Once everyone had a crate of generators, Skywalker showed them on board his ship. Most of them hadn't seen the inside yet, so it was kind of cool.

"This ship is kinda big for just one person," Sabine noted, peering down hallways when she could. "Do you really just fly this thing yourself?"

Skywalker shrugged, opening the door to the cargo hold. "Most of the time, but it comes in handy for situations like these," he told her. "I jump around a lot, so it's nice to have room for when I pick up someone. I'll take a crew with me every once in a while. Not often, but sometimes."

The crates were stacked up against the wall. When they got to Rinn, they'd be ready to unload and disperse to the people there. Artoo went around, making sure all the generators were stable after they were set down.

Ezra watched the astromech work for a moment. "What's the deal with him?"

"Oh, he's always been like that," Skywalker assured him. "You get used to it."

"Yeah, but he listens to you," Ezra pointed out, staying in the cargo hold after the others left. "Did you do something for him that made him like you so much? How did you two meet?"

Anakin glanced over at Artoo, smiling as he remembered. "Either by the will of the Force or an insane amount of luck. I'm not really sure." He climbed to the platform Ezra was standing on. "I've known him since I was a kid. Met him right as I was leaving my home planet and then again as the Clone War started. I don't know why, but he's stuck by my side nearly every day since then. He'll usually cooperate for a friend of mine, but he loves picking fights with other droids."

It sounded a lot like Chopper. They were probably built around the same time, too. "Does he have any droid friends?"

"One, but he likes bothering him too. It's an old protocol droid kept at a safe house in the Outer Rim."

"Great," Ezra complained, but Artoo heard him and whistled back in response. The Padawan didn't understand the R2's binary patterns yet, though, so he didn't know what he was saying.

Anakin made to leave, but Ezra called for him again before he so much as walked out the door. "Hey, Master Skywalker, the person that gave us those generators, she said she was your contact."

He had nearly forgotten about that. Turning to face him, he smiled. "I heard you two had an interesting conversation. According to her, you ask a lot of questions."

"Yeah, but she didn't give a lot of answers."

"Well, you can't blame her. Bounty hunters tend to keep their backgrounds a secret," he explained, glancing around. "Come on up to the cockpit. Maybe I can clear a few things up."

Ezra followed him up a ladder that led between the floors. The cockpit was a hatch sitting right in the middle of the ship, near the vessel's nose. "I kinda like this," he complimented, taking a look around. It was a little worse for wear but still in great shape. Still, Ezra preferred the Ghost.

After the doors closed behind the two of them, Anakin sat down in the pilot's chair and leaned forward on his knees. "So, what did she tell you?"

"Just that you met during the Clone Wars."

He laughed as Ezra took a seat next to him. "That's an understatement. I'm sure she's expecting me to throw her under the bus," he reasoned, grinning at the Padawan. "Ventress used to be Tyrannus' apprentice."

It took a minute for the information to process. "Tyrannus? Like, Emperor Dooku...that Tyrannus?"

"The one and only."

"She was a Sith?"

"Emphasis on 'was,'" Anakin specified. "It's one of the reasons she flies solo now. She started as a Jedi until she got split off from her master and left. Then she studied under Tyrannus until he betrayed and abandoned her. After that, she's not very willing to commit to any cause or organization. Alliances are one thing, but she's loyal only to herself now. She doesn't trust anyone to look out for her."

He thought for a moment. "What happened to her Jedi master?"

Looking to the side, Anakin sat back in his seat. "You know, I don't think I ever figured that out. It's not like she's willing to talk about it."

"But the part about the Emperor, that's why she's helping the Rebellion? She wants revenge?"

"I'm sure that if given the opportunity, she would kill the Emperor herself and save us the trouble of dealing with him."

Laughing, Ezra looked out the cockpit windshield and watched the planet beneath them for a second. After some thinking, he remembered, "She kept talking about 'the good ones.' Has she talked to you about that before?"

The phrase did ring a bell. Even if Anakin had never had that exact conversation with Ventress, he thought he knew what she meant. "Her story comes with a lot of loss and betrayal. Most of the people who befriended her died, and most of the people who lived hurt her. It's hard to trust anyone when those are the only two options you know."

"Do you agree with her?"

Anakin shook his head. He understood where Ventress was coming from, but he refused to lose faith in hope. "Good things end all the time, and new ones start up and try something different. Living in the shadow of everything you've lost risks the chance of getting left behind when the world moves on. You could get lost with it." He looked at Ezra. "If I had gotten stuck on the fall of the Jedi Order and never moved on, there would never be a chance to heal. If you don't let go of the rope, at some point, it's going to start burning your hands."

Though he wore gloves most of the time, Ezra got the point. "How do you know that?"

"A friend of mine lost nearly everything he had. He lost his home, most of his friends and family, everything he was fighting for, everything he believed in." He stared out the window. "If there's one thing I learned between him and Ventress, it's this: You can't force someone to heal that doesn't want to."

"Why would anyone not want to heal?"

He thought about it. There were reasons, maybe not very good ones, but reasons nonetheless. Anakin knew some of them, and he could come up with plenty of his own. There wasn't just one thing that tied people to their trauma, though. No one felt exactly the same way about anything. How was he supposed to sum up all of that in one answer?

Ezra waited for him to respond, maybe to drop another nugget of wisdom, but this time an answer didn't seem to come to Master Skywalker that easily. Yet even in the silence, traces of answers seem to flash across his face. The longer he watched, the deeper the creases in his face became. It took a nearly full minute, but he finally answered: "Because it's important."

