#mando x reader

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin

You imagined doing that now, as you followed him through the vast network of underground tunnels you had been chasing the bounty through, biting your lip from saying anything you might regret. When you first entered the compound, you had suggested to Din that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to follow the bounty in there without a map, or marker of some kind. He had chuckled with that arrogance you oh so loved and said “Relax, Cyar'ika, I know what I’m doing”

Now, as you turned another corner in the seemingly endless labyrinth and still heard nothing from the tracking fob in Din’s hand, you were biting your lip to stop from screaming “I told you so!”

The walls were a mix of cold steel and sharp rock, and to be honest you were starting to worry you were going in circles. Haven't you seen that particular rock 4 times now? You didn’t dare offer that suggestion to Din. The growing frustration from losing the bounty seemed to be radiating off him in waves, and as he harshly shoved open another metal door you wondered if he was starting to let that frustration fuel him a bit too much. 

“Dank Farrik!” Din cursed, throwing the tracking fob down in the sand. You looked around him to see that the door you’d just walked through led to another dead end. You held in your own groan as Din started to pace angrily. One of you had to stay calm. 

“Maybe we could-”

“Just let me think, please” Din interrupted, exasperated and running a hand down his helmet. You bit your lip and screwed your face up, irritated. You decided to just sit down on a rock, and wait for him to calm down. If he wanted to waste time instead of admitting he was wrong, it was his own loss.

The dead end you were in now was almost circular, if you could call it that with the jagged edges. Your eyes followed a pipe embedded in the wall up towards the ceiling and saw a corrugated trap door above you. 

“Hey!” You said, standing up and pointing to it, “There’s a hatch up there, maybe we can get out that way”

Din turned to look at you, then followed where you were pointing to look at the hatch himself. He looked back to the jagged walls.

“It’s high up,” he says. “I’ll give you a boost, see if you can pry it open” He waves a hand at you and stands under the hatch, bending at the knees slightly and clasping his hands together between them, ready to lift you up. 

You reached down to your boot and pulled out your knife, holding it between your teeth as you put your hands on Din’s shoulders, lifting your foot to his hands. 

“One, two, three!” He says, pushing you up and standing straight underneath you, keeping you up while you place your hands on the ceiling to get your balance. 

Once you were steady, you took the knife from between your teeth and looked around the edges of the hatch. You saw what you thought might be a lock with a small green light next to it. You jammed your knife between the lock and the ceiling, shifting your knife left and right. 

“Is it coming loose?” Din asks. You shake your head.

“I think it’s a remote lock” you say “I don’t know if-”

You felt your knife hit some kind of wire, before the green light suddenly started blinking red. A loud beeping started coming from the hatch and you barely had time to react to the door slamming shut before the hatch suddenly opened, gushing dark water out and knocking you both down to the floor. 

You groaned, rubbing your lower back as you sat up to see Din pushing up from where he landed on his stomach. 

“Shit” he said, rushing forward to the door and trying to pull on it. You realise the cause of his panic when you looked back at the hatch and saw the water wasn’t stopping. You followed after Din, trying to help him pull the door open but it didn't budge. “Watch out-” Din says, pushing you back gently before throwing himself against the door, trying to break it down. 

Your heart started to pick up in your chest and you run your hands over the walls, the water already almost to your knees. You could hear Din’s grunts as he kept trying to break the door down, and tried to keep your breathing calm. You stopped and did a double take on one part of the wall when your fingers skidded over a break in the metal, and you saw a small door pannel in the metal. 

You looked back at where you’d fallen before and saw the blurry shape of your knife under the water. You ran over and sunk to your knees, moving your hands around the sandy floor frantically before your hand closed around the handle. You sprinted back to the panel and shoved your knife into the gap, hoping to pry it open. Unlike the hatch, this door popped open after a sharp rug with your knife and you saw a mess of wires underneath. Did one of these open the door? Release another deadly trap for you to deal with? You didn’t have time to worry about that too much, as you felt the water sloshing around your waist. 

“There’s a panel here!” You say “I might be able to open the door!”

Din was better with weapons but you were definitely better with mechanics. He stood behind you perusing the wires as you got to work slicing wires and reconnecting them.

He looked down at the water now reaching his chest, but almost at your chin. “You haven’t got time,” he says.

“I’ve got it”

“You’re going to be underwater before you can-”

“I’ve got it!” you insist, tilting your head upwards and away from the rising water to buy yourself more time. 

You could feel the water on your chin and you opened your mouth to take a deep breath, ready to dive back under to try and work in the water before you ran out of oxygen. Maybe if you were quick you could still-

Suddenly, something was lowered over your head from behind. The water rose over your head and you heard a hiss of air as something sealed around your neck like a divers helmet. Helmet…Din’s helmet! You spun around to look at him in worry before you could think about what this meant. You locked eyes with deep, worried brown ones. He was holding his breath, dark hair flowing slightly in the water and while you knew this should be nowhere near the top of your thoughts, you couldn’t help but let out a breath and marvel at how beautiful he was.

“Din!” You said, eyes watering and reached up to try and take the helmet off, but his gloved ones stopped yours, lowering them down gently and shaking his head. He tapped his wrist a few times and turned you around by your shoulders to point at the wires. Get it open, quickly.

You tried not to think about what had just happened but your vision was blurry as you worked. You saw his face! He could have kept the helmet and found another way out - how could he break his creed like that? What if this panel was another stupid idea and he had just broken it for nothing? 

Your heart sank as you felt his hands twitching on your shoulders. Was he running out of air?! You tried to turn around to look but his hands gripped tighter on you and kept you facing the panel. Tears were falling down your face freely now but you couldn't stop, even when you felt the grip on your shoulders relax completely. You ignored the voices screaming at you in your head and your shaking hands and the sounds of your own heavy breathing echoing in Din’s helmet and attached two bright blue wires together-

“Shit!” You yelped as a shock jumped through your finger. The door flew open and the water poured out, knocking you to the floor again with a grunt. 

You blinked away the shock of the impact before sitting up and looking around “Din!”

The metal slab on the wall where the panel was has now opened up completely and you could see the sun peeking through the narrow passageway. You spun on your knees to look for your Mandalorian and saw him lying a few feet away from you, still on his back. 

“Din!” you cried and rushed over to him, sitting at his side and ripping the helmet from your head, hearing it land with a thunk in the wet sand. 

Your hands flew nervously by his face as he lay unmoving “no, Din, wake up!” you pleaded. Your mind raced through the library of first aid Din had trained into you, and you shook your head to try and steady yourself before placing your hands on his chest and pushing down, down, down in the rhythm he taught you. 

“Please, please, be ok” you begged, moving to tilt his head back and breathing quick spurts of air into his mouth. You didn’t waver as you repeated the compressions and breaths, water dripping from the stone walls and echoing in the cave. 

Your breath was coming in short gasps and your arms were aching as you continued. You leaned forward once more and blew air into his mouth and as you pulled away to try and force his heart to move again, he shook violently and started to cough. You let out a cry of relief as you watched him turn on his side and cough water onto the sand below, hair dripping down his face. 

Once he had started to draw in air in deep, greedy breaths, he fell down to lie on his back again and wide eyes landed on your tear stained face leaning over him. 

“Cyar'ika,” he coughed, “You got the door open, you were right” 

You let out a humourless laugh and threw your arms around his neck, lying with him on the wet sand. His arm lifted weakly to hold you there. 

You were right. A few minutes ago you were dying to hear him say those words as you trudged though this complex and now you were just glad he had said any words at all. You let out the sobs you’d been holding in as you buried your head in his neck, but then shot upright to look down at him when you remembered what he had done. 

“Why did you do that?” You said “Your helmet- Din- Your creed!”

Din continued to take deep breaths as he looked up at you. He reached up and pushed a wet strand of hair back from your face and held your cheek in his hand and said, softly “I was keeping you safe. This is the way” 

Your heart clenched painfully in your chest at the weight of his words and you surged forward again to press your lips against his. You had kissed before in the dark, in hyperspace on the ship with the door closed and the lights down, but this was different. You pictured his face as you kissed him, imagined him closing his eyes and he brought one hand up to cradle the back of your head and the other to your waist to pull you closer to him. It felt like the first time all over again.

After a moment, he pulled away and patted your hip “C’mon” he said, pushing himself to sit up with a groan “The bounty is long gone, lets go home”. 

You helped him stand up with an arm around his waist and once he was steady you left him to turn to his discarded helmet on the floor. You reached down for it, holding it in your hands and looked down at the sand covered visor. You wiped it clean with your sleeve and turned to face him, holding it out for him silently. 

He reached forward but didn’t take the helmet. He instead, placed his hands over yours and guided you up to place the helmet on his head. You kept your hands on his metal cheeks once it was back in its place and looked up at him, his hands still holding yours.

“Gar kar’taylir ni, ni kar’taylir gar” He said softly, not looking away from you. You wanted to ask what that meant, you knew when he spoke Mando’a it was usually his sweetest words, but you could ask him later, when you were safe in your home. For now you smiled up at him then took your place following him out the passageway back home.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

She sat across from Master Khai and looked at her hands. The table. The grain of the surface. The seam where two pieces of material met. Grogu was on the couch to her left, watching them with a curious glint in his eyes. Din stood a few paces back, not sitting, not leaving either. 

Master Khai's attention settled on her without hurry. 

There was a quality to it she had forgotten. The way his attention settled, unhurried and total, finding what she was trying not to show. 

"You never could look me in the eyes when you were guilty," he said. 

She made herself look up to meet his gaze. 

Something in his expression softened. The same thing she had known since she was small, the warmth he kept behind the composure. 

"Ah," he said. "There they are." 

She lasted approximately thirty seconds before she was averting her eyes again. 

"Let me make us some tea." she said, and was already standing before the sentence was finished. 

She made it two steps before she felt Din's hand at the small of her back, steady and light, and stopped. 

"Sit down," he said quietly, close enough that it was only for her. She turned to look at him and tried to communicate with her eyes the full weight of please, not yet, just give five more minutes. He tilted his head very slightly. She felt the smile in his voice when he said, "Go." 

He pushed her gently back toward the table. She went. The pressure of his hands made the thing she had been avoiding feel navigable, so she pulled the chair out and sat down. 

The apartment had changed since this afternoon. She was aware of it without being able to name it, some shift in the air, the way the room seemed to hold itself differently with him in it. Coruscant moved as it always did outside the window, the faint hum of upper-level traffic. She sat in the quiet with his attention on her and let herself feel what it was like to be in the same room as someone who had known her, really truly known her, for most of her life, before the last three years. 

"I don't know where to start" she said finally. 

Master Khai looked at her steadily. "Where is Varen?" 

He had known Varen well too. Had watched him grow up in the same halls, had seen what she had seen in him before everything went wrong. She did not know how to tell this story to someone who remembered him the way she remembered him, before. 

"I-" she started, or tried to rather, then trailed off. Her fingers found her nail beds before she'd noticed, picking at the edge of one, then another. "Maker, I'm sorry it's all just so complicated." 

"Complicated." He breathed the word with the patience of someone who had come a very long way. "You don't say?" 

Something shifted in his expression, not anger, quieter than that, the look of a man rearranging what he thought he knew. 

"I come here and I find you with a Mandalorian. And a child who is not yours." His eyes moved briefly toward the kitchen and came back to her. "Where is the boy you would have died for?" 

He leaned forward very slightly. 

"Little Star, tell me, what is going on?" 

She had not heard that name in years. 

Her throat tightened before she could stop it. Two words and the careful posture she had been holding since the door opened simply came undone, the way things came undone when the right person said the right thing at the wrong moment.

She heard Din behind her, the quiet movement of him setting something on the table. Two cups. The smell of it reached her, something clean, slightly floral, the kind of tea he never would have picked for himself. He was already back in the kitchen before she could look up. 

She wrapped her hands around the cup and let the warmth ground her. 

"We were in love" she said. "From before either of us knew what to do with it. Every time you and I went off on our own, when we had to run, something felt lost. I thought I was hiding it well, but you always knew, didn't you?" 

The corner of Master Khai's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close enough. 

"When we finally came back to the enclave and he was there again, something had shifted. We couldn't pretend anymore. We couldn't push it back to wherever it had been living. It had been there too long. The code became impossible to live inside. The rules around attachment, around love, around wanting anything outside the Order. I had found ways to carry it. Varen hadn't. After the trials it only grew worse for him, the rules pressing harder the more capable he became of seeing past them. The last year he talked about leaving constantly. I understood it, I felt it too, but it didn't feel simple to me the way it felt to him." She looked up to meet her masters eyes. "Then one night he said he was leaving. That I could come or stay and he wouldn't hold it against me." 

"And you went." Master Khai said. 

"I did. Partly because I wanted to. And partly because I couldn't imagine him alone out there." She winced saying it, because that's exactly what had ended up happening regardless.  

"He wanted to leave that night. Right then. I told him we should go to our masters first, both of us, tell you properly and give you the chance to understand. He said the moment we said anything that someone would find a way to stop us. I didn't believe that. I told him you would let me go. That Master Ovis would let Varen go. That if we asked properly, if we explained, you would understand."  

"I would have, I never wanted you to be unhappy. If you had told me that this was what you needed to be happy I would have understood." Master Khai's voice was soft now. 

She felt it sting at her eyes.  

"He said we couldn't risk it. That I was being naive." She reached up to her face to wipe the beginnings of the tears. "And I followed him anyway. He said I was being naive and maybe I was, just not in the way he meant. I thought you would understand. I thought love was a good enough reason to do anything. I thought if I could just make him happy, everything else would follow."

When he didn't respond, she continued.

"So I followed him," she said. "We took a ship that night. I told myself I would write to you when we were settled. I told myself that every day for months. I never knew what to say, and then enough time had passed that saying it had become harder than just not saying anything at all." She pressed her lips together. 

"Where did you go?" Master Khai said. 

"Maridun." She felt the name settle between them. "Far enough from the core that no one woulkd be looking. We found a house on the edge of a farming settlement, two rooms, a decent roof and a garden that had gone to seed. I cleared it and planted herbs and some vegetables, things that would come back season after season. It gave me something to do with my hands. Varen was good with engines and the settlement had no shortage of ships in need of work, traders mostly, people passing through who needed a quiet port and a mechanic. He'd come home with food, maybe a bottle of spotchka and we'd sit outside in the evenings. The neighbours were decent people. They didn't ask questions and we didn't offer answers. It worked." She wrapped both hands around the cup. "We were happy. I need you to know that. Whatever came after, that part was real. I loved him, and for over a year it was enough." 

She glanced toward the kitchen. Din's back was to her. He did not turn when she spoke, but the stillness of him told her he was listening. He would never ask her about this. Not directly, not in words. But she knew he wondered, had always sensed it underneath the silence, and this was the closest either of them would come to her answering it. 

"Well obviously it did't last." Master Khai said, a slight edge to his voice. 

"There was a dispute between some of the local traders and a pirate outfit that had been running the routes into that sector. It had been building for a while before it spilled over. We had nothing to do with it, but they came to us anyway. We fought back. We were managing until we weren't, and then... I don't remember anything else." 

