ii. a different kind of stimuli
chapter two of the nature of living things
words: 11.5k
series rating: explicit
warnings: slow burn, canon typical violence, that good trope where someone gets hurt and the other tends the wound u know the business!!
a/n: i hope everyone enjoys the beginnings of dear droid girl and mando’s relationship!! also does anyone ever wonder why mando keeps zero’s body on the crest and doesn’t like. dump it somewhere lmao anyway hope you guys enjoy! (ps thank u to @equalstrashflavoredtrash for helping me shake this out, and thank u to stevie for being the original ear to hear this story out over a year ago 🥺)
(gif credit: @dindjaring)
You don’t get to look for your droid.
The cold settles in the valley well before the second sun joins its sister beneath a horizon that you can’t quite see from within the vertical walls of sandrock blocking you in — and the darkness follows not long after.
It isn’t the dark that stops your search, not even the cold that was creeping its way into the joints of your fingers — it’s the way the child rattles in your arms at the sudden drop in temperature. His tiny little body, even swaddled up in the wooly jacket that seemed to swallow up most of his form, vibrated with shivers as he hunkered himself deeper into your arms with a disgruntled babble.
So, no. You don’t get to look for your droid. You go looking for blankets instead.
It’s… weird to rifle around in the stranger’s ship — not because he’s a stranger, but because he’s alive. Even in the disarray, the ship doesn’t feel ghostly and detached in the same way the carcassed and picked over hulls strewn across the Plains do.
It feels occupied. Like a room someone had just stepped out of, quietly radiating with the knowledge that they’d return soon enough to catch you in a space you didn’t belong in.
The child fusses disquietly in the crook of your arm, his shivers turning into startles as white arcs of electricity crack and fizzle over head. The small glow-rod you had fished out of your scavenger kit gives a laughable amount of light — hardly offering anything more than an arm’s length of visibility as you blindly massacre your knees and shins on the crates strewn across the hull floor.
“Just hang tight, lil’ guy.” You murmur reassuringly to the megre organic bundle currently clutching onto your thumb with a cold clawed hand. The toe of your shoe drags carefully against the ship’s flooring, nudging crates and debris out of your way after checking their contents with your light. “Gotta be blankets around here somewhere.”
Most contained weapons. Varieties of them, scattered across the hull from upturned crates to the point where you couldn’t exactly tell them apart from any other piece of scrap metal torn away from the ship’s interior. You didn’t want to touch them — gingerly toeing them out of the way as if they might suddenly pop a pair of legs and begin running at you if you disturbed them too much.
You’re wound tight enough that your body gives a hard jolt at the sound of your boot blindly colliding with a crate light enough to topple completely upon impact.
Familiar silver-sealed packages spilled out onto the floor around it — at least three dozen of them.
Your stomach clenches down, knotting painfully in your abdomen with a fierceness that threatens to outweigh the general full body ache that hadn’t yet dissipated from your fall.
Flight food rations.
You don’t need to pick them up or read the labels to know what they are. You’d spent far too many frigid nights of your childhood hating the taste of them — gritty and bland with an aftertaste that you would waste far too much drinking water attempting to wash away — dreading the sight of the little reflective packages that your father would pass between the two of you over a struggling fire.
You had hated them. At least, until they ran out.
“I’m sure the Mandalorian won’t mind if we take some of these,” you murmur to the child as you hunch down, shovelling three of the pouches into one of your pockets, “He’s probably gonna be starving when he wakes up.”
Your hand hovers briefly over a fourth, and your stomach growls traitorously as you stuff it into a different pocket.
The child snorts, tilting his head to peer up at you accusingly.
“Don’t tell your dad about that,” you whisper conspiratorially down to him, earning a little nasal huff in response. “What? He did almost kill me and my droid. Consider it reparations.”
Aiming the light ahead into the darkness of the ship, your fingers absentmindedly massage over the child’s icy clawed hand. “Now, blankets, ” you hum, thinking out loud without much expectation of a response, “before your little ears freeze off.”
The kid squeaks up at you and you bite down on your bottom lip to hide the way the inflection of a simple alarmed note makes the edges of your mouth quirk upwards in amusement at the sheer familiarity of it.
You draw your thumb across the soft fleshy back of the child’s hand and push forward — the sooner you can get the kid comfortable, the sooner you can get back to helping your companion before it got any later.
It takes a long moment of blind fumbling through the unending pit of the ship’s belly before you find it.
Settled against the far right of the ship, and shaped more like a storage cubby than a… bed. Disarrayed from the crash, and the only tell-tale sign of it even being a bed are the strewn bundle of blankets, half wedged into a corner that your flashlight nearly skips over twice.
“This where you’ve been sleeping, kid?” you ask, tucking the handle of the light between your lips to use your non-child-occupied hand to reach in and start gathering the threadbare bundle of clothes. You can’t quite judge — your sleeping arrangements weren’t particularly any better — and you would have told him that had your mouth been free to use.
The child fusses up a sort of response as you kneel into the compartment to tug free the last of the blankets, subsequently yanking free something from within — hard and round and it hits the floor with a metal clatter as it rolls noisily from the cubby to disappear into the darkness.
The child twists his body in your arm to follow the noise, whining softly as you ignore it.
It takes a small feat of effort to wiggle yourself backwards out of the cubby with both arms effectively occupied, even more so when neither the aching muscles of your jaw nor the clench of your teeth manage to maintain their grip on the light dangling from your mouth. The glowrod drops — plopping into the pile of fabric that effectively swallows the light completely, and leaving you with nothing but the memory of how the hell you got this deep into the Mandalorian’s ship and no visual to guide you back out.
“Kriff,” you hiss softly, your eyes straining to adjust to the overwhelming darkness of the ship’s interior.
You blink a few times, narrowing and widening your eyes in an attempt to make out any kind of silhouette. All it does is make your head throb. “I’m not sure what species you are, kid, but now would be a great time to let me know if you can see in the dark.”
The child grouches, hunkering further into the crook of your arm as his tiny fingers burrow lightly into the sleeve of your tunic.
Alright.
Muscle memory, that’s all it is. You only need to retrace your steps towards the patch of sparsely star-lit sky that just barely suggested the exit point of the ship that you had come through.
You step forward, quiet in your concentration as your toe bumps against a crate with enough force to loudly nudge it aside.
Okay, you exhale steadily, so far so good—
You step forward again.
This time, the weight of your foot comes down on top of something. Something hard, round, and metal.
It pitches you forward in the darkness, unsteady and blind and squealing as your instincts force you into a last minute twist to protect the child from taking the brunt of the fall.
The side of your shoulder slams into the uneven metal of the hull’s wall and the pain that blooms hot alongside your embarrassment fails to fully form into a coherent response when the wall starts talking.
