Kanan Jarrus (spectre01) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-02-13 14:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, ahsoka tano, kanan jarrus |
Who: Kanan and Ahsoka
When: The day after this exchange
What: Ahsoka convinces Kanan Star Wars is real
Where: Local burger joint
Rating/Warning Low - some language
Status:Complete!
All Kanan could think about since the previous evening was what Ahsoka had told him over the network. She claimed Star Wars was real, and not only that but she could prove it to him. It was the most incredible claim he’d ever heard in his entire life, and Kanan had heard plenty of incredible claims. The most recent of which had come straight from an old friend who said the current reality they currently lived in wasn’t the only reality. There were several of them in fact and furthermore for some inexplicable reason the people around here could see into those different realities and become the people they were in them.
It had been a lot for Kanan to process at the time, but after a few demonstrations of Lina’s new found abilities as a sorceress, he’d had no choice but to accept what she had said. Now, this girl, Ahsoka, was attempting to bend his mind further by claiming that Star Wars, of all things, was one of those realities. That had been the proverbial straw. It was one thing to postulate that other worlds, other realities, existed, it was another thing altogether to claim that something that was clearly a work of fiction was, in fact, real.
She claimed she could prove it, so Kanan called her bluff. He agreed to meet her at noon at a local burger place. He arrived about fifteen minutes early to check the place out himself as was a habit when he was meeting someone for the first time. He could check for potential traps or ambushes, and in this case, any tricks. Satisfied that the restaurant was as legit as they came, Kanan ordered a soda and took a seat in a booth and waited for Ahsoka to arrive.
Bragging wasn't exactly the Jedi way, but Ahsoka had stopped being a Jedi what felt like a long time ago. Besides, they weren't movies. They were real and she had to prove that to him. But then with Kanan she'd discovered he'd often had to come to terms with things on his own.
Leaving her charm at home, she walked into the burger joint. A six foot tall Togruta, wearing a black trench coat, faded jeans and a loose-fitting shirt. To anyone who wasn't a dreamer she looked human enough. But unless she wore her charm, a dreamer would see her a she normally was.
And she was leaving her charm at home more and more often these days.
She ordered two meals, and then brought them over to Kanan and set a tray in front of him. "Figure you could use a meal."
Ahsoka sat across from him, and floated the salt into the air. "Salt?"
Okay so she wasn't feeling very zen today.
How exactly does one react when someone plunks themselves down right in front of you looking very decidedly alien? Kanan had absolutely no idea, so he opted to stare. He’d been doing that a lot lately, he realized. First with Leliana’s weird-ass pets, then with Lina’s magic and now this. Numbly he reached out to take the salt out of the air. He forced his eyes from Ahsoka, the white markings on her face and her head-thingies to look at it. It appeared to be a normal every day salt shaker, cheap and plastic and very run-of-the-mill. There was no fishing wire or any other filament attached to it that would give it the appearance of floating around.
Kanan glanced at the other people in the restaurant. No one else seemed to take notice of the alien girl in their midst, which was both a relief and extremely disconcerting. It also raised so many questions, he had no idea where to even start.
“How…?” Oh, yes, that was eloquent.
It was cheating, and impatience wasn’t very Jedi nor was she being very zen about it, but Ahsoka was also stubborn. And not feeling particularly patient. But she gave him a smile with carnivorous teeth. “The Force, it flows through everything, remember? I woke up one morning, and I could feel it. And gradually over time, my powers got stronger. And then I changed, physically. I even have my lightsabers. All four of them. The first two came from dreams. The second two came unfinished and I had to put them together myself.”
She’d felt more of a connection to her white blades than to the yellow and green blades she’d had for so long now. It was hard to explain, but it was like she’d lost sync with the older ones. Maybe putting them together in this world had caused that. She didn’t know.
It took a moment for Kanan to really regain control over both his thoughts and his voice. “Remember?” He asked. “Remember what? You say ‘The Force’ that like I’m supposed to know what the hell that’s supposed to mean. I watched the first Star Wars trilogy when I was a kid and I haven’t actually seen the new movie yet. So, no, Ahsoka, I don’t remember.”
It was weird calling them “movies” with her sitting across from him looking so alien. He had called her bluff and she had shown her cards and won the hand. He couldn’t call bullshit anymore. She herself was irrefutable proof that Star Wars was an actual thing. Calling them movies seemed inappropriate now.
