Archive of Our Own

“This is a waste of time.” 

A trio of stuffed lothwolves regard Hera judgmentally from the galley counter. Hera huffs. 

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” she explains, careful to keep her voice low as she jostles the caf pot. “Sweet kid, appreciate his service, great job with the giant death orb and, you know, deposing the regime I’ve dedicated my life against. I’m grateful, truly.”

The lothwolves stare.

“I am!” Hera defends, waving her free hand emphatically. “That does not make this less of a waste of time.” She winces at the bang the pot makes as it hits the counter; a little liquid sloshes out near the pink wolf, so Hera magnanimously shifts it out of the way. “My time, and his time. Kid’s got an entire galaxy at his feet here, I don’t have anything to add. Zip. Zilch. Meiloorun-sized convor egg. Which would be fine, he's earned a dead end chat or two, but it’s a bad day for it, okay?” The lothwolves stare more. “Bastards,” Hera accuses them back. “Have you ever tried to wrangle a toddler on a star base?”

The lothwolves have not.

“Of course you haven’t!” She opens a cabinet with only slightly too much force, acquires her own mug, then passes over the other options there to retrieve a plain one from the next cabinet over. “It’s a bad time, is what it is. Lots of babysitters, sure, but all with pilot-brain. Speaking of which, if I don’t clean up the cockpit before one of them drops Jacen off I just know I’ll trip and kill us all mid-flight, plus I still have to pick up those candies Ryder likes. Oh, and Gial keeps screening my calls, so I need to track him down before—”

“Uh, General?” Hera jumps in surprise, letting out an undignified yelp that her hand is too slow to keep in, though it does fly reflexively to cover her mouth. An immediate jolt of pain at her other set of fingers has it flying once again, now too slow to cover the open lip of the mug she’s holding, and as soon as she processes that there’s already caf on both her hand and - ah, karabast - the bright blue lothwolf, she plunks the mug onto the table to alternatingly suck at her skin and pat at the fur. The shouting from down the hall continues, oblivious. “Are you sure you don’t need help?” 

“Absolutely not!” Hera shouts back, top of her lungs. And neither do you, she bites back. Instead, she hisses to the lothwolves, “Yes, I know I’m the one that said yes! Look,” she drops the blue one apologetically behind its brethren, then picks up a stirring spoon to shake at the now-lead purple wolf, “the next time galactic royalty asks you for a favor, I want to see you say no, hmm?”

The wolf says nothing at all, so Hera gives up on making her point. She straightens, raising her voice to bellow, “Do you take sugar!?” 

“Uh…yes? Yeah?”

Hera pauses, rolls her eyes upward, scoffs.  “Hero of the galaxy; doesn’t know how he takes his caf,” she mutters to the wolves, tapping out a generous portion of sweetener. She briefly considers the open box of cookies over which the wolves sit sentinel, shakes her head, and elects to scoop up just the mugs before she kicks aside some letter-shaped blocks to enter the hall, shouting again. “Probably a good choice, it’s…“

She trails off as she enters the cockpit. There’s a young man planted in the co-pilot’s chair on the Ghost - which she knew, of course she did, obviously - and he’s leaning forward with his head ducked down to prod benignly at the control panel. Maybe it’s his posture or the sheepish look he gives her as he snatches his hand back, the smell of the caf or the cylinder at his hip or the fact that yesterday would have been Empire Day, once upon a time, but for just a second the lump in her throat is too large to speak around.

“…strong,” she forces herself to finish.

Skywalker takes the mug from her, careful and smiling alongside another round of oblivious. “Thanks, General,” he says. “Though I’m not sure how we’re going to do anything fancy if we’re juggling these.”

It takes her another moment to realize there’s no irony in his tone, which - oh, oh no. 

Dammit, Organa. 

“I’m not teaching you how to fly,” she informs him.

“What?” The earnestness is almost comical. Chopper would certainly laugh, if he hadn’t abandoned her to hang out with some of the droids he knew on base. Though that was probably just as well, since Hera’d been about an inch away from taking a wrench to his innards if he didn’t stop heckling her for being grouchy, which - ha! Rich, coming from Chopper, of all people.

“I’m not teaching you how to fly,” she repeats, in a very straightforward, not at all grouchy manner. She leans against the wall, blowing on her drink. “You know how to fly.” 

“But Leia said—”

“Her Highness thinks she’s subtle." A blank look. "She’s not.”

“Um…”

“It’d be like trying to teach a bird."

It occurs to her directly after the words leave her mouth that she totally could have gone with it, shown him a few tricks. He’d have picked up on them in a hot minute, sure, while also barely registering her instructions, but then she could have sent him on his merry way and that would have been that. Dammit. Why didn’t she do that? 

Though she would have had to clean the cockpit, first, so - maybe not. 

Doesn’t matter, anyway. She didn’t, and by now Skywalker’s brightening up with a delight that quickly goes sly. “I’m too good?” he guesses, and yeah, that’s some Jedi-grade cockiness. Familiar, again. Not for the first time, Hera hates the thought that her ship might be too well-named.

“Try the wrong species,” she barrels through the feeling, “No, not Human - it’s all that Force nonsense. You know the basics; after that, the way you and I feel out a flight is going to be different, it just will. It’s not that I don’t know more than you - I do - but there’s only so far we can get when I’m playing dejarik and you’re working a sabacc deck.”

“Okay, so what am I here for?” he asks. 

“Beats me.” It doesn’t. She’s being difficult. 