“F-found some— some in-informa-ation—,” the voice crackles up from a few inches over your head, metallic and broken and you’re already rippining yourself away, staggering back until another crate hits the back of your knees. You drop backwards, landing hard on your ass with a startled squeak from the child as you scramble backwards, staring through the darkness at… at…
You don’t even know what it is.
Your thoughts are nothing but black panic, pulling blanks for any logical rationalization. Red and white lights blink in the dark, illuminating just enough of a pair of bulging bug-like eyes and a misshapen head and —
“Ma-mandalorian—” It garbles out, shifting jerkily in the darkness with every word.
Your heart hammers faster than your legs can move as you clamber upwards, petrified of whatever that thing is, speaking to you in the darkness of this occupied-unoccupied ship .
The flashlight had already gone skittering somewhere amongst the debris and you don’t stop to look for it when you tuck the child in close, tighten your grip on the last few blankets you’re still somehow clinging onto, and book it.
You don’t take the time to climb out with the same careful maneuvering as you had come in — instead, you take a seated jump out of the broken open entrance with the kid braced in protectively to your chest. The impact shoots up your knees and back, flaring another spike of residual pain across your abdomen that staggers you forward.
The child burrows up against your sternum with a small noise, one hand already gripping into the blankets as you clutch both of them to your body.
“Don’t—” you gulp out, winded and teetering on your feet, “don’t tell your dad about that either.”
—
“See, kid? The red wire is supposed to fit to the red terminus, and the blue to the blue terminus. Gotta keep that in mind, very important stuff. Mix them up and Beedee might start walking backwards.”
The fire you built was admittedly a little on the measly side — the best you could manage using the torn off canvas that once covered your workstation and the small electric firestarter kit that had cost you a broken fuel reserve from the Jawas.
Still, it warmed the space enough that the kid sitting between your feet wasn’t trembling anymore.
Lifting the cluster of droid parts from your lap, you spread your knees slightly to peer down at the tiny little fella, bundled with one of the blankets engulfing his small frame with just enough free space to allow a single clawed hand to disappear into one of the silver food packets. Reaching down, you gently fix the hood of his makeshift blanket cloak to cover more of his sparsely haired head.
“You know, kid,” you speak quietly, the words nothing more than thoughts that sounded far too loud in your own head to remain unspoken, “you remind me of him. Except he didn’t get cold, so that’s new. Or hungry, actually. Unless he needed an oil change. Then he just got sassy — kid?”
The child’s head doesn’t tip up to look at you. Instead, it remains trained forward, focus sincerely on the unconscious Mandalorian crudely propped up against the broken landing gear at the opposite end of the fire.
It had been a feat to drag him closer to the fire and away from where he had fallen against the broken ramp — and between the full brunt of his dead weight and that armour that probably weighed the same as the body within it, you’d only managed hardly a few feet before your body threatened to revolt against you and into a new wave of spasms.
With the approaching darkness quickly stealing visibility from you, you hadn’t had much of a chance to admire him, but now… you looked.
The helmet lolled back against the ship, but the visor sat at enough of an angle that it gave the eeriest sensation of being watched right back. You would have actually feared that he might be watching you from behind the helmet, but the Mandalorian sits unmovingly. He hadn’t even stirred in the moments when you settled him in, your movements sloppy enough that you’d apologized twice for unintentionally letting his head or limbs knock into debris — nor had he shown any signs of rousing when you’d taken a moment’s more time than needed to place his hands into his lap, distracted by the complicated pieces of armour wrapped around his forearm.
The blanket you had tucked in around a pair of broad shoulders hardly stretched the full length of his body, pooling up just at his waist and over his arms. He probably didn’t need it under all those layers, and it hardly covered him anyway with the sheer amount of… of…
Kriff, there was a name for it. That metal.
You knew it — you’d heard the vowels, the consonants all jumbled together in your head with the same fuzziness of something that existed precariously at the tip of your tongue, muted by disuse and time and the general haze of childhood memories. Something repeated over your unassuming head far too many times for you to forget it, but far too unimportant in the grand scheme of childhood for you to remember it either.
Your gaze drifts back to the child, cooing quietly, and a small twinge of guilt settles in your gut for your trigger-happy rock throw earlier.
“I know you’re worried about your dad,” your voice softens as you brush the tip of your finger across one of the kid’s forehead wrinkles. “He’ll be awake soon, don’t worry. Here—”
The child murmurs little baby jabber as you scoop him — blankets and all — onto your lap. He settles into the nook of your stomach, cooing curiously as you settle the pieces of Beedee’s torso mechanics against your knees infront of him. You offer the small spare screwdriver from your tool kit, smiling faintly when he abandons the food pouch to wrap his tiny clawed hand around the blunt end. “Help me with this, yeah? Yeah.”
He doesn’t exactly help. Mostly, he just gnaws stubby teeth over the screwdriver handle as you host a very one-sided demonstration of how to attempt to put the severely mangled pieces of your companion droid back together.
“I’m… sorry you crash landed here.” Your words drift soft through the chilly breeze, pensive and distant and you talk mostly to yourself than to the child, though he still gurgles around the handle — which you easily take as a satisfactory contribution to the conversation. Your fingernail picks absentmindedly at a rust spot on Bee’s knee joint, a steady frown slowly rumpling your brow. “Not really a… great place, you know? For a kid.”
The child coos again, and this time you look down to find him peering up at you with those round, glassy eyes that feel a little… too perceptive in the way that they regard you.
“My dad,” the words drift out of your mouth without much thought, and your brows draw together softly as the little one observes you with a quiet kind of interest that invites you to keep speaking, “for a long time after we got here — he’d promise that the next stop would be somewhere… better. Somewhere gr—”
A flash of light burns up at the corner of your eye.
Bright and quick and disappearing before you have the time to pull the kid into your arms and swivel to your feet.
Your eyes scan the crater ridges where the dark jagged silhouette of the valley’s towering craters give way to an only marginally lighter sky.
“Did you see that?”
The kid burps around the screwdriver knob, unbothered as you frown at the darkness that surrounds you wholly, the bonfire only offering an abysmal circle of visibly beyond where you stood.
“Can’t be Jawas,” you state vaguely, “the ‘Crawler’s too loud. We’d hear them coming.”
Your heart offers a sickening skip in your chest at the other option.
Could be raiders.
The type you’d only seen from a distance, hollering in different tongues and tearing through shipwrecks, hunting down swathes of desert creatures for a quick bloody meal with salvaged blasters and scrap metal weapons before—
The wind shifts, and the child shivers, and something moves behind you.
You respond too quickly to feel the appropriate amount of guilt for snatching the screwdriver from the child, your movements swift with fright as you spin around to jab it threateningly at the very awake — and very much pointing a blaster at you — Mandalorian.
