#something deeper

In the morning, Nova wakes up first. 

The sunlight, streaming in through the windows, is the polar opposite of Mandalore. There, everything is blue—muted, cool, soothing even in its holocene. Here, the warmth seeps in through the curtains before the sun even rises, the sky already pink and toned and gorgeous. Both mornings offer different things—steadfastness versus serenity—and yet, both planets feel like home.

For the first time in what feels like an entire lifetime, Nova doesn’t have a nightmare. No Sparmau. No blue lightning. No Ezra, desperate and lost in another mortal plain. No visions of her parents’ ship being dragged out of the sky. No ominous, creeping warning that the First Order–or the looming villainous nothingness—is coming. Just dreamless, restful sleep. 

When she wakes up, it’s slow. The pink light streaming in through the windows is the first thing she notices, the way it warms the floorboards and spills over the mess of their bedding. The off-white comforter is turned orange by the glow. The second thing she notices is the way her body aches, familiar bruises swelling over the map of it. But Nova grins with the hurt of it all, marveling at the way Din’s fingerprints are embedded in her thighs, over the grasp of her hips, pressed into her throat. It’s familiar and nostalgic—it’s been so long that the bruises that line her body were from love instead of war. 

The third thing she notices is Din. 

His mouth is parted slightly, the pink light of Naator cresting over the rugged contours of his face. It slopes over his nose, and Nova resists running her finger over the bump in it. She doesn’t want to wake him from his sleep. He looks peaceful, rested. 

“I love you,” she whispers into the open air, barely making a sound. “I love you so much.” He doesn’t stir, just takes in a quiet inhale. Nova stares at him in his sleep, memorizing every single atom that makes him up. At the beginning of all of this, before she knew Din as Din, she wanted him. A gravitational pull anchored her to his side, the Mandalorian who intrigued her. His depth, his kindness—they were shown in small doses, through the cracks in his armor, both literally and figuratively. The way he refused to leave her behind on Corellia. The way he protected her when Xi’an came back to the ship. The way he chased her down when her heart told her to flee. And now—now, even when she betrayed him, even when she ran after promising she never would again, here he is, tangled in her arms, ready to marry her all over again.

Nova can’t help it. Her eyes well with tears. 

Din stirs under her watchful eye, and Nova bites her lip, trying to swat the tears away. His eyelashes flutter open, and when they come to rest on hers, there’s nothing but love. And then, immediately after, concern. She swipes one away with her fingernail, but Din catches her wrist midair. 

“Novalise,” he says, slowly, carefully, “did I hurt you?”

Nova swallows, stroking the line of his jaw with the hand he isn’t holding captive. “No,” she whispers. “No. I’m just being emotional.” 

His eyebrows furrow, his eyes sharpen. Din for you’re lying. 

“I’m not lying,” she protests. “I’m not hurt. I promise. I just…I can’t believe we’re here. I’m so happy that we’re here. After all this…it feels like a dream.” 

At that, he softens. “I know.” Silently, Din pulls Nova against his chest, and she crumples against the safety of it. For a few minutes, neither of them speak. Din traces shaky but certain circles across Nova’s bare back. “You did…so well evading me.” 

Nova pulls away, grinning up at him. “I told you I’d give you a fair fight, Mandalorian.” 

Din cracks a genuine, rare smile. “You did,” he says, shifting against her to face her head-on. “I…I believed you, you know. I was just trying to rile you up. I knew you could the whole time. I didn’t doubt you.”

Nova squints. “You doubted me a little.” 

Din sighs. “I’m an expert,” he murmurs, dropping his lips to his collarbone. “Hunting bounties was all I ever did before I met you.” 

Nova hums, leaning into his touch. “Did you ever fuck your bounties?” 

Din stops, pulling away. “No,” he says, immediately. “Only you.” 

Nova smiles, biting down on her bottom lip. “I know,” she whispers, lazily running a hand through his hair. “I remember what you told me, the first time you kissed me, back on Dantooine. You didn’t really do anything before you met me.” 

Din nods, his eyes on her lips. “Nothing of consequence. Nothing that mattered.” 

Nova meets his gaze, giving him a gentle smile. “I know.” The repeated assurance hangs between them. “Next time you catch me,” she breathes, her eyes roaming from Din’s to his mouth, “you should handcuff me.” 

She can feel him harden against her leg. “Were my hands not good enough?” In response, one slides up to bracket her neck. “Do you need more of a reminder?” 

He squeezes down, just enough for the edges of Nova’s vision to bottom out, and she gasps into the open air. “A reminder,” she stutters out, “of what?”

Din shifts, pinning her legs under his, and once again, Nova feels like divine prey. “You know what, cyar’ika,” he breathes into her open mouth, “that was the last time you’re ever running from me.” 

Nova sighs as he straddles her. “Who said anything,” she manages, meeting his sharpened, lustful eyes, “about running?” 

*

The sky has bled through violet to magenta to salmon to pale pink by the time Din and Nova eat and get outside. The door, thrown open last night, never got closed, so when they walk out into the open air, they’ve spent the morning already breathing it in. Nova steps over the vestibule to the sky, so gorgeous that even the highest level paints couldn’t capture it correctly. The morning, there’s a hint of fall in the air, a chill that persists even with the sun high in the sky. 

It’s perfect. Naator, in all its beauty, is perfect. Being here, after everything they’ve endured is perfect.

She feels Din come up behind her before she sees him. The smell of leather and gunsmoke and metal and earth and something more than all of them. Cinnamon, ever-present, even though the spice doesn’t even exist on most of the planets they’ve journeyed to since. It still smells like home. She turns, slowly, reveling in it. He’s back in the beskar, covered in reflective silver. His helmet, though, is trapped against his hip and his hand. 

Nova beams. Din smiles back. “You’re out in the open,” she breathes. He did the same thing on Sorgan. He’s shown his face to everyone that he considers family, now. But this is different. This isn’t in grief, or in a controlled space. It swells in Nova’s throat. 

“Until we reach town,” Din confirms, pulling her into his armored body, slinging an arm around her jacketed shoulders. They walk, in unison, around the bend in the little clearing their cottage is dropped in, through the crunch of the yellow leaves that keep dancing down to the ground. 

Nova savors everything around her—the feeling of the leaves beneath her boot, the air singing with honeysuckle and soil, the mild pink skies above the gaps in the trees. Naator feels sacred, like something holy. To her, it is. Untouched, a relic. So far away from the war and violence that’s seemed to follow them all around over the last year. She’s determined to keep it that way. Nova’s jaw clenches with the unspoken promise.

“What?” Din murmurs, low enough that it just resounds next to the shell of her ear. 

Nova swallows. “I…while we’re here, I want to pretend. Pretend that the First Order isn’t lurking in the darkness. Pretend that Ben doesn’t turn evil. Pretend that Ezra is safe, or that he’s just a dream.” She bites down on her bottom lip. “Pretend that war isn’t coming,” she whispers, quieter. “But—”

“But,” Din interrupts, not unkindly, “that’s not how you work, Novalise. That’s…not who you are.”

Nova nods. “Exactly.” 

Din regards her carefully. “Do you remember what it was like?” He asks, and then echoes, “before?”

Nova blinks a few times, coming to a standstill. The leaves drop wistfully to the ground around them, but the trees never become bare. It’s like they replenish every time one falls. The woods around her aren’t silent, but they seem to hold their breath as she stops. “When the Empire won?” 

Din nods. 

“I couldn’t forget even if I wanted to,” Nova whispers. It’s the full truth. “I wasn’t alive when they came into power, but I know…I remember how dark everything was. Uncertain. Horrible.” 

“The First Order doesn’t seem as…”

“Obvious?” Nova cuts in. 

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Din muses, “but yes, actually.” 

Nova sighs, rubbing her eyes. Even though she had her first night of restless sleep for the first time in what feels like years, she’s suddenly exhausted. “I think…I think they’re in their infancy,” she says carefully. “I know when all of this started, when you became Mand’alor, that we thought they were a more…present threat. I think the pieces that I know about—Gideon not being in charge of everyone, Sparmau’s connection to ‘him’ and the Dark Side, visions of Ben Solo as someone evil and unhinged—they’re all…futuristic, almost. Like maybe the First Order isn’t in existence yet. But I know they’re coming.” Nova punctuates it with a double-fingered tap across her heart. “I can feel it, Din, in here. But it’s not just the First Order ahead of us to fight. It can’t be. There’s a million restless pieces hidden behind the scenes, and the evil that they are might just be the tip of the iceberg.”

Din watches her, curious, awed. “Do you think…do you think that there’s anything to fight against? Right now?”

Nova chews on her bottom lip. “I mean, there are things to fight, after we get home. I don’t…I don’t know if they have a fleet of starships or that they’re ready to attack us. But I know there’s something wrong with Ben. I know the visions I’ve had will become real someday. I know that Qi’ra and the Crimson Dawn, whatever the hell they are, want political capital and to run spice through Mandalore.” She looks up at him. “I kind of wish they—whoever they are—had a fleet of starships ready to attack us, though.” 

Din offers a small smile, and as always, it makes Nova’s heart flip over in her chest. “Something concrete,” he allows, hooking an arm around her shoulders, steadying them both. “I know what you mean. But…Nova, there’s no war here.” 

And the weight doesn’t lift completely off of Nova’s shoulders, but it feels lighter, more tangible. Enough to push away the darkness. Enough to put in on pause. 

The town is as serene as it was the last time they were there. Nova watches as Din pulls his helmet over his face, turning from man to Mandalorian. When they step out from behind the trees, it feels like something shifts. Nova’s hair is still a disaster from the night before, but no one gives her a second look after greeting both of them with a smile. Everything is glorious in the morning light, sifting through all the gorgeous yellow trees. 

It moves at a sleepy pace, this town. It’s a comfort after spending so much time running for her life. Nova passes through the gauzy curtains fluttering in the light breeze, breathing in the scent of the leaves. Everything here feels safe, colored a perpetual state of goldenness. 

“Are you hungry?”

“Hmm?’

Din gestures toward the restaurant in front of them. “Hungry?” 

Nova’s eyes glitter. “You satiated that need already.” 

Din cocks his helmet at her, and Nova laughs into the open air. 

“No,” she concedes, swinging out in front of him to wrap both of her arms around his neck. “No, I’m not hungry. But I want to go somewhere. Come with me.”

Din doesn’t move until Nova’s hands slide down from where they’re clasped at the nape of his neck, gliding across the individual, seamless pieces of beskar, down until they grasp his gloved hand. He lets Nova pull him onward, through the idyllic little town, with no resistance, without any quarrel. 

The little flock of trees where they stood once, preserved under the perennial, falling yellow leaves—it’s not distinct enough to stand out. But Nova remembers walking over the gnarled roots in the ground, the branches that curled up and over the others, like they’re dancing, trying to hang perfectly in the air. She weaves in and out of birch trees, small, flowered bushes, until both her and Din are back in the spot where they started. A lifetime ago, the first time they fell together on this planet, when it was love before the word. 

Din observes, silently, from under the visor. When Nova turns around to study him, she catches herself in the tiniest blip, a singular supernova of deja vu. She inhales, breath shuttered in the valley of her throat, chewing on her bottom lip. Around them, the leaves dance down, a lulling melody in the gentle, sweet wind. 

“You told me,” Nova says, in a whisper so quiet that Din has to lean in to hear her, “that I was your home once. In this very spot.” 

He doesn’t move. Slowly, agonizingly, his hand snakes up across the fabric on her arm, up to the bare, exposed dip of her collarbone, anchoring finally against the back of her neck. Nova falls into his gravitational pull—the same way she did the first time, the same way she always has. “Novalise.” 

“Listen,” she mouths, and Din falls silent, obedient, waiting. “You’ve been my home since I met you. Since I walked on the Razor Crest. Since you trusted me enough to let me in, but if I’m being honest…long before that.” She stops, trying to keep her voice steady. “But this is where I admitted it. This is where our lives, together, really started.” 

Din nods, just once, the beautiful warmth of Naator reflected dully in his beskar. 

Nova reaches up, hooking her fingers under the rim of the helmet. “Do you trust me?” she asks, and this, too, vaults her back in time. 

“Yes.” The permission is there in his voice. Nova takes a sharp, solid inhale, and lifts it off. He’s staring at her, love in his eyes, half-lidded, star-studded. Like even in all of Naator’s gorgeousness, Novalise is the only thing in the entire galaxy. Nova’s heart catches in her chest, as it always does, as it always has. 

“I love you so much,” she breathes, and then repeats it in Mando’a. Din echoes her, and as Nova watches his lips curve around the contours of the vowels, everything explodes. 

Nova recoils, skittering backward as if she’s been struck, her head and her heart split open by lightning. She holds both her palms over her eyes, trying to shut it out—the immediate weight of it all, the heaviness of holding the world on her shoulders. All the peace that Naator usually offers suddenly dissipates, and doubt seeps in like fog, like poison, like venom. It holds her captive, whispering in her ears like a death rattle—Sparmau may be dead, but Nova put her in the ground. Blue lightning. Ezra trapped in an alternate dimension, one that may not even be real at all. The look of pure evil simmering in Ben Solo’s eyes. Something ocean blue and dangerous, lurking on the edges. The impact of her parents’ ship fracturing off into a million awful pieces. Cara’s death. The darkness coming in from every angle, shaving off every single piece of her until the only thing left is a weapon. The wound Jacterr carved into her stomach. The scars she wears every day. The look on Din’s face when she left—again—the resounding echo of I don’t forgive you.

“No!” Nova screams, and it reverberates through the trees. She has no idea how the chasm opened, but now that it’s been carved, she can’t escape it. She’s going to fall in. So she does the only thing she can—run.

Not alone, though. Never alone, not again. She reaches forward and snatches Din’s gloved hand, unsure if she’s able to manage any apology, pulling him behind her. Din stares at her, stunned. Nova can see it out of the corner of her eye. But panic comes up and threatens to swallow her whole, and despite all of her promises, she keeps running.

“Nova!” 

“Follow me,” she cries, a choked, visceral sob. It’s too much. It’s not enough. She feels like a false idol, like she’s been masquerading. The love she feels, the love that she’s lost. Her home on Yavin. Her parents, killed by an enemy she wouldn’t meet until ten years later. The man she thought she loved, how his punches felt like knives. Giving up the Rebellion. Nearly losing her life in space. Cauterizing every single wound she’s ever had with a shimmering, vital blade. Trading happiness for disaster. Din walking away from her on Dantooine. Having to fake her death on Mandalore. Looking pure evil in the face and winning. Almost losing Din and Bo-Katan in the same stroke of horror. Every awful thing Grogu’s had to endure. Surviving and nearly falling over the edge. Not being forgiven. Looking in the mirror and seeing a split between Novalise and the saint and Andromeda. Past lives and lives yet to come. Ezra’s panicked face. Blue lightning. Horrible laughter. The certainty that darkness will rise again. The future, shimmering but uncertain. The longing for something more pounding inside of her chest, finally laid bare. Wanting to be holy, to live forever. Wanting a quiet life here, on Naator, with no more hurt ahead of her. This is what hurts the most—a glimpse at a future that still hangs uncertain. All of it collides, a horrible kaleidoscope. 

“Novalise!” Din’s voice is unobscured now, sharp, sudden. Nova can hear it register, faintly, barely, over the incessant pound of blood in her ears. She runs across the flower field, up the barely trodden path towards the cave in the maw of the mountain, open and waiting for her. Neither of them are attempting to remain quiet this time, disrupting the forest’s peace. Nova can’t find it in her to care, to bring herself down to the earth. Her heart is still screaming. She’s following the sound, how it coaxes her toward the cave. Her name, a chant, three times. 

“Novalise.” 

This time, it isn’t just Din’s voice–it’s a triumvirate. Nova can feel it calling out to her, whispering  through the sage, amber glow of the forest. She climbs, over and over again, until she’s standing at the cave’s open mouth. Din’s only a few steps behind her, but Nova hurtles through the opening. Like it’s making a choice. And Din follows, right on her heels, like she knew he would. 

“Nova!” 

She turns. 

“I’ve had this dream,” she whispers, “over and over again. A vision, maybe. It’s me, looking in this mirror at the top of a dais. Almost like the throne room on Mandalore, but different. And I’m wearing this dress, Din, silver and shimmering, with this—halo on my head.” She swallows. “And I see her everywhere. This version of myself, this saint. I see Andromeda, too, her innocence, her determination, her brokenness. For months, it’s replayed on a loop in my head. I’ve been trapped in this alternate dimension with two timelines in opposing directions. It’s crazy. I know. I know how that sounds.” Nova steps toward him, reaching her hand out. A plea. “Come with me.” 

Din stares at her, helmetless. His hair is a mess. His eyes flash with worry. “What?” A single word with such care, such concern. “Novalise—” 

“I don’t know what it means,” she whispers, broken in half. “In every dream, either of them will tell me they’re—me. That I can’t throw it away. When I saw Ezra, he told me I can’t throw it away. None…none of it makes sense. They’re glimpses. Force visions are like that too, especially the ones Grogu makes me see, when he presses his head to my forehead. And I didn’t understand. I never understood. But,” she says, pulse racing, the realization that it’s the truth warming her belly from the inside, “I do now.” 

Din just cocks his head at her. “What do you mean?” 

Nova grabs onto his hand, which latches perfectly into hers. “I need to show you something.” 

Din lets himself be led. He doesn’t argue that she said the same thing back down the mountain, that she’s not making sense. He trusts her—wholly, implicitly.

Nova carefully retraces her steps, following the trickling, shimmering stream to the center of the cave. On top of it, still impossibly, sits the dais with a mirror. Din’s breath catches in his throat, an impossible thing. Nova swallows, leading him closer, closer, closer. Slowly, carefully, she walks up the stone to the center of it. There’s barely enough room for the two of them on the same pedestal, but they make it work. Nova’s leg draped over Din’s, her foot notched against his boot to keep them in place. 

“Do you trust me?” Her mouth is only a few inches away from his, her hair flowing in an invisible breeze into his face, tangled in his beard. Din swallows, eyes glancing off her lips, and then he nods. Resolute. Complete. 

His answer is the same as it was before. The same as it always is. “Yes.” 

Nova dips her chin, chewing on her lower lip. “It might be scary,” she whispers, just a breath, nothing more. “I’ve never—Grogu is the only one I’ve been able to do this with. Others have put visions in my head, but it’s only people who can use the Force.” She swallows. “But…the mirror. I think the mirror will help me show you.” 

Din’s eyes flit across hers. “Nova,” he says, quietly, “I don’t understand.”

Nova huffs out a tiny laugh. “I know. I know you don’t. But you will.” 

Din holds her gaze. “I trust you.” Unwavering. 

Nova swallows. “I love you.” Absolute. She reaches up, snaking her right arm around so that it latches onto Din’s temple. She matches the placement on her other hand, the other side of his head. A tether, a lifeline. Slowly, she turns his head to face the mirror. “Open your eyes.” 

He does, but only in theory. They’re still closed, but Nova can feel them moving, flickering, tracking. She appears in the mirror, the saintlike version of herself. Her face is impeccable, a portrait. A world crackles to life within her gaze. The image flickers. It’s her at fifteen, lips half-chewed and not nearly as pink as they are now. Her hair, shoulder-length and messy. That same gleam in her expression, her chin jutted upward, her eyes on the stars. The rest of it comes in flashes, two ends of the continuum. Her parents: Piper tall and statuesque, Arokel with his crooked smile. The way her mother’s hands match and create her own. The flicker of her father’s eyebrow, his constellations charted across her nose. The smell of springtime on Yavin. Seeing space for the first time behind the pilot’s seat. Flying Kicker for the first time Din’s breathing through the modulator. Flying in the Crest. Swimming in a sea so blue it hurts to look at. The glittering of the stars above. The sound of a lightsaber igniting. The sharp cliff edges of Ahch-To. Landing on Naator for the first time. Din’s face, bare and unrestricted. Din down on one knee. Din on both knees, face between her legs. The hook in Din’s nose reflecting in the low light of the ship. Din leaving her on Dantooine. Din finding her again in the double suns on Tatooine. Din’s mouth on hers. Din’s warmth radiating across the void, bringing Nova back home. Din giving Nova her name all over again. To radiate. To shine in silence. Sparmau’s catlike gaze locked on hers, knives in Nova’s heart. Her blood full of poison. Her anger like venom. The vision of Piper and Arokel’s ship crashing down into nothing. Andromeda. Jacterr’s fist connecting with her jawbone. The scar he ripped up her stomach. Nova taking her first life—Jacterr, then her own, right after each other, in succession. Seeing Wedge again by chance, and letting him bring Andromeda back. Meeting Luke in person, even more magical than she ever could have dreamed. Leia’s lightsaber lighting up in tandem with her own. War on the horizon. Din, Din, always Din. Grogu’s tiny little hand pressed into hers. The crystal cave on Ilum. Boba and Fennec letting her hug them, embrace them. Cara’s knowing, sacrificial smile. Bringing Din back to life. Being ready to sacrifice herself over and over again, the martyr complex that somehow refuses to die. Meeting Sparmau as Andromeda back on Yavin. Sacrifice, eternal sacrifice. Her lightsaber hanging off her belt, the Darksaber in her hand. The feeling of karma, of justice, of triumph over evil. Din’s hand in hers, over and over again, making Novalise Nova. Saint. Andromeda. Novalise. Over and over again, Nova spills her lifeline over into lifetimes, showing Din every incredible, agonizing piece. Of who she was before. Of the woman she is now. And of the holiness she will be someday. Only with the vision of the two of them tied together on the cliff’s edge when he proposed does Nova let everything recede, fall back into place, and takes her hands off of Din.

It’s his choice, now, if he wants to give her his in return.

For what feels like an eternity, Nova doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t do anything, terrified that she’s broken some rule of what she can and cannot do, using the Force for something corrupting, something dangerous. Her heart hinges in her chest. In, out. In, out. 

“Oh,” he breathes, and Nova doesn’t dare move. “Oh.” 

She swallows. Din’s eyes fly open. 

“You—” he cuts himself off, breathing heavily in the cathedral ceilings of the cave above them. Nova feels dizzy. “That’s what it’s like? Being in your head?” 

It’s so gentle. Nova can feel the tears coming. “I—More and more now, it’s all the time. It’s every single waking moment, everything that’s brought me to this one. And everything that’s yet to come.” 

Din stares. 

“I know I’ve been a disaster,” Nova breathes. “I know I’ve made mistakes, Din, over and over again. But I’m trying to fix it. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to save us, and the galaxy. I don’t know how. But I know that I will.” 

“I would say you’re just one person,” Din manages, slowly, carefully, “but—” 

“But I’m not,” Nova admits, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip again. “And now you know it. You know it all.” 

“When you left to fight Sparmau,” Din says, still tentatively, like he’s trying to fit it all together, “you really were doing it because you didn’t think you had another choice.” 

Nova’s eyes well with tears. “Yes. I didn’t. And it’s not an excuse, Din. It’s not an excuse for running from you, or not giving you a chance to make the decision with me. But for as long as I can remember,” she stops, hitching in a shallow breath, “running has been the only way to keep me safe. To bring me home. You’re the only thing in ten years that has ever made me stop. And when I had the choice to stand my ground or to run to protect you, I ran. Muscle memory. Because it’s kept me alive. And it was my biggest mistake.” She swallows. “This time, when I ran up the mountain, I knew you’d follow me. And I knew I could show you this. Because this is what it’s like to be—” 

“You,” Din manages, raggedy but strong. “You, Novalise. You.” 

Nova swallows. 

“I love you so much,” she whispers, a breath of a thing, moving as close as their tiny proximity will allow. “Darasuum. Forever. And I want to spend the rest of my life—this lifetime, last lifetime, and the next lifetime—with you. But, Din—” Nova’s breath catches, and she closes her eyes, trying to find the center, “—I don’t know if I can marry you in front of everyone—after all of this—without you forgiving me.” 

He stares. She grabs his hand, holding it flat against her chest. 

“I know…I know that might not be fair. I didn’t tell you I forgave you right away, either. And I know forgiveness is hard. I know betrayal is the worst wound. I felt it when you left me. But I need you to believe that I am never, ever going to run again. You loving me, it’s penance. It’s—it’s karma, in the best kind of way. And I understand if it’s going to take time. I don’t need your forgiveness right this second. But—”

“Novalise,” Din interrupts, and Nova stills. “I forgive you.” 

Her heart wrenches upward. What a terrifying, magical thing. “Din, I just said—”

“I forgive you.” 

Nova presses her lips together. “You mean it?” 

Din nods. A vow. “I…I don’t know if I can live multiple lifetimes like you can.  I will love you in this one, and I will try to carry it…into the next. But,” he says, tipping his forehead against hers, his gloved hand lacing in her hair, “don’t you dare ever leave me again.” 

“Never again.” She’ll learn how to say it in Mando’a. She’ll say it in every language the stars know. But it’s the truth, regardless of what tongue it’s spoken in. So when Din presses his lips to hers, Nova feels forgiveness. This is the karma that led her here. And this, too, feels like coming home. 

*

Three more days pass. In every one of them, Din shows Nova every single piece of the parts she thought she’d lost in the battle. They lay in the middle of the flower fields, mapping out the constellations, tracing the stars. They climb trees like children, laughing in midair. They fly Kicker around, across the ocean, up into the stars. Nova watches as Din learns how to pilot an X-Wing, grinning and giddy the entire time. They eat food in the village, and in the back booth, away from everyone else, Din eats, unarmored. In the evenings, in the mornings—their bodies find the same rhythm they’ve invented and reinvented, every moment a brilliant, shining star. 

