#amiedala

Novalise is formidable in her gentlest moment, electric even when she smiles. She is laced with glitter and honey, sparkles with it. The Force—it radiates through her. But this? This is something else. Her eyes are gone. Her eyes—sage green, pure warmth—no longer. They are sepulcher-dark. Tombs. They are venomous, oil slick with poison. No. No, worse. 

They are nothing.

“Nova,” Din tries to croak out, but she is gone now, and his voice is, too. He grasps at her, dully, not fully there. Not a match for her. 

What remains is not Novalise—no, this is not Nova at all. This is…violence. This is demonic. This darkness—decidedly not the ghosts Bo-Katan spoke of, fluttering around in corners and weaving in and out of dreams. The thing holding him captive—the thing inside of his Novalise—this is not a haunting. This is an evisceration.

Novalise has gone radio silent. Novalise has gone nuclear. 

Novalise has gone, entirely. 

“Nova,” he tries again, but there’s nothing that comes out of his throat this time. Spores cloud Din’s eyes, and he knows he’s close to the end. He will not withstand her strength much longer. In his armor, he could likely escape her grasp, but here, he is bare. Down to his skin, his bones. He does not want to hide. Not from her. His Novalise, his cyar’ika, his salvation. 

Even now.

His eyelids blink, once, twice, and Din feels his heart beat slower. “No…va,” he croaks, barely air at all, trying to fight the bitter, blinking darkness. 

Din cannot tell if it’s just sleep, or oblivion. He doesn’t care. 

One thought flashes through his mind, though—distant, faraway—Grogu. 

“No.” 

It does not come from him, though.

It comes from Novalise. 

But it does not sound like Novalise—this wrenching, guttural gnarl. It comes from something deeper, lower. Baser. She is fighting off something of her own. 

“No,” she says, again, this time in a whisper, and her fingertips, still latched against his throat, chitter and jump. Din’s pulse is thready, but it thrums back in. Air floods his mouth, then his lungs, in great, streaming inhales. As if in restraint, Nova’s fingers twitch once, twice, and then, with incredible upheaval, she wrenches herself off of him, crying out. Horribly. Anguished. A low, keening, awful noise is coming out of her throat. 

It sounds inhuman. She sounds inhuman. She looks at him, eyes evergreen, tears flooding at the seams, nose dripping vantablack, lurid. They are both sprawled, gnarled, across the floor, entwined but afraid to touch the other person, Din’s hands bracing his own throat. Like a protection spell. To ward the demon inside of her off. He’s inhaling air like he’s never felt it before. Ragged. Horrid. 

Nova stops breathing as he sucks it from the sky. They are in the dark depths of this mausoleum, together, still entwined, still separate.

“Din,” she whispers, looking at him. 

With one word, he knows. It’s her. It’s her, and relief floods into him. He moves forward, dropping his hands from his throat, reaching for her, legs an entwined mess with her own, and Nova recoils. Horror is written across her face. Turmoil. “Din,” she says, again. Not an accusation, a—a collapse. 

“It’s okay—” 

“No,” she says, raw, split-open. “Did—was that—?”

“Nova,” Din says, carefully, bracingly, reaching for her, “I’m okay—” 

She holds her hands up—shaking, now, and he freezes, midair. “Don’t.” It’s a dividing line. Again. “Don’t touch me. Don’t try to make this—Maker, Din. I f-fucking strangled you, you cannot make this okay.” 

Din swallows. Winces—because swallowing is impossible, and then winces again, because the look on Nova’s face is cataclysmic. “Novalise,” he tries again, and it comes out ragged. 

Her eyes, in the dark, are as full as saucers, brighter than the pulse of her saber’s glow, so opposite than they were a minute before, and they’ve never cut him as deep as they have right now. “You should have let me die.” 

Din’s heart saws in half. “What?” he manages, the syllable broken down the middle, agonized.

Nova wipes black blood away from her nose, smearing it across her mouth, her face. The twin silver glint of her rings catch in the low light, on nothing but the tiniest hint of dawn on the horizon. The crystal glows, just once, then refracts on nothing. “On Hoth. When Thrawn blew it to nothing. You should have left me there.”

Din reaches for her again, desperate.

This time, Nova doesn’t push him away. 

“When I told you,” he says, fiercely, grabbing her head so tightly he fears he’ll leave a bruise, “I am never going to leave you again, I meant it.” He pulls her closer, grip tightening on her jaw, fingers snarling in the wilds of her hair. She melts into his grasp—yielding, folding. Nova looks relieved at the pain, and it makes Din’s grip loosen a little—but barely. He feels crazed, feverish, undone. There are tears streaking both of their cheeks, and he is rattled, bones restless and uncaged, blood hot, pulse thready. “There is nowhere you go where I cannot follow. Don’t you dare try to die on me. You will not like the consequences.” 

Nova looks at him. 

Din is bluffing. He is lying through his teeth—teeth that are aching, sore, red-hot from nearly being choked to death by the woman he loves. Nowhere you go where I cannot follow. That was true when he was just a bounty hunter and she was just his copilot. Now, they’re intricately interwoven—Mandalorians and Rebels both, in varying measures. Din is a hollow point, a broken animal, a pit of a person, a dutiful husband, a caring father, a worshipful man. Novalise is vigor and honey, Jedi-in-training, warmth personified, martyr-turned-savior, selfless wife, and…something more. Always something more. She has entered worlds he cannot access. She is not wholly herself anymore. 

“You should have let me die,” she repeats, mournfully, sadly, regretfully. Like that would have been the merciful option. Like that was ever an option at all. 

Din shakes his head. “Not a fucking chance,” he grits out. 

Nova swallows, the sound of it rough. “I’m—so sorry,” she chokes, tears streaming down her face, in rivulets, in waterfalls.

Din sighs, thumbs brushing them away. There is nothing to forgive. This is his atonement. His sanctification. “I know, baby,” he murmurs, “it’s okay.” Like a litany, like a prayer. He was right—to not let anyone else in this room. He will not speak a word of this. He will not let anyone else see her, not in this state. They can stay here, preserved, as long as they need to, until Novalise is ready to step foot outside. Until Novalise is fully Novalise again. 

“What happens if I do go somewhere,” Nova whispers, “where you can’t follow?” 

Din freezes. 

“Not my body,” she murmurs, so quiet, like that’ll keep it a secret, like that’ll keep it safe. “I’m not running. Not talking about—running. I—My…soul.” 

Din inhales, unable to look at Nova head-on. He squeezes his eyes shut, thinking about the bruises forming around his throat. About the threat of Thrawn and his disappeared fleet. About the ghosts they’re dancing around. About the impending doom hanging in the balance. Fuck, he doesn’t know. He—he’s not a Jedi. He doesn’t deal in magic, in these half-steps, in the glimmer and flash between worlds. But he loves her, he loves her more than anything else in this galaxy or the next, and if it takes inventing a way to step through an inaccessible portal, Din will do it. For Novalise, Din will do anything. 

“Novalise,” Din whispers, “I will make a way to follow you.” 

She looks at him—straight through. Crystal-clear, her eyes, the pulse of her heartbeat against his hand steady, even. Din knows she understands. And, the small, insidious part of his brain whispers, you know it’s Novalise who’s listening to you. 

Dawn creeps up over the horizon, and Din and Nova stay entangled on the floor, wrapped up in hurt and blankets and each other, shell-shocked, in silence. 

Nova doesn’t say anything else. Din doesn’t either. 

When her breathing regulates, the fall and rise of her chest in a fixed rhythm, only then does Din extricate himself to the fresher, turn on the showerhead, collapse under the concealed sound of the stream, and cry. 

*

In the morning, like it always is on Mandalore, the sun is hidden behind the clouds. 

Din wakes up after she does. He can feel Nova’s presence in the room before his eyes open—she’s staring out the window, the blue curtains fluttering in the breeze. She’s curled up in the windowsill, perched like a lothcat. Knees clutched to her chest, chin resting on one of them. Arms holding herself together. Her hair, long and wild, spills down her back. It sprawls, now, to her waist, longer than he’s ever seen it, and it’s not as tightly coiled as it was when it used to rest around her ribcage. 

For a minute, a blessed moment of silence, he watches her. 

“You’re stealthy,” Nova calls, still facing the landscape of Mandalore, quieter still in the half-dawn of early morning, “but I know you’re awake.” 

His heart stills. Din pulls the covers back, walks over to her, pulls her close. Nova rests against his bare chest, settling into him. Even after nights spent in the same bedsheets, she smells like coconut and freesia and lavender and something else entirely, and Din presses a kiss to her scalp before Nova swings around to face him, tipping her head back to look him square in the eye.

No darkness remains. Not in her eyes. No blood clotted from her nose. No teeth marks on her lips. But Nova’s eyelashes stutter, her breath catches in her throat. 

He knows there’s bruising around his neck. He knows how close she came—that thing came—to decimating him last night. He swallows. It aches. He does not flinch. Nova looks like she’s bartering with something. She bites it back, clenches down her jaw. 

She holds his gaze. A minute passes. She closes her eyes, inhales, exhales, lets her eyebrows relax, lets her shoulders drop. The average person would say this was letting it go—but Din knows it’s Novalise summoning the courage to do something harder. “How long was I out?” she whispers. 

Four small words—what a weight they hold. A gut punch, an anchor sinking. She hates losing things, his Novalise, but time most of all. “A little over two weeks,” Din murmurs, tracing his thumb over the now-prominent line of her cheekbone, and braces for the impact. 

Nova winces, just a little, then nods. Acceptance for this, too, maybe, or swallowing it down to fester like a wound later. 

“I can bring a commlink in here,” Din offers, “or a holotable, and we can review what’s happened since—”

Nova shakes her head. “No.”

He blinks. “No?”

“I can’t,” she says. “They don’t want me in there. In the war room. Making the calls.” She says it so matter-of-factly. She wipes her nose, which isn’t running. She should not know that, after being out for the better part of the last moon cycle, but she does. “I shouldn’t k-know anything.” Nova studies the lines on her palm, tracing the arc of one with the tip of her forefinger. “Just in case.” 

Din looks at her. “Nova,” he says, trying to straddle the line between pragmatic and delicate. He is not good at either, but he will try. For her. “You are…you’re the Mand’alor and a—a commander in the Rebel Alliance, and now both are stationed here. On this planet. In this palace. They…they need you to make a statement, to—”

“I,” Nova says, flatly, “am sick.”

Din stares. Scratches the back of his head. “Sick.” 

Nova pulls the covers up around her. “It’s as good an excuse as any, right? To answer why I’m not down there? To why I haven’t been seen in—” she stops, eyes defocusing, and Din lurches forward. Nova sags, shaking her head. “I’m fine,” she says, dejectedly. “Just… tired. I’m tired. Bo-Katan was right, though.” This is softer, dulled around the edges, like she’s asking Din to confirm. “With what she said on Hoth. I am unfit to rule.” 

“You are not—” 

“There is something inside of my body,” Nova says lowly, levelly, “that is not me.” 

Din feels the world bottom out. “Nova—” 

“I don’t know what it is,” she whispers. “I don’t know what it is, if it’s an it at all, or if it’s just—me, but a corrupted, awful, dark version of myself. Nova of the future. Nova that’s to come. Nova that could become Nova if I make a wrong decision. I went out into that storm on Hoth and I saw her. Me. But I have been seeing her, and these visions, for longer than that, Din. Much longer. It did not originate on Hoth. It did not originate in Deep Space. It did not originate in the Unknown Regions. There was not a demon on some planet that I swallowed, not some poison that let spores loose in my bloodstream, not some nuclear fallout that you did not protect me from because I did not have my beskar on.” Her gaze is chilling—clear. It’s all Nova, and for some reason, it fills Din with panic, flooding him like ice. 

“Nova,” Din tries again, weakly. 

“Ask me where,” she says, a touch softer.

He swallows. “Where?” His mouth wobbles. A little. Maker, he is so out of his depth. His skin is crawling, and he wants to be under armor so badly right now, but Novalise needs him bare, needs him raw, needs him as Din, not the Mandalorian. He does not move, does not flinch. Lets the light in—so that she can, too. “Where did it start?”

“Right here,” Nova whispers, “in this bedroom, on our wedding night, before we left Mandalore at all.” 

Din does not move.

He doesn’t breathe—not properly—not until Nova’s words settle into him fully, landing like ash.

Her—whatever this was, phantom-self? Flickering? Haunting? It wasn’t brought upon by Corellian back alleys, or the whetstone ice of Hoth. No, Nova spoke the truth of it aloud, and it sung to him, sunk in its teeth.

“Din?” Nova whispers, and he does not answer, his face frozen in what he hopes is a perfectly acceptable, neutral expression, but her eyebrows are turned up in the middle, her tangled lashes beating against her cheeks, and he knows he’s reacting. 

Maker, he really wishes he had his armor. 

“It came on quickly,” Nova is saying now, her voice shuttered, as if she was speaking through a funnel. Din nods, a sharp jut of his chin. 

In the place where he held her. In the place where he vowed everything. In the place where she whispered that she was his, and he hers, and there was nothing—nothing—in the stars that could pull them apart.

And still. Something had. This thing inside of her, a pitted, blackened presence.

He inhales through his nose, slow, shallow. The weight in his chest is not grief. Not yet. It’s dread, coiled. Suspicion confirmed. The storm had not blown in from Hoth or the fringes of space. It had bloomed here, grown like the freesia and forsythia of her hair. 

Nova’s voice is quiet, but it trembles on the edge of something shattering. “I felt it the moment I said yes. We came back here; I reassumed the role of Mand’alor, and something gnawed at me, Din. I felt it like a thread slipping around my ribs. Like something ancient… waking up.”

Din can’t speak. He watches her wrap her arms tighter around her legs, jaw clenched against the weight of what she’s just admitted. 

“I thought it was nerves. Thought it was…too much too fast. Too much responsibility, maybe. Too many people watching. I wanted to believe it was just that.” She glances up. Her face is hollowed, pale, eyes rimmed red with unshed tears. “But it wasn’t. And I think—” Her voice cracks. “I think I was chosen.”

Din flinches. Not blessed. Not called, not destined. Not anything else that Novalise has held in her hands over the years—her unwitting ability to be at the center of the entire universe, not just his own—this time. Chosen.

Like a host. A vessel.

He feels sick.

“I think it… knew I would say yes,” Nova says. She’s being very careful, all curved in on herself. “To…all of it. That some sick, unfinished part of me—” she cuts herself off, her finger pointed like a gun against her chest, “wanted to let it in. To fix it. It picked me because I’m the kind of person who says yes. Who doesn’t ask questions. Who wants to carry the burden so no one else has to.”

“Nova,” Din says, rough and barely audible, “you shouldn’t have to carry that alone.” It’s entirely too late, he knows this. Novalise is a study in survival and a martyr every time, and he doesn’t trust that unwitting luck he’s had keeping her anchored to hold. 

She looks at him like she wants to believe that. Like she’s starved for it. But then her gaze turns inward, and the moment slips. “Din,” she says, low, strangled, “I’ve already let it in.”

Silence falls. It feels like a verdict. Din swallows, covers his hands with his eyes, and tries not to shatter. Outside, the Mandalorian sky lightens, silver and blue bleeding across the clouds. Day is coming. And still, Din sits beside her, bare-chested and hollow-eyed, unsure how to shield her from something she’s already swallowed whole.

He leans forward, lays a hand on her knee—light, not possessive. “Then we cut it out,” he says.

Nova blinks. “You… what?”

“We fight it,” Din says. “We hunt it down, tear it apart, root by root. I don’t care if it’s in your blood or your bones or your soul—I’m going to burn it out of you if I have to.”

Her lips part, throat working around a sound that never comes.

“I made a vow,” Din murmurs. “To you. If this thing came for you because you said yes, then it picked the wrong fucking target.”

Something flickers in Nova’s face—hope, or horror, or both. “Din,” she whispers, “how the hell do you expect to do that? Cut it out? Exorcise it?” Her breath catches in the basin of her throat, and Din has to look away into the dawn, hazy and half-bright as ever, coming in from the eastern window, so he doesn’t start screaming. 

Din doesn’t flinch. “I’d kill for you. With you. Through you, if I have to. What part of you doesn’t understand that by now, Novalise?” A beat. “But this thing? I’ll kill it. Whatever it is. I don’t care if it wears your face. I’ll know the difference.”

Nova’s voice shakes. “What if I can’t hold it off next time?”

He cups her cheek, thumb grazing her jaw. “Then I’ll be here. Like always.” 

Nova nods, faintly. She knows this is a given. “What do we tell everyone else?” A whisper, her voice, barely there at all. 

Now, Din has conviction. He matches it, fire and fury, and holds a shaking, pointed finger in her face. “You said it yourself. You’re sick. That’s all they need to know.”

She blinks at him. Once, twice. “I won’t lie to them,” she manages, her voice all air. “The rest of them—fine, they’re safer not knowing. Bo-Katan and Wedge, though; they deserve to know.” 

Din shakes his head, resolute. He knows that both of them have already guessed, gesturing at what’s wrong with her, but he’ll hold this line so Nova doesn't have to. “No. Not yet. Not until we figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. You didn’t want them to know ten minutes ago.” 

“No, I didn’t want to speak as Rebel Leader or Mand’alor, and I still don’t. I am not to be trusted in front of a crowd.” Nova flexes her shoulders as her arms are still wrapped around her knees. Din can see what little remains of her muscle, and it terrorizes him. “Wedge and Bo are not my subjects. They’re in my command, and more importantly, they are my best friends, and I trust them more than anyone else who is not currently occupying this room.” 

Din repeats the head shake. Firm, absolute. “Not yet,” he says. “Let’s not give—whatever this is—more ammunition. You unload on me, cyar’ika. Understand?” 

Frustration—a blessed, eternal glimmer—sparks in Nova’s eyes. Her mouth is set in that way she gets when she’s defiant, but with one small blessing, she gives him a reluctant nod. “Okay,” she whispers. A beat of silence, their tomb of a room growing lighter with the permablue haze of a sunny Mandalore. “What do we do now, then?” 

“I’m going to smuggle you out of here,” Din says, the answer springing to life before he realizes what it is. “Then we’re going to the mines of Mandalore.” 

Nova looks up at him, sideways, and then releases her shoulders, her body unfurling, anchoring towards him like a tractor beam. Her head rests against his shoulder, she nods, and Din wraps his arms around her as if to stitch her back together. For now, there is no war room, or throne. No Jedi Council. No ghost fleets, threatening them from above. No Thrawn. 

Just them. Just this. 

And it tears through Din like a tsunami. 

* 

The mines of Mandalore are considered a sacred, holy place. To Din, and his sect of Mandalorians—Maker, that feels like centuries ago, when he was just a Mandalorian, in a faceless society—it was one of the pieces of mythos he always believed. Maybe it was because this place was a breeding ground for the strength the Mandalorians shouldered, maybe it was because a tiny part of him always wanted to believe in something more. 

But he’d never been here before. And now, he needs their magic so badly it fractures inside of them. 

The starfighter—once his, now Nova’s, belonging to the Manda’lor—cut through the azure air like smoke. It’s silent, the ship, and Din isn’t sure who he thought he would be disrupting, but no one bothered him about it. Downstairs, in the war room, in the dining hall, handfuls of Mandalorians and Rebels alike were together, orange and beskar, piling over maps and holotables and war plans. Bo-Katan affixed him with a cool, steely glare as he slipped past her to the shipyard. Once upon a time, Din would’ve seen that as opposition. Now, he knows it’s well-hidden concern. 

But she did not follow him. Just unfolded her arms and leaned over the holotable with Hera, both of them blue in its glow, continuing to pore over it. And Din brought the ship up into the open air of their balcony, beckoning Nova onboard. 

She is folded up with him in the passenger’s seat now, hair spiraling down her back in perfect ringlets, her eyes open but vacant. 

Please, Din thought. He isn’t sure exactly who he was praying to; he wasn’t a praying man. A God of some sort? The mythosaur itself? Please, bring her back to me. 

They left around dusk. Nova needed to shower first, Din pulling the suds through her hair, lavender-scented and alive. Din stood with her in the fresher as the steam rose, hoping with it would come peace. 

That was a tall order, but it was more the act of the ritual than the ritual itself that he adhered to. 

The sky over Mandalore now is the color of iron—dull, heavy, bruised. A storm was moving in from the west, slow and quiet. Nova didn’t say anything as they passed through the crumbling edge of the capitol’s center, its domes and towers collapsed into jagged silhouettes against the fading light. Din walked beside her, silent but present, his armor catching the last of the sun.

She’s not saying much now, either. As Din docks the ship, he steals a glance over at Nova. She wore her old flight leathers for the trip. Not her beskar. The leather had once been deep brown, but now it is weathered and pale, the color of dried blood. Burn marks scar one sleeve. A blaster bolt had ripped through the knee, years ago, on one of their first missions together, and she’d never patched it right. She doesn’t wear her helmet. She didn’t say it aloud, but Din knows: she doesn’t want anything between her and the air.

They travel the final distance on foot, descending through what remained of the outer cities—now little more than slagged metal and scorched stone. The tunnels narrow as they move inward, the ruins pressing in tighter, the light fading in thin, colorless bands. Din watches Nova.

*

Nova watches back.

Din doesn’t speak, but he stays close. She can hear his breath inside the helmet, the rasp of it against the vocoder. He carries their torch. She didn’t ask for one.

Nova’s fingers brush the wall beside her as they walk deeper into the curve of the mine. Carvings had been scorched into the duracrete long ago—glyphs and battle marks, clan symbols barely visible through the soot. She traces one absently. Kryze. Another. Vizsla. Then a third, nearly worn away: Vau. She doesn’t know that one, and she closes her eyes.

Her hand drops, refocusing on the trail—what little is marked of it—ahead. 

The deeper they go, the worse the pressure grows—like the weight of the mountain itself was bending in toward her. Nova, distantly, recognizes her ears popped. The air thins, full of dust and steam and something else.

Something breathing.

It’s not a sound, exactly. More of a pull. A vibration just behind her ribs, deep in the place where the Force used to live cleanly inside her. Now, the open sore of it festers there like a wound.

She opens her mouth, a slight O to speak some of this into the air between them, but she decides better of it. Nova shutters her eyes, once, twice and keeps moving forward. Inside of her, she can feel the thing snarling, coming alive. With force, she pushes it down. 

They emerge into a high cavern, half-natural and half-carved. The ceiling is low in some places, vaulted in others, shaped by centuries of Mandalorian ritual and reclamation. The walls bore the same sigils she’d seen in the upper tunnels, but here they were untouched by fire. The dark—the utter tomb of it—preserved them.

At the end of the path, the floor slopes down sharply, giving way to a jagged overlook. There, the cavern opens into the sacred chamber. Nova stops at the edge, her breath catching. 

Below them, the Living Waters shimmers faintly, just visible through the mist. Steam coils up in long, luminous tendrils, glowing slightly where Din’s torch touches them. The pool itself is darker than she expected, wide and still. Its surface doesn’t move at all, no stirring to speak of. But Nova can feel it. Pulsing. Awake.

She steps closer to the ledge. The steam continues to rise in soft circles, licking at her cheeks, damp and warm. Her hair clings to her forehead, matted with sweat and fear. Her knees tremble once—but she doesn’t let them buckle.

“I’m going to go under,” she murmurs. “Right?” 

Din nods through the helmet. “The Living Waters were once a ceremonial ground. But, in my covert…” He sighs, leaning up against the stone wall beside them. “You could be remade here. Redeemed.” 

Nova stares at the water. “And you think it’ll help me?” Her fingers curl slightly, then relax again. Instead, she steps past him, to the very edge of the stone platform, where the heat billows up in a sudden rush. It wraps around her like a breath—something woken up, coming alive.

“I don’t know,” Din answers, honestly, arms crossed across his chest. She can sense the exact movement of his brown eyes underneath the helmet, tracking her every move. “But seems a good place to start, yeah?”

“I can feel it calling me,” Nova says in response. The words are quiet, nearly lost in the hiss of steam. They don’t echo, though. They sink. Straight into the bones of the earth here. Nova inhales, a ragged, shuddering thing. 

Din moves to her side. Slower this time. Measured. “The Force?”

She doesn’t answer. No, a tiny, glum, petulant voice hisses. Nova’s eyes flutter shut. Lashes wet. Her chest rises, breath snagging. And then—she feels it. That familiar, dreadful thing inside her. The presence that had nearly overtaken her in their bedroom. That had screamed through her body in jolts of cold flame, stealing the strength from her limbs. It coils now in the center of her ribcage, emboldened. Stronger than before. Hungrier.

It knows this place. The thing recognizes it here, Nova thinks, even though there’s nothing concrete tying that thread together. Home, it whispers.

The word blooms behind Nova’s eyes. A voice that’s hers and not hers. Younger, older. Cracked down the middle. Something else entirely. 

Her breath catches.

Din shifts beside her, armor creaking faintly. “Nova—”

“It’s not hurting me,” she says quickly. Too quickly. “Not yet.”

Silence stretches between them. Heavy. Holding. Din doesn’t push. He stands beside her, steady and silent, hungry. Waiting.

Nova’s gaze sweeps across the chamber. The steam curls in strange shapes—tall and thin and reaching. They look like figures. Like spirits. Memories, here, too-real, like they remember bleeding. She closes her eyes, and that azure blue, star-spun vision from the war room spins around her. An echo, maybe—of a memory, or something yet-to-come. 

“I have to go in,” she says.

Din nods once. The torch in his hand flickers. The shadows it throws are long and broken, and they’re bent at odd angles. “I won’t let it take you,” he says.

Her jaw locks. She looks down at the water. It’s darker than she expected, and so much stiller. It would be unnatural if the rest of Mandalore’s surface wasn’t so quiet, but it almost settles her, this sepulcher reflecting pool. “Don’t pull me out,” she says. “Not unless I stop fighting.”

Din doesn’t answer—not even a curt nod, a promise he’ll break later. Nova’s heart thuds inside of her chest, wanting to reach for him, but she doesn’t. Her skin on his—it recalls the feeling of her hands crushing his larynx, wrapped like a vice around his throat. 

Behind her eyes, the darkness pulses again. Eager. Almost sweet. Nova steps down, bare feet finding the first submerged stone. The heat wraps around her legs like silk.

Or chains. 

She doesn’t debate it long enough to land on a definitive answer. Novalise plunges into the dark, living waters, and feels them close over her head. 

* 

Nova sinks.

Not far. But in the space between breathing and blackout, something cracks open. She floats underneath—not in only the water anymore—in a silence that hums. A pulse surrounds her, slow and resonant. A world breathing in the dark. 

She opens her eyes underwater and finds not Din, not the Living Waters, but a hall.

A circular chamber made of polished stone. Empty but for echoes.

The walls flicker with reflections of stars. Not constellations she knows. Not maps from any sector she’s seen. Instead, they glitter and shift—impossible, wrong. Like the night sky is staring back.

She looks down. She’s barefoot. Her dual rings glint on her left hand, catching a glimmer of light that doesn’t exist. The two bands feel like they’re swallowing her, suddenly, too tight on her finger.

Nova clenches her hands at her sides, and keeps moving forward. In the center of the chamber, a flame flickers to life. It dances atop a still pool, smaller than the one she sank into—shallow, ceremonial. But the flame doesn’t crackle. It whispers. And Nova steps closer, compelled.

When she peers into the water, her reflection stares back.

But it is not her.

The face is hers, yes—but too still. Too perfect. Hair unnaturally neat. Eyes open but unmoving. Mauve lips pulled into a near-smile, cruel and calm. Her ring flashes brighter on the reflected hand than it does on her own. Its center—normally colorless crystal—glows faintly red.

Nova jerks back.

The flame gutters. Smoke slithers up her spine. In the dark, something lilts to her—a blackened, melodic sound. You burn, too brightly. The words are her own voice—but wrong. Echoing, distant. She turns. No one is there. Her heart hammers. Nova opens her mouth to speak, again, but nothing comes out. 

The ring pulses once—hot.

And then, in the blink of an eye, she’s surrounded.

Whispers coil from nowhere, looping around her ankles like vines. Images strobe: a lightsaber igniting; her hands slick with blood; Din screaming her name in a ruined battlefield. A faceless enemy watching her. The sharp burn of failure in her gut.

The voice returns. You do not want to know what you are.

Nova clamps her hands over her ears. She’s shaking. Her knees buckle. The chamber warps around her. The ring on her finger is burning now.

And then—Din’s voice.

Faraway. Frantic. Real. She gasps, lurches, reaches. She comes out of the water like a blade. 

*

Nova breaks the surface with a sharp inhale, eyes wide, lips parted, soaked in steam and shivering. Din is already waist-deep, reaching her, holding her up. Her breath hitches like she’s trying to scream but can’t find the sound.

“Nova,” he breathes, pulling her close, bracing her against his chest.

She clings to him.

“I saw… something,” she whispers, barely audible. “But I don’t think it was the Force.” She swallows, hand ghosting around her temples, trying to jumble the words together to make more sense. “It didn’t feel like a Force vision,” she corrects herself, numbly, words slurring together. She’s not sure what she’s trying to protect.

Din doesn’t answer. Just steadies her. Cradles her in the rising mist. His fingers brush her hand—she’s hot to the touch; flushed. Fevered.

“Okay,” he whispers, finally, “let’s get you home.” 

Nova doesn’t speak as he leads them forward. She is silent, barely-moving, all the way back home.

*

Din wraps the cloak around her shoulders before the water has even finished sliding from her skin.

Nova doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t shiver, doesn’t lean in. She just walks forward, barefoot across the broken tiles, her hair dripping down her back like ink. Her silence is deafening, too loud. Din would beg a word off her, right now, if he could. It is a dark thing in the center of his chest.

Instead, Din follows three steps behind, torch in hand, the shadows on the walls skittering like creatures. The corridor stretches ahead, narrowing, winding back toward the surface. It feels longer now than it did before.

He watches the way Nova’s spine curves under the weight of nothing. He doesn’t say her name. She hasn’t looked at him once. His hand, furious, clenches tighter around the torch. Something’s wrong, deeply so. Not only with Nova, either—the palace itself is silent and not right. 

And he feels it now—like pressure building in the back of his throat, behind his eyes. He doesn’t have the words for it. He was never trained to name spirits or forces or curses. But he’s hunted enough to know when something is off.

Nova looked through him when she came up. Like she wasn’t sure he was real. And when he touched her hand—her ring was hot. Just for a moment. He thought he imagined it. Surely, it was the steam, or the adrenaline, or the weight of almost losing her again. But now… The feeling clings to him. Heavy. Like wet wool over beskar. Like an albatross hung around his neck. Ahead of him, dancing in the light of the flame he’s carrying, Nova keeps walking.

Her footsteps are slow but measured. Controlled. Like she’s afraid of what will happen if she moves too fast. He wonders if she even knows where she is. If she remembers. At the first bend in the tunnel, Nova pauses. Doesn’t turn, though. She stands there, her head tilted slightly, eyes trained on something he can’t see.

“Nova,” Din says softly. “Let’s keep going.”

She nods once. Wordless.

They resume. He watches her more than the path ahead—not because he doesn’t trust her footing, although he’s worried about that, too. 

Because he doesn’t trust what’s in her skin.

Din hates himself for it, he does. But it burrows deeper the longer he walks behind her. The memory of her hands around his throat—how strong she was. How absent she looked. She apologized. She cried. He forgave her the instant it happened, she has to know that. But—

He can’t shake the vision of it from behind his eyes, and he hasn’t stopped seeing her green eyes flood black. Vacant and cruel, right before his eyes. He can’t stop it from replaying on a loop. Not now, and not while she was in the water, and not while they begin their slow journey back to the palace.

The light from the torch flickers. Nova’s silhouette elongates ahead of him. Din hates this. 

He loves her. He would die for her. Has almost died for her. But he doesn’t know how to reach her right now. If Luke were here, maybe. If Ezra, and his strange fucking parasympathetic connection with Nova, were here either—maybe then, too. Leia, Hera, Ahsoka—Din cycles through the Jedi and Rebels that he knows, that may be able to shake her out of it, but he comes up empty. 

Not with the Force, not with words, not even with touch.

The woman he married is still here.

But something else is, too.

And he doesn’t know how long he has before it shows itself again.

*

Long after dusk, the ship returns to the palace. The stone floor chills Nova’s bare feet as she walks the long corridor toward their quarters. Her wet hair drips with each step, dotting the obsidian tile in uneven intervals. She disappears up the curve of their staircase; doesn’t look back.

Din watches her go. Even under the helmet—especially under the helmet—she can feel his eyes on her. A sentinel watch, sharp and deliberate.

The doors to the palace seal softly behind them, muting the outside world. The air inside is warmer, drier, but it doesn’t feel safer. Nova, exhausted, almost timid, doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t ask for him to follow.

She turns the corner and disappears into their suite, the noise of the door hissing shut echoing in the absence of the activity from earlier. 

*

Din lingers in the hallway, water trailing from the joints of his armor, steam rising faintly from where the warmth inside meets the cold of Mandalore’s stone bones. His helmet is still on. He doesn’t take it off.

He breathes, once, sharp. Then he turns.

He needs answers. Needs to feel like he can do something. Like he’s not just standing here while the woman he loves slowly breaks in front of him.

Din doesn’t follow Nova to their suite. Instead, he turns on his heel, heads for the war room.

It’s long past the hours the Rebels and Mandalorians usually keep in here. So the space is dimly lit, its glow cast in soft reds and tactical blue. The map table hums with data—fleet movement, resistance channels, Mandalorian patrols—but none of it matters when Din steps through the door.

Bo-Katan doesn’t look up. Her arms are folded tight, one foot braced on the edge of the table. She stares at a glowing node in the Mid Rim like she could kill it just by thinking hard enough.

Wedge is the one who turns, blinking when he sees Din. His expression breaks first into worry, then expectation. “Is she—?”

Din nods. “In the fresher. She woke up last night.” He clears his throat, impreceptibly—he can still feel the knot of Nova’s possessed, dark hands twisted around his neck. “We just got in.”

Bo-Katan’s head lifts now, slow. Her gaze sharpens. “She went out?”

“To the mines,” Din says.

Silence.

“The mines,” Bo-Katan echoes, flat.

“She asked me to take her.” He’s hoarse, isn’t he? His words are coming out ragged. 

Bo-Katan’s jaw works. “The mines,” she repeats again, and Din can hear worry in her voice. Disguised behind the blade of it, as always, but there. 

He presses his hands into his eyes, regretting not taking his helmet down with him. “Yes.” 

Bo steps away from the table, arms still folded, cloak swinging behind her. “So, what? Novalise  wakes up after nearly a full moon cycle of being—stunted, out, whatever the hell you want to call it—and you don’t call for us? You just…bring her down to the mines of Mandalore?

Wedge shoots her a look. “Bo—”

“No,” she says, calm and cold. “Let him explain.”

Din’s shoulders stay square. He doesn’t fidget. “She wasn’t afraid, Bo-Katan, she wanted answers.”

“That’s the problem,” Bo-Katan snaps. “She doesn’t need to be down in that place when she’s—” Her voice cracks in the middle, though only just. She closes her mouth like she’s said too much.

Wedge steps in. “Did something happen?” His eyes dart warily between the two of them—sensing the tension, rife more than usual, on opposite sides of a conflict, yet again—but he’s confused. In the dark. “Something else, other than the obvious?”

Clearly, Bo-Katan hasn’t let Wedge in on the conversation they had in the hallway, Din’s arm against her throat. 

Din doesn’t answer right away. Not because he doesn’t want to—because he doesn’t quite know how. His arms feel heavier than they should. The smell of steam and ash still clings to his skin. When he inhales, he can’t get a read on Nova’s scent anywhere. He clears his throat, grateful that the turtleneck he always wears beneath his armor covers the map of his mottled neck. “She saw something,” he says finally. “In the water.”

Bo-Katan stiffens. “A Force vision?”

Din shakes his head, resolute. Then, slowly, “She hasn’t told me what she saw. But I don’t think it was a vision—not like ones she’s seen before.”

“Did she lose time?” Wedge asks. “Did she pass out?” He swallows. Older than all of them, Wedge is, but right now, he looks almost childlike. Din studies him, carefully, a dull ache sparking up in the hollow of his chest. 

“Not in the mines.” Din clears his throat again. “But she was underwater for a while.”

Bo-Katan shakes her head, pacing now, slow and frustrated. “You made it worse, Din.” Her voice isn’t accusatory, and that’s what knifes at him. 

Din’s brow furrows. “She came back up. She’s still here, okay? She’s awake again—”

“For how long?” Bo snaps, turning to face him. “How long until she doesn’t come back at all? She hasn’t been right since Hoth. She hasn’t been Nova since before that.”

Wedge’s voice is softer. “Do you think she’s been…compromised?” He looks away, eyebrows knitting in pain. “By whatever’s inside her?” 

“I think,” Bo says, quiet now, “something’s dragging her under. And we’re all pretending not to see it, and that’s not—” she shoves a hand over the desk, papers fluttering over the war room floor. “Helpful,” Bo-Katan finishes, finally, breathing heavily through her nostrils, “to Nova, or any of us.” 

Din shifts. His hand brushes the edge of his glove. He doesn’t speak about the heat of the ring on Nova’s skin. Or tell them about the moment in the water, her reflection not matching Nova’s face. He files it away like he always does, on a need to know basis, and right now, he’s afraid of what Bo-Katan and Wedge will say. 

“She’s trying,” Din says, low. “Whatever this is… she’s fighting it.”

“Is she?” Bo doesn’t blink. “Or is she just pretending to, for your sake?”

The blow lands where it’s intended to. Din’s jaw tightens. Wedge exhales sharply and turns away from them, both hands gripping the edge of the holotable now.

“She’s not pretending,” Din says, lower than usual, no vocoder to distill it for him. 

Bo’s voice cools again. “Then what is she hiding?” The room falls quiet. The map flickers.

Wedge straightens. “Is she in danger, Din?” A soft thing in a room gone sharp. “Is she dangerous?”

“I don’t know,” Din says. And it, he realizes, is the only answer he’s had all day, and it is the worst answer of all. He won’t tell them, he decides. He will not speak a word about how Nova flooded back into herself, her hands knitted around his neck. 

Bo-Katan turns back to the map. She taps a finger on a blinking red icon.

“We don’t have time for ghosts,” she mutters. “Not with Thrawn building in this galaxy again. If she’s unstable—”

“She’s not a liability,” Din cuts in. “She’s a commander. She’s your Mand’alor, Bo-Katan, for fuck’s sake—”

“She was,” Bo corrects. “What’s happening now, Din?” She blinks. “Do you honestly think Nova should be leading any of us right now, as Mand’alor or into battle?” 

The silence between them is jagged.

Din steps back from the table, glancing once toward the hallway. He’s said too much already. Not enough. He’s not sure. “Nova needs rest,” he says. “Let her have that. For now.” He starts to walk away, then stops. “She’s sick. If anyone asks, she’s sick, and contagious, and—”

“Yeah,” Bo-Katan says, miserably, “that’s what I’ve been telling everyone since she first went down, Din.”

Wedge just nods, barely. A corroboration. He looks like he wants to go after Din, but he stays put—leaning back over the holotable, both of them in the blue of the projected stars. A line has been drawn, and Din can feel it down to his teeth.

In response, Din turns and leaves.

*

Nova stares at her reflection in the mirror. It is fractured and unwell, this thing inside of her, and it sluices through her veins. Her hands tremble. She knits them together at her bellybutton, the familiar hunger ripping through her stomach. Her hair has sprung back up into its curl pattern, and she tries to find the edges of herself—her mother’s face, her father’s eyes. Rebel Commander, Mand’alor, Jedi. 

The thing coiled deep inside of her flexes. Novalise, it beckons. 

She meets her eyes, and they flicker black. A blip, a tiny piece of it, and then it’s gone. 

It’s not morning. It’s never morning. Not out here, in the crush of space. 

They are in a windowless room. They are in transit, in limbo. 

