If there was one thing to comfort him after hours of training, it was that he could at least always find the thread. It was the same one each time — he learned to recognize it by his third try — and it was drawn to him as if by instinct, as if the Force lured it right to Ezra's hands. Or deposited him exactly where he needed to be to find it.

That was an advantage, Ezra knew — to be dropped right into the enemy's mind at the exact position he needed, without having to search around for hours looking for a thread he wasn't sure how to find. But hell if he knew how to work that advantage.

On each attempt, the thread stayed in his hands, leading him nowhere, never opening up. It vibrated against his palm, glowing silver-blue — sometimes cold, sometimes so hot he could barely keep hold of it. He coaxed it with the Force, trying to persuade the thread to unbraid itself, trying to convince the minuscule knots in it to loosen.

But nothing happened. Each attempt stretched out longer and longer, until Ezra was spending full hours inside Thrawn's mind with this thread in his hands, a tension headache tightening around his skull like a metal band. During this time, he was like a blind and deaf man, disconnected from everything except the glowing thread; he had no sense of Thrawn's physical sensations or thoughts, no way of telling whether Thrawn was still whittling or if he was even in the shelter with him.

When he came out of Thrawn's mind for the last time, the sky outside was pitch-black, and he couldn't tell whether it was nighttime or if the storm clouds had simply thickened. His limbs trembled, weak from exhaustion even though he'd been sitting on his bed unmoving for hours now; the shelter rattled around him, buffeted by wind and rain.

And across from him, Thrawn held a stained rag to his nose and examined the fully-finished wooden figure in his hands. It wasn't the lizard; when Ezra's eyes tracked over the room, he found that particular figure sitting on a shelf that had been dislodged during their move and now rested on the floor. Beside the lizard was what appeared to be a tiny stack of TIE fighters all wedged together in a cube-shaped wooden frame. How Thrawn had gotten them inside the frame, Ezra didn't know; their wooden wings poked out from the bars, so it wasn't like he could have carved them separately and then wedged them inside. The item in Thrawn's hands now was a complex chain of wooden links, each one connected seamlessly to the next.

He glanced up and met Ezra's stare; there was a bruised look to each of the faint red lines beneath Thrawn's eyes. He held Ezra's gaze for a long moment before looking down, removing the rag from his nose to check if he was still bleeding.

He was. Ezra could tell before Thrawn's fingertips came away stained with red; he could see how bright the blood was from where he sat and knew from experience that if it was so vividly red at this point, that meant it was still fresh. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his arms and legs aching at the joints — and if he felt this bad, how awful must Thrawn feel?

He thought back over the discussion they'd had only a week before — the Dark Side vs. the Light Side; the memory of Palpatine's interrogation drifted into his head, bringing with it a ghost sensation of the agony that had sent Thrawn to his knees. At least what Ezra had done didn't seem quite so harmful — there was the nosebleed, yes, and from where he sat he could see shallow cuts covering both of Thrawn's hands, probably caused by Thrawn flinching as he held his knife. But he hadn't stopped whittling throughout the experiment, except maybe to tend to chores — Ezra had no way of knowing whether he'd done that or not — so at least he knew he hadn't reached Palpatine-levels of torture.

Small comfort, he reflected, eyeing the smudged spots of blood on Thrawn's sleeves. Across from him, Thrawn folded the rag over delicately and applied a clean spot to his nose.

"The name?" he asked Ezra, his voice muffled and more nasal than usual.

"Uh…" said Ezra. He rubbed the back of his neck, reluctantly meeting Thrawn's eyes again. "I couldn't get it."

"A lot of effort for no results," Thrawn commented, his tone completely neutral. He leaned over, setting the rough wooden chain down on the same shelf as the lizard and TIE fighters. "What are you doing differently?"

"Me?" Ezra said, a sharp pain shooting right through his temples. He blinked at Thrawn, flabbergasted. "What are you doing differently?" he shot back. "Normally, I can read your thoughts with no problem, and suddenly I've got nothing! No physical sensations, no thoughts or memories, no emotional state — it's a completely empty, dark room inside your head, dude. There's nothing there but this one little glowing thread, and that doesn't lead me anywhere. I can't get into it, I can't follow it to a memory, I can't make it, like, open up…"

He jerked his hands up in a futile gesture, frustration stealing his words. Thrawn stared at him placidly through the outburst, not interrupting, his facial expression unwavering.

"Things have changed for you," Thrawn said.

