A/N: Thank you for your patience and apologies for no updates on sunday. I was quite royally fucked past few days, without any lubrication of course. Back to Back exams and to cover the whole ass syllabus on the night before exams....Gosh I hate maths so much now that even any other course that lean into it feel so so hateful.Well Rant aside, this chapter is a bit on lengthier side cuz there were a lot of threads to be wrapped up and thing explained. I tried quite a bit but couldn't make it less heavy so hope you have fun reading it.
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We walked through impossibly green grass, and the bag on my shoulder dug into my collarbone with every step.
The thing weighed a solid fifteen kilos more than it should have, courtesy of one very unconscious spider droid nestled inside alongside enough weaponry to make any customs officer faint. Normally I'd be struggling visibly, but a thin trickle of Force reinforcement through my shoulder and spine kept my gait steady. One of the few advantages of this whole power-boost situation—the background effort that used to require active concentration now ran almost on autopilot.
"If you don't mind my asking," Bail said, matching his stride to our shorter legs as we crossed the field, "how old are you, Ezra?"
"Ten, Senator."
Bail's step faltered. Just barely, just for half a second, but I caught it.
"Ten." He looked down at me with the expression of a man recalculating several assumptions at once. "That would make you the same age as Leia."
"Give or take a few months, probably."
"I would have guessed twelve at minimum. Thirteen, perhaps. Even then, the way you carry yourself..." He trailed off, shaking his head. "If I hadn't heard you speak over comms, I would have assumed Ben's operative was at least a young adult."
"Nothing much to it, Senator. All that exercise Master makes me do is to blame." I shifted the bag's strap. "Besides, circumstances tend to age people faster than normal. A senator would be quite experienced with that fact, no?"
Bail let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "True enough."
"Now that Bail mentions it," Obi-Wan said from my other side, and I caught the slight tilt of his head as he studied me, "you do look a bit taller than when we first met. Has your growth spurt started?"
I blinked. "Really? I don't feel much taller."
"An inch at least. Perhaps more. The proportions of your face have shifted as well. Subtle, but noticeable."
An inch?
Wait, seriously?
A small, entirely undignified spark of excitement lit up somewhere in my chest. I crushed it immediately because I was in the middle of a serious political situation and this was absolutely not the time to be celebrating—
Puberty. Actual puberty. Finally.
God, I was so tired of this body. Every mirror was a reminder that I was trapped in a frame that couldn't reach high shelves without Force assistance. Not to mention the... other aspects of prepubescent anatomy that made looking at certain parts of my own naked body feel illegal.
An inch. It wasn't much. But it was a start.
Soon. Soon I would be a real boy again.
...that came out wrong.
I adjusted my expression back to neutral before anyone noticed the momentary crack.
Ahead, the main estate came into view properly for the first time. Three stories of pale stone set into the hillside like it had always been there, climbing vines with blue flowers crawling up one wall, wide windows catching the last of the twin sunset.
Instead of going there, Bail steered us away toward a second structure.
It sat about two hundred meters from the main house, connected by a covered stone walkway but clearly a separate building. Smaller, two stories, but "smaller" in the context of Organa property apparently meant "only large enough to house a mid-sized diplomatic delegation."
"This wing is reserved for... sensitive guests," Bail said, choosing the word with a diplomat's precision. "Minimal staff. No surveillance systems. The personnel here are personally vetted by me, not the palace security apparatus."
Simply said, this was where you put people whose existence was politically inconvenient.
People like, say, a supposedly dead Jedi Master.
"Bail," Obi-Wan said, his tone shifting to something more serious, "I appreciate the hospitality, but I should not linger. He cannot be left unattended for long."
Both knew exactly who 'he' was.
"Ben, from what you've told me on the walk here, the situation on Daiyu is going to stir considerable heat. An Inquisitor going silent, the disruption at the spice den—the Empire will investigate. If you depart immediately and they've already begun tracking your ship's trajectory..." Bail paused, letting the tactical implications fill the silence. "Give me a day. Let my people assess the situation, check the hyperspace corridor records, confirm your return route is clean. One day."
Obi-Wan's jaw tightened beneath the mask. I could feel the internal war—duty to Luke pulling him toward the ship like gravity, the rational part of his mind acknowledging that Bail's caution made sense.
"One day," Obi-Wan conceded. "No more."
"That's all I ask." Bail gestured toward the entrance as an older man in simple but immaculate clothing stepped out to greet us. "Carel here will see to anything you need. He's been with my family for over two decades."
Carel bowed. Mid-fifties, salt-and-pepper hair, the kind of posture that came from a lifetime of professional service. His eyes swept over us with the practiced assessment of someone who cataloged details for a living—lingering on my armor and oversized bag for exactly one second longer than polite before settling into professional warmth.
