#i forgot what they were arguing about but ezra probably deserved it

[simstoyourdismay]

i love his little fangs

[bedlamsbard]

Part 13 of the other side AU concept!  I am going to eventually pull these apart into parts one (Devil’s in the Details) and two (Carry the Fire) and do edits/rewrites to the extent they meet my standards for going up on AO3 as chaptered, titled fics, but I don’t currently have the mental and emotional energy for that.  (Have you...met January 2021?)  In the meantime here are my in-progress playlists, if there’s interest: Devil’s in the Details and Carry the Fire.

About 5.8K below the break.

*

Zeb got up to keep watch, since he had the best ears of the group; Kanan took his place on the tree root and Ezra leaned back to keep his head tipped against Kanan’s knee, barely able to comprehend that single point of connection.  Kanan’s presence radiated through the Force with startling solidity, as if after years of shadows someone had suddenly turned on a light in a dark room. Ezra had to fight back his urge to roll around in that strength like an overjoyed Loth-cat in a patch of sunlight.

“I don’t know exactly what happened when the Chimaera went down,” he said eventually.  He hesitated, not wanting to get into the fact that at the time he had still been locked in his cell.  He didn’t think he could get away without telling them that at all, but he didn’t want to lead off with it if he could help it.  “I wasn’t up in the bridge – Thrawn and Pellaeon didn’t really want me near anything important.  What I heard later was that the Vong tricked the Scylla and the Charybdis – they’re the only other ships left in the Seventh – into leaving the Chimaera, and once the cruisers were out of reach they hit the Chimaera with everything they had. Their ships aren’t like ours,” he added slowly. “They’re living things, for one – I have no idea how that works.  They’re not shielded, but they’ve got some kind of – of miniature black holes that move around on their ships, swallowing up most shots before they can get through at all.  Dovin basals, that’s what they call them.  TIE pilots don’t know how to deal with them – ship gunners either, for that matter.  I don’t know how they work; the Chimaera’s scientists were trying to figure it out.”

He glanced over at Sabine in time to see her eyebrows snap together, obviously trying to work it out for herself without even having seen one.  She still had the piece of broken beskar in her hand, like she couldn’t comprehend what had happened to it.

“The Chimaera had already taken a lot of damage by the time the Vong started boarding,” Ezra went on slowly.  “Zafira – that’s the death trooper captain – let me out around then, but I was never on the bridge or anything.  I guess Thrawn had the idea that the Vong ships might not be able to survive in atmosphere since they’re alive and they live in space, so he started bringing the Chimaera down into the planet’s atmosphere.”

Sabine whistled softly. “Did it work?”

Ezra shrugged. “You saw the Chimaera.”  He was quiet for a moment, remembering the desperate battle in the narrow corridors of the star destroyers – lights flickering as power was cut off, then restored, emergency notifications about hull breaches still blaring out absurdly over the sound of blasterfire and Vong war cries.  He would have given his right hand for his lightsaber.

He swallowed past the lump in his throat and went on, “Thrawn sent Pellaeon and some of the other bridge crew to the auxiliary bridge so that they weren’t in the same place. I know they were arguing about it – I think Pellaeon wanted to evacuate and Thrawn still thought he could win.”

“Zeb and Chop and I searched the bridge,” Sabine said.  “There wasn’t much of it left.  We had to get into the communications room computers.”

Ezra nodded. “Yeah.  I was with the death troopers – we ran into Pellaeon on his way down to the auxiliary bridge and stayed with him. The Vong took Thrawn, the rest of the bridge crew, others – there’s no accurate count on how many died and how many the Vong took captive.”  He resisted the urge to say that as far as he was concerned, the Vong were welcome to keep Thrawn; with his luck they’d team up and that was the last thing he wanted or needed.  “No one was in the auxiliary bridge when the bridge went; by the time we got there it was too late to pull the Chimaera up.  Pellaeon ordered the evacuation then; the Vong were already pulling out.  I guess they got what they wanted.  By then the Scylla had come back; Charybdis was still trading punches with the Vong out in space.”

