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Lothal was alive.
Ezra didn’t think he’d ever seen the streets of Capitol City so full of people. Not during Empire Day, not even during the Harvest celebrations he remembered fuzzily from his childhood. But now, in the delirious wake of the Empire being driven from the planet, they roamed freely. There was laughter. People embraced—sometimes, Ezra couldn’t even tell if they knew each other or not. And there was drinking. A lot of drinking. Hera wouldn’t approve, but Ezra couldn’t really blame them. Parents put their kids up on their shoulders. Couples kissed, drew apart, then kissed again, like they couldn’t get enough of it. Occasionally he staggered past someone and saw their face glistening with tears.
Somebody had even cobbled together homemade fireworks. The colored sparks sporadically lit up over the houses, originating from somewhere near the main square. Cheers rose up whenever they did. Ezra didn’t think Sabine had anything to do with it, but when it came to explosions, he’d never write her off.
Lothal was alive—but it wasn’t just the people.
Lothal was alive. The whole planet seemed to thrum underneath him, suffusing the Force with a thick euphoria. Ezra wasn’t sure when it had started—sometime between the end of the fighting and the beginning of the celebrations, he guessed. Although, now that he was thinking about it, it had probably started after the celebrations. If he’d been in this state before, Hera and Kanan never would’ve let him off the Ghost.
He stumbled into another side street teeming with people, the music and the voices and the Force—stars, the Force, it rang—filling his head with fog. He’d never been drunk before—Hera didn’t allow alcohol on the Ghost, and even if she did, he doubted she or Kanan would let him touch the stuff until he was significantly older than most planetary laws required him to be—but he imagined that it must feel a little like this. The air around him seemed to buzz, creeping under his skin and lighting him up from the inside out. Even as a deep, bone-weary exhaustion tugged at part of him, the other part burned.
His thoughts slipped lazily through his fingers, but he found that he didn’t mind it all that much. Not with the Force so vivid around him—no, through him. He’d never felt so connected before. It was as if he was himself, but he was also everyone else, and the animals, the grass, the mountains, the dirt. And Kanan had even told him that he had a special knack for that sort of thing. Could’ve been a mind-healer, or something, if he’d been raised in the Temple. Kanan had only told Ezra that when he’d been drunk, coming back with Zeb after meeting a contact in a cantina. Kanan had been more talkative than usual and Ezra had soaked it up. That was when Ezra had learned about padawan braids and the Room of a Thousand Fountains and that his grandmaster had been called Mace Windu, and that he’d been on the Council, and that he’d been the wisest of the Jedi except maybe Master Yoda.
It had been nice until Kanan had gotten sad. Really, really sad. Sad enough that Ezra had been able to sense the storm of misery clouding his master’s Force signature even with his shields jammed up. He’d held Ezra’s face in his hands and told him that he’d never let anything happen to him, with the kind of emphasis that implied he’d let somebody else down, before.
Hera had dragged Kanan off to bed before Ezra could figure out exactly what that meant, and she’d been mad at Kanan about the whole incident for a solid week. Ezra and Sabine had agreed that it would’ve been funny if Kanan hadn’t seemed so genuinely guilty.
Ezra blinked as somebody bumped against his shoulder, throwing him off-balance and bringing his fuzzy thoughts back to the present. Kriff. He hadn’t meant to get so sidetracked in his head. The crowd had carried him far enough away from where he’d started that he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to find his way back.
He tried to regain his footing, but it seemed that his center of gravity had gone as screwy as the rest of him. Even flailing out blindly with the Force didn’t do anything to steady him.
Ugh. This was going to hurt, wasn’t it?
Just as he was readying himself for a painful introduction to the street, he staggered backward into a warm, solid chest.
The person grabbed Ezra underneath his armpits and hauled him back to his feet, then latched onto his shoulders and spun Ezra to face them, at once holding him upright and capturing his attention. It took Ezra one blink too many to focus on the scarred face hovering worriedly in front of him, sightless eyes boring into a space just to the right of Ezra’s own, and—
Oh. Kanan.
