He knocked on the door, and felt Zaluna's presence in the Force as she moved toward it, a brighter spot against the dozens of smaller living things that filled her home.

"Who is it?" she called as she opened it.

Kanan cleared his throat. "An old friend."

"Oh!" she said. No hesitation; he supposed he shouldn't be surprised that she could place his voice instantly, even after all these years. Her memory had always been excellent, her hearing trained to separate out a hundred voices in recordings of a crowd. "Is H—is anyone else with you?"

He spread his hands, pointlessly, then let them drop. "No. Just me."


"I'm sending Sabine to collect food supplies," Hera had told him at Chopper Base.

"Why?" Kanan asked. "We have plenty of ration bars."

"And here I thought you would have noticed that we were out of the jiruusi fruit-flavored ones you like so much."

Kanan shrugged. He could tell from Hera's hiss of breath that she wanted more than that, that she'd hoped for some banter or rejoinder. "You know they taste just the same as the shuura ones," maybe. He didn't have it in him. All food tasted the same to him, anyway. Whoever said loss of sight sharpened other senses had been lying.

"I'm not sending her for ration bars," Hera continued doggedly, rather than letting the silence stretch. "I'm sending her for fresh food. Fruits, vegetables, eggs if we're lucky. A morale-booster for the men. And I'd like you to go with."

Kanan's head jerked toward her voice. "I don't need a milk run to keep me busy. Stop pitying me."

"Stop pitying yourself," Hera snapped back. He was, absurdly, grateful for it; grateful that she'd forgotten, for one moment, to treat him like he was made of glass. "I'd like you to go with because I'm sending her to Wiero, and I think it would do you good to visit Zaluna while Sabine bargains with the farmers."

Kanan opened his mouth and closed it again. The problem with arguing with Hera was that she was usually right. "Fine," he said, after a pause. "It's not like I'll be missed."

Hera sighed. "Yes, you will," she said, back to her soft spun-glass voice. "But we can do without you for a few days, at least."


"Oh," said Zaluna, her voice suddenly tight with worry.

"Everything is," Kanan started in reflexive assurance, and then stopped. "Hera is fine."

"But you aren't?" Zaluna asked shrewdly.

"No." He shifted his weight, uncomfortable talking in the street. "Look, can I come in?"

"Right, yes, of course!" He could hear Zaluna's footsteps as she hastily moved away from the door, and feel her Force presence receding into the house. "Come in, come in. Though it's a bit of a mess in here, I'm afraid. The girl hasn't been by to clean today, and I've been pruning. There's probably leaves everywhere."

"Probably," Kanan agreed absently. The smaller Force presences were plants, then; now that he knew what he was feeling, he could sense their drive to drink, grow, and reach toward the sun. There seemed to be fewer to the left of the door, and he reached out, groping until he found a chair. It was a Zaluna-sized chair, and he filled it awkwardly, knees nearly pressed to his chest.

"I was just making tea," Zaluna said. "I've been experimenting with growing the leaves myself. I can't say it's very good tea—I'm still getting the hang of drying them—but would you like a cup?"

Kanan nodded, then cleared his throat. "Sure." He heard the teacup hitting the table in front of him and moved his hand cautiously toward the sound, feeling for its heat. The liquid splashed his fingers when he jostled it, and he hissed through his teeth.

"Sorry, sorry!" Zaluna said. "Did I fill it too full?"

"I'm sure it's fine. I just can't see it very well."

"Oh, of course—there are lights, hold on, let me find them."

Kanan grimaced. "That won't help."

"Won't—oh."

"Oh," Kanan echoed. He pulled his mask off, let it settle on the table next to the tea, and rubbed his eyes, medical droid's instructions be damned.

"You move very smoothly," she said after a moment. "I would have tripped over the doorstep. And I didn't hear you tapping a cane. But I suppose you have certain advantages."

"Advantages?" Kanan hedged. He'd never told Zaluna he was a Jedi. He hadn't even told Hera, not then.

"Kanan," Zaluna said drily. "I'm blind, not deaf. I do listen to the HoloNet. Your name comes up, generally with very large numbers attached to it."

". . . right."

"This, though—I hadn't heard this."

