her on the shoulder. “There ain’t nothing ya boy Strider can’t handle!”

She smiled faintly and nodded before following Kanaya. Dave shook the doubts out of his head and started running to the tracking station. Jade would be busy in the med sector, John’s fucking special ops crew was down for the count, and all vital personal, including Rose and Kanaya, weren’t allowed out after the temps got to low. He smiled to himself. Good thing he wasn’t valuable to anybody.

The station had been at least a little help. A deck officer informed him that a) Karkat’s tracker was working and b) going outside in these temps were suicidal. Dave winked at him and made a grand display of calling on any men, or women, he added hastily, with enough balls to go with him would forever have his respect and a seat on the Falcon. This was said with one foot on a chair and fist raised high to all the staff in the drab, freezer burned metal and glass tracking station. He waited for someone to volunteer to join his Karkat crusade, but no eyes met his. He just groaned and asked the man at the computer to feed him coordinates through his comlink. The man nodded with a sorry smile.

It’s not like Dave could have made them go. He had no rank to pull and wasn’t a leader like John was. That crazy son of a bitch could encourage a quadruple amputee to enter a kickboxing match. Hell, with John coaching him, the dude would probably win too. He hoped John was okay. He shivered as he remembered all the blood that was still frozen to his jacket. At least it was red.

The tauntaun he chose snorted as he hopped onto its back. He patted its matted fur with his gloved hand and it stopped shaking, a little bit. “I’m sorry, dude,” he said as he waved at the guard by the smaller door on the side of the hangar opening. The tauntaun stamped its feet in protest, but Dave spurred it on and plunged into the white, windy world awaiting them.

A few minutes into the snow and Dave knew something was wrong. Karkat was a stupid, cranky idiot at times, sure, but he wasn’t someone who went off and got themselves killed all the sudden, right?

His grip tightened on the reigns as he kept on the course that a steady beeping in his ear directed him too. It was the Mayor, that short-circuit of an R2. He loved that little guy and so did Karkat. Karkat… he shook his head and tried to look at something but the fading light made all the whiteness around him dirty, tinged with shadows and grey in-between snowdrifts. The wind roaring in his ears didn’t help either. Usually, he nabbed his special Harley-made comlink that had all his dank tuneage uploaded in it before going on his patrols, but he’d rushed out with his head already forgetting little things like that, blocking out anything that wasn’t important to the task at hand.

Even now, the exhaustion threatening to pull his eyes shut couldn’t outmatch the determination telling him find Karkat, find Karkat, find Karkat.… His cold stiffened fingers tightened on the tauntaun reigns. The electric scent of temperatures that low snuck through the thick cloth tied around his mouth and nose. This wasn’t a time for letting his mind wander. He had to stay on his toes, or at least, his tauntan. He leaned forward to try and steal a little warmth of the creature’s body. Karkat better have something warm around him, or that crabby dude had less a chance of surviving than an ice-cream cone on Tatooine in the middle of summer, that was for sure.

Very suddenly it seemed, the gray shadows around him turned into a menacing black. Only the frosty tips of the snowdrifts were visible in the fading light. Dave swore and urged the tauntaun on faster. Below them, the smallest excuse for a path wound out further and further into the black and white wasteland. On their first day on Hoth, they’d been told never to follow any “paths”and to only stay on GPS. The wind was the real siren out here, leading many a man to their doom by convincing them they’d just found a path back to base, and leading them miles off course all the way to an icy, frozen death.

Dave knew this, but since the Mayor’s guidance had cut out in his ear a long time ago he had no choice but to follow it to wherever it was leading him. There was a good chance Karkat had fallen into one of the wind worn death sidewalks, but this one specifically? Even Dave knew it wasn’t that likely.

He should turn around, he knew he should turn around and yet he couldn’t. It wasn’t that there was that Force that everyone kept talking about telling him where to go or anything like that; it was fear. If he turned around, there was absolutely no chance of finding Karkat. But if he kept going… it was possible.

While there was time to ponder the morality of leaving someone to die in order to save yourself, the thought never crossed the smuggler’s mind. If it was someone else, maybe. Dave wasn’t dumb enough to convince himself that he was saintly on any planet, but he was just dumb enough to convince himself that Karkat meant the same to him as everyone else did, and that misconception didn’t add up to him risking his life for the guy, but he didn’t want to talk about it. He’d find some excuse later.

What Dave was about to ponder was whether or not Karkat would risk his life for him, but he never got the chance to reach a conclusion. His tauntaun’s legs gave out and threw him into the snow before he could form a coherent thought on the matter.

Instinctively, he ducked into a roll and came up on his feet as the massive animal toppled into the sub zero ground. It groaned once, and then stopped moving. Dave stared at it. Death hung in the air and was shoved in his face by the merciless wind. He looked to the gray hills and dips surrounding him. His breath came in one gasp, two. On the third, he shook his head and started walking. If he started crying, the tears would freeze on his face and he could not let that happen. He put one boot in front of the other and started walking.

“Damnit, Kar… where are y- fuck!”

He hadn’t meant to trip over the nearly frozen body, but it was a stroke of luck he wasn’t going to ignore. Don’t look a present bearing hoof beast in the consumption hole, or whatever the fuck it was Alternians said, right?

“Karkat!” Dave dropped to his knees and started groping the body, searching for signs of trauma in the near darkness. It wasn’t difficult to feel the frozen blood masking half of his friend’s face. “Karkat!” he yelled again. He didn’t respond. Was he even breathing?

His fingers traced down the troll’s face again. Nothing covering his mouth. Dave struggled to untie his own cloth with his gloves. When his own face was clear, he laid his cheek to Karkat’s mouth. Warmth. He was breathing. Dave cried out and punched the air before tying the cloth around Karkat’s face and hoisting him up onto his shoulders. Good thing he was so small, fuck. As soon as he’d begun walking, the final dredges of that pathetic excuse for sunlight died, leaving them in frigid darkness.

“Don’t worry, Kar,” Dave grunted through the darkness, his feet following the path back the way he’d come. “I’m here.”

He couldn’t tell how long it took to reach the tauntaun carcass. Without that strip of cloth over his mouth, Dave was positive his lips were freezing off. He didn’t know where his fingers were, but his stomach felt warm, and he didn’t know when he’d stopped shivering. That was a bad sign.

Dave dropped to his knees and let Karkat fall off his back and onto the ground. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Again, he raked his hand across Karkat’s body. He was so stiff and so small Dave began to worry he’d just keep curling up until there was nothing left of him but something so small and gray and frozen and it’d just become part of the snow drift.

Finally, his hands landed on the lightsaber. He was too afraid to take it out of Karkat’s hand and break a finger off, so he just pressed Karkat’s thumb onto the button it already rested on and let the stream of red go from there.

Karkat was a mess. He was sure the red light made it worse, but… the dark patches of frozen blood covered more surface area than clean clothes, and that couldn’t be good. Someone had spilled a whole gallon of red ink all over him, Dave realized. Then he shook his head because he really didn’t want to die of hypothermia.

He looked from the lightsaber, to the round belly of the dead animal, back to the lightsaber, and then to Karkat. And then he screamed, because the one eye that Karkat had open stared at him with manic intent and reflected the light of the Jedi weapon so that every second Dave held eye contact he felt as though he were being burned.

“Psiioniic!” Karkat gasped. He tried to do something but was too cold, so he just ended up shaking. “Psiioniic!” he gasped again. The word came out ragged and labored in the darkness. “Da- Da- Da- Dago- Dago-“ he tried.

“Shhhs…” Dave yanked the shaking saber between them in a wide arc and spilled the contents of the tauntaun’s insides all over the two of them. His stomach tried to throw up but the rest of him wouldn’t let it happen. The lightsaber fizzled and sputtered before shutting off in a shower of sparks that burned Dave’s frozen skin.

Karkat struggled to get more words out. Dave leaned down in the dark and kissed his check with his frozen lips. Karkat calmed down and closed his one eye once more. Dave apologized again as he took the boy and shoved him into the dead animal as deep as he could go and still breathe.

Once Karkat was in, Dave forced himself to dig into the saddlebags of the tauntaun and pull out the bivouac and a flashlight. He labored to set up the corners and let the drill drive the pegs into the ice. After what seemed like years, a puny tent was up around the desperate pair and the little protection from the wind made the struggle worth it. He did the best he could to lay out a blanket on the icy floor before finding the distress beacon at the bottom of the saddlebag. He pressed the button and watched the small, elliptical device glow a pulsing red.

He stared at Karkat’s abused face and wondered what had happened. Was he trying to say Dagobah? What happened out there? He stared at Karkat and promised not to fall asleep in the cold just before the exhaustion finally won, and his eyes shut all on their own.

Chapter Text

Snow all around him as-

Stars bursting under his eyelids from the impact of-

Earsplitting, hungry roar. It lumbered towards-

The lightsaber-

Noise-

Staggering-

“Don’t die on me yet, you little shit. I need you to go pester an old friend of mine. The crazy bat’s name is Redglare, and you’ll find her blind ass on Dagobah. Don’t fucking give out on me now, Karkat…”

“I’m here.”

There was something over his left cheek. Before he opened his eyes, he tried to open his mouth, but the flesh on his left cheek fought against the movement. He frowned, but that was difficult too.

“It’s okay Kar, the nurse said your face would feel like it was still frozen.”

He tried to open his eyes, but the blinding whiteness of the light above him forced him to slam them shut again. “For the love of fuck, John, turn that fucking sun burning my seeing orbs out off!” Well, he tried to yell it, but his throat just kind of spit the words out pitifully with a cough. He heard a chair scoot and footsteps. The light dimmed and John chuckled.

Karkat opened his eyes. He was in the med wing of the base. Great, that meant he must have gotten really fucked up. He tried to push himself up a little, but his muscles wouldn’t cooperate. John stood and moved to help him.

“Fuck off, Egbert. If they put me in that fucking blue shit I’ll have to wake my body up, you know that.”

John nodded and sat back down. “Sorry dude. You just look so helpless like that.”

“Thanks.”

After a few minutes of silence between the two of them, Karkat was ready to talk. He’d fought against his body until he could move his fingers again and feel his hands on his face. There wasn’t even a scar. How the hell did they manage that?

He finally looked over and scrutinized John. Half a rotation in space looked rough on him. He looked older, if that was possible. In the low light, his blue eyes seemed gray and dull, like they’d been bleached from the sunlight of so many distant suns. His smile remained constant, though. Karkat smiled himself at that. The universe was sure to keep on turning so long as John Egbert smiled.

“What the fuck are you even doing on Hoth?” Karkat asked him.

John shrugged. “What, not overjoyed to see me?” He laughed at himself. Karkat laughed with him. “Well, we got some pretty shitty news and it cost me a couple broken ribs and a crapped pair of pants to get it,” he sighed.

Karkat leaned forward. “Did you really shit yourself, this information was so bad?”

John rolled his eyes. “No, the second Death Star can’t be worse than the first. I did fall out of a crashing spaceship to get here, though.”

Karkat laughed but John wasn’t laughing. He just leaned back in the chair with a smug look on his face. Karkat rolled his eyes and sat up a little more. “Motherfucker, you actually fell out of a crashing ship. What the hell happened?” The Empire’s plans didn’t concern him that much. The little tug in the pit of his stomach that he’d been following more and more these days told him that today wasn’t the day to worry about it.

“I’ll tell you what happened as soon as you tell me why Dave had to save your sorry ass from freezing to death two days ago,” John retorted, buck teeth in full view as he grinned at his old friend.

“Yeah, I’d like to know that too.”

Karkat turned to face the familiar voice. Dave’s question hung in the air as he and Rose walked into the medical bay side by side. Karkat’s blood pusher lurched and he told it to calm the fuck down. It was just Dave. He’d seen him every day for over a full rotation now. Nothing special about Dave. Except… everything.

“Karkat?” Rose sang, waving a hand. “Still got a little sedative in you, or do you need a minute to ogle at your heroic, albeit idiotic, savior?”

He glared at her and her innocent, pursed lips, and then at Dave, and his deadpan face with the exception of a single cocked eyebrow. What an asshole.

“I was attacked by the abominable fucking snowman!” he yelled. “A giant, furry Yeti with a taste for flayed Vantas chilled and served on pointy ass icicle skewers! Fucker put me in its meat locker cave like I was already dead! I was frozen bulge to boot to the roof of that cretin’s humble abode, before I forced yanked my lightsaber out and the would-be flay-ee became the flayer.” He made the slashing motions to drive home the effect. Rose and Dave were emotionally immune to his theatric recount of the experience, but John hung breathlessly onto every word.

“Next thing I know, Psiioniic is right there in front of me, basically giving me the sparky middle finger!” At least that sparked a ripple of confusion to his audience. He shrugged and leaned back. “And then, I woke here.”

Dave stepped forward and sat on the end of the bed, propping his legs up on John’s lap. “Yeah, thanks to me, you absolute crab.”

“What, did you go out there and get me?” Karkat laughed.

Dave nodded. His mouth was still set in a firm line. He looked like he was angry, but why would he be? “Thanks,” Karkat told him quietly, but the look didn’t change. Dave just sighed and pulled something out of one of the compartments on his belt and handed it to Karkat.

“Piece of shit shorted out after I used it to slice and dice a tauntaun and get you all warm and toasty inside,” he told him.

Involuntarily, Karkat lurched. “Yeah, I’m really fucking glad I don’t remember that.” He looked down at the lightsaber in his hands and pressed the button. Nothing. He pressed it again. Nothing still. He shook it and held it to his hearing hole. He shook it again. There was something broken in there.

“That is apparently,” Rose started, walking to the door, “a kyber crystal.” She opened the door before Jade could. The massive girl looked surprised for only a moment. So was life in the vicinity of Rose Lalonde. She opened her mouth to say something, but saw Karkat first and squealed instead.

“You’re awake!” she shouted, stating the absolute obvious. He nodded. Yeah. Before he could think of a good sarcastic comment, Jade had already crossed the room in two steps and lifted him halfway off the mattress in an enormous hug that felt more like a suffocation attempt. She set him down when he started gasping.

“Oh!” She pointed at his lightsaber. “I know what’s wrong with your lightsaber!”

“Let me guess,” Karkat coughed, “would it happen to be a kyber crystal?”

Jade’s ears flopped down. She stroked the little hairs on her chin and tilted her head at him. “How did you kno- Rose!” She growled at Rose and Rose laughed it off as she walked out the door to greet two more incomers. Karkat sagged at the prospect of more people. He could take tight spaces, but crowded rooms really made him feel claustrophobic.

He was about to protest any more company when his words caught in his throat and all complaints fell away. Kanaya swept into the room with Feferi in her wake and made a beeline for Karkat. She practically shoved Dave off the bed and sat holding Karkat’s hand.

“Hello,” she said quietly.

“Hey.”

The room quieted for a moment. Their affection made everyone present uncomfortable and they both knew it, but they both didn’t care at the moment. He papped her hand softly. Feferi turned around with a pink blush making her freckles jump off her cheeks. The moirails took a few more moments together before letting go. Jade then stepped forward.

“I was just explaining to Karkat the situation with the kyber crystals,” she explained.

“Did you get to the part where John comes in?” Feferi asked. John stood up with a frown.  He turned to Dave, but Dave was no help either.

Jade shook her head. “I will in a moment. Karkat,” she said, “do you know what kyber crystals are?”

He nodded. “They’re like Force sensitive rocks that make lightsabers lethal, right?”

Jade sighed but nodded, “In essence, yes. The Jedi used them to power their weapons, just as the Sith use them to power theirs. The Empire had been collecting them to power the Death Star.” Karkat nodded. Made sense. “Well, we don’t know where any are anymore.”

“So?” Karkat asked.

“So you don’t have a lightsaber anymore, dumbass,” Dave said with a smirk. Karkat glared and tried desperately, but ultimately failed, to conceal the angry flush that he felt creeping up his cheeks. Even Kanaya was smiling at him.

Feferi raised her hand. This enormous troll with hair that could probably hide an entire squadron, and was literally their commanding general, still raised her hand to speak. Her gills flapped excitedly. For a long moment, no one called on her. Then, Karkat guessed, suddenly her rank flooded her waterlogged memory and she gasped a little.

“Oh! Opps!” She covered her face in her hands for a moment, and the clanging of her bracelets filled the room. Feferi only wore a light coat around the base, and often rolled up the pink sleeves so her jewelry would jangle. No matter how many times she explained that the ocean depths weren’t much warmer than the base, Karkat would still never believe she wasn’t freezing her fins off.

“Whale, this is the part where John swims in!” Feferi clapped her hands and looked over the group of people before her. “In the communique that ZEL apprehended a few days ago, there was a piece of information regarding delayed construction on a second Death Star. In all our months of espionage, we don’t have any more information on that at all.” She looked around to see if everyone was still paying attention. Karkat made a ‘keep going’ motion with his finger. Yeah, and?

“So, John, we have a mission for you, Nepeta, and Equius with a double porpoise, but I’m not sure if you’re going to pike it…” she frowned at him.

“Bring it,” John shrugged.

She nodded, and her golden earrings jingled. “Okay. We want to send you three to Alternia.”

“What?”

“Wait! Fuck! No! They’ll die!”

“Whose idea was this?”

“That’s impossible.”

“Guys!” John yelled. Dave, Kanaya, Karkat, and Jade shut up. “It’s okay!” His hands were held up and his smile was excited. “Go on, Fef.”

“There’s a kyber processing plant in the northern hemisphere. We need you three to go and take a look around. Simple swim in, swim out. If they’re processing crystals, then the rumors of a second Death Star may be true.”

John nodded at her. “And I suppose if we snag a crystal for Karkat, that’d be okay too?”

Feferi nodded. “We can’t order you to, but we can’t stop you either.”

“John,” Dave a Karkat both said at once.

“Don’t do anything stupid, bro,” Dave warned.

“I agree with space cowboy over here for once,” Karkat said. “Don’t get your ass hauled off by a Stormtrooper for a shiny rock.” Jade and Kanaya agreed, but Rose simply smirked behind them all, arms crossed and a look in her eye that Karkat didn’t like.

“Hey!” John laughed. “First of all, I’ve got to make sure Nepeta and Equius are okay with it, and second of all, don’t worry! It’s not like there’s many adults on Alternia! I’ll be fine!”

At this point, Karkat was crawling out from under the covers. He fought against the fabric death trap, fell on the floor, and popped up pointing a finger in John’s face. “First of all! Those wriggling bastards could kill you in seven ways with a plastic spoon, you hear me, Egbert! Don’t undermine those little fucks! They’ll eat you alive! And Second! It’s just a lightsaber! I’ll find a crystal somewhere else!”

“Calm down!”

“Don’t tell me to calm down! You calm down!”

Kanaya grabbed his hand. “Karkat.”

He kept yelling. John tried to defend himself, and suddenly Dave was defending John and Jade was defending Dave and Feferi kept telling to them the lightsaber was the smaller issue here and finally Rose threw a plastic jar into the wall and everyone shut up.

“As much as I adore you all fighting over how much you care about each other,” she laughed uneasily, “you might want to worry about that.”

Kanaya frowned. “About what, love?”

Rose frowned back. “It hasn’t started yet, has it?”

Kanaya stepped away from Karkat and caressed Rose’s dark, round, chubby face with her long, elegant hands. “What?”

“The alarms,” Rose explained. She shook her head and blinked. “Hmm, must have not started yet.”

Feferi yanked her com link out of her belt. “Command, this is General Peixes. Is there anything going on that I should know about?”

A voice crackled out of the com link. “As it happens, yes. A patroller just shot down a probe in sector five, quarter twelve. We think it’s Imperial. Suggested course of action is full-scale evacuation. How do we proceed, general?”

Feferi hesitated for only a moment. “Proceed with the evacuation.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Feferi turned to Kanaya and Rose and nodded. The three strode out of the medical bay together, Kanaya still holding Rose’s hand. Kanaya winked at Karkat before she walked out of sight.

The rest of them waited. Karkat looked to John. John’s face had hardened with apprehension. Karkat poked his arm. “Just don’t get killed, okay?” John smiled and nodded.

“I won’t.”

Then the alarms sounded, and everyone but Karkat left to start packing up.

Chapter Text

It’s not as though they hadn’t done this before. The Empire had chased the Rebellion from one side of the galaxy to the other. Karkat tapped his fingers on the edge of his hospital bed. He wanted to be released to go help out, anything to not be in the fucking med bay. He hated it here, with all the med droids hovering about him constantly. He was fine! He could move! He didn’t get that dizzy when he stood up!

He huffed and jumped out of the bed again. Maybe it was a good thing they were evacuating. It gave him an excuse to sneak off to the Dagobah System. He didn’t really have to sneak, but it’d be faster, that’d for sure. Who was Redglare, he wondered. Maybe Kanaya would know.

He smiled. After the Battle of Yavin, their silly moirallegiance had taken off pretty quickly. It’d taken him a while to realize that she needed him as much as he needed her, though. She wasn’t someone who let herself be vulnerable, and fuck it, neither was Karkat, so it’d taken a few months before either one of them realized that the other actually cared about them. It was nice, what they had.

He still hadn’t told her about Dave, though. Karkat growled and paced faster. Dave had saved him! How ignominious! He paused for a moment to glare at the rock and water pipe ceiling then bury his head in his hands. Dave probably thought he was an idiot! A stupid fucker that would be a trollcicle without a hand to hold like a two-night old wriggler!

His hands migrated from his face into his hair, raking the shaggy black strands away from his face. He took a deep breath. And that fucking glow stick was broken! What else was going to happen today, an Imperial attack?

Even the thought made him cringe. At least he’d been ready for it. Whatever the medical droids had cooked up in that blue bath they dumped him in really had him going. He was ready to kick some Empire ass, lightsaber or no!

Fuck, he really liked that thing though. He plopped back down on the bed and fiddled with the broken piece of machinery. It was his only memory of Psiioniic, and in a stupid way, it made him think of Crabdad too. All his belongings from Tatooine were left, and the clothes he had worn were ruined by the trash compactor, not that he would have kept them anyway. The lightsaber was… comforting.

And it was that only thing that made him a Jedi, he supposed. Well… what the fuck had happened in the cave?

In a sudden burst of excitement, he threw the lightsaber down on the bed and stepped back far away from it. He held out his hand towards it and breathed deeply, imagining the object jumping into his palm. He’d seen Psiioniic do it. He’d be able to do it too. He closed his eyes.

There, in the middle of his chest, he felt a pull. He willed the lightsaber to come towards him, the way it had in the cave. He pushed out Dave, and Kanaya, and the Empire, and just focused on the lightsaber…

Come on…. Come on…. It was possible….

He opened his eyes after nothing had happened. The lightsaber remained exactly where it had been. Wait. He knelt next to the bed and glared. Did it move a few inches? No. Yes? Was it there before? Maybe?

He stood up in a huff and kicked the bedpost. No. He wasn’t a Jedi. He was just delusional.

The door opened behind him with a pneumonic whoosh. Karkat whirled around and faced the beeping bucket of circuitry behind him. “No, Mister Mayor,” he said to the familiar little droid, “I’m not praying. I’m cursing, actually.” The Mayor whirred and chirped, doing a little robotic dance from side to side on its rollers. Karkat put his hands on his thighs and leaned towards the droid.

“What’s that space Lassie? Dave? Stuck in an ice well?”

If a robot could give a dirty look then he did. Karkat straightened and patted his friend on its domed head. “Nah, you’re right. Medical clearance is better than a chance to save Dave, but only by a little bit.” He laughed and turned to get his gear on. He stopped and pointed a finger at the Mayor. He squinted. “Don’t tell him I said that.”

The Mayor made an ambiguous series of beeps and rolled out the door, Karkat’s eyes drilling holes into him all the way down the hall. “And go to the auxiliary field and get an X-Wing ready for me, will ya?”

A shiver ran down Karkat’s spine as soon as he stepped outside the heated hospital room and into the narrow hallway. All around him people hurried this way and that, driving lifts and checking things off electronic clipboards. The work surrounding him was hurried and efficient, but not panicked. They all knew the drill. Pack up. Get to the launch site. Fall into formation. Jump to hyperspace. Easy peasy.

Karkat ducked out of the way of a few magnetic transporters and worked his way into the main hanger. He liked it in the hanger more than anywhere else, no matter what base they were on. Not so much because of the ships—those weren’t fun without Johnny boy spouting mechanical crap about them—but because the Falcon was always there, and so was Dave. They’d spent countless hours together, along with Jade, Kanaya, Rose, and Feferi, all in the nonchalant living space in the middle of the ship, but very rarely was it just Karkat and Dave. He’d thought a few times that Dave had tried to get him to stay after everyone had left, but he always crapped out and made some excuse, like a damn lobotomized school girl with no autonomy. Sheesh.

He saw Jade welding on some open hatch up top. With her long hair tied back in a ponytail and the black welding mask covering her pointed ears as well as her face, this was the only time when she ever looked more feline than canine. Because of all the teasing, she’d painted “The Sparky Hell Cat” on the forehead of her mask. All the engineers called her that now and she loved it.

Karkat snuck past her and almost ran up the boarding ramp before anyone could notice. Once inside the familiar corridor, he took a deep breath and walked to the place they all used as a living block. There was no one there. He balled his fists and threw himself down on the couch under the window in an angry huff. There goes his chance to-

“Yo, what’s up man?” Dave asked, walking in. His red jacket was tied around his waist, and his white tee-shirt was sweated through the front. Dave looked down at in and frowned. Karkat gulped. “One sec.” He walked out of the room and came back in a few moments later with a clean shirt on, but the grease was still in his hair and his glasses still had cinders on the lenses.

Dave sat down next to him on the couch and took off his glasses to clean them on his shirt. “How’s it hanging? Gotta get this old ship in working order before we fly out of here,” he said, looking down. “She’ll fly, but I don’t know for how long,” he laughed. He put his glasses back on and looked up.

“So what’s eating ya, dude?”

Karkat raised his eyebrows. “You realize you’ve asked me in three different iterations since you’ve walked in some new version of ‘what are you doing’ here, right? Like, are you consciously aware of the use of your vernacular or does that escape you too?” He laughed and was relieved when Dave laughed too.

“No matter how I phrased that sweet greeting, you still haven’t answered.” Dave poked Karkat in the ribs and Karkat hissed at him. He could be infuriating if he wanted to be.

Karkat glared at him and sighed. “I, uh, just wanted to say thanks for saving me. My ass would be a late night snack for ol’ snowy out there if you hadn’t frozen your bulge off to rescue me. So thanks.” He stood up and Dave did too.

“Hey man,” Dave said, reaching out to touch Karkat, but pulled away. “You’ve saved Jade and I how many fucking times on the battlefield? Ain’t no thing. My dick would be proud to freeze off for you.” Karkat tilted his head and Dave just kept on going.

“Yessiree, one permafrosty dick out there in the ranks, just doing his duty like the rest of us. Had a wife and a family. Two little penis kiddos and a third on the way. All was well when genitalia and orifices lived in harmony, but everything changed when the Imperial assholes attacked. Only the Jedi, wielders of the dildo, could-“

Karkat slammed his hand over Dave’s mouth. “You can cut the bullshit there, Strider! I don’t need a visual running around my think pan, thank you very much.” Dave shrugged and licked Karkat’s palm. Karkat shrieked and tore his hand away.

“Get your motherfucking taste tentacle off of me, you creep!”

Dave laughed and put his hands up. “Sorry mister Jedi Master, I’ll buy you dinner first next time.”

Karkat glared at him and tried to suppress the anger growing behind his ribs. “Okay, you horny asshole.” He stepped up to Dave and pointed a finger in his face. Dave waited, eyebrows high. Karkat opened his mouth and closed it. He probably looked like a sea dweller out of water. He bared his teeth and glared. He wanted to yell at Dave for being incorrigible and he wanted to do other things too but didn’t want to think about that right now. He just shook his head and growled.

“Saving me was one of the million fucking amazing things your smug ass has done in the timeframe I’ve had the displeasure to know you!” he finally yelled. Dave smiled at him and took a step forward. Karkat took a step back, waving his hands in the air. “Thank you, and good fucking bye!”

He turned around and tried to walk away before Dave could see that his hands were shaking or that his face was on fire or that his blood pumper was about to beat its way out of his chest. Did he do it right? Did Dave know that he meant it? Fuck, it was so much easier in movies.

“Good fucking bye to you too, pal!” Dave said cheerily as Karkat stormed out. He couldn’t tell if that was meant to be rude, or funny, or exasperated. He just ducked his head and stomped down the ramp and right into Jade’s massive chest.

She smiled at him. “Hey, grumpy face. What’s got you all flustered?”

He scowled and was saved from the trouble of replying by the way the low, steady sirens changed into high-pitched battle station alarms. He and Jade sprinted to the command center in immediate response, slowing down only to let Dave catch up with them. They streamed into the command center with all the other pilots as fast as they could. The three tumbled in and shoved their way through, which wasn’t too hard with Jade at their side, up to where John, Nepeta, and Equius already were standing at attention.

Feferi stood at the head of the room, flanked by Kanaya to her right, and Rose to her left. Her fuchsia blood gave her a few inches on everyone else, save Jade, so when she rose her hand to silence them there was no missing her. The noise died and her voice, as loud and powerful as crashing ocean currents, swept over every pilot in the room.

“Listen up, fronds! We have two Star Destroyers swimming in from sector four! The energy shield is up but won’t last long. Carriers, group at the north entrance. All heavy loaders will depart immediately. We keep packing till the last minute; anything left will have to stay. Two fighter escorts per ship. The ion cannon will do enough damage to the Destroyers to let us get through by the scales on our fins, so stay close. Follow your flight trajectory. Meet at the rendezvous. Under-sand?”

Pilots nodded. “Good,” Feferi said. “Move out!”

Karkat ran beside John to the line of T-47s in the main hanger. John hopped into the first one he saw and practically yanked Karkat up the ladder.  “Good to see you on your feet again!” he said as he climbed into the pilot’s seat. Karkat grabbed his collar.

“First of all, strong words from someone who spends more time on his knees than I do on my feet, and second,” he pointed to the controls, “who said you were piloting?”

John looked hurt. “I always pilot!”

“Yeah, so do I, idiot!” Karkat yelled, throwing up his hands. “We’re both pilots!”

Swarms of men, women, and others ran all around in emergency procedures below them. Cargo pilots were treated like royalty, as their safety was the utmost concern to everybody. Karkat, John, and the other fighter pilots ran to ready their ships in case of a ground attack, and the hairs standing up on the back of Karkat’s neck told him that there most certainly was going to be a ground attack.

“Hey, Karkat,” John said strapping himself into the pilot’s seat. “Strong words from a guy that would hop on Dave’s dick faster than ice melts back home.” Karkat reeled back. John smiled at him with his big, goofy teeth. “Don’t think Jade and I haven’t been talking.” The goading motherfuck wiggled a finger in Karkat’s face. “Besides, your Force vision or whatever makes you a way better gunner than me, so suck it up.”

Karkat smacked him on the head, but crawled into the gunner’s seat. “It makes me a better pilot too, you idiotic walking piece of human feces!” He pulled the canopy down as he strapped himself into the gunman’s controls. He pulled his headset on and connected to John’s. “Idiot,” he said again into the mic. John just laughed.

The line clicked to open coms again. He hears John going over the safety checks behind him. Karkat growled and crossed his arms in wait of commands. John Fucking Egbert could suck his bulge. What did he know? He hasn’t even been here the past year! Yeah! He was right, but how the hell would he know!

Karkat sat back and listened to the information being relayed over the open coms. Troops were moving into ground stations out front. Tarps were being ripped off hidden turrets and trenches lined with soldiers waited quietly in the snow to see what the Empire was planning next. Karkat closed his eyes.

He felt fear, a lot of it, but very little panic. That was good. He knew these people. Anyone under General Peixes tended to have a pretty level head. He felt defiance, overall. People were tired of this. People were tired of the Empire, of the war, of the dying. They carried this fatigue with them on every planet they occupied. He focused harder. There were a few bits of depression that managed to rear its head over the adrenaline, and someone nearby was angry. He frowned. He knew that person. He focused harder on that spot specifically. It was angry and anxious. It felt warm, this person. They felt… something that made his chest tighten and he gasped and opened his eyes before digging any deeper.

His hands shook as he placed them on the triggers. He always felt bad when he accidentally poked into someone like them, even if he didn’t know who they were. Emotion that raw didn’t belong to him, and yet what he’d just spied into… he wanted to feel it again.

Over the coms came the first piece of good news. “The first transport is safe.”

Karkat and John cheered along with everyone else, but were quickly silenced by the next announcement. “Imperial Walkers on the north ridge! Repeat: Imperial Walkers on the north ridge! Pilots, prepare for launch.”