The relief that exhales out from your lungs hardly quells the way your heart still hammers at the sight of him.
Upright, he is… intimidating.
The fire throws light across the armour, casting deep shadows into the sharp angles of the helmet that you somehow register as glaring at you, despite not quite having the features to emote such a sentiment.
“You’re up—” you breathe.
“The kid—” he interjects.
His voice cuts through yours, sharp and curt, and for a moment you’re almost stunned. Floored by the depth of it, the presence, the… humanness. You blink at him again, and you don’t even register that you’ve been holding the screwdriver handle-end outwards because — kriff, how long has it been since you’ve heard another person’s voice?
Not a Jawa. Not a droid. A person.
Standing right infront of you.
And not just a person—
“You’re a Mandalorian,” you echo your thoughts out loud, sounding just as incredulous as you had been when you found him. You exhale a short disbelieving laugh, staring up at the helmet that only tips sideways as you start talking again — to him, to yourself, to no one in particular— “And— and you’re okay. Probably concussed, I mean. But you’re up—”
Your arm drifts downward, almost lowering the screwdriver that you’d nearly forgotten why you’d grabbed. Almost. Until he steps in closer, still obviously unsteady with unconsciousness judging by the way his blaster droops in his grip.
The child wriggles in the crook of your arm, reminding you of his presence against your body as he starts fussing.
“The kid. ” The Mandalorian repeats, the words dragging deep and cutting through the slightest muffle of the helmet despite the sluggishness that still clings to them. “Give him to me.”
You take a step back in tandem with his approach forward and re-steel your grip on the screwdriver.
You don’t know why you do it. He’s right. You should give him the kid — it is his kid. But you look down at the balster aimed at your chest and find yourself slowly drawing the child in defensively. Your body tilts away, leading with your screwdriver and buffering the little one as far as you can from the weapon. Steadying yourself again, you speak: “Put down the blaster first.”
The Mandalorian takes another step forward, sand crunching beneath his boots as you retreat backwards again until the back of your leg bumps into the crate you had been sitting on.
You follow him with your eyes, gauging his next movement to plan your subsequent ones.
He is big. Broad enough that when he steps in front of the fire you pray to the Maker that the shadow he casts is dark enough to mask the way your throat constricts as you swallow down the taste of your nerves.
“I’m not going to ask again.” His voice drags along the edge of the threat, sharpening it with promise.
“You didn’t ask the first time.” The words don’t even pause on your tongue for reconsideration, and you bite your own tongue for muttering them at all.
The Mandalorian’s fingers flex around the blaster, and — what exactly did your father’s old stories say about Mandalorian stances on killing strangers? Whatever it was, something told you that you might be pushing very close to finding out the answer to that question if you kept speaking recklessly.
This time, when he steps forward again, you have nowhere to go but up. Your legs scramble onto the crate, the entire thing a little too small and a little too unsteady, but you hold your ground, weapon boldly — though shakily — poised.
“Look, okay— just—” In your arms, the child chirps up a few notes of babbles, squirming enough that you awkwardly bounce him against your hip to reestablish a grip. It’s almost instinctive the way the Mandalorian starts forward, one hand extended as though ready to catch the child should you drop him. The movement makes your knees wobble, and the Mandalorian quickly pauses in his approach. “Y-you— you got the dust knocked out of you in that landing, big guy. And I'm not handing the kid over when you look like you’re about to keel over again, with a blaster. So— we can either stand here all night pointing weapons at each other, or you can put that blaster down and we can talk.”
A beat passes between you.
You — standing a crate taller with your palm growing sweaty and slick around the metal end of your screwdriver.
The Mandalorian — half blocking you in with a blaster locked unsteadily at your torso and a visor silently shifting between you and the fussy cargo nestled in your arm.
And the child — still croaking up throaty noises as he lifts his arms towards the armoured stranger.
Your heart hammers hard in the centre of your chest as he regards you and — kriff. You swallow again and hope he doesn’t notice because there’s something predatory in the way he watches. Analytical and silent, like he’s assessing every coil of your muscles to predict your next move and his best counterstrike should you choose not to give up the child, and you’re suddenly uncomfortably aware of the striking lack of protection you have should he decide to —
“That’s not much of a weapon.”
Your brows twitch together in the smallest inflection of confusion, your gaze slowly following the line of his visor’s vision to the blunt, mildly spit-glistened screwdriver handle that you were currently threatening him with.
Heat blooms in your cheeks, but you tighten your grup around the wrong end and pointedly jut your arm outwards again. “At least I can point it straight.”
He’s slow in lowering his blaster — slow enough that you only realize how long you’ve been holding your breath when your lungs begin burning for air well before the weapon even reaches the holster against his hip. He raises his empty hands, palms to you, before taking another slow step forward. “Now,” his voice draws low and final, “give me the kid.”
You… don’t know why you hesitate. But you do.
You look back down at the child — small and green and warm in your arms, and very much not like the explorer droid you were used to holding. And you… hesitate .
The kid babbles eagerly towards the Mandalorian, and the appearance of yellow-tipped gloves at the edge of your vision admittedly startles you. It’s instinctive, for the briefest moment, the way you draw the child in closer before wearily passing him off to the Mandalorian’s hands.
“Be careful with him,” you half-chide, the words mostly just an errant thought bubbling up from the constriction of your throat.
There’s a tenderness to the way the Mandalorian carefully bunches the loose tail of the blanket beneath the child, tucking him into the crook of his arm at the softest points of his armour. The kid giggles up at him as he tucks the coat beneath his chin and suddenly your arms feel markedly empty.
Your fingers flex against your side, and your eyes drift to the collection of droid parts now sitting in a hastily discarded heap beside the crate.
“He’s not hurt,” you offer thoughtlessly, hopping down from on top of the crate to begin gathering up what was left of your BD unit’s lower half, “I found him walking around the ship after you crashed. Not a scratch on him.”
The Mandalorian looks down at the child, and the child returns the gaze with an innocent snort.
You don’t catch the exchange, the Mandalorian already turning away by the time you finally straighten up, Bee messily settled into your arms again as you throw a short glance back towards the canyon’s edge. However, judging by the weight of the curse that echoes dully from beneath the helmet, you can guess the state of his ship comes as a surprise to him.
In the firelight, the ship is nothing but a shadowed monstrosity — patches of it darker where missing panels swallowed the light, its torn off pulsar jet ruining the symmetry of the silhouette with jagged edges that looked more like the planet itself had used its teeth to tear the gunship apart.
“What planet is this?” the Mandalorian asks, and the question falls somewhere between irritation and aggravation, and you can’t quite register whether it’s directed at you or the circumstance.
