Chapter Text
One weeks after the tunnels
You fell on your back with a thump. Mando stood over you with his hands on his hips as you panted through the rolling pain.
“Ow.” You really hope your glare holds the accusation you’re feeling. He was supposed to be helping you, not throwing you around. You crawled up and reset, feet staggered and elbows tucked.
“Try again,” he said. You waited for him to reset too, but instead he reached out and snatched your forearm, threw it wide, and kicked a foot out from under you. You toppled backwards.
“How is this helping?” you said from the ground. He extended his hand to help you stand, and you consider dragging him to the ground. But he’s stupidly heavy, and you know it won’t work.
“Let’s change it up,” he said once you were standing. Sweat dripped off your forehead and down your chest. He must have been dying under the armor. “When the Twi-lek attacked you, what kept you from striking? You had a shot at his side.”
“The giant knife in my face.” you answered. Your tone was testy. You’d only talked about what happened enough for Mando to surmise you needed at least one defense lesson. You had argued his point because it had been a one off, right? You were normally at his side, protected by guiding fingers and the fact that everywhere you went people gave him a wide berth.
“It was not that big,” he retorted with mild amusement lacing his voice through the modulator. He turned and gently uncurled the kid’s favorite spoon from his little hand. “Hush. You can have it back in a few minutes,” he tells the kid. The child huffs but sits down in his floating crib to watch you both with curiosity. “Let’s try with this.”
“What are we trying?”
“I’m going to hold it to your face,” he said and took a cautious step toward you. “And you’re going to push it away.”
You froze. You weren’t interested in re-enacting what happened. “I don’t want to do that.”
He stopped in front of you. He is very annoying about this. You’d let him know by crossing your arms. But he had tilted his visor down, telling you he knew, he gets it, this is hard. And frankly, you’re putty when he gives you that look. You don’t even know what that look is, but you can feel it, and it worked. You drop your arms and huff. “Fine.”
He touched inside your wrist with his gloved fingers. He knew.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he offered. “You follow my directions. I’ll keep it simple.” You nodded, glad you didn’t have to think through this scenario. Carefully he brought the spoon to your cheek and set it against your skin. Goosebumps crawled up your arms, but you stood still, and fixed your eyes on his helm.
“Focus,” he drawled. “The point of having a weapon is to make your kill from far away. If someone is this close to you, the fights over. The right is your dominant hand. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Use your left hand to push mine out.” You used your palm to push his hand with the spoon away in slow motion. “Now punch me.”
You scrunch your face and look over his armored body. “ Where ?”
“I’d say face but you’d break your hand.” Your eyes went wide. “Here, next to the pauldron,” he says, tapping a soft place next to his shoulder. You shoved your fist into the bare spot between shoulder and chest. “Do it again. Faster this time.”
You ran through it again and again. He varied the location of the spoon, sometimes coming in lower, sometimes from above. But the strategy for you is the same: shove it away, get a punch in. He gave you simple directions; where to punch him, how hard to shove. In thirty minutes you can successfully knock the make-shift weapon away, land a hard punch, and create distance.
“Good,” he called. You don’t miss the way he tries to stretch his left side. It’s a big show. There’s no way your tiny fists hurt him through a flak vest and heavy suit. But you’re grateful all the same that he’s trying to boost your confidence. “Let’s try a new variation.”
He brought the spoon to your skin again. “Don’t push my hand away. This time, grab my wrist with both hands and turn my hand up and around.”
You tried it slowly. His bones go lax, letting you try the motion out.
“Shouldn’t I be trying to get them to drop the weapon completely?” He resets, and this time you really had to apply effort to turn the spoon on him.
“Assume any attacker knows you’re my crew,” he told you. He reset with the opposite hand. “Which means they’ll be trying to kill you.” You move fast, turning his wrist with everything in your biceps. Mando grunted at the unusual turning of his joints. “You’re not strong enough to take anyone in hand to hand. But you can turn the weapon on them.”
“Thanks,” you said and dropped his wrist. He squared his shoulders, tapped the spoon against his holster.
