Chapter Text
Rebellious 6
Part 1:“Disillusionment”
“Oh,” Kanan made a soft, disappointed noise.
In stories, told both by writers and whoever was responsible for the awful holo-dramas Sabine so loved to tear apart, regaining a lost sense always was described as something miraculous, something great and beautiful. It was the thing that brought tears and cries of joy.
It wasn't like that at all. The sudden flash of light was confusing and disturbing, not to mention a flash of sharp pain followed it before, thanks the Force, Maul did something that made his vision fade to black again.
Kanan was fearing the whole thing was just one big mistake after all. He was not going to say so, not when he knew how hard everyone was working for the sole reason of him regarding his vision, but still. There was that uneasy feeling in the lower part of his stomach and tension in his shoulders he couldn't shake off.
The cables running down his face, from the newly installed set of artificial eyes towards whatever Maul was holding to manipulate the prosthetics, were feather light and even the small movement of his head made them tickle against his suddenly hypersensitive skin.
“ What?” Maul asked.
“Nothing,” Kanan replied quickly. “ I was just startled.”
The former Sith didn't comment, but he clearly didn't buy the obvious lie either.
“I'm going to turn the sensitivity up again,” Maul declared instead.
Kanan nodded. This time he at least he was warned about what was about to happen and the time to psyche himself up for it.
Maul had the surprising decency to change things very slowly.
At first, there were just vague shapes in the darkness, a soft movements and shifts. Things one would usually notice with the corner of their eye, on the far end on the field of vision, where things were always blurry.
The darkness was decreasing steadily.
Maul was sitting in front of him, with a flat, book-sized device in his hands.
Kanan stared, having no idea what else there was for him to do.
The patterns covering his skin were much more complicated than Kanan remember them, placed in a way that they appeared to move along with every shift of a muscle. Other things however, were off. The colors, these were barely there and he surely remembered Mauls skin to be bright, bright red.
Kanan moved his head, deciding that looking at other things, things he knew so very well, things he was passing every day would somehow help.
“It is going to take more time,” Maul said.
“So, the colors are off?” Kanan asked, feeling relief washing over him. So, it wasn't just his imagination, adding things to the memories that weren't there.
“Yes.”
“It's all so… flat.”
“ It's partially because your field of vision is slightly different, “ Maul explained. “Wider. You don't have the blind spots in the corners of your eyes you're used to.”
“This is going to take some time to get used to,” Kanan smiled nervously, his hand automatically reaching up to brush his fingers against his temple. He shouldn't see the tips of his fingers in that position. Yet there they were, not blurred at all.
He touched his skin, or rather the place where his skin was supposed to be and suddenly the upper left side of his field of vision was filled with letters and long strings of numbers.
“Uh….”
“ Can you not?” Maul scolded him. He sounded very annoyed and looked even more so, with brow furrowed in a frustrated grimace, pale eyes shining bright, mouth locked in a scowl. Damn, he had ridiculously expressive face!
“Sorry!”
Maul rolled his eyes and pouted his lips, before doing something on his device. The letters disappeared.
“This is going to take even longer to get used to than I expected, isn't it?”
“If you continue to be so distracted it would surely do,” Maul agreed.
“It's hard not to be distracted,” Kanan admitted with a sigh. “It wasn't long, but… it's so different now!”
“It's not going to be the same,” Maul said. “It's not going to be even close.”
Kanan cocked his head to the side and then he grit his teeth. The movement was completely unnecessary and out of habit. He probably got used to express himself with his whole head since his eyes were covered, but now it worked against him. Everything shifted, too fast, too unexpected.
Kanan found himself wanting to close his eyes and being completely unable to do so. All he could do was fighting off the sudden wave of dizziness followed by nausea and sitting as stiff as it was possible, to make thing stop moving.
“Can you turn it off for a minute?” Kanan asked through gritted teeth. Talking was an awful task with his stomach twisting painfully and mouth filled with too much saliva.
Maul took one short glance at him and then the world was filled with comforting darkness.
Kanan concentrated on his breathing, slowly regaining his balance. His throat felt too tight and his brow was wet with sweat. He coldness was travelling down his spine too, making him shudder. However the nausea was passing, with each breath becoming less and less intense.
“Everything okay?”
Sabine, Kanan identified the voice. She sounded worried, tense, there was a rising suspicion in her voice too. He probably looked like crap now and Maul was the only other person in the room.
“Yes,” he said. “It is just… too much. For now. I'm sorry.”
“There's nothing to be sorry for,” the girl was quick to reassure him.
“If you're already here, Vizsla, then be of use. Go stand in that corner.”
“What.”
“Stand in the corner,” Maul repeated with annoyance. “There's a decent light there, it would make things much more efficient.”
“Efficient,” Sabine repeated after my in the same deadpan voice as before.
“You’re going to serve as a point of reference during modifying the color settings,” Maul stated.
Kanan had to admit, using the girl as a point of reference would work much better than just staring at a wall or some piece of furniture. Definitely much more colorful.
“Like, now?” Sabine asked with a bewilderment in her voice. “Shouldn't we wait?”
“I'm alright,” Kanan forced a smile onto his lips.