He pulled his legs up and rested his chin on his knees.  He didn’t think he would ever forget the sight of the Chimaera crashing, which he had seen from one of the evacuating gunships.  The shock wave when the star destroyer had struck the ground had tossed the gunships around with toys; two of them had crashed into each other and exploded. Even the Scylla, making a reckless atmospheric approach in an attempt to save as many of the Chimaera’s crewmembers as it could, had been thrown aside.  Ezra never wanted to give Imperial any more credit than necessary, but the fact that Commander Kisujo had kept the Scylla from crashing was probably a minor miracle, especially given how much damage the cruiser had already sustained.

“Pellaeon went back afterwards to look for survivors,” Ezra said eventually. “There weren’t any. There were Vong hunting parties all over the place, though, seeding their blasted worldshaping plants.”

Hera stirred. “Those are the plants all over the Chimaera?  We thought the ship must have been there for years until we got into the computers.”

Ezra nodded. “This planet is already pretty close to what they like in a world –”  He gestured at the jungle that sat heavy and waiting all around them, “– but I guess they do it as a matter of course whenever they’re grounded for a while.  Change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the groundwater, destroy anything that looks like technology, enslave the natives – I don’t think this place has any, though.”

“So what are you doing out here?” Zeb asked over his shoulder.

“Looking for the Vong,” Ezra said.  He rubbed his aching shoulder, where a Vong warrior had slammed him into a bulkhead on the Chimaera, and which had gotten further banged up when the shock wave from the Chimaera’s crash had tossed them his gunship around like confetti. Getting thrown into that tree hadn’t helped it either, nor did it help that it was the same shoulder he had been shot in six years ago.  “Pellaeon thought he’d send someone who actually had a chance at making it back. And who he didn’t mind losing,” he added sourly. “TIE patrols spotted the Vong camp out this way – or the one who made it back said so, anyway.  Pellaeon wants Thrawn back for some reason.  And the rest of the crew, I guess.  Even if they’re Imps they don’t deserve what the Vong will do to them.”

He fell silent, thinking about some of the holos he had seen of Vong-controlled planets the Chimaera had found.  He had only been allowed groundside on one of those occasions, when Thrawn had decided he wanted to see what a Force-user would make of it, and he’d wanted to claw his own skin off within minutes of touching down.

“This isn’t the invasion fleet,” he said eventually. “I don’t know where they are.  Thrawn thought it was some kind of advance scout fleet to figure out how hard the Vong would have to hit the Empire.”

Hera exchanged a look with Kanan over Ezra’s head.  Sabine and Zeb both swore, Sabine in Mando’a, Zeb in Lasat.

“What?” Ezra said. “What did I miss?  Uh, besides everything that happened in the last six years.  You can just give me the highlights.”

Sabine rested the piece of beskar on her knee and ticked them off on her fingers. “Tarkin’s dead, Vader’s dead, the Emperor’s dead, Alderaan got blown up, the Empire’s in pieces but Palpatine still tried to destroy it from beyond the grave, the New Republic’s being run by idiots.  Did I forget anything?  Oh, the Jedi are back but all they do is argue about doctrine.”

Kanan sighed. “That’s an oversimplification.”

“Wait – what?” Ezra said.

“Not everyone on the Provisional Council is an idiot,” Hera said.

“Wait, what?”  Ezra felt like he had just been hit with a very large brick. “Palpatine’s dead?” he said, focusing on that.

“Probably,” Zeb said. “Skywalker’s the only one who saw it happen.”

“Who’s – wait, like Anakin Skywalker?  But he’s –” He stopped abruptly, remembering what had happened on Malachor.

There was an awkward silence shared between Kanan and Hera; Zeb and Sabine just looked at each other and shrugged.  Sabine said, “If Palpatine was still around there wouldn’t be a dozen warlords – mostly former Imperials – running around trying to carve up the Empire between them.”

“Yeah, and maybe the Provisional Council would stop arguing with each other,” Zeb grumbled.

“The Jedi?” Ezra said a little wildly.

“Yeah, all three of them,” Zeb said.