“Leia was real clear that I talk to you, specifically.” 

“Was she, now?” 

“She was! And you know it!” Rude. 

Hera can also be rude. “Maybe Her Highness isn’t always right.” 

“My sister’s usually right,” Skywalker insists with a devotion that makes Hera think about dumb idiots who get into fights over Meilooruns.

“Your sister’s very pushy,” Hera insists back. 

“C’mon, you gotta—“ 

“My husband was a Jedi.”

Skywalker freezes.

Hera freezes, too. 

Karabast. 

She reboots faster than he does, a bare brief stop between tapping one finger and the next on her mug, and then she takes a slow sip to prove how unfazed she intends to pretend to be. His mouth, meanwhile, hangs open where it was derailed midway through disrespecting his elders, never mind that she’s ten years his senior at most. His face does something kind of fascinating, and Hera monitors his hands to make sure he isn’t about to drop his drink. It’s not a sure thing. 

Karabast. Not the way to do this, Syndulla. What are you doing? 

What’s said is said, though, and a moment later when Skywalker unsticks, he sits up so straight it’s a wonder he doesn’t rocket through the ceiling. 

“Oh!” he declares. “Oh, well that would,” a furrow again. “...wait, husband? I thought Jedi couldn’t…”

Hera shrugs. 

“Did you marry in secret?” 

“What? No.”

“But he was—“

“We never married.”

“But you said—“

“I have cookies; would you like a cookie?”

Hera’s being difficult. She’s being difficult because Luke Skywalker is young and bright and heroic and a little whiny, and he holds himself like someone who only just learned how but had to learn fast, and the set of his mouth is serious but he’s got this boyishly frustrated expression that makes her want to ruffle his hair and find it’s turned dark under her fingers. Because she can see in the tense line of his shoulders a burden, yes, but also exactly how young he is, which is exactly how young a man she loved once was and exactly how young a boy he isn’t would be.

Which is young. Really, really young. 

He’s so kriffing young. 

And here’s Hera, being difficult.

Fuck. 

She sighs. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the wide-eyed look he gives her tells her she’s surprised him again. She finally sits down, settles into the pilot’s chair. It’s this chair that is the most hers of anywhere that ever has been or will be, and that’s the kind of familiarity she finds she needs to plant her feet and lean back and peer at this boy from over the rim of her mug. “I’m not at my best. Can we try again?” 

“Uh…sure. Sorry, try what?” He’s so earnest, even more so when he says plainly, a bit of a blush there, “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be doing.” 

“We,” Hera says, and takes a deep breath, “are talking about Jedi.” 

“About Jedi?” he asks, and kriff, there it is, that wide-eyed, tell-me-who-I-am hope. 

“About Jedi,” Hera confirms.

-

They talk about Jedi. 

This is hard. 

For one, Hera is - as she had emphasized strenuously to Princess Leia, when she’d called in the favor that started this - not a Jedi. For two, Skywalker’s existing framework is…spotty. 

“Okay!” He says, and then winces at his own voice echoing around the ship. Hera chuckles. “Okay. All the meditation - that is definitely a Jedi thing!” 

With some effort, Hera tears her fascinated gaze away where she’s been tracking his effortless, seemingly mindless paces around a scatter of Lasat puzzle toys. She blinks up at him. “I don’t know what to tell you,” and if that’s not a summary of this whole day, she doesn’t know what is, “it was all a Jedi thing.”

“No, no - Yoda was all about the, the meditation, but you’re talking about cats! Cats and wolves and purrgil!” 

“And spiders. Though that was more Kanan’s thing.”

“Spiders?!” 

“Really big ones.” At his blank look, she adds, “Me-sized.” 

He groans without surprise or horror at the scale, which is what Hera supposes she should expect from a boy from Tatooine, then collapses into her co-pilot’s chair and groans again into his hands. He says something into them, but it’s muffled. 

“Say again?” 

He doesn’t look at her, but speaks up just enough for her to make out, “I can’t do that.” 

“What?” Hera asks, “Can’t you do that whole…mind…thing?” 

Skywalker sighs, unfolding just a bit to drape himself across the chair in a slouching lounge that does something aching to Hera’s heart. Then he immediately sits up, pin-straight and shoulders high, like he’s remembered that slouching isn’t very Jedi-like of him, and the aching gets worse. “I mean, I can…” he waves his hand in a way that’s apparently supposed to mean something to Hera, and almost does, “droids you’re looking for, and all. But I can’t talk to cats.” He bashes his head lightly back, then looks at her beseechingly. “You’re sure he talked to cats?” 

“He definitely talked to cats.” 

“Did anyone else? Did Ben? I can’t see Ben talking to a bantha. Or maybe I can?” 

“Who’s Ben?”

“My first master - uh, Ben Kenobi. Obi-Wan.” 

“Ah, him.” Hera says. “I never met him.” 

She wishes Ezra were here. 

“And…” Skywalker’s voice is hesitant, quiet. “…Anakin Skywalker?” 

“Him either, I’m afraid,” Hera says gently. “I didn’t know many Jedi.” This time she wishes for Kanan. She is used to wishing for Kanan. “Ahsoka Tano, I knew,” she offers. 

“Who’s that?” Skywalker asks.

“She was…” Hera mourns that what she’s saying is inadequate even as she says it. “She was one of our best agents, and my contact with the Rebellion for the longest time. One of our leaders. And she used to be a Jedi.” 

“Like Yoda and Ben?” 

