constantly exhausted

Melted beskar was the lifeblood of the covert in the eyes of all those who came before and all who would find themselves behind the visor of a helmet. Though rare and scattered across the galaxy after the siege of Mandalore, the steel remained marked with the screams of people you never knew, but could hear nonetheless. They called each piece blood money—claimed it to be cursed like the ruins of the planet its own people couldn’t return to.

But it poured the same into molds carved near a century ago. It bent the same beneath the swing of a hammer and the flame of the press meant to mold it into shape.

You could taste the sparks at the back of your tongue when she brought her tool down with one final swing, the sound resounding off the walls with a harsh clang. Your ears used to ring with the noise as a teenager. Back when you first came stumbling off the ship that rescued you from Concordia after an attack from the Empire.

It would keep you up at night. Pinging with a vibration that sat low in your stomach. Each loud hit a new wound as she molded you new pieces to fit your growing form, the old pauldrons and chest plate destroyed in battle.

The helmet sat in your lap most nights. Staring back at a face you could no longer recognize after years of forgoing ever glancing in the mirror and ignoring you had a face altogether. Perhaps if no one could see your eyes they wouldn’t notice the tears that burned hot down your cheeks at night. They’d forget you existed behind the wall of beskar and the barrel of your blaster.

The screams of your mother to run as she held your father’s corpse in her arms became a ghost you couldn’t exorcise—their spirits were tattooed onto the very skin they never got a chance to see one final time.

You think your mother had brown eyes. Or blue. Or…something.

All you could recall was the black T of her visor staring at you, shouting in a language that was rooted down to your very being. Your father’s eyes were already rolled to the back of his head before you could discern their color to have for when you simply wanted to remember.

The picture you formed halfway of what they must have looked like blended together until you could no longer tell which of your features came from your mother or which were given by father. Perhaps they wanted it this way. For you to forget what they looked like and only remember the splash of blue across your mother’s helmet and the scratch on your fathers that resembled a scar he must have harbored on his skin.

“What’s the most important part of the covert?” Her voice was clear as a drum through her modulator, helmet fixed on yours while you fidgeted with a new pauldron for a child.

“The foundlings,” you uttered quickly.

“And why do we protect the foundlings?”

“Because they are the future of the covert.”

Another swing forced a jolt right down to your bones, the power of it reverberating beneath your dark beskar. Gold littered your armor and traced along your visor, scattering along your chest plate and pauldrons. The color black was certainly different for a Mandalorian to wear, but you felt you had earned the dark hue after witnessing far too much death. Friends fallen, family slaughtered, an entire clan turned to ash because the Empire willed it so. Jaig eyes once marked in gold and now smeared in a mess of red you hastily painted on one night through tears became a reminder for those who watched you pass in the tunnels.

Their whispers followed like a permanent half written story you never bothered to help finish. They knew you came from Concordia, that your parents were Mandalorian, and that your line traced back to the the planet Mandalore at some point in the past. But that didn’t stop them from talking—making assumptions that you were hand picked because of your bloodline.

Not because you witnessed more death in the tribe than most had in their entire lives.

“You seem distracted today prudii (shadow).”

Her words cut through you, forcing your attention back to what she was doing. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Your dreams of their end still haunt you then?” Your head snapped up, mouth opening and closing beneath your helmet, but she’d already snagged the thread of your irritation and began to unravel it at an alarming rate. “The sacrifice of your parents is an honorable one. As their child, protecting you was an act for the future of their clan.”

“I hear them sometimes,” you whispered, setting the pauldron down and watching the firelight play off the silver. “They tell me what to do, let me know if what I’m becoming is a mistake.”

“To be chosen as leader is a path every Mandalorian would wish for their legacy. You wear their honor-” She gestured to your helmet, the crimson jaig burning a hole in your skull each time you set the beskar into place. A ceremonial crown you hoped one day they wouldn’t bestow on you. “Bearing it with shame only turns their final act into failure.”

Betrayal in the Mandalorian culture didn’t fade like others, leaving behind a wound that might heal one day even if the blow inflicted was ugly and torn. To betray a Mandalorian brother or sister was to sever the ties with one another entirely. To betray a family member—living or dead—would taint their honor and bring ruin to its once honorable status.

No matter how much you willed the future they chose for you to be handed off to someone else, buried and forgotten in a grave you would dig yourself. This was one choice you couldn’t make for yourself.

Ruining their honor.

Decimating a legacy that spanned for generations beyond them and you.

You’d rather face death—the full might of the Empire—than rip the remains of their spirit out of your body. You were their child, the future of the clan they would no longer get to uphold. It was your honor, your duty, to carry out their wishes until your dying breath passed it on to the next foundling in line.

“I understand,” you got out between clenched teeth and a throat constricted with the burn of guilt. “It’s an honor to carry them.”

The Amorer didn’t believe you. The lie that slid off your tongue was translucent and shallower than the waters that flowed in the underground of the planet. But her question that would normally come in the tip of her helmet was overshadowed by the sound of boots thudding down the steps, the soft clang of metal against metal echoing in the darkened space only lit by the forges fire.

Rusted red armor and a blue pauldron lit by the orange glow rounded the corner as the familiar echo of his modulated voice greeting the Armorer filled your ears. Din Djarin. A fellow warrior that you met in the first week of finding your place in Nevarro. He’d come from the same moon as you, though trained in a different section with foundlings that were rescued on planets attacked and burnt to the ground.

Considering the brutality he’d faced as a child you didn’t expect to find yourself latching onto someone like him. Although you supposed that was the irony of why you stood closer to him in training than others, why you sat side by side around firelight as the elders spoke of a time when Mandalorians didn’t have to hide. Why you once snuck out to meet him years back in the middle of the night to practice with a blaster he stole from someone’s bunk; a choice that would later come with consequences he refused to let you be apart of.

You both emerged from the embers of a stolen life and chose survival at the end of that suffering.

“My pauldron,” he said, allowing the Armorer to inspect what damage had come to the metal. “I tried to fix it myself but-” He winced when she yanked it clean off, gesturing to the bench one usually took in the building process. “It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with it.”

“A Mandalorian must always know how to fix ones armor,” she snipped never bothering to glance over her shoulder. You could taste his shame in the air as he ducked his head, fingers curling into fists on his thighs.

“Always trying to be the best,” you muttered soft enough to blend into the hiss of hot metal touching wires.

His head reared back, visor fixed on the sight of you welding together the inside of a foundlings chest plate. “Like you wouldn’t do the same?”

You scoffed into your work, ignoring the burn of his gaze through his black visor that you could feel through the metal clasped along your body. “What’s there to prove with me? When my future is marked out.”

The clang of metal hit the table before he could reply, his blue pauldron flickering on the inside. “Prudii (shadow) you will finish this piece. I will take the chest plate to the foundling. He will no doubt be pleased with your work.”

“Of course.”

Din’s back stiffened, fingers splayed wide and elbows locked at his sides as you stepped in close. He could feel the nerves along his spine jolt, want a sweet taste on the tip of his tongue. The pauldron was heavy in your hands but set in nicely with a familiar click, the magnetized wiring on the inside fitting back into their proper space. You’d learned the inner workings of the armor well enough to know that this would last him for years to come—quite possibly his entire life if he stayed out of trouble.

Highly unlikely in his case.

“You don’t want this,” he finally said as the fire spit viscously into the air, as if handing over your answer for you.

“And you know what I want.”

His head tipped back to find your visor. You stood over him, a shadow of night bathed in the orange glow of a flame that knew you far more intimately than he did. And still he saw you. Past the black armor, beneath the markings of a warrior, until he peered into the eyes of the person that somehow still lingered in between the destruction.

“Your future,” he hesitated, a hand shifting until the back of his glove pressed to the plate on your thigh. “It isn’t carved into beskar.”

“To them it is.”

“What about to you?”

The question occurred to you more times than you cared to admit. Especially to yourself. For as long as you’d been alive your future existed in a line, always straight and headed directly to a point marked and forged by the people who brought you to existence. It never curved, never arced sharply to the right or left. You were destined to be clan leader even if they had to drag you down bloody and fighting to take what they deemed your rightful place.

More often than not you found yourself considering a hasty plan to escape off world in the middle of the night. A chance to run from what you feared the most—a life that existed beyond any choice of your own.

“To me…” You faltered when his hand curled around your wrist that hung loose at your side, tongue twisting and chest a rapid thud at the sight of his large palm clasped around yours. The fine line was drawn in the sand the day you met him—you stay just out of reach of being friends, nothing more, nothing less—and now it blurred with the shift of his body angling closer than before. “I don’t exist,” you finally admitted in between heavy breaths and a heart that sounded different in this shade of darkness.

“I can see you just fine from here.”

Your lips curled, tongue sweeping along your bottom lip. If only he could see you beneath the beskar—oh how he longed to. “I mean, I’m not my own person like you or the others. I’m made up of my parents and their parents and their parents before them. I’m…vheh (dust).”

“Dust,” he muttered. “I don’t…”

“Don’t you remember the theory of stardust told to us on Concordia?” For a brief moment you allowed your palm to linger on his shoulder, thumb dragging along the pauldron and Din felt as if you were touching his bare skin. “Everyone is made up of what first created the galaxy: the dust of stars. The start of everything.”

He chuckled dry and low enough to simmer a flame in your stomach. “A myth if you ask me.”

“I used to think so too. But…I’m the dust of my family’s legacy. Their clan. Many leaders came before me and as expected many will follow, but to uphold that future I must sacrifice my own. For the good of the covert.”

A scoff ruptured through the modulator, startling you. “You sound like the elders. Did they tell you to say that?”

“It’s true!”

“It’s bantha shit-” The sharp thwack of your hand striking his side echoed off the walls, punctuated by his muffled groan as he doubled over in pain.

“Do you think I’m blindly following their advice? I know my choice Djarin.”

“Your choice is because of what your parents wanted.” Standing up he felt part of his shoulder pop beneath the weight of beskar set back in its original spot. He ignored the splint of pain to catch how you deliberately shifted back.

The possibility of more lingered between the two of you longer than either of you cared to admit. He could taste it some days. Like sugar stuck behind his teeth that he continued to pick at—the constant question of maybe became the wall erected in the space where your touch remained. Never able to press through the steel but still warm enough to burn.

“But you understand that,” you reminded him, your mouth tugging down. “The need to keep a part of them alive.”

He did.

Probably more than most.

The foundlings that were rescued came to Concordia as children younger than him—many small and malnourished from years on their own. Which meant the memories of their parents had time to fade, to become distant images that blurred in the back of their minds. They were given the opportunity of a fresh start. The title of Mandalorian never hindering where they came from or who they might have become. But his parents were burned into the front of his mind day and night. He could no sooner forget them than he could you.

Handing over pieces of yourself that might have survived beneath the rubble of a former life, in order to save something so insignificant to others yet everything to the Mandalorians, made sense to him. If he was in your position he would act no different. He’d wade through blood and bone and the death of his future to keep hold of what little memory still remained of his parents. You were merely doing what had always been expected of you.

“I should get back to work,” you got out, chest tight and lungs aching with the burn of shame.

“Okay.”

“Make sure not to damage that again. Or she’ll have your head—helmet included.”

“We wouldn’t want that to happen,” he dryly said though you could hear the smile in his words. “Ret’ (goodbye) Ca’tra.”

He turned, cape brushing the table as he re-attached the rifle along his back and left up the steps. You watched his form vanish into the shadows but still refused to move even when he was long gone. There were nights you wished you were a foundling unearthed from a life that held no return. Days you wanted to be just like him. Free.

The hope that he might turn back around with a plan for escape burned eternal in the base of your chest. To even think of it felt like a form of madness in its own way, but you had little to grasp onto. If anyone were able to drag you from the grave carved in the names of your parents, you hoped it would have been him. Perhaps that’s why you found Din Djarin. A person to keep you stable.

An ally to depend on. A friend to place your trust in.

The welcome sound of metal clashing and the pained groan of a fist colliding with its intended mark filled the tunnels of Nevarro’s underground. You likened them to the songs of old; to the memories of Concordia as a child. Sparring happened before dinner, when the energy had yet to dwindle and spirits were high. You grew to look forward to that time—when the clan found peace in those few hours and allowed themselves the chance to settle.

Warriors, ones your age and younger, took the center space as the others buried themselves with tasks at hand and matters of business your generation wasn’t privy to. Every now and then they spared a glance and on the rare occasion, traded credits in favor of who might come out victorious.

“Kaysh shu’shuk. (He’s a disaster),” Paz grumbled beside you, glaring at the helpless grip the youngest Mandalorian had on an older boy nearly twice his size.

“He’s trying,” you retorted.

“They’re gonna eat him alive.”

“Vizsla,” you growled under your breath, clamping teeth into your lip to stifle a laugh.

“We trained you better than that!” he barked.

The youngling tripped over himself, slipping out of their grasp. This was the nature of finding one’s footing in the covert. An opportunity to grow into the warrior’s shadow cast upon everyone at a young age. Harsh as it may be there was little you could do as Paz clipped their helmet with the base of his palm, maneuvering their legs back into a stance that wouldn’t knock them down.

The duty of the older Mandalorians was to train the young. Everyone was required to spend time dedicating their skills. And you were no exception.

As leader the Alor was the example from which others followed. They upheld the way of all Mandalorians and so you did as you were told—following traditions that had been passed down longer than Mandalore had existed. The young learned what you were taught as a child on Concordia. Lessons handed down from your ancestors. Not simply the ways of battle—though certainly important—but the politics of why Mandalore fell. Why it existed in the first place.

You spoke the history of a people they would never get to know in the hopes that they might do better. That if the culture of Mandalorians were tested once again at the hands of fury, they wouldn’t allow ego and old grievances to dictate centuries of legend.

“Keep your hands up,” you ordered. “Don’t let them catch you off guard. You are as much a weapon as the tools you use. To keep your faith in whether your blaster will work each time you pull the trigger is a fools way of fighting.”

Your father’s words slid easily off your tongue. His voice a baritone echo in the back of your mind, filled with the grit of battle and the knowledge of what his enemies blood tasted like on his tongue. It made your lips curl to hear your voice recount them—your stomach bubbling with acid at the knowledge that you became the child he might honor with pride.

The boy nodded, arms rising to block a jab. You could feel the burn of one too many eyes on your back, regarding you as the leader you weren’t. Years from now you’d stand before them and take the oath. You would recite the vows and promise them a life that was never yours. The signet of a Raqour’daan—a dark wolf—worn by your parents and theirs before them would finally be set into your armor. Solidifying you as their perfect warrior.

Honor. Legacy. The words lost all meaning in the face of something you didn’t fight to keep. When the Empire set ruin on the lands of Mandalore you understood that the future they planned for you—the fate tied in red knots around your wrists—would be the only outcome of your life. If they weren’t alive to train the next generation then you’d set your boots into their footprints and hope to fill it the same way.

Burden.

You loathed the word.

Mandalorians stood for digging their blades into the stones of the past and using them as a foothold to craft the future. But no matter how many different ways you looked at the sum total of your life and the results that now lay in tatters at your feet—honor and legacy had nothing to do with you becoming leader. You didn’t earn the title. You weren’t deserving of its prestige.

They built your burden from their own wishes cracked off from pieces of your shattered bones that were set in place to resemble a child. You didn’t exist.

What dreams you tucked in the back of your mind and hopes that echoed with the striking burn of desire vanished in the face of their expectations.

Maybe Din was right. Maybe you were just spouting the nonsense the elders ingrained in your mind the day you first arrived here.

“How about you get in the ring?” A voice not yet matured with the years he pretended to carry sounded behind you. The ego dripped off his tongue and you didn’t need to turn around to know who bothered to goad you on.

Orron Dene. He was a year older than you, stood half a foot taller, and wore his new clan marking like a crown the covert never awarded him. Although his helmet was certainly big enough for his head, you didn’t see it surviving beneath the weight of his ego for much longer. He singled you out your first week there, intent on digging just far enough to find your breaking point. A nuisance in blue and silver armor.

“I’m helping today Orron. Maybe you should give it a try.”

He scoffed and you caught sight of Paz’s large form taking the space at your right—a weapon in case you needed him. Though you never did. But something else tugged sharp at the back of your mind, heat spreading along your neck as another set of eyes drilled holes into your armor. You didn’t need to find his helmet to know he stood in the shadows away from the rest.

A guard dog primed and begging to sink his teeth into the flesh of your opponent.

He’d taste the blood so you didn’t have to. Even if he knew you enjoyed the flavor just the same.

“Then show them how its done. I challenge you to fight.” You nearly laughed at the ridiculous spectacle he made of detaching his cowl and dropping it at the edge of the hand drawn circle. “C’mon, don’t you wanna prove your worth of being our Alor?”

You stepped into the ring. “I don’t need to prove anything.”

“Really?” The condescending smile dripped into his words. “You’re just that bloodthirsty huh?”

“Keep it civil Dene,” Paz growled.

“Civility is an earned right on Mandalore. Isn’t that right?” His head tipped, fists rising and you watched his feet slide into the traditional stance you taught the younglings on the daily. “Or do you not remember seeing as how you were born on Concordia.”

He swung towards your face and you dipped to the side, grabbing his arm in your grip and twisting it until his shoulder popped. He stumbled nearly hitting the ground with his knee but caught himself before he could land out of bounds. The sparring wasn’t so much about hurting one another rather than knocking the other out far enough to lose. At least those were rules you abided by. Orron didn’t seem to care.

Another swing landed a hit to your side and you felt the pain splinter with malice up your chest. His shrill laugh echoed off the walls, piercing your ears as you ducked another swing. Your knee came up into his thigh, elbow smashing into the space just beneath the pauldron set on his shoulder. It was hard to fight the smile of his pained grunt when he fell to the side.

“That’s all you got?” he huffed, scrambling back to his feet.

“We’re sparring.”

“Are we?” A kick to the side of your thigh and fist to the base of your chin just beneath your helmet left you gasping for air. “I challenged you oh great future clan leader. So give me a challenge.”

You blocked his fist but didn’t anticipate the boot in your hip as pain slid up your torso and the air punched from your chest. The crack of the metal strapped to your knee hitting the ground drew all conversation to a halt. The stillness of the quiet drowning everyone out until all you could hear was the sharp ragged gasp of you fighting for air. An ache bloomed in your body and you knew you’d be sporting sore limbs for days to come.

Orron didn’t stop there.

The punch to the back of your neck sent you forward, hands slapping to the ground to keep you steady as he rammed another swift and heavy kick to your side.

“That’s enough!” Paz snarled. “You’ve made your point Dene.”

“I don’t think I have,” he chuckled dryly. “I wanna see the wolf in her natural state.”

“Fuck you.” The words spit out against your helmet, rage seeping into your already hazy vision.

Orron crouched to your level, gripping the edge of your helmet and dragging you forward. “Are you gonna take me out kyr’am (death)? Thought that’s what your clan was known for. The dark wolves of Mandalore sent out to do the dirty work.”

You pulled back but he kept a hold of your face, the burn of everything you swallowed—the grief you buried—bubbling to the surface and searing heat into your chest. His sneer ripped the fine line of your patience in two. “Or are you just as I thought. I’ll put your out your misery, but be sure to tell your parents I said hi.”

Sucking in a breath you felt the lick of red wash along the edges of your vision, coiling anger at the base of your spine and you swung before you could drag it back in. Your fist collided with the side of his jaw with a sharp crack and he fell back. You heard the cry tear from your throat, felt the spit burn hot at the back of your mouth as you ground out words that were said with the same explicit rage your mother exhibited the day she died.

The day you lost everything.

“Gar kyr'am. Ibac’ner.” (Your death. It’s mine.)

In a reckless move he swung his leg to knock your feet out and you grinned when you smashed your foot into his knee. His sharp wailing moan nearly overlapped the loud snap of his bone shattering. You swung for his face, clipping his jaw, his neck and side. Anywhere you could drive your fist into his body you went for it, colliding metal into flesh until blood began to pour between the crevices of his armor. He blocked your hits the best he could, clawing away from you with wet gasps for air, but you dragged him back with a snarl.

“Laandur (weak, pathetic),” you spit harshly. “Get up and fight.”

“Stop-” Your knee hit his chest sending him sprawling onto his back. “Please-”

You clambered onto his form, rearing your arm back with a growl and a heavy breath, the rage narrowing your desire for his blood that hung in the air. The death of your parents, the loss of a planet, the home you once knew turned to rubble that still smoldered with the stench of dead bodies buried beneath the metal of armor you’d never be able to pry off. It played in your mind as you pummeled him until you could no longer feel your hands, the pain in your knuckles now a numb ache.

“He’s had enough!” Someone yelled as they watched you seek the death you vowed to take from his immobile body. “Get her off him!”

“No!” you roared as two arms banded around your waist and hauled you up and off Orron. “Get off me! Get your hands off me!”

They didn’t bother fighting off your meager attempts to hit them with your elbow as you were all but dragged out of the room and into the empty hallways. The crowd gathering around Orron to make sure he was alive became the last thing you saw before the door slammed shut. Leaving you bathed in the jaundiced yellow glow of Nevarro’s underground.

“Get off me,” you gasped, air difficult to come by as the rage fell back into the shadows of your mind and reality set back in. “Please. Let me go.” The words croaked from your mouth, thick with the rush of tears.

“Ca’tra,” Din murmured, turning you into the wall with an arm still holding you upright. You slumped into the concrete, legs giving out as you struggled to come back from the waves that begged to drag you under.

A minute passed—the hallway filled with the sound of your breath—before you spoke again. Guilt lay heavy on your tongue oddly tasting of Orron’s blood that still coated your knuckles. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Din replied quickly.

You nodded, icy relief flooding your veins. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” You reared back, watching as he pressed his other hand into the wall beside your head and dropped his helmet to yours. “Orron’s an ass. What he said about your parents crossed a line.”

“No I crossed the line. We were supposed to be sparring and I should have ignored him-”

“If you hadn’t done it I would have.”