The night before the wedding, Nova falls asleep in Din’s arms. Above them, the night sky shines purple and pinpricked to let the light through. The cool, flowery breeze filters in through the open windows, letting the wind dance the curtains around and around—like they, too, have been swept off their feet. 

“Thank you for bringing me back,” she mumbles, barely awake, and as Din’s hands stroke over her head, Nova doesn’t know what she means—bringing her back to Naator, bringing her back to her senses, or bringing her back to life.

He folds her in even tighter, and whispers I love you over enough times that those words, too, hold multitudes, a vow. 

*

Bo-Katan crash-lands in the middle of the field the morning before their wedding. With a gleeful, unnatural smile on her face, she shoves Din out of his own house, stacking his arms high with Mandalorian blue colored clothes. The ship—Bo-Katan’s ship, Nova guesses—has been completely renovated. Its belly is gleaming silver and wide enough for Din to spend the entire day as the guests start arriving. Bo-Katan, however, gives him a strict order to not see Nova again until she’s walking down the aisle, and even though Din huffs off, Nova sees the glimmer in his brown eyes as he walks away, memorizing every inch of her until he gets to hold her again, scooping Grogu off the ground as he walks away.

“You’re excellent at literally everything else,” Nova says, as Din and Grogu walk off across the field to Bo-Katan’s awaiting gunship, “why can you not fly a ship to save your life?” 

Bo-Katan fixes her with a withering icy glare. “We all have our flaws.” 

Nova grins at her, pulling Bo-Katan and her full armor into a hug. “A year ago, you never would have admitted that.” 

Frustrated, Bo-Katan pushes Nova away, up and over the vestibule, and manhandles her into a chair. In the mirror, Nova watches the light in her best friend’s eyes, hiding her small smile against the rogue curls that drift into her face. “A lot can change in a year, Novalise.” 

Nova sighs, letting Bo-Katan brush through her hair, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “I know.” 

“With us,” a voice from the doorway sighs, “a lot can change in twenty-four hours.” 

Nova grins. Wedge, for practically the first time in his life, isn’t wearing his orange jumpsuit. He looks unfinished without it, mildly uncomfortable. He keeps running his hands over the hem on his jacket, like he’s increasingly aware he’s not supposed to be wearing it. 

“Hey.” Bo-Katan snaps her fingers. “No men allowed.” 

“That is not Naboo tradition,” Wedge says, ignoring Bo-Katan’s order and the sour look on her face. “Just the husband-to-be. I’m allowed to see the bride.” 

“How would you know,” Bo-Katan grumbles, but she moves off towards the fresher to run the tub anyways, and Nova stands up and settles into the notch of Wedge’s arm. 

“You look beautiful, kid.” 

Nova raises her eyebrows. “I haven’t gotten ready, yet, Wedge.” 

“Still,” he grins, pressing a peck to her temple. “You always are.” 

Nova swallows. “I wish—”

“Me too.” She doesn’t need to finish the sentence for Wedge to understand. Today—and every day—the two of them feel the loss of Piper and Arokel. Out of the corner of her eye, Nova can see the grave, sad expression on Wedge’s face. Long ago were the days that it didn’t exist at all. For a second, Nova sees it in flashes—him carrying her around on his shoulders when he was a teenager and her parents weren’t much older, back when Nova was still Andromeda, back before this life existed at all. But she blinks, pulling away, and Wedge looks the same as he always has—the smile lines on his face are so much more prominent than the wrinkled ones. “They’d be so proud of you, Nova,” he whispers, and Nova lets herself sink into the sadness of it, the regret she has. “I am, too.” 

Nova looks up at him. “It’s still weird,” she manages, sounding like a little kid again, “remembering they’re not here. Fighting this war without them. Especially with whatever comes next.” 

A strange, pained expression flits across Wedge’s face, but it passes as quickly as it appears. Nova’s eyebrows furrow, but before she can ask, Bo-Katan reemerges without speaking and points one impeccable finger towards the doorway. “Later,” he says, and the double meaning isn’t lost, even as he disappears into the pink sunshine of the early afternoon. 

The day fades off into a brilliant, shining salmon. Nova can feel the heat leaving as Bo-Katan sits her down, braiding white flowers into her long, curly hair. 

“How’s Mandalore?”

Bo-Katan meets Nova’s eyes in the mirror, finishing the last strand of her hair. It’s beautiful—long ringlets cascading down her back, two strands framing her face, a braided crown across the base of her skull. Nova bites down on her bottom lip, raising her eyebrows in question. They’re perfectly even, except for the scar that cuts through her right one, a few shades lighter than the deep brown of her skin. Nova asked Bo-Katan if she should fill it in, and Bo-Katan had given her a very definitive no. 

“Ready to have you back,” Bo-Katan says, her voice guarded. More so than it usually is, and Nova raises that unfinished eyebrow in question. Bo-Katan sighs. “Not thrilled about joining with Rebel forces, but rallying behind their Mand’alor.” She straightens up, shoulders back. “They’ll come around.” 

“You’re so sure about it,” Nova says softly, and Bo-Katan nods, resolute. “How?” 

“Because,” Bo-Katan answers, smoothing the silk collar of Nova’s robe over her shoulders, “Mandalore is a planet of warriors. And you’re the strongest of us all, leading us into whatever battle comes next. They might not love you, but they trust you. And respect you. And, besides,” Bo-Katan sighs, “War is always coming. That’s something you and all of Mandalore have in common.” 

Still, there’s something weighted there, but Nova doesn’t push. There’s a whole lifetime of the next fight ahead of them. This moment—this is for love, for peace. For war to be laid bare. 

“I’ll be right back,” Bo-Katan says, abruptly, and Nova smiles at her receding in the mirror. Only then does she look at herself head-on. Her face has been made up—not in armor, not in war paint—but in the same simple makeup that Piper Maluev once wore for her own wedding. Her lips are pink, her eyes are delicately lined in black. Nova feels Andromeda here in equal measure, glittering just like her parents are, alive in memory and in her. Arokel’s eyes, Piper’s beauty, Andromeda’s smile. 

Nova stifles a sob. Bo-Katan walks through the curtain into the corner of their bedroom, alarm immediately catching on her face. 

“What?” Bo-Katan asks, immediately, moving swiftly into position. “Did Din do something? I’ll punch him, would that help—”

Nova shakes her head, willing the tears to keep at bay. “You chased him out of here upon pain of death, Bo-Katan.” She swallows through shards of glass. “No. I…I just…I can’t believe my parents aren’t here.” She swallows. “I know Din and I are technically already married, and they weren’t at that either, but…this is a Naboo wedding. The kind my mom and dad had. And it just hit me that they’re gone. They’re never going to see me get married. They’ll never meet Din, or Grogu, or you, Bo-Katan.” She touches a hand to the beskar Rebel symbol hanging from her neck. “I’ve been running for so long,” she continues, quieter still, “that I forgot how much it hurts when I’m not.” 

Bo-Katan doesn’t say anything. For a long time, she just stands there, at attention at Nova’s side. And maybe that’s enough, Nova thinks. Bo-Katan’s love language isn’t words, anyway, it’s action. The fact that she’s here, facing it all with Nova anyway—that’s enough. And then, with the stealth only a Mandalorian can possess, she turns around to one of the bags splayed over the bottom half of her bed. Silently, she unzips it, pulling something white and gorgeous out of it. 

Nova watches, backward in the mirror. It’s not until she turns around that she understands what Bo-Katan brought her. “You made me a dress?”

“I,” Bo-Katan says, so carefully, “did not. It would look like armor if I did. But I helped. Creative direction. Whatever you want to call it. The stitching on the outside is silver.” She points at the gossamer thread that laces the gown together. It’s glorious. It’s long and flowing, with miniscule stars scattered all over the train. The sleeves are silky lace that catches Mandalorian blue when it hits the light. The top of it looks structured—like wisps of beskar—like it’ll fit Nova perfectly. It’s so beautiful. “Some of it is thread from Mandalore. But…not all of it.” She looks at Nova in a way Nova can’t quite decode. 

“Where’s the rest from?” 

Bo-Katan swallows. “You’re allowed to be mad.” 

Nova startles. “Why would I be mad?”

“Because…I kind of…stole something.”

Nova raises her eyebrow. 

“From you. Well, not you, really, but something that was—yours.” 

“Bo-Katan. I have no idea what you mean.”

Bo-Katan sighs in frustration. “I went to Yavin. I went into the old base and found your family’s quarters. In the corner, there was a pile of bookbinding materials. In there…I found thick silver thread.” She clenches her jaw, looking uncomfortable. “It was your father’s. For his linguistic books. I wanted you to have something. Of his. For your wedding.” 

Nova’s eyes go glassy. Her throat tightens even more, and this time, she can’t stifle a sob.

“Oh, Maker,” Bo-Katan says, dropping the bunch of fabric in her hands. “Nova, I’m sorry, I thought you’d like it, that you’d—I don’t know, feel like your parents were here with you—”

“You went to Yavin?” Nova manages. “You went to Yavin, for me?”

Bo-Katan stops, her shoulder sagging. “Of course I did,” she whispers. “You’re my best friend.” 

Nova gingerly lifts the dress back onto the bed and then promptly launches herself into Bo-Katan’s arms. Well, against her armor, because Bo-Katan’s arms aren’t open. But slowly, as if she’s adjusting to the shock, they come up, closing around Nova’s back, patting her gently—if awkwardly—between the shoulder blades. 

“I, uh,” Bo-Katan says, muffled against Nova’s thick, never-ending curls, “I have something else, too.” 

Nova dislodges herself the best she can, wiping her eyes frantically with her fingers. “What else could you possibly have?” 

Bo-Katan slowly reaches back into the bag, rustling around until she pulls it free. Nova watches it glitter in the low light before she can blink into focus. Immediately, she recognizes it. It’s the headpiece her mother wore in her own wedding. It’s the halo of stars that Nova wears in every vision of herself, saintlike and untouchable. 

“Bo-Katan—”

“I put everything back,” her friend says quickly, cutting Nova off. “In the place it came from. The room looks undisturbed. I promise.” 

“Thank you,” Nova says, in one breath of air. “Thank you so much. I don’t know how you found these things. I don’t–I don’t know where you even got the idea. But you…you don’t know how much this means to me.” She swallows. “I’ll have a piece of them there at the wedding, after all.” 

Bo-Katan’s lip wobbles, and that’s enough for Nova to yank her back into a bone-crushing hug. “I know what it’s like to lose your family,” she whispers. “I wanted you to know that…you still have one.” 

Nova swallows, her throat constricted. She’s trying very hard not to cry, to keep her makeup intact, to save the tears for the ceremony itself, but as usual, the tears threaten anyway. “I love you,” she manages, through all the emotion. “I know you don’t like gushy speeches of emotion, but I do, and you need to hear it. And…Bo-Katan, you’re my best friend. I had no idea when I first met you that you’d become this person for me. But I need you to know that I couldn’t do this, any of this, without you.” Nova’s hands glance off Bo-Katan’s cheeks, warm and full between her palms. It’s so different from the icy exterior that once seemed impenetrable. Up this close, Nova can see the light smattering of freckles stubbornly scattered across her nose. “You’re a good person, Bo-Katan of the clan Kryze. You’re the best kind of person. You’re the one I need in my corner. You’re the person I trust in a fight. And whatever’s coming for us next is going to be a hell of a fight.”

“I know you and Din are Mandalorians,” Bo-Katan says softly, “but I sincerely hope your wedding doesn’t turn into a fight, Novalise.”

Through her tears, Nova tips her head back and laughs. It’s blurry when Bo-Katan comes back into her line of sight. “You know what I mean.” 

“I do.” Bo-Katan sobers, picking the dress back up. “But that’s not what’s important right now.” 

Nova splays a hand over her heart. “Bo-Katan Kryze focusing on something other than an impending war? Say it isn’t so.” 

“Shut up,”  Bo-Katan says, but there’s no malice behind it. “Get dressed.” 

And so Nova does.

The entire procession is gathered outside. Nova shivers in anticipation through the crack in her front door, looking at the magenta sunset hanging on the horizon. She swallows, catching a glint of light against the beskar, and her mouth runs dry. There, at the end of the aisle, decorated with yellow leaves and flower petals, is Din. Her husband already. The love of her life. 

“Are you ready?” 

Nova whirls around. As if in a trance, Bo-Katan reaches forward and straightens her veil, the starry crown encircling her head. Nova swallows. “It’s stupid to be nervous, right?” 

Bo-Katan considers it. “You’re already married.” 

“I am.” 

“It’s Din standing at the end of the aisle. Not some…enemy.” 

“Yes. Din.”

“Realistically speaking, walking down an aisle in front of all your friends is the least scary thing you’ve done in…months.” 

“Realistically speaking, you’re right.” 

“Well,” Bo-Katan says finally, “it may be stupid. But I think you’re allowed to be irrational. Just for today.”

“Right.” Nova exhales. “I’m still scared. Just, you know, for the record.” 

“Well,” Bo-Katan says, simply. “I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel, so in my book, I suppose that’s fine.” 

Nova chews on her bottom lip, stalling until her heartbeat runs back down to its normal beat. “Were you ever in love?” 

Bo-Katan affixes her with a sour look. “I know you remember my dating history, Novalise.” 

Despite everything, a laugh bubbles up in the back of Nova’s throat. “And you know mine. You can easily love someone who turns out to be a monster.” 

Bo-Katan sobers. “Not like this,” she answers, softly, and Nova knows she’s laying everything bare. “Not the way you love Din. And certainly not the way he loves you.” It blooms in her chest like the honeysuckle and clover growing in Naator’s gorgeous fields. “When Sparmau took us to Coruscant, there were hours when he wouldn’t talk to me, you know.” Bo-Katan swallows. “He was furious at me, Nova, for letting you escape. For helping you go off to fight Sparmau on your own. If she didn’t kill us, I knew I could lose him anyway. Not because I kept your secret. But because he was willing to sacrifice everything to make sure you were the one who came out of it alive.” 

“If she killed you, either of you—”

“I know.” Bo-Katan’s eyes flash in the low light. “I know, because I would have felt the same way, Nova.” 

Nova tries to keep her composure. 

“Sparmau left, once, after torturing us for hours.” Her voice is barely there. “My throat—it was swollen, almost shut. Din was beaten half to death. And he looked at me, helmetless, with that anger in his eyes, and I tried to tell him it would be okay, that you were coming, even if I didn’t know if she’d even let that happen.” Bo-Katan swallows. “And he looked at me with one good eye and said, ‘Nova’s job isn’t to save us. It’s to save the galaxy’.” 

Nova stops breathing. 

“And I tried to tell him he was being stupid. Because he was. As if you’d let us stay there. But he yanked me close with the chains keeping us knotted together and whispered, ‘But she’s going to save us anyway.’”

Tears well up in Nova’s eyes. “He did?”

Bo-Katan nods. “I told him some bullshit about how he couldn’t stop believing. I didn’t know where it came from. It was like you possessed me for a minute there, or something. He was still so mad, but he listened. And then he said, ‘Nova’s the only miracle I’ve ever believed in.’” 

Nova exhales, a shaky, rattling thing. I don’t believe in miracles, but I believe in you. “Bo-Katan—”

“That man hasn’t known faith in the same ways you have. He doesn’t hold weight in higher powers like you and I do. But Din Djarin has looked a miracle in the eye every single day since he met you and knew that was something holy.” Bo-Katan steps forward, grabs Nova on the arms of her glittering, silver-white gown. “Whatever war we go into next, that man will be a zealot for you. He will defy every single person who tries to tell you no. You’ve brought him back from death more than once. I’m telling you this now because I need you to know that if you are scared walking down that aisle, you are an idiot.” 

Nova startles. It brings her back down to earth, a lightning strike. 

“Every single person standing out there would walk into battle with you. We have before. We will again. But the one at the end of the aisle, Novalise? He’s had a crisis of faith for the last two years. And you’re the only divine thing that’s pulled him out of it. He’s not afraid. He’s standing there, helmetless, in front of people that have somehow—” Bo-Katan punctuates this with a begrudging eye roll, “—become our family.” She stops, adjusting the starry crown atop Nova’s head. “He’s not scared of any of this. That’s a man who’s all in.” 

Nova straightens her shoulders. “Thank you,” she whispers, the words wobbly. She wants to cry, to give Bo-Katan a sappy speech about how the only miracles she’s made happen are because of the faith people have in her, about how her best friend is something holy herself—but she reigns it in. Bo-Katan went out on a limb to give Nova these words. She owes it to Bo-Katan to give her sweet, meaningful silence. So she just squeezes down on Bo-Katan’s grip, letting her friend take one arm instead, fisting the curtain in the other hand, and gives her a nod. 

She’s not afraid anymore. There’s a war ahead, sure. There always will be. 

But this love burns so much brighter. It shines so much deeper. 

The music starts to swell, stars pricking to life in the magenta dusk.

Nova’s sage eyes meet Din’s brown ones—emotion marrying warmth, over and over and over. Everything shimmers and sparkles. Something deep inside of her chest comes to life. Slowly, Nova and Bo-Katan make their way across the aisle, strewn with flower petals and yellow leaves. Around them, the people they love—Grogu, Luke, Leia, Wedge, Boba, Fennec—beam as Nova and Bo-Katan pass, but Nova doesn’t take her eyes off of Din’s, that beautiful, singular locus.

When his hands clasp around hers at the end of the aisle, everything in the universe shifts into place. 

“Hi,” Nova whispers, holding the weight of the world in that one, desperate confession. 

“Hi,” Din echoes, and everything else fades out. 

This, right here? This is something deeper. This is the best kind of karma. This is coming home.

Bo-Katan moves around behind them, orbiting the two of them like a singular star. Only then does Nova look out at the small, mighty procession—the people gathered around them in a semicircle, strewn across flower petals and yellow leaves, the sky shining a deep, warm pink above them as the sun slips over the horizon. All of them, gathered here, putting their individual fights to bed, to share in this radiant, brilliant moment. It thunders in Nova’s veins, makes her heart grow three sizes.

“On Mandalore,” Bo-Katan begins, “weddings aren’t a ceremony. They’re simple, private events. Two Mandalorians remove their helmets and say their vows in Mando’a. Those are the kind of weddings I grew up with.” She looks at Nova, then over at Din. “But we’re not on Mandalore,” Bo-Katan continues, with a ghost of a smile spreading across her face, “and Nova and Din are something other than Mandalorians.” 

Din narrows his eyes slightly. Nova grins.

“Love,” Bo-Katan says, rolling her shoulders back, “used to be a four letter word to me. The people I loved were my sister, and the most evil woman in the galaxy.” Nova meets Bo-Katan’s eyes, which glimmer with just a lapse of momentary grief. “Both of them are dead now, for better or for worse.” She swallows. “But love,” she continues, into the pink night, “is not. Not here. Not ever again. You know, Cara was supposed to do this part. She was supposed to stand up here in front of the entire crowd and perfectly proclaim why Novalise and Din are perfect for each other, why their love is so special, but Cara is dead now, too.” 

Nova sneaks a furtive glance at Bo-Katan, raising her eyebrows. Bo-Katan shoots her back a chilling glare, perfectly clear—I know what I’m doing. Nova looks at Din, who imperceptibly shakes his head, a small smile splayed across his face, and Nova relaxes. 

“I hated Nova when I first met her,” Bo-Katan says, and both Luke and Fennec laugh out loud.

“Bo-Katan,” Nova interjects, “seriously?”

“I hated Din more,” Bo-Katan continues, serene and unperturbed. Din presses his lips together as Bo-Katan tilts her head towards him, undeterred. “Really. I thought you were a zealot, and I thought Nova was too hopeful for her own good. I didn’t want to spend a second with either of you. I wanted Mandalore for myself.” She stops, looking up toward the three peaks in the distance. “I don’t want that anymore.” 

Everyone settles back into silence. 

“My whole life, I’ve judged people by the way they’re able to hold their own. Especially on the battlefield. And since I’ve known Nova and Din, there’s never been a second of peace. Both of them, in their own ways, have fought back. Back against tyranny, back against evil, and most of all, back against me.” She moves a half step closer. “Not with weapons, but with determination. Care. Anger, sometimes, sure. But most of all, with love. There’s been a hell of a fight since Nova and Din met me. And a fight even before that, when it was just Nova and Din against the galaxy. Before they brought us in on any of it.” She stops, and Nova catches her eye, and for the first time, Nova sees something that could be tears reflected back at her. “I once thought there was one way to be a Mandalorian. I didn’t think someone raised as a Child of the Watch could be a Mandalorian. I certainly didn’t think that a Rebel pilot—a Jedi, at that—could be a Mandalorian. But both of them have sat on that throne, and I’ve never wanted to fight alongside two Mandalorians more.”

“Nice save,” Din mutters, and Bo-Katan shoots him a death glare. 

“To Novalise and Din, though,” Bo-Katan says, ignoring him entirely, “fighting isn’t a way of life. It’s to have a life, after the battle is done.” She stops, watching as a shooting star streaks across the sky. “The battle might be done, but this war isn’t,” Bo-Katan whispers, more to herself than to any of them, “but I know at the end of that one, too, the love that the two of them have will outlast all the fighting. The rest, though,” Bo-Katan says, “and everything in between, is up to them.” 

Nova beams at her. Din smiles, too, and Nova can feel the eyes of the family they’ve chosen gleaming back at the three of them, the unlikely triumvirate, as Bo-Katan steps back. 

“Neither of you are wearing helmets,” Bo-Katan says, “but—”

“I want to say the Mandalorian vows anyway,” Din interrupts, and Bo-Katan nods, pleased. He looks at Nova, and the entire galaxy shines back at her in those brown eyes, trained just on hers. “Repeat after me. Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde.”

“Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde.”

We are one when together, we are one when we’re apart, we will share all, we will raise warriors. 

At Din’s feet, Grogu coos. 

Nova grins, tears sparking up in her eyes. “On Mandalore, they exchange words in Mando’a. On Naboo, they read vows aloud. On Yavin, marriage was mostly made in the skies. And on Naator,” she says, carefully, “we’ve done all three. Din Djarin, you’re already my husband. In name and in love, in war and in peace, you’re the one I love. From Andromeda to Novalise to the woman I will be, you’re the one I need by my side. I’ve loved you since you saved my life the first time, and I will love you long after my bones turn back to dust.” She swallows. “You know every inch of my soul—every horrible, fractured, glowing inch—and you’ve never once looked away. I am yours in love and in life. I will be yours in death. You are the only one,” Nova mouths, her hands squeezing down on his bare ones, “who brings me back. To you, this I swear.” 

“Novalise Djarin,” Din begins, carefully, eyes flickering over to their very captive audience shifting under the bareness of his words and of their gaze, “Andromeda Maluev. I think you saved my life more times than I’ve ever saved yours.” His grip is tighter, stronger, swearing every chosen word down to the marrow in her veins. “I once said I don’t believe in miracles, but I believe in you. Now, more than ever, I think they’re the same thing.” For a second, Nova thinks he’s done talking, but Din’s mouth unhinges from where it’s been pressed down to the quick. Speaking in this much succession, unmasked, his words heard by more than just her ears—it means volumes beyond what she could ever say. “Your name, Novalise, comes from the Mando’a word novay’lain. To radiate. To shine in silence. And you shine, but never just in silence. And I will follow you,” he says, the words barely above a whisper, “into the dark, into the storm, and into every war. Without question.” His eyes blaze, and then Din sighs—not out of boredom, but out of love. “To you, this I swear.” 

“Din Djarin,” Bo-Katan says, and even though she’s fading back into the night, Din eclipsing everything else in Nova’s line of sight, Nova knows this, “you may kiss your bride.” 

“Way ahead of you,” Din murmurs, and he crashes his lips to Nova’s. Above them, surrounding them, everything explodes into stars. Later, after the light completely leaves the sky except for the galaxy hanging, all of them dance and sing, twisting around each other like there’s nothing left to fight, like celebration is all any of them know. They build a bonfire in the night, their smiles and the flame keeping the warmth around them. The mountains surrounding them embrace the people here, standing sentinel, keeping watch. The stars glitter and dance. The leaves, yellow confetti, line the ground. Here, on Naator, there’s only family and friendship, and love, so much love. In this moment, this shining, glittering moment—it’s only Nova and Din and the family they’ve made, this home they’ve built out of starshine. 

After the celebration, the group fragment off their own separate ways—Luke back to Ahch-To to teach, Leia back to Hosnian Prime to lead, Boba and Fennec back to Tatooine to guard, and Wedge, Bo-Katan, Grogu, Din, and Nova back to Mandalore to plan. There’s a war building—none of them have said the words aloud since the wedding, but plans have been made. They’re a garrison, all of them, and each of them have a part to play to make that garrison into an army. For now, everyone is gathering resources. When morning comes, Mandalore will become everything it needs to be—birthplace of their blended army, solace to the surviving Mandalorians, a truce between populations that used to be enemies, newfound Rebel base, and home to Nova and Din. But for now, it’s them in the blue darkness,  newlyweds getting ready for the life ahead of them.

*

Walking into the palace on Mandalore feels right in a way that it’s never felt before. Nova moves up the marble steps, into the open doors of the place they call home, and she feels the rightness in her chest, something finally laid bare. 

