Chapter Text
Sabine still finds the noises of the Ghost crew going about their morning routines slightly jarring, even after being on the ship for the last three months. She’d gotten used to the sounds of the Academy’s morning wake-up drills: rushing through getting dressed, parting her un-dyed dark hair with the same military precision, and showing up to the mess hall for the same old tasteless provisions. Before that it was her family’s quiet breakfasts, always promptly early and unable to be missed unless injured or sick.
The Ghost is a mishmash of noises and behavior far from both of those environments, but she can’t say she doesn’t love every second of it.
No one wakes her unless there’s a mission briefing she needs to be present for. Foods of both instant nutrition and actual flavor are available to her at any time, even sugar-filled pastries that she only shares a liking for with Ezra. She fills her days with training, art, and bonding with every member of the crew more and more. There’s a lot to like about the Ghost and its crew, even if it’s a change.
That’s why it’s of no surprise that when she finally gets dressed and begins to stroll towards the Ghost’s kitchen, she starts her morning with the sounds of Ezra and Kanan's familiar squabbling.
“We’re heading out,” Kanan says, voice even, but without seeing him yet she tell he’s likely got his arms crossed.
Then follows the tinkling sounds of cereal being poured into one of the dishes from the cupboards. “Okay,” Ezra says, bored and barely acknowledging Kanan’s comment.
“You know the rules, right?”
Ezra scoffs. “No, I’ve forgotten since the last three-hundred times you’ve explained them to me in the last four years.”
“Ezra,” Kanan warns. When Sabine finally reaches the doorway, she does in fact find Kanan standing with his arms crossed and a flat look on his face.
“Kanan,” Ezra retorts in a similar tone, crossing his arms and looking up from his current position at the counter where he’s seemingly fixing his breakfast. They stare at each other in silence for a moment before Ezra squirms a little, caving. “I’m gonna be fine. Sabine and I are going to be fine. You’ve left me alone on the ship plenty of times. I know how to take care of myself. I’m almost fourteen.”
“Oh, well if you’re almost fourteen, then.” Kanan rolls his eyes and grumbles, unimpressed. “And you weren’t alone,” Kanan mumbles the next part, aware of how pitiful an argument it sounds. “You were with Chopper.”
“Yes, Chop was so helpful that time those sleemo tried to steal the Ghost while you guys were gone. And because I didn’t have a blaster, I had to hide in the vents for an hour until you and Hera showed up!”
“You were ten years old! I stand by not entrusting a ten year old with a blaster. Besides, he thought to comm us immediately when something went wrong.” Kanan raises an eyebrow, prompting. “Which is why…?”
Ezra sighs heavily, as if terribly burdened, before reciting. “Comms are to be worn at all times and, when hailed, responded to immediately.”
“Very good. We’ll be gone for a maximum of two days. Stay out of trouble and don’t break anything on the ship that you can’t fix before Hera finds out.”
“Okay, Dad, just go already. Force, we’ll be fine, I promise.”
“Uh-huh.” Kanan pulls Ezra into a short one-armed embrace before ruffling Ezra’s hair and getting pushed away for his trouble.
Sabine strolls into the room with a short wave in their direction, walking by to get into the cabinets for a bowl and spoon of her own. “If Ezra does do anything, I’ll be sure to drag him out of it by the seat of his pants, as usual,” she quips, smiling when Ezra looks entirely unamused.
“Please take her with you,” Ezra grumbles before shoving the box of cereal into her palm with a little more force than normal.
“Poor kid just can’t take a joke.” Kanan smiles at her, shaking his head back and forth dramatically. “No idea where I went wrong.”
Ezra just groans at Kanan, sloshing some blue milk onto the flakes of his cereal and stomping over to the booth of the dejarak table.
“Try not to torture him too much while we’re gone, Sabine,” Kanan jokes, placing a firm squeeze of his hand on her shoulder before turning around and presumably heading towards the Phantom where Hera and Zeb are waiting.
“He'll be in good hands,” she affirms, returning a playful smile at Kanan’s back.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Ezra grumbles when she takes the seat across from him in the booth with her own breakfast. “You’re not even that much older than me.”
“You keep telling yourself that, kid.” Sabine adds on the moniker for an extra tease, laughing when Ezra throws a balled up napkin at her with striking accuracy.
“I’ve been on this ship longer than you have." Ezra points his spoon at her for emphasis, the milk on it dripping down onto the table. “If anything, I should be babysitting you. You might blow the ship up with one of your explosive experiments. Do you even know where the fire extinguisher is?”
“There are like, five of them on the ship. Do I really need to recite their exact locations for you?”
Ezra just shrugs, dropping the argument in favor of trying to eat his cereal before it gets soggy.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Sabine starts, stopping to take a bite of her own food. “What’s the deal with you, Kanan, and Hera, anyway?”
Ezra goes still, his eyes going from her face to his bowl with an odd sort of intensity.
It’s not as if she thought the question would be a particularly easy one. If Ezra asked her out of the blue to start explaining her family, she’d likely have to restrain herself from screaming at him. It can be a sensitive topic, even for someone who seemingly has it so good with such supportive people as Kanan and Hera.
