A/N: So, exactly a year ago today, I published my first Rebels fic and I've so loved being in this fandom and writing about these characters! This has been one of the most creative and fun 52 weeks of my life, and I've got no plans to slow down. And I'm sentimental (and a little shameless) and I just couldn't let today pass without a fic to mark the occasion. This is a tiny little drabble I wrote a couple weeks ago and threw up on tumblr to exercise my first-person POV writing and, more importantly, to soothe my Kanera woes and to imagine how things could have gone...well...differently.
Differently
Hera has this dream sometimes: they're on the fuel pod, it explodes, Kanan dies. Over and over, again and again. She screams for him. He looks at her. He dies. He dies and she never even told him she was pregnant and they never said goodbye and nothing was like it always should have been.
She wakes up gasping and shaking and more often than not she can hear the last syllable of his name as it falls from her tongue and usually she's running for the 'fresher because her stomach is heaving and the grief and the pain are so real.
Tonight, though, she stops before her feet hit the floor, sitting on the edge of her bunk. Her breath hitches in her throat when she feels it again—that little fluttering deep inside her. With one trembling hand, she reaches for that place below her navel. Palm flat against the growing curve, she can feel the baby—her baby, their baby. She can feel that life they created so carelessly, that little spark that's both him and her. She loves this baby so much she aches but she's terrified and she feels guilty because what kind of galaxy will this child be born into?
She feels that fluttering again, stronger this time, and that makes her feel guiltier because what if the baby is upset because she's upset? So she takes a deep breath and she rubs her hand over her belly and she whispers so quietly, "Shh, love, it's okay."
"Hera." Kanan stirs beside her and he sits up and his name passes her lips in a sob; she'd half-convinced herself he wasn't there. "Breathe," he soothes. His voice is thick and gravelly and the sound of it thrums in her bones as he leans close. "It's okay."
She shivers when his hand brushes one of her lek, which has twisted around the back of her neck and is hanging over the opposite shoulder, and he gently moves it back to where it belongs. He massages the base of her skull and he kisses the nape of her neck and then he wraps his arms around her from behind. He pulls her into his embrace and back into bed and he holds his hands over hers, resting on her abdomen.
"It was—that dream again," she says when she can trust herself to speak. "Kanan, it's so real, I—"
"I know. I know." He curls his body around hers and she feels grounded and calm and all that fear and anxiety starts to seep away. "I'm here, Hera. It's okay."
"It could have gone so differently."
"But it didn't."
There's a small part of her that remembers everything he's ever said about different paths and points of divergence and she wonders if, in some other place and time, that was their path—the pain and the fire and the never knowing what it's going to be like to raise this child together.
"It didn't," she agrees with a relieved shudder.
She focuses on the sensation of their child safely within her and Kanan's arms safely around her and she closes her eyes to try and find sleep. And this time—as always when he holds her—when the dreams come, they end differently.