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The baby was sleeping soundly, finally, safely tucked into the crate that once again had to serve as a crib after all of the ugnaught’s skilled work had gone to waste. Despite the sound of the kid’s slow peaceful breathing Din turned in the pilot’s seat to glance over his shoulder, just to be sure. With nothing else around the ship suitable as padding, Din had gone back to using his cape for the purpose — the baby didn’t seem to mind, one small hand tangled in the folds of it and his face slack-mouthed and soft with sleep, mythosaur pendant still clutched in his other hand.
Din turned back to the viewport to watch the serene lights of hyperspace dancing by outside, blood caking uncomfortably in his hair under the helmet.
Whatever it was IG-11 had done with the bacta spray it seemed to have worked —Din’s head felt clear, apart from the exhaustion, and that horrible raw wrongness in his torso that meant something important in there had been shaken past breaking was completely gone — but he still ached all over, every movement setting off a fresh fireworks display of discomfort through his whole body. He felt vaguely like he’d just gone three more rounds with the mudhorn and lost every one.
Din kept his hands loosely curled around the control sticks even though there was no real need to anymore, with their destination set and the ship’s systems ticking away steadily. His plans hadn’t arrived at a real ‘towards’ yet, having largely stopped at ‘away, before something even worse shows up’, which he felt was becoming an unfortunate yet undeniable trend in his life lately. Get far enough away, get some supplies, hope for some decent work, rinse, repeat.
The events of the last few days blurred together, a thin sheen of oil puddling on top of deceptively calm waters without sinking in. From experience it would probably hit him worse once the battle numbness receded, but for now he simply sat there in the vast silence of his head, watching the lights run by. The only sounds were the baby’s snores and the familiar creaks and low moans of the Razor Crest.
Finally Din sighed and shifted a bit. He should go find something for the baby to eat in case he’d be hungry when he woke up. What with one thing and another it was starting to be a while since his last meal. Din got up and walked softly over to the hatch, dropping down as gently as he could to avoid waking the kid. He opened the storage space he reserved for foodstuffs and stared blankly at the containers within for a while, willing himself to just pick one.
That was when the crying started.
Din startled out of his haze of indecision and made his way back to the cockpit, where the baby was giving such a miserably plaintive cry that Din felt it like an ache in his own chest. When he spotted Din the baby cried even louder and reached his small arms towards him, straining up desperately enough that he almost fell out of his seat.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Din said, picking him up and holding him in a state of mild panic because he’d never heard the kid make a sound like this before. “What’s wrong?”
The baby just sobbed helplessly, his tiny face tucked against Din’s body and his three-fingered hands clutching at whatever part of the armor he could reach.
“You hurt somewhere?” Din asked, fear shooting up his spine and shaking him awake in earnest. The kid had seemed fine, but maybe something had happened that Din hadn’t noticed, or perhaps turning that wall of flame away had been too much of a strain on his little body, or —
Cradling the baby against his chest Din reached up with his free hand to activate the extremely rudimentary medical scanner built into the visor of his helmet, only partially reassured when it showed nothing out of the ordinary with the kid except a heightened pulse, which could easily be attributed to the huge gasping sobs. The scanner was only designed to give information on the ‘dead or alive?’ sort of level. If something was wrong with the baby’s brain, or, or wherever else his abilities came from, though, how would Din even…
Shit, he wished the nurse droid were still here, IG-11 would have known what to do. When it came to usefulness they would have been better off if it’d been Din blowing himself up at the end of that tunnel. The Armorer might be wiser than anyone else he’d ever met, but he didn’t know what the hell she’d been thinking, sending the kid off with Din as his only permanent bumbling support. For a moment and for the first time since he was a boy, Din gave serious consideration to just sitting down on the spot and bursting into tears himself.
Taking a deep breath he pulled himself together.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, holding the baby closer. “Everything’s okay, I’m here. It’s safe.”
The baby gave a hiccup between sobs and gazed up at him, the worst of the urgency slowly melting away. His round cheeks were flushed and his face still scrunched up slightly in distress, but his eyes cleared enough that Din could see something in his voice must have reached him.
“Whatever it is, we can fix it,” Din said, willing himself to believe it as he stroked his thumb over the baby’s forehead and along one fuzzy ear. The baby still looked at him, his hand fumbling to grab a hold of the fabric of Din’s gambeson like he was afraid Din would disappear if he didn’t.