Karkat revved up his cannons as John brought them into a hover along with the rest of the pilots. Karkat could see the floor of the base shaking below them at the approach of the massive war machines, like the structure itself was scared. He took a deep breath and adjusted to being in the backseat, facing away from the direction they were flying. It looked like the world was speeding away from him faster and faster as John accelerated.

He’d gunned before, but not for a while. Generally, he didn’t trust another pilot with his life. He wouldn’t have agreed to gun if any other person but John was piloting, not even Dave. And John was right. As they sped away from the base, he could feel them approaching the Walkers even without having to look at the computer.

“All troo-purrs call in,” a cheery voice sounded over the coms. Karkat rolled his eyes. Of course Nepeta would be commanding. She’d only been an Imperial spy since what, furrever? He made a gagging motion. John called in for them and fell into a delta attack formation behind Nepeta and Equius in the leading snowspeeder.

“Kar, you need an approach vector?” John asked.

“No,” Karkat called, “Just a visual should be fine.”

“Alright people,” Nepeta said, “sepurrate on my command and move into a dual attack position. Theta on the north side, south stick to delta. On my command.”

John radioed on. “Affurmative, captain.”

“John I will figure out how to pull mutiny with my own gun and fucking kill us both if you do that again,” Karkat growled.  John just laughed. Nepeta counted them down from ten.

Below them, the battle really took off. The Walkers moved forward at a steady pace. Karkat couldn’t see them from where he was facing, but their line of fire was indication enough. The ground exploded near trenches into giant plumes of disturbed snow that would settle just in time for the next burst of fire. If they didn’t do something soon, the troops down there were going to be massacred.

“-three… two… one. Split!”

John dropped low and straight into the fire of the Walkers. Karkat could see five within range on the computer readout. His stomach jumped into his throat as the nosedive filled his windshield with the gray sky on the descent, and suddenly white snow as they climbed up and over the Walkers they’d just flown under. Karkat took his shot and blasted as many open lengths of metal that he could get in his scope. Not every shot was a hit, but most were.

He frowned. It wasn’t doing anything.

“John! Take us in closer!”

John didn’t even reply, simply made a sharp bank and flew directly past the side of a Walker. It swung its turret to face them, but so did Karkat. His fingers already ached from pulling the stiff triggers. He blasted five shots into the side of the machine, the noise of the fire filling up the cabin. The Walker fired a second laser after the first impact, and its laser only barely missed John and Karkat because of how Karkat’s fire had knocked it off balance for a moment, but was still yet to do any real damage.

Karkat cursed and looked at the fading images around him. He saw a ship fire directly into a Walker’s front window and still doing no damage at all. He was jerked from side to side as John outflew fire and flak from the steadily approaching Walkers. The world spun as John went into a barrel roll and Karkat saw the ground forces, then the sky, then the ground forces again, and so on. They weren’t getting slaughtered, but it was pretty damn close. He swore, and John swore and yanked the ship to the side and punched the accelerator. The air ran out of Karkat’s lungs as he was swung forward by the motion, caught by his seat straps, and suddenly he had an idea.

“Nepeta, you fucking warrior cat or whatever the fuck you are! Do you read?” he yelled as John climbed again to avoid fire.

“Loud and clear, Karkitty,” she answered, though breathlessly. He could hear Equius screaming behind her answer.

“Watch this and if it does any good tell everyone else to do the same!” He slapped a button to close the com and let go of the twin triggers in front of him.

“What are you doing?” John yelled up front.

“You’ll see, now won’t you?” Karkat yelled back, fighting with the harpoon controls. “Get as close to that Walker’s legs as you can!”

John seemed to get the idea and was off like a bullet circling the legs of the Walker. The other Walker’s started firing on them so Karkat aimed, took a breath to clear his head, and focused on the white noise in the back of his skull, honing in on it, waiting for its command.

His fingers twitched without him noticing, and the harpoon was out and impaled in the Walker’s leg. John punched the accelerators and wound the animatronic robot war dog up as tight as it could go before Karkat released the tow cable. A front leg lifted and a back leg tried. It toppled forward, its front cockpit smashing into the icy ground, sending a wave of snow into the trench about a hundred yards in front of it.

John whooped and sped off to cover a snowspeeder in distress. He danced around the heads of the Walkers while the speeder below pulled the same trick they had, toppling the metal beast into the cold surface of Hoth. They cheered again, but Karkat’s celebrations stuck in his throat as he saw one of the base’s defense ray guns explode into sparks and shrapnel. They remaining Walkers were in firing range now.

“Crash them meow! Meow! Meow!” Nepeta yelled.

Pilots and gunners made dizzying work of the Imperial Walkers, and every time they downed one, Karkat watched the ground crews swarm over the carcasses like voracious bugs. Still, enough hits were landing on the actual base to make him nervous. Kanaya was still in there. And Dave. There were enough Walkers still out there to take down the shield generator. He steeled himself as John went in around the legs of another Walker. They didn’t have that many cables. Fuck.

He saw another one of the Rebel snowspeeders explode in a ball of fire and flak above them. Bits of the ship rained down over his windshield. He cursed and shot at the Walker that had taken the ship down. It turned its turrets on him and John, but was felled by another snowspeeder before it could fire.

Karkat’s heart stopped. “John-“

A burst of laser slammed into Karkat’s right, John’s left. The T-47 veered to the right, almost crashing into a Walker. John yelled as he slammed on an ion thruster to avoid collision, but the thruster was damaged, and only lessened the impact. Karkat’s helmet crashed into the wall of his cabin as the ship slammed into the Walker. The ringing in his ears was louder than the grinding of metal from the collision. Then Karkat thought his soul left his body as the snowspeeder dropped. His hearing came back in a rush of alarms and John’s swearing and finally the roar of the engines waking up from the stall and carrying the ship away from the ground.

All systems restarted and Nepeta’s calm, but strained voice, flooded into their ears.

“Retreat! All forces retreat to sector eight! Base has been taken by Imperial Forces!”

John swung the limping ship around and flew as fast as it would take them back towards the base. Karkat saw the snow plains of destruction below them as the Walkers kept on coming. He tried to shoot at them, but their guns were out.

“It’s not use, Kar,” John coughed. “We can’t win every battle.” Karkat let go of the triggers and slammed the window with the heel of his palm.

They crashed into the retreat site with the auxiliary fleet and jumped out of their broken ship. All the pilots around them scurried into unmanned ships already loaded with cargo and took off sporadically. Karkat grabbed a passing woman’s sleeve. She yanked her arm away and glared at him.

“Did the Princess make it out?” he asked. She shook her head and told him she didn’t know, but the Falcon flew by just a few minutes ago.

Karkat sighed. Dave wouldn’t have left without Kanaya, so they were both alive. He was positive. He turned to John, who was scanning the people around them. Many were leaving drops of red and other colors in the snow as they scrambled to get off Hoth before the Walkers were finished with the base and found them. They knew they weren’t a priority, but there were no reason to leave them alive.

John spotted Nepeta and Equius and waved. He turned to Karkat. “Come with us,” he said. Karkat shook his head. “Come on,” John pleaded. “You’ve always wanted to see Alternia. You can pick your own kyber crystal.” His glasses were still cracked and it made the blue eye behind the lenses look like it was swimming as he moved. Karkat shook his head.

“I have to get to the Dagobah System. Psiioniic, that crazy old fuck, told me too,” Karkat told him. John heaved a heavy sigh and nodded.

“Be careful.”

“Me?” Karkat scoffed. “You better be telling that to yourself, buddy.”

The blasts of laser fire behind them started to sound not so distant. Karkat turned to say goodbye and found himself enveloped in one of John’s bone-crushing hugs. He squirmed till John let him go. John waved and ran off to go on his suicide mission. Karkat gave him a mock salute before running to go find a suitable X-Wing. He almost ran past the Mayor, already sitting in one, just waiting.

The Mayor beeped and Karkat slipped in the snow in front of him. “There you are! Let’s go!” He scurried up the ladder into the cockpit and strapped in tight. As he lifted away from the snow and pain, he tried to feel for Kanaya. He couldn’t find anything, but he knew that that meant she was safe.

Well, alive.

He slammed the accelerator and left behind the cold of Hoth for the emptiness of space.

Chapter Text

The wrench fell out of Dave’s hand, again. By this point, he couldn’t tell if it was just his hands shaking or the impact of the Walker fire. He gulped and shoved his hand between the two scalding pipes and winced as the hot metal seared his forearm, again. His fingers closed around the wrench and he got back to work fixing the broken exhaust pipe.

Sweat threatened to slip his shades right off the tip of his nose. He pushed them up with the back if his hand and got back to work, trying to block out the shouts of crews below him loading ships and issuing orders in the heat of battle. He tried not to think about the fact that he wasn’t helping. That he was stuck doing something for himself, once again.

“Dave!”

He looked up to face Jade. She yanked off her welding mask and pointed to the cockpit. “I’m going to test the engines again. Did you get that auxiliary heat pipe fitted?”

He shook his head but told her he’d give her the signal when he did. The wrench almost slipped out of his fingers again. He was good in a fight when he had his sword at his side or his ship running at least halfway decently. Even fist fights were doable with enough tact. But at times like this, when a battle was going on and he was useless, his nerves kicked his brain out to the curb. No three-week notice or anything. Brutal.

He tightened the pipe bolt one more time and banged it with the wrench. It didn’t fall out again, so he called it good and unlatched the magnetic clamps holding the hatch flap open. It fell shut with a bang so loud Dave almost fell backward. He’d been expecting it, of course, but shit made him so jumpy when he was anxious. He couldn’t help it. Loud noises made his mind jumpier than a kid lighting up for the first time and doesn’t know when his parents are getting home. Looking over his scrawny ass shoulders all the time. Jumped when he turned the volume up on his own damn TV. Poor kid. Bad road ahead if he keeps on that path, like a when those old choose your own adventure books, where-

“Dave?” Jade yelled in his headphones. He reeled. “I know you’re stressed, but we need to move. Is the pipe in?”

“Who’re you calling stressed?” he asked, running to the ladder. “I’m up here chillin’ like a villain, and that pipe’s snug as a pipe-shaped bug in a spaceship shaped rug, yo.” He jumped off the ladder after only a few rungs, rolled onto the floor, and sprinted into the cockpit where Jade was running a diagnostic check.

“Things look good!” she exclaimed, running her finger along the rows of lighted buttons and beeping columns. She turned to Dave and high-fived him. “We’re all good to go!”

Instant relief rushed over Dave’s chest. He suddenly felt exhausted, but calm. The ship worked. That meant, if anything, they could run away. And Dave felt pretty competent in his mad evasive maneuvering skills after all these years smuggling with Jade.

He watched her talk to herself as she kept on going over controls. Well, it hadn’t been that many years. They’d met up after he ran away from home. She was older than him, but not by much. Not enough to make it weird. She was working in a garage, for all her talent, on this heap of scrap metal. No one would buy it because it looked so damn shabby. Dave fell in love with the ship the moment he laid eyes on it. It would be his first ironic masterpiece. He bought it, with a large amount of money he’d stolen from family before he left, and offered Jade the copilot’s seat if she agreed to go adventuring with him. It was a pretty shady job description, but a scrawny, skittish kid of thirteen really isn’t that intimidating when you’re a whole head a half taller than him, and probably twice as wide. She shook his hand and Harley and Strider have been inseparable ever since.

“Command Center has taken damage,” a tired voice said over the link connected to the Falcon’s coms. Dave and Jade locked eyes. Dave stood up.

“Get the ship ready to go. Karkat is going to kill me if Kanaya gets hurt.”

Jade nodded but grabbed his hand. She stared at him with those eyes that practically glowed. “Hey, I know you want to prove yourself, but please don’t die over it.”

Dave kissed her forehead, something he rarely did, but something that wasn’t altogether unexpected. She smiled at him and sighed. He ran out of the ramp and into the chaos. Cracks in the ice and rock ceiling widened with every impact. Dave felt like he was running through a quake. The cracks kept on widening and the ground wouldn’t calm down for longer than half a minute. He felt his stomach drop to his boots as he realized that the ground forces outside here loosing, well, ground. The Walkers were going to make it to the shield generators.

He ran past cargo crews and dodged falling objects and showers of ice and dust raining down from the ceiling. He shivered. His issued snow jacket was still on top of the Falcon. Damn.

He slowed down to a jog down the last corridor to the command center. Something had stopped. The corridor was quiet, save the hissing from a broken pipe down a junction. He jogged into the control room. Planes of tracking glass lay shattered on the floor and few people remained at their posts. Feferi and Kanaya were arguing about something.

“I’m not marooning you here!” Feferi yelled Kanaya. She stood tall and defiant over the jade blood. Kanaya just shook her head and took Feferi’s hands.

“Fef, you’re connected to Gl'bgolyb and you are acting general of this quarter. You’re more valuable than me,” she patted Feferi’s dismayed face. Feferi’s gills flapped frantically.

“No-“Her argument fell away from her own lips. Dave watched as her militant rational took over. “I’m shore you can take care of yourshellf, frond.” Kanaya nodded and sent her off with a little wave.

“Take the last transport! I’ll procure a ship!” she yelled at Feferi as the fuchsia and three guards ran to the other exit. Feferi stopped at the door.

“May the Force be with you,” she called before ducking her head out.

Rose and Kanaya, the last two in the command center, looked silently at the computer before them. Dave cleared his throat and both of them flinched. “Y’all don’t need to hitchhike. Jade and I will-“

The explosion pushed them all off their feet. It’s happened so fast, there was no time to brace themselves. Dave and Rose were up first, dragging Kanaya by her arms out of the command center as the roof caved in behind them. The three fell in a heap in the corridor.

“No!” Kanaya tore her comlink from her belt and yelled into it, “Nepeta! Call a full retreat!” Dave and Rose lifted her up. As soon as her thumb lifted off the transmit button, an open communication came through loud and clear.

“-entered the base! Imperial troops have entered the base! I repeat: Imperial-” There was a scream and the line cut out.

The corridor Dave had come through had lengthened by miles since he’d left. At least, that’s what it felt like as he, Rose, and Kanaya navigated through broken pipes and loose rubble to get back to the hanger. His brain didn’t panic, but it did start to prioritize. Rose can get Kanaya to the Falcon and Jade can get them out. He’d provide cover and let them escape if they get into a firefight. He nodded to himself as they sprinted down a path of clear corridor. That was a good plan.

Dave could see the hanger at the end of the corridor. It was a firefight, dammit. He realized he didn’t have a blaster, just his sword. He swore at himself and kept running.

“Get her on board!” Dave yelled as he ran out before Rose could argue. Stormtroopers had just begun to march into the main hanger. They fired at will, picking off cargo pilots that hadn’t evacuated yet. Dave ran below the belly of a broken Y-Wing and made sure Rose and Kanaya were following. He sprinted to the next spot and ducked as lasers tracked his movement. He jumped over a box at the Stormtrooper that had fired at them and shoved his sword through the chink in the armor at the shoulder before she could get another shot off. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rose and Kanaya run past him towards the ship. He yanked the sword out, grabbed the blaster with his left hand, and shot the trooper before running after Rose and Kanaya up the entry ramp into the Falcon.

They had already beaten him to the cockpit, where Jade was revving up. He wasn’t surprised to find AR on board. That pesky little Robocop showed up everywhere these days.

He jumped in the pilot’s seat and ran through the startup procedures with Jade. The engines hummed just as a gigantic shard of ice fell into the windshield, sending spiderweb cracks across the plane. Everybody froze.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Rose muttered.

Dave frowned at Jade. “Ah,” he said, “that’s… something we haven’t dealt with before. Those are supposed to be reinforced.”

Jade hopped up and ran down the corridor without a word. She was back after ten seconds holding what looked to be an industrial iron and a plug. “They were reinforced before you or I ever saw them,” she muttered as she plugged in the device and reached for the cracks. The cord didn’t reach. All of Jade’s tech expertise and this was the bullshit that suddenly couldn’t go wireless?

“Jade…” Dave said, looking at the oncoming Stormtroopers. He checked to make sure the ramp was up. It was.

She pulled an extension cord from her belt and continued with her work, attaching the iron to the cracked plane.

“Jade…” Kanaya said as the ice ceiling shook with more vehemence above them.

“Just a minute!” Jade sang as she went about ironing the plane with the cracks. The machine hummed as it worked, and the cracks slowly started to solidify into faint scars on the glass. Jade stood on her copilot’s seat to reach the window.

“Jade…” Rose sang back as the figure, cloaked in black, appeared at the side of the hanger.

“I’m almost done!” she said, working on one last pesky little corner of cracks with her enormous iron.

“Rose would you…” Dave waved a hand over towards the turrets. She nodded, dazed, and ran out of the cockpit. A moment later, the troopers below them were being blasted to high hell by trigger-happy Rose Lalonde.

Jade squealed as the final cracks disappeared. “There!” she cried happily. “It won’t hold through too many jumps, but it will be enough.” She poked Dave in the ribs. “We really got to get that fixed.”

Dave nodded and brought the ship to a hover. Sufferer still remained on the fringes of the hangar. Dave nodded to Jade and punched the engines, blowing over rows of Stormtroopers as they blazed out. He hoped Sufferer got tangled in his own cape and choked to death.

As Hoth fell away below them and they climbed higher into the gray, dreary sky, Dave tried not to look at all the smoke and carnage down below. It’d been one hell of a fight. He was glad he wasn’t outside to see it.

They broke through the gray clouds and climbed higher into the atmosphere. Dave’s fingers shook as he fought against the machine around him, Jade working beside him in tandem. They could fly their own ship, but just barely. They knew which levers were sticky and which were broken altogether. Kanaya held onto the straps on the ceiling, silent, behind them, aside from telling AR from time to time to lay off the statistics and trust Dave.

“I’m a robot, Ma’am,” AR spat with a sarcastic edge. “Trust isn’t programmed into my algorithms.”

Dave rolled his eyes and took a deep breath as the first massive metal death Dorito appeared out of the blackness. He tightened his grip on a booster switch and hesitated.

“Dave,” Jade barked, literally. “Two more Star Destroyers flanking from behind. Kanaya, will you help Rose on the guns?”

Behind him, he heard her reply, “Certainty, but what will that do against Imperial Star Destroyers?”

Dave flipped switches and stood up for a moment to activate the ion cannons. “Oh, nothing at all,” he said, “but you might do some damage to the half a dozen TIE fighters hot on our ass.”

He heard Kanaya run towards the guns. He hadn’t told her to run to the lower turret, after a few moments the streams of red laser fire told him that she’d found her way pretty easily. He slammed a joystick to the right and barrel rolled away from two approaching TIE fighters.

Rose hissed over the coms. “Kanaya can’t shoot that fast! Call out your evasive maneuvers!”

Kanaya spat back, “You’re cheating, actually. I can shoot fine without a crystal ball for a brain, thank you very much.” And the TIE fighter in front of them that blew to pieces attested to that.

“Lightbulb,” Rose retorted.

“Fortune cookie,” Kanaya responded factually.

Dave muted the coms and the shields took impact as he did. Sure, he was distracted for a moment, but it was worth ending Mrs. and Mrs. sitcom back there. He rolled his eyes at Jade. She didn’t need him to take off his glasses to get the message. She just nodded and rolled out the stats for a jump to hyperspace on the computers. AR muttered something about a decimal and pointed it out. Jade swatted his robotic hand away and growled. AR threw his hands up in surrender and backed off.

The Falcon keeled to the side and the only indication was a dramatic tilt in the stars. Dave was so used to artificial gravity; he knew that was happening instantly. He threw the coms back on and yelled to the girls to shut the hell up and was glad he did. Their insults were getting overtly sexual.

“Put it in your pants and listen up!” he yelled as the Star Destroyers closed in. “Those TIEs are trying to push us into range of a docking beam. We don’t want that, so pay less attention to shooting them down and more to scattering their forces! Copy?”

“Yes,” said Kanaya sharply.

“Loud and clear, cap!” Rose hollered. She got bored with Kanaya’s politics sometimes and everyone knew it. Putting her in a turret was like giving a starved dog a bone. Only that dog was a martially trained bodyguard and that bone was a blaster and she was surrounded by enemies and liked it that way. Yeah. That was a little more accurate.

“Jade,” Dave said as they pushed straight towards the Star Destroyer in front of them. He couldn’t get the ships to collide, but he could use one as cover. They wouldn’t use big guns on their own ships. That’s what the TIE fighters were for. He veered to the left and rode under the belly of the Star Destroyer, skimming the rage for the tractor beam. “Get us out of here before we get out from under this.” She nodded and kept punching numbers.

“You know how space is, Dave,” she muttered, pushing a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear. Her human ear. He’d gotten over the fact that she had two sets of ears a long time ago.

“We’ll be more out in the open that Rose during Pride month on Coruscant if we don’t jump in the next thirty seconds,” he said, pulling back on the throttle just a little more.

“I heard that, sunglasses,” Rose said. “True, but I heard that. Jade!”

Jade made a noise of acknowledgment as she kept crunching numbers, occasionally hitting a button for Dave.

“Make the three a nine and punch it!”

“Of course!” Jade shouted. Her face lit up, all confusion falling away instantaneously. “Thank you!”

She typed in the numbers and nodded to Dave. Dave set the ship in the direction on the computer told him too and revved the hyperdrive. Jade pulled back the lever and suddenly the stars pulled back around them and the view outside the cockpit windows went psychedelic with blue and white starlight. Dave let go of a breath and let his body wilt into his chair.

Rose and Kanaya were whooping over the coms and Jade was smiling happily. She patted Dave’s shoulder and leaned back herself. “That was close,” she breathed as they watched the light show.

“Yeah,” Dave sighed. “We all made it out alright.”

“I do hope that Karkat isn’t badly injured,” Kanaya almost whispered over the coms. He heard the headset switch off as she left the turret, and Rose’s headset made the same noise a moment after.

More than once, Dave had been punched in the gut when he hadn’t been expecting it. This felt a little like that. Karkat. Karkat hadn’t even crossed his mind once during the whole battle, even when he wasn’t running for his life. He screwed his eyes shut, trying to keep the guilt inside of him. How did they all do it? Kanaya was probably worried sick this whole time. He opened his eyes with a sigh. How could he tell himself that he cared about Karkat? He shrugged and sat up straighter as Rose and Kanaya’s footsteps sounded behind him.

It was okay. It wasn’t like Karkat thought about him anyway.

Chapter Text

Karkat sighed. His hand hovered over the computer module in his X-wing and then he set it back in his lap. He looked at the stars whizzing past in hyperspace. He tapped a little rhythm out with his claws on the dash. He tapped his foot, although that felt uncomfortable because he was sitting so he instead started bouncing his leg and found that much more enjoyable. The Mayor hadn’t beeped him in a while, but that meant nothing bad. They were just getting on their way. That was all. His hand hovered over the computer module. He could still turn back, but he wouldn’t.

Truth be told, Karkat was nervous. He knew that John knew he would be in the Dagobah system, but John was about to go under the radar. He’d sort of told everyone else in the hospital, but they weren’t really listening and he knew it. They’d just been glad that he was breathing and while the sentiment was nice and all, he hoped at least one of them had taken their sentimental head out of their ass and listened to what was coming out of his speech hole. Kanaya got so worried about him.

To think just a couple of years ago he was a nobody on Fuck Knows Where, Tatooine.

He rubbed his sight spheres. He needed to get some rest. Dagobah was a short jump, only about an hour and a half and yet he was halfway there and couldn’t get his think pan to shut the fuck up. And none of it was important, either. Sometimes he could get his old thought thinker to slow down, and it felt like he could feel the universe breathing, and other times when he went into that strange, dark, spectacular place, he saw fire and so many images that he started crying. Kanaya was the only one that could really calm him down from those.

This was not one of these times. This was regular old nervous tension tearing into his memories and incapacitating his ability to rest. The battle had shaken him. They always did. Three years ago, the battle of Yavin. He felt like they were getting closer, like the Sith were… he didn’t know how he knew it, but he felt like their grip on the galaxy was slipping. Dave didn’t seem to have hope anymore, but Karkat did.

He rubbed his temples.

Dave had never really given up, he didn’t think. It was like that fucker had never really had hope to begin with. They’d spent three years on and off in each other’s vicinity now and nothing had changed for him. While Karkat was having all these realization and whatnot, Dave was just Dave. He knew that something was going on behind those shades. He felt it. But Dave never showed it. He supposed that was because the kid had been forced to grow up long before Karkat was. Dave really never spoke about life before Jade, but Jade gave him the rundown one night. About Dave’s brother. About his home. About everything. Karkat tried to keep that in mind when he was with him.

He leaned forward and ran his fingers through his hair and screamed a little. No one can hear you scream in space. It’d taken him about a year to realize that he really liked Dave. After the hype of the Death Star had died down, and after Dave and Jade had left for a few months to go drop John, Nepeta, and Equius off on some planet before ZEL was even a thing. Karkat had realized, after a few days of turmoil, that Dave was perfect.

And he knew he wasn’t perfect but that didn’t change the fact that he felt like he was. He knew the guy was an emotionally damaged asshole, but… wasn’t he one too? Did that make them fit, in a way?

He hadn’t really had time to think it over because he was too busy getting to know Kanaya, and falling in love with her. She was the light of his life, in the sense that she helped him figure out what he needed to do, and that her light up Sketchers skin was really useful in dark places. He loved her to the point that it was almost painful to try and describe it, but it wasn’t because words had transcended that. They were on frequencies of their own that resonated to music only they could hear. And as fucking cheesy as the sounded, Karkat couldn’t say it anyway else. They were moirails.

But Dave. Now Dave was actually fucking painful, that bastard. Being around him made his hands shake and his blood pumper stop and start in funny ways. It made him angry, and mad, and infuriated. He dreamed about Dave often and hated it because when he woke up he was sad and it made him wants to punch walls and yell at someone. He often did. That person was often Dave. Dave often laughed. Except for the times when he didn’t.

Karkat had stepped over lines, from time to time. They both knew it. Dave always forgave him, and Karkat always felt bad. He wished Dave would hurt him sometimes too so that the feeling was mutual. But Dave, he’d learned over the years, didn’t feel like he was a person that was worth getting hurt over, and this made Karkat have to restrain himself from telling him that he loved him every time he saw the guy’s smug ass face.

Of course, Karkat would never have the courage to just say something like that. He’d probably fuck it up and make a meme reference or something, knowing him. He just wanted Dave to be happy, and you know, maybe kiss him a little bit.

“Fuck this biochemical bullshit!” he yelled. He knew the internal monologue would get him nowhere. It hadn’t in about a year so why would things change now?

He sighed and flopped back in his pilot’s seat and went through the exact same train of logic again, for the fifth time, hoping to come to some realization this time around.

He didn’t, of course. He was just about done with coming to the conclusion that he would be a gutless, romantic failure forever, for the twelfth time when the stars around him fell back into their allotted spots and Dagobah loomed before them in a small, soft circle. He set the controls to manual and flew towards the cloudy planet.

The Mayor beeped in his ears. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Shady looking little corner of the universe, isn’t it?” He rolled his eyes as he thought of something Dave would say. “We get it. You vape.” He chuckled to himself as he slowed his throttle.

“No cities?” he asked the Mayor. The Mayor confirmed that there was no recorded civilization currently on the planet. Beings had explored it, but there was nothing good. The place was a swamp. With monsters. And ghosts!

“Ghosts?” Karkat raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

The Mayor whistled low. You never know. Karkat ignored the fact that he really had nowhere to land and started his descent into the murky, greenish gray clouds. The Mayor kept pestering him.

“Listen here, you mechanical gremlin. We’re docking on Dagobah!” he gripped the yoke tighter as the turbulence got worse. “I have Jedi shit to do here!”

The Mayor screamed that they didn’t have any readings of the ground below them, if it was even ground! And Karkat was screaming because, motherfucker, the scopes were dead and he was pretty sure that they were hitting things! There was a loud crack and the ship lurched, confirming that, yup, they were definitely hitting things!

Shapes formed quickly in the fog and left just as fast. A branch. Something with wings. Something with a tail. Something with teeth! More branches! And all the while the Mayor’s screaming was heard over the impacts. Some of the impacts went splat! Others went thump! None of them were good.

After what seemed like way too long a descent, they “landed” with a violent smash into something wet. Water splashed on the cockpit windows and Karkat took a breath to continue screaming but realized that they’d stopped moving. He let out a whoop instead and punched open the canopy. Water droplets fell into his face as they ran off the glass of the canopy. The Mayor was already out of his spot in the back and moving towards him, whistling petty droid things. Karkat flipped him off.

“Okay, so we’re in a swamp. Congratulations, genius.”

He put his hands on his hips and looked around. Well, he looked around as best he could. It was kind of hard with the stereotypical graveyard fog rolling all about the creepy place. He could hear the strange calls of creatures more than anything else. Many of them flew or scampered in and out of sight, but none long enough for him to really see what they were. Tree limbs poked out of the mist, dangling moss as a seller displays cloth. Karkat wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The humidity was disgusting.

Then he heard the kerplunk of something probably droid shaped falling into a swamp and looked into the mist above him for a moment of contemplation before sighing and looking into the water below him. The Mayor’s little periscope was bobbing around and heading towards something that might be a shoreline.

“You alright?” Karkat called. The Mayor gave him a bubbly reply but one that wasn’t hard to translate. Fuck off is pretty universal, even in droid speak.

The Mayor’s periscope became a periscope attached to a dome, and the dome became a dome attached to a cylinder, and so on. When the Mayor had fully emerged on land he turned around and stood silent, looking at Karkat. The droid opened his hatches and drained the water out silently. Oh boy was that old bucket of bolts miffed.

Karkat looked into the grimy black puddle surrounding him and shuddered. He told himself not to think of that thing in the garbage compactor that one time. Too late! He was thinking about that thing in the garbage compactor that one time! Fuck!

He cringed and plunged into the water, creamsicle suit and all.

It was cold, but not freezing. He emerged gasping, pushing his body towards shore. He wasn’t the best at swimming, having grown up in a fucking desert, but he could manage. Sticks and leaves made him flinch during his swim to the muddy shoreline, but nothing alive, as far as he could tell. As far as he hoped.

The Mayor waited for him, silent. Karkat spat out water and crawled next to the little guy. He glared at him. “What, do you want a fucking apology? I’m sorry you’re a fucking know-it-all tin can. Happy?”

The Mayor beeped testily. Karkat patted his domed head and wiped off his camera with his wet sleeve. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he told him, “we’re supposed to be here. I know it.”

He reached for his lightsaber and tried to ignite it, and for a moment was surprised when the red beam didn’t pop out. He sighed and put it back in his belt. Damn.

It’d taken hours to drag the necessary stuff out of the ship, wading in and out of the rank water to the ship and back. Karkat stripped down to his underwear and left his clothes hanging off a branch. No need for everything to be all wet come nightfall. First, he grabbed the radio and then the rations, and then the heater. He got a toolbox too and went to work on fixing up the Mayor as best he could. A lot of water still needed to be vacuumed out.

After his skin had dried and he put his clothes back on, he sat next to the heater and tampered with the long distance communicator. Nothing but static. He’d expected as much. So now they were just sitting. Again, his mind wouldn’t stop on its apparent spiral into insanity. This rollercoaster ride was centered on John, and what that cheeky bastard was up to these days. And by days he meant these about six hours. He wondered if he was at Alternia yet.  Alternia was a core world. At least a day and a half on a hyperdrive, but he’s seen them loading up in a transport shuttle. That wasn’t much, but it had more hyperdrive than he had. They should get there fine.

He reached for his lightsaber and his blood pumper stopped. It wasn’t there. It had been in his belt a second ago. And he’d just been sitting. He patted the ground around him with mounting panic. Where the fuck did it go? He turned to the Mayor, but the R2 unit had powered down.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and closed his eyes. It was close. He felt it.

Karkat opened his eyes and jumped where he sat. The lightsaber was being held inches away from his face, and a troll with opaque red glasses faced him thoughtfully.

“Who the fuck are you!” Karkat yelled.

The woman threw her head back and cackled. She was only a little taller than him, which was petite by adult troll standards. Her hair was almost shaved, but it wasn’t neat. She was rugged, wrapped in teal robes and many years gone by. She kept on cackling, holding onto a tree stump for balance.

“Oh- oh my goodness!” she wailed. “I was- I was-“ her nasal voice was cut short by her own laughter. “I was going to say something like, ‘looking for this?’ all serious but- but your face! Ah!” She wiped teal tears away with her red-gloved hands. “Oh, Psiioniic was most definitely your teacher at one point. You reek of him!” She lost herself laughing again.

Karkat sprang to his feet after the shock wore off and lunged for his lightsaber. The troll simply sidestepped him and wiped under her glasses again. He glared at her.

“Are you the reason Psiioniic sent me here?” he shouted.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Angry. That’s not good. Looks like Psiioniic has a knack for picking the feisty ones!” She snorted again.

