The trepidation hadn’t mounted until he’d actually stood on the landing platform and watched Jyn’s craft lift off, the tiny figure of their child in his arms, kicking against his thighs and waving a single excited hand in farewell to her mother. “She’ll be back in six days,” he’d told her, nose pressed against her ear, bestowing a kiss into the soft brown hair she’d inherited from her mother, currently bundled into three knots parading down the back of her small head. “We get to amuse ourselves until she comes back. Just the two of us.”
Amuse ourselves meant two very different things for Cassian and Rey, however. While it may not have been amusing to rerout holos and communicate with the base on Yavin, it was intensely interesting to the five year old, at least until Cassian grew wary of her bright mind picking up on the classified intelligence, and declared it bedtime. Stories were told, holos were shown, and at last she slept and Cassian betook himself to the empty bunk and fell into the slumber of exhaustion.
The long, indeterminate time in which a voice belonged to both the waking and the sleeping held Cassian captive, but the light touch of a small hand on his arm had him jerking from the darkness of oblivion and into the world of the wakeful, blinking hard into the blue-black shadows and finally bringing into focus the figure of the little girl, ghostly in a white shift, standing by the side of his bed.
“Rey,” he breathed, attempting a smile, face stiff with sleep, extending a hand from beneath the covers towards his daughter, beckoning her near. “What is it, pequeña?”
