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]

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.

[2_old_for_this]

"I know that feeling," Peter said. He watched Kanan with equal interest. "If I'd never made the choices that I did..." If he'd never become a shadow, even if he hadn't died in the siege of Byzantium, where would he have ended up? Certainly not here. Not anywhere for the last millennium and a half.

[uncertain_dume]

"Not much to be done about any of it for either of us now, I suppose. Unless you know a trick that lets you travel through time, anyway. But I've crossed gone from star system to star system in a matter of hours, and time travel is still something I haven't quite figured out yet."

And space, would he have liked to.

[2_old_for_this]

"No." Peter finished his tea and set it down. "Time moves differently in different worlds, but as far as I know, it always moves forward."

[uncertain_dume]

"So, not much to do but go along for the ride," Kanan agreed. "I suppose, at the very least, 'forward' doesn't look like it's shaping up to be boring."

You had no idea yet, Kanan.