“Your shields, Ezra,” Kanan said, gentle but firm. “You’re letting too much in.”
“I can’t,” he answered, a little breathlessly. “Kanan, I—”
He cut himself off, not even sure what he was going to say. In response, he felt Kanan’s mind bump lightly against his, asking for a wordless permission. Ezra gave it, and Kanan’s Force signature draped over his own, strengthening his shields and helping to dull the roar of the Force.
Some of the fuzziness retreated. In its absence, the crushing weight of his fatigue smashed into him. Force, he was tired. He couldn’t even remember the last time he—or any of the crew—had had a chance to sleep without the weight of the universe hanging over them. It was a much less pleasant sensation than the one Kanan had just partially banished, and he resisted the childish urge to squirm his signature out from underneath his master’s so he could get back to it.
“Better?”
“A little,” he answered, trying to blink away the heaviness in his eyelids. “Do you…?”
Kanan nodded at his unspoken question. “Yeah, kid. I feel it too. Not as strongly as you, I think.”
“It’s Lothal.” He shook his head, not even fully aware of why he felt so certain. “I don’t know how to explain it, but… it feels like Lothal. Is that even possible?”
Kanan shrugged. “It could be. Some planets are stronger with the Force than others, so… maybe some part of Lothal is aware of what happened today. It would explain why you’re more in-tune with the energy than I am.” Kanan smiled softly. “This is your home.”
There was an unspoken addendum of and you saved it to the statement, but Ezra heard it loud and clear. The thought sent a thrill down his spine. He hoped it would never stop.
Before Ezra could work out a response, Hera materialized beside them, expression softening from worry to relief. Ezra wondered if she’d been with Kanan when his master had noticed something was wrong and followed him, or if her instincts for when her crew needed her help really were that good. It was probably the first thing—Hera and Kanan had been all over each other, since they’d finally gotten over themselves on that fuel pod. Touching and kissing and ew. He fought back an absurd giggle at that, leaning heavily into Kanan’s hands again.
“Ezra?” Hera glanced between him and Kanan, lines deepening on her face as she noticed Ezra snickering to himself. “Are you alright?”
Funnily enough, she seemed to direct the second half of the question up to Kanan instead of him.
“He’ll be fine,” Kanan answered. “Ezra’s just a little overwhelmed right now. I was going to take him back to the Ghost.”
Hera nodded, all business. “I’ll gather the others.”
Ezra winced, some of his humor fading. Last he’d seen of Zeb and Sabine, they’d been having fun. Drunk fun, yeah, but that was fun. Ezra was really starting to understand that, with the Force making him feel as buzzed as it was.
“You don’t have to—”
Hera held up a hand, silencing him.
“It’s getting late. We’re all tired.” She reached out and touched his arm, smiling. “Let’s stick together tonight, alright?”
Hera’s concern for him sloshed freely into the Force. Concern, exhaustion, and… desperation, maybe? Ezra pushed a tendril of his consciousness free of Kanan’s shielding, probing the sensation. No. Not desperation, but desire. A deep, core-bound impulse to gather everything she loved in one place and keep them there forever.
The clarity of the emotion surprised him. Hera’s presence was rarely this intense. He always had a fuzzy idea of what she was feeling—just like he did with Zeb or Sabine—but it was never strong enough for him to glean more than base impressions. It was nothing like the way he could sense Kanan through their Force bond, or even the way Master Kenobi’s signature had blazed to him on Tatooine. The only time Ezra was really able to get a clear grasp on the crew in the Force was during meditation.
“Okay,” he whispered. Hera smiled at him. For a split second, he thought she might reach out and cradle his face, but instead she melted back into the crowd, off to round up the missing members of the crew.
“Alright. Let’s go, kid,” Kanan said, and although he had to speak loudly to be heard over all the commotion, the tenor of his voice was gentle. “You’ll feel a little clearer on the ship.”
Ezra sort of expected Kanan to tug him along by his wrist or something, so he startled a little when his master stooped down enough to wrap his arm firmly around Ezra’s waist. He didn’t go quite as far as pulling Ezra’s arm over his shoulders, but Ezra could tell that he was ready to do just that if it seemed like he needed to.
