A/N: Took quite some time to write. I will update another chapter today to quickly end the whole training arc.
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The day I finally managed to launch myself into the air like a scrawny, poorly-aimed missile, something in Ben's eyes changed. Before that, he'd been treating me like a weird, hyper-intelligent pet project he'd been saddled with. There was a certain relaxed, almost resigned quality to his teachings. "Calm your mind, Ezra." "Feel the flow, Ezra." It was all very zen and completely fucking useless.
After that? It was like someone had flipped a switch from 'Zen Garden Master' to 'Drill Sergeant from Hell.'
The very next morning, I was rudely awakened by a stick poking me in the ribs. "Up. The twin suns will not wait for your youthful indolence."
I groaned, pulling my blanket over my head. "Five more minutes. The Force is telling me to catch up on my beauty sleep."
"The Force is telling me that if you are not outside in five minutes, you will be cleaning the cave with a toothbrush," his voice replied, dry as the Tatooine sand itself.
And so began the new regime. Apparently, my successful leap had convinced him that my 'Control' was advanced enough, and now we needed to work on the 'vessel.' His exact words were, "A Jedi's body is the temple for the Force. One does not house a divine spark in a dilapidated hovel."
Which was just a fancy way of saying I was out of shape. And he was right.
I'd always assumed Jedi, with their whole 'Force-assisted everything' deal, didn't bother with all that mundane, sweaty shit. I mean, why run when you can float?
I learned how spectacularly untrue that was.
"A healthy body is a responsive conduit for the Living Force," he'd said, looking annoyingly chipper while sipping some beige-colored tea that probably tasted like disappointment and dust. "To maximize the help the Force can give you, you must first maximize your own vessel."
Which meant I had to wake up before the twin suns of Tatooine showed their full, blazing faces. Being late meant running sprints in temperatures that would cook a bantha in its own hide.
I was beginning to understand why, in less than ten years, this seemingly young Master of mine would become Alec Guinness. The desert was aging him in real-time. I'm pretty sure I saw his hair recede two millimeters just from doing burpees in the early morning heat.
I was subjected to a ridiculous, grueling regimen of running up and down sand dunes, push-ups that felt like pushing the planet, and squats that threatened to separate my tiny, scrawny pelvis from the rest of my torso.
And Master Ben? He'd just sit cross-legged in the shade of the cave entrance, radiating a maddening serenity. His eyes were closed, a faint, rhythmic humming the only sound escaping his lips.
'Go faster, Ezra! Feel the Force reduce the strain in your hamstrings!'
'Breathe, boy, breathe! Let the lactic acid flow through the Force!'
Useless platitudes, all of them. But I did them. I had to. Because if this was the price of learning how to keep up with my own over-engineered plans, I'd pay it. I wasn't just building a body; I was building a battery and a firewall for my powers.
The physical torture was just the first part. The second, and perhaps the most important thing he told me one needs in battle, was reflexes.
"A Force-sensitive enemy is not like a droid or a stormtrooper," he'd explained one evening, watching me collapse in a panting heap. "They will move with a speed you cannot match, with intent you cannot always predict. Your own body must be your shield, and that requires reflexes faster than thought."
Then, one day, as I was sitting there, exhausted, trying to peel the crust of sand off my sweat-soaked coat, he came out of the cave. In his hands were two lengths of charred, heavy wood, each about the length of a short sword.
I got an immediate, sinking feeling—a premonition of violence and very sore muscles.
He tossed one stick, and I instinctively caught it, the impact stinging my palm.
Obi-Wan held the other stick with a loose, deceptively casual grip. He spoke a single, ominous sentence: "Attack me, or I will attack you."
Of course, I attacked. I wasn't an idiot. Better to get the beating over with than wait for the inevitable. Being a diligent disciple, I launched myself forward, swinging the wood like a club.
The result was a very sore body.
The old man didn't show even a sliver of mercy. He dodged my amateur swings with the ease of a cat on 'Spice,' and struck my body with his stick like a damn bantha.
Smack. Across the ribs.
Thwack. Down on the shoulder.
Whack! A sharp, stinging blow across the back of my thigh.
I wasn't totally shit at it, to be fair. My recent experience with handling the heavy spear-axe did translate somewhat to this stick-fighting, but they were essentially different instruments. My slight mastery in the 'vision-combat' was mostly helped by the small but numerous muscle memory echoes the ancient weapon gave me.
As I'd practiced with it during the preceding weeks while traveling, I was slowly but steadily growing to own those instincts, but it would still take a long time to fully integrate them into my combat style. The barrier I felt was that faceless opponent of mine in the trials. Defeating him would surely bring a change, though I didn't know what.
SMACK!
A sharp rap on the side of my head broke my focus. I stumbled, tasting the dry desert air.
"Eyes on your opponent, Padawan," Obi-Wan's voice was calm, but the strike was not. "An Inquisitor will not grant you the courtesy of a moment to muse."
"I was thinking about booty!" I grunted, rolling out of the way of a follow-up strike and lunging forward in a clumsy thrust. He sidestepped it, and his stick clipped my elbow.
