Ezra lay awake that night, listening to the sounds of insects and nightfowl through the open window of his shelter. It wasn't that he wasn't tired — every inch of him was exhausted, every muscle worn out. Even his mind seemed half-asleep already, unable to concentrate on any particular thread, but still stubbornly active. It was like his head had been filled with white noise.
One word kept emerging from the fog in his brain: Grysks. They'd been mentioned or implied more than once in Thrawn's memories; they were at the nexus of that peculiar knot of fear in Thrawn's mind. And they were a species Ezra knew next to nothing about, a species he'd never heard of before in his entire life, much like the Chiss.
Staring out the window at the night sky, Ezra thought back over the memories he'd seen — and the structure of Thrawn's mind, the subtle flickers of emotion he was just learning how to recognize. The fear he'd felt was muted, subdued — low-grade background noise — and when he thought about it now, he believed the fear was centered less on the Grysks and more on a general anxiety, a feeling of frustration and helplessness that Thrawn was here — stranded — and the Chiss were out there, possibly being threatened by any number of unknown species.
Ezra rubbed his eyes and sighed into his hands. He kept his face covered for a moment, enjoying the utter darkness, the way the world seemed to stand still. When he slid his hands away again, his mind felt just a little bit calmer.
The memories were real, he decided. There was no doubt about that — he could feel the authenticity of them in his bones, as clearly and confidently as he could look at the alphabet and say which letter was Senth and which was Fom. And the memories painted a very stark picture, that was for sure.
But was it the right picture?
The memories he'd seen three days ago were genuine, too; he had no doubt that Thrawn had once walked across a frozen landscape in handmade snowshoes, or that he'd worn animal furs around his shoulders and listened to the hailstones coming down, or that he'd sat in a field of wildflowers when spring came. But while those memories were true, the impression given by those memories — that Thrawn's home planet was primitive, with absolutely no contemporary technology — was absolutely, undeniably false.
Maybe this was the same thing, Ezra thought, biting his lip. Maybe Thrawn had layered his memories again, deliberately giving Ezra the impression of an enemy force far more powerful and deadly than the Empire. He'd intertwined more recent memories — himself and Faro and their encounters with the Grysks — with older moments from his homeworld, scenes where the influence of the Grysks was implied but never outright stated.
It was entirely possible, Ezra mused, that there were warring factions among the Chiss he simply didn't know about — couldn't know about, because Thrawn had neither told nor shown him. In the more recent memories, he'd seen Thrawn as a Grand Admiral discussing the Grysks' ability to brainwash conquered planets, turning people against their friends and family — and then Thrawn had showed him memories of Chiss attacking Chiss and left Ezra to make his own conclusions. But people killed people all the time, and you didn't need to be brainwashed to do it.
The strong emotions of the memories seemed convincing, but really they just helped muddy the waters, Ezra realized. He sat up in bed, heart pounding, and looked through his window at Thrawn's shelter. At some point in the not-so-distant past, Emperor Palpatine had fallen for the same trick; he'd picked through Thrawn's mind looking for specific information and Thrawn had deflected him, distracted him with a memory full of such genuinely strong emotions that it overrode everything else Palpatine might have seen.
And Thrawn had admitted to doing that — what? Ten minutes, maybe less, before allowing Ezra back into his mind?
The scene of Thrawn and his older brother (his Force-sensitive older brother? Or was that just another misdirection?) and the pendant which Thrawn still wore — the scene with the Chiss woman, Ar'alani…. Ezra got the sense she was a colleague, a mentor, possibly more; someone Thrawn trusted and cared for as strongly as he cared for his brother. And then the memory at the very end, finding his parents' bodies rapidly deteriorating after the attack…
Ezra thought of his own parents and winced, swallowing back a sudden, bitter taste of bile on his tongue. He couldn't imagine many things worse than that; if Thrawn was looking to simultaneously feed Ezra a false conclusion and distract him from the evidence of what he'd done using a cascade of emotionally-charged memories, he couldn't have picked a more fitting way to end it.
It seemed too perfectly tailored for the memories — and the order they came in — to be totally organic. But at the same time, Ezra couldn't think of a single compelling motive for Thrawn to trick him like that.