“Not quite. She left the order before everything went down, as I understand it.”

“You could do that?” 

I don’t know, Hera thinks. Why would I know? “I guess,” Hera says.

“Is she - could you - can you, I mean. Is she…around?”

There’s that hope again. That question he can’t help but ask, even though she knows he knows how it will go. She hates that she can’t do anything but prove him right, and - this. This is the problem. “She disappeared. There was a fight with Vader.” An intake of breath, sharp, but otherwise Skywalker remains silent. “She got Kanan and Ezra out; they were there. I wasn’t.” 

“And she—“ his voice chokes off.

“I don’t know,” Hera says. “Ezra said he saw her again. He even said she might come back. But she never did, as far as I know.” 

Skywalker gives a long, slow nod. He processes that, for a moment, and finally he asks, “Why’d she leave the Jedi?”

“I…” Hera sighs. “I don’t know.” She wishes she’d asked Kanan, though she isn’t sure even he knew. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him any of this, because she’d thought they’d have— well, no. It’s not that she’d thought they’d have time, precisely; she’d hoped they would, because if Hera Syndulla was good at anything she was good at fancy flying and taking in strays and hope, but hope notwithstanding she’d always known any day could be their last. It’s more - maybe he’d have ended up telling her these things, if they’d had that time. Maybe they would have simply come up, in passing, and she’d have them to supply now. But they hadn’t, and it hadn’t occurred to her that this might be her legacy to preserve. Selfishly, she thinks it isn’t. 

“I can ask Rex,” Hera says, because it's the only thing she can think to. “You should meet Rex.” 

—

The kid meets Rex. 

Rex doesn’t know why Ahsoka left the order, not precisely. There was a trial, he says, only knew some details - she didn’t talk about it - but I know it was her choice not to come back, not ‘till the end. 

What Rex does know, apparently, is a whole lot about Anakin Skywalker. And by his enthusiasm, he’s been chomping at the proverbial bit to share with his old officer’s son. 

“...and then,” Rex tells, grinning as his beer sloshes over the side of his tankard, “General Skywalker saunters up, cool as anything - as Cody’d tell it, anyway; I was under the bridge with the boys, ready to pounce - and he’s all I surrender!”

“He gave himself up?” Skywalker asks, rapt. 

“Uh…no,“ Rex says. “It was more of a trick, really. Har-har, up yours to the separatists - he had style, your dad.” 

For some reason, that thins the line of Skywalker’s mouth. He wrinkles his nose. “Are tricks a Jedi thing?” 

Hera raises her eyebrows at him. 

“The ones who…taught me,” he explains without explaining, then he huffs. He looks troubled, but then, she’s coming to think that Luke Skywalker may often look troubled. “They’re into tests.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rex replies, unperturbed. He leans forward with a grin. “Never much got the impression General Skywalker liked school.” 

“But Be— Obi-Wan Kenobi, I mean. He was his teacher?”

Rex gives a big, booming laugh. “Ah, General Kenobi! Now there was a man with style, even if he drove old Cody mad half the time. More old school, though - he was all council this and orders that. Every Jedi I’ve ever met goes off half-cocked, mind, but your father’s the one who really made an art of it. Unorthodox, was Anakin Skywalker. Creative. Absolute terror in battle." This time his grin has teeth, "Pitied the Separatists, we did. Wouldn't have wanted to meet your dad on the field, not from the other side.”

Rex laughs again. 

Skywalker doesn’t. “Yeah,” he murmurs, frowning into his tankard like there are answers in its depths, and also like maybe he can’t hold his drink. His voice is soft. “Yeah.” 

Rex, deep in his own cups and deeper in his memories, misses it this time. He needs this, Hera thinks, which is why she doesn’t stop him when he leans back in his seat to sigh. “Ah, I miss that. Not war, no. May I never lose another brother to war. But - we made our fun, in a way. Kenobi and Skywalker one-upped each other like children; Commander Tano was all of fifteen, and sometimes you’d think she was the only adult in the family.” 

“Oh,” Skywalker says, brow furrowed and voice small. He doesn’t say much after that.

—

“About my father,” Skywalker says, a few days later. He’s got her cornered in the hangar, but he looks serious enough to make her pause her rush. 

“Yeah?” Hera asks. She thinks, Oh no.  

“Did you ever - did anyone ever - talk about him?” 

Hera takes a deep breath, in then out. There isn’t time for this - Chopper’s waving his little arms at her impatiently from the Ghost, and she needs to be in the air five minutes ago. But also, there has to be time for this. “I’m sorry, Master Skywalker, but no,” she says gently, tucking her helmet under one arm, “Not besides Rex. Kanan might have—“ his eyes flicker, hope-bright, and she wishes she hadn’t even said it when she’s compelled to finish with, “—but not to me. He didn’t talk about the Republic much. A little more to Ezra.” 

“He’s—“ Skywalker takes a deep breath. His eyes skitter, side to side. “My father, I mean— He was— After, after I met Yoda, when I was on the…I…” 

“General Syndulla!” 

Hera spins aside, already making a sharp one moment gesture. It doesn’t do any good. When she looks back, Skywalker’s closed off. 

“It’s nothing, I’m just - I gotta go.”

“Luke!” 

But he’s gone. And unfortunately, Hera has to go too. 