“Din-”

The hand on your hip killed what protests lay on the tip of your tongue. Always primed for a fight—that was the nature of your being. But around him it retreated to the back of your mind. In his presence you could picture the person you were and not the warrior everyone else wished you to be. He silenced their words with a touch and you wished some part of you was eloquent enough to tell him that, to thank him for giving you a piece back to yourself.

He sighed long and low. “I’m leaving Ca’tra.”

You imagined what it felt like to die many times over. After having witnessed enough of it you were able to gather the basics of what it meant to leave this mortal plane. But never did you think about how it would feel. Standing there you finally understood what it was to die as your heart dropped to your stomach and pain erupted along every nerve and vein. Until you couldn’t even catch what little breath remained in your lungs.

“What do you mean you’re leaving?” you got out, hot tears spilling down your cheeks.

“I joined The Guild that operates above ground. The covert needs the credits and I can’t hide anymore.”

“So you’re just going to go? Were you planning to tell anyone or is that just your way.”

“I’m telling you,” he said.

You scoffed. “Yeah thanks for the consideration. I’ll see you when you get back-”

“Atin verd (stubborn warrior),” he chuckled hand shifting to tip your helmet until you could look nowhere other than his visor. “I want you to come with me.”

You paused, sucking in a breath as his words absorbed into your already tired mind. Leave the covert. Step out beneath the winding corridors of Nevarro’s underground and see sunlight for the first time in who knows how long. You couldn’t remember the color of the sky most days. Instead you began to pretend you still existed on Concordia with its pale blue and bright sun. The last time you breached above ground you were seeking medicine for the younglings when fever spread quick and deadly.

But this was an opportunity to leave the planet altogether. To see the stars once more. You viscerally recalled how their light flickered in the vast expanse of space as you left the surface of Concordia still coated in mud and blood and the ash of battle. Did they shine the same way? Were they as beautiful as you once thought? Or would you see them differently now that you weren’t drowning in death.

“I can’t leave the covert Din they need me here.” Excuses that tasted the same as lies. You knew it, he knew it. But what else was there to say when he offered your dream in the palm of his hand? “The Alor wouldn’t allow it.”

“She thinks it would be good for you to gain experience off world. To train somewhere Mandalorians aren’t.”

The words died on the back of your throat, eyes going wide. “What do you mean she thinks?”

His shoulders moved as he laughed with a rasp that burned a hole in your chest. You swore you could feel your heartbeat at the back of your throat, the speed growing quicker by the second. He had no idea what he did to you. What you spent so long fighting.

“I asked her.”

“When?” you pressed, the accusatory tone enough to send him into another bout of laughter.

“The moment after I was handed my Fob and given the clear. Early this evening.”

“Your pauldron was damaged…”

He nodded. “To join The Guild you have to bring in a bounty. I found one on the next moon over.”

“You went off world.” Din hummed and you suddenly you felt dizzy, your hand clamping onto his arm to keep you upright. “You left Nevarro.”

The days you couldn’t find him suddenly made perfect sense. When Din Djarin had suddenly up and disappeared from the covert altogether. You thought he was sick or dying or possibly avoiding you, but he’d been off world to plan his escape all along. You were right in your assumption.

He’d drag you out of the grave never meant for your body without question. As long as it kept you alive.

“I did.” The press of his thumb along your neck spilled heat into your fluttering stomach, body growing warm at his touch. “Will you come with me?”

“But the clan. They expect their future leader to be here at all times.”

He interrupted you with a huff, helmet knocking into yours gently. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like beyond Nevarro? Or what it’s like to not have to hide all the time?”

“Of course I do. You know I do.” Perhaps that was the most difficult part of it all. He’d been off world before many times and you were trapped by the walls of the underground. Fused to the beskar of everyone’s armor as they plotted where your feet would go next. “I dream of the day the covert won’t have to hide anymore and can just exist. But I have to protect everyone, for the good of the clan.”

His thumb pressed into your throat and he felt the racing of your heart. Satisfaction bled into his chest at the knowledge that you were affected by him, that this thing wasn’t something he made up in his own mind. But rather something tangible that existed between your bodies.

“What about the good of their future leader?” Your teeth clicked as you shut your mouth. “How can you expect to lead these people if you don’t know what’s above ground? You dream of not hiding. Then stop hiding.”

You needed a push. A hand to hold as you dropped into the unknown once more. Din understood your hesitation, why your heart beat the way it did in difficult situations, but he could see your willingness to yield. When it came to your future you remained on the precipice for every chance that arose. He ran his thumb along your neck and felt the shift in your breathing as his heart rammed hard in his chest.

“Come with me Ca’tra. See the galaxy with me,” he murmured.

Your breath hitched and his knees trembled. “Yes,” you whispered, relenting into his hold. Setting your heart in his shaking hands as he vowed to die protecting it. Til you were old and frail and could no longer remember his name.

Until all the stars burned out in the galaxy.

The muscles of your back screamed with each step, the edge of your chest plate digging into your side. Sweat clung to your face, dripping down your chin as you were suffocated by the hot air of the planet Cantonica. What you wouldn’t give for a hot shower and a quiet place to strip yourself of your armor. Din trudged beside you with his weapon at the ready, body stiff and breaths heavy. He was suffering as much as you were in this fucking place—a sauna that threatened to kill the both of you with heat stroke.

“How much further does the map say?” he asked abruptly. His armor was hot to the touch even through his own gloves. He tried to maintain what little peace he had left in his mind, but the thought of being out here longer than necessary began to grate on his nerves.

“One click away.”

He nodded. “Good. Let’s finish this.”

You took the lead, blaster in your hand and feet silently hitting the ground. He admired your ability to remain stoic in moments like this—even as you flinched each time the breeze of hot air pushed along your bodies. The thought of collapsing on the floor of his ship with the sound of you cleaning off in the fresher muddled his brain. What he wouldn’t give to join you, to wipe the sweat off your body, but the line remained dug into the ground deep enough to crack the foundation of your friendship.

Din wouldn’t risk collapsing it over something as trivial as sex.

The first two bounties you and him found were simple. Having fought side by side together for years you moved in sync with ease. The battles were over quicker with you at his side and you settled into his ship without difficulty. But the close quarters are what drove him to the brink—the knowledge that somewhere on the Razor Crest you were without your armor or bare from your helmet in order to eat.

On Nevarro he could ignore the way his heart leapt at the sound of your voice or the sharp tug of need that pulled at his gut when he stood in the same room as you. All things that were easily rectified with him putting distance between your bodies. Except on The Crest you were there all the time. At every corner he turned he found traces of you and it left his heart clawing at the cage in his chest.

“This one is different,” you finally said, drawing him out of his own mind.

“What do you mean?”

“The bounty.” You huffed as you pulled yourself up and over a fallen tree in the middle of the road. He followed silently. “They know how to hide compared to the other two. This one has been on the run before.”

Din grunted, tearing his eyes away from your form when you bent to fix the armor on your leg. “Makes sense. He’s a thief with a history.”

“You’re the one with more knowledge under your belt about thieves. So how would they think?”

“I wasn’t a thief.”

You shrugged. “Then what do you call those missions you went on with that crew? You were bringing credits back each time.”

Long before you were friends, before he found it was harder to remove himself from your life each day he saw you. He didn’t think you noticed him at that point—so buried in your grief stricken mind to even bother with anything other than what the Alor instructed you to do. He’d witnessed the days it took everything in you to even step outside of the Armory. You were a shell of the person who must have existed on Concordia. Silent, a shadow that clung to the walls most days.

No wonder the covert began to call you death.

You carried it with you. The memory of those you knew, the living embodiment of the last remnants of Mandalore. It dug into your shoulders and he watched your spine snap beneath the weight.

Only when you finally spoke your first words to him: your shitty armor will get you killed, did he understand why he found his way to this clan in the first place. You. It would always be you. The shadow, the dark wolf of Mandalore. Din became a warrior in pieces that you put together—shards of the boy who grew to be a man that followed wherever you lead.

He existed for you.

“I did jobs with them, but I wasn’t a part of their…family.”

The tilt of your helmet dug into his chest. You read him with perfect ease and some days he hated it. Found the idea of you peering into his mind far too invasive for him to handle. But more often than not he delighted in how you perused him in any way you could. As if you couldn’t get enough of the man you saw faint traces of beneath the mask.

“They didn’t trust you did they?” He didn’t need to respond for you to see the answer written in the way his shoulders tensed. “I do. I trust you.”

He smiled, warmth blooming along his face. “I trust you too.”

“Besides if you were still tagging along with them I wouldn’t have the pleasure of your company,” you threw over your shoulder tracking the map to a crossroads. Tall thin trees offered no shade but you would take what you could get, leaning against the smooth bark with a sigh.

Din followed suit. “I asked you to come.”

“Would you have gotten this far without me?”

“Yes.”

If you were anyone else and he was simply a man who grew up on his home planet, he wondered if he would have found you. In the grand scheme of the galaxy, out of all the mapped planets and moon and star systems was there a chance he’d come across you? In a different life, with a different creed. Din liked to believe there was no doubt. That if neither of you weren’t Mandalorian he’d recognize your face in any life. He’d know the curve of your smile simply from hearing your voice.

“But I prefer doing this with you,” he admitted softly, seeing how you shifted from one foot to the other. A nervous tick that came when you were battling emotions others might never see.

You toyed with the handle of your blaster. “I suppose I’m pleasing company.”

“You’re more than that.”

“Less annoying than Paz?”

He groaned, helmet knocking against the tree with a thunk. “I prefer you any day over those utreekovs (fools, idiots).”

“Careful. I might hold you to that when you finally get fed up with me.”

Falling silent he turned to watch you through his visor until the echo of insects and hot air brushing along dead bark filled the space. You wanted to laugh off the words, play them with humor to fight the heat that clung to every inch of your body. Any other time you would, but Din fixed you in place. He trapped you where you stood and picked at the scabbed over chasm you pretended didn’t exist in the center of your chest.

“That wouldn’t happen,” he finally murmured, voice a soft rasp through his modulator. “I’d spend every day with you and still look forward to the next.”

Heat spilled into your face, the thud of your heart resembling wings of a bird ready to take flight. “Oh.”

Din picked the right lane off instinct—even if you knew it was most likely a guess—and you fell into step with him as the sun blared in the sky. It was closer to the planet than others in its system. Which caused the burn you felt seep through your layers and warm the black of your armor. Din’s red chest plate kept the temperature regulated but you were burning up even with the cooling system built into your suit.

“There should be a small cantina up this path. The planet is too hot. They would have had to stop somewhere to cool off before sunset.”

He nodded. “You think they’re that naive?”

“I think they’re in the same situation as us. Thirsty and lacking anything to drink.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “We’re too far from Canto Bight to get there without any sort of transportation. They’d be going on foot.”

The small hut built from clay they foraged from the ground stuck out in the distance. Unlike the trees that you could spot from several clicks back this blended into the surroundings with ease. The formation looked like a boulder that had been there since the very beginnings of the planet itself, but the sign clattering in the breeze set it apart from the terrain. You caught etchings in Cantonican that had to be the name of the place. If you had the data pad stored back in Din’s ship you’d be able to translate it with ease.

A Chinar tree wound up to the sky bending low over the front of the cantina providing shade. The pump set to the left of most likely artificial water poured freely into a pit dug in the ground for animals to drink from. You spotted a few before they scurried away at the sound of your boots.

“Keep an eye out for other hunters,” Din said holstering his blaster and walking up the makeshift porch. Nodding you followed close.

The doors swung open with a creak, sand kicking up where your feet hit the floor as Din headed straight for the bar set in the center of the room. Tables were scattered to and fro; chairs held layers of sand on them as if the place had been vacant for awhile. Four occupants in the corner dealing Sabaac cards barely acknowledged your existence with a glance over their shoulders and a sniff of most likely some type of spice sold on the outskirts of Canto Bight.

“What can I get ya Mando?” An Ithorian wiped glasses clouded in dust most likely set in to the glass as Din silently dropped credits on the bar. “Ah…information. You people are usually the strictly business type.”

“We’re looking for someone,” Din said.

“Got a name?”

You dropped the Fob and clicked the holo-image on. “Rix Halcorr.”

“Must have done somethin’ awful to warrant two Mandalorians on his tail.”

“You can say that,” you replied. “What do you have to drink around here?”

Din stiffened, his hand knocking your thigh. Sticking around would give Rix time to get away, or at least offer him a head start that would lead you trailing after him for days to come. But your tongue was sticking to the roof of your mouth and you could feel your throat begin to grate each time you sucked in a breath. It was either steal away to drink something now or suffer the heat stroke later.

“Artificial water ‘s all I can offer ‘round these parts. Alcohol won’t get shipped in for another three weeks.”

You smiled and felt another drop of sweat follow the curve of your cheek. “Perfect.”

Sand burrowed between suit and beskar as you took the chair closest to the shadows. Din ordered nothing, opting to angle his seat to block any prying eyes as you lifted the base of your helmet and downed the water with a soft hum. The hot air on the base of your chin told you it was just as fucking hot inside as it was outside—the water doing very little to kill the heat curling around every limb.

“They’re still here,” you muttered dropping your helmet back into place with a pitched hiss.

Din nodded. “I know.”

“The bartender is helping him. Did you see how he tensed at the sight of Rix’s face?”

“Looks like you should order another cup. We’ll head around the back when you’re done and the sun is ready to set.”

Rising from your chair you nudged him as you passed, lips curling into a grin. “And you said you’d get this far without me.”

Your stomach sloshed as you moved into a more comfortable position with a sigh. Two hours passed before the pale sky began to fade into a dark purplish hue that made the planet famous. If you stepped outside you’d be able to spot the nebula that brightened in the dark—drawing in crowds of people to the casinos of Canto Bight.

Only the rich frequented the city, or people with freshly earned credits to burn. But out here in the desert you were surrounded by sand and stars—the noise of the city an afterthought as quiet overtook everything but the echo of insects and the splash of artificial water.

“You know this isn’t my first hunt,” you mused leaning back against the trunk of the Chinar tree.

Din stood above you, arms crossed and helmet tipped down. One would think he was asleep if they didn’t know any better. You knew he was peering down at you, keeping guard as you took the time to regain your strength. The act became second nature around you—his need to protect. Even if he understood that when it came to a fight you were far more lethal. Hunting was in your ancestry, a descendant of the dark wolves that kept Mandalore safe from enemies that wished to do it harm.

He grunted, a small acknowledgement as the exhaustion began to weigh on him. The sound made you smile as you picked at the dead leaves scattered on the ground.

“There was a boy on Concordia.” He went still, shoulders tensing as you spoke. It was rare you recounted stories of your past—the memories usually clouded by the haze of grief—so he took every moment you offered. “Castin Vancil. A cousin of the Viszlas who was sent there to train. He was…my friend.”

A lick of jealousy burned down his spine and he swallowed it down with a dry mouth. “What was the hunt?”

“We were sent to the other side of the moon as apart of our training. A fake bounty created by the leaders, but it felt real to us. Well real enough that we were shot at multiple times and nearly killed.”

“They took your training seriously. We were just told to pretend in the mountains.”

You shrugged. “Part of it had to do with me. A child of the wolves must learn to the hunt like one. That’s what my father used to say. Castin was dragged along because the Vizslas wouldn’t stand for a member of their clan not having the same capabilities.”

He remained quiet, just another notch on the tree that hoped with baited breath you might continue. Water spilled into the ground as chirps from critters you could barely see bathed and drank what little they could get.

“He kissed me on the last night.”

Din’s stomach churned, breath stilling in his lungs as you spoke with a grin he could blatantly hear. His fingers clenched tight until an ache spread to his knuckles and the leather of his gloves cracked beneath the strain. “Oh.”

“It was nothing special. I don’t even think he liked me but rather the fact that he could say his first kiss was with a future ruler of a clan.”

He wanted to ram his fist into the boy’s face. Even if it was irrational and stupid Din couldn’t help the twist in his gut at the thought of your first kiss going to someone so inconsiderate. If only he’d met you sooner. He sucked in a breath, leveled his racing heart, and asked the question that he already knew the answer to. Deep down in his bones he knew where Castin was, where everyone on Concordia wound up.

“What happened to him?”

Your back went rigid and Din ached to reach out and stuff the words back down his throat. “He was killed on the same day as my parents. At least that’s what I think happened. We were taking the foundlings to a transport before his parents called him in for reinforcements. I didn’t see him again after that.”

Everyone you knew, the people you were closest to now lay in a grave the size of an entire moon. He was sure the destruction the Empire caused still existed on the surface of Concordia, but by that time he was gone to a different planet. You were left behind to deal with it all on your own. He could recognize the grief in your voice, your throat now thick with emotion. It was familiar to those who lost everything in one fell swoop—the residue of who you were bleeding through the person who existed now.

Before he could stutter out frayed condolences the creak of the door swinging open put you on edge. A man stumbled out of the cantina, bottle in hand and mouth sticky with alcohol. He muttered words you couldn’t hear and called a name you didn’t recognize. But the wide brim hat that tipped over his eyes and the leather coat that flapped around his clumsy feet told you enough.

“Rix Halcorr,” you said under your breath.

The man’s head swung up with a grin, liquid dribbling out the corner of his mouth. “In the flesh.”

“Watch out for him. Plays it off like he’s some broken tortured soul but he’ll rip you to shreds if given the chance.”

The words tasted rotten along the back of your throat, but you the truth seeped through as Rix staggered down the steps. Far too balanced for a man who supposedly drank half the cantina that housed no alcohol. You could see his fingers slide to the side, no doubt anticipating how Din’s hand twitched. This was a man who found joy in the act of violence—a thief with the spirit of a hellion at war.

“To what do I owe the-” he burps in a long breath, coupled with the gurgle of something dragging up the back of his throat. “-pleasure. Two Mandalorians? The Guild is just desperate ain’t they?”

“You have a reputation,” you throw out, getting to your feet as Din stood, body stiff and ready to fight. “Word travels fast around the galaxy.”

“Fast huh?” Yellow teeth and beady violet eyes. You’ve never seen anyone quite like him, but you had half a mind to bet beneath that hat there was a collection of horns that stuck up at odd angles. “D’ya like it fast?”

Din growled a response you could barely hear over the sound of his feet thundering forward, but you know it’s not good. Your hand rammed into his chest before he passed you entirely, mind reeling. Rix Halcorr, notorious escapee from prisons even you haven’t heard of, wouldn’t just walk out of a cantina drunk and on his own. That wasn’t the way for someone of his caliber.

“Plays it off,” you muttered, hand reaching for the blaster at your side before Rix’s smile can curl deep enough to morph into a sneer.

“Shame. Yer smarter than most,” Rix croons.

A blaster went off in the distance with a sharp whistle you heard coming before it could hit its mark. Ramming into Din’s side you knocked him out of the way with a gasp as the bolt embedded itself into the part of you not covered in armor. Your hip. The shot burned as it tore through flesh and you hit the ground with a guttural shout, the breath in your chest punched clean out of you.

“Shit,” Din bit out, whipping around to shoot at the sniper in the distance as Rix took off with a rasped laugh.

Rage burned almost as bright as your wound and you let it fuel what parts of you aren’t injured. Pointing your weapon you suck in a hot breath, aim at Rix’s retreating form, and pull the trigger as Din busied himself with the two men at the back of the cantina. Rix dropped with a scream, clutching his thigh. But you didn’t have time to gloat and Din let you know it. The burn in your hip went ignored as you got to your feet with a sharp groan, aiming your blaster at the bartender who held an old fashioned blaster between two large hands.

“He’s wanted by The Guild.” Din let his own blaster drop an inch, but yours remained with a finger on the trigger.

“Rix is a friend.”

You’d heard those words before. People attempting to find reason for the wrongdoings of others, who fought tooth and nail for people who wouldn’t do the same for them. Kindness bled through the man’s eyes. You wondered if Rix tore out his heart would his eyes shine the same?

If the roles were reversed would Din protect you with as much ferocity as this man? Would you protect him?

The acrid burn of smoke from the bartender’s pipe filtered through your helmet and you swallowed the ball in your throat. It hit your stomach with a twist that you wished more than anything you could ignore. Pain flared to life along your thigh. Soon your leg would collapse and dragging Rix back to The Crest wouldn’t be your only problem. Surviving the heat wave of tomorrow was one thing, doing it injured and on a limb that might not make it was something else.

“Your friend killed people.” The truth cut a hole in his chest—you watched the light dim and set your jaw with a harsh breath. “He blew a hole in a building housing fighters from the Rebellion. They were meant to be honored by The Republic.”

“No he wouldn’t do that-” Din stepped forward and reached a hand out in silence; a gesture of kindness that felt foreign to you and the streak of cruelty that curled tight around your spine. “We fought together against the Empire.”

“The Republic is the one who called in the bounty,” Din explained, taking the blaster from the man’s hand and you felt the compassion in his movements even if they remained stiff.

The man’s silence isn’t what made you drop your weapon, allowing him a moment to grieve. It was Din’s hand on his shoulder. Steady and enduring and burning with the fires of Mandalorian’s songs. A warrior second and a protector first. He didn’t say anything—there was nothing to be offered—but Din enveloped the man in a stillness that could only be shared by those who understood the word betrayal. You nodded his way and he watched you through the visor when you reached for the binders on your waist, limping over to Rix and his crumpled form.

He kicked at your leg with a hiss, the burn clawing up into your chest until you had no choice but to dry heave into your helmet as you slammed a fist into his the side of his face.

A shuffle of boots on sand dragged your attention up to Din’s form approaching, the bartender nowhere in sight, and you smiled. Heat washed down your spine, the burn of open flesh partially cauterized drowning you in the hum of insects that floated nearby. You swallowed around a dry mouth, throat raw and pinched each time you sucked in hot air through the filter of your helmet.

“Guess we can go home now,” you said between shuddered breaths that sent an ache through your lungs.

“I’ll find us transport.”

“I can help.”

