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It starts with a low groan.
It always does.
Then it progresses from there; the sound of thudding feet and limbs against the durasteel bulkhead, sometimes a loud yell of incomprehensible words, followed by something less than a groan but not quite a scream. Sometimes it’s just a shrill ‘no’ that echoes through the corridors and into her heart – her broken heart. From experience she knows that if she wakes him then, he’ll bolt upright, perspiration on his brow, along his bared chest, face flushed with emotions that he’ll never talk about.
It always takes about five heartbeats for his opened eyes to shift from being trapped in his unspeakable memory and becoming alert into his safe reality.
Sometimes there are tears.
Sometimes he just holds onto her and tries to anchor himself to reality.
Sometimes he just needs her to shut his mind off.
That’s how they’ve always done it, how they’ve always faced his inner demons and the darkness that plagues him: together.
Or at least that’s how they used to do it.
Hera shifts in her bed when she hears the low groan come from his room, shifting through the icy durasteel walls that shouldn’t be icy because she’s turned up the climate about three degrees warmer than what’s reasonably affordable. She reasons that it will help get the chill out of her bones. She knows she’ll regret it in a week when they’re taking an undesirable job to refuel the Ghost.
The progression of his nightmares evolves as expected, thudding against the bulkhead and this time it’s the incomprehensible mumbling, urgent and frightened, followed by that guttural noise he makes like a man facing his end. She sits up in her bed, draws her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them.
How many more nights can he really go through this? How many nights can she continue to ignore it?
It’s been two weeks since she dragged his drunk ass back onto her ship, two weeks since she felt like she was a heartbeat or breakdown away from telling him that she loves him, too.
Loved.
Loves.
She still doesn’t know.
There’s another loud cry, this one strangled in his throat and she knows there are probably tears in his eyes; usually she doesn’t let it get this far. Usually she’s taken him up in her arms by now, cards her fingers through his hair and tries to take his pain away. By now, she’s usually trying to protect him from all of those things that are hurting him in his dreams, trying to draw the darkness from his soul.
Tonight, just like the last fourteen nights, she buries her head against her knees and squeezes her eyes shut and just waits for it to end. Tears prick the corners of her eyes because she knows that she is hurting him – or rather she’s letting the dark corners of his mind hurt him – but he hurt her and shouldn’t she want him to hurt just as much? Isn’t that how this shit is supposed to work? She tries to stuff the feelings back down, wipes furiously at her face.
He’s not worth the tears.
Yes he is, her heart whispers.
She ignores that, too.
Those demons aren’t hers to deal with, they’re Kanan’s. She isn’t hurting him, he’s hurting himself. It’s the mantra she’s tried to adopt.
It doesn’t make her feel any better, either.
Really, she’s already a bleeding heart. She left Ryloth to help the entire galaxy – she dreams of happiness for people that she’s never met, freedom to live their dreams. It’s the only dream she allows herself; dreaming of other people’s futures. Listening to Kanan in the throes of night terrors and doing nothing about it goes against literally every thing she’s dedicated her life to.
They’re his demons. He’s hurting himself, she thinks again and the words are just as empty as they’ve always been.
A loud thud turns her head in the direction of her cabin door; she knows that sound, too. Obviously he’s awake because the noises are gone and the loud fuck he yells is verbal confirmation that he hit his head on the bulkhead when he finally broke free from his nightmare. Silence lingers in the stale air between the two cabins and she hears that shuddering breath that she knows that it means that tonight there are tears.
What is it that he sees in sleep that does these things to him? He’s never told her and now she’ll never ask.
Hera lies back down, knees curled up to her chest and blanket pulled tight around her, as she wills the chill from her bones.
-
The climate of the Ghost is cold as fuck; five degrees cooler than where Hera normally runs it during the day but she’s been keeping it three degrees warmer at night. It’s the closest that Hera comes to chaos when running her tight ship, Kanan thinks. He doesn’t complain no matter how cold he is because he’s not exactly in the position to do so.
If he’s being honest, he doesn’t know what position he’s in.