His jaw tightened and he reached across the table and took her hand. "How badly were you hurt?" he said. 

"Badly enough that Varen thought I was dead. Badly enough that he couldn't feel me through the Force at all." 

His hand tightened around hers. 

"When I came to he was standing above me. He had bled his saber. The look on his face." Her voice went quiet. "I had never seen that on him before. Rage and grief all at once and something underneath both of them that looked like an animal backed into a corner with nothing left to lose. I tried to get up, to go to him, and he stepped back. Like he was afraid of me. He kept saying I was dead. That he couldn't feel me. That one moment I was there and the next I was gone." 

"He bled his saber?" Master Khai repeated quietly. 

The grief moved through his expression slow and thorough. A bled saber was not an accident. It was not something that just happened to a person. It was a choice, and Master Khai understood exactly what it said. 

"He said he couldn't live like that. He told me to kill him." 

The room was quiet for a long time, she could see the conflict behind those familiar kind eyes, the question he was burning to ask but couldn't verbalise.  

Did you do it? 

"I made him make a vow instead, neither of us kills the other. Not ever. No matter what happens, we find another way." She held his gaze.  

"It didn't occur to me then what I was actually dealing with. I thought the vow was enough. I thought if we just had time, if things settled, he would come back to himself." She turned her hand over in his, looking at the red skin around her nails. "I didn't understand then what happens when the darkness gets into someone that far. That it had probably been sitting at the edge of him for years before that night tipped it over. And then there was the other thing. He was like that because of me. Because he thought I was dead. If I had stayed conscious, if I had been stronger, if I had moved faster, he would have been fine. He had bled his saber for me. So despite everything I was afraid of, I stayed. Out of guilt, out of loyalty, out of the belief that I owed him the chance to come back? I don't know." 

When he spoke, each word was placed deliberately, "Listen to me, you were not the reason he broke. You were the occasion. There is a difference. The darkness does not need a reason. It finds the cracks that were already there and widens them. If not you, if not that night, it would have been something else. A different loss. A different grief. The capacity for it was in him long before that." He paused before he added, "You could not have known what you were dealing with. Neither could I. Neither, I think, could he." 

"That does not mean it was not real," he said. "Only that it was not your fault." 

She did not answer. She let it sit until it felt like she could believe the words. 

"How long did you stay?" Master Khai asked eventually. "Knowing what you knew. Feeling what you must have felt." 

"We left the planet immediately I mean... We had to. And I think part of me knew something had changed but I couldn't see yet how far it would go. It happened so slowly. That's what made it so hard to see. Each time I noticed something I could explain it away somehow. He was grieving, he was frightened, he just needed time. The possessiveness came first, not wanting me out of his sight. At first that felt like he just wanted to keep me safe and I understood it, after what had happened. Then it became something else. Who I was allowed to speak to. Where we went. He didn't forbid things directly, not at first, it was more that there was always a reason not to, always something that made it easier to just stay with him, until I looked up one day and the only person I had spoken to in weeks was Varen." 

"I asked him one morning if he knew how he had changed." She met Master Khai's eyes. "He lifted me off the ground before I finished the question. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but feel the Force closing around my throat. He almost killed me." 

The silence that resumed each time she stopped speaking was palpable.

"After that I knew," she said. "I planned it carefully. I had to weaken his mind to get through the defences he'd built, put him under long enough to get clear. Took the ship. Ditched it on another planet so he couldn't trace it. M

Made my way to Coruscant, stayed low, took whatever work I could find. And eventually I heard about a Mandalorian with a Force sensitive child." She smiled towards Din in the kitchen at the end. 

Her hands were flat on the table. 

"That was the last time I saw him." she said. 

From the kitchen, the sound of something being set down. She did not look toward it. But she was glad Din had been there for all of it. 

"Where is he now?" Master Khai asked. His gaze moved briefly toward the kitchen, toward Din's back, and came back to her. "Have you heard anything at all?" 

The Force bond. The thin persistent thread of it she had spent months suppressing. The things that had come through it anyway. 

"No," she said. Which was not a lie, precisely. 

"I should have felt it," he said quietly, more to himself than to her. "How did I not feel that? I should have come." 

"You couldn't have known." 

"I should have felt it." The words had the edge she recognised, the one he used when he was holding himself responsible. "That is not a thing I should have missed." He was quiet. "When you left, I told myself I was doing right by you. I had watched the two of you since you were children. I had watched you grieve every time you were separated and I decided I would not be the thing that kept you apart again. I placed too much trust in him." He said it to the table, not to her. 

She had nothing to say to that. 

"I told myself if you had each other you would be alright," he said. Something in his voice she had not heard before. "I was wrong." 

"Master-" 

"I was wrong," he said again. Then he straightened. "Come. Walk with me. Just the two of us." He began to rise. 

"No." 

He paused. 

She looked toward the kitchen. Din's back was to her, moving between the counter and the stove, the smell of herbs and slow-cooked vegetables warm in the air now. 

"He's making dinner," she said. 

She said nothing else. Master Khai read what he needed from the silence. 

He settled back into the chair, sitting straighter than he had before, the vein in his temple, growing more pronounced by the second." 

"Well," he said. "Fine." He folded his hands. "Then you want me to ask?" 

She looked at him warily. "Ask what." 

"I see that mark on your neck," Master Khai said barely containing his anger, "so do not lie to me, young lady. He is not a room mate." 

The sound she made was not dignified. Small and startled, the heat in her face immediate. She had been so entirely thrown by finding him in the apartment that the marks Din had left on her neck last night had not crossed her mind once since she walked through the door. She looked involuntarily toward the kitchen and thought, with vivid clarity, that if she had known they were coming home to her master she would have bought something to cover her neck before they left the market. 

Din had heard. Of course he had heard. He kept his back to them a beat longer than was necessary, and then he turned. 

She watched him cross the room and come to stand beside her. 

"Mando," he said to Master Khai, with a slight incline of his head. "This is my son, Grogu." He looked down at her through the visor, brief and certain, and then back at Master Khai. "We work together," he said. "We travel together. We-" He looked at her. "We look out for each other." 

He looked at Din for a long moment. 

"I see that." he said. 

She let out a slow breath. He had named the shape of them plainly and left the rest unsaid. 

"And the youngling," Master Khai said. His gaze moved to Grogu, who was still on the couch, watching Master Khai with the calm assessment of someone who had been running calculations since he walked through the door. "Are you raising his child together?" 

She opened her mouth. She and Din had not had this conversation, had been circling it for months, and she did not know what she was to Grogu in any language she was ready to offer. 

"Yes," she said, without fully coming to the conclusion in her mind. 

Master Khai's gaze stayed on Grogu. "The Force is strong with this one. I have heard of him. He trained with Master Skywalker." 

Grogu's ears came up, at the mention. 

She turned to look at him. "What?" Then she looked at Din. 

Din nodded. 

"He chose not to continue his Jedi training," Din said. "He chose his path with me." 

"I have heard of you as well," Master Khai said, looking at Din now with the level attention of someone who had begun his own assessment some time ago. "The famous Mandalorian. Your name precedes you, and not always favourably." 

Din's posture shifted. Not much. But enough. 

"That was before." he said. 

"I am not asking you to defend yourself," Master Khai said. "I am stating a fact." He considered Din. "Aren't you a little old to be running around Coruscant with her?" 

"With respect-" 

"I raised her," Master Khai said pleasantly. "You will permit me to ask the question." 

She picked up Grogu from the couch and carried him to the window, out of the immediate radius of whatever was developing behind her, and held his face up to hers. His ears were at full extension and he was watching over her shoulder with great interest. 

"You trained with Master Skywalker," she said quietly, looking at him. "Little man, I think I need to start taking lessons from you."

Grogu touched her face with one small hand, a little smile forming on his face.

"Where do you think you're going?"

Master Khai's voice had not changed in pitch or volume and yet she was standing very straight before she'd decided to.

"Nowhere" she announced on reflex.

She came back and sat down, watching her master carefully. The effort was visible in his shoulders now, the slight heaviness of someone who had held a position past its usefulness and was deciding whether to put it down.

He put it down.

"I look at you," he hesitated, as if he wasn't sure he should speak at all, "and I see walls. I cannot get a read of you. Something is closed. You were never closed to me before." It was not an accusation. It landed closer to sorrow.

She thought about the Force bond. The sustained daily effort of suppressing it, the way that kind of walling-off could not be entirely precise. She said nothing. Not yet.

"Are you happy?" he asked.

"Yes." she didn't need to hesitate.

"Do you want to come home?" His voice dropped with this question.

She sat with that. Not because she was considering his offer, but because she could no longer identify a place as home. For all her life, home was never a place, it was always people. Her people.

She handed Grogu to Din.

She stood in front of Master Khai and looked at him directly, the way she had not been able to when she first sat down.

"This is my home." she said. "Wherever they are." She did not look behind her, she didn't need to. "I have missed you every day. I have regretted every day that I didn't tell you before we left. I am more grateful than I know how to say that you're here. But if you've come to take me back, I can't. I'm sorry."

He looked at her for a long time.

"My little star," his voice cracking, "You have grown so much."

He reached up and wiped her face and she had not known she was crying until he did it. He looked over her shoulder at Din.

"Those tears have always brought this old man to his knees." he said.

Din made a sound behind her, quiet and warm. "She knows how to work us."

She turned and hit her master's arm. "You're not old. You're in the prime of life."

"My dear," Master Khai sighed, "it was raising you that did it."

She laughed.

Then she heard him, not through her ears but through the other channel entirely, his voice arriving quiet and precise inside her head.

Do you love him?

She looked at Din. He was holding Grogu and looking back at her with the full weight of his attention, and she felt the answer move through her before she had decided to let it.

She didn't have to put the words together for the sentiment to be clear. She absolutely did.

Do you trust him?

Completely.

She felt Master Khai receive it.

"Very well," he said aloud, rising from the chair. He looked toward Grogu. "I believe I smell dinner on the stove. Let us see if we can be of any assistance." He extended a hand. "You, little one, Grogu, is it? Come along. You shall assist."

Grogu considered her for a moment, asking for permission. She nodded.

He went to Master Khai with great seriousness, and she watched the two of them move toward the kitchen together, and felt something in her chest go full and quiet at once.

She turned to Din. He was already watching her.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "That was a lot. I'm sorry, he just showed up, he shouldn't have gone after you like that, I-"

His hands settled on her shoulders. Not heavy. Just there, and she stopped her rambling.

"I'm okay," he said, but there was something else. Something being held back.

She took his hand in both of hers.

"Do you miss him?"

She looked up. "Who-" And then she understood. Not Master Khai. Varen.

He had offered to end Varen without blinking. This question was quieter than that. It was the kind of question that cost something to ask, and she felt the weight of it, the fact that he had asked it at all.

She thought about it honestly, because he deserved that.

"I do," she said carefully. "I miss him. I miss that life. But it was so fleeting, and it went so wrong, and more than anything it was a fantasy." She felt him shift and tightened her hands around his, held it to her chest. "But I don't miss being with him. Not in that way. I don't want him back."

Din was very still.

"What if he could go back to how he was before? Before all of it."

She was shaking her head before he finished the question.

"No version of him," she said firmly. "I don't want him anymore."

She meant it. What she had with Din she wanted to keep intact, wanted to keep safe, and that wanting was so steady and so large that there was simply no room in it for anyone else. She had not known a feeling like that before. She was not sure she had known she was capable of it.

She kept hold of his hand.

"I didn't expect to be interrogated by your father tonight." Din leaned in slightly as he complained.

She opened her mouth. "He's not my-" The sound of Master Khai's voice reached her from the kitchen, low and measured, and Grogu's answering babble. "He's not my father..." She was quiet for a moment after the words left her mouth. "I suppose he is though, isn't he. The closest thing I have." She looked toward the kitchen. "He's my you."

Din was quiet. "Your me?"

"Like you are to Grogu."

He turned toward the kitchen, listening, and said nothing for a moment.

"Hmm" he hummed as he considered the comparison.

"One day you'll have to meet his partner. " she joked.

He was quiet for a moment. "I won't be alive to see that." He said it simply, not self-pitying. Just a fact about the life he lived. "Better you than me. I wouldn't know what to say."

She thought about what she had said to Master Khai.

"What I said earlier. About Grogu." She turned it over, trying to find the right words. "I didn't mean to- I don't know what I am to him. Not exactly. And that's-"

"I think Grogu has decided that for you."

She looked at him, eyebrows raised.

"He's not letting you go," Din said. "That's his decision. Not yours."

From the kitchen came the sound of Grogu's delighted babble and Master Khai's steady response, and she leaned into Din's side and let the warmth of all of it settle around her.

The kitchen was small for four. Master Khai had made himself at home in it, which did not surprise her in the slightest. The stew had come out well, the red vegetables now soft and dark in the pot, the herbs sharp at the edges, the bread torn and passed around without ceremony. It was a good meal. Better than she had expected.

Grogu regarded his bowl for a long moment. Then he turned to her with an expression of deep personal betrayal.

"You picked those out."

"You have to finish them." Din added.

Grogu pushed the vegetables to the edge of his bowl with the Force, slowly, as though this might go unnoticed.

"Grogu..." she scolded.

His eyes went wide and dark and liquid, filling with a wordless pleading that she felt somewhere directly behind her sternum.

She held firm for approximately four seconds.

"Fine," she sighed. "Give them here."

Grogu slid the bowl toward her with both hands and let out a sound of pure triumph.

Din made a sound under the modulator.

"Don't" she said to him, pointing her fork at his helmet.

From across the table, he watched all of this with great composure. He looked at Grogu, who was now wearing the expression of someone who had successfully concluded a negotiation.

"Good," Master Khai said to the child pleasantly. "Now you know." He folded his hands. "You make her suffer, she gives in. Remember this."

Grogu's ears came up.

She redirected her fork at Master Khai as she spoke. "You are not helping."

"I am simply observing." He picked up his tea. "I have been doing it for some time."

"You just told him how to manipulate me!" she exclaimed

"Observation is not always passive."

The washing up had been Master Khai's idea. He had always had strong opinions about the order of things, about how a day ought to end, and somewhere in the years since she had left the enclave she had apparently forgotten how steadying that was until she found herself standing at the sink beside him, drying a knife he handed her with the wordless efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times.

"How is everyone?"

"Everyone is fine. Busy, as always. More younglings now than I can remember in some time, so that's good." He handed her another bowl. "Not enough Jedi to train them all."

He looked at her accusatorially.

She felt the guilt land before she could stop it, and somewhere underneath it, the small hot flicker of defiance "What about you hmm? Have you taken a new padawan?"

She was not entirely sure which answer she was hoping for.

"No." he said, a note of finality in his voice.

"Master Khai-"

"Not a subject for tonight." He passed her a set of cutlery without looking up.

