A/N: Got late writing it as its an massive chapter (3.7k).
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He braced himself for the sight of white armor and black helmets.
What he saw was the single most ridiculous thing he had witnessed in ten years.
There, in the flat, sandy expanse before his cave, was a speeder bike. Or at least, a vehicle that was making a valiant effort to be one. It looked like it had been assembled from a junkyard's reject pile, with mismatched panels, exposed wiring that sparked ominously, and a repulsorlift that whined in a key that could curdle milk. It was cobbled-together, ugly, and absurdly oversized for its rider.
And riding it, wearing the same bulky helmet from yesterday, was Ezra.
The boy was clearly trying to park the monstrosity, but he'd misjudged the altitude. The speeder hovered a good foot and a half off the ground. His legs, clad in oversized pants, flailed uselessly, a desperate little dance as he tried to find purchase on the sand. He must have nudged the throttle, because the machine suddenly lurched forward with a startled whine, then slammed back down to the ground with a loud CLANG and a puff of sand, throwing its rider clear.
Ezra tumbled sideways off the seat, landing in a heap of limbs and disgruntled ten-year-old. His helmet popped off and rolled a few feet away.
For a moment, there was silence, broken only by the tink-tink-tink of the speeder's cooling metal. Then the boy pushed himself up, brushed the dust from his trousers with exaggerated motions, and walked over to the stationary vehicle. He gave its rust-streaked chassis a firm pat.
"Naughty girl," he said, his voice clear in the morning air, sounding far too cheerful. "Still, good enough for your maiden voyage!"
Obi-Wan just stared, his blaster hanging loosely at his side. If that had been the maiden voyage, he was ready to eat bantha shit and call it a delicacy.
His eyes then traveled past the smoking heap of the speeder bike to the vehicle that had followed it. Or, more accurately, had been dragged by it. Tethered to the back of the speeder by a thick, synthetic rope was a large, flat-bed hovercart. It was piled high with a small mountain of crates, bags, and bundled-up possessions. A compact, rust-colored moisture vaporator was strapped precariously to one side, next to a dented cylindrical power generator. He could see the corner of a pop-tent, sacks of what were probably food staples, and a large, insulated container that likely held perishables. It was, in essence, a mobile settlement.
The boy retrieved his helmet, tucked it under his arm, and began trudging toward the cave as if arriving via catastrophic mechanical failure with his entire life's possessions in tow was the most normal thing in the galaxy. He spotted Obi-Wan standing in the cave mouth and beamed, a picture of pride.
"Morning, General Kenobi! Brought us transportation!" He gestured grandly behind him, encompassing both the dying speeder and the laden hovercart. "And the rest of my stuff."
Obi-Wan sighed, the sound dredged up from a deep well of exhaustion that now seemed to have a new, permanent resident. He holstered his blaster and pointed a finger, first at the speeder. "What, precisely, is that?" Then he swung the finger to the hovercart. "And what in the seven hells is all of that?"
"What does it look like? It's a speeder bike. Mostly." Ezra shrugged, as if the distinction was trivial. "And that is my stuff. I live here now."
"You... what?"
"Well, it's silly to go back to Mos Eisley every night, isn't it? All that risk, just for a overpriced, lumpy motel bed. This is more efficient. I can focus on my training. Don't worry," he added, seeing the look on Obi-Wan's face. "I brought my own tent, generator, food... I won't be a bother. Mostly."
Obi-Wan opened his mouth, then closed it. The sheer, audacious practicality of it was both infuriating and, he had to grudgingly admit, logically sound from a security standpoint. It also completely bypassed any permission he might have given.
He found he had no rebuttal, but he felt compelled to assert some semblance of control over the situation.
"We have discussed regarding my name," he said, the words sounding weary even to him. "The name is Ben., not General Kenobi." While he argued for the claim, he instinctively knew that this 'discussion' was going to happen many times in future.
"We have discussed this. The name is Ben."
"And who's here to snitch on the name, anyway? Certainly not Akkani, right?"
As if on cue, the eopie, who had been drowsing in her sheltered corner and had slept through the crash, let out a soft, inquisitive brump at the sound of her name. Her big, liquid eyes focused on Ezra, and she took a few clopping steps toward him, her long ears twitching with interest.
"See? She'd never snitch," Ezra said confidently.
"Certainly not due to the entire bag of ithorian marsh-roots she was fed yesterday," Obi-Wan said dryly, watching as the eopie took a step toward the fence, her focus entirely on the boy.
"Oh? I wouldn't know about such thing surely," he said, his voice the very picture of feigned innocence, while reaching into a pouch on his belt and pulling out a wrinkled, purple root vegetable. He offered it to Akkani, who lipped it from his palm with a happy, snuffling grunt.
