#mando x reader

The water was nearly scalding on her back. From the way her fingers had begun to prune, she had already been standing under it far longer than she needed to. Steam had filled the fresher until the mirror was entirely useless, the air thick and warm, but she was in no hurry. The heat worked into the muscles of her shoulders and she let it, let the tension of the day dissolve under it, let herself just stand there and breathe, not thinking about anything in particular. 

Over the steady rush of the water, she heard the fresher door swing open. 

She didn't turn around, only just glancing towards the noise. Through the heavily fogged screen, she could make out only the dark, familiar outline of him standing in the doorway. Reaching out, she slid the screen open, her movements slow and unhurried. The motion caught him mid-movement, his bare hands actively rolling his sleeves up against the thick, trapping heat of the room. Now that the glass was clear, she noticed what he was wearing or rather, what he wasn't. No armor on, only in his black undershirt and flight pants, completely free from the beskar, save for the immutable presence of his helmet as always. She looked at him the way she had been quietly looking at him for months, a privilege she had only recently allowed herself to indulge in without being the first to look away. His forearms were bare where the fabric was bunched, the muscle and veins shifting beneath the skin as he finished fixing his sleeves. He looked good. He always did, but there was something about the effortless, unapologetic way he leaned against the frame, watching her, that sent a low, blossoming heat into her belly that had absolutely nothing to do with the water. 

"Are you going to join me, or just stand there?" she asked, her voice sliding over the sound of the water. 

"I like where I'm standing." 

She turned back to the spray again, letting the rhythmic heat of it settle across her shoulder blades. 

She could feel his entire attention anchoring her to the floor. It had been like that for days now, a palpable, heavy weight that clung to her skin any time they occupied the same room, which, lately, was nearly all the time. But the texture of that attention had shifted. She no longer averted her eyes when he caught her looking, and she didn't shrink when the dark expanse of his visor locked onto her.  

Slowly, deliberately, she trailed her hand down the curve of her own body, never breaking visual contact with the center of his visor. "Your hands feel better than mine." 

She heard the faint shift of fabric against the doorframe, the quiet, telling sound of him paying her his undivided attention. 

"Bigger," she murmured, her fingers brushing over her clit, the shuddering breath that escaped her entirely honest and unguarded. "Warmer. I keep thinking about them." 

The heavy silence stretched just long enough to make her heart stutter against her chest. Then, rough and low, he said, "Yeah?" 

"Mm." 

"I want to watch you." His voice dropped into that dark, gravelly register that did wicked things to her composure, things she had long since stopped pretending she could resist. "Go on then, pretty girl. Touch yourself while you think about my hands." 

She let the heat build in slow, torturous waves, her fingers finding the rhythm they knew by heart while the water ran slick over her skin. Her other hand came up to her breast, her thumb rolling over one nipple until she exhaled, a sharp, involuntary gasp that echoed off the tiles. Being watched by him was its own distinct kind of pleasure, standing completely bare under the absolute focus of his gaze while he remained entirely clothed in the doorway, conceding nothing to her but his bare arms. 

The water began to cool, but she barely noticed. The real warmth was beneath her skin now, radiating outward from her core. She worked toward the edge without rushing, letting her soft, ragged sounds slip out into the steam without trying to control them, matching the subtle change in his own breathing from across the room. 

When she was agonizingly close, she looked out towards the open door. 

"Come here," she breathed. 

He crossed the small room and stopped right at the edge of the open screen, close enough that she could see the silver beads of steam condensing against his helmet. He reached forward, cupping the side of her flushed face in one bare, heavy hand. The intense warmth of his palm against her cheek made her eyes flutter, his thumb moving with agonizing slowness across her lower lip. She leaned into the touch before her mind could even process the choice. 

She turned her face slightly into his palm and nipped the tip of his thumb. 

He let out a low, deliberate click of his tongue, a quiet reprimand. "Do you need something to keep that mouth busy?" He let his thumb rest against her teeth. "Hmm?" 

She smiled up at the visor, opening her mouth just enough to slide her tongue out against his skin. Without a word, he pressed his thumb past her lips. 

She closed her lips tightly around it, letting her tongue work over him in slow, thorough strokes. Her eyes remained locked on the black T-visor while her hands kept moving below, one working blindly between her thighs, the other pinching and rolling her nipple. The contrast of the two sensations built into a roaring tide that rapidly dissolved any coherent thought. She watched the visor watch her. 

A low groan escaped him, rough and involuntary. "You look so pretty like this."

His grip on her jaw tightened, fingers holding her steady as she worked. When the climax broke over her, she leaned back hard against the wet wall, her body shaking through every violent wave of it. The ragged sounds of her release were swallowed around his thumb, her hands working through the pulse until the oversensitivity finally arrived and she had to force herself to stop circling her clit. He held her jaw firm through the entirety of it, refusing to let her rush. 

When she finally stilled, the fog in her mind cleared enough for her to realize the water had gone completely cold. 

He slowly withdrew his thumb, reaching past her shoulder to twist the tap off. In the sudden, heavy quiet, the only sound was the frantic catch of her own breathing. Then, he ran two fingers down through the slick, trembling heat between her legs. She hissed at the sudden contact, overstimulated and sparking like live wire. He brought his wet fingers right back to her lips, and she took them into her mouth without a single thought, tasting herself on his skin, the intense intimacy of it settling like a physical weight behind her sternum. 

She threw her wet arms around his waist and pulled him flush against her, the frigid water on her skin soaking straight through the front of his fabric flight suit. She pressed her face hard into his chest. 

"I want you" she whispered. 

"You've got me." His bare forearm settled like a hot brand against her wet back. "I'm all yours, baby." 

He wedged his arms under her thighs and scooped her up in one fluid motion. 

She let out an undignified, helpless squeal that bounced off the tiles, her legs kicking back in mock protest, but he only tightened his grip, trapping her against him. She was laughing, her forehead pressed against the crook of his neck, when three hard, commanding knocks rattled the front door. 

He stopped mid-stride and her head shot up towards the door, eyes wide. 

"Dank ferrik. It’s like he has some kind of tracker on us.” He held her close for a few more seconds. 

“What’s he doing back here anyways?” she lowered her voice to ask. 

“Don’t care. That old man has terrible fucking timing.” Din said. 

She laughed harder, burying her face into his neck, though he grumbled that it wasn't funny. When he finally set her feet on the floor, she was already scurrying toward the bedroom, glancing back once over her shoulder at the dark, wet patch across the front of his flight suit, biting down her embarrassment as she hoped Master Khai wouldn’t think too much of it. 

She went straight to Grogu's cot first. The kid was exactly as she had left him, completely dead to the world under his blanket with one oversized ear folded over. The soft, rhythmic snoring sound he made was something she had long since stopped finding anything but deeply endearing. She smoothed the edge of the blanket that didn't need smoothing, just to feel the reassurance of his small presence, then turned to get dressed. She moved fast, grabbing the first tunic and pants on top of the shelf without looking. 

As she pulled the fabric down, Din's voice drifted in from the front room. There was another voice underneath it, lower than Master Khai's, entirely wrong in a way she couldn't quite place, but carrying a distinct, sharp authority. She threw her shirt over her head and stepped out into the corridor. 

She came into the living area already talking. "You're going to wake Gro-" 

The words died in her throat. 

The woman standing in the doorway was definitely not Master Khai. She had striking red hair cut close to her jaw, and the kind of face that was used to commanding difficult, hostile rooms and had organized its features accordingly. Her armor was unmistakably Mandalorian, she knew the sharp angles of it well enough by now, but it was older than Din's, more worn. And she wore no helmet. The woman's face was completely open to the room, unmasked, taking her in with the same frank, calculating assessment she was receiving in return. 

Instinctively, her hand twitched toward her bare hip, her reflexes screaming at the sudden absence of her lightsaber. Her gaze darted between Din and the intruder, trying to read the heavy, stagnant air of the room. 

