[IC CONTACT]

[photophobic]

You should know where to find me.
But if you leave a message here, I will see it.

Comments

[photophobic]

Which part.

[merging]

probably the death star and the moon part

[photophobic]

I suppose I should be flattered you weren't more confused by the concept of Ronan and I leading a mission, but I did neglect to mention the rest of the team.

[merging]

you're both pretty powerful so it makes sense
and even you wouldn't benefit from the death star being here

i've still never seen one.

[Obviously that's a GOOD thing, but he feels this weird guilt about not even being able to help this time. He knows he can't help in the future, and it turns out the same is true here.]

[photophobic]

I'd never seen the inside of one before.

[Starkiller, of course, was... much bigger. And a different beast altogether. Kylo doesn't want to dwell on that... or, really, how close to disaster the mission he'd pulled Ronan into had come.]

You missed the opportunity to pilot a TIE Silencer, too.

[merging]

i've piloted a regular tie fighter and a tie defender before
that said you probably wouldn't want me piloting anything unless you had no one else
not really my thing

[photophobic]

That's right. Animals, wasn't it? Your thing.

[merging]

yeah before i got here i wasn't exactly sure if it was a force thing or my force thing
but the rest of you guys don't have cats following you so

[photophobic]

No. Thankfully.

[Yeah, not a fan of anyone or anything following him around and pestering him, thanks.]

[merging]

[Kylo the amount of teens following you says otherwise.]

you don't like animals? :(

[photophobic]

I don't mind them. I would mind them following me.

[Ugh!! Calling him out like this!!]

[merging]

it's not that bad. and definitely not bad when they rip into stormtroopers for you

[photophobic]

I rarely need help ripping into stormtroopers.

[merging]

i'm guessing we have very different reasons for ripping into them unless more happened last month than you're telling me and you're ready to put the starbird on all your clothes

[photophobic]

That's me. Jedi of the month. All it took was my freshly indoctrinated grandfather coming over to bring me chocolate cake and spout ridiculous, outdated philosophy while calling me, a grown man several years his senior, a child.

[bitter much?]

[merging]

technically you don't need to be a jedi to be a rebel
which is what i meant

but at least you got cake out of it

[photophobic]

[He didn't eat it.]

You do need something to rebel against though. Don't you.
So what did you have in mind.

[merging]

you destroyed the death star so i was gonna start with that

but i could also say something poetic like destiny???? except you're the poet not me

[photophobic]

All is as Ezra Bridger wills?

[merging]

ha no way
but i think we'd be on the same side if you were born during my time

(and probably we both wouldn't be too happy if either of us were born before the clone wars lol)

[photophobic]

Do you ever wonder what it might have been like. If there had never been any Jedi. Any Sith. No teachings. Just those of us with the ability to sense it exploring the Force for ourselves.

[merging]

this might sound weird, but that doesn't sound too different from the way i was trained

i didn't know what the force was for most of my life. and i definitely didn't know anything about jedi or sith. but i realized sometimes people would believe my lies over another person's truth. or i could make a jump someone else couldn't. or i'd always know when to duck to avoid blaster fire

i didn't think anything of it until i met kanan, and he helped me make sense of it. not because he was a jedi, but because he was kanan. he wasn't even knighted when we first started our training. and there's no way any real jedi order would let us in.

maul didn't train me like a sith either. he hated them you know. he just showed me a different way to use the force

the reason i don't use the dark side anymore isn't because i'm a jedi, kylo. it's a decision i made on my own.

sorry i'll shut up but i guess what i mean is, i've always wondered more about if i had been trained as an actual jedi in an actual order with an actual temple

i'm pretty sure i would've fallen
whether to the light or the dark is hard to say
but i know i wouldn't be myself

[photophobic]

[Kylo reads the message through more than once, trying to work out what it is about it that has him so irritable. It isn't Ezra's defense of Kanan— as misguided as Kylo believes it to be, he can understand that. It isn't even Ezra's continued choice to call himself a Jedi despite all accumulating evidence to the contrary.

And then he realises... it's all of it. The framing of it, the way Ezra mistakes Jedi philosophy, Sith philosophy, for inherent truths about the Force. The way he himself had.]

Fall into what. From what. You call yourself a Jedi. Then you say you reject their methods, or that they would have rejected yours. But you still define yourself by their standards. You use their words. Their concepts.

What if you had never been taught it was possible to fall. If you had never been taught to fear the possibility of disqualifying yourself. If it had never even been suggested everything belongs to either the Light or Dark side of the Force, that your choices align with one or the other.
What if you had never been told any of it.

[merging]

let's not talk about the force then. the sith the jedi any of it

because honestly? we both know we're a lot more than that

if hera didn't find me, i'd be a pirate or a smuggler or dead. i thought about leaving the rebellion constantly, even ran away a few times. and i definitely still have some issues with how the larger rebel alliance is managed

but the reason i don't use the dark side is the same reason i chose not to follow hondo ohnaka into a life of piracy

it's just not me.

and i'm not a rebel because mon mothma's a rebel, i'm not a jedi because yoda's a jedi

who i am is because of my family. my family of jedi, rebels, lasats, mandalorians, clones, droids, even ex-jedi and ex-imperials. they matter more to me than any order or any alliance or any republic

everything i've been taught comes from them, and from my parents as well. i want to be the type of person who makes them proud. and i want to be proud of myself too.

[photophobic]

You realise you've defined yourself entirely by your preferential attachments to individual people.

[You know, like... Jedi are expressly forbidden to. Does he need to say it? Ezra. Come on. If it doesn't walk like a star wars equivalent of a duck or talk like a star wars equivalent of a duck, how can you justify calling it the star wars equivalent of a duck?]