Star Wars Rebels fanfic - Together (an AU of an AU) Part 8/9
I’m so sorry! It’s been forever since I posted the last chapter of this! Bad writer! Bad! I just couldn’t get it right. I still don’t know if it’s there to be honest, but it’s probably as good as it’s going to get. Comments are loved, reblogs are loved.
And please, please check out the awesome artwork that @superherotiger did based on chapter 4 of this fic, because it’s so great and should be getting much more love than it is!
(part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7)
The Sith holocron wasn’t heavy. Ezra held it in one hand, fingers loosely curved around its angular shape, and moved it up and down. It should be heavy. The secrets and knowledge contained within it felt as though they should have their own weight.
At the other side of the room, Kanan was meditating. Ezra should have been doing the same thing, but his mind was elsewhere today and he couldn’t concentrate. That wasn’t unusual, but today there was more too it.
Kanan didn’t bother to open his eyes. He turned his head just a little, to face in Ezra’s direction, frowning like he already knew something was wrong. He probably did; he was more open to the Force than usual when he meditated, and he could probably sense it. Even if he wasn’t sensing it through the Force, he would be able to hear it in Ezra’s voice.
Ezra got to his feet and swallowed nervously. Against his will, his fingers gripped the holocron a little tighter as something inside him fought to keep possession of the thing. He needed to do this, he knew that, but it was going to be difficult. The knowledge within the holocron had helped him, and he wasn’t ready to give it up. Not when there was still so much more that he could learn from it.
Maybe he could just keep it a little while longer. A week, or a month. Just long enough for him to learn a few more…
He needed to stop. He had known from the start that it was evil, and he had opened it anyway. He had told himself that it would be just one time, and then he had done it again. And again. And every time he had, he had felt it tempt him further down the path to the dark side. One day, it would try to convince him to turn his back on the light side completely, and when the time came, he didn’t know whether he was going to be able to say no.
There were things that it could offer him in return that would be very difficult to turn down.
Kanan looked genuinely worried now. “What is it?” he asked.
The holocron was closed now, but Ezra could still imagine the voice within it, whispering at the back of his mind. It spoke to him in moments of weakness. It reminded him of how he couldn’t protect his friends and his family. It spoke of his failures; of the times when he had let them down in the past because he had been too weak. Unless he grew stronger, he would do it again. The dark side could help him.
It had taught him new ways to use the Force; things that Kanan had never even hinted were possible. As he had tried them, he had felt himself growing in strength, but he had felt a new kind of hopelessness growing within him too. It was different to the one that he had experienced when he had learned that he was going to lose his sight, and different to the one that he had felt after Malachor. It was an emptiness that longed to be filled.
He had felt his anger and his hatred growing every time he had tapped into them to increase his strength, and at night when he lay in bed surrounded by a darkness so complete that he could see nothing at all, they were eating him up inside.
But there was more than that. So much more.
The dark side could help him to see.