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“Kid, you can’t just--look, the couch is not a place for little frog monsters, you need to stay--”
Din’s words of protest were quickly cut off as he received a shift kick to the sternum, the result of picking an excited baby boy up from the couch to much protest. All the air left his lungs in an instant, and he grimaced at the boy - his son - in his arms. How a baby could be that strong was beyond him. He just prayed it wouldn’t leave a bruise.
This was how it was when he was home with the kid. He’d grimaced at the term “wiggle worm” when the nurse at the hospital had used it to describe the boy, but he had to concede that it wasn’t far from the truth. The only time the boy ever stopped moving was when he was down for a nap - and usually only because he’d exhausted himself from squirming about so much. Din was lucky if he could sit down for more than a few minutes in a row without having to pry the kid away from somewhere he didn’t belong. This time, it was the seat of the couch, which he’d endeavored to lift himself onto at risk of toppling over.
“Just because Cara lets you do whatever you want does not mean you get to start training to be Spiderman.”
He gave the boy a mock-stern glance as he held him aloft, which was greeted only by a raucous belly laugh, and he sighed. Cara was a brilliant cop, but a horrible babysitter.
Well, not horrible, per se. But the fact that the kid hadn’t started scaling his couch like it was Everest until after she’d started watching him on Mondays certainly said something about her skill with children.
The kid was absolutely restless, and part of Din wished that he still had that much energy in him. He’d tried to put something on the TV to distract the little terror, but it seemed he wasn’t a particular fan of Sesame Street or Disney Junior like most kids. Din had even tried that damn Baby Shark thing to no avail, only to have it stuck in his head as the kid looked on unbothered. When he was excited, the kid squirmed like it would kill him if he sat still, and it seemed like nothing could calm him down. The only thing that could keep him even mildly occupied was sitting on Din’s lap as he worked, which was the route his father chose to go with this time, hauling him over to the old oak desk that he’d piled weeks worth of paperwork on, in an attempt to return to some semblance of productivity.
Unfortunately, “mildly occupied” meant that the kid grabbed at anything and everything within his reach, including pens, coffee cups, important legal documents, and any part of Din’s arm that wasn’t immediately occupied with something.
Nobody could ever say Din’s boy wasn’t curious.
Din sat himself down in the sagging excuse for a desk chair with a huff, attempting to adjust both he and the baby in such a way that the boy’s inquisitive hands wouldn’t be too much disturbance. He prayed that simply being in his father’s lap would calm him slightly. Din was wearing some old hoodie, branded with a surf shop logo from back when he used to be able to relax and take vacations. (Read: the one time he took a weekend trip with “friends” in college.) The faded blue material was practically worn through, and it was a size too big on him (“that used to fit you”, Cara would say, “you’re wasting away,”), but the kid seemed to love it. He loved squishing up against the soft material in his dad’s lap, using his as his own personal pillow while Din went about his business. On good days, he’d hum something under his breath and the kid would bury his face into the material, content to simply be close to the person that cared the most about him.
On other days, he’d use the fabric as teething material and grab at it with tiny, chubby hands until he exhausted himself.
Today was an other day.
Din sighed before his hands could even reach pen and paper. The baby shuffled so much in his father’s grasp that he couldn’t afford to let go of him, despite the arms of the chair situated to protect him from falling. He squealed as he grabbed a large chunk of the hoodie’s fabric, and Din thought he could feel the noise puncture a hole in his ear drum. The boy’s next move, naturally, was to then make a chew toy out of his father’s clothing (as one does), and muffled happy giggles soothed the aural pain of the earlier squeal as he determined to soak both his tiny jumper and his father’s clothing in drool.
On the outside, it looked cute - the kid’s chubby cheeks would’ve been perfect for a Gerber commercial. And they were cute. Din found himself smiling more often than not when he looked at the kid, but one too many days running on little sleep and a lot of caffeine made him wish he could get an hour’s worth of work done in peace. Bouncing a kid on your lap was no easy task, and a cynical part of him wished he hadn’t picked the most hyperactive baby in the world to bring home. Sometimes he found himself dreaming of the days when he used to be able to sleep in past five.
“You’re a menace, you know that?” Din’s words were halfway between amused and exhausted as he rocked the office chair back and forth, ideas spinning in his head as to how to entertain the kid. “A tiny, chubby, drooling menace.”
The baby giggled, as if agreeing with him, and he sighed.
“What am I going to do with you, huh?”
