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It had been an eon of approximately twelve hours and the ripples accelerated in mites.
As one of the few who now knew of the tale of Anakin Skywalker, Kanan treaded carefully.
The heated moistness of Hera's forehead slicked his hand.
"I know you're hurting. Keep breathing."
Between breaths... "Kanan, you know nothing... Nothing... Nothing of this fire."
He allowed a few seconds before replying, "You're right. I know nothing." He could feel the shudders and detect the ripples even if he wasn't touching her, but he'd never know her pain.
This was no agony that could be meditated away.
She emitted a wince, he stroked her.
The end of the War unlocked the breathing space to express the possibility, of mutually accepting it once it came. It came as a surprise it happened so soon. But not too soon. Soon enough they were caught off guard but not unready.
"Kaaanan." Through touching her cheek, he could trace the sensations radiating from her abdomen.
Upon the news, no instantaneous flood of mutual joy, but vocal uncertainties. The assault on Jakku had ended, but other galaxy-relevant threat might emerge from the unknown unpredictability of space. After a deep breath and counting the seconds of her silence, he responded to her news with, "What's your decision?" He detected enough hesitation to suspect that she was considering other options even when she wholeheartedly affirmed, "I do want this now. I, we, can do this now. We can work for this now" even though, and she knew by the way she squeezed his hand to punctuate her assertion, he felt the confidential wavers in her certainty.
"Tell me... that story, luv," Hera croaked. She removed his hand from her forehead and clutched it at her chest to her throbbing push of heartbeats.
"Which one?"
"The one."
Hard to keep track which banal episodes in his Temple upbringing he told her in bed. His mind fluttered through an archive of memories, his walk in the Temple garden with Depa, duels with friends, the first time he ran into Depa, the game he and Tai-
"How about the tagging and hide-and-seek incident in the Temple?"
"Mmmmmmh," something neither yes or no.
He might as well, whether or not she already heard that one.
He leaned close to her ear cone. "As Younglings, we had our own playgrounds and play room, but we dared ourselves to play our games in the corridors under the Jedi noses. We figured it was a practice of skill and discipline, exercise our scanning senses and exercise our restraint so no master would know what we were doing. I found Tai, my friend, behind one of the pillars in the hallway. And we chased each other. Well, we sped-walked instead of ran, because we knew we were surrounded by masters. Then we came into the garden."
"Mmmmmm." A small chuckle.
"The garden didn't seemed crowded and, impatient with the game, that's when I bothered to dash after her to tag her. But she gave me the appropriate payback. As I Force pulled her, she Force-flung me right into a bed of flowers."
Suddenly, the smell of dirt and a floral aroma pervaded the sterilized ambience. He had to take a deep breath to know that Hera couldn't smell the Temple's garden.
"It was a bed of Chalactan Roses. I got covered in them." Depa's favorite flowers. He didn't know it then. "Then I Forced-yanked her into the flowers with me. We all laughed."
"Mmmah." Now he could feel the corner of her lips smile beneath his palm.
"We got gardening duty for a week. But the best part was when Master Mundi heard our laughter then ran in-"
"Uggggggh. Kanan..."
He never got to the where Master Mundi helped them to their feet and grabbed them have the scruff of their collars to be escorted to disciplinary action, yet there was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. "Careful Dume and young Uzuma, I wouldn't want to see you get more destructive than my daughters." (As an endangered member of his species, Master Mundi was among the few allowed marriage and children, something the Younglings had debated on whether it was duty or privilege.)
Hera's writhe cut through the memory of the Jedi Master's twinkling eyes and the snap of a millisecond of a retrospective understanding: The light in the Master's eyes was wrought with thoughts of daughters he couldn't be there for.
A Twi'lek midwife fed Rylothian-comforts. [It's time, it's time.]
Powerful ripples poured out in whips of harsh energy. He tensed up. It worried him there were no med-bots available, but they made due. The first hospital built after the War when it could be afforded through the reparation. He could only be present and stroke her hand.
Eons whizzed by, a light-speed jump, a sudden perpetual jump fueled by howls.
The Force was trapped, squirming, screaming buried somewhere in Hera's cries. And all he could do is sit by as the Force thrashed about on cave walls.