Karkat threw his hands up and scowled. “Look, lady, you obviously know more about what’s going on than I do so spill those fucking beans. Let the meow beast out of the bag. Just tell me what the dick is going on on this soggy ass good for nothing vape ball of a planet before I march my wanna be Jedi ass onto that useless fucking X-Wing with my loveable but incompetent mechanical trashcan and use the power of my own, massive, exacerbated will to troll Mary Poppins my bulge out of this rank swampy, worst lazy river ever-“

He was more offended she put her hand over his mouth than anything. Rude.

The woman sighed and tilted her head. His reflection looked back at him from the deep, ruby lenses of her tear drop shaped glasses. “Okay. I knew Psiioniic long enough to know what a rant like that means.” She took her hand off his mouth and handed him the lightsaber. He snatched it back and glared.

“Name’s Redglare. I’m not stopping you from leaving. Go. Makes no difference to me. I’ll even help you fix your ship.” She leaned back on the tree.

Karkat looked down at his feet and growled. Psiioniic had told him to find Redglare, and that she was crazy. And blind. Here comes a crazy woman in red glasses and it’d taken him how long? Perception was a bitch.

“Psiioniic told me to find you,” he said through gritted teeth. She nodded. He waited. Animals cried out in the mist. “So… why?” he asked.

Redglare didn’t face him. Instead, she was looking fondly at the Mayor, a faint smile on her lips. He wondered if she really was blind. She was very subtle. No features particularly stood out. A defined jaw, a smart, upturned nose, soft cheeks. If her hair were longer she might look different, but the shaggy, overgrown buzz cut just made her look old. She sighed.

“I want you to figure that one out,” she said after a pause.

Karkat scoffed. “Well fuck, he just told me to come and pester you. That doesn’t give us much to go on, now does it?”

Redglare laughed, but softer this time. “As melodramatic as ever, even in death.”

“Yup, he was an asshole. And no offense, but so are you, are far as I’ve seen,” he said with no real venom.

“You’re not too chummy yourself, friend,” she said. “Maybe it’s a Jedi thing.”

“Are you a Jedi?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Is it important?”

Karkat threw his hands up and rolled his eyes and stomped his foot. “Is it important!” he yelled. “The Galaxy is overrun by a fascist, Sith loving, hemophobic fuchsia blooded asshat and her vampire looking, cape-wearing ass second in command with millions of genetically engineered asshole troopers to back them up! The Jedi stop shit like this, right? Why are they all hiding off on dick knows where planets with their heads in the sand?”

“Because most of us are dead,” she said simply. “You’re right. Fascist, Sith loving military control. Jedi don’t last long.”

“So you’ve given up,” Karkat scoffed. Redglare shrugged but didn’t reply. Karkat waited until he realized she wasn’t going to elaborate. “Okay, so Sith want Jedi dead. Jedi are mostly dead. Where do I fit in in all of this?”

She shrugged again. “That depends. What do you want to do about all of this, as you put it?”

“I want to fight it,” he said simply. Redglare waited again. “I want to know how to be a Jedi and not just some asshole with a glow stick and magic hands that make things fly. I want to understand all this Force shit and whatnot. I feel….” he paused, waiting to see if she would interrupt him, or prompt him on. She remained still. “…I don’t know. So I guess I need help.”Redglare still did not move. Karkat sighed. “Will you help me?”

Redglare still did not move. Karkat sighed. “Will you help me?”She nodded. “Okay. You need to rest, though. I can’t help a hypothermic corpse, you know.”

She nodded. “Okay. You need to rest, though. I can’t help a hypothermic corpse, you know.”He nodded and switched on the Mayor, telling him to hold down the fort while he was gone, much to the little droid’s dismay. “It’ll be fine!” he told him as he followed the stranger into the mist.

He nodded and switched on the Mayor, telling him to hold down the fort while he was gone, much to the little droid’s dismay. “It’ll be fine!” he told him as he followed the stranger into the mist.

Chapter Text

“John?”

“Mmmmm…”

“Wake up, Johnny boy. We’ll be arriving on Alternia in an hour.”

“Five more minutes, Nepeta.”

She batted his nose hard enough to make it sting and John’s eyes flew open. “Hey!”

Nepeta’s soft, freckled face hovered only a few inches from his. She leaned over him with her messy curls falling around her round face. “Nope. You said that ten minutes ago. Up.”

John groaned and sat up, knowing his hair was a mess and feeling that his face was greasy from sleep. He yawned and pushed himself up off the little bed. The transport cruiser wasn’t fancy. In fact, it wasn’t even Imperial, which was going to be a bitch hide in Alternia. But that was fine. They’d handled worse.

“John,” Equius said holding an open palm out towards him. “You fail to comprehend; this is literally the worst thing we have ever faced. Ever. Nepeta and I are Alternia born. We know its perils. Trust us.”

“I do trust you!” John said over his caffeinated drink as the three of them sat around the beds, formulating a plan. “Of course I trust you! There’s no one else I’d rather have crash a spaceship onto Hoth with me in an open compartment.” He laughed but Equius just glared at him. John set his drink down. “Okay. Tell me. Why is Alternia so horrible?”

“Well, you know the gist of Alternian adolescence, correct?” Nepeta asked.

John nodded. “Old Condy wanted to expand her military, and play it safe after an internal rebellion, so she called all the adults off planet and only left the children. Yeah. That was standard for thousands of years, when trolls ruled most of the galaxy. After the Galactic Republic was formed, the military was disbanded, but it was still standard for Alternian adults to leave the planet at a certain age. I know all this. What’s so bad?”

Nepeta and Equius looked at each other. “Flarpling,” they said at the same time.

John pursed his lips. “A bunch of kids live-action role-playing? Guys, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

Equius shook his head. “John. Flarp. Fatal live-action role-playing.”

John spit his drink out a little bit. “You’re kidding,” he said as he wiped the dribble off his lips. They shook their heads. “That’s illegal! That’s like, planet-wide child endangerment! And Alternia is a core world! It’s monitored!”

Nepeta still shook her head. “It’s never been monitored. Even before Her Imperious Condescension. Alternian drones wouldn’t, and still don’t, let anyone that’s not a juvenile, not a troll, and not )(IC herself on planet. That’s just how it goes.”

“But they actually kill each other? Kids?” John couldn’t keep himself from shouting.

“Yes, John,” Equius stressed. “Children kill each other for fun. This is Alternia. It’s nothing like you have ever experienced.”

John looked between the two of them, suddenly sick. “Did you two ever….”

They looked at each other. Nepeta shrugged. “I lived off in the mountains with my lusus. I didn’t really get involved, but I think I might have mortally injured a few trespassers on my territory before.”

Equius nodded. “I had a similar experience. I don’t recall killing anyone myself, but I did sell equipment to people who definitely did.” He shrugged. “It was a way to make boonbucks.”

John pushed his hair back and blinked hard. “Wow. Okay, so if we get past the drones, we’ll have to deal with a bunch of demonic teenagers that will probably kill us for fun.” He shook his head. “I can’t kill a kid!”

“We may have to,” Nepeta said. “It’s Alternia.”

“It’s disgusting,” John spat. “Beforus isn’t like that, is it?”

Equius shook his head. “No, their society is much weaker.”

John rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and pulled a computer pad out to place between them. He sat next to Equius on a bunk, with Nepeta watching from the bunk above them. He pulled up a map of Alternia and zoomed in on the kyber refinery that they needed to get too.

“Okay,” he said, “It’s on a coastline so that it can have water to cool its nuclear reactors. That’s basically all we know about the refinery. No floor plan. No staff. Nothing. Do you guys know this part of the planet?”

Nepeta shook her head. “I was on a different continent,” she said.

Equius frowned on it. “I recognize the area from maps. I lived in a cave in these mountains, here.” He zoomed out and pointed to a range on the other side of the continent that they were looking at. “We’ll basically be going in dark.”

“As for staff,” Nepeta said, “They’ll only be drones, but those things won’t hesitate to claw your heart out.”

John gulped. “What are they, robots? Do they kill the kids too?” he whined. Equius and Nepeta nodded with tight lips. “Why?” John asked.

“Ah….” Beads of sweat formed on Equius’ brow. “Well, they are the result of unfertilized offspring from the Mother Grub. Their only purpose is to carry out orders. As for culling children… it’s a reproductive matter, you see…”

John held up a hand. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to know. I hate this planet already. Alright. Drones. What else?”

“Potential flarpers,” Nepeta reminded him. “Although I don’t know why they’d want to play so close to that many drones…”

John nodded. “Recon?”

Equius and Nepeta nodded. “Land somewhere safe,” Nepeta said, “Stakeout. Get in. Nab a crystal. Get out. Remember, we just need to figure out if they’re refining kyber crystals. That’ll confirm that they’re building something. We don’t need to be fancy.”

“We may not have the opportunity to apprehend a crystal, John,” Equius said.

John sighed, but nodded. “I get it. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought. We’ll only get one if it’s convenient,” he looked at his team, “and unanimous.”

They all nodded and grabbed a computer pad, looking for potential landing spots and gleaning every piece of information that satellite images and darknet could offer them. This was a mission that would make or break them and they all knew it.

Alternia approached all too quickly. It was an odd planet, all grey masses that blended in with an ash grey sea. Nepeta and Equius had told John that the world would light up at night into a bioluminescent wonderland, but that was a little hard to believe when looking at its seemingly dead surface. He felt exposed, coming in for landing on the day side of the enormous planet. He understood that Alternia was a night world, and that most people and things would be asleep in their hives at this hour, but still… recon in the day? Unnatural.

They came in for an approach, passing the purple and green moons slowly. John didn’t like this planet. It was barbaric. In all the places they’d traveled, and all the worlds they’d seen, children were innocent. Sure, maybe a few times they’d come across a kid that was swept into a situation by circumstances outside of their control, or sold or traded into a life they didn’t want, or something like that but here… that life was voluntarily?

He shook his head in disgust. That was wrong beyond words for him.

He pulled the ship in a rapid nosedive as soon as they broke the atmosphere. He wanted to get in as fast as they could without drawing attention, so he pulled the throttle just a little under the speed of sound. His mind churned out rough calculations. Alternia’s air was roughly was the same makeup as most life-supporting planets. A lot of nitrogen, a little oxygen. Standard stuff. He kept the craft just under the three hundred and thirty meters per second mark to avoid a sonic boom as he dove to the surface.

The transporter was not designed for this kind of maneuver, and John knew it. He fought against the friction and kept the ship as steady as he could as he came in for a drop-off. Let’s see how his team felt about falling out of a rapidly descending object, huh?

Nepeta and Equius stood up from their seats in the cockpit and moved towards the back of the ship. They were covered from head to toe in UV protective gear. With the scarves and reflective goggles, they reminded John a little bit of raiders.

They gave him thumbs up, and he dropped an emergency oxygen mask over his face. Yeah, transport cruisers aren’t really meant for jumps, but they were dealing with what they had. He had to trust that his straps were on tight because there was no time for a safety check. The surface sped towards them.

Nepeta and Equius opened the back exit, and John fought to control the ship as it depressurized and flashed warning lights. Hot wind ripped through the little cruiser, tearing anything that wasn’t bolted down into the grey abyss beyond. He leveled out the ship as soon as Equius began the countdown.

“Jumping in three… two… one,” said Equius in John’s earpiece. He didn’t look to see if they’d got out safely. They’d jumped at about ten thousand feet. He gave them a few seconds, and then pressed the button that manually closed the door. The wind died, and John swooped low into the cover of the nearby mountains.

If it had been just Nepeta or just Equius, he would have been worried about just dropping them off a mile from the refinery, but they had each other. Nothing could stop the two of them.

He flew in low and found a nice outcropping far away from any life readings. He assumed the massive creatures that his scanner was picking up were lusii, and he didn’t want to mess with any of those. He’d been attacked by Crabdad once before, and apparently, that crustacean was a small custodian. He had no desire to meet a one that fell in the large category.

So he set a timer and leaned back in wait. It was too risky to send out communications, not with all the low bloods running around and their powers. Not only special psychic abilities, these kiddos were also viciously smart. There were some of them that could hack anything; he’d discovered in his research. This planet was dangerous.

So no open coms. He’d come back to pick up Nepeta and Equius in two hours, no matter what. If something went wrong, they had to hold their own until he could help. He trusted them, though. There wasn’t much the two of them couldn’t handle together.

He leaned back in his pilot’s chair and watched the barren, tilted world. He’d attached the ship to the steep wall under the overhang and chose to leave the artificial gravity on. While he wasn’t slipping around anymore, he was a little disoriented.

Outside the window was a plain of lifeless gray, and a gray ocean beyond with one little building on its shore. While Alternia was a large planet, its days and nights were short, only about ten hours each way. The pink moon was already a faint crescent in the sky.

Four hours until sunset.

Chapter Text

The steady hum of the hyperdrive began to die down after only a couple of minutes in hyperspace. Dave didn’t know where they were going to end up, but he knew it wouldn’t be that far. He pulled back and readied himself for the stars to fall back into place. The window really couldn’t stand that long of a distance jump if they were to try and go somewhere far, anyways. He didn’t know why Jade kept fretting over the numbers, though. She knew space better than anybody.

“Rose…” Jade muttered, looking up at her with her mouth set in a befuddled line. “These coordinates don’t make any sense. We’re going to land in the middle of dense space polluted with objects caught in some kind of gravitational pull. I was trying to avoid it when I was calculating, but I didn’t know how.” She frowned back at her computer. Her ears flopped down. That meant she was really upset. “We’ll have enough space to jump out of hyperspace, but I don’t know how much more!”

Rose, in a very helpful exercise of universal signals, shrugged. “Hey, I know what you know. We’re going to complete the jump safely, but beyond that, I can’t promise you anything. As far as I can rationalize, though, anything is going to be better than being boarded by Imperial Troops.”

Kanaya nodded next to her. “Whatever it is my love has failed to see, we’re going to be facing it head-on in a few seconds.”

Dave tightened his fingers on the pilot’s yoke and slowed his breathing down to a steady rhythm and waited for the last seconds of hyperspace to end. His fingers twitched. He wondered which way he’d have to turn to get out of-

“Shit is flying off the fucking handle! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

Jade screamed as the asteroid field materialized around them. Dave yanked the yoke and pulled back a lever to deftly escape colliding with an asteroid that was easily two times bigger than the Falcon. He dodged, ducked, dipped, dove, and dodged.

“Rose!” Dave screamed. “Get us out of here!”

“I can’t!” she yelled. “It doesn’t work like that! They don’t tell me everything!”

Dave yelled out a string of commands that made absolutely no sense to anyone but Jade, as most of them was some variations of old meme references. She knew what they meant, though, and flipped the appropriate switches until the Falcon was shielded and moving at a pace that was swift enough to outmaneuver the dead space rocks, and slow enough to make tight banks around objects quickly.

Jade waved a hand at Rose, who was rubbing her forehead. Jade snapped her fingers. Rose looked up, terrified. “Rose, go to the turret and shoot anything big coming our way, understand?”

Rose laughed. “I know that won’t do much and you’re only trying to calm me down.” She winked and walked out of the cockpit. Kanaya let her go. Kanaya probably knew better than Dave that, when Rose was upset, she was nigh inconsolable. She needed a distraction; otherwise, she’d end up hurting herself.

“Thank you,” Kanaya told Jade softly.

Jade nodded without really hearing and continued watching the asteroid field around them for something that would help them possibly not die. “Hmm…” she mused, after they’d fallen into a rhythm of navigating the asteroid field. Asteroids were usually spread out by miles. This localized spot must have been due to a recent collision of two massive objects.

“That’s not unusual for this part of space,” Jade said, running a scan. “I think it’s safe to say that these are natural asteroids and not some kind of debris. I’ll see if I can find us a place to attach our landing grips to for a few minutes and catch our breath.”

“That’d be lovely.”

“Sick, dawg.”

After only a few moments, Jade pointed to something big on the scanner. “I don’t know if it’s safe, but if we stay out here much longer without any direction, we’re going to be crushed or something is going to break off that we can’t fix.”

AR piped up behind them. “Honestly, I’m surprised you all have lasted this long.”

“Can droids be surprised?” Dave spat as he followed the computer’s instructions to wherever it was that Jade had found.

AR made a mechanic sighing sound behind them. “When you beat odds as high as I’m calculating, yeah, color me shocked.”

Dave ignored the chatty tin man and steadily approached an enormous asteroid. It was so large that it had a gravitational pull of its own, greedily stealing smaller rocks from their trajectories and pulling them into its orbit. A few clunked off the side of the Falcon as Dave went in for landing. He cringed, but what were a few more dents? The poor ship needed some serious remodeling.

He plunged the ship into a giant crater on the moon-sized asteroid, and as the mountainous walls engulfed them, he spotted a smaller crater and flew into that, and let its cavernous walls consume the ship. Kanaya stood silent. Jade turned on front lights and lead Dave a little deeper into the tunnel than he would have liked. He shuddered. Enclosed spaces. He turned the ship around before landing so that the tiny spec of light from whatever sun in whatever system they were in could be seen. He lowered the landing gear and powered down the engines.

For the first time in hours, the world was still. Dave yawned and leaned back in his chair. Jade stood up next to him and ruffled his hair. “I’m going to go check and see how the engines are holding up. I didn’t like that noise they were making. Kanaya, will you give me a hand?”

Kanaya smiled at Dave before she followed Jade out into the corridor. They all knew that Dave would be a better mechanical hand to have at a time like this, but the exhaustion that follows panic was quickly taking over Dave’s system. It’d barely been an hour since they left Hoth. John was probably taking a nap in hyperspace, knowing him.

Dave glared at the soggy cave around them? Why would a cave on a desolate rock be soggy?

“Hey, there.”

Dave jolted awake. When the hell did he fall asleep? He didn’t even remember closing his eyes.

“Whoa, Nelly. Sit down,” Rose said, sitting next to him in the copilot’s chair. “You’re fine. You couldn’t have been out more than three minutes.”

Dave nodded and yawned. “Did you see Jade and Kanaya?”

Rose nodded. “I walked past them on my way here. It’s literally been less than three minutes.”

Dave nodded and rubbed his eyes. He wished he didn’t get so overwhelmed when battles and whatnot happened, but he couldn’t help it. It just took everything out of him to keep going. What a great soldier he made. He rolled his eyes and stretched. He was so used to beating himself up over all his bullshit that it was practically second nature to him now. He supposed it kept him honest.

He looked over at Rose. She stared out the dark windows. Her dark eyes were half-lidded and carried with them a fatigue that had to do with more than sleep. He knew that getting them into that asteroid field was eating at her. He opened his mouth to tell her that it-

“-wasn’t my fault?” she finished. “Yeah. I know. Still stings, though.”

“I know what you mean, sister,” Dave sighed. A message from Jade popped up on the ship’s computer. He pointed to a switch near Rose’s arm. She lazily turned it up to the third notch without having to be told. She turned to him and rolled her eyes. He nodded. Typical. Powers, or luck, or the Force… it always kicked in just when you needed it least.

“The hyperdrive will be ready in six minutes,” Rose announced with an underwhelming flick of her wrist and a sigh. “By that time, the girls downstairs will have realized that we are not, in fact, in a cave, and are in the mouth of a giant space worm.” She sighed again, heavier this time, as if all of this was very boring, and fiddled with a control. “But soon after this stark realization, we’ll have made our daring escape and will be on our way to probably equally dim endeavors.”

“Hell, I believe it.” Dave looked at the incoming message from Jade. Rose had already done what she needed. “Don’t you just get tired of it all?” he asked.

Rose shrugged. “It is exciting, being a hero. I admit to that freely. My life would be much duller sans the Rebellion and all, I just wish I had more time alone with Kanaya.”

Dave noticed the slump in her shoulders and the way her plump lips pouted under all that lipstick. He’d seen Rose like this once before after Kanaya had been injured a year ago. It was her vulnerable face, the one that scared him more than anything else she did. Usually, she was so confident and snarky. Seeing her like this made him feel helpless.

“I feel that way about Karkat,” he said, and then immediately regretted it. There he goes again, making it about him. Like an ass. He felt too moronic to say something else. Luckily Rose laughed and her smile went from melancholy to coy and as great as it was to see her smiling, that was not a smile that he liked to see after admitting something personal.

“Are you finally going to admit to all those little fantasies playing on loop in that shitpost of a brain you got up in there?” She giggled as she went to tap his forehead. He batted the hand away and glared, halfheartedly.

“You said you couldn’t read my mind, asshole.”

Rose giggled a little more and arched her pierced eyebrow. “I can’t. But I really didn’t need you to admit to me just then that everything I suspect is true. You’re clear as crystal, head over heels.” She bared her teeth at him. Maybe she was trying to smile, but her violent excitement made her a little scary. It wasn’t just about relationships. She’d get just as menacing when guessing how someone liked their coffee.

Dave stood up and towered over Rose. He flipped a switch above her head and glared as he sat back down. The lights flickered around them momentarily. “And just what exactly do you know?”

She shrugged and licked her lips. “Kanaya tells me that Karkat won’t do anything but rant about you when he’s not playing Jedi, and I see that little sulk in your step when he walks past you without at least throwing a nice little piece of profanity at you. It’s incorrigible. You two are obsessed with the other and it seems both of you are the only ones that fail to see this.”

While she said all of this, Dave tried to bite back his excitement. She could be lying to him, but why? She had nothing to gain. And it wasn’t like he went around blogging his wet dreams for all to gawk at. Maybe… just maybe… he did have a better chance than a snowball in hell to get with Karkat.

“And why the hell are you telling me all of this now, Lalonde? Not when it would have been,” he tapped his chin, “useful? Those nights on Hoth were pretty chilly. Shame I had no one to share them with.” He pretended to pout at her, but he knew the shake in his voice was giving everything he said away. A moment ago he was falling asleep in his chair, and now his ears were ringing. How the hell could a snappy, scruffy, little ball of anger turn him into a nervous wreck when they weren’t even in the same solar system?

Rose stood up and stretched. “Call it a tactical omission of information as a safety deposit on your future romantic endeavors.”

“A tactical what now?”

“Don’t worry about it now, deary,” Rose said with a wink and a bop on his freckled nose. She turned around and faced AR, who was just running in. “Well?” she said expectantly.

“Well,” he mocked her, “there seems to be something alive out there....”

“Wonderful!” Rose clapped her hands. “Dave?”

Dave nodded at the controls. “Yeah, yeah. Giant worm. I’m working on it.” He wasn’t even surprised by the quake in the tunnel. Some debris fell onto the cockpit windows. Times like this were when he really wished for windshield wipers. He scowled and got the control panel ready for engine startup.

“Rose, start the engines when…” he faltered, and she smirked at him. “Oh never mind.”

He ran down the corridors and took comfort in the ringing of his boots on the hollow metal. The sound of home. He stormed to the airlock and tossed on an air mask before bolting outside the ship and ran down to where Kanaya and Jade were fighting to weld a piece of metal in place.

The mist was thick and the ground bouncy. Things fluttered around above them. He didn’t like that at all. What the hell flutters in a place like this?

The air came in thin through the mask. He tried to breathe slower. Jade saw him and motioned to the sheet of metal she was holding. It was too big for Kanaya to hold by herself, so Dave helped her heft it up and told Jade to get a move on.

“I was just telling Kanaya, I think the whole tunnel is organic!” Jade yelled over the torch in her large hands.

Dave nodded but didn’t say a word. According to Rose, they would get out fine, and her clairvoyance was never wrong, but if there was one thing she warned about her foresight, it was to never test it. It made the beings that controlled it angry.

The ground shook again and Kanaya slipped on its slick surface. Dave caught her arm, and almost ate mud himself. Kanaya thanked him and held the sheet in place while the final seem was finished. Jade stood back with pride.

“Well, that looks to be about-“

The end of her sentence was drowned out by the startup of the engines. Time to skedaddle. Dave grabbed Kanaya’s arm and helped her back through the mud. Jade grabbed the toolbox and scrambled along after them up the ramp of the ship. Rose sat in the pilot’s chair, running through startup. She hit the ramp button and scooted out of Dave’s way.

Dave fell into his seat as the cave shook again.

“What is that?” Kanaya yelled, grabbing a strap in the ceiling and Rose’s hip to steady herself.

“Space worm, darling,” her girlfriend explain with a kiss on the cheek.

Jade gasped and started punching buttons. “Oh goodness!” she exclaimed. “I’ve seen these before! We gotta move! It probably didn’t like all those sparks on in its mouth!”

“Mouth?” AR yelled from behind them all, the perpetual backseat skeptic.

“Everyone, hold on you your dicks, we’re going for a ride.” Dave gunned the boosters, hovering the craft as the square of light at the entrance of the cave/mouth started to collapse. Dave yelled as he blasted towards the light with everything the ship had.

“Sideways! Sideways!” Jade screeched.

Dave slammed the yoke to the left and everyone screamed as the rows of white teeth closing to block their exit scraped past as Dave shot out of the mouth of the gigantic worm. He didn’t look back as he blasted the ship into the asteroid field.

“One more iron in the fire…” Kanaya muttered.

Dave smiled at that and pushed on into the pockmarked oblivion around them. The adrenaline in his veins made his vision sharp, but it was hard to focus. His mind was going somewhere else. Rose had made it clear. He had to get back to Karkat, and an asteroid field was the least of his worries.

Chapter Text

Two hours till sunset.

John detached the ship from the rock face and flew the first couple of miles to the drop zone. This part of the planet was supposed to be sparsely populated, what with its massive desert plains and nigh inhabitable mountains, but as the hot sun began to dip further down in the too light blue sky, his scanners were detecting movement, and a lot of it. Big things were waking up, and he didn’t like it at all. Most of all, he didn’t like that those big things were moving in the direction of his location.

He wished the ship had some kind of cloaking or stealth as he flew as low as he dared out over the hard desert rock. It was a damn transport cruiser, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t meant for missions like this but in all the confusion after the attack on Hoth… it was the only ship capable of far hyper jumps that was more than one man. It was the best they could get.

As he neared the coast, dunes began to grow under the belly of the cruiser. He rode them up and down until hitting the spot where they had set meeting coordinates. He dropped down a ladder and hovered. Two figures crawled out of the sand and latched onto the rungs. As they began to climb, John began to rise, and soon enough the two shrouded people fell onto the small main deck with the beds.

The ship was only ten meters across. No door into the pilot’s quarter. John looked over his shoulder to see Nepeta and Equius unwrapping themselves, panting. He heard them scurrying behind him as he raced back to the cover of the mountains.

“The lioness… needs water!” Nepeta moaned. She often roleplayed to pass time. Sometimes Equius played along, other times he didn’t. John glanced over his shoulder and just saw Equius handing Nepeta a cold water bottle from the little fridge and wiping her hair out of her face. The two were plastered in sweat.

John let them rest until he attached the ship to the mountain wall again. When the ship was settled, he walked the few steps into the cabin with the beds. Nepeta and Equius were both lying down, curling into each other.

“Guys?” John whispered. Nepeta kept on murmuring, but Equius’ eyes were open. His sunglasses, cracked from an adventure that John couldn’t even remember, sat on the floor next to their pile of clothes and empty water bottles. He just remembered that his own glasses were still cracked from Hoth.

John had no idea how the two of them could nap like that. Equius sweated buckets daily, but now John was pretty sure the guy was swimming. Nepeta was either too tired to care, or just really loved him.

“What?” Equius whispered.

“We have one hundred and ten minutes until sunset. What did you two find?”

Equius grunted and moved Nepeta’s small, sleeping body around a little so he could face John better. “We definitely saw drones guarding the three entrances. It’s a two story building, long. I’m guessing at least 100,000 square feet. No civilian hives nearby. Something is happing in there, but what, we cannot be certain of until we infiltrate the site and bring evidence back to Feferi.”

John nodded. Equius rarely took his glasses off. Even after all this time, John felt like he couldn’t look him in the eye without the opaque black lenses. Equius tried too hard to be too strong. He didn’t have to protect Nepeta the way he did. Deep blue bags hung under his eyes. The yellow sclera that all trolls bared stood out in an almost neon relief above the dark skin. Without his glasses, Equius was terrifying.

“There was something else, too,” Equius whispered. “Trash. Faygo bottles littered the outside of the refinery. That’s not good, Egbert. That means that trolls—purple bloods at that—are frequenting the refinery. We have to be on constant alert throughout this mission.”

“Yeah,” John agreed quietly. “How long to sweep the factory? Did you see drones inside?”

“We couldn’t get a look inside, but it appears the factory has a large floor of machinery. That’s all we can assume.”

John looked at his watch. One hundred and nine minutes. “I don’t want to drag this out any longer than we need to,” John said. “If you two rest for half an hour, we should have just a little over an hour to break into the factory before the sunset. Do you want to wait it out another day or try and finish this tonight?”

Equius brushed the hair out of Nepeta’s face. “I would prefer that we abscond as soon as possible. This planet is not well.” His scarred and broken fingers made patterns in his moirail’s hair. “I say, wake us up in half an hour, and we’ll see what Nepeta says because I’m already ready to leave this forsaken planet.”

He closed his tired eyes and wrapped his massive arms around Nepeta. She made mewling noises in her sleep. John crept out of the room and set a timer.

One hundred and eight minutes till sunset.

When he went to wake them, Equius was already rubbing Nepeta’s arm and telling her it was time for the lioness to rise. John doubted the muscle man got even a minute of sleep. Nepeta uncurled herself and stretched. Sometimes it was easy to forget she was a trained soldier who specialized in espionage and deception. She was so cute, with her oversized jacket and yawns that seemed way too large for her tiny body.

Equius explained the situation to Nepeta. She pondered it for a moment, which annoyed John. Yes or no, Nepeta. Come on.

“I want to turn tail and get out of here as much as mew do,” she started, “but I think we really need to consider the options. We might need more time. Are we willing to take that risk?” She turned to John. “Are we willing to take that risk and possibly forfeit Karkat’s crystal?”

He looked at his watch. Seventy-six minutes. They could still get there with over an hour leftover. “I think it’s worth it,” he said resolutely. “The mission comes first, Karkat second. In and out, that’s what we all said earlier. In and out.”

Nepeta stood at attention and nodded sharply, remnants of her time in the Empire. As much as she tried to bury that part of her past deep inside her, it was never really gone. You couldn’t mistake that the thing in her eyes, the thing that made their enemies turn and run from the girl that stood tall at five feet two inches… that thing was faith. Her had soldier’s faith in her cause, and that’s what made her so dangerous.

“Let’s move it!” she said.

John grabbed his blaster, hammer, and inhaler. The hammer had been a gift from Jade. It was a gnarly little piece, despite its colorful appearance. The thing had a blunt end and a curved piercing side, and both could run an electric current that could fry Stormtrooper armor to smithereens. He didn’t go anywhere without it. It was invaluable to him in close combat.

While Nepeta tested her claws and Equius wrapped his knuckles, John geared the ship up and began racing into the sunset. The thing was so blinding, he had to manually change the tint on the windshield. No wonder the planet refused to be diurnal, damn.

He set the ship down between two dunes, only half a mile from the refinery, threw on a sun shawl and glasses and followed Nepeta out into the setting sunlight.

John faltered. Had Tatooine been this fucking hot? Stepping into the sand, he feared his boots might melt off. Nepeta and Equius trudged up the sand and for a moment, John’s heart stopped. The dizziness of the heat scared him, but there wasn’t any time to be scared. He puffed his inhaler and pushed himself to keep pace with the rest of his team up, and down, and up the eight hundred meters that felt like miles.

Fifteen minutes of agony later, the trio lay on the top of the last dune. There, only about a hundred meters away, loomed the black building. It was a perfect rectangle, as far as John could tell, with only three drones on three of the four walls, but that was enough. There were cameras too; not many, but enough to know that this wasn’t going to be easy.

Equius signaled to the long wall to the right of their position. John and Nepeta crawled behind him in the sand until they were closer to the corner connecting the short wall and the long wall. From here, John could see the gray, turbulent ocean that ran parallel to the far, long wall. Red pipes ran out from under the water and into the building. Equius motioned to the pipes. John and Nepeta nodded. They needed to secure the pipes if they wanted a way to climb to the roof and make it in.

Equius pulled out a scrambler and set the small, round device in the sand. It was a makeshift tool that Equius had built on the way back from their last mission. It was a miracle the thing survived the crash on Hoth. Equius synced it with a computer on his wrist and tapped into the four external cameras and froze the images.

John pointed to the drone on the short wall, and them himself. Equius and Nepeta nodded. Nepeta counted down from three, and the trio broke like light through cracked glass onto the forces below.

No talking. Voices and faces can be recognized. As long as they could help it, faces covered and voices off.

John sprinted towards the terrifying, robotic, troll warrior thing that guarded the wall. It was Crabdad sized, but with spiked, red metal armor instead of a smooth carapace. John gulped as he raised his blaster with his left hand and shot above the drone’s spiked helmet. The thing looked towards John and raised a giant, gauntlet clad fist at him. John ripped a sonic grenade from his belt and tossed it at the drone’s feet, and threw himself against the wall right before the explosion of soundwaves ripped through the air, blasting the drone off its feet.

