Chapter Text
“You know, it’s not too late to change your mind,” Luke Skywalker said. “We do have other candidates.”
Zeb grumbled something softly under his breath that was probably, “Sounds like someone who doesn’t know her very well.”
Luke flicked a glance at him, but most of his attention was on Hera. “This is dangerous,” he said, almost apologetic.
“And the Rebellion has been a blue milk run,” Hera said. “I’m fine.” She folded her hands together and looked across Luke’s right shoulder at the wall behind him. She didn’t know him very well, had never had any particular inclination to get to know him, and at the moment didn’t feel particularly encouraged by either his presence or his reluctance. It wasn’t fair to him, but Hera couldn’t particularly bring herself to care, not when even being on the same ship as him brought a dull stab of pain to her heart.
Not fair.
Nothing was fair, especially nothing about the Rebellion. But she wished he hadn’t had to be on the Ghost for this.
“You sure you don’t want to wait until we can get hold of Ahsoka?” Zeb asked, his frown deepening. “Rex thinks he has a line on her current location –”
Ahsoka was the only person Hera wanted to consult about this less than Luke. She glanced at Zeb, who read the thought on her face and held up his big hands. “Fine, fine. But guess who’s still going to be here if she finally shows up while you’re gone –”
“I’m sure you’re capable of defending yourself,” Hera said. Besides, it was Luke’s problem to explain, as far as she was concerned. She looked back at Luke and said, “We’re wasting time.”
He hesitated briefly, his expression suggesting that he agreed with Zeb but wasn’t going to argue this anymore, then said, “All right.” He took a deep breath. “Are you ready? I’ll probably only get one shot at this.”
“I’m ready.” She looked at Zeb, who nodded slightly, and Chopper, who groaned a long protest. She had told Jacen goodbye via holo a few hours ago; he didn’t quite understand how Mama leaving now would be different than Mama leaving normally, and Hera hoped that he wouldn’t have to understand for many years, if ever. She had tried to explain it to her father in the same holocall and wasn’t sure she had succeeded, especially considering that she couldn’t tell him the most relevant parts because of Ryloth’s dubious position in the Rebel Alliance. She had been able to tell Sabine a bit more; Sabine had understood but had told her it was the worst idea she had heard since – well, you know, she had said, and looked like she had wished she hadn’t mentioned it.
“All right,” Luke repeated. He looked a little unnerved, which Hera took vindictive pleasure in and then felt guilty about. “If this works, I’ll open it again every ten days – right here, all right? It can’t be anywhere else.”
Teach your mother to feed nunas, Hera thought, giving him a sideways look. She just said, “I understand.”
Luke nodded, swallowed, and raised his hands, releasing the artifact he had been holding. It was a little bell-shaped construction of crystal and metal, both substances etched all over in runes that no one had been able to fully decrypt. It could, Hera knew, very easily kill her if what they had managed to decrypt was wrong.
It hung suspended between Luke’s palms, glowing a bright, vivid blue. A rising hum made all of them but Luke wince, Zeb’s sensitive ears flicking in disgust. Hera kept her eyes on it, trying not to blink as the light brightened until it was all that she could see. Her stomach turned over, but it wasn’t any worse than doing a barrel roll in an A-wing.
All at once, the light was gone. So were Luke, Zeb, and Chopper. Hera looked around the Ghost’s common room, marking the differences in the familiar space. Zeb’s big wooden chair was absent; the walls were bare of Sabine’s artwork. So they had probably gotten the timing right, at least. Hera stepped towards the holotable, running her fingers over its surface and searching for the deep scar near the rightmost edge of the frame, which was courtesy of Ezra attempting to show off his lightsaber during their early days with Phoenix Squadron. It was missing.
Hera took a suddenly shaky breath.
Ten days, she reminded herself. It was both a lot of time to get this wrong and no time at all. She put her head to one side and listened to the now only half-familiar sounds of the Ghost.
She hadn’t spent much time on the ship recently, and mostly it had been with the ship almost as empty as it felt now. It made Hera think of its namesake, of her old crew’s namesakes, every corner of the ship haunted. She thought with enough time it might get better, less raw, but so far the war hadn’t given her that time. Instead, she let herself be moved around the Rebel Alliance as needed, sometimes with what remained of her crew, mostly alone. Even Chopper didn’t always stay with her, much to his protests.
This, though, had needed to be done on the Ghost, and Zeb had brought the ship to her from where it had been docked on Lothal for the past six months.
Luke had been right. There had been other candidates. But they all thought this might work best with her, because there weren’t many options for where she had been more than a decade ago and in a position where she would probably be willing to help. Han Solo and Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon, maybe, but that was a much longer shot than Hera Syndulla. Any Hera Syndulla.
She took another deep breath in an attempt to calm the sudden rapid patter of her heartbeat, and moved towards the hatch leading towards the cabins and the cockpit. There was no rumble of the engines; the ship was docked somewhere – solid ground, Hera thought, though it could have been a space station. The air filters seemed to be drawing a little heavier than usual, which suggested they were dirtside. Some stations triggered that too, though, if their own filters weren’t good enough.
The short corridor between the common room and the cockpit was empty. Hera rested her hands briefly on the cabin doors as she passed them, but there was nothing to tell her which was being used and something kept her from opening the doors to check. The cockpit hatch slid open with only the tiniest of jerks, which Sabine had repaired years ago.
