Ny

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[pzychothik]

Pzychothik's Masterlist

I write about emotionally damaged men and the people unfortunate enough to fall in love with them.

18+ | Minors DNI

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Star Wars

Din Djarin

Beskar and Light (Series) Status: Ongoing

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

Part 17

Part 18

Part 19

Read it on AO3

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[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 22

I have been disgustingly sick for the last few days while I was writing this chapter, so if it feels a little like it was written through a haze of cough syrup and bland soup… that's because it was.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Home (soft version) – Good Neighbours

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, no smut in this one, domestic fluff. MDNI.

W/c: 5.6k

She woke to the sound of his breathing and the weight of someone who had been deeply asleep for a long time. 

His breathing came slow and even, entirely without the reservation she had come to expect from him even in sleep. There was no readiness in it. No low-level alertness holding somewhere beneath the surface, waiting. She had never felt the absence of it before, had not understood until now how present it always was, that faint tension he carried everywhere. He had slept. Not rested, not maintained the barest edge of wakefulness against whatever might come. Really slept, against her, with the deep even weight of someone who had felt safe enough to go all the way under. 

His face was turned into her chest, her breasts warm under his cheek. She'd noticed it the moment she'd surfaced, had turned it over and waited for the embarrassment to arrive. It came, briefly, and then it was gone, and what was left was simply the warmth of him and her own skin and the dark of the room. 

She thought about Grogu. He had gone down long before she'd left the bedroom, had been deeply under when she'd finally untucked herself and crossed the dark apartment to the couch. She had not woken since to the sounds that usually followed when he surfaced. Half greeting, half demand. The sound of someone checking that the people who were supposed to be there still were. This morning she'd heard nothing, and she lay in the dark and turned that over. 

She reached through the Force and found him. Awake, the way she'd suspected. But the quality of it was not distress or loneliness or the flavour of a child trying very hard to be patient. Settled. Deliberate, even. She pressed a little closer and felt the small warm shape of his awareness brush hers. Something came back, not language exactly, not image, more like a hand pressed flat against a door. 

I'm okay. 

She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling she couldn't see and felt something move through her chest that started warm and became something larger. She breathed it out slowly and left it alone. 

She moved her hand, letting her fingers find Din's hair. She knew how it felt, the slight curl of it, softer than anything else about him. She touched it carefully, just her fingertips working slowly through it while he stayed completely under. Somehow during that, the thought occured to her that she had no idea what colour it was. Dark, maybe, like the hair on his chest, but she had no way of knowing for sure.

She didn't know the colour of his eyes either. 

With Varen she had read everything through his face. 

She had loved Varen. That was still true regardless of what he'd become, regardless of what she'd had to survive to get out. But for years before everything collapsed she had been happy in ways she hadn't known she was allowed to be. She had known him through his expressions, through the way his jaw set and his eyes shifted and his mouth moved before he'd decided what to say. She had believed that was the only way of truly knowing someone. Had built everything on the readability of him, yet when what was behind the face changed she hadn't seen it coming until it was too late. 

Din she had learned without that. Through his hands and the weight of his attention, the way he stood and moved, the quality of his silences. She knew the weight of his shoulder against hers, the way his helmet would tilt when he was working through something, the pressure of his grip when he caught her arm, the warmth of him when they stood close, the pace of his breathing when he was worried about Grogu and when he wasn't. She knew so much of him by touch and sound and the shape of his presence beside her that the not-knowing of his face had long since stopped feeling like an absence and become simply another texture of how he was. 

But she had woken up beside Varen a hundred times and never once felt this. Never once wanted to stay exactly where she was, to not move a muscle, to tell the morning to wait. With Varen there was always somewhere to be, always a current running underneath the ease of it that she hadn't understood until she was out of it. This was different. If not for the child in the next room who already held a piece of her she couldn't account for, she thought she could have stayed here forever. 

She ran her other hand down his arm slowly, feeling the shift of muscle under skin. She pressed her lips to the top of his head, very gently, and felt him begin to surface. 

She felt it in the quality of his breathing first, then the slight change in how his weight rested against her. He turned his face up toward her in the dark, cheek rising from her chest, and she brought her other hand down to find the line of his jaw with her fingers. 

The scratch of it registered before she'd processed what she was feeling. She ran the pad of her thumb along the edge of it and felt him go still under her hands. She traced the corner of his mouth. The slight curl of hair above his lip, softer than the rest of it, the line of his jaw where the stubble shaded into the smooth of his throat. She was doing it slowly and deliberately and she could feel his attention on her the whole time. 

"Does it bother you?" he asked, his voice was rough with sleep and she felt the sound of it somewhere in her core. 

"No." She said it before she'd finished checking, "I like it." 

"Yeah?" 

He kissed her then. Just that at first, his mouth against hers in the dark, slow and warm, and she felt something in her chest go soft with it. She kissed him back. His hand found her waist. She brought her hand up to his face and felt the scratch of his jaw against her palm again. Neither of them pulled away. The kiss changed without announcement, deepened, his hand drawing her closer until she could feel the warmth of him all the way through. His mouth moved to her throat and she tipped her head back and felt his lips against her pulse point, deliberate and warm, and did not think about anything at all. 

He came back up to her mouth and she kissed him properly, open, her hand in his hair and his hands moving over her, her waist, her back, the warmth of his palms through the thin fabric of her shorts. She wanted him. That was just true, sitting low and certain in her. She kissed him deeper. His breath changed. Then he was at her neck again and her mind registered once more, that Grogu was in the next room. 

Grogu was in the next room, alone. And had been for hours.

She leaned forward to press her forehead against his and they stayed like that, breathing the same air. 

"We should check on him." she said. 

He kissed her once more. Brief and certain. 

"We should." he said. 

Neither of them moved for another moment. 

She felt the decision happen in him before he finally did, the small shift that meant he'd made up his mind. He sat up and the warmth of him was gone.

His hand found her face. His thumb moved across her cheekbone slowly, and she turned into it on instinct. Her eyes fluttered close when she felt the absence of his weight. 

"You alright with some light?" 

"Mm." 

She heard him move. The curtains pulled back and bright morning light came in all at once. She opened her eyes and saw him across the room with the helmet on, his flight jacket half-shrugged over his shoulders, unhurried, not looking at her. She lay there and watched him and thought about the fact that she was doing it, that she was lying on a Coruscant couch watching Din get dressed after the night they'd had and did not look away. 

She sat up and reached for her shirt and found it wasn't where she thought it had been discarded. He crossed to something on the floor between the couch and the window and picked it up, bringing it back over to her. She lifted her arms and he pulled it over her head, his hands settling the fabric down at her shoulders, smoothing it at the hem, the same careful attention he gave everything.

He took her hands when she settled to pull her upright on her feet, and she stepped into his arms. Her cheek found his chest and his arms came around her in an instant. She could feel the warmth of him through the fabric and the steady sound of his breathing while she stood there and held on to the moment for a little longer. 

"What does mesh'la mean?" she asked into his chest. 

He was quiet for a moment. 

"You said it last night," she tried to explain, "I want to know what it actually means." 

His hands shifted against her back. She felt him deciding something. 

"Beautiful," he said. "That's the word. But it's not exactly-" He stopped himself, really thinking before he continued, "In Mando'a it's closer to precious. Something worth grieving if you lost it." 

She stood with that. 

Her face was warm. She pressed her lips together and held onto that word, precious. The warmth of it moved through her in a way she had not been prepared for. 

"Thank you." she said, hoping he would understand how much it meant to her.

When she pulled back his hands stayed at her waist a beat longer than they needed to. She looked up at the visor and then felt his hand move, his thumb tracing a spot at the side of her neck and pressing gingerly against it. 

"Does this hurt?" 

She hadn't known it was there. She brought her own fingers up and pressed against the spot and felt the tenderness of it under the touch, warm and sharp. 

"Hold still," she said, and leaned close to angle her face in the reflection of his helmet.

He laughed but went still anyways. She made out the shape of it in the beskar's surface. A deep bloom of red spreading up her neck, vivid and deliberate and exactly where his lips had been. 

"I'm sorry I got carried away." He mumbled, his hand still lingering on her neck.

She straightened. The mark was right there for anyone to see and she felt claimed in a way that sat entirely too well with her. She found there was nothing to be done about the smile that tugged at her lips. 

"What?" he asked. 

She looked up at the visor, still grinning like an idiot, and let him see it. "Nothing. Why are you apologising?" 

The helmet tilted, clearly confused.

She stepped closer and went up onto her toes before she put her mouth close to his visor and said, very quietly, "I want more." 

The sound he made was immediate and low. She committed it to memory before she stepped back. 

"I'm going to go check on Grogu," she said, and turned toward the bedroom door before either of them could do anything that would make this harder. 

She pushed the door open and stopped short in the doorway. 

Grogu looked up at her from inside a fort. 

He had taken the pillows off the bed, the blankets, even the spare one from the shelf in the cupboard, and built something with load-bearing pillow walls, a draped ceiling and a narrow entrance designed, very deliberately, for a creature of his dimensions and no other. Her water flask was installed in the near wall. Din's spare glove sat at the entrance. He spread both arms when he saw her, conveying the full scope of what he'd achieved, and then pointed at the fort, then at her, then at Din behind her, then at the fort again. 

"Grogu did you build all this?"

He pointed at the fort. 

She looked back at Din. 

Din looked at the entrance then back at Grogu, who was watching from inside with his ears at full height and the complete untroubled confidence of someone who had never doubted this outcome. The opening was sized for Grogu, which was to say it had been sized for a creature of approximately cat-like dimensions. Din's shoulders were objectively wider than the entire structural gap. 

"...No" Din said. 

Grogu pointed more insistently. 

She pressed her hand over her mouth and sat down on the floor to watch. 

Din crouched in front of the entrance for a long moment, apparently conducting some kind of structural assessment. Then he tried his right shoulder first, at an angle that should not have worked and briefly appeared like it might. It didn't. He backed out, reassessed, tried the left shoulder. Grogu had begun to babble instructions from inside.

"Maybe one shoulder first." she offered, unhelpfully. 

"I'm trying that." 

"Have you considered going in sideways?" 

"I am going in sideways." 

"You could try-" 

"I know what I'm doing." 

He did not, demonstrably, know what he was doing. He got his upper half through on the third attempt and then couldn't get his legs in without the ceiling beginning to sag dangerously. She watched the blanket roof buckle. Din went very still as the roof collapsed. 

There was a silence. 

Grogu looked at the ceiling now draped over Din's helmet. Then at her. 

Din backed out slowly. 

Grogu was already lifting the blanket back into place before Din had fully cleared the entrance. He rearranged the near wall with brisk efficiency, then pointed at the ceiling.

"He wants you to hold the roof," Din said. 

She got up off the floor. Grogu directed the reconstruction from inside with short decisive gestures, pointing at where each pillow needed to go, shaking his head when Din placed one incorrectly and moving it himself, pointing again. Din moved the pillow, Grogu considered then shook his head, decided. Din moved it back. 

"You could tell him it's too small." 

"He worked hard on it." 

She looked at Din, crouched on the floor with a pillow in both hands, waiting with complete patience for Grogu to decide where it went. Not humouring him. Just waiting, the way he waited on things he'd decided mattered. She held the roof and didn't say anything. 

Din got in on the fifth attempt, folding himself down in stages that defied any reasonable geometry. There was a moment when she genuinely thought it wasn't going to work. Then he was in, knees somewhere near his chest, taking up most of the available floor space, and the ceiling was still standing. She felt his hand wrap around the inside edge of the blanket to brace it. 

"It's a good fort" he said. Flat, considered, entirely sincere, the same voice he used to assess landing zones. 

Grogu babbled at length. 

She bit down on the inside of her. cheek and settled cross-legged outside the entrance. Grogu pointed at her immediately. 

"I'm guarding the perimeter," she declared. 

Grogu stared at her.

"Someone has to." 

He pointed at the space next to Din. 

"I don't think he's accepting that as an excuse." Din said, from inside the fort. 

"I noticed." 

Grogu held out his hand toward her. Just his hand, open, patient, waiting. 

She looked at the entrance. She looked at the hand. She looked at the entrance again and measured it against her shoulders, which were considerably less wide than Din's, she thought about her dignity, and thought about the hand, three small fingers still reaching for her. 

She got in on the second try. Wedged herself between Din's arm and the pillow wall, which left approximately no room to breathe. Grogu climbed immediately from Din's lap onto hers, settled himself between them, reached back and took one of Din's hands and one of hers. He made a sound of profound satisfaction. 

Neither of them said anything. 

She was sitting on the bedroom floor with her back against Din's arm and she could not identify anything about this moment that was not completely right. 

Her datapad chimed from the side table. She reached one arm through the entrance and retrieved it. 

Something must have come up. Take the day. We'll catch up tomorrow. — D 

She held it through the gap toward Din. He read it. His helmet angled toward her. 

"Generous" , he deadpanned, almost mocking.

"Surprisingly." 

Grogu looked between them, satisfied, and then pointed at the kitchen. 

She retrieved fruit from the kitchen and passed it through the entrance piece by piece. Grogu received each one with ceremony, examined it, occasionally extended a piece back toward her or toward Din by way of sharing. Din accepted his without comment. Inside the fort Grogu made small contented sounds. She sat with her back against Din's arm and listened to him and did not reach toward any of it or try to hold it. She just let it be there. 

"We need more pillows." she said eventually. 

"We need a bigger apartment." Din said. 

Grogu babbled something. 

Grogu had already begun pointing at the couch cushions visible through the bedroom door. Din looked at them, something in the set of his helmet suggested he knew exactly what was coming and had already decided not to resist it. 

Din picked up the nearest couch cushion and passed it through the bedroom door without a word. Grogu received it and pointed at where it should go. Din fetched another. She got up and took her blanket from the hallway shelf without being asked and handed it through, and Grogu directed its placement with two decisive gestures.

At one point she was on her hands and knees holding up a section of ceiling while Din crawled backwards through what Grogu had apparently decided was now a tunnel on the other side. She could hear Grogu directing him, small emphatic sounds, and then she heard Din laugh, low and sudden, at something she couldn't see from where she was. The laugh was unguarded, the kind that came out before he'd decided to make it, and she stayed very still with her hands braced against the blanket and listened to the quiet that came after it. 

Grogu closed his eyes. 

Her knees started to ache in earnest around the time she stopped being able to guess what hour it was. The apartment had disappeared almost entirely beneath blankets. She did not mind any of it. 

They went to the market in the mid-afternoon, when the light had shifted from harsh to something gentler and the crowds had thinned enough that Grogu was not at risk of disappearing between legs while walking on his own. The lower market on their block ran along a covered walkway thirty levels below the apartment, open on one side to the city's grey midday air, loud with vendors and the smell of engine exhaust and street food that she had at some point stopped noticing.

Grogu was on Din's shoulder before they had even made it halfway down the first row, having escalated his demands by stages until Din lifted him without comment and Grogu immediately grabbed his pauldron with both hands and leaned forward to point things out. He had opinions about everything. A stall selling small carved figures earned a sustained monologue and Din inclined his head as though giving this serious consideration. 

She drifted a little behind them and watched. 

Din was always ready to angle his body when Grogu reached for something, already preparing to catch him if he leaned too far. Grogu patted the helmet absentmindedly and used the curve of it as a headrest when he started going drowsy, and Din let him, adjusting his grip without looking up. Something about that, the automatic quality of it, the way he didn't have to think about it anymore, stopped her for a moment where she stood. 

Din had stopped at a produce stall. Grogu was pointing excitedly at something in a wooden crate near the bottom while Din crouched to investigate. She looked over his shoulder, a pile of small root vegetables, dark red, with the bitter smell of something that probably needed a long time in heat to become worth eating. 

"He wants those tonight." Din said. 

"He does't know what those are." 

Grogu looked at her with an expression that suggested he found this doubt personally offensive. She picked one up, turned it over, considered whether she actually knew how to prepare them. 

She bought them anyways. 

She smelled the herbs before she saw them. Something sharp and green from a stall on the left, cutting through the engine exhaust and frying oil, and she stopped and turned toward it. The vendor had them bundled loose, tied with twine. She pressed her thumb against a leaf and brought it to her nose and thought about the root vegetables. She bought two bunches. 

Din appeared at her shoulder. He looked at the bunches in her hand, then at the stall and picked up a small paper twist from the end of the display, holding it out to her. 

"What is that?" she said. 

"Dried pepper. Goes with what you just bought." 

She looked at the twist. Then back at him with a smile. "How do you know what I just bought it for?" 

He said nothing, just shook his head. She took the pepper. She added them to the bag alongside a bundle of something that looked like shallots and a small jar of dried pulses she couldn't identify, and by the time they moved on she was mentally assembling dinner, the root vegetables low and slow, the herbs and pepper near the end, and found herself thinking about whether the apartment had a deep enough pot for everthing. 

She stopped at a flower stall next. 

She hadn't planned to but there she was standing, looking at a row of small bunches in deep reds and pale yellows. The yellow ones were the colour of the perfect early morning sun. She reached out and lifted one, just to look at it, feeling the stem cool and damp between her fingers, the petals close at the centre where they hadn't fully opened yet. 

She stood there turning it in her hand. 

The bare kitchen windowsill came to mind. Then the side table with nothing on it. The surfaces that had been borrowed and were starting, incrementally, to become something else. She had arranged her things in the cupboard a certain way and told herself it was just order. She turned the flower over in her fingers and looked at it and was not quite sure when exactly she had started thinking of the apartment as somewhere she lived. 

She looked up. Din was a few steps away, Grogu occupied with something in the next stall. He didn't say anything. He was just there looking at her. 

She bought the flowers and carried them loosely in one hand. The walkway opened up ahead of them, wider, and Grogu immediately pointed at something on the far side, a stall selling small painted objects, plates or tiles, she couldn't tell from here. Din steered toward it with the resigned patience of someone who had long since stopped resisting Grogu's navigation. She followed, half her attention on the bag she was carrying, mentally accounting for what she had and what she still needed, whether the dried pulses would need soaking tonight. She was looking at a rack of cured meats on a nearby stand, tilting her head at the labels, when she saw the sign. 

It was on the building across the walkway, a clinic. The sign itself was modest but above it a display screen rotated through public health advisories, and the one currently showing was an advertisement for a contraceptive implant service, bright and matter-of-fact. 

She looked at it for a moment.

She'd had her implant fitted close to three years ago, right after she left the Order, when leaving had felt like a declaration and she'd been making declarations about everything in her life. The fitting had been quick. She'd thought very little about it afterwards, right up until the first time she'd been thrown hard into a wall and lost consciousness, and then thought about it briefly, and then not again for months. After leaving Varen, she had virtually no reason to think about it at all.

She looked back at the screen. 

She thought about last night and the tension of the morning after, watching him across the room with the curtains open and not stopping herself. She thought about what she wanted. About the fact that she was standing in a market thinking about this at all. That last part sat warm and slightly ridiculous in her chest, the sheer presumption of it, and she felt warmth climb the back of her neck. 

She glanced over at Din. He was occupied, Grogu in the process of transferring something small into his fathers pocket while Din's attention was presumably elsewhere. 

She thought to herself that it would only take a minute and crossed the walkway before she could talk herself out of it.

The clinic was clean and efficient. A receptionist, a brief wait, a nurse who asked only what she needed to know, a scan, a confirmation. She thanked the nurse and walked back out into the afternoon. 

She stalled as soon as she did. 

Din was standing outside the clinic door with his arms crossed. The helmet was angled toward her and had not moved since she came out. 

"What are you doing here?" she asked. 

"You were gone too long." He said it simply. "I couldn't find you at the stalls so I tracked your position." 

Grogu was on his hip, both ears up. 

"I wasn't gone that long." 

"Long enough." 

"Is it your arm," he said after a few more seconds. Carefully. Like he'd had time to sit with that possibility and make peace with it. 

She had genuinely forgotten about her injury from the day before. "No." 

"Then what is it?" She could hear the worry in his voice now. 

She looked at the flowers in her hand. Then at the ground. 

"It's nothing," she said. "I just needed to check something." 

"Check what." he continued to press.

"It's fine. Everything's fine." She started walking. "Can I tell you later?" 

"No." Flat. "Now." 

She stopped. Grogu's ears had not gone down. She looked at the ground and thought about how this must look from where he was standing, where he'd been standing for however long she'd been inside, and breathed out. 

"I went in to get my implant checked," she said quietly. "I've had it for... awhile and I've been knocked around enough in that time that I wasn't sure it was still doing what it was supposed to."

A weird sort of silence settled between them for a moment. The helmet turned away from her, just slightly, toward the middle of the street. 

"So," he spoke finally, "Is it?" 

She looked up, startled by his casual response. "It's fine..." 

"Good." He reached out and took her hand and kept walking. 

She let him lead her a few paces before she gathered enough courage to ask, "Not mad?" 

He shook his head. 

"You could have just told me," he said, gentle. "I would have come in with you." 

She absorbed that. "I didn't want you to think that's what was on my mind. That I was putting something on you." 

He was quiet for a moment. "So it's not something you're thinking about?" 

She looked at him, unable to form the words to respond to him in any satisfactory way, totally caught off guard by how simple this seemed to be for him. 

"I am." Din said. 

She sat with that for a moment. "You just wait till I get that helmet off tonight Mando." 

He down, visor pointed at her. "You'll be surprised by what I can do with it on." 

The warmth that hit her face was immediate and not remotely dignified. "That," she started without really knowing what to follow it up with, "is extremely good to know." 

Grogu pointed at a stall they were passing with tremendous priority. Din steered them toward it without breaking stride, still holding her hand. 

The market was thinning as the afternoon settled toward evening, vendors beginning the slow business of packing down. She watched a woman wrap something in cloth at the far end of the walkway. A child ran past them in the other direction, nearly catching Din's elbow, and he shifted Grogu to the other hip without comment. Grogu watched the child go with considerable interest.  

Din's gloved thumb moved against the back of her hand just once. She wasn't sure he knew he'd done it, but it felt soothing all the same.

The upper levels caught the early evening light in a way she had noticed before, on other evenings, some in the time before she'd met her companions. It looked different with them beside her. She wasn't sure if that was the light or her or simply the fact of having somewhere to go back to. 

She was still carrying it when they got back, the warmth of the day still on her, Grogu drowsing on Din's shoulder. She reached the door first and put her hand to the handle. 

"Can't sleep yet kiddo, you made me buy this stuff now-"

The door opened before she turned it. 

She felt it before her hand had finished moving, a presence on the other side of the door, and her whole body went still around it. She had known this energy since before she could remember not knowing it. It was as old as anything in her. 

Din's hand moved toward his blaster. 

"No." she said, pushing the flowers into his hand

She pushed the door open all the way. 

Master Khai sat in the chair by the window with his hands folded in his lap, watching the door with the expression he had worn for as long as she could remember, which was the expression of someone who found the universe genuinely interesting and was in no hurry about any of it. He looked older than she remembered, not by much, but enough to note. The same economy of stillness. The same quality of someone for whom the room had arranged itself. 

His eyes moved from her to Din to Grogu, unhurried, taking inventory. 

"You look well." Khai said. 

"Master-" It came out as a whisper, barely a word. Her hands were already moving, coming together at her chest the way they had ten thousand times before. She bowed, and kept her head down, did not immediately look up. Her eyes were stinging, she tried to blink it away to no avail. She hadn't let herself think about seeing him again, had quietly placed it among the things she had probably forfeited. Now he was sitting in her chair and her eyes were filling but she couldn't do anything about it.

He looked at her, and his expression softened immediately. He stood and held his arms open.

She laughed, which surprised her, a wet helpless sound. She crossed the room and walked into him. His arms came around her properly, and she pressed her face into his shoulder feeling the familiar weight of his secure presence, something that had not changed at all. Three years collapsed like they had never been there at all. He had kept her alive for most of her life. He had taught her almost everything she knew that mattered, had been her guardian and her anchor and the only constant for years when there had been nothing else, yet, she had left without saying goodbye. He was here. He had come. She could not speak for a moment and did not try to.

He held her for a long moment. When she pulled back she wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at him properly, the lines by his eyes, the grey that hadn't been there before. The absurdity of it rose up alongside everything else.

"You broke into our apartment." she said, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Well the Director did suggest I wait outside... But I'm an old man. Weak knees and whatnot." He waved it off.

Khai's gaze settled on Grogu, who had woken fully and was regarding the stranger with both ears up and the focused, calibrating attention of someone running a thorough assessment. Something shifted in Khai's expression. Very slightly. "Hello, little one."

"It's alright Grogu," she said. "I've known him a very long time." 

Grogu considered this. Then he extended one small hand toward Khai, not quite pointing and not quite reaching, tentative and deliberate. Khai extended two fingers toward him in return. Something moved between them in the Force, quiet and brief. 

"I never thought I'd see you again." she admitted. 

Khai looked at her with what might, on someone with less composure, have been warmth. "Sit down child," he said. "I imagine we have a great deal to catch up on." 

She sat but suspected Khai already knew most of it. 

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[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 21

Most of this is pure filth. Took us long enough babes I'm so happy we made it here.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Heaven and Back – Chase Atlantic

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, explicit smut, oral sex (M receiving), fingering (F receiving), breast play, lots of kissing, explicit consent and communication, praise, mocking(kinda), soft Dom!Din, emotionally overwhelmed reader, Din being down horrendous, helmet removal, domestic fluff. MDNI.

W/c: 7.2k

Grogu had finally stopped crying about an hour ago.

She knew because she'd been counting, not the minutes exactly but the shape of his distress as it moved through its stages. He had startled awake at the sound of the door, she'd heard that in the first cry, the sharp disoriented noise of a child pulled out of sleep by something sudden. But the crying that followed hadn't been about that. It had shifted within seconds into something else entirely, the kind that had nothing to do with being woken and everything to do with whatever he'd felt the moment consciousness came back to him and he understood, in whatever way Grogu understood things, that something was wrong. Not the door. Not the dark. Something between the two people he trusted most in the galaxy, a disturbance in something that was supposed to be still. He had known it before she'd even reached him. She gathered him up, sat down on the edge of the bed, and rocked him slowly. He pressed his face into her neck and shook.

It had taken a long time.

She lay on her side in the dark now with him tucked against her chest, listening to him breathe, and thought about how she had never seen him cry like that before. She knew all of his registers, had learned them the way you learned any language you used every day without consciously studying it. The theatrical protests. The genuine upsets. The quiet sadness that passed quickly because one of them always noticed it before it could settle. This had been none of those things. This had been grief, or the closest thing to it that a fifty-year-old child in a small body could manage, and she had sat on the edge of the bed and rocked him and said it was okay in a voice she wasn't sure she believed.

She wondered if he understood what had happened. Whether the fight had registered to him as two distinct things colliding, or whether he simply felt it the way he felt everything, in the Force, as a disturbance in something that was supposed to be still. Whether he understood that the two people he depended on most had torn something between them tonight, or whether he just knew it was torn and couldn't locate the shape of it.

She pressed her lips to the top of his head and didn't move.

Sleep wasn't coming. She had known that since the door had clicked shut behind her, and the hours since had confirmed it thoroughly. Her mind kept snagging on the same two or three things and pulling, the way it did with things that hadn't finished landing yet. Not the full argument, not all of it, just certain moments that kept returning with more weight than the others.

Not guilt, not exactly, but something adjacent to it that she couldn't quite get a grip on. She had a line about how she uses the Force on people without their consent and she'd held it for years, considered it one of the few things she'd kept from the Jedi that she actually believed in rather than simply obeyed. And tonight she had crossed it without a second's thought, her hand up and the decision made before she'd consciously made it. He had been about to walk into something dangerous. That was true. It was also true that she had pushed him across a passage using his own body without asking, which was the exact thing she said she wouldn't do, and the fact that she hadn't used his mind felt, lying here in the dark, like a distinction that mattered more to her than it probably should.

She hadn't locked the door.

She had lain here listening for him to try it.

He hadn't.

She thought about going back to the silence. Not the ordinary quiet they had built together, the comfortable kind that had become part of the texture of things before she'd registered it happening. The other kind. Nine days of it on the Crest, moving around each other like they had forgotten how to share the same air, the two of them moving around each other like planets in wrong orbits, close enough to feel the gravity and too far apart to do anything about it. She had come out the other side of that diminished in ways she was still finding the edges of.

But it was different now, that was the thing she kept coming back to. That silence had belonged to a version of things that no longer existed. This bed, this room, everything these last few weeks had built between them, it all meant something it hadn't meant then. She thought about the weight of him beside her, the warmth of it, the way she had stopped having to remind herself it was real. She thought about falling asleep here and waking to the same silence that had nearly hollowed her out on the Crest, except now she would know exactly what she was missing. That felt like a different kind of unbearable entirely.

She lay there until she thought she had been there long enough.

Then she lay there a little longer.

Then she carefully untucked herself from Grogu, easing his hands loose one finger at a time, and settled him against the pillow. She pulled the blanket up around him, tucked it in at the edges the way he liked, and stood there a moment looking down at him in the dark. His face was completely unguarded in sleep, nothing in it of whatever he had felt earlier, and she felt the ache of that, how easily children let things go when they finally could, how long it took adults to learn the same thing. Then she crossed to the door and opened it.

She opened it slowly, just enough to look through the gap.

The main room was dim, the curtains letting in a thin line of grey from Coruscant's pre-dawn, not enough to read by, barely enough to see shapes. She could make out the couch. She could make out him on it, one arm behind his head, legs extending past the end of the cushions because the couch had not been designed with him in mind. No armour. Just the flight suit, and the helmet still on, and the particular stillness of someone who might be asleep or might have been lying there for hours.

She couldn't tell which.

"Din?"

He shifted immediately. Turned toward her.

She came around the couch slowly. He tracked her without speaking. She came around to the front and stopped. He sat up, making space. She sat down.

Not close. She left a gap she wouldn't have left yesterday, before all of it, when she would have simply tucked herself against him without asking. The awareness of that gap felt like its own kind of information about the state of things.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

She sat with her hands folded in her lap and tried to find a place to start. Every place she tried felt wrong. Too small for what needed to be said, or too large for three in the morning on a couch with both of them still raw from it.

She could feel him waiting. Not impatiently. He just went quiet and present and gave her the space, and she was not sure whether she found that easier or harder than if he'd pushed.

"Are you okay?" he asked, eventually.

Low and careful through the modulator. She nodded, and then decided that wasn't enough.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended, which she supposed was honest.

He didn't say anything.

She had expected something. Some acknowledgement or deflection. Anything to give her the next foothold. Instead the quiet sat between them.

"For walking out," she said. "For shutting you out again. For what I did today."

Still nothing.

She turned toward him. "Please say something."

He shifted slightly. When he spoke it was measured, the way he was measured when he was still carrying something and hadn't decided yet how much of it to set down. "Don't say it because you think you have to. You stand by your choices. I know that you do."

"I am sorry." The inadequacy of the sentence was obvious to both of them. "I do stand by it, I just- I didn't think about how it would feel for you. Not in the moment. I mean I understood it in theory but I've never-" The rest of it wouldn't come. "I didn't think."

"How could you not?"

It wasn't angry. The absence of anger made it worse somehow.

"How do I know," he said slowly, "that you won't do this exact thing the next time you decide I'm not equipped for a threat?"

She opened her mouth.

What came out was, "I don't know."

She heard how it landed. She hadn't planned to say it. It was true, and they were both tired of things that weren't.

He let out a breath through the modulator, short and dry. "You don't even have to think before you push me away."

"I never meant to make you feel less than me." She said it to her hands. "It's what I do. It's been instinct for as long as I can remember. I protect. But-" She exhaled. "I'm scared."

"I know."

"No." She shook her head. "Not just scared for you. Scared of what would happen to me."

Something shifted in him.

"If something happened to you," she said, and the words felt like something she'd been carrying in a locked room for a very long time, "or to Grogu. I don't think I'm strong enough. I don't think I'm-" She stopped on the name she'd been about to say. "I've seen what grief does when it's got nowhere to go. I've been close to it." A breath. "And I know what I'm capable of when the people I love are in danger, and that scares me more than anything coming for us." She exhaled. "So when I jump in front of something, I'm protecting a piece of myself too. Is that selfish?"

He was quiet for long enough that she looked at him.

"What do you mean?" he said. His voice had changed. The careful measurement had gone out of it.

"I think if I lost either of you," she said, "I would lose myself too. The same way he did. And I can't let that happen to me. So I jump, because losing you is the catastrophe I'm actually trying to prevent, and I don't know how to make that a reasonable thing to say to someone and I know it doesn't make what I did today okay but-" She exhaled again, trying desperately to calm herself. "I just needed you to know that it's not about thinking you can't handle things. It's about me not trusting myself to handle losing you both."

She heard how much was in that sentence only after she'd said it.

He sat with it for a long time. She could feel him turning it over, the way he turned things over, quietly and thoroughly, and she waited, trying to take a page out of his book on patience.

When he spoke again it was quieter, the careful edge fully gone now.

"Listen to me." He turned toward her fully now, "I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. I've survived worse than tonight, gotten the kid out of worse than tonight. He's done the same for me, more than once." His voice stayed even, not reassuring exactly, just certain. "You are not responsible for keeping us alive. That's not what I need from you. And it's not what you need to be."

"I don't know another way." she said.

He reached for her hand.

She felt the gloved fingers close around hers and something that had been wound very tight in her chest all evening shifted incrementally. She looked down at their hands. Then she reached up with her other hand and peeled his glove off carefully and set it beside her, and held his bare hand instead. His fingers were warm. His pulse was steady at the inside of his wrist and she held onto that for a moment.

"You came to me tonight," he said quietly. "That was a start."

She laughed, which she hadn't expected, a soft broken thing, and felt tears arrive at the same time. "I couldn't do another nine days." She shook her head. "I couldn't do another nine days of walking past you and not saying anything. Of lying there knowing you were five meters away and not being able to make myself cross it." She looked at him. "You've become someone I don't know how to be without. I don't know when that happened but it did."

She laced her fingers through his.

He held out his other hand.

She looked at it for a moment and then pulled that glove off too and set it with the first one. He raised his free hand to her face and she felt his thumb move across her cheek, slow and deliberate, and the tear it found had already been there.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For not coming to you then. I knew something was wrong. I was angry. I didn't know what to say, so I waited for the right moment." A pause. "The right moment never came. I should have come anyway."

"So was I," she said. "Angry, I mean."

He nodded once.

"Don't run from me again." Quiet. Not a demand, not quite a plea. Something in between that had no good name.

She heard everything in it. Every version of running she had ever done, the night on Nevarro with the N1, the days on the Crest, the bedroom door just hours ago. All of it in five heavy words, and she understood that he meant all of it.

She reached for him.

She hadn't planned to cry. She pressed her face against his chest and felt his arms come up around her. Something cracked open that had been building since she'd slammed the door. The apologies that came out was not an explanation, just one word, over and over, because she had run out of the kind of words that explained things and this was the only one she had left.

His hand moved into her hair. Slow and steady. His other hand held hers.

"That's cheating," he said, after a while. Something in his voice had changed again, the last of the stiffness gone, something warmer underneath that she had missed badly tonight even when she'd been the one who caused its absence. "You cry like this and I forget why I was mad in the first place."

She laughed against his chest, still wet-eyed, which felt like an embarrassing combination and also like exactly the right thing to be doing at three in the morning with him.

She stayed like that for a while.

Then she sat up a little, looking at him.

"Is this okay?" she asked.

He pulled her back in instead of answering.

"This is all new for me." he said, after a while. Not apologetically, just truthfully.

She lifted her head to look at him.

"I know it isn't for you," he continued, and there was something careful in how he said it, like he had been holding this thought for a while and was testing whether it was safe to set it down.

"I haven't done this." she said, a tone of finality in her voice.

The slight tilt of his head communicated what he thought of that without requiring words.

"I know," she said. "I know what you're thinking about..." She looked down at her hands for a moment. "That was a different version of me, with a different person, and I was so young I didn't even understand what I was giving up until I didn't have it anymore." She lifted her gaze back to the visor. "You're not him. And I'm not who I was then. Whatever this is, we're starting from something a little broken."

He didn't answer immediately. She waited.

Then he reached out and took her hand, and held it, and that was enough, it told her more than any words could have.

She sat up a little further and looked at him for a moment, at the helmet tilted toward her in the dark. Her hands found the sides of it, cool under her palms.

"I want to kiss you," she said. "Can I?"

His hands came up and found hers, gentle but firm. He tilted his head toward the window.

She looked. The curtains were open, Coruscant's pre-dawn light coming in grey and thin through the transparisteel.

"Too much light." he said gently.

She glanced toward the window. It was a few steps, no more. She could get up, close them, come back. She looked at him instead, at the helmet tilted toward her in the dark, at his hands still loosely holding hers, and decided there was something she wanted more than to walk away.

She released the helmet and let her hands drop to his collar instead, finding the fastening at his throat, and she felt him hold his breath as she began to work it open. She pressed her lips to the first inch of bare skin she uncovered, the warm hollow at the base of his throat, and heard his breathing change.

She worked lower.

His collarbone. His chest, the warmth of skin she hadn't had access to before, the slight tension of him as he held himself carefully and let her. She moved lower still, lips tracing down his sternum, the planes of his stomach, the muscle there softer than she'd expected, but still taut beneath her mouth in a way that made it difficult to think clearly. She felt him draw in a slow breath as she reached his navel, abdomen contracting slightly under her lips, and kept going. She followed the trail of hair below his navel, and at the waistband she hooked her fingers in and looked up at him from below and waited.

His hands caught her face by the jaw, gently, redirecting her back up to him.

She froze.

"You don't have to do that" he said.

She absorbed that, and felt her stomach sink.

His thumb moved across her cheek. "I don't want you thinking you need to make something up to me. That's not what this is."

The thought landed. She hadn't been thinking of it that way, but now that he'd said it she couldn't un-hear it. Underneath that was a quieter thought, whether he simply didn't want her like that right now, whether it was too much, whether she'd read this entirely wrong. She hadn't fully processed any of it before she was already pulling back, sitting up, moving to the far end of the couch and pulling her knees to her chest.

"Fine," she said. "I'm going to sleep then."

She started to get up.

His hand caught hers.

"Wait." It came out almost amused, patient in the way he always was. She stopped but didn't turn back. He pulled her steadily, without rushing, until she was sitting across his lap, her legs draped over his. She kept her gaze somewhere past his shoulder.

She felt the misery of having made herself vulnerable and then being denied, which wasn't the same as being rejected but felt uncomfortably close to it when she were already in this state. She had spent months cataloguing the ways she wanted him and telling herself that wasn't what this was, then tonight of all nights, after all of it, she had let herself act on it, and now she was sitting in his lap being told he didn't want her to feel obligated, which was very considerate of him and also felt like being handed something back she hadn't offered as a formality.

She was aware she was catastrophising. She was doing it anyway.

"No running," he said. "Remember? What's wrong."

"If you don't want me like that, you can just tell me. So I can stop embarrassing myself."

He was quiet for a moment that felt very long.

"You think I don't want you?" Something in how he said it, disbelief edged with something softer, made her turn her face toward him despite herself. He took it in his hands, his fingers spreading into her hair, turning her to face him fully. "What was the other night then?"

She didn't have an answer for him.

"Let me be very clear." His voice was low and certain, the kind of certain that didn't require volume. "I want you."

The word hit somewhere she hadn't braced for, somewhere in the pit of her being where she needed him more than anything.

"I don't want you thinking," he continued, "that because of tonight, because of the argument, that you owe me this. I want you to want it. Not to feel like you have to earn your way back."

She sat with that. Let it settle.

"I know," she said. She looked up at him. "I want to because I want you. That's all it is."

He exhaled. She felt his hands still in her hair.

"Please?" she said.

She pressed her lips to the line of his jaw, then lower, finding the side of his neck, and felt the groan move through him before she heard it, low and involuntary, his hand coming up to the back of her head. She stayed there a moment, just that, his pulse against her lips, and then slid from his lap to the floor between his knees, looking up at him in the dim.

He didn't stop her this time.

She drew his pants down slowly, taking her time, and the flush of warmth that moved through her when she saw the size of him was something she hadn't anticipated quite so immediately, the thickness and length, the semi-hardness of his member already giving her a clear sense of what she was working with, and she felt warmth spreading down between her own thighs in response to it. His chest rose and fell above her. His knuckles had gone white on the edge of the couch.

She wrapped her hand around the base of him, feeling the heat of it, the thick ridge of a vein under her thumb, and heard the sound his breath made.

She pressed her lips to the head of him, just that, her tongue finding the slit briefly before she held herself there, and felt his whole body respond before he made a sound, the sharp pull of his inhale. She parted her lips and took just the tip of him into her mouth and heard the sound he made, low and rough through the modulator, something he hadn't planned on making. His hips shifted toward her without his permission. She felt the want in it and let it move through her.

She released him and kissed slowly down his length instead, her lips tracing every inch of him, feeling the heat radiating from it, the feeling of every vein under her tongue. She reached the base of him and lower, mouthing at his balls gently, feeling them tighten, hearing the groan that came out of the vocoder above her, and she stayed there a moment, taking her time, because she had thought about this more than she ever intended to admit to him. Then she kissed back up his length and took him into her mouth properly.

She took a little more this time and heard him curse quietly, the words flowing soft and involuntary. She looked up at him from where she was, from below, and watched the visor angle down toward her and felt the weight of that attention like a physical thing.

She worked him into her mouth slowly, feeling her throat open to him by degrees, breathing through the resistance, adjusting to the weight and the heat of him against her tongue. The sounds that kept escaping him were the best part, quiet and unguarded, nothing like the controlled economy of how he usually spoke, and each one sent heat pooling lower through her until she was aware of her own want as a persistent, distracting warmth. She found his hand and laced her fingers through his and felt his grip tighten in return.

She learned him. She learned what made his breathing break and what made his thighs tense beneath her hands and what made the careful, deliberate control he carried everywhere finally start to fracture at the edges. She took him deeper when she could, feeling the stretch of it, the faint reflexive resistance of her own throat that she breathed past, and when she took him all the way her throat closed around him and she gagged lightly, eyes watering, but she pressed further rather than pulling back, hollowing her cheeks around him as she finally breathed through it. She heard the sound that came out of him when she did, low and long, his head dropping back. His free hand moved to her hair slowly, not directing, just gathering it, his fist closing gently in her hair, the only part of her he could reach.

"Maker." His voice was rough through the modulator, strained with the effort of not moving. "You are so beautiful."

She felt that in places she hadn't expected, her chest and the back of her throat and the heat already spreading between her thighs. She held him deeper still because she could, because she wanted to, and felt him exhale hard above her.

She released him briefly when she needed to breathe, lips wet and trailing from the red tip of his cock. His hand came down not to her face but to the hem of her shirt, pausing there with a question in it. She lifted her arms and let him pull it over her head. He leaned back slightly and she felt the shift in his attention, a quality of focus settling over her that she felt more than saw, his gaze moving over her in the dim. She'd had nothing on beneath and the cool air of the apartment found her immediately, her nipples tightening in response. The impulse to cover herself came from somewhere old and automatic, years of learning to take up less space, and she recognised it for what it was before it could take hold. It had nothing to do with him.

"Mesh'la," he said, barely audible, almost to himself.

She didn't know the word but she felt the weight of how he said it settle over her like something warm. The heat reached her face before she could do anything about it.

His hand found her again, moving to the underside of one breast with a slowness that felt deliberate, like he'd thought about this and now that she was bare in front of him he was doing it properly. His thumb traced the curve of it, slow and certain, learning the shape of her in the dark. She felt each point of contact as something separate and entire. She had wanted his hands on her for long enough that the reality of it was almost too much to process cleanly, and she let herself have it, leaning into his touch, dropping the composure she'd been maintaining all evening. Then his thumb found her jaw and tilted it up and she went back down over him, tongue rolling over him once before she bobbed her head down, her throat having relaxed enough now that she could take him fully at one go, the coarse hair at his base against the tip of her nose when she took him deep. The deep vibrations from his chest travelled through her down to her core, making her press her thighs together for any small amount of friction.

She felt the shift in him then, the remaining restraint beginning to fracture. His hand entangled in her hair once more became something with intention behind it, and she felt him fighting the instinct to use it, the want to push, to set the pace, to stop being patient for once. His hips lifted toward her once, just once, entirely involuntary, and she heard him exhale hard.

"Sorry," he said immediately, rough and quiet, his grip loosening at once, giving her back the control she already had.

She reached up and took his hand herself, brought it to the back of her head. Felt him understand the moment her fingers closed over his.

He took it.

He guided her then, setting the depth and the rhythm of it, and she followed him into it, her head moving with the pressure of his hand, the steady pull and release of it. Her throat burned with the stretch from his thickness, the ache of it building in a way that she felt everywhere, but she let it because she had offered this deliberately and she wanted him to take what he needed from her. His breathing became uneven. The sounds he made lost their restraint, coming freely now, each one making her more aware of the heat between her own thighs, the wetness of her own want. She moaned against him and felt the vibration of it travel through him and felt his whole body tighten in response.

"Fuck," he breathed, voice stripped raw, "that mouth," and she took him deeper and felt him shudder.

That was the last of it. He stilled, his hand in her hair going loose, and she held herself down and felt him come apart beneath her hands and on her tongue, the pulse of it, the heat, and swallowed around him while he fell back against the couch and let out a long exhale, the kind that came from somewhere deep, that had been held for a very long time.

She held herself down while he spent himself, feeling each pulse of it against the back of her throat, thick and hot, waiting until it ebbed before she released him slowly, the sound of it obscene in the quiet of the apartment. His release had traced a line from her lips to her chin. He reached down and swiped it cleaned it with the pad of his thumb, slow and deliberate, then brought that thumb to her mouth. She parted her swollen lips and took it, her tongue moving over it the same way it had moved over him, and felt the sharp intake of his breath above her. She pressed one last kiss to his oversensitive tip and felt him shudder faintly at the contact. She eased his pants back up and climbed back along his body, her hands on his chest. The difference in him was immediate, a looseness through his whole frame, the tension of the evening finally given somewhere to go.

She was aware, as she settled against him, of her own bare chest against the warmth of his skin, the unfamiliar intimacy of it. They had never had this before, this much of each other, and she felt it acutely, the heat of him under her palms, the way her body was already responding to the closeness in ways she let herself feel without doing anything about yet.

"I still want to kiss you." she said, and felt her face go warm even saying it, which was an absurd response to the circumstances.

He moved before she'd finished the sentence.

He stood with her, letting er legs come to wrap behind his torso, carrying her against him while crossed to the window, pulled the curtains shut. The room dropped into complete dark. She reached for the helmet immediately and it came free. She let it fall somewhere and found his mouth on pure instinct, her hands on his face, the warmth of his skin under her palms.

His lips responded immediately, hungrier than she'd expected, the want in it entirely undisguised. She felt the relief of it more than she'd anticipated, the relief of want that had been going in one direction for too long finally finding its answer. He walked them backward to the couch and came down with her, settling over her. She pulled him closer rather than away from the weight of him.

He kissed her like he meant it, which she suspected he always had. His mouth moved against hers with a focus that left no room for anything else, and she kissed him back with everything she had been carrying all evening, her hands finding his face, his jaw, the back of his neck, learning the shape of him the way her fingers had learned the shape of the helmet in the dark. Her fingers followed the lines of the hair on his face,the rasp of it against her palm, against her lips when she pressed closer, and she found herself cataloguing that detail with the same attention she gave everything about him she had not been allowed access to until now. His hands moved over her, her waist, the curve of her hip, the small of her back. She had not been kissed like this before, not really, because this had nothing of performance or possession in it. This was just him, and she felt it from her sternum outward.

His mouth found her neck first, lips pressing open against the skin there, and then his teeth, a slow deliberate suction that made her tip her head back and grip his shoulders. He worked down from her throat to her collarbone, in no rush at all, like he was learning this too, and then his mouth found her breast, warm and deliberate, and she arched up into it, her fingers threading into the hair at his nape. He began to trail lower, his mouth open against her sternum, the flat of his tongue dragging slowly down before his lips closed over a spot on her side and he bit down, not hard, enough to make her gasp. He did it again lower, then over her stomach, the soft skin below her navel, working his way down like he had all the time in the world, and when he reached the waistband of her shorts she stopped him with her hands.

"Up here," she said. "I need you close."

She felt him pause.

"Let me take care of you." he said quietly, against her stomach.

"Not tonight." Her voice came out smaller than she intended, her fingers still twisted in his hair. "I can't- just come back up to me please? I need to feel you close to me right now."

