#waves crash

there’s a storm. on the small planet, out further than the trio ever imagined the outer rim stretched, it seemed there was always a storm. 

the lightning strikes. the waves crash. he collapses to stop in your home, given no choice but to be met with the onslaught of memories, of you, of your perfect smile, of everything you were before he left. 

the waves crash. he wonders when you last smiled. he wonders if it’s all his fault... 

The Mandalorian x reader, ft. Cara, Karga, the Child and the weather

chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7.5 | 8 | 9 | epilogue

-> my ko-fi !

a little note below the cut from me !

pairing: the Mandalorian x reader

post waves crash smut (18+) | masterlist | kofi

a/n: so this is only my second smut, and I know it’s not great but it’s the best I’ve got right now. and if I wanna get better I gotta keep trying right? all forms of feedback encouraged as always! and obviously, waves crash spoilers !

“How’d you get it?”

From where you were behind him, the faint question barely made it to your ears, and even though you had an ear for his hushed tone, you couldn’t make it out. Instead, you hummed inquisitively back and continued your work with the rifle sat across your lap, cleaning the intricate mechanisms.

But he didn’t continue on. You could just feel his stare directed your way from where he sat in front of you on crates along the floor of the Razor Crest’s bottom hull, forcing you to stop your delicate work and look up.

He was treating his own wound, a lengthy cut on his forearm, one he insisted he was capable of treating himself. But he wasn’t actually doing any treatment at the moment, he was looking back over his shoulder at you.

Furrowing your brow, you asked with real words this time. “How’d I get what?”

Using his injured arm, he brought his bare and un-gloved fingers to where the mouth would be on his helmet and gestured vaguely. But even with confidence in his motion, his voice still came out strained behind his helmet. “Across your bottom lip.”

With one hand still holding your cleaning equipment, you used the other to reach up and gently trail over the pale clinch on your bottom lip with your calloused fingers. It didn’t surprise you that he asked, honestly, it only surprised you that it took so long for him to.

He rarely ever asked questions of the sort, but the day he picked you up off the planet you had been staying on for a new mission, the first time he saw you since you acquired the small mark across your lip, it had given him pause. You got a real and genuine stand-still out of him when he caught sight of it. His staring was normal, it was something you grew fondly accustomed to, but this was shock.

But he didn’t ask then, he just welcomed you aboard the Crest. There was a job to get to and no time to linger.

Apparently there was time now.

the Mandalorian x reader

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cute little parts are going to keep coming and eventually the title will make sense, I promise. ( but at the same time, come tell me what you think it’s about, what you think the promise is? ) -r.e.

“So, what do you think it was?”

You had long since sewed him back up and covered the wound, now laying exhausted next to him, Cara couldn’t help her confusion. Both she and Karga stood in the kitchen, snacking on the delicately cut pieces of fruit you hadn’t necessarily cut for them, but you offered it, after the fourth hour of them hovering over your shoulder watching you work.

Karga only shrugged in response to the question, reaching into her bowl to steal a slice of the blue fruit his selection was curiously missing. “He took quite a few shots back in the fight-”

“No- not that.” She shook her head, still attempting to keep her whisper down, “I mean the two of them, what do you think the promise was?”

He chuckled a solid hearty chuckle that radiated from his chest. He couldn’t help the booming voice that followed him everywhere even if they tried not to wake you.

“I think Mando specifically asked us not to think about it.”

She blew out from her lips, reaching back into his bowl and grabbing a perfectly cubed orange fruit. “You think it was romance?”

“He doesn’t take his helmet off.” Karga reminded but she just shook her head.

A cube of fruit still stuffed in her cheek mid-chew, “He has no problem with the ladies, trust me.”

“You?”

He couldn’t even help the laughter that burst through him as her eyes went wide, she couldn’t get a negative response out fast enough. Shaking her head and crossing her hand in front of her neck at the same time.

“No- nope- no-”

“Then who?”

“This mom, back where we met, in a little village who bought him for protection.” She finally calmed back down, still shaking her head slightly trying to rid herself of the mental image.

“But he left her too?” Karga was all in now, he couldn’t help it, watching on from the kitchen.

You were slumped uncomfortably against the table you had instructed him to be left on, his chest plate discarded next to you with a pile of blood-soiled clothes used as you cut him open and stitched him back up. It was all hand-done out here, no bacta sprays to heal him up in seconds, you had to do it yourself.

They imagined it was a combination of the exhaustive efforts just to keep him breathing and the fact that there was no way you got any sleep once they arrived last night, but you were exhausted.

“Is that what you think happened here?” Cara questioned, still scanning over the scene, waiting for some clue to jump out, but the two of you were so stoic.

Even in stitching him back up after he collapsed in your doorway, you didn’t crack from your mysterious façade. It was incredible. You managed what he did even without the helmet. Level-headed didn’t even begin to cover it.

