IMPORTANT: This was not a good time in TKT Ezra’s life. This timeline’s gonna be pretty rough. Mind the tags. If you want a happier version I have posted a Lost in Wild Space but Nothing Bad Ever Happens Timeline on my @laelish-afriend​ blog that may be more your speed. It has all the same art, but everything is much happier there.

There will probably be logistics issues in this thing. It’s a lot to account for. So if you’re like “wait, that’s doesn’t make sense” you’re almost certainly correct.

Also this is a pretty long post.

The First Year

-First couple weeks were rough. We’re not going to go into it, but it was a bad time.

-After two weeks Ezra manages to 1. smash the IT-0 droid against a wall 2. cause considerable harm to a few people that very much deserved it 3. escape and disappear into the vents

-He learns the entire layout and ventilation system of the ship over the next few months.

-He steals small amounts from supplies, including armor, weapons, clothes, food and water.

-He learns rotations and uses bathrooms, showers, etc. when everyone has other places to be.

-Sometimes uses trooper armor to be able to walk around like a normal person.

-Mostly sleeps in places where he knows there either aren’t cameras or they’re blocked and no one’s likely to go. (Storage rooms, mechanical compartments, in the vents, whatever.)

-Finds two loth rats on the ship. Makes friends with them. Names them Ratmorigan and Jabba the Ratt.

-THRAWN HAS PROBE DROIDS PATROL THE VENTS?!

-RATMORIGAN DIES IN A TRAGIC PROBE DROID INCIDENT?!

-Tiny funeral for Ratmorigan.

-Ezra steals and reprograms the probe droids to go after the officers instead. Serves them right. Jerks.

-Probe droids stop patrolling the vents.

-Ezra gets caught again. Bad times. Thrawn tries to get him to Navigate them out of the Unknown Regions. Ezra refuses. More very bad times.

-He escapes with help from Jabba the Ratt after a few days. Easier this time. Luckily, they still haven’t fixed the IT-0.

-Ezra sabotages the communications system so that everyone’s call signs get randomized. Listens in on comm frequencies to hear all the mishaps. Many scandals. Lots of drama.

-Puts an intermittent frequency jammer under a table in the middle of the mess hall. It only turns on for one minute every few hours. Takes them a month to find it.

-Ezra teaches Jabba the Ratt how to do a high-five.

-Hammerly unknowingly befriends Jabba the Ratt. She makes him tiny hats that he immediately chews to shreds because he likes them so much.

-No capture for six months. “Dammit Bridger” becomes a running joke on the Chimaera every time a machine breaks or someone forgets where they put their comm. (Like 30% of the time it actually is Bridger, so…)

-Finally find an inhabited planet at nine months! But it’s like… one small community of aliens and only Thrawn knows their language. But they trade with the Chimaera for food, water, and a small amount of fuel, then point the ship in the general direction of other inhabited worlds.

-The Chimaera travels by doing hyperspace jumps to the edge of the range of the sensors. These are like… five minute jumps, but then they have to wait for a little while between each because if they do too many in a row the crew considers mutiny and they risk breaking the hyperdrive.

-Jabba the Ratt dies of old age. It is the worst day. There is no joy left in the far, far away galaxy.

-Two months later they finally make it to a planet with actual towns.

-Ezra tries to steal a TIE Defender and gets caught again.

-Manages to escape within a day and launches every single escape pod at once, including one that he’s in. (Turns on small portable heaters in other pods so they all read like there’s life forms in them.)

-Once he’s on the ground he actually does manage to steal a TIE Defender. He tries out navigating hyperspace with the Force and it goes decently well. He can find his way to other planets in the region, but can’t find his way all the way back home.

-The Chimaera follows his trajectory and ends up at the same planets he does, but usually a week or two later.

Year Two

-Ezra sees one of Sabine’s Phoenix symbols on a wall in a city. He’s very excited that he has finally been found after over a year without his family and looks everywhere trying to find her.

-The next night he finds a person in a cloak actively painting the symbol, but when he approaches it’s Thrawn and there’s a whole ambush set up.

-When he comes to again and finds himself in the Chimaera’s brig he is furious. He uses the techniques he learned from the Sith holocron to immediately get out and starts causing problems. Major systems start going out all over the ship – lights, heat, guns, shields… As soon as one’s back up another goes dark.