He’d subconsciously started to rock the kid like he was putting him down for a nap, and now he did it intentionally, eyes scanning the apartment for something that could keep him occupied. The floor was littered with toys, including the tiny stuffed frog Din had gotten him the day they’d come home together, and it looked like a bomb had gone off. His apartment was a war zone, and that was putting it nicely. The kid had enough to keep an entire preschool entertained, and yet all he wanted to do what whatever Din was doing. And currently, all Din wanted to do was have something to fill the silence that threatened the very low level of confidence he had about his parenting skills.
But maybe that gave him options.
The rocking suddenly stopped, much to the chagrin of the baby who was still very much attached to Din’s hoodie. The two rose from the chair as one, and Din thought he could see a questioning expression on the kid’s face as he plopped him down on the soft, plush carpet of the living room rug (a recent investment), propping his tiny backside up against the leg of the couch.
“Don’t move, squirt.”
He said it with all the chutzpah of a dying Energizer bunny, and scooped up the boy’s tiny frog to hand to him, praying that he could be left alone for fifteen seconds without embarking on a mission to give Din a heart attack before turning his attention elsewhere.
Din wouldn’t consider himself an audiophile, but he liked to think he had something approximating taste. Vinyl was finally coming back into fashion, and a whole wall in the tiny space he called an apartment was dedicated to it, a high quality player sat on a shelf just under the only larger window the living space actually had. Its speakers were the only major “adult” thing he’d ever invested in for fun, and they sat like sentinels on either side of the shelf. The speakers had been the only major thing he’d ever invested in for the apartment, forking over a grand for the set, one tucked on the either side of the one large window his apartment actually had. Admittedly, each one was the size of a small child, and Cara nagged him incessantly about it, but they made the feeling of an empty apartment on the north side of Seattle a little less depressing, so he kept them, disguised as sleek stands for the houseplants he somehow hadn’t killed yet.
He knelt down to flip through the stacks he kept stored between the speakers, one eye on the kid as he perused his fairly impressive music collection. What other had by way of books, he had in wax. A holdover from his teenage years, he figured, of flipping through milk crates in Goodwill to find what little music he could afford. He still had some of the busted old things, scratched oldies records he’d picked up for fifty cents when he couldn’t afford what was cool. Roy Orbison, Chubby Checker, and the Shangri-Las greeted him with smiles as he flipped through the stacks of albums, forever cheerful even if Din didn’t feel that way himself. He tried not to consider himself old, but his music tastes betrayed him. He knew “You Can’t Hurry Love” as well as he knew Bowie, and anyone who flipped through what he played while alone (read: Cara) would know that behind the hard exterior, Din Djarin was maybe, begrudgingly, a little bit of an old man.
The kid didn’t seem to care though. He giggled happily on the floor, drool discoloring the head of his tiny frog toy as he mouthed at its tiny black eye. He gazed up at his father (Jesus, that term still felt fresh) with those same big, inquisitive eyes he’d seen that first cold night, content as a tiny human being could possibly be. It sent something akin to awe shooting through Din’s heart as he glanced back, and his hands froze as he took in the moment. Him, standing in his apartment, with a kid who didn’t care if he was dead tired or had weird taste in music or wore the same hoodie he’d had since Bush was in office. A kid who only ever seemed to want him, in all his graying, double-shift working, inadequately ready to be a parent glory. A kid who, in his own small way, loved him.
The smart-mouthed kid who surfed crates for vinyl with three dollars in his pocket certainly hadn’t expected this.
That revelation seemed to stir his hands back into actions, finger deftly flipping through the (frankly obscene) amount of cardboard sleeves he kept meticulously organized. He wasn’t sure was he was looking for, just aimlessly drifting until his brain decided to give him some kind of insight. The kid couldn’t exactly tell him what he wanted, and Din had no idea what was appropriate to play for babies. Cheap Trick probably wasn’t good. Quiet Riot definitely wasn’t. Weren’t you supposed to play classical music for babies? He felt like he’d read that somewhere. But not even his broke sixteen-year-old self had invested in cheap pressing of Mozart or Bach. That would’ve compromised his cool level altogether. Hell, with Cara, it would compromise it now .
He settled for something he hoped would be just as stimulating, yanking out a red and blue cover that looked just slightly akin to a fresh bruise on some sudden impulse. He’d ditched the oldies for fear they’d put the kid to sleep and screw up his sleep schedule, so a circle of black wax came sliding out of the bruise as Din slipped it onto the turntable, its significance entirely lost on the baby still chewing on his frog on the carpeted floor. It was the first real album Din had ever bought with money he’d earned, a shiny, sealed reissue purchased with a check for a week’s work hauling boxes off the back of freight trucks in high school: the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light.
He hoped the kid liked David Byrne.