The lapping of the ocean was replaced by nothing as the earpieces that John wore swelled closed to protect his eardrums. His body pressed into the wall by the impact of the compressed air erupting from the grenade. He pushed himself off the wall and launched at the drone before the thing could get up. It smacked an armor-clad arm up before John could sting it with his hammer. John dodged and tried to get on the things back, but its armor was too damn spikey.

He had to roll to avoided impalement, and roll again to avoid being crushed as the thing came towards him, already upright again. The grenade had done nothing, and he had lost his chance. His hearing slowly returned as the earpieces deflated to their original size. Now he could hear the scrape of metal as the drone came towards him. John slipped in the sand as he tried to stand up, and the drone took a shot with a blaster attached to its arm.

John rolled and dove for the thing’s massive boots. He grabbed onto the spikes and bit his tongue as it tried to kick him off, driving a spike into John’s forearm in the process. John yanked his hammer out. He couldn’t electrocute it while he was still hanging on. That was suicide. It lifted its leg up again to try and stomp him off. John stabbed the pointed end of the hammer into the bend of its calf. It reached the apex of its kick and John let go of the spikes on its boots, but not before activating his hammer. As he was flung into the air, the drone shook as the blue bolts of energy tore through its circuits, and its flesh.  It toppled to the ground just as John was caught by two muscular, albeit sweaty, arms.

Equius set him down and frowned at the blood running out of John’s sleeve. He waved it off and motioned to around the corner. Nepeta lead them around the wall. John’s eyes met the head of the second drone first, and followed the trail of teal blood to its body a few feet away. He wasn’t even going to wonder how the two managed that.

John held two fingers up and motioned around the corner. Equius pushed his sleeve up to show John everything the scrambler was picking up. He pointed to the drones head and then to his ears and shook his head. When John looked at the computer, there was a mute icon over some words in Alternian. He understood and checked his watch. Fifty minutes.

Nepeta lead them down the wall. This was the wall without an entrance. She nimbly hopped up on the pipes and reached halfway up the building. With more force than probably should have been possible, she launched herself up and pushed herself by running on all fours vertically up the wall to where she just barely grabbed the lip if the roof and pulled herself over.

The rays of the red sun began to dance of the crests of the gentle gray waves.

John and Equius ran back to the short wall and waited outside the red metal door. John snuck a puff from his inhaler and tried to ignore the stabbing pain coming from his forearm. There was no way to see how bad it was with his jacket still on. He walked over to the drone, yanked his hammer out, and hoped for the best.

A few moments later, they heard the crash. It sounded like it was above them. John and Equius yanked at the door together, but no luck. Equius frantically pulled tools out of his belt to unlock the door, but it was some kind of deadbolt, nothing that could be hacked. They said nothing as the crashing continued.

Equius tore his sleeve up, ripping it back and trying to get onto the cameras inside. He grunted and tapped the screen so hard it cracked. A black line of pixels split the screen but it was still otherwise functional. His meaty fingers shook as he scrolled through a line of HTML looking for a camera that would be near them when John put his hand on Equius’ shoulder. The crashing had stopped.

John heard Equius take a deep breath. “Nep-!” John shoved his hands over the scarf covering Equius’ mouth before he could get the word all the way out. John shook his head violently. Equius ripped his arms away, sending bolts of pain down John’s arm and took another breath when the door creaked open.

They froze and stared into the blackness. Two yellow eyes blinked back. Nepeta stepped forward into the light. Rust blood ran in little rivers down the front of her sun shawl and her eyes were already swelling shut. Equius gently smoothed down her messy black curls. Nepeta allowed herself half a second to lean into his touch, then pulled away. She beckoned them in and led them through the dusty, hot shadows.

Forty-four minutes.

They entered in a metal stairwell that went up and down. They followed Nepeta up and froze as the red-hot heat hit their faces. The hot air smelled like iron and ash. She nodded at their awe and stepped back to let them take it in.

The refinery was operational and running at full speed. A conveyor belt a hundred feet long fed long rows of what looked to be crushed obsidian down a line of machines that cut, cracked, or tested the pieces. John followed the production line with his eyes, starting at the enormous tank of crystals, a cube at least fifty feet each way that fed the belt, all the way down to the molten vat at the end of it all, where the red-hot mass of swirling kyber was churned and heated.

Nepeta pointed to the catwalks above them, and a drone hanging from chains around its neck from one of the metal strips. She shrugged at it, tiredly. She pulled down her mask and mouthed to Equius, Can we talk now?

He stopped taking pictured with the device on his wrist and went to his scrambler screen. There was some number next to a microphone icon. John’s Alternian wasn’t the best. The number was either zero or one thousand but because Equius lowered his mask and said, “We should be safe,” John took that as a zero.

“So what happened on your end?” John whispered to Nepeta. It felt too weird to talk loud. The machinery was so soft.

She shrugged. “I think it was just the one drone. A supervisor?” she guessed. “He was a slippurry one.” She turned and took her blue hat off. John gently put his hand on the back of her head. She winced as he touched the bump there. He took his hand away and looked at the green spots on his fingers.

“You may have a concussion,” he said. She nodded and then hissed at Equius, who was kneeling next to where she stood, examining a patch of green bleeding through her knee. “Eqkitty!” she hissed again. “Go take pictpurrs! Don’t worry about me right meow.”

He stood up, troubled, and nodded. John checked his watch. Forty-two.

He left Nepeta to sit on the stairwell and looked around while Equius was taking pictures. The factory was big, but not as big as he thought it would be. There was something missing. John took a puff from his inhaler and kept along the side of the walls. He took a sample from the conveyor belt, but all of these crystals were already shattered and going through the refining process. He needed a real, full, unbroken kyber crystal.

Dust hung permanently suspended in the air. This refinery hadn’t had living workers for a long time, if ever. Apparently, Condy didn’t trust droids or clones on her homeworld, because here it was all drones. Where had the shipments been coming in?

He ran as lightly as he could around the refinery while keeping an eye on his watch. Equius was almost done photographing the entirety of the process but something still didn’t make sense. The refinery was too small.

“Equius,” he whispered when Equius had gotten to the final stage of the refinery. “Something doesn’t add up.”

The mountainous troll nodded. “I know. Where is all this kyber going to? This vat is too small to hold all that is being fed into it.”

John agreed. “We have about twenty minutes before sunset. I want to peek down those stairs.”

Nepeta kept watch at the top of the stairs, but she’d been hit badly. For a moment, she’d forgotten why she was bleeding. John had to keep Equius on his toes. He couldn’t have him distracted by Nepeta. She would be fine. They couldn’t think about that right now.

John and Equius stalked down the metal stairs a flight down. There were no lights, and only Equius’ computer served to guide their way with its pixelated glow. They reached a metal door. It was also deadlocked without a key. John held a finger to his lips. They could hear machinery behind the door and… humming. Song humming, not the machine kind.

Equius looked just as baffled as John. John pointed behind him. There were more stairs. They started downward once again.

It was the same thing on every floor. Every flight of stairs down led them to an unmarked, red, metal door. Some were silent. Some had machinery sounding behind their deadbolts. None of them were hackable. The doors ended eight flights down. All there was at the end was a service hatch on the ground. That one had a label. Equius typed something in Alternian on his computer and translated it into Galactic Basic. “Danger: Nuclear Reactor.”

John looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes. That was just enough time to get back to the ship before sunset.

Equius looked over and saw the number on the watch face. He pointed up and mouthed, Let’s go. Nepeta will be slower. John nodded, and they began to creep back up the stairs.

When the door opened, they were on the fifth flight. Equius and John pinned themselves to the wall and held their breaths as soon as the latch clicked. They saw a light a few floors above them. The hummer skipped out of the door and ran down a flight. A child. They pulled a key out of their belt and opened the door above John and Equius and skipped in, their oversized lab coat trailing behind them.

John and Equius waited. They could hear the humming coming from behind the door above them. Whoever it was, they were kept near the entrance. John counted the seconds. It took two whole minutes. He didn’t dare check his watch for fear the door would open as soon as he did. Finally, the door opened and the child skipped back upstairs.

They waited as the slit of light from the door above them grew smaller. As soon as John heard the key hit the latch on the top floor, he sprinted as quietly as he could up the single flight. He ripped his hammer from his belt as the door closed, still feet away from him, and slid the tool into the doorframe. The door stopped propped open by the hammer.

John and Equius ran into the red-lit room.

It was an engineering lab. Rows of white stations sat with wires and parts that John couldn’t name and tools he’d never seen. Equius frowned at the equipment around him as he took pictures. John tapped his arm and pointed to a lightsaber grip. Equius took a picture of it and nodded.

He typed onto his computer and showed it to John. “Scrambler doesn’t work this far. Need to get out soon.”

John nodded. The lab was empty, but looked to have enough room for at least thirty people. There were other doors leading out of the chic place, but he knew they didn’t have time to explore them. Twelve minutes. They’d already passed their deadline of getting back to the ship before sunset. It wasn’t like all residents of Alternia would be awake and around as soon as the sun went down, but they wanted to be safe.

Equius held up the handheld computer to a sign posted next to the door. John recognized the numbers on each row of words. It was a directory. He squinted at the first floor down and mouthed to Equius, kyber?

Equius nodded, and shook his head. Yes, but no time. John nodded. He placed his ear to the door and listened for footsteps. Nothing. He pushed the door open. The stairwell remained quiet. They made it back to Nepeta without being caught.

Ten minutes. Nepeta had laid down on the top step of the stairs waiting for them. The gloom of the factor had seemed to grow more ominous since they left. Equius scooped up Nepeta. John held out his hammer. He’d have to defend them all of it came to blows, and he was ready for that.

The door below opened again. John whipped around towards Equius.

“No,” Equius whispered.

Nepeta blinked at him. “Let him, Eqkitty. For Karkitty.” She closed her eyes and curled back into his massive chest.

The door was closing. They could hear it. “Fine,” Equius hissed. “Go!”

John sprinted down the single flight and caught the door handle just as it was about it close. He dashed in and held up his hammer. Empty, just like the last lab. His heart beat out of his chest as he scanned the room for kyber crystals. The place looked like a geology lab. He sprinted towards a glass case in the back. There were half a dozen full grown, real kyber crystals on little stands. John didn’t see any sensors, but he also didn’t have a key to the case. Where were all the magnetic locks that he usually fried? All of this was old school.

He looked around at the empty lab and listened for footsteps. Silence. He took a short breath and punched through the glass. He grabbed the deep crimson crystal and shoved it in his boot pocket with his inhaler. He was running towards the door when a square of orange caught his eye. He cursed and turned to face where the light was coming from. There was a window on the far wall. He cursed again and ran to it.

Oh. That’s where all the kyber was going.

Through the window was an enormous room, almost as big as the production floor above, filled with tubes of the molten crystal being molded into lenses, shapes, and parts. He’d been briefed on the Death Star mechanics. Those lenses were for lasers meant to destroy planets. His breath hitched as a key hit the latch in the door.

He dropped behind a lab station and held his breath.

He saw the boots of the child troll in the lab coat skip towards him. He prayed that they wouldn’t come any closer. They were humming, occasionally spitting out an Alternian word here or there. He didn’t recognize any of them.

The boots stopped and grabbed a tool off a desk a few feet from him, then skipped back out the door. John let go of his breath.

As soon as he was out the door he was up the stairwell and by Equius’ side, he let himself puff on his inhaler. He felt like his lungs were about to attack him. Equius glared at him. “Five minutes,” he whispered. John nodded. He’d been checking his watch.

John opened the door for Equius to carry Nepeta through. Equius froze as something rolled to his feet. John bent down and picked up the empty Faygo bottle.

“What the hell?”

“Was it worth it, John?” Equius asked. John looked up and straight into the painted face of a purple blood holding a metal bat. Behind him stood four other trolls with various weapons in various threatening positions.

The purple blood in front tapped the bat on the doorframe.

“It’s a motherfucking miracle,” they said in Galactic Basic. He smashed the bat into the door, denting the metal.

In one motion, John threw his hammer into the young troll’s face. Purple gushed from his nose as he dropped the bat. John swooped up the hammer and dove towards the first troll he saw and walloped them on the face too. They fell, clutching the side of their head. The next troll just winked at him as he bull rushed him and before John could do anything else, the blue blood told him to go to sleep, and so he did.

Chapter Text

Karkat was beginning to think that all Jedi were just ostentatious assholes. As he tripped and tried to keep up with Redglare, the little woman just swaggered away from him, never even stumbling once over roots and rocks hiding under the low lying fog. Karkat growled out a few strings of profanity every few feet, and noted the tilt of the woman’s head every time he did.

Finally, they reached the little mud hut on a mini peninsula of land. Redglare walked through the open door and lead him into the hive. It reminded him of Psiioniic’s own little dwelling back on Tatooine. It was small and cramped, but this one was definitely neater. He could see a room with a sleeping mat, a kind of closet, and that was all that connected to the small, main room with one table and a small kitchen. He had no idea how someone could live here. Sure, it had the tools to survive but it didn’t feel like… a home. Redglare lit a fire in the hearth and put a metal pot over it.

“No electricity?” Karkat asked as he took a seat on the floor. There were no chairs.

She shook her head. “It never really felt safe after order sixty-six.” It’d begun to rain softly outside. Karkat hoped the Mayor was doing okay.

“Order sixty-six?” Karkat asked. It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

Redglare took off her red gloves and set them on the counter before coming to sit with him. The hive had almost no personal effects, save a few journals and items for cooking and cleaning. The place looked like it’d been standing a long time, but was well taken care of.

“Order sixty-six,” Redglare explained, “was the order sent out by Her Imperious Condescension to all Stormtroopers to dispose of any and all Jedi. This was one event in the chain that led to the downfall of the Galactic Republic and the rise of the Empire.”

Karkat nodded. Kanaya had explained something of this to him. “Yeah, Kanaya’s mother had told her the story of the day it happened, Sufferer’s raid on the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.” She had tried to rub some politics off on him, but it wasn’t too much avail. Karkat was more interested in the militaristic properties of the Republic’s downfall. She tried to explain to him how the Condesce had overthrown the Senate, but he really only listened to the battle parts.

Redglare nodded. She stood and grabbed a few mugs out of a shelf and ladled some of the heated liquid into them. “I blame Psiioniic,” Redglare said as she handed him a mug.

Karkat held the hot cup close to him but did not take a drink. “Why the fuck would you blame Psiioniic? Were you there? Was he even there?” he asked, incredulous.

“First of all,” she said, “please refrain from using profanity around me. I see that Psiioniic has passed on to you his questionable vernacular.” Karkat rolled his sight spheres. “Second, Sufferer was Psiioniic’s padawan, back in the day.”

Karkat set down the mug. It wasn’t cold, but he was trembling.

“Oh yes, against warnings, Psiioniic chose to train him.” She smiled as the anger and confusion rose in Karkat’s chest. “But there’s no changing the past. If only Psiioniic hadn’t trained him. If only Dolorosa hadn’t trained Psiioniic. If only Sufferer hadn’t grown up on… well, you get the point,” she said as she adjusted her glasses. Karkat glared at her vehemently. Is this why Psiioniic wanted him to pester her, because she was an entitled old bat living in Bulge Knows Where, Dagobah with swamp water clogging her think pan?

“Why did Psiioniic send me here?” he growled.

Redglare shook her head. “No, see you’re not asking the correct questions. And I see you balling your fists. Don’t get angry with me. I may be the last person in the galaxy who can help you right now.”

“What if I don’t need your help?”

Redglare laughed. “Well then, you were lying when you asked for it, weren’t you? See? Wrong questions.”

Karkat looked at the mud ceiling and the shadows dancing off it from the fire. He tried to choose his words without using his favorite nouns, adjectives, or verbs. “Okay. What the- What am I supposed to be asking you? You said you can help me. How the- how can you help me?”

Redglare nodded at him. “I can train you, but don’t think it’s because I want to.”

Karkat scoffed and stood up. “Listen, I don’t need to take this shit from you!” He jabbed a finger in her face and she cackled.

“See!” she yelled, turning her face a little to the left. “I told you! I told you!” She clasped her hands in delight. “Just like Sufferer, but he’s not even trying to hide his anger! No. I know you mean well, but no. I won’t do it.”

Karkat looked beside him. There was no one there. “Who the fuck are you-“

Redglare sighed deeply. “He doesn’t even know you’re here.”

Karkat’s hands shook. She was crazy. She had to be crazy! There was no one there! He looked from her, to the space, and back to her. Her lips were curled in a reptilian way that suggested how little she thought of him. Finally, he groaned and screwed his eyes shut, thinking of Kanaya and Dave and John. He shoved the hot fury burning in his throat down and focused on the thing in the back of his head. The little feeling that made him dizzy, but always led to the right choice.

When he opened his eyes, Psiioniic was standing next to him. He blinked, rubbed his seeing globes again, and reached out to touch him. Psiioniic let Karkat feel his robes. They were sandy, as though they’d just left Tatooine.

“How…?”

Redglare sipped her drink. “So he can use the Force. Many people can.”

“I think you’re wrong, Redglare,” Psiioniic said softly. Karkat could believe that the old, sparky fucker was back from the dead, but was that… respect in this voice? Psiioniic didn’t respect anyone! This was a trick! Then again, Karkat had only known him for a day. “He’s different.”

“Because his blood is red?” Redglare said sarcastically.

“No,” Psiioniic almost laughed. “You taught me a long time ago that blood color has nothing to do with it. It’s who he is, not what color he bleeds.”

Redglare smirked at Psiioniic. Karkat reached out and touched the hem of his robe again. It was real. He could feel it, but he knew it wasn’t possible.

“He’s too old, and he’s too stubborn,” Redglare shook her head. “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Psiioniic?” Karkat whispered. Psiioniic turned to face him. “What if she’s right?”

For a moment, the sounds of the swamp drifted through the open windows and no one spoke. Karkat listened to the water and the rustling of the trees. He wasn’t really a Jedi. He was too angry. He didn’t know what he was getting into.

“Tell me,” Redglare said to him. “You’re scared. Why?”

“I don’t know…” Karkat said honestly. He knew she wouldn’t speak until he gave her an answer. “I want to….” he tried to find the words. “I feel this pull in my chest… I feel like I have to do this. I feel like it’s the only way to help my friends.” He wanted to choke on the words. Where were the fucking flower crowns and rainbows, for fuck’s sake? What next, were they going to tell him to lie down on a couch and talk about it? He’d had enough of this emotional bullshit with Rose day in and day out. One psychic lunatic in his life was enough for him, thank you very much.

“Help?” Redglare asked. She frowned. “Not… protect?”

Karkat scoffed and finally took a drink from the mug. He immediately spit it back in. “Ack! Fuck! Ew!” he wiped his taste muscle on his hand. “What the hell is that? And yeah, help. Like, I mean, sure, I want to protect them but they’re pretty capable themselves. I worry about them, but I know that it’s their own lives. Seriously, what the fuck is in this?”

He turned to complain to Psiioniic, but the old troll was gone. “What the hell?” Karkat reached out into the air beside him. Nothing. He turned back to Redglare, who still stared at him with her mouth open. “Where’d he go?” Karkat yelled.

Redglare shook her head. “Oh,” she sighed, “he’s still here. We’ll never really be rid of him. I’ve tried.”

She grabbed Karkat’s mug and poured it out the window. “You need to rest. Your training will begin tomorrow.” She grabbed a clay jar out from somewhere and handed it to him.

Karkat sniffed it and sipped it cautiously. Water, a little musty, but it was water. “Why the fuck are you training me now? Where did Psiioniic go?”

She shook her head and stared out the window. “For the last time, I will not train you if you insist on speaking in that vulgar language. And I will train you because apparently, you’re not as idiotic as I had previously perceived.” She turned to face him, the fire glinting off her glasses. It was sunlight off rubies. Blood reflecting lasers. Crimson silk under candlelight. Karkat shivered. “You still have time to prove me wrong, though.”

Karkat frowned at her. This was going to be difficult for both of them.

“Basic lightsaber training starts whenever I wake you up. Days and nights on Dagobah are too long to follow a schedule too,” she said as she handed him what looked to be some kind of stuffed bread. He didn’t realize how hungry he was. He hadn’t eaten since before he left Hoth.

“About that…” Karkat said slowly, in between bites. Redglare raised her eyebrows. “My lightsaber is kind of… broken….”

She took a deep breath and rubbed the bridge of her nose, pushing up her glasses a little as she did. “Why do you do this to me, Psiioniic?” she muttered. “Okay. What do you mean, ‘kind of broken’?”

Karkat slipped the weapon out from his belt and pressed the button. Nothing. He shook the tube a little so that his new master could hear the two pieces clanging around the inside. “Like, shattered kyber crystal broken?” Redglare’s face contorted in frustration. “I have a friend that’s getting me a new one!” he assured her quickly. “It’ll work itself out!”

“You should pick your own crystal,” Redglare explained with what might pass as patience. “There has to be a connection! That’s why your ancestor’s crystal broke in there because that was his lightsaber, not yours.”

Karkat shrugged. “It worked fine for a long time. I trust John to grab me a good one.”

Redglare rubbed her temples. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

Karkat awoke to water splashing on his face and Redglare yelling at him to run! He scrambled off the floor and took off without hesitating. She chased him around the swamp, making impossible jumps and leaps as she did. When Karkat collapsed, she fed him breakfast and began to teach him basic lessons of the Jedi code. Later, she threw him a stick and told him to fight. She didn’t say who, and he felt like an idiot sword playing to no one. The Mayor had squealed in delight. Before they turned in for the night, Redglare told him to lift the X-Wing out of the marsh. He tried and failed. She gave him a small dinner and he fell asleep, exhausted.

Karkat woke up to water splashing on his face and Redglare yelling at him to run! And he would wake up to that the next time, and the next time, and the next time…

Chapter Text

It’d be a mistake. If he’d shaved off ten minutes, five minutes, two… things would be different. They might have gotten out, or have been able to have fought their way out. Maybe Equius would have been able to set Nepeta down and help him. Maybe the roaming band of high bloods and middle bloods wouldn’t have gotten a hold of them. Maybe...

John traced his swollen fingers along the edge of the room. He should have started the tally marks the day that they were brought down here, deep into the refinery, into the seventh red door, past the lab filled with weaponry, down the long, gray corridors, and separated into identical makeshift cells.

That blue blooded boy… he had simply told them to take off all their weapons and march into the cells. John had given up his hammer, blaster, remaining grenades, and even his multitool. The other blue blood, a girl, demanded that their earpieces be taken out as well. John complied without as much as a whimper.

How many days had it been?

John screwed his eyes shut, despite the absolute darkness of the cell, and tried desperately to remember. A little less than a standard week, a little more? The days and nights blurred into each other seamlessly now. There was no schedule. They’d be dead by now if it wasn’t for the youngest of the crew of sadistic juvenile trolls. She was a little yellow blood, six sweeps old. Her double set of horns split at the top of each one, so that a crown of yellow Ys hovered above her constantly. She had been the one running the labs for almost two and a half sweeps now, as far as John could glean from what little conversation they had. She researched weapons for the Empire. With her psionics, she had to either make herself useful or be doomed to the life of a helmsman, and she would do anything to avoid that fate.

While John knew he shouldn’t blame her for what had happened, he still did. Her name was Iignis, and she’d doomed them all to die.

She’d told him it was her only way to survive. The crew of purple and blue bloods, led by a mysterious violet that John had yet to see, stumbled upon the refinery one sweep ago. It was a perfect facility to use for flarp escapades. It had value. It had drones. It had miles of practically unused tunnels underneath to be used at their disposal.

They’d blackmailed her. If Iignis didn’t let them use the facility for their own purposes, they’d trash it, not enough to put it out of use as that might endanger their own lives, but they’d trash it enough to have reasonable cause to report Iignis for being unfit to protect the facilities. If she was unfit for lab work, her new home would be the helm of the Condesce’s personal flagship. Iignis couldn’t let that happen.

The little yellow blood apologized every time she brought John water and a few bites of food.

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

“You can help us,” John would say to her. “Look at what the Empire has done to you, to your life! You can get us out of here. We can take you with us.”

She’d shake her head. “I can’t. I’m not strong enough. My lusus is in here too.”

John wanted to tell her he felt like he couldn’t do it either, but he couldn’t. To say that out loud would be to admit that he couldn’t take this much longer. His body was giving up faster than his mind could handle. The infection in his arm… the fever every night…. He was dying. He could feel it happening over the slow hours. He couldn’t keep fighting, but he couldn’t admit to that either. He couldn’t give up…

The banging on the door sent his heart beating so hard he thought his frail ribs might shatter. All traces of sleep were flushed out of his system by the sudden panic as the foreign yells and taunts of his abusers echoed through the room. John ripped his inhaler out of his boot and inhaled some of the medication before the door was kicked open by the purple blood with the broken nose, the nose that John had broken on the first night.

The troll, Smierc, snarled at John and brandished his own hammer at him. Broken glass soda bottles hung from his belt. They made clinking noises as he stalked towards John. John curled into the wall, away from the flashlights and the violence and the pain.

“Get up,” said a voice in his head. He stood slowly and groaned as he did. His entire neck hadn’t relaxed for two days now. His left arm hung limp, and useless, and oozed with green and brown puss where the drone’s boot had punctured him. The blue blood, whose name John had yet to figure out, laughed at his grimaced face.

“You don’t look to good, Johnny,” they whispered. John’s back arched involuntarily as he did, the sentence forming in his ears and in his brain.

John tried to look at them, but they wouldn’t stop shining the flashlight right into his face. All he could place was their voices, and the dim reflective circles that were their eyes. He groaned again and tried not to throw up what little food he had managed to swallow.

“How are you not dead yet? That’s a motherfucking miracle right there.” Smierc laughed. John followed him out of the door and down the corridor against his will. “Eh, you’re not that bad,” Smierc laughed again. “Not really. No, a real miracle is that kitty cat back there is still kicking! I mean, jeez if it wasn’t for that sweaty hoofbeast of a troll, cat girl would have stopped breathing ages ago! She’s as good as gone, by this point.”

For a moment, John’s shuffling feet faltered as they exited the corridor and reached the dark, metal stairwell. He wished it weren’t true, but Nepeta’s concussion should have been treated days ago. She’d stopped fighting after the first battle, and Equius had been pulling her weight ever since, and it was killing both of them. They couldn’t keep on like this much longer.

Up two flights and into the unmarked red door. John stopped to lean his sweaty forehead on the cold concrete wall. Smierc shoved him forward, and John cried out as his brow was scraped by the rough surface.

“Keep moving,” the voice in his head demanded. His legs moved forward.

This corridor was long, longer than John would have imagined was possible. The entire facility underneath the desert was a labyrinth in itself. They walked down the long corridor until reaching another unmarked door. John could never remember which one it was. He gulped as they crossed the threshold and started down the slanting new corridor.

From here, he could start to feel the small rumble of the crowd. Trolls came from all around to watch these inane death fights. Opposing flarp teams would contract the facility out and use it to abuse their enemies. The whole thing was barbaric, but profitable.

Basically, it was one on one. A complete flarp team has five members on each team: four ‘players’ and one ‘clouder’, the clouder being the one who runs the game from an undisclosed location, feeding info into their players’ earpieces, or telepathically if they had that available to them. So four trolls entered the arena. One was drawn at random, and pitted against the next troll in line. If they did not fight, the enemy team would open fire. If one of the other two teammates went to help, the enemy team would open fire. If one or both of the two tried to escape, the enemy team would open fire. The last troll standing would be set free to go back to their clouder. Usually, that troll killed their clouder for having failed them. It was a tidy little process.

As far as John could tell, these were usually private affairs, all old grudges and debts paid in blood. The arena was carved out of the facility, and there wasn’t exactly a huge seating section. He guessed that the gang that ran these flarp massacres didn’t want word getting around of what they were doing… until now.

Now they had a show to put on, only for elite blue through violet bloods. There was the occasional teal blood, but John never really had the time to scan the crowds and note the color of their insignias. All he knew was that his suffering provided entertainment for the high class.

Nightly, trolls would be dragged into the crude arena. John thought that it was two conjoining labs that had had all equipment and workbenches torn out and the walls were torn off so that the six rooms alongside the space could see in. In those rooms were rudimentary stands or seats that were now packed full of bloodthirsty high bloods. None of the lights on the lab ceilings worked. It was an eighty by thirty-foot rectangle of concrete floor with pipes sticking out from where the workbenches had been; only lighted by surrounding light sources. A meandering white line drew a rectangle around the area. If you stepped out, you were fair game to be fired upon.

John looked at the multicolored splatters on the concrete and averted his eyes. For the past however many nights, the high bloods would drag anybody that owned them a debt, or that they just didn’t like, with them to the arena. The gang members would accept the participation fee, and throw the quaking young trolls in a line around the edge of the arena. Despite the money they could be making, they still only accepted eight trolls a night; one set of four per each battle.

There were only two battles now: Nepeta and Equius’ battle, and then John’s.

The first night Equius had made a deal with Smierc after having been explained the rules. He begged that Nepeta and he would be permitted to fight together. Smierc agreed on the condition that if Nepeta and Equius fought together, they’d have to battle two trolls at once. Knowing full well that Nepeta was not capable of defending herself, Equius had agreed.

John winced as he was shoved to the corner of the arena opposite of Nepeta and Equius. The rules were the same. Once a troll was killed, a new one would enter so the numbers remained two on two until the end. John looked into Equius’ glasses, but Equius wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at Nepeta as he held her upright to his side. He gently rubbed a spatter of teal blood off her cheek. Her eyes were still swollen shut from the fight with the drone, and her face was so pale now it almost looked white. Iignis had told John that she couldn’t get Nepeta to eat at all anymore. She was rarely conscious anymore, and when she was, she lashed out, terrified and confused. Her time was almost up and it was killing Equius as much as it was killing her.

The crowd hushed as the sea dweller that ran the fights stepped into the arena. Her long hair with the violet streaks was always tucked neatly behind her flashy aquatic ear fins, so that everyone could see the gold and silver jewelry dangling from them.

“Equius,” she sang to the troll that towered above her, “what Strife Specibus shall you be using tonight?”

The same question every night. The same answer.

Equius stumbled forward. His face was swollen on the left side, and one of his glasses lenses had completely been broken out. He walked with a limp, as an ambitious teal blood had stabbed him in the calf a few nights ago. He cleared his throat. “Fistkind.”

The small crowd cheered. The violet blood’s fins flapped as she leaned towards Nepeta’s slumped figure. “And you, Nepeta? What kind of Strife Specibus shall you be using tonight?” Nepeta didn’t even twitch at the question like she had the past few nights. The audience booed.

“Refusal to present a Strife Specibus will result in a forfeit of all weapons,” the fishy demoness said with mock disappointment. She waited a moment for Nepeta to reply, but she was too far gone. John fought back the bile in his throat.

He was dimply aware of the moderator walking over to the green and teal blood that awaited battle. Teethkind and macekind. Nothing too exciting. She accepted these and asked the other two. John didn’t even look at their blood colors or hear their answers. He was too concerned with trying to stay vertical, and he didn’t want to watch this. Not again.

But he had to. He watched Equius set Nepeta on the bloodstained floor as gently as he could. He watched the two kids circle him under the soft lighting. The one with the mace ran at Equius, and the big troll punched them in the windpipe as they slammed the mace into his face. The kid reeled onto the ground, trying to do something, anything to survive, but the force of Equius’ jab had collapsed her windpipe. She’d pass out in a few moments. It was not a fatal hit. With oxygen, the girl could be fine with a brace and some rest, but no one was going to help her. Asphyxiation was the kindest death Equius could give her.

Meanwhile, Equius had been too slow to react to the mace. The swollen left side of his face was torn open with a horrible noise. John screamed as Equius fell to his knees in front of Nepeta, blue rivers gushing through his fingers where he held his mutilated face. John wanted to look away. He couldn’t. Equius tore his hands away from his face to try and see the next attacker. The left eye hung just a little further out of the socket than it should have, and his left cheek was ripped open, revealing two white lines of teeth.

The second troll ran towards him. John pushed himself off the wall but was yanked back by the blue blood in his mind. “I don’t care if you want to get shot,” the voice whispered, “but I’m getting paid to see to it that you fight when your time comes. So stay put.” His muscles screamed to disobey, but could not press hard enough. He was too dehydrated and too scared to cry.

The second and third troll launched themselves at Equius at the same time. Equius blindly threw a punch and managed to whack the troll bearing her teeth so hard she flew out of the arena. John lurched as the gunshot immediately followed.

