Into the Storm
Authors Note: This is the first time in a long, long time since I've last written for my own pleasure. Something inside me made write like a mad demon and I sincerely hope it pays off. For some context, this story takes place about two months before the events of Rogue One. In that time, Lothal has been liberated and the Mandalorian Civil War has been brought to an end, with all the clans uniting under the direction of Bo-Katan and the House Vizsla; Kanan and Hera have married; and the greater Rebellion is about to be born. With that I shall leave you, readers, with this first chapter of Into the Storm. Enjoy.
‒Filius Hibernia et Germania
Chapter 1: The Tempest Brews
It started with the largest delegation of Rebel leaders since the Petition of 2000. After almost four years of fighting on their own, it seemed the Rebellion finally had the courage to face the Imperial forces head-on. After hours of debate and intelligence updates from Kallus and General Madine it seemed that the matter of formally declaring war on the Empire would never arrive. Everyone was slowly becoming more and more restless and tempers were on the brink of flaring. However, no one at the meeting was tenser than the crew of the Ghost.
As important as the meeting was, no one on the ship was necessarily happy to be there. With the meeting consisting of practically all the leaders of the main resistance cells in one single place, it was hard not for the crew to have a collective bad feeling about this. Ezra in particular was on edge throughout the entire meeting. For some reason, he felt as if they were unknowingly perched atop a trapdoor. Feeling an urgent need to have a quick escape ready, he ordered Chopper back to the ship to prepare for take-off. As the droid wheeled off, grumbling something about paranoia, Ezra got up out of his seat to leave.
"Kanan, Hera, I'm going to go step outside for a few moments, guess I just need to stretch my legs." It was an obvious lie but neither of them questioned it. They were both worried about the young man, who was effectively their adopted son, but neither decided to push the matter any further.
Noticing the worried look on their faces Sabine got up and began to leave: "Hera, Kanan don't worry I'll go see if Ezra is alright. I think he'll talk to me, let me know what's wrong."
Still worried Hera almost spoke up before Kanan put his hand over hers as he whispered to his wife: "Hera it will be alright. Considering what happened earlier this year, I think it would be better to let Sabine handle this. She was with him after all, she can talk him down if he decides to do anything rash." Barely reassured Hera only bid Sabine a word of caution before the young Mandalorian artist left the makeshift Parliamentary Hall in search of the troubled apprentice. In the meantime, it had seemed that the seemingly endless debates were indeed coming to a close as the Senator and de facto leader of the Rebel Alliance, Mon Mothma, approached the podium.
"I believe we have now heard all the necessary arguments and information, shall we now put it to a vote?" asked Mon Mothma as she looked out over the dozens of military and civilian officials before him. With the silent affirmations of her colleagues she continued; "All those in favor of ratifying the Declaration of War and the Articles of Rebellion say aye?"
Meanwhile:
Ezra's bad feeling from earlier only intensified with each and every step he took. The darkness creeping into every fiber of his being, bringing with it an intensely chilling sensation, the hallmark of the dark side's presence. Reaching out into the force, he tried to sense where the danger might be coming from, but he found nothing within the immediate vicinity. "I must be imagining this, still I should keep my guard up and mask my force signature in case anything were to happen," he said to no one in particular. Reaching once more into the force before cloaking he sensed a familiar bright if only slightly diminished force signature behind him.
"Sabine."
Turning around he came face to face with the young Mand'oa. "Ezra are you alright? Hera and Kanan are worried, I know it's been months since it happened but you need to talk to them if your still struggling to cope. I know you don't like it when people worry about you, and that you feel as if you bear the weight of the world, but you can't do it alone. You have people who care about you." Sabine hesitated, "I- "
"It's not that Sabine," Ezra quickly cut her off, Sabine knew it was a load of Bantha, but she decided to let it slide. "I just have a bad feeling about all of this." Ezra said, gesturing to the meeting hall, "There's a foreboding presence in the force, and I just didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. The entire Rebel government is in that building and if the Empire finds out we're here, they'll either capture us or bombard us from orbit, and that will be the end of it." Morosely he finished: "I just want prevent the danger before it happens…again."
