Author's Note: This is my gift to AceOfStars16 for the Rebels May the Fourth Gift Exchange. My prompt was "Sabine and Ezra (platonic or romantic), stranded, and fluff." This takes place between the Season 3 episodes "The Last Battle" and "Imperial SuperCommandos" in order to constrain what they did and did not have at their disposal. I went the platonic sibling route, for story purposes. For more notes, please see the end of the story.
"If you would just look before you rinse your paintbrushes, you wouldn't have ruined my favorite orange shirt!"
"Oh yeah, well maybe if you wouldn't leave your half-done laundry in the sink for hours, it wouldn't have happened!"
Sabine stomped her way down the gangplank of the shuttle, following close behind her partner. Their bickering was punctuated by the ring of their boots on the metal.
"That's not my fault! The laundry unit was bro…." Ezra's voice cut off abruptly. "Wait, where's the base?"
Sabine stopped up short to avoid running into him; her boots crunched in the dirt and gravel. She quickly assessed the narrow strand where they stood between a swift river and a copse of trees. On either side of the river towered sheer cliff faces. She shielded her eyes with her hand to see the far wall: it was still steeped in shadow. It was barely daybreak, so the sunlight did not yet fully reach the canyon bottom. Ezra turned around to face the shuttle, where the gangplank was winding closed behind them. "Chop!" he yelled.
Sabine whirled around as well; she slammed the comm on her wrist. "Chopper, what are you doing? You're supposed to let us offload the rest of our supplies!"
There was a tap on her shoulder.
"I don't think this is the right place. Where is everyone?" Ezra waved his arms at their surroundings.
The thrusters hissed, and the Phantom II began to lift from the ground. Dust and dry leaf-needles washed over them, making her cough. Sabine tried to raise Chopper again. "Chopper, what's going on here?" she demanded. Her voice felt thick in her mouth.
This time Chopper responded. "Whoop waaa, whoop waaa waaa," the droid cackled, barely audible over the static. The Phantom II steadied itself, then took off.
"Chopper!" Ezra screamed, hands cupped around his mouth. They watched as the shuttle crested the canyon wall and was soon out of sight.
Sabine continued to try to raise the rebellious droid on her wrist-comm. "Chopper! Chopper! You come back here right this minute!"
She heard only static in return. She growled and cut the connection. The air was silent, except for a bird chirruping in from a branch and the sound of the river flowing nearby.
Ezra slipped his pack off his slumped shoulders and dropped it to the ground. Sabine's stomach twisted with concern as Ezra stumbled to the edge of the clearing and sat down with his back to a tree trunk. He folded his arms across his chest.
"That stupid bucket of bolts stranded us." he murmured. "Why would he do this? He has to have a few corrupted circuits that are programmed only for spite…."
Ezra tried to activate his wrist-comm. "Hera? Hera? Can you hear us? Atollon, we have a problem."
"It's no use, Ezra." Sabine walked toward him. She didn't want him to slip into another fugue of darkness again; he'd only recently been getting better. She held out her hands, fingers spread. "I think those flares from Dantooine's sun as we were coming in have blocked communications. Too much electromagnetism in the atmosphere. We'll have to wait until it dissipates. It's probably why there was so much static just talking to Chopper from right next to the shuttle."
"Really?" Ezra's voice cracked. He tipped his head back against the mottled bark of the tree. He closed his eyes as if to steady himself. After a few moments, Ezra reopened his eyes. He uncrossed his arms, and placed his palms on the ground next to him. With new calm, he asked, "how far do you suppose we are from the base?"
He paused a moment, then his blue eyes widened. "Wait, can we even be sure we are on Dantooine?"
Sabine tapped a different button on her wrist comm and a terrain holo appeared. She rotated the view so that it oriented the direction they faced. She twisted her lips, tapping them with one slender finger. "Hmm…"
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"This is a setback. We are on Dantooine, but we aren't anywhere near Dantoo Base." She pinched into the terrain, zooming in to see the detail. "Look. We're at the bottom of this canyon, here. My positional accuracy isn't very good because of the interference, but I think we're somewhere in this reach." She gestured to a small wide spot in a bend of the river. She flicked her fingers open to zoom out. "But the base is all the way over here."
Sabine went silent for a moment; she teased the map back and forth as she analyzed different routes. "The biggest problem is the walls of this canyon. It's too sheer for us to climb, especially with no climbing harnesses. If I had the jetpack I've always wanted, I could fly us up and out."
"If I were stronger in the Force, I could jump us out of here."
"And if wishes were nerf, we could ride," Sabine said. She tried to sound firm and more confident than she felt.
"I think the only way out is downriver." She flicked the map downstream, until the canyon mouth opened up on a wider plain. "Here is Dantoo Town. The river takes some meanders, but it is about 35 klicks south of here as the shriek-hawk flies."
Ezra stood up from his seat at the base of the tree. He closed the gap with Sabine in a few steps. He frowned as he stared at Sabine's terrain map. "I'm not so good at swimming."
"We'll need a boat," she said. "This is far too long to swim." She pivoted on her foot and began to walk along the narrow strand lost in thought. By rote, she went back to tapping her lips again, lost in contemplation. "Ponder and deliberate before you make a move," said the old Mandalorian whose name was lost to time.
Ezra broke into her thoughts after only a short time, when her plan had just begun to formulate. "Okay, so how are we going to get a boat?"
"I'm thinking about that." She reached the end of the strand and made her way back towards him. Ezra turned in a slow circle, as if gauging the walls for some new handhold. Sabine knew it was useless; the extended height and sheer walls made free climbing out of the question. Ezra noticed some leaf litter on the edge of his orange shirt, and tried to brush it off. It was stuck with some sort of sap that had hardened. "Rats. Another shirt ruined! I got sap all over it from the tree. It's my third-favorite one!"