He came back up to her, his forehead dropping to hers, his breath warm against her lips, and she held his face between her palms and thought about how desperately she wanted to learn the shape of him, the gravel in his voice in her ear. She wanted to hold every detail of it she could gather in the dark and lock it away.

"Okay," he said against her skin, his voice close and without the modulator, smooth and low, still something she was getting used to hearing, "whatever you want baby."

Her stomach turned over at the word and she forgot what she'd been about to say.

His hand slipped under the waistband of her shorts, his palm pressing against the fabric of her underwear, and the sigh she let out when he did was involuntary, the simple relief of contact she had been wanting for hours without admitting it. He pressed once, feeling the wet heat of her, and made a sound against her throat that told her everything she needed to know about how long he'd also been wanting.

"Din- please." His name came out drawn out and a little desperate. She heard exactly how desperate it was and couldn't bring herself to care. She rocked her hips into his hand, chasing the pressure of it, not subtle about it at all.

He pulled the fabric aside and ran two fingers through her, collecting the slick heat on his fingers slow and thorough, and her eyes fell closed and she exhaled like something had been allowed to stop bracing. He paused. "You're wet." Said quietly, almost to himself, like he hadn't quite expected the extent of it.

"It's you," she said, her voice coming out lower than intended. "It's only ever you."

His fingers left her and she made a sound before she could stop it, reaching for his wrist in the dark, her fingers closing on nothing. She found his arm instead, felt it raised and understood. He had brought his fingers to his own mouth.

"Din."

"Mm." There was something in his voice that was almost amused. "Patience."

"You were right there."

"I needed to taste you too." Said plainly, like it was obvious, like she should have expected this. "You'll live."

She made a noise that communicated her feelings on this clearly.

She heard a quiet laugh then his fingers found her again, a long, slow drag that made her hips lift involuntarily, and then he pushed one long calloused finger inside her, slowly, maddeningly so, and she felt him curl it just slightly and then withdraw almost entirely before pushing back in, no urgency to it at all. Her ankles were digging into his lower back and she understood immediately what he was doing. She also understood she was going to lose her mind before he was done.

"Need more Din-" her pleas cut short when he stuffed her full with just the one finger.

He gave it to her though, his finger moving properly now, a rhythm that made her breath catch on the first stroke and her thighs close around his hand on the second.

She dug her fingers into his hair and felt his lips press against her throat, and when he curled up against the spot that sent white heat up her spine she held on, past the point of trying to be quiet.

"Think you can take another?" he asked, low against her lips.

He pushed a second finger in before she had time to react. The stretch of it made her gasp, a sharp bright sensation that dissolved immediately into heat, her walls closing around him. His thumb found her clit and began moving in slow circles, each one deliberate, and the pleasure built in waves that rolled through her lower belly and radiated outward. She felt it everywhere, the backs of her thighs, the base of her spine, her chest. She heard herself saying his name and yes and please in a stream she was no longer consciously producing, her hips pushing up to meet the movement of his hand.

"I wish I could see you," he said against her ear. "I want to watch you fall apart on my fingers. Feeling it will have to be enough."

She came apart on those words more than anything else.

It moved through her completely, every thought she'd been carrying through the long terrible evening simply gone, her back arching up and a sound leaving her that she made no attempt to contain, his name somewhere in it, and then the wave of it crested and broke and she was left loose and warm and entirely emptied out, no space left in her for anything that wasn't this, the weight of him, the heat, the steady sound of her own breathing slowly returning to her.

She lay there.

She felt his lips against her temple, light and slow. Then her cheekbone. The corner of her eye. The bridge of her nose. Small careful things, patient, like he had nowhere to be and all the time in the galaxy to get there, and she lay without moving beneath them and let him.

She caught her breath by degrees.

"Thank you," she said, eventually, when she had enough of it back to speak.

"For what."

"You know what for."

He kissed her again, once, properly, and she felt the tenderness of it.

"No." he said.

She turned her face toward him. His face was close, his breath warm against her lips, and she still had not fully accounted for what that was like, having him like this, without anything between them. "What does that mean?"

"You don't thank me for that."

She rolled her eyes, which she was aware he couldn't see, but suspected he knew anyway.

His hand came up and found her waist, running slowly along the curve of it, and she felt the touch more than she'd expected, her skin oversensitive in the aftermath. He turned his face into her neck and she felt his lips there, soft and slow.

"Do you want to go to bed?"

"This couch is pretty comfortable," she said. "Besides, Grogu's probably sprawled out in there by now, don't wanna wake him."

She felt him laugh against her neck, low and quiet. "Can't exactly do this with him in the bed."

He kissed down toward her breast by way of demonstrating this.

He moved lower, his mouth finding one of her breasts, and she felt the difference from earlier, just his lips closing over her nipple slowly, his tongue moving in a way that made her fingers curl into his hair all the same. He moved to the other side after a while, the same pace, the same deliberate attention, like he was doing something he'd been wanting to do and now had nowhere else to be. She felt her whole body soften under it, the last of the evening's tension finally leaving her.

She let her eyes close. There was something in the way he was doing this, thorough and patient, that felt less like a lead-up to something and more like its own point. All those months of the helmet between them, the quite desire and waiting, of never being able to have this, and now he did and he wasn't rushing it. She felt herself go loose under his mouth, her breathing slowing, her fingers tangled in his hair not to hold on but just to feel him there.

After a while he rested his head against her chest and she felt the weight of it, his breathe against her skin, and kept her fingers where they were, her nails grazing lightly at his scalp.

"Hey," she said. "Why'd you stop."

She felt him laugh against her. "You need to sleep."

"I can sleep just fine while you do that."

"Okay," he said. "I need to sleep." He pressed one kiss into the valley between her breasts. "And you make a good pillow."

She laughed and tugged him closer by the hair. She felt him settle more fully against her, his arm coming around her waist, legs tangled together, and she lay back and looked at the dark ceiling of the apartment and thought about how she had come out of that room an hour ago with no idea how to start and had somehow ended up here with him being held with his breath slow and even against her breast.

"Fine," she said. "Sleep."

He hummed against her chest, the sound of it low and almost content, and she felt it more than heard it.

She closed her eyes.

His arm tightened slightly around her waist and didn't loosen again.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakotali @drvoos @cosmicbitxh23 @angellthanatos

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 20

Honestly, I got distracted by a Frankie Morales fic and this took longer than it was supposed to. BUT WE'RE HERE NOW! Enjoy and don't be mad at me.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: The Beach – The Neighbourhood

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 8.2k

The cantina smelled like burnt oil and whatever passed for food out of a fryer that had seen better decades. She sat at the high stools along the bar, a watered-down drink sitting in front of her, close enough to watch the door without looking like she was watching anything at all. Across the room, tucked into a booth near the far wall, Din sat with Grogu balanced on his lap, looking like a father and son who had wandered in for an early dinner rather than two thirds of a surveillance team working the opposite end of the room from his partner. Grogu had thrown himself entirely into the role, methodically working his way through a bowl of something fried that he had already declared, in his own particular vocabulary, an unqualified success. 

Around them the cantina churned with the low, constant noise of a hundred separate conversations, a Twi'lek bartender working three orders at once, a group of off-duty dock workers arguing loudly over a game playing on a cracked holoscreen bolted above the bar. It was the kind of place built to be forgotten the moment you left it, which made it exactly the sort of place someone hiding from the galaxy might end up eating dinner in without meaning to be noticed. 

"Third bowl," she said over the comm, watching Grogu shovel another piece of fried critter into his mouth with theatrical concentration. "He's going to owe someone a very large bill by the time we're done here." 

"He's committed to the cover." 

"He's committed to the critters. There's a difference." 

She caught Din's helmet tilt very slightly in her direction, holding a beat longer than it needed to. "You're staring," he said, then seemed to think better of finishing it, the sentence trailing off into nothing over the comm. 

"I'm working." 

"Focus." 

"I am focused." She did not look away from him even as she said it, entirely too pleased with herself. "I just also happen to like watching you. Call it multitasking." 

"That's weird." 

"You love it." 

He did not answer that one. He shook his head instead, the small motion she had long since learned meant he was smiling behind the visor, caught out and unwilling to admit it to her out loud. 

Two hours in and nothing had moved. She had caught herself checking the chrono on the wall more than the door, and each time she looked back Din was already watching her instead of the room, which she was fairly sure defeated the entire point of splitting up in the first place. 

"We should call it," Din said, voice low over the comm, pitched for her ear alone. "Nobody's coming." 

"Ten more minutes." 

"You said that three times already." He shifted Grogu higher against his shoulder, the movement unhurried, nothing in it that would read as anything but a tired father settling a tired kid. "Just admit you were wrong to trust Rax's tip." 

"His information has been right every time so far." She turned her glass a slow quarter turn on the bar, not drinking it, just giving herself something to do that was not checking the door again. "I'm not writing him off because one lead is running long." 

"And how do we know this isn't a trap? Set specifically for you." 

"It's not." She said it plainly, without hesitation, and let a smile tug at the corner of her mouth before she could stop it, glancing across the room to find him already looking. "Besides. You're right there." 

"I should be closer." It came out fast, almost before he seemed to have decided to say it, the words landing in the middle of the noise like he had surprised himself with them. 

"Oh yeah?" 

He did not answer immediately, and she watched him recalibrate mid-sentence, the particular stillness of a man realising what he had just said out loud. "Or you should, you know... Be here. With us." 

"Careful, Mando." She kept her eyes on her glass, fighting the smile properly now. "Almost sounded like you meant that." 

"I meant it." 

"If you want me over there," she said, low enough that it barely carried past the comm, "all you have to do is ask." 

It was around then that a girl came through the front door, moving in a way that did not draw the eye so much as slide past it, shoulders drawn in, gaze down, cutting along the edge of the room instead of through the middle of it. She watched her go out of old habit, the same automatic scan she gave every new face that walked in, and kept watching as the girl crossed toward the back and folded herself into a table half in shadow, the kind of seat someone chose because it was the one nobody else wanted. 

A server took the girls order a few minutes later, unhurried, and she let her attention drift back to Din in the meantime, checking on the girl only in passing the way she checked on anything that had briefly interested her and then stopped, a glance every so often to confirm nothing had changed. She had nearly stopped bothering to look at all by the time the food came out, a plate set down without ceremony, the girl reaching for it before the server had even finished turning away. 

She felt it before she'd fully looked away again, a faint, uneven pressure settling into the room from that direction, the kind that came from someone bleeding Force energy into their surroundings without any awareness they were doing it. She went still on the stool, the banter gone from her voice entirely by the time she spoke again. 

"Something's changed." 

She turned her head back properly this time, following the pull of it rather than any visual cue, and found the girl eating too fast, the way people ate when some part of them expected to have to run before they finished. Her fork trembled where it sat balanced on the edge of her plate, and a half-empty glass beside it shivered a fraction of an inch across the table, entirely without her hand anywhere near it. The girl did not seem to notice either. Whatever was leaking out of her did so unconsciously, the way breathing did not require a person's attention to keep happening. The two tables flanking her stood conspicuously empty even as the rest of the cantina filled in around them, as if something in the air there had already warned people off. 

Her clothes did not match, layered wrong for the climate, the kind of mismatched practicality that came from taking whatever was available rather than whatever fit. Her eyes never stopped moving, cutting toward the door, then the kitchen entrance, then back to her plate, cataloguing exits the same automatic way Din did without ever seeming to think about it. She could not look away, cataloguing every detail with the same clinical attention she gave any potential asset or threat, filing it all away without yet letting herself feel anything about it. 

Across the room, Din had gone quiet in the way that told her he was watching the same thing she was. Grogu had stilled in his lap, small ears tilted forward, and his arm came up around him without her seeing him decide to do it, not restrictive, just present. 

 "Confirmed," she said quietly over the comm, eyes still on the girl.  

He nodded once, barely a motion at all, and she felt the shift in him from across the room, the stillness that meant the job was done, that whatever came next was simply the business of leaving cleanly and letting the Director's people decide what to do with the information. 

The girl's head snapped up, eyes cutting across the room in a fast, wide arc like she'd felt something touch her and needed to find the source. They landed on her and stopped there, fork frozen halfway to her mouth, the two of them staring at each other across the width of the cantina for one long, unmistakable second. The girl's face went white. She was on her feet before the shock of it had fully registered, chair scraping back hard enough to draw a few irritated looks from the nearest table, and then she was gone, weaving through the crowd toward the kitchen exit like she had already mapped this exact escape a hundred times in her head. 

She was already moving before she had decided to move, some older reflex answering before thought caught up with it, boots finding the gap in the crowd the girl had cut a half second earlier. Only once she was clear of the tables and into the corridor beyond did the rest of it arrive, quieter and heavier than the instinct that had gotten her this far. That was just a kid back there. Terrified, alone, and running from the only two people in that room who might actually have been able to help her. 

"This wasn't in the brief," Din said, already up, Grogu secured against his chest. 

"I know." She did not slow down to say it properly. "Front. Cover the other side." 

He peeled off toward the main entrance without another word, trusting the shorthand of it, and she went straight through after the girl, shouldering the kitchen door open into a wall of steam and shouting cooks who barely looked up from their stations. 

The corridor beyond spat her out into a night market in full roar, stalls packed so tight the walkway barely counted as one, vendors calling prices over each other in half a dozen languages, the air thick with grilled meat and overripe fruit going soft in the heat off the fryers. The girl cut through it like she had run this route before, ducking under a hanging rack of plucked poultry, upending a crate of loose produce behind her that sent two vendors shouting and a scavenging womp rat bolting for cover. She followed the wake of it, sidestepping the spilled crate, catching a stall awning with her shoulder hard enough to rock it, apologising to no one because there was no time to. 

Past the market the alley narrowed and rose, strung overhead with a tangle of maintenance cables and washing lines slung between the buildings, low enough in places that she had to duck under a sagging cluster of them or risk losing a layer of skin off her scalp. The girl was faster through the gauntlet, small enough to slip beneath a line where she had to half crouch, and for a few meters the gap between them opened wider than she liked, cable slack brushing cold and greasy against the back of her neck as she cleared the last of it. 

The alley dropped them onto an elevated transit platform just as a hovertrain was pulling in, brakes shrieking, doors already cycling open before it had fully stopped, and the girl used the crowd surge boarding it as cover, cutting sideways through the press of bodies instead of onto the train itself. She lost sight of her for two full seconds in the crush, working through on instinct more than sight, shoulder first, until she caught the flash of mismatched fabric ducking under the platform rail and down a maintenance stair on the far side. 

The stair let out behind a bank of public laundries, machines venting steam in thick white gouts that turned the narrow passage into something closer to fog than air, visibility dropping to almost nothing. She lost the girl's shape entirely in it for a moment, tracking her instead by the disturbance she left behind, a hanging sheet still swinging on its line, a puddle scattered where a foot had gone through it moments before. She came out the other side soaked through and half blind, blinking the wet out of her eyes just in time to see the girl duck into a narrow alley strung with buzzing neon signage in three different scripts, colour bleeding down the wet durasteel in long smears of pink and green and sickly amber. 

The neon alley dead-ended. She felt it before the girl did, the geometry of it obvious from the angle of the walls even through the haze of colour and steam still clinging to her clothes, and she pushed the last of her speed into closing the gap rather than announcing it. 

The girl found the end of hers in a narrow maintenance alcove behind a row of defunct water reclamation units, chest heaving, back pressed against a wall with nowhere left to go. 

Din caught up a few seconds later from the opposite corridor, Grogu still held tight against him, and stopped a good ten meters back without being asked to. 

"Hang back." she said. 

He did not argue. She felt the trust in that more than she heard it, the fact that he simply planted himself where he was and let her walk the rest of the way alone, hands loose and visible at her sides, the lightsaber deliberately left clipped and untouched at her hip. 

"Hey," she said, soft, stopping a few meters short. "I'm not here to hurt you." 

The girl said nothing. Her eyes darted past her toward Din, toward the exit behind him, toward every possible angle of escape that had already closed off one by one, cataloguing and discarding each in turn. 

"I know you're scared." She kept her voice level, unhurried, the way she had previously used it on wounded animals and frightened children. "I'm not with the people who'll want to lock you up for what's been happening. I promise you that." 

Nothing. The girl's breathing had gone ragged, shoulders drawn tight, every line of her body braced for a fight or a flight that had nowhere left to go. 

"What's your name?" she tried, gentler this time. 

The girl's jaw tightened. She did not answer, did not seem to consider it worth the risk of giving away even that much, and she let it go without pushing, filing the silence away as its own kind of information. Whoever this girl was, whatever had happened to her before this, she had clearly learned a long time ago that names were something you kept, not something you handed to strangers. 

"That's okay," she said. "You don't have to tell me anything. I just want you to know I'm not going to make you." 

She took one slow step closer, watching the girl's whole body flinch at the movement before forcing herself still again, some animal part of her deciding, in real time, whether running was still worth the attempt. 

"I'm like you." she said finally, quiet enough that it barely carried the distance between them.  

That should have helped. It did not. The girl's eyes went wider instead, whatever fragile control she had been holding onto visibly slipping, because now the stranger in front of her was not just dangerous in some abstract, undefined way. She understood exactly what she was, and what she could presumably do to her if she wanted to, and that understanding seemed to strip away whatever thin composure she had managed to hold onto until now. 

"I'm not going to use it on you," she said quickly, reading the shift immediately. "I promise. I just wanted you to know you're not the only-" 

The first burst of energy came without warning, a crate to the girl's left crumpling inward like something enormous had stepped on it, and she did not so much see the panic take hold as feel it, raw and uncontrolled, rippling outward from a source that had no idea how to contain what was happening inside her. It was not malice. It was not even conscious. It was simply terror finding the only outlet it had ever had, the same reflex that had probably caused every incident on the Director's list, and it was accelerating. 

She watched the girl's breathing without meaning to, three short pulls and no exhale to match any of them, the same ragged pattern from the cantina table now doubled in speed. Every fresh burst of debris followed it exactly, a breath caught and held until something in the alley paid the price for it, then released in a shudder that did nothing to slow the next one down. There was no rhythm underneath any of it, no counter-technique, nothing that looked like it had ever been drilled into her the way it had been drilled into the Jedi, over and over, until breathing through it stopped being effort and became instinct instead. 

No one had ever taught her that. 

She thought of the enclave then, unbidden, of her master who had found her before she was old enough to remember it clearly. If he had never come, this could have been her. Her heart tugged hard at the thought of everything this girl must have already survived to end up alone in a cantina on Coruscant, untrained and terrified of her own hands. 

Din moved then. 

She felt him coming before she heard his boots on the duracrete, a fast, hard stride that meant he had read the situation exactly the way anyone would from where he stood, a Force-sensitive person losing control and his partner standing directly in the blast radius of it. She did not think. She did not look. Her hand came up on pure instinct and the Force answered it instantly, a controlled, focused push that caught him mid-stride and sent him back a clean ten meters, nothing violent in it, nothing meant to hurt, only enough to put him somewhere he could not make this worse. 

She registered what she had done a half second after she had already done it, and there was not time to feel anything about it yet, not with debris still flying and a terrified teenager one bad breath away from completely losing whatever tenuous grip she had left. 

"Look at me." she said, steady despite the chaos, stepping closer instead of away. "Just me. Nobody else." She meant it as more than comfort. Every ounce of the girl's attention fixed on her was an ounce not spent on the two people standing ten meters back, and she would rather absorb every piece of flying debris in the alcove herself than have one shard find its way toward Din or Grogu. 

The girl's breath was coming in short, panicked pulls now, another piece of scaffolding groaning somewhere above them, and she kept walking, slow and deliberate, hands still open, still empty, still refusing to give the girl any reason to read her as a threat. 

"You're not in trouble, nothing that's happened this week is your fault. Do you understand me? None of it." She took another step forward, reaching one hand out towards the scared girl. 

Something in the girl's face cracked, just slightly, just enough to show the exhausted child underneath all that terror. 

The debris came without warning, a sharp piece of paneling torn loose by the last uncontrolled surge, spinning directly toward her upper arm. She saw it coming with more than enough time to move. She did not. Any sudden motion now risked reading as an attack, risked undoing every careful step she had taken to get this close, and the girl mattered more in this exact moment than a few centimeters of skin did. The metal caught her arm and opened a shallow gash through her sleeve, and she felt the sting of it distantly, already filed under things to deal with later. 

"I'm okay," she said, before the girl could spiral further over it. "See? I'm fine. And so are you." 

The girl looked. Whatever she saw, steady, calm, entirely unbothered by the blood already soaking through her sleeve, seemed to reach her in a way that nothing else had. The wild, uncontrolled pressure between them began to ease, the Force settling the way water settles once whatever has been thrown into it stops churning. 

She knelt slowly, bringing herself level instead of looming, and held out one hand again, palm up, empty. The girl looked at it for a long moment. Then, shaking, she reached out and took it. 

Din reached them a moment later, Grogu quiet and wide-eyed against his chest, and said nothing about the stretch of pavement he had just been thrown across. She did not look at him yet. She did not look at him yet. She was not ready to face whatever he was thinking behind that visor, not with the girl's hand still shaking in hers. 

They took her back to the NRI. 

The Director's expression, when the three of them walked into his office with a fourth, unaccounted-for person trailing behind, told her exactly how far outside the mission parameters this had strayed. 

"This was not the brief." he said, before she had gotten a full step past the doorway. 

"No." She did not try to soften it. "The girl was the source of every incident on your list. What I found when I got close to her was an untrained Force-sensitive with no control and no idea what she's capable of, panicking badly enough to bring a corridor down around us. I made the call to bring her in rather than leave her on the street to do that again somewhere with less cover." 

"You understand the position that puts me in?" The Director's tone stayed level, but the challenge in it was clear enough. "I have no verified history on this girl. No name, nothing at all. My responsibility is to this station, not to one field agent's read on a stranger." 

"I was standing close enough to feel exactly what she was doing." She held his gaze without flinching. "There was no intent behind any of it. Just fear with nowhere to go. You can log it however you like. It won't change what I felt." 

The Director studied her for a long moment, then let his gaze shift, briefly, to the girl standing silent and hollow-eyed just inside the door, still gripping the sleeve of her jacket like she had not quite decided this was safe yet. 

"And what would you have me do with her?" 

"Structured supervision, not a cell." She kept her voice even, professional, the tone she used when she needed someone to listen past their first instinct to argue. "I can help her with the basics, breathing through it, recognising the warning signs before they escalate. But I'll be honest with you. This is out of my depth." 

It was somewhere in the middle of saying it that she felt the warmth first, a slow, spreading heat down her arm, and only then did she glance down and register the blood, considerably more of it than she had expected, soaking clean through her sleeve. She kept her expression even and did not mention it, filing it under the same category as everything else that could wait. 

"The Force has been running unchecked in her for years by the look of tonight. Someone with real Order training would do a great deal more good here than I can on my own." 

The Director considered that, then nodded slowly. "I'll see what can be done." He did not elaborate further, and she did not push, some instinct telling her this was not a thread worth pulling on tonight. "In the meantime, she stays under NRI supervision. I'll have quarters arranged tonight." His eyes moved briefly to Din, who had not said a word since they had walked in, then back to her. "You have my agreement, on the condition that this does not happen again without authorisation first." 

"Understood." 

A moment later she felt it threatening to drip, one heavy bead gathering at her elbow with nowhere left to go but down onto the Director's carpet, and she brought her free hand up to press against the cut without breaking her sentence to the Director. The Director's eyes flicked once to the movement, then back to her face, and he said nothing about it, professional enough not to interrupt what was clearly still an open conversation. 

Din did not share his restraint. He crossed the room without a word, without asking, and knelt in front of her chair, gently rolling her sleeve higher to check the wound properly.  

"Medpack," he said, flat, to the nearest NRI officer standing near the door, who scrambled to comply without waiting for the Director's confirmation. 

"It's fine, Mando," she said quietly, not breaking her explanation to the Director for more than the half second it took to say it. 

He did not answer. The visor lifted slowly from the cut on her arm to her face instead, and stayed there a moment before he moved, letting her sleeve settle back over the wound without having touched it. 

The NRI agent returned a moment later with the small case. Din took it without opening it, tucking it into his belt instead. 

The Director watched the exchange for a moment, then cleared his throat, gently steering things toward a close. "I think we've covered what we need to for tonight," he said. "Thank you both. Truly. I'll take it from here with our new guest." His eyes flicked to the girl, still silent, still holding onto her sleeve. "Get some rest. Both of you. There's a transport waiting." 

The girl's hand tightened briefly on her sleeve before letting go, and she gave her what she hoped was a reassuring look before Din's hand found the small of her back, guiding her toward the door with Grogu already half asleep against his shoulder. 

The transport ride home was silent in a way that felt different from the ordinary quiet they usually shared. Ordinary quiet had a texture to it, comfortable, something they had built together over weeks of not needing to fill every gap with words. This felt like something being held shut by force. 

Din pulled the medpack from his belt once they were settled, and reached for her arm without asking, folding her sleeve back past the cut with the same careful economy he brought to everything else. She let him, watching him clean the wound and wrap it tight, his hands doing the one thing he still seemed willing to do for her tonight, and neither of them said a word through any of it. 

She tried to bridge the quiet once he had finished, watching his visor for any reaction at all. "The cut's superficial. It barely needed the wrap." Nothing. Not a turn of the head, not a shift in posture, nothing that told her the words had even registered. Just the low hum of the transport and Grogu's soft, even breathing where he had finally drifted off against Din's chest, one small fist curled loosely in the fabric of his cowl. 

She tried again, quieter. "What is it?" 

"Not now." 

Two words, flat and immediate, and somehow that was worse than the quiet had been, because at least the quiet left room to imagine he simply had not heard her. This confirmed he had, and had decided, deliberately, that this was all she was getting. 

She studied the side of the helmet for the rest of the ride, unreadable as always, and felt something shift in her understanding of the quiet itself. It was not irritation. She knew irritation from him, the particular clipped economy of his words when something merely annoyed him, quick and dry and usually gone within the hour. This was different. This had weight to it, something being held very deliberately in place behind his teeth, and the longer it stretched the more certain she became that whatever he was not saying was going to cost them both something significant once he finally let it out. 

She thought about reaching for his hand, the way she usually would without thinking, and found she could not quite make herself do it, uncertain for the first time in weeks whether the gesture would be welcome. That uncertainty alone told her more about how badly tonight had gone than anything he had actually said. 

By the time the transport docked and they climbed the last flight of stairs to the apartment, Grogu stirring awake just enough to blink blearily at the familiar hallway, she found she would have preferred shouting to this. At least shouting gave her something to push back against. This quiet gave her nothing at all, just the growing, sick certainty that she had done something that mattered far more to him than she had understood in the moment she had done it. 

Dinner was dead quiet except for Grogu. It was late so she had made something simple, more out of habit than appetite, and they sat together at the small table, not at opposite ends of a ship the way they had after their last silent stretch weeks ago, but across from each other, close enough that avoiding each other took actual effort. She caught his gaze more than once in the time it took to serve the food, and each time neither of them held it, both looking away at exactly the same moment like they had rehearsed it. Din did not touch his plate at all. He sat with his hands folded near it, still helmeted, food going cold in front of him while Grogu chattered on, sleep forgotten. 

She pushed food around her own plate without eating much of it either, cutting the same piece into smaller and smaller sections until there was nothing left to justify holding the knife. Grogu, sensing something was wrong in the special way he always did, launched into an increasingly elaborate performance meant to close the gap between them himself, holding a piece of food out toward Din, then toward her, babbling something that clearly wanted a response from both of them at once. She managed a small laugh despite herself. Din made a sound that might have been meant as one, low and automatic, and reached out to steady Grogu's hand before he could fling anything across the table. 

They sat like that for a long while, the three of them, quiet stretching everywhere except the small orbit around Grogu, who kept trying, undeterred, long after both adults had run out of things to perform for his benefit. Eventually he gave up trying to bridge it and went back to eating, glancing between them every so often like he was still waiting for the conversation to resume on its own. 

It was Din who finally broke it, though not with anything close to what she had been bracing for. "Let me put him down," he said quietly, already rising, gathering Grogu up before she had finished nodding. "Then we'll talk." 

She did not answer beyond the nod. She waited until she heard the bedroom door click shut over the cot, then went to the fresher instead of the couch, standing under water too hot for comfort long after she'd finished washing. She knew what she was doing, standing there. She unwrapped the bandage anyway checking to see if the bleeding had stopped, peeling it back with careful fingers, and let the water find the cut underneath it, the sting of it sharp and almost welcome, something simple and physical to feel instead of everything else waiting for her on the other side of the door. 

She came out in her towel, hair still damp, and found him already standing in the middle of the living room, unmoving, helmet angled toward the floor like he was still deciding whether to say anything at all. Neither of them spoke. She crossed straight to the bedroom instead, closing the door behind her long enough to dress and paused on her way back out to look in on Grogu, curled up, sound asleep in his cot with one small fist loose against the blanket. She eased the door shut without a sound and came back into the living room, stopping near the kitchen counter, unwilling to be the one who broke first. 

"Why?" 

One word, quiet, but the edge under it was already showing, none of the careful stillness he had managed earlier in the evening. 

"Why what?" 

"You pushed me away." He said it too fast, tripping slightly over the back half of the sentence like he had meant to lead with something else and changed course halfway through. "Back there. Before I was even close. You made it so that I could not get to you at all." 

"Because I had it." She did not reach for the level, reasonable tone she had used on the Director. Her arms came up across her chest instead, defensive before she had decided to be. "I was seconds from talking her down, Din. I felt it working. You would have undone that." 

"You don't know that." 

"I do, actually." She heard her own voice climb and did not bring it back down. "That's the whole problem, isn't it. You weren't standing where I was. You didn't feel what I felt. So as far as you're concerned my read on it doesn't count for anything." 

"That's not what I said." 

"You didn't have to say it." She was already shaking her head before he finished, the motion sharp, almost dismissive. "It's in everything you're not saying right now." 

He did not have an answer ready for that, and it seemed to cost him something to admit it, his hand curling briefly at his side before he found the next thing to say. "I'm not talking about whether you were right." 

"Then what?" 

"I'm talking about you shoving me halfway across a corridor like I was in your way." His voice had climbed too now, no longer flat, no longer careful. "Like I'm something you have to manage in the middle of a crisis instead of-" The sentence ran out from under him, and he stood there a moment with nothing to finish it, jaw working behind the visor like the rest of it refused to come. 

"Instead of what." 

"I don't know." He said it like it embarrassed him, which only made it sharper. "Instead of someone who's allowed to be scared for you too." 

"So what was I supposed to do, Din, let you walk into it and get hurt?" 

"Ask me. Warn me. Anything other than just deciding for both of us." Something harder crept into his voice, an edge she hadn't expected yet. "You've told me that you don't think it's right to use what you can do on someone's mind without permission. That it's a line you won't cross. But you'll use it on my body without asking and somehow that doesn't count?" 

She opened her mouth to argue and found the words weren't there yet, the accusation landing somewhere she had no ready defence for. 

The words sat in the room for a second longer than either of them seemed to want. She looked away first, toward the dark window instead of him, and she could feel where his next sentence was heading before he'd said a word of it, some old dread rising up ahead of the words themselves. 

He said it anyway. "You did exactly the same thing on Nevarro." 

She flinched like she had been struck, all the fight in her going out of her for a single unguarded second before it came back sharper than before. "Why would you even bring that up right now." 

"Because it's true." 

"Can we not." It came out low, almost pleading, nothing like the sharpness she had been using thus far. 

"Are we just never going to discuss what happened?" His voice had gone flat, worn down rather than angry, like he'd been holding the question back for longer than just tonight. 

"No it’s just not relevant. You don't get to bring that up now just because you don't like a call I made in the field." She was pacing now, one step toward the counter and back, unable to hold still the way she usually managed to. "It's not the same thing, Din. It was never going to be the same thing." 

He watched her move without moving himself, and when he spoke again his voice had gone rougher, some of the anger giving way to something underneath it he seemed less practiced at showing. "You want to talk about tonight instead? Fine. Let's talk about your arm." 

That stopped her mid-step. "It's a scratch." 

"It went straight through your sleeve and you didn't even look at it." 

"It doesn't hurt." She rolled her eyes saying it, dismissive, and hated the tone even as it left her mouth, but it was already out and she was not about to take it back now. 

"No?" His voice had gone dangerously quiet again, worse than shouting, and he took a step closer for the first time since the argument had started. "What if it had been a few centimeters to the right. What if that piece of paneling had gone through your neck instead of your arm." 

"It didn't." 

"That's not the point and you know it." 

"Then what is the point, Din, because I genuinely don't-" 

"The point is you don't let me worry about you until you're already bleeding in front of me." His voice broke slightly on the last word, betraying more than he probably wanted her to see, and he stopped there long enough that she thought that might be all of it. It was not.  

"That's when I get to touch you. When I get to matter. When you're already halfway gone." He exhaled hard, the anger cracking for a second into something closer to what it actually was. "I'm scared every single time that the next one won't stop at your arm." 

That one landed somewhere ugly, and she felt it settle before she found anything to say back. "That's not fair." 

"Isn't it." He had not raised his voice, but something about the stillness of him now was worse than shouting would have been. "You want to know when you actually let me close? It's never when things are fine. It's every time you're one bad decision from dying, and never before it. Nine days of you not saying a word to me on the Crest, and I only got close once you were too far gone to keep me out." 

She stood very still for a moment, turning that over, feeling the shape of it settle somewhere she did not want it to. "You want to talk about the Crest?"  

Her voice had gone thin and dangerous by the time she said it, and he must have heard the shift because he did not back down from it. 

"I want to know why you couldn't walk five meters into the cockpit and say something. Anything. Instead of lying there for nine days pretending you were fine." 

"I was avoiding you because you threatened me." The words came out louder than she meant them to, loud enough that she heard herself and did not care. "You told me you'd hunt me down if you had to. Was I supposed to just walk in after that and pretend it was nothing?" 

He was quiet a moment, long enough that she thought he might not answer at all, and when he did his voice had lost the edge it had carried through the rest of the fight, something rawer and less sure of itself underneath it. "I said that because I thought you were leaving us and I didn't know how else to make you understand what that would do to Grogu, to me, so I said the ugliest thing I could think of instead of the true one." He stopped, "I know how it sounded. I know what it sounded like I meant." 

"You never gave me the chance to tell you why I leaving." Her voice had gone thin, something old and unresolved rising up underneath the anger. "I never got to explain any of it, Din, because you jumped straight to threatening me instead of asking." 

"That's not-" He stopped, something in his stance going rigid, the anger faltering for a second into something closer to defensiveness. "I never said I didn't trust you." 

"You didn't have to say it." She crossed the last of the distance between them without seeming to notice she had done it. "You locked me on that ship like I was cargo. You don't lock someone in if you trust them." 

"Because I was terrified you'd disappear the second I looked away." 

"So instead you avoided me too." She had not meant to raise her voice again but it climbed anyway, cracking slightly at the edges. "You could have come to me. You had nine days to say something and you didn't. That's not just mine to carry." 

"I thought you needed space." 

"I needed you." Her voice cracked clean through the middle of it, and she hated that it did, hated that he could hear exactly where it broke. Something uncertain crept in underneath the anger, the memory itself gone soft and unreliable at the edges. "I don't even know how much of what I remember from those days was real and how much I made up lying there half out of my mind. But I remember needing you. I remember that part clearly. And you weren't there." 

He flinched at that, the small, involuntary kind that had nothing performed about it, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the silence thick enough that she could hear Grogu's breathing through the wall. 

Then he said it, so quietly she almost missed it. "You stopped eating." 

She froze. 

"I never saw you sleep, I heard you moving around down there for hours.” 

She said nothing. There was nothing left in her to say. 

She had believed, with total certainty, that she had hidden every piece of it. That certainty came apart all at once, standing in her own kitchen while he recited back the small, private collapse she had been so sure had gone entirely unwitnessed. 

"When you found the stims," she said, her voice gone very small, "why didn't you say something?" 

He did not ask what she meant. That alone told her everything. 

"I know you found them." Her voice sharpened, because his silence was somehow worse than a denial would have been. "I know you knew, Din. So why didn't you say anything to me then?" 

"Because I didn't know what I would have said." It came out rough, stripped of whatever composure he had been rationing all night. "What was I supposed to do. Walk in, tell you I'd found stims in your jacket, and demand an explanation? You'd already made it very clear you didn't want me anywhere near you." 

"How did you decide that?" Her voice had gone flat with disbelief, some of the anger draining into something closer to hurt.  

"Then why didn't you just come to me?" His voice cracked on it, something desperate leaking through despite himself. "Instead of taking stims alone in your bunk for nine days like the answer was in a syringe instead of five meters away through a door. If you had come to me, I would have known. I could have done something." 

"Why didn't you?" She threw it back at him with no space left between his question and her answer. "You had exactly the same five meters, Din. The same door. You could have walked through it any one of those nine days, and you didn't either." 

"I tried." It came out rough, almost injured. "I went down to the cargo bay , made up some reason to be there. You left as soon as I got down. I waited outside the fresher another time. You wouldn’t come out." 

That admission landed somewhere neither of them seemed prepared for, and for a moment the argument itself seemed to lose its shape entirely, both of them caught on the same impossible symmetry, two people who had each gotten close enough to say something and lost their nerve at the exact same threshold, over and over, for nine straight days. 

"I don't know what this is." He said it quieter now, some of the fight gone out of him entirely. " Not what it is to you. I didn't know then either and I still don't." 

Her face burned, sudden and unwelcome, heat crawling up her throat before she could stop it. She knew what he was asking her to say, and she knew exactly why she could not make herself say it, why she had never once let the actual words leave her mouth in all the time since. Saying it would make it real in a way she could not undo afterward, and some part of her had always understood that once it was real it could also end, the way everything she had ever let herself want out loud eventually had. 

"How did you not." Her voice broke, disbelief bleeding into something closer to desperation. "After everything that happened on Nevarro? I asked you to stay." 

"And that's how I was supposed to know?" It came out too fast, frustration breaking through the exhaustion underneath it. "You asked me to stay and I stayed. What was I meant to read into that when you made a run for it just hours later?" 

She had not thought she needed to say more back then, because she had never let herself think that far in the first place. She had believed, the same way she believed most things about herself without examining them too closely, that being with the two of them, having a place by the fire with them, was already more than she had any right to ask for. She had never let herself imagine she could have him, not really, not the way she wanted, so it had never occurred to her that the wanting itself might be worth saying out loud.  

Neither of them had anything left to say to that for a long moment. The apartment had gone completely quiet except for the low hum of the environmental system, and she stood there in the middle of it feeling every word they had just thrown work its way past whatever defence she had had ready. 

"You don't think you're allowed to let anyone else carry any of it," he said finally, quieter now, the anger gone out of it entirely. "Not me. Not tonight, not on the Crest, probably not ever. You just decide on your own that the risk belongs to you, and you take it before anyone else gets a vote." 

She had not consciously decided to shut him out either time, on Nevarro or tonight, had not sat down and reasoned her way into shouldering the danger alone. It had simply been instinct, the same reflex that had kept her alive and moving for years before Din had ever entered the picture, and she had never once stopped to consider that it might look, from where he stood, exactly like being shut out on purpose. 

"That's not-" she started, and stopped, because she genuinely did not know how to finish the sentence honestly. 

He did not push. He just stood there, breathing harder than the conversation alone accounted for, giving her the space to either find an answer or admit she did not have one, and the quiet between them stretched long enough that she felt every second of it settle heavy in her chest. 

Neither of them apologised. The argument had simply run out of the energy that had been fuelling it, both of them standing a few meters apart in a kitchen that suddenly felt too small to hold whatever had just been said in it. She felt herself unravelling from the inside, exhaustion and guilt and something rawer than either pressing in all at once, and she knew, with total certainty, that if she stayed in this room another minute she was going to fall apart in front of him in a way she was not ready for. 

"I can't do this right now." she said, voice cracking somewhere in the middle of it, and turned before he could see the rest of her face fall apart the way it was about to. 

She crossed to the bedroom and shut the door harder than she meant to, the sound of it cracking through the quiet apartment like something breaking. 

Grogu's cry started almost immediately, startled awake by the noise, and she felt the fresh wave of guilt hit before she had even wiped her own face clear. She crossed to his cot in the dark, already crying harder than she wanted him to hear, and lifted him carefully into her arms anyway, murmuring something soft and useless while he hiccupped against her shoulder. She sat on the edge of the bed with him curled against her chest, rocking slightly, her own breath coming in the same broken rhythm as his, and stayed like that a long time, unable to stop either one of them from crying. 

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[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 19

It's been a hot minute since we had a Din chapter!

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Starry Eyes – Cigarettes After Sex

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 6k

The room was pitch black when he woke, but he didn't need to see anything to know where he was, or who was wrapped around him. She'd migrated in her sleep sometime after he'd stopped keeping track of it, until she was lying mostly on top of him, one arm slung across his chest, head tucked beneath his jaw, her hand still clasped around his where it had been since they'd fallen asleep. He didn't move. He didn't want to be the reason she woke up, not when she was sleeping like that, deep and even and entirely unguarded, in a way he'd rarely seen from her.

He liked the weight of her there more than he had words for. He didn't try to find better ones. He just lay still in the dark and let himself feel it, the slow rise and fall of her against his side, the warmth of her breath against his collarbone, the simple fact of another person choosing to be this close to him without being asked to.

He thought, not for the first time, that he'd built a life out of exactly the opposite of this. Rooms with one exit and his back to the wall. Sleep measured in shifts, never more than a few hours uninterrupted, because uninterrupted sleep was how people ended up dead.

His first thought on waking had been about her. His last thought before sleep had been about her too. That had been true for a while now, longer than he was willing to examine too closely, but it felt different this morning. Heavier, in a way he didn't entirely mind, and lighter at the same time, which didn't make sense until he stopped trying to make it make sense and just let it sit there instead.

It occurred to him, lying there in the dark with her still asleep against him, that he'd spent all this time quietly convinced he was the one failing to keep his distance, the one who kept finding reasons to stand closer than any job required. Looking back at it now, he wasn't sure that was true. He'd spent most of that time waiting to give her whatever she reached for, ready the instant she asked for something, and never once let himself be the one doing the asking. She was the one who moved first, every time, toward every version of this either of them had let happen so far. He simply followed, telling himself he was the one holding steady while she did the actual work of wanting something out loud. She wasn't chasing him. She was just braver than he'd let himself be, and some part of him had known that for a long time without ever putting it in those words.

He thought about the kiss. He'd been the one to close the distance in the end, not her, even though she'd been the one who'd asked him to take the helmet off in the first place. He'd thought about it, in the dark, with her hands still on his neck from the massage, and made the choice himself. She'd met him there without hesitation, which had surprised him more than it probably should have, but the choice itself had been his. He'd wanted more of it than he let show afterward. She'd been the one to pull back, gentle about it, telling him to sleep, and he'd let her because that was clearly what she needed in the moment. He hadn't tried to keep going. He'd simply held on a beat longer than necessary when she started to pull away, long enough that she'd probably felt it, and that had been the only sign he'd allowed himself to give.

It had been his first kiss, the first time anyone had ever kissed him, the first time he'd let anyone have him in a moment like that with the helmet off entirely. He hadn't let himself think about that distinction too hard then, too caught up in the fact of her mouth against his to catalogue what it meant on top of everything else. He thought about it now, lying in the dark with her weight against him, and something about it sat strange and warm in his chest at the same time, an ordinary thing that somehow wasn't ordinary at all when it happened to him for the first time.

Her fingers in his hair had done something to him he still didn't have a name for. More than the kiss itself, if he was honest, though he wasn't sure that made sense to anyone but him. Nobody touched his hair. Nobody got close enough to try, and even if they had, he wouldn't have let them, not before her, not in all his years of keeping every part of himself covered by something. He thought about the drag of her fingers against his scalp, unhurried, like she had nowhere else in the galaxy she'd rather be, and had to consciously stop himself from waking her up just to feel it again.

He wanted more of her, plainly and without complication, wanted to see more of her, feel more of her, do more than lie here with his hands full of exactly as much as he'd allowed himself so far. He wasn't confused about that part, yet it wasn't only about not wanting to push past what she needed last night either, though that was true too. It was that no one had ever done what she was doing now, not once in his life, and even wanting more the way he did, he found he didn't need to rush toward it, because everything he already had felt like more than he'd ever let himself hope for.

Nobody had ever noticed the way his shoulders locked up after a bad job and done something about it with their own two hands. Nobody had ever taken his gloves off just to hold on to him tighter. Nobody had ever been there in the morning at all, let alone every morning, asking nothing of him except that he stay a little longer. He didn't have a framework for what came after that. He was still learning the shape of this part, even while he wanted the rest of it too.

He tried to let his eyes adjust to the dark, the way they would have under the visor, out of habit more than anything useful. Nothing came. He needed the helmet for that. Without it he was just a man lying in a dark room same as anyone else, and for once he found he didn't mind the limitation, didn't feel the low simmer of exposure that usually came with being without it. He wondered, distantly, when that had started to change.

He'd woken before her most mornings in this bed, the same as he had most mornings on the Crest before it, and he'd taken to spending the quiet hours just watching her instead of doing anything useful with the time, the visor giving him enough in the dark to make out the shape of her face, the twitch at the corner of her mouth when something in her dream amused her, the small line of drool at the edge of her lip that he found more endearing than he had any right to. The way her eyebrows would draw together in whatever she was dreaming, and how, seconds later, she'd curl further into him or tighten her grip on his hand, like some part of her noticed he was there even asleep, even unconscious, even somewhere he couldn't follow her to.

This morning there was none of that. The helmet was off, set on the ground somewhere beside them, and without it the dark stayed exactly as dark as it was, no visor compensating for what his eyes couldn't do on their own. He couldn't watch her the way he usually did. He could only feel her, which turned out to tell him almost as much. The steady rhythm of her breath changing right before she stirred. The faint twitch of her fingers against his when whatever she was dreaming shifted direction. He found he didn't mind the trade. He wasn't ready to stop feeling her yet, not for something as simple as seeing clearly.

He wondered, watching the shape of her breathing change against him, whether she still dreamed about Varen. He didn't know if that was a fair thing to wonder, lying here with her hand in his. He still couldn't quite make himself believe that two years spent living with someone left nothing behind worth dreaming about, and some quiet, unhelpful part of him kept circling back to the question of what exactly she still felt when she thought about the man, underneath the fear of him.

There was a worse thought underneath that one, and he let himself have it for exactly as long as it took to breathe through once. He worried, some nights more than others, about what she might decide to do if it ever came down to a choice between her own safety and theirs again. Not anything final in the way he sometimes let himself dread in the dark. Something simpler and just as frightening, that she'd put herself between them and whatever came for them without thinking twice about it, the way she'd already tried to before.

He thought instead about her fingers in his hair again, because that was easier to sit with than the rest of it. He matched his breathing to hers and let his mind wander toward the Force, toward whatever quiet architecture let her and the kid do the things they did without ever seeming to try very hard. She'd promised him once she'd never look inside someones head without asking first. He believed that completely, without reservation. He still found himself wondering, in an idle, curious way rather than anything more urgent, what it would be like to see even a corner of what she carried around with her. Not to take anything from her. Just to understand what put that furrow in her brow at four in the morning, what she was afraid of even when she thought no one could see it happening, whether the fear followed her all the way down into sleep or only waited for her there.

He thought about how she still felt entirely warm against him even now, no armour between them, nothing hiding either of them from the other, and he let his free hand rest against the back of her head, content to stay exactly like this for as long as she'd let him.

Grogu broke the moment eventually, a small stirring sound from the cot followed by a yawn and the rustle of him sitting up in the dark. Din knew he should get up. It took him longer than it should have to actually move, some stubborn, selfish part of him refusing to let go of the morning yet, wanting five more minutes of this exact configuration before the day asked anything else of him. It wasn't until Grogu called out properly, a small demanding question aimed at whoever was going to come free him from his crib, that Din finally shifted.

He knew the kid could climb out on his own if he really wanted to. He'd done it once already, here in the apartment, and Din had woken to find him already wedged between them in bed, having scaled the cot rail without a sound and apparently decided asking permission was optional. But Din wasn't about to lie there and listen to his son ask for help now and do nothing about it, whatever it cost him to move.