“Don’t know,” you admit. The Mandalorian turns his head and shoulders to look at you again, and something about the flourish of the movement tells you that that might not have been the answer he was anticipating. “But you’re lucky,” you continue, “could have been a lot worse. For you, at least. Most of the times when ships come down that ugly I find the bones a couple months or years later in the Sand Pits. Depending on where the Jawas drop them when they’re done strippiing the ship — and kriff, they would have had a field day with you—”
“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?”
There’s a cut to the Mandalorian’s question — a curtness that draws your guards up again, puts you on the defensive and steals the casualty from your tone.
“I mean I don’t remember,” you restate carefully. This time, the Mandalorian turns the rest of his body completely in your direction and you fight the overwhelming urge to step back. “I crashed here. Same as you.”
It’s not the fear that he’d hurt you — pull the blaster back out of its holster and do away with the strange girl that had no real answer to the valid questions he was asking. You reckon if he really wanted to, he would have done that the moment the child was out of your grasp.
It’s not that at all.
He… intimidates you.
You can’t read him right — and even if you could, you don’t doubt that you’d have read him wrong anyway. Everything about the stranger that once again blocks your path is intimidating. The armour, the size of him, the bass and warp of a voice that seems both warmly, familiarly human and yet not quite — something out of the stories you remember only in the tone of your father’s steady voice. An apparition almost, drawn up from nights spent half-dozed over blueprints that never quite made any sense to an adolescent brain that only understood the significance by the frequency and reverence in your old man’s voice when he rambled over the topic.
“You said years,” he presses on, and it takes you a second to recall the point in your rambling where you had unintentionally said that at all. “How long have you been here?”
How long. The question shouldn’t make you pause, or flex your jaw, or search his helmet’s gaze as long as you do.
How long? You’d kept track once — filled over the text of stray book your father had found in a downed cargo ship with neat little lines and crosses until one day you just… stopped. You’d never tallied them all up. Never amounted the sum of all those days into a tangible number. You couldn’t even remember now the last time you had seen that book, couldn’t even fathom how many long days had passed that hadn’t been added to the count of short, unhelpful lines. Your clothes had gotten harder to fit in, your shoes smaller, your hair longer, and the count had never ended — writing it down didn’t make a difference. You’d always be counting down to the same end, just with the hope that you’d have met it in the company of the now silent and still droid nestled in your arms.
You don’t tell the Mandalorian this.
Besides, it feels like whatever answer you give him isn't the one he wants to hear. So, you straighten your back and tip your chin upwards, bracing your response with more confidence than you possessed in the moment:
“Why does it matter?”
His helmet regards you. It tilts, just slightly enough that it catches the orange firelight against its side.
It puts you on edge the longer he stares.
“You’re right,” the Mandalorian finally states. “It doesn’t.”
The words slap you.
Blunt and dismissive and it rings in your ears with that steely cut of his vocoder — strikes you silent and stunned and all you can do is stare as he turns back towards the wreckage and begins walking away and —
There it is again. Swelling thick and painful in the back of your throat, a lump that hurts to swallow around and you… you hate it — you hate the feeling, the helplessness and frustration that all seem to fight for an attention that couldn’t be split enough ways to give every individual emotion its space. You hate the circumstances — the ship, the crash, the pieces of your life scattered across the cold canyon, the fact that this is the first person you’re meeting in so many years and— and the way he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter.
A nugget of truth exists in the statement, a reason the sting of his words puts a quiver in your bottom lip — and you hate that too, and you can’t stop yourself when your feet start carrying you forward, following in his footsteps and buzzing with that low hum of emotion.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” You call to him, voice tight with unwelcome tears. Kriff, you wish you had another rock to throw at him when he doesn’t even turn around. “Hey—!”
It’s not your voice that makes the Mandalorian stop.
It’s the blaster shot that singes hot and bright through the darkness — fast enough that you only register it after —
Heat blooms across the edge of your cheekbone, the air burning hot and pungent with singed hair as it whizzes past your periphery to burst apart against the side of the Mandalorian’s shoulder plate.
He staggers forward at the surprise of it, and all you can do is blink. The angered flame that had burned so brightly in your chest only moments ago fizzles to nothing.
Warmth drips down the curve of your jaw, and your right ear rings loud enough that the words the Mandalorian barks at you only registers when a gloved hand sharply tugs at the crook of your arm. He pulls you forward with enough force that you stagger into the side of his chest.
“Wha—?” Your voice echoes outside of your own head, your brain playing catch up in deciding whether to first process the twinges of pain flaring across the side of your face or the child being shoved into your arms ontop of the droid parts already overflowing from between them.
Then you hear it.
Not the Mandalorian—
The hooting.
Deep and throaty and cutting through the canyon like the baritone of a hundred different rolls of thunder. First it came from your left—
Then your right—
War cries in the night, somewhere outside of the small perimeter of firelight where the darkness falls thick and heavy. The noise ricochets across the canyon, a feedback loop so effective that you’re not even sure what was an original call, and what was simply an echo.
“Raiders—” you blurt out, your voice swallowed and unsteady as you step back in tandem with the Mandalorian, guided by the firm grip curled across your bicep.
He cages you behind him, placing you and the child between his body and the side of the wreckage. You decide not to question whether he’s defending you or the whining baby cradled in your arms when he braces one arm outwards to cover you both. His other hand draws his blaster against the threat that neither of you can see. “Get in the ship.”
You open your mouth to argue — to tell him that you both need to run, that you’ve seen their jagged rust-and-blood coated weapons, seen how they tear into the hulking, peaceful sand beasts that lumbered too slowly through the Pits and—
Something drops into the sand beside the struggling fire with a muted metallic thwunk.
Both of your heads drop to the device.
Light bursts across the blackened canyon, brilliant and stark white and your eyes throb in your skull as you flinch behind the protection of the Mandalorian’s shoulder.
He blindly recoils with a grunt, bumping hard into you and you’re just grateful that he’s close enough for you to knot a hand against the coarse fabric of his cloak because when you finally blink your eyes open you actually have to double check that you didn’t still have them closed.
Darkness — like fabric over your eyes and dense enough that the fragments of embers that dance up from the extinguished fire offer nothing more than ghostly starlight that dissolves too fast to offer any substantial light.
Your hand knots tighter in the Mandalorian’s cloak. This close, you can hear his breathing — steady, quick and strong beneath the helmet and —
Quiet.
Unbelievably quiet. Everywhere.
Your heart hammers loud enough that you hear it in your ears.
“Get back in the—!”
He throws the command over his shoulder, ragged in his throat and breaking off into a harsh grunt when another blaster shot cuts bright though the canyon to explode against his chest plate.
It takes you a startled moment to register the words, let alone the way he uses his arm to herd you backwards in the direction of the ship. “Go!”
