Places No One Knows

by yellowcottondresses

Summary:

Hera Syndulla is many things: Rebel. Pilot. Captain. Mother. One thing she has never been is a failure. So why does she feel like one now? And why is it suddenly so hard to be strong?

Notes:

Author’s Note: Will be a three-parter with epilogue.

Tesa Jarrus is my original character. She makes another appearance in a fic of mine called “Named”. It’s not essential to read that fic in order to understand this one, but…hey, why not? =)

I don’t own SWR.

Chapter 1

I.

Maul’s blade is right over her daughter’s heart

Hera watches the wild-eyed creature hovering over her helpless infant. The baby isn’t crying or moving; she just stares up at the monster, wide-eyed and silent, awaiting her own execution with a studious expression.

Maul turns to Hera.

“Remember today,” he tells her. His voice like ash and smoke scorching her soul. “Remember today as your greatest failure.”

Hera says nothing. She crosses her arms across her chest, watching the scene before her like a mildly interesting holonet drama.

On the ground, Tesa turns her head towards her mother. Hera meets her gaze, level and steady, before her daughter looks away.

Maul’s lips peel back in a snarl, and he raises the lightsaber above his head. There is the briefest moment of utter stillness as he hovers the blade above that tiny body.

Then, he brings it down.

 

 

II.

In her head, she’s picturing the inside of the engine, walking herself through each step needed to repair that damaged converter. Not complicated in and of itself, but so many little steps to take, and it’s a piece of the ship that’s is absolutely necessary to keep them in the air.

The caf brewer has been percolating since before the sun came up on this little moon, when Hera decided there was no point lying in bed waiting for Tesa’s inevitable shrieks to summon her. Too much needs to be done, and she’ll factor sleep in later.

(At some point)

(When she finally makes some sort of dent in the list of Things That Need To Be Done To Prevent The Galaxy From Falling Into Everlasting Tyranny and Oppression)

But she woke up electrified, her heart slamming against her ribs, unable to close her eyes. Even though every part of her body pulsed with exhaustion, she lay awake beside Kanan, jittery and frustrated. It didn’t help that Kanan was sleeping peacefully, looking full of that famed Jedi serenity she’d heard so much about.

From in the crib next to the bed, the rustling of blankets let Hera know her daughter was awake again, and probably hungry.

I’ll get up when she cries, Hera had thought, resting her head in a nest of her arms. Her face felt sticky and unwashed, her skin covered in a film of grease from being awake all night long. Through the tiny window above her bunk, she could just make out the razor-thin blades of golden dawn. It was always a weird feeling to her, seeing the sun rise after a long, sleepless night. Like she was watching the rotation cycle spinning the opposite direction.

She couldn’t stay in that room a second longer. Not while Kanan slept and her veins were on fire and she was alone with the baby.

So Hera pulled on yesterday’s clothes and tucked the baby under one arm. For some reason she was panting, so she tried once to be comforted by the stagger of her daughter’s breathing; the rattle-hiss of every inhale, the loud heat of her chest moving in and out without rhythm or pattern, but at least moving. It didn’t help, but a few cups of caf ought to clear her head.

The kitchenette aboard the Ghost fills with a warm, cocoa smell, and Hera grabs a fresh mug for herself with one hand, balancing the baby against her waist with the other. The caf maker grinds and churns, and Tesa reaches out for it, trying to touch the stream of brown liquid filling the pot. When Hera snatches her tiny hand back, Tesa whines in protest.

“Oh, I know, Little Luv,” Hera says, setting Tesa in her little carrier-seat on the table. After fussing the entire night, she wonders how her daughter still has energy left to cry. “Life is so hard when I don’t let you stick your hand in boiling water.”

Her daughter lets out another sulky whimper, but Hera turns her back to the baby, listening to the slow gurgle of the machine instead. Soon her daughter’s voice becomes a background hum she can’t completely tune out, but at least push to the back of her mind.

Normally, Kanan’s the one to watch her in the mornings, after Hera’s done feeding her. But Kanan is dead to the world right now, and she was wide awake most of the night, so she decided to let him rest a little longer.

She’d stared at his face while she dressed, the way his eyes moved under their closed lids. He wasn’t thrashing under the covers or grinding his teeth, like he did whenever he was having a nightmare.

She wondered what he was dreaming about. Whatever it was, it must have been good.

Tesa hollers, and Hera presses a gloved hand to her forehead. Gritting her teeth, she mentally labels the four main parts of the converter. She thinks it’s a problem with the connector fuse, probably a short-circuit; she’ll have to replace it with whatever’s lying around in the spare parts closet and just hope that holds out. At least, until they complete the mission and can find a new fuse back at the base –

“Remember today as your greatest failure.”

“Oh, great, a fresh pot.”

Hera’s head snaps up at the sound of Sabine’s voice. Despite the early hour, the girl is already dressed in her armor.

“Help yourself,” Hera replies as Sabine grabs a mug from the drawer and pours herself a generous amount.

“Save some for me,” she hears Ezra call, and the boy shuffles into the galley still in his sleep pants, dark hair flattened against the side of his face. He flops down at the table with a dramatic sigh, resting his head in his arms.

“Euuurgh.” Zeb groans as he sits next to Ezra, his eyes bleary. “Hera, you gave birth to a baby, right? Not a jet engine?”

Not for the first time, Hera wishes she had one of Chopper’s electric probes and a clear shot at Zeb’s rib cage.

“And to think,” Sabine says mildly. “We were so worried about her lungs.”

Zeb snorts. “Trust me, that part of her’s working just fine.”

Sabine slides into her seat at the table.

“I thought you guys could use the Force,” she says. “You know, to calm her down. So she wouldn’t wake up screaming her head off.”

“Girl’s got a point,” Zeb grumbles. “I saw you use the Force with those babies we rescued from the Inquisitors. It kept them from doing exactly what that one did all night!”

Hera narrows her eyes at Zeb.

“That one?” she repeats coolly.

Zeb has the grace to look like he regrets the comment.

“Don’t you think I’ve been trying?” Ezra snaps. “Or that I like staying up all night because she won’t stop crying? The Force isn’t a pacifier! I’ve BEEN trying to connect with her! Kanan has, too. But it doesn’t always work!”

He rests his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands.

“Sometimes,” he says, his voice muffled through his fingers, “babies just cry. They don’t have a reason; they just…do.”

“Yeah,” Zeb mutters. “I think we’re all aware of that.”

“If you would like to do something about that,” Hera tells him, “you can always run diagnostics on the Ghost’s internal systems.”

“That’s a droid’s job!” he says. “Get Chopper to fix it; he could do it in two minutes!”

“Chopper is busy working on the Phantom II’s power grid,” she replies. “You, on the other hand, will have plenty of time to do the job.”

Zeb growls, but even he knows better than to keep pushing.

Tesa fusses in her carrier, making every long, sulky syllable stretch like rubber. It always amazes Hera how she can do that.

Ezra rubs his black-bagged eyes. He reaches into the carrier to lift Tesa, and Hera watches as he takes the hem of his sleep shirt and wipes Tesa’s mouth clear of the bubbling drool that’s slipping down her cheeks. She wonders why it didn’t occur to her to do that.

“How do we make you happy, Cranky Lady? Hmm?” he says to Tesa in a singsong voice. For some reason, he has a grin on his face, even if weariness tilts it slightly off-balance.

Tesa coughs, a wad of snot landing on Ezra’s shoulder. The boy winces. Zeb practically leaps up from the table like he’s been stung.

“Where are you going?” Hera asks.

Zeb twitches his ears towards the baby. “Between out there and in here, I’ll take my chances with whatever is on this rock.”

“I think I’ll join you,” Sabine says, downing the rest of her caf in one swig. “Fresh air sounds good right about now.”

Hera rolls her eyes.

Ezra holds Tesa against his shoulder, rubbing her back in slow circles. She’s still whimpering, but the high-pitched cries have mostly died down. Hera can see her eyes glazing over as Ezra soothes her. If he can get the baby to be quiet for just two minutes, she will promote him to squadron commander.

“Any luck?” she murmurs, taking the seat Sabine abandoned.

Ezra shrugs his free shoulder. “She’s not in any pain. She’s just cranky. And hungry.”

“Right.” Of course she’d be hungry; the last time Hera nursed her had been–

She can’t remember. Hera has a foggy recollection of sitting on the edge of her bed, flightsuit unsnapped and pooled at her waist while the baby drank from her. There’s another memory of Kanan with a bottle, testing out the temperature of the liquid on his wrist.

Were those from the same night? Were they even from last night, or last week?

Ezra holds the baby out to her. Hera stares at him for a second before realizing she has to take her daughter.

 

 

III.

She’s making a valiant effort to catch up with the latest schematics of an Imperial ammunition factory when Commander Sato comms her, and thank the Force, or the Ashla, or the Flying Potato Casserole Creature Of The Galaxy that he can’t see her right now.

“Captain Syndulla.” Crisp and no-nonsense as always. Man must have the patience of a saint. Hera distinctly does not remember being that calm when she was bedridden for weeks on end.

She sets the datapad she’d been studying aside, grateful for the reprieve. The lines and sketches were starting to wiggle off the screen.

“Commander Sato,” she replies. “I was just looking over the report Captain Jinso sent us. Looks like they used the same planning structure they used to build the Lothal weapons factory. I’ll send a team to do some recon and make sure.”

Tesa lets out a grunt and kicks against her belly, a sharp pain Hera ignores. Her right lek slumps over one shoulder close to her daughter’s face. Hera tucks it behind her so Tesa won’t decide she’s more interested in yanking on Mama’s headtails than finishing her meal.

Mama. Something in her chest catches at the word. She pushes it away, hard.

There’s a pause from Sato before he asks, “I’m sorry, have I interrupted something?”

“No,” she says, too quickly. “No, it’s fine. What were you saying?”

There’s the briefest pause before he speaks again, his voice unwavering as ever.

“I know you are aware of the situation with Captain Ibo’s unit.”

Hera sighs. “You mean, the unit that lost an entire strike fleet in that Imperial air raid?”

Sato’s voice is grim. “The attack on Cato Neimodia greatly weakened them. They are in need of pilots to build a new fleet.”

Hera sighs, shifting Tesa’s weight in her arms as silently as possible. “They can take a number,” she mutters.

Another pause in the transmission, and Hera’s face flushes. Not exactly the model behavior of a squadron leader.

“There are several volunteers who wish to aid Captain Ibo in rebuilding his squadron,” he replies. “But most of them are not formally trained as pilots.”

Tesa squirms against her mother’s hold. Hera pats her back, hoping the baby won’t cry or unlatch. Now is not the time for a fifteen minute session of squashing her boob against her daughter’s face in an attempt to relatch while Tesa yells in hunger.

“I understand that you have a great many responsibilities aboard the Ghost,” he says. “And I know I’ve asked a great deal of you these past few weeks –”

Hera blames her overtired mind for taking longer than necessary to put two and two together.

“You want me to train them?” she asks.

“I understand if you cannot leave,” Sato says. “Phoenix squadron still needs your leadership, and your crew is vital to our fleet.”

“And,” he adds, his voice a fraction softer, “I know leaving the young one is a difficult thing to ask of you. I do not wish to take you away from your child; only know, I would not ask unless I thought –”

“No.” Hera would never cut off a superior officer so abruptly, but she’d rather Sato think her rude than weak-willed. “No, Commander, that’s not it. I’ll take the mission. I’ll help them.”

There’s more doubt than surprise in Sato’s voice when he replies. “Are you quite certain? Do you wish to confer with the other members of your crew?”

Hera shakes her head, forgetting he can’t see her.

“I don’t need to confer with them,” she says confidently. “They’ll understand. The attack on Cato Neimodia cost the Rebellion so many lives, and we aren’t replacing them quickly enough to make up the numbers. The sooner we get Captain Ibo’s new recruits in the air, the better.”

There’s a long silence on Sato’s end.

“Very well,” he says finally. “I trust your judgment, Captain Syndulla. I shall contact Captain Ibo and let him know he should be expecting you within two days’ time.”

