#diametric

He’d never experienced anything like it, not up close, not in his adult life. To be fair, he didn’t have much context as far as relationships were concerned. The most intimate relationship he’d had was with Xi’an; she was the only person he’d been with consistently, and he wasn’t even sure that what they’d had could be called a relationship.

But Din had changed so much since the days when he worked with Ran’s crew. Back then, he had been cold and hungry—brutal and rash in his desperation to prove himself, to feel something. He had been ravenous for violence and credits and adrenaline.

These days, he longed for… what?

He watched you pull the kid into the circle of your arms, whispering sweet words and rocking him gently as his eyelids started to droop. The image stirred that unnameable feeling in Din’s chest—it reached past his ribcage and threatened to fill some empty, long-forgotten hollow in his heart.

Din longed for that. For affection. For comfort. For family.

For you.

If anything spoke to just how drastically he had changed over the years, it was that. He could barely believe that the same man who had chosen to be intimate with Xi’an was now undeniably possessed by his feelings for you.

The pair of you were like night and day, complete opposites. It didn’t even feel right to think about you at the same time. The venn diagram that represented your personalities was two completely separate circles, no overlap between them whatsoever. In fact, you weren’t even the same shape. Xi’an was sharp, like the triangular blades of her throwing knives, and you were… something else entirely. You couldn’t be described with a simple contour: there was too much to you. You were something three-dimensional, something real and wild. A sunrise maybe.

Fuck, he was getting soft.

Watching you soothe the kid with murmured reassurances, Din couldn't help but dwell on the comparison... but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that you were almost impossible to compare. He had learned so little about Xi’an when they were together, and he remembered even less: he knew how she fought and how she fucked, and that was the extent of it.

You, on the other hand, he knew down to the minutiae.

He knew what everyday pleasures made you smile: a freshly bloomed flower, a toothy smile from the kid, anything sugary and sweet, a shooting star, hearing Din’s own rasping chuckle.

He knew what you sounded like when you stubbed your toe, what curses accidentally spilled from your lips, even when it happened around the kid. He knew the guilty, silly face you’d make, how you’d slap your hand over your mouth when you realized you’d just let out a string of expletives in front of a toddler. It always made him smile beneath the helmet.

He knew how grouchy you got if you didn't get enough sleep, the groggy, unfocused way your eyes looked when you first woke up. He was all too familiar with the fact that your patience went from undying to zilch when you were operating on less than five hours of rest. He found it endearing, honestly. It made him want to pull you into his arms and smooth the crease between your brows with his lips.

He knew the soft clothes you slept in, how they smelled like laundry dried in warm sunshine and something sweet and flowery, like night-blooming jasmine—neither of which made any sense at all considering you used the same washer, dryer, and detergent that Din did.

He knew that you were vicious and adept in a fight. The first time you pulled a knife on a quarry and wrestled them into submission, Din stood on the sidelines and watched, wide-eyed and impressed. You were unflappable, even in the face of danger, and he loved that about you.

Din also knew things about you that he shouldn’t know.

He knew that you called him Dad to the kid when he wasn’t in the room. You’d never done it in front of him, but he already knew he wouldn’t correct you or draw any attention to it if you happened to let it slip in his presence. No, he liked the sound of it too much, especially in your voice.

He knew the noises you made when you pleasured yourself—they were etched into his brain, branded there for the rest of his kriffing life. One day, he’d cranked his helmet’s volume all the way up to scan the area around the ship for life forms, only to hear the quietest panting and faintest moans from your bunk. He listened for a few moments longer than he should have while his brain caught up and he realized what he was hearing. When it clicked, he panicked and dialed the volume down to silence, walking straight into an unfamiliar forest, the kid trailing behind in his pram. He made sure to never fiddle with the volume control on his helmet while you were tucked away in your bunk ever again.

After spending so many months with you, Din knew you, inside and out. You were multifaceted: you were soft and hard, funny and serious, stubborn and patient, clever and silly. You were complicated and contradictory.

And that was why you felt so different from Xi’an—because Din had allowed himself the luxury of getting to know you. He had the time and willingness to learn you. He had never done that with anyone else, never given Xi’an that chance, never invited intimacy. At the time and in retrospect, he had reduced her to a two-dimensional shadow of a person, and that was on him.

He was a changed man now—and thank the stars for that because he wanted things to go differently with you. He wanted all of you.