Then the Force fell quiet. Dull. Still.
And then the Force no longer existed.
Then the Force escaped the cave.
With her final agonizing wail, the Force ripples wavered toward its peak.
The space jump came to halt, a tumble never happened, eons converted into heart-throbbing milliseconds...
Gradually, as if the Force had been lagged by the inertia of anxiety, out poured the...
Fear.
Spilling out of Hera.
Spilling out of him.
All landing in the cushion of the doctor's palm.
The air didn't even yield a whimper.
The fear notched up. It was his own, in his head. It was Hera's too. The silence compelled him to squeeze Hera's hand so hard she stiffened.
No signal. No new beacon. When he remembered the Force existed within him, he scanned out and could only detect the microcosm flicker in the doctor's hands.
Silence, and then an affirmative rubbery-pat from the glove. The flicker flared into a new beacon. That triggered a piercing echo. The metallic snip of a scissors, of a cord being snipped by methodical hands.
But the new light in the Force not quell the fear.
Kanan underwent a newly discovered emotion, or instinct, without a known name, a sentiment that required too many words: the primal wanting to slink back to the dark of the cave due to an overexposure of light.
Suddenly, a piercing cry cresendoed, he realized it wasn't his own emotions.
The source came from the first cries, looming closer with the doctor's footsteps. Hera let go of him, he slackened his grip on Hera.
He felt Hera's restrained impatience and the weight of her arms outstretched.
The Force had been torn from the comfort of the womb two weeks earlier than medically scheduled. Hera had avoided the hazard of overwork, she had coordinated relief-missions behind-the-scenes and piloted scheduled flights with limited worry. Perhaps the Force decided for her. The Force was eager to enter this world.
The wails pierced his eardrums and thrusted him into a cerebral realm, like when he treaded the light of the holocrons.
The expulsion of cries provoked nothing special in his emotions: old turmoil, old bliss, paternal worry for Sabine and Ezra, relived, restructured, familiar emotions amplified. Emotions Jedi guarded themselves from. Emotions deemed a hazard. Emotions he underwent too many times to be a slave to them.
The infant had been placed upon Hera's chest, from the proximity of the cries and the sifting of fabric in her arms, and her lulled "shhhhhhhhh" which quelled the sobbings and everything else in the Force, the torrent in his chest, pacified under the first words Hera could articulate in the wake of the childbirth,
"She's at peace, Kanan."
She. A little girl. Hera guided his hand to a tender palette of skin, a cheek.
"...Dark green, cheeks dappled with freckles, eyes closed..." Hera articulated.
He gave the signal: he extended his vacant arms.
"Let him," Hera breathed to the nurse, an assurance a blind man could hold his newborn.
His fingers shivered as the nurse plopped a bundle of fabric onto his hands. The same soft material woven into their wedding sheets, a fabric both deemed good luck and designed for thermal warmth. He remembered their intimate exchange of words, cocooned under the safety of the sheets, it was custom for newlyweds to cover themselves head-to-toe, to deafen themselves to the world and only heed their life partner's ecstasies and protect it from leaking out to the world. Twi'leki customs defined the first act beneath wedding sheets as, "Lighting a new fuse."
Kanan Jarrus was in awe. If Hera was his beacon of hope, the little one was the torch she had bestowed upon him and he was its appointed guardian.
"Congratulation, Jedi Knight," she whispered wirily and teasingly, "you've protected life and now you've created it."
Created. Funny word, as if it could only be applied in the context of building, like forging a lightsaber or a holocron.
He traced the tiny length of her arm to the wrinkles of her fingers. Tiny fingers closed around his forefingers. He thought of Depa, and how she could react if she knew her padawan transformed into the forbidden: a biological father.
He delayed long enough. When he planted his lips to the forehead, he felt the yawning openness of space within her head.