"What happened on Ossus was not your fault. It was just bad luck that the Sith just happened to discover the Great Library at about the same time as we did. Least of all, there was no way you could've known that Vader would show up. Besides you saved our lives, you saved my life. Who knows how much longer Vader would've kept me alive?"
'Vader!' The very name worked Ezra up into a rage. The Sith Lord was a harbinger of death, destruction, and despair for the Jedi and the Rebel Alliance. He was the one who betrayed the Jedi Order. He was the one who oversaw the Lasat Genocide. He was the one who enslaved Lothal and Ryloth. He was the one to murder Ahsoka on Malachor. But all this paled in comparison to what happened after Sabine and Ezra were captured on Ossus.
Flashback: 10 months ago
The Dark Lord tried to turn Ezra, first by torturing him through sleep deprivation, starvation, poisons, and other barbarities. They went a month before they realized it wasn't working. 'Or maybe they knew it didn't work and kept going until they were bored,' Ezra thought. But when that failed to break him, they turned their attention to Sabine. Ezra had never been so horrified in his life as he was the moment he heard her almost inhuman shrieks of pains, and at nights when her panicked cries for Ezra to help her flowed out of her nightmares. This continued without end for 4 months
Then one day after getting nowhere, Vader brought the Sabine and Ezra into the torture chamber at the same time. "I understand you have feelings for this Mandalorian girl," a look of horror came over the padawan's face. Turning around Vader brandished his lightsaber and held the blade to the young woman's eyes.
"Wait, no what are you doing! STOP, NO PLEASE, I BEG YOU! NO!" Ezra yelled, but it was to no avail. The Dark Lord seared his lightsaber into the woman's eyes, as she screamed in pain. Sabine was blinded.
The room suddenly went dark as all the energy in the room flowed into Ezra. Suddenly Vader felt a torrent of rage and dark side energy emanate from the apprentice, before hearing a metallic crunch. The restraints had been broken. Unfazed, Vader gave a chilling mechanical laugh as Ezra's rage continued to grow. "Yes, now you see the true strength of the dark side. Join me and you will be able to save the one's you love," Vader arrogantly commanded.
But then Ezra did something the Sith Lord did not expect. From his hands, Ezra summoned a single powerful column of lightning and targeted the strike at Vader's chest. The blast hit the control panel of Vader's suit, before arcing out across his limbs, disabling them all. Looking down on the now immobile cyborg Ezra spoke to him with unrestrained contempt "You kriffing bastard, I should kill you where you lay," Ezra's eyes slowly cooled back to their natural blue and his voice relaxed," but then that would make me no better than you." Pulling the Sith Lord's lightsaber from its grip Ezra activated it "Instead I will ensure that you won't be able to follow us." With that Ezra severed the mechanical limbs of the Dark Lord and threw him into the wall with a force push powerful enough to knock the Sith unconscious.
After making sure Vader was neutralized, Ezra went over to where Sabine was restrained. She had passed out from the pain but Ezra wasn't taking any chances. Not wanting her to wake up in a pained state of shock Ezra used what little strength in the force he had to wipe her memory of what Vader did to her before putting her in a temporary force sleep. He headed out the door with the Mandalorian on her back and left the cell.
It still took nearly an hour before the Empire noticed what happened but in that time Ezra had already stolen a full officer's uniform, had Sabine and their things safely secured in several crates, and had managed to mind trick the hangar control into letting him make off with one of their light transports. Once Ezra had ensured their course home, Ezra returned to the cargo bay to make sure his "cargo was safe. Carefully Ezra picked up Sabine and put her in the small medical bay near the cockpit. A wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame Ezra. With what little mental strength he had left he set an alarm to wake him up when they arrived at their destination. Heading back to med-bay Ezra took a seat across from Sabine, his thoughts about the status of his loved one being the last before sleep took over.