-In the middle of the chaos, Ezra breaks into Thrawn’s office and takes art from off the wall, a loth-wolf, only to realize that it’s dyed cloth, not painted canvas. He ties it over one shoulder like a shawl and wears it from then on.

-The tractor beam is offline when Ezra takes back his stolen TIE Defender and flies off.

-The damage sends a very clear message: Damage to oxygen systems, but not enough to keep it from going right back online. Damage to heat, but reparable before it goes from uncomfortable to dangerous. Loading hatches left just a few inches open in major storage areas filled with crates of food and medicine. No major losses, just half a dozen harmless, shallow cuts to the Chimaera’s vitals.

-It’s not the last time Ezra gets caught by the Chimaera’s crew, but it’s the last time that Thrawn goes hunting for him.

-Ezra paints his TIE Defender. He tries to do something like Sabine would do, but it’s kind of just a mess. But at least it’s a colorful mess.

-Thrawn manages to get holo-photos of the finished ship and establishes an entire art-profile based on Ezra’s crude attempts at painting loth-cats.

Years 3-6

-Ezra and the Chimaera fall into a routine. They end up on the same planets, but for the most part they stay out of each other’s way.

-Ezra keeps tabs on the Empire and if they start making trouble for locals he intervenes. It doesn’t usually go well for him, he’s out-gunned by a lot. But it gives them someone else to pick on.

-Every time they take him on board the Chimaera, Ezra makes sure to leave with a piece of art.

-The pieces he takes are very specific: Kanan’s mask, Hera’s family portrait, a Lassat wall scroll, the helmet Sabine painted.

-Whenever Ezra arrives on a new planet he covers the TIE fighter in a little lean-to shelter to keep it out of view and make himself a temporary home. The art gets put up where he can see it and remember home.

Year 7

-Thrawn’s friends find him? Thrawn has friends apparently???

-One of Thrawn’s friends isn’t terrible actually? Like he’s for sure Empire, but he isn’t The Worst?

-The other friend has a cape and is endlessly fun to cause problems for. Bonus – everyone enjoys it when he causes problems for this person, even the Chimaera’s crew.

-Ezra is definitely not friends with Vanto. Absolutely not. It is at most a begrudging respect.

-He does however say loudly and openly that he is best friends with his bestie, Ronan. It is Ronan’s least favorite thing.

-Ezra figures out Vanto’s comm frequency and starts telling him whenever any of the Chimaera’s stormtroopers are being terrible and corrupt.

-It actually gets better?! The corrupt ones either get straightened out or they stop going planet-side.

-Vanto starts making Ezra learn Math against his will whenever he gets caught.

-Vanto also starts finding ways to get him packages with food, water, and basic toiletries whenever Ezra is not stuck on the Chimaera.

-Not every call to Vanto’s comm is about corrupt stormtroopers anymore. Sometimes it’s just. Talking to somebody who doesn’t seem to actively hate him.

Year 8

-It is becoming way less fun to attack the Imps and also there are fewer problems than there used to be. So there’s less need to attack the Imps.

-Ezra’s getting frustrated and bored and also how come Thrawn’s friends found him first?! HOW?!

-Ezra finds out that Thrawn and Vanto are together. Traumatized. Cannot unknow this now.

-Ronan realizes that it bothers Ezra and starts bringing it up around him. Ezra does not throw him out the closest airlock, but it’s a near thing.

-Ezra steals Ronan’s cape. Ronan is full of rage. Nobody helps him get it back.

-Vanto tries to convince Ezra that Thrawn isn’t the worst person to ever exist. Arguments are not compelling. Seems highly unlikely.

-Ezra now has multiple people’s comm frequency on the Chimaera. He can no longer count the number of people he doesn’t hate on the Chimaera on just one hand.

-THRAWN SOMEHOW GOT EZRA’S  COMM FREQUENCY?!

-Ezra switches his comm frequency and Thrawn finds it AGAIN

-He keeps getting relevant status updates? Inclement weather warnings? Random facts about local customs and science trivia that always seems to come up later somehow, as if Thrawn magically knew it would?!

-Ezra never responds to any of these, but they keep on showing up regardless.

-Nothing makes sense anymore.

Year 9

-Ahsoka and Sabine find the Chimaera!

-But then they get caught, which is not ideal.

-Everybody finds out that the Empire doesn’t exist anymore and the Rebellion won and became the New Republic while they were gone. So that’s fun news for exactly one person on the ship.