Obi-Wan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Cease bribing my eopie."
"It's not a bribe. It's a… stipend. For services rendered as a co-conspirator." He gave Akkani another pat as she crunched the treat. "Besides, you try finding a reliable speeder in Mos Eisley for under half a thousand credits. This was three hundred, certainly a bargain I could say for so early in the morning. The repulsor coil is a bit out of alignment and the motivator needs a firm whack sometimes, but it got me and my entire mobile home here, didn't it?"
"Barely," Obi-Wan muttered, his eyes sweeping over the towering hovercart once more. The price was unbelievable for a speeder bike, even if it looked less like a vehicle and more like a collection of parts having a violent disagreement. "Where did you even acquire that… thing?" He gestured to the speeder.
"Junkyard, of course."
"Since when did junkyards started selling speeder bikes that work?"
Ezra looked at him, his expression deadpan. "Who said I bought a working one?"
And such was how Obi-Wan discovered that his new student had expertise in technology far greater than what were one's expectations of an 10 year old boy, certainly not reminding him of another.
He watched, with a kind of weary fascination, as Ezra, with a few precise taps and a muttered curse that sounded entirely too adult, coaxed the wheezing speeder bike into a state of quiet dormancy. The boy moved with an efficiency that belied his age, his hands sure and steady as he disconnected power couplings and secured loose wiring.
After that, while singing some strange tune, he saw the boy move toward the hovercart, as if intent to start unloading stuff right now.
This was getting out of hand. The boy hadn't just come to learn; he had come to settle in.If he had any doubts previously, they were extinguished by now surely.
Obi-Wan felt a familiar tension begin to build behind his eyes. He had wanted to delay, to observe, to maintain the comfortable inertia of his exile for just a little longer.
Enough. The boy wanted to learn? Then he would learn. The lesson would start now. Not when the tent was pitched, not when the rations were sorted, but now.
As Ezra turned, dusting off his hands and clearly preparing to begin the monumental task of unloading his hovercart, Obi-Wan stepped forward, blocking his path.
"Those things will still be there in an hour," he said, his voice level, adopting the tone he once used with younglings in the Temple. A tone that brokered no argument.
Ezra stopped, looking up at him with those unnervingly perceptive eyes. "Yeah, but the suns are getting higher. It's gonna be a pain to set up the vaporator in this heat. Figured I'd get the heavy lifting done first."
"Your first lesson does not involve heavy lifting," Obi-Wan stated, his expression unreadable. "It involves standing still. And being quiet."
Ezra's head tilted, a flicker of suspicion in his gaze. "Just like that? You're actually starting? I figured I'd have to, I don't know, wash your dishes for a couple of weeks. Sing you some sad songs about the Clone Wars. Maybe polish Akkani's hooves until they reflected the twin suns."
A nerve above Obi-Wan's eyebrow began to throb. He had faced down armies of battle droids, negotiated with crime lords, and dueled a Sith Lord on a volcano planet. None of it had prepared him for the sheer, unadulterated gall of this child.
"I find my patience is a finite resource, young one," he said, his voice dangerously low. "And you have already consumed a significant portion of it. You came here for a purpose. We will begin to address that purpose. Now."
He gestured to a flat patch of sand a few meters from the cave entrance. "Go. Stand there. Close your eyes. And tell me what you feel."
Ezra stared at him for a long moment, as if trying to determine if this was some elaborate prank. Then, a slow grin spread across his face. "Okay, 'Master Ben.' You're the boss."
Obi-Wan watched him sit, a deep sigh building in his chest. This was, without a doubt, the worst idea he had had in a decade. And that included the time he'd tried to spice up his rations with sand-lichen. He was a teacher again. May the Force have mercy on them all.
...
[Warning: Next Part is sort of an Info Dump, its basically Obi Wan reaction at Ezra's Hyperperception and then later on explaning what Force and Jedi means. I am not strictly following canon persay, so the explanatons you might feel to be wrong but please do understand that its just my artistic interpretation of Force. You may skip it if you want. In next chapter I would summarize what happened below]
Obi-Wan stood in silence, the morning sun warming his back as he watched the boy. He had expected the usual, fumbling first attempts of a novice. A description of vague feelings, a sense of peace, perhaps the bright presence of the eopie or the heat of the suns. It was the standard starting point, the foundation upon which all other training was built.
He had asked Ezra to close his eyes and tell him what he felt.
The boy had spoken for nearly ten minutes without pause, his voice clear and steady, describing a reality that Obi-Wan had only ever glimpsed in the deepest meditative states, and even then, it was like seeing a reflection in troubled water.