Another blaster shot bursts up through the night — this time punctuated by a screech that meets the roar of a flame from the Mandalorian’s extended arm that was no longer protecting you and the child. The first raider recoils from the heat, only for a second to erupt from the darkness to the Mandalorian’s left — suddenly too close, shockingly close as he slashes down his weapon against the Mandalorian’s outstretched arm, effectively redirecting the flame downward.
The Mandalorian barks his order at you again, and your legs are lead and uncoordinated with fear and the last thing you want to do is leave the safety of his shadow, but when he snarls at you again to run — you run.
Your feet feel like they sink too fast and move too slow through the soft sand as you scramble forward, your path only illuminated by the blooms of orange flames and flashes of red blaster fire that explode against the crash debris in blinding intervals and — Kriff, you can hear them.
Shouts, accented and as course as sun-tanned leather, dried out under a merciless heat that hardened everything it touched —
And the Mandalorian — the sound of blasters and metal against armour, hard grunts that punctuate every reverberating strike and a part of you wants to turn back, to help him—
The child whines low in your arms, and you shove forward.
“It’s okay,” you say outloud, breathless. Your calves strain from the effort of gaining traction against the sand as you round the edge of the ship’s silhouette, aiming for the same blackened threshold you had climbed into earlier. “It’s okay, it’s okay—”
You push the child and your droid into the hatch first, your movements sloppy and blind as you use your hands to find the ledge that sits inches over your head. It takes the sum of all your upper body strength to manage to even jump high enough to leverage yourself over the gap.
You’re almost inside— one knee mercifully carrying the weight of you as your arm stretches forward, reaching to brace yourself amongst the debris—
Almost safe, almost ther—
Iron seizes down around your still outstretched ankle. Cold and biting and you hardly manage a shriek when it rips your leg out from beneath you, destabilizing you completely.
“No—!” Your arms scramble against the darkness, grabbing for purchase against the crates.
The floor of the hull skitters under our fingers before escaping you completely, the only weapons crate you had even managed to latch a hold onto spilling out with you, scattering its contents across the steel below. The force with which you hit the flattened ramp ricochets pain right through your lungs. You gasp against it, sucking down lungfuls of grit and sand that bloom up around you on impact.
You whimper, your voice trapped somewhere in your ribcage, and it takes more than a monumental effort to twist yourself around when the metal claw digging into your ankle starts dragging you across the ramp and towards its wielder.
“Come here, little mouse,” the rader chortles, the Basic choppy and just as abrasive as the ramp dragging raw against your back. He doubles the length of the winch across his forearms and in the flashes of fire and blasters, all you can make out is the glimmer of a silhouette — horned and massive and terrifying.
Fear twists hot in your stomach, seizing behind your throat in tight yelps with every curl of the raider’s arms bringing you closer and closer—
Your hands flail against the ramp surrounding you, grasping at anything — any of the fallen debris that offer any bit of resistance until—
Yes.
Your fingers curl around the cold barrel of a blaster, the form of it too complex to dare figure out, so you don’t think—
You throw.
A bluster of firelight from your left catches the way the weapon twists in the air to connect with a crack against the raider’s nose bridge. The winch drops as he recoils, offering just enough slack to scramble back to the entrance of the ship.
You don’t think about the pain that ignites anew in your chest or your back or your ankle as you hoist yourself back into the hull of the ship with the same speed and terror as a child yanking their legs away from the threatening terror of the underside of their cots.
You can still hear him — snarling and spitting and your brain offers the image of blood in the sand and you’re blind in the dark while your hands scramble for anything else — anything to defend yourself, to defend the little one whimpering nervously in the dark, because he’s coming back —
Anything, anything—
“Get back here—” The voice pulls like gravel over sandstone, ridges of a knife against bone, all violence and promise and when your hand skitters across the edge of a nearby crate you don’t think twice when you decide this will do—
The raider hisses into the darkness of the open hull, his silhouette approaching in staggered steps against the flashes of flames and blasterfire and you wait. Perched in the dark behind the heavy crate. Because you need him closer—
“—little mouse—”
Now.
You kick out with your feet, throwing all your power into shoving the crate in front of you out of the hatch and into his head.
The sound of the collision unsettles your stomach. The sickening smash of the steel crate against facial bones, the crash of weaponry across the durasteel that overpowers the sound of the raider’s body hitting the ramp. For a hard second you find yourself frozen solid. Vulnerable and open as you blink ahead at the glistening silver figure of the Mandalorian in the distance —
Three raiders, judging by the barrage of silhouettes surrounding him on all sides, each swinging various weapons that you couldn't quite see other than the blasters—
You should help him. He needs help. The Mandalorian needs help.
Your hands shake against the hull, surrounded by weapons you didn’t even know how to use to help —
Cold, clawed hands softly latch around your forearm, startling you from your stasis. The child burbles up at you, those inky black eyes reflecting what little light they could catch as he blinks up at you. Your brow furrows at him, at the distinct sense of quiet… clarity. Not peace — not ease — but clarity. It cuts through the flurry of terror, the paralysis — just as renewed and clear as the Mandalorian commanding you to go.
Another blaster shot snaps across the canyon, and you flinch as it zings overhead to disintegrate into a flurry of sparks in the interior of the hull.
Then, you’re moving again — finding the child in the darkness, the droid parts still sitting beside him, and gathering them both into your arms and running.
You stagger your way deeper into the ship’s belly, one shoulder pressed tightly to the side wall and taking care not to encounter whatever it is you had brushed up against earlier. All you need is to find a hiding spot — somewhere safe enough to hunker down with the little one, barricaded until —
Until the Mandalorian finds you, or —
You push the other option out of your head as your shoulder collides against the sharp steel of a — sticking your free hand out, you swat blindly until your fingers close down around a horizontal rung — a ladder, yes.
Adrenaline alone pushes you upwards, the child and bundle of mechno-parts precariously clutched to your body as you work yourself up into the cockpit hatch.
An ugly grinding sound burrs up from the blast doors, thrown off track by the crash and struggling to automatically open any further than a few feet, but you don’t need much space to work yourself through the gap and into the cockpit.
The dome shields offer just enough distant moonlight to suggest a path — and you stagger forward, your movements sloppy, clamouring and shaky as you scramble, all hands and knees, towards the dark underside of the console just beside the pilot’s chair.
You carefully sit the whining child against the deep leather of the seat, settling the armful of parts alongside him. “Don’t move,” you whisper, and your voice shakes just as much as the hand you brush over the shape of the little one’s head.
The cockpit hardly spans more than a few footsteps in either direction; enough space to feel secure, and just little enough space to feel trapped.
Barricading the door takes more strength than you can manage — shutting only a few additional inches before seizing completely when you attempt to force them closed by the strength of your own body.
Damnit.