She didn't push. She already knew the answer, and so did he, that the rules on attachment were never just about romantic love, not just about what had happened between her and Varen. They covered this too. The way he had never stopped thinking of her as his own. The way she had never stopped needing him to. Neither of them had ever been particularly good at following those specific rules, even if he would deny it entirely. In every other way he was a perfect model for the Jedi order. On this one front, she saw herself in him. It was not difficult to understand why it was this way, he had sought her out, taken her from her birth family for safe keeping when she could barely speak. He'd been the one to pick her up when she fell, to clean her wounds, to push her in every way. She spent 5 years in hiding with only him as constant company. How could anyone expect such a deep and meaningful bond to dissolve just because she passed her trials? Why would that mean she didn't need her mentor anymore?

"Have you finished your fruit?" He asked, breaking her out of her spiralling train of thought.

"Yes."

He nodded toward the table. There was still a small plate of fruit sitting on it, cut large, not the way she usually prepared it, small enough for Grogu and for Din to manage through the gap under his helmet. Din had not touched his, which was understandable.

"That's not mine," she whined, "I finished I swear."

"You hardly eat any fruit at all. Why do you think I brought so much?" He passed her another glass to dry. "I knew there wouldn't be any here. Go on. A little extra won't hurt you."

She scowled. "We finished the fruit at home. During breakfast."

"That's a likely story." Master Khai said, mocking.

She ate the fruit. He was already handing her the next bowl to dry.

Behind them Grogu had claimed the couch and Din had apparently been absorbed into whatever game Grogu was playing, because she could hear the low sound of him talking, Grogu's answering babble. The quiet that followed that sounded like comfortable attention.

When they had finally cleared the last of the dishes she offered him some of the sweet wine she had bought at the market. They settled on the couch. She sat with a glass and watched her Master resume his inspection of Din with the calm, methodical attention of someone who had not yet finished forming a conclusion.

He had apparently heard stories about a Mandalorian of considerable reputation, a particular aptitude for ruthlessness. She caught the edges of it, the rumours, the bounties, the question of how such a man had ended up in possession of a Force-sensitive child of that power. Din answered in short, careful sentences, the kind he used when he was being measured and knew it. Master Khai listened to it all with an unreadble smile playing on his lips. She truly could not tell if he liked Din at all. She suspected that was the point.

She sipped her wine and let her attention drift from the conversation and sat with the quiet strangeness of it, this room, these two people, this life. She had not imagined that her old world and current one could occupy the same space. They were not exactly comfortable together. But Master Khai was still here, and Din was clearly trying not to give him anything further to interrogate, and somehow that was enough.

When he was done, Master Khai set down the empty glass and stood. "I should go." he said.

"Why don't you stay the night? You can have the-" She looked around the apartment, calculating, was it appropriate to offer the couch? She didn't want him knowing just yet that the bedroom only had one bed.

"I have quarters of my own," he said. "Don't worry about me."

She walked him to the door. Din stayed back, a respectful distance, and Grogu was already asleep on the couch.

At the door she stopped. She unhooked her lightsaber from her belt before she could decide not to go through with it and held it out to him. "I know I shouldn't have kept it." she said. "It wasn't mine-"

Master Khai reached out and folded her fingers back around it. Both hands around hers.

"It will always be a part of you." he assured.

"Will I see you again?" she said quickly. "Or are you lea-"

"Soon, Little Star. In the meantime I have work of my own to do. I need to speak with Master Ovis." He gently released her hands before adding, "We will find him. Before he finds you."

She nodded only because she did not trust herself to say anything else on the matter.

He left. She stood in the doorway for a moment after the door closed, his presence already fading further and further down the corridor, then she turned back into the apartment.

Din took her hand in his, picking up Grogu with his other arm.

"Ready for bed?" he asked.

She nodded and let him lead her toward the bedroom.

Din set Grogu down carefully in his cot. She leaned over and ran one finger along the curl of his ear, his little face scrunched in sleep, and felt something in her chest go very soft. She moved toward the closet to find something to sleep in. By the time she turned around Din was already there, one of his shirts in his outstretched hand.

She took it, and felt heat climb up her neck.

She had been more self-conscious about this before. Now she turned away and undressed without thinking much of it. She pulled his shirt over her head, hanging off one shoulder. It smelled like him, it smelled safe.

He had taken his own shirt off. In the remaining light she could see the shape of him, broad-shouldered and tan, reaching for the curtains. He drew them shut and the last of the light died.

She heard him move. The soft sound of the helmet being set on the bedside table. She made her way to her side of the bed by touch and sat on the edge of it, waiting for him.

His hand found her cheek. Tilted her face up. His lips against hers in the dark, just briefly, then his hands were at her shoulders, shifting her up and back. She let him move her, felt her legs be lifted, settled and tucked, the blanket drawn up around her, the solid warmth of him coming around on the other side. She scooted toward him before he had finished getting in. Her back against his chest.

"How are you feeling after all of that?" He spoke into her hair.

She thought about the table and Master Khai's hands closing around hers and the way the evening had moved through the apartment, all of it, the weight and the warmth of it.

"I had a good day," she decided. "A really good day. I've missed him so much."

"Some warning might have been nice."

She laughed, quiet in the dark, and felt his fingers trace the mark on her neck, slow and tender.

"What were you like?" The question came suddenly, but warmed her from the inside, his desire to understand her.

She thought about it properly. "The same, mostly. Just... Less."

"Less what?"

"Just less. A lot of time spent running, a lot of time learning what I was supposed to be. Not much time understanding who I was." She settled her hand over his. "I made myself small. Less everything."

He made a sound of consideration.

"I was too naive. Could have saved myself a lot of pain if I'd let him go on his own. Might have saved him too."

They were quiet for a moment.

"I've been wondering since Adelphi," he started. "It never seemed like the right time to ask. How does bleeding a saber work? Couldn't he just go back, once he understood you were okay?"

She turned it over, searching for the right words.

"The Jedi spend their lives on the light side of the Force," she explained. "Everything exists in a balance. I never felt balanced exactly, more like contained. But the pull is there if you think about it. The other ways to use the force. The darker ones. It takes real strength and control to resist. That's why the code forbids attachment, not out of cruelty. Desire leads to wanting more than you can hold in balance. When he thought I was dead, his scales tipped hard. Coming back from that is near impossible, it's been done, but it takes more than Varen had. And instead of fighting it he listened to the thoughts that told him controlling me would protect me." She exhaled.

"Varen was never the better fighter, that was always me. Strategy, reading people, working through the mind, that was his strength. So when I came to and saw what was left of the people who attacked us..." She winced at the memory, "It was like someone else had taken over his body. The Varen I knew couldn't have done that. Wouldn't have. That's what made it so frightening. Not just what he'd done. The fact that he'd been capable of it at all."

"And you?" he asked. "You feel it too?"

"Less since I left the Order. My relationship with the Force is mine now. It's freer." She smiled, though he couldn't have seen it in the dark. "But in the middle of a fight, sometimes. When I slip into less contained styles. When I draw on something darker than I'd like to admit. It's there at the edge."

"I've seen it happen to you. It's like a switch."

She nodded and a comfortable quiet settled between them, the easy kind.

"What about Grogu?" he said.

She understood the worry without him saying more. She turned in the dark until she was facing him, or her best guess at where he was.

"There's light and dark in all of us. He'll learn to navigate it when he's ready. But when I reach for him through the Force-" She tried to think of a way to describe it to someone who had no frame of reference. "He's the brightest thing, Din. Just the brightest." She found his hand in the dark and pressed it. "He'll be okay."

He hmmed. She felt him press his lips to the tip of her nose, soft and brief, and she smiled into the dark.

A few moments later his breathing changed, slower, the readiness going out of it.

She listened to him go under.

After testing the restraints a few times with no luck, you try to squint through the darkness. Where is he? Is he asleep in the cockpit? Will he be angry if you call for him?

He'll be angrier if you pee on the floor of his ship, you think, so you nervously clear your throat and call out into the eerie silence.

"Mando?"

It's what Druk called him. A nickname, you assume, but it's the only name you have.

You wait a minute but hear nothing above you. No scraping of metal, no heavy footfalls indicating he's coming to check on you. Nothing. So with a deep breath, you try again, just slightly louder now.

"Mando?"

This time you hear something. You pinch your lips together and wait, gaze fixed where you think the hatch is for the cockpit, but to your surprise a door slides open just a few feet away. You yelp and scoot backwards in surprise as the Mandalorian emerges from a very small room tucked into the wall on the other side of the ladder. How didn't you see that before?

"What?" comes his irritated, filtered voice. You swallow.

"I—I need to pee."

The light from his room illuminates him as he stands to his full height with a sigh. When he bends to unlock your cuffs, you realize his gloves are off. And so is his armor. He's just left in some black clothes he must wear underneath all that metal.

"Stand up," he orders. You blink and hurry to your feet, not even realizing he had uncuffed you. He points to the fresher door, now visible in the light spreading from his bunk. "Be quick," he tells you curtly. You nod and murmur your thanks as you stumble forward and shut the door behind you. Even without the armor, he's still intimidating and big. Solid. He has to be, you think, in order to carry around all that metal every day.

Once you've relieved yourself, you return to the hull of the ship. Mando is standing exactly where you left him, next to the rumpled blanket he bestowed upon you a few hours earlier. His thick arms are folded across his chest and you have to assume he's glaring at you through his dark visor because the energy radiating off him right now is less than positive.

So he doesn't like to be woken up. Got it.

"Thank you," you say again, slinking past him and curling up on the cold floor. It's not so bad once the blanket is covering you, but it's far from comfortable.

Once you're settled, you start to close your eyes, but frown when you realize he hasn't moved. One eye pops open, then the other, and you look up at him curiously.

"What?"

"Hands."

Oh. Right.

You suppress a groan and offer up your wrists, but can't help yourself when he leans down to tighten the cuffs around your sore skin.

"Do you have to? I promise I won't—"

"Non-negotiable."

You sigh and let him do it. It was worth a shot, anyway.

Once you're secured to his liking, Mando turns to retreat back to his bunk. You watch him fold himself into the small space. Just as he's about to close the door, you speak again.

"Where are we going?"

His fingers hover over the button to close the door and the lengthy pause after your question makes you think he's just going to ignore you and go back to sleep, but to your surprise, he answers.

"Nevarro."

"What's in Nev—"

The door slides shut. Darkness and silence engulfs the hull of the ship once again.

This man really doesn't like to talk much.

***

You'd only ever heard of Nevarro, never visited. But word has it, it's a lawless land in the Outer Rim. You remember it was under Imperial control for some time, even establishing a military base there and it stayed that way until the end of the war. Now, you have no idea who—or what—lives there.

You suppose that's why Mando insisted you come with him after he docked. Or maybe he still doesn't trust you to be entirely alone on his ship. Regardless, you're thrilled to get some fresh air and see someplace new, even if it is under the threat of the big, hulking Mandalorian by your side.

"Here," he grunts, tugging on your ragged dress to make you stop in front of a vendor. Your eyes scan the booth, taking in the shirts and shoes in every color and pattern imaginable.

When you give him a confused look, he sighs. "Pick out something new," he tells you flatly. Your brows raise in shock.

"I—I can't. I don't have any—"

"I have plenty," he says, "just pick out something."

It doesn't mean anything other than he doesn't want to be seen next to someone who looks like they just crawled out of a pig's den. Still, the gesture makes your face warm, which you quickly try to hide under the guise of browsing the clothes. You settle on a simple blue dress made from lighter fabric that goes down to your ankles with two slits up either side that stop just above your knees. When you show him, Mando nods and crosses his arms.

"Get one more."

Another one? You quickly shake your head.

"I can't. I won't be able to repay you."

"I never said you needed to."

You blink up at him slowly. It's hard to find the words for your gratitude: this man could have killed you—especially after seeing his face, or kicked you off his ship and left you for dead, but he didn't. And now he's buying you clothes. With his credits.

Your mouth opens then shuts as you struggle to express your appreciation. He must see the wetness forming in the corners of your eyes because he quickly shifts his weight and looks away.

"Don't. It's fine. Just get something that's comfortable and practical."

Blinking away your tears, you scan the other dresses. There's a black one you liked but it was lower cut and the fabric was clingier, but it was comfortable like Mando said. And practical, you figure, since you could move around easily in it.

When you hand the two items to the vendor, Mando grabs a matching set of dark grey clothes and tosses it onto the table.

"In case it gets cold," he mutters before handing over the appropriate credits.

"Thank you," you whisper. It's all you can manage because your throat is closing up. He doesn't answer. Just packs the long sleeved shirt and pants he picked for you and jut a chin towards the small changing tent.

Oh. So he wants you to ditch your filthy dress now. Okay.

You choose the blue dress and Mando folds up the black one to pack away while you slip into the tent. When you emerge, you stuff your old dress into a sack of garbage under a table and give Mando your brightest smile.

"What do you think?"

You do a little spin and you swear you see his shoulders jump like he had actually, maybe, possibly chuckled. But then he clears his throat and swivels on his heel.

"Good. Let's go."

You scurry to keep up, trailing behind him as he weaves seamlessly through the crowd. They all naturally part for him, you notice, and it makes you curious.

"Where are we going?"

"The cantina. I have business there."

The last thing you expect is for him to buy you food, but he does. He sets you up at the end of the empty bar with a bowl of stew and tells you not to move, that he will be watching if you try to run. You almost want to laugh—why would you run at this point? He's given you no real reason to. But you suppose since you've seen his face, you're a liability to him until he can figure out what to do with you, and he can't let you out of his sight.

Whatever he ends up doing, he's not going to kill you, so you're not worried. He would have killed you by now if he was going to, and he certainly wouldn't be spending money on clothes and food if that were the plan.

... Right?

***

Greef Karga.

That's the name of the older man sitting across from Mando. From what you've gathered eavesdropping on the conversations from the workers behind the bar, he's an agent of the Bounty Hunter Guild. You could've presumed as much when you watched Mando slide a few pucks across the table, exchange a few words with the man, and then a moment later receive new ones along with a heavy pouch filled with credits.

Mando doesn't look your way, but you know he's watching. You can feel it.

"Can I get you anything else?"

A younger man with light brown hair behind the bar asks you the question with a warm smile. You return it and shake your head.

"No, thank you."

He clears your plate and you sip slowly from the cup of water you were given as you continue to scan the room. It's still not terribly busy, but the cantina appears to attract all forms of life, most of which are new to you.

Then your gaze slides back to the booth where you're surprised to find Mando's helmet aimed in your direction.

You nearly choke on your drink under the scrutiny, which only worsens when you realize Karga is also looking directly at you.

Karga says something to Mando and you notice his shoulders stiffen before slowly raising one hand. He curls a gloved finger and your feet hit the ground obediently.

They both regard you silently when you stop next to the table with your hands clasped. Then Karga smiles.

"Why, hello," he says sincerely. Then he glances at his guest. "What's her name?"

There's an uncomfortable silence then, for both of you. It never even crossed your mind to offer your name and he never thought to ask. No one's ever bothered to ask.

To save you both, you give Karga a smile and say your name. You miss the way Mando's fist involuntarily unclenches on the table when he first hears it.

Karga's eyes scan you once before he gives you his name along with his hand to shake. You accept it with a polite smile and he chuckles before turning back to Mando.

