like a moth to the flame, part IV
Pairing: monster!Din Djarin x Female Reader Rating: E, 18+ Word Count: 11.1k Content Warnings: dark!Din, predatory/obsessive/possessive behavior, body horror/painful physical transformations, injury/gore, blood and hunting and monstery shit, oral (m-receiving), p-in-v Note: Endlessly grateful to both @frannyzooey and @ezrasbirdie for lending me their big beautiful brains xx
DIN Din had woken, disoriented and hurting, that morning after he’d found the Armorer on Glavis.
He came-to curled in the fetal position on the hard metal floor of his tiny compartment on the humming public transport. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he knew his body felt wrong. Uncomfortable and unwieldy, heavy and strange.
When he did open his eyes to the harsh, artificial light, the first thing he noticed was the sharp clarity of his vision. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but it felt like he was looking through one of the strongest filters of his visor. He blinked hard. No change.
He unfolded his arms and studied his hands, splaying too-long fingers, and his thoughts tangled and snagged as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
The glint of cruel silver claws.
In his periphery, he caught the movement of a dark shape over his shoulder.
He tried to scramble away from it. It followed, a shadow.
Wings.
The word felt absurd. But it was…right. Silver that matched the half-moons of those claws, a structure of bone sprouted from both of his shoulder blades, a hooked joint forming the apex of each inky black, bat-like wing. Colossal and dark.
Piece by piece, in a haze of disbelief, he discovered new parts of himself.
The sheer size of this body, the power coiled in his changed muscles.
He ran a finger along the edge of his teeth, catching the pad on an elongated canine. Blood welled.
The wound on his thigh, where he'd burned himself with the saber the night before, was largely healed. There was only a trace of it, a fading pink scar.
Din stopped there. He couldn’t bring himself to look in a mirror, to see himself like this. He wasn’t ready for it to be real, to know if his face was still his own.
Instead, he picked up his chest plate to start collecting his armor, and his claws bit gently into the perfectly smooth surface. He was stunned.
What scratches beskar?
Beskar.
Of course.
The silver of his claws, of his wing joints was beskar. Virtually indestructible.
Din sank back to the floor and closed his eyes. He sat against the cold metal wall with his clenched fists pressed against his eyelids, the tips of those talons cutting into his palms. He wanted to escape the prison of this body, of this new reality; to wake from this nightmare; to blink himself out of existence altogether.
He forced himself to slow his breathing, holding it at the top of each inhale, until some of the tension in his chest eased. He let his thoughts go, focused on the cadence of his breath. Preparing himself as he did before a fight.
A slow, creeping sense of relief spread through him gradually, growing so palpable it turned physical. Like a cool wash of water over his aching muscles, a full-body shiver racked him. The tremble and quake of his broad frame was fleeting but intense. A release. His bones shifted in a pinch of discomfort. His mind drifted.
And then, stillness.
He’d opened his eyes minutes later, and his vision was blessedly, beautifully blurred—just barely. As it always was. As it was supposed to be.
Sitting there, staring at his hands and his blunt, human nails, Din might have been able to convince himself he’d imagined all of it. A fever dream. A delusion. An exhaustion-fueled moment of insanity, his mind addled by the fight and the pain and the life-altering dismissal from his covert.
Except, etched into his chest plate…those damning marks.
A mechanical voice announced the imminent arrival of the transport, interrupting his moment of existential crisis. Tatooine. The local time and weather blared through the speaker.
Tatooine. He couldn’t go back there. Not like this.
He made a choice. He dressed and readied himself, deboarded and found his way to the baggage claim. A droid unlocked his case, and Din methodically reattached each of his weapons. He reached for the dark saber last. The metal hilt felt hot, even through the thick leather of his glove. Nothing else had—not his blaster or his charges. Just the saber, warm under his touch. Warm like something alive. Like something warm-blooded, something with a thrumming pulse. Like something pleased to be back in his grip.
Like it knew.
He clipped it to his belt and let it drop, relieved to not have it in his hand.
Din turned, looking for the closest screen of departures, and scanned the list for the least populated destination.
*** Now, months later, he wakes to a fantasy.
He hadn’t meant to sleep. He didn’t want to risk it, even in the armor—not after he felt his body start to shift under his beskar last night. He didn’t think that was possible. Then he’d sucked your taste off his fingers, and his head had snapped to the side, his spine straightening. He’d felt the pop of vertebra and the sudden tightness of the skin across his back, the warm tension in his muscles straining for the change, but he’d managed to stave it off.
Just barely.
No, he hadn’t meant to sleep last night, but he had. And he wakes now, well rested, to the feeling of your warm body curled into his side, your head nuzzled into his neck, your breathing slow and deep. Watery morning light, as light as this dark forest ever gets, is visible through the trees outside the window.
He’d tried to move away from you during the night, to give you space, sure that you’d be more comfortable without the hard edges of beskar digging into your soft body, but every time he’d started to extract himself gently, you’d grumbled and tightened your fingers wherever they happened to be—caught in the folds of his duraweave, gripped around armor, tangled with his own. The leg you had hooked over his thigh had tensed too, your foot tucking itself under his other knee. You twined yourself around him, like a tenacious little climbing vine, and refused to let go.
He likes it. You’re possessive too.
The realization hurts a soft spot under his ribs—you want what he wants. To belong to someone. To claim and be claimed. To know that closeness. Skin-to-skin, joined and sweaty, without all these fucking layers between you. That hopeless, dangerous thing he can never give you.
That thought is unbearable when you’re asleep on his chest, your hand still curled over the top of his chest plate, fingers clinging to the sharp cut of metal. When he can smell the faint tang of your blood as it pumps idly through your veins, detectable even under the layer of your delicate floral scent, even from beneath his helmet.
His mouth waters.
It’s the catalyst that finally gets him moving. He carefully but forcefully unfastens your hand, inches your leg off his, and slips out of bed. You readjust but don’t wake.
As soon as he’s standing, looking down at you, he regrets it. The space between your bodies is intolerable, and he has nothing to do but wait for you to wake. So he waits. He waits, and he seethes.
He thinks about the mistakes he’s made.
*** He’d spent yesterday angry at himself, fuming at his own idiocy. He’d ruminated on how to proceed, how to scare you off again after he’d all but courted you the previous night when he’d given you a com link. Had invited you to use it. Fucking encouraged it. He’d been drunk on you—on your presence, on your forgiveness, on your smile. On the headiness of your scent as you’d stood so close to him outside your house. And it had messed with his fucking head, made him do stupid things. Dangerous things.