Kanan wove through the crowds with a surprising amount of grace. More than a few people recognized them—particularly Ezra, it seemed—and they reached for him with outstretched hands, patting his back and offering him drinks. Ezra was grateful for Kanan’s grip in those moments, because even the gentlest contact threatened to knock him straight off his feet.
“Almost there,” Kanan promised, and Ezra knew he wasn’t lying because he could see the grasslands that dominated the landscape outside Capitol City sprawling ahead of them. For once, they hadn’t left the Ghost that far outside the city’s borders.
Without the Empire, there hadn’t been any need to.
They met the others sometime after they’d broken free of the city’s borders. It seemed to Ezra that one second he and Kanan were alone, and then he blinked, and the next second Hera, Zeb, and Sabine were beside them. Hera had a similar grip on Sabine to the one that Kanan had on Ezra, which he honestly thought was kinda funny. Between the four of them, Kanan and Hera really did look like parents dragging their stupid kids home from the bar.
Sabine smiled at him, face flushed. There was a cut running along her forehead and Ezra couldn’t remember how she got it. Ezra wondered if he had any. He hadn’t looked at himself much after the fighting had ended. Zeb had smeared bacta on him at some point, hadn’t he? Ezra couldn’t remember if that’d included his face or not.
Chopper greeted them at the foot of the Ghost’s loading ramp, beeping and warbling too rapidly for Ezra to decipher in his haze. Still, he was pretty sure the droid snapped at Kanan for bringing “the baby fleshbags” back inebriated.
“Wouldn’t that be Hera’s fault, too?” Kanan grumbled under his breath. If Chopper heard him, he didn’t seem to care.
The crew stumbled up the ramp in a mess of weary limbs and dragging feet. Chopper shut it with a hydraulic hiss behind them. The ladder up to the main deck—and their crew quarters—was only a few feet ahead of them, but then Zeb dropped his bo-rifle on a crate instead of heading towards his and Ezra’s room. Sabine slumped down against the wall of the cargo bay with a muffled groan, tugging uselessly at the fastenings of her armor until Hera knelt down beside her to help. And Kanan settled next to Hera.
And after all that, Ezra really didn’t see the point of going to his empty cabin. Honestly, he didn’t want to be alone at all. So he just let his legs give out beside Kanan, slouching half against an empty crate of his own and half against Kanan’s side, too tired to care about getting to a real bed. At least it seemed like everyone else agreed with him.
Zeb sat beside him, nudged his shoulder gently. Stars, even Zeb looked tired—and wasn’t it funny, Ezra thought, that he’d never even seen a Lasat before joining the crew, but now he could tell when Zeb was tired?
Zeb caught Ezra watching him. “Alright, kid? Nearly gave Hera a heart attack when she realized you’d gone missing.”
“It’s uh…” Ezra struggled for the words. He waved his hand vaguely around his head. “Loud.”
Zeb clearly didn’t understand what Ezra meant—Force, even Ezra wasn’t sure he understood what he meant—but that didn’t matter. A lot of his and Kanan’s Jedi stuff had never made sense to the others. They didn’t need to understand to care.
“Coulda told me that,” Zeb said, gruff but not. “I woulda gotten you outta there sooner.”
Ezra smiled. He felt absurd and emotional and tender. Even with Kanan’s shielding, the Force still pulsed around him, bright and right there. He could practically taste Zeb’s fondness—and beyond him, he could sense every spark of life that was his family. All safe. All alive. All here, with him.
Force, his family. Warmth flushed through him, dizzying him in a completely different way than before. There’d been a time in his life when he never thought he’d get to feel this way about people again, but he did.
Kanan’s palm pressed against the back of his neck, squeezing softly. Grounding.
He was still staring up at Zeb, whose ears suddenly flattened against his head. It took Ezra a second to realize that his face was wet—and that Zeb was reacting to him, crying.
“Kid…”
“He’s alright, Zeb,” Kanan said. "I’ve got him.”