And she wanted to know more. She wanted to know why Mando actually believed you would shoot him if they lingered around for a second past sunrise, but the sun had long since set on the rapidly passing day on this planet, and not only did you feed them, but you stitched him back up.

You refused to leave his side just hours after threatening to end his life if he bought up more time than you allotted.

She was confused and she wanted to know what the promise was. She wanted to understand.

“I think that he made and broke an important promise like he said.” Karga supplied, setting the empty bowl back down and moving to lick his sticky fingers.

“But do you think it was love?” She kept pressing.

“I’ve only ever seen a woman get so mad for love and money.” He shrugged, “And since I know his stream of finances and she lives here, it’s either love or we’ve got it all wrong.”

It wasn’t that it was a shanty house. It was certainly holding up against the endless storm, give or take a few windows shaking when the lightning struck close enough. But it wasn’t some luxury estate on the shore of a sunny planet meant for relaxation and nothing else.

By the looks of it, the nap you were currently stealing next to Mando’s slowly rising and falling chest was the closest you had come to relaxation in a long time.

There were no mementos about, no keepsakes, nothing. There was a couch around the fire pit, a table there that Mando now slept away on, a few candles and books tossed aside to make room for him. There was a kitchen, no abundance of food, everything looking as if it had been picked or fished within a five-minute walking radius of the house. There was the small bedroom in the corner, Cara had run in under your orders to grab a few fresh clothes, it was just one bed on the floor, a few more unlit candles and books, a refresher and not much else.

It wasn’t a home, it seemed to be a temporary shelter. Except you had said two years. And everything about the efficient scheduling and care you placed in making sure everything was exactly where you wanted it… It didn’t feel temporary, it just didn’t feel like a home.

“You think he’ll ever tell us?” She pressed once more, fishing around in her bowl but not caring for any of the remaining pieces.

“Assuming he wakes up and she doesn’t kill him?” He countered and she nodded, only making him chuckle out again. “No.”

She couldn’t help but laugh and shrug along. He raised a good point. Mando wasn’t one for talking, and something this personal? Definitely not one for talking.

“Alright, I’m going to feed the kid, see if he’s got any cool hand magic for me,” Cara suggested, gesturing forward with the bowl in her hand.

Karga pursed his lips out and quirked his head. “Yeah, I’ll watch.”

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the Mandalorian x reader

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I promise things will pick up in the next part, for now, enjoy some yearning and shirtless mando tho not as sexy as it could be, maybe soon

The heat on his chest was oddly warm.

No beskar to keep it away, to keep his natural warmth within, nothing. Just his bare skin open to the fire blazing beside him.

His hands snapped up despite the pain to feel for his helmet, still on around his head, not having even been shifted. Not that he really feared you would try anything, but he couldn’t help the concern which overtook him in the brief moment when he realized he had passed out.

Unconscious, he was in control of nothing. And that was a pretty big fear of his.

You stirred awake as soon as you felt him move, and by the time he lifted his head enough to see you, you could tell that even through the helmet, you both wore the same look of surprise in realizing you had fallen asleep beside him.

He dragged his gloved hands over his bare chest, finally able to feel his heart beating again with a steady beat, all the way to the small stitches tied in his side. It hurt, but it was better now than it had been before. It was a pain he could manage.

How could he not, he was used to it by now.

The pain shifted to sharp and scalding the second he tried to sit up.

You reached a somewhat deft hand to his chest and gently urged him back down, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Your voice was a raspy mix of having just woken up and complete and utter exhaustion even despite it. Hair slightly astray, bags under your eyes, hardly the constant version of you that you strived so hard to keep. A rock sank in his stomach knowing it was him who disrupted it all.

So much for being out by sunrise.

“Do you remember collapsing?” You shifted around, onto your knees next to him, keeping your hand pressed to his chest to gauge the steady beat, careful around the wound, checking to see the rise and fall.

Your touch was soft. Methodical in its placement and even in his current condition, he couldn’t miss the callouses that lined your palm and fingers. But it was soft to him. And he wanted more, though he knew he didn’t deserve it.

“Yes.” His voice was something to rival your own, but he realized it immediately as it shot from his lips in a curt graveling tone. He recoiled, he cleared what he could, the modulator spitting it back out in a much more average tone for him, “Yes,” as he repeated.

“Was the pain in your lungs?”

“I thought I had broken a rib…” He mused, trying to steal a look down at his own chest, a pretty gnarly bruise stretching across the entirety of it, emanating from his right side with a line of stitches straight through it. “After the fight… I just ignored it.”

“You punctured your lung, must have been the rib.” You nodded as you spoke, eventually tugging your hand away and bringing back the cloth, which was previously covering him up, replacing your warm touch with it. He wished you lingered for just a second longer, his body yearning for the warmth of your touch over that the fire was providing.

