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Kanan was seated in the middle of his bed, wearing sleepwear that consisted of a loose-fitting pair of pants, and a shirt that looked as though it had seen better days. He untwisted the band that held his hair in place. It fell loose around his shoulders, a kink near the nape of his neck where it had been held in place all day.
Ezra clambered up the ladder to the upper bunk and tested the bed. Unsurprisingly, it felt much the same as his own, perhaps a little firmer, but that could easily be his imagination. “Thanks for this,” he said.
Honestly, if Kanan hadn’t offered to let him borrow his spare bunk for the night, Ezra thought he might have spent the night camping out somewhere else in the base. Not in one of the various crew dorms or rooms though — that would have meant coming up with an answer to any number of difficult questions. Most likely, he would have found a comfortable hiding spot and bedded down for the night. Wherever he ended up, he could guarantee that it wouldn’t have been the worst place he had ever slept.
“Don’t mention it,” Kanan told him. There was a creaking sound below him, much quieter than when Zeb got into bed, but distinctive enough for Ezra to recognize it. “Just remember, you need to go back tomorrow.”
Ezra sighed quietly, but he knew that Kanan was right. The longer he left it, the more awkward it would become. Anyway, now he was here, he couldn’t help but feel a little bad; what would Zeb think when he never showed up for bed? He should have said something. Of course, the problem with that was that it would have involved saying something.
He lay down on his side, facing out into the room. “I will,” he promised.
Probably the best way to handle it would be to act as though nothing had happened. Zeb would realize he didn’t want to talk about it, and respond in kind. Or at least he hoped that he would. It probably wasn’t going to work that way.
It was too late to use that tactic with Sabine. He thought of the stack of work she had given him to read through; page after page of dots arranged into patterns, a key showing him which letter each combination of dots corresponded to. It had been interesting at first, and then not so interesting, and then he had put down the flimsi and loaded the datacard into his datapad and realized from the title of the file why she wanted him to learn that particular code, and…
He should have realized right away. He had made the connection between what she was giving him and the nameplate on Noisi’s door. He knew, in theory at least, that there were better ways for blind people to read than to listen to audio files. And Noisi was an eye specialist, after all. One serving as a general med droid for the whole base, it was true, but he had a specialty, and apparently a custom-built nameplate to match.
The information that Sabine had given him was all designed to be read visually. Still, he had run his finger across the screen, trying to imagine what it might be like to feel the letters beneath his fingertip. It seemed impossible. Part of him had wanted to go to Noisi’s door and try it out, just touch the embossed code there and try to feel any kind of a difference from one letter to the next. If he could do that, he might be able to convince himself that the project was a worthwhile use of his time.
Kanan didn’t use it. At least, not as far as he knew. He could ask him, but he didn’t want to. The fewer people were aware of it, the fewer people there would be expecting him to learn it. Because he wasn’t going to be able to do it.
Honestly, there was no point even trying.
“How was today?” Kanan asked him. “What did you do for the rest of the afternoon?”
Ezra squirmed a little uncomfortably. He didn’t like lying, not to Kanan. Not to any of them really. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Just wasted my time.” It wasn’t a lie. Or at least, he didn’t think it was going to be a lie.
He thought back to the code, trying to bring it back to mind; after hours of studying, he could only remember five of the letters. Maybe six. Either way, not enough. And that was reading with his eyes. When they decided to fail him, he was going to have to switch to his fingers, and that would be an entirely different skill. One he wasn’t sure that he possessed.
“I guess that’s fine for one day,” Kanan told him. “Tomorrow we need to do some training.”
He didn’t specify what kind of training. Ezra was okay with that for now.
“Well,” Kanan said. “Goodnight.”
“Night,” Ezra repeated. He closed his eyes and braced himself, but the light in the cabin didn’t switch off. It wasn’t until then that he realized, the old familiar argument over the light wasn’t going to happen here; it wouldn’t matter to Kanan whether it was on or off. Still, he figured he should probably ask, just to make sure.
“Hey, Kanan? Is it okay if we leave the light on overnight?”
There was a pause before Kanan answered. “…Yes, I think that’ll be fine.”
Okay, now he felt vaguely ridiculous for asking. He opened his mouth to apologize — pointless, as he knew that he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, when a noise started up unexpectedly; a dull buzzing that grated on his senses, seeming to fill the room with sound that was impossible to ignore. Ezra gritted his teeth and wrapped his pillow around his head to block out as much of the noise as he could. It still penetrated, seeming to settle, vibrating, inside his skull.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think about something — anything — else, but the noise intruded on his mind, he couldn't relax to sleep, because he couldn’t stop listening to it. It wasn’t a particularly unpleasant sound, but there was something about it that just bothered him.
Noisi.