“Zip it.” He wasn’t having any arguments about this. You took a deep breath to focus. “This is a last resort. If you absolutely can’t get the weapon away, turn it on them.” He returned the spoon to the kid, who clanked it around inside his pram, big ears sticking out. Mando shook his head at his green child.
“Should I…” you trailed off, trying to find the right term for what is surely a gruesome act. “Use it?”
“Yes,” he said. You nod. Quickly, you walked to him, and leaned into the chest plate until your nose pressed into it. Your shirt tightened as he planted a hand against your back. When you close your eyes it was like being in the ship hull, quiet and dark and full of familiar smells, things you know.
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” The edge of his helm pressed into the back of your head.
“Compared to me you’ll seem merciful.” He cupped your jaw with one hand and drew it up so he could look into your face. One thumb swept gently along the soft skin stretching under your chin. It always makes you shiver, and at this point you think he does it just because he can. You’ve been wondering if this is his version of apologetic. Soft touches contradicting the hard bones and steel plates of his body.
You’ll take it.
Two Days Ago
Thirty-six hours from Nevarro
His lead is seventy-two hours through hyperspace, two sectors over. It’s a solemn flight. He has enough credits to re-fuel the Razor Crest a dozen times which means there’s money for repairs, lodging, and emergencies if need be. You’ll be out here for a long while.
It’s quiet. The beat of gravity being shifted and pulled aside wades across the hull. You think it would be a good time to set up monitoring equipment and track power output and hyperdrive fluctuations. But you’ll need to wait until Mando has deserted the cockpit in favor of sleep. The last time you tried to hook your electronics in he’d grumbled about ‘lack of space’ and ‘breaking his concentration.’ It isn’t even something you have to do. It’s purely for your education in the ship’s systems. You’d poked into the hyperdrive enough times to know she functions fine.
Until he does leave the controls, you play with the child. He’s happy to help you ice your bruises. They are all healing at different paces. The ones on your foot and shin are an ugly chartreuse, but the one on your thigh remains purple, and it’s all the Mandalorian’s fault. He’s managed to find it every time you’ve lain together, and it remains dark from his teeth and thumbs.
You suppress a shiver running up your spine and focus on the child. He’s being very helpful, holding an ice pack against the top of your foot, content to be your assistant in this as well. He takes the pack away only to press it into the bruise again. You giggle at his surprise that it isn’t well yet. He’s wonderful. Always curious about what you’re fixing, always ready to toddle down the ramp and explore with you. He crawls onto your stomach to sleep after meals, and the thought of being without his weight brings an uncomfortable ache to your chest.
“You’re being very helpful, buddy,” you tell him. His eyes and ears lift together, intent on your voice. “It will be good as new in a couple days.” His smile spreads, and he focuses on holding the ice pack still. You wish he could tell you his name.
You secretly hope this lead goes nowhere. You don’t know what’s going to happen once you find the Jedi and surrender him to his kind. The Mandalorian hasn’t talked about it. You haven’t brought it up. But you’ll need to confront it soon. He hired you to care for the kid, but once there is no kid, there is no reason for you to stay. You’re a shit medic, and Mando is an engineer in his own right. He doesn’t really need you here.
Staring at the top of the child’s soft head, you wonder what it’s like to be a fifty-year old baby, if time moves slower for him. He’s been alive longer than the Empire existed. Longer than the Mandalorian has been alive, and he will outlive him. The thought makes your head tighten. He’ll outlive you too. By a lot. Is he going to remember the Mandalorian in three hundred years? Will he remember the hours he spent re-arranging the bottom-most cabinets in your kitchen? Or chasing pollinating lizards through your greenhouse? His fingers are barely as wide as your pinkies. You smile a little because he’s become distracted by the air pockets forming in the bubbling ice pack, and pokes at them uselessly.
In the back of your mind, you remember something about the Jedi, a whisper you’d heard about their ability to alter people’s will. To toss objects without touching them. To feel thoughts. You focus on the kid and think hard.
I love you, kid . He keeps poking at the bubbles. An unwanted tear forms in the corner of your eye and you swipe it away with your fingertips, letting the pack fall off your thigh. I love you, I love you, I love you, even after I forget everything, I love you.
