I.

"So, off to Themes?" Sabine asks.

Hera nods. "Numa's already there. She's got the place picked out and everything."

She sent Hera a holo-image of it yesterday. It's pretty. Doesn't look much like Ryloth, with its dark, breathing jungles and sprawling plains, but it's open and wild and untouched by the war of the worlds, and anyway, it doesn't matter if Cham would like it or not, because this isn't about him. He already said his goodbyes.

"Time to get my head screwed on right. Get this –"

She has to make herself say it.

"Get things straightened out."

II.

"Hera."

She looks up from her daughter's sleeping form. For once, the baby drifted off without complaint. Her breathing comes out in fluted little tufts of warm air that Hera feels with the back of her hand. She presses her fingers just close enough to graze the cool, velvety dampness of her daughter's mouth.

Kanan doesn't sit beside her. He stands over Tesa's cradle, places one hand on their baby's head. Her skull is small enough to fit in his palm.

He once promised he'd see her again.

An image suddenly comes to mind – Kanan, after their rescue on Mustafar. Lying in her bunk, too exhausted to keep his eyes open but too wary from weeks of torture to fully trust what was going on: that he was back on the Ghost, surrounded by family, in Hera's bed, with her hands administering what little first aid she could give him without disturbing him or causing more pain.

They made their promise years ago –dragged out of each other because they knew there was a bigger picture and they couldn't be selfish, and all those other words they'd tossed back and forth that they knew by heart. Their mouths and lips and tongues formed the words, as much a sense memory as the touch of each other's fingertips to the ridges where bones and blood and tissue met under smooth panes of brown and green skin –

She hadn't intended to break that promise to Kanan. She always figured he did, because he'd lost what he loved once, and she didn't know if there would still be pieces left to pick up if there was ever a "next time".

But she had broken it, when she weighed a world without Kanan to a world where their crazy plan had the slimmest chance of success. And call it temporary insanity, call it selfishness, call it crazy, but she decided the Rebellion could temporarily go burn in the fires of Mustafar's hellish volcanic surface. A world without Kanan wasn't a world she wanted.

She'd spent years knowing where her devotion stood, only to have it completely overridden for reasons she swore would never happen.

Because sometimes, refusing to accept your choices was the same thing as letting them be taken away from you.

And the Empire had already taken enough from all of them.

She wraps her arms around herself and hates how small it makes her look, even if Kanan can't see it, so she slips her hands under her thighs and sits on them instead.

He moves to hold her, but she pulls away from his touch. The words are whispery and soft, a voice entirely not her own.

"I'm not sad about my father."

III.

No one says a word about this being her fault. No one tells her she's weak. She doesn't know what she's supposed to do with that, what she's supposed to think. She just does her everyday things in the same order – nurse the baby, perform routine maintenance, report for briefings in the war room, stay updated on Intel.

Sato has been as courteous as ever. He'll be officially released from medical leave the week after next, with his new prosthetic leg and a cane to help him get around until he adjusts to his new artificial limb. She studies his holo-projection face and tries to discern whether he wears his disappointment in her openly, or if he's keeping it buried beneath the stern lines of his face.

She can't see it.

The one thing she's certain of is that he agrees with her: Rex is the best choice for a temporary Captain and Phoenix leader. He's been communicating with Sato and several other generals behind closed doors, learning plans and strategies and chains of secret information that Hera will not be privy to.

For the first time, she thinks she might understand how frustrated Sabine was with her about withholding Fulcrum's true identity. It's not so much fun to be on the outside of the circle, even if Hera knows it's for her own good.

Sabine leans against the wall of Hera's bunk, arms crossed over her chest. The look she gives Hera is unreadable, the look in her eyes the closed-off expression of the girl who said she could try to trust.

Hera corrects herself. Not a girl. A young woman, strong and certain, whom she watched grow up. Whom she loves.

"You could have told me," Sabine says quietly. "Hera, you should have. I would have done everything I could to help you!"

Hera sighs. "I know that, Sabine. But I don't think there's really anything that could have been done."

Sabine shakes her head. "How could you know that if you never asked? I could have helped out more – watched the baby, given you a break…"

She cuts herself off abruptly, shaking her head.

Hera places both hands on the girl's shoulders.

"Sabine."

Hazel eyes meet hers. They're angry, but they're also something else Hera rarely sees in Sabine's gaze – worry, that particular way only family can hurt you with their blend of fear and love and frustration.