“I’ll explain later,” Kanan said quickly. “It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you about the Death Star,” Sabine said. “Mark one and mark two.”

“The what?”

“Let’s focus on our current situation, shall we?” Hera said quickly.

“Don’t even get me started on Mandalore.”

“I’ve always tried not to!”

“Hera went to another universe.”  Sabine considered. “And she has a baby.”

“What?”  Ezra almost fell off the tree root twisting around to look at Kanan and Hera.

Hera bit her lip. “Jacen’s not a baby, he’s six,” she said.  She looked at Kanan and smiled, soft and fond.  “He’s back on Ryloth with my father.”

“I need a drink,” Ezra muttered, then, louder, “Congratulations.  Wait, you, went to another universe?”

“Kanan too,” Sabine said. “Oh, Ahsoka’s back too, but that was a while ago.”

Ezra rubbed at his forehead. “Okay, can we catch me up later?”

“The relevant part is that neither the Imperial Remnant nor the New Republic is in any position to repel a full-scale invasion,” Hera said.  She sighed.  “The only reason the New Republic let us come out here – officially, I should say – is because there have been rumors about Thrawn for years.  If he’s in contact with anyone in the Remnant –”

Ezra shrugged. “Believe me when I say that I’m the last person Thrawn ever talked to.  About anything.”

“How much of the Seventh is left?” Kanan asked.

“The Scylla and the Charybdis are the only ships left, and they both got pretty beat up in that last fight with the Vong,” Ezra said, thinking back.  Pellaeon didn’t tell him much more than Thrawn did, but he had seen the makeshift command post in the Scylla before he’d left.   “Everyone’s taken pretty heavy losses since Lothal –”  He looked up suddenly, his heart in his throat. “Lothal –”

“Fine,” Sabine reassured him quickly. “Ryder’s governor again, everyone’s fine, Loth-cats as far as the eye can see.”

Ezra’s shoulders slumped in relief.  Eventually, he said, “At least ten thousand back at Chimaera Camp and on Scylla and Charybdis, but I don’t think they’ve got more than fifteen thousand left altogether.  I guess it depends how many the Vong took off the Chimaera.”

Kanan drew in his breath sharply.  Ezra couldn’t blame him; the Chimaera’s full muster was for forty thousand, but it hadn’t held that many people since well before the purrgil had reduced it substantially.  Most star destroyers, Pellaeon had remarked once, seldom held a full muster unless they were expecting to go into battle; in the normal course of things a star destroyer simply didn’t actually need nearly ten thousand stormtroopers who would do nothing but take up resources and start fights.

“That many troops plus the cruisers is enough to give any of the warlords a leg up on the others,” Sabine said practically. “Even without a star destroyer – or Thrawn, for that matter, I can’t see him letting Isard or Zsinj hold his leash.”  When Ezra frowned at her, she clarified, “Those are two of the warlords running around making trouble.  Isard used to run the ISB, Zsinj is just annoying.”

“He’s gotten a lot of people killed,” Zeb said harshly. “That’s more than ‘just annoying.’”

Sabine made a gesture of apology.  When Ezra looked uncertainly between them, Zeb explained, “Before I volunteered for this, I was with New Republic Special Forces – the Pathfinders, not the droppers. The droppers are all crazy.”

Ezra filed that away to ask about later.

Kanan and Hera shared one of those silent moments of communication that Ezra had been so familiar with half a decade earlier, then Hera said, “We’ve stayed here too long already. Ezra, were you on your way to or back from the Yuuzhan Vong encampment?”

“To.  I know about where it is.  And I can’t sense the Vong –”  He glanced at Kanan and saw the older man’s nod, acknowledging that it wasn’t any fault in Ezra’s command of the Force, “– but I can sense the captives they’ve got.  And what they’re doing to this planet.”

Kanan nodded again, his expression grim.

“Will you take us there?” Hera asked. “We’d better see this, and then we can decide what we’re going to do. Regardless, the New Republic has to know.”

