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Ezra Bridger is alone.
But it’s usually that way. He’s used to it by now.
He makes it to the top of his tower, shrugging off his pack. The single fruit he managed to snag is good while it lasts. He misses its sharp tang on his tongue almost as soon as it’s gone. There’s nothing left to do but be alone again, so he does that.
He puts on one of his old stormtrooper helmets first. Pretends to have a big blaster. He’s tall. Taller than any Loth-rat. He isn’t scared of anything because people are scared of him.
That thought seems to spoil the idea. He takes off the helmet. It’s bland and white. He sticks it back on top of the crates and goes back to being Ezra Bridger.
Alone.
The tower isn’t the nicest of places—he would know, having been in a few himself. (He’s good at getting people to look the other way.) The walls are peeling, the color underneath even uglier than the one that clings on top. But it’s good for space. He has plenty of that. He fills it with both things he finds and things he steals.
But most of the stuff here is rusty. It gets cold at night, and there isn’t much Ezra can do about that. The view is nice. Sometimes he can pretend the whole planet is his. There aren’t guards on every corner. His parents live there, too. He has friends. They’re just down there. Too far to see.
Ezra slumps down against the wall, sliding until he’s sitting on the floor. His home is quiet.
He knows he’s lucky to have it. He’s lucky no one’s come to take it back, to throw him and what little he has out. There is always his parents house—but he stopped going there ages ago. He can’t stand feeling their absence in the air. He always ends up crying when he goes back.
So for now, this is home.
EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER
The first thing Ezra notices is the walls.
He thinks it’s the art that draws his eyes there. Atop blocks of vibrant pinks, oranges, and purples, there are scattered doodles depicting various things. There are Loth-wolves, starbirds, miscellaneous shapes, and Loth-cats . So many Loth-cats. A fully inflated, childish looking puffer pig. The space by the cot even has a little Chopper.
Sabine kept his scout trooper helmet. The one she painted for him. Ezra takes it down to admire it. It’s as orange as it was the day she teased him for not knowing how to use a jetpack.
She’d kept the little tapestry he’d hung on the wall, the one with the Imperial cog crossed out by a big red X . That almost makes him laugh.
The slats in the walls are opened to let the sunlight in, something he rarely did as a kid. It brings life into the space. There’s running water in a vanity area and containers that Ezra can guess are space for clothing.
He turns slowly, taking everything in.
It’s been ten years. He expected the place to be either completely run down or repurposed for what it was originally—a communications tower. But Sabine called this place home for longer than he had. She made it her own.
It feels lived in. It feels like a home.
He finds a stash of weapons, a box of keepsakes. Empty paint cans, stiff, forgotten brushes, parts for explosives. Her old paint sprayers are in the box, along with a pin he knows belonged to Ursa Wren, her mother. He looks at that one for longer than the others.
Then he finds the recordings.
Ezra almost doesn’t touch them. He succeeds for a few minutes—until he finds his own message, sitting out in the open. He lets it play all the way through, listening to the words he spoke over ten years ago.
It goes dark. Ezra shakes his head.
Before he can stop himself, he’s kneeling in front of another one. The space lights up with her face and he doesn’t regret it.
She’s sitting cross-legged, hands wrapped around a mug of what is presumably caf. And she’s not wearing her armor, which is a rare sight for Ezra. She fills up the entire holo for a moment, her hair so long it makes Ezra lean forward.
She stares back at him. “ Babysitting ,” she says.
Then she leans back and it’s quiet. She’s looking somewhere out of Ezra's view. Then she says, “ What are you making? ”
A little voice responds. “ I’m drawling .”
Sabine’s laugh is barely a breath from her nose. “ You’re drawling?”
She has this cute little smile on her face, her brows drawn up. Ezra smiles back.
“ I’m drawling Mom. And you .”
“ You’re drawing, Jacen. ”
“ That’s what I said! ”
Sabine looks at the recording over the rim of her cup. There’s a beat of silence. Ezra can hear some sort of coloring tool hitting the paper. It’s a juvenile sound that piques at his memory—perhaps a sound he might’ve known as a child, when he still had his parents. The sounds of Sabine’s art were different, Ezra remembers. She always had a light hand, swift and deft.
“ Auntie Sabine? ”
“ What’s up? ”
“ Why are you recording? ”
This seems to surprise Sabine. She laughs, the liquid in her mug sloshing over the rim. “ Why are you so nosy? ”
“ Is it for my mom? ” Jacen says, suddenly sounding excited. There’s a loud sound, like a jar or utensils falling over. Spilling. Everwhere.