Once the record was spinning and the odd sound of Moog synthesizers filled his apartment, Din returned to the work he’d abandoned when the kid started playing mountain climber, trying not to be overwhelmed by the worry that he would be just as excitable as before. He hated his paperwork as much as the next guy, but he was already on the fence with Karga after the whole “adopting a baby on impulse” thing, and doing immense amounts of clerical bullshit from home was about the only thing that was keeping him employed at the moment. Therefore, as cute as the kid was, he couldn’t afford to let it keep distracting him.
For a hot minute, his plan seemed to work. The noise of eighties new wave filled the apartment and Din was able to fill out a sheaf of papers, illegible scribble verifying arrests and file transfers and arraignment details. It was as monotonous as selling winter coats at the beach, but he plowed through it, determined to finish at least the first pile of papers before dinner.
That lasted all of about fifteen minutes.
A feeling of paranoia began to settle into Din’s bones after that first quarter of an hour, a feeling he can’t quite identify until he realizes he’s been subconsciously thinking about the kid every time his pen scratched across paper. Some deep parental instinct had settled inside of him, telling him he should be making sure the baby was okay instead of worrying about work. It was an irrational impulse, the kid was five feet away playing with his toys, but the lack of noise from anything other than the record practically chilled him enough for ice to form on his skin.
He shoved his office chair backwards, enough to allow him to spin and gain a better view of the apartment as a rogue transfer request fluttered its way to the floor. David Byrne’s voice filled the apartment, the familiar chords of “Once in a Lifetime” sinking into Din’s bones with an odd familiarity. He panicked for a moment when the kid wasn’t where he’d left him, but he forced himself to remember that babies can crawl, and he’d baby-proofed the shit out of the apartment for that reason. (Goodbye, coffee table, hello Pack’n’Play.) A quick swivel to his left, then his right, then to his left again assuaged all of his fears, for when he looked a little further afield…
There he was, sat square in front of the speaker closest to Din, with two tiny, chubby hands placed flat against the vibrating wall of music.
Letting the days go by…
The kid was transfixed. He stared at the corrugated metal like it held the secrets of the universe, those inquisitive eyes locked onto the source of the voice currently questioning itself about a beautiful house around them. He was focused, as much as a tiny baby can be, and his usually hyperactive hands didn’t budge, too focused on the vibrations of the music to move even an inch. It was like watching someone have a religious experience, and Din found himself unable to move to disturb the strange moment.
Into the blue again, after the money's gone...
Something in his heart twisted, something in that tiny part of him that was still reserved for those teenage years when music was all he had. That small part felt washed over with an unidentifiable emotion, one deep in his chest that shot him back thirty-odd years to the first time he’d played that record. He imagined his face, though several years older, looked much the same as the kid’s did as he sat, stiller even than he had been when Din had first seen him, the deep thrumming of Tina Weymouth’s bass vibrating the speakers under his hands.
Once in a lifetime...
The song finished - almost too soon, Din thought - and the room went quiet, only the noise of the radiator across the room to fill the silence. Din watched as the baby’s brow furrowed, a comical imitation of his father’s own disgruntled expression as he patted the speakers, clearly upset that the music had stopped. He looked up at the now-stilled circle of black, then back to the corrugated metal, before finally craning his neck around to look at his father. Those big, inquisitive eyes were full of fascination, of wonder and awe to such a degree that Din was overwhelmed. It was so simple, and yet he couldn’t believe that the answer to the kid’s curiosity had been staring him in the face the entire time.
The fact that the kid seemed as engrossed in music as was might have made him teary. But no one ever needed to know that.
The kid’s eyes didn’t leave Din’s face, his usually smiling face frozen in an expression that leaned towards a plea for Din to fill the awed silence. Din didn’t hesitate to acquiesce, but not before grabbing a sheaf of papers and a pen from the desk and tossing them on the floor next to the kid. His back was going to regret it later, but Cara had mentioned something about taking advantage of quality time with the kid, and he’d be damned if he’d miss any more of it.
His hands shook as he flipped the record carefully, the baby’s eyes trained intently on his hands as he did so. (One day, when he was older, he’d teach him how to do it, he swore.) With a delicate touch, he set the album back in place and adjusted the needle, then sank down to the floor next to his son.
The music started again, and Din laughed. The baby looked torn between crawling into his lap and maintaining his position in front of the speaker, and ended up reaching one hand out to him, as if beckoning him to come closer. It set something aflame in that same part of his heart, and he found himself shuffling over so that the kid could lean against his leg while still feeling the vibrations from the speaker. It was about as close to domestic as he’d ever gotten, and not even the paperwork that he had to begrudgingly get back to could ruin that.
" You’ve got good taste, kid.”