The third troll whipped out a yo-yo and slammed it into Equius’ other eye, effectively blinding him. John’s screams were drowned out by the crowd’s cheers as the fourth troll brought out a blaster. Ranged weapons were not allowed in combat. The rust blooded girl didn’t need it for a ranged attack, though. She simply brought it down on Equius’ head with enough force to knock him out cold.

John threw up. He didn’t mean too. He closed his eyes as yo-yo kid wrapped the weapon around Equius’ throat and pulled back as hard as he could. John heard no cry from Equius, no sounds of struggle. This was it then. The end.

Shhhhhhhiiink.Thump.Thump.

John opened his eyes in time to see the bodies of the two troll flarpers fall, one with teal running down their throat, the other clutching their stomach as rust poured through their hands. Nepeta stood above them with her claws unsheathed, her eyes still closed. Her chest heaved up and down with effort.

She collapsed onto Equius before the blaster shots even reached her.

“Johnny, and what Strife Specibus shall you be using tonight?”

“Hammerkind.”

As soon as the blue blood looked away, John charged past the troll in front of him and threw the hammer. The pointed end stuck in the blue blood’s neck with a noise of breaking flesh. John sprinted the last couple of feet as lasers ripped up the concrete floor behind him. He yanked the hammer out of the blue blood’s neck and shocked four trolls before his leg was hit by a laser. He fell forward and threw the hammer with a delayed electric pulse up as hard as he could into the lights. The seventy or so trolls screamed as the blinding white light flashed and all the lights blew in showers of sparks. The hammer fell but John didn’t see where. He heard a thud. He punched past disoriented trolls in the darkness until reaching the door and falling through it into the darkness beyond.

“I should have grabbed a blaster,” he cursed as he limped up the corridor as fast as he could. He hoped the trolls’ sensitive eyes would buy him some time.

Stair after stair after stair… clumsy footsteps far behind him.

“What the hell are you-“ John slammed his bloody palm over Iignis’ mouth to shut her up. He had three flights to go when he ran into her on the stairwell. A communicator in her hand provided dim light between them. John saw her eyes widen as she registered the footsteps clattering up the stairs.

“Ship,” John growled, “now. Let’s get out of here.”

She grabbed his hand and dragged him down a flight the way he’d come. His leg and arm collapsed on him when she did. He clattered down the flight and she screamed. The footsteps were growing louder.

“Come on,” she whispered as she helped him to his feet. She tossed his good arm over her shoulder and took the keys out of her lab coat as calmly as she could. Her hands shook as she put the key in the unmarked door. The footsteps grew louder. “Come on…”

The door swung open just as the shouting started a few flights below. John felt blue tendrils start to crawl into his mind. He groaned. Iignis shoved him into the door and slammed it shut behind them. The mind probes died. They emerged in a room John had never been in before. It was more of an anteroom, with one door leading out the other way.

John collapsed to the floor a second time as fists banged on the door. Iignis yanked a silver cylinder from her lab coat and ignited it. John blinked at the fierce yellow lightsaber she now wielded. Iignis shoved the tip into the lock and melted it shut.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” John moaned.

“I hope you can save us from the Empire,” she yelled back. She slung his arm over her shoulder and limped towards the door at the other end. It was unlocked. They ran straight onto a catwalk in a small hanger. There were no ships that John recognized.

“This one!” Iignis pointed to a small red craft. It was a strange ship, a little bigger than a Y-Wing, with red spikes that looked reminiscent of the drone’s armor. Iignis pulled John down the catwalk and over to the ladder.

“Come on!” she yelled.

John hobbled up the ladder with one arm and one leg. It felt like it took years. He didn’t think about where the ship was going, or how they were going to get out of there.

Finally, he stumbled into the cockpit of the ship. It was two manned, a pilot in front, gunner in the back. He fell into the back. Iignis climbed over him and he watched in awe as yellow sparks flowed from her fingertips into the control panel, and all the systems came to life at her touch. The ship lurched and started down a narrow exit corridor.

“Hold your breath…” Iignis said quietly.

“What?”

Suddenly they burst through a force field into the cold depths of the Alternian Ocean. John did the opposite of what he was instructed and gasped as the array of neon pinks, blues, and greens swam and swayed around him in the black currants. An enormous creature swam past them, all white with deep violet orbs pulsing along its spine.

“I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye,” Iignis whispered softly to someone that was not there.

Iignis pulled up and the craft cut through the layers of the sea. The pink and green moonlight cut through the water in dancing strings of light, and when they broke the surface, John couldn’t believe the beauty of the dark landscape below him. It was a living world of color, maybe the most beautiful place he’d ever seen in the entire galaxy.

He never wanted to set foot here again.

Chapter Text

In and out, Karkat kept telling himself, in and out. Don’t look at where your hands are grabbing. Don’t look at where your feet are landing. Just breathe. In and out.

He launched himself forward and looked ahead instead of down. His hands landed on a sturdy vine that he swung on and released, hitting the mushy ground still running. Something told him he’d just cleared a jump that shouldn’t have been possible. It’s not that he ignored that thought; it was just that it didn’t seem relevant. The only thing that mattered was the sting in his chest as each breath forced oxygen from his lungs into his blood.

The fog around him cleared for a moment, as it often did. He almost liked it better when running under the heavy blanket of gray mist. Then his eyes couldn’t trick him into trusting his surroundings. He’d think that somewhere was safe to jump, and end up slipping into a thicket of something sharp, or slimy, or itchy. If there was absolutely zero visibility, he didn’t have to think, though, he could just trust the tug in his gut.

He launched himself forward again and flipped over a boulder that barely reared its head above the low-lying vapor. What seemed like a long time ago, Dave had tried to explain freestyle rapping to him. He’d said that you don’t need to know the words; they just come to you exactly when you need them, like magic. Karkat had said that was hoofbeast shit, but now he kind of understood that. The Force wasn’t something that was demanded, or summoned, or bestowed onto a person. It was bigger than that. It was all around. All you had to do to access it was ask.

Redglare had told him that people often tried to personify the Force into a being, or something tangible, but that was thinking too small. It had to be accepted for what it was, and what it was… was everything.

In and out.

Karkat faltered and cleared his mind again. He told himself to stop thinking about the Force, and just feel it. It sounded like some kind of stoner’s mantra, but that shit was working, so he rolled with it. He neared the final stretch of jungle and could sense more than see the small fire on the edge of the lake that Redglare had kept burning while he was gone. His damp hands and feet felt the phantom warmth as he pictured the fire drawing him closer.

In a final burst, he flipped over a downed tree and sprinted the last stretch to where Redglare sat peacefully next to the fire, as if she was just out on a camping trip and he happened to be passing by.

“What-“Karkat gasped “-was my-“ he sucked down another breath “-time?”

While he was out there running, it felt like his body was one with everything, and that the air was putting itself in his lungs more than he was breathing. But after his focus crapped out, he was just as fucking helpless as old Jonny boy’s asthmatic ass after a sandstorm. He collapsed onto the leaves and filled the peaceful swap dusk with his atrocious breathing.

Redglare adjusted her glasses and peered down at him over the flames. “Was I supposed to be timing you?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

Karkat sputtered. “Fu- Yes!” He pushed himself to his knees. “You’ve been timing me for the past nine cycles! I ran my ass- dic- bul-“he cut himself off and growled towards the tree limbs above him. “I ran really really hard, okay!”

“Then why do you need a time to tell you that?” Redglare asked. “The fact that you pushed yourself ‘really really hard’ is what we’re trying to get at here. You could have walked, moseyed, or meandered, for all I cared, but as far as you and I have figured, adrenaline is what clears your mind.”

For the billionth time, the old hag made Karkat’s blood boil. Sure, he understood what she was saying, and finding a way to make him clear his mind that wasn’t mediation had been a real breakthrough for both of them, but he really wanted his fucking time!

Out of the corner of his eye, Karkat saw a lightning strike of white. He tried to pull his hand back but Redglare was too fast. Her long white cane with the dragon-headed handle flashed out and rapped his fist, which he had been clenching so hard his claws bit into his palm.

“Gah!” he hissed and held his hand close to his chest. “I know!” He took a deep breath and forced himself to sit cross-legged on the ground across from Redglare.  “I know,” he repeated, “no frustration, yadda yadda.”

“Frustration is okay,” Redglare said, her voice so low that the crackling leaves in the fire almost drowned her words. “Frustration is not anger.”

Karkat breathed and tried to go through the five lines Redglare had drilled into his brain over the time they had been together. He breathed in and out and repeated to himself:

There is no emotion, there is peace.

There is no ignorance, there is knowledge

There is no passion, there is serenity.

There is no chaos, there is harmony.

There is no death, there is the Force.

He screwed his seeing globes shut. For a while now, it was obvious to him that he was just repeating this without really thinking about it, or understanding it, or even believing it. It seemed impossible, too, this Jedi Code. No emotion? No passion? No death?

He was dying.

Karkat grabbed his throat and yelled. He was being suffocated. Redglare’s hands held him down as he screamed. She was yelling something at him; maybe she was trying to calm him down. He couldn’t tell.  His cheek was on fire. His eye was getting ready to pop. His muscles screamed. His head was being split open. His wrist was splintering. His throat was cracking. His teeth ground with effort. His body throbbed as waves of pain rolled over him.

That’s when his blood pusher started beating faster than it ever had in his life. He couldn’t even hear himself screaming over the deafening thump thump, thump thump, thump thump echoing all around him.

Fear, raw and merciless, gripped everything in him as he wriggled on the ground and just when he thought that he was about to die-

It stopped.

He opened his eyes panting. Redglare’s firm, bony hands held him down by his shoulders. Her glasses had fallen off in her effort to hold him down. He saw her wide, unblinking yellow eyes with teal flecks staring down into his. She slowly took her hands off of him and sat back on her knees.

“What did you see?” she whispered.

“See?” he shouted, pushing his unsteady legs to stand. “Fucking see? Someone just died!” His own voice ripped through his throat. “Someone just died, and I felt it!” he yelled again, stumbling forward. Redglare caught his arm and held him up.

“No death?” he yelled in her blank face. “No chaos? Impossible, Redglare, fucking impossible!” He choked down a breath and violently scrubbed the tears off of his face. He let her lower him to the ground.

Suddenly he was small again. All those connections to the universe, and the people in it, had all ran away in a flash of fear and anger, and he wasn’t sure he wanted them back. He knew the person, no, people, who had just died. He didn’t want to think about who it could be, but the names ran through his mind before he could stop them.

Kanaya? Dave? John? No. He shook his head. Jade? Rose?

His stomach lurched as two more names ran through his mind. He didn’t dare say them out loud; even think them, because he knew it was true. He buried his head in his hands.

“Karkat?” Redglare whispered. “I need to talk to you.”

She said it like there was a choice, but maybe there was. Maybe if he just didn’t respond to her she wouldn’t say anything.

He inhaled and exhaled the air as a sigh. He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he merely nodded.

“We did something wrong,” Redglare started quietly, and at first his close-minded brain thought that she was just talking about herself and him. “Sufferer… when he was Psiioniic’s Padawan… he felt things in ways we couldn’t help him with. The Jedi Order failed him as much as he failed us. That anger you feel is not everything. You have to try and understand this.”

Karkat scoffed, “Because peace is everything.”

“The attempt for peace is,” Redglare nodded. The years seemed to drip down the features of her face as she spoke. “Although we are beings of the Force, we are not one with it entirely. The effort and choice of living up to it are what allows us to cultivate it and use it to help others. Acknowledge that anger, but once you have, let it go.”

Karkat felt like he was floating. He couldn’t handle this. He’d been trying desperately to follow what Redglare had been teaching him, but it felt like a lie. It wasn’t real. He was just playing pretend. He wasn’t a Jedi. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t live that way.

“What is the Sith Code?” he asked suddenly.

Redglare tilted her head. “Why?”

“There is no ignorance, there is knowledge,” Karkat laughed shakily. “I want to know. I want to know what pulls people over to that side because Redglare,” he looked at her, into her eyes that now stood bare without the glasses to shield them, “I am angry. I am mad. I need to know why people like Sufferer found solace in that.”

A small silence elapsed between the two. Karkat wanted to look away from her face but forced himself to keep staring. He now understood that she wore her glasses to protect others, not the other way around. “So you can avoid it,” Redglare said plainly.

Karkat shook his head. It was the only thing to do while staring into those eyes. “So I can find my own solace.” While the words were blasphemy, they felt like the first real thing he’d said in all his time on Dagobah. “I don’t know if I want to be a Jedi, and I definitely don’t want to be a Sith. I need to know all of it, though, not just one side.” He laughed bitterly. “Besides, you don’t believe I can become a Jedi and neither do I so why keep pretending that you’re training me and admit you just want me to kill Her Imperious Condescension?”

He wanted Redglare, desperately, to deny that that was what she was doing. She’d been showing him how to use the Force to elevate himself, and while she preached that the Force was only to be used a defense, he knew battle training when he saw it. She was giving him the speed round, the placement test, the fucking tutorial to go send him to kill her. Weren’t Jedi supposed to never lie?

“Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

Through passion, I gain strength.

Through strength, I gain power.

Through power, I gain victory.

Through victory, my chains are broken.

The Force shall free me.”

“What?” Karkat said.

“You asked what the Sith Code is,” Redglare said. At first, he thought she was bitter, but he realized that she was just tired, of it all. “It’s a lie.” She said the words like she was begging something of him.

“So is the Jedi Code,” Karkat countered.

Redglare did not reply.

On Dagobah, days and nights went on so long that they blurred together through the half-darkness of filtered daylight and semi-light, ethereal and frightening, that drifted around the edges of the swamp in ignited gas flares. Karkat and Redglare had not exactly told each other that they would not be speaking to one another, but mutually accepted that fate. The night, if that’s what it was, had been silenced. Karkat sat perched on a high branch looking down at the black water below him. Now, just the tip of his X-wing stuck in its watery grave. He clenched his fist. He was never going to get off this stupid fucking planet.

The Mayor beeped below him. He looked at the little droid but made no motion to come down. He wanted to be angry at someone, and blame something with every ounce of scorn that he could muster, but it wasn’t going to happen. He wanted to blame the Condesce. Her war started long before him. He wanted to blame Sufferer, but Sufferer was like him, apparently.

No. That was not a fucking excuse.

Karkat’s claws dug into the hard branch until it started to splinter.

Sufferer didn’t have to kill Psiioniic. A deep feeling in his chest tore at his rib cage. He bit his shirt collar and screamed. There was no end. Even if the Rebellion won the war, there would never really be peace. The Sith were right about that, as far as Karkat could tell. And that meant the Jedi were delusional. He shuddered to think that a simple fact of life had led so many to pursue the Dark Side, but also that a misguided institution had tricked so many into that so-called “Army of Light” as well. There was no peace but that didn’t mean there weren’t … good things.

His think pan throbbed with exertion as he desperately tried to piece together everything that was happening. Jedi, Sith… the war…. He felt himself slipping from the branch as his mind buzzed into an angry maelstrom of thought after thought after thought. If the war will go on forever and Nepeta and Equius were dead and if Dave was going to die and if Kanaya wasn’t happy and if he couldn’t even help himself then what was the point at all?

His grip slacked and in an instant, his insides stayed suspended in the air as his body fell backward. He wasn’t sure if he had abandoned balance or balance had forsaken him. Gravity’s greedy fingers dragged him earthbound and he knew he had the power to stop the impact but doubted he had the desire to act. He wouldn’t die. The water would do something but was he high up enough for a broken bone? Paralysis? He didn’t even know if he didn’t even care until he felt the hands gently folding his body into a line so that he’d cut through the water on impact.

In a flash, the cold blackness had surrounded him. He hadn’t broken anything, or hit the X-wing, or shallow water.

He opened his eyes in the blackness and faced the troll in green that stared at him with a benevolent smile. While he was conscious of being underwater, her standing right in front of him felt completely natural.

“Hello,” the woman said reverently. She smiled with fanged teeth and sparkling eyes. Though she was surrounded by the blackness, her face was lit up by a sun that was not there. She reached out to him. Karkat reached out towards her soft, strong face, her cat-eared horns, and bright green eyes.

“You’re all grown up,” she sighed. When her hand touched his cheek, it felt like manifested sunlight. He tried to say something to her but she shook her head. “I know,” she said, “but it’s okay. Don’t look for the right words, just do what feels right.” She giggled Karkat missed the sound, although he’d never heard it in his life. “Psiioniic used to make fun of me for saying things like that. Don’t let them make you into something you don’t want to be, Karkat.”

Her eyes shone at him. She squeezed his hand and pointed to the surface just as Karkat realized that he couldn’t breathe, and that he was under more than ten feet of water, and that he didn’t even know which was up in the pitch blackness.

In a panic, he opened his mouth to scream. The bubbled crawled up his face to the surface and he followed them with frantic kicks of his legs and pumps of his arms. The water around him went from black, to a slightly lighter shade of black, and he broke the surface gasping.

The Mayor screamed at him from the surface. He choked and fought his way to shore, crawling and sputtering as he did. The Mayor’s screaming didn’t help at all as he splayed himself out on the leaves and coughed up tainted water through the effort.

After a few moments of breathless agony, he could breathe with only a terrible, but not unbearable, rawness burning his throat and his nose. The Mayor screamed at him again.

“I fell because I fucking wanted to fall! Okay?” Karkat yelled. The Mayor stopped beeping. “And I’m done pretending to be a Jedi!” he yelled, but it wasn’t as angry as before. Freedom filled his chest as he stood up and fell, then stood up again. By fuck was he not happy, but he was determined, and willing. He hacked up a few more dredges of fluid and pointed a finger at the Mayor. “We’re getting out of here!” He added, softer, “It’s not out time. It’s not our place. Just a little longer.”

With that, he glared at the last tips of the X-wing that still remained above the surface. Maybe he couldn’t will the hunk of metal out of the fucktasic mud puddle, but he knew someone who could.

Chapter Text

Well, it wasn’t exactly what Dave would have called smooth sailing, but so was life on the Falcon and him and Jade had been through much worse. Their tango with the Star Destroyers had done a wee bit more damage than anyone had been expecting, though.

“Oh, shit!” Rose had spat as soon as they had flown back into the asteroid field, ten cycles ago. Straight out of the mouth of that grump worm and right into the fourth-dimensional antigravity pop rock minefield. Jade and Dave hadn’t really been paying attention to the worm, as they were fighting the aforementioned asteroid field, dipping and diving and swearing. They weren’t that far from a break in the highway of space rocks, and Jade didn’t hesitate to yank back the switch to go light speed as soon as they made it to a semi-clear zone. She already had the Rebel rendezvous coordinates programmed in. The ship shuttered.

“Oh, shit!” Jade yelled. Rose nodded. She and Jade both declared, “Hyperdrive,” in monotone unison. Jade slapped a hand to her face and growled. Her quick fix hadn’t been that useful after all. And thus, their couple of hour jump to the rendezvous point was out of the question. It’d take years to get that far without a hyperdrive.

“We also gotta worry about being tracked,” Dave had reminded them. Rose groaned and Kanaya pursed her lips. It was true. Now that they couldn’t outrun their enemies, they’d have to avoid them.

After pulling up a star map, Dave had told the lovely ladies and unlovely droid that they were in luck! Bespin was right around the corner, metaphorically speaking. It’d actually take a few days to reach without light speed, but that was better than drifting and waiting to get picked up by something Imperial.

“too bad we cannot call for a tow,” Kanaya had pouted, “I believe a distress signal is ill-advised in our current predicament, though.” Everyone agreed. They probably weren’t out of range of Imperial scanners either.

Of course AR had to be the pain in the ass. “But what help could we possibly find on Bespin?” the pesky walking, talking build-a-bot had asked.

Dave had smiled when Jade groaned. “We have a friend on Bespin!” Dave yelled.

Jade scratched behind her ears and growled. “You have a friend! I have an ex!” She glared at him. “I don’t trust him!”

“What’s not to trust about him?” Dave asked with mock honesty, “He’s practically my clone!”

“He is your clone!” Jade shouted. “He’s your feathery, winged, assholey, ghost, orange-tinted, clone!”

“Time out!” Rose exclaimed with a shit eating grin taking up most of her scary face. “Are we talking about a sprite here? Does Dave Striver have a sprite? An actual, real, live motherfucking sprite?”

Dave nodded ecstatically as Jade stomped her foot.

“He’s terrible!”

“He’s awesome!”

Out of the chaos, Kanaya raised a nimble finger. All conversation halted. “And what,” she asked quietly, “would a sprite happen to consist of?”

Dave and Rose tried to explain what the creatures were, with many a valiant hand gesture, but gave up and yielded the floor so that Jade could provide a more scientifically accurate description of a sprite.

She rolled her eyes before clearing her throat. “Sprites are aliens, commonly mistaken as ghosts in many cultures and seen as spiritual guides. They are, in fact, corporeal and alive. Their origins are still pretty vague, but they appear all across the galaxy as hazy forms that…” she tried to find the correct words. “Well, I guess they sort of imprint on things, objects, beings… and take on their features and personalities. They’re very rare and often shunned as shapeshifters and tricksters. While they can’t change shape after one or two aspects are imprinted on them, they actually do seem to be troublesome by nature.” She frowned and fumed. “They can be very jealous of those who gave them their forms!”

Kanaya’s mouth opened in wonder. “And one such sprite has imprinted on Dave?”

“He’s orange!” Jade exploded.

Dave shrugged and ignored Jade’s outrage. “So what if he’s orange? At least it’s a natural hue, not some shitty spray tan orange. And he didn’t really imprint so much on me, but from me.” He stepped forward and lowered his head and his voice so that Rose and Kanaya had to lean in to hear him. “Jade and I were far, far out of the last systems. This was one of our first missions. Someone hired us to raid an old archeological meteor that had been abandoned. They probably thought ‘these kids are gonna die so we won’t even have to pay ‘em.’ I squeezed my tight ass in adventurer shorts for that shit.” Rose and Kanaya laughed, but Dave kept on.

“Jade and I were deep in a tunnel, oxygen masks on, blasters out, when the temperature… dropped.” He didn’t mean to give himself goosebumps, but recalling the experience made him shiver every time. Rose and Kanaya had grown quiet. “We were past Lwhekk, almost a quarter of a lightyear away from any civilization. Our lights flickered, and when we saw the faint glow come towards us, Jade panicked and threw an amulet at it.”

“I panicked,” Jade hissed. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I thought we’d disturbed something by taking it.” She hugged her arms. “It was some kind of ornithological idol. Whatever the hell it was gave that thing a beak and wings.”

“And then it flew through me!” Dave yelled. Kanaya jumped. “I thought my heart stopped. And suddenly there was a pretty cool dude with my mug shot staring back at me. It was sick! I have a flighty clone dicking around the galaxy! And he lives on Bespin!”

Now that the story had passed, the crew felt free to laugh a little.

“And you dated him?” Rose crooned.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” Jade cried.

That was ten cycles ago. They’d turned the entire smuggling ship as ghost as it could get. No communications. No signals out or in. Hell, not even the wireless speakers were allowed. But they knew that wasn’t enough. Jade had constantly modified the sublight engines, and that meant the pirate ship was the fastest ship in the galaxy in and out of hyperspace, but they’d still lost their hyperdrive. If the Empire had stayed around and tracked them, plotting their course wouldn’t take much skill at all, and there could be a full welcome committee of Stormtroopers waiting for them as soon as they set foot in Cloud City.

But there wasn’t much else to do, and Dave kept a healthy supply of junk food in the cupboard and Jade a healthy supply of, well, healthy food, and chew toys, so there wasn’t any worry of starving. The air recycler was working fine and there seemed to be no debris in their way. There was nothing to do but wait for the ten cycles.

A standard cycle was a fifteen hour period of light and a nine-hour period of darkness amounting to a twenty-four hour day. Dave really wasn’t a fan of schedules and him and Jade both practiced atrocious sleeping habits, so they’d disabled that function a long time ago, but the unit of measurement remained the same.

It hadn’t really been ten long days, just ten boring ones. Dave felt home on the Falcon, sure, but the suspense of the Empire looming over them and all the people on board made him jumpier than he cared to admit. He couldn’t stream anything, so he ended up rewatching old cartoons he had saved on his computer, and there was no one who wanted to spar with him so his untapped energy continued to grow exponentially as time went on.

He didn’t want to think about Karkat as often as he did, but with nothing to do, he really couldn’t stop. What the hell was he going to say?

“Hey there, Karkat. I think I might be in love with you? If you aren’t in love with me is there any fucking way that I can convince you to Jedi amnesia-ize your own damn ass to save mine from enough embarrassment that I’ll spontaneously combust into a super fucking cool explosion and die?”

Nope. He’d have to be cool about it. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem, seeing as he was the fucking coolest kid in the fucking galaxy, but Karkat, try as the heroically inclined little furball might, was not that cool at all. The guy once said “sight nuggets” instead of eyes. It was so fucking cute.

Or he could try a more subtle approach.

He could be all, “Hey there, Karkat, is that a lightsaber in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

And Karkat would be all angry and say something like, “I’ll shove my lightsaber up your ass if you don’t shut the fuck up!”

And Dave would be all like, “Well if you insist on shoving things up my-“

But Dave hadn’t really ever talked to him! Not casually! The only time they really looked each other in the eye was after one of them had almost died! What kind of relationship was that? Did he even want a relationship? Was he just being unreasonably attracted to someone who saved his life on a regular basis? Jade did that, and he didn’t like Jade! Well, he did when he first met her, but that wasn’t the point!

Was it?

And the internal soliloquies would find a new tangent to follow and begin anew. He wasn’t really sure if it could be called rhetoric reasoning, as he never really came to a conclusion and he was damn sure that he never started with one. The term “downward spiral” rolled off the tongue a little better, he decided. His arguments never went anywhere. Where do they come from? Where did they go?

And then he’d start humming and drumming on whatever happened to be nearby because that felt a lot better than just sitting there.

And it’d been this way for ten days!

What he really wanted to do was talk about it with Rose, who would usually do anything shy of murder to armchair psychoanalyze someone and their problems, and Dave wasn’t even sure if murder was her limit. But Rose had been utterly intoxicated by the opportunity to be with Kanaya for ten whole standard days without fear of political interruptions or crisis. While she didn’t say everything was going to be alright, Rose was positive that they’d arrive at Bespin. That didn’t inspire any particularly enormous confidence in Dave, but apparently Rose thought that it was safe enough to keep Kanaya and her locked in their little room for almost the entirety of the trip! It wasn’t even a room! Only Jade and Dave had rooms! Rose and Kanaya slept on the couches in the living deck! But they were obviously finding something to do in the little five by six storage cabinet!

Jade was no help. Come war or peace, if you leave her alone with her plants, guitar, or pet projects with test tubes or screwdrivers, she could occupy herself alone. She’d always been able to do that and Dave, to this day, couldn’t figure out how.

But a small, orangish spec had steadily been growing in the distance. He sat in the pilot’s seat with his bare feet on the dead controls watching the spec grow. He checked his watch. Nine more hours till entering the atmosphere. Nine long, long hours.

Dave turned up the volume on his earpieces even louder so that the steady hum of the ship was drowned out as much as he could get it. Nine fucking hours. Come on! He tried tapping his feet, then drumming his fingers but nothing was really working for him so he took out his sword and started to clean it. He hated and loved this old katana. He hated it because his brother had given it to him, and he loved it for the same reason.

As he pulled the sword out of his sheath, he saw a reflection behind him. He plucked out an earpiece. “Hey Jade,” he said without turning around, “do you think John and his dudes are doing okay?”

“I’ve no idea,” Rose said.

Dave flinched and winced as he cut his finger on the blade. He glared at Rose as she slid into the copilot’s seat. “What are you doing up here?” hissed.

“What are you?” Rose countered. “The ship’s on autopilot. AR checks it every ten minutes. In fact, he should be in here. Where is her?”

“Aw, I kicked that possessed, riveted, metal GPS out of here,” Dave huffed. “He was annoying me. I like the little one better, but Karkat stole him before he left.”

Rose gently laid a hand on his arm. “I know being all cooped up in here has been difficult for you-“Dave laughed and nodded, “-but we’re almost there.”

“Rose, you said you don’t know what happened once we get there, though,” he reminded her.

She nodded. “Yeah, but we’ll figure it out.” She patted his arm. “And Karkat’s probably fine as well,” she tacked onto the end with an impressive eyebrow waggle.

“Wow,” Dave sighed, “oh no. You said his name. Whatever shall I do about my massive fucking boner that was summoned by your pornographic pronunciation of my unrequited love’s syllable identification sound?” She rolled her eyes and punched him not so gently on the arm. He glared.

“As much as I’m thinking about him,” Dave said, “he’s not what’s bothering me. I just hope John’s okay. Has Kanaya ever said anything about Alternia to you? Is it as bad as they say it is?”

Rose shrugged. “She’s never been. She was raised by parents, remember? Her mothers were both on Alderaan.”

Dave nodded. “I wonder who Karkat’s parents were,” he mused. “Didn’t Psiioniic tell him that he was hatched on Tatooine?”

Rose nodded. “He did. Kanaya doesn’t tell me a lot about her relationship with Karkat, but over the years, some things just become common knowledge. It is strange that his parents never found him. Something about a Jedi and a Senator? I really don’t remember.”

Dave nodded and turned back to his sword. “I should ask him about that,” he said quietly. He saw Rose nod out of the corner of his eye.

“You should,” she said after a while. Her usual affinity for provocative conversation seemed to have left her as she watched the orange dot grow in the distance. It was a big planet. There was still plenty of time till they got around to it.

Dave cleared his throat. “So, how are things?” he tried to ask, but the question kind of tumbled out of his mouth too quietly. Rose’s eyes had glossed over as she looked out into the vast darkness beyond the sun of this system. He could try to talk to her, but she was in a mood. Sometimes she liked to sit next to him when the voices in her head grew too loud. Kanaya was okay with being there for that, but over the course of the three years they’d all been together, there’d been many times when Kanaya wasn’t around to help Rose through her visions of the horror terrors. Dave usually was, though. He thought she liked to sit next to him because it felt safer.

And so he put his custom earpieces back in and went back to polishing his sword. Nine hours.

Always on time, Rose’s eyes fluttered and cleared a few moments after Dave had shut off the sublight engine and switched to ion thrusters.

“I’ll get out of your way,” she said dreamily as she stood up. Dave tilted his head at her just as Jade walked in and sat down in the copilot’s chair. She and Dave shut off the long distance thrusters and had to manually reset systems to turn communications back on. The first thing Dave did was open his communicator and check his social media. Nothing crazy. A few followers. A few likes. He’d stopped updating content as the Rebellion went on, but there were always a few loyal followers.

But there were no messages from Karkat or John. Bummer.

Kanaya came to take Rose’s hand as they approached the pink and orange swirl in space that was Bespin. It was a beautiful planet. Gas mining had started air colonies in the habitable zone of the atmosphere. Sentient beings. You’ll find them anywhere these days.

The cabin reminded silent as Dave and Jade dropped them down into the orange clouds. Dave suddenly felt like he was dropping into an ocean. Water looks blue but when you get close, it’s all clear. The clouds were orange and pink in descent, but the nearer they got, all they saw where white poofs of suspended cotton. The think air opened into a clear canyon in the sky full of hovering buildings that went on and on, some down into obscurity by the clouds and others up. The sky was blue over the canyon and the clouds stayed broken over certain spots in the city.

“Dave…” Jade said.

“I see ‘em,” Dave said as he noticed the two cloud cars zooming towards them. Their now open intercom crackled to life with “not permissible to land” this and “forced to fire upon you” that. How fucking rude.

Dave opened the coms. “Hello, yes officer, we hear you loud and clear but-“

“Then turn this ship around!” the voice yelled. “You do not have permission to land!”

“But we’re here to see Davesprite!” Dave yelled.

“We have no record showing your arrival date.”

Dave groaned. “I understand that. I didn’t make any. Just tell him Dave is here to see him!” Dave pleaded. He noticed Jade’s fingers twitching at the small trigger for the side laser canons. They weren’t much, but they were enough to slow one of this hover cops’ asses down.

The line went silent. Dave tapped his fingers on the yoke.

“Alright,” the voice said, “follow us. We’ll escort you to a landing platform.”

Dave let out a sigh, along with everyone else, and followed the white cars deeper into the floating metropolis. It was almost angelic, the way the stark white and silver metal gleamed in the light of the distant sun. Dave liked it here, but it also gave him the creeps. Just like on Coruscant, he always got vertigo when looking out windows.

They followed the cars to a domed building with an extended landing platform. Dave and Jade brought the Falcon down to the metal platform and landed, watching the police cars fly away and disappear into the clouds.

“That’s… odd,” Rose said quietly.

Things were odder as they exited the Falcon onto the empty platform. AR refused vehemently as Kanaya demanded he stay on the ship. They had to lock him in. Dave, Jade, Rose, and Kanaya stepped out, blinking at the brightness around them, onto the platform where no one was waiting. The wind wasn’t terrible but was too annoying to speak over. They walked to the only door. It wasn’t guarded or sealed with a passcode.