He’d worked through the steps of his drills while he thought, slashing the saber through the air as he’d tried to decide what to do. How to retract his offer of the com. He didn’t think he could bring himself to be cruel to you, to reject you outright. He’d imagined your face, imagined the hurt there, and he’d just…known he couldn’t do it. He’d have to leave. He wouldn’t let himself see you again. He'd jam the frequency of the com link. A clean break.
It was the only option.
He’d decided he’d let himself change early then, before the sun had dipped below the green horizon. One last hunt before he found a way off this planet.
He’d been minutes away from letting himself shift, minutes away from heading out completely uninhibited, when he’d caught your scent. You were close. The timing of it had made him want to break something. That was exactly the problem with all of this: one misstep, one instance of bad timing…and you could end up dead.
Why hadn’t he thought about you finding the bodies? How had that not occurred to him?
He’d left a perfect trail from your house to his. His animal brain had thought protect and nothing else. He’d gotten sloppy, comfortable. Maybe some part of him had wanted you to find it, to follow.
This was how it would end, then, he’d thought as he waited for you. Not in the easy way he’d planned, not a quiet exit—a coward’s exit. He’d have to face you, to turn you away and tell you he was leaving.
Then you were in front of him, and all of that was gone—the struggle and the resolve, the determination and decency. He’d fought to get it back for a few minutes, scrabbled against his own desire. Had tried to deny himself—to deny you. It was futile.
You’d asked him if he thought you were weak, if all of this was somehow your fault. And that was it.
He’d refused to punish you for his sins.
*** And now you’re in his bed. Warm and soft under his comforter, your head pressed into his pillow. A dream. Something he could wake up to tomorrow and the next day, if he wanted. A string of perfect, untouchable days stretching before him like a beckoning temptress.
He can’t let himself think like that.
Your life, he reminds himself. Your life is what matters most. Keeping you here wouldn’t just be selfish, wouldn’t just be a temporary balm, it would be a gamble. Your life pitted against his own self-restraint. Your life pitted against the self-restraint of a monster he doesn’t trust.
If he can just get you out—out of his bed, out of his house, out of his head—he’ll be able to think straight, and then he can go.
He watches you stir, aware suddenly that a fully armored Mandalorian looming over you might not be the most comforting sight for you to wake to. But you crack open sleepy eyes before he can move, and a lazy smile spreads across your face. His heartbeat stumbles.
“Morning,” you yawn, stretching your arms over your head.
“Morning,” he replies, clipped as he tries to expedite this process.
“It’s early,” you muse, your gaze trailing to the window. “I think you should come back to bed.”
Din’s thoughts stall immediately. You look so cozy, so comfortable snuggled in his bed. In his bed.
“Please?”
Din’s helmet follows the path of your hand as it begins to wander: as it slides languidly down the column of your neck, molds over the swell of your breast, lingers along your waist. You know you’ve snared him right away. You always know.
He just stands there, silent and yielding, as you kick the blankets away and shimmy out of your clothes. He wants to tell you to stop, but his mouth isn’t responding to his brain, his jaw dropped open slightly behind the helmet as he surveys the bare lines of your body. He didn’t get to enjoy this yesterday, didn’t get to luxuriate in the view, to drink in every detail. To commit it to memory.
His visor catches where your fingers stroke the curve of your hip.
“I can’t—” he starts.
You slip your hand between your legs, run your fingers through the soft hair there.
He was going to get you out. To regroup. That was his intention.
One of your fingers slips lower, dips into the seam of your sex. His cock responds.
He barely knows his own name, let alone any sense of reason when you’re looking at him like that—touching yourself like that. Begging him to touch you. His nervous system jolts from freeze directly into overdrive, and immediately he can feel himself brushing up against some physical limit, teetering on the edge of his control.
He watches you drop your knees open, and a low, pained sound passes through the modulator when you use two fingers to part yourself, putting yourself on display for him. You roll the pad of one finger over your clit, and your head drops back onto the pillow, your eyes closing in pleasure. Need claws at the inside of him.
“Stop,” he commands, but there’s no bite in it, his mouth watering at the sight of your stroking fingers.
You smile and widen the spread of your thighs, moving your hand lower.
He tries to sound firm, but his words come out like a plea: “Don’t—”
“I wouldn’t have to touch myself if you’d do it for me.”
You keep your eyes on his visor as you press two fingers inside yourself, frictionless as they sink inside the warm clutch of your body. He’s fixated on the flex of your wrist as you fuck yourself gently—his rapt attention suddenly a shivering, living thing throbbing under his skin. When you ease them out, he can see the shine of your arousal coating your skin up to the knuckle, a clear thread strung between your fingers for a brief moment when you slowly separate them.
“Your fingers feel so much better,” you breathe.
His blood pulses loudly in his ears, a too-slow beat. He knows what you feel like, clenched around his thick fingers—how slick, how hot. He knows what you taste like, licked off his own skin. Din would like to say that some greater primal force takes over, hijacks his body, that the monster in him doesn’t give him a choice, but that would be a lie.
He decides to let go.
Without changing forms, Din silences the part of his mind that’s protesting. He lets the animal of his hindbrain take control, a predator submitting to the call of its prey drive. It feels good to give in—a rush of blissful quiet overtakes him. He looks at you, and it’s simple. He wants you.
Time slows, but his hands move quickly—going to his belt buckle. The weapon-heavy leather thuds when it hits the ground at his feet.
You watch him disarm himself, poised like a willing sacrifice on his bed with your hand caught between your open legs, a naked eagerness on your face that pleases the possessive, hungry thing in his chest. His vision is tinged red, the severed thread of his control a distant memory as he thinks of all the things he wants to do with you.
To you.
He condemned himself to this the moment he let himself touch you. There’s no going back. He’s going to taste your nectar from the source. He’s going to fuck you with his tongue and gently suckle your clit between his lips until you sob. He’s going to eat you out until you come on his face, your hands tangled in his hair.
And then he’s going to do it again.
He tries not to think about how much easier that would be with his other tongue, his tongue when he’s transformed—long and dextrous as it is. He could get so deep inside you like that. Taste you from the inside out.
Later. He appeases himself with the promise of later. The promise of tomorrow and more more more.