When she first joined the crew—cagey and angry and distrusting as she initially was and sometimes still is—she was surprised to find someone else so young among their ranks.
Zeb wasn’t that much of an oddity. He used to be a soldier and the Empire had fiercely wronged him. It made sense that he would join freedom fighters like Kanan and Hera and vouch for their goodness to her.
She wasn’t foolish enough to think that the Empire hadn’t also destroyed the lives of children just like her across the galaxy—she was just surprised that Ezra was an active part of the fight.
He hadn’t been on the mission in which she was recruited, but he joined them for many after that. He was sharp. Impressive for someone who seemed so young and small. At times he seemed much too somber for a thirteen year old. (Though she often felt too troubled for a fifteen year old, so she supposed she had no room to judge.)
“What do you mean?” Ezra finally responds, swirling his spoon around in his bowl instead of looking at her.
“You don't have to answer. You know, if you don’t want to. I was just…curious, I guess.” She shrugs, regretting how they’ve lapsed into an uncomfortable sort of quiet. “Sometimes you call Kanan ‘Dad’, but other times you don't. You say you’ve been here for a long time, but I get the sense that it hasn’t been all your life. I can tell how much Kanan and Hera care for you, love you. It’s just a little odd, you being out in this fight so young. Younger than I was when I finally wised up to how bad the Empire really was.”
“It’s…” Complicated, he doesn’t say, or some variant thereof. He finally looks at her, his eyes focused and almost searching. She hopes that he sees her intentions are well meaning, even if she is being a little nosy. “I’ve been on the Ghost since I was about nine. Kanan and Hera ended up working together on this mining planet—Gorse—and the next thing I know, we’re being invited on to the crew of this ship. They don’t talk about what happened there much, but Hera trusted him enough to want him to stay. She extended that trust to me too. Since then, I’ve been more than willing to give it back. It’s hard to imagine being anywhere else, now.”
“But you were? Before that?”
Ezra nods. “A lot of places. Since Empire Day, it’s just been Kanan and I, really. We moved wherever there was work for Kanan to get. The Ghost is as close to home as we’ve had since…well, it doesn’t matter. My real—my biological parents were from Lothal, but I haven’t been there much outside of missions.”
“Are they…?”
He hesitates, unsure. “I—I never knew. We were…separated when I was young. Kanan had a few leads on them years ago, but all we know is that they disappeared from Lothal. I thought I found something else, but it, um, never really paid off.”
She wants to say I’m sorry. Wants to say she knows being separated from family. However, it’s not the same and she thinks it might be worse to trying to equate it that way. Instead, she changes the direction of the conversation. “So how did you meet Kanan, then?”
At this, Ezra smiles. She’d quietly always suspected Ezra at the very least considered Kanan his parent, even if they weren’t biologically related. There’s a bond there she can’t begin to describe. Eerie, sometimes, how they read each other’s moods so clearly, seemed to silently coordinate plans to perfection on missions. “He was a mentor to me, back when I was really small. I was always following him around, trying to bug him into hanging out with me instead of behaving.”
“You? Not listening to what people want you to do?” she teases.
“Haha,” he laughs flatly.
They’re quiet again for a moment, Ezra finished playing with the dregs of milk and cereal in his bowl and Sabine uninterested in the soggy mess now in her own.
“It must’ve been nice—having Kanan as a dad, I mean.” She tries not to think of her own father, of her mother and her brother. How she loved them but they didn’t stand by her when all she wanted was to protect Mandalore instead of do more harm to it. Why didn’t they understand—!
“It was,” Ezra answers, pulling her out of her mind’s dangerous territory. “It is. He’s ridiculous and overprotective as all hells sometimes, but that’s not always a bad thing. He looked out for me when he didn’t have to. When it would have been easier not to. When everything else was awful…at least we were together.”
“Empire Day. That’s when you said everything started. Is that when you were separated from your parents?” She tries for a smile, hoping to keep the mood light despite the continued questions. “Anyone specific I can go after for you?”
“I—“ Ezra crosses his arms, then uncrosses them. He stutters, running his hand through his already unruly hair. “I, um. I can’t—”
She feels awful, ruining the mood like that again, making him so clearly upset. “Oh, no, if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t—I was just joking, I didn’t mean to—“
“No, I can’t,” he says, shaking his head and half-jumping out of his seat at the table. “Look, Sabine, we like having you here, so I—please don’t ask about that stuff, okay?”
“What—?” She doesn’t understand exactly what she asked about in more detail. The Empire? His parents? What happened on Empire Day itself apart from what everyone in the galaxy already knows? Hera would gladly go against the Empire for Kanan and Ezra, so why—?
Before she can get another word out, Ezra’s already out the door, leaving his dirty dishes across from her on the table and closing the door to his bunk before she can think to ask him to stop.
She sits there for a moment in the quiet, unsure how to answer when Chopper rolls through a few minutes later with a few inquisitive beeps as to what all the noise was about.