"No shit they've changed—"

"I don't mean this," Thrawn said, pointing between them as if to indicate the mental channel Ezra had opened up between their minds. "Your inability to read my mind is a symptom of some other malady. Until you resolve those issues, you will consistently fail — and you will continue to cause strain to both yourself and me." He put the rag back against his nose, wiping gingerly at the blood starting to crust there. For some reason, this gesture more than anything else caused Ezra's anger to spike; he sat up straight on his bed, glowering at Thrawn, a dull ache suffusing his entire body.

"The issue's with me?" he asked. "That's what you're saying? I just want to make absolutely sure that's what you meant to say."

It was hard to tell, since he didn't have any visible pupils, but it looked like Thrawn might have rolled his eyes. "I am not deliberately obscuring my thoughts and memories," he said. "No more than I typically do for these exercises."

"So, what, I'm just supposed to believe my brain is suddenly broken?" Ezra asked. He could hear sarcasm dripping into his tone, but he couldn't seem to stop it. "Or is it the Force, Thrawn? Did the Force stop working while I was looking the other way?"

Thrawn gave him a strange, sharp look at that. After a beat of silence, he seemed to recalibrate and said, "Of course the Force is working." He gestured at his bleeding nose, as if that settled the matter. "I felt the evidence of that quite strongly. What's damaged is your relationship to the Force."

This hit eerily close to home; it sounded too similar to something Kanan might say. Ezra turned to the window with a shaky scoff, suddenly thrown off-balance and trying to mask it. "Suddenly you know all about the Force, huh?" he said.

The ensuing silence was long and suffocating, allowing Ezra nothing to focus on but the static hiss of rain outside and the creaking of wind against the shelter walls. He crossed his arms across his chest and knew — though he wouldn't admit it — that he was doing it for a sense of warmth and comfort, not because he was mad.

Eventually, he heard Thrawn shifting behind him, the box he was sitting on scraping across the floor. He sensed footsteps approaching him and turned around just as Thrawn said, "Look."

The oth'ola endzali was untied, its leather cord lying loose in Thrawn's palm. He held the pendant out to Ezra with an unreadable expression on his face.

"What?" asked Ezra, refusing to take the oth'ola endzali. Thrawn kept his hand outstretched, likewise refusing to take it back.

"I am not Force-sensitive," Thrawn said, his tone strangely heavy. "And I never have been. But my brother was, and this wayfinder is imbued with his life energy. You know this."

Reluctantly, Ezra nodded. He stared at the oth'ola endzali as if it might bite him.

"I cannot connect to the Force," said Thrawn, "therefore I cannot be said to have a relationship with the Force. Perhaps because of that, my wayfinder rarely changes. So long as I am wearing it, it projects a sense of calm — as you also know, since you have felt it yourself. However…"

His eyes drifted away, staring into the past — as if remembering something years away but still painful.

"However," he started again, "I have occasionally loaned this pendant to Force-sensitive children who were too overwhelmed to function. In almost every case, the child sensed Thrass's life energy and was comforted by it. But in one situation out of dozens, the child was not comforted at all. The metal scalded her and Thrass's life energy somehow amplified her already negative emotional state; rather than find her equilibrium, she was knocked off-balance and remained upset to some degree or another for roughly eight months afterward."

Ezra stared down at the pendant, the unassuming, tarnished metal looking cool against Thrawn's skin. When he glanced up again, Thrawn's red eyes were searing into him, his face hard.

"I say eight months," Thrawn said, his tone flinty, "because eight months later, she was dead. She navigated her ship directly and deliberately into an asteroid belt, with no survivors. I believe her relationship to the Force was not ideal; perhaps you would say she had fallen to the Dark Side. Whatever the case, this wayfinder responded to that, noticed somehow the deterioration of her relationship to the Force."

He took a step closer, taking one of Ezra's hands in his and pushing the oth'ola endzali into his palm. Ezra jerked back, flinching away from the pendant by instinct, but felt his fingers closing around it against his will. The metal was cool to the touch for just an instant — then, so quickly Ezra didn't have time to react, it was red-hot, so hot he felt sure it must be melting through his skin. He yelped, fingers clutching tighter around the pendant, and sunk to his knees.

At the same time, Thrawn grabbed his wrist in an iron grip and peeled Ezra's fingers apart, plucking the oth'ola endzali out of his now-injured hand. Eyes squeezed shut, water leaking from the corners, Ezra almost didn't notice that the pendant didn't burn Thrawn when he touched it; it must have gone cool again as soon as Thrawn took it away.

