Chapter Text
The kid was coming home tomorrow.
The kid was coming home tomorrow, and Din was still awake at midnight, in his apartment that vaguely resembled something out of Candyman, light green crib parts strewn across his spare room like a bomb had gone off.
“You’re sure that’s the piece that goes in here?”
Din liked to think he was good with his hands, but he hadn’t so much as put together a birdhouse since he’d graduated from college, much less something meant to hold a human. The task of putting together said thing was only more daunting when he’d had about three beers and Cara had been heckling him for the last thirty minutes about picking the most convoluted contraption possible when it came to child safety, so needless to say, he was a bit stressed.
He pointed with what he hoped was the right tool at the wood his partner was holding, a small slatted piece that could’ve been a support beam or a decorative piece of nonsense. He had no idea. And clearly, neither did Cara.
“It’s either that or some poor Swedish guy misplaced a piece of his house’s new siding.”
She shrugged and tossed it over to him, where was sitting with one side of the crib balanced on his lap while he tried to read instructions in a font much too small for his ageing eyes. His ass was starting to hurt from the hard wood of his living room floor. He’d never bothered to spring for a rug, and he cursed that decision silently as he tried to decipher the labyrinthine maze that was the crib’s construction manual before his muscles would freeze in their current position.
Admittedly, he probably should’ve done this sooner, but with three weeks of back to back night shifts and enough paperwork to fill an entire filing cabinet, he’d barely had time to take a shower, much less prepare his tiny, dark apartment for a child. (He was lucky he had Cara, or else he’d still be living in a shitty Airstream near Alki Beach like he was when he met her.) He’d spent the last week working halved shifts, spending every available second he could with his nose in baby books or with his eyes glued to the computer, watching hours upon hours of videos on how to babyproof an apartment.
His place was barely fit for a child, all sharp angles and furniture barely used since he’d moved in six years ago. There wasn’t enough room in the “master” bedroom for a crib (there was barely enough for a bed), so his spare room had been converted into a makeshift nursery, the mattress that only a very drunk Cara ever slept on pawned off in favor of a playpen from Target, an old rocking chair, and the IKEA-produced disaster of a crib they were currently trying to construct.
(Getting the damn thing home hadn’t been easy either. Din had nearly strained his back trying to get one of the flat pallets off the shelf, ending in Cara driving them home while she called him an old man for ten straight miles. She was never going to let him live it down.)
It was all so much for him, even sitting on the floor with his partner while they traded beers and horror stories from the week. There was still a hundred things he had to do before he met with the doctors the next morning, and the fact that he was actually going through with it was still settling in his brain. He’d gone through with the adoption proceedings without thinking, blindly filling out forms and making phone calls in a haze to assure that he could be legally made the boy’s guardian until the adoption could make it through the courts. It had taken more than a few favors from the commissioner and a little bit of fudging on his part to get the paperwork to go through, but more than a month and a half later and it was real. He was, for all intents and purposes, the boy’s father.
He had actually, for real, adopted a baby, and he couldn’t help but feeling he’d made a terrible mistake.
The imminence of the situation was the only thing that cleared the haze of emotion he’d felt over the child and set the reality of life with a kid before him. It was going to be an aggressive amount of work, raising a baby from diapers. It was work he had no experience with, no training for as an only child who’d had a less than pleasant introduction to the real world at quite a young age. It was a Herculean task, one that set a sordid fear in the back of his mind, like a shadowy figure from a horror film lurking in the corner, waiting for its moment. It crawled up the back of his throat like bile, no matter how many beers he had to wash it down, and it washed to the forefront every fear that had pricked at Din’s skin since he’d agreed to take the child.
He was getting old. He worked a job with ridiculous hours. He’d been single for the better part of fifteen years, and certainly didn’t have a woman in his life that could be a mother to the kid. (And he wasn’t about to trust Ms. Cara “Beer Shotgun Champion of 2019” Dune with those responsibilities either.) He lived in a tiny apartment, on the far side of town, with almost no knowledge of how to take care of a child beyond changing their diapers a few times a day. What made him think he was qualified to adopt a child?
Sure, the boy seemed to like him, and there was no doubt in Din’s mind that he deserved a safe place to call home, but who was he to call himself a father? He could barely take care of himself, let alone another human being. Let alone another human being who relied on him to survive. There was a reason he hadn’t ever adopted pets.
“I’m not ready for this.”
The words come as a shock to Cara, who’s busy fiddling with two pieces that look like they go together, but may well have absolutely no relation whatsoever. She lifted her head to look at Din, whose eyes suddenly shone with a light that looked foreign to him, but that she recognized all too well.
“Aw, come on Jarren.” She tried to keep her voice light, the aural equivalent of stepping lightly around a sleeping dog. “It’s just a little side panel. You can do it.”
Din frowned, clearly not amused at her attempts to distract him from the crisis he was clearly having.
“You know what I mean.”
Cara matched his frown. She was not letting him dig himself into a ditch when he had a kid to pick up in twelve hours.
“I’m not sure I do.”
