Not How Your Stories End

Chapter 17

Hera choked.

"Call for the medic."

She had felt her voice leave her throat, but she didn't hear it. Thankfully, Sabine seemingly did, gently resting Ezra's hand back on the mattress before bolting out the room without another word. Hera almost envied her easy out. Wished that she had given herself a task to focus on with such intensity that she could forget for a moment the gravity of what was currently happening in front of them all.

Hera did it, though. She pulled herself together like she always does. Like she always has to do. She wrestled down every fear and conflicting emotion that was clawing behind her eyes, her throat, her chest, and she looked down at Ezra, smiling at him as brightly as she could without succumbing to real relief.

"Where...?"

Ezra's breathless question eased some of the tension coiled tightly within her. This was an easy question. This was something she could tackle.

She leaned in, covering his hand with her own, her thumb running little circles against his knuckles.

"You're in a medcenter on Mandalore, love. Do you remember what happened?"

She hesitated on the last word, realizing only part way through the question that it may have been too much of a thing to ask him to attempt to recall everything. Not all at once, right after emerging from a coma. She watched him as his gaze traveled across the room, unfocused and uncontrolled. Hera feared for a moment that perhaps she had indeed overwhelmed him, and somehow immeasurably set back his progress in just the short time that he had been aware again. Ezra's eyebrows furrowed, head rocking back and forth, and just for a moment, Hera thought he may be actually attempting to recall.

"Head... bad... "

Hera snapped a look back at the other occupants of the room, desperate as it was no-nonsense. What was taking Sabine so long?

"Where's the medic?"

Zeb began to get to his feet, evidently aiming to hunt down Sabine and a staff member. But before he had made it even a single step, Sabine stumbled back through the door, a doctor Hera recognized as Ezra's surgeon hot on her heels.

"He's awake, he's responding," Hera spit, straight to the point as always.

The doctor seemed genuinely surprised at this, hailing down a droid and checking the display readouts around Ezra's bed.

Ezra's eyes drifted, wide, glassy and scared as he attempted to track the medic's bustling movements for a moment. But after such a long period of dormancy, even such a small task seemed to absolutely drain him, his irises quickly aborting the action and his eyelids drooping halfway closed.

Hera watched with a hopeful intensity, not daring to blink or even breathe, afraid that the slightest movement might make this all go away. Ezra seemed to catch onto this, his half-lidded eyes drifting slightly before settling firmly on her, glassy and blue and sad.

"Mom?"

The room stilled. Hera couldn't breathe. She was burning. She could have sworn that her body was on fire. Tears formed before she even had the capacity to fight them back and soon they were spilling over. For once, she embraced it. She held his hand, still so weak and fragile, to her chest, clutching it tightly. She wanted him to fight it. She wanted him to be able to fight it. To feel embarrassed about being so coddled.

"Ezra..." Hera's voice was small, smaller than she had ever remembered speaking before. Even as a child, she had the ability to make her voice carry some sort of weight to it. A sense of authority that amused her mother and immensely irritated her father. But now, with her child's hand to her chest, embracing the idea that, even if only in delirium, Ezra may see her fit to carry a title that was dearer to him then she could ever fully grasp, she felt weak. Tiny.

Fingers twitched, a sad attempt to grasp onto the fabric under his fingers. To hold on tighter. To be closer. Hera leaned into it.

"Mom..." Ezra repeated, ever so slightly stronger this time.

The doctor seemed to catch onto the tone of the room, the reporting between her and the med droids quieting down to soft murmurs. Kanan, blessedly, took the reins, herding them all into the hallway to receive the actual medical information that they would need to know. Hera would need to thank him for that, later, she thought. But not now. Now, all that mattered was right in front of her.

Keeping one of her hands firmly against Ezra's, she reached the other out, brushing an errant tear away from the corner of Ezra's eye. Whether it was out of relief or fear, she didn't know, but she resolved to make it better no matter what.

For a moment, Ezra's mouth opened and closed without a single sound escaping. His brows began to knit in frustration, his head tilting back just slightly against the pillow behind him. Hera moved her hand from his cheek to his hair, running her fingers through it slowly, gently. She leaned in closer, until her forehead brushed against his own. Her hand stilled, her thumb then tracing little circles on his hairline as his breathing slowed and his movements stilled. It almost felt like peace.

"Shhh... Shhh I'm here, Ezra. I'm here." And there she would stay.

AN: Hahaha so... it's been awhile, huh? And I probably owe you all some sort of explaination.

I guess the long and short of it all is just that being a human is really fucking hard.

Here's just a few of the things that have happened in my life since I last updated this fic:

I graduated college. I got an amazing internship that I was super excited about and then lost it before it could even begin because of covid. I had my life threatened. I dealt with the loss of a father figure. I've worked jobs that I've loved and jobs that I've hated. I've maintained the first serious, long term relationship that I've ever had. I've come out as trans to a lot of my loved ones. I've moved once and I'm about to move again. I made a short film and am working on another. I've applied for hundreds of jobs and I'm still looking. I am doing my best to make things and build a career that I am passionate about while still maintaining jobs that I hate just to pay the bills. I've felt just about every emotion under the sun and somehow I'm still here.

Really, I am just as surprised as you.

But for all of my waxing poetically, I guess it all comes down to me, in the end. And truly, it's been hard to convince myself to work on something that didn't have some sort of measurable purpose to my life outside of just pure enjoyment. I've conditioned myself to believe that everything I do has to be for some greater purpose and that's been a lot of pressure. So I've decided to try and stop doing that. And part of my endeavor to do so was forcing myself to finish this fic, because it's something that I've wanted to do for a very long time. I'm sorry for making you all wait so long.

All the chapters are complete now and I am going to be posting them over the next couple of days. I am sorry if the ending to this story feels rushed at all. It kind of was. This fic is the length of a novella already and I just needed to get myself to the finish line so that I could finally say that I did it. I need to allow myself to be imperfect sometimes, as hard as that is, and sometimes that means putting things out into the world even though I can think of a million ways to tweak it and make it better because if I keep pushing myself towards perfection, I am never going to finish anything ever. And I think that would be a damn shame.

Thank you to whoever is left here and to whoever took the time to read all of this unnecessarily long author's note. I have genuinely appreciated hearing that people are still interested in this fic even years later, and I hope the ending brings you some sort of satisfaction as it did for me. I am grateful for you all.