linger
pairing: Din Djarin x Reader
word count: 2k+
warnings: fluff
a/n: just frolicking in a field with a touch starved mandalorian...
masterlist
ao3 link | gif credit: @rexahsoka
You press a kiss to his cheek, or where his cheek would be. At the curve of his helmet. The action is so quick that he barely registers it before he sees you bounding down the Crest’s ramp and into the grassy field beyond. It was so fast that he finds himself racking his brain to remember if you had done it before, if it was a normal habit and he had somehow forgotten it.
If he concentrates, he thinks he can feel your lips against his cheek. And if he concentrates a little harder, he can feel them at the stubble of his jaw, and ghosting down the side of his neck, lingering at the point where his heartbeat can be felt at the surface of his skin. Then you turn around and face him, surrounded by a halo as the setting sun lights your silhouette. The grass swallows your figure up to your hips. “You gonna stand there all day?” your voice calls to him. It’s enough to break him out of his trance.
He takes a second to compose himself and in a moment he’s back to the version of himself he usually offers to you. Silent and stoic as he follows your footsteps down the ramp. When you see that he’s moving towards you, you turn your back to him again and wander further away from the ship. With the child fast asleep inside the Razor Crest, the Mandalorian taps a button on his vambrace to seal the ramp of the ship before tracing your steps through the field.
He can’t pinpoint where exactly you intend to go, your path crisscrosses through the field aimlessly, and he dutifully follows, unable to do much else while he’s fixated on the way your hand trails over the taller stalks of grass.
Four standard days ago, you had told him the Crest needed some repairs. “I’ll take us to the closest inhabited planet,” he had said.
“I have everything we need,” you shook your head. “We can go somewhere else. Maybe somewhere that isn’t populated. Where we can stay an extra day.” That last part was posed more like a question. He had turned his head towards you silently. In the dark cockpit, you could see the stars reflecting off the metal of his helmet.
You knew that he would prefer an uninhabited region. His armor made him a spectacle every time you stopped for food or refueling, and that made protecting the child from bounty hunters quite difficult. Word of a Mandalorian sighting always spread fast.
“An extra day?” he had asked.
You shrugged noncommittally. “I want to stretch out. We’ve been flying for so long.”
“There’s plenty of room in the cargo hold for stretching.” You would’ve thought the remark was an attempt at a joke if not for his perfectly serious tone and the nature of every conversation you had ever had with the man.
“That’s not what I mean.” You huffed out a breath in frustration.
“What do you mean then?” The question was cautious. Like every conversation was. It always felt like he was scared to learn too much about you. And he always offered even less about himself.
You mulled it over for a moment before settling on how to describe it to him.
“I want to see a sun. Not from the Razor Crest where the light is blinding and I have to hide out in the cargo hold until we pass it because I don’t have a helmet with polarizing filters. I want to see a moon peeking out from between clouds. I want to feel a breeze that isn’t just the Crest’s circulation system. Just for a day.”
You must have sounded really desperate because he turned back to the console and punched some buttons before responding to you.
“Okay.”
The smile on your face didn’t disappear from that moment until you stepped into the grass on a planet whose name you had already forgotten.
Your shadow grows longer and longer as you meander, the sky darkening with each passing moment. Before he’s realized it, you’ve led him back to where the Razor Crest stands. He’s far away enough that when you sit down, the tall grass obscures you completely from his vision. For a moment, he’s alone on this planet with nothing but his ship. The thought sends a bolt of panic through his heart, though he can’t understand why it sparks such terror. Long before either you or the child were with him, he traveled alone. The feeling should be familiar, not terrifying. But his heart is still eased when he comes to stand next to where you lay in the field, grass stalks flattened below your back and softening the ground.
You look giddy, he thinks, like the face you get when you finish a particularly complicated repair, but somehow more. You gesture to the grass beside you in invitation. “Join me?”
He doesn’t have to accept. He could say he needed to check on the child, or that he should eat inside the ship now while you spent time outside. You’re just the mechanic he hired. There’s no need for him to spend time with you outside what is necessary. But he knows that hasn’t been true since he started noticing the faces you make during repairs and it’s certainly not true after he’s imagined your lips on his neck.
The Mandalorian lays down beside you as gracefully as he can whilst covered in armor and you turn your head to face him. Your clothed shoulder rests against his pauldron. There is still enough light that he can make out your features but the details are disappearing as the sun falls lower and lower below the horizon. “I’ll get started on repairs at first light tomorrow. They shouldn’t take more than a day of work,” you tell him.
“You don’t have to,” he says before he can stop himself. “We can stay here a few days longer.”