You step back from the doors, chest heaving as your eyes drift across the cockpit wall for something — anything to keep you safe—
Until the Mandalorian finds you. The thought echoes in your mind as you back away, clenching and unclenching your fists as the distant sound of blaster fire against steel drift through the ship. Or someone else does.
You’re not sure if your knees finally give out, or if you actually sink to the floor again yourself.
The dome shields offer just enough light, yes — just enough to recognize that you were cornered — but also just enough to catch unassumingly against the smooth steel of something undoubtedly half-tossed into the shadows of the second co-pilot chair in the crash.
Hope flares hot and tight in your chest, overriding the pain that bands across your sternum as you stretch across the gap until—
A rifle.
Pronged at the tip and heavy enough that it takes two hands to drag it out into the open and even more effort to prop it against your knees as you fall back into your position beside the pilot’s chair.
The child watches from the pilot’s seat, babbling softly as you angle the weapon towards the blast doors.
“Okay, kid,” you mutter aloud, exhaling unsteadily as you curl your trembling hand across the wooden stock, your fingertip only just grazing against the steel trigger. It only takes the moment of stillness before exhaustion begins pulling at the edges of your vision, adding what feels like five more pounds to the weapon propped atop your knee. “Okay. We’re gonna be okay.”
Your eyes burn — dry from dust and sand and that heavy tiredness that ebbs in as your heart rate slows to a steady pace again —
“We just have to hold out,” you murmur, “Just a little longer.”
Just until the Mandalorian finds us.
—
The cockpit doors make an ungodly skreeeee as they’re wrenched open.
Loud and abrasive and overshadowed by the sound of the rifle in your hands firing across the empty space and into the spot just above the yellow-tipped gloves curling around the door’s misaligned edge.
The intruder recoils with a startled grunt.
“Easy!”
You blink into the dark, disoriented at how quickly the sleep drains out of your body, leaving just the hard rush of blood in your ears that hardly clears enough to hear the ragged voice of the Mandalorian.
“It’s me ,” he rasps, the words heavy and slow. “Door’s jammed.”
The child squabbles as you remove him from the nook between your thighs and stomach that he had somehow worked himself into while you dozed off.
The Mandalorian’s fingers curl into the gap again, leaving room for you to slot your own hand against the steel. Planting your feet against the ground, your palm slips across a patch of slick grease as you take hold of the blast door and pull.
The door gives with a grating scrape, and with it comes that scent—
Iron and metal hits the back of your nose as the Mandalorian staggers forward into the darkened cockpit, the weight of him falling into you before you have the chance to back up. You grunt at the impact, your slick hand slipping against the armour plating of his chest to land somewhere along the soft padding at his side in a sloppy attempt to catch him. The fabric squelches wetly against your fingertips — warm, unbelievably warm for how cold the steel of his armour is against your shoulder as you struggle to guide him into the cockpit.
He hisses at the contact, the noise pained and sucked in harshly through the bypass of the helmet, sharp enough that you babble out an apology when he catches your wrist, pushing it back to the chest plate instead of his side.
“You’re hurt,” your voice trembles again, pulled tight with strain of his weight as you awkwardly slump him down into the empty pilot's seat, “ Kriff, you’re really hurt—”
“I’ll be fine,” the Mandalorian swallows, dragging his arm across his abdomen as though finally surveying for himself the extent of his injury. You don’t need the visual of his face to know he speaks through gritted teeth. “The child—”
Fine—? You can feel his blood cooling thick and sticky across your palms and for once you’re almost grateful for the lack of light mercifully tinting the thick streaks of your bloody handprints on his armour into a black oil-slick.
“The kid's fine—” you lower yourself onto your knees beside the seat to get a better look at his wound. The helmet catches the dim light of the planet’s furthest moon through the cockpit’s shields, enough so for you to catch the way his head unsteadily follows your movements. “—but you won’t be with the way you’re bleeding right now.”
The tension from him is nearly tangible. Coiled up tight like a spring that startles you when it finally snaps , his hand snatching your wrist the second you reach towards the spot on his side that his other hand protectively conceals. “No—”
You flinch at the suddenness of his movement, though his grip softens enough to tell you that his intent isn’t to hurt or scare you. It was defensive. Instinct over everything else.
So, you soften your tone as best as you can, though your octaves still shake when you look up to the visor that stares back down at you through the darkness, reading the threat of you.
“Let me help you,” you implore, your eyes drifting over the contours of his helmet as if you could read any emotion in its unmoving shape. “Just. Tell me what to do.”
The Mandalorian hesitates. Turns the offer over silently, assesses it for long enough that you don’t realize you’ve been holding your breath until the helmet finally shifts, his fingers slackening around your wrist until he lets go completely. “There’s… a medkit in the hull,” he says slowly, the words tight and effortful, “Should have enough bacta inside.”
Bacta. Okay. You knew what that looked like. “Can you tell me where it is?”
“In the gun rack.”
Gun rack. Okay. Was he aware that the entire ship seemed like a gun rack to you?
You don’t know if he reads the clueless expression written across your face despite the darkness, but he lifts his hand away from his side to jab sloppily at a panel of buttons on the armour wrapped around his forearm. Something brokenly hisses beneath the cockpit. “Straight ahead from the ladder,” he drawls, “you won’t miss it.”
“I’ll find it.” You get to your feet, sparing just a small glance to the shadowy figure of the little one — somehow once again out of his seat and settling an innocent hand over the tip of the Mandalorian’s boot.
Your hand pauses against the doors, just beneath the black streaks of blood that curl around where the Mandalorian had pried it open.
Fear hesitates at the back of your throat as you turn back. “The raiders—?”
“I took care of it,” he exhales tightly, his head tipping back against the leather of the seat, “it’s safe.”
Took care of it.
Okay.
You don’t ask for any more clarification than that.
The hull of the ship is only marginally familiar as you lower yourself carefully from the ladder and take stock of your surroundings. The cubby with the blankets sits somewhere to your left, you recall, doing your best to push past the blur of adrenaline to map out the ship’s interior.
To your right, somewhere against the wall between the ladder and the exit, was that thing , that bulging eyed entity that had spooked you in the darkness—
You force your focus forward again. Straight ahead. Can’t miss it.
Except you do.
It takes an embarrassing amount of time fumbling across the dark before your hands finally curl around the half-unhinged doors to the weapons cubby, and an even longer moment to find the coarse fabric of a medical kit wedged into the corner of it. The light inside of the rack might as well have been completely blown out based on how useless it was in illuminating anything as it flickered dimly in and out of existence, but it gave just enough in its intermittent bursts to guide you to the handle of a small portable fuse lamp as well.
In the fickle light, dozens of crash-tossed weapons dimly glint at you — blasters, blades, you name it, all barely hanging onto the clasp that secured them to the wall.
