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The Roof of the MCA, Sunday Morning

Kanan had a shift he needed to be getting to at the diner, and whether he would or not depended mostly on how this conversation went. But the fact remained that this was a conversation that needed to happen, and time for them to have it was growing short. Kanan had brought Stance up to the roof early enough to watch an Earth sunrise, and they'd both taken a seat up on the hull of the Escape to do so.

"You're gonna like this," Kanan offered. "Earth's pretty backwards in a lot of ways, but at least it goes all-out making its mornings nice to watch."

[OOC: Open for anyone who has business up on the MCA roof! Huuuuge spoilers for the first five issues of the Kanan comic series in the Kanan/Stance thread.]

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"So far," Stance mused, looking out over the island, the trees and buildings and the glimmer of lights and the expanse of water beyond it, "so good, there. Wasn't like the war gave us much opportunity to take in the scenery."

Kardoa and Mygeeto had both been 'get in and get it done' assignments. No time to sit and watch the sunrise.

Hell, they'd arrived on Mygeeto in the dark, and Stance hadn't survived the night.

"You might've liked Kaller," Kanan offered, glancing from the view over toward his visitor. "Lots of forest, a bit like here."

Plenty of brush to get lost in. Kanan's head bowed a little.

He didn't talk about Kaller to anybody.

Stance watched him in silence for a few moments, his mouth pulling into a small frown.

"You're doing it again, Caleb," he noted, his tone somewhere between wry and gentle. "What happened on Kaller?"

Kanan exhaled. A sharp huff. A near-laugh. Something tired and hurt and resigned to the fact that they were going to end up having this talk, or else Stance would leave and all they'd have between them was a little bit more time and a sunrise.

"You aren't gonna like it, buddy," he warned. "And I'm not gonna like telling it."

"It's too early in the morning to give me the runaround," Stance replied, leaning sideways to elbow Kanan in the ribs. "Haven't finished my caf yet."

That elbow earned an 'oof' out of Kanan, mostly reflex. He turned to look at Stance again, mostly out of the corner of his eye.

"We were stationed on Kaller when the Separatists lost the war."

Stance sat in silence, mulling that one over for a few long moments.

"You don't sound like that was a good thing," he noted.

"It wasn't exactly what I'd call a victory," Kanan replied, closing his eyes. "We survived the war. We didn't all make it through the night that followed."

He swallowed heavily, picking up his mug of caf and just kind of holding it in his hands, grounding himself in the warmth of the ceramic against bare fingers.

There it was. There was the pain that Caleb had been drowning in since he'd arrived. Stance considered it, considered what had been said the other night in the street. His friend had been someplace else entirely when he'd seen him, and if it had just been leftover trauma from being not more than two meters away when Stance himself had died, then maybe they could have moved on and been done with it.

But there had been a cry of 'clone,' when that blaster had been drawn and aimed at him, and Stance had spent the last couple of days turning over what that meant, over and over in his head.

He realized he desperately didn't want to know.

And he realized that he needed to.

"What happened, Caleb?"

Kanan didn't flinch at the name. He'd given Stance permission to use it for the weekend. It wasn't as though he'd be running around telling it to everybody when the time came for him to go back, when he became one with the Force again.

Enough about him was different now, he could let his friend have a name.

"Good soldiers," he said, his voice thick as he tried to scrape together words, "followed orders."

Grey had said that, as Caleb Dume looked up to stare down the barrel of his blaster rifle.

'Execute Order 66,' Styles had said, stepping up beside him. And once again, Kanan's expression went somewhere far away.

Stance watched that happen, took note of the fifty-yard stare that he'd never seen on the face of his friend before. His own time in the war had been short, but he'd served with a a handful of brothers who had seen a hell of a lot, themselves. Big-Mouth sometimes got that look about him, when talking about how much he hated that so much of General Billaba's battalion was made up of unproven soldiers, of green kids like him.

Haruun Kal had been hard on everyone who had survived it, he'd been told. Hardest of all on the General.

"Caleb," he said, after giving him a few moments to lose himself in the silence, "what did we do?"

"Everywhere at once, Stance," Kanan said, closing his eyes. "Everywhere at once, clones turned on their Jedi leaders. We were all branded traitors, were slaughtered as the Republic fell and the Empire rose to take its place."

He stayed in that faraway place as he spoke. Appreciated that right then, Stance knew better than to try to pull him back from it.

He could see the fire, again. Could see the blood.

"My Master took my arm," he recounted. "Told me to run, and I froze. They... they fired on us. Kaylon and Remo ended up dying by their own blaster bolts turned back on them. Mixx ran in too close and lost his head for it, all before I stopped just... staring."

His friends. Stance's family.

Stance listened in silence, his expression going from shock to the dawning of silent horror.

Everyone was dead. Caleb had said so the other night. Stance had wanted to assume it was a mission gone horribly wrong. At least then, they could have gone down fighting, gone down trying to do some good. But turning on the Jedi?

Turning on all the Jedi?

They loved their Commanders, their Generals. What he was hearing now was absolutely beyond the pale.

"Soot and Big-Mouth went down by my hand," Kanan continued quietly.

Stance gave a sharp, pained inhale between his teeth, and Kanan could only guess at the reasons why.

Big-Mouth had taken both of them under his wing, after all. Had made it his personal mission to get Stance through the war alive, and he hadn't been able to. Had gone out of his way to befriend Caleb Dume, surprising him with offerings of ripe melon wherever they went.