The tone was completely different from the sound generated by the med droid’s wheels, but it was similar in that it was a single tone, steady and unchanging. He didn’t know what was making it, but he felt sure that it hadn’t been there the last time he had been in Kanan’s quarters.
How it wasn’t bothering Kanan, he had no idea.
“Kanan?” he asked.
Kanan didn’t answer right away. Ezra heard him shift in the bed below him and clear his throat before he did. “Yeah?”
“Um…” he didn’t want to sound like he was complaining, but if that was going to continue all night, he probably wasn’t going to get any sleep, and if he wasn’t going to get any sleep, he might as well have avoided Zeb by spending the night camped out in the lounge. At least he would have had access to snacks there. “What’s the noise?” he tried.
“Oh.” He heard Kanan sit up in bed, and leaned over the side to check what he was doing. He was reaching for some kind of dome-shaped object on the chair by the side of his bed. “Sorry,” Kanan said. “Habit.
The object was a light grey color, a rounded shape on the top, sitting on an oval base. He couldn’t make out any detail, but there appeared to be buttons on the base, as well as some kind of display on the front, slightly illuminated text that he definitely couldn’t see. He wasn’t sure whether that was down to his distance from the thing, or not. “What is that?” he asked.
“White noise generator,” Kanan told him. He pressed his hand onto the top and the music cut out instantly. “I’ll turn it off.”
Ezra leaned a little further over the edge of the bunk to get a better look at the thing. “What’s it for?”
“Well,” Kanan ran his fingers over the buttons on the front. “Generating sounds, mostly.” He paused, a little awkwardly, and sat back on the bed. “Hera gave me it. When I… after Malachor. Sometimes I’d wake up, and not know…” he stopped again. “It was supposed to be something to listen out for, to tell me instantly where I was when I woke up uncertain.” He paused. “Leaving the lights on wasn't an option for me,” he added.
Ezra understood then. Those rare times when he woke from some dream or nightmare to darkness in the middle of the night, when all he could do to chase away the dream and convince himself that he was safe and at home was switch on the light and look around him at the familiar surroundings; Kanan hadn’t been able to do that anymore. And at the time, he probably didn’t lack for bad dreams.
Somehow, he had never considered that Kanan might have gone through something like that, but that was because Kanan had never shared that with him; and why would he? It was private, and probably not an easy thing to share. Possibly not something he ever would have, if Ezra hadn’t intruded upon his space like this.
Unless, of course, Ezra had brought it up, because that was definitely going to be something he would have trouble with too, he knew that already. He didn’t dream often, but when he did, it was as though his mind decided to commit fully to it, and sometimes took a while to bring himself back to reality. If… when… he couldn't switch the light on, things were going to be so much worse.
“Did it help?” he asked quietly.
Kanan shrugged. “Not really. But switching it on has turned into a habit. One I can do without for tonight.”
The room suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet, Ezra could hear the sound of his own and Kanan’s breathing, the slight creak of the bunk underneath him as he adjusted his position, and nothing else. He was glad of the light, because if it were dark he didn’t know whether he would have been able to stand it. He licked his lips. “Does it make any other noises?” he asked. “Ones that sound less like…” it didn’t actually sound like Noisi, “like that?”
“I don’t need it on, Ezra,” Kanan told him. “Like I said, it’s just a habit.”
“Still,” Ezra said. “Something else might be nice, something that sounds a bit less like someone fell asleep with their head on a musical keyboard.”
Kanan laughed. “Okay. There’s quite a bit on there, music, nature sounds, there’s a display on the front with the titles, if you want to look through and choose…” he stopped abruptly, probably remembering Ezra’s struggle to read the datapad a few days earlier. “Or I could just flip through them until we land on one you like,” he suggested.
“Yeah.” Ezra lay back in his bunk. The display looked larger than the datapad, he probably would have been able to read it, but he didn’t want to try. “Let’s do that.”
Kanan reached for the noise generator again and pressed the top again. The buzzing noise kicked back in. He pressed a button on the front and the tone changed to something softer, but similar in nature. Kanan scrolled past it, either because he didn’t like it himself or because he correctly assumed that it wasn’t going to work for Ezra.
He pressed the button a few more times, and the sound of raindrops on a metal roof filled the room. They began slowly, then growing heavier as though a storm was beginning outside.
“Wait,” Ezra said. It reminded him of Lothal, when the rains started, sometimes they would continue for days at a time. He could hear them from his room in his parents home, it reminded him of feeling safe and warm, listening to the voices of his parents speaking in low tones in the next room while he snuggled beneath the covers and drifted off to sleep. “I think I’d be okay with that one,” he said. “If you are, I mean.”
By way of an answer, Kanan pulled his hand back from the noise generator, and lay back down on his bunk. “Yeah, I think I could live with that,” he said.