A/n: Edit: Had to change chapter name
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"Oh, so you are finally awake."
The voice came from behind me, dry and weary and achingly familiar.
"You know, I've been sitting here for the past hour trying to formulate a speech. Something wise. Something measured. Something befitting a Jedi Master addressing his wayward apprentice." A pause. "But I've decided to skip all that and just say—why is it that every single time I let you out of my sight, I end up hauling your unconscious carcass back to this ship while questioning every decision that led me to this point in my life?"
I turned my head. The cockpit swam into focus around me. The Scythe's interior. The familiar dark paneling, the dim instrument lights, the co-pilot seat I was apparently strapped into.
Hyperspace? Where are we going? Lothal? Tatooine? Alderaan?
"I carried you, by the way. Both of you. Through six blocks of that wretched city, in the rain, with my back, at my age." His tone carried the specific flavor of indignation that only a sixty-year-old man forced into manual labor could produce. "I am entirely too old for this, you miserable little shit."
I barely heard him.
My hands were already moving, fumbling at the seat straps, yanking them loose. I launched myself out of the chair and immediately started patting myself down with the frantic energy of someone who'd just woken up covered in spiders.
Please don't be on my body. Please don't be on my body. Please please please—
Arms. Legs. Torso. Neck.
I wasn't wearing my armor. Just the gray undersuit I kept underneath. I didn't care about when or how that had changed. My fingers ran over every inch of exposed skin, pulling up sleeves, checking my wrists, my palms, the spaces between my fingers.
Please please please please—
No black residue. No dark veins. No slick, pulsing film.
Nothing.
The relief hit me so hard my knees buckled. My ass hit the cold floor of the Scythe and for one beautiful second I just sat there, letting the chill of the metal seep through the thin fabric of my undersuit.
Then the joy caught up.
"HAHA— YES! FUCK YES!"
I kicked both legs out against the console, slammed my palms flat on the floor, and rolled onto my back like a deranged beetle. My legs pumped the air. My fists hammered the deck plating. I may have made a noise that could generously be described as a victory screech but more accurately resembled a womp rat being stepped on.
"HA! Nothing! Clean! Take THAT you eldritch piece of—my BODY! MY body! Mine! All mine! Every finger, every toe, MINE—"
I flopped back flat, chest heaving, grinning at the ceiling like a lunatic.
I was feeling like I was forgetting something very important, but with the whole fight feeling like a hazy memory, espesially after spending nearly an week in that Alabama sponsored slasher horror of a nightmare, and shredded cheese of Reva's memories being dumped into my head, it was still a wonder that I wasn't going into an psychological breakdown.
Or wait...I could be going one, but then again, who cares? I am me, and when me says me, we go me me me me me meeee~
When I finally tilted my head toward the doorway, Obi-Wan stood there with his arms crossed,the mask I gave him hanging loose around his neck. His robes were damp and dirt-streaked.
His hair was plastered to one side of his head. He looked like he'd aged five years in the span of a single evening. But then again, he just has 10 years to change into Alec Guinness of A New Hope so it made slight sense.
And his hand was resting very deliberately on the emergency medkit where I knew for a fact we kept the sedatives.
Choosing to Ignore that, I felt emotions bubble up in my chest.
My eyes burned with tears of love.
"Master... you came."
It came out more whiny & less sincere that I hoped, and I would have kissed the man had he not grown a beard rougher than Tatooine sand on his face.
On second thought, change that to I would have hugged him too if every muscle in my body wasn't currently running on the structural integrity of overcooked noodles.
Obi-Wan's expression softened for exactly one second before snapping back to parental exasperation.
"Of course I came. My Force-be-damned disciple informs me over comms that he has encountered an Inquisitor, assures me—against my explicit advice—that he has the situation handled, and then his signal goes dead." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "What, precisely, was I supposed to do? Sit in the safehouse and meditate on your probable demise?"
"There wasn't—okay, so—listen, it wasn't—I had her, right? I had the whole thing planned, the poison, the comms intercept, everything was going exactly like I—but then my Force control just—and she noticed, so I had to engage, and then the fight started going sideways because the black goo—wait, no, before that—the poison was working but then something in my head went—and then she was dying but also the goo was eating—no wait, it was eating me, she was the one being—and then there was this thing with the mom—not my actual mom, the dream mom—and Vasha was there but she was also—and then I was naked—NO, not like—she was naked—NO THAT'S WORSE—I mean the goo had—it was dissolving—and then I killed—or maybe I didn't kill—the kissing was—NO, not kissing, I said killing—"
Obi-Wan's expression had undergone a remarkable transformation throughout this explanation. It started at concern, passed through confusion, detoured briefly through alarm, and was now settling into a very specific look I'd seen parents give their children in public spaces. The look that said I am genuinely trying to determine if this person needs medical attention or an exorcism.
