Uiro

“I owe you my life.”

They had returned from the mission and given a report before the rest of the Council. Now, they found themselves alone once again, this time in Kit’s quarters. They sat on the bed together, Kit stripped to the waist as Plo massaged salve into his skin. It was getting better, but still needed attention—and neither of them was about to turn down a chance for such sweet intimacy.

“Plo,” Kit said seriously, leaning back against Plo’s chest. Plo’s hands moved to wrap around Kit’s midsection, cradling him close. “Mine was yours a long time ago.”

“And mine, yours,” Plo admitted. He bumped his mask against Kit’s shoulder, and the regret in him was palpable, like a scent filling the air. His masked lips could touch Kit’s body, or Kit’s masked lips could touch Plo’s, but never again would—or could—they both be bare-faced at the same time. “...I wish I had been conscious to feel your mouth on mine.”

It was unseemly for a Jedi to say, and had Plo loved Kit any less his training would have kept him from saying it. But he wanted, when he was with Kit; he wanted deeply and was unashamed.

Kit took one of Plo’s hands from where it rested on his ribcage and kissed it. “‘My love and I, we’ve mixed our souls,’” he said, quoting from an ancient Kel Dor poet Plo adored. “I know you can feel that. And it’s better by far, I can tell you.”

Even when Plo returned to his own quarters, even when he was assigned a new mission on one side of the galaxy and Kit one on the other, they would not truly separate. The Force flowing through them, binding them together for hours in the water tank with no other distractions, had changed them. A little bit of Plo lived in Kit, and vice versa.

The experience of almost dying had been a hard one to handle, but Plo trusted Kit without reserve. As long as Kit was there, he didn’t truly believe he could die. And, with this new connection having been sparked between them, something good had come of it.

“I’m not glad it happened,” Plo said, “But I’m glad you were there when it did.”

Kit came back to himself gradually, first realizing that he was stretched out on a cot, shivering and shaking like he was learning how to regulate his bodily stability all over again. To his left, a cot holding Commander Wolffe, sitting up with a report in his unbandaged hand. To his right…

Plo. Relief.

He found he couldn’t sit up, so with effort he turned himself all the way over onto his side to watch Plo sleep.

The hours in the tank began to trickle back into Kit’s brain, slowly and piecemeal. His gills had filtered out the oxygen in the water, and he had breathed the unpoisoned air into Plo’s lungs and the used air back out of them. The Force flowed between the two of them, making them into one single beast that needed to breathe in two different ways, keeping them locked in the bond that enabled Plo to stay alive.

Kit’s skin was irritated, the cells stressed far beyond their normal limits by the length of time they had been forced to absorb oxygen for Kit. He wanted to speak up and get Stronghold’s attention, ask for something—anything—to put on it and make it less dry, but his throat was sore and his head spun if he tried to move too much.

After a moment’s trying, and more effort than he would like to admit, he was able to clear his throat and call out. His voice, usually rich and warm as velvet, was thin. “Stronghold?”

The medic was at his side in an instant. “Yes, General?”

“My skin—”

It didn’t take more than a moment for Stronghold to clock the darker green rash breaking out across Kit’s exposed limbs. He returned to the unit set up in the middle of the med tent and pulled a bottle of medicinal salve from a neatly-stocked drawer near the bottom.

Stronghold’s hands were a little too calloused from years of pulling at durasteel armor and dispensing medical treatments to be comforting against Kit’s chafing skin, but once he was done layering salve on Kit’s limbs and torso, it was pure bliss.

“He made it through alright?” Kit asked, turning to look at Plo again now that he had been taken care of.

“Like a champion, sir,” Daylight confirmed from a collapsible stool set up next to another patient’s cot. “He’ll be awake any time now. There’s no permanent damage.”

Then it was all worth it.

“We’re pinned down, does anyone copy?”

The panicked voice of Yap, a clone fresh out of training on Kamino, came over the comms distorted by static. Plo was moving towards his location as Kit finished off the last of the droidekas they had been working on, then took off running in Plo’s footsteps.

When the sound of an explosion rattled the ground and blasted up dust, Kit stopped for a moment, completely frozen, and his brain caught up with what his heart instinctually knew; what had made it stop beating. The explosion was straight ahead.

Plo was straight ahead.

In another second, Kit was full-out sprinting, his path increasingly blocked by loose bits of rubble. After almost turning his ankle on a shard of rock, he heard Yap’s voice, in the open air this time, and followed it to find Plo and several clones on the ground, some with burn marks on their armor and others with blood seeping from between the plates. He noted that whatever droids had pinned down the clones were in pieces, and wondered whose grenade had gone off to decimate both sides.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the fact that Plo Koon was lying on the ground, injured and unmoving.

Kit knelt down beside Plo, picking up Plo’s lightsaber on instinct and clipping it to his own belt. The first thing he noticed, even while his hand was still moving to secure the weapon, was that part of Plo’s mask had been blown off.

It took all his years of training to tamp down the instant feeling of panic that seized his brain. “Plo,” he said urgently, “Can you hear me?”