Hera stepped inside, resting a hand on the back of the pilot’s chair as she looked around. The back left chair was plain, without the distinctive paint job Sabine had given it; the back right was still the old matching chair, not the one they had had to replace six months before they had gone to Lothal.
There was a pair of black gloves sitting on the dashboard.
Hera frowned at them, trying to decide what about them struck her as familiar. She didn’t own a pair like that at the moment, but she probably had in the past.
The scene outside the viewport was one Hera had seen hundreds of times before: the blank gray durasteel sheeting of a docking bay wall. She leaned forward to peer out, searching around for some indication of where the Ghost was docked, but there was nothing. It could have been any docking bay on any thousands of the planets and space stations in the galaxy.
Hera hesitated for a moment, then leaned down over the dashboard, intending to get into the Ghost’s systems to find out where – and more importantly, when – she was. She hadn’t gotten further than turning them on when the hatch slid open behind her.
Hera turned quickly, self-conscious and achingly aware that this wasn’t her own ship, to come face to face with Kanan.
She had forgotten how handsome he was.
Hera still had a precious handful of holos of him, but most were from those last few years, and she had trained herself out of looking at them too often because of the dull, anguished hurt that accompanied the action. Jacen was looking more and more like him as he grew up, but Hera didn’t see her son often either. Increasingly the war made time feel like it was slipping through her fingers like sand; Hera held onto it with unexpected desperation, both for her own sake and for the Rebellion’s. Emperor Palpatine’s death should have made it easier, faster; it wasn’t like that at all. Days both flew by and spread out; sometimes Hera felt like she blinked and it had been years, sometimes she turned around and what had felt like months had only been a handful of minutes. It was both too long and not long enough since – since Lothal.
Kanan was younger than she had expected, twenty-two or twenty-three, clean-shaven and with short-cropped hair. There was warm affection in his clear bluish eyes as he looked at her, though Hera couldn’t miss the scars flecking his face, scars that she knew Kanan – her Kanan – hadn’t had when he had died. He wore all black, a high-collared, long-sleeved short open at the neck and tight black trousers, with an unfamiliar lightsaber hung at his hip.
“I didn’t know you were back from HQ yet,” he said.
Hera opened her mouth to respond and couldn’t. She was crying without meaning to, tears rolling down her cheeks; she had told Zeb she could handle this and she had been wrong.
Kanan took a step towards her, his expression going from affectionate to alarmed. “Hey,” he said gently, “what’s wrong? What happened?” He put a hand to her cheek to wipe away her tears, warm and strong and alive, and Hera cried even harder. She wanted more than anything to step into his arms; he even smelled the same, and she could have been eighteen again, twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-seven – young and with the whole galaxy spread out before her, possibility endless, in love and with a future that could have held anything, instead of a present constricted down to a war that continued to grind on long past when it should have ended and a child growing up without her.
Below them, the Ghost’s hatch opened. Kanan turned his head slightly, frowning, and despite the tears blurring her vision Hera saw where a notch had been taken out of his left ear.
Hera tried to breathe in gasping breaths, trying to get herself together enough to speak. “I’m not her,” she managed to say. “I’m not –”
She saw realization start to form on Kanan’s face, though he didn’t take his hand away from her cheek. Light steps sounded on the cockpit floor as a new arrival stepped off the ladder, followed by the sound of a blaster clearing its holster.
“No, you’re not,” said Hera Syndulla, a girl barely out of her teens wearing an ISB officer’s crisp white uniform, her green skin startlingly bright against the stark fabric. She held her blaster with practiced ease, right hand wrapped around the grip, left hand bracing the butt of the weapon. “Who in blazes are you?”
Hera could barely remember being that young.
Given her counterpart’s occupation, the other woman’s youth probably shouldn’t have even registered with her, but Hera couldn’t get past it. When she had been that young, she had been blinkered by single-minded focus on the mission, on an end goal of destroying the Empire. She hadn’t thought to regret it until years later, crying her heart out in that cave on Lothal.
Does he know you love him? she had thought, in that first split second when Kanan had stepped away from her, his clear-eyed gaze flickering between the two women. Do you know you love him?
And then she had seen Kanan bend his head to the other Hera and her expression soften, her body curving towards him without touching, and Hera had known that both of them knew. It was a sharp stab of jealousy that shouldn’t have bothered her after all this time, when there was nothing she could do about it. Imperials or not, they were lucky to have that.
Hera leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the cabin door and sighed. They had locked her into one of the empty cabins after they had searched her and taken her blaster and other possessions away. It happened to be Sabine’s cabin, but of course Sabine wasn’t here yet so there weren’t yet explosives tucked away into every nook and cranny of it, “just in case of an emergency,” Sabine had told her once. “What kind of emergency are you expecting?” Hera had demanded.
Three days later Maul had broken onto the Ghost and taken them captive, so she might have had to take that back if they had actually had any opportunity to use all those explosives.
She could just barely hear Kanan and the other Hera talking to each other, but couldn’t make out the words through the heavy metal door. They hadn’t given her much of a chance to say anything before they had locked her in here, but at least they hadn’t acted like most Imperials Hera had known and stunned her first.
