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“We need to talk.”
Ezra walked away from her, and it rankled, that she should have any news about his parents and wait one single second to tell him. Ezra’s shoulders drooped under some invisible weight, and she imagined him disappearing into some frigid corner of the hold, alone. Why did he need to be by himself?
“Yes. We do.”
“Fine by me. I’ve got a project anyway.” Sabine shoved Kanan’s shoulder on the way by, her affectionate way of saying “Glad you’re back.”
“Everything all right?” Zeb asked.
“Yeah.” Kanan nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Now. I just…need to figure some things out.”
“Fair enough. Chopper and I can disappear. Somebody has to man the cockpit.”
Chopper blatted out a complaint.
“What, you don’t want to fly the ship around and make us all sick?”
Another angry response.
“Aww, come on, Chop.” Zeb made some sloppy assumptions about what the astromech was saying virtually always, but he also knew when to get out of the way.
“Bunk?” Hera asked, and Kanan nodded, following her to her marginally more private quarters. The whole ship echoed, but her room, with the hum of electronic equipment on one side, had marginally better soundproofing.
Hera palmed the door shut and was turning with her mouth open and the words “Zeebo thinks Ezra’s parents might still be alive,” on her lips, when Kanan beat her to the punch. “Ezra tapped into something dark today.” She stood, mouth still open. His eyes were unfocused, staring at a point a meter or so from the bottom of the door. Distant, but he obviously expected a response.
She didn’t know what he meant. “Tapped into?”
“With the Force.”
“Yes, dear, I thought so. But what does that mean, he ‘tapped into’ it?” It was one thing to walk along a path and accidentally encounter some scary thing. It was quite another to make that thing an ally.
Kanan shrugged. He didn’t look spectacular, himself. Hera gentled her tone. “All right, maybe you’d better tell me the story.”
“Right.” He ran a hand back through his hair, found it neatly bound out of the way, and stopped mid-gesture. “He’d done so well.” A long frown.
“Story, love,” she reminded him gently.
“Okay.” Kanan took a deep breath. “We found those creatures right where you left them. Same hanger, same everything. And we had time to prepare.”
“You stayed IN there with them?!”
He blinked and met her eyes fully. “They’re just animals, Hera.”
“And…they didn’t try to eat you.”
“Well, they did at first. That’s why it was a good test for Ezra.”
“Kanan Jarrus!”
That got her a piece of a grin. “You’d do the same thing.”
“…All right. Maybe. Moving along.”
“He passed. Hera, he did so well. We were one with the Force, we were in tune with creatures, we were…at peace. And then the Inquisitor showed up with his goons. And we did okay. But it wasn’t… enough. I…” he cleared his throat, and she knew she wasn’t going to like this part. “I ended up dueling him.”
“Of course you did.”
That sheepish look told her that he probably even enjoyed it, on some level. Kanan had been such a relief. She often put herself in danger, and mostly, she could judge her own abilities. But other people, she always had to keep an eye on. Kanan… No matter what they faced, he was seldom in any real danger. She’d let her guard down, assuming that he was safe, and now this Inquisitor was chasing him, and she was learning to worry again.
He must have picked up on that thought. “Well, don’t worry, next time we’ll come up with some other approach. I got my ass handed to me.”
She winced in sympathy.
He cleared his throat again. This was going to be the tough part. “As I was coming to–”
“So you were unconscious.” Of course he’d failed to mention that when they returned. She could feel her own eyebrow raise.
“Listen. The whole room felt…cold. And at first I thought it was just me, but then I saw… The pebbles. Every single rock and scrap and piece of trash in the bay, just hanging there in the air.”
What could do that? Hera’s hands felt cold inside the gloves.
“Ezra?” she guessed quietly.
He gave a quick nod. “His eyes…weren’t… normal. He wasn’t there. Or he WAS there, it was just some alternate version of Ezra. And then this big beast lumbered up behind him, straight out of a fiery pit, I could not make this up if I tried, and went for the Inquisitor.”
“He’s dead?” She should feel worse. That niggling dread at the thought of Ezra killing was almost completely overwhelmed by relief at the thought that the Inquisitor might be gone.
“No, it just kept him busy. Ezra passed out and for a minute I didn’t know…” He swallowed. “I grabbed him and ran for it.”
“He was possessed by something, then.” It didn’t sound like Ezra, to begin with.
“No, Hera. He wasn’t fully in control of himself. He was channeling something bigger, sure. But it was HIM. He made the choice.”
