Chapter Text
"Rebellious"
Part 5(a): All For One
Ezra used to wish for the Lasat to leave their room, to joke how the place needed air refreshers and stuff, how Zebs things were constantly clustered all over the floor because the man had no shame at all. If not for Ezra, things would probably grow in there and develop a civilization. Zeb usually just snorted when the messy life-style was pointed out, some other times he handed him a rag – because if he had an issue with the state of the room he could make it presentable. Ezra usually did. With Zeb gone, their room suddenly appeared to be way too big for one person, too clean to really feel like home. It was too quiet too.
Ezra ended up wandering off and spending the time outside of it as long as he could, but Sabine was also gone, visiting her Mandalorian friend and the Ghost also felt empty. And tense.
Hera was all tense nerves and sitting on needless, staring down the comm link like it would make things like space travel work quicker or the communication between ships in hyperspace possible.
Kanan was... well, even looking at Kanan was making Ezra feel guilty.
He was the one who dragged them to Malachor, who wanted to unravel the secrets, who... Ezra shook his head. Thinking like that, it wouldn't lead to anything, good or bad. Besides, they found Maul, who clearly needed help and who was now helping them. Regretting going to Malachor would be like regretting rescuing him. Rescuing people definitely counted as a good thing, no matter what.
The Zabrak was another reason for everyone on the ship to be more antsy than usual. He was a former Sith and was not hiding it. On the other hand, he wasn't doing typical Sith things either. Just sitting in solitude and building things out of spare parts. The rest of the crew were watching both him and Ezra like a hawk, expecting the former Sith to start corrupting Ezra or do something as evil as that.
It was understandable - Maul was still an unknown, still a potential danger, ridiculously skilled and with an unknown agenda. Well, he was going to have an unknown agenda for awhile if nobody actually talked to him. And okay, maybe Ezra was a little bit too curious about the former Sith.
The rest of the crew was not making it any better, doing everything to keep him away from Maul in fear that the Zabrak would try and turn him to the Dark Side or something.
Maul was actually humoring them and playing nice, not even talking to Ezra without someone else supervising.
There was also no mention of the Sith Holocron either. Ezra had no clue where the ancient artifact was hidden, besides the fact it was somewhere on the ship. He felt somewhat tempted to look for it, because the treasure hunt would take his mind away from the dark and gloom – and he would be searching just for the sake of search itself, not because he wanted to use it - but decided against it. It was… too big to just toy around with it. And it would make Kanan and everyone else even more agitated. So no, that search was a no-no.
Ezra made a small, annoyed hum, then carefully looked around, to check if he was still unseen.
He couldn’t look for the Holocron, but there were definitely other things to poke at. He was heading towards the workshop. Maul wasn't there – currently out on a trip with Zeb of all people - but the things he was working on were and Ezra was too curious to not snoop around when he had a chance to do so.
The workshop usually was in a state of artistic mess, with random tools, flimsi with schematics and other things lying around. The mechanical parts and electronics were stuffed in boxes and shining around them in piles. Ezra had no idea how many times he accidentally stepped on something small and hard. It definitely was a lot. Now the workshop looked... different. Apparently among the other things, Maul was also a neat freak. Or bored out of his mind. There was still a lot of things, but now they were carefully sorted. Instead of spilling around randomly, there were now even rows of spare parts.
"I had no idea we had so many memory chips," Ezra muttered, looking through the items.
The working place itself was the most interesting. There were four oval droids resting on the left side and a fifth one in the middle of it, still only half finished. He curiously gawked at it, having a chance to look at how droid looked on the inside for the first time. It looked... much less complicated than he expected to be, trough Ezra had only a vague idea why things were connecting in this way and not the other. His knowledge was very spotty, though, he learned just the very basics from Hera and she was hovering over his shoulder the whole time, ready to give a hint at any moment.
There was a flimsi nearby, with something that looked more like a sketch than actual schematics: a carefully drawn outside shell of the round droid and then vague, lazy swirls connected with lines in different colors. They probably meant something to Maul, same as the rows of calculations on the side; they were also half-way done, many steps missing to the point Ezra had no idea what it all was even meaning.