Din’s going stir-crazy. He watches Novalise, steady, eternal. He doesn’t need the mask, not in here, not at all, really, not anymore—the woman sleeping by his side is something so much holier than his Creed. But his fingers are still clutched around it. He’s not sure if that still qualifies as religion. If he can pray to the helmet like he used to. If he can truly pray at all. 

When Din does pray, it’s not to the Maker. It’s not a vow to the Mandalorian Creed. It’s to the stars around him, above him, the ones that surround him now, that Novalise’s head will be safely returned to her body. That she won’t slip away. Not into the ether. Not into the pinpricks of light she’s so devoted to. She shines in the dark, his Nova. His locus, his temple, his fixed luminous point. 

He wants to believe in her the way she does in goodness—steadfastly. Without question. But right now, she’s… altered. Made darker. Flickering around the edges. 

He doesn’t think anyone else has noticed. Wedge probably would’ve, at this point, if he were here. He knew Nova before she was Nova at all, and there’s an inextricable thread that loops them together, that is woven as tight as family. Bo-Katan probably knows, from thousands and thousands of miles away, that something is off. Her sharp eyes are always trained on Nova. Her bloodhound nose picks up signals almost immediately. And Grogu, sweet, eternal Grogu—with his father’s steadiness, with his mother’s heart—touches those little fingers to Nova’s collarbone and can feel it in words that none of them can name. 

Din takes stock of all of this. The room is still pitch-dark. He can see Nova’s outline, shimmering. He’s not sure if he actually can, or if he’s just memorized her shape, but the semantics don’t matter. She’s sound asleep, a tiny whistling noise coming from her nose. And his heart, how it aches in his chest. 

“Nova’s different,” he imagines himself saying. He can’t figure out who. He needs someone like her to take a look, inspect her, interrogate her in a way he can’t. He doesn’t know what the warning signs look like for a Jedi—when they’ve tipped over into another world entirely. But that’s the problem, and that’s why Din can’t ever picture who he’s saying those damning, strange words to—Nova’s always lived in a different world than he has. She’s made of more—of starlight and shine and magic, magic he has never touched, a kind of divinity he used to thrash for, fight for, kill for, and yet—

She’s haunted. But more than that, she’s taken something out of the dark and transfigured it, transfixed it. She’s made it her own. 

And yet, there’s nothing in this galaxy or the next that could keep him from this kind of holiness. Din Djarin has spent this lifetime bringing people to their knees. Cutting off heads of hydras, slashing through blood and flesh and bone, and he’d beg for forgiveness over and over and over and over if it meant he could worship at the altar of Novalise Andromeda Maluev Djarin—savior of worlds, star in the sky, and the holiest thing he’s ever held in his filthy fucking hands. 

There’s something off about her. Something different. 

And yet. 

Din presses his hand into his tired eyes. He’s weary. Beaten-down. He wants to shake something, to take it in his hands and make meaning out of it. To grab the thing haunting Nova by the throat and force it out of her. To cut it down to size, into piecemeal. But whatever it is inside of her, and he doesn’t know if this ghost that’s chasing her around is a Jedi thing, or a Nova thing, and he cannot hurt her or he will blame himself forever. 

A tiny, terrible part of him whispers: Ezra would be able to fix it. The earlier version of that sentence is Luke would be able to fix it, but Din knows Luke, trusts him, knows what he lacks in subtlety he makes up for in flamboyance and kindness in equal measure. Luke Skywalker, according to Nova, according to everyone else in these circles—well, he’s kind of a big deal. Luke is to the galaxy publicly what Nova is to Din privately, and he knows enough about the man to trust him with his kid’s training and his wife’s heart. 

But Ezra Bridger—Din doesn’t know him. Nothing past visions and reverence; mystery and intrigue. He is a man who exists but doesn’t, and he lives in Nova’s head. And as much as Din knows Ezra is the key to fixing so many things, that he’s good, selfishly, irretrievably, he is jealous. It festers inside of him like rusted steel. Like an open wound. He is not proud of it, this enormous, awful feeling, but he cannot tamp it down. 

Din wants to be the only man who lives in Nova’s head. And he is certainly not good. Not pure. Not made out of the light. He is a bullet made of beskar, a steel-sharpened blade. It festers inside of him, an open wound. He wants to be good, to be worthy. 

To be deserving of the prayers that leak out of his covered mouth.

And yet, this impossible quest is now close to home, to something Nova considers holy—the remainder of the Rebel Alliance, her legacy, her roots, and he cannot let this feeling rear its ugly head. Can’t let it out of the cell he keeps it in. He is both jailer and prisoner, and it haunts him. 

Everyone on the Ghost is carrying their own ghosts. And he’s here again, at the intersection of ghosts and religion, of haunting and the Creed. And Novalise, in the middle of it all, in the middle of everything.

Circles. Din’s thinking in circles. 

He needs to get off this fucking ship. 

Nova inhales—sharply—once, twice, and then she jackknifes upwards, waking up like she’s fighting a war. One she’s losing. 

Din is on her in a heartbeat.

*

“Did I wake you?”

In the dark, Din shakes his head. Nova can feel it. She could even without any part of their bodies overlapping, even though they are right now, entangled like roots. She moves in closer, trying to shake the dreams from her head. To come back down to earth. Pressing her hand to the metal above her head, reassuring herself she’s safe, she’s okay, she’s herself— 

“What?” 

That word—it’s so soft. Nova closes her eyes, pressing the heel of her hand to her heart like that can manually stop the racing. She wills it to quiet, for everything to sink back down to normal, but panic is still leaking from her like a sieve, running like adrenaline through her veins. “What?” she repeats back at Din, deflecting. 

“What were you dreaming about?” 

Nova shifts in the vantablack. “That’s always the question, isn’t it.” 

A beat. “Novalise.” His voice is delicate, knowing. 

It makes her want to kiss him on the mouth and shove him away in equal measure. It shocks her, the violence of that—the intensity. In the quiet secrecy of their hideaway, she digs her fingernails into her palm, enough to draw blood, to gore the rest of the darkness out. Nova takes a steadying, stuttered breath. 

“Teeth,” she whispers. “So many teeth.” 

Din is quiet. “Is that a metaphor?” 

Nova manages a mirthless, tired smile, even though he can’t see her. “Most nights, I hope it is. This one? I don’t think so.” 

“Nova,” he says, so quiet. 

Nova sighs, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “It comes in flashes.”

“The teeth?”

The sickening thrash of all of it. That’s her answer. But Nova doesn’t know how to vocalize that—that she, child of the light, has been bathed in darkness, swaddled in it. It’s started to become familiar, and she hates it, but she is so tired of fighting an upward battle. 

“Yeah,” she mumbles, unceremoniously, praying that’ll be the end of it. She shifts closer to him, burying her nose in Din’s neck. He smells like metal and cinnamon, like always, but there’s something else on his skin—mint, maybe? It smells foreign, like the interior of this ship, and decidedly not the Crest, and not Kicker, and that makes her heart ache even worse. 

Din’s quiet. Pondering. Nova wrestles with wanting to tell him everything—Sparmau leaking back into her dreams like poison; Thrawn’s deep, unsettling voice. The ones where she’s fighting the unnamed villains that slice through her head. And the worst ones, the ones that feel so dangerous and raw that it makes her want to claw her eyes out—where she hurts Din. Where she hurts Grogu. Where Nova is not Novalise at all. 

“I can’t… speak it aloud,” she whispers slowly, so quietly it’s just a breath. “I can’t even put words to it. It’s just… darkness.” It’s both the truth, and not, and obfuscating it makes Nova feel sick, but she puts a hand over her stomach and presses hard, forcing herself to swallow it down. “I don’t know what to do, Din.” 

Seven small words; the weight of the world. They settle around Din and Nova’s entwined bodies, settling in like snow. Lethal and cold and dangerous, blanketing them in it. 

Din’s quiet. Observant. Nova can sense it, the feeling of his brown eyes on the side of her face, tracing it from memory. She swallows, trying to keep the tears at bay. She feels—off-kilter. Sideways. Like the version of herself she used to be able to wear like a shield—unbreakable, indomitable Novalise, rebel girl and starchild—was left behind on Mandalore. Like she’s wearing the version of that Nova’s skin, but the second she embarked on this journey, she left her behind. Like she’s possessing herself. 

And Nova can’t undo it. She feels wrong.

“You do what you’ve always done,” Din says, finally, and the words that she used to live and die by feel like a knife now. “You fight back.” 

“I am,” Nova manages, heavily, angrily, “so tired of fighting.” 

Din doesn’t speak, but she can feel his soft exhale in the dark. He moves closer, always closer. Something in Nova flares. She can’t tell if it’s want or anger, and the blurring of that line terrifies her.

“I need you,” Nova whispers, needing the words to be true. She reaches for Din, tracing down the line of his torso, reaching to cup him between his legs.

A hand shoots out to stop her. Lightning-quick. His grip is unyielding. It cuts so deep. Nova sucks in a wounded gasp. “No,” Din says, and there’s no warmth to it at all. “You don’t.” 

Nova recoils, blinking back sudden tears. “Din—?” 

“You are using this,” he whispers, stroking a thumb over her cheekbone, “me, as a bandage for what you’re feeling. I want you in every way but this, cyar’ika. Something is wrong, and you cannot use me to drown out that feeling. It won’t make it go away.” 

Nova feels a knife somewhere through her heart. It surges into her, white-hot panic. “Please—” 

“Novalise.” Her name feels distant, like it’s echoing from faraway, a place that isn’t this ship, a place that maybe isn’t even out in space at all. “Stop.” 

She sucks in a breath, shattered. “Din,” Nova breathes, ragged, heartbeat thumping off something wild. “Please touch me—” 

“No.” 

She pulls away from him. Violently. Nova digs her nails back into her bloodied palm, shaking when she realizes this is real, very much not a nightmare, and the glitter and snap of the jaws of darkness begin crooning at her. She is wrong. Something is definitely, decidedly wrong, and she is teetering on the edge of losing it, and she is exhausted, bone-weary, and there’s flames licking down her throat, between her legs, and she wants to be voracious, to feed, to drown everything else out with the thrush of Din inside of her—

Something snaps. From deep inside of her. A low, keening noise, the one she was making—it dissipates, suddenly. Nova feels—strange. She stands up, stick-straight, sweaty, freezing. 

“Novalise.” 

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t even breathe. There’s a low scratching sound, coming from inside of her, gnawing. 

“Nova, you need to tell me what was in your dream.” 

She doesn’t move. She feels feverish, but this is a different kind of fever than the one she felt when she was slick with need, wanton, heavy. Nova feels—unhinged. 

“Me.” 

But her tongue—her tongue is not her own. The snarl that rips out of it is something else. Nova can feel it, the taste of it, and it’s wrong and bloodied and so awful that she puts her palm to her hand and screams into it. 

Din is on her in a second. “Baby—?” 

That word—it is not theirs. Not without danger preceding it. Nova thrashes, once, twice—she is undone and desecrated. Her body is not her own, it is a channel, a conduit, and the Not-Nova, the ones from all of her darkest dreams—she is slithering around inside of her, whispering, crooning, seductive, and Nova cannot grab herself, hold the evil at bay. Bring herself back into the light. 

Din surges forward, catching her body, holding her, cradling her. 

“Novalise.” 

She surges back into her body like a crescendo. A wave. An electric thrum exploding. Nova shudders, and Din flips the lights on, and she looks at him in confusion, because they were not on this ship, her soul was on a different plane, like she was caught between worlds, and Din’s holding her in his arms, his bare hands. He is not a Mandalorian, not protected from her in beskar and bullets, not behind a shield. He is a man, and, Nova realizes, sweat-slick and freezing, he is breakable. 

He’s looking at her like she’s—a ghost. 

Nova can feel the tears welling up in her eyes. She’s thankful for them, this proof that she is herself. She is emotional and undone, yes, but she’s not unhinged. She does not belong to the darkness. Din wipes the pad of his thumb across her mouth and it comes back bloody. 

“What,” he repeats slowly, softly, so gently it aches, “happened in your nightmare?” 

“I wasn’t myself,” Nova whispers, “and when I woke up, it stayed.” 

Din blinks. Fear is so foreign in his eyes. She looks up at him, half-lidded, through wet lashes. 

“I don’t know what to do,” she repeats. 

This time, he doesn’t tell her to fight. He doesn’t tell her anything. He just stares, and Nova can tell how scared he is. Unshakable, unbreakable Din Djarin—she’s terrified that she will become his undoing. 

“Nova,” he whispers.

Something else snaps. Thunders. Strikes like lightning. She stands up, stick-straight—like she’s just been blinked back into reality. “What just happened?” 

His eyes, barely recognizable in the dark, widen at her. “You woke up screaming. I asked what you dreamed about. Then you… Leaped out of bed. Onto the floor.” 

Nova stares. “What happened in between?” 

He goes to reach for her, and Nova flinches. Flinches. Not because she doesn’t trust Din’s hands on her—because it’s the only thing she trusts right now, the only thing that’ll keep her anchored. “I didn’t—I didn’t touch you?” Something flares low in her stomach. She thinks, this time, that it’s danger beckoning. 

Din rears back like he’s been slapped. Nova can’t tell if it’s from her flinch—so loud, so bright, even in the darkness—or if it’s from her words. 

“You woke up,” he whispers, “and got out of the bed like it was made of fire.” 

Nova swallows. She can’t get a grip on reality. It’s seismic, kaleidoscopic—she can’t make out what’s real and what isn’t, and she clenches her fingers harder down on her hand. “What happened in between?” She’s repeating herself. She’s not making sense. 

“You told me you dreamed of teeth. That you were scared of yourself. And then you leapt out of bed, away from me.” His voice is low, strained with something. Anger,  Nova realizes, anger, and probably confusion, but he’s schooling his tone to be as neutral as possible. 

“Away,” she repeats, “from you.” 

Din nods. She can’t see much, but if she could, Nova would be watching his jaw clench, the muscle jumping as Din grits his teeth together. 

“And you’re mad at me for that?” She can feel the sick swell of anger taking over her own body, and Nova tries to fight it, shut it out, but it feels—good. Alive. More alive than she’s felt in weeks. Since defeating Sparmau. No—since Din chased her down like prey on Naator. “You’re mad?” Her voice is breathy, low. 

“No.” 

“I don’t believe you.” Nova’s hand reaches out, flicking on the dim light. Din is silhouetted by the bulb behind him, and his face is contorted—with anger, maybe, but also fear. She can smell it on him. She wants to slam herself into him, to have it burn her down, to drown out all of the noise. But she doesn’t move. She just watches him. “I don’t think,” Nova whispers, even-keeled, all ice, “this counts as running from you.” 

It’s not fair. That word carries such a weight. She wants to take it back the second she says it. Nova swallows, blinking, that anger de-crescendoing out of her faster than it spreads. She feels sick. 

“Din—” 

“You want to play it like that?” 

“No.” Nova takes a step backward, clenching her nails back into her palm, feeling fresh blood whisper across the new cuts. “No, I don’t want to play at all. I’m sorry—” 

“I followed you into the darkness,” Din says, and there’s nothing there, no emotion, and somehow that sluices through her even deeper. The blade of his words is so sharp. “You cannot go anywhere I couldn’t find you. That place doesn’t exist.” 

But it does, that monstrous, traitor inside of her whispers, because I belong to something more, and there are places I go that Din cannot follow. 

“Din—” 

“If you’re trying to get me to hurt you,” Din grits out, “you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that.” 

Her heartbeat, her pulse—both skyrocket. “Why would I want you to hurt me?” But Nova does. She wants to be annihilated by her Mandalorian. She wants pain from him, pain that drowns out the ghosts inside of her, deep enough that she could rise from the depths anointed. Reborn. Renewed. She needs something holy to cling to, to carve her true self out of.

“You need to come back to me.” 

She blinks. That cuts, but not with sweet silver blades. With something serrated. Dulled. She steps back as Din steps forward. 

“I haven’t gone anywhere—” 

“We both know,” Din whispers, “that’s not the truth.” 

“Something,” Nova says, “is wrong with me.” 

It’s like those words wake him right up—startled out of a dream. Not the one of her sick reflection in the mirror—something that’s held Din equally as captive. 

“Nova—”

But her name and haunted look in Din’s eyes is interrupted by three sharp knocks at their door. 

*

The door unlatches with a cold hiss. Hera stares at both of them. Din can feel her gaze hanging heavy on Nova, her sweat-slicked skin, her bloodied lips, her hair raging like a wildfire around her face. She is barely clothed and he is helmeted, half-armored, and he knows what this looks like, and it makes him feel sick. 

But Hera just blinks once, twice, then rights herself. She carries herself like both a mother and a soldier. It reminds Din so much of Nova. “I’m sorry,” she says, both crisp and genuine. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we have a problem.” 

Din squares his shoulder. Nova wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. She snaps back into herself—Mand’alor, Jedi, Rebel, all in equal measure. Now that it’s back, written into the code of her DNA, it makes it even more obvious that the Nova he was just interacting with was… wrong. 

“What?” 

Hera swallows, digging her hands into the pockets of her bomber jacket. “You need to come to the cockpit.” They file after her, Din feeling naked and undone without the rest of his armor. He watches Nova as she follows Hera up to the front of the Ghost. She plucks Grogu—asleep—off the copilot’s chair and settles down into it, eyebrows knitted down the middle. 

“Before I play this,” Hera says, “I need you to know that I trust Wedge Antilles with my life at this point.” 

Nova recoils. Din can feel his heart sink. 

“Me too,” she offers up. Din nods once. Sharply, in assent. 

“Great,” Hera says, “but I am also not listening to the warning he explicitly gave me. So.” A pause. She’s watching Nova closely. “And if you want to heed it, you are allowed to. I will walk into this fire alone. I would prefer not to, but I will.”

Din’s frustrated. But Nova—Nova offers Hera a tiny smile, a spark of something he hasn’t seen in days, and he cocks his head to the side, ready to follow her into the flames. All over again. “I,” Nova says, gently, evenly, “have explicitly ignored many warnings Wedge Antilles has given me for the sake of doing something stupid yet necessary. And the last thing I am going to let you do,” she continues, leaning forward to clutch Hera’s hand, which Din just now clocks as trembling, “is jump into that stupid yet necessary thing alone.” She pauses, squeezing down. “What happened, Hera?” 

Hera inhales, exhales. It’s shaky. Din watches her, carefully, through the silent safety of the visor. She leans forward, pressing a button on the screen. Din hears what Bo-Katan and Wedge are saying. He understands the situation—Thrawn’s massive Star Destroyer hanging over Bespin and Hoth like a bad omen—but he doesn’t register how dark it is, how deep. All he can think about is that Bo-Katan—Bo-Katan—is shaking in the blue light, Hera’s hand is cinched so tightly over his wife’s that it’s about to snap, Wedge is telling them it’s a lost cause, and Nova—

Nova’s face is not what he expected. Tears, Din would have predicted—lots of them, silently streaming down her beautiful cheeks. An expression of well-earned grief. For the destruction of a planet she’s considered like home, for the last true active Alliance base, for the people that she’s protected her entire life. But Nova’s face has hardened into resolve—true, unadulterated determination. 

It’s the one she wore when she fought Sparmau. It’s the one she’s worn in every act of Rebellion, every time she’s been a savior. She is a warrior at her core, and the face she is wearing is nothing but fight and glory. She looks like that version of Novalise—her true self—is slowly waking up.

There she is. Then, quieter: Thank the Maker. 

“I know Wedge said—”

“We’re going to Hoth.” Nova lifts her chin. “We’re going to fight.” 

Hera looks at her with fear and relief. Din can’t tell which one is winning. “We need fuel.” 

Nova nods. “Then let’s get it quickly.” 

“I should mention,” Hera says, slamming her finger down on the hyperdrive button, letting the Ghost thud out of warp, “we’re refueling on Corellia.” All of them lurch in the sudden drop, but they’re braced for impact, fortified with the muscle memory of living out in open space. 

Quietly, Din speaks through the modulator: “That’s convenient.” 

A smile glitters across Nova’s face. A true one. 

“I hope you’re prepared to fight Wedge on his warning,” Hera says, lowering the thrusters as they slowly start to sink onto the cesspit named Corellia. “Because when we land, you’re both going to find him and Bo-Katan.” 

Din shifts, refusing to display any of what he’s feeling. He is strong and stoic, a bullet made of beskar. He’s a Mandalorian warrior, and he is not afraid. Except the first time he and Nova were on Corellia, he killed a rogue bounty who would have made shrapnel out of her. And the last time he and Nova were on Corellia, he almost lost her to visions of Sparmau and herself. Death, Din has concluded, is in the air on this stars-forsaken planet. 

Corellia and Din Djarin are, decidedly, not friends. 

He sighs. Nova gleams. She looks over at him—full of knowing, that look, and something else he can’t entirely place—and extricates herself from the chair with the giddy grace only she has ever possessed, slipping back into their room to don more clothes than secondhand baggy trousers and a barely-there tank top. When he turns back around, Hera’s eyes are on his, dead-on, through the visor and all. She doesn’t miss much, Hera Syndulla. Against his permission, Din shrinks and shifts under her gaze. 

“Convenient,” he echoes, finally. “That fuel and the Mon Cala vessel are both down on Corellia.” 

She blinks slowly. “I wanted this reunion to be in less dire circumstances. But, for better or for worse, these are the lives that we’ve chosen to lead.” She sighs. 

Din observes her. Hera carries herself with the same precision, the same rigidity, that he does. What they lack in magic is made up for in skill. “Do you think this is a good idea?” He can’t tell if he means Corellia, or Hoth, or fighting at all, but the sentiment is the same regardless. Wary, murky. 

Hera lifts her chin. “I think this is war, and we can’t play it safe.”

Din nods. “I agree.” Hera holds his gaze, uncanny, those blue, discerning eyes, and he turns away, to go after Nova, to right the wrongness that they both held earlier—but Hera’s soft hand lands on his unarmored arm. He jerks away, like he’s been burned, instantaneously, and she rescinds her touch. Nearly as immediately. Din’s respected Hera from the second she rescued them, but even more so now. 

But her eyes—they burn with grief and loss and it hurts him to look at her head-on. He knows his own eyes burn with the same demons. It’s part of the reason he keeps his helmet on for the most part now. Din doesn’t know how to school his expression in the way non-Mandalorians do. But, he realizes, it doesn’t matter, because everyone in his life seems to see right through the visor anyway. 

“Din,” Hera says softly, “I loved a Jedi, too. It’s…difficult. I know what their world is like, and it’s full of horror and wonder that we cannot understand.” 

He stiffens. “Ezra?” 

A small, sad smile dances across Hera’s mouth. “Yeah. Ezra, too.” 

He pauses, turning back around to fully face her. “What happened?” His question is low, urgent. Probing. He feels like he’s betraying Nova, but he needs to know. “To your…other Jedi?”

Hera swallows. Her face is written with sadness. That’s not something Din normally notices, but it’s like a beacon, like—like the way Nova feels. Full to the brim of emotion, so big that it overflows. “He fancied himself a martyr, too.” A flash of her eyes on his. “Don’t,” she whispers, “let Nova give into that sentiment. The rebellion will live on without her, but it will never be the same.”

“Hera—”

“You love her?” With the weight of this galaxy and the next, he loves her. But Din can’t speak that aloud. He just manages one terse, fervent nod, and knows she understands. “Good,” Hera says, “then you keep that light alive.” 

And with that, she releases him, and the spores of terror that have been festering in Din’s stomach spread and spread. 

*

Nova doesn’t have armor. Doesn’t have anything, really, anything other than her own tank top and the pants Hera lent her, which must not have been Hera’s at all, because Hera’s got curves, but not like Nova’s hips and thighs, and these are belted tight around her waist. Her hair is hanging down her back, braided halfway, the rest of her rogue curls hanging loose out of the elastic. Her skin looks sallow, typical from spending so much time in the vantablack of space. Her lips are puffy, her eyelashes long and tangled, her torso wrapped in a shawl and one of the extra jackets hanging on the back of the Ghost. She smooths her hands over the front of the ill-fitting jacket—cropped above her waist, the sleeves too long—and wishes, for one of the only times in her life, that she did have armor. That she was just a Mandalorian, just the Mand’alor. That her biggest responsibility was uniting a people that had been razed and divided, not given to them in fragments—not this leader that was equal part Jedi and Rebel, with Mandalorian sprinkled in. 

Her reflection—it looks like her. Nova hitches in a breath, afraid to peer too close, afraid to see the Not-Nova looking back. In her dream, she had teeth that snapped and glittered, a gaping maw of horror and half-ness. But the only thing reflected is her face, her body, her eyes. Nova smiles, and it’s soft—echoing glories and morning, sunlight filtering through the cracks. No razors. No darkness. She feels relief spark up in her heart like an old friend, and she touches her fingers up to her reflection, willing it to stay. 

“Good enough,” Nova murmurs, and then she’s out the door. She presses her lips to Grogu’s wrinkled forehead on her way by, squeezes Hera’s hand with a silent promise, and looks up at Din—obscured, always, but she knows his eyes are locked tight on her like a tractor beam, like a place of worship, like… he’s watching her. Carefully. Steadily. Two things she doesn’t feel. “Ready?” For a minute, before he nods, she’s caught in it, suspended, the way he’s holding her hostage, captive. Safe.

“This goes without saying,” Hera murmurs, and Nova’s reverie is broken, “but please don’t take any risks down there. Get out, find the rest of the crew, and get back here.” She swallows. “We don’t have time to waste.” 

Nova nods. “Be safe. Getting the fuel. Corellia is…” 

“This place,” Hera says heavily, slamming her fist to disengage the hiss of the ramp, “is the least of my fears.” And the gangplank lowers, revealing the gray slush of Corellia’s crime-ridden, grimy surface. Nova inhales, exhales, grabs onto Din’s gloved hand, and walks down the ramp. 

Din has the tracking chip in his hand. Nova walks behind him, out into the abyss. His body is tensed, a steel bullet, a weapon of mass destruction. She keeps her face low, obscured from the light, but she can feel the seedy, dangerous gaze of the people that pass by her. She’s got nothing of worth, no pockets to pick, but her sabers are loud and vibrant on her belt. One light, one dark. There’s a metaphor in that, somewhere, but Nova is too busy watching Din as he dances through the low light of Corellia, powerful and precise as a lothcat. 

Once upon a time, she tried to barter with him. Back when he was just the Mandalorian and she was still Andromeda, lifetimes ago, ages back, what feels like years and years. To leave her here. On Corellia. Because she felt guilty—guilty that she wasn’t able to fend for herself, that he picked her up in the Crest, that they were strangers. It feels impossible now. To look at the man in front of her and see anything other than the love of her life, her locus, her true star. 

“What?” His voice is low, throaty. It filters through the modulator, slipping off into somewhere deeper, and Nova shivers. They step through an alley, a slice through two walls, puddles and brick littering the ground around them. “I can hear you.” 

Her eyebrows furrow. Nova takes one step, two, and then Din’s whirled back around, hooking a gloved hand under her chin. It’s bold and determined and vital, and Nova sinks into the black hole of his grasp. Slowly, Din cocks his head to the right and Nova thrills. 

“Hear what?” It’s barely a whisper. 

Din sighs, an exhalation, coming out low through the vocoder. Nova bites down on her lower lip, blinking up at him through half-lidded eyes. “Your thoughts,” he grits out, “are so damn loud.” 

Nova licks out a line over her split lip, and Din sags. Just for a second. Then his arms snap out, bracketing her on either side. She sinks back against the wall, body slamming into the wall with a sick, satisfying thud. “What am I thinking, then?” 

Din doesn’t move. “No.” 

Nova blinks. “No, what?”

Din blows out a breath, again, low and languid like a smoker. Nova’s heart clenches, then something lower, wetter. “You’re being,” he grits out, low, almost angry, “a fucking distraction.” His words cut through, like a knife. Nova loves the way it sings through her. “We have a job to do, Novalise. And we need to talk about what happened earlier. We have other things to finish first.” 

Nova knows. She knows. But frustration and want are pouring free from her, sluicing through her body, desperate and wanton. Din is the only thing that has ever silenced that panic—that’s ever made her quiet. “I know.” 

“People to save.” 

Reality floods back in. Just a little. Nova doesn’t put words to it, because it’s awful, it’s horrible, it’s venomous, the thought. That she’s so tired, tired of always being the savior, tired of chasing an impossible reality. That she wants to be selfish, to feel Din’s hands on her like a salve, like a resurrection. Like she could open her mouth and let him whistle in, dirty, filthy things exhaled, sweat dripping down to the steel floor. Like it could make the visions disappear, like it could flood out all of the weight hanging over her head. 

“I know,” she repeats, dully, but Din’s gaze is still on her, locked-in, seizing her closer and closer. 

“I’m not touching you.” 

Nova’s gaze flickers over him, to the arms that are clenched hard against the wall. “Not even a little?” 

“A little,” Din hisses, “with you, is everything. I can’t stop once I’ve started. And we have a mission to do. I’ll ask you again, Novalise. What do you want?” 

Nova bites down on her swollen bottom lip. Reality is running currents through her. She needs to get her head on straight. To remember what she’s here for—there is a planet at stake, there are people to save, and she is being selfish, so selfish, but the monster inside of her head is purring, and Din’s body is like an oil slick, and she is undone and starving. 

She knows—in the back of her mind, where rationality still lives, she is whispering to herself—Din will not touch her. Din will not drown her like she’s begging to be drowned. Novalise is starving. Emaciated—deprived of touch, touch she had hours ago, because Din’s body is both her heaven and her hell, and she is addicted to it. Addicted to the fix that is her husband, her Mandalorian, her weapon, the love of her life—she has a mission to do, she has the fate of the galaxy on her shoulders, and she’s hungry like an addict, and all she wants to do is feel Din sinking inside of her, rhythmic, seismic, pushing her down, deep enough where the only pain that exists is him, the only salvation is his hands, his mouth, his letting her breathe—

“Novalise.” 

She blinks. “What I want and what I need,” Nova whispers, shaking and undone, “are two very different things.” 

She hears the way Din’s breath catches in the modulator. “Nova—” 

“You know what I mean. We’ve been through this already.” She leans in closer. Her breath fogs up his visor. With the strength of a thousand stars, she wrenches herself free, ducking under Din’s arm and moving out into the maw of Corellia, needing to put distance between their bodies before she does something rash, before she gets on her knees, before she loses sight of her mission— 

“Nova,” Din calls behind her, his voice sharp and heady—needy—and Nova keeps moving, clutching the tracker in one hand, silently blinking out the correct path to Bo and Wedge, away from that dangerous, razor-sharp desire, because she will slit her throat with it if she stays here. She will give into it, into the plunge, and she will not be able to extricate herself. “Hey—” 

His hand closes around her wrist. It’s sweet, sweet relief. She snaps back around, so fast that they almost crash into each other, yanked back into the alleyway. “Don’t hide. Don’t run from me.” 

“I am not running,” she whispers, everything faint against the feeling of his touch against her skin, “I am losing.” 

Losing time, she means. But losing—grip. On herself. On reality. Like she’s been—drugged. Or like she’s living across different timelines, almost identical, but not close enough to match. She blinks, once, twice, and then Din’s surrounding her again, even as she tries to move forward. 

“What is going on?” 

Nova stops—almost letting Din collide with her, beskar and all—but she looks at him over her shoulder, sirenlike, dangerous—and catches exactly where she knows his brown, deep eyes are locked on her, laser-sharp. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know, and it terrifies her, because she is muddied and violet, pitch-dark with desire and shame, and Nova has never felt indecision like this before, this terrible seam ripped open inside of her stomach. She doesn’t know. 

She doesn’t know anything except the basics. She doesn’t want to fight—not anymore. She wants to win. She wants a quiet life with the man she loves, and she wants this galaxy out of turmoil, but the dark thing leaching inside of her stomach wants to be selfish, and it’s terrifying, and she has no idea how to put this into words—to be Novalise, just Novalise, the girl the Mandalorian picked up on Nevarro. Everything flashes before her eyes, lightning-quick, the beats of her life—from sacred touches to low breaths, to commlink calls to tender kisses, to sweat-slick sex to awful rainstorms of tears, to death, to life, to this moment. Can we start over? Nova thinks, reality cold and crisp in Corellia’s mangled air, and then— I feel…wrong—

“I can’t tell what’s real—”

“Wait.” Din steps closer, but the visor is pointed down at the blinking tracker in Nova’s hand, suddenly gone silent. “They’ve dropped off.” He puts his hand to his helmet, and Nova watches him, dazed, shaking, like she’s woken up from a dream, guilt running like ice through her veins. “Bo-Katan? Can you hear me?” 

No answer. Static. Silence. Then—Nova hears it, faintly, the incredulous, frigid voice of Bo-Katan Kryze. It’s one of the best sounds in the universe. “Din?” 

Din’s body sags, just a little, and Nova feels the same sweet relief coursing through her, overriding the sick sense of awfulness she feels—at letting want overtake need, at wanting something selfish rather than something more—and she swallows it down. This is not the place for want. This is the place for fighting. 

Din projects the frequency outward, grabbing Nova and dragging her in close, close enough that the two of them can hear it, but the quickening dark of the heart of Corellia around them doesn’t. “We’re in the middle of the city,” Bo-Katan says, “hiding the best we can. Din, this place is crawling with—” 

“I know.” His voice, low through the modulator, vibrates against Nova’s ribcage with her body pressed almost flush against his. “Don’t move, okay? Stay where you are.” 

“Not an option,” Wedge cuts in, “there’s troopers and bounty hunters everywhere, and the Mon Cala we were with sold us out.” A blaster fires. “Look, we’ll hotwire a ship and come meet you. Where are you located? Still in hyperspace?” 

“No,” Nova says, and there’s yelling and fire through the comm, and panic replaces relief and guilt in equal measure, “we’re on Corellia, we’ll come to you. What’s your coordinates?” 

Silence. 

“Wedge?” 

“You,” he says, sourly, “are a terrible listener.” Someone shouts, and Wedge curses under his breath. “We’re in the middle of Coronet Center. Do not come here—” 

It’s too late. Din clicks the radio off, stifling Wedge’s voice, and then he’s grabbing Nova’s hand in his. She looks over at him, silently resolving to figure it all out later, to pull herself together. His hand clenches in hers, and he nods, and then they’re running, entwined, into the heart of the storm. 

*

Din’s thoughts on Corellia hold fast. This place is crawling with unfriendlies—from the stormtroopers armed up to the nines with blasters and weapons to the bounty hunters with blades of steel to the men who keep looking at Nova sideways. The deeper and deeper they crawl, sinking into the pit of Coronet Center, Corellia’s capital city—it becomes clearer and clearer that no one here has good intentions.

His eyes slide over to her. Too much. Enough to take his eyes off the prize. Navigating this city is a hellscape on a normal day, but with their friends trapped in the belly of the beast and his wife unsure, unsteady—Din doesn’t feel in control.

He’s felt like that a lot lately. Out of control. He can’t figure out why. He wants, and that want pulses low inside of him. The desire to get the hell out of here whispers to him, wheedles, croons. It lives under his skin like a parasite. Back on Mandalore, before they left to go find Ezra, before they left for the Unknown Regions, Din told Nova he wanted to just go back to Naator. But that wasn’t possible. That’s not in her nature. She doesn’t abandon things. She doesn’t give into the same selfish haunts. She’s stronger than that. Than anything, really, even while she’s seeping through the cracks. If a woman could be forged from beskar, it would be Novalise. 

She’s walking like she’s injured something. Din watches her out of the corner of his eyes as Nova steps—gingerly, carefully—across the grayscale streets, littered with scrap metal and trash and terrible things. Needles. Bones. Corellia is a grifter’s paradise, and she does not belong here. Her hip, he thinks, something’s wrong with her hip. Probably still injured from the starfighter crash, and him sinking to the hilt inside of her hours ago probably didn’t help. 

“Stop looking at me with those eyes,” Nova whispers, but it’s playful. Lighter. 

Din shoots her a sideways look. “I’m not—”

She lifts her chin, swinging her head around to check the alleys behind her. It’s getting darker, and on Corellia, that means more dangerous. Nova’s hand finds her belt, where her yellow lightsaber and the Darksaber hang. She palms her own, then the Darksaber. Din watches this too. “I know where your eyes are at all times, Mandalorian.” Nova smiles, and, Maker, Din’s stomach lights up with butterflies. “Even under that helmet.” 

“You’re hurt.” 

Her face shutters. Just a little, but Din’s an expert in Nova’s micro-expressions. “Nothing I can’t handle.” 

He tilts his head to the side. “Can you please tell me what your dream was about?” 

Her face contorts. “It’s not related.” 

“Novalise,” Din sighs, “you are the worst liar I have ever met.” 

She narrows her eyes. “Me. Okay? Like I told you. I was myself, and then I wasn’t, and I keep hallucinating things, and the reason I need you to keep touching me is because it’s the only real thing I can hold onto.” Nova licks over her lip, tongue lingering over where it split back in the crash. Din wants out. He wants to gather Nova in his arms, jet out of here with the pack strapped to his back, shoot his way to Bo and Wedge from the air. He can feel eyes on them from the shadows, though, and anger flares in his chest. 

No. Not anger. Something worse.

Fear. 

“Nova—”

“No,” she whispers, but she grabs his hand for a second, squeezing down, “not here. We’ll talk about it all later, I promise—” 

He hears it before he sees it. A blaster, drawn out of his holster. Din ducks and yanks Nova down to the ground alongside him, razor-sharp and quicker than breathing. She doesn’t yell—in fact, she goes quieter, and when the shot ricochets off his armor, Din’s already got his own blaster out to return the fire. He doesn’t have his vibroblade, but he wishes for it; to sink between the notches of armor and sear into the trooper’s skin. 

They weren’t shooting at him. They were going for Nova. 

Her hand is already at her waist, but Din moves faster. He cuts forward, steel toes light against the Corellian ground, and he’s on the trooper before another shot can even hit the barrel of the enemy’s gun. He fires, once, twice, then kicks the dead trooper to the ground. Nova’s watching him, wide-eyed. 

“There’s more.” 

He whips back around, ready to fire. He doesn’t need to, though. 

Nova’s hand pulses over the sabers hanging on her wrist, and without a second’s hesitation, she’s ignited the blade.

Corellia doesn’t glow yellow. 

No. It flickers with the angry, pulsing energy of the Darksaber.

*

The Darksaber used to be heavy. Like it was resisting her. Not anymore, Nova realizes, as stormtroopers pour out of alleyways like ants, storming across the ground around them. Din’s quicker, a soldier—but she has a weapon in her hands that’s meant to be wielded. Once upon a time, killing was a haunting, awful thing. She still aims to stun, to disarm—not to cut down. But she could. With this blade in her hands, Novalise could bring an entire city to its knees. She moves like a Jedi and fights like a Rebel, and she cuts forward like Mandalorian. Simply. Like it’s written into her DNA. 

Din, in her periphery, is dropping trooper after trooper. But there’s… there’s more, coming out of the cracks, incessant. Nova knows that something is amiss. She can taste it in the air, heavy and metallic, the tang like blood. Corellia is crime-ridden, yes, but this is different. And then there’s other people, not troopers. 

Bounty hunters. 

“Din,” she calls, and he turns to look at her, and Nova can feel the panic flash, white-hot through her veins. They’re surrounded. Completely. She feels like she lost time—she was just cutting them down, cleaving through the air like it was nothing, leaving the troopers’ forces scattered. But she blinks, just once, and she’s surrounded, but white masks and evil eyes alike, and Nova feels adrenaline and fear slice her clean through. 

“Nova!”

But he’s choked out by the thrush of troopers, hundreds of them. Nova loses sight of him. She tries to cut through, and then a bounty hunter flashes his teeth at her, and she stumbles, the blade of the Darksaber snarling as Nova falters. 

“I thought you looked familiar.” 

Nova clenches her jaw. “I don’t think we’ve met.” But he looks familiar. His expression does, at least—darkness gathering there. 

He laughs, an evil smile curling across his face. She can feel the ranks closing in behind her. Nova lifts her chin, holding the weapon higher in her hand. “Oh, we’ve met,” he says, cocking his head to the side, a sick glint emanating from his eyes. “You’ve done a good job transforming yourself—Novalise, is it now? Come a long way since you were tied up like a prize on that ship.” 

