Work Text:
The baby's eyes are green.
Poe cries when she opens them the first time, tiny mouth puckering up in a squall and fists pumping. She's going red with frustration, and her eyes open and all he can see is -- green.
"Give her to me," Rey is saying, faint behind the buzz of white noise in his ears, and he somehow places the squirming bundle safely in her arms.
"Don't cry," Rey tells the baby, and she doesn't, sobering and blinking up at her mother thoughtfully.
Poe sits down on the side of the mattress and reaches for Rey's hand. His fingers are shaking. He tries to wipe his cheeks with his other hand.
"She's watching you," Rey says, gently.
The baby's eyes are bleary and soft-focused, and the color of water reflecting summer leaves. The color of Rey's eyes, when they spread Poe's jacket on the mossy floor of a forest clearing and he tucked a flower behind her ear. The color of Yavin's fourth moon, when you break through the rings of the gas giant to land.
"Hey, Shara," he whispers.
:
Someone – so many people on base give her gifts it's hard to keep up with who gave what – knits her a wrap of softest green. When Rey swaddles her in it the first time, all Poe can think of is the flimsi picture books he had as a kid, the adventures of the Rebellion on Endor, and Princess Leia's poncho. He'd begged his mom to make him one just like it.
"You're not going to break her," Rey reminds him, tucking the baby into the crook of his arm and patting her back. "I just need a minute to breathe, I'll be back."
She's more like Luke than she likes to admit, Poe thinks. They both need the time to clear their heads, and sometimes get lost in the meditation. But she always comes back: eyes clearer, forehead relaxed. He doesn't begrudge her the time at all.
Shara sleeps against his chest while he finishes the documentation Statura asked him for – it's due the next week, but Poe would rather do it now. Who knows what the galaxy will look like in a week.
It’s only been three weeks, and Shara has grown in ways that terrify him and amazing him equally. It's an ever-present reminder of how quickly time moves.
Her tiny fists move in her sleep, delicate fingers clenching and stretching, grasping at his thumb when he tries to soothe her. He has to finish the rest of the report one-handed.
:
Rey begins taking Shara with her some days, asking Poe to tie the ends of her swaddling carrier at the small of her back and setting out with the baby’s head barely visible beneath her chin. Poe gets to unwrap her later, as Rey washes up in the fresher. He treasures the way she blinks up at him, unfurling like a flower bud, blinking and stretching and reaching for him.
The three of them pile up in bed and Rey tells him about the trees they saw, the stream they found. “She likes the bird calls,” Rey informs him, and Poe hides his grin against the baby’s round belly, blowing a kiss on her perfect pink skin.
“Of course she does. She’s like her mama.”
Rey flushes, pleased, and tousles his hair, letting her fingers linger in the curls behind his ear.
Poe glances up at her. She looks relaxed, the way she always does after an afternoon in the forest, her eyes bright. Her hair is still damp from the fresher, and Poe is grateful one more time that their newest base has the woods for her to roam and the water for real showers afterwards.
His life has narrowed to this, most days, and he’s thankful.
:
Most days are not all days. There are still the hard times: when he has to send his squadrons – they’re all his, now – off-world without him, because a general doesn’t abandon the base to go on recon missions. He still gets the tug in his guts that says he should be suiting up with the rest of the pilots, but that time is past. He has more lives to consider.
But he and Statura stay late in the control center, until everyone who’s coming home has made it back.
They’re in a holding pattern, now, trying to buy time for the resistance to regroup. For Rey and the others to train. For Finn to send back intel.
For Shara to grow.
:
Rey had told him in the middle of an evacuation.
He’d been looking for her after the hangar explosion, trying to find anyone, but especially Rey, and – she’d come out of medbay right in front of him, looking stunned.
He grabbed her by the hand, then let her go, remembering Finn’s laughing stories of Jakku. “We have to go,” he’d said. “There’s a transport waiting, we have to be on it.”
“What about–” she asked, and then she had paused, and he’d felt her sympathy wash into his pain like the two feelings were tangling up and becoming one single reaction.
They’d run down the hall together, stumbling over rubble and bodies and Poe had felt like his chest was caving in, not just the base.
She’d clung to his hand in the transport as they pulled away. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “I know– she cared for you so much.”
The news wouldn’t circulate for hours, everyone too afraid to open a commlink, and Poe couldn’t bring himself to say the words aloud to the rest of the transport. The grief was just theirs, and Poe let himself feel the loss like the day he lost his first mother.
Rey held him upright and let him cry into her hair silently as they tumbled through hyperspace.
She whispered it against his throat, when the tears had finally stopped.
And Poe knew, somewhere in the Force, Leia was laughing.
:
Sometimes, when Shara burbles that funny baby sound that's not quite laughter, but the seed of it, Poe thinks he can hear her.