RUHLSAR000 Here! Okay, confession time. I drew from my own personal difficulties and learning issues. One of my biggest issues was communication and understand social cues, something that is hard enough when you're not diagnosed with learning disabilities in that area. I couldn't even understand my own cues when it came to anger, let alone explain why I was getting frustrated. The sad thing is my school district was actually one of the best schools districts in the state with regards to dealing with learning disabilities. Look this author's note is long enough, if Aibek sounds stupid or like a spoiled brat, just know I'm speaking through a nine-year-old who has issues with communication and am dealing with still very strong emotions about how people handled not only my social learning difficulties but other kids as well. We weren't bad kids but we were treated as such because we didn't know how to process our feelings. And I generally got off light because everyone knew I was a goody two shoes.
I open the door to my bedroom, with a sigh. Aibek is lying on my bed reading a datapad. That's not exactly surprising. With Hera taking the Ghost on a mission, private space is at a premium in the house. "Hey Aibek," I smile dropping my travel bag.
"You going to yell at me, too?"Aibek snaps, turning away from me.
"Oh boy, what happened?" I sigh, sitting down next to him. "Am I going to have to plan some overly complicated activity to explain why I have to go out and aid in the recovery of Jedi artifacts?"
"Nah, I've seen the Archives at the Temple. They need all the help they can get." Aibek tries to hold back a chuckle and fails. He puts down the datapad, rolling onto his stomach.
"So, have your siblings. That didn't help them." I smirk, lying down next to him. "Then again you do have a tendency to think further down the road than they do." He smiles at the comment. "So, why are you hiding?"
"I… I got into a fight." Aibek sighs, hunching his shoulder. "Sort of…"
"Sort of? Did someone sort of get hurt?" I raise an eyebrow, hiding any of my worry behind a wall of nonjudgement.
"I may have grabbed Anyiof to make him hurt." Aibek looks down. Anyiof… That was one of his main bullies. He's been calling him names and stupid kriff like that for over a year. Kanan and Hera have already yelled at the school for this multiple times. It's still a kriffing problem.
"Do you regret it?" I ask.
"Depends on what he does Monday." Aibek sighs, "Look go ahead chew me out. But he's been mean to me for years and no one's done anything. I… I…"He buries his head in the pillow. After a moment whimpering comes out.
"Hey, hey. It's okay." I wrap an arm around his shoulder.
He's mumbling something into the pillow. After a moment of focusing, I can make out, "I'm not a bad kid… I'm not a bad kid…"
"No, you're not." I coo gently.
"I just… He kept saying I should be the servant in the school pay because I'm a twi'lek. I didn't even know I was getting mad until I say red and… well… you know."
"Did you try the strategies?" I ask and am promptly met with a frustrated scream into a pillow.
"They don't work. Breathing, counting to ten, removing yourself from the situation. What are those supposed to do! Breathing and counting do nothing. And that's even if I can remember to do them! Do you know how hard it is to remember anything when your busy yelling because the only thing filling your mind is how angry you are?"
"It's close to impossible," I admit. "Which is why you use them before you get mad."
"And how am I supposed to know that? One second I think I'm fine the next I'm in the middle of an explosion." Aibek groans frustrated. "And then the teacher says 'Calm down, Aibek' like it's the simplest thing. I would if I could. I hate it. I hate being like that. I hate being out of control. I hate the way people stare. I hate how everyone thinks I'm bad. I'm not bad… I just don't know what to do. And no one is helping me learn. They only send me where the bad kids go to fill out those stupid smiley charts that I can't do because I went to 0 to angry in under a second."
"The speech therapist office is in the detention room." I deadpan. They can't be that stupid. He's not a bad kid. He just behind on the development of social skills. It's a part of his general learning disabilities. That is literally asking for an association between punishment and calming down to be built.
"Nope and neither is learning strategies, but the calm down area share space with the detention." Aibek rants. "And that also wrecks the strategy of removing yourself from the situation, too. Because where are you supposed to go? Both Learning strategies and Ms. Reed are busy with other students. They wouldn't be able to help anyway. The hall and the calm down area are where bad kids go. And you can only go to the bathroom for so long before missing important stuff in class." Aibek's voice breaks as he ends. He's not a bad kid. He just doesn't know what to do and has lost all faith in the system that should be helping him learn. He's nine kriffing years old.
I cloak my frustrations. "I take it you haven't told your father about what triggered this explosion?"
"He wouldn't care… He'd just tell me to meditate and 'release my anger into the Force'." Aibek sighs.
"Are you kidding? Heads are going to roll." I say, with a chuckle. I shouldn't be finding the idea of that quite so satisfying. Then again, the school should bloody figure out how to deal with emotional bullying already. "What are you working on by the way?" I pick up the datapad. I looked to be some sort of piano app.
"Nothing," Aibek says grabbing the datapad. "You really think he'd care?"
"Aibek, your father loves you so much. He may have trouble with showing that he will always be on your side, but he is." I smile, ruffling his head.
So, yeah. Kanan is going to rip the admin apart when he finds out. I feel a little awkward posting this after this week's episode. But the next WHF chapter takes place after this on and Ner Vod's next chapter won't be ready until tomorrow or Sunday... Well, now you all have to badger me about it if I don't hold that up. Beyond that, I like to pretend he is still alive and having all the headaches child rearing entails.
There is a hole in my heart that has caused me intense pain for the last few days. I don't kn- No, I hate this. I understand it from a storytelling perspective and while I will agree with the woman on Rebels Recon that it was logical for the growth of the other, I hate it. I respect it, but I hate it. And I bloody saw it coming when I realized there was only about one episode of Kanan shots in the mid-season trailer but I tried to deny it saying that there are four years or so between Yoda's (could be fake) ultimatum and the end of Rebels.
So, here's a fun fact about me. I like using significate name meanings when I write and am highly interested in name meanings. And in Star Wars does place importance on names. So, when Rebels first came out I looked up everyone names. My default site listed two possible meanings for Caleb. The first one I didn't see any connection until recently, so I assumed the second was what they were going for which is "whole heart" or "all of heart". But the first meaning was "dog". There is definitely a strong connection between Kanan and Wolf Dume.
Thank you, everyone, for reading that long AN. And thank you, Midnight Luna, for being the only person to write me reviews recently. So clearly my assessment of Kanan surviving was wrong. But FYI, the last episode has Family Reunion in the title. Me thinks we are going to see Kanan in some form again. Glad you liked Indiana Jones. It started out as just being a random archeologist but when that hit my brain there was no going back.