The dawn had broken with the Mandalorian leaving you naked and wrecked in the Razor Crest. He’d left practically sauntering while you were a puddle of goo, which wasn’t a bad start.
But as you shoved a Devaronian’s body off your legs taking care to avoid the blood pouring out of his throat, all the good parts of the morning felt parsecs away. Your head ached, you couldn’t get the muscles in your neck to relax. Your legs were stiff with lactic acid, and down your calf were deep crimson gouges you couldn’t feel anymore until you set it against the grass and hissed at the wet sting. His body bled garnet into the phthalo green shore grasses. The smoke from his body hit your senses and you twitched, breathing hard. A sea breeze pushed it in the coast, and nausea overtook you even as you got to your feet, blaster in hand.
He’d come out of nowhere. You’d only had a minute to hatch a plan.
The Razor Crest was half a klick away, too far to run while defending a smaller body, so you’d done the best with what you had. You tucked the kid into a long-deserted sandpiper’s nest under thick bushes, pressing a kiss to his head and promising you’d be back for him. Then you’d drawn your blaster and taken off sprinting in the general direction of the ship. Your lungs had burned with the effort, and you found out the hard way the hunter was sporting some stolen goods when he refused to be knocked down with blaster fire directly hitting his chest.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” you’d mumbled. All you wanted was to lead him away from the kid. If worse came to worse, Mando would find the green bean later, he’d be fine. If you wanted a clean shot, you’d have to stop and that wasn’t an option. He wasn’t fast, but you were shaking too hard to aim precisely. Fuck, you had no plan.
So you kept running, and turned to fire every so often, which only proved to enrage him more. You led him down to the sand, thinking he’d lose footing in the dunes long enough for you to get a decent shot in, but it was a mistake. Your legs were so tired, you took a sharp turn and slipped where the grasses faded to sand, and that’s when he’d caught you.
“Where’s the Mandalorian?” the hunter snarled while squeezing a hand around your throat. “Where’s the crab ?” You threw a knee into his hip, throwing him off balance. He recovered, shoving a sticky hand against your face into the dusty ground. “I want his armor .”
Some vicious scream erupted from your throat. You flung sand in his eyes and tried to crawl away, throwing the flat of your boot back into his nose. There’s a sick crunch and that does it. He’d dug his claws into your calf eliciting a scream and crawled up your body to shove your mouth in the sand. You thought you’d blacked out until he shoved you over straddling your waist, and dug your blaster barrel against your sternum.
“I want the prize, and the armor.” It was a revolting parody the way he’d drawn his cloak back to reveal a painted, stolen chest plate. “Make a matched set.”
Your mind blanked, and without hesitating you grabbed his wrists and turned the blaster nearly upside down, and surprise did the rest of the work. He slumped back over your legs, lifeless.
You had forced yourself to jog, blaster clutched and on high alert, back to the child, nearly a mile and a half on a bleeding leg. You collapsed before the nest you’d left him in, pushed all the brush away and took him tightly against your chest whispering that you loved him, and he was safe, and you’d protect him. His whole face is wet and snotty, but he settled when you wiped the tears out of his eyes with your sleeve. He gurgled and hummed the whole three miles back to the ship. It was a long fucking walk. What were you thinking walking so far from the ship?
You passed the body on your way back to the ship. For a second you thought about taking the time to get the beskar, then decided...if Mando wanted it he could get it. You hadn’t signed up to be a grave robber. You left it red and leaking, letting the tide lick at it.
“Mando, are you there?” you called into the comm system. The ship felt hollow with just the two of you and only the ground protocol system running in the background. You had set the kid in the crib, peeled your jacket off, and hunched over the dashboard to breathe.
“I’m here .” You swallowed the lump in your throat, relief flooding your head.
“When are you coming back?”
No reply for a moment. You could hear forest brush crunching underfoot. “What happened? ”
“A bounty hunter came after the kid and me.”
“Stay on the ship. I’m coming .”