Nova’s stomach clenches. “You—” 

“Shame Jacterr didn’t like his things to be touched.” He surges forward, hand outstretched to caress her body. “But he’s not here now, is he?” And Novalise explodes.

Fury swings forward, flooding everything else out. Nova screams out, cutting, cleaving, using the Darksaber as it was intended. A weapon fit for a king—in the hands of something more than that. Something stronger. Nova slices and knifes with the blade until there is blood on the ground and pink mist of a man in front of her, and she feels nothing. Just anger, red-hot, pulsating like lava, and she cuts through stormtrooper after stormtrooper, until she can see Din again, surrounded by bounty hunters.

“Hey!” Nova screams, loud enough to echo across the surrounding buildings, “Mandalorian!” 

Din’s head doesn’t fully turn—he’s blasting with one hand and choking out another trooper with the other—but the side of the helmet flashes her way. 

She holds up the Darksaber, blade still ignited, transfiguring everything into greyscale, and shouts again. “Catch.” She tosses it through the air, high above everyone’s heads. Din’s gloved hand snaps out to catch it. Perfectly. Like it has been his all along, like it belongs to him. Like it’s craved his touch, like it’s breathing a sigh of relief to be reunited with his hand. Nova offers him one radiant, glowing smile, and then she’s ignited her own lightsaber, turning everything to yellow, then to ash. 

Together, slowly, Din and Nova clear a path through the thrush of troopers and hunters, cutting fast and hard and away, and then—

Something happens.

She can’t see it. But she can feel it. Nova stutters—like her body stops working. She can’t describe it—this feeling. A shuddering. It rips through her like fire and shutters her defenses, and even with the saber in her hand, she feels—depleted, suddenly. Hair’s standing up on the back of her neck. 

And a second later, she knows why. Din cries out, a noise that she’s only ever heard him make when he’s wounded, a soldier cut down in battle. There’s a bounty hunter trying to pull his helmet off, another one gripping his neck, exposed, now, his tan skin a beacon in the dark. And even though Din is allowed to be Din now, Nova’s anger roars through her, the weight of an exploding star. She surges toward him, troopers crawling over her like vermin, like bugs, but she will not let anyone in this world take Din’s autonomy away from him, not again, not ever— 

“Novalise.” 

It’s her own voice. 

She turns. “Not now,” Nova whispers, cutting through white armor with her golden blade, trying to let everything drip out of her, trying to tap into that sense of magic that runs like a current through her bloodstream. 

“Novalise.” 

She turns. It’s not the version of herself from the nightmares. It’s the version of herself from the future, the one gilded and saintlike, untouchable—holy. 

“Help me,” she whispers. Bring me back, she means to say, and this version of herself smiles, reaching out to touch her face. “Get me closer, help me—” 

“Novalise.”

Exasperated, exhausted: “What?”

“You have all the weapons you need.” A beat. “Call it by name.” 

Nova closes her eyes, and when she reopens them, it’s like lightning has surged through her veins. Back when she was fighting Sparmau, all the Jedi had told her don’t throw it away. This was an echo chamber of that, a repeated cycle, an endless paradigm—call it by name. 

It’s one word. Her name. “Novay’lain.” It’s a whisper with the force of a scream. And all the light floods back into Nova’s body. Everything that was dimmed, covered in gasoline, or nightmared into reality—it stands no chance. To radiate. To shine. 

She tears through the rest of the troopers and hunters like an asteroid. She is singular, Rebel girl with the Force aerating through her bloodstream. She’s on Din faster than any of the rest of them can, and she’s swinging and cutting her blade through the air, white-hot and gilded. All of the darkness settles into her bones, the light shooting to the surface. She could wield the weight of the sun if she needed to, to get to him. The hunter prying Din’s helmet off is cut through the middle. Sawed off. Torso in two pieces. Nova doesn’t even blink. 

“Come on,” she whispers, dropping to her knees beside him. “Let’s get out of here.” 

Din spits something out onto the ground, splattering over the armor of the dead trooper at his feet. Blood. It looks like blood. He yanks his helmet back down, the illusion of the untouchable snapped back into place, and then he shakes his head at Nova, sighing. “I thought you’d never ask.” 

Electric, white-hot—that’s how she feels. Illuminated, yes. But on fire. Nova is moving with adrenaline that doesn’t feel borrowed. Not anymore. She is supercharged, a yellow blade, surrounded by silver and nettle, divinity and blood. 

They’re firing like bullets down alleyways. Din doesn’t have the tracker out anymore. She doesn’t have a hard and fast map of where Bo-Katan and Wedge are, but Nova doesn’t need it. She feels them, can hear their heartbeats, can sense their wounds. She turns, frantic, down another alleyway, and then Din’s hand slips out of hers. 

She stumbles, catching herself on either side of the alley’s walls. “Come on,” she whispers, gently, turning around to face him. “We have a mission to complete, remember?” 

“Nova—” 

“They’re right on our tail, Din,” she says, blinking rapidly, heart hammering a brutal rhythm out against her ribs. “Come on.” 

“Wait, no—” 

“Din,” Nova says, out of breath—why is she suddenly out of breath? She sags back against the wall, the light inside of her chest rapidly dwindling. Her vision is flickering. “Din—?” 

“Cyar’ika,” he whispers, “stop.” 

Nova does. She looks down. 

Impaled in her stomach is a blade. “Oh,” she whispers. Her vision blurs further, and then her knees are buckling, collapsing—

“Novalise—” Panic flashes through Din’s voice. “No, don’t you dare—” 

And then, like a dying star, everything goes pitch-black. 

*

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AHHHH I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!! this was such a headrush to write. i am SO excited to share this one, and i hope you're ready for the next chapter. i've already started writing it and man… i cannot wait to share it!!

thank you, as always and eternally, for reading, for being here, and for sticking with me <3

CHAPTER 7 COMING SOON!!! for day-to-day updates, follow me on tiktok @ padmeamydala :)

Everything is hollowed. Fucked out. The rest of the world filters away, vanishing. 

Nova drops to her knees, then crashes against the ground. Din’s not quick enough. Maker, it’s like he’s been trapped in amber. He’s fast, but he’s not fast enough. He cries out, the sound high and panicked through the modulator. Din sounds wounded, but he’s not the one that’s been stabbed. Nova’s white-faced, all the color leached out. She is held together with whispers and prayers, with nothing but him. 

She keeps fucking bleeding. His hands are doing nothing to staunch it all, leaving out of her like an oil spill. Something terrible is flashing in the back of his mind. Something that feels an awful lot like deja vu. 

This is how it must have felt, he realizes, horrified, frozen, when he got knifed with Sparmau’s poison dagger, and Nova had to keep him alive and pilot the shattered Mand’alor vessel away from enemy territory. The weight of the world, she holds it up. It slams into him like a Star Destroyer.

Din feels—bowled over. Scraped raw.

“Novalise,” he hisses. Her eyes flutter, rolling back in her skull. “Nova. Wake up.” It’s senseless. She is out entirely, on a different plane of existence, on a different reality. She’s so cold. Her blood pools around his gloved hands. She got hit deep. Somewhere critical. Fear leapfrogs up his throat. It tastes like bile. 

This is a fucking disaster. They should have never come here—to Corellia. To the Unknown Regions at all. Everything that’s happened since that damn distress call.They should have stayed in the stars, out there in the darkness, before any of this was real. If he could go back—he would pin her down back on Mandalore, before Nova decided to do this, to run headfirst into a rescue mission where she is within the line of fire. 

But that’s not who she is, his Nova. She cannot be caged. So he will be a monster for her. But this time… this time, he wasn’t fast enough. 

Din swallows, tries again. “Can you hear me?” 

It’s senseless. It doesn’t work. She’s passed out, which is likely a terrible sign, Din’s only passed out—clean, full out—a few times, and each instance, it was when he almost died. He keeps reliving Novalise falling to her knees, on repeat. He shakes his head, trying to clear it, trying to dislodge the memory. He hooks his fingers under the rim of his helmet, exposing his face. He doesn’t care who’s watching. He’s going to burn this entire planet to the ground. “Nova,” he whispers again. 

A miracle happens. Her eyes open. Blearily, pained, but they’re open. 

There’s something in his eyes. Din wipes the back of his bloodied glove across his face, realizing what it is when it comes back wet and clear. Tears. “Hey. Can you hear me?” 

“Ouch,” she whispers, voice croaking. Din almost laughs—laughs—in sheer relief. 

“Hold on for me,” he whispers, compounding the wound with his gloves. Maker, they’re dirty. Filthy. But he can’t worry about infection. Not now. Keeping Nova alive is mission number one. Hera will have bacta, needles, compounds—all of it, back on the ship. He’s seen her use up her dwindling supply on Nova already. He just needs to get her okay enough to get her back to the Ghost, then he can go save Bo-Katan and Wedge. He can do that. He can carry that weight. He won’t collapse. “Stay awake, baby.” 

Her eyebrows furrow. Nova coughs up blood spatter. Her pink lips are a ghastly shade of white, stained on the insides. “‘M trying,” she slurs. “What—what happened?” 

“That lowlife hunter,” Din snarls. His voice is a blade. He increases the pressure of his hands against her wound, and Nova whimpers. He has to steel himself, gritting his teeth down to refuse to rip his hands away. “Stabbed you. Deep. I’m gonna kill him.” 

“No,” Nova manages. Her hair is haloed out around her on the ground. Din bites down on his lower lip, fetid wind blowing over the both of them. It’s cold. Corellia’s temperate until it isn’t, but right now, it’s freezing. They’re not far from the makeshift battlefield—they’ve run a couple of klicks into the center of Coronet City, but the remaining forces of their enemy could very easily be on their six. “No need. Already did.” 

Love floods him. Din bites out a quick laugh. “Of course.” He shudders in a shaky breath. “Course you did, sweet girl.” 

Nova blinks up at him. “It hurts,” she manages, and her voice cracks down the middle. She’s putting on a brave face, his Novalise, but she’s in bad shape. “How much blood have I lost?”

Din leans down, presses a quick kiss to her clammy forehead. He’s deflecting, and he knows it’s apparent. He knows that Nova could see it written across his untrained face, but it doesn’t matter. Not more than evacuating her, now. He’s not answering that question. “I’m getting you out of here,” he promises, putting his helmet back on. “We’re jetting back to the ship. Gonna compress your wound, okay—” 

“No.” It cuts clean through. The airlocks hiss as he snaps his helmet back into place. Din stops, blinking at her through the visor. It’s been running her metrics in the absence of when it was last on his head. She’s lost so much blood. That fact keeps cycling through, entirely unhelpful, bringing him back to reality. This is—unfair. Royally so. She was saving him, chasing him, fighting his battles for him. Anger is aerating through his bloodstream, and Din swallows a growl in the back of his throat. Losing it won’t help anything. Won’t keep Nova safe from slaughter.

Maker, he really, really wishes it would. He wants to feel blood pouring out on his own hands. He wants to unleash vengeance. He wants to call revenge by name. 

“Nova. I need to bring you back to the ship.” 

“Not happening.” Her eyes flutter again, pupils unfocused. “‘M coming with you.” 

Din stares. “You can’t—” 

“They’re coming.” 

It’s so quiet. He doesn’t realize what she’s said at first—and then he hears it. The sound of footsteps. They’re not concealed. Not under the helmet. He could hear the bloodstream of a rodent with the combination of the Mandalorian mask and his fine-tuned senses. And that’s exactly what’s coming towards them right now—fucking vermin. He stands. A blade. His body becomes a blade. 

“Here.” Nova’s hand clenches at her side. “Take this—” 

“I am not,” Din enunciates, cold and flat through the modulator, “leaving you.” 

Nova holds his concealed eyes, just for a second, before she shutters hers in pain. “Take it, Din.” Her hand wraps around the shaft of it, and then she’s unclipping the Darksaber from her belt. 

He stares. “It’s not mine anymore—”

“Not the time,” Nova manages, breath uneven, “for saber-wielding semantics.” She wheezes, spitting out more blood, and Din’s panic flares again, a heat-spike, red-hot. “Do it.” 

He blinks at her. “I can’t.” 

“You can. Cut them down,” Nova whispers. Then she shoves at him—with so much more strength than he would have been able to muster—and it propels him to his feet. “No mercy.” She cracks a wan, exhausted smile. It curves up, half-scarlet, and fuck if it isn’t the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “Then you come back to me.” 

Din Djarin disappears. The Mandalorian takes over. It whistles through his bloodstream, the strength of it. He is a weapon, a blade, the thing that lives in the darkness. He hasn’t been this—the beskar bullet, the metallic monstrosity—for years long past. Before Nova. He can still don the mask and pretend, but this is different. Troopers and hunters alike surge around the corner, and he flexes, breathes, unloads.

No living thing stands a chance. 

*

Pain. 

That’s the only word that registers, the only feeling Nova knows. It comes on like a lava surge, white-hot and deafening. She looks down, blurry-eyed, at the gash in her stomach, a knife wedged tight into the muscle of her pre-existing scar. It’s almost laughable, the irony of it all. 

“Okay,” she whispers. The world shifts around the edges, elastic. The knife squelches in her abdomen, and Nova winces. “You,” she chastises herself, “can do the hard thing.” 

She can. Novalise is very good at doing the hard thing. The problem is—she knows the blade is plunged into something bad. Her liver, maybe. Her spleen. In a divine comedy, this knife sliced through her sinew in the same place Sparmau’s poison dagger did to Din, back on Hinari, back what feels like a lifetime ago and is only a handful of months. Nova felt stronger then, but in all reality, she’s stronger now. 

It’s facing death for what seems like the umpteenth time, stuck with a relentless blade. She’s here again. She’s always here, it seems. 

Novalise has seen so much hurt. This same scar has been carved into her skin like an awful melody, muscle memory. She’s suddenly transported—back to when she was still a teenager, back when she ran right into the hornet’s nest, a viper’s den, danger that didn’t give way to goodness. She’s nineteen and haunted again, chained down in iron to a ship that was a sucking pit of despair, with a man whose kisses were venom and whose hands were made of terror. 

She is not there. She is not Andromeda. Not anymore.

And the last time Novalise got stabbed in the stomach, she pulled light from the sky itself. She doesn’t need to do that this time, but she will. 

Because she can. 

Distantly, very distantly, Nova can hear Din cutting through the rat’s nest of troopers and hunters. Flaying them alive. She knows he will be a pit of a man for her, an interlude of darkness and terror, and he will come back on his knees. He will pray for forgiveness. 

He doesn’t need to, though. He’s already gotten hers. 

She’s the holy thing granting it. 

“You,” Nova levels with herself, “can do this.” There’s no room left but to face it. Nova has spent enough time anthropomorphizing the past, pulling it in layers over her skin. There is nothing another timeline can do for her now. There is nothing that can save her back in her memory. 

Nova has spent months fighting against her intuition to do things alone. But this time, she isn’t running away. She’s ripping the blade out of her skin, and she is facing the light, and she is going to save her friends—her family. No more running. Just fighting back. 

She does the hard thing. She pulls the dagger out, inch by sickening inch. 

Biting into the heel of her hand to staunch the screaming, Nova props herself half-up against the wall. She utters a string of curse words under her breath—ones in Basic, Mando’a , Huttese, and a few more that she picked up along the way. She’s the daughter of a collector of linguistics, and Nova knows how to cuss her way through at least twenty languages. “Okay,” she says, wiping the sheen of sweat from her face, “okay.” She utters the word over and over again, until she’s convinced herself that she is. 

The Darksaber is being wielded by her Mandalorian, so Nova unclips her own lightsaber from her belt. It’s covered in crusted blood, the silver handle tinged crimson. She bites down on her swollen lip as she ignites it, feeling power spark to life in her exhausted bloodstream. The blade flickers and trips, but it doesn’t falter. Nova stares into the golden abyss. Her lightsaber gazes back. 

“You can do this,” she whispers, calling on the strength of all her past and future selves. They flick through her shuttered eyes like a hologram, like fortification. She sees her parents’ faces. That’s likely not a good sign—stars, she’s really bleeding—but Nova takes that as a good omen. That’s what she does. Takes a black hole and pulls a supernova out of it. She is her own exploding star. 

She cauterizes this wound with her lightsaber. Maybe it’s a metaphor for something, but Nova can’t think of anything else but stardust right now. She is not forged by the darkness. It cannot call her by name. 

Only Nova can do that.

It’s not the first time Novalise has forged her own scar into her skin, but this one is different. The last time, she was on the brink of death out in the crush of space. This time, she’s planted on the ground. There’s still something cosmic in that, though. Something holy. 

Novalise is the only star on Corellia. She detracts her lightsaber’s blade, and the world still glows yellow. 

*

Din Djarin isn’t here. He is hiding, far underneath the mask that he wears and the Creed that he once swore by. He is not bleeding crimson rivers, but if he did, there would be no wound that could cut him down. At this moment, he has ceased to be a man. He is all Mandalorian—all fighter. No, that’s not correct. Even soldier is too small of a word. The definition is closer to warrior, but even that is far below what he is. 

He is an oil spill, vantablack in movement, silver in makeup. He is tungsten and steel, a weapon forged from beskar. The Darksaber—decidedly not his—flickers in his hand, pulsing the people he cuts down into grayscale. It’s heavy. So heavy. It is the weapon of something stronger than he is, but that something is laying on the ground behind him. And Din wants them all to pay for it. 

He does not know the Empire. Not intimately like the people that surround them. Not personally like Novalise. He does not care. It doesn’t matter who they are. If the troopers are being called upon by the mysterious First Order. If the bounty hunters are reporting to a shadowy figure. Those are not questions he is equipped to know the answers to. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. None of it matters except wielding the weapon in his hands. 

No mercy. That’s what Novalise said back there, blood staining his gloves scarlet, pooling over her perfect mouth. She gave him permission. No mercy. 

Din Djarin is not answering to his name. He is not taking prisoners. He does not care about life. Every single person in front of him is responsible for the attack on Novalise, crumpled and bloody on the ground. He will stomp the light out of their eyes. He will massacre the evil from the ground around them. 

He cuts through the army surrounding him like paper. Not humans. Not anything, not anymore. Nova would mourn their half-lives—because she is good, because she has not become a sucking wound, even in the face of so much horror. 

But Novalise is not the Djarin in front of this swarm of evil. They have Din to answer to. And he’s not listening. 

He does not stop. He is relentless. He is a warrior, a weapon, the darkest version of himself, and for the first time in years, Din can switch his humanity off. He doesn’t care. He cannot care. Every single one of these people—stormtroopers and bounty hunters alike—were responsible for his heart laying half-dead in the back of a filthy alleyway, stuck with a knife so big it could have cleaved her in half. 

No mercy, Nova had said. 

He takes the helmet off. A grin spreads across Din’s face, sickened and bloody, as he rips limb from limb. 

At the end, there’s just silence. He stands, covered in crimson and guts, with the blade of the Darksaber flickering in the same pulse as his heartbeat. It is monstrous and wonderful and he feels nothing but adrenaline, coursing through his veins. The helmet hisses back into place like a rattlesnake striking its prey. Din turns around, wipes the blood marring his visor, and runs back to Nova. 

He sheathes the Darksaber. He tries to sink back into his skin, to put the monster back into its cage. 

It goes, angrily, snarling, all the way back to her.                                                                               

*

When Din returns, Nova isn’t where he left her. She did that on purpose. She’s propped against the steel of the building behind her, but she’s standing. Her top hangs in shreds around her midriff. She spits a mouthful of blood onto the filthy ground, disappearing into the dust. Her hands are braced on either side of the wall, slung low like an assassin, face grimed with sweat and blood alike. 

“What the hell,” Din asks, low and angry, “did you do?” 

Nova musters a smile, wincing as another round of pain rips through her. “You were busy.” 

There’s silence. Then a low, quiet hiss as he removes the helmet. Her heart catches in her throat when she realizes that Din ran off into battle with it removed, at least partially. That signifies no survivors. He is bloody, crimson splashed across his beautiful, tortured face. Heat runs through her, even amidst all that pain, and Nova inhales, staggering, staring into the silhouette of the man she loves. He is not the darkness he just swallowed and spat back out. He is in front of her in armor, but the face her Mandalorian is wearing is not the Mandalorian’s at all. 

“Nova—” His voice is low, flagellating. Another thrill runs through her. “You—” 

“Had a problem,” she says, gesturing at her now-exposed midriff, the curve of her belly sucked in and carved with a new scar. “And I fixed it.” 

He steps forward. Those footsteps could shake the ground beneath them. They have. They will again. Nova sighs as he catches her swaying, exhausted body and pins it between him and the wall. Safety. She hums, endorphins overriding all the hurt still coursing through her bloodstream. “Fuck,” Din says. No—he snarls it, right into her open mouth, and Nova maps his brown, deep eyes on her own. “You—cauterized your o-own wound?” 

Nova offers him a grin, cocking her head to the side, curls blowing in the acrid wind. His hand curls up around her cheek. She knows it comes off bloody. “Not the first time I’ve had to,” she whispers, and then the reality of the situation sets in. She swallows, blinking back sudden, desperate tears. “I’m fine,” she says, damage control. Maker, Din’s eyes are almost black. “I’m okay, Din. I promise. I—well, I’m holding it together.” Then, the real version of the truth: “I’m safe.” She looks up at him. “Now.”

He’s staring into her soul. It feels like a heart attack. Nova’s stuttered breath catches in her throat. “I am doing a very dangerous thing,” he grits out, “letting you stay out here. Do you understand me?” His hand grips her chin, lifting it to meet his. He’s only inches away, and Nova’s newly cauterized stomach flips over—in hunger. Want. Need.

“Yes,” she breathes. 

“Should’ve you slung over my shoulder.” He’s muttering. Nova leans closer. “Should take you b-back to the ship. Shouldn’t let you stay out here.” This rambling, forged together of half-sentences and clipped words, sounds like the Din she knew before she knew he was Din at all—when he was just the Mandalorian and she was barely Novalise yet. 

“I slaughtered them,” Din whispers into the hollow of her open mouth. “I slaughtered them.” It sounds like a vow. No—a prayer. 

“It’s okay,” Nova manages. “You were—” 

“Protecting you,” Din growls. “No—avenging you. You said no mercy.” 

Nova doesn’t break eye contact, doesn’t look away. “And I meant it.” 

His head is slung so, so low. His forehead—rife with gore—is pressed up against hers. “I killed them all, cyar’ika.” 

Past-Nova would have been heavy with grief—thankful, but uncomfortable. Not now. She is not a murderer, but there are some forces in this galaxy that cannot be saved. That need to be cut down, cut away from the festering, invading wound of unfixable evil. She saw it back with the cloning tanks. She saw it in Sparmau’s teeth. She saw it in Gideon’s stare. She felt it in the blue, even face of Thrawn. Even just in nightmares, she’s known the evil coming out of them—leaching, bleeding, like an oil spill. She doesn’t need to be her own avenging angel. 

She has her Mandalorian for that. 

“They would have killed me,” she whispers. “They tried to. They would have gotten to Bo and Wedge, too.” Nova swallows. Two words—what a weight they hold: “I’m glad.” 

His mouth slots against hers—timid at first, then coaxing, then a fucking wildfire. He kisses like he’s starving, like he’s been whetting himself on danger and adrenaline while her lips were away from hers. Nova sighs as Din holds her face flush against hers, tongue licking into her mouth like a viper. She wants to get drunk on his particular brand of venom. She needs him inside her like a demon. She wants to be possessed by Din Djarin. Getting fucked isn’t enough. 

A moan unfurls from behind her teeth, spilling over into his, and Din freezes. With the strength of something holy, he wrenches himself free. “I am doing a very dangerous thing,” he murmurs again, “letting you stay out here. With me. Rather than bringing you back to safety.” 

“Din,” Nova whispers, and a small whimper leaves his lips at the sound of his name, “if you tried to put me back on the Ghost, now, when we still have our friends to save, I would fight you.” 

A wicked smile curls across his mouth. “You would, hm?” 

She nods, looking up into his eyes like a siren. She reaches forward, for his belt, and his knees sag when she finds it—and then Nova yanks the Darksaber off of it, igniting the slick, spitting blade. Both of them shutter into black and white, and Nova sees Din’s pupils flare so large his whole iris is almost black. “This,” she breathes, “belongs to me.”

He groans. “That’s not the only thing that does,” he murmurs, and then, with a Herculean effort, he pulls away. Nova sheathes the blade, flaring back to the blue-grey dampness of Corellia’s atmosphere. “You tell me,” he warns, “if you feel worse, if you feel anything—” 

“I will.” 

Holding her gaze for what feels like an eternity, Din nods. When he turns to put the helmet back on, Nova winces, falters, then forces her way through. She is fortified by her Mandalorian and from her own light. Both forged by stardust. 

They soldier on. 

*

“Anything?”

Bo-Katan throws Wedge a glare over her shoulder. “If I had the signal back by now,” she says, sourly, “I would have told you.” 

Wedge sighs, dragging a hand over his face. His stubble is longer than she’s ever seen it. Wedge’s age doesn’t often show—the four of them are scattered across their late forties and early thirties, now—but it does now. “Okay.” 

Bo-Katan softens. A little. “I’m working on it,” she whispers, a shade lighter than the voice she usually uses. “They must have crossed over into the inner rung of the city by now, though.” 

Wedge’s eyes are fixed on a hollow point behind her. They’re in what looks like an old shipping container. Bo-Katan didn’t happen to look before she threw both of their bodies inside and locked the door. The troopers were close—too close. Internally, she muses over this as she fiddles with their damaged radio, held together with little more than hope. These troopers—they were far from incompetent, slung onto the field with blunt force and a desire to shoot blaster rounds. They seemed…organized. With older armor. Of the Empire, not of its scattered remains. She swallows, flipping from station to station, trying to root out the static. 

“This is bad,” Wedge admits, his head hung heavy. And then, quieter, “I’m scared.” 

Bo-Katan catches his eye. He looks exhausted. Neither of them have slept much over the last few days, especially since the cheap, thieving Mon Cala they hitched a ride with sold them out to the troopers. “I know.” She doesn’t try to push the feeling away. 

Hell, she’s scared too. Thrawn, back in this galaxy. Thrawn, in his massive Star Destroyer, heading towards Hoth. Bo-Katan hates Hoth. Thinks an ice planet is a waste of space. But she knows how much it means to Wedge. And Nova. They’ve both been displaced out of a home—since the Alliance moved to Hoth, it’s the home Wedge has lived in when not out in the stars. And Nova… it’s one of the last untouched places where her parents once lived. 

“How bad?” Wedge’s voice snaps her back to the present. Bo-Katan fiddles with the radio again for something to do with her hands. If she doesn’t, they’ll be curled into fists. 

“How bad, what?” She’s deflecting. 

“Thrawn.” 

Bo-Katan sighs, pinching the bridge of her swollen nose. One of the troopers broke it with the butt of his blaster. Consequently, she ripped off his chestplate and fired the remaining rounds straight into his heart. “Bad.” 

Wedge swallows. “I was afraid,” he muses, crossing his arms over his chest, “of that.” 

Bo-Katan inhales, exhales. “Wedge,” she manages, “...I’m sorry.” 

He holds her eyes, a small smile captured on his lips. He knows what she means—sorry for being this way, sorry for getting him in this situation, sorry that they’re stuck together again, sorry that she wasn’t strong enough to get them out of this mess, sorry that Din and Nova are rushing here and putting their lives on the line for the two of them again, sorry that his home is about to be pulverized. She’s sorry for it all. Even the stuff she doesn’t have control over. 

“I know.” A beat. “I’m sorry, too.” 

The radio flares to life. “Bo-Katan?” 

It’s a female voice. Not Nova’s, though. Bo-Katan blinks, sitting up a little straighter. “Hera?” 

“I told Din and Nova to be back here with you both an hour ago,” she says, voice staccato from the static. “I’m assuming something has gone horribly wrong, right?” 

Bo-Katan exhales through her sore nostrils, wincing. “It’s likely.” 

Hera’s quiet. “Should I wait?” 

Her eyes flick to Wedge. He nods. Imperceptibly, but Bo-Katan can read his expressions by now. “Yes.” 

“We’re running—”

“Out of time,” Wedge cuts in, moving closer to the radio. “But—” 

Hera’s voice comes through again. “I’ll wait.” 

Bo-Katan smiles up at the rusty ceiling of the shipping container. Something nasty is dripping off in the corner, and the smell in here is rank, musty, but she can see a tiny glimpse of the night sky, and there’s a star. Bo-Katan Kryze doesn’t usually do signs, but she does do stars. 

“What are the odds,” Hera continues, “that the four of you will end up back on the Ghost alive?” 

At this, Bo-Katan cracks a wide, true smile. Nova would be thrilled. “General Syndulla,” she says, proudly, “I sure as hell wouldn’t bet against us.” 

Hera sighs. “I have their location,” she says. “Maybe, if they couldn’t get to you—”

“We’ll get to them,” Wedge says firmly. 

“We don’t have time,” Hera reminds them. Bo-Katan can sense the fear in her voice. It’s the same fear she’s kept close to her own chest. “Be safe. But—” 

“We’ll be quick,” Bo-Katan promises. She looks over at Wedge, mustering up all the energy she can. “Ready?” 

He gets to his feet—gingerly, carefully, but when he stands all the way up, he’s locked in. Hardcore. All Rebel. “As I’ll ever be.” 

Bo-Katan musters up one more true smile. One for her friend Wedge. After all they’ve been through, he deserves it. “Run.” 

And they unleash hell on the center of Coronet City. 

*

Nova winces. She recovers, quick enough to hope against hope that Din didn’t catch it—but he is nothing if not observant, especially in that helmet, and he whips around. “Stop.” 

She fixes him with a sour look. “I,” Nova proclaims, “am fine.” 

Din sighs. “You were stabbed and cauterized your own wound, Novalise,” he says, “you are certainly not fine.” 

She exhales and then relents, sagging back against the wall. They’re in another alleyway, now, and this one is considerably cleaner than the last. Less bloody. She hisses out a breath between her clenched teeth, dragging the shredded remains of her tank top up over her bellybutton. She can hear Din’s breath through the helmet, and it fogs her clarity. 

“Let me see.” 

She does. 

They’ve been here before. They’ve been here before multiple times. Blood dripping, the other person silencing it, stifling it. Din rips one glove off with the other—his hands, topographic and so much softer than anything else on his body—are unbloodied. The only thing on his entire suit of armor that isn’t dripping scarlet. That makes love flare up in her chest, suddenly, completely. Nova watches him, carefully, lovingly, as he lifts her shirt higher, breath catching somewhere between his throat and the modulator. “Looks okay.” 

Nova looks at him through half-lidded eyes. “Only okay?” 

He tilts his head to the side, affixing her with a tired look. She can tell, even through the visor. It’s the only part of his helmet that isn’t sticky, gored with dead stormtroopers. The blood, for once, does not bother her. Want sings low in her injured stomach, and Nova bites down on her bottom lip.

“Novalise.” 

“What?” 

He sighs again, and then Din bends lower, sinking down on his haunches until he’s level with her on the ground. Nova grabs onto his clean, ungloved hand, needing to feel his warmth. It coils around her with comfort, and she relaxes. Just a little. “You,” he says, irritably, “are distracting me.” 

She laughs—the sound is melodic as bells in such a hellish atmosphere. Din’s bare hand finds her cheek, stroking over her cheekbone, her bottom lip. They both melt, a little, into each other. Entwining like roots of the same gnarled tree. Nova feels uncalled tears stinging at the bridge of her nose, flooding in at the corners of her eyes. The air is heavy, thick. Tensioned. She’s suspended here by her Mandalorian. “What?”

“C’mere.”

Nova feels air leave her lungs, air she didn’t have the capacity to give. “I’m here,” she whispers, the sound barely a sound at all.

“This is going to hurt,” Din says gruffly, and fear drops in Nova’s chest like an anvil.

“Nope.” 

“Novalise—”

“No needles.” 

He looks at her head-on. In the low light of the quickening dark around them, Nova can almost see the outline of his eyes. Maybe she’s just memorized them—the depth of them, where they sit on his face. “You pulled a blade out of the muscle of your stomach,” Din says, shortly, “and the cauterized it.” 

“Yes.” 

“But a bacta needle is where you draw the line?” 

Nova hisses in a breath between her teeth. She can see her reflection in the silver of his helmet. “Yes,” she repeats. 

Din sighs. This time, it is wearily. “It’ll be a pinch.” 

“I don’t want it—” 

“You take everything else, my good girl,” he murmurs, “why not this?”

Nova points a finger in his face, stabbing the nail against the visor. “Hey. You’re not playing fair—” 

“Novalise,” he interrupts, holding her cheek in one gloved hand, “just—do this for me, okay?” 

She swallows. Relents. Din lifts her chin with one hand and sinks the needle into the lip of her exposed belly with the other. She yelps, a little one, and then the antibiotic seeps in, and Nova relaxes. The needle hurts—but the rush of the medicine helps soothe the sting. And Din’s touch—well, that soothes it, too. She wipes a single pearl of blood away from where the point went in. Din brushes one gloved finger over it, feather-light, and it disappears into the leather. 

“That wasn’t so bad,” Din murmurs, “was it, cyar’ika?” 

“You distracted me,” she says, haughtily, expecting Din to laugh again. But his grip tightens, his knees sag, and both of them sink back against the wall. Nova blinks up again, grimey forehead almost pressed flush against his metal one. “Din—?”

“You scared me,” Din says quietly. “Terrified me. If I had gotten back there and you were—” he chokes, and the tears spill to the forefront of her eyes. “Fuck, Novalise. I don’t—I don’t know what I would have done.” 

She swallows. She wants to touch his face, to ground him against her. To push the fear away. “I’m alive,” Nova breathes. “I’m here.”

Something changes in his body language, although she can’t quite put a finger on what. Tightens. Shifts. Like silver mercury, becoming rigid. “What if—” 

“No what ifs,” Nova says, much more decisive than she feels. “I am right here.” And it’s true, she realizes. For the first time since they left Mandalore on this gods-damned failed mission, she feels like herself. Whatever was inhabiting her—the darkness—has quieted. Put on mute. Not gone. She can feel it, still. But for right now—now, the fight has flooded back into her veins—she is starlight, golden, herself. Nova tightens her grip on Din’s hand, still silhouetting her face. “You pulled me back,” she whispers. “Every time, you pull me back.” 

It conjures a memory. Not one that’s passed—one that’s waiting for her. Nova feels herself stutter over timelines, lost between what’s happened and what’s to come, and then it’s all drowned out as her husband moves closer. Din’s helmet rests against her forehead, anchoring her in place. Nova can feel the steel of the wall through the protective curtain of her hair—and it isn’t even half as strong as the man on his knees in front of her. She breathes, the cloud of air fogging up the bloodied visor, and then Din’s hand is leaving her, and Nova makes a disappointed noise, low in her throat like an animal. 

He chuckles. His laugh could launch a thousand birds out of the sky. “Need to give you something.” 

Nova rears back. “Nope.” 

Din laughs again. Her heart clenches against the sweet, sweet sound. “It’s not another bacta shot.” 

Nova’s eyes narrow. “Don’t know if I believe you,” she says. 

Din sighs. Din’s always sighing. But this time, it’s not out of exasperation. “Will you just—” 

“No needles,” Nova says. She’s trying to sound brave. She really is. But bravery left with the golden light of her lightsaber, and she has to really muster up the conviction. “Mean it.” 

“Novalise.” 

“Mm.” It’s noncommittal, that noise, her hands held up, braced against his pauldrons. “If you’re lying to me—” 

“Relax,” Din hisses, and for some reason, some untold signal in his voice, she does.

His hand isn’t in the pocket on his belt that was hiding the bacta. No, he’s reaching into a hidden one, tucked in the inner workings of his beskar, and the protest dies in her throat. Nova’s breath evaporates into the air around them. In his one, ungloved hand, Din is holding a ring. It’s silver, but lighter than the beskar he shines in, lighter than the beskar of his ring she’s worn proudly on her left hand since he first dropped to his knees in Nevarro. But in the middle, mercurial, shifting, is a marbled, swirling grey stone. It looks—alive. Almost like the Kyber that ignites her lightsaber, but not really. Almost like her mother’s pearls that hung around her neck, but not quite. It’s unlike anything Nova has ever seen before, and yet, it calls to her. It sings. Like calls to like. 

“Found this,” Din says gruffly, like he’s trying to keep emotion out of his voice, and Nova’s heart swells. “It’s for you.” 

She shakes her head imperceptibly, blinking up at him. “Where?” 

“I’ve almost lost you so many times.” It’s not an answer to her question. Nova doesn’t care. “I know we’ve been…” he swallows. “Fighting. Arguing. Like we haven’t… been on the same…wavelength.” It’s her word, coming out of Din’s mouth, and Nova’s never loved it more. “I’m sorry.” He clears his throat, and then, huskily: “I’m trying. I love you.”

“I love you,” she echoes, reaching out to touch him, to take the ring. Din moves, stacking it on top of her engagement ring, and it hisses into place. It swirls in front of her eyes, the metal cool to the touch, the stone a pool for her to fall into—swallowing. Consuming. It slots onto Nova’s finger like it was made for her. Like it’s been missing this whole time. It pulses. It glows. It’s obsidian and ivory. It’s silver and not. It is hers. It sings out to her. Nova responds.

“Do you like it?” Din cuts back in, slices through her reverie. His voice is so low, slung deep. Hungry. 

Fuck, Nova’s hungry, too. “Yes.” So much weight is thrown behind that one word. She swallows. Need is coursing through her veins, holding her heart hostage. “Come here.” 

“Nova—” 

“I know, and I don’t care,” she breathes, grabbing the back of his neck, anchoring him lower, closer. “Kiss me.” 

He is fighting an unspoken battle, her Mandalorian. Nova can hear his breath deepen, intensify, can feel the heat radiating off him like magma. “You—” 

“Kiss me,” she breathes, emboldened, brazen. Desire slams into her, an entire ocean. “Please.” She’ll beg. She’s not above begging. But it doesn’t matter, because Din curls his fingers underneath the rim of his helmet, pulling it clean off, and he blinks at her, brown eyes almost black. 

“Fuck it,” he snarls, and then his mouth, hot and wanting, is on hers.

This is selfish. His touch, molded against her skin—that’s selfish. Devouring hers in a dirty back alley, that’s selfish. Spending time, sweet precious time, with their bodies melded together like metal, when their friends are out there fighting—that’s selfish. Nova feels the darkness flood in, take over her body like a superbloom. She sighs out against the lock of Din’s mouth against her. 

“Din,” she whispers.

He stiffens like it takes all of his control, all that silver now rigid and unyielding. “What?” 

Nova looks up at him, wetting her lips with her tongue. He groans out, the sound choked in the low light of the alley, and want pulses again between her legs. Hungrily. Snarling. “Don’t take it easy on me.” 

His eyes are so dark. Maker, she could drown in them. Nova shudders, wanting to, needing to. “That’s not how this works.” He swallows, the sound thick. “Especially now.” 

She pushes at him, clawing her fingers into the untouched skin at the back of his neck. Din whimpers—full on, loudly—and a thrill runs through Nova’s entire body. Fire, sparked to life. “It is today.” 

He looks at her. “Nova—” 

“Fuck it away,” she breathes into the hollow of his open mouth. “Please. Please. You want me to beg? Fine, I’m begging. You want me on my knees? You’ll have to make me.” Din’s mouth falls open wider. Nova wants to shove her tongue into it, make his lips take away all of the pain. “Yeah, it hurts. It hurts.” And it does. But what’s a little charred flesh worth in battle against her Mandalorian? Nothing. “Make me ache. Fuck the pain away.” 

Din grips the back of her head, a halo of hair in his ungloved, unbloodied hand. There’s a metaphor in it, in the way he’s clutching at her like his unbecoming. Nova sighs into the space between them—just armor and skin, nothing more. 

“You don’t know what you’re asking.” 

Nova does not flinch. “Yes. I do.” 