Kanan isn’t the same man he was two years ago; that Kanan would have just cut and run. Just the clothes on his back, world to world on tramp freighters, never for more than a few months at a time – and a few months was a serious commitment. He would have run without a second thought and without a single care in the galaxy – at least when he was drunk anyway.
What confuses him is that he doesn’t want to be that man anymore. Life would have been a lot easier if he could have figured out that he didn’t want to be that man a couple weeks ago when he was using ultimatums instead of words. If he could have figured it out before he was saying a bunch of crap that had absolutely nothing to do with their run-in with the Empire and everything to do with the fact that he’s afraid of losing her, afraid of the Imperials finding out what he is.
What he was.
So instead of running, he’s sitting in purgatory because Hera needs him there – she has made sure to clarify that she does not want him there – and he knows it’s because she’s gotten in over her head. The missions are more complex, the Imperials are getting stronger, and sometimes it seems like the Empire is almost anticipating her interference.
Their interference.
Hera doesn’t want him there but she needs a crew.
Kanan doesn’t want to leave because he needs Hera.
He needs her direction, he needs her light, and he needs to make sure that she’s safe. He wants her, too but Okadiah used to tell him to want in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.
Kanan doesn’t need to test the advice to know the answer.
The caf machine is horrendously slow this morning, or the exhaustion racking his body combined with the cold cutting into his bones is making it seem that way. They’re both on the ground today and he needs to be alert; it’s the first time she’s asked – no, told – him that he’s on the ground. Being half asleep and sluggish from the chill isn’t going to help him win any points with her, if there’s any points to be won.
Points aren’t the priority though, protecting Hera is.
The tension in Hera’s body precedes her physical presence in the galley. He can always feel her coming before she’s actually there; the ache and the anger, the despondency and determination. Under all of that, though, she still has hope. It’s one of the things he loves about her, the thing he envies the most. No matter what happens, no matter the odds, Hera always has hope.
Hera has no reason to hope; she’s seen war just like he has – it’s all that she’s ever known. At least he had the confines of the Jedi Temple as a child, the illusion of safety within its walls even with other worlds at war. That’s a luxury that Hera never had. They both started fighting too young; she was spying on Imperial facilities at 10 and flying risky relief missions at 14, just like he was slinging a lightsaber on Mygeeto and Kaller at the same age.
He lost his Master.
She lost her family.
War and loss are familiar friends for both of them. Somehow, though, she still dares to hope and desires to fight.
It’s a drive he’s never had; the only mode he’s ever known is survival.
Just another reason that you don’t deserve her, Kanan grimaces at the thought. His expression darkens more when he uses the opportunity to remind himself that he reinforced that by getting drunk and screwing Sloane.
Then he realizes that he actually knows two modes; survival and self-loathing.
Neither one are useful.
When Hera finally enters the galley, Kanan makes no effort to move. He focuses his eyes on the countertop and practically holds his breath. He’s staying out of the way, he’s staying quiet, and if he had a way of making himself invisible, he’d probably do that too. He’s giving her exactly what she asked for. He knows that Hera is fiery; full of piss and vinegar and as razor tongued as they come when she wants to be – but she’s also a twenty year old pissed off Twi’lek who is as adept at the cold shoulder as she is as a pilot. It’s the closest that she’s ever come to reminding him of a typical woman.
Silence lingers heavy in the air and he can tell by the sounds she’s making that she’s stopped moving, only a couple feet away. She must be glaring at him because he swears he can feel daggers in his back and idly he thinks he’d prefer taking actual daggers compared to this.
“Can you quit wasting the fucking caf?” Every word is enunciated with venom.
It’s literally the most she’s said to him that wasn’t strictly business. It’s fire coated with ice and somehow a relief that she’s mustered enough emotion to say something to him, no matter how angry or petty it is. Kanan wants her to yell at him, to scream, to curl her lekku into her back and angrily pronounce all of the things he deserves to hear.