Ezra nodded, a little puzzled at the odd tone in her voice, then realized abruptly what might be going through her head right now.  “I’m not one of them,” he said. “I didn’t switch sides.  It wasn’t all awful, but I spent most of the past six years in a cell except when Thrawn decided to haul me out in case having a Force-user around helped.  No one on the Chimaera ever forgot whose fault it was they were out there,” he added, gritting his teeth against the sudden quaver in his voice.  He touched a finger to the white streak in his hair; it was probably invisible in this poor light, but it was part of the reason he kept most of his hair cropped short these days.  “I got this the last time some of them decided I should pay for that and shot me in the head.  That was the fourth time someone tried.  Thrawn executed a hundred and thirty-seven people for it, including all the death trooper officers.”

He heard Zeb’s growl, low and furious, and the leather of Sabine’s gloves creak as she closed a fist.

“I’m not an Imperial,” Ezra said, fisting his own hands against his knees.  He had nightmares about that day sometimes, about getting dragged out of his cell and down to the starboard hangar bay; the death trooper commander, who had been in charge of the attempted lynching, had wanted as many crewmen as possible to see it.  Ezra had heard later that there had been a significant number of the conspirators who had wanted to execute Thrawn as well, blaming him for bringing Ezra onboard, getting them lost in the Unknown Regions, and attracting the attention of the Yuuzhan Vong.  As it was, Thrawn, Pellaeon, and most of the other senior officers who weren’t also in on the conspiracy had been locked in one of the conference rooms before they had managed to get out.  He had found out later that Thrawn had actually wanted to execute more of the conspirators, but had decided not to under the circumstances.  As a result Ezra had spent most of his time in the medbay worried that one of those who had escaped the executions would come after him to finish the job.

He looked at Kanan, knowing that he would be able to sense it even if he couldn’t see it, and added, “I’m still a Jedi.”

“I know,” Kanan said, reaching down to squeeze Ezra’s shoulder.

Ezra felt something tight inside him unknot.  He reached up to grasp Kanan’s fingers, feeling sick with relief.

“I believe you,” Hera said. She looked over his head to Kanan, who nodded in response. “I believe you,” she repeated.  “We’ll have a job of it convincing New Republic Intelligence, but let’s not borrow trouble before we have to.”

*

Before they left, Ezra found his sniper rifle and the sheared-off barrel.  He handed the barrel to Sabine so that she could inspect the severed edge, comparing it to the dead amphistaff, and broke down the rifle until it was in its heavy blaster pistol configuration.  He packed the rifle components away rather than leave them there; the machinists back at Chimaera Camp would either be able to repair them or use them for another purpose.  The pistol went on his belt in the holster he had brought in case he needed to use it in that configuration.

Sabine returned the barrel to him and regarded the amphistaff’s corpse thoughtfully.  Ezra had already tried and failed to get his vibroknife out of its neck, to his disgust.

“Can I take this with us or can they track it?”

“No idea,” Ezra said. “It’s never come up before.”

“Don’t take the risk,” Hera said.

Sabine sighed regretfully but admitted, “I’m guessing this isn’t the last time we’re going to run into these things.”

“The Vong are worse than grass ticks,” Ezra said, looking around until he found where he had dropped his night vision goggles.  When Zeb reached for them, Ezra shook his head and explained about the amphistaff poison, which had already eaten through the lenses and left a brown patch on the ground where the goggles had lain.  Ezra wouldn’t touch them again; he had seen too many people die from a drop of it on bare skin.  It ate through stormtrooper armor only a little more slowly than it did cloth.  At least five people from the Chimaera had had limbs amputated where they must have touched somewhere it had been, even if the venom itself was no longer visible.

“I’m really starting to dislike these things,” Zeb growled.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Ezra said.  He looked around until he saw the thud bug that the Vong warrior had thrown at him early in the fight, and found it lodged into the thick bark of one of the nearby trees, which must have prevented it from returning to the warrior the way most thud bugs did.  The fact that it hadn’t taken a chunk out of the tree impressed him, since he had seen them rip holes in durasteel plating a few times.  That must have been very hard wood.

