A/N: Bonus Chapter for reaching 600 stones!
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[11 BBY]
The years had passed in a blur of grease, scrap tal, and the ever-present ache of frustration.
Two . Whole. Years.
Two years cramd into this body that still couldn't reach the top shelf without a stepladder. Three years of playing the wide-eyed tech prodigy kid while my adult brain scread obscenities at the sheer injustice of it all..
Two years of Vasha's morning breath in my hair.
Two years of her shalessly changing clothes in front of like I was a decorative houseplant.
Two years of my body betraying in slow motion.
Puberty had arrived early—no surprise, given the sheer volu of hormonal chaos cramd into my skull. My voice cracked at the worst possible monts. My limbs had started their awkward stretch toward adulthood.
And yes, my little Excalibur had finally decided to unsheathe itself, just enough to be a cruel tease rather than an actual solution to my problems.
Not that Vasha noticed. Or cared. Or even rembered I was in the room half the ti when she strutted around in nothing but a towel, humming so Rylothian drinking song like my sanity wasn't dangling by a thread.
But I had gained resistance due to exposure therapy over years. I could look straight up to her face while her tits kept starting at , for a whole 2 minutes...
anwhile, the shop had flourished.
What started as a glorified junkyard had evolved into sothing resembling a legitimate business. The walls were still cluttered, but now with purpose, neatly labeled shelves, a proper display case for the high-end refurbished tech, even a waiting area with chairs that didn't actively threaten to collapse.
Shockwave (forrly LQ-79, renad after an incident involving an overcharged motivator and a very startled custor) had sohow beco our star salesman.
Sure, he still lectured buyers into comas about the tallurgical properties of capacitor casings, but now they actually handed over credits afterward.
Progress.
Our previous main line of buisness of repairing junk and selling it to bidders still went on, but it was dwarfed by another source of inco
Our real money-maker, the niche stuff: discontinued components, impossible-to-find parts for obsolete luxury tech, vintage tech and all.
Especially in this galaxy which had apparently had a regression in technological levels compared to the old republic era. There were tech, outdated ones, and even futuristics ones that didn't have schemas printed out.
The companies or people that made them? Died so centuries ago.
Turns out, rich Corellian snobs hated being told their vintage speeder was now a very expensive paperweight.
And when word got out that so backwater shop on Lothal could sohow Frankenstein working replacents or outright even repair their stuff?
Off-world clients started trickling in. Not a flood, but enough to keep us comfortably in the black.
But you know what wasn't comfortably in the black?
My love life. Or, more accurately, my complete lack of one. Well, not that I needed one when sharing bed with my caring alien dommy mommy.., Yes, I had folded after so long, and trust anyone would.
And then there was the Force.
After two years of near-daily practice, my telekinesis had graduated from pathetic to marginally functional.
I could lift tools now, small ones, from a few feet away, and only if I didn't sneeze.
Progress, sure, but glacial. I wanted growth, damn it. The kind of power that didn't fizzle out trying to levitate a hydrospanner.
Which, speaking of— that....my powers might not have remained a secret.
It happened on a completely ordinary afternoon.
Vasha was bent over the workbench, soldering so fried circuitry on a busted navicomputer. The soldering iron—still glowing red-hot—was resting precariously on the edge of the table.
I was across the room, elbow-deep in a dismantled power converter, when I noticed it wobbling.
"Vas—"
She turned at the sound of my voice, knocking the table with her hip.
The soldering iron tipped.
Straight toward her bare foot.
Ti slowed.
My brain short-circuited.
No no no no—
I didn't think. Didn't plan. Just reacted.
My hand shot out.
And the Force shoved.
Not gracefully and neither precisely. Just a raw, instinctive burst of get-the-fuck-away-from-her.
The soldering iron jerked sideways mid-fall, skidding across the floor like it had been kicked.
Vasha froze.
Her eyes locked onto the iron. Then onto . Then back to the iron.
Silence.
Absolute, deafening silence.
Then—
"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!"
Her voice cracked like a whip.
I flinched. "Uh."