It only takes a moment for him to decide that maybe now is as good of time as any to test those boundaries, to see if he can draw more of the poison out of her. She doesn’t deserve the darkness and he doesn’t want her holding onto it, “I’m not wasting it. It’s cold and I thought you might want a cup, too.”
Kanan leaves the part off about how he’s trying to be thoughtful because that’s asking for a response that he isn’t ready to hear.
Her voice is icier than the climate on the ship but the fire fades beneath it, “I don’t want anything from you.”
Hera leaves him with a chill that a cup of caf could ever curb.
-
There’s a method to their madness.
Hera has the idea, Kanan makes the plan. That’s how they work, it’s how they’ve always worked. It wasn’t an intentional thing; she told herself several times on Gorse that she wasn’t there for recruitment, only reconnaissance. Of course the decision to avoid recruitment happened when Kanan found her and no matter how much he tried to hide behind his flirting, fighting, and boozing, Hera found him.
Now he’s lost again.
The mission is a fucking disaster.
Sloppy doesn’t even begin to explain it. She’s supposed to be lifting intel off of one of the Ithorians sitting at the table with her and Kanan is supposed to signal which one it is. It’s a routine job for them – as close as they get to taking shore leave these days – and yet he will barely look at her to give her the signals.
Or maybe she won’t look at him.
Either way, she’s trying to retrieve intel with no intel and she may as well have left Kanan back on the ship because everything is going south. A Devaronian is visually undressing her from the corner, the Ithorians are getting antsy, and oh good – now there’s a bunch of stormtroopers here to make things even more complicated. Her party breaks and she still has no intel, Kanan is doing nothing that she needs him to do – or if he did, she didn’t notice it – and the Devaronian is fighting with the stormtroopers.
At least two of her four problems are handling each other.
Hera doesn’t know if she actually signaled to Kanan that she was going after them or not because she’s so lost in her thoughts about how she’s going to get the intel and which one is most likely to have it that she can’t remember. She’ll worry about her inability to focus later. She follows twenty paces behind them, eyeing their interactions and who seems to lead the pack – she’s no Jedi but she’s perceptive enough.
It’s just an intel mission. Why did she bother telling him to come in the first place. Maintaining the close distance between herself and the Ithorians, she settles on she shortest of the group who despite their stature seems to be the one in charge. They’re not the greatest fighters, easy to throw off balance and not nearly as nimble as she is – as long as she can get them out of public view, she should be able to take them down by force if necessary.
If she pulls this off, next time she’s leaving him on the ship and she’ll only tell him that he needs to be there when she needs muscle.
The Ithorians break up and the two largest stay with her target. Six would have been fine but three is just too easy, she thinks to herself. Her target rounds a corner into a less populated alley and she quickens her steps to close the distance. Any other day, asking nicely first would get the job done but she’s just not in the fucking mood so she pulls her blaster first and asks questions after.
Of course her intel went the other way. The result is three stunned Ithorians slumped over in an alley and Hera having to guess where the other three went. They’re tall and lumbering, huge heads and long limbs and they should stick out like a sore thumb but she feels like literally half the galaxy is in this marketplace – and half of them are stormtroopers.
Focus. Her brain is grappling for a grip on the situation, to gain control of this mission that has quickly deteriorated into a steaming pile of blurrg droppings. Hera sinks into another cantina, this one populated to a nauseating degree with Imperials – stormtroopers and grays.
Fucking great.
They’re probably after her intel, too.
Sidling up to a seat at the bar, she flags down the bartender with a gloved hand for a drink – something strong. She’s a Twi’lek and strong for most is weaker than water for her.
Hera resists the urge to pull the hood of her cloak down over her face – Kanan has told her a million times if she’s trying to avoid looking suspicious, that’s not the way to do it. There’s a lot of things that she thinks about Kanan right now but she’ll reluctantly acknowledge when he can utilize his brain for intelligent thought, even right now.
Besides, he’s the one that’s experienced with running. An unexpected bitter laugh comes out of her mouth on that one and she tosses back half of the drink presented to her. The mission has gone to hell and it’s just as much her fault as it is his.