He eased himself out from under her carefully, an inch at a time. She turned onto her side on her own, still asleep, still breathing slow and even, and he slipped his fingers free from hers and crossed to the cot by memory, counting the steps out of habit even though he knew this room well enough by now not to need to. Grogu made a pleased little sound the second Din's hands found him, then reached up and pressed both palms flat against his cheeks, the way he always did when he found him without the helmet, like he needed to confirm it was really him under there and not some imposter who'd wandered in during the night.

"Morning," Din murmured, low enough not to carry. Grogu answered with something sleepy and satisfied, already curling into the warmth of his chest, one small hand fisting against his bare skin.

He tried to slip back into bed without waking her, but the mattress shifted the moment he sat, and she stirred anyway, some sixth sense apparently attuned to exactly this.

"Go back to sleep," he told her, quiet.

Grogu had other plans. He launched himself out of Din's arms and landed squarely on her back with the enthusiasm of someone who'd never once considered that other people might still be tired at this hour.

"Shit," Din muttered, then, recovering, "Come on, Grogu. We'll start breakfast."

"No," she said, muffled by the pillow, mostly asleep still, one hand flailing out vaguely in Grogu's direction without any real intent behind it.

"Sleep a little longer. It's early."

"No..." More insistent this time, the word dragged out. "Please Din?"

Something in him went quiet at that, the way it always did when she used it, except this time it landed harder than usual, still half asleep and unguarded the way she'd said it, like his name was simply the word that lived in her mouth now instead of something she had to remember to reach for. Maker, he'd been wanting to hear her say it like that for longer than he was willing to admit, not the careful, deliberate way she used it most days, but easy, automatic, the way a person said the name of someone they already considered theirs. He hadn't known, until just now, how much his own name could carry when spoken by the right person.

"We have a meeting in two hours, let me go get breakfast ready."

"Don't care. Stay."

He felt her hand moving in the dark, searching for him, and he gave in without much argument at all, settling back beside her while Grogu wedged himself into the space between them, wide awake now regardless of what anyone else in the room wanted. Her hand found his chest first, flat against his sternum like she was checking he was still there. The other searched blindly until it found his jaw, and he leaned into it to make it easier for her, catching the pad of her thumb against his mouth when it grazed too close.

He kissed it before he'd fully decided to.

"Good morning," he said.

"Mm." Her voice was still thick with sleep, "is it?"

"You tell me. You're the one who begging me to stay."

She shifted beside him, sitting up slightly, and Grogu let out a small, aggrieved sound at having his carefully chosen spot between them disturbed without warning. She murmured an apology to the kid, brief and only half sincere, before her hand found Din's face again in the dark, guiding him toward her. Her lips found his a second later, and it was nothing like the night before, no urgency to it, none of the messy, half-rushed edge that had carried them both the first time. This was slower. Sweet in a way that undid him faster than anything frantic could have, unhurried enough that he felt every part of it.

She pulled back. "Morning," she said, voice wrecked with sleep, and something in his chest gave out at the sound of it, the same way it had the first time and every time since.

He'd half expected the second kiss to feel different from the first, more uncertain somehow, now that neither of them could blame it on the dark or the exhaustion or the vulnerability of the night before. Instead it had felt inevitable, ordinary in a way that surprised him more than the kiss itself had. He should have reached for the helmet then. Instead he lay there a moment longer, letting himself imagine what he'd see if he put it on now, whether the visor would adjust fast enough to catch her exactly like this, hair a mess, eyes still half closed, entirely unbothered by how she looked because she had no reason to think anyone was watching. He thought about the curtains, still drawn, and what it would look like if she reached over and pulled them back, morning light finding the fine hairs at her hairline that she probably didn't know were visible, the exact shade her eyes went depending on the light, whether they were lighter first thing or whether that was something he'd invented because he wanted it to be true. He wanted to see it with his own eyes, not the visor's, nothing between him and her at all. He wanted, badly, to look at her properly. He wanted her to look back, and actually see him doing it, without the visor deciding for both of them what she was allowed to see.

That wanting alone told him everything he needed to know about why he wore the thing every night regardless. One night without it, one conversation where he'd let the wall down, and he was already lying here rearranging an ordinary morning around the idea of her seeing his eyes over caf. It wasn't just her face anymore, or even his own. It was the whole unplanned shape of a life he'd never let himself imagine having, mornings like this one strung together into something that looked dangerously like a future, and that scared him considerably more than anything with teeth ever had. He'd faced down worse things than this without flinching. This was different. This asked something of him he didn't know if he had.

He'd spent most of his life organising everything around one job: Keep Grogu alive. That had been the whole of it for so long he'd stopped noticing it as a choice at all, just the shape his days took by default. Somewhere in the last few weeks the job had quietly expanded into something he didn't have a clean word for yet. Keep this alive. It had just happened, the way most of the important things in his life seemed to.

He reached for the helmet anyway and settled it back into place. The visor came up dark for a beat too long, his eyes still adjusted to the room rather than whatever brightness had already found its way in past the curtain she must have shifted at some point, and he blinked through the momentary blindness until the display caught up. By the time it did, Grogu had scrambled upright and was mid-leap toward the edge of the bed, evidently under the impression that beds existed for jumping on, an idea Din blamed entirely on the fact that the kid hadn't had a real bed worth the effort until recently. He caught him out of the air on reflex and set him down on the floor, and Grogu trotted off toward the door looking extremely pleased with the outcome regardless of the interception.

She was already up and moving toward the kitchen by the time he followed Grogu out, tying her hair back with the kind of efficiency that suggested she'd done this exact routine a thousand times before. He set Grogu on the counter with a salt shaker to keep him occupied, and turned to find her watching him.

She didn't look away when he caught her at it. If anything the smile on her face got a little more deliberate.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing." She didn't sound like it was nothing.

He looked down eventually, mostly to see what exactly had her looking so pleased with herself, and found the answer immediately. He'd walked the entire way from the bedroom without a shirt on, apparently, hadn't even registered doing it, and his own personal menace was very clearly enjoying the view in full daylight rather than the darkness had to settle for last night.

He thought, distantly, that this wasn't the first time he'd caught her watching him like that. There'd been a look on her face once or twice before, back when he'd been doing something as unremarkable as cleaning a blaster or checking a strut on the Crest, that he hadn't understood at the time, hadn't had a category for. He had started to understand. Maybe he had understood for some time now. That had been the first real sign, if he was being honest with himself, and he'd been too slow, or too unwilling, to catch it.

"You're staring." he found himself chastising.

"I'm allowed to stare. You're the one standing in my kitchen half naked."

"Our kitchen."

That got a reaction out of her he liked considerably more than he was willing to admit, a flush of colour rising fast across her cheeks that stood out sharp against skin that never seemed to lose its warm, sun-kissed colour no matter how little actual sunlight she'd seen in months of running and hiding and living out of a ship's hold. He'd noticed that about her early on and never once mentioned it. He noticed how that the blush did something specific to it, a deeper pink blooming right over the gold, unmistakable even from across the kitchen, and he found he liked being the reason for it more than he probably should have.

"Don't." she said, not specifying what.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever that was. That tone you just used."

"I didn't do anything."

"You never do," she whined, "and somehow I still end up like this every single time."

"Like what?"

"You know what."

"I really don't." He crossed the kitchen instead of waiting for an answer, coming up behind her close enough that she went still, close enough that she'd have felt the heat of him even without turning around. "Explain it to me."

She turned in the small space he'd left her, caught between him and the counter, and opened her mouth like she actually had a ready answer. Nothing came out, not right away. She looked, for a second, genuinely stuck, and something warm and thoroughly satisfied settled in his chest at having done that to her with nothing more than proximity and a low voice.

"You're doing it right now," she said finally. "Standing there like you know exactly what it does to me." She exhaled, annoyed with herself more than with him. "I used to be able to hide it. I can't anymore. You figured it out, and now you use it, and I hate that I let you see it happen."

He heard what was actually underneath that, past the mock outrage, the plain fact that she was admitting he did something to her, that whatever this was between them worked both directions and she wasn't bothering to hide it from him anymore. It landed somewhere low in his chest, hearing her put actual words to it instead of leaving it for him to guess at. He hadn't expected to ever be the reason someone talked like that. He wasn't sure he'd fully believed it was true until just now, standing in a kitchen listening to her admit it out loud, irritated and unguarded in the same breath.

"You're extremely smug."

"I'm not smug."

He wasn't going to argue with any of it, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and he found he didn't mind being caught at it nearly as much as he probably should have. There was something close to dizzying about being able to do this to her now, reduce her to fumbling for words with nothing more than his voice and the small distance he'd closed between them, when for months he'd been the one who couldn't get a full sentence out whenever she looked at him a certain way.

"I hate you," she said, without any real heat in it, turning back to the counter before he could see the rest of whatever her face was doing.

He turned to go get dressed before he did something else to make it worse, satisfied with himself in a way that would have put Grogu to shame.

He probably should have felt guilty about it. He didn't. Somewhere in the last few weeks he'd discovered he genuinely enjoyed making her flustered, the specific look on her face when he'd done it on purpose, and he wasn't in any hurry to feel bad about a discovery like that.

"Where are you going?" she asked, entirely too innocent for someone who'd just been caught staring at him for a solid minute.

"To put a shirt on before you lose a finger. You're distracted."

"I am not distracted." She almost sounded offended

"You cut through half a loaf of bread without looking at it once."

"That's called muscle memory."

"It's called you not paying attention," he said, already walking away.

"You're impossible."

"You've said that before."

"It's still true."

"And yet," he said, over his shoulder, "somehow you still end up like this every time," and didn't wait to see her face when he said it back to her, mostly because he already knew exactly what it would look like.

They were late by the time either of them remembered they had somewhere to be.

"Okay, okay, okay," she said, scarfing down caf from her mug with one hand while pulling a boot on with the other, clearly operating under the belief that both tasks could be finished in the ninety seconds they had left.

He crossed the room, took the mug out of her hand, and set it down on the counter.

"Hey-"

"Late." he said. "Let's go."

"I wasn't finished with that."

"It'll still be here tonight."

"But it will be cold." She rolled her eyes at him but anyway, grabbing her jacket and Grogu in the same motion. Under the helmet, he was smiling the whole way to the door.

The transport ride up through the levels gave them exactly enough time for her to finish arguing that she could have brought the caf with her, and for him to point out, twice, that she'd have spilled it the moment the platform hit turbulence, which she couldn't actually dispute. Grogu spent the ride with his face pressed to the transparisteel, narrating the passing traffic to himself in a language only he understood, occasionally pointing at something with enough enthusiasm that she had to lean over and confirm, gravely, that yes, that was in fact a very impressive ship, before he'd settle again.

"You're quiet," she said, somewhere around the fourth level, glancing at him sideways in that particular way she had of reading him even through the helmet.

"Aren't I always?"

"Quieter than usual."

He didn't have a good answer for that one, not one he was willing to give her in a transport car with Grogu narrating traffic beside them, so he said nothing, and she let it go, which was one of the things he'd noticed about her early on and had come to rely on more than he probably should have. She didn't push when he went quiet like this. She just stayed close enough that he knew she'd noticed, and let him come back to the surface on his own time.

The transport was waiting a few levels up, exactly on schedule despite the two of them not being so. The NRI had a standing meeting with Rax, whose network had proven useful enough over the last two weeks that the Director had folded him into more of the operation than Din was entirely comfortable with. Din didn't trust him. He never had to be completely honest, not since the way Rax's eyes raked over her in his lounge. Definitely not now that they tracked her a beat too long whenever she walked into a room, cataloguing something Din didn't like the shape of and had never quite been able to name to her satisfaction when she'd asked him about it once. It wasn't only that, though he wasn't going to pretend it wasn't part of it. Rax survived by reading people and bending what he found to his own use, and Din had spent enough of his life around enough men exactly like that to know better than to relax around this one just because he happened to be useful for the time being.

Grogu was deposited outside the boardroom with two of the younger agents who spent more time arguing over whose turn it was to entertain him than doing actual work, both of them lighting up the moment they spotted him coming down the corridor, and Din offered a short apology for the delay on their way in, along with a look toward her that he made no effort to disguise as anything other than blame.

She didn't look remotely guilty about it.

The boardroom was already half full by the time they took their seats near the end of the table, and Rax was on his feet at the front of it, one hand resting on the back of a chair he wasn't using, addressing the room in the unhurried, faintly theatrical way he addressed everything. He caught sight of her the moment she sat down and held the look a beat too long before continuing, and Din felt his jaw tighten under the helmet without deciding to let it.

"As I was saying before our friends arrived." A small nod in their direction, more performance than acknowledgment. "We've had a string of incidents over the last week. Individually, they're nothing. A supply run gone quiet near the lower docks, the crew found unconscious with no memory of how. A contact who stopped answering after years of reliable service, last seen walking away from a locked door that shouldn't have opened for him. A delivery that arrived a full day late, the driver swearing he'd taken a route that didn't exist on any map he'd used before or since."

"Taken individually, none of this means much," he continued, spreading his hands in a gesture that managed to look both helpful and faintly self-satisfied. "Taken together, I'd call it a pattern. I don't like patterns I can't explain."

"Neither do we." the Director said from the head of the table.

Din had done this long enough to recognise the shape of a pattern before anyone in the room said the word out loud, and from the way the Director's jaw had tightened at the sound of it, he wasn't the only one who'd already gotten there. He was still waiting for someone to get to whatever they actually wanted from him when she went still beside him, gaze locked on the data pad in front of her, her whole posture changing in a way that had nothing to do with the meeting's slow pace.

"Is this a Force user?" she asked, looking up sharply, cutting straight through whatever Rax had been about to say next.

"This is why we have the two of you on retainer," the Director said, almost fond. "Yes. We believe it is."

She went back to the data pad immediately, scanning it with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment before, and Din felt the shift in her before he could have explained exactly how. He'd learned to read threat assessments a long time before he'd learned to read her, but the two had started to blur together the longer he spent watching her work, and what he read now wasn't professional concern. Her grip had tightened hard enough on the edge of the data pad that her knuckles had gone pale. Her breathing had changed, shallow and quick in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds earlier. Her eyes were moving too fast across the screen to actually be reading anything on it.

He didn't need to look inside her head to know exactly what she was afraid of. It wasn't the fact of a Force user operating somewhere in their territory. It was the very narrow, very specific possibility of which one.

"We'd like the two of you on this," the Director said, apparently unaware of anything happening on the other side of the table, or choosing to proceed regardless. "Rax's contacts can get you close to the last known point of contact. From there it's a matter of confirming what we're actually dealing with before we commit more resources."

"How close is close," Din asked, mostly to give her a few more seconds with the data pad before anyone expected her to speak.

"Close enough that discretion matters," Rax said, folding his hands together on the table. "I'd rather not spook whoever this is before we know what they want."

"And if it's someone with a personal reason to be here," Din said, watching her out of the corner of the visor rather than looking at Rax directly, "instead of a professional one."

The table went quiet for half a second too long.

"Then that changes the calculation considerably," the Director said, carefully, and Din didn't miss the way his eyes flicked toward her for exactly as long as it took to gauge a reaction before returning to the room at large. "Which is precisely why I want you two running point on the confirmation. If there's history here, you're better equipped to read it than anyone else at this table. In the meantime, I'll reach out to someone who may have more context than we do. I'll know more once I've spoken with them."

She hadn't said anything yet. Din could count on one hand the number of times he'd watched her go this quiet and every one of them had ended badly for someone, usually her. He put a hand flat against the table, not quite touching her, close enough that she'd feel it if she looked down.

"We'll take it." he said, before she had to.

She looked up at that, something unreadable passing behind her eyes before she nodded, brief and controlled, the kind of nod that told him nothing about what she was actually thinking and everything about how hard she was working to keep it that way.

He waited until they were clear of the boardroom, Grogu handed back off to him by one of the younger agents with visible reluctance, before he pulled her aside into the empty corridor behind the transport bay, out of earshot of anyone still filing out of the meeting.

"Is it him?" he asked, quiet enough that it couldn't be heard by anyone passing.

"I don't think so." She said it fast, like she'd already asked herself the same question a dozen times in the last ten minutes and hadn't liked any of the answers she'd come up with. "It doesn't feel like him. I'd know. I think I'd know." She shook her head, more to herself than to him. "But it could be connected. It could be someone who knows him, or someone he's sent ahead, or-" She stopped, pressing the heel of her palm briefly against one eye like she could push the spiral back down by force.

He'd seen her steady through worse than this. Firefights, ambushes, and she'd stayed level through all of it, focused in the particular way she got when there was a problem in front of her she could actually do something about. This was different. The mere possibility of the man had her unraveling in a way nothing else seemed to manage, thoughts spilling out half finished, hands restless, that same frantic edge creeping into her voice that he'd only ever heard a handful of times before and never once liked. He didn't know how to fix it. He only knew he wanted to.

He reached up and tilted her face toward his with two gloved fingers under her chin, gentle, giving her the chance to pull away if she wanted to. She didn't.

"Hey," he said. "You alright?"

She held his gaze through the visor for a long moment before she nodded, steadier this time. "Yeah." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she added, "We can handle this."

He believed her more than he believed himself, so he nodded anyway, and didn't let go of her until Grogu, still balanced on his hip, reached out and patted her cheek twice, as if he'd decided that was his job too.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakotali @drvoos @cosmicbitxh23

[cupofzo]

Chaneldro side profile.

[pzychothik]

my man...

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 18

I'm lowkey nervous posting this...

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Common – Zayn

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 5.3k

A week or so into living in the apartment, she could no longer pretend this was temporary, not with three separate trips back to the Crest already logged, each one bringing back a little more of a life neither of them had planned on unpacking anywhere. Her clothes had gone first, then his spare gear, then, eventually, the accumulated pile of Grogu's things that had somehow taken over half the Crest's storage without them noticing until they had to pack it all up.

They'd made trips to the market too, wandering stalls, picking up things that had nothing to do with survival. A few changes of clothes, a second frying pan, because Din turned out to have opinions about which one worked better for what. A soft toy for Grogu that squeaked when squeezed, which he refused to be parted from within the hour of getting it. It still didn't feel like home, not with half the crates still unpacked in the corner, but it had started to feel like something, and she'd stopped trying to find the right word for it.

The apartment had given them a kind of proximity the Crest never had. On the ship there was no room for it, not really, no way to sit beside him when he was in the pilot's seat, so she'd spent most of their time together looking at the back of his helmet instead of any part of him. Here there was a couch, and evenings with nothing pressing enough to keep them apart, and she'd taken to leaning into his side while they went over job briefs or simply sat with the quiet between them.

The first time she rested her head in his lap, he'd been out of the armour entirely, sprawled back against the couch with a data pad in one hand and she'd gone for it half expecting him to tense the way he still did with most unplanned contact. He hadn't. He'd barely paused, thumb still scrolling through whatever report he was reading, like her head finding a place against his thigh was the most unremarkable thing that had happened to him all day. She'd stayed there far longer than she needed to, mostly to see if he'd eventually shift or say something about it. He never did.

She liked the warmth of him under her cheek more than she wanted to admit, and it wasn't long before she noticed how much of him she still hadn't actually touched, how much stayed hidden behind leather and beskar even here. One evening, without much thought behind it, she reached for his hand and asked if he'd take the glove off. He had. Since then it had become something he did without seeming to notice he was doing it, his bare thumb moving in slow circles against the back of her hand while he read through whatever the Director had sent over that day.

Every night they'd spent in the apartment so far, they'd fallen asleep in each other's arms, no real discussion required after the first time it happened. Grogu slept in his cot most nights, worn out enough from whatever he'd gotten into that day to go down without complaint, but every so often he refused outright, climbing determinedly up onto the bed and wedging himself between them until there was nowhere left for either of them to go but around him. Neither of them minded. She'd wake some mornings with her hand still tangled in Din's, bare the way it had been on the couch the night before, and something about the fact that he never once put the glove back on before morning settled deeper in her.

She'd started to love saying his name more than she probably should have. Outside the apartment it never once left her mouth, not on a job, not in front of the Director or anyone else they crossed paths with, because some instinct told her it belonged only to the three of them and the walls they'd started calling theirs. Mando was for everyone else. Din was hers, spoken low and often once the door had shut behind them, and she liked the shape of it in her mouth more than she would have ever admitted out loud.

They cooked when they could, which surprised her more than she'd expected it to. Din turned out to be a genuinely decent cook, methodical about it the same way he was methodical about everything else, measuring by eye and never once burning anything she'd seen him make. Grogu took to perching himself on the dish drying rack on the counter most evenings, chin propped on his hands, watching with the solemn concentration of someone convinced dinner was an event of galactic importance. Between the two of them, he ended up fed more bites of raw vegetable and warm bread than someone of his size was owed.

"Mando, could you hand me the knife?" she asked one evening, reaching across him for the rack while he stirred something at the stove.

He didn't move.

She caught the stillness in his shoulders, the deliberate way he kept his eyes on the pot, and knew he'd heard her just fine.

She exhaled through her nose. "Din. Can you pass me the knife?"

Only then did he hand it to her, something satisfied in the set of his shoulders. She could practically see the smirk on his face even with the helmet fully on when he said, "That's better."

"You're impossible."

"You're inconsistent."

Grogu made a small, amused sound from his perch, clearly delighted by the exchange, and she flicked a piece of a chopped vegetable toward him just to watch him catch it out of the air with unnerving precision and put it straight into his mouth.

They ate at the small table by the window most nights, plates balanced on their knees as often as not because the table itself was nearly always cluttered with crates or bags they hadn't gotten around to unpacking.

It was over dinner, a few nights into their stay, that the conversation drifted somewhere she hadn't entirely meant to steer it. She'd been teasing him about something unrelated at first, the sheer competence with which he seemed to do everything he touched, cooking included, and somewhere in the middle of it her mind wandered back to the alley behind the lounge instead, the way he'd known exactly what she wanted before she'd said it and still made her ask for it anyway, unhurried about the whole thing in a way that hadn't read like beginner's luck.

She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. "Never mind."

"What."

"It's stupid."

"It's not, if you want to know something," He watched her over his plate as he trailed off, patient in a way that implied he wasn't going to let it go. "Ask."

She hesitated a second longer than she meant to. "Have you ever... been with someone?"

He shifted in his seat, head tilting slightly, clearly confused. "Like this?"

"Well, like this. Or, you know." She gestured vaguely, already regretting the question. "Not like this."

"I don't follow."

She huffed, annoyed at herself more than at him, at the sheer inability to have one normal conversation like a functional adult. "Physically. With someone. You know what I mean, right?"

He nodded slowly, something settling into place behind the visor.

He was quiet a moment before he answered. "I haven't-" He stopped, like he couldn't find the right shape for the rest of it, and let it go without finishing. "Not this."

He let a beat pass before he added, "That part, though... it's been a long time. Before the kid."

She nodded, feeling the weight of the admission settle somewhere she hadn't quite expected. He didn't say anything else right away. He just looked at her instead, something unspoken and slightly awkward sitting behind the visor, and she understood well enough what he wasn't quite managing to ask outright.

"Have you?" he said eventually, rough, the question trailing into something unfinished. "With—"

He didn't have a name to put there. She'd never given him one.

"Varen," she said, before she'd decided to say it at all, the name slipping free before she could catch it.

She realized what she'd done a beat too late. She'd carried that name for years, long before she'd ever known his, and she'd just handed it across the table without meaning to, easier than Din had managed to give her his own. She hadn't said it out loud in months, not even to herself most days, and now it was sitting there between them like she'd dropped it on purpose.

Nothing about him outwardly changed, not that she could tell through the visor, but the way he'd asked the question in the first place told her he'd already assumed the answer. Two years living with one man. Nobody needed her to confirm it outright, least of all him. It struck her that she hadn't been particularly fair asking him what she had, not when her own history was the kind that didn't require a follow-up question at all.

Something in him went quiet at that, his hands stilling around his fork, and she watched him decide, visibly, not to say whatever had risen up in him in response. It wasn't the fact of it that seemed to catch him off guard. He'd known for a long time there'd been someone, known roughly how long, known enough of the shape of it to have pieced together the rest. What he hadn't had, until now, was a name to put to any of it, and something about hearing it land plainly in their own kitchen seemed to weigh more than she'd expected it to.

Grogu, sensing the shift the way he always seemed to, made a small demanding noise from across the room, and they both turned toward him at the same moment, grateful for the excuse to let it go. She noticed, over the days that followed, that he seemed to find reasons to stay a little closer than usual, an arm settling low against her back more often than not, nothing he'd ever call jealousy outright, but close enough to it that she didn't mind.

For as close as they'd gotten, there was still so much neither of them had said out loud. They hadn't put a name to whatever this was, not once, not even alone in the apartment where nobody but Grogu could have overheard it. They hadn't talked about Nevarro, not really. They hadn't talked about what exactly had happened after he abandoned the plan to bring in Rax, or what it meant that neither of them had tried to repeat it since, though she knew well enough why she hadn't. She'd tried once already and he'd been the one to stop it, and some quieter, more insecure part of her wasn't sure she could survive hearing no a second time. It wasn't that either of them was avoiding all of it on purpose, not exactly. It was more that neither of them wanted to be the one who reached for a thread that might unravel something they weren't ready to lose yet.

It was three nights later, after a job for the NRI that had run long and gone sideways twice before they'd finally gotten out clean, that things shifted again. Din came through the door first, dropping Grogu by the entrance with none of his usual precision, and made it as far as the couch before he groaned and sat down hard, helmet tipping back against the cushion behind him. He looked thoroughly wrecked, the kind of exhaustion that came from running on adrenaline instead of sleep for the better part of two days.

She came out of the fresher a few minutes later, towel still damp in her hair, tired in her own right but not tired enough to miss the way he'd slumped into the couch like his spine had simply given up on him. She crossed the room without really deciding to and started on the clasps of his armour before he'd even registered she was there.

"I'm fine," he said, not moving.

"Okay." She didn't stop.

He huffed something that might have been a laugh and let his head fall back again, watching her work through the visor without any real attempt to stop her. She could feel the tension in him even through the beskar, in the stiffness of his shoulders, the way he held himself even at rest like his body hadn't gotten the message that the job was over. Piece by piece she set the plates aside, working down his shoulders, his chest, his gauntlets, until his gloves came away last and his bare hands lay open by his side, and only then did she sit back and look at him properly.

"Maybe I can help you release some of that tension," she said, one hand already settled on his thigh as she said it.

His helmet shot up. "What?"

She knew exactly what that sounded like. She also knew exactly what she meant, and let both truths sit there for a beat before she answered him.

"A massage," she said, mouth twitching upward. "What did you think I meant?"

He didn't answer right away, and when he finally did his voice had gone a little rough at the edges, something close to embarrassed. "Sorry. I didn't mean to-" He stopped himself, shook his head slightly like he was trying to shake off the assumption entirely.

"That'd be good, actually. The massage."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

She reached for his hand. "Come on then old man. Up you go."

He let her pull him up off the couch, already thinking ahead to the bedroom by the way his hand tightened briefly around hers. Grogu was still sitting by the couch where he'd been playing since they got home, content enough that she left the door open a crack behind them, just enough to hear him if he needed her, not so much that they lost any privacy in the meantime.

"You know," she said, glancing back at him as they crossed into the bedroom, "purely in the interest of doing this properly, you should probably lose the shirt."

He held her gaze through the visor for a long moment before he pulled the outer layer over his shoulders, dropping it somewhere she didn't bother tracking, because she was too busy watching him do it. He didn't look away from her while he did it either, and she got the distinct impression the whole thing was deliberate, drawn out for her benefit in a way that made her mouth go a little dry. She let her eyes drag over him shamelessly, over the tight undershirt clinging to what was clearly a considerable amount of muscle underneath, and then, because she wasn't feeling particularly subtle, tipped her chin up at him in silent instruction.

He didn't hesitate, not exactly, but he took his time with it anyway, drawing the shirt up slow enough that she understood, somewhere underneath the haze of it, that he knew precisely what he was doing to her. When it finally came off she had to consciously remember to breathe.

She'd never seen this much of him. Broad through the chest and shoulders in a way the armour had only ever hinted at, soft in places she found she liked rather more than she expected, dark hair scattered across warm olive skin that seemed to hold its own light despite never seeing the sun. Scars marked his left side, starting high at his shoulder and trailing down toward his ribs, old enough that they'd faded to pale seams against the rest of him. She dragged her eyes back up slowly, deliberately, until she found the visor again, and for a moment neither of them moved at all.

She thought, distantly, that if she wanted to, she could take this further right now. She could undress herself the same slow, taunting way he just had. She could beg, and she wasn't above it, not when it came to him. The comfort they'd built over these last few days was real and it mattered to her more than she could easily explain, but underneath it the wanting hadn't gone anywhere, and some nights it was all she could do not to reach for him and simply ask. She held back anyway, partly because she still remembered exactly how it had felt the one time she'd tried and it hadn't gone the way she hoped, and partly because some quieter part of her wanted to keep what they had exactly as it was for just a little longer.

She cleared her throat instead. "Well? What are you waiting for. Get on the bed."

He shook his head slightly, and she watched it move through him, a small shake in his chest that was unmistakably laughter, silent and real. He sat on the edge of the mattress, and she moved up behind him, kneeling so she had a clear line down the length of his back, which was, she decided immediately, just as good a view as the front had been.

She started at his shoulders, working her thumbs into muscle that felt like rope pulled too tight for too long, and he sighed under her hands almost at once, some of the rigidity finally starting to give.

She worked quietly for a while, losing herself a little in the simple fact of having her hands on his bare skin, in the small sounds he made when she found a particularly stubborn knot and pressed until it eased. It was several minutes before she spoke again, mostly because she'd been turning the question over and hadn't quite decided whether to ask it.

"You've taken it off to sleep before," she said finally, fingers still working at his neck. "Why not here?"

He didn't answer right away. She felt the change in him before he said anything, a fresh tension gathering under her hands that had nothing to do with the job they'd just come back from.

"I've told you I can't trust myself," he said eventually, quiet, and something about the flatness of it told her the conversation had already gone somewhere he didn't want it to go.

She let her hands slow, understanding arriving a beat behind the words. It wasn't about her. It had never really been about her, not in the way she'd let herself worry it might be. It was the helmet itself, held up between them like the last wall he had left standing, and she wasn't sure whether that realization made things better or considerably worse.

"I trust you," she said quietly. Then, when he didn't respond right away, quieter still, "Do you still not trust me?"

She heard the small, insecure edge in her own voice before she could stop it, the shape of what she'd done on Nevarro still sitting somewhere underneath the question. He turned before she'd even finished asking, twisting to face her properly, one hand finding hers where it had gone still against his shoulder.

"That's not it." His voice had lost the flatness, gone rough instead, closer to urgent than she'd heard him in a long time.

She studied the visor, searching for something she couldn't read, and let him hold her hand a moment longer before she moved, shifting from behind him to beside him on the mattress so she could see him properly, or as properly as the helmet allowed. She reached up and took the sides of it in both hands, gentle, deliberate, making sure he felt every bit of the care in it before she spoke.

"I would never take something from you that you didn't give me," she said. "Not like this. Not ever." She held his gaze through the visor, willing him to understand it. "I know I walked away from my Order a long time ago, and I know that's not the same as yours. But I admire you for what you believe. For how strong you've had to be to keep it. I would never want to be the reason you lost any part of that."

He was quiet for a long moment. "I've shown my face before," he said finally. "For the kid."

Something in her went soft and a little sad at that, thinking of Grogu, small and green and unaware of what a gift he'd been given without ever having to ask for it. She didn't say anything about it, though, didn't let herself dwell there, because that wasn't the point she was trying to make and she didn't want to make him feel like she was keeping score.

"I'm not asking you to," she said instead, letting her thumb move gently along the edge of the helmet where it met his jaw. "I never will. But you shouldn't have to hide in there. Not around me." She let the words settle before continuing, softer now. "I don't need to see your face to know who's holding me. I know you, Din."

He didn't answer right away, and she let her hand drift down to the back of his neck instead, where the tension still sat thick under his skin, and pressed her fingers into it slowly. "This isn't about wanting to see your face," she said. "I know the beskar's heavy. I can feel how tight your neck still is even after everything I've already worked out of it. I just want you to be able to put it down when you're resting. When it's just us." She glanced toward the window, where the last of the evening light had already gone. "We can keep the room dark, if that's what you need. I just don't want you carrying all of it, every single night, when you don't have to."

The silence that followed felt different than the ones before it, less like avoidance and more like him actually turning the thought over, testing its weight the way he tested everything before he let himself trust it. She kept her hand steady against his neck and waited, because she'd learned by now that pushing him only ever made him retreat further, and this, whatever this was, felt too important to rush.

She thought about the cottage again without meaning to, the night he'd lifted the helmet just long enough to press his lips to her forehead while she held her eyes shut and she understood, somewhere underneath all of it, that the wall between them had only gotten heavier since, not lighter, because now there was so much more on the other side of it worth protecting.

She touched her lips lightly to the crown of the helmet, the closest thing to his forehead she could reach, and let it linger there a moment before pulling back. Then she rose from the bed without waiting for an answer, crossing the room to turn off the last of the lights one by one. She checked through the crack in the door and found Grogu curled up on the couch cushions outside, thoroughly asleep, one ear flopped over his face. She drew it shut, then crossed to the window and pulled the curtains fully closed, until the room fell into a darkness so complete she couldn't see her own hand in front of her.

She turned back toward where she thought the bed was, moving carefully, and had barely taken two steps before a hand found her bare thigh, warm and steady. She startled, just slightly, and followed the line of his arm up to his shoulder to steady herself, his other hand settling against her other leg a moment later. He drew her forward by her thighs, patient, until his knees parted and she was standing between them, his legs framing hers. She climbed onto the mattress after that, one knee and then the other finding the space on either side of his hips until she was kneeling over his lap properly, closer now.

He reached up and took her hands from where they'd settled against his shoulders, bringing them together with his own until they found the base of the helmet, and stopped there, waiting. She understood what he was offering before he said anything at all. Together, slowly, they lifted it free, and she felt the weight of it leave her hands, heard it settle softly onto the mattress beside them.

His hands were still over hers, larger, and for a moment neither of them moved.

"Hey, Trouble." he said.

He'd never said it quite like that before, not straight to her face with nothing else riding on it. This time it was just for her, quiet and unhurried, and she knew without having to think about it that it belonged to no one else. It was theirs.

She'd heard his voice like this once before, brief and unguarded, on the Crest. Before she had not let herself examine the voice under the modulator at all. She'd noticed it then and made herself stop thinking about it before it turned into something she couldn't take back. She let herself listen properly now. It was rougher than she remembered, and quieter, worn down with the same exhaustion that had put him on the couch in the first place, breathy enough that she felt it more than heard it, a vibration she could have traced with her fingers if she'd reached for his throat. It was just him, saying something so small and so entirely him that it undid her more than anything grander could have. Nothing between them now but the dark and the sound of his breathing, closer than it had ever been.

He released her hands to circle her waist instead, drawing her the rest of the way into his lap, and she went easily, settling against him with her knees braced either side of him. Her hands found the back of his neck on instinct, resuming the massage she'd started what felt like hours ago, slow and deliberate against skin without the edge of the helmet in the way. He made a low sound at that, something rough and unguarded, and she felt it as much as heard it, a vibration against her own chest where she'd leaned into him.

"Better?" she asked.

"Infinitely." The word came out on something close to a laugh, warmer than she'd ever heard from him.

She let her hands wander after that, not entirely on purpose, tracing up along his jaw in the dark, finding the line of his cheekbone, the rough edge of scruff along his jaw that she'd never once been allowed to touch before tonight. She stopped herself there, made herself pull her hands back to the safety of his bare chest, because she hadn't earned this, not all of it, not in one night.

"You should sleep," she said quietly. "I'll get Grogu settled."

He didn't answer. He didn't let her go either. She stayed where she was, caught between the two of them, unsure what he was thinking in the dark without even the small tells the helmet used to give her, until she felt something warm press against her neck, and she gasped, louder than she meant to. His mouth dragged slowly up to her jaw and only stopped just short of her lips. Neither of them moved for a long moment after that, each giving the other every chance to pull away.

She thought of the ghost of his mouth against hers when she'd been half delirious and certain she'd imagined it. This was nothing like that. This was real and slow and entirely deliberate, so when he finally closed the last of the distance between them, she met him there without hesitation.

The kiss was soft at first, careful in a way that felt like both of them were still asking the same question. Then his hands tightened at her hips, drawing her into him, and she felt herself sink into it properly, a small sound escaping her that she immediately felt too embarrassed to have made, except it seemed to be exactly what he needed to hear, because he kissed her harder after that, less careful, more certain. It wasn't skilled or practiced between them. Their noses bumped once, and she laughed against his mouth before he chased the sound right back into another kiss, and somehow that clumsiness made the whole thing feel right.

She lost track of time entirely, aware only of the taste of him, the scrape of his jaw against her skin, the fact that the whole galaxy could have started spinning around her and she wouldn't have noticed or cared. When his mouth opened against hers she followed without thinking, deepening it, and felt him groan low in his chest at the change. She didn't let herself grind down against him, though she was aware of exactly how affected he was beneath her, because this wasn't about that tonight. It was just this, and it already felt like more than she'd let herself hope for.

Her fingers found their way into his hair, and she registered, somewhere distantly, that it was longer than she'd expected, soft curls she'd assumed would have been kept short and practical under the helmet. He moaned into her mouth when she threaded her fingers through it properly, and she finally pulled back, needing air, or rather, needing a second to remember how to breathe.

She didn't want to push further than this, not tonight. He needed rest more than either of them needed to keep going, and some greedy, quiet part of her wanted to hold on to this exact moment for as long as she could before it turned into something else. She leaned down and pressed one more soft kiss to his bare chest instead, feeling his heartbeat under her lips, and murmured against his skin.

"Go to sleep."

His arms didn't loosen around her. She could feel that he wanted more, and she wanted it too, probably even more than he did, but this was already so much more than either of them had let themselves have before tonight, and she wanted to keep this exactly as it was a little longer before asking for anything else. She reached up in the dark, found his jaw by feel, and tipped his head down until their foreheads met, resting there for a long, quiet moment.

"I'm going to get Grogu," she whispered. "I'll be right back."

He let her go, reluctant, his grip finally easing enough to release her. She found the door by memory, opened it to a thin beam of light from the front room, and slipped out without looking back, letting out a long breath once the door had shut behind her. Grogu was still curled on the couch cushions where she'd seen him, worn out from the day, and he stirred when she lifted him, blinking sleepily up at her with a small, lopsided smile before tucking himself into the curve of her arm and going still again.

She carried him back into the dark bedroom, easing the door shut behind her, and crossed to his cot by feel, setting him down carefully. He didn't fuss, only turned toward the wall and settled, already halfway back to sleep. She felt her way to the edge of the bed after that, expecting to find her own side of it, but his wrist caught hers before she got far, guiding her up and into him, until she found her place against his bare chest, her head tucked into the crook of his neck. Neither of them said anything else. She let her eyes close, and within minutes, she was asleep.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099@literaryloony@tundra-un1verse@sucker4seresin@baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakoktali @drvoos @cosmicbitxh23

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 17

So much fluff. SO MUCH FLUFF!!!!

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Fade Into You – Mazzy Star

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual? smut. MDNI.

W/c: 7k

The dress shop was smaller than she remembered it being a day ago. 

Or maybe it was just that Mando took up more of it this time, standing at the rack, turning hangers with the focused attention he normally reserved for weapons checks. The shopkeeper had materialised at Grogu's side within thirty seconds of their arrival, emitting soft sounds of delight while he batted at the fringe of her sleeve with both hands and communicated his approval of it. She had scooped him up without being asked and was now carrying him along the displays while he pointed at things with evident authority. 

Mando turned a few more hangers and stopped. 

"This one," he said. 

She looked at what he was holding out. A slip dress in gunmetal grey, just short of black, the fabric sitting heavy and smooth, catching the shop's light with the quiet sheen of silk. Simple. Clean. Not demanding anything of the room. 

"It's not exactly a statement," she said. 

"That's the point. You don't need to announce yourself twice." 

She took it into the fitting room without further protest.

In the mirror it sat on her the way all well-made things sat, without effort, without insisting. The grey went darker against her skin than it had looked on the hanger, richer, and the cut was better than she'd expected, sitting at exactly the right place on her hips. The tied closure at the chest she left loose, the ribbons hanging open, because she was just going to say it was fine and they were going to leave and she did not need to stand here thinking about it any more, simply because he had been the one to pick it out for her.

"It's fine," she started to call out from inside, "It's simple, but it-" 

Mando drew the fitting room curtain back and stepped inside before she could complete the thought. 

The stall was small. Even smaller with both of them in it. She registered this immediately and completely, aware of the mirror behind her and the light and him close enough that she could have taken half a step and been they would be touching. 

She thought about the service passage, what he had said before they left, of him now choosing to step into an enclosed space with her voluntarily when he didn't have to. Whether that was him initiating something or whether she was, again, constructing meaning from proximity because she had spent weeks doing exactly that and could not reliably stop. She didn't say any of it. She held it where it was and kept her face still and waited to see what he would do. 

"Turn," he said. 

She gave him a look. "Really?"

He said nothing. She turned to give him the full view of how his choice of dress looked on her. 

She felt him move before she saw it. Then his hands were at her chest, not touching her skin, just the ribbons, and he was tying the closure the way it was designed to be tied, neat and even, the fabric gathering at the neckline into the shape it had been made for. He stepped back. 

She looked at herself in the mirror. The dress was different tied. He had been right, which was irritating. 

"Good," he said. 

She did not argue. She stood in the small fitting room and thought about how she had wanted to stay for significantly longer than ten seconds, but then changed back into her clothes and brought the dress to the counter. 

Mando paid before she had the chance to offer. The shopkeeper handed over the bag with the warmth of someone who had made certain assumptions when she first saw them and felt comprehensively confirmed in them.

They left, Grogu, now restored to Mando's arm, still had a few strands of the shopkeeper's fringe in his fist and seemed to consider this a fair trade for his company. 

Coruscant moved around them the way it always did, indifferent to any three people in particular. 

She thought about taking his other arm as they turned onto the walkway. She didn't. She walked beside him instead and watched Grogu twist in his grip to look at everything. 

"We need to figure out how we plan to handle Rax." she said, when they had walked a block. 

"We go in together. Simple." He stated, matter of factly.

"What about Grogu?" She asked, looking towards the squirming kid in his arms.

Grogu made a sound, drew himself up to his full seated height in Mando's arm and was regarding them both with the expression of someone whose capabilities were being systematically underestimated. 

"No," she said, "we don't know enough about Rax yet to know what he'd make of a Force-sensitive child and I don't want to find out in the middle of a conversation." She looked at Grogu more gently now, "You watch the ship. Deal?" 

Grogu considered this with appropriate gravity. Then he nodded. 

"He was fine last night," Mando said. "Didn't get into any trouble." 

Grogu nodded more vigorously at this. 

"I suppose he is older than me." she said. 

"He's older than both of us." 

She stopped walking. 

Mando took one more step before he noticed and turned back. She was looking at him. 

"What's wrong?" he asked. 

She shook her head and started walking again. She had asked him about his age early on, within the first few days of them meeting, when she had been trying to get any foothold of information about who he was. He had said nothing, in the way that meant the subject was closed. She had left it there and assumed she would never know. 

"How old are you?" she finally caved. 

He looked at her as they walked. She could feel him considering, the quality of attention that meant he was deciding something, and then he responded.

"Forty-three." 

Straightforward, completely unfazed. He kept walking. 

She turned the number over. Forty-three. She was not sure what she had expected. Older than her, she had always known that, sensed it in the way he moved and spoke and made decisions. But knowing something by feel and having a number for it were different things. She counted and landed at seventeen years between them. She thought about what those years had built in him, the patience and the steadiness, the way he had taken care of her without being asked and without making anything of it, the complete absence of uncertainty about who he was. She had always known he was older. Having the number just made it make more sense.

She kept walking. 

They moved into a more crowded sector and she felt him shift, his attention spreading outward the way it did when a space required more care. 

"Hood up," he said. 

She pulled it up without question. A moment later his hand settled at the small of her back, guiding her through a tighter section of crowd. 

"This cloak has been remarkably useful on Coruscant," she said. 

"Armour's better," he said. "Nobody recognises me." 

She looked at him. At the beskar, polished and unmistakable, catching the city light on every surface like something that had been designed to be seen.

"Really?" She deadpanned, "you don't think if someone had laid eyes on all of this once they wouldn't spot you from a mile away?" 

He considered this for a moment. "Maybe," he said. "But then they'd run in the opposite direction." 

She laughed and looked up at him. The visor was already angled toward her. She held it for a moment, aware of his hand at her back, thinking about how normal this had started to feel and how she had stopped noticing it and then started noticing it again in a different way. 

That evening they stood in the sleeping alcove with Grogu between them, looking up at both of them with his ears at their fullest extension and his goggles pushed up on his forehead like someone already halfway into a mission briefing. 

"He'll be okay," Mando said. 

"I know he'll be okay, I just-" She looked down at Grogu. "You'll be okay right?" 

Grogu squared his small shoulders. Nodded once. Very serious about it. 

Mando crouched to his level. "We'll be back soon," he said, quietly, the way he talked to Grogu when there was no one else to perform anything for. "You watch the ship. Okay?" Grogu nodded again, more firmly this time. Mando stood. 

"Okay," she said. 

She took one more glance at the lightsaber on the shelf.

She had left it behind last night and it had been the right call. A lightsaber walking into a negotiation said the wrong things. And tonight was still a conversation before it was anything else, and she didn't want to draw the kind of attention that came with it.

They turned to go, climbed down the ladder into the cargo hold. She heard a small sound behind them and looked back. Grogu was standing at the top of the ladder with one hand raised, waving at their backs. 

She waved back. She was smiling before she'd decided to be. 

At the base of the ramp, Mando held the step for her and then, when she turned, offered his hand. She took it without hesitating. They fell into step together. 

"How do you track a target?" she asked eventually. "I've never actually seen you work. Not from the beginning." 

He was quiet for a beat before deciding how to respond.

"The helmet has different view modes. Thermal, low-light, standard. They overlay. Changes what I can see." 

"What does thermal look like? Outlines or more detailed?" 

"More detailed than most people expect. Heat signatures vary. You can read size, movement, whether someone's been running." 

"And tracking beacons? Do you usually plant one before a pursuit?" She continued.

"When I can. In this case we have nothing." 

"We start at the Syrax Lounge then? Since that was our last confirmed location?" 

He nodded.

"Work outward from there. Known contacts, known patterns." He paused. "Having met him already helps. A file gives you a face. Meeting someone gives you the way they move. How they occupy a space. That doesn't come from a photograph." 

She thought about how she had read Rax in the lounge, the careful intelligence of him, the way he had been assessing each of them from the moment they walked in. 

"He's smart enough to know if he's being tracked," she said. 

"Good. Smart targets are predictable in their own way. They vary their routes, take precautions. The variance becomes a pattern if you watch long enough." 

She considered this, wondering if she could be considered a smart target.

"Different from what you expected?" he said, when they had walked another block. 

"I didn't know what to expect," she said. "You've never explained it before." 

She appreciated it though, this willingness to explain what he knew. To treat her understanding of the work as something worth having. 

They reached the Lounge from the previous night. 

He stepped behind her at the entrance and lifted the cloak from her shoulders, the way he had learned to do without being asked, folded it over his arm. She smoothed the front of the dress and looked at the door. 

They went in together. 

The Wookiee bartender registered them before they had fully crossed the threshold. Mando moved slightly ahead of her and put both hands on the bar. 

"You're going to tell us how to contact your boss, or I'm going to describe to you exactly what happens to bartenders who spike paying customers." His voice was menacing.

"No need to threaten my staff." 

The voice came from the back of the lounge. 

She turned. Rax was standing near the rear wall with the easy posture of a man who had been expecting this and had decided in advance how he felt about it. He looked at them both with something that might have been amusement or could have been relief. 

"I was sure you'd start here," he said. He inclined his head slightly in her direction. "I appreciate you dropping the pretences." He gestured toward the back door.

"I'm ready to talk. Shall we?" 

She looked at Mando. Her instinct was to move immediately, to follow Rax through that door before he changed his mind. She held it still. This was his read to make, the operational one, whether Rax was leading them somewhere safe or somewhere where they would be at a disadvantage. She waited. 

He nodded once. 

She moved to follow Rax out. 

The transport was waiting outside where there had been nothing only minutes ago when they arrived. Long, low, interior seats facing each other, the quiet hum of something built for conversation rather than speed. They got in behind him, sat together opposite the Devaronian. 

"I've thought about your offer," Rax said. 