"Mando?" she said, her voice laced with caution. 

Din raised a single gloved hand toward her, a small, silent gesture that meant stay easy. "It's okay." He looked back at the redhead. "This is Bo-Katan Kryze. Ruler of Mandalore." 

Bo-Katan looked at her with a brief flicker of curiosity before she seemed to consciously pull herself back into whatever rigid mindset she required for this visit.  

"Who is this?" she asked Din, and the question carried a dangerous lightness that didn't entirely belong in the quiet apartment. 

Din ignored her question entirely, "What do you want, Bo-Katan?" 

Bo-Katan looked at him for a long moment, and a subtle shift moved across her features, the exhausted look of someone who had been traveling toward a deeply difficult conversation for a very long time and had finally arrived at the destination.  

"I need a favor, Din. I need you to go. Tonight, if you can manage it." She delivered the line like something she had been actively rehearsing on the journey here. "It's a matter of life and death, and I have wasted too much time getting here already." 

"You're gonna have to give me more than that before you can send me anywhere." Din stepped back from the entrance, his posture tightening into a defensive guard. "Come inside." 

Bo-Katan stepped through the door, her sharp gaze sweeping the apartment once before she moved toward the kitchen. Din pulled out a chair across from her and sat. 

“Where’s the little one?” She asked, still looking around as if she was expecting Grogu to pop his little head out from behind one of the couch cushions. 

“He’s asleep. You know, since its past midnight and all.” She spoke with an edge to her voice when she adressed the red haired woman. 

Her eyes darted between the two of them, taking the measure of a room she didn't have the luxury to be comfortable in. "I went to Nevarro first," she said, her focus locking onto Din. "Your N-1 was on the pad, so I waited. Two days, Din. I sat in your house for two days before I accepted you weren't coming back anytime soon." 

Something moved through her chest at the mention of Nevarro, the ship, small and cold, there and then gone as soon as it arose. She kept her face still. She wasn't sure she managed it. Din's visor turned toward her, just briefly, before moving back to Bo-Katan. 

"Then tracking you here took longer than it should have because you are not exactly broadcasting your location. I’m running out of time. We have maybe five days to make this work." She paused, her jaw tightening into a hard line before. "This is sensitive information. Could we have some privacy?" 

"She stays," Din declared, his tone absolute. 

Bo-Katan looked between them again, some small, quiet arrival at a new understanding softening her expression for a split second.  

Bo-Katan was clinically precise about it. Voss had been one of her own once, then hadn't been, quietly gathering the factions most resistant to a unified Mandalore over the months, feeding their growing dissatisfaction with direction and momentum. Giving their anger a face and a name, which was always far more dangerous than aimless rage alone. Now he was tucked away in the Outer Rim on Florrum and she had intelligence suggesting he wasn't just avoiding her. He was out there gathering Empire support for his cause. Resources, backing, the kind of infrastructure that didn't come cheap and didn't come without strings.  

"I can tolerate dissent," Bo-Katan said, her voice hardening at the edges. "A Mandalorian who doesn't like my leadership, fine. Bring the challenge. But the moment you start taking Imp money to do it, you are not a political opponent anymore. You are a threat to everything we just bled to rebuild."  

She watched Din tense at the mention of Imperial Remnants. 

"Once he lands with the weight of that expectation behind him, he becomes a symbol. A returning hero," Bo-Katan said, her voice dropping. "A rallying point for everyone who has ever wanted a reason to pull Mandalore apart along the same old bloodlines. I cannot move against him openly without making him a martyr. I can't use Mandalorian forces without it looking like a political arrest. I need him to disappear before he ever makes it back home. And I cannot be the one to make that happen." 

"Everything is on here," Bo-Katan continued, reaching into her flight jacket and sliding a small, silver data chip onto the table between them. "Live tracking of his ship, his coordinates, his route, and exactly who he’s been meeting. Five days, Din." 

She had been listening in absolute silence. Her eyes fell to the data chip sitting beneath the dim kitchen light, staring at it for a long, heavy beat before she finally looked up at Bo-Katan. 

"That's not a favor," she said, the words cutting through the room. "That's a political assassination." 

"I am willing to trade one life for thousands. That is what this is," Bo-Katan said. 

"You're not the one making the trade," she replied. 

Something moved through Bo-Katan's expression, not offense but closer to a sharp recalibration, the adjustment of a ruler who had not expected to meet real, unyielding resistance from a stranger in the middle of the night, and was now deciding what to do with her. 

"I was in the Order," she said carefully, holding Bo-Katan's gaze. "I know persecution. I lived it. I know exactly what it costs to belong to something that powerful people want to see entirely ended. I know what it does to a people, what it costs to carry that survival across generations." 

The Mandalorian ruler nodded slowly. "Then you understand, better than most, how fragile a culture is when its enemies have been trying to end it for long enough. How little it takes to shatter it again." She looked at her steadily. "Do you really think it is selfish to stop a war before it starts? Because that is what this is. If Voss reaches Mandalore with momentum behind him, people die. Not one man. Our people cannot survive another civil war. Not now. We are too fresh." 

A heavy, stagnant pause stretched across the kitchen. 

"I have made harder decisions than this one." Bo-Katan added. 

She crossed her arms, refusing to break eye contact. "Then get someone else. Anyone else. Why come to him?" 

Bo-Katan sighed, a small deflation in her posture that felt entirely genuine. "I understand that I am asking a lot, which is precisely why I am here. There is no one else I trust to ask for such a thing. No one whose skills and discretion are adequate." She shifted her gaze back to Din, her voice softening slightly. "More than anything... he understands." 

Din had been completely motionless throughout the exchange. She could feel him working through it in the quality of his stillness, the heavy, internal thinking happening somewhere deep behind his helmet where she couldn't reach. 

Bo-Katan leaned in. "You know what happens if he gets home." 

"I know what you think happens," Din said evenly. 

"Then tell me I'm wrong!" Bo-Katan snapped, leaning over the table. "Tell me Mandalore can survive another fracture. Tell me the factions will hold. Tell me there's enough left of our world to build on if it all goes wrong again!" 

Din said nothing. 

"It's against the creed, Bo-Katan," he finally said, his voice measured and flat. "Any Mandalorian has the right to challenge a leader's rule." He paused before he added, "This is the way." 

Something finally cracked through Bo-Katan's perfect composure, and she let it, a single lick of real, terrifying flame breaking through a controlled fire. "You," she said, and his name had a jagged, specific edge on her tongue, "Din Djarin you who breaks the creed as and when it suits you? You've never apologized for it because you didn't have to. You were right, and That kid is sleeping soundly tonight because of it. So don't use it as a wall right now." She leaned forward until she was inches from his visor. "You helped me take Mandalore back. Now help me keep it." 

Beside him, she felt the name catch like a physical thorn in her chest. Djarin? Said the way you said a name you had always known, a name with a whole, vivid person attached to it. She had only ever been given Din. One syllable. She kept her eyes glued to the table, swallowing the sudden, bitter lump in her throat. 

The room fell entirely quiet. Din reached out, picked up the data chip, and turned it over in his gloved fingers. Five days. She could practically feel him doing the math in his head, could read it in the rigid quality of his posture when he ran numbers he didn't like. Three days to Florrum at minimum. Which left two, maybe less, to track Voss and execute it cleanly before anyone connected the hit to them. No backup. No official cover. Absolutely zero room for anything to go sideways. 

He turned the chip over one last time, then looked towards her. 

"What would you do?" 

She held his gaze honestly. She thought about Mandalore, about what she understood of its bloody history, and about Grogu, about what it meant that those fractured people were the kid's people, too. She thought about the five days, and the ugly shadow sitting inside them. 

"I don't know," she said softly. "It's your call. These are your people. Grogu's too." 

He was quiet for another long moment. Then, he set the chip firmly back onto the table. "I need his exact position on Florrum, you’re giving me no time here to track him myself." he told Bo-Katan.  