A burst of lightning struck down just outside the house, reverberating back into the room with an echoing rumble of thunder. You didn’t even flinch in acknowledgment of it, you simply waited for the sound to die down and continued. “I stitched it back as best I could, but, you could use some real medical attention.”

He nodded curtly, as much as he could without any pain manifesting, it seemed his whole body ached.

“Do you want me to leave?”

You froze where you knelt, holding your own hands together in front of you, mindlessly pulling over them, but as soon as the words left his mouth, your pull against your own skin got tighter and tighter.

He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know how to read that.

He knew you, or at least he thought he did, but this was new, a new tick he was going to have to learn. Or not. If he didn’t stick around much longer, what difference would it make?

“Listen-“

“I’m not going to throw you out…” You finally mustered, but you refused to meet the stare of his helmet. You knew he was looking; you always knew. “Your two people have gone out for wood and supplies, mentioned your ship was broken, you can stay until it’s fixed.”

He didn’t nod. He just stared; you weren’t looking his way anyways.

“And they left your baby.” You scoffed, gesturing toward the sleeping bundle on the couch. “Which was, as far as surprises go…”

But the words trailed off on your tongue, something else catching in your throat, words you just couldn’t manage.

“I-”

“I think it would be better if we kept our interactions to a minimum.” You coughed out, getting to your feet and defensively snuggling your arms around your torso. “You should be fine for now, so…”

“Right.” His voice came out strained, he didn’t mean for it to but he couldn’t help it.

You glanced to him and he held the stare. But both of you looked away when the door opened back and his two drenched companions came back in, carrying soaking wood. It was impossible to keep anything dry in that storm.

“Oh, sorry, if we’re interrupting something-” Cara interjected, so hoping that she was interrupting something, you could hear the eagerness in her voice even as she tried to dampen her smile.

“You’re not.” You shot back before Mando could even find the words to do so. “One of you should keep an eye on him.”

He lifted his head with an attempt to protest one last time, but you were gone before he could manage it, moving to the door to grab the sheathed machete there, strap it to your hip and leave.

Cara and Karga shared a look but when Mando let his head fall back down with a groan, they moved over to him instead of lingering any longer.

Karga settled in on the couch next to him, reaching over to gently pat the head of the sleeping kid. “How are you feeling, Mando?”

“As far as near-death experiences go…” He shrugged as best he could, earning a brief chuckle from Karga. “The ship?”

“I can’t even get the engine on her back on, we’re going to be needing a lot of parts.”

He scoffed, because of course, it wouldn’t be as simple as flipping a switch and getting out of here. Reaching down to his chest, he ran his gloved fingers over again, the scoff having torn through him uncomfortably. Everything felt okay. For now, at least.

“I can take you to town tomorrow-”

“No.” Karga was curt. “You need to rest.”

“I’m fine-”

“You said that and then passed out.” He couldn’t argue with him there. “You rest. We’ll figure it all out.”

“I’m not very good at sitting still.” He huffed but Karga only chuckled, reaching forward to gently pat him on the shoulder now.

“Figure it out now or next time, you’ll wind up dead.”

He nodded, Karga had a point.

“And there won’t be any pretty women to patch you up.” Cara added, though she had been actively pretending she wasn’t paying attention.

He sighed. He could have done without the commentary.

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The Mandalorian x reader

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- I am so taken aback by the response to the first one, I’m glad you like it so much ! I think theyre going to be coming out in short parts for now, but definitely more to come

He watched you. The whole morning. Since the second you woke up, until now, the moment he had to push his repacked bags towards the doorway, the light of the sunrise just beginning to peek over the coastline out the window.

The storm didn’t stop, if anything, its intensity grew in the night.

But he watched you and you seemed less than phased by the constant clattering of water against the roof.

You were deliberate in every motion.

Careful with the knife in your hand and precise when you raised and lowered it repeatedly over the board of fruits. Some he knew, others he had never seen. Not an ounce of juice spilled from the board, even if it squirted from each of the fruits as you sliced, you had a hand on a towel before you could make even a drop of a mess.

It was careful. Precise. Perfect. Everything he remembered you to be in such a different way. It was somehow the domestic equivalent of what he was used to with you and he couldn’t pull his gaze away.

And he knew he was staring. He knew you knew he was as well. You could feel his gaze from a parsec away, confined to the small living space, you were nearly suffocated by it. But he didn’t care.

He wanted to stay just to tell you that.

But besides the board where you surgically diced the fruits of various colors, sat your blaster, loaded and the safety off. Each second he spent staring, the sun got closer and closer to the horizon, blazing the sky he could see from the window in a warm orange out of the darkness of the night.

Each second was a second closer to you asking him to leave with a shot to the beskar just to make your point. Or given how quiet you had been, maybe just the shot without warning.