"You're full of surprises."

His helmet tilts ever so slightly. "She's a stowaway. It's not what it looks like."

"It never is," he grins before plucking a shot glass from the table and tossing the liquid back in one quick go. Your lips tighten but say nothing. "Forgive me, but how did a stowaway sneak onto the Crest? Last I checked, Mandalorians have infrared."

"I was distracted," he mutters, "your quarry gave me a hard time. Were you aware he was being held hostage on that planet?"

Karga opens his mouth to reply but someone else speaks first.

"He was no hostage. He's a liar."

Shit. Did you say that out loud?

There's a thick silence after that makes you fear looking at either one of them. Instead, you pin your gaze to the floor and wait.

"And how would you know that?" Karga asks slowly. You swallow tightly and force yourself to look at Mando. Seeking permission, you suppose. He gives it with a subtle nod.

"Because I was held hostage there," you say bravely, "and I heard things. Saw things. Druk was not held against his will. He received the best foods and the most comfortable bed. He roamed freely."

"What did he do there?" Mando asks with an edge to his filtered question. You swallow again.

"I'm not sure," you admit, "but the others had guesses. Intelligence, maybe?"

"A spy?" Karga supplies, and you nod. He drags in a deep breath and looks down at the pucks on the table. He taps one softly while he thinks, and you shift your weight nervously while you wait.

"How did you hear these things?" Karga finally asks. You shrug.

"The ones who spoke Basic never saw me as a threat. They spoke rather openly when I was around. Druk included."

Mando shifts slightly but he's otherwise unreadable. You wonder what those kind brown eyes are doing under all that metal. Are they tight with tension, or wide with esteem?

"They underestimated you," Karga says with a note of awe. Your cheeks warm but you remain silent. Then he looks at Mando. "She might be a good asset for you."

"I work alone," comes his firm reply.

"This one," Karga taps a fresh puck on the table, "has a soft spot for pretty girls. And he's in Coruscant."

Mando groans beneath his helmet and you frown.

"Why is Coruscant bad?"

Karga smiles up at you. "It's not bad. It's very well populated. A bounty hunter's nightmare."

"I always find my quarries on that planet," Mando argues, then under the sharp look from Karga, he sighs. "It just... takes longer."

"I—I can help," you say eagerly, "I mean, let's face it. It's probably easier to question locals when you're not a walking wall of metal draped in weapons."

If you had to guess, Mando is pinning you with a deadly glare under that helmet, but you don't wither under it. You grin.

"You're proving my point, you know," you say with a raised brow. Suddenly, Karga barks out a loud laugh that grabs the attention of the few patrons in the cantina.

"Oh, Mando. You'll have your hands full with this one," he chuckles, "but I think she'll be good for business."

Mando stands abruptly and scoops up the fresh pucks. You stumble backwards a couple feet but otherwise hold your ground.

"She won't be here when I come to turn these in," he tells Karga, "don't get too attached."

You swallow and try to ignore the pit in your stomach. What is he going to do with you? Has he already decided? Is he going to leave you on some remote barren planet to fend for yourself? Feed you to a rancor?

"Bye," you whisper to Karga with a small wave before hurrying to keep up with the pissed off Mandalorian stomping away.

"It's not me you need to worry about getting attached!" Karga laughs, and you cringe when you see Mando's fists tighten at his sides.

Okay, so maybe he will kill you.

***

"I promise I won't touch anything if you let me go," you say as he tests the restraints one more time. His hands still over your wrists and he leans forward ever so slightly. His helmet is so close now that you can see your own worried expression mirrored back to you.

"You know," he begins, voice low, "anyone else I've allowed on my ship has been frozen in carbonite. If you don't like the cuffs, I can make other arrangements. Just say the word."

You lean even closer.

"And yet you didn't throw me in there the moment you found me," you reply just as softly. "I can make it worth your while if you release me."

"Why do you keep offering me your body?"

Your smile falls. His response is so quick, it makes you falter.

"What?" you breathe.

Mando doesn't move. His helmet is still inches away from your face, studying you, staring you down.

"It's not your only asset," he says, "stop suggesting otherwise."

You blink. "W-What other assets do you mean?"

Finally, Mando sits back on his heels, creating a small bit of space. "You're quick. You're observant. You're clearly a survivor. So start using those skills. Use them to your advantage like you did today and stop using your body first like those monsters taught you."

The air rushes out of your lungs like you've been struck.

"Okay," you whisper. Then Mando rises to his feet with a sigh.

"We're going into hyperspace," he warns, "but once we're stable... I'll undo the restraints."

Relief floods your veins.

"Thank you."

He stays true to his word. Once the ship lurches into hyperspace and silence engulfs the hull, Mando unbuckles your cuffs with a stern warning not to do anything stupid.

"What do you expect me to do?" you ask, rubbing your wrists and sitting up against the metal wall. "We're in hyperspace and you're encased in metal. Do you really think I'll somehow get the upper hand on you and magically learn how to pilot a ship?"

"Funny," he says dryly.

"You're very... intense," you say as you watch him move around the hull. He's carefully putting away each one of the weapons he carried on him while in Nevarro. It seems like an endless supply, ones you hadn't even noticed before.

"Mandalorian," is all he says in response. You roll your shoulders, working out the stiffness there as you think. There's so many questions you have, why not use the time to ask a few?

"What does that mean exactly?"

Mando's hands freeze on a blaster. Then his helmet slowly turns to the side.

"What?"

"Mandalorian," you echo, "I've never heard of your kind before. Can you tell me about your people?"

He shrugs before turning back to the armory. "There's not many left now," he tells you, and your breath stalls. "Not as many as there used to be."

"Why?" you ask softly. Mando keeps his back to you while he works.

"The Empire."

You could have guessed as much.

"Everything was lost that night," he continues solemnly, "and what remains is a shell of what it used to be. I'm told the rest of the Mandalorians are scattered across the galaxy. Some alone, some in smaller groups."

"Have you... do you speak to any?" you ask carefully.

"There was a group in Nevarro. They call themselves the Tribe."

"What?" You rise to your feet. "Why didn't you go to them?"

Mando's fingers curl tightly over the rifle he just cleaned and put away. You can hear the creaking from the leather gloves from where you stand.

"I... can't. Not anymore."

You frown, poised to ask more, but he stops you when he swivels around sharply.

"You've seen my face," he says, and you blink slowly a few times.

"Wha—"

"It's against our code," he tells you now, voice tight, "I'll be exiled. Nobody can see our faces."

He stomps past you to dig through his bag, the one he carried on Nevarro. You watch as he unpacks the clothes he bought for you, setting them on a small shelf near the fresher before fishing around for the bounty pucks.

"B-But... why?" you finally sputter. Mando pauses with one hand gripping the puck he was after.

"It isn't The Way."

"What does that mean?"

"It's a creed," he tells you before placing the puck on the floor. "I swore as a child I would never remove my helmet in front of another. We all took the same oath. And I broke that oath."

"But it was an accident!" you exclaim, filled with a heavy guilt now that you understand a bit more. "Surely, that doesn't count!"

"It does."

"Well... what can I do to fix it?"

Mando tilts his helmet in your direction and regards you silently. Seconds stretch on like minutes under his scrutiny. It makes you squirm.

"I... I want to fix it," you add, softer this time.

"You can't," Mando tells you, and his voice sounds almost apologetic. Stars, you wish you could see his face right now.

"There has to be something," you whisper. "You saved me and I... ruined your life."

"Enough. You need to study this—"

He taps the puck and a hologram suddenly flickers to life. You can see the back image of a man, and alongside his face there's small text written in neat little letters.

"Mando," you plead, heart burdened with guilt, "there must be something. I can't—can't be responsible f-for—"

His chin lifts and he must see your watery eyes because his spine straightens and he takes a weary step back.

"Don't—"

One lone tear trickles down your cheek.

"If you killed me, would it—would it erase everything?"

You watch his shoulders sag.

"No."

There's a long, tense moment where neither of you speak. You should feel relieved. There's no reason for Mando to kill you. Instead, you feel... awful. Sick. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, Mando is staring at you, utterly bewildered that you'd so much as suggest he harm you for what happened.

What sort of person offers themselves up as a sacrifice?

A brave one? Or a fool?

"I can... there's someone I can ask," Mando finally tells you. Your sad eyes find his visor with a flicker of hope. "Back on Nevarro. The Tribe. Their leader... we call her The Armorer. She... might know what to do."

"Yes. Okay. Let's go back," you say, pointing to the ladder. "Turn it around."

"I can't just—turn it around," he scoffs, "I'll ask when we've returned with these bounties. It's not worth the fuel."

"Fine. Then I'm helping you catch these guys." You circle around to plop down on the ground in front of the hologram. "It's the least I can do."

Mando sighs heavily behind you. "You'll help me with this one and that's all. You'll get yourself killed, silly girl."

There's an uncomfortable pause after the term of endearment slips out. You stare straight ahead, pretending to study the last known whereabouts of the quarry, but in reality your mind is buzzing. And Mando? Mando must be blushing under his helmet. He's shifting nervously on his feet while trying to come up with anything else to say but he's drawing a blank.

You finally jump in.

"Well... then I'll clean your ship or. Something. Make food and... anything else you need me to do to earn my keep."

"I told you," he huffs before crouching down next to you on the floor, "stop offering yourself—"

"Oh! I—I wasn't. That—I didn't mean—"

Shit, now your face is burning up. You press your palms to your cheeks to try to temper the flare.

"Maker, I'm sorry—"

"No, no, it's fine!"

"—I just thought—"

"Really, it isn't a big—" You fan your face with an awkward laugh. "You made it very clear you're not interested, and I respect it."

"I never said that."

Your head snaps in his direction, eyes wide. Your pulse skips frantically in your throat as the Mandalorian fumbles over his words.

"Wait. Okay. That came out wrong," he says slowly. You have to bite your bottom lip to keep from grinning. "I just—I meant—I didn't want you t-to think you're not..."

"Pretty?" you offer.

"Careful," Mando warns.

"Desirable?"

"Stop."

"Sexy?"

"Okay, enough," Mando snaps, "focus on the mission."

You giggle behind your hands. It's the first time you've felt lighter in... years.

"I'm sorry," you laugh, "I'll try not to distract you with my radiant beauty. I'll save it for the quarry."

Mando grumbles something inaudible inside his helmet but you can tell he's not really angry. You're pretty sure, at least.

"Keep it up and the cuffs are going back on."

You manage to bite back a snarky quip about the handcuffs being foreplay, too afraid to push your luck. Instead, you settle down and let Mando explain his whole process, from start to finish, when hunting down a quarry. Where he starts, what he packs, what to expect. Best places to isolate them. How to stay undetected. And the whole time you listen quietly.

You meant what you said. You don't want to let him down.

Food is shared along with information about Coruscant. A plan is formed while you help clean up after eating. And finally, when Mando notices your eyelids begin to grow heavy, he suggests turning in.

He's sealed into his small bunk and you're seconds away from sleep when it hits you: he never put your restraints back on.

You fall asleep with a smile.

Taglist:

Grogu had finally stopped crying about an hour ago.

She knew because she'd been counting, not the minutes exactly but the shape of his distress as it moved through its stages. He had startled awake at the sound of the door, she'd heard that in the first cry, the sharp disoriented noise of a child pulled out of sleep by something sudden. But the crying that followed hadn't been about that. It had shifted within seconds into something else entirely, the kind that had nothing to do with being woken and everything to do with whatever he'd felt the moment consciousness came back to him and he understood, in whatever way Grogu understood things, that something was wrong. Not the door. Not the dark. Something between the two people he trusted most in the galaxy, a disturbance in something that was supposed to be still. He had known it before she'd even reached him. She gathered him up, sat down on the edge of the bed, and rocked him slowly. He pressed his face into her neck and shook.

It had taken a long time.

She lay on her side in the dark now with him tucked against her chest, listening to him breathe, and thought about how she had never seen him cry like that before. She knew all of his registers, had learned them the way you learned any language you used every day without consciously studying it. The theatrical protests. The genuine upsets. The quiet sadness that passed quickly because one of them always noticed it before it could settle. This had been none of those things. This had been grief, or the closest thing to it that a fifty-year-old child in a small body could manage, and she had sat on the edge of the bed and rocked him and said it was okay in a voice she wasn't sure she believed.

She wondered if he understood what had happened. Whether the fight had registered to him as two distinct things colliding, or whether he simply felt it the way he felt everything, in the Force, as a disturbance in something that was supposed to be still. Whether he understood that the two people he depended on most had torn something between them tonight, or whether he just knew it was torn and couldn't locate the shape of it.

She pressed her lips to the top of his head and didn't move.

Sleep wasn't coming. She had known that since the door had clicked shut behind her, and the hours since had confirmed it thoroughly. Her mind kept snagging on the same two or three things and pulling, the way it did with things that hadn't finished landing yet. Not the full argument, not all of it, just certain moments that kept returning with more weight than the others.

Not guilt, not exactly, but something adjacent to it that she couldn't quite get a grip on. She had a line about how she uses the Force on people without their consent and she'd held it for years, considered it one of the few things she'd kept from the Jedi that she actually believed in rather than simply obeyed. And tonight she had crossed it without a second's thought, her hand up and the decision made before she'd consciously made it. He had been about to walk into something dangerous. That was true. It was also true that she had pushed him across a passage using his own body without asking, which was the exact thing she said she wouldn't do, and the fact that she hadn't used his mind felt, lying here in the dark, like a distinction that mattered more to her than it probably should.

She hadn't locked the door.

She had lain here listening for him to try it.

He hadn't.

She thought about going back to the silence. Not the ordinary quiet they had built together, the comfortable kind that had become part of the texture of things before she'd registered it happening. The other kind. Nine days of it on the Crest, moving around each other like they had forgotten how to share the same air, the two of them moving around each other like planets in wrong orbits, close enough to feel the gravity and too far apart to do anything about it. She had come out the other side of that diminished in ways she was still finding the edges of.

But it was different now, that was the thing she kept coming back to. That silence had belonged to a version of things that no longer existed. This bed, this room, everything these last few weeks had built between them, it all meant something it hadn't meant then. She thought about the weight of him beside her, the warmth of it, the way she had stopped having to remind herself it was real. She thought about falling asleep here and waking to the same silence that had nearly hollowed her out on the Crest, except now she would know exactly what she was missing. That felt like a different kind of unbearable entirely.

She lay there until she thought she had been there long enough.

Then she lay there a little longer.

Then she carefully untucked herself from Grogu, easing his hands loose one finger at a time, and settled him against the pillow. She pulled the blanket up around him, tucked it in at the edges the way he liked, and stood there a moment looking down at him in the dark. His face was completely unguarded in sleep, nothing in it of whatever he had felt earlier, and she felt the ache of that, how easily children let things go when they finally could, how long it took adults to learn the same thing. Then she crossed to the door and opened it.

She opened it slowly, just enough to look through the gap.

