Writing Shorts

(Star Wars: Rebels) To Smile (1)

From the boarding ramp of the Ghost, Sabine observed Ezra from a distance...

[Set during Season 1, during the episode "Empire Day"]

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Part 1: Lothal

The first time Sabine observed him from the ramp of the Ghost, it was not long after he joined the crew.

Ezra was a street rat. He was naïve. And even though his horrendous flirting attempts had died down a while ago (She probably had Zeb to thank for that), he was still a bit immature. At least he had begun to get along with the rest of the crew, including Zeb—and even Sabine had to admit that she was slowly warming up to the kid, now that he had stopped hitting on her.

But he was also Force-sensitive, the hallmark of a potential Jedi. Which was why Kanan, a Jedi himself, had taken him outside to the grassy plains of Lothal to teach the kid to connect with the Force.

Whatever that means...

Sabine never understood the ways of the Force as preached by the Jedi. But, as a Mandalorian, she was taught that the Jedi of legend—jetii, as her mother called them—were the ancient enemies of her people, their unnatural abilities with the Force likened to peculiar sorcery. The Jedi warred long ago with her people's ancestors, and their interference contributed to the downfall of the Mandalorians' grander days.

Of course, times had changed long ago. The Mandalorian peoples had fractured into splinter factions, many of which bore conflicting ideologies leading to further infighting and destruction. And the Jedi Order of old was long gone, its greatest warriors slain by dark forces when the Empire was formed, and its survivors like Kanan in hiding since then.

So it fascinated Sabine to observe the teachings of the Jedi, a thing of the old era, from a distance. It stoked her curiosity in how they became the kind of warriors described in legend. And it intrigued her to see what would become of Ezra, who seemed a rather unlikely fit to be a Jedi, through these teachings.

It's intrigue, she said to herself as she felt the breeze brush lightly through her dyed blue and amber hair. She reasoned that her intrinsic desire to learn and understand, shaped by her days as a cadet in the Imperial Academy on Mandalore, was what drove her to observe Ezra Bridger from a distance. To see what he would become as a Jedi, as a part of the crew.

As she watched Ezra struggle with a rather aggressive Loth-cat and Kanan look on in frustration, as she was suddenly alerted to the presence of TIE Fighters in the skies above, she never suspected that she would learn more about him instead.

How today, Empire Day, was his birthday.

She never suspected at the time just how much she would sympathize with the Lothali street rat.

Or how she would be the one to cheer him up with a simple gift... a fond reminder of his lost parents, something she would find unexpectedly in the basement of Ezra's old safe house.

Or how his smile would bring out a smile of her own as she wished him a happy birthday.

As it turned out, Sabine liked his smile. And the way it made her smile in return.