Making him stay on the Ghost after everything he did was a mistake. Maybe letting him on the Ghost to begin with was a mistake.
Bringing him on the mission was definitely a huge. fucking. mistake.
Hera takes another long drink and tries to tune out her thoughts and tune into the conversations around her. The Imperials are stupid; they have big mouths and no concept of being discreet, no matter what the intel. They spout off military codes like the codes are their native tongue but none of them actually have military precision.
It works to her advantage.
Most of the time.
Something else is happening on this planet; it’s apparent by the chatter. There’s discussion of a factory and yet another mining operation. It’s useful information but not the information that she came for to begin with. Hera lingers a little longer, sips more slowly to file away the intel that she didn’t come for and hopes for a clue that will lead to the intel that she did.
It’s not like they don’t have comms. It’s obvious that they’re not going to be successful if she doesn’t suck it up. She throws down a couple of Imperial credits for drinks she couldn’t afford because this intel was supposed to be their paycheck and walks out of the cantina with fierce determination. There’s a quiet alley just around the corner – it isn’t lost on her that there’s always a dirty alleyway outside of a cantina and the implications make her stomach churn – and she pulls out her comm.
“Kanan,” she speaks his name and it feels like glass in her throat.
No answer.
Great.
“Kanan,” she repeats and it still hurts, “Kanan, we need to rendezvous and find these guys.” Hera leaves off the part where he should have been keeping a fucking eye out and told her which guy it was long before they ever left the cantina because maybe he gave her the signal and she just couldn’t look at him.
She didn’t want to look at him.
After a long moment, she gets her answer, static and a high pitched sound with ‘got it’. The words aren’t clear – ‘got it’ as if they’re going to rendezvous or ‘got it’ as if he actually pulled it off. “Kanan, you’re saying – “
Her words are cut off by an unseen assailant ripping the comm from her hands and subsequently crushing it under a shiny black boot. Hera spins in her heels, fingers already embracing the grip of her blaster when she comes face to face with her unwelcomed intruder. Black shiny boots, gray uniform, dark skin, and unruly human hair forced into submission under a matching gray cap.
Hera’s blood runs cold for half of a heartbeat and then starts to boil. She keeps her fingers gripped around her blaster but she doesn’t pull it – she’s smart enough not to fire on an Imperial officer without back up – and backup is a luxury she doesn’t have right now.
I’d rather hit her anyway, Hera thinks to herself and balls her right hand at her side. “Captain Sloane,” Hera finally speaks and inwardly winces at how telling her tone is.
Rae Sloane turns up a sadistic grin that doesn’t match the disdain in her dark eyes, “Lose somebody, Twi’lek?” It’s a question she doesn’t have to ask because she already knows the answer. She’s the one who did the taking and she finds that she gets to crush the Rebel before her in more way that one.
Hatred is practically oozing from Hera’s pores and she doesn’t dignify Sloane’s question with an answer. She’ll let the bitch blither for a minute while she discreetly assesses her odds for escape; after all, Sloane is an Imperial and she can talk a lot but she can’t back any of it up.
“It’s a pity, really, that he’s not here,” Sloane continues and she’s so fucking predictable. “I couldn’t have possibly let him walk away this time – but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t requisition time for interrogation. I can definitely see why you kept him around.”
The bitch is striking a nerve, Hera will give her that much but she still doesn’t respond. Kanan likes to flirt with Imperials – to fuck them – to get them off his back. He says that silence and arguing doesn’t work with them but Hera isn’t Kanan. Silence will do just fine until the haggling civilians across the alley get out of the way and give her a clear shot to fire on the two stormtroopers right behind them to give her a clear escape.
Sloane grabs a lek and pulls hard, dragging Hera into her face, “Did you hear me, Twi’lek? You speak to an Imperial officer of the Galactic Empire when addressed.”