This love, what the sentients of the universe almost unanimously defined as such, was wholesomely primal, hardwired in instincts. When he reached to the infant's mind, it yielded a a surreal vast plane of blankness, bereft of words, a chasm. Empty, not abysmally empty, but the concept of "empty" preached during meditation. Like... an unfilled organic Holocron, awaiting knowledge to be sowed in its flowerless garden. A holocron with a will, fragile organs, waving limbs, and incoherent murmurs that melted his heart. Her unfilled head still retained the instinct to reach toward him because she had the silver of understanding he was her guardian, the one who will guard the torch.
After years of fighting for something, an ideal, a Jedi goal, he never fathomed he could be the one to forge this light. He chased light, wielded it, fought for it, it was an entity far from him. He fought for the security of Universe with the pledge he'll give his life to it. And now he got to live in it. And give, in the literal definition, life.
"I missed those eyes, Kanan." He could imagine them, those eyes, gazing up at him. Hera would see Kanan Jarrus's eyes. But he'll always picture Caleb Dume long-lost eyes, staring up at him, not with the glower that haunted his reflections and dreams, but a serene gaze that suggested, Thank you for being there for me.
These feelings weren't new. Emotions resurrected, unfolding, resurfacing in a modulation where he sustained the neutrality of an expression. He felt this same level with Ezra, the pride when he watched Sabine design art. But this was a more delicate torch to bear.
Despite all temptation to defuse the emotions, his lips were numbed from formulating a good-natured sarcastic, "Hera, what do I do?" Partial truth. Because although he concocted a general sense of a game plan-childish games blended with productive Force exercises inspired by bygone Youngling activities and carefully teaching her to swing a lightsaber-he'll be winging it, revising the plans, adjusting to the unexpected as he did on the battlefield and for Ezra.
He had even turned to his former Padawan for advice, much to the confusion of the young man. "But you've been like a dad to me and Sabine, what can I give?"
"You know what it's like to have a mother and father." Kanan had Okadiah, a "father figure." Depa was... "a mother figure."
And Ezra could only answer what he knew. "Dads, well, good dads do games, stuff, lectures, scoldings. Trying to hide me from the Empire, bedtime stories."
"Kanan, why did the Jedi forbade this?" Ezra was a boy with the privilege of having nostalgia for biological parental nurture.
Kanan had to admit to himself he could have stoked a shadow of resentment toward old dogmas for suppressing this privilege, overruling what should be a natural order of the universe. Not the case. Now Kanan Jarrus could see why they implemented the restrictions: those extremes, the overwhelming light, the waterfall of fear that spilled out. That was why. And Kanan choose to see this as progress, an enlightenment. Because he knew how to tread carefully. It allowed more light on the challenge.
She was as innocent as...
That's when the dams crackled without warning. War scars snatched his ability to produce tears. He could not restrain the spasms of his lips. He knew from testimonies that it was considered normal (if not healthy) for new fathers to cry, yet the Jedi Knight wanted to maintain a neutral-looking dignity.
Caleb. Once he resented the innocence in Caleb Dume, damned it for its responsibility in his fall. Now Kanan embraced it, understanding it wasn't revolting and perhaps he overlooked the glow in it.
"Kanan, it's all right. Let it out. Let go." And then came the guttural murmurs through stammers. With Hera, the doctor and midwife present, and the new being bearing witness to non-Jedihood-sanctioned vulnerabilities on display, he let loose the river.
"Hera, s-she's, she's... I knew she'll be tiny, but I didn't expect... so much light out of her."
Caleb.
He bit his lips. It would be unfair to impart the legacy of a long-lost battered Youngling in her. But the murmurs of her, the imagined twinkles in her eyes, his long-lost hues, broke the taboo of the vocal pronunciation. It wouldn't be Caleb's name he'll be calling. Still.
"Kaleb." He didn't know when he muttered a clarification on how he wanted it spelled.
"Kaleb Syndulla," Hera echoed, brief enunciation on the K, picking up on the implicit desired distinction.
He could give Kaleb the same promises he made to his pilot and Ezra. He'll be in her life as long as he could. Knowing the fate of Caleb, he knew he could not forever guard her from the darkness of the universe and that she'll pass and fail her own tests, entering into shrouded caves without him holding her hand.
Next to Hera's whispers, the Force emitted a drowsy yawn and burrowed into Kanan Jarrus's steadying heartbeat, magnetized by the light within him.