"What are you doing here?"
"Uh, hi Hera?" Ezra smiled widely, trying to put away the flimsi in a way that would be hard to notice for the Twi'lek.
"You shouldn't be poking around here," she said, still with a frown on her face.
Ezra sighed. "I know, okay? But I'm curious," he admitted. "Besides, it's not like I can actually read any of these."
Hera raised an eyebrow at him. Then her gaze slowly wandered towards the schematics on the table and the half-done droid. Silent for a few short moments, she made a decision. "Let me see these."
"And what happened to snooping being wrong?"
"I'm just making sure it won't blow up my ship," Hera said without missing a beat.
"Damn, you're good!" Ezra obediently handed her the flimsi.
"Huh," Hera blinked after a moment of investigating the sheet. "It looks like a flying camera and - what a surprise! - it actually is a flying camera."
"You were seriously expecting to find something dangerous?"
"I have no idea what to expect," she admitted with a sigh. "I still don't."
"...so, can you read these?"
"I can guess," she said with a shrug. "Besides, it's not like these droids are very complicated. Quite the opposite, it looks like he was dumbing them down on purpose."
"What for? We don't have some parts, or something?"
"The parts are here," she shook her head. "It looks like he was looking for a way to fry them easily."
"Fry?"
"Yeah, look here," she pointed out inside the half-finished droid, her fingertips brushing along the colorful wires inside. "These shouldn't even be near each other, if it overheats it would kill the whole camera instantly, all the hardware and programming would die too."
"Then... why is he doing that?"
"Making it look like these were created by an amateur?" Hera tilted his head.
"Uh-huh," Ezra nodded. Making something breakable on purpose seemed to be just odd. A waste of resources, a waste of all the time spend on building the thing in the first place... he couldn't quite wrap his head around it.
"This is probably how paranoia looks like," she said dryly.
xxx
Sabine was walking in front of the table instead of sitting by it like rest of the crew did. She needed to move around, because her legs felt stiff after flying for so long, she told them. She was also the only person in the room who wasn't paying much attention to Maul looming in the doorway.
The Zabrak seemed to be occupied by his own thoughts, leaning against the doorframe with his hands crossed on his chest, but it wasn't making him any less eye-catching. He was just sticking out so much, his skin a spot of darkness in the well-lit room.
"So, I was talking with Ketsu and she said there are people that can have the stuff we need," she talked, making yet another circle. "The problem is, finding these people is going to take months. With the Empire out there being more and more active they're getting really paranoid."
"We don't have months," Hera said winkling her nose.
Ezra felt his shoulders dropping. These were bad news. The fact that they actually had so much time without a mission was simply a matter of Hera calling on favors, but those were about to run out at some point, same as the food rations and the fuel. He overheard her talking about doing something costly with the life support system too, which probably was very important.
“We might have found someone?” Zeb said carefully, not looking up. Until now he was drawing patterns across the lines on the table, with his ears slightly dropped, eyes half-blooded in concentration. “I think. I don’t understand what happened, but we do have a location.”
“You do?” Sabine asked quickly, stopping dead in place.“Who?”
“A merchant?” Zeb said unsure.
Sabine brow furrowed further. “A merchant or The Merchant?”
“There’s a difference?”
She groaned in frustration and smacked her forehead with a loud splat.
The Lasat merely shrugged. “So, it looks like there is one. What’s the deal?”
“The deal is,” Hera started. “That person is a myth.”
“No, I’m pretty sure the Merchant was running deals with the Back Suns,” Sabine said, running fingers through her hair. The short, colorful fringe became even more pointy than before. “Or rather, a very few of the members of the Black Suns and they refused to talk about it. Someone spilled and then disappeared. “
“I don’t like this,” Hera said.
“This sounds like a bad idea,” Kanan agreed. “It’s not worth the risk. If that person goes to such lengths just to stay hidden I have no idea just how bad they would react to strangers suddenly showing up.”
“We can’t just give up like that!” Ezra protested. “We have to try! We already have so much!”
“Ezra…” Hera started slowly.