"Senator. It is an honor. If you and your guests would follow me, the private study is prepared."
Bail nodded. "Good. Ben, we can discuss the details inside. The room is—"
"Actually," I said.
Both men turned.
"Master, perhaps you should handle the debrief with Senator Organa."
Bail's eyebrows rose. "Oh? I admit I was looking forward to hearing the full account directly. Leia's version has been... passionate but not entirely coherent."
"Master Kenobi was witness to most of it, and I've given him a thorough account of everything else. I'm sure he'll be far better company for that conversation than I would." I rolled one shoulder, letting the genuine stiffness sell the performance.
"Besides, Senator, I've spent the better part of a week sealed in armor that's beginning to develop its own ecosystem, aboard a ship whose refresher was designed by someone who considered 'water pressure' a theoretical concept. I would genuinely kill for a shower right now, and I'm in a profession where that statement could be taken literally."
A tired smile crossed Bail's face. "Well, I can hardly argue with that."
"And honestly," I let my voice ease into something more genuine, "you two have years of catching up to do. I'd only be in the way."
Hearing my words, I felt like Obi-Wan was about to say something to me but didn't voice it. Instead he looked toward Bail.
"The boy has a point," Obi-Wan said, the faintest emphasis on boy that was definitely a message. "There is much I'd like to discuss with you privately, Bail."
Bail nodded once, then turned to his attendant. "Carel, please show our young guest to the upper suite. And see to it he has everything he needs."
"Of course, Senator." Carel turned to me with a slight bow. "If you'll follow me, sir."
I watched Bail and Obi-Wan disappear through an inner doorway. I did mean the part about catching up to do, but that was not the only reason.
I needed Obi-Wan to paint my picture to Bail, as my presence was something that would inevitably come up when they discussed this whole thing. Rather than blow my own pipe, it would be better for Obi-Wan to tell. I trusted him for a good impression. Coming from a Jedi Master, that testimony would carry a weight my own words never could.
Should I worry about the Force vision story getting out? About Bail learning the specifics of how I knew things I shouldn't know?
No. In fact, the more Bail heard, the better.
After all, my future plans were going to depend heavily on that reputation.
"Sir?" Carel's voice, politely expectant.
"Sorry. Lead the way."
We climbed a flight of actual stairs—stairs, because apparently the Organas believed in architectural tradition over convenience—and arrived at a door of dark wood.
Carel opened it and stepped aside.
Wow...
Is this the real life? or is this just an fantasy?
A wide bed dominated the center, the kind built for people who considered sleep a luxury experience rather than a biological necessity. Fresh flowers on the nightstand, a writing desk by the window overlooking the valley, late sunlight pouring across polished stone floors.
Through an open archway, I spotted the refresher.
The bathtub alone could have qualified for its own postal code. Stone-lined, deep enough to submerge in, with actual fixtures that suggested the water came out hot, pressurized, and possibly infused with something that would make my skin feel like it belonged to a person who hadn't been living in a desert warzone.
Speaking of which, I was not, even remotely, lying about the shower part earlier.
"Carel," I said, with a gravity befitting the moment, "this is perfect."
"I'm glad to hear it, sir. The call panel is beside the bed if you require anything."
He withdrew, closing the door with the quiet click of a man who had spent decades perfecting the art of the unobtrusive exit.
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[A Long Relaxing Shower Later]
The bed made a sound when I hit it that no piece of furniture had any right making.
My hair was still dripping, skin flushed pink from water hot enough to qualify as a religious experience, and I was wearing nothing but a towel and the boneless satisfaction of a man who had finally, finally, been clean.
A sharp, indignant chirp erupted from somewhere near my left knee.
Arachnae scrambled sideways across the sheets, all eight legs splaying in startled disarray, her optical sensors flaring bright before dimming back to their current half-power glow. She clicked at me in a rapid burst that translated roughly to warning before landing would be appreciated.
"Sorry, girl."
She clutched the plush tooka doll tighter against her chassis with two front legs, like I'd tried to take it from her. She'd found it in my backpack(why she was looking through it was still a mystery) on the Scythe somehow, despite me burying it under three layers of gear, and had refused to let go since.
She'd surprised herself instead and now treated the thing like a firstborn child.
Another chirp. Softer this time. She settled back near the pillow, tooka doll secured under two legs, and tucked the rest of her limbs underneath her chassis in that energy-conservation pose I'd been seeing way too much of lately.
I'd checked her over as soon as I could on the Scythe. While Obi-Wan said she didn't looked damaged, small droids like her were very fragile things, and for some reason Arachnae had tendency to hide any damages just like cat try to hide their injuries. And my decision proved to be the right one as the subsequent diagnosis had been a mixed bag.
The good news was that her core processing unit and primary sensor arrays were intact. Whatever the black goo's proximity had done to organic matter, Arachnae's durasteel hull had only taken superficial damage.