"The Empire didn't do it," Kanan said. "I doubt they know. Not yet." Not yet, and wasn't that just a ticking bomb—how long until the Empire knew that the Rebels no longer had a Jedi fighting for them, how long until they realized how vulnerable Ezra and the others were? He could feel his pulse rate climbing, and forced himself to breathe slowly, letting the steam from the tea flow in and out of his lungs.

"It was recent, then," Zaluna observed. He could hear her fingers drumming against the table as she fit together patterns of data in her head. "How long will you be here?"

"Until tonight. Unless my friend runs into more trouble than expected, buying supplies."

"There's not a lot of trouble to be found on Wiero."

"You haven't met my friend," Kanan retorted.

Zaluna chuckled. "Is it—no, silly me, don't answer that. The less I know, the better. Bad enough that I know you two, though at least they can't ask me to pick you out of a line-up."

It was a terrible joke, but it got a laugh out of Kanan from sheer surprise.

"It helps to laugh about it, sometimes," Zaluna said gently.

"I haven't felt like laughing much lately."

"It also helps to cry." He heard the clatter as she lifted her teacup, sipped, and set it back down on the saucer. "If you still have tear ducts, at least."

"I—yes."

"Well," she said brightly. "That's something."

Kanan snorted.

"I don't know what Hera expects me to do in one day," Zaluna said, after another sip of tea. "It was Hera's idea for you to come?"

"Of course it was Hera's idea. It's always Hera's idea. Unless it goes wrong. Then it might be mine." Wrong, like Malachor.

"I seem to recall you had a few good ideas yourself, back in the day."

"Maybe one or two," Kanan allowed. "I don't think Hera expects you to fix this."

"That's good," Zaluna retorted. "I'm not a medical droid. But she thought it would help, for you to be reminded that life is possible without sight?"

"Where there is the Force, there is life," Kanan said automatically. "Yes. I guess. We didn't really . . . talk about it." He sighed. "I know life is possible. It's whether I can still be useful that's the question."

"You were useful on Gorse," Zaluna reminded him gently. "I saw all the times you helped people. And you never needed a lightsaber to do it."

"I've learned that I can do more than that."

"And now maybe you're learning you can do less." There was a rustling as she stood. "Do you think less of me, Kanan? That I didn't join your Rebellion? That the most I do is offer a tip or two on the HoloNet to people who seem in danger of getting caught? And not even that much, lately. My knowledge of surveillance technology gets more dated with each year."

"Of course not!"

"Then why are you judging yourself?"

"It's different," he said, aware as he said it that he sounded nearly as petulant as Ezra.

"Hm." He felt her move toward him, and pushed his empty cup and saucer back so she could find them in the spot where she'd set them down. "Today is market day. So I suppose you can help an old woman carry her basket. Unless that's too little help to be worth your while?"

"I'd be happy to," he said, surprised to find that he meant it.


The market was loud. Chopper Base was loud too, some days, but never with quite this directionless cacophony. Kanan had resisted when Zaluna had told him to keep a hand on her elbow at the start of the walk, but now he was glad for the contact and had to work to keep his fingers from clamping down. He focused on the tapping of her stick as it swung rhythmically side to side, on the sound of her voice as they went from stall to stall, bargaining.

The Force was everywhere—in the people, in the animals, in the produce that filled the bins, only just cut from the vine or pulled from the earth and still shimmering with the residue of life.

"Not that one," he said, sensing rot at the heart of one fruit, and Zaluna hummed.

"It smells off," she agreed, and he heard the gentle rasp of her fingers against the rough skin of one piece of fruit and then another as she dug her fingers through the bin, searching for the perfect specimen.

"Smells off," he echoed. "Right." He had been trying not to smell things, the odors nearly as overwhelming as the sounds after so much time spent on sterile spaceships and dry Atollon. He relaxed his fingers again, which had started to clench, and took slow, meditative breaths.

"I've never lived anywhere that smelled this rich," he admitted, as they began their slow walk back to her house in the cooling evening air, the basket heavy on his arm. Before Hera, it had been mining colonies and industrial towns that drew him, that gave him the work and anonymity and easy access to alcohol that he craved. And before that . . . well, Coruscant was rich in many things, but no one had ever claimed agriculture was one of them.

"It shouldn't surprise you of all people that Hera picked well."

"No," he said fondly. "Does it ever bother you, though? Finally moving to a world like this, only after you can no longer see the sun."

She shrugged, sending movement rippling through the elbow he still held. "I can feel it. And the plants can, which is enough for me."