He could be testing Ezra, teaching him a lesson about how to read memories and extrapolate information — plausible, because he'd made that same lesson before, but at the same time, it was absolutely ludicrous. If he wanted to teach Ezra a lesson, he could have done so just as easily using mundane memories of events that meant nothing to him — the same way he had before, with the misleading memories of life on a primitive planet.
It could be a malicious mind game — an attempt to convince Ezra that he was the real bad guy here — but there had been no sense of malice in Thrawn's mind, and if he did want to torture Ezra simply for the fun of it, why would he simultaneously expose his own vulnerabilities? Ezra mulled it over, tentatively dismissing this option … for now.
It was possible, too, that Thrawn was trying to convince Ezra the Grysks were an imminent threat because — and just thinking this made Ezra huff out an ironic little laugh — he thought it would erase the animosity between himself and Ezra somehow. In a way, this made some sort of rudimentary sense; they were stranded together for the foreseeable future, with the only possible hope for escape being the dim chance of a rescue. Until that happened (and Ezra didn't hold out much hope that it would), they were stuck with each other — so why not make the stay more pleasant by turning an enemy into an ally?
It seemed like an awfully weak motivation to Ezra; he still couldn't imagine Thrawn revealing high-stakes memories like that just on the off-chance that it made Ezra more cooperative with chores. With a sigh, Ezra leaned his forearms on the rough window frame, letting the cool night air touch his face.
Eyes closed, working by instinct, he stretched out with the Force. He could see Thrawn's mind working in the darkness around him; the web of ciphers was still and silent, but faintly — in the background — Ezra could see unknowable letters and numbers shifting methodically, rhythmically, as Thrawn's subconscious worked through the problems of the day.
He pulled away again, this time stretching out to the forest, following the quick flickers of movement from the minds of lizards, nightfowl, predators large enough to kill a man. Deep in the woods, he let his mind brush over the cold, dead wreck of the Chimaera and moved into the trees beyond.
And there he stopped. There was nothing there; it was like a sleeping mind without the background sensations that came from subconscious thoughts and dreams. It was like an empty room so vast you couldn't see the walls.
Or maybe he was sensing nothing, Ezra thought, eyebrows furrowed.
Maybe there was no life in that side of the forest at all.
The next day, he woke up before Thrawn — easy, since he hadn't slept — and stood on the bank of the river with his nose wrinkled, trying to remember how to empty and reset the traps. He'd watched Thrawn build the first one over a month ago, but his own chores had called him away before the rest of the snares and baskets were done; over the ensuing days, by mutual agreement, the traps had become Thrawn's responsibility and his alone, leaving Ezra with only the vaguest idea what to do.
Or at least, he thought it was by mutual agreement. He remembered that first coherent thought he'd successfully read from Thrawn's mind — I don't enjoy doing this either — and how Thrawn had interrogated him over the emotion attached to those words, poking and prodding at Ezra to see what he had found.
Probably trying to passive-aggressively hint that he should help out more, Ezra thought. He was still standing on the bank contemplating this when Thrawn emerged from his shelter, looking only half-awake and a little bruised around the chest and back, where he'd struck the wooden frame. His eyes shifted away when he saw Ezra standing by the river and he nodded slightly in greeting, but he headed straight for the campfire rather than join Ezra there. He stood near the flames for a long moment, rubbing warmth into his bare arms; the tarnished pendant rested against his collar bone, shining a dull silver-blue in the early morning light.
Ezra glanced away, scowling down into the clear, unpolluted water. This wasn't the first time he'd seen Thrawn injured, of course — after the crash, he'd caught a few quick looks at the deep discoloration on Thrawn's skin where the purrgils had almost crushed him, leaving massive, red-tinted bruises everywhere they touched. But today was the first time he'd felt anything other than satisfaction about it; a sort of uneasiness bubbled up inside him and he crossed his arms over his chest, trying to will the feeling away.
Stretching out to the Force, he could sense Thrawn's brain kicking into gear, the mathematical formulae of his mind picking up speed and clarity as he came awake. When he joined Ezra by the river a moment later, his eyes were sharp and he was combing his fingers through his hair, looking a little more like the Grand Admiral Ezra knew.
"You didn't sleep," Thrawn said, blatantly staring at Ezra. Ezra shrugged one shoulder and forced his face out of a scowl and into a more neutral mask.
"I slept fine," he lied. "I just woke up earlier than you."