It was all unfair. Kanan deserved more, Kanan deserved for them to try instead of hide in defeat because things were dangerous. He almost felt like all the hope was slipping away from his fingers, leaving him torn between walking out to cry in a corner and hitting the table with both of his fists, preferably until the surface broke.
“Not complete strangers,” Maul picked this moment to join the conversation. “I’ve dealt with them before.”
“You did?” Sabine raised an eyebrow. “Well, you look alive, which is a good thing. Through… how did you make the contact in the first place?”
“I simply had something the Merchant wanted.”
That explained little to nothing. It was annoying, Ezra decided, to not know the whole story, to not know what that thing the mysterious stranger wanted or who it was. Or even if he still existed.
“Do you think we have something at our disposal now?” Hera asked, crossing hands over her chest. “We’re pretty much scrapping by and this sounds… expensive. That sort of expensive we wouldn’t be able to afford without taking big risks.”
“I believe you have just the thing,” Maul smiled.
“What?” Kanan asked. “What is it? The Holocron? Because I’m not willing to give something like that away. It’s too dangerous-“
“Malachor.”
“What?” Hera blinked rapidly.
“The planet is uncharted, safe for the maps from things like Holocrons and the things the Emperor has under heavy guard,” Maul explained. “Therefore it’s impossible to travel there.”
“And why the Merchant would want to go there in the first place?”
“An ancient temple, riddled with equally ancient weaponry lying around?” Maul chuckled softly. “I believe the temptation would be too strong for the Merchant to refuse us.”
“There were kyber crystals there,” Kanan said, his voice grim. “I’m still not sure…”
“Most of them were either damaged or plain out broken to be really of use,” Ezra quickly cut him out. “I’ve tried to activate one of the lightsabers, remembered? It broke instantly and I picked the one that looked best.”
Kanan still looked unsure, fingers balled into fists on the table surface, mouth twisted in an unhappy grimace, shoulders painfully tense. Hera looked at hit with a worried furrow for a moment, wrapping arms around herself even harder than before. Then her expression changed. A decision was made.
She turned towards Maul. “Are you certain it is going to work?”
“Fairly well,” he replied without missing a beat.
“I’m willing to give it a try,” Hera declared with a steel look in her eyes. “I don’t care about that space rock and I don’t think someone dealing with criminals would be interested in working with the Empire so they won’t get their hands on any crystal that somehow survived. I don’t think they even would be interested in digging through scrap in the first place.”
“Hera-“
“No!” she stomped hard, cutting Kanan out. “You are worth the risk, Kanan Jarrus! You helped so many people, you put your life on the line so many times. Now it’s our turn to do the same.”
“So it’s settled!” Zeb clapped his hands together. “We are going to sell a planet!”
“Uh, guys?” Sabine tilted her head. “The enthusiasm is cute and all, but don’t you think that taking a ship like the Ghost would be like asking for it?”
“You think we should just send the Phantom?” Hera asked. "That sounds reasonable, though I would like to have the Ghost close enough, just in case."
“I want to go!” Ezra almost jumped in his seat.
“No!” Both Maul and Kanan protested at the same moment. The Jedi shook his head and then turned towards Maul, brow furrowed over the white surface of bandages and shoulders tense, before he nodded. There was some sort of an silent conversation going on between those two and they apparently came to an agreement.
“No?” Ezra asked, feeling disappointment. He hoped that they would understand, that at least Maul would know that he's capable and ready to do things instead of sitting back. Ezra didn't want to sit back and stare, he didn't want to watch others fight again, especially not after what had happened to Ahsoka.
“Merchant is not fond of Force sensitives,” Maul explained, noticing the curious - suspicious, Ezra decided, still suspicious no matter how much the former Sith already helped them- stares, his voice still calm and soft. “Just two of us is pushing it.”
“You want to go alone with Kanan then,” Hera said slowly. She didn’t sound too happy, suspicion yet again raising in her voice.
“And the Mandalorian,” Maul added.
“I can go,” Sabine nodded, making her decision in a split of second. “I’ll make sure everything works out fine… and I’ll admit, now I’m curious about this Merchant more than even before.”
“Do I even got a say in this?” Kanan sighed deeply.
“No,” the girl smirked at him. “I don’t think you do.”