She sighed and left the door to slump onto the bench built below the upper-level bunk, leaning an elbow on the table and her chin against her palm. The room seemed bare without Sabine’s colorful artwork; Sabine hadn’t lived on the Ghost for years, but she hadn’t stripped the walls, either, and she still kept some of her things onboard.
Sabine would still be on Krownest now, Hera thought, if she had gotten the dates right. Ezra would be back in his tower on Lothal. The Scourge of Lasan was happening right now and Zeb was there in the palace with the Lasat Royal Family. Kallus would be on Lasan too, maybe already giving the order to use ion disruptors on the Lasat defenders.
Kanan was alive, and on this ship, and Hera knew that if she started crying again she might not stop.
It will have to be Alderaan, she thought. Leia Organa had volunteered for this mission for just that reason, but during the target period she had been on Alderaan, and Luke hadn’t been certain that this would work simply by flying to the Graveyard. It had been a shock to realize how few people with the clearance for this operation had been somewhere the Rebel Alliance could still access ten or fifteen years later. They hadn’t even been entirely sure it would work on a ship, but it was the best option they had. Hera had been certain that she could convince her younger self to help and equally certain that for the first twenty years of her life there was very little that could divert it, which wasn’t true for everyone else.
Obviously, she had been wrong.
She rubbed a weary hand over her face. She was going to find a way out of this situation, get to Alderaan, and talk her way into seeing Bail Organa, however that was going to go. Chandrila and Mon Mothma were another option, but for something like this she still thought Organa the better bet. Ackbar wouldn’t have the access and Mon Calamari weren’t good spies, either. Not to mention she didn’t have the faintest idea where he was right now. Her father –
Hera couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened to her father, not if her counterpart was an ISB agent right now.
She looked up at the sound of approaching voices. Just outside the door, she heard her counterpart say suddenly, her voice small and hurt, “You didn’t realize she wasn’t me?”
“Hera –”
“We’re not even dressed the same. And she’s at least ten years older than me.”
Hera rolled her eyes and called, “I’m thirty-three.”
There was a sudden silence from beyond the door, then it slid open to reveal Kanan and the other Hera. The woman was still in her white ISB uniform, her cap matching white leather. Her lekku were covered with wide straps of more white leather, completely obscuring their color. The rank badge she was wearing gave her the equivalent of a first lieutenant’s rank. Kanan, beside her, was still wearing all black, but he had added a second layer of heavy black leathers and vambraces that bore the Imperial cog.
Hera looked at it and then away, fighting down her hurt. There had to be a reason. She knew Kanan. He wouldn’t do this without a reason. She had seen that kindness in his eyes, that genuine care; Maul hadn’t had that. She hadn’t met any of them, but she doubted the Inquisitors did either. He was still Kanan. She would know him anywhere.
The other Hera was looking at her with the same sick hurt that Hera was feeling right now. Hera made herself look at her, really look, because despite her first impression it wasn’t at all like looking into a mirror. Despite the obvious muscle beneath her uniform – Hera suspected she usually wore a field agent’s grays and cuirass, rather than formal whites – there was something oddly fragile about her. She stayed a carefully measured length away from Kanan, as if both aware of his presence and certain she couldn’t show it in front of a stranger. When she moved forward, it was with precision, lekku barely moving with the motion, and Hera thought suddenly, she grew up with humans.
“Is Daddy dead?” she said before she could stop herself. She said it in Basic, not Twi’leki; if her counterpart had grown up with humans then there was no way to be certain that she was fluent anymore.
The other Hera froze, her eyes going wide with surprise. “What?”
“Daddy – Cham – is he dead?”
The girl flicked a startled look at Kanan, then shook her head. “No. Not that I know of, and if he had died someone from HQ would have hauled me into an interrogation room about it for the next three days. Why?”
“You grew up with humans,” Hera said. “He wouldn’t let that happen.”
“If you think that then you don’t know him that well,” her counterpart said bitterly. “I grew up in the Imperial Academy on Serenno.”
“I grew up on Ryloth,” Hera said. “At home, at the villa in the Tann Province – at the townhouse in Lessu, sometimes. Until my mother was killed when I was thirteen, then my father sent all of us back to the villa until I was old enough to leave.”
The other Hera blinked slowly. “The Syndullas haven’t been on Ryloth for a long time. Cham sent the family to the colony on Zardossa Stix after my mother was hurt in the Lessu Riots. Then he tried to assassinate the Emperor, so the Empire wiped out the colony. I don’t know what happened to the others. The Syndullas and the other clans fled Ryloth not long afterwards. They’re on the Imperial Terrorist Watchlist.”
Hera blinked. “Mama’s alive?” she whispered.
The other woman looked aside. “You’re not the one asking the questions here,” she said, but not before Hera saw sick hurt flash across her face. She set the small holoprojector Hera had had in her pocket down on the table in front of her and activated it. “Who is this?”
“That’s my son,” Hera said, trying not to look at Kanan and failing. “Jacen. He’s five. He’ll be six in a few months.”
The other Hera’s eyes went wide with shock. “Your son?”
Hera nodded, swallowing back a familiar lump of regret. “He’s staying on Ryloth with his grandfather now that Free Ryloth has been able to retake the planet. They’re rebuilding the villa, but my father spends most of his time in Lessu. The townhouse wasn’t destroyed, just ransacked a bit.”
