Chapter Text
The child. Will not go to sleep .
Din has tried everything. He fed the child. He turned a fan on. He turned the fan off. He sat in the room with him for fifteen minutes hoping that would allow the child to fall asleep, but the child absolutely refused to lay down for longer than a few minutes at a time no matter what Din did.
Din is on the verge of… of something he’s too stressed out to put a name to. He just needs to be left alone for forty-five minutes without worrying the child is getting into something he shouldn’t. That’s all he needs, and then he can put the child to bed early during the ship’s night cycle. Din has things to do. He needs to clean some of the weapons he’s too afraid to pull out around the child for fear he’ll get hurt, he needs to contact people without being interrupted, and most importantly, he needs some silence or he’s going to go out of his mind. The child isn’t usually very loud, but he’s been talkative today and when the child is awake, silence has the opposite effect Din needs because it means the child is getting into something he shouldn’t and Din needs to go on full alert.
Din is watching the child, praying to all his ancestors that this time he finally goes down. The child’s eyes droop as Din takes another lap around the hold, rocking him gently but with decreasing patience. The child takes a very long blink, and Din puts every ounce of willpower he has left into keeping his body relaxed. Three increasingly long blinks later, the child’s eyes do not open again.
Din draws in a careful breath and takes another five slow laps just to be safe.
Finally, he turns towards his cot. The door is already open, and he steps through and deposits the child on the bed in a single fluid movement. He then gently drapes a blanket over the child and then steps with all the stealth and purpose he’d use on a job to get out of the room and then slides the door shut as quietly as he can. In the moment before the door closes, Din sees an ear flip and light glinting off two liquid-black eyes.
The door shuts and Din resists the urge to slam his head into it as hard as he can.
Maybe, he thinks a little hysterically, Maybe he’ll fall back asleep this time.
There is an awful anticipation in the air, the dread of a man waiting for the guards to come around the corner and escort him to his execution. There is silence from the room beyond. Din allows himself to hope.
The door slides open to reveal the child, who happily babbles up at Din as if everything is absolutely fine. Din wishes someone would shoot at him right now so he could tear them to pieces. Instead he bends down to pick the child up.
“Why won’t you sleep,” Din asks the child. The child yawns and rubs an eye. “You are clearly tired, why won’t you go to sleep ,” The child smiles up at Din with the light of a thousand stars and babbles something unintelligible.
Din turns to his datapad and consults the ‘net on what to do once again. The ‘net suggests singing a lullaby. Din frowns down at the datapad and tries to remember a lullaby from his youth. More recently the songs he’s heard are varyingly filthy drinking songs sung by correspondingly inebriated beings when he visits taverns and snatches of high energy dance music he’s heard while in more heavily-populated regions in pursuit of a target, and neither are good fits for a child he’s trying to send to sleep.
“Okay, ad’ika , let’s try something new. Want to hear a song?” The child babbles something up at him and then opens his mouth wide around an immense yawn, exposing a maw that should, by all rights, be too big for the little being in Din’s arms. “C’mon then,” says Din, and he heads back into his room.
The child’s ears turn down and he begins to fuss near immediately as Din situates them on the bed, but Din shushes him. Din pauses a moment to think. He hasn’t sung anything in a long while. Finally, he settles on a fairly popular nursery rhyme.
“Ma’ra had a little nerf, little nerf, little nerf, Ma’ra had a little nerf that stunk like- who’s milk was sweet as honey” Din sings quietly, stumbling a little as he almost sings the version some of his age-mates had sung to make fun of the song once they had gotten older. The child perks up at the sound of his voice, and finally stops trying to escape his grasp to go out into the hold again. Din cycles through “Ma’ra Had a Little Nerf” a few times before switching to a rhyme about hyperspace. The child stills and plasters an ear across the top of Din’s chest, listening to the rumble of his voice.
After a while, Din remembers a song his parents used to sing him when he was a child. Before the war came, and Din became a foundling, back when Din’s whole world was the town he grew up in. Din realizes he’s slipped from singing into humming, and tries to hum the beginning of the song in the hopes that it will come back to him. He looks down at the child, who is sliding into that heavy, safe kind of sleep that children fall into when they are totally content. Din starts a little hesitantly, trying to remember the words and the melody.
“Now it’s time to say goodnight,
Goodnight,
Sleep tight.
Now the sun turns out his light,
Goodnight,
Sleep tight,
Dreams sweet dreams for me,
Dreams sweet dreams for you”
Din can’t quite remember the rest of the song, so he settles for repeating that for a while. The child falls completely asleep, and Din is a little afraid to get up in case he wakes up again, but he also doesn’t want to leave this perfect slow moment.
When Din catches himself blinking a little too long, and that the pauses between his humming phrases keep getting longer, he knows it’s time to get up even though he would love nothing more than to drop off into sleep himself. He carefully slides the child off of his chest and into the cot, and drapes a blanket overtop him. At the door, he peeks back to check on his charge, and finds to his utter relief that the child is deeply asleep, not even shifting position.
Once the door is securely closed, Din stands in the middle of the hold and basks in the feeling of peace suffusing the ship, giving himself one last moment before he gets to his tasks.
The moment of peace is shattered when his comm begins to blare like the siren for a weapon of mass destruction. Din nearly gains the ability to fly without a jetpack in his shock before he slams his hand down on his wrist. In his haste to stop the noise as soon as possible he accidentally answers the call and the person on the other end answers as loudly as is physically possible for him to be.
“ Din! Me’v-”
“Paz if you don’t shut up right now I’ll turn you in for the highest bounty Fett has out on him gift-wrapped in your own guts.” Din hisses with as much venom as he can muster, which is a lot right now. Paz falls silent and Din freezes completely, listening intently to the ship. Miracle of all miracles, there is no sound, meaning the child is still asleep. Din nearly puddles to the floor in relief, but instead he lowers the volume on his comm unit and heads up towards the cockpit.
“ ...Din? ” Paz asks much more quietly this time after another minute or so.
“Sorry,” says Din. “It took me ages to get the kid to sleep and my comm was at full volume.”
“Oh. Sorry.” There is a long, awkward pause.
“A Fett bounty? Really?” Paz says finally. “You really hate me that much?”
“Well if you’re gonna wake up my kid I might as well make a good profit off my revenge,” Din says, and the tension is broken. Din relaxes into the conversation and thinks over what he needs to do while the child is sleeping.
He also makes a mental note to look up more music he can play for the kid, since he seemed to like it so much.
And if he’s being honest, Din liked it too.