#zeb orellios

holy crap your mind

New Chapter and one of my elderly cats, she's Pupazzo and is 11.

I had her since the day she's born because some asshole thrown her and her 2 siblings in a trash bin.

Luckily a gardener, a family friend, heard then meow when throwing away some grass and immediately took them to us.

I was quite sure she wouldn't survive because she was the tiniest and had problems to heat.

When it was time to give her and her siblings into adoption, I decided to keep her.

She was in love with the gardener, who called her "my assistant ", because she was always around him when he was working in the garden of the apartment complex we used to live.

Space is cold.

The chill is seeping, slow and calm and pressing. It needles at his bones, a nagging request, a gentle scold that eats at the pit in his stomach.

He blinks, and turns away from the stars.

Chopper hoots softly, tucked into a corner shrouded in shadow where there’s a port. He’s probably programming the navicomputer, or contacting home base, or digging through the ship’s memory, looking for something they can use.

But he would shift his struts back and forth if he were irritated, an insistent clang-clang-clang that would make Zeb’s lip curl, and he isn’t. Instead, the gears in his scomp link twist faintly into the bowels of the ship, and he rotates his head in Ezra’s direction. The indistinct glow of the planet behind them casts his orange paint to beige.

He doesn’t say anything, so Ezra doesn’t either. Chopper will be vague, or he’ll be blunt, and Ezra won’t want to talk about it either way.

Chopper turns his head back to the port, having obtained whatever answer he was looking for in the spaces between Ezra’s silence. Tatooine still stains his paint too light, a dusty pale that seems too unremarkable to hurt, but the memory of grit and sand and sun prods like a bad joke too pointed to feel innocent. His breath stings at the back of his throat, a physiological reproach like bitter distrust after the searing sands.

So it’s just the light and the cold, settling on his skin, a question he doesn’t want to answer.

Ezra mutters something about checking out the rest of the ship and waits until the cockpit doors close behind him before he remembers how to breathe, pretends the walls will shield him from Chopper’s silent sympathy, stinging more than it soothes. A droid’s pity, he thinks, and there’s some dark amusement at the idea of it. Emotional intelligence was never his strong suit - unsympathetic, strong of will, demon of kneecaps, leaving bone bruises in his wake. Whatever, he’d say, if he said anything at all, and continue to plow along whatever path he had been on to begin with, even if your shins were still ringing from his collision with your bones.

Ezra had been hiding in the nose gun, wallowing in shame with the doors locked behind him, and Hera had let him go, given him space, but he was the kind of frustrated and indiscriminately upset that stony reticence spiked when she reached out. Okay, she’d said, when her fingertips set him from clenched-jaw upset to reactive vehemence. Maybe go take a minute. Chopper picked the lock. Suck it up.

Hera would bring him his meal at dinnertime, a soft smile and a soft touch as if to cushion the sharp edges of Ezra’s hurt. Sabine would tread carefully, not too close, but never out of reach. Kanan kept his distance, would meet him when he returned. Zeb would look down, a gruff you okay, kid? that toed the line of too-casual nonchalance, the dusting off of pants after a fall.

Condolence isn’t point-blank, so Chopper doesn’t bother dealing it out.

And maybe the closed doors don’t help, because Ezra is still cold. There aren’t many lights on the rest of the ship, and maybe the darkness isn’t better than Tatooine’s dusty cling.

The ship is small.

But it feels big, unnatural, because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything to fill it. There’s a fresher and a captain’s quarters and the door to the hold all off of the common room, shades of durasteel that have forgotten the concept of color. The corners are swathed in shadow. The air is still, hanging silence and not-quite secrecy, the ghosts of forgotten stories once told here.

It’s kind of funny, Ezra thinks, that a Sith once lived here.

Maul slept on threadbare sheets, pulled his meals from a drawer full of the exact same rations - Ezra remembers eating those, once upon a time when he lifted a crate of them from an Imperial shipment, and thought it was funny that no one seemed to mind. The tasteless tube of nutrition made his mouth thick for the next month, dry crumbs sticking to his teeth, bloated and waterlogged and stubborn when he tried to wash them away. There’s a pile of pens on the rickety nightstand, all run out of ink, and the artificially dyed jar of oral tablets in the fresher has lost its color.

Ezra runs his fingers over the walls, disassembles the pens, digs through the rations, strips the sheets from the bunk as if a Sith Lord would hide his secrets under his mattress. He goes through the hold as if expecting that the Nightbrother had had a penchant for collecting more deadly relics and omnipotent artifacts, tears apart the common room until the shadows shift and he is reduced to checking under the table for whispers of an answer, but he can’t seem to figure out what his question is or whether it’s why or how, whether it’s emotional or academic or compassionate or apathetic.

Did he really live here?

Did Maul walk into this ship and stop and think home? Could he have, with its empty rooms and threadbare sheets and shadows and ghosts? Did the darkness feel like a consolation? Did the cold seem comforting?

Ezra sighs, and tries to imagine Maul, listening to the stories in the shadows, and maybe that was home enough for him. But the cold needles, and the darkness is pressing, and space has never felt so empty-melancholy, a forgotten gap waiting to be filled, those forgotten stories that haven’t been told.