It wouldn’t surprise him. He wouldn’t even argue he didn’t deserve it. There was an uncomfortable tightness in his chest just imagining it.

Cara hit him on the arm, not rough, just a nudge, a reminder of the sun’s position in the sky, as if he hadn’t been counting down until the exact second, ensuring to spend each moment he had to spare in the same room as you.

“You could ask her if we could stay?” She whispered carefully, chucking her chin up and back towards the kitchen. To you.

Another cut on the board, each piece the exact size as the one before.

“I don’t think she’ll shoot you; you know…” Karga felt the need to chime in from where he dipped in for shelter from the rain, coming into the conversation from behind them. “If you apologize-”

He couldn’t even entertain the thought any longer. It was torture to even envision a path where you accepted any attempt at saying he was sorry, where he could stay with you for just a second longer. He had tried before; he knew the odds of this time being any different.

The helmet shook in a resounding ‘no,’ “No. We’ll head into town, get what we need, and keep moving.” His voice strained through the pain in his heart.

One last look, it was all he would give himself. He almost hoped you would spare him one glance back, maybe if you did, he could survive another two years. But your knife hit the board again, stare never varying from the board in front of you.

“Mando, whatever you did-” Cara tried, her brows furrowing just slightly in towards each other. It was a genuine concern, he believed it. But she didn’t know.

“I shouldn’t have brought us here.” He defended quickly, just loud enough to be overheard. Stars, he wished you were listening. “Let’s go-”

He moved to take a step out the door, to shut the door behind him and end it all now that the sun was just about to fully rise over the horizon, but he didn’t move more than an inch in his beskar. Not as his chest went tight.

A tightness he thought was because he was looking at you, like a tear in his heart. But this was a real tightness, a real sharp pain as he moved.

The broken ribs he had been nursing since their last fight were nothing new, but this pain was sharp, not chronic. It was like being stabbed, no, he knew all too well what that felt like this. This was worse. This was so much worse.

For a brief second, he considered that you had shot him. But he would have heard you move for the blaster; he would have heard the shot. Even if it wasn’t you, if it had been anyone from any direction, he would know.

This was from within him, his own body screaming as a pain latched onto every single cell and echoed through his chest.

He could do nothing but fall to his knees at first, Cara reached out to keep him upright but severely underestimated how much a man in full beskar weighed the second he became dead weight. He was on the floor before he knew it, the clambering of his armor against itself enough to cause a ruckus on its own, but now it was combined with Cara’s frantic calls for help.

And the only thing flashing through his mind was guilt. Guilt for suddenly becoming even more of a problem for you. Another burden for you.

He grunted and groaned, doing his best to move into a position where it didn’t hurt but after a few struggling squirms on the floor, he became painfully aware that didn’t exist. Something was very wrong. The broken ribs he had been ignoring for the past day or two since the fight, just trying to get them to safety, all of the injuries from that day, it was all catching up to him, burning a hole through his chest by the feel of it.

Then all he could see was you. The small slit of his vision through his helmet was focused entirely on you. He knew it wasn’t a hallucination, you looked much too stoic for that, he imagined that if he was dreaming, you would at least feign concern, for his ego.

No. Not you with your steady hands and streamline thought.

“You’ve got to get him level with the floor.” He had fallen, collapsed in onto himself into a twist. Cara did as instructed and got him flat on his back with a few heaving tosses of him in his heavy armor. “What happened to him?”

Everything was beginning to blur, nothing but your voice echoing in his head with the pain now. But he could see Karga and Cara share a brief look from where they both knelt next to him.

“There was a fight.” Karga stuttered out, waving his hand. It wasn’t necessarily a lie, but it was nowhere near helpful.

“He took a pretty bad blow to the back of the head.” Cara followed up as best as she could.

But your hand wasn’t anywhere near his helmet, you knew better than to even try. You trailed down his chest, hands dipping beneath the armor wherever it could, finding a few places to stop and hold, letting it move up and down with each of his shuddering breaths. Uneven and scarce.

“It’s not his head.” You commented under your breath, releasing it almost as a scoff as you pulled away, getting back to your feet right at the edge of his blurring vision.

The light behind you played you for something heavenly, the sun fully up above the horizon now, dousing the room with cascades of bright light and the rain echoing against the roof to a steady rhythm now. Much steadier than his labored and almost nonexistent breath sounds.

“Get him up, move him onto the table here.”

He couldn’t see you anymore once you gave your instruction and dipped out of vision, but he could hear the clatter of everything that had been on the small fireside table as it hit the ground. Cara had him by the shoulders and Karga got him by the legs, trying to keep him level as best they could until his back his something solid and the heat of the fire began to overwhelm him, now cooking in his armor.

Your face was back. Just the vague outline of it as he felt himself teetering on the edge of consciousness. Your fingers pressed just underneath the helmet, grabbing a pulse on his neck but not daring to venture any further up.