She’s calling Din on his bluff. He’s holding himself back. Right now, it’s not Din she’s speaking to. She wants the monster underneath his skin, licking and pulsing like flames. It’s barely contained. It is snarling at her, screaming. He is a tar pit. He is blackened steel. He is all beskar, all blade. Nova knows what she’s asking.

She loves Din. But right now, she needs the Mandalorian.

When he breaks, when he crashes his mouth against hers, it’s not reassuring. It doesn’t taste like empathy, like sweetness. He’s not trying to take away the pain. Din’s doing exactly what she asked for. He’s going to fuck it all away. 

Din’s tongue, leaden, is heavy inside Nova’s mouth. It pulses, rolling over her own, desperate. Cloying. Needy. He is all teeth and bone. He growls—really, truly growls—and it’s not a mockery. It’s not anything but desire, coiled so deep it needs to strike. Like a pit viper. Like a rattlesnake. Like venom and honey. She wants to drink it down. 

“Novalise—”

“Tear me apart,” she enunciates, the words barely a whisper, already off on Corellia’s fetid wind. “I give you permission.” Then, louder, emboldened, for only him to hear: “No mercy.” 

Din’s mouth returns and leaves like a furious tide, biting down on her lips, cascading down her neck, licking tides to her collarbone, over and over. He is rhythmic in his domination. Unyielding. This is not the man she married. This is the Mandalorian she loved first. He takes instruction well, the weapon of a man in front of her. And then he takes control.

Din’s hands—cloying, desperate—rip at the seam of her pants. It burns so bright, his fingers wrenching her clothes away. Nova’s eyes are blackening at the edges, sweet, sweet sensation. “Don’t rip them,” she mewls, and his hand stills. Shame and need war inside of her, and Nova reels back against the metal wall. Her knees—all that’s left standing, at this point, the rest of her body slumped against Din’s metal one—shake on the cold ground.

“So bold,” he croons, and the hair on the back of Nova’s neck stands straight up. His hands dip lower, lower than her belt, low enough to hook around the waistband of her panties, and flame licks at the very core of her. “You’re not in charge,” he whispers, and every word is electric, a live wire, a lightning bolt. Nova isn’t cold, but she shivers. “You gave that up, sweet girl. You don’t get to make demands. But fuck, you sounds so good when you try.” 

“Still have—” she pants, “a mission to f-finish—” 

“Then shut your pretty mouth,” Din snarls, “and let me finish you first.”

That does it. Nova hums out as he digs low. His fingers are filthy. Not with blood or grime—no, not from the men he felled back on the impromptu Corellian battlefield. No, he kept his gloves on for that. But with her—slick, wet, wanting. Nova’s eyes roll back in her head as Din sinks two fingers inside of her, to the hilt, and curls. He presses, and she feels it building, the crushing crescendo of an orgasm, already, yes, already—but then there’s an absence of where his fingers once were, and her eyes open fully, eyebrows furrowed in frustration—

He’s sinking the same two fingers into his mouth. The moan he emits could fell a nation. An army. Nova’s not sure. She would die on the battlefield if this were her enemy, silver-clad and dangerous. Electric. She blinks at him, eyes half-lidded. “Oh,” she says, distantly, distantly because there’s something buzzing in her ears. “Oh—” 

“Taste so fucking good,” he grits out, and Nova shudders, going limp. And then his fingers are back inside of her. “Clench around me. Good girl.” He takes a fistful of her hair in the other bare hand and yanks back. Hard. Nova’s ears are still ringing. “Harder.” It’s rhapsodic, that voice. An echo chamber of filth shudders back at her. 

“Tell me,” she whispers. To cum is the rest of that sentence, but stars above, Nova can’t finish it. She’s limp. Undone. And all he’s done is touch her—and then Din’s fingers, that ecstasy, is gone again. “Fuck—” she cries, frustrated, and Din chuckles. The sound is so bright, so perfect, that it dulls the ache of his absence. A little. And then it floods back in and Nova grabs at his wrist. But it doesn’t budge. It trails up from the sucking seam of her pussy, wet with her own slick. 

“Stop leaving me,” she whines. 

Din chuckles again. Lower this time. It feels like a vibration. Nova hums, and then he’s gripping her face. Hard. Her lips pucker out as he clenches down on her cheeks. It hurts, pain singing out in the best way. “Open.” 

Nova tries to comply, she really does, but her mouth is being held captive by the massive plain of Din’s flexed fist. He shoves his fingers inside, wet and dripping. “This is how you taste,” he hisses, licking a line of it off the cleft of her split bottom lip. “Before you’ve even cum for me.” He clicks his tongue. Nova’s thighs clench together. It’s involuntary, truly. “Wanna taste how sweet you are when you have?” 

She stutters out a breath, lips puckered in a perfect O, and the way Din grins at her is sinful. Criminal. Dark and lecherous, if it were any other mouth wearing that smile, but he looks at her like he worships her, even now, and Nova’s heart flips. 

“Need you,” she manages, through the painful part of her mouth, “please—” 

“Who am I to deny my sweet girl,” Din breathes, “when she begs for me?” 

Nova can barely keep her eyes open. Din’s grip lessens, just a little. The other hand, previously anchoring her hip in place—which is likely going to be sporting purpled bruises tomorrow, but Nova doesn’t care—leaves the curve of her waist to shove something at her. It’s her shawl. Nova blinks at it. “What—?” 

“Cover your stomach,” Din says, brushing the mess of ringlets out of her face. “Don’t get it dirty.” 

“It’s—” Nova’s breath catches as he pushes her back against the wall, dragging her body up against the durasteel of the abandoned building they’re up against—fuck, she can’t think straight. “Not a wound anymore—” 

“Don’t care,” Din grits out, shoving it against her skin. Nova feels the pain of the contact, just a little. Faintly. Maker. She’s losing it. “No cover, no cock.” Hearing him say it so crudely sparks something bright and devastating in the pit of her stomach. “Don’t argue with me. You won’t win.” 

Nova nods. Din’s hand finds her chin again—still slick—and she sighs out into the air around them. 

“I’m going to fuck you now,” he rasps out. 

Nova looks down—he is still, so regrettably, clothed. She pouts. “Wanna see you.” 

Din grins again. Devilish. Dark. Her stomach curls. That softness, there just a minute ago, is gone. He is a blade, the pit of a man called into battle. “Then look down,” he simpers, and then his hand slips down to her throat, pushing just hard enough to make her beloved stars explode. 

Nova cries out into the open air, stifled by the warrior’s hand clenching around her airway. Just how she likes it. She tries to look down. To see his cock, thick and wanting, pierce her, cleave her in two. She wants to watch—really watch—to see how the Mandalorian moves inside of her—but Nova can’t. She’s trapped in the staccato rhythm of pleasure and pain, equally enticing. 

“Look at me.” 

Nova hears it, dully. She’s too far gone, already almost on the edge again. Din’s grunting, animalistic, and it’s the sweetest, sickest sound she’s ever heard. She is undone. This is sacrosanct. This is divine. She was standing on holy ground, and her Mandalorian is desecrating it. 

“Novalise.” Her name cuts through, and Nova abandons sweet disconnect to look him in the eye. Din’s not here right now. He is the version of himself that kills, that slaughters. She wants him. She needs him. “Look at me.” 

“Maker,” she manages, strangled, and Din hoists her higher against the wall to fuck into her harder, deeper, so much deeper, sheathing himself inside her like he would a blade into safety, except nothing about this feels safe. She’s craved danger before. But Nova has never craved danger more. 

“No,” Din snarls. “No Maker is here right now. No, cyar’ika. You pray to me.” 

Her orgasm rips through her—bluntly. Unyielding. Unfettered, like the pulse of her Mandalorian. He cries out, grunting, fingers curling in her hair. 

“Who do you belong to?” Din asks, and the sound is ringing from somewhere far, far away. Nova is a universe of exploding stars. She is slick and sweaty, dangling from the wall like an animal while the man in front of her rips her to shreds in the sweetest, holiest way. 

“Mmm,” Nova manages. She is gone. She is over in another galaxy, her body hanging limp in Din’s hands. “You.” 

He fists a hand in her hair, dragging her gaze up to his. “I’m not finished with you yet.” And—fuck—he’s not. He snaps his hips into hers. An unending rhythm. Time stops. There is nothing here—nothing on this plane of existence. There’s Din, and there’s Nova, and there’s the want, the heavy thrum of sex, desire pumping amorphous, silty blood through their veins. This is a darkened star, this is the only thing in the world. The divine feeling of her Mandalorian, fucking with abandon, bisecting her. Din tips Nova over the edge, once, twice, three more times. She is a mewling, destroyed mess. 

“Mine,” Din is whispering. Chanting. Then, in Mando’a: “ibac’ner.” 

It’s a prayer. Or something close to it. Nova’s eyes open, watching her Mandalorian’s face as he comes undone. 

“Yours,” she whispers, into the open hollow of his mouth, and then everything contracts. He slams into her, once, twice, three times—and then he’s undone, spurting into her, hot and wet and warm, and Nova feels something settle and crack inside of her all at once. She can hear his heartbeat. Through the armor. Through everything, They stay there, panting, foreheads locked together, and when Din pulls out of her, Nova mourns. He licks his lips as he tucks his cock back in his pants. He wipes the cum leaking out of her away with his bare hands. Nova watches, half-lidded, as he lifts his fingers to her mouth. Nova takes it like communion. She feels wrecked. A ship hurled against rock. Undone. And fortified. That sweet, sweet darkness licks at her edges. 

“What do you taste?” His voice is low. Guttural. Whatever Din let out of its cage is not fully back in. 

Nova hums, licking it off her lips. “You.” 

He smiles, wicked and low, before pulling his helmet back over his head. “Not quite.” Then, modulated, voice duo-toned, flickering like the Darksaber, double-sided like the vessel of his armor and the stature of the man within it, with one finger hooked under her chin: “Us.” 

Nova doesn’t have time to contemplate what that means. Two things happen.

One: She just feels the vantablack obsidian curling low in her stomach—seeping back in. 

Two: The hologram in Din’s hands flares to life. 

*

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I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!! the filth was FILTHY this time around lmao, but it was such an exciting chapter to write! please let me know what you think <3

CHAPTER 8 WILL BE UP AT 7:30 PM EST ON MARCH 9TH!

First—blinding, searing light. 

Then—a whisper, creeping in around the edges.

Nova blinks once, twice, trying to shake the exhaustion from her eyes. Everything filters in slowly, like she’s been drugged, in a coma, off floating in another dimension entirely. It all floods in flashes—in and out of the light, like her own eyes shuttering against the memory. She’s drained—down to her bones, she can feel it, the weary, tired seep. It feels like how she did when she slept off three months on Naator, head stuck in a dream, body lost in the void.

That does it. She jackknifes upward, catapulting forward, hand on her belt.

Her belt is empty. 

Nova curses under her breath, stumbling around in this ship’s low, grey light. It feels similar in make to the Crest—but it’s not the Crest. It’s roomier, warmer, slightly, and she categorizes all of this while rooting around for her lightsaber, the Darksaber, any saber will do, really, she’s not picky—

“Your sabers are safe.” 

Nova whirls around, fists up.

The woman leaning against the wall is grinning at her. Not sadistically, not evilly—just smiling. Also, she’s a Twi’lek. And she’s green. Nova runs through these facts in her head, trying to make sense of them. She comes to the same dividend—she cannot. 

Nova blinks. Once, twice, trying to dislodge the sleep in the corners of her eyes. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.” 

The woman’s smile widens, rows of glittering teeth so bright in the dim light of the ship that Nova shrinks back. Her eyes rove over Nova’s body—her tousled hair, her ripped clothes, the cuts she’s sporting. At some point, Nova’s lip split, her ribs are still bruised, and her eyes feel puffy. She’s not sure if that was from the ship fracturing or from blowing up the remnants of the evil laboratory, but she can feel the ache now. 

The woman in front of her has blue, blue eyes—river-deep and unreadable. “You’ve been through a lot.” They’re kind, though, Nova recognizes, running the pad of her thumb over the seam of her lip, worrying along the fault line. From her eyes to the smile on her face, the woman in front of her looks kind. 

Nova darts her tongue out, then immediately winces at the sharp pain of the still-open wound. She sits up straighter instead.  “That’s an understatement.” 

“She told me you’d be wary. That’s good. Out here, wary keeps you alive.” 

“She?”

“A friend…sent me.” 

Nova chances a half-step forward. Her head feels underwater, her body feels bruised. She wants Din, and a hot shower, and to curl up and sleep for another full rotation. But she forces her chin up, tilting her head to the side. “I have lots of those,” she says evenly, “you’re going to have to clarify which one.” 

The woman laughs—a hearty, inviting thing. She doesn’t look dangerous. She looks warm. Nova eases up, both physically and mentally. “And I happen to have multiple friends in common with you, and it’s a shame we haven’t met before. Welcome aboard the Ghost, Novalise Djarin. My name’s Hera.” 

It sounds familiar, but in her addled state, Nova can’t place it. She relaxes, though. It’s imperceptible, but it filters into the crush of her jaw, easing the tension of her shoulders.  “And you know me…how?” 

“A few ways,” Hera says, cocking her head to the side. “And you’re safe now. All of you.”

 Nova squints at her, dazed. “I think I hit my head.” 

Hera sobers, moving to meet her in the middle. “I’m sure you did,” she murmurs, holding her hands out in an invitation. Cautiously, Nova creeps forward until Hera’s green fingers trace across her forehead, looking for the source. “From what your husband told me—”

Nova rears back. “Where is he?” 

“Oh good,” Din murmurs from somewhere in the dark, emerging like shadows singing around the woman in front of her, immediately drowning everything else out, “you’re awake.” 

Nova leaps across the floor, running into Din’s chest—thankfully unarmored, but it still packs a wallop—and sinks her skin against his. Freshly showered, he still smells like gunsmoke and cinnamon, and the lingering waft of metal, the tang that never seems to leave his skin, his blood, his heart. “You’re here.” 

He smiles down at her, one thumb tracing over her cheekbone. “Where would I go?”

Nova bites her split lip, winces. “Down there, we—”

Din’s brown eyes flash with something—guilt, a memory, she’s not sure. All Nova knows is that hers are likely flashing with the same thing. “Not now,” he whispers, a ghost of a thing, and then: “All that matters is that we’re all here.” 

“And where,” Nova says, a half-step louder, still muffled against Din’s beskar-clad chest, “is here?”

“The Ghost,” Hera supplies, and Nova reluctantly leaves Din’s tight grip to face their rescuer again. “My ship. And our mutual friend—the one I was referring to, anyway—is Ahsoka Tano.”

Nova’s breath catches in her throat. “You said all of us were safe,” she whispers, heart banging in her chest, hammering against her injured ribs, “but if Din and I are here, then—” 

The noise comes from just out of reach, in the cockpit. It fills Nova’s lungs, seeps warmth into her blood before she can recognize why. When Grogu comes toddling around the bend, Nova lets out a cry—part anguish, part relief—and scoops him against her chest, pressing her injured forehead against his green one, three-fingered palm tracing right over the place on her cheek that Din’s hand just left. 

“Ahsoka sent me,” Hera says, smiling down at them, “but this little guy found me. Come sit down, Nova. We have a lot to talk about.” 

*

Grogu is safely nestled in Nova’s arms, the warmth of his little green body thrumming against her own chest. Hera is making them tea—real tea, brewed with leaves and flowers, some of Yavin’s purple petals tucked beneath the rest of the scattered ones. It feels like a good omen. 

“We have a lot to cover.” Hera says this matter-of-factly, like she’s running through a pre-flight checklist. There’s a no-nonsense assurance to the way she carries herself, the way she puffs out her chest. It’s not arrogance. It’s knowledge. She’s careful and she’s sure—it fractures Nova’s chest, just a little, because even in just this glimpse of her, Hera reminds Nova so much of her mother. “But you must have questions, and I’d prefer we start there.” 

Nova slides her thumbnail between her teeth, worrying along the split. A gloved hand darts out to catch her wrist before she can dig in too deeply. Din’s helmeted, obscured from the light, but Nova would bet all of her credits that he’s wearing a neutral expression underneath. The familiarity of this—Nova, unhinged, Din, unbothered—feels so much like their early days traversing the galaxy that she’s lost there for a minute, eyes roving over her Mandalorian, hands clasped around their kid in her lap. 

“I’ll start with the worst one,” she mutters, sliding her fingers around a roguish curl instead. SHe inhales, exhales, trying to keep her fear at bay.  “How long was I out this time?” 

Hera’s eyebrows furrow in the middle.

“Five days.” Din tilts his head to the side. “Well. Five and a half, technically.” 

Nova sits back in her chair, sighing. 

“Not the worst,” Din murmurs, trying to keep her level. His thumb strokes over her own. 

“Not the best,” Nova volleys back.

“We were so far out there,” Din says, voice level, to keep her even-keeled, “that you didn’t miss anything. We just reached the far side of the Outer Rim earlier, about an hour before you woke up. You didn’t miss anything—”

“I missed five and a half days of my life.” Nova swallows, trying to hold onto the sense of calm that Din always embodies in the face of her unsteadiness, trying to absorb some of Hera’s cool. It radiates off her in waves. Nova presses the heels of her hands into her eyes until stars explode. “I don’t care what happened when I was out. I hate losing time like that. You let me sleep?” It’s not meant to be accusatory, but it comes out that way anyway.

“Nova—”

“Excuse me,” Hera cuts in, steady yet warm. “You were just in a crash landing—where, miraculously, nobody died—and you’re…upset because you…” she trails off, blinking at Nova, clearly trying to not offend her, which makes Nova warm to her even more, “...slept?”

Din sighs, trying again: “Novalise—”

“I once lost three months,” Nova says miserably, wrapping her arms around her legs like a little kid, fully aware she’s acting morose and silly, but unable to shake it free regardless. “Three months of my life, gone, because a Sith acolyte found me in my dreams and began to possess the people around me while also siphoning off my life force. Poof. Gone. I was out—not sleeping, dead, but somewhere in between.” She snaps her fingers for emphasis, which is a sound entirely too sharp for the interior of the Ghost, and all of them jump. Just a little. “She also kidnapped my best friend, tried to raze Mandalore—again—stuck Din with a poisoned dagger, almost killed him, seriously interrupted my journey to become a Jedi, found out she murdered my parents, manipulated me into trying to meet her alone, kidnapped Bo and Din, tried to kill them, again, tried to kill me, again, but then I killed her—except, except—she’s still fucking around in my head. I keep having visions, I keep having nightmares, and I cannot figure out where the premonition ends and the dream begins. And since Wedge ran into you on Hoth, I have been running across the galaxy in the search of a lost Jedi that I’ve never met, even though he’s told me not to, over and over again, and that what’s coming is even worse than what already happened.” She swallows, placing a hand over her racing, skipping heart, trying to will it to quiet. Hera is staring at her. Nova blinks, once, twice, a futile attempt to come back down to earth, closing her eyes tight when she realizes just how much that was—to blurt out, to experience. Either. Both. She can’t differentiate. 

“Needless to say,” Din says, low and even, “Novalise doesn’t like to lose time.” 

Hera’s staring back and forth between the both of them. 

“I know you have questions, too.” That’s Din, talking. Nova’s fighting the furious, stubborn tears welling up in her eyes. “Especially after that. Ask them.” 

“Didn’t you guys…talk?” Nova asks, when Hera’s mouth doesn’t move from the shell-shocked, half-open state it’s hung in since she began talking, “while I was…out?

“Your husband,” Hera whispers, “is not a man of many words.” 

Despite everything, Nova laughs, the feeling of it bubbling up in her chest foreign and bittersweet. 

“It must have been very hard,” Hera says, carefully, “to carry the enormous weight of being responsible for so many lives, including your own.” 

Nova swallows, looking down at her purple fingers, war-torn with the efforts of the starfighter crash, the destroying of the midichlorian tanks, the days of unconscious and fitful sleep. She feels bruised around the edges, crushed like the Yavinian flowers in her tea. Everything is violet and half-formed. She feels raw—not like she’s been through war, but like she’s at the dawning of a new world, after the devastation of losing her original ones, over and over and over again. “I am not very good at delegating,” she whispers, and Din’s hand finds her knee, anchoring her to the bench of the table, unfurling all the seismic hurt pooling in the center of her chest. Grogu is asleep on her lap, his tiny breaths synching in tandem with her own. “Which is to say,” she continues, barely a whisper, and she’s being melodramatic, maybe, but Nova thinks at this point in her life, she’s earned it, “my name is Novalise Djarin, and I am the patron saint of lost causes.” 

Din stiffens beside her, recoiling. The words taste awful in her mouth—but they aren’t untrue. “Nova,” he whispers, and there’s so much weight hurled behind that one small sound, the anatomy of her name, but they can’t do this, not here, not now, not after everything—

Hera’s green hand comes up between them, bisecting the tension, dissolving it. “You are Novalise Djarin,” she says, “and nothing I am about to say makes that unshakable fact untrue.” Nova sees it in her eyes, what she’s going to say. “But I think before you were Nova, you were someone else.” 

Nova straightens up a little, wary, even though she’s fully let Andromeda back in, made peace with her hurt, clutched her former self’s strength to her heart like a pearl. But she knows Hera Syndulla ran in the same orange circles of where she originated from, where Andromeda was formed, where Andromeda was unmade. And she is so close to fracturing, so she waits with her swollen lip bit between her teeth. 

“I knew your parents,” Hera says softly, extending a green hand across the granite of the table between them, a living shock against the anathema of white. “And I think who you are now is in no small part because you are Piper and Arokel Maluev’s daughter.” Are, Hera says. Present tense. It wraps Nova in like a hug, and she breathes out a sigh of relief. “And I think that the woman you’ve become has the spirit of a Mandalorian and the heart of a Jedi. Resilient. Strong. You live up to every legend that the people we share have told me about you.” Her teeth shine in a sad, eternal smile. “And I am so sorry, Novalise, that you have had to shoulder so much hurt.” 

Nova can’t speak it into words, the relief she feels, the safety in this woman who rescued them—who is still holding both her sabers hostage—and she lets out a small noise, a quiet keening sound, wiping the unlodged tears from her eyes with the back of her free hand.  

“Thank you,” she manages,  and then: “I’m very grateful you’re the one who found us.” And it’s a tiny thing, miniscule in comparison to what Hera has just said, but it shines between them, that understanding, like a star. Next to her, Din’s body shrinks against Nova’s, the tilt of his pelvis closer, his leg, so warm, even clad in beskar, pressed against her own, and when her hand slips out of Hera’s, it finds his gloved one. She looks over at him, and even through the mask, there’s understanding. There’s an apology, even though it’s not necessary. They are the ghosts of every version of Novalise and Din that have come before, and they return to each other again and again and again. His thumb strokes over her exhausted one, and for the first time in weeks, Nova feels a sense of settling. She chooses to name it peace. 

“Bo-Katan Kryze,” Hera says, faintly, bringing Nova back to steady ground, “is your best friend?”

Nova nods. Fear stokes up in her chest again like a roused flame. “I don’t know where she is—” But Hera’s already pulling something out of her back pocket as Nova’s heart catches in her throat. “But you said all of us, earlier, were safe—?”

Hera’s green finger thumbs over the button on a hologram. The white disc fills the space between them, suddenly opalescent and painting the atmosphere blue. “Can you please move? Move!” Then, slightly winded and heavily sour, like she’s just been elbowed somewhere soft: “Please. Thanks.” Mumbling and grunting in another language filters off-screen, and Bo-Katan’s beautiful, annoyed face floods the screen, and Nova feels relief seep like a drug through her bloodstream. “I don’t know if this’ll get to you.” 

“It will. I memorized the channel frequency before we left for the Unknown Regions.” 

Bo-Katan shoves at Wedge offscreen. More grunting, a distant, slippery language on the tongues of assorted people in the background. Decidedly not Wedge, or Bo-Katan, who’s looking off-camera like she’s at her wit’s end. 

“Yes. Very smart, Wedge,” she spits, and Nova can feel the smile Wedge is sporting from lightyears away. “Okay. The report from this half of the Victory crew is this: we got picked up by a group of very slow-moving Mon Cala. Their hyperdrive’s broken, so we’re stuck on this medical frigot indefinitely. But we’re heading—slowly—towards Mandalore, where Wedge and I are planning to rally the troops that we can.” She pauses, leaning in, the striking curve of her jaw clenched. 

Nova’s breath catches in her throat, tears pinpricking at the corners of her eyes. 

“Technically,” Bo-Katan continues, “I’m cashing in on a favor that doesn’t exist yet. But it’s one I’ll repay tenfold when we’re back together again. Listen, Hera—I know this is a big ask. But I also know you’ve been looking for Ezra, and if you’re not flying a mission for the New Republic, you’re out in the Unknown Regions anyway. So I am hoping against hope you’re closer to the rest of the Victory crew than we are. I don’t use this word lightly—please,” she whispers, and her machismo and iciness vanishes in that one word, “please make a pit stop on Lenahra and look for the shattered Mandalorian starfighter. It’s a massive wreck. You can’t miss it.” She swallows. “I have friends there in need of rescuing.” She glances right. “Get in here.” 

“Hi again,” Wedge says, as he’s yanked into frame, “General, if Bo-Katan hasn’t already sold you, it would be the favor of a lifetime.” 

“You’re being weird,” Bo-Katan stage-whispers, “stop it.” She lifts her chin, with a little bit of hope etched onto her face. “Hera,” she says again, “if that wasn’t convincing enough, there’s more.” She swallows, her gaze again flickering upwards, like she’s not sure if she can speak freely. Wedge squats down beside her, the two of their faces filling the entire space in front of Nova’s eyes, and her heart is still thundering in her ears, even though they’re safe, they’re safe.

“You know the Chimaera is back,” Bo-Katan whispers. “And I know what that means for Ezra.” She holds Hera’s gaze through space and time, even though it’s a message, it’s being played, it’s not in real time. “But that means he’s here, too.” She swallows, raising her chin, the mask snapping back on. “So—be careful. I really, really owe you one. Get the Djarins and meet us on Mandalore. We’ll see you soon.”

The hologram flicks off, leaving all of them in anesthetic silver and white. Din sighs out next to her—in relief, in exasperation, Nova’s not sure. But she leans into him, slowly handing off Grogu into his crossed arms, and looks at Hera. 

“That message,” Hera says, her voice faraway, “came in not five minutes after Ahsoka’s did. She set up a beacon across every planet in the Unknown Regions, set to trip the second new life forms entered the atmosphere.” She swallows, and for the first time since Nova’s opened her eyes, Hera looks undone—afraid. She licks her lips, knotting her fingers together, bracing herself for impact. Nova leans in, slightly, knowing she’s missing something—a key piece of the puzzle—she just doesn’t quite know what. It’s ringing, dimly, faintly, in the back of her mind—she has all of the information, it just hasn’t clicked into place. “Ezra Bridger,” Hera says, with the ache of a thousand worlds, “is my family.” She swallows. “A long time ago, he disappeared into deep space. And now,” she whispers, “according to the Chimaera’s distress signal, and Ahsoka’s message, and Bo-Katan’s hologram, and your testimony, Ezra is in this galaxy. Ezra Bridger, my long lost, brave Ezra—he is home.” Hera shifts, fear and hope, in equal measure, warring across her face. 

“I haven’t found him yet,” Nova whispers, “but I’m going to, Hera—”

“Ezra is not lost,” Hera interrupts, her voice low and thrumming with pain, “because he is back here, against all odds, in this galaxy. After years, after sacrificing himself to save the rest of us, Ezra is back here, hiding again, obscuring himself to protect us.” Her eyes meet Nova’s with startling clarity—the same reflection that she’s seen between herself and Ezra, the parallel lines connecting their spirit, over and over again, alike like only two Jedi can be. “And that is not good luck. That is not possible, not without him.” 

Nova blinks at her, still feeling like she’s on the outside looking in, like she’s peering through the looking glass without a solid scope, a kaleidoscope, a mosaic of so many lives, woven together by an exhausted gold thread. “Hera—” 

“If Ezra’s back,” Hera says, far more evenly than Nova would have been able to muster, “that means Grand Admiral Thrawn is, too.” That name. Like calls to like. It’s been spoken aloud, for the first time—but Nova feels it resound in her chest—blue skin, rows and rows of glittering, awful teeth. Sharp, that name—razor-thin and infinitely more dangerous. The nightmare in the back of her skull, primordial and real. Hera holds up a finger as Din shifts, as Nova inhales, both too sharp. “And that means,” Hera whispers, “that the entire galaxy is going to war.” 

*

Hera fills Nova in on an entire history. Nova listens to Hera’s account of the Alliance she was never a part of, the wars going on in space she was never privy to. When Hera and Ezra and the crew of the Ghost were running around in the stars, Nova was fighting for her life.

And yet, Din knows, she’s kicking herself for not being there anyway. So Din watches Nova, tuning out everything else. 

Nova, his Novalise, his cyar’ika—his beloved, his home, his heart. She is there, alive, filled with mortality and vitality. She feels like a heart attack, too warm, too close. Hera is talking, monologuing about the history of Thrawn, about his prowess, his sick skill, his evilness—and it should absorb, really, Din should be listening, and he is, he’s incapable of not multitasking, but he can’t focus on anything but Nova. 

She is sitting, body coiled taut like a live wire, energy radiating off her in spurts. So alike the Nova that used to sit in the cockpit with him, as Din fed her lines of his restricted life, his dangerous thrush, his brutal career. She is unflinching in the face of despair—it shines like a star, like a pearl. Maker, she’s brute strength, his wife—every single part of her tuned into a frequency he cannot access, cannot hear. Before Nova, Din didn’t even try.

He does now. 

“He’s going to try and take over the galaxy,” Hera is saying, her hands laced together so tightly that she could break her own bones. Din watches Nova out of the corner of his eye. “And he is terrifying.” 

“We’ve dealt with terrifying,” Nova starts, but Hera shakes her head, tightly. 

“Not like this,” she manages, letting the words hang in the balance between them. Din watches as she tries to collect herself, gathering that even-keeled composure she’s kept since she first picked them back up in the Unknown Regions and then shifts. It snaps back into place, but Din’s an expert by now at seeing the cracks in the veneer. 

Nova’s leaned into Hera, like she’s magnetized in her orbit, teeth gnawing on her bottom split lip, the smell of freesia and coconut still raising off her curls, even after a crash landing and the ship splitting apart. Din inhales through the helmet, not moving a muscle, watching her.

Hera sighs, sitting back. She drags a hand over her face, trying to physically erase the sorrow written there. She lifts her chin, trying to snap that sense of calm and control back into her face. Din watches as her blue eyes flick to the visor, then to where his gloved hand is clenched around Nova’s. A tiny, sad smile flashes across her face, a flutter-cut. If Din didn’t wear that expression like an old friend, he wouldn’t have caught it. 

Hera sighs. “You both must be—well, exhausted doesn’t even cover it. Why don’t you lay down. Catch up.” She gestures to Grogu, who’s still sound asleep in the hollow of Din’s arms. “I’ll take the little guy up to the cockpit with me. I could use a copilot, even a sleeping one.” 

Din raises an eyebrow under the helmet. Nova looks over at him, and the world cements, crystallizes. He relents, sighing, letting Hera pluck Grogu out of his arms like a berry. 

“I’ll get you both up when we land to refuel,” Hera promises, “and we can make a plan.” 

“The plan,” Nova says, “is to get out of enemy territory. Get back home.” 

Hera cocks an eyebrow. “I was planning on that,” she says, a small grin playing across her mouth. “I’ll program the flight plan towards Mandalore.” 

Nova smiles, and it’s like light streaming through the clouds after a year of rain. “No,” she says, chin in the air like the leader she is, “I’m a Mandalorian, Hera, and a Jedi, too, but before that, I’m a Rebel.” Her eyes connect with Hera’s and Din’s chest swells with pride, listening to her talk, to speak, to slot their shattered pieces back into place. “If we’re fighting a war, we need to start at the beginning. I want to go to the base.” Nova blinks away sorrow and pain, shifting back into herself. There she is, Din thinks.

“We need to go to Hoth.”

*

The room is so quiet. It’s not a room, really, it’s just an alcove, barely big enough to fit a double-person bunk, but it’s tucked into the hull of the Ghost, away from the bridge and the cockpit. If Nova didn’t spend most of her life out in the stars, she wouldn’t know they were hurtling through space at all, but she can feel the vibrations of the metal as the ship soars through hyperspace, getting closer and closer to home. 

She touches her hand to the hull, ice-cold. Nova snaps her eyes shut, and for a second, she’s back on the Crest, and she’s falling in love for the first time. Din is not her husband, he is not her anything—he is the Mandalorian, and he’s brought her out of Nevarro and into the stars, and all she has of him is the cockpit they share and the millions of miles of open space. She longs for it, sometimes, the simplicity of their beginning. Din asked her if she wished they could stay on Naator—but before Naator, they had bounties and quarries, they had wounds and silence, and they had the crush of space. It’s always been them, through all of this—but sometimes, sometimes, when Nova lets herself, she yearns to start at the beginning, to blip herself back in time, to touch her hands to Din’s face for the first time. 

To feel like a supernova, rather than being Supernova. 

“What?” His voice, low and gravelly, holds volumes. 

Nova inhales sharply, dragging her hand off the hull, turning to face Din in the pitch-dark, in the vantablack night. 

“When you picked me up on Nevarro,” she whispers, afraid to put it into words, “if you had known all of the hurt and heartbreak that would come of it—would you have even looked twice?”

Silence. It crushes her, pulverizes her chest. Din’s thinking, choosing his words, plucking them out of the illuminated pinpricks around them, but it hurts in Nova’s chest all the same, the weight of waiting for his answer.

“Novalise,” Din says, the word—her true name—baring teeth in the darkness, “if you even have to ask me that question, you have no idea how deep my love for you runs.” 

Nova swallows. “I am a mess,” she whispers, the words fractured. She drags her knees up to her chest, leaning back against the headboard—or lack of one, really, because all that’s in here is the metal wall of the ship. Her hands press into the hollows of her eyes, hard enough to try and force the tears back. “I don’t feel like my—I don’t feel together,” she whispers. “I feel—wrong. Like I have made the wrong choice, over and over again, and it keeps almost costing us all our lives.” 

Quiet. The small rustle of Din shifting closer to her in the blackness. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Nova says, inhaling a shuddering breath, “that we shouldn’t have left Naator. But we shouldn’t have left Mandalore, Din. When Wedge and Bo-Katan said they got the distress signal—when I found out it was Ezra, I should have listened to what he told me. Clear as day, don’t come after me. And you have tried to bring me back to earth, over and over again, since this senseless mission started—to tell me that he didn’t want to be found.” She swallows a sob. “He didn’t want to be found because it was dangerous. And now he is lost, again, while Thrawn—this elusive, evil terror—has made it back to our galaxy to—unmake it.” Nova heaves out another uneven breath, feeling that same knife bisecting her heart, feeling the terror of what’s to come pulverize her stomach. “I made the wrong call,” Nova whispers, a tiny admission the weight of the universe on her tongue, “and you gave me the chance to correct it, and I didn’t.” 

Din’s warmth is right next to her, but it feels like he’s a million miles away. In her head, in flashes—the snap of Sparmau’s glittering teeth, the devastation of a starship crashing, the ghosts of her parents in every breath she takes. Thrawn, a vision, nothing more—holding the fate of the galaxy hostage. The midichlorian tanks, the evil running in fault lines that drip across the galaxy. The reflection of Nova’s own face in the mirror—her, but not her—the way she can feel herself unbecoming, atom by atom, the exhaustion in her marrow, the anger still clinging to her bones. Everything is amorphous and ungrounded, and Nova is fractured into millions of tiny stars, trying to fix it, to gather herself up, to pull it all together, to save everyone, to find the fight again—

“Novalise.” 

Quietly, barely a breath: “What?” 

“What do you want?” 

She stares out into the darkness. Somewhere, in the very back of her mind, Nova can’t shake the sensation of the darkness staring back. “I want to save the galaxy.” 

Din’s shutter-still, only breathing in the darkness. He smells like cinnamon and metal, and Nova is so exhausted, and so afraid of falling into fitless sleep, and everything is pulsing through her temples like a migraine, like a hex, like a curse. Din speaks softly. His words could rattle mountains. “What else do you want?” 

Nova doesn’t put words to what she wants—really, truly wants. It does not exist. It cannot exist. She has become the divining rod for something more, the physical symbol of rebellion. The fight ahead of them—it has the power to shatter the stars entirely. She is the earnest and exhausted savior of the galaxy—for better or for worse. It is a Herculean feat, and Novalise is, decidedly, not a god. 

(She wants something more than all of this. She wants to put down the weight of the world. She wants Mandalore to have a truer leader. She wants to learn how to be a Jedi, to live on a quiet planet with yellow trees and purple-pink skies, and she wants to live a life free of violence, to grow old without the threat of war, or pain, or death. She wants to choose love. She wants to choose her family.)

“I want,” Nova breathes, “you.” 

Din doesn’t move. “Nova—”

“You,” she chants, like casting a spell. “No—I need you. I need you, Din.” 

He’s staring at her through the dark. Nova can feel it radiating through to her, want and need coursing in equal measure through her bloodstream, taking the bite out of all of this hurt. It’s so simple, she realizes—Din and Nova, traveling through millions and millions of stars, how it’s always been, how it always will be. In this moment, right now, she doesn’t have to think about the hurt that’s happened, or the horror on the horizon. 

“I can’t save you,” Din breathes, cutting through the dark. “From what pain is living in your head or from the danger ahead of us, I cannot save you. I need you to understand that.” 

It’s too big. Nova fights the urge to slap her hands over her ears. “Din—” 

“You made the wrong call,” Din whispers, “but you did not force me into battle. Do you hear me? I am not an unwilling soldier. I am not marching to my death. I am following you—my Mand’alor, yes, but more than that, my savior—into the next war.”

“Din,” Nova whispers, and she feels him moving closer, but she cannot sense where he is, and the thrum of her heart starts up like a hummingbird. 

“You can save the world,” he whispers, “I know because I’ve seen it.” 

“But it’s so much—” 

“You are Novalise Djarin,” he whispers, and for the first time, it doesn’t sound like a prayer. It sounds like a question. It scares Nova more than she can admit, but the heavy thump of her heart drowns it out, floods it to the back of her mind, clinging on to Din’s words as he moves in above her, like a predator, like a soldier— “You want to save everything? I am your first in command. You want to burn it down? I am still your first in command. You made a bad call. I’ve made them before, too.” His mouth presses against hers, and Nova flinches at the surprise of it in the dark, then leans into his eternal, magnetic pull, like a tractor beam—inevitable. Her Mandalorian. “My worst call was leaving you,” he whispers, “and that will never happen again.” 

“Din—”

“You can do this, Novalise. That has never been in question.” 

But, Nova thinks, an awful thunderstorm raging in the back of her mind, what if I become something else in that process? What if I lose sight of something holy?

“Would you still follow me anywhere?”

“Into the dark,” Din vows. “Into the stars.” 

“What if I go somewhere you can’t follow?” 

He stares. Nova can feel the crushing weight of his fury on the other side of that question, even in the dark. But she doesn't speak, doesn’t try to undo it, doesn’t try to take it back. 

She’s not talking about leaving. She’s talking about being ripped away. With teeth and silver, a parting from this mortal realm. Something is buzzing low in her head. Nova can’t quite put it to name.

“I am never,” Din repeats, low and angry, “leaving you again.” A beat. “What do you want, Novalise?”

“I want you,” Nova manages, through glass and poison, through the insurmountable weight of everything that lies ahead. Then, one word, a shattering, desperate thing— “please.” 

His lips are on hers like a siren, like a bandage. It’s loud and it’s everything and it drowns all the hurt out of her. In the darkness, stars explode. Din licks a line over her split lip, thrusting his tongue into her mouth, lapping up everything that Nova has left in pieces. He surges forward, and suddenly, his body—unarmored and tight, corded muscles tensed over the wash of her own—is covering her, crushing her, pulling her back into his orbit. 

