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Cassian notices the little girl first, but Jyn is the first to do something about her.
He notices everything. Some might call it his greatest asset; he would simply call it a fact of his life, if not altogether a problem. He notices everything, and feels the need to catalogue that information away in a file in his mind. The war is long over, now, but it keeps him safe. It keeps them safe.
So when he sees the little scavenger girl first eyeing them, and then following them as they meander through the outpost at Niima, he tracks her the same way that she tracks them, albeit more subtly. He highly doubts she’s a threat, but her interest in them seems more than passing. There’s a wariness about her that doesn’t align with her age, one like Jyn still wears on her worst days.
“It’ll be hard to prove, you know,” Jyn says to him as they roam the marketplace, picking up a strange yellow fruit and pretending to inspect it. “Even harder to enforce.”
He nods, his lips turned down into a tight grimace. “The evidence won’t justify action.”
It’s an old refrain, for them. After the defeat of the Empire, the New Republic tended to keep its belt cinched tight. But when Luke Skywalker, by way of his more politically inclined sister, asks you to investigate slavery and trafficking in the Western Reaches, you don’t say no. With this sort of thing, it’s better to ask the government for forgiveness rather than explicit permission.
Jyn’s hand slips into his and squeezes. “It’s got to be better to know.” She doesn’t say the second part, the part that they both know is true—willful ignorance is what gave us the Empire. Even if it can be challenging to put all of the pieces together, it’s well-known at this point that if enough people had been paying attention to what was happening right under their noses, the damned war would never have needed to happen.
Then again, Cassian and Jyn would never have met, if there had been no war, and he wouldn’t trade knowing her for anything.
In his slight distraction—kriff, he’s getting rusty—he’s lost sight of the little girl, and he curses to himself. She could have been the living proof they needed, could have had information that made her a valuable asset—
He curses to himself again. Valuable asset. Gods, she’s just a child. And he’s not a spy anymore. He needs to get out of that frame of mind.
Suddenly, he senses tension in Jyn’s shoulders, but she’s reaching for her blaster before he can do anything. Or, well. Maybe not quite. When he actually looks, the only hand on the blaster he sees is a small one, freckled and worn. Jyn has the little girl’s wrist in her grasp and crouches down to her level. It puts him on high alert—Jyn’s never been one to tolerate even the most desperate of thieves.
But her eyes are both firm and soft with understanding when she looks at the little girl. “Dangerous thing, touching someone’s blaster,” she tells her in a low, but not unkind, voice. “Could have gotten hurt, you. Unless you know how to use it?”
The little girl is frozen in place, her terrified eyes practically boring holes into the ground. Cassian kneels down beside them, stifling a groan as both the natural and artificial parts of his leg adjust to the change in angle; he’s simply not as young nor as flexible as he once was. He assesses the girl’s condition wordlessly, taking in the way that her skin seems to stick to her bones, how small and fragile she seems with her sunken eyes, rimmed with the red of tears and the dark rings of sleepless nights.
She seems to sense Cassian’s eyes on her and takes a small step closer to Jyn. Maybe she doesn’t trust men, he thinks, suppressing a shudder. He hates to think of a child, of any child, in a situation like that.
“What’s your name?” he asks with all the gentleness he can muster.
She chews on the question, almost literally, biting the inside of her cheek with purpose. “Rey,” she finally answers quietly, no frills, no additions. Just Rey.
Jyn loosens her grip on Rey’s wrist, but doesn’t quite let go. “Where’s your grown-up, Rey?”
She shrinks back into herself a little; it’s clear the question isn’t one she wants to answer. Cassian tries a different one, maybe one more specific. “Are your parents here?” She shakes her head in the negative. “Alright,” he continues. “Where do you go at night, to sleep?”
At first, he thinks she’s lost in thought with the way she stares into the middle distance, until he realizes that she’s looking past him toward the junkyard, toward a more permanent stall manned by a creature of a man, sentient but nonhuman. Even from this distance, it’s clear he’s not a kind soul. He imagines that there’s no love lost between the alien and the little girl.
“What’s that man’s name?” Cassian asks. Little details matter, in cases like these.
Rey squirms a bit, but then she whispers, “Unkar,” and shows him her other wrist. It’s a miracle that Cassian doesn’t vomit when he sees the brand there. His scars, and Jyn’s, will always serve as a reminder of their pasts, of the way life required them to fight tooth and nail for every last scrap. In the end, though, they could say they chose their fight. This little girl would never have that, not like this. Not as a slave.
He meets Jyn’s eyes briefly, but a thousand conversations exist in a simple glance between them. It isn’t difficult to make the decision. Jyn steals little Rey away to their ship, and Cassian aims two silenced blaster shots between Unkar Plutt’s eyes. He has never enjoyed killing, but there’s a sense of satisfaction in this one. May the gods grant you what you deserve, he thinks before he walks away.
It’s been a busy day for the little desert scavenger; the icy light of hyperspace and the hum of the ship’s engine lull her to sleep in the tiny bunk that the two adults take turns sleeping in, when necessity requires. Sitting side by side in the cockpit now, he reaches over to brush back a bit of hair that’s fallen out of Jyn’s loose bun.
“Did we do the right thing?” she asks, not looking at him.
