@karmaphobic - Tumblr Blog

Jul 4

Provider | Part. 7

AO3 Masterlist

.✦ ݁˖ in which a simple extraction mission to save Karga’s daughter leads Din down a dangerous path of sweet domesticity and romance, forcing him to choose between his own selfish desire to hold onto her and the devastating realization of what it actually means to protect her.

Din Djarin x Fem!OC

Word count: 15.372 words

She turned onto her side, her jaw tensing as a sharp, hot flash of embarrassment crept into her cheeks in the darkness.

It was ridiculous.

No, worse than ridiculous. It was humiliating.

She was twenty-one years old. She wasn't some naive child spinning fantasies out of a few acts of kindness. She understood transactions. Contracts. Obligations. She had spent her entire life watching people evaluate her worth in credits, influence, inheritance, and political convenience. She knew exactly how quickly affection disappeared when a ledger was involved.

And the calculations of this situation should have been simple: he was a bounty hunter and she was a job. The equation should have ended there.

Yet every time she tried to settle the matter in her mind, another piece refused to fit. Jobs didn't spend nineteen nights sitting on the floor. Jobs didn't receive names. Jobs weren't carried off cold benches and tucked beneath blankets. Jobs weren't promised, over and over again, that they wouldn't have to face a room alone.

Versé squeezed her eyes shut.

The worst part was that she knew exactly what answer she was supposed to reach. She was supposed to accept that Din Djarin was an honourable man who took his responsibilities seriously. That was all. That was enough.

It should have been enough.

But her thoughts kept circling back to the same impossible question. If she was only a job, why had he stayed? Was he lying about the Razor Crest needing repairs? The questions settled heavily in the darkness, unanswered and persistent.

Versé rolled onto her back again and stared at the moonlit ceiling.

Outside, Nevarro continued to breathe through the open balcony shutters. Somewhere down in the city, a late conversation drifted through the warm night air, followed by distant laughter.

And despite every effort she made to think about anything else, her mind returned to the same image. A man in beskar armour standing in the doorway of her room.

Four days.

Greef Karga had opened a drawer, took out a data pad, and handed it across the desk because he needed a professional who wouldn't be bought, turned, or frightened off.

That was all.

The Mandalorian hadn't crossed the Outer Rim because he cared about a girl in an ivory dress. He had crossed it because he was the best at what he did, because Karga had offered a contract, and because bounty hunters didn't fly halfway across the galaxy for free.

He had a ship to maintain.

A child to provide for.

A life that existed entirely outside of her.

Versé squeezed her eyes shut.

The patience he had shown on her floor wasn't personal. The long nights outside her door. The careful way he had reduced every threat instead of escalating it. The hours spent sitting on cold stone while she worked herself into exhaustion. None of it had been some extraordinary offering reserved for her.

It was methodology. Professionalism. The technical skill required to handle a volatile target who had already driven away every previous contractor. That explanation made sense. It was reasonable.

A frustrated sound escaped her as she rolled onto her back once more, staring at the pale ceiling overhead. She was overthinking this. That had to be the answer.

She had spent three years starving for a single human interaction that didn't come attached to a demand, a contract, or a threat. Of course her mind was turning itself inside out. Of course she was taking a handful of small kindnesses and trying to build an entire emotional architecture out of them.

He had given her attention. Consistency. And she was turning them into something heavier because she didn't know what to do with them. Because she wanted them to mean more.

He lied about the thruster casing, a small, traitorous voice whispered from somewhere behind her ribs.

Versé immediately pressed her face into the pillow.

"No," she muttered into the darkness.

The ship was old. The fuel lines were ancient. Selt's men had been armed. Things broke. Repairs happened. That was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Why did he spend nineteen nights on the floor of the bedroom?

"He was being paid."

Why did he stay when the job was finished?

Versé pulled the blanket higher over her shoulder as if she could smother the questions beneath the weight of the fabric.

Because the ship needed repairs. Because Grogu liked the market. Because Karga asked him to. Because there were a hundred practical reasons. There had to be.

Because the alternative, that Din Djarin had looked at her sitting on the edge of that bed and simply decided he wasn't ready to leave her alone yet, was far more terrifying than anything waiting outside her window.

Beside her hip, Grogu let out a soft, sleeping sigh, his tiny body shifting against the linens as he burrowed deeper into the folds of his robe. One ear twitched before settling again, his breathing never once breaking its calm, steady rhythm. He was completely at peace, untouched by the quiet storm she had been fighting for hours.

Versé turned her head and looked at him. The child slept as though the galaxy had never given him a reason to doubt that someone would be there when he woke up. Her fingers moved almost without thought, drawing the blanket a little higher over his shoulders.

She envied him.

Not because he was innocent. Not because he was young.

Because he trusted. Grogu never seemed to question whether Din would come back. He never measured every interaction for hidden obligations or future consequences. He never searched for the cost hidden beneath an act of kindness. He simply reached for the people he loved and expected them to remain within reach.

Versé didn't know how to do that.

She had spent too many years learning the opposite lesson.

In her world, affection was leverage. Attention was transactional. Kindness was usually the first layer of a negotiation she hadn't agreed to yet. Every smile carried an angle. Every promise carried conditions. Every open door eventually revealed itself as another room inside the cage. Trusting someone felt less like stepping forward and more like walking blindly toward the edge of a cliff.

Her gaze lingered on Grogu for another moment before she looked away. The child had accepted Din's presence as naturally as breathing.

Versé, meanwhile, was lying awake in the middle of the night trying to convince herself that the sound of beskar walking away wouldn't hurt. A sharp ache tightened behind her ribs.

She rolled onto her back again and stared up at the ceiling, forcing her thoughts into neat rows, forcing herself back into the familiar discipline that had carried her through three years on Palar.

She would hold the line.

For four days she would keep her composure. She would call him Mando when others were present. She would maintain the careful boundaries he had given her. She would match his dry humour, accept his company when it was offered, and ask for nothing that wasn't freely given.

And when the mechanic finally finished with the Razor Crest, when the ramp lifted and the grey hull disappeared into the red Nevarro sky, she would let him leave.

That was the sensible outcome. That was the outcome she had been preparing herself for since the moment she stepped off the ship. She repeated the rule to herself again and again as the night slowly thinned around her. Dawn began to gather beyond the shutters. Somewhere in the city below, the first merchants were already opening their stalls.

But sleep never came. And neither did the relief she had promised herself would follow once she accepted the inevitable. Only that same stubborn ache remained, quiet and persistent beneath her ribs, refusing every argument she tried to make against it.

────୨ৎ───

The rule was easier to be created in the middle of the night than executed in the blinding glare of the Nevarro morning.

Versé discovered that later, when Grogu surfaced from the pillows with the single-minded focus of an orbital strike. He didn’t look for his sweet-root pastries; he didn't care about the balcony view. He toddled straight to the heavy metallic door, planted his tiny feet against the stone, and began a series of high-pitched, demanding sounds that echoed off the high ceiling like blaster fire.

"No," Versé whispered, sitting up with her dark hair falling in a tangled curtain around her face. Her eyes were rimmed with the exhaustion of a night spent counting floor tiles. "He is working on his ship."

Grogu looked over his shoulder. His large ears flattened into a perfectly horizontal line, the universal sign of a creature that had heard an argument, weighed it against his own immediate priorities, and found it entirely lacking. He let out another, louder sound, his tiny hand smacking the metallic door.

He was stubborn. He was as unyielding and persistent as she was, but unlike Versé, he had no armour to maintain or twenty years of trauma to calculate against the room. He simply wanted his father, and he was fully prepared to dismantle the morning’s quiet until he got him.

Versé was still locked in a silent standoff with the child when the frantic, heavy pacing began outside in the corridor.

The leather of Greef Karga’s imported boots was moving with an agitated, frantic frequency right past her threshold. Then came his voice, rough and slightly breathless through the thick wood, repeating the same sentence he’d clearly been rehearsing since dawn.

"Versé? My dear, if you're awake... the dining hall is prepped. Just a simple breakfast, if you will. Just… it would mean a great deal. The Marshal is already there, Mando too."

Versé froze on the edge of the mattress, her fingers tightening around the dark fabric of her skirt.

The words themselves barely registered at first.

The dining hall is prepped.

A simple breakfast.

The Marshal is already there.

Those details drifted past her like smoke.

And then—

Mando too.

The title landed with enough force to stop her thoughts completely.

For one suspended second, the room seemed to narrow around it. The pale stone walls, the open balcony, the morning light spilling across the floorboards, all of it receded beneath the sudden, sharp awareness that he was somewhere else in the building. Not on the landing pad. Not inside the Razor Crest. Not preparing to leave.

Here.

A ridiculous pulse of relief moved through her chest before she could stop it.

Verse immediately hated it. Her jaw tightened.

Pathetic.

She had spent the entire night constructing careful rules, stacking them one atop another like defensive walls. She had explained the situation to herself repeatedly until the logic felt airtight. He was a bounty hunter. Nevarro was a stop on the way to somewhere else. Four days would pass. The ship would be repaired. Then he would leave. Simple.

So why did the knowledge that he was at the breakfast table as well make the pressure behind her ribs ease by a measurable amount?

Why did her body react before her mind could intervene?

It wasn't as though she would even see him.

The thought arrived sharp and immediate.

He wasn't a man who sat around dining tables exchanging stories over morning coffee. He wasn't even permitted to remove his helmet in front of other people. Whatever breakfast looked like for the Mandalorian, it certainly didn't involve lingering conversation or warm domestic rituals. He would stand in some quiet corner of the building, armoured and distant as ever, collecting information while everyone else ate.

There was no reason for his presence to matter.

No reason for the simple fact that he was still here, somewhere beneath the same roof, to loosen something tight around her lungs.

Yet it did.

And that was the problem.

Because the more she tried to reduce him to practical realities, the more stubbornly her mind returned to smaller things: the sound of his boots outside her door. The low rumble of his voice through the modulator. The impossible steadiness of a man who always seemed to appear exactly where he said he would.

Versé squeezed her eyes shut.

This is ridiculous, she told herself fiercely.

He was a Mandalorian, not a lifeline.

Grogu, sensing victory, let out a triumphant chirp and smacked the door again. Versé glared at the back of his head.

"You are impossible," she informed him quietly.

The child cooed in agreement.

Outside, Karga cleared his throat through the metal. "Absolutely no pressure," he called, sounding very much like a man applying pressure. "Take your time."

A pause.

"Mando only arrived a few minutes ago."

Verse closed her eyes. The old magistrate might as well have announced a military deployment.

She could practically hear the desperation in the way he had tacked the information onto the end of the invitation. As though he had noticed exactly which detail might actually convince her to leave the room.

Unfortunately, he was correct. And that realisation was somehow even more embarrassing.

With a quiet groan, Versé pressed her palms over her face. Across the room, Grogu cooed again, already certain he had won the battle. The worst part was that she was beginning to suspect he was right.

The door was right there. If she opened it, she would have to step out into the hallway and walk down the long stone corridor beside the mountain of beskar she had spent the entire night trying to remove from her thoughts. The awkwardness of it flared hot beneath her skin, a sudden, suffocating panic that made her throat go dry. She couldn't face him yet.

Worse, she wasn't entirely certain she trusted herself to act normal.

The thought settled heavily in her stomach. Every carefully constructed rule from the night before felt dangerously fragile in the light of morning. She had spent hours reminding herself that he was a bounty hunter, that Nevarro was only a temporary stop, that she would survive his departure the same way she had survived everything else. And yet the simple knowledge that he was downstairs had already undone half of that work.

But as Karga's footsteps began their anxious circuit back down the corridor, another calculation asserted itself, quieter, colder, and far more practical. She couldn't stay here, either. Because eventually Grogu would win. He always did. The child would demand his father, and Din would come to collect him. Then the door would close. And suddenly there would be no crowded dining hall, no Cara Dune, no nervous Magistrate stumbling through conversation to fill the silence. No protective buffer of other voices and other people.

Just the two of them. Alone.

The thought struck with surprising force. She could already imagine it: the quiet room, the morning light across the stone floor, the impossible steadiness of his presence filling the space while she desperately searched for something intelligent to say. Every glance would feel too long. Every silence would feel too heavy.

No.

That would be worse.

Far worse.

