time || a Sabine Wren fic||

I

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Kanan and Hera find her when everybody else does not.

They find her in the footsteps she leaves from pools of blood and the smell of betrayal that lingers wherever she goes. They find her through her art, through her life through her love. They find her when Ketsu Onyo leaves her for the dead, they find her in the dark, alone.

They find her even though they've searched planets for the whispers of her rumors, they find her even though she is the ghost of something that does not exist.

They find her, and in that moment she finds them too.

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She sees the ghost when they carry her away.

It's big and it's the kind of freighter Sabine has on her bucket list of ships.

She tries to tell them, her head lolls.

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The Lasat on board says something like, "This better be her Hera, or the trashcan'll be thrown outta the window."

He's as big and as purple as the Last Legends say they are, and Sabine thinks that maybe once she's able to move she'll be friends with him. The trashcan is an astromech- he's orange and white and yellow and he rolls over Zeb's leg and makes him scream. It's funny, they're all funny, and Sabine thinks she'll fit right in.

The ship rises, higher, higher, higher.

Then dark.

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Lothal is lonely and everywhere. It is the grass and the sky and the mountains. It's that call somewhere in the wind that tethers them to this world. She's at- peace. For the first time, even though all she's ever been taught is war.

Kanan meditates. Hera sits next to him. Zeb swings his bo-rifle around at chopper. Sabine watches.

They give her a room and it's hers. She paints all over the walls, she paints until it looks like she's detonated a bomb of colors in there. Zeb whistles when he sees it, Hera smiles. Maybe she can find a family in them.

Kanan is more of an enigma. He's quiet- and he likes to argue with Hera even though they look like they're best friends. He comes into her room and talks about the clone wars. They're both veterans of different wars, and the invisible string between them is like the sea, it connects them the way teal forms between blue and green in her spray paint. He tells her stories of worlds without war, he tells her stories that existed in different times. He tells her about life over and over again in different universe, until each one is exhausted.

He takes out a metal cylinder and then- it's beautiful ! It makes Sabine want to pick up her paint and spend days drawing it over and over again, as each painting draws her closer to the secret of that blade, the song she doesn't hear, the colors she can't see. But she feels it all the way she feels her art, gradually and then-

Everything.

He's a Jedi, and Sabine is not surprised.

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Sabine finds Hera through her family.

She feels Hera in bold reds and soft pinks, and the paradox that is unconditional love. She finds Hera through parents who have sunk so deeply into the war that they have become it and it has become them. She learns new colors around them; the brushing of fingers, the wind in the air ; she's never felt these colors before, and she thinks that maybe, maybe once she finds these colors, she'll be able to understand more. Watch more. Sabine adds the sky to her infinite pallet, even though she will never be able to paint what it feels like to be the wind.