"I didn't tell anybody because I didn't understand it myself." She squeezes Sabine's shoulders. "It has nothing to do with trust."

She looks the girl square in the eyes. Sabine doesn't blink.

"You were there when she was born," Hera whispers. "I know I need you."

Sabine's hard expression doesn't change, but there's a twitch in the line of her mouth.

Then her chin drops, and Hera lets go.

IV.

Her hands are shaking. She tries to clench them into fists, to command them to stop. She can't, and this scares her more than anything has in a long time.

"Just because you don't look sad doesn't mean you aren't," Kanan whispers. "Grief isn't always crying or making a scene. Sometimes it's hiding yourself away from the people you love, distancing yourself from everything you used to be, because you can't let yourself feel it."

His head droops. "Sometimes, it's too much to feel all at once. The hurt, the fear. So you don't."

Her gaze linger to the jaig eyes Sabine painted on his mask. She knows what he's getting at, but Hera still shakes her head.

"That's not what I mean," she says. She doesn't know what she means.

V.

Ezra has the baby right now. She can hear him laughing from the common room – the spilled-coin babble of Tesa making noises to herself, Zeb's throaty laugh, Chopper's high-toned grumbling. She's said her goodbyes to the boys already. Neither would meet her eyes.

Before she said goodbye to the baby, Hera held her one more time. She touched her daughter's warm skin, felt her fragile bones. She buried her nose into the baby's neck and inhaled her. The baby didn't move, except for the sporadic rattle of her chest, the broken-engine hiss when she breathed.

She knows Tesa will be perfectly loved and cared for here, among family. But Hera can't leave just yet. She can't move until everything is how it's supposed to be, under her control.

Everything still feels out of control and she doesn't accept it. She knows the far-reaching force of their enemies. She has never known a world without it.

But her family is here and Kanan's arms are open and her daughter is safe and loved. She has everything she needs and there is nothing she can do except wait for the bruises to fade.

VI.

The look on his face is so open, stripped and transparent that she can see right to the center of him, and the sudden jolt of pain and panic it stirs in her is too much so she slides off the bunk and staggers towards the door, refusing to turn and see the look on his face. He's given her everything and she can't give him anything, he's opened every artifice to show her what's underneath, and she can't, she can't, she –

"Hera."

The way his mouth forms her name; as if he learned to how to breathe by forming his lips to the shape of its letters.

"Hera."

A beat of silence, punctuated only by their daughter making noises in her sleep.

If he touches her, she will let him. If he says her name, she will tell him every single thought that has been in her head since their daughter was born. If she peels herself open and shows herself to him in the same way he looks at her, she will become another Hera. The Hera no one else is supposed to see will suddenly become all of who she is.

Kanan will see her. Everyone will see her. She will see herself.

VII.

Kanan appears in the doorway.

"We're all set," he tells her.

She looks over at Sabine, who nods her head.

"Say hi to Numa for me," she says.

Hera smiles. "I'm sure she'll say the same about you."

Sabine shrugs.

"It's hard," she says. Her eyes flicker to Hera's knowingly. "Being apart from family."

VIII.

"I don't –"

Hera's throat catches. She tries to take a breath, but there's nothing there, no recycled oxygen from the air vent above their heads, no ready smile and reply to reassure him everything is going to be A-okay, no feeling in her chest, no words her tongue can form.

It's suffocating, feeling like everything would be clearer, somehow, without her daughter. With one less mouth to feed, one less soul to fight for, one less person who needed her to be strong. Her lungs are so heavy. Her chest is so hollow. She doesn't know how to breathe through this.

One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. She listens for a sign of herself. A familiar sound that lets her know she's come back to her mind, inhabiting this skin, this soul.

He takes her hands in his. There might be nothing else in the universe except this, them.

"Tell me what's going on," he says. "Whatever happens, we'll get through it. Together."

He says it with too much tenderness. He wants to help her and she wants to push him away. She can't stand it if he knows but she misses him and she isn't sure which one is stronger at the moment.

He strokes one of her lekku with the softest, most worshipful of touches.

"Please," he whispers.

Their baby breathes. In. Out. In. Out.

In.

IX.

After they leave Themes, she'll follow Commader Sato's request to train General Ibo's new pilots. Kanan will go back to Atollon with the others and take care of the baby while she's gone.