Kanan started to raise a hand towards the image, clearly barely conscious he was doing it, then closed his fingers into a fist against his side. He said quietly, “He’s dead, isn’t he? Your Kanan.”
Hera couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at him and her son at the same time, not when her mind was already picking out the similarities between them, seeing what hadn’t been clear from the precious holograms she hadn’t been able to bear looking at alongside her son. How could I have forgotten? she thought. Jacen bit his lip the same way when he was thinking hard, had the same heavy eyebrows, was going to grow up to have the same broad hands and elegant fingers.
She put a hand to her mouth, trying to hold back her tears. “Yes,” she said eventually, when she was mostly certain of her ability to speak without stumbling over the words. “He died. He died before Jacen was born. He didn’t know – he never knew –”
She lost her battle to contain her tears and scrubbed her sleeve hard across her eyes. The other Hera had drawn close to Kanan without seeming to be aware she was doing it, reaching for him as if searching for reassurance that he was still there and breathing. They were holding hands when Hera got herself under control and looked up again.
She had talked about this with Zeb and Rex, with Sabine chiming in via holocomm, when she had been cleared for this mission. They had talked about what she could bring with her, what had the best chance of convincing her counterpart and Kanan’s, and Rex had insisted she bring this. I’m probably the only person in the galaxy who has any idea of what this is going to be like, he had told her. And it’s not the same for a clone as it will be for you, but it’s as close as you’re going to get.
Hera opened her mouth to say the Empire killed him and stopped. The Empire killed him, and you’re working for them. The Empire killed him, and you’re alive, both of you are alive, how can you be doing this when the Empire killed him? The Empire killed him and he never knew he was going to have a son. The Empire killed him, and I loved him. The Empire killed him and he should be alive today, he should be with me now, he should have been able to meet his son.
She said again, “He died.”
“I’m sorry,” the other Hera said. She sounded very young.
She was younger than Sabine had been when Kanan had died, Hera thought, and pulled her shirt cuffs up to scrub at her eyes with both hands. She couldn’t remember being that young.
Haltingly, the girl said, “I know – a little – what that’s like. I’m sorry.” She was gripping Kanan’s hand so tightly that it had to hurt both of them.
Hera touched the base of the holoprojector, looking at her son’s familiar face, then, deliberately, flicked the hologram over to the next image. It hurt to look at too.
Kanan stared at it, his eyes going wide. “What –”
“There was a Sith lord named Maul,” Hera said, and was curious to see him flinch, recognizing the name. “Kanan was hurt fighting him.”
Kanan was laughing in that holo, grinning at something that the recorder hadn’t captured – something Ezra had said, maybe. They had been on Atollon, just a few weeks before Thrawn had reduced the planet to little more than a cinder. Someone in Supply had scored thirty crates of Yensid/Sacul Vineyards wines, apparently by accident, and they had split it up between everyone on Chopper Base who wanted some. Not long after this had been taken, Hera and Kanan had taken a bottle and a few blankets and gone off to a quiet corner of the base. Ezra had found them the next morning and declared himself scarred for life by the sight.
It had been a good night.
The other Hera was peering at the hologram with curiosity, looking between it and Kanan. She caught Hera watching her and said again, “I’m sorry.”
Kanan shut off the holoprojector. He paused with his hand over it, then pushed it towards Hera. “You’re a Rebel, aren’t you?” he said.
“I’m an Alliance officer,” she corrected him, suspecting that it might be better to leave the “Rebel” part of “Rebel Alliance” off in this case. She had anticipated explaining to a younger Hera and Kanan that given a decade’s time, the disparate groups of rebels scattered across the galaxy would pull together, that they had defeated the Emperor and taken Coruscant, and that there was – or would be soon, once the vote concluded in a few days’ time – a Galactic Republic again. The possibility that she might have to explain this to a pair of Imperial officers, one an ISB agent and one an Inquisitor, had never occurred to her. “I came here because I need help.”
The other Hera drew herself up, settling her shoulders as if aware of the uniform she was wearing and its significance. “Fighting the Empire?” she said, her voice suddenly cold.
“No,” Hera said. “In my time the Empire no longer exists, not as it was. Since the Emperor died there have been a dozen warlords all struggling for power, all trying to take his place.”
The other Hera’s eyes went wide. “The Emperor…died?” she said.
“Yes. He was killed by Darth Vader.” At Kanan’s flinch, Hera looked at him and said, “A Jedi Knight named Luke Skywalker sent me here to retrieve data tapes on something called Project Cluster-Prism. In my universe the only copies that we know of were destroyed along with the data vault on Scarif six years ago. That’s all I need. Just data tapes. I’m not here to hurt anyone.”
“Why would I help you?” said the girl. “I’m an Imperial officer.”
“I’m not fighting your Empire,” Hera pointed out in what she hoped was a reasonable voice.
The girl looked away. Kanan stirred a little, uneasily, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, the other Hera said, “I don’t have that clearance level.” She swallowed, then said, “I need to think.”
She finally released Kanan’s hand and started towards the door, white-wrapped lekku nearly invisible against the white wool of her uniform jacket. It was as though she wanted to be human, or, barring that, at least wanted people to forget that she was a Twi’lek.
