#sometimes you just have to drop everything and design the rebel alliance's parental leave policy from scratch in your brain

[sesamestreep]

AND bc i know u love a good rogue one, rogue one crew and “booties” perhaps???!!

went ahead and posted this on AO3 as well, since it got well out of hand.... thanks for waiting six months for this, phil! <3

Jyn is already back in their quarters, cleaned up from their mission and wearing fresh clothes, by the time that Cassian is finished with his debrief with Draven. He returns to find her sprawled out on their bed with her wet hair that she hasn't even bothered to comb out soaking into the pillow beneath her head and her sleep shirt folded up to her ribs so she can rest her hands on her bare stomach. She's not showing yet, not even a little, which is odd mostly because Jyn feels so different already. It's unnerving to know something is happening inside of her body and have no external sign of it, so she's taken to resting in this position as a means of coping with that weirdness.

Cassian has seen this before, of course, but he still raises his eyebrows at the sight of her, a gesture she knows to mean he's worried by her behavior but trying to act casual about it. There's a whole scale of nervous Cassian gestures she's become an expert in and, if she's reading things correctly, this one is thankfully on the milder end of it.

"Anything?" He asks, as he hangs his jacket on a hook by the door.

"No, nothing," she replies, as she watches him take off his boots and line them up neatly against the wall. He pauses a moment to arrange hers—flung off haphazardly as soon as she got home and ultimately left wherever they happened to land—in order next to them and she feels a rush of affection for him. He is so full of little kindnesses and considerations like that; she doesn't know what she did to deserve him.

"Oh."

"I'm not worried," Jyn adds. "The medical droid said we won't feel any movement or kicking until at least the second trimester."

"Okay."

"Yeah?"

Cassian sighs as he flops down next to her on the bed. "If you're not worried, I'm not worried."

She smiles. "You're always worried."

"Well, that's...true, I guess. But I'm not worried about this, at the moment."

"What are you worried about, then?"

"The threat that the Empire poses to freedom for all peoples and planets across the Galaxy, of course," he says, without a moment's hesitation.

Jyn groans. "Cassian..."

That just makes him laugh, unfortunately. When she tries to shove him away, though, he sobers immediately. "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, you know," he says, carefully.

"I'm fine," she says, more quickly than anyone who's ever actually been fine has ever said those words, so she pauses and actually takes a moment to think about it before she continues. "You said they needed to know and I agreed. And you said that they needed to hear it from us, before I started showing or news got around the base, and I also agreed with that.”

When Cassian doesn’t say anything in response, she adds, “So we told them. And it was fine. Was I maybe expecting more of a reaction from everyone? Sure. But it doesn't really matter."

This last part of her speech would probably be more believable if it wasn’t also the moment she bursts into tears. There’s plenty of reasons she can think of that she’s losing it now—she’s coming off three long weeks on a difficult mission in one of the Empire’s last strongholds with little sleep and zero privacy, for starters—but she knows it’s really her stupid hormones that should shoulder most of the blame.

For the record, she officially hates this part of pregnancy, though that isn’t saying much. There aren’t a lot of parts she does like, to be perfectly honest, and she hasn’t done a great job of hiding that fact from Cassian. He wouldn’t want her to, she knows, but she can also tell it makes him feel guilty, that he wants this to be a magical, wonderful time for her, rather than uncomfortable and strange. She keeps assuring him that she’s going to love the actual kid when it gets here, that she doesn’t have to love being pregnant just as long as she loves being someone’s mother, but it’s been hard for both of them in different ways.

She feels Cassian wrap his arms around her middle and haul her in close to his side and she remembers that this is the thing they’re good at. It wasn’t easy in the beginning—not with the way either of them grew up—but somehow, over the years, they’ve managed to find a place in between their disparate experiences where they can make a home together, a place where they’re always safe. In moments like this, when it’s just the two of them together in this world of their own, she doesn’t worry at all about their future. So long as this baby is half-Cassian, she is going to love it beyond belief. It’s going to be so easy.

She burrows even further into his embrace and he breathes in deeply, like he’s trying to catch the scent of her soap, and then exhales in a way that makes her think he was still holding onto a lot of tension from their mission. She shamelessly exploits the fact that she’s carrying his child and therefore he can’t begrudge her anything by wiping her nose on his shirt. He makes an exaggeratedly disgusted face at her in return, which makes her laugh. If her laughter sounds a little damp, it doesn’t really matter; she’s stopped crying, at least.