She pointed at the soldering iron. Then at . Then back at the iron. "Did you just—did you just push that without touching it?!"
I swallowed. "Maybe?"
Her lekku twitched violently. "Since when can you do that?!"
"Uh. A while?"
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "A while?! What the hell, Ezra! You've been holding out on !"
I rubbed the back of my neck. "I an, it's not like I've been hiding it. You just never asked."
She threw her hands up. "Oh, sure! Because 'Hey, Vas, by the way, I can move shit with my mind' is just casual conversation!"
I shrugged. "I an, you saw fix stuff that shouldn't be fixable. You didn't freak out then."
"That's different!" she snapped. "That was just—weird kid intuition or whatever! This is wizard or psychic bullshit!"
I blinked. "You're taking this way better than I expected."
She glared. "Oh, I'm freaking out, gremlin. I'm just doing it internally."
Then she paused.
Her expression shifted.
From shock to sothing else.
Sothing dangerous.
A slow, wicked grin spread across her face.
"Wait a second," she said. "If you can push things… can you pull them too?"
I hesitated. "Uh. Yeah?"
Her eyes lit up like a kid who'd just been told they could have unlimited candy.
"Oh, this is amazing," she breathed. "Do you have any idea how useful that is? No more getting up to grab tools. No more climbing shelves. I could just yoink stuff from across the room—"
I stared at her. "You're not… mad?"
She scoffed. "Kid, I've seen you pull off repairs that make zero sense. At this point, I'd be more surprised if you couldn't do weird space magic."
Then her expression sobered.
"But."
She jabbed a finger at .
"No doing it where Imps can see you. Got it? I don't need you getting dragged off to so lab because so stormtrooper saw you floating a spanner."
I nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, of course."
She crossed her arms. "Good."
Then, after a beat—
"Now pass that hydrospanner."
I blinked. "What?"
She pointed at the tool rack behind . "The hydrospanner. Yoink it over here."
I groaned.
This woman was impossible.
But I did it anyway.
____
The utterly anticlimactic aftermath of my "I can move stuff with my mind" revelation aside, the Force hadn't exactly handed a gift basket for my trouble. But it had kept quietly upgrading my two oldest, strongest tricks: Hyper Perception and Psychotry. They'd been with in so form since the very beginning, nascent sparks of weirdness that had, over the last two years, blossod into sothing terrifyingly powerful.
Hyper Perception had beco my default state, humming just beneath the surface of my normal senses. But with a conscious push, I could let it fully open. Sitting on my stool in the workshop, I let the ntal walls fall away.
The world dissolved.
My sense of self expanded, bleeding outward until my awareness filled a perfect sphere around . In that first chaotic year, it had been a re two-ter bubble—a disorienting flood of sensation. Now? It had grown to five.
Yes, five ters. I'm not joking. It just kept expanding, a little more each ti I used it. Because I usually paired it with Psychotry while repairing old junk, I'd gotten into the habit of filtering out the environntal noise. Didn't notice how much had changed.
So, consider completely blindsided the day I let it run freely.
A five-ter radius. That kind of exponential growth wasn't just surprising—it was absurd.
Within that field, the constant repetition had sharpened everything. Hyper Perception wasn't just stronger; it was deeper. Where once things like drifting dust or air currents were hazy impressions, now they were crisp. I was the dust, the swirling particles glinting in the shaft of sunlight streaming through the high window.
Electric flows through old circuits weren't vague pulses anymore. They were intricate threads, and I could trace them with my mind. Living bodies had started to feel more perable too. I still refused to really look through them, for reasons I preferred not to revisit, but I could if I wanted.
The sensory input that would've shattered my brain two years ago now flowed through like calm water. My mind had adapted. Rewired itself to take in the deluge without even blinking.
The most dramatic change was in depth. I used to be able to see micro-fractures, energy patterns, stress points. Now, if I truly focused, if I pushed my perception to its limit, the entire structure of matter began to shift. Molecules blurred in and out of focus, jittering like static. I couldn't pick out individual atoms, not yet, but I could feel the scaffolding that held reality together. And all of it pulsed with the Field—the Force in its purest form. It wrapped through every grain of dust, every ripple in the air, every nerve in Vasha's body, stitching the universe into a single, humming whole.
And then there was Psychotry.
It had matured just as much. In the beginning, it was clumsy—a chaotic storm of half-understood mories and jumbled impressions. Reading from tech manuals had been a lucky fluke. Now, it was surgical.
My eyes drifted to the dented power converter on the bench. I reached out, fingers hovering a breath above the tal. In the old days, touching it would've slamd with everything: the sweaty grip of the scrap dealer, the pilot's furious shouting when it failed mid-flight, the factory worker's numb routine. All of it dumped on at once like a collapsing archive.
Now, I had finesse. I had built a technique out of necessity, a way to send out a soft "ping" with the Force. It didn't dive into the entire mory, more like brushing against it. Like sonar. I let it sweep across the converter, let it bounce back with quiet data. Ten to twelve years old, probably. Within range.
I narrowed my focus, digging deeper with purpose. I pushed toward the mont it failed. A flicker responded. Schematics blurred into view, a jolt of energy, the pop of sothing overloading. Faint swearing. Panic.
It was clean. Precise. Controlled.
That control had been earned the hard way.
About a year ago, Vasha brought in sothing rare. A protocol droid torso, supposedly from the High Republic era. Gorgeous design, high-grade alloys, elegant as hell. The kind of thing collectors and tech cults would start blood feuds over. The client was offering enough to make nervous.
I'd walked in brimming with confidence. Placed my hands on it and dove into the past.
It felt like shoving my mind straight into a fusion reactor.
Five hundred years of history struck like a hamr to the skull.
Voices. mories. Emotions.
All of it hit at once. No order. No filter. One instant of raw impact.
I felt the pride of the droid's first creator, hands trembling with joy as it powered on for the first ti. The terror of a forgotten battle on so Outer Rim wasteland. The loneliness of decades buried under dust in a warehouse. The idle chatter of a hundred different owners. All of it layered together in a churning ss.
My mind wasn't just overwheld. It was stripped bare. Scoured by a tidal wave of raw, unsorted mory. No context. No structure. Just sensation.
The pain was imdiate and incandescent.
My vision vanished into white nothing. A hot gush of blood burst from my nose. Then—nothing.
The next thing I rember was Vasha screaming my na.
Her hands gripped my shoulders, shaking like she could drag back to reality through force alone. I was sprawled across the floor, my head in her lap. Her voice cracked. She was panicking.
I barely registered her sprinting to grab dpacks, stim injectors, anything that might help. The shop was quiet, too quiet, broken only by the sound of her boots hamring the floor and her breathing gone ragged.
I'd scared her. Bad.
The week that followed barely existed.
Migraine after migraine. Every light was a spike to the skull. Every sound, a blade. I couldn't keep down food. Standing made the world tilt sideways.
Vasha stayed with the entire ti.
She turned the lights low, muted every alert, and pulled the shutters halfway down. She spooned broth into my mouth, cursed under her breath when I flinched, and wiped my nose when the bleeding started again. She slept on a chair next to the cot. Not once did she leave my side.
She shut the shop down. Flat out. Canceled jobs, turned away clients. Didn't care who was angry. She barely let walk to the fresher without hovering.
I told her I was fine. Joked about it. Tried to wave it off.
She didn't laugh. She didn't even answer.
When we finally reopened—because I begged—we didn't go back to business as usual. She made new rules. Every piece of tech had to have docuntation. Manufacturing dates. Ownership records. No more mystery parts. No more ancient garbage from long-dead wars.
That was when I developed the ping.
A soft touch. A shallow brush of the Force across an object's tiline. Not a dive—never again a dive. Just enough to feel the weight of it. Like sonar. Like echo-location through ti. If sothing felt too deep, too layered, too old—I stopped.
That was the only reason I could still use Psychotry at all.
I respected the power. Feared it, even. But I couldn't deny the beauty of it.
I could feel reality hum. Watch ti flow. Hear ghosts whisper across copper wires. I experienced the universe in a way most people couldn't even imagine.
