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Nemik is asleep— unconscious— and he has been since they escaped the atmosphere.
The moment they were safely out of the Eye, he started to fade. Maybe it was the med spike kicking in, or adrenaline fading, or maybe he was just in too much pain. Either way, they’d moved him down out of the cockpit and made him as comfortable as seemed possible. Vel had retrieved his manifesto from within his clothes and pressed it into his hands, and Nemik nodded his thanks and looked to Skeen, wild eyed and scared like he could feel himself slipping and didn’t want to be. Skeen stepped in, kneeling at his side and holding his hand, keeping eye contact as long as he could, as Nemik faded into the dark. Gently stroking his cheek, he leaned close over Nemik even after his eyes had closed and his breathing had gone slow.
There’d been the little fight about taking him to the doctor— for the first time, Skeen had been glad Clem was with them. Clem had been the deciding vote; he was taking them to the doctor to save Nemik’s life.
Vel went to the cockpit and stayed there, staring forward. Skeen guesses she’s feeling guilty for suggesting they skip the doctor and let whatever will happen to Nemik happen. Clem occasionally looks over his shoulder back at the cargo. Maybe to see if anything has changed with Nemik’s condition.
It hasn’t. He’s still breathing. He’s still unconscious.
Skeen returns to sitting on the floor of the trawler. With his knees up and his heart pounding in his throat, he sits with Nemik and brushes hair off his forehead and holds his hand. He unbuttons Nemik’s imperial uniform to give him more room to breathe. He can’t help himself but to lift Nemik’s undershirt, just to see. And as he feared, Nemik’s entire torso is a mottled contusion. He’s bleeding inside. He’s crushed, ground up.
The best of them. And he’s going to die.
Maybe this doctor is a miracle worker and maybe he’ll be able to fix Nemik’s insides and save him. Maybe he won’t be able to walk but he’ll live. But probably not. Skeen has seen injuries like this before, in labor camps. The people who have them die.
It’s too much damage.
And for what? So this messy, disorganized, meaningless rebellion can have eighty million credits? What are they even going to do with all that? There’s no leadership, no one who can use the money to do anything meaningful. The rebellion is too fractured. It’s an idea, not a movement. It’s certainly not a militia. It’s nowhere close to being an army.
Someone has to decide to buy the guns and decide when to use them. Someone has to know when to strike and how. The rebellion doesn’t have that someone. They’re fighting a war without any generals, without any consolidated oversight. It’s not a war that way. It’s a series of scattered skirmishes that accomplish nothing against an enemy better organized and more powerful than they ever could be.
And the only someone Skeen would have followed into real war is lying on the ground in front of him, dying.
He should’ve been paying more attention. He should’ve kept Nemik near him, kept a hand on his arm and pulled him to safety. Skeen never should have let this happen.
Nemik never should have been part of this to begin with.
Skeen stares at the pallets of credits and holds Nemik’s hand. His fingers are warm, still, at least.
What’s it all for? Why did they even do it? So they took eighty million credits from the Empire. It’s a drop in the bucket to them. It’s meaningless.
If he’d known it would end up like this— with Gorn and Taramyn dead and Nemik dying— Skeen might’ve jumped ship two months ago. He might’ve tried to take the kid with him. Anything to keep him alive and dreaming. Instead of dying and holding his manifesto like a lifeline that won’t save him.
If he’d left two months ago, if he’d left alone, at least he wouldn’t have had to know that Nemik didn’t make it. The only one of them who really deserved to come through it all— and he’s dying. It was just an accident too. A poorly secured pallet and the wrong time and the wrong spot and Skeen across the trawler, paying attention to something else. Just plain, hideous bad luck.
Bad enough for Gorn and Taramyn to be gunned down in the heat of it, fighting the fight to their last breath. But this? This meaningless, pointless death?
He’d rather have walked away and never known. Could’ve imagined Nemik alive and well for as long as he wanted.
He’d rather have never met Nemik at all than to be sitting next to him now, watching him breathe shallowly, afraid that every breath will be his last.
The credits gleam at him and it makes him sick. It all comes back to those fucking credits. Shouldn’t something good come out of stealing all that money? Something more than death and loss?
He stares for what feels like– and probably is– hours and Nemik doesn’t stir. Doesn’t wake. It’s too late.
He should’ve left two months ago, and dragged Nemik with him. Should’ve taken him away and convinced him, begged him, to not do anything so stupid as to put his life at risk ever again.
All Skeen can think about is how pointless it is. Pointless. Wasteful. Pointless. Purposeless. Pointless.
He goes numb.