Cassian hums, moves his hand to coax the strain out of her neck, pleased when she relaxes into his touch. “Better than leaving her there.”
One of her hands comes to rest on her stomach. “Do you think…?”
The way she trails off is like a cord around his heart. Three miscarriages and a stillbirth. Neither of them had ever even thought of having children while the Empire was in charge, but they were young yet once the war was over. It became less of a plan or an explicit desire than an acceptance of fate, the both of them believing that whatever forces—or Forces—were at work in their galaxy, in their universe, what was meant to be would be. He wasn’t sure he believed that anymore, though. It hurt too much to think that the universe would want them to suffer like they had.
But maybe this is what the universe had planned all along. Maybe they were always meant to find a little scavenger girl on Jakku.
“I don’t know,” he admits, her unspoken question settling deep in the pit of his stomach. He’d rather treat Rey as her own person than believe she was delivered unto them by destiny. “If you still wanted—”
Jyn bites her lip. “I don’t know if I can. I don’t think I can go through it again, Cass.” She takes a deep breath, decades of complicated emotions bubbling up inside of her. He can see clearly that the thought of losing another child is one of her greatest fears. It’s ironic, considering how anti-maternal she’d been for so much of her life. But the hope of survival and of victory and of the trust they had in each other has changed them both. In an era where they were supposed to be moving forward, it’s difficult to recover from new dreams dashed.
He takes her hand and hopes that she can sense his meaning when he tells her, “She’s her own blessing, I think. She’ll need us, when she wakes up.” And I think we might need her.
She looks behind her to see Rey sleeping like the dead, and Cassian watches the way her eyes soften. It needs to be enough, he sees. She, this little girl they’ve absconded away with, must be enough. “She’ll never be alone,” she whispers. “Never.”
“Never.” He squeezes her hand, knows that she can see him softly smiling out of the corner of her eye. He loves her so much it aches in his soul. He didn’t know for most of his life, but now he’s not sure how he ever lived without her. Each time his eyes flicker to Rey, fast asleep and at peace for possibly the first time in her life, he wonders if the way he loves the people who matter will ever feel like anything but agony.
Every day that Cassian spends as a father is a blessing beyond his wildest dreams.
It isn’t something that he would have expected, but domestic life suits them. Jyn takes slicing gigs but stays on-world for the most part. Cassian, meanwhile, finds himself among the koyo trees in the grove that connects their little patch of green with the Dameron ranch, harvesting alongside its owner, Kes. It would be an understatement to say that he owed his life to Kes Dameron, and he’s grateful that his old rebel brother-in-arms is a generous soul. The two men don’t speak much as they harvest except to answer the questions of the little scavenger who follows at their heels.
“What’s that kind of knife called, Papa?” she would ask as he sawed at a bunch of the ripe fruit.
“It’s a machete, mi querida,” he’d answer, letting one of the looser melons roll out of his arms and into her waiting hands.
She would use her little paring knife—he’d been reluctant to let her have it, but Jyn had been rather insistent—to peel the skin off the small, round fruit, the juice running all over her fingers, coating her palms and making them sticky and sweet. “Why is koyo fruit so messy, Papa?”
He’d pull a handkerchief out of his pocket and hand it to her, ever the over prepared soldier. “Because of all the water inside, mija.”
These simple questions, borne from the mind of an under-occupied, too-clever child, are easy to answer. In another life, Cassian is sure he never could have done this. But he feels himself smile when she asks him a question, when she looks at him as if he has all the answers and always will.
The harder questions, though, come when he least expects it. He steps out of the Dameron kitchen to bring another crate of koyo inside to the wash station, and when he comes back, he can hear his daughter asking Kes her questions now.
“Tío, who’s that?” she asks, pointing to a piece of flimsi tacked onto the wall that shows an image of a beautiful, dark-haired woman in an orange flight suit. For a moment, his stomach tightens and he’s tempted to rush into the room and pull Rey out of there; it wouldn’t do to have her witness his friend’s hysterics over his late wife. But he watches from the doorway instead as Kes picks Rey and holds her on his hip, like true family does, and points to the picture in kind.
“Her name was Shara Bey,” he explains calmly, if not a little wistfully. Cassian has a feeling there are tears in his eyes, but it’s hard to tell with Kes facing away from him. “She was my wife, and I loved her very much. I lost her a long time ago, now.”
Cassian’s heartstrings thrum as Rey leans her head on her tío’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Tío Kes,” she murmurs. “Mama says we don’t really lose anyone. They’re just waiting for us up in the stars.”
Kes’ voice is strained as he replies, “Your mother is very wise, niña.”
It’s like a punch to his gut, Cassian thinks, as the memories of the people he’s lost—the people they have lost—burst through whatever damn inside of his mind had been holding them back. Even if some of the people he’s lost haven’t died, it still hurts to remember. He thinks about the Rogue One crew, thinks about Draven and Bail Organa and Shara and Bix and Maarva and Kerri. Gods. There’s nothing he wants more than to give Rey the life he could never give Kerri.
He wouldn’t trade Rey for any of the people he's lost, though. There isn’t a bone in his body that doesn’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt, no matter where either of them really came from, that he is her father. There is nothing else he’d rather be.