“It’s okay if it hurt your feelings, you know,” Cassian says, gently, after they’ve been quiet a moment.

“What?”

“The crew’s reaction to our news. It’s okay if you imagined it going differently.”

Jyn thinks about this, really and truly, because she’s not sure what she imagined. She and Cassian had agreed to make their announcement to the crew when they returned to base after their mission. It had felt important that everyone hear it from them, rather than through the Alliance rumor mill, especially since discretion has proven to be a difficult concept to impress on medical droids and they’ve become somewhat notorious for blurting out sensitive information about patients to anyone with the appropriate security clearance. Still, she hadn’t bothered to let her imagination run wild with different scenarios of how the crew would take the news of her pregnancy. She barely knows how to feel about it herself most days, let alone trying to imagine what other people will think.

But, obviously these aren’t just any other people. The Rogue One crew is basically a family at this point and, whether she likes it or not, she cares what they think. With the clarity of hindsight, she now realizes she’d wanted them to be happy about it, which just made their nonplussed reactions that much more difficult to handle. Everyone had taken the news in much the same way they’d probably have responded to an announcement that they needed to land the ship in a different dock. It had mostly been blank stares and a few nods of understanding, and then everyone had gone back to their assigned tasks, eager to wrap up the mission and get some rest. Bodhi had clapped her on the shoulder as he passed by and murmured his congratulations to the both of them, but that was as effusive as the reactions got.

Jyn probably would have stood there gobsmacked in the middle of the cargo hold for another twenty minutes if Cassian hadn’t put his hand on her back and given her a pointed look that said they could talk about this later. He knows her well enough to understand the last place she’d like to fall apart is on a mission, in front of the crew that trusts and relies on her. She’d been thankful for him, then, just as she is now. Sometimes it can drive her crazy how well he knows her, that he can often tell how she’s feeling before she’s even figured it out for herself, but mostly it feels like a gift, to have someone like that in her life. Thanks to him, they’d been able to finish out the mission without issue and, as soon as they were back on base, Cassian had dismissed everyone else and dragged K2 off with him to report to Draven, giving Jyn the opportunity to return to their quarters and untangle the knot of emotions she was feeling in peace.

“Did it bother you?” She asks him, coming back to the present. She hasn’t fully processed her feelings on the matter and, as crazy as it might sound, sometimes she has an easier time identifying her own emotions once she hears him talk about his.

“I was...surprised, I guess,” Cassian says, choosing his words carefully as always. “I thought everyone would have more to say on the matter.”

Jyn nods emphatically, glad that they can agree on this. “That’s what I thought too! Even if they didn’t approve, I thought at least they’d have something to say about it. I mean, we’re having a baby. That’s huge! But nobody said anything at all.”

“You were disappointed.”

“A little. I guess," she says, with a small shrug. "Maybe we shouldn’t have told them. Maybe they don’t care.”

Cassian bumps his nose against her shoulder, in what she takes as a reassuring gesture. “I’m sure that’s not it.”

“I don’t know.”

They’re quiet for a moment before Cassian asks, “Do you remember when you told me about the baby?”

Jyn shifts to look at him, baffled by the question. “Of course I do,” she says. “For one thing, it wasn’t that long ago and for another, it was kind of an important moment.”

He plants a kiss on her shoulder and ignores the belligerence in her voice. “You thought I wasn’t happy about it because I didn’t react much at first.”

“I already said I remember. What’s your point?”

“If you remember that, then you also remember what I told you. That I wanted to make sure you were happy about it before I showed you that I was. Because if you weren’t happy...”

“There was no way you could be,” Jyn finishes for him. She closes her eyes. “I know. You’re a wonderful man.”

“That wasn’t my point.”

“Well, it’s mine.”

“Nevertheless, what I’m saying is that the others might be doing the same thing for you.”

“I don’t follow.”

Cassian’s arms tighten around her middle. “They love you, Jyn,” he says urgently. “They want you to be happy as much as I do. I think they’re waiting on your reaction before they get excited for us.”

Jyn turns in his embrace so she can look him in the eye. “I gave them my reaction already, Cassian! I mean, didn’t I seem happy when I told them?”

“You gave them more of a mission briefing than a reaction, I think,” he says with a soft smile that she knows is meant to stop her from getting defensive. “‘In approximately six months, Cassian and I will have a baby,’” he quotes, “‘We expect this to impact this team in the following ways…’”

She buries her face in his chest with a groan. “Why did you let me do the talking this time?” She asks miserably. “You’re the one with social skills!”