—

She doesn’t expect to see him again. One conversation, some reminiscing, an ill-advised introduction to an old friend of the family, a strange and aborted vulnerable moment in a hangar - it’s enough, it’s more than enough. It’s maybe too much, even. Hera’s inclined to butt out where she’s like to do more ill than good. So she calls herself done with what respect she can pay to Kanan’s legacy and her own soft heart, and now Luke Skywalker’s off to do the kinds of things heroes of the galaxy do while Hera’s off to do the kinds of things antsy young retired-ish military generals with equally antsy five-year-old sons do. That’s the long and the short of it. 

Which is why she’s so surprised when she gets a comm call from him, more than half a year later.

“Tell me about the Jedi,” he says, after a haphazard and perfunctory attempt at the social formalities. 

She sits up so fast she nearly knocks her head on the Ghost’s underside. Chopper squawks at her indignantly, skittering back a few feet. 

“Master Skywalker—“

“Luke.”

“…Luke,” she amends slowly. She makes a silent, placating gesture at Chop, who is threatening to drop a pallet of paneling if she doesn’t get her act together. “I’m sure by now you can find plenty of people who know much more than—“

“No, I can’t,” he bites out, clearly frustrated. They’re on audio-only, but her silence must communicate her expression; he walks it back immediately, shame coloring his voice. “Sorry, General. I’m - no, you’re right. There are people who remember, but they talk about Jedi like they were all - battles and myths and secrets. Even mission reports don’t have details of what the Jedi could do, what they were like. No one has specifics.” 

“I don’t have specifics,” Hera says, testy.

“You do! You have - cats!”

“Cats?” 

“Cats.” 

Cats, Hera thinks, exasperated. The kriffing cats. She curses the name of Princess Leia Organa. She curses Ezra’s stupid lothcats. She curses the Jedi for all dying and then she curses mysterious Masters Kenobi and Yoda for the same and then she curses Kanan and then she takes it back, because she can’t even pretend with that one. She thinks that she maybe should have enabled visual when Skywalker called; maintenance or no, maybe if she was looking at Luke’s face it wouldn’t be so easy to imagine it twisted into the exact earnest expression she’s always been a sucker for. 

She does not have time for this. 

She sighs.

“I can try,” Hera says.

“There is no try,” Skywalker murmurs, as if by rote. “Just do or—“

“—do not.” Hera finishes. She laughs despite herself, a shock of memory. “Kanan and Ezra used to say that to each other. I thought it was some kind of joke.”

“It’s - it’s something Yoda said.”

“Huh. So it’s a Jedi joke.” 

“Jedi joke,” Skywalker repeats, just a smidge too awestruck to be reasonable. Hera gets it, though. Jedi jokes, for when there were enough Jedi that they could joke together. 

Hera feels her own smile fade. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay?” All that hope. 

“Okay.” 

Chopper grumbles. Hera ignores it. 

“Okay!” Skywalker repeats. She can hear the grin, even if she can’t see it, bright and bright and bright. “Let's do it."

"Tomorrow," Hera says, waving off Chopper's new string of invectives with an I know, I know, "I have an appointment this afternoon, but we can talk tomorrow."

—

Except, no they can’t. He's got some kind of reunion and then after that she’s taking Jacen to see Sabine for once, and then Luke has a dinner he’s promised his sister about and Hera needs to hurry to a weekend-long allocation meeting she’s not technically slated for and a billion other things make this week terrible for her and next week terrible for him and so on and so forth. 

They reschedule. Thrice. 

Then they talk. 

She tells him about the time Kanan brought a storm to a dogfight.

“Really?” Luke sounds delighted. He sounds relieved. He sounds, she realizes, like this is exactly the kind of specific he’d wanted to hear. 

“Pretty sure the storm was a guy,” she adds. 

“What?” Luke blinks in confusion. Hera laughs. 

“Hey, I dunno. He was Kanan’s friend, not mine.”

“Kanan’s friend?” 

“He called him a friend, anyway. Insofar as friends threaten each other with death and destruction.”

“Doesn’t sound much like a friend.”

“Jedi have weird friends, in my experience.” 

“I don’t have weird friends.” 

“What do you call Solo?” 

“I’m telling him you said that.”

She talks herself hoarse about Attolon until they sign off in the name of Hera’s bedtime and Skywalker’s breakfast. Hera tucks Jacen in before she tucks in herself, and that night she dreams of thunder. 

—

He calls again three planets and a cycle later. Hera’s in a field with Jacen, which is supposed to be a no-calls kind of time, but she picks up anyway. 

“...couldn’t see a damn thing,” she ends up telling him. “Fog so dense you could eat it, and there’s Kanan—”

“Who was blind.” 

“Yeah, who was blind, not that it much - Jacen sweetie, no, we don’t pull the kitty’s tail…what do you mean he likes it? Okay, then we ask before we tug the kitty’s tail, okay? - not that it much mattered. And he used the Force.”

“He controlled the ship?” 

“Oh, hell no. If I’m on the Ghost, I am the Ghost. And I don’t much like it when I’m not on the - Jacen! No! I said ask!…no, ask me, not the kitty…and also the kitty, I guess. Uh, sorry Luke. What was I saying?”

“Is Jacen Force-sensitive?” 

“You tell me; all I know is he’s five and likes cats. Oh, right, yeah. Fog. Kriffing Gerrera. So I flew, and Kanan gave directions.” 

“And you’re sure you’re not Force-sensitive?” 