Mercenary.
The word arrives at the front of your thoughts with the abruptness of a remembered dream from years ago. It echoes in your father’s voice, warm and coarse and comforting — like an evening hearth and campfire stories that had lulled you to sleep for so much of your childhood. Mercenary, he had said, sounding the words out carefully until you had repeated it in a little wondering voice that had never before put those syllables together in that combination. Mandalorian’s are mercenaries.
Your brow furrows at the memory, at the word you hadn’t heard in far too many years.
Overhead, the Mandalorian groans.
Shaking the memory away, you start moving again.
The scent of blood greets you midway back up the cockpit ladder. Your heart knots up at the sound of the Mandalorian’s unsteady huffs of breath as you wedge yourself through the broken doors.
“No, kid— ”
The fuse lamp glows yellow as you blink down at the scene it illuminates in the cockpit.
The child, wriggling awkwardly against the gloved hand knotted in the back of his little coat, and the Mandalorian, nursing his other hand against his bloodied side, doing his best to keep the kid away from the mess.
“Kriff— hey, kid, no—” you clear across the cockpit quickly, setting the lamp and medkit on the floor at the Mandalorian’s feet before scooping the fussing child into your arms. The kid squeaks at you as you bundle him into the crook of your arm, obviously displeased in the thwarting of his plans.
The Mandalorian exhales tightly, bracing himself to sit up in your presence now that he wasn’t wrangling the child.
“Take it easy,” you insist, settling the kid on the other seat before quickly appearing at his side. Not even the thick curve of armour between your palm and his shoulder can hide the way his muscles tense when you touch him in an attempt to settle him into the seat again. You lower yourself to your knees beside him, bringing yourself to the right height of his wound. “Try to relax, you’re just going to bleed faster if you don’t.”
Everything about him reads discomfort — beyond just the injury. It’s in the way he had grabbed your hand the first time you tried to touch him, how he tenses rather than slackens with relief at your willingness to help—
Your hand hesitates before it attempts to clear the distance towards the spot where he covers the wound with his own hand.
Raising your eyes to the visor, you ask — for direction, permission, all of the above. “Can I?”
The Mandalorian inhales tightly, visibly turning the question over again as though every offer of assistance held some kind of subversion that he needed to assess for threats before agreeing — as if turning over how much of your help he truly needed, and how much he could do alone.
Slowly, he draws his hand away from his side.
“There’s… there’s two bacta shots in the kit,” he says slowly — and whether that’s for your benefit or because it takes a moment to form the words correctly, you’re not sure. He tips the visor slightly to the medkit on the floor beside you. “Do you know how to administer them?”
“Uh,” you hesitate. You’d administered shots before — once when you’d broken an arm attempting to climb the rockledges before you’d memorized all the footholds, and several more when your father had begun to need them — but time had drawn those memories far enough to doubt yourself. “Pointy side goes in the skin, right?”
The helmet gives a pointed tilt, and you don’t need to see his face to hear the muted huff of either unamusement or agreement. “That about covers it.”
“Except that two bacta shots doesn’t exactly cover this,” you stress, the fat of your cheek finding its way between your teeth as you close the distance between your hand and his side. “You’ll need stitches at least, something. The bacta’s only going to do so much.”
“It’ll do enough,” he says with enough finality that you decide not to fight this battle while he was still dripping blood onto the cockpit floor.
You hope he doesn’t notice the way your fingers tremble as though he might suddenly snap at you like a wounded animal unable to tell if the helping hand was friend or foe. He doesn’t move though — but you still jerk your hand back when he sucks in a hiss of air from behind the helmet the moment your fingertips attempt to pick away the tattered scraps of his underclothes. The gash runs jagged and inches deep from the base of his ribcage and across his side, only offering up more blood to soak into his clothing with every sharp inhale.
“Sorry,” you flinch, only steeling yourself again once he settles back into the seat, “Kriff, did— did a blaster do this?”
“Not a blaster,” the Mandalorian grits out tersely, the words effortful and tight with every drag of breath, “Some kind of blade. Let him get too close—”
You choke down the way your stomach turns at the feeling of warm blood coating your fingers slick, working quickly to clear the area before getting the thick syringe from the kit. “At least he didn’t get any closer. I don’t think two shots of bacta would be able to put your insides back inside.”
A small, short noise cracks brokenly through the helmet’s vocoder.
You can’t tell if it lands between a laugh or a scoff, but at least he had enough blood in him to find that amusing.
The bacta glowed that fresh, sky-wash blue against the yellow aura of the lamp — unlike the ones you’d come across in recent years, whether it be in Republic shipwrecked fleets or downed Empire cargo hulls, had all sat long enough to lose both their colour and usefulness. The syringe weighs more than something of its size should as you carefully uncap it, taking extra care not to waste more than necessary to clear the air bubbles just as your father had once taught you. Very important stuff, he had said.
“This isn’t going to feel too pleasant,” you warn apologetically as you pick a clear patch of intact skin that you could get at without too much complication. You angle the needle’s tip carefully, hesitating for just a moment. “You might want to hold onto something—”
“Just get it over with—”
You take his distraction as your cue.
“Sorry, sorry,” you whisper, biting down the urge to wince at the sound of his fist knotting tight into the leather of the pilot’s seat as you suppress the syringe’s plunger. If it hurts, he makes a good show of bracing the pain without outright grimacing any more than necessary. “Almost done, I promise.”
The second injection is only marginally easier.
The Manndalorian’s body slackens slowly as you withdraw the needle, his muscles softening with every shallow tremble of breath that only takes slightly less effort to draw in. Taking advantage of the drug-induced haze, you swap the needle for the handful of tightly wound gauze at the bottom of the medkit.
“Still with me, big guy?” you ask, and this time your hands are steadier than your own voice.
“Mmm,” the Mandalorian exhales roughly, droopily drawing his hand down across your own as you flatten the bandaging as best as you could against the length of his wound. The contact startles you, and you go still as he presses down slowly, effectively trapping your hand beneath the soft, blood-tacky leather of his glove.
For a moment, you… stay like that.
His fingers are firm — warm under the worn leather as he holds your hand thoughtlessly against him, as though he hadn’t even registered that you hadn’t yet gotten out of his way.
Your eyes are slow to drift across him. They pause over the armour — the one you can’t remember the name of, but still rings so familiar, that encompasses so much of him. His breath comes steadier, rising and falling between your palm and the hand trapping it against his ribcage.
The scent of blaster residue lingers against the leather registers in your nose — sharp and twangy beneath the heaviness of the blood — and it’s… different. The stimulus. The warmth, the weapons, the adrenaline and the feeling of a heart pulsing hard enough that you can feel it beneath your palm and all of it were things that are… different from what you’re used to. Different from the quiet company of yourself, of your fussy little droid, and of the unchanging desert.