Zeb’s eyes flickered between Kanan and Ezra, then he shrugged, sighed. “Right. Well, I’ll be right here if ya need me. Either of ya.”
Ezra let his head drop onto Kanan’s shoulder, eyes closed. “I know,” he mumbled.
And he did know. It had taken him a while to start trusting that the crew really cared for him—that they weren’t just going to kick him off on some random planet after he’d made one too many mistakes—but once he’d gotten there, it’d become one of the only sure things in his life. And now, he could feel it. Zeb and Kanan and Sabine and Hera and, somehow, even Chopper, who by all rationality shouldn’t have a Force signature, but… did. Or, had something recognizable. Everyone’s presences were unique, then merged together into a six-piece melody of contentment. Of family. Like the Force wanted them there, together. Zeb, burning bright even whilst as tired as the rest of them. Kanan, calm like always, familiar and centered. Sabine, slightly fuzzed by sleep. Hera, warm like home, like the scent of his mother’s freshly-baked bread that he could still remember from childhood…
He paused. Even half-asleep, he sensed something… different, about Hera. Her Force signature felt… split. Or, no, not split. Her signature was still there, completely whole and completely Hera, but inside that was something else…
He blinked his eyes open, exhaustion momentarily forgotten in the thrill of his discovery. Hera was pregnant! There, just a little bit away from him, was Spectre-7. Or, at least, the beginning of Spectre-7. He squirmed in Kanan’s hold until he could look up at his master’s face, wondering if Kanan knew already, because—
Oh. Oh! Hera was pregnant. Which meant that Kanan was almost definitely the—
Kanan was looking down at Ezra, somehow managing to bring his sightless eyes into a perfect alignment with Ezra’s. The corner of his mouth was quirked up in amusement and… pride? Ezra pushed out with the Force again, focusing on Kanan's signature. It wasn’t hard—Kanan was still maintaining most of Ezra’s shields, which meant that their bond was flung wide open. And, yeah. Pride. A chagrined kind of mirth. Excitement. Joy. Fear. Love.
He opened his mouth to say something—probably about to use words that Hera would not appreciate, because kriff, a baby!—when Kanan slipped the arm he’d wrapped around Hera free and held a single finger up to his lips.
“Close your eyes, kid,” Kanan said, still half-smiling, still radiating warmth into the Force. “Go to sleep.”
It was a dismissal, but not an unkind one. More of a please, not right now. And Ezra got that. Kanan was just as tired as they all were. Still, he sleepily shoved a sense of insistence towards his master—the unspoken equivalent of you’re so totally gonna spill about all of this in the morning—which Kanan acknowledged with a gentle pulse of equanimity. Satisfied, Ezra tucked himself more comfortably into Kanan’s side, letting his aching body finally go limp.
And… didn’t fall asleep.
He mostly did. But not quite. Instead, he sank into a thick haze, teetering in that strange space that usually preceded sleep, but he never quite seemed to sink past it. It was like some part of his brain was still on guard, waiting for the Empire to rise from its ashes and throttle them all.
If he’d been any more conscious, he might’ve gotten frustrated about it.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed when Hera’s voice broke the quiet, but it was enough time that Zeb had started snoring softly and Chopper’s persistent buzz had gentled into the hum of standby mode.
“He’s not drunk, is he?” Hera murmured. It took Ezra an embarrassingly long moment to realize she was talking about him.
“No,” Kanan said, matching her volume. “Just tired. Like I said, he got… overwhelmed.”
“By…?”
“The Force. With that many people, with emotions running as high as they are…” Kanan sighed. “I’m not sure how to explain it. He’ll be fine, once he gets some sleep.”
Hera hummed, seemingly satisfied. More time passed in silence. Ezra wasn’t sure how long.
“How are you feeling?”
Hera chuckled in a way that told Ezra she was probably rolling her eyes. “I feel fine, love. Just like I told you the last ten times you asked.”
“I’m just… you know…”
“I do.” A pause. “I was thinking… I don’t want to tell too many people yet—it’s still so early—but I do think we need to tell the crew. Especially the kids.”
“Ezra already knows,” Kanan whispered.
