Rough Day by guardianangelicas

The Floor is Better

This story doesn't belong to me. It belongs to guardianangelicas on AO3.

Alright so this bed is, like.  Atrociously uncomfortable.

It's not even a bed.  It's a cot.  Just a bare minimum place to sleep, shoved into the wall and taking up less space than the ship's armory.  Like a... like a really shitty gurney almost, except no padding.  So not even a gurney then, just a fucking.  Piece of metal.  Just a piece of fucking metal to sleep on.

There's surprisingly a bit of space to maneuver yourself when you're pulled into the cubby completely like this, and yeah, it's quiet and dark in here but man does your back hurt.  Is his spine made of metal, too?  Is that why he prefers this?  The floor isn't a feather mattress by any stretch of the imagination, but at least there aren't any uneven support bars digging into your side.

You're on Coruscant, and Mando's been gone for over three weeks.

It.  Fucking.  Blows.

You've literally run out of ideas to occupy your time.  You're far enough above Coruscant's dangerous underworld to not worry about any potential... mishaps, like what happened on Corellia, but the only issue with the ground being so far below you is that it's not like you can just stroll down the road and buy yourself a deck of cards at the nearest merchant.  The only shop within walking distance of this hub contains the bare essentials; things like food, medical equipment and bacta, spare electronics and parts—all of which you purchased without hesitation.  Other than that, you need a ship to travel anywhere in this massive galactic capital, and while you just so happen to have a ship, what you don't have, at least right now, is a Mando.

Fuck, but you did.  Before he left, you had Mando all to yourself for at least a full hour.  After he landed the Crest in a long-term terminal and turned his attention back to you, for some reason, he was insatiable.  It didn't really make much sense back then, but in hindsight, it's like he knew good and well how long he was going to be gone this time, attempting to search for a quarry on a planet with a population that broke a trillion last year.  It makes sense.  With this many people, a biometric tracking fob would be almost useless, and sure, you realize he set the ship down in the long-term terminal for a reason, but long-term with Mando typically means a week or two.  You suddenly realize that in a handful of days, he'll have been gone a full month.

You suppose you probably could fly the ship somewhere else and send him a coded coordinate set of your new location, but for some strange reason, you can't seem to reconcile going to all that trouble just because you're bored out of your fucking mind.  You don't want him to have to travel another however many miles out of his way to get back to you just so you won't have to twiddle your thumbs for weeks on end.  You don't want to run the risk of trying to make a quick trip there and back without alerting him of any change in location, either, especially on a planet this size.  He could return to the hub at any time, and if he comes back to a different ship parked in this lot, you'll probably never see him again.

Okay, no, that's not true—he hunts people for a living, and you have his kid.  You probably just wouldn't see him for at least another month or so, and by then he'd be fucking livid.

So.  You stay here.  The baby offers a distraction, but only to a certain point.  The ship is pristine right now, inside and out.  Fucking pristine.  Almost... almost compulsively so, you reluctantly admit.  The console's entire motherboard has brand new soldering and connections.  You used ear swabs to clean and polish each individual button, key, and knob in the entire flight deck.  You... may or may not have even labeled and color-coded the heat shrink wrap on every single cable in the Crest's patchbay, all five-hundred and something of them.  When you pried open the metal paneling that covered all the ship's interior routing jacks, you remember gasping at the sight of a mechanic's worst nightmare and wondering if the last person who touched it took even more than a few hours on its installation.  What used to be a horrifying tangle of haphazard wiring is now a lovely set of rainbow snakes meticulously gathered and bound together with zipties, and you're incredibly proud of it, though you still haven't decided whether or not you should be.