Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You know, it’s not too late to change your mind,” Luke Skywalker said. “We do have other candidates.”

Zeb grumbled something softly under his breath that was probably, “Sounds like someone who doesn’t know her very well.”

Luke flicked a glance at him, but most of his attention was on Hera. “This is dangerous,” he said, almost apologetic.

“And the Rebellion has been a blue milk run,” Hera said. “I’m fine.” She folded her hands together and looked across Luke’s right shoulder at the wall behind him. She didn’t know him very well, had never had any particular inclination to get to know him, and at the moment didn’t feel particularly encouraged by either his presence or his reluctance. It wasn’t fair to him, but Hera couldn’t particularly bring herself to care, not when even being on the same ship as him brought a dull stab of pain to her heart.

Not fair.

Nothing was fair, especially nothing about the Rebellion. But she wished he hadn’t had to be on the Ghost for this.

“You sure you don’t want to wait until we can get hold of Ahsoka?” Zeb asked, his frown deepening. “Rex thinks he has a line on her current location –”

Ahsoka was the only person Hera wanted to consult about this less than Luke. She glanced at Zeb, who read the thought on her face and held up his big hands. “Fine, fine. But guess who’s still going to be here if she finally shows up while you’re gone –”

“I’m sure you’re capable of defending yourself,” Hera said. Besides, it was Luke’s problem to explain, as far as she was concerned. She looked back at Luke and said, “We’re wasting time.”

He hesitated briefly, his expression suggesting that he agreed with Zeb but wasn’t going to argue this anymore, then said, “All right.” He took a deep breath. “Are you ready? I’ll probably only get one shot at this.”

“I’m ready.” She looked at Zeb, who nodded slightly, and Chopper, who groaned a long protest. She had told Jacen goodbye via holo a few hours ago; he didn’t quite understand how Mama leaving now would be different than Mama leaving normally, and Hera hoped that he wouldn’t have to understand for many years, if ever. She had tried to explain it to her father in the same holocall and wasn’t sure she had succeeded, especially considering that she couldn’t tell him the most relevant parts because of Ryloth’s dubious position in the Rebel Alliance. She had been able to tell Sabine a bit more; Sabine had understood but had told her it was the worst idea she had heard since – well, you know, she had said, and looked like she had wished she hadn’t mentioned it.

“All right,” Luke repeated. He looked a little unnerved, which Hera took vindictive pleasure in and then felt guilty about. “If this works, I’ll open it again every ten days – right here, all right? It can’t be anywhere else.”

Teach your mother to feed nunas, Hera thought, giving him a sideways look. She just said, “I understand.”

Luke nodded, swallowed, and raised his hands, releasing the artifact he had been holding. It was a little bell-shaped construction of crystal and metal, both substances etched all over in runes that no one had been able to fully decrypt. It could, Hera knew, very easily kill her if what they had managed to decrypt was wrong.

It hung suspended between Luke’s palms, glowing a bright, vivid blue. A rising hum made all of them but Luke wince, Zeb’s sensitive ears flicking in disgust. Hera kept her eyes on it, trying not to blink as the light brightened until it was all that she could see. Her stomach turned over, but it wasn’t any worse than doing a barrel roll in an A-wing.

All at once, the light was gone. So were Luke, Zeb, and Chopper. Hera looked around the Ghost’s common room, marking the differences in the familiar space. Zeb’s big wooden chair was absent; the walls were bare of Sabine’s artwork. So they had probably gotten the timing right, at least. Hera stepped towards the holotable, running her fingers over its surface and searching for the deep scar near the rightmost edge of the frame, which was courtesy of Ezra attempting to show off his lightsaber during their early days with Phoenix Squadron. It was missing.

Hera took a suddenly shaky breath.

Ten days, she reminded herself. It was both a lot of time to get this wrong and no time at all. She put her head to one side and listened to the now only half-familiar sounds of the Ghost.

She hadn’t spent much time on the ship recently, and mostly it had been with the ship almost as empty as it felt now. It made Hera think of its namesake, of her old crew’s namesakes, every corner of the ship haunted. She thought with enough time it might get better, less raw, but so far the war hadn’t given her that time. Instead, she let herself be moved around the Rebel Alliance as needed, sometimes with what remained of her crew, mostly alone. Even Chopper didn’t always stay with her, much to his protests.

This, though, had needed to be done on the Ghost, and Zeb had brought the ship to her from where it had been docked on Lothal for the past six months.

Luke had been right. There had been other candidates. But they all thought this might work best with her, because there weren’t many options for where she had been more than a decade ago and in a position where she would probably be willing to help. Han Solo and Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon, maybe, but that was a much longer shot than Hera Syndulla. Any Hera Syndulla.

She took another deep breath in an attempt to calm the sudden rapid patter of her heartbeat, and moved towards the hatch leading towards the cabins and the cockpit. There was no rumble of the engines; the ship was docked somewhere – solid ground, Hera thought, though it could have been a space station. The air filters seemed to be drawing a little heavier than usual, which suggested they were dirtside. Some stations triggered that too, though, if their own filters weren’t good enough.

The short corridor between the common room and the cockpit was empty. Hera rested her hands briefly on the cabin doors as she passed them, but there was nothing to tell her which was being used and something kept her from opening the doors to check. The cockpit hatch slid open with only the tiniest of jerks, which Sabine had repaired years ago.

Hera stepped inside, resting a hand on the back of the pilot’s chair as she looked around. The back left chair was plain, without the distinctive paint job Sabine had given it; the back right was still the old matching chair, not the one they had had to replace six months before they had gone to Lothal.

There was a pair of black gloves sitting on the dashboard.

Hera frowned at them, trying to decide what about them struck her as familiar. She didn’t own a pair like that at the moment, but she probably had in the past.

The scene outside the viewport was one Hera had seen hundreds of times before: the blank gray durasteel sheeting of a docking bay wall. She leaned forward to peer out, searching around for some indication of where the Ghost was docked, but there was nothing. It could have been any docking bay on any thousands of the planets and space stations in the galaxy.

Hera hesitated for a moment, then leaned down over the dashboard, intending to get into the Ghost’s systems to find out where – and more importantly, when – she was. She hadn’t gotten further than turning them on when the hatch slid open behind her.

Hera turned quickly, self-conscious and achingly aware that this wasn’t her own ship, to come face to face with Kanan.

She had forgotten how handsome he was.

Hera still had a precious handful of holos of him, but most were from those last few years, and she had trained herself out of looking at them too often because of the dull, anguished hurt that accompanied the action. Jacen was looking more and more like him as he grew up, but Hera didn’t see her son often either. Increasingly the war made time feel like it was slipping through her fingers like sand; Hera held onto it with unexpected desperation, both for her own sake and for the Rebellion’s. Emperor Palpatine’s death should have made it easier, faster; it wasn’t like that at all. Days both flew by and spread out; sometimes Hera felt like she blinked and it had been years, sometimes she turned around and what had felt like months had only been a handful of minutes. It was both too long and not long enough since – since Lothal.

Kanan was younger than she had expected, twenty-two or twenty-three, clean-shaven and with short-cropped hair. There was warm affection in his clear bluish eyes as he looked at her, though Hera couldn’t miss the scars flecking his face, scars that she knew Kanan – her Kanan – hadn’t had when he had died. He wore all black, a high-collared, long-sleeved short open at the neck and tight black trousers, with an unfamiliar lightsaber hung at his hip.

“I didn’t know you were back from HQ yet,” he said.

Hera opened her mouth to respond and couldn’t. She was crying without meaning to, tears rolling down her cheeks; she had told Zeb she could handle this and she had been wrong.

Kanan took a step towards her, his expression going from affectionate to alarmed. “Hey,” he said gently, “what’s wrong? What happened?” He put a hand to her cheek to wipe away her tears, warm and strong and alive, and Hera cried even harder. She wanted more than anything to step into his arms; he even smelled the same, and she could have been eighteen again, twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-seven – young and with the whole galaxy spread out before her, possibility endless, in love and with a future that could have held anything, instead of a present constricted down to a war that continued to grind on long past when it should have ended and a child growing up without her.

Below them, the Ghost’s hatch opened. Kanan turned his head slightly, frowning, and despite the tears blurring her vision Hera saw where a notch had been taken out of his left ear.

Hera tried to breathe in gasping breaths, trying to get herself together enough to speak. “I’m not her,” she managed to say. “I’m not –”

She saw realization start to form on Kanan’s face, though he didn’t take his hand away from her cheek. Light steps sounded on the cockpit floor as a new arrival stepped off the ladder, followed by the sound of a blaster clearing its holster.

“No, you’re not,” said Hera Syndulla, a girl barely out of her teens wearing an ISB officer’s crisp white uniform, her green skin startlingly bright against the stark fabric. She held her blaster with practiced ease, right hand wrapped around the grip, left hand bracing the butt of the weapon. “Who in blazes are you?”

Hera could barely remember being that young.

Given her counterpart’s occupation, the other woman’s youth probably shouldn’t have even registered with her, but Hera couldn’t get past it. When she had been that young, she had been blinkered by single-minded focus on the mission, on an end goal of destroying the Empire. She hadn’t thought to regret it until years later, crying her heart out in that cave on Lothal.

Does he know you love him? she had thought, in that first split second when Kanan had stepped away from her, his clear-eyed gaze flickering between the two women. Do you know you love him?

And then she had seen Kanan bend his head to the other Hera and her expression soften, her body curving towards him without touching, and Hera had known that both of them knew. It was a sharp stab of jealousy that shouldn’t have bothered her after all this time, when there was nothing she could do about it. Imperials or not, they were lucky to have that.

Hera leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the cabin door and sighed. They had locked her into one of the empty cabins after they had searched her and taken her blaster and other possessions away. It happened to be Sabine’s cabin, but of course Sabine wasn’t here yet so there weren’t yet explosives tucked away into every nook and cranny of it, “just in case of an emergency,” Sabine had told her once. “What kind of emergency are you expecting?” Hera had demanded.

Three days later Maul had broken onto the Ghost and taken them captive, so she might have had to take that back if they had actually had any opportunity to use all those explosives.

She could just barely hear Kanan and the other Hera talking to each other, but couldn’t make out the words through the heavy metal door. They hadn’t given her much of a chance to say anything before they had locked her in here, but at least they hadn’t acted like most Imperials Hera had known and stunned her first.

She sighed and left the door to slump onto the bench built below the upper-level bunk, leaning an elbow on the table and her chin against her palm. The room seemed bare without Sabine’s colorful artwork; Sabine hadn’t lived on the Ghost for years, but she hadn’t stripped the walls, either, and she still kept some of her things onboard.

Sabine would still be on Krownest now, Hera thought, if she had gotten the dates right. Ezra would be back in his tower on Lothal. The Scourge of Lasan was happening right now and Zeb was there in the palace with the Lasat Royal Family. Kallus would be on Lasan too, maybe already giving the order to use ion disruptors on the Lasat defenders.

Kanan was alive, and on this ship, and Hera knew that if she started crying again she might not stop.

It will have to be Alderaan, she thought. Leia Organa had volunteered for this mission for just that reason, but during the target period she had been on Alderaan, and Luke hadn’t been certain that this would work simply by flying to the Graveyard. It had been a shock to realize how few people with the clearance for this operation had been somewhere the Rebel Alliance could still access ten or fifteen years later. They hadn’t even been entirely sure it would work on a ship, but it was the best option they had. Hera had been certain that she could convince her younger self to help and equally certain that for the first twenty years of her life there was very little that could divert it, which wasn’t true for everyone else.

Obviously, she had been wrong.

She rubbed a weary hand over her face. She was going to find a way out of this situation, get to Alderaan, and talk her way into seeing Bail Organa, however that was going to go. Chandrila and Mon Mothma were another option, but for something like this she still thought Organa the better bet. Ackbar wouldn’t have the access and Mon Calamari weren’t good spies, either. Not to mention she didn’t have the faintest idea where he was right now. Her father –

Hera couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened to her father, not if her counterpart was an ISB agent right now.

She looked up at the sound of approaching voices. Just outside the door, she heard her counterpart say suddenly, her voice small and hurt, “You didn’t realize she wasn’t me?”

“Hera –”

“We’re not even dressed the same. And she’s at least ten years older than me.”

Hera rolled her eyes and called, “I’m thirty-three.”

There was a sudden silence from beyond the door, then it slid open to reveal Kanan and the other Hera. The woman was still in her white ISB uniform, her cap matching white leather. Her lekku were covered with wide straps of more white leather, completely obscuring their color. The rank badge she was wearing gave her the equivalent of a first lieutenant’s rank. Kanan, beside her, was still wearing all black, but he had added a second layer of heavy black leathers and vambraces that bore the Imperial cog.

Hera looked at it and then away, fighting down her hurt. There had to be a reason. She knew Kanan. He wouldn’t do this without a reason. She had seen that kindness in his eyes, that genuine care; Maul hadn’t had that. She hadn’t met any of them, but she doubted the Inquisitors did either. He was still Kanan. She would know him anywhere.

The other Hera was looking at her with the same sick hurt that Hera was feeling right now. Hera made herself look at her, really look, because despite her first impression it wasn’t at all like looking into a mirror. Despite the obvious muscle beneath her uniform – Hera suspected she usually wore a field agent’s grays and cuirass, rather than formal whites – there was something oddly fragile about her. She stayed a carefully measured length away from Kanan, as if both aware of his presence and certain she couldn’t show it in front of a stranger. When she moved forward, it was with precision, lekku barely moving with the motion, and Hera thought suddenly, she grew up with humans.

“Is Daddy dead?” she said before she could stop herself. She said it in Basic, not Twi’leki; if her counterpart had grown up with humans then there was no way to be certain that she was fluent anymore.

The other Hera froze, her eyes going wide with surprise. “What?”

“Daddy – Cham – is he dead?”

The girl flicked a startled look at Kanan, then shook her head. “No. Not that I know of, and if he had died someone from HQ would have hauled me into an interrogation room about it for the next three days. Why?”

“You grew up with humans,” Hera said. “He wouldn’t let that happen.”

“If you think that then you don’t know him that well,” her counterpart said bitterly. “I grew up in the Imperial Academy on Serenno.”

“I grew up on Ryloth,” Hera said. “At home, at the villa in the Tann Province – at the townhouse in Lessu, sometimes. Until my mother was killed when I was thirteen, then my father sent all of us back to the villa until I was old enough to leave.”

The other Hera blinked slowly. “The Syndullas haven’t been on Ryloth for a long time. Cham sent the family to the colony on Zardossa Stix after my mother was hurt in the Lessu Riots. Then he tried to assassinate the Emperor, so the Empire wiped out the colony. I don’t know what happened to the others. The Syndullas and the other clans fled Ryloth not long afterwards. They’re on the Imperial Terrorist Watchlist.”

Hera blinked. “Mama’s alive?” she whispered.

The other woman looked aside. “You’re not the one asking the questions here,” she said, but not before Hera saw sick hurt flash across her face. She set the small holoprojector Hera had had in her pocket down on the table in front of her and activated it. “Who is this?”

“That’s my son,” Hera said, trying not to look at Kanan and failing. “Jacen. He’s five. He’ll be six in a few months.”

The other Hera’s eyes went wide with shock. “Your son?”

Hera nodded, swallowing back a familiar lump of regret. “He’s staying on Ryloth with his grandfather now that Free Ryloth has been able to retake the planet. They’re rebuilding the villa, but my father spends most of his time in Lessu. The townhouse wasn’t destroyed, just ransacked a bit.”

Kanan started to raise a hand towards the image, clearly barely conscious he was doing it, then closed his fingers into a fist against his side. He said quietly, “He’s dead, isn’t he? Your Kanan.”

Hera couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at him and her son at the same time, not when her mind was already picking out the similarities between them, seeing what hadn’t been clear from the precious holograms she hadn’t been able to bear looking at alongside her son. How could I have forgotten? she thought. Jacen bit his lip the same way when he was thinking hard, had the same heavy eyebrows, was going to grow up to have the same broad hands and elegant fingers.

She put a hand to her mouth, trying to hold back her tears. “Yes,” she said eventually, when she was mostly certain of her ability to speak without stumbling over the words. “He died. He died before Jacen was born. He didn’t know – he never knew –”

She lost her battle to contain her tears and scrubbed her sleeve hard across her eyes. The other Hera had drawn close to Kanan without seeming to be aware she was doing it, reaching for him as if searching for reassurance that he was still there and breathing. They were holding hands when Hera got herself under control and looked up again.

She had talked about this with Zeb and Rex, with Sabine chiming in via holocomm, when she had been cleared for this mission. They had talked about what she could bring with her, what had the best chance of convincing her counterpart and Kanan’s, and Rex had insisted she bring this. I’m probably the only person in the galaxy who has any idea of what this is going to be like, he had told her. And it’s not the same for a clone as it will be for you, but it’s as close as you’re going to get.

Hera opened her mouth to say the Empire killed him and stopped. The Empire killed him, and you’re working for them. The Empire killed him, and you’re alive, both of you are alive, how can you be doing this when the Empire killed him? The Empire killed him and he never knew he was going to have a son. The Empire killed him, and I loved him. The Empire killed him and he should be alive today, he should be with me now, he should have been able to meet his son.

She said again, “He died.”

“I’m sorry,” the other Hera said. She sounded very young.

She was younger than Sabine had been when Kanan had died, Hera thought, and pulled her shirt cuffs up to scrub at her eyes with both hands. She couldn’t remember being that young.

Haltingly, the girl said, “I know – a little – what that’s like. I’m sorry.” She was gripping Kanan’s hand so tightly that it had to hurt both of them.

Hera touched the base of the holoprojector, looking at her son’s familiar face, then, deliberately, flicked the hologram over to the next image. It hurt to look at too.

Kanan stared at it, his eyes going wide. “What –”

“There was a Sith lord named Maul,” Hera said, and was curious to see him flinch, recognizing the name. “Kanan was hurt fighting him.”

Kanan was laughing in that holo, grinning at something that the recorder hadn’t captured – something Ezra had said, maybe. They had been on Atollon, just a few weeks before Thrawn had reduced the planet to little more than a cinder. Someone in Supply had scored thirty crates of Yensid/Sacul Vineyards wines, apparently by accident, and they had split it up between everyone on Chopper Base who wanted some. Not long after this had been taken, Hera and Kanan had taken a bottle and a few blankets and gone off to a quiet corner of the base. Ezra had found them the next morning and declared himself scarred for life by the sight.

It had been a good night.

The other Hera was peering at the hologram with curiosity, looking between it and Kanan. She caught Hera watching her and said again, “I’m sorry.”

Kanan shut off the holoprojector. He paused with his hand over it, then pushed it towards Hera. “You’re a Rebel, aren’t you?” he said.

“I’m an Alliance officer,” she corrected him, suspecting that it might be better to leave the “Rebel” part of “Rebel Alliance” off in this case. She had anticipated explaining to a younger Hera and Kanan that given a decade’s time, the disparate groups of rebels scattered across the galaxy would pull together, that they had defeated the Emperor and taken Coruscant, and that there was – or would be soon, once the vote concluded in a few days’ time – a Galactic Republic again. The possibility that she might have to explain this to a pair of Imperial officers, one an ISB agent and one an Inquisitor, had never occurred to her. “I came here because I need help.”

The other Hera drew herself up, settling her shoulders as if aware of the uniform she was wearing and its significance. “Fighting the Empire?” she said, her voice suddenly cold.

“No,” Hera said. “In my time the Empire no longer exists, not as it was. Since the Emperor died there have been a dozen warlords all struggling for power, all trying to take his place.”

The other Hera’s eyes went wide. “The Emperor…died?” she said.

“Yes. He was killed by Darth Vader.” At Kanan’s flinch, Hera looked at him and said, “A Jedi Knight named Luke Skywalker sent me here to retrieve data tapes on something called Project Cluster-Prism. In my universe the only copies that we know of were destroyed along with the data vault on Scarif six years ago. That’s all I need. Just data tapes. I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

“Why would I help you?” said the girl. “I’m an Imperial officer.”

“I’m not fighting your Empire,” Hera pointed out in what she hoped was a reasonable voice.

The girl looked away. Kanan stirred a little, uneasily, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, the other Hera said, “I don’t have that clearance level.” She swallowed, then said, “I need to think.”

She finally released Kanan’s hand and started towards the door, white-wrapped lekku nearly invisible against the white wool of her uniform jacket. It was as though she wanted to be human, or, barring that, at least wanted people to forget that she was a Twi’lek.

“Why are you here?” Hera asked suddenly. “Why are you ISB?”

The girl stopped, bracing a hand against the wall. She didn’t look back, just said quickly to the door, “When the colony was destroyed, I was sent to prison. I was there for – for a long time. My handler gave me a chance to get out, to apply for the Imperial Academy so I could start making up for some of the damage Cham had done. So I did. I had to. I’m ISB because my handler blocked my application to the Starfighter Corps; he wanted me in the Bureau.”

Hera bit her lip. “How old were you?”

There was a long moment of silence, then the girl’s lekku swayed just a little as she swallowed. “Fourteen.”

When Hera had been fourteen she had been racing blurrgs across the Tann Province with her cousins Doriah and Nury, or sneaking out of her room to work on her mother’s old racing pod.

“I’m sorry,” she said slowly.

“It’s done now.” The other Hera took another shaky breath. “I’m where I need to be.” She touched the control and the door slid open; she left with hasty strides, as if she couldn’t wait to be as far from Hera as possible.

Kanan stayed. Hera looked up at him, drinking in the sight of him, because she was never going to have this again. She was never going to see him again, never going to hear his voice, never going to touch him.

“Tell her you love her,” she said quietly. “Please.”

He nodded. “She knows,” he said. “I tell her every day.” He hesitated, then asked, “How did he die?”

Hera looked down. She closed her hands over the holoprojector, studying her gloved fingers. “There was an explosion,” she said haltingly. She never talked about it. She would have to tell Jacen someday, but everyone else knew better than to ask. She thought that Luke had wrangled the story out of Zeb or Rex, maybe Kallus, but wasn’t sure. “We were – on a planet called –” She hesitated, remembering that this Kanan was an Imperial Inquisitor, and corrected herself, “We were on a planet that a member of our team had close ties to. There was an Imperial factory there building a new kind of TIE fighter. We had been doing groundside work, commando work, for weeks, but I left to go back to the Alliance and ask for a starfighter task force to wipe out the factory. I got it. But we couldn’t get past the planetary blockade and I was captured. Kanan and two others – his apprentice and a Mandalorian girl – came up with a plan to rescue me. It almost worked.”

She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes again. “Kanan got me out of the Imperial Complex while the others stole a gunship. We – we almost made it. The Empire blew up its own fuel depot to stop us. Kanan held the explosion back so that the rest of us could get away, but he – he couldn’t. Get away, I mean. And he knew that.” Her voice broke. “He sacrificed himself for us, and I still don’t know if he knew – if he knew – how much I loved –” She had to stop. She couldn’t go on, not now, not ever.

She was crying in gasping sobs, tears rolling down her face as she wiped at them with already soaked sleeves. Kanan took a step towards her, hesitated, and then came the rest of the way, putting an arm around her shoulders.

It was too much. Hera wept as though her heart might break, because it was broken, and Kanan was here, he was here. He drew her close, and Hera turned her face against his chest and cried. It wasn’t him. Hera knew it wasn’t him, but at the same time, it was, and she didn’t know how to bear it. She cried until all that was left were dry, hiccoughing sobs, and made herself pull back from him, wiping her sleeve over her face.

Kanan touched her cheek gently. “He knew,” he said. “Believe me, he knew.”

“I would give almost anything to have him back,” Hera whispered. It was a confession that she had never made out loud, had never intended to. Not anything, not quite, but almost anything. Even years later there were days she wanted him so much that she couldn’t think past her grief and her longing, just go through her day on autopilot until something happened to jar her into full cognizance. “I loved him so much, and I never told him.”

“He knew,” Kanan repeated.

Hera put a hand to her face. She couldn’t look at him; if she had to keep looking at him, she might scream. But she didn’t know if she could look away either. “Go be with her,” she said. “Please.”

Kanan nodded. He hesitated, then leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll talk to her about helping you,” he said. “I don’t – Hera’s here because she doesn’t see that she has any other choice. I’m here for her, not the Empire.”

“She has a choice,” Hera said. “We always have a choice.” She shook her head. “Just – go be with her. Tell her you love her.”

“I’ll tell her.” For a moment he stood still, looking at her, then he turned and left. Hera heard the door lock behind him.

She put her head down on her folded arms and wept.

Sometime later, Hera raised her head from her arms as she heard the door unlock, scrubbing a hand over her aching eyes without much success.

The other Hera came in, holding a tray with a bowl, a cup, and a pitcher on it; if she noticed that Hera had been crying, she didn’t comment on it. Hera caught a glimpse of Chopper’s unmistakable orange chassis in the hallway outside, trying to peer into the room before the door closed again.

“Thank you,” she said as the girl put the tray down on the table in front of her.

Her counterpart looked up, a little startled. She had changed, wearing civilian clothes now instead of her uniform, but her lekku were still wrapped, and something about the cut of her clothes still felt subtly wrong. It took Hera a moment of staring at her to realize that it was at least partially because she was wearing clothes designed by and for humans instead of Twi’leks.

“How old are you?” she asked, trying to estimate how long she had been with the Empire. Even a day would have been too long, but as it was –

The other Hera hesitated, then said, “I’m twenty. My birthday’s in three weeks.” She straightened upright, heat in her cheeks. “You don’t have to – you keep looking at me as if you feel sorry for me.”

Hera did feel sorry for her, but she knew better than to say as much. She just poured herself a glass of water and said, “I’m surprised that the Empire let you keep Chopper.”

The girl glanced at the closed door, presumably well aware that he was out in the hallway, then said, “When I was commissioned three years ago, my handler gave him to me as a – a reward for graduating the Academy. He knew Chopper had been mine before. Chop’s memory was supposed to have been wiped, but –”

“That’s easier said than done?” Hera suggested.

It startled a smile out of the other woman. “It made him grumpier, but he was smart enough to pretend that it worked once he had realized what had happened.”

“Yeah, I didn’t read the manual when I was fixing him up the first time either,” Hera said. Chopper’s memory storage was so cross-wired she was fairly certain that no one else could do anything more than read it, the way the Empire had tried six years ago when he had been sliced, which was why she was the only one who had ever been able to do selective memory wipes on him. Every other attempt just bounced off.

“Chop got forbidden from the Imperial Complex when I was flying a desk here last year,” the other Hera confessed. “On the second day. He, um – he set another agent on fire. Not that Agent Sarkov didn’t deserve it –”

“Here?” Hera repeated, startled. “Where are we?”

The girl leaned back on one foot. “We’re on Naboo, ISB regional headquarters in Theed – we’re docked in one of the ISB hangars.”

Hera stared at her, appalled.

“Well –” the girl said uneasily, “– the Inquisition forced the ISB to take all the surveillance off the Ghost when Kanan came back, and I haven’t told anyone at the ISB you’re here. And Kanan hates the Inquisition, so he hasn’t told them, either. Not yet.”

“If he hates the Inquisition,” Hera said, latching onto that, “then why is he –”

Her face crumpled. She sat down heavily in the seat across from Hera, looking younger and more grief-stricken than ever. “I didn’t make him,” she said. “I didn’t –” She looked up at Hera, so distressed that Hera almost got up to go to her. She stayed where she was, though, watching her.

The other Hera looked down again. “I – I met Kanan when I was a week out of the ISB Academy. I had been in the Academy for four years, Serenno and then Naboo, and in prison before that, and I was on assignment, my first assignment, to track down possible rebel sympathizers on a planet called Gorse.”

Hera twitched a little, startled.

If the girl noticed, she didn’t show it. “There was an incident – anyway, it was dealt with. But I wanted him so badly. He was the first person who treated me like a person – I suppose you don’t know a lot of Imperial officers, but most of them are terrible, especially the men, and I didn’t think I could want anyone at all. Kanan was…” She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe her good fortune. “We worked together for almost a year. My handler was so angry – he tried to have Kanan killed once. But we worked well as a team so the Bureau was all right paying him, and Agent Beneke – my handler – just had to live with it. And – and the Inquisition found out about him.”

She put her hands to her face, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “They had me bring him back here,” she said haltingly. “I thought – it was supposed to be the Bureau. I didn’t know about the Inquisition. Except it was them, and he was – he was – he was arrested. And they gave him a choice, Lord Vader and the Inquisitor who was there. He could go with them, and maybe come back to me later, or they could kill him. He chose me, and they took him. They had him for a year. No one would tell me anything, and I thought he was dead. I thought I’d gotten him killed. I –” She wouldn’t look Hera in the eye. “I was here, on Naboo, because the ISB wouldn’t put me in the field alone and wouldn’t let me do fieldwork with the Naboo agents since they thought I was a distraction because I’m a Twi’lek. I was so sure that he was dead and I had gotten him killed.”

She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “They let him come back eight months ago. He’s – he’s mostly all right now. He’s better. But when he first came back, he was so badly hurt. Not physically, but – he was so hurt. He wouldn’t talk. He couldn’t touch me. He wasn’t…he wasn’t always here, like half of him was still back on Mustafar. He couldn’t sleep half the time, and when he did, he had nightmares. He won’t tell me what happened there. He’s – he’s terrified of the Inquisition, even though he’s an Inquisitor.”

“I’m sorry,” Hera said. She reached across the table to lay her hand on the girl’s.

The other Hera looked up at her, then away. “Agent Beneke still hates him,” she said, sounding distracted. “We’re back on Naboo because he’s been trying to find a reason to break us up that the ISB and the Inquisition will both accept.” She touched her face again, as if surprised to find her cheeks wet, and then said, “You weren’t…expecting us, were you.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“I met Kanan – my Kanan – on Gorse too,” Hera said. “Except I was the rebel trying to track down a rebel sympathizer before the Empire did.” She didn’t say that while she had thought that Kanan was sweet – not to mention handsome – she hadn’t felt the same kind of desperate yearning the other girl clearly had. On the other hand, she hadn’t been surrounded by Imperial officers for the previous four years, and she was well aware of how most Imperial men thought of Twi’lek women. Kanan must have seemed like a revelation to her. She smiled wryly. “I was expecting someone more like we were back then.”

The other Hera looked at her, her eyes sad. “I didn’t think that there was any other option,” she said quietly. “Or if there was, it was worse. I do know what happens to most Twi’lek prisoners in the Empire.”

She stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry – I swear it was hot when I brought it in.”

Startled by the change in subject, Hera stared at her, then down at the bowl in front of her. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not as if most Alliance rations aren’t cardboard and protein mush.”

“I – I have to think,” the girl said, and fled before Hera could say anything else.

Sighing, Hera poured herself another glass of water – she couldn’t even remember drinking the first one – and sat down to eat. More than a decade in the Rebellion had taught her to eat when she could, rest when she had the chance; you never knew when you were going to get another opportunity, no matter how quiet it seemed.

Kanan found Hera sitting on the floor in front of the faulty signal modulator, surrounded by tools, and staring blankly at the device as tears rolled silently down her cheeks. Chopper was beside her, patting her shoulder awkwardly with one of his manipulators.

Kanan sat down beside her and put an arm around her; Hera turned limply towards him and pressed her face against his shoulder. She cried silently – she always did – but she was shaking with the force of her sobs. Kanan held her close, the same way she had held him through all those bad nights after he had returned from Mustafar, when he had been recovered enough to let her touch him without screaming.

“Talk to me,” he told her softly. “Don’t shut me out.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Hera muttered, her voice thick. She leaned heavily against him, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve the same way the other Hera had done. “I – I want my mother,” she said, self-conscious. “I never think about her. Not since – but when she said Mama was dead, all I could think about was that I wanted my mother. I know she’s out there because she’s on the watchlist next to Daddy, and I know I shouldn’t want her anymore, but, Kanan, I want my mother.”

“It’s your mom, Hera. It’s all right.” He kissed her forehead, not saying, We can go to her if you want. He wouldn’t make her refuse.

Hera looked down at her hands. She pulled her black gloves off and set them aside to stare at her long green fingers and close-cropped nails. “I was with Agent Beneke for twelve hours today,” she said. “Locked in his office going over every operation you and I have ever been on together and every operation any Inquisitor has ever worked with the ISB, all while he was asking me about my state of mind and your state of mind and about our sex life and if you like to tie me up.”