"It's all on the chip." Bo-Katan rose, and moved straight for the door. She paused and looked back at her, and the cold, assessing look that had been on her face all evening thawed into something warmer, something that almost looked like respect. 

She looked at Din, then at her, the weight of what she was about to say settling over her features. "I was never here. I never came to Coruscant. This conversation did not happen, and if anyone ever suggests otherwise, I will have no record of it and neither will you. Whatever you find on Florrum, whatever you do there... it cannot be traced back to me. Not a single thread." She held Din's gaze for a long moment. "Clean." 

"I hope we meet again under better circumstances," Bo-Katan said towards her. Then she looked back at Din, her expression shifting into something too casual to be accidental, the look of someone delivering a small, devastatingly private joke at the exact moment she knew it would land. "Well done, brown eyes. About damn time." 

The door clicked shut behind her. 

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere in the apartment, the environmental unit hummed. Din had the chip in his hand, turning it over. She sat where she was and let the silence settle and did not look at him. She was aware of her own breathing in a way she usually wasn't, aware of the specific weight of the air in the room. She pressed her fingertips flat against the table and stared at them. 

"I need the datapad," Din said, already pushing back from the table. She heard him move down the hall toward the bedroom. 

She pushed her own chair back without saying a word, her chest too tight to breathe, and walked straight out of the apartment. 

The corridor was much cooler than the room she left. She stood against the durasteel wall, her eyes squeezed shut, pressing the flat of her hand hard against her sternum to stop the aching tightness. Her mind was a chaotic storm, completely consumed by a sudden, sharp rumination she hadn't allowed herself to sit with before tonight. 

Brown. 

The word rattled through her thoughts like a loose bolt. Bo-Katan could say it like it was nothing, because she had stood in a brightly lit room with him and just looked. For Bo-Katan, it hadn't been a sacred ceremony or a profound sacrifice, it fell from her lips like it was something casual. Just a thing that had happened between two people who knew each other. 

She had filed that desperate want away, telling herself it was not hers to examine. She loved him, that wasn't the question, but she had been so incredibly careful with him, fiercely guarding his boundaries so he would never feel the crushing weight of his creed on her. She knew his face in the dark. She knew the exact line of his jaw and the high curve of his cheekbones, knew the radiating warmth of his skin when she held it, the instinctive way he turned his face toward her hands whenever she touched him. She knew his voice without the mechanical modulator. She had spent months learning the language of his posture, reading him through the heavy Beskar armor. He had told her just a few days ago that she saw him, even through the armor, and she had mostly believed it. 

But she didn't know the color of his eyes. She hadn't let herself want it, because it wasn't fair to either of them. But Bo-Katan had looked. Djarin, spoken like a name she should have known. Brown, spoken like any other ordinary word. 

She had about four seconds of that suffocating realization before the door slid open again. 

"Where are you going?" Din asked. 

She didn't stop, "Just taking a walk." 

"Dressed like that? At this hour? Baby, you don’t even have shoes on." 

"I won't be long." 

"Hey." His hand caught her arm gently, his grip not forcing her to stop so much as pleading with her. She halted, her back still turned to him. "Talk to me. Is it the job?" A long, tense pause. "Or is it something else?" 

She couldn't answer immediately. The restriction in her chest had been building ever since Bo-Katan had dropped that color into the room, and she wanted to run somewhere smaller and entirely private before she lost her grip. 

"It's nothing," she lied, her voice tight. "I just need a minute." 

"You're shaking." 

She looked down at her hands, watching her fingers tremble, feeling a sudden flicker of what might have been embarrassment if she had any emotional capacity left for it. "I'm fine. Go back inside, Din. You have work to do. I'll be back before you leave." 

"I'm not going anywhere without you." 

Slowly, she turned around. 

He was standing in the dim corridor in just his undershirt and pants, his arms hanging loose at his sides. He looked entirely present. Like he had bolted out after her without stopping to think about the how exposed he was, because thinking would have taken too long, and he wasn't willing to waste a single second apart from her. 

"This has nothing to do with you," she whispered. 

"Tell me what it's about then." 

"It's-" The words physically lodged in her throat. "I don't want to say something that makes you feel like you've done something wrong. So just let me go, okay? I'll be back in ten minutes." 

"No." 

"I just need-" 

"No." His voice was quieter this time, but unyielding. "I'm not going back inside while you stand out here. So start talking." 

She dropped her gaze to the floor. The truth tore out of her before she could stop it. "I don't care if you have a history with her." 

"We don't." 

She looked back up at him, at the unreadable metal helmet. "I love you, Din," she said softly. The confession sat heavily between them. "But I don't know you. Not all of you. And I'm not asking you to change that for me. I just didn't realize how much I minded until tonight." 

The words were out and she couldn't take them back and she wasn't sure she wanted to, but the guilt arrived immediately anyway. She had held this back deliberately. Had watched it sit in her chest for weeks and chosen, every single time, not to put it down in front of him because Din already had too much to carry. Because it was already too much and it had cost him to let her in as far as he had. She had not wanted to hand him her longing for something he couldn't give and watch him try to figure out what to do with it. She had been so careful about that until now. 

He went completely, terrifyingly still. She understood from the absolute rigidity of his shoulders that he had arrived somewhere he hadn't expected to tonight, a place that had taken the breath right out of his lungs. 

The corners of her mouth twitched into a sad, involuntary smile. "It's okay. It's my issue. I just need to be in it for a little while." 

She turned and began to walk away. Four steps, then five, nearly reaching the heavy doors of the stairwell, when a sharp hiss cut through the quiet. 

The metal whipcord caught her flawlessly around her waist, firm and sudden. Before she could even think about bracing her weight, the cord yanking pulled her backward through the air until she crashed gently but securely against his chest. 

She gasped, looking up. "What-" 

"I love you." 

She stopped breathing entirely. 

His arms wrapped tightly around her waist, pinning her against him. His voice was rough, trembling in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with performance. "You need to stop running from me like this. Wherever you go, I want to go." He held her tighter, burying his helmeted head against her hair. "Don't... just don't shut me out. Okay?" 

She let out a long, shuddering breath, her body melting against his chest. "You don't have to say it just because I did," she whispered against his shirt. 

He let out a low, breathless laugh, real and unburdened. "I love you. I do." 

She stayed exactly where she was, letting his arms hold her together. She could feel the rapid, steady beat of his heart through his thin shirt, warm and alive, and she just listened to it for a long time, anchoring herself to the rhythm. What had changed was that he knew now, and he was still standing here in the middle of the night, holding her in a cold hallway. She supposed that was the part that mattered most right now, even if it didn't fix the rest. 

She pressed her face deeper into his chest and remained silent. 

He was quiet too for a long moment, his chest expanding with a deep breath. Then, carefully, like a man who had weighed every single word, he said, "You do know me." 

She didn't answer, listening. 

"All the parts that matter, you know me." he murmured. 

She lifted her head to look up at him. She thought about what she actually knew, the unique sound of him moving through a quiet room, the incredibly gentle way he held Grogu when the kid was terrified, the three seconds of absolute stillness he fell into before making a choice that mattered. She thought about his face resting entirely in her bare hands in the dark, refusing to pull away. Bo-Katan only knew a color. She knew him. 

"I know," she said finally. 

He leaned down and pressed the hard brow of his helmet to the top of her head, not a performance, just a quiet, grounding truth. 

She closed her eyes, breathing him in. After a while, her voice muffled against his undershirt, she said, "We have to talk about what you just agreed to." 

She pulled back just enough to look at him. "This is a terrible plan. There's no margin." 

"It’s going to be tight." He fell quiet for a beat. "But if we don't go now, we don't go at all." 

She let that reality sink in. The threat was real, and the target Bo-Katan had given them wasn't an ordinary mark. Getting in clean was already going to take everything they had. Getting out afterward, in the window that remained, with no backup and no extraction plan and a five-day deadline that left no room to regroup if the first approach failed, that was the part that sat in her chest like a stone.  

