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Dammit, Hera!
She smiles to herself, it’s the third variation of those words she’s heard this mission and she determines it’s her new goal to see how many times she can make Kanan say her name with the varying degrees of frustration. Perhaps it because he seems to have found some footing and it gives her more freedom to push his buttons. Maybe it’s just because they haven’t really fucked up a mission for a while and he hates not having control of the situation – control she used to give him – and she enjoys needling him, so she takes the opportunity where she can get it as long as it doesn’t compromise the objective.
Milk runs are the perfect opportunity for her provoke him, too.
Dammit, Hera.
The first variation came before they’d even made it off the Ghost – when she was explaining what they were doing as she eschewed yet another one of his plans. Maybe it was a good plan but her plan would work just fine – it is working just fine. That variation wasn’t satisfying – just a teaser of what she really wanted.
Dammit, Hera!
No, the second was vastly more satisfying when she landed the Ghost harder than she needed to – she knows how to handle her baby and if she can bristle Kanan without hurting her ship, she’ll take any given opportunity. It’s her favorite form of passive aggression – and she doesn’t kid herself that she is being passive aggressive – tossing him on his ass with a rapid ascent, throwing him off balance with an unnecessary spiral when he rubs her the wrong way or when the mood strikes her. Kanan used to admire her skills at the helm. Now she’s made it a mission to use those skills against him mercilessly, to torture him with them however she sees fit.
The hard thud of his weight against the walls of the corridor accompanied by those two little words she was coming to enjoy so much was almost as satisfying as if she’d physically pushed him into the wall herself.
Serves him right for the first ‘Dammit, Hera’, she had thought to herself.
This latest variation though, this latest variation was her favorite – hissed in the darkness with fresh credits in hand and one stormtrooper begging for the stun setting of her blaster before Kanan could take her shot.
“Dammit! Hera!” he hisses after her but she’s already five meters away and closing in fast on her mark, The stormtrooper is an idiot for hanging out without his companion – they always come in pairs because an individual stormtrooper is lucky to have half of a brain.
Hera fires off her blaster and the stormtrooper drops as expected and she throws a look back to Kanan, self-satisfied and sanctimonious and silently pronouncing I told you that target was mine.
The smile is wiped from her face with a sharp pain in her back, just shy of her spine and it radiates with searing brilliance along her chest and down her side.
“Dammit! Hera??”
She’s wilting to the ground when she hears the fourth variation and she decides that maybe she doesn’t like the words after all.
-
“Dammit! Hera??” Kanan yells after her, no longer concerned with the unseen guests to their party. He bounds out of the dark and grinds to his knees at her side with Force-sharpened reflexes. Another blaster shot is fired in their direction and Kanan throws an angry hand up, embracing the gifts that the Force has given him as he embraces her, and deflects the shot with ease. He’s barely got her slung over his shoulder when another shot fires off, and he knows it's the counterpart to Hera’s mark, waiting for another easy shot.
Kanan draws his blaster and levels his weapon on the trooper without so much as turning his head to visualize his target.
The shots stop.
The Ghost is only a few steps away, the ramp is down, they’re both inside and he’s sprawling Hera across the cargo bay floor while yelling, “Go, Chop, Go!”
There’s nobody chasing them and they’ve got nowhere to go – Hera is adamantly against most med centers, afraid of being tracked by the Empire. They’ve got a med kit and a galley table and its crude but it usually gets the job done. Before she was busy trying to prove whatever it is that she’s trying to prove by getting herself shot, it got the job done. Now he's not so sure.
There’s not a lot of blood or if there was, heat has cauterized the external insult and the bleeding can’t be seen. The offender was an Imperial, so Kanan knows there isn’t a projectile. It should make him feel better but it doesn’t. She’s stunned, but not completely out, so probably a shock blaster. “Dammit,” he murmurs gently, “Hera.” There’s nothing he can do here and moving her is going to hurt her but it has to be done.
It’s not a fatal insult but a wound that could get nasty without attention and she isn’t going to reach it on her own.
Kanan grimaces when she flinches, bites the inside of his cheek when she weakly groans and he knows that no matter how small she sounds that the pain is so much greater. He favors his cabin for the galley – she’s going to need rest after he gets her bandaged up and there’s no use in struggling with her bunk and the galley is not a good place for healing. Having her ingloriously slung over his shoulder leaves his hand free to grab the med kit on their way.
The irony that he’s about to get her half naked in his cabin isn’t lost on him – it’s about as unsexy as it can get, though.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes, easing the buttons and the buckles, her life takes priority and he’ll only uncover what he needs to.
“Not like you haven’t seen it before,” he’s surprised when she musters the words but she either makes no effort to move or her nerves are still stunned from the shot.
