Star Wars Rebels: Hera & Kanan

Chapter Fifteen

Seven months after A New Dawn

(Contains a significant spoiler for Lords of the Sith)

Hera dropped into her seat in the cockpit of the Ghost, feeling completely exhausted. Everything seemed turned upside down, and it was her own doing- all because she hadn't been able to control herself in a moment of weakness.

Why did you kiss him? What were you thinking?

The answers to those questions were simple, and she knew it. She'd wanted to kiss him for a long time. And now that she knew what it was like, well...

Stop it, she told herself. You have a mission.

Even if there had been no mission and no obnoxiously handsome Jedi to recruit, Hera's instinct still would have been to avoid any legitimate romantic entanglements at all costs. Falling in love was a liability. She'd seen it over and over again on Ryloth during the Clone War, and again when the Empire came. She'd seen it on every Empire-controlled planet she had ever visited. Lovers torn apart, families destroyed. The Empire crushed love- pulverized it under their boots- left nothing but pain and heartbreak and the pitiful memory of something pure and true. Her own father, Cham, had lost two loves to the Empire. After Hera's mother was murdered, Cham threw himself into the Free Ryloth Movement, trying to put himself, and Ryloth, back together. And once he'd had some success with both, he had lost Isval, one of his most trusted warriors. He'd never spoken to Hera about her, but Hera found out that Isval had sacrificed herself to save Cham and the Movement.

Watching her father, and so many others, go through this sort of pain had made Hera very wary of it. When she lost her mother, and it had been brutal. But her father lost his partner, best friend, lover, and the mother of his children, all at once. Her death changed him in ways that Hera couldn't truly understand. What she did understand, though, was that Cham became so obsessed with liberating Ryloth that he had neglected his only remaining child with the woman he loved. In a way, it had been like losing both her parents. Her father was there, but he was not the man she knew any longer.

The death of her mother may have hardened her father, but for others, a loss like that could become a vulnerability. Hera didn't want to be weak. She refused to allow herself to become vulnerable to the Empire. So she'd kept her distance from compromising entanglements, never allowing anyone to get too close. Not that she hadn't had her fun- Hera was not shy, and if she wanted something (or someone), she went after it. But it was only fun, and never anything more serious than that.

Hera had kept her distance from Kanan, too. She could have had fun with him- a lot of fun, she suspected. And there was no question that he would have been a very willing and enthusiastic participant. But she wasn't so foolish as to believe that sex would have been enough to satisfy either of them. She could have taken him up on his offer way back on Gorse and left him behind afterward, but she'd always wanted more from him because she'd always been able to see that there was so much more to Kanan Jarrus- right from the first moment she'd laid eyes on him. What Kanan felt for her had always been somewhat less clear. But he'd stayed with her, despite the fact that she had never taken advantage of his unlocked cabin door in the middle of the sleep cycle. If sex was all he wanted, there were much easier ways to get it.

The Ghost drifted in a lonely area of space outside the Lothal system, and Hera looked out at glittering stars that her eyes did not see. Instead, she saw Kanan's face, lit up by his lightsaber in the darkened cargo bay. She'd never seen anything like what she'd just witnessed. He was powerful and graceful, and there was something about it that had seemed almost otherworldly. It was magic from a time long gone.