They waited. 

"I'm not interested in being part of the problem when I have the means to be something else. This network exists because the galaxy needs people who can move through spaces the official structures can't reach." He paused. "For a long time that was enough for me. A purpose of a kind, but I've watched these districts since the Empire fell and they are not improving."

She listened to him and thought that he really means this. It was not a negotiating position. It was the actual thought underneath the careful exterior. 

"My brother was a bad seed. I've known it for years." He looked at neither of them, just forward. "The New Republic found his resentment useful. Cultivated it. Funded it. Used him as a lever against me without him knowing it." Another pause,"When he finally understood what he was, he turned on them first so I can't really fault them for what they had to do." 

"They eliminated him," she said. 

"Yes." He said it without grief and without anger, with something more considered than either. "Whatever he did, he was still family. And family means that even when someone is beyond saving, you don't forget them." 

He looked at them both. 

"This is not a simple decision but it is bigger than me and him. But my terms will have to be met. I will only share intelligence through channels that leave no trace back to me. My network continues to operate without New Republic interference or oversight. In exchange I want assurances about how my information is used and protections for people within my network who might be exposed." 

She had been thinking about what the Director had authority to offer when the world went sideways. 

The impact came from the left with enough force to lift the transport entirely and roll it. She had no warning, just the sudden lurch of the floor becoming a wall and then the ceiling, the hard crack of something structural giving way somewhere underneath them.

Her ears were ringing. She was on the ceiling, which had become the floor, and her shoulder had met something unforgiving on the way down and was making its feelings about that very clear. She lay still for one breath, running a check. Head clear enough. Nothing broken. The shoulder would bruise spectacularly but she could move. 

Mando was already beside her, hand on her arm, steadying. "Are you hurt?" 

"No," she said. "Go." 

He checked her face once more, reading whatever he needed to read, then put his shoulder to the ruined door and shoved it open and was gone. 

She turned. Rax was against the far wall, coming around slowly, blood running from a cut above his eye. She pulled her blaster and trained it on the door and listened. Blaster fire in controlled bursts outside. Mando's movement in the pauses between. 

Rax pushed himself upright and focused on her with the sharp clarity of a man who had been in bad situations before. 

"If this is the New Republic-" 

"It's not us," she said. Flat. Certain. "I swear to you." 

He looked at her for a long moment, blood tracking down his cheekbone, and then nodded. She stayed where she was and kept the blaster on the door and let the fear and the focus exist side by side and did not let either of them run things. 

Mando filled the doorway. "Move." 

She went first. 

The street was chaos. Three bodies down already, more figures moving in the shadows at both ends of the block. Rival footmen, she understood immediately. Rax had made himself locatable tonight for their benefit and whoever else had been tracking him had taken the same window. 

She raised the blaster. Mando was already on his vambrace, calling in extraction, coordinates, primary status. She heard the words and kept her eyes on the street. 

Rax appeared beside her. "I know them," he said, low. "Brakkar syndicate. They must have known I would surface tonight." 

"Which direction puts them behind us?" Mando asked, attention entirely on the escape. 

Rax pointed. 

"Let's go" Mando said. 

They moved together. 

She had fought alongside him before, or near him, which was different. Usually she was already moving, already committed to a line, her lightsaber doing its own thinking before the rest of her had fully caught up. She had never waited for him because she had never needed to. The saber was enough. She was enough on her own.

This was different. Without the saber she had nothing to commit to immediately, no instinct pulling her forward, and in that gap she found herself actually watching him, actually reading where he was going and where he needed her to be. And he was doing the same. She learned the shape of it in the first twenty seconds, he always knew where she was, she could feel it in how he positioned himself, the half-step that put him between her and the heaviest incoming angle before she had consciously identified the threat.

She covered what he couldn't reach and trusted him to cover what she couldn't even though her shots were going wide because the blaster felt wrong in her hands, the sighting built for a different style of fighting than the one she had trained in. 

She felt the absence of her lightsaber acutely. She had told herself before they left the Crest that she would be fine without it. She was discovering the distance between fine in theory and fine under fire in an unwelcome way. 

She cursed under her breath at a miss. 

"You're holding your breath when you fire," Mando said, close to her right shoulder. 

"I am?" 

"Stop. Breathe out on the shot. And feel it." He shifted her sideways without touching her, just his presence directing, the way water directed. "You have the Force. Use it the way you use the saber. Feel where they intend to move before they move." 

She breathed out. She reached for the awareness she used with the lightsaber, the layer that lived below thought, and the noise and the chaos were wrong and unfamiliar but it was there under all of it, it was always there. She found it and let it spread. 

Movement at her right. Not visible yet but directed and imminent. She turned and fired before the figure had fully cleared cover. 

Mando, immediately to her right, very quietly said, "Good girl." 

She short-circuited. 

Two words in the middle of a firefight with rounds going past her ears and she lost a full second to absolute white noise, standing in a Coruscant street with her blaster raised and her face burning and every thought she had accumulated about those two words arriving in a single wave. 

She fired twice more on instinct. Covered the angle. Moved when she needed to move. 

She held it. Turned it over. Let herself look at it properly. 

Good girl. Said to her specifically, in his voice, and not as a diminishment, nothing about it was a diminishment, it was the opposite of that. It was the sound of someone who had been watching closely enough to know when she had done something right, who cared enough to say so, whose approval had apparently taken up permanent residence somewhere in her chest and had no intention of leaving. 

She moved differently after that. More settled in her own body, more certain of her feet and the Force under them. She felt intentions sharpening around them and let herself be moved by the information rather than waiting for her eyes to confirm it, and a shot went past where she had been standing a half-second before she had consciously decided to move, and from somewhere to her right she heard Mando exhale, short and sharp, the sound he made when something had gone right. 

They pushed back steadily, covering each other, until the pressure in the street dropped enough that Rax said, "I have a club, two sectors over. My people will already be moving there." 

"Lead the way" Mando said. 

They moved to a recessed loading entrance off the main passage and stopped to regroup. Rax pressed his back to the wall, hand over the cut above his eye, and looked at each of them in turn. 

"They've been wanting a piece of what I've built for two years." He paused. "My bodyguard was driving. He's dead." He said it without flinching, but she heard the cost of it in the pause that followed. 

"Word will spread that you surfaced tonight," Mando said. "Anyone else with a reason to come after you will hear it. We need to get you off the streets." 

Rax nodded. "Get me to my club." 

"NRI has agents stationed near each of your establishments," Mando said. "They'll be inside when we arrive." He looked at Rax. "We'll cover you the rest of the way." 

Rax looked between them with the expression of a man who had arrived at this situation by a series of reasonable decisions and was now fully committed to it. "I don't appear to have better options." He put his comms unit away. "Let's move." 

She stood at the entrance to the passage and kept her eyes on the street and tried not to hyperventilate. 

Mando appeared at her side. 

His voice came low, for her rather than for Rax, "Stay close. I've got you." 

She looked at his visor and thought about how many times in the last several weeks she had watched him handle something that should have been unmanageable and how he had never once looked like he didn't know exactly what he was doing. 

"I know you do," she said. 

His body language didn't change. Around Rax he was all focus and authority, the bounty hunter, the Mandalorian, nothing personal and nothing uncertain. But the register of his voice when he spoke to her was something she had learned to hear as distinct from all of that. 

"Ready?" he asked. 

"Ready." she nodded. 

They moved fast through the back streets, Rax directing, Mando covering their rear, her on point. Two sectors felt much longer when you were navigating them in the dark with your heart beating in your ears and no lightsaber. She tracked intentions the way he had told her to and twice felt something sharpen at the edges of the street before it resolved into movement, and both times she was already shifting before Mando said anything. 

They were a block out from the club when the fire picked up again, heavier this time, coming from two directions. She ducked behind a support column and fired back and thought to herself we are not going to make it to that door. 

Then fire opened up behind their attackers from a direction she hadn't tracked. She turned expecting NRI agents and found Rax's people instead, organised and moving, the pressure shifting immediately as the Brakkar caught fire from both sides. 

"Move," Mando said. 

They moved. She ran the last block with her blaster up and her lungs burning and went through the club's entrance into darkness. 

The club was dark. Lights off, music gone. And inside, in the careful stillness of people who had been waiting, the NRI agents. 

She stopped in the middle of the empty dancefloor and felt the adrenaline begin its long slow withdrawal. Her hands had stopped shaking by the time she registered they had been. She looked at Mando. He was looking at her with the focused attention of someone running a check. 

"You're not hurt." he said, more to himself. 

"No," she said. "You?" 

He shook his head once. 

She looked at the empty club around them, the absent crowd, the lights off over a bar that had probably been full of ordinary people having an ordinary evening before they arrived.

Before the NRI agents took him through the back, Rax stopped. 

He turned and looked at them both. At her specifically, long enough that she felt it. 

"This wasn't your part of brief" he said. "Staying when it went bad. Getting me out." He was quiet for a moment. "I've been doing this long enough to know when someone is running a secondary angle and when they're not." He looked at Mando briefly and back at her. "I appreciate it. Both of you." 

She nodded. Mando said nothing, which from him was the same thing. 

One of the NRI agents stepped toward them both. "The Director is waiting at your ship. You're to report back." 

She looked at Mando. He looked at her. The same thought, she could tell, arriving at the same moment. 

Grogu was on the ship. The Director, who she did not know well enough yet to feel easy about, was on the ship with Grogu. 

"Grogu," Mando said. 

That was all. They were moving. 

She linked her arm through his at the first thick crowd because the streets were dense and he was moving fast and she was not willing to lose him in the mess. He felt it and slowed, starting to apologise for the pace. 

"No, keep going," she said, and picked up her own pace to match his. 

The Director was standing at the base of the Crest's closed ramp with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be, hands clasped behind him, looking out across the landing bay with the expression of someone who found it mildly interesting. 

The ramp was closed,no Grogu in sight. 

She watched Mando's hand move to his vambrace and then still as his sensor confirmed what she had already felt through the ship's familiar quiet. Grogu was fine. She let out a slow breath that she had been holding since the word Director. 

She had not expected to feel this way about a fifty-year-old toddler she had known for less than few months.

"Wonderful," the Director said, as they approached. "I'm glad to see you both intact. I understand matters proceeded in an unplanned direction." 

"Rax was cooperative, before the ambush at least." Mando reported.

"Quite." The Director looked at them both with the measuring attention she had come to expect, taking in their state with the professional discretion of someone who noted everything and commented on very little.

"Before we discuss next steps, there's a practical matter I'd like to address." He turned toward the Crest. "I understand that this is your current accommodation." 

She looked at the ship. Its hull plates, the scorch marks she had long since stopped seeing. The lines of it that she could have navigated in the dark. 

"And while it looks entirely adequate," the Director continued, with the diplomatic precision of a man who had chosen words like this many times before, "I do have quarters I can offer you in a residential sector nearby. More room. Better suited for people who are going to be working in this city for the foreseeable future." A pause. "I would feel better knowing my contractors were properly rested and stable." 

She had a response forming. She opened her mouth. 

Mando turned to her. 

She closed it. 

He was looking at her with the quiet attention and she understood what it meant. He was asking. Consulting. For the first time in as long as she could remember, someone was asking her what she wanted before a decision was made, and that person was him, and she understood that it meant something that she was not going to examine standing in a landing bay at whatever hour this was after a firefight. 

She thought about it properly. The Crest meant mobility. She had needed mobility for months, the ability to be gone in under an hour, to change direction, to remain unfindable. She had built a version of safety around that capacity. But they were staying. They had agreed to stay, and had been living in a space that was not quite large enough for three people, one of whom was still growing and bouncing off the same walls and deserved more room than a cargo hold. 

She thought about what a month in one place might feel like. What it might feel like to know where things were. 

"What do you think?" he asked out loud. 

"I think it might be nice" she said. 

They turned back to the Director together. 

"We'll take it," Mando said. 

The Director nodded as though this had been the expected outcome. Mando reached up and opened the ramp. 

She turned to the Director. "Sorry. He has terrible manners, but thank you for the offer, just give us a minute." 

She followed Mando in. 

He was already in the cargo hold, Grogu in his arms, the kid babbling at full speed with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and both hands gripping Mando's collar. She went to up her bunk and started pulling things out, packing without a system, prioritising by what she reached first. 

"I've got him," Mando said, meaning Grogu. 

"And we're going to need things," she said. She kept going. "Clothes. Soap. His food. His-" She looked up. "Oh." 

Mando was already at the storage shelf where Grogu's things lived, gathering them with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. 

She picked up her lightsaber and finished her bag. They looked at each other for a moment across the galley hold before heading back down.

The apartment was on a residential level with a view she had not expected. 

Not the NRI building's altitude, not that abstracted geometry of the city seen from too far above, but high enough that the lights of the lower levels spread below them warm and dense and alive, a city that had been building downward for centuries. She stood at the window for a moment after the Director showed them in and just looked at it. She had lived in those lower levels. She had moved through them for months trying not to be found, and from here they looked like something else entirely, like something that had been built for the purpose of being beautiful at night. 

She thought about what it meant to have somewhere to stand above them for a while. 

The Director showed them around efficiently. The apartment was modern and simply furnished, nothing excessive, nothing that required explanation. Bedroom, fresher, kitchen. Functional. Clean. More space than she had occupied in a single room in a long time. 

Grogu had wriggled free of Mando's arms the moment the front door opened and was now moving through the apartment at speed, beginning with the structural soundness of the couch, which he tested from several angles before finding it satisfactory, then investigating the kitchen with the focused interest of someone evaluating its long-term potential, then doubling back to the couch to verify his earlier findings. 

The Director, reading the room with the professional ease of a man who had arranged a number of things for a number of people, let himself out quietly. 

The door closed. 

She and Mando stood in the entryway. 

The apartment was quiet. Not the ship's quiet, not the engine hum and the recycled air and the sounds of the hull that had become so familiar she only noticed them in their absence. This was different, a residential quiet, the city muffled behind transparisteel and walls, Grogu's small movements the only sounds. 

She looked at Mando. He was looking at the apartment. 

She thought about the Crest and all the cargo hold and the too-small galley and the sleeping alcove that had needed to expand to hold everything they had become to each other. She thought about how little she had owned when she came aboard and how much more she felt she owned now, none of it objects. 

Grogu yelped. 

She turned to find him mid-air, having misjudged the height of the couch arm with characteristic optimism, and caught him before he landed, lowering him carefully to the floor. He looked up at her with the expression of someone who had not been surprised by this at all. 

"Bedtime," she said. "Come on." 

She walked to the bedroom. Grogu followed, pausing at every threshold to register the new surface, the new smell, the new quality of light. The room was simple. A cot by the window, compact and well-made with a good pillow. A large bed against the far wall. 

Grogu made a beeline for the large bed, hauled himself up onto it with considerable effort, and settled himself in the middle of it with the expression of someone who had found exactly what they were looking for. 

"Hey," she said. "You have your own." 

He looked at the cot. Looked back at the bed. Looked at her. 

"That one." She pointed. "That one is yours. It's very nice." 

He considered this for a long moment, then climbed down from the large bed with the dignity of someone making a concession rather than being redirected, and allowed himself to be deposited in the cot. She lifted the goggles from his head. He found the pillow within seconds, turned his face against it, and went still with the speed of a creature prepared to accept sleep on whatever terms it came. She pulled the thin blanket over him and stood for a moment looking at him. 

She straightened up. 

Mando was in the doorway watching them. Not the apartment. Them. 

"Tired?" he asked. 

She combusted slightly. 

She knew what he meant. She was standing in a bedroom in a Coruscant apartment after a firefight and a long day and he was asking whether she needed sleep because it had been a long day. She knew that. She also knew that he had said those two words to her and had spent the subsequent hour carrying approximately eight hundred thoughts about it, none of which were making themselves useful right now. 

"Maybe a little," she said. 

"Go freshen up. Get some sleep." 

Her eyes moved to the single bed, then back to him. Tonight it was a real choice. No fever, no spice, no emergency and no necessity. If he stayed it was because they had both decided, standing fully in themselves and knowing it. 

She went to the fresher. 

It was larger than the one on the Crest and she stood in it for a moment and registered that, the room of it, the fixtures chosen for comfort rather than efficiency. She washed her face, changed into the softer things she had packed and stood at the sink and looked at herself. 

She looked tired but like herself. Her face was her own again in the way it had not entirely been for days. She thought about that for a moment and then put it down. 

She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment longer and thought about all the small pieces she had been collecting without meaning to, without knowing that was what she was doing, and she thought about what they added up to. 

She dried her hands and went out. 

She came out of the fresher and nearly walked into him in the doorway. He was heading in. They stepped around each other without speaking and she went to the living room and lay down on the couch, pulled her knees up, stared at the ceiling.

She thought about the two words again. The way it had landed mid-fight. How she had short-circuited and then caught herself and held it somewhere it could settle. Not embarrassment. Something claimed. She thought about his voice dropping register in the passage, firm for everyone else and different for her, specifically for her, and she thought about that distinction and what it might mean. 

She thought about him sharing his age. About the way he had said it, matter of fact, like it was information she was simply entitled to. She had not expected him to tell her. She had assumed she would never know and had been living with that assumption for as long as she'd known him but now she was thinking about the seventeen years between them and finding that it made him feel more real rather than more distant. 

She heard the fresher run and go quiet. Heard him move through the apartment before he came into the living room. 

Flight pants. Undershirt. Helmet still on. She was looking at him before she had decided to look at him, at the width of his shoulders without the armour framing them, the exposed forearms, tan and muscular. She couldnt help but stare at the lines of his xcest under the thin shirt, clinging so perfectly to him.  

"You done?" he said. Dry. Low. 

She turned her face toward the front of the room. "Sorry," she said. "Goodnight." 

She heard him cross the room. Then the couch dipped slightly behind her head, his hands on the back of it, leaning over. 

"There's a perfectly good bed in there," he said. Close. "And you're going to sleep out here?" 

She turned back. 

He was leaning over the couch watching her, the helmet tilted at the angle she had learned to read as him paying careful attention to something. 

"Are you sure?" she asked, not really wanting to give him the option to take it back. 

He stood. 

Walked toward the bedroom. 

She followed him because that was the only thing she had needed, the indication that it was allowed. 

She got into the bed and faced the door. She kept to her side, left a deliberate gap between them the way they had in the bunk last night, the same careful distance that said I'm here and I know you're there and I'm not assuming anything. 

She lay still and thought about the night and the way his voice had gone soft in that passage when he talked to her. She thought about how her life had looked a year ago and how it looked now and how very different those two things were. 

She was still thinking when his arm came around her middle and pulled her back against him in one unhurried dragging motion. 

Every muscle went completely still at once. 

She felt him go still too, both of them suspended in the same held breath, the movement hanging between them. 

"Is this okay?" his voice directly in her ear. 

"Yes," she whispered. 

She felt him relax. Felt herself relax into him by the same measure, the solid warmth of his chest at her back, the arm settling around her properly now that they had both said it. She lay there in the dark and let herself stop managing everything and just absorbed how it felt to be held by someone who had chosen, deliberately and with full information, to hold her. 

She thought about all the careful distance, all the discipline of wanting something without saying so, and she let herself stop. 

A while passed in comfortable silence before he spoke.

"You did well today."

"I should have brought the saber," she mumbled. 

"I don't think you've ever actually listened to me before," he continued, and the dry edge of it came through the modulator clearly. 

"Mando.." she said in protest. 

A pause. 

"Din." he said. 

She turned to look at him, brows pulling together slightly in confusion. 

"My name, is Din" he said. 

She lit up. She could feel it happening, the smile arriving before she had decided on it, warmth moving through her chest at the deliberateness of it, at the fact that he had chosen now, this dark, this quiet, to hand her this. 

"Din," she said. Quietly. Like she was trying the weight of it. 

She felt him watching her. 

She said it again, and this time it settled somewhere it was going to stay. 

She reached down and drew his arm tighter around her and tucked herself back into him until she could feel him fully behind her, real and present in the way that all the armour and all the silence had held carefully at a distance for so long. 

His arm tightened in return. 

He leaned down, slow, and rested the front of the helmet against her hair, and she felt the weight of it and held still while she thought about what he was doing. Not the physical gesture, but what it meant. What he was choosing to give her, with three letters and the willingness to be known by her specifically, after all this time of being known by no one. 

Her throat tightened. 

She had become a crier lately, she was aware of this. But this was different from all the other times, this was not pain or fear or shame but something that had no opposite, something that filled her up from the inside without leaving room for anything else. 

"Thank you," she said. 

"Shh," he soothed. "Goodnight." 

She closed her eyes. 

"Goodnight," then she added, "Din." 

taglist: @mandosgirl2099@literaryloony@tundra-un1verse@sucker4seresin@baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakoktali

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 16

I'm back!!!! Had a great time, spent too much money on star wars blind boxes but got some cute Mando hippers and Grogu keycaps. I even bought a giant Grogu plush, he's adorable Iove him. He's got to be the size of like 4 Grogus but he is my baby. Anyways, sorry this is a little late, hope you guys enjoy it! I'll see you again soon.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: I Want You - Mitski

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 4.9k

She didn't know how long she had been standing under the shower. 

It had gone cold a long time ago. She hadn't moved, just stood there and let it run over her and thought about nothing, or tried to. The cold felt good against the heat under her skin. She didn't know what to blame for it. Exhaustion? The alcohol? The spice she hadn't known she was drinking? Or the thing she kept circling back to, which was the memory of Mando in the service passage and the way his voice had dropped below the modulator so she felt it more than heard it, then the way everything had gone wrong immediately after and she'd ended up feeling small and cold and stupid on a Coruscant street while being led back to the ship by the hand. 

He'd held her hand all the way up the ramp. She'd felt his grip shift as they came through the cargo hold, like he was about to say something, and she had moved before he could, before she had to see his face and decide what to do about it. She'd come straight here. 

She reached out and turned the water off. 

The fresher was quiet. She stood there dripping wet as she thought about what she was doing and arrived at the conclusion that she was wallowing, which was not productive but felt deeply necessary. She had not even thought to bring her clothes in. She had simply needed to be as far from him as possible on a very small ship, and the fresher was the only room with a door that closed. 

She reached for a towel and wrapped it around herself. Then she reached for the door handle and stopped. 

She felt him before she touched it. 

His presence on the other side of the door was as familiar to her as her own hands by now. She had spent months learning the grammar of him, the way he occupied space, the weight he put on silence. She had assumed he would have gone to the cockpit to avoid her the way they'd been doing for days, the careful choreography of two people who had decided the other side of the ship was safer. 

But things had changed in that alley. She had felt it settle into place the same way his words had settled, and the problem was she didn't know what to do with it. She had spent so long wanting something she had convinced herself she wasn't allowed to want that actually having it approach was almost worse. Almost.

His words kept echoing through her mind. If not there then where? If not like this then how? The questions sat in her chest and she had no answers for them and she had been standing in cold water for twenty minutes and there was a man outside her door who was still there. 

She slid down the glass panel until she was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, legs crossed, towel wrapped tight. She looked at nothing and let time pass. 

She thought about asking him to leave but couldn't bring herself to say the words. Asking him to leave required admitting she couldn't face him, which required acknowledging why, which was the whole problem.

She could hear Varen's voice from years ago, cold and clear in the back of her mind.

You make yourself small and you call it caution.

She didn't want to be that person. She also couldn't stand up and open the door. 

So she sat.

He stayed. 

After a long time she heard him try the handle. 

He found it unlocked and stopped. She could feel the quality of his pause, him registering that the door wasn't locked and deciding what that meant. He did not push it open. 

The gold dress hung on the back of the door where she'd hung it when she'd stepped out of it. It caught the light the same way it had in the shop, the shimmer moving through the fabric, and she looked at it and thought about this morning, the too-small mirror, the confidence it had given her. That felt like it had happened to a different version of her. The dress had been about being seen. About looking like herself again after weeks of not. Now it just looked like evidence. 

She heard the long exhale through the modulator. 

The handle released. 

She heard his weight shift. The small sound of him beginning to turn away. 

She was on her feet and opening the door before she'd decided to stand. The movement was too fast and the room tilted sharply. She grabbed the door handle and held on for a moment, waiting for it to settle. The cold water hadn't fixed anything,  just delayed it. She breathed through her nose until the floor stopped moving and then opened the door the rest of the way. 

Not because she was ready. Because she couldn't face another silence. She had spent ten days in the silence and she knew exactly what it cost her. 

She opened the door and said, "Wait." 

He stopped. Turned back toward her, came to stand a few feet away and looked at her. She was aware, suddenly, that she was standing in the corridor in nothing but a towel with her hair stringy and half dry, she felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the towel. He didn't seem to register it. His attention was on her face, focused and concerned, the same way he focused on a situation he was trying to assess. 

She looked at his chest. 

"I'm sorry," she said. 

Her throat did something she hadn't given it permission to do. She swallowed and held it back and kept her eyes down. 

"What for," he said dragged out, clearly confused.

She looked up. "For earlier." 

He tilted his head very slightly to the side.

"Are you apologising," he said slowly, "for almost leaving with the target?"

"Outside the lounge," she said. "In the passage." She watched his face, or the visor, for recognition. It didn't come. He was looking at her with the same expression of someone who genuinely didn't understand.

"I threw myself at you," she said, flat, because apparently they were doing this.

"I'm sorry. You were very decent about it and I'm sorry it happened." 

He looked at her for a long moment. 

She stared at him. 

He tilted the helmet to the other side. Looked at her. She looked back. The ship was uncomfortably quiet around them and she had the distinct impression that they were having two completely different conversations that neither of them knew how to fix.

"I thought you meant the mission," he said finally. 

She pressed her lips together. "I didn't mean the mission." 

"Right," he said. 

A silence. 

"Right," she said, for no other reason besides filling the quiet.

Neither of them said anything else for a long moment. 

"You don't need to apologise," he said. "You didn't know what was in the drink." 

"I know I didn't know. That's not-" She stopped herself short. "It's not about that." 

"Then what is it about?"

She looked at the floor. She thought about saying it and couldn't find the shape of the words, the way to say I pressed my mouth against your neck and asked you to give me something and you said no and I felt like a fool without sounding exactly as foolish as she had felt.

"It doesn't matter," she said. 

"It clearly does." 

She looked up at him. He was still looking at her with the focused attention of someone who intended to stay in this corridor until he understood what was happening, she thought about telling him that his patience was the most infuriating thing about him but decided to save that for another time. 

"I was embarrassed," she said. "That's all." 

He said nothing for a moment. Then he looked at her, properly, the way he sometimes looked at things when he was running some internal calculation, she saw something shift in his expression, in the angle of his head, and he looked down. 

"You need to get dressed," he said. "And into bed." 

She was grateful for the change of subject even though part of her wanted to shake him. "I feel really hot." 

"I know." He tapped the side of the visor once. "Thermal imaging." 

She stared at him. "You can see that?" 

"Since the door opened." 

She thought about asking how long he had been able to measure that. She decided not to. 

She looked back into the fresher at the gold dress hanging on the door. The shimmer. The ties across the back. The way it had felt putting it on this morning, like something being reclaimed. She thought about putting it back on and her stomach turned over. 

"I don't want to wear that again," she said. 

He looked at the dress. Looked at her. Didn't ask why. 

"Your bag isn't here," he said. "I'll find something." 

He turned and walked down the corridor. She heard the sleeping alcove curtain. Heard him going through things, carefully, and then a pause, and then drawers again. He came back with a folded stack that was clearly not entirely hers. Soft shorts that she recognised, but the shirt on top was larger than anything she owned, worn thin at the collar, smelling of him when she took it. 

He held the pile out without looking at her directly, then turned and faced the corridor wall. 

She stood there a moment and looked at his back. Then she went back into the fresher and closed the door. 

Dressing took longer than it should have. Her hands were unreliable. Halfway through pulling the shirt over her head she had to sit on the closed lid and wait for the room to settle, and she sat there and breathed and heard nothing from outside except him being there, and was grateful for it. 

"Okay," she said. 

He turned back. 

She watched the way his body organised itself when he looked at her, the slight change she had learned to read as concern, she thought about saying she was fine then dismissed it, it just wasn't true.

"Come here," he said. 

She followed him out to the sleeping alcove. Grogu was asleep in his hammock, ears drooping, making small sounds in his sleep. She sat on the edge of his bunk. He sat beside her, then moved behind her, his hands finding her hair. She understood what he was doing and said nothing. He worked it back without knowing quite what he was doing, until it held. 

She pulled the braid over her shoulder to look at it when he finished. 

"It looks awful," she said. 

"It's functional." 

She huffed, ran one finger along the edge of the braid, feeling where it held and where it was loose. She committed the feeling to memory anyway, the sensation of his hands, the intense quiet of him concentrating on something this small. 

She thought about Nevarro. About lying in his bed there after the dark troopers, about the way he had checked the wound on her side with such careful attention, and she remembered thinking, somewhere between pain and exhaustion, something she shouldn't have thought. She had seriously considered getting hurt more often so he would take care of her like this. She was aware that this was a deeply unhinged thing to consider but the feeling lingered.

"Are you only going to be like this when I'm on the verge of death?" She asked.

He stopped. 

She felt him look at her. 

He said nothing. 

She turned to look at him. He looked back at her with the stillness that meant the question had landed and he had decided not to answer it, which was its own kind of answer, and she thought about pushing and decided against it. 

"Can you eat something?" he said. 

She looked at him pointedly for a moment. He didn't give her the answer she was waiting for. She dropped her shoulders and gave in. "No. I don't think I could keep much down." 

He reached into the medkit he'd set on the shelf and took out an injector. Bacta, she realised, as he pressed it to her arm.

"The stims," he said, as he worked. "They function by flooding your system with cortisol. Your body reads it as a crisis and responds accordingly, redirecting every resource into basal function. Keeping you moving. The immune system, the digestive system, anything non-essential gets paused while the rest runs at capacity."

He set the empty injector down, let his other hand linger over her arm. "The cortisol debt accumulates the whole time. Your body has to pay it back eventually, and the recovery takes far longer than the stims themselves buy you." 

She said nothing. 

"Add spice to that," he continued, "and you're spiking everything at once. Heart rate. Temperature. Neural activity. A system that's already been running on artificial stress for over a week doesn't have the reserves to handle that kind of load." He looked at her. "Your heart could have given out." 

"I know," she said quietly. 

"Why were you taking them?" 

She looked at her hands. She thought about how to say it in a way that was accurate without being more than she was ready to give him.

"When I was shot that night, the pain opened something I'd been keeping closed without realising." she said.

"There's a Force bond between me and him. I didn't know it was still there. I thought when I left and the connection cracked it had broken on both sides." She paused. "It hadn't. When I was hurt it opened and I felt him come through. Which meant he could feel me. Where we were. What was around us." She looked up. "When I sleep my defences drop. I don't know what he can see when that happens. I don't know if he can find us from it." She stopped. "I was scared. It's that simple. I was scared and I didn't know how to fix it and the stims kept me functional enough to keep working on it." 

He was quiet for a moment. 

"You should have told me," he said. 

"We weren't speaking," she said. 

He had nothing to say to that. She watched him not have anything to say to that and felt something in her chest ease slightly. 

She thought about the other part, the part she couldn't say yet. That she had been afraid of what Varen might see if he looked through the bond while she was sleeping. Not just the location. What she thought about. Who she thought about. She had spent a week keeping herself awake partly because of the crack in the wall and partly because she was terrified he would look through it and find her thinking about Mando and decide that was a reason to stop hunting her and hunt someone else in her place. 

She did not say this. 

"You don't have to carry everything yourself," he said. "And you don't have to decide things for me." 

She looked at the floor, unable to bring her eyes to meet the visor.

"There's a lot we need to talk about," he said. 

She looked up. "Yeah. Let's do that." 

"Not now." 

"You just said that-" 

"I know." He cut her off.

"Then why not?" 

"Because I need you alive for long enough to argue with me." 

She laughed. A short and exhausted laugh, but a laugh all the same.

"Sleep," he said, "you need a couple of weeks of taking it easy. No single-handedly fighting off armies." 

"Then back to business as usual." she said. 

He walked over to the cockpit and she thought, as he went, about the pilot's chair. About how she had kept herself upright through sheer refusal for nine days and then sat down in his chair and her body had simply given up. She had woken in her own bunk and known it was him who had moved her. 

She thought about that now. She had been fine, or her version of fine, until she was close to him in some form or another. Until his presence was close enough to feel. And then something in her had simply released, like a fist unclenching, like a breath let out after too long held. She didn't know what to call that. She turned it over and sat with the question of whether it made her weak, or whether there was another word for it that she hadn't found yet. 

He returned and stood infront of her, offering his gloved hand. She took it but didn't move to stand.

"I don't want to sleep in my bunk." she said. 

He looked at her. She watched something move through him, some conflict working itself out behind the visor. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, the slight change in his posture. He was worried about something. She thought about what it might be. Thought about the alley and what he'd said and what she'd done and understood. 

"I know what it sounds like," she paused, "I just don't want to be alone now." 

He was quiet for long enough that she started to take it back internally. Then, "Alright." 

He hesitated for just a moment before he sat back down on the edge of his bunk and reached for the first pauldron. She watched him from where she stood and then, when his hand moved toward the second one, she leaned forward and put her hand over his. 

He went still. 

She looked at the visor, checking. He didn't stop her. She unclipped the second pauldron and held the weight of it a moment before setting it on the shelf beside the first. Then she knelt in front of him and worked through the rest of it, the chestplate, the vambraces, each piece in the order she had absorbed from weeks of watching him suit up. 

The position was the problem. She was aware of it. She had imagined being on her knees in front of him before, in the disordered delirious week of not sleeping, but the context had been entirely different. This was nothing like that, and it was somehow more. This was him sitting still and letting her, with the most deliberate form of trust from a man who did not trust easily. She had spent weeks doubting whether he trusted her at all, not with the missions, but with himself. 

She set the last piece down and looked up at him from where she was. 

He reached down and put his hands under her arms and pulled her up, taking her weight, easy. 

She sat beside him on the edge of his bunk and heard Grogu make a small sound in his hammock beside them, resettling in his sleep. 

He pulled the blanket back. She got in and faced the inside wall. He lowered himself in after her. They lay with a deliberate gap between them, hands to themselves. The alcove was dark. She could feel his warmth at her back and thought to herself that this is enough. Whatever came next, this was more than she had allowed herself in a very long time. 

She was asleep before she finished the thought. 

She woke to something warm tucked under her chin. 

She came back to herself slowly, the way she hadn't managed in weeks. No jolt. No wall to press at. Just warmth and the sound of the ship and the gradual return of her own body feeling like hers. 

She lay still and thought about last night before she opened her eyes. She thought about his hands in her hair, careful and unpracticed, the mess of it. She thought about his fingers after the bacta injector, the way they'd stayed a moment past necessary. She thought about the service passage, about the heat of his arms around her and the warmth of the beskar and all of it, and she smiled into the dark before she even knew what she was smiling at. 

She opened her eyes and looked down. 

Grogu had wedged himself between them sometime in the night, his back against her chest, one small hand fisted in her shirt. He had filled the narrow gap they'd maintained and somewhere in the night her bare leg had come to rest against Mando's. 

She thought about moving it. 

She didn't. 

She looked at Grogu instead. The round of his cheek. She ran one finger over the top of his ear, very gently, and felt him stir and press himself further into her chest. She pressed a small kiss to the top of his head. 

This felt right. She held that thought and found nothing to argue against it. 

She assumed Mando was asleep. If he were awake he would be doing something practical, in the cockpit or the hold. He would not just be lying here. 

She let her eyes drift up. Not far. Just to the edge of a sleeve. The fold of the blanket. 

She looked back down at Grogu. 

The alcove was very quiet. 

She was perfectly still and thought if she stayed here a little longer she wouldn't have to think about the rest of what happened in alley and everything she had said and done in that state, which, was going to have to find a way to live with. 

"Morning," he said. 

She went completely still in a different way. 

He had been awake. She didn't know for how long and was not going to ask.

"Morning," she said. Toward Grogu, essentially. 

A pause. 

"How are you feeling?" 

She had forgotten about the fever. Her temperature felt normal. The elevated strange quality of last night had cleared. Her hands were steady. She was tired in the ordinary way of someone who had slept well, which was so different from everything she'd felt recently that it took her a moment to recognise it as just fine. 

"Better," she said. "I think." 

"Good." 

Grogu chose this moment to wake, stretching both arms in opposite directions with the confidence of someone who had decided the sleeping arrangement was correct and expected everyone to agree. He looked up at her, his neck craned to look behind him, with the expression of someone who deeply approved of the current arrangement. 

He cooed. 

She laughed. Small and real and completely unguarded. She pressed her face into the top of his head and felt something loosen in her chest that had been tight for a very long time. 

Behind her, something in Mando relaxed. She could feel it even without looking. 

After a while she heard him move, the careful sounds of him getting up without disturbing Grogu, and then the familiar sequence of the armour going back on. Pauldrons first. Then the chestplate. She lay still and listened to it and thought about having taken it off piece by piece last night and felt something warm move through her chest. 

When the sounds stopped she got up carefully and straightened the blanket, tucking it back into something resembling order while Grogu watched with the air of someone supervising. 

"You look good," Mando said. 

She paused. Looked down at herself. His shirt, a little too large, hanging off one shoulder. 

"In that," he added, which did not help as much as he probably intended it to. 

She didn't know what to say to that. She thought, before she could stop herself, that she was sure he'd look good out of his shirt. The thought arrived with such clarity and such complete inappropriateness that the heat climbed her face before she had a chance to do anything about it. She turned back to the blanket and smoothed it again, which it did not need. 

"You're heating up," he said. His voice had shifted, sharpened. "Is the fever-" 

"It's not the fever," she said. "I'm fine." 

She turned to face him. Gave him a slow, deliberate once-over, from the boots to the visor. Then she met his eye line and said, "I promise, it has nothing to do with the fever." 

He looked at her for a moment. Then he reached out and took hold of her wrist, and the contact was warm and certain, and she thought he was about to say something. 

The notification from the cockpit cut through the ship with the efficiency of something that did not care what it was interrupting. The Director's channel. She heard the words urgent debrief before she'd even fully registered what was happening. 

Mando let go of her wrist. 

They looked at each other. 

"We have to go," he said. 

"I know," she said. 

They didn't even get to have breakfast. 

The Director's office was the same. Transparisteel wrapping around, the city spread below, furniture chosen to communicate careful consideration. He was at his desk when they were shown in and looked at them both with the measured attention of a man who had been deciding what to say. 

There was a caf machine on the credenza along one wall. She glanced at it once, not quite a request. Mando crossed to it without a word and came back and set a cup in front of her before taking his position beside her. She looked at the cup before she picked it up. She looked at the side of his helmet and smiled into the cup. The Director observed all of this with the quiet attention of a man who was paid to notice things and had just noticed several. 

"I imagine," he said, "last night did not go entirely to plan." 

"We had a complication," Mando said. 

"We screwed up," she said at the same time. 

She looked at him. "A complication?" 

"The operation was-"

"You walked in early." She deadpanned.

"There were circumstances that we hadn't planned for." 

"We can work through the details at a later time." the Director said, efficiently. He folded his hands. "What I can tell is that contact was made before the situation deteriorated. He was receptive. That is more than we had yesterday." 

She looked up. 

"He didn't reach out," the Director continued. "But our agents on the ground confirmed he left the lounge in a considered frame of mind rather than an alarmed one. There is still a conversation to be had." He set his hands flat on the desk. "The question is how you intend to approach it." 

"We go back," she said. "Same approach. I go in first, re-establish the conversation. This time Mando comes in at an agreed point rather than early." 

Beside her, she felt Mando go still. 

"Together," he said. To her, not the Director. "Or we don't go at all." 

She looked at him. 

"I'm not waiting outside again." he said, decided. He wasn't going to budge on this one.

She held his gaze for a moment. There was something in the angle of the helmet that she recognised and chose not to argue with right now. She turned back to the Director. 

"Together," she said. "With a plan we both actually follow this time." 

The Director's attention moved briefly to the distance between them, which was smaller than it had been at their first meeting, and returned to his desk without comment. 

"That may serve you better than you expect," he said carefully. "Rax is a man who values knowing what he's dealing with. Knowing where the Mandalorian is may be more useful than having him hidden." He set a datapad on the desk. "I'll arrange for contact to be re-established on our end. In the meantime, two other items." 

They stayed another twenty minutes. By the time they left she had the outline of a cargo retrieval job and the beginning of what felt, cautiously, like a working arrangement. 

Mando's hand found the small of her back as they walked toward the lift. 

The Director, she noticed, was watching them go. 

They were in the lift when she said it. 

"I'm going to need a new outfit." 

He sighed. 

"Something I can actually move in this time." 

"Of course you do."

"Which means we should go back to that market." 

He looked at the lift doors. 

"I'm picking it this time," he announced. 

She looked at him. "Really?"

He said nothing, which she had learned to read. 

"What if I go back and get the first one I showed you?" she asked teasingly. "The leather one." 

"No," he said. Immediately. Without qualification. 

"Why not?" She rebuffed.

The lift reached the ground floor. He stepped out. She followed, and without thinking about it she reached out and took his hand to stop him. 

She looked up at the visor. 

"Tell me," she said. 

He looked at her hand in his. Then at her face. There was something in the angle of the helmet she had spent months misreading as professional attention and was only now beginning to understand as something else entirely. 

"You know why." he said eventually.

The city moved around them, indifferent and enormous. 

She didn't let go of his hand. 

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakoktali

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 15

Had to feed ya'll good before i disappear for a week. Not too much just enough, but we are getting there guys SOOOOON (See if you can spot my little hotd reference in honour of season 3 starting)

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Meet Me In The Hallway - Harry Styles

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behaviour, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual? smut. MDNI.

W/c: 8k

The briefing came through on her datapad while she worked on her third caf. 

She sat on the edge of her bunk, legs dangling over the side, and read it there, working through the summary the Director had sent over. Target profile. Known establishments, seven of them, scattered across 12 levels of Coruscant's lower districts. Movement patterns, such as they were. Associates. One photograph taken at distance, a Devaronian in his forties maybe, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once had to look over his shoulder. 

Rax. She turned his name over a few times. It suited him as far as she could tell. 

She was on the second pass through when she heard Mando come up the ladder. She did not look up. He pulled up his own copy of the brief on his vambrace and she could feel him settle, the shift in the quality of the alcove's silence, and when she did glance over he was leaning against the wall across from the bunks with his arms crossed and his eyes on the display. Grogu looked between them from the hammock with the resigned patience of a child that had accepted this was simply what the adults were like now. 

The hold was quiet for a while. 

"Seven establishments," Mando said eventually. 

"All in the lower levels." 

"He rotates. No schedule." 

"No." She scrolled back through the movement data, looking for anything that might function as a pattern even without being one. Rax did not travel at the same hours two days running. He did not use the same route twice. He had not been photographed entering any of his locations in the same order across the past month of surveillance. Either he was genuinely disorganised, or he was very careful, and given that he had been running a shadow operation in the Coruscant underlevels for the better part of a decade without the New Republic managing to corner him, she was inclined toward the latter. "He's not erratic," she said. "He just looks that way." 

Mando looked up from his vambrace. "You think he knows he's being watched." 

"I think he assumes he might be." She turned the datapad around and pushed it across the table so he could see the movement data. "Look at the timing. He never leaves the same establishment two nights in a row. But he always leaves before midnight. Every entry in the surveillance log. Not once does he stay past it." 

Mando studied it for a moment. "Habit?" 

"Routine," she said. "Which means if we're in the right area by early evening, we find him. We track him, confirm the location, then I go in."

"We?"

She started at the blank stubborn visor. "Fine. You track and locate. Then I go in and you wait."

He looked at her for a moment, but did not argue it, which she took as agreement.

"You'll need to be somewhere close to wait with Grogu while I do the final sweep," he said.

"There's a cantina on the third level, opposite the Meridian Club. I know it. That should work."

He was quiet for a moment. "You've been to the Meridian Club?"

He almost sounded judgemental.

"I've been to most places on this level." She said it without inflection. "I spent months down here."

He did not ask what she had been doing in them. She did not elaborate. The silence between them was at least functional now, the silence of two people working through the same problem rather than the silence of the last ten days, which had been something else entirely.

"The NRI agents will be outside," he said. "Receive only. They don't intervene unless something goes wrong inside."

"Nothing is going to go wrong inside."

"Something always goes wrong."

"Something always goes wrong for you," she said accusatorially. "You walk into every situation carrying about sixty kilograms of beskar and two blasters. The going wrong is part of your operational strategy." She picked up her caf. "I'm going to have a conversation in a bar. The potential for structural collapse is limited."

He looked at her. She looked at her caf. The hold was quiet again.

"You can't push him," he said.

"I know."

"If he feels like he's being worked-"

"He is being worked. That's the job." She interupted. "The point is he doesn't feel it. I know how to talk to people. I've been doing it my whole life. It's basically the only skill the last several years have given me that wasn't exclusively useful for running away." She held his gaze. "Let me use it."

He said nothing.

"Okay?" she asked finally.

"Fine," he said.

Grogu made a small sound that sounded like him giving his approval too.

She scrolled to the last page of the brief. A single short paragraph under the heading Operational Notes. She read it once and scoffed. The audacity of the statement stinging slightly as she set the datapad face down on the table.

"He also says I need to polish up."

Mando glanced up at her.

"The Director. He says for this target, presentation matters." She picked up the datapad again. "He says this task will require considerable effort and a polished appearance."

"We'll go shopping then," Mando said. As though this were obvious.

"I can find something on my own. I know where to go."

"That's exactly why you're not going alone."

She opened her mouth. Looked at him, at the set of his shoulders and the angle of the helmet. This was not a conversation she was going to win through logic. She had already won one argument once that morning and it wasn't worth starting another.

"Fine," she said. "We'll all go."

The market district was hundreds of levels above where she had spent most of her time on Coruscant, which meant it was cleaner and more expensive. Mando moved through it with the expression she had come to associate with him tolerating something he found unnecessary, which was to say no expression at all, but a quality to his silence that communicated it.

Grogu had no such reservations. He observed everything with the open delight of a creature experiencing a new category of existence. Pointing at displays. Making sounds of interest. Reaching toward things he had absolutely no business touching. She caught his hand twice and redirected it.

They passed a few shops that didn't look right, too formal, too cheap, too aggressively aimed at a clientele she was not trying to look like. Then one caught her eye. The proprietor was a smal woman with the precisely arranged appearance of someone who had made a professional investment in the subject, and she looked up when they walked in, took in Mando, took in her, and smiled at them both with the warm energy of someone who had just sensed a generous sale walking through her door.

She tried on four things in quick succession and dismissed them all.

The fifth was a mistake. She had known it the moment the fabric settled against her skin, but had put it on anyway out of a morbid curiosity she could only attribute to sleep deprivation and low blood sugar. It was leather, dark and skin tigh, printed with a repeating scale pattern pressed into the hide, the kind of thing designed to be looked at rather than worn. A corset-style bodice that laced up the front and did significant architectural work in the chest area. A skirt that was technically present but making very little effort about it. The whole thing accentuated her relatively ample chest in a way she had not anticipated and was not entirely comfortable with.

She came out anyway because she was curious.

Mando looked at her wordlessly. then he looked at the wall to his left.

"What," she said. "No good?"

"No," he said, to the wall. "Change."

"I think it's interesting." She did a little twirl, looking down at herself.

"Change."

"You didn't even look at it properly."

"I don't need to." The helmet was very firmly oriented toward the wall. "Change."

She went back into the fitting room.

The sixth was at the opposite end of the spectrum. A full body suit in deep charcoal, sleek and close-fitting, the kind of thing that would have looked entirely at home on a covert operative or a very well-dressed assassin. She turned in the mirror. It was extremely well-cut. Nothing visible that shouldn't be.

She came out.

Mando straightened slightly. "That's good."

"It's very sensible," she said.

"It works."

"It works," she agreed. "But it doesn't do what I want it to do."

"What exactly do you expect your clothes to do," he said, and the dry sarcasm of it was audible even through the modulator.

She looked at herself in the mirror and thought about how to explain it to someone who had never had to think about it. Which was a strange position to be in, given that she was explaining it to a man in full beskar whose presence rearranged the air in a room before he had finished walking into it. She had watched people's eyes find him on every planet they had visited. Heads turning on market streets, in cantinas, on landing platforms. He demanded attention without asking for it, just by existing in the armour, all that polished metal and that height and the certainty of the way he moved. He had probably never thought about it once.

