A/N: As per Chewbacca shooting Kylo Ren, I'm assuming that blaster wounds can bleed. Getting kind of liberal with science and medicine here; I was a music major in college and got straight Cs in biology and I was pretty ok with that. Bear with me. This fic brought to you by: caffeine, undying love for Kanera, an idea birthed during the writing of my last oneshot "Wounds," and a few words of dialogue I pilfered from the animated "Beauty and the Beast." Enjoy this mess if you can.

Target Practice

Time Elapsed: Twenty Months

Things were not going according to plan.

Hera lay low against a rooftop, peering over the ledge and into the alley below. She and Kanan were on a back-water world trying to steal a shipment of Imperial torpedoes and so, it seemed, was everyone else. About seven different beings from three rivaling crews all converged on the crate the same time Kanan did, and he, vastly outnumbered, was not doing well. People were starting to draw blasters and it was easy to see that if anyone was going to be eliminated first, it would be him.

But a Devaronian started shouting at a Sullustan and one shot the other, and that started a total melee. Hera bit her lip anxiously, watching as Kanan expertly fired his weapon, dodging blast after blast as he sought cover behind a stack of shipping pallets. She was at once annoyed and relieved that he wasn't using his lightsaber; doing so would have given him a better defense, but it most certainly would have made him the center of attention.

The center of attention was not where he needed to be, but that was exactly where he ended up when a barrage of blaster fire disintegrated the pallets he was hiding behind and the remaining beings started shooting at him. He threw himself to the ground in a roll, and by the time he came up, Hera made a calculated decision.

She had to take him out of the equation. It was the only way to save his life. Her blaster was in her hands, and she steadied them on the ledge. Kanan was ducking again, blaster bolts zinging over his head. She needed him to stand so that she could take her shot. She was about seventy-five percent sure she could hit him without killing him, but not from this angle.

She needed him to remember she was up there. Shouting at him was completely out of the question. She looked at him, willing him to turn around and look up and see her. Kanan, she thought desperately, look at me. And by some miracle, he shot up and turned toward her, eyes locking on hers. She was already taking aim. Trust me, love.

She knew that he did. Without hesitating, she squeezed the trigger and watched, helpless, as he went down.

He was bleeding. He was burned and bleeding and there was a blaster wound on his side, a pretty big one. And it was all Hera's fault. At least she was trying to make it right. She'd dragged him to the Ghost's small medbay and started to patch him up. There were several scenarios wherein he'd imagined the alluring Twi'lek stripping his shirt off and running her hands on his bare skin, but this definitely was not one of them. Not even close.

She leaned over him now, something concealed behind her back. Her eyes held a mixture of uncertainty and determination. "Just…hold still," she said. Her tone was apologetic.

"What—ouch!" Kanan sucked in a breath when Hera touched him with gauze and disinfectant. "That hurts!" He jerked, trying to sit up and get away, but she was faster than him. She hopped up on the bed and pinned him there, her knee on his chest. There was no way for him to throw her off now without hurting them both. He doubted he could do it at any rate; he was feeling worse by the second.

Hera's mouth was tight and her eyes flashed. "If you'd hold still, it wouldn't hurt as much!"

He turned his head on the pillow, refusing to look at her. "Guess I don't have much of a choice!"

She lithely maneuvered herself back to the ground and a standing position. She swung an arm toward the door. "If you want to go to your room and sulk and bleed to death, be my guest!"

He blinked. Bleed to death? He picked his head up just enough to take a look at his side. There wasn't much to see except blood, and a lot of it. Everywhere. He looked at Hera; she was paler than he'd ever seen her, and her hands and the front of her jumpsuit were stained and damp with blood. A sudden panic gripped him. "Hey, none of that is yours, is it?"

"No," she said, face softening. "Twi'leks don't bleed red anyway, you know that. Lie back."

He complied and she touched the gauze to his skin again and dabbed gently along the length of the wound. His vision started to swim and blinding pain muddied his senses. Hera was talking to him, but he couldn't make sense of a single syllable. He only heard the rise and fall and rich timbre of her words. The sound was soothing, though, and it made him remember how much he was in love with her. The first moment he ever heard her speak, he knew he'd follow her anywhere. Even to botched jobs and blaster wounds.

"Have I ever told you how beautiful your voice is, Hera?" His mouth moved without his mind's permission, and the words sounded slurred and uncertain even to his own ears, which were ringing loudly. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

Her eyebrows flew up. "No, and don't start now." She frowned, still looking at his wound. She swiped one hand across her forehead as the other very firmly held a clean patch of gauze to his side. Her lips pursed into a thin, worried line that made Kanan very nervous.