Shaking from the pain, Ezra uncurled his fist and stared at the perfect circle of blistered skin on his palm. "Is that … is that what it did to that girl?" he hissed, teeth clenched. Thrawn knelt down beside him and took Ezra's wrist again — gently, this time — to look at the wound.

"Yes," he said. "More or less."

He ran his thumb over the burn, making Ezra wince. "So my relationship to the Force is…."

He couldn't make himself finish the sentence. Thrawn examined the wound a moment longer, frown lines wreathing his eyes.

"You'll need to wash it," he said, pushing to his feet and gesturing vaguely at the open window. "An infection would be suboptimal out here."

Ezra grimaced. No shit — in fifty-four days, he and Thrawn had probably amassed at least the same amount of small injuries altogether, and infection was always the first concern to pop into Ezra's mind. He was highly cognizant of the lack of bacta or even more primitive first-aid measures; all that had been lost to the shipwreck.

He held his injured hand out the window, a muscle in his cheek jumping as rain arrowed down onto his wound. He could hear Thrawn shuffling through the wooden boxes and shelves arrayed in the shelter, and by the time he turned around, there was a small wooden bowl being brandished right in his face.

"Dude," Ezra said, leaning back so the bowl wouldn't hit him in the nose. "Personal space."

"Use this," said Thrawn, backing off a little but keeping the bowl outstretched. "It's a bitternut salve."

"Bitternut…?" Cautiously, Ezra took the bowl, unscrewing the little wooden lid. Inside was a pale green substance that looked a little like a lotion and smelled … well, awful. He squinted up at Thrawn, unwilling to try the salve. "You found this on the Chimaera?" he asked.

"I made it," said Thrawn evenly. "It is not as effective as bacta, but it has some antibacterial properties."

"You made it?" Ezra repeated. "Here?"

"Yes," said Thrawn, one eyebrow ever-so-slightly raised.

"Well, then, it's not really bitternut, is it?" Ezra said, sliding the lid back into place. Thrawn accepted the bowl without any sort of argument, dipping his fingers into the salve.

"It is bitternut," he said. "You might not have noticed during winter, when most of the vegetation was dead, but there are many plants and trees here which must have been imported from other worlds. More evidence that a society once thrived here — and it isn't toxic. Watch."

He spread the salve over his own open cuts, his face impassive. Ezra moved closer, watching carefully for any signs of poison — steam rising from acid-eaten skin, perhaps, or sores opening up like potholes, or sudden discoloration and decay. Thrawn stood there, allowing Ezra to examine his hand until he was satisfied.

"Fine," Ezra said, taking the little bowl back. He cradled it in the crook of his arm as he applied salve to the burn, wincing as the creamy substance settled in and stung over the blistered edges of his skin. The pain was intense enough that he felt like he was being burned all over again, but he grit his teeth and kept his eyes open until it faded away, when he handed the bowl back to Thrawn.

Thrawn adjusted the lid absently, his eyes far away. Instead of putting the salve back in its box, he held it in his hands with his thumbs pressing down on the lid; he didn't seem to notice he was still holding it. When he finally moved, he slid the salve gently back into one of the wooden boxes and straightened up again, his free hand going automatically to the oth'ola endzali around his neck.

"Which memory unsettled you?" he asked.

Ezra folded himself onto the thin mattress, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle. He kept the palm of his right hand a few centimeters away from his clothes, careful not to brush his burn wound against anything.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "I didn't see any memories, remember? It was just that stupid thread."

"Not today," said Thrawn patiently. "The last time you successfully picked through my mind, you uncovered multiple memories. Since then, you haven't been able to uncover anything — even the name of my aide. Something you saw inside my mind must have damaged your relationship to the Force — if we figure out which memory triggered a negative reaction, perhaps—"

"Dude, literally every single memory I saw was damaging," Ezra cut in. "I mean, how the hell did you think I was gonna react? First I get to see the Chimaera literally exploding as it hits the ground, then I get to see you holding somebody's severed arm, then I find out this planet isn't even deserted — I mean, take your pick! There's like fifteen traumatizing experiences packed together into every single one of those!"

Thrawn sat on one of the overturned wooden boxes, clasping his chin in his hand as he thought. "Tell me the Jedi tenets again," he requested.

It took Ezra a moment to recalibrate and process this request — he forced himself to dial down the exasperation and anger he'd allowed to build up. Jedi tenets, Thrawn said — Ezra was pretty sure he and Thrawn had never gone over the Jedi 'tenets' in the first place. "You mean, like the Jedi code?" he asked.

