A/N: I am in a bit of burned out phase(Not strictly related with the story, its also academics related) so updates are slower than usual. Hope to get back the pace but I am taking a bit of rest to recover..
Btw this Chapter is a bit on longer side (3.8k words) and while as much as I wanted to keep it shorter, the conversation just couldn't be handled in small bits without character feeling like caricatures. Do tell me your thought about the whole chapter
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"It is." Ezra met his gaze directly. "But before that, tell me Senator—how do you think a ten-year-old boy found the most reclusive and wanted Jedi in the whole galaxy when even the Empire couldn't?"
Bail paused.
It was a fair question. One that had been gnawing at him since Ben first mentioned how the boy had tracked him down. Tatooine was a backwater, yes, but Ben had spent a decade perfecting the art of invisibility. The Empire had devoted considerable resources to hunting surviving Jedi, and yet this child had accomplished what their entire apparatus could not.
"Ben mentioned some bits of it," Bail said carefully. "Though he was as vague as I have come to learn Jedi Masters tend to be. Something about an unusual yet strong connection to the Force. A sort of... blessed intuition that guided you."
"Intuition."
"His word, not mine." Bail studied the boy's expression. "Though I confess, even as he said it, I felt it wasn't wholly true. The way he spoke suggested there was more to it."
"There is."
"It stirs my curiosity quite a lot, I admit."
Ezra smiled slightly. "Master Kenobi has a habit of downplaying things when he thinks the full truth might cause complications. I'm grateful for the care he shows me, truly. But calling what I have 'intuition' would be accurate only if intuitions came packaged with HD holovids."
"I'm not sure I follow."
"The Force has blessed me with visions, Senator." The boy's tone shifted, losing its playful edge. "A lot of visions. And it continues to do so. Visions of the past. Visions of the future. Clear as watching a recording, sometimes clearer."
Bail felt something cold settle in his chest.
Jedi prophecy was not unknown to him. He had heard the stories during the Clone Wars—Masters who glimpsed fragments of what was to come, who sensed disturbances before they manifested. But those accounts always emphasized the cryptic nature of such visions. Symbols and feelings. Impressions rather than images.
This boy was describing something else entirely.
"I have seen," Ezra continued, his voice steady, "the moment when the first Sith in a millennium—Darth Maul, trained by Palpatine himself—was sent to Tatooine to capture Padmé Amidala. To legitimize the Trade Federation's occupation of Naboo. To weaken Valorum's hold over the Senate and clear the path for Palpatine's election as Supreme Chancellor."
The wine glass in Bail's hand suddenly felt very heavy.
"I have seen how Anakin Skywalker was seduced and manipulated to the dark side by that same person. How Palpatine exploited his fear of losing his wife. How he twisted a good man into something unrecognizable, one careful lie at a time."
The words hung in the air. Bail found himself unable to respond.
"I could tell you a dozen other things the Force has shown me," Ezra said. "A hundred, probably. But frankly, most of them are a waste of time. The past cannot be changed, after all."
He paused, letting the silence stretch.
"But the past is not all I have seen, is it?"
The question felt rhetorical but its implications were anything but that. The boy couldn't be saying that he...that would be unprecedented.
The question was rhetorical, and they both knew it to be the truth.
"You must know about the planet Geonosis, right?" Ezra asked, letting his feet swing gently against the base of the oversized chair.
"Geonosis?" Bail's brow furrowed in confusion. "The site of the first battle of the Clone Wars. It was a battle that saw heavy casualties on the Republic's side, especially among the Jedi. A great tragedy—"
"I mean recently, Senator." Ezra's voice remained conversational, but his posture had shifted slightly as he looked directly into the man's eyes. "What do you know about Geonosis in the past few years?"
Bail considered the question. Geonosis had largely faded from galactic attention after the war—until his memory suddenly supplied a more recent event.
"Around a year back, if my memory serves right," Bail said, the political map of the galaxy reorienting in his mind. "It was another one of the dozens of attempts the Empire made to lure out rebel cells. Though this one was particularly devastating for several resistance groups in the Mid and Outer Rim. There were rumors of a massive, restricted Imperial project underway in the Geonosian orbit, and the ISB used leaked construction manifests as a honeypot to draw in dissidents."
