1 | Star Wars Rebels: Beginning Of The End (completed)

Part 10

Rebel Base, Atollon, 1231, 3278 LY

     A fifteen-year-old boy with blue hair and eyes opened a door, revealing a Twi'lek woman working on something. When the Twi'lek, Hera, heard the boy open the door, she looked up and smiled. The boy, Ezra, knew why: his face was a healthy color and his eyes shone vibrantly with life, opposite of what it had been when he had gotten sick. When Hera had told him that it was the Viper, she explained to him what it was. Now she commented, ''You look better.''

     Of course Ezra was better, he was up and moving around. Grinning, he responded, ''I feel better, too.'' His grin wavered as he remembered something, the thing he wanted to tell Hera in the first place. She saw this and frowned, knowing it was something bad. ''Hera, I'm worried about Kanan.'' There it was, he told her. ''He hasn't been getting better, but I have. The times that I would wake up, I'd feel stronger, but when I looked at him, he was the same as he was before.'' He glanced up at her with worried eyes. ''Sometimes weaker.''

     Hera sighed, shaking her head. Ezra was worried sick about Kanan, whether he would get better. He needed his Master, didn't want to be without him, didn't want to feel the agony again that had came with the bond breaking. Hera soothed, ''Kanan will be fine, Ezra. He just needs a little more time to heal.''

     Sighing, Ezra stated, ''I hope you're-'' He got cut off when he received a sharp throb in his head. Grunting, he grabbed his head in his palm, willing it to go away. He felt Hera bend down and grab his shoulder; he waved it away, motioning to her that it was just a small pain, nothing to worry about. He breathed in deeply, the pain receding rapidly. ''It's going away,'' he told Hera, but then something inside him snapped.

     ''KANAN!'' he screamed, falling onto his hands and knees. By that point, he wasn't aware that Zeb was there, he only saw the black splotches in his vision. Something was happening to Kanan. He was being pulled away from Ezra by some invisible force, tearing something inside him. He curled up in the fetal position, darkness coming in and out of his vision. His ears rang, his head pounded, everything hurt. It hurt to move, think, even breathe. 

     By this time, a crowd of dismayed rebels were congregating after hearing Ezra's scream, but neither Hera nor Zeb paid any attention. They were trying to get Ezra to talk to them, but it seemed he couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear anything except his pounding head and his ringing ears. Of course, he couldn't have known that he cried out again when something else snapped inside of him. He tried to fight the darkness, but he was losing. Fast.

     The dismayed rebels around Hera wanted to do something, but didn't know what. Hera paid them no mind, she was trying to get Ezra to stay awake, but the boy's eyes kept rolling back into his head, then they would snap open. She tapped his cheek, but he seemed to not be able to respond to the tap, as if he couldn't feel it. This was something Hera had never had to deal with, and something she knew nothing about. It wasn't the Viper; Ezra was too strong for that. But-

     From in the direction of the medbay, Sabine yelled, ''HERA!'' When she turned to Ezra, the boy was unconscious, his face somewhat contorted with pain. She left him with Zeb, then ran over to Sabine who in fact stood at the medbay. Based on Ezra's scream and where Sabine was, Hera knew that something was happening to Kanan. ''Hera,'' Sabine continued, ''Kanan's not breathing.''

     Eyes wide, she realized what was happening. The bond that Kanan and Ezra shared had snapped, putting Ezra through agony. The Viper had struck again, this time the Master. That puzzled Hera for a moment as she rushed over to Kanan. She also figured out that the reason it had struck Master instead of apprentice was because the Master was weak and the apprentice was strong; and to the sickness, the roles were switched, so the Master became the easy target. ''Blast it, Kanan!'' The Master had given life energy to the Padawan to make him stronger. Leave it to Kanan to be overprotective and try to save Ezra.

      The problem was that Kanan wasn't breathing even after Hera performed life-saving techniques for over a minute. In fact, his heart rate was slowing, more time between each beat. Turning to Sabine, she echoed what they were thinking, a sense of hopelessness in her tone. ''I think we're going to lose Kanan.''