Talking to Nobody

Ezra turned his eyes away from the screen as he switched on his datapad. It was something he had caught himself doing several times recently, taking a moment to work up the courage to glance at the screen. It was turning into a bad habit, and it was one that someone was going to notice sooner or later, if he wasn't careful.

To his intense relief, when he did look down, he could still read the words on the screen. They looked much too big, but he needed that size if he wanted to read without straining his eyes. He hadn't had to increase the size again since the last time, but he would, soon enough.

The datapad was still displaying a text file, the last thing he had been reading; an article on genetic conditions that mostly went way over his head, and had turned out not to be relevant anyway. He closed it, and called up the voice recorder program instead. It was a simple program, and one that until recently he had seen no need for. Of course, for someone that couldn't see, the ability to record audio notes and play them back could be invaluable, but that wasn't him.

Not yet, at least.

The program consisted of five large buttons filling the screen. Ezra wasn't certain whether it would have looked different before he had played with his screen settings, but that was irrelevant. In the centre of the screen, there was a large 'record' button. He reached out to press it. His finger hovered over the screen an inch from the surface.

"Okay," he said. He spoke quietly, for his own benefit rather than the recording.

His finger edged a little closer to the button. He took a deep breath and reached out into the Force. Actually working out where somebody was, was still beyond his skills, but learning whether or not they were close by was easier. Nobody should be on the ship; that was why he had chosen this particular morning. As an extra precaution, he had locked the door to his quarters. It would be better to deal with a frustrated Zeb hammering on the door and demanding entry and then to know what Ezra had been up to, than it would be to have someone walk in on him if he didn't notice they had returned.

He cleared his throat. "Okay," he said again, a little louder this time. He tried to make himself sound more confident, more natural. It didn't really work. "Okay, I feel ridiculous."

It was strange, talking when he knew nobody was listening, and at the same time, he couldn't quite banish the paranoid feeling that somebody was listening. He knew that wasn't the case, but still it made it difficult to speak, like trying to force out sounds that didn't want to come. He tapped several times on the record button with the nail of his index finger before touching the screen. The button turned to a bright red color, indicating that it was recording. He cleared his throat again.

"Uh, so… hello," he said.

His voice sounded weak and whispery, like he didn't want to be doing this. He did want to; it had been his idea, nobody was forcing him, but he could hear his embarrassment, and it sounded ridiculous. He didn't even want to think about what it would sound like on the recording. Not that it mattered; it wasn't like anybody was ever going to listen to it, not even himself.

"So," he said. "You know how people are always saying that talking about stuff helps? Well, not all people, I guess, and not all stuff. There's plenty of stuff you learn not to talk about in the Empire, and if you did, it wouldn't help you at all… that's not what I mean though. People say that talking about things that are happening and how you feel, and… I mean, Kanan and Hera are both always telling me I should talk about… But see, the problem with talking to people is that the people find out what you're thinking, and I don't… I mean, they know already, but maybe they don't know all of…"

Well, that had been a garbled mess. He stopped the recording, jabbing at the screen with his finger and watching the record button turn back to white, then he touched the file that it had created, deleted it, and the switched back to the recording program.

He pressed the record button again, then took a deep breath. "Hi," he said. "I'm Ezra Bridger, and I'm going blind."

That hadn't been as difficult to say as he had expected. Maybe it was the fact that he was alone, or that he had practiced it in his head over and over from the moment he had come up with this idea. Or maybe it had more to do with the way that he had allowed the words to pour out so quickly that he had barely noticed the final word until it was out there. He took another deep breath, and ran his hands quickly through his hair.

"So, yeah," he added. "That's happening. And I got the idea that talking about it might help, but I didn't really want to talk to a person, and just talking to a rock or something would feel ridiculous — not to mention on this planet it might turn out to be a living creature — so I thought a recording might work. So… here I am, I guess. And this is what's been happening."