Sabine stopped pacing and looked up. "That's it!"
"What?"
"The sap. Ezra, grab your kit and bring it here."
By the time Ezra did as she suggested, Sabine had already taken a spot on the ground. She emptied out her pack, hefting each item in her hand before setting it next to her.
"Did you pack all your essentials?" she asked.
"Well, yeah," he replied. "Kanan would never let me hear the end of it if I left on a mission unprepared."
"Aha!" There was her rain poncho, finally. She pulled it out and laid it in front of her. "That's what I needed. How about you? We'll need yours, too."
"Umm—" he fished in his pack— "here it is." He handed it to her, and it went on the ground with the other poncho.
"How about some string? Do you have any string?"
Ezra searched again, and pulled out a neat coil of cordage. "Here." His eyebrows narrowed. "So what do you need all this for?"
Sabine looked up at Ezra, fixing him with her gaze. Leadership training came back to her: lean on her confidence. She knew Ezra's strengths, and her own. She knew their weaknesses, and would do her best to bring them both out of this. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,"said the old Mandalorian.
"So here's the plan: we're going to build a boat."
"Build?" Ezra's voice wavered.
Sabine shrugged. "Sure. This is just like we used to have exercises when I was an Imperial cadet. They'd give us a box of random things and we'd have to use our creativity and the items to solve the problem. We're going to build a boat based on what we have in our packs and what is on this riverbank."
Ezra leaned forward, tapping his finger on his pack. "Nice. What's next?"
Sabine looked around. "I'm going to collect some of that sap to seal the edges of our rain gear. Can you gather us some of those willows over there, and two big tree branches for poles?"
Ezra nodded, and they went right to work. Sabine was glad the local needle-leaf trees seemed to be a sticky sort. It was unfortunate for Ezra's third-favorite orange shirt, but lucky for boat-building. At the slightest disturbance of the bark, sap welled up around the edges, which Sabine collected on a flat piece of driftwood she found along the bank. She carried her palette back to the work area, where she spread the sap on the overlapped poncho seams. It stuck to her fingers, pulling up in long strands of amber gooeyness each time she dipped into it, but hardened quickly in the cool morning air.
"I wish I had a paintbrush," she said. "But this would probably ruin them. I used to love painting with my fingers as a kid. I wasn't as discriminating as an artist back then." She laughed, a musical trill.
Ezra made his way among the willow brake, using his lightsaber to collect the tallest pieces. He carried them back slung over his shoulder, and dropped them with a clatter in the open space that had become their work area.
Sabine sighed; he was so careless.
Kneeling in the tufts of grass and gravel, she took the scattered heap and arranged the willow branches neatly by length. Sabine laid them out in a lattice framework after she bent each one to test it. She wove them together— over under, over under— to make the flat bottom of the coracle. Ezra held each joint together while she lashed the intersections with the cord for reinforcement. Finally they bent up the sides and finished it with a sturdy brace of willows around the edge.
Ezra and Sabine stepped back to admire their work. The sun was finally over the edge of the canyon wall, and it was getting warm. Ezra brought out his canteen. "Not bad," he said, as he wiped a drop of water from his mouth.
Sabine smiled. "Now we have to attach our rain gear to make a hull."
They upended the frame on the grass. This time both of them had the enjoyment of gathering more sap and dipping their hands to spread it along the frame. Working as a team, they lifted the combined poncho fabric and placed it over the frame. When the sap dried after another short break, they flipped the frame back over to fit the edges of the fabric around the gunwhale.
"There you have it," Sabine said. "One coracle."
"I hope this works." Ezra took a step closer, gently prodding sections in turn.
"There's only one way to find out, and the alternative is we sit here until someone from the Base comes looking for us." Sabine snorted. "And who knows what story Chopper's cooked up, so they may not even be looking for us."
Ezra shuddered. "I'm starving. Let's eat lunch," he suggested, to Sabine's agreement. She sat down in a patch of grass— she was not going to lean against a tree and chance ruining the paint on her armor. Ezra undid the flap of his pack and pulled out a ration bar. He wandered to the water's edge and perched on a boulder next to the river. Sabine watched as he pulled off his boots and set them on the gravel at the water's edge. Hesitating for a moment, his toe hovered over the water and then dipped in. She smiled when the toe came right back out.
"Wow, that's cold!" Ezra exclaimed.
"Just think how it would be earlier in the melt season!" Sabine called back. "We won't die, but we can't go swimming in it, for sure."
"I've never been to a stream like this," he said. "It's all shallow warm rivers on Lothal."
Always a student of colors, Sabine observed that the river rocks were part gray, part white— different colors above and below— demarcating the river's flood stage. She hoped it would not rain today. She looked up at the clear sky, where two brith circled on the currents, flapping their wings in lazy strokes. The sun was almost overhead now; the morning was consumed during their labors.
Sabine nibbled at her ration bar, watching as Ezra gobbled his down. When she was done, she stood up and brushed the dust from her armor. "I'm going to visit a tree, and then I say we get going. How about it?"
Ezra nodded. "Sounds good. You head that way- I'm going to walk this way." He pointed in an opposite direction. The teenagers looked at each other, the awkwardness hanging in the air for just a heartbeat too long.
"Right," said Sabine. She turned on her heel, and walked upstream. In a canyon this small, it would be hard to get 70 paces from the stream, but she figured she'd just have to do her best. It would be too awkward to run into Ezra…. Ugh, she didn't want to think in that direction.
When they each returned to the bank, they stood looking at their small craft, gear in hand. Perhaps it was trepidation, perhaps it was disbelief. But they had to go forward.