Hera blinks. She hadn’t expected to be sent away so quickly. That doesn’t give her a lot of time to work out a temporary childcare solution with Kanan and the others.

She shakes her head. They all know how to feed and change the baby. There’s a storage of youngling formula in the Ghost kitchenette for situations like this. They’ll figure it out.

“Thank you, Commander,” Hera says. “I’ll be awaiting your coordinates shortly.”

She assumes he’s dismissed her, but when she reaches to switch off the commlink, she’s surprised to hear Sato’s voice from the other end.

“I am told that your daughter is doing quite well.”

Hera’s eyes widen. Sato has never asked about Tesa. He’s hardly even seen her, other than a visit to the medwing shortly after her birth.

“She has.” She stares at her daughter, still nursing, her long suckles pulling at something deep in the pit of Hera’s belly. “Some days are better than others, but she’s getting there.”

“So, there is some good news.”

He sounds quieter, somehow. More reflective.

The first time Sato met the baby, he was still in his wheelchair. The stump from his amputated leg was bandaged and tied right at the knee, and his head was still wrapped in layers of bacta strips that looked like a helmet made of gauze. He hadn’t been very mobile in those early days, so Hera knew that for him to use what little strength he had to wheel himself here was a big deal.

He’d walk again, the medic said. Thank his lucky stars. But he’d always have a limp, and prosthetics could be tricky. Even if they could be fully attached to a person’s body, there was no guarantee it would be a smooth transition. Most likely, she’d warned, the commander would have to use a cane for the rest of his life.

A squadron’s worth of soldiers, and they only managed to pull three survivors from the smoldering wreckage. The Imperial attack above the Abregado system had been precisely calculated, swift and merciless. Thrawn had them all on the run, and he knew it.

By the time they found Commander Sato, his left knee had been hanging on by the barest threads of skin and tissue. He was unconscious, half-buried, in shock. Had they been thirty seconds later, he would have bled to death.

But he survived. Barely.

He hadn’t say much. Just wheeled himself to the edge of Hera’s bed, presenting her and Kanan with a simply-wrapped package resting in his lap, tied with what looked like a shoestring.

“For your little one,” he’d said solemnly.

It was a quilt. Hera had run her hands over the seams, tracing a pattern of blue stripes against a yellow background; a jungle-pattern of treetops; a flower-print of little pink blossoms.

She’d stared open-mouthed at Commander Sato. For a moment, she was too stunned to remember her composure as a Phoenix leader.

“This is beautiful,” she’d told him. And expensive, she realized. Hera had seen enough amateur stitching in her day to recognize true craftsmanship. The seams of this quilt were perfectly aligned, the patterns blending into one another without any jagged edges or strange, misshapen sections.

Before Sato wheeled himself back to his bed, Hera had studied his lined, tired face for any sign of disappointment. Of frustration, unhappiness, rejection. She’d searched and searched and searched his expressions, looking for the one that would tell her what she’d feared every day since the moment she decided to carry this child to term.

She hadn’t found it then. She hasn't found it yet.

But she’s still looking.

Hera turns to face the wall, letting the cool metal press against her throbbing head. It’s a small reprieve, but instantaneous, and she keeps her forehead resting on the wall, grateful for the relief.

She hasn’t seen Commander Sato since he’d been fitted with his prosthetic leg. But if he was well enough to give orders and discuss war tactics with other rebel leaders, she figured he’d be out of the medwing sooner rather than later. Good news for all of them.

Hopefully, he’d return to base camp knowing that everything was precisely the way he’d left it. He’d return and see that Phoenix squadron had managed to hold it together just fine in his absence. That everything was running on time, as smoothly as it could. He’d see that promoting Hera to act as his replacement while he recovered was the right decision.

He would see she is still a capable leader. The perfect choice for such a demanding job. Baby or not, everyone could count on her to be Captain Syndulla, part of the Rebel Alliance fleet.

She would not fail.

Nobody would expect anything less from a Phoenix leader.

 

 

IV.

The language of flying isn’t utilitarian. It requires resilience and determination and a damn good Basic-to-Bonkers translation guide. Every ship has its own dialect, every star system its own ways of accenting and pronouncing and conjugating their grammar. The language of flying means you speak part orbit, part binary, and part "oh shit I have to make a decision right now or else I am going to crash into that moon and die."

The language of flying is the language of the sky – sprawling, ever-changing, unchartable. Everyone who thinks differently and tries to capture the black might as well try to capture the concept of time, or infinity.

Hera has spent every day since she left home speaking the sky. And for everything about it that is vast and unknowable, it’s the only speech she understands these days.

It grounds her to the ship – her ship – in a way that reminds her she has always been here. The Ghost isn’t just a vessel that gives her the art and thrill of flying. It’s home. An extension of herself. A connection more than love at first sight; it’s kin, because you couldn’t speak the language of the sky unless you were flying through it in something that you trusted to navigate the different dialects respectfully, one that you swore could predict your instincts and reactions before you made your move.

This is her world. This is as much a part of her as the patterns of her lekku, the shade of her skin, the sound of her voice. If the ship is still connected to the unspoken words of the cosmos, then she is as well.

Or at least, she will be, once she gets her head sorted out.

A shower of sparks suddenly erupts above her, startling Hera. She slides backward against the cold metal floor, heart racing. She just misses being shocked, but it was close enough. She’d been jolted before, and it was the kind of pain that couldn’t be braced for and sucker-punched the breath right out of your body. She lets out a stream of curses as she re-positions her body under the open panel.

From the little carrier that Ezra fashioned for her, Tesa is whining, arching her little body into a tight line as she tries to squirm out of her seat.

“Sorry, Little Luv,” Hera calls. “Forget Mama said that.”

She pauses at the word. Not for the first time, Hera wonders why she sometimes refers to herself that way. All her life she’s gone by her own or various code names, or “Captain Syndulla”. But for some reason, she calls herself by the title that only one being in the whole galaxy can precisely claim as her own. As if she has become a whole separate entity, no longer part of herself; as if the Hera she was before giving birth shifted to make room for the Hera she is now.

It makes no sense to her, this lingering feeling of rearrangement. That’s not the exact word for this feeing, but the only other word that comes to mind is “loss”, and Hera hasn’t lost anything. Hera knows what loss feels like; her entire crew does. None of them are strangers to grief, to heartache.

She’s gained a beautiful little girl, a new edition to the wonderful family she and Kanan have built. She’s surrounded every day by the people she would cross whole galaxies for. To call it “loss” would feel ungrateful, in some way. Diminishing, compared to the suffering that she’s seen.

Tremendously selfish.

 

 

V.

“Have you been at it all morning?”

The words are muffled, and it takes her a moment to surface from the depths of the Ghost’s innerworkings.

Kanan stands in the doorway, still wearing his sleep pants. Barefoot and hair askew, face free of the mask over his filmy eyes, he looks strangely older, somehow. Hera feels too exposed without her flightsuit, gloves, and headwrap, but Kanan’s face looks carved from stone, features worn deep into the dark skin. He looks steady as a mountain, old as the earth they walk on.

At the sound of her father’s voice, the baby’s head whips around. Her feet kick like pistons as she flails her arms, reaching for him. When he lifts her out of the carrier into his arms, Tesa’s small hands reach up, resting against his cheeks. Kanan bends his head close to their daughter. For a moment everything is so quiet, so unbreakably peaceful.

Kanan once said he dreamed about her, while she was still inside Hera’s belly. Even before Hera had missed her first cycle, Kanan could feel the presence inside her, the small clot of cells that was already reaching out through the Force, somehow sensing her father even when she hadn’t even formed the ability to know the word “father”. Before it had even formed enough to be called a “she”.

When Tesa was inside her, he never missed an opportunity to feel the baby kicking against his palm, or wrap his arms around her from behind. On the rare nights they had time to be alone, he’d lay his head on her stomach, his face soft in concentration as he whispered in wonder to Hera, everything he could tell about their growing baby through her already-present signature in the Force.

It startled her, realizing he was that in-tune with something that was going on inside her own body. Hera had never really understood the Force, but she had always trusted Kanan’s instincts. Still, his knowing, his intimacy, unnerved her. The knowledge that, at least temporarily, she was not connected to only herself. Her body was an alien thing to her, not solely Hera’s to command.

Kanan had been the one to dream about their child. He’d known her before she’d come to their world. But Tesa had grown inside her body. Hera had felt her moving inside her belly, felt the flutter of her kicks against her skin. Her body had nourished this being into existence; they were once as physically close as it was possible for organics to be.

Kanan and Tesa are twinning souls with a dialect only they speak. Hera is her mother, but Hera will never speak that language, or come close to understanding it.

“Has she been fussing all morning?” Kanan asks.

Hera rolls her eyes. “I don’t know where she finds the energy. You think being up all night would tire her out at least a little.”

From her spot on the floor, Hera watches Kanan as he leans against the doorframe, shifting Tesa in his arms. Her hands splay across his bare collarbone like little stars, fingers spread wide. Kanan prefers direct skin contact with their daughter. He’s always tracing the lines of her face with his fingers to commit its shape to memory; holding her close so the warmth of his own body flows freely into hers; lying her on his chest while the sound of his heartbeat lulls her to sleep.

And he never says it out loud, but Hera knows Kanan too well for him to hide behind his silence. She knows he thinks that if the baby can feel him breathing, her own small chest might memorize the rhythm of the motions. Maybe their daughter will learn the right way to inhale and exhale the same way Ezra learned lightsaber combat, or Hera learned to fly; going through the motions, letting the experience sink inside their skin, the patterns of their bodies imprinting all the way through their bones until it was second nature.

“Did you sleep at all? You were gone when I got up.”

“It’s fine.” She wipes her brow with one arm. Too late, she remembers she’s had her hands in oil and grease, and she’s probably streaked her forehead with a dark, metallic-scented stripe. “We don’t have time for anything else.”

“You need a break? A fresh set of eyes on the problem might help.”

There’s just enough of a question mark in that phrase to make her lekku twitch.

“No, it’s okay. I think I almost figured out the problem. I’m almost positive it’s an issue with the flux converter. Tedious to fix, but not impossible. We should be off this hunk of rock soon enough.”

“Still. Is there anyone who could help move things along?”

She bristles at the implication; once upon a time, Kanan never questioned her ability to do what needed to be done.

Hera keeps her eyes focused on the pattern of screws and bolts above her head. They’re real and solid and they don’t slide away from her as she works. Everything is within her grasp.

“You know what you can do?” she asks instead. “Take her for me. This has to get done. It’s not negotiable.”

“Hera –”

“We’re already too far behind as it is.” She keeps her voice level, still focused on the grid above her head. Wires crossed, bolts tightened, currents moving in their correct path. The organs of this ship she knows as well as she once knew the breakdown of her own body. “We’re cutting it close no matter how fast we travel. And if we miss this drop, we’ll have to wait two more rotations until the next one. Assuming the Empire hasn’t figured out we have an inside source at their transport station and moved the entire base of operations around. In which case, we’ll never get to them. All because I didn’t do everything I could to help.”

Kanan sighs.

“I see your point,” he says. “I’ve got her.”

The world is suddenly smeared around the edges, blurring as her grip on the controls start to slide away. She makes herself breathe and grinds her teeth. On her forehead, the oil mark dries and tugs at the skin, creating an itch she refuses to scratch.

“If you need anything,” he says quietly, “just say something.”

Hera doesn’t have an answer for that – at least, one that she wants to say out loud – so she just continues working. She doesn’t look up as he leaves the room, taking their daughter with him.

Chapter 2

I.

“Hera –”

Thrawn turns to her. His red eyes glitter with savage radiance, but the stoic expression on his face betrays nothing.

“Curious,” he murmurs.

There are screams from inside of the Ghost; she recognizes Kanan’s voice barking orders, Zeb growling with fury, Sabine’s rage-filled screams and Ezra’s call to hold on, to never give up.

And the baby crying.