“We’re almost there,” Clem calls from the cockpit, startling Skeen out of his thoughts. “Keep him steady.”
The landing is bumpy. Skeen keeps his hands on Nemik’s shoulders, holding him as still as possible. Clem is a good pilot and he does his best to set them down gently, but hitting the ground is still a jarring jolt.
Nemik shifts and for a moment it looks like he might stir into consciousness, but then he doesn’t.
Vel comes back from the cockpit. “I’ll get the doctor. He’ll have a stretcher—“ She doesn’t finish the thought before she’s got the door open and is down the ramp.
They’ve already moved him too much, Skeen knows. A gurney won’t make a difference. If his problem is his spine, which it certainly is, it’s too late to think keeping him still will help. He’s shredded in there. No doctor in the galaxy would be able to save Nemik’s legs. He’ll never walk again, that's obvious. If this doctor can save Nemik’s life, that alone would be a miracle. It's a miracle that will need every second they can scrape out.
So Skeen puts an arm under Nemik’s limp legs and an arm under his shoulders and lifts him. It’s easy enough. Nemik is light.
Clem finally comes down out of the cockpit. He’s frowning.
“Are you sure you should—?”
Skeen just holds Nemik tightly against his chest and takes him down the ramp. His head rolls away from Skeen’s shoulder.
Vel and the doctor are hurrying up, Vel quickly but efficiently telling what happened, what they did. The doctor gestures towards Nemik with his four arms, offering to take him from Skeen. He’s carrying a board in one of the hands; something to stabilize Nemik’s back, Skeen guesses.
“He’s been out for hours,” Skeen says, striding past towards the only little building in sight. He’ll take Nemik as far as he can, until someone tells him to leave.
Frowning and grumbling, the doctor scurries back the way he came, pointing Skeen into his surgery. There’s a table and a lot of mean looking equipment.
“Okay, kid, here goes.” Skeen lays Nemik on the table, taking a moment to arrange his legs, to brush hair off his forehead. To kiss his temple, light and quick.
“On his side,” the doctor grunts. Skeen does as he’s told and gently puts a hand on Nemik’s hip and one on his shoulder and turns him. The doctor steps in and Skeen steps back. He watches as the doctor cuts away Nemik’s shirt. The contusions are worse. The knobs of his spine look too sharp, and out of line.
How has he lived this long?
There’s a noise as the doctor runs his hands over Nemik’s back— a squeaking moan, then a prolonged one.
Skeen dashes around the table, skidding to kneel in front of Nemik’s face.
His eyes are open. He’s awake. He’s foggy, unfocused, but awake. Alive and mostly conscious.
“Karis.” Skeen touches his hands, his chin. A sick squeeze of hope punches through the numbness in his chest. “Hey.”
Blindly, Nemik moans, “Vel? Vel?”
The hope drops into a pit and dies.
“She’s here.” Skeen looks over his shoulder to where Vel and Clem are hovering by the door. He waves her over and she comes. Skeen fades out of the picture as Nemik whispers instructions to Vel, handing over his manifesto, asking a few barely audible questions. Nemik’s not interested in him. Even so, Skeen stays near, on the periphery but only just. His chest, his heart, is doing something sick and painful now. It’s giving up. It’s curling up and dying right along with Nemik delivering his final pronouncements.
Vel holds Nemik’s hands and his manifesto and nods seriously.
“I have to go in,” the doctor says, gruff and factual. “If there’s to be any hope.”
Hope. What a joke.
Skeen leans his way back into Nemik’s line of sight. The kid lifts his eyebrows at seeing him, surprised maybe, or glad. Almost like he didn’t see him before, or forgot that he had in his haze. He smiles. He didn’t smile at Vel.
“Skeen,” he sighs in a voice that’s too small. "Arvel." He opens his mouth like he might say more, but nothing comes out. The doctor is already injecting all sorts of things into his back— anesthesia and nerve blockers and who knows what else.
Skeen forces a smile as Nemik drifts back into the dark. If it’s the last thing the kid is ever going to see, it might as well be a smile.
Vel puts a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should wait outside.”
He nods, feeling the numbness rising up again. Vel can stay and assist the doctor. He needs some air anyway. He can’t stay here and watch Nemik’s blood pour out onto that table and he can’t be there for the moment he dies. That would be too much. That would be unbearable.
He wants Nemik to outlive him. That’s how it’s supposed to go.
So he wanders out to the trawler, where Clem is sitting on a crate and staring at his hands.