“You told him!?”
Hera’s exclamation was loud enough that Ezra scrunched up his face in annoyance. He could hear Sabine grumble something, too, although Hera shushed her with a faint tint of apology in her tone. Kanan just brushed a silent hand over the crown of Ezra’s head, steady and calm.
“I didn’t tell him,” Kanan murmured, once everything had fallen quiet again. “He figured it out.”
“How?”
“In the same way that I did.”
Hera sighed. “Jedi,” she said, with no small amount of bitter amusement. “All these years, and I still find myself surprised by you both.”
“He didn’t mean to,” Kanan explained, voice raising just barely above a whisper. “It’s… I’m not sure how to explain it. The Force has been… strange. It’s as if the planet itself is rejoicing.” Ezra could hear a distant reverence enter Kanan’s voice as he let the sensation wash through him. “I’m having to concentrate to keep from being swept away in it. And Ezra’s tired. His shields are weaker than they ought to be. He was just trying to feel all of your signatures. He didn’t realize how far he was reaching, or that everything would be more intense with the Force like this.”
“Feel our signatures?”
Ezra felt Kanan start a shrug, then quickly abort it, as if he realized that the movement might disturb Ezra. “Everyone is unique in the Force. It’s how I’m able to recognize each of you as soon as you enter a room. It’s become a more necessary skill for me than it is for Ezra, but he’s always had a knack for it. Connecting comes so naturally to him, especially when he’s connecting to something he loves.” Kanan sighed. “He was just checking on all of you. He’s so tired… I’m not even sure he really knew that he was doing it.”
Even with his eyes closed, Ezra could feel Hera watching him.
“He’s so…” Hera started, then trailed off.
“Odd?”
“I was going to say sensitive,” Hera huffed. Then her voice softened again. “Even after everything—with his parents, with the war…”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s still not safe. We may have driven the Empire from Lothal, but it’ll all be temporary if we can’t do more. And even if the Empire does leave Lothal to us… they won’t stop hunting him. Or you.” A pause. “Or the baby, if they’re…”
“We don’t know that they will be.”
“Neither will the Empire,” Hera whispered. “And I don’t think they’ll stop to take an M-count, do you?”
Kanan hummed. “I guess that means I just have to topple the Empire before you’re due.”
Hera laughed, although the sound was muffled, like she was burying her face into Kanan’s shoulder. “Oh, love. Even you can’t singlehandedly destroy an entire government in seven months.”
“Who said anything about doing it singlehandedly?” Kanan rubbed his palm against Ezra’s back. “I’m going to make Ezra help, obviously.”
This time, there was nothing muffling Hera’s bark of laughter. It was unexpected enough that Ezra jolted out of his hazy not-rest, flinching into Kanan’s arm and blinking past the grit in his eyes.
“Kanan?” He mumbled, squinting up at his master. On Kanan’s other side, he was distantly aware of Hera having a similar exchange with Sabine.
“Everything’s okay,” Kanan said, smiling. “Hera’s just loud.”
“And you’re obnoxious,” Hera snarked, voice suddenly closer, and aimed at them. Ezra peered over at her and saw that she was leaning awkwardly across Kanan—probably jabbing him in the ribs, from his master’s winces—to reach out and cup his cheek, brushing a thumb over the twin scars on his cheek. “It’s alright, sweetheart. We’re sorry we woke you.”
He leaned into her hand. “‘S okay.”
Hera pulled back, but Ezra’s face stayed warm where she’d touched it.
“Go back to sleep, Ezra,” Kanan murmured after a minute or two, quiet enough that Ezra was sure the words were meant only for him. “It’s over now. Lothal’s safe.” The warmth of Kanan’s Force signature settled over him like a blanket, soothing and fond. “Let me take over for a little while.”
Ezra closed his eyes, pressed his face closer into Kanan’s chest. Behind his eyelids, the constellation of the Ghost—and everyone within her—lit up like nightlights. And for the first time in his life, Ezra Bridger fell asleep on a free homeworld, surrounded by the warm pulse and soft breaths of his family.