He pointed the thud bug out to Zeb and Sabine; Kanan and Hera were talking quietly to each other a little ways away.  “We’ve been calling them thud bugs – they’re some kind of beetle; they can change their gravity somehow to hit incredibly hard.  The Vong throw them – razor bugs too.  That name’s probably self-explanatory.”

Sabine fingered a scratch on what remained of her armor.  She looked oddly unbalanced without the missing portion of her breast plate, which she had stowed in one of her hip-pouches. “Ran into a couple of those. Lightsaber goes through them,” she noted, glancing at Kanan.

“Does it go through the armor?” Ezra asked curiously, hoping the answer was yes.  He would feel better to know that something did.

She and Zeb both shook their heads. “Kanan’s real good at finding soft and tender places, though.”

Kanan turned his head at the sound of his name.  Ezra felt the flicker of his attention at the edge of his mind; he hadn’t been listening in on their conversation.  He was exquisitely aware of Kanan’s presence now that he knew the other man was there; if he had been paying more attention he might have realized when the Ghost arrived in-system.  As it was, he had had his mind focused on the area immediately around him, trying to make certain that the animals and plants of the planet would tell him the Yuuzhan Vong crept up on him.  He hadn’t flung his mind wide into the Force.  No one on the Chimaera was Force-sensitive; the Empire screened even the weakest Force-sensitives out of the service.

He might have been more concerned about the way his awareness of Kanan’s presence was blotting out his awareness of the rest of the Force, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Kanan was here.  All he wanted to do was creep over to Kanan’s side and bask in the sheer strength of his presence in the Force, like a Loth-cat in a patch of sunlight.

They left soon afterwards. Ezra took the lead with Zeb, wishing for the night vision goggles but knowing he didn’t need them.  Even before Malachor he had trained blindfolded with Kanan – which he still remembered vigorously protesting at the time – and afterwards he had worked twice as hard at it, even though he had never told Kanan as much.  He didn’t need his eyes when he had the Force, and with all his attention on the Force, the planet itself would tell him if the Vong were approaching, let alone Zeb’s sensitive ears and nose.  Zeb had confided to Ezra that this planet reminded him of Lasan before its fall – Lira San, he had said, was nice enough, but somewhere between too similar and not similar enough to be comfortable for long.  If Lira San was anything like, Ezra didn’t want to visit; he had already had enough of jungle planets and this was the only one he had been to.

He pushed his awareness of Kanan’s nearness to the back of his mind with a force of effort.  Six months ago he had woken up from a sound sleep, shocked and shaking and knowing that some essential truth of the universe had just changed.  Since it had happened he had touched that knowledge a hundred times a day, trying to work it out without having any way to do so.  He had spent long hours in meditation, reaching out into the Force and falling just short every time.  He had thought he might go mad with frustration.  Thrawn, who never missed anything, had certainly noticed, even if Ezra had refused to say what had caused his sudden discontent.  If Ezra had thought that there was any way he could get back to known space on his own, he might have made a break for it.  He had considered it – Thrawn had certainly made the point enough that as a Force-user Ezra should have been able to – but by the time he had nerved himself up for it the Vong had begun hunting them in deadly earnest.

Being back here with them felt odd.

Ezra had certainly dreamed about it enough times, and if he hadn’t been so aware of his bad shoulder he might have thought that he was back on the Chimaera, sound asleep.  He knew it was a danger, too; that his awareness of them ran the risk of distracting him at a crucial moment.  As much as he pushed his knowledge of their presence away, trying to keep his mind only on the simple facts rather than the emotions involved, he knew he was putting them all at risk.  He had to trust that between the five of them, they would be able to tell if Vong warriors searching for their missing patrol approached.

It took the better part of three hours before they reached the edge of the jungle.  Halfway through, Ezra and Kanan both sensed the passage of another Vong patrol – sensed the wildlife and plant life reacting to it, rather – but the warriors were far away and showed no sign of approaching them. Dawn was filtering through the forest canopy in a gray-green haze as they ghosted up to the edge of the tree line. Like the path Ezra had taken earlier, the jungle ended barely a meter short of the cliff-face, forming a kind of bowl around the valley below.  Ezra eased forward on his belly, pulling the riflescope out of his pack.  He could sense the passage of another Vong patrol on the rim of the cliff, but it wasn’t near enough to be concerned with unless they were here for a while.  He didn’t intend to stick around longer than he could help it.

