for_everyone | (no subject)

She's awake. Her face is flat against some smooth surface, the smell of it quick to help her remember the mat. The sandcrawler, the Jawas. One arm is tucked beneath her, the other out, her fingers also pressing into the mat. She feels the fabric of her hood tucked against her forehead, her lekku, and there's something on top of her, lying horizontal across her, set just above her elbow. Hera can hear slow, steady breathing, can feel it along the back of her neck. It's all she can hear. The crawler has stopped.

Hera opens her eyes. There's bright white light, coming up from the grate beneath them. She shifts, turning over, and realizes what's lying across her is Kanan's arm. She must have moved closer to him in her sleep. Hera lifts herself up, and slowly tries to move his arm off from her and back to his side, quietly and gently enough to not wake him. Maybe that's something she should think about, be bothered by or – not. But for now it doesn't hold her interest. She rolls back to the edge of the mat, looking down into the room below, but though the lights are on, and the combustion chamber reignited, there's no one inside.

Now she hears more – voices. Scurrying footsteps outside. Have they arrived somewhere? Hera doesn't feel like they've slept that long. She pulls out her chrono – nearly four hours. It's the middle of the night. What's gotten the rest of them up?

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"No, it isn't. Even when pieces might be similar, or related -- "

He breaks off, and it takes real effort not to reach out for her hand, just for the briefest touch.

Um.

"But I shouldn't . . . I just mean I can see why you'd wonder. About it. Sometimes."

Her eyes flicker open. By now, much of the light has died down again. She can barely make out the edges of Kanan's faces, the line of his shoulder.

"If we'd managed it, to keep everyone out, stay isolated - maybe we'd have our own secret spacefarers. Or maybe we'd just be like them, but on Ryloth - no one'd know anything about us, except to stay away."

Kanan takes a moment to watch Hera's face, the faintest traces of light limning the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her lekku.

"It'd be a shame for you not to be out in space, Hera," he says at last. "You belong here. You all deserve the stars."

"But if I could trade being out here for none of that ever happening - no invasions, no slavers..."

It didn't matter really, because there would never been any offer like that.

Still, she murmurs, "I'd have to."

"Me, too," Kanan says quietly.

He's still watching her, carefully keeping his hands pressed against the ground next to him.

"But that's not really a choice we're ever going to have to make."

Not about the Twi'leks, anyway. Not about Ryloth.

"No, it's not."

She waits a few seconds after that, the only sound the gears of the crawler around then. Then, slowly, she reaches to check her chrono again. More than six hours now.

"We should probably try to get some more sleep."

He exhales, trying to keep the sound quiet, even with the grind of the gears taking up the space around them.

"Do you think you can?"

"Yeah."

She tilts her head forward, her lekku stretching gently along the mat. "It reminds me a little of home, in here."

"Hey," Kanan says, smiling into the dark, "Whatever it takes."

He moves to lie down, too, wriggling around to try to make his back comfortable without extending his legs out into a well-traveled area.

"I might meditate for a while. It's . . . Still kind of stuffy in here. For me."

"Okay."

She curls her own legs up, tucking her arms to her chest.

"Is there anything I can..."

She lets it drift off, as she realizes it's a silly thing to ask. What can she possibly do to help him, to make it less stuffy in here? But by now, she can't un-ask it.

Even in the dark, Kanan shakes his head.

"Nah, you just sleep if you can."

He hardly pauses there, speaking before he thinks.

"It's soothing, you know, listening to you breathe."

Uh.

"Instead of the gears churning, I mean."

Um.

"Okay," Hera repeats.

She likes the sound of the gears turning. It's a constant, easy pattern, one she feels like she can be swept up into, if she tries.

So she curls herself a little more inward, resting her head against her arms, and once more closing her eyes.

Kanan, too, lets his eyes drift closed. He doesn't try to match his breathing to Hera's, because that's more distracting than anything else -- possibly especially to her, but --

He does focus on it to the exclusion of the gears, the sound of the mechanical parts of the prowler slowly fading away from his conscious mind, replaced by breath through the lungs and faintly, just on the edge of perception, the pounding of blood through veins and vesicles and arteries.

His own does not keep pace with it, but for a fleeting moment, maybe he wishes it would. But he keeps breathing, and Hera keeps breathing, and eventually he forgets to pay attention and drifts off into his own deepening sleep.

It's a pleasant one.