"Grogu doesn't come," Din said, his voice tightening. It wasn't a question. "I'm not taking him near this." 

"Okay, we keep him out of this." she agreed softly. 

"I don't do this kind of work anymore," he murmured, the vocoder catching on a sudden, rough edge. "Not since I took him. I don't want him around a hit. I don't want him seeing... whatever happens to Voss." He paused, his gloved fingers tightening slightly against her waist. "Stay here with him. Keep him safe. I can handle this alone." 

She pulled back sharply, a sudden, fierce flash of defiance pulsing through her eyes. 

"No way," she said, her voice dropping into an unyielding register that brooked absolutely no argument. "You think I'm letting you fly into an Outer Rim hornets' nest to carry out a shadow assassination by yourself? If you go down, who pulls you out? No, Din. We are a team. Where you go, I go." 

The visor remained fixed on her face, taking in the absolute rigidity of her resolve, before he gave a slow, defeated tilt of his head. He knew better than to try and leave her behind. 

"Then how do we handle the kid?" he asked quietly. 

"Master Khai will take him," she suggested, the plan snapping into focus as the only reasonable alternative. "He can protect him." 

He nodded once, a slow, heavy movement, and she could read the immense weight behind it, the deep discomfort of leaving the child at all, balanced against the dark nature of the mission they were heading into. 

"Are you sure about this?" she asked. 

He looked down at her through the dark glass. "Are you?" 

She thought about Bo-Katan's face, about Voss, and about a fractured Mandalore barely holding together at the seams. Ultimately, she thought about the immutable fact that whatever Din decided, she was going with him. 

"Yes"  

They went back inside without another word and began to pack. 

It didn't take long. She pulled on her jacket, the one he picked out for her on Corelia, then clipped her saber to her hip, checked the blaster in its holster twice out of habit. Across the room she could hear the familiar sound of Din seating each piece of armor into place. By the time she'd shouldered her pack he was fully beskar-clad, every inch of him the Mandalorian again. She looked at him for a moment. He looked back. Neither of them said a word.

Grogu barely stirred when she lifted him from his cot. He let out a tiny, soft coo of protest, then immediately settled his heavy head against her shoulder with the absolute, unquestioning trust of a child. His small, clawed hand curled tightly into the fabric of her jacket. She held him a moment longer than necessary, feeling his solid, warm weight against her chest, breathing him in, the specific, clean, comforting smell of him that was entirely his own.  

Master Khai's door slid open quickly enough that she suspected the old Jedi hadn't been fully asleep to begin with. He took in the sight of the two of them, both fully geared for combat, Din holding the coordinates pad with Grogu's small travel bag packed in his other hand. Khai's expression flickered through several calculations before settling into a careful, stone-still mask. 

"I need you to take him" she said simply. 

"What is happening?" 

"I can't tell you." She carefully transferred the sleeping child into his arms. "We'll be back. But if we're not back in a week, then you can worry." 

"Little star-" 

"I know." She stepped forward, wrapping her arms around the old man, Grogu stirring slightly between their chests. In the quiet sanctuary of that closeness, she reached out through the Force, her mind careful and deliberate as she found the familiar thread of Khai's attention, the way she had learned to do when she was just a child. She deliberately let her shields drop just a fraction, allowing the old master to feel the sheer, terrifying vacuum of the danger they were walking into, the genuine, cold probability that this was a final farewell. 

If we don't come back. Take care of him. 

She felt the old man's sudden, sharp surprise bleed through the bond before he could compose his mental walls. 

What do you mean? 

The way you took care of me. 

Khai went completely rigid against her. 

Just promise me. 

A heavy, grieving pause echoed in her mind. 

I promise. 

She stepped back, breaking the physical embrace. Khai was holding Grogu securely, one large hand supporting the back of the child's sleeping head, his face perfectly composed. "Take care of him," she said, grateful that her voice didn't betray the tremor in her heart. 

"Where are you going? How do I find you if you aren’t back in time?" he asked. 

She shook her head. "I can't tell you that either. If we get stuck, we’ll relay over comms." 

Din had remained entirely silent through the exchange. He reached out now, the armored tips of his fingers grazing the soft skin at the back of Grogu's head just once, an incredibly gentle touch. Grogu made a tiny, contented sound but didn't wake. Din withdrew his hand, his jaw set behind his mask, and she understood, watching the tense line of his shoulders, that there were some things he simply could not say out loud either. 

They turned from Master Khai's door and began the long walk down the corridor. Behind them, the warm light through the doorway stayed on, casting long shadows ahead of them. She walked in perfect sync beside Din toward the landing bay, the empty corridor quiet around them, and she did not look back. 

Master Khai had been spending a great deal of time at the apartment ever since he’d arrived on Coruscant.

He joined them for meals whenever he could, turning up at the door with food or simply arriving at the right hour and sitting down without being asked. He had come with them twice to meet the Director, which had not been discussed and had simply happened, Master Khai falling into step beside her on the walkway as though he had always been expected. He had a gift for occupying a room without appearing to impose on it, finding the chair that left him with a clear view of everyone else, saying exactly enough and not a word more. 

She had noticed, early in the second week, that he was always between her and Din. A chair angled just so. A question addressed to her at the precise moment she might otherwise have turned toward Din. Not obviously, not in a way she could point to without sounding unreasonable. She had no choice but to watch him do it for several days before she was certain enough to be annoyed. But there was always a reason for him to be present, always something that wanted his attention. Calling him on it would give him a satisfaction she was not willing to provide.  

What it had cost them was harder to name. All they were left with was stolen moments on the couch, his hand finding hers in the gap between cushions, quiet makeout sessions under the covers after Grogu had gone to sleep, neither of them willing to take it further with the kid three meters away. She told herself she did not mind, but she absolutely did. 

What she had not anticipated was Grogu. 

Grogu had decided, with the certainty he brought to all decisions, that Master Khai was his now. He climbed onto his lap during the evening stories and stayed there, small hands occasionally reaching up to touch the folds of his robe or investigate the beads at his belt. Master Khai bore all of this with perfect equanimity and spoke to him the way he had always spoken to her when she was young, as though the child across from him had a complete inner life and full capacity for a serious conversation, which in Grogu's case was arguably accurate. He told him stories. The great Force users, the ones whose names were still spoken with weight. The founding of the Order, the Jedi who had walked complicated paths and what those paths had cost them. 

She was on the couch with a datapad one evening when Master Khai began talking about Tarre Vizsla. Grogu was wedged between him and the arm of the couch, ears up, watching Master Khai's face with the focused gravity of someone absorbing every word. She had half her attention on him, the other half trying to focus on the briefing infront of her. Master Khai was describing the saber, the way it had been made, the intention behind it, a weapon that was also a statement, a question the Order had never been entirely comfortable with. 

Din stopped in the kitchen doorway with his shoulder against the frame. She caught the shift in him from the corner of her eye, the set of his shoulders changing just slightly, the kind of change that meant he was listening to something he had not expected to care about. 

Master Khai kept talking. He had noticed too, she thought. He gave no sign of it. 

When he reached the part about the saber passing to the Jedi after Vizsla's death, Din said, from the doorway, "They tried to take it." 

Master Khai looked up, almost surprised. "They did." 

"And Mandalore took it back." 

"More than once, over the centuries." Master Khai held Din's gaze across the room. "It has always found its way back to Mandalorian hands. Some things resist being separated from where they belong." 

Din was quiet for a moment. Then he came into the room, sat in the chair across from Master Khai. Grogu immediately transferred himself from Master Khai's side to Din's lap, the move executed with the precision of someone who had been planning it all along. Din's hand came up automatically to settle him. 

"You know a lot about it," He said before adding with some disdain, "for a Jedi." 

"I know a lot about many things. Tarre Vizsla interests me because he refused the binary. Most people, when faced with two identities that should not coexist, choose one and bury the other." Master Khai folded his hands, "He wore both. The armour and the robe. The creed and the Code. It made people deeply uncomfortable." 