"You walk into a room," she said, "and people look. Not because you're asking them to. Just because you're there and you're impossible to miss." She turned away from the mirror. "I want something that does that for me. Not this, this says capable. I need something that makes him forget to be careful."

"Those are not mutually exclusive."

"For men like Rax they are." She pulled at the suit one more time and shook her head. "I'll keep looking."

He sighed. Low and resigned, the modulator cracked with the sound of a man who knew he had lost this argument three exchanges ago and was only now acknowledging it to himself.

The shopkeeper appeared at her elbow. She had been observing the fitting room consultations with the focused interest of someone assembling a picture.

"I think that he would love this." she said, looking between her and then at Mando with a small knowing smile.

The he was unmistakably directed at Mando. She opened her mouth to clarify the nature of the arrangement and then closed it. The correction would take longer than it was worth and the shopkeeper had already turned toward a rack at the back of the store.

"Try this," she said, holding something out.

She took it and retreated back behind the curtain.

The fitting room mirror was smaller than the moment deserved, which was a shame, because what she was looking at was not doing itself justice at this scale.

Gold. Not the aggressive kind that announced itself, not the flat kind that sat dully under light either. The kind that existed in a relationship with movement, warm and slightly burnished, so that standing still it looked structured and composed, and moving it caught every available source of light and turned it into something that shimmered rather than simply existing. Liquid where it caught the light. Solid where it didn't.

It was two pieces. The top sat cropped and close, a soft square neckline in front that draped rather than held, cowling slightly against her chest in a way that was more elegant than it had any right to be. The back was almost entirely absent, open from her nape down to the small of her back, held together only by a series of fine satin ties crossing the exposed skin. The lower half wrapped from one hip to the other, gathering into soft folds that pulled across the fullest part of her thighs before sweeping diagonally across her body and releasing into a long draped fall behind her from the shoulder like a sash, shifting independently with every step, catching light as it went, the fabric clinging where it had something to cling to and flowing where it didn't. There was a slit somewhere in the wrapped skirt that appeared and disappeared depending on how she moved, present but not screaming for attention.

From the front it read as intention. From the back it was something else entirely. She turned once in the mirror and watched the fabric move with her, the shimmer travelling through it in waves.

The shopkeeper made a sound of quiet professional satisfaction when she stepped out.

Mando looked at her. A full second. Then another.

"Get the other one," he said.

She looked at him.

"That seems too safe."

"It' keeps you covered.'s appropriate"

"Appropriate isn't the assignment." She turned back to the mirror. The gold caught the light of the shop, the shimmer moving through it as she shifted her weight. She watched it happen and felt, quietly and with certainty, that she had found what she came for. "I'm getting this one."

"It's too exposed."

"It's exactly enough."

"You're going to cause-" He stopped himself. The helmet tilted briefly toward the ceiling and then back. "Just get the suit."

"I'm getting this one," she said again, pleased with herself, and went back into the fitting room to change.

She also bought heels. Strappy things in the same warm gold, not too high, because the dress required something other than her boots and she was not going to sabotage herself with height she couldn't move in. Mando looked at them with the expression of someone calculating how fast she could run in them and finding the answer unsatisfactory.

Mando paid for everything at the counter before she had finished gathering her things. She had not asked him to. She had not even looked in his direction when she handed it over, had been occupied with getting the bag and pretending she was not aware of him standing directly behind her. By the time she turned around it was done. She did not comment on it. She tucked the bags under her arm and they walked out and back into the market, still turning it over, and was still turning it over when he said on the walkway back toward the ship:

"You look fine in your normal clothes."

She stopped.

He went two steps before he seemed to notice and half turned back towards her.

"That's not a complaint," he said. "It's just an observation."

"I know what it was," she said, and kept walking.

She kept to herself that she was smiling.

That evening she stood in the sleeping alcove of the Crest in the gold dress and the heels, her lightsaber sitting on the shelf beside her bunk.

She looked at it for a moment longer then she picked up her cloak instead and draped it over her shoulders. The cloak covered the dress almost entirely, which was the point, though it felt like a bit of a waste. She also slipped the comlink onto her wrist, tucked the chrome blaster into the holster at her tactical belt resting on her hips over the gold fabric, and adjusted both.

She came down the ladder.

Mando was waiting in the cargo hold with Grogu on his arm. He looked at her. At the cloak. At the lightsaber-shaped absence at her hip.

"You're not taking it?" he said.

"No." She picked up the trailing edge of the cloak and settled it. "Less conspicuous."

He was quiet for a moment, considering her decision.

"I'll have the blaster." She looked at him. "As long as you're not the one I'm shooting at, I'll be fine."

He didn't argue. She wasn't sure if that was trust or resignation and decided not to examine the distinction too closely as she descended the ramp behind him.

She pulled her hood up the moment they stepped off the landing platform and kept it up. Coruscant at night in the lower levels was a different animal from Coruscant in the daytime, louder and more compressed, the crowd thickening as they descended through the district tiers. The amber and neon red of the undercity lighting caught the gold of her dress through the gap in her cloak and she pulled it tighter.

They were maybe ten minutes from the cantina when she saw him. Not the him they were looking for.

He was on the far side of a junction, moving through the crowd with the proprietorial ease of a man who had not changed his habits because he had never had reason to. Large, heavyset, well-maintained clothing that advertised prosperity without advertising the source of it. She knew his face the way she knew a handful of faces down here, from encounters she had mostly tried to forget. She had gotten into some trouble with him a few months ago, standing in a club that smelled of damp metal and desperation, using her mind tricks to get a group of people out of a situation they had not chosen to be in. He had not been happy about it when he realised what had happened and he didn't seem like the kind of man who forgot faces.

She started to turn away. Not fast enough.

His eyes swept the crowd and nearly caught her, and in that half-second she went completely still under the hood and stood there hoping the hood was enough and knowing it probably wasn't if he looked directly.

Something closed around her arm from behind.

Mando pulled her sideways and back into the recessed service entrance of a building set slightly back from the walkway, deep enough to put them both in shadow. He pressed in front of her, his back to the street, Grogu tucked under his arm. He was obviously broad enough to block the sightline entirely. She had nothing between her back and the wall. Less than that between her body and the beskar of his chest plate. She could feel the warmth of his body radiating from beneath the armour. She held herself, trying consciously not to lean into him. Her own pulse was thundering somewhere in her ears and she hoped very much the beskar gave her a barrier he couldn't feel through.

"There's someone at the junction," she said, very quietly.

"I know. I saw."

"I don't think he saw me."

"No." He did not move. His head was turned toward the street, tracking the crowd. "Not someone who'd be happy to see you I suppose."

"Not especially."

"What did you do?"

"Freed some girls he would rather not have had freed." She kept her voice low. He was close enough that she did not need volume.

"He tried to have me arrested afterward. It didn't take. There were seven of them, all young, working off a debt that kept inflating and would never actually reach zero." She paused. "I convinced him that it had."

He said nothing. She stared at the strip of street she could see past his shoulder and tried very hard to think about the man they were watching for and not about the fact that Mando's arm was three inches from her face.

She tried to think of anything besides how content she would be to spend the rest of the night like this, if they hadn't been in the middle of a job.

"He's gone," Mando said.

She let out a slow breath. "Thank you."

He didn't move right away. She registered this with the same sharpened attention she had been applying to everything in the last two minutes, the small pause, the way space between them opened by degrees rather than all at once. She wondered if he noticed her heartbeat then straightened up and told herself to stop.

He looked at her, she could feel the piercing gaze even if she couldnt't see it.

"This is why I should have done this alone."

"I was almost recognised," she said. "Almost is a reasonable margin."

"It isn't."

He looked at her for a moment longer than the situation required. Then he stepped out onto the walkway and she followed, and she kept the hood up the rest of the way to the cantina and thought about the warmth of the beskar and told herself to stop thinking about it and did not stop.

The cantina was exactly as she remembered it, dim and functional and unbothered by the concept of ambience. She took a booth near the back with a clear sightline to the door and ordered water and something warm to calm her nerves while Grogu immediately began negotiating with the server droid about the dessert menu in his own little language.

Mando left without comment.

She sat in the cantina in the gold dress under her cloak, feeling very out of place and waited.

At least an hour later, the comlink on her wrist finally chimed.

"Syrax Lounge," Mando said. "Fifth level, south end. He arrived twenty minutes ago. He's at the bar."

"I'm on my way."

She found him outside the cantina a few minutes later. Standing with the stillness of a man who had been waiting longer than he intended to. She walked up to him and unclipped the comlink from her wrist and held it out for him.

She unclasped the cloak from her shoulders and handed that over too, and watched him register what was underneath it and then very pointedly choose not to react to what was underneath it. She almost smiled.

"One hour," he said.

"I know," she said.

"Whatever happens, don't take any spice from them."

"I can handle-"

"I mean it."

She turned to face the direction of the lounge. "I can handle my spice, I've done it a bunch of times."

"Not when you have days worth of high grade stimulants still in your bloodstream." Flat. Certain. Not a discussion.

She shut herself up at that.

It was the first time either of them had aadressed it directly. She had known he knew, had felt the weight of it sitting between them all day, but neither of them had named it, and now he had, plainly and without making a thing of it, and she did not know what to do with that so she did nothing with it and turned back to hand Grogu over. The kid went to his father willingly enough but kept his eyes on her, and she smoothed a hand over his ear before letting go.

"One hour," Mando said again.

"One hour," she agreed and turned to walk towards the entrance.

"Wait," he said suddenly.

She turned, annoyed at his pedantic obsessing. He was standing in the amber glow of the undercity with Grogu against his chest, the beskar catching the light, and he looked at her for a moment, holding something she had never been able to read behind the visor.

"Forget it. Go."

She rolled her eyes, and left without another word.

The spice Lounge smelled of something expensive burning somewhere out of sight, and the music was live, a Bith quartet playing something that required no attention to enjoy. She stepped through the entrance and paused just inside the door, long enough to let the room come to her.

People looked.

Not everyone. But enough. A shift of attention as she moved from the threshold to the bar, the gold catching the amber light of the lounge and doing exactly what she had hoped it would do. She was aware of it and kept her face unhurried, the expression of someone who had nowhere particular to be and found the view acceptable.

She had not walked into a room like this in months. Had not dressed like this or needed to be anything other than someone trying very hard not to be noticed. The confidence she wore was real, but it sat on top of something more cautious, something that knew this could go wrong in several directions. She noted both things and took a stool near the centre of the bar.

The wookiee bartender regarded her with professional neutrality.

She scanned the room. Two exits visible, probably a third through the back. She recognised nobody. Nobody was watching the door in the way that meant they were waiting for something.

Rax was seated at the far end of the bar.

He was already there, four stools down, a glass in front of him. He had the photograph's quality in person, that unhurried presence, a man who moved through the world as though it had been arranged for his convenience. He was looking at the middle distance, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts, and had not yet noticed her.

She ordered something strong and deliberately not cheap. Then, with the lightest possible application of the Force, sent a credit drifting slowly across the bar toward the wookiee's waiting hand.

Rax's gaze moved.

He tracked the credit. Then he tracked back to her. He was quiet for a moment, assembling something.

He moved three stools closer.

"You know most people just hand those over," he said.

"Most people don't have the option of doing it the fun way."

He looked at her with the attention that preceded a decision about whether to invest. "Jedi?"

"Not anymore." She picked up her glass.

"Can't stay in the Order when you develop a taste for physical pleasures. The masters take a dim view." She gave him a small wink, all part of the plan to bait him.

Something that was almost a smile tugged at his thin lips. He settled onto the stool beside her. She did not give him her name. He did not offer his either.

She let him lead the conversation at first, the way you would let a current guide you before you decided where you actually wanted to go. He was smart, smarter than the brief had suggested, with the easy confidence of someone who had been the most interesting person in most rooms for a long time and had learned to carry it without effort. She asked questions that were genuinely curious and laughed at things that were actually funny and waited until she could feel the shape of his attention properly before she began.

"I heard a story," she said, somewhere in her second drink, stronger probably, a house special Rax had called it. "About a businessman, Devaronian, like you, successful, legitimate enough on the surface, shadow networks underneath." She turned her glass slowly. "His brother wanted what he had built. Spent years quietly undercutting him, building his own network inside the existing one." She paused.

Rax had gone very still.

"Rumour has it that the New Republic Intelligence division was running the brother as an asset without him knowing quite what he was. When he realised it, when he finally understood who was pulling his strings, he didn't take it well." She looked up. "He had plans that would have caused significant problems for everyone involved."

"So they cut him loose," Rax said. Very quiet.

"They cut him loose," she agreed. "Before he became a bigger liability than he was worth."

The silence between them was not uncomfortable. She let it sit.

"Someone thinks," she said, "that you could do considerably more than you're doing in the shadows. Someone thinks that the people who tried to use your brother against you made a significant miscalculation." She looked at him. "I think I agree."

Rax was watching her with the full weight of his attention now, the easy manner set aside. He was thinking. She could see it, the machinery of a very sharp mind turning over something it had been turning over for a long time without anyone to turn it over with.

"The shadows are where I work," he said. "I'm not interested in suits and rules and the New Republic's idea of what order looks like."

"Nobody's asking you to be." She put her hand over his on the bar, just briefly. "Just to lend your network to something larger. The galaxy is better with someone like you in it and working rather than hiding." She held his gaze. "Your brother was a liability. He always was. He turned on the New Republic long before they turned on him, and what he was planning would have brought everything down including you." She withdrew her hand. "You could do more."

He looked at her for a long moment. She could feel it, the weight of the conversation shifting toward something, the almost-yes of it gathering somewhere close. She leaned forward slightly, just a little, and let the warmth of the lounge and the second drink and the gold dress do what they were there to do, and watched his attention settle on her the way she had been working toward for the last twenty minutes.

"You know, you're not at all what I expected." Rax said, and his voice had changed, easier now, the businessman retreating in favour of something more direct.

"I rarely am," she said. "It's one of my better qualities."

He smiled at that, a real one, and she thought, I have him. Another few minutes and I have him.

That was when the energy in the room changed.

She felt it before she looked, the shift of the lounge's attention toward the door. She looked sideways without appearing to. There he was. Moving along the far wall in full beskar with the focused gait of someone trying very hard not to be conspicuous, which under different circumstances she might have found funny, because there was no version of Mando in a spice lounge that was subtle and she had factored that into the plan and apparently factoring it in had not been sufficient.

She looked back at Rax.

He was already watching the entrance.

Her first thought was anger, purely at the thought that he brought Grogu in here. Then she looked more carefully. Grogu was not there. Worse, he had left Grogu somewhere alone to come in here early, had thrown their entire plan out the window.

"Is he witth you?" Rax said.

She looked down at her drink. Let a beat pass. "I have no idea who that is."

He looked at her. Looked at Mando. He was clearly not a man who missed things. She watched him arrive at a conclusion.

He set down his glass. "There are better places to continue this conversation," he said. "More private ones."

She felt the thread again, the almost-yes still there under everything. She stood. "Lead the way."

Rax smiled and gestured toward the back of the lounge with one hand. The other found the small of her back. She felt the exposure from the open back of the dress under his palm, the instinct to step away from it, but held still and let none of it show. She had barely taken half a step before she heard the whipcord.

It snapped out and wrapped around Rax's wrist and Mando's voice arrived from behind them.

"She's not going anywhere private with you."

Rax looked at the cord. Looked at her. Looked past her at Mando with the expression of someone confirming a hypothesis they had been building since the door opened.

Around them, she could feel the lounge shift. A few heads turning. The particular stillness of people who had sensed something about to happen and were deciding whether to be interested or absent. The NRI agents were outside. There was nobody here to help her if this became a fight, and a fight in a spice lounge in the Coruscant underlevels was the single best way to ensure Rax never came near any of them again.

She turned to face him for the first time.

"You sure this isn't a friend of yours?" Rax asked again. There was no real anger in it. He was reading the room the same way she was.

"Friend, nuisance. Take your pick." She held Mando's visor through the glare of it, let him feel the full weight of her displeasure, and then turned back to Rax.

Rax looked between them and then laughed, a genuine sound, full and unguarded. "Your bodyguard very much disagrees with your negotiation tactics."

The people nearby had not dispersed. She could feel the potential of the room like pressure, the way things tipped. She needed this to de-escalate. She needed Rax walking out of here intact.

"Mando," she said, without looking at him. "Let him go."

A pause. Then the cord released.

Rax rubbed his wrist and regarded the room for a moment with the expression of a man reassessing. Then he looked at her, and something in his face had shifted, the sharp intelligence working through it, arriving at a conclusion she suspected she was not going to like.

"I appreciate the offer," he said. "And I will consider it." He glanced once more at Mando. "But for now you need to get your Mandalorian out of here."

He turned and walked toward the back of the lounge, unhurried, through a the back exit she had noticed before, and he was gone.

She was through the door and down the steps before she had consciously decided to move, trying to identify the direction Rax had gone, the part of her that had not accepted the evening was over still pushing forward.

She could see the speeder at the kerb, Rax descending toward it with the certainty of a man whose car always waited.

There was no way to follow it once the door shut behind him.

Mando's hand closed around her wrist from behind.

She pulled free. He was faster. He caught her by the elbow and turned her into the narrow service passage between two buildings, one smooth motion, and when she tried to walk back out he stepped in front of her. No grip. Just his body between her and the street.

She looked up at him, feeling all the anger she had been holding against bubble right back up to the surface. Hot and all consuming.

"Move," she said.

"He's gone."

"I know he's gone. Move."

"There's nothing to follow."

"I said move."

She stood in the service passage in the heels that had been a mistake for cobblestones. The anger had settled into something colder and more precise, the kind that came from being right about something and having it matter less than it should have.

"I almost had him," she said. "I was there. I had done everything correctly and I almost had him and then you walked in." She looked up at him. The visor looked back, unreadable, and she was done with careful distance, done with the managed space of two people maintaining something between them that neither of them had agreed to. "Why did you do that?"

"I couldn't leave you in there alone."

"We had a plan." She stepped toward him, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to hold the eye line. "We had a plan for a reason."

"I needed to be there," he said. Quieter now, the modulator catching it only partially. "I needed to know that-"

He stopped himself short.

She waited. When he didn't continue, her patience wore thin. "What?What did you need to know? That I can't function without you? That you're the hunter and I'm just along for the ride?"

"No."

"Then what? You didn't trust me not to run again?"

"I trust you," he said.

"I don't get it. If you can't trust me why not just let me go?" She looked up at him defiantly, though she could feel the prickle of tears behind her eyes. "What am I even doing here if you won't give me the room to do the one thing I'm actually good at? Why didn't you just let me go?"

"I said, I trust you" He raised his voice slightly, probably at the mention of nervarro, she rationalised.

She laughed, once, short and disbelieving. It was a cold sound.

"Right of course you do." She scoffed.

"Do you really think I'd ever leave Grogu with someone I don't trust?" The words came out harder now. "Do you think I would have let you anywhere near him if I didn't? Kriff, of course I trust you. I don't trust anyone around you. That's not the same thing."

"Where the hell even is he? Sitting in that cantina by himself?" Now she was shouting, not registering the weight of his words, focused only on what she couldn't see.

"He's safe."

She stared at him and turned it over everything he had said. It still didn't fit. What he said and what he had done just didn't line up. He was not possessive. He was not the kind of man who thought she owed him her movements or her choices. She had been held by someone who was and she knew exactly what that looked like and this was nothing like it.

"I can't trust anyone around you," he said again after a long silence.

Then, lower, the voice dropping somewhere below the modulator's range so she felt it more than heard it, "I can't even trust myself around you."

The passage was very still.

She stood in it and felt the words settle into her and did not say anything, because there was nothing she could say that would not change everything, and she was not sure she was ready for everything to change. Not here. Not in a service passage after a mission that had not gone right.

But she did not step back.

She was aware, suddenly, of how close she had gotten. She had been so focused on the argument, on the anger and the need to push back against something, that she had not tracked the distance between them closing, and now she had. Now, she was standing close enough that stepping back would be a choice she would have to make deliberately.

She thought about the words. Turned them over. Tried to find the version of them that meant something ordinary, something manageable, and found she couldn't quite construct it. But she also knew herself well enough to know that she heard what she wanted to hear sometimes, that loneliness had a way of filling silence with whatever it was most desperate for. If he had said what she thought he had said, maybe he hadn't meant what she thought those words meant.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed it again. Opened it. She probably looked like a fish caught in a net.

She took a slow breath, pressed her hand flat against his chest to steady herself as she did, and felt the beskar solid and warm under her palm.

"Where is Grogu?" she asked finally, deciding to go with practicality for the time being.

"Back on the Crest."

"And the NRI agents?"

"Probably waiting for us to explain what happened in there."

She nodded once. Slowly. She looked down at her feet before she spoke, "I don't know what to say,"

She felt the understanding arrive before she was ready for it, settling into place with the weight of something that had been building for a long time and had finally found somewhere to land.

The city moved above them, indifferent. She could hear the lounge music faintly through the wall.

She heard him shift. The small sound of beskar moving, the weight of him turning away from her, toward the street.

"Let's go," he said.

"No." Her hand shot out and closed around his wrist before she had decided to do it. He stopped.

She held on and looked up into the visor and said nothing for a long moment. She knew she couldn't let him take this the wrong way. She knew, with the clarity of someone watching a door swing shut, that if she didn't say something now she would not get another chance at this particular moment. It would close and they would walk back through the streets of Coruscant and get on the ship and the silence would come back and be different from before and she would have no one to blame but herself.

The fear was still there. It sat in her chest the way it always sat, the dread of someone getting close to her, of what that had cost before, of what it could cost him now. It was not a small fear. He could get hurt because of how she felt about him.

But was it possible, she thought while looking up at him, that he might feel the same. She had spent weeks assuming she was another broken thing in his care. Another stray child. She had been so certain of it that she had not let herself question it until just now, standing in an alley in Coruscant with his wrist in her hand and his words still settling into her.

"It's fine," he said. Quieter. "Come on."

She opened her mouth but still, nothing came out. She tried again. Still nothing. Everything she needed to say was getting caught somewhere between her chest and her throat and she could feel herself starting to look like an idiot and she didn't care.

She released his wrist.

Then she stepped closer.

She brought her hands up slowly, past his shoulders, up to the back of his helmet, and felt him go very still. She knew what she would do if she could. She would have kissed him. She would have pressed her lips against his and hoped that would carry everything she couldn't quite put into words. But that wasn't an option here so instead, she let her fingers find the contours of the helmet instead, felt the shape of it under her palms, and angled it down toward her, and rested her forehead against the front of it. The smallest thing. All she could manage.

His arms came around her waist.

His hands settled against the bare skin of her back, certain, and she felt heat pool low in her stomach and pressed herself closer without entirely meaning to, close enough to feel the front of his flight suit against her, and a low sound came through the modulator that she had never heard from him before. It did something to her that she was not prepared to pay too much attention to.

She slid her hands down slowly, tracing the curves of the helmet to the cowl at his neck. Her fingers found the edge of it, and tugged, working it loose from around his collar to pull it back. The skin underneath was warm and tan and she was honestly surprised he let her get this far. She had expected his hands to come up and stop her.

She looked up into the visor once more. Let her eyes ask the question.

He didn't push her away.

She leaned in and rested her face in the crook of his neck, tucked herself there, and stayed. Just stayed. His arms were still around her, steady, the sounds of Coruscant moved above and around them but this passage was theirs, at least for now. She could feel his pulse under her lips so she breathed him in, the warmth of him, the musk of skin and leather and something underneath it that she had been noticing for all the time she'd known him without naming, and it went to her head far more cleanly than the drink had.

Something seemed to come over her, a haze almost. She pressed her lips to his neck. Soft, first. Then again. His hand moved lower, to the full curve of her behind, and she made a sound she had not planned on making, a moan muffled against his skin. She felt him squeeze and the next sound that came out of her was not muffled at all.

She froze. Heat flooded her face.

He squeezed again, like an answer, and she felt the anger in her body dissipate, arousal taking its place as it settled into something heavy and insistent at the pit of her stomach. She pulled back slightly.

"I-" She stopped. Started again. "I need-"

She couldn't say it. She couldn't get the words out. She needed something, needed friction, needed to close the distance between what she was feeling and anything that might relieve it. She couldn't say any of that out loud so she reached down instead, through the soft pleats of the skirt, her hand moving upward.

His hand closed around hers.

"Tell me," he said.

She shook her head. She could feel how hard she was blushing now. He held her hand where he caught it and looked at her through the visor before he released it. Then both his hands were on her hips as he turned them both, pressed her back against the wall of the lounge behind her, and then without warning he lifted her, bringing his leg up between hers so she was sitting against his thigh, the armoured plate of it pressed against her heat, her breath left her entirely.

He held her there, one hand at the small of her back, the other braced against the wall, and rocked his thigh up against her once.

She threw her head back.

She held onto him and started moving her hips, chasing the friction. He held her still with one hand and tilted the visor very slightly to the side.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"Mando." It came out wrecked. She rolled her hips against the ridges of the beskar plate.

He held her still again. She said please and she was not embarrassed about how it came out because she was past embarrassment, past thinking about anything except the pressure of the armour and the heat building against it and his gloves on her skin. She leaned back in to find his neck again, her lips against the skin there, sucking, biting lightly.

"Hey." Low, so low and deep, "look at me?"

She didn't stop.

"Look at me." He repeated, firmer this time. His hand tangled in her hair, gathered it, pulled her head back to look at her. Not harsh. Deliberate. The way she had been thinking about for days, only this was so much better

His head tilted. The visor moved over her face in a way that felt like an assessment.

"Are you alright?" he asked carefully.

"I will be," she said, and tried to move against him again.

"No." He held her still. "Your eyes... What did you drink in there?"

"No spice." The words came out thick. "Please, Mando-"

"Your eyes have a shimmer," he said, flat and certain. "That's spice."

She blinked at him, genuinely confused. "I didn't-"

"I know you didn't." He set her down.

She whined, she was not proud of it.

"Shh." His hands went to her shoulders. "Think. What did you order."

"I don't know, something strong, I didn't ask what was in it, can we please-"

"Fuck!" He exclaimed, turning away from her. "I'm going to kill that Wookiee."

"We were in the middle of something," she said.

"Not anymore. Let's go."

She stood against the wall and did not move. She felt small. She felt the heat of a moment ago draining out of her and being replaced with something cold and awful, the feeling of being put down and stepped away from, of wanting something, holding it in your hands and then having it removed. She knew, somewhere underneath the haze still moving through her blood, that this was the right call. She knew it. She just did not feel it.

He had already taken a few steps toward the street. He stopped and turned.

She still hadn't moved.

She heard him come back. He stepped into her space and took her hand while she maintained eye contact with the ground.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was harsh. I didn't mean-" A heavy pause followed.

"I need to get you back to the ship."

She looked up at him through the blur of tears she had not noticed until now. His other hand came up, slow, and brushed them away from her face with his thumb. When he spoke again his voice had come down to something low and careful.

"Just not here," he said. "Not like this. Alright?"

She couldn't look at him. She nodded, once, and let him keep her hand, then let him lead her out of the passage and back towards the Crest.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp @dakotali

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 14

Hello all! I am posting this on Wednesday for me, 15 will be posted before my flight on Friday night. Then I will see you all next weekend, optimistically on 3rd night, realistically on the 4th with part 16!! See you soooon

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Cherry Hill – Russ

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 4.7k

Not proof read

She woke up in her own bunk.

The ceiling above was familiar. The blanket was hers. The smell was the Crest, engine oil and recycled air and the faint metallic undertone she had stopped registering weeks ago. Everything where it was supposed to be.

Her mind felt like her own.

She pressed at the wall, carefully, the way she had been pressing at it for days. Felt for the crack, for any soft place where something had gotten through while she was under. Solid. The barrier held. She lay there and let the relief move through her.

Then the relief curdled.

She had slept.

She sat up too fast. The sleeping alcove tilted around her and she grabbed the bunk edge and waited it out, her body registering its complaints in sequence, the headache, dull and low behind her eyes, the shakiness in her hands she hadn't noticed until she was gripping metal, then finally, the nausea, immediate and insistent.

She made it to the fresher just in time, knelt on the floor and stayed there. There was nothing in her stomach to throw up, just the retching, dry and painful, her body going through the motions because it had decided something needed out. When it faded, she sat with her back against the wall, breathed through her mouth, and waited.

After a while she got up. Rinsed her mouth. Pressed a damp cloth to her face and looked in the mirror.

She did not look like herself.

The shadows under her eyes had gone past tired into something structural, carved there, like they had taken up permanent residence while she wasn't paying attention. Her lips were cracked. Her skin had the flat dull quality of someone who had not seen natural light in too long. She pressed her fingers under her eyes and rubbed, knowing it would do nothing, doing it anyway, watching the shadows refuse to move. In the corners of her eyes, faint reddening, the evidence of tears she barely remembered, burnt into the sensitive skin. She turned the tap cold and pressed both hands against her face and held them there.

It didn't help.

She ran her fingers through her hair and found it knotted at the back, tangled in a way that would take real effort to tame, and she stood there holding the knot and looked at herself and thought: this is what I did to myself. She considered taking a blade to it. The thought sat there briefly, practical and detached. Then she remembered fingers tangled in it, gathering it at the back of her head, and looked away from her own reflection.

She became aware while standing there, that the engines were off.

She had a vague memory of the cockpit. Stars through the viewport, the pilot's seat, pulling her knees up against her chest. It sat at the edge of her thoughts with the quality of things that happened at the border of consciousness, too present to dismiss entirely and too uncertain to trust. She might have dreamt it. By that point she had been delirious enough that the line between the two had become genuinely unclear.

She went back to the bunk.

Her hand went under the pillow before she had consciously decided to reach for it. Found nothing. She held the emptiness for a moment, then started looking. Jacket pocket. The shelf in the wall of the bunk. The floor. The small gap at the base of the mattress. She went through everything twice, then a third time with less care, lifting things and setting them down and checking places she had already checked.

Gone.

She stood in the middle of the sleeping alcove and felt the absence of it somewhere below rational thought, cold where it should have been, and then felt something following right behind that she recognised with considerable shame as panic.

She told herself it wasn't about the stims. She stood there telling herself this while her heart rate climbed. The wall was holding. She had slept. Nothing had gotten through. She was fine. The stims had been a crutch and she didn't need them and the crack was sealed.

She was fine.

Her hands were shaking.

Grogu was watching her from the hammock.

She didn't know how long he had been watching. Long enough to have made a decision about whether to intervene and landed on not yet. His ears were up. His eyes were doing the thing she had been avoiding looking at directly for days.

"Did you take it," she said.

He blinked at her. Tilted his head slightly, uncertain whether he had heard correctly.

"The case," she said, sharper. "Did you take it."

He understood this time. His eyes went wide. His ears dropped all the way. His bottom lip wobbled once and then he was crying, small and quiet, the distressed sounds of someone very small startled by something they hadn't expected from a person they trusted. She stood there and watched it happen and felt it go through her like something cold.

She crossed to the hammock and lifted him out and held him against her chest.

"No. I'm sorry. That wasn't fair. I know you didn't take anything."

He pressed his face into her shoulder and held on.

She stood there holding him and thought about the last several days. About the way he had been staying close, hovering at the edge of every room she was in. About how she had barely looked at him. About all of it.

She had cried at some point during the holding, she noticed. She wasn't sure when it had started, just that her face was wet and her throat was tight and she was crying into the top of his head while he held on to the collar of her shirt. She was so sick of crying. She had cried more in the last few weeks than in the entire preceding year and she was done with it, she was so done with it, and yet here she was again, standing in the sleeping alcove of a gunship leaking all over a child who deserved better.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"I'm sorry," she said. "For all of it. You knew something was wrong and I didn't listen to you and I should have."

He pulled back to look at her face, checking.

She looked back at him.

"You can tell me," she said, quieter. "If you know where it went. I won't be angry."

He shook his head. Not I don't know. Something more deliberate than that, more considered. I know and I'm not going to tell you.

She almost smiled. "Right."

She carried him to the cockpit.

The navcom told her they were in Coruscant before she had a chance to look out the viewport and figure it out herself. She stood in the doorway and read it and thought: of course. She had known they were heading toward the core. She had known about Ward's contact. Coruscant was a reasonable destination. She had still not expected it to feel like this, standing in the cockpit of a stationary ship reading Coruscant on a navcom display, the particular weight of being back somewhere she had left.

She had spent months on this planet. Not happily, not well, but she had learned its lower levels the way you learned places you needed to survive in, every district mapped by what it offered and what it cost. She had moved and hidden and eaten what she could manage and eventually, traced a rumour through mechanics and information brokers until it led her to a Mandalorian in an alley in the rain.

She thought about going out. Getting a sense of where exactly they were. She shifted Grogu to her other hip and went to the ramp controls.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

An error on the panel flashed aggressively in her face. She read it.

Child-lock engaged.

She stood there for a moment.

He had child-locked the ship.

She went through this slowly. First, he had taken the stims. Brought them to Coruscant. Child-locked the ship before he left. She had no idea when any of it had happened or how much he knew or what he had seen when he found her.

She looked at Grogu.

"Fine," she said. "Are you hungry?"

He lit up with approval. She wasn't surprised, the kid was always hungry.

"Come on then."

There was no milk. She found this out after she had already committed to the cereal, standing in the cargo hold staring into an empty compartment. It didn't matter. She brought the cereal and two bowls down to the booth in the cargo hold. She ate without enthusiasm, her stomach still making its opinions known, the cereal tasting like compressed air. She ate anyway. Grogu ate his with the focused intensity he brought to all food regardless of quality.

She floated a piece of cereal across the table to him. Just one.

He watched it travel and looked up at her.

"Your turn," she said.

He huffed, the small exhalation of someone registering an objection without refusing. He closed his eyes. The piece of cereal lifted off the table, wobbled, then set itself back down.

"Again."

He lifted three. Held them for a moment, then lost one.

"Keep going." She leaned forward slightly. "Don't try to hold each one separately. You're dividing your attention wrong. Be aware of each one on its own, as part of a whole."

He frowned at the table. Tried again. Four pieces this time, hovering in an unsteady cluster, trembling slightly.

"Hold it," she said. "Just hold it there."

He held it. Ten seconds. Fifteen. One piece drifted sideways and the rest held.

"Better," she said. "That's better."

He let them down deliberately this time instead of dropping them, one by one, and looked at her with an expression that was trying very hard not to be smug and not quite succeeding. She pointed at the table.

"Again."

She heard the ramp.

The hydraulic hiss, the thunk of the seal releasing, the shift in air pressure through the hold. She did not look up from the cereal. She heard his boots on the ramp, heard him come up into the cargo hold. She looked at Grogu. Watched his concentration dissolve into immediate delight, the cereal pieces dropping all at once, the kid cooing and waving both hands.

She did not look up.

He was standing at the base of the ramp. She could feel where he was without looking, the way she had always been able to feel where he was, some awareness that had built up over time and was not going anywhere just because they were ignoring each other. He was looking at them. She could feel that too. Without entirely meaning to, she looked up, eyes meeting the intensity of his stare.

She held his gaze for a moment through the visor she couldn't actually read, and then she looked down at the cereal and broke it deliberately.

Questions rose to her mouth. Where did you go? How long have we been here? What did you see? She had more than she could have asked even if they were speaking, so she picked up a piece of cereal and considered it like it was the most interesting thing she'd seen, even deliberated eating it, while his boots indicated he had moved to climb up the ladder.

She heard the sound of the cockpit door sliding open, then shutting behind him.

She dropped the distraction, rubbing the space between her temples in frustration. She knew she was being a child, they had no hope of reconciliation if she insisted on acting like this.

Grogu watched the ladder for a moment. Then he let out a small, exhausted sigh.

"You know," she said, "you are turning out to be just like your father."

She was still mad at him. That was the part that kept catching her off guard, the part she hadn't fully accounted for when she imagined how this interaction would go. She had spent days telling herself she had no right to be angry, that she had been the one to try to leave. She had catalogued her own failures extensively.

But he had threatened her.

He had taken everything from her without asking. Had dismissed her choice, her decision, without ever giving her a chance to explain that she was only doing what was best for them. He had threatened to hunt her, like some animal, like one of his bounties. On top of all that, he left her locked on this damn ship. And she understood why, she did, she understood every decision he had made and the logic behind each one, and she was still angry, and the anger sat badly because she could not quite justify it and could not quite put it down either.

If anyone had a right to be mad, it was her.

He had won and she was still licking her wounds.

He came back down while she was still sitting in the booth.

She had cleaned up the cereal. The bowls were stacked at the end of the table and she was on her second caf, running her finger absently around the rim of the mug, which had gone cold long enough ago that she had stopped noticing.

She heard him on the ladder and did not look up. He only stopped at the top of the ramp.

"I'm going to meet Ward's contact." He was not looking at her when he said it. "You can come or you can stay."

She got up. He had not so much as turned around when he spoke, had not extended even that much, and she was not going to give him an answer he hadn't bothered to look at her to receive.

She went upstairs without a word.

She reached the top of the ladder when she heard him raise his voice from below.

"An answer would be nice."

"What, so you can child-lock me in here again?" It came out before she had finished deciding to say it, too loud, carrying across the ship. Not the response she would have chosen with more time.

He didn't answer.

She stood in the sleeping alcove and pulled on her gear. Her jacket. Her boots. She picked up the cloak from where it had been sitting folded on the shelf, the long one Mando found functionally useless, and draped it over her shoulders anyway

Then she went down and walked right past him without looking up.

She pulled her hood up before they were off the landing platform. Old habit from the months she had spent on this planet learning to move without being noticed. The lower levels mostly, borrowed spaces and cantina corners. She had known people here. Some decent, most not. She knew which districts to avoid and which clubs would let her sit in the back without trouble. She knew of corridors that went nowhere useful and which of the lower level information brokers would take a small amount of credits and provide quality information.

She fell a few steps behind on a narrower section of walkway and felt him slow without checking, adjusting his pace until she had closed the gap, then continuing. No hand at her back. No glance over his shoulder. Just the adjustment, something in him that tracked where she was without needing to look.

Grogu lasted exactly four minutes in the crowd before his feelings on foot travel became impossible to ignore. He stopped walking, looked up at both of them, and made a sound that communicated his position clearly and without ambiguity, then he lifted both arms.

They both bent at the same time. She caught herself and straightened up, leaving it to Mando. Not because she didn't want to carry him, just because this was the silent Mando, the one in the middle of a job, the one who gave no explanations and no commentary and moved through space like he had already calculated every variable and didn't require input. She had seen this version of him on jobs before and he had never frightened her exactly, but he had always commanded a certain amount of respect and right now, with everything between them still unresolved and raw, she found she wasn't ready to reach past him for the kid.

Grogu twisted to look at her over his father's shoulder with an expression that communicated several things she was choosing not to receive right now.

She looked at the street.

She had been orienting herself toward the lower levels without thinking about it, mapping the routes she remembered, calculating which turbolifts to take. She assumed that was where they were headed. The contact Ward had mentioned had always sounded like someone who operated in the shadows, not on the surface.

The turbolift went up instead. Past the mid-levels. Past the residential sectors. Past the commercial towers and into altitude she had never reached on foot, where the buildings were a different kind of grand.

She had never been this high. The lift climbed past floors she had no frame of reference for, and she felt the pressure change in her ears as they rose, that faint uncomfortable shift, and she watched as the city fell away beneath them and became something abstract and almost orderly from up here, the chaos of the lower levels resolving into geometry from sufficient altitude.

The building announced itself before they reached it, one of the surface towers that had been built after the Empire fell, New Republic architecture, all clean lines and official insignia. A uniformed guard at the entrance checked Mando's credentials with the efficient disinterest of someone who had been briefed to expect them. She was given a cursory glance, Grogu a slightly longer one, and then they were waved through.

Another lift. This one interior, they were surrounded only by the quiet hum of the ascent and a panel of floor numbers she watched tick upward. The doors opened onto a reception area with the particular restrained quality of places that wanted you to understand they were serious without having to say so.

New Republic Intelligence

A junior officer appeared and led them without preamble through a corridor and into the office. Floor to ceiling transparisteel on two sides, the city spread below it in every direction. Furniture chosen to make the people sitting in it feel that everything here had been carefully considered. She stood near the windows for a moment and looked out and felt, faintly, like she was standing somewhere that did not quite belong to the world she knew.

The man who came in behind them was somewhere in his sixties, precisely dressed, with the careful deliberate manner of someone who had spent a long career in rooms where information was the only currency worth having. He turned to Mando first.

"It's a genuine honour," he said. "Your reputation across the galaxy precedes you considerably. I'm glad Ward was able to bring you in." He shook Mando's hand, and then he looked at her.

"And Master Khai's former padawan." His tone was warm. "An unexpected pleasure."

She went very still. The title landed strangely. She hadn't been anyone's padawan in years.

He moved to sit behind the large metallic desk. "Your Master and I are old acquaintances." A pause, measured before he continued, "I understand you actually, there are few things one would not do for love."

"I left for my freedom," she clarified, "not for anything else."

Something moved in his expression. He noted it, she could tell. "Of course."

She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. If he knew that, what else did he know? How much of her life existed in a file on some Intelligence floor she had never been to. Despite herself, what she really wanted to know was if her old Master was alright, whether he knew what had become of her since she had last seen him. The question sat heavy in her chest without an answer.

He looked at Grogu next, and before he could say what he intended to, Mando's voice came through the room.

"We're here. What do you need."

The Director settled back. "Several things, in time. But first, there is a matter requiring immediate attention." He folded his hands on the desk. "I need you to retrieve someone for me. Intact and in a cooperative frame of mind."

Mando said nothing, the man continued.

"A Devaronian. He operates across several establishments in the lower levels, moves between them unpredictably, keeps no fixed hours. We have been attempting to bring him in through conventional channels for four months. Financial incentives, intermediaries, diplomatic overtures, direct invitations. He doesn't trust governments." A brief pause. "He has particular reasons not to trust this one. We never know which of his establishments he'll be in on any given night, which is where you come in. We need him located and then brought to the table."

"Done," Mando said.

"Not quite," The Director glanced between them, "locating him is the straightforward part. Getting him into a room willingly is the other matter." He held her gaze. "He has a documented interest in unusual people. Rare things he hasn't encountered before. A rogue Force user is uncommon enough. An attractive one more so."

She stared at him.

"The presentation can be adjusted," he added, with a brief glance that took in her face, her hair, the general quality of someone who had been surviving rather than living for the past two weeks. "With some intervention."

She almost objected. Then she remembered her reflection in the fresher mirror that morning. The shadows under her eyes. The state of her hair. The flat dull skin of someone who had not seen daylight in too long. She closed her mouth.

"You've been building a file on me," she said.

"It's my function." He did not apologise for it. "You're well-positioned for this. You can handle yourself if things deteriorate. You understand how to read people. And you have capabilities my agents don't."

Mando said, "No."

Nobody looked at him.

The Director tilted his head toward her. "Is that your position as well?"

She held herself still and thought about what it meant that this man had looked at everything she had spent years trying not to leave traces of and decided she was the right instrument for this task. He knew about Master Khai. He knew she had left. He had looked at the years of moving and hiding, the lightsaber she still carried, the thing she was, or rather what she no longer was, and decided that she was useful. She had spent a long time trying not to be found. It was an unpleasant reminder that not being found and not being known were entirely different problems.

She thought about saying yes. She was tired of people deciding things for her. She was tired of being managed and handled and moved from one place to another by decisions she hadn't made. She had woken up this morning in a ship she couldn't leave, missing memories of how she ended up in her bed, with her belongings missing and one extremely silent beskar clad man was likely responsible for all of it.

She wanted this one thing.

"I'll do it." she said.

Mando's helmet turned toward her.

She did not look at him.

"I'll need a full briefing on the target," she said to the Director. "His patterns, his habits, what he responds to, anything you have really."

"Of course." The Director's voice held no satisfaction, which she noted. "I'll have everything prepared and sent to your datapad."

"She is not going to be bait for a Devaronian," Mando said, firmer now.

She looked at him then. At the visor. At the angle of it and everything the angle communicated. She held his gaze for a moment and then said, quietly, "You're going to have to find it in yourself to trust me to handle this."

His free hand flexed, just once, brief, something she might not have caught if she had not been watching closely. He said nothing.

The silence in the office was thorough.

"I can handle it," she said, quieter. Not for the Director. "You know I can."

Mando still said nothing.

The Director looked between them with the attention of someone reading a room for information he had not been given directly.

Grogu, in the crook of Mando's arm, looked at her with enormous eyes.

She looked back at the Director.

"Send me the briefing," she said with finality.

The turbolift ride back down to the spaceport was silent for long enough that she had assumed it was going to stay that way.

She was genuinely startled when Mando broke the silence.

"I don't think this is a good idea."

She looked at the lift doors, at the floor, anywhere but at him.

"Stay on the Crest with Grogu. I'll bring in the target."

"No," she said.

A pause. "No?"

The word came back at her with a quality she had not heard from him before, something that sat right at the edge of dryness and indignation. She almost smiled. She turned to look at him directly.

"Did you hear him in there?" she said. "If they wanted to bring this man in by force they would have arrested him already. The Director said they need him cooperative. You walking into his place of business, hitting him over the head, and putting him in cuffs is not going to produce a very cooperative Devaronian."

Mando was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he almost sounded offended

"I could be interesting enough for him. Mandalorians are about as rare as Force users."

She looked at him. Held it for a second.

"Sure," she said. "Maybe our target has a thing for mysterious masked men. That might work."

It came out entirely normally, the way things had used to come out, and she felt it land between them like something neither of them had been expecting. Mando sighed through the modulator, low and put-upon.

"You can be so difficult."

"If I genuinely thought I wasn't right for this I'd tell you," she said. "But think about it. We do this correctly, the Director said he has more work for us. Let's not ruin it before we've started."

He did not answer. She faced the doors again and watched the floors count down and felt the quiet settle around them, different from the last several days of it, less like avoidance and more like two people who hadn't figured out what to say yet.

She was proud of herself for being able to speak to him at all. For getting through it without it falling apart.

She knew they hadn't made up. She didn't know if things would go back to how they had been before Nevarro, before the N1, before all of it. But if they could coexist, if they could do the job and exist in the same ship without the silence eating everything, she would find a way to come to terms with whatever the coldness meant. She would have to.

Her stomach turned over once as they walked out into the hangar, low and unpleasant, a reminder that her body had not forgiven her yet for what she had put it through. She pressed a hand briefly to her side and breathed through it and kept walking. The nausea passed. The shakiness in her legs did not entirely.

Mando had stepped out first and she followed. Grogu reached out from his father's arms and tugged once on the edge of her sleeve as she fell into step beside them.

She let him hold her sleeve and kept walking. The city moved around them the way it always had, indifferent and enormous, ten trillion lives with nowhere particular to be. She had been afraid of it once. She had hidden in it, moved through it like something that needed to stay small.

She didn't feel small right now.

She felt like hell. But not small.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold@solomonssimp @dakotali

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 13

Trying to feed ya'll good this week before I go on holiday for a week from Friday!!

I thought I might start adding the song I resonated with the hardest while writing these, I have a playlist I listen to while writing but the last few chapters have had very specific songs that became the emotional core for me.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Possibility – Lykke Li

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, stimulant misuse, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, mentions of choking, female masturbation, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 6.6k

Not proof read

Silence, when sustained long enough, stopped being the absence of something and became a thing in itself. It had weight. It had texture. In the first day or two it even had a kind of mercy to it, the way extreme cold eventually stopped hurting and became simply a condition of existing. She lay on her back in her bunk and let it settle over her and told herself this was fine. That she was fine. That the silence was doing what she needed it to do.

It was only later that she understood the silence wasn't protecting her. It was just keeping her still while other things got worse.

She told herself that several times over the course of the first day, checking the way you checked a wound, pressing lightly to see if it still hurt.

She had not slept since leaving Nevarro. She had not slept while Mando gathered their things and brought Grogu to the ship, she had not slept during the first jump, but she had told herself that was because she wasn't tired yet, then told herself that again an hour later with somewhat less conviction. The truth, which she circled a few times before landing on it, was that every time she closed her eyes she felt the crack. Not his presence or his voice or the particular quality of his awareness that she had spent years learning to recognise. Just the crack. The place in the wall of her mind where the door had given way and the vulnerability of knowing it was there.

She could not sleep through that. She needed to be awake to hold it.