"What is it?"

Her eyes hesitated to meet his. "If you don't stop bleeding soon, we're going to be in real trouble."

Translation: he possibly really was bleeding to death.

"'M not worried about it," he mumbled, closing his eyes to stop the ceiling from spinning. "You owe it to me to keep me alive since you're the one who shot me."

"I said I was sorry." She sighed, agitated. Her hands were on his skin again, and he liked how that felt, even though everything else felt terrible. One hand beneath his shoulder and the other at his hipbone, she helped him turn over on his good side. "Maybe that will take some of the pressure off and stop the bleeding," she murmured. But the tone of her voice said, I don't know what else to do.

He grunted his acknowledgment, in too much pain to speak. His side felt hot and sticky, but the rest of him was cold. His muscles were tense and quivering. Hera's wrist brushed against his forehead.

"You're clammy," she said tightly. "I think you're in shock."

Did her voice break a little? That concerned him just as much as anything else. Hera Syndulla was almost never upset, unless it was at him. But all he could manage to say was, "Cold."

"I know, love."

She was calling him 'love' now; another bad sign.

His back to Hera, he couldn't see anything now except the wall anyway, so he let his eyes close. His lids were so heavy. He fought for consciousness, afraid he'd never hear her voice again if he succumbed now. He listened to her every move and maybe she knew that he needed her to talk him through the pain, because that's exactly what she started doing.

"Alright," she said, slipping a scanning device onto his forefinger, "this baby is going to tell us how to help you." He heard her fingers tap against a datapad. There was a beat of silence. "Well congratulations! You've lost approximately seventeen percent of your blood volume." She took the scanner off his finger and started bustling around the medbay.

"That's bad," he grunted. Seventeen percent sounded like a whole lot and his already-rapid pulse started to climb even higher from sheer anxiety. He couldn't make his teeth stop chattering.

"Not as bad as it could be," Hera said, sounding hopeful. "Most humanoids can lose up to thirty percent before a transfusion is necessary." She slipped an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, securing an elastic band to fit snug around his head. "Here—breathe. You're going to be fine."

The oxygen made him feel dizzy, but it also helped clear the fog in his head, and Hera's sentences started catching up with him as his breathing evened out. "Wait," he said, swatting the mask aside, "Thirty percent? How do you know that?"

A slender green hand reached around to put the mask back on. "Um." She brushed his hair back from his forehead and he knew she was stalling.

"Hera?"

She started swabbing a patch of skin in the crook of his arm and then tied a tourniquet above his elbow. "I saw it on a show on the HoloNet."

He looked up and saw a bag of fluids hanging above his head. Surely Hera didn't intend to hook him up to an IV. "What show?" He demanded, voice cracking. "You're not talking about 'Belnar's Physiology,' right?" His words sounded like a weak, jumbled mess through the mask, but he knew that Hera understood him perfectly and chose to ignore him.

"You don't have anything to worry about; they say only the good die young."

He sputtered for a response and she chose that moment of vulnerability to plunge the IV catheter into his arm, ease the needle out, then tape the line in place. She unwound the tourniquet and he flexed his hand. The process had been very nearly painless. He didn't know why he was surprised she'd been able to do that with such skill; he'd seen her hands work wonders on the Ghost and her touch had always been unfailingly gentle all the times she'd tended to his various other wounds. But starting an IV?

"Y-you didn't learn that f-from the HoloNet," he said, teeth chattering again. He knew his vital signs were stabilizing; breathing was coming easier and his heart had slowed, but he still felt so agonizingly cold. Hera sponging his skin with a cool cloth didn't help.

"Piloting wasn't the only thing I learned in my time with the resistance on Ryloth," she said distantly. He wished he could see her face. He was about to say so, but then she lifted the gauze over his wound and the rush of fresh air set him shivering violently.

"Finally!" Hera cried, sighing. The relief in her voice was almost palpable. "The bleeding stopped. You're going to be just fine, Kanan."

Her elation was contagious and he smiled despite the pain, but confusion made his brow furrow. "You said that earlier. Didn't you mean it?"

Her lips met his temple, then she covered his wound with a clean, thick bandage and taped it down. "I mostly meant it."

He swore, and not just because her fingers sliding across his ribs sent pain radiating everywhere. The shaking didn't help anything. "I m-might freeze to death, Hera," he said.

