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Chapter 37 - Premonitions 1

Just as I was internally monologuing about my tragic Force dysfunction like a Sith-themed diary entry, the door hissed open.

Enters Vasha.

Loose shirt, no pants. Just that soft, slightly oversized top that hung off one shoulder like it had a casual grudge against symmetry, and a pair of underwear that were absolutely not helping my focus situation. Somehow she had managed to simultaneously top both the Hotness and Cuteness charts with one outfit. Like, girl, pick a lane—or at least give the rest of us a chance to emotionally prepare.

She didn't say anything. Just sauntered in like a sleep-deprived goddess, flopped back-first onto the bed with all the grace of a Twi'lek who'd been wrestling with ship parts since dawn, and let out a muffled groan that translated directly to: "If one more droid misroutes power, I'm gonna eat a fusion coil."

My Force stuff?

Yeah, that got Thanos-snapped straight out of my frontal lobe.

I sighed, raised one hand with just enough theatrical flair to seem casual, and floated my caf cup back to the cluttered nightstand. The liquid barely rippled—a minor flex of control that I definitely wasn't doing just to show off. The ceramic touched down with a soft clink against yesterday's empty mug, and I let the Force connection dissolve like sugar in rain.

Then: executive decision made. Head, meet thighs.

Thick thighs, if I may add to the official record. The kind that could probably crack a stormtrooper helmet if properly motivated.

But more importantly: soft. Impossibly, unfairly, catastrophically soft. The kind of soft that made your soul sit up, take notice, and start composing resignation letters from all your life goals. The kind of soft that had your neurons staging a coup against common sense. Her skin was warm through the thin fabric of her underwear, and she smelled like machine oil and that citrus soap she'd stolen from some fancy Core world shop three systems back.

She cracked one amber eye open, lazy as a sunbathing nexu. Her left lek gave the tiniest twitch—amusement, maybe, or just acknowledgment that yes, her girlfriend had once again turned her into furniture.

"Whassup, champ?" she mumbled, lips quirking into that half-smirk that did terrible, wonderful things to my cardiovascular system.

I just mumbled into her leg, words muffled by blue skin and questionable life choices. "Thinking deep thoughts. Failing to move furniture with my mind. Contemplating whether the Force has a customer service line I can complain to. The usual."

"Uh-huh." She yawned, showing those slightly sharp canines that I definitely didn't have feelings about. "Bet the furniture won."

"The furniture always wins. It's got union representation."

She chuckled—a low, throaty sound that vibrated through her stomach and into my cheek. Without seeming to think about it, her fingers found their way into my hair, nails scratching lightly against my scalp. The touch was automatic now, habitual in the way that spoke of countless mornings and stolen moments. Casual. Natural. Dangerously, impossibly affectionate.

Her fingers worked through the tangles with practiced ease, occasionally pausing to massage a particularly tense spot near my temple. Each touch sent little sparks down my spine, the kind that made you forget how to form coherent sentences in any language, Basic included.

I was supposed to be contemplating my metaphysical failures. Maybe working on that Force push that kept going sideways. Definitely not lying here with my cheek squished against her thigh, pulse doing interpretive dance routines, drowning in the reality that the person I'd been hopelessly, helplessly, "would fight the Empire with a spoon if she asked" in love with was just... casually letting me use her as a meditation cushion.

The worst part? She probably didn't even know she was doing it. The hair thing. The soft humming under her breath—some Rylothian tune her mother probably sang. The way her free hand had found mine, thumb tracing absent circles on my wrist.

Send help.

Or don't.

I wasn't moving until the heat death of the universe. Maybe not even then.

She kept up the impromptu scalp massage, her touch light enough to be soothing but firm enough to untangle whatever rat's nest my hair had become during my rooftop brooding session. I was approximately thirty seconds from achieving a bliss-induced coma when she spoke again:

"Oh, by the way." Her voice had that deceptively casual tone that meant incoming bad news. "Dropped by Jon's while you were doing your whole mysterious-Force-user-on-a-rooftop thing. Heard the Empire's planning to jack tech taxes up to forty percent next quarter."

I blinked. Lifted my head exactly three millimeters—enough to convey alarm, not enough to actually leave my thigh pillow. "Wait. Forty? Didn't those fu—"

I paused. Tried to find a replacement word that wouldn't earn me another cheek pinch. Failed spectacularly. Settled for aggressive tone modulation.

