The boots crunched softly over gravel as we stepped out onto the rear path behind the Organa estate.
Alderaan at night was unfair, honestly.
The air carried actual smells. I caught the scent of pine, damp soil, and something floral I didn't have a name for. A breeze moved through the trees, and the leaves answered back with a quiet rustling that sounded almost conversational.
Compared to that, Tatooine felt like someone had built a planet out of sand, despair, and poor life choices.
We walked in silence for a minute.
Obi-Wan's hands were tucked into his sleeves the way they usually were when he wasn't actively holding a lightsaber or a cup of tea. His posture had that relaxed Jedi thing going on where it looked casual but somehow also perfectly balanced.
The path curved into a thin forest trail. Lanterns hung from low posts every twenty meters or so, leaving stretches of darkness between them.
I blinked. "Huh?"
"Alderaan." He gestured lightly at the trees. "It has a way of reminding one that the galaxy is capable of producing something other than sand."
I snorted. "Don't let Tatooine hear you say that. The planet already has self-esteem issues."
"Oh, I've no doubt." His mouth twitched faintly. "Ten years there was quite enough to convince me that the Force had an interesting sense of humor."
"You lasted ten years?"
"I aged twenty."
"Sounds about right."
We walked a little farther. The banter settled into a more comfortable silence after that. The path curved around a shallow pond where moonlight sat on the water like polished metal. Somewhere higher in the branches, a night-creature chirped in a pattern that almost sounded deliberate.
I let the quiet stretch while my thoughts drifted right back to the problem waiting for me.
The conversation with Bail had gone about as well as I could have asked for. The senator would verify Geonosis. He would look into Rossi. He would pull on threads and, with luck, keep pulling.
That part required follow-up. I needed meetings and messages. More than that, it required me to be somewhere other than Tatooine.
I couldn't stay there.
The reason had started as practical and ended somewhere closer to obvious. Luke was on that planet. I worried about the entire future that I kept trying to preserve with my own existence. Having Obi-Wan train me for a few months was one thing. Repeated Force disturbances, dead dark Jedi, stolen Inquisitor ships, and whatever the hell Daiyu had turned into were entirely different matters. If attention ever turned fully toward that patch of sand because of me, there would be no one to blame but myself.
Even ignoring Luke, I had things to do. I had networks to build, information to trade, and people to find. I needed to locate Vasha.
That thought still came with the dream wrapped around it. I remembered fire, smoke, and her voice. It was enough to keep the urgency in me awake even when the rest of me wanted sleep.
Therefore, I needed to leave.
The problem was finding a way to tell Obi-Wan Kenobi that a ten-year-old absolutely had to go unsupervised into the wider galaxy to commit crimes, build clandestine networks, and eventually break a woman out of the Empire's industrialized hell.
If I had been in my old body and some orphan kid had crossed continents to find me, bullied me into teaching survival skills, lived under my roof for months, and then announced he was heading out to fight terrorists and dismantle a fascist state, my response would have involved physically hauling the little idiot into a car and taking him somewhere safe. I would have dropped him at a school, a police station, or therapy, and ideally all three. I would have never said goodbye and wished him luck.
The problem remained very much alive.
Maybe I could get Bail to adopt me temporarily. That would provide some kind of legal cover. A respectable senator would act as guardian on paper, while I continued doing whatever I was going to do anyway.
The image of Leia looking up at me and calling me onii-chan arrived uninvited and foul.
I shuddered hard enough that Obi-Wan looked over.
I straightened immediately. I absolutely refused to entertain that thought. That path led to psychic damage of a completely different category.
"How are you feeling?" Obi-Wan asked.
I blinked. "Uh. Fine?"
"Physically," Obi-Wan said. "Any recurrence of the episodes since Daiyu?"
I remembered the episodes.
"No, actually." I flexed my fingers as we walked. "Nothing. The Force has been steady. It feels stronger and easier to reach. It avoids lashing out on its own anymore."
"That's encouraging."
"It is." I kicked a pebble off the side of the path. "Honestly, the last week has been so stupid that part of me expects the next logical step to be getting struck by divine lightning for narrative balance. The Force has a sick sense of humor."
"That's simply life." Obi-Wan's tone turned thoughtful. "You may go years with very little changing. Routine settles in. You begin to mistake stillness for permanence. Then, in a handful of days, everything rearranges itself so thoroughly that the earlier quiet feels imagined." He glanced ahead through the trees. "For Jedi, the Force is what keeps us steady through both."
I looked down at my hand as we walked.
For a brief second, the shape over my own looked larger. It appeared blue, long-fingered, and familiar.
I blinked, and it was only my hand again.