“What?” Kanan said, startled.

There was a brittle edge to Hera’s voice. “Well, he knows we’re sleeping with each other again and he wants to know what changed since you came back. Except he never actually said any of that, just talked around it, so I had to sit there listening to him, because he was talking about our operations too, and if I’d stopped paying attention for even a minute I might miss something that meant he would break us up or put me back behind a desk or – or call the Inquisition, or – all he has to do is suspect I might have even looked at another Twi’lek and I’ll go in an interrogation room for a week while everyone makes sure I’m not secretly in communication with my father. Or go back to the Spire. That’s what happened when Daddy left Ryloth; they pulled me out of class and put me back in the Spire for three weeks. I almost failed the entire year. And he could do that again if Daddy’s done something, or if he thinks Daddy’s done something, or if anyone else at the ISB thinks Daddy’s done something, or – I don’t know. When you were gone – when I was – when you were gone, there was an attack on one of the spice mines on Ryloth. Terrorist action. Not Daddy – not Free Ryloth, I mean. But they put me in a cell anyway, just in case. Came and got me from my desk, walked me down to holding, and put me in a cell until they could make sure that the Syndullas hadn’t had anything to do with it. And then they let me out. Four days later.”

She pressed her hands to her face. “I hate being on Naboo,” she said. “I hate it. And I hate being at HQ. It just reminds me of –” She stopped abruptly before going on as if she hadn’t interrupted herself. “And then when I finally got out of that blasted meeting and got back here, you – and her – could you really not tell she wasn’t me?”

Kanan hesitated, thinking. “Yes and no,” he said after a moment. Hera stiffened with hurt in his arms, and he said quickly, “I wasn’t paying much attention when I came in. I’d felt the disturbance in the Force when she arrived, but it didn’t have to be in the ship, and I didn’t know what it was. Naboo is a Force-rich planet and it didn’t feel like a threat. It could have been anything. I got up to the cockpit and – it was you. She felt like you. She still does. I can tell you apart now, but when I got in there I didn’t realize you weren’t back yet.”

“She’s thirteen years older than me,” Hera said, her voice small. “And you know I was in uniform when I left.”

“I wasn’t looking,” Kanan said. “I know it sounds like an excuse, but I wasn’t looking. We – we don’t, always, you know.”

Hera frowned a little, a line knotting between her brows. “I know,” she said finally. She looked down. “She told you what happened to him.”

Kanan nodded. “Yeah.”

“Don’t tell me,” Hera said. “Just – was he – he was like you. More like you than she is like me?”

“I don’t –” Kanan hesitated. “I think you’re more like her than you think.”

“She’s a rebel,” Hera said. She looked down at her hands again. “But she loved him.”

“Yes.” Kanan touched her chin, and when she turned her face up to his, kissed her lightly on the lips. “How he died,” he said slowly after she had drawn back a little, “I would have done the same thing.”

Hera’s face crumpled. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, shivering all over. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, her voice muffled. “Kanan, I don’t know what to do. I should comm Agent Beneke – but – I can’t, Kanan, I just can’t. And I want my mother. I can’t believe I want my mother. And Agent Beneke was asking me if my physical needs were being met, you know he has that hang-up about Twi’lek women and sex – I’m so tired.”

Kanan kissed her forehead. “You’ve been working all day. Go change, take a shower if you need to, get some rest.”

She nodded wearily and let him lever her up. “I love you,” she said suddenly, her hands tight on his arms. “Kanan, I – she was so sad. And she loved him. And when you were gone, I thought you were dead, and I – she was so sad. I remember being like that, and it was – it was awful. I can’t imagine feeling like that for years.” She looked down, her lekku drooping with her weariness. “At least I had that little bit of hope that you’d come back, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time.

Kanan put an arm around her waist and leaned his forehead down against hers. “I’m here,” he told her. “I love you, and I won’t leave you again.”

Hera was shaking in his arms. “I know,” she said, but her voice broke on the last syllable. She managed to summon up the ghost of a smile and added, “I – I don’t want a baby, though.”

Since Kanan could think of very few things that would make their already tenuous situation worse than Hera getting pregnant, he couldn’t disagree. Not to mention he knew exactly what the Inquisition did with the children of Force-users. He just kissed her again and tried not to think about the boy in that holo.

“I can just imagine what Agent Beneke would say about that,” he said instead.

Hera groaned. “Don’t remind me. You don’t want to know what my med center visits are like, since he gives the doctor a list of everything he doesn’t want to ask me himself.”

Kanan grimaced. He had his own problems on that front, but he wasn’t about to tell Hera about them. “Go change,” he told Hera gently. “It’s too hot for wool right now anyway.”

“Says the man wearing head-to-toe black leather,” she teased. She brushed another quick kiss over his lips, then left for her cabin.

Kanan rubbed a hand over his face and knelt down to pick up the discarded tools so that neither of them tripped over them later. “You could make yourself useful and fix this,” he suggested to Chopper, who had come back now that the feelings were over.

He told Kanan what he could do with the signal modulator, making Kanan laugh, and then added a tentative inquiry about the woman locked in the empty cabin. Kanan sat back on his heels and regarded the droid, thinking. “Well,” he said finally, “you probably will meet her.”

Technically speaking something like this was really more of a job for the Inquisition than the ISB. Kanan should have been on the comm right now to Mustafar. The Hunter, who hadn’t wanted to send Kanan back to Hera anyway, would have had a field day with this. Lord Vader – and the Emperor –

Kanan could just barely imagine what they would do with the knowledge the other Hera had brought with her, and it terrified him.

He rubbed at his face again, then dumped the tools in the tool box and put it out of the way where no one would step on it. He didn’t think Hera had realized yet that this was an Inquisition matter and not an ISB one.

He couldn’t turn her over to the Inquisition. She might not be his Hera, but she was still Hera Syndulla, and he couldn’t. Not when he knew what that meant. Not ever.

Kanan had meant to get up and go do something, anyway, but he found himself slumping back against the wall, his head in his hands. Her lover had been a Jedi, even if she hadn’t specifically said as much. Kanan knew better than most that being a Jedi in the Empire was a death sentence, and Hera’s lover had died for it.

He’d died for it, and Kanan was walking around with the Imperial cog and his operating number inked into the back of his neck, the Hunter still a constant presence at the very edge of his consciousness almost a year after Kanan had left the Crucible. He touched the lightsaber hilt at his belt, then snatched his fingers away as if the metal had burned him.

If he stretched out his mind, he could feel the kyber crystal in his old lightsaber and Master Billaba’s holocron singing silently to themselves in the locked drawer in his cabin.

“I can’t do this,” he said out loud, then passed his hand over his face again, feeling a decades-old croak of do or do not echoing in his memory.

The only good thing about being on Naboo was that she didn’t have to worry about checking in with Agent Beneke via comm, though he could and did comm her at odd hours even when she was onworld. Since she had spent the entire day with him, however, Hera wasn’t anticipating hearing from him and left her comlink in her cabin before she crossed the hall to Kanan’s room.

She didn’t bother to knock, just went in. Kanan was sitting on his bunk, with his head down over something held between his hands. Hera put her back against the door after it closed behind her and said, “What is that?”

He looked up at her, his expression anguished, and raised the lightsaber a little. It wasn’t his lightsaber – or, rather, it wasn’t the lightsaber he habitually carried. It was the one that he had left locked in the drawer under his bunk when he had been arrested.

Hera crossed the room to him and put her arms around his shoulders. Kanan tipped his forehead against her stomach, then after a moment put one arm around her waist. He kept his other hand on the lightsaber.

He died, Hera thought miserably. The other Kanan went down this path and he died.

As if he had heard the thought, Kanan raised his gaze to hers. Hera ran her thumb over his cheekbone, then leaned down to kiss him. Kanan kissed her back, hard and desperate, bracing both hands against her waist as Hera climbed into his lap. She could feel the lightsaber he was still holding as a hard weight against her hip as she reached up to pull her shirt off. Kanan kissed her again as soon as he could, releasing the lightsaber to run his hands up her back to her bra clasp. It fell to the floor with a dull thunk, but neither one of them was paying attention.

Even after years away, Hera knew the Ghost too well not to be aware of every sound on it. She had been half-asleep already, trying to pretend that she was back in her own bunk rather than in what should have been Sabine’s.

They were being quiet, but despite that and the two closed doors between them Hera was aware of them anyway. She pressed her face down against the borrowed pillow and cried herself to sleep.

Chapter Text

Kanan let her out of the cabin in the morning. He was in all black again, though without his vambraces or heavy leathers, and looked tired. “Hera – my Hera – and Chopper went up to HQ,” he said, even though she hadn’t asked. “I’m guessing there’s no point in keeping you locked up since you probably know this ship as well as Hera does.”

“Well,” Hera allowed, glancing around the common room, “there have been some modifications.”

He gave her a wry look. “Anyway, I didn’t like – Hera hates being locked up.”

“I don’t think anyone enjoys it,” she pointed out. “But I’ve never had to be in a cell for more than a few hours.” She hesitated, then said, “She told me what happened to you.”

He went very still. “What happened to me wasn’t her fault,” he said after a few moments of silence. “And as it happens she doesn’t know what happened to me, and she won’t if I have anything to say about it.”

“Why not?”

Kanan looked down as if he suddenly found the floor fascinating. “Because it was bad,” he said eventually. “And she doesn’t need to know how bad.”

“I think she knows more than you think,” Hera said.

He just shook his head. “I won’t do that to her.”

“You can – you can tell me, if you want,” Hera offered. Sleeping on it had given her the distinct impression that this Kanan wasn’t all that different from her own Kanan, occupation aside, and Kanan would never have talked about it to anyone. She thought he needed to.

“You don’t need to know either,” Kanan said. There was weary grief in his eyes, and the shadow of remembered agony. He ran a hand back over his short-cropped hair and then added, “Come on. I’ll get you breakfast.”

Hera followed him into the galley. It was better stocked than hers currently was, but that was mostly because she didn’t live on the Ghost anymore with a crew of five eating their way through an army’s rations on a regular basis. Or on the Ghost at all anymore.

“Are you letting me out and feeding me because you’re going to help me?” she asked.

Kanan paused with his back to her and his hands on a cupboard door, then said, “That’s why Hera took Chopper with her.” He bent his head over the cupboard, and Hera stiffened at the sight of something black on his neck, just beneath the high collar of his shirt. It vanished again as he straightened up.

“He was a Jedi, wasn’t he?” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Hera said, swallowing back her surge of grief. “He was.”

“And that’s what killed him.” He wasn’t looking at her.

“No,” Hera said. “The Empire killed him, but not for being a Jedi. They didn’t manage that.” She hesitated, then crossed the room to him. “The Inquisition is gone in my universe. He did that.”

Kanan swung around towards her, his eyes huge and shocked.

“There was an Inquisitor,” Hera said, watching him. “A Pau’an –”

“The Hunter.” His voice was rough. “The Grand Inquisitor.”

She nodded. “Kanan gave himself up so that the rest of us could get away. He was being held on a star destroyer over Mustafar –”

He flinched.

“We broke him out. Kanan dueled him and defeated him, and he died.”

Kanan dropped the plate he was holding. He made an aborted motion with one hand, then stared at it, as if he wasn’t certain what he had meant to do.

“You know him?” Hera said hesitantly.

“He’s my master,” Kanan said after a long moment of silence. He touched his notched ear and added, “He did this. Other things too, but…this first. I –” He made another helpless gesture.

Into the silence that hung between them, his comlink began to beep. Kanan glanced down at it and said distractedly, “I have to check in. Wait here.”

He left the room with long strides.

Hera waited until she had heard his cabin door slide open and shut behind him, then followed him.

There was a long silence from inside; presumably he was putting the rest of his uniform on. Then Hera heard the holoprojector activate and a deep, mechanical voice say, “I felt a disturbance in the Force.”

Darth Vader.

Her lekku twitched with recognition. Hera flexed her fingers, fighting down her urge to run; there was nowhere to go anyway. She had to trust that the next words out of Kanan’s mouth wouldn’t involve turning her over to him.

“Yes, my lord.” Kanan’s voice was harder to hear than Vader’s. He was using the Coruscant accent Hera had only heard a handful of times, which he had told her once was the natural accent he had worked hard to get rid of after the fall of the Republic, when the Jedi were being hunted. “I felt it also.”

“My master desires the source of this disturbance,” Vader went on. “You will find it and bring it to him.”

“Yes, my lord,” Kanan said again.

“Do not fail me.”

“No, my lord.”

The hologram shut off. Hera stood there, fists clenching, waiting for Kanan to come out and find her there; when he didn’t emerge, she touched the door control.

He was kneeling on the floor, his hands over his face. Without looking up, he said, “I told you to stay where you were.”

“What made you think I’d listen?” Hera asked.

“Optimism.” He still didn’t look at her.

Hera crossed the room and knelt down beside him, putting a hand on one shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t pull away, so Hera didn’t release him. If he had more armor besides his vambraces, he hadn’t put it on for this meeting, and this close Hera could see the Imperial cog tattooed on the back of his neck. He looked young, painfully young, and wounded somewhere deep inside. She had never seen her Kanan look like that, not even after he had come back from Malachor.

“And are you?” she asked him quietly. “Going to turn me over?”

“I can’t do that,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You’re her.”

“I’m me,” Hera said. “I’m not her. And you’re not him.”

“I know I’m not him.” He turned his head a little, though his gaze was still blank; Hera looked in the direction he had indicated and saw his lightsaber lying on the floor by the bunk. No, not his lightsaber; the unfamiliar one with the blackened hilt was still on his belt. It was Kanan’s lightsaber that was on the floor.

She got to her feet and crossed the room. The lightsaber was cool against her palms as she picked it up, turning it over in her hands. If Kanan hadn’t dropped it all those years ago –

The past was past and couldn’t be changed.

Hera took a deep breath and went back to Kanan, kneeling beside him again. He was staring at the floor, unseeing. He flinched again as Hera put her free hand on his shoulder.

“You’re not him,” she repeated, offering him the lightsaber. “But that doesn’t mean you should let the Empire tell you who to be.”

“Don’t make trouble,” was the first thing Hera said to Chopper as they got off the maglev train at the station nearest the ISB Complex. She had told him that back at the Ghost, but she thought it bore repeating.

He grumbled back at her and Hera made a face at him.

The platform was crowded with commuters, most of whom were either Imperial officers or support staff for the Imperial Complex and ISB Headquarters a block away. Hera’s green skin and white-covered headtails got her a few second glances, but after four days here she was starting to become a regular, and a few people remembered her from the previous year. She stopped at a tapcaf to get a takeaway caf and nervously emptied two packets of sweetener into it while Chopper complained about the delay.

“Oh, shut up or I’ll leave you here,” Hera told him, jamming the lid back onto her cup. The tapcaf was full of people in gray or white Imperial uniforms, mostly junior officers or staff running errands for their superiors up at the Imperial Complex. Only moffs and flag officers could keep really good caf in their offices; even on Naboo what was available in the mess hall or the break rooms tended to be swill. Even if it hadn’t started out that way, being kept on a warmer for eight or twelve hours rendered it little better than tar. Not that tar didn’t have its place, but Hera was of the firm opinion that place was in the field on a sixteen-hour watch, not in the office.

She threaded her way out of the tapcaf back into the street, where several other astromechs were waiting on the pavement for their owners; Chopper had followed her inside rather than make polite conversation with them.

The Imperial Complex was only a street away. The stormtroopers at the entrance waved her inside with only a cursory check of her credentials and Chopper’s operating number; Hera wasn’t the only nonhuman who worked there, but as far as she was aware she was the only Twi’lek. She had to swipe her code cylinder in order to get into the ISB building, while Chopper had to plug in to be scanned. Since his ban had never been official, just verbal, he was allowed in without raising any alarms.

“Do not light anyone on fire,” Hera told Chopper under her breath when they had reached an empty hallway that she knew had a faulty security cam. “I’ll signal you when I’m done.”

He saluted her with one of his manipulators and rolled off. Hera took a deep breath, smoothed down the front of her uniform unnecessarily, and started towards the turbolifts and the bullpen on the sixth floor where Agent Beneke’s office was. Markus Anjali, as he had done the past three days, was waiting for her outside the glass doors to the bullpen.

“Hey, Hera,” he said, as if he hadn’t been staking the turbolift lobby out.

“Hello, Markus,” Hera said, pitching her now-empty caf cup into the nearest trashcan and already exhausted by the thought of having to spend the next few minutes with him. They had shared a desk when she had been working here, she and Markus and two other agents at one of the four-desk setups in the bullpen. The others had been all right, but neither of them were here at present.

Her old desk was occupied by an agent she didn’t recognize. A handful of offices ringed the bullpen’s second level; Hera glanced up and saw Agent Beneke silhouetted through the window of his office.

“Do you want to get dinner tonight, after you get off?” Markus said. “We could catch up.”

“I’m here with my partner, Markus,” Hera said.

“Well, it’s not like he has to come.” He put a hand on her wrist. “I know you were angry at me after Felucia, but by now you have to realize that he’s not –”

“Let me clarify,” Hera said. “I’m here with my partner whom I love and have sex with on a regular basis, Markus. I wasn’t trying to replace him two months ago and I’m not interested now.” She removed her hand from his before he could respond and was at the stairs to the second level before he could do more than open his mouth again.

She rapped her knuckles against Agent Beneke’s door and waited for him to look up and wave her inside before she entered.

“Good morning, sir,” she said.

Beneke gave her the kind of look that made her uncomfortably certain that he knew that not only had she spent the night in Kanan’s bed, but that her double was on the Ghost now and Chopper was rolling around ISB HQ looking for a convenient and sufficiently high-access dataport to plug into. But all he said was, “Good morning, Hera. Have a seat.”

She took the chair in front of his desk and set her shoulder bag carefully down by her feet.

“I hope this inactivity has not made the Inquisitor too restless,” Beneke said.

“No, sir.”

The cams are disabled, she reminded herself. He doesn’t know. They had checked the Ghost over months ago after Kanan had first come back, after a chance comment from another ISB agent Hera knew who usually oversaw internal surveillance. The bugs had ben transmitting until just after Kanan had returned, when they had been turned off; Chopper had been able to have the Ghost’s systems fry their internal circuitry so that they couldn’t be reactivated if the ISB and the Inquisition ever stopped fighting over the two of them.

Agent Beneke looked at her for a long moment. Hera met his gaze evenly, not allowing herself to blink or look aside; it was Agent Beneke who finally said, “Well, let’s get started then.” He touched the control on his desk that dimmed the windows to the bullpen, so that no one down below or on the balcony outside could see what they were doing. “Where were we when we left off last night?”

“Otoh Gunga, sir.”

As Hera was pulling out her datapad to bring up her own notes on the mission, Agent Beneke said, “Agent Anjali only has your best interests in mind, Hera.”

“Agent Anjali has getting into my pants in mind. Sir.”

Agent Beneke raised an eyebrow. “My impression has been that Agent Anjali has always been a good friend to you, apart from that little incident on Felucia. And you must admit you overreacted there.”

Hera felt a muscle in her jaw twitch. That “little incident,” as Agent Beneke called it, had been her slapping Markus in front of a tent full of officers and agents – not to mention Kanan – after he had called Kanan a thing and suggested that she was sleeping with Kanan because she didn’t think she had better options. As far as she was considered her reaction had been entirely justified and would have been so even if she had gone up on charges for it, which she hadn’t – mostly because everyone there had been too afraid of Kanan to suggest that she might have been in the wrong. He had been six months out of the Crucible, barely speaking, and terrifying even to the officers in command of that operation. It had also been the morning after the first time since he had come back that they had had sex; for months after his return Hera hadn’t been certain he would ever be able to touch her again. Markus’s reaction had gone a long way towards ruining her morning. He had also suggested with what was clearly supposed to be glowing praise that she was “nearly human,” presumably in contrast to the Twi’lek girl down at the Imperial-operated brothel known as the Lake House whom Hera knew he slept with regularly.

“Sir,” she said instead of any meaningful response.

“We do have some leeway with the Inquisition, you know, Hera,” Agent Beneke said mildly. “If you were to request a transfer, it would go through. Your partnership – if it can be called that – is highly irregular and entirely unprecedented as a long-term assignment.”

“I’m content with my assignment, sir.”

Agent Beneke arched an eyebrow at her, as if gently contemplating how that could possibly be true. “You were very young when you met him, and you haven’t had much experience apart from your current assignment –”

“I had a year’s worth of experience, sir.” She had even seen other men on occasion, mostly to placate Agent Beneke when she had been so tired and so grief-stricken that she would have done nearly anything to make him leave her alone. Every one of those occasions had ended disastrously, including the time two years ago when she and Kanan had been fighting and she had gone out with another agent to make him jealous. She had never gone home with any of them; she hadn’t even gotten through dinner with any of them.

“I suppose that’s true,” Agent Beneke conceded, “but you must admit that it was somewhat limited. I could arrange for you to be transferred to one of the other ISB regional headquarters, or even to Coruscant. Give it some thought.” He activated the holoprojector over his desk and the city of Otoh Gunga sprang up in miniature. “Let’s review your operation here.”

It was one of her rare solo operations from her year on Naboo, and Hera was glad that she had made herself take extensive notes at the time, since she had blanked out most of her miserable year onworld.

From the Otoh Gunga op they moved onto a review of the Onaxa fiasco, which had ultimately been a win for the Bureau but had unfortunately involved several senior officers and government officials being completely humiliated. That had been one of the operations that had taken place shortly after Kanan had found out that Hera was ISB and not an independent contractor, so he had been as delighted about it as she was dismayed. It also happened to be the operation they had been working on when she had gone to dinner with Agent Taraj and come back to the Ghost drunk and crying. She and Kanan had been fighting for weeks; he had been furious with her for lying to him about working for the Empire, and she had been furious at him for not merely accepting it. He had left when she had told him the truth; he had come back not long afterwards, but the fact that he had left at all had hung over them both.

When he had come back, he had asked her to leave with him, and it was the greatest regret of Hera’s life that she had refused.

“Hera?” Agent Beneke said, a note of reproach in his voice.

She raised her gaze to him. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t sleep very well.”

She knew it was a mistake to say as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Agent Beneke’s eyes narrowed, so slightly that anyone who didn’t know him well might not have noticed, and he said, “Did the Inquisitor keep you up?”

Hera wondered how he would react if she told him the truth, that she had lain in bed beside Kanan and thought about the woman in the other cabin, the woman with her face and her voice and the insignia of something that didn’t exist, not yet. For that matter, she wondered what he would say if she told him yes, she had been having sex with Kanan most of the night, even if on this particular occasion it wasn’t the truth.

“No, sir,” she said instead. “I just don’t sleep well when I’m dirtside.”

“Perhaps you should see the Bureau psychologist about that, Hera,” Agent Beneke suggested.

“I’ll consider it, sir.”

She wondered if the other Hera Syndulla ever had to deal with this. She couldn’t see it – the other woman was too confident for that – but it seemed inevitable that she must have. With rare exception, humans were humans and her Rebel Alliance couldn’t be that different than the Empire except in goal.

A Rebel Alliance, part of her thought. She had gone after plenty of rebels and in her experience, none of them wanted to cooperate with anyone else, which was why they were rebels in the first place. The little she knew about the way her father ran Free Ryloth suggested that it only worked because he was the highest ranking person there; if another curial clan ever joined up – unlikely, given how much most of the curiates hated each other – then the fleet would probably self-destruct. Unless something had changed drastically by the other Hera’s time, Hera couldn’t see any way that a rebel alliance could actually succeed.

She forced herself to concentrate on what Agent Beneke was saying, despite her earnest desire to be anywhere else right now and her sinking feeling that no matter how intently she listened, it ultimately wouldn’t matter. After this, she wouldn’t be able to come back to the ISB even if she wanted to. And she wasn’t sure she did. She wasn’t sure she didn’t, either, but if she went through with this then the choice would be out of her hands.

She could also, she knew, tell him right now and then that would be out of her hands too. But she couldn’t do that. She just couldn’t.

She sat impatiently as Agent Beneke asked her a series of leading questions about Kanan’s involvement with the Onaxa operation and how he had interacted with the other ISB team on that operation. Since he had shot one of them – not Agent Taraj – it was an exhausting conversation, even if Agent Beneke had to admit that it had been a justified shoot. It just didn’t look good when a civilian contractor, which Kanan had been at the time, shot an Imperial officer.

What does it matter? she thought despairingly. I’m not going to stay.

The realization brought her up short.

She and Kanan had talked about this, or rather, they had talked around it. They had discussed what they were going to do; they hadn’t discussed what it really meant and what the outcome was going to be. But she was going. She wasn’t coming back.

“Hera,” Agent Beneke said pointedly.

He must have asked her a question; Hera didn’t have the faintest idea what it was. She was still staring at him when the comlink set into his desk beeped with an incoming transmission.

He touched the control. “Yes?”

Hera kept her expression neutral through the response; Agent Beneke said, “I’ll be down shortly,” and disconnected. As he stood up, he looked down at her and said, “This will only take a few minutes. We will continue this, Hera.”

“Yes, sir.” Hera folded her hands over her datapad, looking straight ahead.

“Stay here.”

He left the room. Hera sat where she was, silently counting off his progress across the bullpen floor until she was certain that he had reached the turbolifts, then got up and crossed quickly to the other side of his desk. He hadn’t bothered to log out of his computer, though Hera knew his log-in information and had been prepared to use it.

Hera pulled the datacard she had brought with her out of her jacket and inserted it into the slot. She kept an eye on the door and the darkened windows as she brought up the files she was looking for and copied them over. She was about to close out the files and disconnect when she saw a folder titled “SYNDULLA.”

It was probably nothing more than his notes on her, which Hera frankly didn’t want to see, but she copied them to the datacard anyway. She closed out of everything she had opened, then disconnected her datacard and stuffed it back into her jacket. It hadn’t taken more than two minutes.

Hera straightened upright. She looked around the office, taking it all in – a small, spare room whose only decorations were a handful of plaques and a single watercolor landscape of Naboo’s Lake Country. Then she straightened her jacket and walked out of the room, clicking her comlink once as she went.

Markus looked up as she passed his desk. “Hera,” he said, surprised. “Are you leaving already? I thought you –”

“We’ve got an op,” Hera said, surprised by how calm her voice was. “Orders just came in from Mustafar.”

He frowned, but even the ISB wouldn’t argue with the Inquisition.

“Could you tell Agent Beneke that I’m sorry I had to leave without saying goodbye?” Hera said after a moment’s hesitation. It wasn’t a lie, not quite, and that surprised her too.

“Yeah, I can do that,” Markus said. He started to stand, and then stopped, as if unsure what to do. “Hera, I – be careful.”

He didn’t add “with him,” so all Hera said was, “I always am,” before she left. She didn’t look back.

Kanan met her on the Ghost’s ramp with a quick kiss and an arm around her waist. Hera took a few moments to lean into the comforting curve of his shoulder before they went inside, breathing in the familiar scent of him.

She doesn’t have this, she thought, and the memory of what that had been like made her heart ache. The idea of going on like that for years was too painful to contemplate.

“All right?” Kanan asked her quietly.

Hera nodded. She leaned up to kiss him briefly, then said, “Did you get the transmission?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up at Chopper, who had preceded them up the ramp, and added, “Nice job.”

Chopper waved one manipulator and made a dismissive noise, but Hera could tell he was pleased by the compliment.

They went up into the Ghost, closing up the ramp behind them. Hera pulled at the front of her jacket, suddenly uncomfortable having it on, even though it wasn’t treason – not quite yet. They still had a few hours before then.

Kanan glanced at her, his expression understanding; he was in his uniform too, even though he hadn’t been wearing his leathers and armor when Hera had left that morning.

“Can you take us out of here?” Hera asked him once they were up in the cockpit. As Kanan’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline, since she seldom let him fly, she added, “I have to work on the credentials.”

“Yeah, of course,” Kanan said, though from his expression she could tell he knew she just didn’t want to be the one who left Naboo behind. She had left the planet dozens of times before, but this was different. She didn’t know if she could bear watching, let alone doing it.

“Thanks.” She left him and Chopper in the cockpit, stopping in the corridor as soon as the door had closed behind her. She pressed her hands to her face , breathing hard, then started to strip off her gloves. She had one hand out for her own door controls when something made her frown and look up.

She went down to the common room instead, and started in surprise to find the other Hera Syndulla sitting at the holotable, holding a mug between her hands. She looked up as Hera came in.

“Oh,” Hera said. She didn’t know why she was surprised; of course Kanan would have let her out. She knew that he knew she hated being locked in anywhere.

“Hi,” the other Hera said.

Hera almost turned and walked out of the room again, but instead she said abruptly, “Are you afraid of the dark?”

The older woman blinked. “No. Why?” She hesitated, then asked, “Are you?”

Hera nodded. “If Kanan’s not there, I have to sleep with a light on.” Sometimes when he was there too, if she was having a particularly bad night; he had never commented on it or asked why. She thought he probably guessed, and something about the way he had acted after he got back from Mustafar made her suspect he knew exactly why.

She glanced at the door she had come through, feeling the Ghost’s engines vibrate through the deck as Kanan started them up. He wouldn’t be leaving the cockpit anytime soon. She looked back at the other Hera and swallowed before saying, “When I was at the Spire – when I was in prison – they used to turn the lights off. Or on. Not on the planet’s night cycle, it was just…random. Sometimes not for very long. Sometimes for – for a long time.” She looked down at her hands, which beneath her gloves were still flecked with scars where she had beaten them bloody pounding at the door to her cell when it had gotten to be too much for her.

She could still measure out the walls of her cell in the dark; it had been a little smaller than her cabin was now. On bad nights, when Kanan wasn’t there, she still walked the width of her cell, back and forth in her cabin or in the Ghost’s hold, turning invisible corners and skating around the steps that had led up to the door. Once one of the Ghost’s air filters had broken and Hera had woken up wild with terror, because it had smelled exactly the same as it had back in the Spire. Kanan had fixed it while Hera had curled up in a corner of her bunk, weeping as Chopper tried to comfort her.

She looked up at the other Hera’s stricken expression.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I just couldn’t remember if I was afraid of the dark before or not.”

“Hera –” She stood up.

Hera left before she could come after her, hurrying back down the corridor to her cabin and catching herself on the wall as the Ghost lifted smoothly up from the docking bay. She stumbled into her cabin, letting the door shut behind her and flattening one hand against the wall. She was breathing hard, tears pricking at her eyes; she wasn’t sure why.

But she had a lot of practice doing work while on the verge of tears; she had gone through all of last year and most of her Academy days like that. Swiping the back of her wrist across her eyes, Hera pushed away from the wall and dug the datacard out of the inside of her jacket.

Hera looked up as Kanan came into the common room. For lack of anything else to do, she had been playing dejarik against herself, which was easier said than done since Sabine hadn’t fixed the buggy software yet and creatures would randomly disappear and reappear on opposite sides of the board.

Seeing him was still a shock. She knew he wasn’t her Kanan – the age was a dead giveaway, even if the scars and black outfit hadn’t been – but it hurt to look at him. She could tell that he knew it, too.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said.

Hera shut the game off. “Do you have a plan?” she asked. She couldn’t shake her uneasy memory of what had happened the last time the Rebel Alliance had come to Scarif. They still didn’t know what had happened down on the planet, and never would; everyone who could have told them had died there. Many people who had never made it to the surface had died there.

He arched an eyebrow. “Did you think we didn’t?”

“Why do you think I asked?” Her Kanan would have had a plan. She might have had one, but it likely wouldn’t have been as good as his.

He smiled a little. “We do.” He glanced back as Hera – his Hera – came in behind him as if summoned. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she had been crying, but she looked grimly determined.

“I hope you don’t mind wearing an Imperial uniform,” she said to Hera.

“Well, this is new,” Hera muttered a few minutes later, pulling uncomfortably at the hem of her borrowed uniform. It was ISB field grays, and a little tight – she and the other Hera were almost but not quite the same size, though she thought the younger woman was actually broader in the shoulders, if smaller in the bust. Well, she was an active field agent instead of a flag officer, and she hadn’t had a child.