Some pitting on her lower chassis plates, a few corroded contact points where the substance had pooled against her frame, but nothing structural.
The bad news was her power cells.
She'd fired the taser charge over and over on Daiyu, shocking me back to consciousness again and again without giving her capacitors time to cycle and recharge between discharges. Two of her three cells had overheated from the sustained drain, their internal chemistry degrading enough to cut output to maybe forty percent of rated capacity.
The third cell had melted, taking out a cluster of non-vital circuitry on its way out—her rear proximity sensor, one of her auxiliary leg actuators, and the subsystem that controlled her thorax-mounted spotlight.
I'd done what I could during the hyperspace trip. Bypassed the dead cell, rerouted charge pathways around the damaged circuits, replaced a few corroded connectors with spares from the Scythe's maintenance locker. She was functional. She could move, scan, chirp, and cling to stuffed animals.
But she was running on fumes. Low-power mode. Sluggish movements, less frequent chatter, longer rest cycles.
She needed proper parts and proper tools and proper time. All things I was critically short on.
Her optical sensor dimmed as she cycled back into rest, the tooka doll still firmly in her grip.
I closed my eyes and sank inward.
The mindscape came easy now. Almost too easy, like the barrier between conscious thought and deeper perception had worn paper-thin after everything that happened.
Everything looked the same as before, same as the first assessment I'd done on the Scythe.
Ladies and gentlemen, the chapter of my life where I had an illegal alien parasite squatting rent-free in my brain was officially, conclusively, done.
The Alex star hung where it always had, stable and white and humming along like the dependable bastard it was. The part of me that was still Alex of Earth, still remembered dying on a cold road, still kept a running tally of every anime and video game reference that applied to his current situation. Untouched. Uncompromised.
And the goo itself—gone. The space where it used to writhe and pulse and generally make my inner world feel like a Cronenberg movie set was clean and empty. Paranoia was a bitch through, and that was why I again spent minutes looking through every nook and corner of my mind for even the tiniest trace of it...seventh time since the first observance.
Now, it made a certain retroactive sense when I thought about its behavior patterns. The way it had consumed and assimilated the fractured pieces of Ezra's ego, feeding on dissolving memories, parasitizing broken identity fragments—that was textbook her. Same operational playbook she'd used in the dream, wearing faces, consuming attachments, promising unity through annihilation.
Which raised the question I really, genuinely, desperately did not want to think about.
Where did it go?
Destroyed during the burning phenomenon on Daiyu? Incinerated when the midichlorian cascade tore through both me and whatever remained of Reva? That was the optimistic read, and I wanted very badly to believe it.
Or did it escape?
Did fragments of something connected to an entity that predated the stars just... slip out into the galaxy while I was busy having a seizure in an alley?
I turned that question over in my mind, poking at it from different angles the way you poke at a bruise even though you know it's going to hurt.
She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Bringer of Chaos, the Mother, whatever title you preferred for something that defied sane categorization.
In the Legends timeline—which apparently wasn't just legends anymore, thanks universe, really appreciate that plot twist—she'd been imprisoned in the Maw, contained at Centerpoint Station by the combined will of the Ones of Mortis. The Father, the Son, the Daughter, all keeping her locked away in a cosmic jail cell maintained by sheer metaphysical architecture.
Was she still there? Still imprisoned?
The dream made me consider otherwise. Or at least suggested she could reach out from confinement, extending influence across whatever boundaries held her. An very worrying discovery but reaching out and breaking free were very different things. In Legends, it had taken the destruction of Centerpoint Station and the death of the Ones to let her loose entirely.
The Ones were dead here. Mortis had happened during the Clone Wars, the Father had ended himself, the Son and Daughter were gone. So one of the three locks was already broken.
And then there was the Force disturbance Obi-Wan had described. The one that every Force-sensitive in the galaxy might have felt. Was that caused by her manifesting in my dream? By the black goo erupting into physical reality? By my midichlorian experiment, which, by the way, had actually worked?
Small victories in the face of grim cosmic reality, am I right?
Could have been any of them. Could have been all three happening simultaneously, layering on top of each other into one massive ripple that made the Force itself flinch. And if the Emperor felt it—if Vader felt it—then I'd just rung a dinner bell for every dark side predator in the galaxy.
I chewed on that for a while. Went back and forth. Played out scenarios. Tried to map Legends events onto whatever hybrid continuity I was actually living in. Got nowhere useful, just deeper into speculation that fed on itself.
...Okay. I needed to stop.
Spiraling about cosmic horror while lying in a bathrobe on an Alderaanian luxury bed was not a productive use of my time. What I needed wasn't more theorizing. It was information. Hard information, the kind carved into temple walls and stored in holocrons by people who'd actually encountered these forces and survived long enough to document them.