That didn't exactly clear things up. Ezra still didn't understand. "What's important?"

"All of it, I think. The pain and the healing," Master Skywalker told him, still not making eye contact. In fact, his vision seemed narrow in at a spot on the planet beneath them.

Slowly, in the Force, Ezra felt something he wasn't used to feeling from Master Skywalker. Usually, he was pulsing with strength and certainty, but it was cut away by something sharp that came from inside him. His own pain, surfacing through his mind and revealing itself. Ezra didn't mean to bring out anything that hurt the Jedi Knight, but he was so distracted by it that he focused on it.

As powerful as Anakin Skywalker was, the pain lurking inside him seemed to be just as strong. Ezra was always curious about his past, surely a great war hero like him must have all sorts of stories, but for the first time, he wasn't sure he wanted to know all of them. If any of those stories caused what he felt now, they couldn't be good. The pain seemed to claw at the Jedi, scraping into his reassuring spirit before burrowing in. At first, Ezra was scared that it would do something to it, maybe chase it away or change him, but Skywalker just seemed to take the hit. His head dropped, and Ezra saw a tear fall down his face.

Anakin wasn't expecting to remember the past like this today, but maybe it was for the better. One of the things he never remembered seeing from anyone in the Jedi Order, except on the rare occasion from Obi-Wan, was vulnerability. It didn't help that he had been the apprentice of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was, by the Council's standards, the ultimate Jedi. Whether it had been intentional or not, he had felt pressure to measure up to that image, to be perfect and completely in control of his emotions at all times. Needless to say, he had failed miserably in that respect.

That image was gone, though. Not only had he long since given up being perfect, but he no longer measured himself by the standards of the Jedi Council of old. To Anakin, suppressing emotions was not mastering them. He felt every emotion very often, but he didn't let those emotions govern his mind. He could use them when they helped him, and he could set them aside when they hindered him. Anakin Skywalker was a person, an intelligent, caring person who felt as strongly and deeply about the galaxy as any other. That did not make him weak, and it did not make him unwise. He felt emotion, and he was mastering it a little more every day. To him, that meant understanding what he felt and deciding what to do with his emotions. He had decided to learn from it.

Maybe today, he would also teach from it. Anakin had been so scared to show emotion, or as he had thought of it, to show weakness to other Jedi in the Order. The first step in undoing that stigma from the past was to break it down. Opening up to Obi-Wan was one thing, but Ezra had no context for Anakin's past, no reason to understand it. Yet Anakin was determined that Ezra would never feel so guarded or intimidated by him that he wouldn't trust him. Anakin Skywalker was not just a legend, not just a superior. He was a person, like Ezra, no matter what else he was. If vulnerability could be rekindled between their generations, it might never die again.

Eventually, Ezra realized Anakin was looking at him now. He looked down at his feet, feeling a bit awkward. "Sorry."

He shook his head. "Don't be. It's not your fault."

It wasn't often that Kanan taught 'out of the book' to Ezra, but there had been one lesson in particular that his master had passed onto the apprentice. "I...I thought there was this saying the Jedi had. I don't remember how it goes exactly. It started with 'Fear leads to...' something."

"'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred leads to suffering,'" Anakin recited, the words all too familiar to the Chosen One. "That's why I'm trying to learn how not to be afraid of pain. It hurts, it always does, but that doesn't mean healing is impossible."

"Has that always been there?" he asked timidly, referring to what he had felt in Anakin moments ago. "I've never noticed it before, but..."

"For a long time," he affirmed, nodding.

"Will I have that one day?"

Anakin saw his fear growing just beneath the surface. It was in the eyes. You could always see it in the eyes. He didn't blame Ezra. Even at fifteen years old, he had so much to be afraid of. Losing his family, losing the Rebellion, the Inquisitors, Offee, Tyrannus, the Empire, it seemed like all the odds were stacked against him. It was the reason Anakin tried to steer kids away from the battlefield until they were at least sixteen, if not older. Kids, teenagers included, didn't need to be strong; they needed to be safe. They could be strong later.

He couldn't lie to the Padawan, though. "Probably."

"What do I do?" he asked, drawing his knees to his chest. "I'm not- I'm not as strong as you are, I can't just keep going if something like that happened to me."

"That's the thing," Anakin told him, smiling. "You don't have to. You have an entire crew behind you waiting to catch you if you fall."

Ezra looked toward the door to the cockpit, where the others were roaming about. "What do you mean, do they even understand this?"

"Understand pain? Absolutely."

"But they've never tried to deal with something like this before."

"Have you ever asked them to?"

Smirking just a bit, Anakin watched as Ezra froze up a bit, realizing he hadn't. "It's odd how no one ever realizes that until after it's too late. They think they're all alone because they tried so hard to hide the pain from everyone else, not realizing that was the way out."

He hugged his knees a little tighter. "But...you don't need anyone to help you."

Anakin shook his head. "Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they're not helping. You haven't met them, but that doesn't mean I don't depend on them. They're out there, somewhere, fighting their own fights. If they ever asked, I'd drop everything and run to their side in a heartbeat." He pointed out to the door. "If any of them called you, saying they had an emergency and they needed you now, would you hesitate to help them?"

"No."

"Then believe in them. Believe, even if it doesn't feel like you deserve it, that they would do the same for you."