After a long moment, Thrawn turned away from Ezra, scanning the surface of the river. He was mulling something over, Ezra could tell, and he stood there silently, filled with nervous energy as he waited for Thrawn to bring up the night before. He had no idea what Thrawn would say — if he would be angry that Ezra had seen such personal memories, if he would lash out either outwardly or passively — and he had even less of an idea how he would react to it himself; all his suspicions from the night before seemed dangerously near.
So when Thrawn finally opened his mouth, Ezra tensed up the same way he would tense in anticipation of a blow, his knees bending and his hands automatically curling into fists — but all Thrawn said was, "Since you're awake.…"
He didn't continue right away, forcing Ezra to glance over at him with eyebrows furrowed.
"Yeah?" Ezra said.
Thrawn's eyes slid over to meet his own. "Can you sense the traps beneath the water?" he asked. "With your Force?"
Ezra frowned; as soon as Thrawn posed the question, he became suddenly, irrevocably aware of the large, alien creatures caged below the surface. "I can sense the fish," he said, still puzzled, "but not the traps themselves. Why?"
Thrawn considered this for a moment. "Could you perhaps manipulate the traps without seeing them?"
Ezra gave it a cursory amount of thought before dismissing it. "No." He knew his limits too well to pretend otherwise.
"But if you could see them?" Thrawn asked.
"Well, yeah," said Ezra, thinking, Obviously. Although Thrawn had seemed vaguely dissatisfied with his previous answers, now he inclined his head in evident approval. But before Ezra could ask what Thrawn had in mind — honestly, before he could even process that slight inclination of the head — Thrawn was balancing on one leg at a time to pull off his boots and then, tossing them farther back on the bank, he waded straight into the water.
"This will be much more efficient with your help," said Thrawn, his voice barely audible beneath the splash. Two things flickered across his mind at once, both broadcasted to Ezra — the jarringly unpleasant sensation of near-freezing water against Thrawn's skin first, and a sense of muted excitement and scientific curiosity mingled together second — but neither of these showed on Thrawn's face. His expression was all business even as he pushed chest-deep into the river. The icy temperature made his muscles stick, spasming against the bone, but he worked through it with a grace and speed that suggested many years of practice.
"Okay, hang on a sec—" Ezra said, but before he could finish the sentence, Thrawn had already ducked underwater. Ezra cut himself off, leaning back on his heels with a roll of the eyes. The surface of the river was placid, the ripples cycling out from where Thrawn had disappeared before slowly evening out and fading away. A minute passed, maybe more, as Thrawn untied the traps.
"Right," Ezra muttered as he waited. "Cuz I have nothing better to do with my time."
It was only a handful of seconds later when Thrawn re-emerged with a quiet splash, taking a quick, sharp breath of air and simultaneously hauling a full, cone-shaped basket out of the water. It was strung with camouflaged nets, with a thick cluster of eels squirming around inside. Thrawn blinked rapidly, water streaming down from his flattened hair and into his eyes, and then turned to face Ezra with the trap held above his head.
"Take—" he said.
Using the Force, Ezra lifted the cage out of Thrawn's hands and floated it to the bank. Momentarily stunned by their apparent gift of flight, the eels got used to it fast and started squirming again as Ezra brought the trap down, making it tremble a little before it touched ground.
"Yes, thank you," Thrawn finished, wiping his face. Before Ezra could respond, Thrawn took another quick breath and ducked below the water again. Evidently, he wasn't interested in wasting time this morning, even to chat. Ezra shifted on the bank a moment, mildly aggrieved by the lack of communication, before curiosity took over; he touched Thrawn's mind, getting a sense of murky water — clouds of displaced mud obscuring Thrawn's vision — and Thrawn's hands working blindly to untie the knots keeping a second trap in place. Halfway through, something in Thrawn's thoughts inexplicably shifted and he started tightening the knots again instead, undoing the work he'd only just started.
He stood up, wiping the water off his face again and coughing a little from the small amount that had reached his lungs. Ezra watched him warily.
"Lose your breath?" he asked.
Palming mud off his neck, Thrawn shook his head. "It was empty," he rasped.
Ezra looked at him doubtfully. "You couldn't even see it," he said.