“Daughter.” Unlike the others, Cham’s voice is completely calm, without a trace of fear or anger. “Hera, Daughter, for Ryloth.”

Thrawn turns away from Hera and faces out the window of his Star Destroyer, where they watch the Ghost burn in the never-ending blackness. One hand hovers over the switch for the ion cannon, pointed straight at the ruins of the ship she calls home.

“Yes, indeed,” he says, almost lazily. “So very curious.”

The light from the cannon is blinding. The almighty crash of the Ghost being blasted to smithereens with everyone she loves inside could tear the vastness of the sky apart.

“Hera –“

She gasps awake.

Her head spins too fast; she doesn’t know where she is. She reaches for her hip, and there’s a moment of pure panic when she can’t find her blaster

The screaming echoes, an endless howl of agony.

“Hera.”

Kanan’s voice is the only steady thing. She closes her eyes, tries to focus on the sound, the unwavering timbre. He sounds as if he’s speaking from far away.

He grabs her hand, squeezes it. The familiar calluses on his palm help bring her back to now.

She sits up, adjusting her tangled nightshirt. It’s damp around the collar and armpits, the skin there sticky with sweat.

There is no screaming. She knows there never was.

Kanan guides her hand towards the crib. He opens his palm, hovering it right over their daughter’s chest. For a moment Hera thinks Kanan is going to make her touch the baby, and a quicksilver instant of terror surges through her.

I need my gloves, she thinks dazedly. I can’t touch her.

Her heartbeat slows when Kanan just holds her hand over the crib, hovering their palms inches above their daughter’s sleeping form.

“She’s alright,” Kanan whispers. “Hera, she’s fine.”

She stares at his hand, placed over Tesa’s body. Her daughter is sprawled like a star cluster, fat little fists raised above her head like she’s grabbing fistfuls of moonlight in her dreams. The baby’s chest rises and falls in unsteady rhythm, every movement noisily announced through the tiny slash of her mouth.

They sit there for a while, neither of them moving or speaking.

Kanan slips his arms around her. She follows him back under the covers.

“She’s fine,” he says again. “See? Her breathing’s okay.”

He’s asleep in minutes. She lies next to him, wide awake.

The baby gasps her shuddery breaths. The scream still echo in Hera’s head.

 

 

II.

The fresher is empty this time of night. No one’s awake except Chopper, so when she slips into the shower stall and turns the faucet on as hot as she can stand it, Hera can ignore that she’s breaking every rule she ever told her crew a million times over about being conservative with the hot water. Pushing away her lectures, she lets the steaming water pour down her clammy, sweat-soaked back.

Long, hot showers were a luxury she’d never allowed herself before Tesa. They’re wasteful, expensive, not to mention irresponsible. There are a million other priorities she has to attend to. Hera shouldn’t take so much time up for her own comfort, not when so many are counting on her.

But as long as the water keeps pouring down on her, she can concentrate on that. Nothing but the heat and the steam and the roar of the water all around her, like she’s some kind of aquatic species in the middle of a wide, warm ocean. One that can survive in the deepest, blackest, most unknown parts beneath the surface, down so deep no one knows they even exist.

The heat from the water loosens something in her chest. Hera tilts her open mouth towards the showerhead, letting the sour, slightly metallic taste of the water run down the sides of her lips and roll off her tongue. Her head is spinning, and she tries to recount the steps of her day, the moments leading up to this, the dreams and silences and thoughts exploding like a supernova in the recesses of her mind. It’s a repetitive exercise, pointless and redundant and leading nowhere.

“Hera Syndulla can do anything she sets her mind and heart to,” Kanan told her once, when she was exhausted after a three-day mission to Saleucami and a narrow escape from Imperial forces. She was, at the same time, too tired to move and so fueled with adrenaline she felt like she could sprint across a planet, heart pounding so hard she was certain it would hammer its way right out of her chest.

She wasn’t showing yet. The kids knew, and so did Commander Sato. She hadn’t figured out what to tell the rest of Phoenix squadron; if she ought to break the news to them as soon as possible to prevent gossip, or just let them figure it out for themselves when she kept getting bigger.

She’d just confessed to Kanan. The words she hadn’t been able to say for months but had always been there, like a nagging bug that wouldn’t stop flying around her head.

“I was so young when I lost my mother; it’s not like I have a model to go on. And there was never a time we weren’t fighting just to stay alive – from the Separatists, from the Empire, from anyone who felt like they could profit off of people desperate and starving enough to do anything for a little gold.”

The Ghost soared through hyperspace with her hands off the controls, and she leaned back in the chair to gaze at the rush of colors flying above her. It made her dizzy. She had to close her eyes.

“So many times, I wonder if I’m really cut out for this.”

Kanan had brushed her off. Smiled and said that he didn’t exactly have a roadmap to being a father, either. All he had were his instincts, and he trusted them enough to let those guide him into making the right decision.

Besides, he’d added. She’d been taking care of everyone else for so long. Long before Kanan ever came into the picture. She was the strongest, bravest, most loving person he knew. There was nothing that Hera Syndulla couldn’t handle.

Of course she’d make a wonderful mother. She’d be a natural.

The heat feels wonderful. It’s almost as if she’s floating. But her body feels too heavy, the stone of her own heart anchoring her down.

Hera can’t remember the last time she cried. Maybe when Fulcrum told her to leave Kanan behind. Maybe when they’d escaped from Mustafar and she saw the damage weeks of captivity and torture had done to him. Maybe right after Malachor, when the medic told them there was no chance his vision could ever be restored. Either way, she tries to wipe them off, scrubbing her wet face with the back of her hand. But her mind is a maze of confused images, some from her dreams and some real and others Hera isn’t sure of. Every idea she tries to focus on feels too slippery and disappears like the steam above the shower almost as soon as it comes to mind.

She ducks her chin to her chest. It’s hard to take a breath. The gulps of air she does take in burn deep inside her chest.

 

 

III.

“Captain.”

A voice from above. A dark, weathered face grinning down at her. Heavy boots standing close to her head. How did she not hear the footsteps?

“Rex.” She tries to smile, or as much as she can lying flat on the floor, goggles askew and her head pounding so loudly she wonders briefly if Rex can hear it himself. “What can I do for you?”

Rex raises his eyebrows at her a moment before turning to Tesa. The baby is wriggling in her carrier, sputtering like she does right before she’s ready to start an all-out cry.

“Just checking on the Little Bit,” he says. “I could hear her making a ruckus from down the hall.”

Hera never heard a thing. Then again, she’s been absorbed in losing herself inside the beating heart of her ship, every bolt and wire that made up a larger piece of a whole, and it had been so easy to tune out everything else - even her kid throwing a fit.

At least until Kanan took her for the rest of the morning. Then Hera could actually finish her work in peace.

If her baby is about to start crying, Hera ought to do something about it. Not lie on the ground and pretend she can’t hear her.

But before she can make the move, Rex unsnaps the carrier and lifts her daughter free, joggling her in his arms.

“Hey there, Little Bit.” The baby stops squirming, the high-pitched whines quieting down. “You miss your Uncle Rex?”

The baby seems to take this question seriously, stuffing her fist in her mouth and sucking on it as she gazes at Rex with wide eyes. Drool puddles out of the corners of her mouth, dribbling onto the faded cotton jumper that had, at one point, been an old shirt of Ezra’s that Hera had repurposed for baby clothes.

“There we are,” Rex said, bouncing the baby slightly. “Are we feeling better, now?”

Not for the first time, Hera thinks of weird it is that people refer to the baby as “we”. As if she was more than just one person, or a part of whoever was around her. As if everyone else gave up a piece of themselves to make room for her child, so Tesa could become a “we”.

Tesa reaches up to poke at his nose. Rex laughs, and Hera’s caught between relief that the baby didn’t start screaming, to feeling relieved that someone else is dealing with her kid right now, to bone-deep resentment that Rex, of all people, is better at dealing with her crying child than she is.

“There we go, now. Come on, no need to cry. That’s it. That’s it. There we go. No more tears. Everything’s all right.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Hera is dimly aware that she ought to take the baby from him. This is her child. This is her situation to deal with. Her problem to solve.

Mothers take care of their screaming children. Mothers have the intuition to know why their children are screaming. Mothers want their children in their arms.

Mothers don’t refer to their children as “problems”.

She blinks, realizing Rex is trying to talk to her.

“I’m sorry.” She blinks again, feeling like she’s swimming underwater. “What was that?”

“I just asked if you managed to get any sleep last night,” Rex asks, studying her face. “But from the look of it, I’d say no.”

Hera shakes her head, trying not to yawn.

“Not with the Little Luv being such a fuss,” Hera says. She tries to keep her voice light. If she makes it into a joke, everyone else will too. Move along, nothing to see here.

“That’s gotta be tough,” Rex replies. “I mean, with everything else you’re doing.”

“Yeah, well.” Hera’s voice trails off a beat before she adds, “Kanan and I knew what we were signing up for.”

She tries to brush it off as self-deprecating, but Rex just looks at her, and Hera has the unsettling feeling that he knows she’s full of it.

“No offense intended, Captain Syndulla,” he tells her, “but I don’t think anybody who has a kid knows what they’re signing up for.”

She opens her mouth, then shuts it again. She can feel Rex’s eyes on her when she turns her back.

“Sorry,” the old clone says gruffly. “Didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business, anyway.”

She turns back to the engine panel, and Rex clears his throat.

“Anyway,” he says, “I take it now is not the best time to discuss Imperial encryption codes.”

All of a sudden, she’s so grateful for Rex and his ability to diffuse any situation. There’s the hot press of tears in her throat before she chews on the inside of her cheek and firmly tells herself to get a kriffing grip, already.

“That sounds great right about now, actually,” she admits. “I could use some grown-up talk.”

Rex smiles. “I’m sure the conversation will be scintillating.”

Setting the baby back in her seat, he maneuvers himself into the space beside her.

“Could you hand me that copper wiring?” he asks. “The sooner we get off this blasted rock, the better.”

Hera peers over at Rex, lying on his back parallel to her. He adjusts his goggles against his face and examines some loose wire near the shield generator.

Hera’s mouth twists. “Couldn’t agree with you more.”

 

 

IV.

Time clicks past her with every clang of machinery, slippery as a dream and over just as quickly. Eventually, she’ll find the rhythm she’s looking for; a serenity that can only come from losing herself in the mechanics of light and steel.

“Look,” Rex says. “About before. What I said about you and Kanan. I’m sorry if I overstepped. Didn’t mean to sound nosey. It’s just, with everything going on at the moment, the little one doesn’t exactly make things easy.”

Rex trails off a moment before he adds, “it’s got to be tough for you, is all I’m saying. And Kanan, too. Raising a kid in all this, especially with her being sick.” He shakes his head. “I can’t imagine.”

Hera snorts. “Sometimes, I can’t either.”

Rex’s eyebrows shoot up, and it takes a moment for the thought to catch up to Hera that maybe, she shouldn’t have said that.

Did other mothers experience moments like this? When they said something so true it shouldn’t be said? Or when they thought something there shouldn’t be words for, but somehow, there were?

Hera adjusts one of the loose bolts close to her head. It doesn’t really need to be tightened, but she taps her wrench against it anyway, trying to look occupied.

She used to wonder what kind of difference it would make now, if her mother was still alive. Or if she had survived even a few more years, after Hera had outgrown the need to be mothered. Her relationship with Cham would probably have been a lot smoother, for one. And Hera might have some sort of schematic to go off of; some baseline of motherhood to consider. A way to differentiate what made some mothers good and some bad.

But her mother is dead. She has been since Hera was a little girl. There is no time to think about the what ifs and wishes that never came true. She doesn’t have the time or luxury to dwell on the past. Not when the Rebellion needs her; when her family needs her.

There are too many people depending on her to be who she’s always been:

Hera Syndulla, who can pilot a ship through the eye of a needle. Hera Syndulla, who can lead an entire squadron of rebels into war with the Emperor, and they will follow her every command. Hera Syndulla, who always has a plan; who takes care of everything; who always puts herself last. Because it’s her nature to sacrifice, to never give up; to always, always, always put the greater good above herself.