“Absolutely not. Just a little blind trust - that’s a joke he’d make. Not that I’d call it blind, really; you pick your people, and I’d pick Kanan, any day. I’d pick anyone he vouched for, too; he was good at it. Ezra, on the other hand, now Ezra would run off with just about anyone, if they seemed interesting enough; Saw, pirates, Maul -  yes, Jacen, she’s very soft - what, you haven’t heard about Maul? Oh, he’d hate that…”

—

He calls again. 

“So you’re saying I can get…small.” 

“I’m saying - no, Kanan said - there are the big things, and the small ones. You say the big ones are all about letting go of the, I guess the idea of physical load, right?”

“Yeah, so you’re saying the small ones are like - stop remembering I’m not just…doing it?” 

“That’s how Kanan described it, yeah. When he was loosing a screw or breaking a lock. He'd call it mental dexterity; he used to set Ezra up in the Ghost’s gun turret and make him try to turn the lights on and off by triggering the hall sensors without getting up. Good idea, but Ezra liked to cheat.” 

“Cheat?” 

“Mostly by bribing Chopper. Sometimes ranting about about how much better old school lockpicking was until they’d spent too much time arguing to practice anymore. And then sometimes— ah, but that's a bit off topic. Anyway, he got it eventually, more or less."” 

“Hmm. So, you’re saying I could—“

“Oh, and don’t use it to make caf.” 

“…”

“…”

“…You don’t know I was going to say that. Maybe I wasn’t going to say that.” 

“Kanan tried to make caf. Ezra tried to make caf. You think, oh, great, it’s morning and this bed is so warm, I’ll just cheat this one time and use my mystical super secret extra sacred Force powers to make a cup of caf and float it here. Caf, all over the bedsheets. Caf, all over the diagnostics array. Caf, all over the— oh, blast it, Chop, I just fixed that—“

—

And again.

“Do you think vulptices are anything like lothcats?”

“Uh, Sky—ahem, this may be a bad—“ 

“Because I was on this planet - don’t tell Leia, she’ll kill me, I’m supposed to be in meetings this week—“

“That’s—“

“And there are these uh - they’re these little crystal guys, you might know that - anyway I—“

“…not the best time…“

“—tried really hard! But all they do is stare at me with their beady little eyes! It’s like—“

“…Kid…“

“—I know the Force is in all living things, right, and when it’s a person I’m great at reaching out, but—“

“Skywalker!”

“—they’re staring with the eyes and— uh, what?” 

“Luke, honey, I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“Oh! Oh, I’m so sor—” 

“—say Luke? Because if that’s my krayt’s ass of a brother and he isn’t bleeding out—“

“—mustbethewrongchannelsorrybye.” 

—

And again. 

“Wait, what?”

“I said—“

“Because I thought you said, Yoda hates questions, and isn’t he…?” 

“Dead, yeah,” there’s a break in communication, a light grunt and a familiar background static, followed by a sound that is suspiciously similar to pew-pew-pew, “but he comes and talks sometimes. Master Kenobi, too.” 

“Oh, well that’s normal then. Skywalker, are you in combat right now?”

“No,” he says. Hera hums placidly, then waits patiently while she watches Jacen try to plaster his face to a display of old sculptures. “…Yes.” 

“Luke—“

“Don’t worry about me, General. These guys are easy.”

“I’m not worried, I’m—“ jealous. Not bitterly - she watches Chopper herd Jacen down the hall, first the droid and then its tiny Twi'lek/Human mimic beeping grumpily at the completely logicless room numbers, and thinks she couldn’t have a better reason to be grounded. And it’s not like she doesn’t keep a hand in the game, see her current uniformed getup; sometimes she just gets greedy for all of it, sue her. “We can reschedule, you know.” 

“That’s a joke, right?” Fair enough. “C’mon, keep me company while I clean these guys up. Did your Jedi find the old masters this hard to talk to?” 

Your Jedi, he says so easily. Hera feels greedy again, and reins it back. “Yoda and Kenobi? I don’t think they really dropped by. At least, not casually.” 

Laser guns firing again; if Hera listens closely, she can hear the flick of Luke’s fingers dancing over his control panel. “Oh, well that makes sense - kriff, this guy’s a runner - they weren’t dead, then. Did they speak with other masters?”

“Not really,” Hera would have known, if Kanan had had something like that. He would have liked it. She’s somewhat resentful that apparently it was an option, just not one extended his way. She does not say that to Luke, who she’s begun to realize has an unshakeable loyalty to the men who trained him, albeit briefly.  “My - Kanan came back as a wolf, I guess.” 

“Really?” 

“For a time.”

“Seems inconvenient. Ben just glows blue.”

“What does Leia think?”

“Leia - oh, kriffing hell, one second here, almost done,” there’s a place in Hera’s gut where the sky lives, and she thinks the rebellion maybe karked her up more than she thought, with how much the sounds of violence and flight from the other side of the comms leave it aching. The comm goes quiet, and Hera spends the time checking room numbers down the hall while Luke no doubt patches into a different channel to congratulate his team, which shouldn't make her think of a team half a decade gone and disbanded, but does, so she doubles down on the room search. She’s just about regretting refusing a campus guide when Luke switches back to her, his voice complex - bright with adrenaline; dampened by the topic. “Leia doesn’t want to talk to them,” he sighs. “Leia doesn’t want to talk about any of this, really.” 

“That’s a pity.”

“It’s her choice. She doesn’t say it, but I think she’s mad at Ben. For choosing me.”

There's a distance to his voice that she doesn't like. “Choosing you for what?”