"Just a second." He heard her moving around and moments later, she draped a thermal blanket over him. He curled up as much as he could, greedy for every bit of warmth he could get. His lips parted with a relieved moan.

"If this is what shock feels like, I'm not a fan," he said, pulling the blanket tight around his shoulders. Between the effects of the oxygen, the IV, and the blanket, he was starting to feel a little less horrible.

"Your color's coming back," Hera said. She peered into his face. "Are you still cold?"

"No," he said, still shivering. Hera snorted.

"Right."

"It's getting better." That was a lie, but he didn't want Hera thinking he couldn't take a non-lethal blaster wound like a man. He heard her exhale in such a way that told him she was standing with her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, thinking. He suddenly remembered she was covered in his blood. "You should go change."

"I'm going to," she said, a lilt in her voice. "But first, we need to get you warm."

"I am warm…ish," he insisted, fighting against drooping eyelids. Drowsiness was taking over his senses. Hera was doing something, maybe cleaning up the blood or the scattered medical supplies; he couldn't tell. Suddenly, the edge of the blanket lifted and he gasped at the cold. Then the bed shifted and Hera stretched out next to him, pulling the blanket over them both. As she settled in, her back touched his, and it was bare. Completely bare.

"Before you start running your mouth," she said severely, "remember that the only other person on this ship available to direct your medical care is Chopper."

He didn't say anything, but not because he took her warning seriously. In the last hour, Hera had: skillfully and diligently treated his blaster wound, called him 'love,' kissed him, and now she was in bed with him, half naked. Maybe his feelings weren't quite as unrequited as he thought.

As interested as he was in seeing Hera's face, he was incredibly grateful that she'd decided to lay with her back to his. The heat from her skin radiated through him and his shivering stopped little by little. His muscles began to relax. "And to think I would have been happy with a second blanket," he said, recovering from his speechlessness. He cleared his throat, breath fogging in the oxygen mask. "Doctor Syndulla, is this medically necessary?"

Her silence was very telling. "Does it matter?"

"No."

"Just rest, Kanan," she said softly.

Exhausted, he didn't say anything else. He draped his arm over her hip, ignoring the pinch of pain from the IV catheter. She twined her fingers through his, and suddenly all pain was a distant memory. He intended to tell her that she could shoot him any day of the week if this was how she intended to make up for it, but he was lulled to sleep by the comfort of her closeness and the rhythmic steadiness of her breathing.

Hera jerked awake from a fitful dream, gasping and disoriented and alone. Hadn't she been right next to Kanan?

"Welcome back," he said. His voice came from across the room. She shifted her eyes and saw him sitting cross-legged on one of the other bunks, reclined against the wall. He was still shirtless and so, she realized, was she. She glanced down and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was fully covered by the thermal blanket. It was, in fact, tucked very neatly around her shoulders and chin.

"I promise I didn't peek." Kanan's mouth twitched. Hera sat up, careful to keep the blanket around her. She frowned at him.

"You should have woken me, Kanan." She rubbed her eyes; they felt unbelievably gritty. "How long was I asleep?"

"A few hours," he said. She just blinked. A few hours? She climbed out of the bunk, forcing her stiff knees and hips to move.

"How long have you been awake?" She asked, forehead wrinkling in concern. "Long enough to disconnect your IV and take a shower, I see."

His middle was no longer bloody, and he had changed into new trousers. His hair was neatly pulled back, still damp. A brand new bandage covered the blaster wound on his side. "You look better," she said, relieved to see that his face no longer held the sickly pallor of shock. She held her hands on her hips to keep him from seeing how they were trembling. She'd been calm earlier, laser-focused on keeping him alive, but she was quickly coming undone. "Kanan, I'm sorry—"

He shook his head. "You made the right call. I'd definitely be dead if one of those other guys had shot me. Besides," he paused, looking Hera up and down. She was immediately wary of the suggestive gleam in his eye. "Your bedside manner completely makes up for the fact that you used me as target practice. Or should I say backside?"

Any lingering guilt over having to shoot him evaporated like moisture on a desert planet. She ignored the little fluttering thing her heart did when she remembered how she'd fallen asleep holding his hand and how natural it felt to lay so close to him. Today was not the day for trying to process complex things.

And she couldn't stand that smug look on his face.

She locked eyes with Kanan as she walked over to the internal comm panel and activated it. "Chop," she said in a honeyed voice, "Come down to medical. Kanan's going to need help applying some anti-bac ointment and it needs done STAT. I'll be in the 'fresher. If the wound re-opens, let him bleed."