“Why are you here?” Hera asked suddenly. “Why are you ISB?”
The girl stopped, bracing a hand against the wall. She didn’t look back, just said quickly to the door, “When the colony was destroyed, I was sent to prison. I was there for – for a long time. My handler gave me a chance to get out, to apply for the Imperial Academy so I could start making up for some of the damage Cham had done. So I did. I had to. I’m ISB because my handler blocked my application to the Starfighter Corps; he wanted me in the Bureau.”
Hera bit her lip. “How old were you?”
There was a long moment of silence, then the girl’s lekku swayed just a little as she swallowed. “Fourteen.”
When Hera had been fourteen she had been racing blurrgs across the Tann Province with her cousins Doriah and Nury, or sneaking out of her room to work on her mother’s old racing pod.
“I’m sorry,” she said slowly.
“It’s done now.” The other Hera took another shaky breath. “I’m where I need to be.” She touched the control and the door slid open; she left with hasty strides, as if she couldn’t wait to be as far from Hera as possible.
Kanan stayed. Hera looked up at him, drinking in the sight of him, because she was never going to have this again. She was never going to see him again, never going to hear his voice, never going to touch him.
“Tell her you love her,” she said quietly. “Please.”
He nodded. “She knows,” he said. “I tell her every day.” He hesitated, then asked, “How did he die?”
Hera looked down. She closed her hands over the holoprojector, studying her gloved fingers. “There was an explosion,” she said haltingly. She never talked about it. She would have to tell Jacen someday, but everyone else knew better than to ask. She thought that Luke had wrangled the story out of Zeb or Rex, maybe Kallus, but wasn’t sure. “We were – on a planet called –” She hesitated, remembering that this Kanan was an Imperial Inquisitor, and corrected herself, “We were on a planet that a member of our team had close ties to. There was an Imperial factory there building a new kind of TIE fighter. We had been doing groundside work, commando work, for weeks, but I left to go back to the Alliance and ask for a starfighter task force to wipe out the factory. I got it. But we couldn’t get past the planetary blockade and I was captured. Kanan and two others – his apprentice and a Mandalorian girl – came up with a plan to rescue me. It almost worked.”
She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes again. “Kanan got me out of the Imperial Complex while the others stole a gunship. We – we almost made it. The Empire blew up its own fuel depot to stop us. Kanan held the explosion back so that the rest of us could get away, but he – he couldn’t. Get away, I mean. And he knew that.” Her voice broke. “He sacrificed himself for us, and I still don’t know if he knew – if he knew – how much I loved –” She had to stop. She couldn’t go on, not now, not ever.
She was crying in gasping sobs, tears rolling down her face as she wiped at them with already soaked sleeves. Kanan took a step towards her, hesitated, and then came the rest of the way, putting an arm around her shoulders.
It was too much. Hera wept as though her heart might break, because it was broken, and Kanan was here, he was here. He drew her close, and Hera turned her face against his chest and cried. It wasn’t him. Hera knew it wasn’t him, but at the same time, it was, and she didn’t know how to bear it. She cried until all that was left were dry, hiccoughing sobs, and made herself pull back from him, wiping her sleeve over her face.
Kanan touched her cheek gently. “He knew,” he said. “Believe me, he knew.”
“I would give almost anything to have him back,” Hera whispered. It was a confession that she had never made out loud, had never intended to. Not anything, not quite, but almost anything. Even years later there were days she wanted him so much that she couldn’t think past her grief and her longing, just go through her day on autopilot until something happened to jar her into full cognizance. “I loved him so much, and I never told him.”
“He knew,” Kanan repeated.
Hera put a hand to her face. She couldn’t look at him; if she had to keep looking at him, she might scream. But she didn’t know if she could look away either. “Go be with her,” she said. “Please.”
Kanan nodded. He hesitated, then leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll talk to her about helping you,” he said. “I don’t – Hera’s here because she doesn’t see that she has any other choice. I’m here for her, not the Empire.”
“She has a choice,” Hera said. “We always have a choice.” She shook her head. “Just – go be with her. Tell her you love her.”
“I’ll tell her.” For a moment he stood still, looking at her, then he turned and left. Hera heard the door lock behind him.
She put her head down on her folded arms and wept.
Sometime later, Hera raised her head from her arms as she heard the door unlock, scrubbing a hand over her aching eyes without much success.
The other Hera came in, holding a tray with a bowl, a cup, and a pitcher on it; if she noticed that Hera had been crying, she didn’t comment on it. Hera caught a glimpse of Chopper’s unmistakable orange chassis in the hallway outside, trying to peer into the room before the door closed again.
“Thank you,” she said as the girl put the tray down on the table in front of her.
Her counterpart looked up, a little startled. She had changed, wearing civilian clothes now instead of her uniform, but her lekku were still wrapped, and something about the cut of her clothes still felt subtly wrong. It took Hera a moment of staring at her to realize that it was at least partially because she was wearing clothes designed by and for humans instead of Twi’leks.
“How old are you?” she asked, trying to estimate how long she had been with the Empire. Even a day would have been too long, but as it was –
The other Hera hesitated, then said, “I’m twenty. My birthday’s in three weeks.” She straightened upright, heat in her cheeks. “You don’t have to – you keep looking at me as if you feel sorry for me.”