He’s there in twenty minutes flat, landing with precision in front of the viewport. You wave through it, and climb out of the cockpit as the hatch opens. He meets you halfway, and he starts assessing you before offering a greeting of his hand on your shoulder.
“Are you hurt?” His voice is borderline angry.
“I have, um,” you start. It doesn’t feel real. You have holes in your leg. Holes. “I breathed some sand in.”
“What else?” He’s looking at the scrape on your nose from being shoved face first into the dirt. He knows you’re lying.
“My leg is bleeding.” He swears quietly, gives your shoulder an involuntary squeeze.
“Where’s the kid?” he asks, helm whipping up like he’d just remembered.
“In the cockpit. He cried himself to sleep.” Your voice sounds far away.
Mando is perceptive. He sees the change, and he slides a hand down to your waist and for fucks sake he’s being very touchy, and part of you feels dirty. “What did you do?” It’s asked quiet, just between the two of you.
“I did the hand turn thing,” you say. “He shot himself in the throat.”
If you could read steel, you’d call the way the light glances off of his mask as regret. Both hands come to cup your cheeks as he tips the helm down to rest it against your forehead. You’re supposed to cry right now. You’re supposed to feel bad, but you don’t.
“I’m not sorry,” you whisper between the two of you. “He…” your voice thickens as you remember the rage you’d felt rise in you. “He wanted the kid, and your armor. He called you a crab and said he wanted a matched set. He would have killed you both and I would die for the kid, I couldn’t let him-” finally, with a lurch, a sob breaks out, and wipe your nose with the back of your hand. You lean into the chest plate and let the exhaustion take over.
In the daylight he is frugal with his affection, but now he makes an exception. He says “sweet girl” with something akin to lament, and scoops your legs out to carry you into the ship to tend to your weeping leg.
You came to the shore to cry. And you did. You let the sobs wrack your ribs until they ached.
There’s a chemical cocktail percolating through your body. You are worn out. Exhausted. You sweep your hair out of your face and sit with your elbows on your knees. There’s a marine layer sitting pretty over the ocean, greying it out and muting the deep blues you’d fallen in love with that morning, before everything. Every inhale is clean. The sweet breeze blowing in sends whiffs of algae and wet creatures. It’s pushing the fog further in, and soon you’ll be surrounded in the mist. Part of you wants to dissolve into it.
You weren’t stuck. You weren’t a burden to the Mandalorian. You thought on your feet, you tricked a dangerous criminal. You protected the child, and Mando with all the raw strength you had leftover. But more importantly you didn’t freeze. You have a red scrape over your rose from the dirt. You from a year ago wouldn’t recognize herself. You’re sporting new skills and new scars. The Mandalorian bandaged your leg up and told you it would scar. Bacta heals many hurts, but new skin is new skin. There will be half moons in your leg for years and that was that. He’d cleaned the sand off your face, and then let you wander away, within sight of the ship. His warning to stay close lingers in your ears.
You close your eyes and track your change, your growth, your evolution. You make a sad half-smile at the ocean.
The Mandalorian finds you. He’s given away by grass crunching beneath his boots. You don’t turn around until he stops walking. He is a couple meters away, his hands hang tensed by thighs, thinking hard on something.
“I’ll be okay.” It’s the best you can do right now. But it’s better than screaming at him. “Did you get the beskar?”
He doesn’t move. “I’ll get it later.” His voice is shot through. You try to keep your face neutral even as you work through the possibilities of what could make his voice sound like that. He squares his shoulders and turns his toes out. It makes him appear bigger all of a sudden. It’s inappropriate, but heat shoots up your chest.
“You said you’d die for the kid.” He says it slowly, testing the words out. You stand as still as you can to mirror his posturing. “Is that true?”
“Why are you asking?” You don’t mean to be defensive.
“People say things off of adrenaline highs,” he answers. The timbre in his voice rushes through you.