Plo groaned, a wet sound that only filtered partway through the broken mask. A jolt went through Kit as he realized this was the closest he’d ever come to hearing Plo’s natural voice. It was a little less mechanized, obviously, but still deep, and slightly raspy.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. He didn’t say that the medics couldn’t do much once he did, if the damage was as bad as it looked—they hadn’t brought a spare mask with them. Plo had discarded his older one a few months ago to guard against routine wear, putting on his unworn backup mask, and hadn’t yet received a replacement backup from the factory on Dorin.

Kit slipped one arm beneath Plo’s knees and the other around his shoulders and lifted him from the ground. It was a jerky, clumsy movement, but after a moment of strain Kit was standing and Plo was held securely in his arms. It would take every Separatist in the galaxy to pry him loose now.

With the battle under control now, he left Wolffe and Monnk to finish the job and made his way back to base camp, where the clone medics had a tent already set up to care for the wounded. Kit noticed several of his men lying on the cots. He would check on them when he knew the depth of the damage Plo had sustained.

“The General’s mask is broken,” he told the orderly who waved him over to a free cot. “I don’t know enough about his biology or the mask to tell how bad it is. Find Daylight, he’ll know what to do.”

Every medic on Kit's staff was briefed in Nautolan biology. Every medic on Plo’s was briefed in Kel Dor. But only the attention of Daylight, Plo’s chief medic, would do.

Moments later Daylight appeared at the side of the cot, holding a scanner and a kit full of small tools for the intricate work of tuning up Plo’s mask. He knelt down and began to fiddle with it, assessing the extent of the damage.

Kit flagged down his own chief medic as well. “Stronghold, I need you to get on the comm channel with Dorin. Throw my weight around if you have to, throw Plo’s around if it means more to them, but arrange for a new mask to be sent out here as fast as possible.. The factory has his specs on file already.”

Stronghold nodded and went to the station in the middle of the tent, where long-range comms, medical equipment, and an assortment of weapons in case of emergency were located. He booted up the comm channel and within moments was chatting with a Kel Dor woman who worked for the mask factory.

“It can’t be fixed, General,” Daylight determined. He set down his tools, his face somber. “It’s on its last legs. He’s got about ten minutes before it fails completely—and that's if he's lucky.”

He and Kit exchanged a glance. They both knew that even with a transport ship traveling through hyperspace at full speed, it would take far more than ten minutes for it to arrive...and that wasn't even counting how long it would take for Plo's mask to be constructed.

Stronghold closed down the comm channel and returned to Plo’s bedside. “The new mask will be finished within the next half-hour.”

“Dorin is two, maybe three hours from here at top speed,” Daylight said quietly. “The General won’t survive long enough for the mask to be constructed, let alone long enough for the ship to get here.”

“We have to do something,” Kit said forcefully. “He is not going to die.”

Daylight and Stronghold stepped aside to discuss their options. Kit stayed at Plo’s side, watching to make sure he didn’t stop breathing.

His entire being felt laser-focused, the Force or adrenaline thrumming through his limbs as he stood there with his heart pounding and his eyes trained on the rise and fall of Plo’s chest. Plo had to keep breathing—but what good would it do him, when the mask stopped working and air became poison to him?

Then Kit knew what to do. He wasn’t sure how it occurred to him, but there was one thing they could try.

“I need the portable water tank,” he said loudly. Stronghold and Daylight stopped talking and turned to listen, both a little confused but also pretty much out of ideas. “And a ladder or some crates to use as steps. Quickly.”

Daylight was the one to pass on the command to an orderly to go drag in the camp’s portable water storage unit and find a ladder. Stronghold returned to Plo’s cot, waiting for Kit to elaborate.

“He can’t breathe oxygen,” Kit said, beginning to pull off his outer robe. He dropped it in a heap at his feet and started work on unclasping his tunic. “But he doesn’t have a backup filtration system in his own body.” The inner tunic was next, and he quickly shrugged it off, leaving his upper body bare. “I do.” With one hand busy pulling off his boots, he tapped the other against the gills at the base of his tentacles. They connected to his regular airway, enabling the systems to work together if necessary. “We ditch the mask, I form an airtight seal around his mouth—whatever it looks like—with mine, and the Force if I have to, and I use the gills to filter out the oxygen so I can breathe for him.”

Daylight looked at him like every word he said was gibberish, but Stronghold nodded with understanding. He was familiar enough with Kit’s biology to catch on to the last part of his plan.

“You’ll have—at most—a little under four hours where you can continue to absorb oxygen,” he said. Kit’s skin could take in oxygen directly from the atmosphere around him and diffuse it through his cells, but not indefinitely. It was a biological backup system for when everything went to hell. That was, without a doubt, now. “What are your orders when that time is up?”

Kit stared down at Plo, whose breath was beginning to come more and more painfully. “Even if I pass out, my body will wring every last second of life out of itself to keep going. For him. Don’t pull me out.”

He couldn’t bring himself to voice the unspoken, very un-Jedi part: If he dies, we die together.