“I’ll take Grogu to bed,” Bo-Katan murmurs, squeezing Nova’s hand as she plucks him out of her tired arms. “Don’t stay up too late.” 

“Thank you,” Nova calls after her, throwing the weight of her gratitude into it. Bo-Katan just nods in acknowledgement and lets Nova and Din press their own kisses onto Grogu’s big green forehead, disappearing up their staircase. 

“I want to take you to bed, Mand’alor,” Din whispers into the crook of Nova’s neck, his breath rupturing goosebumps across her entire body, lighting up under the silk of her wedding dress. She lets him push her against the blue wall, lips ravenous, divine, pulling her into his gravity. 

“That’s a fantastic idea,” Nova murmurs as Din’s tongue slides against her jugular, her hands knotted in his hair, “but I want to fuck you on my throne, Mandalorian.” 

Din stills. Nova grins against the feeling of his tongue on her neck, flickering, halting. “You know,” he says, carefully, intentionally, “you’re the leader of this planet, Novalise. You could order me to do anything. I’d be helpless, without a choice. Needing to comply.” 

Nova’s moan goes directly upward, into the vaulted cathedral ceilings. “That sounds familiar.” 

She can feel the low grin stretch across Din’s mouth from where it’s anchored against her pulse point. “I may have…stolen it.” 

“You make a habit of stealing things, Din Djarin?” 

“For you?” Din’s hands travel lower, lower, until they’re cupped under the curve of her ass. Nova sighs as she gets lifted off the center of gravity, falling helpless to Din’s dictation. “I’d steal the stars.” 

“Well,” Nova concedes, high and breathy, “if anyone could.” 

With a long, languid noise, Din’s mouth pulls—regrettably—off of her neck. But when Nova sees the look on his face—hungry, wanting—she doesn’t miss the press of his tongue against her skin. “Are you going to rule with an iron fist, Mand’alor?” 

“Not Mandalore,” Nova whispers, tracing the outline of his pink, bitten lips with the tip of her finger, “but you, maybe.” 

A groan falls out of his open mouth, and Nova grins. 

“You’re fucking devilish,” Din grits out, and Nova can feel how hard he is as his grip slips, watching the silhouette of her tongue swiping over her top lip. “The galaxy is lucky you use your power for good.” 

Nova winks. She has him here, in the palm of her hand, fully enraptured. It doesn’t ever get old—the allure that comes with holding the Mandalorian’s heart, mind, and soul between her fingers. How lucky she is to have him, to love him. How lucky he is to know her, to adore her. “For the galaxy, I’ll use my power for good. But for you, Din Djarin, I’ll use my power however I damn well please.” 

For a second, just a fleeting, blip of a moment, Nova wishes he had the helmet on. She wouldn’t trade the look in Din’s eyes—pure, unrestrained lust—for anything, but to be able to hear the moan that just passed through his lips through the modulator would make everything inside of her molten and wet. “Use me however you damn well please.” 

Din’s looking up at her like she’s something holy. And in this shining second, Nova feels like holiness is just that—divinity, not a burden to bear. Everything inside of her is shimmering, glinting silver. The beskar he’s adorned with. The stitching that structures her dress. Everything here is shiny, eternal. 

So is Nova. 

“Let me down.” 

Din whimpers. “But—”

“You had your turn to be in charge. That’s my throne now.” Nova hooks her finger under Din’s chin, pulling his brown eyes, reverent and half-lidded, up to gaze into hers. Slowly, she unhinges her grip and points instead to the gleaming beskar throne on top of the dais. “Do you understand me.” 

It isn’t a question. 

Din’s grip relinquishes as he lets her go, sliding up from the curve of her spine, over her hips, settling into the crook of her waist. Poised, ready to snap into action, but waiting for Nova’s orders. 

When her feet are on the ground, solidly, Nova wets her parted lips. Din’s fingers hitch into her sides, but he doesn’t move, resolute and unyielding. Even without the helmet on, he’s acting like the Mandalorian—ready to strike, but waiting for the signal. “Get on your knees.” 

Din’s eyes, dark and hazy, flash at her request. 

Nova raises a singular eyebrow—the one sliced through with the scar. She watches carefully as Din’s irises flick up to it, back down to her own. All reverence. All delight. Nova steps forward, refusing to break eye contact, until she’s flush against his body. Din’s hands slide up her ankles, cupping the backs of her calves, until they anchor to the backs of her knees. Nova knows how much strength he holds, how Din could cut the sides of his hands towards his body and tumble her down to the floor. Like a knife, poised as something other than a weapon. A willing one. 

Everything stills as Din looks at her. Nova bites down on her lip, lust pooling between her thighs, running like lava through her veins. She knows how much willpower she has left—it’s an hourglass counting down to nothing. If Din moves a singular muscle, she’ll crumble, relinquish every semblance of power, and beg him to fuck her here, on the floor, the throne be damned. But she watches as his lips part, tongue hanging in the open chasm of his mouth, and she has another idea. 

Slowly, silently, Nova reaches up the back of her dress. In a stroke of genius, Bo-Katan’s design choices for this wedding dress included a silver zipper instead of pearly buttons up the back. In one solid, smooth stroke, Nova yanks the zipper down her spine, goosebumps erupting all the way down. Gently, she steps out of the cathedral of a dress, swiping it to the side, away from damage across the blue floor. Din watches as it slides away, Nova standing in her silver slip and nothing else, still holding all the power. 

“You’re still wearing your beskar.” 

“Yes, Mand’alor.” Din’s voice is so thick. It makes Nova’s blood thunder in her ears. 

“Take it off.” 

Din’s eyes don’t leave hers as he starts prying every single piece of it from his body. First the pauldrons, then the gilded plates on his arms, and then, finally, the chest. Dully, Nova recognizes the significance of it—his heart, too, completely in her hands. The palace is dark and quiet. Everyone else is either gone or asleep—and hopefully, for Bo-Katan’s and Grogu’s sakes, well out of earshot. 

When the final piece of armor clatters ceremoniously to the floor, Nova steps forward and grabs Din’s face on either side, possessive, hungry. It’s the same way he’s grabbed her since the second they first collided—with the want of someone starving, with the weight of a collapsing star. He falls into her touch, heavenstruck, possessively. 

“Do you want me, Mandalorian?” 

“More than I’ve ever wanted anything,” Din manages, choked and distorted. Nova strokes a thumb over his cheekbone and Din’s eyes close, committing her to memory. 

“What if I told you I wanted to fuck you on the floor?” 

“Fuck, Nova—”

“Or on the holotable?”

“Anywhere,” Din vows, the words thick with lust, “Maker, any way—”

“Do you trust me?” 

Din’s eyes fly back open. “If you don’t know that by now,” he whispers, “I think we might have a problem.” 

Nova’s smile spreads across the entirety of her face, and the giggle she lets out bubbles up in the air around them, melodic, butterfly-winged. She leans in closer, swiping her thumb across Din’s mouth. “Protect your head,” she whispers, and as his hand comes up to shelter the back of it, Nova plants her bare foot against his chest and sends him backward. 

The breath knocks out of Din’s lungs. Nova waits a beat for him to recover and then slowly sinks to her knees, the ghost of that smile still flitting across her mouth. “Good boy.”

Din groans. “I thought,” he says, words ragged, “you wanted to fuck me on your throne.” 

Nova shrugs, hiking the slip up as she drops her panties to her knees, straddling Din’s chest. His breath hitches in the hollow of his throat as she gets closer and closer, sliding up across the smooth marble of the floor until she’s hinged just above Din’s mouth. “Oh, baby,” she murmurs, hooking her fingers inside of his teeth and pulling his tongue free, “I am on my throne.” 

Din moans so loud that Nova can feel his body beneath her spasm. She waits, the words hinging on her mouth, but he shakes his head so vehemently that his hair moves. His hands, so obediently pressed to the ground a second ago, snap to her hips, bringing her cunt down low enough that Nova can feel the hot heat of his breath blowing up into her. “Don’t you dare.”

“What?” It comes out as breathy as Din’s does.

“I’m not having just a taste,” Din says roughly, “I’m going to fucking devour you.” 

Nova squirms as he brings her down closer. “I’m in charge,” she protests, but it’s so halfhearted that Din’s laugh echoes against her bare pussy as he licks a line clean up to her clit.

“Whatever you say, Mand’alor,” Din concedes, hot and wet against her, and then he sinks her all the way down. 

Nova moans as she adjusts to the rhythm and warmth of Din’s mouth. It’s only been a handful of hours since the last time he went down on her, but it feels like years. He takes his time, careful with it, and until Nova adjusts to the shock of it, he takes it slow. Agonizing. The power in his tongue is unparalleled, unlike anything she’s ever felt. Her pulse thunders in her ears as Din’s grip tightens around her hips, tongue playing everywhere but her entrance. 

“You’re going to leave me bruised—”

“Good,” Din growls, and the absence of his tongue for the split second it took him to say it makes the building orgasm flutter and shake just for a second. “Don’t you dare run away. Let me drink from your cunt.” 

Nova’s eyes roll back in her skull. “Oh—”

Din’s tongue finds her clit again, and Nova’s whole body thunders from the impact. She reverberates as he traces it with his tongue, once, twice, three times—and she’s a goner. Nova cries out, unintelligible. He doesn’t let up, as insistent and thorough with her pussy as he is with the bounties he hunts down. Panting, Nova tries to pull away from it, every single nerve in her  body firing on all cylinders, but Din grinds her down farther. 

“What did I say about running?” he croons, breath hot and intense against her. 

“Not—running,” Nova pants out, “fuck, Maker above—”

“Don’t pray to the Maker. I’m your god now.” When Din’s tongue finds her entrance, he thrusts up and inside of her, and Nova screams out, a far cry from a singular moan. She’d send the entire palace thundering towards the throne room if anyone was listening, but right now, the entire galaxy fades out. Nova folds in half as Din brings out another orgasm, then another, and her thighs are shaking, ruined, by the time he’s decided he’s finished, gently placing her back down against his chest. 

“Holy shit,” Nova breathes. 

“Something holy, that’s for sure,” Din says, lifting his chin to meet her eyes. “I meant it when I said you weren't allowed to run from me ever again.” 

Through half-lidded eyes, Nova tries to catch her breath. “I wasn’t running—”

“And I wasn’t finished, Mand’alor,” Din breathes. “How could you deprive me of tasting you until I’d drained you?” 

Nova grins down at him, heart pounding against her ribcage. “Drained me? I haven’t fucked you yet.” 

Din raises an eyebrow, breathing ragged and uneven. 

“We still need to break in the throne up there,” she says, pointing up at the beskar on top of the dais.

“We’ve broken it in,” Din murmurs, letting Nova use his hands to brace up against as she rises, shaking, to her feet. “Or do you not remember the first time I fucked you in this room?”

“Oh, I remember it,” Nova says, grinning, grasping Din’s throat in her hand as she slowly leads them backward, towards the steps to where the dais is raised. “But that was when you were Mand’alor. It’s my turn now.” 

Din’s knees sag as Nova’s hand travels down the valley of his throat to the silken blue of his underclothes. Slowly, they climb up to the top, the metal glinting even in the low light. Nova lets go of Din, just for a second, to slide both straps of her slip down over her shoulders, watching as it sparkles as it drops to the floor. On the step below, Din gathers up the fabric in his hands and tosses it off the dais altogether. It’s just Nova and her star-studded halo on the throne now. 

“Holy fuck,” Din says, reverently, and if Nova coulmd’t taste divinity on his lips before, she can sure as hell see it in his eyes. “You’re—perfect, Novalise.” 

Nova crosses one leg over the other, and Din’s eyes travel down her naked body, ravenous. “Take your clothes off.” 

He complies. In the dark, even under midnight skies, he shines. The contours of his body—memorized, well-loved—are so familiar, equally as holy as the look of love in his eyes. Din’s eyelids flutter. “I have a confession to make.” 

Nova raises her eyebrows. 

Slowly, he slides the waistband of his trousers to the floor. In it, though, Nova can see the wet spot there, sticky, still gleaming on his skin. “Din,” she whispers, pussy clenching, “did you cum from eating me out?” 

Silently, he nods.

“Just from that?” 

“I could taste you every day for the rest of our lives,” Din breathes into the hollow of her ear, bending forward until his hard cock is flush against her bare thigh, “and cum every time from that alone.” 

Nova moans.

“But I’m selfish, Nova,” he whispers, “and I want to fuck you, too.” 

“I’d make you beg,” Nova pants, “but I don’t have the patience.” She reaches up, grabbing him buy the neck again, and Din’s knees lock into place as Nova pulls herself off the throne and spins them around, pushing Din’s chest so he lands back against the beskar. He looks so regal here, even without the silver adorning him, especially with nothing on at all. Nova moans as he drags her forward, kicking her legs open so that she can straddle him. “Tell me you want me,” she whispers, into the open air behind them.

Everything stills. “I’ve never wanted you more,” Din manages, and then he’s thrusting up into her as Nova sinks down. Her eyes roll back in her head. Nova cries out as he ruts into her, feverish, devilish, desire coursing through his veins like he’s never fucked before. 

“Din—”

“I know, sweet girl,” he murmurs, teeth sinking into her neck, “I know.” 

For a moment, neither of them can speak. Nova moans, the sounds higher and higher, floating clean up through the vaulted ceiling to the stars above. On Mandalore, it’s a rare, starry night—the fog disappearing long enough for every single shining locus in the sky to hear their worship. 

“I’m—yours,” Din slurs, breath hot and heavy in her ear, “fuck, Nova, I’m all—”

“Wait for me,” she pants, already cresting on the edge of her orgasm. She wanted it to last forever—the sex on their wedding night—but as Din cries out into her ear, Nova’s ready. “I’m gonna—” 

“Don’t make me wait anymore,” Din growls, hips slamming into her as he pounds her, relentless, both of them unanchored and edging towards a supernova. 

“Cum for me,” Nova manages, and stars above, he does. Right as he erupts, spilling hot, pearly ropes into her, Nova clenches down, and they go over the edge together. As they always do. As they always will. 

And on the comedown, foreheads pressed together, the words fall from Din’s swollen lips: “We have all night for more.”

Nova grins, leaning in to press her mouth to his. “We have forever.” 

They stay like that, intertwined together, bodies hinged into a two-headed animal, until both Nova and Din can catch their breath. Finally, with a disentanglement of limbs, clothes collected off the floor, Din holds out his arm. 

“Let me take you to bed, Mand’alor.” 

Nova laughs, low and long, her smile sleepy and eternal across her face. “Don’t think I can walk up the stairs, Mandalorian.” 

Din’s arms scoop her up, collapsing her body in a roll down the middle, and Nova links her hands around his neck. “This is something newlyweds do, anyway.” He notices her furrowed eyebrows, a small laugh bubbling out of his mouth. “Carry you over the doorstep.”

“We’ve slept in this room a thousand times before, Din,” Nova whispers, but she lets herself be swept into his arms anyways, carried up the steps. 

“Tradition,” he mumbles, half-asleep, and when he carries her over the vestibule of their bedroom, Nova grins up at him. It’s not a Mandalorian tradition. It’s something else entirely. “I love you,” he says, silhouetted in the moonlight. “Did you know that?” 

“Vaguely,” Nova yawns, crawling into the silk of their bedsheets, settling right into the crook of Din’s arms. “You’ve given me a few hints.” He laughs out loud, an unrestricted, melodic thing, and Nova’s heart sings in her chest. “I always wanted for something more,” she whispers, against the warmth of his chest. “More meaningful, more…more like home. I don’t need to wish anymore.” 

Din folds her into his arms, like he’s always done, like he always will. “It’s deeper than that word can hold,” he agrees, fading off into sleep, Nova’s heart beating in tandem with his, “but yeah, Nova. We’re both home.”

And when Nova dreams tonight, it’s with her lightsaber in one hand and her husband’s in the other. She can feel that something deeper, the eternal pulse for more, saiated, full. The people that stand next to her—Rebels and Mandalorians and Skywalkers and everything in between—they’ve become her new family. Her parents are somewhere in the great beyond, fortifying her, keeping the orange that forged her alive. There are thousands of people that have become Rebels, united in resisting all the evil that lives in the underbelly of the galaxy. This isn’t like last time. This isn’t going to plunge the universe into something insurmountable. And, sure, whatever darkness is coming—and there is a multitude of evil, murky and midnight, uncertain but forming—will be strong. 

But Novalise Andromeda Maluev Djarin is stronger. And the army next to her, the people that have become her family, they know how to beat the darkness.

Pull its mouth open. Threaten it with light. 

*

EPILOGUE 

“You’re up early.” 

Bo-Katan affixes Wedge with a tired—yet somehow still withering—stare. Earlier, after she was certain Nova and Din were done desecrating the throne room, she had snuck back into it, powering the holotable on. Everything in the room is lit up azure, that incessant, never-ending blue. “I never went to sleep.” 

He smiles, but it’s fleeting, taut around the edges. The night has clouded back over, but the grey is fading into something warmer. Above them, any minute, the sun is about to rise. “What’s wrong?” 

“Before the wedding,” Bo-Katan sighs, moving around the blue glare of the holotable to meet Wedge on the other side, “I went to Yavin.”

Wedge just raises a bushy eyebrow. 

“I…I went to Nova’s old barracks. Where she lived with her family.” 

“I know the place,” Wedge says, sadly, and Bo-Katan feels her chest squeeze, just for a second. She can’t get distracted, can’t get deterred. She wipes her exhausted eyes, trying to shake the sleep loose. “What did you find?” 

“What I needed for Nova’s dress. Thread, that veil  she wore. But before I left to go to Naator, Grogu would not follow me. He kept running off down the main hallway, and he refused to come back—or let me pick him up—until I followed him instead. Into a…into a war room. It looked like—”

“A ghost town.” 

“Like it hadn’t been used in years, yeah.” Bo-Katan nods. “But there was a…distress signal. And I thought it was new, maybe. But all the distress signals, everything in communication—they’re all regularly rerouted to Hoth. And all of them will be rerouted here, now, to Mandalore. So this one—”

“Must have been old.” 

“Stop interrupting me,” Bo-Katan snarls, and then realizes what Wedge is saying, clocks how calm his face is. Suspicious, she raises an eyebrow. “Why…why the hell aren’t you surprised?”

“I came from Hoth.” 

“Yeah, Wedge. I know.” Bo-Katan sighs through her nose, a heavy smoker’s exhale. She turns around, flicking through the thousands of old Mandalorian and Rebel files on the holotable in front of her, letting Wedge filter out so she can bring up the distress call. 

“I came from Hoth,” Wedge repeats, watching Bo-Katan carefully as she taps out her password on the holotable, trying to bring the distress call up, “where I ran into General Syndulla.”

“Mhm,” Bo-Katan says, half listening, still running through the archives.

“She told me about this Star Destroyer.” 

Bo-Katan rolls her eyes. “Who gives a fuck about a Star Destroyer, Wedge, there’s a million of them. Did she give you an identifying number—”

“Bo-Katan—”

“Yeah. Quite frankly, I don’t need the identifying number right now. I need you to hear this distress call—”

“Bo-Katan, listen to me—”

“Wedge, just shut up—”

“General Kryze!” Wedge yells, and both Wedge yelling and using her formal title is so wildly out of character that Bo-Katan shuts up and listens. “I spoke to General Syndulla. On Hoth. About a missing Star Destroyer.” 

Bo-Katan’s eyes narrow. Her heartbeat picks up, rapidly, dizzying. “Did you say—”

“General Syndulla. A missing Star Destroyer. Are you listening to me?” 

And suddenly, with the force of a tractor beam, Bo-Katan realizes her and Wedge are talking about the exact same thing. “You don’t need to listen to the distress call,” she whispers, slowly, as everything snaps into place, “because you don’t need the identifying number.”

Wedge nods. “It’s the Chimera. It’s back.” 

Bo-Katan stares from Wedge to the holotable, then back at Wedge. Silently, suddenly awake, she slides her helmet back on. “Wedge,” Bo-Katan says, her voice ringing out even and clear, “someone needs to wake up the Mand’alor.”

*

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*

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!! i'm so, SO sorry that it took me ~3 months to give you this final chapter. i was in the hospital for the fourth time this year, had multiple work-related breakdowns, had to have surgery (again), dealt with more UTIs (again), and have not been by best self. my 2022 started out with sepsis and nearly dying, and truthfully, i've been fighting tooth and nail for almost a full year now to fully come back from it. i've been emotionally, mentally, and physically unable to write for so much of this year, and it's devastated me. i haven't felt like myself in a very long time, but slowly writing this final chapter allowed the parts of me that i'm proudest of to shine through again. i'm so sorry for being so wishy-washy and disappearing and always having an end-of-the-world excuse every time i've popped back up on the map. it's been so hard. i don't want to spend forever lamenting, but just know that Something Deeper is such an integral part of me, and the reason why its been gone is inexplicably tied to why i've been gone. you all mean the absolute world to me. thank you so much for caring, for your loyalty, and for being so wonderful to me and my chronically ill body every step of the way. this chapter is a love letter to you. you mean more than i could ever put into words, but i promise i'll keep trying.

Nova’s heart flips, skips a beat, and then hammers. The flood of adrenaline is in her ears, the static dizzying and disconcerting. She swallows, shaking her head, trying to make sure she heard Din right. “You want me to run?”

Din nods. There’s something dangerous in the depths of his eyes. It’s like fire is looking for a place to catch, and he’s just lit the wick. “We’ll make it even. We’ll go on Kicker. And when we touch down, I’ll give you a head start. You’re going to run, Novalise. For the last time.” 

Nova swallows. “You—you want me to run?” It’s the same sentence that she managed before, but higher and breathier. Everything sounds utterly distorted. “You still haven’t forgiven me from the last time I ran, Din. And now you’re—what, giving me permission?” 

“I’m leveling the playing field.”

Nova stares. Din stares back. There’s no mirth in his voice, nothing to indicate he’s joking. Or being sarcastic. Nova doesn’t think he has the capacity for either, not with this. But she studies him, trying to analyze every single breath out of his lungs, the way his mouth shapes around the words. “You think that if you let me go,” she starts, “that I’ll come back to you?” 

It doesn’t come out like she wants to—in sheer disbelief, not in challenge—but it doesn’t matter, because Din nods. Immediately. “I know you will.” 

Nova gapes at him. Acutely, she feels the bark of the tree against the thin fabric of her clothes, the sounds of the people gathered just around the corner, the way the forest barely shields them. She’s drowning in Din, the way she wants to, the way she needs to, filling up on his oxygen because he’s already taken his own. “Din—”

“But let me make something very clear,” he says, and his gaze drops to the shape of her lips. “This will be the last time you run from me, Novalise. You are going to run, and you’re going to try to keep me at bay for as long as you can, but I will find you. This is what I do. This is who I am. And I know where you’d hide. I know where you’d go. I could find you in a galaxy neither of us have been to. I could find you in death.” He presses closer. Nova’s breath hitches in her throat. “If it hadn’t been for Sparmau taking us both, I would have beat you to Yavin.” Din’s mouth dips down to the hollow of her throat. His tongue lashes out and licks her, and Nova gasps as the cool air swallows up the place where his lips just were. “You think you can evade me?”

“You’re…” Nova swallows. She can hear how close the villagers are. Everything inside of her body is running molten and in flames. Wet, hot warmth seeps from between her legs, every single nerve inside of her body a live wire. Her heart is still arrhythmic. She meets Din’s eyes. “You’re terrifying.” 

A slow, dangerous smile cracks across his face. Nova bites her bottom lip. “You’re scared of me, cyar’ika?” 

“No,” Nova says, forcefully. “I mean, as a bounty hunter. You’re…inescapable.” 

Din leans in, pressing his mouth to hers. Before Nova’s knees get weak at the kiss, Din’s hand snakes out and grasps the base of her throat. He squeezes. Not hard enough to do anything except show her he’s there, that he could. But it doesn’t feel threatening. Nova feels alive, like everything inside of her has finally awoken. “Don’t you dare fucking forget it.” 

Nova looks up at him through half-lidded eyes. Here, he towers over her, pressing her back into the tree. “You’re forgetting something,” she whispers, barely audible over the ambient sound of the forest. 

Din raises a thick eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“I lived another life before I met you,” Nova says, slowly lifting her chin. “I became an expert in hiding in plain sight. Naator isn’t Coruscant. It’s built like my home.” She lets her tongue slide out, catching a glimmer in Din’s eyes as he stares at her open mouth. “There were times on Yavin when my parents sent the whole base out looking for me. I didn’t get lost. I wasn’t deep in the trenches. I was right there.” She swallows. “I’m an expert in running, but I’m pretty damn good at hiding, too.” 

Din’s hand catches under her chin, and Nova pulls back into his orbit—intentionally, teetering on the edge of forceful. But the only thing it does is explode heat deep in her stomach, heartbeat quickening with excitement rather than fear. “I’m an expert in finding.” 

“You’ll find me when I want you to find me.” 

“I’ll find you, and when I do, I’m going to fuck that cocky little attitude right out of you.” 

It makes Nova feel fluttery, weak, like willing prey—but she doesn’t show it. She clenches her jaw, rolling back her shoulders, pushing off the tree trunk. Din’s large—towering, all-consuming, especially in the armor—but she’s mighty. “I’d love to see you try.” 