“I meant every word,” you tell him. “I love the kid.” There’s a numbness in your chest and you want it to go away. You stare into the sharp eye-line. “You too, sometimes. I guess.” You don’t know when you became so full as to have something to pour back out. But it eases the numbing in your chest and replaces it with clover sweet bashfulness. You resist the urge to cross your arms, instead letting your sleeves billow out while his cloak rolls up in the air with a gust of wind. You feel your cheeks redden. It’s not the thing you’re supposed to say after a near death experience you don’t think. You’re supposed to wait until the drugs in your body hit normal levels. But he had asked. And you weren’t a coward.
You bore into Mando’s visor, daring him to retort, to tell you off, to remind you this is temporary. But he doesn’t. He’s so still. Something flashes in the steel mask and catches in the air to mingle with salty seagrass. He takes a step forward, careful, and in a calculated move slides one glove off and lets it drop. You pull your eyebrows together as he takes a deliberate step.
“Close your eyes,” he says. He strips the other glove off.
“Why?” Curiosity laces your voice, and you take a careful step back while raising your hands to meet his vambraces. Gun oil and leather from his bandolier envelopes you along with the linen scent his clothes retain. How the fuck do his shitty flight suits smell like linen?
“Close them.” It’s an order. You watch his chest plate rise and fall. He’s barely keeping a grip on his breathing. You close them. “Don’t. Open them.” He steps closer and you feel his body crowd against yours, and you almost topple back. He’s quick and slides a hand on your waist to tug you close. The vacuum seal hisses, and you feel the vibrating clunk of the helm clunk on the ground. His chin and mouth meet the crown of your head. You press your cheek into his warm, bare hand when it cups your face. His pinkies slide down the line of your throat. For a few moments, he presses his lips to yours in a series of chaste, careful kisses. A whimper escapes you, and he responds with the softest vibrations against your mouth. You blush under him. It’s over too fast and he leaves you dragging air into your lungs as he leans down to slip the helm back on. You wait until he tells you to open your eyes.
“The kid,” he says. You stare where you think he’s looking from. “He is my priority. Everything I do is for him.” His voice is thick. “You’ve no obligation to him yet you’d fight bounty hunters three times your weight.”
“You put him in my care,” you try to explain. “You trusted me to watch him. I’d do whatever it took to keep him safe.”
A wily conviction unlocks in your chest. Mando hears it. He brings your knuckles to his mask and presses them into the cool metal. “You protected your own.”
You cock your head a little, thinking on the wording. “Yeah,” you decide. “I protected my own.”
Before you left that awful place Mando retrieved the armor and let the body sink into the sea, no more distinguishable than seaweed or coral formations. He came back with a cuirass slung over his shoulder and smelling of salt. Ocean water scrubs everything clean.
You’d showered, taken care of the child who ate forever and ever, and curled up on your bedroll with the fresher light cracked open. The Mandalorian would join you eventually, he always did. You can close your eyes for a little while.
When you blink open them it’s pitch black in the ship. You can hear the shower running along with the hyperdrive, so you’re back in subspace. You wonder if this trip was wasted.
“Did you find you lead?” you ask in the quiet. He’s shuffling around, pulling soft clothes on, storing armor plates. He operates on touch alone in this pocket of space.
“No,” he answers. “I found their campsite and tracked an hour further. Then I…” he trails, and you hear what sounds like a shirt being pulled on. “I needed to turn around. I can’t explain it.” He nudges your shoulder, and slips in to curl against your back. He had persistently touched all afternoon and this was no exception; wrapping one arm under your neck and the other around your waist to draw you close against his chest. You held his forearms, content to feel him alive and breathing behind you.
“In the tunnels,” he says after a while. “I experienced the same thing. I knew somehow the child was in trouble. I was waiting at the transit hub for you, but I started walking. I had just arrived when the Rodian cornered you.”
You close your eyes, and dip your nose to his skin. He’s clean, warm, whole.
“Do you think he’s telepathic?”
“I can’t be sure until I find a Jedi.” You nod. He presses a gentle kiss behind your ear, running the tip of his nose over the shell. “I need to make a deal with you.”
You freeze, your torso clenches hard and you swallow. “What kind of deal?”
“I need you to lay low for a while. That bounty hunter came after you even when he knew you didn’t have the child. There might be a puck on you.”