Pushing up on your only good leg the pain rammed into you, a cold sweat breaking out and soaking through your clothing. You muttered a curse, unable to fight the wave of bile rushing up the back of your throat. Black spots clouded your vision and Din’s voice calling your name in a tone cracked with worry became the last thing you latched onto as you careened towards the ground. Hands flying out to brace for an impact you wouldn’t feel.

The wound on your leg pulsed, skin burning against the desert air. Din’s knees hit the ground beside your head, fingers tearing at the fabric by your hip. You heard the drag of leather along beskar steel and felt the press of his touch along your thigh as he pulled you into a place where he could see better. Stupidly you grinned behind the cover of your helmet. A delirious fucking smile that curled deep into your cheeks and gave way to the emotions that fluttered against your heart.

“Yes,” you mumbled, fingers digging into his cape. “I think we would.”

Panic edged along his voice as he dug through the small pouch on his hip for the bacta tin. Questions flew from his mouth: can you feel this? where does it hurt? are you okay?. But the heat was pulling you under, cocooning you in the safety of his touch and the low rasp of his voice pushing through the modulator. Your eyes slipped shut, hand loosening its grip with a sigh. Din’s voice a distant hum you felt in the base of your chest.

The frigid air tasted stale along the roof of your mouth, light flashing in bursts behind your shut eyelids as pain hit you with a swing you hadn’t been anticipating. A groan was the first thing you were capable of, your body stuck in a desperate loop of needing more sleep and itching to move about the space. You weren’t sure how long you’d been out of it. Or even where you were, but the sound of a ship’s hum and recycled oxygen that pushed around The Crest gave you enough of a clue.

“You’re awake.”

Your eyes slid open to the cavern of darkness, pitch black nothingness expanded beyond where you could currently see. The only light that came through was the gleam of hyperspace trailing down from the cockpit’s ladder. He must have left the door open to light his path to you.

A hand flew to your face, your fingers sliding along bare skin and terror seized around your heart. “My armor-”

“I haven’t been able to see you,” he quickly replied. His voice sounded…different. Warmer—free from the technical modulation of a helmet. “I removed mine to stay…blind.”

“Blind. Of course.”

He moved closer and you noticed the absence of beskar clanging together gently each time he moved. You slid a palm down your chest, the other going for your thigh and found soft clothing in its place. The suit you wore was cut open at your hip, boots off and discarded to the side, but other than that he’d left you as you were. Careful enough to strip you of what blocked him while maintaining your dignity and creed. The thought left your throat thick with emotion, the hot sting of tears pulsing at the back of your tightly shut eyelids.

“Thank you,” you managed to get out.

“Drink this.” A glass of water pressed close to your face, knocking against your chin as he blindly followed your voice. “I’ll need to put a fresh layer of bacta gel on it, but its healing nicely.”

You swallowed the cold liquid and nearly moaned when it washed down your throat. “How did we get back here?”

“Slowly.” A thump echoed in the space as he sat nearby, his legs drawn up and back to the wall. “I couldn’t carry you and Rix back so I tied him to a small loader from the bar. I helped you walk back where I could.”

The echo of distant memories scraped at the edge of your mind. His soft mutters of encouragement and nonsensical conversation to keep you alert, your feet unable to remain in a straight line as he all but dragged you beside him. You were half awake, one foot entirely in a different world. That certainly explained the ache in your legs.

“Rix is-”

“In carbonite.”

“Good.”

There was so much built in the back of your throat, words that clung to the roof of your mouth and cut the enamel off your teeth. You wanted to thank him for helping you escape Nevarro, for the adventures you’d been on. But most of all you wanted to whisper words that you never even heard your own parents say to one another. Sayings that were carved in your chest with the unsteady hand of someone who couldn’t fathom that intimacy had another name entirely. One you wanted to use.

The consequence of falling in love with Din Djarin was that there seemed to exist no consequence at all. Until it was too late to stop it from happening altogether.

“Ready?” he asked abruptly somehow closer than you expected. His voice came from above you and you imagined what the curve of his face looked like, the shape of his mouth and slant of his eyes. Was he handsome? Or did he hold exterior scars on top of the ones he stitched together beneath his flesh and bone.

You nodded and he must have heard the sound of your head shifting against the blanket spread beneath you. The soft press of bare fingers to your hip sent heat rocketing up your spine. You gasped, twisting your fingers into the soft fabric as he apologized with a rough hum.

Physical touch wasn’t unusual to you, having experienced the warmth of another body and the pleasure sex could bring you. But this seared a hole in your pounding heart so large you couldn’t patch it up. He spread the bacta along your wound gently, pulling the ripped fabric away to give him more space and you sucked in a sharp breath as goosebumps sprouting along your entire body just from the heat of his hand.

His fingers weren’t calloused or rough. An after effect of wearing leather constantly to protect you from the elements. But oh how you wished they would be. If just slightly to give you something to imagine later in your solitude.

“How’s that?”

Your chin jutted down, teeth sinking into your bottom lip hard enough to cut through the soft skin. “Fine.”

“No pain?”

“N-No.”

Another swipe of his fingers had your spine going taut, body rigid and hands clammy as you struggled for any semblance of air. “You scared me out there.”

You willed yourself to say something—anything—that might distract you from the need that ripped at your insides. “They were going to shoot you.”

“So you let them shoot you instead.” His voice was too close now, his breath practically washing across your face. “Don’t do that again. Don’t risk your life for mine.”

“I’m okay-”

“You’re not.” Your teeth clicked shut when his thumb pressed high up on your hip, slipping beneath the fabric. “When you hit the ground I thought I lost you. I haven’t felt fear like that in a long time.”

“Din,” you breathed.

Another inch higher and you knew he could feel the rapid pulse of your heart that spread down through your body. “Cyare,” he sighed, head dropping low enough to feel the brush of his hair along your forehead. It was longer than you originally thought—slightly curled too.

Whatever breath you were holding onto vanished as he spoke a word you’d never been called before. One that was traded between spouses and partners who had spoken the traditional vows. Rarely heard in the light of day and only uttered among others when the alcohol flowed freely and the hefty weight of reality was light. Beloved. A word your mother used once when she cradled your father’s dying form, his head in her lap and eyes glassed over, permanently fixed on his final sight. Her helmet.

Your heart flipped, mouth dropping open to say anything back, but what could you say? How would you phrase years of emotion into something so small?

“Can I try something?” he finally asked breaking the thick silence that blanketed both of you.

“Yes,” the word was soft and almost meek. It didn’t sound like you, held no resemblance of the strong capable warrior you knew yourself to be, but rather echoed the sentiment of someone desperate for touch—a person who begged silently for love.

He exhaled and you felt it along your chin, his nose dragging against the side of your cheek and you dug your fingers into the blanket when his mouth found yours. His lips were chapped, the dry weather of the planet doing neither of you any good, but you couldn’t think past the feel of their warmth. How they moved against yours. A sound pulled from the back of your throat and you replaced the blanket with the front of his shirt, your mouth parting to slide your tongue along his bottom lip.

Din jerked back with a hitch in his breath, but you felt the flutter of his eyes closing as he sunk into you. A hand propping itself above your head and body shifting to slide along yours. You kissed him until you couldn’t breathe. Tasting the burnt caf he must have made on the ship and something entirely him. Spit clung to your mouths, the wet sound of his lips findings yours over and over again drowning out the hum of hyperspace.

“You’re in my dreams,” he breathed quickly against your cheek, kissing along your jaw and cupping the back of your neck. “Every fucking night.”

“Oh-”

He groaned, teeth sinking into your throat and you jolted, hand curling tight into his curls. “I think about you like this. On my ship, in my bed, on Nevarro.”

So it wasn’t just you plagued by that stirring in your chest. The dormant feelings of something ancient rising up out of the ashes of a former life you held no knowledge of. Maybe somewhere in the past you hung in the sky together. Two stars dancing amidst the galaxies endless planets and moons.

“I think about you too,” you gasped, slotting your mouth against his again. Only this time you knew where this would lead, what the burn in your stomach meant as it screamed through the rest of your body.

Clumsy fingers tugged at your suit as you ripped at his shirt. You wanted to see him, admire his physique and burn the color of his eyes into your mind. The fate of your parents—unable to see one another in their final moments—wouldn’t be yours with him. You couldn’t allow that to happen. So you traced his chest with your bare fingers and mapped him in your imagination—the slope of his shoulders, the muscles that bunched on his arms when he moved to settle between your legs.

Existence without him sounded like a hell that only the galaxy could deliver. So you battled against it with your lips, dragging them along his throat until he all but purred at the attention. Your tongue followed the line of his collarbone, teeth indenting into the top of his heart and Din dug a hand into the back of your head to wrench you up to his mouth.

“Can I have you?”

The question made you smile, your teeth latching onto his lip and tugging it into your mouth. “You already have me Din Djarin.”

He laughed but you could feel the nerves rattle beneath his skin when his hand slid along your waist. “Do I?”

“Ratiin (always),” you spoke against his lips. “There wasn’t a day you didn’t.”

Stripping yourself of armor was easy. There didn’t seem to be difficulty in letting the beskar hit the floor and giving Din the time to pull the fabric from your body until you felt his bare chest against your own. But prying open the walls of a heart that had seen far too much and been given back too little became a convoluted labyrinth you couldn’t escape from. You once thought they’d be sealed shut forever—trapping you inside.

He broke you free.

Din took your hand and yanked you from the grave, he dragged you off Nevarro and beyond the walls of the underground. He salvaged any parts of you that remained and let you put the pieces back together as he watched. Always there in the background. Waiting for you to open your palm to him and lead him through the door.

“You’re beautiful.” His mouth closed around your nipple, your back arching up and off the cold floor of the ship as he sucked on it with a moan.

“You—Maker—you can’t see me.”

“I don’t have to.” Thick deft fingers slid beneath your pants and into the folds already sticky with your slick. He groaned long and loud against your chest, mouth planting open mouthed kisses down your stomach. “I’ve known you were beautiful since I first saw you.”

“Don’t mess with my ego Djarin.”

He smiled, thumb pressing down on your clit as you pulled at his hair. “I like your ego sweetheart.”

“Most people don’t-” Your moth dropped open when he pulled your pants down the rest of the way, careful of your hip and mouthed at your cunt with a rumble in his chest. “T-They think I’m difficult to handle.”

A wicked grin curled on his lips as he licked at you in a slow line, fingers dipping into the heat of your entrance. “Oh I can handle you just fine Ca’tra.”

Your eyes rolled back, noise pulling from the base of your chest when he curled two fingers into you, sucking at your clit and letting it go with a loud pop. The shame that would normally come from being with someone bare and open like this didn’t curl around your stomach. Instead need replaced it, burning down your limbs until you could feel it in the tips of your fingers.

The audible moans Din let out vibrated against your cunt, his tongue flicking against your clit and fingers pumping fast. A third one slid in easily and your legs trembled, breaths coming in pants as you sunk into the searing bliss pulling taut in your torso.

“Din,” you gasped, pulling at his curls. “I need you to fuck me-”

His mouth ripped from you as he clambered back up to your mouth, thumb pressing down hard and you came with a shout. It split you open down the center, pulled the unraveled edges of you together and set something whole in your chest. He kissed you—swallowed your moans—and let you taste yourself as you coated his hand in another wave of slick.

“Again.” Though you couldn’t see him you imagined his eyes were dark, pupils blown wide with lust. “I want another one.”

The hard line of his cock pressed to your thigh and you tugged at his pants with a shuddered moan. Your fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. He knocked them aside to pull himself free, letting you curl a hand around the hot length of him as he all but collapsed on top of you. A ragged whine tearing free when you slid a thumb along his tip, dragging what precum was there down.

“Oh fuck, baby.”

You smiled. “When’s the last time you touched yourself Din?”

He stilled, mouth shifting to your throat and you pumped him slowly, enjoying the shudder that went down his spine. “Two days ago.”

“And?” you whispered. The question was traded in silence, hanging in the air as he rutted into your palm and let out another low pitched whine.

“Yes,” he gasped. “You. I think about you every time.”

For years you ignored the emotions that stuck beneath your skin and burrowed their way to your heart. The grief shrouded any concept of love, blinded you to the devotion of his actions. He bled the parts of life you’d been missing for so long. You were two halves of a whole that had been forged into beskar armor. The songs may ring in your heart, but his name sounded louder than anything you’d heard before.

A distant call that grew into a deafening crescendo. You welcomed it with a blissful sigh, feeling him drag his cock throughout your folds. A cracked sound falling into your open mouth.

His hand found yours, pressing it into the blanket as he began to press into you with a groan. And you clutched it when the stretch burned with the strike of a match. He sunk into you slowly, pulling back every inch to press forward again. You were making a mess with each thrust but that made your skin grow warmer. The heat beneath your cheeks bloomed down into your neck, your thighs hitching up around his hips as he stilled. Filling you in a way that killed something deep within you.

That lingering ache of loneliness. The belief that there would come a day you’d be utterly alone in this universe. He chased it away with his lips on your jaw and his cock sliding back into you with a throaty grunt.

“I can feel you in my chest.” Your words tripped over themselves on the way out. Eyes screwed shut and head pushed into the floor. You wanted to see him. Watch his cock slide in and out of your stretched open cunt, see how his eyes rolled back when your walls fluttered as he hit the rough patch that had your toes curling.

“You’re so fucking warm,” he rambled. “So fucking beautiful.”

“Din-” Your heart rammed against your chest, mouth falling open and he kissed you clumsily, knocking his teeth into yours with a throaty laugh.

“Feels good cyar'ika?”

You nodded, digging your nails into his back.

The glow of hyperspace flashed behind his head and you watched it play along his spine. The light giving you something to latch onto. Tan skin and a broad form and the ink of a tattoo that seemed to be on his side or stretching up from his hip. You weren’t able to tell in the darkness. But you took what you could get and shut your eyes to the rest—your teeth finding a home in his shoulder as he pounded into you.

Everything narrowed to how his cock dragged inside you, how he nipped at your jaw and licked along your neck. How he grinded down perfectly so your clit caught along his pelvis. It rose at the back of your spine, trickling into every part of you it could reach, and you let it take you.

“Gonna come,” you choked. “Oh fuck Din don’t stop. Please. Don’t—oh—”

“I need it.” His forehead dropped to yours, hips ramming down into you until you had no choice but to take it. “C’mon sweetheart. Give it to me yeah?”

His teeth closing around your nipple and tugging it sent you over the edge with a hoarse shout, your hips meeting his thrusts the best you could. His fingers tightened on around your hand, mouth colliding with yours as he chased his own release. The wet slick of your come was a mess between your thighs and it splattered against his stomach with the force of his hips, a stuttered cry echoing off the walls of the ship.

Din came with your name on his lips, his spine going taut beneath your hand and muscles contracting along his shoulders. He spilled into you, sighing as you dragged your mouth along his jaw. Content to lay there for as long as he wanted. Until you could no longer feel the pain in your hip.

Silence gathered you both in a comfort you welcomed. His cock softened in you twitching every time your walls fluttered, but Din refused to budge. He dropped his head to your shoulder and allowed the both of you time to simply exist before the demands of bounty hunting caught up to you once more. The press of his thumb into your wrist pulled a smile along your lips, eyes shining with the burn of tears—far too overwhelmed to work through the feelings that pressed insistently against your chest.

He dragged his cloak up and over your waists, letting it warm you in the frigid vacuum of space. Such a small gesture, barely anything to marvel at. But you understood why love was something people died for—why battles were fought and why at the end of the day death was a simple act for your other half.

“Strange to think we never met on Concordia,” you finally utter, his mouth finding yours for a brief moment.

“If we had I’d have been in trouble a lot sooner.”

“I didn’t cause trouble,” you exclaim. “I was perfect.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

You grinned and wrapped an arm around his neck. “I guess you can say we’re made from the same moon.”

Made from the dirt of Concordia, forged in the same fire used to mold and shape the strongest steel in the galaxy. Pieces of who you used to be bound together to create who you would one day become. Maybe that’s what you needed to endure to find one another. The grief, the never ending tragedy your life amounted to. It grew dim in his light—faded to nothing in the warmth of his heart.

“Dust from the moon of Confordia,” he mumbled, thumb smoothing a line beneath your eye. His skin was soft, though you could tell when he was on his own he bit at it the same way you did.

“Dust from the moon,” you sighed, finding his mouth in the darkness.

Want turned your insides molten as you slung your legs higher and felt his cock twitch inside of you. The wet press of his lips slid over yours, tongue a needy mess in your mouth but you met his fervor with a whine. Rutting yourself against his hot skin, your slick caught on his pubic hair as he shifted forward. Dragging you back into the bliss that still flickered with life in the base of your chest.

ONE YEAR LATER

“Hunting bounties has made you strong.” Her voice rang through the armory as she set a finished piece of armor on the table where you sat. “You hold yourself differently.”

Over the past year you’d been everywhere the galaxy allotted you to go. Traversing places you didn’t think were possible to get to. You’d seen planets with no life, moons teeming with it, and through it all he remained at your side. Hunting whatever The Guild offered just for the sake of getting off world and away from the covert for as long as possible. You barely returned in the months you’d been gone. Stopping in briefly to deliver credits and oversee the progress of the younglings before heading off on another job.

The freedom gave you time to think. Space to consider the future you were returning to. Yet every choice you came up with—all the options you ran through—they all lead back to Din. To his ship and the home you’d made together.

That morning he took you in the cockpit, a hand banded over your waist and helmet knocking into the back of yours as he fucked up into you so hard your legs shook when you got back up. Even now you felt the heat of his body. You tasted his mouth and smelled the soap he used that never quite got rid of how leather always lingered on his skin.

You returned today at the behest of the Armorer and like a dutiful lamb you offered yourself back up for slaughter. For the good of the covert.

If only you understood the full extent of what that meant. Maybe then you might not have left the ship.

“It is time you came back to us here on Nevarro.”

Your heart dropped, fingers curling into fists as you watched her set another piece of armor on the table. A pauldron of black beskar with the signet of a dark wolf, a marking that had been etched into your skin since the day you were born. You knew the day would come when they’d burn it into you—when the freedom you so desperately ached for was no longer an option. But that seemed like such a distant afterthought, a life you could run from.

Now it stared you in the face, curling its lips back to reveal teeth ready to sink into your flesh. Unbreakable jaws that now clamped around your throat until blood ran down from its jowls.

“My training isn’t finished.”

She nodded. “That is true. I had hoped you would find other Mandalorians in your journey. That they would teach you the lessons of old that your parents never finished, but it seems I must take that upon myself.”

No.

You couldn’t let go of it all now. Not when you had the life Din offered in the palm of your hand. His necklace hung around your throat, tucked safely into the confines of your suit buried away from prying eyes, but it burned you now. A reminder that what you pretended to have was fake. Simply a dream you concocted to flee the path to being Alor. Something you never wanted.

“Give me a few more months. I’ll complete your training, I’ll find others-”

“The covert needs to see you are ready to lead.”

“They have you.”

“My role is not permanent. Neither is our survival. We each make choices that don’t always benefit us. For the good of the covert.”

You sucked in a breath, shrinking back down to the person you were a year ago. Despite all your running, the nights spent with Din in his ship. Mornings lost to one another as he fucked you into the floor and whispered sweet nothings into your throat afterwards. Days spent walking ground you might never return to, if only to make memories you could dig out and admire later on. It was fiction. And you were now being forced to step back into reality. Tears burned your eyes, dripping down your cheeks and for once you felt thankful that you wore a helmet that shielded you from prying eyes.

“Of course,” you finally replied, voice heavy with grief. You endured it once before—leaving everything you loved behind—and so the pattern repeated and you endured it again. “For the good of the covert.”

“You must tell him.”

“Tell him…”

“If he is to be at your side when the time comes. If he is to speak the vows then he will need to know that the hunting must come to an end. For both of you.”

Both of you.

Not only would you have to leave it all behind, but Din would too. He’d have to let go of a life he built from the ground up, relinquish his ties to The Guild, and start over again trapped in the underground. You might be able to survive that, but Din had changed too much of himself to let it all go now. You wouldn’t allow it. He’d suffocate a slow and grueling death if he let go of the freedom he worked so hard to keep—the future he planned to build…with you.

“I will.”

The pauldron glared at you the longer you fixed your gaze on its shape. You weren’t sure how long you sat there, how many minutes or hours had gone by since the Armorer left to attend to other tasks. How many days had gone by? Would you wither up and fade to dust if you sat there any longer? Or would your armor become a fixture in the armory—a reminder to those who passed you by that this is what happens when you give yourself up. When you meld into the clan and forget who you were.

“I’ve been looking for you.” His voice sliced through your chest, a blaster bolt to your heart as he came down the steps and entered the room. “You missed dinner with the clan.”

“I’ve just been…here.”

He froze at the monotone lilt in your voice, the stiffness in your form. “What did she say?”

If he is to be at your side…

“She told me that I’ve gotten stronger. That our hunts have been doing what she hoped.”

The smile in his voice was obvious and you wished you didn’t know what it felt like on your skin, how it fit into the base of your throat when you told a joke that made him break. You wished you could stop the flow of tears that hadn’t ceased since she uttered those words. How your heart chipped off pieces the longer you sat there and stared your future in the face. You wished you could disappear.

“Something is still wrong.”

“Nothing-”

“You haven’t moved cyar'ika.” The endearment hit like another bolt you weren’t expecting and you swallowed the pain down before it could morph into a sob.

Shutting your eyes to his form, you felt your heart give way as you made the choice that would damn you for eternity. “I’m staying here Din.”

You didn’t need to see him to know his heart stopped. “What?”

Sucking in a breath you got to your feet and met him head on, as a warrior would. “I’m not doing this to hurt you. It’s time I take responsibility for what they trained me to do. I’m doing this…for the good of the covert.”

He snapped, hand gripping your arm to drag you forward. “Those aren’t your words. So tell me the truth.”

The truth was that you loved him. You didn’t think there was a day in your months of hunting that you didn’t love him, that you wouldn’t make the same choice and take a blaster bolt right to the chest for him. The amount of times you nearly died for another would never outweigh the times you should have told him how you felt. How you knew he felt.