Pain sears to the base of her lekku and its an instantaneous headache but Hera doesn’t give Sloane the satisfaction of showing a physical response. Her eyes slide behind Sloane’s ugly face - it's all pinched and plain - and thank Force, the fucking civilians seem to be parting ways. Just a couple more seconds.
“Funny that your kind are the ones used for what they are and yet your pilot came to me, isn’t it?” Sloane tugs her lek harder until Hera’s facing up at the woman. This time Sloane is pleased to get an audible grunt out of the Twi’lek, “Clearly you know what happened because you aren’t surprised. The question is why you’re trying to comm for him when you know. Or is it possibly that you tailheads are just used to it – that you understand that you’re not worth –“
Hera no longer has a fuck to give if there are stormtroopers blocking her exit or if civilians in the way because the bitch is begging for it and she’s not one to deny the woman what she’s asking for. Everything happens in the blink of an eye and far too easily – Hera throws a right cross that sends Sloane staggering to the ground, pulls her blaster from the holster and – thank Force – the civilians are gone so down go the two stormtroopers. She’s already rounding the corner of another building before Sloane ever picks her ass up off the ground.
Hera's head is killing her, she’s down a comm, the intel is a forgotten objective, and all she wants to do is get back to her ship to regroup. Instead she gets a face full of Kanan’s chest as she rounds another corner. Just who she needed to see but didn’t want to see right now.
A blaster bolt draws them both up from the moment and when Kanan grabs her by the arm to drag her in the direction of the Ghost, she lets him. Right this second, her fight isn’t with him and he’s good at running.
In the crowded streets full of civilians and inept Imperials, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd and even easier to make their escape. Up the ramp, close the hatch, bypass the startups and he’s right next to her, already scrambling the Ghost’s signature before they’re ever off the ground. She can feel his eyes on her, on the lek that’s unilaterally tense over her shoulder from the massive headache of having it yanked on twice but he stays thankfully quiet.
Talking is the last thing she wants to do because the mission was a complete and utter disaster. Talking will give way to yelling. Yelling will only make her head hurt worse and a headache is not going to help her figure out how to explain to Fulcrum that what should have been a simple intel mission was a complete and utter failure on every level possible.
They’re out of the atmosphere and soon enough the dotted skies of realspace give way to the brilliant white and blue streaks of hyperspace before Kanan stands to leave her alone in the cockpit.
Must have been waiting to see if there were TIEs in pursuit, she thinks to herself.
Before he leaves the cockpit, he wordlessly places a holodisk next to her hand on the console.
-
It starts with a low groan like it always does.
Hera’s headache is still there, dulled only slightly by the pain tablets, and she has at least another four hours of scanning all of the intel from the botched mission that wasn’t botched. She won’t complain about going through all of the documents because at least she has documents to go through. It makes her mad that she has Kanan to thank for that because after the unwelcome encounter with Sloane earlier, she doesn’t want to thank him.
But she needs to.
She hears the telltale signs of thudding feet and limbs against the durasteel bulkhead. Tonight it’s the shrill ‘no’ that echoes into her cabin.
Tonight, Hera ignores her broken heart and listens to reason instead.
The four meters from her bed to his feel like ten kilometers, a journey made with feet feeling as if they’re encased in duracrete. Hera doesn’t reach out to touch him; doesn’t look at his brow and definitely not along his chest where he’s normally beading up with sweat – the marks are probably long gone but she’s not going to verify that for herself. Instead, she says his name softly and his limbs flail with another distressed sound. She repeats his name again, louder – more clearly; it doesn’t feel like the shard of glass in her throat that it did earlier but it still hurts to say his name. Hera finally forces herself to look at him and she ignores the tug at her heart; it hurts to see him like this but seeing him makes her hurt, too. Another repetition of his name, gentle but still firm, and his eyes finally flutter open. It takes a few moments for him to shift from haze to surprise and then settle on question.
“You were having another nightmare,” is all she can muster. Hera settles on the floor with her back against the bulkhead with knees drawn to her chest and she resumes reviewing the information from their mission on her datapad.
She doesn’t want to thank him and he needs sleep.
This is her compromise.