Work Text:
It was supposed to be a retrieval mission, smuggle some chip and leave. Yet, now Cassian stands here, where Brasso died—between immovable steel and wheat grass brushing against his skin while his coat hitting against the wind is the only sound heard in all of Mina-Rau. Cassian looks at her and the child nestled in her arms, a mirage to a man starved for hope. He thinks Bix is home, what the peace he’s always hungered for could be. A family and the love already swelling in his heart like crashing tsunamis.
She speaks first, her brown eyes crinkling with a fondness so soft he might melt, “Cassian.”
“Bix,” he says, the name tumbling off his tongue not quick enough.
There’s too much to say and never enough time, never. He wants to ask how Bix is, if she enjoys the unending crops and farms of Mina-Rau, if she still watches that show from Coruscant they’d laugh at during the dead of night, how she could bear the thought of leaving, if she knows how much he aches for her and loves her, if she loves him as much—instead he settles for: “Can I hold him?”
“Her,” Bix corrects, readjusting their daughter in her arms. Then, she places the baby into his arms and watches her squirm against Cassian with her toothless, all-gum smile.
Cassian feels the child in his arms and the sunset falling into a cold night. The peace here is temporary, a vision of what’s to come—-a place his child can grow up in without the constant lurking gaze of the empire or presence of stormtroopers. A place of hope. He’ll bleed for a sunrise he’d never see and let the voices of his mother, his father—the memory of him hanging in the plaza like an animal carcass—the sister he never found that he sees so much of in his daughter, and Bix and their child burn the feeling of revolution across his tongue and lean body.
He takes off his coat and wraps it around his daughter, this and Bix’s memories were all she’d have of him. Cassian lets the revolution burn across his fingertips.
~~~
Days later, the news of the Death Star’s destruction reaches Bix, sitting with her baby on her lap in a small house. She smiles, the world seems lighter for a moment—the dream of peace feels tangible. A future where her daughter doesn’t know war or the searing touches of imperial officers’ bloody, corruption-marred hands. The morning sun warms her face and she sees the long wheat grass growing.
Bix picks her daughter up and hugs her, “Your father was a hero, little one.”
“A hero.” she says again, something bittersweet in her gaze.