Thrawn shook his head again. "The currents are stronger near this one," he said. "I felt a stray reed brush my hand when I was untying the rear rock weights; the camouflage woven over it must have come loose, and if so, the gate is also gone. Without the gate, nothing can be held captive inside. The fish will simply swim through."
For a moment, he simply stood there in the freezing water, arms crossed over his chest for warmth and eyebrows furrowed. His fingers curled against his shoulder, physically stopping himself from shivering. Ezra touched Thrawn's mind again, hoping to get a glimpse at what he was thinking; immediately, Thrawn waved him off with a distracted flick of the wrist.
"You are now willing to use your Force to help with the basic necessities of survival," Thrawn said, stating it like an empirical observation.
"Again, it's the Force," Ezra said; he was somewhat distracted and more than a little irritable due to the mass of eels dying on the ground nearby. "And what do you mean, now I'm willing? I've been helping with chores since the very beginning, dude."
Thrawn just waved him off again, ignoring the objection. "If I were to build a funnel with the open portion facing upstream," he said speculatively, turning in the water to indicate the north end of the river, "using stakes which gradually narrow going downstream, we could trap fish using a gate similar to those on each of these traps. Upon swimming into it, they would be unable to swim back out."
He sketched out an incomprehensible schematic in the air, then looked at Ezra to see if he understood. Ezra just nodded, figuring he'd get the gist of it when Thrawn started building the trap.
"Then," Thrawn said, "you could simply use the Force to lift the fish from the water, depositing them on the banks when they are needed." He rested one hand contemplatively on his throat, like an animal absentmindedly protecting itself from an attack; it was an odd gesture Ezra supposed might be common amongst the Chiss. Or it might just be a Thrawn thing. He remembered last night — how Thrawn had touched his throat like feeling a long-healed bruise as he talked about the Dark Side of the Force — and tried to swallow down a sudden stab of guilt.
"In a manner of speaking," Thrawn said, eyeing the river downstream, "a gate like that would function as a sort of aquarium, keeping the food source alive and fresh until they can be eaten. The shallows downstream are clear, enabling you to see each fish; further, if you are somehow incapacitated, the fish can still be accessed by myself using either a spear or…" He shrugged. "Hand-fishing."
Ezra's face twisted as he imagined Thrawn hand-fishing. He sat down heavily on the bank of the river and thought it over; he was reasonably sure he could handle lifting the fish from the river when necessary. He'd already had plenty of practice preparing them for meals — there was something fundamentally different from that and the hide-tanning process Thrawn was constantly trying to teach him; even thinking about that made his gorge rise this early in the morning, whereas the fish scarcely bothered him anymore.
He glanced up and found Thrawn staring at something up the river, his hand still resting on his throat. Ezra called up the link between them half-heartedly, not really expecting to glean anything new.
Twenty-one-point-seven meters from the animal run to the shallows, Thrawn was thinking, his calculations surprisingly clear to read. Approximately fifty stakes, then, of decreasing height in direct proportion to the water level, and no more than eleven smaller stakes will be necessary for the kennel at the end.
And then, hand tightening ever-so-slightly around his throat: As for the isig'cilik'isha, cant hah csarcican't vacosehn besst ch'at tsuzepah ch'a ch'asnisat vibsi cahyn ch'at nimnisasi bah ch'at ch'ircr —
Irritated, Ezra pulled away. He saw Thrawn's eyes flick toward him knowingly.
"I'm only allowed to practice when you say so, huh?" Ezra said; he noticed that his voice came out sounding more rueful than annoyed.
"It does not qualify as practice if my thoughts are in Basic," said Thrawn, turning toward the bank and arrowing his hands through the water before him as he finally waded back to land. "That offers you no challenge and no chance to truly exercise your skills."
He grabbed hold of an overhanging root and hauled himself up onto the bank not far from the basket trap. He knelt there for a moment, lifting the open end of the weave to make sure they were all dead, and then extricated a water-snake from the batch, his fingers pinched firmly around its jaws.
"Besides," he said absently, tossing the snake into the river, "it is my mind. I don't mind if you poke around in it uninvited, but I reserve the right to push you out at my own discretion."
Ezra shrugged like it didn't matter, averting his eyes. The soft rebuke reminded him uncomfortably of Ghost Crew; Kanan and Hera would probably rebuke him the same way. Actually, they'd probably roast him alive if they knew he'd just shoved his way into Thrawn's brain … though he bet Sabine and Zeb would've thought it was cool. Then again, they thought all kinds of shady things were cool.