Hera Syndulla, who could never be so selfish and irresponsible as to want something of her own in the middle of all this madness. Certainly not something as trivial as bringing a new life into the world.

Galver wrench. Open panel. Cross these wires. She needs to lose herself inside her ship doing something necessary, productive. Something that has to be done. And Hera always does what needs to be done.

“Kanan told me she’s been doing really well,” Rex says. “Getting stronger every day. The medic was surprised at her progress. Can’t say I’m surprised, though, with her parents.”

He grins at her, and Hera wills her face to arrange itself into an acceptable expression. But the skin around her eyes feels tight, her mouth dry with a stickiness that leaves a medicinal taste on her tongue.

Frankly, it’s still hard for Hera to wrap her mind around it – a being who had grown inside her own body, and not six months ago was the size of a ripe meiloorun fruit living right under heart, is now an entirely separate being. Tesa has her own thoughts and ideas and desires that she will express whether Hera agrees with them or not. She might go places her mother has never been, do things Hera will never do. She has always been a pragmatic, long-term thinker, but it’s staggering to apply the same logic to her child, and often times Hera can’t do it.

In just the last few weeks, she’s become more than just a small, helpless creature who can only respond to the most basic organic needs. She laughs when Ezra and Rex tickle her stomach and pull ridiculous faces at her; she makes happy little chirping noises when Sabine skims a palm over the top of her head. If she doesn’t want to go into her carrier, she’ll whine and reach her arms out, begging to be picked up. She even started growling a while ago, which is a mystery to Hera. She has no idea how the baby could have learned it, but a few nights back she growled at Zeb, which freaked him out and left Ezra breathless with laughter on the floor. And for some reason, she finds Chopper hilarious, bursting into giggles whenever he starts grumbling in binary.

(Hopefully, actual speech will happen after the crew gets better at curbing their language. She’s told them all to watch their mouths in front of Tesa, but Hera is just waiting for the day her daughter wanders into the kitchenette and asks what the fuck is for breakfast.)

With hybrid genes, it’s hard to know anything about what’s considered “typical” where her daughter is concerned. There is little to no information anywhere about developmental milestones for children like Tesa – which, while not exactly surprising to Hera, is still disappointing.

“Too bad there aren’t any ‘Raising Your Hybrid Infant in the Middle of a Galactic Civil War’ manuals just lying around,” Kanan had quipped when she brought this topic up.

Hera had rolled her eyes. “I guess we’ll have to write our own.”

“Well,” Kanan said, “the way I think about it, we made it this far without letting her fall out of the airlock or get eaten by those spiders. That’s not so bad in my book.”

“Parents of the year,” Hera remarked drily.

Kanan had shrugged. “Small victories. I’ll take ‘em where we can get ‘em.”

They laughed, but they both knew it was easier to joke than admit they were at a loss. Without anyone to guide them, every day was about making up the rules as they went along, and just hoping they weren’t skirting disaster. Which is kind of hard to avoid, since in Hera’s experience, disaster is very adept at finding them.

It’s a risk they both knew they’d be taking when they chose to keep the baby, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

“She has her good days and bad,” Hera says, after realizing she’s been silent for too long. “We can only take it day by day.”

“She’s a good little soldier,” she hears Rex murmur beside her, and Hera blinks very quickly. The air around her suddenly feels hot, choking, and her chest is too tight. “Tough. Already a fighter.”

 

 

V.

Numa liked to say that because Tesa had been born in deep space as opposed to a med-center, she never fully left the stars.

“It’s like she never made it back from there,” the girl mused. “And never made it all the way to the ground.”

“Just like her mom,” Ezra had added, smiling at Hera. “She was born to fly.”

Of course Hera didn’t take that idea literally. If Cham had heard Numa’s words, he would have dismissed them as peasant superstitions and told her to stop being such a foolish child. And he would be right.

But foolish as it is, Hera spends her nights wide awake.

Every night, she watches the rise and fall of her daughter’s chest. In her mind, she counts every hard-won breath Tesa makes. She turns each one over in her mind like a stone worn smooth along the jagged edges.

Her daughter fights to do something Hera has always taken for granted. It makes her want to wish for strength, except she didn’t know how. Strength and resilience were never something she was taught; they were always a part of her, until they weren’t.

“Twi’lek gestation is typically shorter than the length of a human pregnancy.”

The medical droid recited this fact calmly, matter-of-fact as if reading from a medical datafile. Like it wasn’t s fact reshaping Kanan and Hera’s entire lives.

“Humans normally gestate for nine, ten months,” the droid said in that same smooth, almost chirpy cadence. “In comparison, an average Twi’lek female gestates for only six or seven. The discrepancy in gestation is most likely what caused the abnormality in your offspring. Due to her premature delivery, the lungs were not given adequate time to mature inside the mother’s womb.”

Abnormality. Like a twisted leg, or a harelip.

Hera stared at the figure in the glass box. It was hooked up to so many hooks and wires. Monitors beeped in syncopated rhythm as they monitored every struggle to inhale, every rattle of exhale. She knew, somewhere, that she was looking at her daughter, but the thing in this tiny box barely looked like an infant; in her hazy mind, it barely looked alive.

“Hybrid infants do face a higher risk of genetic abnormalities than pure species,” the droid said. “Though they are rare in humanoid species such as your own.”

“So what are we supposed to do with that?” Kanan asked. His voice was rough, but not enough to disguise the tremor in the words.

The droid’s faceplate flashed; Hera could practically see the perplexed expression that would have been on his face, had he been human.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he replied.

Kanan growled, a rusty agonized sound that made Hera unwillingly close her eyes. She couldn’t look at him.

She wanted to clamp her hands over her ear cones. She wanted to tear down the the walls of the room with her bare hands. She wanted to jettison herself into the unending blackness of space, shooting her blaster among the star systems, screaming until the freezing vacuum stole every last breath from her lungs. She wanted to feel every ache in her daughter’s tiny chest, the fight to survive.

Maybe out there, the galaxy would feel big enough to contain the unbearable need inside her to scream her voice away. To turn herself inside out. To rip a hole in the galaxy with knives and bombs and bullets, and when those didn’t work, her own teeth and nails. She wanted break open a hole in the cosmos until it could fit the tearing agony inside her skin.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Kanan hunched over the glass crib, his hand pressed to the protective cover; it was the closest he could get to holding their daughter. Hera’s hand twitched at her side, one gloved hand wanting to touch the glass case along with Kanan’s, but something inside her stopped the hand from moving.

She looked back to the droid.

“Is there any way to fix it?” Her voice was even and never once wavered. “Anything we can do?”

The droid peered over at Kanan, pressed so close to the lid of the cradle that his facemask touched the glass. His ragged breath left hot trails of steam on the clear surface.

“I’m afraid there’s no way to repair the organic damage,” the droid replied. “The discrepancy in gestation length caused the child’s lungs to be underdeveloped. The lack of organ maturity will cause lifelong respiratory problems that cannot be healed, only treated.”

There was a pause in that sonorous recitation, and then the droid turned to Hera.

“Her condition will require lifelong care. In all other aspects, the child is perfectly healthy; there is no reason to believe she will not fall under the Galactic standard milestones for average humanoid infants. But she will always struggle to breathe.”

His mechanical head bowed, and for a moment, Hera thought she saw something like regret in that chrome faceplate.

“Truly, I wish there was more to do,” the droid murmured. “Younglings carry such hope with them. I see it all the time. How parents can see the future in something that is so very new and fragile always astonishes me.”

He glanced up at Hera.

“It is not in my capabilities to understand such things,” he said. “But I often wish I did. It appears to be a miraculous experience.”

The words made Hera snap her eyes shut and take a few quick breaths. Her legs felt like wet paper, unable to stand on their own. Like everything she stood on so firmly her whole life could disintegrate beneath her at eye-blink speed. Like she could fall, helpless, through the void beyond the sky, beyond the stars, beyond everything she knew to be. Who knew if it would ever end.

 

 

VI.

One stray spark, some loose wiring. All of a sudden her chest is on fire, and maybe she’s the one screaming but maybe it’s just the pounding of electricity shooting through her head like blaster bolts. The current isn’t deadly, but it’s strong enough to hurt, and it’s the kind of pain that’s impossible to brace for, leaving her breathless on the ground with Rex bending over her.

“Captain Syndulla! Are you all right?”

She tries to sit up, but Rex puts a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back down.

“Hold still a moment,” he says. “Let me make sure you’re okay.”

“M’ fine,” she mumbles. Her head is spinning, and when she tries to sit up again she slips back down. Her elbows whack against the floor to break her fall, sending another sharp jolt of pain through her body.

“Let me be the judge of that,” Rex replies.

Hera tries to catch her breath, and when her head clears a little and her bones no longer feel like nails tearing at her skin, she realizes the baby is screaming – again. The sound is like knives; like someone is peeling the flesh right off her skeleton inch by agonizing inch.

She lies there on the ground, cracked open and raw, paralyzed by the pain and the fatigue and the screams of her daughter, all pressing down on her.

“Captain Syndulla?”

She turns to him. The shame is creeping in, certain as daylight, its cold tendrils wrapping around her mind and squeezing it tight until it echoes just one phrase:

You have failed, Hera Syndulla.

“I’ll be fine, Rex,” she says, trying for a smile

She says it, and that’s always been enough for Hera to make something true. She speaks it, and it will become fact. She needs to be okay, and she will be, because that’s what she tells herself.

Rex frowns.

“Maybe you ought to think about taking a break,” he says. “At least for a little while. I can take over from here.”

There’s a horrible, sudden twist in her stomach, and her whole body thrums like a coiled spring.

“It’s okay,” she says, and there’s a persistent wrongness in her belly that says otherwise, a cold sweat lining the collar and armpits of her flightsuit that tells her exactly what will be waiting behind her eyes when she closes them, the furious certainty of red and black. “Really. I’m just tired. You know how it is when the baby doesn’t sleep. Kanan’s pretty dead on his feet, too, these days.”

Rex is still watching her with a concerned look on his face. Her throat tightens. She has to look away from him. She can’t look at him. She can’t let him look at her.

There’s no one she trusts entirely to care for this vessel like her. She knows every piece of this ship as intricately and intimately as a lover; she knows every scratch and dent, every bit of chipped paint, every bump and rattle and broken part as her own.

She has to fix it. She has to.

There isn’t another way off this rock, and they need to, because if they don’t things fall apart. Commander Sato’s strategies, Phoenix Squadron’s orders, Captain Dodana’s assault tactics, the rebel cell on Dantooine. Not to mention the people aboard this ship. All counting on her, all needing her, and she respects them too much to just sit here, to let her risk their lives because she’s too tired, too selfish, how could she be so incredibly selfish…

Slowly, she pulls herself into a sitting position, then leans against the wall to stand. Rex reaches out his other hand, but she ignores the help, pushing herself up.

Her knees buckle underneath her, weak and trembling as a newborn eopie, and she slides back down to earth. Hera tries not to cry out at the pain shooting from the tips of her toes all the way up her spine.

Rex is there before she hits the ground, lowering her to a seated position. One hand braces her back, and the other holds onto her shoulder, steady and firm.

“Captain,” he says, and she has to close her eyes because she will throw up. “I think you really ought to lie down for a moment.”

If she lies down, she will not get back up. If she lies down, she will not move. If she lies down, she will stay there and listen to her daughter’s endless cries.

She won’t reach for her child or try to comfort her. She will do nothing, except lie there and listen to her daughter’s screams set her every nerve on fire. The increasingly blurred lines between dream and reality will dissolve and twist, dripping like the paint running off of one of Sabine’s canvases.

The awful, depthless pit in her stomach churns, tearing at her insides.

She’s Captain Syndulla, Rebel pilot, Phoenix leader, a part of a greater whole, she knows the sacrifices, so many depending on them, so many need their help –

But she can’t move.