You swallow again, this time to find your voice.
“You’re gonna need to hold that there for a while,” you instruct quietly, breaking your quiet stare to slowly free your hand from beneath his to carefully set it on top instead. You add pressure behind his hand until you’re sure that you can pull away without him letting go. “I really don’t know how much the bacta’s going to do with a wound that deep. You might still need stitches,” you say, “But at least I don’t think you’re gonna bleed out in front of us.”
The helmet gives no indication of his emotion — none that you can read, at least, and you’re not even sure if he’s looking at you, or past you. Or, hell, if he’s even awake enough to be looking at you at all.
You’re already drawing away when he speaks, the words low enough that you may not have heard it at all if not for the steady quiet of the cockpit.
“You’re bleeding.”
You blink up at the visor that now tips down at you, taking a moment too long to register what such a simple phrase even meant.
You’d been running on adrenaline for so long that it takes the Mandalorian silently nudging the tip of his free hand’s forefinger against your chin, applying just enough pressure to tip your head. The contact flares a hot sting of pain across your cheekbone, and you flinch back just enough to put your own hand to the dried patch of blood and singed skin that left a crusty trail down the curve of your jaw. You could only imagine how you must have looked — your cheek felt cruddier than usual, caked with dirt from the crash and smeared with blood and the thinnest layer of sweat that hadn’t cared for the chill that crept up into the cockpit from the gap in the door.
It isn’t the draft from the door that rocks a shudder up your spine — it’s the memory of the blaster, and the way that if you had just been a little further to your left—
“I’ll be okay,” you insist, though your insistence sounds more like a lie, “could have been worse. I could have been you.”
He doesn’t laugh at that, and deep down you’re not sure if the lack of humour comes from his near death experience or yours.
“Thank you.” His voice drags in his throat, stronger now, though dragged heavy by either exhaustion or blood loss, or a combination of both, “You.. didn’t have to.”
The words draw you to a pause.
The gratitude catches you off guard, almost as much as the sound of the little burble echoing up from the space between you and the passenger chair. Really, you don’t know how a creature with such tiny legs moves so quickly and with so little fuss about him.
Dragging your palms down the thighs of your pants, you catch the kid in your hands before he can clear the space towards the Mandalorian. Admittedly, you’re buying yourself a moment longer to respond as you nestle the kid into your arms again because you’re just… not sure what to say. Mostly because you hadn’t forgotten what he had said.
The simple way he had boiled down your existence into insignificance with a single dismissive statement and… you weren’t mad. No, mad wasn’t the right word — not anymore, at least. Anger had disappeared the moment you realized that a single inch to your left would have truly proved his point. The blood drying on your hands and on your face reminds you as much.
All you felt now was… an emotion you didn’t have the word for. The closest you could get to is relief.
“Well,” you respond, finally, and the humour in your voice sounds empty, hollowing by the second as you continue, “I’ve never met a Mandalorian before. Would have been pretty stupid to let the first one I meet bleed out right infront of me.”
“Not many Mandalorian’s left to meet.” He notes lowly, the words drifting in the air between you two with a somber kind of bacta-induced honesty.
“Then I’m glad I didn’t let you bleed out,” you say, clearing the other passenger seat of Beedee’s parts to resettle the child where he’d been sitting before. Those inky black eyes follow you as you settle yourself on the floor beside the blastdoors, keeping the Mandalorian within your view, “Besides, consider it payback. For, uh, hitting you with a rock earlier.”
“You hit me with a rock?”
You don’t lift your gaze from the durasteel parts that you carefully lay out in the juncture of your crossed legs. Not because you’re preoccupied, but because you use the angle to hide the way you bite into your bottom lip to mask the curve teasing the edges of your mouth. “Guess that fancy helmet isn’t as thick as it looks.”
This time, you’re fairly confident that the huffed exhale that crackles through the helmet is at least a note of amusement.
The quiet that creeps in as the conversation drifts off brings with it the heaviness of your previous exhaustion. You’re… used to quiet — to the familiar sounds that fill the silence: the whitenoise of drifting sand, of gears grinding and shifting as Beedee found a comfortable spot. But, this is different. It’s a louder kind of quiet. A new kind of quiet.
The Mandalorian breathes steady and low across from you. The child babbles to himself as the hollow rush of wind wheezes through the vast emptiness of the massive gunship.
Your finger smoothes over the jagged edges of a rust spot on your droid’s chest component and you open your mouth to speak, to break the unfamiliar silence. You’re not even sure if the Mandalorian is still awake to respond, but you talk anyway.
“I don’t know,” you blurt out, and you cringe at the way your mouth picks the first thing in your mind to say. If the Maker was a merciful entity, it would have granted you the small grace of the Mandalorian’s unconsciousness.
But he shifts in the pilot’s seat, responding quickly enough that you wonder if he had been awake the entire time. “Hm?”
“How.. long,” you clarify after a moment, your eyes not rising from where the dim light offers the dented and misshapen contours of your companion nestled in your lap. The Mandalorian gives you the time to continue. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Didn’t… make sense keeping count, you know? Wouldn’t change the fact that I’m here.”
The Mandalorian takes a long moment before he responds. Long enough that you actually start to wish you hadn’t spoken at all. “Were you alone?”
The question comes softly, curious instead of prying — an invitation to answer instead of an obligation. You look up at him then, and you know before your eyes even land on him that he’s looking at you through the dark lens of his visor.
“No,” you answer. The child coos, as if listening too. “I had my dad, for a while. Then — Bee. Beedee, actually.” Your gaze lowers again to the spot you’d been tracing with the pad of your thumb. Jerky scratches of an unsteady, immature hand curved jaggedly through the thick layer of paint, drawing to a sharp point at its base and mirrored on the other side. Rust had crept into the grooves of the etching over the years, but the little heart you had given the droid had never worn away.
“Bee?”
“My droid,” you smile slightly to the parts in your lap, the small swell in your heart brightening your tone. “He’s a BD-9 explorer droid. Best one in the system.” You say, and the Mandalorian doesn’t interrupt. He watches, though — watches the way the momentary shine of your voice sombers out again, heavy with a worry that bogs you down more than you show. “You… hit him when you came in. But I can fix him. I’ll fix him. Tomorrow,” you hum as you drag the heel of your cleanest hand across your eyes. Exhaustion slurs your words as the weight of the day pulls your eyelids downward. “Once I can look properly.”
The Mandalorian’s helmet tips downwards, focusing on the collection of parts that you cradled so carefully.
He remembers it. Only a speck from that high up — a small white droid, and the hazy memory of the arms of the girl that now cradled what was left of it.
The Mandalorian speaks again, but the apology doesn’t quite make it to your ears.
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