Din’s heart rammed in his chest, unsteady and twisting with a pain he remembered from childhood. The same agony that came with uprooting his life after witnessing his parent’s death, the brutal slap of reality that accompanied starting a new life on a strange moon. The same home he thought you were meant to be find one another on. He watched you choke on words that didn’t belong to you and yet he wasn’t surprised by how easy the rolled off your tongue.

The walls in your heart were far too high for him to climb and he’d done all he could to find a way over them. But not even that was enough for you to let him in.

“I have to be focused on the needs of our clan if I’m ever to take on the role of being Alor.”

The words were sour on your tongue. Lies you spewed to make him feel better about the situation both of you were handed. They were practically transparent and you could see him peering right through them. His gaze fixed on the root of what all of this amounted to. You were never meant to be free. Your red string of fate was a noose he never noticed before and it was growing tighter each day you spent away from the walls of the underground.

They forged you here with purpose and here you would remain.

Footsteps echoed in the distance and Din stiffened as the Armorer entered. “Din Djarin I hear you have brought something back for the clan.”

A beat of silence passed before Din pushed forward, the line digging just a few feet deeper than before. “Yes.”

You stepped back into the role of apprentice, your shadow playing along the wall as Din took his place at the table. The sight of his fingers curling into fists at the pauldron already on the table twisted your stomach into knots. He knew what the symbol meant. Could see the path of your future set in the beskar steel before him and did what he could to ignore the rage that simmered at the base of his chest. Not at you—never at you. At the clan that claimed you long before he ever had a chance to.

A slab of beskar was set on the surface and you nearly dropped at the sight of it. An empirical symbol set into the metal as the Armorer lifted it with curiosity.

“This was gathered in the great purge. It is good it is back with the tribe.” The purge that left you stranded—the consequence of power falling into the wrong hands that now had you trapped. The Armorer continued before you could say anything. “A pauldron would be in order. Has your signet been revealed?”

Yours stared him in the face and you itched to slam it into a different shape, mold it into something neither of you would recognize.

“Not yet,” he replied briskly.

“Soon.”

She turned to gather supplies as you fell into old motions and removed the pauldron from his shoulder. “Your meeting with Greef Karga,” you muttered under your breath.

“A new job.”

One you wouldn’t be joining him on. For the first time in a year he would leave this place alone and remain that way until he chose otherwise. All because you couldn’t find the courage to rip yourself away. They lay dirt over your grave faster than you could dig and you were unable to claw your way out as he stood by and watched. No longer the one to pull you free.

“You may set the pauldron,” she said, handing you the steel that was still hot from the fires. You ignored the burn that came through your gloves and set it into place as you swallowed a choked cry—tears blurring your vision.

A hand curled around your thigh briefly, fingers dragging along the back of it before leaving you entirely. The hot air of the armory drenching you in a warmth that existed without him. A life written in beskar steel and forged in the fires of old long before you were born. Din could see that now—watched how you were wrapped in a legacy so tight no blade could cut you loose. So he let you go.

“Thank you,” he uttered and glanced at you briefly, helmet tipped down and fingers twitching at his side. “Ret’urcye mhi (goodbye, may we meet again).”

Smiling beneath your mask you nodded once and released him with a breath. “Ret’urcye mhi Din Djarin.”

The length of his tie wrapped snug around your fist when you tugged with a brazen smile. It wasn't difficult to get him to go where you wishes. Merely leading him on unsteady legs was enough as he traipsed along to the shitty leather couch the office dropped and forgot about. Wedged deep in the back of an office nobody used anymore. It became storage two years ago.

The layers of dust you felt lodge in the back of your throat made it obvious nobody had stepped foot over the threshold in a countless number of months.

Clark laughed when he nearly tripped over his feet as you shut the door with a soft kick and pushed him the rest of the way through. He was no stranger to finding a hide out with you during his lunch break to make out. Ducking into empty offices and hiding in the shadows with your hand curled into his tie and his arm wrapped snug around your waist. Breathless smiles traded between the soft smack of spit and kisses that bruised your mouth. Never his (even if he wished they had).

It became ritual this far into your relationship.

"You made a good point today Kent." Your words were a barely audible mutter against the corner of his mouth.

"Huh?"

However, this was new.

Blue glazed over the moment you plopped into his lap with a laugh that burned his insides. Coiling need tight and unsteady in his fluttering stomach. He didn't need to ask what you were doing. Your fingers undoing his belt and tugging at the zipper now pressed tight to his crotch was answer enough for him.

Clark figured he could have explained the ramifications of fucking at work. What would definitely happen if you got caught. But when your mouth latched onto his neck and your hips rolled forward—the heat of your cunt bare and displayed beneath your skirt—he didn't much care for the consequences.

As long as nobody caught you of course.

"Explaining your next article in the meeting," you breathed, fingers moving in quickly timed circles against your clit, the wet sound of your slick turning his cheeks a ruddy maroon. "Very professional. So handsome taking charge-"

You gasped, lips catching on the corner of his mouth and Clark felt the whine erupt at the back of his throat. A needy high pitch that you silenced with your tongue. Any other day—in any other place—he would be the one taking his time. Opting for a slow pace and the sounds he knew you could make growing louder by the minute.

But the lunch break was only thirty minutes and Clark could feel the ball of nerves begin to swell in his chest. You kissed him until he felt what he imagined was a shortness of breath—even if it was technically impossible for him to experience. His glasses were knocked askew but he met you with just as much enthusiasm as you had. If not more.

There would never be the same day twice with you. Never a moment you didn’t manage to throw him off guard—knock him entirely off his feet. You were a storm. A beautiful mass of curling mist he couldn’t wait to get lost in. One he knew would exhilarate him in ways only flying had been able to do for so long.

His hands clutched your back, hips jolting up when you hovered over his leaking cock. The tip a dark blush that almost matched the rest of his body. He was no stranger to overheating during sex. But this felt like you'd turned on an incinerator and shoved him inside. Sucking in quick breaths, he tried to hold off coming too soon as you eased him into your cunt with a rasped groan.

"Oh fuck baby," you breathed. Sweat clung to your skin and he licked it off, teeth sinking gently against your throat. "You're so big."

"D-Don't say that. I'm gonna come-"

Your smile was a deviant little thing and he knew what it meant long before it crested into your eyes. "Don't say what? That all throughout the meeting I thought about begging you to bend me over that table?"

A harsh pathetic sound punched from his chest, his face landing into your shoulder as he bucked up into you. "I-I can't-"

Raising up on your knees you felt him shudder—mouth dropped open—as you dropped back down with a loud wet squelch. "Or that I wanted to suck your cock as you talked."

"B-Baby oh gosh."

"How about it Clark?" you gasped, setting a ruthless pace that had him flopping back into the couch with tears glazing his eyes and spit trailing down his chin. "Want me to get on my knees during the next presentation?"

"Uh-huh," he mumbled, eyes fixed on how he speared you open. The creamy ring growing thicker with each roll of your hips.

"Yeah? How about keeping me under your desk?" you muttered, hands clapping onto his chest when you fell forward.

"Yeah." His tongue had a mind of its own and before you could find his mouth with yours he'd yanked open your shirt, lips attaching to a peaked nipple through the lace of your bra.

Tugging at his curls, you dug your teeth into your lip to muffle the choked scream. Clark felt his common sense recede into the back of his mind when your walls fluttered around him. Instinct moving his hand to press the pad of his thumb onto your throbbing clit until your spine went taut and you yanked his head back to press a cry into his open mouth. His eyes rolled back with a ragged moan, legs shaking as you clamped down and came hard enough to make his vision cross.

Fifteen minutes. He found the clock still ticking away on the wall across from him—your head tucked into his chest and pussy fluttering through the aftershocks. If he timed it right he’d be able to give the both of you five extra minutes to clean up and actually eat something.

Clark tugged you up and flipped you over onto the couch, your eyes going wide and hands scrambling for purchase. He crowded you in close, yanking your legs up and over his shoulders, his body half bent as was yours.

“What are you-”

“Keep sayin’ you wanna be on your knees,” he muttered, mouth running up the inside of your thighs. “But I prefer to be on mine.”

The rapid thud of his heart grew when your lips tugged into a smile. “Clark.”

Silooth Saloon was tainted with the rancid burn of drinks that tasted like fuel siphoned from a star ship. No living creature should have gone near it, but people still arrived. Your nose wrinkled at the atmosphere of cheap spice smoked freely and what you assumed was vomit from a long night of way too much alcohol. The cantina was sparse, a few patrons scattered here and there and most were too high to notice a Mandalorian dragging a half limp person through the door. It certainly wasn’t the most strange thing one could find in Coruscant’s underworld.

Din’s foot hooked into the base of a nearby chair and settled you into it with a grunt before plopping down beside you. His helmet tipped to stare at the gaping hole in your pants, no doubt checking to see if the bacta took to your wound. The act might have made you smile if the circumstances were anything other than they were.

The man so intent on helping even as he ran from what was always destined for him. To be a protector, a guardian of those who needed him most.

You never thought you might one day fit into that category.

“What are we drinkin’?” A Twi’lek with flushed purple skin and her lekku tied together behind her back fixed a wary look at the silver armor that reflected the room’s red neon glow. His stiff position no doubt offered quite the story for her to spill at a different time.

“A black caf and a bowl of Joppa stew,” he said before you could even open your mouth. “And no interruptions.”

The thud of credits hit the table and your lips twitched at the sight, chest warm and face hot. You blamed it on the open wound still pulsing with heat and not the way he remembered your order on hunts all those years ago. The food you’d eat in silence alone at the back of his ship—your stomach filled with an ache to have his company over a simple meal like this.

You just wished it hadn’t occurred when separation became a chasm between the both of you. One Mandalorian still following the creed he took as a young boy. The other a forgotten apostate, forced to reckon with a dismantled reality carved by a past you couldn’t change.

“You didn’t get anything.” Yanking a chair close, you forced your leg up and onto it with a harsh groan—pain flaring in bright spots behind your eyelids.

Din’s hand shot out to steady you, pressing his knee to the edge of the seat in case you moved the wrong way again. “I have food on The Crest.”

“You mean your not removing your helmet. Especially in front of me.”

His shoulder twitched, helmet tipped to the side as if going over each word with a fine toothed comb. “No. That’s not what I meant-”

“I’m joking Din. I don’t expect you to join me as an apostate.” The joke was dry on the back of your tongue, but shame dug its claws into your throat after you closed your mouth hard enough to make your teeth clack. “I just mean…I don’t mind either way.”

“A black caf.” A long arm set a steaming mug in front of you, the bowl right beside it. “And Joppa stew. You’re in luck, that’s the last we got for the night. Anything else?”

One shake from his helmet sent her scurrying off back behind the bar, the bartender wiping glasses clean had his gaze fixed on the back of Din’s head. There was a time you used to feel a thrill from the reaction of others when they came across the both of you. Covered head to toe in scratched armor that had seen better days long before you arrived on whatever planet housed the bounty you were seeking.

One Mandalorian was enough to turn heads. Two set people’s teeth on edge.

You swallowed the stew down quickly despite the pungent smell burning the inside of your nose. Only to be met with your stomach twisting, wracking your already exhausted body in a freezing chill you felt down to your finger tips. Nausea climbed up and out of your throat, saliva pouring into a dry mouth as you fought back the urge to vomit. Days of nothing left you with an unrelenting hunger that even food couldn’t quench, so you downed the caf instead—gesturing to the waitress before you even set it back on the table.

His eyes burned holes into the side of your head. The sight of you devouring your food without any qualms about how others could perceive you drew his chest tight beneath the armor.

What would it be like to join you in your obscurity? To feel the weight of beskar steel leave his head and feel the hot air of the cantina against his skin.

The temptation nearly devoured him whole—digging a piercing cavity in his chest.

“I still feel it,” you muttered into your refilled mug, unable to take the burning gaze he fixed you with anymore than you used to. “Took a year to feel like I wasn’t drowning in shame every time I ate in front of people. Some days- Well it feels like I still am.”

There wouldn’t a part of you that didn’t vividly recall the way your body used to be weighed down by armor. The heft of it, how it sat snug to every limb, the pressure at the back of your head from carrying something so monumental. The phantom ache of holding metal for hours at a time never quite went away. Like a permanent bruise at the base of your skull you could still feel if you pressed your fingers down hard enough. You missed it on days when things were quiet and you could settle to breathe for a few weeks at a time.

“You could have put it back on.”

The grin that stretched across your cracked lips was wry, eyes flashing with a resentment he felt curdle at the base of his stomach. “The Alor made it very clear where I stand after that night.”

“The Alor-”

“Besides-” you leaned back with a wince, fingers curled tight around your mug. “-beskar steel attracts too much attention for a bounty on the run. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Even he couldn’t deny the way people’s eyes locked on at the first glimpse of the silver steel, each one calculating how much they’d get if they were able to drop him right where he stood. He felt it now. From patrons across the cantina. Always a piss poor attempt to be discreet, but he knew how their fingers itched for the trigger of their blaster. The taste of their fear drenching the air stopped them from doing something stupid—they knew that to take on a Mandalorian rarely promised anything other than death in the end.

Din’s shoulders bunched as he sucked in a breath. “It has its disadvantages. But not wearing it feels…”

“Like there’s a part of you missing.”

He nodded, shifting in his seat as you pried him open with just once glance. A part of him preferred you with a helmet. Your visor and dark armor used to give him a chance to gauge your reactions, guess what you were thinking. Now you wore it openly on your face. As if you had been doing it all along.

And suddenly you realized this is exactly how he looked when his face was bared to the world—expressions scrawled bright and glaring across each feature.

“I don’t think I’d be welcomed back so easily. A Mandalorian doesn’t run but here I am. I’ve been running for so long I can’t remember what it felt like to simply exist.”

Your head tipped to the side, hood falling against your shoulders and Din caught sight of it in the neon glow of the cantina. The flash of marred skin on the side of your neck forming faint lines that made a circle with spikes. A wound that healed wrong and carved ridges in your neck that you would bear for the rest of your life. There was no cutting out a burn—a mark—that claimed you without mercy as their property.

Din’s mouth filled with the bitter tang of anger, his heart ramming an unsteady beat. The Black Sun burned you, they forced their mark on your skin for everyone to see, as a reminder of who you were running from. To make sure you’d never be able to get away. He wanted to sink every blade in his arsenal into their flesh. To feel the heat of their blood soak into his gloves until the life dimmed in their eyes.

Rage came naturally to a Mandalorian, but he’d never felt it like this.

All encompassing, brutal and without a hint of mercy. His tongue craved the taste of their death and how it would hang in the air long after the job was done and you were safe.

“What did they do to you?” he rasped, his anger held back by a thin strand of control that wavered the longer he stared at your neck.

As if on instinct your hand clasped over it, head ducking and fingers fumbling with your hood. “What they felt I deserved.”

He dragged in a breath, chest heaving beneath his armor yet his body remained still. The tremor of fury began in his hands, a visceral wave of emotions he prided himself on controlling. They became the backbone of every hit, every strike, until his enemy was forced to relent beneath his power—the numb curl of what he guessed to be satisfaction flaring to life in his chest like a forgotten note to a song he started to loathe.

But this echoed like the songs of eons past, loud and unrelenting and stained with the devout belief of a creed the both of you still tasted at the back of your throat. Long before he knew the feel of your smile beneath his fingertips and the way you clung to him as the light of hyperspace flooded the ship, he knew you as his equal.

That was enough for him to let the anger fester. To grow like a pustulate wound that would bubble to the surface and stay there, rotting with the tang of biting hatred for those who would lay their hands on someone from his clan.

It was more than that. Din wasn’t blind to how his heart restarted at the sight of your gaze unfiltered and raw for the first time in all his life. He’d been dragging on since the kid left. Moving from planet to planet in order to forget, but unable to move past.

Sitting across from you dug out the young man who once carried hope in a heart not yet broken. He could see the memories coast along the fringes of his mind and reach for them. Warmth bled into a chest he figured would be cold for the rest of his days the longer he watched you struggle to gather what little of yourself remained.

“I’m coming with you,” he finally said, short and outright.

As expected, you shoved his words off with a wave of your hand—always so damn stubborn in the end. “I don’t need your help.”

“Good. I didn’t ask for permission.” Your jaw shut with an audible click, brows furrowed as you pinned him with a sneer. “I have a ship and you need a way off Coruscant.”

“You’re walking into a war that isn’t written in your name.”

“It isn’t written in yours either.”

The grief blinded you with a harsh tug of wool over your eyes. Clouds thick and dark formed in your mind as memories of a life once by his side were drowned in favor of the acrid tang that coated your tongue. The seething bite of reality wasn’t pointed towards him, but you still pictured his helmet regardless.

He left. Allowed the covert to collapse in favor of protecting a foundling and you couldn’t fault him for that. The foundlings were the future—they were perhaps more important than the lives of others. That wasn’t what infuriated you. It was the glaring fact that he never came back.

Only when it was far too late and the people of your tribe had vanished did he cross the atmosphere of Nevarro again with a child in tow behind him. By then you were already off on a different planet entirely, trapped in the tight grip of Black Sun and all their false promises.

“Don’t be so fucking naive Djarin,” you hissed through clenched teeth. “I’m not the same verd (warrior) you once knew and I…” Air pinched your lungs as you took a breath, swallowing hard around the words you struggled to get out. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get that part of me back.”

Out of sync beats blasted from the shitty jukebox in the corner of the cantina. A song meant for clubs on upper levels where spice flowed almost as free as the Spotchka. But it drowned out the unnerving quiet that hung between you—his helmet tipped in your direction, eyes dragging down the side of your face. Maybe he could see where you split down the center, the fissure of your heart which grew with the promise of collapse.

Half expecting him to move on from this topic, he surprised you when he plundered forward past the wreckage of a life you could no longer hold onto. “Explain it to me.”

“What?”

“Tell me everything. From the beginning.”

“Why?” Your chest thundered as he leaned against the edge of the table and you swore you could hear the malice dripping like venom in his low rasped voice.

“Because if I’m gonna show them what they deserve I’ll need to know the whole story.”

Hesitation trapped your heart in a cage. You didn’t want to tell him, to recount the horrors that still clung to your skin no matter which planet you ran to. But the words spilled free faster than you could reign them in. Din knew you in ways no other would—he recognized you with no helmet and no armor for the same reason you would be able to do the same for him.

You knew the beat of your heart in someone else’s chest, could hear the cadence of its call from light years away. You simply had to come across it again to recognize what you’d been missing.

Perhaps it was the same for him.

“I met with them twice,” you said thumbing the handle of your mug. “The first job turned out to be a spice trade with someone that went bad on their end, and the thief stole enough credits to buy a fucking city. So I picked up the bounty. It was easy enough to handle; I knew what came with the territory of something like that, after all the times we hunted together. No puck, no fob, only a name and the last known location. But they failed to mention the whole fucking story.”

Din’s shoulders tensed, his fingers curling into fists atop the table. “You should have walked away when they didn’t offer a fob.”

“I should have.” The shame gnawed at the inside of your stomach, turning the stew you ate to pure acid as you relived moments that kept you up at night. “But I was starving. I’d been on my own for a month and the thought of finally having enough to eat and a place to sleep sounded like a good deal to me.”

“But the others-”

“Fled the moment they were off world. You weren’t there Din. You didn’t see how revealing ourselves…” You choked on a breath, eyes burning as every emotion crashed to the surface in a wave you could no longer hold back. The tears fell rapidly and you blinked them away. “It broke something in us to give up everything we knew.”

The song changed to an old forgotten beat you heard once in a shitty cantina back on Nevarro—when you were still forced to remain underground as shadows in the background. Just the sound of it brought a wry grin to your mouth, exhaustion withering your sore bones as the food settled in your stomach. What you wouldn’t give for a warm bed and the ease of sleep.

Din watched, terrified of looking away for fear that you might vanish before his eyes. You weren’t the same warrior from before. You were broken, driven to the edge of madness until you had no choice but to wrench yourself back. But the embers of a flame that would never die out flickered to life in the confines of your chest. When survival was your only option death would come to fear your name.

“The second job is when things went to shit,” you sighed, scrubbing a hand down your face, exasperation thick on your tongue. “Another thief stole a family heirloom and took off to Nar Shaddaa so they called me in for the job. Claiming I would be discreet about their business and return with the bounty quicker than others, and of course I thought nothing of it. Just off what they paid me I was able to afford a ship and enough food to keep me going for a month or two. But this job…this one was tainted.”

His heart leapt when you buried your face into your hands, a ragged noise pulling from your chest. “The bounty wasn’t a thief. It was the son of Gyuti—the heir to the Black Sun! And it wasn’t some heirloom. That bastard stole the code to his entire families fortune. Past deals, future deals, trade routes, stash houses, he took everything they had and offered to sell it to the highest bidder.”

“Did you turn him in?”

The scoff was brittle and he could see right through it, but you were past the point of hiding from him. “By the time I found him he was dead. Another thief killed him for the reward. I tried to run and forget the damn job, but when I got off world…it was too late.”

The situation wasn’t uncommon.

A cruel trick against bounty hunters to keep the money off the table altogether. He’d been unlucky to find one or two, but as his reputation grew so did the number of people who were threatened at the very sight of him. Without your armor, you held no rank—no status to wield at your whim. Black Sun used that in every way they could and left you to gather what piece might remain, ripping another shred of your life right out of your chest.

“They claimed I killed him.” Din felt a tremor wrack his spine at the defeat in your voice, his teeth grinding loud beneath his helmet until it was all he could hear. “And there was nothing I could say to refute something like that. So I became theirs.”

“Theirs?” he ground out, steel in his voice and rage thundering in his chest.

“A life for a life,” you grinned though it never reached your eyes. “Because they couldn’t punish the lamb, they chose the lion who hunted him.”

Their death would be too merciful. A kindness he buried in the bottom of his heart at the sight of you unraveling. The strong warrior that fought at his side—the Mandalorian he once swore he’d die for—now a shell of what they made you. Fractured bits of a heart that refused to die quietly.