Silence would be preferable compared to the little whimpers and whines when he peels fused fibers from the wound. Apologies leave his lips so frequently that by the time he’s fully revealed the wound that ‘sorry’ doesn’t even sound like a word. “It’s not bleeding,” he says gently, trying to be tender as he probes the flesh around the wound. It’s close to her spine but not deep enough to cause any harm. It’s just another blaster bolt, another risk of the job. The stronger the Empire gets, the more risk there is of it happening.
It’s a risk that he saw coming before it ever happened and that’s something they’re going to have to discuss.
Later.
-
Hera tries to gingerly shift onto her side and everything hurts. She holds her breath, trying to avoid the burning ache along her back, and tries again to find a position that makes it hurt a little less but it isn’t happening. The breath she’s holding looses from her lips more heavily than she intended, intermingled with the slightest groan.
She holds her breath again when Kanan’s head lifts from the mattress beside her.
The position he’s in can’t possibly be comfortable, sitting on the floor and slumped over at an unnatural curve. He’s always had more staying power than her in long hours and she’s afraid to ask but she does anyway, “How long have I been out?”
It’s always a loaded question because sleep is a luxury, rest is what happens in between missions on hyperspace lanes. There’s a lot to do for the Rebellion and shore leave is not included in the benefits.
Kanan knows it too because his answer is a vague, “Long enough.”
Heaving a great sigh, she closes her eyes again, “What the fuck did they hit me with?”
“Shock blaster, I think,” Kanan says and he produces a couple tablets from the med kit with a cursory, “they’re not the ones that make you lethargic. I double checked.”
It’s ridiculous how he pays attention to little crap like that, she thinks. That he knows that she’d rather tough it out with the weak stuff than feel anything less than in control. Then she feels stupid because that need to be in control and shove it in his face is how she ended up here. She swallows the tablets down but the words she needs to say doesn’t go with them.
“I should have listened to you,” she sighs and it hurts almost as much as the bolt on her back.
He must know he’s in risky territory because he doesn’t agree but he doesn’t disagree which means that he’d be lecturing her if she wasn’t in the state she was in. Instead he settles against the bulkhead but he doesn’t look away from her, “I need to change the bandage on it when those kick in.”
If they kick in, she thinks.
Hera hates the quiet, hates all the words that needs to be said lingering between them when she’s held captive to her own product of pettiness. She hates the way that he just waits patiently for her to keep going but – hasn’t she done the same thing to him?
He must be doing the thing where he knows what she’s thinking even if he claims that’s not how the Force works because he finally breaks the silence for her.
“You can be mad at me forever, Hera. I deserve it and I accept it,” he says and his voice is as light as the words are heavy, “but out there, you have to trust me.” Kanan’s voice unexpectedly surges as he continues and it catches Hera off guard. The words are thought out, the ideas put together, but delivered with the urgency of a man who nearly lost someone he loves, “Maybe you can’t trust me with your heart but you can trust me with your life and you know it. On the ship, you do what you want – it’s your ship. Remind me what I did every five minutes, call me whatever you want, ignore me or don’t – I deserve it – but out there, you can’t do that. Not when this happens.”
The deep breath she takes hurts but this time there’s an ache in her chest that accompanies it. She opens her mouth to answer but there’s no words that find their way out.
“Don’t hurt yourself trying to hurt me,” he says with finality, a request and an order, all in the same sentence.
Hera presses her lips back together and she thinks it’s ridiculous that she’s trying to hurt him at all anymore because she only ended up more hurt and she doesn’t want to hurt him. She just wants the hurt she feels to go away. She can’t give him forgiveness but her trust she can give, “You make the plans.”
The four words aren’t enough to stop the ache in her chest or the searing pain that starts in her back, spreads to her side. It isn’t enough to silence all the other questions.
But they’re enough for now.
-
The wound is still ugly but something must be feeling better because Hera is fiery today. Kanan idly wonders as she strips her shirt away if it’s the knowledge of the time they’ve lost while she’s healing from her wounds that’s set her attitude ablaze or if it’s something else. Her skin is burning hot when he starts to ease back the corners of the bandage.
Today, her muscles seize under his touch, her spine straightens just slightly and her lekku curl inward at the ends.
Kanan allows himself the slightest of grins. He missed those silent messages, misses the others more. With a tender touch, he starts to cleanse the wound and pauses at the edge of the wound bed, the part that always bothers her the most, “Okay?”
“Quit taking your time,” she grinds out through a clenched jaw.
His brow raises and her irritation is palpable, even without the Force tugging at his subconscious. “I told you that you can yell at me.”
“This is my ship, I don’t need your permission to do anything,” she mutters and then inhales sharply when he dabs antiseptic along her back.
His words are a sharp contrast to his gentle touch, “You’re showing your age.”
