Star Wars Rebels: A Gray Tale Chapter 9: Morning After

Bonus Chapter as 100 stones have been reached as well as we have collected enough reviews to get a rating!

Next Goal is 300 stones till end of the week or we go under 50 of power rankings.

And maybe I hadn't ntioned before, but regular update schedule is 1 chapter of 2000 to 3500 words(depending on how long the scene goes to end naturally) every 2-3 days. If chapter is shorter, then expect one the next day.

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I woke up to the sll of sothing bitter and burnt—definitely not coffee, but its grumpy space cousin. For a second, I thought I was back in my old apartnt, and then reality hit like a speeder bike to the face.

Nope. Still a tiny kid. Still on Lothal. Still stuck in a world where Darth Vader could show up and ruin my day at any mont.

Sunlight peeked through the blinds like it wasn't sure if it wanted to fully commit to morning yet. The couch slled like soap and sothing flowery—probably whatever Vasha used to wash her lekku. Not that I was sniffing around or anything. That'd be weird...

Last night's ss ca rushing back—the nightmare, the crying, the whole embarrassing "hugging a hot alien lady like a scared toddler" thing. Ugh. At least she didn't seem weirded out by it.

A clink from the kitchen made peek over the couch like a tooka checking for snacks. Vasha was there, pouring sothing dark and suspicious into two mugs. She turned and caught staring.

"Morning, sleepyhead," she said, smiling. "Sleep okay after… y'know?"

I nodded, rubbing my eyes. "Mhm." No way was I admitting I'd passed out like a drama queen.

She handed the smaller mug. It wasn't the angry space-caf she was drinking—instead, it was warm, milky, and slled sweet. I took a sip. Tasted like cinnamon and comfort.

"Thanks," I mumbled, wrapping both hands around the mug. Two kindnesses in less than a day. I was gonna owe her like, a million favors at this rate.

Vasha sat across from on a crate, sipping her own drink. The quiet wasn't awkward, just nice and peaceful, the kind that introverts like loved.

"You know," she said after a minute, "my little brother used to get nightmares all the ti. After so pirates raided our village."

I blinked.

"He'd wake up screaming about monsters with too many teeth," she continued, her voice soft. "For weeks, he refused to sleep unless I was in the room. So I told him our busted old droid was programd to zap any monsters that ca near."

"Did it work?" I asked. Kids were dumb. I would've believed it.

She snorted. "Not a chance. That droid could barely lift its own arm. But he thought it worked, so that was enough." She gave a look—not pity, just understanding. "It's okay to be scared, Ezra. You don't have to be brave all the ti."

Oof. Direct hit to the guilt centers.

I took another sip of the sweet drink, scrambling for a way to change the subject. Then my eyes landed on the half-dismantled droid arm on her workbench.

"I can help!" I blurted out.

Vasha raised an eyebrow. "With what?"

I pointed a small, determined finger at the dismantled droid arm on her workbench. "I can be your assistant," I said, the words coming out with more confidence than I expected. "My mom... she used to fix our speeder's systems when they broke. We didn't have a lot of credits for chanics."

I lowered my voice, weaving the new thread into the made up tale. "Dad was always busy with 'business,' so she taught . How to read schematics, recalibrate power couplings... basic stuff. I can help."

Okay, fine, maybe that was stretching the truth a little. But hey, I had been an engineer in my past life.

While I didn't know how exactly the tech here ran, the fundantals had to be more or less the sa. I had graduated as an electrical engineer before the soft cushion of software dev appeared and I jumped ship, so I knew more than just basics.

And Ezra's fuzzy mories included watching his parents ss with broadcast tech. Between the two, I could probably figure things out.

And if Anakin Skywalker could build a goddamn podracer at nearly the sa age as , then it shouldn't take too much effort for a graduate fellow to learn things, could it?

Vasha stared at , her expression unreadable. She looked from my earnest, upturned face to the chaotic landscape of her workbench. I wasn't sure if she was considering it or just trying not to laugh at the image of a seven-year-old recalibrating a power coupling.

