Holy Fuck I dont kno what that all that corrupted text shit was but i am SO SO SORRY LMAO DAMN anyway hello friends! I am back after season two and dying. There are no spoilers and you actually get to meet Ezra's mum and Dad in this installment! Sorry for the wait, school's been a bitch of a thing.
Ezra had loved to dream as a cub. She loved to see the clear, impossibly open skies of her home system, adored the untainted view of space right outside of her childhood home. Her life had always been one of vibrant purples, deep blues, and the opaque reds of the rivers that ran behind the façade of the modest house. Growing up, her favorite things had been harvesting that year's crop, the smell of roasting Tlaxca, and the glow of her mother's lamps hanging from the knarly branches of the Zyriuy tree contrasting with the permanent, bio-luminescent nightscape of the fifth planet from the sun. When she had been active duty, it seemed that each day was another one crossed off of her calendar until it was finally the first day of leave and she could go home. On the times she couldn't, she surrounded herself with her staff as well as her fellow commanding officers as they spent the majority of their leave in seedy bars and nightclubs.
But on this visit home, it was not so enjoyable. She was stuck, now. No room to breathe or laugh. She could not run along the thick grain fields of the valley area, could no longer climb the grand trees of the jungles not a sector over, and could no longer serve her empire as she wished.
No legs. Useless. An accident that could have easily been prevented had she remained vigilant. If only she hadn't been so damn trusting of her staff...
In her mind, it was her fault. She was the commanding officer. Those deaths were on her. Ezra was the only survivor of an explosion in the main engineering room during a rebel assault on her commander's warship. Her entire night shift team had died fiery, suffocated deaths while she got out without some necessary appendages and her lung capacity. The Empire would see her wounds as honorable; she got injured gravely and yet lived through the unbearable flames as her fur was fried and melted off, her flesh bubbling and every nerve aching fiercely as she desperately tried to put out the fire. She called for her team with no answer and only just noticed the falling support as she tied off all electrical systems apart from the catastrophic cascade failure.
If she hadn't of done that, the entire ship would be dead in the water amongst the blackest reaches of Space, too far away from the nearest Outpost for help. The crew would starve or be forced to use the emergency escape pods. This was her duty now. She would not lose any more lives than she already had! The fire was dying, she had called for backup and cleanup teams as well as medical support, and yet, she stood there charred to the bone and promptly collapsed to the ground as the last little flickering flame was snuffed by air currents. The smoke had taken her breath as well as her strength, and her shaky legs and scorched body could no longer stand. Blood was in her eyes, and so she closed them while she lay nearly unconscious after her collapse.
The support collapsed as well. It crushed her rib cage and shattered the bones of her legs; blood flooded her lungs, every hurt hurt so badly all at once that there was a shocked nothing.
So she had lain there for an period in which there was no time, nor pain, nor thought and without motion before it all began again but the speed of which became faster and faster and faster and she tried to scream but choked on her own blood, creating gurgling, gut wrenching sounds as the air was crushed from her lungs and blood pooled around her, the initial impact sending the life giving substance across the floor in a fan-like array and over the blackened walls. The deep violet blood under her battered body made her feel like she was being sucked down into the floor! Oh God, she was going to drown!
Now she was home. She doesn't remember what happened after. The weight lifted, someone had petted her forehead, rubbed the ends of her ears soothingly, then nothing. Brief flashes of the sterile coal of a medical center, her mother, usually so untouchable and stoic wept as her father kneeled at the bedside in desperate prayer. Natea was there too, head in hands and long, blunt fingers holding her own charred digits gently. She missed him more than her place as Head Engineer. She wished he could have come home with her, but always dismissed the thought when it reared its ugly head. He had a life now! A career! Every time she thought of her Natea, her chest would swell with pride, and that great joy that it brought would brighten her otherwise empty and lifeless days.
Home didn't have the same feeling of warmth she had remembered so fondly when on duty. It was a cage now. Her lungs would never work as they once did, she was permanently confined to a wheelchair, and the only reason she was not allowed to die in honor of doing her duty was because of a promise Ezra's commander had made to her parents.
She could remember the smooth purr of her father's voice, "Bring her home." There was threat in the undercurrent of his jovial tone, one that even she, a bright eyed Ensign at the time, couldn't ignore.
Captain Druzak had kept his sincere promise.