“I killed for them,” you uttered though your voice had gone hollow and he fought the urge to reach across the table for you. If only to offer a comfort he didn’t know how to give. “Took out their enemies and hunted countless others and still I would up in chains at the end of the day. But eventually they found themselves being hunted and I managed to stowaway in a pleasure ship as one of the guards.”

The door opened with a loud creak and Din forced himself to take a breath as two sets of feet scraped along the floor. Clearly drunk from one too many hours out in the nightlife of Coruscant.

Running a hand over the scar, you winced with the memory—the scent of burnt flesh rooted so deep in your mind you’d never be able to run from. “They gave me this on my last night there before I made a run for it. Courtesy of Gyuti himself.”

You ached for his expressions to be painted across beskar as yours was streaked along your face. He walked through the open doors of your mind without difficulty and became a witness to the grueling agony of seeing yourself stripped of power. Until the warrior that left Nevarro no longer existed in the long run, and was replaced by a paranoid thief who had nowhere left to turn.

“The crime syndicates. They’re no better than the Empire,” Din growled his hand moving close as if it held a mind of its own.

The barked laugh that tore from your lungs startled him into silence. His arm retreated, back going rigid. “C’mon Djarin don’t tell me you’re comparing the crime syndicates to the Empire that overtook an entire galaxy to this day.”

“The Empire is fading,” Din said in a poor attempt to assure you of all the grievances still trapped tight around a withering heart. “What wasn’t destroyed might still exist, but it’s a dying breed now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” you scoffed into your now tepid mug of caf. “The Empire may be gone or disappearing but its ideas—the belief of oppression, power, the restless unwilling force to possess that which they have no right to control. That will never go away. You live in the outskirts of the galaxy long enough and you’ll find it buried in each place you go. It may be cast in shadows and wear a different face, but its all the same fucking thing.”

His glove cracked as he white knuckled the arm rest. “Keeping it alive is one thing but I’ve met the ones who brought it to an end. The Empire—the shadows—whatever it wants to call itself, it can't last.”

“I thought you didn’t care about any of that.”

“I didn’t.”

“And suddenly you changed your mind. What makes you so sure you’re right?”

“I saw it. As long as they exist there will be people to fight back.”

Discarding the caf to the side, you clasp your hands together and prop your chin atop them—your scabbed knuckles scratching your skin. “And Black Sun? They’re what? Just another fight? They’re a criminal organization with my fucking head on the chopping block. I’m not sure fighting is the way to go about this, but what do I know I’ve just been running from them-”

“You’re Mandalorian,” Din stated bluntly, his words a brutal kick to your stomach. “We fight together. Even if the enemy is greater than us.”

Warmth pooled in your stomach at his rigid tone—so much like his young self—and for a brief flickering minute you could see him in scraps of red armor instead of the reflecting silver. You saw him as a warrior who dived head first, taking out the enemy before you could even pull your blaster. At first you came to the conclusion that he was stupid, or at least willing to get himself killed the moment he caught sight of his opponent. It would only be later when the realization occurred that he put himself in harms way to impress you.

After all the future Alor of the clan would need a warrior of strength by their side—their equal in every way possible.

The years weren’t kind to either of you. Even if the both of you wished to prolong this fantasy of believing otherwise.

That night—the bounty he stole—rang like a distant bell in your mind. A child. He fought to protect the helpless, to put himself in the middle of a firefight if only to save that which could not save itself. A true Mandalorian if you’d ever seen one; as if he was dropped from the very songs you listened to as a child.

The smile curled on your lips before you understood the flutter in your chest, heat flooding back into cold and lifeless veins. “Okay,” you replied softly, eyes fixed on his visor. “We fight.”

Downing the last of the caf, you felt his gaze drag along your face—a burn you missed when nights were quiet and the glow of hyperspace dragged in old ghosts you thought were long buried. Perhaps they were in shallow graves all along. Waiting in anticipation for the sun to shine once more and give them a reason to return to life.

“I need you to know,” he sighed, helmet tipped down to the table and shoulders dropped in shame. “You’re not the only apostate sitting at this table.”

Your body stiffened, heart ramming harsh against your chest. “Din? Your helmet…”

“Yes,” he admitted with a rough grunt, anguish clear in his voice. “I’ve removed it more times than I should have.”

He spoke like a sinner begging for penance, seeking the forgiveness you couldn’t give him. Not because you didn’t want to, but simply for the reason you couldn’t give it to yourself. A hand slid across the surface quicker than either of your anticipated, your fingers sliding over his wrist as you pressed close until the edge of the table was digging into your stomach. You grinned when his body jolted; the sight of his helmet rearing back did nothing but drag to the surface everything you hoped to forget at one time or another.

“You are still Mandalorian to me,” you whispered as if each word bled the sacred vow taken and creed promised. “See my face. Bear my shame for your shame is now mine.”

Old words taken from an ancient time.

They rang with the sanctity of partnership, of two warriors speaking of a future beyond what the creed could provide. He clutched your forearm with a shaky sigh and the waves of your tragedy settled into serene glistening waters that rippled through your body and into his.

Unending quiet filled the cavern of grief until you could float beside him and since your final night together all those years ago you finally reached out. Not with the countenance of a fellow Mandalorian, but with the smile of a friend. Something the both of you needed more than air at this very moment. Sitting in the crappy cantina, you found one another entangled in webs not of your own making, and pulled one another free.

You felt his thumb nestle into the curve of your wrist, pressing down on a pulse that skipped in his presence. Old habits die hard. The words sat on the tip of your tongue as he smoothed leather along your skin, his lips curling into a grin that warmed his stomach when he caught you squirming in your chair. A hand pressed over the side of your neck, eyes glued to the shift of his finger sweeping back and forth unconsciously.

He used to touch you like this in the silence of his ship. After you’d all but collapse with the exertion of fucking yourselves stupid until you were too tired to recall the hunt. Let alone speak about it. Times that Din could recall immediately and with a clarity that nearly startled him.

The curve of your wrist felt the same. The way you breathed, the uptick in energy when you spoke after a warm meal remained exactly as he remembered it.

Nothing about you changed. Yet somehow simultaneously everything about you changed.

“Din I wanted to say before I forget-”

The unmistakable piercing sound of a blaster round going off rang in the cantina and he threw himself into action before his mind could process that you were speaking. His head whipped to the right, foot ramming into your chair to shove you away from the table before launching himself over it and yanking it down to its side. Another round struck metal as Din pulled free his blaster—throwing you a quick glance to see yours already clutched between two hands, your face set into a grim line.

Your heart didn’t race in the midst of battle. That was trained out of you at birth—your parents intent on raising you to be comfortable with the sound of blaster fire and the clash of weapons.

But you couldn’t ignore the sharp thrill shooting down your spine at the knowledge that Din was fighting by your side again. No matter how much you tried to forget, shoving memory after memory down your throat until it came rushing back up like bile, you wouldn’t be able to wipe the image of him pulling the trigger in your defense from your mind.

“At the back of the place,” he grunted between two more rounds punching holes through the table and narrowly missing his pauldron. “We need to get to the door out the side. I can lead us back to The Crest from there.”

“How many?” you sucked in a breath, shoving as many bolts your blaster would take into the chamber. He emptied out a pouch and dropped more in your palm before shifting to his knees.

“Caught sight of three when I turned, but there might have been more sitting in the dark.”

“And they’re stupid enough to shoot at a Mandalorian.”

Dropping to your side, you peek out around the table and clocked a Zabrak man leaping over the bar with a weapon in both hands. You aimed, sucked in a breath, and fired the second your lungs began to burn—watching as it hit him in the shoulder and sent him dropping like a swatted fly. The smile thrown over your shoulder at Din shouldn’t have made him feel like a fucking teenager trying to impress you again, but the sight punched every ounce of air out of his lungs until he was forced to drag in a ragged breath.

You were brighter than any star in this galaxy he’d come across. Twice as brilliant and it blinded him for the few seconds he allowed himself to look.

“Tal!” you called, wrenching him out of his stupor enough to get him on his feet and fire off three more rounds.

A gritty voice rang out from across the cantina, his voice practically a whisper with how much spice he probably smoked on the daily. “Hand over the bounty Mando! We’ll give her what she deserved before we hand that murderer back to Black Sun.”

Dread crept up your spine with a harsh frigid chill you’d only experienced once before. It ate at your stomach and turned your food into bile that stung the back of your throat. You should have pushed through it, got to your feet beside Din and fought your way out, but you were crippled by the burn on your neck. Eyes wide and lungs panicking for another breath that wouldn’t come.

You couldn’t go back to that nightmare. Maker you’d rather die than be dropped back on the threshold of hell.

“Hey,” Din barked, falling to a knee and cupping your face to drag you close. “Wake up. C’mon snap out of it.”

A gurgle of words spilled from your throat, ugly gasping things wrenched directly from the fear churning in the pit of your stomach. Any other time you’d be ashamed. Disgustingly embarrassed that you were rendered to such a mess of emotions in front of someone who thought you strong, but you couldn’t rip yourself free.

The strength had withered away the moment you understood death was clamoring for your life long before you’d bear the title Mandalorian again.

Cold metal pressed hard against your forehead as he wrenched you up to your knees with a harsh bitten out grunt. “Ca’tra,” he muttered but the shrill high pitched ring in your ears drowned him out. “I can get you out but I need you to listen to my voice. Alright? Focus on what I’m saying.”

“Din-”

“Yeah good. That’s real good sweetheart.” Another round hit metal and you distinctly heard the sound of it pinging off beskar. He was hunching over your form, using every part of his body to protect yours as you clawed along blood and bone and the ash of screams you could hear pound against your skull. “I’m not gonna let them take you, not today, not tomorrow. Never. But I need you to get up and fight.”

As if he pulled back the curtains of your mind and ripped open the windows, you returned with a gasp. Eyes sharp and fingers curling tight around your blaster, you felt him jolt upright and give you his shoulder to clamber your way back onto unsteady feet. Sweat dripped down your temple and around your eyes, but you could feel cold beskar pressed to your front as he scanned one side of the room leaving you to the other.

Nine men.

Two already dropped thanks to Din’s endless supply of blaster bolts.

Seven left and they were rushing at you with malice wedged between the teeth and the rancid smell of alcohol on their tongue.

“You’re okay?” he asked beside your head as he shoved a vibroblade into your hand.

You nodded, gaze narrowed to the man raising his blaster on the right, aiming for your head. “How do you want to play this?”

“Flanked,” he bit out, catching the way one of them eyed you like fresh meat they were intent on ripping a chunk off with their teeth. “Stay covered and head for the door once I tell you to.”

“Ib’tuur jatne tuur ash’ad kyr’amur.”

Today is a good day for someone else to die.

A laugh cracked through the modulator as the sound of a blaster went off and adrenaline sparked high in your chest. Din kicked the table with a harsh growl, launching it at two men storming your right as you shot one directly across from you who went down with a cry. This was familiar to you. The grueling heat of battle with him at your side. Both of you would die for one another—nearly had at times—and tonight that once old vow rang with truth like you’d never heard before.

Rushing at a man encased in a shitty attempt at reused storm trooper armor, you dropped to a knee with a harsh wince, jamming the vibroblade into his thigh and swinging back up to point the barrel of your blaster at his temple. Fear burned in light green irises. An all too welcome sight as you pulled the trigger and stuffed his death in the back of your mind.

Locked and sealed and never to be witnessed again.

“The door!” he shouted loud enough for you to hear over the harsh sounds of metal colliding with flesh and bodies hitting the floor. “Go! Now!”

The flash of purple caught your eye from behind the bar and your heart dropped to your stomach as a hunter crept towards the waitress left to her own defenses. Din’s voice calling your name fell on deaf ears the moment you started towards her, rushing even with a limp in your step. You grabbed a chair and raised it high above your head before ramming it down on the man’s back, your foot slamming into the base of his spine until your heard a crack.

Bone shattered with ease, but your blaster going off finished him with a heavy breath. She grasped your arm, following you to where Din fought three men as the rest began to close in behind you. Pushing her at your back, you raised you blaster with a breath. Serenity washing over your shoulders and warmth fluttering at the base of your stomach.

If you were to die, at least it would be at his side.

As fate intended.

You pulled the trigger as many times as you could before the chamber sounded with an empty click and you were left right where you began. A roar bellowed from your chest, fingers wrapped tight around the knife still sticky with another man’s blood, but something dark pulled at the edge of your vision. The beginnings of a myth you heard time and time again—embedded so deep it would have taken an act of absolute horror to unearth it from the trenches in your mind.

Din moved with a speed that would have alarmed anyone who had yet to come across the full wrath of a Mandalorian, his blaster raised high and other hand curled around the hilt of a sword. Jettii’kad. Your head reared back, heart hammering an unsteady beat as the air was sucked from your chest.

This was no sword, no lightsaber a Jedi would wield. In his right hand Din Djarin held the Darksaber and suddenly mythology came to life before your very eyes.

He brandished it with a strike, embedding it into the last man’s chest, his body hitting the ground with a heavy thud that echoed loud in the quiet of the cantina. The Twi’lek behind you cowered against the wall at the sight of bloodshed. But to you this was as close to home as you could get.

You nearly drop to your knees at the sight of it, injured leg trembling with the strain of battle. “Mand’alor,” you breathed, unable to take your eyes off the way the saber glinted in the light, humming with its own energy.

He winced, sheathing it with a grimace beneath his helmet. “Nayc.”

“But the Darksaber-”

“Cui ogir’olar. (It’s irrelevant)” That should have been the end of it, but you couldn’t be deterred—far too relentless for your own good at times.

“Irrelevant,” you scoffed. “Whoever holds the Darksaber rules Mandalore and you’re wielding it like it’s a fucking burden.”

“It is.”

He pushed past you and yanked open the door, pushing a body out of the way as the waitress muttered a shaky thank you before she took off into the crowd of people. No doubt with the intention of never coming back. You could hardly blame her; the mess alone would be a hassle for anyone to clean up.

Metal scraped along your arm as you crouched, Tal beeping sporadically over your shoulder, scanning the area for anymore signs of life. Din reached for your arm and you went without hesitation—the unmistakable flutter of want surging to life in your chest. He held the Darksaber and treated it like a curse someone bestowed upon him that would bring his worst nightmares to life. And you’d never been more happy to traipse after him in your life, limping with his hand wrapped around your wrist and helmet tipped slightly in your direction.

The city streets were dead once you reached The Razor Crest, Din opening it with a press of a button, and you smiled at the sound of the creaking door and ramp going down. As if no time had passed since you last saw one another—just another hunt before it was back to Nevarro.

You wanted to pretend for just a bit longer, exist in the bubble of safety he helped you create in the cantina. But as you walked up the ramp and entered the hull of the ship, you caught the sight of a silver pram set in the corner beside some boxes. A blanket spilled out of the top, a silver ball set in the center of emptiness. And the illusion crumpled to the ground in shards you never knew could exist.

“The kid’s not here,” Din said softly from behind you, his stomach twisting in knots at the glimmer of desolation on your face. This is what he must have looked like beneath the helmet the night he returned alone.

You turned, swallowing thick as your eyes burned. “What happened to him?”

“He’s with his own kind now. A Jedi.”

Realization dawned sharp like a knife, burying itself to the hilt in your chest. “When you said you’d met the people who put an end to the Empire…”

“Yes,” he replied. “The Jedi can train him in things I can’t. He can learn the ways of his people. My mission…it’s done.”

“Did you want it to be?”

There you were digging right into his mind with a scrutinizing gaze he could feel burn along his spine. You saw him beneath the armor, understood the weight of a father without his child. Only Din could hardly call himself a father. He didn’t know the kid long enough to become one, to take on that role as someone once did for him. But you could see it with one glance—one sharp tug at the locked door of his heart and it all came spilling out.

He’d been searching for this. The companionship you offered. The promise of a life to be shared, a journey to take together.

The words didn’t need to be said aloud for him to hear it, but they rang in his head louder than a bell as you settled onto a box and he got the ship ready for hyperspace. He rejoined you quickly, the bacta tin back in his palm and your leg spread over his knees. Silence curving along each star and planet you passed and he welcomed it with a faint grin on his lips.

You’d have made a wonderful father.

Your unsaid words became a comforting loop in his mind when he settled beside you, dragging a blanket up and over your body as you slept without pain for the first time in years. Hope burned right to the tips of his fingers, finally settling deep in his heart as the glow of hyperspace streamed down from the cockpit.

In fact, you liked knowing eventually he'd stagger up the front steps dripping in blood and wearing a smile. You began to look forward to the nights he stayed over. Fucking you into the bed (or the other way around) before settling into his routine. Breakfast—one egg over easy never two and coffee black—a work out (running the neighborhood like a fucking perimeter), concluding with him pressing a quick chaste kiss to your lips before you had to get to work.

Mundane. Despite the fact that you spent three hours the night before patching up his side with gauze you kept stored in the kitchen cabinets instead of snacks.

Entirely normal. If one were to overlook the knives neatly set on every table, and the guns strapped beneath surfaces you no longer bothered to check. One swipe of your hand would eventually lead you to the handle of some weapon he left behind. A way to keep you alive.

A relationship you could depend on. Other than the odd body dropped on your living room carpet here and there.

It was—by any other definition—perfect.

The taste of gunpowder lodged itself under your tongue. Thick and biting with the fanged teeth of a demon you’d met before. Mutual acquaintances in the light of day, mortal enemies in the glow of night. You could swish it around your mouth most nights and taste the sour tang of copper spill between molars grit so tight you swore one day they’d crack.

Retribution for the damage you caused. The harm done and lives lost were merely one edge of a sword you balanced, wavering in your steps until you found somewhere new to run or death eventually caught up.

You were accustomed to the ache in your chest that never settled right. Pangs of misery—impractical emotions that plundered into you like rocks in a landslide.

He didn’t taste like gunpowder, or the names of people you couldn’t forget. He barely had a scent that clung to his skin, void of anything to discern him from the others. Humans who owned a favorite perfume, people who clung to a body wash or soap that reminded them of home or a lover they once lost. He smelled clean and practically sterile, pristine in every act and flick of his wrist.

At least you didn’t have to lie to yourself about why you liked him. Why his touch didn’t deter you or make you sick to your stomach. You were filled with too much. Over saturated by names and voices and how they screamed when you were told to make it hurt. They altered the inner workings of a mind gone mad years ago; he settled the nightmare with insignificant words and phrases he thought you wanted to hear.

“I’ll make it…better. It’s difficult…I know.”

The frigid air of New York’s night bit at your face pressed snug into the metal of a sniper rifle set precariously on the edge of a building fifteen stories up. You could jump if you wanted. End the madness with a grin on your face and wings on your back. But the thought of letting death win the tango you began years prior twisted your gut in a way that left you shifting back on your haunches—ready to sprint at a moments notice.

“Eros,” a voice crackled through the piece clipped to your ear, dry and unwelcome. “You in position?”

“Where else would I be?” you muttered, sinking teeth into flesh until the inside of your cheek sprouted fresh blood.

“Piss off with the humor yeah?”

“Keeps me awake through your talking.” You shifted your gaze to peer through the scope. “In position and ready.”

A grunt of distaste filtered through the coms that you recognized as fondness. Even if he’d never admit it to your face. The mask you wore sat snug along the bottom half of your face, black and littered with a few rips on the edge from being yanked one too many times by hands that weren’t your own. You could taste the coffee you downed hours ago on your breath that caught in the fabric. Your nose wrinkled at the scent, noting that you should have picked up a pack of gum before heading out here.

The pinch in your leg from an injury years back sprouted with vengeance at the crouched position you took. A swift kick from a man far more powerful to get you off him and drag you down the stairs by your ankle. You set a knife in between his ribs with a harsh twist and left with the ache of him between your thighs. Back when you were younger and the idea of hurting a few more people was something you could brush off.

Soft muted yellow flicked on in the apartment a story down from you in the opposing building. Home at last after a long days work. Or at least that’s what you assumed. The man looked tired in your scope behind red glasses and an undone tie, a blonde woman traipsing in behind him with files beneath her arm and a frown scrawled on her lips. To you they resembled a couple in the midst of an argument. To anyone else they may have seemed content. Following a daily routine you weren’t privy to.

“Ready when I say,” the voice came through louder this time.

Your gut wrenched in a painful flip, the itch from past missions gone awry pricked beneath your cold fingertips wrapped in black tape. “This isn’t right,” you responded quick, shifting on your boot until gravel scraped along the ground.

A withered sigh pierced your ear. “Just get it done and you’ll get your payment.”

Easy enough. A job done a hundred times over until pulling the trigger felt like second nature. But you couldn’t ignore the stirring your chest, sprouting harsh in every limb of your body that screamed one word: run. The safety clicked back, your breath escaping in a push you felt at the base of your stomach. You counted down the seconds until the man entered the frame of the apartment’s window.

And stared you right in the face.

Jolting back your neck cracked as you blinked away the lick of fear that ran along your spine. You were imagining things. Finding a way out of a job you already agreed upon. You set your cheek back in its spot, peered with one eye through the scope, and caught his lips curling into a wry grin with a tilt of his head. Entirely aware of you sitting one story up on a roof bathed in shadows.

“Piercer I thought you said this guy was blind.” Sweat clung to the back of your neck, your breath hot in your mask.

“He is. Some big shot lawyer. Uses a cane.”

“Yeah, I see a cane.”

“That’s him alright.” The man took a step forward. Taunting you, the grin pronounced as he spoke to the woman behind him. “Name’s Matthew Murdock.”

“You sure-”

Piercer sighed—your cue to shut the fuck up. “I don’t ask questions about what comes through Eros. You shouldn’t either. Now. Pull the fucking trigger.”

The count began again in the back of your mind. Four. Three. Two.

One-

Your finger began to press down, pulling back to your face, but metal collided with your gun and the bullet fired to the left. It flashed across your face, centimeters from your nose and you fell back with a grunt—the knife now embedded into the side of your pack stowed beside you. Black and gleaming with hints of silver was a blade you’d seen before. Scattered on tables and across the nightstand of the man you swore you’d never come back to—even if far too much happened for you to let go.

