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SW Gray Tales 27: Breaking Point I [Rewritten & Final]
🕑 Added 2025-07-24 18:30:00 +0000 UTCSorry guys, took me a bit longer than usual, as I read through content a reader had sent to me and had to make additions to the chapter and rewrite it.
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[11 BBY]
The years had passed in a blur of grease, scrap metal, and the ever-present ache of frustration.
Two . Whole. Years.
Two years crammed into this body that still couldn’t reach the top shelf without a stepladder. Three years of playing the wide-eyed tech prodigy kid while my adult brain screamed obscenities at the sheer injustice of it all..
Two years of Vasha’s morning breath in my hair.
Two years of her shamelessly changing clothes in front of me like I was a decorative houseplant.
Two years of my body betraying me in slow motion.
Puberty had arrived early—no surprise, given the sheer volume of hormonal chaos crammed into my skull. My voice cracked at the worst possible moments. My limbs had started their awkward stretch toward adulthood.
And yes, my little Excalibur had finally decided to unsheathe itself, just enough to be a cruel tease rather than an actual solution to my problems.
Not that Vasha noticed. Or cared. Or even remembered I was in the room half the time when she strutted around in nothing but a towel, humming some Rylothian drinking song like my sanity wasn’t dangling by a thread.
But I had gained resistance due to exposure therapy over years. I could look straight up to her face while her tits kept starting at me, for a whole 2 minutes...
Meanwhile, the shop had flourished.
What started as a glorified junkyard had evolved into something resembling a legitimate business. The walls were still cluttered, but now with purpose, neatly labeled shelves, a proper display case for the high-end refurbished tech, even a waiting area with chairs that didn’t actively threaten to collapse.
Shockwave (formerly LQ-79, renamed after an incident involving an overcharged motivator and a very startled customer) had somehow become our star salesman.
Sure, he still lectured buyers into comas about the metallurgical properties of capacitor casings, but now they actually handed over credits afterward.
Progress.
Our previous main line of buisness of repairing junk and selling it to bidders still went on, but it was dwarfed by another source of income
Our real money-maker, the niche stuff: discontinued components, impossible-to-find parts for obsolete luxury tech, vintage tech and all.
Especially in this galaxy which had apparently had a regression in technological levels compared to the old republic era. There were tech, outdated ones, and even futuristics ones that didn't have schemas printed out.
The companies or people that made them? Died some centuries ago.
Turns out, rich Corellian snobs hated being told their vintage speeder was now a very expensive paperweight.
And when word got out that some backwater shop on Lothal could somehow Frankenstein working replacements or outright even repair their stuff?
Off-world clients started trickling in. Not a flood, but enough to keep us comfortably in the black.
But you know what wasn’t comfortably in the black?
My love life. Or, more accurately, my complete lack of one. Well, not that I needed one when sharing bed with my caring alien dommy mommy.., Yes, I had folded after so long, and trust me anyone would.
And then there was the Force.
After two years of near-daily practice, my telekinesis had graduated from pathetic to marginally functional.
I could lift tools now, small ones, from a few feet away, and only if I didn’t sneeze.
Progress, sure, but glacial. I wanted growth, damn it. The kind of power that didn’t fizzle out trying to levitate a hydrospanner.
Which, speaking of— that....my powers might not have remained a secret.
It happened on a completely ordinary afternoon.
Vasha was bent over the workbench, soldering some fried circuitry on a busted navicomputer. The soldering iron—still glowing red-hot—was resting precariously on the edge of the table.
I was across the room, elbow-deep in a dismantled power converter, when I noticed it wobbling.
"Vas—"
She turned at the sound of my voice, knocking the table with her hip.
The soldering iron tipped.
Straight toward her bare foot.
Time slowed.
My brain short-circuited.
No no no no—
I didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Just reacted.
My hand shot out.
And the Force shoved.
Not gracefully and neither precisely. Just a raw, instinctive burst of get-the-fuck-away-from-her.
The soldering iron jerked sideways mid-fall, skidding across the floor like it had been kicked.
Vasha froze.
Her eyes locked onto the iron. Then onto me. Then back to the iron.
Silence.
Absolute, deafening silence.
Then—
"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!"
Her voice cracked like a whip.
I flinched. "Uh."
She pointed at the soldering iron. Then at me. Then back at the iron. "Did you just—did you just push that without touching it?!"
I swallowed. "Maybe?"
Her lekku twitched violently. "Since when can you do that?!"
"Uh. A while?"
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "A while?! What the hell, Ezra! You’ve been holding out on me!"
I rubbed the back of my neck. "I mean, it’s not like I’ve been hiding it. You just never asked."
She threw her hands up. "Oh, sure! Because ‘Hey, Vas, by the way, I can move shit with my mind’ is just casual conversation!"
I shrugged. "I mean, you saw me fix stuff that shouldn’t be fixable. You didn’t freak out then."
"That’s different!" she snapped. "That was just—weird kid intuition or whatever! This is wizard or psychic bullshit!"
I blinked. "You’re taking this way better than I expected."
She glared. "Oh, I’m freaking out, gremlin. I’m just doing it internally."
Then she paused.
Her expression shifted.
From shock to something else.
Something dangerous.
A slow, wicked grin spread across her face.
"Wait a second," she said. "If you can push things… can you pull them too?"
I hesitated. "Uh. Yeah?"
Her eyes lit up like a kid who’d just been told they could have unlimited candy.
"Oh, this is amazing," she breathed. "Do you have any idea how useful that is? No more getting up to grab tools. No more climbing shelves. I could just yoink stuff from across the room—"
I stared at her. "You’re not… mad?"
She scoffed. "Kid, I’ve seen you pull off repairs that make zero sense. At this point, I’d be more surprised if you couldn’t do weird space magic."
Then her expression sobered.
"But."
She jabbed a finger at me.
"No doing it where Imps can see you. Got it? I don’t need you getting dragged off to some lab because some stormtrooper saw you floating a spanner."
I nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, of course."
She crossed her arms. "Good."
Then, after a beat—
"Now pass me that hydrospanner."
I blinked. "What?"
She pointed at the tool rack behind me. "The hydrospanner. Yoink it over here."
I groaned.
This woman was impossible.
But I did it anyway.
____
The utterly anticlimactic aftermath of my "I can move stuff with my mind" revelation aside, the Force hadn't exactly handed me a gift basket for my trouble. But it had kept quietly upgrading my two oldest, strongest tricks: Hyper Perception and Psychometry. They'd been with me in some form since the very beginning, nascent sparks of weirdness that had, over the last two years, blossomed into something terrifyingly powerful.
Hyper Perception had become my default state, humming just beneath the surface of my normal senses. But with a conscious push, I could let it fully open. Sitting on my stool in the workshop, I let the mental walls fall away.
The world dissolved.
My sense of self expanded, bleeding outward until my awareness filled a perfect sphere around me. In that first chaotic year, it had been a mere two-meter bubble—a disorienting flood of sensation. Now? It had grown to five.
Yes, five meters. I’m not joking. It just kept expanding, a little more each time I used it. Because I usually paired it with Psychometry while repairing old junk, I’d gotten into the habit of filtering out the environmental noise. Didn’t notice how much had changed.
So, consider me completely blindsided the day I let it run freely.
A five-meter radius. That kind of exponential growth wasn’t just surprising—it was absurd.
Within that field, the constant repetition had sharpened everything. Hyper Perception wasn’t just stronger; it was deeper. Where once things like drifting dust or air currents were hazy impressions, now they were crisp. I was the dust, the swirling particles glinting in the shaft of sunlight streaming through the high window.
Electric flows through old circuits weren’t vague pulses anymore. They were intricate threads, and I could trace them with my mind. Living bodies had started to feel more permeable too. I still refused to really look through them, for reasons I preferred not to revisit, but I could if I wanted.
The sensory input that would’ve shattered my brain two years ago now flowed through me like calm water. My mind had adapted. Rewired itself to take in the deluge without even blinking.
The most dramatic change was in depth. I used to be able to see micro-fractures, energy patterns, stress points. Now, if I truly focused, if I pushed my perception to its limit, the entire structure of matter began to shift. Molecules blurred in and out of focus, jittering like static. I couldn’t pick out individual atoms, not yet, but I could feel the scaffolding that held reality together. And all of it pulsed with the Field—the Force in its purest form. It wrapped through every grain of dust, every ripple in the air, every nerve in Vasha’s body, stitching the universe into a single, humming whole.
And then there was Psychometry.
It had matured just as much. In the beginning, it was clumsy—a chaotic storm of half-understood memories and jumbled impressions. Reading from tech manuals had been a lucky fluke. Now, it was surgical.
My eyes drifted to the dented power converter on the bench. I reached out, fingers hovering a breath above the metal. In the old days, touching it would’ve slammed me with everything: the sweaty grip of the scrap dealer, the pilot’s furious shouting when it failed mid-flight, the factory worker’s numb routine. All of it dumped on me at once like a collapsing archive.
Now, I had finesse. I had built a technique out of necessity, a way to send out a soft "ping" with the Force. It didn’t dive into the entire memory, more like brushing against it. Like sonar. I let it sweep across the converter, let it bounce back with quiet data. Ten to twelve years old, probably. Within range.
I narrowed my focus, digging deeper with purpose. I pushed toward the moment it failed. A flicker responded. Schematics blurred into view, a jolt of energy, the pop of something overloading. Faint swearing. Panic.
It was clean. Precise. Controlled.
That control had been earned the hard way.
About a year ago, Vasha brought in something rare. A protocol droid torso, supposedly from the High Republic era. Gorgeous design, high-grade alloys, elegant as hell. The kind of thing collectors and tech cults would start blood feuds over. The client was offering enough to make me nervous.
I’d walked in brimming with confidence. Placed my hands on it and dove into the past.
It felt like shoving my mind straight into a fusion reactor.
Five hundred years of history struck me like a hammer to the skull.
Voices. Memories. Emotions.
All of it hit at once. No order. No filter. One instant of raw impact.
I felt the pride of the droid’s first creator, hands trembling with joy as it powered on for the first time. The terror of a forgotten battle on some Outer Rim wasteland. The loneliness of decades buried under dust in a warehouse. The idle chatter of a hundred different owners. All of it layered together in a churning mess.
My mind wasn’t just overwhelmed. It was stripped bare. Scoured by a tidal wave of raw, unsorted memory. No context. No structure. Just sensation.
The pain was immediate and incandescent.
My vision vanished into white nothing. A hot gush of blood burst from my nose. Then—nothing.
The next thing I remember was Vasha screaming my name.
Her hands gripped my shoulders, shaking me like she could drag me back to reality through force alone. I was sprawled across the floor, my head in her lap. Her voice cracked. She was panicking.
I barely registered her sprinting to grab medpacks, stim injectors, anything that might help. The shop was quiet, too quiet, broken only by the sound of her boots hammering the floor and her breathing gone ragged.
I’d scared her. Bad.
The week that followed barely existed.
Migraine after migraine. Every light was a spike to the skull. Every sound, a blade. I couldn’t keep down food. Standing made the world tilt sideways.
Vasha stayed with me the entire time.
She turned the lights low, muted every alert, and pulled the shutters halfway down. She spooned broth into my mouth, cursed under her breath when I flinched, and wiped my nose when the bleeding started again. She slept on a chair next to the cot. Not once did she leave my side.
She shut the shop down. Flat out. Canceled jobs, turned away clients. Didn’t care who was angry. She barely let me walk to the fresher without hovering.
I told her I was fine. Joked about it. Tried to wave it off.
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even answer.
When we finally reopened—because I begged—we didn’t go back to business as usual. She made new rules. Every piece of tech had to have documentation. Manufacturing dates. Ownership records. No more mystery parts. No more ancient garbage from long-dead wars.
That was when I developed the ping.
A soft touch. A shallow brush of the Force across an object’s timeline. Not a dive—never again a dive. Just enough to feel the weight of it. Like sonar. Like echo-location through time. If something felt too deep, too layered, too old—I stopped.
That was the only reason I could still use Psychometry at all.
I respected the power. Feared it, even. But I couldn’t deny the beauty of it.
I could feel reality hum. Watch time flow. Hear ghosts whisper across copper wires. I experienced the universe in a way most people couldn’t even imagine.
But it was all sensory. Every bit of it.
Hyper Perception let me see the threat. Psychometry told me its life story. But if someone raised a blaster, I couldn’t do anything except maybe hurl a wrench and hope for a miracle.
I could track the energy signature of a stun baton down to the cell emitter. I could taste the heat coming off the barrel before the shot was fired. But I couldn’t stop it.
I was a kid with godlike awareness and no defense.
And that scared me more than any mental breakdown ever could.
Because this galaxy? It wasn’t safe. It was teeming with people who could fight.
Inquisitors.
I’d read about them. Seen their files. Black robes. Pale skin. Eyes like glass knives. They didn’t walk—they glided. Always talking like they were delivering a eulogy. The Empire’s little pet monsters. And if even one of them felt me? It wouldn’t be a fight.
It would be an execution.
The idea of one of them passing through the Outer Rim and catching my signature chilled me to my bones.
And then there was him.
Vader.
The nightmare in black. The final boss. The man who killed hope by breathing too loud.
Ezra had survived a few encounters. But that wasn’t a fight. It was mercy. He lived because of Kanan. Because of dumb luck. Because the writers needed him to.
I didn’t have plot armor. I didn’t have a Kanan.
One wrong flicker. One stray ripple in the Force. One moment where I let myself feel too much.
And I’d light up like a beacon.
Game over. Thanks for playing.
I didn’t want to be that guy.
I didn’t want to be a footnote. A cosmic leftover named Ezra Bridger who did a few heroic things and then vanished into the ass-end of the galaxy. A name buried in some dusty datapad that only bored historians or obsessive fanboys would stumble across a thousand years from now.
I’d seen the heights of power this universe had to offer. Grown up watching it on screens. Jedi flipping through laser fire, Sith throwing starships, rebels blowing up moon-sized weapons. And now? I was living in it.
To be handed the keys to the kingdom of space magic and then be told I could only ever be mediocre?
No.
Fuck that. I wanted more.
So—how to get it?
First, most obvious answer: lightsaber training. Get a glowstick. Learn the pointy end from the melty end. Become a sword-swinging badass.
Perfect plan, with one minor hiccup. I had no one to teach me.
The Jedi weren’t just scattered—they were extinct. Endangered. Fossils.
The Inquisitors had taken over the child-kidnapping-and-brainwashing department, but I wasn’t keen on their methods. Their whole vibe screamed BDSM cult, with an uncomfortable amount of emphasis on the “S.” No thank you. I was a good boy. Pure, even. Uncorrupted by red blades and leather armor.
Kanan was out there, probably being a sarcastic asshole aboard the Ghost, but he was eight years and a thousand dumb decisions away from where I was. I wasn’t about to go knocking on the door of a nascent rebel cell as a ten-year-old.
Best-case scenario? They think I’m a spy.
Worst-case? I lead the Empire right to them and get the whole main cast killed before their show even gets a second season.
What about the old masters?
Yoda was holed up on Dagobah. A planet so deep in the galactic armpit it probably wasn’t even on the starcharts. And, frankly, fuck that frog. His backwards-ass grammar was cute for five minutes in a movie. Listening to that crap day in, day out would drive me insane.
Obi-Wan? Sitting on Tatooine. Planet-sized litterbox. Stewing in his own trauma soup. He’d cut himself off from the Force so hard, he probably couldn’t levitate a grain of sand without getting a nosebleed. Not exactly peak mentor material.
Okay. So maybe the classic lightsaber route was off the table. For now.
But I didn’t need to be defenseless.
The galaxy was full of sharp, pointy objects that weren’t plasma swords. Vibroblades. Force pikes. Hell, even a saberstaff with a cortosis edge. Not Jedi weapons, sure—but still more than enough to ruin someone’s day.
And now? I had money. Real credits. Not scrap-dealer pennies.
I could afford a quality blade. Custom-forged. Balanced. Deadly. I could buy training holos, learn the basics myself. My body was still developing, reflexes sharpening, muscles adapting. The perfect time to build form and flow until it became instinct.
I wasn’t going to wait for some grey-robed wizard to show up and knight me. I’d start preparing now. On my own terms.
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As this and next chapters are all about Ezra thinking, I am posting them together. Have one in advance.