Hera pinches her shoulder blades together as he continues to clean. He can picture the scowl on her face when she replies, “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” he drawls out, slow and lazy, his brain still mostly focused on his task at hand, “that you’re twenty and acting like it.”
“Twenty-one,” she corrects him, “and I act older than you.”
Kanan scoffs, reaching for the bacta, “Not right now you aren’t. Try using words.” When did she turn twenty-one? Had they really been so far gone that he missed that?
“I didn’t realize there was a guidebook for how I’m supposed to act when the man I loved fucked an Imperial,” she snaps back at him, “and then I get myself shot so I have to sit here and let you touch me when your hands have been on her.”
He bites back a retort about washing his hands more often than every few months but he just as quickly decides against it. “Is this the part where I tell you to yell at me or I let you decide it’s your ship and you yell at me anyway?” He asks and he hopes for either because it involves her finally getting it out.
Really out.
The yelling never comes but a barely uttered question takes its stead.
It’s a question he’s never been prepared to answer.
“Why did you do it?”
Why did he do it? That memory is the worst decision amongst a litany of bad decisions, wrapped in a nightmare and hazed over with alcohol induced ignorance. Kanan realizes that she probably spends too many times a day trying to answer it for herself when he’s actively worked on forgetting about it.
And of course his mind is still snagged on the statement the man I loved because yes, she’d called him love a couple times but she’d never explicitly said anything – not like he had.
Why did he do it?
Kanan sighs, his hand temporarily stilled against her skin – she’s so warm – “I don’t know,” it’s a terrible answer but it’s honest, “I started that fight for all of the wrong reasons and I ended up there, and she was there and the exact opposite of you –“
“And you were trying to hurt me because you started a fight?” The question is incredulous.
“No,” his response is firm, “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt you. That wasn’t what I was doing.”
He wants to cover her up and then curl her into his arms, apologize for everything that happened that night but he can’t change it and he can’t take it back. The best he has to offer now is honesty, “I was trying to hurt myself.”
Hera’s shoulders seem to sag a little at those words and she has no response.
Replacing his fingertips with a bandage, he feels a pang of guilt that he really shouldn’t be able to lay a hand on her – even if it’s just to change her bandages. He doesn’t deserve her because he did that, even if he didn’t mean to. Kanan fishes out the pain tablets she prefers but it isn’t going to cure the thing that’s causing her to hurt.
Hera takes them without looking at them or him, swallows them without anything to drink. It isn’t until her shirt is back on and she’s easing herself off of the dejarik table that she finally lifts her gaze to him and it’s empty and her face is expressionless, “So you fucked her because you were trying to hurt yourself and I just got caught in the crossfire?”
“I’ve never claimed that it was an intelligent decision,” it’s a weak response but it’s the best he has. There isn’t a guidebook for how she’s supposed to act when the man she loved hurt her just like there isn’t a guidebook for how he’s supposed to make it better.
She lets her eyes linger a little longer but there’s nothing there. Nothing that she has for him, anyway. Her lekku sag along her shoulders and it’s the only indication – most likely unwitting – that his words and his actions still hurt.
Kanan doesn’t tell her that they still hurt him, too.
Her voice is as soft as he expects it to be when she finally speaks again. A quiet statement that speaks volumes, “At least now I know.”
-
Dammit, Hera.
It doesn’t sound like it did the first time he said it. The words aren’t angry or frustrated or pained really. They’re concerned, maybe? His voice is as distant as her thoughts have been but she doesn’t really like the sound of those words anymore.
They aren’t fun when they sound like that.
Vaguely, she registers his hands on her body, probing along her forehead and cupping along her cheek. He’s so warm and she’s so cold, so she doesn’t push him away. His words and her thoughts are distant but her memories aren’t. She opens her eyes to see the concern in his, recognizes the fierce ache all over her body to be one associated with a fever and she registers what’s going on.
“Have Chop contact Fulcrum,” she murmurs and lifts her hand to his. “It’s not a big deal. You’ll have to rendezvous for meds.”
“I’ll have to?” He clarifies and she can tell by the hesitation in her voice that he thinks she’s probably delirious.
Hera is tired but she has to make him understand that she’s aware of exactly what she’s giving him permission to do, “I trust you with my life, remember? Fulcrum will trust you, too.” Her words aren’t as strong as she wants them to be but they seem to assuage his concerns.
She lets him coax whatever meds he has into her and makes due with the light sheet that he gives her instead of arguing for the warm blanket she wants. He leaves her alone with promises to check on her soon and she’s left desperately wanting to go back asleep but wide awake with the words she thought she wanted to hear.
Dammit, Hera.
Her thought process wasn’t exactly the same but somehow she thinks she understands what he was doing when he did what he did.
She wasn’t trying to hurt herself, she was trying to hurt him.
What she knows now, what she understands, is that it isn’t about who was trying to hurt who because they both were hurt all the same.