Of course, that would require sharing his feelings with you, and that terrified him because he could not for the life of him figure out how you felt about him. He knew you liked his company, he knew he made you laugh—usually not intentionally on his part. He knew you liked how he was with the kid. He knew you’d chosen to stick with him on his tiny ship for almost eight months already. If you held nothing more for him than friendly affection, then why were you still here?

He didn’t let himself indulge in the hope that you cared for him in the way he cared for you.

He couldn’t afford to hope because even if you harbored a fraction of the warmth he felt for you, he could never give you the life you wanted. You missed having a home. He saw it in your eyes sometimes, heard it in your wistful voice when the two of you talked late at night—when you were both lulled by the quiet hum of the ship and Din found himself trading truths with you that he wouldn’t normally say aloud. During those times, when he felt like the two of you were tucked safely away from the rest of the universe, he shared hazy memories of his childhood and his parents, and you did the same. You reminisced about your home planet, about the trees and rain and ocean air, and about your family.

And as hard as he tried, as much as he wanted to, Din would never be able to give you those things. He prolonged jobs on temperate planets as long as he possibly could. But he could never give you what you really needed: time in one place.

The chance to put down roots, to grow yourself a home.

He watched you hum a lullaby to his foundling, and Din knew his time with you was finite.

***

A couple hours later, Din touched the Razor Crest down in an alpine meadow on a green, mountainous planet. He had chosen this particular place for the supply run because he knew you’d like the landscape.

Sure enough, when you stepped off the ramp and the pink and white wild flowers bobbed against your shins, you sighed longingly.

“Wow, it’s so beautiful. I love it here.”

He watched you soak in the panoramic view, and it made Din equal parts happy and sad—happy to have brought you joy, sad to have pushed you that much closer to leaving him. Your joy was worth his pain, though. It would always be.

The three of you made your way to the closest town along a densely forested path, Grogu settled happily in your backpack, his big ears and curious eyes peeking over the top of the canvas. When you arrived at the market street, Din watched as you flitted from one stall to the next, collecting every item on the supply list. He watched you chat with the vendors and feed fruit samples to Grogu, and he couldn’t deny it—you were meant to live under golden sunshine, your feet on solid ground. You were meant to try new things and interact with new people, not just one asocial metal statue and a toddler.

Even though you stuck close by his side the entire time—a habit of yours he loved—Din felt like he was watching himself lose you in slow motion. He witnessed you glow and bloom, and his palms grew sweaty inside his gloves. He felt compelled to do something, to remind you that you liked traveling with him and seeing new places, to remind you that you loved the kid. Maybe he could keep you for a little longer if he gave you enough reasons to stay. He could offer to come back to this same place again.

And then he followed you into a little shop, and Din knew he was screwed.

Oh… shit.

The shopkeeper who approached you was handsome: he was suave and built, with a soft smile. You asked him a couple questions about the items you were looking for, and he was friendly and even a little flirtatious in his responses. Din stood back and watched the two of you hit it off over a conversation about root vegetables. The easy way you clicked made him feel sick.

The shopkeeper made a joke about grains, and you laughed. He reached out and touched your arm, leading you toward the ingredients on your list.

The audacity of this dick.

It had taken Din several weeks to work up to touching you, and after all this time, his touches still remained utilitarian: to help you to your feet, to hand you the kid, to squeeze past you in a tight spot, to show you how to work his Amban Rifle, things like that. And once… to brush a stray eyelash from your face. That one had been purely selfish—and one hundred percent worth it to see the way your eyes widened when he caressed your cheek.

He watched you chat easily with this stranger, and a crushing thought occurred to Din. This man was the epitome of what you deserved: grounded and steady. Normal. Reliable. Soft and open. Affectionate. Unarmored.

The shopkeeper brushed your arm again as he handed you some leafy green vegetable, and even though he knew it was insane, Din’s hand itched to draw his blaster. Instead, he crossed the small space and stood behind you, looming tall and threatening, and the man looked up at him and took a small step back. Good. You looked over your shoulder at Din, a questioning look on your face.

Fuck. What was he doing?

Din forced himself to turn on his heel and walk out of the store, the bell on the door tinkling quietly behind him. He had no right to be upset, no right to be jealous. He had no claim on you, other than a loose working partnership and a bond of friendship. And the devastating reality—the one Din really, really wanted to ignore—was that if he truly cared for you, he owed it to you to let you find happiness.

To let you go.

He stalked down an empty alley, so he could seethe and thunder in private.

Fuck, why did he always have to be principled? Why did he have to feel eternally bound to a Creed, to honor, to his maddeningly insistent sense of right and wrong? Why did he have to return the kid to his people? Why did he have to let you go?

