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Like every night since they brought her home three weeks ago, it’s his daughter’s soft cries that wake him. Little whimpers and whines that he’s learned will quickly morph into full-blown wails. He has a minute, at best.
Don keeps his eyes shut tight, listening. Waiting.
Maybe, just maybe, for the first time, she’ll go back to sleep instead. She’s gotta sleep through the night at some point, right? But seconds later he’s rubbing his face and blinking into the low dark as Lina’s cries do the expected: become a little louder. A little more insistent.
Barely a month old, and she’s already a force of nature. Just like her mother.
Don exhales a laugh, picturing Judy’s expression when she wants him to do something: her full, pouty lips; her big, pleading eyes...
Yeah...
He never stands a chance against that look.
Another cry hits his ears, and Don tilts his head toward the corner where Lina’s crib sits, her light-up mobile casting a dance of stars across the ceiling, the walls. Beside him Judy stirs, a soft, disoriented sound of her own joining their infant’s disgruntled ones as she peels her face up from the pillow.
“What time is it?” Her voice cracks in her half-awake state, and Don gently pushes her arm down when she begins to lift the blanket, readying to get up.
“Hey, no,” he whispers. “You sleep. I’ll take this one.”
Judy gives in immediately.
After weeks of these middle-of-the-night wake-ups, her usual determination has been replaced by exhaustion, and she collapses back into the pillows with a grateful sigh of “thank you...”
Don hums his acknowledgment, dusting a kiss and a soft I love you to her temple before tucking the covers tighter around her shoulders and sliding out from under them himself as Lina’s wails swell.
He hurries the few steps it takes to reach her crib, and in the light from the false constellation dangling overhead, he can see that she’s kicked off her blanket, her little hands and bootied feet flailing as she produces sounds far louder than lungs so small have any right too.
Judy often jokes that she gets her loud mouth from him, and in these moments of shocking volume, he can never decide if he wants to take that as a compliment or not…
As impressed as he is, though, he really wants to let Judy get some more rest.
“Alright, kiddo.” He leans into the crib, carefully positioning one hand under his daughter’s back and sliding the other behind her head to support her neck the way Judy taught him. “You’re okay. Daddy’s got you,” he murmurs as he picks her up, still so small, weighing almost nothing. He’s held wrenches that were heavier.
Lina’s cries sputter out for a moment as she nuzzles her face into his shirt like she’s searching for something. They return with full force when she doesn’t find it.
Don cradles her up to his shoulder and strokes her back, swaying in a gentle, calming rhythm.
“What’s the problem, hm?”
He performs a hesitant smell-check that tells him she doesn’t need a change yet, so...It must be feeding time?
“I hope you got Mom’s brains,” he mutters into a kiss on her chubby, cry-reddened cheek. “You gotta learn to talk stat. Dad’s pretty good at deduction, but words will be a lot easier.”
A breathy chuckle drifts from the cocoon of blankets on the bed and Don looks over, just able to make out Judy’s face in the light of the simulated stars orbiting across her.
Don shakes his head, giving her a small smile. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“I will,” comes her contented reply as she sinks deeper into the bedding, soft eyes still on him. “I love you,” she calls, quiet against the noise of their child.
If Lina was calm, he’d crawl back beneath the covers with her and hold them both—their own little colony of three.
But she isn’t calm. She’s cranky, and needs feeding, and he just volunteered for the job.
“I love you too.”
Gently bouncing Lina in his arms as her shrill screams continue, Don grabs a blanket from the crib and slings it over his free shoulder. He makes a quick stop at their bedside to give Judy a kiss, then heads out to the kitchen.
Not wanting to disturb his unhappy infant even more, he flips the lights to their lowest setting before retrieving one of the bottles Judy left in the fridge. As it heats in the microwave, he keeps up his soothing routine of gentle bounces and soft whispers into her softer hair.
Once the bottle is warmed, he settles on the couch, and Lina’s cries subside to short, sporadic whimpers. Don smiles as she makes tiny fists in the fabric of his t-shirt, and starts to rub her little nose into his chest again.
“Sorry, kid,” he chuckles. “Nothin’ there but pure muscle.”
He kisses the top of her head, careful of the spot that Judy told him would still be soft for the first few months before coaxing her back to replace his shirt with the bottle. Lina latches onto it like she hasn’t had a single morsel to eat in her entire short life, and she falls silent, save a few quiet sniffles and coos.
As Don watches her eat her fill, she watches him in return; her big, brown eyes, so much like Judy’s, so much like his, staring up at him.
It’s strange to recognize parts of himself in someone else.
Raised in that cold, Catholic orphanage, he hadn’t known his parents. Didn’t know if he had siblings. Had never met anyone he was related to. His whole life, it was just Don West; alone in a world that never seemed to want him.
Then he met the Robinsons. He met Judy. And he finally learned what family was. What it felt like to love, and, more importantly, what it felt like to be loved in return. To have people who cared, and who showed up when you needed them. He’d never had that growing up. But Lina?
Lina will have it all.
Her little hands come up against his on the bottle, and even as her impossibly small fingers close around his much bigger one, he knows that he’s the one wrapped around hers.
“Don’t worry, Lina,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “You won’t be alone. I’ve got you. Us Robinson-Wests? We stick together.”