Nova’s mouth opens wide as Din’s lips latch onto her neck, tongue flickering against her pulse point. He knows her body. He’s memorized it, over and over again, more times than she can count. And every time he latches onto her like a viper, it feels like the first time. She mewls out, the wound wet and low and obscene in this tiny alcove, and Din growls, baring his teeth against her throat.

“Careful,” he warns, low and angry. 

“What?” Nova breathes, stars exploding behind her eyes as a rough, ungloved hand comes up hard between her thighs. It knocks her knees in opposite directions, and Nova sings out in the dark, grabbing at his back, his hair, anywhere she can dig her fingers in. Then, lazily, delayed: “...do you mean?”

“Careful,” Din hisses again. His hand comes up, bracketing her throat, fingers squeezing down just enough to send the stars through her eyes again. “You have no idea,” he whispers, but it’s like he’s not talking to her. It’s ragged, a breath, like Din’s praying. Nothing about this feels holy. She is once again begging to be desecrated—to be torn apart. “No idea,” he mouths against her skin. 

“No idea,” Nova manages, through half-lidded eyes, her blood molten and heavy running through her veins, “about what?”

“What you do to me,” Din grits out. Nova mewls again as his other hand trails up the inside of her thigh, nails dragging into the threadbare fabric, tantalizing and dark and possessive. Everything has melted away, everything has—run backwards out of her, like water dripping off somewhere distant. There is no hurt here, nothing dangerous. Nothing beside the man on top of her, her hulking Mandalorian, clad in loungewear instead of armor, diamond-hard. Nova wants to feel him bisect her, split her open, give a new name to the hurt. Turn it on its face, inside out. 

“I have some idea,” she breathes. 

Din doesn’t dignify that with a response. One hand snaps up, quicksilver, pinning both of hers above her head. Nova mewls out again in the darkness, and the hand that was roving between her thighs, teasing against her clit, shoots up to her mouth. Din pinches her cheeks between his forefinger and thumb, puckering her split lip out, and Nova sighs. 

“You want me, cyar’ika?”

Nova nods, eyes tearing up from how hard his grip is—unyielding. Unmoving. It is unbreakable, and she’s caught under the weight of it. This is the darkness she wants. This is the darkness she craves. She would die for every version of Din Djarin, but this one? This one, she would pray to. Endlessly. Worship at the altar of his terrifying, impossible beauty. He is the opposite of monstrous, but in this blackness, he can play one so well. It’s devastating—it’s everything. One word, she’s able to eke out. “Yes.”

Din lets go of her in the darkness, and Nova slams back against the mattress, the flutter of her heartbeat ricocheting off her chest. “Prove it.” 

Nova blinks up at him, entirely unseeable in the vantablack, and slowly channels all her strength into her hands, pushing back against Din’s unshakable grip enough for him to loosen it. Lightning-quick, she pulls her pants down with one hand and shoves his face towards the apex of her thighs with the other. She’s shaking, from want, from fear—it all feels the same. Din inhales, low and deep, and shivers, pressing the bridge of his nose where his hand once was, dragging it back over her clit. 

“Oh, Novalise,” he rumbles, and it reverberates so low it feels like the sound is coming from inside of her. 

Nova shivers. She feels feverish, drunk, like her body cannot hold. She forms the shape of a word in her mouth and it wobbles and fizzles before disappearing entirely, because Din’s licking a hot, wet line up the seam of her cunt, and everything inside of her head has ceased to exist. 

“You don’t want me.” His voice is simpering. Cruel. It cuts her down to the bone. It’s the voice Din used before he was ever Din to her—just the ruthless Mandalorian, the most feared bounty hunter in the Outer Rim. Shivers dance down her spine at the timbre of his voice. “You need me.” 

Nova moans. He slaps a hand over her mouth—hard, hard enough to make her jump, and then he’s soothing it with his tongue, his hands immediately replacing its steady thrum between her thighs. 

“Quiet,” he whispers, “or I’ll have to stop.” 

“You can’t.” 

“I can,” Din whispers, tongue dancing out across the hollow of her collarbone, thready with her hammering heartbeat, “do whatever I want.” 

“Din—” 

“You’re mine,” he whispers, grinding down on top of her, and Nova almost blacks out. “Mine, mine, mine—” 

Nova knows it’ll tip him over the edge. She needs it—she needs him, this unfettered, uncapped version of him, to leech inside of her to the hilt and take everything else away. She is fevered, delusional, grabbing at his hips, trying to loosen the tie around his waist. She breathes out, staccato, the sound of it pornographic and too-loud in the darkness, and then she unleashes her own kind of demon. “Prove it.”

Din goes quiet. Too quiet. The silence falls upon her like a predator that’s just spotted its prey in the wild. Nova doesn’t make a sound. She has just stolen the helm of control and surrendered it in the same two words. She knows he will—he will take, and take, and take, and Nova wants to give him everything down to her bones, until there is no more questioning, no more darkness, no more hurt. Novalise’s light is flickering in the blackness between them, and she needs Din to snuff it out. 

He lets out a low laugh—an indecent rumbling chuckle, and then he is shoving his waistband down, far enough to just free his cock, springing free with force, and then he is pushing inside of her. Nova’s back arches off the mattress. It spears her, bisects her, forces her apart. She has been split down the middle—and then he’s gearing up again, pulling all the way out to slam into her. Nova yelps, and Din’s hand is back over her mouth, tears pricking in the corners of her eyes from the size of it, the weight he’s slamming into her. 

“What?” He pulls all the way out, a sick tease at her entrance, and then thrusts back into Nova. Hard. Hard enough for her to see stars again, more of them, another galaxy’s worth. There are tears running down her cheeks, now, from Din destroying everything inside of her. She craves it, this sick, sweet release. “You talk a big game, cyar’ika.” Another thrust, Nova’s whole body ricocheting from the force. “You told me to prove it.” 

Nova wants to speak, to tease him, to prod him into the Din of her dreams—the unfettered one, the unholy one, haunted and dark. But she can’t open her mouth, can’t form words on her shaking tongue, so she just lets out another moan, hoping he’ll punish her for that one, too. 

“Not.” Din says, punctuating each word with a heavy thrust of his hips, “Good. Enough.” 

“More,” she manages. 

“More,” Din repeats, crooning,” and Nova’s eyes roll back in her skull. “Are you close, Novalise?”

“Yes,” she chokes out, the word split down the syllable, feeling him swell even bigger inside of her, threatening to send her right over that edge. 

“No,” Din snaps, and one hand is back on her throat, squeezing down, hard enough that air wheezes out of her lungs, oxygen leaving her tongue. Nova’s unable to suck it back, and stars, that feels good—to be kept in this limbo, to be unmade by Din’s need. To not think about the horror ahead of them, because she is held, imprisoned by this sweet, cloying torture and bliss, in equal measure. “You don’t get to cum until I tell you to.” 

It’s harsh, gritted out through bared teeth, his voice low and gravelly, and Nova cries out. It’s a sound that always halted him before—half moan, half sob, all need—but both of them are so deep in the maelstrom of want and desire that it’s choked out by the vantablack room around them, lost in the ether of space. 

“Please,” Nova sobs, a desperate, broken—pathetic—thing.” She can feel Din’s lips curl against her neck, purpling the same spot on her pulse point his own shade of violet, and her eyes roll back in her head.

“No.” 

“Din—”

“You do not yield,” Din hisses, “not to anyone but me.”

Nova can feel her orgasm threatening to rip through her—a tornado of feeling, of need. She is not a person, here, she is just a coiled, wet vessel of desire. She is begging Din, but the person on top of her is the Mandalorian, silver and bullets, hail and thunderstorm, and he is closer to a god than he is a man. He is ruthless and dark and everything she has ever wanted, and she can feel release building inside of her, even as he refuses to let her. 

“Please,” she whispers. 

“No.” 

“Please.” 

Nova can feel Din’s lips curl into a smile. “I love it when you beg.” 

“Oh, Maker—” 

He drives into her cunt to the hilt. “Your Maker isn’t here, Novalise,” Din growls, “just me.” 

“I know,” Nova manages, her head dizzied and spinning, “please, Din, let me—”

Din bottoms out into her again, and it’s so close, so cloying, so desperate, Nova can’t hold it back anymore. 

“Cum for me, cyar’ika,” he grits out, hand fisting in her mess of curls, pulling her off the sheets, “Now.” 

She does. Nova feels the world implode, one by one, those millions of stars blinking out behind her eyes. Din’s grip on her throat finally lessens, and she sucks down oxygen like it’s water, throat throbbing, already hungry again in his absence. He makes a low, guttural noise, and then he’s tipped over the edge too, spilling deep inside of her, both of their breathing ragged and undone, chasing breath after breath as they lay together, sweaty and entangled in the darkness. The hand that’s fisted in her hair pulls taught again, and Nova inhales, Din’s lips wet against her ear. “Do not,” he chokes out, “ever insinuate you could go somewhere I could not follow again.” 

The darkness is there—omnipresent, crushing, but right now, it cannot touch her. And Nova is exhausted, held up by Din and the holiness of their desecration and nothing more, but she links her pinky in his, pulls his lips to her mouth, and whispers silent vows into the gap behind his teeth.

*

Hera watches the stars trip by, an endless maze of light. She is no stranger to the hyperspace run—and even less of a stranger to the loneliness of it. The stars are her home, but these ones, these pathways, closer and closer to the Rebel base—they cut her, sluicing with regret. She straightens up in her seat, takes the Ghost off autopilot. They’re low on fuel. They’re too low—running in reserve. She usually pays better attention—but usually, Ezra and Thrawn are not back from another dimension, another galaxy, another cosmos. Hera is torn between fear and excitement—Ezra, her surrogate child, her family, home again—that she let herself get complacent. The fuel gauge glares at her. 

“Sorry,” she mumbles, patting the dashboard. “I’m stopping.”

And the hologram sensor roars to life. 

“Hera!” 

She squints. “Bo-Katan?”

“Can you hear me?” She flickers in and out. Hera leans forward. 

“Barely. Where are you?” 

“Still on this—forsaken ship—”

“Bo-Katan!”

She comes back into screen, sharp and dangerous, the face of a general snapped on. Hera knows it too well. “Hera,” she says, her voice shaking, “we are stuck on Corellia.” 

Hera feels relief seep in, anathema in her bloodstream. “Stars, Bo-Katan, I can come get you, I’m  not far—” 

“That’s…that’s not the problem.” And Bo-Katan, unshakable, ice-princess Bo-Katan has tears in her eyes. “Wedge just got a transmission from the base on Hoth.” She turns away. “Hera,” she whispered, muffled, “I’m so sorry.” 

“General Kryze—” 

Wedge’s face fills the screen. “Hera,” he says, so somber, so unlike him— “the Chimaera’s signal just popped back up on the map.” 

“Ezra—?” 

Wedge shakes his head, shell-shocked. “No,” he manages “Thrawn.” 

Hera swallows. “Where.” 

“Just over Bespin.” 

Her heart flares. “We’re heading to Hoth,” she says, “right now, I just have to stop for fuel, we can…I don’t know, blockade him, shoot him down—” 

“Hera,” Wedge says, “he is going to beat us there.” Then, barely a whisper: “There’s not going to be a Hoth to save.” 

*

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*

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!!! my sincerest apologies as per usual for the literal 6-sh months wait :( 2023 was the wildest and most lived year of my life so far, and unfortunately, it put SH on the backburner. the good news? i sat down over the last few weeks and wrote an entire outline for the full book, as well as a chapter-by-chapter outline through Chapter 16 (for those following along with the Something More Series Lore, that is historically the Nova-Centric Chapter), so while life is still busy with work/living/everything in between, i will be posting MUCH more regularly for the foreseeable future!

thank you all so much for your patience, kindness, and for loving this fic so much. i started writing this series for me, and with how absent i've been, i've made peace with the fact that i may end up finishing writing this series for me, but each and every one of you have proved at every turn how much you care, and the fact that you spend even a few minutes reading my work means more to me than i'll ever be able to say <3

CHAPTER 6 COMING SOON! for day-to-day updates, follow me on tiktok @ padmeamydala :)

The hologram—it pulses. Chitters. Then flares. 

Nova is watching the hologram. Din is watching Nova. There’s something that’s plummeted in her stomach. The hologram in his hands is alive. Then dead. Then alive again. Something has shifted, just in the last few seconds. It hangs heavily in the air around them. Nova can taste it, can sense it, can hear it ringing in the sheer, stark silence.

Din curses, slapping at the hologram. “Bo-Katan. Come in.” 

Static. Where there was a blue figure before is just air and that same static. 

Din tries again. “Bo-Katan. Come in. Can you hear me? Over.” 

Nova shakes her head. Once, twice, three times, trying to keep the gnawing in her stomach at bay. She shivers, whispering to it, trying to placate it, hold it. “No,” she murmurs to it, the displacing, unfettered silence. She barely breathes it: “Not here.” 

Din’s head snaps to her. “What?” 

She swallows, trying to cover her slip. “No signal. Here.” 

He watches her like a hawk under the visor. She knows he can feel it, the vantablack poison that’s flowing through her veins, unquiet and undone. But Nova lifts her chin, pointing towards the inner tangle of the city, past the graveyard of bodies she knows Din left in his wake. 

“Let’s go—” 

“Hell of a fight happening in these parts,” Wedge’s voice blares, clipped through the transmitter, “could really use some backup.” 

Nova feels relief and irritation flare through her in equal measure. Relief, because they’re still, amazingly, blissfully, alive. Irritation, because the display surrounding Bo-Katan and Wedge’s tinny, rigid, mid-fight bodies is showing even more stormtroopers. 

“Where are you?” She’s over the hologram in a second. Din’s visor is still trained on her, not moving an inch. Nova can feel his eyes boring a hole into her own, and she doesn’t dare look at him head-on. 

“Middle—” Bo-Katan grunts, firing a precise round at a trooper, dropping three in his wake, “—of the city center. Hurry up, would you?” 

“Got sidetracked.” 

Through the azure light of the hologram, Bo-Katan affixes Din with a scathing, unimpressed look, eyes flicking up and down. Unimpressed. Judging. Knowing exactly what he’s hiding in that word. So Bo-Katan. She doesn’t have the time to do any of it, and it makes Nova’s heart ache even more. “I’m sure you did.” 

“We’re on our way,” Nova says, fingers fumbling over the hilt of her lightsaber, tripping once, twice, until she latches on securely. “Hold on, okay?” 

“We’re—BAM!—cutting through the west side,” Bo-Katan grits out, interrupted by another blaster shot. “There’s a small underpass, past a block of flattened buildings. Can’t miss it. Meet you in the middle. Don’t get lost. And when I said hurry, I meant it.” And she clicks off, leaving Nova and Din in the darkness, with nothing but the wind and the crumbling structures of Corellia and all their ghosts. 

Nova swallows, pulling the jacket she loaned from Hera—half-destroyed, now—over her shoulders, tucking the loose mess of her curls into the collar. Din reaches out, lightning-quick, and grabs her chin, hooking one finger underneath the curve of it, bringing her face flush against the visor. “What?” she breathes. The heat of it fogs against the beskar. Something low and hungry snarls inside of her belly. Nova flinches, trying to ignore it. It still beckons. Stretches. Yearns. 

“Something is wrong,” Din murmurs. “With you. It wasn’t before. Is now.” 

Nova tries to shake her head. Din holds steady. He doesn’t speak, capturing her there, under the weight of his body and nothing else. 

“Din—” 

“Right?” 

Nova lifts her chin, away from his grip. He does not falter. She sighs, sinking back into it. “Yes. But—”

“Can you fight?” 

Nova blinks. But it’s not the time. That’s what she was going to say. 

But he isn’t coddling her. He isn’t protesting. 

She swallows it down. She will fight the ringing in her ears, the drip-drip-drip of venom in her blood. Something is wrong—Din’s right. She is off, now, somehow shipwrecked against the violence and unsettling living inside of her, knocked loose by the fighting or the fucking, she cannot tell. 

But she is here. Novalise can fight. And something that Corellia reminded her of was that she wants to. 

“Yes,” she breathes. For one earth-shattering, painful second, Din does not react. And then he nods, and then he’s leading her deeper into the entrails of Coronet City. His steps are even, determined. His blaster is notched in one hand and the other is firmly latched in hers. Nova follows where his boots leave, imprinting her own into the ground behind him. 

In the utter darkness, she almost doesn’t notice the dead things—the stormtroopers and bounty hunters. They’re scattered across the ground, discarded. Like leaves. Insignificant. Bodies upon bodies. Maker, there must be—fifty. No, seventy. No… a hundred. Maybe more. Nova swallows as Din cuts a clean path through the men he slaughtered, kicking armor and weapons aside with his steel-toed boots. 

“Din—” 

“No mercy.” The words come out clipped. Dangerous. “I made them pay for it.” 

“You…you did this alone? There were so many—” 

He whirls around. They’re standing in a graveyard of filth and vermin, of bodies belonging to people that meant them harm. Nova tears her gaze off the armor—strange, these stormtroopers’ armor, it itches at her—to look at her Mandalorian. He is a knife, a blade. He could cut her clean through. He yanks her closer, tighter, until her body is pressed flush up against the armor. “I could have killed,” he snarls, voice heavy and thick, “a thousand of them.” He exhales, languid through the vocoder. “It still wouldn’t have been enough.” 

That hunger, dark and twisting, flares again. Nova inhales a sharp, stuttered breath. “There will be more ahead,” she whispers. 

Din curls his lip over his teeth. Nova can’t see his smile, but she knows it’s there. It’s palpable, as heavy and imposing as the storm hanging in the air above them, and that too stokes a fire in her belly, igniting a spark that she’s not sure she can control.

“Good.” One word. It siphons through the air. He snarls it, like whatever possessed him earlier is still rattling around inside. 

Nova’s mouth opens. “Din—” 

She’s not sure what she’s going to say. That this place is ruining them. That they’ve both been possessed, and she’s not sure either demon has left. That she’s terrified of what’s waiting for them on Hoth. That she’s scareder still of the monsters in both of their chests, let out to destroy, unsure if that can be reigned back in. That the good that lit her up, golden and divine, has been corrupted, and Novalise is horrified and alive in equal measure—

But then a blaster flares in the dark, once, twice, and the moment is gone. Din’s visor is secured on hers. Nova allows a small, quiet nod. They both know what that means—later. Like everything else, they’ll address it later. 

They push the ghosts and blood aside. There will be plenty of room for that once they get Bo-Katan and Wedge, off this gods-forsaken planet, and try to save Hoth from Grand Admiral Thrawn and whatever destruction he brings in his wake. 

In the pitch-dark, in unison, Novalise and Din run in the only direction they know. Towards their friends. Towards that light.

*

“More.” 

“Bo-Katan,” Wedge manages, through gritted teeth, “I’m giving ‘em all I got.” 

Bo-Katan snarls, a low, angry thing, and Wedge swallows. He doesn’t have armor to hide under. No helmets, nothing to keep him shielded. He grits his jaw down, ducking and hiding behind pieces of scrap metal, reloading his blaster with the half-measures of artillery he found in the trooper’s discarded one a few klicks back. 

He doesn’t have time to consider that it was once a Rebel blaster, the one that he picked up. That’s the only reason those bullets fit in his gun. He swallows, looking at Bo-Katan through the haze and smoke. Her helmet is as blue and dangerous as the low light of the night is, and she’s moving like a weapon, because she is. General Kryze, Mandalorian Princess, Commander of the Nite Owls. His sharp and kind friend Bo-Katan, a double-edged sword, a dichotomy of sorts—right now, she is nothing but that aforementioned blade. She’s exhausted, she’s undone. She isn’t slowing down. 

He is. He wants to. He’s old, Wedge. And injured. His leg is bruised to all hell. Probably has a few broken toes, if he were to guess. And he is completely unused to fighting these battles on the ground. He wants to be back up there. In the stars. On Hoth. He’s itching for it—to defend his home. That’s the only battle Wedge Antilles wants to be a part of right now. Even if it’s a losing one. Even if they’ve already lost. 

He, like the rest of them, wants the hell off this planet. 

Maker, they’re so out of their league in this one. He sighs, reloads, and pops back up, aiming to stun. 

“Wedge,” Bo-Katan warns. But her voice is soft, like she’s reminding him, not chastising him. 

He sighs again. He resets his blaster to kill. 

*

Years ago, before anything truly holy ever fell in his hands, before anything but the Creed crept into his head, Din Djarin dreamed of a girl. She was a saint of sorts. A queen, but beyond that. Something sanctimonious. She was silver and gilded, something divine. Honey and freesia, lavender and midnight. Laughter spilled from her lips. Sweetness undulated from her hips. She was not a blade. She was not a knife. She was something he did not dare pray to—something holier than even that. 

She was his Novalise. She was his salvation. 

He did not know that yet. He would not know it for years to come. He watched her in flashes, in supercuts. In intermittent, stuttering pauses when he closed his eyes, in the fleeting moments when he was granted rest. Somewhere, in between killing for bringing in bounties and killing for savoring in the bloodlust, Din dreamed. Sometimes, it was the memory of his parents. Sometimes, it was of the home he left behind. Rarely was it ever about the future ahead. He didn’t allow himself to dabble in that happiness, let it linger on his tongue. He was afraid of believing in something like that. Something good. Something more. 

Divinity was not meant for Din Djarin. 

Until it was. 

Divinity walks in front of him now, and Nova is walking like she did in every dream, every hallucination, every premonition. 

Every nightmare. It calls. It beckons.

That’s what scares him. Nova is Nova until she isn’t—where she goes, off into that listing, hollow place, where her eyes are not her own. He dreams of her, she dreams of teeth. There’s a metaphor in that, but she’s the one with the map to all those metaphors, and he’s the one with dark matter and handfuls of blood, and he does not know where hers stops and his begins. And some part of him thinks there’s something pious in that too. Something holy, something he can whisper a prayer to, something he can take to his grave. 

But the only graves in front of him are the ones of their enemies. He has the blood smeared across his beskar—that sweet nectar of war—to prove it. Nova is Nova. Right now, when it matters, she is wholly herself. He is watching her like a hawk, like a falcon. Like himself. 

Selfishly, he needs her to be Nova. The galaxy needs Novalise, yes, their silver salve, their swinging savior, but he needs his Nova. 

In his dreams, that figure—she was called the Sanct’yia. In this lifetime, she is called Novalise. 

In all of them, she shines. 

“What are you thinking about?”

Her words are so faint, Din barely hears them. He swallows. It’s audible through the vocoder. “You.” One word—the truth, all of it. 

Nova turns around halfway, shooting him a glance over her shoulder. “Can’t afford to get distracted, Mandalorian,” she whispers. “Even by all of this.” She gives her shoulders a little shimmy, gestures to her torn shirt, her flowing mess of hair, half piled up at the crown of her head. She’s joking. Din’s never felt more serious. Then, all breath: “Get your head in the game.” It’s so like how she used to speak to him—flirty, light—like she was keeping all the oxygen alive in the air around them by her voice alone—that Din feels himself fall in love all over again. 

He grunts in response. She knows how to decode that. 

Nova winks. A strange expression flutters over her face. Pain—no. It’s not that—it’s like she’s trying to hear a whisper she’s too far away to hear. He can’t tell if that’s the otherness speaking to her, or if it’s the Force, or if it’s something else entirely, but when Nova’s eyes flutter open, the light in them is full-force, crystal-clear. 

“We’re close,” she breathes, and Din nods. Nova’s fingers flutter over the hilt of her saber, then the Darksaber, and then, after a moment of deliberation, she palms it, fists it, and places it firmly in his grasp. 

He sighs. 

“Take it.” 

Din fixes her with the same look he did earlier. The same moment, lived over and over again. Deja vu, how it calls to them.  “Novalise,” he whispers. 

“I know.” And she does. She knows that he struggles against the blade, that he doesn’t fight naturally with it, that something else takes over. That he becomes an animal. That he slices and cleaves until all that is left is blood and sinew and bone. He will become a pit of a man for her, over and over again, if that’s what it takes. But it takes a toll, wielding the Darksaber, on them both. All of this is to say: Nova knows what she’s asking him to do. Din knows he will do it in a heartbeat. 

It is an oil spill, leaching vantablack, whispering poison. And they are swallowing it in equal measure. They will take on the darkness together. Never alone. Never again. 

He takes the blade. They are both soldiers, after all. A battlefield is in front of them; their family on the other side. 

Nova touches her forehead to his helmeted one, kissing skin to steel. Din closes his eyes, imagining the feeling of her heartbeat in his palms, her lips against his, his hands closed around nothing but warmth. I would do anything for you, he thinks. I will do everything for you. 

“We’re going to make it,” she whispers, and Din doesn’t know if it’s a promise or a prayer, but he believes her. 

“On your mark,” he murmurs, stroking a line over her cheek. It comes back bloody. He doesn’t dare think about what that means. 

When Nova charges over the hill, Din follows her like a bullet. 

*

They’re losing. 

That’s the only thing that Bo-Katan registers. 

They’re boxed in, and they’re losing, and she’s furious, because she refuses to lose to stormtroopers, and she refuses to die on Corellia. Stormtroopers surround them, flashes and flashes of endless white armor. They’re trained well. They’re trained like actual soldiers—not pawns, but pieces on the chess board. That bothers her beyond just general annoyance. That’s a real, tangible problem. And she’s cut-up, bruised. Bleeding. Wedge is doing the best he can, but he’s faltering. Favoring his left side, and he’s not left-handed. Hell, she’s doing the best she can, but she’s faltering. 

“Where the hell,” she seethes, swinging savagely, cutting under a fallen trooper to aim and leverage at another platoon, “are they coming from?” 

Wedge doesn’t have an answer. He falls to the ground, hiding and ducking to reload with meager artillery. “Bo-Katan—”

“No.” 

He tries to catch her eye. She purposely avoids it. “Bo,” he says, gently, too gently for a warzone, “it may be worth cutting our losses—” 

“We,” she says, as definitively as she can while hiding behind a dumpster full of fetid garbage, “are not surrendering. Not to stormtroopers.” 

“I meant running.” 

She fixes him with a withering stare. Most people cower under that glare. Not Wedge Antilles. He looks beaten, though. Grimy. Tired. “Wedge,” she says, a tiny bit of desperation finally bleeding into her voice, “where the fuck are we supposed to run to?” 

“The rendezvous point.” He swallows, loading his final rounds into his blaster. “If we go left…We can try to cut through the alley—” 

“We came from there,” Bo-Katan hisses, “and there were even more troopers on the other side. I can try to reach Hera again, but the signal hasn’t gone through.” A beat. Then, angrily: “They must be jamming it.” She slams her fist into metal. It hurts, she registers that, but it’s dully. She has so much rage in her body, rage that’s been simmering, festering, since they left Mandalore weeks ago, and she has nowhere else to put it. 

Wedge reaches over to grab her wrist. Her hands are shaking. Badly. Bo-Katan doesn’t shake—not like this. She hasn’t since Sparmau kept her and Din captive, beating and twisting them both within inches of their respective lives. She tries to take a steadying breath, but all she can smell is steaming trash and cold panic, and another wave of it rises in her chest. Wedge’s hand slides into her own. She wants to fight him off, she really does, because tears are rising in her eyes, and she does not cry, especially not in front of anyone, but it’s Wedge, just Wedge, and she squeezes it back, forcing herself to look at him. 

“Wedge,” Bo-Katan whispers, as evenly as she can manage, “I can’t be a prisoner again.” She exhales through her mouth, biting down on her bottom lip. His eyes are warm. Sorrowful. “I can’t.” She knows he understands. 

Wedge doesn’t say anything. He nods, looking pained. His face is a nasty shade of green. Her eyebrows furrow. 

“What?” 

He sighs, like he’s conceding a point. Then, miserably: “My leg.” 

Bo-Katan looks down. She lets out an obscene string of curses. He’s cut through to the bone. “Maker fuck,” she snarls, ripping a piece of her undershirt—the cleanest bit she can find—to staunch the bleeding. “Why didn’t you say—?” 

“We,” Wedge says tiredly, his head making a sick thunk against the dumpster, “were kind of preoccupied.” 

Bo-Katan feels a fresh wave of tears rise in her eyes, and she angrily swipes them away. She will not cry. Not on this stars-forsaken planet. Not here. “Okay.” She swallows. “I’m going to be the decoy. Try and shoot as many of them as I can. You try to stand up. Then you grab on to me and I’ll fly us as far away from here as we can. Toward the Ghost.” 

Wedge blinks. “That’s a terrible plan.” 

Bo-Katan throws up her hands. “Do you have a better one?” 

“No,” he says. “Din and Nova—” 

“I know,” Bo-Katan says, wiping her traitorous eyes with the heel of one furious hand, “but you’re in dire straits, and I know Hera will have bacta, and likely a better signal than us.”

“I don’t like it.” 

“You think I do?” 

Wedge sighs. “Can your jetpack even support two people?” 

Bo-Katan offers him what she hopes is an encouraging smile. With the way he looks at her, she’s afraid it may have come out a bit more like a grimace. “I couldn’t think of anyone else,” she says, as seriously and kindly as she can muster, “that I would like to test that theory with more.” 

“Bo-Katan—” 

“Wedge,” she says, gently bracing a hand on his shoulder, trying her best to ignore the increasingly loud blaster fire behind them, “with all due respect, we are running out of time for debate.” 

“This,” Wedge announces, “is a terrible plan.” 

“We’ve covered that,” Bo-Katan says, sourly. And then, the unthinkable happens. Wedge is smiling. Smiling. “Maker,” she sighs, “I think you might be dying.” 

“Assuredly not,” Wedge laughs, toothy grin on full display. It sparkles like stars. Bo-Katan shakes him, a jolt of panic suddenly striking through her. Yep. He’s delusional. Dying for sure.  He points to a fixed point beyond her. “Look.” 

Bo-Katan whirls, blaster in hand, prepared to throw herself in front of Wedge and go down swinging, if that’s what it takes. But Wedge isn’t pointing at the army of troopers spilling out of the city’s cracks. He’s pointing at the horizon. And there, like a miracle itself, exploding through the advancing line of troopers, are Din and Nova. 

*

They cut. It comes like second nature. There was a time in her life when Nova would have mourned, would have taken a moment to acknowledge the people inside the insidious white armor. But these aren’t just stormtroopers. These are stormtroopers who knifed her deep enough to kill. These are stormtroopers that stand now between them and their family. And these stormtroopers…look different. Act different. Fight different. 

Feel different.

They fall the same though. Like anyone that stands against the Light. They tumble down in a storm of white armor and body parts. The sizzle and hiss of the combined sabers, grayscale and golden in equal measure—it singes Corellia’s already awful air into something even worse. It smells like death. 

Out of the corner of her eye, in the flashes between soldiers, Nova watches Din cut them down. He moves like an animal. Like a predator. He is obsidian, this blade he has become. The switch has fully flipped. He snarls and stalks his prey. It doesn’t matter that the Darksaber has never fully fit right in his hands. He wields it like it does. 

Din Djarin—he has disappeared. The Mandalorian has taken control. Nova used to know exactly where that delineation was, but the line has blurred. Her own has, too. Since they left Mandalore, she—

A trooper rages out of nowhere, shooting Nova straight out of her reverie. She ducks, twists, rotating her wrist to sizzle the shot out of midair. Her own lightsaber—pure sunlight in Corellia’s midnight sky—catches it, disappears it. She cuts him down, cauterizing the cry out of his throat with one thrust of her wrist. She stuns where she can, knocks heads together and cuts limbs instead of ripping hearts out. 

She is not a monster. Oh, it beckons to her. That darkness. It sings, like calls to like. The ring on her finger glints, gray and yellow, glancing off the light of her saber as she tries to suppress it, push it down. It calls. But Novalise does not answer. She does not have another persona to step into. Not yet. She is Novalise, and this version of herself—silver Supernova, gilded goodness—that will have to be pried and wrenched out of her cold, dead hands. So she kills, yes, she cuts the troopers down, yes, but she does not relish in it. 

She is a Jedi pushed to her limits. She is a Mandalorian forced to be supernatural. She is a Rebel demanded to fight this battle on the ground. 

She is Novalise Djarin, and she is not fucking losing. 

“Where are they?” Din’s voice is close—too close. It cuts through the open air they’re fighting in, and Nova spins around. He’s closer than she thought—silent in his advancement. Cunning in his strikes. A trooper charges for her, hand on the trigger. Din slices his head clean off. She blinks. He doesn’t move another muscle, a fresh spray of blood coating his beskar. Nova swallows, trying to ignore the nausea and want, both warring for control in the pit of her stomach. “Do you know?” 

“I—” 

“I know I said, explicitly, ‘don’t come to Corellia’,” a familiar, exhausted voice rings out, and Nova whirls on her heel, relief a rush through her entire, wired body, “but I’m really, really glad you did.”

They’re in bad shape. Even upon first look, that much is clear. Wedge’s leg is a rivulet of red, bleeding through a makeshift tourniquet, jumpsuit muddied to all hell. Bo-Katan’s nose is surely broken, face as crimson as her hair, missing pieces chipped out of her armor. They’re slung together, they’re fractured, and they’re the sweetest thing Novalise has ever seen. 

“Maker,” Din breathes, and then all four of them are running, in varying states of ability, to meet in the center, a four-pronged star. 

“Three times you’ve rescued me now,” Bo-Katan manages, and her voice is hoarse, shaky, and Nova stumbles through a sea of bodies and white armor to get to both of them before they collapse on this makeshift battlefield, “don’t like owing debts. Especially not to my Mand’alor.” 

Nova’s crying. A slobbering mess. “How about,” she manages, through blurry eyes, “your best friend?” 

Bo-Katan shrugs, considering. She lets Nova pull her into a bone-crushing hug, both of them wincing at the too-hard contact, both of them refusing to let go. “I’ll allow it.” 

“Didn’t know if you were gonna make it,” Wedge says, his voice cracking down the middle, grabbing onto Din’s shoulders like a lifeforce. Din doesn’t flinch, wrapping one arm around Wedge’s waist, slinging the other around Bo-Katan’s. Together, entwined, they hobble forward, Nova’s lightsaber still ignited, leading the way, a four-headed animal. Something out of a folktale, something to be reckoned with. “Really, really glad you did.” He reaches over to Nova to press a kiss into the mess of her bloodied hair. “Rebel girl,” he whispers, through tears, “I have never been happier to see you.” 

Nova squeezes his hand as hard as both of them can handle. So much weight is slung behind that gesture—her Wedge, her family—there’s so much she cannot say, cannot manage through the mess of tears tangled in her throat. They are all entangled now, like weeds, grown together over years and years, but the man she’s holding up is the one that kept her alive when no one else did, the one that knew her before she was Novalise at all, who loved her when she was just Andromeda, just her parents’ daughter. What a fraught and full thing it is to be known so deeply. What a terrible and horrific thing to almost lose all of their lives in this awful place.

“Corellia,” Din announces, roughly, thickly, “is not a good planet.” 

All of them laugh, through sweat and tears. When the shooting starts again behind them, Nova wrenches free, ready to launch herself in front of the world for the three people supporting each other’s weight, and then the second miracle of the day happens. 

A ship, their one blessed Ghost, descends from the sky, dropping between the four of them and the world against them. Hera Syndulla and her one-woman-army lights up the rest of the troopers, extends the gangplank, and pulls them all to the safety of the stars above. 

*

“Thank you,” Nova murmurs. Wedge, Bo-Katan, and Din have all disappeared to clean up—there are separate freshers and bedchambers buried deep in the Ghost’s belly. Hera must have had a whole crew on here at some point. It feels—empty. Like it was full to the brim, once, and now it’s been forcibly deserted, returned to the crush of space without all of its members. Nova doesn’t know any details beyond what Ezra’s said and what Hera’s alluded to, but she can feel it in the stale air. “For rescuing us.” 

Hera’s gaze is so searching. Sad. They’re sitting at the same table they were less than a day ago, but it feels so monumentally different. Novalise is bloodied and bruised. Battered. In an altered state. That darkness, chittering, is pulsing somewhere in the back of her mind, and she is pushing it into the corners, trying to compartmentalize. She can’t deal with it right. She can’t deal with it at all.

“What happened?” The words are so quiet. At first, Nova doesn’t recognize that Hera’s spoken at all. “Down there.” Those blue, blue eyes, river-deep—trained on the newly cauterized wound on her bare stomach. Nova appreciates she’s not trying to hide it. She offered her bacta patches rather than injections, and Nova’s letting them set over the gash before she allows the water  to wash her clean. 

Nova swallows. “There were so many of them,” she whispers. “Troopers. Bounty hunters. Working together. I killed them—Bo and Wedge did, too. Din killed more.” She laughs, low and mirthless. “Din killed an entire platoon, and they kept coming.” She looks at Hera and then away, because it hurts too much. “They looked different.” 

Hera leans forward, jaw set. “Different how?”

That’s the thing. Nova can’t place it. She blinks furiously, trying to explain it, but nothing comes. “Older,” she says, finally, but her voice wobbles, uncertain. “Rawer. Like they were made up of something… different.” 

“The armor?” 

Slowly, Nova nods. “But not just the armor,” she whispers, dragging a hand over her tired eyes, “the way they fought. Those were not the Empire’s troopers. They were calculated. Trained.” Her eyes flash to Hera’s. “Stronger.” 

A look of understanding flashes over Hera’s face briefly, so quickly Nova thinks she may have imagined it. Hera leans forward, gently checking on the patches. “These have set,” she murmurs, green fingers tracing soft, barely-there lines over her skin. “You can shower. Take another injection after. We don’t have much time before we reach Hoth—” 

Fear ripples through Nova. “How much?” 

Hera looks up at her, and this time, the look on her face is equal in both sorrow and determination. “An hour, at most. Do you have a plan?” 

Nova shutters her eyes, just for a second. She wanted this—to be the leader, to be the decision-maker. To run headfirst into battle, light flowing out of her skin. But she has been corrupted by something unsettling. She has sunk somewhere she can’t scry through. She wants a break, a beat, a second—to come up with a tangible plan, to reassess. To go back to Mandalore. To go back to Ezra’s initial message, to listen when he said to stay away. He’s been silent—in holograms and in her head—and she cannot tell if that’s a good sign or not. And she cannot speak that to Hera, not now, not before a faceoff with the man or myth that snatched her son away from her for the last ten years, so she rolls back her shoulders, she lifts her chin, and Novalise does what she always does. She swallows the Light. 

“I have a plan,” Nova says. A beat. Then: “But which version we take depends on if we beat Thrawn there.” 

Hera stands up. “We can beat him there.” 

“Are you sure?” 

Hera offers Nova a real smile, all glittering teeth—ones that Nova isn’t afraid of, and something settles in her stomach at that. “You haven’t met my droid yet.” 

Nova thinks, oddly, as Hera runs to the cockpit—to someone else, that may sound like a threat. 

*

Din isn’t in the tiny bedroom—he’s in the fresher. Nova can hear the water running—he’s under the stream of it, washing everything clean. 

It drip-drip-drips off in the distance, and she slinks in, locking the door behind her, stripping her soiled clothes off. She’s going to need to borrow something else from Hera—hers are truly ruined. But she doesn’t think about it. Not now. She needs to wash herself free of her filth, the blood on her hands, the sins trapped in between. She needs to get clean too. 

Din is facing the water when she walks in. Nova drops her clothes off her body, silently. She doesn’t make a noise when she steps underneath the steam. It’s running in rivulets over his pockmarked, muscled body. His skin, tan and deep, looks so much warmer under the low lights in here than it ever does anywhere else. When was the last time she got to look at Din? Really look at him? Nova doesn’t know. Can’t recall. She studies him, plastering herself to the opposite wall of the fresher, eyes cartographing the map of his back. She wants to commit it to memory. She wants to have this moment to cling to when everything is cold and barren. 

His muscles contract. Hard. He runs his hands through his hair, curling up and jet-black under the steady stream of water. It’s a luxury—they haven’t had a real one, with running water, since they left Mandalore. Mandalore, Mandalore, Mandalore. Maker, Nova thinks, we never should have left Mandalore. The word feels like a hymn or a curse on her tongue—her home, but not quite. Din’s home, but not really. Half-home, to both of them. She was supposed to rule that planet—to move the Rebel base there. To make it harmonious, a place of refuge, where both Rebels and Mandalorians came together to fight a bigger war. Before all of this. Before evil forced her hand.

