Who: Kanan and Katou What: Kanan finally finds Katou Where: The street When: Today, February 12th Rating/Warning: Low/none, other than the feels. Status: Complete
The girl exhaled through her nose, smoke wafting up before her eyes. It was still morning, and she was still waking up, the cardboard cold and hard under her but the rough jacket on top of her still warm, if not coarse. She wondered if she still had enough change from the day before to grab a coffee from the 7-11 down the street, but that could be something she worried about once she actually stood up.
She couldn’t remember anything but living on the streets of the OC, but that didn’t mean much since she couldn’t remember much past the last couple of weeks. She couldn’t even remember her own name, which meant that she’d picked the first one that had stuck out at her: Kate. A name borrowed after seeing a Kate Moss billboard. It was good enough, really.
Once her cigarette burned down to the filter, she tossed it aside and sat up. Then, with much difficulty due to only having one arm, she did her best to cram the jacket and her cardboard into an old backpack she’d managed to get ahold of from one of the shelters. She really could do with one of those 7-11 coffees, with a whole lot of flavoured coffee sweetener.
Kanan was getting desperate. It had been two weeks since the Egg of Wormwood and he had spent every waking hour looking for Katou, and he wasn’t about to give up. From four o’clock in the morning, long before the sun was up, well into the evening, some days even after midnight Kanan was out looking. He knew Katou hadn’t perished with Rociel. He could feel him out there on the Force, where exactly was the issue. Orange County, as Kanan was discovering, was a very large place and Katou could literally be anywhere.
So Kanan followed his instincts. He’d checked all the hospitals first and when that hadn’t panned out, he’d checked the jails. When that yielded nothing Kanan started searching every nook and cranney of the county he could find. Every shop. Every store. Every bar. Every underpass. Every shelter. Every-everywhere. He knew that if he’d been able to, Katou would have contacted him somehow, that he hadn’t made Kanan think something had happened to him, much like what had happened to Wash. He was out there somewhere, alone, maybe confused and afraid. Kanan was desperate to find him.
It wasn’t easy looking for someone when you couldn’t see yourself. Sometimes he stood on a corner of a busy intersection, stopping anyone and everyone who passed by to show them a picture of Katou and asking them if they’d seen him. The answer was always no – if he got an answer at all. And when it appeared his efforts there were exhausted, he moved on to another intersection. Kanan searched until he literally dropped. The long hours were starting to turn him into just one of the faceless masses of transients he was now among hoping, against hope, to find this missing member of his family.
He was closer today than he had ever been before. He could feel something pulling him to this particular section of town. He was wandering, white cane in hand, resorting to calling Katou’s name in a desperate bid to get a response.
The name that the man was calling meant nothing to Kate, but the voice brought her up short from her struggle with the bag. She recognized the voice, which was something that Kate hadn’t really experienced before. She couldn’t place it, not at all, but it was familiar. It was familiar and warm and weirdly safe.
She gave up on her jacket and instead just grabbed her sword and headed toward him. “You looking for someone, old man?” she asked once she fell into step beside him.
The voice that had suddenly come up next to Kanan wasn’t at all familiar, but there was something about the way she said “old man” that caught Kanan’s attention. Something niggled at the back of his head telling him …something.
The Force is trying to tell you something….listen to it…
Oh if only the Knight took his own goddamn advice.
“Yeah,” he answered carefully. His face turned towards the sound of the girl next to him. His faded teal eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses, the scars across his nose and temples just visible under the frames. Despite being sightless, those eyes narrowed in consideration. “I’m looking for my friend. A member of my family, really. His name is Yue Katou. Here...I got a picture.” Kanan juggled his cane under his arm as he reached for Katou’s picture. His leather jacket pulling back away from his side to reveal the hilt of his lightsaber attached to his belt.