“The Jedi. To train,” Hera has learned not to push back on Luke’s insistence that he was trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi, however brief that encounter may have been. “To explain things to.”

“Doesn’t sound like much explaining is going on,” Hera mutters, then brightens when Chopper bangs on a door down the hall, waving her over victoriously. Jacen waves too, with the exact same freneticism. “I’m sorry, Luke, I’m giving a seminar in five.” 

Whatever oddness had been in his tone, it disappears as fast as it came, suddenly all enthusiasm. “This is the new academy, right? They get you to teach?” 

“I’m still thinking on it. But no - this is a one-off.” 

“About Endor? Or Lothal?”

“Purrgil flight safety, if you believe it,” she says dryly; Luke’s sudden laughter is infectious, and gets her to crack a smile. “Instructor called in a favor but let me pick the topic; I’m betting the hotshots’ll listen if it’s from me, not a conservationist. Anyway, Jacen’s going through an unfortunate purgill phase - there’s a hat and everything, I’ll send you a picture - so he gets to come. If,” she adds pointedly, glaring down at the beloved little face, upturned mischievously at the sound of his name, “he’s quiet, and stays good for Uncle Wedge the whole time. Got it, kid?”

“Oh, it’s Wedge’s class! I’m jealous.”

“Eat your heart out, Skywalker, and tell the stars I say hello.”   

—

They talk about flying and mechanics, about mutual acquaintances, about New Republic business, insofar as their clearances align, but mostly they talk about Jedi. Luke is a thoughtful speaker and a good listener, though endearingly rash and even prickly at times. Especially when it comes to his old (dead, still present, apparently) masters; a little when it comes to his family. He doesn’t reintroduce the topic of his father. Hera decides it isn’t her place to ask.

Which is kriffing banthashit, of course; Hera has never much cared about her place. But Kanan did, and that seems to be a Jedi thing, and Luke calls her for Jedi things, not for her opinion. So yeah, she’s trying to channel Kanan. She doesn’t know how in blazes he kept this kind of thing up. 

Actually, she does. Fucking meditation. 

(She tries to meditate. She hates it.) 

She is so karking out of her depth. 

But Luke keeps calling. And Hera finds, every time, she wants to pick up. 

—

“So then the holocrons started to glow, and then - and I really don’t recommend this part—“ 

—

“—how young when he started training? Are you sure? Because—“

—

“—especially huge beast with his mind - oh, uh, they were sort of…catlike? No, no these were different—“

—

“—never ever ever let Ben or Yoda or anyone throw me with the Force, oh my—“

—

“—like Chopper and Yoda have similar training philosophies—“ 

—

“The temple art did what?!” 

—

“…Caf, all over the cockpit.”

—

“A lightsaber. That was a blaster.” 

“I said what I said.” 

“…do you still have it?”

—

(It takes her three days to get back to him. Three days of tearing apart the Ghost’s hold, and three hours on the floor of it amid the self-induced wreckage, trying to get a hold of herself. 

“No,” she says when she comms him back, voice hoarse and visual turned off to hide her puffy eyes. “Apparently, I don’t.”)

—

He finally tells her about his father not much later, while she’s overseeing construction on Lothal. 

It’s a bad time for it, since she could definitely be called away for her opinion on material substitutions or door width or the exact angle of the Lothian sunrise at any moment, but then, there’s never really a good time for it, is there? Anyway, he knows the danger, and she’s pretty sure he has an appointment soon himself, and he’s— 

Well, he’s talking about his father. 

He does it from across from her, full-size and posed so naturally that she suspects it would take extraordinary observational skills and preexisting knowledge to tell that the chair on he’s actually in on Chandrila has different dimensions entirely; seeing as she has both, she can’t entirely ignore the slight uncanniness, though she does her best. He’s got a pile of those old texts he’s become so attached to in his lap, half spilling out in an uncharacteristic display of carelessness - he’d been reading aloud, as he sometimes likes to do, something about library organization and then a bit on temple access trials and then a portion about interpersonal attachment that sent her head and heart aching almost as badly as that one time he’d read through an entire treatise on rituals surrounding Jedi younglings. And then he’d said, my father was Darth Vader and she’d done her best to put her heart aside and her head to rights, because well, kriff. 

“I’ll do it right,” he affirms, while she’s still struggling to grasp on - on what this means, for him, and the Death Star - for, for Princess Leia, and Alderaan, oh - “He - he didn't do it right, he was unorthodox, remember, which is just another way of saying he fell away from these," he shakes the book he’s holding; the one under it tumbles to the floor and out of the holo’s sensory range, “but I won’t. He wasn’t evil, I knew he wasn’t evil, not all the way, and I was right, but that’s all the worse, don’t you see?" His breath comes sharp, quick, "Because not being evil didn’t help him, because these feelings - no one gets what it’s like, these feelings, they get so big. Big in the Force, I mean, and I know, because - because sometimes I think about Leia and Han and Chewie and I think if anything ever...I mean, I see, is all, how easily twisted that can get even when you’re good, and that’s gotta be why Ben and Master Yoda—”

“Kanan wouldn’t plan the mission.” 

“What?”

It’s only then that Hera realizes she’s speaking. She feels distant, apart. A little numb. “Kanan,” she murmurs, hearing her voice like another woman’s, “his last mission - the one to rescue me. Ezra said he wouldn’t make the plan. He wanted Ezra to.” And then, all at once, no longer numb; overwhelmed. She meets Luke’s eyes. “Now I know why.” 