"You're a little small to be a full-ti assistant," she said, but there was no mockery in her tone. Instead, a flicker of genuine curiosity, of amusent, danced in her eyes. "My tools probably weigh more than you do."

"I'm a good helper," I insisted, pushing myself into a sitting position, the oversized tunic slipping off one shoulder. I felt a surge of sothing other than desperation—a flicker of professional pride. "I won't get in the way. I'll just stay here and be quiet and help you until my dad cos back. Please, Vasha?"

I let the 'please' hang in the air, but this ti it wasn't just a ploy. It was a trade. A value proposition. Let stay, and I won't just be a burden. I can be useful. I was offering to earn my keep, through I didn't exactly knew how at the mont.

She sighed, a long, slow sound that wasn't one of defeat, but of consideration. She ran a hand over her face, and when she looked at again, the last traces of worry had been replaced by a kind of weary, reluctant acceptance.

"Alright, Ezra," Vasha said, lips quirking into a half-smile like she couldn't believe she was actually agreeing to this. "Trial run. But—" She held up a finger, suddenly serious. "No touching the electric cooker. No ssing with exposed wiring. No anything that could turn you into a tiny fried Ezra-shaped pancake. Got it?"

"Got it!" I nodded so hard my neck protested.

She grabbed her toolkit, then hesitated at the door. "I'll be back in the evening, and then we can negotiate your future employnt." She winked—actual, honest-to-Force winked—like this was so big business deal instead of her taking pity on a weird kid.

I grinned. "Do I get paid in noodles?"

"Depends on your performance review," she shot back, ruffling my hair like I was an overexcited tooka. Then, with a final glance around the apartnt, she added, "Door's locking from the outside. If anyone knocks or comms, ignore it. No answering, no peeking, no anything."

I gave her my best solemn face. "I'll be invisible."

She snorted, muttering sothing that sounded suspiciously like "I regret this already," before the door hissed shut behind her.

Locked in. Alone.

...Now what?

I took another sip of the warm, sweet milk. A smile, small and genuine, touched my own lips.

I had just landed my first job in a galaxy far, far away. Through unpaid, it had quite a lot of benefits, most importantly being the companionship of a damn beautiful lady.

The silence that descended after the door clicked shut was absolute. It was the kind of quiet that feels loud, pressing in from all sides. For a mont, I just sat there on the couch, the warm mug cradled in my hands, listening to the hum of the building's life support and the frantic thumping of my own heart.

I was alone. I was safe. And I had the entire day to myself.

A slow grin spread across my face. It felt foreign on these small features, but undeniably mine.

First things first.

I padded over to the small, closet-like room that served as the refresher. The grimy street urchin look had served its purpose, but I was done with it. My own seven-year-old hygiene standards had been questionable at best; Ezra Bridger's, I suspected, were nonexistent.

The shower was a strange, cylindrical affair that pulsed with sonic vibrations and a fine, hot mist. It was bizarre and wonderful. As the dirt and gri of the Lothal streets swirled down the drain, I felt like I was shedding a skin.

Wrapped in a towel that was almost big enough to be a toga, I felt less like a desperate refugee and more like Ale-I an Ezra again. An exceptionally short, squeaky-voiced Ezra, but Ezra nonetheless.

My clothes, a collection of stained rags that might have once been a tunic and trousers, were a lost cause. I rummaged through a small chest in Vasha's room and found an old, worn-out undershirt of hers. It was soft, slled faintly of her soap, and on my tiny fra, it fit like a nightgown. Good enough. Through it did feel a bit too personal, but hey, I am just an innocent kid...

Clean, clad in borrowed clothes, and feeling dangerously competent, I turned my attention to the main event.

The workbench.

It was a glorious, beautiful disaster. A testant to a life of practical, hands-on work.

Tools lay scattered where they were last used—hydrospanners, fusion-cutters, a set of delicate-looking wire-splicers. An open datapad displayed a complex schematic, its blue light casting long shadows across the tal components.