The valley below boasted a kidney-shaped lake with large patches of some kind of plant life growing on the surface – Ezra reached out curiously with his mind and winced when he realized that they were Vong rather than native.  The jungle around it had been cut back to make space for what he thought were either structures or grounded ships, all of them looking out of place here – not quite the right color or texture, with shapes that were subtly off enough to make him wince.  He counted several dozen that looked like enormously oversized snail shells, a kind of orange-y green with a faint oily sheen to them. Something else, as large as a cruiser, he thought might be a grounded ship; its material was something like coral, or at least that was what it looked like through his riflescope.

Figures moved through the structures and ships – a few he recognized as Vong warriors, each of them unique in their vonduun crab armor; others were Vong from the different castes. He could sense humans down there, the prisoners taken off the Chimaera, but couldn’t spot them.

Sabine and Hera eased up on either side of him, Hera with a pair of macrobinoculars and Sabine with her rangefinder lowered.  Ezra didn’t have to turn his head to know that Zeb and Kanan were hanging back, keeping watch against a Vong patrol.

Keeping his voice barely more than a whisper, Ezra pointed out the grounded cruiser-analogue, then the coralskipper starfighters that passed by overhead before landing alongside the starship.  He hadn’t seen them in person before, just in holograms.

“Fast?” Hera asked him very quietly.

“About the same as a TIE, I think,” he murmured back. “They’ve got dovin basals – miniature black holes – like the cruisers, too, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Hmm.”

He had to grin at the hint of considering challenge in that syllable.  If anyone could not only outfly a coralskipper solo but also shoot it down – the TIEs and handful of remaining TIE Defenders had to go after them in swarms – then it was Hera.

After a brief moment of hesitation, Ezra reached out with the Force, sorting through the thousands of human minds as he searched for the alien one.  He couldn’t sense the Vong and their living tools at all.

“Thrawn’s there,” he said after a moment, not bothering to conceal his disappointment the way he had done when Pellaeon had asked him to find out if the grand admiral was still alive. He was pretty sure Pellaeon had been able to tell his feelings anyway, but it was the principle of the thing; Pellaeon was fully capable of having him shot as more trouble than he was worth.

Sabine snorted softly. “Might have saved us some trouble if he was dead,” she grumbled.

“Tell me about it,” Ezra muttered back.  He peered through the riflescope again, letting the Force direct him.  The shell-structures seemed to be where the prisoners were being kept, Thrawn among them.  He couldn’t tell exactly which one Thrawn was in, but he supposed that when the Imperials went after him they would probably want to break all their missing troops out as well, since it would be about as much trouble.  Unless Pellaeon tried to make him do it on his own, of course, Ezra thought, and started to grimace at the thought before he realized abruptly that that was no longer an option Pellaeon had.

He was reaching back reflexively for Kanan before he even realized he was doing so, his mind brushing against Kanan’s in the Force for a brief instant of reassurance.  He felt Kanan’s response as if his master had gripped him briefly on the shoulder, calm and collected, though he knew Kanan hadn’t moved from his sentry position.  Ezra turned his face down, his eyes burning with unshed tears.

Sabine elbowed him gently. “Hey,” she whispered. “It’s all right.  We’ve got you.”

Six years ago Ezra might have said something like you took your time about it, but he just nodded.  If they could have come sooner they would have, and if they had come sooner, then Kanan – Kanan might not be back.  Six years in the Unknown Regions with Thrawn and his merry band of sociopaths was a sacrifice he was happy to make for Kanan’s return.

They watched the Vong camp for another two hours, watching the mist burn off the lake as the sun rose. Some of the lower caste Vong went into the shell-structures, probably to feed the Imperial prisoners; none of the Imperials came out.  Ezra did a rapid estimate with the Force and came up with somewhere between three and four thousand prisoners, which he supposed would make Pellaeon happy; the worst case scenario had been that all the crewmembers unaccounted for from the Chimaera were dead.  Hera didn’t look thrilled when he conveyed this information to her.

