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This isn’t how things usually work between them.
For just over a year, Kanan has been the one who can creep up on Hera and send her sailing out of her seat. It’s that particular talent that’s led to Chopper tolerating him, amongst a couple others. There’s never been a day in their life together that she’s been able to sneak up on him and Goddess knows that she’s tried; the fucking blurrg dropping deserves it for the one time he made her spill the last of her favorite caf.
As much as she wishes she could claim that she was trying to get revenge when she extends a thermos of caf over his shoulder, his exaggerated response to her presence is not a result of her efforts. Things have never worked like this between them. Thankful for the cover of night concealing her concerned expression, Hera takes her seat next to him, maintaining a careful distance between the two of them. While they might be pretending that things have gone back to normal between them, she’s starting to think that they’ll never find their version of normal again.
“It’s just caf,” she says in a near-whisper, although the facility that they’re surveilling is well out of ear-shot. It’s hard to sound jovial when you’re staking out a former Separatist slave processing facility and a current Imperial facility reopened for the same purpose, but she tries anyway. “We both know that I make the better caf.”
The sound he makes in return is probably supposed to sound like a slight huff of laughter, maybe a chuckle, but it comes out like more of a grunt.
After most of her childhood spent in the underground network of tunnels and caves beneath the Tann Province, Hera doesn’t need lights to see the tension deeply set in Kanan’s jaw. It extends down his neck and into his shoulders, it contracts the defined curve of his biceps and tightens his toned forearms. She can’t help but wonder if that thing they don’t talk about means that it would only take casual strength to crush the thermos of caf in his clenched hands.
If that’s the case, she may take it away from him because it’s going to be a ridiculously long night.
They sit in silence for several long minutes, Hera’s eyes fixed on the caf in Kanan’s hands and his gaze focused somewhere out on the horizon. She’s caught up in her imagination, wondering what it would look like if the thermos were to collapse under his grip. And Kanan? Well, he might be sitting next to her but clearly, he’s somewhere else.
So much for surveilling the processing facility.
Actually convinced that Kanan is seconds away from destroying their only source of stimulant for the night, Hera reaches over to pull the thermos from his hands and he startles once more.
“Okay, you have to tell me what’s going on,” she finally says after the thermos is in her hands. “We’ve done this kind of job before and you were never this jittery.”
Kanan extends the fingers on both of his hands before flexing them into tight fists. “We’ve never been this close to Coruscant before.”
Hera nearly drops the open container of caf when he mentions Coruscant because outside of him stopping a catwalk from crushing them to death on Forager, he’s never once mentioned what he was—or is. She nearly chokes on the name of the system as she repeats it. “C-coruscant.”
Those blue-green eyes she can read so well remain fixed on the horizon where stars are slowly starting to fill the night sky. “Don’t pretend that you didn’t know. We both know you’re smarter than that.”
“Honestly?” she ventures, her gaze fixed on his although he won’t look at her, “I didn’t. I know that I owe you my life. I thought I might know what you were capable of but it’s not exactly something that I can research and it’s not like you were volunteering any information.”
For the first time, he looks down at her. “Now you know how I feel.”
There’s just a trace of a smile on his lips, something so imperceptible that she’s probably the only person who would ever notice it. The hint of sarcasm in his voice is playful, or as playful as it gets when he’s as tense as he is, not the hardened wit he uses with stubborn contacts before Kanan handles problems his way. That slight raise of his heavy brow and the way he cocks his head, that’s something he only does with her.
“Hardly,” she scoffs. “I’m pretty sure that you knew exactly what I was by the second day we knew each other.”
“That’s not who I am,” he replies, his tone suddenly serious. “It may be part of my past but I’m not that person, not anymore. You might have known what I was capable of before you let me aboard your ship but you didn’t know me—which, might I add, is a hell of a lot more than I knew about you.”
Hoping that this isn’t turning into some sort of fight, something that will drive them even farther apart, Hera turns her attention to the thermos of caf in her hand. “You know me now.”
“I know your last name,” he corrects her.
“Wrong,” she retorts, handing over a small mug of the steaming hot brew. “You know where I lived. You know who my father is, you know my mother is dead, you know where she died, and you even know where my parents got married.”
For a beat, Kanan says nothing, but then he replies. “Kanan Jarrus isn’t the name I was born with. Coruscant. My Master was Depa Billaba. She died on Kaller.”
Hera opens her mouth to reply that none of those things are really about him, at least except for the part where he wasn’t born Kanan Jarrus—whatever that means—and then she closes it again. The ass has a point and she hates him just a little bit for that. “Fine. I get it. I don’t…say things.”
Kanan makes an inglorious snort. “That’s the understatement of the millennia.”
