Chapter Text
When Silas woke up, everyone was dead.
Everyone.
He’d checked. He had stumbled and crawled his way through the carnage to check every still body, to be completely sure that there were no signs of life.
There weren’t. They were all dead.
Everyone was dead.
He needed to go.
It hurt, leaving them like this. Each of them deserved a proper funeral, not to be abandoned in the snow like trash. But he was one man - a heavily injured one at that - and he had no doubt the jetii’se would soon return for their own dead. Silas needed to be gone by then, lest he join the verde that had gone marching.
He grabbed his go-bag - all Mando’ade had one, no matter the job - and a small battery-operated heat generator, then left.
He couldn’t take one of their ships. The jetii’se would notice and hunt him down. He couldn’t go into town. The jetii’se would spot him before he could barter passage off this icy hell and then he would be dead.
So, he needed to brave the snow and survive in the wild until they left. Pray to the Ka’ra that he could last long enough to get off this planet. He needed to track down the few Haat'ade left in the galaxy and tell them what had happened.
He wouldn’t call it luck or a miracle that his legs weren’t injured. If either had had any role here, Silas wouldn’t have been left as the only survivor. The fact was, his legs were uninjured. And that, at least, was good. It meant he could walk.
His head, however, was pounding. A concussion, most likely. A medic would be telling him to sit down and rest. Silas couldn’t do that. He’d be dead if he did that.
He kept walking through the freezing snow.
The blow to his head had messed with his HUD settings, but at least the thermoregulation was still semi-functional. Otherwise, hypothermia would have caught up fast. As it was, Silas couldn’t feel his fingers or toes. He needed to find shelter soon, or he might end up losing some of them to frostbite.
He stumbled over a root in the ground. Managed to catch himself before he fell. Balance regained, he looked up, then stilled, eyes widening.
There was an ad. Unconscious- dead?
The robes – more specifically, the style and cut of them – gave them away. Not just an ad, a jetii’ad.
Silas hadn’t seen a jetii this young among the group that had attacked them. Given, he’d been a little preoccupied with not dying, but he figured he’d have noticed this small figure among the demagolka’se that had massacred his fellow Mando’ade.
And what was the ad doing all the way out here, so far away from the other jetii’se? Silas knew that jetii’se were as protective of their ade as Mando’ade were. So why was this one here, alone, curled up and freezing in the snow?
A part of him said to leave the ad. Silas was injured and needed to move quickly. The ad - the jetii - would make that more difficult. And if the jetii’se came looking for the ad, Silas would be in even more danger.
But they were just an ad. An ad was not responsible for the actions of those who had raised them. And there was clearly more to this story than what Silas could see. The ad was in the complete opposite direction of the Haat’ade camp than the jetii’se had come from, and if someone was looking for them, Silas would have come across them by now.
The ad would die without Silas’ help. If they weren’t dead already.
Mind made up, Silas trudged over, crouched, and tugged the ad into his arms in a princess carry. Three deep breaths, and then he pushed to his feet with a pained grunt. He stumbled, but didn’t fall. After a moment to better adjust the ad, Silas pushed on through the deep snow.
It was slower going, now. The ad wasn’t heavy - quite light, actually, lighter than Silas thought they should be - but the weight of them still hindered him. He wouldn’t leave them, though. To leave an ad, no matter where they came from or what they might have done, was to go against his creed. He would be dar’manda. Silas would not dishonor his people like that - though some might claim saving a jetii’s life was dishonoring his people, especially after the slaughter Silas had just escaped.
But the jetii’se’s actions were not the ad’s fault. Silas would not condemn them for it.
His arms had grown numb by the time he found a ravine. Staying there would certainly be better than out in the open. He shifted the ad in his arms and searched for a route down that wouldn’t end in him breaking a bone. Luckily, there was a narrow but usable path, likely used by wildlife, that was easy enough for him to half-stumble, half-climb down. It was slow-going, but, eventually, he made it down.