He also didn’t mean to snap at her. It was just that ever since he’d first arrived here every time he turned around someone was shoving something in his face that was blowing his mind. There was really only so much a guy could take before he lost his shit.
On top of it, he sort of did know what she was talking about. After the dream he had woken up feeling odd. Not a bad sort of odd as if he’d drank too much the previous night. This odd was as if the universe had reached out and tapped him on the forehead and said “Good morning, Kanan. I have things to tell you, so you’d better shut up and listen.”
Kanan sighed and again reminded himself that he was in Orange County for a reason and that he couldn’t leave until that reason had been fulfilled. He sighed and picked up his soda. “So, you’re a Jedi, then,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t bet any actual money on this. You could have had the shirt off my back. You weren’t in my dream last night. So what does all this mean?”
She almost wanted to hit on him. He was cute. But Hera would kill her if she tried anything. Hera wasn't even here and she'd find a way to kill her if she tried anything and that really wasn't worth the trouble.
"You said you were at a temple. That meant you were a youngling, maybe even a Padawan," she pointed out. She had wondered if he sensed anything yet. The world had changed forever for her that day, and honestly she just wanted to warn him. She would have liked to have been warned.
"I don't know what any of it means. Maybe there's a chance to fix something. I'm only three or four years older than you, but we won't really meet until we're both adults." After the Jedi had fallen, and the Empire had risen. She gestured between them. "You're older than me here, I'm older there. Kind of messed up isn't it?""
“Padawan,” Kanan repeated. That was what Master Depa Billaba had called him in the dream. He had felt a strange and strong connection to her in that dream and somehow, without explanation, it had carried over into reality in such away that he almost felt as though he were grieving and he had no idea why. “Yeah,” he said with a nod. “That’s...that’s what I was. I had all kinds of questions about this signal or something Master Obi Wan was telling us about.” Man this was weird, how natural it felt to talk about these before thought fictional characters as if they were real. “I asked him if it could be used to warn the Jedi away from Coruscant.”
He shook his head as if trying to clear cobwebs from a clouded memory. It was useless, however, as nothing became any more clear. So much for the universe telling him shit. He sighed and ran the heel of his palm along the side of his temple, a habit he hadn’t performed since he’d been a kid. He looked at Ahsoka out of the corner of his eye. The more he looked at her, the less odd she appeared. “You’re older than me in your dreams? Heh, isn’t that a kick. How old are you now? 19? 20, maybe?” A pause and he thought about Master Depa Billaba again. “You said maybe there’s a chance to fix something. Is that what these dreams are for? So we can stop something from happening? Or change something that did?”
Ahsoka stiffened as she listened to Kanan speak. As if she knew what he was talking out. And worse, she'd seen that message. She'd played it a hundred times. A faint hope that old friends had somehow survived. And she knew now that Kenobi had. Or at least a shadow of him had. Anakin had died that day too, at least in a figurative sense. She exhaled slowly, and it almost came out like a snort.
"Nineteen." Her snort turned into a sigh. "Maybe. Or maybe it's a second chance to live. The Jedi never really gave us that chance. I was fifteen when I became a commander in the Army. I was sixteen when I left the Order."
Kanan gave her an odd look. That seemed very young to him to be in command of anything, much less an army. Is that what the Jedi did? Kanan wasn’t a man of very many morals, but turning children into soldiers was something that had never sat well with him. He frowned slightly. “Is that why you left?” He asked her, “because the Jedi never gave you the chance to live?” He hesitated asking his next question for a couple of reasons. First because it seemed selfish to ask, and secondly because he really wasn't sure if he wanted to hear the answer. “Do you know what happens to me?”
“I gave everything to them, and when I needed them to have my back they threw me to the wolves. Then when I’d proven I was innocent they had the gall to tell me it had all been a test. That I’d passed my trials.” Ahsoka took an angry bite of her burger. It was still recent enough in her memories to hurt, even if in her dreams it had been years before and she’d healed. “So I realized I had to find my own path.”
She set her burger down, wondering how much to tell him. She didn’t even know all of the details. “You survive the war, and lose your way for a time. Kind of like how I was lost. When I meet you, you were just starting to find it again.”