She lay down and stared at the ceiling and thought through what she knew about mental fortification. As a youngling she had learned to build basic barriers, simple walls of intention between her awareness and the outside world, the kind taught to children who needed to learn that other people's emotions were not their own.After the enclave, her master had taught her more. How to shore up the edges of a barrier under pressure. How to feel for weak points and reinforce them before they gave. How to hold it steady even when exhausted, even when frightened, even when the thing pressing against it was something that had once known all your openings. She knew what she was doing. She just needed to stay awake long enough to do it.

Running was not an option anymore. She had established that on the N1. And setting that aside, even imagining a version of herself that had not just sat in the pilot seat and watched Grogu hold it down with three fingers, she would not have found a ship just lying around that could outrun what Mando was going to do the moment he realised she was gone. He had said he would come after her and she believed him. The N1 would have been a different story, but the N1 was his and it was coded to his vambrace and she had already learned what that meant. So. Prevention then. All she could do was make sure she didn't become a tracking beacon leading Varen straight to them.

Grogu was in his hammock, quieter than usual, constantly watching her with the particular awareness he had that told her he already understood something was wrong. She was grateful he wasn't pushing. She wasn't sure she had the resources for pushing right now.

She could feel Mando in the cockpit the way she felt the ship's engine through the floor. A constant low presence at the edge of everything. She was not thinking about him. She was thinking about the ceiling.

She did not sleep.

The second day was fine too.

She had gone two days without sleep before. Not often, and not comfortably, but it was not impossible and she had done it, and the body adjusted. She was tired, in the low background way of someone who had been up for thirty hours, but her thoughts were clear and the wall was holding while she worked on it steadily. The plan was simple, seal the crack, confirm it was sealed, sleep. That was the whole plan. It was not a complicated plan. It just required sustained concentration, and sustained concentration required staying awake, and she was staying awake, so that was that.

She sat on her bunk and she worked and she drank caf in quantities that would have alarmed a reasonable person. The galley was neutral territory and she used it, quietly, at hours when she could hear Mando in the cockpit, slipping in and out with the particular care of someone who had accepted that coexistence required precision.

The problem she was beginning to notice was that fortifying the wall required her to use copious amounts of energy to direct the Force, which was draining her, and the math of that was not clean.

She did not sleep.

She told herself it was because she was making progress.

The headaches started on day three.

Not a dull ache. A splitting pressure behind her eyes that made the light from the viewport feel like an assault and the hum of the ship like something scraping against the inside of her skull. That was when she used crucitorn.

It was a Jedi technique, one of the more advanced ones her master had taught her, it was not exactly pain management so much as transcendence of it. You did not redirect away from the pain. You rose above it entirely, lifted your awareness to a place where the body's distress became something you could observe rather than experience. When it worked it was remarkable. She sat with the splitting headache and found the place above it and the pressure faded to something she could see without feeling, and she held herself there and worked on the wall and felt, for the first time in three days, actually functional.

It cost her. That was the problem. The crucitorn required sustained concentration and she was already spending all her concentration on the crack, and adding one more demand to a depleted system had a consequence she felt within the hour. When she came down from it she was worse than before, the fatigue pressing in harder, a new shakiness in her hands she hadn't had that morning.

She noted this and decided not to use it again. She could not afford to.

Her master had warned her about exhaustion specifically. Rest was the key to control, he had said. A mind too tired to guard itself was a mind that could be pulled somewhere it didn't intend to go, that the darkness was patient and would wait for exactly that kind of opening. She had listened with the polite attention she gave all such warnings from the Order, which was to say she had dismissed it alongside everything else they had said about every little thing being an invitation to catastrophe. They had a gift for finding darkness in ordinary human experience. She had largely stopped finding it useful.

She was not suppressing emotion. She was managing a practical threat.

Grogu found her in the sleeping alcove in the late afternoon, climbed up without asking, and settled against her side with the weight of something decided. She held him and let him be warm and did not tell him she was fine this time because the expression on his face made the words feel dishonest in a way she wasn't up to managing.

She could hear Mando in the cockpit up ahead. He had barely left it since they'd left Nevarro, the particular pattern of a man who had decided the cockpit was where he was going to be, and she had decided wherever he wasn't was where she was going to be.

She was not going near the cockpit.

She held Grogu and worked on the wall and drank her caf cold because she had forgotten it was sitting out. She told herself tomorrow she would feel better.

She did not sleep.

On day four she decided to be practical.

She was not going to lie on her bunk and do nothing. The wall was holding but it required her full attention when she was working on it, and when she wasn't working on it the fatigue pressed in in ways she preferred to keep occupied. So she went down into the cargo hold and she started going through it.

Not because it needed it. The hold was organised the way everything on the Crest was organised, with the thoroughness of a man who had been living out of a ship for years and understood that things had to have places. She knew this. She did it anyway, lifting crates and cataloguing contents and placing them back with a care that was slightly more deliberate than the situation required, because her hands needed something tactile and specific to do while the rest of her kept the wall in place.

She worked methodically. Ammunition crates first, counting cartridges, checking the seal on each one, arranging them by calibre in the order she had seen him reach for them before. Then the medical supplies, which were more extensive than she had expected, bacta spray and patches, field dressings and a portable med scanner she had never seen him use, plus several things she couldn't immediately identify that she set aside carefully. She reorganised the lot by use case, the immediate intervention supplies separated from the longer treatment items, the way a medic would have done it rather than the way a bounty hunter apparently did it, which was more or less based on how recently he had needed something.

The ration packs took the longest. There were fewer of them than she would have liked, stacked at the back of the lower compartment in a way that suggested they had been shoved there in a hurry at some point and never properly sorted. She pulled them all out, checked the expiry markers, discarded two that had gone over, and re-stacked the remainder in date order with the oldest at the front. It was the kind of task that required absolutely no thinking while she did it, just the quiet rhythm of checking and sorting, her hands moving through something real and finite and entirely within her control.

She cleaned the caf machine after that. It lived in the cargo hold, a battered old unit that looked like it had been installed sometime during the Clone Wars and had never been seriously cleaned since, and she took it apart as far as it would allow and cleaned every accessible surface of it with a cloth she had found alongside the medical supplies. The residue that came off it was significant. She chose not to think too hard about how long it had been accumulating. She reassembled it and ran a test cycle. It made a sound that was noticeably different from its usual groan, cleaner somehow, she stood there and looked at it for a moment and felt absurdly pleased with herself.

She was putting the cloth away when she came across the stims.

They had been tucked in with the medical supplies, not carefully stored, just there, loose at the bottom of a crate alongside some field dressings and an old canister of bacta spray, the kind of thing that had been tossed in at some point and forgotten about. Two of them, small and military grade. She turned one over in her hand. Chemical stims, the kind carried for situations where a body had to keep functioning past the point where it wanted to stop. She understood why he had them, a bounty hunter working alone, sometimes days from the nearest settlement, needing to stay functional through an injury or a pursuit that wouldn't wait. She would have carried them too, in his position.

She put them both in her pocket.

She finished putting the hold back together with the particular focused calm of someone who had not just found something that was going to solve a problem she had been trying not to acknowledge. She was keeping them in reserve. She was being sensible. She would only use them if she absolutely had to.

On day five, she used one.

She had been in her bunk, when she felt her consciousness waver. Not much, maybe half a second, the edges of the crack softening in a way that sent her attention toward it instead of away from it, and she felt something on the other side that she did not want to acknowledge. She snapped back hard, grabbed the edge of the bunk and sat there breathing.

She sat there for a long time after that.

Then she reached into her pocket and took out one of the injectors and pressed it to the inside of her elbow.

The relief was immediate and clean and nothing like euphoria, which was exactly why it was dangerous. Not a rush. Not a high. Just the sensation of coming back to herself, thoughts sharpening, headache receding, the small continuous tremor in her hands going still. Like a machine that had been running rough suddenly remembering its calibration. She sat there and breathed and felt functional for the first time in days.

She went back to the wall and it came up clean and fast and certain, and she thought to herself that this is fine. This is just a tool. Not so different from bacta applied to a wound. She was sealing a wound. This was helping her seal it. When the wound was sealed she would stop.

She believed this while the stim lasted. She believed it, mostly, for the rest of the day.

One shot left. She put it under her pillow and told herself she would only use it in a genuine emergency.

Mando brought them out of hyperspace on what she thought was day six.

She felt the thrusters change as they entered the upper atmosphere of a planet, the shift in the ship's vibration that meant they were coming down somewhere, and understood they were stopping. She lay on her bunk and stared at the ceiling and understood she was going to have to get up.

Grogu appeared at the top of the ladder above her bunk.

She looked up at him. He looked back at her. Then he pointed down toward the ramp with one three-fingered hand and held the expression of someone who had decided this was not optional.

She gave a small nod.

He started making his way down the ladder, one careful rung at a time. She lay there another moment listening to the small sounds of his descent and thought about the syringe under her pillow. She should not have used the first one yesterday, she knew that now. The come down had hit her harder than expected, her body crashing back down to where it had been and then further, the headache returning worse than before and the tremor back in her hands by evening. She had told herself yesterday that the second was for emergencies only.

She looked at the ceiling.

If she had to leave this ship in her current state she would collapse before she reached the end of the landing ramp. That was the plain truth of it. She was operating well below functional and she needed to be able to walk and think and not draw attention to herself on a planet she didn't know. That was an emergency.

She reached under her pillow and took the last injector out, stared at it for a moment, and pressed it to the inside of her elbow waiting for the relief to move through her. She sat with it for a moment, making sure Grogu had reached the bottom of the ladder and walked away, before she stood.

She got up and went to the ramp.

He was already at the base of it, helmet forward, not looking at her. Grogu at his feet, looking between them with the exhausted anxiety of a creature who had been managing two impossible adults for too long and was beginning to show it.

She went down the ramp and heard him fall into step behind her, feeling a strange sensation overcome her. She felt like quarry. Like something being tracked at a careful distance, close enough to intervene, far enough to let her believe she had choice. Something he's not going to let out of his sight.

She thought about running.

More specifically, she thought about being caught. His hand closing around her wrist from behind, hard and certain, pulling her back before she'd taken three steps. Being turned around. The visor coming down toward her from that height, and the quality of silence that came off him when he was genuinely angry, when it had gone past words into something colder and more contained. Her hands cuffed behind her back, she knew he carried them, she had seen them on jobs, and being walked back, no, dragged, one hand at the back of her neck steering her up the ramp.

She thought about the cargo hold ramp sealing behind her.

She thought about being pushed down, her knees hitting the floor, and looking up at the dark visor from below. At the full height and breadth of him from that angle, the way the beskar caught the hold's dim lighting. His gloved hand coming down slowly toward her face. His fingers finding her jaw, closing around it, not hard, deliberate, tilting her head back until she was looking straight up at him. She thought about the way her mouth would fall open. The helplessness of wanting something that badly and having absolutely no power in the situation and not caring, not even a little, about the not caring.

She thought about leaning into his grip, giving into him entirely.

She made herself stop there.

She was looking at ship parts she had no interest in and she had been walking in the wrong direction for at least thirty seconds. She stood still and felt the ache at her core that was not going away on command and thought about what she was doing. What she was letting herself become. This was the stim shots and the exhaustion and six days without sleep and she was just not thinking clearly. She needed to be aware of that.

She was aware of it, unfortunately.

She was also aware of the burn, which was in fact intensifying. She stood there and thought about the last time she had wanted anything this way. She had only really been with one person. After leaving the Order, when they had finally been free, it had been good for a while, she had learned something of herself in that time. Then he changed and the sex had changed with him and she had been managing it the way she managed everything, carefully and from a distance. She had been on the run since and the question of desire had simply not arisen.

It was arising now. Compounding with the stim and the sleep deprivation and the week of silence and the very specific way his voice had sounded when he told her to close her eyes in his bed. She was not handling it as cleanly as she would have liked.

She crossed to where Mando was at the ammunition counter. She heard him buy two cartridges for her blaster model without being asked and the tightness in her throat came on so fast she had to look at the ceiling. He was furious with her, yet he had still bought her ammunition without being asked, because that was simply how he was built. She hated how much that meant to her right now.

She walked toward the back of the shop before she could do something embarrassing.

The stims were in a display near the back wall. A manufacturer's case of ten. She stood in front of them and thought about the spent injectors and the one she had just used and how six days had felt like sixty and how she had told herself both times that it was an emergency, that she had no other choice.

Her first thought was to take the case and walk. She noticed the thought and set it down carefully. She was not going to steal. She had chosen a particular kind of person to be along time ago and this was not where she would forgo that.

The fact that stealing had been her first thought alarmed her more than she had the mental capacity to process.

She took the case to the counter.

The man looked at her and said, "Those aren't cheap."

"I didn't ask," she snapped, watching him ring it up.

She tucked the case into her jacket. Turned around.

Grogu was at her ankle, looking up at her with his ears at their lowest point and his eyes doing the thing she could not afford to let them do to her right now. She picked him up because he had asked for nothing and deserved everything. His small hands found her face immediately.

"Don't," she said quietly. "It's going to help."

He held her face and looked at her with the expression of someone who disagreed completely and was choosing to stay anyway.

She held him and thought: I know. I know. She knew what the case in her jacket meant. Knew that buying ten shots was not what you did when you were managing a temporary situation. She set that knowledge aside gently. She would think about it later. When the wall was sealed.

She was less worried now. She had enough.

Mando was at the door when she came back through the shop. She walked past him without speaking and heard him follow. She thought about the ammunition he had bought for her blaster and did not cry, counting it as a small victory.

Back on the Crest she went straight to the fresher.

She stood under the water and stopped trying to manage anything. Her mind went where it had been going for days without her consent.

It went to his hands.

Not gloved. She thought about his bare hand, the one she had felt in the cottage, the warmth of him, the deliberateness of his touch. She thought about what those hands would do if she gave them a reason. She thought about them gathering her hair at the back of her head, his fingers wrapping around it slowly, collecting it into his grip, and the total control of that, her head tipping back as he pulled, firm enough to move her but not enough to hurt, directing her exactly where he wanted her to look. Up at the visor. She thought about the way she would have to hold still for that. The way she would want to.

She thought about his hand releasing her hair and travelling down, tracing the line of her jaw with one finger. Caressing. Moving lower. Then fingers wrapping lightly around her throat, his thumb against her pulse, and her whole body going still beneath it, not fear, the opposite of fear, the trust of letting someone hold the most vulnerable part of you and knowing they wouldn't use it against you.

She wanted it. All of it. Every second of it.

And then the thought arrived, cold and unwelcome. What if he could see this? What if the crack was open enough that Varen was in there somewhere, watching, making himself known through her own desire as a reminder that she belonged to him. What if this was his hand and not the one she was imagining.

She snapped out of it so hard she hit her head against the wall of the fresher.

She stood there, heart pounding, and pressed at the wall in her mind with every shred of focus she had. Solid. She had not felt the invasion. She had not felt recognition or possession or the particular awareness of being found.

She breathed.

It could not have been him.

She stood there a moment longer with that thought. It had not been him. It had felt nothing like him. It had felt good and she had wanted more of it. She had only panicked because wanting something that much frightened her and she had blamed the easiest possible explanation.

She turned the water off and sat down on the floor.

The cold came up through her immediately. She sat there wet and naked, the cold worked into every pore but she let it, let the numbness come, let it replace the heat of the last several minutes with something simpler and less demanding. She sat there until she was freezing. She did not move.

Three nights later, she tucked Grogu into his hammock with a care she hadn't managed in days, watching his small face settle into sleep, and then climbed into her own bunk.

She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and told herself she needed to work on the wall.

She did not work on the wall.

She lay there in the dark of the sleeping alcove and listened to the ship and felt the loneliness of it, the loneliness of a small ship where someone she wanted was ten meters away. Though, she knew the distance between them was not the ship at all. She had been awake for over a week. She was running on a chemical that was keeping her body functional while her mind quietly came apart, and she was lying in the dark thinking about hands.

Just a small release. Just that. Just enough to take the edge off the tension that had been building for days, physical tension she had nowhere to put, no outlet for, no way to manage. It would help her focus. It would help the wall. It was practical.

She slid her hand under the waistband of her shorts.

The contact was immediate and she had to press her other hand over her mouth against the sound that tried to escape, biting the back of it, holding herself still against the noise of the ship. She let herself picture it, just for a moment, herself on the floor of the cockpit, between his legs, trapped between them. She slid one finger through the slick heat of herself and imagined clawing her way up his thighs toward the front of his flight pants, her fingers finding the fastenings there, and she could feel how badly she wanted it, wanted him, wanted-

She pulled her hand away.

The absence of friction was immediate and sharp as she lay there. Her face burned hot with shame as she considered what she had nearly done, sitting in Mando's ship, just meters from him. She thought about Varen, who had stopped controlling himself. Who had let the pull take him somewhere that had consumed everything it touched. She was not him. She caught herself. She always caught herself.

But she was catching herself later each time, and she knew what that meant.

This is what the darkness feels like, she thought. Not the wanting. The pull. The loss of control over it. She had felt it in combat occasionally, the seduction of unchecked power, the way it simplified everything into immediate need. Desire worked the same way. Desire at this pitch, unmanaged, chemically amplified, running on a body that had forgotten what rest felt like, was the same pull. The darkness found it's footing in her exhaustion. Her master had warned her of that but she had dismissed it. Yet, she was sitting with it now in a way that made her feel very small and very stupid.

She got up and reached for the case.

She had taken two more stims, one more wouldn't make much of a difference now.

The fantasies were getting harder to manage. Not the content. The problem was that they were arriving more frequently and with less warning and she was catching herself later and later, and the catching herself was starting to feel like a technicality rather than actual control. She thought about his hands constantly. His voice. The physical weight of him in the doorway on Nevarro. Her mind had started supplying details she had no business having and she kept finding herself somewhere she had not decided to go.

She knew she was deteriorating because Grogu was barely leaving her side now, which he had never done in the earlier days, and she understood on some level that his alarm was warranted. She also understood that she was not capable of doing anything about it right now except reassure him that it was temporary, and she did that, several times, and he accepted the reassurance with the patience of someone who did not believe it at all.

She was not sure when she went to the cockpit.

She had been in the cargo hold, doing nothing in particular, just existing in the dark of it with the wall and the hum of the ship, when she came up the ladder and found the sleeping alcove pitch black. No light from the viewport. No sound except Grogu's breathing from the hammock, slow and even.

She stood at the top of the ladder for a moment.

Mando had been sleeping in the pilot's chair for days. Tonight the cockpit was empty. He had finally given in. He was probably in his bunk and Grogu was in the hammock beside him, the two of them were right there in the dark. She stood at the top of the ladder and thought about that, about the two of them close and sleeping, about what that looked like, and found she could not go in there.

She could not stand in that doorway either. She could not be that close to something she was not allowed to want and continue to hold herself together.

So she went to the cockpit instead.

She knew it would be empty, but she still found herself being slightly surprised. The stars were real stars, not the streaks of hyperspace, which meant they were between jumps. The pilot's seat was there. She felt the pull again, past the chair that had, up until a few days ago, become hers, and sat in his instead. It was the only place in the whole ship that held the shape of his presence so completely. She pulled her knees up to her chest.

She was going to sit here for a few minutes and then she was going to back to the cargo hold.

She closed her eyes for just a moment.

He had been asleep for maybe three hours.

He came awake all at once, the way he always did, with an immediate accounting of his surroundings. The ship's rhythm was right. Grogu was breathing beside him.

He checked the sleeping alcove. Her bunk above him was empty, which told him nothing. She was always somewhere he wasn't, always gone by the time he got there.

He crossed the galley toward the cockpit to check the nav-console and stopped in the doorway.

She was in his chair.

Completely out. Not managed rest. Not the vigilance she had maintained even in sleep before all of this. Her body had simply taken what it needed without asking, and what it had taken was total, the kind of sleep that printed itself across every line of the face. Her knees were pulled up to her chest and her head was against the side of the seat and the stars moved slowly past the viewport ahead of her.

He stood in the doorway and watched her.

The dark circles were worse than he had registered. He had seen her in passing over the last several days, when they had stopped to restock, occasional flickers of her in the galley, in the cargo hold when he couldn't avoid it, and he had told himself he was keeping a distance she wanted. The circles were the deep bruised kind that came from well past tired. Her face in sleep looked younger than it did awake and there were the dried tracks of tears near the edges of her eyes. Her hands were curled up against her chest, the skin around her nails was raw, picked down to red in the way of someone who had been doing it for days without noticing.

He had not looked at her properly in over a week.

He went to her bunk.

Her jacket was bundled on the mattress. He picked it up and felt the weight of something inside it and reached into the pocket, finding a small metal case. He turned it over and opened it.

Chemical stims. Ten in the case. Four empty syringes.

He leaned against the edge of her bunk and looked at them.

He reached under the pillow, almost on instinct.

Two more.

He sat there with six used shots accounted for and thought about the last nine days. He thought about what she had been doing in the cargo hold at hours that were not cargo hold hours. He thought about the way Grogu had been following her, the anxiety of the kid in the last several days, and he thought about what Grogu noticed that he had decided not to.

He had been angry.

He had been so angry that he had looked at what was in front of him and chosen not to see it.

He collected the casings and took them with the case back down to the cargo hold. He put them behind a crate on a shelf, out of reach, out of sight. Then he went back to the cockpit.

She was still completely under. He crouched in front of the chair and looked at her face in the starlight and thought about picking her up.

She had made it fairly clear she didn't want him anywhere near her. Nine days of making it clear. He was not sure that carrying her to her bunk while she was unconscious was something she would consider acceptable, and he was acutely aware that she was not in a position to tell him either way.

But they were nearly there. He was going to have to make one last jump soon and there was absolutely no way she was comfortable sleeping in that position. He needed to get her to a bunk. That was practical. That was the reasoning.

He crossed to the chair and slid his arms under her carefully, half expecting her to stir, to wake up and curse at him for touching her, to push him off with whatever energy she had left. She didn't move. Not the slightest shift of awareness when he lifted her, no change in her breathing, nothing. Just completely gone, her whole body slack in a way that told him roughly how long she had been fighting this and how thoroughly she had lost.

He didn't know how he had let this happen right in front of him.

He carried her back through the galley and stood by bunks looking at his, which was lower and closer. He thought about setting her down there. He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to and then lifted her up into her own bunk instead. He pulled her blanket over her.

She still did not stir.

He went back to the cockpit and sat down in his chair, which was warm from her, and started the sequence for the final jump toward Coruscant. He had been heading there for days. It was where Ward's contact was. It was where the next job was. It was also, he recognised, the place where all of this had started, the planet where she had found him, where Grogu had reached for her in the rain, where he had offered her temporary transport in a tone designed to communicate that temporary was the operative word.

He thought about the stims he had found.

He had told himself that she simply preferred space right now, that the silence was what she needed and he was giving it to her. He had told himself a version of events that was convenient for his anger and he had sustained it for nine days while she quietly came apart.

The anger was still there. He wanted to be clear about that, at least to himself. He was still furious. He had spent the last few days furious about the escape attempt, about her sitting in that cockpit and looking at him and telling him she was going, about the arrogance of deciding that leaving was the right call and not giving him any say in it. He had thought about it constantly in the hours alone in the cockpit, had turned it over and found new angles to be angry from, had told himself that she had no right, that she had built something here and then tried to take herself out of it without asking, that Grogu had cried for two hours after they left Nevarro and that was on her. But then she had been lingering in the dark corners of their ship, fighting sleep for days, for reasons he could not begin to fathom.

He thought about the comfortable silence they had built, her coming into the cockpit, sitting in the chair behind him. How neither of them had to say anything for the ship to feel right. He thought about the silence since Nevarro, which was nothing like that silence. He had liked silence. He had lived in silence for years before the Crest became something more than his ship, and he had not understood until now the difference between chosen quiet and the wrong texture of a space that should have sound in it and didn't.

Right now, he wanted her to come into the cockpit and say something infuriating. He wanted her to sit in the co-pilot's seat and argue with him about something that didn't matter and he would say something back and they would be terrible to each other for a few minutes and then it would be over. He wanted her to walk past the galley in those shorts and steal his caf without asking.

He wanted her to do literally anything except whatever she had been doing in the cargo hold for nine days.

Coruscant came toward them through the stars.

He thought about what she had said to him, that she couldn't let them get hurt, that she had to go before something worse happened. He thought about the specific stubbornness of a woman who would rather destroy herself quietly than ask anyone for help, and thought about how that was not so different from a man who had spent years alone in a ship convincing himself that solitude was a preference rather than a default.

He needed her to be alright.

That was the most honest version of what he was feeling. Not the anger, which was still there and was real. Not the other thing, which was also there and was also real and was going to have to wait for a moment when things were less immediately urgent. He just needed her to be alright. He needed her to sleep and then wake up and come into the cockpit and be the person who always managed to make him smile, though he would never let her know.

He set the jump.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold @solomonssimp

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 12

Once again, I have nothing much to say... this is a long one and I love it but oof I think its time for angsty hours.

In other news, I am thinking about posting a Loki one shot that has been sitting in my notes app for at least 3 years... I'm not sure if I'm ready for that but lmk if any of you would be into that.

As always, I truly appreciate all the love from the bottom of my heart and love to engage with you guys 🩷🩷 anyways, enjoy part 12 I will see you guys again soon!! Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Cinnamon Girl – Lana Del Rey

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 8k

Pain was the first thing she registered.

Not sharp. Not the white-hot immediacy she remembered from the sand, the kind that had taken her legs out from under her before she'd had time to understand what happened. This was lower. Duller. A continuous presence settled deep into her right side like something that had decided to stay, not demanding attention so much as simply occupying the space, making itself known every time she breathed too deeply or shifted or tried to remember where she was.

She kept her eyes closed.

There was something she needed. She couldn't name it precisely, couldn't line up the words in her head, but the feeling was there before the thought was, a kind of reaching, the particular pull of someone who has woken disoriented and needs one specific thing in order to know that everything else is going to be alright. Not the location. Not the time. Not even the extent of the damage to her right side, which she was dimly aware of in a way she wasn't fully examining yet.

Him.

She needed to know he was okay. That was all. If she could just confirm that, the rest of it could wait. The pain could wait. The questions could wait.

"Mando."

It came out rougher than she intended, barely a word, her throat dry and tight. She reached for him without opening her eyes, her hand moving across whatever surface she was lying on until it found something warm. Skin. Not the leather of his glove, not the beskar of his armour, just warm bare skin, and she felt the fingers close around hers immediately.

Oh.

She didn't examine that. She wasn't going to examine that right now. She just held on and then, without fully deciding to, drew his hand up toward her chest and held it there, claiming it with both hands because she needed the contact and she was not presently capable of being sensible about that. She felt his pulse against her fingers or maybe she felt her own, it was difficult to tell, and the warmth of him moved through her in a way that made the ache in her side recede slightly.

His voice came through the modulator somewhere close. Low and rough and careful. She could hear the shape of the words, knew he was asking her something, but her brain was running somewhere behind the rest of her and she couldn't quite close the gap between hearing and processing. She let the sound of him wash over her instead and held his hand tighter.

She opened her eyes.

The ceiling above her was unfamiliar. Clay or stone, warm in a light that she could be sure it wasn't the Crest's lighting, coming from somewhere to her right through a window she couldn't quite see from where she was lying. She blinked at it, trying to locate herself, and then turned her head.

He was right there on her side, the helmet angled down toward her, the dark visor reflecting back at her, and for a moment she just looked at him, at the familiar weight of the beskar and the tilt of the helmet and the bare hand she was still holding.

She had questions. For starters, where were they? How long had she been out? What had happened after she went down on the sand? She knew he was still talking, could feel the low vibration of the modulator, but her brain was still catching up and the words kept arriving slightly after she needed them. She lay there and looked at him and let the questions line up for later.

He told her to close her eyes.

She wanted to argue. She had been unconscious, or close enough to it, for what felt like a very long time, and she was awake now, and there was a list of things she needed to establish before she went back under. She opened her mouth, ready to protest.

"Close your eyes."

Lower this time. Slower. Each word placed down with a deliberate weight, like he had decided this was not a negotiation and was communicating that fact with the minimum number of syllables required.

Something in her folded completely. She shut her eyes.

She felt him shift. The surface beside her dipped slightly as his weight redistributed somewhere nearby, and she was still working out what that meant when she felt it.

His lips against her forehead.

She stopped breathing.

He had his helmet off. That was the first coherent thought. If she could feel his lips against her skin then the helmet was off, which meant his face was right there, which meant if she opened her eyes right now she would see him. She kept them screwed shut with everything she had.

She could feel the scruff of his jaw against her skin. Light but definite, the roughness of someone who had not slept or shaved in several days, and the contrast between that and the gentleness of his lips was doing something to her that she was completely unprepared for. In that moment she didn't want to be thinking about why or what this meant. Although she knew what she wanted it to mean. That was the problem.

She wanted it so badly that she couldn't trust herself to read it correctly, and so she held still and said nothing and let it be whatever it was going to be. She wanted it to be more than she was sure it was and that feeling of desire settled like a heavy pit in her stomach, making it difficult to hold still.

She stayed still anyway, eyes shut, not breathing, holding herself completely motionless because she understood instinctively that if she moved, if she did anything at all to acknowledge what was happening, it would stop, and she was not ready for it to stop. She felt him linger. Felt the warmth of his breath against her skin. And then felt him begin to pull back, slow, and then the movement changed, redirected, and for one fraction of a second she felt the ghost of his lips against hers, barely there, barely anything, the softest possible contact, less pressure than a breath.

She wanted to lean into it. To close the distance herself and take what she wanted from him, but he was already gone before she could decide anything, the contact dissolving before she'd fully registered it.

His hand withdrew from hers at the same moment and she felt the loss of both simultaneously, a specific cold absence where warmth had been, and she made a sound before she could stop herself, a soft involuntary protest that escaped before she had the chance to be embarrassed about it. His hand found her hair then, moving slowly, brushing it back from her face, and she felt his presence still close even without the contact and forced herself to breathe.

She lay there with her eyes closed and thought, did that happen? She genuinely was not sure. She had been in and out of consciousness, had been operating somewhere below full cognitive function for an indeterminate number of hours. The forehead was real. She was certain the forehead was real. The rest of it she was less sure about. She was not going to open her eyes to find out because if she opened them and found the helmet back on it would mean she had imagined it, that she was so desperate for him that her own mind was inventing things, and she was not ready to find out that about herself yet.

She felt the mattress dip further on her right side. Felt his warmth settle close. Then her hand was found again in the dark, taken carefully, and held.

She heard the damned modulator.

There it was. Helmet on. She turned the moment over once in her mind, filed it under things she was going to spend a significant amount of time on later, and opened her eyes.

He was sitting close, the helmet angled slightly down in the way it did when he was watching her carefully without wanting her to know he was watching her carefully. Grogu was curled against her left side, deeply asleep, a small warm weight she hadn't fully registered until now.

She looked at Mando for a long time.

She didn't know what to say. She wasn't sure there was anything to say. She was in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place with his hand in hers and the very recent memory of what may or may not have been the softest possible brush of his lips against hers, and she had approximately no framework for any of it. All she knew with any certainty was that if this was how he behaved when she was hurt, some deeply irresponsible part of her wanted to be hurt again. And again. And again.

She tightened her grip on his hand. Held it. Said, with her grip, what she couldn't manage with words: don't you dare take this away from me again.

She didn't fully register what he said after that. Her brain was slow and dulled and what she was most aware of was the feeling of his thumb beginning to move, slow circles on the back of her hand, and that sensation, that small specific warmth, pulled her back down before she could do anything about it.

The second time she woke it was different.

Sharper. More immediate. Light coming in through a window she didn't recognise, painting a warm stripe across an unfamiliar ceiling. She lay still for a moment and took stock. Pain in her right side, present but manageable, the deep ache of healing rather than damage. Grogu beside her, sitting upright, ears at full alert, his back to her and his attention fixed on the door with the focused watchfulness of someone who had appointed himself to a task.

Her hand was still in Mando's.

She looked over at him. He was still on the edge of the bed, helmet tilted back against the headboard, his one free arm dropped from its usual held position across his chest. She had seen him sleep before, once, on the floor of the Crest with his back against the wall, but she had never had a chance like this to actually watch him. The stillness of it was different when he was genuinely under, the particular slack quality of someone who had pushed well past the point where discipline could keep him upright. He had to have been completely spent to have gone out sitting up like this. She let him be.

She reached out her other hand and patted the space between Grogu's ears.

He turned immediately. Large dark eyes full of an emotion she had no trouble reading, relief and anxiety mixed together in a way that made him look simultaneously very old and very young, and he made a sound that rose at the end like a question.

"I'm fine," she said quietly. "I promise."

He looked at her with the expression that meant he was reserving judgment.

"I'm fine, Grogu."

She pushed herself up slowly, aware of the pull in her right side, and looked down at herself. She was expecting the wound. She was braced for it, had already prepared herself for the particular unpleasantness of blast damage up close, and instead she found smooth skin beneath the burnt and torn edges of her undershirt.

She stared.

She pressed her fingers carefully to her side, finding only the normal warmth of intact skin. No wound. No damage. The shirt was evidence that something had happened, the fabric scorched and gone at the edges, but beneath it her skin was simply herself again, uninterrupted, as though the last twelve hours had rearranged themselves.

"What?" she asked aloud, to no one in particular.

Grogu extended his three-fingered hand and pressed it lightly against the uninjured skin at her side, and looked up at her with an expression that contained, unmistakably, a small amount of pride.

She looked at him. Looked at her side. Looked back at him.

"You did this?"

He nodded, once, with great dignity.

She had heard of it. She had read about it in texts that treated the ability as largely theoretical, the kind of passage that prefaced itself with reports of extremely powerful Jedi under extraordinary circumstances. She had never seen it. Had certainly never expected to be lying in an unfamiliar bed with the evidence of it pressed gently under her own fingertips, given to her by a fifty-year-old child in tiny beskar plating who had apparently decided that this fell within his area of responsibility.

"You are so special," she said softly. "Do you know that?"

Grogu's ears lifted. He pressed his face against her cheek and she held him there and felt, along the back of her throat, the particular warning pressure of tears she was not going to allow right now.

"Were you standing guard?" she asked.

He pulled back and nodded, puffing his chest slightly.

"So, so, special." she said. "Your dad will be very proud."

She looked around properly for the first time. The room was small and warm, the walls built from something that looked like compressed clay or mud, thick enough to hold the heat of the previous day. There were two small windows, one looking out onto a stretch of ground she couldn't quite see past, and a door. The furniture was sparse but chosen, the kind of space that had been put together by someone who understood utility and had not thought much about comfort but had somehow accidentally achieved it anyway.

She turned toward the window closest to her and looked out.

Lava fields. The long slow orange glow of them, distant but unmistakable, stretching toward a horizon that was already warm with early light.

"Nevarro," said the modulator behind her.

She turned. Mando was awake, head no longer against the headboard, helmet oriented toward her, the particular alertness of someone who had gone from sleep to full attention without any visible intermediate state.

"Are you alright?" he asked. "How's the pain?"

"I'm okay," she said. "I'm good." She looked at him for a moment. He looked back, or she assumed he did. "I didn't know Nevarro had gotten a facelift. I only knew it as a crime haven."

"It's changed."

"Clearly." She looked around the room again. "Is this an inn or something?"

Grogu babbled. Loudly and with considerable conviction, gesturing around the room with both arms in a way that conveyed ownership so clearly she didn't actually need a translation.

"This is ours," Mando said. "Mine and his. The high magistrate of Nevarro gifted it to us after we helped him with some pest control problems he was having."

She turned that over.

Mando and Grogu had a house. Not just the Crest, which she had understood as their home in the way that ships became homes, built up from routine and accumulated evidence of living. This was something else. Clay walls and a real bed and a window that looked out onto the same view every morning, a place that existed independently of whether they were in it, a place that would be there when they came back.

She tried to place herself as a natural part of that picture and found it required more effort than she wanted it to. Not because the cottage felt wrong but because she was aware, for the first time in a long time, that she was a guest with them. They had brought her to their home. That was different from being on the Crest, which moved, which was a ship, which could be anywhere. This place was specific and it was theirs and she was in it and she hadn't been asked.

She looked at Grogu, who was watching her with the expression of someone who had heard all of that and disagreed with it completely.

"Show me around then," she said.

Grogu was off the bed before she had finished the sentence, landing with a soft thud and immediately beginning to narrate something in his own language, gesturing for her to follow. She pushed herself carefully to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over, moving slowly, aware of the residual ache in her side that told her Grogu's healing had done what it could but that the deeper tissue would take its own time.

Mando was around the bed before she had fully stood, not touching, just present, positioned close enough that she could reach him if she needed to. She tried to move past him toward the door and found he didn't move. A wall of beskar between her and the rest of the cottage, visor angled down toward her.

His ungloved hand came up, hovering over her right side without making contact.

"It's okay," she said. "It doesn't hurt."

The visor remained on her. She couldn't read it. She had spent weeks trying, learning, to read him through posture and tone and the angle of the helmet and the quality of his silences, and right now all of those things were telling her very little except that he wasn't moving.

He was close. Close enough that if she shifted her weight even an inch toward him they would be touching, and she was very aware of that inch and of the specific quality of wanting to close it, and of the warm bare skin of his hand hovering near her waist.

She had decided she was not going to be the first to move away. She had made that decision clearly and was keeping it, even though she could see her own face reflected in the dark surface of his visor and the expression on it was frankly humiliating. All of that wanting, right there, available for inspection. She could only hope that from his side it didn't carry.

He didn't speak.

She didn't move.

At some point, without deciding to, she leaned. Just slightly. She only became aware of it when she felt his chestplate against her and realised they were breathing in the same rhythm, her chest rising and falling against the beskar in a way she couldn't quite believe she had arrived at without noticing. Maybe they were both being embarrassing. Maybe neither of them was going to say anything about it. That seemed acceptable.

His hand made contact. The bare skin of his palm settling against the curve of her waist, careful, the deliberate gentleness of someone who was very aware of what was beneath his hand and was being precise about it. She felt her eyes close. She felt something pull tight low in her chest and stood very still and willed her face to do something reasonable.

She turned her head and rested her temple against his chestplate.

His other hand came up. Found the side of her head. Held it there, fingers moving slowly, and she felt him draw her fractionally closer, his arm coming around her back, and she brought one arm up to rest against his chest and curved the other around his back and they stood in the doorway of his bedroom in the morning light of Nevarro and held each other.

And something in her let go.

She was crying before she understood it was happening, the kind that came from somewhere past conscious decision, and she pressed her face against his chestplate and let it happen. She wasn't even sure what it was about exactly. The wound and the fear and the two days on that planet thinking she had finally found something worth staying for. Every version of herself that had never had anywhere like this to fall apart in, any person steady enough to fall apart on. She had been carrying herself very carefully for a very long time and for the space of this moment she didn't have to.

He held her. Not awkwardly, not tentatively, not the way people held you when they weren't sure what to do with you. Like he had decided this was what was required and was doing it completely, his arms around her, the beskar solid and immovable, and she shook against him and let the exhaustion and the relief and the grief of it move through her until it had gone somewhere manageable.

She wasn't sure how long they stood there. Long enough that Grogu, who had waited in the doorway with the patience of someone confident this would resolve itself, eventually made a small impatient sound.

She pulled back and wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked up at the helmet.

He said it then. Low, through the modulator.

"I'm sorry."

She stared at him.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"Stop," she said. "Stop saying that."

"I should have never put you in that position."

"No." She looked up at him. "Stop. You can't apologise for that. I'm okay. I'm alive and I'm standing here and that's because of you, because of both of you." Her throat was still tighter than she wanted it to be. "You came back for me."

Something moved in the stillness of him.

"That question you asked last night," he said. "About why I didn't leave."

"I know."

"Without a doubt, the stupidest question I've ever been asked."

"I know," she said again, softer. "I know."

He stopped. Started to say something else and stopped again. She watched him hold something back and decided not to push, and thought about the thing she had almost said by the fire, the thing she had been trying to find words for, and understood that this wasn't the moment for that either. There was too much else still sitting between them, too many things that needed room before she could add one more.

She felt something wrap around her ankle.

She looked down to find Grogu, who had apparently concluded that the adults had been standing in the doorway long enough and had taken direct action. He looked up at her with enormous eyes and the expression of someone who had not come this far to be ignored.

She laughed, which hurt slightly, and bent carefully to pick him up. He settled against her immediately, tucking himself against her shoulder, tiny claws in the fabric of her undershirt. She straightened and found Mando still there, watching them, the helmet at an angle she had come to associate with him registering something he wasn't going to say out loud.

She thought about it again before she finally came to the conclusion that whatever this is, is home. Not Nevarro specifically. Not the clay walls or the lava fields or the sparse furniture. This. The three of them standing in the doorway in the early light with Grogu's claws in her shirt and Mando's hand resting on the small of her back.

The day had the quality of something settling back into itself.

They ate on the small covered porch that looked out toward the cooled lava fields, the light coming in long and pale across the stone, and Grogu made his feelings about the food extremely clear in a way that suggested he had opinions about the cottage kitchen that he had been waiting for an opportunity to express.

She felt the normalcy coming back in pieces. The particular ease that had built up between them over months, the rhythms of conversation and silence, the way Grogu inserted himself into both without warning, the specific way Mando's voice shifted when he was being dry about something and trying not to let it show. She hadn't realised how completely she'd absorbed those patterns until she felt them coming back and understood she had been afraid, in some part of herself she hadn't been paying attention to, that she had lost them.

There was something different about him today, though. She noticed it during the tour of the cottage, the way he stayed slightly closer than necessary, the way she caught him watching her more than once and he didn't look away when she caught him. She didn't say anything about it. Neither did he. But the awareness of it sat with her through the morning, warm and slightly unsteady, like something that hadn't decided yet what it was going to become.

Grogu showed her the outside in the afternoon, trotting ahead and narrating with great enthusiasm about things she couldn't fully translate. She was watching him round the corner of the cottage when she saw it, carved into the exterior wall beside the door. A mudhorn. Stylised, deliberate, the same signet she had seen on Mando's shoulder plate from the first day in the alley on Coruscant, the same one on Grogu's tiny circular chest piece. She stopped and looked at it.

She didn't know enough about Mandalorian culture to understand what that meant exactly. She looked at it for a long moment and then at Grogu, who had come back to see what she was looking at, and then at the cottage itself.

She filed it away without asking. That question was for another time.

He showed her the blurrgs after that.

She stood at the fence and looked at them for a long moment. They looked back at her with the profound equanimity of creatures that had made their peace with whatever the galaxy threw at them.

"They're terrifying," she said.

"They're gentle."

"They defy the laws of physics, it's creepy."

"You faced ten dark troopers no problem, but these are creepy?"

"Yes and I got shot, so my record of success is unclear." She looked sideways at him. "How does one acquire blurrgs."

"Carefully."

She was still looking at the blurrgs when she noticed the ship.

It was parked around the side of the cottage, partially visible past the corner of the porch. Sleek and unmistakably stylish, an N1 starfighter that had clearly been worked on extensively, modifications built into it with the same care and intention she had come to recognise in everything he touched.

"Is that yours?"

"Yes."

She looked at it properly. It was beautiful, actually. Clean lines and obvious power, the kind of ship that looked like it knew exactly what it was. "I didn't know you had a starfighter."

"Most people don't."

She glanced at him. "It's impressive."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, in a tone that was carefully neutral, "It's fast."

"Was that a part of some kind of mid life crisis?"

She heard it then, a sound through the modulator that was unmistakably a laugh, surprised out of him before he could prevent it. It lasted half a second and then was gone and he looked back out at the blurrgs with complete composure.

"Maybe," he said.

She stared at his profile and felt absurdly pleased with herself.

Evening came slowly on Nevarro.

The light faded in long grey gradients, the lava fields going from dull orange to something cooler and quieter as the dark came in, and she sat on the porch step and watched it happen and thought about nothing in particular, which was a relief after the previous day's chaos.

Mando sat beside her. Not close enough to touch, but close. Grogu was between them in the particular way he arranged himself when he wanted to be sure of everyone's location, leaning against her leg and holding onto the edge of Mando's cape with three fingers.

They were quiet. The good kind.

When Mando finally said she should take the bed, she looked at him and felt her stomach drop in a way she didn't know what to do with.

She wanted to say stay. She had a very clear picture of herself saying it, direct and simple, stay, and she understood with complete certainty that if she said it he would. She had the word and she had the certainty and she could not make herself say it out loud, because last night she had been hurt and delirious and reaching for him without the full use of her higher functions, and tonight she was none of those things, and asking him to stay tonight meant something different and she couldn't quite get from wanting it to saying it.

She was still working up to it when Grogu made his position known.

The child wrapped both hands around Mando's wrist with the finality of someone who had considered his options and reached a conclusion, and looked up at him with an expression that communicated very simply that he was not accepting this particular goodnight.

She looked at Grogu.

Then back at Mando.

"Stay," she said. Quiet. Not quite looking at him.

A pause.

Then the sound of him settling back down.

She exhaled.

She changed in the fresher and came back to find Mando sitting on the far side of the bed with his back straight and his helmet very much on and the particular quality of stillness of someone who had decided to remain alert. She looked at him from the doorway, in her sleep clothes, and understood immediately that he didn't want to be caught off guard again. She couldn't blame him for that.

"Why don't you take the armour off?" she said. "Get some real sleep."

He said nothing for a moment.

"Yeah," he said, and the dryness of it came through the modulator clearly. "You'd like that."

She went very still for a second. The implication settled over her with the specific warmth of someone realising they had been observed without knowing it, that the moment the other night when she had absolutely not been staring had apparently been noted and saved for exactly this occasion.

The heat that went to her face was immediate and complete. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling with great focus and made no comment whatsoever.

She was still looking at the ceiling when she heard him begin to remove the armour.

She kept her eyes up. She was not going to look. She had made a decision to not look and she was going to respect that decision, and the sounds of the beskar being placed carefully piece by piece at the bedside were not her business and she was focusing on a particularly interesting part of the ceiling near the window.

The mattress dipped. She felt the warmth of him settle beside her, a different warmth than the beskar, closer and less armoured, and she was still looking at the ceiling and she was absolutely fine.

Grogu was between them, already building himself a small nest with the corner of the blanket. The bed was not large, but Grogu was very small, and the dimensions worked, mostly.

She turned on her side, away from him. Away from the ceiling that had been so interesting. The lava fields were doing something quiet and orange beyond the window, and she watched them and let her breathing settle and told herself she was going to sleep very well and not think about anything and certainly not about the arm she could feel behind her holding onto Grogu or the warmth of him without the beskar between them.

She closed her eyes.

The sand was dark and cold.

She was back on it before she understood she was there, the volcanic ground cold beneath her feet, the lake glassy and still and enormous ahead of her. The fire was behind her, dead, only a faint glow left in the hollow they had dug for it. The stars were as she remembered them, impossibly close.

Then the pain came back.

All at once and with complete fidelity, the white-hot impact of it slamming through her right side, taking her legs, and she was on the ground with her cheek against the black sand and the stars wheeling overhead, and her connection to the Force cracked like something that had been pressurised too long, and she felt him.

Not physically. Not footsteps or a presence she could locate in space. Something older than that. The force bond. She had not let herself think about it in a long time, had not let herself think about him by name or reach toward that connection in any direction, because a force bond was not a wall you could build, it was a tether, and the only thing she had managed was to hold it still, keep herself completely quiet on her end so there was nothing to feel.

Varen.

The name surfaced in her mind without permission, the way things did when you had been keeping them down too long and something broke the surface tension. She felt it the moment she thought it, the old shape of the connection, frayed and damaged on her side but not dead, and on his side it pulsed with something she recognised even now. He had felt her. The weakness had cracked the door and he had been there, already waiting, and she had handed him a location she hadn't meant to give.

Recognition. Possession. Awareness.

She woke up sweating.

Her eyes were open and she was staring at the Nevarro ceiling and her heart was going at a pace that was not conducive to the healing wound in her side, and Mando's voice was coming from very close beside her, asking what was wrong, was it the pain, was she alright.

"I'm fine," she said. The words came out thinner than she intended.

She turned toward the window.

The lava fields were outside, indifferent and eternal, and she lay there and looked at them and let her mind do what her mind was going to do regardless.

He had found her. Not physically. Not yet. But the crack in her defences that the wound had opened had let him through, and whatever he had seen in that moment she had no way of knowing. She didn't know if he had seen enough to locate her specifically. She didn't know if he had seen Mando or Grogu. She didn't know how much of the last several weeks he might have glimpsed through the broken door before she went under.