“ Wait—Jacen—! ”
But it’s too late. He’s already swooping in the frame, jumping onto Sabine with the carelessness only a child could have.
Sabine’s caf ends up all over the both of them. It’s quiet for a moment, the two of them looking at each other, Jacen frozen where he’s perched half on top of her. When Sabine doesn’t reprimand him, only serves a flat stare, one eyebrow raised, he giggles once. Then again, and again, until he’s dissolved into a fit of them, on his back, small feet landing all over poor Sabine. She holds her mug out of the danger zone and gives one last look to the recorder before it cuts out.
It blinks back. Ezra’s lingering smile fades.
This time it’s just Sabine. There’s no smile on her face. Her knees are to her chest, hair untamed and frizzy. There are tears in her eyes. She stares at him, then down at her hands, picking at her skin. Then she looks up to the ceiling, as if to get a deep breath, but it’s painfully shaky and when she looks down again, there are even more tears than before. She sniffs loudly, setting her forehead against her knees. For a while, there are no other sounds besides those of her crying. Then, quietly, choked, cutting through the air like a jagged knife—
“ You’re all I have left.”
Then she’s crying again. Mostly just shaking silently, sniffling here and there.
He’s never seen her in so much pain. There’s a flash to when he’d been helping train her for the Darksaber. But even then—she’d been angry. And loud. Accusatory. More like everything she’d been keeping down had come back up with a vengeance.
In this recording. . .Sabine was just alone. There was no one to parry her sword as she swung. No one to pull her out of this rut.
He watches it for as long as he can. It must have been after she lost her family on Mandalore. He hates that he can’t reach out and hold her.
Her last words before the recording ends make him close his eyes.
“ You’re not even here .”
Ezra doesn’t open his eyes for a long while after that. He isn’t meditating, or doing a breathing exercise, or reaching out to the Force. He’s seeing Sabine curled into herself, hurting, crying . Crying to him. Crying for him.
When he opens his eyes, it’s to the sound of claws on the floor. A Loth-cat stares back at him. Ezra blinks a few times, but—yes, it’s still there. He can feel it brushing against his senses, anchoring him in the Force.
“Hello,” he says, cocking his head.
The Loth-cat approaches and sits directly on top of the holorecorder, barely blinking once. It’s white, but not as white as some Loth-cats he’s known thanks to the tan accents in its fur. Its spots are a rich brown. Offhandedly, Ezra thinks Sabine would’ve liked its color, though she’d deem it too boring. Then he surprises himself with a laugh because Sabine would make fun of him for thinking that.
The Loth-cat nudges his hand with its head and Ezra breathes in sharply.
“ Ugh! ” Sabine says, backing away from the Loth-cat. She looks the same as the day he left. “ Shoo! Go bother someone else .”
Memories , Ezra thinks.
It changes, this time to Sabine’s hands as she sketches. One holds the pencil, the other caressing the Loth-cat’s head. That is, until it paws at her sketchbook. Then she groans out loud for three seconds straight.
The last is of the Sabine he’d seen—her hair cropped short, dyed purple, her armor strapped on. His old lightsaber is at her hip. When she kneels down, there’s a new resolve in the lines of her face.
“ Stick around , Murley ,” she says. “ Hold the fort down. I’ll be back .”
Ezra opens his eyes back to the present. The Loth-cat is purring, nudging his hand still, trying to get him to pet it.
“Murley,” Ezra says. The Loth-cat perks up, big eyes staring up at him.
Sabine has a Loth-cat.
Sabine has a Loth-cat . That has a name. That lives with her.
Ezra starts to laugh. Murley watches him curiously. He seems to give up on getting anything from Ezra and turns to find a nice spot for a nap atop the table.
Ezra spends the next few hours relearning his home. He doesn’t touch most of her things—the things that really make the tower seem like it only half belongs to him—because it feels as if they’re waiting for her. It feels like exile all over again; just sitting still, waiting for the opportunity to find home.
But this isn’t what he wanted. Every time he looked at Sabine with the word home on his tongue, he’d always meant. . .her. All those years, worrying and wondering, imagining what his future will look like—she was always there. There is no home without Sabine.
As he packs up the remaining recordings for a different day and turns over her paint sprayer in his hand, Ezra has never been more sure of anything.
He will find her. He did alright those ten years because he had the hope of coming back. Of seeing her again. And Sabine did come. Now he has to do her the same favor. He has to bring her home.
In the end, it will be the two of them. It has to be.