The Ghost always felt like a haven, something tall and wise that bent over to take his hand and lead him to the Light. Zeb’s dry humor, the wit in the clash of Hera’s persistent faith and Kanan’s grounded sagacity, Sabine’s unabated urge to paint her hope all over the walls as if she could will a better world into existence. They’d been running on yet another op gone sideways, and she’d paused to flick a phoenix across a snooty recruitment poster bathed in white helmets and superiority in crimson. Come on, Sabine! Ezra’d yelled. Why do you have to do that now? But she’d shrugged and finished the artful flair of the bird’s wing before moving on. That night, he’d flopped into his bunk before Zeb could start snoring and smelled fresh paint, and there was a crisp new phoenix on the ceiling, as if in answer.

But the walls of Maul’s former home are still a blank canvas of empty durasteel, and the floors are scuffed as if to prove that time used to pass here, and Tatooine no longer feels like some grand story.

It feels like a Jedi growing old, passing something intangible to a boy who thought he was doing the right thing. It feels like the forever-enemy who haunted them both, who was not quite Dark and not quite Sith, who slept on threadbare sheets and kept his old pens after they ran out of ink and listened to the stories in the shadows, maybe. And maybe the dark and the cold didn’t seem so bad, and maybe it was the quiet that was the appeal all along, or maybe it was the quiet that kept him chasing the past like a wraith who couldn’t seem to let go, and maybe his knuckles had been sore from how tightly he clung.

Ezra had been riding north, following the Jedi’s word, leaving them both behind. Your way out. Your way home. The dewback paused, tilted its head to one side like a question, and something had brushed up against Ezra’s mind like the way grass ripples when the wind blows, and the last thing he was expecting was for it to be peaceful.

Death never was. It was candles blown out, saplings crushed, a slow-burning fire that stifled breath as easily as smoke. But there was a finality to it, someone letting out a breath, an old wound that had never closed, laid finally to rest.

And maybe, in the dark of the desert, borne by the life-long hatred of decades ago, the man who could not let go had found some peace. Maybe, the old wound had mended, and maybe, there had been some comfort in the light of the fire and in the lines of the Jedi’s face.

Maybe the man who could not let go had been lonely.

Maul slept on threadbare sheets, pulled his meals from a drawer full of the exact same rations and kept his old pens after they ran out of ink and listened to the stories in the shadows like they could make up for all of those he’d lost. He reached out to Ahsoka as glass shattered around them, an offer that sings of desperation. Join me. He leaves his hand on Ezra’s shoulder, a little hesitant but all too certain. My apprentice. He curls his fingers into a fist, and his voice shakes with a hum somewhere between hatred and amusement, drawn out too far. Kenobi.

But the wind brushes Ezra’s mind the way grass ripples, and the echo of Maul’s death fades with the breeze.

And something settles, a buried memory, a click into place, a peace made. Now you see, Maul says. Quiet and silky, folded with extra meanings and old history and a shadow-shrouded depth.

“I do,” Ezra tells him. His voice fades into the bowels of the ship, and the cold is not so biting anymore, the darkness not so pressing.

He steps back into the cockpit.

Chopper turns to watch him come in, a muted hoot that is both a greeting and a question. They’ve left Tatooine far behind, and only the stars light the cockpit, quiet, omniscient gleams that feel like stories. The galaxy shines in his photoreceptor.

“No.” Ezra sinks into the pilot’s chair. The navicomputer is already programmed. “I didn’t find much.”

Chopper grumbles - something about Maul and stupidity and kriffing Jedi nonsense and sand in his circuits - and Ezra elects to ignore him.

Chopper, after all, was never all that good with emotional intelligence. But he’ll be grateful when they get back home, or something approaching it, will bicker with Hera and terrorize Zeb and run into kneecaps until half of Atollon is covered in bruises. AP-5 will scold him, and Chopper will scold right back until they’ve both forgotten what the offenses were. But he’ll melt into their awkward little family anyway, a grumpy rust-bucket with malicious intent.

Ezra will hesitate, already steeling for a rejection that won’t come. And, eventually, Hera will help him wash the sand from his hair and soothe the angry sunburns patched across his cheeks, and Kanan will bring them both dinner and rest a knowing hand on Ezra’s shoulder, as if there’s conversation there that already happened, an intrinsic understanding that doesn’t require speech or sight. Zeb will be close by, and he’ll look over and say, you okay, kid? with just a little too much briskness packed between the words. He’ll snore too loudly and Ezra will complain in the morning, but they’ll both smile and elbow the other one’s ribs, and there’s some kind of light in the painted walls.

One day, so long ago, a boy with a crate of stolen blasters fumbled his way onto a paint-covered freighter that felt like a funny kind of home, and dropped into the nose gun, and saw the stars. Space, he thought, was mesmerizing. And, for a little while, he forgot what it was like to be cold.

Chopper whistles at him, and Ezra grins. “Yeah, buddy. Let’s go home.”

*******

*quietly creeps out of the ether*

....bye.