The bond had broken when she left him. She had felt it go when the choke released and she fell. She had been so certain it was severed on both sides. But the fact that he had been able to reach her through her mind meant she had been wrong, or that she had been holding the door so hard for so long that she had simply stopped being able to feel his side of it. The bond wasn't gone. It was just quiet on his end until she gave him an opening.

She thought about what he would make of Mando.

She knew him. Not the person he was now, not entirely, but she knew the shape of him well enough. He had made her staying about love for a long time, had told her she was his in a voice that had once been soft and had eventually become something else.

She thought about the fire and the dark and the way she had been leaning toward Mando without noticing it, the thing she had almost said, the two days that had felt like the closest thing to peace she had experienced in years. She thought about how that must look, seen through a crack in a door she hadn't meant to leave open. Of all the things for him to find.

She thought about the dark trooper that had broken away from the fight. Not toward her. Toward the Crest. Towards Grogu. It was possible it had nothing to do with Varen, that the dark troopers had come for whoever had tampered with their monitoring systems. She wasn't certain he was responsible. But it didn't matter whether he had sent them or not, because her mind had given him something far more dangerous than a location. He knew she wasn't alone. He knew she was with people she had come to care about. And she had no idea what he would do with that.

She thought about what he would do to Mando if he found them together and understood what Mando was to her.

She lay there in the dark and felt the tears come, and did not try to stop them because she was alone and the two people in this bed beside her were asleep and she was allowed this much. She thought about the day they had. The blurrgs and the porch and the grey evening light and how easy it had been, how frighteningly easy, to imagine the next day and the one after it and the one after that, all of them here, all of them like this.

She had been ready to commit to that. Just this morning, waking up in this bed with his hand still in hers and Grogu standing guard, she had thought again that this was it. This is what she wanted. For as long as they'd have her.

She thought about the vow. About what it protected and what it didn't. The vow was between the two of them. It said nothing about anyone else. Nothing about a Mandalorian bounty hunter who had made the fundamental error of being kind to her, who had let her onto his ship and into his home and into whatever the thing was that existed between the three of them now. Mando could become a lesson. Mando could become the clearest possible message about what happened to the people she chose over Varen.

She could not let that happen.

She lay very still for another minute, just breathing, just being here in the dark with the two of them close. She let herself have that minute.

Then she pushed the blanket back and sat up.

"Do you need something?" Mando's voice, immediately, low and quiet.

She closed her eyes briefly.

"Just water," she said. "Go back to sleep."

She got up slowly, careful of her right side, and picked up the blanket from the edge of the bed. Her blanket. She wrapped it around her shoulders and walked out of the bedroom.

The living room of the cottage was dark. Small, simply furnished, with a narrow window looking out toward the back of the property where the N1 was parked. She could see the tip of one wing from here. She stood in the dark and looked at it and let the sobs come because they were going to come regardless and she might as well have them now while she still had time.

They came silently, the kind that moved through the whole body without making sound, the kind that required more effort than crying out loud because every part of her was engaged in doing it quietly. She stood in the living room of the house that Mando and Grogu had been given for their own and pressed her fist against her mouth and shook and let the grief of it move through her.

Then she wiped her face.

She had no bag, no datapad, nothing from the Crest. Her lightsaber was in the bedroom and she couldn't go back for it. That was fine. She wasn't going to fight him. That was the point. She was going to go to him, or let him come to her, and she was going to ask him to release her from this, from the running and the fear, because there was still something in him that had once loved her, and maybe that something would understand that she was asking to be free even if she couldn't ask to be loved.

And if it didn't, then at least he would have only her and not them.

The thought arrived without preamble, just there, plain and obvious. The N1 was fast, faster than the Crest surely, and she could have a significant head start before Mando even got to the cockpit. If she could get off the ground, she could get far enough away that he would have no way of catching up with her on the Razor Crest.

She took the blanket tighter around her shoulders and walked to the front door and opened it very, very slowly. 

She made her way around the cottage. The N1 was smaller than she expected it to be from the side, sleeker, and up close in the dark it was clearly something that had been worked on with care, each modification considered and precise.

She didn't let herself think about that for too long.

She used the Force to find the hatch release and felt it click open, and she jumped, which was a mistake, the impact of landing in the seat sending a sharp protest through her right side that she absorbed by breathing through it very slowly, both hands clenched tight, not moving until it passed.

Then she looked at the controls.

She had said to herself that she could fly this thing. She had based that belief on the hours she had spent in Naboo fighters. But that was before she realised tha someone had clearly gone through every system and replaced approximately half of them with something she didn't recognise, and the console in front of her had the bones of a standard N1 under a layer of modifications so extensive that she couldn't tell which switches still did what they had been built to do.

She started from the left and worked right, and somewhere around the fourth switch the flight engines caught, and she felt the vibration of them move up through the seat.

She could not disengage the landing locks.

She found them on the third pass through the controls, identified the right switch by process of elimination, pressed it, and absolutely nothing happened. She tried three more options. Nothing. She tried overriding through the ignition sequence, which sometimes worked on stubborn systems, and was met with a soft cheerful rejection sound from the console that was somehow worse than nothing.

The ship was coded to Mando's vambrace. She had suspected it. She was now sitting in the dark on Nevarro with the flight engines running and the landing locks engaged and a growing awareness that she had not been as quiet as she'd hoped.

The sound of footsteps on stone.

She looked up to see him coming around the corner of the cottage, no armour, a blaster in his hand, helmet on because of course it was, and he stopped when he saw her and for one moment just stood there.

"Where are you going?" No anger, just genuine confusion.

She turned back to the controls ignoring him entirely.

"Why are you doing this." Not a question. Flatter than that, the voice of someone who was frightened and was processing it as something else.

"I have to," she said. She could hear herself, ragged and wet, completely undermining any dignity the situation might have had. "I can't stay here, I can't keep putting you at risk. I have to go."

"You don't know it was him."

"It doesn't matter," she said. "The next time it will be and I can't, I won't let you get hurt because of me, I won't let Grogu get hurt,"

"Get out of the ship."

She found another switch. Pressed it. The landing locks remained completely unmoved.

"I can't." She was trying everything now, both hands moving across the controls, methodical, desperate, she had to be able to do this, she had to. "You have to let me go, you don't understand what he's like, you don't understand what he would do to you if he found us together,"

"Then let me handle it."

"You can't handle this."

"I'll shoot the fuselage," he said, and his voice had gone somewhere colder than she'd heard it, the specific flatness of someone who had made a decision.

She laughed. It came out wrong, wet and broken, but it was there. "No you won't," she said. "You won't because you won't risk me getting hurt."

Silence.

"Get out of the ship." Quieter this time. The cold still there but something else underneath it, something that cost him.

She shook her head. Her hands were still moving over the controls. She wanted to, with every fibre of her being she wanted to abandon this foolish plan and return to bed with them. To keep waking up to them and to have a lifetime of days like the last few had been.

She wanted to scream at him that she wanted nothing more than to stay, but couldn't quite put the words together.

"I can't being the reason something terrible happens to you, to the kid, I have to be alone when he finds me, I have to go."

"Fine," he said.

She stopped.

"You want to go." His voice had changed again, gone somewhere very quiet and very deliberate. "Then go. But then, I'll find you."

The rage came so fast it startled her.

"Don't you dare," she said. "Don't you dare say that to me. I have one man tracking me across the galaxy and I will not have another one threatening to hunt me down."

"Then don't make me."

She slammed both hands down on the thruster, she felt the landing locks disengage beneath her. The engines screamed but the ship stayed exactly where it was.

She tried again. And again. She hit the controls with the flat of her hand and yelled something that wasn't a word and tried one more time and felt the ship strain against itself and go nowhere, and then she stopped. Dropped her hands. Sat there, accepting the damned ship was not about to go anywhere.

She looked out.

Grogu was standing in the doorway of the cottage in the early dark, three fingers raised in the concentration she recognised, the same focused stillness she had watched him practice with volcanic glass on a planet that felt very far away now. The N1 was not going anywhere. Grogu had decided, and the N1 had no choice.

She put her face in her hands.

She heard Mando climb up onto the wing. Heard the hatch open. She didn't look up.

"Get out." His voice had gone flat and final, all the fight gone out of it, something quieter underneath that was harder to hear than the anger.

She got out.

He helped her down from the wing and set her on the ground beside Grogu, his hands lingering for half a second as though checking she was steady before he let go.

She crouched down to the child's level and looked at him without saying anything. Grogu looked back at her. No pride in him this time, no satisfaction at having won. Just the large-eyed solemn attention of someone who had understood the stakes and made his choice.

Mando was still there, looking at them both. "We're leaving," he said. "Before you get any more bright ideas. Grogu, stay with her."

He went inside.

She sat down on the stone step of the cottage and wrapped the blanket around herself and looked at the N1 and felt the shame of it settle over her, heavy and particular. She had failed. She had also been stopped, which was different from failing, but the result and the sinking feeling was the same either way.

Mando came back out a few minutes later with their things, moving past her toward the Crest without stopping.

"You should have let me go," she said quietly.

He paused, but didn't turn around.

"I did," he said. "Take it up with him."

He kept walking.

She pulled the blanket tighter and said nothing else.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 11

EXCITED TO SEE WHAT YOU GUYS THINK ABOUT THIS ONE. I quite literally dropped everything and spent nearly the whole day at work writing this. Very irresponsible I know but it had to be done. I really appreciate the support and all your reblogs everyone! Has truly been so amazing to get back into writing after an almost 5 year long gap. The last time I was writing consistently was for a bts fanfic page on ig during covid and all my old fics on ao3 have been orphaned, my wattpad is deactivated. Tumblr feels like the most comfortable place I've ever written on and i love it.

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Soundtrack: Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby – Cigarettes After Sex

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 5.2k

She went down and the world narrowed to a single point.

He was across the sand before the last trooper had finished falling, both blasters still out, already scanning the perimeter before his boots hit the ground beside her. All ten down. No movement. The volcanic sand around them was still, the lake behind it stiller, and the only sound was the distant settling of cooling metal.

He dropped to one knee.

She was on her side, one hand still loosely around the lightsaber hilt even now, the blade long since extinguished. He got a hand under her shoulder and turned her carefully onto her back and felt the specific quality of dread that came with seeing someone he needed to be fine lying very still in the dark.

"Hey." His voice came out rougher than he intended. "Stay with me."

She didn't answer.

He pulled his glove off and pressed two fingers to the side of her neck and found her pulse, fast and shallow but there, and something in his chest unlocked just enough to let him breathe. The wound was on her right side, and it was bad. Not unsurvivable, he had seen worse and he had survived worse, but bad enough that every second they stayed here was a second they couldn't afford.

He slid one arm back beneath her shoulders and the other behind her knees and lifted her carefully from the sand. She made a small sound at the movement.

Din immediately adjusted his grip, trying to keep the pressure off her injured side as much as possible. It didn't feel like enough. Nothing about this felt like enough.

The Crest sat only a short distance away across the black volcanic sand, ramp still lowered, but it felt further carrying her.

He kept one eye on the dark around them as he moved, blasters holstered now, every instinct split between watching for another threat and checking that she was still breathing.

Grogu was at the top of the ramp. Din had told him to stay in the cockpit, and the kid had apparently compromised, stationing himself at the very edge of the ramp where he could see everything and technically still be on the ship. He knew better than to come down onto the sand when he had been told not to leave the ship. But the fear was obvious in his large dark eyes, tracking every step Din took across the volcanic ground toward him.

Din carried her up and past him without stopping.

He got her up the ladder and into his bunk and crouched beside it, looking at her properly for the first time since she'd gone down.

She had been fighting in her undershirt. He'd had time to get back to the ship and put on his armour. She had stood her ground in nothing but her undershirt, trousers and boots, no armour, no cover, just herself and the saber.

The priority was getting off the planet. He told Grogu to stay with her, went to the cockpit, and got them off the ground. He pushed the Crest hard through the upper atmosphere and kept his eyes on the scanner until the planet's surface had become a dark shape beneath them and there was nothing following them out of orbit. Then he set a rough holding course and went back.

Grogu had not moved from the bunk. Din crouched beside her and looked at the wound properly for the first time. The fabric was scorched and torn at the right side near her waist, compression material fused slightly to her skin at the edges of the wound. He reached down and peeled it back carefully, lifting the hem to see the damage.

The skin at her midriff was warm beneath his fingers. Tan and smooth, softer than he had any business registering right now, the curve of her waist giving way to where the blast had caught her. The wound was bad but it was contained, the reinforced material she was wearing had taken enough of the impact that her organs were intact. He had made her buy that undershirt on Corellia, had picked it out himself and handed it to her flatly, and she had put it on without much argument, and he was not going to think too carefully about what could have happene otherwise.

He had barely reached for the bacta when Grogu climbed up onto the bunk beside her.

Grogu lifted both hands and placed them over the wound, and the air around him had gone quiet. He knew the kid could handle this. He had learned that in the forests of Nal Hutta, lying in the undergrowth unable to move while Grogu sat over him for days, pouring everything he had into keeping him stable. He hadn't asked the child to do it. Grogu had simply decided that this was what was required and had done it, and Din had spent those days drifting in and out of consciousness aware of a small warm weight nearby and nothing else. He understood now, watching the lines of effort deepen in that small face, that Grogu would always do this. That there was no version of events where the kid made a different choice.

Something in him wanted to pull her close, to do something more than crouch beside a bunk watching. Something else told him to move, to get back to the cockpit, to put distance between himself and the specific quality of her breathing and the warmth still registered on his bare fingers from two inches of her skin. His mind and his heart had been running two separate arguments since he landed beside her on the sand, and for now his mind was winning, but only barely.

He stayed until Grogu sat back, until her breathing had settled into something slower and more even, and caught the kid before he could topple.

"That's enough." He held him steady and reached for the bacta spray, applying it because Grogu's healing had limits and because he needed something to do with his hands. "You did good."

Grogu made a small exhausted sound against his shoulder.

"You did good," he said again, quieter.

He had just settled Grogu against the edge of the bunk when she came back.

It happened fast. One moment still, and then she was upright and grabbing for him, both hands finding his arms and gripping hard, and her eyes were open but not present, somewhere between wherever she had been and here.

"Mando." Her voice came out ragged and urgent. "We have to go, we have to get off this planet right now, he found me, he saw me, he's coming, we have to go,"

"Hey." He got his hands over hers. "You're fine."

She stared at him.

"We're off the surface," he said. "He can't follow us here."

She was breathing hard, looking around the sleeping alcove, and he kept his hands over hers and waited while she found her way back. Grogu pressed himself against her other side and reached up to put his palm against her cheek, and she looked down at him and something in her face came loose.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay."

He eased her back down. She resisted for a moment, the way she always resisted things, and he said nothing, just kept the pressure steady, and eventually she let him. He pulled the nearest blanket up over her and she grabbed the edge of it with both hands.

"I told you, I've got you," he said, and it came out lower than he intended. "Nobody's going to be able to follow us. Close your eyes. I'll wake you when we get there."

Grogu was already watching him with the expression that meant he had assigned himself a post and did not need further instruction. Din looked at him for a moment, then back at her.

He went back to the cockpit and took manual control.

He wasn't sure who had sent the dark troopers. Her instinct said it was the ex, and he hadn't argued because she was barely conscious and arguing wasn't going to get them anywhere. But his own read was different. Dark troopers were Imperial hardware. Which meant it was more likely Moff Gideon, or what remained of Gideon's operation, back on his and Grogu's trail the way they had been before. Maybe they had stayed in one place too long.

That thought landed badly.

He had kept them on an unnamed planet with no cover and no backup and nothing on the scanner except an abandoned Imperial monitoring station. Worse still, he had done it because she had looked at the lake and smiled in a way he hadn't seen often enough. He had watched the way her face changed when she asked if they could stay and found himself unable to say they were leaving. He had stayed because he knew how much she wanted to stay. He had let the planet's strange quiet become a reason not to move, had watched her laughing with Grogu on the shore and told himself just one day, and then another. Then between all that, he had been too busy watching her to be watching the sky.

He took backroutes to Nevarro. It was close enough that he could get there in just a few hours but fore safety sake he would take a longer path. Less travelled. If someone had tracked them to that planet he was not going to lead them anywhere near a settlement he trusted. He would add hours if he needed to. He needed the task.

He failed at keeping his thoughts in order almost immediately.

She had been looking at him.

He kept coming back to that moment just before. The fire had been low, Grogu had been asleep between them, and she had turned her head and found him already watching her, which he had been doing more than he was comfortable admitting. She'd gone still. Not startled, not uncomfortable, just very still, and she had been about to say something. He had been certain of it. The kind of certainty that arrived without explanation, from however many hours he had now spent learning the specific grammar of her expressions, the way her mouth changed a fraction of a second before she decided to speak, the particular quality of her silence when she was weighing something against something else.

She had been about to say something.

And then she had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere far behind her eyes, and for one miserable second he had thought: she thought better of it. She remembered who she was sitting next to. A bounty hunter who lived on a gunship and had nothing to offer except the ship itself, a dangerous job and a child who had attached himself to her with alarming determination.

Then the beam of light was lighting up the inky darkness around them and everything else became irrelevant.

He understood now that it hadn't been about him at all. He understood that she had felt something coming before it arrived and had acted on it without hesitation. He had watched her do exactly that, whipping around with the saber already ignited, putting herself between him and whatever was out there before he had even registered that something was wrong. He understood all of that.

He was still sitting with the other thing anyway.

Because the mind did not stop simply because you told it the timing was poor. And his mind kept returning to the fire and the dark and the specific quality of her attention on him and the words she hadn't said, and kept constructing explanations, and all of his explanations led to the same place. His mind was a mess.

She had spent years with a man she had loved enough to leave everything she knew to be with him. The Jedi didn't like attachments, he knew that much. He'd heard it from her in pieces over the weeks. Heard it in stories about Masters and Padawans and rules that made little sense to him. The Order expected distance. Detachment. He had seen tis with Grogu too.

Love, apparently, was something to be managed carefully or avoided entirely. And she'd chosen it anyway. Whatever she called herself now, he still saw the strengths of a Jedi in her every day. In the discipline. In the patience. In the quiet instinct to protect people even when it cost her.

The Order had shaped her, yet she had chosen someone over it.

Din understood, probably better than anyone else could, what it meant to put a person ahead of a creed. He thought of Grogu and found he couldn't regret it.

Maybe she didn't regret her choice either.

Maybe that was why she wouldn't kill the man. Because someone who had broken rules that old, rules that important, for the sake of love wasn't going to let go of it easily. That wasn't the response of a woman who was finished. That was someone still holding on to something, even if the thing she was holding on to had become something else entirely.

So whatever she had been about to say by the fire, he was sure it wasn't what the traitorous part of him had spent the last hour hoping it might be. It was something else. Something he wasn't owed and wasn't going to spend any more time imagining.

He thought about the fight. Specifically about landing beside her and the question she had found breath to ask mid-combat, back to back, both of them still working through what was left.

"Why didn't you leave?"

He had rolled his eyes inside the helmet, knowing perfectly well she couldn't see it, and not answered, because the question was genuinely unreasonable and he didn't have the words for how stupid of a suggestion it was. As though leaving had been an option. As though leaving her had been an option.

He kept his hands on the controls and kept moving.

He had been watching her for weeks now. He had known it was happening and had not done anything about it because there was nothing to do about it. She was under his protection. She was hurt. She had complicated history with someone who was still out there, and she cared for his son with an openness that made something in his chest do things he had no useful language for, and all of that together meant that the things he wanted had no place in any version of this that he was willing to entertain.

It was not as though he was unfamiliar with wanting things he wasn't going to have.

What bothered him was the specific nature of it. He had been attracted to people before, had registered beauty and capability and presence in others and moved on without particular difficulty. This was not that. This was something that had started in an alley on Coruscant when she had handed Grogu back and told him he had the personality of a closed door, not an ounce of fear in her voice, then had the audcity to laugh at her own joke. This had been accumulating ever since in ways he had been pretending not to notice.

The co-pilot's seat to his left had become hers somewhere between then and now. He couldn't have said when exactly it had happened. Somewhere in the last few days it had simply stopped being a spare seat and become the place where her blanket lived, draped over the back of it, still new enough that the fabric hadn't worn soft yet but already settled there like it belonged. She brought caf in and tucked her feet underneath it and asked him things nobody had ever bothered asking before, not because the questions were significant, just because she was curious about him in a way that assumed his answers were worth having.

The tiny little shorts were not helping either.

He was completely aware that this was not a reasonable thing to be cataloguing right now, with her lying injured in his bunk and Grogu sitting watch beside her. He was thinking it anyway, because his mind was apparently not interested in being reasonable tonight, and because she had spent the last week wandering the Crest in those things, completely unbothered, arguing with Grogu about breakfast and bending over the lower storage panels looking for ration supplies. The shorts did very little to conceal anything when she bent over. He had made a point of looking elsewhere whenever that happened and had not always succeeded.

There had been more than a few nights when she had settled into the co-pilot's seat behind him after Grogu had been tucked into bed. Just the two of them in the cockpit. The stars outside. The hum of the Crest. Her blanket wrapped around her shoulders as she curled into the seat that had somehow become hers.

And more than once, despite every effort to the contrary, the thought had crossed his mind. Of all the things he wanted to do to her. Starting with bending her right over the controls he was supposed to be watching.

The sliding door behind them locked.

He knew it locked.

He had spent a considerable amount of time being annoyed at himself for knowing that.

He had thought about her. With a frequency and a specificity that he found genuinely inconvenient given the situation, and there was a version of things in which he did not have to think about it alone in the cockpit at odd hours. She was right there. The Crest was a small ship.

But he was not going to do that.

She was in his care, he reminded himself. The thought of using that proximity, that trust she had extended to him so carefully and incrementally, for his own benefit was not something he was capable of sitting comfortably with. He knew what it had cost her to trust anyone. He had heard enough of her history to understand exactly how much of herself she had given to someone who had used it badly, and he was not going to be another version of that story.

And even if he could set all of that aside, which he couldn't, there was still the ex. Still out there. Still the reason she was on this ship in the first place. Din had offered to end it once and she had said no, and he had watched her face when she said it and had understood, in the way he understood things he would rather not, that the refusal wasn't about practicality. It wasn't strategy. It was something older than that. You didn't keep a vow with someone you were finished with. You kept it because the person still meant something, even after everything, even after whatever had happened in that room she had walked out of. He knew what that looked like. He wasn't going to pretend he didn't.

He checked the route again. Adjusted. Kept his hands moving.

He landed in Nevarro in the early hours, setting the Crest down beside the cottage with a care he usually reserved for difficult terrain. He powered down and sat for a moment in the quiet cockpit, listening to the ship settle around him, and then went back to the sleeping alcove.

She hadn't moved.

Grogu was curled against her uninjured side, one small hand resting on her arm. Din looked at them both for a moment longer than he needed to and then lifted her carefully carrying her down the ladder and the ramp, Grogu waddling behind him the whole way.

She stirred as he was ducking through the cottage doorway. He felt the slight change in her weight as consciousness found her, and looked down to find her eyes open and blinking slowly up at him. She looked so young like this. Lost, confused, innocent and very far from the person who had ignited a lightsaber in the dark and stood her ground without hesitating.

He felt the guilt move through him like something physical.

He looked back up at the doorway and got them both through it without comment.

The cottage had one bed. He set her down on it as carefully as he could manage and she immediately pushed herself upright, questions already forming in her expression, the familiar gathering of someone who needed to understand exactly where they were and why.

He reached past her and adjusted the pillows against the headboard.

"Lie down," he said.

She settled back against the pillows, jaw tight with the effort of not arguing, and he went back to the Crest to get her blanket.

It was where it had been for the last few days. The co-pilot's seat. He picked it up and stood there for a moment in the dim cockpit holding it and did not think about the number of times he had watched her wrap it around her shoulders in the mornings before she was properly awake. He went back to the cottage and draped it over her without explanation and she reached up immediately and pulled it tight with both hands, and something about the gesture made it difficult to look at directly.

Grogu retook his post at her side. Din pulled the chair from the corner of the room and set it beside the bed and sat down. She needed monitoring. The wound was serious. He was being practical.

She was not fully asleep. He could tell from the quality of her stillness, the slight tension still in her hands where they gripped the blanket. He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and watched her. He thought about the fight the way he had been trying not to think about it since it ended.

She had held ten dark troopers alone. For long enough that he had been able to get Grogu to safety, get his armour on, and come back. He had watched her from the sky for the seconds before he dropped, had seen the blade moving through the dark, and had felt something he was not going to name watching her fight like that. She was extraordinary. He had known it for weeks in the abstract way of someone who worked alongside capability daily and had grown accustomed to it, but watching her out there with no backup and no cover had made it impossible to hold at a comfortable distance.

She had done that for him. For Grogu. She had put herself between them and ten dark troopers because she had decided that was more important than her own safety, and she had done it without hesitating or being asked.

Nobody did that for him.

He was the one who did that. He was always the one who stood between Grogu and the thing coming, who absorbed the risk so the child didn't have to, who made the calculation and came up short and accepted that as the cost of keeping the people he was responsible for safe. He did not have people who stood between him and things. He had never expected to. He had stopped thinking of it as something that was available to him years before he met her.

And yet.

He was still sitting with that when he heard it.

"Man...do"

His title. Just that, low and barely there, barely conscious, the word slipping out of whatever she was dreaming with the particular quality of someone reaching for something they trusted to still be there. He went completely still. She hadn't said it to him. She had said it into the dark, to no one, to sleep, and she would not remember it. He was almost certain she would not remember it.

Just Mando. Not even his name. And yet, he thought about what it would sound like if she said his true name. The one he rarely gave to anyone. Said it awake, on purpose, to him. He turned that over once and then set it down carefully.

Not now.

He heard her shift slightly on the bed and looked up.

Her hand had come out from under the blanket, moving across the mattress toward him with the searching quality of someone not quite awake. He watched it for a moment and then reached out and took it.

She stilled immediately. Her breathing changed.

He leaned down close, close enough that the modulator would carry his voice at low volume without waking Grogu.

"You alright? Anything hurt?"

Her hand tightened around his.

He waited.

Her hand tightened further, and she drew it up toward her chest, holding it there, his knuckles against her sternum, and he could feel her heartbeat through his fingers and had to take a very careful breath.

He asked again, quieter. "Do you need anything?"

She looked up at him. He could see the question she wasn't asking, the thing she was trying to figure out from his face that the helmet wasn't going to let her find. He held still and let her look.

She shook her head.

He sat with that for a moment. Then he said, "Close your eyes."

She looked like she wanted to argue. He could see it, the familiar gathering of objection in her expression, and under other circumstances he might have let her, might have enjoyed it even, the specific way she argued with him when she thought he was being unreasonable.

"Close your eyes." Lower this time. Slower. No room for argument left in it.

She closed them.

He glanced across at Grogu. The child was out, the slow even breathing of someone deeply gone.

He reached up and slipped the helmet off, tucking it under his arm. The air in the cottage was cool against his face. He leaned forward.

He pressed his lips to her forehead. Gently. Just that. Just the most basic form of comfort he could offer, the kind that required nothing and asked nothing, the kind that said simply: you are alive and I am here.

He meant to stop there.

He stayed a moment longer than he should have. Her breath was warm against his face. Close enough that when he finally began to pull back, some impulse he could neither name nor account for slowed him, and his lips grazed the corner of her mouth, the softest possible contact, barely there, less than a breath. Then he pulled back fully and took his hand from her grasp.

She made a small sound of protest, reaching for him, and he ran his hand over her hair once, slowly, brushing it back from her face.

He stood. Slipped the helmet back on so he didn't get any more bright ideas, then sat on the edge of the mattress and reached across for hand in the dark and held it.

She didn't move.

After a while, he said, "He's worried about you."

Grogu, curled against her other side. Din watched him breathing in the dark and felt the familiar particular love of it, the love that still surprised him sometimes with how total it was.

She turned onto her side, slowly, and he felt her look at him. He could feel her gaze on the helmet the way he always could, that specific quality of attention she gave him when she was trying to see past it to something she was never going to find there.

She tightened her grip on his hand, not enough to stop him leaving, just enough to make it clear she didn't want him to.

Din closed his eyes briefly.

"You're trouble." Barely above a whisper.

The words carried no heat, no frustration. Just the weary affection of a man who had known exactly what she was from the moment she'd tracked him down.

The words disappeared into the dark before she could hear them.

He stayed where he was. The cottage was quiet. Through the small window, Nevarro's dawn stretched out flat and familiar beyond the fields.

He sat in the dark with her hand in his and thought about the word trouble, and how it had started as an observation but had become something else without him noticing. He had known she was going to be trouble from the moment she found him in an alley on Coruscant, because nobody found him unless he wanted to be found, and he had let her on the ship anyway because Grogu had decided and because some part of him that he generally kept well under control had made a separate calculation that he hadn't examined too closely at the time.

He examined it now.

He wanted to keep her safe. He had failed at that tonight. She had taken a blaster wound that he should have prevented, that he would have prevented if he had sent her to the Crest with Grogu and stayed out there himself the way he should have, the way he always did, the way the entire arrangement was supposed to work. He was the one who stood between things. He had always been the one. Somehow in the chaos of ten dark troopers dropping out of the sky he had let that get reversed, and she had paid for it, and the fact that she had made that choice herself and would make it again without hesitation did not make it easier to deal with.

He was not going to think about what it meant that she had put herself between his family and the thing coming. He was not going to think about the half second of contact that he had no excuse for and was going to carry alone because she hadn't been fully conscious and he was not going to tell her it had happened.

He was going to sit here and hold her hand and keep watch and do the thing he knew how to do.

She worried about him. That was the thing he kept snagging on, the detail he couldn't file neatly away. Not just when they were in danger, not just in the moments where it made obvious sense. She noticed when he hadn't eaten. She noticed when he hadn't slept. Small things he forgot about himself without registering the forgetting, and she caught them and said something, quietly, without making it into anything larger than it was.

He told himself that what he felt sitting here was the same thing she would feel sitting beside anyone who was hurt. That he was doing what she would do. That they were not so different in the end, both of them wired toward the people they had decided to care about, both of them willing to stand in front of things. He told himself that was all this was.

His thumb moved slowly across the back of her hand.

He was not going to think about the fire and the dark and the thing she hadn't said.

He was not going to think about it.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 10

I'm not gonna say much before this one. I'm sorry?

Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

W/c: 5.5k

She woke up not knowing what time it was, which was unusual. Normally she had a reliable internal calibration, some sense of where she was in a day even before she'd fully surfaced. Here the light offered nothing useful. The planet didn't have a proper dawn so much as a gradual reluctant brightening, and even that came in weakly through the cockpit viewport, barely enough to see shapes.

The ship was mostly quiet. Grogu's breathing came from the hammock below her, the slow even kind that meant he was deeply under. She couldn't hear Mando.

She thought about the sound she'd heard last night. She had lain very still after that, eyes open in the dark, acutely aware that he was directly below her, that the bunk was maybe three feet deep, that if she leaned out over the edge right now she would see his face.

She thought about how he might still be down there. Without the helmet.

She thought about that for longer than it deserved.

The thing was that if he was still asleep, helmetless, directly below her, and she leaned out over the edge to check, she was going to see his face. His creed was clear enough on that point even if he'd never said it to her directly, and she was not going to be the person who took something he hadn't offered just because she was curious and the dark made it easy.

She could check his feet. Just the bottom of the bunk. Enough to know whether he was there without seeing anything that wasn't hers to see.

She lay there weighing this for another minute.

Then she braced herself, shifted toward the edge of her bunk, and stuck her head out.

His bunk was completely empty.

She stayed there for a moment looking at it. Neatly arranged, the blanket folded back, no indication that anyone had slept there at all. No helmet on the mattress or the floor.

She pulled herself back and stared at the ceiling.

Well. At least he'd probably got a few hours of comfortable rest. That was the optimistic reading of the situation and she was committing to it.

She came down the ladder to find him in the cargo hold with his armour already on, every piece of it, standing at the base of the ramp looking out at the planet. He turned at the sound of her feet on the rungs.

"Good. You're up." He was already moving toward the ramp. "Come on."

She stopped at the bottom of the ladder. "Now?"

"You said you'd practise with the blaster."

"I said I'd consider it in exchange for food." She looked at him. "I've been awake for approximately forty seconds."

"You're standing. You're speaking." He gestured toward the ramp. "You can't train dressed like that though."

She looked down at herself. Sleep shorts. The oversized shirt. The thick socks.

"I'm dressed like this," she continued, "because I just woke up."

The helmet tilted.

She went back up the ladder, shoulders slumping in defeat.

She considered the fresher briefly, the appeal of hot water and a few more minutes of consciousness before whatever this was, but decided he probably wouldn't wait that patiently. She pulled on her trousers and changed her shirt and laced her boots and came back down. He pointed at the ladder wordlessly again. She went back up and grabbed her tactical belt off the shelf beside the bunks and buckled it on her way down.

The chrome pistol sat in the holster at her hip. She pulled it out and looked at it for a moment. It was, she had to admit, a good-looking weapon. The chrome finish was almost mirror-bright, elegant in a way she hadn't expected, catching the same light as Mando's armour did in a way she found mildly irritating because it meant every time she looked at it she thought about him.

He had arranged three large volcanic boulders in front of the Crest while she slept. She stared at them and then at him.

"Did you sleep at all?"

"Yes."

"When."

"Come here."

She crossed to where he was standing and looked at the boulders. The nearest was maybe twenty metres. The furthest was easily fifty, dark and porous against the black sand.

She had the pistol out before he'd said anything, spinning it once around her finger the way she'd been doing absentmindedly for the last few minutes, chrome catching the pale light, and she could feel him watching that with the specific quality of attention he reserved for things he was deciding not to comment on yet. She raised it in one hand, flipped the safety with her thumb, and fired.

The point she hit glowed bright for half a second and faded to a scorched crater.

She lowered the pistol and looked at him.

She had thought he would be surprised. He had the bearing of someone who had expected a beginner, who had arranged three boulders at increasing distances and planned to start with one and build from there. She had just skipped whatever that first stage was going to be. She had expected him to register it somehow. A pause. One of the helmet tilts. Some acknowledgement that she had just cleanly hit a stationary target at twenty metres with a weapon she'd owned for a week.

Nothing.

"Your whole body is turned perpendicular to the target," he said. "You're shooting with one hand."

She looked at her stance. "I hit it."

"Why do you stand like that?"

"Looks good." she winked.

He came around behind her without further comment, hands settling on her shoulders, and turned her to face the boulder head-on. Then he reached for her free hand and brought it up to support the barrel from beneath, adjusting her grip with a calm efficiency that made it clear this was purely mechanical to him.

She became briefly very interested in the boulder.

"Now, go again," he said, stepping back.

She fired. Hit almost exactly the same spot.

"See? No difference."

"Watch the recoil this time."

She fired again and watched, what she noticed was exactly that, less than she'd expected in this position, the barrel barely lifting.

"Now your way."

She turned back to the perpendicular stance, raised the pistol one-handed, fired, and felt it properly this time. The kick travelling up her dominant arm, significantly more than before.

She was about to concede the point when he said, "Don't move."

He stepped forward. His gloved hand traced up the left side of her torso, not quite touching, close enough that she felt the warmth of it through her jacket, she held very still and kept her gaze carefully on the middle distance.

"You're exposed," he said, stepping back. "Front on, your most protected points are forward. The way you are standing, your left side is open every time you fire." He looked at her. "In the real world your targets aren't boulders. They will be shooting back. You won't always have your lightsaber to cover you."

"A smaller target is harder to hit," she said. "Turning sideways reduces surface area."

"Against one threat. Coming from one direction."

She didn't answer that.

"The middle one," he said.

She adjusted her footing, faced it square, raised the pistol two-handed, and fired. The shot landed clean.

"Further."

She turned to the far boulder, fifty metres out, took a breath and fired. The crater it left was smaller but it was there.

"Good," he said, so briefly and flatly she almost missed it. "Now I want you to try and hit me."

She lowered the pistol and looked at him, genuinely confused.

"I'll be shooting back," he said. "No lightsaber. You can use the Force to get out of the way."

"That sounds incredibly dangerous."

"I've got beskar."

"I don't. What if you hit me?"

The helmet tilted, playful. "Don't let me."

She stared at him. He spread his hands slightly, the gesture communicating that the terms were not changing.

What followed was the most exhausting hour she could remember in recent history. He moved differently than he moved in a proper fight, more deliberately, giving her half a second more than he'd give an actual enemy, which was still not very much. She used the Force constantly, reading his trajectory before his body had committed, redirecting herself out of the path of incoming fire, the sustained effort accumulating differently than lightsaber combat. More patience required. Less explosion, more endurance. Her own shots kept going wide because she was dividing her attention between not being hit and actually hitting him, one of those tasks was proving significantly more demanding.

He was everywhere. She would find an angle and he would have already moved, never gracefully, nothing about how Mando moved was graceful, but with the solid efficiency of a large man who had learned exactly how little movement he needed to not be where a shot was going, and nothing more. She kept trying to outmanoeuvre him and he kept simply not being where she'd calculated.

Eventually she stopped trying to outmanoeuvre him and got close instead, where the angle advantage disappeared, this worked slightly better. She came close twice, close enough that he had to adjust. Close enough that she saw it.

Neither shot connected.

Eventually he stopped. Lowered his blaster.

She was breathing harder than she wanted to be. There was sand on her jacket from one undignified dive behind a volcanic column she was not going to discuss further. Her dominant arm kept trying to bring the pistol up one-handed out of pure muscle memory yet she kept catching herself and correcting it but that alone had been more tiring than the rest of it combined.

"A blaster isn't for when it's better than a lightsaber," he said. "It almost never is. You're faster, you can deflect, you don't run out of charge." He holstered his blaster and looked at her. "It's for when you don't want people knowing you have one."

She turned that over properly.

"Not every job is safer with a Jedi visible," he continued. "Some people react badly to Force users. Some report them. Some hunt them. The kind you can't always outrun with a lightsaber." He looked at her. "You don't have to be a Jedi every time someone points a weapon at you."

She looked at the chrome pistol in her hand. Announcing herself as a Jedi had gone one of two ways in her experience, either people became very cooperative very fast, or they became very dead-set on making her regret it. There was rarely anything in between. He was right that it was a liability sometimes. She had known it and not wanted to think about it too carefully because the alternative was learning to like this thing she was holding, which she was reluctantly beginning to suspect she was capable of.

"Elegant is still better," she said.

"Elegant keeps you alive until it doesn't."

"And useful?"

"Useful keeps you alive longer."

She looked at the three scorched boulders. The chrome pistol caught the pale planet light and threw it back at her, bright, clean and oddly satisfying.

"Fine," she said.

He was already heading up the ramp when he stopped and turned back. He had her lightsaber in his hand. She looked at it, then at him.

"When did you-"

"When you were twirling the pistol at the top of the ramp earlier." The tone was the one he used for things he found genuinely unreasonable. "Blasters are powerful and dangerous weapons. The safety is not a suggestion." He held the saber out toward her. "You can twirl this one."

"I had the safety on." she grumbled.

The sigh that came through the modulator was the longest she had ever heard from him.

She took the lightsaber back. She was smiling before she could stop it, the pleased warmth of it moving through her before she could examine it, and she turned away before it reached her face.

Grogu had been awake for all of it.

She found him sitting cross-legged in the cargo hold doorway when she came back up the ramp, wrapped in the loose end of a blanket, watching her with the satisfied expression of someone who had witnessed something they considered personally significant. She looked at him. He looked at her. She pointed at his hammock. He pointed back at the sand outside.

They ended up at the shoreline.

She scattered a collection of small volcanic glass pieces across the sand between them, the cloudy chips catching the light as they turned, and sat back.

"One," she said.

He lifted it without effort, barely a thought.

"Two."

A second piece joined it in the air.

"Keep going."

He added pieces steadily, the cluster growing, five and then eight and then ten, the movement requiring real concentration now, his brow drawing together, ears lifting with the effort. From the top of the ramp, she was aware of Mando settling into position, forearms on his knees, watching without comment.

"Hold them there," she said.

Grogu held them. The glass turned slowly in the air between them, catching the light. She said nothing, just watched his face, watched the sustained effort of it settle into something steadier.

He held it for ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

Then he added thirty more pieces at once. with no warning at all.

For two full seconds it held, the entire impossible cloud of volcanic glass spinning at varying speeds, orbiting and weaving, she thought wildly that it was actually working, he was actually doing it, then one piece broke formation, the whole thing unravelling simultaneously, every fragment shooting outward in a different direction, scattered wide across the black sand. One piece narrowly missed her ear. One landed in her lap. Several sailed toward the lake and skipped across the surface before sinking.

Grogu sat down heavily in the sand.

Looked at the empty space around him where the glass had been floating.

She gathered him off the sand and held him while he recovered his dignity, his small hands gripping her jacket.

"Better," she said.

"He did the opposite of what you taught him," Mando said from the ramp.

"He held thirty pieces for two seconds. Last time he could barely manage five." She looked at Grogu. "That's progress."

Grogu made a sound that suggested he agreed and found the criticism unfair.

"Again tomorrow," she said. "And the day after. Every day until you can hold ten pieces for ten minutes without thinking about it." She smoothed a hand over one of his ears. "You're so strong, little guy. We just need to build your endurance. We'll get there slowly."

He seemed to accept this. He wiggled free of her arms and trotted off down the shore to investigate something at the waterline, already unbothered, the brief humiliation forgotten. She watched him go and felt the warmth of it settle in her chest, the particular warmth of watching something small and determined simply get back up.

From the ramp, Mando said nothing.

She didn't look back at him.

The walk around the lake was Grogu's idea, or became his idea the moment she stood, pointed toward the far shore and said she wondered what it looked like from over there. He set off immediately with the confidence of someone who had already decided, and they followed.

The lake was larger than it looked. The mirror effect folded the landscape back on itself, making distances deceptive, and after forty minutes of walking the mountains across the water seemed exactly as far away as they had from camp. Grogu walked the whole way, his short legs working considerably harder than theirs to cover the same ground, until he stopped abruptly in the sand, looked up at both of them, and crouched down with his arms lifted.

She and Mando both bent toward him without discussing it.

Grogu looked at Mando. Looked at her. Then, with great deliberateness, he reached out, took one of each of their hands, wrapped his fingers around them, and jumped.

He dangled between them, feet off the sand, and looked up at them both with an expression of complete satisfaction.

They straightened, lifting him with them, he swung forward and came back making the sound he made when happiness exceeded what his body could comfortably contain. They walked and swung him, he laughed every time, she laughed too, and Mando's grip on the child's hand was unhurried and certain.

Then Grogu stopped laughing.

Not because something happened. No sound, no movement. He just went quiet between them, letting go of their fingers and dropping lightly into the sand. He lifted his face toward the sky, his ears raised. He held perfectly still, staring up into nothing, into the wide grey dark above the mountains, and she followed his gaze automatically.

There was nothing there.

"What is it?" she asked.

Grogu blinked once. His ears dropped. He looked up at her with an expression she couldn't read and then tugged on both their hands again, wanting to keep moving.

She let him pull her forward.

She didn't think about it again.

After a while Mando said, "He's going to start throwing up slugs."

"He is not."

"He will."

Grogu looked up at Mando with an expression that communicated exactly where his loyalties lay on this particular matter.

They put him down. He walked alongside them for a stretch, still pleased with himself, then gradually began to flag, his short legs slowing. She started lifting him between steps without really deciding to, just enough, the Force softening each landing so he bounced along the black sand like walking on a low-gravity surface, giggling to himself every time he came down lighter than he'd expected.

She felt Mando look at her.

"You're cheating," he said.

"Look at him. He's exhausted, the poor thing."

Grogu pulled on her pant leg, wanting more.

"He was fine ten seconds ago."

"He was performing wellness. Very different."

Mando looked between them both and said nothing further, which she counted as a win.

The mountains kept their distance ahead. The Crest grew slowly smaller behind them. At some point she became aware that neither of them had said anything about turning back, that the far shore was no closer than it had been twenty minutes ago and the lake was simply going to keep being larger than it looked for as long as they walked toward it.

"We're not going to make it," she said.

"No."

"We should turn back."

"Yes."

Neither of them moved for a moment. The lake stretched ahead, perfectly still, the mountains doubled in it. Grogu looked up at both of them, then at the mountains, then back at her with a philosophical sort of acceptance.

They turned back.

Mando didn't ask if she wanted to sleep outside.

She came up the ramp at dusk to find him emerging, armourless, from the cargo hold carrying two old blankets, worn soft with use, and he dropped them on the sand near the shore without comment and went back inside. She looked at the blankets. Then she followed him back up the ramp.

He had bantha bones in cloth wrapping, a compressed fuel log, a pot, and several other things already gathered on the workbench. He handed her half of it and she carried it down the ramp without being asked. They set up together near the waterline, maybe 10 meters from the crest, the fuel log burning low and steady in a hollow they dug out between them, the pot balanced over it, she sat back on her heels and watched the first real fire she'd sat beside in months take hold against the dark.

He made broth.

She sat on her blanket with Grogu in her lap and watched him work, feeling something so straightforwardly domestic about it that she had to look at the lake for a moment to compose herself. The smell reached her before the broth was ready, warm and savoury, nothing like a ration pack, Grogu sat up straighter in her lap making a sound of pure anticipation.

"His second favourite thing," Mando said, handing her a bowl. "After whatever unfortunate creature happens to be smaller than him."

She laughed. Grogu received his own bowl with both hands and the solemnity of someone handling something precious.

Mando sipped his from beneath the helmet in the way he had, that particular practiced angle, she had stopped finding it strange and now simply found it another piece of the specific person he was. The fire burned low between them. The lake was black and enormous beyond it. Above them the stars were coming in one by one and then all at once, she sipped her broth and thought this was the best meal she'd had since long before Coruscant.

The fire settled lower.

Grogu reached a hand toward it.

"No," Mando said.

The hand retracted. Several minutes later it drifted back.

"Grogu."

The hand came back. Stayed down.

A while after that, Grogu's head grew heavy against her side, the small hands going slack in his lap. Warm and full, he began a gradual migration. He moved first to the edge of her blanket, then to the space between her and Mando, pulling at each of them in turn until the gap had closed. She shifted closer without thinking about it. On the other side Mando moved too, and Grogu tucked himself between them with the satisfaction of a small creature who had engineered exactly the arrangement he intended.

She watched the soft glow of the fire reflected in the only piece of armour still on him, the helmet, the warm light sliding over the dark visor, turning it almost amber. It made the metal look less like a wall and more like a window. She had that thought and then let it sit there without doing anything with it.

Grogu made a drowsy sound, somewhere between a coo and a grumble, both of them shifted instinctively at the same moment, closer, slower and quieter, the way people moved around sleeping children. When she settled again the distance between herself and Mando had essentially ceased to exist.

She looked up at the stars for a long time.

She had stopped imagining what came next. That was the specific quality of this evening, of this whole strange irresponsibly beautiful day, that she had been trying to name since they walked back from the lake and she realised she wasn't thinking about after anymore. Every version of the future she tried to build ended with running. And somewhere between the lake and the fire and the bone broth and the sound of Grogu laughing every time his feet left the ground, she had simply stopped. There was no after tonight. There was just this. The fire. The stars. The particular dark of this planet that was nobody else's. She didn't want to be anywhere else. She didn't want anything that wasn't exactly this.

She was unconsciously leaning closer to him, she realised. The thought arrived as information rather than alarm. She was leaning toward him without having decided to. Grogu was asleep between them, the fire barely a glow now, the stars the clearest she'd ever seen them. She turned her head and found the visor right there, much closer than she'd expected, the last of the firelight warm across the beskar.

She stayed.

She knew he was looking at her. She couldn't see his eyes but she could feel the weight of his attention as certainly as she could feel the heat from the embers, and the thing she had been almost saying all day was right there, very close to the surface. That she didn't want to leave. That she had known it for a while and had been too frightened to say it out loud. That whatever she'd agreed to in an alley on Coruscant had nothing to do with what she wanted now, and what she wanted now was this, all of it, exactly this, for as long as they would have her.

She was still finding the right place to start when every hair on the back of her neck stood up.

She was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. The lightsaber was already in her hand, already ignited, the green blade cutting a hard line across the dark. She turned toward the water and every trained part of her went cold and quiet, scanning for shapes, for movement, for whatever had tripped the wire of her instincts without announcing itself.

Mando was beside her a beat later, reading her without asking, his hand already on his blaster.

She saw them.