"Trust in the Force," I said quietly.
Obi-Wan heard the tone more than the words. I could tell from the way his expression shifted.
"Speaking of which," Obi-Wan said, "has there been any sign of... it? Since Daiyu?"
Calling the thing it remained funny in a grim sort of way. We were discussing the galaxy's worst possible cosmic infection like a vermin problem in the pantry.
"Nothing," I said. "For better or worse, it hasn't shown up again."
I slowed down and stopped altogether.
What had happened on Daiyu had stopped being immediately present. It still mattered.
"I keep thinking about the possibility that it didn't disappear," I said. "What if it only detached? What if it's out there somewhere, loose? And if it is, what does that mean for her containment? What does it mean if even some fragment of her gets more room to move?"
Neither of us said the name.
Obi-Wan's face stayed composed, though I knew by now how much effort that probably took. "If the entity remains active in any meaningful capacity, then the danger is grave."
"Grave is underselling it." I folded my arms. "Master, that thing is a bigger problem than the Empire. The Empire still needs people alive. They require a tax base, labor force, conscripts, or hostages. She operates differently. She just eats the board."
Obi-Wan let that sit for a moment.
Then he said, "Fear of the future cannot be allowed to govern the present."
I exhaled through my nose. "With respect, that's very Jedi of you and not very reassuring."
Obi-Wan almost smiled. "It wasn't meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be useful."
He took another step along the path, and I matched it.
"If the Force means for you to confront that danger," Obi-Wan continued, "it will show you a path when the time comes. Until then, worrying yourself hollow serves no one. Stay alert. Prepare. Do the good that is in front of you. When the moment comes, meet it with clarity rather than dread."
He glanced at me. "And trust in the Force."
I looked ahead through the trees with my jaw working slightly.
"I do trust it," I said.
Obi-Wan shook his head at once. "No, you don't."
That got my attention. "Excuse me?"
"Not fully." Obi-Wan's tone stayed mild, which somehow made it more annoying. "You believe in the Force. That is not the same thing."
I opened my mouth, shut it, and found no satisfying comeback available.
"Padawan," Obi-Wan said, "what I ask of you is more than most children your age could manage. Your faith in the Force is already beyond where most initiates begin. But you still hold yourself apart from it. You accept it as fact. You rely on it when necessary. You have not yet allowed it to guide your intent without first forcing everything through your own grip."
That stung mostly because it was true.
I trusted the Force in the broadest theological sense. I trusted that it existed. I trusted that it connected things. I trusted that occasionally it liked arranging reality into some very messed up jokes. I doubted that it would catch me if I stopped calculating for three whole seconds.
Obi-Wan stopped beneath an overhanging branch and looked at me in the moonlight.
"I know you can do it," he said. "Because I know you."
Before I could decide whether that was inspiring or deeply suspicious, Obi-Wan reached up, snapped a branch free, weighed it once in his hand, and broke off a second. The second one came sailing straight at my face.
My hand moved on instinct and caught it cleanly.
I stared at the branch. Then I looked at Obi-Wan, who had already settled into stance with his own improvised weapon.
"Are we sparring?" I asked. "Right now?"
"No time like the present."
"Master, I don't have my vibroblade. Or my lightsaber." I gestured down at myself. "I'm not even wearing my armor. Without it, I'm just a ten-year-old kid."
"Well," Obi-Wan said, "you are a ten-year-old kid, to be honest. With all the metal on you, even I forget sometimes." His beard shifted with the hint of a smile. "And don't worry. I won't strike you very hard."
"That sentence has never improved anything in history."
"You have a weapon in hand, don't you?"
I looked at the stick. "You know I still haven't figured out how to keep these from breaking when I reinforce them."
"Then you'll learn through practice."
Obi-Wan moved.
There was no obvious start to it. One moment he stood relaxed, and the next moment his branch was already coming down toward my temple with enough speed that thought had to catch up on the run.
I brought my own branch up in a tight Soresu guard. Wood cracked on wood. The impact ran down through my wrists and into my elbows.
A second strike came from the left. I shifted, redirected the attack, and let the motion skim off rather than absorb it head-on. My feet gave ground automatically with small steps over gravel and root, buying space without breaking alignment.
Obi-Wan pressed.
Three more strikes followed in clean succession, appearing simple on the surface and deeply irritating in what they forced me to do. I couldn't overcommit to any one block. I couldn't counter without exposing the next opening. Every angle fed the one after it.
"Hm," Obi-Wan said as our branches met again. "You've added more Form III to your defense."
I caught a high line, cut low to recover, and stepped into the gap I found. Then I froze when the tip of Obi-Wan's branch landed lightly against my ribs.