“Well, we’re not putting them all on the Ghost, that’s for sure,” Zeb grumbled; he was close enough to overhear.

All Hera said was, “I suppose we’ll have to talk to Captain Pellaeon.”

Not long after this exchange, Kanan said softly, “There’s a patrol about two klicks west of us.  We’d better clear off, if you’ve got all you need.”

“Not all we need, but all we’re going to get, I think,” Hera murmured.  The three of them retreated from the cliff face into the cover of the jungle.

Ezra got to his feet, wincing at muscles that had gone sore after two hours lying on the ground. Kanan was still sitting cross-legged on the forest floor, facing away from them with his eyes closed and his expression calm.  Ezra was barely aware of stepping towards him until he found himself reaching down to touch Kanan’s shoulder, wanting to reassure himself of Kanan’s presence. Kanan turned his face up towards him, opening his eyes, and smiled.  Ezra drew his hand back, embarrassed, then grabbed Kanan’s forearm to help pull him to his feet, the hard edges on Kanan’s bracer digging into his fingers.

Despite their precarious position, Ezra still rather wanted to drape himself on Kanan’s neck and weep.

Hera came up behind him and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here before Chopper decides to take the Ghost and come find us,” she said.

Ezra nodded, then nearly had a heart attack as Zeb ghosted out of the jungle to join them; his purple fur and green bodysuit and armor blended in perfectly with the foliage.  If this was true of all the Lasat Ezra was definitely never going to Lira San.

They left silently, moving through the undergrowth with surprising delicacy for the size of their group.  Ezra, reaching out with the Force, found the passage of the same Vong patrol that Kanan had sensed.  If the disappearance of the patrol they had killed had been noted, it wasn’t evident from the way the Vong had acted.  Ezra would have thought that they would have had better security, but apparently not. Either that, or the Force had led them to avoid it on their approach.

The sun continued to rise steadily as they made their way single-file through the jungle.  Zeb took point this time, with Sabine just behind him. While Zeb blended into the forest around them, the sunlight through the tree canopy dappled Sabine’s armor as she moved through it; Ezra couldn’t decide what colors it was and suspected he wouldn’t know for sure until they were back at the Ghost.  Kanan and Hera brought up the rear, nearly soundless though Ezra was excruciatingly aware of Kanan’s presence.

After a sleepless night and a fight with the Vong, not to mention the intense emotion of the past few hours, he was so tired that he was nearly delirious with it.  Everything had taken on a slightly bright edge; he could have fought if he had to, but he was just as glad for the moment that neither the Vong nor the native wildlife crossed paths with them.  After almost a full day out here, he was also extremely aware of the fact that he had spent most of the past six years locked in a cell, with only occasional breaks to go nearly get killed, either by the Imperials or by whoever they happened to be fighting at the moment.  He was almost tired enough that the cell was starting to sound appealing.

 The day wore on, the heat and humidity growing steadily.  Ezra kept his weary eyes on Sabine’s gaudily painted jetpack in front of him; it wasn’t the same color that it had been six years earlier – he would have been shocked if it had been – but the basic winged design was more or less the same, though he could spot differences.  He was so focused on that to stay on his feet that he didn’t realize they had reached their destination until the flicker of movement behind transparisteel caught his eye.

Ezra stiffened, his hand going to his blaster.  It took him a few moments for his gaze to focus; he was expecting nothing more than the endless expanse of forest, not the Ghost parked in a clearing just barely large enough for the ship.  He stared blankly at the ship, unable to believe that it was actually here after so many years.

Kanan closed a hand on his shoulder as the ramp unfolded.  Chopper, apparently unchanged from the last time Ezra had seen him, appeared at the top of the ramp, waving one of his manipulators and shouting in annoyance about how they had gone for hours, they could have died, how dare they leave him all alone.  He stopped midway through his tirade, apparently having spotted Ezra.

Kanan pushed Ezra forward gently.  Hera was walking past him, her own shoulders slumping with weariness; Sabine paused to turn on one foot, her gaze traveling over the clearing.  Zeb was already on his way up the ramp with a comment to Chopper.