Having Karga there was a shield. Having Cara's grounded, uncompromising presence sitting across the table was a shield. Even the noise of breakfast was a shield. It gave her somewhere to direct her attention besides the man she had spent the entire night pretending not to think about.

"Alright," Versé called through the door, forcing her voice back into its familiar, structured cadence. "Give me a moment, Magistrate."

Outside, she immediately heard Karga stop pacing.

The relieved exhale that followed was so dramatic it was almost insulting.

────୨ৎ───

The dining hall was vast, filled with the blinding morning sun cutting through deep stone arches.

Versé entered with a rigid, unnatural verticality, her boots clicking too sharply against the floor plates. She kept her eyes glued strictly to the large wooden table, refusing to let her gaze drift toward the high-backed chair where the Mandalorian sat.

The interaction was a disaster of careful boundaries. When Din shifted his mass to acknowledge her arrival, a low, mechanical clink vibrating through the air, Verse felt the awkwardness stiffen her spine like an iron rod. She didn't look at his visor. When he passed a small bowl of local grains toward her side of the table, she reached for it with a hand that was entirely too fast, her fingers brushing the dark leather of his thumb for a fraction of a second before she pulled back as if she’d been burned.

"Thank you, Mando," she muttered, the title sharp and defensive, a public wall erected to keep the private name buried deep where Karga couldn't reach it.

She didn't look up to see if he noticed. She immediately turned her attention to Grogu, who had scrambled onto the chair beside her and was currently trying to drown himself in a bowl of bone-broth.

Cara Dune sat across from them, her heavy boots resting on the lower crossbar of the table, her dark eyes tracking the frantic, hyper-deliberate way Versé was handling her spoon. A faint, knowing line appeared between the her brows, but she didn't comment. She just reached for a piece of roasted flat-bread and chewed with the quiet, unbothered gravity of a soldier who knew when a perimeter was under tension.

────୨ৎ───

Din didn't eat, of course. He sat slightly angled away from the food, one hand resting loosely near the pommel of his blaster, his silver helmet turned toward Greef Karga as the Magistrate filled the room with trade routes, tariffs, and civic improvements.

Karga was talking enough for everyone.

Din answered when required, offering the occasional low rumble through the vocalizer, just enough to keep the conversation moving. The exchange gave the room structure. It gave Versé something to hide behind. Because the moment she had stepped through the doorway, he had known exactly how little sleep she had gotten. He noticed the shadows beneath her eyes, the stiffness in her posture, the way she entered the room.

Over the last two weeks, Din had become far too accustomed to the small changes in her behavior not to notice them. He knew the difference between her cautious silences and her comfortable ones. He knew the rhythm of her pacing. He knew the way her shoulders sat when she was genuinely relaxed versus when she was forcing herself to appear composed.

This morning, every movement looked deliberate. Carefully measured. As though she were thinking about each step before she took it. She never looked directly at him.

When he passed the bowl across the table, she reached for it too quickly, their hands brushing for less than a second before she withdrew as if contact itself had startled her. Then came the title.

"Thank you, Mando."

Sharp. Precise. A boundary.

Din said nothing about it. He simply let her have it.

If calling him Mando in front of the others made the room easier to navigate, then that was what he would be. He understood boundaries. He understood armour. And if he noticed that she spent the rest of breakfast focusing very intensely on Grogu instead of the man sitting beside her, he was polite enough not to mention that either. So he stayed exactly where he was. Giving her the same thing he had given her on Palar: enough distance that she never felt cornered, and enough consistency that she never had to wonder where he was.

Despite herself, Versé found the edges of the morning becoming easier to endure. Not because of the food, and certainly not because of the conversation. Karga's careful attempts at familiarity scraped awkwardly against walls she wasn't prepared to lower, and every mention of her mother only reminded her how little of that life truly belonged to her anymore.

But beneath all of it sat the quiet certainty she had carried into the dining hall.

Four days.

The knowledge rested somewhere deep behind her ribs, subtle but constant, like a hand pressed against a shaking door. Four days before the Razor Crest left orbit. Four days before she would have to learn how to stand on this planet without the familiar weight of beskar somewhere nearby. Four days to adjust to Nevarro's noise, to Karga's hopeful eyes, to the impossible reality of being allowed to choose where she walked and when she slept.

So when the conversation drifted around her, she found herself listening without immediately calculating escape routes. Her shoulders remained tense, but not painfully so. The panic that had gripped her in the room the night before had loosened its hold by a fraction.

And Din noticed.

He noticed the way her breathing had settled into a steadier rhythm compared to when she first entered the hall. He noticed that she wasn't tracking every movement in the room anymore. The way her fingers occasionally loosened around her spoon before tightening again. Tiny things. Meaningless things to anyone else.

Not to him.

She still avoided looking directly at him. Still flinched slightly whenever their hands occupied the same stretch of space. Still hid behind that carefully reconstructed high-society composure whenever Karga addressed her.

But she had stopped bracing.

Greef Karga cleared his throat, his broad shoulders shifting under his heavy blue embroidery as he turned his attention toward the side of the table where Versé sat. His face carried that cautious, desperate hope again, the look of a man trying to find an entry point into a ledger that had been closed to him for twenty years.

"I... I had the kitchen staff prepare the sweet-root grains specifically, Versé," Karga said, his voice dropping into a softer, unforced register. "Your mother used to—well, she always preferred the sweeter harvests from the mid-rim. I hoped they might taste familiar."

Versé didn't look up from her bowl. Her fingers stayed tightly clamped around the small metal spoon, her jaw tensing as she forced her response into the narrowest permissible boundary.

"They're fine, Magistrate," she said.

"And the room?" Karga pressed, leaning slightly forward, his hands resting on the dark wood of the table. "The balcony has the best view of the lower square. If the sun is too direct in the mornings, I can have the engineers install an iron awning by tomorrow afternoon. It’s no trouble at all."

"It's adequate," she murmured, her green eyes fixed entirely on the bone-broth Grogu was currently splashing across the chair. "The shutters are sufficient."

Small replies. Flat, smooth slates dropped into the space between them, handling the Magistrate at the exact, precise arm's length she had chosen on the landing pad. Karga’s chest lifted with a slow, heavy exhale, the disappointment visible in the sudden droop of his shoulders, but he didn't push. He respected the walls she had built.

Instead, he turned his head slightly, his gaze moving across the table to settle on Din.

"Well, Mando," Karga said, slipping back into the pragmatic cadence he used whenever he was thinking in terms of schedules and manifests rather than people. "If you're planning to make that sector-four run before sunset, you'll want to check the fuel-cell values with the hangar chief. The New Republic patrols have been tight around the mid-rim split, and I don't need you getting flagged for an uncertified sublight trail."

The moment the words left Karga's mouth, Din felt the room shift.

Not physically. Something smaller and sharper. A disturbance in the careful balance he had spent the entire morning maintaining.

His visor remained fixed on the Magistrate, but his attention had already moved to the girl sitting beside him. He knew exactly what Karga had just done. Not intentionally. The old man didn't know about the conversation in the residential suite. He didn't know about the convenient thruster diagnostics or the carbon leak that didn't exist. As far as Karga was concerned, discussing jobs with a bounty hunter was as ordinary as discussing the weather.

But Din already knew what Versé was about to hear.

And worse—

He knew what she was about to understand.

Beside him, the metal spoon slipped from her fingers. The sharp clink against the bowl cut cleanly through the dining hall.

Silence followed. Din turned his helmet toward her. Versé was staring at Karga as though the floor had suddenly disappeared beneath her feet.

"What?" she asked. The word escaped before she could stop it.

Karga blinked. "The sector-four run, my dear," he said, clearly confused by her reaction. "Mando has a tracking fob for a bail-jumper near the gas giants. He's clearing out of orbit by the afternoon cycle."

For a second, Versé didn't move.

Then her gaze shifted, crossing the table until it collided with the black slit of Din's visor.

The awkwardness that had haunted her all morning vanished completely. So did the defensive wit. So did the carefully maintained distance. What remained was something much harder for him to look at. Confusion. Raw, genuine confusion. Because she wasn't trying to calculate a social interaction anymore. She was trying to reconcile two facts that could not exist in the same ledger.

"But..." Her voice was small.

She swallowed. "But you said your ship needed repairing."

The words landed softly, yet somehow they struck harder than any accusation. Because there wasn't any anger in them. Just bewilderment. As though she genuinely couldn't understand why he had told her one thing while the galaxy was now presenting another.

For the first time since entering the dining hall, Din found himself wishing Karga would stop talking.

────୨ৎ───

Across the table, Cara Dune stopped chewing her flat-bread.

Her dark eyes flicked from Versé's pale, bewildered expression to the unblinking slate of the Mandalorian's helmet. For a second, something dangerously close to amusement tugged at the corner of the Marshal's mouth. She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her breastplate with the quiet satisfaction of a soldier watching a perimeter line become hopelessly tangled by its own scout.

Karga looked between them again, his confusion deepening.

"Repairing? The Crest?" he asked. "Mando, I checked the hangar reports this morning. The chief mechanic said your engine values were sitting at ninety-eight percent efficiency. You didn't file for a single replacement part."

"I run the diagnostics myself," Din interrupted, his tone flat and administrative, cutting off the Magistrate before the ledger could get any more complicated. He kept his visor locked on Verse’s wide green eyes. "I don't trust local hangar crews with Imperial surplus. If I say a line needs checking, it needs checking. It takes as long as it takes."

The silence that followed was brutal.

He hadn't made a calculation error.

The realisation landed with terrifying clarity.

He had stood in that bright room yesterday, looked at the panic she had been trying so desperately to hide, and then constructed an entirely fictional problem with the Razor Crest so he could remain on Nevarro a little longer.

Not for the machine.

Not for the Guild.

For her.

The thought hit with such force that Verse immediately rejected it.

No.

That couldn't be right.

Men didn't do things like that.

Not without wanting something.

Not without expecting something.

Her entire life had been built around that lesson. Every kindness carried a price. Every gesture concealed an angle. Every hand extended toward her eventually closed into a fist around a contract.

The idea that someone might simply see her struggling and decide to stay was so foreign that her mind searched desperately for another explanation.

Maybe he was being cautious.

Maybe he genuinely distrusted the mechanics.

Maybe there was some technical detail Karga didn't know.

Anything was easier than the truth unfolding in front of her.

Because if the truth was what she suspected, if Din Djarin had looked at her fear and quietly altered his plans to make the transition easier, then she had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

A sudden heat rushed up the back of her neck.

Her cheeks burnt.

She could feel her pulse hammering against her ribs. The room suddenly felt too bright, too open. Too exposed. Because the frightening part wasn't that he had lied. The frightening part was understanding why. And understanding, with a certainty she couldn't quite smother, that he had known she would never ask him to stay.

He didn't look back at her, because he knew if he did, she'd think she owed him an answer.

She didn't.

Four days had never been about keeping her close.

They had always been about giving her enough time to learn she could stand on her own.

"The... the Magistrate's engineers are likely fully qualified," Versé said, her voice dropping back into that quiet, hyper-refined cadence, though the tremble at the edge of her syllables was completely naked. She kept her green eyes fixed on Grogu’s bowl, refusing to look across the table. "But if the Mandalorian prefers to... conduct his own diagnostics, then I suppose the timeline is his to manage."

"I'll be at the pad," Din muttered, his gravelly voice flat and unbothered as he shifted his mass to stand.

The heavy sound of his beskar announced his departure, the long shadow of his frame crossing her bowl as he moved away from the table. He didn't look back at her, and he didn't reach for Grogu. He walked toward the deep stone archway with his usual measured, unhurried stride, giving her every single inch of the distance she was so desperately trying to maintain.

Versé's eyes followed him despite herself.

The silver shape of his armour disappeared beyond the archway. The sound of his boots lingered a moment longer against the stone corridor before fading completely into the deeper parts of the magistrate's complex.

Only then did the room seem to remember how to breathe.

Across the table, Cara Dune lowered her cup.

She watched the doorway for a second, then slowly turned her gaze toward Verse.

"You know," Cara said, her voice carrying a lazy, thoroughly amused rumble, "I've known that man for a while."

Versé immediately focused on her spoon.

Cara's mouth twitched.

"And in all that time, I've never once seen him voluntarily sit on a planet longer than necessary."

Versé remained very interested in the contents of her bowl.

Cara leaned back in her chair.