His gaze settles on your mouth. There’s something else he wants now.
He approaches the bed and stands at its side, waiting patiently. That desperate sense of urgency drops away, and his shoulders relax. He can decide to have all the time in the world with you if he only lets himself.
When he hunts, when Din really truly hunts these days, he finds that he likes to draw out the indulgence of it. The tease and the chase. The kick of adrenaline before the slaughter. He understands why a predator plays with its prey before it makes the kill.
Because it can.
Because it feels good.
You’re expecting him to join you on the bed. He can see it in your expectant gaze.
“You want it so bad?” he asks, dipping his helmet down. “Come here.”
A wicked look flashes across your face at the change in his voice, at the invitation. There’s a beat of anticipation as you decide to play along, and then you crawl to the edge of the bed on your hands and knees. He watches, an imperious tilt to his helmet.
You perch on the edge, looking up. Waiting.
“Go ahead,” he nods. “Take it out.”
Your hands move to the button on his pants, but you don’t pop it open right away. You let your hand mold to the hard bulge there, feeling the heft of him.
He tilts his helmet the other direction, impatient, and you go for the zipper.
Before you’ve even pulled his cock out, before you’ve even touched him, Din thinks the sensation of your hot breath on the expanse of skin exposed by his open fly might be the most erotic thing he’s ever experienced.
He rips his gloves off and locks a hand around the nape of your neck.
He thinks for a fleeting moment how obvious it must be—his obsession with your mouth. The edge of mania he’s shoved toward when you let your tongue drag up his hip bone. That he’d slit his wrists at the altar of your perfect lips if you asked.
Your eyes drag upward slowly as you lick across his skin, gaze catching on the armored lines of his body before it meets his visor. You peer up at him as you inch the fabric of his pants down just far enough. And then your eyes flick down to watch a pearly bead of precum slip down the length of his shaft at your closeness.
“You want it?” he rasps. “Open your mouth.”
He grunts in satisfaction when your lips part immediately. Again when your hand curls around the base of him and your tongue darts out to circle his head, a touch so infuriatingly delicate that it makes him want to hold you down and fuck your throat raw.
He doesn’t, of course. He lets you set the pace even though your teasing lick across the underside of his cock and another over his slit feel as much like torture as they do like pleasure.
Finally, finally, you take him fully into the heat of your mouth. You start up a steady rhythm, and he’s more than satisfied to let you take the reins.
You’re less satisfied with that though—you settle a hand over his on your neck and press down, your eyes skirting upward as you nod subtly, your other hand urging his hips forward, urging him to fuck your mouth.
Use me.
He wishes you could see his face in this moment, what you do to him. Din’s eyelashes flutter shut at the perfection of your request. But immediately, he snaps them open again, needing to see.
He thrusts forward, and you whine in approval, your fingers tightening on his hip—taking him deep again and again, until he watches a line of saliva slide down your chin. Until your lashes grow wet, eyes watering at the effort of taking him over and over.
It’s too much. It’s too good.
The tight, hot constriction of your throat as you swallow around the head of him, the hard suck of your cheeks hollowing out around his shaft. His helmet rocks back, and a growl reverberates through his chest. But he’s not about to let himself come without knowing what it feels like to fuck you.
His hand drops away from the back of your neck; he forces his hips to still. “Enough,” he grits.
When you surge forward again, taking him deep, he closes a hand gently around your throat and eases you backward, off him.
“I said stop.” He thinks the words would be menacing if the fractured restraint in his voice weren’t so apparent. If you couldn’t see the steady leak of precum from his cock, the drizzle of opaque liquid on his dark pants. He’s teetering right on the painful edge of orgasm, and you know it.
“Need to fuck you,” he says, his hand still settled over your throat.
“Then fuck me,” you reply, your voice hoarse as you shift backward on the bed.
“You want my fingers first?” he asks, his hand drifting down the inside of your thigh. “You want to cum on my hand again?”
“No,” you say, catching his wrist and pulling him onto the bed, over you.
“No?” he says. “You want it to hurt?”
“Yes.”
His fingers tighten on your thigh. Too hard. “Turn around.”
You flip over and settle on your knees in front of him, and Din can see how much you enjoyed sucking his cock in the glossy spread of your cunt.
He catches a drop of your arousal with two caressing fingers. “You want to be fucked hard? Is that what you want, you greedy little thing?”
You press your hips back, rubbing yourself into the cup of his hand. And for a moment, his mind buzzes with blankness—with the thought that he could be tasting you instead of just touching you. He satisfies himself for now by lining up his cock with the soft heat of your pussy, by pressing his sensitive head against your arousal-slick flesh.
But when you whine and start to shift backward into him, he waits. Savors. “You need my cock that bad, huh?”
“Please, I need it. I want it—”
It’s that thing he fantasizes about—the daydream he strokes himself to in the shower after he hunts, when he’s sticky with blood and the leash on his desire has long been snapped. Your whined plea for him, your need so stark and bright that he couldn’t ever possibly deny you. Your need for him so heightened it threatens to match his for you.
“Take it then,” he pants. “Take what you asked for.”
He sinks his cock into the welcoming heat of your body, pressing slowly against the tight resistance of little preparation—hears the soft, drawn-out oh of your pleasure—and he knows there’s no coming back from this.
*** So he doesn’t fight it. He keeps you.
Days turn into a week. Into two. You bring life and sound to this desolate place—the creak of your steps on the hardwood floor, the sound of your humming, the quiet clanks of your movements around the kitchen in the early morning light. The quiet, steady tick of your heartbeat. All those pretty little noises you make when he has you in his bed—the moans and the whimpers and the pleas. His pillow smells like mellow spring flowers, and there are rose colored skirts and silky blue pajamas in his dresser.
He likes it.
He likes the noise and the tightness of the space and the company.
When he heads outside to chop wood for the fireplace, you follow to watch him roll up the duraweave sleeves of his flight suit and swing the ax—again and again until a thick log splits down the middle with a crack—and the attention pleases him.
The weeks stack up, and there is a bar of soap speckled with lavender flowers in his shower. There are sweet strawberry preserves lined up in his cupboard, a colorful wool throw blanket tossed over the back of the couch that you insist is a necessity. For sitting in front of the fire, of course. You poke fun at his ascetic choices, at the lack of coziness in his house, but you don’t seem mad at all to be the one to provide it.