Even these days it wasn’t uncommon for Alliance personnel to have to go undercover as Imperials, and most larger ships had a small collection of Imperial uniforms and armor just in case. Hera, for fairly obvious reasons, had never done so. When she was in the field now she was commanding from the deck of a starship, or on now rare occasions, in the cockpit; when she had been younger she had always had humans around who could believably take that role. She had managed to avoid taking the dancing girl roles that Twi’leks tended to get relegated to when she was younger by virtue of never having to go on a mission where that was necessary; as a flag officer it was completely out of the question now.

She grimaced at her reflection in the mirror and began to wrap up her lekku, hating it immediately. Upper-caste Twi’lek women never covered up their lekku and usually left their other caste markings bare; Hera didn’t bother with the latter because when she had first been in the field she had been concerned about being recognized as a curiate Syndulla. In the Alliance, not only did it not matter, no one would recognize their significance anyway. Once off Ryloth, it wasn’t uncommon to see Twi’leks with decorative lekku markings; it would have taken a Ryloth native or a first generation colonist to recognize her markings as curial caste markings. The other Hera obviously felt differently, though probably for different reasons.

Once her lekku were covered, she used makeup to subtly change the shape of her face, accentuating the slight differences between herself and the other Hera. They would probably still be taken for sisters, but there was nothing to be done about that.

She stepped into the cockpit to a stream of familiar Binary obscenities. Chopper swiveled his dome at her approach, his invective suddenly replaced by a low, startled sound. The other Hera, who had been crouched in front of him, sat back on her heels and looked up at Hera.

“You’ll do,” she said, sounding unhappy about it.

Chopper chirped a cautious inquiry. It was, Hera realized with surprise, the first time she had seen him since she had arrived.

“Yes, it’s me,” she told him. “Do you want to do a genetic test?”

He waved one of his manipulators dismissively, but the sound he made was distinctively taken aback. The younger Hera waved a hand in front of his optical processors. “Come on, you. Your paint’s not dry yet.”

Hera gave him a second look. She had assumed that his black-and-red paint job was how he looked normally in this universe, but apparently not, and belatedly she remembered seeing the flash of his orange chassis the night before.

The door slid open behind her and Hera stepped out of the way so that Kanan could come in. She glanced at him, then did a double-take.

Even in his heavy leathers and black vambraces she had had trouble seeing him as an Inquisitor before. Now there was no question about it. He had added upper body armor, including pauldrons with the Imperial cog painted on, and his step was heavier; he was wearing blackened greaves that covered his legs from ankle to knee. A black mask of some unfamiliar material concealed the lower half of his face, leaving only his eyes visible.

The other Hera said, “I hate that.”

“Not as much as I do.” His voice was a little muffled. He reached up and unsealed the mask, wincing as little as he pulled it away from his face. Hera realized abruptly that the scars she had seen there earlier exactly matched the outline of the mask, as if he had worn it until it had worn the skin raw. “But it impresses the regs.”

“Hmmph.” The other Hera stood up and kissed him. “You look like you’re coming to murder someone.”

“That’s the intended effect.”

“I know.”

Suddenly Hera realized that they were both completely serious.

Kanan flicked a glance at her, as if he had sensed her revelation. He looked away, stepping past her to take the co-pilot’s seat.

He’s done it, Hera thought, her fists clenching and unclenching inside their black gloves. He’s killed people for the Empire. He’s walked into a room dressed just like this to do murder, and she was probably with him.

She didn’t know Inquisitors, but she knew how terrified Kanan had been after they had gotten him back from Tarkin’s star destroyer over Mustafar. He had had nightmares regularly for weeks – months – afterwards. He had still been having them intermittently when they had gone to Malachor, which hadn’t replaced them so much as added something new to have nightmares about. Hera did know Imperials; apart from personal experience with those still in the Imperial service, there were plenty of Imperial deserters in the Alliance ranks. Kallus wasn’t the only former ISB officer, either, though he was the one she knew best. She had a pretty good idea of exactly what it took to succeed in the ISB and the other Hera had clearly done it.

She hadn’t been thinking of them as Imperials in more than name.

The other Hera glanced at her, her expression unreadable, then slid into the pilot’s chair. Hera looked down and took the chair behind Kanan, the one that should have been Sabine’s.

Hera had always felt a certain amount of pity for the Imperials who had come over to the Alliance, though too much experience had kept her for feeling any for those who chose to stay with the Empire. The Empire recruited heavily from worlds like Lothal and Tatooine, Outer Rim planets whose residents had few options to get out or make something of themselves, as well as from the lower levels of ecumenopoleis like Coruscant, where options were equally limited. She remembered being that desperate to get offworld when she had been a teenager, and if she had been human – well, she wouldn’t have taken that option, not growing up as Cham Syndulla’s daughter, but she understood how it felt to do anything, anything, if it meant you could get away. Those who came to the Alliance were the ones who understood that “anything” didn’t mean “everything.”

Hera had always thought that she would never be one of those people, even if she had had the option.

And Kanan –

She looked down at her hands rather than at the back of his head, breathing hard, and missed the transition from hyperspace to realspace.

“Welcome to Scarif,” Kanan said. “That is a lot of star destroyers.”

Hera straightened up, peering over his shoulder out the viewport. “Not as many as the last time I was here,” she remarked. The blue glow of the planetary shield was just barely visible; they had arrived on the day side of the planet. She looked at the shield gate and shuddered.

“You’ve been here before?” the other Hera asked.

“I had more friends with me,” Hera said, then clarified, “An Alliance commando unit infiltrated the vaults to steal plans for the D – for an Imperial superweapon. The rest of the Alliance fleet came to support them; it was our first major fleet action against the Empire. I was with the fleet; it was my last action flying the Ghost, actually.”

“They don’t sound like they were very good commandos,” the other woman muttered.

“They got the information out.” Hera’s mouth tightened. She hoped this didn’t go the same way that had. The Alliance would never know how Rogue One had died, just that they had, and so had everyone else on the planet’s surface.

She had heard their last transmission, the desperate plea to bring down the shield gate. It wasn’t the only thing that haunted her dreams, not by a long shot, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t one of them.

The two Imperials exchanged a look Hera couldn’t read, then the girl leaned forward to touch the comm unit, “This is ISB/Inquisition transport Ghost, code ISB/INQ-972484, requesting permission to land.”

There was a long moment of silence, then the response came, “Ghost, you’re clear to land. Landing pad 6.”

“Thank you.”

Hera supposed that no one questioned the ISB, or possibly the Inquisition; presumably the combination of the two was something that no one wanted to deal with for longer than they had to. It was a pity that that information would be useless back home, since the Inquisition no longer existed.

She watched as they slid past star destroyers, TIE patrols, and transport vessels, the latter all making their slow approach to or from the shield gate. The Ghost descended it slowly; Hera clenched her fists on the arms of her chair, thinking about the starfighters she had seen shattered against it when it had closed during the battle. She glanced up reflexively once they had passed it, even though that didn’t show her anything but the ceiling of the Ghost.

Scarif was pretty, she could tell from the viewport. It would have made a nice vacation spot if it wasn’t for the Empire. She wondered what had been going through Tarkin’s head when he had picked it for the data center – the location, maybe, though there were dozens of other planets as conveniently placed. Hera didn’t think she would ever see it as anything other than a killing ground. She watched the Citadel Tower slide past them as the Ghost circled to their assigned landing pad; the other Hera brought the ship down as gently as Hera herself would have done.

Kanan got to his feet, sliding his mask back on. “Well,” he said, his voice cold, a killer’s voice, an Imperial Inquisitor’s voice, “here we go.”

Chapter Text

The air was hot and humid, making both Twi’lek women wince as the Ghost’s ramp opened. Hera looked automatically at Kanan, anticipating his indulgent grin, but he was looking straight ahead. There was nothing of her Kanan in him now – nothing of Kanan at all, just the Imperial Inquisitor left, the lethal sword hand of the Force clad in human raiment.

The sea was visible through the trees just to their left. The Imperial base here on Scarif was made up of an archipelago of small islands, connected via transit tubes. The salt tang of the water made her nose tickle; Hera half-expected it to be overlaid with the scent of blood. So many people had died here. So many good people, so many bad people, so many who had just been doing what they thought was right, both Rebel and Imperial. She had known and liked Cassian Andor, and a few of the other commandos who had gone with him to Scarif against orders. Chopper had actually gotten along with Cassian’s droid K-2SO, which had been a minor miracle.

Cassian should have lived to see the Rebellion succeed. So should Jyn Erso and Bodhi Rook and Admiral Raddus, everyone who had died at Scarif, at Yavin and Hoth and Endor and the hundreds of other engagements between the death the of the Republic and today. Bail and Breha Organa. Saw Gerrera. Her mother. Ezra and Kanan. They should all have lived.

The Death Star plans are here, Hera thought with shocked realization. Right here, right now. The battle station wouldn’t be complete for another six years, but most of the plans would still be accurate. And it would prove it existed.

She dragged her attention back to the present. There were stormtroopers standing guard on the vault-like entrance to the landing pad’s transit tube, eyeing them with clear distrust and a little fear. Kanan and the other Hera ignored them, striding forward in perfect step. Hera and Chopper followed, suspecting that she probably should have fallen in on Kanan’s other side for symmetry’s sake but knowing that she couldn’t manage it now.

The stormtroopers fell back before Kanan’s approach, one of them hitting the door control. The other Hera nodded a little to them as the four stepped inside; the doors closed with a frighteningly final sound before the transit car began to move.

“How are you planning to get into the vault?” Hera asked in a low voice.

The other woman tapped the code cylinders next to her rank badge. “ISB has access. So does the Inquisition. It will drop a flag, but I overwrote my access level with Agent Beneke’s so with any luck that won’t be immediate.” She glanced at Hera. “There aren’t a lot of nonhumans in the service. I’ve never actually met one of them, but I know there’s at least one woman in the ISB, a Togruta. That’s who your creds will read as if you have to use them.”

“I’m not a Togruta,” Hera pointed out.

“I know, I changed it in the system to read as a Twi’lek and replaced her image with yours. It shouldn’t end up mattering unless someone here has met her. Most people don’t bother checking creds when there’s an Inquisitor in the room.” She smiled at Kanan, who tilted his head a little in acknowledgment but didn’t speak. “Besides, most humans can’t tell nonhumans apart.”

“Twi’leks and Togruta are very different,” Hera said, startled.

“Most humans are stupid,” the other Hera said. “Present company excluded.”

Kanan snorted softly.

Hera held back her automatic response, which was something along the lines of, You spend too much time with Imperials. It wasn’t that she hadn’t run into that problem within the Alliance or among civilians, but it hadn’t happened more than a dozen times since she had left Ryloth.

The other woman flicked a sideways glance at her, but didn’t say anything else. They stood in silence until the transit car deposited them at the Citadel Tower, the doors sliding open to reveal wide gray corridors filled with more Imperials than Hera was, frankly, comfortable being near – stormtroopers and shoretroopers moving in formation, officers and technicians, security droids and a few astromechs –

She squared her shoulders and reminded herself that as far as anyone was concerned, her borrowed uniform was hers and she was as much an Imperial officer as any of them. She followed Kanan and the other Hera out of the transit car, Chopper rolling along beside her. She was interested to note that Kanan’s mere presence cleared their way without him having to do anything more – a few officers actually jumped out of the way when they saw him coming. If he noticed, he didn’t show it.

Gone, Hera’s mind gibbered silently as they made their way down the long corridors. All gone. Kanan had been one thing; but this part of Scarif was simply gone, vaporized by the Death Star. She would have had the same reaction had she gone to Jedha or Alderaan – she had been expecting to have to do the latter.

No one stopped them. They arrived at the entrance to the data vault to find a single technical officer at the data station outside the vault’s heavy doors. She looked up at their approach, then did a double-take. “Sir – ah – Inquisitor –”

Kanan tipped his head a little. The other Hera stepped forward, her expression cool, and slid her code cylinder out of its pocket. “We require access to the vault,” she said. “ISB-327, ISB-398, INQ-065. Authorization, ISB Five Nine Seven Eight Aurek Senth Isk Three Nine Two.”

The technical officer’s eyes were still fixed on Kanan as she took the code cylinder with shaking hands. It took her three tries to get it inserted. Hera held her breath, watching and wishing that she had a blaster just in case, but at last the data station chirped approval. The technical officer handed back the code cylinder and touched a control on the console, opening the massive vault door behind her. “You’re – you’re cleared, ma’am – ah – Inquisitor. What files are you –”

“We’ll recover them,” the other Hera said, sliding the code cylinder back into her uniform pocket. “Take a caf break, Lieutenant.”

“I – I’m not supposed to –”

Kanan met her gaze. She squeaked and almost tripped stepping out from behind the data station.

“We’ll be done in fifteen minutes,” the other Hera said. “Come back then.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the technical officer said faintly. She gave them a wide berth, skating the wall until she reached the exit.

The other Hera let out her breath. “Chop, plug in. Find us that file – Cluster Prism, you said?”

“Cluster Prism,” Hera confirmed. “And Stardust.”

Kanan gave her a sharp look, and the force of that pale glare over the black mask staggered her for an instant. “You only said Cluster Prism before.”

“I – I’ll explain later. Just – let’s get those files.”

The other woman’s mouth compressed into a thin line, but she nodded to Kanan. “You get the files. Chop and I will stay here and locate them for you and head off anyone who comes calling.”

“Why you?” Hera said, a little surprised.

“An Inquisitor can’t stay out here,” she explained. “It looks bad. And my creds are real; yours aren’t.”

Hera nodded. As Chopper rolled over to the data station and plugged in, she and Kanan turned down the long, dark corridor to the data vault. The corridor let out into a harshly lit platform with a window that revealed the data vault itself – long columns that stretched out of sight up and down, each closely stacked with thousands of data files.

What the Rebellion wouldn’t do for all of this, Hera thought, looking up at them as Kanan bent over the computer station. Some of it – maybe most of it – wouldn’t be relevant anymore, but others would be. All the Emperor’s surviving projects that the Alliance knew about had been spread out between his successors, but Hera had no doubt that more of them were lurking out there, waiting to take the Alliance by surprise when they were least prepared for it. It would take months to retrieve and copy all the files here, though, and she didn’t have that kind of time.

Kanan was speaking quietly into the comlink on his left gauntlet. As Hera was looking up at the data vault, she saw a green light flash to her right and a little below her line of sight. “That’s Cluster Prism,” Kanan said, removing his mask and hooking it to his belt. “You’ll have to use the handles.”

Hera supposed that with the sheer mass of data here there wasn’t really a more efficient method. She stepped up to the window and grasped the handles, turning them this way and that until she got the hang of their movement. It wasn’t too different from flying a starfighter, actually, if less exciting; she supposed the adrenaline rush of stealing data from the Empire made up for it. She was able to retrieve the Cluster Prism file from its location and bring it over to the window, where it slid into the drawer at the base.

“I’ll get the Stardust file while you copy that,” Kanan said.

Hera nodded and took it over to the computer set into the wall, pulling a blank datacard out of her jacket. Modern datacards could store almost twice as much as they had been able to a decade earlier, so with any luck it would transfer without difficulty as long as the computer could still read it. She held her breath as she inserted the card, then let out a relieved sigh as it slid into the slot. The bulky data file took a big more finagling, but after a moment it beeped confirmation as Hera set the computer to copy it over.

Kanan came up behind her, another data file in his hand. “What is this one?” he asked.

“It’s the plans for something called the Death Star,” Hera said.

His eyebrows shot up. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Hera grimaced. “No. And it’s not for the Alliance; we already have those plans. I want to give that to someone in this universe, to prevent what happened in mine from happening here. If you and Hera don’t mind making a stop after we leave here –”

“What’s the Death Star?”

“It’s a battle station,” Hera said, wincing at the memory. “A massive battle station the size of a small moon, capable of destroying a planet.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is,” Hera said. “I’ve seen it.” She glanced back at him. “That’s what happened to Scarif. The Empire destroyed their own base in an attempt to keep the Alliance from getting the plans, but the commando team here had already transmitted them to the Rebel fleet.” She didn’t bother going into the details between the Death Star at full planet-destroying capacity and the lesser havoc it had wrought on Jedha and Scarif. With any luck, this universe would never have to know.

“And who do you want to give the plans to?” Kanan asked. “There’s nothing like a – a rebel alliance, not right now, anyway. Just a lot of partisan groups that operate in different systems and sometimes share information.”

“There will be,” Hera said with certainty. “There’s someone I can give them to. I have a message for him anyway. It’s who I would have gone to if you hadn’t agreed to help me.”

He didn’t ask why she wasn’t naming her contact here, not in the middle of an Imperial base.

The computer beeped as it finished copying the Cluster Prism file and spat out both the original file and the data card. Hera switched over to a new data card and exchanged the Cluster Prism file for the Stardust one while Kanan went to return it to its original location.

“What will you do?” she asked Kanan as he came back over. “Once we’ve left here, I mean. You can’t go back to the Empire.”

He shook his head, though his eyes were shadowed. “Hera wants to see her family,” he said. “And we do know where Free Ryloth is right now – the ISB keeps track of the fleet’s location, even if they usually don’t do anything with that.” He glanced sideways at her and added carefully, “She doesn’t talk about her family, but she was upset when you said your mother was dead.”

“If it’s any help,” Hera said, “my father liked Kanan. More than he liked me sometimes, to be honest.”

The corner of his mouth curled up. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“I left home when I was eighteen,” Hera said. “My father has never really understood why, even today. He thinks I should have stayed on Ryloth. Not that he was trying to keep me safe, but he thinks I should have been fighting the Empire back home instead of somewhere else. It’s not that I don’t know that he loves me, but he’s always resented that I decided to prioritize fighting the Empire over fighting for Ryloth. He does love Jacen, though,” she added, and Kanan’s face did something complicated.

“What is he like?” he asked. “Your son, I mean.”

Hera glanced down, smiling. “He’s smart. He likes animals – every time we’re back on Lothal, half a dozen Loth-cats and sometimes a Loth-wolf turn up at the Ghost to say hello, and the blurrgs on Ryloth love him. I think he’ll be a good pilot, too, he’s already got the reflexes. He’s – he’s a very happy child. I just don’t see him enough.” She looked up at Kanan again. “Ah – a friend of mine says he’s Force-sensitive, but it might not last.”

“It doesn’t always at that age,” Kanan said. “You can usually tell, but not always.” He frowned a little, as if in memory, but didn’t explain further. “He sounds like a good kid.”

“He is,” Hera said. “I wish –” She didn’t go on, relieved when the computer beeped it conclusion. She retrieved the data card, handed the file to Kanan to return, and made sure both data cards were clearly labeled. The last thing she needed to do was turn up back in her own timeline with outdated Death Star plans instead of the Cluster Prism ones.

He had his mask back on by the time she turned around. They left the vault to join the other Hera, who was standing next to the data station with Chopper. “Got them?” she asked.

Hera nodded.

“Then let’s get out of here.”

“Do you normally get this reaction?” Hera asked after the Ghost had left Scarif behind and was ascending upwards towards the shield gate. The traffic control officer had been ecstatic to see them go, in a subdued, Imperial kind of way. “They practically threw us offworld.”

“Imperials hate Inquisitors as much as everyone else does,” Kanan said, his hands on the co-pilot’s controls and his gaze fixed straight ahead. “They especially don’t like having me around; I scare the blazes out of them.”

“Why?” Hera said, startled. She had never seen any Inquisitors other than from a distance, but she didn’t think that Kanan was worse than the ones her crew had intercepted.

“Because I’m human,” Kanan said, his voice even. “There were one or two others when the Inquisition started out, but these days I’m the only one. Everyone else is a nonhuman, and that’s the way the Emperor likes it, since it keeps the rest of the service on their toes. As far as they’re concerned, the aliens can do what they want to each other, but once a human’s in the mix –” He stopped abruptly, a muscle working in his jaw.

His Hera shot a sideways glance at him, a little grief in her eyes. Kanan’s gaze cut towards her briefly and he went on, “Most Imperials don’t like the reminder that they’re just vulnerable as all the alien rebels out there. And they take orders from a nonhuman Inquisitor easier than they do from me. And when I was in the field with my master –” He stopped abruptly.

He was silent as they slipped through the shield gate and began to move past the star destroyers. The other Hera had a short exchange with the traffic control officer onboard the gate, then they proceeded past the star destroyers and went to hyperspace as soon as they were out of range of the planet’s gravity well. The girl got to her feet and said, “I’m going to change,” leaving Kanan and Hera alone in the cockpit.

He started to strip off his armor without looking at her. Hera unfastened the top of her jacket, but said, “If you want to tell me what happened – she doesn’t know, does she?”

“No.” He put his fingers to his forehead, looking weary. “A lot of junior officers are around the same age as me,” he said finally. “Stormtroopers too. My master –” He touched his notched ear, but it was clear that the injury wasn’t what he was thinking about. “By most standards,” he said haltingly, “my master didn’t treat me – well, I guess. And I’m human, and except for the uniform look pretty much the same as most of them. And I’ve got the right accent,” he added, this last in such pure upper-class Coruscanti that it made Hera’s back teeth ache. The first time she had heard her Kanan use it she had almost jumped out of her own skin.

“My master hurt me pretty badly,” Kanan went on, not looking at her. “And he didn’t really care who saw him do it. Imperials really don’t like seeing a Pau’an do – that – to a nice human boy. And even in uniform I look right, and I sound right, and – there was nothing they could do about how he treated me, though if they were high-ranking enough they could at least tell him to take it to his own tent or cabin or whatever.”

“Which didn’t make it any easier for you,” Hera said gently.

Kanan rubbed his knuckles across his scarred jaw. “No. But I was never paying much attention to anything besides him at the time, unless he told me to. And he didn’t do that when we were in camp – on base – whatever. I didn’t really realize any of that had been going on until the first time Hera and I were on an op with someone who had seen me with him.”

“How did that go?”

“He was a friend of Hera’s. He was scared out of his mind for her. That was three months ago, by the way.” He touched his fingers to his forehead, looking unspeakably weary. “My master didn’t think he was being cruel. And I didn’t – I didn’t really realize it either, not by the point when they were letting me out in the field with him.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hera asked, tentative.

“Last week.” He shot a sideways glance at her. “I had to go back to the Crucible to check in. The Whip won’t let us be in the same room alone together anymore – which is not on my behalf by any means. He just doesn’t like the Hunter.” He looked down at his hands. “She doesn’t know and she’s not going to.”

“Who’s the Whip?”

“He’s the head of the training facility at the Crucible – Inquisition headquarters, I mean.” Kanan ran a weary hand over his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you all that.”

“I asked,” Hera said.

He shook his head. “She doesn’t know. She can’t know. She can’t. She can’t.”

“Kanan –” Hera began uncertainly. The helpless grief on his face was utterly unfamiliar. Hera had seen it before on Alliance soldiers who had seen too much combat, Imperial deserters who had finally hit their breaking point, freed prisoners finally seeing the outside of an Imperial prison – but not on Kanan.

The door slid open behind her. The other Hera came past her in a rush, putting her arms around Kanan as he buried his face in her shoulder. After a moment he raised his head and looked at her, anguished; she cupped her hands around his face and tipped her forehead against his, murmuring to him.

Hera got to her feet, fighting down her wave of irrational hurt. “Can I use your comm unit?” she asked quietly, not wanting to disturb them.

“There’s one in my room,” the other Hera said without looking up. Kanan’s hands came up to grip her upper arms, tears streaming silently down his face.

Hera slipped out of the cockpit.

Later she sat by the comm unit in the other Hera’s cabin – her cabin – with her head tipped back against the wall. She was balancing her holoprojector on her knee, looking at the old hologram of Kanan.

He should have been here.

Hera sighed and dragged her gaze out of the past, looking around the room. It was scrupulously neat, with uniforms hung on a hook on the wall. Unlike Hera’s own cabin, there were no Twi’leki designs painted on the walls; the only real sign of personality was a discarded silk robe draped over the back of a chair. Hera recognized it; her Kanan had given her the same one the year after they had met.

The comm unit beeped. Hera leaned over to read the transmission, then sent back the correct code. There was a chance this wouldn’t work – but the response came almost immediately. Hera noted the coordinates and got up.

She found the other Hera alone in the cockpit, her head in her hands. She looked up as Hera came in, tear streaks on her face. “What?”

“Can you go to these coordinates?”

“Yeah.” She sat back as Hera leaned over her to input them in the navicomputer. “Kanan said you wanted to meet with someone else while you were here. Is it –”

“It’s probably better if I take the Phantom,” Hera said. “I don’t think it will take long.”

The other woman looked like she was too tired to argue. “Take Chopper with you.” She glanced at the coordinates. “I’ll let you know when we’re there.”

Hera didn’t want to push her. She started to leave, but the girl said suddenly, “He thought I didn’t know.”

Hera stopped, then went back to her.

“He was so badly hurt,” the girl whispered. “And I did notice when Cado found out about him being with me. And I saw him with that – that Pau’an. He doesn’t know I saw them.” She looked at her hands, helpless. “How could he think I didn’t know?”

Hera put a hand on her shoulder. For a moment the other woman resisted, then her face crumpled and she leaned forward, crying silently as Hera took her in her arms.

They came out of hyperspace in an unoccupied system. The star was a distant gleam just visible through the Phantom’s viewport, with a handful of planets unable to support life doing their slow dance around it. The other ship in the system was too far away to make out with the naked eye, its running lights blending in with the star field behind it.

“Detaching now,” Hera said, hitting the control on the dash.

“Acknowledged.” The other Hera’s voice was clear and calm, as if having something to do was helping her grief. Hera suspected it did. “We’ll be here waiting, Phantom.”

Hera gripped the control yoke and eased the Phantom forward out of the dock. It gave her an uneasy feeling of déjà vu; she had forgotten that it would be the original Phantom and not the Phantom II until she had walked onboard.

Chopper muttering to himself was a familiar background sound as she brought the Phantom out of the Ghost’s dock and set her course for the ship showing up on her nav console. She flew by instrument until she was close enough to see it through the viewport, then transmitted the code she had been given. A voice on the other end of the comm, fuzzy with encryption, told her what to do.

The corvette’s dock was only meant for speeders and skiffs, not a shuttle the size of the Phantom. Hera docked at the airlock she was instructed to and shut down the Phantom except for the magnetic clamp. She was met at the airlock by three crewmembers in familiar blue-and-gray uniforms; the female crewperson patted her down and came up with Hera’s holoprojector and the datacard with the Stardust file on it. After inspecting both, she handed them back to Hera. Chopper got scanned by another crewmember and complained the whole time.

They led Hera and Chopper through the familiar corridors of the corvette to a room that she knew very well. It was something she had expected but wasn’t prepared for, aware of places where there should have been dents or repairs made that were still spotless, or, in one case, where a hatch had been entirely replaced in her own time. The man sitting behind the table in the room stood up as she entered, and Hera fought back another wave of disorienting grief. She hadn’t known him well, hadn’t met him more than a handful of times, but she had known him.

“Senator Organa,” she said, resisting the urge to salute. “Thank you for seeing me. I’m Hera Syndulla.”

“A relative of Cham Syndulla, I presume?” he said. “Not the missing daughter.”

“Actually,” Hera said, “the answer to that is a little complicated. I am Hera Syndulla, but I’m not that Hera Syndulla. I’m from an alternate timeline, some years from now.”

Bail Organa’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a rather bold claim.”

“I have a message that might convince you,” Hera said. She took the holoprojector out of her pocket and slid it down the table towards him; she had switched out the datadisk inside before coming over.

Senator Organa took the holoprojector, inspected it briefly, and then set it back down on the table before activating it.

Leia Organa’s image sprang up between them. “Hello, Father,” she said. “If you’re seeing this, it’s because General Syndulla was able to reach you. I wish I could have come myself, but the method we used made that impossible. I know that what General Syndulla has told you will seem very unlikely, but I swear to you that it’s the truth. Please help her for the good of the Rebellion.” Leia’s voice and expression had been calm through all of this, but for an instant that cracked, and she added, “Father – Mother – I miss you,” in a voice that trembled a little. “There are some other holos on this datadisk. I don’t know if you’ll want to watch them or not, but they’re for you, both of you.” She took a deep breath. “I love you.”

Senator Organa paused the holo as it began to repeat. He looked at Hera through Leia’s transparent image as Hera tried to remember how old Leia would be now. Ten or eleven, she thought.

“General Syndulla?” he said.

“Of the Alliance to Restore the Republic,” Hera said. “Or the Rebel Alliance, as it’s more commonly known. The vote on the ratification of the New Republic will be held within a week, in my time. Emperor Palpatine has been dead for almost a year.” She met Senator Organa’s gaze and added, “Luke Skywalker was the one who sent me here.”

Senator Organa’s reaction was so slight that if Hera hadn’t been looking for it, she would have missed it.

“I assume I was executed by the Empire for treason,” he said.

“After a manner of speaking,” Hera said. She took the datacard out of her pocket and laid it on the table. “I don’t need your help. I was able to accomplish my mission with – um – local aid. But these are the plans that the Empire in my timeline to destroy Alderaan, a battle station called the Death Star.”

“To destroy –” He went as pale as his complexion allowed, which, like Kanan’s, wasn’t very.

“I think it won’t happen here,” Hera said.

“Leia,” Senator Organa said, his gaze on the hologram. “She was offworld?”

“Yes.” Unless he asked, Hera wasn’t going to tell him that she had been onboard the Death Star when Alderaan had been destroyed.

“I’m glad.” His voice was low, distracted. He looked at her suddenly. “Do you know what else is on this disk?”

Hera shook her head, though she could guess. If she had had any idea that there was a possibility of seeing her mother here, she would have brought more holos too.

Senator Organa activated the holoprojector again, switching it to the next hologram. In it, Leia sat at this same table in the other version of the Tantive IV, holding her young son in her lap. She looked a little tired, but then again not only were they still in the midst of the war but she had an infant only a few months old. Hera remembered how those days had been for her, though not terribly well since she had spent the entire time sleep-deprived.

“Hello, Father, Mother,” Leia said. “If you’re seeing this, then either you believe Hera or you’re looking for evidence one way or another. This isn’t meant to be evidence, but maybe it will be.” She swallowed. “Hera has probably told you what happened to Alderaan – what happened to you. I know that you can stop what’s coming and that your daughter will never have to feel the way I do.” She stopped as her son made a gurgling sound and waved one chubby fist; he was clutching a soft stuffed model of the Millennium Falcon in it that Chewbacca had made for him.

Leia lifted him up so that he faced the holoprojector. “Ben, can you say hello to Grandpapa and Grandmama?”

Senator Organa made a low, stunned sound; he looked like he had been poleaxed. Ben waved the Millennium Falcon vaguely in the direction of the holoprojector with Leia’s help, then she settled him back in her lap. “I wanted you to see some things,” Leia said. “I thought – Ben will have them when he’s older. But I wanted you to see them too, because my parents never had the chance.” She smiled, a little shaky. “I love you, Papa, Mama, and I miss you. I wish you were here.”

Senator Organa put his hand down on the holoprojector, pausing it. “Can you wait?” he asked Hera, sounding like he was suddenly having a hard time breathing. “I’ll have refreshments sent up.”

“I can wait as long as you need,” Hera said. She hesitated, then said, “I – can take something back. If you want.”

He nodded distractedly and left the room without saying anything else. Hera sat down in one of the empty chairs at the table and looked at Chopper. “That could have gone worse.”

He told her that it still could, sounding so exactly like her own Chopper that for a few moments Hera could have been back on the Tantive IV in her own timeline, waiting for Leia to finish feeding her infant son before she joined Hera for the most recent reports from the front. It was more reassuring than she had expected, after so much disconcerting half-familiarity, and it let her relax, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders. These wasn’t her Rebel Alliance, not yet, but at least these were her own people.

Kanan was sunk so deep in meditation that the world had frayed apart at the edges, leaving him with only the breathtaking clarity of the Force. He didn’t like going that deep; it had left him uneasy even when he had been a child back in the safety and security of the Jedi Temple. At the moment he wanted that clarity; nothing had been clear to him since he had gone to the Crucible, except at those times when the drugs the Inquisition sometimes used had sent him this deep into the Force. He hadn’t liked what he had seen then.