Hera did feel sorry for her, but she knew better than to say as much. She just poured herself a glass of water and said, “I’m surprised that the Empire let you keep Chopper.”
The girl glanced at the closed door, presumably well aware that he was out in the hallway, then said, “When I was commissioned three years ago, my handler gave him to me as a – a reward for graduating the Academy. He knew Chopper had been mine before. Chop’s memory was supposed to have been wiped, but –”
“That’s easier said than done?” Hera suggested.
It startled a smile out of the other woman. “It made him grumpier, but he was smart enough to pretend that it worked once he had realized what had happened.”
“Yeah, I didn’t read the manual when I was fixing him up the first time either,” Hera said. Chopper’s memory storage was so cross-wired she was fairly certain that no one else could do anything more than read it, the way the Empire had tried six years ago when he had been sliced, which was why she was the only one who had ever been able to do selective memory wipes on him. Every other attempt just bounced off.
“Chop got forbidden from the Imperial Complex when I was flying a desk here last year,” the other Hera confessed. “On the second day. He, um – he set another agent on fire. Not that Agent Sarkov didn’t deserve it –”
“Here?” Hera repeated, startled. “Where are we?”
The girl leaned back on one foot. “We’re on Naboo, ISB regional headquarters in Theed – we’re docked in one of the ISB hangars.”
Hera stared at her, appalled.
“Well –” the girl said uneasily, “– the Inquisition forced the ISB to take all the surveillance off the Ghost when Kanan came back, and I haven’t told anyone at the ISB you’re here. And Kanan hates the Inquisition, so he hasn’t told them, either. Not yet.”
“If he hates the Inquisition,” Hera said, latching onto that, “then why is he –”
Her face crumpled. She sat down heavily in the seat across from Hera, looking younger and more grief-stricken than ever. “I didn’t make him,” she said. “I didn’t –” She looked up at Hera, so distressed that Hera almost got up to go to her. She stayed where she was, though, watching her.
The other Hera looked down again. “I – I met Kanan when I was a week out of the ISB Academy. I had been in the Academy for four years, Serenno and then Naboo, and in prison before that, and I was on assignment, my first assignment, to track down possible rebel sympathizers on a planet called Gorse.”
Hera twitched a little, startled.
If the girl noticed, she didn’t show it. “There was an incident – anyway, it was dealt with. But I wanted him so badly. He was the first person who treated me like a person – I suppose you don’t know a lot of Imperial officers, but most of them are terrible, especially the men, and I didn’t think I could want anyone at all. Kanan was…” She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe her good fortune. “We worked together for almost a year. My handler was so angry – he tried to have Kanan killed once. But we worked well as a team so the Bureau was all right paying him, and Agent Beneke – my handler – just had to live with it. And – and the Inquisition found out about him.”
She put her hands to her face, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “They had me bring him back here,” she said haltingly. “I thought – it was supposed to be the Bureau. I didn’t know about the Inquisition. Except it was them, and he was – he was – he was arrested. And they gave him a choice, Lord Vader and the Inquisitor who was there. He could go with them, and maybe come back to me later, or they could kill him. He chose me, and they took him. They had him for a year. No one would tell me anything, and I thought he was dead. I thought I’d gotten him killed. I –” She wouldn’t look Hera in the eye. “I was here, on Naboo, because the ISB wouldn’t put me in the field alone and wouldn’t let me do fieldwork with the Naboo agents since they thought I was a distraction because I’m a Twi’lek. I was so sure that he was dead and I had gotten him killed.”
She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “They let him come back eight months ago. He’s – he’s mostly all right now. He’s better. But when he first came back, he was so badly hurt. Not physically, but – he was so hurt. He wouldn’t talk. He couldn’t touch me. He wasn’t…he wasn’t always here, like half of him was still back on Mustafar. He couldn’t sleep half the time, and when he did, he had nightmares. He won’t tell me what happened there. He’s – he’s terrified of the Inquisition, even though he’s an Inquisitor.”
“I’m sorry,” Hera said. She reached across the table to lay her hand on the girl’s.
The other Hera looked up at her, then away. “Agent Beneke still hates him,” she said, sounding distracted. “We’re back on Naboo because he’s been trying to find a reason to break us up that the ISB and the Inquisition will both accept.” She touched her face again, as if surprised to find her cheeks wet, and then said, “You weren’t…expecting us, were you.”
It was a statement, not a question.
“I met Kanan – my Kanan – on Gorse too,” Hera said. “Except I was the rebel trying to track down a rebel sympathizer before the Empire did.” She didn’t say that while she had thought that Kanan was sweet – not to mention handsome – she hadn’t felt the same kind of desperate yearning the other girl clearly had. On the other hand, she hadn’t been surrounded by Imperial officers for the previous four years, and she was well aware of how most Imperial men thought of Twi’lek women. Kanan must have seemed like a revelation to her. She smiled wryly. “I was expecting someone more like we were back then.”
The other Hera looked at her, her eyes sad. “I didn’t think that there was any other option,” she said quietly. “Or if there was, it was worse. I do know what happens to most Twi’lek prisoners in the Empire.”
She stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry – I swear it was hot when I brought it in.”