Ezra gave a slow nod. "A very effective cover story. But tell me, Senator, do you know the current population of the planet down on the surface?"
An odd question. Bail searched his memory. The Geonosians had been numerous. Their hive structure supported massive populations across the planet's surface and deep underground networks.
"Billions, I would assume. The hive networks were incredibly extensive. Even accounting for war casualties, they breed rapidly and—"
"The current population is exactly one."
The statement hung in the cool evening air.
Bail blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"There is exactly one Geonosian left." Ezra's voice remained steady, as if delivering news to someone unprepared to hear it. "That is the current population. Just one survivor hiding in the ruins of what used to be a bustling civilization."
He paused for a beat.
"The Empire killed them. All of them. Sterilized the entire planet."
For a long moment, Bail could only stare at the boy.
The number refused to settle in his mind. He tried to make it fit and it simply wouldn't. Pre-war census data on Geonosis—he'd reviewed it during appropriations debates years ago—placed the species' total population somewhere north of a hundred billion. The hive networks ran kilometers deep, spanning entire continents, interconnected warrens that had supported one of the most industrious civilizations in the Outer Rim.
A hundred billion.
"Ezra." He set his glass down on the railing with the care of a man suddenly unsure of his grip. "I want you to understand that I am not dismissing what you've experienced. I believe in the Force. I've seen what it can do, and I've known Jedi who relied on visions to guide critical decisions."
"But."
"But we are discussing the total annihilation of a species numbering in the hundreds of billions. The logistics alone—manufacturing and deploying sterilization agents across an entire planetary surface, penetrating underground hive networks that span the breadth of continents, reaching warrens that go kilometers deep." He shook his head slowly. "And then concealing the entire operation. From the Senate. From independent observers. From every intelligence network in the galaxy. An event of this magnitude would leave traces. Refugee populations, disrupted comm traffic, atmospheric contamination readings that any survey vessel could detect. I have seen nothing of the sort."
The boy listened without interrupting, which Bail found more unsettling than argument.
"During the war, I spoke with Jedi who experienced visions," Bail continued. "Masters who described them as impressions. Feelings filtered through the individual's own fears and attachments. Sifo-Dyas foresaw a great conflict—but even his vision was broad, directional. A sense that war was coming, not a precise record of troop movements and casualty figures." He looked at Ezra carefully. "Is it possible that what you experienced was symbolic? A representation of suffering rather than a literal—"
"Is Mandalore symbolic?"
The question cut cleanly through Bail's reasoning.
"The Empire shattered that planet," Ezra said, his tone still conversational. "Millions dead. The surface barely habitable. An entire warrior culture crushed. And that one they did openly. They wanted people to see it."
"Mandalore was a military response to armed insurrection." The words came automatically, drawn from the same well of Senate rhetoric Bail had used to condemn the action years ago. "Terrible and disproportionate beyond measure. But it was directed at a militarized society that had taken up arms against the Empire. What you're describing on Geonosis is qualitatively different. A subjugated civilian population, posing no military threat—"
"You're right. It is different."
The easy concession caught Bail off guard.
"And I'll be honest with you, Senator. When I first saw it, I spent days telling myself exactly what you're telling me now. That it had to be symbolic. An exaggeration. Something the Force was using to communicate a broader truth about Imperial cruelty." He drummed his fingers absently against the armrest. "Because the alternative was too insane to accept."
"And now?"
Ezra was quiet for a moment. "I've had enough visions since then that checked out against real events. Enough to know the difference between a metaphor and a memory. The texture is different. The clarity." He shrugged. "But I'm not asking you to take my word for it. Honestly, if you just accepted it, I'd be worried about your judgment."
Despite the gravity of the moment, Bail felt the ghost of a smile. "That's reassuring."
"What I'm asking is—can we set aside the question of whether it's literally true for a few minutes? Just work with the assumption. If it makes it easier, think of it as a hypothetical."