"Actually, that's not true." She paused. "There was one time."

The silence stretched.

Verse hated herself for listening.

"What happened?" she asked before she could stop herself.

Cara's grin widened.

"He found something he wasn't ready to leave behind."

The heat that flooded Versé's face was immediate and catastrophic.

Cara mercifully took a bite of flat-bread before she could make the situation any worse.

Verse didn't answer.

She picked up her spoon with a hand that was visibly trembling, her heart hammering against her ribs with that stubborn, pining ache that no amount of caution could calculate away.

Across from her, Cara hid another smile inside her cup.

The morning heat had fully claimed the central square by the time Versé finally escaped the dining hall and stepped onto the terrace walkway.

────୨ৎ───

She had spent an hour after breakfast pacing the pale stone of her new chamber, her boots making a sharp, restless rhythm against the tiles while she fought the terrifyingly simple impulse to take the stairs down to the eastern hangar. It would have been easy. She could have claimed she needed to check on the ship's cargo or that she had left a stray hair tie behind in the lower berth. But the calculation was a trap, and she knew it. If she went to the pad, if she saw him standing under the shadow of the grey hull with his tools in his hands, knowing that every turn of his wrench was a performance he was putting on for her sake, she would lose her footing completely.

So she chose the market instead.

"We are getting used to the settlement," she told Grogu, her voice carrying a tight, self-protective sharpness as she adjusted him in the crook of her arm. "That is what we are doing today. Nothing else."

The child didn't offer a counter-argument. His large ears were swivelling in three different directions at once, his nose twitching frantically as the thick, heavy air of the thoroughfare washed over them. It was a suffocating soup of melted sulfur from the flats, roasting gorg meat, and the sharp, vinegar tang of fermented moon-roots being traded near the lower bins.

Versé forced herself directly into the centre of the swarming crowd.

She kept her shoulders square, her chin lifted with a desperate reassembly of her high-society posture, using the dark wool of her cloak to take up as little space as possible. She needed the noise. She needed the sheer, uncoordinated mass of the town to drown out the low, gravelly hum of the vocalizer that had been echoing behind her ribs since breakfast. She wanted to look at things that had absolutely nothing to do with Imperial surplus fuel lines or the heavy, pulse-point memory of a leather gauntlet.

She stopped in front of a textile stall, her long fingers drifting across a bolt of rough crimson cloth hanging from a weathered iron rail.

The fabric was coarse beneath her skin, sun-faded in places where it had spent too many seasons under Nevarro's relentless sky. Wind moved through the rows of hanging textiles, lifting their edges in slow waves that sent shifting bands of shadow across the packed earth.

"The weave is uneven," Versé murmured, forcing herself to focus on something tangible. Something measurable. "The thread count is too low for a formal tunic. It's built for labor. For dust."

The merchant launched into an enthusiastic explanation about local wool production.

Versé heard almost none of it.

She nodded politely when it seemed appropriate, her attention already slipping away.

Around her, the market continued its endless motion.

Voices overlapped from every direction. Merchants shouted prices across crowded aisles. Someone laughed loudly near a food stall. A crate overturned somewhere deeper in the thoroughfare, followed by a chorus of complaints and amused jeers. The entire settlement seemed determined to exist as loudly as possible.

She had come here for exactly that reason.

She had wanted noise.

She had wanted crowds.

She had wanted enough movement to drown out the memory of a silver helmet standing motionless in the bright morning light while everyone around him accidentally exposed a lie he hadn't even bothered trying to defend.

Instead, every distraction seemed to circle back toward the same destination.

Grogu reached out from her arm and grabbed a loose fringe hanging from the crimson cloth.

"No."

Versé caught his wrist gently before he could stuff it into his mouth.

The contact was small.

Innocent.

Warm.

And instantly her thoughts betrayed her.

For one brief moment she was no longer standing in the middle of a crowded marketplace.

She was back on the lower deck of the Razor Crest.

Back in the shadows.

Back beneath the heavy insulation blanket tucked carefully around her shoulders.

Back staring at the impossible reality that someone had carried her there.

Her hand loosened slightly around Grogu's wrist.

The child blinked up at her.

Versé released him immediately and stepped away from the stall.

A pulse of heat climbed the back of her neck.

Stop it.

Her jaw tightened.

Look at the market.

A group of children ran past.

Look at the market.

An old merchant argued with an Aqualish over a basket of dried roots.

Look at the market.

Somewhere above the rooftops, a ship passed overhead with a low mechanical roar.

Unfortunately, her mind had already made the connection.

Because the real problem wasn't the blanket.

Or the berth.

Or even the lie.

The real problem was that every time she tried to stop thinking about Din Djarin, she discovered another piece of him hidden somewhere in the architecture of her day.

────୨ৎ───

She tried.

She spent twenty minutes watching an old Ugnaught mechanic repair the hydraulic arm of a rusted cargo loader, tracking the bright blue spray of the plasma welder as it hissed across dark metal. The mechanic worked with the easy confidence of someone who had spent decades solving problems with his hands, muttering to himself as sparks scattered over the stone like fragments of fallen stars.

Versé watched every movement.

She couldn't remember a single one of them afterward.

She drifted to a spice merchant's stall and forced herself to linger there, inhaling the sharp, bitter scent of crushed pepper-pods and dried moon-roots until her eyes watered. The merchant enthusiastically explained the differences between harvest regions, pointing at jars filled with red, yellow, and deep violet powders.

Versé nodded politely.

She heard almost none of it.

After that she stood near the central thoroughfare, watching children weave through the crowd in chaotic bursts of motion. They darted between merchants and customers, laughing loudly enough to draw half-hearted scoldings from their parents. One stumbled over a loose stone and hit the ground hard enough to skin a knee.

Versé's entire body tensed.

The child simply stood up again.

No panic.

No fear.

No frantic glance toward an approaching authority figure.

Just a brief grimace before he ran off after his friends as though nothing had happened.

The sight struck her with a strange, painful force.

It was beautiful.

It was exactly the kind of life she had spent years imagining from behind the windows of the Vauren estate.

A world where mistakes weren't punishable.

A world where people occupied space without first earning permission.

A world where laughter wasn't treated as carelessness.

And yet, despite all of that, the ground beneath her feet still felt conditional.

As though she were standing on a thin sheet of volcanic crust stretched over something molten and unstable.

Every time a heavy pair of boots struck the stone somewhere behind her, her shoulders immediately tightened. Her pulse jumped. Her eyes searched the crowd before she could stop herself, looking for silver armour that never appeared.

It was never him.

A dock worker.

A merchant.

A traveller crossing the square.

Never him.

The realisation should have brought relief.

Instead, each disappointment left behind a small, hollow ache she refused to examine too closely.

She had come to the market hoping the noise would drown him out. Instead, she found herself measuring the entire city against his absence.

Every face became another stranger.

Every conversation faded into background noise.

Every stall blurred into another shape she couldn't quite focus on.

The market was alive around her, bursting with colour and movement and possibility, but she felt strangely detached from it all, as if she were standing behind glass.

As though this wasn't her life yet.

As though she were still waiting for permission to belong here.

Grogu let out a soft, satisfied coo from her arms, his head eventually settling against her collarbone as the afternoon heat began to pull at his eyelids. Verse smoothed her hand across the back of his head, her gaze drifting toward the jagged black silhouette of the distant volcano rising beyond the settlement.

The realisation came quietly.

Keeping her distance from the Mandalorian was proving far more difficult than surviving the house she had escaped.

That thought alone should have terrified her.

Instead, it simply left her tired.

The afternoon stretched onwards, melting slowly into the long amber light of a Nevarro dusk. Shadows lengthened across the thoroughfare. Merchants began packing away their wares. The laughter of children softened into the quieter rhythm of evening.

And through it all, Versé held the line.

Or at least she tried to.

Because with every passing hour, it became increasingly difficult to tell whether she was protecting herself from him or protecting herself from the possibility that she no longer wanted to.

She did not let her eyes drift toward the high ridge where the eastern hangar sat. Whenever she felt the pull, the quiet, physical ache that wanted to draw her steps back toward the landing pad, she forced herself to look at something else. A merchant’s scale. The grease on a droid’s chassis. The way the sun turned the dust of the thoroughfare into a thick, shimmering fog. She spent three hours wandering the lower stalls, systematically testing her own endurance, proving to herself that she could navigate a world of strangers without an iron shoulder to lean against.

Near the back edge of the market, where the scrap-dealers and off-world cargo-masters traded in unrefined bulk goods, she stopped at a narrow bench piled with surveyor maps and old dataslate casings.

"Do you have pigments?" she asked the merchant, an elderly human with grease ground deep into the lines of his knuckles. Her voice had reassembled its formal, high-society cadence, a thin shield against the heat. "Ground mineral dust. Heavy inks. Or linseed oil. Anything that can be used on rough linen."

The merchant blinked at her through the haze of a low-grade vapor-pipe. "Pigments? Miss, this is a mining hub. If you want red, go dig up the sulfur flats. If you want blue, you’ll have to wait until the mid-rim freighter drops its logistics crate next month. I can put you down for an extra order on the next shipment if you’ve got the credits upfront."

Versé let out a long, slow sigh, her shoulders dropping by a fraction of an inch. "Next month," she murmured.

"Three weeks if the New Republic patrols don't flag the manifest," he said, turning back to his ledger.

"No," she said quietly. "Thank you."

She walked away, her fingers twisting into the dark wool of her skirt. The disappointment was a sharp, physical weight behind her ribs. Painting could have helped her. It was the only language she knew how to use when the interior map got too crowded; it was the way she had survived the suffocating stillness of the house on Palar, turning her terror into rows of disciplined grey lines until her knuckles split. If she had a canvas now, she could have forced the image of the Razor Crest’s lower deck out of her head and trapped it in oil. She could have controlled the data. But Nevarro didn't care about her brushes, and the lack of her tools left her completely undefended against her own thoughts.

────୨ৎ───

The night returned to the magistrate’s complex with a heavy, stifling silence.

Versé lay on the pale linens of her bed, her dark hair spread across the pillow like a shadow, her green eyes wide and fixed on the silver bars of moonlight cutting through the balcony shutters. She had been tossing and turning for hours. Grogu was fast asleep beside her hip, his tiny body a warm, rhythmic weight that didn't stir even when the distant rumble of a cargo freighter shook the stone floor plates.

She tried to sleep. She closed her eyes and forced her muscles to lock into the precise, permitted stillness she had practiced for years. She counted the cracks in the white-washed wall. She tried to catalog the names of the mid-rim merchant houses her mother used to recite.

But every path in her mind defaulted straight back to the dining hall. To the low vibration of his voice saying, I don't trust local hangar crews. To the terrifying, beautiful realisation that he had compromised his own code to build a four-day lie for her sake.

By the middle of the night, the silence in the room became too loud to bear.

Versé stared at the ceiling for another ten minutes before admitting defeat.

Sleep wasn't coming.

The realisation settled over her with a strange mixture of irritation and resignation. She had spent the entire afternoon marching through the market like a soldier on patrol, forcing herself to look everywhere except the one place she wanted to look. She had catalogued stalls, memorised street layouts, inspected textiles she had no intention of buying, and listened to enough merchant negotiations to last the rest of her life.

And still, somehow, every road in her mind led back to the same landing pad.

She rolled onto her side with a frustrated exhale.

This was ridiculous.

He wasn't doing anything remarkable. He was a man working on a ship.

A stubborn, heavily armoured man who apparently believed he could fool an entire city with the worst mechanical excuse she had ever heard.

The thought made something dangerously close to a smile pull at the corner of her mouth before she buried her face deeper into the pillow.

Maker help me.

Beside her, Grogu shifted and let out a sleepy little chirp.

Versé lifted her head slightly.

The child's eyes were still closed, but one green ear twitched in her direction.

"Don't start," she whispered.

Grogu made another small sound and immediately fell back asleep.

Traitor.

Versé stared at him for a long moment before looking back toward the balcony shutters.

The eastern hangar sat somewhere beyond the ridge.

She knew exactly where.

She had spent the entire day making sure she didn't look at it.

Her stomach tightened.

The sensible thing would be to stay in bed.

The sensible thing would be to go to sleep and wake up in the morning and continue pretending that the revelation in the dining hall hadn't fundamentally altered the shape of the world around her.

The sensible thing would be to maintain the boundary.