He could sense Hera sitting in the cockpit, fiddling listlessly with her datapad. Her grief stained the Force; Kanan fought down the urge to go to her and let himself sink deeper into the Force instead. Emotion bled away; he was aware of his tie to the Hunter stretching out from him, connecting him to the other Inquisitor. He didn’t know how to break that bond save by killing the Hunter, and he didn’t know if he could do that without dying himself; the Hunter had bound them together so tightly that back at the Crucible, they had breathed in unison, heartbeats matching each other; he had turned his head and Kanan had done the same without even thinking about it. Kanan hadn’t had to speak to him by the end; the Hunter already knew what he was going to say.

He sank further into the Force; if he lingered too long at this level the Hunter might well sense his attention and yank on that tie like Kanan was an anooba on a leash. Kanan didn’t want to deal with that until he absolutely had to.

The Jedi taught that they were the Force. Kanan felt it now; his physical body was a fading memory, the old agony of injuries nothing more than a shimmer someone else had felt. They weren’t just his injuries, either; he felt a lightsaber burn slash across his eyes, a vibroblade take off his hand at the wrist, flames roar up around him. He was back in his body now, but not his own body. He opened his eyes, but saw nothing but darkness. Shut them again, and was alone with the Force.

No, not alone.

Somewhere in the dark, a wolf howled.

Hera returned to the Ghost feeling more exhausted than the excursion should have left her. She was carrying a shoulder bag with a small box in it; she hadn’t asked what was in the box and Bail Organa hadn’t offered that information.

Kanan met her at the foot of the ladder in the common room. “Did you get what you needed?” he asked.

“I think so,” Hera said. She frowned at him; he looked tired, but also somehow triumphant, and there was something uneasily familiar about it that she couldn’t identify.

His Hera was standing near the door; she knelt down to smile at Chopper as Hera stepped out of the way so that he could descend. He rolled over to her and began a diatribe about how rude the senator’s people had been. They hadn’t been; he just didn’t like being scanned.

Kanan bit his lip, then said carefully, “Hera – I think I can get Kanan, your Kanan. Do you want me to try?”

Chapter Text

Hera had fainted.

She had never done such a thing before, and when she came back to herself a few moments later Kanan and the other Hera were both crouched worriedly in front of her; Kanan must have caught her so that she didn’t hit her head going down.

She was sitting now, with Kanan on the bench beside her and the other Hera leaning anxiously on the holotable. Chopper lingered nearby, either out of concern or curiosity; Hera had gotten the impression that he still wasn’t certain what he thought of her.

“It has to do with the way the Force perceives time and space,” Kanan said, then hesitated. “No, that’s not right; the Force doesn’t perceive anything, the Force just is. There’s not – there isn’t a really good way to explain it in Basic, but I’ll try.” He took a deep breath. His voice was low and earnest; he was speaking a little quickly, as if he thought he had to convince Hera before she fled.

He didn’t have to worry about that. She didn’t think she could have moved if her life depended on it. “Kanan,” she whispered.

He flicked a quick glance at her to determine if she was talking to him or not, then went on. “At the deepest levels of the Force, everything’s – not the same, but – but it’s like reflections in a mirror.” He grimaced. “That’s not right either.” He shaped empty space with his hands. “I started thinking about it when you told us how you were able to come here and that you could only come somewhere where Hera – a Hera – was already. As far as the Force is concerned, you’re the same, but you’re not the same. It’s why I thought you were her when I first met you. I can tell you apart now, but it does take a moment if I’m not paying attention.

“The Force doesn’t really see time, either. It does – but it also doesn’t. If you’re strong in the Force you can sense things that have happened a long time ago, but you can also sense things that haven’t happened yet. They – they ripple, is the best way to put it. It’s another aspect of our precognition, but it’s not quite the same thing.” He took her hands in his.

Clean-shaven, with his hair cropped short, and with those familiar eyes, he looked very like Kanan had in the instants before his death. Younger, with scars flecking his jaw and cheeks rather than slashing across his eyes, but as he had said – the same but not the same.

“I think I understand what happened when you came here,” he said, “and I think I can do the same thing for him.”

“Luke had that – artifact,” Hera said shakily. “You don’t have that.”

He shook his head. “If it’s a Jedi artifact, then it won’t do anything that one of us can’t do on our own. It probably makes it easier and it might make it possible for someone who isn’t as strong in the Force to do it, but all Jedi use artifacts for is to enhance natural ability. Other Force traditions are different; they manipulate the Force in ways that aren’t natural, but Jedi don’t do that. It will be more difficult for me, and if I understand it correctly, I don’t think I would be able to manage it if you weren’t here and if I wasn’t looking for him, because he’s – well, he’s me.”

“Why me?” Hera asked in a whisper.

“You and Hera –” He nodded at the other Hera, who had been silent throughout the conversation but was listening closely, “– resonate at different frequencies, to put it one way. That’s how I can tell you apart.”

“If you’re paying attention,” the girl said, a little dry.

Kanan grinned suddenly, brilliant and just for her; Hera looked away. Her heart was pounding; she could hear her breath rasping out in a shallow flutter, leaving her slightly dizzy.

“If I’m paying attention,” Kanan agreed. “I think – if I’m right – that he resonates at the same frequency that you do, because you’re both from the same universe. It means I should be able to find him without having to sort through infinite possibilities, which I don’t think I could do.” His hands flexed briefly against hers, and he went on, “Those possibilities are out there – I’m aware of them if I go deep enough in the Force. We’re taught not to; it’s too dangerous for us. You can get lost in the Force.”

“Is this dangerous?” Hera made herself ask.

He nodded. “Yes. Mostly to me, though.”

“Mostly?”

“It could kill me. It could kill him. It probably won’t hurt either of you, but it might – I just don’t know.”

Hera swallowed. “When he – when he died,” she said, the words sticking in her throat, “if he had – had stopped what he was doing, then the rest of us might have been killed. Wouldn’t you – taking him out of that moment?”

He nodded.

“If you do that, won’t it have an effect in my timeline?” She looked down at her hands, which he was still holding, and tried to imagine just blinking out of existence.

“I don’t think so,” Kanan said hesitantly. “I don’t think the Force would allow that to happen. I don’t know, but – if that’s the case I think I’ll probably just get a headache and nothing will happen. There isn’t any way to know for sure.”

“I understand,” Hera said.

“Do you want me to try?”

“Yes,” Hera said, small-voiced, before she could think too hard about it. “Yes, please try.”

“How likely is it that doing this will kill you?” Hera said later, her voice very quiet in the still dark of his cabin.

“I don’t know.” Kanan wrapped an arm around her bare shoulders, letting himself relax into the tangle of skin-warmed sheets around them.

“I feel sorry for her,” Hera went on, “but I don’t want to trade you for him.”

Even if that might be a better bargain? Kanan thought, but didn’t say the words out loud. He pressed a kiss to Hera’s forehead instead and said, “I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“But it’s a possibility.”

“Most things are possibilities.”

She pushed herself up on one elbow and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Stop that. I’m being serious.”

Kanan grinned at her, running his hand down to her hip, not wanting to make love again so much as he wanted to reassure himself of her presence. “So am I. Yes, it could kill me, but I don’t think the chance is very high. It’s more likely that nothing will happen.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“No.” He stroked his thumb over her hip and said, “But I have to do this.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.” He reached up with his other hand to cup her face against his palm and said, “If you were in her place, I would want someone else to do it for you.”

“I’m not, though,” Hera said, small-voiced. “I know you think he’s worth more than you because he’s a Jedi Knight and you’re –”

“An Inquisitor,” Kanan finished for her when she hesitated.

“– but that isn’t true. And I know – what happened to you –”

Kanan let his hand fall and turned his face away.

Hera leaned down over him, lekku falling over her shoulders. “Love, it’s not your fault. Things just…went differently there.”

“I’m not trying to trade myself for him,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. But I have to try.”

Hera kissed him, her mouth hard and desperate against his. “Promise me,” she said between kisses. “Promise me that you won’t –”

“I promise,” Kanan said. He rolled them over as Hera wrapped her arms and legs around him, and then both of them stopped talking.

Hera couldn’t sit still. She hadn’t slept well the night before and when she had slept, she had had disquieting dreams, flashes of the Battle at Scarif mixed with what had happened on Lothal. She could tell that neither Kanan nor the younger Hera were sleeping either – at least not for several hours – which didn’t help her restlessness but oddly made her feel a little better. At least they had each other. In the early morning hours Hera finally got up and went to go play dejarik with Chopper, who had apparently decided he liked her or at least tolerated her.

What if he dies? she thought, moving a piece that Chopper immediately countered. They were on their sixth iteration of the game. What if he dies? I can’t do that to her.

There was something brittle about the girl that made Hera’s heart ache, as if she might shatter if pressure was applied the wrong way. From the little she had said about the last six years of her life, Hera couldn’t be surprised by any of it, but she hated the idea of hurting her at all. She was a sweet girl, if harder-edged than Hera was comfortable with; Hera liked her but didn’t want her life.

Chopper made a questioning noise.

“I’m all right,” Hera told him wearily. “I’m just tired.”

He rolled away as Hera stared at the board, not really seeing it. The fear that she didn’t want to think about too hard was that it would work, and she wouldn’t want Kanan anymore. It had been six years. The war had been fought and mostly won in the interim. Ezra was gone. There was Jacen –

Chopper came back into the room holding a mug of caf. Hera smiled thanks at him, and took it, wrapping her hands around the warm ceramic. It was a little reassuring that Chopper here was more or less the same; it helped being treated normally instead of something strange and alien.

I hope it works, she thought, sick to her stomach. I hope I still want him. I hope he still wants me. I hope it works. Please, please, let it work.

Kanan and the other Hera joined her later in the morning. Hera could tell that the other woman was upset, though the girl was trying very hard not to show it; she stayed near her partner, her gaze flicking towards him every so often as though to make certain he was still with her. Kanan was focused in a way that made Hera vaguely uneasy, all of his attention narrowed down to a single goal and everything else left secondary to that. Hera had seen her Kanan like that before, very rarely; Ezra had told her that he had been like that the morning of his death. He had known it was coming – if not that, then something.

“Do we need to go to Lothal?” Hera asked him as they were clearing breakfast away.

Kanan looked up at her, his gaze a little unfocused. “Lothal?”

“It’s where Kanan was when he – when he died.” She still hated to say it. She couldn’t remember if the fuel depot was already in Capital City – it would be easier for them if it wasn’t, she supposed. What would be on Lothal right now, if they went?

Ezra, she thought with a pang. Ezra would be there.

“We had to,” she went on. “It’s why I came, and not someone else. No one else with clearance for this op still had access to where they would have been ten to fifteen years ago.”

Kanan bit his lip in thought, running a hand back over his short-cropped hair. “I don’t think so,” he said eventually. “I think the reason you had to was because you weren’t aiming for anything specific, so you had to narrow down all the other possibilities as much as you could. It’s why – oh – you didn’t end up in a timeline where you never left Ryloth, or where you were flying a ship other than the Ghost.” He shot a sideways grin at his Hera. “Or where Hera was still in the Academy.”

She made a face at him.

Hera frowned a little. “But Hera wasn’t onboard when I got here. Or were you?” she asked the other woman. “I heard the hatch open while I was in the cockpit –”

“I was just outside,” she said. “I was talking to Chopper –”

Kanan shrugged. “It’s the Force. It’s not always exact. Besides, if she had been in the room when you – um – arrived, she probably would have shot you.”

The other Hera shrugged, unrepentant.

Hera hadn’t seen the other woman shoot, but she had seen Kallus shoot, and presumably she was at least as good a shot as him after years as an ISB field agent. She wasn’t sure she would have survived the experience. “So we don’t need to go to Lothal because you already know who you’re aiming for.”

“Yeah. I think. We can try that next if it doesn’t work.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Let me get some water first.”

Hera sat heavily down as he went to the sink. The other Hera followed him, putting a hand on his back as she spoke to him. Her voice was too low for Hera to make out any words, but she could guess what she was saying. After a moment, Kanan turned towards her and they embraced.

Hera looked down at her hands. She only looked up again when Kanan and the other Hera came back to her. “Is there anything I should know that you haven’t told us yet?” he asked her.

“There was an explosion –” Hera said haltingly, fighting back memories. “He was on top of a fuel depot –”

The other Hera went pale. Kanan just bit his lip, then said, “Let’s do this down in the hold.”

In case the fire comes with him? Hera wondered, but got up to follow them down the ladder anyway. Kanan paused to a lay a hand briefly on Chopper’s dome as the droid started to join them; the other Hera knelt down to speak to him. In the end he stayed up in the cockpit, probably in case they needed someone to open doors or turn on the Ghost’s sprinkler system.

The hold was almost empty except for a single crate and two speeder bikes racked against the far wall. Kanan sat down cross-legged in the exact center of the floor. His Hera went over to him, bending down to press a kiss to his lips before she retreated a little ways away. Hera wrapped her arms around herself, shivering.

For a long time nothing happened. Kanan sat there with his eyes closed, his hands upturned on his knees. The other Hera shifted nervously from foot to foot, not looking away from her lover. Hera didn’t move, just stayed where she was, watching him. Once she glanced up to see Chopper peering anxiously down through the cockpit hatch, and couldn’t stop herself from smiling a little, though the expression fell away an instant later.

It’s not going to work, she thought, dismayed. It’s not going to –

She saw the other Hera look up suddenly, her eyes wide. Hera’s lekku prickled, her whole body bracing as if to fight or flee as a thin scrim of frost suddenly crackled out from where Kanan was sitting, spreading across the durasteel floor and up the walls as the temperature in the hold dropped. Her stomach turned over.

“Kanan,” the other Hera whispered.

A blast of heat melted the ice. Hera staggered backwards, slipping on the suddenly slick deck as she threw an arm up to protect her eyes at the flames that roared out of thin air, heat licking at her skin.

Then all at once it was gone.

Hera lowered her arm warily, thinking at first she was seeing double. Then she flung herself down onto the deck, barely aware of the superheated metal burning through her trousers as she dragged Kanan into her lap.

He blinked at her, recognition briefly showing in his eyes before all the color bled out of them to leave them their familiar white. He whispered, “Hera –”

The other Hera screamed.

Hera and Kanan both jerked upright. Hera saw complete bafflement cross Kanan’s face before she registered what she was seeing.

The other Kanan was seizing, his body writhing on the floor. The younger Hera was trying to get to him, but every time she tried an invisible hand seemed to shove her away. She looked up at Hera and Kanan, panic in her eyes as she gasped, “Help me!”

Kanan scrambled to his feet, leaning heavily on Hera as she put her shoulder his. She felt pressure pushing against her before they took more than a few steps, but Kanan batted it aside with an open hand. He fell to his knees just behind the other Kanan, taking the younger man’s head between his palms as he bent their foreheads together. His lips moved silently; after a moment the other Kanan’s thrashing slowed, then stopped. His lips began to move too, in unison with Kanan’s.

It felt like a long time before he opened his eyes again.

He blinked up at Kanan, the two faces so like each other that it made Hera’s heart hurt, and then said, the words slurring together, “I thought you had a beard.”

Kanan sat back on his heels as the other Hera flung herself on her Kanan. “I shaved,” he said.

He turned his face up to Hera as she sank down beside him, barely able to believe that he was really there. She reached for him, her hands shaking, and laid her hands alongside his face. His skin was warm; she felt him move as he breathed, a living man.

“You’re here,” she whispered. “You’re really here.”

Kanan reached up to put one hand over hers, then cupped her cheek in the other. Hera could feel his pulse in his wrist. “I’m here,” he said.

“You’re here,” Hera said again. She couldn’t stop looking at him.

He nodded.

Hera leaned in, shaking so badly that her teeth were chattering together, and kissed him.

Kanan kissed her back, warm and familiar and very alive. He smelled strongly of charring, of burning fuel, but Hera couldn’t bring herself to care. She just kept kissing him.

When they finally drew apart, foreheads tipped together, Hera said, “I love you.” She didn’t want to wait on that, not for an instant.

Kanan’s mouth quirked in a smile. “I love you too.” He cocked his head a little, considering the other Kanan and Hera, who were clinging to each other, then turned his attention back to Hera. “I’m getting the impression I missed something.”

Hera leaned her forehead against his. “Love, you have no idea.”

“Six years,” Kanan said. He looked a little pale, for which Hera couldn’t blame him. “That was –”

“If you’re going to say ‘rash and reckless,’ can we just move onto the next part of this conversation?” she said. “I’m not going to put you back.”

They were sitting together at the table in what should have been Sabine’s cabin, knee to knee because Hera couldn’t bear to be parted from him for more than few moments. Kanan had showered and changed into something borrowed from the younger Kanan, who apparently did own clothes which weren’t black.

“For one thing,” she went on, “I don’t think I can, and even if we could, I don’t think Hera – the other Hera – would let her Kanan try.”

Kanan smiled at her. “No, that’s not – it’s done.” He kissed her, and Hera smiled up at him, so giddy that she could barely think. “What did I miss?” he asked her as they drew apart.

She took a breath. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“What is there more of?”

“Good news.”

“Give me the bad news, then.”

Hera took another deep breath, steadying herself, and said, “Ezra is gone.”

Kanan put his head in his hands.

“When?” he said eventually, not looking up. “How long ago?”

“Six years,” Hera said, putting a hand on his back. “It was just after you, back on Lothal.”

Kanan cursed softly.

“For what it’s worth,” she went on, “we don’t think he’s dead. But there’s no way to know.”

Kanan raised his head. “What do you mean?”

It took her a few minutes to explain about Grand Admiral Thrawn and the purrgil, which to her mild dismay didn’t sound any more believable now than it had giving that report to Mon Mothma and General Madine once they had finally been able to return to Yavin IV all those years ago. Kanan listened to this in silence, his expression unreadable, and then said, “You didn’t go after him?”

Hera ran her hands over her face. “We were going to, but the situation with the war got very bad very fast, and we couldn’t get away. Believe me, Kanan, if I could –” She trailed off, aware that this was reaching the stage of more an excuse than an explanation. “Everyone else is alive – of our people, I mean. Sabine is back on Lothal right now, Zeb and Kallus and Rex are with the Rebel fleet – the Alliance fleet.”

“What’s the good news?”

Hera smiled a little. “Emperor Palpatine is dead.” As his eyes widened, she went on, “So is Darth Vader, and Moff Tarkin.” This last was such old news that she had almost forgotten about it, but Kanan wouldn’t have known.

“The war –”

“The Alliance has taken Coruscant. The Council is supposed to vote on and ratify the constitution in the next few days, and then we’ll have a republic again.” She shrugged. “There are still a dozen warlords with significant power running around – generals, admirals, moffs, sector governors – the old head of Imperial Intelligence held Coruscant for a while, but Wedge Antilles and his current command chased her off. It’s a mess, but we’re winning. Slowly.”

“That is good news.”

Hera swallowed, a little nervously, and went on, “And – there’s some other news.”

As Kanan raised his eyebrows, she said, “You have a son.” Before he had a chance to respond, she said quickly, “His name is Jacen. He’s five, he – he likes animals and flying, and he –”

Kanan caught a hand around the back of her head and kissed her. Hera kissed him back, smiling giddily against his mouth.

“Jacen?” Kanan whispered.

She nodded. “Jacen Syndulla. He looks like you –” She started to reach for her holoprojector, then remembered it wouldn’t matter. “– mostly human, I mean, at least just to look at. No lekku. He must have gotten his hair from me – green, I mean, and his ears are starting to point like a Twi’lek’s. They’re green too. He’s on Ryloth with my father right now, probably having to be hauled out of the blurrg pens every few hours –”

Kanan kissed her again. “I love you,” he said softly.

Hera smiled at him, fighting back tears, and said, “I can’t wait for you to meet him, love.”

“Neither can I.” He ran a thumb over her cheek, smiling at her, then kissed her again.

Hera put her arms around him and kissed him back. They went on kissing, both of them wrapped around each other in a way that might have led to Hera getting laid for the first time in years if she hadn’t finally drawn back, breathing hard.

He grinned at her. Hera brushed another quick kiss over his lips, then said, “Later, love. I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” He sat back to pull at his rumpled shirt, saying, “What about the kids?”

Hera sighed, doing up her askew collar. She knew who he meant without having to ask for clarification. “They’re very young,” she said, which immediately made her feel like a crone. “She’s thirteen years younger than me. He’s – I’m not even sure you know how old you are, love.”

Kanan shrugged. After the Jedi Purge, Hera knew, he had spent years lying about his age, with the result that it was unclear which number was the truth and which was the convenient lie. “‘Young’ is the impression I got too, but I only had about five minutes to get there.”

“They are – they were, up until yesterday – Imperials,” Hera went on.

He raised his head, startled. “I didn’t sense that.”

“You should probably tell him that,” Hera said quietly. “It –” She hesitated over the words. “It wasn’t good for him there,” she said finally. “And he was hurt badly.”

Kanan nodded after a moment of thought. “And her?”

“She’s…brittle,” Hera said slowly. “She is, was, ISB – after getting kidnapped from her family at the age of fourteen, and tortured into agreeing to go the Academy. She’s a sweet girl, and she loves him, but –” She shook her head. “I’m glad I’m not her.” She leaned against Kanan’s shoulder, listening to his heartbeat and reassured by the warm solidity of him. “I’m glad you’re not him.”

Kanan was silent briefly, maybe thinking over what it was he had sensed from the other Kanan in those moments of connection, and then said, “So am I.” He put his arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Tell me about our son,” he said quietly. “What’s he like? What was his first word?”

Hera smiled up at him. “Lolf,” he said, and when he raised his eyebrows, clarified, “He couldn’t say ‘Loth-wolf’ at first. They always lurk around whenever we’re on Lothal. They seem to like him, and he certainly likes them. Loth-cats too. I keep having to chase them out of the Ghost.”

Kanan smiled.

Hera left the room a little later to get them both something to eat. Kanan was visibly fading; Hera had to force herself to remember that as far as he was concerned this was a continuation of an already-long day that had culminated in the explosion at the fuel depot. Two long days, actually; he had told her he hadn’t slept since before her failed assault on Lothal. For Hera that had been more than six years ago; for him, only hours. He was probably dealing with the transition better than she would have under the same circumstances.

Hera had debriefed former Imperial prisoners of war who had spent years in work camps or locked up in the bowels of shadow prisons like the Spire on Stygeon Prime. It wasn’t one of her regular duties, but it was one she had performed often enough to have a feel for it. For some of them, coming back to the Alliance – if they had been rebels in the first place – or returning to their homeworlds, to their friends and families, was like traveling through time. One woman had described it to Hera as having been stuck in carbonite and coming out to find that the world had moved on without her – she had returned to Corellia to find that her wife had remarried and her children barely remembered her. Ryder Azadi had told her once that time moved oddly inside prison, like molasses, either too quickly and in great glops, or so slowly that a day seemed to last years. She actually knew a few people who had been in carbonite, Han Solo among them, and she supposed that was the best parallel to Kanan’s situation. Maybe he could talk to Han.

Hera considered that for a few minutes, then grimaced. She wasn’t certain that Kanan would get along with Han.

She found the younger Kanan sitting in the galley with a mug of tea in front of him and a coldpack pressed to his head. He glanced up as she came in. “How is he?”

“How would you be?” Hera said.

She had meant it rhetorically, but under the circumstances he took it seriously and said, “Confused.”

Hera rubbed a hand over her forehead, but couldn’t disagree. “How are you doing?” she asked instead.

He gestured at the coldpack. “Wishing that I didn’t process painkillers too fast for them to be worth it. I was lying down for a while, but –” He shrugged, then winced. “I don’t like being alone in the dark either, especially not right now. It’s the same reason I don’t want to take any of the heavy-duty painkillers we have onboard. And it seems like a waste to use them on this when we don’t know if we’ll be able to get more.”

For whatever reason, Force-users processed drugs more quickly than other members of their species, or at least Hera assumed that was true for nonhumans as well as humans, as most of the Force-users she had encountered were human and the subject had never come up with Ahsoka.

“I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly, then realized that there was one very important thing she hadn’t told him yet. “Thank you.”

He glanced up at her. His eyes were gentle, despite the way he was wincing a little in pain. “You’re welcome,” he said. For a moment Hera thought he was going to say something else, but all he did was shift the coldpack’s position. “Are you looking for something?”

“Is there something in here we can eat?”

“Take anything but Hera’s meiloorun,” he said, considered that statement, and then said, “Sorry.”

Hera smiled. “It’s all right. I know what you mean.” As she crossed the room to inspect the contents of the coldbox and cupboards, she asked, “Where is she?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then he said, “She’s in the cockpit, calling her parents.”

Hera stilled with her hand on a bottle of jogan juice. Mama, she thought with a pang, then pushed that aside with what felt like a titanic amount of willpower. “That must be difficult for her,” she said instead.

“Yes,” he said.

Hera finished compiling a scratch meal and loaded it onto a tray. She wasn’t certain that Kanan would still be awake to eat it when she got back to the cabin, but if he was, it would probably be better than anything he had tasted in month, since food had been scarce when they had been on Lothal.

“Can you pass me another coldpack?” he asked.

Hera fetched one out of the coldbox and handed it to him, then collected her tray. “Thank you,” she said again, and left the room before he could respond.

Kanan was, as she had expected, asleep, slumped over on the bench with his head against the wall. Hera watched him for a few moments, startled by the wave of tenderness that rose up at the sight of him, and squeezed back tears, because he looked so much like Jacen when her son had fallen asleep after playing too hard that it hurt.

She set the tray down on the table and roused him. Kanan came awake instantly, the way he always did, though this time there was blurry incomprehension on his face.

“There’s food if you want it,” Hera told him. “Or if you’d rather sleep –”

“I’ll sleep,” he said, the words slurring together a little, his Coruscanti accent coming out the way it did only when he was very tired or in a great deal of pain. It halted Hera for a moment, because the last time she had heard it had been from the other Kanan.

“At least take your boots off and get into bed, then,” Hera said, to cover up her confusion. She helped him up, reassured by his solidity, and helped him get his boots off. He caught an arm around her waist and drew her close for a quick kiss, leaning against the ladder leading up to the bunk.

“I love you,” he said, his voice low and serious.

“I love you too,” Hera said softly. “I missed you.”

Chapter Text

“I’ve changed my mind,” Hera said, her voice so small that she could hardly hear herself. “I don’t want to do this. We should fly off and be pirates instead.”

Her hands were shaking so badly on the control yoke that the Ghost was in danger of beginning to wobble. After a moment’s hesitation, she glanced at Kanan to make sure that he had his hands on the co-pilot’s controls, then took her hands off the yoke and fisted them in her lap. She knew Kanan. He would be able to fly straight even with the galaxy crumbling around him, which at the moment Hera felt it was. She could usually fly no matter what; apparently this was the exception to that rule.

The steadily growing shapes that hung in space before them weren’t the Free Ryloth fleet. It was the Syndulla family yacht, the Syndulla’s Gamble, and her aunt Sinthya’s ship the Sandfly, the latter standing a little off the from the Gamble so as to have a better firing solution on the approaching Ghost. She wondered if that had been her father’s idea or her aunt (actually her mother’s cousin) Sinthya’s.

The comm unit on the dashboard crackled expectantly. Hera stared at it, half-expecting it to spit at her.

“I don’t think they’ll want to listen to me,” Kanan said apologetically. He spoke Twi’leki fluently, but had the strongest Coruscant accent in it that Hera had ever heard.

Hera supposed that she could get up and go and fetch the other Hera out of her cabin, but that wasn’t exactly a solution. Wincing, she reached for the comm. “This is Ghost.”

She didn’t recognize the voice that responded, though she suspected it was a cousin of some sort. “This is Syndulla’s Gamble, Ghost. We’re prepared for you to dock at our port airlock. Is that acceptable for your vessel?”

Hera swallowed. “Yes, that’s acceptable. We’ll dock shortly.”

“Acknowledged.”

She ran through a mental registry of which relative that could possibly have been and came up short, mostly through her own faulty memory of her extended family. There were a lot of people who had been lost at the colony, too, and while she was vaguely aware that a few had made it back to the fleet she had absolutely no idea who they were. Besides her mother, of course. Agent Beneke had made sure that she had known that, even though he had kept everything else about Free Ryloth from her.

The Syndulla’s Gamble was twice again the size of the Ghost, a healthily-sized yacht that Hera’s great-grandfather had purchased new from a Corellian shipmaker. It grew steadily in the Ghost’s viewport as they approached; she stared at its half-familiar lines, her gaze marking out the places on the hull where armor plating had been put on or where carbon scoring marked laserfire sustained sometime in the recent past, not to mention the additional quadlasers that hadn’t been there seven years ago, the last time she had seen the Gamble. The changes gave her an odd feeling that she couldn’t quite identify. The ship was still elegant despite the extra weaponry, but…different.

“Do you want to take her in?” Kanan asked her quietly. “I can if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll do it,” Hera said shakily. She put her hands on the control yoke again, maneuvering the Ghost until the two ships’ airlocks matched. They were both Corellian, if not from the same manufacturer, so their airlocks were compatible; Hera didn’t have to worry about running a pressure tunnel between the two ships. She kept her gaze on the control panel until it signaled that the airlocks were locked together and that pressure and atmosphere between the two ships was stable.

“Better stay up here in case – just in case,” she told Chopper. She tried to get up without taking her safety straps off and was immediately jerked back down; Kanan quirked a worried eyebrow at her and Hera grimaced back, undoing the buckle. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Are you all right?”

“What convinced you?” Hera grumbled. She checked the set of her blaster in its holster just for the sake of having something to do with her hands, even though the chances of having to use it were low. Possible, depending on how this ended up going, but low.

Kanan put a hand on her wrist to stop her before they left the cockpit. Hera paused, looking up at him, and he dropped his head to kiss her briefly. “It will be all right,” he told her gently.

She put her arms around him and leaned her forehead against his shoulder, suddenly so tired it was hard to think. “I don’t want to do this,” she whispered to him. “I want my mother, but I don’t want to do this.”

And she wanted the other Hera to see her mother too, even if she didn’t know how to explain that to Kanan, or have any idea how she was going to explain it to Alecto Syndulla, for that matter. If her mother even wanted her. Despite the conversation she had had via comm call, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it, not after six years.

“I know,” Kanan said. “But we’re here.”

Hera nodded glumly. She let herself stay where she was for a few more moments, then pulled away from Kanan and wiped the back of her hand over her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but she could feel the beginnings of tears threatening to start.

Kanan pressed a kiss to her forehead. They left the cockpit together, heading towards the airlock and leaving Chopper to grumble behind them; he didn’t like being left behind. Hera braced herself as they approached the hatch; she was breathing shallowly, and she was holding onto Kanan’s hand so firmly it had to hurt him. He didn’t complain, just glanced at her to make sure she was all right.

Hera gave him a shaky smile before reaching for the hatch control. She had to fight the urge to shut her eyes as it slid open.

Her parents were on the other side.

Hera had had only the vaguest idea of what she was going to say when she saw them, but all of it went out of her head. She started to cry in near-silent gasping sobs.

Her mother was there before Kanan could do more than shift in reaction. She took Hera in her arms and pulled her close, murmuring, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right, I’m here, you’re here, it’s all right. We’ll be all right now.”

“Hera. Hera, baby, wake up.”

Hera woke with a start, wincing at the crook in her neck even before she had fully regained consciousness. She had fallen asleep at the table in her temporary cabin, reading through ISB files on a borrowed datapad. It was hard to tell how many of them would still be relevant to her present day and a few of them referred to programs that she was almost certain didn’t exist in her own time, but no information was ever wasted.

“I’m awake,” she said, almost slurring the words. She spoke in Twi’leki, responding in the same language she had been addressed in. “I’m –” She finally succeeded in raising her head from her folded arms and saw the woman leaning over her. “Mama?”

Alecto Syndulla smiled at her.

Hera scrambled to her feet and flung her arms around her mother’s neck. “Mama!”

Alecto took a staggered step back, but put her arms around Hera and hugged her back, then cupped her hands around Hera’s face and said, “Look at you!”

Hera beamed at her, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. Her brain caught up with the rest of her belatedly and she said, “You – you know I’m not her –”

“I know,” Alecto said calmly. “She explained. But I know my daughter.”