“I don’t like this,” Kanaya said as they passed out of the wind and into the silent, white corridor. Dave scanned the discrete surroundings and nodded.

“Hey, if need be, we can hop back on board and try our luck with a distress signal…” Dave said halfheartedly.

Jade shook her head and said what they were all thinking. “Without a functioning hyperdrive and with the Empire on our ass? It’s suicide.”

Rose opened her mouth to speak but instead stared at the puff of cold breath that came out.

“Yo, what’s this about not having a functioning hyperdrive?” A higher version of Dave’s voice said from down the hall.

“Yoooo!” Dave yelled.

“Yoooo!” Dave’s voice replied in a slightly higher pitch. Dave ran up to the floating figure of himself and fist bumped him. Like always, it was weird to fist bump something that looked like it was made of light and to find it just as solid as you are.

Dave was a little shocked. Davesprite looked different, and not just the average “add on wings, take off legs and a slap on a ghost tail” different. And then there was the matter of the fucking sword sticking out of his torso, all bandaged and bloody. But that wasn’t it. Davesprite looked… young. Dave couldn’t remember how old he was when he’d first… met… Davesprite. Thirteen? Fourteen? Five years didn’t seem like a lot of time but the floaty, orangey, wingy version of himself with a sword in his stomach seemed to much younger than he was, even though he knew the sprite must have been alive for thousands of years before he’d taken a form.

“What brings y’all out to Cloud City,” Davesprite asked. Dave saw himself smiling in the orange-tinted glasses on the sprites face. “Hope your only excuse to visit me isn’t just a hyperdrive.”

Dave shrugged. “I mean, we also have the Empire on our ass, but that’s a rodeo for another day.” He and Davesprite laughed like they always did when they were together. Dave was a lot happier now that they were here. Who wouldn’t wanna trust this guy? He was him!

“Let me introduce you!” Dave said suddenly, because he was just now remembering that, oh yeah, it wasn’t just him.

“You know Jade,” he said pointing to Jade. Jade smiled but it looked pained. “And this is Rose,” Dave said. Rose blew him a kiss and winked. “And this is Kanaya.” Kanaya shook the apparition’s glowing hand.

After the introductions were over, Davesprite waved them down the corridor. “Come on, it’s been ages. Is a hyperdrive repair all you need?”

“Well,” Jade took a deep breath. “There’s the hyperdrive and the windows need reinforcing and our rear shield generator is going out and a laser cannon tune-up would be nice and probably a-“

Dave covered Jade’s mouth with his hand. “We have money! I swear!” he yelled.

Davesprite laughed and threw up his hands. “Hey dawg, ain’t no thing. We’re practically family. I’ll tell you what. I’ll repair the ship for free and even pay you for it! Sweet deal bro…”

“You’re not buying my ship,” Dave said. “I’ve told you that a million times.” He saw Davesprite’s jaw clenched for a moment, but it’d happened so fast, he may as well have imagined it.

“Ah, well,” Davesprite sighed. “We’ll get her fixed up and I’ll put it on your tab. Open tab, keep in mind.”

“That sounds more like it!” Dave said.

They followed Davesprite down the corridor. Dave shuddered as they entered a sky bridge that consisted of glass walls all the way across. He tried to just look at his feet. At least the walkway was opaque. Of course, none of this bothered Davesprite. That asshole could just fly if something happened to him!

“So what do you fill your time with?” Dave heard Kanaya ask Davesprite. He tried to focus on their conversation as they continued their walk down into the city.

Davesprite huffed. “Eh, mining? I really don’t need to do it, but it makes money, and money lets me buy things. You know. Capitalism.” He didn’t sound impressed with his success. “I’d like to be able to find more sprites,” he said, “but we’re a rare breed, literally.”

Dave was glad when they stepped back inside a building with fewer windows. He thought that seeing a prepubescent, bird version of himself would make him want to throw up. Nope, it was heights.

Chapter Text

The first thing to do, obviously, was ditch the Alternian ship. It stuck out like a sore thumb, scared potential help away, and most definitely had some kind of tracking device in it. The second thing to do was get John some damn medical attention because he was fading fast. Iignis had shot him full of cephalexin they found in a small first aid kit, but that wasn’t going to keep him going forever. He needed a doctor. They were too deep in the galaxy to go straight to the Rebel rendezvous, which wasn’t even a planet. It was just an empty area of space in the outer rim that the fleet would regroup at. It was risky to send them a distress call, and it was out of the question to send them a distress call from an Imperial Alternian vessel.

John fought through the painkillers as Iignis took them from Alternia and into the comforting blackness of space. John woke up to her yelling from behind him.

“Johnny!” she squeaked. He forced his eyes open and turned around in his seat to face her. Yellow sparks flowed around her horns in an angry halo, and the ship shuttered every time she did. “Are you still alive back there?” Her small voice broke into a sob.

“You haven’t gotten rid of me yet,” John sighed. He painfully pulled on a headset and motioned for her to do the same. He didn’t want to look at her right now.

“Where do we go? How do we get away from the Empire? What if Her Imperious Condescension finds us? Are you still breathing? What if they follow us? Johnny?”

He shook himself awake and tried to wrestle with the computer display in front of him. It was all in Alternian. He swore and slammed the screen. “Look, Iignis,” he sighed. “I’m going to black out at any moment, so listen carefully.” He tried to stop his words from slurring together but it was so hard. The gunner’s chair was so much nicer than the cell floor. “We need to ditch this ship. What planets- what planets are near enough to make one jump to?”

“Well,” Iignis sobbed, “I really don’t know which ones would work. We’re still in core worlds! I’ve never been off planet!” She broke off unto another sob.

John clenched his good fist and started listing off names. “Naboo? Corellia? Coruscant? Come on work with me, please.” Iignis kept sobbing. John’s knuckles popped. His friends had died and she was crying! Because this was so hard for her! What, she left behind her lusus? Boo fucking hoo, he left behind two bodies! She had no right to be upset! She’d caused the whole fucking mess in the first place! It was her fault that Nepeta and Equius were dead! And he was going to tell her! He was going to tell her all the shit that she’d done!

John opened his mouth and sighed. “Iignis,” he said softly. The sobbing slowed. He leaned his head back in the seat and closed his eyes so the dizzying stars would stop nauseating him. “I know you’re scared. I know you’re sad that you left your lusus and your work and friends behind.”

She sniffled. “I didn’t have friends. I had my research.”

“Okay,” John said gently. “I know that you just abandoned your life’s research. I know that’s hard, but I need you to be strong for me right now, like you were in the hanger and in the lab. Like you’re being right now. I need help. Can you help me, Iignis?”

She sniffled a few more times. “Oh!” she gasped. “You can’t see me. I’m nodding.”

John tried to laugh but ended up coughing. “Good. We need to get rid of this…” Stars started to dance behind his eyelids. “…of this ship.”

“I can’t fly anything without psionic controls,” she said with guilt and fear in her voice.

“That’s okay,” John said to reassure her. “I’ll fly whatever we find.” He hoped that he could, at least. “But we need somewhere to land.”

After a few moments of silence, Iignis made a “hmm…” noise. “What about Abregado-rae? It’s dangerous, for a core world, though… a lot of smugglers… lots of crime. It’s close, but Imperially aligned. What do you think?”

“Sounds… perfect… let’s go…” was all John could get out before his eyes finally stopped flashing and the ringing in his head went silent.

If he dreamed while he was unconscious, John didn’t remember it. He didn’t know what he could dream of that wouldn’t be terrible right now. When he opened his eyes, the little green and red lights on the control panel in front of him shot pain straight into his forehead. He snapped his eyes shut and opened them slower this time. The light still hurt, but other than that, it was dark. He thought that they were in still space for a moment, but gravity held him in his seat more than the straps, so they must have landed somewhere. Wherever they were, it was night. He could see stars above the canopy.

“Iignis?” he croaked. His throat burned as much as his arm and his leg. He forced his aching body to turn and look at the empty pilot’s chair.

His frail heart stopped. With a shaking hand, he pulled his inhaler out of his boot and breathed in some of the medicine. She was gone. Did she abandon him? Shivers arched his back. Without someone’s help, he could barely walk, and here on Abregado-rae, that might as well be a death sentence.

Before he could stop himself he was crying. He swore and punched the canopy with his good hand. It hurt. He heard something crack. The laser wound in his leg stung. His arm was numb but now his shoulder and neck ached. He was going to die here.

The tears and gasps came on so fast he didn’t know what to do. He rocked forward and screamed until he tasted blood in his dry mouth. All of this for a damn rock. Nepeta and Equius’ bodies flashed in vivid gore every time he closed his eyes. He flailed and tried to hit something but just ended up scraping his hand on the sharp, sturdy Alternian controls. He felt blood on his hand and tasted it in his mouth and saw it when he closed his eyes and then it was on his face as he gasped and sputtered in the darkness.

“Nepeta… Equius…” he whispered. “I’m sorry…”

He blacked out from exhaustion. He didn’t want to die.

The canopy cracked open with a hiss. John moaned and tried to push the hands that grabbed him away. He wasn’t strong enough. He screamed and withered as strong hands pulled him out of his seat. He heard Iignis among them. He squirmed even more. She’d turned him in. He didn’t know that he was yelling until the noise was abruptly cut off as a cold patch was slapped onto his cheek, and the dark figures taking him away faded into absolute blackness.

John woke up to the birds. He tried to push himself up but his left arm gave out and he painfully fell back down into the soft bed, his head rushing as he did. He blinked at the room he was in and at the cracked window and the dressings on his arm. He flinched at the gray clothes he wore and tried desperately to scan the room but his neck cried out as he tried to move it. He tried to let his body relax into the soft sheets but his muscles wouldn’t obey. The door creaked open.

“Hello,” a tall woman said in accented Galactic Basic. “It is good to see you awake.”

“Where are my clothes?” John croaked. He shook his head. No. “There was a girl with me. Where is she? Is she safe?”

The woman smiled and nodded. She looked like the servant women on Tatooine, but not so much in her appearance. She was healthy. Her brown hair and brown skin was not cracked or dusty as was common on Tatooine. No, her mannerism was the familiar part. Her heavy steps. The way her smile was sad in the corners. The lines by her eyes. She was tired in a perpetual way.

“Iignis is sleeping in the other room,” the woman said. She stood at the foot of his bed. “And your clothes are washed and waiting for you.”

“Who are y-“ He stopped to cough, “-ou?”

The woman motioned to the water next to John’s bed. He drank it thankfully. “My name is Ellaine,” she said. “We’re about ten miles from the Abregado-rae Spaceport.”

“What happened?”

She squinted at him. “I’m not exactly sure. I’d like it if you could elaborate for me.” She paused, staring at him with pursed lips. “Iignis knocked on our door last night asking for help. She said she’d give an Alternian cruiser to us for no charge if we helped. Now, I thought she was going to scam us. No one takes something with the Empress’ seal. That’s suicide. But she led my husband and me to you, and we knew she was being sincere.”

John tried to sit up again and winched. Ellaine moved towards him and helped prop him up.

“You were a real mess back there. You’re lucky to be alive.”

John grabbed her arm. “Thank you for your help, but I’m afraid we can’t repay you. That ship needs to be destroyed or sold immediately. There are people after us.” Her face remained calm. John tried to stress the danger even more. “You don’t understand. The Empire will kill you if they find you with us.”

“I completely understand,” she said, removing his fingers from her arm. He watched the color return to the spot where he’d grabbed her. “When you’ve been the mother of two smugglers who are always coming back home for a good night’s rest, you learn a thing or two.”

She smiled at John as he relaxed into the pillow. “My husband sold the ship last night. It’s very valuable and practically brand new. No questions asked, and no names. No trail. You’re safe, and I’m paid.” She smiled at him, softer, and John saw before him a mother. “But we would have taken you in anyway, son. We can’t just let people die if we can do something, right?”

John took a shuttering breath and nodded painfully. “Right,” he said.

She patted him on the arm and stood up. “I’ll bring some food in a little while and change your bandage. You better get some rest, Johnny.”

“It’s John,” he laughed. “Trolls like calling me Johnny. It’s a language thing.”

“John, then,” she said, and walked to the door. “We’ll get you and Iignis off planet safely. I can promise you that.” She winked at the door. “My sons may be smugglers, but my daughter is a Rebel,” she whispered. John looked down at his hands. “Don’t think I can’t spot your type from a mile away,” she laughed as she closed the door behind her.

“…and I’d usually stay up way later than I should have, but you know, down there in the labs, I never really saw the moonlight. The sun could rise and I’d be none the wiser. Getting food for Madam Rosalind was a hassle. She wasn’t a big lusus, but you know, still needed to eat. I made it part of the deal that some of the high bloods had to bring me dead lusii or something for her to eat. I didn’t like it, but it seemed like the only thing to do…”

John groaned and the babbling stopped. “Oh, good evening. Are you awake?” he heard Iignis ask. He just kind of groaned again.

“Yeah,” he finally said, “I’m conscious.”

He opened his eyes. There was still sunlight streaming through the window, but it was slanted. He sniffed the air and his mouth watered. He tilted his head and saw the steaming bowl of broth on the stand next to him.

“Will you help me sit up?” he asked Iignis. She came over to him and pushed the pillows up behind his back. She placed the bowl on a little table over his lap. He drank slowly with his good hand, which was only good by comparison. It had bandages wrapped around the palm, but at least he could still move his fingers.

Eating was slow going. His stomach was still trying to work. “Thank you for saving me,” John said in between bites. Iignis sat on the bed next him and shrugged. “You could have left me to them,” John said. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

“But your friends are dead because of me,” she said quietly.

John thought he’d lose his appetite, but he couldn’t, not after having been without real food for so long. “They’d be alive if you let us out sooner,” John agreed. Iignis lowered her head to her chest. “They’d be alive if I had gotten out sooner, too,” he continued. “They’d be alive if the Empire had never occupied Naboo and forced Nepeta to join. They’d be alive if Equius had never volunteered to become a Stormtrooper. They’d be alive if the Condesce didn’t exist.” He sighed. “A lot of things went wrong, Iignis. Don’t blame yourself.”

She nodded and scooted closer to him, pulling his limp left arm over her shoulder. He let her, and ate his soup in silence. Six sweeps, what was that in standard rotations? Thirteen years old? He wasn’t much older than her. She made him feel like he’d lived lifetimes longer than she knew.

Chapter Text

Redglare was still sitting by the fire when Karkat sopped back through the woods to find her. “Go for a swim, Vantas?” she asked as she tossed him a towel that hadn’t been there when he had left. “I know what you’re going to say,” she said as he plopped down next to the fire, teeth chattering. He looked up at her slender figure. She stood tall and proud. “And I agree with you.”

Karkat swung his head around to face her and scoffed. “You agree that I’m sorry? How kind of you.”

Her serene face broke into a frown. “What?” she asked her voice more nasal than usual. “You aren’t going to ask me to raise the X-wing from the swamp to leave Dagobah?”

Karkat rubbed the towel through his hair and scoffed again. “Oh fuck yeah, but I still got a thing or two to learn. I’m not the biggest idiot in the galaxy. Trust me, I know him personally. Really cute, blond, stupid glasses. Anyways, I know there’s a metric shit ton of things I don’t know but you and I have to get something straight, and that’s coming from me.” He looked up at Redglare’s flabbergasted face. “I’m not your Padawan. I’ll never be like the Jedi Knights of the Old Republic. Fuck, I don’t even know if that’s good or bad or light or dark, but it’s a fact. So please, I’m begging you, train me. But don’t train me as some candy ass youngling or whatever the fuck you called them back then. Train me as me.”

Redglare looked down at him from under her glasses. “What you’re asking for is blasphemy under the Jedi Code, you know that right?”

He shrugged. “I do now. I also know that getting on your ass about my friends’ death wasn’t your fault, but the way I handle things when shit flies off the fucking handle shouldn’t be something for you to study or scrutinize. I’m not whoever the hell Psiioniic’s old Padawan was. Suffer or whatever the fuck his name was before. I’m not him. I’m Karkat Fucking Vantas. Okay?”

She seemed to be struggling with something. She said she agreed with him that he needed to get his X-wing out and leave Dagobah. With no small amount of self-satisfaction, Karkat realized that he surprised her. He was probably the first one to do so in twenty-something years.

“Well,” she finally said after a pause. “Alright, Karkat. We start now, then.”

“What, now?” he asked, standing up. “I’ve been training all day!”

“You asked me to train Karkat Vantas,” she scoffed. “Is Karkat Vantas a complainer?” She motioned for him to follow her down the darkening path deeper into the swamp. “You don’t want to be trained from the beginning and you and I both have the feeling that you are going to leave very soon…” she looked over her shoulder at him, “…sooner than you think, I’m guessing.”

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? And fuck yeah he was a complainer. What the hell?

“You obviously have an immense connection with the Force, but you cannot control it or use it at will,” she continued as she ducked under branches and hanging moss. Karkat, still shaking, followed her down the barely visible path. He tried to keep up. She quickly became more and more obscured by the fog.

“I’m not going to tell you anything by the Code, or book, or official rules. I suppose you’re right. The old Jedi Order is dead…”

Karkat waved a bug out of his face and suddenly found himself alone.

“What can the Force do?” Redglare’s voice echoed down from above him.

Karkat looked up into the trees but saw no one. “What kind of anime bullshit…. Who the fuck is this lady?” he whispered.

“What can the Force do?” Redglare asked again, louder this time.

“Uh…” he shivered. He was really fucking cold. He was pretty sure he’d have to defrost his bulge. “Everything?” he said, hesitating.

“No,” Redglare said behind him. He screamed. “It can only do what you can do, Karkat,” she said, stepping closer to him. “The Force isn’t some magic super power that you learn to possess. And I’ll tell you a secret.” She leaned closer. He felt her breath on his face. “There is no light or dark side,” she whispered. “There’s only people and the choices they make.”

He blinked at her.

“But you already know that, Karkat. And so does Sufferer. He learned it the hard way because of our mistakes. The Republic… the Jedi… we forced him to that edge, but he was the one who jumped. The Force is you. It’s me. It’s everything. Good. Evil. Rebel. Empire… the air, the land, the stars… even the confines of time and space are not excluded from the reaches of the Force… it does not discriminate.”

Karkat had nothing to say. He felt like he’d always known that… somehow… but it never felt true. He looked at his shaking hands, but it wasn’t the cold anymore.

Redglare turned and walked past him. Karkat followed with stumbling feet. Everything… so the war… the Rebellion… it was just… us. We caused all of this.

They emerged on the other side of the swamp, right next to the edge of the shore where the X-wing poked out of the water, barely. Redglare stood under the tree where Karkat had fallen. She pointed her walking stick at the submerged ship. “Raise it out of the water,” she said.

“I’ve been trying this whole damn time,” Karkat mumbled.  But he reached out and dug into the world around him as deep as he could go. He felt the trees breathing and heard the water moving, all of the water, all the way down to the depths of the swamp. He felt the enormity of the X-wing and the pieces involved and weight of gravity pulling down on it. He tried to stop thinking about what was, but what could be. That gravity was the Force. He could lift the ship. It was possible.

He heard the ship moving and water running off the sides. His blood pusher pounded in his ears as he strained against the enormous weight of the X-wing. Twelve point five meters of Force. Ten metric tons of Force. A really fucking heavy chunk of the Force-

“Mechanical fuckery-“ the X-wing dropped what little distance it had risen with a pathetic gurgle- “hunk of scrap that could fit in an AT’s ass but not jump out of this fucking cesspool of an ecosystem!” he yelled, fists clenched. Redglare chuckled behind him. He whipped around and fumed.

“You see!” Redglare laughed. “I can tell you all there is to know, but the experience is what makes us who we are.” She crossed her arms and leaned back on the tree trunk.

“But what the fuck was I doing wrong?” Karkat shouted. “I saw it as the Force and whatnot!”

Redglare shook her head. “No, you saw it as separate pieces of the Force. It is not. It’s one thing. You don’t take the pieces apart. You need to simply move them around.” She pushed herself off the tree and stepped up to Karkat. It was nice to know someone who was almost your own height, Karkat reflected as he tilted his head slightly to face her. She turned to the X-wing and held out her hands. “If I only I could have trained you from the start…”

He stepped back as she held out her gloved hands and closed her eyes. The X-wing gurgled and was slow to let go of the water surrounding it. Karkat watched as the huge ship rose out of the water and dripped its way through the air, over their heads, and safely onto the shore behind them, where the Mayor followed the progress with his ocular camera.

Redglare opened her eyes. “You need time,” she told him plainly. “You have so much potential.”

Redglare didn’t help him clean out the X-wing. She left him to do what he pleased. The first thing he had done was take a nap in the pilot’s seat. He’d closed the canopy before the ship started to sink, and the inside was nice and cozy. He slept a lot more soundly than he had on Redglare’s floor.

Next, he went about cleaning the engine ports of gunk and pulling large, shrimplike things out of the exhaust pipes. They were very angry about this situation, and he may or may not have gotten into a fist fight with a crustacean the size of his face, but what was that compared to years strifing with Crabdad?

It’d taken hours, and the gray light that was slow to grace the swamp and slow to return, began to creep into the heavy mist above him. Certain howls and cries slowly laid themselves to rest with the coming of the long day. The sun would rise for about ten hours. It was a strange planet.

Karkat sat atop the X-wing. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the swamp as one thing. As the planets and the stars as one thing. As him and Redglare as one thing. His stomach turned as he tried to imagine him and the Condesce as one thing. He tried, but he knew he was lying to himself if he said he could see it. It was as if he knew it was true, but simply could not accept it at all.

His earlier vison ran across his mind and he shuttered. It really wasn’t a vision. It was… astral projection? Whatever it was, he felt what Nepeta and Equius had felt. There is no death, there is the Force.

He wiped his cheek and sighed. He didn’t know whose tears he was crying. He was upset, but not distraught enough to cry. He wondered…

Karkat closed his eyes and focuses on the tears. He wondered if Dave was crying. He thought about Dave and the scar on his lip, and the way his nimble fingers were bony on the pointer joints from all his time on his drawing pad, and the way he smiled after a speech… nothing.

He pouted. Well if Dave wasn’t crying, who was?

He breathed in again and tried to focus on the tears. He saw himself inside a red cockpit. He was crying, no, sobbing. He hissed as he realized his arm was broken. He looked at it through the darkness and although he didn’t see it, he knew that it was more than broken. He tested his legs and cried out because of the laser wound. He looked around, into the darkness. Where was he? He felt his mouth open up and the rawness of his throat was exposed to the stale air of the cockpit.

“Nepeta… Equius…” he whispered. “I’m sorry…”

Karkat’s eye flew open as he gasped. He sucked down air as the panic bubbling in his chest threated to take over everything. “John!” he yelled, as if John could hear him. He jumped up and flung open the canopy. Where was the damn communicator, where was it?

His hands groped the inside of the cockpit but there was nothing there. The fear in his chest amounted to full on panic and suddenly he wasn’t capable of anything. He knew that the long distance communicator was in the external compartments, and while he knew this very well, his mind wouldn’t let him stop searching the cockpit for the communicator.

“John… John…”

His hands fell on something, but it wasn’t a communicator. It was Dave’s sword. He stood up in a room made of metal grating and steam. Dave lay bleeding out a few feet away from him. He crawled towards Rose’s limp body, but Karkat could see that Rose was dead. Someone screamed. He saw Sufferer drag Kanaya into the room. Her face was swollen on one side. “No!” she screamed again, her eyes transfixed by Rose’s unmoving corpse. “No! No!” she screamed.

“No! No!” Karkat screamed.

He fell back into his pilot’s seat panting. He was back on Dagobah. He was safe, but they weren’t. “Redglare!” he yelled as he jumped out of the pilot’s seat and onto the ground. “Redglare!” he yelled as he ran through the swamp, scaring anything that stood in his way.

He sprinted into the small house to find her writing something at her little table.

“I have to go, Redglare! I saw something! I saw my friends…” he couldn’t get the words out… “Dead! Dying! I have to help them! It might be too late!”

She nodded and motioned for him to take a seat. He clenched his fists but sat down on the floor with Redglare, tapping his foot on the ground.

“I thought this might happen,” Redglare said slowly. “First of all, when did these visions take place?” she asked calmly.

“Two fucking minutes ago!” Karkat yelled.

Redglare shook her head. “No, when did they happen? Don’t be angry right now, Karkat. I can’t answer these questions. I’m trying to help you.”

He slammed his palm on the ground but didn’t argue. He closed his eyes and thought of John. He tilted his head and took a breath. “One has…” he opened his eyes. “One has already happened.”

Redglare waited.

Karkat closed his eyes again and forced himself to think back to Dave and Rose and Kanaya. His heart cried out, but he felt it now. “One hasn’t happened yet!” he yelled. “I can save them, or at least help them! Right? That’s how it works, right?” He tapped the table as Redglare stared back at him.

She nodded. “You may not be able to save them…” she said.

“I know!” Karkat said as he stood up, “but there’s a chance that I can, too! We can’t just let people die if we can do something, right?”

Redglare nodded slowly. “They may survive on their own. They may not. Sometimes a sacrifice is necessary, though.” He glared at her. “If you leave, you’re training will be lost.”

“Why can’t I just come back?” Karkat said as he started pacing. “I will come back! I promise you!”

Redglare sighed and ran a hand over her shaved head. “I know you will, but it will not be the same. This, I know.” She looked up at him. “Psiioniic wants you to stay. I want you to stay. Please,” she sighed, because they both knew that he wouldn’t but he’d given her the hope that he might surprise her. “You can change the course of the war.”

Karkat nodded. “I know, but I need to help them. I don’t know where John is, but I can help my moirail and my friends. I have to.”

Redglare laughed. “There is no passion,” she whispered to herself. “I cannot stop you, but I beg you to stay,” she said.

Karkat knelt on the floor next to her. “I’ll come back,” he said.

Redglare shook her head. “That doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.” She laughed bitterly, like she should have known he would do this, like it was just her luck. “But you still need to defend yourself,” she sighed. Painfully, she reached for her white, dragon-headed cane. For the first time, Karkat really looked at the old thing. Even just leaning against the wall it was poised, ready to strike.

Without speaking, she unscrewed the cane length off, revealing on old silver lightsaber shaft. She handed it to Karkat so delicately, he feared his touch would tear the thing apart. He took it gently. It felt like it didn’t like him, like he didn’t deserve it.

“It’s not yours, even if you keep it,” she told him even though she really didn’t have too. He could feel that quite clearly.

“I’ll return it to you,” he said, “I promise.”

“By then it will be too late,” Redglare reminded him.

“Then I’m sorry,” Karkat said as he stood up again.

“I know,” Redglare said.

Karkat walked out into the swamp and ran back to the Mayor and his ship. As he ran, he saw Psiioniic shaking his head at him through the trees. Karkat kept running.

Chapter Text

Dave didn’t get why everybody was so gosh darn paranoid! He scoffed into his drink and leaned back on the expensive couch, rolling his eyes under his glasses. It was awesome up here in the clouds! They’d only been here a couple of hours and they’d been given a room, food, drink, and Kanaya even got to raid a wardrobe. They probably wouldn’t even spend the night here, although Dave would have preferred to, and kick it with his Dorito colored bird bro. Play some video games or some shit he hadn’t done in years. It was nice to be with someone who understood you.

“Dave!” Jade yelled. He sighed and tilted his head to where she paced in front of a window that looked like its glass was too thin. “He’s a sprite. He’s not you!”

He sighed again. “Why do you hate him so much?” he shrugged. “He’s cool.”

Jade stomped her foot. “Yeah, you think so! I think he’s jealous! And that’s, I don’t know, dangerous maybe in the hands of an almost godlike entity, hmm?”

Dave made several more hand gestures and facial expressions of incredulity and turned to where Kanaya sat in Rose’s lap to see if they’d be of any assistance. Rose shrugged.

“Eh, I don’t know much about omniscient orange bird people,” Rose started slowly, “but I can tell clearly that Davesprite is clouding your judgment.”

Dave choked on his apple juice. “What? What do you mean by that, lipstick?” Unbelievable. They had no faith in him.

“I mean,” Rose continued, “that as far as I can see, he’s reminding you of your past and how things used to be before….” While Dave appreciated that Rose was trying to be subtle, announcing his finer mental workings in front of the whole room was pretty base. “…before a lot of things, I guess. Nothing in particular, just life! Dave, we can’t be too careful. I’d listen to Jade.”

Jade made a noise of confirmation and Dave rubbed his temples. Here they all were, with a good thing going for the first time in fucking months, and they couldn’t enjoy it! Come on! “Kanaya,” he pleaded, “Come on; tell them that they’re being silly.”

The princess took a deep breath and continued playing with Rose’s short blonde hair. Just watching her jade tipped fingers weave in and out of Rose’s hair was mesmerizing. Kanaya tilted her head. “I for one normally wouldn’t say that it mattered. We’re here, and we are getting what services we need, but…” her digits paused momentarily. “…I don’t feel like we are safe. I know that we are not safe, in fact. This is too good to be true. Whether Davesprite is involved or not, we won’t be out of the Empire’s reach forever. I could care less if Davesprite is jealous of Dave’s life, but if that jealousy was deep enough to sell us out to the Empire… we may have walked into a problem.”

This time Dave actually spit out his drink, his nectar of the gods apple juice. “I’m sorry, you think Davesprite is betraying us as we speak?” he yelled and was shushed immediately. He lowered his voice. “That guy’s been nothing but helpful to us ever since we got here! He’s a kid!”

“No, he's not!” Jade reminded him. “He’s thousands of years old!”

“Wow, you really like older men,” Dave winked.

Jade’s dark cheeks flushed as she sputtered. “If that asshole gets us killed, it’s your fault, Dave Strider. Something is off here, and everyone can feel it but you!”

Normally, Jade and Dave didn’t fight at all, but their shared past made things difficult sometimes. The things that separated them weren’t so much grudges, but differences of opinions, and stubbornness. Dave couldn’t apologize for certain things, and Jade couldn’t say she was wrong. This wasn’t every day, and never was constant, but somethings just set them off, and Davesprite was one.

While a scathing remark was preparing for launch from Dave’s smart mouth, the door into their suite beeped once and opened with a hiss. The conversation fell as the orange soda instigator himself hovered into the room.

“Sup?” he asked. There were various replies, all of which revealed nothing but a slight air of uneasiness. Davesprite wasn’t put off by this at all. “We got some grub in the dining hall ready for y’all.” He waved a glowing hand. “Come on.”

Dave moved first. He made a “See?” gesture to the girls and followed his friend out the door. He heard Jade sigh behind him, but her footsteps also.

The silence that preceded them down the hallways was almost tangible. Dave tried to catch up and shoot the shit with his buddy, but Jade had instilled paranoia in him that was too present to be ignored. He tried to push it down and strike up some talk about video games, but found that he hadn’t played anything in years. The more he spoke, the more the real distance between him and Davesprite became.

“And you’ve been off on adventures?” Davesprite finally said after a prolonged silence. Dave felt his face flush and Davesprite nudged him in the ribs. “You can’t have a public account and not think people are watching, bro,” Davesprite said.

Dave laughed nervously. There was an edge at Davesprite’s words that he didn’t like. He watched as Davesprite’s chest plumage ruffled. All around the white walkway, a corona of orange light followed them. It pulsed gently.

“So,” Rose sang, tossing on arm over Davesprite’s shoulder. “This mining job of yours sounds like it’s making some pretty good bucks.” Davesprite laughed. She winked at the sprite and ostentatiously covered her mouth in Kanaya’s direction and whispered as loud as she could, “Say, what’s a lady got to do to get a share of those boonbucks?”

Dave chuckled, but it didn’t feel right. Davesprite was very, very calm. If there’s one thing that Dave had almost nothing of when he was a kid, it was chill. Even now he was still a nervous wreck unless something really big was about to go down.

“Well,” Davesprite said as they walked down the final stretch of corridor to the dining room, “it actually doesn’t make that much at all, and I’m giving this floating pile of junk everything I can to keep it going. The Empire cornered our market.” He shrugged his orange wings. “But there are ways to keep them out of my feathers.”

He snapped his fingers with a crack so loud it shouldn’t have been possible, and the doors flung open. Before Dave could realize what was happening, Jade had shot at the looming, dark figure at the end of the room three times. Sufferer yanked the blaster out of Jade’s hands with a lazy flick of his fingers. The blaster slammed into the wall, next to where a Stormtrooper in strange armor leaned. The trooper’s navy chest plates were scarred and scorched in various places, and Dave didn’t know why this fascinated him so much. It was almost as if, hey, maybe if he didn’t look at the scariest fucking thing in the room, it would go away.

“I tire of your theatrics, Davesprite,” Sufferer wheezed out.