“Shit!” you yelled, rolling back to your feet as a figure emerged from the stairwell behind you, the door propped open when you arrived.

“What’s wrong?” Piercer shouted. “Did you get him?”

“I’ve been made.”

A beat. Then two. Until the line went dead and the message became clear. You were on your own.

The team couldn’t be apart of you being compromised—that was the deal at the end of the day. It was only now as you dodged another knife and grabbed for your gun snug at your thigh did you realize what a shit deal it was.

He wore a dark navy suit and a mask carved with a mark at the top of his forehead signifying exactly who he was: Bullseye. The scrape of his boots on the roof should have terrified you. But the thrill of knowing his voice, how his tongue felt on yours tugged your lips into a grin that felt wrong. The enemy of your enemy was apparently now his ally, or at least that’s what you assumed as you ducked another blade.

“Your off your game tonight,” you spit, landing on your back and pulling the trigger as he went left.

The toe of your boot pushed off the ground as you took off towards the other side of the building. The team would come and clean up your mess later when the time was right and you were long gone. When you had finally outrun Bullseye and landed somewhere safe. Dodging to the right you rolled into a crouch behind a set of boxes, your chest heaving with the brunt of adrenaline pulsing through your veins.

His knives wouldn’t be what killed you, it was the silence that came with it. How he stalked along the roof and waited you out like a feral animal who just needed a bit of food to calm down. Maybe that’s what he thought you were. A stray he could pick off with the ease of simply flicking his wrist a certain way.

You held your breath, shut your eyes, and listened for the thud of his boots.

One.

Two.

Three-

You twisted on your heels and pulled the trigger as he came around to your side, watching the bullet scrape his arm and land somewhere in the brick. He growled low, eyes narrowed at your figure in the darkness. Any other night you would have been gone by now the second your gut signaled defeat. Tonight you felt the thickness in the air at the sight of him approaching, the spark pleading with you for the strike of a match. You primed your gun, aimed for his heart, and pulled the trigger.

Only for his knife to smack the gun out of your hands. Another useless shot buried somewhere less important. His hand engulfed your ankle when you kicked for his knee, slamming you to your back hard until you felt a crack in your spine and your vision spotted black.

You swung for his head, ramming your fist into his chin as he snarled out a curse, gripping your wrist and pinning it to his chest. His knee caved into your stomach, effectively punching whatever breath you had out of your body. And you wrenched in a gasp, fingers clasping onto the collar of his suit. The matchstick dragged and what little remained last time roared back to life, flooding your veins with that burn you likened to hellfire.

“Can’t let you hit your mark tonight, Cupid,” he grumbled beneath his mask, face inches from your own as you gathered what little strength remained.

“Fuck-” You panted, knee ramming up into his groin. He staggered back with a spit of the only name he knew you by. “You.”

Blood trickled down your nose and dripped into your teeth until the fangs you bared were stained a dark wash of red. He panted in breath after breath, suit ripped at his shoulder and blood staining dark blue, but he didn’t reach for a knife or object closest to him. Anticipation tore at your nerves, eyes tracking how he planted his feet, where his gaze was fixed—at the mask blocking your mouth, how your lips curved around each word.

“Don’t tell me your protecting strangers now,” you huffed, getting to your feet with a wince.

His fingers twitched, the cold hilt of his knife brushing along gloved hands. “It’s really none of your business.”

“You fucking with my mark is my business.”

“Your mark,” he said with a smile you could hear. “Change of plans Cupid.”

“Bullshit,” you sneered, reaching for the gun strapped to your lower back. The weight was familiar, slipping into your grip with ease as you listened to the bullet slide into the chamber, the barrel pointed at his face now creased around the eyes.

Smiling at your misery. Grinning while you drowned in self loathing, as if he didn’t partake in the same practice.

He shouldn’t be out here—he wasn’t supposed to find you so easily. Most nights you came to him, seeking the heat of a hard planed body that clung to yours until daybreak. He wouldn’t have peeled you out of the shadows unless absolutely necessary, the nature of the job worming its way into your psyche. Adamant to leave nothing behind but forgotten blood and bone.

Bullseye only hunted when given a reason. This you came to learn the hard way in your first collision with the man who would become an anchor ensnared in your ribs. The latch that kept you from tripping headfirst into a permanent decision.

“Shit,” you exhaled. “Who called the order?”

The creases deepened. “You catch on quick.”

A step closer until your gun brushed his chin, eyes blazing in a rage he felt stir his insides. “Cut the fucking bullshit. Who?”

“Seems you pissed off the wrong woman, Cupid. Valentina’s not happy.”

You expected this outcome eventually. To wind up on on the ugly side of Valentina De Fonatine—most did in this city at one point in their lives. The control she wielded echoed with transactions that came with the benefit of survival, certainly not your area of preferred employment. Which is why you chose a different path. Mercenary work, assassinations when needed and torture if necessary; a clean exit with a payment at the end. Tied in a pretty little knot you could twirl between your fingers.

Valentina detached you from the shards of humanity that remained in the depths of the chasm where a soul was expunged years ago, and came away with one conclusion. You were expendable.

Everyone was a means to an end.

Bullseye included.

“An errand boy,” you mused, catching how the knife slid out of his belt. “Thought you were more than that.”

“Didn’t take it for her.”

You fell back and tumbled to the left, pulling the trigger and heard bullet tear through flesh. Taking a chunk of him with it as blood splattered onto brick and left a nice little souvenir to another excursion gone awry. A knife sunk into your thigh with a flick of his wrist and a shout that clawed up his chest, your own scream muffled by the way you bit down on your lip hard enough to rip flesh. Bullseye left a fucking mark. Every fucking time.

Another one ripped at the edge of your ear, and you scrambled to your feet before he could launch another. He was going easy on you. Each shift in his body was slower than usual, giving you time to react before what he launched at you ever had time to hit its mark.

He didn’t want to kill you. You didn’t want to kill him.

What a conundrum you found yourselves in—partaking a lost game of cat and mouse. Neither of you players, only pieces meant to be moved to and fro.

You had a better chance of hand to hand combat with him than throwing distance, so you chose stupidity over death. Running at him you slammed a knee into his side, a fist ramming into his throat. He blocked and his fist connected to your side with a sickening crack that flared up your chest. A roar surged up your throat as your elbow found the curve of his nose and he staggered back choking on blood as it soaked into his mask.

Tearing it off, he stomped towards you with a snarl primed on his lips now dripping crimson. Ducking and swinging where you could kept you alive long enough to weaken his defenses. You pummeled at his face, foot slamming down into his leg, but where you thrived on adrenaline he found his footing in rage. A hand large and calloused wrapped tight around your throat and he drove you back into the edge of the roof, ramming you into hard stone and cutting off what air you had left.

“You’re always so fucking difficult,” he ground out a mixture of spit and blood hitting your cheek. “You think I want this? I’m in between a rock and a hard place sweetheart but that’s the game isn’t it.”

Clawing at his wrist, your fingernails punctured his skin but he barely flinched at the pain. “D-Dex,” you rasped.

“Yeah I know.”

Using his leverage on your throat he raised your head and smashed you down, the back of your skull cracking open as you clawed your fingers into the scar along his cheek. Fighting the darkness with breaths that never reached your lungs and a fear that licked at the base of your spine. Death’s grin was cruel, teeming with the mirth you could taste on the back of your tongue.

Funny…you never noticed how much it looked like Benjamin Poindexter until this moment.

Light glared behind your shut eyelids, flashing back and forth and with a huff you wrenched them open to see a lamp swinging above you. The shadows of the room illuminated in what parts the glow could reach. You coughed, flinching at what felt like shards of glass puncturing your lungs, your vision swimming in and out for a minute or two. You weren’t dead. That much you could tell by the thrumming of your heart in your throat, the stiffness in your fingers and crunch of your spine when you moved.

A door creaked loud enough to fill the space and slammed with the same rough push. Boots shuffled along the ground, a glass set on the small makeshift nightstand that was really two cinder blocks and a piece of wood. You recognized the shit hole of a safe house from one too many times meeting him here in the dead of night. Ironic of him to kill you here. Although a part of you supposed it was rather poetic in the nature of things.

“You’re awake,” he said plainly, no emotion behind his words though you’d come to discern what flashed behind his otherwise vacant stare. “Figured I killed you out there.”

“Why didn’t you?” Your voice was gone. Rendered to a whisper that grated along your throat with each word you dared to form.

He shrugged and leaned back in the chair he propped by the bed—a man in the shape of a guard dog, not a friend. “Fuck Valentina De Fontaine.”

“She’ll have you killed for that.”

“Clearly,” he replied with a wry smile. “Just look at you.”

Your glare went ignored in favor of him shoving the glass of water into your hands. “Feeling guilty Dex?”

“You sound like shit.”

A kindness in his own words mimicked a stab from anyone else, but you’d grown to favor it. The water was cool against your throat, pooling in your empty stomach. You weren’t sure how many hours passed since he knocked you clean out, but your skin was coated in blood and bandages were matted down against your skull that remained in tact. The same couldn’t be said for your leg. Wrapped tight and bound with a clean knot—clearly done by a someone who knew what it took to keep the wound from growing infected.

“You didn’t kill me.” Your fingers toyed with the knot on your thigh, voice stuck in a low rasp.

Bullseye was an enigma. He killed when he felt it was necessary, but that meant his terms more often than not differed from others. However, Benjamin Poindexter allowed you to read him like a fucking book. You wondered if that was a trait he grew up with or something that developed over time. Once the mask was stripped from his skull and the eyes that peered out at the world was accompanied with expressions.

You wondered if he reserved this only for you.

“Valentina said alive or dead.”

“So you’re still planning to bring me in.”

“The option is tempting.”

Laughing felt wrong at a time like this—sitting precariously on a shitty excuse of a bed and speaking to the man who held your life between his palms as if this were any other Monday. “I haven’t seen you in awhile. I was wondering how you’ve been.”

Dex shifted, legs falling wide and arms crossing with a frown. “Been busy. I didn’t have time to exactly…call.”

“Since when have you ever called me?” Another sip of water soothed your cotton mouth. “We aren’t exactly lovers Dex. We fuck, I leave, we go on like nothing happened.”

The grimace along his lips rocketed through your stomach, pesky little emotions creeping into the frayed edges of your mind. He wasn’t a fan of them—that much he made clear. Uncomfortable silences often filled the expanse between you whenever you allowed them to bubble to the surface, but tonight was a different shade of blue. You could see it play along his eyes, hues clashing into one another until nothing but navy smothered you alive.

“We…talk,” he hesitated, boots shifting loudly in the silence of this concrete room.

You set the glass on the wood and ignored the fire working its way up your leg. “We’re usually too preoccupied to talk.”

“The first night we weren’t.”

Oh.

That fateful night years ago where the uneven scar on your body echoed reminders you’d rather forget. Trapped in an abandoned building with him after you attempted to take him out of the game. Your first ever official target: Bullseye. What a fucking joke that was. Piercer handed you a death certificate carved in between the letters of the name Benjamin Poindexter and you’d been running ever since.

Conversation flowed easy between two killers when there was nothing left to do but bleed out on old wood and mud. He spoke as if he hadn’t been able to in a long time, mouth moving beneath a mask as words flooded the empty space that rapidly became sacred. You were the confessional booth and he was there to partake in the service. That night still rang like a bell in the back of your mind, his words playing in a loop that you wanted to let go of, but couldn’t help dissect the longer you heard them.

“Someone recently granted me mercy,” he’d said attempting to stop the bleeding of you taking one of his knives and ramming it into his calf. “Don’t know if I should even fucking call it that.”

He did something good. Helped someone in need.

Ironic that he should meet you at the end of that path—the newbie assassin sent by a titan to end his battle permanently.

It was only after you dug your way out of the rubble and clawed back to freedom did you find yourself here days later. The only time he ever sought you out. Stalking you in the middle of the night as you attempted to get your life back on track.

“So talk,” you said. The sincerity in your words, how you leaned back into the wall behind you, lips sewn tight gave him a chance to set his foot on otherwise shaky ground and begin.

“How do you do it?” The tip of your head was all he needed. “Feel…guilt…for what you’ve done. The people you’ve killed.”

Grief you stuffed in the back of your chest sunk its teeth into your pattering heart. “I think I feel too much of it sometimes. It’s a problem in this job. To feel remorse after what’s been done to them—what I did to them.”

Could he see the blood on your hands? How another artery burst open with the pressure and spilled what little you had left. Was that why he asked? Because if anyone could tell him what guilt felt like it was the person who sobbed into his neck unintentionally. You didn’t want to at the time—in fact you tasted the revulsion on your tongue for falling apart so easily the moment he got you through the first wave, ramming you right into the second.

“I tried that once. To be good and find a North Star to guide me.”

“You don’t have one anymore?”

He shrugged, fingers digging into his wrist until the bone popped. “It’s easier without one. Feels better when I don’t have to pretend to fucking care or let people know it’s hard or I’m sorry.”

The press of his mouth to your ear each time you crawled into this shitty forsaken room whispering that very same phrase pulled at your mind. You knew he never meant what he said. Merely words to spout as he came inside you with a harsh grunt and a grin that flashed white, teeming with depravity. But the relief dispelled what frustration tangled inside at finally knowing it.

The apologies felt dry—unforgiving—on his tongue. You never wanted him to acknowledge it, blocking out those words each time he stuffed a hand down your pants and latched a mouth to your chest. You sought reprieve from what Piercer liked to call “casualties of battle” and all Dex managed to do was remind you of emotions that eluded him from the beginning.

You were teeming with them. Fighting the urge to snap in half from the push and pull of waves that did everything to drown you.

“Don’t apologize,” you uttered inching off the bed with injuries and bruises you could feel warm your skin. “I fucking hate when you apologize.”

His lips curled and the smile painted itself across his face, distorting the scar on his cheek. The eyes you refused to catch ensnared you with ease, your body sliding into his lap as he shuffled to give you more space. The heavy thrum in your chest wouldn’t be mirrored in his. Attraction burning with the flicker of possibility in your mind became a need for release, a way to quench the stirring in his gut, in his.

“Then what do you want huh?” A hand clutched your bandaged thigh until pressure split into searing pain and a cry worked its way out of your throat. “Want me to be mean? You want me to tell you I’d feel nothing if I killed you tonight?”

The curl of his mouth etched deep into his cheeks and you imagined what it would be like to see your flesh caught between the canines. You wanted to say yes. Beg for his ruthless nature until your throat went raw and your voice disappeared. He’d enjoy it too—watching you writhe beneath his palms, blind with pain and pleasure as they clashed beneath the surface of your skin.

“I need-” You gasped when his fingers dug higher into your thigh, pinching the crease of your hip.

A hand gripped your chin, wrenching your face down to his level as the other tugged at the button of your pants. “I know,” he muttered, gaze flicking between your parted mouth and the wet shine in your eyes.

To forget.

An idea that felt ridiculous as it sounded, but you needed it all the same. You longed to forget the blood on your hands, the stain of how that rust looked between the lines of your palms, the nickname etched on the inside of every shot you fired and person you dropped. Eros could remain in between the world of life and death. Toeing the line with every order you fulfilled.

You wanted to exist here in this shitty room stretched on his lap as he worked his hand down your pants. A sigh of bliss rushed past your lips when his fingers delved between cotton and found the patch of hair already soaked through. He groaned, nose pressing hard against yours; the heat of your cunt dripping over his hand was always a welcome feeling and Dex couldn’t think of why he let it go on so long between each time you found one another.

“She’s leakin’,” he drawled, toying with your clit until your thigh trembled and pain laced up your muscles. Blood sprouted to the surface of the bandage but that only made the saliva in your mouth grow thick. “I can tell she missed me.”

“Fuck you Poindexter.”

A laugh rumbled from his chest, raspy and dripping with contempt. “That’s right.” His grip clamped down on your hips, ripping his touch from where you’d started to grind on his fingers, before he stood with a harsh grunt. “You want me to be mean.”

You stumbled back and nearly felt your leg go out from beneath you, but he was already moving quicker than you anticipated. With a harsh shove he had you on your back—the yank of your hip and grasp on your leg forced you onto your stomach. Until you had no choice but face the cement wall across from you. The breath was punched from your lungs, fingers scrambling along the sheets for something to drag you away from him, but he’d gotten hold of your pants and wrenched them down with a low whistle.

“That’s all you needed huh?”

You dug your face into the mattress, shame burning a path through your gut until you were certain he could see it pouring out of you. Trickling with a sheen of greed that you relished for the time you had it. Blood smeared wherever he moved you—the open wounds pulled taut along your skin with each swift move of your limbs. You’d need to stitch them together again in the afterglow, but that didn’t seem to concern Dex this far.

Kicking your feet apart with his boots to keep you from moving he paused for a brief moment—giving you an out. The choice to set him into a headlock or snap his arm clean down the middle if this wasn’t what you really wanted. It barely lasted a minute, sixty seconds of Dex’s hand on your bare ass and heavy breaths filling the space until there was nothing but you and him waiting each other out.

Both of you had enough blood on your hands to stretch into whatever end awaited for you.

But neither of you would take this. You refused to steal it, to puncture the small bubble of false warmth for quick pleasure. So you held your breath, curled your fingers into tight fists, and waited for his hand to slide down between your spread thighs.

You could feel the rush of slick practically staining the bed—any other night you’d squirm in uncomfortable positions, any other person and you’d be gone the second you opened your eyes. A large palm slipped down and he pushed two fingers into your fluttering hole with a breath you could only constitute as a laugh. It burned to be stretched out so quickly, but you were so fucking wet it didn’t matter to either of you how he did it. You just needed him to touch you.

“Oh f-fuck-” Your words were a garble in the base of your throat, face buried in the fabric as he set a third finger into you until it pinched with each thrust.

“She’s loud tonight,” he said, a grin set wide on his lips. You didn’t need to see him to know how much joy he got from the wet squelch of him pumping into you. “Don’t even need to strap you down tonight. You’re finally being good.”

A jolt ran up your spine, ass pushing up into the air, and you whined long and low. “You could.” Gasping when he curled his fingers rubbing at the patch along your walls that made your legs go numb you felt his mouth drop to the back of your thigh.

“Yeah?” he goaded you, teeth latching onto your ass. “I got a belt.”

He was fucking with you. There was no patience in his veins for any type of play tonight, but the words still echoed with the false saccharine he used when dragging you through the biting pleasure that left you winded. A burn seared at your middle, ripping at your veins the higher he built you. His thumb dug into your clit, blunt nail scraping the sensitive bud and you cried out with tears down your cheeks.

The sting began to unravel your inside, pulling free the knot buried in the base of your chest—memories of nights spent on rooftops dissipating to the far reaches of a hazy mind.

The bliss was right there. You could brush it with your fingers, nearly set your teeth into its dripping essence.

And then it was gone.

“No!” you sobbed, head jerking up and thigh clamping tight when he yanked his hand free from your pulsing cunt.

Dex laughed. A low rasped chuckle you felt vibrate against your skin where he sucked at the skin of your waist. You wanted to wrap your fingers around his neck and press—itched to set one of his knives into his thigh and see how he liked the pain. He wouldn’t have cared if you tackled him to get your revenge; he’d have eaten up your desperation with a spoon set between his teeth.

“Thought you wanted me to be fucking mean,” he retorted, biting the skin of your hip until the indent would be found tomorrow where you ran your fingers along the skin.

“I didn’t want you to apologize.”

“Good. I wasn’t going to.”

“Fuck you,” you sneered, spit trailing down your chin as rage bled into the warmth simmering in your stomach. “You’re a fucking asshole.”

“And you’re a killer.” The anger died. Remorse winded up your throat and suddenly the words were nowhere to be found, no retort you could push that would carve into him the way he did you. “I guess so am I.” You glanced over your shoulder, his cheeky smile tangling his grip around your heart strings. “Besides, I like seeing you cry sweetheart.”

Tears streaked down your cheeks, a consequence of emotions you were never able to control as a child. “I’ll shoot you again.”

He shoved your head down, the clink of his belt and whisper of a zipper clenched your insides as his mouth pressed to the shell of your ear—hot and wet, his tongue licking a line along your jaw. “Something to look forward to.”

Bunching up your top, he all but ripped it off your body, ignoring how you flinched. His blood coated your skin where his wound was still open—you enjoyed the air tinged copper on your tongue as he covered your body with his. The words bubbled up your throat, a quick snap or curse to one up his attitude, but the tap of his cock against your clit had you sagging into the bed. A guttural moan killed what response you came up with in favor of canting your hips back into his lap.

There was no warning, no build up for Dex, because you asked him to be mean. Dig into the ruthless nature of two assassins finding their footing in a dance you’d been in before. Such familiar ground for two people who had nothing to cling to but dead bodies and fractured pasts.

He pushed in with one thrust and you bit down on your forearm to muffle the scream that erupted from your lungs. Your legs trembled, toes scraping the floor. Pain collapsed into pleasure and your mind went blank in a echoing hum of white noise as he pulled out only to thrust back in with a grunt you could barely hear above the rush of blood in your ears.

The itch buried deep beneath skin you couldn’t peel back finally abated and for the first time since you last saw him you could breathe.

“Fuck,” he bit out. “Strangling me.”

“S-Sorry-” you babbled, eyes rolling back when he tipped your hips into a new angle.

The apology tasted wrong on your tongue—old habits you couldn’t kick—but he took it in stride. Teeth set into your shoulder and he silenced you with a punishing thrust you felt set fire to your body. Spit trailed across your cheek, sounds you didn’t recognize clawing up your throat. He pounded into you with moans stuck behind grit teeth and a face pressed into your back.

Your eyes fluttered closed when he began to grind down into you, hand set on your shoulder to push you back along his cock. The wet echo of skin slapping against skin and how you coated him in slick made your cheeks burn, heat pooling deep in your stomach. What he robbed from you earlier began to grow rapidly until you were gasping for breath.