"Enough for most Padawans, I think," Obi-Wan said.
He withdrew and reset.
The whole exchange had taken a handful of seconds.
My breathing had already picked up.
What kept me most alert was the quality of Obi-Wan's movement. He withheld the toned-down version he used during practice. He presented the real article instead. It was clean, efficient, and decisive.
For a brief second, I was back in the desert, learning first-hand why A'Sharad Hett had been a very poor choice of opponent.
I adjusted my grip.
The wood in my branch was already beginning to strain. My reinforcement on objects still lagged behind reinforcement through my own body. I could hold the thing together under impacts that should have splintered it, but only while my focus remained sharp and uninterrupted. That was hard to maintain while a Jedi Master was trying to reorganize my skeleton.
Soresu was insufficient to carry this.
Trying to out-defend Obi-Wan Kenobi with Form III was like trying to explain water to the ocean.
I flicked my left hand toward a low branch overhead. A telekinetic snap tore it loose. I caught it mid-fall and launched forward at once.
I switched to Ataru.
The Force flowed harder through my limbs, into my back, hips, knees, and feet. My body moved past the normal limits of size and leverage and turned those same limitations into advantages. I was smaller. I presented a harder target to line up. I changed elevation faster. I fit better into spaces where a taller opponent briefly had to account for geometry.
I came in low, rose into a turning strike, crossed both branches high, and then let the second swing drop toward Obi-Wan's knee. A twist through the hips turned that into an overhead chop as I planted one foot against a tree root and bounced sideways to attack from a new angle.
Obi-Wan caught every strike.
Now the older man had fully settled into Soresu. His defense became almost insulting in its economy. He displayed no wasted motion and used no unnecessary force. Every parry arrived exactly as needed and no more. I was burning energy by the second. Obi-Wan looked as if he could continue for an hour and afterward discuss local architecture.
"As always," Obi-Wan said while redirecting a two-branch combination that would have cracked an ordinary fighter's wrist, "Form IV suits your build."
I answered with a spinning kick that flowed into a low double sweep.
Obi-Wan stepped over it.
"The acrobatics compensate for your reach disadvantage nicely," he continued. "However, this part of your skill does not seem much improved from last time."
One of my branches fractured near the midpoint under a hard parry.
I let the broken half go, snatched another from a shrub by the path with the Force, and kept moving.
Obi-Wan's eyes flicked once toward the swap, measuring it.
"This alone would not buy you even a moment against someone truly skilled," he said.
The criticism was accurate enough to be annoying.
I had spent less than half a year training under an actual master while simultaneously surviving Tatooine, getting nearly killed by a rogue Jedi, stealing an Inquisitor ship, and doing all the other stupid things that now counted as normal life. By any sane standard, my progress was absurd.
By the standards set by the enemies I expected to face, absurd remained insufficient.
"Was this how you defeated the Inquisitor?" Obi-Wan asked as he turned aside a rising slash. "Or are there still tricks hidden up your sleeve?"
I couldn't help grinning.
That was fair.
I disengaged with a backward leap and landed in a wider stance. Both branches rotated once in my hands as my posture shifted. The aggression remained, but the lines smoothed out. The transitions loosened. I let the fragments of another style settle over what I already knew.
I shifted into Niman.
I drew upon what little of A'Sharad's Niman I had managed to extract out of memory, echo, instinct, and sheer stubborn theft.
I moved.
This time my offense stopped arriving as separate pieces. Branches cut in linked patterns. A guard folded into a deflection, which opened into a strike, which became a feint, which became a change in angle before the first motion had truly ended. The flow borrowed from several forms and committed fully to none. It was flexible in the way Ataru failed to be, and broader than Soresu could afford to be.
More active use of the Force accompanied the movements.
A stone lifted from the path and shot toward Obi-Wan's face.
It was a distraction.
My left-hand branch left my grip entirely and spun through the air on a telekinetic thread while my right continued a quick pattern of slashes from below. I attacked from two lines at once, holding one in hand and leaving one hanging just outside normal expectation.
Obi-Wan's brows rose a fraction.
"A'Sharad?" he said, and for the first time there was clear surprise in his voice. "Well. I had thought my capacity for it exhausted."
"Picked up a bit of it in the desert," I said, recalling the airborne branch and sending it back in from a different angle.
"Consider me impressed, Padawan. Form VI is easy enough to begin. Mastery is something else entirely."
I kept pressing.
I released both branches now and let them orbit on Force-control for a breath while my hands tore a ribbon of pebbles and dirt up from the ground. The debris went first. The branches split wide and curved inward from opposite sides. At the same time I reached with a thin telekinetic thread and tugged at Obi-Wan's centerline, trying to draw him just enough off-balance to meet the converging attack badly.