Bail studied the boy. The request was reasonable. He'd spent decades in Senate chambers working through hypotheticals far less grounded than this one.
"Very well," he said. "Hypothetically."
"So the thing that kept me up at night," Ezra said, pulling one knee up and resting his chin on it, "is that I couldn't figure out why they'd hide it."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean—the Empire does what it wants." He said it flatly, the way someone described weather. "From everything I've seen, in visions and in real life, that's just how it works. They wanted Lothal's minerals, they took them. Relocated whole towns, poisoned the water table, paved over farmland. Nobody stopped them. If people complained, they either changed their mind real quick or they just... stopped being around."
He said it without bitterness. Just observation.
"So if they wanted the Geonosians gone, why not just do it? Announce some security operation. Fabricate an insurrection. File the paperwork and move on. Why go through the effort of hiding it?"
Bail reached for his glass, remembered it was empty, and set his hand back on the railing.
The boy was asking from a civilian's perspective. Someone who had only ever experienced the Empire as an immovable, unquestionable force. From that angle, the question made a certain blunt sense.
But from where Bail sat, the question had a different shape entirely.
"Because the Empire's power structure is more fragile than it appears," Bail said. "The Senate still exists. Not because the Emperor requires its counsel, but because it provides a framework of legitimacy. Systems comply more willingly when they believe they're participating in governance rather than being governed. Voluntary submission is cheaper than forced submission. Always has been."
Ezra was watching him with an attentiveness that didn't quite belong on a ten-year-old's face.
"When something is concealed even from that framework," Bail continued, thinking aloud now, following his own reasoning, "hidden not just from the public but from the institutional mechanisms designed to endorse Imperial policy—it means whatever was done goes beyond what even a compliant Senate would accept. And given how far the bar for compliance has fallen, that is a deeply concerning threshold."
"So they weren't just hiding a massacre," Ezra said slowly, as if working through it himself. "They were hiding whatever the massacre was protecting."
"That would be the logical conclusion, yes."
The boy's brow furrowed, and Bail watched genuine thought move across his face. Whatever the act was, the uncertainty seemed real.
"The thing is," Ezra said after a moment, "the Force didn't give me the answer to that part. What they were protecting. Why Geonosis specifically." A note of frustration crept into his voice. "Visions aren't a HoloNet search. You don't get to ask follow-up questions. You just get shown things and have to make sense of them on your own."
He fell quiet, staring out at the valley.
"And the visions didn't stop there. They kept coming. Every morning I woke up, I was witness to something new. Scenes from around the galaxy. Some from the past, some from what felt like the present. Most of the time I had no way to verify when they were happening, or even if they mattered."
He listed them the way someone might describe a recurring dream they couldn't shake.
"A stormtrooper gunning down a civilian at a checkpoint because the man didn't move fast enough. An Imperial officer on some mid-rim world using his rank to coerce a woman who had no recourse and no one to turn to. Planets being hollowed out the same way Lothal was—strip mines where forests used to be, refineries dumping runoff into rivers that communities depended on."
He glanced at Bail. "The Senator probably knows about these things better than I do. You've been at this longer than I've been alive."
Bail said nothing. He did know. He had years' worth of documented cases, testimonies, evidence packets that went nowhere. Motions filed in committee that were tabled indefinitely. Colleagues who avoided his eyes in the corridor.
But hearing this catalogue from a child barely older than Leia was something else.
He thought of his daughter upstairs, still shaking from one week of proximity to the Empire's cruelty. And here was a boy the same age who woke each day to a fresh gallery of suffering he couldn't prevent and had no one to talk to about it.
The Force could be unconscionably cruel sometimes.
"For a long time I thought it was random," Ezra continued. "Noise. Punishment, maybe. The Force showing me how terrible the galaxy was because—I don't know, because it could? Because I needed to be angry enough to do something about it?"
He was quiet for a few seconds, looking at his hands.
"But then it clicked. And I don't know if the Force intended for me to understand this, or if I just got tired of being confused and my brain finally connected the pieces on its own."