“That is entirely debatable,” Cassian replies. “And I let you do the talking because you insisted.”

“I thought it was because you were afraid Baze and Chirrut would kick your ass for getting me pregnant.”

“That was also a factor, yes.”

Jyn sighs, exasperated. “Well, what are we going to do now?”

After a moment’s consideration, Cassian picks up a lock of her hair and twists it around his finger. “I was going to get cleaned up and ready for bed, unless you had other ideas...”

“I meant, what are we going to do about the crew?” She asks, even as she feels herself blush.

“They’ll come around, Jyn. Once they see how happy we are about the baby, they’ll be right there with us.”

“You think so?”

“I know it,” he says, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “Let’s not waste precious time worrying about this.”

“Not when there’s so many other things to worry about.”

Cassian laughs and she feels it rumble through his chest underneath her ear. “Exactly.”

*

It's only a few weeks later when Cassian comes to find her after a meeting with Draven to tell her that they've got another mission.

"We do?" She asks, surprised. She’s where she always is these days when there isn’t work to be done: curled up on their bed. It turns out growing your own offspring is pretty exhausting.

"Yes."

"You're sure Draven is okay with me going on missions still?"

"Draven is still on the fence about you joining the Alliance in the first place," Cassian jokes, "but I think in this case, he's going to get as much work out of you as he possibly can, right up until the moment you physically can't go on missions anymore."

Jyn acknowledges this with a snort of derision. Even after years of working for him, General Draven still hasn't warmed up to her much. She doesn't know, or particularly care, what he thinks about her pregnancy but she doesn't imagine he's thrilled to have two of his operatives out of commission for something as trivial as having a baby, so she mostly lets Cassian deal with him these days. Cassian is his favorite, anyway, so she doesn't feel that bad about it.

"This will probably be your last one for a while, though," Cassian says, delicately, when she doesn't respond to his teasing.

“I know,” she says. “‘All beings capable of gestation are entitled to work in any capacity or department without reduction of duties or hours until they surpass 67% of their gestational period, at which point their superior officer will reduce their workload accordingly,’” she adds, quoting the administrator who’d been sent to explain the Alliance’s parental rights policies to her after the medical droid submitted the paperwork from her physical, including the blood work that had confirmed her pregnancy.

It’s unlikely, though not impossible, that this mission will stretch into her third trimester, so it should be fine, but anything after this would certainly be too risky. Jyn had honestly assumed that Draven would pull her from active duty sooner rather than later. Even though she’s still got time before her last trimester, she keeps expecting to hear that she’s been reassigned to administrative duties. She’s heard that’s the most common assignment for anyone who gets pregnant and she's prepared for it to happen to her. She and Cassian have already discussed it and agreed it would be the smartest course of action for the end of her pregnancy. And given how exhausted she feels already, she’s sure she’ll be functionally useless by her final trimester, so it’s probably better for everyone this way. Still, despite her ready acquiescence, Cassian looks like he's bracing himself for a fight.

"You feel okay about this?" he asks warily.

"Yes," she says, drawing the word out in annoyance. "We knew it would happen eventually. And it hasn’t even technically happened yet, so...”

"And when it does happen, it's not like it’s forever,” he says, in his most pacifying tone of voice. “There will be more missions for you once the baby is here and you've had a chance to recuperate."

Jyn nods, though even that feels like a lie. “I’m sure there will be,” she says, hoping that her tone is mild enough that Cassian won’t sense her internal conflict.

Of course, he immediately tilts his head and stares at her with narrowed eyes. She can’t get anything past him. “What’s the matter?” He asks.

“Nothing.”

“Jyn...”

“I’m serious,” she insists, even as Cassian comes to sit on the edge of the bed next to her. “It’s nothing!”

Of course, she has no idea how she’ll actually feel once she has the baby, but with every passing day, she wonders more and more if she’ll even want to go back to Rebel Intelligence once her leave is over. It’s always been more Cassian's thing than it has ever been hers and the idea of giving it up doesn't feel like a betrayal of who she is in the way it would be for him if anyone dared to ask him to do it. She doesn't want to ask that of him, either, she just needs to be sure he'll be alright doing it without her. Then again, he did it with only K2 for backup for years and somehow managed to survive, so maybe she's just being self-important thinking he'll care if she's with him on missions in the future or not. Still, trailing after Cassian in the field is most of what she does for the Alliance; she's not sure what else she'd be good for.