It was a good setup.
For one moment, I felt the shape of success.
Then Obi-Wan answered it.
His branch swept through the dirt cloud in a clean arc. One foot planted. His body rooted itself so completely that my pull found nothing loose to shift. The two airborne branches were knocked aside in one smooth motion and thrown back across their own lines.
I ducked under my returning weapons and twisted to recover. Then I found Obi-Wan already inside my range with the tip of the branch resting against my throat.
"But it will take more than that to be useful," Obi-Wan said.
The pebbles settled back to the path.
I let the Force-thread slacken. My branches dropped to the ground. My chest rose and fell a little harder than I would have preferred.
"Hope you had fun bullying a ten-year-old boy, Master."
"I did, actually."
I huffed a laugh despite myself.
The clearing quieted again. Leaves moved overhead. Somewhere farther back in the trees, the same night-creature resumed chirping as if no duel had happened at all.
Obi-Wan lowered his branch and studied me with a look that told me the spar had been the opening move rather than the point.
"Your integration of multiple forms is impressive for someone with your training," Obi-Wan said. "So is the way you weave the Force into your bladework. And borrowing fragments of A'Sharad's style through psychometric contact..." He shook his head once. "There are Jedi Knights who would fail to do half of what you just attempted."
My shoulders loosened by a fraction.
Then Obi-Wan added, "However."
There it was.
"You're still fighting a half-step behind the battle," Obi-Wan said. "You manage it well enough to make the delay difficult to notice. Against me, it was obvious. Against an Inquisitor, it becomes dangerous. Against someone better, it becomes fatal."
I bent down, retrieved one of the dropped branches, and turned it loosely in my hands. "You're talking about the same thing you've been trying to drill into me since Tatooine."
"I am."
"The battle-read thing." I frowned at the branch. "Feeling where the next move is before it physically happens. I know." I looked up. "I've had flashes of it. Tiny ones. But I still lack the ability to do it reliably after this long."
Obi-Wan stared at me for a second, then actually laughed under his breath.
"Ezra," he said, "your definition of 'long' is profoundly distorted. If you had said that in the Temple after less than a year of training, the other Padawans would have made it their mission to ensure I never slept peacefully again."
That got a reluctant smile out of me.
Obi-Wan stepped closer and tapped the branch in my hand with his own.
"And for the record," he said, "I have told you before that the way you emulate this perception is remarkable. I meant it. Most fighters would be dead before they finished consciously processing half of what you sort through during an exchange."
My expression shifted. I hadn't been expecting Obi-Wan to say it quite that plainly.
"But reading the flow of battle is more than predicting the next movement of an arm or shoulder," Obi-Wan continued. "Your method maps the body. It examines tension, intent, position, likely follow-up. That is useful. Extremely useful. It is also taxing, because it still relies on your mind carrying the full burden."
He gestured lightly toward the surrounding trees.
"In a real fight, the danger is not confined to the person directly in front of you. It is the stone under your heel. The branch behind your back. The blaster muzzle you haven't yet seen. The attacker outside your line of sight. Your analysis can account for much of this, until it tires, until something slips, until your attention is forced to choose."
I listened without interrupting.
"When you truly let the Force carry you through combat," Obi-Wan said, "your body stops waiting for thought to finish its work. You are not merely predicting movement. You are touching intent. The field of battle opens. You answer not only the opponent before you, but the whole of it at once. And because you are not forcing every response through conscious effort, you conserve far more of yourself."
That part landed harder than I expected.
I had felt pieces of it before. I recalled rare moments where a fight seemed to widen around me, where my body moved before my brain had time to draft a memo and send it through internal review. Those moments had always been brief, fleeting, and hard to trust.
"I know," I said after a moment. "I just..." I searched for the words and settled on the honest version. "I still don't know how to stop trying."
Obi-Wan nodded as if that answer had been expected.
"That," he said, "is at least the correct problem."
I looked up at him.
Obi-Wan's expression had gone gentler again, though the scrutiny remained.
"You trust the Force in grand, abstract ways," he said. "You trust it to shape history, to move pieces across years, to send visions and warnings. What you do not yet trust is that it can hold you in a single instant if you stop gripping that instant by the throat."
I opened my mouth to respond but couldn't find the words to reply.
____
A/N: Apologies to readers for delay in the chapter. I had gotten an bit struck on the action part of scene and had to go back and research around on Lightsaber Forms and fight scenes. The releases have been a bit slow but I hope that those few were enjoyable enough for you.
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