"Didn't they just raise it to thirty-five last year? What are they doing, funding their mom's retirement plan? Gold-plating the Emperor's toilet? Buying designer helmets for stormtroopers so they can miss their shots in style?"

Vasha snorted hard enough that I felt it through her whole body. "Empire, babe. That's literally the whole business model: steal stuff, tax what's left, blow up anyone who complains, then host a parade about maintaining 'order.' It's in their corporate mission statement and everything."

She shifted slightly, getting more comfortable. Her shirt rode up in the process, exposing a strip of blue skin that my lizard brain immediately catalogued as "extremely relevant information."

(RIP my willpower. You fought bravely. Your sacrifice will be remembered.)

"Actually saw that Emperor guy on the holonet the other week," she continued, seemingly oblivious to my internal crisis. "Did this whole speech about... I don't know, 'youth education initiatives' or 'galactic prosperity' or some other bantha shit. Honestly? Dude looks like someone crossbred a raisin with a Hutt lord and taught it how to lie into a camera. Gets me right in the uncanny valley."

That mental image broke through my distraction. I snorted into her thigh, shoulders shaking. "Shady's putting it mildly. That guy gives off 'would sell his grandmother to a Hutt for half a credit and a expired ration bar' vibes. Like, you can actually see the evil radiating off him. It's probably visible from orbit."

She reached down and pinched my cheek between two fingers. Not hard, but enough to make her point. "Language, you little gremlin."

"Hey—ow! Violence!" I grumbled, the complaint somewhat undermined by the fact that I immediately nuzzled back into her leg like a touch-starved lothcat. "That's definitely too hard. I'm filing a complaint with management."

"I am management."

"Then I'm filing a complaint with the overtly dominant guardian department."

"Also me."

"...I need better union representation."

She laughed—tired but genuine, the kind you only get after twelve hours of wrestling with corroded power couplings and customers who think 'vintage' means 'should cost half a credit.' Her fingers resumed their path through my hair, gentler now, almost apologetic.

"Gods only know what the Senate was smoking when they gave him emergency powers," she muttered.

"If I had to guess? Credits. Mountains of credits. Enough credits to build a small moon out of. Maybe some light blackmail on the side, like a garnish."

"Mmm. Corruption with a side of extortion. Classic recipe."

We lapsed into comfortable silence. Somewhere in the shop, a droid whistled—probably that MSE unit she'd been trying to fix for three weeks. The air recycler hummed its eternal song. Outside, speeders whooshed past in the endless Coruscant traffic, their lights painting brief patterns on our ceiling.

"You want dinner?" she asked eventually. "I'm not really in the mood to eat anything heavy, but I can heat up that leftover spice rice if you're hungry. Think there's some of that Naboo flatbread too."

I sighed dramatically and let my full weight drop back into her lap, burying my face in the junction between hip and thigh like I was trying to achieve molecular fusion. "I'm hungry for sleep, if anything. Maybe a side order of unconsciousness. Hold the dreams."

"Fair enough," she murmured. Her voice had gone soft, edged with that particular exhaustion that came from fighting the Empire's bureaucracy one repair job at a time. "Sleep now. Food later. Rage against the Imperial machine tomorrow. Maybe commit some light treason if we're feeling spicy."

"Sounds like a plan," I mumbled into the fabric of her underwear, already feeling consciousness starting to fray at the edges. "Wake me when the revolution starts."

"You'll be the first to know, revolutionary."

And just like that, Force theory and galactic tax policy both got shoved into deep storage, marked 'deal with later' in mental ink.

All that existed was the faint hum of half-repaired equipment in the workshop, the lingering smell of tibanna gas and that citrus soap, and Vasha's pulse—slow and steady beneath my cheek, a metronome for a universe that suddenly felt a lot smaller and safer than it had an hour ago.

Peaceful.

For now.

...

...

[Sometime around 0300 hours]

Dark.

Still.

Too still.

Wrong-still, like the air before a turbolaser strike.

I woke like someone had grabbed my soul and yanked—heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape, breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps that tasted like copper and fear. Disoriented wasn't even in the same star system as what I felt. My brain was static, white noise, a corrupted data stream trying to process information that didn't exist.