The main room was dim, the curtains letting in a thin line of grey from Coruscant's pre-dawn, not enough to read by, barely enough to see shapes. She could make out the couch. She could make out him on it, one arm behind his head, legs extending past the end of the cushions because the couch had not been designed with him in mind. No armour. Just the flight suit, and the helmet still on, and the particular stillness of someone who might be asleep or might have been lying there for hours.

She couldn't tell which.

"Din?"

He shifted immediately. Turned toward her.

She came around the couch slowly. He tracked her without speaking. She came around to the front and stopped. He sat up, making space. She sat down.

Not close. She left a gap she wouldn't have left yesterday, before all of it, when she would have simply tucked herself against him without asking. The awareness of that gap felt like its own kind of information about the state of things.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

She sat with her hands folded in her lap and tried to find a place to start. Every place she tried felt wrong. Too small for what needed to be said, or too large for three in the morning on a couch with both of them still raw from it.

She could feel him waiting. Not impatiently. He just went quiet and present and gave her the space, and she was not sure whether she found that easier or harder than if he'd pushed.

"Are you okay?" he asked, eventually.

Low and careful through the modulator. She nodded, and then decided that wasn't enough.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended, which she supposed was honest.

He didn't say anything.

She had expected something. Some acknowledgement or deflection. Anything to give her the next foothold. Instead the quiet sat between them.

"For walking out," she said. "For shutting you out again. For what I did today."

Still nothing.

She turned toward him. "Please say something."

He shifted slightly. When he spoke it was measured, the way he was measured when he was still carrying something and hadn't decided yet how much of it to set down. "Don't say it because you think you have to. You stand by your choices. I know that you do."

"I am sorry." The inadequacy of the sentence was obvious to both of them. "I do stand by it, I just- I didn't think about how it would feel for you. Not in the moment. I mean I understood it in theory but I've never-" The rest of it wouldn't come. "I didn't think."

"How could you not?"

It wasn't angry. The absence of anger made it worse somehow.

"How do I know," he said slowly, "that you won't do this exact thing the next time you decide I'm not equipped for a threat?"

She opened her mouth.

What came out was, "I don't know."

She heard how it landed. She hadn't planned to say it. It was true, and they were both tired of things that weren't.

He let out a breath through the modulator, short and dry. "You don't even have to think before you push me away."

"I never meant to make you feel less than me." She said it to her hands. "It's what I do. It's been instinct for as long as I can remember. I protect. But-" She exhaled. "I'm scared."

"I know."

"No." She shook her head. "Not just scared for you. Scared of what would happen to me."

Something shifted in him.

"If something happened to you," she said, and the words felt like something she'd been carrying in a locked room for a very long time, "or to Grogu. I don't think I'm strong enough. I don't think I'm-" She stopped on the name she'd been about to say. "I've seen what grief does when it's got nowhere to go. I've been close to it." A breath. "And I know what I'm capable of when the people I love are in danger, and that scares me more than anything coming for us." She exhaled. "So when I jump in front of something, I'm protecting a piece of myself too. Is that selfish?"

He was quiet for long enough that she looked at him.

"What do you mean?" he said. His voice had changed. The careful measurement had gone out of it.

"I think if I lost either of you," she said, "I would lose myself too. The same way he did. And I can't let that happen to me. So I jump, because losing you is the catastrophe I'm actually trying to prevent, and I don't know how to make that a reasonable thing to say to someone and I know it doesn't make what I did today okay but-" She exhaled again, trying desperately to calm herself. "I just needed you to know that it's not about thinking you can't handle things. It's about me not trusting myself to handle losing you both."

She heard how much was in that sentence only after she'd said it.

He sat with it for a long time. She could feel him turning it over, the way he turned things over, quietly and thoroughly, and she waited, trying to take a page out of his book on patience.

When he spoke again it was quieter, the careful edge fully gone now.

"Listen to me." He turned toward her fully now, "I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. I've survived worse than tonight, gotten the kid out of worse than tonight. He's done the same for me, more than once." His voice stayed even, not reassuring exactly, just certain. "You are not responsible for keeping us alive. That's not what I need from you. And it's not what you need to be."

"I don't know another way." she said.

He reached for her hand.

She felt the gloved fingers close around hers and something that had been wound very tight in her chest all evening shifted incrementally. She looked down at their hands. Then she reached up with her other hand and peeled his glove off carefully and set it beside her, and held his bare hand instead. His fingers were warm. His pulse was steady at the inside of his wrist and she held onto that for a moment.

"You came to me tonight," he said quietly. "That was a start."

She laughed, which she hadn't expected, a soft broken thing, and felt tears arrive at the same time. "I couldn't do another nine days." She shook her head. "I couldn't do another nine days of walking past you and not saying anything. Of lying there knowing you were five meters away and not being able to make myself cross it." She looked at him. "You've become someone I don't know how to be without. I don't know when that happened but it did."

She laced her fingers through his.

He held out his other hand.

She looked at it for a moment and then pulled that glove off too and set it with the first one. He raised his free hand to her face and she felt his thumb move across her cheek, slow and deliberate, and the tear it found had already been there.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For not coming to you then. I knew something was wrong. I was angry. I didn't know what to say, so I waited for the right moment." A pause. "The right moment never came. I should have come anyway."

"So was I," she said. "Angry, I mean."

He nodded once.

"Don't run from me again." Quiet. Not a demand, not quite a plea. Something in between that had no good name.

She heard everything in it. Every version of running she had ever done, the night on Nevarro with the N1, the days on the Crest, the bedroom door just hours ago. All of it in five heavy words, and she understood that he meant all of it.

She reached for him.

She hadn't planned to cry. She pressed her face against his chest and felt his arms come up around her. Something cracked open that had been building since she'd slammed the door. The apologies that came out was not an explanation, just one word, over and over, because she had run out of the kind of words that explained things and this was the only one she had left.

His hand moved into her hair. Slow and steady. His other hand held hers.

"That's cheating," he said, after a while. Something in his voice had changed again, the last of the stiffness gone, something warmer underneath that she had missed badly tonight even when she'd been the one who caused its absence. "You cry like this and I forget why I was mad in the first place."

She laughed against his chest, still wet-eyed, which felt like an embarrassing combination and also like exactly the right thing to be doing at three in the morning with him.

She stayed like that for a while.

Then she sat up a little, looking at him.

"Is this okay?" she asked.

He pulled her back in instead of answering.

"This is all new for me." he said, after a while. Not apologetically, just truthfully.

She lifted her head to look at him.

"I know it isn't for you," he continued, and there was something careful in how he said it, like he had been holding this thought for a while and was testing whether it was safe to set it down.

"I haven't done this." she said, a tone of finality in her voice.

The slight tilt of his head communicated what he thought of that without requiring words.

"I know," she said. "I know what you're thinking about..." She looked down at her hands for a moment. "That was a different version of me, with a different person, and I was so young I didn't even understand what I was giving up until I didn't have it anymore." She lifted her gaze back to the visor. "You're not him. And I'm not who I was then. Whatever this is, we're starting from something a little broken."

He didn't answer immediately. She waited.

Then he reached out and took her hand, and held it, and that was enough, it told her more than any words could have.

She sat up a little further and looked at him for a moment, at the helmet tilted toward her in the dark. Her hands found the sides of it, cool under her palms.

"I want to kiss you," she said. "Can I?"

His hands came up and found hers, gentle but firm. He tilted his head toward the window.

She looked. The curtains were open, Coruscant's pre-dawn light coming in grey and thin through the transparisteel.

"Too much light." he said gently.

She glanced toward the window. It was a few steps, no more. She could get up, close them, come back. She looked at him instead, at the helmet tilted toward her in the dark, at his hands still loosely holding hers, and decided there was something she wanted more than to walk away.

She released the helmet and let her hands drop to his collar instead, finding the fastening at his throat, and she felt him hold his breath as she began to work it open. She pressed her lips to the first inch of bare skin she uncovered, the warm hollow at the base of his throat, and heard his breathing change.

She worked lower.

His collarbone. His chest, the warmth of skin she hadn't had access to before, the slight tension of him as he held himself carefully and let her. She moved lower still, lips tracing down his sternum, the planes of his stomach, the muscle there softer than she'd expected, but still taut beneath her mouth in a way that made it difficult to think clearly. She felt him draw in a slow breath as she reached his navel, abdomen contracting slightly under her lips, and kept going. She followed the trail of hair below his navel, and at the waistband she hooked her fingers in and looked up at him from below and waited.

His hands caught her face by the jaw, gently, redirecting her back up to him.

She froze.

"You don't have to do that" he said.

She absorbed that, and felt her stomach sink.

His thumb moved across her cheek. "I don't want you thinking you need to make something up to me. That's not what this is."

The thought landed. She hadn't been thinking of it that way, but now that he'd said it she couldn't un-hear it. Underneath that was a quieter thought, whether he simply didn't want her like that right now, whether it was too much, whether she'd read this entirely wrong. She hadn't fully processed any of it before she was already pulling back, sitting up, moving to the far end of the couch and pulling her knees to her chest.

"Fine," she said. "I'm going to sleep then."

She started to get up.

His hand caught hers.

"Wait." It came out almost amused, patient in the way he always was. She stopped but didn't turn back. He pulled her steadily, without rushing, until she was sitting across his lap, her legs draped over his. She kept her gaze somewhere past his shoulder.

She felt the misery of having made herself vulnerable and then being denied, which wasn't the same as being rejected but felt uncomfortably close to it when she were already in this state. She had spent months cataloguing the ways she wanted him and telling herself that wasn't what this was, then tonight of all nights, after all of it, she had let herself act on it, and now she was sitting in his lap being told he didn't want her to feel obligated, which was very considerate of him and also felt like being handed something back she hadn't offered as a formality.

She was aware she was catastrophising. She was doing it anyway.

"No running," he said. "Remember? What's wrong."

"If you don't want me like that, you can just tell me. So I can stop embarrassing myself."

He was quiet for a moment that felt very long.

"You think I don't want you?" Something in how he said it, disbelief edged with something softer, made her turn her face toward him despite herself. He took it in his hands, his fingers spreading into her hair, turning her to face him fully. "What was the other night then?"

She didn't have an answer for him.

"Let me be very clear." His voice was low and certain, the kind of certain that didn't require volume. "I want you."

The word hit somewhere she hadn't braced for, somewhere in the pit of her being where she needed him more than anything.

"I don't want you thinking," he continued, "that because of tonight, because of the argument, that you owe me this. I want you to want it. Not to feel like you have to earn your way back."

She sat with that. Let it settle.

"I know," she said. She looked up at him. "I want to because I want you. That's all it is."

He exhaled. She felt his hands still in her hair.

"Please?" she said.

She pressed her lips to the line of his jaw, then lower, finding the side of his neck, and felt the groan move through him before she heard it, low and involuntary, his hand coming up to the back of her head. She stayed there a moment, just that, his pulse against her lips, and then slid from his lap to the floor between his knees, looking up at him in the dim.

He didn't stop her this time.

She drew his pants down slowly, taking her time, and the flush of warmth that moved through her when she saw the size of him was something she hadn't anticipated quite so immediately, the thickness and length, the semi-hardness of his member already giving her a clear sense of what she was working with, and she felt warmth spreading down between her own thighs in response to it. His chest rose and fell above her. His knuckles had gone white on the edge of the couch.

She wrapped her hand around the base of him, feeling the heat of it, the thick ridge of a vein under her thumb, and heard the sound his breath made.

She pressed her lips to the head of him, just that, her tongue finding the slit briefly before she held herself there, and felt his whole body respond before he made a sound, the sharp pull of his inhale. She parted her lips and took just the tip of him into her mouth and heard the sound he made, low and rough through the modulator, something he hadn't planned on making. His hips shifted toward her without his permission. She felt the want in it and let it move through her.

She released him and kissed slowly down his length instead, her lips tracing every inch of him, feeling the heat radiating from it, the feeling of every vein under her tongue. She reached the base of him and lower, mouthing at his balls gently, feeling them tighten, hearing the groan that came out of the vocoder above her, and she stayed there a moment, taking her time, because she had thought about this more than she ever intended to admit to him. Then she kissed back up his length and took him into her mouth properly.

She took a little more this time and heard him curse quietly, the words flowing soft and involuntary. She looked up at him from where she was, from below, and watched the visor angle down toward her and felt the weight of that attention like a physical thing.

She worked him into her mouth slowly, feeling her throat open to him by degrees, breathing through the resistance, adjusting to the weight and the heat of him against her tongue. The sounds that kept escaping him were the best part, quiet and unguarded, nothing like the controlled economy of how he usually spoke, and each one sent heat pooling lower through her until she was aware of her own want as a persistent, distracting warmth. She found his hand and laced her fingers through his and felt his grip tighten in return.

She learned him. She learned what made his breathing break and what made his thighs tense beneath her hands and what made the careful, deliberate control he carried everywhere finally start to fracture at the edges. She took him deeper when she could, feeling the stretch of it, the faint reflexive resistance of her own throat that she breathed past, and when she took him all the way her throat closed around him and she gagged lightly, eyes watering, but she pressed further rather than pulling back, hollowing her cheeks around him as she finally breathed through it. She heard the sound that came out of him when she did, low and long, his head dropping back. His free hand moved to her hair slowly, not directing, just gathering it, his fist closing gently in her hair, the only part of her he could reach.

"Maker." His voice was rough through the modulator, strained with the effort of not moving. "You are so beautiful."

She felt that in places she hadn't expected, her chest and the back of her throat and the heat already spreading between her thighs. She held him deeper still because she could, because she wanted to, and felt him exhale hard above her.

She released him briefly when she needed to breathe, lips wet and trailing from the red tip of his cock. His hand came down not to her face but to the hem of her shirt, pausing there with a question in it. She lifted her arms and let him pull it over her head. He leaned back slightly and she felt the shift in his attention, a quality of focus settling over her that she felt more than saw, his gaze moving over her in the dim. She'd had nothing on beneath and the cool air of the apartment found her immediately, her nipples tightening in response. The impulse to cover herself came from somewhere old and automatic, years of learning to take up less space, and she recognised it for what it was before it could take hold. It had nothing to do with him.

"Mesh'la," he said, barely audible, almost to himself.

She didn't know the word but she felt the weight of how he said it settle over her like something warm. The heat reached her face before she could do anything about it.

His hand found her again, moving to the underside of one breast with a slowness that felt deliberate, like he'd thought about this and now that she was bare in front of him he was doing it properly. His thumb traced the curve of it, slow and certain, learning the shape of her in the dark. She felt each point of contact as something separate and entire. She had wanted his hands on her for long enough that the reality of it was almost too much to process cleanly, and she let herself have it, leaning into his touch, dropping the composure she'd been maintaining all evening. Then his thumb found her jaw and tilted it up and she went back down over him, tongue rolling over him once before she bobbed her head down, her throat having relaxed enough now that she could take him fully at one go, the coarse hair at his base against the tip of her nose when she took him deep. The deep vibrations from his chest travelled through her down to her core, making her press her thighs together for any small amount of friction.