A war that is all moving parts—Grand Admiral Thrawn just the biggest tip of the iceberg. Her dreams—blue lightning, sinister laughter, evil rising from the dead, cloning tanks, teeth, all those teeth, Sparmau’s hands, the elusive First Order, flashes of the galaxy in years ahead—it’s too much. Nova watches her husband, captive under the water, and all she can think about is that she wants. That darkness in her stomach—it beckons to her for a reason. 

Nova feels weak. Behind. Like she’s slipping through an hourglass, like she’s living on borrowed time. 

She wants to win—she wants to save the galaxy, yes. That has always been true, Since Novalise Djarin was forged, created out of silver stardust and orange light—she has been a savior. A martyr, in parts—but a savior, true to her marrow. Nova does not give up. It is not in her blood, her DNA, her makeup. But there is something…coiled deep inside of her. Whether it is desire or selfishness or darkness—she does not know. It doesn’t have a name. It just—yearns. She stares down at the swirling ring, notched perfectly on top of her engagement one, on her left hand—it pulses. Calls. She is a dichotomy of a million things, and she is pulled in a thousand different directions. 

She wants it to be simple. To pull the darkness’s mouth open. To threaten it with light. 

But, Nova thinks, a swirling, insidious thing, what happens if the darkness has become part of me? What if I am the rip current, not the sunrise? 

What happens if I get down to Hoth and I am the dangerous thing?

“I can hear you thinking,” Din says, his voice low and languid, muffled by the pour of the shower. Nova swallows, backing up against the wall. Chills have erupted across her whole body at the sound of it. Vantablack. Obsidian. 

“Thought I was sneakier than that,” Nova breathes, “by now.” 

Din smirks. His head is tilted to the side. His hair is getting long—curls dripping in his eyes, brown warmth flooded out black. “Not with me, cyar’ika.” 

“Most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy,” Nova sighs, stepping under the steam. “How could I have forgotten?”

Din turns to face her. “Can catch anything,” he murmurs, dragging a hand through his hair, pushing it back, “caught you, once.” He yanks her in—hard. 

“You’ve caught me in every lifetime,” Nova murmurs, as she’s tipped off her axis. The water hits her and she hisses—it feels too hot, too much—and then Din’s pulling her into his orbit, coaxing her under the stream of it, and with his body, slick and warm, entwined with hers, and with the jet of warm water pulsing over her sore, bloodied muscles—she relaxes. 

“Does it hurt?” 

Nova’s eyes have shuttered, letting the water run over her curls, weighing them down. They reach almost to the small of her back, flowing over her shoulders, long wispy pieces that used to be bangs now hanging somewhere around her chin. She blinks up through watered-down lashes at her Mandalorian—unarmored, all skin, and her breath hitches in her throat. “Does what hurt?” 

His thumb skates over the high point of her cheekbone—the magnetic pull that’s always gravitated him there, tugging right back into place. His pinky hooks under her ear, brushing over her pulse point, and even under all this warmth, Nova shivers. “Your scar.” 

She looks down, recoiling a little at the brand-new gash in her stomach. It looks—well, still raw, half-formed, angry. Like a freshly cauterized wound should look. But between Din’s coercive injection and Hera’s patches, the antibiotics have worked enough magic to keep the hurt at bay. “No,” she answers, and it’s the truth.

Din’s eyes roam over the map of her face. It burns so bright. “But something does.” 

Nova bites down on her bottom lip. “Hera asked if I have a plan,” she whispers, barely audible over the thrush of the water making them both clean. 

Din doesn’t waver. “Do you?”

Nova doesn’t move. He hooks her chin with one hand, forcing her to look at him head-on. 

“Novalise.” Her name—a warning shot. He knows her tendency for martyrdom—he’s seen the fires she’s been fighting off internally. That oil-slick, that blinking venom. She is a wound, and she is bleeding, and Nova doesn’t know if it will coagulate Rebel orange or something else entirely. She swallows. 

“I am not going to do,” she vows, “anything reckless.” It comes out slightly shaky. Like she’s not sure if she entirely believes it. 

Din doesn’t move. “What’s your plan?” 

Nova swallows. “Evac.” It’s a bitter word. “Get everyone left on base off-planet. To safety.” A beat. Then, softly: “To Mandalore.” 

He blinks at her. “Evacuation—? Evac is a good thing, Nova. And Mandalore is the right choice. The safe choice.” 

“I know.” 

“So what’s the problem?” 

A knot gathers, right at the base of her throat. Tangles there, like roots. “The problem is that the Rebels keep getting their home destroyed. That we’ve had to keep scattering. I want to move us to Mandalore, create a hybrid army, but that’s going to cause tensions to escalate on both sides.” She swallows. “I know we’ve all agreed—agreed on unity. I know that we can make it work. But what happens when the Dark Side catches wind of all of us in a singular location? Then Mandalore will be attacked, again, then tensions will implode, again, then we will have to fight for safety, again.” 

“One step at a time.” He’s thinking logically. For some reason, it makes Nova’s anger flare. 

She turns away, dragging soap over her body, the tangled mess of her hair. She’s buying time. It doesn’t matter. The words slip out anyway. “I want to defend it.” It’s something she can only bite out when she’s not facing Din. “Hoth.” 

“Nova…” It’s so soft, her name. It makes her even angrier. 

“I know,” she says, teeth gritted. “I know it all, Din. I know this is a losing battle. I know it’s a wasteland of a planet. I know that it’s already been blown up before. I know that barely anyone is left. I know that the Alliance is just scraps, and that something bigger is on the horizon, and that I’m clinging desperately to something that truly died a long time ago.” She swallows. “But I don’t care. I…I think I have earned the right to be a little idealistic. A little selfish. I think I’m allowed the chance to put up a fight. If we have to go down, I want to go down kicking and fucking screaming.” She inhales a shaky, trembling thing, and then she turns back around to face Din, to face his rebuttal. 

But all that’s written in his face is love, pride, and stardust. 

It knocks Nova off her center, again. She inhales, sharp and dry, blinking through the steam. “What?” 

“There you are,” he whispers, and Nova feels something flare in her chest. No—lower. 

“You don’t think it’s a bad idea?” 

Din takes a step closer in response. He’s boxing her in against the wall—predatory in nature. Nova is his willing, sweet prey. Their eternal roles. She hums as he presses his body into hers. “No.” 

“You want me to fight?” 

He grins, devilish, white teeth stunning and dangerous in the flickering low light. “Yes, sweet girl.” 

Nova sighs, and his mouth closes over hers. For a minute, she is just suspended here—held up by determination and love and the knowledge that she has not gone sideways, that she has not retreated off somewhere she cannot access. Din kisses like a forest fire, all heat, and she wraps her legs around his waist as he pulls her closer. She wants to be torn apart again, to be ravaged by her Mandalorian, to be torn limb from limb.

“Then fight me.” 

The words fall out of her mouth before she can stop them. Nova bites down on her lower lip, like that’ll rescind them, box them in. Din goes utterly still—silent. She can hear her blood rush in her ears. 

“What?” One word, and everything in her tightens. 

“I—” 

“No,” Din says, pressing her back up against the fresher wall. There’s barely any room in here to begin with—it’s meant for one person, not two, certainly not two people that have hips and muscles and curves and thighs, like they both do—and suddenly, it feels suffocating. “No, you don’t run from me.” He thrusts one hand out, under her chin. It’s not the simple, gentle lift he usually does, trigger finger with his forefinger and thumb—no, he’s grabbing her like he aims to throttle her. There’s something thrumming through his blood—humming, dripping, singing. Nova can feel it, in turn with hers. 

Something darker has invaded them both. 

“What did you say?” 

“I wanted y-you to—” 

“If I am fighting you,” Din snarls, “something has gone terribly wrong.” 

Thunder rumbles, sounding off down in her heart.

“Novalise,” Din croons, “has something gone terribly wrong?” 

The fist coiled inside of her flexes, cracks. 

She wants him. She wants him sheathed inside of her—knocking this darkness, this anger, this un-Nova-ness—loose. She wants to fuck away the pain; to make it sweeter. 

Lighter. 

Holier. 

But they are both running on fumes, both quelling demons, both wound so tight. Din’s cock flexes against her, and Nova knows it would be so easy for him to push it inside of her, to bisect her, to let them both sink into poison, but his mouth hovers an inch from hers and stops. 

“Novalise.” It’s all Din. Nothing more, nothing less.

“No,” she breathes. “I’m here.” She blinks, and whatever reached up her throat and pulsed is gone now. She blinks, once, twice, red clearing from her vision.

Din grabs her again, chin in the claw of her right hand. Maker, his eyes are dark in here, pitch-black, but they belong to him. The darkness—whatever had a hold on her a second ago—it hisses, recedes. 

“I’ve got you,” he says, and Nova nods, pressing her slick forehead to his. Grounding herself there. “You want a fight? You’ve got a fight down on Hoth, baby. Keep your head in the game.” 

It is until after he’s kissed her and released her back into the water that Nova realizes that he’s repeating what she said to him back down on Corellia. She can feel his eyes on her back, boring holes right through her defenses, her armor, her facade. 

Something peers into her. Nova does not look back.

*

Novalise washes herself clean. Din watches her purify, sanctify. He kisses her, braids her hair down her back, holds her eyes in the mirror. She smiles at him, looks at him like the Novalise he knows, he prays to. His Mand’alor, his savior, his Sanct’yia. 

She’s here, he whispers, she’s okay. like a mantra. Like a prayer.

Like a plea. 

He has a bad feeling about this mission. Hell, he has a bad feeling about all of them—but it’s in the air, and Din moves in her footsteps like a kept animal. 

Novalise walks into the belly of the Ghost, every inch a warrior. Din crawls after her, Novalise’s human weapon.

When he dreams tonight, he vows, it will be of how to keep her demons at bay. How to burn them to the ground.

* 

Everyone’s armor has seen better days. 

Hera looks relatively untouched, but she’s lended out pieces of the Ghost’s wardrobe to most of them, so she’s missing a few of her own. Bo-Katan’s missing a pauldron, her left shin cover, and one of her chest plates. Wedge’s orange jumpsuit is more brown than anything else, and it’s cut off at the knee where he got injured. Din’s armor is mostly intact, but is in severe need of a wash. He chose taking a shower himself over cleaning it, so it’s still streaked with blood and guts from their Corellian detour. 

Nova isn’t wearing anything of her own—except her boots, which are a relic, at this point. They’ve survived Jacterr Calican, an X-Wing crash, being left on Dantooine, multiple kidnappings, an all-out fight against Ladmeny Sparmau, becoming Mand’alor, and Corellia. Nova’s pretty sure nothing except a complete nuclear apocalypse could take them out. She has on tan pants, a black thermal shirt, and a brown vest. Her hair is hanging in a singular braid down her back, tied with a piece of Wedge’s ripped jumpsuit. Cliche, maybe, but necessary. She’s not walking onto Hoth’s whiteout surface without wearing something Rebel orange. 

They’re all in the hangar—in a perfect circle. Grogu and Chopper—Hera’s feral droid—are up in the cockpit, and Din keeps shooting worried glances through the visor up through the bridge when he thinks no one’s looking. Bo-Katan catches Nova’s eye and rolls her own, and despite everything, a laugh bubbles up in Nova’s throat, the familiar echo of a smile rolling across her lips.

“The ships on the surface look armed.” Hera is saying, as they descend through Hoth’s cloudy atmosphere, speaking through the comms. The four of them are coiled, ready to strike. “Ready to fly?”

“Ready to fly,” Wedge confirms. “Besides, there won’t be many stragglers.” He’s clutching to the grip above his head like a lifeline. “Most of us are scattered. Not living on Hoth. Working for the New Republic.” 

Nova studies him. He looks—shaken. Undone. But when he catches her eye, he nods once. Sharply. She had asked him, when they were preparing to land, if he wanted to stay on the Ghost, be Hera’s gunner, and he vehemently denied her. No, Wedge had said, and if it were anyone else, Nova would have described him as snapping, Hoth is my home. I’m defending it. 

They’re all on edge. Not just her. Good, Nova thinks, that’ll keep us alive. 

Their plan is simple—Hera isn’t grounding. She’ll be hiding in the clouds, flying airstrikes against the Chimaera. She’s also keeping Grogu and her beloved, insane droid Chopper on the Ghost. When it looks dire, they’re jumping to hyperspace and dropping back to Mandalore, equipped with holograms from the Mand’alor and her First-in-Command confirming that General Syndulla and associated children of the Rebellion are free to fly, as well as a mandate to allow any Rebel-marked ships through the shields. Anything else, Koska confirmed via hologram, will be shot down with extreme prejudice. And excitement, Bo-Katan relayed, with a smile across her own mouth, and Nova knows it’s going to be a diplomatic mess, Rebel refugees and Mandalorian soldiers, and she wants to defend Hoth, she wants to make a stand, but she also wants to save as many people as possible, and the only ones crazy enough to make that stand alongside her are the same four dropping to the icy surface. 

The four of them will arm the rest of the deserted Rebel command center with everything they’ve got and take off in the ship primed underground for flight—a chunky, near-indestructible starfighter with three shooters and one pilot’s seat. Like it was made for them, really. Wedge has had it ready to go since Nova and Din first disappeared from Mandalore, two years ago, when Sparmau showed up in Nova’s dreams for the first time and nearly killed her. 

Everything feels circular. Like she’s tripping over timelines, through portals. Something gnaws at Nova, and she tries her best to stamp it out, focusing on her friends, the mission at hand, and the planet immediately below them. 

“I’ll drop you in thirty seconds,” Hera says. “You’ll have fifteen minutes, tops, to mobilize from initial drop to evac. I have a read on the Chimaera, still a parsec away, but nothing else.” 

“That’s good,” Din says. Silence. “That’s good, right?” 

“No,” Bo-Katan manages, finally, cutting clean through. Her voice is all ice—all Mandalorian. She has snapped back into her skin, back into a warrior, back into a blade. Nova watches her carefully, knowing that there’s something off with her, too—her Bo-Katan is unsteady, that much is clear, even when nothing else is. “No, that means that Thrawn has something up his sleeve.” 

“But if it’s a single Star Destroyer—” 

“The Chimaera,” Bo-Katan says, flatly, “is not a regular Star Destroyer.” 

“And if we have Thrawn’s signal,” Hera continues, her voice slightly muffled through their commlinks, “that means he wants us to know where he is.” 

There’s more behind that, too, but no one pushes it. Din sighs, irritated, and Nova squeezes his hand, trying to stifle some of her own nerves, still some of the grayness molting under her skin. Something feels off. Hoth is quiet. Too quiet. It’s always muffled—it’s an ice planet—but it’s too still. The air feels charged. Nova raises her chin as the gangplank begins to lower. 

“I outrank you all on this planet,” Hera says. “So when I say this is an in and out mission, I mean it. No martyrs. No funerals. You get in, you get out. You hear me?” 

Every single pair of eyes is trained on Novalise. She wants to protest, but she doesn’t. This isn’t like before. She isn’t indestructible. She is faltering. She is already wounded. And there is something darker whispering to her. 

And this is already a dangerous mission. A potential lost cause. No one makes a sound as Hoth is revealed, anesthetic and bleached, snow-covered and unshakable. The ice is unyielding. The cold pierces their skin, the wind howling something horrible. 

Nova sends up a prayer to the stars above that everyone on Hoth makes it out alive. 

“Loud and clear, General,” Nova says, “over.” 

“May the Force be with you,” Hera says, “over and out.” 

The four of them drop to Hoth’s silent, foreboding surface. Something dark snarls inside of Novalise. Din, Wedge, and Bo-Katan move in towards the base. Something stops Nova—a feeling, a pulse—the same unsettling that flared at her on Corellia. Darkness. It chitters. It calls. 

She hears something they don’t. They run forward. Nova stops in her tracks.

That thing. It beckons to her. 

It knows her by name. It whispers in the wind—or is it coming from inside of her? A memory, a prophecy, a voice. Either way, she hears it. Nova pauses, cocking her neck to the side. 

The thing coils tight around her. It croons her name. 

It beckons: Novalise. 

And then it yanks. Hard. 

*

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*

CHAPTER ONE: START AT THE BEGINNING

The end of the galaxy does not come with a whimper, or a bang. There is no immediate fadeout. There is one supernova, the Mandalorian she loves, and their ragtag band of rebels holding up the sky. The galaxy’s end is not immediate, it doesn’t come in a flash. There’s nothing that shows that the end is inevitable, is on the horizon. 

Nothing except Nova’s dreams. 

It’s a hurtling—almost like through hyperspace, through that crush of space that only warp can provide. But it’s different. Darker. 

Greyscale.

Novalise only dreams in color. 

Lightning—not blue—a sinister laugh—resounding. Everything comes in ellipses, like her vision’s been altered. Nova can feel herself teetering between sleep and consciousness. The voices in her head—so real, so tangible—feel like they’ll follow her back into the light. This isn’t like the visions Grogu pulls her into. It’s not like the warped hallucinations that came with Sparmau. It’s not even like her glimpses of Ezra—his face so similar to her own, almost a reflecting pool, almost, almost—but everything is fleeting. Ephemeral. She turns on her heel, her long hair blowing in the wind. 

Wind, she thinks, there’s wind here. She looks up, left, right, sideways—it’s like she’s in a funhouse of mirrors. Like the one on the dais—back on Jedha, or the one in the forest on Naator. But she can’t see anything—not the enemy, not herself—just that persistent, unfurling darkness.

Even in her dreams, it settles like a pit in the center of her belly. 

“Wake up,” Nova whispers to herself. “Wake up—” And then it comes in flashes. Still in black and white, still in that greyscale, but—clear, all of a sudden. Blips of nightmare fuel, of a tall figure who is somehow both man and not man, of a lightsaber whirring past her face, of Din’s startled eyes, of crying in the background, screaming, someone’s screaming—is that her screaming?—Bo-Katan’s iced-out glare, Wedge flailing in the background, the sound of a ship splintering into a thousand pieces, the pulse and flicker of the Darksaber, Mandalore being bombed, stepping through a doorway, a doorway she’s seen before, and then—

“Hello, Novalise.” 

Nova whirls again, toward the sound of the voice, but—silence. And then, the screech, a chittering, awful pulse, and then she’s in the mirror again, staring at herself, and Nova knows what she looks like, but this version is not Novalise, not Andromeda, not anything she’s ever seen. Evil. She looks drenched in it, sweating out something terrible. She holds her fingers up to her reflection’s own hand, trying to find harmony, symmetry, anything to anchor herself to—

“Don’t you dare. Don’t leave me.” Din, suddenly, is as clear as day, as undone and as divine as his bare face. “What if you don’t come out?”

Nova swallows, stepping forward, cradling his cheekbones in between her hands. Delicate enough to keep him steady. Strong enough to shatter bone. She can feel the glow—that constant, utter darkness, pulsating, calling to her. It’s not holy—it’s the opposite, but it beckoned just the same. Nova leans in, lips flush against her Mandalorian’s. So quiet, quiet enough that only Din can hear her: “Then you bring me back.”

Nova hurdles awake, pressing her hands against her hammering heart. She can’t slow it down, can’t force it to steady, but she’s slamming her sledgehammer pulse as if that will shock it back to normalcy. 

A beat later, Din’s up, blotting out the moon shining through the gossamer curtains—it’s so rare, Nova marvels, before she’s caught her breath, that anything can cut through Mandalore’s smog—and then Din is back, her single locus, that one, eternal star. She collapses against him. 

“Dreams,” she whispers, as his hands tangle in her dark hair, hanging almost to her waist, still smelling of coconut and forsythia after their wedding. “Just—dreams.” 

Din’s brown eyebrows furrow, creasing down the middle. “Bad ones?” His voice is still gravelly, stuck with sleep.

Nova considers, inhaling a normal breath. “Urgent, at least.” 

Din observes her. “Jedi dreams?” 

And Nova smiles at that. She can’t help it. She reaches forward, through the interrupted darkness, punctuated by the rare shine of a full Mandalorian moon, and brings Din’s forehead to hers. “Probably. They’re always knocking around in there, somewhere.” 

She can feel Din’s gaze on hers. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“No,” Nova whispers. “I want…I want one night. One perfect night—our wedding night, Din—that isn’t about the uncertain future, about the–the impending doom hanging over our heads.” She looks up at him, forehead still pressed against his, biting on her bottom lip. “I want one thing, right now, and that’s you.” 

She shifts, laying back against the silken sheets, dragging his naked body down with her. Nova can feel him, broad and hers, hard and ready between her thighs, pressed up against her stomach. She doesn’t break his gaze, careful, intentional, hands slipping off his shoulders to caress his cheek, to slip one down to the small of his back. 

“Nova—” 

“Just you,” she repeats, breathier than she intended, relishing in the feel of his brown, bare eyes against hers, that this is her Din, her Mandalorian. Hers. In this lifetime of so much loss, they’re here, together. “Nothing else matters.” Nova reaches up, kissing the long column of Din’s neck, right at his pulse point, encouraging, coaxing, the dreams already forgotten. “Just for one night,” Nova breathes, “the end of the galaxy as we know it can wait.” 

Din moves forward, lips latching against hers, his eyes star-studded and filled with something reverent—

Three knocks at their bedroom door. 

Nova clenches her teeth together as Din stifles a tiny laugh against her mouth. A laugh—one that she savors every time it bubbles out, and she can’t even enjoy it, because of the three knocks. Again. 

“As your Mand’alor,” Nova calls, anger sluicing through her voice, “unless the palace is being razed, again, I order you to leave until the morning.” 

“It’s morning.” 

Nova’s head drops back against the pillow, exasperated. “Bo-Katan, it’s our wedding night—” 

“The sun will be up in an hour. Listen, I’m—I’m really sorry, Nova—” 

“Leave!” Nova yells, again, suddenly furious, “now, please!” 

“Nova,” a voice calls, and it’s enough to make Din’s eyes catch hers in the low light, enough for Nova’s heart rate to pick back up. Wedge. “I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But…but we found something, and it can’t wait.” 

Nova stares at Din. Din stares back. 

“It’s your call,” he mouths, and Nova debates just stuffing a pillow through the crack in the door and muffling them out, but there’s an undercurrent running through Wedge’s voice, one she hasn’t heard in a very long time. One she hasn’t heard since her parents were killed. 

So she disentangles herself from her husband, throws her discarded robe on, and strides for the door. Nova wrenches the handle open, Din still in the shadows of the bed, and tries her very best to look menacing, untouchable. 

“What?” she asks, low and furious.

Bo-Katan doesn’t even notice, eyes blinking rapidly. Wedge’s knuckles are white, clenched in a fist up against his mouth. At first, she thinks he’s stifling his laughter, but there’s not laughter there at all. Bo-Katan is worried. And Wedge is afraid. 

“What?” Nova repeats, but it’s lost all of its fire. 

“The Chimaera.” 

Nova blinks. “What?” She asks, for a third time. 

“I went to Yavin.” 

“Yeah, Bo-Katan, I remember. For my wedding dress. And I’m very thankful—truly, I am, but I don’t think that matters right now—” 

“I ran into an old friend on Hoth.” Wedge finally speaks, and his voice is as taut as a wire. “Nova, when Bo-Katan was on Yavin, she…she listened to a distress call. And at the same time, I was on Hoth, and I ran into someone—”

“Hera.” 

Nova looks back at Bo-Katan, shaking her head, trying to make sense of it. She, decidedly, cannot.

“Hera told me that the Chimaera was picked up on her radio. The distress call, the callsign signature. She—”

“Nova,” Bo-Katan says, strained, “I need to tell you about my—if this ship is back, we are in for—”

“Bo-Katan,” Din says, materializing behind them, as silent as a shadow, “you need to spit it out.” 

Irritation flashes across Bo-Katan’s face. Then, pointedly: “Something very bad is on that ship, Nova.”

Nova looks back at her, and that gnawing pit in the center of her stomach comes back, slung with the full force of gravity. She swallows, eyes locking on Bo-Katan, on Wedge, to Din, who’s moved out of the shadows and is standing in line with them. What a strange quadrangle, the four of them are, whisper-yelling in a palace that’s more like a ghost town. Mandalorians, Rebels, all of them in varying degrees—and now Nova’s not listening, just staring at the three people she trusts most in the world, all three of them speaking in glances and riddles. 

“What do you mean,” Nova whispers, “by ‘something very bad’?” 

“I knew someone once,” Bo-Katan says, her voice faraway, “and he disappeared into deep space. In a ship that’s been presumed missing since—with someone who scared me even more than Ladmeny Sparmau.” 

Nova feels thunder. She doesn't realize it for a moment, but it’s coming from inside her chest. “Who?”

Bo-Katan looks at her. “Nova—”

“Who did you know?”

Bo-Katan looks at her head-on. “His name was Ezra Bridger.” 

*

Nova’s not sure how they materialize down in the war room, but they do. Somewhere, between Bo-Katan dropping the bomb that she knew—knows—Ezra, that he’s real, not just someone knocking around the inside of Nova’s head, and the holotable flickering on, Nova, Din, Bo-Katan, and Wedge all descended the staircase. But Nova can’t remember it, the whole journey downstairs completely blank. 

She stares upward through the domed ceiling of the palace, and the jolt of realization that she can still see straight through the sky is electrifying, a warning sign. Of what, Nova’s still not sure. But it’s odd, the blue sky—slowly receding into a lighter and lighter color—shining above her head. 

Bo-Katan and Din are arguing when she filters back in. “Stop it,” Nova whispers. 

“Nova—” 

“I need you to run this again for me,” Nova says, evenly, blinking away sleep. “Start at the beginning.” 

Bo-Katan inhales, exhales, trying to regain some semblance of composure. She’s a soldier, that much is clear—in the way she gives reports, in the way she gives her delivery. Bo-Katan is so focused on the strained set of her jaw that for a minute, she can’t listen. Bo-Katan stops, observing Nova back, waiting for her to catch up. That sense of softness is in such stark contrast to the girl Nova once met, and despite the entire situation, Nova smiles. 

“I have a lot in my history that I’m not proud of.” 

Nova swallows, looking up at her friend. Bo-Katan is facing the throne now, instead of her. Tentatively, Nova steps forward, trying to bring her back, but Wedge, slowly, shakes his head. Nova’s hand jumps back like a pulse. 

“I… used to be in a group called the Death Watch.” 

“You did not.” Din’s voice rings out, unencumbered and clear without his helmet on. Nova shifts back to face him. “You were part of a cult?” 

“You’re one to talk,” Bo-Katan snarls, turning on her heel. “Child of the Watch.” 

“You and your group,” Din says, evenly, angrily, “were so focused on returning Mandalorians to warriors that you killed thousands of them.” 

“Hey—” 

“You and your group,” Bo-Katan counters, “were religious zealots that ostracized anyone who adapted to our modern ways.” 

“Stop,” Nova whispers, but it’s Wedge that cuts in. 

“We are on the same side,” Wedge yells, so foreign from his normal tone of voice that everyone stops. “I know the two of you have your differences. But I thought we were past this.” He gestures at the tensioned air between them, pulled taut and ready to snap. “We have a mutual enemy here. Aren’t you tired of the infighting? You’re friends. Bo-Katan, you’ve told me as much, so don’t deny it. Din, Bo-Katan just said she’s not proud of it. Stop. We’re not arguing about this anymore.” Everyone stares. Sheepishly, he turns to Nova. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to steal your thunder.” 

Nova smiles. “Steal it anytime. Well said.” Carefully, she positions herself between Din and Bo-Katan. “I know none of this is simple,” she says, looking at both of them. “There’s a lot of history here, and it’s not going to be smoothed over in one conversation, especially with the differences in how both of you were raised. But that isn’t the focus, not tonight.” 

“It’s morning,” Bo-Katan mutters, and at Nova’s exasperated look, she shrinks. Barely, but it’s enough. “I was a commander in the Nite Owls, a subsect of the Death Watch. I believed in what I was doing. I thought that I was…returning Mandalore to its former glory, that anyone who opposed me was wrong. I was young, and I wasn’t exactly naive, but I was headstrong. It put me at odds with my sister.” Her eyebrows are clenched together in pain, clouding her expression. “Satine,” Bo-Katan says, like it burns her coming out of her mouth, “was peaceful in every way I wasn’t. When she ruled Mandalore, she wanted us to be pacifists.” Bo-Katan stops, considering. “I disagreed.” 

“Where does Ezra fit into this?” Din asks.

Bo-Katan glares at him. “I’m getting there. We were exiled to Concordia.”

Din stiffens.

Wedge clocks it first. “What?”

Din sighs, running a hand over his exhausted face. “I…also grew up on Concordia.” 

Bo-Katan gives him a look, but doesn’t press it. Like she recognizes it, like their history may have overlapped. “Listen, my history is… it’s complicated. Complex. I’m trying to give you the important stuff.” 

Nova nods. “I know.”

“My sister and I…we fought, and Death Watch was… relocated. But while all of this was happening here…there was unrest in the Senate. In the rest of the galaxy.” She looks at Nova. “The Empire was on the horizon. And I met Maul.” 

Nova’s eyebrows furrow. “Who?” 

Bo-Katan looks appalled. “Darth Maul?” 

Nova shakes her head, genuinely lost for the second time today. “I don’t know who that is.” 

Din nudges her with his elbow. “You sound like me.” 

Nova rounds on him. “Do you know who this Maul person is?” 

Din peers down at her, puzzled. “Nova, I’m a Mandalorian. Of course I do.” 

Staring, Nova prompts him to go on. 

“He overtook Mandalore,” Din sighs, “Not well. Not for long. But for a while there, someone other than a Mandalorian—by blood or by Creed—held the beskar throne. It’s a big part of Mandalore’s history.” 

Bo-Katan sighs. “I helped him do it.” 

Din looks back at her, stricken. “You helped—”

“To reinstate the Death Watch,” Bo-Katan interrupts, sourly. “It was a coup. I didn’t want him on the throne any more than I wanted my sister to be.” 

“Right,” Din scoffs. “You wanted to be on the throne.” 

Bo-Katan raises her chin, clenching her jaw. “It is no secret that I wanted to be on that throne, Din Djarin,” she whispers, deadly and cool. “In fact, I helped you find Ahsoka so that you would return the Darksaber to me.” 

“How’d that work out for you?” 

“Things change,” Bo-Katan spits. “I changed. Is that so hard to believe, after everything we’ve been through?” 

Nova bites down on her bottom lip, ready to hurl herself between the two of them again, but—amazingly—Din shrinks back, looking chastised. And apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, genuine, brown eyes shining through the dark. 

“Maul killed my friend,” Bo-Katan says, “decapitated him. Right in front of me. And he became the leader of the Death Watch. I began seeking out other ways to retake Mandalore. So I met Sparmau. I thought I loved her.” She swipes her hand across her bottom lip, angry. “She was so bright. So vivid, and dangerous, and I thought she had enough compassion to help me. But she never loved me. She took and took everything that she could, and cut me down until I was the basest version of myself.” Bo-Katan swallows, her face simmering, like she didn’t mean to reveal all of that. “Obviously, that went south. And I went to try and break Satine out of prison. For redemption, maybe. But I wasn’t thinking about anything other than Mandalore.” 

Nova stares at her, feeling worry carving a scar through her own heart. She’s seen Bo-Katan vulnerable—but this is offering up information in front of both Din and Wedge. Information Nova didn’t need to pry out of her. 

“It went badly.” Bo-Katan stares off somewhere in the past, eyes unfocused past Nova’s shoulder. “Maul killed Satine.” 

Nova knows this part of the story—barely, but enough—and she strides across the distance, taking Bo-Katan’s trembling hand in her own. Surprised, stunned out of her reverie, Bo-Katan looks over at Nova as if she’s materialized in front of her, but squeezes Nova’s hand back.

“There’s more to the story,” Bo-Katan sighs. “But I wanted revenge. I wanted Mandalore back. So I teamed up with the Jedi. That’s how I met Ahsoka. And Kenobi. They fought alongside me to capture Maul. I wanted to kill him. Obi-Wan, for some reason, said no.” She shakes her head. “Ahsoka told me that I could be a great leader. That Mandalore could change. But I didn’t want change. I  wanted to rule it in the way I always thought it should be—I never shared Satine’s idealism. And I thought I would finally have the chance to rule the planet.” She sighs. “But Order 66 happened. And the Empire rose.” 

“Bo-Katan—” 

“I was rash. And violent. But I refused to do the Empire’s bidding, Nova,” Bo-Katan says, her voice almost wobbly. “I swear.” 

Nova squeezes down on her friend’s cold hand. “I believe you.”

“Clan Saxon took their chance and forced me off the throne.” Bo-Katan casts a glance up at where it sits on the dais, resetting her jaw. “Eventually, I met a friend. Sabine Wren. She tried to gift me the Darksaber, and I said no.”

“Is that when you lost it?” Din’s voice isn’t goading, or combative, but Bo-Katan’s eyes flash with anger, and as soon as it appears, it vanishes. She looks unsettled—sad, Nova eventually quantifies. Bo-Katan Kryze has been a lot of things, but Nova’s never seen how poignant and powerful sadness looks on her face, like it’s held back by floodgates, raring to be released. 

“That came with the Great Purge,” Bo-Katan says, “and it’s a story for another day. I did gain the Darksaber, eventually—but I was gifted it. I declined, originally, but I…I was assured that enough people thought I earned it. And some Mandalorians accepted me as their leader, but others—” she shoots a pointed, but not unkind, look at Din “—did not. When the Purge came, I lost. Again. And Gideon got the Darksaber.”

“Ezra,” Wedge reminds her, softly, like he doesn’t want to disrupt her speech. This is, Nova realizes, the longest Bo-Katan has consecutively talked in front of all of them. 

“Oh,” Bo-Katan says, faraway, distracted. “Sabine introduced me to Ezra.” She turns away, like she’s swiftly dismissing herself. 

“Ezra Bridger,” Wedge steps in, relieving Bo-Katan, “was a part of the crew of a starship called The Ghost. It was piloted by General Hera Syndulla, who I saw on Hoth. She, along with her crew—including Sabine, and, eventually, Ezra—were Rebels, too. But they didn’t fight in the wars we did, Nova, and they didn’t ever cross paths with you or your parents. I know Ezra was—is—a Jedi, like you. I only know Hera in passing. But she stopped me when she saw me on Hoth and told me that she heard the distress call—” 

“Ezra disappeared into deep space with a man I’ve only heard about,” Bo-Katan interjects, shooting a slightly apologetic look at Wedge, “but he’s certainly the stuff of nightmares. On his ship. The Chimaera. And neither of them were heard from since, until Wedge saw Hera. So we’re facing something…massive.” 

Din sighs, leaning back against the holotable. 

“Am I boring you,” Bo-Katan says, eyes glittering with ice again. Her voice is flat. It isn’t a question. “Because I can stop. But I would advise you to listen to me, because I’m the only person in this room who was on Mandalore for all of this. And if we’re going to fight this—if we’re going to make Mandalore the center of a war again, which we are—I think you should shut up and listen.” 

“All of this matters,” Nova cuts in, letting go of Bo-Katan’s hand to draw a line through the air. “I don’t think I need to remind anyone in this room how we don’t know what’s coming next. Sparmau is dead, but the First Order is still out there, gathering in the dark. Gideon is gone, but whoever he was involved with is still lurking. Grogu’s still terrified every time he sees a stormtrooper. There’s something off about Leia’s kid. The darkness is in every dream I have. And Ezra is a real person—a real person—and he’s trapped out there with someone who scares Bo-Katan more than Sparmau.” 

All three of them are staring at her. Nova swallows the tide of rising emotion in her throat. 

“I’m exhausted,” she whispers, “and I know you all are, too. But there’s something out there, and the only way we’ll be able to stop all of it is if we listen to each other. Piece together our past. We can’t win this fight if any of us are on different sides.” She swallows. “None of this is easy. But we have a hell of a battle ahead of us. I’m tired, but I’m exhausted of being one step behind them all. We’re going to win this war.” 

Din looks at Nova, a tiny, proud smile whispering across his mouth. Everything is solidified by that one look, that forever, eternal locus. “I’m in. And, Bo-Katan, for the record, I was only sighing because I was trying to keep all of the people straight.”

Bo-Katan rolls her eyes, but the set of her shoulders drops. “I’m with you all, whatever comes next. Even you, Din.” 

“Rebel by nature,” Wedge grins, stepping closer, closing their circle. “Count me in.” 

Nova smiles at all of them. “What did the distress call say?”

Bo-Katan and Wedge exchange a look. Wedge speaks. “Just that the Chimaera is back in detectable range. But someone—presumably Ezra—turned a beacon on a shuttle, which let the Rebel base know where it is.” 

“Where what is?” 

This time, it’s Bo-Katan that speaks. “Ezra’s relative location.” 

Nova nods. “Gear up.” She surveys the faces of her confidants, her Rebels, her Mandalorians, her family. She tucks her long curls behind her ear, extinguishing the azure light of the holotable. Above them, the sun is—miraculously—still shining. “Meet me in the docking bay in a half an hour.” 

Din looks over at her, familiar, quiet love sparking in his eyes. “Where to, Mand’alor?” 

Nova smiles, adrenaline rushing back through her veins, breaking through the floodgates. “We’re going to bring Ezra home.” 

*

Din and Nova ascended their staircase alone. Bo-Katan and Wedge are stationed downstairs, Grogu sleeping in his carrier in the corner, tiny mouth open in even smaller snores. 

Silently, Nova peels off the robe she’s wearing, Mandalore blue. Through the dark, she can feel Din’s eyes on her, lazer-sharp, lustful. They track her every movement—the curve of her hips, the way her stomach twists when she bends to pull on underwear, tan pants a few shades lighter than her skin tone. He’s still watching as she clasps her bra, gaze hungry, full of the moment stolen from them earlier. 

“Din.” 

“What?”

“You’re staring.”

A slow, wicked smile spreads across his face, glittering in the early-morning blue of their room. “I won’t apologize for that.” 

Chills spread across Nova’s body. “We have a mission at hand,” she whispers, ignoring the way she shivers as Din moves closer, closer. She loves to be hunted by her Mandalorian, willing prey. 

“My mission,” he says, reaching out, a phantom limb at first, and then the rest of him appears. His open hand rests against the extension of her open throat, and Nova sighs, pressing into Din’s touch, “is to devour you.” 

Nova moans, the sound of it breathy, like it’s been coaxed out of her mouth. Din’s still only weaning his underclothes—no armor, nothing to shield him from her touch. Transfixed, she arches closer to his body, pressing her torso against his. She hums when he growls, low and primal, free hand skating over the small of her back. “Now?” 

“Always.” 

Nova shudders as Din’s hand clenches down—not enough to deprive her of air, but enough to make the stars shoot into her vision. Nova always welcomes the crush of space, the shuddering blackness of it, but this kind is her favorite. Buzzing, she presses her windpipe into the crest of Din’s hand, the sound of her sigh glittering off somewhere starward. 

Din murmurs something she can’t hear, trailing his hand up her back to fist in her hair. Nova knows she has a few seconds of pure bliss before danger sets in—that’s where she and Din live, that fault line. But this is the danger they chose, the danger they crave. She opens her eyes, sage green into dark brown, locked on Din like a laser beam, refusing to shy away. 

He lessens his grip, and Nova sags against his taut, hard body, the apex of his shoulders wider than hers, welcoming her in. Nova sighs, feeling that buzzing in her ears hum back to normal. “Mine,” Din is saying like a prayer, “you’re mine.” 

There’s a desperation to it, an undercurrent, and Nova unhinges her mouth as Din watches, hard and desperate pressed against her, so desperate that it burns through their clothes. A hymnal, he’s singing, with nothing but the same syllables. It’s desperate, pleading. More than piety. Like a zealot, for her, only for her. Like Novalise is something holy. 

Nova steps back.

Din stumbles forward, and they both tumble into where the sun is rising in the east, blue, soft light forcing them into the day. 