The beginnings of Kanan's sweet tooth.

"We cut down a few more members of Rostu Squad," he continued, voice gone empty, "as they widened the perimeter. Tried to cut off our exit."

He was quiet for a few seconds more before shaking his head and correcting himself.

"Tried to cut off my exit."

Edited 2018-10-07 11:51 (UTC)

"The General...?"

Stance spoke before thinking, his head full of too many thoughts to process all at once, his mouth moving before he could shake off that sudden, desperate need to know.

The first time he had met General Billaba, she'd told him to take off his helmet. She had wanted to see the faces of the men under her command. And that was all he'd needed to hear to know that he had been stationed under the best of the best.

Kanan pulled in another slow breath.

"'Go,'" he said, his voice low, his words grim. "'I'll be right behind you.'"

He'd run.

He'd turned around just in time to see Grey gun her down.

And then he'd run some more.

Stance's mind was reeling. It felt a little bit like dying all over again, that sudden shock to the system. If he hadn't been sitting now, he would have staggered under the weight of it all.

Every clone?

Every Jedi?

"I... I don't understand," he managed, finally. That was the best he had.

"Neither did I," Kanan replied, shaking his head. "I don't think I ever completely will."

They had said that it wasn't their fault.

They had said that something had taken control of their heads.

They had killed everyone.

"Grey and Styles survived that night," he continued, grim shifting to numb. "They had missed a Jedi, after all. Followed me everywhere I went with the surviving members of Rostu Squad, just a step behind. Caught up with me on Lahn." A soft breath. "You would've liked Lahn. Beaches, forests. More beaches. Would've been a great place to spend some downtime after the war."

There hadn't been downtime after the war. That had never stopped Caleb and Stance from speculating about what they wanted to do with themselves once they'd saved the whole galaxy, just the two of them.

"Maybe before I leave, we can go swimming, buddy," Stance said, offering Caleb a smile he didn't at all feel. "It'll be just like the real thing."

He was met with silence.

He didn't much blame him for that. He wasn't feeling it, either.

"You said they were gone, too."

And Caleb was not.

"They took me prisoner instead of executing me on sight," Kanan explained. "Don't entirely know where they were taking me. I don't know that they knew, either."

He swallowed, his voice tight.

"Styles was the one who caught me. I was standing in front of this ship when it happened. Took a rifle butt to the face, woke up on a cruiser to him and Grey arguing about how he didn't just execute me on the spot." He glanced at Stance, who was staring at him in silent horror all over again. "They called me a traitor. I... I never did... None of us ever..."

"You were a kid," Stance pointed out, looking down toward his feet, toward the hull of the starship they were perched on. "A dangerous kid. We both were. But not a traitor."

"I told them that." Another swallow. Another breath. "The Jedi didn't betray the Republic, we died with it. Palpatine used the clones to destroy us, get us out of the way so that he could have his Empire. They didn't seem all that interested in listening."

He glanced at Stance for a moment.

No, right now he couldn't handle that face.

He closed his eyes instead. Felt his friend's presence in the Force. Let himself take comfort in that, instead.

"I think maybe somebody did, though."

"How do you mean?" Stance chewed the inside of his cheek a moment before adding, "You were on a Gozanti cruiser manned by the Republic's finest, Caleb. People don't just escape those."

"My options were to be executed by my friends for a betrayal I didn't commit, or to blow myself out the airlock," Kanan explained, quietly. "I chose the airlock."

"What the hell, Caleb?!"

Kanan held up his hands in a placating gesture.

"I put my trust in the Force and I chose the airlock," he amended. Stance... didn't seem terribly reassured, but since Kanan was sitting here right now having this conversation, he couldn't exactly argue the results. "A friend was outside, with another ship besides. My timing was good; I survived the pickup and came back around with enough time to give the order to fire. A pair of freighters. We're sitting on one of them."

Stance stared at Caleb for a few long moments. And then squinted.

And then leaned back again, still squinting. And frowned.

"Two small freighters took down a Gozanti Cruiser."

He was willing to entertain this story to the end, but that sounded a hell of a lot like a big, steaming heap of--

Oh.

"Somebody took the shields down from the inside," he breathed. "Somebody listened."

"Somebody listened," Kanan agreed, quietly. "Grey, I think. He called out to me before I pushed the button. You don't try to stop someone from spacing themselves if you're planning on just killing them anyway."

Unless you really wanted that pleasure for yourself. But that was what Styles had been going on about when he'd brought him onto the cruiser in the first place. Grey had never been the sort.

"Nah," Stance agreed quietly. "Nah, you don't."

He hesitated for a long while. Reached out, and put a hand on Caleb's shoulder.

"I understand, Caleb."

Kanan winced, opened his eyes, and looked Stance's way.

"Understand...?"

"Why you didn't know me to see me," Stance replied. "Why you pulled your blaster. Why... why you said it was better that I had died before. Now I understand it, I think in some twisted way I'm grateful for that small mercy, too."

He died protecting a friend.

Most of his brothers had died betraying theirs.

"Battles leave scars," he noted. "Some you can't see."

"Battles leave scars," Kanan echoed. He sighed, and then leaned sideways to rest his shoulder against Stance's. "Yeah, I suppose they do."

"Yeah."

Stance sighed too, settling in to watch the sun rise, content to sit in companionable silence with his friend, at least for the time being.

Caleb had been right. It was pretty.

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The Roof of the MCA, Sunday Morning

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