Thrawn nodded and waved his hand in a circular get-on-with-it motion. With a sigh and a somewhat dramatic roll of his eyes, Ezra recited:

"There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no—" His mouth went dry. He hoped Thrawn didn't notice the slight stammer on this word. "—no death, there is the Force. "

Thrawn only gazed at him, face blank, as if he expected Ezra to go on.

"That's it," said Ezra awkwardly.

"There is another version, isn't there?" Thrawn said, tilting his head to the side. "I have heard it before, though only once. Emotion, yet peace — ignorance, yet knowledge — and so on. That's quite the different implication, isn't it? It suggests both emotion and peace, chaos and harmony, death and the Force, coexist rather than supplant each other, as your version suggests."

"There is no my version," said Ezra; he could hear how peeved he sounded, and that just irritated him more. "This is just straight-up the Jedi Code. People don't have their own individual versions of the Code."

"How do you know?" Thrawn countered.

"How do you know?" Ezra countered back, much less politely. "You make any visits to a Jedi Temple recently? Did I somehow miss the memory where you were a Padawan?"

Thrawn didn't seem to take offense. His eyes were fixed on the open window, watching the rain pour down. "Perhaps it is a simplified version taught to younglings," he said. "It is your religion, so you should know better than I do. But you came across it in an unusual way. You were old enough when you began your training to skip over simplified versions. However, it seems to me the simplified version of the Code implies a more complex relationship to the Force… unless this is simply an archaic version of Basic I'm not familiar with."

He looked a question at Ezra, who only shrugged. "I don't think so," he said. "Ancient Basic isn't actually all that ancient, you know. It's only been around a few thousand years so it pretty much just sounds like — you know, like 'the Force be with ye' instead of 'be with you.'"

"In that case," said Thrawn, "my theory is that both versions were used — although we may never know exactly why — and as such, both versions are valid. What do you think?"

"I think you're remembering it wrong," said Ezra bluntly. "That or you're just plain making it up."

"I am not remembering it wrong," said Thrawn with what seemed to Ezra like a hint of annoyance underneath a thick layer of patience. "I'd invite you to take a look at the memory yourself, if you were currently capable of reading my mind."

Low blow, Ezra thought — but maybe he'd deserved it. "So what's it matter if both versions were used?" he asked, moving along. "You think some ancient mantra has anything to do with—" He gestured violently between himself and Thrawn. "—with this?"

"Ancient mantras do seem rather important to Jedi," Thrawn said dryly.

"Well, not to me," said Ezra. Thrawn sat back a little, narrowing his eyes.

"You are not a fully-trained Jedi," he said. "In any case, I think it's worth the time to consider it. How does one fall to the Dark Side, again please?"

Ezra huffed out a sigh through his nose. An image of Maul swam before his eyes, there and gone before he could blink.

"I'm not exactly an expert in that," he muttered.

"More of an expert than I am, certainly," said Thrawn. There was no venom in his tone. Ezra sat up a little bit straighter, trying to organize his thoughts.

"Right," he said, "well, they say any sort of untamed negative emotion leads to the Dark Side. So if you—"

"Who says?" Thrawn asked.

Oh, hell. He was one of those types, Ezra noted sourly — the type who asked a question and then demanded more detail from every single aspect of the answer, just to be a dick about it. "It's just, like, a known fact," he said aloud. "I mean, look at the Sith Code."

"You forget you are dealing with someone almost entirely ignorant of these religions," Thrawn said, gesturing toward himself. "Although I have certainly attempted to learn more about the Jedi and the Sith, most records of their existence have either been destroyed or are so heavily restricted that even the Emperor would not allow me to access them. I know only what I have personally witnessed, and that is not much."

Briefly, Ezra pictured Thrawn asking the Emperor for more information about the Force. Yeah, he couldn't imagine that going over well.

"Okay," he said, "so basically, the Dark Side is all about passion, power, strength — whatever. That's what the Sith believe in. And the Jedi, meanwhile, are all about balance."

"No emotion," Thrawn put in.

"Right," said Ezra — but even as he said it, he felt an uneasy twinge deep in his chest. As if he could somehow hear that twinge, Thrawn raised an eyebrow and cocked his head. "Well, it's not that simple," Ezra added quickly. "It's like, no, you're not supposed to have emotion, but like, everybody has emotions, you know? Even you, weirdly enough. So I think what it means is that if you're a Sith, you're going to really embrace those emotions and just sort of stay in them, like really let yourself soak in every minute of it, good or bad. But if you're a Jedi, you have to learn how to let your emotions wash over you and just accept it and, you know, roll with it. Move on."