Luke regards her with the same seriousness he's had, but slower this time. He gives it a moment's thought, and then, “He was a good Jedi,” he comforts.

“No!” her response is immediate and visceral, though she can’t pinpoint why. She blinks once, twice; shakes her head and lets the wave of her lekku through stirred air take her back into herself. She looks at him, really looks now. “I’m sorry, Luke. After everything you just told me—”

“It’s fine,” he says, and he seems to mean it, though his gaze is searching even through the holo. Thirsty-seeking-wanting. “You can tell me about them, you know.” 

“I tell you about them all the time,” she feels like she’s missing something. She often feels like she’s missing something.

“No, I mean—“

A loud beeping sounds just as a head pokes in her doorway. 

“General Syndulla, the landing area—” She holds up a hand, ready to wave Ryder’s favorite master builder off even if if it’s rude. 

But, “Ah, kriff, that’ll be the ambassador,” Luke is saying anyway, looking off to the side. He gives her an apologetic glance that’s also kind of miserable.

“Funding proposal?” She recalls, already standing. So is he.

“Funding proposal,” he grimaces.

“Ouch.”

“May the force be with you,” Luke says. He bows a little, and then he’s gone.  

—

(Ahsoka Tano shows up one day, briefly, on her doorstep. It is the morning of the afternoon Luke will be visiting Hera’s shiny new Lothian house for the first time, though Hera’s not sure how Ahsoka knows that. If Ahsoka knows that.

“I wish I could stay,” Ahsoka says over tea in the garden, staring wistfully at the front door.

“I wish I could go,” Hera says, eyes toward the stars.

They meet in the middle, and finish their tea in silence. 

Take care of him goes unsaid, on both fronts.)

—

“It’s just - it’s just so big!” Luke’s gesture goes expansive, and Hera’s glad she thought to fill his glass low enough to keep it from sloshing onto her brand new carpet.

“Keep it down,” she shushes absently, head inclining briefly towards Jacen’s quiet room. She tops off her own glass, and chuckles when Luke ostentatiously places his finger to his lips, only slightly tripped up by the placement of his drink as he does so.

When he’s done being a little cross-eyed, he says, “Thought he was with your friend Zeb?” 

That makes her stop on her way to the couch. She blinks twice, at Jacen’s door and then at Luke, and then she laughs. “You’re right, of course. Habit. Rather have the kid here than a meeting tomorrow, you know?”

Luke groans out, “Don’t remind me, I don’t wanna think about it. I’ll stay here, go without me.” For that, Hera scoops a stuffed bantha off the floor to lob at his face. Luke catches it without looking and cheerfully spends a moment getting it to balance on his shoulder. “Oh, please, you know it could have been a data blast.” 

She hums her agreement. “Data blast wouldn’t have gotten you to visit, though. Finally.”

“I’ve been busy! You’ve been busy. Why are we so busy?” 

“It’s a curse,” Hera says dryly. “Big, you were saying?” 

“Right, big. Sooo big…” 

He’d slipped entirely onto the floor not long ago, just after a failed staring contest with her resident as-yet-unnamed (“Mom, we have to wait until she tells me”) tabby-striped lothcat. The two remain in their corners, the cat sprawled long against the metal grating of a Jacen-proofed hot air vent and Luke wedged between the couch and a small caf table, finally past his sulking. His knees are up against his chest and a blanket half-off his shoulders, making him look younger than his already young years, and it’s both better and worse to see him here, like this, so loose and comfortable in Hera’s newly-minted home. Better, because Hera has no memories of young men with bright eyes and poor posture and lightsabers clipped to their belts here, in this house on this couch on this floor. Worse, because it makes her wish viscerally she did.

“...a council, and detachments and, and coordination,” Luke slurs just a little, but quieter this time, “can you imagine, having to coordinate Jedi? Enough Jedi to coordinate? Ten thousand…” 

His head falls back against the couch behind him, and he looks up like he can see the stars through the ceiling. He can’t, though it does make Hera consider what it would take to make that an option; something clear and one-way, it’d have to be, for privacy, and durable for security. Transparisteel would work, of course, but may be overkill. She’ll look into other options tomorrow, she thinks. She misses the stars. 

“Can you imagine that, Hera?” Luke asks. 

“I can’t,” she admits. 

“C’mon,” he turns half-sideways, bracing a shoulder against the cushions so he can look at her, “tell me another one.” 

They both know what he means, by now, but that’s no help. “I’m fresh out, kid,” she’s compelled to say. “I’ve told you everything I got.”

“Everything? Really?” 

“Everything about Jedi, anyway.” 

Luke groans. He turns away, back to the couch, and presses his head back against it, hair ruffling. She thinks he must be closing his eyes. “I don’t want to do this alone,” he says. 

And Hera wants, more than anything, to tell him he doesn’t have to. She wants to bundle him up and into her home the way she did with Kanan and Zeb and Sabine and Ezra and even Chop on the Ghost, bind him to her side and herself to his journey like the way she has with Jacen. More than that, she wants Ezra here, to soak in the history like a flower the sun even while he whines about how boring dusty old tomes can be; Kanan to tell the stories that had lived between his silences in life. Because he had talked about it all, here and there, late at night with the rest of the crew in bed and stolen moments in the cockpit, too vague for Hera to reconstruct his words but not too vague to remember the sensations of it: the smell of caf and the hum of the Ghost's systems, the stars through transparisteel and his low, quiet voice filling the small space in equal measure. He’d talked about the Jedi, their councils and their temples and their traditions, what it felt like for the Force to flow through an entire hall of bodies who knew it well, how to do their rituals that he could only remember in pieces. She wonders what else he'd say, here in a house on Lothal, with no war at his back and even more ears to listen.