For a few eternal seconds, I didn't know where I was. When I was. Who I was.

All I knew was the wrongness. It pressed against my skin like deep space, cold and vast and hungry.

The bed was cold on one side.

Ice cold. Grave cold. The kind of cold that meant absence.

No familiar warmth bleeding through thin fabric. No soft thigh pillow. No steady heartbeat playing counterpoint to mine. No gentle breathing disturbing the air.

No Vasha.

The realization hit like a physical blow. Every instinct I had—Force-trained and lizard-brain primitive alike—started screaming in unison. A klaxon in my skull, red alert, all hands to battle stations because something was wrong wrong wrong and—

Panic detonated in my chest like a thermal detonator. Not the slow creep of anxiety but the instant, overwhelming certainty that something terrible had happened. That I'd lost—that she was—

The Force itself felt wrong. Like someone had reached into the universe and deleted something essential, left a Vasha-shaped hole in reality that my senses kept trying to fill and failing.

I sat up too fast. The room tilted, spun, threatened to dump me sideways. Darkness pressed in from the edges of my vision like it had opinions. My eyes darted wild, desperate, searching for—for what? For her, for threats, for answers to questions I couldn't form.

"Vasha...?"

The name came out cracked, barely a whisper. The room swallowed it whole.

No answer. Just the sound of my own breathing, too loud, too fast.

I turned—half frantic, half terrified of what I might not find—and there she was.

Curled up on the far side of the bed, one leg kicked free of the covers, shirt rucked up to show the curve of her hip. Her mouth was slightly open, and she was making that soft almost-snore she'd deny until the heat death of the universe. One lek had flopped across her face. She was drooling slightly on my pillow.

She was there. Breathing. Safe. Absolutely, beautifully, impossibly alive.

The relief hit almost as hard as the panic had. My breath hitched, caught, stuttered like a damaged hyperdrive trying to engage. The pressure in my chest didn't vanish but it shifted, transformed from crushing weight to something raw and desperate.

Not gone. She wasn't gone. She was right there, close enough to touch, and I was going insane over nothing, over dreams, over—

I moved without thinking. Wrapped myself around her like a desperate vine, like if I held on tight enough I could anchor her to this reality. My arms went around her waist, face pressed between her shoulder blades, trying to breathe her in—machine oil and citrus and alive alive alive.

She made a soft sound, somewhere between complaint and question, but didn't wake. Just shifted slightly to accommodate my death grip, one hand coming up to pat clumsily at my arm before falling still again.

My heart was still racing. I could hear it in my ears, feel it in my throat, a war drum that wouldn't stop. The Force whispered at the edges of my perception—not quite vision, not quite prophecy, just the lingering echo of something horrible that hadn't happened yet.

Or maybe had happened, somewhere, somewhen else.

I pressed closer, tightened my grip until it probably bordered on uncomfortable. She'd complain in the morning about me being a clingy lothcat. I'd make a joke about it. We'd pretend everything was normal.

But right now, in the dark, with phantom dread still clawing at my spine?

I never wanted to let go.

And I never wanted to feel that emptiness again.

---

A/N: So I am happy to tell you that I have successfully completed the Prologue Volume of the story on Patreon. 

All in all, the prologue finale happens at Ch 40 for patreon, and at around 44 for WN/ScribbleHub readers. 

Premonitions is the Final Arc of prologue volume, and it going to span from chapter 37 to 44, so hold your horses and meth in hands and hope Ezra doesn't break down crying at end of it.

Honestly that was a long journey till now, I had to write 250k words to finally deliver ~100k words to you.(drafting is a bitch, through a lovely one) Some people might have felt it was very slow, for some it would have been the exact comfort genre that you were craving for, and some might have disliked how Ezra behaved etc etc

Thank you all for your contributions and I hope you guys can continue loving or hating the book.

And just an advance note, I might take a small break of 3-4 days after prologue finale (and leave you guys on the cliffhanger, edging for story jajajaja) as college has started and balancing both is becoming a bit overwhelming. I would have to write the reserve chapters etc so the break would be helpful to me. 

If you want to support me or read advanced chapters, you can do so at Patreon. I would be highly appreciative of that and it would support me very much in my writing endeavors.

Link: www(dot)patreon(dot)com/Abstracto101

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