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“We’re here, sir,” the pilot called back in a tense voice.
Ba’kif was already opening the door to climb out of the small shuttle before the pilot had quite brought them to a full stop. The wind buffeted him the moment he jumped out into the howling storm, whipping his hood off and exposing his neck and ears to the biting cold until he’d wrestled it back up again after clipping on the safety line attached securely to his belt.
The cadets’ locator beacons were fairly precise, but they didn’t have pinpoint accuracy. And with visibility so low, Ba’kif knew he could walk right past Thrawn and not see him, even if he were only a couple meters away.
And if he’d lost the beacon— or if he’d been injured and was buried in the rapidly deepening snow—
Ba’kif turned and headed towards a darker shadow of a blur faintly visible through the white of the storm; a blur that resolved itself into a shallow depression in the rocky cliff face as he got closer. It was nowhere near deep enough to be considered a cave even by the broadest definition— but it would be enough to provide some limited shelter from the elements.
And that was exactly where he found Thrawn, curled up unmoving around the remnants of a small, already burned-out fire.
“Thrawn!” Ba’kif bellowed, the wind tearing the name from his lips and whipping it away almost before he’d finished speaking it. He forced his way through the last few paces of snow, the drifts deep enough to come halfway up his thighs, and finally stumbled into the little hollowed-out shelter. The cadet hadn’t so much as stirred. Ba’kif dropped to his knees to get closer, heart lurching with relief when he felt a faint puff of warm breath against his cheek. Thrawn was alive— but he was in bad shape.
Ba’kif wasted no time picking Thrawn up and throwing the cadet over his shoulder. Pulling his safety line taut, he switched it back to retract and staggered through the gale, following the thin yet strong metal cable back to the waiting shuttle.
“He’s alive, barely. Turn the heat up and get us back to base,” Ba’kif ordered the pilot the moment he’d gotten into the small vessel, still carrying Thrawn’s motionless form. “Call it in the minute we’re close enough for comms.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot answered crisply.
Ba’kif could hear the worry in the pilot’s tone, but put everything else out of his mind as he lowered Thrawn to the floor and grabbed the emergency medkit off the bulkhead. Thrawn was still breathing, but his winter gear was caked with snow and ice, already starting to melt and drip in the warmth of the shuttle. As quickly as he could, Ba’kif wrestled the young man out of his frozen clothes, one layer at a time; discarding them off to the side so he and Thrawn wouldn’t just end up in a puddle of cold water as it all thawed.
He yanked off his own snow-caked outer clothes too, until he was shirtless; then lay down with Thrawn next to the warm air vent and wrapped the emergency blanket from the kit around them both, tucking it between Thrawn and the floor as well. Thrawn’s skin was chill to the touch, cold against his front, and Ba’kif curled around him, pulling the blanket tighter to trap as much of his own body heat in there with them as possible.
“Stubborn bloody fool of a cadet, what in the hell were you thinking… Not turning on your emergency comm until it was too damn late.” Ba’kif hardly noticed he was muttering, distracting himself from worry while he vigorously rubbed at Thrawn’s arms and chest to try and get the blood flowing again. “If you even turned the blasted thing on at all—”
“I did.”
Thrawn’s voice was faint, weak; barely even audible— but it was there.
“You did what, Cadet?” Ba’kif asked gruffly. Keep him talking. Keep him conscious. He probably had frostbite, but that at least could be dealt with once Ba’kif had gotten him back to the hospital at the training base.
“I did… turned it on.”
“That’s good, Thrawn. You did the right thing,” Ba’kif said, but Thrawn shook his head; a feeble little twitch that Ba’kif could only feel through the tickle of Thrawn’s hair against his bare chest.
“No. Too late. Thought it was… training.”
Ba’kif sighed. That’s what he’d been afraid of. That blasted storm had come up out of nowhere, and Thrawn had, of course, assumed it was all intended to be part of the senior cadets’ survival field training for extreme conditions. He’d also clearly tried to last it out way too long before activating his emergency comm, because of course he was more worried about about the prospect of failure than death.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Ba’kif said, still rubbing warmth back into Thrawn’s arms. Thrawn was starting to shiver against him, at least. That was good. It meant his own body was trying to warm him up again. “Tell me what happened.”
“You came for me,” Thrawn said instead of answering, his voice almost dreamy despite the chattering of his teeth. “I knew it… Knew you cared.”
Ba’kif frowned. “Of course I care, Cadet. You’re a soldier in the Defense Force—”
“Mm. No,” Thrawn said muzzily, somehow managing to twist around far enough to nuzzle the side of his face into Ba’kif’s shoulder. “You care. About me. I could always tell…”
He trailed off into another bout of violent shivers, curling up tightly again, and Ba’kif felt something guilty swelling in his throat. Officers weren’t supposed to play favourites. Plenty did, of course— people were people, and no amount of regulations would ever change that. Ba’kif, however, had always prided himself on not being party to that sort of political maneuvering within the CDF.
…But somehow, with Thrawn, it was different. Ba’kif wasn’t sure he could honestly have said another cadet would have gotten his personal attention like this. He was the one who had immediately checked the logs to see if Thrawn specifically had called in for pickup yet when the furious, unanticipated storm had begun building over the training zone. And… the truth was, he’d only done that because he’d been following Thrawn’s time at the Academy closely enough to know that he probably wouldn’t try and call in until it was too late; until the storm had already gotten powerful enough to disrupt comms throughout the region.
Thrawn shuddered again, whimpering softly— he was probably starting to get some undoubtedly painful feeling back in his extremities— and Ba’kif became abruptly aware of just how inherently intimate their position was. Thrawn, naked and clinging weakly to his arm under the emergency blanket; Ba’kif himself clad only in his long thermal underwear and curled protectively around the young man, his own body pressed against as much of Thrawn’s skin as he could manage.
He hadn’t done it with any ulterior motives whatsoever, his intentions centered entirely around getting Thrawn’s body temperature back up. And this was, hands-down, the best way of doing that under the circumstances. But—
I could always tell…
Ba’kif swallowed. He’d heard about, and witnessed firsthand once or twice, Thrawn’s rather uncanny knack for reading people, and he couldn’t help wondering nervously just what Thrawn might have… seen in him but never mentioned. He’d told himself that his feelings towards the young man were nothing more than those of a proud mentor, of sorts— perhaps fatherly at most— so often he’d almost managed to convince himself that it was actually true.
But it wasn’t true, not entirely. At the beginning, yes; but it had become less and less true over the course of Thrawn’s three years of training based out of Taharim Academy.
Pushing those thoughts firmly out of his mind, and pointedly not noticing how well Thrawn fit in his arms, Ba’kif turned his focus back to keeping Thrawn warm, and talking, and awake—
And tried very hard not to think about the fact that he couldn’t quite decide whether or not he hoped Thrawn would forget everything about this shuttle ride once he’d recovered.