"Ezra."
"—and then the midichlorians just started—"
"Ezra."
"—FLOODING into—"
"Are you," Obi-Wan said, very slowly, "describing a combat encounter, or a fever dream you had about a woman?"
"COMBAT! It was combat! Everything I just said was combat-related!"
"You said 'naked' three times."
"CONTEXT-DEPENDENT NAKED!"
He stared at me for a long, measured moment. His hand had not moved from the sedative kit.
Then his face changed.
The exasperation was gone. The bemusement was gone. Something much older and much heavier settled behind his eyes, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into a register I'd only heard him use once before.
"Speaking of the Force." He stepped fully into the cockpit, and the low light caught the hard set of his jaw. "I need you to answer me something. Right now."
"What in the seven galaxies happened down there?"
"W-what are you talking about?"
The stammer was involuntary. My mind was already racing through possibilities, trying to gauge what he'd seen, what he'd felt, how much I could get away with omitting.
"What am I talking about?" Obi-Wan repeated, and for a moment he just looked at me like I'd asked him what color the sky was. "I am talking about what every Force-sensitive being in this galaxy almost certainly felt tonight."
Wait, what!?
"A disturbance in the Force, Ezra. A disturbance so severe, so overwhelming in its magnitude that for a moment I thought—"
He stopped. Swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quiet in that dangerous way that meant the emotion underneath was too large for volume.
"It reminded me of that day."
He didn't need to say which day.
We both knew. The day the comms had lit up with Order 66 and thousands of bright lights in the Force had been snuffed out simultaneously, one after another, like candles in a hurricane.
"And it came from your direction."
I stared at him.
My jaw hung open and I couldn't muster the motor function to close it. My brain had stopped processing at "every Force-sensitive in this galaxy" and was currently running in circles around the implications like a dog chasing its own tail.
How? How was that even remotely possible? I'd siphoned midichlorians from one dying Inquisitor in a back alley on a mid-rim garbage planet. A few thousand cells at most. That was supposed to register on the same scale as the wholesale slaughter of an entire religious order?
The Force couldn't be that much of a reactionary bitch. Could it? Over what amounted to a couple thousand microscopic organisms changing addresses?
Unless it wasn't the absorption that caused it.
Unless it was—
"Abel—"
Both my hands slammed over my mouth so hard I nearly broke my own nose.
My heart was trying to escape through my ribcage.
Don't say it. Don't say it don't say it don't say it—
The name sat on my tongue like a live grenade. Every instinct I had screamed that speaking it aloud would be monumentally, catastrophically stupid. Names had power. Names, especially that name, might as well be an engraved invitation delivered directly to whatever passed for a mailbox in the cosmic horror dimension.
Who the FUCK thought it was a good idea to put Lovecraft in my space opera?
I was supposed to be dealing with lightsabers and stormtroopers and the occasional dramatic family reveal. Not ancient entities that predated the goddamn stars and apparently had a fetish for eating identities like candy.
This was supposed to be Star Wars! Star! Wars! Two words! Neither of which is "eldritch" or "abomination" or "your mother wants to consume your essence, sweetie!"
My hands were shaking.
I stared at them, these treacherous appendages that had apparently decided now was the perfect time to develop a tremor, and tried to force them still through sheer willpower. It wasn't working.
The memories kept bubbling up unbidden—that suffocating presence, the heavy possessive touch, the thing calling itself my mother—
"Ezra."
Obi-Wan's voice cut through the spiral. I looked up to find him crouched in front of me, and when had that happened? His expression had shifted from exasperation to something that looked uncomfortably close to genuine concern.
"Breathe," he said. "Whatever it is, we will face it together. But I need you to breathe first."
Right. Breathing. That thing humans did to stay alive.
I closed my eyes and forced air into my lungs. Held it. Let it out. Did it again, because apparently the first time didn't count. The shaking subsided to a manageable vibration rather than a full-body earthquake.