"I see," said Thrawn. His eyes seemed to be glowing more brightly than usual, giving him a faintly malevolent air. "Rather than wallow in your emotions, you must accept them and move on."

Ezra shifted uneasily; it wasn't like Thrawn to just blandly repeat everything Ezra said, so he had to be doing so now to make some kind of point. The only thing was, Ezra couldn't be certain just what that point was. "Yeah," he said instead of trying to think it through. "Exactly."

"Exactly," Thrawn repeated, inclining his head. "So which emotion are you wallowing in, Commander Bridger?"

Ezra's mouth was dry. "It doesn't necessarily have to be that," he said, a little weakly. He flopped back on the bed in a deliberately careless-looking way, angling his head to look out the window rather than at Thrawn. "It could be anything. Maybe there's some sort of Sith temple here or something and that's messing with me. We don't know."

He heard an almost inaudible hum from Thrawn. "I find that unlikely," Thrawn said slowly, as though he were actually considering it. "There are temples here, yes — or rather, ruins — but they are not Sith. Nor are they Jedi. I suspect the people of this planet were not particularly Force-sensitive themselves; perhaps they were unaware even of its existence."

Ezra scoffed, but didn't argue — he was sort of at a disadvantage here, in that Thrawn had actually seen the ruins and Ezra hadn't. To his relief, Thrawn didn't challenge him on it, either.

"In any case," said Thrawn, "there are many potential factors at play. You've mentioned rage; it is possible, even likely, that you feel rage on a daily basis. I understand I am not what most people would consider an ideal companion, in particular for former Rebels."

At that, Ezra sat up so fast his head swam. "I'm not a former Rebel," he shot at Thrawn. "So far as I'm concerned, you're a former Imperial. You're the one whose ship blew up, remember? You're probably listed in some database somewhere as MIA. Or knowing you, they probably went straight to AWOL, right? Cuz if Grand Admiral Thrawn of all people doesn't come back, he's either dead or he's just switched loyalties. Switched loyalties again, I mean — since you apparently used to be in some other military, too."

Thrawn's eyebrow twitched. "I am still a captain in the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet," he said. "I have never ceased to be a captain."

"Good for you," Ezra said, flopping back down on the mattress again. "I'm sure they'll love to hear that when you get back. Cuz that definitely makes up for the — what is it, ten years? — as an Imperial, right?"

"You are trying to distract me," Thrawn said. He leaned forward in his seat as if to compensate for Ezra lying down, and Ezra was uncomfortably aware of Thrawn's eyes scanning his face, reading every minute muscle twitch. Ezra held his face as still as possible, desperately hoping that if he made himself look like a wooden mannequin, there would be nothing left for Thrawn to read.

"Ah," said Thrawn flatly, sitting back again. "The concept of negative emotions in general makes you uncomfortable. Not necessarily rage, then; perhaps grief."

"Grief?" Ezra repeated, turning his head against the mattress to stare at Thrawn. His eyebrows were furrowed, his mouth twisting from confusion. "What do you mean? Over Kanan?"

After a long pause, Thrawn inclined his head. "Certainly, the death of your master is cause for grief," he said, a little too tonelessly for Ezra's taste. He watched as Thrawn's eyes flicked casually away from him.

For a moment, Ezra almost bought it. The idea that his relationship with the Force was struggling so much because of Kanan, because he'd lost his Jedi Master — it fit together neatly, like the satisfying click of a 3-D jigsaw holo falling into place. And it was true that he was grieving for Kanan, just as it was true he had mostly avoided thinking about it at all.

But he knew deep down that this wasn't the answer. He could examine his grief over Kanan remotely, almost the same way he could look over his and Thrawn's hunting tools and count them to make sure none were missing. He could see the depth and severity of those feelings — of everything he'd been refusing to deal with — and knew it wasn't enough to fracture him this badly.

To make the oth'ola endzali scald his hand.

He thought of Maul again, this time with a bitter taste flooding his mouth, and shook his head. "It's an okay theory," he said, "but it doesn't make sense, really. I've dealt with grief before."

Maul's image wavered, replaced by the foggy memory of Ezra's parents, their surroundings — his childhood home — a blur, but their faces frozen in time forever by the Force.

"Yes," said Thrawn from across the room — his tone of voice, distant and cool, made it clear he hadn't picked up on Ezra's mood. Or if he had, he didn't care to acknowledge it. "Most people have dealt with grief before, you know. Even at your age."