There's also the fact that she imagines she won't be in high demand for missions once she has a young child at home depending on her. The representative who explained when she would have leave from her duties was also adamant that her choice to have a family would not interfere with her chances at promotions or assignments, that the Alliance did not discriminate in that regard and she should file an official complaint if she experienced any such discrimination. Jyn knows that, in a perfect world, that would all be true. But even the Alliance isn't perfect and, if she were a general, her first choice of who to send to the front lines wouldn't be someone's parent. People will naturally assume her priorities have changed and they may even be right. She doesn't know how she'll feel yet, so she's trying to keep an open mind and imagine all the alternatives. But she doesn't want to have that fight with Cassian right now--the one where he assures her that she's valuable to the team and better in the field than she actually is and she gets mad at him, irrationally, for always seeing the best in her--so she doesn't say any of that. She just squeezes his hand.

"I'm just a little nervous about going on another mission like this, that's all," she says, which is true, so she doesn't have to feel bad about the other conversation she's avoiding. "When do we leave?"

"Three days," Cassian replies, and she knows he's choosing to let her off the hook for now, rather than actually being fooled by her excuse. This whole being in love with a spy thing is no joke.

"We'd better tell the others, then."

"Yeah, I'm on my way to do just that."

"I'll come with you," Jyn says, pushing herself up to a seated position with considerable effort. She's still not showing, but she feels more pregnant every day.

"Are you sure?" Cassian asks, brows knitting together in concern.

"You afraid the walk from here to Baze and Chirrut's quarters will kill me, or something?"

"Well, now I am!"

"The last trimester's going to be a lot of fun for you, I can tell."

He glares at her for that. "I was actually thinking that maybe you'd rather sit this one meeting out because maybe you were still upset about the team's reaction to your announcement. I could make your excuses, if that's what you want."

It really would be easy to make up a reason not to go. Between the exhaustion and the morning sickness and the insomnia, pregnancy offers no shortage of opportunities to be antisocial. And the situation with the team is more or less the same as it was a few weeks ago: everyone is still being exceedingly casual about her and Cassian having a baby. Aside from Bodhi asking her how she's feeling with increased frequency, everyone has been acting like it's business as usual. Jyn has done her best not to take it personally—she's sure Cassian is right and they would care more if she talked about it more, but she's not sure she's ready to risk it just yet.

"I'm fine," she says and almost means it. "I'm over it. I'll come with you. If we go to Baze and Chirrut's place first, we'll probably find Bodhi too. He's been over there a lot lately."

Once she succeeds in getting herself out of bed, she and Cassian wind their way through the maze of hallways on the base--Jyn swears that every time they pick up and move to evade the Empire, the rebels make the layout of the new base more confusing--and arrive at the door right before a voice within calls out, "Come in!"

Cassian looks at her with a perplexed frown on his face. She shrugs, because she presumes his confusion is about how they knew to expect them and she has no answer to that. Chirrut just knows things, sometimes. She's moved past being perturbed by it and just accepted it as a very strange part of her life. Cassian acknowledges her non-answer with a nod and punches in the code to the keypad next to the door, which sweeps open to reveal Baze, Chirrut, Bodhi, and K2 gathered together and each absorbed in the task of what looks like knitting.

"What is happening right now?" Jyn asks before she can stop herself. She looks over at Cassian again, only to find him wearing an expression as baffled, she imagines, as her own.

"We are constructing baby items," Kay answers readily.

"You're...what?" she asks, at the same time as Bodhi hushes Kay.

"Oh, right," Kay replies. "It is a secret. We are not doing anything."

"It was meant to be a secret," Baze interjects pointedly, "but I suppose that's over now."

"If it was meant to be a secret, why'd you tell us to come in?" Cassian asks, clearly still recovering from his shock.

"We're expecting Taidu and Melshi any moment," Bodhi says.

"And someone claimed he would recognize their footsteps if he heard them outside," Baze adds, with a glare at Chirrut.

"I knew they were the footfalls of our friends," Chirrut replies. "That should count for something."

Jyn shakes her head, still not understanding the situation she's walked into. "You're waiting for Taidu and Melshi to do...what?"

"To...construct baby items," Bodhi answers, with a sheepish smile.

"For...?"

Bodhi gives her a long look. "For you," he finally says, like she's being dense.

"For me?"

"Well, for your baby, technically. Yours and Cassian's. You do remember telling us about that, right?"

"Yeah, I remember, I just thought..."

"What?"

"We thought maybe you'd forgotten about that," Cassian says, after a moment of Jyn struggling for words. He puts his hand on her arm reassuringly and she's annoyed to find her eyes are filling with tears.