She sneaks out under an opening in his arm, hurtling through his grasp. He’s quick, determined, but Novalise Djarin has all the power of Andromeda Maluev, and when caught off guard, Din is no match. She grins, fleeing back into the firelight, flushed and out of breath. When he reappears, Bo-Katan gives both of them a sickened look, but as Nova rejoins the stragglers, the remaining group of people gathered around the pyre, she catches a tiny smile in the corner of Bo-Katan’s mouth. 

“You disgust me.” 

“Hey, Bo-Katan,” Nova says, the words falling out of her mouth, colliding with Bo-Katan’s pride thinly disguised as annoyance, “I know it’s not the way of Mandalore, but will you be my maid of honor?” 

Bo-Katan’s mouth falls open, gaping. Grogu squeals from her lap. He looks gleefully between Nova and Bo-Katan, big bug eyes lit up as bright as the flames dancing in front of them. “I just insulted you.”

Nova shrugs, unfazed. “I’ve gotten used to it.” 

Bo-Katan studies her. “I thought—” Her voice catches, as if she’s suddenly unsure. “I thought you wanted me to be your officiant.” 

“I do,” Nova says, low and earnest. “But I want you to be my maid of honor, too. You don’t need to do anything else. Just a title. But an important one.” 

Bo-Katan blinks, and it’s like something softens. Not just around the edges, like how she usually does, but like she’s eschewing something cold and dark with it. “Yes,” she answers quietly. “Of course I will.” Her hand finds Nova’s, and she squeezes down hard. 

“Good.” Nova swallows the emotion bubbling up. “But I have another favor to ask first.” 

Bo-Katan sighs. “What is it?”

Hours later, after the pyre has burnt out, after the stars are in full shine, the moon hanging serenely across the celestial splashtop of Sorgan’s skies, the group has whittled back down to the Rebels and Mandalorians and Skywalkers. They’re gathered around the fire, sharing in the quiet of the night, watching as the smoke trails back up into the heavens. Nova can feel the weight of missing Cara, the heaviness of it, but it feels like something has shifted back into place. The grief, while still lodged in the pit of her stomach, isn’t a knot anymore—it just exists, constant and tumbling.

“She would have liked this,” Din murmurs finally, breaking the silence. “I know…I know she’d hate that we were still here, instead of fighting the next enemy, but Cara would have loved this.” His voice is rough, and Nova’s hand finds his gloved one, lacking her fingers through his. No one needs to speak their assent out loud, though, because they’re all in agreement. Cara would have loved this. And Cara would be gearing right up for their next fight alongside them.

Luke and Leia exchange a look—knowing, with trepidation. Nova knows it immediately, because it clenches in her stomach, too, the part of her that’s connected to something deeper, but none of them speak it aloud. Danger is coming, yes, with darkness to follow, but there’s time. Whoever they are, however strong they’re standing, Mandalore is resolute, resounding. And its people—Mandalorians, Rebels, and Jedi alike—are standing tall, a multi-headed animal, ready to beat it all back. 

“What are you thinking, rebel girl?” Wedge calls across the clearing. He’s right next to Luke—his orange clad thigh flush against Luke’s black pants—and Nova bites back a smile at the two of them, still orbiting each other, after all this time.

“I’m thinking,” Nova says, “that I know what comes next.” 

Fennec raises a sharp eyebrow. Leia takes a half-step forward. Boba’s face hasn’t changed, but his stature stiffens. Bo-Katan is flashing a rare, smug smile. Nova doesn't need to look at her to prove it. It hangs in the air. 

“I think we need something joyful before the war calls us back,” Nova says, trying and failing to stifle her own grin. “Din and I are having a wedding. A real one. On Naator, in five days. Please join us.”

Grogu squeals. Wedge’s smile is so brilliant, it could light up the entire forest. Leia’s eyes shine with sadness and excitement. Luke looks thrilled. Karga, who’s been standing in the background, gives a jovial laugh and clap, shaking the ground. Even Boba and Fennec are smiling. 

“Good call,” Wedge says, coming over to embrace both of them, tears shining in the back of his eyes. “We need something more than all this darkness.” And even now, even after all the death and loss and grief, he’s right.

Everyone makes their way to their ships long after the fire has gone cold. Luke and Leia leave in the Falcon, but not before they pull Nova into a bone-crushing hug. “We’ll come,” she promises. “We’ll be there. Five days.” They take off first, that iconic blue blaze shooting through the sky, and then they’re gone.

Boba and Fennec are already in Slave I. Karga is buckled up somewhere in the backseat. Koska is long asleep. Bo-Katan stands outside of the gangplank, arms still wrapped around Grogu. “You trust me with him?” 

Nova nods. “There’s no one else I trust more.” 

Din scoffs behind her, but Nova can hear the joke in it. Bo-Katan fixes him with a sour look. “Five days is a long time to keep him entertained. Or fed. Mandalore doesn't have frogs, Novalise.” 

“That is,” Din sighs, “for the best.” He leans over, plucking Grogu out of Bo-Katan’s lithe arms. “You be good,” he warns, waggling a gloved finger in Grogu’s face. “No crimes. Your aunt isn’t as forgiving as we are. She’ll put you to work.” 

Bo-Katan’s face holds the shine of pride. “I mean it, kid. There are rules you have to follow on Mandalore.” 

Grogu makes an affronted noise, and Nova leans down to press a kiss to his soft, warm, green forehead. He reaches out a three-fingered hand to her temple, and Nova pulls away before it’s fully realized. Just flashes. Not urgent ones, nothing dangerous. The good kind, the sweet blips of life she wants to live in forever. When Slave I finally pulls away, the excitement, running wild through Nova’s veins, returns with a vengeance. She turns to face Din, heart thumping quicker and quicker, flame running rampant through her body. 

“So.” 

Din doesn’t say anything, just watches her intently. 

“How much of a head start are you giving me?”

He steps forward. “It doesn’t matter.” 

Nova narrows her eyes, smile spreading slow and steady across her face. “You really think you’re gonna win, don’t you?”

Din studies her carefully, dark eyes sparking up with lust, with hunger, and Nova lets herself be pinned under his stare. “I told you once there’s no place you could hide from me. I know you, cyar’ika.”

At this, Nova moves forward, one step closer to his entire armored body. It reminds her so much of the first time they met, back before she knew the man under the Mandalorian, back before she had fallen in love, when her life was darker and sporadic and hidden. Even without all the beskar, Din makes her utterly shine. Nova’s never felt anything like his gravitational pull. And when she’s here, magnetic, stuck to it, she can’t remember anything before it. 

“And I know you, Mandalorian, she whispers, voice charged. “I know where you’d go. I know your habits. I know which dark alleys you go down. I know the way you feel when I’m a million parsecs away. Don’t be so sure you’re going to win.”

Din’s on her in a flash, body colliding with Nova’s. It makes her stagger backward, lost in the sheer magnitude of his body, his grip, his face, his mouth slotted against her own. She doesn’t have time to inhale before he’s sucking the very air from her lungs, piercing something deep down inside of her that hasn’t belonged to her in years. She’s caught herself in this endless, voracious love. It keeps her steady even as it invades her. Nova’s dizzy on it, even now, even after all this time. 

When he pulls away, Nova leans into it, both of them stumbling, drunk on it. The thrill of it keeps shooting through Nova’s stomach, pink lipstick staining Din’s mouth. “We’re going now,” he says roughly, pulling her towards Kicker.

Nova yelps as she’s dragged behind, running for a few steps until she’s steady on her feet, Din’s hand clenched around hers, vicelike and determined. “Why?”

He stops. Nova doesn’t. The momentum sends her sailing towards Kicker’s outer structure, reinforced in bright orange paint that blares out even in total darkness. She careens into the wall, but Din catches her, the centrifugal force of his body keeping her in place. The cold metal of Kicker presses against Nova’s hot neck, and she gasps until Din’s mouth is hovering an inch away from hers again. Every cell in her body is so, so alive. 

“Because if we don’t leave right now,” he says, his voice low and gravelly and dangerous, “I will not let you go. I will keep you here until I’ve fucked the fight out of both of us, and we will miss our own wedding. Get on the ship, Novalise.”

Nova falls into the gravity, over and over, stars exploding in the back of her eyes. She can’t get her feet to kick up and move until the weight of Din’s words settle into her veins like fire, and then she’s moving, running up the ladder, igniting Kicker back to life, and setting course for the Mid Rim.

*

It feels like magic to be back in Kicker. Din is strapped into the copilot’s seat. Nova could put her ship into autopilot, but she knows she needs the distraction. If she didn’t hold tight to the controls with both of her hands, they would be all over Din, and she’d forget to put the nav system on, and they’d outshoot the Mid Rim by parsecs entirely. And, besides, even if she wasn’t actively trying to keep herself distracted, Nova wants to hold Kicker up in the skies again. She’s beautiful, an entire disaster, this ship. Lovingly, Nova runs her hands over the dashboard, the control, everything that she missed when Kicker was grounded. 

Home may now be on Mandalore, but there’s home here, too. Nova watches over Din in the pilot seat, helmetless and beautiful, catching a rare moment of deep sleep. His mouth is parted slightly. She can see his tongue in the cavern of his mouth. His eyelashes flutter every once in a while, like he’s caught in the netting of a dream. He’s strapped in, pieces of armor discarded across the pathway up to the hull, and Nova watches him as the ship hurtles through hyperspace. 

She traces the tips of her fingers over the controls, worn down from years of use. Kicker belonged to someone else before it was hers, years and years of love written into a starfighter that was made for war. The last X-Wing she had, she had crashed unceremoniously to the surface of Nevarro. It was dilapidated and ran into the ground long before that became its final resting place. She’d grown up in the cockpits of X-Wings, of Rebel starfighters on the base, and Nova could fly one in her sleep. She flew one half in death. It’s familiar, always—that blueprint, the shape of it—but Kicker feels like hers, unequivocally.

Smiling, Nova settles into her seat, bringing her knee up close to her chest. She watches, silently, as Din inhales and exhales, remembering the time he took her to Kashyyyk and tried to get Nova to shoot him out of the sky. It was glorious, the thrill of it, being back in a starfighter again, letting muscle memory take over. Nova relives it, the whole day, down to her bones. How sure Din was that he was going to win. How hard he was when she did indeed shoot him out of the sky.

“What are you smiling about?” 

Nova blinks, startled out of her reverie. But that slow, easy smile spreads itself back across her face as she looks over at Din, sleepy-eyed and gravelly-voiced. “How certain you were that you could evade me on Kashyyyk.”

“And you shot the Crest down,’” Din says, the same grin reciprocated on his face. “Like it was nothing.” 

Nova tucks a lock of rogue hair behind her ear. Din watches her carefully, tracing her every move. “I could do that in my sleep,” she taunts, lowering her voice to something huskier and addicting. “You better be prepared for a fair fight, Din Djarin.” 

Din’s eyes flash. He leans in closer. “Oh, Novalise,” he sighs, skating his gloved fingers over her thigh, “I didn’t want to evade you. That was just the lie I told you so I could get to fucking you quicker.”

Nova narrows her eyes, trying to keep composure. Her heart is knocking up a storm on the left side of her chest. “You better be prepared to concede in the possibility that I win.” 

Din shifts, moving his face closer and closer to Nova’s. She can’t hear anything but the thrush of blood pumping through her veins. It’s dizzying, being this close to him again, with the promise of electricity in the place of sheer anger. It’s making her drunk. She inhales, carefully, to try to steady herself. 

Din moves his hand up higher on Nova’s thigh. Novalise is unable to steady herself. He tips in closer to her, lips hovering an inch over her ear, and chills explode down her spine. “You might be able to keep me at bay, Novalise,” he breathes, “but you haven’t seen me stalking my prey.”

Nova gulps. “You think I’m your prey?”

Din nods. Nova can hear the rustle of his movement, relishing on his hot breath on the side of his neck. “I’m a bounty hunter, cyar’ika,” he simpers, sickly sweet, “it’s what I do.”

“I,” Nova levels, voice a hell of a lot steadier than she feels right now, “am reigning Mand’alor, Jedi in training, Rebel royalty, and Her Highness Pilotess of the Outer Rim. You may be the bounty hunter, Mandalorian, but I’ve got power. This is going to be a fair fight.” 

“Oh, Nova,” Din sighs, sliding his hand up her waist, her arm, to her neck, fingers closing so gently around her throat, light and restrained. “I don’t want to fight you. I want to fuck you. And even when I give you a head start, that’s all I’m going to think about. I will chase you down across Naator, I will find you, and then I will destroy you in every way you’ve been begging for.” 

Nova gulps.

“You asked me,” Din whispers, licking a line up the right side of Nova’s neck, “back in our bedroom, if I wanted to hunt you. I told you that when I wanted to hunt you, you’d know.” He quiets for a moment, and then his grip tightens. Everything inside of Nova unhinges. She can feel the warmth coursing through her body, threatening to flood out from between her legs, but she holds on, refusing to give into another orgasm before she can give it to him, too. “Do you know now, cyar’ika?”

Kicker crashes out of the sky.

As usual, it’s a bit of a rocky landing. Nova grins as Kicker punches on the way down. Even under her expert grip, the ship still puts up a fight. It’s greedy, like it can’t be grounded fast enough. She’s strangely proud of it, the way Kicker misbehaves. That even the star mechanic on Tatooine couldn’t wrangle her beloved ornery X-Wing into place. Kicker’s a Rebel, too.

The descent to the planet’s surface has Nova’s adrenaline back up. Both of them slept through the night, or at least as much of the night as they could. It’s dawn on Naator, and the usually faded pink sky is nearly magenta. It casts the planet’s atmosphere into a hazy glow, hanging over Nova, Din, and Kicker. It’s invigorating, the sweetness of the air, the yellow leaves dancing down from the perennial trees. They cover the ground in swathes, shining golden in the sky’s bright light. Nova swallows as she looks around, heart wanting wistfully to just stay here, at the little cabin they have to call home someday, get in bed with Din, and not get out. 

But that’s not why they’re here.

When Din follows Nova down the ladder and onto Naator’s beautiful surface, she can feel him. The hair on the back of her neck stands up in equal parts electricity and longing. Nova doesn’t need the helmet to track him, to know where Din goes, to categorize his every movement. For a regular bounty, sure, they’re hunted, stalked like prey. But as much as Nova might want to be, she knows that she has something Din doesn’t, even with all of his fancy technology—the Force. That’s all hers. She swallows, turning around to face him. 

He’s fully outfitted in armor. Nova has to actively try to keep her breathing steady, and when he cocks his head at her, Nova knows he sees it. Din doesn’t say a single thing, just stares at her in silence, hanging onto her every movement, tracking her with eyes she cannot see. 

It feels, just for a second, a fraction of a moment, the same way that Din was when Nova first met him. Not Din Djarin, the man she knows and loves, the man who married her in the darkness of her X-wing, the man who wants to remarry her here, the man who showed her his face, the man who broke his Creed for her, the man who loves her—the Mandalorian. A myth, maybe, a legend, definitely. The top bounty hunter in Nevarro’s Guild, respected and feared across all of the Outer Rim. And he’s here, standing in front of her, with a vow to hunt her, find her, and catch her. 

It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. Nova wants him so badly she can’t breathe.

“What are you thinking about?” 

You, Nova wants to scream, but she doesn’t. Instead, she raises her chin. “Ground rules,” she says instead, and Din moves enough for her to know he’s processing it. “You have a whole suit of fancy armor, with built in tracking technology. I have my own wits.”

“You have the Force,” Din counters, and Nova grins. “You can sense every living thing, me included. No suit of armor or operating technology is any match for that. No deal.”

“You do think that you might not have the upper hand.” 

“I think,” Din says slowly, moving closer to where her feet are rooted to the ground, “that you’re a good match for me. I didn’t say I think you’re going to win.”

Nova sighs. “What else?”

Din’s silent for a moment, but when he speaks, it’s slightly more gravelly than it was before. “No ships.” 

A knowing smile spreads across Nova’s face. “You don’t think I’m going to really run, do you?”

“No,” Din enunciates, “but I also where my strengths are, and with only one ship between the two of us, a ship that seems to only listen to you, you’d obliterate me before the twenty-four hours are up.”

Nova raises an eyebrow. Din cocks his head. “So, this twenty-four hours. Is that including my head start?” 

Din nods. “I’ll wait for three. I’ll stay at the cabin. I won’t follow you. I won’t know what direction you’re heading in.”

“So you’re not going to have the full twenty-four hours to find me?” 

Nova can’t see Din’s face, but she can hear the cocky grin in his voice through the modulator. “I don’t need the full twenty-four hours.”

“I say,” Nova proposes, closing the distance between them, shoe dragging through the canopy of yellow leaves on the ground, “that when I win, you’ll have to fuck me on my throne.”

She can hear Din swallow. It’s audible, even through the vocoder. She bites down on her bottom lip, and he sighs, long and languid. “Whatever my Mand’alor wants.” 

“Your Mand’alor is going to run from you now,” Nova says sweetly, reaching up to stroke Din’s helmeted cheek. “And when she wins, you’ll be eating your words.” 

“One more thing,” Din says, hand flying up to capture Nova’s wrist, keeping it anchored against where it’s pressing against his helmet. “Keep your comm on. I deactivated the tracker linked to mine and the honing beacon in Kicker. But I want you to be able to call me. If you need to.” 

Nova narrows her eyes. “You’re not lying about disconnecting them, right?”

Even hidden under the helmet, Din looks affronted. “I’m not a cheater. Even when I’m hunting down a bounty, I fight fair.”

“Comm on,” Nova repeats, stroking her thumb over where his cheekbone would be. “You got it.”

“If there’s trouble,” Din warns, his voice dropping in volume and tone, “you hail me. Immediately. If you have a vision of Sparmau—or whoever’s not Sparmau. If Ezra…pops into your reality. If someone from the First Order shows up. If—”

“Din.”

“Yeah?”

“I learned my lesson,” Nova whispers, willing his covered eyes to meet hers. “I’m not going to try and fight an entire war on my own anymore. If something bad happens, I’ll let you know. I know my word doesn’t…mean as much anymore, but I swear to you on every single star above that I will call you.” 

Din doesn’t speak for a moment. When he does, the words hold volumes. “I’m believing you.”

Nova leans forward to press her lips over where the outline of Din’s mouth should be. He releases her wrist, he moves forward to hold her for a fraction of a second, and then he’s letting her go. He moves away first, heading into the tiny cottage, locking the door behind him, drawing all the curtains. Nova watches him disappear as panic sets in. 

“Shit,” she mumbles under her breath, “Where do I go?” 

The entire trip there, all Nova was thinking about was the aftermath. Her and Din colliding, over and over, celestial and eternal. The way he’d feel inside of her after weeks that have felt like centuries apart, and maybe, just maybe, his forgiveness in the hollow of her mouth. She didn’t think for a second about a game plan, where she’d go. Even when she was teasing Din about evading him, about winning, she wasn’t scheming. She looks forlornly at Kicker, like maybe her stubborn starfighter will give her a suggestion, or maybe a wish that she could jump back on and get in the sky, but Nova’s not a cheater either. She could just sit out here, in the wide open, and wait for Din’s three hours to be up, but she’d never hear the end of it. 

With one last look at Kicker and the cottage, Nova turns on her heel. The pinkness of the sky has reduced in intensity, but it’s still morning. She wants to head back into the trees where she and Din walked together when they were first here, but that would be a dead giveaway. Din said he could find her in death. He could easily find her lost in a memory.

Instead, Nova turns in the other direction. There’s a vast field of wildflowers, some of them sprouting up to the height of trees, and she decides that’s the best place to go. The cottage is hidden by the trees and the yellow leaves, but beyond the forest, there’s nowhere else to go. Just miles of rolling fields until the mountains gather up into tall peaks in the distance. 

As she moves through the first line of flowers, the smell of them floats up to greet her. Nova forces herself to keep pushing, keep moving, because if the scent of forsythias and freesia and lilies wasn’t distracting enough, the breeze that tickles the petals as it passes makes her feel like peace is possible here. 

“You know,” Nova whispers to herself, “maybe the First Order and whoever Sparmau warned me about wouldn’t be so keen to kill me if they just came to Naator.” A breeze tousles the flowers as she moves through them, deeper and deeper into the tangles of stems and trunks, and Nova giggles. It’s impossible to imagine Sparmau relaxed. She’s only met Ben Solo as a scowling, sharp-eyed kid, but from the premonitions and visions she’s seen of him as Kylo Ren, she can’t imagine him relaxed either. Gideon, before he got the Darksaber plunged through his chest by Bo-Katan herself, was the opposite of relaxed. Strangely calm, sometimes, but with a raging temper and evil calamity. 

But, Nova muses, moving thicker and thicker into the field of wildflowers, Bo-Katan might have a lovely vacation here someday. If Nova could ever convince her to leave Mandalore for longer than a mission. Bo-Katan would be forced to enjoy the wildflowers and the scent of them in the wind. Bo-Katan would begrudgingly trek through the yellow leaves alongside Nova and Grogu if she asked really nicely. Bo-Katan would, at the very least, love the sunset against the pink sky, seeing the whole world lit up in something other than Mandalore blue. 

Nova doesn’t pay much attention to the thinning of the flowers until she’s on the other side. One second, she’s thigh-deep in stems, the next, she’s stepping onto a grassy knoll. Startled, she trips over herself, and when she looks up, she’s on the other side. 

“Oh no,” Nova says, heart sinking, realizing her mistake. Behind her is the very clear and determined path of where someone trudged and tramped through an entire field of flowers. She sighs, squinting up at the sun. “I may have been talking a big game for someone who’s good at running, but  never actually succeeded at staying hidden.” 

And then, right on cue, as if the universe plucked Novalise from a star and chose to grant her one wish, the same breeze that carried the flowers through the air rips across the knoll, over the plains, and through the field, disguising the fact that anyone had been there at all. 

Nova blinks. 

“Well,” she says, out loud, “thank you, Naator.” 

She keeps moving.

*

Three hours later, Nova’s made it through the field of wildflowers, over the bigger plains, and is at the base of the mountain. She stops, exhausted, taking a swig of the water strapped to her back, trying to catch her breath. The comm crackles to life as she perches on a boulder, and she lets out a small yelp, looking behind her to ensure Din isn’t there already. 

“You far away?”

Nova smiles. “Not telling you.” 

The telltale chuckle through the modulator sends Nova’s stomach reeling yet again. “Good girl.”

“The jury’s still out on that one,” Nova says, taking another sip of water. She’s under the treeline, barely hidden by the brush and fallen leaves. The forest over here isn’t encased in yellow—they’re big, sprawling willows with leaves shaped like teardrops. A breeze, the same one that rippled through the field, spurs her on, encouraging her to keep going. “Where are you?”

“On your trail.”

Nova makes sure the comm falls flat, looking around for anything significant enough to hear across the line. There’s a tiny stream that runs through the rocks, but it’s nothing significant, nothing loud enough for her to hear. Songbirds swoop up through the trees and across rosy skies, but their chirps can be heard here and the forest near their cottage, so Nova doesn’t think they’re  a dead giveaway. She’s not wearing her usual boots with their telltale tracks, either—the ones she brought to Sorgan are sleeker, the bottom less detailed. “Your three hours were just up,” she says, checking the tiny watch built into the comm on her wrist, “two minutes ago. You can’t be on my trail yet.” 

She can hear the smile in Din’s voice. “Can’t I?”

“You can’t get into my head, Mandalorian.” 

Din sighs, low and charged. “No,” he concedes, “just other things.” 

Nova hops off the rock. “I’m running again.” 

“Okay, cyar’ika,” Din says, voice dropping, “I’ll see you soon.” 

Equal parts scared and thrilled, Nova jumps to her feet, leaving the rock behind. She loves the water, so she’s tempted to follow Naator’s tiny babbling brook wherever it leads, but she knows Din will clock that from klicks away. So she keeps moving deeper into the forest, keeping track as the weeping willows transform into thicker, deeper oaks, ones similar to the woods on Kashyyyk. At the top of the mountains that surround the area, ice juts like skyscrapers into the sky, but right here, the weather is temperate. Warm enough to not need a jacket, but the breeze is tinged with the feeling of fall. It might be the only planet in the Mid Rim that actually has seasons. 

Deeper and deeper she goes, careful not to step into any mud or make dents on mossy grasses to indicate she’s going this way. She had stretched the truth for Din a little earlier—Nova did indeed once go into the forest and send the whole base on her tracks when she lived on Yavin, but she wasn’t right at the treeline. She had followed a butterfly into the forest, one that glowed violet like the bioluminescent flowers that lined the trees, and she got so entrenched in the woods that she couldn’t even remember which way she came from. 

“Nova.”

Nova whirls around, hand on the lightsaber hanging from her waist, ready to ignite the yellow blade, but there’s nothing there. No person. No vision. No Din speaking to her via comm. She blinks, turning around and around, making sure there’s nothing lurking in the trees, but Naator stays as silent and serene as ever. She sheathes the lightsaber back into her belt, moving deeper and deeper into the tangled forest, trying to shake the sound of her name free. 

She’s lost track of time when she reaches the clearing. It’s a perfect circle, carved into a thick ring of trees. If she hadn’t stumbled straight into it, Nova would never have known it existed. Grass and flowers grow in the middle, and when Nova peeks out at the pink sky, the sun is high. Orange and nearly iridescent, it hides behind clouds, changing the green interior of the forest into something much warmer. It’s beautiful. It looks almost like it’s been carved from a memory, one Nova knows exists but is obscured by something else entirely. 