He thinks you know instinctively that home isn’t a place or a concept he’s familiar with. He thinks you love being the one to show him what it could mean.
He can tell you don’t mind that you have to face opposite directions when you eat. He thinks you like the sound of his voice even more when it’s not passed through the modulator. You draw out every meal with questions. He draws them out with his answers.
He tells you about the little green bounty that changed his life, the soup his mother made for him when he was sick, being adopted by the Mandalorians, the fact that he used to love swimming as a child. That sometimes he thinks about how good it would feel to strip off his armor and swim now. You tell him about your dreams, your childhood, your plans, everything.
When he slips his helmet on again and you turn to face him, he can see that the gulf between what he does tell you and the whole truth is obvious, though.
There is a question—are many questions—swimming in your eyes. The intention to get answers too. He’s not sure which exactly questions they are: Why the armor? The helmet? The Creed? Why this place? Where is he going next? When? What happened to him? What is he? Why the isolation and the fear and the hesitation and mile-high walls and why why why?
What the fuck happened to the wall of the shower?
Valid questions, every one. Many are things he asks himself regularly. All are questions he doesn’t know how to answer without shattering this perfect moment, without ruining the lovely domesticity you’re cultivating together. So when he sees that look and your lips part, Din speaks before you can. He’s not ready, yet, to go there. He reaches for your hand or strokes a gloved finger over your cheek and deflects.
Just a little longer, he thinks, please. And you’re not fooled—he knows that. You understand the request and allow it for now, and he’ll take what he can.
“You want to learn how to shoot?” he asks instead.
Your eyes light up.
He helps you pick a blaster from his collection—“How many blasters does one man need, Mando?”—that’s well suited to you, that fits your grip. He sets up targets outside, scattered on trees at varying distances, and stands close behind you, a solid wall against your back. He adjusts your stance and the placement of your hands, letting his touch linger on your waist in a way that makes your heart rate readout on his helmet spike.
“Are you going to let me focus or not?” you quip, peering at him over your shoulder. “I thought you were trying to teach me something here.”
He raises innocent hands and steps back. “I didn’t realize I was distracting you.”
You smile slyly at him. “Sure.”
He lets himself enjoy it, the ease between you, the way you can read him even through the armor. Standing a short distance behind you, he talks you through the process: how to aim and shoot, how to breathe.
Hand-to-hand, next, he thinks to himself as he watches you practice. Then blades. Tracking.
He’ll teach you anything and everything that will protect you.
For when he’s no longer here to do it for you, he doesn’t let himself think.
He watches you practice each day, watches you focus on the target, your lip caught between your teeth in concentration, until you nail the bullseye. You run to the tree where the target is hanging—a hole singed through the middle—letting out a triumphant cry, and he follows.
“Look,” you grin, so proud it makes his heart trip. You point at the perfectly placed burn mark.
“Good,” he praises. “Do it again.”
You roll your eyes, but you do. You return dutifully to the line he’d drawn in the pine needle strewn ground and shoot until you get the hang of it, until a miss is rare. And then he fucks you up against that tree, your dress bunched up around your hips, the blaster abandoned somewhere by your feet.
You leave for a day, maybe two, here and there to check on things at home, that little fawn you love. As soon as you’re gone, he spends a couple hours getting as far in the opposite direction as he can, changing, hunting whatever he can find in the shortest time, and then after he’s washed every trace of blood away and donned his armor, he waits for you to come back. He tells himself it’s a perfectly workable arrangement.
It’s fine. It’s safe. Safe enough.
With his attention elsewhere, it takes him a few weeks to notice that those prints, the ones he’d been tracking so obsessively, have started to show up closer to his house, to yours. They mark a quiet, slow encroachment into his territory—inching just barely past that boundary he’d been so careful to hold until recently. Their bravery is returning, their local numbers rebounding, because he hasn’t been pushing them back by culling their pack with regularity.
He makes a mental note to keep a closer eye on things, reassured by the fact that there are miles of buffer between their progress and you. And, more importantly, that more often than not, he’s by your side these days—like the times you ask him to come with you when you leave. He’s not going to say no to you.
Every night, he gets to undress you and pull you into his bed. To touch you and fuck you and make you come. He gets to learn what makes you cry, what makes you scream, what makes you beg.
All in the armor, still. In the beskar prison that keeps you safe from him. That line he manages, somehow, to maintain. The monster in him hasn’t wrested it from him yet, and he clings to that last safety net, that final border between risky and reckless.
He wonders every day when you’ll hit your threshold. When it’ll all become too much—the secrets and the questions and the armor. Every day you don’t ask or push or leave, he breathes a sigh of relief, knowing full well it just means the next day is more likely. That worry is so dwarfed by the pleasure of having you that he barely notices it, though.
It helps, too, that he’s well rested for the first time in a long time.
Din doesn’t dream when you’re in his bed, isn’t haunted by the nightmares. He slips into sleep, and it doesn’t fight him like it usually does. He sleeps soundly with your warm, soft form tucked against his side, your face pressed into his cowl. Your presence, your touch, your scent—they soothe him.
He’s always known—even before he admitted it to himself—that there would be no halfway with this. No measured approach to having you. And he was right, of course. Here you are, living with him… and happy, he thinks. He doesn’t like to think about what would happen if that changed, if you left. What he'd do. What he'd have to stop himself from doing.
Din loves hard, with teeth, and all of his are sunk deep in you. If he really thinks about it, though, the opposite is true. Yours, sunk deep in him. You have a bone-deep hold on him, a fatal bite that severed something vital upon first contact. If you decided to let go, he’d bleed out.
And he feels lighter than he has in months. Maybe years.
It scares him so much he doesn’t want to think about it.
So he doesn’t.
YOU
It’s not intentional. You don’t sit down together and make a decision, but you don’t want to leave and he doesn’t want you to go. So you just…don’t.
Slowly, with time, your most essential things migrate from your place to his. You bring a bag of clothes here and your favorite blanket another time. Your shampoo comes along with other bathroom essentials, and some kitchen supplies find their way into his drawers and cabinets.
Within a few weeks, you all but live with him.
You know instinctively that the opposite arrangement—staying together at your house—isn’t possible. Whether or not it’s actually necessary, Mando takes his self-imposed exile seriously. It’s another of the many things you don’t push him on.
Yet.