Startled by the change in subject, Hera stared at her, then down at the bowl in front of her. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not as if most Alliance rations aren’t cardboard and protein mush.”
“I – I have to think,” the girl said, and fled before Hera could say anything else.
Sighing, Hera poured herself another glass of water – she couldn’t even remember drinking the first one – and sat down to eat. More than a decade in the Rebellion had taught her to eat when she could, rest when she had the chance; you never knew when you were going to get another opportunity, no matter how quiet it seemed.
Kanan found Hera sitting on the floor in front of the faulty signal modulator, surrounded by tools, and staring blankly at the device as tears rolled silently down her cheeks. Chopper was beside her, patting her shoulder awkwardly with one of his manipulators.
Kanan sat down beside her and put an arm around her; Hera turned limply towards him and pressed her face against his shoulder. She cried silently – she always did – but she was shaking with the force of her sobs. Kanan held her close, the same way she had held him through all those bad nights after he had returned from Mustafar, when he had been recovered enough to let her touch him without screaming.
“Talk to me,” he told her softly. “Don’t shut me out.”
“Like you’re one to talk,” Hera muttered, her voice thick. She leaned heavily against him, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve the same way the other Hera had done. “I – I want my mother,” she said, self-conscious. “I never think about her. Not since – but when she said Mama was dead, all I could think about was that I wanted my mother. I know she’s out there because she’s on the watchlist next to Daddy, and I know I shouldn’t want her anymore, but, Kanan, I want my mother.”
“It’s your mom, Hera. It’s all right.” He kissed her forehead, not saying, We can go to her if you want. He wouldn’t make her refuse.
Hera looked down at her hands. She pulled her black gloves off and set them aside to stare at her long green fingers and close-cropped nails. “I was with Agent Beneke for twelve hours today,” she said. “Locked in his office going over every operation you and I have ever been on together and every operation any Inquisitor has ever worked with the ISB, all while he was asking me about my state of mind and your state of mind and about our sex life and if you like to tie me up.”
“What?” Kanan said, startled.
There was a brittle edge to Hera’s voice. “Well, he knows we’re sleeping with each other again and he wants to know what changed since you came back. Except he never actually said any of that, just talked around it, so I had to sit there listening to him, because he was talking about our operations too, and if I’d stopped paying attention for even a minute I might miss something that meant he would break us up or put me back behind a desk or – or call the Inquisition, or – all he has to do is suspect I might have even looked at another Twi’lek and I’ll go in an interrogation room for a week while everyone makes sure I’m not secretly in communication with my father. Or go back to the Spire. That’s what happened when Daddy left Ryloth; they pulled me out of class and put me back in the Spire for three weeks. I almost failed the entire year. And he could do that again if Daddy’s done something, or if he thinks Daddy’s done something, or if anyone else at the ISB thinks Daddy’s done something, or – I don’t know. When you were gone – when I was – when you were gone, there was an attack on one of the spice mines on Ryloth. Terrorist action. Not Daddy – not Free Ryloth, I mean. But they put me in a cell anyway, just in case. Came and got me from my desk, walked me down to holding, and put me in a cell until they could make sure that the Syndullas hadn’t had anything to do with it. And then they let me out. Four days later.”
She pressed her hands to her face. “I hate being on Naboo,” she said. “I hate it. And I hate being at HQ. It just reminds me of –” She stopped abruptly before going on as if she hadn’t interrupted herself. “And then when I finally got out of that blasted meeting and got back here, you – and her – could you really not tell she wasn’t me?”
Kanan hesitated, thinking. “Yes and no,” he said after a moment. Hera stiffened with hurt in his arms, and he said quickly, “I wasn’t paying much attention when I came in. I’d felt the disturbance in the Force when she arrived, but it didn’t have to be in the ship, and I didn’t know what it was. Naboo is a Force-rich planet and it didn’t feel like a threat. It could have been anything. I got up to the cockpit and – it was you. She felt like you. She still does. I can tell you apart now, but when I got in there I didn’t realize you weren’t back yet.”
“She’s thirteen years older than me,” Hera said, her voice small. “And you know I was in uniform when I left.”
“I wasn’t looking,” Kanan said. “I know it sounds like an excuse, but I wasn’t looking. We – we don’t, always, you know.”
Hera frowned a little, a line knotting between her brows. “I know,” she said finally. She looked down. “She told you what happened to him.”
Kanan nodded. “Yeah.”
“Don’t tell me,” Hera said. “Just – was he – he was like you. More like you than she is like me?”
“I don’t –” Kanan hesitated. “I think you’re more like her than you think.”
“She’s a rebel,” Hera said. She looked down at her hands again. “But she loved him.”
“Yes.” Kanan touched her chin, and when she turned her face up to his, kissed her lightly on the lips. “How he died,” he said slowly after she had drawn back a little, “I would have done the same thing.”
Hera’s face crumpled. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, shivering all over. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, her voice muffled. “Kanan, I don’t know what to do. I should comm Agent Beneke – but – I can’t, Kanan, I just can’t. And I want my mother. I can’t believe I want my mother. And Agent Beneke was asking me if my physical needs were being met, you know he has that hang-up about Twi’lek women and sex – I’m so tired.”
Kanan kissed her forehead. “You’ve been working all day. Go change, take a shower if you need to, get some rest.”