"I can imagine." 

"The discomfort belonged to those who preferred the categories to remain separate. Not to him." Master Khai paused. "What does a weapon like that mean to a Mandalorian today, do you think? Something forged by a man who was both?" 

"I don't know," Din said finally. "I think it depends what you believe the creed is for." 

"And what do you believe it is for?" 

"Survival. Protection. Something you hold onto when everything else has been taken." He looked down at Grogu, who was looking back up at him with both ears at full height. "Something you pass on." 

Master Khai regarded him for a long moment. "Vizsla wrote about the weight of carrying something whose meaning extends beyond your own life. About what it costs to hold a thing that is larger than you are. He said the weight only becomes unbearable when you stop moving." 

Din said nothing, she was certain he was thinking about his own time carrying the weapon. Grogu reached up and patted the side of his helmet, twice, with the solemnity of someone making a point. Din's hand came up to cover his briefly.  

She had stopped pretending to read the datapad some time ago. She did not think either of them had noticed but by the time the conversation wound down, something had shifted in the room. Not warmth exactly, not trust, but the stillness that settled between two people who had found, against expectation, that they were not, perhaps, as far apart as either of them had assumed. 

When Master Khai mentioned, three days later over breakfast, that he would be away the following day, business at the lower archive district, work that would take most of the day and keep him away until morning, she was the one who sat forward. 

"I remember that place!" she exclaimed. "You took me when I was twelve to see the texts on the early temples." 

"If I remember correctly, you cried." Master Khai smiled fondly. 

"I did not." 

"You did. Quietly, of course." 

She ignored that. "Grogu should see it." She turned to Grogu, who was watching her with the expression of someone who had already decided this conversation was about him and was thrilled.  

"It's the oldest place I've ever been," she told him. "Texts that survived wars, purges, a thousand years of people deciding what was worth keeping. Some of them in languages no one alive can read anymore." She held his gaze.  

Grogu's eyes went very wide. 

"It's a long journey for a child." Din said, clearly unsure.  

"He has spent weeks on the Crest. He'll be fine.”  

"He gets hungry." 

"Then Master Khai will deal with that." She turned to the older man, looking for back up, and found none. 

Grogu, who had followed this exchange with great attention, pointed at Master Khai and then at himself, then made a gesture that quite clearly communicated his position on the matter. 

Din looked at him. "No Grogu." 

Grogu huffed as he pointed again. 

"I said no." 

Grogu's ears went down slowly, one after the other, with the deliberateness of someone making a point. His eyes went very large. He did not look away from Din, intent on working his father into giving in. 

She watched Din hold against it with what she could only describe as professional discipline. 

"He'll be safe with him. You know that." She tried to reassure him. 

"I do." 

"And Grogu wants to go." 

"I can see that." 

Din looked at Master Khai who simply looked back with the composure of someone who had seen this dynamic before. Then he said, "I suppose, if it would set your mind at ease, she could come as well." 

She looked at master Khai with narrowed eyes, "You know we have a job." 

"Of course." He did not say anything else. He looked at her with the expression she recognised as him choosing his words carefully, "How convenient that is." he said finally. 

There was a quality to it that annoyed her considerably. 

Din's helmet angled toward her briefly, just briefly, and away again. 

Grogu, who had been watching Master Khai's attempts with great interest, resumed pointing at himself. 

Din looked at Grogu for a long moment, the look she had come to know as him making peace with something he might regret later. "One night," he said. "You come back in the morning." He pointed at Master Khai. "Anything happens to him-" 

"Nothing will happen to him." Master Khai said. 

"Fine" Din relented. 

Grogu made a sound of pure triumph and immediately began excitedly babbling in his own little language. 

Grogu left mid-morning with Master Khai, toys selected with tremendous gravity and handed to Master Khai one by one for the bag he was carrying. She crouched in front of Grogu and held his gaze. 

"You're going to have the best time," she said. "The archive is going to be the most interesting thing you've ever seen. I want a full report when you get back." Grogu listened, expression serious. She smoothed one ear down gently, felt it spring back. "I'll take care of your dad while you're gone." 

Grogu looked at her for a moment. Then he reached up and patted her cheek with one small hand, and turned back to Master Khai. 

Din was standing in the doorway beside her as they watched Master Khai lift Grogu, toys secured, and head for the corridor. Din's arm came up around her shoulder without him seeming to decide to do it. 

Master Khai looked over Grogu's head at her.  He held her gaze for a moment, as if he was contemplating something before he said, quietly enough that it was only for her, "Be careful." She did not ask what he meant. He turned and they were gone. 

She stayed where she was for a moment, before turning to take in the apaprtment, that was suddenly very empty. 

Din looked at the closed door for a moment, then around the apartment, the same way she was looking at it.  

"You eat anything this morning?" he said. 

"Not yet." 

He went to the kitchen. She heard him moving around in there, quietly working in the now familiar environment. She sat on the couch, pulled her knees up, and listened. The apartment without Grogu in it was a different kind of space.  

He came back with bread and something from the cold unit, set it on the table without ceremony. She sat across from him and he watched her eat in silence. She was conscious, in a way she had not let herself be before, of the specific quality of his attention across a table with no one else in the room. The visor, which she had long since stopped reading as a blank, was on her, the weight of his attention burning through the beskar. 

She looked at her food and ignored the rising heat in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t been trying to orchestrate this situation and if she jumped on the oppurtunity the second Grogu was out the door, she was sure that’s exactly what Din would assume.  

The apartment settled around them. Outside, Coruscant moved at its usual indifferent pace, and in here there was just the sound of them, the day stretching out ahead with nothing in it except the job and then whatever came after.  

He was the one who reached for the dossier. 

She watched him spread it between them and felt something in her chest unknot slightly. Work was something she knew how to do. Work was a language they already shared. 

The shop was in one of the mid-level commercial corridors, wedged between a repair outfit and something that sold fabric in bundles stacked floor to ceiling. The sign above the door was in three languages and told her nothing she hadn't already known from Rax's file.  

The sign above the shop threw purple neon into the corridor and it caught in the beskar, moving across the helmet as he turned to scan the street. There was an air that came around him when he was working, something in the way he held himself, coiled and always prepared, that she had never quite been able to look away from. Every job, she found herself taking stock of him. Sometimes struggling to focus on the mission while she had this beskar-clad man, always an enigma to her, was just an arm's length away.  

He tried the door of the shop. It swung open without resistance, the bell above it ringing once into silence. The interior was dim, shelves half-stocked, nothing moving. Empty in a way that suggested someone had left in a hurry and recently. 

He stood still for a moment, his head angling slightly, reading the empty shop the way she read a room through the Force. 

He pressed one finger to his visor, a quiet command for her to stay silent. Then pointed straight down. 

He went first, circling around the counter with purpose. The floor panel behind it was well-fitted enough that she wouldn't have found it without knowing to look, and below it a narrow staircase dropped into dark. She heard him rack his blaster before his boots hit the first step. She followed, one hand on the wall, the other on her own saber, feeling the temperature drop and the dark settle around them. 

At the bottom, a door. She could feel the presence on the other side through the Force, pressed flat against the wall just beyond it, waiting. She caught Din's arm in the dark and held up one finger. 

He understood. He moved her back and to the side behind him in one motion, putting himself between her and the door, then stepped wide of it and blasted the lock. 

Two shots cracked out of the dark in immediate succession. She felt the first one pass close enough that the air moved against her face. Din was already moving, already firing once, already stepping clear. The second shot went wide into the wall behind them. What followed was a groan, then the dense sound of something large hitting the floor with a thud. 

Din found a light. She had not seen him look for it but there it was, illuminating the room with dim yellow. On the floor lay a Nikto, one leg bent the wrong way, already reaching for the blaster that had skidded from his hand when he fell. Din fired once at the floor between the reaching hand and the weapon. The shot left a scorch mark two centimeters from the Nikto's fingers. The hand stopped moving. 