She doesn't know when she's coming back. Hera supposed it depends on how it takes the rebels to learn how to not-crash into asteroids.

She doesn't know what kind of being this makes her, that she's willing to leave her infant behind and not feel a twinge of regret or sadness, but she doesn't think about it.

"Nothing's more important than family," Ezra had told her, the day they all met her father, and at Hera could hear the fire in his voice, the conviction. Family wasn't an idea for him; it was everything that had been taken away by the Empire, the loved ones that he would never see again and the life he should have had.

She is Captain Syndulla of the Rebel Alliance.

This is the choice she has made.

X.

Her ungloved hand is so small in his. Her palms are softer than his calloused, rough ones; her fingers, smooth and slender, feel so exposed intertwined with his.

She stares at the green skin. It looks so wholesome, unbroken. Unfamiliar. Hera searches her memory for a time when she touched her daughter without the protection of her gloves. Without that reassuring barrier of cracked leather and grease stains that came between her exposed palms and her daughter's tender skin.

She doesn't know how to fix this and she has to keep doing this, keep going, never stop, Hera doesn't give up, she's Captain Syndulla, she knows what has to be done, so she keeps doing it until things will be right again because that's the only way it can be and because that's what she tells herself, she has to make things right because that's her job, but she doesn't know how to make this right, maybe she's been wrong this whole time, she doesn't know how what to do, she doesn't have a plan, she can't fix this, she can't, she can't.

Her heart might explode. It hurts, it hurts, she wants to say it hurts but she won't because she doesn't get to say it hurts. She can't be hurt about anything ever again because Hera knows she doesn't deserve to. She doesn't get to cry or take a break or be sad. She isn't allowed to be anything, and it doesn't matter if Rex says this isn't her fault, if Kanan will tell her the same thing, it doesn't matter if everyone believes them and tells her it's okay because it isn't, none of it changes anything, Hera still chose to be selfish and it set off this chain of events, her daughter is sick and her father is dead and the baby will never get better and the only parent Hera had left will never come back and she misses him, so, so, so much, she can't stop missing him no matter where she pushes the hurt, because it always comes back to wrap its freezing fangs around her heart.

"Something's wrong," she says, finally, words so pathetically incapable of filling the void but the only ones she has at her disposal, the only thing that feels precise enough to define what her whole world has – somehow, inexplicably, shamefully – has become.

XI.

She takes her usual spot in the captain's seat, Kanan at her side. For some reason, the chair seems so much bigger this time, compared to every other time she's sat here, staring out at the cosmos.

Kanan reaches over. Squeezes her hand.

"Whatever this is, I'm here. I'll be with you the whole way. I'm here, Hera. I'm here."

The words he said to her that night. Holding her, stroking her back, her lekku. Kissing her softly, rocking them back and forth like she was just as small as their daughter.

"You and I are going to face it together."

Those words. The memory of Malachor, the freezing dread in the pit of her stomach that she would never see him and Ezra ever again. And the realization that they'd returned, but not all the way. The Jedi she'd known was lost to her, even though he'd come back.

Maybe the same thing has happened to her. Maybe Hera has lost a part of herself that can never come back. Not as powerful as the difference between sighted and blind, but no less essential.

VII.

She doesn't know what to do.

She doesn't know what else to do.

"With me."

She's said those words before, to Kanan, in a completely different context.

Each time his answer remained the same: always.

"Something's wrong. With me."

VIII.

Kanan's hand tightens around her own. She blinks, surprised. She'd been so lost in thought Hera forgot he was here.

"Ready?"

She nods.

"Ghost to Command, preparing to disengage."

A crackle on the comm, then she hears, "Copy that, Ghost."

Burying what's left of her father isn't going to make everything better. It's a self-indulgence.

It's a start.

VIX.

Someday, she will take Tesa to Ryloth. She'll show her daughter, a child of peace, the endlessness of her homeworld, her people, her heritage. She will step into the soft brown earth of the jungles and the compact sands of the valleys, leaving footsteps where she stood on long, adult legs, and claim this life as her own.

She will be a part of it all – this legacy of wind and wild, of smoke and ash, of the sky and the stars and the farthest reaches of the black. Singing into the void, glowing in the darkess, glimmering and immovable in their liberated galaxy, she can see it, she can see it.

END