She felt the shift in him then, the remaining restraint beginning to fracture. His hand entangled in her hair once more became something with intention behind it, and she felt him fighting the instinct to use it, the want to push, to set the pace, to stop being patient for once. His hips lifted toward her once, just once, entirely involuntary, and she heard him exhale hard.

"Sorry," he said immediately, rough and quiet, his grip loosening at once, giving her back the control she already had.

She reached up and took his hand herself, brought it to the back of her head. Felt him understand the moment her fingers closed over his.

He took it.

He guided her then, setting the depth and the rhythm of it, and she followed him into it, her head moving with the pressure of his hand, the steady pull and release of it. Her throat burned with the stretch from his thickness, the ache of it building in a way that she felt everywhere, but she let it because she had offered this deliberately and she wanted him to take what he needed from her. His breathing became uneven. The sounds he made lost their restraint, coming freely now, each one making her more aware of the heat between her own thighs, the wetness of her own want. She moaned against him and felt the vibration of it travel through him and felt his whole body tighten in response.

"Fuck," he breathed, voice stripped raw, "that mouth," and she took him deeper and felt him shudder.

That was the last of it. He stilled, his hand in her hair going loose, and she held herself down and felt him come apart beneath her hands and on her tongue, the pulse of it, the heat, and swallowed around him while he fell back against the couch and let out a long exhale, the kind that came from somewhere deep, that had been held for a very long time.

She held herself down while he spent himself, feeling each pulse of it against the back of her throat, thick and hot, waiting until it ebbed before she released him slowly, the sound of it obscene in the quiet of the apartment. His release had traced a line from her lips to her chin. He reached down and swiped it cleaned it with the pad of his thumb, slow and deliberate, then brought that thumb to her mouth. She parted her swollen lips and took it, her tongue moving over it the same way it had moved over him, and felt the sharp intake of his breath above her. She pressed one last kiss to his oversensitive tip and felt him shudder faintly at the contact. She eased his pants back up and climbed back along his body, her hands on his chest. The difference in him was immediate, a looseness through his whole frame, the tension of the evening finally given somewhere to go.

She was aware, as she settled against him, of her own bare chest against the warmth of his skin, the unfamiliar intimacy of it. They had never had this before, this much of each other, and she felt it acutely, the heat of him under her palms, the way her body was already responding to the closeness in ways she let herself feel without doing anything about yet.

"I still want to kiss you." she said, and felt her face go warm even saying it, which was an absurd response to the circumstances.

He moved before she'd finished the sentence.

He stood with her, letting er legs come to wrap behind his torso, carrying her against him while crossed to the window, pulled the curtains shut. The room dropped into complete dark. She reached for the helmet immediately and it came free. She let it fall somewhere and found his mouth on pure instinct, her hands on his face, the warmth of his skin under her palms.

His lips responded immediately, hungrier than she'd expected, the want in it entirely undisguised. She felt the relief of it more than she'd anticipated, the relief of want that had been going in one direction for too long finally finding its answer. He walked them backward to the couch and came down with her, settling over her. She pulled him closer rather than away from the weight of him.

He kissed her like he meant it, which she suspected he always had. His mouth moved against hers with a focus that left no room for anything else, and she kissed him back with everything she had been carrying all evening, her hands finding his face, his jaw, the back of his neck, learning the shape of him the way her fingers had learned the shape of the helmet in the dark. Her fingers followed the lines of the hair on his face,the rasp of it against her palm, against her lips when she pressed closer, and she found herself cataloguing that detail with the same attention she gave everything about him she had not been allowed access to until now. His hands moved over her, her waist, the curve of her hip, the small of her back. She had not been kissed like this before, not really, because this had nothing of performance or possession in it. This was just him, and she felt it from her sternum outward.

His mouth found her neck first, lips pressing open against the skin there, and then his teeth, a slow deliberate suction that made her tip her head back and grip his shoulders. He worked down from her throat to her collarbone, in no rush at all, like he was learning this too, and then his mouth found her breast, warm and deliberate, and she arched up into it, her fingers threading into the hair at his nape. He began to trail lower, his mouth open against her sternum, the flat of his tongue dragging slowly down before his lips closed over a spot on her side and he bit down, not hard, enough to make her gasp. He did it again lower, then over her stomach, the soft skin below her navel, working his way down like he had all the time in the world, and when he reached the waistband of her shorts she stopped him with her hands.

"Up here," she said. "I need you close."

She felt him pause.

"Let me take care of you." he said quietly, against her stomach.

"Not tonight." Her voice came out smaller than she intended, her fingers still twisted in his hair. "I can't- just come back up to me please? I need to feel you close to me right now."

He came back up to her, his forehead dropping to hers, his breath warm against her lips, and she held his face between her palms and thought about how desperately she wanted to learn the shape of him, the gravel in his voice in her ear. She wanted to hold every detail of it she could gather in the dark and lock it away.

"Okay," he said against her skin, his voice close and without the modulator, smooth and low, still something she was getting used to hearing, "whatever you want baby."

Her stomach turned over at the word and she forgot what she'd been about to say.

His hand slipped under the waistband of her shorts, his palm pressing against the fabric of her underwear, and the sigh she let out when he did was involuntary, the simple relief of contact she had been wanting for hours without admitting it. He pressed once, feeling the wet heat of her, and made a sound against her throat that told her everything she needed to know about how long he'd also been wanting.

"Din- please." His name came out drawn out and a little desperate. She heard exactly how desperate it was and couldn't bring herself to care. She rocked her hips into his hand, chasing the pressure of it, not subtle about it at all.

He pulled the fabric aside and ran two fingers through her, collecting the slick heat on his fingers slow and thorough, and her eyes fell closed and she exhaled like something had been allowed to stop bracing. He paused. "You're wet." Said quietly, almost to himself, like he hadn't quite expected the extent of it.

"It's you," she said, her voice coming out lower than intended. "It's only ever you."

His fingers left her and she made a sound before she could stop it, reaching for his wrist in the dark, her fingers closing on nothing. She found his arm instead, felt it raised and understood. He had brought his fingers to his own mouth.

"Din."

"Mm." There was something in his voice that was almost amused. "Patience."

"You were right there."

"I needed to taste you too." Said plainly, like it was obvious, like she should have expected this. "You'll live."

She made a noise that communicated her feelings on this clearly.

She heard a quiet laugh then his fingers found her again, a long, slow drag that made her hips lift involuntarily, and then he pushed one long calloused finger inside her, slowly, maddeningly so, and she felt him curl it just slightly and then withdraw almost entirely before pushing back in, no urgency to it at all. Her ankles were digging into his lower back and she understood immediately what he was doing. She also understood she was going to lose her mind before he was done.

"Need more Din-" her pleas cut short when he stuffed her full with just the one finger.

He gave it to her though, his finger moving properly now, a rhythm that made her breath catch on the first stroke and her thighs close around his hand on the second.

She dug her fingers into his hair and felt his lips press against her throat, and when he curled up against the spot that sent white heat up her spine she held on, past the point of trying to be quiet.

"Think you can take another?" he asked, low against her lips.

He pushed a second finger in before she had time to react. The stretch of it made her gasp, a sharp bright sensation that dissolved immediately into heat, her walls closing around him. His thumb found her clit and began moving in slow circles, each one deliberate, and the pleasure built in waves that rolled through her lower belly and radiated outward. She felt it everywhere, the backs of her thighs, the base of her spine, her chest. She heard herself saying his name and yes and please in a stream she was no longer consciously producing, her hips pushing up to meet the movement of his hand.

"I wish I could see you," he said against her ear. "I want to watch you fall apart on my fingers. Feeling it will have to be enough."

She came apart on those words more than anything else.

It moved through her completely, every thought she'd been carrying through the long terrible evening simply gone, her back arching up and a sound leaving her that she made no attempt to contain, his name somewhere in it, and then the wave of it crested and broke and she was left loose and warm and entirely emptied out, no space left in her for anything that wasn't this, the weight of him, the heat, the steady sound of her own breathing slowly returning to her.

She lay there.

She felt his lips against her temple, light and slow. Then her cheekbone. The corner of her eye. The bridge of her nose. Small careful things, patient, like he had nowhere to be and all the time in the galaxy to get there, and she lay without moving beneath them and let him.

She caught her breath by degrees.

"Thank you," she said, eventually, when she had enough of it back to speak.

"For what."

"You know what for."

He kissed her again, once, properly, and she felt the tenderness of it.

"No." he said.

She turned her face toward him. His face was close, his breath warm against her lips, and she still had not fully accounted for what that was like, having him like this, without anything between them. "What does that mean?"

"You don't thank me for that."

She rolled her eyes, which she was aware he couldn't see, but suspected he knew anyway.

His hand came up and found her waist, running slowly along the curve of it, and she felt the touch more than she'd expected, her skin oversensitive in the aftermath. He turned his face into her neck and she felt his lips there, soft and slow.

"Do you want to go to bed?"

"This couch is pretty comfortable," she said. "Besides, Grogu's probably sprawled out in there by now, don't wanna wake him."

She felt him laugh against her neck, low and quiet. "Can't exactly do this with him in the bed."

He kissed down toward her breast by way of demonstrating this.

He moved lower, his mouth finding one of her breasts, and she felt the difference from earlier, just his lips closing over her nipple slowly, his tongue moving in a way that made her fingers curl into his hair all the same. He moved to the other side after a while, the same pace, the same deliberate attention, like he was doing something he'd been wanting to do and now had nowhere else to be. She felt her whole body soften under it, the last of the evening's tension finally leaving her.

She let her eyes close. There was something in the way he was doing this, thorough and patient, that felt less like a lead-up to something and more like its own point. All those months of the helmet between them, the quite desire and waiting, of never being able to have this, and now he did and he wasn't rushing it. She felt herself go loose under his mouth, her breathing slowing, her fingers tangled in his hair not to hold on but just to feel him there.

After a while he rested his head against her chest and she felt the weight of it, his breathe against her skin, and kept her fingers where they were, her nails grazing lightly at his scalp.

"Hey," she said. "Why'd you stop."

She felt him laugh against her. "You need to sleep."

"I can sleep just fine while you do that."

"Okay," he said. "I need to sleep." He pressed one kiss into the valley between her breasts. "And you make a good pillow."

She laughed and tugged him closer by the hair. She felt him settle more fully against her, his arm coming around her waist, legs tangled together, and she lay back and looked at the dark ceiling of the apartment and thought about how she had come out of that room an hour ago with no idea how to start and had somehow ended up here with him being held with his breath slow and even against her breast.

"Fine," she said. "Sleep."

He hummed against her chest, the sound of it low and almost content, and she felt it more than heard it.

She closed her eyes.

His arm tightened slightly around her waist and didn't loosen again.

The cantina smelled like burnt oil and whatever passed for food out of a fryer that had seen better decades. She sat at the high stools along the bar, a watered-down drink sitting in front of her, close enough to watch the door without looking like she was watching anything at all. Across the room, tucked into a booth near the far wall, Din sat with Grogu balanced on his lap, looking like a father and son who had wandered in for an early dinner rather than two thirds of a surveillance team working the opposite end of the room from his partner. Grogu had thrown himself entirely into the role, methodically working his way through a bowl of something fried that he had already declared, in his own particular vocabulary, an unqualified success. 

Around them the cantina churned with the low, constant noise of a hundred separate conversations, a Twi'lek bartender working three orders at once, a group of off-duty dock workers arguing loudly over a game playing on a cracked holoscreen bolted above the bar. It was the kind of place built to be forgotten the moment you left it, which made it exactly the sort of place someone hiding from the galaxy might end up eating dinner in without meaning to be noticed. 

"Third bowl," she said over the comm, watching Grogu shovel another piece of fried critter into his mouth with theatrical concentration. "He's going to owe someone a very large bill by the time we're done here." 

"He's committed to the cover." 

"He's committed to the critters. There's a difference." 

She caught Din's helmet tilt very slightly in her direction, holding a beat longer than it needed to. "You're staring," he said, then seemed to think better of finishing it, the sentence trailing off into nothing over the comm. 

"I'm working." 

"Focus." 

"I am focused." She did not look away from him even as she said it, entirely too pleased with herself. "I just also happen to like watching you. Call it multitasking." 

"That's weird." 

"You love it." 

He did not answer that one. He shook his head instead, the small motion she had long since learned meant he was smiling behind the visor, caught out and unwilling to admit it to her out loud. 

Two hours in and nothing had moved. She had caught herself checking the chrono on the wall more than the door, and each time she looked back Din was already watching her instead of the room, which she was fairly sure defeated the entire point of splitting up in the first place. 

"We should call it," Din said, voice low over the comm, pitched for her ear alone. "Nobody's coming." 

"Ten more minutes." 

"You said that three times already." He shifted Grogu higher against his shoulder, the movement unhurried, nothing in it that would read as anything but a tired father settling a tired kid. "Just admit you were wrong to trust Rax's tip." 

"His information has been right every time so far." She turned her glass a slow quarter turn on the bar, not drinking it, just giving herself something to do that was not checking the door again. "I'm not writing him off because one lead is running long." 

"And how do we know this isn't a trap? Set specifically for you." 

"It's not." She said it plainly, without hesitation, and let a smile tug at the corner of her mouth before she could stop it, glancing across the room to find him already looking. "Besides. You're right there." 

"I should be closer." It came out fast, almost before he seemed to have decided to say it, the words landing in the middle of the noise like he had surprised himself with them. 

"Oh yeah?" 

He did not answer immediately, and she watched him recalibrate mid-sentence, the particular stillness of a man realising what he had just said out loud. "Or you should, you know... Be here. With us." 

"Careful, Mando." She kept her eyes on her glass, fighting the smile properly now. "Almost sounded like you meant that." 

"I meant it." 

"If you want me over there," she said, low enough that it barely carried past the comm, "all you have to do is ask." 

It was around then that a girl came through the front door, moving in a way that did not draw the eye so much as slide past it, shoulders drawn in, gaze down, cutting along the edge of the room instead of through the middle of it. She watched her go out of old habit, the same automatic scan she gave every new face that walked in, and kept watching as the girl crossed toward the back and folded herself into a table half in shadow, the kind of seat someone chose because it was the one nobody else wanted. 

A server took the girls order a few minutes later, unhurried, and she let her attention drift back to Din in the meantime, checking on the girl only in passing the way she checked on anything that had briefly interested her and then stopped, a glance every so often to confirm nothing had changed. She had nearly stopped bothering to look at all by the time the food came out, a plate set down without ceremony, the girl reaching for it before the server had even finished turning away. 

She felt it before she'd fully looked away again, a faint, uneven pressure settling into the room from that direction, the kind that came from someone bleeding Force energy into their surroundings without any awareness they were doing it. She went still on the stool, the banter gone from her voice entirely by the time she spoke again. 

"Something's changed." 

She turned her head back properly this time, following the pull of it rather than any visual cue, and found the girl eating too fast, the way people ate when some part of them expected to have to run before they finished. Her fork trembled where it sat balanced on the edge of her plate, and a half-empty glass beside it shivered a fraction of an inch across the table, entirely without her hand anywhere near it. The girl did not seem to notice either. Whatever was leaking out of her did so unconsciously, the way breathing did not require a person's attention to keep happening. The two tables flanking her stood conspicuously empty even as the rest of the cantina filled in around them, as if something in the air there had already warned people off. 