Ezra took one step forward, then another one.  Chopper came down the ramp towards him as he reached it, chirping a cautious question.

“Yeah,” Ezra said. “Yeah, it’s me.”

He started to kneel down so that they were on the same level, then overbalanced and sat down hard instead.  Chopper rolled up to him, close enough to touch but not doing so.  Ezra reached out, hesitating for an instant before he laid his hands on Chopper’s chassis.  The metal was warm to touch, the pain smooth beneath his fingers except where it was starting to chip away.  He could feel the hum of the droid’s inner workings against his palms.

“Yeah, Chop,” he said again, and started to cry, his head bent forward against Chopper’s dome so that none of the others could see. “It’s me.  It’s me.”

[renegadetulisrp]

evcrlasting​:

You couldn’t say she didn’t try, though one could argue she didn’t try that hard either but she wasn’t ready to push him into accepting her offer if he wasn’t at all interested. Was he hiding some secret girlfriend that he didn’t want to tell her about? In a way, she wanted to see him happy with someone who cared about him. On the other hand, sharing Ezra with someone else just wasn’t something she was ready for, not when he was already such a big presence in her life. “Fine, but I wanna know when you do go on a date,” she murmured. More so she could prepare herself for the inevitable. He was clearly joking but Sofia couldn’t deny the fact that Ezra wasn’t completely in the wrong. She wasn’t completely sure she deserved better though, maybe it was that same thought process keeping her in this relationship with Ethan. Instead, she silenced herself with another scoop of ice cream, hoping it would give her time to come up with a less self-deprecating response than the one at the tip of her tongue. “Deserve is a strong word. I’m not sure I’ve really done anything deserve better,” Sofia shrugged. “I am curious as to who you’d set me up with.” They couldn’t be that much worse, not if they were a friend of Ezra. He seemed to have a better judge of character than she clearly did. Sofia raised a brow at his question. Long enough. Seemed like the proper answer. Long enough to expect this behavior, long enough to know she didn’t have to sit and take this, but also long enough for Ethan to have known he shouldn’t treat her like this. Still, an accurate time frame was probably more of what he was expecting than another heavily sighed rant about her wanting better behavior. Maybe too long was an even better answer. At least she wasn’t crying? Right now. “I would say,” she hummed, calculating, “close to 6 months.” Had it only been that short? “It’s felt longer than that,, right?” Failing to add that could be attributed to the constant stress she was put through. Putting herself through. It wasn’t all bad. That was why she was still in it too, it wasn’t all bad, plus she had Ezra. If Ezra and her current relationship could somehow be separate, maybe it would be a different story.

-

Ez could only chuckle at her murmur. "Fine, if it's so important to you." Chances are, he'd find any and every excuse to not go on dates. How long was he willing to wait for forbidden fruit? Hell, did his brother even remember this girlfriend of his? Chances were always 50/50 with Ethan. If Ethan could steal away girls he liked back in high school and college, why can't he do the same back now? He simply didn't have the heart though. "Six months feels like an eternity when it's like a ship out on a stormy sea hhmmm?" Ezra hummed as he savour another scoop of the ice cream. "I'll talk to him," he offered, looking up at Sofia's gentle face. "Bash him if need be..." he tried to make that as a joke but secretly, Ezra was serious about it. She deserved only the good things and yet life handed her unpleasant lessons. Will she learn from it? Only time will tell. "Oh right," Ezra suddenly interjected, facepalming. "I almost forgot." He rummaged around his pockets but they didn't seem to hold whatever he was looking for. "Hang on." He stood up, dragging his chair back and making a ruckus. "It's in the basement office. Be right back." Then he turned his heel to head to the stairwell leading downstairs, not letting Sofia stop him. When he appeared again, five minutes later, Ezra was clutching a box. "I got it for your birthday but uh, never got around to give it to you," he sheepishly told her, pushing it across the table. "I know, I know. You haven't finished the ice cream so technically you can't win a prize but.." he trailed off, shrugging. "Open it."