Hera hugged her again, overcome. “Mama, I – Mama –”

Kanan made a faintly interrogative inquiry from the bunk, sounding like he was still mostly asleep. Hera glanced up at him, feeling a wave of tenderness overwhelm her because he was here, he was here, and her mother was here, and she hadn’t thought she would have either ever again.

“Go back to sleep, love,” she told him. “It’s all right. I’ll introduce you later.”

Alecto drew her out of the cabin into the hallway, hugged her again, then held her at arm’s length as she looked Hera up and down. Hera held still, beaming at her, then fumbled her holoprojector out of her pocket.

“Mama – Mama, can I show you – this is my son, this is Jacen –”

Alecto wore the same poleaxed expression that Bail Organa had when he had seen Leia and her son, Hera was bemused to note. She could practically see the words but why does he have hair? floating behind her mother’s eyes, before Alecto flicked a quick glance at the cabin door and the sleeping human inside, and her expression softened. She put an arm around Hera’s shoulders and smiled.

“He looks like a good boy,” she said. “How old is he?”

“He’s five. He’ll be six in a few months. He’s on Ryloth with Daddy –” She stopped abruptly, her exhausted brain catching up with what she knew about the differences between her own universe and this one. “Daddy – Father – he didn’t leave Ryloth.”

For a moment her mother didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on the hologram. Hera let herself just look at her mother – a tall, handsome Twi’lek woman about her own height, her green skin a few shades darker than Hera’s own. There was a scar tracing its way from the edge of her cap to her jaw that Hera’s mother hadn’t had, and the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes were deeper than they had been. Like Hera’s mother, she had no caste markings on her lekku; Alecto Syndulla had been born a plebeian, not a patrician, and Cham Syndulla Tann Syndulla had married her for love.

“Mama,” she said, small-voiced. “You –” No, not her. Hera squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again and forced herself to say, “My mother died when I was thirteen, in the riots in Lessu. Father said an Imperial sniper shot her, when Moff Mors sent in stormtroopers to deal with the protests. I remember when Daddy and Uncle Themarsa brought her back to the townhouse, after – after.”

Alecto looked at her, her gaze sad, then reached up to pull down the shoulder of her shirt, revealing the puckered scar tissue from an old blaster wound.

Hera had helped her aunt Clotho wash her mother’s body afterwards, preparing her to lie in state as befit a curiate patrician, though they had never been able to hold the usual public ceremony since the Empire had locked down Lessu. The laser blast that had killed her mother had been only a few inches down and to the left of Alecto’s scar.

“Father sent me back to the villa with the cousins,” Hera went on. “He got very distant after that – he wasn’t at the villa often. That’s when he was forming Free Ryloth – I found that out later, when I was sixteen. We had a huge fight about it.”

Her mother looked up at her, her eyes hurt. “After I was hurt, Cham sent everyone away to the colony,” she said. “The Empire wiped it out a year later.”

Hera stared at her. “Is that it?” she said. “Is that – is that the difference? You – my mother – dying? Is that all it is? And – and this happened, just because – is that it?”

Alecto reached out and pulled her into an embrace. “Our lives are our own, baby,” she said gently. “We can’t make sense of the past any more than we can change it.”

But we can, Hera thought; Kanan was still asleep in the other room. Though she supposed that that wasn’t quite changing the past, just taking something out of it; her own life wouldn’t be changed at all when she returned to her timeline. Unless they had all miscalculated, and reaching back to take Kanan out of that moment had had a ripple effect forwards, one that she hadn’t realized yet because she wasn’t there –

She shuddered.

Her mother mistook it and hugged her again. “It’s all right, baby,” she said. She cupped a hand around Hera’s face and smiled at her. “I’m glad I got to meet you. Tell me about yourself – about your life, and your boy. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-three,” Hera said. She faltered for a moment, because she wasn’t more than ten years younger than her mother had been when she had died, but went on, “I’m thirty-three, and I’m a general in the Rebel Alliance – it might be the New Republic Navy now, if the council has already ratified the constitution.”

She smiled at her mother’s soft exclamation, and gave a brief overview of her life since the age of thirteen. She glossed over Kanan’s death, since that was a little more explanation than she wanted to give at the moment, though when she mentioned him her mother said tentatively, “He’s your son’s father?”

“Yes,” Hera said.

“He seems like a nice young man,” her mother said, which puzzled Hera for a moment until she realized that Alecto probably meant the other Kanan.

“Well, I think so,” Hera said.

Her mother put an arm around her shoulders and said, “Let’s go see your father.”

“He’s not –” Her mother was dead in her own timeline, but Cham Syndulla was very much alive, and Hera had talked to him as recently as three days ago. It was all too easy for Hera to take this Alecto Syndulla as her own mother; her mother had died when she was thirteen and Alecto hadn’t seen her daughter since Hera – the other Hera – was fourteen. Hera knew her father.

She took a breath, uncomfortable under her mother’s – under Alecto’s – curious expression, and said, “He isn’t my father, not really.”

A tiny line knit between Alecto’s brows, but all she said was, “Let’s go see him.”

Hera followed her down the corridor into the common room, where she found the other Hera and Kanan along with Cham Syndulla and, to Hera’s surprise, her aunt Clotho and cousin Doriah. All looked a little startled to see her, their gazes flicking back and forth between her and the younger Hera. The other woman looked desperately uncomfortable, and a little relieved to see Hera.

Cham looked exactly the same as her father had when Hera had spoken to him; past a certain point male Twi’leks didn’t show their age much, and without any distinguishing scars Hera would have had to put both men side by side to make out the differences. He got up and came over to her as Hera stared at him, saying, “Daughter –”

Hera opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally managed to say, “Hello, Father.”

For a moment, Cham hesitated, then he put his hands on her shoulders. “Hera,” he said.

She looked past him just in time to see the brief flash of hurt cross the other Hera’s face.

“I’m Hera,” she said quickly. “But I’m a different Hera, from somewhere – somewhen else. I’m thirty-three years old, I’m a general in the Rebel Alliance, and I have a five-year-old son.”

Cham’s jaw dropped. His gaze went to Kanan, sitting beside the other Hera, and Hera had to stifle sudden laughter.

“Yes,” she said, “but mine, I mean, the Kanan from my universe.”

Cham’s expression did something complicated that might have made more sense if Hera could see his lekku, which she couldn’t from this angle; Doriah’s face went outraged but his mother laid a hand on his arm before he could say anything.

“Come and sit down,” Cham said finally.

Hera looked at the expression on the other Hera’s face and hesitated. “I should stay with Kanan –” she said.

The girl shook her head slightly, her expression a little desperate. Hera bit her lip, then sat down at her mother’s urging. She gave them all another brief precis of her life to date, taking out her holoprojector again to show Cham, Aunt Clotho, and Doriah Jacen. Doriah just looked upset, which puzzled Hera, but she didn’t want to ask why in front of anyone else.

Seeing Doriah was something of a shock. She and her cousin had quarreled before she had left Ryloth fifteen years ago; he had been killed while she had been offworld, so they had never gotten a chance to reconcile. They had been close as children – Hera was only six months older – but had spent the latter part of their teens fighting until Hera had finally left Ryloth. Never being able to make up with him was one of the great regrets of Hera’s life.

She happened to be looking at Kanan at the exact moment when he grimaced suddenly, squeezing his eyes shut as his hands went white-knuckled on his knees. The other Hera shot him an anxious look as he got to his feet, muttering an excuse before he went out into the galley. Hera heard the hatch beyond that slide open and then closed again as he went into the back of the ship.

Kanan staggered into the engine room, which was about as far as he could get from the rest of the ship without flushing himself out the airlock, and dropped to the floor beside the hyperdrive. He pressed the heels of his hands into his forehead, wincing, and tried to concentrate on the ache that caused instead of anything else.

No, he mouthed. No, no, no –

The airlock was sounding better and better with every passing moment.

Distantly, as if from a long ways away, he heard the engine room hatch slide open. Kanan winced, trying to get himself together enough to tell whoever it was – probably Hera, maybe Chopper – to go away, but couldn’t get the words to come.

Warm hands touched his wrists. Kanan flinched, but didn’t pull away; the Hunter had trained that out of him early on.

“It’s me,” the other Kanan said, the words accompanied by a light touch of the Force that seared Kanan’s abused mind like acid. This time he did flinch away, and felt his counterpart pull back – in the Force, at least; he didn’t release his light grip on Kanan’s wrists.

Kanan opened his mouth to tell him that he should probably go away and couldn’t remember how to speak.

“Hey,” the other man said, his voice very gentle. “Hey, come on, look at me.”

He couldn’t do that. Kanan had to tell him that he couldn’t do that, because he knew that if he opened his eyes, it wouldn’t just be him looking out.

“Listen to me,” the other Kanan said, “I will not let him touch you. You have my word as a Jedi Knight. I just need you to look at me.”

He knew.

He knew, and the rush of shame that went through Kanan made him dizzy. He could feel the pressure against his mind increase; it was so overwhelming that he almost lost his sense of awareness of the blazing presence beside him.

“I will not let him hurt you or anyone else on this ship,” the other Kanan said forcefully. “I can stop you if I have to. You can tell that for yourself if you reach out.”

He shook his head, willing the other man to understand. If he opened himself up enough to do that, it would give the Hunter space to slip in, and it wouldn’t be him the other Kanan had to deal with it, it would be the Hunter. He couldn’t let the Hunter know.

“Kid, listen to me,” the other Kanan said. “I can help you. Just listen to me. Listen to the sound of my voice. Do you hear me?”

After a long moment, Kanan managed to nod, just slightly. He wasn’t certain that the other Kanan could actually see the gesture, but he said, “Good. I’m going to reach out again. If it hurts you, I’ll stop. Do you understand?”

He jerked his chin in something that might have been construed as a nod. He still flinched when he felt the gentle touch of the other man’s mind against his, but didn’t kick him out this time. The Hunter’s awareness of the intruder flared, then retreated in confusion.

“It’s all right,” the other Kanan murmured, the words seemingly to be half spoken and half in his mind. “He can’t tell us apart.”

Kanan whimpered softly in the back of his throat, like the hound he had been named for. The words came slowly – still to his mind, not to his lips. You’re a Jedi. I’m not. He’ll know –

“Not from this distance, and not without knowing that I’m here at all,” the other Kanan said. “Breathe with me.”

Long months of obedience drilled into him, sometimes bloodily, meant Kanan fell easily into the pattern. It was easier with the other Kanan than it had been with the Hunter, as easy as it had been with Depa Billaba. With the Hunter it hadn’t been difficult – it had been easier than Kanan had liked – but his emotions had gotten into the way, fear and pain making him shy away until the Hunter had trained that out of him.

It felt like a long time before the Hunter’s presence receded from his mind. It wasn’t gone entirely – it never would be, not until the Hunter was dead and maybe not even then; sometimes Kanan thought he could still feel Depa Billaba watching him – but the unrelenting pressure had faded enough that Kanan could think again. He took his hands away from his face, wincing when he realized he had been pressing them against his forehead so hard that his wrists ached, and saw the other Kanan crouched in front of him. The older man’s face was serious, his brows narrowed in concern. He was barefoot, his hair tousled as if he had just gotten out of bed.

Kanan looked at him and then away. He slumped back against the hyperdrive, all the strength gone out of him, because he knew.

“It isn’t your fault,” the other man said. His voice was a little lighter than Kanan had expected, familiar but not exactly identical to his own. Age, maybe, or what the Crucible had done to him.

Kanan put a hand over his face. It took him a moment to find the words, searching tiredly for them in what remained of his mind. “You didn’t.”

They were still attuned to each other, so he felt the faint buzz of the other man’s brief startlement. “It never came up,” he said.

“She said –” Kanan hesitated over the words again, then just let them spill out, knowing that the Jedi would be able to take any stumbling block from his mind. “She said he had you.”

He felt rather than saw the other Kanan’s sudden understanding, his face still turned away. “He didn’t have me for that long,” he said, his voice gentle. “We never got that far. Hera and the rest of my team broke me out first.”

Lucky, Kanan thought without saying as much, though he felt the other Kanan flinch slightly as he sensed it. He still woke up screaming two nights out of every five, and only slept through one of the other three, even with Hera in bed beside him. He had mostly stopped waking her up on the nights that didn’t involve screaming.

“She said you killed him,” he said instead.

“I defeated him,” the other Kanan said carefully. “He killed himself.”

Kanan rubbed his hands over his face, trying to get his head around that and failing. What he wanted to say was why did he hurt me and not you?, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask that question. Instead he just said wearily, “How did you know?”

His counterpart hesitated. Kanan felt suddenly sick, but couldn’t make himself look away from the other man as he said, “I sensed him calling you. It woke me up.”

Kanan folded his hands over the back of his skull and bent his head down over his knees, breathing hard.

The other Kanan leaned forward and put a hand on his knee. He said softly, “Yes, I can feel that bond – there’s a resonance between us, do you feel it? An echo.”

Kanan wet his lips. He didn’t bother looking up, but he was too well-trained to avoid a response to a direct question. Touching the Force made him flinch a little – he was over-sensitive to it at the moment, between what he had done to bring the other Kanan here and fighting the Hunter’s attempt to drag him back to Mustafar – but he didn’t let himself stop this time. He felt the echo between himself and the other man without having to search for it, the Force rippling between them.

“Yes,” he said; he could sense the tie between himself and the Hunter reflecting back on the other Kanan. He had a tie of his own too, similar but not identical to Kanan’s, and much weaker. He hadn’t been the Hunter’s Hound, but there had been something there, the seed of something more that had never come to fruition.

“Did he tell you?” he had to ask.

“Tell me what?”

“When I was – when we were, I guess, you and I both – at the Temple – you know he was a Guard?”

“Yes,” the other man said. “I know he was a Temple Guard, back when he was a Jedi Knight.”

“He wanted – me,” Kanan said jerkily, “– as a padawan, I mean, back when – but if he left the Guard, he would be deployed, and he didn’t want that, and he didn’t want to take a padawan into the war. Especially because I was so young. So he thought no one else would either. He didn’t tell anyone, though, so when Master Billaba – he thought she had stolen his padawan.” He put his forehead down against his knees, breathing hard.

The Hunter had never told him this directly. He had told another Inquisitor, one of the other former Jedi, on one of the few occasions when Kanan had been injured badly enough fighting with other trainees to end up in the Crucible’s medbay. Both of them had thought he was asleep.

“He thought the Force had given me back to him,” Kanan said, the words a little muffled. “And maybe he was right, because he had me.”

He felt the other Kanan’s flinch and couldn’t tell if his murmured words were out loud or only in his mind. That explains the connection I felt…

The next thing he said was definitely out loud. “The Force is possibility, not ultimate truth. Just because something could have happened doesn’t mean it’s fated to. You and I are proof of that.”

Kanan looked up at him. The other man’s face was calm, without the slightly fanatic cast to it that he remembered from a few Knights back at the Temple. Only the scar that cut across his eyes was unfamiliar; except for the difference in scars and the laugh-lines at the corners of his ruined eyes, Kanan could have been looking into a mirror.

He looked down again. “But he found you anyway.”

“It’s a smaller galaxy than you’d think,” the other man said gently.

Kanan lifted a shoulder in a shrug. The two of them sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes as he got himself back under control, a little comforted by the presence of the other Jedi here – the Force could always tell, and there was something solidly reassuring about him that Kanan hadn’t thought he would ever feel again.

“Thanks,” he made himself say eventually. “I just – thanks.”

The other man nodded matter-of-factly. “What did he want?”

Kanan bit his lip. “He likes to pull my leash,” he said eventually, thinking. “I think it was just that – I don’t think he’s realized we’re gone yet. I mean, he might now,” he had to add. He rubbed both hands back over his short-cropped hair, one thumb brushing his notched ear – the Hunter had taken a slice out of it when he had shaved Kanan’s head, his first day at the Crucible.

He glanced up at the other man and said haltingly, “He saw me a week ago – I was back at Mustafar to check in. He was never happy about me going back to Hera, but it was out of his hands.”

The other man was quiet, waiting with patient calm like a master waiting for his padawan to figure out a problem. Exactly like, in fact, so much so that Kanan shivered and looked at him from under his lashes, distracted from his own misery. He remembered abruptly what Hera had said when she had first arrived.

“You have an apprentice,” he said. “A padawan.”

The other Kanan raised his head. For a moment grief flashed across both his face and the Force, fresh enough to make Kanan wince. He knew without having to ask that Hera had brought news that the other man hadn’t wanted to hear, bad news.

All he said was, “Yes. His name is Ezra.”

Kanan couldn’t imagine trusting himself enough to train an apprentice. He wasn’t aware of saying as much out loud, but the other Kanan said quietly, “Yeah, I felt that way too for a long time. But the Force wants what it wants, and it will always have its way.” He lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kanan said quietly.

The other man raised his head and considered him, the Force heavy behind those disconcerting white eyes.

I hope I don’t – Kanan thought, then choked it back. You never did know, and wondering on it was as good as asking the Force for it.

“I think you’d do all right,” the other man said. He smiled at Kanan. “You’ll know when the time comes.”

Hera sat with her family – with the other Hera Syndulla’s family – which was the most disconcerting thing she had ever done, and she included getting Kanan back in that. She knew her family, and knew that her mother had been dead twenty years and her cousin eleven. She had spoken to her father and her aunt recently enough that she was aware of a kind of double-vision, remembering Clotho and Cham as she had last seen them only a few days before. It was obvious that they were all responding a little better to her than to the other Hera, probably because she was what they had always hoped for and the other woman was so visibly uncomfortable.

Hera finally got up. “I should get some rest,” she said, making her goodbyes to the clearly reluctant Alecto and to Cham, who looked just as disconcerted as she felt.

She hadn’t gone more than three paces down the corridor before the door slid open and shut again behind her. Hera turned to see the other Hera there, the girl’s face pale.

“You don’t have to leave,” she said.

“Hera, they’re your family. Not mine. Mine are back waiting for me on Ryloth.” Or dead, but she didn’t want to say those words out loud. Instead, she just said, “You should be with your family. They love you.”

The girl’s gaze flashed sideways, so quickly that Hera might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching for it. She was quiet for what felt like a long time before she said, “I didn’t want to contact them. Not yet. I mean, I – I wanted my mother, and when you said – I wanted my mother. But I didn’t want to come here. I don’t…they want someone I’m not, not anymore.” She took a shaky breath.

“They’re your family,” Hera said again. The words came out more hesitantly than she had intended; she knew all about not wanting to face her own family, but her situation had been completely different than the other woman’s.

The other Hera lifted a shoulder in a helpless shrug. “I know that. I do. But I just…I haven’t told you everything, you know?”

Hera nodded cautiously.

“You said your mother was dead,” the girl said slowly. “I…I wanted you to see her.” She gave Hera a slightly frantic look. “I thought…as long as you were here, you deserved that.”

“Oh,” Hera said softly. “I – thank you. I didn’t realize that.” She put her hands on the other woman’s shoulders. They were the same height, though Hera actually had a slightly higher heel on her boots than the other woman. “I know it’s hard,” she said, “but you should go be with your family. I don’t –” She hesitated, trying to think of a good way to say what she meant. “I don’t want them to get so focused on me that they forget about you.”

The girl glanced down, which Hera took to mean she had noticed that too. “They’re not going to stay much longer,” she said eventually. “I mean – they’ll probably be here for another rotation or so, but we aren’t going to keep the ships linked all the time. And I’m not going back to the fleet with them, not…not yet. Maybe later, but not yet. I just – and Kanan can’t.”

When Hera frowned, she clarified, “He’s afraid that the Inquisition will come after him, and he doesn’t want civilians in the crossfire. And – I’ve seen what the Inquisition does. I don’t want them near my family either.”

Hera nodded slowly. “I understand.” She hugged the other woman quickly. “Go be with them. I do want to rest.”

The girl gave her a shaky smile. “All right.”

Hera watched her go back into the common room, then rubbed a hand over her face and went back into her borrowed cabin – she almost went into her own cabin first, then had to backtrack to the other door. She had expected to find Kanan still asleep in the bunk and froze when she realized he wasn’t there.

She stood there, staring at the empty bunk and feeling her heart beat rapidly in panic. He was here, she thought frantically. He was really here, I didn’t imagine him, I couldn’t have imagined him –

She didn’t know how long she stood there, starting to hyperventilate and too terrified to move, when the door slid open behind her. Hera spun to find Kanan standing there. He was in shirtsleeves and bare feet, his expression exhausted.

“Hey.”

She flung herself into his arms without pausing to make sure he was ready for her. He took one staggered step backwards, then put his arms around her. “I’m all right,” he told her softly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Hera held him close, breathing hard. “I wasn’t scared,” she started to say, then shook her head. “Fine, I was. Where were you?”

He turned his head a little, making sure that the door had closed behind him, and then said, “The Grand Inquisitor took a swipe at the kid, and I caught the edge of it.”

Hera looked up at him in alarm. “Are you all right? Is he?”

“I’m all right. He –” Kanan hesitated, then went on, “He will be, I think, but I wasn’t expecting that. It woke me up.” His shoulders slumped, and he rubbed a hand over his face. “That was tiring.”

“Well, you can go back to sleep,” Hera offered.

“I’m still a little wired,” he said, then winked solemnly at her. “Want to make out until I fall over again?”

Hera flushed and punched him gently in the chest, then leaned up and pressed her lips to his. “Yes,” she said against his mouth, putting her arms around his neck. “I’d like that.”

Hera woke sometime later, not sure what had gotten her attention. Kanan was a heavy weight against her side and she turned her head to look at him, barely able to believe that he really was there. She hadn’t shared a bed with anyone since he had died, not unless she counted Jacen, and that only on rare occasions since he had been a baby; they were seldom in the same place these days.

She touched the soft spikes of Kanan’s cropped hair gently, then drew her hand back. He was so exhausted that he barely stirred, but Hera pushed herself up on one elbow to watch him breathe, marveling at the fact that he was here at all. It could have been any one of a thousand nights spent on the Ghost over the years. She could have been twenty-six again, both of them exhausted from a day chasing the ragtag members of Phoenix Squadron around Atollon, in her case, or trying to beat the principles of lightsaber combat into Ezra’s head, in Kanan’s. She could have been twenty again, the same age as the girl in the other room, in love and so confused by it that she couldn’t admit it even to herself, let alone Kanan.

It had been a shock to her. It must have been even more of one to the other Hera after years in Imperial service – in the Imperial academies, she had said; she had met Kanan only a few weeks after graduating from the ISB Academy. Hera hadn’t asked, because it would have been inappropriate beyond belief, but she strongly suspected that the other Hera and Kanan had slept together long before they had done so in her own universe.

She touched his hair again, disbelieving, and saw him stir a little. They were familiar enough to each other – or she was to him – that he didn’t wake, just made a soft sound in the back of his throat, acknowledgment of her presence. Hera swallowed back her tears and leaned over to press a soft kiss to his forehead. They had spent a pleasant few minutes making out until Kanan really had fallen asleep in her arms – fortunately they had both suspected that was going to happen and had already been up in the bunk, or getting him there would have been impossible.

She curled up beside him, smiling to herself as he shifted a hand to curve over her hip. It took her a few more minutes of listening intently to realize what it was that had woken her; she really hadn’t spent much time on the Ghost in the past few years, or she would have realized it immediately. The Ghost had uncoupled from the Syndulla’s Gamble, the two ships no longer linked. Hera waited, half-expecting to feel the Ghost jump to hyperspace, but nothing happened. Not long afterwards she heard steps in the corridor outside, then the door to the cabin next door opening and shutting.

Hera put them out of her mind and reached down to arrange the blankets more comfortably around herself and Kanan. The narrowness of the bunk meant that they were side by side, pressed closely together – something Hera had been used to six years ago, but was less so now. Even though she and Kanan had always kept separate cabins, she had lain awake so many nights after his death, unable to bear the emptiness of her own bunk. She’d have to get used to it again.

“I love you,” she whispered to Kanan in the quiet dark of their shared bed. “I missed you.”

He didn’t respond, still asleep, but his hand tightened on her hip and she smiled. She leaned over and pressed another soft kiss to his hair, then laid down and shut her eyes, listening to the sound of his breath and his living heartbeat. It didn’t take her long to fall asleep again.

Chapter Text

The first thing Hera noticed the next morning was that the younger Kanan looked terrible. His Hera clearly saw it too; she kept drifting over to him, her expression growing more and more distressed as he – not exactly brushed her off, but it was obvious to Hera that his attention was almost completely absent from the here and now. The girl had evidently seen it before, and wasn’t happy about it, though Hera thought her dismay wasn’t aimed towards him, but towards the cause.

Kanan – her Kanan – came out of the cabin about an hour after Hera had gotten up and was sitting in the galley drinking caf. He looked significantly less exhausted than he had the previous day, but there was still strain on his face. Hera turned her face up to him as he came into the galley and he hesitated for a beat before he leaned down to kiss her good morning. She wouldn’t have let him do that six years ago, not in front of someone else, and the memory made her feel very slightly ashamed. She had been in that war long enough that she should have known better. But Kanan had always seemed so solid –

She had put her hand on his arm when he leaned down, and her fingers contracted at the memory. Kanan tipped his forehead down against hers briefly, then brushed his lips over hers again before he straightened up. Hera forced herself to let go of him with an effort, and looked up to find the other Hera watching them with interest. She glanced aside when she saw Hera looking at her, flushing a little.

Hera supposed she hadn’t seen much of Kanan the previous day, and that it was a matter of interest to see what he would look like given the passage of seven years.

The other Kanan had turned as Kanan came in. For a moment his expression was dismayed, shocked out of his miserable reverie, then he turned his face away and went back to whatever he had been doing by the cupboards.

Kanan’s weary white gaze followed him for an instant, then he sighed, kissed Hera again, and said plaintively, “Is there still caf?”

“I’ll get it,” the other Hera said. She moved to the counter beside her Kanan to pour him a cup, then hesitated and added, “Do you take it –”

“Probably.” His voice was mild. Hera happened to know that since he had first started drinking caf when he was a teenager with the Grand Army of the Republic, his tastes were for caf the general texture and consistency of tar, with enough sweetener added to kill a tooka. She watched with interest as the other Hera proceeded to dump several spoonfuls of sugar into the caf and handed it to him.

The girl looked up at him through her lashes, clearly fascinated. Kanan smiled thanks at her, then took the caf like a shot in a way that made both women wince, put the mug down in the sink, and slung an arm around the other Kanan’s shoulders. “Come on, kid,” he said, and only Hera could probably tell how tired he still was. “Let’s talk.”

The other Kanan’s shoulders slumped, but Hera thought that there was a little relief on his handsome features. He went with Kanan without protest; Hera heard the door to his cabin slide open and then shut again.

The other Hera was looking after them anxiously. After a moment she turned her gaze back to Hera, her eyes sad. “I know something happened yesterday, but he won’t tell me what,” she said quietly. “He didn’t come to bed last night – he does that if he thinks he’ll keep me up.” She smiled a little, tremulous but almost as weary as Kanan. “And not in a fun way.”

Hera smiled back at her. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, playing with the handle on her caf mug. It wasn’t one that she herself had ever owned, which made it interesting from sheer novelty, and Hera had been wondering all morning where the other woman had gotten it.

The girl looked down. She hadn’t covered her lekku today, which made it the first time Hera had actually seen her with her lekku uncovered. It made her look younger and a little sweeter, less severe in general, though even in civilian clothes she had that air that many former Imperial officers had, of being in uniform and prepared for a surprise inspection. Hera didn’t like to think about what had happened to bring her to that point, though even at her most optimistic she had to allow for the fact that it may just have been the influence of the Imperial Academy.

“Who am I going to tell?” Hera went on. “Well, except –” She tipped her head in the direction of the door the two Kanans had gone through. “And I won’t, if you tell me not to.”

The other woman sighed and came over to sit down across from her, putting a plate of sweet rolls and blue puffer pig bacon down on the table between them. She turned her own mug between her hands, frowning down at it.

Hera took one of the rolls while she thought, peeling the layers of bread apart and licking the spiced sugar coating off her fingers. She didn’t particularly enjoy this sort of thing – the listening, not the eating – but it was an inevitable part of any senior officer’s job, especially a senior officer in direct command. Mostly it just made her sad.

In this particular case it was also interesting, but it still made her sad.

“When he was at the Crucible, I was on desk duty on Naboo,” the girl said eventually. “Which was –” She flipped a hand. “Boring, mostly. I don’t remember most of it.”

Hera frowned at her but didn’t say anything; what the other woman was talking around was something that Hera herself was more than familiar with, both from the inside and from the outside. Wars were hard things. So was life under the Empire. So was just being alive, sometimes.

“When Kanan came back…there was something missing.” The other Hera picked up a piece of bacon and began to break it into bits, scattering blue crumbs across the napkin she had laid out. “Not – I mean, he’s still Kanan. But it broke something inside him. And it just never came back.” She looked up at Hera, her eyes sad, then her gaze flicked to the door, as if making sure that Kanan wasn’t there, listening. “I love him more than anything. I did then and I do now. But sometimes I miss how he was then. And it’s hard. He barely talked for six months. He wouldn’t let me touch him – or – or he would, but he didn’t like being touched, not even by me, and he wouldn’t…he wouldn’t be in a room with me unless he was having a good day, and for months that hardly ever happened. I wish – I wish he would just tell me, but he won’t, and I know part of it is because he doesn’t want to think about it, but…I wish he would tell me.”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Hera asked her quietly.

The girl shook her head. “I’m sure I probably don’t. But it can’t be worse than what I’ve been imagining.”

Hera hesitated, because from what she knew of the Force – and from what the other Kanan had told her – it very easily could be. Before she could make up her mind about what to or what not to say, the girl said, “Or it could be, but – I wish that he would let us deal with it together.”

“Kanan never told me how he got hurt – how he lost his sight,” Hera said hesitantly.

The girl looked up at her, startled. “I thought –”

“That everything had been perfect between us?” Hera said, raising an eyebrow. “I wish.” Even before he decided to get himself blown up, she added silently to herself, but she wasn’t about to tell that to the younger woman unless the situation called for it. And it might yet. “He doesn’t like to talk about things that hurt him. He was taken prisoner by the Empire and I know he was tortured, maybe…more…because the Grand Inquisitor was involved, but he’s never talked about it.”

The other Hera looked down.

“He wouldn’t go into the field after that, not for months,” Hera went on, still hesitating over the words. “Things had changed, so it wasn’t…it wasn’t obvious for a long time. And then he went to Malachor with Ezra – with his apprentice, I mean – and another friend, another Force-user. She didn’t come back.” Not then, anyway, she thought with a touch of bitterness. “Kanan came back hurt, and he didn’t – he never told me what happened. Ezra did, but he wasn’t sure either, he hadn’t been there. Neither had Chopper. Kanan just – he just went inside himself again, for a long time.”

The other Hera nodded. “He did that when we were fighting, before – before.” She lifted one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “When he first found out I was ISB. I thought –” She sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”

Hera could imagine what her Kanan would have thought at that revelation, and what she probably would have thought in turn. For the attention-starved teenager the other woman had been it must have been devastating, and it was entirely possible that Kanan hadn’t realized at the time how terrible it had been.

The other Hera looked down at her small pile of bacon crumbs, sighed, and began to eat them piece by piece; Hera guessed that her time in prison had taught her never to waste food. “I think for a long time he got back he wasn’t sure that he was – that he was really here. And then, after he was, that he was going to be allowed to stay. He is better,” she added quickly. “He got better. He tried – I could tell when he started trying, because he didn’t, at first. But I wish – I wish.” She rested her chin against the heel of her hand, her elbow braced against the table. “I wish a lot of things.”

Hera nodded in understanding. She had been there herself, more times than she could count, and not just about Kanan.

After a moment of silence, the girl went on. “I never really thought about what would have happened if I hadn’t – if the colony hadn’t fell. There didn’t seem to be any point.” Her gaze flicked quickly up towards Hera, then down again. “I tried not to think about it. That’s how it is in the Empire.”

“Do I surprise you?” Hera asked her.