“Okay. Then he was protecting you.” She didn’t understand, not logically, why this upset Kanan so much. They fought life and death battles every day. But she could tell that he WAS upset, so the pit of her stomach felt sick, too, and she needed a reason to make it okay. “He was afraid.”
“Yeah. That’s the problem.”
“You’re going to have to explain this one to me, love. You told him to use the monsters against the Imperials. That’s why you went to the base in the first place.”
“This was different.”
“I don’t see how.”
Kanan let out a frustrated breath, and she felt a pang of guilt. She wasn’t questioning him because she doubted his judgment, but it must have felt that way to him. She just didn’t understand. So she slipped off a glove, took his hand, and led him to the bench. “I’m sorry, love. Explain it to me.”
He nodded and considered a moment before trying. “It’s a difference in…intent. When you fight because you have to, or you fight to protect someone, you let the Force use you. You can’t ever really use IT. You just listen to the paths it makes available all around you, and you choose the best route.”
But Ezra was protecting YOU. She didn’t say it out loud, though, because he was still thinking about where to go next. “When you willfully alter those possibilities… you insist on your own will, or you bend someone’s mind in a way that’s against their character, or you just….keep fighting past the point where it’s necessary, because you want to hurt, you want revenge… then you open yourself up to the Dark Side.”
She considered. “You think he wanted to hurt the Inquisitor.”
“I think his eyes were blank, Hera. It’s not some kind of metaphor for behaving badly. It’s…a real force. He couldn’t have controlled that thing without calling on the Dark Side. It can…consume you. Eat up every bit of good judgment you had until the only thing that matters is getting your way and channeling more of that hate out into the galaxy.”
She imagined, for a flash of an instant, those volcanoes on Mustafar, spitting up endless lava. But she couldn’t see what that had to do with Ezra. None of this matched her knowledge of him.
Kanan finished. “That’s what Sith Lords are.”
“Inquisitors.”
“No. Much worse.”
“Kanan.” She took his hands again. He was worried, but not brooding. At least he had shared this with her, explained it all. But she still didn’t completely understand. “Kanan, that’s not Ezra. He’s a good boy. Annoying, willful even, but he’s a teenager. How many teenagers put their lives on the line to help other people? He’s good.”
“I know! I know. That’s why I never thought much about this before. I was always too worried about him getting killed in a firefight, or picked up by ISB. The less physical stuff took a backseat. But… I should have thought of this.”
And the next words out of his mouth were so predictable that she could have mouthed them right along with him. “This is my fault.”
“It is not your fault. This came out of the best impulses—he wanted to help you because he cares about you. He just took it too far. He’ll learn.”
Kanan sighed, and filed away that moment of guilt for worrying about later. “He’s going to have to. You know, this is the first time as an adult that the Jedi teaching of ‘no attachment’ made any sense to me.”
“You can’t think that compassion is a problem…”
“No. But passion is.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Hera–” he sighed for the fifteenth time, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed the top of her head. “It’s not… This is not about us. I love you. I don’t think that’s wrong.”
“Kanan. I never thought it was about us.” She chucked a finger under his chin. “Look at me. I have never had the least fear of you going bad. And you are as attached, as passionate, as they come. So—how do you give that to Ezra?”
He frowned, but they were thinking about solutions now. Even if they didn’t come up with a great answer, they were on the right track. “I don’t know. More…basics, I guess. More real Jedi training. I’ll think about what they did with me as a child, try to see what can be replicated.”
Hera had gleaned a few things about what they had done with, and to, Kanan over the years. “Just think about what it’s teaching him, okay? No tradition for the sake of tradition.”
“Fair enough.” He rubbed a tired hand over his face. “Okay. What were you going to tell me when we walked in?”
“Oh. Zeebo thinks Ezra’s parents are alive—or at least they were imprisoned instead of executed. He doesn’t know where they’re being held, though.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Never rains but it pours, huh?”
Hera knew when he was trying not to cry. “Kanan, what are you thinking?” He would try to protect Ezra at all costs. He wanted Ezra to have everything good in the galaxy. But he also worried obsessively. His first reaction might not be the best.
“He could get them back.” He opened his eyes and looked at her with an expression of such wonder she caught a glimpse of what he must have looked like as a child—unscarred. All of their scars were permanent hollow places. But now Ezra’s might heal—that’s what he was thinking. “He could be okay.”
Compassion.