The Preserve - Saturday

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan still had misgivings about this whole sparring thing, but he'd agreed and there was no real good way to wriggle out of it. He had a half-hope that Kanan wouldn't show, but - he knew better. So Kaidan had thrown on his guard and some loose clothing, loaded some protective gear into a duffel and headed to the preserve.

A teal deer wandered by, incurious about the human and his bag of stuff. Kaidan snapped a picture of it and texted it to Kanan. "Aw look, it matches your eyes."

Then, to burn off nerves, he began doing a warm up set of stretches.

[OOC: expecting 1, open to others if you have reason to wander by. Kanan's thread to be chrono last.]

Comments

[spectre_alenko]

"Yeah, he told me about it," Kaidan said, after a minute, adding, "Like I said, it was a really good talk. He started it like he was just.. reciting history, but he answered direct questions, and I can do the math." Kaidan shrugged, "He was pretty open about a lot of things."

[uncertain_dume]

"I'm almost afraid to ask just how deep you went," Kanan admitted. "Were you satisfied with what you learned, at least?"

[spectre_alenko]

"Mandalorian war, Republic being overrun while the Jedi didn't help, Revan going renegade to help the Republic against orders," Kaidan began to list, "Revan disappearing for a few years after he put down the Mandalorians, and coming back with a Jedi purge, until the Jedi caught him and scrubbed his brain empty, sending him back against his own army. How the purge left the Jedi vulnerable to something..someone?.. he called Nihilus, and what happened then."

He was quiet for a minute, and then said, "A phrase he used pretty much punched me." Kaidan looked up at Kanan, reciting, "'I didn't get involved in any of this until I happened to trip over the last survivor of all the purges.' He could have been talking about you. He wasn't. It was thousands of years before you were even born."

Another minute, "Satisfied? No. That's not a word I'd use for it."

[uncertain_dume]

And now Kanan was quietly taking his lightsaber, holding it up, and twisting it apart. One piece, he slowly, carefully clipped back to his belt. The other, he went to tuck away into his bag again.

He didn't look up as he did this. He couldn't look up as he did this.

"A pretty fraught time," he said again. "Just like every other time."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan watched Kanan shut down, in just about every sense.

And his next question was going to make it worse.

"He said something else that punched me, too. Referring to Jedi looking for Force-sensitive kids, he said they never find all of them. He was one of those kids, his whole ..group, were, except the one survivor who'd actually been trained." He took a slow breath, "Revan would have killed them, in his purges. That's what the Empire's doing now, isn't it?"

[uncertain_dume]

It was impressive, really, just how thoroughly a few words could take a man from playfully swatting at acorns to just... quietly kneeling in the undergrowth, eyes not entirely focussed on anything in particular.

"They..."

He wanted to reply. But replying meant acknowledging it. And why acknowledge something when you could just stay there on the ground for the rest of your life and not function at all?

He bowed his head.

It was as close to a 'yes' as he could muster.

[spectre_alenko]

He took a breath, and then spoke, with the full understanding of all the ways Kanan could react to this. "My takeaway from the talk with Atton is: this has all happened before. He said as much. The Jedi of his time were purged down to a single survivor and a handful of Force-sensitive kids, or young adults. From that, the Order grew."

"This is why Caleb ran, because even then, you knew - somebody had to survive. To bear witness, to bear the truth, and to train the next generation," Kaidan said. He stood and walked over, crouching next to Kanan, and reached for his shoulder. "Kanan - you can't run anymore. I know you've said you're not fully trained, but those kids, the ones still out there, they don't even have that."

"We need to start getting them the fuck out of there."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan let Kaidan put his hand on his shoulder.

He sat there in silence, just staring quietly at his bag, the second half of his lightsaber still just barely visible within. He listened; he couldn't help but listen, to hang on every damn word. To take those words and pick them apart in his head, until all he had left was breath and a dizzying sense of sick that wanted to climb its way up and out of him, force its way past his mouth in a scream, leave him running empty on the forest floor.

"Caleb ran," he said, after an eternity, "because he was afraid."

He didn't breathe. He just sat there and stared.

"Because the alternative to running was to end up dead in the mud next to his Master."

The silence in the woods was deafening.

"Because she promised me she would be right behind me."

He closed his eyes, curled in on himself, and tried to remember to breathe.

There was no death. There was the Force.

"I don't know how to find those kids. If I ever manage to catch wind of one, I promise, the Empire already knows about them. But I haven't, yet. There was a list, once. Either it was destroyed in the purge or they've already had their way with it. That's the only starting point there is."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan listened, as Kanan poured out the guilt that had been living in his head for far too long. He reached across his shoulders, hugging him as best he was able with the curled position Kanan had put himself into.