You visit home on a regular basis, of course, to keep an eye on things. Town, too, for supplies. You make the long walk alone—or sometimes together when you can convince him to put off whatever mysterious, imperative thing he has to do when you’re gone, and it feels shorter then. He’s not so hard to persuade.
You check on Luna, who is happy and well fed in the warmth of the barn, kept company by the chickens and the handful of braying goats.
You find that she’s terrified of other people—or at least of Mando. You’ve never brought anyone else around so it’s hard to know if it’s something about him specifically. Maybe it’s the armor or his size. The first time she sees him, she goes rigid, the picture of freeze, and it takes twenty minutes to calm her down after you nudge Mando back out of the barn and close the door behind him. Even after several visits, she remains wary of him, barely willing to tolerate his presence.
A detail, like so many others, you file away for later.
It's one of many that you don't mention—anything that might prompt impossible conversations. Instead of souring the moment, instead of asking the hundreds of questions that are piling up in your head, you tacitly agree to avoid those things, skirting around any topics that elicit unanswerable questions or suggest an expiration date. Again and again. For weeks.
Then months.
It’s easy enough to rationalize. Might as well make the short time you have together pain free. Only good.
And, fuck, is it good.
You wake in his bed each morning and fall back into it each night. You wait for your lust for him to abate, for the initial need to be sated. Two months in, though, it hasn’t so much as begun to subside. If anything, it’s grown. It’s fed, you think, by the fact that you still don’t get all of him—what you do get just makes you want more.
You get his hands, his cock, the expanse of his lower abdomen and upper thighs when he unbuckles his belt and fucks you. The sound of his unfiltered voice when you eat together. The sight of his thick, veined forearms when he chops wood. Snatches of golden skin dusted in dark hair.
Never his mouth, his eyes, his chest, the rest of him—his face. His face, that you think you might already love without having ever seen.
The why of it all—of the pace, of his nature—doesn’t feel so urgent any more, now that you’ve had the opportunity to soak him in, in more than just brief interactions. You can sense the why on him when you start to appreciate the weight of his past and his creed. There’s a layer of pain and loss calcified under his armor: you can all but feel it when your fingers work past an edge of beskar. He starts to tell you about it, too; he starts to untangle the complicated knot that is Mando. It’s usually during a meal when you’re faced away from each other and you get to hear his real voice that he starts to open up. You untease his past question by question, answer by answer.
When you do almost slip, almost ask a question that is too present, he helps you put it back. Offers a distraction that you gladly accept. An unspoken agreement of not yet.
He just needs time. You just need more time together.
You try not to think about the fact that you might not have time. No, you package that thought up with that list of forbidden questions, the ones that would threaten to crack the ice you’re standing on together, and tuck them all away.
You take the things that he does offer, accept his baffling limits. You satisfy yourself with the reminder of progress. If you think back to a few months ago and draw a line from those cordial interactions at the Saturday market to the current reality of living with him—to watching him welcome all the ways you insinuate yourself into his space, to witnessing the way he seems to soften for you—you can’t help but feel hopeful about what the next few months will hold.
*** Winter comes early this year, sneaking in on quiet feet. It descends around you slowly—in brisk mornings and frozen dew drops strung along twigs like pearls—and then it comes all at once in a sudden blanket of white. You wake up to a thick layer of snow on the ground, the tree limbs and roof frosted and glittering.
He teaches you how to protect yourself—how to shoot and fight and track. You think there’s a part of him that’s certain if he only teaches you enough, you’ll always be safe. You can feel it in his palpable sense of relief when you master a new skill. As if he has a mental list of things to impart on you before he runs out of time.
When you’re consistently nailing the center of his targets again and again, Mando outfits you with a blaster of your own, tells you to keep it on you at all times—that it’s yours. That day, he drops to one knee in front of you.
“Lean,” he says, patting his pauldron.
You listen without really thinking about it, bracing a hand on his shoulder.
“Up,” he says, gesturing to your foot and offering his armored thigh.
You comply, and he slips two loops of leather up your leg, the fabric of your skirt catching on his forearm as he inches them up, until the tips of his fingers brush your inner thigh. A holster. A holster he made for you.
He tightens the straps and then slips the small silver blaster into the leather sheath.
You graduate to hand-to-hand combat next—well, not so much graduate as add it to the schedule. He’s visibly pleased when he discovers that you already have some skills with a knife, when you know how to disarm him of his vibroblade in certain holds, how to make an attacker bleed freely with one well-placed slash. How to sever a tendon or an artery. But he finds plenty of ways to stump you, ways to overpower you, and you practice those until you know how to get out of them too.
A few weeks in, you’re more than satisfied with your skill level, ready to move on. Mando, on the other hand, is ever insistent on more. He holds you with your back against his chest, caught and pinned, a purring vibroblade at your throat.
You’re exhausted, sweaty and sore from breaking out of his grasp again and again. You’re supposed to be doing it once more right now. But you’re limp in his hold.
“Go on,” he grunts.
“I’m actually fine with this,” you decide, letting your weight go even more leaden in his arms.
He scoffs low in his throat. “Is that right.”
“That’s right. I surrender. Do with me what you will.” You drop your head back, looking up at his impassive visor.
He considers. “Anything?”
The word slithers up your spine. “Anything,” you repeat, letting your eyes go heavy-lidded.
He closes the blade and tosses it away, releasing his hold on you. When you lurch forward at the unexpected freedom, your knees buckling slightly, he catches your waist to steady you.
You spin to face him, pointing a finger at the diamond-like center of his chestplate, staying far enough away that he can’t encircle you in his arms again. “Technically that counts as me getting out of that hold.”
He plants a hand on his hip. “Disagree.”
“Emotional manipulation is a weapon. You’re just mad I’m better at it than you are. Maybe I should give you lessons. You know what, yeah, I think it’s only fair that we also start practicing scenarios where I’m the one in control.”
He cocks his head suggestively. “Are we still talking about training?”
“Yes.”
He stares at you silently, adjusting his weight from one foot to the other. It speaks volumes.
You scoff. “Are you implying that I could never have the upper hand in a fight? That there’s no chance in the galaxy of that ever happening?”
A damning beat of silence and then: “No.”
“You are!”
He gestures at his chest, shrugs. “Beskar.”
You roll your eyes. “I’d just need to catch you at the right moment—sleeping or showering—and take you by surprise. Or have the right weapon. Like poison. I know plenty of plants that would kill you—plenty of plants I could find out here or maybe…yeah…those.”