Rex is still holding her upright. His mouth is moving, but she doesn’t register what he’s saying; it’s like a jammed transmission. He’s gripping her shoulders, brows furrowed, and Hera can’t rearrange her face into an expression she thinks will get him to stop looking at her that way. She thinks he might be saying her name.

There’s a tightening in her chest that normally means her milk has come in, that soon it will be time to feed her daughter. But this is a different type of ache, one that fits right under her ribcage and rushes to her ears, the thud thud thud of her heartbeat muffling the world to grey.

It’s the only thing Hera can hear. The uneven rhythm, almost mechanical as it clangs and crackles. Like the engine of the Ghost, right before it fails and leaves her falling through darkness.

Chapter 3

I.

Lately, she’s been thinking about the Kalikori.

She hasn’t in a long time; not since blowing up the old house. It had seemed so important back then, the last connection she had to her mother. Not to mention her heritage, which the Empire seemed closer and closer to completely wiping out with every strategic move.

That heirloom was meant for Hera. It should have been hers to add to and pass down, to carry on the legacy of her family. It was a symbol of her past, and her future.

If your entire life was built on bloodshed and war without end, then how else could you keep going unless you knew what you were fighting for? Otherwise, what was the meaning of it all?

She had told Cham it didn’t matter that the Kalikori was gone. Her family – not just by blood but by circumstance – was what made the memory of her mother live on. She had everything she needed on the Ghost; everyone she loved was alive and well, and that was the comfort she needed to put things into perspective.

Maybe she meant it back then. Hera thinks she did.

When she doesn’t think of the Kalikori, she tries not to think at all.

(She will have to think about the night she was jolted awake by her child’s screams and Kanan shouting her name, shaking her shoulders.

The baby screamed, one long, endless shout. Hera’s heart burst in her ears. There was a cacophonous roar that radiated from her belly all the way to her head and it pounded, pounded, pounded, like a drum, like a warzone, like the sound the bombs made when her mother hid them underneath the house and they listened to the Separatists tear their planet apart.

Stop the noises stop stop STOP STOP

“Hera.” He said her name slowly, soothingly.

Kanan tried to talk to her about the nightmares but Hera refused. He kept at it for a while, but his questions were lost in a sweep of diapers and bottles and crying and worrying about their daughter’s tiny lungs, and for once Hera was grateful the baby’s needs were all-consuming.)

If Cham knew he was going to be a grandfather, would he have fought harder? Would he have run faster, shot better, done something, anything, to escape Thrawn?

It’s pointless and ridiculous and a self-defeating waste of time to think that. But she can't help herself. It splits her like a seam; a blade down the tightly-woven edges of her and ripping out everything that she's kept hidden, buried so deep even she can no longer find it.

 

 

II.

Rex presses a little tin cup of water in her hands, and she takes it obediently. She can’t do much more than swirl the water around in her mouth; her throat feels crusty and it aches to swallow.

“Can you tell me if anything still hurts?” Rex asks.

A lot of things hurt. Her knees ache no matter how many times she ices them. Her joints creak like an old woman’s. Her head pounds constantly, no matter how many headache suppressants she takes. And there’s a persistent, throbbing pain in her lower back that has been there since the final weeks before giving birth.

Almost three standard months after having the baby, and Hera still has no idea how much pregnancy and labor has really changed her body. There are marks on her skin that weren’t there before, and she doesn’t know whether or not they’ll fade. Her clothes don’t fit the same way they used to. Her breasts ache constantly, heavy with milk and sore from her daughter’s greedy, demanding mouth. Some days, there’s a dull twinge in muscles she didn’t even realize she had.

Hera is no stranger to pain. She’s more than used to taping herself back together with bacta and gauze and moving on with her day. But this is different from the graze of a blaster bolt or nursing a broken ankle. Some nights, it’s a relief to finally sink into her bunk, closing her eyes and letting her limbs tremor with fatigue. She doesn’t cry, but if she did, Hera wouldn’t know if it would be from relief, exhaustion, pain, or a mixture of all three. If there’s a new baseline for normal, she hasn’t found it yet.

“Does your chest hurt at all?”

"No." Her voice is so raspy she barely recognizes it as her own.

“How's your head feel?”

Like someone took a hammer to the skull, but she shrugs and says, “No more than usual. You know how it is. The kids making me crazy, baby screaming, a thousand things going on at once.”

Rex meets her gaze briefly, and Hera’s mouth snaps shut. He averts his eyes, a sign of respect to a commanding officer, but Hera knows what he wishes he could say to her: I can tell you’re lying, so why don’t you stop and let me help you.

“Could be better,” she admits. “I’ve tried a dozen headache suppressants, but nothing really helps.”

“Could be from lack of sleep,” he says pointedly. “How much sleep are you getting? Not just last night. I’m talking about on average. How much are you actually sleeping?”

Hera grins, trying not to let it slide off her lips. “There’s not much I can do about that now. There’ll be plenty of time to sleep after we get back in the air and get to the rendezvous point.”

“Where there will no doubt be another mission waiting for us, and another cargo to run, and another strategy to plan and coordinate,” Rex says. “And you’ll just find time to sleep in the middle of all that?”

“I’m fine,” she says. There’s a hard edge creeping into her voice. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Apologies,” he says automatically, lowering his head. “But you’re not going to do anyone any favors by running yourself ragged.”

She frowns. “That’s hardly your concern.”

“With all due respect, Captain,” he says coolly, “I believe it is. You’re my commanding officer, but it’s my duty to look after the well-being of my superiors.”

He narrows his eyes. “And right now, I respectfully request that you take a break.”

Hera shakes her head.

“I have to get back –”

“Zeb and Sabine are working on the repairs,” Rex says firmly.

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to breathe in and out through her nose. Her head needs to stop spinning. Damn it, she’s never fainted a day in her life. That’s for the delicate, the fragile. The weak and hopelessly pathetic. She isn’t about to start now.

“They don’t need to,” she says. “I have it under control.”

She tries to walk past him, but Rex grabs her arm. Hera stops, startled. Rex has never touched her before; not as a friend, and certainly not as a soldier under her command.

“Captain Syndulla,” he says. His voice is unshakeable as stone, and right then Hera understands, in a way she never has before, what an effective leader he must have been during the Clone Wars. “Please. You don’t look well.”

The way he says it makes her feel so small. It makes her feel like a helpless little girl.

“There isn’t another way,” she protests. Her voice sounds weak to her own ears.

Rex frowns.

“Another way for what?” he asks.

She opens her mouth to argue, but something in his voice stops her.

The kids and Zeb would back off, and Kanan would eventually run out of steam or just back away slowly. But Rex’s gaze doesn’t waver, because he is, first and foremost, a soldier. He wouldn’t disagree with his commanding officer unless there was a greater need to service, a bigger picture at hand. She knows that, and she needs to respect that.

Hera remembers how Rex never once judged Kanan for his initial distrust and anger, and fought by his side even when Kanan made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else than with another clone. He’d been the first one to really reach Kanan after Malachor, talking and joking and training with him as if he were still sighted. Hera saw that when they were together, her Jedi was as close to his old self as he’d been since returning.

She slides to the ground, back against the wall. It takes everything in Hera not to walk away, but she has to trust Rex, because he’s always trusted her.

“Where’s the baby?” she asks, suddenly realizing how quiet it is. Maybe she ought to be more concerned, but right now she’s thankful for the silence.

Rex gives her a look that tells her he knows she’s changing the subject.

“She’s with Ezra,” he says. “He can manage.”

Her throat tightens. She has to look away from him. She can’t look at him. She can’t let him look at her. She can’t –

“Hera,” he says, and her stomach drops because he never uses her name, always her title. “Look, I know I’m the last person you would come to if you were having some kind of problem. But if you did, I’d do everything I could to help you. You should know that.”

“I do,” she says, and he’s not the only one surprised by the amount of feeling in her voice. “I do, Rex, and I appreciate that. You’re a good man.”

“Is this about the baby?” His voice is quiet. “Is everything all right?”

He looks at her, and how can she explain it to him?

It is about the baby.

It is and it isn’t.

It’s about how all of this is so much bigger than the baby.

Bigger than all of them – Hera and Kanan and Ezra and Sabine and Zeb and Rex and Commander Sato and every single being they know in this galaxy. It’s about the Bigger Picture. It’s about always keeping the endgame in mind. It’s about knowing in the end, she and everyone she knows is just a small piece of a much larger, much more widespread whole.

It’s also about the days when the balance she tries so hard to maintain between her duties and her daughter are so off-kilter she doesn’t think anything can revert the scales. When she’s in a meeting with Commander Sato and all of a sudden realizes, with perfect clarity, that he doesn’t trust her like he used to; that she’s disappointed him. In his eyes, she has already failed the rebellion. When she’s sitting in the mess hall of the Atollon base, listening to the indistinct chatter all around her, and feels that creeping sensation that comes with knowing people are talking about you behind your back. When she knows the other pilots are whispering about how great she used to be, but now that she has the kid she’s pretty much useless, nothing like her reputation, and what a letdown that was, not to mention a real blow to their cause. When she comes across some Intel she hadn’t personally been briefed on, and wonders if the higher-ups have so completely lost faith in her that they’re keeping her out of the loop as a sign of her own failure.

It’s about how she can’t need things. Not anymore. She gave into her own selfish wants, and now her daughter is here, and she always needs things, so no one else is allowed to.

Least of all Hera.

She wanted this, this one little piece of a dream. For Kanan, their crew, their family. For herself.

Now she can’t have anything else. Because she’s already broken the rules once. She’s used up any grace she might have had.

“Do you need me to get Kanan?” he asks.

She shakes her head, so hard her headtails thump against her shoulders. The tips sting her cheeks.

“No,” she replies. “It’s nothing. He doesn’t need to worry about it. And you don’t, either.”

Hera tries on her best Captain Syndulla face. It doesn’t fit.

How can she find the words to tell him that she isn’t allowed this feeling, this self-indulgence?

“I’ll be fine –”

She doesn’t need Rex’s hard stare to know how weak that sounds.

 

 

III.

The day her daughter was born, the medbay attendant who checked Hera over and pronounced her healthy asked if Mama was ready to see the baby yet. It took Hera a second to realize that the attendant was speaking to her.

It was the most surreal feeling Hera had ever experienced. She’d never feel at home in her pregnant body, felt entirely too close to it when she was giving birth, and now it was as if she was stepping out of herself and looking down on her own form from a different vantage point.

She was Mama. She was the only Mama this baby had.

The attendant could have called her Captain Syndulla or Hera. Or even Miss Syndulla, which Hera had never gone by a day in her life.

But she hadn’t. She’d called her Mama.

Instead of going to see her newborn baby, Hera left her in the medwing with Kanan. The baby was hooked up to a machine that was clearing the fluid out of her tiny lungs. It looked to Hera like some ancient torture device, and she had to look away to keep from shuddering.

She told everyone she needed a second, and brushed off Ezra and Rex’s assistance. Then she hobbled to her bed, where she lay still in the crinkling medbay gown she’d worn during labor. She hadn’t bothered turning the lights on in her bunk. Hera just lay there in the darkness, her knees tucked to her chest, stuffing bedsheets into her mouth to muffle the sound of tears.

She hated moments like this. When the chinks in her armor showed and she felt weak and gave in, however briefly. Too many counted on her to stay sharp, stay focused. Wallowing was an indulgence she couldn’t allow.

But when she heard the door to her bunk whoosh open and his footsteps coming towards the bed, she couldn’t stop weeping, and for once didn’t turn away and keep him from her pain. She didn’t retreat or turn away or brush it off with a smile, absorbing the hurt because there was work to be done.

Kanan didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He just sat down next to her on the bed and took her hand in his, letting her cry and cry and cry until she couldn’t cry anymore.

Who knew how much time had passed before she finally lifted her head from the bed sheets. Her eyes were so swollen she could barely keep them open.

Kanan rested his chin on the crown of her head.

“The med-droid wants to talk to us,” he said, voice wobbling only a little.

Hera shuddered, the last aches and throbs of pain shooting through her tired limbs. She leaned against him as he wrapped his arms around her.