-Ezra helps Sabine and Ahsoka escape, but gets knocked out in the process. When he comes to they are back in the Outer Rim heading towards Lothal.

-When Ezra finds out that they took him directly back to the Outer Rim he realizes that they just gave the Chimaera the trajectory to get out. It will take Thrawn’s ship longer without their own Navigator, but they have the key to return now.

ffxivwrite2021 - #27 Benthos

Continued from #25 Silver Lining (link)

((cw: PTSD, implied torture))

The Lochs, 1552 6AE

She was floating. Gently suspended in a fuzzed grey. Like a fog, rolling off the creek that ran through her childhood village. Or the sea… It had been so long since she’d seen it. She thought she might have smiled, had she the capacity. The improbable expanse of blue cast around her, gliding gently over her arms, her legs, her face. Each powerful swell was like the surge of a great beast, far more powerful than she. At the slightest provocation it could seize her in its jaw and crush her between its teeth. And yet she floated, and in drifted an inexorable sense of peace.

This must be it, she wondered. How much longer til she saw the Gates of Thal- though perhaps she’d passed through without realizing. This could be one of the heavens, she supposed, although it would be a great shock to get here instead of being summarily deposited into one of the hells.

But perhaps it was so. And by the will of the gods, she could descend into repose. She closed her eyes, or at least had the sense of doing so but nothing about her surroundings darkened, and consigned herself to the abyss.

She would have been content to stay here forever, she thought, yet there was a peculiar tug in her gut. Like a hand gripped her side and pulled, and in the featureless pale void she felt herself begin to spin. Slowly at first, in a gradual rotation of her body, then faster, like an undertow gripped at her legs and sucked them in. She sat up, or at least she thought she did, but she felt her balance teeter perilously forward, and in a desperate lunge she grabbed out at the fog but seized nothing. No purchase, no succor, just the sense of the whirlpool seizing her up and plunging her head first into the darkness of oblivion.

The first thing she felt was a weight on her arm.

With a sudden snap that resounded in her jaw, Ojene flailed to life. Her limbs flung out in every direction, but something snaked around them tight, and she convulsed with violent force, ripping and tearing with teeth and fingers alike til the bindings fell away and she toppled- hard. Her shoulder struck something solid but she rolled, basilisk-like over the floor til she pulled her feet beneath her and staggered up.

A hand touched her shoulder. She whipped around, and to her shock her hands parted, no manacles binding them tight as they flew fist first. The impact jarred up her arm with a meaty thwack, and the pressure ripped off her shoulder. A shriek poured into her ears like a banshee scream, unnatural and bloodcurdling, and on blind feet she staggered forward, groping every which way as she stumbled into a thick film, then spilled out- and at once she was enveloped by white.

Ojene froze. Pain seared into her eyes, a blinding blur that shattered all vision and yet she could see it so clearly. The ghoulishly placid face, pale and smiling, haloed just outside the blinding sphere as a knife laid against Ojene’s bared middle, til the face turned and washed itself out in the spotlight’s glare save for the protruding lump in its forehead, the alabaster pearl of the third eye-

Through the agony Ojene blinked, and slowly the bright shock began to recede as shape and color drew into form. And it was not the searing flame of a ceruleum beacon she faced, the cold metal of the table absent from her back. There were no cermet walls, no squalid stone floor braced by impassable black bars. It was orange stone, dusted with traces of sandy soil. Scraggly brush poking between a crack in the rocks. A soft breeze breathing through her hair. And most of all, once again, the blue expanse of the sky lit by the steadfast sun.

Her legs gave out, and Ojene collapsed to her knees, then fell back on her heels. Her body contorted forward, palms slapping into the ground, and the gravelly dust ground beneath her fingers. A sob seized her throat, crashing through her body in sharp, keening retorts as she toppled onto her side. The flood of tears plastered her cheek to the warm stone, and her hands gripped at her wrists, for the first time in an age striking not relentless metal but her bony wrists.

She seized them so hard her raw skin cried in protest, but the searing pain shot laughter through her tears, a giddy bubble that surged up through her chest and poured forth like a creature spilling out her throat.

A weight pressed to her shoulder, and her body flinched, but as she cracked her eyes open, choking around a strangled noise, a familiar face loomed over her- the Highlander woman who’d pulled her from the gallows. Her mouth moved, but whatever she said Ojene couldn’t make sense of it, and a moment later arms folded beneath her.