Dark shapes dropping from altitude, one after another, each impact cracking through the black sand with a sound like something enormous falling a long way. She counted them before she could name them. Ten. They straightened as the firelight caught their edges, eight feet of solid black Imperial steel, the plating flat and unreflective, absorbing the limited light rather than throwing it back, then the shape of them finally resolved into something she recognised.

Dark troopers.

She put herself between him and the line of them.

"Mando." Her voice came out flat and level. "Take Grogu back to the Crest."

"No."

"Mando..."

"i'm not going anywhere."

The nearest trooper raised its weapon. She caught the shot and redirected it in the same motion, stepping into the gap the deflection opened and back out before it closed. She was acutely aware of the fact that he had no armour on besides the helmet. She turned her head just enough to find him over her shoulder.

"Go. Right now. Please. Just go." Her voice was urgent, almost a shout.

She felt him hesitate then finally make the decision, felt the weight of it, and then his boots were moving through the sand behind her and Grogu's confused waking sound cut through the dark, and she turned back to the ten dark troopers standing in what remained of their firelight and held her ground.

The first charge came fast, two at once from the left flank. She moved to meet them, driving into the gap, her blade finding the joint at the first trooper's shoulder housing and going through. The arm dropped. The trooper kept coming. She shoved it back with the Force and redirected a shot from the second back into its own chest plate and kept moving, keeping herself compact, keeping her back to the Crest.

She didn't need to beat them. She just needed to hold their attention long enough for Mando to get the Crest back in the air. She cut the first trooper again, through the neck housing this time, and it finally went down.

Eight remaining. They were spreading out fast, working to fan out into a wide arc, using the dying fire as a barrier behind her, cutting off the angle back to the ship. She was moving constantly, deflecting, pressing forward, trying to hold the centre, and she was good at this, she had always been good at this, but eight dark troopers on open sand with no cover and nowhere to go was a different kind of problem than anything she'd trained for in an enclave on a cold outer rim planet.

A bolt struck the sand an inch from her boot. Another clipped her shoulder, not enough to penetrate, enough to spin her half a step sideways. She caught herself and kept moving and did not think about the fact that she was tiring.

She heard the jetpack before she saw him.

He came in low from behind the Crest, already firing, two bolts dropping the nearest trooper before he'd even touched the ground. He landed beside her with a sound like something settling into place. Both blasters up. Armour on.

"Why didn't you leave?" The words came out between deflections, flat and breathless.

He didn't answer. Just stepped into position at her back and started firing.

They closed the gap between them and the remaining troopers. Adjusting, spreading further, for a long ugly stretch of time she and Mando simply held the line. He covered what she couldn't see. She covered what he couldn't reach. Neither of them said anything out loud. They moved, circling the same point with their backs to each other, and the arc kept trying to close and they kept moving to stop it, and every time she thought they were gaining ground the formation shifted and they had to give it back.

A trooper took three shots to the chest housing and kept advancing. She drove her saber through its head and felt the resistance in it, the horrible solidity of something built to absorb exactly this, and she had to kick it backward to free the blade and by the time she turned there were two more pressing the gap.

He stepped right. She stepped left. A trooper forced the space between them and she caught it across the chest and Mando put two bolts through the back of its head from behind her and it went down and they were already moving.

Five remaining.

Then one of them broke away.

Not toward her. Not toward Mando. It turned and moved with the flat mechanical certainty of something that had identified their weakness. The ramp of the Crest was behind her, and Grogu was alone inside it.

Something changed.

She felt it happen before she understood it, some threshold crossed that had nothing to do with training or control or the careful management of what the Force could ask of a person. She was moving before the thought had finished forming, cutting across the sand with a speed that had no elegance in it at all, and she drove the beam through the trooper's back housing before it had crossed half the distance to the ship.

The remaining four had reorganised while she was moving, pressing the advantage her absence had opened, and Mando had ground to make up. She went back through them without slowing, the blade moving faster now, shorter and more direct, no consideration for anything except what was in front of her and what was behind her and where the threat was. She felt Mando tracking her through the chaos, adjusting to her movement the way he had been. She trusted that completely and used it, driving through the cluster from the outside while he held the centre, the formation collapsed under the pressure of both of them.

"I've got you" he said, low and close, and she felt it land somewhere in her chest even in the middle of all this.

Two to go.

They separated. She went for the one directly ahead. Mando covered the one to her right. They both committed at the same moment, certain enough in each other to take that single step of trust, and she drove the blade through her trooper and felt the shot hit her.

The pain was immediate and absolute, white-hot through the right side of her abdomen, and her legs folded and the black sand came up to meet her cheek. She heard Mando's fire, one clean shot. She heard the last trooper go down.

She lay there and the stars were overhead, unchanged, the same ones they had sat under an hour ago around a fire that was nothing now but a faint glow in cold sand.

Then something cracked.

Not bone. Not flesh. Something else. Something far more fragile that she had been holding shut every day since she starting running, pressing closed with both hands every waking hour, the lock she had built out of focus and discipline and sheer exhausted necessity.

He was there.

Not physically. But in her mind, suddenly and completely, like a presence forcing itself through a door she had spent years barricading. Recognition. Possession. The particular weight of someone who had always known exactly where she was and had simply been waiting for the moment she was too tired to keep him out.

He'd found her.

The thought arrived without panic, which was its own kind of horror. Just the cold clear knowledge of it: He found me. I let my guard down and he knows where I am. He knows who I'm with. He's coming.

She thought about the far side of the lake. She had never found out what it looked like.

The stars blurred.

Then nothing.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 9

I think things are going to escalate soon. I spent some time planning out the next few parts and I'm really excited to write them out now. Hope you guys enjoy it too! This is definitely the fluffiest part so far and theres been a fair amount of fluff i feel like i neeeeed to have some spice soon but it just doesn't feel like it's time yet. Masterlist and ao3 links are below! Comment or dm to be added to the tag list.

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

Not proof read

W/c: 5.6k

The caf was as strong as it always was, enough to constitute a genuine health concern surely. She stood in the cargo hold with Grogu on her hip still half asleep against her shoulder and looked out at the planet through the open ramp. The planet had no name on any chart Mando could find, which she'd taken as a promising sign. Places that didn't exist on charts tended not to exist in anyone's memory either.

The surface was black volcanic sand, fine and still. Mountains rose against a sky that was dark enough to qualify as night but carrying the particular quality of dark that meant it was thinking about changing its mind. And ahead of them, perfectly flat, perfectly still, a lake that caught what little light existed and held it, turning the mountains and the sky into a second world beneath the surface, mirror-perfect.

She stood at the bottom of the ramp and looked at it until Grogu stirred against her shoulder and made a sound that meant he was ready to be put down.

She complied, then watched as he immediately toddled toward the lake.

"This should be an easy one," Mando said, checking his vambrace as he came down the ramp behind her.

"You've said that before."

He looked at her briefly.

"You and Grogu can stay on the ship if you want."

Grogu, who had stopped at the edge of the sand and was looking at the lake with his ears fully raised, turned to face Mando with an expression that answered the question comprehensively.

"Absolutely not," she said, echoing the child's sentiment.

Mando looked between the two of them for a moment, then turned toward the coordinates on his vambrace without further comment.

They walked.

Ward's marker led them past edge of the lake, the black sand giving way softly underfoot, and she kept finding her attention drifting sideways toward the water. The reflection was so precise it was genuinely disorienting, the kind of thing that made it difficult to tell where the real mountains ended and the impossible ones began. She had been on beautiful planets before. She had been on planets that were trying very hard to be beautiful, all dramatic geology and strategic sunsets. This one wasn't trying anything. It had simply been sitting here, unobserved and unhurried, doing this quietly in the dark for however many years it had been forgotten.

The walk was longer than the distance on the vambrace had suggested, the terrain uneven enough to add time, and by the time the marker indicated they'd arrived she had worked up enough warmth to stop noticing the cold. The problem was that there was nothing here. Black sand. A few rocks. The base of a cliff rising to the left. She turned in a slow circle.

"This is it?"

Mando crouched. He brushed his gloved hand across the surface of the sand, then brushed again more deliberately, and she saw the edge of something underneath. Metal. He started clearing sand away from the edges with both hands, digging along what appeared to be a rectangular seam.

She watched him for approximately ten seconds then turned her palm upward.

The hatch jerked upward sharply. Sand fell away from the edges in a small cascade. The entire thing swung open on its hinge and stopped, fully cleared, a ladder visible below disappearing into the dark passage below.

Mando looked up at her slowly.

"What?"

The helmet remained fixed on her face for a long moment. She was quite certain he was smiling underneath it.

He stood and gestured toward the ladder.

She climbed down first, the rungs cold through her gloves, the air below immediately different, older and stiller and carrying the particular smell of somewhere that had been sealed for a long time. She dropped to the floor and stepped aside as Grogu appeared at the top of the ladder above her.

"Grogu, wait for-"

He waited for nothing, jumping before Mando could finish his sentence.

She caught him without thinking, the Force moving before she did, and set him down beside her while he looked thoroughly pleased with himself.

mando's helmet appeared at the opening, "don't move".

A moment later he descended, took one look at the two of them standing precisely where he had last seen them, and said nothing. He turned his attention to the corridor instead, scanning slowly.

"Tracks," he said.

She stepped closer. "People?"

"No." He pointed to where the dust on the floor showed the faint impression of something wheeled. "Droid."

They fell into single file without discussing it, Mando ahead, Grogu between them, she pulled up the rear with one hand resting near her lightsaber out of habit. The tunnels were narrow, clearly maintenance infrastructure rather than anything designed for regular personnel, and the Imperial signage on the walls was old enough that some of it had faded past legibility. Their footsteps were the only sound. No hum of active systems. No ventilation cycling. Just the three of them moving through the quiet dark of something that had been left running on its own for a very long time.

The control room door was sealed. Mando looked at it for a moment and then simply kicked it open.

Inside, a single maintenance droid stood dormant in front of the data display. The noise of the door brought it online in a rush of activating photoreceptors and whirring. It registered them, processed them, and then threw both arms into the air and began emitting a stream of panicked binary at a volume considerably exceeding the size of the room.

Mando shot it right through the head.

It collapsed. The binary stopped mid-sentence.

He walked past it to the control terminal without breaking stride.

She stared at the droid on the floor. Then at Mando, already sliding the datachip into the terminal.

"It had its hands up."

"It was a droid."

"It was surrendering."

"Droids don't surrender." He watched the out-dated system begin translating strings of binary into readable data, rows of ones and zeroes unwinding into transmission logs and sensor readings from forty years of accumulated data reports.

"That is a philosophical position I find deeply troubling."

He transmitted the feed, waited for the confirmation, and straightened up.

"I suppose that's all."

She blinked. "We're done?"

"I should do a sweep. Make sure there aren't any more droids."

She looked at the room around them, the dust, the dead terminal, the collapsed droid on the floor, the complete absence of anything threatening. "You really do hate droids."

"Yes."

No elaboration. No apology.

They swept the facility, which took less time than she'd expected because the facility was extremely small. A few storage rooms containing equipment so old it had stopped being useful and started being archaeological. Two more corridors that turned out to lead back to the first corridor. One room containing nothing but a broken shelving unit and what appeared to be a droid charging station that hadn't been used in forever. No personnel. No additional droids. Nothing.

"Thorough," she said, when they'd finished.

Mando headed back toward the ladder, the other two trailing behind him.

They emerged to a sky that was marginally less dark than it had been. Not light, not yet, but the quality of the darkness over the eastern mountains had shifted, a faint suggestion of something on the other side of them thinking about arriving. The lake had changed too, the near-perfect mirror of it now holding the barest trace of colour at its edges, deep blue bleeding into black at the waterline.

Grogu allowed them to walk maybe half the way back to the Crest before he sat down, facing the lake.

Mando kept walking for a moment before he noticed. He stopped and turned.

"Come on, kid. We're done here."

Grogu shook his head. He pointed at the lake with great seriousness, and then at the mountains, and then back at the lake.

She looked at all of it. The mirror surface. The mountains. The first light starting to think about arriving over the peaks. She looked at the Crest.

"Do we really have to leave right now?"

Mando was quiet for a moment.

"We don't have anywhere we need to be," he said, as though he'd just checked and confirmed this.

"It's a little irresponsible isn't it."

"Probably."

Grogu had already levitated a small slug from the sand nearby and was examining it with considerable interest. She watched him chomp it with the equanimity of someone who had made his peace with a great many things.

"He found snacks," she said.

"We've got rations," Mando said. "Let him eat his slugs."

The decision, such as it was, appeared to have been made.

Mando disappeared back toward the Crest almost immediately, moving around to the port side where the large external engine turbine sat. She heard the access panel come open, and then the particular sounds of someone doing something purposeful with tools. She had learned by now that this was what he did with unstructured time, which he appeared to find mildly threatening. The engines were always doing something that needed looking at, or some wiring needed inspecting, or a system required calibration that had been on the list for a while. She suspected the Crest was in considerably better condition than most ships of its age not because anything was actually wrong with it but because Mando had never developed a comfortable relationship with having nothing useful to do.

She found a flat rock near the waterline and sat on it, and after a while simply slid off the rock and sat on the sand instead because the sand was softer and she was already taking her boots off anyway. The lake in front of her was so still it barely seemed real. She placed her hands on her knees and closed her eyes.

The Force here was very quiet.

Not suppressed, not absent, just unhurried, the way it was in places that had been left alone long enough to settle back into themselves. She could feel the sand under her, the particular electromagnetic presence of the water, the faint warmth that the planet's core was passing up through the rock. She could feel Grogu somewhere to her left, a small bright point of warmth, and she could feel the Crest further to her right and Mando near it, that particular quality of focused attention he carried everywhere.

She could not feel anyone else. Not a trace. Not a whisper. There was nothing pressing onto her from any direction. The planet offered complete silence and she sat in it and felt, for the first time in longer than she could accurately measure, the specific quality of being safe that wasn't just the absence of immediate threat but the presence of something else entirely.

She didn't open her eyes for a long time.

At some point the sounds from the side of the Crest shifted, the particular progression of engine work she'd come to recognise, a sequence of panel removals and inspections and adjustments that had its own rhythm. Occasionally there was a sound suggesting that something was being encouraged to cooperate that wasn't immediately inclined to. Occasionally there was a longer quiet, the kind that meant he was looking at something and deciding what he thought about it.

Just off to her left, Grogu had found the edge of the lake.

She could hear it without opening her eyes, the small sound of something skimming across the surface of the water, and then a second later the faint disturbance as it landed. Then another. Then a third that went considerably further than physics should have allowed for a stone thrown by someone two feet tall, followed by a sound that was unmistakably pleased with itself.

She opened one eye.

Grogu was standing at the waterline with his hand extended, a look of intense concentration on his face, watching a stone travel across the mirror surface of the lake in a series of long, improbable skips that left near-perfect rings spreading outward in its wake. The rings crossed each other and rippled toward the far shore and faded, and then the surface went still again, and the reflection of the mountains reappeared as though nothing had happened.

Grogu turned to see if she was watching.

She opened both eyes and gave him a look that conveyed she was extremely impressed, which she was.

He turned back to the lake, located another stone, and sent it skipping across the surface with the focused calm of someone who had found something they were good at and intended to be thorough about it. The rings spread again. She watched them go.

From under the Crest came the sound of a wrench making contact with something metal, followed by a moment of quiet, and then the particular sound of an engine component being resettled into place with the satisfaction of something that had been put back where it belonged. Then Mando's boots on the sand as he moved to a different section of the hull, and the sound of a second panel coming open.

She closed her eyes again.

She stayed there until Grogu appeared at her knee.

He was pushing her lightsaber toward her with both hands, expression intent.

"It's not a toy, sweetheart."

He pushed it again.

"I know you know that."

Both hands. Insistent.

She looked at him for a moment. His huge dark eyes, completely earnest, completely certain that this was a reasonable request that she would eventually agree to.

She sighed. "All right. But you stay back."

Grogu immediately sat down. Hands in lap. Eyes enormous. The picture of attentiveness.

She stood and looked at the hilt for a moment before igniting it.

The blade came up green and the light went everywhere at once, across the lake and the black sand and the face of the mountain across the water, and across Grogu's eyes, and she watched it happen the way she always watched it happen with children, the specific instant it caught them. His pupils went wide. He stopped breathing for a second. His ears lifted so high they were nearly vertical.

She remembered being that small. Watching the older Jedi train in the enclave courtyard, staying as still as she could so nobody would notice her and send her back inside. Thinking that lightsabers were the most extraordinary things in existence, that anyone who could carry one was some kind of miracle. She had spent years trying to be worthy of the one she'd been given and a few more years after that wondering whether worthiness was even the right thing to be reaching for.

She settled her feet into the first position of Shii-Cho without thinking about it, the stance as natural as standing.

"Every Jedi starts here," she said, and swept the blade through the opening movement, broad and slow and clean, the kind of movement a child could follow. "First thing we learn." Another sweep, the arc carrying through and settling into the next position. "Everything else comes from this."

Grogu immediately began mimicking her with both arms, bladeless and perfectly serious about it.

She laughed and kept going, not explaining the mechanics, not really teaching, just moving through the form with him watching and his little arms doing their best approximation beside her. Shii-Cho was honest in a way the later forms weren't. It didn't ask anything of you that wasn't already there. It just wanted you to move and breathe and let the blade be an extension of the moving and breathing rather than a separate event.

After a while her movements changed. She didn't announce the transition. The blade simply came in closer to her body, the sweeping arcs tightening, everything becoming more economical. Less readable. Each movement doing exactly what it needed to and nothing more, the way a well-made tool was different from a decorative one. Grogu's arms slowed. He could feel that something had shifted even if he couldn't have said what.

"My Master liked this one," she said. She moved through a defensive sequence, redirecting an imaginary attack, stepping into the angle of a second imaginary strike and letting it pass her. "I do too." A beat. "Most days."

She kept moving. Soresu was the form she'd lived in for years while she was running, the one she reached for without thinking when things went wrong, because it was built around the idea that you didn't have to win, you just had to still be standing when the other person ran out of options. Her Master had considered it the most practical form for a Jedi operating alone in a hostile galaxy, which had turned out to be remarkably prescient.

Then something changed.

She didn't decide to switch. It just happened, the way it always happened, the blade finding a different rhythm before her conscious mind caught up to it. The movements sharpened. The energy changed. Where Soresu flowed and redirected and waited, this pressed forward, quick and hungry, reading the openings and moving through them before they closed, not because she was attacking an imaginary opponent but because the form itself had a momentum to it that wanted to be followed. It only lasted a few seconds. Long enough to feel the difference. Long enough for the blade to leave a different kind of light-trace across the dark air.

She stopped.

Grogu made a sound of immediate protest.

"That's enough for now," she said, feeling conscious.

She became aware, in the way she usually became aware of things she'd been avoiding noticing, that Mando was no longer at the Crest. He was standing some distance behind Grogu with his arms crossed and his helmet tilted at the particular angle that meant he was paying close attention to something and not planning to say so.

She didn't look directly at him. Not because she was unaware of him, she was very aware of him. She was finding it mildly irritating how aware of him she was.

She looked at Grogu instead.

"Show him the forms."

She turned.

The helmet was tilted, the arms crossed, the posture completely still. She had no idea how long he'd been there.

"I just did." She shrugged

"Show me."

She looked at him. At the blade still lit in her hand. At Grogu, who swivelled between them with the bright attention of someone who had been hoping for exactly this development.

"I don't want to hurt you." she countered.

The sound that came through the modulator was not quite a scoff but was definitely adjacent to one.

"Show me."

She looked at Grogu. "What do you think?"

The kid nodded with the whole-body enthusiasm of someone who had already decided and was simply waiting for the adults to catch up.

"Fine," she said finally, "You come at me first."

He moved, and she dropped into her defensive stance without thinking, the form settling around her like something she'd been wearing her whole life, which she more or less had. He was fast, she'd registered that early, but Soresu didn't negotiate with fast. It just asked where the attack was and put her somewhere else. She redirected, stepped, let the next strike carry past her, was already in a different position by the time he adjusted to the one she'd just left. He tried three different approaches in quick succession, each one cleaner than the last, and none of them found her.

"Go ahead," she said. "Use your blaster."

He hesitated for a fraction of a second.

She took complete advantage, swinging wide.

The lightsaber stopped just short of his throat.

Neither of them moved.

"Careful, Mando."

He looked at the blade. Then at her. "That wasn't defensive."

"No." She stepped back briefly. "It was effective."

He considered this for a moment. "Again."

Grogu clapped.

This time he didn't hold back, and she felt it immediately, the difference between a man testing what she could do and a man actually trying. She matched him, both of them dropping the performance of it, and for a while the lakeshore was occupied by something that looked less like a demonstration and more like the real thing, the shots deflecting off the blade in bursts of dispersed energy and burying harmlessly in the sand, Grogu watching intently.

She pushed off the ground harder than her legs alone could have managed, the Force lifting her into an arc that was meant to carry her over him and down behind him before he could track the change in angle. It was a good move. She'd used it to end fights before.

He tracked her on the way up. The blaster pointed straight above him. He waited.

"Bang," he said, when she was at the top of the arc.

She came down on one knee in the sand and looked up at him.

He lowered the blaster.

She pointed at him. "That doesn't count."

"Why not?"

"I was in the air."

"You were a very clear target in the air."

"Fine." She stood and brushed sand off her knee. "Call it even."

He holstered the blaster, and then, with the timing of a man who had been waiting for an opening, said, "Blasters are useful."

She groaned. "There it is."

"If you practised."

"If you feed me," she challenged, "I might consider it."

He looked at her for a moment. "Fine. But you let me show you the basics. Can't have you blasting your own hand off."

"I'm not going to blast my own hand off."

"You held it like a hammer when i gave it to you."

"I was demonstrating a point."

"You can demonstrate points with all your fingers attached."

She opened her mouth and then decided he was, unfortunately, correct, and followed him back toward the Crest.

He beat her back to the ship. She was almost at the top of the ramp when she stopped.

Mando had his back to her. He was removing his armour.

Not ceremoniously. Not with any particular awareness of being observed. Just with the easy efficiency of someone taking off work clothes at the end of a long day, one piece at a time, each plate set aside with the careful habit of someone who had done this ten thousand times. Chest plate, pauldrons, gauntlets, all laid out with the same attention as everything else.

Grogu, walking beside her, made a small amused sound.

She became very interested in a point on the wall just to the left of Mando's shoulder and stayed there.

She had known, in an abstract and largely unexamined way, that there was a person inside the armour. Of course she had known that. It was not information she had needed to spend any time with before now because it had never been particularly relevant. It was relevant now. The flight suit fit the way flight suits fit on people who were built in a way that flight suits were not designed to account for, which was to say it didn't entirely manage the situation.

She looked at the wall.

He turned to ask her something. "Which one?"

"Hm?"

"The ration packs. Which do you prefer?"

She looked at him. Then at her feet. "I don't know."

He considered this for a moment. "Fine. I know you hate the bilerat. Take the joppa stew."

"Okay," she said, and went back outside.

The lake had not changed in the last twenty minutes. It was still very beautiful and very still and she sat down at the edge of it and breathed carefully through her nose several times and had a quiet word with herself about self control.

She was a grown woman. She had survived Inquisitors. She had survived years of running through the galaxy with nothing but her wits and a lightsaber. She was not someone who was undone by broad shoulders in a flight suit. She was categorically not that person.

The lake reflected the mountains back at her without comment.

She was a little bit that person.

His boots came across the sand behind her and he sat down beside her and handed over the self-heated pack. She accepted it with the composure of someone who had never been anything other than perfectly composed.

"The sand's not so bad," he said, looking out at the water.

"The sand is wonderful."

"I said not so bad."

"I'll take it."

He made a noncommittal sound and looked at the lake.

They ate without talking. The light over the mountains had grown enough now to give the jagged peaks a faint definition they hadn't had before, and the lake had gone from pure black to something with more depth to it, dark blue, the reflection of the sky shifting as the sky itself shifted. Grogu had abandoned his slug hunting and was sitting at the waterline attempting to skip rocks by Force, which was producing results that were technically correct but physically improbable, the rocks travelling at speeds and angles that had nothing to do with how they'd been thrown.

She watched him. Then she watched the lake.

Not really wanting to bring up the subject but feeling like it might be time to reopen the topic she asked, "When do you think we should get going?"

Mando was quiet for a moment before saying, "We can stay."

She looked at him sideways. There was something different about the way he was sitting. Not relaxed exactly, he was never entirely relaxed, but the particular watchfulness he carried everywhere was dialled back, settled, like a thing that had been running at a certain level of tension for so long it had forgotten it could run lower and had only just remembered. There was no one else here. No threats. No strangers. No expectations arriving from any direction.

Just the lake and the mountains and Grogu skipping rocks at impossible angles and her.

She looked back at the water.

The silence came in closer. She let it. She was thinking about saying something and choosing not to, and he was doing the same thing, she could feel it without reaching for it, the shape of two people in comfortable proximity both deciding the thing they were thinking could wait.

Grogu appeared between them, waddling up from the waterline with a slug held carefully in both his hands, presented upward toward Mando with the solemn expression of someone offering something of genuine value.

"No," Mando said.

Grogu turned to her and raised the slug with the same ceremony.

"No," she said, feeling a little bad.

Grogu looked between them with the expression of someone who had expected a different outcome and was reassessing. He picked up the slug and offered it to Mando again with renewed conviction.

"Still no."

The slug was redirected her way.

"I'm good, sweetheart."

Grogu sat down between them in the sand with the slug in his lap and looked at the lake with the dignified resignation of someone surrounded by people of inferior taste.

She caught Mando's helmet tilting toward her in her peripheral vision and looked away before either of them could do anything about the fact that she was smiling.

The planet's version of dusk was simply the already-dark becoming a slightly different shade of dark. There were no city lights to come on, no street lamps, no distant glow of settlements. The lake went from deep blue back to black mirror, the mountains became silhouettes, and the sky filled in around them with more stars than she'd seen in one place for a long time, uncontested by any other light source.

Eventually the lake went completely still. Not a ripple anywhere across its surface, the mountains reflected so perfectly it felt as though they were sitting between two skies instead of beneath one. The last of the light lingered along the peaks, silver and blue and impossibly soft. At some point Grogu had given up on feeding them the the slug and swallowed it whole. He leaned against his fathers leg, and fell asleep with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether he belonged somewhere.

Mando glanced down briefly before returning his attention to the lake.

After a moment she shifted a little closer, just enough to reach Grogu, and let her fingers drift across the top of his head, smoothing down one of his ears before running lightly through the soft fuzz there. He made a small sound in his sleep. Something tightened in her chest in response, quiet and involuntary.

A few months ago she hadn't known either of them existed.

She looked out across the water.

"I think this might be the best day I've had in years." It slipped out before she could stop it. She didn't entirely mind.

Beside her, Mando made a low sound, a hum almost.

She turned her head and found herself looking at him again.

The helmet. The flight suit. She had been very good, for the last hour or so, not thinking too specifically about what was underneath the flight suit. She was slightly less good at it now, sitting close enough that she could see the delicious way the fabric pulled across the swell of his arms when he shifted his weight. She looked away before that line of thought could get any further.

It didn't matter anyway. Whatever this was, however she felt about it, she would take it gladly. Even if this was all it ever became.

She looked out across the water instead and thought about more evenings like this. More strange planets. Grogu asleep somewhere nearby, the Crest waiting a short walk away, the three of them moving from one world to the next with nowhere specific they needed to be.

The image settled far too comfortably.

She let it anyway, just for a moment, and then let it go.

Eventually Mando turned his helmet toward her.

"Ready to head back onto the ship?"

She looked out at the water one last time. Considered it honestly.

"I could sleep out here," she said. "It's perfect."

The laugh came out of him clearly and all at once, short and warm, nothing mechanical in it, not the muffled approximation she sometimes heard through the modulator but the real thing, close and completely unguarded, gone almost as quickly as it arrived.

She stared at him.

He tilted his head. "Of course you could."

She narrowed her eyes. He ignored her.

Then he stood, lifting Grogu easily into one arm without waking him, the child burrowing closer without opening his eyes. He extended his free hand toward her.

"Maybe tomorrow night," he said, "we can bring blankets out."

She looked at the hand. Then at the lake. Then at him.

"Under the stars?"

The helmet dipped once.

She grabbed his hand and let him pull her to her feet, already picturing it, already looking forward to it in a way that felt uncomplicated and good.

The three of them headed back toward the Crest together, the ramp still lowered, the cargo hold open to the night air. There was no reason to close it. No one else lived on this planet.

She kicked her boots off beside the ramp and climbed the ladder first.

For once she wasn't thinking about tomorrow. For once she wasn't thinking about leaving. For once the future sat quietly somewhere out of reach and she let it stay there, and thought instead about blankets and stars and the specific sound of a laugh she'd been waiting longer than she'd realised to actually hear.

"I'm leaving the lights off."

She glanced back at him in the dim. The planet outside offered almost nothing in the way of ambient light, just the faint scatter of starlight through the viewport. She thought about it.

"I know the ship well enough to get around," she said.

She found her bunk by feel and sat on it and listened to the sounds of the Crest in the dark and thought about the day they'd had.

She was still thinking about it when she heard the sound.

A small thunk. Close. From the direction of the ground.

She went very still.

Her mind worked through it once, quietly, and arrived at the only conclusion that made sense, and then stayed there with it for a moment while her heart in her chest did something she didn't have an adequate word for.

He had taken his helmet off.

In the dark, in the ship, with her right here, he had just taken his helmet off.

She had questions. She had approximately six hundred questions, starting with the most important ones and working outward through every variation of how often does he do this and when was the last time someone else saw his face and what colour are his eyes and does he even remember what it feels like to feel the sun on his face. All of them were right there, crowding up against her lips.

She said none of them.

This felt exactly like spotting a rare creature at the watering hole. One wrong movement, one sound too many, and he'd be gone, back behind the beskar and the careful distance he kept between himself and everything.

One wrong move and he'd disappear back into the armour and she'd have to convince herself she imagined the whole thing.

She breathed in. Breathed out. Found her voice somewhere in the vicinity of steady.

"Good night."

A pause.

Not long. Just a breath.

And then she heard it.

The same voice. Still deep. Still him. But without the crackle, without the flat mechanical layer, without anything between it and the air.

"Good night."

Just that. Just his voice, plain and clear and close in the dark.

She lay back on her bunk and stared at the ceiling she couldn't see and said absolutely nothing else.

taglist: @mandosgirl2099 @literaryloony @tundra-un1verse @sucker4seresin @baalphugrimm @runicthreshold

[pzychothik]

Beskar and Light - Part 8

This is a short one whoopsie kinda filler but enjoy.

Masterlist

Read it on AO3

Mando / Din Djarin x afab! Former Jedi Reader

Warnings: Minor spoilers for the Mandalorian and Grogu, canon typical violence, trauma, PTSD, dark side corruption, possessive behavior, angst, emotional repression, complicated relationships, canon-typical weapons/bounty hunting, age gap, eventual smut. MDNI.

Not proof read

W/c: 4k

Ward caught them as they were preparing to leave.

She came down from the cantina at a pace that suggested she'd been thinking about this for a while and had decided to say it before she talked herself out of it.

Ward folded her arms. "Look, it wasn't a complete waste of time. But it still wasn't exactly worth dragging you all the way out here."

That was probably the closest thing to an apology they were going to get.

Ward sighed, "Anyway. I don't have much on my plate right now, but I do have another job if you're interested."

Mando waited.

"Small one. Simple one." She paused. "Actually, too simple."

Something about the emphasis suggested she was aware of how that sounded coming from her.

"There's an abandoned planet about a night's travel from here. Former Imperial monitoring station. Outer Rim. So far off established routes that people have forgotten it exists."

She handed Mando a datachip.

"I sent a probe droid out a few weeks ago. No life forms detected. No signs of recent activity."

"What do you need us to do?"

"Go down there. Confirm it's still empty. Redirect the monitoring feed back to the New Republic and make sure the equipment's still collecting data." Ward shrugged. "At most there might be a maintenance droid or two still wandering around."

"And if there isn't?"

"Then congratulations." Ward took a sip of caf. "You get paid for spending a night on an abandoned planet."

She glanced past them toward the shoreline.

Grogu was currently attempting to carry an unreasonable number of shells at once. The effort was not going well.

Ward considered this.

"You know what, I'll pay double."

That earned the slightest tilt of Mando's helmet.

Ward pointed at Grogu, "I like the kid."

As if on cue, Grogu dropped every shell except one.

Ward nodded.

"Worth every credit."

She looked back at them. "If you're heading toward the Core Worlds after this, let me know. I've got a contact who may have work."

Mando slipped the datachip into a pouch.

"We'll take it."

"Good." Ward stepped aside to let them continue toward the Crest.

Grogu's goodbye to Rotta was conducted with the solemnity it deserved.

The two of them stood at the shoreline while the last of the afternoon light came in flat and golden across the water, and Rotta crouched as low as his bulk allowed and said something to the child that she was too far away to hear. Grogu listened with his ears up and his whole posture still in the way it got when something mattered. Then Rotta said something else, and she caught enough Huttese to understand it was a promise about the shells, about next time, and Grogu's ears settled and he nodded once with great seriousness.

Then Rotta gave him a small nudge toward the ship, and Grogu turned.

He made it two steps before his legs seemed to register how tired they were. He slowed, stopped, and looked up at Mando with both arms already lifting.

Mando picked him up without breaking stride, without any discussion of it, the child simply going from the ground to his chest in one easy motion, and Grogu immediately went boneless against the beskar with the absolute trust of something that had always known exactly where it was safe.

She watched it happen and then looked away, aware that she'd been staring.

Rotta's eyes found her before she fully managed it. He said nothing. He didn't need to.

She followed Mando up the ramp.

Grogu did not want to go to sleep. This was clear from the moment Mando settled into the pilot's seat and held the child out toward her, the handoff as easy and automatic as everything else between them, and she took him and felt immediately the particular tension of a small creature determined to outlast his own exhaustion. Grogu curled both hands into the front of her jacket and peered up at her with eyes that were fighting very hard to stay open.

"Yeah?" she said. "You're fine, are you?"

He babbled something, a full sentence by the sound of it, very important.

"Really? You don't say?"

More babbling. His eyes drooped and then opened wide again with great determination.

"That's fascinating," she said. "Tell me more."

She carried him through to the sleeping area and sat down on the lower bunk with him in her lap, and he kept talking, quieter now, the babble losing its urgency and softening into something that was more texture than content, and she listened to all of it with her chin resting on top of his head.

"I can't believe I didn't even know you a few weeks ago," she said, when the talking had slowed to something almost drowsy. "A couple of hours away from you on that boat and I missed you so much it was embarrassing."

Grogu made a small sound.

"Don't tell anyone."

He made another sound, which she chose to interpret as agreement.

His weight shifted against her, going heavier the way it did when the battle was almost lost. She kept her hand moving slowly across his back and listened to his breathing change, the gradual surrender of it, until she was quite sure he was out. Then she lifted him carefully into the hammock, tucked the blanket around him, picked the goggles up from where they'd already slipped down his nose and set them on the shelf above, and stood there for a moment looking down at him.

She climbed up to her bunk and stared at the low ceiling.

She lay on her back with her arms folded across her chest and thought about everything she had said on the boat back from the island and catalogued, at length, all the ways in which she should not have said most of it.

Not because any of it was untrue. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that she had handed him things she hadn't planned to hand over, had talked in the particular loose way that happened when someone made too much space and she forgot to be careful about what she put into it, and now they were on the other side of it and she had no idea what he'd done with any of it.

The problem wasn't that she'd told him.

The problem was that she couldn't remember making the decision to.

She'd told him about the enclave. About the Inquisitors. About him. About the promise. About things she'd carried for so long that they had become part of the shape of her life rather than stories she actively thought about.

Most of it hadn't even felt difficult while she was saying it, that was what unsettled her. She couldn't remember choosing to trust him with any of it. She'd simply looked up one moment and found the words already leaving her mouth.

Worse, if she was honest, there had been things she hadn't said only because the boat had reached shore first.

The realisation sat heavily in the pit of her stomach. She wasn't accustomed to wanting people to know things about her. Most of the time she preferred the opposite.

Yet somewhere between Coruscant and Adelphi she'd apparently started treating the Mandalorian like someone she could hand pieces of herself to without thinking too hard about whether she should.

That felt considerably more dangerous than anything she'd actually told him.

He'd been fine though, that was what she kept coming back to. He'd been completely fine. Nothing had shifted in how he moved through the ship or handed her the child. Which should have been a relief and was instead making everything worse, because it left her with no information at all about what he'd actually made of it, and her brain had apparently decided that uncertainty was an invitation to invent the worst possible interpretation and run with it.

She lasted perhaps ten minutes before giving up on sleep entirely.

With a quiet sigh she pushed herself upright, careful not to jostle the bunk, and reached automatically for the tactical belt hanging beside her. Her fingers found the lightsaber immediately. The familiar weight settled into her palm. For a moment she simply sat there with it. She rested the hilt across both hands.

Years of use had worn parts of the casing smooth. Tiny scratches marked the metal where it had knocked against armour, stone, starship bulkheads and a hundred other things she'd long since forgotten. The emitter bore faint scoring that would never fully polish out. None of it had been there when it first came into her possession.

Not that it had ever truly felt new. She still remembered the first time it had been placed in her hands. The weight of it. The responsibility of it. The uncomfortable awareness that she was carrying the history of someone she'd never met and never would.

It had felt borrowed then. Like she was keeping it safe until its rightful owner returned. Years later she knew better. Her thumb brushed absentmindedly over the activation switch.

The crystal sat silent inside. The same crystal that had travelled across the galaxy with her. The same one that had survived the enclave, the Inquisitors, the Empire, the years afterwards. Through every hiding place and every escape route, it had always been there.

A ridiculous thing to take comfort in.

And yet she did.

She sat there for several minutes turning the hilt slowly between her hands, letting the cool metal anchor her while her thoughts threatened to wander somewhere less useful. Eventually she let out a slow breath and rested the saber across her lap. The comfort lasted right up until her mind found its way back to the boat.

The ceiling was the same as it had been. Grogu's breathing was steady in his hammock below. Everything was exactly as it always was and she was lying here dismantling herself over a conversation that he had apparently received, processed, and moved on from without incident, and the least she could do was attempt to do the same.

She picked up the blanket, swung her legs off the bunk, and jumped down, dragging herself back to the cockpit.

Mando was flying manually. No hyperspace, just stars moving past the viewport at the steady pace of conventional travel, the Crest cutting through empty space on the kind of route that didn't exist on any chart. She stood in the doorway for a second and then crossed to the co-pilot's seat and pulled the blanket around herself and sat down without saying anything.

He didn't say anything either.

She watched his hands on the controls and let the quiet of the ship settle around her, and after a while the weight she'd been carrying across her shoulders since the boat ride started to ease. He really was the same. The ship was the same. The silence between them had the same quality it always had, which was to say it didn't ask anything of her and she didn't have to perform into it. She could just be a person sitting in a chair wrapped in a blanket watching the stars while someone else flew, and nothing about that required her to have said the right things or the wrong things.

She allowed herself a little while more to figure out if anything was different anyway. Whether he held himself at a different angle. Whether the quality of the quiet had changed in some way she could identify if she looked hard enough. She sat with that question and got nowhere useful and eventually recognised that she was cataloguing his every small movement in the manner of someone who had told themselves they'd stopped overthinking and had immediately continued overthinking from a different direction.

Nothing was different. That was the honest answer. He was flying the ship. She was sitting behind him. Grogu was asleep. Outside, the stars were moving slowly past, and she was warm inside her blanket, and the Crest hummed beneath her the way it always did, and she let out a slow breath and leaned back in the seat and let herself stop looking for things to worry about.

Then he said, "I can take care of it."

She sat up to look at him.

He was still watching the viewport. Both hands on the controls, exactly as they'd been. He said it the way he said most things, without preamble, as though it were the logical conclusion of something he'd been thinking through and had simply reached the end of.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Him." A beat. "I'll make an exception for you."

She understood what that meant. She knew his rule. New Republic only, no private contracts, no guild jobs. He had said it once the day they met and had never needed to repeat it because he simply didn't deviate.

"You can't kill him," he said. Because of her vow. Because he'd understood that part at least. "But I can."

He turned to look at her when he said it. Completely steady. Matter of fact, the way he was when he'd reduced something to its parts and arrived at what he considered the logical answer. There was nothing uncertain in it.

For a moment she simply stared at him. Not because of what he was offering. Because of the fact that he was offering it at all, that he'd listened. That realisation landed strangely.

She'd spent long enough managing her own problems alone that there was something disorienting about someone else quietly deciding one of them was theirs now. That was what landed strangely, not the offer itself but the fact of it, the simple reality that he had listened and then sat with it and arrived here.

It should have been a relief. She kept waiting for it to feel like one.

When she'd told him she would leave once the hunt ended she'd been standing in an alley on Coruscant in the rain, trying to make herself easy to say yes to. Temporary. Low maintenance. A passenger rather than a permanent complication. It had seemed practical at the time and she had meant it in the way you meant things when you hadn't thought them all the way through yet, because the part she hadn't thought through was this: she had never actually believed the hunt would end. Not really. He wasn't going to stop. That had been an absolute fact fro the moment she left, something she had built everything else around the way you built around load-bearing walls, every hiding place and contingency and escape route arranged on the assumption that the threat was permanent and the future came in short stretches, weeks if she was careful, months if she was lucky, long enough to survive and then long enough to run again.

She had never planned past that. There had never seemed to be any point.

And now Mando was sitting in the pilot's seat calmly introducing a version of events she had no map for, a future where someone simply removed the problem, and the possibility sat in her chest like something with an unfamiliar weight and she looked at the stars outside and tried to work out why it made her feel like this.

She should have liked it.

She should have been relieved.

Instead she found herself staring through the viewport wondering why the idea made her feel as though the ground had shifted beneath her feet.

"No," she said.

He waited.

"I won't strike first." She stopped. "I'm not ready to make that call."

Something shifted in how he was looking at her. She couldn't read it precisely but she felt it, the slight change in the quality of his attention, like he'd heard something he hadn't expected.

A few moments later he added, "I've done it plenty of times."

"I know."

"To people who deserved it less."

"I know that too." She looked at her hands in her lap, at the blanket bunched around them. "I've killed people too. Not by choice, never by choice, but I have. When it was between them and me, or them and someone I was protecting. That's the line I've held. Going out to find someone and deciding they need to die, even someone who hurt me, I don't know how to do that."

"Technically, you wouldn't be. I would."

She didn't answer.

He seemed to take that for what it was. "I understand it," he said, after a while. "Wanting to set a different example. That's why I stopped taking Guild jobs after the kid. Not sure it's exactly the same thing. I still terminate when it's necessary."

"Well," she said, "when weapons are your religion, what are you gonna do."

"Isn't it the same for the Jedi?" He said it genuinely, without challenge. "The kyber crystal, the bond between a Jedi and their saber. I've seen it. It's not just you. There's always something about the way your people carry them."

She thought about it. "A lightsaber isn't just a weapon," she said slowly. "I mean, yes, obviously it's a weapon, but that's not all it is. It's an extension of me. It's a tool. It's a shield, it deflects, it protects. It's built to defend more than it is to kill." She turned the hilt over in her mind the way she'd turned it in her hands an hour ago. "There's an elegance to it that a blaster can't have. A blaster is a weapon. A lightsaber is something more."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Mine never worked that way," he said.

She looked at him. "Your blasters are many things, but elegant isn't the word I'd reach for"

"My saber."

She stared hard at the back of the helmet.

"What saber?"

"It wasn't a lightsaber, exactly. It was called the Darksaber." He said the name evenly, without drama. "Looked different. More like a Mandalorian longsword. Black blade." He shifted slightly in the seat. "It was supposed to determine who ruled Mandalore. If you won it through combat, the throne was yours."

She stared at the side of his helmet for a long moment.

"So you are the ruler of Mandalore?"

"I gave it away" he said. "It never felt like it was mine. It always felt wrong, like a dead weight in my hand. Nothing like what you described."

She found herself sitting forward slightly without meaning to. "Where is it now? I want to see it."

"Destroyed." He said it without particular grief. "The remains are on Mandalore."

She settled back. Thought about a black-bladed sword that looked like a weapon and felt like a burden, passed from hand to hand through combat across generations until it ended up with a man who had never wanted what it represented.

"Must've been something," she said.

He didn't respond to that.

"Maybe it never felt like yours because you didn't want what came with it." She said it to the stars more than to him. "The thing and the weight of the thing. If you never wanted the weight, maybe the thing never really settled."

He was quiet for long enough that she wasn't sure he was going to answer.

"Maybe." He spoke eventually.

Something about that lodged itself unexpectedly beneath her ribs.

Not the ruling part.

The walking away from it.

Most people spent their entire lives clawing for power. Chasing titles. Building themselves around whatever authority they could gather.

He'd held the symbol of an entire world in his hands and decided he wanted none of it. It shouldn't have surprised her. It was, in hindsight, the most Mando thing she'd ever heard come out of his mouth.

Still.

She found herself looking at him differently afterwards. Not entirely because he could have been a king. More-so because he could have been one and walked away.

For reasons she preferred not to examine too closely, she found that absurdly appealing.

The stars drifted slowly beyond the viewport. She watched them and thought about burdens. About inheritances. About futures people handed you without asking whether you wanted them.

The Darksaber.

The Jedi.

The boy she'd loved.

The man hunting her.

The life she'd imagined for herself after the Empire fell.

None of it had gone the way it was supposed to. When she'd first stepped aboard the Crest she'd been looking for somewhere to hide. Somewhere temporary to catch her breath before she started running again. That had been the entire plan.

Survive.

Move on.

Repeat.

At some point she'd stopped thinking about where she was supposed to go next. She couldn't identify exactly when. Only that a few hours ago she'd been sitting on a boat discussing Grogu's future as though she expected to be part of it. As though she expected to still be there.

Running had become a permanent thing, a certainty she could organise the rest of her life around. She had never needed to ask herself what happened afterwards because afterwards didn't exist.

Until now.

Until a man in beskar armour had looked at her and calmly offered a version of the future where she didn't spend the rest of her life running.

Maybe that was why the conversation had unsettled her so badly. Not because she was worried about what he would do, because for the first time she was being forced to imagine what came after.

And because, somewhere along the way, she'd started hoping that whatever came after might look an awful lot like this.

She woke when the ship touched down.

For a moment she didn't move, held in the soft confusion of waking somewhere unexpected, and then the Crest assembled itself around her and she remembered. The viewport was dark, whatever planet they'd landed on offering almost nothing in the way of ambient light. Everything was still.

Something warm was pressed against her side.

She looked down.

Grogu was curled against her, both hands tucked under his chin, deeply and completely asleep. She had no idea when he'd come into the cockpit or crawled into her arms.

She stayed very still and closed her eyes again.

She heard the pilot's seat shift. Boots on the floor. A low sound came through the modulator, involuntary, the sound of someone's stiff back registering a full night in the same position. Then the particular quiet of a person who has noticed something and stopped.

She kept her breathing even.

She felt him lean across and adjust the blanket, carefully, around Grogu where it had slipped, and then around her shoulder. She kept her face still. She concentrated very hard on not smiling and was only partially successful.

Then his boots crossed the cockpit. The ladder. The cargo hold. Gone.

She opened her eyes.

The ship sat quiet around her. Grogu breathed against her side. Outside, the dark flat surface of the planet was visible through the viewport, featureless and still in the low light. She looked at it for a while and then looked around the cockpit, the worn panels, the scratched viewport, the controls she loved to watch Mando tinker with.

She'd always known leaving Grogu would hurt. She'd been letting herself know that for weeks, quietly, in the way you allowed yourself to know things you couldn't do anything about.

She'd been considerably less careful about his father.

She tucked the blanket more securely around Grogu and looked at the planet outside and thought about the Darksaber and things that never felt like they belonged to you, and thought about the offer that was still sitting somewhere in the ship like an object she'd refused to pick up, and thought about what came after, and found that she still didn't have an answer.

"You want caf?" Mando called up from below.

"How long have you known I was awake?"

She felt a little heat creep up her cheeks

"Since we landed."

She groaned and dropped her head back against her seat.

Somewhere below, she could practically hear the satisfaction in his voice.

Grogu stirred. His eyes opened, found her face, and closed again.

She pressed her cheek against the top of his head and didn't say anything.

She had until the problem went away to figure it out. She was becoming less certain that was going to be enough time.

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