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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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.