Dammit. That was going to bruise.
The lessons in stick-fighting continued, interspersed with Obi-Wan's famous 'Jedi wisdom.'
"The lightsaber is a life-saving tool, not a blunt instrument for rage," he instructed, effortlessly disarming me with a flick of his wrist. My stick tumbled into the sand. "It is an extension of the self. The moment your emotions control your attack, you create a hole in your defense that a true master will exploit."
He gestured for me to retrieve the stick. "There are seven forms of lightsaber combat, each with a different philosophy. What we are practicing now—these basic strikes, parries, and blocks—are the foundation of Form I, Shii-Cho. It is the Way of the Sarlacc: simple, direct. It teaches you control before you can earn complexity."
I retrieved the stick, my mind instantly latching onto that. Seven forms. This was Form I.
I thought about how much faster I could maybe learn by using a lightsaber myself. If it behaved like a tool, it would be better. But even if it behaved the same way as the polearm, forcing me to battle the phantoms within to learn, it would still help.
I asked Master Kenobi about it, as casually as I could.
"Master Ben," I'd started, rubbing my sore shoulder. "I think I could apply my learnings faster if I could just see a lightsaber in action. Maybe... hold it for a minute? Just for educational purposes."
I was met with swift refusal. "You are not ready for a lightsaber, Ezra. It is a weapon of peace and skill, not a toy for a child's curiosity."
I even asked to just look at it, which was also denied. "I do not have one," he said, which, technically, was true.
I knew the reason. He had buried his in the sands. The two buried lightsabers—his and the one that belonged to his long-gone Padawan—carried a lot of baggage. I felt it through my Hyper Perception; a thick, heavy blanket of grief and guilt whenever I steered the conversation too close.
He was a broken man trying to be a teacher. Knowing Anakin was alive was already quite a hit to his mental state. It wasn't the Obi-Wan Kenobi of A New Hope yet. He was Ben. I felt it would be cruel to force him to confront that past right now.
So, I practiced. Diligently. I wasn't so weak that I needed a crutch to learn anything; that much pride I had on myself. And besides, my plans to rescue Vasha wouldn't go forward without 'that' anyway.
The morning and evening routines essentially became just that: a blur of sand-sprinting and stick-fighting. In between?
The remaining hours of the day, from late morning until the oppressive heat of the setting sun, were reserved for meditation.
Meditation. Fucking boring meditation.
Yes, nearly five to six hours of sitting still, cross-legged, every single day.
I was like, holy shit, isn't that too long? Vasha is on Scarif, not waiting for me to hit peak inner peace.
Master Kenobi, however, was adamant. "It is necessary, Ezra, to balance the emotions within and achieve a state of calmness. For only with a calm mind can one truly sense the guidance of the Force."
, being the perpetually annoyed voice of meta-awareness and engineering-based logic, couldn't help but push back.
"Master Ben, with all due respect, I'm already calm," I argued, trying to ignore the tingling in my numb legs. "And what exactly are we 'balancing?'"
"The tempest within," he replied, his eyes still closed, looking like a dusty Buddha.
"But emotions aren't ever-present, are they? Events in the real world create emotional responses—different emotions emerging with different events. If those external stimuli aren't present, what is there to balance? I can work with the whole 'make yourself calm' thing, but this 'balancing' idea seems illogical, no?"
I watched his brow furrow slightly, a tiny crack in the serene mask. He'd clearly heard this brand of initiate's logic before, but my adult-minded, pedantic phrasing probably gave it a new, annoying flavor.
Obi-Wan sighed, opening his eyes. "You view emotions as simple, discrete reactions, like a switch being flipped. They are not. They are currents that run constantly beneath the surface, feeding one another."
"And if those currents are left untended," he continued, his voice taking on the familiar, heavy tone of the fallen Order, "they swell. They become attachments—to fear, to anger, to love. These attachments lead to actions taken out of self-interest, rather than the will of the Force. They lead to selfishness, and ultimately, to the Dark Side."
Ah.
My brain hitched on that. Love.
This was the big, messy, philosophical core of the problem I'd seen in the movies. This was the part that had spawned a million forum debates.
Was this the "fatal flaw" everyone argued about? The idea that love and attachment were the same thing, and both were poison?
My first instinct, my 27-year-old engineer-brain's instinct, was to call bullshit. My entire motivation for being on this dustball, for enduring stick-beatings and beige-colored sadness, was built on attachment. My love for Vasha was the engine keeping me going. To deny it felt like denying my own existence.
But I wasn't blind to precedence.Blind to the fate of chosen one - Anakin Skywalker.
His attachment to his mother? Led to him slaughtering an entire village of Tuskens. His attachment to Padme? Led him to... well, all of this dogshit.
Maybe the Jedi had a point. Maybe I was just another Anakin in the making, convinced my attachments were righteous and justified, right up until the moment I started choking my loved ones in a fit of paranoid rage.
Well, the fact was also there that I would love getting choked rather be the choker but that was an separate issue. Now thinking of choking, I do remember getting choked in vasha's titties back in the days. Those were the days.