Ezra felt his temper flare. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep it in check, then remembered that Thrawn did the same thing whenever he was angry and bit his tongue instead. "You don't have to be a dick about it," he said, his voice as measured as he could make it. "You lost your parents when you were a kid, too. You know what it's like."

Thrawn tossed him a calculating look. "I did not intend to offend you," he said carefully. "I meant to say it is not uncommon for a man your age to experience grief, such as for one's parents or for a cherished mentor. But it is uncommon for a man your age to be cut off from his galaxy and friends and to experience grief for forty-six thousand people all at once."

Lying on the bed, Ezra could only stare up at the ceiling, his face frozen and his breath refusing to come. He couldn't believe Thrawn had said it; he felt his muscles twitching beneath his skin, urging him to stand up, to fight, to run — something, anything. At the same time, he felt so weak that he knew he couldn't move at all.

"My guess," said Thrawn softly as Ezra covered his face, "would be a combination of grief and survivor's guilt. You saw my memories of the crash; perhaps you were confronted with the reality of your actions for the first time in full. The resulting emotional imbalance might have gone a long way toward damaging your relationship with the Force; perhaps you have incorrectly speculated on my own emotional state, and doing so has damaged your mind-reading capability as well.

"To read my mind, you must first establish a link," Thrawn said. Gradually, feeling feverish and cold at the same time, Ezra uncovered his eyes just enough so he could watch Thrawn as he spoke. "You must build a channel, yes?"

Reluctantly, Ezra nodded.

"And as we've established," Thrawn continued, gesturing to his bloody nose, "when Sith infiltrate another person's mind, it causes pain. We theorized that this happens because the Dark Side Force-users do not bother to build a connection first, or perhaps because they are incapable of doing so. Lately, since seeing my memories of the crash, you have had difficulty establishing a proper connection, yes?"

Again, Ezra nodded. This time, he was slow to do it because his mind was whirring over the implications, not because he was reluctant to admit it.

"Perhaps you have difficulty establishing a connection," Thrawn said delicately, "because you fear my emotional state."

There was a pause just long enough for a quiet, steady breath; with no light coming through the window, Ezra couldn't be sure of the expression on Thrawn's face, but something in the air made him go still anyway, made him hold his breath.

"I do not blame you for the Chimaera's wreck," Thrawn said. "I don't blame you for the loss of life. War is war, Commander Bridger — you did what you thought was necessary for a victory, and I cannot blame you for that. You escaped from the bridge as the Chimaera crashed, and I cannot blame you for that, either — you were unfamiliar with the controls, and with impact only seconds away, you could not reasonably be expected to learn. Nor do I blame you for—" A shadow crossed his face, there and gone in a flash. "—what happened afterward," he said, biting the words out. "You were exhausted from using the Force for too long and at too great a degree; I have seen a similar type of exhaustion before, and I know you could not have assisted with my rescue attempts. I have known this and worked to accept it from the start."

For a long moment, Ezra could think of nothing to say. His face worked; he concentrated on thinking nothing, on feeling nothing, on stretching out to the Force, losing himself in it — letting the overwhelming flood of emotions he couldn't even identify wash over him entirely. When he finally spoke, his voice was trembling — but only a little, steady enough that it might have fooled somebody other than Thrawn.

"You're saying you don't feel anything negative about me?" he asked, the challenge in his tone lost to a minute tremor. "After everything I did, you're not even a little angry? You don't feel anything at all?"

Thrawn contemplated him for a while, saying nothing. Finally, his eyes shifted away and he leaned over, retrieving his knife and a bark-covered strip of wood from the floor of the shelter. He turned the blade over in his battered hands, examining it in the dark.

"If I do," he said, "what does it matter? You will have to read the minds of men who actively hate you in the future. Men who want you dead. True enemies, people on the other side of the war. And you will have to forge that connection nonetheless; it isn't my emotions that matter. It's yours."

Ezra's blurred vision focused on the block of wood in Thrawn's hands. His throat ached; his limbs felt cold and weak. He wasn't sure, later on, if he ever nodded or if he simply sat there, quiet and exhausted, accepting Thrawn's version of events without batting an eye.

He watched as Thrawn dug the edge of his blade into the bark, sending long, graceful slivers of it spiraling to the ground.

"If you aren't ready, I suggest you meditate on it," Thrawn said. "If you are ready…"

His eyes flicked up, meeting Ezra's dead-on.

"...I suggest we try again."