Din crossed to him, completely unhurried. 

The whipcord came out. The Nikto pulled and twisted and Din let him exhaust it, standing over him with the patience of someone who had already decided how this ended. When the Nikto went still the cord was done. Din planted one boot beside the man's shoulder and looked down at him. 

"You're going to tell me what I need to know." 

She stood back and watched. She was supposed to be reading the room for threats. Instead, she was watching the way Din's weight had shifted onto one hip, the blaster loose in his hand like something he had forgotten he was holding, the exact degree of stillness he was giving the Nikto to fill.  

"Get off me." the Nikto snarled. 

"When we're done." 

"You have no authority here, Mandalorian." 

Din's voice never changed in pitch or tempo. "I'm here as someone who was paid to get information. I have all the authority I need." 

The Nikto made a sound of contempt. "You think I'm scared of you?" 

Din didn't answer immediately. He waited long enough that the question felt like it had gone somewhere and not come back. Then, very quietly, "Are you?" 

The Nikto spat. 

She watched Din look at the floor where the spit landed, then back at the target on the ground. The Nikto watched him do it and she could see the moment the contempt in his face shifted into something more careful. 

"You can give me what I want," Din said, measured, "or I can take it from you." 

"You won't touch me. The people I work for will know within the hour if anything happens here." 

"Good thing we’ll be done within the hour." Din looked at him for a moment. "I'm not going to touch you." He glanced at her across the room. "She will." 

She was aware, distantly, that the look had done something to her that had nothing to do with the job. 

"You can speak for yourself," she said to the Nikto, trying to play good cop. "I'll give you one chance." 

He spat at the floor in front of her. 

Din's shoulders shifted. A very small movement that she had learned to read as controlled anger arriving at a conclusion. He looked at her once. 

She stepped forward and found the Nikto's eyes. 

"You will tell us what you know." She felt the shift in the Force at her words. 

Four seconds. Then it came out, steady and complete, the entire network's structure, the cells reactivating in the Anoat sector, three handler names the New Republic didn't have, a supply route through a station the Director had been trying to locate for six months. The Nikto gave all of it plainly, and when he stopped talking he blinked like someone surfacing from deep water. 

"Good." Din said, and hit him once across the face. The Nikto went down. 

She had her comm out before he finished falling, relaying everything to the Director in a steady recitation while Din released the whipcord and left the man where he lay, stillr beathing. Not their problem. 

The Director's confirmation came back in twelve seconds. 

They came up through the floor panel. The corridor outside was unchanged, people moving past without looking, the city entirely indifferent to what had just happened below it. Din's arm came around her shoulder as they stepped onto the street. She leaned into it. 

"That was quick." She could hear the edge of a smile in his voice.  

"Clean too." 

It had been. She turned it over as they walked, the way she always did after a job, checking the seams of it. The Nikto had given everything without her needing to push past the first layer. All of it had gone exactly as the dossier suggested it would, which was not always the case. She had worked jobs that went clean before. There was a specific quality to the decompression after, a kind of quiet steadiness that was different from relief. She felt it now. She also felt the warmth of him through her jacket and the easy weight of his arm around her. 

The mid levels had their own quality of evening. Not the way the upper levels went dark, where the building lights eventually gave out and the windows filled with something resembling night. Down here the light was constant, ambient, the city generating its own amber from ten thousand signs and corridors and open shopfronts. She had stopped noticing it weeks ago. Tonight she noticed it. She noticed the way it caught the beskar at his shoulder, the way the crowd moved around them, occassionally catching someone looking at the pair of them. 

She went through the intel out loud as they walked, what the cell structure meant for the Director's operation, where the gaps were, what would need a follow-up. He listened without interrupting.  

There was a particular intimacy to this, she had come to understand. Not the talking. The thinking beside each other. The way he followed a problem to its end without needing to fill the space around it, the way she could lay something out and trust that what came back would be worth having.  

"What do you want for dinner?" she asked. 

He leaned close, his helmet near her ear, and said very quietly, barely audible though the modulator, "You." 

The heat of it moved through her from her sternum outward. 

"Let's walk faster." She felt a grin spread over her face as she said it. 

She heard the low sound of his laugh. 

"If your father is in there when we get back, I'm kicking him out." 

She laughed properly this time. His arm tightened around her shoulder. 

She pushed open the door and stopped. 

Dark. The apartment was dark. No one home, no one expected. No small shape on the couch. No toys on the floor. No sounds from the kitchen and no smell from it either. 

Din's hand pressed gently at her back and she stepped inside. The door closed behind them. 

She turned around as she spoke, "Are you sure you’re not hungry?" 

"Starving," he replied, and stepped forward, the door swinging shut behind him. 

He came to her and she let him. His hands found her waist and lifted, coaxing her as she wrapped her legs around him with the ease of something she had imagined too many times to count, felt the beskar firm and cool against her chest. She leaned her head against his helmet, felt his arms settle under her, his breathing change. They stayed like that for a moment, just that, his weight solid against her, and she let herself feel the whole length of months of anticipation collapsing into this single point. 

He walked them to the bedroom. The door swung shut behind them, closed with a kick. 

"Get the curtains." she said, shrugging off her jacket and letting it drop to the floor. 

"Not yet." 

She pulled back far enough to see the visor. "Din..." 

"Not yet." He repeated with an edge to his voice, a plan already formed. She held the helmet's gaze for a moment, then let him set her down on the edge of the bed. 

He stepped back as he took to his armour. 

She usually helped. She knew the order without thinking, had learned it without deciding to, piece by piece passed off to the floor or the stand in the corner. Tonight she sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the light move across each panel as it came away. He worked without hurry and his attention through all of it was on her, the visor finding her every time he set something down. The chest piece. The pauldrons. The bracers. The greaves. Each piece setting the next part of him free until only the flight suit remained. 

She had not said a word. Neither had he. 

He reached for the hem of his shirt and she felt her breath change. Then he stopped. 

"Close your eyes." he instructed. 

She looked at him for a moment. Then she closed them without question. 

She heard him move, felt the air shift as he leaned over her, the warmth of his body close. Then fabric pressed against her face, soft and folded several times, warm against her eyes, her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose. His undershirt. She could smell him in it, clean and warm and entirely him. Something in her chest gave way a little at the fact of being surrounded by him so completely. 

He tied it carefully behind her head. 

"Too tight?" he asked. 

She shook her head, the movement quick, the excitement of it moving through her chest like a current.  

He cupped the side of her face with one gloved hand, just once, and she turned into it slightly before she could stop herself. Then his hands were in hers, turning her palms up, and she understood. She worked the fingers of one glove off slowly, then the other. Something they had done before, a small and simple act that had already become theirs. She set them on the covers beside her. He held her hands for a moment after, bare skin against bare skin, and she felt the warmth of his pulse. 

Then his hands were gone. 

She heard the heavy thump of the helmet on the bedside table. 

His hands came back to her thighs. He pulled her cargo pants and panties down in one motion, swift. She gasped at the sudden cool air, then shifted her hips to help him get them off. Then his hands returned, tracing the bare lines of her thighs, learning the shape of her knees and the curve above them, and she shivered. 

"Cold?"  

"Not at all." Which was true, in fact she was burning inside. 

He hummed. His hands moved inward and without deciding to, against every intention, her thighs pressed together. 

"Relax for me" he said, low and unhurried. 

She made herself open herself up to him. He laughed, low and real, and she felt the warmth of it settle somewhere in her chest alongside everything else. 

She felt him lean over her, the mattress shifting under his weight, his body warm and close. Then his mouth was on hers and the patience he had been giving everything else was simply gone. The kiss was deep and intent. She gave it back in kind, her hands going to his face, his jaw, his neck, tracing the shape of him she had not been able to see. He kissed her like he had been waiting for a very long time to do it without anything in the way. 