“He disappeared two weeks ago,” Kanan went on as he produced the photo from the inside breast pocket of his jacket. “Right before the black-out and the earthquakes…” He trailed a moment. That niggling was more intense now. He knew this girl. He knew that he knew her. Her presence was so goddamn familier. If Kanan didn’t know better…
“We were fighting an angel…” he trailed carefully.
If Kate thought that the man’s voice sounded familiar, it was nothing compared to the man’s face. There were stirrings of memory there, and she stared, not quite able to pull her gaze from his face. Even when he produced the photo, it took Kate a couple of moments to pull her gaze from his face, a feeling inside her saying that all the answers she’d been looking for for the last two weeks were behind those sunglasses.
But looking at the man was nothing compared to what she felt when she looked at the photo. Without thinking, she ripped it from the man’s hands and stared at it, her stomach lurching. She knew him. She knew she knew him. She raised a hand to forehead as if doing so would somehow make this make sense.
Even though Kanan couldn’t see her, he was aware that the girl calling herself Kate was staring at him. Much he same way one can tell when someone is looking at them from behind. It was the feeling of being watched. At first he thought it was due to his eyes. The girl couldn’t see them, of course, hidden under his sunglasses, but it was very obvious to anyone looking at Kanan that he was blind. He was used to people staring at him, even if they didn’t mean to. It was natural to stare at something that struck you as out of the ordinary.
However, something was telling Kanan it was more than just his blindness that had caught the girl’s attention. She hadn’t responded to his claim that he and Katou had been fighting an angel. Most people would have considered the statement to be odd, even if they were momentarily distracted. This girl, however, was so distracted by first Kanan’s face and than the picture. The picture. She practically tore it when she snatched it from Kanan’s hand. The sudden movement caught him off guard, but he didn’t react in anger or annoyance. There was meaning behind the girl’s actions. Kanan also noted the sound of something clinking. Metal. He’d heard it before. A sword….?
Kanan let the girl take the picture to stare at. “His name is Yue Katou,” he repeated. “My name is Kannan Jarrus. Yue is a part of my family and I’m very worried about --” Kanan cut himself off before the word “you” came tumbling out. Why did he want to say that? Why did he want to make this girl Katou…?
The Force is telling you something, Caleb. Pay attention to it…
Carefully, Kanan took his sunglasses off, revealing faded eyes surrounded by angry scars. “You know him, don’t you?....and you know me.”
When Kanan removed his sunglasses, Kate tore her eyes away from the picture of the boy and looked into his eyes. They didn't look back, but something in her brain clicked into place. A stranger stepping in to stop her from getting dinged for shoplifting and giving her a job. Moving into the spare room of the house.
You're the only family I have.
If there were any passerbys watching at that moment, they may have been surprised to see the girl’s wavy back hair shorten and straighten into a bleach blond, to see her grow a couple of inches and turn into a lanky Asian boy. Her eyes turned from blue to Brown, but the tears that were welling up in them didn't change.
“Kanan?” Katou asked, his voice trembling.
Relief flooded through Kanan when he heard that voice. The damage done to his eyes made it impossible for him to cry. But if he still could have, he would have out of sheer releif to have found the missing member of his family again. “Yue,” he breathed. He pulled the younger man to him in a thankful embrace. “Thank god I found you. I was so worried. It’s ok. I got you now. You’re safe.”
Katou stepped into the embrace and with the only hand he had left, he grabbed the front of Kanan’s shirt. There was a part of him that was humiliated as he sobbed into Kanan’s chest, but he couldn’t stop himself. The memories were all flooding back now. All of them. Him losing the Egg and the Cross Rod. Him discovering that Rociel of all people was using the Cross Rod to murder innocent people. He had almost convinced himself that he didn’t give a shit about those people; he didn’t know them, and he didn’t owe them anything, but he had. He’d known he was responsible. And then Wash disappearing, another victim of Rociel. Another victim of Katou. Tamaki. Who knew how many others?