She nodded wearily and let him lever her up. “I love you,” she said suddenly, her hands tight on his arms. “Kanan, I – she was so sad. And she loved him. And when you were gone, I thought you were dead, and I – she was so sad. I remember being like that, and it was – it was awful. I can’t imagine feeling like that for years.” She looked down, her lekku drooping with her weariness. “At least I had that little bit of hope that you’d come back, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time.
Kanan put an arm around her waist and leaned his forehead down against hers. “I’m here,” he told her. “I love you, and I won’t leave you again.”
Hera was shaking in his arms. “I know,” she said, but her voice broke on the last syllable. She managed to summon up the ghost of a smile and added, “I – I don’t want a baby, though.”
Since Kanan could think of very few things that would make their already tenuous situation worse than Hera getting pregnant, he couldn’t disagree. Not to mention he knew exactly what the Inquisition did with the children of Force-users. He just kissed her again and tried not to think about the boy in that holo.
“I can just imagine what Agent Beneke would say about that,” he said instead.
Hera groaned. “Don’t remind me. You don’t want to know what my med center visits are like, since he gives the doctor a list of everything he doesn’t want to ask me himself.”
Kanan grimaced. He had his own problems on that front, but he wasn’t about to tell Hera about them. “Go change,” he told Hera gently. “It’s too hot for wool right now anyway.”
“Says the man wearing head-to-toe black leather,” she teased. She brushed another quick kiss over his lips, then left for her cabin.
Kanan rubbed a hand over his face and knelt down to pick up the discarded tools so that neither of them tripped over them later. “You could make yourself useful and fix this,” he suggested to Chopper, who had come back now that the feelings were over.
He told Kanan what he could do with the signal modulator, making Kanan laugh, and then added a tentative inquiry about the woman locked in the empty cabin. Kanan sat back on his heels and regarded the droid, thinking. “Well,” he said finally, “you probably will meet her.”
Technically speaking something like this was really more of a job for the Inquisition than the ISB. Kanan should have been on the comm right now to Mustafar. The Hunter, who hadn’t wanted to send Kanan back to Hera anyway, would have had a field day with this. Lord Vader – and the Emperor –
Kanan could just barely imagine what they would do with the knowledge the other Hera had brought with her, and it terrified him.
He rubbed at his face again, then dumped the tools in the tool box and put it out of the way where no one would step on it. He didn’t think Hera had realized yet that this was an Inquisition matter and not an ISB one.
He couldn’t turn her over to the Inquisition. She might not be his Hera, but she was still Hera Syndulla, and he couldn’t. Not when he knew what that meant. Not ever.
Kanan had meant to get up and go do something, anyway, but he found himself slumping back against the wall, his head in his hands. Her lover had been a Jedi, even if she hadn’t specifically said as much. Kanan knew better than most that being a Jedi in the Empire was a death sentence, and Hera’s lover had died for it.
He’d died for it, and Kanan was walking around with the Imperial cog and his operating number inked into the back of his neck, the Hunter still a constant presence at the very edge of his consciousness almost a year after Kanan had left the Crucible. He touched the lightsaber hilt at his belt, then snatched his fingers away as if the metal had burned him.
If he stretched out his mind, he could feel the kyber crystal in his old lightsaber and Master Billaba’s holocron singing silently to themselves in the locked drawer in his cabin.
“I can’t do this,” he said out loud, then passed his hand over his face again, feeling a decades-old croak of do or do not echoing in his memory.
The only good thing about being on Naboo was that she didn’t have to worry about checking in with Agent Beneke via comm, though he could and did comm her at odd hours even when she was onworld. Since she had spent the entire day with him, however, Hera wasn’t anticipating hearing from him and left her comlink in her cabin before she crossed the hall to Kanan’s room.
She didn’t bother to knock, just went in. Kanan was sitting on his bunk, with his head down over something held between his hands. Hera put her back against the door after it closed behind her and said, “What is that?”
He looked up at her, his expression anguished, and raised the lightsaber a little. It wasn’t his lightsaber – or, rather, it wasn’t the lightsaber he habitually carried. It was the one that he had left locked in the drawer under his bunk when he had been arrested.
Hera crossed the room to him and put her arms around his shoulders. Kanan tipped his forehead against her stomach, then after a moment put one arm around her waist. He kept his other hand on the lightsaber.
He died, Hera thought miserably. The other Kanan went down this path and he died.
As if he had heard the thought, Kanan raised his gaze to hers. Hera ran her thumb over his cheekbone, then leaned down to kiss him. Kanan kissed her back, hard and desperate, bracing both hands against her waist as Hera climbed into his lap. She could feel the lightsaber he was still holding as a hard weight against her hip as she reached up to pull her shirt off. Kanan kissed her again as soon as he could, releasing the lightsaber to run his hands up her back to her bra clasp. It fell to the floor with a dull thunk, but neither one of them was paying attention.
Even after years away, Hera knew the Ghost too well not to be aware of every sound on it. She had been half-asleep already, trying to pretend that she was back in her own bunk rather than in what should have been Sabine’s.
They were being quiet, but despite that and the two closed doors between them Hera was aware of them anyway. She pressed her face down against the borrowed pillow and cried herself to sleep.