She frowned in thought. “I don’t know if ‘surprise’ is the word I’d use. Some of what you’ve said is just…I mean, it’s not anything I’ve ever thought of. I don’t mean that like –” She flipped her free hand. “I mean, a Rebel Alliance. No one in the service would ever take that seriously.”

Hera smiled. “And that was to our advantage for a very long time – just long enough, in fact.” She looked down at her half-forgotten sweet roll and peeled another layer off it. After she had eaten that, she said, “Was it hard for you in the Imperial Academy?”

The other Hera looked down. She had eaten the little pile of crumbs, so she reached out and took a roll of her own, picking at it slowly for a long time before she spoke. “Yes. I hated it. I have nightmares about it sometimes, even though it’s been years. I wasn’t –” She hesitated, but didn’t say the word that Hera silently filled in. “Most humans just think certain things about Twi’lek women. Even Agent Beneke – my handler, I mean – does. A lot of the boys I was at the Academy with made – made assumptions.” She glanced up at Hera again and said, “I’m sure even your Rebel Alliance is like that. Humans – not all of them, Kanan never did – but most humans –”

“No,” Hera said gently. “Not most humans.” Not that she hadn’t run into that assumption in the Alliance from time to time, but it wasn’t what she would have called common, and it was a misconception that was swiftly corrected, usually not by her. There had been a few incidents, but most of those had more to do with how she had gotten her rank so young, and those had fallen off over the years after casualties in the line of battle killed off Clone Wars veterans (of which there had never been very many) and elevated people like Lando Calrissian and Han Solo. Though Hera had to admit that Lando’s rapid advancement probably had more to do with the fact that he had actual administrative experience, which was both a rarity and a badly needed skill in the Rebel Alliance. Han she just blamed on luck.

A tiny line knit between the girl’s brows. Hera didn’t need to ask to know that she wasn’t believed. She said, “You met Kanan when you were in the field, didn’t you?”

The girl nodded cautiously.

“And you did other operations like that, where you were interacting with civilians and not Imperial officers or officials?”

Another nod.

“And how did they treat you?”

Hera was running a risk, because all that belief about Twi’lek women being sluts didn’t come out of thin air, but out in the real world more people had actually met Twi’leks who weren’t dancers or courtesans.

The other Hera looked down, peeling strips off her sweet roll and dropping them on her napkin. “Like a person, mostly,” she admitted eventually. “Even when Kanan and I were –” She flushed, and Hera tried to remember ever being that young. When she had been the younger girl’s age she had been falling into bed with Kanan at regular intervals and spending the rest of her time trying to convince herself that it wasn’t happening, something which had both amused and frustrated Kanan.

Love, I’m sorry –

She had the time to make up for it now.

Awkwardly, the girl said, “I’m not really…good, with other Twi’leks. Or other nonhumans at all. I almost failed my field test at the ISB Academy because they sent me into the Twi’lek enclave in Theed and I had a panic attack.” She bit her lip. “I can’t…pass. You saw that.”

Hera nodded reluctantly. She hadn’t even been looking for it and she had been able to tell that the other woman had been raised by humans. In a way it didn’t make complete sense to her – the other Hera had been with her family until she was fourteen – but she supposed that after four years in Imperial academies she had put so much effort into trying to blend in that she had forgotten how not to, even if it was impossible.

The girl touched the tip of one lek, self-conscious, then took her hand away. “Kanan never cared that I was a Twi’lek,” she said, a little wonderingly. “I don’t think he would care if I was a Rodian or a Togruta or a Mikkian or – or a human.”

She looked down at her mutilated roll. “Kanan’s the same way now. He can’t really…they can’t put us on the kind of assignment we used to do because he can’t – everyone just looks at him and knows that he isn’t…right. No one could ever work out what I was because it isn’t like anyone thought I could be ISB, but when I was in the field with Kanan before it was all right. Being with him made it…easier, I suppose? People made assumptions. Right now…he’s better than he was for a long time, but it’s like everyone looks at him and knows he’s dangerous. Not the way he was before, the way you are and I am and a lot of people in the underworld are, but…” She let the words trail off, her expression miserable.

After a moment Hera nodded understanding. She had seen that before, once Kanan had started using the Force on a regular basis again after taking Ezra in hand. People didn’t always understand what it was they were seeing, but they knew power when it walked among them. Ezra had had that too, near the end, and she had seen it in Luke and Ahsoka.

“You have some time now,” Hera offered gently. “Both of you do. To do whatever you want.”

“To get chased wherever the Inquisition wants to chase us, you mean,” the other Hera said, but there was still a little relief in her voice. She gave Hera a shaky smile and added, “But they have to find us first.”

Kanan took in the almost-familiar space of the younger Kanan’s cabin with only a brief tilt of his head. It wasn’t any way that he had ever kept his room, mostly because he had never accumulated enough possessions for it even after he had been settled on the Ghost; it took him a moment of furrowed concentration to sense discarded armor in the corners of the room, and a scattering of other pieces of Inquisitor’s uniform. People wreck their living spaces when they feel out of control of their lives, he reminded himself; he had seen that before many times, mostly in the years between Order 66 and taking up with Hera, but on occasion both before and after that too.

He had the sense that this wasn’t the worst the other man had ever done to his room, either.

“Let’s sit,” he said gently.

It would have been easy for one of them to take the meditation cushion and the other to take the bench built into the wall, the way Kanan usually did with Ezra, but instead he sat down cross-legged on the floor. The younger man did the same, with the boneless grace of youth that made Kanan aware of both the extra years he carried and how exhausted he still was. What he wanted was several solid meals, more sleep, meditation, and a few hours in bed with Hera, not necessarily in that order. He needed to think and he needed to make peace with the Force, again, not necessarily in that order.

But the younger man’s psychic distress was so intense that it was giving him a headache and Kanan had to deal with this as much as possible now so it didn’t get to the point where it was affecting Hera and…Hera…which was the danger of the Force-strong. If they let themselves slip they could start affecting the world around them.

“Did the Grand Inquisitor make another try at you?” he asked; he thought the answer was likely to be no, since after yesterday he was nearly certain that a second attempt would have alerted him as well, even as dead to the world as he had been after he had fallen asleep.

The younger man shook his head, then said, “No,” clearly remembering that Kanan couldn’t see him and uncertain of what that meant for his perception.

Kanan didn’t let himself smile, since that wouldn’t go over very well right now; he suspected the Inquisition didn’t train blindfolded the way the Jedi had, and even without that the other man was very clearly wary of the Force, which Kanan couldn’t blame him for under the circumstances. Even without the circumstances.

Their connection the previous day had told him more than the other man wanted him to know and more than Kanan, frankly, wanted to know. In an hour or a day or a week the enormity of what had happened to the other Kanan would hit him and he would have to process it, but for now he did his best to push the knowledge aside.

It could have been me, he thought, not for the first time. He knew it with the sick certainty that the Force could convey when it felt like it. If Hera and Ezra and the rest hadn’t rescued him –

He set that aside with the same mental effort he used whenever he thought about Order 66 and how easily one of Grey’s or Styles’ blaster shots could have ended up in his back. Or how close Maul’s lightsaber had come to taking his head instead of just his sight. Or the fuel depot –

No, that one had happened, and he pushed that thought aside too.

He could feel the younger Kanan watching him warily, with more resignation than any other emotion except shame. Kanan fought back his stab of pity because the kid wouldn’t appreciate that; he wouldn’t and he ought to know.

“I –” the younger man began, then gave up on whatever he had been planning on saying and just stared at Kanan in mute dismay.

Kanan could have pushed him and maybe if he had been anyone else he would have, but instead he said after a moment’s thought, “Do you want to ask me anything?”

He felt the other man’s faint start of surprise and spared a moment of regret that he couldn’t actually see his face. The Force was good for a lot of things, but Kanan had spent years not using it and was – had been – very good at reading people’s faces and body language as a result. The Force couldn’t tell you everything, and sometimes Kanan resented having to depend on it as much as he did. And he was just curious.

The younger man was quiet for a long time before he said, “Do you think I made a mistake? Bringing you here, I mean.”

Kanan blinked and fell back on his earliest teachings. “What do you think?”

He got a faint sense of relief from the kid, as if he was reassured by the familiarity – answering a question with a question was how the Jedi always taught. Of course, if Kanan knew it, then he would too – he felt the acknowledgment of that at the same instant.

“The Force let me do it,” the younger man said eventually. “But the Force let my master do – do a lot of things, too. And it let us die.”

“We’re the arbiters of good and evil, not the Force,” Kanan said gently. “The Force is possibility, not truth.”

“What does that even mean?”

He felt rather than saw the other man slump, which meant that he wasn’t certain whether the other Kanan actually had done so or just thought about it. Probably he hadn’t; Kanan got a strong sense of the kind of durasteel discipline he was familiar with from both Imperial officers and from the Jedi. Thinking about something didn’t mean doing it, even for the most casual actions.

“What do you –”

“That was rhetorical,” the other man said dryly, a light, familiar tone that made Kanan smile inadvertently. “Would you have done it?”

“No.” He responded without thinking, and felt the other man’s flinch – he was fairly certain that this one had been physical. “But I’ve never been in a situation where it was an option.”

There was an instant of hesitation before the other man nodded, his understanding a faint shimmer on the surface of the Force.

“Why did you do it?” Kanan asked him gently.

This time there was good humor but sincerity in the boy’s response. “I’ve always hated seeing Hera sad, and it turns out that it doesn’t matter which Hera it is.” He hesitated again before adding, “I didn’t know whether or not it would actually work.”

“I’d be surprised if you had,” Kanan said mildly. He felt the faint buzz of the younger man’s brief amusement in response to that. “Why did you think it would?”

“What Hera –” He didn’t need to clarify verbally which Hera he meant; Kanan could tell from the Force undertones that only another Jedi would have sensed. “What Hera said about the way she came here, I understood how it worked. I think. And you know Jedi don’t do anything with artifacts that can’t be done with the Force alone.”

Kanan nodded reluctant agreement. It would never have even occurred to him to try, but he had never been in the other man’s shoes either. And he did hate seeing Hera sad.

“Being in the Inquisition,” the other Kanan went on haltingly, “– it was…awful.” Kanan felt his mind touch briefly on the memory before flinching away. “I knew that, and Hera knew that –” This time he meant the other Hera, his Hera, “– but there was nothing either of us could, would, do about it. And then she came.”

“You never thought about leaving?” Kanan asked gently.

“I thought about everything at least once. But I couldn’t leave Hera. And she – wouldn’t.” He raised his head to Kanan, exhausted, and said, “I thought we were both going to die, sooner or later. Probably sooner.”

Kanan started to reply, then hesitated, because anything he said on that particular subject would be a little biased by his circumstances. He sensed the younger man’s next question before the other Kanan could even voice it.

“No,” he said, this time with a wince of his own. “No, I didn’t want to die.” He hesitated, but if there was anyone he had to be completely honest with, it was this boy. “It’s always a possibility, but I knew – I had a feeling – that this time it was more likely than not. Not a certainty, but almost nothing is.” Kanan was quiet for a moment, thinking, and then went on, “Precognition can narrow possibilities in itself, I think, whether you’re trying to avert it or trying to make it come true. And if I’d known Hera was pregnant –” He shook his head. “Sometimes you just run out of choices.”

“Yeah,” the other Kanan said quietly.

Kanan leaned forward to grip his shoulder, feeling the younger man twitch a little in surprise. “I’m not angry with you,” he said. “Just because I wouldn’t have done it doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do, and I can’t exactly resent not being dead.” He smiled crookedly. “And I can’t stand seeing Hera sad either.”

“Kanan.”

His smile when he raised his head to her was automatic, lingering on his lips before he seemed to grasp the seriousness of her tone.

He was so handsome it took her breath away, and he was here, he was here. Hera flattened her palms against the door behind her and said his name again, just for the sake of saying it and not immediately wanting to weep. “Kanan,” she breathed.

He took a step towards her, reaching for her hands before stopping when she didn’t reach back. “What is it?”

Hera had spent the day with the other Hera and her family, which had been just as odd an experience as the previous day’s – just as emotionally fraught, because her little cousin Xiaan had been there too, and the last time Hera had spoken to Xiaan she had just moved into her new dormitory at the University of Alderaan, with a few of their cousins along to visit. All of them had been there when the Death Star had destroyed the planet. Not here, she thought. That won’t happen here. She was certain of that now. Bail Organa had the Death Star plans, and the circumstances meant that Xiaan Syndulla wouldn’t be going to university anytime in the foreseeable future. What had happened to Doriah and Xiaan – and presumably to the rest of her missing first cousins who had been captured at the Zardossa Stix colony and enslaved – in this universe was terrible, but at least they were still here and alive. She understood why Doriah had been so upset to hear that she had a half-human child, too.

She looked up at that child’s father and smiled, drinking in the sight of him. He was beautiful, still the most handsome man she had ever seen even with his younger counterpart to compare him with. “I love you,” she said..

Kanan smiled a little, crookedly. “I love you too.”

“Will you go to bed with me?”

He curved his palm gently against her cheek, and Hera smiled up at him. His hand was big, and warm, and very alive, the calluses from lightsaber and blaster use still half-familiar after all these years. “Yes,” he said gently, and kissed her.

Hera put her arms around his neck as she kissed him back. “I haven’t done this for a very long time,” she murmured.

“None of those rebel heroes wanted to comfort a beautiful widow?” Kanan asked, only a very slight hint of strain in his voice.

“Well, Lando Calrissian offered,” Hera said, and had to laugh a little at the expression on Kanan’s face. She kissed him again and said, “You know I’ve never been interested in anyone except you.”

Which was why it had been so much of a shock the first time. There had been people that Hera had found attractive, but even years later Kanan was still the only person, male, female, or any other gender, that she had ever wanted enough to act on it.

Kanan kissed her again, the stubble on his jaw scraping against her skin. Hera kissed him back, trying to get her jacket off at the same time and mostly just succeeding at getting her arms caught in the sleeves. “Wait –”

She stepped back until she could untangle herself from her jacket and hang it up. She took her gunbelt off after that, even though the holster was empty since the other Hera and Kanan still hadn’t returned her blaster and Hera hadn’t had a reason to ask.

“I could have terrible scars,” she said slyly, and saw Kanan raise an eyebrow.

“I’ve told you to stop crashing starfighters.”

“I’ve never crashed that many,” Hera said. “I mostly don’t fly combat anymore – I command shipside.” She shrugged as Kanan raised an eyebrow. “I also ran one of the pilot training centers for a while, when I went back to duty after Jacen was born, so I wouldn’t be in combat.” She hesitated for a moment, uncertain if Kanan would take offense at the fact that she had gone back to duty at all after having a child, but all he did was nod.

“Well, I hope you weren’t crashing those ships.”

Hera laughed and stepped up to kiss him again. “I wasn’t the one crashing ships. I had to keep taking over them on remote because some of those recruits had a little more enthusiasm than skill.”

“Mmm, sounds like someone I know.”

“You had better be talking about someone who wasn’t planning on taking her clothes off in the next five minutes,” Hera teased.

He winked solemnly at her. “I know a lot of bad pilots, but none of them are in this room.”

“Modest, aren’t we?” Hera caught his hands in hers and guided them to her waist. “Speaking of taking my clothes off…”

He grinned and kissed her again, tugging her shirttails free of her pants. “Well, if you’re going to be pushy about it, I guess I could help.”

Hera shivered a little as his fingers skated over her bared skin. She didn’t hate being touched the way she could tell the other Hera did, but she wasn’t accustomed to it anymore either. As it happened Lando had propositioned her, using almost that exact phrasing, but it had been good-natured and no more than half-serious. He would have taken her up on it if she had said yes, but hadn’t been bothered that she had said no, just gotten her a drink and talked with her about some ideas he had for adapting pod-racing to Bespin before Han and Leia had called him away with a better offer.

She put her hands up to cup around Kanan’s face as he started to bend his head to her shoulder, smoothing her thumbs over his cheekbones. He raised his head to her, smiling, and Hera said, “I love you. You – you believe me, don’t you?”

Kanan laid his hand alongside her cheek and said gravely, “I always knew.”

Hera shut her eyes, then opened them again because she couldn’t bear to not be looking at him as long as he was here. “I made a mistake, not telling you before.”

“Hera –”

“I love you,” she said again. “I need you to know that, Kanan, I love you, I love you, I love –”

He kissed her. “I know,” he said against her mouth, the words humming against her lips. “I always knew. I’m sorry if I made you think I didn’t.”

Hera was crying softly; she wasn’t even aware of starting, just that there were tears running silently down her cheeks and dripping off her chin. “I love you, I’m sorry, I love you –”

Kanan kissed her again, wiping the tears from her cheeks with his thumb. “I know,” he murmured, “I always knew. It’s all right, Hera, I’m here now. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” she said furiously. She touched his face gently, reassuring herself that he was real, then put her arms around his neck again and drew him close to her. “I made you doubt me,” she said, low-voiced. “And then I never had a chance to make it up. I had to live with that.”

“I never doubted you,” Kanan told her. “Hera, I love you. I just –” He hesitated. “I don’t know what I wanted. I knew something was coming, and I didn’t know what it was, and I was afraid.”

“You knew we were running out of time.”

“No. Yes. No – I don’t know. It doesn’t work like that.” He tipped his forehead down against hers. “I’m here now. You did that. You did that.”

Hera folded her fingers against the back of his neck, shuddering, and whispered, “You’re here,” uncertain if she was trying to convince herself or telling Kanan a simple fact.

“I’m here,” he told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Promise me,” Hera said, but shut her eyes, because she knew from his moment of hesitation that he couldn’t promise her that any more than she could promise him. “No, I know,” she corrected herself. This had been a nice vacation from reality – literally – but she was going back into a war and she was taking Kanan with her. And both of them knew exactly what that meant.

He kissed her gently. “I’m here now,” he repeated.

“I used to dream about you,” Hera whispered.

“You’ve got me.” He ran his thumb gently over the line of her cheek, brushing the tears away. “I’m here.”

Hera kissed him again. They were pressed so closely together that she could feel his heartbeat, and he was very warm and very alive in her arms. “I love you,” she whispered. “Will you take me to bed, please?”

“Yes.” He smiled down at her, then kissed her again as he dropped his hands to the front of her shirt.

Hera shifted back a little so that they had more maneuvering room and let go of him so that getting undressed would be slightly less complicated than staying tangled up together would be. She watched him as he undid the fastening on her shirt, shivering at the slight roughness of his callused fingers against her skin, and again as he drew his hands deliberately up across her stomach to her breasts. She was wearing her own bra, but had borrowed the shirt she was wearing from the other Hera in lieu of having brought a change of clothing; it hadn’t been on the list of things anyone had thought about back when they were planning this op.

“I remember this,” he said, his breath warm against her ear.

“I’d hope so, since for you it’s only been about a week and it wasn’t like you didn’t have a lot of experience with them before,” Hera said, grinning despite herself. She helped him get her shirt off, then unclasp her bra, which he did with what she considered a reasonable and enjoyable amount of generous groping. She kissed him in exchange for that, one arm looped around his neck, then laid her hands against the front of his borrowed shirt and smiled at him. “My turn.”

He grinned back at her.

His shirt was easier to get off than hers had been, and once Hera had stripped him out of it they spent a few more minutes kissing before they got down to the serious business of getting the rest of their clothes off.

Hera shifted a little uneasily once she was standing naked in front of him, both a little relieved and a little disappointed that he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t see the jagged scar that cut across the outside of her right thigh and halfway down to her knee, but it wasn’t as though he didn’t know it was there, and he –

“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she told him, resisting the urge to lick her lips. “Even with the hair,” she added gravely. “Between you and your – your counterpart, it’s growing on me.”

“Is his short too?” Kanan arched an eyebrow, amused. “Well, don’t expect it to stick around unless you want to help me keep it trimmed.”

“Anything to keep you from cutting it yourself again,” Hera said. She reached for his hands, shy, and then hesitated. It might have been only a few days for Kanan, but it had been six years for her.

Kanan stepped close to her, smiling, and Hera raised her face to him. He kissed her, lipping her mouth open slowly as Hera put an arm around his shoulders, feeling the muscles of his back flex beneath her palm. She shivered as he moved his mouth from hers to press a kiss to her jaw, then down the line of her throat. He put his hands against her waist to brace himself as he kissed his way down her collar bone, lingering on each breast and making her shudder before he continued downwards. He sank to his knees with boneless grace, his mouth still moving over her skin as Hera laced her fingers across the back of his skull, his cropped hair soft against her palms.

He kissed the faint, nearly-faded stretch marks on her belly, then the sharp edge of each hip bone. His hands brushed across her thighs, then paused on the scar. His white eyes shone through what Hera had always thought were absurdly long lashes for a man as he raised his head to her.

“What happened here?”

It took Hera a moment to remember how to speak. “My starfighter got shot up,” she admitted. “They had to cut me out of my X-wing.”

“I told you to stop crashing ships,” Kanan said gravely.

“It wasn’t a crash –” she started to say, then gasped as Kanan moved his mouth to the wet heat between her thighs. When Kanan finally leaned back, grinning, his mouth shining, Hera had to force herself to unclench her fingers, shuddering.

“I didn’t crash,” she managed to say. “I was teaching. One of my students shot me down. By accident.”

Kanan’s eyebrows climbed. “Even the Phoenix Squadron newbies know to check which way their guns are pointed before they pull the trigger.”

Hera fought down her pang of regret at the mention of Phoenix Squadron and tugged him to his feet, pulling him into another lingering kiss. “Lots of new recruits after Alderaan and Yavin,” she said after she drew back, breathing hard. “Not everyone has combat training, you know.”

He kissed her back. “Live rounds in training, though?”

“That goes for the mechanics too, but the cadets were supposed to be shooting at targets. That weren’t me.”

“I’d hope not.” He wrapped an arm around her waist and took another deep kiss from her as Hera put her arms around his neck. She felt pleasantly shivery in his arms, but nowhere near satisfied, not yet. She pressed her hips meaningfully against his, catching her lower lip briefly between her teeth as Kanan moved his hand down from her waist.

“For the record,” Hera breathed against his mouth, “I’m not having sex on the floor when there’s a perfectly good bed, even if we have to go up a ladder to get to it.”

Kanan grinned, kissed her again, then drew back enough to take her hand in his. He led Hera across the small room to the bunk; Hera tried not to watch his backside in case she forgot what she had said two seconds ago and had him on the floor.

They went up the ladder with a great deal of giggling, kissing, and enough good-natured groping that Hera was gasping when she landed on her back on the narrow bunk. She put an arm around Kanan’s shoulders and pulled him down for another kiss. Kanan braced himself between her thighs, kissing her back.

“I missed you,” Hera said softly against his mouth. She needed him like she needed to breathe, shifting her hips as she tried to urge him to stop teasing her and get inside her. But she needed him to know this, too. She couldn’t tell him enough times. “I love you.”

She felt his lips curve in a smile against hers. “I love you too,” he murmured.

He curved a hand around each thigh and Hera hissed through her teeth, reaching down between them to help him one-handed. She felt rather than heard her low groan as he pressed into her, digging her nails into the hard muscle of his back. It had been a long time.

Kanan dropped his forehead briefly to her shoulder, breathing hard. For a few moments, neither of them moved, overwhelmed, then Kanan whispered, “All right?”

Hera shifted her hips a little and felt him breathe in sharply. “Yes,” she said, “yes – better than all right.”

He turned his head, meaning to kiss her neck. Hera caught his mouth with hers, hooking one foot over the back of his ankle as she did.

“Come on,” she gasped as they began to move together. “Come on, love –”

Her whole body was sensation. She let her attention still from its usual restless inventory of facts and figures, tactics and personnel, to nothing more than Kanan and his body against hers. He was a revelation, and she sank into him.

“I missed this,” Hera mumbled against Kanan’s neck sometime later. She felt too loose and relaxed to even raise her head enough to look at him, just let the words hum against his skin as he stroked a hand across the small of her back. She knew it didn’t matter whether or not he could hear them; he would know what she said anyway. “I missed you.”

“I love you too,” Kanan said. He sounded sleepy, but his voice was clear. His thumb moved in soothing circles across her skin, making Hera sigh with pleasure.

She could hear his heartbeat, feel his chest moving up and down with every breath. He felt solidly real, alive and beloved and there. “Kanan,” she said softly, just to feel his name in her mouth and know he would respond.

“Mmm?”

“Marry me.” It wasn’t what she had meant to say, but the words came out anyway. She pushed herself on an elbow as Kanan went still, watching his face with a sudden start of panic that washed away her weariness.

He put a hand on her elbow to reassure her. “We’ve never talked about that,” he said, his voice quiet. He didn’t add that the last few times they had seen each other, he had been trying to convince her to talk about their relationship, though marriage had never come up.

Six years for her, a few weeks for him, Hera remembered, not for the first time. She sat up the rest of the way – it felt important to be sitting up for this conversation. Kanan pushed himself up too, taking her hands in his.

“Do you want to be married?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Hera said, though she took a minute to think about it first. Not about whether she meant it or not, because she did, but she knew Kanan wouldn’t appreciate a quick answer, not after the way they had left things six years ago. She squeezed his hands and said, “I love you. I want to be with you. I want to raise our child with you. Besides, the Alliance – the New Republic – has tax benefits for registered domestic partners.”

Kanan blinked. “Tax benefits? Since when do we pay –”

“New Republic, love, not just the Rebel Alliance anymore.”

He sighed. “That’s a real government, isn’t it.”

“That was the point of the whole rebellion,” she pointed out, her mouth quirking. She leaned forward and kissed him softly. “There’s a veteran’s pension too.”

“There are a lot of things that have changed.”

“A lot of things. Not everything.”

“No,” he agreed. He kissed her back, his mouth warm against hers. “Not everything.”

“I want to marry you,” Hera said again. “I want to be married to you. If – if you want –”

“Yes,” Kanan said. He kissed her again. “Yes.”

Hera put her arms around his neck. They went back down onto the bed together, Hera pressing Kanan down into the mattress as he smiled up at her. She kissed his mouth and murmured, “Do not knock me up again, I don’t have time to be pregnant right now.”

“All right,” he agreed gravely.

She smiled and kissed him again, running her hands down his bare chest. Kanan put an arm around her waist, flattening his palm against the small of her back.

“I love you,” Hera said again, the words humming against his lips. “Thank you for coming back to me.”

Chapter Text

The next few days, waiting until they could return back to their own universe, were the closest Hera had come to a vacation in years. Even on her infrequent trips back to Lothal or Ryloth to see her son Hera was working, going over reports or on holocalls with other members of the Rebel Alliance. She couldn’t do any of that here except make lists that might or might not be relevant for this universe. She spent more time than she cared to admit in bed with Kanan, sometimes making love and sometimes just talking. It was very good to have someone she could just talk to again; as a flag officer she couldn’t confide in her subordinates and seldom had anyone else of her own rank there. While Zeb was sometimes around, mostly her old crew was somewhere else and Hera couldn’t talk to them just because she felt lonely. Kanan knew her – maybe he didn’t know her now, but he had known her then, and he was learning fast.

The Syndulla’s Gamble left for several rotations – Hera got the impression that they couldn’t be away from the Free Ryloth fleet for very long – then returned. Hera was able to introduce Kanan to both her parents, an experience that made her sheepishly nervous. They weren’t her parents, not really, but they were at the same time, and she wanted them to like Kanan and Kanan to like them. She was cautiously optimistic afterwards that it had gone well. Even if this Alecto Syndulla wasn’t her mother, she wanted her to like Kanan.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been so easy for her to relax considering the circumstances, but Hera had been in the war long enough and seen enough things – both strange and terrible – that now that the initial shock had worn off, she couldn’t bring herself to be much bothered. The other Hera and Kanan were pleasant enough, even if they both made Hera feel terribly old, and…she had Kanan. That was what she had wanted for a long time, and having him now was almost more than she could comprehend.

Their next to last night on the Ghost, the other Kanan woke them all up. Kanan felt the edges of the younger man’s nightmare bleeding into his own dreams, a welter of pain and terror and the durasteel strength of the Grand Inquisitor, and dragged himself to wakefulness a full minute before the other man started screaming.

Hera jerked awake beside him. Kanan forgot what bed he was in and fell the six feet from the top bunk to the floor, catching himself in a crouch that jarred every bone in his body and made him bite through his own lip. He stumbled out of the cabin and had a moment of blank confusion as he tried to remember which room he was in and which room the screaming was coming from. For a moment past and present seemed to blur together, the veil between universes slipping as he reached out with the Force to steady himself. He heard conversation from the direction of the common room, Zeb and Sabine teasing Ezra with Chopper’s occasional interjections, and smelled the familiar acridity of fresh paint from the room behind him – Sabine’s room. He shook his head and it was gone again; he crossed the hall and went one cabin over.

The other Kanan had already stopped screaming by the time the door slid open for him. He was curled into a knot on the far side of his bunk, his Hera leaning over him; she looked up as Kanan came in, but he didn’t. He felt her hesitate as he came towards him, then she scrambled off the bunk so that he could crouch down beside it. He was vaguely aware of Hera following him in, drawing the other woman aside.

Kanan could hear the younger man weeping, nearly soundless. He reached out with the Force before he followed through with an outstretched hand, feeling the other Kanan flinch away from him in both body and mind. For a moment he felt the other Kanan’s blind panic threatening to drag him down into his nightmare, the real world starting to fray away around him, then he drove himself down deep into the Force. He cast his mind out for an anchor, starting to reach for Hera before he sensed something else instead, something that would work better for this sort of thing. Kanan let the solid, familiar strength of the holocron hidden beneath the bed anchor him, distantly noting that to his senses it felt the same as his own had. Exactly the same, as if somehow the two were one as far as the Force was concerned. Only when he was certain he wasn’t going to lose himself did he feed himself into the other Kanan’s nightmare.

The boy’s terrified mind seized on him with so much strength that Kanan felt his tie to the holocron stretch under the unexpected strain before it finally settled into the weight.

He opened his eyes to bright sunlight.

If he had been in control of his body the shock of being able to see again would have made him hesitate if only for an instant, but he was a passenger in someone else’s nightmare. He was aware at once of the ache of recently cracked ribs, healed enough that he could move without difficulty aside from the occasional painful twinge if he turned too fast or tried to bend over at all. Pressure against his face took him by surprise, a hard mask covering nose and mask and sealing against the sides of his face; he felt the other Kanan’s weary familiarity and resignation, and the faint, constant pain where the edges wore away at his skin.

A hand closed on the back of his neck. Kanan’s mind flinched away but not his body; he didn’t have to look up to know that it was the Grand Inquisitor’s – the Hunter’s – hand on him. The Pau’an’s grip wasn’t hard enough to hurt, though all he would have had to do was squeeze and he could have shaken Kanan like a massiff with a pikobi. He could tell from the boy’s distant, barely comprehending misery that the Hunter had done just that before.

The complicated tangle of the boy’s conflicting emotions made his stomach turn over. There was hatred there, which Kanan had been braced for; there was also love, which he hadn’t been. He could sense the same ties of apprentice to master that he had felt before, stronger now from proximity, and still so fresh that the psychic wounds made by their creation had barely scabbed over.

It took him a moment to realize that they were breathing together, the other Kanan’s breath unnaturally slow for a human, in time with the Pau’an beside him, his heartbeat slowing to match his master’s. When the Hunter raised his head, Kanan looked too – not a beat behind, but at the exact same moment.

They were standing at the edge of a broad purplish-green expanse of manicured lawn. There was a big mansion behind them, but the two Inquisitors’ attention was on the large pavilion set up at the center of the lawn. The distant sounds of conversation, laughter, and music came from the pavilion.

The Hunter released him.

Any relief that Kanan might have felt was lost in the wave of bloodlust that went through him. He could tell, just barely, that it was external rather than internal; it felt a little like what he had read about what the Jedi called pack instinct, though usually that only appeared when there were a dozen or more Jedi – or Force-users, he supposed – intent on the same goal. He couldn’t tell if the boy was aware that it came from the Hunter rather than from inside himself; he couldn’t tell if the other Kanan cared. He supposed at this point it didn’t make a difference.

As the two Inquisitors started across the lawn, moving with the smooth, inhuman grace of trained Force-users, it struck him that it was entirely possible that that moment of bloodlust had only been a part of the other Kanan’s nightmare, not his memory.