“I’m taking your chest plate off.” It wasn’t a question, not that he would have been able to answer if it had been, but you let it fall from your lips more as a courtesy than anything else.

He reached out for your other hand, the one by your side, trying with a near numb and deft hand to give it a squeeze, but everything went black.

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The Mandalorian x reader

waves crash- masterlist here

this is the end of the line y’all, I’m so glad you could come with me on this journey. what was supposed to be small snippets turned into my first finished fic in a long time! let’s see what I do next, I hope you’ll join me then too!

Cara just didn’t understand.

The child had been in her care for approximately 16 hours since Mando and you stopped by Nevarro and dropped the child off with her and Karga, citing a particularly dangerous mission on the horizon, something you couldn’t bring the child into. They just needed to watch the kid for a day, at most, just until you could settle what needed to be settled.

That wasn’t what Cara didn’t understand. In the six months since they had left that stormy planet, Mando and you have had to leave the child under their protection twice when your mission to get him back to his people got too risky to have him around.

This was relatively normal.

What the child was doing, that was what she didn’t understand.

She lived through the child attempting to Force choke her out, she watched the fireworks when he burned the fire trooper to death, she had seen him heal Karga and so much more. This was not strange in the magical power respect, this was strange in the child respect.

It walked around the small cantina crawling with bounty hunters, banging his goddamn womp rat head on surface after surface.

Cara had to stop it from grabbing the metallic leg of one of the droids who entered the cantina and crashing its head against its calf. It was the strangest impulse that overcame his little green body.

It didn’t make any sense. She just didn’t understand.

“It’s like it has a death wish.” She cursed, setting the burlap bundle onto the table in front of Karga. “I swear, just wants to bash its own head in.”

“It’s just a child, let it be.”

The child grabbed a puck off the table and stuck it into its mouth, sucking the metal with a cooing voice which only made Karga bellow out with a laugh.

“Going to be just like Mando with these pucks.” He joked, grabbing the puck back and instead flipping on the hologram to distract him.

“Not if he keeps hitting his head against anything he can.”

“Just tell them when they get back.”

She scoffed, leaning back in the booth. “If they’re coming back.”

“Of course they’re coming back, why wouldn’t they?” He furrowed back, stopping his extension of a hand to order a drink, the words catching him so off guard.

Blowing out a breath from her lips, “If I was traveling around the galaxy on fun quests looking for an ancient people with the love of my life and I could leave this little creature somewhere it would be safe, I wouldn’t come back.”

“Mando is a man of honor and purpose.”

“Well, I wouldn’t come back.” She chuckled out as the kid hobbled to her, headfirst, “Not for this monster.”

“It’s a wonder they left it in your care.” He mocked, shaking his head, finishing ordering his drink when the communicator on the table began to buzz. “That them?”

Cara checked it while still trying to hold the stubborn child back. “Yeah, they just docked.”

“Do you stand corrected?”

“I wouldn’t come back.” She reiterated, grabbing the child and shaking her head. “I’ll be back.” She huffed, sliding out of the booth.

“Ironic.”

She just rolled her eyes and kept walking, the child bouncing along in her arms the entire way to the docks.

The Razor Crest had a few more scratches on its hull than the last time it docked, but minor, nothing that would require repairs or anything, eventually they would just blend into the natural character of the ship.

She considered letting the kid down to run up the ramp by itself, but something stopped her before she got the chance. Just far enough around the corner, she was able to spot the quiet moment she was about to intrude on and hang back, keeping the child quiet against her chest.

He had been sat on a crate in the hull, something that wasn’t there last time she went to pick up the kid, so she could only assume it had been whatever you left to obtain. And you had been knelt in front of him, wrapping a bacta patch around his wrist.

It was such a personal moment, she even felt bad eavesdropping as she waited, but she couldn’t help herself.

“That was stupid.” You cursed out first in basic, then followed it with a string of colorful insults in your native tongue, hands working faster to wrap and secure the dressings.

“I know.” He spoke solemnly back to you, the voice low through his modulator, so low Cara was barely able to hear it over the sounds of muffled coos in her arms.

“Don’t do it again.”

He huffed out a breath, almost strained like he was in pain as you pulled the wrap tighter around the wound. “I thought the beskar would take it.”

“Well it didn’t hit the beskar.”

He didn’t need to be told that, he was the one who felt the sharpness of the blade tear through his shirt and skin as he lunged in front of you to take the hit. There wasn’t much of him not covered in beskar, the guy had managed to hit the few inches of unprotected landscape.

But he could manage the small wrist wound. Had he not, it would have been a much larger wound across your neck, he was confident about that much.

One last tear with your teeth at the patch and he was all taped up. But as you stood to gather the rest of the supplies in the small medicine box, he grabbed your wrist and stopped you.