Unfortunately, sensible decisions had lost considerable authority after learning that Din had fabricated an entire maintenance schedule because he couldn't stand the look on her face when she thought he was leaving.

Versé squeezed her eyes shut.

Opened them again.

Stared at the ceiling.

Counted to fifty.

Failed.

With a quiet groan of surrender, she threw the blanket back.

"This is not because of him," she informed the sleeping child as she swung her legs over the side of the bed.

Grogu continued sleeping.

"I just need air."

Silence.

"And perhaps a walk."

More silence.

Even unconscious, he somehow managed to sound unconvinced.

Versé scowled at him.

Then she stood, crossed the room, and stepped out onto the moonlit balcony, already knowing exactly which direction her eyes were going to drift the moment she reached the railing.

In a sudden, desperate moment of weak judgment, the kind of sudden fracture that occurs when a person has been standing against a wall for too long and simply runs out of structural strength, Versé pulled her dark cloak over her shoulders, her fingers trembling slightly as she unlatched the heavy wood door, and stepped out into the shadowed corridor.

The complex was dead silent. The guard Cara had placed at the end of the hall was sitting on a low bench, his chin dropped against his chest armour as he drifted through a shallow watch-sleep. Versé moved past him like a ghost, her soft leather boots making no more sound than the wind through the overgrowth as she found the rear stone stairs leading down toward the landing pads.

The air outside was cooler now, carrying the sharp, metallic tang of the lava fields under the stars.

She walked through the empty courtyard, the silence of the market square feeling vast and eerie after the daytime noise. She didn't slow her pace until the high, curved shadow of the eastern hangar rose out of the dark. The archway was unlit, a deep cavern of black stone that smelt heavily of sublight grease and unrefined fuel cells.

The Razor Crest sat in the centre of the pad, its grey-panelled hull looking massive and ancient on the loading pad. The ramp was down. It rested against the volcanic stone with its familiar, heavy tilt, a long tongue of iron leading into the dim amber glow of the main cargo bay.

Versé stopped ten paces away, her breath catching in her throat, her heart doing that strange, frantic fluttering behind her ribs.

He was there.

He wasn't sleeping, and he wasn't running diagnostics. He was sitting on a low rusted storage crate at the base of the landing gear with a long cleaning rod held loose in his large, gloved hands. He had his chest plates off, the dark flight-suit underneath revealing the broad, powerful lines of his shoulders, but the silver helmet was still firmly in place, the black T-visor catching the faint reflective glint of the hangar lights.

He didn't move when her shadow lengthened across the floor plates. He didn't reach for his belt weapon, and he didn't alter his posture. He had known the exact second her footsteps had cleared the stone archway, he had tracked her mass across the pad, and he just sat there in the quiet of the middle of the night, an unmoving mountain of beskar and leather, waiting for her to reach the edge of his space.

The realisation made something tighten painfully behind her ribs.

He had known she was there.

He had known, and he hadn't called out. Hadn't demanded an explanation. Hadn't spared her the embarrassment of standing in the middle of the hangar with absolutely no reasonable justification for being there.

The silence stretched.

Versé became acutely aware of every detail of herself. The cloak thrown hastily over her nightclothes. The loose state of her hair. The fact that she had crossed half the magistrate's complex in the middle of the night only to stand ten paces away from a man she had spent the entire day avoiding.

This had been a catastrophic mistake.

She should leave.

Immediately.

Before she made the situation any worse.

Din tilted his helmet slightly.

Just enough to acknowledge her presence.

"Couldn't sleep?"

The low, mechanical voice cut cleanly through the hangar.

Versé stared at him.

Of all the things he could have said, the simple question somehow made the heat rush to her face faster than any accusation could have.

"No," she admitted.

The answer slipped out before she could manufacture something more dignified.

Din gave a single nod.

Nothing more.

No follow-up.

No attempt to interrogate her reasons for appearing outside his ship at an hour when most of Nevarro was asleep.

He simply accepted the answer and returned his attention to the cleaning rod resting across his knee.

The gesture should have made escape easier.

Instead, it somehow made leaving impossible.

Versé remained where she was, watching the slow, methodical movement of his hands.

After a long moment, Din shifted slightly and tapped the toe of his boot against an empty cargo crate sitting beside him.

The sound echoed softly through the hangar.

An invitation.

Nothing more than that.

No pressure.

No expectation.

Just space.

The same thing he had been giving her since the first night on Palar.

Versé looked at the crate.

Then at him.

Then back at the crate.

Her pulse hammered once against her throat.

Slowly, before she could talk herself out of it, she crossed the remaining distance and sat down.

For a long time, the only sound in the hangar was the rhythmic, hollow sigh of the ship’s primary cooling lines.

Versé stood at the edge of the light, her dark cloak wrapped tightly around her frame, her fingers buried so deeply into the wool that her knuckles ached. She looked at the broad lines of his shoulders without the chest plates, at the heavy grease staining the dark fabric of his flight suit, and then up at his helmet.

She didn't speak. She let her silence occupy the space between them, testing the density of it, checking to see if the mountain of iron would shift under the pressure of her arrival.

He didn't move. He kept the cleaning rod loose in his large, gloved hands, his posture perfectly still, giving her every single inch of the perimeter she needed to feel safe.

Finally, the armour she had tried so desperately to reassemble all day simply fell away, leaving nothing but the raw, unembellished truth of her voice in the quiet.

"You lied," she said.

The words were flat, stripped of the defensive wit and the formal, structured cadence she had used at breakfast. It wasn't an accusation; it was a plain, mathematical calculation that had been laid out on the stone between them. She took two steps forward, her leather boots clicking softly against the volcanic floor plates, her green eyes fixing onto the dark centre of his helmet.

"The hangar chief didn't find a leak," she whispered, her throat moving in a delicate line. "The ship is fine. Why?"

Din let a full three seconds stretch, the hangar lights catching the scarred edges of his gauntlets as his hands tightened slightly around the cleaning rod. He didn't offer a tactical distraction, and he didn't try to reconstruct the lie about the Imperial surplus. He sat on the rusted storage crate and looked up at her through the green tint of his HUD, his gravelly voice dropping into that low, level register that belonged only to closed rooms.

"You weren't ready," Din said plainly.

Versé’s breath caught in her throat. She tried to hold her ground, her heels locking into the stone, her chin lifting by a stubborn, defensive fraction to keep herself from trembling. "That wasn't your ledger to manage. You are a bounty hunter. You had a tracking fob, and your job here was finished. You don't... you don't owe me a floor to stand on."

"I told you I'd be there," Din muttered, his tone carrying that ironclad consistency that always seemed to freeze the gears of her panic. "That didn't have an expiration date."

He stood up then. It was a slow, fully announced movement, giving her every second to track his mass as his tall, heavy frame rose to its full height. He didn't step into her space; he maintained the three feet of distance she had required since the first night on Palar, but the sheer presence of him without the chest plates felt twice as intense, twice as exposed.

He had spent hours sitting in the dark of this hangar running the arithmetic of his own life, and the numbers hadn't been kind.

He knew his age. He knew the gray that was beginning to settle into the margins of his hair behind the mask, and he knew the heavy, exhausting wear of a lifetime spent under the weight of beskar plate. He knew what he did, he was a creature of the Creed, a hunter who followed tracking fobs into the black and brought back targets for credits. That was what he needed to do. That was what the forge required, what the child required, and what the galaxy expected of him. He couldn't stay on Nevarro forever, and he couldn't build a garden on a volcanic rock.

And then there was her.

He had thought about her across nineteen nights of silence. He had thought about her green eyes, the sharp, defensive wit she used like a shield, and the terrifyingly fragile way her shoulders shook when the panic took her. He knew what she couldn't be; she couldn't be a wanderer in the cargo hold of an old gunship, running from New Republic patrols and sleeping on coarse wool mattresses until her spirit broke. And he knew what she could be if she had the time to find her footing. She could be someone who walked through a market without checking the corners. Someone who filled a room with colour instead of grey lines.

He knew, with a quiet, tightening certainty behind his chest plates, how wrong everything about this was.

It was dangerous. If the Guild or the remnants of the Empire found out that the Mandalorian was altering his navigation logs for the sake of Karga's daughter, the perimeter would collapse before the month turned. More than that, he was intensely, brutally aware of his own nature. He was a man of iron and violence, and she had already spent twenty-one years being managed by men who treated her like an asset. The last thing he wanted, the one thing he refused to let happen, was for his own presence to become just another cage she needed to recover from. Another history she had to survive.

And yet, as he looked at her standing in the moonlight, her dark hair falling loose over her cloak, her green eyes brilliant with a desperate, pining curiosity that she couldn't calculate away, the discipline of his training completely failed him.

He didn't pull the ramp up. He didn't tell her to go back to her room. He stood by the landing gear and he let her lead. He let her set the pace of the night, letting her small, fragile mass orbit around his iron center like a satellite that had found the only gravity it trusted.

"You're going to leave," Versé whispered, her voice fracturing at the edge.

"Not yet," Din said.

His voice was steady, unhurried, and entirely devoid of a performance. He didn't offer a promise he couldn't keep, and he didn't try to soften the reality of the black void outside the hangar. But as he stood there, letting her hold the silence with him under the stars, he gave her the only truth he had left to spend.

"Four days," he repeated quietly. "The ship still needs work."

Versé looked up into the black slit of his visor. She just stood in his shadow, her heart hammering with that stubborn, beautiful ache, letting the private weight of him hold her steady while the rest of the galaxy waited in the dark.

She looked down at her own shoes, her long fingers tightening so hard around the dark wool of her cloak.

"I can't sleep," she said.

The words came out in a sudden, quiet rush, as if she needed to drop the data onto the stone before her pride could catch it.

"I tried to. I spent hours trying to find a rhythm on those linens, but the room is too quiet. On Palar, the house had a sequence of sounds. On your ship, there was the engine. Here, it’s just... flat. It feels like waiting."

Din didn't interrupt. He stood perfectly still, his tall frame catching the faint reflective blue of the security lights, listening to the raw, unpolished cadence of her honesty.

"I went into the market to look for pigments," she continued, her green eyes lifting to lock back onto his T-visor, carrying a sharp, defensive flicker of her old wit. "Ground mineral dust, linseed oil, anything. I thought if I could just mix a row of grey lines, I could organise the map in my head. But the merchant told me the next cargo freighter doesn't drop a manifest for three weeks. I have no materials. I have nothing to do with my hands except count the hours."

She took a short, shallow breath, her chest rising against her dark dress as she prepared to deploy her final perimeter line. She looked from his mask down to the small, empty space between his boots, her jaw tensing with sudden focus.

"And the child is being entirely impossible," she said, her voice dropping into a firm, structured register. "He woke up at dawn and began complaining at the metal of the door. He didn't want the sweet-root pastries Karga sent up. He didn't care about the balcony. He spent the entire morning trying to force his way down the corridor because he wanted to find you."

She shifted her weight, her shoulder drawing in by a fractional, self-protective inch as she made the calculation perfectly clear.

"He misses you," Versé whispered, her green eyes wide and brilliant with a fierce, desperate intensity as she stared up into the black slit of his visor. "He's stubborn. He's the one who can't find a rhythm without the mass of your armour nearby. I only came down here because I couldn't manage his pacing anymore. It’s him. Not me."

She threw the excuse into the space between them like an iron barrier, a frantic, naked attempt to rewrite the ledger of her midnight walk. She needed him to believe it. She needed the Magistrate, the Marshal, and the man behind the mask to think she was just an exhausted supervisor handling a difficult foundling, because admitting the alternative, admitting that she was the one who had run out of structural strength in the dark, was a vulnerability that would drop her directly into the void.

The excuse landed between them and immediately collapsed under its own weight.

Din had spent enough time around the child to know exactly what Grogu sounded like when he missed him.

More importantly, he had spent enough time around Versé to know exactly what she sounded like when she was afraid of telling the truth.

He didn't call her out on it.

He didn't tell her that Grogu had spent most of the afternoon asleep in the market according to Cara's report. He didn't point out that the child was currently snoring in a magistrate's guest suite and therefore wasn't the one standing in the middle of a hangar at nearly midnight.

He just stood there.

The black slit of his visor remained fixed on her face.

Versé felt the weight of it immediately.

It wasn't judgment.

That almost made it worse.