He paused. He had gotten up to the part where he decided when would be a good time to do this, and he had thought about how to start, but very little beyond that. So much had happened in the past couple of months that it was difficult to know where to begin. Although it had, of course, started a lot earlier than that.

"You know, I actually found out about this ages ago. I mean, not ages ages, not back on Lothal or anything like that, but still, longer than most people think. I don't actually know how many people know that. Kanan does, since I told him before I got the diagnosis, and the rest of the crew. Hobbie too, and I guess he might have told Wedge, but I'm pretty sure everyone else thinks I found out about a month ago. It, uh… It was actually more like a year."

It had been a little longer than that. It had already been over a year when he had first received his diagnosis. It had been not long after they had first learned about the wider Rebellion that he had first started to notice that things weren't right, and not long after that, that he had first put those symptoms together with the genetic condition that ran in his father's family. Even once he had made that connection, it had still seemed impossible. Sacul Syndrome began in middle age and acted over decades. Except, it appeared, for those cases where it started early and happened fast. Rare. Incredibly rare. Ezra had won the lottery, and the prize was a pile of bantha dung.

"The first thing I noticed was I couldn't see the stars," he said. "We were on some planet — I don't even remember which one — and we ended up staying there overnight. Everyone else was talking about the stars, looking for patterns in them. Until they did that, I'd been assuming it had gotten cloudy when the sun had set. I kept looking up, trying to clear my vision, but nothing."

He paused. He realized his confidence had grown as he had continued speaking. He had been right; this was easier than talking to a person. He checked, quickly, to make sure he was still alone and the door was still locked.

"I was half convinced they were messing with me. But then, why would they have done that? Like, what would have been the point? Blindness wasn't on anybody's radar at that point, not even mine. And even if they had been thinking about it, nobody would be cruel enough to pull a trick like that. Especially not those guys. And anyway, when would they have come up with it? We'd been together all day."

He had only considered that possibility later, when they had returned to the Ghost, and he had dismissed it instantly. He had found the stars exactly where he had left them when he looked out of the view screen of the Ghost, and the entire incident had been forgotten until the time Chopper had turned out one of two lights in a room, plunging it into darkness. It shouldn't have been that difficult to see in there; not when he could see that the other light still on. That had been the time he had first started to worry. It had been that night that he had first typed the word 'Sacul Syndrome' into a computer terminal with the misguided intention of putting his mind at rest.

It had even been working, until a small section at the very bottom of the article he had found mentioned the existence of a rare, early onset variety of the syndrome.

"I wanted to tell them sooner," he said. "I mean, I tried to. So many times. But it's not an easy thing to say, you know? I mean, it should be; it's just three words. 'I'm going bli…' I… just never got around to it; it was never the right time. So I kept waiting, and even though I knew what it was, I kept hoping that I was wrong. And then we went to Malachor, and, well, you know how that turned out. I literally couldn't do it after that."

The irony was that he had been going to do it after that. He had been so certain that when they returned, triumphant, from their mission, he was finally going to have the confidence to sit them down and tell them the truth. His sight had been getting steadily worse, to the point where he could notice it all the time, and he knew that sooner or later, somebody else was going to notice too. Before they went wouldn't have worked; they would have worried about him going, they might even have tried to stop him. But when they got home, he had been going to tell them. Only, Kanan had come home injured, and he couldn't possibly have told them after that.

"Anyway, I guess after that happened I just kinda gave up on telling them. I knew it was going to happen eventually, either I'd tell them, or someone would work it out, but I honestly didn't think they'd work it out as soon as they did, and I don't know why, but I never imagined it would be Kanan that did it."

He paused again. He still had no idea how Kanan had worked it out. He had imagined scenarios in his head, and every time it had been him missing something that somebody else could see, and them noticing, asking him about it. Kanan hadn't done that, of course; it was as though one day he had simply known. Whether the Force had betrayed the secret, or whether Ezra had given himself away somehow, he wasn't sure. It didn't matter, it had happened, and even if he wanted to change it — and he still wished about half the time that he could, he would trade the relief of not having to hide for his life back as it had been before, just for a few months — it was too late to do anything about it.