They were at the entrance to the pavilion before anyone realized they were there. It was a trick that Kanan had never learned the knack of, a way of using the Force to suggest to any observers that what was seen was only what was expected. To the guards positioned outside the pavilion – their rich livery suggesting they were the private bodyguards of whoever owned the mansion behind them – it must have appeared as if the two Inquisitors had appeared out of thin air.

Kanan flung a hand aside, sending the two nearest guards flying as they started to reach for their weapons. He and the Hunter were moving in perfect lock-step as they entered the pavilion, the nearest occupants only just starting to turn and stare at them.

He wasn’t even aware of reaching for the lightsaber on his belt, just that it was suddenly in his hand, the gleaming red blade springing up before his eyes. The Hunter had his in hand as well.

Kanan had already known how fast a single Jedi, never mind two, could go through a troop of battle droids. He had never thought to wonder if a Jedi – a trained Force-user – could do the same through other human beings.

He found that out now.

He could feel the younger Kanan’s mind flinching away from the nightmare, from the memory. If he could have closed his eyes, he would have, but the boy had seen exactly what he had done, and Kanan did too. Real or imagined, the boy was trying to lose himself in the killing, to numb himself enough to stop thinking about it and just go on with it. Kanan was aware in a vague kind of way that it wasn’t the first time he had done something like this, nor would it be the last.

He flexed mental claws as if digging his feet into Lothal’s rich earth, feeling the strain of the holocron binding him to the real world. The kid was strong in the Force, as strong as Kanan – obviously, and his control slipped for an instant as he reminded himself of that. It wasn’t strength versus strength; it was the blind, panicked terror of the kid’s nightmares versus Kanan’s greater experience and control.

The kid fought him with the terror-strength of a cornered animal. The abattoir dissolved around them as the boy’s mental claws raked him, a hound’s teeth snapping before Kanan slapped him down with one paw in reflexive defense. He was only half aware of having taken this form in the Force, fitting himself into paws and claws and teeth so he wouldn’t be distracted by the knowledge of his own physical body. The kid had done the same, reflexive; shadowed and smaller than Kanan but with the air of a creature that would chew off its own limb to get out of a trap.

They tumbled through the Force, a half-acknowledged welter of memories and nightmares – mostly the kid’s, though he was aware of the shared horror of Order 66, of his friend Stance’s death, of being lost in the living dark beneath the Jedi Temple as a youngling. The other Kanan fled him, and Kanan might have let him go if they hadn’t already been tangled up in each other, so that he dragged Kanan behind him into the dark even as Kanan tried to free them both. His tie to the holocron flexed, but held; he was vaguely aware of Hera’s hands on his shoulders in the waking world before the kid caught him in what might have been a killing grip in the real world, his hound’s teeth closing on the back of Kanan’s neck, and they fell out of the Force into another nightmare.

Literally fell. The back of Kanan’s head connected with a hard surface beneath him, making his skull ring. He was half-aware of his counterpart fading into the waking nightmare of the memory, leaving him a passenger again.

He was so frightened.

Not him, he realized a moment later, but the boy – a little younger, with a splinted wrist, a bruised eye swollen nearly closed, and a newly split lip. Other injuries too, half-healed wounds, none more severe than the wrist in its splint. He flinched as a black-gloved hand closed around his throat and dragged him to his feet – really flinched, not just the reflexive mental flinch from before.

“Again,” said the Grand Inquisitor, releasing him.

Kanan took a staggered step back, rubbing at his bruised throat, but put his good hand out anyway and called his fallen lightsaber into it. It was an Inquisitor’s lightsaber, double-ended and with a curved half-moon guard. He must not have had it long; the kyber crystals in it hadn’t attuned to him yet.

The Grand Inquisitor – the Hunter, here – watched him with what might have been a smile on his pale features. Kanan wouldn’t look at him straight on, keeping his gaze slightly averted as he ignited one blade of the lightsaber and brought it up before him in a guard position.

The Hunter already had his lightsaber in hand, the blades deactivated at the moment. Kanan watched him through his good eye as he prowled sideways, the back of his neck tickling. He didn’t reach for the Force, no more than the subconscious knowledge of it that every Force-sensitive had, but that failed him this time; he turned to parry a blow that never came and the Hunter backhanded him hard enough to split his lip open again. Kanan staggered backwards, his mouth full of his own blood.

The Hunter caught him by the chin before he could recover, fingers digging into his skin. Kanan swallowed reflexively, gagging on blood, but all of his attention was on the Hunter’s cool yellow eyes. The confusing tangle of emotions that Kanan had felt in the boy earlier wasn’t there yet, not in full; the kid was terrified of him and hated him despite his best attempts not to fall prey to that, and there was a burgeoning hint of something that wasn’t love, not yet. The connection was already there, the tie that bound master and apprentice, and the kid knew it with despairing certainty.

“You are the Force made flesh,” said the Hunter, his voice soft and dangerous, and Kanan flinched at every word. “You earned your lightsaber on that truth. You gain nothing by denying it now.”

Kanan’s mouth worked silently.

The Pau’an looked at him for a long moment, his gaze boring into Kanan’s eyes, then he released him with a jerk. “Again,” he said.

The boy fumbled and nearly dropped his lightsaber, making the Hunter frown. He was shaking so badly that there didn’t seem to be much point in fighting the Hunter, but he ignited the blade and brought the weapon up anyway.

The Hunter just looked at him for a moment, his expression suggesting further disappointment, then he moved his hand and the lightsaber slipped free of Kanan’s fingers before he realized what was happening. Kanan flinched from him, wide-eyed, terror humming through his veins as the Hunter seized him again.

“A lightsaber is only a tool,” he said. “You are the weapon. We are the weapons.”

In the nightmare if not in reality the other Kanan’s terror was overwhelming, blanking out his awareness of everything around him. The numbness that had come later wasn’t present yet; he was all raw nerve endings, the shadow of the dark side scraping against him whether or not he reached for the Force. But already all of his attention was focused on the Hunter, his rapid, shallow breathing starting to slow to match the Hunter’s, his heartbeat doing the same. He wasn’t doing it consciously; Kanan was aware of the overwhelming pressure of the Hunter’s mind on his, forcing the master/padawan connection onto the open wounds left behind by Depa Billaba’s death.

Ezra, Kanan thought, with sharp, genuine fear that he felt reverberate down to the kid. He had never thought of the shattered connections left behind after Master Billaba’s untimely death as a vulnerability, never thought of them at all in the face of the horror that the Force had been after the Purge. Of course, he had never had anyone take advantage of it – had never even considered that that was a possibility. It was something only someone trained as a Jedi could or would have done.

The kid’s exhausted, all-encompassing terror was beginning to fade, too focused on the Hunter to sustain fear. It had an almost soporific effect on Kanan; he grabbed for the Force and pulled, lashing out with mental claws.

The Hunter vanished as the younger Kanan turned on him, his panic back in full force. Kanan reached for the holocron, meaning to drag them both back to reality, just as the boy flung himself at him. They tumbled through the Force in a welter of bad dreams and memories, into Kanan’s own private nightmare.

Flame roared up around him, heat pressing in from all sides, and he heard Hera scream.

His mind went blank with panic that he was vaguely aware he hadn’t felt at the time. He took one breath, two, heat searing his lungs –

– and the kid pulled him out.

Both of them hit the floor of the cabin, gasping for breath. Kanan threw himself sideways immediately, feeling the other Kanan’s momentary reaction to Kanan’s weight on top of him. His mind was still too scrambled from the succession of nightmares to concentrate on the Force; he heard rather than felt Hera scramble towards him, kneeling down beside him. He turned his face into the smooth warmth of her thigh, gasping for breath as she flattened her palms against his back.

The sound was mirrored by the younger Kanan’s ragged gasping. “Don’t do that again,” the boy said when he had caught his breath.

“Sorry,” Kanan said; the words came out muffled against Hera’s skin. He turned his head enough that he could speak clearly and repeated, “I’m sorry. I thought that would go differently.”

“Not your fault,” the kid said, a little stiffly.

“Love?” Hera whispered, stroking a hand over the back of his neck. “Are you all right?”

“Give me a moment.” He turned his face back into her thigh, breathing in her familiar scent – nothing at all like the acrid smell of burning fuel or the coppery tang of blood. He was vaguely aware of the other Hera doing the same with her Kanan, but didn’t make any attempt to listen.

“All right,” he said eventually, and let Hera help him up. He drew the Force around himself as he did, sensing the other Kanan still kneeling on the floor with his face buried in his Hera’s shoulder. Belatedly he released his tie to the holocron, and winced as he felt the boy flinch; he had sensed that. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Not half as sorry as I am.” The other Kanan’s voice was muffled. He felt Hera – the younger Hera – glare at him, and winced.

He didn’t bother telling either of them that he hadn’t expected that outcome, since that was self-evident and the boy could pluck it from his mind anyway. He just folded his hand into Hera’s and left the cabin.

“Are you all right?” she asked him again once they were back in their own cabin with the door closed.

Kanan put his arms around her. She was warm and very real, comfortingly alive in a way that made the rapid pounding of his heart slow – to human normal, not the slower pulse common to Pau’ans.

“Kanan?” she insisted when he didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” he made himself say. “Yeah, I will be, I just need a moment. I did something stupid.”

She guided him over to the bench below the bunk and sat down beside him. He could still feel the other Kanan’s terror thrumming along his nerves and pushed it out of his awareness with a force of effort; it wasn’t his to know.

“You didn’t mean to.”

“That doesn’t make it less stupid.” He pressed his face down into her shoulder, then kissed her neck just for the sake of feeling her pleasure in the Force. It was clean, and honest, and utterly hers. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“The screaming woke me up.” She pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Let’s go back to bed. Unless you don’t want to?”

At the moment Kanan couldn’t think of anything better than curling up in bed with Hera in his arms, especially with a closed door shutting them off from the rest of the world. He kissed her neck again, then followed stood up and nearly brained himself on the top bunk. His body still felt not quite his own; he could feel his eyes straining to see in a way he hadn’t done in years. Phantom pain from injuries he had never suffered made him wince and Hera turn towards him, radiating worry.

“I’m fine,” he told her.

“Mm-hmm.” She cupped her hands around his face, studying him, then kissed him quickly. “Come on and sleep it off, love.”

“I have something for you.”

The younger Kanan sounded unspeakably weary, for which Kanan couldn’t blame him. He said gently, “Did you get any sleep?”

“Some.” He felt the younger man eye him, hesitating on whether or not to say anything else, then he said, “This happens pretty often.”

“I’m –”

“Not as sorry as I am.” The kid scrubbed his hands back through his hair, letting his breath out in a sigh. “It’s fine. You were – I know what you were trying to do.” He put a shoulder against the wall, scuffing a foot absently against the floor.

“Kid –” Kanan hesitated, turning his head briefly in the direction of the common room door. He was aware of both women in the other room, having some kind of argument with Chopper about either fruit or repairs; he couldn’t figure out which of the two it was without putting more than glancing attention to it.

“I’m starting to feel like you’re just calling me that to get a rise out of me.” His voice was dry, with a hoarse note to it after the previous night’s screaming. Kanan had noticed that he always spoke a little hesitantly, as if he was never quite certain he should be doing so at all.

“The alternative is a little confusing, but I’ll stop if you want.”

He felt the younger man’s brief amusement. “It’s fine. I know what you mean.” He tapped a finger against his forehead. “And you don’t do it the way the rest of the Inq – the way it is at the Crucible.”

He stepped back from the wall, letting the door to his room slide open behind him; Kanan followed him inside. It was on the tip of his tongue to apologize again, but he stopped himself; words only did so much when it came to Jedi. Instead, he said, “Will you be all right?”

They both knew he didn’t just mean after the events of the previous night. The other Kanan sighed and said, “I don’t know.” He turned his attention to his hands, studying his unmarked palms and the faint scars across the backs of his knuckles. “Would you be?”

“I was lucky.”

“Every other –” He hesitated for a long moment, then grimaced and finished, “– every other pet the Hunter had died. So maybe I was lucky too.”

“You’re alive.”

“Yeah.” He snorted. “I guess.” He gestured at the meditation cushion and Kanan took a seat, folding his legs tailor-style. His automatic impulse was to let his mind roll out, but he kept a hold on himself instead, studying the younger Kanan without reaching further into the Force than he had to.

The kid turned away from him, opening the drawer beneath his bunk. Kanan felt the bright flare of the holocron’s awareness and the other Kanan flinching away from it, unwilling to test himself by bringing it out. He turned around with his – with Caleb Dume’s – lightsaber in his hand, offering it to Kanan.

“I know you don’t have yours,” he said quietly. “And I don’t – I can’t – it’s a Jedi’s weapon, and I’m – I’m not a Jedi anymore.”

Kanan got to his feet. He felt the boy look up quickly, his eyes widening, and knew somehow that his gaze had gone immediately to a point three inches above his own head – where the Grand Inquisitor’s eye line would have been. After a moment the younger Kanan swallowed, biting his lip.

After a moment, he said, “You didn’t see the worst of it.”

Kanan bit his lip. His sleep the rest of the night had been restless, a welter of incoherent dream fragments that he knew he had picked up from the other man during their connection, and some of it had been worse than he had imagined the first time he had touched the younger man’s mind. He had woken up with the light touch of Hera’s hand on his shoulder and nearly flung himself off the bed, as if burned by her touch. It had taken him three shuddering breaths to remember who she was and where they were, and who he was, for that matter.

He put his hand on the hilt of the lightsaber, just above the boy’s, but didn’t take it from him. The other Kanan started to release it, then stopped.

Kanan could feel the kyber crystal beneath his fingers, familiar but also not at the same time. It was just slightly discordant to his senses, a difference in resonance to his own so slight that he might not have noticed it if he hadn’t known his own kyber crystal so well. The crystal is the heart of the blade…

He drew his hand back, and felt the younger man look up at him in surprise. “It’s your lightsaber,” Kanan said gently. “Reach out with your senses – can you feel it?”

“I’m not a Jedi,” the boy said again. He turned his attention down to the weapon in his hand, his mind reaching out to the crystal and then flinching back even as Kanan felt it welcoming him.

“Why do you think that?” he asked quietly. “That you aren’t a Jedi, I mean.”

The boy looked up at him. “I’m an Inquisitor,” he said, his voice flat. His free hand dropped to the lightsaber on his hip, then jerked away as soon as his fingers brushed the metal of the hilt. “I can’t be. Not after what – not after.”

Kanan couldn’t tell if he had meant to say “not after what I did” or “not after what happened to me,” but he didn’t ask. He said, “You didn’t bleed your crystal, though.”

“No. I – my lightsaber was on the Ghost when I was…when my master took me from Naboo. When we got to Mustafar – to the Inquisition headquarters there, the Crucible – they put me in a room with four trainee Inquisitors, all armed. I wasn’t. That’s where I got this.” He touched the lightsaber on his hip again, then closed that hand into a fist.

Kanan put his hand out silently, and after a moment the other man took that lightsaber off his belt and put it into his hand. He turned his mind to it, cautious, and felt the kyber crystal respond.

He could sense the boy’s sudden interest; he had felt the kyber crystal’s reaction too. Without turning his attention from the lightsaber, Kanan sat back down on the meditation cushion, folding his legs in front of him. When he dropped his hands to rest on his knees, the lightsaber stayed where it was, suspended in the air before him. His mind ticked over the weapon, pulling it into its component parts.

It had been the standard Inquisitor’s double-bladed lightsaber with its circular guard before, he found. At some point the younger Kanan had dissembled it and reassembled it to his liking, clearing the crystal of its taint when he had done so; the second kyber crystal that made the dual blade possible was gone. Casting his mind out further, Kanan couldn’t sense it anywhere on the ship – though with unaligned kyber crystals it was always hard to tell – so the boy might have left it on Mustafar or lost it somehow.

He lifted the remaining kyber crystal gently away from the other components to examine it on its own. It was attuned to the other Kanan, but only weakly, the way any item in the possession of an active Force-user would attune itself to them over time. The boy’s fear had kept him from sinking into it inasmuch it was possible with any random kyber crystal, rather than the one he had found on his Gathering.

Kyber crystals weren’t sentient, not like people and not the same way holocrons developed a kind of low-level sentience over time. But they weren’t not, either, and Kanan could feel this one responding to him with cautious interest and gaining enthusiasm. The other Kanan hadn’t hated it – either he was too good a Jedi for that or he had saved those strong emotions for the Grand Inquisitor, either consciously or otherwise – but he had both resented and feared it.

He could sense the crystal’s previous owners entangled in its matrix. It puzzled him for a moment; amongst the Jedi kyber crystals were only ever passed down between Temple Guards, who set their own lightsabers aside as long as they served in that post, and he had never had any reason to examine a Temple Guard’s lightsaber closely.

The Grand Inquisitor was a Guard, he thought with a sudden start. Not for the first time, he wondered how much of what he had seen in the temple on Lothal had been real.

Telemetry wasn’t one of his wild talents and this wasn’t really telemetry, but he still blinked in surprised at the flash of memory that he felt through the crystal. It passed in less than a second, but even that was long enough for Kanan to be aware of the younger Kanan’s constant fear, that hot flash of satisfaction when he had taken it from the Inquisitor who had borne it previously, that Inquisitor taking it from another, and another before him, and then a moment, scraped raw and bare, when the crystal been removed from its original lightsaber and bled to its red sheen. Beyond that, there was nothing, as though the trauma of its bleeding had wiped the crystal matrix of its memory of its first bearer.

I’m sorry, Kanan thought, for whatever that was worth. The idea of his own kyber crystal being stripped from his lost lightsaber and corrupted that way was unbearable, nearly as bad as the loss of his sight. Kyber crystals were sacred to the Jedi; his own body was only flesh.

He felt the crystal align itself to him, the resonance of its silent song altering incrementally until he could barely tell it apart from his own body. He let it settle back into the framework of the lightsaber hilt, his mind bringing the disparate pieces back together, settling firmly and comfortably into place. When he raised one hand, the lightsaber fell neatly into his palm, feeling different somehow than it had when he had first taken it from the boy.

He raised the lightsaber in front of him, feeling the strong, familiar warmth of it in his hand. He depressed the trigger almost without conscious thought, the blade springing up before him.

“It’s blue,” the younger Kanan said, his voice harsh with longing. “It’s yours.”

Kanan deactivated the lightsaber and let his hand fall to rest on his knee. “That weapon is yours,” he said, nodding at the lightsaber the other man still held. “You know it, I know it, your crystal knows it. The crystal is the heart of the blade; the heart is the crystal of the Jedi; the Jedi is the crystal of the Force; the Force is the crystal of the heart. All are intertwined – the crystal, the blade, the Jedi – you are one.”

The other Kanan began to weep, harsh, gasping sobs that shook his whole body. Kanan was on his feet in an instant, pulling the younger man into his arms as he wept. The other man didn’t try to pull away, just leaned against him. He was all turmoil in the Force, fear and pain and the open, bleeding wound that was his connection to the Hunter. Kanan held him the way he would have held Ezra, but unlike with Ezra he didn’t need to speak out loud; just let the warmth of the Force pass between them in something more primal than words. Words would have rung false, anyway; so he just held the other man, letting him cry as if his heart was broken.

“I’ll miss you,” the other Hera said. Her voice was still a little hesitant, as if she wasn’t certain how to admit any of her own feelings to anyone else. “It’s…nice to have another Twi’lek around. And you’re not like –” She flexed her fingers on the handle of her caf cup, thinking for a moment before she went on. “My family wants certain things from me, and I just…I don’t know how to be that for them. You never wanted anything from me.”

“I wanted you to leave the Empire,” Hera said gravely.

“You never told me that,” the girl pointed out. “You never expected it.”

Hera opened her mouth to respond and then hesitated, thinking back on everything she had said over the course of the past ten days. She supposed she hadn’t ever come out and asked for anything other than help getting to Scarif, and she wasn’t certain she had ever asked outright for that either. She had stated her case, and left the two Imperials to make up their own minds.

“I didn’t need to,” she said at last. She smiled at the other woman over her own cup. “I didn’t have to.”

The other Hera sighed. “I wish I could have that kind of faith in anything.”

Hera flicked a glance in the direction of the cabins, where the two Kanans had gone to talk or meditate or both. “Nothing?”

The girl followed her gaze and sighed again. “I love Kanan more than anything,” she said, lowering her voice. “And I know he loves me. But – it’s not him, it’s me.” She looked down at her mug, turning it until the handle pointed directly at her, then up at Hera’s distressed expression and bit her lip. “Oh,” she said, even softer. “It’s me, then, not…us.”

Hera tried to arrange her features into something less appalled and reached across the table to lay one hand on the other woman’s. “I would stay if I could,” she said. “Both of us would.”

The girl turned her hand palm up and curled her fingers briefly around Hera’s. “When I was at the Academy, I never –” She hesitated over the words, frowning. “I…forgot who I was. And I can’t be – I can’t be you, or who I would have been if I’d grown up with the Fleet, but I didn’t know what was…me…and what was – what was the Empire.” Her hand moved briefly under Hera’s, as if starting to gesture before she stopped herself. “It’s…nice, I suppose…to have a baseline.”

“I’m not sure I’m much of a baseline,” Hera said mildly.

She lifted a shoulder in a brief, constrained shrug, the same kind of gesture Hera had seen a dozen Imperial defectors make over the past few years; uniformed Imperials weren’t prone to much in the way of expression, while armored troopers tended to exaggerate their gestures when they made them at all. “You’re something. And I can’t – I’ve never been able to remember anything from before the Spire very well. It’s there, but it’s – it’s like it happened to someone else, or something that I watched in a holovid.”

She looked down again, not releasing Hera’s hand. “Auntie said – but it’s not what happened at the colony. I mean, it didn’t help, but – the Spire – my cell there – it was my whole world for so long. It’s like my life ended there.”

Hera squeezed her hand, not knowing what to say in response. If she had been one of her cadets back in the Alliance there were things she could have said, but this wasn’t a cadet or a recruit or another officer, it was…her. It could have been her.

The other Hera looked up suddenly, heat flushing her cheeks. “May I ask you something? You can say no. It’s – it’s a little – a lot – personal.”

“Of course,” Hera said, bemused. She squeezed the other girl’s hand again, then released her to wrap her fingers around her mug.

“You and Kanan – your Kanan.” The girl bit her lip, not meeting her eyes. “When –”

Hera bit her lip, not sure whether to blush, laugh, or cry. “Sometime around now, I think,” she admitted, after a moment where she got herself under control. She could feel heat in her face, spreading up under her flight cap to the base of her lekku.

The girl’s eyes went wide. “That’s a long time,” she blurted out, then covered her mouth with one hand. “I’m sorry –”

“No, it’s – when did you?”

The other Hera looked down, blushing so hard that it vanished beneath the high collar of her shirt and the edge of her flight cap. “About four months after Gorse,” she said, her voice small. “He was so beautiful, and he – he was so kind and he – I wanted him so badly. I never wanted anything – or at least, I never wanted anything and got it before then.” She put her hands over her face, breathing hard, then lowered them after a moment. “You don’t know what it’s like in the service if you’re a Twi’lek. They’re – it’s –” Her hands were shaking.

Hera reached across the table and took her hands in both of hers again. “It’s all right,” she said gently. “It’s over with now.”

The girl wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I thought I was broken,” she said. “People kept – telling me things about what Twi’leks – what Twi’lek women – were like, and I – I knew they were wrong, but they kept saying it, and I felt like I was going mad. Or that I was broken. Or both. And he – I wanted him so badly. I’ve never felt like that about anyone else. He was – he still is – so beautiful, and I wanted him so badly. I didn’t think that I – that I could feel like that. He wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met, and he – he treated me like I was a person. Like it didn’t matter. Or – that’s not right. Like it was just part of me. Like me being a Twi’lek mattered because it was part of me, not – not because I was a Twi’lek. Do you – do you know what that’s like?”

“A little,” Hera said. “It was different for me.”

The other woman looked at her uncertainly, but whatever she saw in Hera’s eyes must have convinced her. “What was it like for you?”

Hera hesitated, setting her teeth against her lower lip as she thought. “I wanted to fight,” she said finally, trying to remember what had been going through her head at the age of eighteen. “More than anything. My father only cared about Ryloth, but I wanted something bigger. Kanan – I met him on Gorse too – was part of that. I couldn’t let myself think about anything past that. He understood that.”

The other Hera nodded slowly. “What happened?”

“Well, we both almost died,” Hera said, and the girl made a sound that was almost a laugh, though she immediately looked worried that Hera would be offended. “It was complicated. I probably made it more complicated than it needed to be; I never wanted to talk about it. We just – went on, I suppose. And then we started getting a crew, and – it was harder because there were more people on the Ghost –”

The girl winced, for which Hera couldn’t blame her.

“– it was all right,” Hera hastened to assure her. “It was just different. And then Kanan got an apprentice, and we started working with other Rebel cells –”

The other woman nodded in sudden understanding. “Everyone at the ISB knew about us,” she said softly. “But around other people it’s different.”

Hera nodded. “It was stupid of me,” she admitted. “We’d been together for a decade – sleeping together for most of that – and I just thought we’d go on. He – knew. He knew there was something coming. And I wouldn’t –” She took a suddenly shaky breath; this time it was the other woman who squeezed her hands.

After a moment she raised her head and smiled crookedly at the other Hera. “It’s good that he knows you love him,” she said. “And that you know. I wish I’d had that when I was your age. There’s nothing wrong with having a mission, but – I thought it had to be that at the cost of everything else for such a long time. That cost us both.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said gravely. “That sounds difficult.”

Hera didn’t think it sounded half as difficult as what she had been through, but she wasn’t going to say as much, since she wasn’t sure that there was anything she could say about it that wouldn’t sound like a veiled insult. “Will you be all right, once we’ve gone?”

The other Hera nodded. “Yes. I don’t know what we’ll be – who we’ll be – but I think we’ll be all right.” She glanced at the door the two men had gone through. “He’s better now. I didn’t think he ever would be.” She hesitated, then added, “I am too.”

Hera squeezed her hands. “I’m glad,” she said. “I wish –” She wished a lot of things, but at the end of the day she needed to get the Cluster-Prism data back to the Rebellion and she needed to get back to her son.

“We’ll be all right,” the other Hera said again. “Both of us. I – thank you. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise, but…thank you.”

“This could be a little awkward,” Hera said thoughtfully. She accepted her blaster from the other Hera with a faint smile, automatically checking the safety and the charge before holstering it; since she had never needed it she hadn’t bothered asking for it back before now.

Kanan smiled at her. “Awkward as in ‘duck, they’re going to start shooting’ or awkward as in ‘this is going to take a lot of explaining’?”

“Probably the second one,” Hera said. She checked the bag slung over her shoulder for the fifteenth time that morning, making sure that she had the datacards with the Cluster-Prism files and the ISB files she had gotten from the other Hera, along with the box Bail Organa had given her for Leia. “Maybe the first one, depending who’s there. I hope Zeb hasn’t decided to make a three-ring circus out of this. Or Chopper.”

Chopper grumbled at the sound of his name and Hera smiled a little. “My Chopper,” she clarified. “Not you.”

Kanan grinned in reminiscence, then stepped aside to talk quietly with the other Kanan. Hera turned away to give them some privacy, looking at her counterpart. After a moment she held out her arms.

The girl hesitated, then stepped into her arms, returning the embrace. Despite the obvious muscle in her shoulders and arms she still felt terrifyingly fragile to Hera, as if she might shatter under too much pressure. Hera pressed a kiss to her forehead and said, “You’ll be all right.”

She got a smile in response. “So will you,” the other Hera said. She hugged Hera again, then stepped back.

Hera looked over in time to see Kanan put an arm around the younger man’s shoulders in a swift, fond embrace. He said something to him, too low-voiced to make out, and the other Kanan nodded, his response equally soft. When Kanan released him, he came over to Hera.

She put her hands out to him, smiling, and he took them. “Thank you,” she started to say, at the same time he said, “Thank you –”

Hera laughed, then released his hands so that she could hug him. “Thank you,” she said again. “I just – thank you.”

He hugged her back. “Thank you,” he murmured in response. He didn’t clarify that, but he didn’t have to.

“Be well,” Hera told him gently, kissing each cheek. She hugged him once more, then let go of him.

The other Hera was speaking shyly to Kanan. Hera waited for them to finish, then saw both men wince in unison.

“Are you all right?” the younger Hera said, startled.

“It’s starting,” her Kanan said. He gave Kanan a crooked smile. “I think we’re both going to be sensitive to that for the rest of our lives.”

“Forgive me for hoping it never comes up again,” Kanan said, returning the same grin. He put his hand on the other Hera’s shoulder, smiling at her, then stepped back.

Hera held out her hand and he took it as he stepped up beside her. She could feel the pressure coming, the air starting to hum as her vision flickered at its edges. The younger Kanan and Hera backed up, as did Chopper.

“May the Force be with you,” said the girl.

The universe dissolved around them.

“– ait, there’s something wr –”

Luke Skywalker’s voice was garbled, as if coming over a malfunctioning comm. Hera tried to respond and couldn’t; when she breathed in, there was nothing there and she gagged; she opened her eyes not to blackness but to nothing, to an absence. She would have screamed if she could have.

The only thing she was aware of was Kanan’s grip on her hand. She felt his fingers flex against hers, his breath hissing out between his teeth with effort.

“– ith me, togeth –”

The second voice was female, familiar, with the same quality of being barely there. Hera flailed out wildly with her free hand, but there was nothing. It was like being in vacuum, but worse; there were no stars, no planets, no pieces of shattered starships to orient herself with. There was only Kanan’s hand.

“– n, think about your mo –”

Kanan’s hand flexed on hers again. Hera dug her nails into the back of his hand, terrified that she might release him by accident and lose him in the void.

“– the Force –“

Hera had the sudden sense of being thrown as the familiar confines of the Ghost’s common room coalesced around her. For an instant she still saw the younger Kanan and Hera where she had seen them last, then they were gone, replaced by Zeb and Chopper. She staggered sideways, fighting back nausea and supporting herself on the holotable before she fell over.

“Whoa!”

“Mama!”

Hera jerked upright in time to see Alexsandr Kallus grab Jacen and thrust him behind himself before he could run to Hera, his hand on his holstered blaster. Sabine was there too, her blasters already in her hands and raised, pointing at –

Hera flung herself in front of Kanan, who had very sensibly not moved. “It’s him!” she said. “I swear, it’s him!”

She took in everyone in the room with a glance – Zeb, Chopper, Sabine, Kallus, Jacen, Luke and Leia, Rex in the doorway, and –

Ahsoka Tano, one of her lightsabers already in her hand and ignited, her expression hard. Kanan’s head was turned towards her, his white eyes fixed on hers. Luke, who was holding the bell-shaped artifact between his hands, drew in a sharp breath; even Hera felt the air flex between them.

“It’s him,” she said again. “It’s Kanan, I swear.”

“We’ll see about that.” Ahsoka deactivated her lightsaber but kept in her hand as she stepped forward, gesturing Luke to stay back when he made to join her.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Kanan told her quietly as she approached.

“I could say the same for you,” Ahsoka said. Her gaze went to the lightsaber on his belt, the one he had gotten from the other Kanan, then she said, “Don’t fight me.”

“Don’t give me a reason to.”

“He’s –” Hera started to say, but Ahsoka held up a hand to silence her.

“It’s all right,” Kanan said, turning a quick smile on her. “This won’t take long.”

“What –” Sabine started to say, then gave it up, her blasters still raised.

Ahsoka replaced her lightsaber on her belt and placed her palms on either side of Kanan’s head, her gaze boring into his. Kanan didn’t pull away; Luke sneezed and Leia put a hand to her head, her expression pained. Jacen made a startled sound and Hera made a reflexive motion towards him before Kallus met her eyes. She stopped.

Ahsoka stepped back suddenly, her breath ragged. “I –”

Kanan wiped blood away from his lower lip where he had bitten through it. “That’s a little hypocritical, isn’t it?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then took a step back until she could sit down abruptly on the bench-seat, pressing a hand to her forehead. Something passed silently between them, and Ahsoka’s hard expression softened. Her shoulders slumped suddenly as she said, “It’s good to see you again, Kanan.”

