"This isn't working," Ezra said. They had been repeating variations on the same exercise for what felt like hours and he just couldn't make the Force do what he wanted it to.

"It will," Kanan insisted.

But he was wrong. Ezra wasn't any closer now to being able to see with the Force than he had been at the beginning of the lesson, and now all he wanted to do was scream. Or cry. Or possibly both at the same time. He opened his eyes and shook his head. "It won't, Kanan. It's not even starting to work."

Kanan frowned. "Maybe you should wear a blindfold," he said. "It'd make it more difficult for you to open your eyes every time you got frustrated."

"That's not the problem!" Ezra told him.

"I know, but it's a problem. You're never going to get it if you stop and open your eyes every time you don't get instant results."

Kanan didn't get it. Kanan couldn't get it.

"Remember the first time you tried to make a connection through the Force to another creature?" Kanan said. "You didn't get that the first time either. Or the second. But then you did, and now you're probably better at it than I am."

"That's different."

"How?"

Because he'd always been good at making connections. It was one of the things that had kept him alive for so long on the streets of Lothal. Using the Force had been an extension of that. It had taken him a little while to realize that, but as soon as he had, it had come naturally to him. "It just is," he said.

Kanan looked unconvinced. "Just, let's try it with a blindfold. Okay?"

He didn't want to. Even the thought of it provoked an irrational claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. It wouldn't be the first time he had covered his eyes, and he could take it off if he needed to. And Kanan was right, he did open his eyes a lot, even when he didn't mean to. It would stop that. He nodded his reluctant agreement. "But can we take a break first?" he asked. "We've been doing this for ages."

"We've been doing it for about a half hour," Kanan corrected. "But yeah, I think a break's a good idea."

Relieved, Ezra leaned hard against the wall and let his back slide down until he was sitting on the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest and let his head fall back until it hit the wall gently.

"You'll get it," Kanan told him.

Kanan genuinely appeared to believe that. Ezra looked at him. "Can you do it?" he asked.

Kanan looked thoughtful before he answered. "No," he said. "Not completely. But I've been trying it. I wouldn't ask you to do it if I hadn't. I can get a rudimentary understanding of what's around me, it's not much, but right now that's all we're aiming for. We can work on the rest later."

Ezra sighed. He knew Kanan was right, but it didn't help. He wanted it all, and he wanted it right now, so that he didn't have to worry about it anymore.

"You've done it before," Kanan added. "It isn't completely new to either of us. Remember the dust storm, on the planet where we found Rex and the other clones?"

Ezra nodded. Of course he remembered it.

"I directed us where we needed to go, you manned the gun. You took out an Imperial Walker, if I remember right. You and I were the only ones that could see out there, and we did it using the Force."

"That wasn't seeing."

Kanan nodded. "Not technically. And this won't be either. But imagine what might be possible if you could develop that sense. I think that's the key. It won't be seeing, not in the traditional way. It's going to be about finding a new way to experience the world."

A new way. Ezra closed his eyes and tried to imagine what Kanan was describing to him. Kanan was right, he had done it before, and not only that one time. But every time it had been in a life-or-death situation, and it had come in short bursts; seconds where the Force stepped in to tell him something that he needed to know. He didn't control it, and he didn't know if he could.

He also couldn't control the stab of disappointment. Until recently, he had come close to accepting that he was going to lose his sight. There was nothing that he could do about it, and so he had resigned himself to it. But then Kanan had spoken of blind Jedi, and it had awoken a hope in him that there might be some forgotten Force technique that they could rediscover. Something that would truly replace his sight.

The idea that it was something he had done before, and something that had been nothing at all like sight, was both encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging because the idea of having to develop a technique that even Kanan didn't know had been daunting to say the least, and frustrating because what he was being offered was so much less than he had hoped for.

"We just need to learn how to hone that sense," Kanan said. "Make it work for smaller, everyday things, not just life or death situations, and make it work all the time. We need to know how to keep it switched on, keep concentrating, keep open to the Force."

We. Kanan kept saying 'we', like he needed to know it too. He might be trying to teach it, but he didn't need it. Not like Ezra did. He would never understand what it was like to need it.

What he was suggesting sounded exhausting. Not only that, but it sounded impossible. Ezra reached out into the Force, eyes still closed, trying to use it to sense anything at all. He was greeted by a void, empty and meaningless. He could sense the Force, but nothing beyond that. No understanding of the world around him.

"I know how it sounds," Kanan told him.

"Impossible, you mean?"

"No, difficult. But like I said, you've…"

"Done it before. Yeah, I know." Ezra shook his head. Still nothing. He was getting nothing at all. He clenched his hands into fists and tried to make the Force do as he wanted. It refused. "That was different."

"I know," Kanan told him. "But not completely different. You've trained blindfolded or with your eyes closed before now too. That got easier, didn't it?"

The first time, he had fallen off the ship. It couldn't have gotten much worse than that. Kanan was right, the more he had done it, the easier it had become. But they hadn't done it regularly, and it had only been for lightsaber practice, not for walking around. And it had ceased to feel easy the moment Ezra had begun to realize there was something wrong with his eyes.

Taking his silence for agreement, Kanan continued. "This might not be the full answer, but for now it's what we've got. If nothing else, it's a place where we can start."

'We' again.

Ezra glared at Kanan as the frustration built up inside him until he felt ready to scream. "Stop saying that!" he snapped. "It's not 'we'. The last time I checked, you could see just fine. It's not 'we'. It's… just me."

His anger and frustration dissipated as he finished speaking, replaced by a sense of loneliness; isolation. It was just him. He was alone in this. Kanan could try to help, but he couldn't understand. Not really. Maybe if his eyes stopped working, he'd be motivated to come up with something that would work.

No. Ezra shook his head as though he could undo the thought. He shouldn't even think that. It wasn't fair. Kanan was trying to help him, and probably doing a better job of it than anyone else could.

"Okay," Kanan agreed. "You. But we're going to figure this out, okay? We're going to do it together."

Ezra forced out a puff of breath and leaned his head back against the wall. "Yeah, okay. Sorry," he said, apologizing more for the thing he had thought, than for what he had said.

"Don't be," Kanan told him. "You're right."