Din grunted, a distinctly male noise that meant he had no idea how to vocally vent whatever was on his mind. It was an endlessly frustrating noise to Cara, even though she herself had never been great with words. So, she waited, plenty stubborn enough to do so until she could tease out exactly what was bothering her friend. It was like a cowboy’s midday showdown, only with guns replaced by hand tools.
“The house,” her partner finally spat out, a dim shadow of an explanation. He gestured around the room with one arm, at the shadowy tenement filled with boxes and pieces of wood and the occasional trinket that proved that somebody actually lived there. “I can’t raise a kid like this.”
Cara had a feeling he was referring to more than just the apartment.
“People have done worse.”
She shrugged, her answer honest and open. She and Din had both come from rather... undesirable backgrounds, if she was using the term that she’d heard from the yoga pants-wearing trophy mommies at the park where she took her dogs. They knew what shitty houses looked like. They knew what grim circumstances were. And Din’s apartment, despite the fact that it was small and he probably needed to sweep a bit, was nowhere near that.
“Most people have at least six months to prepare for a baby,” she said. “You barely had six days.”
Din sighed, shifting himself enough to set the half-constructed crib on the floor with a thunk. He didn’t look any more pleased than before.
“Great pep talk,” he replied.
Cara rolled her eyes.
“You’re damn right.”
She picked up her bottle of the pretentious craft beer Din had haphazardly grabbed from the store on the way home and sighed herself. It was clear that her friend still felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, despite the fact that he had more than a few people willing to share the load with him. She felt for him; it couldn’t be easy, going from hard-working bachelor who never slept to the man who had to take six days off just to get used to the fact that he’d have a tiny human living in his house. Din was not one to make poorly thought-out choices, but he’d never done anything quite this big.
“My point is, you don’t need to worry,” she said slowly. “The fact that you’re trying at all is more than enough. For him and for you.”
She stared at him over the rim of her bottle, her posture rigid but her eyes as soft as the color of the cradle they were trying to piece together. Cara Dune was not a soft woman, and the fact that she was directing any kind of sensitivity at Din of all people sent a shock of fear down the base of his still-sore spine.
“Why didn’t you talk me out of it?”
His voice is small. Too small for a man of his age and size. It comes out sounding like he’d been dragged underwater, disconnected from reality as he stares from Cara, to the piece of crib still in her hand, then back to her face. It’s a disconcerting sound that he can’t believe came out of his own mouth. Cara, in all her mildly intoxicated glory, can’t believe it either.
“I tried,” she said. “You yelled at me.”
She gets an allen wrench thrown at her for that one.
“Hey. First rule of parenting.” She lifted the wrench up to her face, pretending to examine it closely before looking back at her partner, who was now trying his hardest to etch permanent lines into his face by scowling. “No throwing shit.”
She chucked the wrench right back at him.
All levity aside though, she worried for Din. Yes, she’d initially tried to dissuade him from a possible bad decision. But the way she’d seen him talk about that kid, the way his eyes shone in a way she’d never quite seen before, had her convinced that there was no person in the world more destined for that baby than Din. Sure, he was a little worn around the edges, and his Kevlar and old, holey Fleetwood Mac shirts wouldn’t exactly match the acrylic nails and Lululemon of the playground moms, but he was smart. He was determined. And most importantly, he was kind.
She didn’t know what had made him doubt himself, but she’d been his partner for almost ten years, and she wasn’t about to let him fall now.
“That kid would love you if you lived in a cardboard box under a bridge.” Her voice dropped to the level of her partner’s, quiet in the darkness of the night. Anything louder felt wrong. “You’re trying, even if it’s hard and it sucks. And I’m sure it does. But you’re putting in the work, and that’s what matters. You’re going to be a good father, Din.”
The silence that punctuated her words was deafening. Din’s jaw clenched, then unclenched. She was shuddering just slightly, shifting in place like he was an engine seconds away from losing its drive belt. Cara didn’t expect a response. She just hoped he’d take her words to heart.
“Well, maybe, if we ever get this fucking crib finished.”
She reached across the floor to snatch the instructions from him, her face crunching into an exaggerated frown as the childish part of her tried to pull Din out of his funk. She didn’t expect him to spring immediately back into action like a cartoon, but she at least hoped she wouldn’t leave his place while he was still sulking.
“God knows I’ve shared a bed with you, and I’d be pitying the kid ‘til he’s eighteen if he had to do that.”
She looked up from the weird jumble of Swedish words for a brief moment. The hardened expression on Din’s face cracked like ice on the first day of spring at her words, the smallest of smiles creasing the crow’s feet around his eyes. It was a relief of a sight to Cara. Even on the best of days, Din barely smiled. He wasn’t the kind of guy to give that affection away without good reason, and to see it now made the light at the end of the tunnel shine just a bit brighter. It was going to be a long road ahead, filled with a lot of bumps and more than a few unfamiliar sights. But her steely resolve to stand by him was unfailing, and she knew that kid was going to have a good life, if Din had to fight tooth and nail for it to happen.
Din Djarin was a good man, and he was going to be an even better father.