Ezra spoke of the Force not as an energy field that surrounded them, but as the fundamental medium of existence itself. He described it as an endless, lightless ocean, a void that contained no color yet made everything visible. He spoke of the sand beneath them not as a collection of grains, but as a symphony of individual presences, each one a note in a vast, humming chorus. He could feel their molecular structure, the slow grinding of their existence, and by focusing, he could feel the echo of time itself in each one—the pressure that formed them, the journey that brought them here, the wind that was currently wearing them away.
He spoke of the microorganisms in the air, in the soil, a teeming, invisible universe of life that Obi-Wan had only ever known as an abstract concept. To Ezra, they were as distinct and real as the rocks and the suns.
And then he spoke of Obi-Wan.
He described his presence in the Force as a brilliant star, a beacon of light and life. But then, his tone shifted, becoming one of clinical curiosity. He described how that light was constrained, bounded by an unseen shell. He spoke of the flow within him not as a river, but as a stagnant pool, its current stalled and dammed up by a barrier of the man's own making. He didn't say it with judgment, but with the simple, unvarnished observation of a scientist noting an anomaly in an experiment.
When Ezra finally fell silent, opening his eyes and looking up at him expectantly, Obi-Wan felt a profound sense of disorientation. He had spent his entire life studying the Force. He had delved into the deepest archives of the Jedi Temple, studied the theories of the greatest seers and mystics, and learned at the feet of masters who had communed with the Force for centuries.
He had never heard anything like this.
What Ezra described wasn't just a heightened sense; it was a fundamentally different perception of reality. The Jedi archives spoke of the Unifying Force and the Living Force, of sensing the intentions of others and the flow of events. This was something else entirely. This was perceiving the very fabric of creation, down to the molecular level. It was psychometry on an impossible scale, a connection so profound it blurred the line between the observer and the observed.
The boy spoke of time as something that could be felt in an object, a concept that bordered on the realm of myth, of abilities only attributed to the most powerful of the ancient Jedi. And he spoke of it with the same casual ease he used to describe his junkyard speeder.
He didn't realize. He had no idea that what he was describing was beyond the ken of most Jedi Masters. To him, this was just... normal. This was what the Force was.
But to have it perceived so clearly, so easily, by a child... it was like having his soul laid bare. A decade of carefully constructed walls, of self-imposed isolation, and the boy had just walked through them as if they were made of smoke.
Obi-Wan took a slow, steadying breath, forcing the tremor from his hands. He had to approach this with the detachment of a healer, not the shock of a victim. "How long," he asked, his voice carefully neutral, "have you been able to perceive the Force in this way?"
Ezra shrugged, picking up a small stone and turning it over in his fingers. "Since I was seven. The first time I really tried to meditate. I held a vision for just a second, and it felt like I was... dissolving. Like I was about to become part of everything. Scared the hell out of me. After that, I learned to do it in smaller doses. Control it. It's gotten easier over the years. I can hold it for as long as I want now."
Seven. For three years, the boy had been navigating the universe with a perception that surpassed masters who had lived for centuries. It was an absurd, terrifying thought.
"But that's the thing," Ezra continued, his voice dropping with frustration. He tossed the stone aside and held out a hand. "Sensing is all I'm good at. When it comes to actually using the Force... it's pathetic."
He closed his eyes in concentration. A fist-sized clump of sand lifted from the ground, hovering silently in the air before him. Obi-Wan watched, intrigued. The boy then began to manipulate it. The sand flowed like liquid, reshaping itself with impossible fluidity. It became a perfect sphere, then flattened into a disc, then twisted into the intricate, spiraling shape of a galaxy. The control was phenomenal. It wasn't brute force; it was artistry. Few Jedi ever focused on such minute, delicate applications, but Obi-Wan had no doubt this was a high-level achievement, a display of precision that would have impressed even the Council's most adept telekinetics.
"See?" Ezra said, a hint of pride in his voice. He sent the sandy galaxy drifting a few meters away. The moment it passed a certain distance, the intricate shape wavered, lost cohesion, and crumbled back to the ground in a soft puff. "That's the problem. It's like the signal just dies. And I can't lift anything bigger than this." He gestured to a hydrospanner lying near the speeder bike. "I've been practicing for years, but my power hasn't grown at all. It's like I hit a wall the day I started."
Obi-Wan looked from the fallen sand to the boy's dejected face. He saw the problem, but it wasn't the one Ezra saw. The boy was looking at his abilities through the lens of a mechanic, thinking of the Force as a power cell where bigger was always better. More lift, more push, more raw output. It was a common, and dangerous, misconception.
He walked over and picked up the hydrospanner, weighing it in his hand. "You have been practicing for three years," he said, his tone thoughtful, "and you believe you have failed because you cannot lift this?"
Ezra nodded, his expression sullen. "Basically, yeah."
"You're looking at this the wrong way," Obi-Wan said, setting the tool down. "The Force is not a battery. It is not a measure of how much you can move. It is a current, a river. You have been trying to build a dam when you should have been learning how to navigate the stream."