He'd been a friend of her mother's, impressed with Ezra's quick thinking, unorthodox ideas, and skill with anything she put her long fingered hands to. It helped that she had a knack for engineering. He'd been the one to request her aboard his ship in the first place, and now she was being forced to leave. She could remember clearly the last time they spoke face to face, her body was still wrapped securely in white linens, her tall ears taped to lay flat against the top of her skull and wrapped tightly to prevent permanent mutilation of the delicate appendages. She could barely move her arms without agony ripping through her nerves and even on the highest dosage of pain medication, there had been an uncomfortable twinge.
He'd looked at her with pity as they said their goodbyes and it made her feel all the more ashamed of her weakness. The pain she experienced in the hollows of her chest would haunt her the rest of her life; an agonizing reminder of that day along with the bitter phantom pains in the empty lengths of her legs
It was a shame, too. Ezra had rather like her legs.
Prosthesis weren't out of the equation, but Ezra knew they took an embarrassingly good while to make to fit just perfectly to one individual and to tune it to one's own quintessence. There was no expense as accidents happened often, but Ezra's ship had been for exploration, and she would not make them wait. That was why she had requested Natea take her place as CO of Engineering. He was brilliant! That was why she had taken him on when her commander had suggested it. He had been a project at first, and after less than an hour, she ended up practically adopting him in her own mind. His bitter and vehement protests at being placed under her surveillance were almost entirely ignored, and Ezra had been all too happy to gather up all the blankets she'd had to pile them up on the floor in her meagre living room for the Ikyak to sleep on.
She could die happy knowing that he would have a place he could thrive in, even if many Galra would question his legitimacy due to his species. It was the skill and work ethic that counted, and now, Ezra was counting each day for fear of losing her grip on reality. Idle hands did not make an idle mind, and she was so, so tired of crying. She hadn't really looked at herself in the mirror for a time, but she was sure that she'd rubbed the black-violet fur under her eyes off or, at the very least, irritated her skin to inflammation.
Her fur had lost its luster over the course of the first few weeks of her stay and some white patches had begun to show up around her back ridge and at her temples. Her scales were grimy and her mane was matted in some spots. Her sight was dimmer, too. A result of the initial explosion, most likely. The flash of it had been violent. Everything was wrong and grey and she'd long since lost her taste for pleasurable things. She couldn't even enjoy the benefits of being home for the first time in literal decades; her father's cooking turned to a tasteless mush in her mouth, she felt like she was being swallowed in the soft mattress of her bed without her legs' balancing weight, she couldn't run in the fields or climb trees or help her aging parents with farm work!
This wasn't how she pictured being retired and the truth of her situation always felt like a lead weight in the pit of her stomach. She always felt queasy.
Her mother, Vzahn, and her father, Lebekk, were very supportive of her, knowing that she loved to work with her hands and mind as one, and tried to help her find something she could enjoy, but the depressive and ghost-like state she'd sunken into had made her listless and emotionally unresponsive. She was over three centuries old and she was sulking like an adolescent. It made her irritable and snappish. The Galran Military Police hadn't caught the perpetrator yet, and each passing day was another drop into the ocean of her building and repressed rage.
Things had begun to look up, however. Her father had asked around about office jobs for engineers on their home planet and had found a firm willing to look into her schematics for more efficient, preexisting inventions as well as her original innovations. Her mother had nearly cried again when they had told her the news over dinner and a broad grin had cracked over her face. Vzahn had later told her that she couldn't have been happier to see her cub's crooked grin and fucked up teeth than she had in that moment. The old General really had cried when Ezra had answered her with a breathy laugh instead of a scathingly sarcastic remark.
Shortly afterward, as Ezra had settled in with her new job as an architectural engineer, Vzahn had called up a few old colleagues within the empire, asking if any were willing to create a pair of legs for her only cub, and when she had received an swift affirmative and informed Ezra of it, the younger Galra couldn't have been held back by the Emperor himself when she launched her legless body at her mother and father's waists, the two of them quick to catch her under her arms and hold her in a group hug. Vzahn, a former high commander, and Lebekk, an ambassador and saboteur, would have called in every favor they had ever built up during their years of service to make sure their cub had the best life they could offer, and every day Ezra became more aware of just how much her parents had cared for her in their own way. They were still her cold and generally distant progenitors, but they did care for her. The warmth she gave to them and what she received in return had begun to heal her spiritual wounds. Ezra had even begun to think that she could live on, even if they never found the cowardly murderer.
She couldn't wait to share the news with Natea.