Her clothes did not match, layered wrong for the climate, the kind of mismatched practicality that came from taking whatever was available rather than whatever fit. Her eyes never stopped moving, cutting toward the door, then the kitchen entrance, then back to her plate, cataloguing exits the same automatic way Din did without ever seeming to think about it. She could not look away, cataloguing every detail with the same clinical attention she gave any potential asset or threat, filing it all away without yet letting herself feel anything about it. 

Across the room, Din had gone quiet in the way that told her he was watching the same thing she was. Grogu had stilled in his lap, small ears tilted forward, and his arm came up around him without her seeing him decide to do it, not restrictive, just present. 

 "Confirmed," she said quietly over the comm, eyes still on the girl.  

He nodded once, barely a motion at all, and she felt the shift in him from across the room, the stillness that meant the job was done, that whatever came next was simply the business of leaving cleanly and letting the Director's people decide what to do with the information. 

The girl's head snapped up, eyes cutting across the room in a fast, wide arc like she'd felt something touch her and needed to find the source. They landed on her and stopped there, fork frozen halfway to her mouth, the two of them staring at each other across the width of the cantina for one long, unmistakable second. The girl's face went white. She was on her feet before the shock of it had fully registered, chair scraping back hard enough to draw a few irritated looks from the nearest table, and then she was gone, weaving through the crowd toward the kitchen exit like she had already mapped this exact escape a hundred times in her head. 

She was already moving before she had decided to move, some older reflex answering before thought caught up with it, boots finding the gap in the crowd the girl had cut a half second earlier. Only once she was clear of the tables and into the corridor beyond did the rest of it arrive, quieter and heavier than the instinct that had gotten her this far. That was just a kid back there. Terrified, alone, and running from the only two people in that room who might actually have been able to help her. 

"This wasn't in the brief," Din said, already up, Grogu secured against his chest. 

"I know." She did not slow down to say it properly. "Front. Cover the other side." 

He peeled off toward the main entrance without another word, trusting the shorthand of it, and she went straight through after the girl, shouldering the kitchen door open into a wall of steam and shouting cooks who barely looked up from their stations. 

The corridor beyond spat her out into a night market in full roar, stalls packed so tight the walkway barely counted as one, vendors calling prices over each other in half a dozen languages, the air thick with grilled meat and overripe fruit going soft in the heat off the fryers. The girl cut through it like she had run this route before, ducking under a hanging rack of plucked poultry, upending a crate of loose produce behind her that sent two vendors shouting and a scavenging womp rat bolting for cover. She followed the wake of it, sidestepping the spilled crate, catching a stall awning with her shoulder hard enough to rock it, apologising to no one because there was no time to. 

Past the market the alley narrowed and rose, strung overhead with a tangle of maintenance cables and washing lines slung between the buildings, low enough in places that she had to duck under a sagging cluster of them or risk losing a layer of skin off her scalp. The girl was faster through the gauntlet, small enough to slip beneath a line where she had to half crouch, and for a few meters the gap between them opened wider than she liked, cable slack brushing cold and greasy against the back of her neck as she cleared the last of it. 

The alley dropped them onto an elevated transit platform just as a hovertrain was pulling in, brakes shrieking, doors already cycling open before it had fully stopped, and the girl used the crowd surge boarding it as cover, cutting sideways through the press of bodies instead of onto the train itself. She lost sight of her for two full seconds in the crush, working through on instinct more than sight, shoulder first, until she caught the flash of mismatched fabric ducking under the platform rail and down a maintenance stair on the far side. 

The stair let out behind a bank of public laundries, machines venting steam in thick white gouts that turned the narrow passage into something closer to fog than air, visibility dropping to almost nothing. She lost the girl's shape entirely in it for a moment, tracking her instead by the disturbance she left behind, a hanging sheet still swinging on its line, a puddle scattered where a foot had gone through it moments before. She came out the other side soaked through and half blind, blinking the wet out of her eyes just in time to see the girl duck into a narrow alley strung with buzzing neon signage in three different scripts, colour bleeding down the wet durasteel in long smears of pink and green and sickly amber. 

The neon alley dead-ended. She felt it before the girl did, the geometry of it obvious from the angle of the walls even through the haze of colour and steam still clinging to her clothes, and she pushed the last of her speed into closing the gap rather than announcing it. 

The girl found the end of hers in a narrow maintenance alcove behind a row of defunct water reclamation units, chest heaving, back pressed against a wall with nowhere left to go. 

Din caught up a few seconds later from the opposite corridor, Grogu still held tight against him, and stopped a good ten meters back without being asked to. 

"Hang back." she said. 

He did not argue. She felt the trust in that more than she heard it, the fact that he simply planted himself where he was and let her walk the rest of the way alone, hands loose and visible at her sides, the lightsaber deliberately left clipped and untouched at her hip. 

"Hey," she said, soft, stopping a few meters short. "I'm not here to hurt you." 

The girl said nothing. Her eyes darted past her toward Din, toward the exit behind him, toward every possible angle of escape that had already closed off one by one, cataloguing and discarding each in turn. 

"I know you're scared." She kept her voice level, unhurried, the way she had previously used it on wounded animals and frightened children. "I'm not with the people who'll want to lock you up for what's been happening. I promise you that." 

Nothing. The girl's breathing had gone ragged, shoulders drawn tight, every line of her body braced for a fight or a flight that had nowhere left to go. 

"What's your name?" she tried, gentler this time. 

The girl's jaw tightened. She did not answer, did not seem to consider it worth the risk of giving away even that much, and she let it go without pushing, filing the silence away as its own kind of information. Whoever this girl was, whatever had happened to her before this, she had clearly learned a long time ago that names were something you kept, not something you handed to strangers. 

"That's okay," she said. "You don't have to tell me anything. I just want you to know I'm not going to make you." 

She took one slow step closer, watching the girl's whole body flinch at the movement before forcing herself still again, some animal part of her deciding, in real time, whether running was still worth the attempt. 

"I'm like you." she said finally, quiet enough that it barely carried the distance between them.  

That should have helped. It did not. The girl's eyes went wider instead, whatever fragile control she had been holding onto visibly slipping, because now the stranger in front of her was not just dangerous in some abstract, undefined way. She understood exactly what she was, and what she could presumably do to her if she wanted to, and that understanding seemed to strip away whatever thin composure she had managed to hold onto until now. 

"I'm not going to use it on you," she said quickly, reading the shift immediately. "I promise. I just wanted you to know you're not the only-" 

The first burst of energy came without warning, a crate to the girl's left crumpling inward like something enormous had stepped on it, and she did not so much see the panic take hold as feel it, raw and uncontrolled, rippling outward from a source that had no idea how to contain what was happening inside her. It was not malice. It was not even conscious. It was simply terror finding the only outlet it had ever had, the same reflex that had probably caused every incident on the Director's list, and it was accelerating. 

She watched the girl's breathing without meaning to, three short pulls and no exhale to match any of them, the same ragged pattern from the cantina table now doubled in speed. Every fresh burst of debris followed it exactly, a breath caught and held until something in the alley paid the price for it, then released in a shudder that did nothing to slow the next one down. There was no rhythm underneath any of it, no counter-technique, nothing that looked like it had ever been drilled into her the way it had been drilled into the Jedi, over and over, until breathing through it stopped being effort and became instinct instead. 

No one had ever taught her that. 

She thought of the enclave then, unbidden, of her master who had found her before she was old enough to remember it clearly. If he had never come, this could have been her. Her heart tugged hard at the thought of everything this girl must have already survived to end up alone in a cantina on Coruscant, untrained and terrified of her own hands. 

Din moved then. 

She felt him coming before she heard his boots on the duracrete, a fast, hard stride that meant he had read the situation exactly the way anyone would from where he stood, a Force-sensitive person losing control and his partner standing directly in the blast radius of it. She did not think. She did not look. Her hand came up on pure instinct and the Force answered it instantly, a controlled, focused push that caught him mid-stride and sent him back a clean ten meters, nothing violent in it, nothing meant to hurt, only enough to put him somewhere he could not make this worse. 

She registered what she had done a half second after she had already done it, and there was not time to feel anything about it yet, not with debris still flying and a terrified teenager one bad breath away from completely losing whatever tenuous grip she had left. 

"Look at me." she said, steady despite the chaos, stepping closer instead of away. "Just me. Nobody else." She meant it as more than comfort. Every ounce of the girl's attention fixed on her was an ounce not spent on the two people standing ten meters back, and she would rather absorb every piece of flying debris in the alcove herself than have one shard find its way toward Din or Grogu. 

The girl's breath was coming in short, panicked pulls now, another piece of scaffolding groaning somewhere above them, and she kept walking, slow and deliberate, hands still open, still empty, still refusing to give the girl any reason to read her as a threat. 

"You're not in trouble, nothing that's happened this week is your fault. Do you understand me? None of it." She took another step forward, reaching one hand out towards the scared girl. 

Something in the girl's face cracked, just slightly, just enough to show the exhausted child underneath all that terror. 

The debris came without warning, a sharp piece of paneling torn loose by the last uncontrolled surge, spinning directly toward her upper arm. She saw it coming with more than enough time to move. She did not. Any sudden motion now risked reading as an attack, risked undoing every careful step she had taken to get this close, and the girl mattered more in this exact moment than a few centimeters of skin did. The metal caught her arm and opened a shallow gash through her sleeve, and she felt the sting of it distantly, already filed under things to deal with later. 

"I'm okay," she said, before the girl could spiral further over it. "See? I'm fine. And so are you." 

The girl looked. Whatever she saw, steady, calm, entirely unbothered by the blood already soaking through her sleeve, seemed to reach her in a way that nothing else had. The wild, uncontrolled pressure between them began to ease, the Force settling the way water settles once whatever has been thrown into it stops churning. 

She knelt slowly, bringing herself level instead of looming, and held out one hand again, palm up, empty. The girl looked at it for a long moment. Then, shaking, she reached out and took it. 

Din reached them a moment later, Grogu quiet and wide-eyed against his chest, and said nothing about the stretch of pavement he had just been thrown across. She did not look at him yet. She did not look at him yet. She was not ready to face whatever he was thinking behind that visor, not with the girl's hand still shaking in hers. 

They took her back to the NRI. 

The Director's expression, when the three of them walked into his office with a fourth, unaccounted-for person trailing behind, told her exactly how far outside the mission parameters this had strayed. 

"This was not the brief." he said, before she had gotten a full step past the doorway. 

"No." She did not try to soften it. "The girl was the source of every incident on your list. What I found when I got close to her was an untrained Force-sensitive with no control and no idea what she's capable of, panicking badly enough to bring a corridor down around us. I made the call to bring her in rather than leave her on the street to do that again somewhere with less cover." 

"You understand the position that puts me in?" The Director's tone stayed level, but the challenge in it was clear enough. "I have no verified history on this girl. No name, nothing at all. My responsibility is to this station, not to one field agent's read on a stranger." 

"I was standing close enough to feel exactly what she was doing." She held his gaze without flinching. "There was no intent behind any of it. Just fear with nowhere to go. You can log it however you like. It won't change what I felt." 

The Director studied her for a long moment, then let his gaze shift, briefly, to the girl standing silent and hollow-eyed just inside the door, still gripping the sleeve of her jacket like she had not quite decided this was safe yet. 

"And what would you have me do with her?" 

"Structured supervision, not a cell." She kept her voice even, professional, the tone she used when she needed someone to listen past their first instinct to argue. "I can help her with the basics, breathing through it, recognising the warning signs before they escalate. But I'll be honest with you. This is out of my depth." 

It was somewhere in the middle of saying it that she felt the warmth first, a slow, spreading heat down her arm, and only then did she glance down and register the blood, considerably more of it than she had expected, soaking clean through her sleeve. She kept her expression even and did not mention it, filing it under the same category as everything else that could wait. 

"The Force has been running unchecked in her for years by the look of tonight. Someone with real Order training would do a great deal more good here than I can on my own." 

The Director considered that, then nodded slowly. "I'll see what can be done." He did not elaborate further, and she did not push, some instinct telling her this was not a thread worth pulling on tonight. "In the meantime, she stays under NRI supervision. I'll have quarters arranged tonight." His eyes moved briefly to Din, who had not said a word since they had walked in, then back to her. "You have my agreement, on the condition that this does not happen again without authorisation first." 

"Understood." 

A moment later she felt it threatening to drip, one heavy bead gathering at her elbow with nowhere left to go but down onto the Director's carpet, and she brought her free hand up to press against the cut without breaking her sentence to the Director. The Director's eyes flicked once to the movement, then back to her face, and he said nothing about it, professional enough not to interrupt what was clearly still an open conversation. 

Din did not share his restraint. He crossed the room without a word, without asking, and knelt in front of her chair, gently rolling her sleeve higher to check the wound properly.  

"Medpack," he said, flat, to the nearest NRI officer standing near the door, who scrambled to comply without waiting for the Director's confirmation. 

"It's fine, Mando," she said quietly, not breaking her explanation to the Director for more than the half second it took to say it. 

He did not answer. The visor lifted slowly from the cut on her arm to her face instead, and stayed there a moment before he moved, letting her sleeve settle back over the wound without having touched it. 

The NRI agent returned a moment later with the small case. Din took it without opening it, tucking it into his belt instead. 

The Director watched the exchange for a moment, then cleared his throat, gently steering things toward a close. "I think we've covered what we need to for tonight," he said. "Thank you both. Truly. I'll take it from here with our new guest." His eyes flicked to the girl, still silent, still holding onto her sleeve. "Get some rest. Both of you. There's a transport waiting." 

The girl's hand tightened briefly on her sleeve before letting go, and she gave her what she hoped was a reassuring look before Din's hand found the small of her back, guiding her toward the door with Grogu already half asleep against his shoulder. 

The transport ride home was silent in a way that felt different from the ordinary quiet they usually shared. Ordinary quiet had a texture to it, comfortable, something they had built together over weeks of not needing to fill every gap with words. This felt like something being held shut by force. 

Din pulled the medpack from his belt once they were settled, and reached for her arm without asking, folding her sleeve back past the cut with the same careful economy he brought to everything else. She let him, watching him clean the wound and wrap it tight, his hands doing the one thing he still seemed willing to do for her tonight, and neither of them said a word through any of it. 

She tried to bridge the quiet once he had finished, watching his visor for any reaction at all. "The cut's superficial. It barely needed the wrap." Nothing. Not a turn of the head, not a shift in posture, nothing that told her the words had even registered. Just the low hum of the transport and Grogu's soft, even breathing where he had finally drifted off against Din's chest, one small fist curled loosely in the fabric of his cowl. 

She tried again, quieter. "What is it?" 

"Not now." 

Two words, flat and immediate, and somehow that was worse than the quiet had been, because at least the quiet left room to imagine he simply had not heard her. This confirmed he had, and had decided, deliberately, that this was all she was getting. 