He held your hand tight with his and pulled you in closer as he stood to his own height directly in front of you.

Cara peered around the corner just in time to catch the brief motion, you standing to press your forehead to the equivalent of his on the helmet, shutting your eyes as your skin gently collided with the cold metal. His gloved hand wrapped behind your neck to keep you just as close, the two of you consumed by each other so silently.

It was a solemn expression that painted your face, but Cara nearly swore she saw a brief upturn at your lips.

You two held there, just with each other, for only a few curt seconds before pulling away. She knew very little about Mandalorian culture, she knew even less about you and where you came from, but even she could recognize the action as something so intimate, certainly more intimate than she had ever seen Mando be in the entire time she had been with him. Even since you came along.

It was beautiful. Which was probably why she felt so bad having witnessed something she imagined existed only between the two of you. Something special, something personal, something yours.

Or maybe not just between the two of you.

The child tugged on the armor which kept it contained to her arms, readjusting in her grip to hit its head firmly on her chest plate.

She felt like she was beginning to understand its new and strange habit.

Mando descended the ramp mere seconds later and she had no time to pretend she wasn’t just intruding. And while he went stiff when her presence caught him off guard, he quickly relaxed when he saw it was just her and the child.

“Mission go alright?” She questioned, looking back up the ramp as she set the child onto the floor. Immediately it took off towards where you were working in the weapons closet, not quickly, just a slow hobble, but adorable, whether Cara would admit to finding it so or not.

“Yeah, fine.” He added back just as short, following her stare now, watching as the child hit its head against your calves while you worked.

There was still a smile being suppressed on your lips, but less effort went into keeping it hidden this time, the two of them could very easily see it. The scar on your bottom lips stretched but you didn’t seem to mind it while you worked.

“The kid’s been doing that head thing all day.” She explained, clearing her throat to catch Mando’s attention back from you. “Couldn’t get him to stop.”

“Yeah.” If she didn’t know better, she would say it sounded like a smile cutting through the steel around his head. “Don’t know where he got that from.”

“Me either.” She chuckled quietly, earing a quizzical tilt of his head her way that she felt better ignoring. “I like this for you.”

“Like what?”

“Just.” She blew out a breath, watching as you picked the child up and retreated further into the ship to where she could no longer see, the last image she caught being you with a smile as the kid tried to headbutt you directly. “This.”

He saw it too. He was staring. He was always staring. 

“Yeah.” He nodded, “I like it too.”

Cara knew why he came back for the kid.

-> my ko-fi

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tags: 

The Mandalorian x reader

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wow okay, so I was going to have this up last night but then I made it so much worse, oops. enjoy ? I still really love all the feedback so please keep it coming !

The lightning that night woke you with a thunderous clap.

In your own defense, you had barely been asleep. After hours of laying on your sad excuse for a bed, simply staring at the ceiling, you had managed to briefly drift off and that was when the weather woke you back up.

By then, you knew no sleep was coming and you weren’t one to waste any more time waiting for it. You had to stay busy. Sitting… Lingering in it… It would all come back.

Who were you kidding? It was back the second the Razor Crest cut its engines on your front lawn.

The fire had nearly begun to die out, you noticed it the second you stepped out of your small room. But all of the firewood was still drenched.

It wasn’t a cold planet, quite the opposite, the steamy jungle surrounding the house and the hot winds off the coast kept everything plenty warm on its own. But the smoke was necessary to keep the natural insects away, not that they were dangerous, more of a nuisance than anything else.

But since you had taken up a home there, you had never once let the fire die out.

It was hard during the wet season, but you had managed. But not this year. Not with them here. You just weren’t functioning at your highest capacity and the mee thought f it made you uneasy.

Trying to keep a silent step, you inched closer to the central pit and watched as the embers continued to flicker, not much of a fire but still something small and warm. They each laid out around the room. Mando stayed on the couch, occupying one side while Cara took the other, a reasonable distance between the two of them which the child filled. Karga was on the other side of it, laid out across the floor strewn around with blankets.

But within seconds of standing over them and watching, you knew he was awake. You could feel his stare, even from where he laid down.

And you let it linger, pretending you didn’t notice, keeping your stare on the fire and nothing else. You weren’t sure why you did it, why you wasted the time playing into his hand, but you did. Wrapping your thin blanket even tighter, you stayed still, just letting him stare.

He may have been hurt still, but he knew you knew. You always knew.

Yet the silence lingered.

Every so often, a thunderous clap would echo, accompanying the violent downpour of rain against the roof or the child would let out a faint snore. In the briefest periods of silence from the storm, the waves could be heard crashing violently against the shore.

There was no rhythm to it. It was crude and disjointed. Nothing like the gentle lull you had been so easily encapsulated by the day prior while sitting on the damp sand.

This was as aggressive as the storm.