He looked up, and his eyes caught the starlight.
"The Emperor is afraid, Senator."
That sentence was so unexpected that Bail found himself unconsciously hold his breath for a second. For the boy to declare that the Emperor, who ruled over a million planets, trillions of people, and essentially the most powerful man in the whole galaxy...to be afraid? That idea itself was unthinkable, much less declared with such certainty. Oh how much he wanted to shake the boy's head to find out what tempted him to say that, but he controlled himself. Patience was a virtue that an politician had to temper much after all.
"For all his power—the fleets, the garrisons, the Inquisitors, everything he's built—he is afraid."
"Of what, exactly?" Bail found himself asking unconsciously, feeling his throat dry in just one question.
"Of the one thing he can't control." Ezra's voice was unhurried, yet like someone who'd spent a long time alone with a thought and was only now saying it out loud for the first time.
"The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear."
He let that sit for a moment.
"But freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Nobody has to teach people to want it. Nobody has to organize it or fund it or legislate it into existence. It just happens. Wherever there's a boot on someone's neck, eventually—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—someone reaches up and pushes."
A breeze came off the lake, carrying the smell of night-blooming jasmine from the gardens below. Ezra didn't seem to notice.
"Every random act of defiance, every protest, every kid on Lothal who throws a rock at a transport—the Empire can't answer that with reason. Only with more force. More control. More fear. Because the moment the pressure lets up, the moment the boot lifts even a fraction, everything starts to come apart."
He met Bail's eyes.
"Emperor is afraid because he knows that what he's built is unsustainable. That control of this magnitude cannot be maintained forever. And a man who is afraid..."The boy paused, "-will do terrible, irrational things to make that fear go away."
The silence that followed lasted several seconds.
Bail set his glass down on the railing.
The ideas themselves were not foreign to him. He had lived inside the machinery of Imperial governance long enough to understand its fragility. He knew, in the way that anyone who studied history knew, that systems built on coercion carried the seeds of their own collapse. He had discussed as much with Mon Mothma in private chambers, in careful language, over many years.
But those conversations had been informed by decades of political experience, by watching institutions corrode from within, by the accumulated weight of a career spent navigating the space between compromise and complicity.
The words themselves were what a seasoned political philosopher might arrive at after a lifetime of study. That they had come from a ten-year-old sitting barefoot in an oversized chair was what gave Bail pause.
"Things like sterilizing a planet," Bail said quietly.
"Things like sterilizing a planet could just be the start..." Ezra agreed.
Bail realized he was gripping the railing while looking up to the skies filled with stars.
Neither of them spoke for a while. The lake sound drifted up from below, gentle and indifferent. From the second floor of the main house, the last lit window dimmed. Breha and Leia, settling in.
Bail took his empty glass and walked to the small side table. He poured himself a fresh glass of Toniray, slowly, using the mechanical action to give his thoughts time to organize.
His mind was already moving past the emotional weight of the boy's words and into operational territory. That was what decades of political survival did to you—grief and outrage got sixty seconds, and then the machinery took over.
If Geonosis had been sterilized, there would be evidence. Not in intelligence reports or comm intercepts—those could be scrubbed. But a dead planet couldn't hide its silence. Atmospheric composition would shift without billions of organisms cycling gases through hive ventilation systems. Electromagnetic output would flatline. Thermal signatures from deep warrens would cool.
A single unmanned probe, routed through a civilian survey company, filed as a routine mineral assessment. Plausible. Untraceable. The readings would tell him everything he needed to know in a matter of days.
If they came back normal—billions of Geonosians going about their lives—then the boy was wrong, and the cost was one probe droid.
If they didn't come back normal...
Bail poured a second glass, barely a third full, and held it out.
Ezra blinked. "Senator, I'm ten."
"It's barely alcoholic. Local vintage. And I think we've both earned it."
The boy stared at it for a moment, then took the glass with a small smile that was, for the first time all evening, completely age-appropriate. He sniffed, took a cautious sip, and pulled a face that belonged on a kid trying cough syrup.