Fucking Clem, who’s only here for money. Who doesn’t give a fuck about the rebellion, about sacrifice, about Nemik. Knew him for three days and liked him enough to bring him to a doctor. That’s nice, but it doesn’t mean shit. Clem is going to walk away from here with enough money to be comfortable and free for the rest of his life. Far away from the fighting and the horrors. Far away from loss and pain. Clem is going to take what he came for and leave.
Isn’t that lovely?
Meanwhile, Skeen is going to carry it forever. The five standard months on Aldhani. Nemik.
He never should have let himself care about Nemik. Never should have teased him or talked to him or fed him. Never should have put a blanket over his shoulders or taught him how to shoot a blaster blind or trimmed his hair for him. Never should have smiled at him. Never, ever, should have allowed himself any soft feelings for Nemik, let alone the kind of soft feelings that turn into hard passions. All-or-nothing feelings that so easily become deadly.
It made him vulnerable. It made him dependent. It made him willing to throw away his safety, his independence, their plan, everything.
And Nemik is going to die.
The air is cool and clear and feels clean in Skeen’s lungs. Not foggy and thick like the air on Aldhani. Clean and crisp and dry. It’s refreshing. Or it would be, if Skeen didn’t already feel like he was drowning.
What’s the point of any of this? Why bother with it if it’s all going to end like this? In death and pain and grief? Every time. Forever.
Why suffer? Why fight? Why do any of it when there’s a trawler full of money right there? Why do it when Skeen has a blaster on his hip? When Clem does too?
He sits down across from Clem and watches him. Feels his own breath go rattling.
It’s like he’s a mile away from his body. He hasn’t cried in years and he isn’t going to cry now. He’s too far away. His emotions now feel encased in glass. Untouchable. Too volatile to touch but still roiling. He's always been able to close off in the past. To move on and not care. What’s different now? Why does it have to be different?
Nemik.
“Do you think he’ll make it?” he asks Clem, because he needs to know if there’s anything worth dreaming about left in the entire universe.
Nemik, barely more than a kid, the reason they’re here. Saved them on the escape, navigated through the Eye. But more than that. Nemik is everything good and possible about the rebellion. He’s hope, he’s life, he’s possibility. He’s the reason Skeen almost believed in this goose chase.
Without Nemik, he’s got nothing, no one, no reason to fight, no reason to care. Without Nemik, everything before becomes nothing. His brother, his vengeance, his drive… all bleeds away into meaningless void. Disappears into the blackness he’s teetering at the edge of.
Clem hesitates, then says, “He could get lucky.” And Skeen knows there’s nothing. He takes a shuddering breath and leans his head back against the cool metal of the trawler. The stars are bright overhead. Glistening and glittering.
There’s no such thing as luck. If Nemik was lucky, he never would’ve been hurt. He never would have been on this mission. There’s no luck, no luck, no luck in the entire galaxy.
He won’t make it.
And for what?
“Yeah, luck. It drives the whole damn galaxy, doesn’t it?”
He looks at Clem and feels a surge of hate and misery. Clem is like him, he thinks. In the end. Bitter and lonely and lost. Cynical and hurt and defensive and only barely human. Luck is a capitulation. He doesn’t believe in luck anymore than Skeen does.
What’s the point? Shouldn’t something good come out of this? Shouldn’t someone get some peace?
Clem is looking at him, cold and steady and curious.
Clem is a mystery. Mercenary and self-serving but generous with his knowledge. He was a good asset on the mission, and he did bring them here after all. To try and save someone he barely knew. Nemik was right— something in him reads as a believer. Something about him, under the cynicism and selfishness, is hopeful. Is a true, honest believer.
He isn’t sure about Clem, but he is sure about himself. He doesn’t believe. Maybe he could have, once, but now…
He decides to try it. To toss a pitch in Clem’s direction and see what happens. Call it a test, call it a needle. Call it a trigger.
Skeen isn’t sure he wants to live at all after this, but if he lives, he might as well live comfortably. Maybe Clem will take his offer and split the loot. He can go live in empty luxury on some backwater planet and drink himself into oblivion and ignore the rest of the galaxy. Or maybe Clem will kill him, or turn him over to Vel and Vel can kill him. Either would be fine at this point. Even with the loot he may find a way to die down the line. It’s not hard in this mean, luckless galaxy.
He wants Nemik to outlive him.
Sometime, and soon, Vel will come out of that hut of a surgery and ring the death knell. She’ll come out and shake her head and say, There was nothing we could do. He didn’t make it. He’s gone. And Skeen would rather die than have to hear that.
He wants Nemik to outlive him, even for a minute.
“You wanna guess how much is in there?”