As a particularly large wave crashed, the wind whipped a gust of rain into the side of the house and lighting struck, a bright flash of light coating the room before an unsettling rap of thunder followed.

He sat up with a faint groan, incapable of letting the game of pretend linger any longer between the two of you. You were both too adept for that.

But you surprised him with your raspy morning voice, speaking first.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Even as it came with gravel in the tone, as tumultuous as the sea raging outside, it felt soft as it coasted to his ears.

Maybe it was because you looked particularly soft where you stood with your arms wrapped around your torso, keeping yourself encased with just the blanket, the dying fire casting an almost warm glow across the half of your form which faced it. Or maybe it was because you intended it to come out as soft, though he couldn’t wrap his mind around that idea for long.

You wouldn’t be soft, he told himself, not with him. 

“I couldn’t sleep either.”

You nodded slowly along with him, trying to not linger too long of the thought that he had been listening to you toss and turn in your bed, incapable of falling asleep the entire night. But you couldn’t help it. He laid out on the couch in a very specific direction, the direction facing your small room.

The ambient silence returned, him staring at you and you staring at the fire while the storm seemed to ravage the jungle and coastline outside the thin walls of your house.

But it wasn’t that noise which bothered you. It was the faint snores from the child that wouldn’t escape your mind. The small green creature which had been so bright. So happy.

That was a sound you needed out of your head, a sound you need to talk over. And suddenly the words fell from your lips before you could stop yourself.

“Why did you come here?”

Out of your peripheral, you could spot the slight change in sparkling reflection across his helmet as he quirked his head.

“We needed somewhere to lay low.” He answered quietly, another low groan escaping through his modulator as he managed his way to his feet. “Somewhere off the radar.”

You nodded again, still refusing to glance his way, even as he got closer to where you stood. From the corner of your eye, you could see he still had his chest plate and undershirt off, not replacing anything after you cut it off to save him. Instead, he had a blanket tossed over his shoulders, loosely shrugging over his form.

He looked warm. You forced your focus back to the crackling of the last remnants of wood in the pit.

“She apologized for you.” Again, the words came before you could stop them. But once they were out, you couldn’t take them back, nor did you have any intention to do so. 

He quirked his head once more, angling himself to you instead of the pit you stared at.

You answered before he even got the question out, “Cara… She said you were thankful I let you stay, that you felt bad for breaking whatever promise you made to me.”

Your voice was barely above a whisper, toeing the line of audible once the thunder surged through the sky again. But he heard you. He was standing to close to miss it, and his stare followed the flex of your lips with every word you spoke. He didn’t miss a syllable.

Which was why his heart sank the way it did.

He stole a brief glance to where Cara had passed out, face inwards to the bend of the couch. He couldn’t tell if she was awake yet, he was trying as hard not to wake them as you were. But if she was awake, there was no way she would show it. He knew she would try to eavesdrop for as long as possible in place of disturbing them in any way.

He wasn’t sure whether he was mad or not. It wasn’t that her comment was out of place, or even wrong, it was that they had been words he was incapable of getting out, of telling you directly the way he wanted to and she told you before he got the chance. He wasn’t mad. If anything, he felt slightly inadequate.

“You consider it a broken promise?” Your meek voice eked out before he had a chance to assemble any version of an adequate response. “You told them you broke a promise to me but-”

“Yes.”

Your stare finally disconnected from the fire and turned to him. Half cast over in shadows, half burning with the warmth of the fire given the way he turned towards you.

Another calamity of waves against the shore crashed down and another violent strike of wind and rain hit the windows, giving the house a slight shake that neither of you paid any attention to now that your stares remained fixed on one another.

“I promised that I would keep you safe, and I didn’t.” He managed out through a clenched throat. His brain didn’t even know how he was managing it as he traced the intricate details across you equally as shadowed and fire painted face. “I failed you.”

You didn’t know what strength you were pulling from to keep his stare, but you couldn’t look away from the small slit of his helmet, knowing his stare behind it had never left you since you walked in.

A bright strike of lighting cast the two of you in a bright light for the briefest of seconds before fading back to the warm light of the fire, getting smaller and smaller each and every second, then the thunder came.

The memories were there as soon as the bright hue of the lightning hit across his beskar, illuminating him from the shadows briefly.

How the aggressive artificial lights of the stolen imperial ship had cast him in the same glow. Three years ago. The day he made the promise.

The ship was soaring through space at hyperspeed, he had abandoned the controls to come to the back of the cargo hull and watch you tend to your own wound. You knew he was staring. You always knew.

A bounty was placed on you. That was why he came to find you. What you had done in the two months since he had last seen you, he didn’t know, nor did he care. And he had absolutely no intention of freezing you in carbonite aboard his ship either. He found you to warn you.