He cleared his throat and massaged his face with a hand. He would trade a lot for his secret back, but he thought he would trade even more for a cure. "So, Kanan dragged me off to see Noisi. Not literally dragged me; but he didn't give me a lot of choice. He said I needed to know for sure, and I guess that's true, but you know what's not a good way to spend an evening? Finding out you were right about something you'd still really been hoping was wrong. But Noisi — that's the med droid by the way — he did a bunch of tests, and well…"

He broke off, suddenly unable to finish the sentence. His head was full of bad memories, and that one wasn't even close to being the worst, but it was the most recent, and the most fresh. Revisiting it now was almost like being back there, sitting on the floor of the 'fresher with his back pressed against the door while Kanan tried to convince him to come out, the droid's voice replaying over and over in his head. "You are suffering from early onset Sacul Syndrome…"

He touched the screen of the datapad, pausing but not stopping the recording. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed, forced in a deep breath and held it until it hurt. He had known what the droid was going to tell him; he had thought he had been prepared for it. He had been wrong.

He released the breath slowly, trying to release the panic, the fear, and the frustration with it. It didn't work. It never worked. He opened his eyes, then touched the button to resume recording. He licked his lips.

"So Kanan's trying to teach me about how to see with the Force," he continued. He was surprised to find that his voice sounded completely normal despite the fact that his mind was still back in the medbay reeling from his diagnosis. He tried to push the memory aside and get back into the slightly less uncomfortable present. "Only, it turns out a lot of what Kanan does isn't actually anything to do with the Force. That's part of it, but the rest is more like what my aunt would have done. Normal stuff. Normal… blind person stuff. And we haven't done a lot yet. We haven't really done anything yet. It's…" He stopped again, and sighed.

They hadn't done much at all. Kanan had emphasized the benefits of meditation to deepen his connection to the Force, and although he probably wasn't wrong, Ezra found meditation difficult at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. They had discussed the basics of what Kanan did, and Kanan had shown him a few things, and talked about others, but sooner or later they were going to have to start with real lessons, and Kanan had agreed that they would.

"So, anyway, then I had to tell the others. For a little while, I thought Kanan was going to help me keep the secret, but no such luck. He said I needed to tell them, and he was right, I guess. So Sabine and Zeb went away on a mission, and I told Hera while they were gone."

Only he hadn't told her. Not really. He had talked around the subject, avoiding saying the actual words that would make clear what he was trying to tell her. Eventually, Kanan had stepped in, and done it for him. And then Ezra had fled to his quarters to hide away.

"Then all three of us kinda told Sabine and Zeb together," he continued. Ezra had managed to get the words out for himself that time, and then stuck around for a few seconds before leaving Kanan and Hera to pick up the pieces. He supposed he should feel guilty about that. He didn't. "Chopper already knew," he added. "I think he might have known before I did."

Telling Sabine and Zeb had been worse than Hera, somehow. Maybe it had been the build-up to it; Hera had spent some time beforehand preparing a datafile to give to them and then distribute around the base, with the intention of reducing the number of questions that Ezra had to answer over and over. He had hated the idea, and even more than that, he had hated having to answer some of those questions for Hera. Or it could have been the fact that he had told them together; having to deal with two reactions at the same time. He didn't sense emotions as well as Kanan yet, but he did sometimes find it difficult to shut them out.

"The next day, it was everywhere," he said. "I still don't even know how that happened. I guess maybe someone overheard… I dunno. I know Hera talked to Sato about it the day after — and then he banned me from missions the next time he saw me — and Kanan told Rex. I guess it just kinda filtered through until everyone knew."

It had done so incredibly quickly. He had had no idea how fast news traveled on the base until he had become the subject of that news. Suddenly, it was everywhere; people were looking at him, talking about him, stopping talking when they noticed him nearby. People were coming up to him, offering advice that he neither needed nor wanted, expressing sympathy that made him want to scream, asking questions about things they had no business knowing. After having kept his secret for so long, in the space of a day he found it everywhere he turned.