There was a long moment of silence in the room, then Sabine flung herself forward with a shout, nearly bowling Kanan over as she hugged him. Zeb was just behind her, sweeping Hera into the embrace as well as they almost knocked the holotable out of its seating.

“How!” Sabine said, not so much a question as an exclamation “How – it’s you? It’s really you? This isn’t a trick?”

“It’s me,” Kanan said, sounding slightly strangled. “It’s really me.”

Zeb yelled in triumph. Hera found herself laughing, effulgent with joy and success. She could hear Chopper shrieking just behind her and managed to disentangle herself from the group embrace to kneel down and put her arms around her droid. “I missed you,” she told him fondly, then looked up.

Kallus looked as gobsmacked as everyone else in the room, still holding onto Jacen’s hand as they came over. “Mama!” Jacen said, and Hera released Chopper to put her arms out. She swept her son into a hug, kissing his forehead and breathing in his familiar scent.

“Hello, love,” she said. “I missed you.” She reached behind herself without looking, knowing when Kanan took her hand. He knelt beside her, and Hera looked over at him, smiling. She was crying; she didn’t remember starting, but she could feel the tears on her cheeks. “Jacen,” she said, “this is your father.”

Chapter Text

Only General Airen Cracken, the head of Rebel Intelligence, and Leia Organa were present when Hera did her post-mission debrief. She suspected that this op was going to be the kind whose reports were mysteriously lost – if they ever existed at all – but as it was she gave Cracken and Leia the truth as best she could.

When she had finished, Cracken and Leia glanced at each other. The small office was quiet for a long time, broken only by the hum of the air filters on the big warship and the sound of steps in the corridor beyond the closed door.

Cracken turned the data card with the Cluster-Prism files over in his fingers, frowning to himself. He was a human male with graying fair hair, his mild expression belying the sharpness in his eyes. After a few moments, he said, “I would say that none of what you just told us leaves this room, but I assume under the circumstances you’ll be informing members of your old crew the details.”

“I could hardly not,” Hera said, forbearing to point out that most of them had been there when she had returned. Luke and Ahsoka had taken Kanan off to talk to him privately; since Hera hadn’t heard any alarm klaxons yet, either they had all killed each other quietly or it was going as well as it could under the circumstances. Luke and Ahsoka didn’t get along at the best of times and this wasn’t those.

Cracken tapped the edge of the data card on his desk, then shrugged and said, “This should get us a step ahead of Warlord Zsinj – several steps ahead, with any luck. Will you be transferring back to the Lodestar? You’re due some leave that I assume you’ll want to take under the circumstances.”

“Airen, you know as well as I do that a general never really gets to go on leave,” Hera said dryly, which made the corner of his mouth quirk up in a grin.

“I do that.” He pulled open a desk drawer, removed something, and tossed it to her. “By the way, the Council vote was four days ago. Alliance commissions are automatically transferred to the New Republic, but if you did want a new assignment, this would be the time to ask.”

Hera caught the neat circle of embroidered fabric and inspected it; the new insignia was the Rebel Alliance starbird surrounded by fifteen starbursts. She turned the patch over in her fingers, thinking.

“Hera?” Cracken said, when she had been silent too long for comfort.

Hera put the patch down on the desk in front of her, smoothing her fingers over the starbird, and looked up at Cracken. “I’m going to resign my commission.”

His sandy eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

“There’s something I’ve needed to do for a long time,” Hera said slowly, “and I’ve put it aside for far too long. I can’t do that anymore.”

“You’re talking about Ezra Bridger,” Leia said.

Hera glanced at her. “Yes.”

Cracken rubbed a hand over his chin. “I’ve read those files. Vanished off into the Unknown Regions with Grand Admiral Thrawn and what was left of the Seventh Fleet.”

Hera nodded.

“I met Thrawn, back in the old days,” Cracken remarked. “If he ever returned, we could be in for a bigger fight than Zsinj and Isard and the rest of that lot have been giving us. Do you have any reason to think they’re out there? Bridger, Thrawn, the Chimaera, any of the other ships from the Seventh?”

“No more reason than to think they’re not,” Hera said. “I won’t be alone.”

“Mmm.” Cracken tapped his fingers on the table. “Not being from Starfighter Command or representing High Command in this case, I can’t accept your resignation, General Syndulla. I will say that since the Council vote, we’ve already had a rash of personnel resigning, officers and enlisted alike. Some of them aren’t interested in going legit, others believe that the Council vote means the war is over.” He shook his head. “As long as there’s even one Imperial Remnant ship or base out there, the war will never be over. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t believe that, though.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

He snorted. “No, you wouldn’t. You’re like the rest of us old-timers. We saw too much. Kills our credibility as far as the kids who joined up after Yavin or even Endor think, let alone the ones who lived through Cinder.” He leaned back in his chair, sharp eyes considering. “You’re too good an officer to lose, Hera.”

She stiffened, but he held up a finger to silence her before she could protest.

“Let me finish before you tell me to go to hell and flounce off with that resurrected boyfriend of yours.”

“I never flounce, Airen. And it’s fiancé.”

His eyebrows went up. “Congratulations are in order, I suppose.” Then he frowned. “Is this for the damn pension? Because as I recall, technically Jarrus was never an Alliance officer –”

Leia stirred and said, “It’s in the Articles that members of informal rebel cells have the right to apply for retroactive status if they couldn’t formally join the Alliance due to captivity, distance, or other reasons –”

“Such as being dead?” Cracken said.

Hera met his gaze. “Prove it.”

He massaged his forehead. “Oh, for love of the Force.”

“The last formal rank he held was commander,” Hera said.

“In the Grand Army of the Republic, I assume.”

“There’s precedent. Rex –”

Cracken waved a hand. “I’ll sign off on the datawork if that’s what you want. If it’s just for the pension rather than actually finding him a command –” He tapped a finger on the data card. “This does count for something, but we’re a bit short of commands at the moment.”

“What, even with officers resigning left and right?” Hera asked.

“That’s not the problem. The Governing Council wants to reduce the size of the military, despite the fact that nothing actually changed after they had the vote and we’ve still got Zsinj and Gideon and half a dozen other warlords out there.”

Her voice very dry, Leia said, “There’s a faction in the Council that believes that once we have an established government again with a senate and maybe a chancellor or a president or whatever we decide to call it that most of the Remnant holdouts and the independents will fall in line.”

Hera rolled her eyes. “Has Borsk Fey’lya actually talked to any of the independents?”

“You can tell me if you think your father would pick up his calls.”

Hera snorted softly. Ryloth had refused the offer to formally join the Rebel Alliance until certain conditions were met, which the Alliance Council had been refusing to grant for the past year. With the Curia in disarray after almost twenty years of the Empire doing its best to delegitimize it, Cham Syndulla had managed to get the bulk of political power on Ryloth in his own hands, for better or worse. “Not the last time I spoke to him, which was only two weeks ago. We’re getting off-topic, Airen. And yes, the pension would be useful; just use the carbonite forms and leave the being dead part out of it; it isn’t like it’s never happened before. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Starfighter Command won’t accept your resignation without a good reason, and maybe not even then,” Cracken said, with a wince at the words “carbonite forms.” They hadn’t been used often, but they were a datawork nightmare for everyone involved.

“Why not? I’m a decent combat commander, but there are plenty of others who are just as good or better, and you can’t tell me that some of the people thinking about retiring wouldn’t be just as happy training pilots, so I’m not exactly necessary there.”

He ticked off reasons on his fingers. “You’re young, you’re pretty, you’re a woman, you’re not human, you’re a general – for that matter, you’re from one of the independent worlds in the Outer Rim and in high society back on Ryloth, even if most Core Worlders see that as the back of beyond – because most Core Worlders see that as the back of beyond –”

Hera frowned. “What does any of that have to do with it?”

“Apparently Ackbar had this conversation with Wedge Antilles while you were gone over some hot new project Antilles has in mind – nothing to do with you, but Antilles pointed out that most of the best-known officers in the Alliance – excuse me, the New Republic – are human, and mostly male. Except for you,” he added to Leia, who grimaced. “You, General Hera Syndulla,” Cracken went on, pointing at her, “are a PR officer’s dream. I guarantee that whenever you get back to the Lodestar there will be a message waiting for you with orders to report for a HoloNet interview and probably a photoshoot. All very reserved but sexy, to make it clear that the New Republic is open to everyone and that we’re not the Empire; even a Twi’lek woman can rise high.”

Hera fought down the memory of the younger Hera’s anguished voice saying, Most humans just think certain things about Twi’lek women. I’m sure even your Rebel Alliance is like that. “If you’re trying to convince me not to resign, it’s not working.”

“It won’t matter, because Starfighter Command won’t accept your resignation, and Ackbar won’t for the same reason if you try to go over their heads to him. He doesn’t look good on the front of a holomag unless you happen to be another Mon Cala.”

Hera rubbed a hand over her face. “Please just stop talking or I won’t even bother with resigning and just desert.”

“Yes, please do,” Leia said dryly. To Hera she added, “You’re not the only one, but I don’t work as well for it because I’m human and a princess of Alderaan. And married, but a really good reporter could spin that if they wanted to.”

“I’m trying to get married,” Hera pointed out. “Get to the point, Airen.”

“You were seconded to Intelligence for this operation,” Cracken said. “I can’t accept your resignation, but I could give you a new assignment. And right now no one’s going to notice if you’re transferred here permanently, with all the datawork chaos from the transition.” He held up a hand to still her protest. “You may need a New Republic general’s authority if you’re out in the Unknown Regions searching for a missing Imperial fleet. We’ve had rumors about Thrawn for years; he’s been the bogeyman beneath the Alliance’s bed since well before Endor. Since Jakku, more than a few Imperials have vanished, claiming they’re off to find him. If he’s out there, then we need to find him before they do, and they have a head start.”

Hera leaned back in her chair, frowning. “Starfighter Command is not going to like you poaching me anymore than they’ll like me resigning.”

Cracken and Leia exchanged a glance. “I can handle the fallout,” Leia said. “There’s enough else going on right now that no one is going to notice for a while, since you’re seconded already.”

Hera turned her frown on Cracken. “What do you get out of this?”

“We get someone out in the Unknown Regions looking for Thrawn,” Cracken said, raising an eyebrow. “Which I’ve been asking for since Endor, but we’ve never had the resources to send anyone out there. We still don’t, but if you’re going anyway –” He tilted his head.

Hera suspected there was a trap in here somewhere, but as it went Intelligence didn’t have so many generals in it that anyone but Cracken could give her orders. “I agree with conditions,” she said.

“What are those?”

“I don’t answer to anyone but you – or Ackbar,” she had to concede, since as the commander-in-chief of the New Republic military he had precedence even over divisional commands, “– and my crew draws a salary.”

Cracken closed his eyes briefly, clearly annoyed, but just said, “Agreed. We’ll discuss the specifics later.”

Hera and Leia left a few minutes after that, letting the door slide shut behind them as they stepped out into the corridor.

“I have something for you that I didn’t want to give you in front of General Cracken,” Hera told her quietly, drawing her aside into an empty room. She withdrew the box Bail Organa had given her from the bag slung over her shoulder, holding it out to Leia.

For a long moment Leia just looked at it. Eventually, she reached out, her fingers hovering just above the silver insignia inlaid in the fine wood of the lid, then she snatched her hand back as though she couldn’t bear to touch it. Hera didn’t protest, just waited patiently as Leia stared at it.

She hadn’t left her meeting with Bail Organa out of her report, though she hadn’t conveyed the exact content of their conversation either, not having a Jedi’s near-eidetic memory.

Finally, Leia reached out with shaking hands and took the box from her. She didn’t open it, just drew it in against herself, cradling it against her chest. Her voice a little shaky, she said, “He was…well?”

“Yes,” Hera said. She started to reach out, then hesitated, not certain if Leia wanted the comfort or not.

Leia didn’t seem to see her. She whispered, “They’ll live. They’ll all live. Somewhere else, even if not…here. They’ll live.” She bit her lip, then looked up, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’d like to be alone now.”

Hera nodded. She touched Leia’s shoulder briefly and found that the younger woman was trembling; Hera squeezed her shoulder and then left her alone, letting the door slide closed behind her.

She was on her way back to the Ghost, docked in one of the massive warship’s several bays, when she ran into Ahsoka Tano. Hera stopped at the other woman’s gesture, stepping aside into a mostly empty wardroom. The only two officers already there cleared out when they saw Hera’s general’s insignia, saluting her briefly before they left.

Hera eyed Ahsoka a bit warily. While they had been friendly in the old days with Phoenix Squadron, Hera had never been able to feel anything other than resentful of Ahsoka’s return from Malachor, nor had she been able to shake the suspicion that the other woman was keeping something from her. Something had changed there, something more drastic than the circumstances had suggested. Hera was vaguely aware that that was more than a little unfair, given what those circumstances had been, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. It helped that since her return Ahsoka had avoided her and most of the other members of the Rebel Alliance, preferring to go off on her own rather than take any formal role.

“Before you ask,” Ahsoka said, “it was my decision to bring Jacen here. Sabine went to get him from Ryloth. I spoke to General Syndulla before she arrived.”

Hera felt the muscle in her jaw twitch. Political reasons meant her father couldn’t set foot on a New Republic ship and thus couldn’t have come with Jacen; Ahsoka must have been very convincing to get him to agree to this. “I hope you have a good explanation for why you thought my five-year-old son ought to be on a warship.”

Ahsoka tucked her hands behind her back, frowning. “Believe me, Hera, if I hadn’t thought it was necessary I never would have brought him here. Rex didn’t find me until after you had already left.”

“That still doesn’t explain why my son is here,” Hera said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Because I didn’t think we would be able to get you back without him,” Ahsoka said. “And we nearly didn’t even with him here.”

Hera frowned at her. “Explain.”

Ahsoka sighed and looked around, then dropped into the nearest armchair and folded her legs in front of her. Hera sat too, a little stiffly; the chairs and couches in the room were all mismatched and hard-worn, but comfortable enough compared to the inside of a cockpit.

“When Luke sent you away – sent you over there – he had to have a – for lack of a better word, an anchor, a target. That was why they had to use you and not someone else.” She rubbed briefly at her forehead, suddenly looking every day of her thirty-odd years.

Hera nodded warily. “No one else with a high enough clearance for this op could be relatively certain of being able to access the same place they probably were before Scarif. We weren’t even sure just using the Ghost would work, except it did.”

“She – the Hera Syndulla from that universe, I mean – was there when you arrived?” Ahsoka inquired, looking briefly curious.

“Not in the room. She said she was just outside the ship – the Ghost was docked in a hangar on Naboo.”

“Hmm.” Ahsoka smoothed the side of her thumb over the armor plate resting across her crossed legs, her expression academically curious for an instant before she drew herself back to the subject at hand. “Having her there, in the Ghost, in a specific time span, gave Luke something to aim for. It could have been any number of other universes, too, other – other possibilities.”

Hera nodded. “Kanan – the other Kanan – said that the reason Luke had to use those constraints was because he wasn’t aiming for anything very, very specific. He had to have a range, but not one which was too wide.”

Ahsoka frowned in thought. “I suppose. I didn’t think about it like that, but the dialect on the artifact is very archaic. My grasp on it is better than Luke’s, but I came to the same conclusion he did.” She looked up, her brows drawing together. “The…other Kanan. He didn’t use an artifact or a focus of any kind?”

Hera shook her head. “He said he didn’t need to. He said that Jedi didn’t use artifacts like that for anything they couldn’t do naturally, those just made it easier, but he also didn’t think he would be able to manage it if he didn’t know who he was looking for or if I wasn’t there, because otherwise he would have to – to sort through all the options, and he didn’t think he could do that.”

The other woman nodded slowly, her frown deepening. For a moment she looked like she was considering commenting on that, then she shook her head and said, “Anyway, that’s going there. Coming back is harder, especially since you’re not a Force-user and can’t direct yourself. Going there, the other Hera Syndulla could act as an anchor for you, to – to pull you into that universe. But to come back to this universe – well, you’re not here. You’re already gone. One of the holocrons Luke found talked about people getting lost in the transition.” She flattened her palms on her knees. “We didn’t find the reference until after you had left.”

“What does Jacen have to with any of that?” Hera asked, deciding to worry about that later.

“Jacen is your son,” Ahsoka said. “Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, to be old-fashioned about it. Your father probably would have worked just as well, but –”

“But he can’t set foot on an Alliance – a New Republic ship unless Ryloth joins the New Republic,” Hera said, rubbing a hand over her face. “You could have taken the Ghost to Ryloth instead of bringing Jacen here.”

Ahsoka shook her head. “The same reason but the other way around. And General Cracken wouldn’t allow it, since this was an Intelligence operation. I did ask.”

Hera ground her teeth and bit back her first few responses to that. When she didn’t say anything, Ahsoka went on, “We thought that Jacen would be able to serve as an anchor for you in this universe, especially because he’s Force-sensitive. We weren’t counting on –”

“Kanan?” Hera filled in for her when she hesitated, and Ahsoka winced.

“No. He…probably helped you along, but it’s hard to tell. It’s not like any of this has been done in living memory.” She glanced aside, clearly uncomfortable.

“Jacen is Kanan’s son too,” Hera pointed out.

“Yes,” Ahsoka admitted, looking even more uncomfortable. “I’m sure that helped. I don’t know what would have happened if your father had been here instead of Jacen.” She added with the ghost of a smile, “You should probably comm your father when you have a chance.”

“I’ll do that,” Hera said dryly. “He’d probably like to know that Kanan’s back and we’re getting married, too.”

Ahsoka sat up so abruptly that Hera heard her back pop. “What?”

“We’re getting married,” Hera repeated, raising an eyebrow.

Ahsoka pushed to her feet and paced the room, as if she suddenly couldn’t bear being seated any longer. Hera turned her head to watch her, frowning. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, of course not,” Ahsoka said, her voice strained and the words seemingly automatic; almost in the same breath she finished, “Yes.”

Hera felt the muscle in her jaw jump. “You and Kanan used to be friends.” You and I used to be friends, she thought, but held back the words. They weren’t enemies, but it had been a long time since they had been friends. Some of that was due to Hera’s inability to look at any Force-user without thinking, it should have been Kanan, but Ahsoka had pulled away from everyone except Rex after she had come back from Malachor.

Ahsoka stopped pacing. She was still facing away from Hera, but Hera could tell that she had her arms crossed over her chest, her shoulders hunched in. “We were. We are.”

Hera rubbed a hand over her face. She wanted to go back to the Ghost, reassure herself of Kanan’s presence, hug her son, and comm her father, but apparently she had to deal with this first. “Do you have something against my son?”

“Jacen’s a very nice boy,” Ahsoka said without turning around. She was quiet for a long moment, then she said, “Do you know who Luke’s father is?”

“A Jedi Knight who was killed during the Purge,” Hera said. She and Luke had talked about it a little when they had been stationed on Hoth together; he had sought her out after someone had told him about Kanan and Ezra.

“Anakin Skywalker,” Ahsoka said, a wealth of pain in her voice. “He was my master. And he didn’t die during the Purge.” She took a deep breath, then turned around to face Hera. “You might know him better as Darth Vader.”

Hera blinked rapidly.

“I don’t think – I know Kanan. I knew Kanan. The situation isn’t the same. I just –” Ahsoka bit her lower lip.

“You had better not be saying what it sounds like you’re saying,” Hera said quietly.

Ahsoka closed her eyes briefly. “After – Malachor – I did some digging. During the Clone War I’d made assumptions – well, we all had. It’s not as though Jedi never had affairs, though we weren’t permitted commitments outside the Order. And Padmé – Luke’s mother – had been a friend of mine. We all knew they were having an affair. Except it wasn’t an affair. They had been married in secret just after the war started.” There was agony on her face as she looked at Hera. “Anakin broke his vows, and because of it the Order died. They all died.”

Hera got to her feet. “Kanan isn’t him.”

“I know that!” Ahsoka snapped. She took a deep breath, putting one hand on the back of the chair nearest her.

“And the Jedi Order is a generation in its grave. There’s no one left but you and Kanan.”

“I know that too,” Ahsoka said. She was clutching the back of the chair so tightly that Hera heard the suede of her gauntlets creak.

Hera crossed her arms over her chest. “Does Luke know you knew his father?”

Ahsoka shook her head. “Knowing wouldn’t serve any purpose. The Anakin Skywalker I knew…” She let the words trail off, then shook her head again. “I can’t look at him and think of anything but what Anakin did, and I won’t burden him with that more than he is already. That’s not a ghost he needs to carry with him.”

“Is it one that you need to?” Hera asked her.

“If I could set it aside I would,” Ahsoka said. She sounded unspeakably weary. “But everyone I know died. That isn’t an exaggeration. Everyone I know – except Rex – died because of him, because he decided to break his vows and we all loved him so much we let him.” She rubbed a hand over her face, briefly dislodging her headband. “Hera, it’s nothing against Kanan, truly, or you, or Jacen. But Anakin was a good person too, and so was Padmé. And – and everyone died. All of them. Padmé, Obi-Wan, the Order, the clones, the Republic – they all died because of Anakin. The Emperor as well, but – Anakin sided with that. And I’ll never know why, not really. I did what I could to find out, but – but everyone is dead. There’s no one left who knows. They’re all dead. And Anakin did that.”

She looked up at Hera. “That’s what I see every time I look at Luke. I won’t give him that burden, but I can’t set it aside either.”

“Is that what you think about Kanan and me?” Hera asked her. “That we’re on the knife’s edge of everyone dying?”

“No,” Ahsoka said. “No. But when you said it –” She hesitated, then went on, “– when you said it, it was the only thing I could think of. And I know you and I knew Kanan, but I knew Anakin too.” She looked at the chair she was gripping, then sighed and moved around to drop into it. “I knew you and Kanan were involved before, but I didn’t – I didn’t have to know it, if that makes sense. And I didn’t know about Anakin then. When I came back, I did know, and – and you had Jacen. And Luke was there too, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t bear it. I know it’s not fair,” she added defensively as Hera glared at her.

“No, it’s not.” She tried to bite back the sarcasm in her voice, but suspected she didn’t succeed. She stood there, looking at Ahsoka’s slumped form in the armchair, and said the first thing that came to mind, “Did you tell Kanan you were worried about him snapping and murdering us all?”

Ahsoka looked badly startled. “No, of course not. We had other things to discuss.” She grimaced, then added, “And Luke was there, and some of what I have to say to Kanan I won’t say in front of him.”

Oh, this should be good, Hera thought. She had always thought of Ahsoka as fairly even-tempered, but the handful of occasions where she hadn’t managed to avoid Luke had been memorable for everyone with the misfortunate to be in the vicinity. “Then if you’re not going to say it to me, I need to go comm my father.”

She was almost at the door when Ahsoka said slowly, “Hera –”

She turned back. “What?”

Ahsoka bit her lower lip. She was quiet for a long moment, then she said, “Ezra could have brought Kanan back six years ago, when he brought me back, and I stopped him.”

Hera froze.

Ahsoka looked back at her, her gaze weary. “There was a reason –”

“I don’t care,” Hera said. Her mind felt as though it had gone blank with either shock or rage; she wasn’t sure which at this point. She balled up her fists at her sides, not certain either whether she just needed something to do with her hands or if she was trying not to hit Ahsoka. “I don’t care,” she said again, and was surprised to find that it was the truth. She took a shuddering breath, because Kanan was here now and it really didn’t matter as long as Ahsoka didn’t try to remedy what she clearly thought of as a mistake. Then her mind caught up with the rest of what Ahsoka had said and she snapped, “Do you know where Ezra is?”

“No,” Ahsoka said. She had sat up straight, but not risen. “This was before he went missing – from what Sabine’s told me, from when he went inside the Jedi Temple on Lothal.”

Less than a day after Kanan had died.

Hera stared at her, trying to think of something to say. She only realized she had put her hand over her stomach when she felt the edge of her belt buckle pressing into the side of her hand. She had been pregnant then and only just beginning to realize it; she wouldn’t be certain for another few weeks.

Hera still had nightmares about that day.

“I told Ezra I would find him,” Ahsoka said.

“Don’t bother,” Hera said. “We’ll do that.”

She turned and left.

She felt as if she was having an out of body experience, her hands still shaking, the ordinary ship sounds around her strangely muted, even the recycled air moving across her face every time she passed a vent seemingly alien. Whatever expression was on her face seemed to warn anyone off; passing crew members or pilots veered around her.

Slowly – painfully slowly – reality reasserted itself, and by the time she had reached the hangar bay where the Ghost was docked she was breathing normally again, the sound of her footsteps on the durasteel floor familiar instead of muffled. When she tapped her code into the Ghost’s locking mechanism and waited for the ramp to lower she almost didn’t feel like screaming anymore.

Once inside she raised the ramp again, then just stood with her forehead tipped against the ladder leading up to the cockpit, aware of the sound of voices from up above. Kanan’s was one of them, though several layers of deck and closed doors made it impossible for her to make out the words. She let the cool metal of the ladder leech out her remaining anger until she finally felt calm enough to climb up and follow the voices into the common room.

She stopped in the doorway, fighting back her instinct to burst into immediate tears. Kanan was sitting on the floor with Jacen, his expression somewhere between stunned and awed. Jacen had brought out the box of toys Hera kept on the Ghost, as well as some that he must have brought with him from Ryloth, and was gravely showing them to Kanan. He did this by putting each one into Kanan’s left hand, then guiding Kanan’s right hand over the toy – at the moment it was a large stuffed anooba plush that Numa had made him several years earlier. Sabine and Zeb were sitting at the holotable, watching them and looking like they weren’t terribly far from tears either. Chopper was watching too, and somehow managed to look as emotional as it was possible for an astromech droid to get, though at Hera’s approach he chortled a greeting.

“Mama!” Jacen said gleefully, abandoning the anooba in Kanan’s hands, and scrambled up to run to her.

Hera hugged him, kissing his hair. “Hi, baby. Are you and your father and Auntie Sabine and Uncle Zeb having fun?”

Jacen nodded enthusiastically and tugged her towards Kanan and the pile of toys. “Look what Grandpapa gave me!”

Hera sat down next to Kanan and leaned over to kiss him, then turned her attention to the delicately carved nunas-and-gutkurrs set Jacen showed her. After he was certain she had seen it, he took each small animal out of the case to hand to Kanan, who inspected it solemnly with his fingers before passing it back and accepting the next one. Hera had had a similar set when she was a child, but had lost most of the pieces by the time she was ten.

“So are you heading back to Starfighter Command now?” Zeb said eventually, his voice elaborately casual. Chopper echoed the question, curious.

“No,” Hera said. “I’m transferring permanently to Intelligence, and there’s something I need to talk to all of you about.”

Sabine, who had been slouching and picking at some peeling paint on her knuckle plates, sat up straight. “We’re going after Ezra?”

Hera stared at her. “I didn’t even say anything!”

Sabine waved a hand. “It’s the only thing it could be, now that Kanan’s back.” She grinned happily at him. “Unless you wanted to stay and help Luke with his mission to restore the Jedi.”

Kanan grimaced. “He seems like a nice kid, but I just spent three hours in the middle of a doctrinal dispute and I didn’t even think I still had standards for heresy.”

They all stared at him.

“…what,” Zeb said eventually.

He winced. “Don’t ask. I was afraid to because I’m pretty sure I disagree with both of them, but pointing that out just now seemed like it was asking for trouble.”

“Amateurs,” Sabine sniffed. “No one’s dead yet. By Mandalorian standards that’s barely even a spirited debate.”

“To be fair, two of us were dead,” Kanan pointed out dryly. “We just happened to get better.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t die from the doctrinal debate, so it doesn’t count.”

“That’s because every time the Jedi have a doctrinal debate that results in someone dying it also results in a galactic civil war that lasts for years and kills hundreds of thousands of other people,” Kanan said. “So we try to avoid getting to that point.”

Sabine shrugged. “Maybe if you had those more often you’d have smaller civil wars.”

Zeb frowned at her. “Isn’t that why all you Mandalorians hate each other in the first place?”

“Not as much as we hate anyone who tries to interfere in our civil wars.”

Zeb gave Hera a pained expression.

“Don’t look at me,” Hera said, gathering Jacen into her lap. “Ryloth was still having blood feuds between clans three generations ago, and even now you shouldn’t try to get a Fenn and a Kru in the same room together if you don’t want trouble.”

Sabine pointed at her. “See, someone who understands me.”

“I don’t think anyone understands you,” Zeb muttered. “Back on Lasan – and Lira San – we all just sued each other.”

“Well, that sounds boring.”

“And dueling, but that’s been illegal for a century – two on Lira San. And that’s only for extreme cases anyway.”

“Now we’re talking,” Sabine said, sounding more satisfied as Chopper chuckled agreement. “I was starting to get worried for a moment there.”

“About what?” Kanan wondered out loud. “It’s not like there aren’t lawyers on Mandalore.”

“Well, not anymore,” Sabine said.

Kanan raised an eyebrow at her, then visibly decided not to pursue that line of questioning any further and went on, “And I’m pretty sure under the circumstances trying to kill either Luke or Ahsoka would have been a bad idea.”

Hera felt the muscle in her jaw twitch again. Jacen turned his face up to her, feeling her sudden tension, and Hera hugged him. Kanan picked up one of Jacen’s discarded toys, a small stuffed Loth-wolf, and balanced it briefly on the palm of his hand. Then he turned his hand sideways, the Loth-wolf remaining suspended in mid-air, and sent the Loth-wolf galloping towards Jacen. He bounced with glee, making Hera let out a soft oof, and caught it.

“I can do that too!” He narrowed his eyes in concentration, then sent the Loth-wolf back to Kanan. It wobbled a little in mid-air, but Kanan caught it easily, grinning. He picked up the anooba Jacen had shown him earlier.

Jacen put his hands out gleefully, not waiting for Kanan to send it to him. It sailed through the air to him and he hugged it, then he caught the Loth-wolf that Kanan sent after it.

“Hold that for a few minutes, love, we need to talk,” Hera told him. She settled him more comfortably in her lap – he was heavier than she remembered him being, but then again she hadn’t seen him in person for several months – and looked at the rest of her crew.

Her crew.

She, Zeb, Sabine, and Chopper had only been in the same place a handful of times over the past six years, and Kanan hadn’t been there at all. Hera had served with a number of people whom she had gotten along with, many of whom she had liked, but none of them were the three beings and one droid in the room with her now – in the Ghost with her now. She had thought that she would go to her grave without ever having this again.

Hera swallowed past the lump in her throat. “There have been rumors about Grand Admiral Thrawn and the Seventh Fleet for years,” she said. Zeb knew some of this, but she didn’t think Sabine did and Kanan certainly didn’t. “Rebel Intelligence has never been able to confirm that they’re still out there or that Thrawn was in touch with the Emperor – or anyone from the Remnant, for that matter. Because we’ve been busy dealing with the warlords since Endor, General Cracken – that’s the head of Intelligence,” she added for Kanan’s benefit, “– hasn’t been able to send anyone out into the Unknown Regions to investigate the rumors.”

“What happened to General Draven?” Kanan asked, startled; the previous head of Rebel Intelligence had been on Yavin while they had been there.

“He died,” Hera said. “Five years ago.”

Kanan winced.

“So since we’re going to be out there anyway, we might as well do it with Alliance – Republic – authority?” Sabine said. She cocked an eyebrow at Hera. “That is what you said to Cracken?”

“More or less,” Hera said. “Doing it with Republic authority was his idea. I was just going to resign.” She hesitated, then added, “I can’t order you – any of you – to come. But I’ve let this go long enough and I won’t wait any longer.” She couldn’t help but look at Kanan as she went on, “Ezra is family, and we’ve all lost enough family to the Empire.”

“I’m in,” Sabine said.

“Me too,” Zeb said. Chopper chortled agreement.

Kanan just leaned over and kissed her.

Hera let out her breath, relief making her shoulders slump. “All right,” she said. “Make your arrangements. We have to take Jacen back to Ryloth.” She smiled at Kanan. “And we’re getting married.”

That got them a round of back-slapping and congratulations and promising not to actually do it until both Sabine and Zeb could be there. By the time they were all settled down again, Hera was flushed with happiness, leaning against Kanan’s shoulder with her other arm around her son.

We’re all right, she thought, looking around at her crew – at her family. We’re all going to be all right.