Unfortunately, running with the paranoia of a hefty bounty on your head made you much more skeptical of the beskar covered hunter. The second he entered the cantina you were hidden in, you started a bar brawl, using it as a distraction to escape him. The long wound across your chin came as a broken bottle skimmed your throat and caught your jawline, a consequence of the battle you started to escape him.

Him. The man you had the least to fear from in the bar. You just didn’t know that at the time.

You managed to get out, but so did he, following you back to your ship just as you collapsed in the hull. A stolen imperial model. Not that there was any empire anymore, but it was certainly not a ship you bought with your own credits.

Futilely, you tried to fight him with blood cascading from your chin. He shut that down easily, but with hunters still following, he had no choice but to get you to safety aboard your own ship. Which was how he ended up flying it while you applied your own bacta in the hull.

And now, he just watched.

As soon as you had the last of the patch covering the wound, you looked back to him and sighed. He took that as an invitation to approach, whether it was or not, he didn’t care.

“So, how much are you getting for me?” You shot back carefully, eyeing him as he came to standstill in front of where you sat.

“I’m not.” He sighed, groaning briefly as he bent down onto his knees in front of you. “I came to warn you, not to bring you in.”

You scoffed, directly into his helmeted face, shaking your head as much as you could before your cut began to sting against the patch.

“I could never hurt you.” He tried again, placing his hand gently to your knee, waiting for you to hit it away, but you didn’t.

You let it linger as you always allowed his stare to.

“I don’t know who put the bounty on you, but I won’t let anything happen to you.”

And in that moment, with his gloved fingers drawing tiny shapes into your skin, you believed him. Worse. You trusted him.

You didn’t trust anyone. But you trusted him. 

For a year, you trusted him. You heeded his word and stayed put on a small planet, immersed in the religious culture as you traded labor for the monastery in exchange for privacy.

He knew hunters better than you did. He said you would be safe there. He promised you that.

A year later almost exactly, two hunters set fire to the entirety of the village to flush you out.

You woke to the sound of screams, screams of children and adults alike. The same children and adults who had accepted you so easily, who had been so bright and happy, who had been screaming with excitement as they celebrated their holidays just a mere hours prior to the current calamity.

The village was gone. Almost everyone was dead. And they did it to get to you.

Mando showed up two hours too late, finding you covered in blood, kneeling over the bodies of the two hunters responsible, a knife in your hand. The blood wasn’t yours. None of it was.

He didn’t bother trying to explain himself, he knew you wouldn’t hear it.

He just waited silently as he watched you wash the blood from your body in the still water of the lake.

Since the day the bounty was placed on you, he had only seen you smile when playing with the village youth. Now, as you washed the dark blood of the men who killed them from your skin, he knew he wouldn’t see you smile again.

He didn’t bother telling you he eliminated the one who put the bounty on you in the first place. It didn’t matter to you anymore. You knew he would only be back if he had done that, if he was sure you would be safe now, he had said just that. You didn’t need him to say it, you knew.

And it didn’t matter.

You pushed the knife into his hand as you walked with a drenched form out of the water, you were nothing like he left you.

He did that to you. He knew that. He had ruined you. 

As much as you wished it was a memory only brought back by him being there, you couldn’t lie. It was the highlighted plot of each of the nightmares that plagued you when you laid in bed desperate for sleep on this hot planet. It wasn’t even worse now that he was there. You couldn’t blame him like that. They were always bad. With him there, they were still bad. No worse. They couldn’t get worse.

He promised to keep you safe and failed. He knew that. 

Two years and he still didn’t realize that he hadn’t failed you in that respect.

“I’m alive.” You muttered out, pulling your blanket even tighter around your form. It wasn’t cold. You weren’t cold. You just needed to.

“That wasn’t what I promised you.” He sighed, taking a half step closer. “Everything that happened was my fault and I promised you.”

“I didn’t meet you at the door with a blaster because you broke that promise.”

He didn’t need to quirk his head to get you to continue, the dam was already broken, the words were coming now.

“I don’t blame you for what happened. I know how to accept responsibility for my own actions…” You inhaled and kept going. “But you left me here alone.”

“I thought that you wanted me gone.”

“You left me like I was some broken piece of equipment.” Your throat had gone dry, but you tried to muster through it. “You couldn’t look at me, that was why you left, don’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you-”

“You can’t say you left because I wanted you to. I didn’t. You left because your guilt consumed you, so don’t blame me.” You huffed one last time, eyes finally dropping from where they had stayed on his helmeted stare. “I know what I was, I know what I did to get that bounty, I know they died because of me… But I never blamed you and you left me because you convinced yourself I did.”

You stepped around him and moved out of the living area before he had a chance to stop you. He was frozen, incapable of thinking of a single word of response as his heart tore in half.

He let you go.

The waves crashed again on the shore. Ragged and turbulent just like his breathing now. 

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