“Dex-”

He groaned, fingers sliding up and around your clamped hand, lacing them together and curling them into a fist. “I can feel it baby.”

“Fuck—I’m gonna-”

Pain splintered in your thigh where his hand dug between your thighs. You swallowed it down, losing yourself in how he circled your clit with rough calloused fingers. You pressed back into him and his stunted thrusts as he chased a release for his own pleasure. It etched into you now. The feelings you overlooked in favor of his cock fucking into you—the hopeless nature of caring for a man who just might be the cause of your demise one day.

You let it unravel in your chest, felt how it wrapped tight around an already constricted heart. Tears spilled down your cheeks as you sobbed, his mouth hot on your neck and cock twitching in your cunt.

“Need you to come,” he muttered. Less so in your direction and instead at your cunt that clamped down hard, dragging him in.

Squeezing his fingers your mouth dropped and you tumbled into it. He collapsed into your spine with a high pitched whine, his cock giving one last thrust before he followed you into the numbing bliss. Warmth spurted into you, dripping in between your thighs. Any other night you would have immediately pulled away. But the beat of his heart was pressed snug to your back and his breath felt soothing on your neck.

Eventually the cool air began to dry the stickiness along your skin and it grew to be too much. “I gotta fix the fucking bandage.”

He grunted, lips dragging along your shoulder as chills ran down your arms. “I’ll do it.”

“One orgasm and suddenly you’re nice,” you grinned.

Mouthing at your neck he pushed his hips up into you, pulling free a soft cry. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

Difficult. Trying. I’m sorry.

They were blatant in the silence, written along the walls in handwriting you’d know as his. The soft words of a man who didn’t understand the meaning. Things he’d never say. He stabbed you, he caused the pain, so he’d fix it where he could. Even if that wasn’t his nature. Tending to things belonged to a version of himself that only existed in shards somehow still embedded in worn down muscle tissue.

“What’s next after this?” he asked, wiping between your legs so you could move.

You shrugged, twisting to splay your thigh on the bed, blood dripping from the bandage. “Whatever Piercer sends through.”

“And then?” Small talk felt odd when it came to him but you didn’t question it.

“And then I get the job done.”

He nodded, stripping your leg and packing it with the efficiency of a former soldier. Simply going through the motions, never quite feeling the twinge of guilt. You liked it. The ease of being in his presence. You swallowed the emotions and shut the door of vulnerability behind you, awaiting the day he’d come knocking, requesting it be opened again.

“Well-” He tied the bandage off, patting your thigh with that same grin you saw in your dreams. “I guess I’ll see you then…Eros.”

As it was always meant to be.

The taste of Coruscant lingered on the back of your tongue like an unwanted memory. The thick smog of thousands of ships, speeders, and forgotten drains that remained clogged with toxic fumes clung to your skin. Forming a permanent layer of grime along your clothes until you couldn’t forget the odor of the unground. You likened it to the pinched nerve on your spine from one too many sparring lessons, your only weapon at the time being what you could find and the sheer will to survive.

Perhaps it was the temerity pumping through your arteries that gave you the ability to walk these streets, hood drawn and thigh strapped so tight you could feel the pulse of your heart along the curve of your knee. The blaster you managed to salvage from the wreckage of your former life became a vein that pumped blood through an unrelenting heart.

Although even that was due to a past built on the bones of those who came before.

Your teeth had been bared ever since you could remember, your tongue bathed in blood and canines chipped down to the gums. But nothing managed to strip your presence in the galaxy yet. Though many had certainly tried.

Down below in the muck of Coruscant you allowed yourself to forget the sky. You melted into the shadows of buildings constructed one on top of the other, disregarded amidst those who begged for credits of any kind and those who dug for spice—desperation bleeding off their bodies as they battled a war you’d been privy too far too many times. You were familiar with this crowd, practically one of them as you traipsed through puddles and beneath neon signs that buzzed loud enough to ring in your ears.

The faint beep against your shoulder kept you grounded, feet rooted into cracked cement and the wash of other’s dreams that spilled over from the very top. There you could see everything. Glimmering stars battling enough light pollution to burn the atmosphere and air that settled in the base of an already aching chest. But here in the depth of the planet that housed far too many you were nothing.

“We’ll be fine,” you muttered, finger tapping the head of rusted metal and a mechanical whine you felt vibrate against your back. “Just gotta find something valuable to sell.”

He beeped again, worry etched into every mechanism, and if you glanced over your shoulder where he clung to worn leather and ripped fabric you’d see the flickering glow of a little pale blue eye seeking yours. The other was crushed, practically dismembered alongside his left antenna that had gone missing years prior, but he was a survivor.

A perfect match to your stripped soul left barren and bleeding with gashes you could hardly remember obtaining.

“Be on the lookout yeah? I want to eat real food tonight. None of that Bantha piss from yesterday.” The two day old meat auctioned off as surplus became acid in your stomach the moment you swallowed it. Even now it twisted your insides.

A chirp and the grind of old gears set him into motion with a twitch of his still working antenna. The glow of his scanner along buildings glared in your peripheral as you tucked into the black fabric of your cloak—eyes cast into the puddle beneath you. One squint would clear your reflection, an image you’d grown used to seeing as time passed. But eventually…you stopped looking.

That part of you faded into obscurity the moment you felt the heavy weight of metal crash against stone. An irretrievable memory you stashed in the back of an already broken mind.

“Got something?” you pressed, allowing your gaze to drift between the rush of people on the street.

Any other night you’d have allowed the presence of someone like him to pass. Not a target you were intent on troubling—the willingness to put up a fight was forged in his gait. Leather clad hand hovering just above what you assumed to be a blaster strapped to his hip, but the glare of neon against pure beskar wound tight around your stiff bones.

Familiar and all too tempting.

Mandalorian’s weren’t inconspicuous on Coruscant, but rather a beacon of an old world left to die by the hands of a mangled Empire that fled to the outskirts of the galaxy. Along with the rest of those who served under its helm. You’d come across one or two that bent the knee resentfully—a way to keep food in their mouths and their backs safe from those that desired a trophy. But this man, this figurehead of austere beliefs passed down through generations, echoed with the resounding tune of a song you left forgotten.

You tracked his steps as he wound through the crowd, the low beep in your ear keeping you five paces back until he entered a path lit only by the glow of cantinas and saloons. It began in your chest. The string tied in knots around your ribs went taut—the intimate hum of a life before yours raging loud and unrelenting. A legacy that would continue on long after you and him were gone. The vibration nearly struck you blind when he stopped, his helmet tilted to the side, senses fixed on the outpouring of laughter from inside a bar you could smell like burnt oil.

The blaster, the stance. You’d seen this man before, witnessed as he pulled the very same weapon from his holster a thousand times over.

Last seen on a planet that narrowly avoided capturing your death in its hands. Your heart hammered a dull beat in your chest, ears deaf to the insistent beeping over your shoulder, as you got too close to escape. A group of three—clearly drunk and blind with joy—collided into him, forcing him a few steps back. You swept past, hand sliding against his belt rapidly until something unlatched with a subtle click you felt against the tip of your fingers.

The weapon’s weight dropped in your hand like a stone, and you glanced at it momentarily before stuffing it beneath your cloak and pushing through the crowd. Made of beskar. At least. Which would buy you a meal or three and some shitty version of alcohol to go with it; enough to let you forget you saw him. To swallow down the thick burden of what you once knew.

A local trader would bargain easily for something of this magnitude and for a brief moment you could taste the freedom on the tip of your tongue. The sweet melancholy of a life not on the run. You grinned, relief flooding veins as your heart raced with enough adrenaline to keep you stable and upright despite the fatigue of days traveling.

The crowds dispersed. Your boots splashed loud into the back of an alleyway leading nowhere and you should have heard the beeping over your shoulder. You should have paid attention.

Pain split down your leg, coursing down to the base of your spine as you stumbled forward—a hoarse shout tearing free. Your knee hit the ground with a crack nearly shattering bone if it weren’t for how you threw yourself to the left to prevent any injuries. A shard of metal—barely an inch long—embedded itself into the open flesh, chafing against the fabric of your pants. Clambering for your thigh your fingers came back wet and hot and stained in blood as the echo of his heavy steps clashed against the vibrating tempo of the nearby cantina.

“Fuck,” you spit, rolling to your other knee and forcing yourself upright, the burn now splitting up your side.

“Hand it over.” His voice was an unforgiving punch directly into the base of your chest, the modulated timbre of familiarity almost brought the sting of tears to your already wet eyes.

How easy it could have been to apologize and go about your day. Accomplished with the breeze of surface air you’d never get to feel.

Instead you smiled. “I found it. Honest.” Extending your arm you felt the grip of metal release and hit the ground with a whirring beep as you clambered to a stance that would hold your weight.

“I felt it leave my side.”

You shrugged, favoring your weight on the only leg you had left. “I tried. Apparently not well enough.”

His hand twitched at his side, helmet tilting to the right as if sizing you up. One shot with a bolt from his blaster would bring any other being down with ease, but you’d been shot before—the resilience of a fighter still sewn into your blood and bone. You wouldn’t drop till you were dead, until he ripped the life right out from your chest with his gloved hand.

But that wasn’t his way.

It never had been.

You charged with a guttural shout, watching him dip to the side giving you space to swing your elbow into his neck. A modulated choke ripped from his throat, feet staggering back into the wall. A stray pipe lay discarded beneath a pile of trash and you swept it up with the toe of your boot before he could raise his blaster in the direction of your face. One swing had it colliding with beskar—the sound ringing loud and deafening in the small alleyway.

“I can bring you in warm-” he grunted.

A laugh ruptured from your chest as you ducked beneath his arm, spinning on your heel. Still the same old saying that left a burn lingering warm in your body as memories flooded to the surface.

He yanked out the spear attached to his back, gun forgotten about, and brought it down in a quick arc towards your head. Only to be blocked by the pipe, now bent in the center.

“Solus!” you barked. The sight of his back going stiff and helmet rearing back nearly made you spill out with glee. You smacked the pipe upward, disarming him of his spear and twirling it to your side—the edge tipped at where you knew his jaw was set beneath the silver gleam of his helmet. “T’ad!”

The rasp of his voice finally broke through the thick silence like a knife. “You’re…how-”

Tipping your chin down, you tossed the spear to the ground and listened as it hit with a ear shattering clatter. He didn’t move to pick it back up. “Tug’yc (again).”

“You are not Mandalorian,” he stated plainly, as if it were the simplest answer in the world. “Who taught you those words?”

Of course he couldn’t see it. Of course you’d go forgotten about even with the people who once knew you the most.

“I thought Mandalorian’s never forget,” you pushed, wincing at the pain erupting in your thigh. “Or are you still an or’dinii (fool)…Din Djarin?”

Though you couldn’t see them beneath the dark visor, you knew his eyes were trailing down your figure. In an attempt to put the pieces back together of how you could possibly know him. The stance of your feet and strap of your blaster gave you away faster than you would have liked.

Realization dawned as his shoulders dropped and relief washed over his body. A soft choked noise emanating from the harsh modulator.

“They told me you were dead,” he whispered, hand twitching with the urge to reach out and touch your face, feel the curve of your nose and line of your jaw that he’d only imagined. He curled his fingers into a fist instead. The grim set of your eyes flecked with all that you’d gone through told him enough.

You weren’t dead.

But you wished for it all the same.

You wished that night on Nevarro, when you yanked off your helmet and felt the eyes of your clan fall on your bare skin for the first time, was how you died. Still encased in beskar, still fighting the remnants of a broken Empire until your very last breath pushed through a fucking modulator.

“Do you believe everything they tell you?” you joked, swallowing around the thick ball of dread at the base of your throat.

He shuffled closer, spear forgotten and he drank in the sight of you for the first time. The shine in your eyes as you fought against the grief he enclosed in his heart. The power that once set your shoulders into a rigid stance now bled out onto the street below you—the pain of losing it all in one night would be far too much for anyone to handle.

But there you were. Forced to survive in a galaxy that would be glad to see you dead.

The night you escaped was littered with the deaths of those you loved. Aliit. Your clan, your tribe. Unlike him you were born to parents who bestowed their traditions onto shoulders far too young and a mind not yet broken. But that didn’t make you anymore of a warrior than the man standing mere feet away you—it simply meant you were split apart years before he would ever join the ranks of Mandalorian.

He followed your movements intently and reached for his belt at the sight of your pants sporting a new dark stain courtesy of him. “You need to fix that before it’s infected.”

“Someone shot me,” you mused, lips curling into a grin he felt burn along the tissue of his stomach. “Can you believe that?”

“You stole something important to me.”

The weapon was stuffed in your vest and you wrenched it out with a groan, stumbling back into the cold wall behind you. It lay heavy in your palm. Silver and black and oddly familiar. You swore you’d seen something like this before in your childhood, years ahead of when you were set to don a helmet of your own.

Jetii’kad.

Sword of the Jedi.

You tipped it in his direction, avoiding the switch as if it might burn you at the wrong slide of your thumb. “What are you doing with a Jedi’s weapon?”

His form went rigid, fingers curling into fists and suddenly the Mandalorian before you became what you recognized the most—stone in the form of a man. “It doesn’t belong to a Jedi.”

“Did you steal it?”

“No,” he disclosed much to his chagrin.

“Find some interesting friends then? Since the last time I saw you.”

Silence unfurled down the length of the alleyway, but you allowed him to sit with it. His answers—his story—it was his own. You didn’t need to be privy to it in order to understand he remained the same man you understood. Yet something lingered beneath his armor, jutting out between the cracks of beskar and begging to be picked apart.

A tender empathy that didn’t exist in the brash young hunter who melded into the gaping holes in your chest; the man of few words and a gruff exterior now someone with a different path.

A different tale altogether.

He stepped closer, dropping a canister of bacta gel in your palm, sliding his fingers around the lightsaber before you could tuck it back beneath your cloak. “Let me help you.”

Resentment simmered in the base of your twisting stomach, but even you knew it wasn’t directed at him. You refused to look up, eyes fixed on the etched markings in Aurebesh on the tin cover. He escaped that night with more than just a life chasing bounties and barely enough credits to afford fuel in his ship. He found his purpose. Whereas you were scrounging for scraps in the underground because there was nothing left, nowhere you could go that might guarantee your safety.

“I’ve managed this long without Mandalorian’s in my life Djarin.”

“I would have come for you,” he said with ease. “I could have brought you back-”

Your gaze snapped to his, finding his eyes even through the visor—a trick that always startled him to his very core—a sharp glint reflecting in the shade he was now seeing for the first time. “You would have sent me back to those that witnessed my shame.”

Din reared back, pain splintering in the far reaches of his chest and for a moment he almost couldn’t give it a name until he knew exactly what dug into his bones and reset them anew. Regret. The same emotion that plagued him when he watched his kid leave in the arms of a Jedi. The part of him that lingered even now as your eyes bored into his with a fury that drove into his ribcage with the tip of a vibroblade and refused to let go.

“Your shame is theirs.”

“My shame is different now. You’ve been gone a long time Din Djarin. You don’t know who I am anymore.”

He loathed how that was true—tasted the bitterness of it on the back of his tongue like the acrid bite of spice that lingered in the air. There was a time when he knew every thought in your mind and the cadence of your heart, a time before he took on the duty of another’s life, where he knew what your skin felt like in the pitch black of space. How you sounded when he smiled against your throat.

“Tell me what happened,” he offered bluntly. “But let me help you.”

“What for?”

Gloved fingers tapped your thigh, helmet tipped down. “Someone shot you.”

The laugh rumbled in your chest, spilling warmth into the very tips of your fingers as he clipped his weapon back in place. “I wonder how that happened,” you drawled.

“They’ve got good aim.”

“Mir’sheb (smartass),” you bit back.

You caught the chuckle that filtered through his helmet moments before he plucked the tin out of your palm and flicked it open. In one swift move he dropped to one knee, beskar clanging against stone as he became eye level with your pulsing wound. Yanking the knife off his belt, he cut a small hole into the fabric of your pants much to your distaste.

“I can do that.” You snatched the blade from his hand, clutching onto his shoulder for balance as you braced yourself with a breath so deep it stung down your lungs. “Fuck.”

Digging it into the open flesh was easy. A routine jab of pain right before you felt the flood of adrenaline pulse beneath your skin. You felt the shard protruding right near the surface and began wrenching it out with a stifled cry. Din clutched at your thigh, watching in awe at the sheer resilience of how you managed with ease. Cutting into yourself as if it were nothing. How many times had you endured pain this intense? How many times had you been made to forgo asking for help?

The metal hit the ground with a soft clink and before you could push off him he was smoothing a thick layer of bacta along your skin. You sighed into it, eyes fluttering as the cooling gel seeped into your wound.

“It’ll take a day to heal over completely,” he explained, rising swiftly and depositing the tin back in your palm. “I can reapply it in a few hours.”

“That’s not necessary.” Bending the best you could and extending an arm with a click of your tongue. “K’olar (come here)!”

A hand gripped your waist on instinct, holding you steady as the figure clambered up your limb with ease, settling back on your back with a low beep that made you smile. Din regarded the droid with a grimace, watching as it pressed its head to yours in a move he’d recognize anywhere. A kiss. Even though you wore no armor you still moved with the etchings of your past carved into every part of your body.

He must have made a noise, a slight grunt that had your gaze back on him in an instant. It was involuntary—a reaction of his past coming out to make itself known once more.

“You still hate droids don’t you?”

His shoulders pushed up and dropped with a breath. “Things have changed.”

“For both of us it seems. This is Tal,” you said, allowing the small BD droid to peek over your shoulder, a chirped greeting emanating from its speakers. His single antenna flicked, eyes adjusting with what you’d come to know as a sign of joy.

Another noise cracked through the modulator before he could catch it. “Its name is…blood?”

You nodded, a quick jut of your chin and narrowed eyes. “He’s family.”

“It’s a droid-”

“Aliit ori’shya tal’din. (Family is more than blood.)” you snapped. “I found him on Nevarro the night you escaped. Mangled by a shockwave from those Imperial bastards and left for dead.”

Much like you were.

The words didn’t need to be said for him to feel their meaning glaring directly at him. He’d be a fool to ignore what happened, to move past what you’d gone through since that night. It all changed when he made his choice. Without realizing it he dragged an entire clan into a mess they were still dealing with—the aftermath of his chaos bleeding directly into your own path even as you fought against it.

“You could have gone back,” he murmured, watching your spine go straight despite the pain in your leg. “You were to be the next Alor.”

You scoffed, tugging your hood up and over your head. “That’s ancient history now.”

“They would make an exception-”

“Like they did for you?” you sneered. “You didn’t reveal yourself, you still remain a follower of the creed. I’ve become…” Your throat constricted, eyes burning and you blinked back the rush of tears. “I’ve become a Mandalorian’s worst nightmare. I ran that night with the rest of them.”

Leather clad fingers reached for your arm and you thought about letting him touch you. Giving into what you once knew. It would be as easy as taking a breath, falling back into a past that came with the certainty that no matter what…he’d catch you. Through every battle, every sparring session, every hunt. He broke your fall with a gruff bout of laughter you could feel even now.

His voice melted against your chest, a soothing balm to an ache you held no cure for. “But you ran from them. Why?”

You sucked in a breath that tasted like burnt fuel. “Dar’manda,” you uttered and felt the word that consumed your existence get wrenched from your chest. He watched with prying eyes you could feel dig beneath your skin. “I am a Mandalorian no more.”

“So you go to Coruscant’s underworld to hide.”

If he were anyone else—a different Mandalorian altogether—you would have pushed past him and limped out of the alleyway with what shreds of your pride that remained still in tact. You almost wished he was someone else. A person you could ignore, a stranger you might one day allow to fade in the back of your mind.

But he knew the taste of your laugh.

He knew what it felt like when you curled into him on nights off world and pretended to be more than either of you would allow.

Din Djarin clasped your history in his palm, tightening his grip until it became a vice you wouldn’t be able to run from. And for a brief moment you ached to flee from, you didn’t want to run. You could have left him there and he probably would have let you go with nothing to be said but the traditional words of goodbye and a quick clasp around your forearm.

Instead you were rooted to the spot as he regarded you with the eyes of a friend and the heart of a past lover.

Tal beeped over your shoulder, cutting the vines that held you in place and allowing you a chance to breathe. “The underworld is safe compared to the rest of the galaxy.” Din’s modulator cracked with what you knew to be a scoff. “Not everyone has the reliance of beskar and a way off world.”

The quiet became unnerving in his presence—his mind turning over words that echoed with something else. A story you weren’t willing to reveal just yet. But Din Djarin knew you better than most. He could see the itch beneath your skin, the need to run because you’d already been here too long. You entertained the act of reminiscing when instead you should have been taking off in a different direction altogether.

“Who are you running from?” he pushed, nearly ripping your skin clean off as your heart sank into the pit of your vacant stomach.

“Don’t make up tales in your head.”

“I know what it looks like.” A step closer had you pinned to the wall as Tal chirped with an air of discomfort on your behalf. “You know what it looks like. You forget, all the bounties we hunted together shared something.”

“Djarin-”

“They were never able to stop from looking over their shoulders.”

“Gev, (stop)” you spit, malice bleeding off your tongue.

“Who?” he rumbled, fingers clasping around your wrist before it could reach for your blaster. “What happened to you to make you run?”

The close proximity of his helmet inches from your face suffocated you, the sharp echo of the underworld’s nightlife cracked through the silence like metal shattering glass. You wanted to cower away from the question. The innate urge to flee rising up the back of your throat, clawing at your insides as he waited patiently for your response. One that would come whether you wanted it to or not—his ability at making you spill your guts as present as ever.

He pressed you close to the wall, barely a hairsbreadth away from touching your forehead, but he might as well have been atop you altogether. You sucked in a breath, eyes darting to the entrance of the alleyway in a last ditch attempt to form a shitty plan that would never work.

Fingers stroked up to your palm, pressing down slow on the rapid pulse point beneath your thumb until your hand fell open. The tranquility of having him so close—the memories of a past that once drowned you—suddenly became all you longed for. That forgotten sensation of what it meant to love and be loved and live without fear.