Once steady and after readjusting his hold on the ad, Silas searched the walls of the ravine for any sort of opening or dip. Anything he could use to better protect himself and the ad from the elements. He got lucky- there was a crack big enough for him to squeeze through which opened up into a space tall enough for him to stand and big enough that if he wanted, he could stretch out in the center without touching any of the walls.
He laid the ad down, shrugged his go-bag off of his shoulders, and slid to the ground.
Five breaths. In, hold, out, repeat.
Silas flicked on his helmet’s headlight, then removed it and set it to the side. With the HUD malfunctioning, it was easier to use his bucket as a light source than to switch on night vision.
Next, the ad. He tugged off a glove and pressed two fingers to the pulse point on the ad’s neck. There was a pulse- faint, slow, almost nonexistent, but it was there.
Heat. They needed heat and fast. Night would be approaching soon and this part of the planet was in the dead of winter. They would freeze before morning without heat.
Good thing that he’d had the mind to grab that heat generator. He wasn’t sure how much power it had left, but these things lasted for a while, and he was in no state to go gather tinder for a fire.
He got the heat generator set up, and though he wanted to crank it to full heat, he knew it was best to conserve its power. So, he kept it on a low setting, and made a note to turn it off every so often as well instead of keeping it on constantly.
That done, Silas stripped out of his armor - the beskar alloy as cold as the snow outside - and finally assessed himself. Lightsaber burns on his abdomen, hip, and upper arm. Injured wrist - sprained, likely - and one hell of a concussion. He didn’t have the supplies to properly treat every injury, so he focused on the ones that would most impede him.
First, his wrist. He didn’t have a brace, but he was able to wrap it. That would have to do. There were only two bacta hyposprays, and he injected both into his neck to help with the concussion. The sooner that healed, the better. The burns, he slathered with a thin layer of bacta cream, then covered the one on his abdomen in bandages.
In the time it took him to fix himself up, their small shelter had warmed enough that he could finally feel himself beginning to thaw. He checked on the ad and was relieved to see their breathing had deepened. He checked their pulse again - stronger, but still slow and weak - then rummaged through the go-bag for something to use as a blanket. All he found was an extra set of clothes, but there was a thick jacket, so he laid that over the ad’s torso. The spare shirt and pants were too big for the ad’ika, unfortunately, so Silas pulled them on over his kute. The more layers, the better they both would be protected from the cold.
There wasn’t much else Silas could do right now. His body begged him to sleep, but he knew that was unwise with his concussion, and he needed to keep an eye on the ad in case their condition worsened.
Which meant he was left alone with his thoughts, and with nothing else to distract himself, the grief hit him in full force.
Fuck. Fuck.
All of them were dead. Every Haat’ade who had come on this mission- dead. Murdered by those demagolka’se. Weren’t Jetii’se supposed to be peacekeepers? What kind of peacekeeper attacked without any attempt at negotiation beyond “Surrender or die”?
They’d died warriors, that at least gave him some solace. Not a single one of those verde had gone down without a fight- that was clear from the jetii’se corpses scattered among the Mando’ade. Someone had even managed to take down the skanah who had led the attack. Silas wished he knew who it was.
The Haat’ade wouldn’t be able to recover from this. Losing Jaster was already a hard blow. But a massacre like this, just as Jango was beginning to find his footing as Mand’alor? There was no coming back from it. Not anytime soon at least.
Fuck, Jango. Silas hadn’t seen his body among the dead. Had he survived? Had the jetii'se chosen to arrest him instead of killing him like they had his verde? Or had they assumed him dead and he’d escaped like Silas?
There was no way for Silas to know. And he wouldn’t be finding out anytime soon, not in his current condition. He could only pray that his Alor was alive and had escaped. Pray Jango hadn’t gone marching ahead with the others.
His chest ached, and it had nothing to do with his physical wounds.
He needed- he needed to speak Remembrances. For the verde that had gone marching. He knew each and every warrior that had been on this job with them. Hopefully the concussion wouldn’t keep him from remembering them all.
Eyes blurry and cheeks wet, Silas swallowed down a sob, opened his mouth, and began.