fandomhigh | Culture Shock: Adjusting to Life on the Weird Side, Tuesday, Period 2

If Kanan seemed a little out of sorts this week... well, he was. He was doing an admirable job of not wearing it on his sleeve, but there was a sort of stiffness to his posture that wasn't normally there. His arms were folded in front of himself, and yes, he'd let the dog tag along to class today. Because having a rainbow-spotted dalmatian napping near his feet was comforting, and also, shut up.

Similarly, Cecil had a large pink osmingo with him. In his case because Foucault seemed to be a bit grumpy about having been a teenaged bird over the weekend, and didn't want to go anywhere that wasn't plastered to Cecil's side.

"So, this past weekend, many of the adults on the island turned into teenagers again." Kanan gave the students a tight smile. "This... was likely to mean a lot of different things to anybody who was aware of it when it happened. For some, students or transformed adults alike, it might have meant a chance to cut loose unsupervised without fear of consequences. Others might have found themselves lost, or assisting somebody who was." Look at how Kanan expertly wasn't making eye contact with anybody who might be in the room right then. "For a few people, it was a stark realization that this place often plays fast and loose with what makes us... us."

Fast and loose and occasionally cruel. If his ship hadn't been dangerously low on fuel and if Portalocity could get him back to the proper reality, Kanan probably would have fled the planet by now. Karking island.

"And sometimes," Cecil sighed, "it was just really annoying, because honestly, who wants to be tiny and have their voice still breaking? Again?" He paused. "Again again, even?"

"The adults turning into teens hasn't been the only shift this island has put people through, even since I arrived here," Kanan noted. "There was a weekend where most of the island's population turned into older versions of themselves. I admittedly don't remember much about that one, though."

It had been dark?

"Oo, I missed that one!" Cecil said. "I was a pony, though. That was when you were that adorable cat thing! And a while back, I was an older me - I was a younger me at the time - and then with an extra eye and tentacles and these nifty tattoos! It was really neat."

That made sense if you were Cecil.

"In a place like this, it's important to be able to keep a firm handle on your sense of self," said the guy who referred to his teenage self in the third person, because of course Kanan did. "So, instead of a discussion today, an affirmation. Sit down and write five to ten things about yourself that are uniquely you. Those things about yourself that you're happy to get back to being, if the island goes and messes with your identity. You don't have to share them with the class, just hold on to them, be aware of them. Use them to ground yourself if you need to."

"If you can't think of ten," Cecil suggested, "make some up! Maybe you'll get lucky and grow into them."

[OOC: Open!]

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Ahsoka lingered after class.

"So..."

Kanan had kind of figured this would happen, yeah. He blew out a tired sort of sigh, and then nodded a little.

Okay.

"So." Grade A reply there, Jarrus. Better supplement that one with something, huh? "Yeah. Uh."

This man was hopeless.

"Thank you. For this weekend."

"Yeah, well." Stunning conversationalists these two were. At least they were going to be better when they ran into their own versions of each other? "It was the least I could do. I meant it when I said I wished I could more."

"You took me in, fed me, and gave me a safe place to sleep," Kanan noted. A few years down the road, they'd both be a fair bit better at seeing one another, hopefully, yes. "Right then, that was what I needed."

Anything else he would have wanted would have been impossible. Ahsoka couldn't bring Master Billaba and the other Jedi back. But she'd shown him more of them than Caleb had figured still existed. That was something, too.

"Then I spent half the night sending messages to Anakin and Master Kenobi because I didn't know what to do next," Ahsoka said, then added wryly. "Turns out I could've saved myself half the work and just sent them to Obi-Wan."

"Yeah, Master Skywalker was..." Kanan pursed his lips slightly for a moment. "He meant well, anyway."

If Kanan had any clue...

"I think I owe you an apology, too. For not mentioning sooner. I didn't think that part of my past would come back so, ah, thoroughly."