'Hang in there 'Bine we're almost home.'
Present
As much as Ezra hated to admit it, Sabine was right; Ossus was just an unfortunate situation. "Maybe your right," Ezra replied. Looking back up at her face, he noticed the small flickering in the electronics of Sabine's prosthetic eyes. Curiously, Ezra asked; "So how have the new cybernetics been working for you?"
To his surprise, Sabine's face lit up with a smile as she enthusiastically replied: "They are wonderful, I don't know how you managed to convince Senator Organa and the others to pay for them, but it's like I never lost them in the first place." Seeing the small smile on Ezra's face, she decided to continue as he seemed to lighten up. "Actually in some ways they are even better than the one's I was born with; I can now perceive colors I never thought I'd see before. My visual clarity is almost on par with the Mon Calamari and other amphibious species. I think my art has even improved since I got these."
"I'm surprised to hear that, I thought most biomechanical eye replacements had a number of problems. Why don't they seem to affect you?" Ezra asked.
"These things are top-of-the-line, so most of these problems were non-existent to start with. Don't get me wrong, I still get headaches but the doctor suggests that this is mostly phantom pain from when I was blinded. They say they might be able to help it, if they knew how I was blinded," Ezra felt a pang of guilt at that remark. "But I'm much more worried about you. How's the cardiac implant they installed, is it working alright?"
After the ordeal with Vader the brutalities suffered upon Ezra had done some damage to the muscles of Ezra's heart. It was discovered only moments after Ezra touched down on Dantooine base after ensuring Sabine's medical treatment. When Ezra had come down from his Force-heightened state of strength, his heart gave out in exhaustion. He bounced back between life and death before the medics stabilized him. As a result, the surgeons installed a small device package that would dispense nanodroids to repair any damage to his heart; a pacemaker to ensure it pumped correctly, and a defibrillator in case if Ezra had another heart attack. "Honestly, I'd have thought that either Rex or Zeb would end up with one of these things before I did. But it's not like it's really meant to be noticed, but I seem to be healthy enough with it."
"Are you sure? I only ask because I looked at the diagnostics and you've apparently had three heart attacks within the last month. One of them apparently happened this morning. And given how stressed you were back there in the meeting, I thought you were going to have another one. I‒ We don't want to lose you, not when you finally seem like yourself again."
"I'll be fine, 'Bine you can't getting rid of me that easily. Besides the Force is with me, if something goes wrong I can try and heal myself with it until I find proper medical aid."
Sabine strongly doubted Ezra's claims, and Ezra could tell that she wasn't buying it either. But she had seen what he could do in an emergency, and gave him a pass. Ezra gave a small chuckle, he wasn't too surprised that Sabine was getting this worried about him. She had come a long way from that snarky, reckless, walled-off teenager that he met so long ago. Though physically she was much the same, the way she behaved now reminded him of Hera; strong, open, compassionate, and stubborn. Ezra had grown too, every day he looked more and more like his father, but he was also now adopting many of Kanan's mannerisms as well; like master, like apprentice. More importantly in light of the physical and spiritual trials he endured as a POW, Ezra had been knighted as a true Jedi, in the eyes of the force.
"Whatever you say my handsome knight," Sabine joked, eliciting a slight blush from Ezra. "We should probably head back before Hera organizes a search party for us?"
"Yeah we probably shou‒."
"Ezra what's wrong?!" Sabine asked worriedly.
The darkness. It was back again, and this time it struck with the force of a hurricane. Before Ezra could reply an Imperial battle group of two Star Destroyers and four cruisers, two Acclamators-IIs, and two Interdictors had appeared over the horizon. Heralding their arrival was the tell-tale shriek of a flight wing of TIE Fighters. That's when Ezra felt it, a presence he had not felt since his and Sabine's time as POWs.
Vader was here.