Why couldn’t he be selfish for once?

He should. Just this once. Yes.

He knew you’d stay if he told you he needed you.

And yet... he knew he wouldn’t. This was an unshakeable feeling in his chest—the same type of feeling that had told him to go back for the kid—something so fundamental that he couldn’t deny it. He knew he would let you go...no matter how much it made him want to put his fist through the duracrete wall of one of these buildings.

Dank ferrik, he really needed to calm down. Din paced back and forth in an effort to dispel his mounting rage, but it wasn’t helping. His blood was still boiling, his breath coming in short pants. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, rolling his neck and shoulders to try to relieve the tension.

“Mando? What’s wrong?”

Dammit. He was hoping he’d have more time alone. The selfish voice in his head was pleased, though; it whispered: yes, good. The less you spoke to that man, the better.

He turned around to face you, schooling his body language to feign composure. “Nothing. Nothing is wrong.”

You looked skeptical, crinkling your eyebrows together in concern and confusion, but you seemed to let it slide, saying, “I’ve got everything. Let’s head back?”

“Yeah.”

You turned and walked in the direction of the Razor Crest, the kid still snuggled in your backpack. His big brown eyes followed Din’s movement as he fell in line behind you.

The uneasy feeling in Din’s chest remained.

You were going to wait until you were back at the Razor Crest to break the bad news to him—probably because you could tell he was irritated, and you wanted to give him time to calm down. You were thoughtful like that. It was infuriating.

Or maybe, you wouldn’t leave today. That alternative wasn’t a relief though; if you didn’t leave today, it might be tomorrow or a week from now—it would just be prolonging the inevitable.

Din was still trying to parse out what to say to you, if he should even say anything at all when you arrived back at the Crest.

You walked up the ramp and settled the sleeping kid in his hammock, shutting Din’s bunk. Then you turned to face him, a serious look on your face.

“Mando, I think we should—”

So it was going to be today.

Before he could stop himself, Din blurted: “So you’re going to stay?”

His voice sounded cold and hard, in no way betraying how he actually felt. He was bracing for the inevitable impact, erecting a wall around himself to preempt the heartbreak.

Your concerned expression morphed into confusion. “Stay where?”

“Here, on this planet.” He idiotically pointed a gloved finger to the open ramp, like you might not be aware of where you were.

Something unnameable flashed across your features. “Why would you say that?”

“You want to stay—I can tell. I know you’re not happy moving around all the time. It’s okay though. I know you’d be happier here. You should stay. I-I want you to.”

“You… want me to stay?”

“No—no, that’s not what I mean. But you deserve a home and whatever else you want. I want you to stay with me. And-and the kid, of course. I want you to stay with us forever,” he cringed at how sappy that sounded, adding tentatively, “but what I want even more is for you to be happy.”

Your features softened then, eyes warm and bright, and you stepped forward and threw your arms out. Din couldn’t help it—he was so caught off guard by the sudden movement that he flinched away, taking a small step back.

You were unfazed, stepping forward again. “Dammit, Mando, let me hug you.”

Din let out a surprised chuckle, and this time, he stayed still as you tucked your arms around his middle and rested your cheek on his broad chest.

For a long, awkward moment, Din held his arms stiffly out to the sides, too unsure to move. Without leaving your position against him, you reached out and guided one of his hands to the small of your back, and the other followed. You hummed in contentment when his arms were wrapped around you, and he squeezed you softly.

“I am happy,” you said. “My home is with you and the kid, wherever we go together.”

Din’s throat tightened, and an invisible weight lifted from his shoulders. The most he could get out in reply was a slightly choked, “Good.”

But the longer you stayed there, the more he defrosted, growing comfortable in your embrace. His helmet dipped against your ear, and his tense shoulders relaxed, his whole body curving around you. Even through the modulator, he could smell that inexplicable mixture of sunshine and jasmine, and he breathed it in. It triggered the familiar tightness in his chest, but it wasn’t twinged with hurt anymore; it felt like solace.

Remembering that you had been trying to tell him something, he asked, “What were you going to say before?”

“I was going to ask if you were okay. You were obviously upset earlier.” You slipped your hand under the fabric of his cape and rubbed soothingly up the muscles of his back.

“I’m good now,” he reassured you, tugging your body a tiny bit closer. “And I meant it, you know. I want you to stay with us—with me always.”

“I know,” you replied, and he could hear the smile behind your words. “I want that too.”

***

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