Dave tried to look at everything at once. Sufferer, with his black, mechanical carapace, the way his words made him want to hide, and way light seemed to bend away from him in the luminous room. He swung around to Rose, standing defensively in front of Kanaya, who stood expressionless and tall. Jade, on the other side of him, bared her teeth. They briefly made eye contact. She didn’t look mad, just scared.

Finally, his eyes settled on Davesprite, floating ambient in the corner.

Dave shook his head at him and Davesprite shrugged. “Hey man,” he said, “This war is gonna come and go, just like you. I may not look like it, but I have needs. I need to keep these people safe. I need to get out of here and leave it better.”

“Great. This is when you decide to be noble,” Dave spat.

Davesprite shook his head. “I’ve always been like this, but you didn’t think I was capable of doing something like this because you thought I was you.” He spread his wings across half the length of the room, flapped once, and vanished in a burst of orange.

Sufferer’s breathing filled the remaining space. “That was unnecessary,” he sighed. “I don’t like wasting time.” The troll wrapped in darkness turned to the trooper at his side. “Take them, and ready them for me.” She nodded and moved towards them.

Dave automatically threw an arm in front of Jade. She gently pushed it down and shook her head. Dave’s heartbeat in his ears as everything crashed down around him. “Princess,” he heard Sufferer say as the trooper shackled him and his friends, tightly. “I’ve been waiting to catch you and your partner for a while now; the smugglers are a pleasant addition.”

“For someone who doesn’t like things that are unnecessary,” Dave laughed, cockiness replacing his fear, “you sure say a lot of melodramatic bullshit. I mean, ‘pleasant addition’, what are we to you, that extra thing of fries that the lady in the drive through gives you because she wasn’t paying attention?” He laughed and the super special Stormtrooper swiveled her head towards him.

“I, for one, think that if anyone is being dramatic and unnecessary,” Dave continued with flare, “it’s your capey ass! Knee-high boots, polished to a shine, whoa! You’re a regular humdinger, right there. I bet-“

The trooper suddenly spoke, but Dave wasn’t sure if anyone else heard it because her words ran circles in his head.

“Shut the fuck up and go to sleep!” it yelled. And so he did.

Dave woke up thinking, “Well that wasn’t so bad.” Immediately after said thought, a lightning bolt struck him in his face, and in that moment, he knew he fucked up.

“Son of a…” he laughed as he tried to peel his eyes open. His face was swollen to balloon likeness, as far as he could figure. He thought he still had his glasses on, for a moment, but quickly realized the dark shadows around him were just that, not some tinted image.

He shook his head and tried to figure it out. Davesprite… Why did he say he did it? The economy? Needs? What the fuck was that bullshit? He was a sprite! He was him! Unless…. Dave hung his head… unless sprites weren’t what he thought. Unless he’d really fucked up this time.

The hiss of a door opening forced him to look up again through the steam and shadows. He heard footsteps off metal grating somewhere ahead of him. Red lights and heat occupied the spaces darkness and steam vacated. Dave’s body ached. How long had he been here?

The girls were nowhere to be seen, from what little he could see. He bit his swollen lip. He’d probably killed them all by bringing them here. Typical. The final and grandest of his fantastic failures. All he ever did was hurt people. What a fucking joke.

No! He shook his head. They could still be alive. He could still get out of here. He had some mad skills up his sleeves. Shit may be off the handle, but Dave Strider was still kicking.

He told himself he can apologize to everyone later, but he couldn’t apologize to them if they were dead. He struggled against the constraints on his wrists and ankles. He was locked down the spy novel way. He wondered briefly if they’d try to cut him in half with a laser.

The lightning struck again and suddenly he was screaming as the white-hot electricity licked his face. He fought for maybe two seconds, but the pain only increased. Finally, he went limp. The electricity stopped.

Dave groaned and tried to open his eyes again. One of his ears had really gotten fond of making an annoying ringing sound and he’d really appreciate it if that ear just shut up. He forced his eyes open and saw before him an orange glow penetrating the red.

“Man, you ain’t gotta torture him and all that shit,” Dave heard his younger voice saw.

A filtered sigh followed. “Sprite, you believe that you are all powerful, but remember the price you pay for my company.” Sufferer. Dave’s muscles instinctively tensed. He heard Davesprite chuckle, low, menacing.

“Alright,” was all he said.

”Lord Sufferer,” a new voice said. “May I remind you that I won’t gain my bounty if Strider is dead.” Dave shuddered. It was the voice that had invaded his head and dragged him in there. It was that Stormtrooper who couldn’t have been a Stormtrooper. Stormtroopers were blue bloods, yes, and that meant that they were inclined to have psychic abilities, but that was supposed to have been cloned out of them! What was she, a defect? A special weapon?

“Also,” she continued, “luring the other boy, Egbert, out of the woodwork will be more difficult without his friend, and Snowman wants them both alive.”

“Patience, Serket,” Sufferer said. “You will have your prize in good time. He’ll be fine.”

Oh goody, I’m valuable and also a hostage. Dave wiggled his wrist in its shackle. He received a prompt shock for his efforts.

“And what about them ladies?” Davesprite asked. “I mean, banging up my boy Dave wasn’t really in the terms and conditions, so now that I know how much of a villainous weasel you really are I’m buckled up for the ride. We’re in the shit together now. So, how about ‘em?”

It was silent for a moment. Dave’s stomach decided it’d be a good time to start feeling sick. He swallowed hard and tried to ignore it.

“Do what you will with them,” Sufferer finally said, “so long as they stay on this planet and out of my sight.”

Dave sighed. They were alive.

“Pssh,” the other voice, Serket, scoffed. “Why not just kill ‘em? The canine put a fucking dent in my armor! And they’ve been a thorn in your s-“The words suddenly faded into garbled breaths and the wet noises of suffocation.

“Miss Serket,” Sufferer said, “I will not have you question my tactical choices. You may have tracked them here to Bespin, but they are mine now.” Dave shuddered. Sufferer’s voice and the sound of Serket gasping chased shivers up and down his spine. He still couldn’t see anything aside from the orange glow faintly pulsing through the steam.

“Hostages… examples… bait for Vantas… the possibilities are endless. Agreed?” Sufferer finished, and Dave heard metal on metal crash as Serket presumably collapsed in the metal grated floor.

“Agreed…” she spat out.

Dave heard a door open and close. He groaned aloud and strained against the shackles, and when the electricity started, he screamed but kept on struggling.

“Oh, give it a rest, you dirty excuse for a pirate,” Serket said.

Dave looked up to face the trooper. He’d seen other troopers without their helmets before, but she was different. The dark red light made her ashen skin glow. One of her glaring yellow eyes had a flower of pupils blooming in the middle. Unlike other clones, who all sported a tight crew cut, her long wavy hair poured down over hearmor-plateded shoulders and framed her face in horrifying relief.

“Are you going to tell me another bedtime story?” Dave coughed.

“No,” she shook her head, “I’d rather just do this.” And she punched him squarely in the nose before he could tell her to punch him anywhere but the face.

For the second time in as many hours, Dave woke up with no fucking clue what was going on. He was in a cell. He had his glasses back? It was dark. His face hurt, but the swelling had gone down. Oh yeah. And someone was holding him.

“Gah!” he flailed and tried to break their grip but they just hugged him harder.

“Stop struggling like an angry cat, Dave Strider,” Jade told him forcefully. He went limp in her massive arms.

“Jade!” he cried, but because his throat was so sore, it was more of a squeak. He threw his arms around her neck and curved into her warm, breathing, alive body. “I’m so sorry,” he told her. “You were right. You’re always right. I got us into this. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She peeled him off of her and held him back. “It’s okay. You fucked up. We all do.” Her eyes adjusted to low light better than his, and they shone back at him as two green orbs in the gloominess of wherever they were. He nodded and looked around.

Normal cell. Looked like they were in a whole prison block, but theirs was the only space occupied. No guard, but Dave was positive of some security cameras somewhere. He tried to think of a plan.

“I feel sick,” was all he could come up with.

The door behind them whooshed open. Both he and Jade covered their eyes at the unexpected light. There were some scuffing and familiar voices. The door closed and the light cut off again, only to be replaced by a soft glow.

“You look sick, too,” said Rose.

Dave threw his arms around her and her luminous girlfriend. “I fucked up big time, guys.” He said. “I’m sorry.”

After hugs had been exchanged between everybody, Kanaya placed a hand on Dave’s shoulder. She really didn’t do that often, as a troll. “Dave,” she said softly. Her and Rose both looked a little worse for wear. Rose’s lip was swelling from some kind of fight and Kanaya’s new dress, given to her by Davesprite, was torn in three places he could see. “If we didn’t come here, we would have gotten caught anyways.”

“But trust us a little more next time,” Jade added, “okay?”

Dave nodded. “Okay.”

“Well I for one am personally offended in your lack of trust, David Elizabeth Strider,” a voice said out of midair. Everyone froze. A spec of orange grew in the corner of the cell. First there was a Cheshire cat grin, and the rest of Davesprite quickly followed.

“You little-“Dave launched himself at Davesprite’s throat, but his hands went right through him and his wrist slammed into the wall at a painful angle. “Fuck!”

Davesprite ruffled his feathers. “Uh, you could be a little more grateful that I’m here to help you out, dude.”

“Help us?” Jade laughed. “What the hell can you do, besides lure us into something else, bird brain?” she growled.

Davesprite rubbed his face, and years beyond measure fell onto the adolescent features. “Guys...” he sighed, “I don’t have a lot of time. I didn’t mean for things to go this way. Here’s what’s up.” He swept his head around the room to make sure they were all listening. “Dave is being sold to Snowman, but the rest of you have to stay here. You won’t be hurt.”

Kanaya scoffed. “Should I be offended that Sufferer doesn’t want to kill me?” she asked.

“No,” Dave said, “but you should be scared. He’s using you as bait for Karkat.” Kanaya’s jaw dropped as she mouthed No. He nodded and glared at Davesprite. “That’s right, I do know somethings.”

“Well, genius, did you know that that idiot is on his fucking way here right now?” Davesprite asked.

“Dammit!” Kanaya spat. “That’s just like him, too.”

“But you’re here to help us, right?” Jade pleaded.

Davesprite hung his head. “You have to understand. The lives of the people in this city… they depend on this mine. This is… my home. I can’t just-“

Jade yanked a handful of feathers out of his wing. Davesprite gasped and the feather’s in Jade’s hand lost their glow and faded into nothingness. “You coward,” she spat. Davesprite faded away, his orange glasses the last thing to go.

As soon as he was gone, the door opened again. Serket stood in front of six guards. She glared at Jade. “If any of you try anything,” she hissed, and Dave noticed her fanged teeth now, “I will make you kill the person next to you with your bare hands. Do you all understand that?”

They didn’t answer. They understood quite clearly. She smiled, turned on her red booted armor, and led them out into the shining hallway.

Back into another dark, red lit room they went. Dave didn’t like the look of the vat-like machine in the center of the room. Wires and coils and tubes ran in and out of the thing like the vines of some kind of monstrous, mechanical plant. Aliens he didn’t recognize enough to name ran frantically about the thing, getting it ready for… something.

Sufferer stood above the scurrying workers, watching their progress. Davesprite hovered at his shoulder, arms crossed and a scowl on his face that made him look even more like a bratty teenage boy. Dave saw no reason not too, so he waved him over. The guard next to him swatted his hand down with the butt of his blaster, but Davesprite was already popping into existence next to him.

“What’s going on?” Dave asked.

Davesprite sighed. “Long story short, Edge Lord over there wants to freeze ya boy Karkat before delivering his frozen dinner Jedi ass to the Empress. But, the guy doesn’t want to accidently kill his paycheck, so he’s going to put her in it first,” Davesprite finished, pointing at Rose.

“No,” Kanaya said. Rose held up her hands and smiled sheepishly.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Rose said, stroking her beloved’s cheek. “I knew this was going to happen, so I’m going to put Dave in it instead.” She smiled diabolically. Dave gaped at her. She winked. “Come on, Dave, as if you’re perpetually guilt ridden thought process wasn’t going to volunteer for my place?” She laughed.

He pursed his lips. It was true. “So I’ll survive?” he said.

Rose’s eyes dropped. “Well… I assume so.”

“Assume?” he said a little too loudly. Serket turned around and glared at him. He lowered his voice when she turned back. “Rose, what do you mean assume?”

She took a deep breath. “No, you won’t die by this.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Dave,” Rose whispered, “I can’t go in there. I can’t leave Kanaya.”

“Rose!” Jade and Kanaya both whispered.

Dave grabbed Rose’s hand. “Rose, I don’t want to die, but I’m the one who got us into this mess. I trust you.” She was crying. He’d never really seen her cry. She threw her arms around him and suddenly fear course through his entire body. She was sobbing. Nothing made Rose sob. He buried his face in her neck.

“Why- why not me?” Jade choked out. “I don’t have value like Kanaya or Dave’s bounty or Rose’s gifts. Why not me?”

Rose shook her head and said into Dave’s shoulder, “You’re too tall for the carbonite case.”

“What the fuck are you all doing back there?” Serket yelled.

“Tell Karkat I love him?” Dave said into Rose’s hair. She nodded into his shoulder.

“Step away from each other!” Serket said, and involuntarily, they did. “Gross.” She grabbed Rose’s arm and yanked her forward. Dave saw that Rose had regained her composure and the signature smirk she sometimes sported when she either felt invincible or about to die.

Serket shoved her forward to the carbonite freeze. Sufferer looked down on her. “Useless girl…” he sighed. “Put her in!”

Rose shook her head and held up a finger. “Umm… I think you might be mistaken by that,” she said apologetically. “See,” she stepped back from Serket and leaned on one of the control panels. “I’m not useless, actually! I’m quite gifted. I know things, see?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Serket said, stepping forward. Again, Rose held up a finger and shook her head.

“Vriska… Vriska… Vriska…” she sighed. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Where’s all that class Mindfang had? Girl could talk the skin off a cat…”

Serket froze. “What is this?” Sufferer said. Serket didn’t hear him. She lunged forward and grabbed at Rose’s throat.

“How do you know about her?” she yelled, before being flung back by a flick of Sufferer’s hand. She crashed onto the floor.

Rose nodded her thanks and rose to curtsy before sitting back down. “I know things, Sufferer. Valuable things. Things you would kill to know. Do you really want to freeze me?” she crooned. “Poor, useless Rose Lalonde? The Princess’ escort?”

Dave had no idea what she was doing. If anything, she was just pissing him off. Sufferer looked ready to blow his helmet off. “Stop with this nonsense!” he yelled, and the floor shook. “Freeze her!”

Rose tsked. “I didn’t want to do this,” she sang, “but I’ll tell you what. If you don’t freeze me, I’ll answer one question of yours, hmm?” Sufferer motioned for the guards to restrain her. She sighed as they grabbed her arms and started her towards the vertical panel with straps.

“Alrighty… Signless.”

The guards around her all grasped their throats at once. They dropped to her sides and Rose stepped forward, around the vat, up to the foot of the steps where Sufferer stood over her. The guards choked and sputtered in a heap.

“Questions?” she whispered. The room creaked as pieces of random metal began to bend or snap. Dave thought the whole place might implode. He saw fear in Kanaya’s eyes as she watched what was happening continue. Jade reached for Dave’s hand as the walls shook and the guards started going limp.

Then it all stopped. “Take her away! Throw them in a cell! Except Strider! Bring him to me, we still need a test run.” Sufferer yelled at the guards by the door. “Get up!” he commanded the guards gasping for breath on the ground. “Now!” he yelled.

“But…” Serket tried.

“The Empire will compensate you if he dies,” Sufferer added, “You will get your reward, bounty hunter.”

Dave was shoved forwards by the guards. He passed Rose and nodded to her. She smiled sadly at him. He could hear Jade and Kanaya yelling to him. He trusted Rose. He trusted her. Right?

Things started to get blurry as the hands shoved him onto the vertical platform. Suddenly he was being raised up over the vat. The heat started around him and he wondered if this was the last thing he was ever going to see and he didn’t want that so he looked up. He was Rose and Kanaya and Jade all staring at him, silent. He wished he could see Karkat one last time.

The panel started to drop into the vat. He didn’t even know what was waiting for him, there was so much steam.

“It was lit!” he cried, and fighting against the shackles, held out two fingers, in one last glorious peace out.

Chapter Text

John was scared. He was scared because nothing was happening. If something was happening, he could fight against it, or make a plan, or do something and act. But nothing was happening. He’d wake up. He’d eat. He’d hear Iignis playing outside his window. They’d only been here two days, but days were short on Abregado-rae. They needed to get to the rest of the fleet and stop endangering this woman and her husband. Every second they spent here was a second the Empire could be getting closer.

Still…. He stood looking out the window into the sunlit forest. This place was beautiful. He knew only a few miles away was a trading port similar to the one on Tatooine, filled with thugs and murder and crime, but out in the country, it was peaceful. No one really bothered you if you didn’t bother them.

Someone cleared their voice behind him. “And just what the hell are you doing out of bed?” Ellaine scolded him from the doorway. He smiled and turned around.

“I’m fine,” he told her. She nodded wryly and took the half empty glass of water off the bed stand and placed it at his feet.

“Okay, John. Pick that up,” she told him, crossing her arms.

John looked at the glass, all lit up in the dusty sunlight. He bent at the waist, but his hand couldn’t reach the short glass. He heard Ellaine grunt but he kept trying. He started to lower his right leg, and his fingers barely touched the rim. With dismay, he tensed the muscles in his left leg to bend down.

He cried out and fell forward into Ellaine’s arms. She nodded as she helped him back into the bed. “See? You’re probably used to a quick fix but we don’t have that kind of technology here on the farm and I think bringing you into the port is out of the question.”

John nodded sorely and sat back on the bed. She was right. He’d seen his own wanted posters on the web using a computer she had given him. He checked a few darknet sites that he knew as well and they all confirmed the same thing. He was a criminal against the Empire. He was surprised to find that this didn’t bother him. All he cared about was that Iignis’ picture was right there next to his.

When he showed Iignis, and she asked if they were going to get out, he had told her that of course they would. He hoped that was true, though. He felt responsible for her now. He really didn’t want to, but that was the just way it was. That was what was right, right?

“We’re trying to get a ship lined up for you and Iignis,” Ellaine told him, but her eyes were unfocused. “John, there are Stormtroopers in the trading port, though. Purchasing a ship without suspicion is becoming more and more difficult. They know you’re here.”

John nodded. “I know. I don’t want to put you at any more risk than is needed. You’ve already been too kind.”

“We’ll get you out,” she repeated. “We’ll…” she tilted her head to the window. John held his breath and he could hear it too. There was a motor in the distance, getting closer.

“Iignis!” they both yelled. She’s been in the forest, where the sunlight wouldn’t get to her skin. Ellaine fell to her knees and threw a rug on the floor back. She ran outside without having to explain.

John groaned as he pushed himself to his feet and fell to the floor as gently as he could. He ran his fingers along the wood until a board shook as he did. He found purchase with his fingernails and pried the small piece out, revealing a handle underneath. He pulled on it and opened up the hatch. He slowly started the stairs into the darkness.

A moment later, Ellaine ran in with Iignis. “You have to hide,” she said. Iignis nodded and waited impatiently for John to descend the stairs. The motor grew louder, coming now from the other side of the house where the entrance was. It shut off. John’s foot touched the level ground. He stepped back as Iignis threw herself in after him. Ellaine shut the hatch on them, leaving them only the darkness. He heard the wooden piece go in, the flap of the rug, and the hurried footsteps out of the room.

“Are you okay?” he whispered to Iignis.

“Shut up!” she responded. “Listen.”

They heard footsteps and voices.

“…no. No one like that 'round these parts, Ma’am,” Ellaine said smoothly.

“Well, do you mind if we search the house?”

“Ha! Is that necessary? I know the Empire has jurisdiction here, but isn’t that still illegal?” she laughed.

“It’s only illegal if we don’t find anything,” the other voice responded coolly.

There was a pause, then a sigh. “Fine.”

“Thank you.”

They heard footsteps growing louder and fainter as whoever was searching the house made their rounds. The door creaked above them. “Do you live alone, Miss Alverez?” the voice asked.

“No,” Ellaine responded. “I live with my husband. Our children rarely visit anymore,” she sighed.

“So why is there a second room with an unmade bed?” the voice asked.

Ellaine scoffed. “There’s a reason the kids don’t visit, with the way their father acts? I kicked him out of my bedroom a while ago.” She added, mumbling, “Let’s see how long it takes for me to kick him out of my house, too.”

Another pause. John took Iignis’ hand and gently led her to the cold concrete wall. He pushed his body against the wall, and gently put his hand on her chest and pushed to indicate her to do the same. If they opened the hatch, they’d still be obscured by darkness.

“Thank you for your compliance,” the voice said in clipped tones. The footsteps left. The motor started and faded away. John and Iignis waited. More footsteps. The rug. The piece. The hatch, and suddenly the light. Iignis had been expecting it, and already had her eyes closed.

“We have to get out of here!” John grunted as he heaved himself up the stairs. “You can’t get hurt because of us!”

Ellaine shook her head as she pulled him out. “We’re trying! Vez is working on it.”

John shook his head and turned to Iignis. “We should steal a ship tonight. The sun will set in an hour, but I won’t leave without you, and I’ll need your help.”

“Okay,” Iignis said. “I trust you, and I don’t want anyone else to die because of me.” Her horns flickered for a moment as a few yellow sparks bloomed and dissipated around them. She sat back on her heels, ready for orders.

“Please,” Ellaine begged them, “If you two get hurt…”

“It won’t be your fault,” John finished for her quickly, placing his hand on hers. “It’s our choice. I have some very important information to get back to the Rebellion. This is our decision and my duty.”

“Mine too!” Iignis said, offended. “I’m a Rebel now, too!”

John frowned. Maybe in labs, yes, if she wanted to, but if she was a Rebel he was going to do everything in his power to make sure she was never deployed. She was too young right now, but something told him that he’d always think she was too young.

“Okay,” John sighed. Ellaine helped him to his feet and then to sit on the bed. “We need to make a plan.” Without saying why, Ellaine wiped a tear away from her eye and handed him his clothes.

“If my husband is not back by sunset,” she said, “then I will help you. Give him forty minutes, John.” Her dark eyes begged him not to go. John swallowed hard and took the clothes she held out to him.

He agreed to wait. As her and Iignis left the room so he could change, he pushed down the vomit threatening to escape his stomach. Forty minutes till sunset. He didn’t like watching the minutes till darkness anymore, no matter how important.

He opened the little side pocket in his boot and stuck his hand inside. Good, his inhaler. That would have been bad if he somehow lost it. He frowned. There was something else, too. He dug both items out and opened his palm. There before him rested one white inhaler and one red kyber crystal.

Forty minutes later and Vez had not shown up yet. John glanced at his watch, and then pushed himself off the bed with the aid of a cane. He hated this. Anyone could attack him in this condition. How the hell was he going to protect Iignis?

He looked at her, sitting patiently on the little stool in the corner of the room. She tugged at the sleeves of her lab coat. Ellaine had washed it, but there were still spots where John had bled on her the night they came.

“Iignis,” he said. She looked up. “Do you still have that lightsaber?”

She nodded and pulled the silver tube out of her pocket. The thing was crude, basically a cylinder welded together and a simple switch on the side. John turned it over in his hands. “Can you use it?” he asked.

Iignis smiled and shrugged. “I mean, I can turn it on, but I’m really not the best at fighting. I’ve never really had to do it, and my lusus was never aggressive with me as a wriggler.” She smiled again, guilty.

“That’s fine,” John quickly assured her. “We’ll figure it out.” He smiled at her, but he had no idea how assuring that was. Most of the wounds on his face had healed nicely, but there were a few nasty scars here and there that hadn’t absorbed the medication yet. He really hoped that they’d go away. He didn’t like scars. They were bad for cover.

With John’s hand on her shoulder, they walked out of the door and into the living room where Ellaine sat with her hand folded solemnly in her lap. She looked up at them mournfully and then back down to the communicator on the table. “Vez is held up in security,” she sighed, shaking her head. “They’re screening everyone. Are you two sure you want to go through with this?”

Just looking at her broke John’s heart. He couldn’t tell why she cared about them so much. He looked down at Iignis. She smiled up at him as she tied her short hair back out of her face.

“We have to get back to the Rebellion,” she said simply. John nodded. He hoped that she was saying that because she meant it and not just because she felt like she had too. She was so young.

Ellaine sighed again and pushed herself up. “There’s an unregistered speeder in the garage. Take it, and go through the south entrance into the trading port if you can. It’s a gamble. There’ll be less police, but those that are there have more cause to arrest you.” She looked around the adobe house until her eyes fell on a drawer. She sighed again and walked over to it, unlocking it with a key from her dress. “And I’ll suppose you’ll want one of these, John.”

John took the blaster gratefully. “Thank you,” he said. She just nodded and led them out into the countryside dusk.

The garage was small and the speeder sat under a tarp and a blanket of dust. Iignis helped Ellaine pull the cover off. Ellaine gave John the startup code and stepped back. He wanted to hug her goodbye but didn’t know how.

Iignis looked from John to the crestfallen woman. She crossed the few steps to her slowly. Ellaine did not look up as she did. Iignis cleared her throat. “Yes?” Ellaine said.

Iignis quickly hugged her waist and stepped back. “Thanks for everything,” she said. That must have been some kind of final straw, because Ellaine broke. She gasped and suddenly tears streamed openly down her worn face.

Without knowing what else to do, John hobbled forwards and put his arms around the woman. She leaned into his chest and sobbed for maybe ten whole seconds before pulling herself away and looking up at him. She smelled like fire and fresh clothes.

“Ah, don’t mind me,” she laughed quietly as she wiped her eyes. “I just want you kids to be alright.”

“Is there anything we can do for you?” John not so much asked, but pleaded. He couldn’t bear not helping her for all that she’d done. She’d been a mother to them and neither John nor Iignis had ever had that before. “I can request leave for your daughter. What’s her name? Please…”

Ellaine chuckled. “Oh, dear, I wish that were possible.” John didn’t’ understand. How could she smile and cry at the same time? “But my daughter never did make it back from Yavin.”

That had settled it. As John drove the speeder through the calm countryside, he decided that Iignis couldn’t ever fight. She didn’t even want to, so there wouldn’t be a problem anyways, but... too many people were dying.

He watched the silhouette of someone tending to a heard of big, lazy grazing animals. What if the Death Star targeted this system, this planet? What if the second Death Star was already operational? Everybody here… Ellaine, her husband, everyone in the port, everyone in these fields… dead. What did they do to anyone? He gripped the yoke tighter. It was wrong, and the Rebellion needed to know, otherwise Nepeta and Equius died for nothing.

“Pull your cloak down,” John told Iignis. “And stop sparking.” There was a crackle of energy in the seat next to him. “Iignis!”

“Sorry! I get nervous!” she whined, and the sparks started to grow brighter. John pulled back on the speeder as they neared the south entrance, a huge metal gate that spanned both the road and river in. They’d have to get into the canal if they wanted to get anywhere. The whole city ran on waterways.

“What makes you calm?” he asked her. The sparking diminished a small bit.

“What?”

“When you broke me out, and flew the ship, and landed here, and got me help, and did all of those badass things,” he said slowly, “what made you calm? How did you do it?”

She giggled almost frantically into her cape. “It’s silly.”

The gate loomed closer. “It’s not silly if it keeps you alive,” he told her. “Tell me.”

Iignis coughed. “I pretend I’m my ancestor. Most trolls on Alternia have one. Mine was a chemist called The Catalyst. She went on adventures all around Alternia before being captured by the Empress and was forced to work in her laboratory designing weapons, but she escaped in the end.”

John smiled. “Good. Keep that in mind. You’re going to need it in there. Things might get bad.”

He pulled off to the side of the little road and turned off the speeder. He wished to tell Ellaine where he was going to leave it, but it was too dangerous to send a message that could lead people back to her. The gate remained about half a mile ahead.

Once that was done, he motioned for Iignis to come to the water with him. They sat on the bank under the shadow of a bush and waited.

“See how narrow these canals are?” John asked her. She nodded. “Back in the day, these were the perfect size for small trading ships, but now transport rafts have gotten bigger, but an increase in the size of the canal would mean bigger water flow, and the city inside can’t handle that.” She nodded again. “Do you know why this is important?” She shook her head.

John held out a hand and motioned to the long, flat metal raft that floated slowly towards them. “It means that thing’s sides are almost touching the bank. We can basically step on.” Her eyes widened. He nodded and pointed to her horns. She took a deep breath and the light subsided.

The raft wasn’t huge, maybe thirty meters, but lucky for them it was carrying livestock. The whole bottom half of it was just fenced in animals. Noises of snorting and stomping drifted towards them from the soft lapping of the water. John used his cane to pull himself into a crouch, and waited until the raft had almost completely passed them by.

He motioned for Iignis, pushed himself up while holding his breath so as not to grunt, and stepped onto the back end of the boat, holding onto the metal fence and ducking his head. His cane smacked against the metal. He swore silently and forced himself to duck further in case someone heard the clash. He heard no footsteps and let out his breath. All in order. He turned to Iignis. Iignis was not there.

“Iignis!” he yelled in a whisper to the shadow of her standing on the shore. She ran after him, but the boat was faster than it looked. Her horns sparked like crazy.

“Grab my cane!”

He held out the metal stick with his right arm and prepared himself for the pain in his left. As she grabbed onto the cane, he yanked back with his right arm and held on with his left, despite the burning spike of pain where his left arm was still bandaged. Iignis landed on the metal fence panting.

John put a finger to his lips and motioned for her to get into the corral. Her eyes widened in the soft twilight. She shook her head. The gate’s shadow now fell on the top half on the raft. John grabbed the collar of her lab coat and pushed her forward. She landed in a huff between to bleating animals. John clamped his jaw and forced himself over the fence to land next to her.

He gagged as his nostrils shriveled. The smell burned. Iignis glared at him under the shadows of furry bellies. He shrugged apologetically.

“Papers,” the heard a droid say ahead of them. There was a shuffling of something and a beep. A green line of light could be seen at the top of the boat, slowly coming towards them. John scooted under the belly of the closest animal and motioned for Iignis to do the same. She cringed but did as she was told.

The light passed over them harmlessly.

“Access granted.”

The raft drifted on through the gate. Through the legs and the stench of the cargo, John saw the edge of the canal wall. He tapped Iignis on the shoulder and pointed to tell her to stand up on his signal. The raft continued through another gate, this time without needing identification, and all at once the soft lights of outer city flowed down on them. The boat took a turn and headed towards a brightly lit dock, but John could just barely make out a tunnel ahead of them.

“Get off at the tunnel,” John whispered to Iignis. She looked up as the shadow of the brick tunnel started over them. John pushed himself up and staggered into an animal. He heard Iignis’ quick feet hop over the fence and onto the side walkway. He swore as he tried to get his lame leg over the small fence.

“Come on,” Iignis whispered in the half darkness. John could see the light at the end of the tunnel approaching quickly. He forced his right arm to lift him up, swung his right leg over, and flung himself off the back of the boat just as the darkness ended.

He fell forward and would have slammed into the wall if Iignis hadn’t grabbed his arm. He panted against the wet stone. “That was close,” he sighed.

“Yeah,” Iignis breathed.

They hobbled out coolly into the stone street, even waving at the merchant who had unknowingly snuck them in. Iignis bounced as she walked, and John reminded her to think of The Catalyst, and what she would do. Iignis breathed deeply and walked a little slower.

“Getting in and out will be the hardest part,” John told Iignis as they walked. It was a beautiful city. He wondered how the place looked in daylight. There was a nice mix of modern and old that blended well. John had seen pictures of Naboo’s capital, Theed, and it didn’t look old like this city looked old. Theed looked like it was trying to be old, and preserve a time gone by. This place had stone walkways under metal storefronts and neon lights. It’s new grew out of the old in a way that somehow worked.

It’d be a nice place if it wasn’t crawling with Stormtroopers.

They were in some kind of shopping district. That livestock was probably headed to a butcher for stores. While there weren’t as many Stormtroopers here, they may run into more along the way. They were wanted, after all.

“A parking garage would be nice, but probably won’t have the kind of long-distance ship we’ll be looking for,” he continued, “so I suggest we find a maintenance shop and just steal one from there. There’s bound to be at least one that’s completely ready to fly. How does that sound, Iignis? Iignis?”

The sights and smells and music had enchanted her cooped up soul a little more than he’d been expecting. John shook his head and pulled her hood down farther.

“Hey! Now I can’t see!” she objected.

“And no one can see you, either,” John argued. “Keep your head down.”

Her black hood bobbed as she nodded.

They weaved out of the active part of the city and slowly strolled down a block of closed shops and spare parts places. While John hated the limp, it did give him a nice façade under the darkness as someone who really couldn’t fend for himself. He kept that in mind as one hand under his cloak stayed fixed on the grip of his blaster.