When I opened my eyes again, Obi-Wan was still there, patient and waiting.
"Forgive me, Master." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "But I fear telling you might invite more problems than it solves."
His brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
Instead of answering, I asked, "When you found me in the alley—what did you see?"
The question seemed to throw him. He straightened, one hand coming up to stroke his beard in that unconscious gesture I'd started to recognize as his thinking tell.
"You were on the ground," he said slowly. "Covered in what looked like black soot, or perhaps ash. Your droid was beside you, chirping in what I can only describe as mechanical panic. The girl was against the wall, unconscious." His eyes darkened. "For a moment I thought I'd arrived too late. That you were both beyond saving."
Black soot.
Not black goo, that motherfucking living, pulsing, identity-devouring parasite matter.
Just eldritch soot of questionable composition.
Which meant either the substance had burned off entirely when I'd done my impromptu midichlorian heist, or—
I shoved that thought into a box marked "PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE EZRA" and mentally welded it shut.
"Wait." My brain, operating on a concerning delay, finally processed the full sentence. "Arachnae—where is she? Is she okay? Is she—"
I am a fucking jerk.
She'd saved me. Yes, zapped me to heaven nearly but it was a undeniable fact that without her I'd probably would have been trapped in that suburban hellscape, while having being digested by an eldritch horror wearing a floral apron.
And I hadn't even asked about her until now.
Great job, asshole. Really prioritizing the important relationships here.
"Your droid is fine," Obi-Wan said, and the knot in my chest loosened slightly. "It appeared to have completely drained its power reserves. I placed it in the sleeping quarters to... charge? Rest? I confess I'm not entirely certain what the appropriate terminology is for a droid that chirps with more emotional range than most senators I've known."
"She," I corrected automatically. "Arachnae's a she."
"Of course she is." His tone suggested he'd stopped questioning my life choices somewhere around the third near-death experience. "The princess is also there, still unconscious from the sedative. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
"I exercised appropriate caution regarding civilian safety in a combat zone," I said, which was technically true from a certain point of view.
"You drugged a ten-year-old."
"A ten-year-old who was about to watch me murder someone. Context matters."
Obi-Wan looked like he wanted to argue, but ultimately just sighed with the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who had accepted that this was his life now.
I pushed myself off the floor, legs wobbling only slightly, and made my way to the viewport.
Hyperspace stretched before me in ribbons of light and impossible color. The swirling tunnel of twisted starlines that meant we were hurtling through the galaxy at speeds that would have made Einstein weep into his equations.
Still can't believe this is real.
The thought surfaced unbidden, the way it sometimes did when I caught myself in moments like this. Part of me—some stubborn, unassimilated kernel that still remembered being Alex, still remembered dying on a cold road with headlights in his eyes—kept expecting to wake up. To find out this had all been some elaborate fever dream conjured in the last firing synapses of a dying brain.
Wouldn't that be something? To have fought this hard, survived this much, only to discover it was all a fantasy spun by neurons desperately clinging to consciousness?
Would it matter?
The thought was uncomfortable, so I did what I always did with uncomfortable thoughts. I filed it away and focused on the immediate crisis.
"Master," I said, still watching the lights dance. "You remember the black substance I told you about? The thing in my mindscape, covering the damaged star?"
"I recall the conversation vividly, yes."
"I found out what caused it." I pressed my palm against the cold transparisteel. Grounding. Real. "Or more accurately—who."
Silence from behind me. Waiting.
"There's an entity." The words came slowly, carefully. "Something so old that it might predate the stars themselves. Something that exists—I don't know if 'exists' is even the right word—in the spaces between reality. And apparently, it's been taking a very personal interest in me."
"An entity."
"An entity," Obi-Wan repeated.
"Yeah. Let's call her..." I searched for a placeholder that wouldn't invite disaster. "'She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.' For safety reasons."
I slid into the co-pilot seat, suddenly too exhausted to stand. "So, Master—remember back when you guys went to Mortis? And Ahsoka turned evil, and there were those Force gods playing dysfunctional family drama? The Father, the Son, the Daughter?"
Obi-Wan stared at me like I'd grown a second head. "W-what are you talking about?"
Oh.
Oh no.
The memory wipe. Of course—the Father had erased it all at the end. I sank back against the seat, deflating.
I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. "Master, it's gonna be a long info dump."
And here I was, thinking I'd finally get to check on Arachnae.
[End Chapter]
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