Her father doesn't have the faith in science he once had, and religion has always been a faraway concept to him. It meant a great deal to Lyra, so he respected it even if he didn't understand it, but his strange dreams and stranger relationship to the crystals he worked with hadn't saved him. Hadn't saved Lyra.
So if he's going to find faith at all--it's here. This one hope, that he'd only given form to in his strongest moments: that Jyn might still be out there somewhere. That she wasn't with Saw anymore had been a surprise, from what little info he's gathered, but Saw ...Saw had changed. If Lyra was alive, if they'd made it together away from Alpinn, would she have fallen to that fate? Scarred over and twisted by constant fighting, constant fear--no, he can't believe that. Never Lyra.
Then again he doesn't know his daughter so well as he once had, either. Now is the opportune time to find out, it seems. The opportune time being the only time. "Yes. So you are."
It's a little choked; when he backs up just to arm's length, keeping his hands tight on her shoulders, his eyes are wet. "Let me have a look at you." ....a look that seems like it might go on quite a while, Galen trying to draw the lines that melted away a child's features; she has her mother's mouth, strong and stubborn and petulant, the kind that grows radiant in smile; the nose and cheekbones could be either--but. Even when she was little, she had his eyes.
"So much of your mother," he murmurs, only semi-voluntarily; mostly it feels like a compulsion. "But so much that is just you, I think. I want--" he falters a little; the difficulty had been there with Bodhi too, the assumption that any grand words he might have to give would never actually be said. This is a lifetime's worth of words, though, everything he should have been there to say as she grew. "There's so much I want to tell you. For you to understand. Will you tell me of you, first? Anything you like."
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So if he's going to find faith at all--it's here. This one hope, that he'd only given form to in his strongest moments: that Jyn might still be out there somewhere. That she wasn't with Saw anymore had been a surprise, from what little info he's gathered, but Saw ...Saw had changed. If Lyra was alive, if they'd made it together away from Alpinn, would she have fallen to that fate? Scarred over and twisted by constant fighting, constant fear--no, he can't believe that. Never Lyra.
Then again he doesn't know his daughter so well as he once had, either. Now is the opportune time to find out, it seems. The opportune time being the only time. "Yes. So you are."
It's a little choked; when he backs up just to arm's length, keeping his hands tight on her shoulders, his eyes are wet. "Let me have a look at you." ....a look that seems like it might go on quite a while, Galen trying to draw the lines that melted away a child's features; she has her mother's mouth, strong and stubborn and petulant, the kind that grows radiant in smile; the nose and cheekbones could be either--but. Even when she was little, she had his eyes.
"So much of your mother," he murmurs, only semi-voluntarily; mostly it feels like a compulsion. "But so much that is just you, I think. I want--" he falters a little; the difficulty had been there with Bodhi too, the assumption that any grand words he might have to give would never actually be said. This is a lifetime's worth of words, though, everything he should have been there to say as she grew. "There's so much I want to tell you. For you to understand. Will you tell me of you, first? Anything you like."