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“Ezra?”
He didn’t respond, almost couldn’t, too zoned out on the village from up on the cliff.
“Ezra!” Sabine tramped up behind him, whacking him lightly on the back of the head. “What are you doing?”
“Ow,” he muttered, ducking sideways out of her range. “Just looking.”
A glance over at her revealed her face contorted into a familiar expression: one he found, with a pang in his chest, that he’d deeply missed. (Even if it was just an exasperated glare.) A familiarity, an urge to tease, trickled up his spine, electric—a feeling he hadn’t felt in years. It had been…well, forever, it seemed, since those bright, dreamlike years on The Ghost.
Since he had felt so—at home.
A tiny smirk pulled at his lips, and he let himself stare, for just a second.
This was Sabine Wren. Finally. She was real. Well. Again.
She had found him, his best friend had come—and now they were unstoppable, again.
He didn’t quite realize his smirk had turned into a full-on grin until she was staring incredulously at him, head tilted and jaw set. Ezra tried to tamp it, calm himself down, but he couldn’t quite help the bubbly chuckle that wormed its way up.
“Hi,” he said, giving in to the urge. He held a hand out like they were strangers, and giggled. “Hello, I’m Spectre-6. I haven’t seen another human in way too long—” Sabine’s face flashed with some feeling—“and I’ve heard a friend of mine is traveling in these parts.”
Sabine stared for a minute longer—softer—and then, slowly, indulgently shook her head, rolling her eyes. A tiny smile, that flickered out almost as soon. She took his hand. “Well,” she responded, playing along with a quiet voice, “I…might have heard the same rumor.”
Ezra shot her a fond look, turning to look back at the quickly moving village. Their shoulders bumped together as their hands fell back at their sides, and he might not have realized quite how touch-starved he was. “Yeah?” he asked, a murmur.
“Yeah.” The same, gentle tone. “I heard—along the gossip chain, of course—”
“Duh.”
“—That she might be excited to see him. That she’s missed him, obviously, and so has Hera. Um, their pilot.”
“Spectre-2,” he nodded, sagely.
A snort. “Yeah, sure, whatever. I’ve also heard, through dubious means that will be denied, that Spectre-6’s friend did a lot of hard stuff to get here. But, it’s still been pretty much all she’s been able to focus on, whenever it seemed like a possibility that he might still be alive, somewhere.” She glanced over at him, which he caught out of the corner of his eye. “That he was a real Hutt to leave her and the others like that.” And—her voice was impossibly soft. Despite it all. “But he’s mostly forgiven, actually, because she’s so glad to see Spectre-6. Again.”
“I’m glad,” he muttered, and found that was all he could say. He couldn’t even look over, for fear of her familiar brown eyes. She would be here, with him, for the next…until they figured out a plan. Together.
He was going to have help. Sabine’s help, which felt a whole lot more weighty with her name attached.
Oh, kriff. His stomach flipped over, nailing the landing right on his nerves. He shut his eyes, arms suddenly tingling all over, and he could recognize that it was silly to feel this way, stupid. But he still flinched without moving at the thought of it.
She was—it had been a while. Technically, Sabine was free. Always had been, but now she was older (they both were), she was wiser (he liked to think they both were), and she looked more tired. (Which they definitely both were.)
She could have moved on, finally, from the worst of The Ghost. All the pain of Kanan’s death, the constant flinching over your shoulder. And he—what, he’d had the right to ask her to drag herself kicking and screaming back into this life, this kind of anxious world, all for him?
(Yes, his mind supplied. Yes, because you wouldn’t have thought, or think, twice about doing the same for her.)
He swallowed, running the words through the scroll in his head. He imagined he could watch them float across—
“Wow.” Sabine huffed a laugh. “This place really did a number on you, huh?”
His eyes popped open, almost surprised to still see the sun setting, as Sabine’s warm hand clamped down on his shoulder. She was grinning, mouth twisted sideways in mocking amusement. “Hey, brains of the op to Ezra? Anybody there?” And with light fingers, she reached out and knocked twice on the side of his head, laughing when he swatted her away, stumbling back.