"Doesn't matter how, anyway. They knew. They know. And I guess they've kinda gotten used to it by now. I mean, some of them still get awkward sometimes, and you would not believe how far out of their way people go to avoid saying 'see' or 'look' when I'm around. Some of them still look at me like they don't know what to say, and that's kinda awful. But, hey, it's not like I'm going to be able to see the way they look at me soon, right?"

He grinned, like he was playing for an audience, then felt the smile falter. Nobody was there, nobody was watching, and even if they had been, that wasn't funny, and they would have known the smile was fake. He sighed. He didn't need to put on an act here; nobody was judging him. Nobody was ever going to listen to this. He could be as honest as he dared.

"I'm scared," he said.

His voice cracked slightly as he said the word, but to his surprise, he managed to get it out. His eyes began to sting as they threatened tears, and he raised both hands to his face to rub them away. His fingers came away damp, and he wiped them roughly on his pants leg. He couldn't cry now. If he did, he was afraid that he wouldn't be able to stop.

Instead, he took a deep breath, held it, and forced the knuckles of one hand into the flesh of his thigh until it hurt, until he was sure it was going to leave bruises. "I'm scared," he repeated, more slowly this time, trying to control the words. "I think that's the first time I've said that, but it's true. I keep telling everyone I'm fine, but I'm not. I'm so not."

His eyes were stinging again, his vision blurring far beyond what he had grown used to. He ignored it.

"They know I'm lying," he whispered. "They haven't said so yet, but they know. How could anybody be okay, right? I mean, for a long time, even Kanan wasn't okay. How could I be?"

Not that he and Kanan were the same. The two situations might seem similar to another person, but they were very different. Or at least, at the moment they were very different. In a few years, the end result would be the same.

Ezra cleared his throat. "Sometimes — and here's another thing I'd never normally say out loud — sometimes I'm jealous of Kanan. That it was fast for him. That he didn't have to wait, and dread, and know what was happening but not be able to do anything to stop it. I'm not saying what happened to him was a good thing, of course it wasn't, but at least he never really saw it coming."

He shouldn't have said that. If this really was going to make things easier to discuss in the real world, he shouldn't have said that.

Kanan was okay now. Or, if not okay, then at least better than he had been. He was coping. Anyone that met him today might have no idea that he had once been able to see; the way he moved, the way he fought. Ezra should have been able to take encouragement from that, but he couldn't. Just because Kanan had learned to do something, that didn't meant that Ezra would be able to do the same thing, and so far, nothing had even begun to convince him that he was going to be able to do what Kanan could.

Even the thought of trying to move around his own quarters without sight scared him. He was okay as long as he could take off the blindfold, or switch on the light, but the thought of that option being taken away from him forever was terrifying. The knowledge that that was going to happen, and the clock ticking above his head, made it even more so.

He paused the recording again, and placed the datapad on the bunk next to him, then got to his feet and began to pace the room. This wasn't helping anything. He had thought that talking about it, even if nobody was listening, would help; that it would make it easier to deal with what he was feeling. Instead, it was making it all so much worse. It was forcing to the surface feelings that he had been keeping hidden deep inside him, some of them for over a year; things that he himself had barely even realized were there.

Strangely though, despite the way it was making him feel, despite fighting the urge to cry and squashing down the panic rising within him, he couldn't help but want to continue. He even wanted to go further, to give in to those urges and simply see what would happen. He couldn't do that, of course. Not here, and not now. Instead, he took several deep gulps from a glass of water that he had brought with him, then reached into the Force to check that the ship was still empty. He found himself just as alone as he had been the last time he had checked.

"Okay, here we go again," he said quietly, and hit record again.

He cleared his throat.