He remembered her love for plants, how excited she'd been at the spacious expanse of earth behind her new home. "Will you show me your garden?"

"I thought you'd never ask," she said, her voice warm. "It will be dark soon. But I suppose that doesn't matter much."

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't matter much at all."


The garden's smells were less discordant than the market's, carefully arranged in a way that was no less art than Sabine's paintings.

I'll never see Sabine's paintings again, he thought, and let the regret pass through him before he bent to sniff the next night-blooming flower. Zaluna chattered happily beside him, rattling off names of plants as quickly as she had once listed every likely location for surveillance cameras.

"You're happy," he said, when her list reached a pause.

"Well. People still disappear every day, and don't come back. It's not a safe galaxy. It might never be, in my lifetime. You know that. You're fighting that—you are," she said, fiercely, reacting to some unvoiced sound of self-deprecation he'd made at a pitch too low for his human ears to hear. "And I'm fighting it too, in my own way. Sometimes I think being happy is the biggest thing we can do to resist the Empire. It's certainly not what they want."

"I used to be better at it," he said, after a pause. "In the spare moments between being shot at."

"Really? Because I always rather got the impression that you liked the being shot at parts. Better than I did, anyway."

His mouth quirked. "Maybe a bit. When they missed."

The chiming of his comlink interrupted whatever ribbing Zaluna might have given him. "Spectre-1, I've got the goods and I'm on my way to pick you up."

"I copy, Spectre-5."

"So formal," Zaluna said, sounding amused.

"Blame Hera's influence. We've come a long way from blundering from explosion to explosion on Gorse." Out in the darkness was the tree that Zaluna had once named Skelly's memorial; he could feel the slow, steady pulse of life within it. "Or maybe not so far, really. I think Skelly would have liked Spectre-5. I think Spectre-5 would have liked Skelly."

"There's a terrifying thought."

Kanan grunted agreement.

"Come inside," Zaluna said abruptly. "I have something I want to give you."


He leaned against a wall, safely out of the way, while she bustled around a cluster of plants that seemed to fill a shelf in the center of the room.

"This one," Zaluna said finally, and thrust a small, rough pot into his hands. "I make the pots," she added. "I sell them to my neighbors. It seemed like a useful thing to learn, and I couldn't live on Hera's money forever."

Inside the pot was a plant with smooth leaves, rounded and slightly spongy to his touch. They grew in clusters from long, looping stalks that folded around each other in a loosely knit knot. The Force thrummed through it, a slow, steady pulse of life.

"Thanks," Kanan said, pulling himself back from his inspection. "Really, thank you. But I live on a ship. It's not a good place for plants."

"If you're telling me no one on your ship can rig up a full-spectrum light, I'll give you one of those, too. I had more plants than this in my office on Gorse—well, I didn't have a garden there to tend to, too—and it never saw a speck of sunlight."

"Someone can probably manage the light," he allowed. "But it's a ship. You've been on board when Hera was flying. One firefight, and everything in my quarters will be tossed onto the floor." He could picture the plant there already, dirt smeared around it and sharp pottery shards ready to be stepped on.

"Then it gets tossed on the floor," Zaluna said. "They're plants, Kanan. They die all the time. I take new cuttings, I plant new seeds. The collection keeps growing. The point isn't to keep each individual plant alive forever. I love them while they last, but I don't get too attached. I thought," she added somewhat hesitantly, "that you of all people might understand that."

Kanan blinked beneath his mask, and rubbed his jaw. "I—yeah. That seems to be a lesson I need to keep relearning."

"Well," Zaluna said, "I'm not saying I've never cried over one, either. That's what the tear ducts are for."


"I thought I was doing the shopping," Sabine said as they settled into the Phantom. The plant was cupped carefully in his hands. "What's that? A little extra spice for dinner?"

"No," Kanan said. "Purely decorative." He paused. "I think." He hadn't been paying that much attention to Zaluna's recitation of plant names and properties.

"You're planning on putting it on the Ghost?" Sabine asked incredulously. "The first time Hera does one of her rolls, it's going to be a goner."

"That's not the point," he told her, in his best serene Jedi voice.

"Huh," she said. And then, a bit later, as they broke atmosphere, "Can I paint the pot?"

"Even though it's going to get broken?"

"You just said that's not the point."

"Yeah." Kanan swallowed. "Yeah, you can."