The orderly returned with a stray trooper in tow, one who had brought back an injured comrade and was waiting for orders to return to the field, the two dragging the water tank behind them. Ordinarily, the portable water tanks were sealed up tight to keep them sanitary, and couldn’t be pried open wide enough to submerge two bodies in them, but it was an easy problem to solve for a Jedi. Kit drew one of the lightsabers from his belt—Plo’s, casting blue light across the tent—and carved the top of the tank clean off. A set of crates were stacked next to it, providing a makeshift staircase.

Kit peeled off his leggings, naked down to his underwear, and climbed into the tank. The more skin he bared, the more oxygen he could absorb, and the better his chances of staying alive. He paddled to stay afloat with as much ease as shifting weight from one foot to the other on land.

“Bring Plo to me,” he said.

Stronghold was easily able to lift Plo from the cot: of all the clones in Plo’s and Kit’s divisions combined, he had the most pure muscle, which came in handy for hefting around the injured as he was doing now. Carefully climbing the stairs, he handed Plo off into Kit’s arms, the robes clinging to Plo’s limp body as they quickly became sodden. It was hardly any extra effort for Kit to hold Plo afloat.

“As soon as I form the connection, push us down into the water. We have to stay completely submerged until the mask arrives,” he instructed the medics.

Kit’s fingers hovered over the broken mask for a moment. He understood—now, more than ever, he understood—why he could never have seen Plo without it before, and yet he still felt a chill down his spine at the idea of touching Plo’s bare face.

One moment more of hesitation, he allowed himself, then with quick dexterity ripped the mask off and without even waiting to properly view the face behind, he clamped his hands on Plo’s temples and pressed his lips to the small, squid-like beak, forming a seal around it with his own mouth. Then he was conscious, somewhere in the back of his mind, of being plunged fully into the water, submerged in an instant from head to foot, as most of him reached out to Plo in the Force and found him, twining their minds together and letting their souls touch and bleed into each other.

It was a rare mission that saw Plo Koon and Kit Fisto fighting side-by-side. Once at the beginning of the war they had teamed up—and in doing so, had realized they had fallen in love.

It was easy to overlook, Kit thought, tossing another stick into the fire. He and Plo were together again now on Felucia, and sitting in the jungle with Plo so close by reminded him of their first mission together. Day after day, they had seen each other in the Temple, living just down the hall from one another, taking part in the same Council meetings, and the comfortable camaraderie that developed between them went unnoticed for years. Then the war had broken out, and they had been sent off together to fight one of the early battles.

Kit remembered watching Plo through the fire then. They had been more tense, thrown into a new way of life, and they were no longer sure of how they were supposed to be beyond the Temple walls, and it made them stiff with each other. Their troops were separated, too, one half of the camp for Plo’s men and the other for Kit’s. But the firelight didn’t know that, and it danced playfully across Plo’s face, the deep tan of his skin glowing copper and gold, and Kit knew he was staring but how could any man turn away from such a sight?

And then….

He reached for Plo’s hand, smiling. Now, they sat together, shoulders touching and body warmth shared, and their men were milling about them laughing and joking together like old friends.

They had been forced to learn as a unit of two, uncertain at the beginning of the battle and wearied, but with opened eyes, by the end. All the familiarity came rushing back, tighter than before with the bond of warfare and shared pain, as they collapsed into one tent, neither wanting to be alone. As they had laid there, trying to find stillness in the Force in the quiet of the night, they had found it in reaching out and clasping hands.

“Separatist forces are expected to attack at dawn,” Commander Wolffe said, leaning in closer to Plo. “Nothing we shouldn’t be able to handle, but reconnaissance reports a number of droidekas.”

“Those are on us,” Kit said. “Your men can have the rest.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll pass it on.”

“I suggest we turn in.” Plo rose from his spot, smoothing out his robes. Kit was always impressed by his ability to do that without snagging the cloth on his talon guards. “Set alarms for two hours before dawn.”

Wolffe nodded sharply, also getting to his feet. He wished them both goodnight, in that way somewhere between formal and familiar that tended to characterize conversations between the Jedi and their right-hand men, and headed towards another fire with a mix of his and Commander Monnk’s troops to deliver the information.

Plo offered his hand to Kit, who took it and allowed Plo to pull him up. He didn’t have the obvious athletic build that Kit had, honed with years of swimming and participation in marital arts classes, but he had a strength derived from saber training and his new battlefield experience.

No longer were there separate tents set up for them, nor did they lie down in the one they had out of a desire to quell a war-torn emotion neither of them could name. Instead, they went to the single tent they had intentionally set up to share, simply wanting each other’s company, hating to be parted when, out here in the wilderness on the eve of battle, they did not have to be.

Kit closed the tent flaps as Plo removed his outer robes, folding them and setting them in the corner, leaving him in his leggings and inner tunic, both a shade of pale beige that had once been clean, but had faded with time spent in the field. The sounds of laughter and talk outside grew dimmer, as clones also began to drift in twos and threes to their bedrolls. Also stripping his outer robes, Kit set them beside Plo’s and the two stretched out on their sleeping mats, Plo pulling his standard-issue blanket tightly around himself.