There was no challenge in his silence. No demand that she explain herself. No pressure at all.

Just the quiet certainty of a man who had watched her long enough to recognise the difference between her words and what was actually happening underneath them.

Her throat tightened.

"He's attached to you," she added quickly.

The amendment sounded weak even to her own ears.

Din's helmet tilted slightly.

"He is."

Versé nodded once.

Too fast.

"Exactly."

Silence.

The cooling lines sighed somewhere deep inside the ship.

Din remained completely still.

Verse stared stubbornly at a point somewhere near his shoulder.

Another few seconds passed.

"Versé."

The low rumble of her name immediately unravelled half the defences she had spent the day constructing.

She hated that.

She hated how quickly it happened.

Slowly, reluctantly, she lifted her eyes toward the visor.

Din's posture hadn't changed.

"Grogu's asleep."

The observation was delivered with the same calm simplicity he might have used to discuss weather patterns.

Versé opened her mouth.

Closed it again.

Because unfortunately, he was right. Grogu was asleep. Grogu wasn't pacing. Grogu wasn't standing in this hangar. Grogu wasn't the one who had crossed half the settlement in the middle of the night because the silence in a safe room had become unbearable.

Din didn't press further. He simply waited. Giving her the same thing he had always given her. Space.

The option to step back.

The option to stay.

The option to tell the truth if she wanted to.

And somehow that freedom made her eyes burn more than any interrogation ever could.

Din let her words settle into the cool, greasy air of the hangar. Behind the green tint of his HUD, he read the frantic, trembling geometry of her posture, the furious pink tracing the edges of her ears, and the precise, defensive rigidity of her chin.

He knew the child missed him, of course. Grogu's attachment was a constant, uncalibrated weight in his ledger. But he also knew that Grogu was currently fast asleep on a pale linen mattress three floors up, snoring into a pillow without a single care about the secondary drive diagnostics.

He didn't correct her. If she needed to use the child as a proxy to stand in his shadow at two in the morning, he would let her use the proxy. He would let her have the wall.

"He's difficult when we're grounded," Din said, his voice dropping into a low, level hum through the modulator. "He has an opinion about how the schedule should run."

He reached down slowly, his large, gloved hand picking up the long cleaning rod he had set against the storage crate, his movements deliberate and announced so she could track the mass.

"There's a crate of unrefined slate-oil in the lower tool bin," Din muttered, gesturing with his helmet toward the open cargo ramp of the Razor Crest. "It's thick. It isn't pigment, but if you mix it with the carbon scrape from the thruster housing, it turns black. It stays on wood if you let it dry."

Versé blinked, her breath catching in her throat as the defensive line she had just built completely lost its utility against his bluntness. He hadn't bartered with her excuse, and he hadn't checked the accuracy of her data; he had simply reached into his machine and produced a tool for her hands.

"Slate-oil," she whispered.

"It's messy," Din said, his visor remaining fixed on her green eyes for one long, unblinking second. "But it doesn't take three weeks to drop from a freighter. Go."

Versé looked from the dark slit of his mask to the warm, amber mouth of the ship's ramp, her heart hammering with that stubborn, pining ache that no amount of armour could help her away. She just took a slow, deep breath of the sulfur-tainted night air and walked up the iron slope into his ship, leaving her rules on the stone behind him.

The inside of the Razor Crest was exactly as she had left it. It was thick with the scent of ozone, old leather, and the heavy, metallic warmth of the ship’s primary systems.

Versé stood at the top of the ramp, her feet tracking the rough, familiar texture of the iron deck plates. She didn't move toward the tool bins immediately. Her fingers slowly uncurled from the dark wool of her cloak, her green eyes scanning the narrow, rib-lined walls of the cargo bay. Down here, the suffocating stillness of the magistrate's complex couldn't reach her. The space felt small, industrial, and completely safe: a tiny, iron fortress where she didn't have to keep her chin lifted at a formal, high-society angle.

She walked to the secondary workbench, her long fingers finding the heavy, latch-locked latch of the lower tool bin Din had mentioned. She lifted the lid. Inside, tucked between rows of hydro-spanners and replacement hull bolts, was a small, square canister of unrefined slate-oil. It was dark, viscous, and smelled sharply of tar and ancient earth. Beside it sat a flat scraping tool, its edge caked with the dense, powdery carbon black of the thruster housings.

It wasn't a fine Mid-Rim artist's kit. It was dirty, crude, and smelled of grease instead of linseed.

But as she touched the cold metal of the canister, a sharp, electric spike of genuine relief rushed behind her ribs. Her fingers automatically wrapped around the handle, her mind already beginning to mix the dark, heavy liquid against the wood fragments of an old ration crate in her head, drawing the first disciplined lines to stabilise her interior map.

She turned back toward the ramp, the canister held tight against her side.

Din was still standing at the base of the iron slope. He hadn't returned to his seat on the storage crate. His tall, broad-shouldered frame was a massive silhouette against the cool blue of the Nevarro night, his silver helmet tilted slightly upward to track her shadow as she cleared the threshold of the bay.

The three feet of distance between them felt remarkably thin in the quiet of the middle of the night. Without his chest plates, the dark fabric of his flight suit shifted with his breathing, revealing the sheer, heavy physical mass of the man beneath the armour. The tension in the air changed instantly, turning into something sharp and electric.

Versé stopped three steps from the bottom of the ramp. She looked down at him, her light green eyes wide and luminous in the amber wash of the ship's lights, her breath catching in her throat as she registered the proximity. She was standing on his ship, holding his slate-oil, her hair falling loose over her shoulders, and the urge to step down those last three rungs, to close the final boundary line and feel the solid heat of his shoulder plate against her hand, was a fierce, desperate pressure behind her ribs.

The silence stretched, taut as a wire under tension, pulling them both toward a ledger neither of them was permitted to write.

Din’s hand tightened against his belt, the leather creaking softly in the dark. Behind the green tint of his HUD, his pulse point was running too fast, the tactical calculations that usually governed his mind completely dissolving under the gaze of her green eyes. He could feel the exact trajectory of her orbit, could see the precise, fragile way she was leaning toward his mass, and the temptation to let her finish the stride, to let the walls go completely and hold her steady in the shadow of his gunship, was a brutal, suffocating weight behind his chest plates.

He knew how dangerous it was. He knew how easily the perimeter could fracture if they took the wrong turn tonight.

Before the silence could snap, Din adjusted his weight. He tilted his helmet slightly toward the dark courtyard beyond the archway, his gravelly voice dropping into a flat, administrative rumble through the modulator to anchor the room back to the floor.

"You need to go back," Din said.

Versé blinked, her shoulders drawing in by a fractional, defensive inch as his bluntness hit her armour.

"Cara's guard is on a light watch," Din continued, his tone dry, and entirely stripping the romantic weight out of the air before it could choke them. "But the magistrate runs a central security grid. If the command terminal registers an empty berth in the residential wing before the dawn cycle, we're going to wake up with alarms all over the town."

He let the logistical reality sit between them, an unembellished shield erected to protect the boundary. He didn't want Karga’s sector-guards flooding the hangar with tracking scanners, and he certainly didn't want Cara down here asking questions about why the girl from Palar was mixing thruster carbon at three in the morning.

Versé swallowed, her throat moving in a delicate line as the hot, electric flush in her cheeks slowly began to recede. The dry, sarcastic consistency of his voice acted like a floor under her feet again, steadying her frame before she could lose her balance completely.

"Of course," she whispered, her voice reassembling its quiet, structured cadence as she clutched the canister tighter against her ribs. "Maker forbid the Marshal be forced to deploy a full patrol unit because the foundling’s supervisor went looking for an alternate ledger. The Magistrate’s administrative routine would never survive the shock."

"Karga's loud when he's startled," Din muttered, his visor remaining fixed on her eyes for one last, unblinking second as he stepped aside to clear her path. "Go.”

A tiny, sharp breath escaped her lips, the familiar defensive wit returning to her frame like a shield she knew how to carry. She stepped off the iron ramp onto the volcanic stone, her dark cloak catching the cool night breeze as she walked past his shoulder, keeping her eyes fixed strictly on the stone archway ahead. She didn't look back, but as she carried the heavy smell of his slate-oil back through the empty courtyard, she knew the four days were exactly where they needed to be.

The walk back up the vaulted stone stairs felt longer than the descent. The canister of slate-oil was heavy and cold against her ribs, the sharp, tar-like scent of it clinging to the wool of her cloak. Versé moved through the shadowed corridors of the residential wing with her head down, her boots silent on the stone tiles, her mind still running to the broad lines of his shoulders without the chest plates, the dark slit of his visor, and the low voice.

She rounded the final corner toward her threshold, her fingers already reaching out to open the metallic door before the central security grid could register the dawn cycle.

She stopped. Her boots froze against the stone.

Cara Dune was leaning against the white-washed wall directly beside her door.

The Marshal hadn't changed out of her dark armor. She sat back against the stone with her heavy boots crossed at the ankles, her thumbs hooked loosely into her tactical belt, and the repeating rifle slung casually over her shoulder plate. The lamp over the corridor was dimmed to a low amber sliver, casting long, sharp shadows across the scars on Cara’s breastplate and turning her dark eyes into two steady, unblinking points of light.

She didn't look startled to see Versé appearing out of the dark at three in the morning. She didn't reach for her sidearm, and she didn't call for the guard at the end of the hall, who was currently standing very straight and very awake, a distinct sweat breaking out over his collarbone.

Cara let out a short, quiet breath, her head tilting slightly to register the dark metal canister clutched tightly against Verse's side.

"Nice night for a walk," Cara said. Her voice carried absolutely no administrative performance in it. "The sulfur flats always clear out the lungs around this hour."

Versé felt the sudden, hot flush of embarrassment hit the back of her neck, but she didn't let her shoulders drop. She pulled the shield back over her features with a frantic, desperate intensity, her jaw locking into a rigid line as she forced her voice into its quiet, structured cadence.

"The... the child was restless," Versé said, as she lied directly to the Marshal’s face. "He required an alternate stimulus to stabilize his routine. I simply went to locate a... a logistical item he left behind in the cargo bay."

Cara’s dark eyes shifted from the girl’s pale face down to the canister of slate-oil, a slow, highly amused line tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"Right," Cara muttered, leaning off the wall with a slow, deliberate movement that let her armor clink softly in the quiet hall. "The kid's a real stickler for industrial lubricant at three in the morning. I've noticed that about him."

Versé's fingers tightened around the metal handle until her knuckles turned white. She didn't offer a counter-argument. The exposure felt raw and terrifyingly public under the woman’s gaze, her heart doing that frantic, erratic fluttering behind her ribs.

Cara stood in the center of the corridor for two full seconds, her thumbs still hooked in her belt, watching the girl’s rigid, self-protective posture with the quiet gravity of a soldier who had seen a lot of perimeter lines get tangled in the dark. The sarcasm vanished from her expression, replaced by something much simpler, something grounded and safe.

"Go inside," Cara said softly, gesturing with her chin toward the heavy door. "The security terminal logs what I tell it to log. It's not going to flag an empty bedroom tonight."

Versé swallowed, her throat moving in a delicate line as the suffocating pressure in her chest suddenly dropped by a real, visible inch. She looked at the dark, scarred plate of the Marshal’s armor, realizing with a quiet, unexpected foothold that the woman wasn't there to build a cage for her. She was just holding the perimeter.

"Thank you, Cara," Versé whispered, her voice losing its brittle, refined edge entirely.

"Don't worry about it," Cara said, turning her boots back toward the main stairwell with an unhurried, heavy stride. "Just make sure the Mando gets those fuel lines checked before the morning cycle. I'd hate for him to have to stretch his diagnostics to a fifth day because he ran out of carbon scrape."

Versé didn't answer. She slipped through the door, leaving her alone in the warm amber shadow of her room with the smell of old earth and a floor that finally felt solid beneath her feet.

She let out a sharp, ragged exhale, a sound that was half a gasp and half a groan of sheer, suffocating mortification.

She didn't walk across the stone tiles; she moved in a frantic, silent rush, her boots practically flying over the floorboards. She threw the heavy canister of slate-oil onto the low storage chest at the foot of the bed and practically launched herself onto the mattress.

She buried her face straight into the center of the cool, crisp linen pillow, pressing her forehead and eyes deep into the fabric as if she could physically force the heat out of her skin.