He stared out over the river for a long moment, remembering Sabine's flinty-eyed smile, the way Zeb used to clap him on the back so hard he lost balance. He was over-tired, drained, just exhausted enough that thinking about them tightened his throat and made his eyes burn. He rubbed his eyes and sniffed as quietly as he could before standing up and brushing off his clothes, hoping the flurry of movement would disguise how close he'd come to crying.
Thrawn was watching him openly again, the basket trap secured under his arm, his expression thoughtful but difficult to read.
"What?" Ezra said defensively, putting some hardness in his voice.
For a long moment, he didn't think Thrawn would answer him — but then, with a minuscule, one-shouldered shrug, Thrawn said, "Would you prefer to cook or start collecting stakes?"
Ezra eyed him, trying to figure out if Thrawn's mind was truly still focused on chores or if this was an uncharacteristically tactful way of changing the subject. Thrawn gazed back at him undaunted, not wavering under Ezra's scrutiny.
Finally, more than a little sarcastically, Ezra tossed Thrawn a sloppy salute. "Permission to read your mind, sir?" he asked.
Thrawn's expression didn't change, but he leaned a little to the right, shifting the weight of the basket trap from one arm to the other. "Granted," he said, turning on his heel. He set off for camp without another word, clearly expecting Ezra to follow. It took Ezra a moment to coordinate his body (scrambling to catch up with Thrawn) and his mind (scrambling to catch up with Thrawn's brain), but he figured it out quickly, falling into step at the same moment a channel opened up between them:
He is bare from the waist up but still overheated, his hands dirt-stained and slick with sweat as he leans on the wooden handle of a homemade spade. The sun is high, burning down against his bare shoulders and arms; it takes him a long moment to catch his breath.
It shouldn't affect him so much to dig a simple hole; by now, he can no longer deny that his encounter with the purrgils has had a notable physical impact on his body. The bruises have faded, but at night and in the early hours of the morning — when the air is cool — his ribs, his right shoulder, his hip around the ilium; all of it still aches. Perhaps it has impacted his breathing most of all; at times he finds himself inexplicably gasping for air, winded after only a few seconds underwater or struggling to breathe without noise as he stalks an animal through the woods.
There are ways around these shortcomings, he's found. There are always ways to adapt to a situation. Some of the fowl of this world are roughly the size of wolves, with meat both tender and adequately appetizing for consumption — but they walk on two squat legs, and their necks are long enough to give them tunnel vision when it comes to which areas of this planet are safe and which are not. He can eliminate the need for stealthy tracking — temporarily, of course — by focusing on these fowl; if he digs small ravines in the forest, perhaps 0.75 meters tall, and seeds them with wild grain, the fowl will willingly trap themselves inside. Because their necks are long enough to see over the sides, they think themselves fully capable of flying away, but the narrowness of the tunnel and the height of the walls prevent them from either spreading their wings or climbing out.
His breath comes a little easier now, though still a bit shallow. He straightens his arms with some effort, struggling against stiff muscles, and leans away from the spade before stabbing it into the ground again. His arms ache; it is inefficient to dig so many separate graves. But the officers and enlisted men of the Chimaera were largely Core Worlders, with traditional beliefs which frowned upon cremation as well as mass graves.
And he does not have to dig thousands of graves, he notes darkly, the corners of his mouth tightening. So far, he has been able to locate and identify only fifteen distinct remains; the rest are buried deep in the ship, too closely entwined with the twisted metal to be located. He slams the sharp tip of the spade into the ground with all his might, leveraging a thick slab of hard-packed dirt out of the hole and shredding blistered skin from his palms at the same time — and his eyes slide to the left against his will, centering on the almost entirely intact body of a hangar technician whom he found lying close to the fractured bay doors.
His breath seems to stutter. Irritated, Thrawn touches his ribs and turns away. When he closes his eyes and breathes slowly, deeply, he can smell Hangar Technician Kydo's body as it heats and expands under the sun.
Strange that he should find it difficult to breathe now, he thinks, when he's just finished resting. He touches the cool metal of Thrass's oth'ola endzali with his free hand; he can't say for certain that it has ever truly calmed or comforted him the way it's supposed to — sometimes his own emotions are too mild and vague for even him to understand — but he knows the metal always seems warm when it's too cold outside for comfort, and always seems cool when the sun is too high.