Kanan frowned, it was obvious he was liking what he was hearing less and less. The movies would have you believe that the Jedi were the ultimate Good, fighting the forces of the Dark Side and the Empire - the ultimate Evil. However, their entire system seemed beyond flawed. Robbing children of their childhoods, sending them off to war, turning on their own only to backpedal and claim they were testing them. It was all incredibly messed up as far as he was concerned.
He’d apparently survived “the war”. Not being a huge Star Wars fanboy, Kanan wasn’t sure what Ahsoka meant at first. Was she talking about the Clone Wars? She had to have been it was the only other war Kanan knew of. He was just a kid in his Dreams, just how long had the Clone Wars lasted? Then again, as was already stated, the Jedi weren’t above sending children into battle.
His burger still sat in front of him mostly untouched. “Jesus,” he sat back in his seat. “I don’t know if I should be relieved to hear that or not. How long are we...lost?”
It was messed up. Ahsoka would be the first to admit that. She’d idolized the Jedi, first as a youngling and then as a padawan and it had all come crumbling down. That didn’t mean she didn’t mourn the dead, or mourn the peace that had been lost.
“I don’t know about you. I only know what I’ve gleaned from Hera. But I wandered for years.” She hadn’t been alone the whole time, but she had sought out solitude much of the time. “I don’t know how long you were working with her when I recruited her for the rebellion.”
“Hera?” Kanan repeated the name. It meant nothing to him, but Ahsoka said they worked together. That didn’t sound quite right. Kanan preferred to work alone. It was safer that way, at least for him. And without any ties to a specific place or person if he needed to pack up and take off, he could without any explanation. It was convenient and more importantly it kept him alive.
He’d mulled over the strange name for a moment before he realized the second part of what Ahsoka had said. She had recruited this Hera person into the rebellion. Again, Kanan’s knowledge of Star Wars was limited to what he’d seen in the movies, but he knew who the rebels were: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and all the others who had blown up the Death Star and gallivanted around a galaxy far, far away opposing Darth Vader and the Emperor. He wondered if that made him a rebel too. That didn’t sound like him either. Kanan would have considered himself more of a Han Solo than a Jedi...but even Han Solo had joined the rebellion.
He glanced down at the burger in front of him. It was likely cold by now. He didn’t really want it. What he wanted was a goddamn cigarette. Ahsoka had bought it, however, and it would have been a waste to throw it out. He picked it up as he raised his eyes to the girl across from him. “I still don’t know if I’m relieved to hear any of this or not, but at least I have an idea of what to expect.” He gave her a bit of a rueful smirk. “I survive at least, that’s good to hear. Would suck to die in one of these dreams.”
"One of the best pilots I've ever seen, and I've seen the best," Ahsoka commented. Of course, one of those pilots was Anakin and the other was her, but still. Good pilots were rare, great pilots even more so.
She felt a pang of regret and sadness. Many days lately, she'd wished there was a way to change things for the people she dreamed about.
"I've heard of people who did dream of their deaths, but that part didn't affect them at least. You might start waking up with scars though." She wondered what would happen if someone lost a limb in the dreams. "But I haven't dreamed in a month, not anything new. You were alive last I saw."
Should she warn him about Ezra? Ezra might be worth warning about, he was a handful, but Ahsoka decided to let Kanan find that for himself.
Kanan took a bite out of the burger. He’d been right, it had gotten cold, but it was still edible and all things considered, not that bad. He chewed while silently reflected on everything Ahsoka had told him. It was a lot to take in and completely changed his perspective of the movies. He made a mental note to do some research online into the whole Star Wars universe and brush up on history that apparently was his own. This whole thing was going to turn him into such a nerd.
“So injuries can come over from Dreamland as well,” he noted before taking another bite. “Good to know so I can be prepared for it.” He wondered exactly what he’d be doing to get some of those scars, if anything. “And speaking of that kind of thing…” he eyed her carefully, trying to choose the wording of his next question very carefully. “How is it you can go around, uh, looking like...uh…” he made a vague gesture to indicate her appearance.
“That’s my understanding. Luckily I never took a lightsaber badly.” She could only imagine waking up gutted or limbless - her encounter with the Sith in the fog with Anakin but she refused had shown her exactly how both of those things felt and she never wanted to experience them again.