But it was all sensory. Every bit of it.
Hyper Perception let see the threat. Psychotry told its life story. But if soone raised a blaster, I couldn't do anything except maybe hurl a wrench and hope for a miracle.
I could track the energy signature of a stun baton down to the cell emitter. I could taste the heat coming off the barrel before the shot was fired. But I couldn't stop it.
I was a kid with godlike awareness and no defense.
And that scared more than any ntal breakdown ever could.
Because this galaxy? It wasn't safe. It was teeming with people who could fight.
Inquisitors.
I'd read about them. Seen their files. Black robes. Pale skin. Eyes like glass knives. They didn't walk—they glided. Always talking like they were delivering a eulogy. The Empire's little pet monsters. And if even one of them felt ? It wouldn't be a fight.
It would be an execution.
The idea of one of them passing through the Outer Rim and catching my signature chilled to my bones.
And then there was him.
Vader.
The nightmare in black. The final boss. The man who killed hope by breathing too loud.
Ezra had survived a few encounters. But that wasn't a fight. It was rcy. He lived because of Kanan. Because of dumb luck. Because the writers needed him to.
I didn't have plot armor. I didn't have a Kanan.
One wrong flicker. One stray ripple in the Force. One mont where I let myself feel too much.
And I'd light up like a beacon.
Ga over. Thanks for playing.
I didn't want to be that guy.
I didn't want to be a footnote. A cosmic leftover nad Ezra Bridger who did a few heroic things and then vanished into the ass-end of the galaxy. A na buried in so dusty datapad that only bored historians or obsessive fanboys would stumble across a thousand years from now.
I'd seen the heights of power this universe had to offer. Grown up watching it on screens. Jedi flipping through laser fire, Sith throwing starships, rebels blowing up moon-sized weapons. And now? I was living in it.
To be handed the keys to the kingdom of space magic and then be told I could only ever be diocre?
No.
Fuck that. I wanted more.
So—how to get it?
First, most obvious answer: lightsaber training. Get a glowstick. Learn the pointy end from the lty end. Beco a sword-swinging badass.
Perfect plan, with one minor hiccup. I had no one to teach .
The Jedi weren't just scattered—they were extinct. Endangered. Fossils.
The Inquisitors had taken over the child-kidnapping-and-brainwashing departnt, but I wasn't keen on their thods. Their whole vibe scread BDSM cult, with an uncomfortable amount of emphasis on the "S." No thank you. I was a good boy. Pure, even. Uncorrupted by red blades and leather armor.
Kanan was out there, probably being a sarcastic asshole aboard the Ghost, but he was eight years and a thousand dumb decisions away from where I was. I wasn't about to go knocking on the door of a nascent rebel cell as a ten-year-old.
Best-case scenario? They think I'm a spy.
Worst-case? I lead the Empire right to them and get the whole main cast killed before their show even gets a second season.
What about the old masters?
Yoda was holed up on Dagobah. A planet so deep in the galactic armpit it probably wasn't even on the starcharts. And, frankly, fuck that frog. His backwards-ass grammar was cute for five minutes in a movie. Listening to that crap day in, day out would drive insane.
Obi-Wan? Sitting on Tatooine. Planet-sized litterbox. Stewing in his own trauma soup. He'd cut himself off from the Force so hard, he probably couldn't levitate a grain of sand without getting a nosebleed. Not exactly peak ntor material.
Okay. So maybe the classic lightsaber route was off the table. For now.
But I didn't need to be defenseless.
The galaxy was full of sharp, pointy objects that weren't plasma swords. Vibroblades. Force pikes. Hell, even a saberstaff with a cortosis edge. Not Jedi weapons, sure—but still more than enough to ruin soone's day.
And now? I had money. Real credits. Not scrap-dealer pennies.
I could afford a quality blade. Custom-forged. Balanced. Deadly. I could buy training holos, learn the basics myself. My body was still developing, reflexes sharpening, muscles adapting. The perfect ti to build form and flow until it beca instinct.
I wasn't going to wait for so grey-robed wizard to show up and knight . I'd start preparing now. On my own terms.
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