“She’s so beautiful,” Kanan told her, and even with the fear in his voice there was such awe when he spoke of their daughter, such wonder.

Hera closed her eyes, trying to picture the creature the med-droid had pulled from her body and laid on her chest. It had only happened a few hours ago, but for some reason, Hera felt like it had been a long, long time since that moment.

“You should get checked out,” he said.

Hera shook her head, trying not to wince. Even that hurt.

“The doc already said I was fine,” she replied quietly.

Kanan snorted, but didn’t comment.

After a moment, she grabbed hold of the bunk supporters, and Kanan’s grip on her shoulders tightened.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

“I’m ready now,” she replied.

The moment her feet hit the ground, her knees buckled, and only Kanan’s quick reflexes kept her from falling over.

“You need me to bring the chair in here?”

She’d had to use a wheelchair for some time while recovering from Concord Dawn. Her superficial wounds had healed but the internal ones still needed time, and she couldn’t sit still in that medbay bed a second longer. The chair had been a compromise between her and Kanan so she wouldn’t hurt herself further in an attempt to move around and relieve her boredom.

She shook her head. “It hurts worse to sit down.”

He smirked. “Well, good thing I’m in better shape to fly, then.”

She swatted him lightly. “You? Fly my ship? Not even in your dreams, mister.”

They both laughed, but it petered out quickly.

“Let’s go,” she said, trying to push herself upright again.

Kanan peered at her face, as if studying her expression. His mask was so close to her eyes that its hard surface could have brushed the tip of her nose if they were a breath closer.

Whatever his sightless eyes must have found, it made him clear his throat and nod.

This time, when he helped lift her, she gritted her teeth and pushed herself upright. It still hurt, and her legs still felt weak as a newborn lothkitten. But she was on her feet, and the more steps she took, the more her resolve strengthened.

When they finally reached the door to the medbay, she pushed Kanan’s hands off of her. Before giving birth, she hadn’t been in this room since Concord Dawn, and she didn’t want to be treated like a patient now. This time, she hadn’t been shot out of the sky in a surprise air raid; unlike then, this was pain she had chosen.

The thought cut through the distracting haze of her physical pain. It brought the last few hours into vivid clarity:

They were parents now. She and Kanan. She wasn’t just Hera Syndulla, rebel captain and squadron pilot. And he was no longer just Kanan Jarrus, Jedi Knight. They were somebody’s parents now.

They had brought an entirely new being into the galaxy today. One that was utterly helpless and innocent and dependent on them for every part of her survival. One who never had a say in whether or not she wanted to be a part of this world. But here she was anyway, and it was up to Kanan and Hera to protect her. To care for her. To give her all the love they could.

This was going to change everything about them. This was going to change the entire dynamic of their family. She and Kanan had always known this on some level, but now it was real, and pragmatic as she had always been, Hera realized just how ill-prepared she was for the reality.

Funny, how the unknown had always meant the worst possible situation. Like watching Kanan and Ezra board the ship to Malachor, or the first glimpse of the bacta bandage pulled tight around his ruined eyes. They’d dealt with not knowing what to expect before, and it was something you never really made peace with. But this was the first time it had ever been a good thing.

The first gaze into the little glass cradle left her breathless. She thought there would be some type of pull inside her, a switch of natural maternal instinct that suddenly flipped on. Or at least, a spark of recognition deep within her, a primal surge through her body when she saw this creature that had spent so many months growing underneath her heart. She’d thought there would be some sort of insight, a feeling of kindred souls.

Nothing inside Hera recognized this child as her own. She peered down at it, watching its tiny green hands flail around uncontrollably, tiny chest struggling to rise and fall, little probes and wires hooked all over the squirming body, and felt nothing familiar.

This is my daughter, she told herself. It still didn’t feel real. She was looking at her baby, and her mind stubbornly refused to connect the fact to the rest of her body. This is my daughter.

She was still repeating the phrase in her head, when suddenly, the baby’s eyes opened. Hera hadn’t seen them before, and she now she saw a blue-green and so familiar Hera knew it would break her heart for the rest of her life.

Those eyes met Hera’s, and maybe it was just a moment, maybe it was a heartbeat or an eye blink or a standard galactic cycle, but it felt like they were the only two beings in the whole sweeping galaxy.

Hera slowly reached one hand to touch the glass cover. All around her, machines beeped and whirred, counting the moment of breathe in, breathe out.

“Hey, Little Girl,” she murmured. “You know me? I’m your mama.”

 

 

IV.

For the first time in her life, Hera wishes she knew how to meditate.

It always seemed impossible to her. Kanan could wax poetical all day about “letting the Force move through you” or “being one with The Force”, or whatever mystical mumbo-jumbo he spouted off, but Hera never gave it much thought. Meditating was great for Jedi and all, but it wasn’t going to help her put together a new assault plan, or strategize new battle tactics, or make proton bombs and an entire strike fleet of x-wings appear out of thin air for the rebellion.

But when she closes her eyes and listens to her ship, Hera thinks she might finally understand what Kanan is talking about. She feels almost feel featherlight, drifting through the breeze of artificial recycled air that carries her through the body of the Ghost. The hum and whir and whisper of the ship’s machineries around her, vocal as any living being, make a peaceful soundtrack as she listens to its steel murmurs, understanding the veins of its mechanical heart. She can almost feel the rush of atmosphere under its wings, the shimmer of hyperspace as it soared at lightspeed.

“May I?”

Hera cracks one eye open. Rex gestures to a spot on the wall beside her.

When she nods, he slowly lowers his large body to the ground, grunting a little at the aging creaks. Hera almost wants to smile, because she knows that for all appearances, the old clone can’t be more than twenty or so standard years old; younger than her and Kanan. If it weren’t for the accelerated maturation the clones underwent, Rex would be just another one of the kids.

For a moment, the two of them sit there in silence.

“You know,” Rex says, “back during the war, I met a clone deserter who’d gone civvie. Lived on a farm, got married, had kids. With a Twi’lek woman, come to think of it.”

He shakes his head. “Told me he didn’t see the point in fighting a war that made no sense to him. That everyone he cared about was gone, and he had nothing left to live for. Until he had his family, and he walked away from all of it. The war, the Grand Army of the Republic, his fellow soldiers…that it was his choice.”

Rex reaches over and picks up the wrench he’d been using moments ago. He tosses it between his large hands, weighting the heft of it in his palm.

“Didn’t understand it back then,” he murmurs. “My brothers and I, we were bred to be soldiers. That was our purpose. We were made for war, to serve a cause higher than ourselves.”

Hera stares at the floor, knees drawn to her chest.

Quietly, she says, “I know what you mean. When I was pregnant, Kanan told me that the future wasn’t worth much if we couldn’t picture it for ourselves.”

She closes her eyes again.

“That was what we kept coming back to,” she says. “That it was a CHOICE. Having her. Starting a family. Even in the middle of all this chaos, letting something beautiful in. That even on the worst of days, we could still see something bright and good in the world. Something worth saving. Even if there was nothing else left, hope would still be alive.”

Beside her, Rex is silent.

“It sounds ridiculous now,” she mumbles. “When I try to explain it. I can’t even explain it to myself, really. Every time I do, it sounds so silly.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Rex says. “Having hope is a good thing. Somedays, it feels like all we have to go on around here.”

Hera doesn’t answer him.

“That choice was already made for us clones,” Rex continues. “But we followed it willingly. When I met that clone who had deserted, I knew that kind of life couldn’t be mine. And it wasn’t just about programming, or being engineered that way. It was about serving a worthy cause. About fighting for more than just your own needs or wants. Serving a higher purpose.”

He sighs, sounding weary. “So long as there was something worth fighting for, we would always defend. If you can’t see tomorrow, then why bother fighting at all?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” she replies, and Rex looks over at her. “Because there will always be a reason to fight. And to do that, you need to belong to something bigger than yourself, bigger than just tomorrow, or the day after that. And if you’re going to give up, give up only when everything else has failed, when everyone is gone, and there’s no strength left. When there isn’t anything to hold onto. When there’s no hope left, that’s when you give up. But not a second before.”

Hera realizes she’s breathing hard, like she just ran uphill at a dead sprint. She tries to calm herself, but her body feels tight as a drum, pulled tight with anticipation.

“You’re a very inspirational person,” Rex says, a smile tipping the corner of his mouth. “Has anyone mentioned that?”

She almost smiles.

“That’s one word for it,” she says, shaking her head. “My father said I was just being stubborn. Which is an odd thing for him to say, considering he could never see the desert for the sand.”

Hera turns his words over in her mind. She doesn’t want to, but she thinks of her father, and she’s too tired to put up a fight when the flash of memories comes flooding back.

It hadn’t been long since Cham, when she and Kanan told the rest of their crew about the baby. Not long enough for Hera to start showing. Barely a month, not long enough for her to stop dreaming of her father’s last words in her ears, the firm order of his voice, unwavering in its commanding timbre, laced in love and loss and sacrifice:

Hera, Daughter, for Ryloth. For Ryloth, for our people, for everyone. We fight, and we will rise.

She hadn’t told Cham she was pregnant. She and Kanan had already made their decision to terminate, and their choice was none of her father's business. She figured he would probably understand her reasons, but Hera still hadn’t wanted him weighing in on the issue one way or the other. This was her life, and this wasn’t a choice she would make in the shadow of Cham Syndulla.

And then – abruptly, finally, shockingly – the shadow was lifted.

Strange. She’d been surrounded by death her whole life. Neighbors, friends, family – she’d lost so many of them to the Separatists, and then the Empire. She’d buried her mother when she was still a child. And she had killed many times before; between all the TIE fighters she’d destroyed, Stormtroopers she’d taken a shot at, and unlucky civilians caught in the crossfire, who knew how large a body count she’d racked up over the years?

But even surrounded by all that death, it had somehow never occurred to her that it would happen to Cham, one day.

Because her father defied death. Defied it openly and brazenly, with the same reckless anger and pride that led him through years of unending conflict with the Empire, and the years of peacetime when their people looked to him for guidance. Hera had lost her mother, but the fear of losing Cham as well had never crossed her young mind. It hadn’t crossed her adult one, either.

Her father was a legend. A bulwark of unstoppable force. The Twi’leks saw him as a hero. And how, she guessed, a martyr, an idol to immortalize in their songs and stories, a reminder of the reason they must keep fighting.

Everyone had waited for her to lose it. To scream, or break down, or start plotting some revenge plan against Governor Pryce and Grand Admiral Thrawn. They were waiting for her to cry, except she didn’t, and she hasn’t cried once for her father since the day he died. Not once.

She knew, somewhere in the dim recesses of her memory, that her father would probably approve of her lack of emotion. After her mother had been killed, Cham often scolded Hera for her tears. He would tell her that she needed to be strong; they had no time to let weakness overwhelm them. After that, Hera kept her tears mostly to herself, crying only sometimes in the middle of the night when she could hear the faint sound of ships flying over her home, cutting circles in the smoke-dark sky. And even that was a luxury Cham hated, the failure of self-involved grief.

But this wasn’t the same kind of sadness Hera remembered – the misery of a scared little girl who was suddenly motherless and, for all intents and purposes, fatherless, even if she didn’t understand that yet. She didn’t feel that sharp ache in her chest, that heaviness; didn’t feel her head spinning, refusing to comprehend this new world without someone who had always been a part of it.

She didn’t feel sad at all.

She just felt…empty. As if something were missing inside of her, some part of her heart and mind that controlled normal behavior. She was like a crosswired droid, who did the opposite of what its programming required it to do.

“It’s funny,” Hera says, talking to herself more than Rex. “When I was a little girl, I hated the way my father completely threw himself into fighting for Ryloth; so much so that he neglected everything else. Including his family. When I left home, I promised myself that would never be me; that family would always matter. Except I dedicated myself to the rebellion, and then that became the center of all my choices.”

She sighs, resting her chin on her knees. “Guess I’m more like my father than I thought.”

“I can’t say I knew your father well enough to know if you’re right or wrong,” Rex says. “But I do think you have the opposite problem he did. You don’t miss the desert for the sand; it’s more like you see nothing but desert wherever you look.”