My mind, the treacherous bastard it was, decided that was the perfect moment to go on a its 27th trip of the day to the memory lane named Vasha.
I missed those days. I missed the way she'd laugh, a real, throaty laugh that made her lekku twitch, when I'd say something particularly stupid. I missed the smell of engine grease and the faint, sweet scent of whatever fruit she was snacking on. And yeah, I missed the physical comfort. The simple, mind-numbing bliss of burying my face in her chest after a long, frustrating day of trying to fix a busted power converter.
It was a safe, warm place, a mental bunker from the crushing reality of the desert and the lecture on emotional purity. A place where the biggest problem was the awkward, teenage boner I was desperately trying to hide from the woman who thought of me as her son.
God, I missed her. I missed the comfort, the warmth, the simple, uncomplicated physical presence of another person. I missed the feeling of being safe, of being cared for. And yeah, I missed the tits. I was a teenage boy with the mind of a grown-ass man, sue me.
It was like a reset button for my soul. A warm, soft, perfectly shaped reset button.
Now my reset button was getting smacked with a stick by a dusty old man who thought emotional constipation was a superpower.
Was that attachment? Was that love? Was it selfish? Probably. But it was also the only thing keeping me from just lying down in the sand and waiting for a womp rat to make a meal of me. If this feeling, this driving need to get her back, was the Dark Side... then sign me the fuck up. I'd wear the black helmet and the cape. As long as I got to see her again.
Well, not so fast through. I couldn't trust those bastards to not use her as yet another Torture tool to break my mind and bring my loyalty to the Emperor. It was an option open to save her, but not without having the strength needed.
But still, that aside, A philosophy that had survived for thousands of years couldn't be dismissed just because I'd watched a couple of heavily-edited historical documentaries. It wasn't weak. It had survived logic. It had to have a practical, functional point.
Because opposite to it stood the Dark Side.
Even that wasn't the problem. It was the shit that Disney had created by dividing Star Wars in Legends & Canon continuity. While being in Canon helped a lot in terms of cosmic level security and existential crises , it also made all Force too much esoteric and undefined
In Legends, there had been so many different philosophies. People who tried to walk the line, who believed you could balance both, who saw the Force as a tool.
But here? In this reality? The "Canon" reality? The track record was... shit.
There was much less knowledge about Force and its duality and what did exists, solely existed to paint Dark Side as an unnatural state that twisted, corrupted parodies of oneselves, driven by pain and rage until nothing else was left.
For all I knew, the Dark Side in this universe wasn't just "feeling more angry than usual" or "losing your morals" due to having too much power.
It could be a metaphysical cancer. A "heart demon," that actively eats your mind and keeps piling more and more darkness inside until there's nothing left of you.
Even Luke, the guy who supposedly proved the old Jedi wrong, the one who saved Vader using love... what happened to him? He shitted himself and the new Jedi Order into oblivion because of a bad dream. He got scared one time and almost murdered his nephew, creating Kylo Ren
So yes, there was a tad bit of conflict inside me.
"I... see," I said slowly, trying to untangle the knot in my head. "But... how can love lead to selfishness? Isn't it the opposite?"
"Can it not?" he countered, his voice gentle but firm. "Does a fear of loss not stem from love? A desire to control, to possess, to keep things as they are, rather than accepting the flow of the Force? The desire to save one life at the cost of the galaxy?"
Oof. That last one hit a little too close to home.
I nodded, swallowing my counter-argument. He wasn't wrong. He wasn't necessarily right in the way my modern sensibilities wanted him to be, but he wasn't objectively wrong. It was a subjective belief, a core tenet built on millennia of watching Force-users go supernova.
Obi-Wan must have sensed my internal conflict, the silent war between my heart and the grim reality of this universe. He saw the flicker of doubt, the grudging acceptance that his ancient philosophy wasn't just arbitrary dogma. It was a warning label, written in the blood of countless fallen Jedi.
He let the silence stretch for a moment, letting the harsh Tatooine wind be the only sound.
"Forget the mechanics of emotion for a moment," he finally said, his voice softer now, sensing my mental resistance had shifted from outright rejection to troubled consideration. "Think about this: what you are is first a part of the Force."
He shifted his posture, leaning forward slightly, his gaze looking past me, toward the endless dunes.
"Imagine you are an ant in a river. And the river is the Force. You don't swim against the current; that only leads to struggle, desperation, and your own degradation. By moving with the flow do you truly move."
He paused, letting that sink in.
"But it is easy to lose oneself in the flow, for the Force is as vast as the galaxy, and we are not even an ant in that flow. We are microscopic. By meditating, you do not so much 'balance' your emotions as you understand their flow, and you strengthen your own identity—the 'you'—within the current, so you are not swept away."
He finally looked back at me, his eyes sharp. "You are learning to hear your own voice above the roar of the river, so that when the current tugs you toward selfishness or anger, you know to paddle gently back toward the center."
I couldn't logically refute that. It was subjective, yes, but it made a perverse sort of sense.
It was a functional model & I could work with that.
And so, I meditated