Din maneuvered his way down to the lower section of the ship one-handed so they’d have more space, speaking to the baby the whole way — he had no real idea what he was saying anymore, only that the baby seemed to calm at the sound of his voice. Once he reached the cargo hold he started pacing slowly, though whether to help soothe the baby or himself he couldn’t say at this point.
The baby fussed quietly but miserably, still unable to settle all the way down. Din rocked him gently in the way he’d found through trial and error best did the trick, mindlessly walking back and forth across the floor as he looked down at the baby and tried to prod his exhausted mind back to work to figure out what was going on.
“This would be a lot easier if either of us knew how to talk,” Din told the baby mournfully, bouncing him as he reached the end of the cargo hold and turned around again.
A spark of instinct lit up the weary murkiness of Din’s brain. When Kuiil — and there was a blankness around the name in his head that from experience meant something large and ugly was waiting to take its toll when the worst of the fog lifted, but for now there was only silence — when Kuiil had taken the baby away with him, back towards the ship, Din had been too wrapped up in his own fear-hazy thoughts to think to reassure the kid, too busy trying to work out contingencies and strategies with too little information to go on to...
Something shifted in Din’s mind, his perspective drifting and realigning just so, as he realized that the last time he’d seen his parents he had always known it was the last time. There had been no time for doubt. One moment they’d been there, and then they were gone. There had been no space where he hadn’t known whether they were coming back, no waiting.
Big dark eyes watching him as he walked away and didn’t even glance back.
The thought went through him like a shot the beskar could do nothing to stop, leaving something in there to bleed.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, cupping the baby’s head in his hand. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
The baby looked at him with his head on one side, ears lopsided in exhaustion, but there was something like understanding in his wide dark eyes, the crying finally dying away.
“Yeah, I know,” Din murmured, stroking the back of the small downy head. “I know all of that was scary. It’s okay to be scared. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. It’s okay.”
The baby rubbed his cheek against the breastplate, fumbling around until he found the mythosaur pendant around his neck and absentmindedly stuck it in his mouth as he gazed unwaveringly up at Din. Distantly, illogically, Din wanted to press a quick kiss to his forehead, but he doubted the kid would find the cold touch of beskar and transparisteel all that comforting. Instead he carefully wiped the last of the tear tracks away with his thumb, smiling despite himself when the baby scrunched up his nose and made a protesting sound around the pendant. “Sorry.”
Din unfastened his breastplate so the baby would have something softer to rest against, then half collapsed, half sat down on the spot, his back resting against the bulkhead. He held the kid against his chest, cradled in the crook of his arm. The baby made a pleased sound and tucked himself even closer with a wiggle. Din used two fingers of his right hand to pull off the glove on the left so he could feel the reassuring warmth of the little body under his hand, gently running his thumb back and forth over the baby’s back when he snuggled into it.
They sat like that for a while until Din sighed.
“I know… I know words don’t count for much and you’re probably still too small to understand, but I — think I need to say this out loud.” Din glanced down and carefully took the kid’s tiny hand between his own thumb and forefinger, stroking the back of it. “I’ve, uh. Sworn only one other oath in my life and it was a long time ago, so I might be a bit rusty.”
While he paused the baby wrapped his entire hand around Din’s index finger, his feet tipping idly back and forth in the way that usually signified contentment while he gazed up at Din.
Din took a deep breath, dizzy with something like reverence and possibly also the last lingering remnants of the concussion. “No matter how many times I go away, I am always going to come back. As long as I still live I am always, always going to come back for you. I promise.”
His voice broke slightly on the last part and he cleared his throat, blinked quickly a couple of times even though he knew no one could see his face. The baby raised his arms in the way he did when he wanted to be lifted, so Din held the kid up in front of him until they were face to face, or at least face to visor. The baby reached out and put his palm flat against the metal, giving a low happy coo.
“I know I’m not much of a prize,” Din said in a rough voice, their new sigil bright on his shoulder and in his mind. “But I promise I’m going to give it everything I have.”
The baby babbled like he was imparting a piece of great wisdom and wrapped his arms as far around the helmet as he could with a trilling sound, legs dangling cheerfully. Din used the opportunity while his view was obscured anyway to close his eyes for a second.
“I promise,” Din said again, willing his voice to carry the meaning if the words couldn’t, and held the child even closer against his chest.