Carefully, gingerly, Nova steps forward. 

“Novalise.” 

Again, she whirls around, this time the lightsaber flying out of its pouch and into her outstretched hand like a reflex, and again, there’s nothing there. No birds, no forest creatures, no light on her comm, no visions in her head. 

“I’m going crazy,” Nova whispers, and for the first time since she got here, to this beautiful safe haven that feels like home, she can feel the darkness creeping up her spine. It infiltrates, hissing and licking as it grips her tighter, luring her back into fear. “Am I going crazy?” she asks, a little louder, talking to Naator itself. This planet feels sentient in a way that humanity doesn’t. It pulls her back from the edge. 

“Nova.” 

This time, it comes from the comm. Nova swallows, falling relieved into the patch of green grass. The salmon skies sing warmth across her skin. “Having trouble finding me, Mandalorian?” 

“Never.” 

Nova smiles, wanting to lay down here in this patch of grass and flowers, and sleep some of her trek away. And then, as the warmth of the meadow cals to her, threatening to caress her into dreamland entirely, she jolts awake. Din’s voice sounds weird.

“Din,” she says slowly, “where are you?”

“Like I’d tell you,” he says, but he sounds muffled. Like he’s standing near something…rushing. Not a waterfall. Naator doesn’t have waterfalls. It doesn’t have an ocean, or a river, or anything bigger than the stream she walked by a few hours back. Nova’s eyes dart back and forth, trying to put her finger on it. A really strong wind? Laying close to the brook to distort his voice?

And then it hits her. Din isn’t at a waterfall. Din is in his full suit of armor, made of Mandalorian beskar and steel, and included in that impenetrable fortress is his jetpack. 

“Hey!” Nova yells, scrambling off the grass, raking through it with her fingers to obscure any trace of her being there, running back under the canopy of the forest, “you said no flying!”

Din laughs, and it still sounds like a miracle, even when it’s muffled by the rush of the air. Nova’s still panicked at the knowledge that he’s airborne, but she can’t fight the smile off of her face either. “I said no ships,” Din clarifies, and Nova darts through trees and brush and rocks to get deeper and deeper into the forest. “If you’d worn your Mandalorian armor, you could be flying, too.” 

“This isn’t fighting fair,” Nova whispers, trying to keep her voice level. Din was right. He probably could have given her a full twelve hour head start and still be right on her tracks the second he started. She’s crashing through the underbrush, not focused on anything in particular except staying hidden. “Low blow.” 

“You could just let me catch you.” 

Nova blows the hair out of her eyes. It’s knotted in a braid that hangs down her back, but the curls that frame her face fell out somewhere back before the forest. “You should know by now,” she says, vaulting over a boulder, “that I don’t give up that easily.” 

“C’mon, sweet girl,” Din croons through the modulator, and it takes all of the strength in Nova’s body to not turn around and catapult back into his arms, “you know you want to.”

“I’ve waited this long,” Nova manages, through gritted teeth, “I can wait a little more.” 

The whoosh of flying through air halts, and Nova keeps moving, refusing to be distracted by it. Carefully, she looks upward, scanning the sky through the trees, but she doesn’t see her Mandalorian in beskar, no pink light glinting off the silver. “Are you sure?”

“Do you play with all of your bounties like this?” Nova asks, moving deeper into the mossy brush, landing on her toes to hide full footprints. 

“I’ve never needed to,” Din answers. “They don’t want me to catch them. You, on the other hand…”

“Goodbye,” Nova sings into the comm, undeterred and melodic. She powers it down, smiling, trying to get her racing heart to settle down. Without Din’s voice invading her rational mind, it’s much easier to think. She does so easily and effortlessly, clearing her head like she does when she’s using the Force—letting everything run out of her backward. 

She’s not anywhere she recognizes. She knows that when she darted back into the forest, away from the familiar circular meadow, she was heading toward the base of one of the mountains. By the way the sun’s hanging in the sky, Nova can calculate that she’s been running for about five hours. Maybe six. She’s starving, and she didn’t think to bring food with her. Scanning the forest floor, the moss jumps up at her again. Beyond the moss, there are tiny violets swaying in the breeze that never seems to hold still, and beyond the flowers, there are ferns. 

“Thank you,” Nova exhales, extending her gratitude to Naator itself, thankful that the planet’s seasons gave her a time where the fiddleheads are crisp and edible. She rushes over, plucking them from the fern’s tip, foraging until she has enough to fill her hands. The stream seems to wind out of nowhere, and Nova settles in at the tiny river’s edge, plunging her cupped hands underwater. It runs clear and beautiful, and all the dirt and debris from the forest floor runs downstream. It would be better if she could crisp them up over the fire, but she doesn't want to risk it. Smoke is a dead giveaway for anyone, let alone for a bounty hunter as experienced as Din.

For a minute, Nova just sits. Her legs are still banged up from the fight against Sparmau. Under the grey clothes she wears, leftovers from the funeral, the bruises mottle against her brown skin. They’re a strange, haunting reminder about all of it. The way they still ache, even now. The entire ordeal only took place over a week ago, and when Sparmau kidnapped Din and Bo-Katan, it was only a month before that. So much loss and devastation in such a short span of time—Sparmau’s wrath, losing Cara, letting her friends back in, seeing Ezra for the first time, getting her Kyber crystal and lightsaber, killing Sparmau, getting Din and Bo-Katan back, accidentally becoming the Mand’alor. Nova downs the last fiddlehead, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. The exhaustion seeps back in, replacing adrenaline and excitement. She could fall asleep right here. Orange sunlight streams through the cracks in the trees, and Nova yawns as she uncovers her eyes, letting everything filter back in.

A butterfly flutters above. 

Nova looks at it once, twice, and then she’s hauling herself to her feet. It looks exactly like the one she followed into the wild back on Yavin, back when she was still Andromeda, back when she was still a kid. Bioluminescent and violet-blue, the hue electric against the warmth of Naator. She stares up at it. 

“What are you doing here?” Nova breathes. The butterfly flutters down and encircles her head. Nova can’t tear her eyes away. It’s everything she remembers it to be—ethereal, not of this world. It gives her the same holy feeling that the Jedi Temple did, the cave on Ilum, the cathedral back on Jedha. She lifts her fingers up to the butterfly, coaxing it down against her skin. Novalise rephrases ehr earlier question. “What are you?”

The butterfly doesn’t respond. It does land in the outstretched palm of her hand, though. Nova feels warmth, then nothing at all. It flaps its wings at her, lazily, gently, and then it’s taking off, moving up and down across the tree cover, and Nova abandons all reason. She follows it. 

There’s no guarantee that she’s being led in the right direction. It might, in fact, be the same path that she made to get here, and this beautiful creature might be leading her right back into Din’s grasp, but Nova finds it incredibly difficult to muster up the energy to care. It doesn’t matter. The hunt, running from Din in the first place—what was she thinking? Nova abandons all reason, all feeling that she should try to stay hidden. She doesn’t want to run away. She wants to run right into his arms.

The butterfly flaps its wings harder and harder, an electric shock of color. Nova bounds over small rocks and mini mountains of moss, getting led somewhere she’s never been. Not back to the meadow. Not back to the cabin. Somewhere else entirely, the sprawl of Naator both familiar and foreign. her surrounding blur around her as Nova follows the butterfly. It drifts higher and higher, and she climbs over fallen trees and unfamiliar terrain and what could be graves, but everything is obscured in comparison to the butterfly. It flies higher and higher, eclipsing her vision, until Nova stops, whirling around and around, trying to catch sight of it again. 

“No,” she whispers, turning again in desperation, and when the butterfly flits beyond the canopy of the willow and pine trees, Nova’s forced to look back down and realize where she is. 

She blinks. Once, twice, three times, trying to clear her vision. 

“Novalise.” 

Nova turns around again, but she knows it’s useless. It’s the trees singing to her, the flowers whispering a lullaby, her own imagination. Besides the gatherings of villages on the flat surface of the planet, Naator is empty. It’s just her and this planet and the man she loves chasing after her. But this time, it’s coming from somewhere she can pinpoint. 

Hand on her belt where the lightsaber and Darksaber hang, Nova moves forward, stepping gingerly across the uneven forest floor. There’s an open mouth of a cave, the gaping maw of grey rock and granite. It seems to have come out of nowhere. Nova forges forward, toward the open, jagged O hanging open, inviting her in. 

“Novalise.” 

Nova pushes forward. She forgets about the butterfly, of Din right on her tracks, of the time. She forges on, moving into the cave, toward what she thinks is the sound of the call. This isn’t a coincidence. It can’t be a coincidence. 

She doesn’t believe in coincidences. 

The cave calls to her. Like the crystal cavern on Ilum, like the cathedral on Jedha. She swallows, moving carefully across mossy rock, trying to keep moving. There’s a thrumming coming from the center. She can feel it—not hear it—feel it, like it’s coursing through her veins, consuming her very soul. Deeper and deeper she descends, slipping over damp rocks, not caring that it’s soaking through her thin clothes. It’s freezing in here, but the air doesn’t seem to be touching her. 

“Novalise.” 

Nova moves quicker. Desperate, searching. She can’t put her finger on the voice. It sounds so familiar, so unbelievably distant. She wants to get inside it, feel its warmth. 

Her name. A chant, three times. The beacon of it, calling her home. 

She gets to the middle of it all. In the middle of the cave is a gilded intricate mirror. Nova stares. Her reflection stares back. The overwhelming feeling of deja vu settles in her bones, thumping in her heart. She’s been in this moment before. She’s had this vision. She’s come alive in this dream. She looks like herself—brown skin, pink lips, green eyes—but there’s something wizened and melancholic about her expression. And then it shifts, and her smile lines lessen, her eyebrows unfurling, her teeth gleaming. Nova sees herself—Andromeda, Jedi, Rebel, Novalise, Mandalorian, Saint. All her identities, all out of order. 

Nova swallows, lifting her fingers to the mirror. Immediately, she’s vaulted somewhere else—a memory, maybe, or something yet to come. She’s looking at herself from outside her body. There’s Nova, on the floor of the ship she escaped Coruscant on. Laughing with Bo-Katan in the fortress of her bed. Flying an X-Wing that she couldn’t quite reach the controls of. Sitting on the beskar throne. Holding Grogu in her lap and floating him his little silver ball. Kissing Din for the first time, obscured entirely in the dark. Getting left on Dantooine. Mapmaking with her mother. Singing karaoke on the Rebel base. Getting fucked in the Razor Crest. The festival she stumbled into on Balnab. Meeting Luke. Walking through the halls of the base on Hoth with Wedge. Seeing Din’s face for the first time. Looking at herself with grey in her hair, still hanging in ringlets down her back. Slashing her yellow lightsaber through the pouring rain. Dancing in a circle with Wedge. The heat of Tatooine’s double suns. Smelling the meadows on Naboo. Unearthing languages with her father. Defeating Sparmau. Blue lightning. Sinister laughter. A hand reaching through the veil and pulling Nova through reality. Laying with Din in the wildflower meadow, half-clothed with purple twilight settling in around them. The scratch of his beard on her neck. The permabruise of his fingers clenched around her thighs. The grip of his arms around the small of her back. Safety and surety and a place to call home. Her own reflection in this same mirror, like a piece of her was here from the beginning of time, like a part of her will be there at the end. Din’s lips on her neck. Her heart meeting something more. Her body feeling something deeper. Her soul being something holy. 

Novalise is vaulted out of her reverie. Like she’s being resuscitated, she can hear Din’s voice flooding back in, the evergreen breeze, the scent of flowers, the warmth of the breeze. Nova blinks, and there’s no mirror in the cave. Just a hole where she projected herself, and brutal, stunning clarity.

Like a woman possessed, Nova hurtles back out of the cave. She’s careful but quick, planting her feet on dry patches, reaching up towards the light. The second she hits the air above, Din’s voice blares. 

“Oh, Novalise.” 

Nova’s heart is pounding. The butterfly—imaginative or real, it didn’t matter—was a distraction. She has no idea how long she got lost in the cave, but when she comes back out, the filtered, slightly sepia tone of the forest is hanging in dusk. She gulps. “Yes, Din?” 

“I see you.” 

Nova’s heart stops. 

“No, you don’t.” She leaves no question in her tone, but she knows he’s not lying. As quietly and nimbly as she can, Nova slips between foliage, running and moving with her heart pounding arrhythmic in her chest. She’s fast. The exhaustion that pressed her down to the earth earlier is gone, replaced by the spark that her own reflection gave her. 

Behind her, incredibly, unbelievably, Nova hears a twig snap. A yelp rises in her throat, seeing a flash of silver in the corner of her eye. She panics, jumping over a small ridge. She gulps on the way down, crossing her fingers, letting the Force guide her way to the ground. Running is what she built so much of her life on, and even though Nova has learned how not to fall victim to her first instinct, it still comes to life in her marrow when she needs it. And right now, she needs it. Behind the wall, there’s a small opening between boulders. Against the tree is a fallen log. Her eyes oscillate between the two, trying to make a split second decision. She can’t hear Din anymore, but she can feel him, residual, haunting, present. She dives for the tree, barely making it around the corner before a suit of silver beskar materializes out of nowhere. Quickly, silently, Nova slams her hand against the comm, the blinking red light disappearing from view. She holds her breath, willing her heartbeat to steady itself, for everything to quiet. 

“Where are you?” Din asks, smug like he already knows, and a pool of warmth rushes through Nova’s stomach at the sound of his voice, modulated and gorgeous. It’s gravelly with want. She could hurl herself at him right now, at this very moment, and all of the need pent up inside of her would be gone. They could destroy this patch of forest and no one could hear a thing. “I can smell you, Novalise.” Another small twig snaps. “I want to make you come undone.”

Nova presses her thighs together as tight as they’ll go. 

“Come out, come out,” Din croons, voice low, “wherever you are.” 

Nova squeezes her eyes shut. She can feel him getting closer, the vibrato of his breath through the modulator. 

“You want to be hunted,” Din continues. “I know you love the chase. But you love getting to cum more, don’t you, my sweet girl? Come out of hiding.” 

Nova inhales a ragged breath, clamping her legs together. 

“I can’t promise I won’t ruin you,” he taunts, his voice closer and closer, “but I can promise you’ll be begging me for more.”

Nova mewls. Din’s head snaps in her direction. She can’t see him, not inside the hollow of the tree, but she knows the sound it makes. She wants to be found. She wants to be ruined. She has become the something holy that is begging to be desecrated. 

“I know,” Din simpers, and the tone of his voice is electric, inviting. Alluring. Tantalizing. Dragging her down deeper and deeper, until the rest of the world fades out. “It’s okay. You don’t have to hide from me.”

Nova presses the comm back on. “I know,” she parrots, and Din steps backward at the sound of her voice so close, “I don’t scare easy.” 

She lifts her hand as much as her hiding spot will allow, closing her eyes, letting everything drain out of her backward, and makes a bush rustle in the distance. Din snaps to attention, darting after the sound. Nova feels her eyelids flutter, and she makes another tree rattle, sticks snapping, way off, back down the mountain. Silver beskar armor streaks up the hill, and then disappears entirely. Nova keeps making the planet bend to her will until she feels something snap from pure exhaustion, and she plasters both hands against the trunk of the tree, bracing herself. Her breath is ragged, uncertain, and when she collapses to the ground, there’s a smile on her face. 

Nova stays there, on the serenity of the forest floor, for a long time. Twilight comes, and night dawns over the horizon, milky navy. Above her, visible only as a smattering under the tree cover, are stars. The energy she expended getting Din away from her—the physical exertion of it combined with the mental war of wanting him closer—returns, but by the time she sits back up, night has almost completely fallen. 

She checks her time. There’s only six more hours until sunup. She’s evaded Din—with a very close call—through eighteen hours. A bunch of them were swallowed by the cave, although it only felt like minutes. She has six more, and she wins. 

Carefully, Nova pushes herself to her feet, breathing in the smell of the soil and water that runs like veins through Naator’s gorgeous earth. She’s exhausted, and she’s also exhausted all her options. She has no idea where she is. She has even less of an idea where to go next. 

And then, all at once, it hits her, colliding like a shooting star.

Din thinks she’s running from him. Din thinks that she’s heading down the mountain. Which means Din thinks that he’s still tracking her.

And Nova meant it when she said she was done running. He thinks she’s going back down the mountain. And she will be, but this time, she’s not going to be hunted. She’s going to do the thing he’s least expecting, the Mandalorian that she loves—she’s going to chase him right back. 

*

It’s much harder to navigate the mountain in the dark.

Nova’s used to rugged, tree-lined terrain, especially after growing up on Yavin, but Naator’s nature is blossoming, constantly shifting. If she hikes too far north, the temperature drops and the ground gets rougher. If she runs down the mountain, the moss springs up, plush and roving, and holds much more moisture. She grits her teeth, holding onto the brush for a better grip, trying to make it back down the hill she hiked up in a daze earlier. 

In the middle of the night, there’s still pink in the sky. It’s a very muted purple, but Naator’s nights don’t turn vantablack and obsidian like the other planets do. There’s still a resemblance of midnight, but it’s hazy around the edges, like the day has just been put on pause instead of turning over into night entirely.

Nova sighs. A yawn works its way out of her mouth before she can stifle it, and with her eyes closed, in the dark, her foot rolls over a fallen stick and she crashes to the ground. 

“Smooth,” she mutters to herself, blowing hair out of her eyes. She sits up, wincing, acutely aware of how quiet the night is around her. There’s the sound of the constant breeze, and the rustle of dancing trees, and the bugs and frogs that chirp, but other than that, there’s nothing. Just wide open air that Din is so trained for, the expert bounty hunter that he is. 

A twig snaps down the mountain and Nova’s heart stops.

“There’s no way,” she whispers, and immediately claps a hand over her mouth. Even that tiny omission, barely loud enough for her to hear alone, could be caught by the experienced bounty hunter immediately on her trail. Nova’s heart flip-flops as she waits in the silence, pounding out a staccato rhythm that only Din can evoke. She feels like prey, even though she’s flipped the script, even though she’s the one doing the hunting. 

She doesn’t move. Her heart pounds in her ears. Something bounds through the brush—something small, and decidedly not covered in beskar. She exhales, stepping so carefully across the forest floor. It’s hard, painstaking work, keeping this quiet, but she’s determined. It doesn’t matter if her bones ache. It doesn’t matter that she’s barely slept in two days. She knows what’s waiting for her at the bottom of this mountain, what she’s going home to. That’s enough adrenaline coursing through her body to keep her awake for days. 

“Novalise.” 

Nova stops. “You’re not making this easy on either of us,” she growls, too pent up to play the game anymore.

She can hear the smirk in Din’s voice. “Just tell me where you are, and this can all be over.”

“You came so close earlier,” she breathes, moving through the wistful willow trees, all twisted together. From the breeze, even at this distance, she can smell the flowers in the fields. “And you didn’t find me. So maybe it’s time to start admitting that I could beat you at your own game, Din Djarin.” 

Silence. 

Then: “What do you mean?” 

Nova swallows. She may have just let on a bit more than she intended to. “Think on it.” 

“Novalise—”

“See you soon,” she whispers, drawing the last syllable out, and then she turns off the comm. The night blinks on around her. Nova wrestles the giant smile off of her face. She stops, draining the last of the water she took from the stream earlier. She stretches, cracking her vertebrae all the way up her spine, rolling her neck side to side. What she needs to do next is get inside Din’s head. She’s nowhere near as strong of a tracker as he is, and even if she had worn her armor and her helmet, he’s had years of practice on her.

But Novalise is scrappy. And she also has the Force. 

At the base of the mountain, where the willows bleed into pines, Nova sinks down behind a boulder, right at the root of a giant tree. It hangs over her like protection, and she knows with the combination of the night and the leaves, she’s hidden in obscurity. She closes her eyes, rolling sore shoulders back, letting everything run out of her. 

It drained her, earlier, simulating her footsteps back down the mountain. She doesn’t feel as connected to the world around her. Nova pauses, focusing on her breath. In and out, even and steady. Din’s face keeps popping into her mind’s eye, but it’s not the version she needs. She can hear his flesh slapping against hers, feel the rumble of his moans in his throat. She knows the exact noise he makes when he’s coming undone. It’s distracting, spreading heat through her entire body. 

“Focus,” Nova breathes, but the only thing she can visualize is the way he cornered her in that cell in her dream. The hungry way his body crashed into hers, the way he made her repent. She shivers, but it has nothing to do with the air around her. Carefully, she sidesteps the memory, as visceral as it is, focusing on Naator and the space Din’s in. 

It comes to her in a blur, like her focus is shifting in and out. Nova blows out air, trying to find him in the ether. It’s not easy. She’s only ever explored around where the cottage is, there and the little village down the lane. All of the mountains are made up of the same flora and fauna, so the environment he’s in won’t be easy to identify. Nova shuts out the rest of the forest, trying to pinpoint his location. 

Just when she’s about to give up, give in, make herself known so that Din will come here and feed her hunger, Nova finds him. He’s sitting at the base of his own willow tree, helmet tipped up to drink water. Her heart skips a beat then stills, like it can’t make up its mind. Seeing him, covered in armor, unmasked only for her, on this planet—it’s the best kind of deja vu. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. Nova lets out a tiny sigh. 

He’s so beautiful. It hurts to look at him, and hurts even worse when all she wants is to be right there beside him. To take the rest of his armor off. The need pulsing through her veins rivals her want to win. Hearing his voice is bad enough. Seeing him is even worse. 

Without thinking, Nova raises the comm to her lips, pushing down until it starts to blink. “Where are you?”

Din’s eyes dart around, and then he smirks into the night. “Why? Getting desperate?” 

Nova sighs, trying to stay in the vision, to stay connected to him. “Because I’m breathing down your neck.” 

Din turns, and Nova catches sight of him, clocks where he is. He’s not far at all. But she recognizes where he is, because his willow tree is facing the wildflowers.

Like liquid, completely fluid, Din springs to his feet. “No, you’re not.” 

Nova grins. She’s being pulled out of the vision, but she blows him a kiss he’ll never see. “Watch out, Mandalorian. I’m on your trail.” 

She falls out of the vision sideways, but it doesn’t matter. Leaning down to run the water bottle through the stream, Nova pops back up, buoyed by her tiny victory. As the terrain shifts to flatter, grassier sections, she skates close to the line of willow trees. Din’s in here somewhere, and he’s the expert. Her little head start could be entirely screwed if he even gets a whiff that she’s as close as she is. 

Carefully, painstakingly, she presses on. Vignettes of Din dance through her head—all filthy, all permanent. The way his mouth tastes after he goes down on her, devouring her for hours. The rough brush of his mustache against her upper lip. The grip of his hands, squeezing whatever part of her that needs to be throttled. The growl deep in the base of his throat when she wraps her lips around the perfect head of his cock. The feeling of him inside of her, moving desperately as she grips him. How long it’s been since he’s fucked her. How badly she needs it right now. 

Nova shivers, trying to shake the want loose. More than anything, more than she’s aching, she wants to win. Din’s made it perfectly clear how easily he can find her. The odds are tipped in his favor, even right now, even while she has the upper hand. 

She watches the forest floor under the bruised night sky, skirting around any branches or fallen, brittle leaves. Novalise is a lot of things, but a hunter has never been one of them. Still, she takes note of the breeze, the particular rustle as it dances through the trees. She knows there’s a giant pine tree near where Din is—one that the woods fades into up the mountain, but it’s alone around here. She swallows, pacing her breath. 

Come on, Nova, she thinks, this is your one shot. 

She stalks forward, prey turned predator, ready to—she’s not sure what exactly. Pounce? Maybe. Prove to Din that she can find him right back? Definitely. But a nagging voice seeps into her head, the one that’s competitive, the one that wants to win, and it’s only saying one thing.

You’re still running out the clock.

Nova stops. This wasn’t part of their deal. The directive was to avoid, evade, not hunt Din back. A flash of beskar, camouflage in the night, catches her eye at the same time that the moon comes out from under the clouds. She darts behind a giant willow tree, the trunk three times the size of her. 

Nova closes her eyes, thinking. 

“I can feel you, cyar’ika.” 

They shoot back open. Her heart picks up its arrhythmia. Nova swallows, clapping a hand over her mouth, afraid to breathe too loud. She feels him, too—knows his movements, even without seeing them. He may be a hunter, but Nova has her own strengths. 

“You may be able to feel me,” she breathes, barely moving her lips, which are pressed up against the comm, “but you can’t catch me.” 

The pounding in the left side of her chest rackets up in intensity. Din’s utterly silent, evaluating the challenge, and then he moves, lightning-sharp, whip-quick. Instead of being stuck in indecision, Nova closes her eyes, letting her intuition take over. 

She still has to be quiet, nimble, ten steps ahead. Especially with Din on her tail again. But this time, Nova doesn’t think. She doesn’t agonize. She keeps moving, refusing to let the swaying trees ahead of her outmaneuver her path through the trees. She doesn’t have the same kind of stamina that Din does, but right now, in this moment, she doesn’t necessarily need it. She’s no longer moving like Novalise. She’s letting the Force use her as a conduit, and she streaks through the trees, careful to stay out of sight. 