"So, I told you Sato removed me from active duty? That's one of the worst things about this whole thing. Well, so far, anyway. That happened the day the whole thing came out and people started to know. So that was great; just shows the damage a little honesty can do, right? But I'd been thinking it was Sato's decision. I mean, it was his decision, but when Hera went to talk to him about it, he put her in charge of deciding whether I could go back, and she decided I couldn't. Actually, no. That's not the worst part. The worst part is, I think she might be right."

Well, he had begun confessing now, might as well continue, and this was another thing he was never going to say to anybody else. He knew they would respect him for it if he did, but that didn't matter. He couldn't let anybody know.

"I've been telling her how okay I am, and that my eyes aren't even that bad yet, and they're really not. Not compared to how they're going to get. But the truth is, they're getting worse all the time. They're not reliable, either. I mean, right now, it's kinda like…" He floundered for a moment, trying to come up with an accurate description. "You know if you're wearing a hood, it can sometimes cut out your side vision? It's kinda like that, only what you can see, in the middle, that's kinda fuzzy too, like... like wearing a hood in the fog. It couldn't even let me have a clear view of the bit in the middle while the walls closed in."

The fog analogy didn't work completely, but it was close enough.

"But that's now. Tomorrow it could be a little better, or a little worse. And if it's worse, I don't know if that's a permanent thing or if it's going to get better again. All I know is that on average it's getting worse. Eventually, I'm going to miss something important, and make a mistake, and if someone got hurt, I'd never be able to forgive myself. So yeah, Hera's right, I shouldn't be on missions, not until I'm ready. And the things she told me would make me ready, they won't. She wants me to see the med droid regularly, have a backup plan for everything, and she wants me to be honest with her about everything…"

That last one shouldn't have been the most difficult, but it was. There were things that he was never going to share with anybody, things that he had spoken about on this recording that he had no intention of discussing ever again. Things that were his alone, and that he didn't want to inflict onto others. He might not actually be 'fine', but he would be, one day. And until that happened, they didn't need to worry any more than they already were. They didn't need a regular status report, it would only remind them of things that he didn't want at the forefront of their minds.

"But then, she said that if I can learn to do everything without looking — basically to do what Kanan can do — I can forget those other conditions," he added. "I don't think she was serious about that; when she told me the conditions, I argued. She came up with that as an impossible alternative. But she offered it, and I'm going to take it. She underestimated how much I hate that droid."

That had only been half a joke. He really did h… no, it wasn't really 'hate'. 'Strong dislike' was a more accurate description, and it wasn't aimed at Noisi himself. It was just that every time he got near the droid, or to the med bay, he found himself thinking about things he would rather not. Also, that matter-of-fact tone the droid used to talk about what was happening to him; the way he was so fascinated by it, eager, almost. It was as though he was happy that Ezra was going blind because he wanted to watch it happen.

Actually, 'hate' might have been the right word after all.

He took a deep breath, but didn't pause the recording this time. "So, that's basically it," he said. "That's where I'm at. I can't actually do anything at the moment, it's gotten so bad that I'm actually thinking about asking Hera to give me some jobs around the base. You know, maintenance or something. Something I can do to kill the time, until I'm ready to come back."

He didn't want that; not really. It just seemed like a less terrible option than sitting around waiting to go blind. Kanan was going to set up a regular training schedule, and that would take up some of his time, but not all of it. He couldn't do that all the time, he wouldn't be able to cope.

Maybe that had been why Kanan had had such difficulty. There had been no rest from it for him, no option to take off the blindfold and return to normality for a while. Or course, that same fact might have sped up his learning.

"Anyway, in the meantime I've been playing around with the dokma, Hobbie's been helping. I've worked out a way to influence the races… Well, I'd better not talk about that, but yeah. Really, it's just practicing making connections through the Force, so nobody should be able to complain about it, and we only do it every now and then, because we don't want people to notice. So yeah."

He paused, leaving the datapad recording silence. That was it; the events of the past months compressed into a few minutes of talking to himself. But he didn't feel like he was done, or like he wanted to be done. There was more that he needed to get out.

He reached into the Force once again, to check that he was still alone.