“What?” he asks, genuinely concerned. Nova blinks, tracing a line over the map of Din’s face—her Mandalorian, her husband, her beloved. The thick, coarse hair of his mustache, the bow of his upper lip, the ridge of his beautiful hooked nose. “What’s wrong?” 

“What was that, back there?” Nova whispers, afraid to take her touch away this time. Something haunted and terrible is skirting the corners of Din’s eyes. “With Bo-Katan?” 

Din sighs, blinks, and the expression shifts, but doesn’t disappear. “Her group and mine have been enemies for a long time.” 

Nova brings her other hand up to cup Din’s cheeks in equal measures. “Your sects of Mandalorians, sure, but you’re friends, Din.” 

His eyes cloud, uncloud. “Yeah,” he says, unconvincingly, and Nova squeezes down, trying to bring him back. “Yes,” he corrects, much stronger. “We are. But it’s beyond that. Being here…it’s strange.” He clears his throat. “I don’t know how to explain it.” 

Nova tilts her head to the side. “Din. It’s me.” 

“There’s so much history here,” he says, carefully. “And when it’s just us, it’s one thing. But…with war on the horizon, we’re going to have to unite the Mandalorians. You will, as reigning Mand’alor. They will follow you. You’ve proven yourself as a warrior, and they respect you. But…”

“This is a larger war than they’ve ever fought,” Nova fills in when Din trails off, eyes slightly unfocused. “This is bigger than one enemy, and it’s going to force all of us to be on the same side, regardless of their history.” 

Din nods, once.

“There’s more, though,” Nova breathes, circling her thumbs around his temples. “What’s going on?” 

Din’s gaze snaps back to hers. “I’m so tired, Nova.” 

Something fractures along her heart. Another fault line, cracking and bisecting. Small until it isn’t. Nova tries to brace herself against her racing heartbeat, tracing her fingers over Din’s cheekbones. “I know, my love.” 

Din’s jaw clenches. “Do you wish—”

Nova tips her head closer when he stops short in the middle of the sentence. “What?” she whispers, barely air at all, trying to coax it out of him. 

“That we just stayed on Naator?”

Nova blinks. “Din—”

“You have the galaxy to worry about,” he says, a weight behind the word, a heaviness that Nova never noticed before. “And we have a duty to Mandalore. I don’t want to run away.” 

Observing, Nova moves closer, tipping her forehead against his. 

“But,” Din whispers, so quietly it’s like there’s nothing there at all, “what if we ran away?” 

Novalise is speechless. For a tortuous, long second, she doesn’t speak. Whatever haunted thing was lingering in Din’s eyes breaks away, hides like it was never there at all. 

“Wishful thinking,” he mutters, trying to pull away, but Nova anchors him in place. 

“One day,” Nova vows, “one day, we will save the world, we won’t fight another war, and you and Grogu and I can live the rest of our lives under Naator’s pink sky. I promise you, Din.” 

He gives her a sad smile, hand grasping her chin, tipping it up to meet his eyes. “But you’re a fighter. It’s who you are. You aren’t…just going to leave. It’s not in your blood.” 

“You’re a Mandalorian,” Nova whispers, repeating his own words back to Din, “and fighting is part of your religion.” 

“Yeah,” Din says, kissing her on the mouth, lips lush and full against her own, “sure, it is.” 

It’s not until they’re both dressed, Grogu in tow, and heading towards the ship bay, that Din whispers something so quiet that Nova doesn’t hear it. 

“But I don’t worship the fight anymore. Just you.” 

*

“For the record,” Bo-Katan yells, over the hum of her ship’s engine starting up, “I still think this is a terrible idea.” 

Nova squints, long black braid swinging over her shoulder. “What choice do we have?”

Climbing into the cockpit, Nova and Bo-Katan take the helm. Wedge and Din disappear as they take off from Mandalore’s surface, the atmosphere clouding with every second they rise towards the stars. Wedge is likely going to eat. Din, Nova knows, touching his helmeted cheek as he disappears into the bowels of the ship, is going to try and sleep. 

“I don’t know,” Bo-Katan sighs, pushing all the thrusters up high. Her ship is made of the same metal and steel that Din’s was, but it’s older, less flashy. More utilitarian. Very Bo-Katan. “We’re going after an entire Star Destroyer. We can’t beat them.” 

“We are the galaxy's mightiest heroes,” Nova says, tossing Bo-Katan a grin. 

Bo-Katan gives her a sour look in return. “Yeah. But the four of us have almost died a lot.” 

“Grogu and I have the Force.” 

“Novalise,” Bo-Katan sighs, “no offense, but when has that ever really worked in your favor?”

Nova mimes getting struck in the heart, throwing her head back. “Ouch.” 

“We should have brought Koska and Axe. At least. Maybe a few other warriors.” 

Nova studies Bo-Katan as the ship ascends above Mandalore’s atmosphere. “You usually don’t share the fight.” 

Bo-Katan’s jaw clenches. “I’d share this one,” she mutters, flicking switches until the ship levels. A furrow in her eyebrows appears as she leans forward, trying to calculate exactly where the Chimaera’s signal was pulsing from. “Shit.” 

Adjusting, Nova brings herself closer to the nav system. “Where is he?” 

“Way out there.” Bo-Katan’s long, lean finger taps against the tracking beacon. 

“Primea?” Nova asks, squinting at the planet. “That’s not in the Outer Rim. That’s…”

“The other side of the galaxy,” Bo-Katan supplies. “The Unknown Regions.” 

“Luke’s out there,” Nova counters, trying to fight the rising anxiety in her stomach. “Luke’s on Ahch-To. That’s in the Unknown Regions. So, maybe, Ezra found—” But the impossibility of the entire thing catches up to her, flutters in her throat. It would be a couple days of journeying, even at full warp. They might have to stop somewhere to refuel. And Ezra was trapped out there, trapped with someone Bo-Katan was actually scared of… Maybe they are in over their heads. Nova realizes she stopped abruptly in the middle of her sentence. Now it’s Bo-Katan’s turn to stare at her. “I guess it’s too much to hope for,” she whispers, “that Ezra is anywhere close to Luke. That… that he might have found safety.” 

“Well,” Bo-Katan says, checking the fuel gauge as she fires her ship into hyperspace, “If Luke’s anywhere with Leia’s freaky son, maybe he’s not safe either.” 

“Bo-Katan—”

“That kid’s a weirdo,” Bo-Katan says, a mirthless laugh rising in her mouth. 

“You haven’t even met him.”

“Do I need to?”

Nova purses her lips, considering. “No,” she admits, quietly, and Bo-Katan barks a laugh. “But he’s…he’s troubled.” 

“Troubled like he’s a troublemaker? Or troubled like he’s a little Sith lord in the making? Because I think you and I both know the answer to that one. And he’s not a troublemaker.”

Nova stares out into the crush of space, thinking of Din’s hand on her throat, Bo-Katan’s words echoing in her mind. “He’s…he has the power to be terrible,” she says, carefully. “I know he’s Leia’s son, but there’s a darkness in him. Something awful. I’ve seen visions. I know who he’s destined to be.” 

“Kill him,” Bo-Katan shrugs. “Now, before he has that chance.”  

Nova stares at her. “I’m not going to kill a child. Leia’s child, no less.” 

Bo-Katan shrugs again, unaffected. “She’d thank you in the long run. If he turns into the monster you’ve seen he will.”

“Bo-Katan—” Nova sighs, pressing on her eyes hard enough to see stars. “I can’t kill him. I won’t. I… It would be wrong.”

Bo-Katan eyes her. “I’ll do it.” 

Nova blinks. Once, twice. “Maker above.” She bites the inside of her lip, looking at her friend. Bo-Katan’s rigidity is back, her ice queen persona snapped and frozen into place. Din looks haunted, permeated by something torturous he can’t bring to light. And, as always, Nova is oscillating between the both of them, orbiting their morality, trying to find the will to either bend or break. For once, that black hole in the pit of her stomach just feels too massive, too full of possibilities. “No one is killing him. Besides,” she says, hoping this will prod at Bo-Katan’s facade, “this is bigger than Ben Solo. This is bigger than just Mandalore, or the Order, or the Rebels. This is bigger than all of us, Ezra included.” Pointedly, she stares at Bo-Katan, wielding Ezra’s name like a weapon. 

It works. Bo-Katan’s front doesn’t shatter, but she falters. 

“Who is he with?” Nova whispers.

Bo-Katan’s spine goes straight. “Nova—”

“Why are you so afraid? Is…is this other person a god, or something?” 

“No,” Bo-Katan bites, “something of nightmares and legends, but absolutely not a god.” 

Nova offers her a tiny smile. “So…they’re killable?”

“If Ezra couldn’t—didn’t—then I don’t know. Genuinely, Novalise, I do not know. This…man, if you can call him that…is terrifying.”

“How?” 

Bo-Katan is staring out into space, a tiny crack in her armor showing. 

“Bo-Katan,” Nova whispers, just as desperately as she tried to get through to Din earlier, “it’s me.”

“I don’t know,” Bo-Katan finally spits, seething. “I don’t know, Nova. I don’t know anything about him, really. Hera Syndulla would know more. Ahsoka would too.” She turns her burning gaze to Nova. “Where is Ahsoka, Novalise?”

Nova blinks. “She’s…she’s out there. She told me she’d show up when I needed her next. That our paths were destined to cross again.” 

Bo-Katan snorts. “Typical Jedi nonsense, then.” 

“I thought Ahsoka was your friend—”

“I have no friends!” Bo-Katan yells, “Not anymore.” She swallows. “Except you. And Wedge, when he’s not getting on my nerves. “And Din. I guess.” She gives Nova a glance out of the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and the words still sound so foreign coming out of her mouth. “Of course you’re all my friends. I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on. I’m… Things are getting…wrong.” 

It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Nova reaches out, grasping her friend’s hand. 

“If I wasn’t so vehemently opposed to the notion,” Bo-Katan says, sniffing, “I would say Mandalore is cursed.” 

“How can it be?” Nova asks, voice quiet, tucking her half-braid and curls underneath behind her shoulder, giving Bo-Katan an earnest, tiny smile. “It brought me to you.” 

It’s the type of quip Bo-Katan would typically roll her eyes at, but instead they flicker, her lips quirking up at the edges. “There’s something off about all of this,” she whispers, finally, clutching Nova’s hand back, “Nova, can’t you sense it?” 

Nova doesn’t say anything.

But that’s the problem. She does. And it’s seeped under her skin. It won’t scrub away. 

*

Bo-Katan eventually disappears to sleep. After she’s beaten Nova seven times at Sabacc, effortlessly. Nova took over the helm hours ago, listless, afraid to fall back into sleep. She doesn’t want to have nightmares. She can’t fathom the fact that so much of the galaxy is disintegrating in her fingers. She’s always thought of saving the world colloquially, like a metaphor, even. But this…all of this feels too big. Bo-Katan is scared. Din is becoming unhinged. Nova has made herself an enemy out of so many people—Ben Solo, the First Order, Gideon and his cronies, the sinister laughter, the blue lightning, the myth that Ezra’s been missing in action with. They’re all congealing, coagulating like blood, staining her skin, her mouth, her heart. 

“Hey.” 

Nova jumps. “Stars, Wedge, you scared me.” 

A small smile lights up her old friend’s face. “I thought I’d relieve you.” 

Nova blinks. “How long have I been up here?” 

Wedge cocks his head to the side, holding out his hand to help her off the pilot’s seat. Yawning, Nova takes it, sliding out of the chair. She cracks her neck to the side, realizing how tired she is. “Hours.” 

Nova blinks. “Where are we?” 

Wedge looks at the nav system. “Somewhere cresting through the Outer Rim. I don’t know where the—” he squints, “—Primea system is, but we’re not even close to the Unknown Regions yet. A way to go until we find where exactly the Chimaera’s distress call is coming from.” 

Yawning, Nova nods. Her head is pulsing. “And then what?”

“Well,” Wedge says, crossing his arms over his chest, that familiar orange jumpsuit so warm in stark contrast to the blue and grey of Bo-Katan’s Mandalorian ship, “then we find Ezra.”

“Wedge,” she says, and then closes her mouth. “Do…do you think this is a stupid idea? Going after Ezra with no idea what’s out there waiting for us?”

Wedge studies her. “I think it’s a Rebel thing for us to do,” he says, grinning. 

“I’m serious.” Nova’s voice almost wobbles. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispers, so softly, the truth of it laid bare. It’s something she would have admitted to her parents—she can picture Arokel’s troubled eyes, so like her own. She can feel Piper’s determination, coursing through her blood. But Novalise is tired, and the ghosts of the people she’s lost are just that—a specter, a haunting. Not a fortification, not a lifeline, not right now. “Wedge, what if we’re walking into a trap?” 

Wedge studies her. “Nova,” he says, sighing, resting a strong hand on her shoulder, thumb clasped right against the curve of her neck like her father used to do, gently bringing her back down to earth, “we’ve walked into plenty of traps. You always come out swinging.” He stoops down to catch her eye. “I’m old. I’ve seen a lot of things, now. And I know this—even exhausted, even confused, you are a leader. Even when you don’t feel like one. Even when you don’t want to be. And that crown hangs heavy on your head, rebel girl.” He smiles softly, so much like her father that it makes Nova’s heart ache. “Go give your mind a break.” 

And there’s so much Nova wants to say—so much, but she’s exhausted, and Wedge has given her permission, so she just sways into his hug, turns on her heel, and sinks into the belly of the ship to find her husband. 

*

The room is so dark. Almost entirely blacked out, Nova stumbles through the door after the hiss has resounded, arms out in front of her as she fumbles toward the bed. Bo-Katan isn’t a lavish person, so the rooms are sequestered and small, with only a cot for the bed. It’s big enough for two bodies—if Din isn’t wearing his armor, which he decidedly is not. Nova feels around and locates the curve of his hip, fingers skating underneath the hem. His skin here is so soft—one scar travels up the bone, slightly raised against her touch. 

Nova unhinges, pulling her jacket off, pushing her hair back behind her ears, closing her tired eyes. This is primal—folding her body against Din’s in the dark. It’s what she’s done since before she learned his name, since before he gave Nova her true one. Shivering, she draws her legs up, facing Din in the dark. 

Slowly, she traces the bump of his hooked nose, gorgeous and hers even in the vantablack of the sleeping chamber. How familiar and foreign this feels at the same time—tracing the man underneath the Mandalorian, discovering everything that makes Din the man he is. She feels her heart turn over, drawing him closer, closer still—

“Nova?” 

Her eyes fly open. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she whispers, “but I’m here.”

His arms reach around to enfold her. They rustle in the dark. Nova’s enclosed against his chest, feeling Din’s heartbeat flutter in tandem with hers. 

Din’s hand comes up, lazily, sleepily, to stroke through her hair, unraveling the top half from its braid. “Where’d you go?”

“I was keeping Bo-Katan company,” Nova whispers, inclining her head into the curve of his neck, “up in the cockpit.” 

Din’s quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s not what I mean.” 

In the dark, Nova feels her cheeks flush. “I’m nervous,” she admits, “about what this means. Bringing someone back who’s been missing for years. Whoever Ezra was with. Everything just feels…so much deeper. Bigger,” she corrects, licking her bottom lip. “Like we have more to lose.” 

Din sighs into the dark. “We do have more to lose.” 

Nova’s heart sinks, just a little bit. 

“But,” Din says, exhaling through his nose, “it means we have more to fight for.”

Nova wraps her free arm around his back, skating under his shirt, taking careful note of the little groan he lets escape in the dark. Quietly, so quiet it’s like her words aren’t there at all, she breathes: “I thought you were tired of fighting.” 

Nova’s almost asleep when Din’s answer floats out, right into the shell of her ear. “I am. But I’ll never get tired of following you into war.” 

*

Nova’s dreams are in black and white again. Greyscale, like she’s seeing something ancient. Primal. Back before the galaxy existed.

Nova falls through the glimpse of this other side, this vantablack reality. And when Din appears, he’s wrong. 

It’s palpable, the way he radiates. Metal, gunsmoke, danger—that sweet scent of cinnamon gone. Locked away, hidden behind beskar and steel. It’s everything she needs, everything she doesn’t—fear and desire, locked up together in ecstasy. She knows she’s dreaming—but she still needs him, craves him, feels him, everywhere—

“Din’s haunted,” a whisper cuts through the dark. Nova doesn’t know if it’s her own voice or something else entirely. 

All she knows is that she doesn’t care.

Everything in this place is primal, attuned to a frequency only they can walk along. Nova watches, everything obsidian and mottled, hidden in shadow. Obscured. He’s obscured, too. His helmet—it’s visceral, his face underneath it all. Nova can feel it in the silence, in the dark.

Limbo. They’re both in limbo. 

She needs him like a prayer. Something whispered into all that darkness, pleading for a higher power. He’s haunted, this version of him—the version of Din where he becomes the Mandalorian, nothing more. 

In the dark of night, on a bed of velvet and honey, Nova watches him. Moonlit, shining only by the stars that surround them. They glitter and refract off the beskar like a million tiny shards of glass. He stands in the doorway while she rests, listless and unable to submit to sleep. He stalks her in the night like an animal, primal and terrifying. 

“Do I scare you, cyar’ika?” he asks one night. Croons, like the taste of fear is tantalizing. Sweet. Nova shivers, her body only half-covered by the gossamer sheet. They’re both spinning, lost in this nothingness, equally bisected by all this darkness. It would be devastating if Din wasn’t here to share it. Even though he’s haunted. Even though he’s not himself. 

Even though this is a dream.

It is a dream, right?

“Din—”

Gloved hands grab her ankles, throwing off her center of balance. He yanks her to the foot of the bed, throwing the sheet away. Nova tries to cover her body, but she watches the helmet slowly shake back and forth. An order. 

“Do I,” he whispers, velvet and tungsten, “scare you?” 

“You’d like if it I answered yes,” Nova whispers. “Wouldn’t you?” 

It’s not really a question.

She can feel his teeth glint in the dark, white-hot, even underneath the visor. This Din doesn’t take his helmet off. Not now. Not ever. It comes to her in flashes, little vignettes—what he used to look like, what warmth used to live in his eyes. Now, he’s more Mandalorian than man, and she wants him to bisect her, to halve her, to tear her into shreds. Even if it’s just for a moment. Even if none of this is real. She wants him, low and desperate in her belly, and it drives her up to the stars. His gloved fingers are trailing up her legs, predatory. 

“Do I scare you?” Visceral, through the modulator. 

“Yes.” 

His hand stops. 

“Novalise.” It sounds like absolution, a prayer. A reprimand, sure, but something holy. Proof that he hasn’t forgotten who she is. Nova bites down on her bottom lip as Din’s rough, gloved hands start dragging up her thighs again. “Do you like it?” 

He leans in closer. Nova feels something slide across her wrists, keeping her anchored in place. She doesn’t know what it is. She doesn’t care. “Din,” she whines, and his helmeted head is a knife through the air, landing an inch away from her cunt. Nova clenches down as he sniffs, inhaling through the modulator like he’s devouring her already, and her moan comes out broken in two. 

“I can smell you,” he whispers, strangled. “You want me so bad, it’s killing you.” 

“Yes,” Nova manages, her entire body shaking with want—with desire. She wanted it, then—yesterday, a million years ago—back on Naator. She’s always wanted it—to be Din Djarin’s prey.

But right now, he’s not Din Djarin. He’s the Mandalorian. And the distinction is blackened and honeyed, a dangerous, terrible thing. She doesn’t know where they are, what this place is—just that they were plunged into this vantablack and have become forged by it. Trial by fire, trial by desire—the circumstances change, but the story always remains the same.

“I want to devour you, sweet thing.” 

That word again—it, too, feels divine and sacrosanct, living in the light, belonging to the dark.

Nova moans. “Do it.” 

Din inhales again, a raggedy, wanton thing, and when Nova squirms, the blackness tightens around her wrists. She’s on display for him, this haunted man, and she’s an offering to whatever demon lives inside of him. 

When he leans forward, fingers digging into her hips to draw her closer, Nova’s mouth opens into a starstruck O, pulling the sound clean out into the air. “Louder.” 

“Maker,” she gasps—and then—

“Don’t pray to him,” Din grits out, his other hand snapping out of nowhere, clasping around her neck. “Your Maker’s not here. You worship me.”

Stars above. Nova doesn’t look away—she looks into that blinking, leaching blackness. He’s slick like an oil spill, her Mandalorian, and she’s caught in his gravitational pull. It’s inevitable. It’s everything. 

Nova gives in. 

“I worship you.” 

“You’re a miracle, sweet thing,” he whispers, and through the modulator, it vibrates. His head is face-to-face with her pussy. Nova can’t really feel his breath—the helmet prevents it—but the memory of it is just as strong. “But in here, I’m your God.” 

“Din,” she whispers, fallow and weak, hips jerking underneath his light touch, “please—”

When he pushes a finger inside, it’s thick. Unyielding. Without warning. This is what Din’s like inside of here, this husk of a man—something beyond material and metal. He’s both divine and sacrosanct. It’s stifling. Din’s head cocks to the side, considering. Outside the window—is it a window?—the stars are brutal and clear. Without remorse, he cocks it, curling it up inside of her, and Nova shudders. 

“I want your words.” 

“Feels—fuck, so good—”

“Is this enough, cyar’ika?” He leans closer, and Nova can still feel the imprint of his tongue from before, before the darkness swallowed them both, before this—and he pulls her closer, driving that gloved finger in deeper. Nova sobs. “Is it enough?” 

“No,” Nova mewls, finally, “no, I need more—”

“Greedy,” Din interrupts, and then she’s being stretched open with two fingers, and she’s so close to the edge, tasting it, dancing on it—and then nothing. 

“Please,” she manages, and when she looks up, Din’s helmet is obscured in shadow. He’s standing between her legs at the edge of the bed, staring down at her—she can feel his eyes, under there. They haven’t disappeared. A jolt strikes Nova, deep in her stomach. Deep brown, she reminds herself. Deep brown, like reflecting pools. The color of wet soil, the feeling of home.

“What do you want?” 

Nova’s mouth falls open. “For you to come back to me.” 

It’s not what she meant to say. Not what she intended on saying. But still, it’s here, and she can’t take the words back. For a second, the veil ripples—color floods back, color other than black and grey, other than that dulled starshine, and they’re back somewhere where the earth felt warmer. It rips through her like a lightning strike, sudden and unforgiving. 

“I’m right here,” Din whispers, and then the hiss of the helmet disengaging. “I never left.”

Nova swallows. “Prove it.” 

She can’t see him. She can’t see anything, and for a moment, it feels like he’s going to slink out of that darkness unrecognizable, and then she hears the unmistakable sound of Din popping his gloved fingers in his mouth, sucking every drop of her off of them. The moan that follows is so loud—it could shatter bone. Nova feels like it does, for a second. 

“You’re so fucking sweet,” Din pants out. “So fucking—” 

“Yours,” Nova manages, wanting to reach up to stroke his face, to move her thumb over his cheekbone, to anchor her back in reality. Her heart pounds, obsessive and unfettered, and her vision drops out as Din crawls over her. 

“Need to fuck you,” he grunts out, and then his hands are fumbling at the clasp on his pants. Nova reaches up, trying to help, but that darkness keeps her anchored down. She kicks up, trying to get leverage— “Don’t you fucking leave me.” 

Nova moans. 

“You can’t go anywhere, Novalise.” One strong, gloved is anchored on her bare stomach, pushing down hard enough to keep her locked in place. “You belong here.” 

Nova gasps, wanting to buck her hips up—not to run away, not to leave—but to get closer, and Din’s hands free his cock from his pants, and for a second she stops struggling, just staring at it. It’s always big—the bulge of it always swells in her belly—but in the half-light, it looks like it will spear her, split her in two. 

“You can take me.” 

“I need…” Nova writhes against the heat, staring at the head of Din’s cock, bead glistening, and her mouth waters. 

“I know. I know, baby.” 

“Please,” she begs, stars threatening behind her eyes, “please—”

“You don’t even know what you’re begging for,” Din croons, and his free hand slides off the base of his own dick to shoot around her throat, those same stars now supernovas, bleeding out obsidian, “do you?” 

“For you,” Nova manages, “for you, always you, always, always you, Din—” 

“You’re holy,” Din whispers, squeezing down once, “divinity.” 

“Yes,” she manages, sweet tears gathering at the corners of her eyes, “but you—” 

“I’ll drag you down to the darkness with me,” Din says, voice low and guttural, and then he pushes inside of her. No give. No take. Nova moans, a ragged, tortured thing, and Din slides all the way in, pounding into her, and she can’t take it, it’s everything, it’s devastating, it’s— “Look at me.” 

He lets go, stars receding back to the dulled state outside that window. Nova tried, eyes attempting to find their locus in the darkness, but when she sees Din’s face, it’s just the darkness looking back. 

It makes her cum so hard she sees black. 

“Novalise—” 

And she wakes up. 

Nova thinks she yelps—a noise works its way out of her mouth, it’s devastating and dark, guttural, leftover from the dreamland.

Din, only a second’s delay, is up and taut next to her, his body tensed into  warrior. “What?” he gasps, arms braced against her, breath hot in the obsidian of the tiny room. “What’s wrong, cyar’ika?” 

When she doesn’t answer, trying to bring her heartbeat down to normal, to make it even-keeled, he repeats the words. A mantra, a prayer. Tears spring to life in her eyes, this desperate, fantastical dream. It felt real, so real— 

“Dream,” she chokes out, finally, dragging a hand over her flushed, inflamed face, hands shaking from his mouth in between her thighs, the way he pushed into her, unyielding, relentless.

She knows he’s cocking his head to the side, considering. Nova doesn't need to see Din to know the way he moves. It’s ingrained in her—everything about him, grounded in muscle memory. 

“Bad dreams?”

A laugh hitches like a hiccup in her throat. “I’m not sure.” 

“What—” Din struggles, sitting up straighter. His bare hand trails up between her legs, and Nova thinks he’s still talking, but when he finds the apex of her thighs, he stops in the middle of his sentence. “Oh,” he says, low, pulsing, like it’s knocked the air out of his lungs. “Oh. What did you dream about, cyar’ika?” She can hear the proud smirk in his voice. She shivers, despite the heat of his touch. 

“You,” Nova manages.

Din’s hand clenches down. It’s not enough to hurt, but right now, Nova wants it to bruise. She wants Din in every single reality, every single iteration—but this one, right here, this is the basest, realest version of him. She doesn’t need to resort to dreams. She doesn’t need anything except him. 

“Is that all I get?” he croons, leaning in to lick a line up the column of her neck, stopping to flutter his tongue at her pulse point. That, enough, knocks her undone. 

“I can’t explain it,” she gasps, feeling his teeth graze over the same spot, stars shooting out behind the back of her eyes. “I—just need you, please, Din, please—” she’s begging now, begging like she was in the dream, that alternate reality, where Din was razor-sharp and married to the poison. She wants to sink into his skin, here, now, and that’s not enough. 

It’ll never be enough, she thinks, and then Din is maneuvering in the dark, with precision that only he’s ever had, notching his entire broad body between her legs, breath catching as he rips the strap of her top away from her collarbone. His teeth never leave, latching over and over as he makes his way down her body, bunching up the fabric of her shirt in his fist, yanking it away from the terrain of her stomach. Nova cries out, biting into the back of her fist to stay quiet—Bo-Katan’s ship is big, but not that big—

“Don’t you dare,” Din hisses, low and dangerous, “you scream for me.”

High and breathy, a moan works its way out of the open O of Nova’s open mouth. Din flutters his tongue somewhere below her bellybutton, desperate and spurred on. “Please,” she cries out, half delirious, not sure what she’s even pleading for—

Din grabs fistfuls of her pants and yanks down. Hard. Nova yelps as she’s exposed down to her knees, still shaking from her dream, shaking even more from the way Din’s unfurling here now. 

“Louder,” he goads, and she can’t stand the blood rushing in her ears. 

When he brushes his hand against the tender flesh of her inner thigh, Nova quakes. Desperate, pleading up to something high and holy above her, something she’s not even sure she believes in, Nova’s eyes roll back into her skull when Din’s mouth finally meets the apex of her thighs. 

“Oh,” she cries, and he licks a line straight up to her clit. It’s everything. It’s devastating. It’s like her dream, but so much better because this is real, he’s real, and he’s devouring her like she’s that something holy, like she’s the only locus he’s fixated on. 

His tongue feels alive, animalistic. Devour is the word Din used earlier—and devouring he is, bisecting Nova with his tongue. Desperate, she clutches her hands in his hair. Din moans at her touch—no matter how many times she’s done this exact thing, touching him in the dark always brings out that lust, that want. Nova can feel it as he’s trembling as hard as she is, tongue jittering as he licks her clean, over and over again. The tip of his tongue swirls around her clit again, and she’s so close, so close to the edge—it’s undone and divine. They’re sweating out confessions together—Nova’s in her head, Din mumbling them between her legs. Neither of them can vocalize it, make the words come aloud, but Nova knows they’re both pleading, crying, confessing—to whatever higher power they believe in, to the stars above themselves. 

“Cum for me,” Din rasps out, and it’s both a demand and a plea, and Nova can’t take it anymore. When his tongue latches down, fingers plunging into her, desperate—she does. She lets go, loud and warbling, her moan just as shaky as she is. Over and over again, she does, stars supernovae in the back of her eyes, blood thundering in her ears.

She barely comes down to the earth when Din does it again, again, again. He fucks her with his tongue like it’s an apology, like it’s divinity—Nova can’t decide which. Only when they’re both falling from it does he stop, climbing up her body to kiss her on her open mouth, smearing her lips with her own taste, and Nova kisses him. She wants to crawl inside of his teeth, be swallowed down, and live in his heart. She can’t explain it, this longing, this despair. It owns her.

It knows her by name. 

“Thank you,” she whispers, finally. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. 

Din doesn’t say anything, just lurches forward to bury his face in her neck. On the comedown, both of them flutter off into sleep again, and the only thing Nova can think is that Bo-Katan was right. 

Something is off. Something is bigger than they are—like they’re beginning a slow descent right into the eye of the storm. 

*

Knocking on the door brings both Nova and Din back awake. Nova opens her eyes, bleary, remembering that her trousers are still somewhere around her knees, or maybe by now her ankles. She shivers, the warmth of their cocoon refusing to rise up and meet her. She pulls on her sweater, folding her arms against her chest.

A small sliver of light leaches into their darkness. Nova squints. It’s Bo-Katan. Her hair is askew, mussed from her own sleep.

“What’s going on?” Nova asks, yawning, and then something hits the ship. 

Bo-Katan’s eyes are panicked. “We—we fell out of warp.” Another blast sounds, and the hull shutters. Din jackknifes up from the cot behind her. Nova wrenches open the door. 

“Are we under attack?” he yells, loud and panicked, and adrenaline and fear jolt through her with equal intensity. 

“Yes. Nova, you gotta pilot the ship,” Bo-Katan screams, over the noise, and Nova runs, grabbing hold of anything in the hallway she can to keep herself upright, seeing Bo-Katan lurch forward and grab Din’s forearm, dragging them both back down the hall to where the ship’s artillery is located. 

“Wedge!” Nova screams, hurdling into the cockpit. His face is covered with a sheen of sweat, and he looks at her, panicked for the first time in years. She reaches forward, grabbing the controls, helping him anchor it back in place. “What the hell is happening?” 

“Trap!” He yells back, the sound of gunfire too loud to hear anything but a whisper. “We crashed out of hyperspace, and all of these ships were—waiting for us.” 

Nova, wild-eyed, jumps up onto the seat next to Wedge, whose arms are shaking. “How is that possible?”

He shakes his head, trying to regain control of Bo-Katan’s shaking vessel, but Nova bumps him with her hip. “Co-pilot,” she manages. “You’ve been up here for hours. I can hold her for a minute.” 

Wedge’s mouth is set in a thin, firm line, but his eyes hold relief. Nova’s never flown this ship before—it’s decidedly not an X-Wing. But she can handle Kicker, so she can handle anything. She straps in, kicking the thrusters up as high as they’ll go, trying to get the warp to catch. 

“Come on,” she whispers, and she feels the ship shake as Bo-Katan and Din find their footing, shooting back at the armada of ships that are firing at them. Large sharded pieces of asteroids fly into her vision. Nova plays the offensive, swinging and dodging, trying to keep them on a clear path as Din and Bo-Katan shoot their way to safety. 

She looks down at the warp button, bleating a defeated cry. It’s broken—or damaged. A pulse of panic shoots through her bloodstream. “We can’t get out of here!” she cries. “Wedge!”

But as soon as they appeared, the ships encircling them pull back, disappearing behind the giant moon hanging on the horizon. Nova looks at the hyperspace drive again, and dives, lurching over the edge of an asteroid, ears still ringing in the sudden silence.

“We have to try,” she whispers, pushing at the button again. “They can’t have disappeared—Wedge!” She stops short as he slaps her hand away. “What the hell?” she asks, low, surprised, startled. 

“Stop!”

A giant bang resounds. Nova flinches, realizing the bottom of the ship scraped across the asteroid. 

“What?!”

“Stop!” Wedge cries again, finger stabbing at the navigation. “Stop, Nova—”

“I’m not doing anything!” she screeches, near hysterics, heart pumping out a million beats per minute. “Maker, Wedge, what?”

“We’re here!” He roars, and Din and Bo-Katan reappear at the cockpit’s edge. Nova stares down at the pixelated planet on the screen and back to the one appearing in front of them. It’s not a moon at all—it’s a cratered, white planet. Slowly, the noise from the rest of the ship filters back in, loud in the absence of all of the fighting outside. 

“Primea,” Bo-Katan whispers. “How are we at Primea? This journey should have taken us at least three days—”

“Where’s Ezra?” Din asks, and Nova’s heart is in her throat. 

“It cannot be this easy,” Nova breathes, shaking her head. That distress call—still from the Chimaera’s mothership, still blinking her callsign—is coming from a shuttle craft a few klicks down on the planet’s surface. “It cannot—”

“It’s not,” Bo-Katan says, her hair still in disarray, her face pale, discolored. “We’re walking into a trap.”

“Bo-Katan,” Nova whispers, uneven and erratic, “what choice do we have?”

*

Primea is a ghost town. It’s quiet. So quiet. Everything is salty and dusted in white—like snow without the chill. It’s so eerie here. The four of them walk in formation—Nova and Din in front, Wedge and Bo-Katan in tow. Four sets of boots crunch across the crystalline ground, eyes scanning the skies, the craters, waiting for the army to materialize, waiting to be swallowed up by whoever took Ezra.  

“This is wrong,” Bo-Katan mutters, under her breath. “This is wrong.”

“Bo-Katan,” Din hisses, both of their voices modulated under their helmets, “keep it together.”

She doesn’t so much as shoot him a furious look. They’ve all seen–or felt—it enough times to know what it looks like under her helmet. Nova feels unsettled. She’s right. They’re walking a fault line, and no one can tell exactly where the crack is. 

Nova skitters to a stop. “There.” She whispers it, but it sounds like a yell. Nature should not be this quiet. A tiny escape pod, grey like the Star Destroyer it was borne from, is splayed out across a crater, an overhang disguising where the color meets the sky. 

Her heart is in her throat. She feels like she’s going to throw up. 

“We should have an attack plan—” Wedge starts, but they’re already running. Novalise first, then Bo-Katan, then Din behind them, in quick succession. The four of them cross the open terrain, Nova’s hand on the Darksaber in her belt. With one glance at Din, Nova throws the saber to him, igniting her own—yellow, warmth seeping out sunlight onto this greyscale planet. Bo-Katan arms her wrist rockets, fists out to meet the air. Wedge’s blaster has been unholstered since the second his feet touched down on the ground. 

Smoke is billowing out of the ship. Nova didn’t see it before, camouflage against the backdrop of the sky—but it’s impossible to miss now. Fear lurches into her stomach. When they reach the hatch, she leans forward, opening the pressurized door. 

“Ezra?” Nova whispers, her voice shaky and childlike in the dark hull of the escape pod. 

Frantically, they look around the ship, inside, outside, searching every tiny cranny, every impossible nook. It’s clear immediately, but they keep looking. Ezra isn’t here. 

“Where is he,” Bo-Katan manages, panic ripping up an octave in her voice. 

Wedge’s eyes bulge. 

“What?” Din murmurs, looking over at him. 

Blaring, on the dashboard, are two things. 

The timelog reads the date—five and a half days after they left Mandalore. The four of them have been out of space and time for the better half of a week. 

And the hologram button is blinking. 

“What the fuck,” Bo-Katan states, angry and flat. 

Shaking, Nova presses the hologram. His face—the shape of this phantom Jedi that’s visited her, warned her—blares up, azure and tiny. Din’s hand is at her waist, keeping her weak knees steady. Nova leans back into his gravity, hands trembling, heart terrified despite his anchor.

“If you’re watching this,” Ezra says, his voice tinny and distorted, “that means I’m too late.” He looks over his shoulder, panicked. The hologram glitches, flickers, and then it’s just his face—so like her own, Nova feels like a knife in her gut, almost like she’s looking into a mirror—and Ezra lurches closer. “And you guys need to run.” 

*

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*

WE'RE BACK BABY!!!! i hope you all loved it!! i am SO excited to bring this next and final installment in the Something More Series to life. thank you for being here, for staying through all my absence, and for reading—regardless if this is your first journey with Nova & Din or if you've been here since day one, you mean the world to me. <3

CHAPTER TWO WILL BE UP IN TWO WEEKS, SATURDAY, MARCH 25TH, 2023! (hoping posting every two weeks is an easier schedule to stick with this time).

LOVE YOU!

The fault line glimmers and cracks, swallowing pieces of them all. Nova can feel it—a seismic, vantablack change, desperate and leaching. She grabs hold of Din’s arm, stumbles toward Bo-Katan, just trying to reunite all of them, to hold onto pieces before they fracture.

Ezra Bridger’s frantic message is playing and replaying in front of them, azure, desperate. 

“What,” Bo-Katan states, just as plainly as before, “the fuck.” 

“I don’t know,” Nova murmurs, but the hair on the back of her neck is standing up, full tilt. “Play it again.” 

“It’s playing on a loop,” Bo-Katan hisses, low but not angry. Nova ignores her. 

“If you're watching this,” Ezra repeats, for what may be the tenth time, “that means I’m too late.” He pauses, hair swinging in his face before he looks over his shoulder, “and you guys need to run.” 

Nova swallows. That frantic, frenetic expression on his blue face—she’s worn it. She’s seen it in her head. She’s seen it in the mirror. 

Something moves at the corner of the hologram. Nova watches it blur and obscure, then disappear entirely. A blaster shot, maybe? The sharp gunsmoke of light flits by, fleeting, going, gone. 

Primea is so quiet. The silence is so loud, pressing into their eardrums like an oil slick. There’s no frequency here—like the planet has been glassed and reduced to nothing, yet is still masquerading like there’s life. Nova shivers, even though she’s not particularly cold. 

“‘Too late’,” Din mutters, and it’s the first thing he’s said since they found the hologram. Three sets of eyes find him, silver and reflective, helmet cocked to the side. “What’s too late? To save Ezra’s life?” 

Panic jolts across Nova’s heart, bisecting it, dropping it into her belly. “No,” she says, but it wavers, coming out more like a question. “No,” she repeats, stronger this time, “I would have felt it if he were gone.”

“Was there more with the ship?” Wedge murmurs, hand on his chin, thumb brushing over his bottom lip. It’s a repeated action, one that reminds Nova so much of her father that she has to look away. “Was it just Ezra who… escaped? Or does that mean that the Chimaera and her forces are still out there?” 

“They’re out there.” Bo-Katan’s still staring at the hologram. “But there are no forces. Just them.” 

At this, everyone’s expression shifts. Wedge looks surprised. Nova’s eyes narrow. And Din’s head snaps over to her. 

