Star Wars Rebels: Hera & Kanan

Chapter One

(This is a short chapter that takes place immediately following the end of A New Dawn)

"Let's go somewhere," Kanan said, heading up the ramp of the Ghost .

Hera walked beside him, and she arched an eyebrow. "Where do you want to go?"

Before he could answer, a small orange-and-white astromech with yellow accents rolled into view at the top of the ramp and began gesticulating wildly with its grasper arms while making a tinny and indecipherable racket.

He stared at the droid, dumbfounded. "Is that...is that a C1 series astromech?"

"Yes," she sighed. "His name is Chopper, and he's a bit...eccentric."

"Chopper!" Kanan laughed. "That's a name."

"That's the name he came with. He lives up to it, believe me," Hera said, scowling at the droid with her fists planted on her hips.

Kanan knew Binary well enough to have caught several fairly crass insults artfully nestled within the droid's angry ranting, and he laughed again. Truly ill-tempered droids were something of a rarity; routine memory wipes kept most droids from acquiring too much "personality". He studied Hera for a moment, considering what kind of person would never schedule routine memory wipes, and then it hit him: the droid was much more to her than just a droid.

Hera threw up her arms, exasperated. "Okay, okay! I told you that getting Zaluna settled might take a while!"

The droid bleated out one last furious warble and then subsided into low grumbling.

"The last time I saw one of these droids was probably in the- uh, in the city, on Hosnian Prime- when I was just a kid," Kanan said. He briefly chastised himself for his near slip-up. There was something about Hera that made him want to tell her all his secrets, especially now that she probably had suspicions about the biggest one. But suspicions were one thing, and knowing was another thing entirely. The less she knew, the safer they both would be.

"I pulled him out of the wreckage of a fighter that crashed near my home on Ryloth, during the Clone War. I fixed him, and we've been together ever since," she said, regarding the droid with a mixture of fondness and irritation.

Kanan watched her as she looked at her droid, and his chest felt suddenly tight. She was something else, that was for sure.

"Chop," she said to the droid, "This is Kanan. I just hired him on as crew, so you're going to treat him like he belongs on this ship."

The little astromech rolled towards Kanan, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hera's face tense. That seemed...odd. He looked down at the droid just in time to see a grasper arm making an extremely rapid approach at his thigh. A half-second later, he felt it.

The burst of pain radiated up his leg and down through his knee. "OW!" he yelped, quickly backing away from the little menace as he rubbed at the afflicted spot on his leg.

"Chopper!" Hera bellowed.

The droid let out a high-pitched warbling that sounded exactly like maniacal laughter.

Kanan's eyebrows shot up, and he stared at Hera, incredulous. "You call that eccentric?"

"It might be a little bit of an understatement," she said with a shrug.

"You think so? I don't remember you mentioning anything about there being a violent astromech on board your ship," he said, failing to keep an accusatory tone out of his voice.

"Well, you know...there might be some things I don't tell you, so you might as well get used to it." Then she shrugged again, giving him a wry smile. "Welcome aboard!"

Notes:

Thought it might be fun to see what Kanan and Chopper's first meeting was like, although I'm sure no one is surprised that it went the way it did.