Gradually, the memory dissolved. Sun spots ate up the scenery until Ezra was himself again. He blinked, an echo of the memory clouding his sight and leaving him dazed, and when his vision cleared he realized he was trailing behind Thrawn at a distance.
He hurried to catch up, feeling worse than he did before. The smell of rotting flesh heated up by the sun was lingering in his naval passage, coating his tongue and seeping deeper into his lungs with every breath. His stomach twisted into a tight, empty knot deep inside him, leaving him feeling nauseated and practically immobile, like he couldn't keep walking until the peculiar feeling went away.
Ahead of him, Thrawn stopped and turned to look at Ezra. He shifted the basket trap in his arms again, sagging a little under the weight.
"You asked," he said.
Feebly, Ezra nodded; Thrawn gazed at him a moment longer before turning away. They walked back to camp silently, with Ezra lagging behind the whole way. By the time he entered the clearing, Thrawn had knelt near the assembly of flat rocks which had become their food preparation space, efficiently and methodically emptying the basket of eels and the occasional translucent fish.
Without speaking, he walked past Ezra and into his shelter, returning moments later with the jagged knife they used to prepare food. He stopped in front of Ezra, holding the knife out to him, but Ezra didn't move to take it. He stared down at Thrawn's open hand, the rough-hewn bone blade lying flat on his palm, and felt his gut twist again.
Hesitantly, he met Thrawn's eyes and shook his head. He expected to feel a cold flicker of disappointment echoing through the Force, but there was no emotion in either Thrawn's mind or his face. He closed his fingers around the knife and looked away, eyes roaming over the heaps of dead eels before shifting toward the river.
"In that case, you will prepare the stakes," Thrawn said; there was a lilting quality to his voice that made Ezra think this might be partially a question instead of an order. "Do you remember the approximate quantities and heights needed for the funnel?"
"I…" Ezra hesitated again, unsure what to say. Rather than take this as a cue to keep talking, Thrawn fell completely silent, waiting patiently for Ezra to go on.
"Well," said Ezra eventually, his eyes drawn inexorably to the spot farther south in the woods where he liked to meditate, "it doesn't need to be done today, right?"
Thrawn only stared at him for a moment, saying nothing.
"I mean, the basket traps have worked fine so far," said Ezra, gesturing to the empty one a few meters away. "There's more food than we can eat in a day over there, so … it seems like a good system. Why shake up a good system?"
"As you've said, the winter shelter was also a good system," said Thrawn evenly.
"Right," said Ezra. "Exactly."
Thrawn gazed at him steadily, and for a moment Ezra had the faint hope that Thrawn would just agree and move on — at least for a day or two, long enough for Ezra to sleep and meditate and get rid of the droning buzz of nausea, the ever-present sting of tears clawing at the back of his eyes. The stench that was stuck in his nose of bodies rotting inside the Chimaera.
But instead of agreeing with Ezra, Thrawn slipped the knife into his belt and shifted his stance to get more comfortable while he waited, arms crossed loosely across his abdomen.
"Yet the winter shelter was small and cramped, built to retain heat and incapable of withstanding strong winds," Thrawn pointed out. "Indeed, much of its frame support came from tightly packed snow. A high wind — as you may have noticed, this planet is prone to high winds — will likely destroy the winter shelter before summer begins. If it didn't, we would be forced to build a new shelter nonetheless; the temperatures in summer are likely to be particularly high, and the temperature inside the winter shelter would be ten degrees higher, or perhaps as many as fifteen, leaving us with no respite from either insects or the heat."
These were all arguments Ezra had heard before, and it was difficult to listen to them again without letting his impatience show. "Look, I get it," he said, "but I'm really tired, okay, so—"
"A funnel system will be significantly more efficient than the basket traps," said Thrawn, his eyebrows furrowing as if he couldn't understand Ezra's point of view in the slightest. "It will eliminate hours of work spent emptying and repairing traps, preparing and preserving more fish than we can eat — the amount of energy spent each day in retrieving fish would be reduced to almost nothing, even if you cannot use the Force and we must fish by spear."