Hera studies the oil stains on her gloves.

“That was the big contention between us,” she says. “He thought I was wasting my time, being a part of the larger rebellion. Him, all he wanted to do was liberate our world. To save it –”

Like he couldn’t save my mother, she thinks, and stops herself from saying it out loud.

The idea is astonishing and jewel-bright in her mind. Hera wonders why she never saw it before.

Maybe she’d been too angry to see it. Angry at Cham, angry at his judgment of her. Angry that his whole life had been war, and it shaped Hera’s by extension. Angry that her mother had been one more tally in a long line of hurts that she’d always kept buried somewhere deep down, so hidden they’re unknown even to her.

Ryloth. Ryloth. Everything for Ryloth. His single-minded obsessed had gotten her mother killed. It had driven her away. It kept Cham away for so many years; it kept her from having the time with her father she should have had.

And now, she would never have it.

Growing up, she’d often wondered why her mother and father chose to have her in such turbulent times. Even before the Clone Wars, Ryloth was never exactly a beacon of peace and prosperity. Not long before she left home and stopped speaking to Cham, she accused him of wanting to raise a soldier, not a child, and that just because everyone else worshiped the ground he walked on didn’t mean she did.

At the time, Cham hadn’t denied it. It made teenage Hera feel justified in what she’d always believed: her father saw her as a disappointment. The fact that he never bothered to reach out to her during their years apart only strengthen the belief that she was correct.

After Cham’s death, it seemed perfectly clear that she and Kanan had no other choice except to terminate. She couldn’t, in good conscience, bring something so fragile into such an uncertain world. Bringing a little helpless creature into this kind of world, where any of them could be taken at a moment’s notice, was too irresponsible, too selfish, too cruel.

But then they changed their minds. And Hera wondered if her mother and father brought her into the world for the same reasons she and Kanan were clinging to. They wanted their world to live on even after they were gone; they wanted to keep their culture, their history, their identity alive in a world that was trying to wipe it out. Amid death and destruction, something beautiful could thrive, a last piece of hope.

Maybe her mother and father wanted to still have that choice. They wanted to prove that nobody could force them to stop living their lives.

Because sometimes, refusing to accept your choices was the same thing as letting them be taken away from you.

She thinks at her daughter. Her dark green skin. Her Kanan eyes. The shape of her mouth that belongs to Hera. The rattling sound of her ragged breathing, the jagged patter of her heartbeat; Hera can still feel it inside her own body, as if she were still carrying her daughter inside her own skin.

“I look at that little girl,” Hera says softly, “and I see everything I’m fighting for. Every reason I dedicated my life to fighting the Empire.”

She looks up, and Rex meets her eyes.

“I don’t fight because of my daughter. I’m fighting FOR her. For the world she ought to have.”

She bites her lip. “And I was selfish enough to think I could give it to her. That I could guarantee her a better life.”

She winces at her words, because they’re so naïve and pitiful and foolish. The dreams of an idealist who has no sense of how horrible the world can be; how small a drop in the bucket their rebellion is compared to the size and spectacle of the Empire. They sound like someone who hasn’t seen how war can sweep you up, churn you in its unending, unwinnable machine, and spit you back out as something so different from who you once were that the person who had been might as well have died.

Nobody ever promised Hera that life would be fair. No one could guarantee happiness, or safety, or even simple survival.

She’d been a fool to believe she could give her daughter any of those things. Not when she’d spent her entire life in the shadows. Not when she lived by the charge of a blaster and the revving of an engine. Not when she only became her best self when the world around her was in smoke and flame and she was soaring through the darkness, darting and dashing among the rubble, untouchable as starlight.

“I don’t think that makes you selfish,” Rex tells her, his own voice very quiet.

 

 

V.

It wasn’t long after her daughter’s birth that Hera realized her feelings towards Tesa were very different from Kanan’s.

Kanan seemed to naturally fall into the routine of being a father; even completely blind, Hera knew he was the better parent. He knew how to interpret the baby’s cries as hungry, or tired, or just wanting attention and demanding to be held. He could calm her down with a simple touch, running his hands down her back or tracing her face with a single fingertip. He held her every night against his chest, skin bare so she could listen to his heartbeat. The utter peace on his face wiped away the years of hurt and loss and scars. It centered him to the here and now, where everything was whole and still.

Because for him, their daughter was the reason for being put in the galaxy; she centered him, anchoring him to this moment in time instead of letting his thoughts linger on the past.

Tesa didn’t mean more to him just because she was his biological child; Kanan tried to explain to Hera that it was more like Tesa added to what was already there. Like how he’d come to rely on the Force after losing his sight.

His love for Zeb and Ezra and Sabine didn’t change when Tesa was born. It was augmented. It gave Kanan new awareness of compassion, peace, joy, and hope. It brought everything into a focus he didn’t had before.

He had his Jedi training. He had Hera. He had Ezra and Zeb and Sabine and Rex and Chopper. Their family. The hurts and secrets they both hid and shared. And he had their daughter. She was the hope that kept him fighting; what kept him tethered to them when despair tried to pull him away, like it almost had after losing his sight.

And this is where she and Kanan differed:

Hera has never needed a specific thing, one defining person or reason, to fight. Fighting for a concept is good enough for her. It always has been, because she believes the world ought to be free from the Empire’s oppression and fear and tyranny.

She doesn’t need her daughter as a reason to fight; she has a whole galaxy of reasons.

Hera doesn’t know how she could describe that to anyone. She can’t find a way to voice it without sounding like she regrets her choice to keep the baby. Every time, her words always sound like she doesn’t love her daughter.

It’s not true. It never has been.

She loves that baby. Loves entirely and without an ounce of restraint, and Hera could not hold herself back from adoring this child even if she tried. She loves that baby with a swooning intensity that overpowers every ounce of pragmatism and compartmentalization she has. She will do anything for her child– move galaxies, rearrange whole planetary systems, tear open the sky and remake the stars one by one.

She loves that baby, so much that she wakes up in the middle of the night even when her daughter is fast asleep just to watch her, her mind racing with a catalog of all the terrors and traumas waiting among the stars, mercilessly eager to tear into her daughter’s helpless flesh.

She loves that baby with an animal savagery that strikes her to the core, the knowledge that nothing can take her child from her, and she will die before she allows her daughter to be ripped from her arms.

She loves that baby.

And yet.

The peace Kanan feels with their daughter; the way it centers him, brings him back to himself, makes him feel like a piece of a larger whole –

Hera knows that peace. She feels it every time she pilots the Ghost through the blue and white shimmer of hyperspace. Every time they’re deep into the black with nothing but stars around them, glowing against darkness that can’t take their light. Every time they sail away after a successful mission, knowing she and her crew did everything they could to bring them one step closer to freedom.

She knows how it feels, those treasured instances of serenity. She feels it when she flies.

She’s never felt it with Tesa.

And yet.

Her daughter only has half a mother, but Hera can’t imagine it any other way. There is no way she can separate herself from the world her child was born into. To do so would be ludicrous. Without her mission, her duty, without the world beneath her wings, there is no life that Hera recognizes as her own.

And yet.

Freedom means difficult choices. It’s something she’s understood for as long as she can remember. She feels it in the deepest parts of her. She known it as strongly as she knows her own name. The world is a difficult, unkind place that does not take to innocence, and Hera is willing to take it on at any cost – including the cost of her own needs.

And yet.

Kanan once said the Empire made too many choices in their lives. But she makes the choice every day to fight. She made the choice to leave home, to use her skills to help others.

She chose to fly.

The best version of herself is when she’s high above the atmosphere, soaring through the darkness, weaving through the starlight with nothing but deep space at her back.

There is no world in which Hera Syndulla is not sacrificing her last breath to fight for an idea so much bigger than herself.

And yet.

Every day, Hera looks into her daughter’s eyes. And every day, Hera feels the weight of that gaze like a tilted orbit. There’s a millennia of star systems and uncharted space in Tesa’s eyes; places Hera, for all her piloting expertise, would never reach in the Ghost or any other vessel. The starlight in that gaze tells Hera all the things she is not.

Those fathomless eyes. Like Tesa has all the wisdom in the world. Certainly enough to know Hera isn’t up to the task of being her mother.

 

 

VI.

The hurt rocks through her, again and again and again. Guilt and anger and love and desperation are a grenade in her chest, hitting her exhausted body with spasms that leave every inch of her shaking uncontrollably.

Hera has to close her eyes, because if she doesn’t she will say everything she can’t let herself say; everything she barely allows herself to think. But she’s already worn down from the endless spiral of her nights, the ones that make her feel like she’s floating through life. Like she’s treading water in an endless ocean, trying not to get sucked under by the massive whirlpool nipping at her heels, threatening to pull her all the way under.

There are so many nights where the whirlpool seems to get closer, and she’s that much closer to drowning. Nights where she is so exhausted, it seems like the marrow in her bones is throbbing; her joints move like sludge; her back is twisted in coils; her shoulders feel like they carry an invisible, burdening anvil.

“I wanted to have her,” she says, the words white-hot on her tongue. “I chose to bring her into this world.”

Her voice feels blurry, thick with tears. She can’t remember starting to cry but suddenly she can’t stop. Everything hurts, hurts like it hadn’t since the aftermath of Concord Dawn, and even that hadn’t been as bad as this, like she’s been flayed alive.

“And sometimes, I just want her to go away.”

 

 

VII.

She half-expects the words to destroy her. For the earth to open up and swallow her whole. For it to shake her to the core of her being, to tear her heart in half. To leave her leveled to the ground.

To her dull astonishment, there’s nothing. Instead, Hera is awash with the same feeling she had after her father said his final words to her, just seconds before his death. Maybe she’s in shock and it hasn’t sunk in yet, but she realizes with a blank lack of surprise that’s not the case at all.

Her father is dead. Her daughter is a stranger to her. She can’t talk to anyone about it. Her family needs her. The Rebellion needs her.

And she feels nothing.

Rex doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move to hold her or try to touch her. He just sits by her side, like an anchor.

“I wish I understood what you were feeling, Captain,” he says after a long, still moment. “And I wish I knew what to say that would help.”

Hera stares at her hands. They feel frozen inside her gloves, but the rest of her feels burning, feverish.

“But I’m certain this isn’t a weakness. You are one of the most commanding and capable soldiers I’ve ever had the honor to serve with. This, whatever you’re feeling, it doesn’t mean you’re anything less than that.”

He turns to her. There’s compassion in that gaze, and concern, but something harder. More militant.

She wants to turn away from his words. But instead they coil themselves around her heart. Rex doesn’t lie for the sake of making anyone else feel better.

“She deserves better than me,” Hera murmurs, because it’s true, and there’s no value in lying to yourself, no matter how hard or shameful the truth can be.

Rex shakes his head.

“You deserve better, too, Captain,” he says.

There’s a war leader’s order in that voice.

Chapter 4

I.

“So, off to Themes?” Sabine asks.

Hera nods. “Numa’s already there. She’s got the place picked out and everything.”

She sent Hera a holo-image of it yesterday. It’s pretty. Doesn’t look much like Ryloth, with its dark, breathing jungles and sprawling plains, but it’s open and wild and untouched by the war of the worlds, and anyway, it doesn’t matter if Cham would like it or not, because this isn’t about him. He already said his goodbyes.

“Time to get my head screwed on right. Get this –”

She has to make herself say it.

“Get things straightened out.”

 

II.

“Hera.”

She looks up from her daughter’s sleeping form. For once, the baby drifted off without complaint. Her breathing comes out in fluted little tufts of warm air that Hera feels with the back of her hand. She presses her fingers just close enough to graze the cool, velvety dampness of her daughter’s mouth.

Kanan doesn’t sit beside her. He stands over Tesa’s cradle, places one hand on their baby’s head. Her skull is small enough to fit in his palm.

He once promised he’d see her again.