“I thought you said you didn’t know who—” 

“I lied,” Bo-Katan says, and the word cracks in half. “I—”

But the earth beneath them shifts, and all of them move. Forward, together—tossed against each other like a moorless ship, heaving over the waves. Nova yells as she’s pitched into Din, as the smoking escape pod’s floor cracks beneath them. It’s such a physical manifestation of how she's feeling that at first, Nova doesn’t quantify it as true, as reality. A giant, gaping maw opens up through the steel floor. Nova screams, grabbing an arm, a leg, wrenching her people back, away from the mouth coming out of the silt and salt, suddenly immobilized with fear. 

“Grab the hologram!” Wedge roars, kicking off the sideways wall to reach it, a blinking thing—almost like a bounty puck, Nova muses, like her mind can’t focus on the danger at hand. 

Together, with Herculean effort, the four of them sift through the cracking ship, avoiding teeth as massive as their forearms, running for the opening that once used to be a door. The escape pod is tiny, and they fall out of the wreckage—one, two, three, four, in quick succession—and shoot towards the hills where they came from. Wedge is still holding that beacon in his hand, blinking softly, a satellite unaffected by the seismic change. 

Something is wrong. Nova can feel it in the air, a chittering, screeching pulse coming from the creature behind them—underneath them. Is it entirely from the creature? She can’t tell. The white, salt-cracked ground is fracturing still, and Nova stares down at it shuddering underneath her, completely unmoored. 

“Faster!” Bo-Katan roars through the modulator, and they all try, feeling the earth shake beneath them. Nova isn’t a fast enough runner—her legs are too short, her hips are too full—and the rest of them outstride her. Bo-Katan is built, but lithe; Wedge is still tactically trained from the days the Rebellion was active, and Din—well, Din is an optical illusion, a bullet made of beskar. Hulking, tall, yes, but nimble, still built for running like it’s aerosolized in his blood. 

Suddenly, something wraps around her waist, and Nova shrieks, a loud, guttural yell that splits the air in front of them. 

“It’s me,” Din yells—no, he’s not yelling, they’re just soaring through the air and his voice is cutting through the sound of the wind, propelled up by jet fuel strapped to his back, “it’s me, sweet girl—”

Nova sobs, fractures, feeling completely unhinged, unglued. She sinks into Din’s steel grip, an iron trap, burying her face in the beskar. They’re flying horizontally, alongside where Bo-Katan has plucked Wedge off his feet, trying to gain velocity and move vertically, but her small jetpack isn’t strong enough for two people. 

The monster behind them is sneering, huffing—a scaly, terrible thing, made entirely of shards of ice and salt, a predator designed to blend in with its wasteland. Nova can feel the way the ground is still shaking, even though they’re off of it. 

“Maker,” she says, the word ripped straight out of her mouth, and then panic seizes her again. “Grogu—” she cries, and she pounds against Din’s pauldron. He’s so tiny, so impossibly small—he wouldn’t even register as food to this hulking creature, he wouldn’t even be a snack— 

And then they’re rounding on the ship, Bo-Katan and Wedge lagging slightly behind, and Nova screams out, looking down at the creature again—

“Let everything run out of you backwards.” 

They’re Luke’s words, but in Ezra’s voice, and it’s like the two of them materialize and possess her. The answer is so simple. Nova can’t believe she didn’t think of it back there. She does, closing her eyes, tuning out the rattling of her skull, the fear in her bones. Slowly, carefully, she reaches out a hand from over Din’s shoulder, pointing it at the monster still shaking the ground, and pushes it forward until the earth stops threatening to fall apart.

She’s not strong enough—not alone, not by a long shot—but it slows the creature down, letting the four of them close the distance between them and the ship, enough for Bo-Katan to storm the cockpit and lift them up out of there, enough so that Nova can pry Grogu from his crib and press the scent of his skin to her nose, enfold him in her arms— 

They get out, but just barely. 

It’s a blur. Nova’s heart doesn’t peter back down to a normal range until they’re out of the atmosphere and off of Primea’s surface entirely, and even then, panic still lives inside of her, gilding that fault line, licking at the cracks. 

*

None of them speak for an abnormally long time. Fighting off a monster—a true monster, one made of salt and bone and teeth, not one who walks the galaxy on two legs—was somehow entirely unexpected. Nova’s still cold, clutching Grogu to her chest. Bo-Katan and Wedge are silent in the cockpit. Din’s quiet is otherworldly, pressing—but he doesn’t dare breach that silence, the one that all of them are suddenly slaves to, the hologram of Ezra’s panic still blinking on the dashboard. 

For what feels like seconds—or days, time isn’t solid out here—no one speaks. No one speaks at all. Then, finally, Wedge breaches the barrier between the cockpit and the back, outfitted in orange, lines in his face pronounced. “We have to stop for fuel,” he says, gently.

“Where?” Nova asks, and it comes out pleading. They’re so out of their depth out here. Ezra is nowhere to be found. It’s the five of them against impending doom, and right now, Nova feels like the impending doom is winning. Grogu coos against the swell of her chest, and she smooths a hand over his ears like her mother used to over her hair. 

“Soon.” It isn’t the answer to the question she asked—it was the one to the hidden, obscured question, the one hiding from the light. They’re running out of fuel. They’re running out of time. And the Unknown Regions are a wilderness pit, someplace destitute and unlawful, and there’s no information on where fuel even is, or if this hole of blank space is devoid of anything except crushing, complete darkness.

Nova reads in between the lines. They’re really low. 

She cracks her sore neck to the side to relieve some of the pressure, trying to regain control like she’s in the pilot’s seat on Kicker. She rolls her shoulders back, considering. “I don’t know where to go,” she says, finally, coming up with nothing. “Ahch-To is out here, somewhere, but it’s just… mountains and ocean. What little fuel Luke has, he needs for his own X-Wing.” 

Nova doesn’t miss how Wedge stiffens, blinks, readjusts at Luke’s name. “We need fuel, Nova,” he says, lowly, “soon.” 

Swallowing, Nova regards him in the half-light. That prick on the back of her neck is back, like eyes she can’t see are watching her. “I don’t know where to go.” 

Din’s voice, sighing like honey through the modulator, stops them both in their redundant conversation. “I do.” He exhales, low and despondent. “But none of you will like it.” 

*

They land on a planet called Parnassos. Nova can feel the anxiety, taut against Din’s hulking frame. It’s curled inside his belly in the same way it’s curled inside of hers. The atmosphere is toxic, not enough to kill you, but enough to hurt. Din and Bo-Katan have pressurized air in their helmets. Nova and Wedge aren’t as lucky. 

“You should stay here,” Din expresses as Bo-Katan drives her ship down to the planet’s smoggy, smoky surface. 

“Absolutely not,” Nova hisses. 

Din’s helmet is still on, but if it wasn’t, Nova knows that he’d be shooting her an exasperated expression. “Novalise—”

“We need someone to get fuel,” she whispers. “And we need to get food, too. That means two groups of people. And I don’t think any of su should go off alone.” 

“I’ll stay,” Wedge volunteers, nudging his way into the conversation. “I’ll stay here with Grogu. That way, if all of you need a fast exit… I’ll be here.” 

Nova eyes him. There’s a stiffness to Wedge that she hasn’t ever seen before, a rigidity that’s seeped in like poison. Primea was so unsettling—a ghost town with something scarier lurking under the surface—and it’s affected all of them in different ways. This is Wedge the war general, not Wedge her friend. “Okay,” she agrees, softly, wrapping her shawl around Grogu’s sleeping body, swathing him in orange. Reluctantly, she hands him off to Wedge, cooing in his sleep. 

Bo-Katan emerges in the doorway after she’s landed the ship on Parnassos’ rocky, unyielding surface. “Ready?” 

Nova’s breath hitches. If the atmosphere is toxic—they can’t be out there for long. She can’t be out there for long. Not without armor, not without a failsafe—

Bo-Katan tosses a blur of orange and grey through the air. Nova catches it—her helmet. Her Mandalorian helmet, the one she initially said she couldn’t don, the one that made her feel like an imposter instead of a leader. She stares down at it for a second, considering, and then slides it over her head, the airlock hissing her into safety. Din grabs something off the dashboard, blinking. Ezra’s hologram. 

“Wedge, if anything happens—”

“It won’t,” he says, firmly. “Just get out there, get fuel, get food, get back. Four easy steps.” 

“What if we run into something?” Nova asks, her own voice distorted through the modulator. Chills erupt across her arms, down her spine. 

“We won’t,” Din says, sighing, “You’ll see.”  

Parnassos’s surface is war-torn, haunted. It’s the first thing Nova feels—not sees, feels. Visceral and raw, like no one is supposed to be here. 

She shivers, stepping carefully over the terrain, rocks and glass crunching underneath their feet. For what feels like hours, the three of them walk in tandem silence, a multi-headed animal, a desperate triumvirate. Bo-Katan is precise in her movements. Din is walking like he’s hunting something. Nova hangs back, eyes tracking their heat signatures, their movements, trying to forget the feeling like she’s the dividing line come to life, the physical representation of where Din and Bo-Katan stand. 

For miles, they walk, traversing difficult terrain. Large geyser pits spit clouded, toxic steam.The planet is red, but muted, like whatever anger used to be held in the atmosphere left a long time ago. Din steps on ahead, a man on a mission, knowing where he’s headed. Bo-Katan stumbles and Nova catches her arm, latching onto her the second she falters.

“I’m fine.” 

“I’m not.”

Bo-Katan stops to study Nova, cocking her head to the right. 

“What the hell did you mean back there?” 

Bo-Katan clears her throat through the modulator, moving on. Nova walks in lockstep, heart hammering wildly.  “I know that the Chimaera wasn’t fully armed. It was just Ezra and who he disappeared with.” 

Nova blinks, brow furrowing. “How do you know that?”

Bo-Katan doesn’t speak for a long time. “Nova, I wasn’t intentionally keeping it from you.” 

Running her tongue over her teeth, Nova tries to read between the lines. “Why didn’t you say something sooner, then?” 

“I did.” Bo-Katan stops. Nova can feel her stare. “I told you Ezra disappeared in the ship with someone who sounds terrifying.” 

“Who?” Nova asks, pressing down, trying to hit Bo-Katan’s pressure point, to get past the guarded exterior, to pry it free. “I don’t understand—you told us so much back on Mandalore, Bo-Katan. If you know who he disappeared with—” 

“I didn’t know him myself,” Bo-Katan interrupts, “I just…heard stories.” 

“What stories?” Din is so far ahead of them at this point, Nova fears losing him to the smog. “Please, Bo-Katan, I understand he’s…scary, but we have no hope of beating him if we don’t work together.”

“He’s not human. Near-human, maybe, but something completely…different. He doesn’t have a conscience, but he’s not unhinged. He’s brilliant. Ruthless. Taking apart the Rebellion one piece at a time.” 

Nova steps carefully around a geyser, considering. “How do I not know who this man is?”

Bo-Katan steps up over a boulder. Din’s armor glints in the reddish haze in front of them. “He ran in different circles than you did. Orbited your Rebellion, but never touched it.”

“Why?”

“He disappeared with Ezra into deep space before any of the big battles happened.” 

Nova stops. 

“Keep moving,” Bo-Katan says, harshly, “we can’t linger.”

Nova’s legs are so tired. Her mind is exhausted. She wants to rub her eyes, but she can’t reach under her helmet, can’t breathe in the tainted air. She can feel a threat hanging against the horizon, and it’s not just the haunted setting of the planet. She feels watched, like whatever they’re doing is ten steps behind, like someone’s eyes are assessing their every move.

“Everything he’s done, though,” Bo-Katan continues, once they’re through a rock outcropping, “it lived in the Empire. And I can still feel it.” 

Nova blinks. “Wait, what do you mean?”

Bo-Katan stops, just for a second, and Nova can sense the uneasy expression on her face. “I think whatever the First Order is, whatever they’re trying to do, it’s out here. In the Unknown Regions.”

“Bo-Katan—”

“Everywhere we’ve been has been wrong,” Bo-Katan says, finally, gaining speed. Nova can’t keep up, physically or mentally, “and I think there’s something bigger at play here.” 

“Like what?” 

Bo-Katan considers. “Like we’re walking into a trap.” 

A terrible, awful beat of thrumming silence. “Whose trap?” Nova asks, her voice small, scared.

“That’s the problem,” Bo-Katan sighs, “I don’t know.” 

*

They’ve only been out here for an hour, but it feels like days. Nova’s sweating, chilled to the bone by the unsettling planet they’re walking, the threat literally hanging in the air. But she doesn’t dare unzip her jacket, doesn’t try to let any of the poison in. She keeps moving, trudging after her two experienced Mandalorians, thinking about anything other than that feeling of being watched, of playing right into someone’s trap. 

Get out there.

Get fuel.

Get food. 

Get back. 

Four easy steps. Nova repeats it silently, like a mantra, like a salvation. When Din and Bo-Katan finally stop, it takes her a beat to catch up. They’re talking low and hushed. When she approaches them, Bo-Katan raises her helmeted chin. “We’re splitting up,” she declares. 

“No,” Nova answers, immediately. “Not a good idea.”

“You and Din go get food,” Bo-Katan says, ignoring her entirely, “I’ll get fuel.” 

“Bo-Katan,” Nova says, low and desperate, “there’s no edible food here.”

“There’s a town center,” Din says, “and inside, there’s a greenhouse. Right at the center.” 

Nova looks at him. “How do you know?” 

Din shifts uncomfortably. “I… I’ll tell you on the way.” He looks back at Bo-Katan. “Fuel is at the outpost, down the main road, to the left. Be quick. If you run into anyone—”

“Shoot first,” Bo-Katan says, nodding. “Ask questions later.” 

They have an unspoken agreement, one Nova isn’t privy to. She watches as Bo-Katan disappears into the smog, the straight ramrod of her back dematerializing until she’s completely gone. Swallowing, Nova turns back to Din. “I don’t like this,” she says, trying to sound derisive, clear, but her voice shakes. 

He brings a gloved palm up to cup her helmeted cheek. “I knew you wouldn’t.” He sighs. “I don’t either, but the rest of the planets out here are either wastelands or… worse.” He turns on his heel, making his way to the center of the decaying, toxic city. Nova follows him, outlining the shape of the man she loves under the armor, trying to uncover what lurks in his silence, what’s buried underneath. 

“Din,” she chances, after a handful of minutes descending deep into the ruins of the city, “how do you know this place?”

He sighs again, long and languid. Nova waits, patiently. 

“I used to live here,” he says, finally, sourly.

Nova stops in her tracks. “What?”

“It was for a short time,” Din continues, scaling a small boulder. His boots crunch as he lands, lifting up an arm to help Nova climb over the obstacle, visor trained ahead instead of on her. “Back… back when I was with—”

“Xi’an,” Nova supplies, softly. Din flinches. She doesn’t miss it. “You… lived out here? In this wasteland?”

“It was only for a few weeks,” Din says, turning left, right, in quick succession. The buildings around them are crumbled, in ruin. Nova doesn’t know if it was from the atomic devastation or if it was simply from disuse. “I never took my armor off. Her skin—her brother’s, too—they aren’t affected like humans are. It didn’t bother them, living in a radioactive zone.” He huffs a laugh, mirthless, so unlike him. “Guess that’s because they were radioactive, too.” 

Nova looks up at him. “Din,” she starts, completely out of her depth, “how long?” 

He cocks his head to the side, refusing to look at her. “What do you mean?” Together, they twine deeper into the city center, the buildings less and less destroyed. Nova can glimpse glass in the distance—the greenhouse, she assumes, but she doesn’t mention it aloud.

“How long were you trapped here?” she asks, softly, and with that, he turns, abrupt, enclosing Nova against a crumbling brick wall. 

“I wasn’t trapped,” Din spits, and it’s totally unlike him, a crack straight down the middle, that Nova’s breath catches in the hollow of her throat, body slamming into the brick. “I liked it, Nova. I was a machine back then. I wasn’t—I wasn’t who I am now. I loved the hunt. I was as ruthless as they were. I liked it.” He steps forward, body flush against hers, and Nova swallows, her mouth running bone-dry under the helmet. “I am not good, Novalise.” 

Tears spring to Nova’s eyes, warring with the dark plunge of excitement that hungers low in her belly, desperate, unhinged, voracious. “You are now,” she manages, “and whatever you’ve done doesn’t scare me—”

“I did what I needed to survive,” Din snarls, “and I liked it.” 

“Din—”

“Your lover was a killer,” Din croons, and Nova stares up at him, that vantablack, desperate feeling unhinging once more, threatening to consume her like it did in her dream. “Does that scare you, cyar’ika?” 

Nova lifts her chin up to meet his, throwing her shoulders back, stepping forward. “You could never scare me.” 

“Oh, that’s not true,” Din says, and Nova can hear the wicked smile in his voice, “you just like to be scared.” 

Want is a desperate, knifing thing. Nova reaches up, wanting to pull Din closer, needing to have his body against hers, even in this torrential wasteland, even in this place of radioactive air— 

“Novalise,” Din says, but he’s not pressed up against her, he’s not crooning, he’s not haunted. Nova blinks once, twice, then—the smoke clears, and he’s a few feet away, head cocked concernedly, arm stretched out to pull her forward. They’re at the greenhouse, glass gloomy and reflective against the clouded red sky. 

“What—?” Nova looks back, back at the place Din had just had her anchored against the wall, but they aren’t there. Nothing that just happened was real—or if it was, it was minutes ago, not right before—the flash cut scares her, sends adrenaline rocketing through her veins. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, looking back up at the man she loves, warm concern written all over his hidden face. 

“Are you seeing things?” Din asks, low and worried, and Nova’s cheeks flare with heat. “It happens, it’s the air, you need to keep your helmet on—”

“No,” Nova says, trying to sound convincing, pointing up at the greenhouse. “Can we get in?” 

Din nods, leading her around the back of the building. Nova looks over her shoulder, half-expecting evil to materialize, for something horrible to show its face to her, glinting in the awful amber haze. Nothing does.

They’re alone out here, alone with each other and all their ghosts, alone with the fear of something happening. Against a razor’s edge, both hidden and glinting. Alone with want, with hunger, with fear.

Nova doesn’t know what scares her more. 

The greenhouse is exactly what it’s advertised as—green, lush, sprawling. A tiny sanctuary in the middle of a war torn city, a ghost town, a wasteland.

It’s beautiful, the greenness of it, the life growing here. Tiny white flowers dance across the ground, even without a breeze. Nova marvels at that, at the little life still growing here, after all the devastation. 

“Look for things we can eat,” Din says, the toe of his boot softly nudging her calf. “Divide and conquer?” 

Nova nods. “How much should we take?” 

Din looks around, visor trained on the reddish haze of the outside world against the frosted windows. “Everything we can.” 

Nova swallows, looking at the expanse of greenery spread across the floor in front of them. Large vines crawl up a staircase, spiraling up to another level. Those tiny, white flowers, signets of peace, lean back and forth in the windless greenhouse, driven by something other than the breeze. Tall grasses grow every few feet, guarding the pockets of edible greenery, of carrots and radishes and things that grow in the rich, deep soil, undisturbed by the horror here. 

“Shouldn’t we leave something?” Nova asks, “for anyone else who travels here?”

Din regards her for a second. “No one else will travel here,” he says, finally, his voice quiet, “and if they do, they’re someone who deserves to starve.” He turns away to gather his own food, letting that red line tethered between the two of them go slack. Nova swallows.

Her dream was right, she concludes, as she starts to gather—peppers, mushrooms, lettuce—Din is haunted, possessed by something she can’t put her finger on, cannot name. She slips her gloves off to root through the soil untouched, and the glint of her ring catches in the low light. For a second, Nova stares down at it. It’s a testament of love, but it’s more than that—the band made of beskar, the embedded crystal glowing like a Kyber, white and glassy, otherworldly. The engagement belonged to a Nova in another universe, where the only evil she knew was Gideon, where the only love she knew was as Novalise. 

Softly, she swallows a sob, tucks it away for later. It used to be so simple—she fell in love with a Mandalorian who was a bounty hunter, between missions and quarries, out in the crush of space. This life they live now—all this, and heaven too—is desperate, wanting, belonging to forces beyond tangible reach. Before all of this, they were just a Rebel and a Mandalorian—and now the Rebel is the Jedi ruler of Mandalore and the Mandalorian is worshiping the Jedi Rebel. Things have changed—in cosmic, drastic ways—and they’re hunting for something more, something deeper, something holy—something Nova doesn’t even know exists.

She would like it too, though. Stars, she wants it to. 

Tucking her ring with the stone down, she gathers food, stuffing it into the small pack Bo-Katan gave her before they disembarked the ship. She layers the smaller vegetables within the leaves of lettuce and cabbage, unfurling them enough to tuck them in safely. Din has disappeared over the other side of the greenhouse, form rustling in the tall grass. Her section is picked clean, and Nova turns to head up the spiral staircase, metal preserved in this tiny safe haven, but creaking with disuse.

Din doesn’t turn as she rises, but Nova can see him, on his knees, sifting through soil for more food. Love springs to life in her heart as she watches him, the hunter—gathering, bending to the earth below them. She forces herself to keep moving, keep rising, keep going upward—want seizes in her belly again, and she would rather ignore it than find out it was never real at all. 

The second floor is darker, even though it’s closer to where the sun would be, if the sun could shine on Parnassos at all. Large panels cover the roof, but they’re not to let the light in. They refract in the darkness, like a funhouse of mirrors, something Nova’s read about but has never actually seen. She makes her way through the thick vines and trees above them, navigating the haphazard maze of boxed-in gardens, flowers and thorns overflowing and running into each other. Freesia, marigolds, tulips, carnations, rhododendrons—thousands of flower species from planets all over the galaxy tumbling together, hidden from the sunlight but shining just the same. 

Nova’s breath catches in her throat as handfuls of Yavin violets, impossibly purple, spring up from between the vibrant oranges and deep blues, blooming just for her. She leans down to smell them, forgetting that she’s wearing her helmet, forgetting why she’s wearing her helmet—

Nova disengages the airlock, completely focused on the flowers calling her home. She doesn’t think about the toxic air, the radioactive wasteland outside, if the greenhouse is safe enough to breathe in. She touches the tips of her bare fingers to the skin of the flower, the petal recognizing her by name, that ultraviolet light pulsing through the stem, so utterly alive against all this wreckage. 

It calls out to her. It knows her by name. 

Nova falls sideways into a vision. It’s slippage, so seamless that she doesn’t realize it at first—but then that unsettling feeling materializes, slips back in, making itself a home underneath her skin. 

Insidious, Nova recognizes, that’s the word. Creeping into her bones, her marrow, until she herself is tainted. 

A doorway. In the vision, there’s always a doorway. It’s so familiar, something ancient, something brand-new. It knows her all the same. Everything in the greenhouse fades away, shearing into something dark and deep-blue. Laughter echoes in the background, not like a whisper—like she’s too far away to hear it up close. Nova shivers, turning, trying to get back to that open doorway, trying to step back towards reality. 

But she doesn't want to relinquish her grip on this otherness, not yet. She wants to scry into it, wants to find its absolution. 

Nova spins, feeling herself drip through space. Suddenly, everything is black and white. She’s on a dais, but it's not the one back on Jedha, and it’s not the one from the woods in Naator. It’s a reflecting pool, in disguise as a mirror. She looks at herself, expecting to see Andromeda, Novalise, something she’s been before.

She doesn’t. 

The woman staring back to her is Nova with all of her Nova-ness missing. Her eyes are haunted, black, obsidian. The color has seeped out of her face, everything in grayscale. She flickers the fingers on her left hand—in possession or in recognition, Nova’s not sure. She feels her own hand come up to meet her vision, her alter-ego, to touch the looking glass and reconcile the differences.

Her shadow-self pulls Nova straight through the mirror. 

“Hello, me,” she croons, hand traveling up to Nova’s face, skating across the expanse of her cheeks, tucking dark ringlets behind the shell of her ear. “I’ve been waiting for you.” 

“I am not you,” Nova manages. She feels like she’s moving through amber, or honey—suspended in place, unable to run. She has been planted into this black, rotting earth. “I will never be you.” 

Her shadow-self curls those wicked lips up into a smile. It’s devoid of emotion, shattering, a destroyed star, a thousand knives pointed in her mouth, glittering like teeth. “Don’t be so sure,” she whispers, like a hex. She shoves that same left palm into the center of Nova’s chest, sending her spiraling back through the doorway, unspooling the haunting as she goes. 

Nova thuds on the ground, hearing laughter echo and dance in the back of her skull. Like, now, it’s coming from inside her head. When she looks up, she’s in the tall grasses of Yavin, back home. Her parents are smiling down at her—Piper’s long, black hair catching in the sunlight, Arokel’s freckled face tipped back to laugh. 

“We caught you, Andromeda,” they’re saying, teasing, gilded, laughing. “We caught you!”

It morphs, and her mother’s teeth snap into Sparmau’s, clicking so close to Nova’s face. She cries, skittering backward on her hands, needing to get away, to escape—Sparmau’s palm comes up and clutches her ankle, yanking Nova back to her. “I caught you, Andromeda.” 

“You’re dead,” Nova manages, kicking her heel into Sparmau’s stomach, hard, sending her ghost sliding back to the ground, barren and dark under a thousand shining stars, winking in her favor. “You’re dead, and you can’t haunt me anymore.”

Sparmau grins. “I don’t need to. You’re doing an excellent job of it yourself.” Her teeth are so white, so poisonous. She snaps them at Nova again, once, twice. “And he’s coming for you, Novalise. He will destroy everything you love and then some.” 

Nova blinks. “Who?”

“He’s baaaaack,” Sparmau goads. “And he will tear you apart.” 

Nova rushes forward, anger surging in her chest like a live wire. “Who?” She spits again, clawing at Sparmau’s exposed skin with her nails, wanting to scissor her into ribbons, wanting to draw blood. Sparmau slips away like she’s just a ghost, disappearing like vapor in Nova’s hands. 

“You already know,” Sparmau says, her disembodied voice floating higher, higher. “You’re already losing.” 

“I have not lost!” Nova yells, but her voice sounds unhinged, dark. When the vision changes, she’s here. On Parnassos. Confused, she blinks, wiping her sleep-crusted eyes, trying to make the stars fade back into reality. Cautiously, she steps forward. There’s a giant ship in front of her—a Star Destroyer, but decidedly not the Chimaera. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but she does. Nova peers in, stepping through the metal doorway, as quiet as a whisper. 

It looks broken, worn-down. This entire planet feels haunted, she realizes, and this ship even more so. It’s reduced to an exoskeleton, but Nova can sense the evil gathering here in the dark, a schematic of what will be, rather than what once was.

She steps forward, once, twice, and the scene shifts. It’s nothingness, just the crush of the Unknown Region. Nova turns, looking over her shoulder, certain she can feel something lurking, skittering towards her in the dark. Watching her. 

This entire place is haunted.

Nova feels haunted, too. 

It shifts again. Nova peers into a tank, where a creature is curled inside. Like a fetus, but it isn’t—it looks older, a mesh of purple skin, light and violet, a terrible feeling. The tank bubbles and multiples.

Out of habit, Nova looks over her shoulders, and there’s Grogu—terrified, in chains, staring up at the tank, too, quivering. She moves forward, wanting to shield him, to protect him, to cover him from this unsettling creature—

He presses his tiny, three-fingered hand against her temple. Nova gasps, pitching backward. She sees the outline of a vision, something that looks so uncertain it has to be futuristic, has to be something that’s yet to come, not something that once was. She sees the flash of lightsabers—one that effervescent Skywalker blue, one that’s an awful angry scar of red—and that purple creature on the throne, one that’s a grown, morphed mutated version of the tiny thing in the tank, laughing high and angry.

He peers through the vision, this creature, locking eyes with her. “You,” he whispers, reaching out a clawed hand, seeming to rip Nova across the sidelines, bring her across the room to him. “You have something we want.” 

“No,” she manages.

He smiles. “Then we’ll take it from him, instead.” He points that awful hand at Grogu, summoning him—

And Nova shrieks, breaking the scene.

Now, Novalise stares down at her hands, her own hands—she knows them. They have fought off evil. They have belayed threats. They have killed and loved and tortured and saved. They’re imperfect, desperate, horrible, wonderful, a lifeline. She examines her palms, like tracing maps of the stars, finding truth in every ridge, every map. 

Nova has fought off the darkness. She can close the fault line. 

Desperately, she punches forward, trying to get her hands to ignite, to summon light, to feel the grasp of her lightsaber in her hands, to bring herself back down to earth. 

Ezra’s face materializes through the dark. Nova abandons the tether, tripping toward him, arms outstretched. 

“Where are you!” She cries, and she sounds tiny, so little, like a petulant, emotional child. “Ezra!”

“I am in every star,” he says, dreamlike, in a trace. His purple eyes are clouded, like the frosted glass of the greenhouse windows. Like he’s possessed. “I will find my way back home.” 

“Ezra,” Nova says, panting, trying to hold his wrists between her hands. He keeps slipping away, amorphous, liquid. “I need to find you. Please, we’re trying to find you—”

Lucidity snaps back into his eyes, and Ezra snaps his hands, clawed and determined, to Nova’s shoulders. “Don’t come after me.” 

Nova blinks. “Ezra,” she says, as steadily as she can manage, “we already have.”

Panic seized his face. So close to hers, so similar. Close, but not exact. “Then we’ve lost.” 

Fear lurches up in Nova’s chest. “What do you mean?”

“I kept him away as long as I could,” Ezra says, “but he’s back, and that means the galaxy is in danger.” 

Nova swallows. “The galaxy is always in danger,” she offers, trying to get him to smile, trying to coax them back from this cliff edge, back to reality. 

Ezra looks straight through her, onto some other plane of existence. “Not like this.” 

Shivering, Nova tries to move forward. Ezra’s iron grip keeps her in place. “Don’t throw it away,” he says, and all the times he’s said the same four words before are like a shock to her system, defibrillating her panicked heart. 

“I didn’t,” Nova says, gently, gesturing behind her like that can encapsulate everything that happened with Sparmau.

“This is a different kind of danger,” Ezra says, haunting, like a spell. “This is a different kind of danger.” 

Nova feels sick. “Why?”

“Can you feel the evil there?” 

She stares at Ezra, so distant, so close. “Yes.”

“Then you’re aware of what’s coming.” 

Nova can feel herself trembling. This is not what she was expecting—ever since the ground opened up underneath her to reveal rows and rows of awful, giant teeth, she’s had the feeling she’s been pulled into that open mouth, that gaping maw, that black hole. “I don’t know what’s coming,” she whispers, “do you?”

Ezra looks at her, considering. “It’s all connected,” he says, and then he’s spinning her around. A dematerialized blue face appears in front of her, red eyes, dark eyes. Nova is paralyzed with fear. He smiles at her, with the same kind of powerful, awful rows of teeth that Sparmau had, all aiming to kill. 

“Hello, Novalise,” he whispers, his voice rumbling in the dark around them, “I’ve heard so much about you.” 

Nova screams. 

“Not yet,” he croons, “save that until I can hear it for real.” 

“You’re not real,” Nova whispers like a mantra, a litany, something to protect her. “None of this is real.” 

That smile, devastating, dangerous, shines on. The rest of the stars have striked from the sky. Just Nova and this blackness and the terror in front of her. “It’s not real yet,” he says, his voice like a caress, “but it will be.” 

And Nova crashes out of the sky. 

When he grabs her, Nova yells. 

“It’s me!” Din yells, panicked, desperate, repeating himself over and over again until she’s grounded, until she recognizes the voice in front of her. “It’s me, cyar’ika, it’s just me—” 

Sobbing, Nova lurches forward, launching herself into Din’s arms, desperate, wanting, reduced to nothing except herself. 

“What happened,” Din murmurs, hands roving over her body to check for damage, for injuries. “I saw you disappear up here and a second later, you started screaming—”

“A second?”

Din stops, staring down at her under the helmet. “Yes.” 

“I saw everything,” Nova whispers, her voice shaking, coming out chopped through the modulator, “in pieces.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“It’s all connected,” Nova says, shaking in Din’s arms, shivering with the weight of it all, the horrible place that she’s stuck and moored in, remnants of the vision dueling in her head, desperate, fragmented,. “It’s all connected. Ezra, and who he brought back with him. Sparmau, and the man Ezra’s with. This planet, the Unknown Regions, Gideon, the First Order, all of it—” she stops, a sob threatening to rip her chest open, an awful shard of truth, “Maker, Din, there’s so much we have to fight—” 

“We will.”

He’s so resolute. It makes Nova ache. 

“What if we don’t?” she whispers, still so unsteady. She feels disconnected from herself, unanchored, like she’s not fully back yet. “What if we just… leave?”

Din goes deathly still. “It’s not in our blood to run from a fight.” 

“But—”

He shakes his head. “You can’t abandon everything now. You can’t run when it gets hard.” 

Tears prick at Nova’s eyes. “Din, I—”

“I once wanted to protect you from the fight,” he says, voice deep and guttural. “But I couldn’t, because you always throw yourself into it anyway.”

Nova swallows. “I don’t want to fight,” she whispers, “not all of this.” 

Din clutches her tighter, desperate, cloying. “That’s not true,” he whispers.

Nova stares up at him, her ungloved hands grabbing at the rim of his helmet, trying to pry it off. “Then bring me back,” she whispers, and the words sound familiar, but she can’t explain exactly why. “Make me see the truth.” 

“How?” Din whispers, and Nova pulls his helmet clean off, like she’s haunted, like she’s possessed by something else. Want knives through her like it did back at the alleyway, like it did once in a dream. 

“Fill me up, Din Djarin,” she breathes, fogging up the humid greenhouse air around them, “make me whole again.” Concern and desire war in Din’s eyes. Nova knows which one will win. She’s been here before. “Please,” she moans out, hungry, ravenous, nails clawing at the open expanse of his neck, “I need you.”

Three simple, little words, and Din comes unglued. 

He moves forward like he’s been possessed. His eyes flutter closed as he pulls a kiss from her open mouth, ready and wanting, desperate and unhinged. Nova sinks into his skin, leaning back into the green, open ground. This is dangerous, the air in the greenhouse obscured from the wasteland outside but still not safe—and that lurch makes Nova want it more, deeper, stronger, her fingers prying off pieces of Din’s armor as he kisses her, hungry, wanting. 

“More,” she mewls, in the dark, lush danger of the greenhouse, “more, Din, more—” 

“I’m giving you everything,” he hisses, mouth latched onto the pulse point against her neck, making the mirrored glass above them refract and reflect with a thousand versions of Nova’s expression, dressed in ecstasy, eyes rolling back in her head. “Be patient.” 

Something stills, for a second, and Nova decides it’s not enough. She reaches underneath his armor, prying more and more off, leaving beskar littered around their entwined bodies, fearless, heart thumping in her chest. 

“Do you want me,” she whispers. It’s not insecurity—it’s the opposite. But it comes out breathy and high anyways, desperate.

Din stops to stare down at her. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted,” he says, his voice clipped, almost angry. “I want to devour you.”

“You say that every time,” Nova sighs, bucking her hips up to feel him, to latch around his armored waist. Something about this place is goading her, making her want to hurt, riding that line between pleasure and pain, perfect, determined. 

Din’s lightning-fast. He reaches out to grab her neck, balancing it between the fingers of his hand, thumb pressed down to that sweet pulse point, the curve between pressing against her hairway, sending Novalise back up to the stars. “I would tear you apart,” he croons, “is that what you want to hear? That I’ll be on your scent, ready to destroy the world for you. When I say devour, cyar’ika,” he says, pressing down until the stars multiply, “I mean destruction. Can you handle that?”

“Yes,” Nova squeaks, breathless, air taken right out of her lungs. 

“I don’t think you can.” 

She feels dizzy. This is exactly what she wanted, this devastation. This devastation that loves her. This devastation that’s carved out a place of its soul for her, this devastation that she knows by name. 

“I can take it,” Nova whispers, whines, into the shattering green dark of this place around them. “I can take anything.” 

Din smiles down on her, bright enough to shatter the stars above. “That’s my girl.” 

It was all a trick—to bring her her strength. To bring Nova herself back. She grins back up at him, love pumping through her veins, vital, strong. 

“What if I want you to destroy me anyways,” she whispers, into the hollow of his neck, licking her tongue along his collarbone. “What happens then?”

Din’s eyes flash as she pulls away, smiling up at him, teasing him, testing him. “Is that what you want?”

“I want you,” Nova whispers, “need you, Din, please—”

“Stop talking,” he growls, and she shuts up. 

His lips on her neck feel like devotion, divinity—if this is destruction, it’s desecration. Din moves closer, closer still, pinning Nova’s body underneath his own, pieces of beskar littered around them, the other half still glittering on his body. It’s desperate, it’s reckless, it’s everything Nova needs. He moans out into the dip of her throat as she rakes her bare nails against his back, fingers clenching at the waistband of his pants, begging to pry him free.

It's so different from the wasteland outside, than the wasteland in her dreams. Nova feels that same hunger, that want calling out to her. But what was once vantablack and obsidian is green and honeyed, is her something more. This feels like it’s something else entirely, something saner—but not safer. She can feel her breathing get marred by this wasteland air, by the apocalypse waiting outside. 

“Life your hips,” Din pants into the shell of her ear. Nova’s entire body erupts in chills. She obeys. She feels it, now, the same crush that he used to pin her down with, the desperate claw he used to use on her all the way back on the Razor Crest, undone, divine. Nova feels air hit her, flush against her exposed skin, at the apex of her thighs. Din pulls everything down in the same yank, fingers scraping against the humidity of her skin, worshiping her in a way that feels sanctified instead of pious. He doesn’t give her a second of give before he pushes inside of her, all give, all take. 

“Oh,” Nova moans, the sound of it ricocheting off the open air around them, off the mirrors on the ceiling reflecting their entangled bodies. “Oh, Maker, Din—”

“Your Maker,” Din grunts, “isn’t here right now. Just me, cyar’ika.” 

Nova moans again, high and refracted back at her. She would be embarrassed if he didn’t feel so good. He’s bisecting her, driving into the hilt, using his cock as a weapon. Devastation yes, desecration—something holy between them in all this sin, all this danger. 

“Give everything to me,” he whispers, like he’s pleading. He’s no longer demanding. Somewhere, buried deep within her cunt, the roles have shifted. Now it’s Nova in charge, even as she’s being speared open by the man she loves, even as they’re doing something. Give and take, this power, this divinity unspooled between the two of them. 

Equality. 

That’s what it’s always been, with Nova and Din—push and pull, ebb and flow—but both of them are equal in measure, in power, in lust, in love. 

“More,” Nova cries out again, and Din obeys. 

“Nova,” he sighs, fisting her hair, yanking her head back. When it opens again, Nova feels her eyes roll back. “Mine, mine, mine.” 

“Yours,” she whispers, as he repeats it like a hymn, a prayer. Something beyond what she’s ever heard before. Something holy, a confessional of the flesh. 

“Gonna cum,” he whispers, and it’s ragged and split down the middle, and her legs shake as she becomes undone, too. “Gonna–”

And then they’re both painted and panting, woven together, inextricable. Nova feels everything in her skin flush, come back to life. 

“What do you want?” Din whispers, “Now that you’ve already had me.” 

Nova runs her fingers over the slope of his nose, the high points of his cheekbones. “To win.” 

Din smiles back at her, the rest of the room fading out. “I know.” 

“We’re going to find Ezra,” Nova says, tracing a finger over his eyebrow, “we’re going to figure out who he’s fighting, and we’re going to win.” 

“There you are,” Din says. “Don’t you dare lose that again.” 

Nova looks over at him, raising her eyebrows before they both put their helmets back on in tandem, ready to face the world outside, the apocalyptic wasteland on their way back to the ship, and the expanse doesn’t seem so terrible. That fault line shifts, cracks, but it right now, it feels surmountable. 

“Lose what?” 

Din reaches forward to brush his hand across her heart. “Hope.” 

He clips Ezra’s holopad to his belt, reaching out for Nova’s hand, ready to descend out of the greenhouse, to meet Bo-Katan, and return back to the ship. 

Neither of them notice the new message light blinking blue.

*

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I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!!!!! i'm so happy to be posting regularly again :') lemme know how you like it <3

Chapter 3 will be up at 7:30 pm EST on Saturday, April 8th!!! <3