It is his forty-second day on Tatooine. The suns are high in the sky, and by his humble estimation it is about seven hundred and sixty-eight degrees outside. Sitting in the shade provides a brief escape from the sweltering heat, but only until he sees the party of four moving slowly towards his hovel. With a sigh that quickly transforms into a stifled groan, Ben rises to his feet and steps into the hellish sun, flipping his hood up to keep the rays from burning his face.

"You the wizard?" the man at the front asks when he is ten paces away.

Wizard. Magic man. Healer. Devil. Hermit. He has yet to be called Jedi, so he tries not to take offense at any of the names the locals have labeled him with. "So they say," he carefully replies. "What's wrong with him?" He flicks his chin at the boy lying on the stretcher propped between the four of them. An unruly mop of dusty brown hair is all that he can see of the child, but the outline of his tiny frame beneath the thin blanket gives his relative age away.

The spokesman casts a glance at the boy and then turns back to Ben, eyeing him with a look that is both wary and hopeful. "They tell us you might be able to help him."

"That depends on what's wrong," Ben says, growing impatient.

Not a minute later, he is staring at a mangled leg that he knows has to be amputated. There is too much blood, there is too much of it missing, and the boy is pale to the point of translucent, and with practiced calm Ben asks, "What happened?"

"He took a slug to the leg. Tusken Raiders."

Sweet Force. Had Clone Troopers been equipped with slugthrowers, had droids been armed with slugs for ammunition… well. Suddenly blasters seem quite civilized indeed. "A slug…" he mutters.

"That's what I said."

Did I survive the Clone War and the Purge just to be prepared for this? Ben blinks and then moves. He lifts the boy from the makeshift stretcher and carries him inside. No one else is allowed to enter. When they leave, the boy is pale, shaking, sweating profusely, and missing his leg.

But he will live. Ben and his lightsaber made sure of that. He watches them leave and then sits back down in the shade. Upon reflection, he decides that if he has to, he would do it again. Amputate a limb to save a life.

Especially that of a child.

It's a far cry from removing three limbs to win a duel.