"I had a dream the other night," he said. He was speaking quietly again, almost a whisper. If the recording didn't catch the words, it wouldn't matter; it was going to be deleted anyway. "I'd gone back to Lothal, I don't know why, it doesn't matter. But nobody there knew I was coming, and when I got there, I saw Ryder Azadi talking to… He was talking to my dad."

The dream had been so vivid, it had been no effort at all to believe that it was true. Ryder had been acting as though walking down the street talking to Ephraim Bridger was completely normal; something he did every day. Ezra had found himself caught between two completing emotions, relief and joy that his father was alive, and anger, because Ryder hadn't told him.

"He was older," he continued. "His hair had gone gray, and it was longer than I remember; I guess he didn't bother to cut it in prison, and he was walking with a cane. Only then I noticed he wasn't using it for support, he was feeling his way with it, like my great aunt used to."

He had woken in tears, not able to decide whether they were tears of joy or sadness, and when he had dragged himself to full consciousness, a heavy sense of loss had lingered for the rest of the day, as though he had lost his father for a second time. Even now, days later, Ezra could still feel it weighing on him, and the questions that it had raised.

"He'd have been around the right age if he'd lived," Ezra said. He wasn't speaking for the recording now, just for himself. "The right age for the normal version anyway. But that moves slower, he wouldn't have been blind yet. I know it came from his side of the family, and he passed it on to me — thanks, dad — so he must have at least have been a carrier. I'm not sure how it works; if that means he'd have gotten it, or…"

It didn't matter. Not anymore. Still, he couldn't help but wonder whether that was why he hadn't been able to get away when Ryder had. Had he been slower because his vision had been failing? Had he tripped over something that he hadn't seen? Had Ezra's mother stayed with him, tried to help, and they had both been caught?

Ezra shook his head. It really didn't matter, and dwelling on it wouldn't help anything.

"You know," he added. "I could see fine in the dream; I always can. I guess my brain hasn't caught up with reality yet, because I can see perfectly when I'm asleep. I want to ask Kanan if he's the same, or… but I don't know if I want to know. I'm not sure which answer I'd prefer."

That wasn't the only question preying on his mind that he hadn't been able to bring himself to ask. He would get to them in time, or he wouldn't, and he would find out for himself.

He reached over and stopped the recording. The file saved automatically.

He was finished. There was more he could have said, of course He could have talked about Sabine's awkward hug not long after he had told her, and the solemn way that she had promised not to make fun of him in her art once he couldn't see it. He could have talked about the tactile alphabet, the reading system she had tried to introduce him to. He had even tried to read the information she had given him, but he already knew it wasn't going to be of any use. He didn't need to read. He could have talked about so much more, and maybe he would, one day.

For now, it had left him mentally exhausted. He couldn't have continued if he had wanted to, and he didn't want to. Not really. He wanted to be gone from the room by the time Zeb returned, out in the base, so that Zeb didn't think he had spent the morning in bed.

He touched the file, and selected delete. The file remained on the screen for a moment, before it blinked permanently out of existence leaving a blank space behind it.

Just as would everything else, soon enough.

Kanan had told him once that the world wouldn't be gone, that he would just have to find a new way to see it, and that was true. He just hoped he would be able to find it soon, before it was too late.

With a deep sigh, he switched off the datapad and got to his feet, then unlocked the door and headed out with no particular destination in mind.

A/N - I'm co-writing an AU over on Archive Of Our Own with this storyline. This is one of the stories that makes up that AU, but it also serves as a kind of a recap of the story so far, so I thought I'd publish it here in case I can tempt anybody over to AO3 for the rest of the story.

Unfortunately, we can't post the whole thing here very easily, because it's a series with two different authors writing different fics within the series, and doesn't allow for that.

If you enjoy this story and want to read the rest, you will find it at "archive of our own . com[slash]series[slash]618631" - remove the spaces and put in the backslashes, why oh why won't you allow external links, ff.n?! Or just visit AO3 and find the series called "Little By Little".