It was useless. The blush was a violent, raging wildfire that started at the base of her collarbone and rushed all the way to the tips of her ears. She could feel the pulse hammering in her cheeks, hot and electric and completely out of her control.

She knew. Cara knew. The entire planet probably knew by now.

Versé squeezed her eyes shut against the dark interior of the pillow, her fingers clawing into the white sheets. She had spent all day constructing a flawless, logical perimeter. She had ignored the hangar, she had walked through the market until her boots were covered in volcanic ash, all to prove that she was independent, that she was fine, that she didn't need the shadow of a silver helmet to keep from drowning.

And then, in a single hour of weakness, she had walked straight into his hangar, demanded an account of his lies, and walked back up the stairs carrying a piece of his ship like a trophy, only to get caught by Cara who looked at her like she was a transparent data pad.

“I’d hate for him to have to stretch his diagnostics to a fifth day...”

Versé pressed her face harder into the linen, letting out a muffled, frustrated breath that warmed the fabric against her lips. The teasing wasn't malicious, Cara’s voice had been too soft, too grounded for that, but the sheer exposure of it was what made her chest turn its gears so violently. She had never been perceived like this before. On Palar, people looked at her to see what she could provide, what she could paint, or what her signature on a contract could buy. Nobody had ever looked at her and seen a girl who was simply pining after a man who had been patient with her.

Beside her hip, Grogu let out a soft, sleeping grunt. The sudden shift of her weight on the mattress had caused him to roll over, his tiny, three-fingered hand reaching out through the dark until his knuckles bumped against her elbow. He didn't wake up; he just tucked his nose back into his oversized sleeve and sighed, thoroughly content now that the room smelled faintly of the Razor Crest’s tool bins again.

Versé slowly turned her head to the side, her cheek resting against the cool, undisturbed edge of the pillow, her breathing finally beginning to slow from a frantic sprint to a shallow, exhausted trot.

Through the open slats of the balcony shutters, the first pale blue lines of the true Nevarro dawn were beginning to bleed across the stone floor tiles, erasing the silver bars of the moonlight.

She looked at the dark canister sitting on the chest in the corner. It was crude, messy, and entirely industrial, but it was real.

The slate-oil smelled like grease and old metal. The carbon scrape would stain her fingers black. By any reasonable standard, it was a terrible substitute for paint.

Yet as the heat in her cheeks finally began to cool against the linen, Verse found herself staring at it with a quiet, impossible fondness.

It was the first gift anyone had given her in years that hadn't come with a contract attached.

Her eyes drifted shut.

Three days, she told herself.

Three days was nothing.

The thought followed her into sleep anyway.

────୨ৎ───

The morning sun rose hot and bright over the central square, burning away the cool, blue mist of the dawn and replacing it with the familiar, heavy scent of baking sweet-root and sulfur.

Versé walked the middle rows of the thoroughfare with her shoulders thrown back, her dark hair pinned up tightly away from her face to keep the wind from catching it. Her cheeks had finally returned to their normal, pale clarity after the mortifying theater of the previous night, but she was still moving with a hyper-deliberate verticality. She was on high alert, her green eyes scanning the edges of the crowd, half-expecting Cara Dune to lounge out from behind a spice stall with another devastating comment about industrial lubricant.

She needed to focus on the terrain. She needed to look at things that had absolutely nothing to do with the eastern hangar or the canister of slate-oil currently sitting in her bedroom.

Her boots slowed as she neared the upper terrace row, where the off-world merchants set up their more permanent pavilions. A display mannequin carved from dark, polished synthetic wood caught her eye, standing just beneath the shadow of a crimson awning.

Versé stopped. Her breath caught in her throat by a fractional, involuntary inch.

The outfit was minimalist, and completely unlike the heavy, impractical ivory silks she had been forced to wear in the Vauren compound. It consisted of a long, sleeveless tunic-dress crafted from a dark charcoal fabric woven with fine, almost invisible silver pinstripes that caught the harsh Nevarro light. The high, structured collar rose elegantly around the neck, lending it a refined, almost military appearance that offered a sense of protective containment. Sharp, angular shoulders extended slightly outward, creating a strong silhouette, while tailored seams contoured the torso before flowing down into a straight skirt that reached the ankles.

It looked like something a high-ranking sector coordinator might wear to a formal briefing, until she looked closer at the engineering of it.

A clean, precise slit ran up one side of the charcoal garment, but beneath it were fitted black trousers that hugged the legs from waist to ankle, ensuring absolute freedom of movement without exposing a single inch of skin. Completing the ensemble on the mannequin's base was a pair of sleek black boots with modest, sturdy heels, their polished leather adding a subtle, dangerous edge to the otherwise understated design.

It was a beautiful contradiction. It blended the clean, structured lines of formal attire with the practical, rugged functionality expected of someone accustomed to life among the stars.

It would be so practical on the Crest, the thought slipped into her mind before her caution could deploy a firewall to stop it.

Her heart did that sudden, erratic fluttering behind her ribs. Her mind ran the ledger with terrifying efficiency, picturing herself climbing the iron rungs of the cockpit ladder without the heavy hem of her dark dress wrapping around her shins. She imagined sitting in the co-pilot's chair, her legs tucked up safely in those black trousers, matching Din’s dry, sarcastic rhythm while the blue hyperdrive lines rushed past the viewport. The boots wouldn't click against the steel floor plates the way her actual shoes did; they would make a solid, grounded sound. A sound that belonged on a gunship.

A sudden, sharp flash of embarrassment hit her ears.

Stop it, she told herself fiercely, her jaw tensing as she forced her eyes away from the charcoal fabric. You are not staying on the ship. You have three days left. You are not buying an outfit for a ship that is leaving.

She turned her back on the pavilion, her chin lifting as she took three fast, rigid steps down the packed-earth row, determined to continue her walk. It was a pathetic malfunction of her defenses. She was overthinking a garment because she was still suffocating under the realization that the Mandalorian had manufactured a four-day lie for her sake. She didn't need star-faring trousers. She needed to get used to the settlement.

She took five more steps. The murmur of the market rose around her. An Aqualish merchant barked a price. A cargo droid whined.

Versé stopped.

She let out a long, frustrated, defeated sigh that puffed through her lips, her shoulders dropping by a real inch. She couldn't do it. She couldn't leave it there. The pining curiosity about the life behind that silver mask was simply too heavy, and the desire to have at least one thing that made her look like she belonged in the daylight, even if it was only for three more nights, was a calculation she couldn't outrun.

She spun around on her heel, her dark cloak flaring against the dust, and walked straight back to the pavilion.

"The charcoal tunic," she said to the merchant, her voice reassembling its quiet cadence to mask the frantic pounding in her chest. "With the trousers and the leather boots. I will take them."

The transaction was brief, her fingers handling the credit chips with a sharp efficiency. When the merchant handed over the neatly folded, dark bundle, Versé tucked it securely under her arm, her green eyes looking at the ground as she prepared to make a swift, defensive retreat back to the residential wing before anyone could see her.

She took two steps out from under the crimson awning and nearly collided with a solid wall of dark breastplate armor.

Cara Dune was standing right there at the seam of the row.

Versé stopped so abruptly that the folded bundle nearly slipped from beneath her arm.

For one terrible second, neither of them spoke.

Cara's dark eyes dropped to the charcoal fabric.

Then to the boots.

Then back up to Versé's face.

The Marshal's expression remained perfectly neutral.

Which was somehow much worse.

Versé felt her stomach drop.

"Good morning, Marshal," she said with rigid formality.

"Morning."

Cara continued staring at the bundle.

A long, unbearable silence followed.

Finally, Cara lifted one eyebrow.

"That's new."

Versé tightened her grip on the package.

"It is clothing."

"Glad we cleared that up."

The silence returned.

Cara looked down at the folded trousers again.

Her mouth twitched.

Versé immediately knew she had identified the problem. The trousers. Not formal trousers. Not house trousers. Not the kind of thing anyone from Palar would normally choose.

Functional trousers.

For climbing ladders. For cargo ramps. For moving around the interior of an old gunship.

Heat rushed straight into Versé's ears.

"I need practical outfits," she said quickly.

"Uh-huh."

"The settlement is rough terrain."

"Sure."

"The current garments are poorly suited to daily movement."

"Absolutely."

Cara nodded along with every word, her expression growing steadily more dangerous.

Versé wished the volcanic flats would open beneath her feet.

"The boots are sturdy," she added.

"That's important."

"And the tailoring allows greater mobility."

"Can't imagine why you'd need that."

Versé closed her eyes.

Just briefly.

When she opened them again, Cara was openly fighting a smile.

"The funny thing," the Marshal said thoughtfully, "is that if I didn't know any better, I'd say that's exactly the sort of outfit someone buys when they've spent too much time on a certain outdated gunship."

Versé made a sound that wasn't quite a gasp and wasn't quite a strangled scream.

Cara finally lost the battle and laughed.

Not loudly.

Just enough.

"Relax," she said, waving a hand. "It's a good look."

Versé stared at her.

Cara's grin softened by a fraction.

"For what it's worth," she added, "it's the first thing I've seen you choose because you wanted it."

The words landed differently.

The teasing vanished from the edges.

For a second, Cara wasn't looking at a girl with a crush.

She was looking at someone who had spent twenty-one years wearing whatever other people put in front of her.

Versé's grip on the package loosened slightly.

Cara jerked her chin toward the residential wing.

"Go try it on."

Versé blinked.

"What?"

"Go on."

Cara folded her arms.

"Before Mando accidentally develops another four days of diagnostics."

The flush on her cheeks slowly began to cool in the hot Nevarro breeze, but her fingers didn't loosen their grip on the bundle. She looked down at the charcoal fabric, the silver pinstripes catching the brilliant morning light, and she let out a long, slow breath. The excuse had been thin, incredibly thin, but as she turned her boots back toward the magistrate’s complex, the pining curiosity behind her ribs felt a little less like a trap and a little more like a destination.

Versé slipped back into the quiet shelter of her room. The cool, sweet-grass-scented air of the suite washed over her, a massive relief after the blinding heat of the thoroughfare and the devastating weight of Cara Dune’s knowing smirk.

She leaned her back against the door, her shoulders dropping a real, visible inch as she let out a long, slow breath. She was still clutching the dark charcoal bundle tightly against her ribs, her cheeks finally cooling from the intense pink that had flared up under the market awning.

A quiet, rhythmic crunch-sound cut through the stillness of the room.

Versé blinked, her green eyes shifting from the stone floor tiles toward the center of the pale linen mattress.

Grogu was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, completely surrounded by the crisp white sheets. Tucked securely under his tiny left arm was a small, grease-stained paper sack, and held between his three-fingered hands was a bright, neon-blue cookie. He was mid-bite, his large ears tilted slightly upward in absolute, unbothered bliss as crumbs of blue sugar drifted down onto his coarse woolen robes and scattered across the pristine bedding.

He stopped chewing the moment the door clicked. His large, dark eyes locked onto Verse, his jaws going perfectly still as a faint ring of blue powder dusted the edges of his mouth.

Versé stared at him, then at the sack, and then at the distinct, messy blue trail he was leaving behind on the magistrate's imported linens. A sharp, understanding line formed between her brows as her mind instantly ran the data. He hadn't gotten those from Karga’s kitchen staff, and he certainly hadn't bartered for them himself in the lower market bins.

"Where did you get those?" Versé asked, her voice dropping into a quiet, accusing murmur as she stepped toward the bed.

Grogu didn't answer. Instead, he let out a sharp, defensive sound, his tiny hands immediately drawing the macaroon closer to his chest, his large ears flattening into a stubborn horizontal line. He looked at her with the exact same defiant focus he had used at dawn when he was complaining at the door. He was protecting his assets.

Versé stopped at the edge of the mattress, setting the neatly folded charcoal outfit onto the low storage chest. She looked down at the tiny, blue-faced creature, a faint, helpless tug pulling at the corner of her mouth despite herself.

"He gave them to you," she whispered, her voice losing its stiff, protective cadence, revealing the soft, raw interior underneath.

It wasn't a question. She knew exactly whose large, gloved hand had reached into a storage chest on the Razor Crest to pull out that paper sack. Din had probably found the child toddling around the hangar floor or sitting on the ramp, stubborn and refusing to leave the ship, and he had used the blue treats to bribe him into a temporary compliance. Or maybe... maybe he had just given them to him because he knew the kid was restless away from the cockpit.