Twice they’d walked past Stormtroopers. They kept their heads down and that seemed to do the trick, but two people wondering the streets were already too suspicious. A human male and a troll child were said to be hiding on Abregado-rae. The shoe fit like a glove.

After walking a dark loop of sidewalk lined canal twice, John stopped on a corner. “There’s a pricey garage halfway down the canal,” he told Iignis. “I need you to cut a hole in the glass with your lightsaber and break in.”

“What!” she squawked. He shushed her. She frowned at him and suddenly remembered trolls and their weird thing with shushing them.

“I mean, be quiet,” he whispered. “As soon as you touch that place, Stormtroopers are going to flood us, okay?”

“No. Not okay,” she said, shaking her head so hard he thought her horns might fly off. “Not okay at all! Why would we do that?”

“You are going to do that because I am going to be breaking into the garage across the canal,” John told her. “And after you set any ship of your choosing to autopilot itself anywhere, you’re going to run out to meet me in the Corellian Cruiser I am going to steal, and we are going to scram as fast as our asses can take us. Understand?”

“That’s a terrible plan!” she spat, her head sparking and her fists shaking. “They have security all over the city! How will we get out? Hmm?”

“Quietly,” John told her. “Also, those two Stormtroopers patrolling this area have ten minutes left on their circuit, so I’d get moving if I were you.”

He turned and limped over the bridge towards the beaten up garage that was no doubt being run into the ground by its shiny competition across the street. He took out his baster once he reached the metal side door, the door where he had earlier peeked into its window and saw the nice little man doing his final tune-up on the nice little cruiser. John and Iignis had to walk the loop twice before he left the shop dark and vacant.

John listened to the faraway sounds of the city nightlife. As soon as Iignis’ lightsaber lit up across the street, John whipped his blaster out and shot the door panel twice. It blew open and he limped into where the cruiser was. He shot the security panel too.

His sweating hands fumbled to undo the magnetic clamps and lower the cruiser into the transport raft below the garage. The garage floor opened with agonizing slowness. He lowered the cruiser onto the raft and hobbled down a ladder to reach it. The floor above him started to close as he steered the raft out from under the shop and onto the canal.

Iignis stood shaking on the edge of the canal, lit lightsaber in her hands. John pulled back his hood so she could see him. Her face lit up. She ran and tumbled onto the raft just as the alarms sounded in the big garage.

“Quickly,” John hissed, “throw that tarp over this cruiser.”

Iignis nodded and scurried behind him with the tarp. John slowly steered the raft down the canal. He pulled his hood down as the lines of Stormtroopers began racing down the streets. A screeching noise sounded behind him. He whipped his head around to see the roof of the other shop opening and a Nubian ship hovering out.

“Nice,” he laughed to Iignis.

“That was awful,” she moaned. “I was so afraid we were going to be caught!”

Stormtroopers shouted as the ship geared up to take off. Blasters were fired and signals were called in. Some smart one had the brains to launch a tracker at the ship before its engines ignited and carried the ship away.

John rubbed beneath his cracked glasses and laughed. “Iignis, you did amazing!”

She sort of fell to her knees. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

John steered the raft to the edge of the trading port, the south entrance, the way that they had come in. The sun would rise in a few hours, and the city had finally quieted down. John simply shot the droid that asked for papers and continued to drift down the canal into the quiet darkness. Gentle noises of the water guided the raft through the night, and the stars shone brightly outside the lights of the trading port.

“Alright,” John said to Iignis. She yawned at him. “Can you get that tarp off for me?”

She nodded sleepily and worked to clear the tarp off the ten-meter cruiser. It wasn’t much, but it wouldn’t have a tracker in it and it did have a hyperdrive. That was all they needed. John took a little sticky note off the canopy. On it was written the startup code.

He unlatched the canopy and showed Iignis how to strap into the copilot seat.

“Alternian vessels are much more advanced than these,” she told him, “but there aren’t enough psionics to pilot the Star Destroyer fleet.”

“Good thing for us,” John said as he pulled himself painfully up into the pilot’s chair. The canopy closed over them and he went through startup procedures. The ship hummed below him and John finally let his shoulders relax and unclenched his jaw. Finally, to just have a ship under his control. He rubbed his thumb along the yoke. He needed to pilot something.

As he went through the engine startup and pulled the ship into a hover, he felt the past weeks hit him hard. He’d never take off with Nepeta and Equius again. He’d never land with them. He’d never… do anything with them ever again. They’d never even get their bodies back. He rubbed his eyes before imputing the coordinates into the flight computer. What was Jade going to say?

“John,” Iignis coughed. He didn’t turn to her. He wanted to, but he’d already begun pulling the ship up through the atmosphere and wanted to look for dark shapes against the stars. Sometimes a keen eye was better than any computer.

“Yeah,” he grunted. His arm screamed as he pulled back the yoke and accelerated.

“Once we get back to the Rebellion…” but her words were lost under the roar of the engines. John used one hand to point to the headsets on the console. He clumsily put one on one handed. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Iignis adjusting hers to her horns.

“What?” he said as they shot into the darkness.

“I said!” she yelled, “That once we get back to the Rebellion, I’ll leave you alone. I know you don’t want to take care of me.”

John couldn’t help it. His first reaction was laughter. He yanked back the hyperdrive and took off his headset as the strange silence of hyperspace overtook the ship.

“Why are you laughing at me?” Iignis whined. Her yellow eyes glared at him. She crossed her arms and sunk into her cloak and lab coat.

“It’s just,” John laughed, “you’re so cute.” He laughed again and turned to her. “I don’t hate you, Iignis. In fact, I feel responsible for you.”

She tilted her head at him. “Why?”

John shrugged and turned back to the blue and white star swirl in front of them. “I guess… I think this war leaves so many of us alone, that it’s only right to take care of those of us that are left.”

Iignis yawned in her seat and tugged on the restraints. “Thank you, John Egbert.”

She fell asleep before John could say, “You’re welcome.”

Chapter Text

There were no guards. Now, Karkat wasn’t usually a field operative or anything, but even he was pretty damn sure that it was a pretty bad fucking sign when there were no guards. He’d never been to Cloud City, but as he zoomed over the magnificent floating buildings, he felt that this place should be scurrying with people. It was too big and too beautiful to be this silent and still. He felt fear, almost as thick as the clouds around him. Something was wrong.

He gripped the yoke tighter than he had been. The Mayor warned him to be careful. Protocol implied that unidentified vehicles, such as his, should be detained from flying over public airspaces, such as Cloud City. No one had come to meet them.

Karkat groaned into his helmet. It was a trap. It was so stupidly, painfully, dreadfully, obviously a fucking trap, and he was walking right into it, well, flying. There was not a doubt in his mind that he was in the right place. Dave, Jade, Rose, and Kanaya were here on Bespin. He didn’t even hesitate when his mind fixated on the landing platform in the middle of the city. They were in there. He knew it.

He hovered above the platform and dropped gently. He shut down the engines and sat in the still cockpit. Wind whistled on his canopy glass. It’d maybe been a full year since being in some place so civilized. All around him, the architecture and design welcomed him into the city in the sky.

There were two worlds folding into each other. There was the rank, sweaty cockpit of the X-Wing. It was worn, faded but familiar, and could take him right back to Redglare without risking his life. And there was the clean, new, deadly world outside of the glass.

An argument as to which world he would choose was unnecessary. It was obvious what he had to do.

He unlocked the canopy and braced himself against the wind.

Getting in was easy, painfully easy, so fucking easy a two-day old grub who threw a fucking hissy fit, rolled over and got stuck on their back, and accidentally spat on the entrance control panel could do it. That was too fucking easy.

He froze in the silent white corridor. The Mayor bumped into the backs of his knees. He glared at the droid. The Mayor shrugged. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to bring a droid along for backup, but he didn’t have any fucking backup and at this point, he was getting desperate. Dave would call him “player without a game” or some edgy hoofbeast shit. He’d probably be right, though, that fucking meme lord. If some prissy purple blood needed to spout about motherfucking miracles or some shit, all they needed to do was look at Dave’s life story. His shit was going to catch up with him one day.

Karkat continued down the corridor with one hand on his blaster and the other hovering over the lightsaber on his belt. It was a terrifying piece of machinery. Now he understood what Redglare had meant about picking your own kyber crystal. This thing radiated with her power, and he was pretty sure it hated him. Thing gave him the heebie fucking jeebies.

But he really couldn’t think about all that right now. He had to stay alert, focused. Fuck knows what could be around the next corner.

Around the next corner, he ran into a whole clusterfuck of surprises. He didn’t care that a Stormtrooper in blue armor was shooting at him. He didn’t notice her, even as he shot back. For a split second, through the haze and laser fire, all his seeing globes could focus on was the cool, measured, grayscale encased body of Dave fucking Strider. The maniac was flashing a peace sign in his preserved doom. What an asshole. Karkat was going to kill whoever did this to him.

He ran forward screaming and blasting with measured abandon. The trooper in blue signaled her men down a corridor and shot at Karkat to provide them cover. Karkat ran backward, slammed himself back around the corner he’d come from. A chunk of metal and stone blasted off the wall in front of him, spraying dust into his eyes and lungs. He coughed as he dropped to a knee at the bottom of the corner and swung out blasting-

Into nothing. He sprang forward and ran towards the closed door that the guards had taken Dave into. “Fuck!” he yelled as he slammed the closed door with his fist. The echoes of his failure drifted down the corridor and returned with the marching of feet.

At the end of the hallway entered a whole fucking squadron. He ran forward, blaster raised, to liberate Rose, Kanaya, and Jade from their guard, and whatever the hell that floating, winged, Dave doppelganger was. Of course there was fire as he bull rushed them.

“Karkat, no!” Kanaya yelled, along with Jade and Rose. Karkat shot a guard as he rushed to where his friends were being forced into a doorway.

“We’re bait! It’s a trap!” Jade yelled.

Karkat wanted to say, “Yes, Miss Harley. I am capable of recognizing a trap when I see one. This particular one is quite well laid out, and for the time being, I can see no foreseeable way of freeing said bait, and said target, from said trap. But I’m fucking trying!” But since he was literally charging a whole group of people with better guns than he had, all he could do was grunt and hope that the message got across.

One more laser sunk into a grey clothed guard as the last of them ran into the doorway. Karkat pushed his legs to move faster, but once again, he reached a closed door instead of an escape. He swore and blasted the door panel with five shots. The door did not swing open. That was okay. Sometimes ye ol’ blasting the panel trick didn’t go so well. The door got stuck.

He pushed on the sides of the door with all his might. Nothing. “Fuck!” He slammed his eyes closed and tried to use the Force to open it, but too many things happened at once for him to focus.

Rose’s guilty assurance, Kanaya’s fear, Jade’s anger… he felt it but he didn’t know where. He tried to shove it out of his mind but instead, he saw Dave’s frozen face, the insufferable smirk. He screamed and hit the door again. It was fucking useless. There was no way in hell that he’d get to them.

No! There was no way in hell he’d get to them through that damn door! He pushed off the door and tried the one beside it. It whooshed open easy enough. “Come on!” Karkat yelled at the Mayor, lingering in the corridor behind him.

His blood pusher throbbed in his chest in time with his boots smacking on the metal floor. He’d find them. He’d find them. He’d find them. He had too.

He emerged in some kind of metal anteroom that was blocked off by another door. Good, maybe he would get back to a landing pad and find Kanaya and the others!

That thought drove him to the end of the bare metal room and to the plain door awaiting him. He jabbed the panel as quickly as he could, just as the Mayor rolled into the room. “Come on!” Karkat yelled as he jumped into the darkness before him. The door immediately slammed shut behind him.

Dark shadows and red, blinking lights greeted him. “Shit…” he breathed. Stepping into the room, he suddenly felt the confusion of having suddenly realized that you were having a nightmare, but this was not the kind where you wake up. Fear wound its way into his already frantic body, and he holstered the blasters as soon as it did. The lightsaber at his side burned his thigh. He gripped it and ignited the blade. It was like holding a nuclear reactor between his fingers.

Across the red light and the darkness, Karkat made out a figure standing on some kind of platform. The whole room seemed to be something technical. Metal platforms rose and fell in the shadows and steam around him and his enemy. Karkat inched forward into the battlefield. Over the soft hiss of steaming pipes, another sound poisoned the air. It was labored breathing.

“You know that does not belong to you.”

“And my friends don’t belong to you, you creepy fuck,” Karkat said as he stepped forward possessed by the weapon in his hands. Not the best first line, he figured, but banter was for idiots anyway. His moirail, possible matesprit, and his friends were in danger and he was done trying to pretend that that cheesy shit didn’t matter to him. It was too exhausting.

So he lunged forward through the half-light and onto his oppressor. Sufferer swatted his first blow away lazily. Karkat swung the sword down in an attempt to pierce Sufferer’s black armor, but no luck. Sufferer batted away his attacker without trying.

Karkat pushed harder, but there was no way. Even with this saber, he was still a kid who didn’t know shit.

He screamed as Sufferer’s red lightsaber grazed his arm. Karkat parried the blow by scooping up Sufferer’s attack and shoving him away. That was a warning. That could have been much, much worse. He had to fucking do something!

Sufferer stepped to him and lashed his saber at Karat’s gut. Karkat jumped backward to a platform above and behind him, tripping as he did, but rolling up to a stance just as Sufferer climbed the stairs to his challenge. Karkat lunged and fell back, doing nothing but causing himself to panic even more.

Fuck! His lightsaber slipped in his sweating palms as Sufferer continued to hound him across the dark room. He couldn’t do this. Who could do this?

And there it was. He flicked his wrist in a way that felt unfamiliar, but natural, and Sufferer’s lightsaber fell away from his face.

What can the Force do? It can only do what you can do, Karkat.

He breathed out and listened to the clash as the two red streams of energy collided. He felt hands that were not his pull and push his weapon in ways he’d never learned.

The Force is you. It’s me. It’s everything. Good. Evil. Rebel. Empire… the air, the land, the stars… even the confines of time and space are not excluded from the reaches of the Force… it does not discriminate.

The Force could do what he could do, and he could fight like Jedi before him. He stepped forward and attacked Sufferer with all he could. Killing someone from a ship was easy. Killing someone in an unexpected fight was a little harder. But murdering someone? Actually planning to kill someone? Wanting to? This was new.

Sufferer laughed through his mask as he raised the intensity of his defense to match that of Karkat’s attacks. “Congratulations,” Sufferer told him between pained, but not exerted, breaths, “You can use that connection to the Force of yours. That’s good. Not many get that far.”

Karkat chose to not respond. Villainous asshole. Who tolerated this high a level of drama? How did the rest of that military operation treat his pretentious ass? No wonder Nepeta hated him so much.

But he couldn’t think of things like that right now. It was taking every ounce of his strength not to let his guard down. His mind held onto the knowledge and aide of those who were now a part of the Force as much as it could, but fear clawed out his focus and resolve and quickly replaced it with doubt and panic instead.

“Hmm…” the Sith mused as he defended himself from Karkat’s sloppy attacks. “I see you’ve been training, but there is still so much that you do not know.”

And the next thing Karkat knew, Sufferer had hooked Redglare’s lightsaber out of his hands and with on outward thrust of a hand, shoved Karkat off the platform they fought on. Karkat twisted in the air and fell into the steam filled carbon freezing chamber painfully. A hose moved over the rectangular pit. Karkat sprang up through the steam just as the molten carbonite began to gush. The freezing hot liquid grazed his boot as he flew through the air. His fingers looped around a pipe in the ceiling. He allowed himself to cling as tight as he could to the hot metal tube.

Maybe Sufferer would just leave him alone.

He watched as Sufferer drifted through the steam to look down into the steaming carbonite chamber. He heard the Sith Lord sigh. “Hmm… I should expect more from someone both Psiioniic and Redglare deluded themselves into training.”

Maybe he won’t look up…

He looked up and Karkat could imagine the troll inside smiling under the mask. “But you do surprise, don’t you, Karkat?”

Karkat watched as Sufferer shifted his weight on the floor. There was a reason the floor was metal grated, he realized. There was something below them.

“Oh yeah?” Karkat yelled as loud as he could.

“I would not lie to you,” Sufferer said softly, but honestly Karkat couldn’t care less. His voice had echoed into something far larger than this room and that’s all he needed to know.  He swung down onto the platform, used the Force to yank his lightsaber back, and attacked Sufferer with renewed ferocity. Sufferer’s feet stumbled to keep up with Karkat’s attacks, and the clashes of their weapons evolved into something more and more explosive.

“I ask you,” Sufferer said, a little more labored this time, “Did you learn to use your anger like this from them?” He skillfully evaded yet another one of Karkat’s attacks. “Or did you decide on your own that anger made a more powerful ally than indifference?”

For one moment, Karkat relented, but that was all Sufferer needed. Sufferer slammed his saber into Karkat’s chest. He tried to block, but merely deflected the attack, and his body crashed to the floor and slid to the edge of the room. His head slammed into a row of pipes. Stars flashed under his eyelids and suddenly Sufferer stood in front of him with his lightsaber pointed at his throat.

“Karkat…” Sufferer started slowly. He tilted his head towards the still ignited lightsaber that Karkat held in his right hand. “Anger is the only thing that-“

But Karkat didn’t let him finish. He pulled his blaster out and shot at Sufferer’s legs. Sufferer stumbled backward at the blasts, and Karkat took the opportunity to launch himself up and at Sufferer’s throat. In two seconds, he yanked the Sith forward and threw him over the pipes and into whatever was below them.

Sufferer’s cape made a flapping noise as he fell, but there was no crash. Karkat swore. He must have landed on his feet.

He pushed himself up and looked over the edge of the platform. The gloom made it impossible to see what lay below. He switched off the lightsaber and leaned on the pipes. All he could hear over his own breathing were the sharp hisses and creaks of the machinery.

He could leave. He didn’t have to kill Sufferer today. He could go and find Dave and Kanaya and Rose and Jade. He could walk away.

And he should have, but as much as he hated it, Sufferer was right. Psiioniic and Redglare hadn’t taught him how to fight like that. Sufferer wasn’t going to just fucking strut away from all the shit he’d done. Karkat was going to see to that personally, and after him, and Empress was going to get the same fucking deal.

He spotted a ladder into the pit.

Through the small tunnel, he saw a soft light. Karkat lit Redglare’s lightsaber and cautiously emerged from the entrance tunnel into the dark hallway. On his right, a huge circular window overlooked some enormous space at the heart of this floating structure. He scanned the room. His eyes passed over control panels and large pieces of machinery, but no Sufferer.

A shadow detached itself from the wall. Karkat threw himself forwards Sufferer with a vengeance but instead met a huge hunk of machinery flying towards him. He cleaved it in half with his saber, but already a new shadow ran out at him from the other direction. He swung and sliced again, avoiding yet another lethal blow. A wrench suddenly slammed into his side and he felt more than heard the rib crack.

A toolbox, a hammer, a dial… more and more attacked him from the air and through his abuse Sufferer slowly walked towards him from his corner. Karkat swore and cried out as more and more broke and bruised him. He used the Force to shove one more giant hunk of metal out of his way and as the window crashed he knew he was wrong.

Karkat’s body rocketed through the air. The reactor core behind him vacuumed air our from above the building and shot it out the bottom, allowing the building to float on the clouds in a pocket of low pressure.

He was wrong. Anger was not power. Strength gained through anger is just stupidity disguised as genius. What a fucking idiot. Everyone was going to die because he’d surged forward without thinking about any of it.

The winds grabbed Karkat’s small body and sucked it into the middle of the enormous wind reactor. His insides squirmed at the sudden upset of gravity.

He could have just walked away, come up with a plan, saved Dave, saved Jade, saved Kanaya, saved Rose… hell maybe even saved John wherever the hell that cheeky bastard was.

Inertia released his free fall and let the vacuum and gravity pull Karkat at dizzying speeds right to the metal console platform in the middle of the wind reactor.

They could save themselves, he hoped. If anything, his death would buy them a little time.

Karkat didn’t actually remember hitting the platform, just the insane pain that shot through every fiber of his body the second after he did. He rolled off the gantry and over the side the second after the second he had hit. His grasping hand found purchase on the edge of the sky bridge. Somehow, his other hand managed to keep a death grip on Redglare’s lightsaber. No coherent thoughts, just blind panic, pulled him up onto the platform. He spat sour blood onto his shirt and the roaring winds dried it moments later.

He pushed himself up on shaking legs and limped towards the circular middle ground of the console platform. Sufferer already had entered the reactor shaft and walked towards Karkat from the other end of the platform. Pitifully, Karkat observed that the door was on that end, and the only promising thing behind him was the drop off into the abyss.

With one last deep breath, Karkat raised his lightsaber. If he was going to die, he might as well try to take the bastard down with him. He pushed his miraculously unbroken legs to run across the narrow platform and met Sufferer swinging.

The Sith fought back not easily, but well, pushing Karkat back with every other move. Karkat gained no ground.

“Now,” Sufferer yelled over the wind, “Now you see that as a Jedi you cannot-“

Karkat screamed and pushed forward. He didn’t want to hear any of this bullshit. He wanted to kill him, and he was angry, and he was defeated, and he was tired of all of it.

“Let me speak!” Sufferer yelled as he pushed Karkat further towards the end of the gantry.

Karkat scoffed and rolled his eyes. People always told him that rolling his eyes would cost him, but Karkat had never guessed that he’d pay for it with his hand.

Sufferer lunged and one-second Karkat had a right hand holding a lightsaber, and the next he did not have any right hand at all. He screamed as he stumbled backward. Sufferer switched off his weapon and followed behind Karkat’s agonizing walk to the end.

Karkat’s back hit a pole. He slid down to his knees and held onto the length of metal. His red tears tinted everything around him, especially the demon stalking ever so slowly closer. The fear in his chest was chased away by pain. It hurt, to know that he was going to die and all because folly had sunken its teeth too deep. He wished desperately that his nihilistic ways might suddenly return, and usher him into the great unknown with dignity, but there was no such saving grace. He was to die alone and sad.

“Karkat,” Sufferer said, “you are better than this. You are better than anything that Psiioniic or Redglare or any other Jedi believes that you can be.”

Karkat laughed. It hurt his chest. “The bar’s pretty fucking low already, pal.” At least he could put this smug asshole in his place before he became one with the Force, if not with murder than with sass.

Sufferer stepped closer. “I can train you to be more than you know. Please, let me show you what it means to be powerful. You have so much power already inside you. We can make the galaxy whole again! You and I!”

Karkat sobbed but kept his grimace. “Join your little Empress fan club? Fuck that shit! I can wear all black and pink in my free time without terrorizing the galaxy. In your wet dreams, you fuchsia pushover!” The corners of his vision played with the idea of darkness. He tried to blink the tunnel vision away. If he was going to bleed out, he at least wanted to make the most of it.

“You and I are the same!” Sufferer yelled.

Karkat scoffed but just ended up coughing up more red blood. “You, me, Psiioniic, Signless… apparently there are a lot of stubborn people who can fling shit through the air without touching it.” The darkness crept closer but he wouldn’t let it win. That’s how blood loss worked, right?

This time Sufferer laughed. He reached his hand out towards Karkat. “Psiioniic trained me as well as Signless, Karkat.” Karkat gripped the pole with his one hand tighter.

“What the fresh hell do you mean by that?”

“I am Signless. I am the troll that imprinted on your egg. I am your destiny.”

With one last burst of energy, Karkat laughed again. “And I couldn’t care less.”

On that note, he let go. His body fell back into the endless pit and Sufferer shrunk smaller and smaller until there was nothing more of him. Karkat closed his eyes and readied himself for the splat, or the crunch, or the rush of endless sky that would signal his end. Instead, there was a pop as an exhaust vent opened and sucked him into a long tube of slightly less wind. He tumbled to a stop in a dip in the vent.

He gasped and coughed and sputtered, painfully grinning through it all.

“I’m alive!” he croaked out to no one in particular. He kept his handless arm shoved under his left armpit as he kicked on an octagonal plate below him. If he could just find a service shaft or something, then maybe-

The plate slipped off and a rush of wind sucked him down into some other tube. This one was slick. Karkat fought desperately to hold onto something, anything, but found nothing. The machine spat him out into the air, and he fell into the windy expanse and reached out for anything once again.

He landed on an electric weather vane. It had three horizontal bars attached to one vertical shaft. Karkat’s foot hooked onto the middle bar. His head swung down to face the cloudy nothingness below him. On and on the orange and pink clouds went. They would have gone on forever had the black clouds not impeded them.

Tunnel vision, Karkat realized sadly. He was blacking out.

Karkat pulled himself upright. He twisted his body so that his feet hooked onto the bottom bar and shoved his torso between the first and second bars. As the ringing in his ears started to grow louder than the wind, he wrapped his arm around the shaft and stuck his only hand in his pocket.

It was the best that he could do before the darkness overtook him. Darkness, then ringing, then nothing.

Chapter Text

“And then what happened?” Iignis asked with eyes wide. She sat in Kanaya’s lap. Rose and Kanaya had decidedly adopted the girl as soon as they met her. Only a few hours after she and John had arrived at Haven, the Falcon had jumped out of hyperspace and docked on one of the massive transport ships. There’d been a lot of confusion, but finally, there was a moment for them all to rest.

John watched Karkat shake his head. It was quiet now, after the commotion. He had already been in the medical bay when Kanaya, Rose, and Jade ran in behind Karat’s hovering stretcher. They didn’t even notice him at first. Karkat was put into intensive care and John had to grab Jade’s arm to ask her what the hell was going on. Jade gave him a quick hug and told him they’d explain later.

Later had come after Karkat’s surgery. John himself couldn’t keep awake with all the drugs they had in him, and after a few hours of him being awake while Karkat was asleep and Karkat being awake while he was asleep, they’d finally gained consciousness at the same time.

“Hey fuckface,” Karkat had groaned at John, “good to see ya still breathing”. John had blinked and smiled. Karkat looked terrible. His whole face was a mess of purple and blue bruises. One eye was swollen shut and his lip had stitching still in it.

“Hey, Kar,” John signed. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

Karkat nodded bleakly. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

John didn’t have to ask what the condolences were for. He’d arrived without Nepeta and Equius. What more was there to say? He would have immediately requested rescue team if there’d been a point. His silence had told his officers that there wasn’t one. He requested to speak with Feferi as soon as possible, but she was on a different ship planning things. He could wait.

And Kanaya and Rose had barged in before him and Karkat could talk. They each held one of Iignis’ hands and swung her between them as they walked. Iignis giggled and had rushed towards him when she saw that he was finally awake.

“John, I love your friends!” she yelled. Rose smiled down at her and patted her head.

Kanaya pulled up a chair and her and Rose sat between him and John. “Hello, John,” she said softly. He didn’t know how much Iignis had told her, and he really didn’t want to at the moment.

“Hey,” he smiled. “Where’s Jade? And where’s Dave, I never saw him come in.”

Rose played with Iignis’ hair. John gripped the bed sheets and Rose shook her head suddenly.

“No, he’s alive!” she said quickly. “But… we need to get him back.”

“What the hell happened?” John asked. “I feel like it’s been years.”

Karkat struggled to sit up next to him. “Yeah I’d like to know that too. All I remember is waking up on the Falcon with everyone screaming their asses off about a broken hyperdrive and-“ he paused and screwed his face up like he’d just thrown up a little. “-and I remember feeling Sufferer on the Star Destroyers that were chasing us.”

John watched Karkat clench his good fist.

“I suppose that means we’re going first,” Kanaya sighed. She shifted Iignis in her lap. “Jade and Davesprite have already left. They took the Falcon to get a head start on tracking down Dave,” she said.

“Who?” Karkat and John asked at the same time.

“We’ll get to that, patience,” Rose laughed.

“Alright then,” Kanaya started. She and Rose both looked different than the last time John had seen them. They looked tired but so happy that they were alive. Seeing how they were with Iignis made John smile. The three of them would be a good thing.

“As soon as we left Hoth’s atmosphere, Dave, Jade, Rose, and I found ourselves facing multiple Imperial Star Destroyers…”

“…and Karkat had almost gotten to us before the doors shut,” Kanaya continued.

“And then what happened?” Iignis asked with eyes wide.

“Well, Davesprite happened,” Rose explained with a smirk. “We tried to get to Dave, but things got in the way. Serket took off before we could get to her. It was all Davesprite could do to get us even to the Falcon! Sufferer’s troops were all over us as we ran around that precocious labyrinth. We took out as many as we could on our way out.”

Kanaya nodded. “It was our luck that you brought WV along, Karkat,” she added. “He got us through the security codes and onto the ramp. While we were racing out, Davesprite, don’t ask me how he did, watermarked his entire face onto the sky and told the citizens to evacuate.”

“We had to shake off a couple of TIE fighters on the way out, but we survived…” Kanaya trailed off. John could tell that she and Rose were being theatrical for Iignis’ sake, but now Kanaya’s voice got quiet as she looked at Karkat.

“And I knew that we couldn’t just leave you,” she almost whispered. “I knew you were alive. I knew you were under the city. What happened should have been impossible. You fell, but Davesprite flew out and caught you. The timing… how I knew… I felt it. I don’t understand.”

She and Karkat stared at each other for what seemed like forever. John wanted to ask what kind of telepathic conversation they were having, or whatever, but knew that it wasn’t the time. They’d tell him when they could.

“And we fought the hyperdrive for a few moments, you woke up to utter something ominous, and we flew off into the stars. And that was that…” Rose finished up, ruffling Iignis’ hair, which Kanaya had been combing flat for the past ten minutes.

“We’ll find Dave,” John said.

“Fuck yeah we will,” Karkat agreed.

Kanaya cleared her throat. “And you?” she asked quietly, taking her moirail’s hand.

Karkat’s recount was much more abbreviated that Rose and Kanaya’s. John felt like Karkat wasn’t saying everything that had happened on Dagobah, but hey, it sounded like most of that was training anyways. Still… Karkat was different. While he still spat out clever strings of profanity and gestured with as much range of motion he could achieve in his state, he seemed tired. More so than Kanaya and Rose, he looked depressed. Something had taken it out of him. John wasn’t going to press what just yet.

Karkat finished up eloquently, “So basically my space daddy is out there trying to brainwash me and cutting off my hand is how his fatherly ass decided to go about that. I’m calling child services.”

Kanaya pursed her lips. “Do you think his imprintment on you is why you are so inclined with the Force?”

Karkat shrugged so hard he winced. “Gah, fuck if I know and fuck if I care. I didn’t ask to be hatched by anyone.” With that, he turned to John and raised his eyebrows, one of which was mostly covered by a bandage. “And you, Johnny boy?” he asked.

John smiled at the tense silence that had fallen at the words. He was glad Karkat asked because he didn’t want to just pretend that it’d never happened. He didn’t want them to ignore that he’d just lost his partners and brought back random a child. But he didn’t want to talk about it either. The acknowledgment was about all he felt like shooting for at the moment.

He looked at Iignis. She’s stopped smiling. He leaned over and tilted her chin up. She looked up at the sparks dancing around her horns. John looked at her and hoped that she knew he wasn’t mad. He couldn’t be.

“Nepeta, Equius, and I landed on Alternia,” he said simply, “scouted out the refinery. It’s active and Iignis here can confirm that a second Death Star is in production.” Iignis nodded up at Kanaya and Rose sadly. “She worked there,” John said simply.

He laid back into the pillows and closed his eyes. “I made a mistake, and the three of us got caught. We were imprisoned for about a week by some trolls unaffiliated with Iignis. Nepeta and Equius were killed by them. I escaped with Iignis. We switched ships at Abregado-rae and flew back here.”

He opened his eyes and smiled quickly at Rose and Kanaya. They both distracted themselves with Iignis. “I’m so sorry, John,” Kanaya said. Rose nodded.

“Hey,” he sighed, “It is what it is.”

Rose and Kanaya left John and Karkat to themselves. John watched as Karkat tenderly unwrapped the bandages covering his new hand. It was a metal structure with enough joints to make it as dexterous as a normal hand. John wondered if Equius could have built a better one.

“Karkat,” John said, “Catch.”

Karkat flinched as he caught the little red crystal with his new hand. He turned the rock over and over from his new hand to his old. “Did… did they die because of this?” he asked quietly.

John leaned back and shook his head. “I think they died because of a lot of things. I’m one of them, and I don’t know how the hell I’m ever going to be okay with that.”

He listened to the clinking of the kyber on metal. Was that the point? To be okay, or was it just to survive? Right now, both seemed impossible.

But he was here. Iignis was here. Karkat was here. Dave was alive, somewhere. And that’s what mattered. Not what had brought them all to this point, but where they were going, what they were going to do.

After all of this, if there was one thing he could be sure of it was that moving forward was the only option any of us ever have, really. To think anything else meant you were already dead.