An image suddenly comes to mind – Kanan, after their rescue on Mustafar. Lying in her bunk, too exhausted to keep his eyes open but too wary from weeks of torture to fully trust what was going on: that he was back on the Ghost, surrounded by family, in Hera’s bed, with her hands administering what little first aid she could give him without disturbing him or causing more pain.

They made their promise years ago –dragged out of each other because they knew there was a bigger picture and they couldn’t be selfish, and all those other words they’d tossed back and forth that they knew by heart. Their mouths and lips and tongues formed the words, as much a sense memory as the touch of each other’s fingertips to the ridges where bones and blood and tissue met under smooth panes of brown and green skin –

She hadn’t intended to break that promise to Kanan. She always figured he did, because he’d lost what he loved once, and she didn’t know if there would still be pieces left to pick up if there was ever a “next time”.

But she had broken it, when she weighed a world without Kanan to a world where their crazy plan had the slimmest chance of success. And call it temporary insanity, call it selfishness, call it crazy, but she decided the Rebellion could temporarily go burn in the fires of Mustafar’s hellish volcanic surface. A world without Kanan wasn’t a world she wanted.

She’d spent years knowing where her devotion stood, only to have it completely overridden for reasons she swore would never happen.

Because sometimes, refusing to accept your choices was the same thing as letting them be taken away from you.

And the Empire had already taken enough from all of them.

She wraps her arms around herself and hates how small it makes her look, even if Kanan can’t see it, so she slips her hands under her thighs and sits on them instead.

He moves to hold her, but she pulls away from his touch. The words are whispery and soft, a voice entirely not her own.

“I’m not sad about my father.”

 

 

III.

No one says a word about this being her fault. No one tells her she’s weak. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with that, what she’s supposed to think. She just does her everyday things in the same order – nurse the baby, perform routine maintenance, report for briefings in the war room, stay updated on Intel.

Sato has been as courteous as ever. He’ll be officially released from medical leave the week after next, with his new prosthetic leg and a cane to help him get around until he adjusts to his new artificial limb. She studies his holo-projection face and tries to discern whether he wears his disappointment in her openly, or if he’s keeping it buried beneath the stern lines of his face.

She can’t see it.

The one thing she’s certain of is that he agrees with her: Rex is the best choice for a temporary Captain and Phoenix leader. He’s been communicating with Sato and several other generals behind closed doors, learning plans and strategies and chains of secret information that Hera will not be privy to.

(For the first time, she thinks she might understand how frustrated Sabine was with her about withholding Fulcrum’s true identity. It’s not so much fun to be on the outside of the circle, even if Hera knows it’s for her own good.)

Sabine leans against the wall of Hera’s bunk, arms crossed over her chest. The look she gives Hera is unreadable, the look in her eyes the closed-off expression of the girl who said she could try to trust.

Hera corrects herself. Not a girl. A young woman, strong and certain, whom she watched grow up. Whom she loves.

“You could have told me,” Sabine says quietly. “Hera, you should have. I would have done everything I could to help you!”

Hera sighs. “I know that, Sabine. But I don’t think there’s really anything that could have been done.”

Sabine shakes her head. “How could you know that if you never asked? I could have helped out more – watched the baby, given you a break…”

She cuts herself off abruptly, shaking her head.

Hera places both hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“Sabine.”

Hazel eyes meet hers. They’re angry, but they’re also something else Hera rarely sees in Sabine’s gaze – worry, that particular way only family can hurt you with their blend of fear and love and frustration.

“I didn’t tell anybody because I didn’t understand it myself.” She squeezes Sabine’s shoulders. “It has nothing to do with trust.”

She looks the girl square in the eyes. Sabine doesn’t blink.

“You were there when she was born,” Hera whispers. “I know I need you.”

Sabine’s hard expression doesn’t change, but there’s a twitch in the line of her mouth.

Then her chin drops, and Hera lets go.

 

 

IV.

Her hands are shaking. She tries to clench them into fists, to command them to stop. She can’t, and this scares her more than anything has in a long time.

“Just because you don’t look sad doesn’t mean you aren’t,” Kanan whispers. “Grief isn’t always crying or making a scene. Sometimes it’s hiding yourself away from the people you love, distancing yourself from everything you used to be, because you can’t let yourself feel it.”

His head droops. “Sometimes, it’s too much to feel all at once. The hurt, the fear. So you don’t.”

Her gaze linger to the jaig eyes Sabine painted on his mask. She knows what he’s getting at, but Hera still shakes her head.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. She doesn’t know what she means.

 

 

V.

Ezra has the baby right now. She can hear him laughing from the common room – the spilled-coin babble of Tesa making noises to herself, Zeb’s throaty laugh, Chopper’s high-toned grumbling. She’s said her goodbyes to the boys already. Neither would meet her eyes.

Before she said goodbye to the baby, Hera held her one more time. She touched her daughter’s warm skin, felt her fragile bones. She buried her nose into the baby’s neck and inhaled her. The baby didn’t move, except for the sporadic rattle of her chest, the broken-engine hiss when she breathed.

She knows Tesa will be perfectly loved and cared for here, among family. But Hera can’t leave just yet. She can’t move until everything is how it’s supposed to be, under her control.

Everything still feels out of control and she doesn’t accept it. She knows the far-reaching force of their enemies. She has never known a world without it.

But her family is here and Kanan’s arms are open and her daughter is safe and loved. She has everything she needs and there is nothing she can do except wait for the bruises to fade.

 

 

VI.

The look on his face is so open, stripped and transparent that she can see right to the center of him, and the sudden jolt of pain and panic it stirs in her is too much so she slides off the bunk and staggers towards the door, refusing to turn and see the look on his face. He’s given her everything and she can’t give him anything, he’s shown her what’s underneath, and she can’t, she can’t, she –

“Hera.”

The way his mouth forms her name; as if he learned to how to breathe by forming his lips to the shape of its letters.

“Hera.”

A beat of silence, punctuated only by their daughter making noises in her sleep.

If he touches her, she will let him. If he says her name, she will tell him every single thought that has been in her head since their daughter was born. If she peels herself open and shows herself to him in the same way he looks at her, she will become another Hera. The Hera no one else is supposed to see will suddenly become all of who she is.

Kanan will see her. Everyone will see her. She will see herself.

 

 

VII.

Kanan appears in the doorway.

“We’re all set,” he tells her.

She looks over at Sabine, who nods her head.

“Say hi to Numa for me,” she says.

Hera smiles. “I’m sure she’ll say the same about you.”

Sabine shrugs.

“It’s hard,” she says. Her eyes flicker to Hera’s knowingly. “Being apart from family.”

 

 

VIII.

“I don’t –”
Hera’s throat catches. She tries to take a breath, but there’s nothing there, no recycled oxygen from the air vent above their heads, no ready smile and reply to reassure him everything is going to be A-okay, no feeling in her chest, no words her tongue can form.

It’s suffocating, feeling like everything would be clearer, somehow, without her daughter. With one less mouth to feed, one less soul to fight for, one less person who needed her to be strong. Her lungs are so heavy. Her chest is so hollow. She doesn’t know how to breathe through this.

One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. She listens for a sign of herself. A familiar sound that lets her know she’s come back to her mind, inhabiting this skin, this soul.

He takes her hands in his. There might be nothing else in the universe except this, them.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he says. “Whatever happens, we’ll get through it. Together.”

He says it with too much tenderness. He wants to help her and she wants to push him away. She can’t stand it if he knows but she misses him and she isn’t sure which one is stronger at the moment.

He strokes one of her lekku with the softest, most worshipful of touches.

“Please,” he whispers.

Their baby breathes. In. Out. In. Out.

In.

 

 

IX.

After they leave Themes, she’ll follow Commader Sato’s request to train General Ibo’s new pilots. Kanan will go back to Atollon with the others and take care of the baby while she’s gone.

She doesn’t know when she’s coming back. Hera supposed it depends on how it takes the rebels to learn how to not-crash into asteroids.

She doesn’t know what kind of being this makes her, that she’s willing to leave her infant behind and not feel a twinge of regret or sadness, but she doesn’t think about it.

“Nothing’s more important than family,” Ezra had told her, the day they all met her father, and at Hera could hear the fire in his voice, the conviction. Family wasn’t an idea for him; it was everything that had been taken away by the Empire, the loved ones that he would never see again and the life he should have had.

She is Captain Syndulla of the Rebel Alliance.

This is the choice she has made.

 

 

X.

Her ungloved hand is so small in his. Her palms are softer than his calloused, rough ones; her fingers, smooth and slender, feel so exposed intertwined with his.

She stares at the green skin. It looks so wholesome, unbroken. Unfamiliar. Hera searches her memory for a time when she touched her daughter without the protection of her gloves. Without that reassuring barrier of cracked leather and grease stains that came between her exposed palms and her daughter’s tender skin.

She doesn’t know how to fix this and she has to keep doing this, keep going, never stop, Hera doesn’t give up, she’s Captain Syndulla, she knows what has to be done, so she keeps doing it until things will be right again because that’s the only way it can be and because that’s what she tells herself, she has to make things right because that’s her job, but she doesn’t know how to make this right, maybe she’s been wrong this whole time, she doesn’t know how what to do, she doesn’t have a plan, she can’t fix this, she can’t, she can’t.

Her heart might explode. It hurts, it hurts, she wants to say it hurts but she won’t because she doesn’t get to say it hurts. She can’t be hurt about anything ever again because Hera knows she doesn’t deserve to. She doesn’t get to cry or take a break or be sad. She isn’t allowed to be anything, and it doesn’t matter if Rex says this isn’t her fault, if Kanan will tell her the same thing, it doesn’t matter if everyone believes them and tells her it’s okay because it isn’t, none of it changes anything, Hera still chose to be selfish and it set off this chain of events, her daughter is sick and her father is dead and the baby will never get better and the only parent Hera had left will never come back and she misses him, so, so, so much, she can’t stop missing him no matter where she pushes the hurt, because it always comes back to wrap its freezing fangs around her heart.

“Something’s wrong,” she says, finally, words so pathetically incapable of filling the void but the only ones she has at her disposal, the only thing that feels precise enough to define what her whole world has – somehow, inexplicably, shamefully – has become.

 

 

XI.

She takes her usual spot in the captain’s seat, Kanan at her side. For some reason, the chair seems so much bigger this time, compared to every other time she’s sat here, staring out at the cosmos.

Kanan reaches over. Squeezes her hand.

“Whatever this is, I’m here. I’ll be with you the whole way. I’m here, Hera. I’m here.”

The words he said to her that night. Holding her, stroking her back, her lekku. Kissing her softly, rocking them back and forth like she was just as small as their daughter.

“You and I are going to face it together.”

Those words. The memory of Malachor, the freezing dread in the pit of her stomach that she would never see him and Ezra ever again. And the realization that they’d returned, but not all the way. The Jedi she’d known was lost to her, even though he’d come back.

Maybe the same thing has happened to her. Maybe Hera has lost a part of herself that can never come back. Not as powerful as the difference between sighted and blind, but no less essential.

 

 

XII.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She doesn’t know what else to do.

“With me.”

She’s said those words before, to Kanan, in a completely different context.

Each time his answer remained the same: always.

“Something’s wrong. With me.”

 

 

XIII.

Kanan’s hand tightens around her own. She blinks, surprised. She’d been so lost in thought Hera forgot he was here.

“Ready?”

She nods.

“Ghost to Command, preparing to disengage.”

A crackle on the comm, then she hears, “Copy that, Ghost.”

Burying what’s left of her father isn’t going to make everything better. It’s a self-indulgence.

It’s a start.

 

XIV.

Someday, she will take Tesa to Ryloth. She’ll show her daughter, a child of peace, the endlessness of her homeworld, her people, her heritage. She will step into the soft brown earth of the jungles and the compact sands of the valleys, leaving footsteps where she stood on long, adult legs, and claim this life as her own.

She will be a part of it all – this legacy of wind and wild, of smoke and ash, of the sky and the stars and the farthest reaches of the black. Singing into the void, glowing in the darkess, glimmering and immovable in their liberated galaxy, she can see it, she can see it.

 

END