She looked around. “Most people don’t seem to notice. Like they’re not tuned in to see people who look different. I usually have a charm that helps, gives me a human appearance, but I left it at home today.”
More thoughtful chewing as Kanan glanced around the restaurant. Everyone around them was carrying on with their lives blissfully unaware of the serious conversation taking place between two Jedi in a booth. No one so much as even gave Ahsoka a second glance. The whole thing was so bizarre. So surreal. This was the kind of thing he’d have to learn to accept if he was planning on staying here for any length of time, and he hadn’t made up his mind about that yet. On the one hand he was curious to see just how far down this rabbit hole went. On the other, he was afraid of what he might find if and when he reached the bottom. For all he knew, the rabbit hole was a bottomless pit. How far would he fall before losing his mind?
He shook his head slightly. Lina and Leliana seemed perfectly sane and both of them had been here for a while now. And Ahsoka, as short tempered as she’d first come off as, also seemed perfectly normal, all things considered. Kanan tapped a finger against the side of his hamburger bun thoughtfully.
“You said earlier that maybe the dreams are a second chance to live?” He raised an expectant brow at her. “Is that what you’re doing, Ahsoka? Are you living?”
It was a neverending rabbit hole and Ahsoka was pretty sure she’d lost her mind a long time ago. Sometimes it was nice to have normal concerns, but even her crushes were on extremely powerful people, some of them with emotional issues that could destroy the world if unchecked. So normal wasn’t really a thing any more.
“..I thought I was.” She tapped her fingers on the table, before stilling them. “I work, I train, I play. I have all the normal crap someone my real age should go through. Learning to balance the force with being a person. The kind of stuff the Jedi never taught me. Don’t believe the crap they’ll teach you about compassion and relationships, anyway.” She wondered how many jedi fell over the years because they repressed everything until it exploded.
Kanan’s brows furrowed. He didn’t understand what she meant. He’d only had the one Dream so far, of being a Padawan full of questions to the point that his classmates (Padawanmates?) groaned and rolled their eyes when he’d raised his hand and shouted out his question about the beacon’s possible usage. They had all taken what Master Obi Wan had said at face value, probably as they were supposed to, but it had been Caleb who had questioned it as if on instinct.
Kanan frowned slightly. Even in his dreams he couldn’t escape that goddamn name. It hadn’t been his in over a decade. He’d done everything he could to not be Caleb Dume and the dreams had reminded him of everything with a simple throw-away line.
He set his burger down. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean, but if I decide to stick around here, I’ll be sure to remember that,” he told her. He looked at her carefully. A teenage girl, child soldier, rebel leader all rolled into one. Kanan actually felt a little sorry for her. “If you believe the reason for the dreams are to give you - us - a second chance to live, then take advantage of it. There’s a difference between surviving and living, Ahsoka.” He grinned at her, “make sure you’re doing the living part and don’t think too much about it.”
Ahsoka didn't know if leavig Orange County would make the dreams go away. She knew people sometimes still dreamed on vacation. It was relentless and never ending and it changed a person. Ahsoka had something inside of her that meant she couldn't sit by and do nothing. But Kanan was right. There was a difference between living and surviving and the woman in the dreams had spent too many years not living.
"I'll try. I've been trying. But sometimes trying isn't enough."
“I understand,” Kanan said. “It took me a while to figure out the difference. I spent a long time just surviving long enough to see the next day. After a while I got tired of it and saw my only options were death,” he held out one hand, “or actually living,” he gestured with the other. “And seeing as I didn’t want to die any time soon, I chose to live. And here I am. It’s not an ideal life, but it’s mine and I make the best of it the way I know how.” Another bite of burger. He still planned to do that, even if everything he thought he knew had been turned on its head. “Basically, what I’m saying, Ahsoka, is that this is still your life, Force, Jedi, dreams or whatever are only a part of it, right?”
That was easy enough for Kanan to say. He’d only had one Dream. He had no idea what lay in store for him in the future and how it would change him whether he wanted it to or not.
“You’re right, it’s only a part of it. But there may come a point where the weight of the dreams tips the balance of the scales. And the question becomes what do we do with this power that we’ve been given.” She picked up her own burger to finish the last few bites, though her appetite had vanished, lost to the ether. The Jedi were worth rebuilding in that dream world. A chance to make things better. She just hoped they wouldn’t be needed here.