This was my new kingdom.

I picked up a hydrospanner. It was heavy, solid steel, a universal wrench designed for the high-torque needs of starship and droid maintenance. A glorified crescent wrench, maybe, but it felt like Excalibur in my hand. My engineer's brain, dormant for what felt like an eternity, sparked to life.

My promise to Vasha wasn't just a ploy to stay. It was a lifeline. A way to anchor myself in this insane new reality with sothing I understood: a problem that needed solving.

The confidence was a heady, unfamiliar brew. For the first ti since I'd landed in this ss, I felt a flicker of my old self—the engineer, the problem-solver. But as I stood before the dissected droid arm, the bravado began to curdle into cold, hard reality.

It's not like you can just open up a circuit board and expect to know things by psychic osmosis. Learning is a process. The best way is to get your hands dirty, to do stuff, to fry a few components and learn from the magic smoke you just let out. But that's only possible when you have two things I desperately lacked: prerequisite knowledge and enough money to burn on your mistakes.

Not to ntion the shocks. I'd gotten zapped so many tis during my undergrad labs that my project partners used to joke I was secretly charging my phone with the static buildup in my hair. The thought of that familiar, teeth-rattling jolt from an alien power source that could probably run a small moon was… less than appealing. It seed the shocking period of my life, pun absolutely intended, was about to make a spectacular coback.

I needed to study.

I dug into the battered old backpack I'd snatched from Ezra's cellar—my only link to a past that wasn't even mine. Tucked between a ration bar that looked like fossilized shoe leather and a spare power cell was the datapad, . I powered it on, its blue light a welco glow in the dim apartnt. I preferred 144 Hz OLED display, but retro would do.

For the next two hours, I tried to give myself a crash course in Galactic Standard Engineering. The search was a nightmare. There was no Google, no Stack Overflow, no 'Droid Repair for Dummies' holovid channel. The absence of a centralized, easily searchable repository of public knowledge was staggering. It suddenly made a lot more sense why people in this galaxy were so largely uninford about… well, everything.

Eventually, I found what I was looking for, buried in a sub-folder on Ephraim Bridger's personal drive: a handful of old, basic textbooks. Fundantals of Power Conversion. Introduction to Droid Logic Pathways.

I opened one. And understood precisely jack-shit.

The words were in Basic, sure, but the terminology might as well have been ancient Sith. My engineering degree had taught about resistors, capacitors, and transistors. This book spoke of ion-dampeners, hyper-capacitive flux chillers, and motive-flow regulators. It was like reading a technical manual co-written by a physicist and a fantasy novelist.

My confident claims to Vasha about being her assistant were starting to sound less like a helpful offer and more like a fraudulent promise I could never deliver on.

Okay, new plan. Forget the theory. Let's try reverse-engineering.

I turned to Vasha's datapad, which was lying on the bench, surprisingly without any password or security lock. A small testant to the trusting soul she was. I found the schematic for the loader droid arm she was working on.

Now this I could partially understand.

As an engineer, I could read the flow of a diagram. I could see the logic. My finger traced a thin blue line on the screen. "Okay, so this seems like the primary power conduit and it branches from the main cell here..." I glanced at the actual droid arm on the table. "...and connects to this little silver doohickey."

I followed another path. "And this bundle of wiring leads from what looks like a processor unit to... that cluster of angry-looking red bits."

...

...

I could understand the where. I could follow the wires and see what connected to what. The problem was, I had absolutely no idea what the "little silver doohickey" or the "angry-looking red bits" actually were. What did they do? Why were they there? My entire education was suddenly out of its watt-knowledge.

I slumped back onto the couch, defeated. I was surrounded by the tools, the parts, and the diagrams, but I was missing the most fundantal piece of the puzzle: the language. All my bravado from this morning, my grand plan to earn my keep by being a whiz-kid chanic, had evaporated into a cloud of humiliating ignorance.

There was only one thought left, a conclusion so simple and so humbling it was almost funny.

I should probably start attending elentary school.

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