He'd have to get in line behind Ahsoka. Though for what...

"It's kind of a difficult opening even without... everything." That hugely traumatising everything. "Hey, remember when I was three years younger and a lot shorter than you?"

When did you get so tall, Kanan? It wasn't fair. ~~You were going to end up three centimetres shorter, Ahsoka.~~

He'd had a few years to kind of grow into his... trauma, mostly.

"Yeah. 'Remember that Padawan who drove all the Masters crazy with roughly a million questions?'" He gave Ahsoka a wry smile. "It took me a while to figure it out, too. And I had the unfair advantage of a few more years to kind of grow out of it."

Out of being short? Out of being Caleb. Out of the immediacy of that trauma. All of it.

Ahsoka huffed something resembling a laugh and looked at her hands.

"Even counting the time here, it's only been months." They still had years before they were going to share another event anywhere near traumatic enough they'd need to specify which they were talking about. "More time than that version of you'd had, but not by much."

Yeah, Kanan remembered well enough just how long it had taken him to come around to a point where he wasn't waking up screaming, or in tears. How long it had taken for him to be able to sleep at night at all, even after Kasmir took him in.

"Not by nearly enough," he agreed, softly. He pulled in a deep breath, chewed on his lip for a second, and then ventured, "Are you okay, Ahsoka?"

Ahsoka had at least learnt how to ~~repress~~ deal with the nightmares before she'd even left the Order. You know, luckily.

"Not really," she said, rubbing her thumb along her palm. "I'm not sure any of us are."

Kanan nodded. She was right, really. The fallout of Order 66 had taken its toll on the living just as thoroughly as the dead.

"True," he sighed. "We've all got our scars. Yours are still relatively fresh, though."

He said, as though he hadn't just had a whole whack of his own torn open on the weekend, too.

"And they're not the kind bacta works on." Not that there was even more than a few emergency dressings worth of bacta on the island. "It's funny, I've been reaching for my lightsabers and coming up empty handed since, well, before it even happened, and now that I've got the ones I had when I found you, I have to keep convincing myself nothing bad's going to happen if I wear them."

She suspected Kanan might get that better than the two major proponents of 'this weapon is your life'.

Reaching for his lightsaber and coming up empty handed had gotten him captured by Clones, once. Kanan knew very well what Ahsoka was talking about on a few different levels.

"I could never bring myself to get rid of mine," he admitted. "But I keep it in pieces, close, but never on hand. It's a memento, these days. Dusty. I got very good with a blaster very quickly."

Another sigh. This was the most open he'd been about his lightsaber itself since Kasmir told him to put it away.

"I don't doubt Master Kenobi when he says it's safe to be what we are, here," he added. "Not consciously, not really. But that feeling in my guts, that survivor's instinct that wants to take every possible precaution, isn't making it an easy proposition to fully accept, either."

"I can count how many times I've lit them," Ahsoka said. "Pretty sure I'd lit my first more times before I'd gotten off the Crucible."

"I trust Anakin and Obi-Wan not lie, not about that." About other things, well, she'd learnt it from watching them. "But trust your instincts and feel, don't think, don't work that great when none of those agree with each other."

Jedi teachings, maybe not the best way for traumatised teenagers to deal with the world.

"Emotion, yet peace," Kanan murmured, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, and then gave a wry smile and shook his head. "Surviving in a galaxy without the Order makes it easier to appreciate that perhaps the Order didn't consider that we'd have to ever do so. There are some things that it's easier to hold true to when doing so isn't exactly what they're looking for while they're out hunting for Jedi."

It was funny how easily picking and choosing had come to Kanan, over the years.

"And with the galaxy the way it is, 'trial and error' is a dangerous game. Sometimes the best you can do is weigh your instincts against your sense of reason and hope that the one you pick isn't the one that gets you killed."

Culture Shock: Adjusting to Life on the Weird Side, Tuesday, Period 2

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