With a heavy sigh, Hera leans back on her palms and checks the installation for only a moment before turning her eyes to the sky. Thoughts start turning over in her head as she searches for something that she can give him, a little piece of who she is, but she isn’t sure she even knows herself. She’s nineteen, her mother is dead, she’ll do anything she has to in order to see the Empire fall, she—
A starfighter breaks the atmosphere far off in the distance; it’s nothing Imperial, probably a private craft leaving the spaceport about 50 klicks to the south.
“I’ve always wanted to be a pilot,” she tells him quietly. “Always. All I wanted was to leave Ryloth and live in the stars. There was never anything else that I wanted, at least not until my mother died.”
“Betcha can’t guess what I wanted to be until the Empire killed that dream,” he says bitterly.
Hera hums for a moment, nudging her shoulder against his. “A senator, obviously.”
Warmth spreads through her, taking hold of her heart in a tender grip, when he nudges her back. “Am I really that obvious?”
“Afraid so,” she answers, the distance between them closed with their arms pressed together. “I’m guessing bartender was your second choice and if neither one of those worked out you were going to settle for—” she hesitates for a moment before actually saying the word. “Jedi?”
“Something like that,” he shrugs.
“I was ten when the war ended. I remember that it was just over, like it was something they could have easily stopped whenever they wanted to,” she mumbles. “You were fourteen but you said that you had a Master. You fought? How did you—”
“She saved me,” Kanan interrupts her, eyes turning back out to the horizon. “She told me to run, so I did. I just kept running.”
“And then what?” Hera presses, even though she knows that she’s supposed to be telling him things about herself.
Something in his expression shifts, something that looks almost bittersweet, and then he paints on that playboy persona with the boyish grin before he looks down at her. “I ran into you, sweetheart.”
Rolling her eyes, Hera gives him a less-than-playful shove. “I’m serious.”
“I’m serious, too,” he quickly replies.
Looking up, she studies him for a second, narrowing her eyes as if she tries hard enough she’ll be able to see through the half grin and smug confidence. It’s there in those pools of blue-green, glittering under the starlight, that she sees he’s telling the truth. She really is the reason he stopped running.
“Are you done running?” she asks quietly, turning her gaze down to the blade of grass that she’s picking at.
“Force, I hope so,” he exhales.
Hera doesn’t say it but she wants him to be done running too.
They turn their discussion into a game, something to keep them sane through the long and cold night. For every piece of herself that Hera gives Kanan, he does the same for her—so long as he deemed her confession worthy, anyway. Being so tight-lipped about everything is probably a trait she picked up from her mother or Uncle Gobi, not just because she was trying to be stubborn, and she told Kanan as much. When he asked why she couldn’t have gotten it from her father and she told him because the only thing the man likes to talk about is himself, it was the first time she heard him laugh—really laugh—in months.
There's so much more to him than she could have ever imagined. The man he's always pretended to be is nothing at all like the man that he is.
Just before the sun is set to creep over the horizon, she knows that she vastly prefers the name Kanan to Caleb, that his favorite color really is green and that’s not just a line, that he still has his lightsaber but he doesn’t like seeing it, and that he learned how to cook on one of the colony worlds where he lied about his age to get the job. It’s also how he fed himself for an entire month; the longest period of stability he had in his life until he found himself on Gorse. If he had anything nice to say about the Force, and he doesn’t, he would say that it kept him there for a reason.
Hera gave him everything she could think of, which wasn’t much given that her childhood was war and there wasn’t anything interesting about growing up in underground tunnels. Still, he was amused by her antics with stealing an Imperial ship and using it to disrupt an Imperial mining operation when she was ten, awed by the story of fighting to deliver medicine to her people when she was just fourteen, and seemed to better appreciate why she wanted to fight the Empire. It was another one of those things she didn’t say, but she felt like the night ended too soon.
Surely there’s more they can share with each other.
She wants the chance to tell him more.
Kanan rises to his feet and extends a hand down to her. “Time to go before someone notices us and we end up doing involuntary surveillance inside the facility.”
“I want to help them, Kanan,” she says, her voice breaking slightly. “I want to help all of them.”
“And you will,” he says with surety as she rises to her feet. “I…I want to help them, too. I want to help yo—”
Suddenly, Kanan stops what he’s saying and wraps his arms around her, pulling her body tight against his. The movement draws a small yelp of surprise past her lips, a sound that’s followed by a harsh cry when something tears along her ribcage, feeling as if it’s burning away layers of skin. With her body still flush against his, he raises his blaster and fires off one shot, and that single shot is all that’s needed.
The world around them seems to blur and Hera reaches for her side, only for Kanan to grasp her wrist.
“Don’t,” he says in a low voice, his tone soothing. “Let me take care of you.”