A quiet, pining ache tightened behind Versé's ribs. She reached out, her long fingers gently brushing a stray blue crumb off Grogu's sleeve, her mind instantly returning to the hangar, to the sight of Din sitting on the rusted crate without his chest plates, his gravelly voice dropping into that low, level register to offer her a tin of slate-oil.

A quiet ache tightened behind Versé's ribs.

The slate-oil sat on the storage chest.

Grogu was covered in blue sugar.

Neither problem had existed yesterday.

"You're making a mess," Versé murmured softly.

Grogu responded by shoving the entire cookie in his mouth.

"You're impossible," she whispered.

#din djarin #the mandalorian #pedro pascal #the mandalorian fanfiction #fan fic #mando #pedro pascal characters #din djarin x oc #oc #original character #mando x oc

karmaphobic

Jul 4

Provider | Pt. 6

AO3 Masterlist

Din Djarin x Fem!OC

Word count: 4910 words

The heavy steel ramp lowered with its familiar grinding shriek, and immediately the world outside rushed in.

Heat struck first.

Not the damp chill of Palar's endless grey mornings, but dry volcanic warmth that seemed to settle over the skin like a living thing. It carried the sharp sting of sulphur, the scent of sun-baked stone, and beneath it all the distant sounds of a city already awake. Voices drifted across the landing field. Machinery rumbled somewhere beyond the walls. The steady rhythm of construction echoed through the settlement as Nevarro continued its relentless transformation from frontier outpost into something larger.

For the first time since leaving Palar, Versé was stepping into a place that had no connection to the life she had known.

At the base of the landing pad, Greef Karga was waiting.

He had arrived early. Far earlier than anyone would reasonably expect a magistrate to stand on a landing platform under a rising sun, but he had not trusted himself to remain elsewhere. Eighteen years was a long time to wait for anything. Long enough for hope to become dangerous. Long enough for certainty to erode into something far more fragile.

When the ramp first began lowering, he had been standing with his usual confidence, arms spread wide beneath his richly embroidered robes, prepared to greet them with the practiced warmth he offered every visitor who stepped onto his world.

Then he saw her.

The performance disappeared immediately.

His arms fell to his sides.

The smile vanished.

For a brief moment he looked less like the Magistrate of Nevarro and more like a man who had spent almost two decades carrying a wound that had never properly healed.

Beside him, Cara Dune noticed the change at once. She remained where she was, boots planted firmly against the volcanic dirt, her arms folded across her chest plate, but her attention sharpened. Her gaze moved from Karga to the figure emerging from the ship and immediately settled into a protective sort of assessment.

At the top of the ramp, Versé appeared. And the change in her was immediate. The open space alone seemed to affect her.

Din felt it before she moved. He noticed the subtle tightening in her posture. The slight hesitation in her step. The way her gaze dropped instinctively toward the ground as her body tried to account for too many unknown variables at once.

Then she shifted closer. Not drastically. Not enough for anyone unfamiliar with her to notice. But enough. The dark fabric of her cloak brushed against his thigh plate as she moved into the space beside him, unconsciously positioning his armoured frame between herself and the strangers waiting below. She wasn't hiding behind him because she believed he would solve the situation for her. She was hiding behind him because he was currently the only fixed point in an unfamiliar universe.

Din adjusted nothing. He didn't create distance. He didn't acknowledge it. He simply descended the ramp at his usual pace, allowing her to remain exactly where she wanted to be.

The movement brought them to the bottom of the landing pad. The moment their boots touched the ground, Karga took a step forward. Then stopped.

Whatever speech he had prepared died before it reached his tongue. He found himself staring. Searching.

There were traces of her mother in the shape of her face. In the line of her eyes. In certain expressions that appeared and vanished too quickly to properly catch.

But there were other things there too. Years of caution. Years of isolation. Years spent learning that safety was conditional and affection came attached to contracts.

The sight hit him harder than he had prepared for.

"Versé."

His voice emerged rougher than intended. The single word carried none of the authority that usually accompanied it. Only a father who wasn't certain he had earned the right to use his daughter's name.

Versé didn't answer. She didn't move toward him. Didn't offer a smile. Instead, she remained exactly where she was, close enough to Din that her shoulder nearly brushed his arm plate. Watching. Calculating. Every instinct she possessed was evaluating threat, distance, intention, and escape routes.

Karga saw all of it. And understood immediately. The realisation settled heavily on his shoulders. Whatever relationship existed here would have to be built from the ground up. There would be no miraculous reunion. No emotional embrace. Only patience and time.

Cara watched the entire exchange unfold and quietly decided somebody needed to intervene before the weight of it crushed everyone involved.

She stepped forward, but not enough to dominate the space. Just enough to redirect it.

"Mando," she said, her voice carrying the easy steadiness of someone accustomed to defusing situations before they exploded. "How was the flight?"

"Standard," Din replied.

The answer earned the faintest twitch at the corner of Cara's mouth. Typical. Her attention shifted briefly toward Versé. The girl looked exhausted. Not physically. Emotionally. Like someone who had spent every reserve she possessed simply getting here.

Meanwhile, Versé finally lifted her gaze fully toward Karga. For a moment neither of them spoke.

"Magistrate." The title landed with surgical precision. Not cruel. Not hostile. But deliberate. A boundary carefully placed between them.

Karga absorbed it without flinching. Still, the impact showed. A flicker of grief crossed his face before he managed to smooth it away. Because the truth was simple: she owed him nothing. Not trust. Not affection. Not forgiveness.

So instead of reaching for something that hadn't been earned, he inclined his head slowly and accepted the distance she offered him. "Welcome to Nevarro, Versé." His voice had softened.

The silence that followed wasn't hostile. It was the kind of silence that appears when everyone involved understands they are standing at the beginning of something and nobody knows how to take the first step.

The hot wind moved across the landing pad, carrying sulphur and dust between them.

Versé lowered her eyes again. Cara watched her shoulders tighten. Watched the subtle way she remained positioned behind Din's armour. And made another decision.

"Alright," she said, cutting cleanly through the tension. "The sun's getting higher and the market's about to become a nightmare. I'll take Versé up to the residential wing. Give her a chance to settle somewhere that doesn't smell like starship engines."

The reaction was immediate. Versé's head snapped toward Din. The fear appeared so quickly that it bypassed every defence she had. The distance between them was changing. And she wasn't ready for it.

Din met her gaze through the black slit of his visor. He didn't move closer. Didn't soften his posture. Didn't treat her like she was fragile.

"I'll meet you in a bit." A brief pause. "Take Grogu with you."

Versé swallowed. She looked down at the child nestled against her side. Grogu looked perfectly content, as though the entire situation was proceeding exactly as expected.

Slowly, reluctantly, she stepped away from Din's armour.

Cara gestured toward the stone archway leading deeper into the city. "This way."

This time Versé followed. Halfway across the courtyard she stopped and looked back. The movement was almost involuntary. A final check. A need to confirm that the thing she was trusting still existed.

Across the landing pad Din remained exactly where he had been. An unmoving silhouette of beskar and leather beneath the Nevarran sun. Watching and waiting exactly where he said he would be. Only then did she continue walking.

Five steps later she looked back again. And once again she found him standing there.

The dark fabric of her cloak disappeared beneath the shadow of the archway. Only after she was completely out of sight did the landing pad finally fall silent.

────୨ৎ───

Greef Karga stood motionless for a moment after the girl disappeared through the archway. The landing pad suddenly felt larger than it had a few minutes ago.

Empty.

His broad shoulders lowered beneath the weight of his embroidered robes, the authority of the Magistrate peeling away piece by piece until only the man underneath remained. The man who had spent twenty years imagining this moment and discovering, with painful clarity, that imagination had not prepared him for reality.

When he finally spoke, his voice came out quieter than intended. "She's very quiet, Mando." The words were almost lost beneath the wind rolling across the volcanic plateau.

Karga kept his eyes fixed on the archway where she had vanished, his hands disappearing into the deep blue sleeves of his robes to conceal the slight tremor that had settled into them.

For a moment neither man moved.

Din watched the same archway through the black slit of his visor. "She's careful," he said.

Karga let out a slow breath. The distinction landed harder than he expected. Quiet implied temperament. Careful implied experience. One was personality. The other was survival.

Din thought about the administrative building, already reorganising the next steps in his mind. The reunion was only the beginning. There were still conversations that needed to happen, arrangements that needed to be made, and boundaries that needed to be protected.

"Let's talk inside."

Karga nodded once.

────୨ৎ───

The moment they stepped beyond the heavy lintel, the sheer, crushing mass of the town hit Versé like a physical wave.

She stopped. Her boots froze against the sun-baked stone. She didn’t mean to display her lack of preparation, but the shield she had tried so desperately to reassemble since leaving the landing pad cracked instantly. Her green eyes went wide, reflecting a chaotic kaleidoscope of color, motion, and light that her mind simply didn't know how to categorize.

Nevarro’s market was a living, breathing creature.

Below the terrace, the thoroughfare was packed with a dense, swarming crowd of species she had only ever seen in the margins of her mother’s old data pads. Aqualish merchant-barterers argued over strings of dried glow-fish; old humans in faded linen tunics bartered with green-skinned Mirialans over crates of blue spice-roots; and children, real children, dressed in mismatched rags and bright local wool, chased each other through the gaps between the heavy stalls, their high-pitched shouting rising above the deeper rumble of the crowd.

But it wasn't the numbers that made Versé catch her breath. It was the noise.

It wasn't the structured, managing efficiency of the Vauren compound, where every footstep had to be accounted for and every conversation was conducted in the flat, muffled tones of people trying not to draw Selt’s eye. It was loud. It was uncoordinated.

A group of off-duty cargo-freighters sat at a long, grease-stained bench outside a common house, throwing their heads back in a sudden, booming roar of shared laughter that carried clearly up to the stone walkway. A child stumbled over a loose crate, dropped a small, wooden toy, and instead of freezing in terror, simply picked it up and ran off, laughing as an older woman shouted a mock-scolding after him from a fruit stall.

They were happy.

Versé stared down at them, her fingers tightening around Grogu’s coarse robes until the kid let out a small, questioning grunt against her ribs. She didn't look at the colors or the banners; she looked at the faces. There was an absolute, terrifying absence of worry on the skin of the people below. They didn't move with their shoulders drawn inward. They didn't calculate the distance to the nearest exit before they spoke. They were just... existing in the daylight, spending their credits on roasted gorg, and sharing space without the ghost of a contract hanging over their heads.

It felt completely unreal. It felt like a stage performance, a bizarre, beautiful illusion that she expected to shatter the moment someone noticed she was watching.

"It’s a lot to take in at first," Cara said.

The Marshal had stopped two paces ahead of her on the walkway. She didn't crowd Versé’s space, and she didn't try to force her to move; she just stood with her heavy boots planted wide, her thumbs hooked into her dark armour belt, watching the girl with a quiet, grounded gravity that had no performance in it.

"Palar doesn't get a lot of noise, from what Karga told me," Cara added, her dark eyes tracking the frantic way Versé’s pupils were dilating as they scanned the crowd.

Versé swallowed, her throat moving in a delicate, tight line as she forced the air back into her lungs. She looked down at Grogu, whose large ears were fully elevated, his nose working at a furious pace as he caught the combined scent of roasting meat, heavy spices, and the sharp sulfur drifting from the flats. He looked thoroughly satisfied with the noise.

"They're... they're just walking," Versé whispered, her voice losing its refined, defensive edge entirely, revealing the raw, bewildered twenty-one-year-old underneath. "Nobody is... nobody is checking the corners. Why is no one watching them?"

Cara let out a short, quiet breath, not a laugh, but the heavy, understanding sound of a soldier who knew exactly what it felt like to come out of a dark hole into the light.

"Because we do the watching for them," Cara said simply, gesturing with her chin toward the repeating rifle slung over her shoulder plate. "Karga runs the ledgers, I run the perimeter, and the Mando... well, the Mando ensures nobody changes the rules without a fight. They paid for the right to be loud. It took a lot of blood to clear the slate enough for a school to sit down there, but it holds."