He brought one knee up between hers, holding it against her cunt. She pressed down onto it without hesitation, the wet heat of her dragging against the fabric of his pants, and the friction of it pulled a sound out of her she hadn't planned on.  

"What do you need?" he said against her lips. 

She answered by moving against his knee, rolling her hips, slow and deliberate, spreading herself against him, chasing it while he let her. She was aware, with some clarity, of exactly what she was doing. Using him for her own relief, shamelessly, while he held himself still and let her. She did not mind that awareness at all. She moved against him and felt herself start to come undone at the edges. 

Her hand slid down from his hair, his jaw, his throat, his chest, tracing him with her palm, and when she reached his stomach she felt the muscles pull tight under her touch. She moved lower. She felt for his cock through the fabric and went still for a moment, feeling the heat of him, the way he had hardened under her hand, and she pressed her palm flat and felt him breathe in hard. 

His hand came over hers. He did not move it away. He held it there, pressed to him. She felt him under her palm, felt his breath change at the contact, the moment stretching between them, both of them very still, until he gently took her wrist and lifted her hand away. 

"So eager." he teased. 

"You have no idea," she said. 

"We've got all night, baby." He kissed her once, deep and slow, and then his knee and his mouth were both gone at once and she made a sound of protest. 

She felt him shift lower. His breath hitting the inside of her thigh. 

She reached behind her with one hand to brace herself. The other went to his hair. His mouth touched the inside of her thigh and she felt her own pulse everywhere. 

He kissed upward, unhurried, and she pulled at his hair to guide him. He made a low sound against her skin. 

"Patience"  

She whined, low and wanting, the sound pulled out of her before she could catch it. 

He kissed the crease of her thigh and she felt her whole body clench with the nearness of it. 

"You smell incredible," he said, quiet and rough. "Feel how wet you are." His finger traced slowly through her, parting her folds, finding her slit, and she made a sound she was not entirely in control of. "How long have you been making a mess of yourself for me?" 

She pressed toward him. 

"How long?" he urged again. 

The heat moved up through her chest and into her face, the embarrassment of the honest answer sitting right behind her teeth. She didn't want to say it. Saying it meant admitting how long she had been carrying it, how many times she had looked at him across a room and felt it move through her like a current she had no name for.  

"The mission," she managed. "Watching you. Earlier." 

"How unprofessional." His finger moved again, slow and deliberate, and she gasped. "Did you want me to take you right there? In that basement?" 

She nodded, her voice getting caught in her throat. 

"Words." 

"Yes," she breathed. "I did." 

His mouth found her. The sound he made against her was deep and appreciative. Then he was licking a slow stripe from her entrance to her clit and she cried out properly, both hands scrabbling for purchase, one finding the sheets, one finding his hair. 

He pulled back suddenly. 

"Din-" 

"What do you need?" he said. 

"You," she breathed. "Anything. I need to come, please-" 

"Yeah?" She could feel him looking at her. "Wanna come on my face?" 

"Yes," she said immediately. "Please, please I want to..." 

"I want to watch you fall apart," he said, quiet and certain, and put his mouth back on her. 

His tongue worked her clit in slow circles, the scratch of his stubble against her inner thighs pulling a sharp sound out of her every time he shifted. She felt her thighs start to close around his head and forced them open. He hummed his approval into her, the vibration of it making her gasp. She moved against his mouth, chasing it, and he let her set the pace, his hands braced on her thighs, pulling them closer. 

He slipped one finger into her as his mouth stayed on her clit and she arched off the bed. He worked her open slowly, curling his finger up against the soft give of her inner walls, pressing into the place that made her vision go white at the edges as she lay back. She could not hold herself up anymore. She felt the build of her arousal spreading from her stomach outward and tried to hold herself together, tried to stay present, tried to keep track of where her hands were and whether she was breathing. She was losing. He held that angle with the same patience he gave everything else, steady and relentless, and she felt herself dissolving one increment at a time, her hips rolling toward his hand without her permission, small broken sounds escaping her she had no capacity left to be embarrassed about. 

He added a second finger. 

The stretch of it made her cry out, her back bowing off the mattress. He worked her open further, unhurried, curling both fingers against that place inside her until the sounds she was making stopped being anything resembling words. 

Then he added his tongue back into it properly, mouth and fingers working together now, each movement feeding the next. She gripped the sheets and felt her release close, closer, the warmth of it cresting. 

She felt herself getting close and the need to stay here, to keep feeling this, made her try to hold back. She didn't want it to end, wanted to live in the feeling of it a little longer, to chase it rather than let it wash over her too soon.  

"I thought you needed to come," he said. 

She let out a breath that was almost a laugh, shaky and involuntary, because he was right, because he knew, because somehow he had learned to read her well enough to call it. 

Her thighs closed around his head and pulled him back. He pumped his fingers into her relentlessly, his mouth finding her clit again, and when he grazed his teeth over it she sobbed, her whole body seizing every thought she had went quiet. 

"I'm going to-" she started. 

"Good," he said against her, rough and low. "Make a mess. I'll clean it up." 

She came apart. 

She thrust against his mouth and his fingers, shaking, crying out into the dark of the room. He worked her through every wave of it, relentless and thorough, slowing only when she was trembling, pulling at his hair with both hands, saying his name over and over without quite knowing she was doing it. 

When he finally lifted his head she heard him breathe, slow and deliberate. Then she felt him move up her body, felt the warmth of his skin on hers, and she pulled him up by his hair the rest of the way and kissed him, tasting herself on his mouth, his tongue tracing hers. 

His hands moved down her body as they kissed, slow and reverent, like he was memorising the way she responded to each place he touched. She felt his palms at her breasts, her waist, the curve of her hip, learning her by touch the way she had learned him. She pressed into it. 

Her hand found him through his pants and she felt him groan into her mouth. She palmed him slowly, feeling the heat of him, the hard length of him straining against the fabric. 

"Slow down," he panted against her lips, rougher now, "or I'm never going to make it." 

"Just need you," she said. "Can't wait anymore." 

He pulled back enough that she could feel him looking at her, or feel the attention of him in the dark. "We don't have to. Just because we're alone doesn't mean-" 

"Yes we do." She found his face with her hands, both palms against his jaw, and she could feel her own pulse in her fingertips. "I need to feel like I'm yours. I need you to make me feel like I'm yours. Please. I've been waiting so long, I can't- I just need you. Please." 

Something shifted in him. She felt it before she heard it, the quality of his stillness changing, the breath he drew. 

"You are mesh’la" he said, and his voice had gone low and rough in a way that moved through her like heat. "You're mine. You've been mine." 

"Then show me." 

He said, very quietly, almost to himself, "Trouble." Then, with something in it she had not heard before, like the word had new weight it hadn't carried until now, "My trouble." 

He kissed her again, and this time there was nothing held back in it. 

Her shirt went first, his hands finding the hem and pulling it over her head. Then her bra, his fingers working the clasp with more patience than she had. Before she could reach for him he dipped his head, his mouth closing over her breast, tongue tracing slow and deliberate, and her head fell back on a sharp exhale. His fingers found the other nipple, rolling it gently, and she arched into him without meaning to, one hand going to the back of his head to hold him there. He took his time. She reached for his belt, his zipper, shoved fabric down his hips and let him kick it free. When it was finally done and there was only skin, the full length of him against her thigh, she went still for a moment. Just feeling it. The reality of him, unhidden, unarmoured, entirely here. 

She reached up and touched the blindfold. 

"Close the curtains," she said. 

"What?" 

"The curtains. Close them." Her fingers found his jaw, the line of it, the warmth of his skin under her hand. "I need to hear you. I need your voice. Close the curtains and come back to me." 

He was quiet for a moment. Then the mattress shifted as he stood and she tracked him by sound alone across the room, the soft drag of fabric, the pale light behind her eyelids going fully dark. His footsteps back. The give of the mattress. Until his hands found the knot at the back of her head, carefully working it loose. 