Hera isn’t sure if he means what he says or if he even understands how it sounds; all she knows is that something hurts and she can feel blood trickling down her side. She can’t even find the words to ask what the hell happened. Thoroughly disoriented, it’s all she can do to wrap her arms around his neck when he lifts her off the ground to carry her back to the Ghost.
Chopper must have gotten them in the air, or maybe Kanan did and Chop handled the hyperspace coordinates. Although she still isn’t sure exactly what happened, Hera knows the hum of her hyperdrive and the gentle pull of the interdimensional realm swirling around them; she knows everything about her ship. Right now, she knows that she should really consider setting up a dedicated medbay because the galley table is not comfortable for whatever happened to her.
The damn thing is cold, too.
Hera’s brow furrows slightly and she raises a hand to her abdomen that’s bare. She knows she didn’t take her shirt off, or at least she thinks she knows that she didn’t take her shirt off. Using one hand, she pushes herself up to a sitting position, a movement that she regrets immediately. Closing her eyes, she tries to breathe deeply and hopes that it will make the room stop spinning.
“I suppose it was too much to hope that you’d stay down until I made it back with the medkit,” Kanan huffs from the doorway.
“My shirt?” she asks without opening her eyes.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he answers, sounding somewhat embarrassed. “There was a sniper on the ridge. I tried to get you out of the way in time but they still hit you and I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything lodged in there.”
Warily, Hera opens one eye to see if the room has stilled. “Not like you haven’t seen it before,” she says matter-of-factly. “Pretty sure you’ve had your hands on it, too.”
There’s a slight chuckle from Kanan at that, one she isn’t expecting. “Oh, I haven’t forgotten. Those are cherished memories.”
Even as he pours antiseptic over her side, the shit that stings, she gives a slight smile. She definitely won’t say out loud that there were certain parts of that mission that she enjoyed quite a bit and given a few more seconds, she would have savored them thoroughly. Unfortunately, the deep green flush of her face and lekku give her away.
“Behave yourself, Syndulla,” he teases, rough fingertips brush against her ribs just beneath the strap of her bra.
“Oh, you wish I was thinking about that,” she mutters half-heartedly, trying to play it off.
Kanan pulls his hand away before looking down at her. “I can tell you the six other times I’ve seen you turn that color,” he leans in slightly and lowers his voice before continuing. “It goes along with those cherished memories.”
Hera bats him away. “Ass.”
They should be exhausted, heavy with the harsh reality of the galaxy they saw through the night, even with the things they discussed—but they’re not. Somehow, they feel lighter. Things feel right again—
—but they feel so incredibly different.
When Kanan starts to pull away, Hera reaches out to take hold of his wrist and grips it tightly so he can’t get away. She knows now that she wants this, she wants him. This isn’t the first time that she’s felt that way, she was ready to fuck him right there in the lounge, using sex as a substitute for the emotions she wouldn’t let herself have. Now, things are different. Now, he knows who she is and she knows who he is and they belong to each other, or at least they should.
There’s barely a centimeter of space between their bodies when she rises to her feet and when she looks up at him, it’s through half-lidded eyes. “Kanan,” she whispers, “I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you because I mean it.”
Just as their game kept them going through the night, for her truth, Kanan gives one back.
“I want to kiss you, too.”
It’s like gravity, the force that pulls them together, the way that his head lowers until there’s only a hairsbreadth between their lips. His nose nudges gently against hers and she parts her lips in eager anticipation, a soft whimper of want breaking the silence surrounding them. Kanan’s touch is searing as his hands gently grip her arms, the strangest of contradictions since she runs warmer than him.
And then he pulls away.
“I want to kiss you,” he utters, looking down at her, “but I know that I shouldn’t.”
Hera can’t fight the overwhelming disappointment she feels, can’t wonder what she did wrong to make him not want this anymore, at least outside of being herself. Things felt right again between them but now—
Smooth palms running down her arms to take her hands in his draw her out of herself and she looks back up at him in question.
“I have feelings for you, Hera. I will always have feelings for you and after last night, I know there’s nothing in the galaxy that will ever change that,” he murmurs. “But this thing that you’re doing, it’s important and it’s not who you are but it’s what drives you and,” he pauses for a moment and takes in a deep breath before he continues, “I think I want to fight with you. I will fight with you.”
His words nearly knock the wind out of her.
“You mean that?” she asks, although she isn’t really sure which part she’s asking about.
“I mean it,” he nods. “I can’t promise I won’t be keeping count of all the times that I want to kiss you, though. You’re going to owe me big when this is all over.”
She flashes a shrewd smile, thinking of how he finessed his way onto her ship. It feels like forever ago. “I can live with that.”
He starts to pull away again but then Hera wraps her arms around him, burying her face against his chest. She knows that it catches him off guard because it takes a moment for his arms to settle around her.
Perhaps it isn’t the kiss she wanted to share with him, but somehow it feels just as good.