Versé looked from the laughing freighters back to the dark, scarred plate of Cara’s armour. The awkwardness that had tensed her frame since the landing pad didn't vanish, but the suffocating pressure of the panic began to lift, replaced by a deep, pining curiosity about this volcanic rock that she couldn't quite press down.

"He told me about the school," Versé murmured, her thumb tracing the soft curve of Grogu’s ear. He said Karga had an investment in it."

"He did," Cara said, her boots shifting against the stone as she resumed her unhurried pace down the walkway. "And he wasn't lying. Come on. Your room has a window that looks right over the courtyard. If you get tired of the noise, you can just pull the shutters. Nobody's going to knock them down."

Versé took a slow, deep breath of the hot, heavy Nevarro air, the coppery sting of it filling her chest. She looked back toward the landing pad one final time, confirming that the grey hull of the Razor Crest was still visible through the heat waves, before she followed the Marshal into the deeper shadow of the residential wing.

The residential suite was cooler than the terrace, the thick volcanic stone walls acting as a natural barrier against the heavy Nevarro heat. It smelled of clean linen and dried sweet-grass, an intentional lack of old carbon and starship grease that felt almost jarring after the close quarters of the Razor Crest.

"This room is yours," Cara said, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe. She didn't cross the threshold, maintaining that steady, non-threatening distance she had held since the landing pad. "If you need anything else, tell the guard at the end of the hall. He reports to me."

Versé stood in the centre of the floor, the dark cloak she had worn from Palar suddenly feeling too thick for the room. She looked at the wide, neatly made bed, its linens pale and crisp, and carefully lowered Grogu onto the mattress. The child didn't object; he instantly crawled to the centre of the bed, his large ears flapping as he patted the soft fabric with his three fingers, letting out a series of low, exploratory grunts before settling into the pillows.

"Thank you, Marshal," Verse said, her voice reassembling its quiet, structured cadence.

"Cara's fine," she muttered, her dark eyes lingering on the girl for one last, protective second before she left, leaving the room to its silence.

Versé let out a long, slow breath and let her shoulders drop by a real, visible inch. She didn't look at the washing basin or the wardrobe. Her feet moved across the stone tiles toward the far side of the chamber, where a pair of wood shutters stood unlatched.

She pushed them open.

It wasn't just a window. It was a small, stone-carved balcony that jutted out over the upper ridge of the courtyard, completely open to the heavy air of the planet. Versé stepped out onto the ledge, her long dark hair instantly catching the warm wind.

Versé rested both hands against the warm stone railing and simply stood there.

For a long moment, she did nothing except watch.

The city stretched beneath her in layers of movement and sound. From this height the people in the thoroughfare became streams of colour flowing between the dark volcanic buildings: merchants pulling awnings into place, workers carrying crates balanced against their shoulders, and children weaving recklessly through spaces that looked far too narrow to fit through. The noise rose continuously from below, not as a single sound but as hundreds of separate lives colliding together. Laughter. Arguments. Bartering. A door slamming. A distant burst of applause.

Nobody seemed afraid of any of it.

That realisation settled over her more heavily than all the noise combined.

On Palar, every sound had carried meaning. A door opening could mean a summon. Footsteps in a corridor could mean trouble. Raised voices almost always meant somebody was about to lose something. She had spent years unconsciously measuring every disturbance around her, sorting it into categories of danger before she even realised she was doing it.

Here, the sounds simply... existed.

A child shouted somewhere below and was answered by three more. Someone laughed loudly enough that half the street turned to look. Nothing happened. Nobody rushed to correct them. Nobody lowered their voice. Nobody reminded them of their place.

Versé found herself gripping the railing harder. It was such a small thing. People being allowed to be loud. People being allowed to exist without permission. The thought lodged itself somewhere deep inside her chest.

Her gaze drifted across the city until she found the landing pad.

The ship sat exactly where it had been when she entered the building. Even from this distance she could pick out its familiar silhouette. The sight of it loosened something inside her that she hadn't realised was still wound tight.

She knew who was down there. Not because she could see him. The distance was too great for that. She simply knew.

Din Djarin.

The name moved through her thoughts with uncomfortable ease. He had given her that name freely on the first night, offering it without ceremony in the quiet amber light of her room. No bargain. No expectation. No contract attached.

Just trust.

And standing above a city full of strangers, Versé realised she had no desire to share it. Not with Cara. Not with Karga. Not with anyone.

To the rest of the galaxy, he could remain the Mandalorian. The bounty hunter. The armoured figure people stepped away from. He could be Mando. But Din felt different. Private. Not because she had any claim to it, but because it had been given to her. And for someone who had spent most of her life having things taken, traded, managed, or assigned, the distinction mattered more than she wanted to admit.

────୨ৎ───

Versé was sitting on the edge of the bed, her fingers absently tracing the soft fold of Grogu's robe, when the heavy mechanical door hissed open behind her.

The sound made her tense automatically.

Her shoulders stiffened. Her breath caught. For a fraction of a second, every instinct she had spent years cultivating under the Vauren roof snapped awake, preparing for an interruption she couldn't control.

Then came the familiar rhythm of boots against the stone floor.

The tension left her body almost as quickly as it had arrived. Not completely. It never disappeared completely anymore. But it loosened enough for her shoulders to drop and her fingers to unclench from the blanket. She didn't even need to turn around immediately. She already knew who it was.

Somewhere along the journey from Palar to Nevarro, she had learned the sound of his approach.

And, somehow, her body had started treating it as the opposite of a threat.

Only then did she glance toward the door.

He stepped inside, his tall, broad-shouldered frame instantly making the bright, high-ceilinged room feel smaller, crowded with the cold presence of beskar and dark leather.

The heavy door slid shut behind him with a muted mechanical hiss.

Din only moved a few paces into the room before stopping. He didn't approach the bed. He didn't intrude on the space Cara had given her. As always, he left a careful distance between them, one that acknowledged her boundaries without drawing attention to them.

The helmet tilted slightly.

His visor settled first on Grogu, asleep among the pale linens with one ear folded beneath his head and a fist curled into the blanket. The child hadn't stirred at the sound of the door. His breathing remained slow and even, completely unaware of the silent inspection.

Only after confirming that the kid was still asleep did Din's attention shift.

The dark line of the T-visor found her.

She was here. The thought settled heavily into the silence. She was on Nevarro. Not the imagined version she had constructed during sleepless nights on Palar. Not a distant possibility waiting somewhere in the future. A real place beneath her feet. A room with clean linens. A balcony overlooking a city full of strangers. A door she could close herself.

For a long moment, Versé stared at the pale stone floor, her fingers twisting together in her lap.

And then the realisation arrived.

Not all at once. Piece by piece. There would be no more midnight visits to her room. No more nights spent waiting for the familiar sound of beskar in the corridor outside her door.

The job was finished.

A cold sensation spread slowly through her chest. She had spent so many nights focused on escaping Palar that she had never allowed herself to think beyond the escape itself. Never allowed herself to examine what happened afterwards.

What happened when Din Djarin fulfilled his promise. What happened when he no longer had a reason to stay.

Because he was a bounty hunter. That reality felt suddenly enormous.

He belonged to the spaces between worlds. He belonged to hyperspace lanes, tracking fobs, and contracts written by people who only cared whether a target got taken care of. He moved from system to system with the ease of someone who had spent his entire life leaving places behind.

And she—

Versé swallowed. She was just a frightened girl sitting in a borrowed room, still learning how to exist in a city where nobody knew her. The ache behind her ribs sharpened. For a terrible moment, she could picture it with perfect clarity. The Razor Crest lifting from the landing pad. The engines disappearing into the clouds. The city remaining exactly where it was while the one solid thing she had trusted vanished into the black.

Her throat tightened.

Immediately, instinct took over.

Her chin lifted. Her shoulders straightened. The carefully constructed high-society composure slid back into place like armour she had worn for so long she no longer remembered where it ended and she began. She would not let him see it. She would not let him see how frightened she suddenly was.

But Din knew.

He had spent too many nights sitting in the amber quiet of her room on Palar not to recognize the signs.

The changes were small. Most people wouldn't have noticed them. Versé had spent years perfecting the art of appearing composed while entire storms tore through her chest. She knew how to lift her chin at exactly the right angle. She knew how to smooth every trace of uncertainty from her voice. She knew how to hide behind refinement and careful wording until nobody could see the frightened girl underneath.

But Din had grown accustomed to the details. The slight hesitation before she spoke. The way her fingers tightened into the fabric of her dress when she was trying to keep control of herself. The almost imperceptible increase in her breathing whenever a thought frightened her more than she wanted to admit. The fact that she hadn't looked directly at his visor since he'd entered the room.

He saw all of it.

She was preparing herself for his departure. The realisation settled heavily somewhere beneath the beskar.

She was sitting in a safe room, in a city full of people who would protect her, with a father willing to wait years if that was what she needed. Every practical variable in the equation had improved. And she was still bracing for impact. Because she thought he was leaving.

Din remained motionless near the door, his visor fixed on her rigid posture. He knew he would have to leave eventually. The galaxy didn't stop moving. Contracts didn't stop appearing. Credits would need to be earned.

Eventually.

And as he looked at her sitting on the edge of that bed, trying so hard to appear unaffected by the possibility of his absence, he found himself making the decision before he had fully examined it.

The ship could stay on Nevarro a little longer.

"The ship needs work," Din said suddenly, breaking the tense atmosphere in the room.

Versé looked up, her light green eyes wide and startlingly bright as they locked onto the dark slit of his visor.

"The primary thruster casing took a hit from Selt's men at the spaceport," Din continued, his tone perfectly flat, laced with that dry, unbothered consistency that always seemed to lock the gears of her panic. "The fuel lines are leaking carbon into the secondary drive. It’s going to take the mechanic three days to clear the diagnostics, maybe four if the parts have to come from the lower hub."

The Razor Crest was fine. The hit from Selt's men had scorched the hull plating and left a few cosmetic marks across the starboard side, but nothing that would keep him grounded. If he wanted to leave, he could be beyond Nevarro's atmosphere before the afternoon shadows reached the lava flats.

The moment he stepped into the room, he knew exactly what she was bracing for. She thought the job was finished. She thought he had come here to tell her he was leaving.

The room was safe. Karga was willing to wait. Cara wasn't a threat. Yet Versé sat on the edge of the bed as though she were preparing for an impact she couldn't avoid. And despite everything the Creed had taught him about distance and discipline, he found he wasn't ready to take away the one thing she had allowed herself to rely on.

"I'll be around," Din muttered, his helmet tilting slightly toward the balcony as though the decision were nothing more than another entry in a ledger. "Grogu would like to be with you a little longer."

Versé swallowed, her throat moving in a delicate line as the suffocating weight in her chest suddenly eased. Not completely. The fear was still there, buried somewhere beneath her ribs, tangled up with every uncertainty waiting beyond the walls of the room. But it loosened enough for her to breathe around it.

A small breath escaped her lips, quiet and unsteady. Relief settled through her frame in slow waves, warm and almost embarrassing in its intensity. Four days. It wasn't forever. It wasn't even particularly long. Yet to someone who had spent the last three years measuring her life in careful survivals and closed doors, four more days felt impossibly generous.

"Right," she said softly, a faint spark of defensive wit returning to her voice. "Of course. Maker forbid the Mandalorian leave a city before his ship is thoroughly scrubbed of Palar dust. The dried gorg would never survive the trip."

"The gorg is fine," Din replied. "The ship is old."

He turned toward the door, his boots making a heavy, deliberate sound against the stone tiles. He didn't rush the movement. As always, he gave her the full geometry of his departure, never appearing and disappearing without warning, never leaving her scrambling to find her footing after he was gone.

At the seam of the heavy metallic door, he paused, his broad frame outlined against the corridor light.

"Four days," he said quietly. "Get some rest, Versé."

He didn't wait for a response. The door closed behind him with a solid, measured click, and the room settled back into silence.

Versé sat motionless for a moment, listening. The sound of his boots echoed down the corridor in slow, rhythmic intervals. She listened until she couldn't hear it anymore. Only then did she let out a long, careful breath and sink back against the pale linens.

The strangers outside her window were still strangers. The city below was still loud and unfamiliar. The future remained a vast, uncertain thing she couldn't quite bring herself to look at directly.

But Din Djarin was still here.

For four more days, she wouldn't have to learn how to navigate this new world alone.

For four more nights, the anchor she had thrown into the dark would remain exactly where she had left it.