Then he leaned in close, his mouth at her ear. "You have no idea how badly I've wanted this. To take you apart. To get inside you and feel you fall apart around me." His hand found her jaw, tipping her face toward him in the dark. "I'm going to ruin you, baby."  

In the dark she shifted, found her bearings and rose to straddle his lap. She felt the weight of his hard cock hard against her, the length of him pressed between their stomachs, hot and heavy against her skin. She was still wet, still slick, and she could feel herself making a mess of his thighs and the knowledge of it, the specific intimacy of it, made her press closer rather than pull back. She put one hand flat on his chest instead, turned her head, settled it into the crook of his neck, and focused on his breathing. 

"Say something." she commanded. 

"What?" 

"Just talk to me. I want to feel it." 

A beat of silence. She felt the rise of his chest under her hand as he considered this. Then he said, "You're so beautiful." low and plain and without performance. She felt it move through her whole chest, felt his voice as vibration under her palm, in the air between them, in the warmth of his breath against her hair. She breathed him in. 

"That's all you've got?" she said, smacking his chest lightly. 

He laughed. She felt that too, the movement of it in his ribs, in her palm. His voice was the only part of him she got to have completely. No armour over it. No modulator filtering it, no helmet between his mouth and her ear. Just him, completely, with nothing in the way. She pressed her lips to the side of his neck and felt his pulse. 

"You know what I kept thinking about," he paused, "Every time you looked at me like you could see right through it." His hand moved through her hair, slow. "Like the armour wasn't even there. Like you were just looking at me. I don't know what to do with that. Someone looking at me like that. Like whatever's underneath is enough." Another pause, longer. "You never asked me to take it off. You never looked at me like you were waiting for something else. You just saw me." She felt the warmth of it spreading from her chest outward, different from the ache between her thighs, broader and more frightening, the warmth that had been living in her for months every time he was near. 

She knew. She knew exactly how she felt. She could name it, had named it to herself in the quiet, had turned the word over and found it true. She thought about saying it. Maybe he should know, before this. If he wasn't in the same place she should give him the chance to know that before they did this. But the last time she had loved someone it had been carved out of her. She had been young and stupid and so completely wrong, and the certainty was the worst of it, the way she'd had no idea it was coming. This was so much larger than that. Not just the two of them. There was Grogu to think about, there was all of it. Din had already given her so much, had let her in, had been vulnerable with her in ways she knew cost him. She did not want to push. She held the words somewhere behind her sternum and kept it. 

Din shifted under her, "Hey, I mean it we don't have to do this tonight." 

She reached between them and wrapped her hand around the base of him and started moving, slow and deliberate, the same unhurried teasing he'd given her. 

"Really?" she said. 

He groaned, head dropping back. "Maker have mercy," he said, rough and feeling every word of it. 

His grip tightened on her hips. She swept her thumb across the bead of liquid forming at his tip, brought it to her tongue, moaned around her own finger. His hips shifted upward involuntarily and she felt the control he was exerting, the effort of holding still for her. 

"I only know one thing right now," she said. "I need you inside me." 

He guided her hips, one hand steadying her, the other finding her entrance, aligning her above him. She started to lower herself, felt the thick press of him beginning to stretch her open. She'd barely taken the head of him before the pressure coiled tight in her belly, her walls fluttering around him already. 

"You okay?" he said, taut with the effort of not moving. "Does it hurt?" 

She nodded, breathed through it, tried to lower herself further. "Fuck, it hurts" she muttered. 

His hands tightened on her hips, steadying, holding her up. "That's enough, sweetheart." 

"No." She shook her head. "Din it hurts so good. I need all of you." She pressed down another fraction and felt herself stretch further, the sound that came out of her not entirely dignified. "Please baby, please please please, give me all of you." 

Something in him broke loose. He cursed under his breath, then gathered her, and flipped them in one motion. 

She gasped as he slipped free of her, the sudden emptiness making her walls contract around nothing. Then he was hovering over her in the dark, his mouth finding hers. The kiss was hungry and open, his teeth catching her lower lip, her hands finding his shoulders and gripping, holding on. He kissed her like he was making a point. His hands found her face, her hair, holding her like something he'd been afraid would slip away. 

Then he lined himself up and pushed into her. 

Slowly. Giving her time, feeling every inch of resistance give way, the stretch of it making her breath come in small broken pieces. She felt him filling her in increments, felt the give of her body around him. When she finally felt the weight of him fully sheathed in her cunt, she let go of the breath she'd been holding in one long, shaking exhale. He held still. She could feel him everywhere, the stretch of it, the impossible fullness. Her hands curled into the sheets. 

"Din," she whined his name. 

"I know baby, I know." His forehead dropped to hers. His breathing was ragged, controlled by effort. "I've got you. You're doing so good." 

"So full." The words came out soft, barely more than exhaled. "It's so much. Don't stop." 

"You were made for me," he said, rough and quiet, and she felt it somewhere behind her chest alongside the word she was keeping. 

"Move," she said. "I need you to move, baby." 

He pressed his lips to her temple. Tender, careful, completely at odds with the hunger of everything before it.  

Then he withdrew slightly and pushed back in, slow, deliberate, watching for her. Testing. She felt every fraction of it. Her hands found his back, the muscle there, and her nails pressed in hard enough that she felt him pull a breath. 

He did it again. Still careful, but less so. 

She cried out his name, loud and unguarded, loud enough to fill the apartment and spill past it, and she felt him shudder at the sound of it. 

"Faster," she said. 

He gave into it. The pace he set was not gentle. It was the answer to months of waiting, thorough and relentless. She felt him everywhere, splitting her open, felt the pressure of it coiling again already, the pain from before ebbing into something that was only fullness and heat and him. She was already fluttering around him, her body responding without asking her permission. 

He groaned into her ear, the sound raw and unguarded and entirely without the careful measure he gave everything else, and she clenched around him instinctively. 

"Fuck," he said, between thrusts, panting the word out. "Do that again." 

She clenched again. 

His hand came up in the dark and traced her face, her cheekbone, her jaw, his thumb at the corner of her mouth. "I'm close" he said. 

"Me too." 

"That's my girl." His hips didn't slow. "Come around me. I want to feel you." 

She felt herself tightening around him and he groaned, low and broken, his rhythm stuttering for just a moment before he found it again, harder. She pulled him down to her mouth and the kiss was nothing like the ones before it, open and desperate, more breath than anything else, his forehead dropping to hers between thrusts, both of them panting into the small space between them. 

"Maker, you're perfect. You're mine. All mine." 

"Only yours Din" she said.  

She shattered. It hit her all at once and kept going, wave after wave before she could catch her breath between them, and she gripped him and shook and heard herself crying out and did not try to stop it. He followed her over, his hips stuttering, his groan low and raw in her ear, his whole body shuddering against hers as he spilled into her. They rode it out together, clinging, breathing hard, the room dark and close around them. 

He held himself there until she stopped trembling. 

Then he pulled out of her slowly, and she felt the warmth of them trickle against her thigh. She heard him exhale, low and wondering. His finger traced through their collective release, gathered it, and then his hand was at her mouth, gentle, and she parted her lips and sucked his finger clean without thinking, tasting the two of them together. 

He made a sound from somewhere deep in his chest. 

"You'll be the death of me." he said. 

She didn't have words. She felt boneless, spent, the good kind of ruined. There was a thought somewhere underneath all of it, quiet and persistent, the same one she had been keeping behind her sternum all evening. She let it sit there. It wasn't going anywhere and neither was she. She turned her face into the crook of his neck. 

He shifted. Got an arm under her and lifted her against his chest. She let him. She was too spent to do anything but hold on, her face still turned into his throat, and she felt his heartbeat against her cheek as he carried her the few steps to the head of the bed. He pulled back the covers one-handed, laid her down against the pillow. She didn't want to let go of him. He climbed in after her before she had to ask, pulled her close, her back to his chest, his arm settling heavy across her. 

She pulled his arm tighter around herself. 

“I’m yours too, you know that right?” 

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.

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