"That's actually not bad."
"Toniray." Bail settled back into his chair. "Ezra, I appreciate you sharing this with me. And I want to be transparent in return."
The boy looked up over the rim of his glass.
"I intend to verify what you've told me about Geonosis," Bail said. "Quietly. Through channels that cannot be traced back to Alderaan. An unmanned survey probe, filed under routine mineral assessment. If the planet's biosphere readings come back consistent with a living population, then we can revisit the nature of your visions."
Ezra's expression didn't change, but something in his posture eased slightly.
"And if they don't come back normal," Bail continued, "then I will want to hear everything else you've seen. Urgently."
"That's more than fair."
"Is there anything else you can remember?" Bail asked. "Any concrete detail from the visions? Names, locations, shipping routes—anything that could serve as an independent thread to pull."
Ezra tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly. His lips moved silently for a moment, the way someone does when sifting through half-remembered fragments.
"There was a name," he said after a beat. "A captain. Rossi, I think. Filia Rossi." He pressed two fingers against his temple, frowning. "Imperial Academy graduate from Raithal. Served as first officer on an ore freighter before taking command of a vessel called the Blood Crow. From what I could piece together, she was transporting large quantities of doonium and starship components. To Geonosis."
Doonium. Primary hull alloy for capital-class warships. Bail filed the name and the details with the precision of a man who had spent decades cataloguing exactly these kinds of threads.
"Shipping manifests leave traces even when they're scrubbed," Bail said, more to himself than to Ezra. "Crew rotations, port authority logs, fuel purchases. If this Rossi exists and her routes match what you've described, that corroborates independently of any probe data."
Ezra nodded. "That's why I mentioned it. Visions are one thing. Paper trails are another."
Bail took a sip of his wine and regarded the boy over the rim.
Ahsoka would like this child, he thought. The thought arrived unbidden but felt right. There was something in the way Ezra carried himself—that confidence, the refusal to be cowed by the weight of the room—that reminded Bail of Anakin, in a way. Before everything went wrong. The same audacity, the same disregard for the gap between his age and his ambitions.
But the mind behind it was different. Anakin's boldness had been a fire that burned in every direction at once. This boy's thoughts moved with a kind of deliberate patience that seemed far too practiced for someone who had been alive for barely a decade.
Then again, if Bail woke every morning to visions of genocide and daily cruelty, he imagined he'd age quickly too.
"There's one more thing," the boy said. "And this one is more of a request than information."
"Go on."
"The investigation into Geonosis—into whatever the Empire is building. It needs to stay completely separate from Master Kenobi."
Bail frowned. "Separate? Why?"
"Because his purpose on Tatooine carries seeds that are far more important than any single operation." Ezra's voice was careful. "Seeds that the Force itself has planted, and that need time and protection to grow. Involving him in active rebellion work risks exposing those seeds before they're ready."
The metaphor was not lost on Bail. He thought of a moisture farm on a desert planet, and a boy growing up under twin suns, and a promise made to a dying woman in the aftermath of everything falling apart.
"I understand," he said quietly.
"Good." Ezra uncrossed his legs and let his bare feet touch the cool stone floor. "Then I think that's enough for one evening. I've given you a headache that will probably last through breakfast, and I apologize for that."
"No apology necessary." Bail stood as the boy did. "Though I suspect I'll be awake for some time."
"Senator." Ezra paused at the top of the steps, silhouetted against the path lights leading back to the guest wing. He looked very small in that moment. Very young. "Thank you for listening. Not many people would."
"Thank you for trusting me with it."
The boy nodded once, turned, and padded barefoot down the stone path into the dark.
Bail Organa stood at the pavilion railing for a long time after that, watching the stars wheel slowly overhead and thinking about dead worlds and frightened emperors and a child who saw too much.
He reached for his comm unit.
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A/N: dont forget to vote with powerstones. Also, next update would be on Monday or Tuesday I think, but I would be quite thankful if you guys could vote for the book on Sunday, as momentum of the week in rankings is lost if start is not great