He’d ended the world. He’d ended the world in both his lives. He’d seen Rociel, and all he could think about was how he wanted to kill him for what he’d done. For what he’d done in the dreams, for everything he put Kira and Setsuna through. For what he’d done to Wash. And the whole purpose of his finding Rociel, of securing the Egg and getting it back to the Agency had been wiped from his mind. All he could think about was taking Rociel’s pretty little head off that neck of his. And when Rociel had healed from all the cuts Shiranui had inflicted, Katou had grabbed the one weapon he knew would work. He’d grabbed the Cross Rod, and had rammed it into Rociel’s chest and had released every bit of astral energy he had in himself and the Rod. And he couldn’t figure out why Rociel was laughing until Katou had seen the Egg, caught up in the light of his astral energy, begin to crack.
“I’m sorry,” Katou sobbed, words that he hadn’t uttered since he’d left his father’s house. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Kanan held Katou tightly as the younger man sobbed. He wasn’t at all put off by Katou’s tears. The young man gone through something terrible -- traumatic -- he would have been more concerned if Katou hadn’t been emotional. Kanan himself was emotional. Even if his eyes were unable to shed tears, his voice was deep and husky and his chest and shoulders shook with sobs that refused to be productive.
Neither he nor Carolina had been present when Katou had fought Rociel. They had been stalled outside fighting a mind-controlled Wash. Kanan had known even then that had been the entire point. Roceil had set out to separate them. Divide and conquer was a long standing and proven way to deal with one’s enemies. Kanan had hoped they would have been able to deal with Wash quickly, but he had proven to be far more resilient than Kanan had given him credit for. Of course that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The guy had been a marine for a decade. Kanan had cursed himself for falling into such an obvious trap and by the time he and Carolina had finally “won” – if you wanted to call beating the crap out of your girlfriend’s brother “winning” – the Egg had already hatched and a literal hell had broken loose on the county.
But it was over. Done and in the past. Kanan had no blame to place at Katou’s feet – or Wash’s for that matter. Both of them had been used and right at that moment all Kanan cared about was that he had Katou back. “I am too,” he said through his own dry sobs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there and that it took me so long to find you.”
Kanan shouldn’t have been apologizing to Katou. He’d don’t nothing worth apologizing for. Maybe it had taken him a while to find him, but at least he’d been looking. That was more than most people would have done. Katou wanted to say as much, but he didn’t trust him self to say anything coherently and he didn’t want to start wailing on top of his sobs. At least he could draw comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one blubbering in the middle of the street. It suddenly struck him what a sight they probably made, two grown men bawling in each other’s arms on the damn sidewalk.
He struggled for a couple of moments before he was able to get himself back under control, and then he took another couple of deep, calming breaths before he pulled away from Kanan. He looked at the cement between their feet, partially to avoid seeing if they had managed to attract an audience. “At least you looked,” he said quietly. His voice, he was embarrassed to notice, still wavered. He took another gulp of air. “Man, you should be glad you can’t see us right now,” he said, a little more bravado to his voice. “We look like a couplea chicks.”
Kanan didn’t give a fuck what the scene may have looked like to any passersby. He had his family back that was all that mattered. But Katou’s quip made him laugh anyway. “Yeah, I’m sure we do,” he agreed. He was grinning now. He couldn’t help it. All the anxiety and worry that had plagued him for the last two weeks had finally left now that he’d at last found Katou. It left him feeling almost giddy.
“Carolina was out looking too,” he added as he set his sunglasses on his face again, once more hiding his damaged -- but somehow still annoyingly sensitive -- eyes from the brightness of the sun. “Wash too.” He didn’t mention, for the time being, that Carolina had joined the search only after she’d been able to find her brother a week or so after their fight with Rociel. It seemed unnecessary. The family was back together again. That was all that mattered.
He reached for the white cane tucked under his arm and reached out to put an arm around Katou’s shoulders, “C’mone, let’s go home.”