Darker the Night (A Star Wars Rebels AU)

Chapter Eight

Hera figured that she had seen the last of Caleb. The day after their dinner, she'd waited a bit impatiently for him to appear in the Starfighter Corps hangar, but he never showed. Captain Enneb told the squadron he'd been called away on Jedi business, and she resumed training the squadron as if the Jedi had never been there at all.

After a few days, Hera began to wonder if he had been, or if she'd just imagined the whole bewildering thing. Captain Enneb promoted her to official squadron leader, and she was expected to make sure the cadets were always in top form, in addition to keeping up with her own studies. Two weeks flew by in this manner, and aside from the sight of the Delta-7 Aethersprite he'd flown sitting in the hangar, there was little to remind her of him. She didn't expect to see or hear from him again- as far as she was concerned, there was no point in wasting precious mental resources on the matter. It seemed, after all, fully ridiculous to believe that a Jedi wanted to be her friend. She put him out of her mind.

The cadets got one day off per standard week, and Hera usually used her day off to study and run errands. Keran always tried to coax Hera to join the squadron at one of the nearby cantinas. She'd gone with them once or twice- she knew it was important to build rapport with her team. She enjoyed their company, but she didn't have much interest in it beyond that. And, of course, she had work to do.

She was sitting in her spartan room in one of the Judicial Academy's high-rise dormitory buildings, working on her datapad, when Chopper alerted her to an incoming transmission. She didn't bother asking who it was- the only people who ever contacted her via hologram, as opposed to her comm, were members of her family. She just assumed it was her little brother or, more likely, her mother- so, when Chopper projected the image, she didn't immediately look up from her datapad to see who it was.

"Look, I'm sorry I haven't gotten in touch," she said, scowling at a particularly difficult problem involving the physics of hyperspace travel. "I've just been really busy."

"No apologies necessary," a deep, amused-sounding male voice responded.

Hera looked up in surprise. There was Caleb Dume, rendered in flickering cyan light. She'd forgotten how striking he was, and she gazed at him rather stupidly for several seconds before realizing she was doing so. She blinked and sat up a bit straighter in her very straight-backed chair.

"Oh. Hello," she said in a perfunctory tone, flustered and scrambling to hide it by acting like Jedi contacted her every day. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

"Yeah...sorry about that. An emergency came up, and my master and I were sent to deal with it. We ended up being gone longer than anticipated."

"Was it anything exciting?" Hera asked, unable to keep the curiosity out of her voice.

"Not really. Just pirates hassling some locals on Devaron- we had to deal with a very irritating Devaronian crime syndicate. If the Republic doesn't address things like that quickly, the locals go to the Separatists for help."

She nodded. "It sounds like things are getting worse."

"They are. From what I hear, there's a lot of squabbling in the Senate, and the Chancellor is having a hard time just getting everyone to come to a consensus about what to do. Meanwhile, more systems are leaving the Republic. It's not good. But I don't know much more than that- my master is on the Council, but she's not allowed to share much of what goes on in that chamber with me," Caleb said.

"But surely the Jedi can do something."

Caleb shrugged. "I don't know. There's more to it than that."

"What?"

"The dark side."

Even though she was only looking at a hologram, she could see that he was troubled. "You told me you'd explain that term to me," she reminded him.