Ironic, my love, Hera thinks. You wished for someone more equipped to teach all this, and now here I am wishing for you. 

(I’m always wishing for you.)

“Yeah," she says, because he can't have any of it, so what else is there to say? She rests a hand on the broad, tense ledge of his young shoulder. “I know.” 

Luke leans into the touch. Him on the ground and her on the couch, her view is mostly of his blond head, and so for a moment he looks like himself and himself alone. Himself lonely. She never met these old masters Luke so respects, but she knows how they spent the end of their lives, remote and solitary. She wonders if that’s what he sees for himself. She looks at him and hates that she can see it, too: Luke straight-backed and lonely, older and wiser but cynical and alone, a fitting addition to his tableau of ghosts. Ghosts which continue not to include Kanan, as far as Luke has ever said. But then, Kanan was a different kind of Jedi, she’s starting to think, than the Kenobis and the Yodas. 

Which - isn’t that just something in itself? To think, there were once enough Jedi for there to be different kinds. In her lifetime, even, though Kanan and Ezra couldn’t have know how much they’d lived counterpoint to scripture and myth and legend, to deep commitments and serious minds, to the secreted-away figures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda: hermitage and its opposite, two together and two apart. 

Now, there’s just Luke. 

Hera stares. Hera breathes in, breathes out. Hera wishes for more time, or the ability to change it; for a cozy cockpit and a cup of caf and a steady, familiar voice at her side.

She can’t have it, either. 

What else is there to say?

Except—

“Alright, budge over.”

“Hera, what—?”

“You heard me,” she digs a socked foot briefly into his side; he yelps. “Scoot.” 

—except. Except there is more, isn't there? Oh, it'd be easy to mistake what she has said for the important stuff - storms and lothcats and holocrons, temples and lightsabers and darksabers, Ezra’s tantrums when he couldn’t get a move right and Kanan’s broods when he was convinced he’d done everything wrong. Luke’s seen Ezra’s last transmission; he’s read every one of the mission reports she’d wheedled Kanan into writing. Here's what Jedi can be like, she'd said without saying, over and over.

But now, stepping away and looking at just what she’s said, not what she knows, that picture looks - thin. Partial, like one of Sabine’s mock-ups before she puts in the color, far too hard to distinguish from the characters in those texts Luke likes to read. It’s both intensely difficult and devastatingly simple to pinpoint what’s missing, because what’s missing is - meilooruns. Meilooruns and helmet collections and spray paint, late nights in the cockpit and that time Sabine gave Kanan a week-long cold shoulder over the last slice of Jogan fruitcake and the day Chopper nearly gave Zeb a concussion by stealing the screws from Ezra’s bunk. Little things, and then not so little ones, like the timbre of Kanan’s voice when he’d asked her what she wanted from life beyond the cause, like the way all six of them had thrown their lot in with Lothal because it was the right thing to do and because Kanan had a feeling about it but mostly, just as much, because it was Ezra’s. Things that have slipped into conversation, here and there, around the edges of the more heartfelt stories, but only as an afterthought and always cut off - because they are hers, these moments, in ways that she forgets to share even with Zeb and Sabine and Chop because they already know, hers in ways that become private just because she keeps them that way and maybe they shouldn’t be. Hers in ways that aren’t about the Jedi at all, and maybe they should be.

“Hera, what are you doing?” 

“Hey, can you get that other bottle?”

“It’s all the way over—“

“Are you a Jedi or are you a Jedi?”

“It’s your floor—“

And look - she’s not stupid. She knows a bottle of his new Yavinite wine on the floor of her new Lothian house (in glasses, in their hands, she has faith in him) won’t change much, nor will caf thrice a cycle or even regular comm calls, when they can cobble that much. She can’t make her stories his just by telling them, and nothing changes the fact that at the end of the day he needs answers to questions he doesn’t even know how to ask and she wouldn’t understand if he did. Which means he’s going to become what he’s going to become and he’s going to learn what he’s going to learn and he’s going to teach whatever shavit he’s learned and that shavit is going to be the Jedi’s rumor-soaked ghost-touted rotted-parchment deserts-and-swamps lonely-ass shavit, first and foremost. Any move against that is a losing battle.

But then - she thinks of Kanan pushing her back from a ball of flame. Of Ezra jumping to hyperspace on a ship with blown-out windows and Sabine dropped out of touch mere weeks after she left to follow him, of her father who never got to stop fighting and Ahsoka Tano’s bone-deep sadness and Andor’s team and Bail Organa and an entire planet alongside him. She thinks it’s always been a losing battle, even when they’ve won. 

“Hera?” Luke asks, successfully offering her the unopened bottle of wine once she’s lowered herself to the floor at his side, between the table and the couch. He’s got fond-amused-perplexed painted across his face like one of Sabine’s more abstract works, and it makes him look so much less like a man apart. “Hera, you know tomorrow’s meeting—“

“Blast the meeting,” Hera says. She finishes tapping an apology out to Leia - you asked for this, it starts - and then she waves the bottle in his direction. She knows he’s got the idea by the way he starts to grin, even before he force-pops the cork. “You ever have a meiloorun, Luke?” 

He laughs. He answers. And late into the night, they talk.