The version of you that would rather die fighting than scurry behind shadows and dark corners.

“It’s not your fight,” you threw out the excuse—one final opportunity to get him to relinquish this hold he had over you. “This is one battle you won’t walk away from. So I suggest you leave before shit gets ugly.”

Empty threats. Nothing more.

A different person would leave and they’d do it without question.

But that wasn’t his way. “Your fight used to be my fight. A long time ago. Back when we were…friends.”

“Too much has happened for you to say that and actually mean it,” you get out in a harsh breath that burns your chest.

“I mean it,” he shot back, pulling you off the wall. “There will never be a time where I don’t believe that.” Your arm was set over his shoulders, a sturdy one going around your waist as he hoisted you against him and began the slow trek out of the alleyway.

Being stubborn was a trait of all Mandalorians, a prideful ego that became damaged easily. But this you could look past. The kind gesture of an old friend was enough. Until it became too much.

“I need a drink,” you sighed.

Another gruff bout of laughter spit out in cracks as he helped you towards the nearest cantina. “Tell me who’s after you and I’ll buy you a meal to go with that drink.”

“You don’t give up.”

“Munit tome’tayl, skotah iisa,” he threw back. “Long memory-”

“Short fuse. I know.” With a grunt, you felt his hand tighten around your waist, Tal beeping in curiosity as strangers took in the sight of a Mandalorian being helpful. “Black Sun.”

Din stopped, body going rigid as the words registered in his mind, and you almost wished you could stand on your own. “Dank ferrik!” he cursed loud enough to make people go around. “The crime syndicate?”

You nodded, swallowing thickly at the anger radiating off his form. “I did a job for them—caught a bounty—but they weren’t too keen on letting me live afterwards. They figured I would talk. Spill Falleen family secrets and how they conduct their business.”

“Seek refuge with the Alor. She will hear what you have to say.”

“And drag more lives into this?” you snapped. “One is enough Din. Me. That’s where it ends. I won’t put our aliit in harms way to save my own skin.”

Like you did.

Words that you’d never dare to speak aloud. But he heard them nonetheless. Loud and clear and brutal enough to carve another piece of him off from what little still remained. He’s part of the reason why the covert had to leave Nevarro. But the Empire was to blame for all of it, for the mess created and lives devoured. Din knew you understood that. He could read it in your eyes—so expressive now without a black visor to hide behind.

You spoke through the grief he’d been carrying since that night; it had to go somewhere, forced you to place it in a locked box before you lost yourself to it. He’d done the same the day he left Moff Gideon’s ship…alone.

“Haat, Ijaa, Haa’it, (truth. honor. vision.)” he replied, swallowing the pinch of grief that threatened to choke him. “We swore that to each other once.”

“Eons ago Din. I don’t expect you to hold yourself to a vow that was made by two people who didn’t know any better.” Your form was ragged, worn from the exhaustion of running. Din felt it in his bones. He knew what it meant to lose everything in one go, but you’d been forced to that same fate time and time again in such a short time.

If the galaxy wouldn’t protect you he would. That was his original purpose in this lifetime once and he’d honor it over and over without question. If only to keep you safe at his side.

“I meant it then and I mean it now.”

Your gaze dragged up to his helmet, lips parting as you finally felt the weight of separation lift. “Why?”

Din figured the answer was obvious, his heart ramming loud and unsteady in his chest as you regarded him with the eyes of a friend. “This is the way,” he said, pulling you along the busy street without waiting for a response.

A forgotten creed you absconded even as its words welcomed you home.

You tracked his steps as he wound through the crowd, the low beep in your ear keeping you five paces back until he entered a path lit only by the glow of cantinas and saloons. It began in your chest. The string tied in knots around your ribs went taut—the intimate hum of a life before yours raging loud and unrelenting. A legacy that would continue on long after you and him were gone. The vibration nearly struck you blind when he stopped, his helmet tilted to the side, senses fixed on the outpouring of laughter from inside a bar you could smell like burnt oil.

The blaster, the stance. You’d seen this man before, witnessed as he pulled the very same weapon from his holster a thousand times over.

Last seen on a planet that narrowly avoided capturing your death in its hands. Your heart hammered a dull beat in your chest, ears deaf to the insistent beeping over your shoulder, as you got too close to escape. A group of three—clearly drunk and blind with joy—collided into him, forcing him a few steps back. You swept past, hand sliding against his belt rapidly until something unlatched with a subtle click you felt against the tip of your fingers.

The weapon’s weight dropped in your hand like a stone, and you glanced at it momentarily before stuffing it beneath your cloak and pushing through the crowd. Made of beskar. At least. Which would buy you a meal or three and some shitty version of alcohol to go with it; enough to let you forget you saw him. To swallow down the thick burden of what you once knew.

A local trader would bargain easily for something of this magnitude and for a brief moment you could taste the freedom on the tip of your tongue. The sweet melancholy of a life not on the run. You grinned, relief flooding veins as your heart raced with enough adrenaline to keep you stable and upright despite the fatigue of days traveling.

The crowds dispersed. Your boots splashed loud into the back of an alleyway leading nowhere and you should have heard the beeping over your shoulder. You should have paid attention.

Pain split down your leg, coursing down to the base of your spine as you stumbled forward—a hoarse shout tearing free. Your knee hit the ground with a crack nearly shattering bone if it weren’t for how you threw yourself to the left to prevent any injuries. A shard of metal—barely an inch long—embedded itself into the open flesh, chafing against the fabric of your pants. Clambering for your thigh your fingers came back wet and hot and stained in blood as the echo of his heavy steps clashed against the vibrating tempo of the nearby cantina.

“Fuck,” you spit, rolling to your other knee and forcing yourself upright, the burn now splitting up your side.

“Hand it over.” His voice was an unforgiving punch directly into the base of your chest, the modulated timbre of familiarity almost brought the sting of tears to your already wet eyes.

How easy it could have been to apologize and go about your day. Accomplished with the breeze of surface air you’d never get to feel.

Instead you smiled. “I found it. Honest.” Extending your arm you felt the grip of metal release and hit the ground with a whirring beep as you clambered to a stance that would hold your weight.

“I felt it leave my side.”

You shrugged, favoring your weight on the only leg you had left. “I tried. Apparently not well enough.”

His hand twitched at his side, helmet tilting to the right as if sizing you up. One shot with a bolt from his blaster would bring any other being down with ease, but you’d been shot before—the resilience of a fighter still sewn into your blood and bone. You wouldn’t drop till you were dead, until he ripped the life right out from your chest with his gloved hand.

But that wasn’t his way.

It never had been.

A normal human would have felt the crunch of bone as they're ribs severed from a blow to the side. They would have died from colliding into the side of a building and swallowing a mouthful of concrete and plaster. And some days he swore he felt it. The phantom ache of his body pleading for hours of rest, even as he set the alarm for six in the morning. Three hours after he managed to crawl between crumpled sheets and the heat of your slumbering body.

Tonight he felt it.

He curled tight around your back, face pressed into the side of your neck and felt that all too familiar illusory pain split down his side. Clark got out the words please can I feel you, said in thick pleading voice before he felt it set tight around his throat. And your resounding yes came so easily.

Legs parted and lace panties pushed to the side as he hooked your thigh over his and slid home. With only so much as a single breath used in effort. Because the pain wasn't real. Of course it wasn't - it couldn't exist so long as he existed on a planet with a yellow sun. But he felt it dig into the base of his spine when he pushed his hip forward and heard you choke out a garbled version of his name.

"I need to forget," he muttered into your shoulder, body molded around your back and hips grinding up into a spot that burst white behind your tightly shut eyes.

"Uh-huh." Your voice was a pathetic excuse for what it normally sounded like. Whimpered and breathy and hanging onto the end of a fraying thread.

"It hurts-" he gasped, teeth scraping your throat as his fingers dug into the plush of your stomach.

The bed creaked with the way he fucked into you with strong precise thrusts that had your legs trembling and head falling back. You clawed at his hip, ragged gasps wrenched out of your chest each time his cock slid to the base and dragged against that patch along your walls. You were wet. Practically soaking between your thighs with each shift of his body, certainly making a mess he'd later clean with ease.

Clark felt the pulse in your walls. The rapid beat of your heart rising to a crescendo he could taste on the tip of his tongue. Your scent, your slick, it stained the air and set a haze in his mind that eclipsed the pain.

"Oh fu-" His hand dropped to your entrance, fingers toying quickly with your throbbing clit, and you cried out at the sudden stimulation. "Oh gosh. Can I have it? C'mon baby give it to me. Let me feel it."

It burned through you, prying a sob from your chest as your body went taut and thighs began to shake. Something wet spilled along your skin but it was Clark's broken grunt that drowned out everything. He sucked at your skin, thighs clapping loud and obscene against your body, cock sliding in just a bit deeper until you couldn't come down.

"Clark-" you sucked in a ragged breath, eyes rolling back when he turned with a speed that blinded you. His cock twisted hard in your body, your fingers blindly grasped the sheets as he swept your legs up and over his shoulders.

The hot palm of his hand still sticky with your slick cupped your chin to drag his lips messily across your own. And for a brief moment you could breathe. The merciless wash of your high calmed as he kissed you with sounds that had your heart fluttering madly in a chest already wracked with palpitations.

"I'm gonna come," he pushed along your tongue, hips grinding down until you sobbed wet and undone into his open mouth.

Your eyes rolled back, body limp as he used your hips to push you down along his cock. You could feel the splatter of cum begin to trickle onto the sheets, soaking your thighs and his, but Clark was lost. He towered above you, knees pressed into the mattress and drove into you fast and sloppy and hot enough to send bliss rippling down to the tips of your fingers.

"I need-" A hand slamming down beside your head, his body arched over you and eyes narrowed in on the fucked out expression written across your face. "Need to c-come baby. I'm gonna-"

Whatever words he might have said broke off into something harsh at the back of his throat. His forehead dropped down against yours, hips working once, twice, until he spurted into you. The warmth of it leaked down along your ass, staining the sheets you'd no doubt have to replace. But you couldn't worry about that.

Clark slumped down with a grunt, rolling you to the side as your hand dug into his curls with a hum.

"Feel better?" you grinned, unable to even move let alone curl into him.

You didn’t think about the wind when you fell. Or rather…when you leapt.

The glass pane window of your job slid open with ease as if beckoning you close with a smile. One that said I understand, I want to help. And like a fool you grasped onto its palm with blurry vision, eyes streaming tears you don’t remember falling.

Maybe you’d been crying this whole time. For years on end until your chest caved in. Until your scream cracked raw and ceased to exist.

The wind hit your face with a sting that burned. Slicing along cheeks and tightly shut eyes; if you closed them you wouldn’t see the ground. You’d get to enjoy the drop, feel adrenaline pulse life back into your veins. Even as cement rose up to meet you—half expecting to hear the crack of your skull as it split on impact.

Other people might have screamed, realized their mistake halfway down and scrambled for safety. You smiled. Grinned stupidly at the rush until laughter bubbled to the surface. Joy bloomed in your stomach, stretching to the tips of fingers and frozen toes.

It’s done. It’s over. No more visceral anguish.

No more tears.

Your eyes fluttered open, catching sight of stars in the sky and windows still glaring lights. A glance would have told you where you were, how much time you had left to admire the view. Drink in a city you’d never see again. Short hellos and even shorter goodbyes. Forgotten in an instant, fleeting and helpless. A baby bird dropping from its nest, a human at the end of their rope.

So close to the final note. The plunge into darkness—peace at the end of the tunnel. So…damn…close.

Something snatched you from midair, yanking at your stomach until the burn of acid rushed to the back of your throat. You choked, spluttering for air as red and blue and black hair crowded your peripheral. Wind rammed into your chest, the building growing closer as whatever trapped you in its hold rose to meet the window still smudged with your fingerprints.

At least they would be able to I.D. you.

“You’re safe now,” a voice rumbled, setting you onto unstable feet, the cape brushing your boots as you stumbled. “Did you trip? What happened?”

Oh how you wanted to laugh. The irony. The brutal travesty. You couldn’t even kill yourself properly without someone ceasing it all with instinct. The nature of a hero to rescue lost souls, even if they didn’t want to be saved.

“W-Why did you do that?” You could hear the devastation in your voice.

What little strength existed to commit the act trickled into fear when your eyes slid to the open window. Air seeping into an already frigid office space.

“I saved you,” he said as if it were obvious. The only thing he could think of.

“Saved me?” you exclaimed, voice thin and throat tight. “I wanted—oh god—“

The situation dawned on him as you trembled with nausea. Horror stricken across a tear stained face. Tragedy written along eyes that would cease to be dry again. You wanted to die. And he stopped you.

His heart dropped, hands guiding you forward until your chest knocked his and his arms looped around your shaking form. Hugging people wasn’t unusual to him. Part of the job. But you crumpled with a sob he felt wrench out of the base of your stomach. Falling to your knees as he went down with you, his eyes squeezed shut to the sting of tears.

“There’s no one left,” you got out between sobs that wracked your frame. “No one to mourn me. I waited till there was no one left.”

You waited.

For how long?

How many years? How many people? How much pain?

“What’s your name?” he finally spoke, voice thick with an emotion he could feel lodged in his throat. And you whispered it with closed eyes. Prayed it into his cape as if that alone would bring you back to life. “Now I’m left.”

Your eyes snapped open, rearing back with hands pressed to his chest. “W-What?”

“I’ll live,” he replied, thumb pushing tears away from your chin. “I’ll live for a lot longer than you. And I’ll mourn you. After it all. After you live. I’ll do it.”

“You don’t even know me.” The words were bitter, useless anger you had nowhere else to put.

But he smiled as if it were the easiest thing in the world—a breath he had no trouble taking for the both of you.

He came to the conclusion that dying on your couch would ultimately be the easiest way to go. Death by any other means might seem inferior to a man like himself. Trapped with the taut muscles in his thighs and the ache in his stomach that screamed syllables he'd never bother to decipher. No. It simply had to be this way. With a hiss that clawed along the wet flesh of his esophagus and fell into the cavern of his open mouth.

He could feel it behind his teeth. Grating against enamel and settling into the grooves he'd later pick at with the tip of his tongue—in a last ditch effort to remember what it felt like to die on your couch.

Except...he wasn't dying.

Quite the opposite.

Tommy felt the back of his head slam against the edge of your couch, rough fingers that had seen one too many swings of a hammer at work now dug into the plush skin of your thigh. Indents would appear in small crescent moons later. When he unlatched his grip and found he could finally suck in a gasp of air.

"How's that?"

The calloused palm of his right hand might make a good muzzle, he tossed dryly into his racing mind. The wet slick of your own palm echoing in time the rapid beat of his heart. He wasn't sure if he wanted to hear you, or if the soft lilt of your voice pressed right up against his ear was just what he needed to taste the sweet edge of death.

"Shit baby," he got out between panting breaths. "T-That's good. That's real good."

The curve of your smile against his cheek snapped his eyes open to see you better than just a peripheral glance. So sweet. Sitting on your knees with the edge of your shorts riding up into the crease of your hip, your eyes fixed on the grip you had to his cock. He wanted to push you open. He wanted to watch the glaze of lust turn to a wash of tears as he fucked you nice and just a bit too slow.

But he couldn't remember how to fucking breathe. You twisted your wrist pulling up and then down and Tommy's felt the oxygen punch out of his chest as his back arched up into your touch. A pathetic grunt ripping from deep in his body.

Teeth dragged along the shell of his hear, trailing down the curve of his jaw until his skin sparked. His eyes rolled back with a moan, hips fucking up into your hand as another wave of precum leaked down along your fingers. It caught in between your knuckles. But he was staring at the way your tongue swept quick and wet along your bottom lip. As if you were begging for a taste of him.

His hand snapped forward, curling along the back of your neck to crush his mouth to yours. The wet slide of his tongue against the back of your teeth - a way to share the taste of death—punctuated with your soft little whine threading a noose around his heart.

"You're gonna fuckin' kill me darlin'," he pushed against your tongue. Spit stringing each time he pulled back to see the dark wash of need in your gaze.

"Do you want to come in my mouth?" you murmured.

And Tommy felt it in the base of his stomach.

He wasn't going to fucking last.

Clasping a tight grip on your wrist he thrust one, two, three more times into your fist before coming with a hoarse shout. Spilling hot over your hand and spurting along your bare thigh. He felt it hit the lower part of his stomach that jutted out slightly over his sweats most days. The indent of your teeth still marred his skin where his trail of dark hair began to grow a bit too thick beneath the waistband of his briefs.

"Fuck," he gasped, head back and chest heaving. "I wanted to fuck you first before I did that."

You smiled pressing your nose against his. "You can still do that."

"Gonna take me a minute to-"

"That's okay," you shrugged. "That gives me some time."

"Time for what? You got a to-do list or somethin'?" he chuckled.

The soft thud of your knees hitting wood forced his head back up, gaze locked on where exactly you were headed. He felt it stir beneath his skin, thrumming sharp in his blood at the sight. This would take no time at all.

Going on a date with Clint Flood is risky. Not in the sense that falling for him was out of the question. The intention to trip and land face first was already there. Blinding and horrifically set in a microscope he was already peering into with a grin so wide it it stretched his mouth and bared his teeth.

You didn't deny the pull of attraction you felt grow tight in the base of your chest. A hand the width of his own seemed to grip your heart, pressing fingers into soft muscle and popping capillaries until you could taste copper on the back of your tongue.

Bitter and entirely too welcome.

You said yes to the date with a breath that took little effort to push out. Lungs singed bright by the orange end of his nasty habit. One he just couldn't kick—not that he wanted to. And you inhaled it just a bit deeper, some form of gruesome intent you caught flashes of in the mirror coming forward with the swing of his hand up to his lips. Another cloud of biting tobacco obscuring the view of dark brown eyes that seemed to shine your name.

Going on the date was easy. Laughter flowed better than the shitty beer you picked—never quite knowing the better alcohol to go with—and your stomach swooped each time he glanced at the gold chain around your neck. A sacred little heart pressed neatly between your breasts. Hidden from prying eyes but seemingly begging for his in particular.

He found it with the scrape of his teeth an hour after the food had settled and conversation bled into the tip of his boot finding the side of your heel. The maroon tablecloth hid the sight of how he spread you thighs, how your fingers dug into the side of your leg until crescent shapes decorated your skin the yellowed glow of the restaurant.

Attraction was obvious, but the fire fanned with an unexpected edge of certainty. You should have said goodnight. You stood primed and poised for the end of an evening well spent—despite how he eased himself back into the chair with a lazed grin. The knowledge of your legs spread wide beneath the table, dripping into lace panties and an awful wooden chair, flickering bright in his mind. It would have been so easy to tell you to touch yourself, to indulge.

At least that’s what you told yourself in between gasps and the sound of spit traded in between kisses that burned a hole in your chest. Your arms wrapped tight around his neck, lips smeared and sticky despite the lip-gloss you applied hours ago. Now traded in for the shine of his saliva as he pressed it against your tongue.

"I knew it," he muttered, the rough chafe of his facial hair scraping along the edge of your jaw. "Knew you'd want this."

Grappling for his jacket, you dug your nails into the leather with a gasp, thighs shaking with the effort of keeping you upright as two thick fingers slid deep. He sucked at the base of your throat, a moan bit out and choked at the feel of your walls clamping tight. Hot need pulsing harsh inside your shuddering body.

"So fuckin' good."

"Clint-"

They curled quick, rough pads searching for something as his eyes trapped you until you were couldn’t move. A deer in the headlights that never meant to cross this road. You should have run. You should have said goodnight. The brick wall was cold against your back but his stomach pressed tight to yours was hot. Every inch of his form emanated heat, until you could no longer tell where you began and he ended. Until you were certain he'd clawed open a spot on his flesh for you to reside in—to remain safe in.

Your hips jolted, mouth dropping in a harsh whine he smothered with his tongue, and Clint grinned like he found gold.

"There it is," he breathed, licking deep as his fingers worked you over faster than anyone had before. “That’s it huh?”

You couldn’t give him a fucking answer even if you wanted to. Your mouth dropped open and you expected his name, affirmation that whatever he stroked felt like a fucking storm in your body, but the jagged edge of a moan fell out instead. Hoarse and needy. It burned with each pump of his fingers. The twitch of your thighs, the way you arched your hips into his hand, grinding on the edge of his palm until it caught deliciously against your throbbing clit.

He ruined you. Out in the open. With a grin on his lips.

“I feel-” you gasped, wrenching your head back only to feel his hand slide firm and prepared behind you, palm pressed to the wall. “Oh God.”

“I know,” he murmured, lips sliding hot along the edge of your jaw. “Gonna come for me baby? Gonna give me my dessert?”

The words twisted sharp in your stomach, muscles pulling taut as he licked a line up your throat with a harsh groan. A third finger stretching you wide with a pinch of a pain. The whine you let out was ragged, throat thick with his name as he caught your mouth in another kiss that made your toes curl. You bucked into his hold, spit trailing down to your chin as he ground his calloused thumb hard and unrelenting against your clit.

It split you down the center. Tore a wound through the center of your body you swore would be bleeding profusely later. And you came with a muffled shout, gushing into his palm and trembling in his tight hold as he pressed you even closer into the wall. The light from the street was blocked until all you could see was him. Surrounded by his scent, curled into his body, as shivers wracked your spent form.

You felt your walls pulse, fluttering in time with each pump of his fingers as he dragged you through it. Watching as tears spilled from the corner of your eyes, sparks trailing hot down to the tips of your fingers as he pulled his fingers out with a loud squelch and circled them fast against your clit with a rough pinch.

His fingers slid quick into his mouth, a rough moan rumbling from his chest, as he licked them clean. Eyes rolling back slightly with the tang of you spread across his tongue.

“Beautiful,” he grunted. “The prettiest fuckin’ sight I’ve seen. You like it?”

You nodded slowly with a drunken smile, his nose brushing soft against yours. “Does this mean you want a second date?”