“You're such a shitty liar…”
“Okay,” Kanan raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I might need some time to get used to it all. It's just so much and all at once and I can't close these eyes!”
“You can't what?”
“When it's active it's active,” Kanan tried to explain.
“How are you going to sleep?”
“He's obviously going to switch it off.”
“He's a Jedi, not a lamp!”
xxx
Kanan Jarrus could as well be a lamp.
Maul ended up letting him go blind for the rest of a day. It sounded even more ridiculous when out in words, but Kanan couldn't help it.
After waiting for so long to regain his sense of sight, he actually felt better being blind.
Well, 'better’ was probably too big of a word. Kanan was also deeply ashamed of how he was unable to just man up and start using his new eyes. There was no time for him to roll in his own misery, no time for running away, because there was a war to fight and people to save and he was sticking to being blind.
“There's nothing to be ashamed for,” Hera said softly, a warm presence next to him, with soft, delicate fingers massaging the back of his neck and making circles along the scalp of his head. “You have every right to rest before going any further.”
“It feels wrong,” Kanan sighed, leaning into her hands some more. “I should be out there, I should be doing something.”
“You're not the only one.”
“Am I?” Kanan asked with a heavy sight. “After Ahsoka…”
“She definitely wouldn't want you to slowly kill yourself,” Hera murmured. “Give yourself some time. You can't save anyone when you read on your feet.”
“Wasn't I away from action long enough?”
“You were healing. You still are.”
Kanan turned his head away, feeling conflicted over a whole different set of things, things that had little to nothing in common!mom with battles and the rebellion.
He wanted to look at Hera. To see her gentle face, her eyes sparkling with hope and determination, this funny thing she was doing with her mouth when she felt annoyed. He wanted to count all the pale, round lines on her lekku, to check if he remembered them right, he wanted to see her winkling her nose…
At the same time the mere thought of looking at something was making him slightly nauseous, the memory of the oh so very different, so flat image was filling him with terror.
It was almost like the new eyes were there only to mock him, purposefully unable to show the world as it was, letting him notice only a small part of it.
It wasn't fair, it was so not fair. Because seeing thing like that would slowly make him forget how things were supposed to look like and forgetting how beautiful Hera eyes were seemed unforgivable.
“Shush,” Hera said softly, her gentle hand running up and down his shoulder blades in attempt to give him some comfort.
“Shush, love.”
“I should be grateful,” Kanan said, his voice oddly disconnected, like it belonged to some stranger instead. “Everyone worked so hard for this, for my sake and all I can do is to complain how this gift is not perfect.”
“The thing with changes is,” Hera said softly, “they are scary. People fear new, they fear different, but all they need is time to understand.”
Kanan nodded, through it wasn’t making him feel much better. Changes were one of these few thing in the universe he couldn’t help, but despised. The first time something shifted in the world among him, he was thrown from this calm, steady rhythm of life where everything has it’s place and tame into the nightmarish reality where he was hunted and small, so very cold and hungry and there was no way back to return to how things were before.
Now he was balancing on the edge of yet another shift like that, blood turning into ice in his veins, while he was fighting with all his might to stay put where he was. Despite all the chaos and misery, he finally, after long years of wandering and mistakes, managed to put his life together, to have something…
The perspective of losing it was horrifying. It was also a proof that he was a failure after all. Jedi were not supposed to have any attachments.
It wasn’t just the matter of deciding to use the prosthetic eyes or not.
“Can I ask you something?” Kanan murmured, head hung low, fingers carefully brushing against her small hand.
“You don’t need my permission to ask something,” Hera said. “I want to help you. I don’t know if I have the answers you are looking for, but I want to try.”
“Do you think we can trust him?”
She hummed, this time her fingers were the wandering ones, the soft touch tickling across his skin.
“That’s a difficult question,” she said finally. “Do you want to trust him?”
“Does it matter?” Kanan bend his mouth in a smile, because he had no idea what other expression to put on his face. “We both know who he is. What he had done. But now… we need allies.”
“We do,” Hera sighed. “We really do and he had no love for the Empire at all.”
He was smart, scarily so, he was pulling one ability after another out of his sleeve with
ease that seemed to be unnatural even for the people who were very strong in the Force. However he was also a merciless killer.
It was all so much easier when Maul was just a figure of the past, something out of the writing record rather than flesh and blood. There, things were just black and white, where evil people were simply evil and to be defeated by the righteous hero.
Kanan knew that the world was never as simple as black and white, that people had reasons for the things they were doing. He knew that someone seen as righteous and heroic could be simply creating such image around himself for the personal gain and he knew there were decent people even among the thugs.
Maul was already on the Ghost, he had already helped out in more way than one, though Kanan guessed that some of these things were accidentally rather than carefully plotted for whatever reason.
Kanan inhaled deeply. The artificial eyes were already here, stuck to his face. It would be difficult to have thing be more final than that.
“Do you think it could work?”
“Well, by now we could all be dead if he really wanted it,” Hera stated in a matter of fact voice. “I don’t know much about the Force, but I know that he could take the Ghost away from us with ease if he wanted to.”
Which he didn’t, obviously.
Unless he was planning to drive them all mad with confusing them out of their minds.