"'Forgotten,'" Baze grumbles under his breath as he shakes his head, which does an eloquent job of showing what he thinks of that idea. He doesn't so much as miss a stitch in whatever he's knitting, though.

"It was Baze's idea," Chirrut pipes up from his side. "Back when we used to run the orphanage in Jedha City, he'd sometimes make things for the kids when we didn't have enough donations. One of the women in the marketplace taught him, and he taught me."

He holds up what he's working on, which is a tiny, fancy-looking sock, just like the one Baze is making. There's a pile of similar items on the bed between them.

Jyn swallows around the lump in her throat. Baze doesn't often talk about their life on Jedha before she showed up and disrupted everything. Chirrut is more forthcoming, naturally, but she gets the sense it's painful for both of them, just in different ways. The fact that they're making clothes for her child makes this piece of their history even more precious to her.

"Socks?" she asks, leaning closer to see.

"Booties," Chirrut corrects, cheerfully.

"Fancier than a sock, but not as sturdy as a shoe," Bodhi adds, helpfully. When she looks over at him, she notices that's not what he's making and, as if sensing her gaze, he immediately ducks his head in embarrassment and adds, "I'm not making those anymore. I had a little trouble with the shaping."

"Bodhi is working on a blanket, which is just as important," Baze interjects, sternly, "and only involves knitting in straight lines."

"And I'm winding yarn," Kay adds, gesturing with his hands to show them the purple yarn wound perfectly around them and feeding into Bodhi's project.

"Which is also just as important," Bodhi says, deliberately, in Jyn and Cassian's direction, as if daring them to laugh.

"Yes. It is," Kay says, happily.

Jyn feels herself scramble for a reaction to all this that isn't collapsing into a ball of tears on the floor, which would be embarrassing, or fleeing from the room, which would be rude and potentially also embarrassing. Then again, sobbing in front of everyone might seem unappreciative, so that might also be rude. She doesn't have a lot of good options here.

She feels Cassian squeeze her bicep with the hand he still has resting on her arm, and she turns to him in tearful bewilderment. She sees some of her own fond confusion reflected back at her in his eyes, and just a little bit of I told you so in the small smile he gives her.

"I don't understand," she says, in his direction, but mostly to the others. "Why are you doing all this?"

"You're going to need clothes and things for the baby, and I assumed you and Cassian don't have much left from when you were that age," Baze says, as if this should all be obvious.

Jyn swallows painfully, the reminder of her childhood not being a pleasant one. But he's right. She certainly doesn't have anything from when she was a baby, and, knowing what she does of Cassian's past, it's unlikely he does either. Neither of them are really the sentimental type, anyway, by training if not by nature. At least, they didn't used to be.

Things change, though, she thinks as she covers Cassian's hand with her own. "No," she says to Baze, "we don't."

He nods, as if this was the conclusion he's been waiting for her to arrive at. "Where Chirrut and I are from, it would be your families that made such things for you when you're expecting your first child, so I thought we could put something together for you." He pauses, frowning. "Perhaps I should have--I didn't mean to assume..."

"No, it's--" Jyn takes a deep breath, overwhelmed. "Thank you."

"It means a lot to us," Cassian says to the group, as he wraps his arm around her shoulders.

Baze nods again, accepting their gratitude with his usual placidity, and Chirrut smiles down at his project. When she catches Bodhi's eye, he winks at her before turning his attention back to his stitches and K2 naturally has no idea that any of this emotional upheaval is happening right in front of him. Jyn feels more stable now and less like she might start sobbing at any moment, but the threat of it is still very real when Cassian tightens his hold on her, bringing her closer into his side.

"Alright?" He asks, quietly enough that only she can hear.

She feels a single tear roll down her cheek and hurries to brush it away, and when she looks at Cassian, she can see his eyes shining with moisture as well. At least she's not alone, she thinks as she smiles up at him.

"Yeah, I just...I'm a little overwhelmed. I mean, look at all the stuff they're making us!"

"I know," he says, fondly. "This baby is going to be so lucky, having all these people to love them."

"Right, that," Jyn says, waving a hand. "But seriously, look at all those baby socks!"

"Yeah, I see them. What's wrong?"

"It's just...how many feet do they think our baby is going to have?!"

Cassian glares at her and she can only withstand it for about a second before she starts laughing. He pulls her into his arms and she can feel him laughing too.

"Whatever happens," he says, as he kisses the top of her head, "we've got them covered."