From the Preserve to MCA, Saturday

[2_old_for_this]

It was fairly quiet out here in the preserve; the odd animals seemed uninterested in Peter, which was fine with him. He wasn't out here to animal-watch.

It had gotten oppressive in his apartment, the walls seeming to press on him along with the memories. He still needed to do more, though. The magic was coming back to him, and he needed to remember more.

The air crackled slightly around him as he sank to his knees and took a deep breath. He cupped his hands together, channeling the excess energy into a ball, then pushing it away to dissipate in the air. He took another breath and sank back into the memories of Hell, searching for what he needed. From the outside, it might look like meditation, if you ignored the expression on his face.



[Expecting one!]

Comments

[uncertain_dume]

"I can think of at least four off the top of my head," Kanan shared, "and I haven't even met all that many people since I arrived here. I can guarantee you that you'll catch the attention of at least one or two, and I don't think all of them will be willing to overlook having lightning thrown at them."

Not to mention that seething aura. It still had Kanan on edge, and he sort of knew Peter.

Well, Peter had bought him a coffee that one time, and Stance seemed to like him. That was something, right?

[2_old_for_this]

Dogs were great judges of character!

"I think...I should remember enough now to put up a bit of a barrier in my apartment. At least help block out a bit." Peter turned his head to look at Kanan. "How much magic do you know?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Magic in the same sense as you'd know it?" Kanan shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. "Probably none. I..."

He tapered off, eyeing Peter for a few moments, and then heaved a sigh. His hand reached up to run through his hair. Usually pulling his hair back stopped him from making that stupid gaffe, but there he was, with his fingers to the knuckles in chestnut hair, and nowhere to go because of the hair-tie.

Damn it.

"I have other things I can fall back on. No fancy lightning fingers, though."

[2_old_for_this]

"Things like what?" Peter asked. "You can feel magic, you said?"

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan blew out a breath, then made a face and tugged his fingers free. Right. Fine. Master Kenobi was going to swear up and down that this was a safe place to be a Jedi? Then Kanan was going to take him at his word.

"I can feel a lot of things. I could see the power that was gathering around you in the preserve. Not half as well as some people could, but I'm... working on that."

Probably against his better judgment, mind.

[2_old_for_this]

"So you're a natural talent, but not really trained?" Peter asked.

[uncertain_dume]

Eesh, that part was complicated, wasn't it?

"I'm a natural talent, and I was trained for the first fourteen years of my life," Kanan replied, frowning. "And then I quit. Completely. I only picked it up again after coming here. It's a long story."

It wasn't that long a story.

[2_old_for_this]

"Longer than mine?" Peter asked, giving Kanan a crooked smile.

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan made at least a cursory attempt to give Peter a stinkeye for that one.

It was fairly halfhearted. Kanan definitely couldn't compete with a thousand years, no.

"Everyone in my Order was betrayed, hunted down, and systematically murdered in cold blood by the people we marched into war alongside." There was a rough edge to his voice that wasn't usually there. This wasn't something he talked about. Ever. "So I stopped being what they were hunting for."

[2_old_for_this]

Peter winced. "Sorry." Sure, shadows had been hunted down and murdered, but they'd never thought the church were their allies. "I've had to hide too, but it's probably not the same thing."

[uncertain_dume]

"Who knows?" Kanan shrugged, a gesture of dismissal meant to signal that he'd really had enough of talking about that for the time being. "Either way, I'm a bit rusty. But it's still there. It never did completely go away, no matter how much I tried to will it to."

[2_old_for_this]

"Your enemies could feel the magic, too?" Peter guessed. That, he'd experienced.

[uncertain_dume]

"Some could," Kanan allowed with a sigh. "The ones who couldn't had been working alongside us for long enough that they knew us to see us. No Force sensitivity required."

[2_old_for_this]

"And if you used magic to look different, the feel would give you away?" Peter grimaced. He made a note of the different terminology, but didn't think much of it.

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan considered that for a moment. He supposed that could be done, at that, though it was a trick that he'd never learned. Maybe he would, someday.