"Why did she tell him to run?" Kaidan asked, and then answered, "Because she wanted him to survive. And you did. You're here, now, alive. You have the skills she taught you. Kanan, I met Caleb. 'Afraid' might've been at the forefront of his emotions, but there's no way that's all he was feeling. It's just all you remember, because you're carrying the survivor guilt. It is, you know. Guilt. You've been blaming yourself ever since that day. The only thing you could do was survive, and you did. It's time you stopped hating yourself for it."

He was quiet for a moment, and said, "It won't be enough to wait and hear a rumor. That list - those kids are likely gone, but there will be others that were never on it. Atton said he came out of the slums, places the Jedi of his time rarely went. You've mentioned Jedi kids tend to get obvious at some point. So.. we start there. In the places the Empire is least likely to look, and we go hunting. You've both said there's a blood test as well, but Atton said only Jedi could administer it. I don't know if he was telling the truth, his tone of voice was odd."

[uncertain_dume]

"I can't do it," Kanan murmured. And then, at length, he clarified. "The blood test. I don't know how it worked."

So, that was something he had to rule right out, right there.

"And they aren't Jedi yet," he added, vaguely. "Force-sensitive, yes. They're only Jedi if they've been trained to be Jedi."

His voice sounded pretty far away, itself. Add another name to the list of Jedi boys with survivor's guilt with an odd tone of voice while discussing this topic.

[spectre_alenko]

"Research for me, then, on the blood test," Kaidan said, "I'll see what I can find out about it." Since Atton hadn't really seemed adverse to talking about it. It would mean divulging his biotic status but since nobody here seemed to give a shit anyway, that wasn't a chore.

"Force-sensitive kids, then," Kaidan corrected, "They get obvious. When you were in the temple, did any of the other kids talk about it? About how they were found?"

Thinking of something, he asked hesitantly, "Are Jedi able to ..feel Sith if they're nearby?"

Part of the talking was just to keep Kanan talking. Kaidan had way more experience with PTSD than he wanted; he knew not to let him go catatonic.

[uncertain_dume]

It took Kanan another few moments to come up with words, again.

"I don't know. Maybe. There might be... cold. Never really met one before."

Well. Vader had ended up in the diner once. But Kanan had been blocking himself off from the Force so much at the time he'd almost resorted to hiding in the damn freezer. Somewhere near the back. Behind the bear and the thing with tentacles.

"It's possible to hide one's presence in the Force, though. It's what I did."

[spectre_alenko]

"Was that instinct, or was it something you were trained to do?" Kaidan asked, thinking.

[uncertain_dume]

"Took me a year to figure it out."

So, neither.

"It's the opposite of instinct. It involves cutting it away. Like..." And here he was going to draw on an analogy Master Kenobi had given to him before going back to... wherever he had been. "... Like amputating a limb."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan winced. He knew that feeling. That was how it had felt the first time John..died. Like having part of himself just ..cut away. Exactly that feeling.

"So, not something the average Force-sensitive kid is going to know how to do," Kaidan extrapolated, "and not something a Force-sensitive adult would do without a really good reason."

Like surviving a $%^$@#$%^@$ purge.

"Talk to me, Kanan. What's going on in your head right now?" Kaidan asked quietly, done with the inquisition for the moment.

[uncertain_dume]

"Too much," Kanan replied quietly. "Too many thoughts at once, I can't finish any one of them."

He closed his eyes. Bowed his head. Only vaguely let himself become aware of the arm around him. How had he missed it before?

He'd been drowning.

"I'm trying, and I want, and I need, and they need, and I can't. I... I can't breathe."

[spectre_alenko]

Yeah, well, it's still there. Kaidan isn't releasing contact until you shake him off.

"Kanan, how does it go? There is no emotion, there is peace.. What's the next line?"

[uncertain_dume]

"There is no ignorance," Kanan replied shoulders bunching up that little bit more. "There is knowledge."

He opened his mouth to take a breath, and on his exhale, he added, "There is no passion, there is serenity..."

[spectre_alenko]

Oh good. He was breathing again. Kaidan knew the next line. Kanan had all but growled it at him. "There is no chaos, there is harmony.."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan murmured along with that line, too.

And then, the final line came up, and he all but sobbed it out, feeling something, in him on the razor's edge of a breaking point, but refusing to let himself fall over it.

The result was a quiet, bruised, ragged, "There is no death, there is the Force," which was followed, almost immediately, by a shudder and a shake of his head. He was breathing, now. That was more than he really felt up to doing. But he was breathing.

[spectre_alenko]

"Kanan, say it again," Kaidan said quietly. He kept reinforcing the name on purpose.

[uncertain_dume]

"There is no death," Kanan murmured, shaking his head. "There is the Force."

And he knew it. He knew it was true. The island had given him his Master back for a weekend. He could feel her influence through it, guiding him, from time to time.

Death, yet the Force.