A/N: A weird bit of inspiration hit after I saw that Hera/Thrawn clip this afternoon. I'm sure we'll all have five hundred thousand things to write about after we see the show on Monday, but I thought I'd go ahead with this for fun. I'm not really sure how I like it? I'll let y'all be the judge. Also, I gave Hera's mom a name because the pronouns in this piece got out of control.

Ripples

At the beginning of the Separatist occupation, the Syndullas had two healthy children. Maybe their son was just a touch more frail than his sister. But he always had been, and she, his tiny mother, took such sweet care of him that it went unnoticed a lot of the time. Barely five and two, they were fine and thriving under their parents' watchful eye.

And then the food shortages started. Sickness followed, ravaging the province. The Syndullas' son and daughter got sick like all the rest. Their bodies burned with fever and their little chests heaved for air while their mother sat anxiously by, administering what small comforts she could.

During the fourth awful night, Hera's fever broke and she started getting better. Her brother did not. As she lay recovering, sleeping soundly and still too weak to move, he passed quietly from life.

Cham and Alora were devastated by the loss, heartbroken in a way that two parents never should be. And they were sick with dread over what to tell Hera. How could they explain death? How could they console the loss of a sibling?

Hera woke just before dawn, rubbing her glassy eyes as she turned over on her side, looking toward the cot where her brother had been. Alora held her breath, waiting for the question—where is he?

But it didn't come.

Hera didn't need to be told. Looking at the empty cot and her mother's tear-stained face, she understood; it was in her eyes. Alora nodded. "Yes, love," she whispered.

Little Hera sighed, resigned to the truth she already knew. She curled up tightly and Alora lay in the floor next to her, needing to be close to her now-only child. She hovered over Hera after that, always close by during the day, sneaking into her room at night. She slept with a hand on Hera's, to make sure she was warm, she was breathing. It was like that every night for a couple of months until Hera said frankly, "I don't mind sleeping next to you, mama, but it makes me scared that you're scared."

Alora was scared—scared that this war would take both her children from her. But she backed off and gave her daughter the space she needed to adjust to the absence of her brother, to process her grief.

Cham and Alora watched, dumbstruck, over the next months and years as Hera blossomed.

She was bright, independent, fiercely stubborn. Obsessed with Republic starships. Devoted to the younger children in the province. Friends, cousins, strangers, off-worlders—it didn't matter. Hera looked after them all, nurturing the most fearful young ones and sagely talking the older ones out of doing whatever was about to get them in trouble. Through her childhood years, wherever Hera was, there was almost always a string of others behind her.

It concerned Alora.

"She misses her brother," she fretted to Cham when Hera was about eight. "You see how she comes to life when she's with other children. She misses him."

He shook his head slowly. "Maybe so—but I believe…I believe it's something innate in her. She has…she's a natural-born leader."

Alora stared at her husband, because she could see the wheels turning in his head. "Don't do that, Cham." Her voice was low, threatening. "Don't try and weaponize her compassion."

Cham folded his arms. "Surely you see it."

"What I see is the seriousness in her eyes that wasn't there before this war. Whoever she was going to be before all of…this….she never will be now and I—"

"Alora!" Cham put his hands on her shoulders, gently turning her toward him. "She is stronger for having lived through this."

"I didn't want her to be stronger." Alora's voice quivered. "I wanted her to be a child."

"There's nothing we can do to change what's happened."

"No." She lifted her eyes to his. "But we can let her dream, Cham. Let her think about something other than death and the war and Free Ryloth."

Cham's thinking was that Hera's strength and resilience should be harnessed into something that would help her continue to thrive on this deteriorating world, but if Alora wanted to let Hera look up at the sky and fill her head with nonsense about piloting ships, well…he could turn a blind eye to that to keep the peace.

(He had a harder time turning a blind eye to it when Hera left him ten years later, capably flying the Ghost.)

It would take about ten more years for Cham to realize that Alora had been right; Hera was not the person she would have become in a different life. Sometimes, he saw glimpses of the softer, more relaxed woman who would have been Hera Syndulla had war and worry never come to Ryloth. Yet, Cham knew, she was exactly who the Force had meant her to be. The things in her childhood—the loss of her brother and mother, her love of starships, her compassion for others—molded her years before she ever stepped foot off the planet.

It was a good thing.

Like ripples in a pond, the things and the choices that shaped Hera's life also shaped Kanan Jarrus's, and Garazeb Orrelios's, and Sabine Wren's, and Ezra Bridger's—who all, in turn, shaped the lives of others through their work for the Rebellion in those early days—

And the waves kept crashing, galaxy-wide, ceaselessly and forever.