He gestured to the spot where the sand had fallen. "What you did there... that was not weakness. That was control of the highest order. To shape a thousand tiny, individual grains into a single, cohesive form? That is a feat of focus that many Knights would struggle to achieve. Your limitation is not one of power, but of perspective."
Ezra looked up, skepticism warring with a flicker of hope in his eyes. "Perspective?"
"You believe your gift is broken because it doesn't fit your idea of what it should be," Obi-Wan continued, his voice gaining a quiet intensity. "You have a gift, Ezra. A very, very potent one. You perceive the galaxy in a way few ever have. You see the connections, the history, the life in all things. That is not a stepping stone to becoming powerful. That is the power. You have been trying to use a microscope to hammer a nail. You're looking for a bigger hammer, when what you should be doing is learning what you can truly see with that microscope."
Obi-Wan let the weight of his words settle in the desert air. He watched the boy process the idea, saw the flicker of understanding in his eyes. It was a start.
"You speak of being unable to 'crank the volume' of the Force," Obi-Wan continued, picking up the boy's earlier, unspoken metaphor. "But you misunderstand the instrument. The Jedi Order, for all its wisdom, often fell into the trap of quantifying the unquantifiable. We developed a metric for it."
He paused, choosing his words carefully. "We called them midi-chlorians."
Ezra's posture didn't change, but Obi-Wan felt a subtle shift in his focus, a sudden, intense stillness. The boy was listening now, truly listening.
"They are microscopic lifeforms that reside within the cells of all living things," Obi-Wan explained, falling back on the lessons he had learned as a youngling. "They are a symbiont. They speak to us, telling us the will of the Force. They are the conduit, the bridge between the Living Force, which is all around us, and the Cosmic Force, the greater destiny that binds the galaxy. When a Jedi uses the Force, it is the midi-chlorians that facilitate the connection, that translate our will into action."
He could see Ezra absorbing this, his expression unreadable behind the mask of a child trying to grasp a complex lesson. Obi-Wan knew the boy likely understood the concept better than he did, but he played his part.
"The Order believed that a high midi-chlorian count was a sign of great potential. My... my former apprentice, Anakin Skywalker," he said, the name still catching in his throat, "was measured to have the highest count ever recorded in a Jedi. Over twenty thousand. It was seen as a prophecy fulfilled, the mark of the Chosen One."
He let that hang in the air, a testament to how easily the Order's metrics could be misinterpreted.
"But," Obi-Wan stressed, holding up a finger, "that is not the only way. It is not a simple equation. Think of it like a comms signal. No matter how powerful your transmitter is, it is all bound by how well you can communicate, how clearly you can send and receive the message. A brilliant strategist with a weak signal can still outmaneuver a brute with a powerful one. The potential is meaningless without the wisdom to direct it."
A wry, humorless smile touched his lips. "And to show you how little it truly matters in the grand scheme... my own midi-chlorian count was one of the lowest ever recorded for a Jedi initiate. It was a source of no small amusement during my time at the Temple. A hilarious coincidence, truly, that I should be the one to train the boy with the highest count in history."
He let that sink in, watching Ezra's eyes widen slightly. It was a deliberate move, to show the boy that the numbers were not destiny.
"Beyond that," Obi-Wan continued, his tone shifting, becoming more serious, "all of this... the sensing, the telekinesis... it is an aid. It is not the main part of a battle. The most important part of a Jedi, akin to their own limb, is their lightsaber."
He saw Ezra lean in, his focus sharpening even more. The boy had seen them in visions, but visions did not tell the whole story.
"A lightsaber is more than just a weapon. It is a focus. A discipline. It is an extension of the Jedi's will, a symbol of their commitment to the light side. To build one is to understand yourself. To wield one is to master your own emotions. Nearly every fight, at the end of the day, comes down to the blade. And there, your raw potential in the Force means much less."
"Some speak of a 'talent' for lightsaber combat," he conceded, "but all that truly determines is your learning pace, how quickly your body memorizes the forms. With dedication to the blade and a calm mind, any gap in raw talent can be bridged. I have seen it countless times."
He looked Ezra dead in the eye, his voice dropping to a low, serious tone. "Especially when you face the ones you will inevitably fight. The Sith. They are lost in their emotions, drunk on their power. They rely on rage and hatred to fuel their strength. A Jedi who is centered, who is calm, who trusts in the Force and the blade in their hand... that Jedi will always have the advantage. Their power is a storm; yours can be a rock. The storm breaks itself against the rock."
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Also, a small poll regarding Hera.
Should she be an love interest or not?
She is one character from rebels who is currently active thats why i was asking mainly tbh as she might make appearnce soon