You pull out of his arms and sit up. Your chest hurts, fuck . He sits up to wrap an arm against your waist. You’re grateful for the lack of light, the utter blackness falls around you and you might as well be translucent.
“Stay on Nevarro. Karga will look after you. He already has a job for you.”
“You’ve thought about this?” Hurt leaches out of you. You protected the child, you protected Mando, and this was the thanks? The reward?
“Karga suggested it. Your line of work would benefit the community. You’d be an asset.”
You’re quiet for a while. You dig your elbows in your knees and lay your head against your arms. Mando’s broad hand sweeps up and down your back. “Are you tired of protecting me?” It comes out muffled, but he hears.
“Not at all.” His hand settles between your shoulder blades, barely touching the bare skin at the crown of your spine. “You keep the child safe, I keep you safe. That’s our agreement. I’ve seen how you protect your own.” You swell a bit, because there’s adoration in his voice. "I need to finish my task. Karga will keep you safer than I can right now." There's an unspoken or else embedded in the sentence.
“Can I think about it?”
"Yes." He leans over and rests his other hand just inside your thigh. His fingers are hot through your clothes. “Come here,” he says, pulling your waist. You tuck your head against his shoulder and breathe in his scent. It’s drowsy and electric, and you realize your soap might have overtaken his. He tugs your leg up over his thighs so you're wrapped around him. With one of his hands he draws circles outside your knee.
You stare into the monitoring screen, sipping your caf. The air filter sweeps the toasty smell away before you can really enjoy it. The hyperdrive’s output hasn’t dropped below ninety percent in an hour. It’s running fine. Every system in the ship is running fine.
“I’ll go.”
Mando flicks the auto-pilot switch on and swivels in the pilot chair to face you. You hold your steel cup against your lips. Reaching blindly onto your console, you offer him the schematic draft you’ve been working on since your first set down on the Crest.
“But only because I finished it.” Mando takes it. He leans back in his chair, legs wide, and examines your work. Minutes later he sets it aside and lands a hand on your knee to squeeze. “And because you’re taking me to Nevarro and not Pamarthe.”
“You don’t want to go home?”
You shrug, and sip your beverage. “It’s boring. I need a project. And I like Mythrol.” Mando snorts and you smile hopelessly.
He jerks his helmet in a ‘come here’ motion, and you set everything aside to settle astride him in the chair. His hands curl around your ribcage, your toes just touch the ground and hold you still. His armor used to intimidate you, now it feels comfortable beneath your thighs and hands. It’s a safe place to land.
“Don’t ditch me there, by the way,” you say in a firm voice. You dig your palm into your eye to keep any traitorous tears from falling.
“I won’t,” he says, pressing his thumbs into the soft skin of your torso. It makes you want him between your legs, around your chest, tucked into the place your shoulder meets your throat. You aren’t sure how you’ll sleep without the planes of his torso vibrating beneath your fingertips.
“Promise me.” It falls out before you can stop it. You dig your fingers into his cowl, and watch his chest plate rise.
“My name is-”
You jerk back. “You have a real name?”
Mild laughter falls through the modulator, and you smile brightly because the sound is so rare. “I haven’t used it since I swore the creed. Our names and faces are forgotten. They are only used to unify.” You nod at his succinct summary, trying to get the smile to leave your face. He tilts his head at you. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” you say. “Is a name like a promise?”
“Yes,” he answers, and drags you closer, pressed intimately together. You do your best not to grind down because this is important , he can take you like this in his chair, in his armor later . “You protected my clan like it was yours. You should have my name.”
With one hand you trace the signet on his pauldron. The other you flatten against his collar bones. In a hushed voice to tell him, “Promise me you won’t ditch me on that lava pit.”
“My name is Din.”
“Din,” you test on your tongue. Beneath you, his whole body wakes up. It’s a clap breaking sound barriers. Blast charges coercing bedrock deep, down underground to move. The thud of a meteor splitting tectonic plates. The first warm patter of swollen raindrops on fresh tilled soil.
“Din Djarin.”
“It’s a good name,” you say touching your forehead to his helmet.
It is a good name.