Your smile disappears and reappears as something softer. It’s timid. Surprised, even. It’s an acknowledgement that he must be fighting his instincts to keep moving; after all, staying in one place for more than a day would be out of the norm for the pattern he had established while protecting the child. You turn your head back to the sky and he follows suit. Three moons form an arc across the sea of stars. Thin clouds float slowly across your vision.
You stargaze in silence. It’s peaceful. A different kind of silence from looking at the same objects from the cockpit of the Razor Crest. That silence was always anxious and frantic. Even hours of floating through space was not enough time to enjoy the stars when you were on the run, constantly thinking about the next seven steps, always planning for the worst. But for once, the Mandalorian finds that he’s losing track of time, and he’s not worried about it in the slightest.
Before he’s realized, so much time has passed that the largest moon is at its apex, bathing the field in a silver glow from directly above where you lay. There’s a question on the tip of his tongue, though he doesn’t know how to ask it. There’s a chance you’re asleep after hours of silence under the night sky, but he can’t bring himself to turn his head and check if you are awake. If your eyes meet his through the slit of his helmet, he knows the question will die in his mouth.
“Earlier today,” he begins, then stops. His voice rings clear in the empty field. He waits for a sign that you heard him.
“What about earlier today?” Your voice is quieter than usual and slow with lethargy. It has his heart beating harder beneath his armor and him even more unsure of the words he’s about to say.
The question is jumbled on his lips and he’s calculating the best approach, the most careful phrasing. He’s always cautious, but you could never figure out if it was because he was worried he’d scare you away like a skittish deer or if giving up too much of himself or learning too much of you might somehow trap him.
“Why did you kiss me?” He asks the question in a rush of words. Then he holds his breath. He thinks he’d die if he looks at you.
If he did look at you, he’d find you with a gentle smile on your face, eyes closed as you try to fight sleep. Maybe if you were a little more awake and a little less lighthearted from the afternoon of frolicking, you might find it in you to be embarrassed at the action, or at the very least acknowledge that it was unusual. Instead, you’re shamelessly honest as drowsiness strips away any inhibitions you might have had during the daylight hours.
“I was happy,” you tell him. It’s perhaps too simple an answer, but your mind is too far gone to formulate a better response.
You feel him shift beside you. His head is turned to you now, mapping the features of your face he can see in the moonlight. He notes that your eyes are closed.
“Are you still happy now?” he asks. You barely register the question as you linger at the edge of slumber. It’s a whisper at the corner of your mind. Words escape you in the moment so you do the only thing your muddled brain can think to do.
You turn your head until you can feel the metal of his pauldron cold on your cheek. Another small movement brings your lips to the piece of armor and you place a kiss there. It’s so quick and so gentle that he would have missed it had he not been staring at you.
You still completely and he would have thought you had fully fallen asleep, but your quiet, uneven breaths are picked up by the sensors in his helmet.
Then suddenly, your hand is feeling along his vambrace, searching for something. You seem to find it when you grip his fingers and pull his hand towards your face. Sleep has destroyed all command of your impulses and he feels you tracing the material of his glove near his wrist.
Your fingertips brush his bare skin and you stop your movements. His heart stutters. Your skin touches his at the gap between his glove and his vambrace. A tiny patch of skin he’d always been a little bit careless about. The sensation is wholly unfamiliar, but it lights a fire in him that screams for more contact. He doesn’t want you to move. His nerves are buzzing with the new feeling and he swears that when he checks next morning, your fingerprint will be burned into his wrist.
Then the feeling is gone and immediately replaced with something he’d only come to crave earlier that day. Your lips touch his wrist and Maker, he’s gone. He’s ascended. The moonlight feels impossibly brighter. His helmet is suddenly suffocating and his chestplate too tight. The breeze rustling the grass around your bodies is delightfully cool, but every inch of his skin prickles with heat.
You drop your hand, still clasping his, to your stomach. “I’m always happy when I’m with you.” And with that, you promptly fall asleep, seemingly unaware of the turmoil you had just caused in the man lying beside you.
Long after your breathing has slowed, he continues to watch the rise and fall of your chest in silence. He sees only what the moonlight offers to him, refusing to activate his helmet’s night vision. He can barely make out the outline of your hand tangled with his, resting on your stomach. Though the skin at his wrist is covered now, his glove having shifted back over it, he can still feel the ghost of your lips brushing over it. When he closes his eyes, the sensation grows stronger. If he concentrates, he can imagine what your fingers interlocked with his would feel like without the leather that separates them. It feels like a secret, hidden from even the night sky by layers of leather and beskar. But it’s a secret he’ll share with you in the morning.