And how foreign it was to hear his own name in Basic, but how happy it made him, all the same. He smiled guiltily up at her, accepting her hand to help him off of the rock he had backed into. Only—she jerked him too far, probably on purpose, and he almost went tumbling off the short cliff. She grabbed the back of his tunic, cackling, and he was sure his face was on fire as he accepted her half-hug, tucking her to his side so she couldn’t do that to him anymore.
She didn’t try to fight him, wrapping her arms around his ribs in a hug they’d practiced only a few times, as they gazed out over the mini-village packing up.
“Hey, Ezra,” she said, “everybody else is—they’re mostly good, yeah. I don’t want to, like, hide stuff that isn’t happening from you.”
“Thanks,” he said, dryly. “For the non-information.”
“Shut up,” she scoffed. “Zeb is happy. With Kallus, their home base is still on Lira San. Hera is a General in the New Republic—oh, we won, by the way—and Jacen is doing okay, too—”
“Jacen?” he asked, pulling away enough to peer at her.
Her jaw dropped, and she stared up at him in disbelief. “Oh, kriff—what—you didn’t?—did you seriously leave before she got to tell us? Oh, my karking Republic, I guess you did!” She laughed, high-strung and stressed. “Hera—has been, apparently, since a few days before that night—is a mom.”
It was like he could hear his stomach dropping, falling slowly about eighty stories. His ears started ringing.
Through the noise, he heard, “Yeah, I mean Jacen Syndulla.” Sabine smiled, proudly. “He can almost shoot a blaster almost as well as his dad.”
His—no, he didn’t want to think about that? Kanan was the—right?
Sabine must have seen his mental meltdown, because she pulled away with a fond eye-roll. “He’s Kanan’s, idiot,” she told him, and he must have been stupid, because that felt like it cleared everything up instantly. His ears even stopped ringing.
“Oh,” he gasped. And then—“OH!” His shoulders jumped up to his chin, arms throwing themselves wide. “They have a—!” He grinned, shivering exuberance bubbling up. “Kanan and her had a kid!” Ezra threw his head back and laughed. “I was convinced the baby was just a joke in the Force, like, some trick of the mind played by Kanan’s ghost hanging around, or something?”
Vaguely, he registered Sabine looking confused.
“I mean,” he plowed on, “what are the odds? The depot happened, and like a few days later I start hearing a second heartbeat whenever I focus around her all the time, and I kinda suspected but then she just kept doing everything exactly the same? Maybe a little more careful, I guess, she was acting kind of more serious-motherly? No bad stuff for babies, of course, but she never really did any of that, anyway, so—”
“Wait,” Sabine interrupted, seething, jabbing a finger hard into his chest. Okay, ow, that might bruise. “You knew? You knew, Ezra, and you still flew off and left us?”
He threw his hands up. “To protect all you guys from Thrawn.”
“Hm.” She was still angry, but she looked a little sedated, at least. “Thin ice.”
“Noted.”
“Thanks.”
He offered a tiny smile. “Glad to hear the kid’s okay.”
“I cannot believe you found out before I did.”
“I can’t believe she hid it so well?”
“Oh. Zeb was in on it.” She shrugged, like she hadn’t just scrambled his brain. “He’s older than all of us, and he had helped a Twi’lek research about her pregnancy, a long time ago, before.”
“Before joining the team, or before Hera got—?”
“Both.”
They stared at each other. It was weird. His head was screaming. And then they both cracked up laughing, and it was such a relief to have Sabine by his side.
It almost felt like some of that sunlight from those golden days on The Ghost had trickled over, warming the entire world. He was happy—this was nice.
He heard a shout from the village below, and braced his hands on his knees as he looked up, still laughing. It looked like the Nuti were ready to move.
“Come on,” he chuckled, pulling her arm along. “You have got to see how clever these guys can be on the road.”
And she followed willingly. It had been so long since—well, he was more of a leader, here. It was nice to have a best friend.