Even though Din is right on her heels, Nova doesn’t give into the war between heart and head, or the voice begging between her legs. She keeps on moving, running through brush and weaving through tree trunks, thinking about nothing except the pulse inside of her that’s keeping her steady. The trick is to get to somewhere with more cover, but as she reaches the very end of the wooded area, she realizes there’s a flaw in her plan.

Ahead, there’s only two options. The field of wildflowers, or a straight shot cut across the grass. 

She skids to a stop, feeling the chase. Nova gulps, knowing Din is only seconds behind her, and then she lets herself fall back into the thing that’s driving her. The field of wildflowers provides more cover. But the path cut through the edge of them, one she completely skipped over earlier, is the straightest, quickest point to the flock of trees where their cottage and the village hides. 

She can feel Din before she sees him. 

“Hi, Nova,” he breathes, and Maker, a rush of wetness pools between her thighs. She catches a flash of silver out of her peripheral vision, and then she knows he’s lunging. Nova has a split second to decide if she wants to give in, if she wants to get caught—or if she wants to win. 

Adrenaline decides for her. Just as a full body in beskar is about to land on top of her, trapping her to the spot, Nova dives forward, tucking and rolling before she hits the ground. She somersaults up with precision, using the momentum from her movement to keep running. Tearing across like birds streaking into the skies, she runs toward the straight path cut between the flowers. She doesn’t look back, but she knows the second Din’s after her again, his stride will eclipse hers. She can’t slow down. 

This rush, this adrenaline—it feels like everything she’s been running from since her parents died. The feeling of being trapped, of being hunted, it used to sit like a pile of rocks in the shape of panic in the middle of her stomach. But, she reasons, as her feet tear against the short grass, she was always running from something awful. 

She didn’t want to get caught. 

This time, she does. Stars above, she really, really does. Lust thunders in her ears the same way the drive does, and Nova fights it off, feeling Din’s stride shake the ground behind her. She has her plan. It materializes in the middle of the haze, and she grits her teeth and runs faster. This would be so much easier if they were in the sky, the Crest versus Kicker, but Nova can’t fly. She can’t be a pilot down here. 

So she goes on autopilot instead.

It took her hours to canvass the field earlier. If she had seen the shortcut, she would have been through the thick of it in just a few minutes. The opening is way on the side, approaching the flock of trees where the village rests from the left flank instead of head-on. 

“Stop running,” Din pants through the modulator, and fuck if the command isn’t storng enough to make Nova consider it. 

“Make me,” she responds, trying to keep her shaky voice level.

She can hear the growl before it fully comes out of his mouth. Din’s not a growler—he’s a rasper, a grunter. This noise is different and guttural and ten times as intense as the one he let out earlier. Nova squashes it down, relaying it to replay in her memory for months afterward, stashing it away when she feels like making Din scream. 

She only manages to stay a breath ahead of him, but it’s enough. He lunges again, and Nova tumbles off into the high grass, somehow, thank the Maker above, staying on her feet. She keeps moving, legs burning, lungs heaving, spurred on by the fact that she’ll be in full cover in a matter of seconds. And the knowledge that she’s evaded the most feared bounty hunter in the Outer Rim for almost a full day.

The same bounty hunter who knows her inside and out. The Mandalorian who could find her in death. The one that could probably resuscitate her, too. 

“Novalise,” he bites out, and it’s surreal to hear it in the comm and behind her at the same time, but Nova doesn’t stop. She crashes into the treeline, leaving grace and finesse behind, heading towards the cabin, desperate to get ahead just a little bit more. She’s waiting for something in particular. 

It’s pitch-black in here, in contrast to the mountain. The trees and brush are much fuller, robust. She knows any second, a big gust of wind is going to whip across the field, and it’s going to disseminate through the yellow trees. It’s what she needs, exactly what she needs. Nova swallows air as she streaks through the forest, feeling the breeze pick up, and as it does, she whips around the corner of a huge oak tree. As the wind shakes the tops of the trees, Nova closes her eyes, holds her breath, and jumps. 

She doesn’t like heights. It’s ridiculous to admit, especially since she’s a Rebel, a fighter pilot, but if she’s not encased in the steel stability of a starship, she hates them. Nova pushes all fear aside as she leaps, disappearing into the open mouth between thick, wiry branches of a tree, and she crosses her fingers as she grips the branch and the wind dies down. 

“Where are you,” Din grits out. It’s not a question. It’s a demand. Nova grins, wanting to slump back against the branch and catch her breath, but she doesn’t dare. Summoning what’s left of her strength in reserve, she raises her hand and shakes the brush, willing the breeze to follow with her scent. Din has his jetpack on. He could easily find her up here and snatch her out of the sky. But from this vantage point, if she pretends she’s seeing things through the dashboard, Nova’s in control. 

“Come find me,” she breathes, “but you can’t disturb the village. They’re sleeping.” 

She can practically see Din’s eyes flash. “That was a mistake.” 

Nova purses her lips up to the side. She can see him, barely, through the trees. The way he’s standing is so charged—taut, hungry, controlled. She mouths out a silent prayer to Naator, and the planet pulls it off. Again. After Din swings around, visor canvassing the entire area, he turns in the direction of the village, running off. 

Nova exhales, gulping in lungful after lungful of air. She’s feeling the burn of running now—it’s in her bones, her muscles, her sinew, her organs. Her heart is still pounding an obscene amount. Her calves and thighs ache like they’re falling apart. She settles in on the branch, creeping as close to the tree as she possibly can, knowing that if she has any chance of making it to the finish line, she needs two things—to keep Din distracted, and to close her eyes.

The village is perfect. It’s quiet, but there’s always a person or two making noise in the silence of the night, and there are so many places to hide. Nova feels a tiny pang of guilt for siccing an angry, horny Mandalorian on the people of Naator, but she knows they have spunk. They can handle it. 

And it’ll kill enough time for her to rest. Not sleep, Nova reasons with herself as she settles in, because sleeping is dangerous, but rest. She can rest for a few minutes, breathe normally, let her body relax, and then she’ll execute the final step of the plan.

Catch Din Djarin before he catches her. 

*

“Novalise.”

Nova’s eyes pop open, terror flooding through her veins. For a second, she forgets where she is—on Naator, actively being hunted down, perched up in a tree like a lothcat—and her heart hammers against her ribs as she plasters herself to the branch she’s leaning on, gripping with arms and legs like she’s never held onto anything before. 

Everything is diluted through shades of pink and warmth. Nova gasps, realizing the sun is cresting up over the horizon. 

The comm on her wrist is blinking, and Nova hurriedly rubs sleep from her eyes. She can’t have nodded off for more than a handful of minutes, twenty at the most, but when she checks the tiny clock counting down the hours, she startles. 

There’s only twenty-five minutes left on the clock. 

“Novalise.” 

“What’s the matter, Din,” she whispers, lips skating off the device, “still can’t find me?” 

“Oh, I know where you are,” he says, easily, “up in a tree. You didn’t think you were going to keep me off your trail for a full day, did you?” 

Nova’s heart sinks. “I—”

“Come down,” Din says, “and let me catch you.” 

Nova swallows, mouth dry. “No.”

Din’s voice gets closer. “Jump. I’ll catch you.” 

“That,” Nova says, looking around to find him, “has a double meaning.”

“I’m not going to fuck you up in that tree, cyar’ika. So you can either come down now and keep running, or I will fly up to you and drag you down myself.”

That absolutely should not turn her on, but it does. Nova breathes out, stuttered and cloying, and tries to clear her head. 

She sees him. He’s on the ground, staring up at her, head cocked to the left. Her chest burns. She wants him, just Din, and she’s so close to giving in and letting him ruin her in all the ways that he promised, but another idea blossoms up, and Nova hides a smile against the branch. 

“Okay,” she sighs, sounding resigned, “come up and get me, then.” 

She hears the propane in the jetpack ignite, and then he’s lifting off the ground. Nova tenses up, rolling her shoulders forward, and the second Din gets close enough to touch her, she backflips off the branch instead. 

It’s terrifying. And high. So, so high, but she doesn’t let herself think about it for too long. Nova hits the ground, staggering back over a root, feeling the full impact vibrate through her legs, and then she’s running again. 

She’s so close to making it. So close, and the adrenaline combined with the euphoria of winning spurs her on to what is hopefully the final lap. Nova sprints in the only direction she can—she runs towards the cottage. The timer on her wrist has counted down even lower. Fifteen minutes, then ten, then seven, as she runs through the trees, skirting through alleys and dusty side streets near the village, hurtling down the path, sending yellow leaves skittering up in her wake. 

Nova knows Din’s on her trail. She’s winded, even with the rush of almost making it, and he’s not even slightly affected. Her comm is still on, and she can hear his steady breaths as he chases her down. Her heart flips over when she looks over her shoulder. He’s so much closer than she anticipated, so quick, so agile—but Nova knows what to do. 

She’s going to run like hell and dive into the cottage, and then she’s going to escape out the back window while Din is tearing it apart looking for her. 

“Scared, Mandalorian?” she tosses over her shoulder, voice uneven. 

“You have no idea,” Din says lowly, “what I’m going to do with you.” 

“Oh,” Nova manages, breathless, “I have a few ideas.”

And the cottage bursts through the tree cover, into sight. Nova takes the chance, springing toward it, hand turning the knob on the door as she’s flying through it. Din’s caught a few paces behind her. It’s enough time to execute her plan. She slams the door behind her, flying into the tiny fresher off to the side, prying open the window. 

She feels Din in the house before he can make his presence known. Expert, heavy feet cross the floorboards, knowing exactly where to apply the right pressure. Enough to make the movement foreboding, sinister. Hidden enough to not be a dead giveaway. The cottage is only one floor, and there’s only so many places Nova can hide, so the second the window opens, no screen blocking her escape, she’s vaulting through it and sprinting around the side of the cabin. She knows Din will come out in a second, but the clock is down to less than a minute. Sneaking around the side, staying out of sight of the other open windows, she sneaks back around to the door.

Din makes a noise of anger, frustration. It coils deep in Nova’s stomach, rolling through her like a wave. She looks at the timer on the clock.

Fifteen seconds. 

Carefully, she places her hand against the holster for the Darksaber on her belt. 

Ten seconds.

She puts the other one on the open door, palm flat against the wood. 

Five seconds. 

Nova sees where Din is. Her breath is still held, hoping against hope he doesn’t feel her presence.

Four seconds. 

She steps carefully, praying, over the vestibule. 

Three seconds. 

One step forward.

Two seconds.

Her heartbeat, hammering, lightning-quick. 

One second. 

Nova bends her knees. 

The clock runs down to nothing. 

Nova pounces.

Colliding with full-body beskar is painful, knocking the wind out of her. She ignites the Darksaber in her free hand as she moves forward, the whoosh of the blade crackling through the static in the air, charged and intentional. Din braces himself for impact, but Nova’s already got him in her grasp, electric and alive. Everything inside of her is filled with adrenaline or lust. She stares up at him, triumphant, grin plastered across her exhausted face. 

“Gotcha,” she breathes, staring up at the visor. 

Like it’s nothing, Din shakes her off. Nova lets the Darksaber drop out of her hand, reining it in before it cuts through the wood of the floor. 

“That,” Din says lowly, “was not the deal.” 

The smile flickers and falters. “I caught you,” Nova breathes, “I win.” 

“You were supposed to evade me, cyar’ika. Run for twenty-four hours.” 

Nova blinks up at him, trying to categorize it. She was supposed to run, not catch him back. Her heart pounds as he moves closer, grabbing her chin roughly and forcing it up to meet his eyes behind the visor. She swallows, everything wired taut, staring. 

“I did,” she whispers, “and then I caught you.” 

“I found you three times,” Din grits out, so much stronger through the vocoder, “or did you forget so quickly?”

Nova raises her eyebrow. “You may have found me three times,” she says, voice high and thready, “but how many times did you actually catch me?”

If she could see Din’s face right now, Nova’s positive that his nostrils would be flaring, his teeth clamped down tight, something dangerous in his brown eyes. It should terrify her, being at the mercy of her Mandalorian, but it doesn’t. It just makes her wet. 

Her lips part. With a low growl, Din moves forward, closing the little distance between them, pressing her heaving chest against his armored one. Nova lets herself be pushed backwards, stalked like prey, all the breath leaving her body. 

“I’ve got you right here,” Din says, voice low and gravelly. His hand tightens against her chin. Nova lets him slam her back against the wall of the cabin, only dully registering the way it knocks the remaining air right out of her lungs. “Are you going to fight back?”

Nova licks her lips, staring back at him, knowing what his eyes look like under the modulator. “Do you want me to fight back?” 

For a moment, neither of them speak. There’s something dangerous between them, charged and wet. Like the way the sky feels before a thunderstorm. Like the best kind of devastation. 

“If you run from me again,” Din says finally, “I will drag your body back here and fuck it out of you.” 

Shivers shoot down Nova’s spine. She can feel how close she is, already, how she loves to feel like Din’s prey, even though she was the one that caught him. Again, the war of wanting to prove that she won and wanting her body to be ravaged sits in the middle of her chest. “Try it,” she breathes, and then she’s yanking her chin down, out of his gloved hold, and trying to dart out between his body and where his other arm is plastered against the wall beside her. 

She’s quick. She expects it to be easy, like the same move was back on Sorgan, but her body is already exhausted from the full day she spent running, and Din’s entire form is covered in a suit of armor that only enhances his strength. His hand shoots out, vicelike and expert, and Nova yelps as it closes around her arm.

In disbelief, she looks back at him, trying to yank it free. Once, twice, and then on the third, Din lets her go. But even as she moves like a firecracker, trying to traverse the floor and make it back outside into the pink air, Din’s hand fists in her hair, pulling her back against his body. It sings out in pain, but he soothes it immediately, gently holding her against his body, gloved hand pressed against her stomach, anchoring his back against him. 

“Good try,” he says, and his voice is absolutely filthy. “You like running from me, Novalise?” 

Nova’s voice comes out breathy and strangled. “Yes. And I like getting caught.”

Din’s hand travels up her stomach, over the peak of her chest, gloved fingers snapping out to pinch her nipple through the thin fabric of her shirt. Nova squirms, but it just makes Din hold her tighter, hand palming her tits, the other traveling from the nape of her neck down her stomach. He’s rock hard against her, and the more Nova wriggles against him, the harder he becomes. His other hand inches down to the waistband of her pants, and when she twists her hips, trying—with absolutely zero urgency—to break free, he slips his gloved hand into the line of her panties, dragging the leather across her bare skin. 

With an impossible grip against her chest, Din slips his other hand further, thumbing down on her clit, hard. Nova mewls without being able to control the volume of it, and with the door still hanging open at the hinges, the noise travels out into the open air. Din dips his fingers lower, dragging them through her slit, and right when she’s about to beg for him to go deeper, he pulls them out, releasing his grip. 

Her knees buckle as she’s released back to her own volition, but before she can react, or try to run, Din’s hand is on her hip, flipping her around to face him.

She swallows. He’s holding her firmly in place, and pushes his other hand into her mouth. She tastes herself against the leather of his glove, and her eyes flutter back as she moans around his fingers. 

“You’re so fucking filthy,” he grits out, and Nova opens her mouth wider, letting his fingers go deeper into his throat. “Why did you run away from this, cyar’ika?” 

He punctuates each word with moving his fingers down to the hilt, and Nova can taste the gunsmoke and forest against the glove. Her knees sag again. She mumbles something, muffled against his hand. 

Nova whimpers as Din’s fingers pop out of her mouth. “Wanted to be hunted,” she slurs, licking her lips. 

Din’s hand comes to rest against her chin, and Nova tips her head back, silently goading him to clench it around her open throat. She’s dizzy, drunk with how badly she wants him—needs him. 

“I told you back on Mandalore,” he breathes, “you’d know what it would feel like when I was hunting you.” 

Nova looks up at him through half-lidded eyes, extending her neck back. “Feels so good,” she croons, using her free hand to guide his down to where she needs it. “Make me stay.” 

And then she wrenches free from his grasp, the only hold Din still has on her the hand bracketing her throat. She gives him a devilish grin, and yanks herself free, getting ready to run. Din stares at her under the visor like he can’t believe what she’s insinuating, and then, as she runs towards the open door, a snarl leaves through the modulator.

The sound alone is enough for Nova to cum right there, but she doesn’t. 

Din’s gloved hand closes around her neck, ruthless and unyielding. Stars flicker at the edge of Nova’s vision. 

“You want me to possess you, cyar’ika?”

All she can manage is a moan. 

“You have no idea,” he whispers through clenched teeth, dragging her back against his body, “how possessive I can be.” 

Nova lets him manhandle her against the wall, vision tunneling from the grip he has on her throat. Combined with being confined, caged in against the wood, it’s everything she needs. She’s strung-out and high on it, the feeling of being hunted, held. Din’s grip against her throat loosens, just enough for her to suck in a ragged, desperate breath. 

He presses himself into her. This isn’t the man she loves, the one under the armor—it is, but he’s encased in beskar, the full-on Mandalorian. This is the Din that would kill any man that looked at her. This is the Din that would fuck her into nothingness. This is the Din that screams danger. And she’s never wanted him more.

“You smell so good when you’re running from me,” he whispers, cloying, dangerous. Nova moans again, and she can feel the helmet press in the crook of her neck, giving her no room to escape. “So sweet.” 

Nova swallows as Din releases his grip around her throat. His arm is pressed flat against her chest, and even up against the wall, he paws at her tits, tracing a single gloved finger against her nipple. 

“Is this hard because you’re scared,” he says slowly, flicking at it, tweaking it between his fingers, “or because you’re turned on?” 

“Oh, Maker,” Nova pants, as his hand travels back up and squeezes her throat, “both.” 

Din stills for just a second. Long enough for her to feel like he’s evaluating her answer, and Nova freezes. For the first time, a hot flush of embarrassment shoots up her neck, and then she’s being spun around so that Din can look at her, study her, pin her body facing his. 

“That’s the wrong answer,” he grits, one hand on her thigh, the other tracing circles around her collarbone. “You’re going to lead me down a very dangerous path, cyar’ika.” 

Nova swallows, looking straight through the visor, refusing to back down. “Good.” 

Din sighs, low and languid. “If I fuck you like this,” he says, “I might ruin you.” 

Nova lifts her chin. “I’ve been a very bad girl, Din Djarin,” she breathes, tracing her fingers along the top of the plate on his thigh, cupping him between his legs. “I deserve to be ruined.” 

Din groans as Nova slides her hand up the entire length of his cock. “Nova,” he says, strained, the pretense dropping for just a second, “I don’t want to hurt you—” 

“I know,” she croons, feeling his fingers tighten against the skin of her throat as she palms him, “and you won’t. I want it.” 

Din exhales so loudly through the modulator that it consumes her. 

“Ruin me, Mandalorian,” she whispers, and she can feel the last visible shred of hesitation snap, as she lowers her voice, whiny and moaning, “please.” 

That does it. Din tears at her shirt, his gloves shredding the material. Nova moans as he grips her, so desperate, so strong. The material of her bra snaps as he yanks it off of her, gloved fingers back on her tits, pawing and squeezing. She moans again when he tweaks her nipple, wet and languid. 

“You gonna cum just from me playing with your tits, cyar’ika?” Din mumbles, and the sound of it through the modulator shoots Nova right to the edge. 

“Maybe,” she manages, and then he’s lifting the helmet just enough to wrench his mouth free. When his lips close against it, she cries out, not giving a single fuck that the door is wide open, that anyone could stop by and hear her crying out in pleasure, could stand there and watch. “Oh, fuck—”

“It’s okay,” Din says, hand traveling down to crawl between her thighs. Nova grinds down, desperate, and he shakes his head from side to side with her nipple in his teeth. “No,” he growls, “no touching my hand until you’ve already came.” 

With a shaking, stuttered breath, Nova nods, and then his tongue is swiping over again, and she’s gone. She clenches down, hard, and that’s as much as she needs until her orgasm rips through her, cresting and waning far too fast, and then she’s shaking and undone, held up only by Din. 

“Din—”

“Shhh,” he says, and then he’s ripping her pants down to her ankles, and Nova inhales through her teeth as his gloved fingers roam across her panties, already soaked clean through. She yelps as he thumbs over her clit, still so sensitive from how hard she just came, but he doesn’t do anything but tease her. Even with him on his knees, Nova registers dully, he still has all of the control. He traces a line up and down her lips, and Nova sobs out, needing more. “I decide,” he snaps, and Nova’s blood thunders in her ears. “You’re at my mercy. Do you know how fucking hot it is,” he breathes out, teasing with the lace on the underside, “to have you here, dripping and ready, stripped out of your clothes? To know that I can just take what’s mine?” 

Nova whimpers. 

“Your pussy smells so fucking sweet,” he growls. “I’d have you like this all the time if I could.” He circles her clit again, and Nova’s in heaven, already so close. “With those perfect tits on display, the smell of you in the air. And then I’d fuck you in front of anyone who dared to look at you.” 

Nova’s eyes squeeze shut as his thumb presses exactly where she needs. This time, she doesn’t care how desperate she is, how wrong everything Din’s saying is—because right now, in this moment, it just feels right. She’s addicted to it, the filth on his tongue, the way he’s possessing her, and on the comedown, her eyes open just enough to see him remove the helmet. Helplessly, she claws at it, hooking her fingers under the rim, pulling it clean off. 

His eyes are black with want, with lust. His hair is an absolute mess, and he tears at her underwear, ripping them in half. Before Nova can warn him just how overstimulated she already is, Din’s giving her a devilish grin, dripping with sin. He slams her back against the wall as he notches his tongue between her thighs, drinking, devouring. 

Nova’s a goner. She goes blind with it, exploding all over his tongue. She’s riding the same wave he’s lapping up, drinking like she’s the last water in the world. She grabs at his hair, trying to drag him away, but his eyes pop open in question. She can tell immediately what he’s asking: do you want to stop?”

“Fuck, no,” she breathes, and that same steely glint returns, and he’s diving deeper, tongue running in circles around her clit, swiping and lapping lower. Nova yelps as it teases her entrance, and then it slips inside—and she’s lost in ecstasy. This is better than when she rode his thigh on Korrus. Better than the first time he made her cum. Better than riding him into submission. Better than absolutely anything she’s ever felt. This is what people kill and die for, and she’s living it. 

She cries out as Din pulls away, but it’s only for a second. He’s standing, roving up her body, and then he’s anchoring both of his hands down on her shoulders, pushing her over across the floor to the bed.

They don’t make it that far. 

Nova drops to her knees, not caring if she cuts them against the floorboards. “I love to be on display for you,” she croons, tearing at Din’s waistband, “but it’s your turn.” 

Din’s eyes flash. “No.” 

Nova raises her eyebrows, stopping immediately. “No?”

“If you put your sweet mouth on my cock right now,” he grits out, his voice so dark and gravelly it sounds like it’s still coming through the modulator, “I will cum down your throat. You won’t get fucked.” 

Nova shrugs. “Worth it,” she says, and then she’s pulling it free and licking over the tip. 

Din moans so loud that it shakes the foundation of the house. “Cyar’ika—”

“It’s,” she says, her tongue roving down the underside of it, “my. Turn.” 

Din doesn’t protest. His hands tangle in the mess of her hair, groaning as she swallows. He’s huge—thick and long at the same time—but Nova’s had plenty of practice, and she takes him down to the hilt. With one hand, she pulls him even closer, begging to have every single inch, and as he pistons out of her, Nova’s eyes flood with tears. 

It hurts so good. She wants more, needs more, and her free fingers find her clit, begging Din to fuck her mouth. He’s undone, unhinged with it, and so is she. This is the kind of high she’s been chasing, the one they both need. Ruination feels so good when it’s this kind of desecration. Holiness being corrupted. Nova cries out around Din’s cock as she crests close to the edge again, and then he’s snarling, pulling her off. 

“Hey—”

But before Nova has a chance to protest, Din’s scooping her off the floor like she weighs absolutely nothing. The sheer force of him knocks the wind out of her, his hands closing around her ass, carrying her over to the bed. 

“It’s been so long since I’ve came,” he grits out, throwing Nova down on the sheets. She yelps with the force of it, feeling it down to her molecules, her bones. “Not doing it if I’m not inside you.” 

Nova stares up at him, pink light streaming in through the windows. She wants to stay right here, in this moment, in this kind of love, forever. It’s addicting. It’s haunting. It’s everything she’s ever fucking needed. 

Din doesn’t move, waiting for permission. He stands resolute until Nova sits up enough to bring him down on top of her. “Fuck me,” she whispers, breathless, “hard.” 

Din inhales and then he’s pushing inside of her, cock still dripping with her saliva. Nova moans as he sinks in, painstakingly slow, careful, clawing at the small of his back, and then he’s snapping his hips, driving inside her so deep. She’d forgotten how good he feels, how big he is, how badly she wants him, needs him. Three strokes and she’s on the edge again. He buries his face in her neck, and Nova arches her back against the feeling of his teeth on her skin. He’s relentless. She’s so in love. 

“Your cunt is so fucking tight,” he manages. 

“How wet am I?” she breathes back, and Din’s fingers trail down her body to dip in. Somewhere between the floor and the bed, his gloves were ripped off, and when he pushes his wet fingers into her mouth, Nova hums around them. 

“Soaked,” Din manages, and something in his voice completely unhinges. “Oh, fuck, Nova, I’m gonna—” 

“Cum for me,” she interrupts, and then his eyes are rolling back in his head. “Ruin me.”