"I get that it's more efficient," said Ezra, striving for an even tone. "But I'm not some kind of droid, Thrawn, I need—"
"Then why not execute the plan?" Thrawn asked, jumping in before Ezra could say anything else. "On any of my ships, the words 'It doesn't need to be done today' would lead to reassignment, with more capable and dedicated officers taking the place of the offender. But that is not an option here. We have no one to work with but each other, yet there is always some excuse at hand—"
Ezra's temper skyrocketed so quickly at the word 'excuse' that he was rendered speechless.
"—some unconvincing reason why you cannot assist in a given chore," Thrawn said. "You seem not to understand that these are basic survival skills, skills you must learn; you have survived on your own since you were only seven years old, yet now you deliberately seek to avoid these tasks as if they somehow harm you rather than—"
"I'm not deliberately avoiding stuff like this," Ezra snapped, trying not to sound as heated as he felt. He could feel his eyebrows coming down low over his eyes anyway, a muscle jumping in his clenched jaw. "I'm just bad at it, okay? This isn't exactly in my wheelhouse, you know."
The look on Thrawn's face could only be described as stubborn. "Jedi are warriors," he said. "Every warrior must be well-versed in survival skills by necessity. And you are a survivor first, a Jedi second. This is second nature to you. Why pretend otherwise?"
Survivor again. He kept saying that word, and every time it stabbed deep into Ezra's brain like a heated needle designed to melt right through the flesh.
Ezra turned away with a bitter shake of his head. His nausea had been replaced by a burning rush of adrenaline, making his arms tremble as he paced. "Look, if you need me to go toe-to-toe with someone in a lightsaber battle, I'm down. If you want me to bootleg some droids or pick a tourist's pocket, I got your back. This is just different. You have your talents, right?"
Thrawn opened his mouth to respond, apparently not recognizing a rhetorical question when he heard one.
"Well, I've got mine, too," Ezra plowed on. "There's no point in having me build the stakes when it's gonna take me ten times longer than you and you'll probably have to redo it all in the end, anyway. It's not efficient. You're all about efficiency, aren't you?"
Thrawn raised his hand in a wordless gesture, then let it drop, staring at Ezra like he was a particularly frustrating number puzzle. He shook his head slightly, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. In the thickening silence, Ezra only doubled down, crossing his arms and openly glaring at Thrawn. To his surprise, Thrawn glowered back, his mouth tight.
"Ezra," said Thrawn finally, pronouncing Ezra's name with the crisp, even tone of someone making a valid attempt to not be angry. "Read my mind."
He tapped his temple in invitation. It was the first time he'd used Ezra's first name instead of his title, and that fact alone was enough to make Ezra pay attention. Warily, he established a connection, reaching out with the Force until his mind touched Thrawn's.
Half a second later, he flinched and slammed the connection shut again, overwhelmed by a wave of mind-shattering anger, confusion, and disdain.
"Geez, dude," he muttered, rubbing his forehead. Pain stabbed through his frontal lobe, like someone had taken an icepick to his brain. "What the hell?"
"My apologies," said Thrawn evenly, not sounding even slightly pissed now. "Try again."
"No way, man," said Ezra, taking a step back, his face still screwed up in pain.
"Please," said Thrawn.
Please. Another first, but at least he seemed genuinely contrite. Even more warily than before, Ezra stretched out with the Force. This time the wave of roiling emotions was ten times stronger, slamming into Ezra and sending him back half a step with a pained yelp as he wrenched the connection with the desperation of a trapped animal, until it broke.
"Dude," he said, stumbling away when it was over. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and only succeeded in making himself nauseous. "Leave it to you to kriffing weaponize your thoughts."
"Everyone is capable of learning new skills, Commander Bridger," said Thrawn, his tone sounding just like the strict schoolmarm Ezra had as a kid. "Particularly you. In many ways you are more suited to wilderness survival than I am; if you simply apply yourself—"
"What, I'll suddenly, magically know how to make pots and pans from scratch?" Ezra asked, throwing his hand out to indicate the skillet Thrawn had made out of melted durasteel. "If I simply apply myself I'll realize I actually knew how to make a blaster out of woven grass all along?"