She studied the side of the helmet for the rest of the ride, unreadable as always, and felt something shift in her understanding of the quiet itself. It was not irritation. She knew irritation from him, the particular clipped economy of his words when something merely annoyed him, quick and dry and usually gone within the hour. This was different. This had weight to it, something being held very deliberately in place behind his teeth, and the longer it stretched the more certain she became that whatever he was not saying was going to cost them both something significant once he finally let it out. 

She thought about reaching for his hand, the way she usually would without thinking, and found she could not quite make herself do it, uncertain for the first time in weeks whether the gesture would be welcome. That uncertainty alone told her more about how badly tonight had gone than anything he had actually said. 

By the time the transport docked and they climbed the last flight of stairs to the apartment, Grogu stirring awake just enough to blink blearily at the familiar hallway, she found she would have preferred shouting to this. At least shouting gave her something to push back against. This quiet gave her nothing at all, just the growing, sick certainty that she had done something that mattered far more to him than she had understood in the moment she had done it. 

Dinner was dead quiet except for Grogu. It was late so she had made something simple, more out of habit than appetite, and they sat together at the small table, not at opposite ends of a ship the way they had after their last silent stretch weeks ago, but across from each other, close enough that avoiding each other took actual effort. She caught his gaze more than once in the time it took to serve the food, and each time neither of them held it, both looking away at exactly the same moment like they had rehearsed it. Din did not touch his plate at all. He sat with his hands folded near it, still helmeted, food going cold in front of him while Grogu chattered on, sleep forgotten. 

She pushed food around her own plate without eating much of it either, cutting the same piece into smaller and smaller sections until there was nothing left to justify holding the knife. Grogu, sensing something was wrong in the special way he always did, launched into an increasingly elaborate performance meant to close the gap between them himself, holding a piece of food out toward Din, then toward her, babbling something that clearly wanted a response from both of them at once. She managed a small laugh despite herself. Din made a sound that might have been meant as one, low and automatic, and reached out to steady Grogu's hand before he could fling anything across the table. 

They sat like that for a long while, the three of them, quiet stretching everywhere except the small orbit around Grogu, who kept trying, undeterred, long after both adults had run out of things to perform for his benefit. Eventually he gave up trying to bridge it and went back to eating, glancing between them every so often like he was still waiting for the conversation to resume on its own. 

It was Din who finally broke it, though not with anything close to what she had been bracing for. "Let me put him down," he said quietly, already rising, gathering Grogu up before she had finished nodding. "Then we'll talk." 

She did not answer beyond the nod. She waited until she heard the bedroom door click shut over the cot, then went to the fresher instead of the couch, standing under water too hot for comfort long after she'd finished washing. She knew what she was doing, standing there. She unwrapped the bandage anyway checking to see if the bleeding had stopped, peeling it back with careful fingers, and let the water find the cut underneath it, the sting of it sharp and almost welcome, something simple and physical to feel instead of everything else waiting for her on the other side of the door. 

She came out in her towel, hair still damp, and found him already standing in the middle of the living room, unmoving, helmet angled toward the floor like he was still deciding whether to say anything at all. Neither of them spoke. She crossed straight to the bedroom instead, closing the door behind her long enough to dress and paused on her way back out to look in on Grogu, curled up, sound asleep in his cot with one small fist loose against the blanket. She eased the door shut without a sound and came back into the living room, stopping near the kitchen counter, unwilling to be the one who broke first. 

"Why?" 

One word, quiet, but the edge under it was already showing, none of the careful stillness he had managed earlier in the evening. 

"Why what?" 

"You pushed me away." He said it too fast, tripping slightly over the back half of the sentence like he had meant to lead with something else and changed course halfway through. "Back there. Before I was even close. You made it so that I could not get to you at all." 

"Because I had it." She did not reach for the level, reasonable tone she had used on the Director. Her arms came up across her chest instead, defensive before she had decided to be. "I was seconds from talking her down, Din. I felt it working. You would have undone that." 

"You don't know that." 

"I do, actually." She heard her own voice climb and did not bring it back down. "That's the whole problem, isn't it. You weren't standing where I was. You didn't feel what I felt. So as far as you're concerned my read on it doesn't count for anything." 

"That's not what I said." 

"You didn't have to say it." She was already shaking her head before he finished, the motion sharp, almost dismissive. "It's in everything you're not saying right now." 

He did not have an answer ready for that, and it seemed to cost him something to admit it, his hand curling briefly at his side before he found the next thing to say. "I'm not talking about whether you were right." 

"Then what?" 

"I'm talking about you shoving me halfway across a corridor like I was in your way." His voice had climbed too now, no longer flat, no longer careful. "Like I'm something you have to manage in the middle of a crisis instead of-" The sentence ran out from under him, and he stood there a moment with nothing to finish it, jaw working behind the visor like the rest of it refused to come. 

"Instead of what." 

"I don't know." He said it like it embarrassed him, which only made it sharper. "Instead of someone who's allowed to be scared for you too." 

"So what was I supposed to do, Din, let you walk into it and get hurt?" 

"Ask me. Warn me. Anything other than just deciding for both of us." Something harder crept into his voice, an edge she hadn't expected yet. "You've told me that you don't think it's right to use what you can do on someone's mind without permission. That it's a line you won't cross. But you'll use it on my body without asking and somehow that doesn't count?" 

She opened her mouth to argue and found the words weren't there yet, the accusation landing somewhere she had no ready defence for. 

The words sat in the room for a second longer than either of them seemed to want. She looked away first, toward the dark window instead of him, and she could feel where his next sentence was heading before he'd said a word of it, some old dread rising up ahead of the words themselves. 

He said it anyway. "You did exactly the same thing on Nevarro." 

She flinched like she had been struck, all the fight in her going out of her for a single unguarded second before it came back sharper than before. "Why would you even bring that up right now." 

"Because it's true." 

"Can we not." It came out low, almost pleading, nothing like the sharpness she had been using thus far. 

"Are we just never going to discuss what happened?" His voice had gone flat, worn down rather than angry, like he'd been holding the question back for longer than just tonight. 

"No it’s just not relevant. You don't get to bring that up now just because you don't like a call I made in the field." She was pacing now, one step toward the counter and back, unable to hold still the way she usually managed to. "It's not the same thing, Din. It was never going to be the same thing." 

He watched her move without moving himself, and when he spoke again his voice had gone rougher, some of the anger giving way to something underneath it he seemed less practiced at showing. "You want to talk about tonight instead? Fine. Let's talk about your arm." 

That stopped her mid-step. "It's a scratch." 

"It went straight through your sleeve and you didn't even look at it." 

"It doesn't hurt." She rolled her eyes saying it, dismissive, and hated the tone even as it left her mouth, but it was already out and she was not about to take it back now. 

"No?" His voice had gone dangerously quiet again, worse than shouting, and he took a step closer for the first time since the argument had started. "What if it had been a few centimeters to the right. What if that piece of paneling had gone through your neck instead of your arm." 

"It didn't." 

"That's not the point and you know it." 

"Then what is the point, Din, because I genuinely don't-" 

"The point is you don't let me worry about you until you're already bleeding in front of me." His voice broke slightly on the last word, betraying more than he probably wanted her to see, and he stopped there long enough that she thought that might be all of it. It was not.  

"That's when I get to touch you. When I get to matter. When you're already halfway gone." He exhaled hard, the anger cracking for a second into something closer to what it actually was. "I'm scared every single time that the next one won't stop at your arm." 

That one landed somewhere ugly, and she felt it settle before she found anything to say back. "That's not fair." 

"Isn't it." He had not raised his voice, but something about the stillness of him now was worse than shouting would have been. "You want to know when you actually let me close? It's never when things are fine. It's every time you're one bad decision from dying, and never before it. Nine days of you not saying a word to me on the Crest, and I only got close once you were too far gone to keep me out." 

She stood very still for a moment, turning that over, feeling the shape of it settle somewhere she did not want it to. "You want to talk about the Crest?"  

Her voice had gone thin and dangerous by the time she said it, and he must have heard the shift because he did not back down from it. 

"I want to know why you couldn't walk five meters into the cockpit and say something. Anything. Instead of lying there for nine days pretending you were fine." 

"I was avoiding you because you threatened me." The words came out louder than she meant them to, loud enough that she heard herself and did not care. "You told me you'd hunt me down if you had to. Was I supposed to just walk in after that and pretend it was nothing?" 

He was quiet a moment, long enough that she thought he might not answer at all, and when he did his voice had lost the edge it had carried through the rest of the fight, something rawer and less sure of itself underneath it. "I said that because I thought you were leaving us and I didn't know how else to make you understand what that would do to Grogu, to me, so I said the ugliest thing I could think of instead of the true one." He stopped, "I know how it sounded. I know what it sounded like I meant." 

"You never gave me the chance to tell you why I leaving." Her voice had gone thin, something old and unresolved rising up underneath the anger. "I never got to explain any of it, Din, because you jumped straight to threatening me instead of asking." 

"That's not-" He stopped, something in his stance going rigid, the anger faltering for a second into something closer to defensiveness. "I never said I didn't trust you." 

"You didn't have to say it." She crossed the last of the distance between them without seeming to notice she had done it. "You locked me on that ship like I was cargo. You don't lock someone in if you trust them." 

"Because I was terrified you'd disappear the second I looked away." 

"So instead you avoided me too." She had not meant to raise her voice again but it climbed anyway, cracking slightly at the edges. "You could have come to me. You had nine days to say something and you didn't. That's not just mine to carry." 

"I thought you needed space." 

"I needed you." Her voice cracked clean through the middle of it, and she hated that it did, hated that he could hear exactly where it broke. Something uncertain crept in underneath the anger, the memory itself gone soft and unreliable at the edges. "I don't even know how much of what I remember from those days was real and how much I made up lying there half out of my mind. But I remember needing you. I remember that part clearly. And you weren't there." 

He flinched at that, the small, involuntary kind that had nothing performed about it, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the silence thick enough that she could hear Grogu's breathing through the wall. 

Then he said it, so quietly she almost missed it. "You stopped eating." 

She froze. 

"I never saw you sleep, I heard you moving around down there for hours.” 

She said nothing. There was nothing left in her to say. 

She had believed, with total certainty, that she had hidden every piece of it. That certainty came apart all at once, standing in her own kitchen while he recited back the small, private collapse she had been so sure had gone entirely unwitnessed. 

"When you found the stims," she said, her voice gone very small, "why didn't you say something?" 

He did not ask what she meant. That alone told her everything. 

"I know you found them." Her voice sharpened, because his silence was somehow worse than a denial would have been. "I know you knew, Din. So why didn't you say anything to me then?" 

"Because I didn't know what I would have said." It came out rough, stripped of whatever composure he had been rationing all night. "What was I supposed to do. Walk in, tell you I'd found stims in your jacket, and demand an explanation? You'd already made it very clear you didn't want me anywhere near you." 

"How did you decide that?" Her voice had gone flat with disbelief, some of the anger draining into something closer to hurt.  

"Then why didn't you just come to me?" His voice cracked on it, something desperate leaking through despite himself. "Instead of taking stims alone in your bunk for nine days like the answer was in a syringe instead of five meters away through a door. If you had come to me, I would have known. I could have done something." 

"Why didn't you?" She threw it back at him with no space left between his question and her answer. "You had exactly the same five meters, Din. The same door. You could have walked through it any one of those nine days, and you didn't either." 

"I tried." It came out rough, almost injured. "I went down to the cargo bay , made up some reason to be there. You left as soon as I got down. I waited outside the fresher another time. You wouldn’t come out." 

That admission landed somewhere neither of them seemed prepared for, and for a moment the argument itself seemed to lose its shape entirely, both of them caught on the same impossible symmetry, two people who had each gotten close enough to say something and lost their nerve at the exact same threshold, over and over, for nine straight days. 

"I don't know what this is." He said it quieter now, some of the fight gone out of him entirely. " Not what it is to you. I didn't know then either and I still don't." 

Her face burned, sudden and unwelcome, heat crawling up her throat before she could stop it. She knew what he was asking her to say, and she knew exactly why she could not make herself say it, why she had never once let the actual words leave her mouth in all the time since. Saying it would make it real in a way she could not undo afterward, and some part of her had always understood that once it was real it could also end, the way everything she had ever let herself want out loud eventually had. 

"How did you not." Her voice broke, disbelief bleeding into something closer to desperation. "After everything that happened on Nevarro? I asked you to stay." 

"And that's how I was supposed to know?" It came out too fast, frustration breaking through the exhaustion underneath it. "You asked me to stay and I stayed. What was I meant to read into that when you made a run for it just hours later?" 

She had not thought she needed to say more back then, because she had never let herself think that far in the first place. She had believed, the same way she believed most things about herself without examining them too closely, that being with the two of them, having a place by the fire with them, was already more than she had any right to ask for. She had never let herself imagine she could have him, not really, not the way she wanted, so it had never occurred to her that the wanting itself might be worth saying out loud.  

Neither of them had anything left to say to that for a long moment. The apartment had gone completely quiet except for the low hum of the environmental system, and she stood there in the middle of it feeling every word they had just thrown work its way past whatever defence she had had ready. 

"You don't think you're allowed to let anyone else carry any of it," he said finally, quieter now, the anger gone out of it entirely. "Not me. Not tonight, not on the Crest, probably not ever. You just decide on your own that the risk belongs to you, and you take it before anyone else gets a vote." 

She had not consciously decided to shut him out either time, on Nevarro or tonight, had not sat down and reasoned her way into shouldering the danger alone. It had simply been instinct, the same reflex that had kept her alive and moving for years before Din had ever entered the picture, and she had never once stopped to consider that it might look, from where he stood, exactly like being shut out on purpose. 

"That's not-" she started, and stopped, because she genuinely did not know how to finish the sentence honestly. 

He did not push. He just stood there, breathing harder than the conversation alone accounted for, giving her the space to either find an answer or admit she did not have one, and the quiet between them stretched long enough that she felt every second of it settle heavy in her chest. 

Neither of them apologised. The argument had simply run out of the energy that had been fuelling it, both of them standing a few meters apart in a kitchen that suddenly felt too small to hold whatever had just been said in it. She felt herself unravelling from the inside, exhaustion and guilt and something rawer than either pressing in all at once, and she knew, with total certainty, that if she stayed in this room another minute she was going to fall apart in front of him in a way she was not ready for. 

"I can't do this right now." she said, voice cracking somewhere in the middle of it, and turned before he could see the rest of her face fall apart the way it was about to. 

She crossed to the bedroom and shut the door harder than she meant to, the sound of it cracking through the quiet apartment like something breaking. 

Grogu's cry started almost immediately, startled awake by the noise, and she felt the fresh wave of guilt hit before she had even wiped her own face clear. She crossed to his cot in the dark, already crying harder than she wanted him to hear, and lifted him carefully into her arms anyway, murmuring something soft and useless while he hiccupped against her shoulder. She sat on the edge of the bed with him curled against her chest, rocking slightly, her own breath coming in the same broken rhythm as his, and stayed like that a long time, unable to stop either one of them from crying.