As if he was just waiting for her permission, Din does. Nova clenches around him, both of them coming apart at the same time. Even with the ceiling above her, Nova only sees stars in her eyes. For what feels like both a blip and an eternity, they stay there, sharing the high. When Din finally comes back down enough to pull out of her, he takes two fingers and plunges them back inside of her, an unspoken reminder that he’s possessed her. 

Nova’s exhausted, sweaty, happier than she’s been in weeks. This was worth the chase. This was worth the wait. 

When both of them have recovered, at least enough to breathe evenly again, she turns on her side, gazing at Din through the rays of pink light. “So,” she says, still breathless, “who won?” 

The way Din looks at her is more than just love. It’s reverence. “Me.” 

Nova glares at him. “I caught you,” she says, punctuating it by pushing a finger into his still-armored chest. 

Din grins at her, and it’s divine, the bareness of it. “You did,” he concedes. “Always, it’s you catching me. I—I meant that I won. Loving you, that’s winning.” 

Nova smiles, tears threatening at the edges of her eyes, letting him pull her in. It’s safe here, the feeling of it radiating through her entire body. Sleep tugs at her. “I’m never running from you again, you know,” she whispers against Din’s neck. “And I love you. So much.” 

He doesn’t say anything, just strokes a hand over her hair. He doesn’t need to, not this time. He knows. Before sleep takes Nova, the last coherent thing she thinks is that sure, Din may ruin her. But he always resuscitates her, brings her back to life.

*

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!!!! i know Chapter 26 was a whole novel, and i so hope it was worth the wait <3

with my original outline, the next chapter (27) was supposed to be the end of SD, but now i'm not so sure if it will be. we still have a few plot points to go before the third one (a hint for the title of the third and final in the SM trilogy was hidden in this chapter, let me know if you catch it) ;)

with how life has knocked me around, i don't want to promise that 27 will be up within a week, but i DO promise it'll be SOON!!!

*

The word “wedding” hangs in the air, and both Nova and Bo-Katan do a double take. 

And, somehow, in this moment, Bo-Katan is the first one to speak. “I’m sorry,” she starts, tucking her hair behind her ear, squinting back and forth between Din and Nova in the dark, “I thought you were already married?”

Nova swallows. “We are,” she enunciates. Din’s face is unclouded, clear. The moonlight still shines through the gossamer curtains, but it splashes across only the foot of the bed, now, illuminating none of them. “We took the vows.” 

“We took the Mandalorian vows, yes,” Din says. His voice is still that strange sense of calm. “We swore them to each other. But, Nova, you wanted more than just a private exchanging of vows. You wanted to get married with all of our friends on Naator.”

Nova nods, reeling. “Months ago,” she clarifies, her voice quiet. “Before Sparmau, before this war, before all the Jedi in my head. I still want to,” she continues, quickly, because Din’s eyebrows knit down the middle. “In front of all our friends and family. A bigger ceremony than the one on my X-Wing. But I don’t know if now is the time.” 

Bo-Katan surprises both of them yet again. “Yes,” she says, and her usually cool voice is wavering with something colored like emotion, “it is.”

Nova inhales a shuddering breath. The curtains flutter in the breeze. The night feels alive, strangely so, charged with an energy she can feel but can’t yet put a name to. “I want to marry you,” she admits, finally, speaking only to Din, trying to hone in on him, trying to put enough conviction in her words to convey the intensity of it. “Now more than ever. Do you—do you want to marry me?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Nova can see Bo-Katan shift. Back into the obscurity of shadow, trying to eclipse herself from the intimacy of the moment. 

Din doesn’t break her gaze. He doesn’t let Nova’s question sit in silence. He nods, solemn, serious, a promise. “Yes,” he answers, the word an unshakable thing. “Now more than ever.”

Nova feels tears well in her eyes. The significance of it, of his surety—it burns like a bursting star. After all this, the war, the heartbreak, the division, Din Djarin wants to remake Nova into his wife. That’s a feeling Nova can’t ignore the weight of. “Cara was supposed to marry us,” she whispers, and grief comes crashing back in through the open window. 

Din swallows, and for the first time since he looked at Nova head-on, he averts his eyes. They drop off somewhere dark and full of mourning. “I know,” he manages, staring down at the pooling of the silk sheets in the middle of the bed. Mandalore blue, they form an ocean. “She was.” 

Nova hears the nasal exhale from the corner, and she startles, remembering Bo-Katan’s still there. “I could do it,” she offers, her voice small and half-formed, “if you want me to.” 

Din glances up at Nova. Nova glances back, biting down on her bottom lip to not let the smile slide out. Back when they first discussed the real wedding, put on paper with the million other to-dos in their life, it was when Nova was proclaimed dead on Mandalore and Bo-Katan was a hinderance, not a friend. She was sour and sculpted from ice and spat venom every time she got too close. Nova had felt that shell cracking, even all those months ago, but it hadn’t given way to the person standing in front of her—bruised, softer around the edges, a mess of usually impeccable red hair, putting more weight on her left foot. Bo-Katan Kryze isn’t a hardened iceberg anymore. Bo-Katan Kryze is Nova’s best friend.

“Or not,” she amends, after a few seconds of prolonged silence. “The offer’s there.”

“The offer,” Din says, and the intensity of his voice carries the volumes of everything he and Bo-Katan endured when Sparmau had them, “is accepted.” 

Bo-Katan’s smile, wide and unencumbered, gleams. Happiness wears her like an old, estranged friend. Nova wants to hop out of bed and crash into her arms, make Bo-Katan feel that gratitude right down to her bones. “I can’t promise I’ll be as good as Cara.”

It’s sobering. “Not many people would be,” Din concedes. 

“She’d be proud of you.” The words fall out Nova’s mouth before she realizes they’re her own. Both of them look over at her. Nova’s fingers are embedded around her necklace, pressing down until the Rebel symbol imprints on her thumb. “Offering to marry us means you like us. Enjoy our company, even. All Cara wanted was for us to be on the same team.”

Bo-Katan nods, looking like her head’s off somewhere else. “I do, you know,” she says. She’s looking at Din, not Nova, and Nova knows that it’s because Bo-Katan has made this part perfectly clear to Nova already. “Like you.”

Din nods, his eyes holding the full knowledge of it. After a second, after he’s made it known, a small smile snakes its way across his lips. He turns his head to left and right, moving his hands rapidly across the bedspread as if he’s desperately searching for something. 

“What,” Bo-Katan sighs, voice already stretched thin to exasperation.

“Looking for the end of the world,” Din deadpans, hand shaking Nova’s wrist. A laugh bubbles out of her throat, and Nova lets it. It cuts through the darkness of the room, wiping the heaviness clean. “It must be coming if Bo-Katan Kryze admits to liking us.”

“I take it back!” Bo-Katan shouts as she turns on her bare heel, stalking towards the door. Nova laughs again, letting Din rattle her body. It’s been months—years, even—since he’s acted this free. “I hate you.”

“Liar!” Nova calls at Bo-Katan’s retreating footsteps, and when Din wraps his arms around her again, Nova feels like she’s finally come home.

*

When morning comes, the sky has clouded over. The moonlight that sprawled all over the room last night is gone, replaced by the usual Mandalore fog. Din’s not in bed. Nova wakes up slowly, feeling around for the shape of him under the covers, but by the feel of the blankets and the absence of warmth, he’s been gone for a while. Nova’s heart sinks. The memory of last night is still full and clear in her mind, but it burns. She rubs sleep from her eyes, trying to decipher if Din’s desire to remarry her was just her imagination or if it was real.

“Hey.” 

Nova jackknifes up, pulling the covers up over her naked body. Din is propped in the doorway, holding a mug of something hot. He holds it out to Nova in offering, and she sheepishly pulls on her discarded clothes as he waits, walking over to him. 

“You weren’t in bed.”

His eyebrows furrow. “It’s midday.”

Nova blinks. She looks out the open window and back again, the words traveling through her hazy, sleep-fogged head, and then she startles, wrapping her hands around the mug. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

Din tilts his head to the side, the gesture somehow as endearing as it was when he was obscured under all that beskar. “Because you needed the sleep?”

Nova’s mouth goes wobbly. It’s the simplest answer, the easiest one, and yet, she had assumed the worst. Still stuck in fight or flight mode, her body shakes on the comedown.  “Oh,” she says, softly, sheepishly, and Din leans in to press a kiss against her forehead.

“We’re all downstairs,” Din murmurs. He feels so strong, even still emaciated and bruised from the fight.

“Planning our attack?” Nova asks, pulling away from the embrace to give Din a smile.

His face is unreadable, but there’s still sadness in the lines of his mouth. “No,” he says quietly, and he’s looking at Nova, but something’s missing. “Planning the funeral.” 

*

There are Mandalorians, Rebels, and Skywalkers alike gathered in the throne room. Nova feels like the sanctity of it still prevails, even though all of them have worked together in some capacity for months now. Grogu is, inexplicably, in Bo-Katan’s arms. And he looks like he’s enjoying it, which is even more bizarre. She’s leaned against the holotable, talking with Fennec. Luke and Wedge are together on the steps, and Leia keeps sneaking knowing, furtive glances at them. Koska is talking with Boba, which surprisingly doesn’t look heated, and the throne—Nova’s throne—sits above all of them.

For a minute, Nova doesn’t disturb any of them. She doesn't want to. This moment, this grand gathering of all the family she’s recruited along the way—this is what she’s been missing since she was fifteen and left alone in the world. It sticks in her throat, the emotion of it, and she has to swallow before she steps forward. 

“Good morning.” 

Wedge grins, saluting her. “Good morning, Mand’alor.” 

Nova allows one full smile before she turns her attention to the matter at hand. “Where are we in planning?” she asks, and just like that, the energy in the room stills, goes quiet. Everyone gathers in a circle around the holotable. Something about all of them, united, makes a lump stick in Nova’s throat. 

“She wouldn’t want fanfare.” 

It’s Fennec who speaks first. Nova raises an eyebrow. 

Fennec looks defensively at them all. “What? Am I wrong?”

“You’re right,” Din says slowly. “She wouldn’t want a big funeral. Nothing fancy. A good, honest lay-to-rest, and then she’d want us to stop moping about it.” A small smile flits across his face, and then it’s gone.

“She lived on Nevarro.” This is Wedge. “She spent most of her time out patrolling and catching the slimy criminals in the Outer Rim, but Nevarro was her home base.” 

Nova nods. “Does Nevarro have any specific…rituals? Anything she’d want at her funeral?” The word still caught in her throat and left a sour taste in her mouth. Nova swallows, trying to appear level, like she’s not still shattering to pieces inside. 

“Cara may have lived on Nevarro,” Leia says, her voice sustained and clear, “but she grew up on Alderaan.” Her words are calm, measured, senatorial. Nova feels the urge to stand up straighter as Leia speaks. She contains worlds. “She may not have wanted a huge ceremony, but it’s tradition to gather in a beautiful place to bury the body.” Leia looks up. “We have no body, but we can put her to rest somewhere beautiful. No matter what state the galaxy is in, there’s no shortage of those.” 

Din nods. “Sorgan.”

The name stirs something in the pit of Nova’s belly, but she can’t put her finger on exactly what. 

When no one contributes, Din sighs—more to fill the silence than anything else. “I met her there,” he says finally, his words careful. “She called it her early retirement.” A small smile turned up at the corners of his mouth. “She tried to shoot me. I tried to shoot her. A fight ensued. Then the kid toddled in with a cup of bone broth and Cara was declared a friend, not an enemy.” Grogu babbles in assent, still nestled in Bo-Katan’s lithe arms. “She’d like to be laid to rest there. If she could choose…I think that’s where she’d go.”

Nova nods. “Then we go to Sorgan.” 

Luke’s brow shoots up. “Today?”

Nova knows what he’s thinking. The vision still lives in her head, haunts the rest of her mind. The sinister laughter. The blue lightning. Ezra’s warning. And, even bigger than all of that, Nova’s nightmare of Sparmau not really being Sparmau is snarling on the precipice, angry at being compartmentalized and locked away. There’s a war coming, the First Order is still in the shadows, and there’s evil yet to be eradicated. This moment might feel like an ending, but it’s the beginning—the beginning of something so much deeper and darker than the hell they’ve already been through. 

But she nods. “We can’t move forward into the war without grieving what we’ve lost,” she says quietly. “I can’t, at least, and we all owe our lives to Cara’s sacrifice. I know we need to prepare,” Nova continues, not dropping Luke’s gaze, “but this is fighting back, too.” 

A boyish grin spreads across Luke’s face. For a second, all Nova can see is the kid he was when he fought against Vader, back when the Empire had won, back before all of this. He’s full of light, even outfitted in those black Jedi robes. It radiates out of him, from every single place. It’s ebullient and magical and exactly what Nova needs. “Damn right it is.” 

They all move to the exit. Nova hovers in the throne room, still trying to take it all in. Somewhere, in town, the rest of the Mandalorians are living their lives. The ceremony of Nova becoming Mand’alor was only a day or so ago, but it feels like an eternity. She brushes a hand over the beskar throne. Bo-Katan lingers with her. 

“You don’t need to tell them all where you’re going.” 

Nova startles. It’s like Bo-Katan plucked the thought straight out of her head. “How did you—”

“Heavy is the head,” Bo-Katan sighs, walking over to where Nova’s frozen by the holotable. “I’ve been very close to multiple Mand’alors, for better or for worse. I know you feel like you have to lead every second, because it’s who you are. But we are very self-sufficient people, us Mandalorians.” She smiles. It warms Nova’s heart. “They don’t need to be led every second, no matter what Din told you.” 

Nova swallows. “Din told me…I need to be all in. That I can’t abandon them.” 

Bo-Katan raises her chin. “You are abandoning no one,” she says curtly, her eyes flashing. “You’re going to grieve your friend, and you’re going to send her off, and then you’re going to come back here to be the Mand’alor. It doesn’t get much more Mandalorian than that, Novalise.”

Nova swallows. She needs to put on something other than glorified pajamas, and she still can’t shake the sleep from where it fogs across her head. “I need,” she sighs, choosing her words very carefully, “to do it right this time.”

Bo-Katan has an odd look on her face, something Nova can’t quite identify. Finally, she extends a gloved hand. Nova takes it, letting Bo-Katan drag her away from the center of the room. “Hard to fuck up,” she shrugs, as both of them exit the ornate beskar doors, “when you have me by your side.” 

*

Luke, Leia, and Wedge opt for traveling in the Millenium Falcon. Nova would have preferred Kicker, but she was still on Tatooine’s stuface, getting whipped back into shape by that eccentric mechanic, and besides, it was a tight squeeze when it was just Nova, Din, and Grogu. Slave I fits Bo-Katan and Fennec, too, and it hosts more than a nest of blankets masquerading as a bed, so it was the obvious option.

“What?”

Nova startles, looking over at Din. His bare face is just as beautiful as it was when she saw it for the first time, and seeing it here, in the hull of a ship that’s not their own, still sparks up low in her belly. “Just thinking,” she murmurs, thankful for the semblance of privacy the inner hull of Slave I is. Bo-Katan is up front with Fennec, and Grogu’s asleep.

“About what?” Din shifts, moving closer. He’s in the bunk opposite Nova, staring at her through the breath of space between them. 

“I’m scared,” Nova admits. It’s not what she expected to come out of her mouth, but it’s the truth all the same. She swallows, her mouth dry. “This whole time…I’m used to knowing who our threat is. Sparmau made it abundantly clear. And before her, it was Gideon. Before Gideon, it was the Calicans. It’s easy when you know what—or who—you’re fighting.” Nova inhales, shaky and off-center. “I know nothing about what’s coming for us, Din. I know the First Order is something bad, constructed in the wake of the Empire. I know they’re gathering, and I know we have to stop them. But that’s pretty much my ceiling.” She pauses, considering, and then leans forward. “How did you feel about Ben?”

Din’s eyebrows furrow. “Luke’s nephew?”

Nova nods.

“Uh,” Din says, considering, “fine?”

Nova’s heart sinks. “You didn’t feel it?”

Din leans back, crossing his arms across his chest. Nova tries her best to stick with the thread of the conversation, but she gets distracted as he moves. “He’s…odd,” Din says finally, watching Nova like he’s afraid he’s going to say the wrong thing. “Strange.”

“He’s tied to them. The Order.”

Din recoils. “He’s a kid.”

“I know. But he won’t always be.” 

“Nova, I know you feel things I don’t—I can’t—but…he’s a Skywalker—”

“Skywalkers aren’t always good,” Nova interrupts, looking down at her hands. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, her fingers laced together in her lap. “One turned into Vader, remember? And besides, he’s not a Skywalker in the way Luke and Leia are, Din. There’s something off about his energy. Corrupted. I’ve seen visions.” 

Din stares at her. “Nova,” he whispers, and the careful way he says it makes something angry ignite in the pit of Nova’s stomach, “I know you—you see things. I don’t know how, or why, but I know the kid does, too. And I trust you, both of you. But sometimes—sometimes, they don’t always come to life the way you see them.” 

Nova holds his gaze. “I’ve seen him. In every vision, he wears a mask, he has a red lightsaber that ignites like a sword, and he calls himself Kylo Ren. He will be on Takodana. I felt him there. I saw it. He will try to stop the Resistance. He’s connected to the First Order. I’ve seen his portrait in the crystal cave on Ilum. It’s not just me. Luke sees it too. And so does Leia.”

Din blinks. “Leia?”

“Yes.” Nova raises her chin. “That kid is going to turn into something horrible. And when he does—not if, Din, when—he’s going to be our enemy.” 

A long sigh falls out of Din’s mouth. He rubs his forehead, trying to make sense of it. “So if you know that piece of the puzzle, why don’t we—?”

“Stop him?” Nova interjects glumly. “Because he’s not our biggest threat, and because he’s Leia’s kid. When it comes down to that, we’ll do what needs to be done. But I can’t do anything now.” She swallows. “None of us can.”

They’re both quiet for a minute. 

“Are you still having visions of Sparmau?”

Nova looks back at Din and immediately away, turning the Darksaber over in her hands. “When I sleep. They’re nightmares, until they’re not.” She sighs, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars. “She shows up. She can still hurt me. I don’t think it’s her. Not really. But there’s remnants of her in whoever the person we’re up against is, and he’s—he’s terrifying.” Nova shudders. “I haven’t seen him. I don’t know his name. But Sparmau always said she was nothing in comparison to the pain and havoc he could wreak. And Ezra knows him.” 

Din watches her carefully. “What has Ezra said?”

“Nothing concrete.” Nova runs her tongue over her teeth, considering. “He—it’s like he’s not fully there. When I see him, he’s blurry around the edges. Like he’s in limbo. No one else appears to me like that.”

Din nods. “Is he real?”

“Yes,” Nova answers, immediate and concrete. “He’s real. His reality just…isn’t ours. I think it used to be, but not anymore.” 

There’s something resigned in Din’s eyes. Nova watches him, studies him, trying to place it. He looks haunted still, from Sparmau, from all the loss. He’s emaciated and thin and unarmored, and it’s strange to observe him in this form, like everything has been stripped bare. Anxiety hammers in Nova’s heart, dangerous and incessant. 

“I know, it sounds crazy—”

“No,” Din interrupts, leaning forward. Their faces are only a few inches away. “It doesn’t.” He sighs, reaching forward. Nova lets his bare hand swallow hers, basking in the safety and security of it. “Maybe it does. But I’ve had a front row seat to this for a while now, and I know better than to doubt you.”

Nova’s throat constricts. “I think you’d like him.”

Din squeezes down on her hand. “Maybe he’ll come back someday. Out of your head.”

Nova runs her tongue over her teeth, then nods. “Maybe.” They share a look, a long one, and then Nova hops off her bunk and uses her hands to push herself up on Din’s. He moves over to the wall, letting her curl in around him, and Nova closes her eyes, listening to the thrush of Slave I’s coast through hyperspace, breathing in Din. Metal and gunsmoke and fire and cinnamon, and something different underneath all of them. It’s the lack of armor, the smell of the air hitting his skin. She snuggles up against him, getting closer and closer until they’re one cohesive form, a multi-headed animal, limbs wrapped around limbs. “Sorgan,” she whispers.

Din makes a noise reminiscent of a “yes.” 

Nova looks up at the metal interior of the ship. “There was a woman there,” she says, trying to keep her voice level, devoid of any jealousy, “if I remember correctly.”

Din nods against Nova’s head.

“She wanted you to stay,” Nova repeats, stringing together the concurrent stories that both Din and Cara had told her. “You wanted to stay.” 

Din’s quiet for a minute. “Nova—”

“That’s true, right? Did you want to stay?”

More of the quiet. Then, smaller: “Yes.” 

Nova considers this. “Was she Cara’s friend?” This is a genuine question. Nova can hear the tha-thump of Din’s heartbeat. As usual, it’s steady and strong, and it doesn’t quicken under pressure. “Should we invite her to the funeral?”

Din shifts. “I think we should invite the whole village,” he says, finally, after spending a moment lapsed in silence. “Cara saved them. I helped, but she…she was the power behind most of it. They’d want to come.” 

Nova nods against his chest. “Okay.”

The familiar lull of space, and the feeling of being intertwined with Din again, make Nova sleepy. She’s been chasing sleep in small doses for what feels like years, and still, she’s not rested enough. After a few minutes, she’s forgotten she’s asked about the woman on Sorgan.

“Novalise.”

Nova shifts, looking up in the darkness of the ship. She can hear Grogu’s tiny snores next to their beds, and even though she can’t see the stars from back here, she feels their presence. “Yeah?”

Din’s hand pulls her even closer, running his fingers through her hair, and already, Nova feels more at peace. “Sorgan’s not Naator. And Omera was never you.” 

*

Nova’s not sure how long it takes to get to Sorgan from Mandalore. She sleeps through the whole thing, and she’s woken up by the rough touchdown onto the planet’s surface, rattled in the bunk like she’s getting thrown around in a cage. 

“Sorry,” Bo-Katan calls, the single-word apology angry. “I don’t have the landing down in this thing yet.” Nova hides a small smile as she gets down off the bunk, pulling her armor and lightsaber from where it’s scattered across the ship’s floor. She makes her way to the cockpit, bracing herself in the door.

“Where’s Fennec?”

“Not here, obviously,” Bo-Katan says sourly, tucking her hair behind her ears. It’s still longer than it usually is, the red shock of it hitting almost to her shoulders. Nova loves it, the wildness of it. “She conveniently went to use the fresher before warning me the ship does not land like a normal ship.”

Nova presses her lips together, and Bo-Katan catches a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye, shooting Nova a look. Nova raises both of her hands as proof. “I come in peace.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where’s Din?”

Nova looks around, still dragging from sleep. “I don’t know. He was with me.”

“Out here.” Din’s voice rounds the corner, and Nova and Bo-Katan climb down the gangplank, tracing its origin. Nova glances up at the treeline, and does a double take. It’s beautiful here, with towering pines and yellow-green grasses that dance and rustle in the breeze. It looks like Kashyyyk but more populated, and the smell of the air reminds her of Yavin. Nova can feel her heart in her throat, and she swallows, looking out at the mountains.

And then, out of nowhere, a desperate frog immobilizes in the air. Nova yelps, recoiling, and Grogu stands in front of her, his tiny face screwed up in concentration, his three-fingered hand wobbling. Before she can do anything, Grogu drags the frog down to the level of his mouth and swallows it whole. Din looks appalled. Bo-Katan looks strangely proud. 

“Don’t play with your food,” Din grumbles.

Grogu blinks his giant eyes in response. Wordlessly, Din concedes, grabbing him gently off the forest floor and holding him close to his chest. Nova wraps her jacket around herself, grinning, propped up against the side of the ship, the hull still warm from the long travel. She smiles at Grogu as he extends his little silver ball toward her, and the two of them float it back and forth, wordlessly, reflexively. 

“There you are.” That’s Bo-Katan’s voice, splitting the air behind her, but Nova’s concentration is entirely focused on keeping Grogu’s ball in the air. “Can you take your ship back? She doesn’t listen to me.”

Nova smiles, expecting Fennec’s dry response, but the voice is someone else’s entirely. “Happily. You were under strict orders not to touch the controls. I could have you killed for that.”

“Maybe you could,” Bo-Katan mutters, “but your jurisdiction is only good on Tatooine.”

Nova whirls around. Standing in front of her, tall and broad, is Boba Fett. And behind him, stubborn as ever, is Kicker. Nova cries out, letting Grogu’s ball float back down to his hand, and before he can protest, she’s hurtling toward Boba and grabbing him in the fiercest hug she can manage. After a moment of stunned silence, he chuckles in her ear and carefully hugs her back. 

“You came.” 

“She’s not ready to go into battle,” Boba says, jerking his head toward Kicker as Nova releases him, “but she’s airborne.”

Nova’s chest tightens. “You came,” she repeats.

“I couldn’t make the fight,” Boba says, and even though his voice is even, she can see sorrow in his eyes, “but I like to keep my promises.” 

Nova nods, trying to keep the tears at bay. “Thank you,” she whispers. 

Boba’s smile is directed entirely towards her. He squeezes her shoulder. “I assume there’s going to be a Skywalker here.” 

“Two.” Leia has her hair braided in a crown over her head, her face set in a no-nonsense scowl. “So. You survived the Sarlacc.” 

The warmth slowly slides off of Boba’s face. “Not easily. You survived the Hutt.” 