Jedi archives. Sith records. There must exists many ancient holocrons or libraries that both orders had maintained across thousands of years. I didn't care about the morality of it, whether it was dark side or light. In the face of her, even Luke Skywalker had to make alliance with Sith Lord, so it was clearly not something to beat myself over with.
And Mortis itself. If the physical location still existed in some accessible form, going there might reveal something about the containment architecture. How it worked. Whether it was degrading. How much time I had before "reaching out from confinement" became "walking around free."
There was also that dagger. The one from the Clone Wars—I remembered it hazily, a weapon forged on Mortis that could allegedly kill even the gods themselves. If something like that existed, if it was still out there somewhere...
That went on the list. Right near the top, underlined twice.
For now though, I had to work with what I had. And what I had was a patched-up connection to the Force, a battered spider droid, and a one-day window on a planet that wouldn't exist in roughly a decade.
Which brought me to the actually interesting development.
The Ezra star.
Still broken. Still fractured in ways that would make any Jedi healer reach for the nearest bottle of whatever Jedi drank when they needed to cope. But it was holding together, and the rate of dissolution had slowed to almost nothing, and when I looked closer at why—
I had to look twice. Then a third time, because what the hell.
Gray patches.
Dozens of them, scattered across the star's surface. Filling cracks, bridging fractures, holding the structure together with a tenacity that bordered on desperate. They looked like crude welds over hull breaches, the kind of repair you'd do with whatever scrap metal was available when the alternative was the whole ship coming apart.
And they were made of Reva.
When I saw it the first time, my reaction was 'I'm sorry, what in the name of eldritch-ness is this new horror?'
It wasn't even in the last of the last realm of possiblities that I had imagined. Since when did broken souls get mashed together and repair each other by fusing!? This was like someone took the 'You complete me' plot of cliche romance movies too literal.
I then examined them again, closer, probing with the delicacy of someone defusing a bomb. The results were more or less the same as intuition. The gray matter carried traces of her. Fragments of memory, shards of emotion, scraps of identity—all fused into the gaps of Ezra's broken soul like some kind of metaphysical spackle.
None of this was supposed to happen. The midichlorian absorption was about raw Force potential, about pulling cellular-level organisms from a dying body. It had nothing to do with soul repair. The two processes shouldn't have even been related, like trying to fix a software bug by upgrading the hardware.
But apparently, when you shove your hands into a dying woman's chest, penetrating through the wrong hole, while an eldritch parasite is simultaneously trying to eat both of you, perhaps the normal rules of metaphysical architecture take a lunch break.
It did made me wonder a lot, was this something the black goo did before it vanished? Some byproduct of its assimilation process, accidentally funneling fragments of Reva's identity into the gaps it had previously been filling? Or was it my own experiment, the midichlorian cascade carrying more than just microscopic organisms, dragging pieces of her Force signature along for the ride?
Speaking of the midichlorian experiment, that one had actually worked, by the way. Small victories in the face of grim reality! The resonance technique, the synchronization with dying cells, the actual, verifiable transfer of midichlorians from one living being to another — all confirmed successful when I'd had the presence of mind to check on the ship. The process had been chaotic and uncontrolled and riding on the back of a parasitic entity's infrastructure, but the underlying principle was sound.
First confirmed case of midichlorian absorption in the history of the galaxy, probably.
And I'd achieved it while being possessed, poisoned, and on fire.
My thesis advisor would be proud. If I had a thesis advisor. If I had a thesis. If I existed in a universe where academic credentials mattered more than "can you survive being eaten by a god."
But regardless of the small win, the overall picture was enough to make anyone want to crawl under a blanket and stay there for a decade or two.
After going back and forth on it for what felt like an hour but was probably five minutes, I forced myself to stop.
Not to mention, the whole Ego-Mashup thing also helped the case.
How? I didn't know. Couldn't know, probably, without understanding far more about soul mechanics than any living being in this galaxy seemed to.
But the result was undeniable. The broken transformer was running cleaner. Not totally perfect, but better than before.
Force energy still scattered and refracted as it passed through the damaged star, but the worst gaps were plugged.
But the fuses had been replaced, and power was getting through.
I opened my eyes. The writing desk settled back onto the floor with a soft thunk. The nightstand drifted down beside it, crystal vase barely sloshing. Individual flower stems that had wandered free floated lazily back toward their container.
Arachnae was still out, clutching her tooka. God forbid my demonstrations would have rattled her even a little, and I would have to spent the next few hours apologizing to an irritated spider droid. Sometimes made me doubt my decision of adding the female archetype behavior core in her program.
But well, whatever she had become was the best anyways.
I stared at the ceiling for a few moments, before closing my eyes.
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PS: Do tell me your thoughts about the chapter and overall pacing