You gesture at the row of detonators lined up on the side of his belt as he reattaches it around his middle. He always takes it off before you practice hand-to-hand, along with the vambrace that apparently emits flame.
“Yeah, they’d be effective,” he admits, clipping the buckle together. “The problem is you don’t have any.”
“You don’t like me enough to share your detonators with me?”
“To kill me? No.”
“How about this one?” you ask, reaching toward the mysterious hilt that’s always clipped next to them.
He steps out of reach before you can touch it.
“What is it? Can I see it?”
“I don’t use it,” he says. You know him well enough now to read the lie in his level voice.
“Then why do you always carry it?”
“It’s…a long story.”
“I’ve got time,” you press, curious.
He looks away. “I can’t.”
And you realize it isn’t just stubbornness or stoicism. It’s pain. A bruise he isn’t ready to address, and you’re prodding it.
You wonder how many secrets can simmer between you before they boil over.
“Alright, come on,” you say, grabbing his hand and turning for the house. “I’m starving.”
*** It’s deep winter when Mando starts to take you into the woods, away from his house, to teach you the basics of tracking. Each time, when the forest lightens around you and you can hear the titter of birds overhead, he tells you to pick the tracks of a deer or a fox to follow. It’s easier now that the snow is thick on the ground, a continuous blanket of white.
He instructs you, as he always does, to disregard the larger prints—the clawed ones—that you come upon occasionally. Too often for comfort.
“I’ll take care of those,” he says, unconcerned.
Each time, you think back to that bloody trail and know he’s more than capable. And then you wonder when he’s away from you long enough to actually do that.
Never, it turns out.
You’re on the tail of a stag when he holds out an arm unexpectedly, stopping you in your tracks.
“What is it?”
He turns his head slowly, scanning the quiet forest. Listening, waiting. You can’t hear a thing—not a rustle of leaves or whisper of wind. The stag isn’t close.
“They’re coming.”
“The sta—?”
Mando drops his arm and grabs your hand, hauling you back in the direction of home. You follow on instinct when he breaks into a jog with you in tow, heavy boots crunching through the snow. He twitches as he moves; he groans and presses his shoulders back, rolling his neck, his hand too tight around yours.
He’s in pain.
“Mando—” you say, trying to slow him down, to understand.
“Run,” he interrupts, pushing you ahead of him, urging you toward the house. “I can’t stop it."
You halt in front of him, a hand raised to his chest plate. “I can’t— I won’t—”
He growls when you hesitate, the sound not entirely human. His hands are shaking.
“I can help—” you start, not even entirely sure what you’re offering.
“I won’t risk you.”
“But—”
A gloved hand settles over your mouth, the other gripped tightly around your bicep. “We don’t have time for this. I won’t let you—I can’t—just go home and lock the door. And promise me you’ll stay there until I come back.”
He drops his hand and starts stripping off his gloves and vambraces. “What are you—?” The pieces click together belatedly in your head. Those colossal prints, the clawed ones.
They’re coming.
“Promise me,” he says, forcing them into your hands. “Take this too.”
He reaches for his helmet and rips it off his head, pushing it into your arms. Your jaw drops open in surprise. You don’t even have time—or the free hands—to cover your eyes or the sense to shut them tight.
“It’s okay,” he says, responding to the fear in your eyes. “I wanted to—been wanting to.”
You only have a moment to take him in. He’s just as handsome as you imagined—maybe, impossibly, more. His dark hair is wavy and tousled, falling across his forehead. His eyes are brown and wild with fear, his sharp jaw peppered with gray-flecked stubble. His perfect lips are set in a half-smile. He looks a little bashful for a moment, a little boyish as you study him.
He holds your face between his warm hands. “Promise you won’t leave the house until I come back.”
You nod.
“Say it,” he prompts, his dark eyes serious. He knows you didn’t really mean it the first time.
“I won’t leave the house until you come back,” you repeat, a little dazed.
You’re looking into his eyes. Your brain is struggling to process it.
There's fear there that doesn't just belong to the threat to your safety. It's more: the fear of being seen. Wholly.
You’re waiting for more words to come to you—something that will express the feeling that’s blooming in your chest without relying on words it’s too early to say.
“Be careful.” It’s the best you can manage.
He presses his lips to yours in a quick kiss. It’s too fast, not enough. If your arms weren’t full of beskar, you’d grab him to keep him close, to kiss him deeper. Instead, he’s pulling back and turning you on the spot with an iron grip.
“Go.”
He urges you forward with a gentle push, and you break into a jog, glancing over your shoulder as often as possible without running face-first into a tree or slipping in the powdery snow underfoot. He’s stripping off his chest plate, his pauldrons, his thigh guards. Leaving them haphazardly on the forest floor.
The last time you look back, his back is to you, and several pairs of yellow eyes are emerging in the dark spaces between the trees.
One, two, four—too many to count.
You’re tempted to stop. To turn back. To bring him the rest of his beskar. It feels so wrong to leave him out here, alone and unarmored. He’s stripping down from metal to man, and it feels unbearably vulnerable. Maybe you could help—
But just as you’re thinking that, Mando turns his head and bellows, “Go!”
You’re far from him—too far to truly make out the details—but you swear, even across the vast distance, that the whites of his eyes look black.
*** You drop the pile of beskar onto the kitchen table, unholster your blaster, and drag a chair to the window. You study the intricate line work of ice on the frosted pane, tracing cold veins with the pad of your finger. You fidget and shift, but you don’t dare leave your spot.
You stare at the place between the trees where you emerged, straining to hear any sound, knuckles white where they’re wrapped around the edge of your seat.
It’s silent.
Minutes pass like molasses—they stretch and sprawl, leisurely and unhurried, while you wait.
You steal glances at the clock on the wall. You swear it’s been hours since you slid the dead bolt shut behind you, but the clock tells you you’ve been sitting here for eight minutes.
Ten.
Twelve.
Seventeen.
He’s out there, outnumbered and alone.
Fuck it.
You get to your feet.
You wrench open the front door, but before you can break into a run, you catch a subtle movement between the trees. The blaster slips out of your hand. He’s staggering back to you—stripped and injured. His flight suit is unzipped to his waist, the sleeves tied around his hips. One hand is gripping his ribs, the other trapping pieces of his armor against his side. He’s barefoot and limping through the snow.