Leia nods, a sharp thing. She’s wearing an expression that doesn’t belong to Luke. Nova’s seen it in her visions. Leia may be an Organa, but she has her birth father’s face. “It’s what I do.” She holds his gaze. “You’re lucky Han’s not here, or this would be a different conversation. Don’t try anything. Not with me, and not with my brother. We’re here for a funeral.”

Boba looks from Nova to Leia to Fennec, who seems to have materialized at his side. “I know. I knew Cara. I liked her. That’s why I’m here. And,” he sighs, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “I brought someone.”

Greef Karga climbs out of Kicker, and Nova sighs. Besides Din, he was probably the person here who was closest to Cara. His usually easy, jovial face is saddened. It’s written into his smile lines. “Hello, gorgeous.”

“She has a name,” Din says gruffly, standing up. Karga stares at him for what feels like an eternity before he recoils, realizing who it is. 

“Stars above,” Karga cries. “Mando!”

Din blinks, like he forgot that he was unarmored until now. Nova moves closer into his orbit, ready to be his armor in the absence of it, but Karga smiles, extending his hand. “Good to see you, old buddy.”

Din still doesn’t know how to make normal facial expressions, especially around people who have never seen his face, so it takes him a painfully long time to meet Karga’s grasp. “You too,” he says, finally, and Nova knows it’s the truth.

Nova looks around at the group of them—three Mandalorians, in varying stages; Skywalkers; a tiny green baby stronger than most of them; the slightly slipperty head of the Guild; two bounty hunters; an experienced Rebel. They’re a ragtag group, an army without any sort of collective training, but they’re all here for one thing—Cara. And she’d be happy. She’d have drunk her spotchka and laughed at all the tension, and she would have made it so much easier to bear. Nova can feel her, here, on this planet. It’s serene in all the ways Cara wasn’t, but it’s exactly the kind of place where Nova can picture her being happy. 

“Let’s have the ceremony at sunset,” Nova says, breaking the silence. “We can have it right here, at the forest’s edge.” There’s a small smile on Din’s face, and seeing that in public is so rare that it startles Nova out of her speech. “What?”

“Nothing,” he says, looking where the trees meet the open sky, eyes traveling over the small town below. “It’s—this is the place where we fought. This was the town we protected. Cara shot down an AT-AT right here.”

Nova smiles. It’s so fitting, so Cara, that for a second, it takes away the heaviness of her grief. “Here it is, then. Fennec and Boba, can you move the ships? Not far,” she warns, and Fennec winks. “Karga, you and Bo-Katan can start gathering stumps and logs for people to sit on. Luke and Wedge, will you stay with Grogu?” Bo-Katan gives Karga a side eye, vicious and glaring, but when she catches Nova’s eye, Nova knows Bo-Katan understands. Nova wants someone to watch Karga, who looks sullen and strange, and that Bo-Katan could use the physical release of doing something difficult. Luke nods, grinning at Din as he plucks Grogu easily out of his arms. “Din, Nova says, “you know the town. Will you go ask them if they’d like to attend the ceremony?” Something sad and conspiratorial passes between them, and his hand squeezes down on Nova’s for a second before he retreats back into the ship to gather his armor. “Leia,” she says, finally, after everyone else is accounted for, “will you tell me about funerals on Alderaan?”

Everyone divulges, set off on their respective missions, and after a flurry of movement, it’s just Nova and Leia standing at the forest’s edge. Leia finds smaller sticks and logs, gathering them up in her arms like she’s lived in these woods her whole life. Nova follows in her footsteps, and after a few minutes of silence, both of them are standing in front of a hand-built pyre. In traditional funerals, the body would be wrapped in a shroud, but they don’t have a body to bury or a body to burn. 

“I did this for my parents,” Leia says, as the flames roar to life. Both of them are in shades of blue, illuminated by the dancing orange. “After Vader blew up Alderaan. I did one alone on Yavin, but Luke and Han and Wedge didn’t let me go through with it. I yelled at them and told them to leave, but they’re stubborn when they want to be.” She smiles, lost in the memory, staring at the fire. “Especially Luke. He held my hand and stood with me as we burned the wood down to nothing. I don’t know if this is an Alderaanian tradition,” she confesses, looking over at Nova, “but it’s what my family has always done. When Vader died, when Luke saved him, Luke brought his body back to Endor. I didn’t want to mourn him, but we lit the pyre anyway.” She’s quiet for a moment, deep brown eyes studying the fire. “I’ve been to a lot of funerals, Novalise. Too many. But for the ones that matter, we light these pyres.” 

Nova chews on her bottom lip. She doesn’t know what to say, how to shoulder the sadness. Leia is so fiery, so intentional, that seeing this emotion—raw, not in an outburst—feels strange. After a minute, she reaches forward and takes Leia’s hand. “I haven’t burned a pyre before,” she says finally. “When Sparmau killed my parents, their ship imploded on impact. I mourned them by running.” She swallows. “I haven’t had an actual funeral for anyone I loved. I’ve just held onto the grief and hoped I could put it to rest in my mind. But Cara deserves more than that. My parents deserved more than that.” The fire crackles, and Nova and Leia stand hand in hand, captivated by the flame. “She sacrificed herself for me. What am I supposed to do with that? How am I ever going to repay her?”

Leia’s quiet. “I had a friend once,” she said, “who sacrificed himself for me. And Luke, and Han, and Chewie, so we could get away. So we could make the rebellion matter. I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid, but he kept saving my life, and Luke’s, and Anakin’s.” She clenches her jaw. “He loved Anakin once. He loved Padme, my birth mother, too. And he was so good. Exhausted, retreated into himself, but good. His whole life was about making sure we stayed alive.” She stares into the fire. “He came to the Death Star for me. It had been ten years since I saw him, but I told him I needed him, and Obi-Wan came for me. I didn’t even get to see him before he died.” She inhales, exhales, and even over the roar of the fire, Nova can hear her breath shaking. “For a long time, Nova, I was furious at him. I held onto anger because I thought it would protect me from the grief. I wish he didn’t come. I wish he had stayed on Tatooine. But he didn’t. He died,” she says, her voice wobbling, “for me. I didn’t know how to reconcile it. But then I do this,” she says, punctuating it by waving her hand through the air, “and I get why he did it. I built the Senate back up. I fought for the Rebellion. I helped save the galaxy. Obi-Wan couldn’t have done it at that point in his life, but he knew I could. So I did.” She looks over at Nova. 

“You make it sound so simple,” Nova whispers. 

“It is,” Leia enunciates. “Cara told you why she did it. She sacrificed herself so that you could kill Sparmau. So that you could keep saving the galaxy. So don’t you dare throw that away. Be loud and fierce and cut down any evil that stands in the way. You’re something more, Novalise Djarin. Something closer to holy than any of us. So take the second chance Cara gave you. Don’t you dare throw your life away.”

Nova’s mouth runs dry. “Leia—” she starts, but the words evaporate with the smoke. She wants to tell Leia about the nightmares that wear the face of her son. She wants to talk about Ezra, the warnings he brings, the need to bring him back from the void. She wants to prove to Leia how sorry she is about all the loss she’s had to endure, her friends killed, all four of her parents gone. But Leia just holds her hand, squeezes it twice, gives Nova a look, and that’s enough. It’s not, it’s nowhere near it, but for the moment, it’s everything Nova needs.

As darkness begins to descend over Sorgan, people trickle in. There’s enough ships now that everyone has a place to rest, and before Din brings the town to her, Nova sneaks into the cockpit of Kicker, needing a second of peace before the grief comes back in. She folds herself up in the pilot’s seat, running her fingers over the worn dashboard. There’s the flower she pressed back from Naboo, before she and Din were together. There’s the map that Piper and Arokel made together, the cluster of stars shining even in the darkness. There’s the messy nest of the blankets on the floor. There’s random tchotkes hanging from the ceiling. There’s home here, made in between all the strangeness and brokenness, and Nova sits in the middle of it, knees drawn into her chest, looking up at the stars. 

It’s beautiful, this universe of hers. Dangerous and all-consuming, sure, but beautiful. Novalise shines in the silence, all the stars, standing on the precipice of everything her life has led to. She’s Mand’alor, Rebel Girl, on her way to becoming a Jedi. She’s seen the worst of all of this, gone face to face with evil, but here she stands, ready to take on the darkness. It feels insurmountable if she thinks about it for too long, but she’s not alone. She’s here, alive. What a strange thing. 

“Nova.”

She turns, expecting to see Din, but it’s someone else entirely. Something else entirely. 

“Ezra?”

“Have I caught you at a bad time?” he asks wryly, and even though she knows he’s exhausted, she can see the smile in the corners of his mouth. It’s a ghost of one, but still, it’s there. 

Nova smiles, too. “Darkness is coming, my friend. It’s kind of always a bad time.”

Ezra’s face shifts. He looks off into the distance, somewhere Nova can’t see. “The Order is coming, too. Not soon. Not anytime specific. But I can feel them building.” 

Nova nods. “I know.” She screws her lips up to the side. “But, Ezra—”

“The Order is like the Empire,” Ezra interrupts. “Evil, yes, but not insidious. No, this is different. This is—who I’m fighting, whatever else we’re fighting—that’s different.” 

“Ezra,” Nova says, standing up. Wind comes whipping around the both of them, and Nova forgets she’s indoors. “Ezra, who is he? Who are you with?”

Eza disappears for a second, then reappears. “The people who took your kid, that man, he was trying to harvest something from him. Just because that man is dead doesn’t mean it’s over.”

Nova feels a chill run down her spine. “Gideon?”

Ezra nods. “They’re doing something dark with the Force. Corrupting it. Twisting it.”

Nova feels a headache coming on. “Ezra,” she tries again, “where are you? How can I help?”

Ezra crackles in and out. Nova stumbles back. “They haven’t mobilized yet. they’re not strong enough. but they will, and they will come for you. I’m holding the floodgates back. You need to tell me when you’re ready.”

“Ezra, I—” 

“Goodbye, Novalise,” he calls, drowned out under the wind, “I’ll see you soon.”

Nova falls back into the pilot’s seat, reeling. Part of her is still lodged in the vision, the memory of it sticking to her like a dream. She shakes her head, once, twice, and when she stands up, she collides with Din. She yelps, ricocheting off the armor, and Din  lunges forward to grab her, controlling Nova’s fall back into the chair. “Hey.” 

Nova blinks up at him. “How long have you—?”

“I walked in on you talking to nothing.” Even under the helmet, Nova can see Din studying her carefully. It’s mapped into his body language. She doesn’t need to see his face to know there’s concern written all over it. “I assume it wasn’t nothing.” 

Nova shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. She can't tell if she’s erasing the vision or if she’s trying to make Ezra stay. “Something is happening. Wherever Ezra is, Din, the…the veil is shattering.” She swallows, looking up at him. “It’s coming down, and the Order is…it’s after us for something other than just revenge.” 

Din’s helmeted head tilts to the side. “What do you mean?”

Nova takes a breath, trying to steady herself. “When Gideon took Grogu, he wanted to harvest something from him. Midichlorians. I said that, but I had no idea what it meant. I think it has to do with the Force. So if Grogu has them, I do, too. And Luke, and Leia.” She closes her eyes again, the vision of Ezra’s face, so similar to her own, haunting her. “And Ezra.”

Din doesn’t say anything. 

“He told me he’s holding it off,” Nova whispers, her fingers vicelke around Din’s armored wrist. “But he can’t for much longer, and when it comes, we’re looking at something even more dangerous than Sparmau.” 

Something about Din’s appearances becomes steely, unyielding. “Is that possible?”

Nova nods. She can feel it in that sinister laugh, the blue lightning, the warnings, the way Ezra looks off into the distance like he’s shielding her from whatever danger he’s holding off. “I can feel it,” she breathes. 

Din stares. Nova stares back. There’s so much they need to talk about, all of them. They need to plan, to prepare, to pull the fight together. But they’re stretched thin, and they’ve all had to shoulder so much grief. Nova’s heart wrenches. She wants to lay down here, to pause, to let someone else handle the weight of the galaxy for a change. But then she remembers Leia’s speech, her determination, her refusal to give in. It strengthens her. It lights a spark. So Novalise does what she does best—she sits up straighter, she braces herself, she finds the light. Nova reaches out, touching a hand to Din’s face. The feeling of the beskar underneath her bare fingers is nostalgic, familiar. She gives him a small smile. “You’re wearing your armor.”

Din shifts under her touch, moving closer. “I am.”

Nova bites down on her bottom lip. “You wore your helmet down to the town?”

Din nods. “I…I’ve gotten used to having it off, with you and the kid. And Bo-Katan,” he adds. “And the rest of us. It’s still strange, but it’s…easier.” Nova can hear him swallow through the modulator. “But the rest of the galaxy—”

“You don’t have to,” Nova interrupts gently. “If you don’t want to. You’re allowed to put it on, and you’re allowed to take it off. Those rules, that part of the Creed—you don’t need to live by it if it doesn’t feel right anymore.” She leans forward, pressing her lips to his armored forehead. She rises, silently, pulling on pieces of armor. Her clothes, Mandalorian blue, won’t show up under the orange light of the fire and the darkened night around them, but it feels good to wear something that represents who she is. Nova steps into the tiny fresher, brushing her hair carefully, trying not to disturb the ringlets. She’s planning on braiding the top half back, but when she looks at her reflection, long dark curls hanging in her face, she sees Andromeda. And Nova sees the person Cara helped er get rid of, all those months ago, when Sparmau had put a bounty out on her head. She can’t get rid of her now.

So Nova just wraps her shawls around her shoulders, offsetting her blue underclothes, her dark armor. She doesn’t cover herself in her helmet. She doesn’t try to erase Andromeda. When Nova looks at herself, she just sees Novalise. And it’s what Cara would have wanted.

Nova reappears into Kicker’s main cockpit, and to her surprise, Din’s helmet is off. He looks at her, sadness written into his face, but when his beautiful brown eyes meet Nova’s, they light up. “You’re not wearing your helmet,” she says, softly, bracing herself in the doorframe. 

Din shrugs, reaching forward to her. Nova falls into his arms, letting all of her fear and anxiety melt off into the background as he holds her, happy to just live right here in this moment. “When I met Cara here, she wanted to know why I didn’t take it off. Why I didn’t leave my cohort, why I followed the rules that I did. She wanted me to settle down, to be happy, to show my face. I just didn’t find any of that worthwhile until I met you.” 

Nova’s heart flips over. She pulls away from Din’s armored chest, the beskar warm against where her bare skin had touched it. “Din—”

“I could have stayed here,” he continues, “and maybe I would have been happy. But none of it mattered until you walked into my life, Novalise. So I’m going to wear the armor, but not my helmet. I’m going to stand out there with our friends, our kid, this town we once saved, and I’m going to make Cara proud.” 

For what feels like the millionth time since they landed, Nova’s eyes prick with tears. “You’re making me proud, too.” 

Din gazes down at her, hands snaking up to hold each cheek, capturing Nova’s face in his palms. Her stomach fills with butterflied, and Nova leans into the thrill. “Nova, after tonight, before we go back into the fight, I’m going to—”

Bo-Katan raps on the door three times before she lets herself in. “Everyone’s down there,” she says, softly. “I think it’s time.” 

Din’s hands drop from Nova’s face, and his left finds her right. 

“What are you going to do?” Nova whispers, heart hammering, as they follow Bo-Katan down the gangplank.”

“Later,” Din murmurs, squeezing her hand. “I’ll tell you later.”

Outside, the sun has set entirely over the mountains. The forest is dark, but with the people gathered around them and the fire lit, light dances. Boba and Fennec parked all three ships under the tree cover, and when they emerge into the clearing, Leia catches Nova’s eye and gives her a smile. Nova forges forward, her hand caught in Din’s grip, trying to steady herself. This is about Cara.

In the middle, there’s an open space before the fire. Nova makes her way over to it, looking around at all the people here to grieve their friend—Karga, Bo-Katan, Boba, Fennec, Luke, Leia, Wedge, Din, Grogu. The townspeople looks sorrowful and determined. Din lets go of her hand with a squeeze, and he moves towards Bo-Katan, plucking a rapt Grogu out of her arms.

“Hi,” Nova begins, her voice small. She clears her throat, feeling fortified by the rush of the flames behind her. “Thank you for coming,” she continues, much more self-assured. “Carasynthia Dune was nothing if not a fighter, and knowing an army she built is here to send her off would make her proud.” Nova smiles off in the distance. “My name is Novalise,” she continues, trying her best to meet the eyes of everyone in the crowd, “but a long time ago, it was Andromeda. I was ashamed of the person I was. I thought she was weak, and when I took on my new identity, I tried to bury her entirely.” She swallows. “When I met Cara, she was my friend instantly. She’d heard of me from my husband, and she didn’t reserve any judgment. She hugged me, told me she was happy to meet me, and that was it. When Cara learned I used to be someone else, it was because an enemy put a bounty on my head, using my old name. She didn’t treat me like a criminal. She didn’t interrogate me. She fiercely and unequivocally fought by my side to make sure I survived.” Nova swallows. “She died to protect me,” Nova continues, carefully. She meets Din’s eyes, then Leia’s, and forges on. “She sacrificed herself so that we all survived. That’s the person Cara was. I know she was that person for all of you, too.” Nova lifts her chin. “Before she died, before she threw herself in front of the danger for us, she told me that I needed to stop martyring myself. That it wasn’t fair. And when she did finally make the sacrifice, she told me everybody needs a martyr. And that it wasn’t going to be me.” Nova can feel the tears building up, and when she blinks hard, one falls. “I can’t thank her for that. But I can repay her. And knowing Cara, the person she was? That’s what she would want anyway.” She turns to the fire, closing her eyes, imagining Cara’s face. “Thank you,” Nova whispers, just to the flame. “I promise you, I’m not going to throw it away.” 

The crowd opens up, letting Nova back into its fold. She falls into Din’s arms, and she can feel eyes on her, but they only last for a minute. She watches, held up by Din’s strength, as the rest of the gathering takes turns. Karga tells a rousing story about Cara’s time as Marshal. Boba and Fennec go up together, as they always are. Bo-Katan’s speech is to-the-point but heartfelt in the kind of way only Bo-Katan can manage. Even Luke and Leia take brief turns. Wedge’s eulogy is brief, but so endearing. Grogu babbles in Din’s arms, and Din presses the tiniest, briefest of kisses against Nova’s temple before he passes their kid to her to take the stand. Nova swallows, standing as tall as she can, trying to stay upward without him. 

For a minute, Din just stares out at the crowd, unblinking and awkward. There’s no noise besides the crackle and roar of the fire, and Nova meets Din’s eyes, whispering a silent affirmation, holding his gaze. 

“I,” Din starts, and then the words fall off. He swallows, looking back at the fire, then to the crowd, then to Nova. “My name is…Din Djarin. Some of you only knew me as the Mandalorian. Mando.” The people from the town whisper to one another, the rustling noise sweeping through all of them. “About…two years ago, I met Cara Dune here. She held a gun to my head. She did that a lot.” A tiny smile spreads across his uncertain face. “The two of us were always competing to see who would die. She…she came here with me, to this town, to help fight back against the last of the Empire. She brought down a whole walker right here.” Din swallows. “Cara was…probably my best friend. She refused to leave me alone, even when I wanted her to. Shed saved my life on Nevarro once, refused to let me die down there. And she led me back to Nevarro, the day I met Nova.” His eyes snap to Nova’s again, and the butterfly menagerie comes to life in her stomach. “My wife.” 

She bites down on her lip, eyes still teary, beaming back at him. 

“Cara was tough. She was from Alderaan. She was a shocktrooper. She became the Marshal. She killed evil things, and she fought off criminals for a living. But she loved my kid, and she told me when I was being stupid, and she…taught me being alone wasn’t always the best thing.” Din swallows, and the rest of his sentence is strained: “And I’m going to miss her very much.” With that, he moves away from the makeshift podium, making a beeline for Nova and Grogu, and when he reaches them, Nova bursts forward to hug him. Din, still adverse to showing his face in public, let alone any sort of unhindered emotion, stiffens for a second, and then falls into it, letting Nova hold him up. 

More of the townspeople go up and make their own speeches. Little kids talk about Cara’s muscled arms, her Alliance tattoo on her cheek. Nova just stays in Din’s embrace, a buffer against it all, when one of the women from the town makes her way to the front. Her voice is gentle and kind, and when Nova sees her over Din’s shoulder, her gaze meets Nova’s. She’s beautiful, and a small smile graces her face. “Hello,” she says, and the crowd responds. “My name is Omera.” Nova swallows, staring up at her, but there’s nothing on Omera’s face except grief and gratitude. “Cara Dune helped save me and my daughter and our town. I didn’t know her well, but we wouldn’t be standing here today if it wasn’t for her. So I want to thank her. I want to celebrate her. Sorgan will always be in her debt.” 

When the rest of the ceremony dwindles down to nothing, people gather and drink and laugh. Nova keeps looking over at the fire, wishing Cara was here, startling in the knowledge that she’s not. She holds onto Grogu, and Din stands behind them, talking about something with Wedge. Nova can see Luke looking wistfully over at Wedge, so she beckons him over, and then she feels a tap on her shoulder.

Omera is standing in front of her. Nova blinks, once, twice, and then Omera smiles and extends her hand. “Your eulogy was beautiful,” she says, smiling. “You had a lovely friend.” 

Nova nearly crumples. “I did,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. “Your planet is wonderful. I’m so glad the peace has kept since Cara and Din left.” 

Omera looks over at Din, then back to Nova. “I’m so happy he’s happy,” she says, and squeezes Nova’s forearm. “That man was incredibly conflicted when I met him. You were exactly the kind of person I had in mind to help him.” 

Nova swallows. “Thank you,” she whispers, wanting to say more, but Omera just gives both of them another kind, genuine smile, and disappears back into the gathering to find her daughter. Bo-Katan picks up Grogu from where he toddled off towards the swamp, assuredly in the search for another frog to gobble down. 

“The child,” she says, with perfectly measured disdain, “is hungry. I’ll feed him.” She sighs, like it’s an inconvenience, but with the smile on her face, Nova knows she’s delighted. Din comes up behind her, snaking his armored arms around her waist. 

“Come with me,” he murmurs, pressing himself into Nova’s body, and her stomach flips over in anticipation. He closes his hand around her wrist, dragging her behind him, off behind a clump of trees. Nova exhales as he walks her up against one, bracing his arms on either side of her on the trunk, impossible to escape from. Something warm and wet snakes through Nova’s body, humming in anticipation. “You,” he says, voice low and thick, “are the only person who I would do this for.”

“Do what for?” Nova breathes, the air cutting through her voice. Din’s head dips in to her neck, pulling away the shawl to trace a gloved finger over her collarbone. 

“All of this,” he whispers, his tongue licking a line across the hollow. Nova shivers, hearing the sadness and laughter of the people only a few yards away, chills exploding across her wanting body. “Showing my face. Following you around. Falling in love. Wanting to fuck you out in the open. Needing to prove that I belong to you.” 

Nova barely stifles a moan. “Din—”

“I gave you this ring on Nevarro. I proposed to you on Yavin. We made our home on Mandalore. But the day I realized I wanted something more was here. On Sorgan. And when you walked into my life, I wanted you so badly it…consumed me.” 

“I want everything with you,” Nova manages, her head sparkling with static, every nerve a live wire. “Then, now, for the rest of my life.” 

Din pulls away, just for a half second, and then his mouth is on hers. It’s everything, dizzying, wanting, and Nova lets herself fall into the chasm, wanting more, needing it. But then Din pulls his mouth away and looks at her, still pinning Nova in place. “You said you're never running from me again, cyar’ika. Is that true?”

Nova startles, nodding. “I—yes, yes of course—”

“No,” Din says, tantalizingly, slowly, “it’s not.” 

Nova blinks. “What do you mean?”

“I’m taking you to where I fell in love with you. Naator.” 

Nova’s stomach flips over, staring from Din’s plush lips to the hunger in his eyes. “And then what?”

“Oh, Nova,” Din groans, leaning forward to tuck a lock of loose hair behind her ear. His finger follows down to her pulse pint, skating across it, then pressing. “And then I’m going to chase you. No bounty pucks. No Sparmau to call you away. No visions. No distractions. Nothing but you and me and the planet. You evade me for longer than a day, a full twenty-four hours, you win. If I hunt you down before then, and I will, then I win.”

“And what,” Nova asks, staring at him, “does the winner get?”

“Whatever the fuck I want.” This is the Din from her dream, the Din who chased her down and fucked her in the palace. Nova thrills with it, drips with it, everything inside of her electric and so, so alive.

Nova swallows. “How are you so sure, Din Djarin,” she breathes, leaning into his touch, “that you’re going to win?”

Din presses her back into the tree. She can feel every inch of him, even through the beskar. Nova knows that live wire inside of her is about to explode, edging her closer and closer to the edge. This right here is tangible—an unshakable thing. “Let’s find out. “Go ahead. Run from me, cyar’ika. One last time.”

*

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I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!! i'm sorry again for totally disappearing, working full time has already been so consuming, but recovering from surgery and COVID on top of it all has been… exhausting. i am going to finish SD even if it kills me!!! i promise!!!! and i don't want to give you a set date on when the next chapter will be up, but i promise it will be soon <3 thank you all so much for your kind words. i'm going to be catching up on comments tonight and tomorrow!!!

I LOVE YOU ALL and chapter 26 will be out soon!!!