Thrawn lifted his hand and let it fall in another aborted gesture. For a moment, he stood there with his eyebrows furrowed and his mouth a thin line. Then, with an almost deadly look in his eyes, he slipped the leather cord of the oth'ola endzali off his neck and reached for Ezra's hand. Ezra jerked back, flinching instinctively, but Thrawn seemed to have expected this; he uncurled Ezra's fingers and pressed the pendant into his palm.
An odd sensation spread from the pendant, an ice-hot feeling that seeped into his skin and spread down to his toes and up to his hairline at a slow, all-consuming rate. His eyes widened for a moment and then a sense of calm seemed to surround his brain from the outside, slowly sinking into the little grey cells that made up his mind.
"Damn," he breathed, suddenly feeling embarrassed over his outburst — and even over his earlier exhaustion, his preoccupation with Thrawn's memory of the Chimaera, his bout of nausea and guilt. His cheeks were hot, the rest of his body pleasantly cool. He held the oth'ola endzali out to Thrawn, who took it and re-tied it around his neck, still looking vaguely annoyed.
"Perhaps your greatest trait is flexibility," he said to Ezra. "Yet now you deliberately repress it, refusing to learn or change — as if you consider yourself incapable of adapting. Or you see yourself as already dead."
Ezra bit his lip, saying nothing. He still felt a little dazed from the pendant, too dazed to argue back.
"You may know that I have some skill in interpreting works of art," Thrawn said. "As a military officer, I applied this skill as needed to the task at hand, using examples of artwork from a given species or individual to extrapolate weaknesses and strengths on the starfield. These skills are almost useless here, but—" His eyes narrowed. "—this does not make me helpless."
It wasn't the same, Ezra thought wearily, but he didn't say so aloud. Thrawn had apparently been exiled at least once before in his life, had gone through plenty of trial and error — and possibly even extensive training — to get to where he was today.
"I have some skill also in long-term strategizing as well as improvised battle tactics," Thrawn said evenly. "As we are not in battle here, I have applied those skills to the basic necessities of survival instead. You are correct in saying our skills are different, Commander; perhaps you would never think to build a funnel trap or snares in order to capture animals. But you do not need to build elaborate snares. You can lift fish from the water without either a weapon or decent aim. You can lull a frightened animal to sleep, eliminating the need for both tracking and stealth. And although I have the height advantage by roughly twelve inches—"
A wild exaggeration if Ezra ever heard one.
"—I believe you are more than capable of out-matching me in strength," said Thrawn, his eyes glowing intensely, "and you can certainly jump much higher than I can reach. If, for example, our survival depended on attaining a certain degree of height — in the event of an avalanche, perhaps, or an unusually rapid flood — you could simply leap to high ground and be out of harm's way in a matter of seconds, whereas I would have no choice but to search for a climbable route. In that event, my survival skills might be meaningless, whereas your lack of survival skills would also be meaningless."
Slowly, Ezra could feel himself thawing to the idea — once he got over Thrawn's apparent conviction that Ezra was about five feet tall. "But still," he said uncertainly, "our skill sets are just different. I'd never catch up to you in most of this stuff, and when it comes down to stuff like that — I mean, avalanches or whatever — that's pretty much just luck, isn't it?"
"No amount of practice will enable me to jump twenty feet vertically," said Thrawn steadily, patiently. "But even a small amount of guided practice and instruction will improve your basic survival skills. It is true you may struggle to reach my level of confidence, but I doubt very much you will never reach my level of skill. Your level of adaptability is equal to or perhaps greater than mine. Your victory with the purrgils is evidence enough of that."
He gazed at Ezra, waiting for a reply — waiting for his inspirational speech to take hold, perhaps. Ezra didn't exactly feel inspired; he felt washed-out and weary — not on-edge or angry like he had before touching the oth'ola endzali, but still exhausted.
With a weary wave of his hand, Ezra summoned the knife. Thrawn's arm twitched — maybe out of surprise — when he felt the knife unhitch from his belt, but there was no expression on his face as he moved his arm out of the way and watched the knife float through the air to Ezra. He considered Ezra for a moment, their eyes locking.
To Ezra, it felt like a challenge. It was a long, tense minute before Thrawn inclined his head.
"I will handle the funnel," he said, glancing up at the sun. "We can resume your training after you rest; we don't wish to fall behind."
And, not seeming to notice that Ezra could barely stay on his feet, Thrawn turned and walked into the woods to begin his work.