You run to him.
His hair is sticking to his sweaty forehead, and there’s blood on his face—so much blood—coating his lips, smeared across one flushed cheek. Lines running down his neck. It covers his hands, forearms. It’s splattered across his muscled chest. When his lips part in a pained grimace, you can see the inside of his mouth is bloody too, red lining his white teeth.
You don’t have time to process it, to think about what it means because he’s hurt.
He must see the terror on your face when you register the state of him because he shakes his head and says, “Not mine. Just this,” jerking his chin down to gesture at his side.
A row of deep lacerations is seeping blood down his ribs, over his tense fingers and down his stomach, where it’s soaking into the dark fabric bunched at his hips. You shudder at the sight of it—even through his spread fingers, you can see that his flesh is torn open in a way that makes your stomach pitch.
Behind him, there’s a sporadic trail between the trees, red dripped on virgin snow.
You want to hold him, to pull him into your arms, and, most of all, to fix him and put him back together. You start by taking the pile of armor from him and slipping under the arm of his uninjured side, pulling it over your shoulders to support his weight. He accepts the help wordlessly, leaning on you as you stumble forward together.
“They’re gone,” he pants. “Dead. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” you scoff. “Are you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
He grunts.
You limp the rest of the distance to the house together and pull open the front door, kicking it shut behind you as you help him inside. He reaches behind you to lock it, his shoulders dropping in relief when it clicks.
You drop his beskar on the floor as gently as you can while you’re half holding him up. It clatters.
“We need to get these closed up,” you say, gesturing toward a kitchen chair. “You need bacta. Sit down.”
When he doesn’t move to sit, you look up at his face, and he’s staring at you with an intensity—a soft, quiet intensity of creased brows and bright brown eyes—that takes your breath away.
“I’m fine,” he protests, gently gripping your shoulders and pushing you back in the direction of the bed instead. He fumbles with the hem of your shirt, trembling fingers slipping under the fabric to caress your skin. “I’ll heal. Just let me touch you.”
His hands are hot on your waist.
"You’re not okay,” you protest, trying and failing to redirect him. “You won’t heal if you bleed out.”
“I just need to hold you.” His words are starting to slur, running together. The blood loss is tipping him into delirium.
“After—just let me—”
He ignores you and curls himself around you, crushing you against his body, a heavy hand holding your head to his chest, the other arm locking yours to your sides.
“Mando, please—I really need to stop the bleeding—”
“Din,” he says, nestling his face against your neck sweetly. His forehead is sweaty and feverish. He brushes gentle lips over your fluttering pulse. “My name is Din.”
You’re speechless.
“I want you to call me that,” he says. “Please.” There’s a heartbreaking vulnerability behind his words, like he’s worried you won’t accept the offering of something so precious.
“Of course. Of course, I will.” His grip slackens, and you wrap your arms around his middle reflexively. The heat of his throbbing wound and the hot slip of blood against your forearm make you recoil.
“Shit—sorry—”
But Din doesn’t react to the pain.
“Din—hey—”
You try to pull back, to extricate yourself from his hold and get a better look at him, but the arms draped over your shoulders go leaden, and he sways on his feet, forcing you backward a couple faltering steps. The backs of your calves hit the bed.
“Din—” You try to steady him, but he’s getting heavier by the second, his weight shifting unexpectedly as he tries to keep his balance, half-conscious and fading.
Your knees threaten to buckle when he grunts and goes completely boneless, slumping against you.
“Fuck—”
You’re just barely able to angle your body so that you can gently—and awkwardly—use his momentum to guide him face-first onto the bed. It’s a miracle you both don’t end up in a crumpled pile on the floor. You hoist his legs up too. It takes all your strength to haul his dead weight over to flip him onto his back so you can access the slashes across his ribs.
Your heart jumps into your throat when you see how rapidly a crimson stain is spreading on the comforter underneath him. You run for the med kit, dumping it on the bed beside his prone form and digging out all the necessities.
He doesn’t flinch when you clean, close, and dress the wounds. Not even when you prick him with a bacta shot. You work as quickly and carefully as you can, keeping tabs on his breathing all the while. Any time you have a free hand, you rest it on his chest, soothed by the shallow but steady rise and fall.
The whole time, you think about all those questions, those details, those secrets. You turn them over again and again in your head in a feverish loop—all those things you’ve been stacking on top of one another all this time, a teetering pile of essential pieces of him, ready to topple with a gentle nudge. Kept at bay by distractions and diversions and half-truths. All the ways you’ve both been keeping your relationship in stasis to postpone…what? Loss? Something that’s inevitable, something no one can ever truly prevent. It feels undeniable when your hands are covered in his blood. When you almost lost him anyway.
It seems obvious now. Obvious that in the end, it will be more painful to have only stayed in this place with him than to have at least tried to give yourself wholly to whatever this is.
Before you secure the final bandage over the wounds, you check your work once, twice—terrified the simple expansion of his ribcage as he breathes will force them open again. You press edges of the bandage down and watch closely, dreading the red seep of blood on clean white. It doesn’t come. You breathe a sigh of relief.
You clean him up with a moist towel, wiping the blood from his skin, his face, his rumpled hair.
If he hadn’t chosen to take his helmet off before any of this, you’d feel like you were invading his privacy by being able to see so much of him. It still feels that way, just a little, as you admire the taut lines of his biceps, the broad spread of his shoulders, and thick muscles of his pectorals. As you gently swipe over the soft expanse of his middle, feel the hard abdominals underneath. As you study the slope of his nose and the grays threaded through his stubble, his long eyelashes fanned over his cheeks. The soft pink of his lips.
You rinse that stained-red towel until the water runs clear, until there’s no trace of blood left on him.
The bloodied sheets and blanket and pillow underneath him will have to wait; it doesn’t even occur to you to be bothered by them when you climb in next to him, when you sweep his damp hair back off his forehead and press your lips to his warm skin and settle against his non-injured side.
You fall asleep like that, your head on his sternum, the subtle rise and fall sweeter than a lullaby.
*** He’s healed by the morning.
He’s healed.
When you wake after a fitful sleep, you scramble out of bed to pull back his bandages and find that the wounds slashed across his ribs look like they’ve had several weeks to mend, the skin knitted back together seamlessly. You run your fingers gingerly over the tender flesh in wonder, in relief.
