COMING SOON on STORIES WITH STRIDING_VALKIRE
A LONG WAY HOME, a Star Wars: The Mandalorian story, inspired by the prompt shared by @jupiter-awakens
Bo would remember it in fragments. A low groan from the ceiling above. Din's hand on her chest plate, shoving her backward, hard. The crack of falling ice. A blue-white roar of snow and a pressure wave that took her off her feet. Then the dark, and the cold, and the realization that the tunnel behind her was no longer there.
She fumbled her helmet light on. It flared white off the walls of a pocket roughly four meters across, with the tunnel collapsed at both ends. Din was on his knees against the far wall, one arm braced over the sling at his chest. Grogu was making the small frightened noise of a child who had not yet decided how loudly to cry. Din shifted his shoulders, murmured something soft in a language she did not know, and the child quieted.
She tried hers. Solid white noise. The amount of ice between them and the surface was enough to swallow the signal entirely.
"Mine is the same," Din said.
She moved carefully across the pocket and knelt in front of him. The light from her helmet bounced off his visor in a small white star. She set a gloved hand on the side of his pauldron.
"Din. There is blood on your cloak."
"Bo." He caught her wrist, very lightly. "It is a graze. I will live. Help me check him."
They went through Grogu together. The child was tired and a little scared and entirely intact. Din settled him back into the sling and the small ridiculous mushroom of a hood swallowed his face up to his eyes. He sucked his thumb. He pressed his ear flat against the inside of Din's cuirass. He was, as far as Bo could tell, more displeased than frightened. She wanted, more than was sensible, to put her hand on the top of his small head.
Then they sat against the back wall of the pocket because there was nothing else to do.
The cold began to work on them within the first hour.
Hoth at depth, in a sealed pocket, with no source of heat and no airflow, did not freeze you the way the surface did. The surface stole your warmth in a great rush. The depth was patient.Β
It sucked heat out of you in fine threads, through every seam and joint of armor, through the soles of your boots and the gap at the back of your neck, until you began to forget that you had ever been warm.
Bo had grown up on Mandalore, which was a desert that pretended otherwise; she had trained in the snow at the academy, but she had never sat still in the cold like this. The shivering started as a tremor in her jaw and worked outward.
Beside her, Din was shivering too. She could feel it through the contact of his shoulder.
"We need to share heat," she said. Her teeth had begun to chatter and she hated it. "Two armored idiots sitting half a meter apart is wasting body heat."
He came. He shifted along the wall until the length of his thigh was against the length of hers, and his pauldron was firm against her shoulder, and the sling with the child in it was a warm bundle between them. They sat for a while like that, half-leaning. It was better. It was not enough.
She did it without thinking, which was the only way she could have done it at all. She reached over, found the seam where Din's gauntlet ended, and pushed her bare cold fingers up under the cuff of his glove until her palm was flat against the inside of his bare wrist. The skin there was warmer than she had expected. She felt him go very still.
"You are warmer than me. Share."
A pause. Then his other hand, gloved, came up and curled around her bare fingers where they pressed against his wrist. He did not pull them away. He held them there, gauntlet over knuckles, like a man pinning a bird he had decided to keep.
"Bo," he said again, and the way he said it the second time was different.
She turned her head. She could not see his face. She could see, in the small reflected light of her own helmet, the slight downward tilt of his visor toward her, and she could feel the way his thumb was moving in a small, deliberate, repeated arc across the back of her hand.
"I have been," she began, and stopped, because the cold was making her honest in a way she did not entirely want to be. "I have been counting. Every time you have touched me. Since the council fight about the refugees. I do not know why I have been counting. I am the Mand'alor. I am not supposed to be counting."
"I have been counting too," he said.