Maybe not.

"Not to the troopers, it wouldn't have," he acknowledged. "But my training hadn't come far enough for me to have the slightest clue where to start with something like that. Some kind of Force persuasion, but not my strong point. There's tech that could have done it. Not all holos are blue and flickery, but I didn't exactly have the resources to scrape something like that up."

Hell, he'd spent weeks eating garbage on Kaller, afraid to sleep. He would have loved to have some kind of holo disguise, back then.

[2_old_for_this]

Only about half of that made sense to Peter, but he could figure it out.

"I knew people who could do that, but I never needed to learn it, or I'd show you." He'd just shapeshift if he needed to. "Sorry."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan gave his shoulder a shrug, and gave Peter an uneasy smile.

"I never really did bother so much with the mind tricks," he admitted. "And besides, they wouldn't work on any species resistant to the Force. Or droids. The galaxy's got a lot of droids."

You couldn't mind-whammy something that didn't in the most technical sense of the word actually have a mind.

"My way's worked well enough until I wound up here, anyway. And people keep assuring me that here, it's mostly irrelevant. So..." He shrugged. "I'm learning again. But I do at least have enough to be able to keep an eye out, if you want."

[2_old_for_this]

"That would probably be a good idea," Peter agreed. "You don't mind?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Nah." Kanan shrugged again, and then reached forward to scratch Stance behind one ear. "You seem like a decent person, even if you did go all Sith Lord on me back there."

Yeah, still not over the lightning.

"And if it's something I can do..." He waved a hand. "I mean, don't go around telling people, they might get the wrong idea and think I'm good people or something."

[2_old_for_this]

Peter grinned. "My lips are sealed. What's a Sith Lord?"

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan sighed, and then made a reach for what was left of his tea.

"There's another long story in that one, though I suppose we've got the time, don't we?" He took a sip. He was starting to see why Obi-Wan seemed to always have the stuff on hand. "It's all about light and dark. Peace and passion. Checks and balances and that whole... thing."

[2_old_for_this]

"I'm not going anywhere right now." Peter shrugged.

[uncertain_dume]

"Right," Kanan replied, and then stared into his tea for a moment. Okay. Just a casual chat about the Force. No big deal. "Where I'm from, there's a... an energy field, that connects all living things in the galaxy. That's what I'm talking about when I mention the Force. And it lets people who are sensitive to it do some pretty remarkable things. Things that most people aren't capable of."

Kanan was going to skip all the midi-chlorian babble. It looked like Peter was confused enough about the things coming out of his mouth without getting into microscopic force-sensitive beings that lived in the bloodstream.

"There are a lot of different interpretations of the Force. A lot of people who use it differently. But the two most commonly known groups are... were.. the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi align themselves with the light, and the Sith with the dark." He waved vaguely toward Peter's hands. "The Sith are also a bit notorious for their affinity for shooting lightning bolts from their hands."

[2_old_for_this]

"Oh." Peter glanced down at his hands for a second. "Yeah, what you call the Force sounds like magic to me. It's in everything, but not everyone can tap into it. Hell, I didn't really know I could before. Not really. Now..."

He concentrated briefly and sent a green glow flowing down his arms to pool around his mug, heating the tea a bit more before it dissipated.

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan watched with interest, paid attention both with his eyes and through the Force, not really because he didn't trust that Peter wasn't tapping into the dark side, but because, so help him, he was curious about whether there were all that many differences between the Force and Peter's 'magic' in the first place.

Results: Inconclusive. Whether that was because Kanan was so out of practice really remained to be seen.

"I've been aware of the Force and its role in my life since as far back as I can remember," he noted, shrugging it off. There would be plenty of time to figure that much out later. "It's hard to picture who I would be if I had never known it."

Maybe he'd have family. Where that family was, he had no idea. It wasn't as though he remembered his homeworld, after all. He certainly wouldn't be taking a little breath and then levitating his own cup over to set it neatly on the table beside himself, the way he was now.