Another one of his secrets. Something else to ask.
He rouses at your touch, starting as he blinks open bleary eyes. He must be immediately aware of the absence of his helmet because his whole body tenses as he recoils, his eyes panicked as he tries to decide to attack or to flee, jerking away from your hand on his arm.
“It’s okay,” you say, holding up your hands in placation. “It’s me, Din. It’s just me. You’re safe—you’re home.”
He calms somewhat as he meets your gaze, as he registers your face and his surroundings, settling his head back against the pillow. The tension in his body remains.
“How are you feeling?” you ask, resisting the urge to reach up and brush his tousled hair off his forehead. Touch, you think, is his to initiate in this moment.
“Fine,” he croaks. He’s visibly uncomfortable like this, still not used to being so unguarded around someone else. Holding eye contact for longer than a moment seems almost unbearable for him, his eyes shifting around the room so they don’t have to stay settled on yours.
You hand him a glass of water, and he sits up against the headboard to drink it. He winces a little as he maneuvers, his jaw ticking. He’s sore.
“You’re the worst patient, you know,” you gripe, trying to lighten the mood, to give him something to focus on.
He scoffs, lifting an eyebrow over the rim of the glass.
You give him an unimpressed glare. “I couldn’t take care of you until you fainted from blood loss.”
He has the audacity to shrug a little.
You blow out an exasperated breath, distracted, maybe, by the movement of his throat as he swallows. By every detail of his face that you can’t seem to memorize quickly enough—a privilege you’re more than willing to relinquish if it means easing the tension in his shoulders, the wrinkle of concern etched between his brows.
When he sets the glass down on the bedside table, you retrieve his helmet and offer it to him wordlessly, a show of nonjudgmental understanding, a willingness to back-pedal if that’s what he needs right now. His eyes soften when he takes it.
The urge to say something before he disappears behind beskar jumps up your throat.
“I was scared, so scared,” you admit quietly. “Din, I thought—I thought you…”
He sets his helmet beside him on the bed and jerks his chin. “Come here.”
You make to settle next to him, but he pulls you onto his lap instead, guiding you until you’re straddling his thighs.
You try to wriggle away. “I’m going to hurt you like this—just let me—”
“Shhh,” he breathes, hands locking down on your hips. “I’m fine, okay? I’m not going anywhere.” He hesitates for the briefest moment before he leans forward and presses his mouth to yours.
His lips are soft, tentative. His first, you realize. Of course.
Your mind snags on the way he tends to be in bed—directive, commanding, sure—and holds the two up side by side. This hesitation, the halting press of his lips, has something in your chest going soft. Between your legs going molten.
You cup his jaw and lick into his mouth when his lips part—an it’s okay, I want you to take—and his breath goes ragged against yours. He leans into you, an arm slung low around your back to keep you close as he starts to tip you backward.
“Don’t move,” you say, attempting to ease him back gently.
He ignores the command, responding to your open mouth with the slip of his tongue.
“Or I’ll stop,” you threaten.
He sits back, chastened, a subtle pout to his lower lip. It disappears when you lean back in.
He makes a low noise of protest when you don’t meet his lips, but it turns into something pleased when you move your attention to his neck. You lick over his thrumming pulse, across the faint saltiness of his flushed skin. Your hands roam the planes of his chest, over his pounding heart, and down the swells of his muscled arms—greedy for so much warm skin, for so much of him you’ve never seen or touched or tasted.
Even with the helmet set beside you, the fear that you’ll have to go back—to concede gained ground—that he’ll revert back to full armor again, rankles at the back of your mind. You dig your nails lightly into his shoulders, and he growls.
You can tell it’s taking all his restraint not to move, to keep totally still aside from his wandering hands. You know he’s hard underneath you, that he’s aching to wrest control from your hands, to put you on your back and fuck you like this, with no layers between you. And he knows you won’t let him when he’s still healing.
You try not to let it escalate, to keep things from getting out of hand. But then his mouth is on yours again, your lip caught gently between his teeth, his hand locked possessively around the nape of your neck, and you can’t help the quiet moan or the subtle grind of your hips in his lap.
Din jerks back, hands braced on your shoulders to keep distance between your bodies, his head tipped back against the headboard and eyes closed as his panted breath gradually slows.
And you know it’s not just the injury. He isn’t humoring you or in too much pain. He’s fighting it—the transformation, the change that keeps him in his beskar. What he wouldn't let you see in the forest.
“It doesn’t bother me,” you say—quiet, serious.
He pauses, understanding despite the sharp turn. The energy in the room shifts as he waits for you to continue.
“Your…you—?” you stumble over the words, struggling to find the right ones. It comes out badly. “What you…are.”
His eyes are downcast, fixed on the silver shine of his helmet.
He doesn’t ask how. Of course you know—it’s an open secret between you, has been for months.
“I want to see,” you press. An honest plea. “To know. Just let it happen.”
A tight, subtle shake of his head. No.
“Please, Din,” you say, laying a hand on his chest. “Show me.”
He looks away, his eyes full of some unnameable emotion, something soft and fragile, a sharp edge that might be anger. He slips away so easily, even without the helmet.
“Please,” you beg, framing his face with your hands to guide his gaze gently back to yours.
He still won’t meet your eyes.
Suddenly, you know this was a mistake. That this is the thing that’s going to break what’s between you. He’s given you his face, his name—they should be enough. Yet, here you are, pushing him for more. There’s no coming back from it, no swallowing the words, though. You find you don’t want to anymore, even when you can feel him slipping out of your hands.
“It’s not safe,” he says.
“How? It’s you.”
“No,” he says, “it’s not.”
“I don’t understand, Din,” you say, a hint of desperation laced between your words. “And I need to. I need to understand. We can’t avoid it any more—look at what happened. I just—I can’t do this when I know I don’t have all of you. I can’t do this anymore. All these walls, all these secrets between us.”
His head snaps to you, a flicker of panic kindling in his eyes. But he doesn’t deny it, the skirting and avoidance, the game you’ve both been so willing to play. His eyes settle on your joined hands.
“I want all of you. I need all of you. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” he says, his voice low, and the panic in his eyes is swallowed by a deep, hollow want—a yawning blackness that expands and disappears so quickly you think you must have imagined it. “I do understand that.”
“Then let me see you.”
His brown eyes flick upward to meet yours, and he nods.
