Lightening your path.

How things are.

Alone. There he sat, with only his thoughts to keep him company. Curled up in the corner of the cold cell was all young Ezra could do to keep himself warm. As he rubbed his arms in a futile attempt to keep warm (though not too much or he would agitate his many cuts and bruises), he looked around the cell for the thousandth time, only seeing the dark gray walls that trapped him in that retched cell on the horrible imperial base. He looked around and considered for at least the hundredth time that everywhere else would be better than this place. Surviving on the streets didn't seem nearly as bad as this wretched place, at least he had been free; even if he starved and was constantly cold on the streets with nowhere to sleep and no one as a companion.

In this imperial base he was forced to go through torturous training sessions, was beaten by not only the troopers who were 'training' him, but also by other inquisitors who were ordered by the Grand Inquisitor to show the child no mercy. If Ezra resisted training then he was restrained tightly and painfully in cuffs, in chains, or was stuffed in a cage that he could barely move in. The poor kid especially hated when they strapped him to a torture table, it always meant they would not just punish him by restraining him, but also meant torture for him with intense electroshocks, like they thought it would break him, but he wouldn't .

Sometimes they also restrained him to test new drugs. Ezra hated that, he could never predict what effect it would have on him. One day it felt like he was on fire, while another day he kept seeing different swirling colors that made him dizzy.

The prison barley fed Ezra; sometimes not at all as a form of punishment. Ezra felt skinnier, weaker than he had been on the streets. Ezra's stomach rumbled at the thought of food and water; he was so thirsty, and hungry that it was giving him a massive headache. When not being tortured or forced to train. Sometimes he was left for long periods of time to freeze in the lonely cel he was in at the moment. The isolation seemed to do the worse to Ezra mentally. No noise, no one talking, it was enough to make someone mad. Not that it mattered anyways. Ezra could go mad, could just crock from the torture and training anyways; because the next day he was to be sent to Mustafar, to be executed.

Death, it frightened him. Ezra couldn't suppress a shudder of just thinking of what was waiting him, Mustafar. The aching pain he was feeling now from the wounds, from "training" would probably be nothing compared to the pain he would experience there. The threat of going to Mustafar was something the Inquisitor used to try to keep Ezra in line and now he was being transferred there. This was all his fault. He could feel the fear turn into burning hatred when he thought of him.

Flashback

Ezra ran down the street with several stormtroopers in pursuit. Ezra quickly scarfed down the fruit he had managed to steal; so he at least they could not take it from him. Ezra hated stealing but what choice did you have as a street rat? The empire had been trying to arrest him for two years now.

"Come back" shouted a trooper.

"Yeah right like I would wait for you to arrest me!" Ezra thought as he ran into a small alley with a wall at the end.

Ezra ran to the wall and started climbing on the pipeline, hoping it would throw them off his trail, as it had before.

"Come back here you little dirty street rat" snapped the angry troopers from below, but none of them seemed too eager to climb after him. Ezra reached the top and started to climb down on the other side of the building; His feet had barely touched the ground when he felt something cold was wrapped around his neck.

"You've tried that trick before, now hold still unless you want me to strangle you, street rat" said a voice he despised beyond anything else.

Agent Kallus, the man that first had tried to arrest him. Ezra's mom and dad had told him it was because he was force sensitive, a term he did not know at the time. It was because of this man that he had lost his parents, because they had resisted his arrest and helped him escape, at the cost of their own freedom. The empire had found his parents broadcast equipment and arrested them on the spot for helping a convict escape and for speaking against the empire. For two years, the empire had hunted him, trying to capture the force sensitive child and now they had him.