The touch seared, and Ojene’s body twisted to deny it as a sharp wave of revulsion overtook her- but the spiking urge to lash out and roll away fragmented somewhere away from her consciousness. Her eyes fixed on the Highlander’s face- the woman was smiling now, a small gentle thing. And somewhere in the sparking pieces of her mind spilled a soft wave of relief. And so Ojene didn’t fight it as they wrapped their arms beneath her and carried her back the way she’d come- into the recesses of a Resistance tent.

There, laid on a thin bedroll, when she turned her eyes upward she saw no sky. But she grabbed her wrists and wrapped her ankles around each other as the new shards of reality began to sink in. The fetters were gone.

She was free.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #13 Oneirophrenia

((cw: implied torture, death))

An Imperial prison - Ala Mhigo, 1561 6AE

If she wanted, she could let go.

The realization shocked a flare of fear that ripped in a tingling sweep beneath her skin, but as the surge prickled away it melted into a warmth that bubbled up Ojene’s throat and spilled out into rasping laughter that floated unnaturally through her ears.

How oddly the Garlean watching over her must be looking at her now. As the laughter died the sense of it remained, floating balloon-like through her mind, and she imagined the stupid look on the guard’s dumb face. She couldn’t see it after all. Her eyes had lost the ability to focus some time ago on the endless ocean she floated upon, arms spread wide as every lap of the waves against her face throbbed with the pain that cushioned her back. Devoured her in its embrace, til there was nothing left but the distant awareness of it somewhere far below.

Blearily she blinked, struggling her eyes wider, for whenever she dared to let them close for longer than a split-second he stepped forward knife raised. What was another cut to join the others, their crosshatch pattern coating her like a second shirt as they seeped into the tattered rags she wore. Yet every time he did she felt the scream ravage her throat, her closely trained stoicism long since collapsed.

But this time the Imperials had taken it too far. The balloon of laughter sublimated into a haze of revolving glee that slipped through her awareness like an eel. They’d told her she’d never be free again, but ah! She could barely feel the stone floor beneath her, the everlasting weight of the manacles on her wrists featherlight as if the chains themselves fell away. With each thud of her heart the pain surged, then faded, each wave growing dimmer like the receding of a tide. It could take her with it, and then it would be done. Slipped away beneath their noses, if only she could keep her eyes open long enough to maintain the ruse.

Head lolling sideways, she flexed her fingers faintly with her pulse. It wouldn’t be long.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she murmured.

She wasn’t sure she made a sound, but it made no difference. A sensation pushed against her chest like the firm press of a thumb, the creeping vice of disapproval.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “The Garleans, they take everything, even you.”

The vice’s crank turned as the pressure grew, and she saw his eyes, sharp and grey upon her.

“Stop looking at me like that. Just let me go… we’ll see each other again when you’re dead. It’s the best way.”

In the pit of her senses- or what was left of them- she felt as much as heard his low rumble of dissent, like a distant peal of thunder vibrating the stone beneath her fingertips. Get up, Ojene.

“No,” she groaned. “Don’t make me do this again. I can’t.”

You can. You must.

“Why?” she demanded, and suddenly through the fading haze a spike of anger shot through, hot and sizzling.

You know why.

“Don’t you think I’m trying to come back to you?”

You’re not. You’re trying to die.

“Well, that’s the bloody fucking point!” Ojene snapped, and suddenly she wasn’t floating upon the ocean anymore but standing upright, somewhere, in some seamless fog as her clenched hands raged at her sides.

You’re not allowed, his voice admonished, but even as it did it melted into something softer. Gentler, as if it molded into a soft caress that breathed against her jaw. Come back to me- whole.

“I…” she started, but it was too late. A tether looped around her waist and with a faint tugging sensation she spilled forth.

Rapidly her eyes fluttered, and as the world rose back into blinking awareness a shape loomed over her. A hiss slipped into her ears, and as Ojene squinted hard the Garlean guard blurred into focus- as did the blade in his hand. But he frowned down at her, unmoving, and as a deep breath cascaded unwillingly into her lungs so did the surge of pain as it blanketed her entire torso.

Her hands tightened and the manacles rattled, the tips of her fingers numb.

“Fuck you,” Ojene spat aloud, and she passed out.

((@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast))