Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The cell smells like rust and recycled air, and the lights went down hours ago – not off, never off, just dimmed to that bruised red that means the facility's day cycle is over and its prisoners are supposed to sleep. You haven’t slept. You’re not sure you remember how to anymore.

Three days. That’s how long you've been in here, counting by the rhythm of the ration slot and the heavy clank of boots that come once per shift change. Three days since the bounty hunter who calls himself Vane dragged you off your transport with a vibroblade at your throat, smiling like he'd won a sabacc pot. He hasn't told you what he wants yet, clearly being the kind of man that likes to make a woman stew.

You shift on the metal bench that passes for a bunk, drawing your knees up to your chest. The durasteel wall behind you is cold even through your shirt, but you press your shoulder blades into it anyway, because the cold is a real thing, and real things are rare in here.

That’s when you hear him move.

The cell next to yours was empty when they put you in. You'd stared at the dividing wall for the better part of a day, watching the seams, listening for breathing, and there had been nothing. But somewhere in the long stretch between the last meal and the dimming of the lights, they must have brought someone in, because now you can hear the unmistakable scrape of something heavy against metal, the dull clink of what can only be armour settling.

You hold your breath and hear a long exhale on the other side – mechanical, filtered. Like it’s passed through a vocoder before it reaches air. You know that sound. Every spacer this side of the Rim knows that sound.

A Mandalorian.

You don't know what possesses you to speak. Loneliness, maybe, stupidity, definitely and you turn your face to the wall.

"Hey."

There’s nothing for a long moment, just that mechanical breathing, even and slow, like a man who’s been in worse places than this and is conserving himself for whatever comes next.

"You're awake."

His voice lands in your chest like a stone dropped down a well. Low, rough at the edges, made stranger by the helmet's modulator, carrying that slight metallic burr that turns every consonant into something with teeth. It should have been off-putting, but it isn’t. It’s the first voice you've heard in three days that isn’t Vane's oily purr, and your whole body leans toward it before you've even decided to.

"Can't sleep," you reply. "How long have you been in there?"

"Couple hours."

"I didn't hear them bring you in."

"They didn't want you to."

You press your palm flat against the wall, as if you can feel him through it. You can’t, of course, the durasteel thick enough to stop a blaster bolt. But you imagine him on the other side, sitting the way you’re sitting, his helmet tilted toward the sound of your voice.

"Are you hurt?" you ask.

He pauses. "Nothing that matters."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one you're getting."

You smile, in spite of everything. "Fine. Don't tell me your name either, then."

"I wasn't going to."

"Of course not." You let your head tip back against the wall. "So, what do I call you for the purposes of this limited conversation?"

"Mando works."

"Very original."

"It’s functional and descriptive."

You laugh, a tiny breath of one, surprised out of you because it’s been a long time since anything has made you laugh. You hear him shift on the other side of the wall, a slow grinding of beskar against metal that you feel more than hear, the vibration humming through your spine.

"What did you do to end up in here?” he asks.

"Wrong cargo on the wrong ship. You?"

"Wrong face on the wrong wanted poster."

"Yours or his?"

"Mine, apparently."

"Hm." You trace a finger along a seam in the wall, following its line down to where it meets the bench. "Are you going to kill him when you get out?"

"Yes."

He says it the way another person might say I'm going to get water. No inflection, no heat, just the flat statement of a future fact. You should be frightened of him, but you’re not. There’s something steadying about that voice, that certainty. As if the universe is a problem he’s already solved, and you’ve only stumbled into the middle of his working.

"Take me with you," you say, before you can think better of it.

"You don't know me," he replies, with the shape of a laugh through the modulator.

"I know you're not him."

"That’s a pretty low bar."

"It's the one I've got."

He goes quiet for a while after that. Not an uncomfortable quiet, rather the kind that feels like company. You listen to him breathe, slow and even, and try to match your own to it, and find after a few minutes that you have. You inhale when he inhales and exhale when he exhales, as if you’re sharing a single set of lungs through the wall.

"What's your name?" he asks.

You tell him without thinking, the syllables just leaving you, soft, into the dim red dark.

"That's a good name.”

"It's just a name."

"There’s no such thing as just a name."

You turn your face to the wall and press your cheek to it. The metal’s less cold now, or you’re warmer – one of the two.

"Say it again," you whisper.

There’s a pause long enough to make you think he might refuse. Then his voice comes, lower, slower, and he says your name the way you've never heard it said before, like it has weight, like it’s a thing he’s setting down carefully on a table between you, where you can both look at it.

Something flutters low in your belly, and you tell yourself it’s hunger. Three days of nutrient paste can do things to a person.

You know it isn’t the hunger.

"Tell me something," you say, mostly to fill the silence. "Anything, I don't care."

"Like what?"

"Like…what's the last good meal you had and on what planet. I don’t know, anything."

You can hear him thinking about an answer before he speaks. "Tiingilar. On Nevarro. But there was too much spice, and it burned my tongue for an hour."

"You eat through that helmet?"

"Not in front of you, I wouldn't."

The phrasing is so specific, so oddly intimate, that it makes your face hot. In front of you. As if he's thought about it. As if you’re a person whose presence would change what he does with his mouth.

"Why not?" you ask, voice careful and quiet.

"It's the Way. No one sees my face."

"No one?"

"No one living."

You let that sit and take in the whole shape of it — the loneliness baked into it, the discipline, the strange tender violence of a vow that old. You think about a man who hasn't shown his face to anyone in years, who eats alone, who sleeps alone and who would die before he breaks that code.

You think about what it would mean if he ever did break it for someone.

"What about touch?" you ask, and you can hear your own pulse in your ears now. "Does the Way say anything about that?"

He pauses for a single beat. "No."

"No, it doesn't say anything? Or no, you don't…?"

"It doesn't forbid it."

"Oh."

The silence after that has a different quality, the silence of two people who’ve both noticed the same thing at the same time and are waiting to see who’s going to acknowledge it first. You feel your fingers curl against the wall and the wall against the line of your thigh through your trousers, the cold of it sinking through and meeting the heat of you.

"Mando," you say finally.

"Yeah."

"When's the last time someone touched you?"

The modulator catches his exhale and turns it into something like static. He doesn’t answer right away and so you wait. You can be patient when you need to be, and right now, with your cheek to the wall and your blood loud in your throat, you need to be.

"It’s been a long time," he admits finally.

"How long?"

"Longer than I'm going to tell a stranger."

"I'm not a stranger, you know my name."

"That doesn't make you not a stranger."

"Doesn't it?"

You imagine him in the cell next to yours, that helmeted head bowed, his gloved hands resting on his thighs. You imagine his shoulders pressed back against the same wall you’re pressed against, the only thing between his skin and yours a few centimetres of durasteel and a lifetime of bad decisions.

"What about you?" he says.

"What about me?"

"When's the last time anyone touched you?"

The directness of his question startles you. You've been the one playing this game and somehow, he’s taken the cards out of your hand without you noticing.

"A while," you admit.

"How long is a while?"

"Long enough that I think about it when I shouldn't."

"When shouldn't you?"

"Now," you say, "for instance."

You hear the soft sound through the modulator that you decide, immediately and with some certainty, is a laugh, or the closest thing he allows himself to one. It’s a warm sound and it goes straight down your spine and pools at the base of it.

"You're thinking about it now?" he asks.

"You asked."

"I did."

"Are you going to ask what I'm thinking about?"

"I think I'd rather you tell me."

Your face is suddenly on fire and you’re grateful for the wall, grateful for the dark, grateful for every centimetre of durasteel that keeps him from seeing the colour you must be. You press your forehead against the metal, close your eyes and feel the steady, mechanical sound of his breathing on the other side.

Fuck it, you think. You’re never going to see him and he’s never going to see you. If you both die in this place tomorrow, the only thing left of this night will be the air it’s moved through.

"I'm thinking about your voice," you say.

"My voice?"

"That's where I'd start."

"Where would you start with it?"

You wet your lips. "I'd want you to keep talking. I'd want you closer to the wall. I'd want…I'd want to put my ear right up against it, and I'd want you to put your mouth right up against it on your side, and just…talk. About anything. I just want it in my head."

You hear him move, hear the scrape of beskar against the wall, and you know, even though you can’t see him, that he’s shifted closer, that the helmet is nearer to you now than it had been a minute ago. That if there were no wall, he would be a hand's breadth away.

"Like this," he says, and his voice is lower than it had been, the vocoder rasp gone soft, almost a whisper, and impossibly intimate for that. "This close enough for you?"

"Yeah," you breathe. "Yeah, that's…that's good."

"Tell me what else."

"I'd…" You swallow. "I'd want you to tell me what you'd do."

"What I'd do?"

"If there wasn't a wall."

He takes his time with the answer. You can hear him thinking, hear him deciding, hear the moment he gives himself permission to say what he wants to say. It comes through the helmet as a small exhale, almost a sigh.

"I'd put my hand on your throat," he says.

Your breath catches.

"Not to hurt you," he adds. "Just to feel it, your pulse. You've got it going pretty fast right now, I bet."

"How can you tell? It's…it's not the only thing it's doing."

"No?"

"No."

"Tell me."

You press your thighs together, the friction of the rough fabric almost too much. You haven’t realised how wound you've been, how three days of fear and adrenaline has sat in you with nowhere to go, and now his voice is a key turning in a lock you haven't known was there.

"I'm wet," you say, quiet, into the wall. "I've been wet since you said my name."

The sound he makes then isn’t modulated. It is – for just a fraction of a second – something raw that slips through underneath the vocoder, a breath that turns into something else, and you want to live in that sound, want to wear it.

"Show me," he says. "Tell me. Whatever you're doing…tell me."

"You first."

"I'm hard."

The directness of it punches the air out of you. He says it the way he said yes, I'm going to kill him, flat and true, a simple fact of the universe.

"Are you touching yourself?" you whisper.

"I want to wait."

"For what?"

"For you."

Oh. Oh. You bite down on the inside of your cheek to keep from making a noise that will carry. Some part of you is still aware that there are guards somewhere in this facility, that Vane is somewhere in this facility, and that anything either of you does or says too loudly could be heard. But the bigger part of you, the part that’s been starving for three days and probably longer than that, is already past caring.

"Together, then," you say.

"Together."

You work your hand under the waistband of your trousers. The fabric’s stiff and unfriendly, but underneath it, you’re soft and slick and so ready that the first brush of your own fingertips makes you gasp into the metal.

"Talk to me," you say. "Mando…keep talking."

"I'm undoing the belt," he says. "Just the cod, the rest stays on. You can't be careless in a place like this."

"Yeah."

"I’ve got my hand on it."

"Tell me…tell me what it looks like."

"It's hard. It's been hard since you asked me about touch. And it’s leaking a little at the tip. I'm wiping it with my thumb."

"Are you…are your hands gloved?"

"I took the right one off – for you.”

You whimper softly, and don’t even try to hide it. You have two fingers circling your clit now, slow, the way he’s talking – slow and deliberate, with that mechanical control that you suspect is the only thing keeping him from coming apart already.

"What about you?" he says. "Tell me what you're doing."

"I've got my hand down my pants. My fingers…” you exhale. “I'm so wet, Mando, I can't…I'm circling, just circling, slow."

"Slow's good."

"I want it to be your hand."

"What would my hand do?"

"It would be slower than mine and heavier. You'd make me wait. You'd make me…you'd make me ask."

"Would you ask?"

"Yes."

"Ask now."

You can’t think because you can barely breathe. The wall against your forehead is wet from your breath, the metal smelling faintly of iron. “Please."

"Please what?"

"Please touch me. Please…please don't stop talking, please put your fingers in me, please…"

"How many?"

"Two, start with two."

"Tell me when."

"Now. Mando, now…"

You push two fingers into yourself and the sound you makes is hot and high and you press your other hand over your own mouth to muffle it. On the other side of the wall you hear a sound through the modulator that’s almost a groan, but not quite. He’s holding it back, but you hear the shape of it, hear the way it cracks the calm in his voice.

"That's it," he says. "Tell me how it feels."

"Tight. Hot. I…Mando, I haven't…I haven't done this in so long, I…"

"I've got you."

"What are you doing?"

"Stroking, slow. Long strokes. My grip's tight, I…fuck…"

That word through the modulator, low and almost involuntary, is the most vulgar thing you’ve ever heard. It makes you clench around your own fingers, and whine into your hand.

"Say it again," you beg.

"Fuck."

"Again."

"You feel that good?"

"Yes."

"What if it was me? What if it was my hand inside you?"

"It is. Right now, it is. Tell me you're thinking about it."

"I am. I'm thinking about…about pushing you up against this wall where you can't move. Where I can hold you there with one hand and use the other…"

"How many?"

"Three. You'd take three."

"I would."

"You would. You'd take everything I gave you, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I'd take everything you gave me."

You add the third finger. It’s a stretch, just on the edge of too much, and that edge is exactly where you want to be. Your thumb works your clit in tight circles and you pant against the wall, against your own palm, and on the other side of the durasteel a Mandalorian is stroking his cock to the sound of your voice and you’ve never, in your entire life, been so undone by a man you’ve not seen.

"Mando."

"I'm here."

"I'm close."

"How close?"

"Close. Close, I…keep talking to me, please, please, just…"

"Listen to me," he says, and his voice has dropped to something so quiet it’s almost a breath, almost prayer. "Listen. You feel like silk. You feel like the best thing I've put my hand in in years. If I were there, I'd have my mouth on your throat right now. I'd have my teeth on the place where your pulse is. I wouldn't bite hard, just enough that you'd feel it for days. I'd have my fingers in you all the way to the knuckle, and I'd be working you open, slow, until you were begging me, until you were saying my name…"

"I don't know your name."

There’s a pause. A long one, during which you almost stop breathing.

"Din," he says. "It's Din."

Something cracks open in your chest. He’s given you something he’s not supposed to give, given you something that, by his own laws, no one should have. And he’s given it to you with his hand on his cock and your name in his throat and a wall between you. And you understood, in that moment, that you will never, not as long as you live, hear that name said in that voice again without falling apart.

"Din," you say.

"Yeah."

"Din…Din…"

"Say it again."

"Din, I'm…"

"Come."

You come around your own fingers with his name in your mouth and the metal of the wall against your forehead, and you bite down hard on the heel of your hand to keep from screaming. On the other side of the wall, you hear the shape of his climax through the modulator, the cracked-open sound of a man who hasn’t let anyone hear him in a very long time. It goes on, and on, and on, and when you finally collapse back against the bench, you’re trembling all over, slick with sweat, your fingers still inside yourself, your breath coming in pieces.

For a long time, neither of you speak, but you can hear him breathing. You lie back on the bench with your trousers half-undone and your hand against your chest and your heart hammering up into your palm and listen to him do the same on the other side of the wall.

The dimmed red lights buzz faintly overhead and somewhere far down the corridor, a door cycles. The world is still in here, the way it always was – but underneath the stillness, something new is sitting between you that hadn’t been there an hour ago. You

can feel the weight of it and suspect he can too.

"Din," you say, just to see if you’re allowed to say it again.

"Yeah." His voice is rougher than it has been, the modulator doing its best to flatten it out and failing. "I'm here."

"Are you alright?"

"That's my question."

"I asked first."

"I'm alright."

You smile at the ceiling. There was something so absurdly him about it – a man who has just come apart with a stranger's name in his throat and is now answering you in two-syllable monosyllables, the way he probably answers everyone about everything.

Your fingers are still tacky, your face still hot and you feel, somehow, like you’ve just survived something rather than enjoyed it.

"I'm alright too," you say, in case he’s waiting for it.

"Good."

"Din?"

"Yeah."

"You shouldn't have given me that, should you?"

He’s quiet for a long time and you let him have the quiet. You've learned, over the course of the night, that his silences are a kind of speech, that he’s a man who turns things over thoroughly before he sets them down.

"No," he says finally. "I shouldn't have."

"Are you sorry?"

"No."

"Good."

You roll onto your side, facing the wall, draw your knees up and tuck your hand under your cheek. The metal is warm now where you’ve been pressed against it, warm with the warmth of you, and you imagine that on the other side of it some matching patch of beskar is warm too, warmed by a helmet that’s been resting against the same plane of durasteel for the better part of an hour.

"Are you really going to kill him?" you ask.

"Yes."

"Tomorrow?"

"As soon as I get the chance."

"Will I get to see it?"

"You'll be out of the cell before it happens, I'll see to that."

You close your eyes. The certainty in his voice is a strange thing to lean against, but you lean anyway. It’s the most solid thing you've had to lean against in three days, maybe longer.

"Din?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me something else. Anything, just…keep talking, until I fall asleep."

"What do you want to hear about?"

"Anything that isn't this place."

You hear him shift, heard the soft sigh of the helmet against the metal as he thinks about it and settles him in.

"There's a marsh moon," he says, "out past Trask. There’s nothing on it, no settlements, just water and reeds as far as you can see. The water glows at night. Some kind of bioluminescent thing in it. You walk through it and your boots light up the whole pool, blue, like you're walking on stars."

"Have you been there?"

"Once."

"What did you do there?"

"I refuelled, sat on the ramp of my ship for a while and watched the water."

"Alone?"

"Yeah."

"I'd like to see that."

"I'll show you."

Your chest does a thing it has no business doing, given the circumstances. You press your cheek harder into the wall, not rusting yourself to answer, because if you answer, your voice is going to do something embarrassing.

"Keep going," you say when you can. "Tell me more."

So, he does.

He tells you about a desert at dawn on a planet whose name you don’t catch, where the sand turns the colour of beaten copper in the first light. He tells you about a forest where the trees grow so close together that you have to turn sideways to walk between them, and about a kind of bread they baked on Sorgan that you eat with your hands.

You don't know when you fall asleep. You only know that somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a city built into a cliff face, your eyelids give up, and the last thing you remember is the steady metal-edged sound of his voice telling you about the way the wind moves through the canyon at night and, for the first time in three days, you’re not afraid.

****

You wake to white.

Not red, not the bruised dim red of the night cycle, but the cold flat white of the day lights, full and unflattering and merciless on your gummed-shut eyes. You squint and sit up, your body protesting in a hundred small ways and you put your hand to the wall before you've even fully remembered why.

"Din?"

Nothing.

You frown, sleep still thick in your throat.

"Din,” you cough. “Are you awake?"

Nothing.

The breathing’s gone, that’s the first thing you notice, the absence of the slow, even, modulated breath that has become, over the course of the night, as familiar to you as your own pulse. The cell on the other side of the wall is quiet. Not the quiet of a man sleeping, but the quiet of a room with nothing in it.

Your stomach drops.

You scramble off the bench and go to the front of the cell, pressing your face to the narrow slit in the door, trying to angle your eye to see down the corridor. You can’t see much, but you notice the edge of the next cell's door…

…which is open.

Not forced or blown, rather open the way a door’s open when someone’s unlocked it and walked out. The interior, what little of it you could see, is empty. No figure on the bench, no silhouette by the wall, no beskar.

"Din?"

Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to.

You stand there for a long time with your forehead against the cool metal of your own door, and you try to talk yourself into the reasonable explanations. He’s escaped and he’s going to kill the man who put him here, and a man who says a thing like that the way he said it isn’t a man who stays in a cell longer than he has to.

He said he would see to it that you got out before it happened.

He said I'll show you.

You believe him. You had believed him at the time, and you believed him now, in the cold white morning, with your hair stuck to your face and your hands trembling slightly from cold or hunger or the aftershock of a night you’re still half-convinced you dreamed.

You go back to the bench and sit down. You put your hand against the wall, except it isn’t warm anymore. It’s cold all the way through. He’s been gone for hours, probably, since not long after you fell asleep, because that’s the kind of man he is – the kind

who waits until you’re safe in sleep before he does what he has to do, so that you won’t have to lie awake listening to him do it.

You wonder if he said goodbye. If somewhere in the dark, between one of his sentences about canyons and the next, he said something soft to the wall, and you hadn't heard it because you were already gone. You hope so. You hoped he'd put his gloved hand against the metal one last time and said your name the way he'd said it the night before.

You draw your knees up and wrap your arms around them. Then you press your forehead to them and you breathe, slow, in and out, the way you’d breathed with him in the dark, except now you’re doing it alone, and the rhythm doesn’t match anything but the memory of him.

It’s then that you notice it.

A small thing, set on the floor at the base of the dividing wall, on your side, where it must have been pushed under through the narrow gap between the wall and the floor – a gap you haven’t noticed before, a gap barely wide enough for a finger but wide enough, evidently, for this.

You pick it up.

It’s a sliver of beskar, no bigger than your thumb, cut clean, the edges smoothed. A scrap, probably, from some repair he's done to his own armour a long time ago and kept in a pouch for reasons that are his and not yours. The metal’s warm in your hand, even though it shouldn't have been.

Wrapped around it, twice, is a thin strip of leather. And on the leather, scratched in with the point of something sharp, in letters small and precise and careful, he’s written you a message.

Wait for me.

That’s all. No name, no instructions. no promise more elaborate than those three words, in a hand that has pressed hard enough into the leather to scar it.

You close your fingers around the beskar and shut your eyes. You press your closed fist to your mouth and sit there in the cold white morning of the cell that has held you for three days, and you don’t cry, because you’ve not cried in years and you’re not going to start now. But something in your chest does a thing that’s very close to it – a hot, full, aching thing that wants out and can’t get out and so just sits there, glowing, like the water on his marsh moon.

Down the corridor, very faint, you hear footsteps, heavy ones, coming closer.

You open your hand and look at the sliver of beskar once more, and then you close your fist around it again and tuck it into the inner pocket of your shirt, against your skin, where no search would find it without finding you first. You straighten your spine, wipe your face with the heel of your hand and set your jaw.

You wait.

Because he's asked you to. Because he’s coming back. Because a man like that, a man who said yes the way he said it and I'll show you the way he said it and Din – Din, it's Din – into the dark, to a stranger, through a wall, breaking a vow he has kept his whole life – that man doesn’t say wait for me unless he means it.

The footsteps get closer then stop outside your door.

You hear the soft electronic chirp of a lockpad being overridden – not the heavy clang of guards cycling a door open in the normal way, but the cleaner, quieter click of someone who knows exactly which wires to cross and which ones to leave alone.

The door slides back and there he is. Beskar from helm to boot, the morning light off the corridor lamps making a hard silver line down the curve of his pauldron. Blaster holstered at his thigh, vibroblade still wet at the tip. He fills the doorway like he’s been built to fill it, and the visor turns

toward you. You stood up so fast you nearly crack your head on the underside of the bunk.

"Took your time," you say.

The modulator catches the tired amusement before he's even spoken. "There were six of them."

"And Vane?"

"Five."

You snort because you can’t help it. He steps into the cell, glances at you, glances at the wall, glances – pointedly – at the floor where the sliver of beskar had been. He doesn’t say anything about it because he doesn’t have to. The angle of his helmet says, good, you found it, and the small tilt that follows says come on, and you’re moving before he's finished the gesture, ducking under his arm into the corridor.

"This way," he says.

"I know which way."

"Then go."

You know the layout of this facility because you’ve spent three days memorising the sliver of it you could see through the door slit, and because, it turns out, you also saw the schematics two weeks ago in a briefing on the Crest – a briefing you had pretended to listen to while throwing ration wrappers at the back of his helmet.

You take the left at the junction and he covers your back. Then you take the service stairs down two levels, through the maintenance hatch and out into the cold dawn air of a landing platform where a familiar gunship sits waiting with its ramp already down, because he landed it himself before he came for you and he isn’t the kind of man who leaves a door closed when he might need to run through it.

The ramp clangs shut behind you, the engines spool and you brace yourself against the bulkhead as he takes the pilot's seat and throws the Crest up off the platform with the kind of brutal efficiency he uses for everything. The planet falls away under you, the stars come up, and you’re free.

You stand in the cockpit doorway, breathing.

"Don't say it," he says, without turning around.

"Don't say what?"

"Whatever you're about to say."

"I wasn't going to…"

"You were going to."

"I was going to say thanks."

"No, you weren't."

You laugh, finally. It comes out shaky, the adrenaline leaving you in a slow drain. You let yourself slide down the bulkhead until you’re sitting on the deck with your back against the metal, and you put your hands over your face and laugh until your ribs hurt.

He punches the coordinates in, sets the autopilot, then stands up, slowly, the way he stands up when his back hurts and he doesn’t want you to know. But you know, because you've been flying with him for nine months and you know every small tell his body makes through the armour.

He crouches in front of you and puts his gloved hand on your knee.

"You alright?"

"Yeah."

"Look at me."

You take your hands off your face and look up at the visor. The T-shape of it is the same as it’s always been. The same as it’s been across a hundred campfires and a thousand cantina tables and the dozen times he’s sat across from you in this same hold and cleaned his weapons while you cleaned yours.

The same, and not the same. Because now you know the shape of his voice when it cracks open. Now you know the word he says when he comes.

"We really need to stop doing this," you say finally.

"Doing what?"

"The wall thing. The talking through the wall every time a job goes sideways, and they put us in adjoining cells thing. This is…Din, this is the third time."

"Fourth."

"What?"

"Fourth. You're forgetting Ord Mantell."

"Ord Mantell was a closet, not a cell."

"Still a wall."

"Still a wall," you allow.

He huffs, his hand still on your knee. The leather of the glove is warm from the inside of his fist, and you can feel each individual finger, and that he’s not lifting it away.

"It's because we don't talk like this anywhere else," you say. "You know that, right?"

"I know."

"You only get like that when there's a wall."

"I know."

"It's ridiculous."

"I know."

"Din..." you hesitate. "That's the first time you've told me your real name."

"Yeah."

You lick your lips. "Fuck me."

The hand on your knee tightens, just a fraction, just enough that you know he heard you.

"Don't," he says

"Fuck me. Let’s get it out of our systems. Once, properly, with nothing between us and…and I swear to you, I swear, the next time some Hutt-licking bounty hunter shoves us into a holding block, neither of us is going to need to do the wall thing ever again, because we'll have done it, and the tension will be gone, and we can go back to being…"

"Being what?"

"Whatever we are."

"You think that's how it works?"

"I think it's worth finding out."

You watch the visor, watch the way his shoulders move when he breathes, watch the long, calibrated stillness of a man who’s already decided what he’s going to do and is making himself take an extra second to be sure of it.

"You don't know what you're asking for," he says.

"I do."

"You don't."

"Din, I had three fingers in myself last night while you talked to me through a wall. I think I have some idea."

The sound that comes out of him isn’t a laugh, it’s something rougher, something he doesn’t quite catch in time, and his hand leaves your knee and goes to your jaw, gloved thumb against the corner of your mouth.

You stop breathing.

"Stand up," he says.

You stand he stands with you, and you have to tip your head to keep looking at the visor. He looks down at you for a long moment, and then his other hand comes up and he hooks one gloved finger under the collar of your shirt and tugs, gently, until you take a step toward him, and another, and then his back is against the bulkhead and yours is against him and his arm is around your waist.

"Once," he says.

"Once."

"And it doesn't fix anything."

"Probably not."

"And you're going to have to be quiet, because the autopilot doesn't know what to do if you scream and trip the proximity alarms."

"Din, I am going to scream."

"Then I'll cover your mouth."

You go hot all the way through and feel your own pulse in places that have no business having a pulse. You press your forehead against the cold beskar of his chest plate breathe in the smell of him – leather and weapon oil and metal warmed by the body underneath.

"Bed. Bunk. Somewhere. Now."

He picks you up, one arm under your thighs and the other across your back, like you weigh nothing, like he's been waiting a long time for the excuse to find out exactly how much you weigh. He carries you down the short ladder into the hold and through to the narrow alcove where his bunk is set into the wall and sets you down on the edge of it. Then he stands between your knees and starts, with great deliberation, to undress.

The pauldrons came off first, heavy clunks against the deck. Then the vambraces, the chest plate, the cuirass, the thigh plates. He sets them all aside in the order he always sets them, the order you’ve watched him set them in a hundred times, and the familiarity of the ritual mixes with the unfamiliarity of what’s happening making your head spin a little.

The flight suit comes off next. Black, snug, all the seams you’ve stared at across many a hold while pretending to read. He peels it down to his waist and you see the long lean torso of him, scarred in a dozen places, a constellation of old hurt, a body that has been keeping itself alive for a long time and has the receipts.

There’s scant hair across his chest, dark and soft-looking, narrowing down toward his waistband and a long pale scar that wraps around his ribs like a vine. There’s a tattoo, small, on the inside of his left bicep – a mythosaur skull, no bigger than your thumb – that you have absolutely never known exists.

He keeps going. Flight suit all the way off, boots, trousers and the under-layer beneath. Everything. Every stitch.

Except the helmet.

He stands there in the low light of the bunk alcove, completely naked from the neck down, hard already, his cock heavy against his thigh, and the beskar catches in the dim light off the bulkhead in a way that makes the helmet seem almost a separate creature from the body that’s offering itself to you.

"Din...”

"No."

"I didn't…"

"You were going to."

"I wasn't…"

"You were."

"...I was."

"No."

"Just the eyes. Just…just let me see your eyes."

"No."

"Please."

"No."

He says it gently with no heat in it, as a feature of the universe, not a refusal of you. And then he steps closer and takes the hem of your shirt in both bare hands and pulls it off you, slow, then drops it on the floor on top of his own.

"You have me," he says. "All of me. Just not that."

"Din…"

"All of me," he says again, and he puts his bare hand flat over your sternum, between your breasts, hot palm and rough fingertips against your skin, and you forget what you had been going to say. "Everything else. You can have everything else. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I understand."

"Then take it."

He kisses you.

Or…the helmet does. He presses the cool flat front of the beskar to your forehead first, the way he had once or twice before in moments you’ve not allowed yourself to think too hard about. Then he tilts his head and brings it lower, pressing the brow of the helm to your mouth, just for a moment, just enough that you feel the cold kiss of the metal on your lips, and then his hand is sliding up to cradle the back of your neck and he tips you back onto the bunk.

He kisses everything else with his hands.

The pads of his fingers move down the line of your throat. His thumb skates across your collarbone. His palm cups the underside of your breast and his mouth – the front of the helmet, the smooth lower edge – drags slow against your nipple, cool and unyielding, and you arch up off the bunk with a noise that you try, and fail, to keep quiet.

"Shh," he says.

"I can't…"

"You can."

"I can't…"

His hand comes up and his fingers slip into your mouth. Two of them, the same two, and you bite down and moan around them and he makes a low sound through the modulator.

"Good. Like that. Quiet."

He keeps going down, the helmet tracking down the line of your sternum, the soft place under your ribs and the flat of your stomach. His other hand works your trousers open and shoves them down. You kick them off, and your underthings with them, and then you’re naked under him, and the cold metal of the helmet presses against the hot skin of your inner thigh and the contrast makes you whimper around his fingers.

"Din…"

He doesn’t answer with words. He answers by taking his fingers out of your mouth and replacing them, slowly, between your legs. Two fingers, the way you’d asked for last night. He finds you slick and ready and he hisses, audibly, through the modulator.

"All night," he says. "Like this?"

"Most of it."

"Greedy."

"For you, just for you."

The fingers push in slowly, deeper than yours had gone, longer, more deliberate, and you make a sound that starts high and would go higher but for him pressing the front of the helmet to your sternum.

“Quiet, I told you."

"I'm trying."

"Try harder."

He fucks you on his fingers for what feels like a small eternity. Long, slow, brutal strokes, his thumb finding your clit with the precision of a man who knows where every nerve in a body lives and where to put pressure on each of them. You’re drenched, shaking, biting the back of your own wrist to stay quiet and he’s watching you do it, the visor angled down at your face the whole time, and you know – you know – that behind that visor his eyes are on your mouth.

"Din…Din, please, I want…"

"Tell me."

"You inside me, properly. Now."

He takes his hand away and shifts upwards, bracing one hand on the bunk beside your head and the other on his cock. You feel the blunt heat of him drag through your slickness and your hips buck up of their own accord and he makes a low strangled sound.

"Wait. Wait, look at me."

You look at the visor.

"Are you sure?" he asks.

"Din."

"Say it."

"I'm sure. Fuck me, please."

He pushes in slow, so slow you think you’re going to die of it. He pushes in to the hilt and then holds there, his forehead – the brow of the helmet – against yours, his bare chest against your bare chest, his hand on your jaw and the metallic rasp of his breathing the loudest thing in the world. You can feel him trembling, just slightly, with the effort of not moving.

"Alright?" he asks.

"Move."

"Alright?"

"Move, Din…"

He moves the way he does everything – efficiently, without waste, with the calibrated intensity of a man who’s decided what he’s going to do and is now doing exactly that, and nothing else, and nothing less. He sets a rhythm that’s deep and steady and merciless, and you wrap your legs around his hips and your arms around his shoulders and press your face to the side of the helmet, to the place where his ear would be, and you say his name into the beskar over and over again because you can’t say it into his mouth.

"Din…"

"I'm here."

"Din, harder…"

"You'll bruise."

"I want to bruise. Please, Din, please…"

He fucks you harder. He braces both hands on the bunk now, one on either side of your head, and drives into you with the long, full strokes of a man who’s been holding himself in check for nine months and has finally been given permission to stop. The headboard of the bunk knocks, softly, against the bulkhead in time with each thrust, and your hands roam his back as you map him by feel.

The helmet stays on.

You beg, somewhere in the middle of it. When the pleasure has stripped your inhibitions down to nothing, you put your hands on the sides of the helmet and say, "Please, Din, please, just…just let me see…" and he catches your wrists in one hand and pins them above your head.

"No. Not that. Anything else. Anything else but that."

"Anything?"

"Anything."

So, you take the anything. You take his hand off your wrists and put it around your throat, light, the way he said he would in the dark. You feel his fingers settle there, careful, finding the pulse, and he makes a sound that’s almost a groan, almost the sound you heard through the wall last night, and his thrusts falters for one stroke and then comes back harder.

"Like that?" he asks.

"Like that. Like that. Din…"

"You're close."

"Yes."

"Stay quiet."

"I can't…"

"You can."

He puts his other hand over your mouth. Bare, hot, dry and rough and you moan into it. He fucks you through it, hips snapping against yours in a rhythm that’s losing its precision, finally, after how long you can’t say, and you feel him start to come undone above you – felt the small involuntary movements he’s no longer controlling, feel the way his head bows and the helmet presses to your temple, feel the choked sound through the modulator that you’ve now heard five times in your life and will, you suspect, hear a great many more times before you’re done with each other.

"Come for me," he says, against your ear, against the metal between your ear and his mouth. "Now. Now, sweetheart, now…"

You come around him with his hand over your mouth, his other hand at your throat, his cock buried to the hilt and his forehead against yours, and you scream into his palm. He feels you go – feels every pulse of you around him – and he makes a sound you’ve never heard him make before, a real one, a whole one, unmodulated and choked and human, as he comes inside you, hard, in long pulses that you feel all the way up into your stomach.

Then he collapses – not all the way, catching himself on one elbow carefully – but his full weight comes down on you in a way it hasn’t, and the beskar of the helmet rests cool against the side of your face. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and hold him, his bare back slick under your palms, his breathing wreckage.

"Din," you say when you can.

"Yeah."

"You called me sweetheart."

He freezes fractionally. "I did."

"And...I lied."

"About what?"

"The tension. It's not gone."

His forehead – the brow of the helmet – presses harder against yours.

"No," he agrees. "It's not."

"What are we going to do about that?"

"Try again."

"Now?"

"Give me five minutes."

You laugh into the side of his helmet and feel his shoulders shake, just a little. You run your hand up the back of his neck to the very edge of the helmet – the place where the beskar meets the skin – and let your fingertips rest there.

He doesn’t stop you or pull away. He lets your fingers stay at the line where his hidden self begins, and he lets you keep them there, and that, you understand, is a different kind of yes.

You take it, close your eyes and keep your hand where it is.

Five minutes, he said.

You can wait five minutes.

You have, you reflect, gotten very good at waiting for him.

Chapter Text

The hum of the Razor Crest in hyperspace is a sound you've come to know better than your own heartbeat – that low, throaty thrum that vibrates up through the deck plating and into the soles of your boots, into your knees and into the soft hollow behind your sternum where want lives. The cockpit lights are dimmed down to a smoulder, blue-edged shadows pooling in the corners, the wash of streaking star lines turning the inside of the cabin into a slow blue snowstorm.

He sits in the pilot's chair like he always does, spine straight, gloved hands resting easy on the armrests, helmet tilted just a fraction toward you, the dark T of the visor swallowing every flicker of light it catches.

He hasn't said a word in three minutes and neither have you, but the air between you has thickened to where you can cut it with a vibroblade. When you finally push off from the bulkhead and cross the metal floor toward him – bare feet silent, your tunic loose at the collar – you see the leather of his glove flex once against the armrest.

Just a twitch. A tell. Mandalorians aren’t supposed to have tells, but you've been studying him for months now, cataloguing every microscopic concession his body makes to your presence, and that little flex of his fingers tells you everything you need to know.

You sink to your knees.

Three weeks.

That’s how long it’s been since the cell on Vane's facility, and in that time, you haven’t stopped sleeping with him, and he hasn’t stopped sleeping with you, and somewhere in the middle of all that sleeping-with the geometry of the two of you has quietly, irreversibly, changed.

It isn’t just the sex, though the sex is good. The sex is unhinged. The sex has taught you things about your own body that you have not, in thirty years of inhabiting it, suspected. He takes you against bulkheads and over crates and on the floor of the cockpit with the autopilot blinking placidly above your head. He takes you slow in the bunk in the middle of the night when neither of you can sleep, and he takes you in the refresher with the water running and the steam fogging the visor and his bare hands skating slick down your spine.

The helmet always stays on. You haven’t stopped wanting, but you’ve stopped asking, because the wanting is your problem and the not-asking is, you’ve decided, a thing you can give him.

But it isn’t just the sex.

It’s the way he starts making caf for two in the mornings now, instead of for one. It’s the way he sets his armour down in the order he always sets it down but pushes your half of the bunk smooth before he lays himself on it. It’s the way he says your name when he wants your attention from across the hold, low and unhurried, like a hand on the small of your back.

You know what it is. He knows what it is. But it’s clear that neither of you are going to be the one to use the word. He’s a man who’s spent his whole adult life saying as little as possible about anything that matters, and you’ve decided that you respect that – that you’d rather have his silence honestly than someone else's words pretending. And so, you carry the unspoken thing around in your chest like a small warm coal and you feed it kindling and you do not, blow on it, in case the smoke makes him bolt.

For three weeks you mould your body to his and sink to your knees and allow yourself to have whatever this is between you.

The deck plating is cold under your knees through the thin fabric of your trousers, but you barely feel it. You kneel in the narrow space between his boots, the worn leather scuffed and dust-pale, and let your hands settle very lightly on his thighs, right where the flight suit emerges from beneath the cuisse plates, where the dark quilted fabric stretches taut over muscle.

You feel him go still. Not tense, just still. The way a predator goes still when something interesting walks into its sightline.

"Din." Your voice comes out lower than you mean it to. "Tell me to stop."

He pauses for a long moment, the vocoder hissing faintly with his breath before he speaks.

"No."

That one word, filtered through the modulator, gravel-rough and warm at the edges, lands somewhere low in your belly and blooms outward like a struck match. You smile up at him, slow, and slide your palms upward, over the quilted dark of his inner thighs, fingers spread wide, taking your time, mapping the heat of him through the fabric.

You feel the moment his thighs flex under your touch, feel the way his breath catches and stutters out through the vocoder as a soft static crackle.

"Good," you murmur. "Then sit back and let me take care of you."

His head tilts in that maddening way, the visor angling down so that you know, you know, he’s watching every move you make. You've never seen his eyes, never seen his mouth go slack, never seen his jaw clench, never had the satisfaction of watching this man fall apart in the conventional way. All you have is the helmet, the dark immovable mask of beskar, and the small involuntary sounds the vocoder can’t quite scrub clean.

It’s enough, a delicious little game, dragging every reaction out of him by force, pulling each one through the filter of his armour like coaxing music from a closed instrument.

You work the codpiece loose first. There are clasps along the underside, hidden, fiddly things, and you take your time finding them, letting your knuckles drag deliberately against the swell already firming up beneath the plate. He inhales sharply and the vocoder catches it, distorting it so that it sounds like a low electronic rasp. You hum approvingly and finally get the last clasp free, lifting the codpiece off and setting it down on the deck beside you with a soft, careful clink of metal on metal.

The dark fabric beneath is obviously, undeniably tented. You let yourself look for a long moment, savouring it – the shape of him straining against the cloth, the small dark spot where he's already started to leak through. Then you raise your eyes back up to the visor and give him your sweetest smile.

"Look at you," you breathe. "All this control and you're already this hard for me."

The gloved hand on the armrest tightens, the leather creaking.

"I know," you murmur, working open the front of the flight suit, easing the laces loose with deliberate slowness. "I know, patience. I'm going to give you everything."

When you finally free him you have to take a breath. He’s heavy in your hand – hot and flushed dark already at the head, a bead of slick beading at the slit, the whole thick length of him twitching faintly against your palm as you wrap your fingers around the base. You've had him before. You know the shape, the weight and the way he fits in your mouth. But every time feels like the first time. Every time he pulls this particular reaction out of you – this nearly worshipful pause, this want that buzzes in your teeth.

You look up, holding the visor's gaze, and then, slowly, you lean in and press a kiss – soft, almost chaste – to the very tip.

His whole body jerks in a tiny movement that’s almost nothing. Just a flinch of his hips, the smallest involuntary buck, and then the iron clamp of his own self-control snaps it back down. But you feel it and grin against him, lips still pressed to the head of his cock, letting your tongue slip out and drag a slow stripe through the slick beading at the tip.

"Haar'chak." The curse hisses through the vocoder, half static, half breath.

"Mm." You lick your lips, tasting salt and skin and the faint metallic tang of whatever he's been wiping his hands on earlier. "Say it again in Basic, Din. I want to hear you in Basic."

A long, ragged breath comes through the modulator, and his hand leaves the armrest and settles into your hair, the rough leather catching at the strands. He doesn’t pull but rather just rests his palm against the back of your head like he needs to anchor himself there.

"Please," he says, and the way the vocoder bends the word, scratching it raw, making it almost a whisper nearly undoes you right there on the cold metal floor.

You reward him by opening your mouth and taking him in – just the head at first, sealing your lips around the flushed crown and sucking, slow and soft, the flat of your tongue working in small circles against the underside. The taste of him fills your mouth, salt and musk and something faintly metallic that you've long ago decided is particular to him, to the man under the beskar, and you let your eyes flutter closed for half a second just to savour it.

He makes a low, strangled, half-mechanical sound that the vocoder can’t quite categorise and his hand in your hair tightens, just barely.

You sink lower, agonisingly slowly, working him into your mouth inch by inch, your tongue pressing flat to the underside, your lips stretching tight around his girth. You feel the head bump the back of your throat and you pull back, breath catching, eyes watering already because he’s thick and you’re out of practice at this kind of patience. Then you go down again a little further, working saliva down the length of him with each pass until he’s slick and shining and your jaw is beginning to ache pleasantly.

His thighs tremble – tiny tremors, barely perceptible, but you can feel them under your palms where you've braced yourself against him. The Mandalorian – the man who can stand motionless in a firefight, who can track a quarry across three-star systems without losing his composure – is trembling under your mouth.

You want to weep with how good it feels to do this to him.

You pull off with a wet, obscene pop and look up at him through your lashes, watching as his chest rises and falls in shallow, controlled drags. The vocoder catches each breath and gives it back to you as a soft electronic rasp.

"Are you watching me?" you ask. Your lips feel swollen and you lick them deliberately, watching the visor track the movement. "Tell me you're watching me, Din."

"I'm watching."

"Good." You lean in and press your cheek against the inside of his thigh, letting his cock rest heavy and wet against your face, the slick head smearing against your temple and your hair. You turn and mouth at the side of his shaft, dragging your tongue in long, lazy stripes. "Don't look away, not for a second."

"I won't."

The promise scrapes out of the vocoder like a vow.

You take him again, deeper this time. You've warmed up to him now, your throat relaxing, your breathing falling into the rhythm you need. You let him slide back, back, back, past the soft resistance at the back of your tongue, into the tighter clasp of your throat, and you swallow around him and feel him judder. His hips lift off the chair an inch and slam back down. The gloved hand in your hair fists, finally, finally pulls, not hard, just hard enough to tell you he’s losing some thin filament of control.

"Slow…slow…"

You don’t slow. You set a rhythm, bobbing your head, hollowing your cheeks, taking him deep on every third or fourth stroke and feeling your nose press against the dark fabric of his flight suit at the base. Your hand wraps around what your mouth can’t reach, twisting gently, thumb dragging beneath the head on every upstroke. Your other hand creeps up under the cuisse plate, scrabbling at the edge of the flight suit, until you find the soft pouch beneath and cup him there too, rolling him gently, playing with the weight of him, and feel him moan through the vocoder as a long staticky exhale.

The Razor Crest hums around you. The star lines streaked. The dim blue light catches on the curves of his armour, and you kneel at his feet with his cock in your throat and you think, dizzily, that you’ll never want anything else. That you’ll do this for the rest of your life. That if he asks you to live on your knees on this ship you'll do it without a second thought.

"Mesh'la." His voice is breaking up now, ragged through the filter. "Mesh'la, mesh'la, mesh'la... "

You don’t know the word, but you know the tone and you pull off, gasping, drool stringing from your lips to the tip of him, your eyes streaming. You take three quick breaths, then you go down again in one long swallow, your nose pressing flush to his stomach, your throat working around him, and you hold it.

You hold it until your lungs burn, until his hand is shaking against your skull, until you hear the vocoder spit out a long, broken sound that might be your name and might be a curse and might, in fact, be both.

When you come up for air, your mouth is numb, your eyes were streaming, your chin slick and you’ve never, ever felt so beautiful.

"Din," you rasp, your voice wrecked from the effort. "Tell me how it feels."

He can’t speak at first, the vocoder hissing static, breath after ragged breath.

"Like I'm going to die."

You laugh – a hoarse, delighted little laugh – and press a kiss to the slick head of his cock, tasting him afresh.

"Not yet you're not," you whisper. "I've got you, just hold on."

You start again, slower this time, but deeper, more deliberate, your tongue working tricks against the underside, against the sensitive spot just beneath the head that you know drives him to pieces. Both of his hands have now abandoned the armrests, one gripping your hair, the other fisted tight against his own thigh, the leather creaking and creaking. You watch the rise and fall of his chest as the visor stays locked on you, unwavering.

You feel him swell against your tongue, feel the tell-tale tightening, the way his thighs go rock-hard under your palms, the way his hand in your hair starts to push you down instead of just resting there. You let him guide you, let him take what he needs, let your jaw go slack and your throat go loose and your eyes close because you want to feel everything, you want to drown in this.

"I’m going to…I'm…"

You hum around him, long and low, a vibration that runs the length of his cock, and his entire body goes taut as a bowstring.

"Off…" he manages, urgent now, his hand trying to push you back, "you have to… "

You look up at him, his cock buried deep in your mouth, your eyes locked on the visor and shake your head minutely.

The sound he makes is a low broken groan, almost a sob, and then his hand is clamping down at the back of your skull, and he holds you there as he comes in long, hot pulses against the back of your tongue.

You swallow around him, your throat working, the salty bitter heat of him filling your mouth faster than you can take it down. You feel him shudder, feel the way his thighs lock up and his whole body strains forward, feel the helmet tip back as his head falls against the headrest of the pilot's seat. The vocoder rasps out a single long breath that stretches into something unrecognisable.

You stay on him as he softens. You stay until the last twitch, the last little pulse, until his hand loosens in your hair and his thighs unclench beneath your palms. Only then do you pull off – slow and careful, your lips dragging the whole length of him on the way up – and you sit back on your heels, breathing hard, your chin and lips slick and shiny in the dim blue light.

You look up at him, his helmet tilted back, chest rising and falling like he's just sprinted across a desert. The gloved hand that had been in your hair hangs loose at his side, twitching faintly with the aftershocks, the other unclenched at last from the meat of his own thigh.

You smile because you know exactly what you look like – flushed and wrecked and triumphant – and you let him have a long moment to take it in.

"You," he rasps finally, through the vocoder, "are going to be the death of me."

You laugh, lean forward and press a final kiss to the soft, spent length of him before you tuck him gently back into his flight suit, lacing it up with the same careful slowness you used to undo it. You retrieve the codpiece from the deck and refit it, clicking each clasp back into place. You smooth your palms up the front of his thighs, over the plates of his cuisses, up the dark quilted fabric to settle finally, feeling the slow steady pound of his heart through the layers of armour and underclothes.

"Mm." You rest your cheek against the cold metal of his chest plate. "Not yet, I hope."

His hand comes up slow, almost shy, the way it always is when he isn’t in the heat of it. He cups the back of your head, gentle now, fingers carding through your hair where he's just had it fisted, his other hand settling at the nape of your neck, his gloved thumb stroking lightly along the line of your jaw.

"Mesh'la," he says again, quieter now.

"What does it mean?"

He strokes your jaw again as the streaking blue starlight slides across the curve of his helmet.

"Beautiful."

You smile against the beskar and close your eyes, allowing yourself to stay there a long moment, kneeling at his feet in the dim cockpit, the Crest humming around you, his hand gentle at the back of your neck, the taste of him still warm on your tongue.

"Din?"

"Yes?"

The words form in your mouth, but you hesitate and push them back down again because you’re not sure if this is the right moment. Or if in fact there will ever be a right moment to tell him exactly how you feel.

The silence stretches, then his thumb presses, very gently, against the soft hinge of your jaw, tilting your face up.

You turn your face into his palm and press a kiss to the worn leather of his glove.

"Take me to bed."

And that’s how it goes for another three weeks.

Six weeks of sexual satisfaction which, you tell yourself, is all you need.

Then he takes the Tarvix job.

****

Tarvix is a jungle world out past the Mid Rim, hot and wet and full of things that want to eat you. The bounty is a Twi'lek arms dealer who’s taken his operation off-grid and underground and very specifically into a network of root caves that no sensible bounty hunter would follow him into, which is, of course, exactly why this particular bounty hunter takes the job.

"It's a stupid job," you say on approach.

"It pays."

"It pays because nobody else is dumb enough to take it."

"Which is why it pays."

"Din…"

"It's a clean grab, in and out. We've done worse."

"We have done exactly worse and the exactly worse is why I'm telling you it's a stupid job."

He turns his head, the visor settling on you, and you see – even through the beskar, even with no eyes to read – the small relenting tilt of the helmet that means he’s heard you. Reaching out, he puts his gloved hand on your thigh.

"Stay close to me."

"I always do."

"Closer."

It goes wrong the way these things always go wrong, which is to say slowly at first and then all at once. You find the Twi'lek, secure it and are on your way back out of the cave system with the Twi'lek cuffed and grumbling between you when the root caves turn out, surprise, to have a second tenant – a colony of something the Twi'lek has been paying off in ration packs to keep them docile, and whose docility runs out roughly thirty seconds after the ration-packer gets cuffed.

They come out of the walls, long pale segmented things, the size of small speeders, with too many legs and a mouth-part arrangement that doesn’t bear thinking about. Din shoots the first one in half. The second one takes a flame to the face and screams in a register that makes your back teeth ache. The third one comes up behind you while you’re dealing with the fourth, and you get your blaster around in time to put a bolt through its eye-cluster.

But you don’t see the fifth one, the one in the ceiling, the one that drops.

It hits you across the side like a falling girder.

You go down hard, sideways, off the lip of a root ledge that you haven't realised is a ledge, and fall a long way, a longer way than you should have survived falling, into the wet dark of a lower chamber. You land on your back on something that gives under you and the world goes white.

You come back to it in pieces, pain shooting across your whole left side, the sharp wrong kind, the kind that means ribs and you mouth fills with blood. You feel a long burning line down your flank where the thing's claw, or whatever it is, has opened you up through your shirt. You smell smoke from somewhere overhead and hear the high mechanical whine of a flame projector going and going and going.

Then you hear his voice through the helmet comm in your ear. It’s very close to you, somehow, even from up above.

"Talk to me."

"Din…"

"Talk to me. Where are you hit?"

"Side. Ribs. I…I can't…there's a lot of blood…"

"I'm coming. Don't move. Don't move. Don't move."

"I wasn't…"

"Just keep talking."

You do as asked, but you don’t remember what you talk about. You remember that your voice sounds thin and far away and that you can’t seem to take a full breath because each one turns into a wet stabbing thing in your chest, and that somewhere above you the flame projector keeps going, and the roaring stops one by one.

Then there’s the soft hiss of jetpack thrust, and his boots hit the chamber floor in front of you with a thud that you feel in your teeth.

He’s on his knees beside you before the dust has settled, gloves off, his bare hands on you, one on your jaw and the other under your shirt, finding the wound and pressing. You cry out, and his head snaps to your face, the visor so close to you that you can see your own reflection in it, wet and grey and not looking very alive.

"Stay with me."

"I'm here."

"Stay with me."

"I'm here, Din, I'm…"

"Look at me."

You look and suddenly see that his hand on your jaw is shaking.

You’ve never seen his hand shake in all the time you’ve flown together. Not under fire, not in the middle of a job going sideways, not when he’s setting a broken bone in his own forearm with his other hand and a length of pipe.

The hand of Din Djarin does not shake.

The hand of Din Djarin has been engineered specifically to not shake, and now it’s shaking against your face, his bare thumb skating across your cheekbone, smearing the blood there, and his voice through the modulator comes out a half-tone too high.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Okay, I've got you. I'm picking you up. This is going to hurt, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, cyar'ika, I'm…"

He stops and you know he hasn’t meant to say that. You hear the small, choked silence where the word has landed and where he’s decided not to chase it, and you want to ask him what it means, but you can’t, because he’s sliding one arm under your knees and the other under your shoulders and lifting. You scream, and he makes a sound through the modulator that sounds very close to a sob.

"I know. I know, I'm sorry. Just…just hold on. Just hold on to me."

You get one arm up around his neck and fist your hand in the cape at his shoulder, pressing your face into the side of his helmet.

He carries you up through the cave system at a run. You have no idea how the jetpack works with the weight of you in his arms, and you have no idea how he’s navigating or how he’s fighting – because somewhere in the middle of it you remember the muzzle-flash of his blaster going off one-handed past your shoulder, and him swearing once, very quietly, when something rakes the back of his cape – but he gets you out.

He gets you out into the green wet light of the jungle, across half a kilometre of root and mud and up the ramp of the Crest, through the hold, and into the small alcove that served as a medbay. Then he sets you down on the cot so carefully, so impossibly carefully, that you barely feel the transition and starts hurriedly removing his beskar.

And then his hands start moving on you.

You’ve seen him field-dress wounds before. He’s good at it, efficient at it. He moves through a medical situation the way he moves through a firefight, which is to say with the calibrated economy of a man who’s been doing this for a long time and has learned, somewhere along the way, that panic is a luxury for people with other people to panic for them.

He’s not efficient now.

He’s fast, but there’s a roughness to his movements that you’ve never seen in his hands before. He cuts your shirt off you with a vibroblade and the cuts go in wrong directions, doubling back, his free hand pressing at your side to hold the wound closed while the other does the work. Twice you see him stop, just for half a second, just long enough to take a breath that the modulator turns into a stutter, before he keeps going.

"Din."

"Don't talk."

"Din, I'm…"

"Don't talk."

"I'm okay."

"You are not okay. You are not okay. You're…" His voice cracks mid-sentence, the modulator catching and amplifying the crack, and you hear the sound of his control failing. "There is a lot of blood. There is a lot of blood, and I need you to not talk so I can…so I can…"

"Din."

"Please."

You stop talking.

He gets the shirt off you and cleans the wound with bacta wash, the cold sting of it making you hiss through your teeth. Then he reaches for the cauteriser, his hand still shaking, and he stops. He sets the cauteriser down on the tray, pushes up the sleeves of the flight suit and presses both his bare palms flat to the cot on either side of your hips, bowing his helmeted head, breathing in and out.

You watch the whole bare expanse of his arms, the corded muscle, the scars, the little mythosaur on the inside of his bicep that you’ve now traced with your tongue more times than you can count, all of it locked into a posture of such absolute, white-knuckled control that you understand, finally, what it’s costing him to do this at all.

You reach up, arm aching, and put your hand on the side of his helmet – on the beskar, on the cheek of it. "Hey."

He doesn’t move.

"Din, look at me."

The visor comes up.

"I'm okay," you say. "I'm here. I'm okay. You're doing fine. Pick up the cauteriser."

The helmet bows lower, the brow of it coming down to rest against yours, beskar against skin, cool and hard and so familiar by now that it’s almost a kiss.

"You scared me," he says.

The modulator is barely there. The voice underneath it is barely there. It’s a thing he says directly into your skin, almost.

"I know."

"I thought you were…"

"I know."

"I can't…"

He stops himself from saying the thing he can’t let himself finish, and you want, with a fierceness that surprises you even now, to grab the back of his helmet, pull it off and look at the face he’s making under there, because you’re sure that whatever his mouth is doing right now you would die to see.

But you don’t. You put your hand around the back of his neck instead, against the small bare strip of skin between the helmet's edge and the collar of his flight suit, and you hold him there.

"Cauteriser."

He picks it up and works, the skin on your side sizzling. You bite down on the heel of your hand, hard, and you don’t scream, because he’s already as close to broken as you’ve ever seen him and you won’t give him a sound he can carry into his next sleep.

He works the long burning line of the gash closed, packs it with bacta gel, and then he puts a patch over it, and sets his palm flat against the patch, holding it there as if he can press his own steadiness into you through the bandage.

His hand isn’t shaking anymore. Somewhere in the last sixty seconds he’s taken all of it – the shake, the crack, the whatever-it-is – and has folded it down small and tucked it back inside himself. You’ve watched him do it, and know, watching him, that this is the price of him. That this is what it costs him, this discipline, this not-saying, this absolute refusal to let anything spill that he hasn’t first measured into a cup.

"Other ribs," he says. "Let me feel."

You let his fingers walk your ribs one by one, slow, professional now, the shake gone. Two of them are cracked, one might be broken. He wraps you, slow and careful, lifting you against his shoulder so he can pass the wrap around your back, his bare arm strong under you, his other hand passing the bandage from one side of you to the other across his own body.

You lean your forehead into his neck, close your eyes and breathe him in.

"Almost done," he says.

"Take your time."

"I am taking my time."

"Take more."

He finishes the wrap and lays you back down. Then he sits on the edge of the cot beside you, one hip against your hip, and looks down at you for a long moment, before reaching up and brushing a piece of hair off your forehead with the back of his bare knuckles.

"You're going to live."

"Optimistic."

"I'm the one with the medical training. Trust me."

"Mm. Lie down with me."

"I'm sweaty."

"I don't care. Lie down with me."

He hesitates, glances at the cot and at himself then makes a small sound of acceptance and eases himself down on his side, propped on his elbow, his hip pressed to yours. His free hand comes to rest, lightly, on the unbandaged side of your stomach, his bare palm warm and anchoring.

You watch the visor for a long time, he lets you, and somewhere in there your throat goes tight in a way that isn’t related to any injury.

"Din."

"Yes?"

"What does cyar'ika mean?"

He goes very still and doesn’t answer for a long moment. The hand on your stomach doesn’t move and the visor stays where it is, tilted down to your face. You watch the way his shoulders rise and fall once, twice as he decides.

"It means…”

The proximity alarm goes off, shrieking out of the ship's speakers in the high two-tone wail that means a ship has just entered scan range. His head snaps up toward the cockpit, his hand leaving your stomach, and the whole moment shatters.

He’s on his feet before the alarm finishes its second cycle. "Stay,” he says over his shoulder, back to his working voice. “Don't move, I mean it. Don't get off this cot."

"Din…"

"Stay."

Then he’s gone, up the ladder to the cockpit, three rungs at a time, and you hear him drop into the pilot's seat, and punch the alarm off. Then you hear him bring up the scanners, and swear, quietly, once, with feeling.

You put your bare feet on the cold deck, grab his cape from where he left it, pull it free from the vest, and walk, very slowly, out into the hold. You know you’re not supposed to be moving and that he’s going to have words for you when he comes back down, but you don’t care. You sit on a crate and listen to him work.

You can read him by sound, by now, the cadence of his hands on a console as familiar to you as his breathing. You hear him bring up the long-range scope, toggle through the bands and hear the small grunt through the modulator that means he’s found what he’s looking for and doesn’t like it.

You hear him flick the comm to passive, hear the navicomp wake up and hear him punch in coordinates without consulting the charts, which means he already knows where he’s going, which means he’s been thinking about this contingency since long before you took the job. Which means that you were right about it being a stupid job, and he’s known it was a stupid job, and has taken it anyway, and made a back door.

You hear the hyperdrive spool and the soft whump of the stars turning into blue.

Then you hear him push back from the console, slowly, before he comes back down the ladder.

He sees you on the crate, stopping on the third rung from the bottom, and looks at you – visor down, the whole long judgment of the T-shape directed at the place where you very obviously are not.

"What did I tell you?”

"You told me to stay."

"And?"

"I didn't."

He comes down the rest of the ladder and crosses the hold to stand in front of you. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and you watch his bare hand flex once, at his side, and then unflex.

"Why?" he asks.

"I thought I heard something."

It’s a lie and he knows it. He looks at you for a beat longer and then sighs, a real, tired one, the modulator turning it into a long mechanical exhale. Then he crouches down in front of you and puts his hand, very lightly, on your good thigh.

"You're going to make me grey," he says

"You're already grey."

"You can't see my hair."

"I'm extrapolating."

"From what?"

"From the way you sigh."

He huffs then tips his head down and presses the brow of the helmet to your collarbone – gently, mindful of the ribs and the bandage – and stays there a moment.

"Who was it in the scope?”

"A Guild ship, looking for us. We're clear now."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere quiet."

“Like where?”

“You ask too many questions. Somewhere you can heal. Somewhere I can…take care of you.”

"What are we going to say about the bounty?"

"Screw the bounty. Someone else can pick him up, if he's still breathing."

You smile, in spite of yourself. He lifts his head off your collarbone and looks at you, and you can feel him cataloguing – the colour of your face, the set of your mouth, the way you’re favouring your left side, the way you’ve wrapped his cape around yourself without thinking – and you watch him add it all up and make whatever decision he’s making. Then he stands up, bends and slides one arm behind your knees and the other behind your back.

"Din…"

"You walked, now I carry."

"I can…"

"You walked. On the ribs I just set. You do not get to negotiate with me right now. Put your arm around my neck."

You put your arm around his neck and he lifts you, carrying you back into the medbay alcove and setting you down on the cot with you in his lap, your legs across his thighs, your bandaged side cradled in against the bare skin of his arm. Then he sits there with his helmet bowed against your temple and doesn’t move for a long time.

"You scared me," he says again, as if he needs to say it twice. As if the first time hasn’t been enough to set it down.

"I know."

"Don't do it again."

"I'll try."

"Try harder."

"I'll try harder."

His bare hand comes up and cups the side of your face, his thumb moving across your cheekbone, stops at the corner of your mouth and stays there.

"Cyar'ika," he says.

You hold very still.

"You asked me what it meant."

"Yes."

The thumb at the corner of your mouth doesn’t move.

"It's old Mando'a," he says, finally. "It means…it doesn't translate cleanly. It's what you call someone you…"

He stops.

"Someone you what?"

He doesn’t answer, so you wait. You can be patient. You’ve learned how to be patient with the long shape of his silences, how to let him build them and stand inside them and decide, in his own time, whether he’s going to come out the other side of them with a word in his mouth or without one.

The hyperdrive hums under the deck and his thumb stays at the corner of your mouth, his chest rising and falling against your good shoulder, steady now, the breathing of a man who’s brought himself all the way back from the edge he's been on in the cave.

"Someone you keep," he says.

It isn’t the word, you know it isn’t. He’s walked himself right up to the word and turned, at the last second, and offered you a different one – a smaller one, a safer one, a truer one in some ways. Because love is a word that everyone uses for everything and keep is a word that he, specifically, has probably never said out loud in his life.

You feel your eyes go hot, but you don’t cry because you know, if you do, he’ll think it’s the ribs, and will feel responsible, and he’ll close up around the not-saying again and the next time you try to drag the word out of him it’ll be even harder. So, you don’t cry. You take his bare hand off your face, turn it and press your mouth to the palm of it, hard, holding it there with both your hands, breathing against his skin until your throat lets go.

"Okay," you say, into his palm.

"Okay."

"Keep me, then."

"I will."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

He says it the way he says everything, and you understand that you’re very probably, never going to hear the other one out of his mouth, but that you’re going to hear this one, in its place, for as long as he has a mouth to say it with.

You can live with that. You can live with that for a very long time.

He shifts carefully under you and lies back on the cot, slow, drawing you down with him, settling you against his chest with your bandaged side up and your head tucked under the chin of the helmet. His arm comes across your hips, the other one under your neck and he pulls the thin medbay blanket up over the two of you with one hand. Then he presses the brow of the helmet to the top of your head and exhales, long, the modulator turning the breath into a sigh that you feel all the way down your spine.

"Sleep," he says.

"You first."

"Together."

"Mm."

His hand spreads flat against your back under the blanket, the pad of his thumb tracing the line of one of your vertebrae. Up. Down. Up. The bacta is already doing its work, the throb in your side dulling, going far away, the way pain does when somebody you trust is holding you through it.

You close your eyes and you think, in the last clear moment before sleep takes you – He almost said it and he didn't have to.

And in the dark behind your eyelids, very quietly, in the secret place where you can say it because nobody can hear you, not even him - you say it back.

Then you sleep, whilst his thumb keeps moving on your spine. Up. Down. Up. For a long time.

Chapter Text

For once, it’s quiet onboard the Crest – no pursuit, no atmospheric chop, no proximity alarms screaming about Imperial remnants or Guild rivals breathing down the exhaust. Just the steady drone of the hyperdrive and the gentle tick of cooling plates somewhere behind the cargo netting.

Which leaves the hold all to the two of you.

You've been lying flat on your back on the cold durasteel grating for what feels like an hour, arms splayed, hair fanned out, staring up at the bundle of conduit that runs along the curve of the ceiling. You've counted rivets and reached seventy-three before you give up and roll your head to look at him.

Din is at the weapons rack, doing what Din does when there’s nothing pressing to be done – maintenance. Always maintenance. The man can field-strip a blaster in his sleep and probably has. The pulse rifle lies in tidy components on the workbench, each piece arranged with that quiet, ritual precision that you've come to recognise as a kind of meditation for him. The beskar catches the low amber light of the hold, dulled and scarred and gorgeous, the T-visor angled down at his work.

You watch him for a long time – the shift of his shoulders under the flight suit beneath the cuirass, the flex of leather across his back where the harness crosses, the slow, deliberate movement of his gloved hands, knuckled and competent.

Before you met him, Mandalorians had been people to fear, hidden behind their armour. Now, you can’t help but think it’s the most arousing thing you’ve ever seen.

"Din."

He doesn’t look up. "Mm."

"I'm bored."

"Read something."

"Read what, your weapons manuals? I’ve read everything on this ship at least twice. Next time we pick a planet to land on, I want to be sure there’s either a bookstore or a library."

"There's a holo in the locker."

"It's a sabacc tutorial from before the Clone Wars."

He exhales faintly through the modulator, not quite a laugh, but the shape of one. Then he sets down the bore brush and finally turns his helmet toward you, that black T-slit fixing on you with a patience that’s become deeply, infuriatingly familiar.

You prop yourself up on your elbows. "Teach me to fight."

The visor doesn’t move. "You know how to fight."

"I can shoot, sort of. You said yourself my left guard is a disaster, and the last time someone got me at close range I almost ate a vibroblade. If I'm going to keep flying with you, I want to be able to put someone on the floor when it goes sideways. And let’s be honest here, it always goes sideways."

“If you’re going to keep flying with me?”

You try and fail not to smile, because there’s no if about it. He’s keeping you and you’re keeping him, regardless of what you want to name it.

“Okay,” you nod, “because I’m going to keep flying with you…yada, yada, yada.”

He considers you for a long moment. You can’t see his face, of course, but you've learned to read the helmet by now – the tilt of it, the pauses, the way the visor lingers on you a beat longer than necessary when he’s deciding something.

He sets the brush down, pulls off his gloves, folds them, and lays them on the workbench beside the pulse rifle's disassembled receiver. Then he reaches up and begins unclipping his pauldrons.

Your stomach does a small, traitorous flip. If seeing a Mandalorian in armour – your Mandalorian – is the most arousing thing, then watching your Mandalorian remove it is off the scale.

"Up," he says.

You scramble to your feet, suddenly very awake.

He sets the pauldrons aside and unclips the cuirass next, lifting it off over his head with a practiced economy. Underneath, the dark flight suit clings to him in ways that the beskar always hides, and though you’ve seen him out of his armour before many times, there’s something different about watching him take it off in the middle of the hold under the workbench lights.

Methodical. Intentional. Like he’s preparing.

The vambraces stay on. The greaves, the boots, the codpiece, the belt and the helmet. He strips down to the parts that won’t bruise you if he has to take you to the floor, and you understand, with a small thrill, that he’s taking this seriously whilst you’re looking to end up on your back.

He rolls his shoulders, the flight suit pulling across the breadth of him.

"Centre of the hold," he says. "Feet apart. Shoulder width."

You go where he points and set your feet.

"Wider."

You widen them as he circles around behind you. You feel the warmth of him before you feel the touch – a hand at the small of your back, the other at your shoulder, adjusting, broad and hot.

"Bend your knees. Keep your weight on the balls of your feet, not your heels. If I push you…" his hand comes to your sternum, flat, and gives a small, testing shove, "…you should be able to absorb it. Try again."

He pushes and you stagger.

"Again."

He pushes and you hold.

"Better."

His voice through the modulator is always a little flatter than a person's voice ought to be, a little more metal-edged, but you've long since learned to hear the texture underneath – the dry approval, the rare, gravelled humour, the rasp when he’s tired. Right now, it’s patient and instructive.

He steps around to face you, the T-visor angled down, and you look up at your own warped reflection in the dark of it.

"Hands up."

You bring them up.

"Higher. Cover your jaw. Elbows in. You're inviting me into your ribs."

You adjust and he nods once.

"Now I'm going to come at you slow. Don't try to hit me back. Just keep your guard and move your feet. If you can put your hand on my chest and keep me from getting past you, you win, yes?"

"Yes."

He comes at you slow, a wall in dark fabric and battered beskar at the wrists, and he doesn’t punch, doesn’t grab – he just walks into your space with the inexorability of weather. Your hand comes up to his sternum, and you genuinely try to keep him off you, but he simply puts a hand on your wrist and turns it and you’re suddenly facing the other way with his arm across your collarbone, your back flush to his chest.

"Dead," he says quietly, right next to your ear, the modulator buzzing against your hair. "Again."

He releases you and you shake out your hands, trying not to think about how solid he had felt behind you, all that warm fabric over all that warm man, the shape of him pressed up the length of your spine for one held second.

You set your feet and he comes at you again. This time you get a half-step further before he hooks your ankle with his boot and you nearly go down. He catches you, his hand fisting in the front of your shirt and arresting your fall with a casual strength that turns your knees stupid, and holds you there for a beat, suspended, while the visor tips down at you.

"Watch my feet," he says. "I telegraphed that. You looked at my shoulders."

"Maybe I like your shoulders."

The visor tilts and you feel, rather than hear, the small exhale through the modulator.

"Focus."

"I'm focused."

"On the lesson."

"Mm-hm."

He sets you back on your feet, steps away, and you see the deliberate way he resettles himself – rolls his neck once, plants his stance – and you realise with a flush of triumph that you’ve gotten to him, just a little. Just enough.

You set your guard.

On the next pass, he moves faster. Not full speed – you know that full speed from him will put you on your back before you blink – but faster, real enough to mean it. You watch his feet. You move when he moves. You keep your hands up, and when he steps in, you slide your palm onto his chest, push and pivot at the same time, the way he's shown you. He lets you slip past him by maybe six inches before his hand closes around your upper arm and turns you neatly back into his orbit.

"Better," he says.

"Did I…?"

"You did good. Again."

You do it again and again and again. And somewhere around the eighth or ninth pass you've worked up a sweat, your shirt sticking between your shoulder blades, your hair clinging to your temple, and his hand has been on you – wrist, arm, collarbone, hip, ribs – so many times that the contact has begun to register as something else entirely.

The next time he comes in, you don’t try to slip him.

You let him close, and you grab two fistfuls of his flight suit at the chest and yank. His weight is suddenly committed in a way he hasn't intended, and you twist and use his own forward momentum to bring him down with you, the both of you crashing to the grating in a tangle of limbs and hot breath and the dull clank of beskar vambrace on metal.

You end up half-under him, half-pinned, one of his thighs heavy across yours, his weight braced on a forearm beside your head, both very still.

The T-visor is a hand's breadth from your face.

You can hear his breath through the modulator now – uneven, the smallest catch in it. You feel the rise and fall of his chest against yours. His other hand is somewhere at your hip, and you can’t quite remember how it’s gotten there.

"That wasn't the lesson," he says low.

"Wasn't it?"

"No."

"I improvised."

"You cheated."

"You said put you on the floor."

"I said put me down, there's a difference." His head tilts, that slow, considering tilt, and you watch yourself in the curve of the visor – flushed cheeks, parted lips, hair stuck to your forehead. "You used your weight against mine."

"You taught me that two passes ago."

"I taught you to use it on someone your own size."

"You're not that much bigger than me."

"I'm exactly that much bigger than you," he replies dryly.

His thigh shifts, moving an inch higher between yours and you make a sound you haven't meant to make, small, barely anything, and you watch the visor go very, very still above you.

You lie there under him in the warm hum, and you don’t say anything, and he doesn't say anything, and the silence stretches out and gets heavier and heavier until it’s its own thing in the air between you.

Then, slowly. he lowers his forearm closer, until the bare skin of it is alongside your cheek. His other hand leaves your hip, comes up and brushes your hair back from your temple with warm fingers that then trail down the side of your neck and stop at the dip of your collarbone where your shirt’s damp with sweat.

"Tired?" he asks quietly.

"No."

"Mm."

"Are you?"

"No,” he replies with the smallest sound of amusement.

"Lesson's not over, then."

He looks at you for a long second through the visor, then his hand on your collarbone slides lower – up over the cotton of your shirt, over the curve of your breast, his thumb dragging slow across the peak of it through the fabric – and he watches your face the entire time. The watching is almost worse than the touch. The unreadable beskar dark of him, that helmet that hides every micro-expression, the only feedback the steady weight of him on you and the slow, deliberate motion of his hand.

"No," he agrees. "Lesson's not over."

You arch up into his palm before you can stop yourself, the sound that leaves you something between a gasp and his name.

The hand at your chest tightens. His thigh presses up between your legs, the seam of his flight suit drags across the seam of yours and you grind down on him without meaning to, your hips lifting off the grating, chasing the friction.

The modulator buzzes with what might have been a curse in Mando'a.

"Up," he says.

"What?"

"Up. The floor's cold and I'm not fucking you on a grate."

The casual filthiness of it, said in that calm, modulated voice, like he’s telling you to refuel the thrusters, makes heat punch low through your belly. You let him pull you to your feet, but he doesn’t go far, backing you the three steps to the wall of the hold, between two crates of foodstuffs. His hand moves to your jaw, thumb tracing your lower lip, the visor tipped down close enough that you can see your own eyes reflected in it.

"I shouldn't have let you bait me," he says.

"You didn't let me."

"Mm. Tell yourself that."

His hand leaves your jaw, goes to the hem of your shirt, and pushes it up in a single steady motion, baring your stomach, your ribs and the underside of your breasts. You lift your arms and he pulls the shirt off over your head and drops it somewhere on the floor. Then his bare hands are on you, both of them, palms hot, and he’s looking at you, just looking, the visor moving slow down the length of you and back up.

"I want…" you start.

"I know."

"I want you to…"

"I know."

His hands cup your breasts, thumbs dragging over the tight peaks, and his head tips down so that the cold smooth curve of the helmet's cheek presses against your cheek, the modulator vent so close to your ear that you can hear the small mechanical click of the rebreather as he inhales.

"Tell me," he says right against your ear. "Use words."

"Touch me."

"I am touching you."

"Lower Din, please…"

He makes a low sound through the modulator, something almost like a laugh and almost like a growl, and his hand leaves your breast and slides down your stomach, over the waistband of your trousers, his palm pressing flat against you through the fabric.

You buck into it and he lets you. He holds his hand there, steady pressure, and watches you grind yourself against the heel of his palm with your head tipped back against the bulkhead and your mouth fallen open.

"Look at you," he says with a quiet reverence laced with a roughness that isn’t reverent at all. "Wanted me to teach you how to fight, huh?"

"I…"

"Is this what you really wanted?"

"Yes."

His fingers work the closure of your trousers open, slide inside, and his bare fingertips find you slick and burning and ready for him. "Yeah, I figured."

His fingers move in the way he’s learned over the last year. He’s good at this in the same way he’s good at everything. Two fingers slide into you, and his thumb works you in slow, tight circles. Your hand grabs at his shoulder, at the bare skin of his neck where the flight suit dips, anywhere you can reach, and you make noises into the helmet's cheek that you'd be embarrassed about in any other situation but this one.

"Din…Din, I'm…"

"Not yet," he says.

"What?"

"Not yet." His hand withdraws and you whine, openly, shamelessly. "Easy. Easy, mesh'la."

He strips your trousers down your legs and you step out of them, kick them aside, and stand there against the bulkhead in nothing at all while he’s still mostly dressed, the disparity making you shiver, making you press your thighs together because the air of the hold is cool against the wet of you.

He sees it the same way he sees everything.

"Look at me," he says and you look up at the T-visor, steady on your face.

"Stay there."

He steps back and unfastens the closures of his flight suit at the throat, the chest, the waist – not all of it, just enough – and his bare hand pushes the dark fabric aside. You watch as he frees himself, watch him take his own cock in his bare hand and stroke once, slow, the visor tipped down toward you the whole time.

You make a small sound.

"Come here," he says and you go without question.

He turns you gently until your palms are flat against the bulkhead, your back to him. His bare hand smooths down your spine, over the curve of your ass, and his other hand comes up to brace beside your hand on the wall.

"This okay?"

"Yes."

"Tell me if it's not."

"It's okay, Din, please."

You feel him line himself up, feel the blunt heat of him press against you, drag through the slick, and then sink in – slow, slow, slow, the patient relentless press of him filling you up inch by careful inch until his hips are flush against yours and you’re panting open-mouthed against the cool durasteel. His hand comes up to wrap around the front of your throat, not squeezing, just there, holding you in place against him.

"Breathe," he says as he starts to move.

You let out a gasp at his long, deep, deliberate strokes, the kind of fucking that isn’t fast or frantic but is somehow worse than fast and frantic, because it gives you no relief, no chance to climb the edge and tumble over. It’s just the steady relentless drag of him in and out of you, the slap of his hips against your ass, the low constant noise of him through the modulator that’s somewhere between a breath and a growl.

His hand at your throat tightens, fractionally, the bare pads of his fingertips against your pulse. His other hand leaves the bulkhead and slides around your hip, down between your legs, his fingers finding you again where you’re stretched open around him, working you in time with his thrusts.

You come apart on him almost immediately.

It hits you with no warning – one second, you’re panting and the next your knees are going, your whole body clenching, and the only thing keeping you upright is his hand at your throat and the press of him inside you. You sob his name mixed with something less coherent. The modulator buzzes at your ear with a sound that might be approval and might be a curse, and you can’t tell and you don’t care.

He fucks you through it, not slowing down or speeding up, just keeping the steady devastating rhythm of him while you flutter around him and shake and try to remember how breathing works.

"That's one," he says and you can’t answer. "Going to give me another one, mesh'la?"

"I…can't…"

"You can."

His hand leaves your throat. He turns you again, your legs jelly, and you whimper at the loss of him for the two seconds it takes to get you on your back on a stack of crates that he's dragged together with the side of his boot. Then he’s inside you again, your legs hooked over his arms, the cool of the vambrace on the back of your thigh, the helmet tipping down to watch where your bodies meet.

"Look at that," he says, quietly again. "Look at you taking me."

"Din…"

His thumb comes up to your mouth, and you open for it without thinking. He presses the pad of it onto your tongue, and you suck, eyes locked on the visor. He watches you suck like it’s the most important thing happening in the galaxy, like he’s filing it away, every detail, the way your tongue moves against the pad of it, the hollow of your cheeks.

"Good girl," he says.

You moan around his thumb as he presses it down on your tongue and you feel yourself clench around him hard enough that he makes a sound – a real one this time, low and bitten-off, the kind of sound that comes from deep in his chest and barely makes it through the vent of the helmet at all.

"Fuck," he breathes.

His hips snap up. The slow methodical fucking falters, just for a beat, into something rougher, and your back arches off the crates, your hands flying up to grab at the edge of the helmet where it meets his collar.

The visor tips down and watches your hand hover at the edge of his throat, and then his hand leaves your hip, catches your wrist and guides it back down to his chest, over the open flap of the flight suit, to the bare hot skin of his sternum.

"Here," he says, rough. "You can touch me here."

Your palm flattens against him, his heart hammering beneath. Your Mandalorian is an immovable mountain of a man, and yet his heart is going like a hunted thing under your palm, and you understand with a hot dizzy lurch that you do this to him. That for all his patient methodical control he’s as wrecked by this as you are, just better at hiding it under all that beskar.

"Din…come in me…” you beg, even though he does every time.

His hand tightens on your thigh. The vambrace is cool against your skin and his bare fingers are burning, and the difference makes you shiver.

"Get yourself there first."

His hand slides down between your bodies, finds you again, and his thumb works you in those tight little circles while he fucks into you harder now, less measured, the crates creaking under your back. You can see him losing it, the way his breath comes faster through the vent, the way his free hand has fisted in the strap of his own harness like he’s holding himself together by main force.

"Look at me," he says, “and don't look away."

You don’t look away. You come on him for the second time staring straight into the dark of that helmet, into your own reflection, and see your own face break apart in the curve of the beskar. You feel him follow you a half-dozen ragged strokes later, the modulator choking, his hips stuttering hard against yours, the hand on your thigh going white-knuckled as he spills into you.

He holds there and doesn’t move, the brow of the helmet lowering until it rests against your forehead, cool beskar to hot skin, and you both breathe. His thumb drags along your jaw, slow and gentle.

"Lesson over?" you whisper.

The modulator gives back the smallest huff of breath.

"Lesson over."

He doesn’t move for a long time. He stays inside you, over you, his hand stroking idle warm circles into your hip while your breathing evens out and your heart climbs back down out of your throat. When he finally slides out and steps back, he does it carefully – one hand at the small of your back to help you sit up, the other already reaching for the rag he keeps clipped to his belt for blaster maintenance. He cleans you up with the same patient methodical care he used on the pulse rifle an hour earlier and the thought makes you laugh, breathless, the visor tipping at you with mild inquiry.

"Nothing," you say. "Just…you really do treat me like one of your weapons."

"Mm." He fastens his flight suit closed with one hand while the other smooths your hair back from your damp temple. "Best thing on the ship."

"Flatterer."

"It’s the truth."

He bends and retrieves your shirt from where it fell by the bulkhead and pulls it gently back over your head, threading your arms through the sleeves with the same quiet attentiveness he gives everything. He helps you off the crates and your legs wobble, so he catches you with an arm around your waist and holds you there against his side until you've remembered how to be a person again.

"Same time tomorrow?" you ask into the leather of his harness.

"Footwork tomorrow," he says. "Real footwork. You're still dropping your left guard."

"Din, I just came twice on your cock. Let me have this."

He pauses. "Footwork. Tomorrow."

You laugh into his chest and feel, more than hear, the small answering rumble of him laughing back.

****

Later, you sit curled into the copilot's chair in the cockpit with your bare feet tucked beneath you and a thermal blanket over your shoulders in the long blue silence of the hyperspace run and watch the stars not move.

His hands are still bare, and you’re holding one now across the space, running your fingers over his knuckles and the small white scars there as if you’re reading a book in a language he’s taught you only the alphabet of.

You don't know, even now, why you asked it then.

Maybe it was the afterglow. Maybe it was the year that has piled up behind you like snow against a door. Maybe it’s the way he says cyar'ika, the way he holds you afterward, every time, with a tenderness that feels like a promise he hasn’t yet decided he’s allowed to make.

"Din?"

"Mm."

"Have you ever thought about family?"

The hand under yours doesn’t flinch. He has a long-trained body that doesn’t give away surprise easily. But you feel the very small adjustment of him, the half-degree settling, the way a man sets his weight before he answers a question that matters.

The vocoder catches the slow exhale.

“My parents died when I was young. The Mandalorians are…were…my family.”

“No, I know, I…I wasn’t meaning that. I meant more…a partner and…and children.”

He moves slightly again.

"Why do you ask?”

"I don't know." You stroke his knuckle. "I was thinking about what kind of life this is. About whether…" you break off, because you can’t quite ask it the way you want to.

Whether we could. Whether you want to.

He’s quiet a long moment, the blue light moving across the visor.

"I have thought about it," he says, finally. "I'm not sure what kind of life I could give a child, cyar'ika. This…" his free hand makes a small gesture that takes in the cockpit, the stars, the bounty puck still glowing on the dash "…this is not a life for children."

"There are Mandalorians with children, aren’t there?"

"Yes, in covert, in community. With…a place. The covert I came from is gone. I have no home to bring a child to but this one."

"This is a home."

He turns the helmet, slowly, to look at you and you feel the weight of the visor's attention. The thumb of the hand you’re holding strokes, very lightly, over the inside of your wrist.

"It’s a ship," he says gently, “and it’s a life of running, and hunting, and being hunted in return. I would not…" he breaks off, the vocoder catching a small rough sound. "I would not ask that of a child. Or of the woman who might bear me one."

Or of the woman who might bear me one.

You feel the sentence land somewhere under your ribs and stay there.

You don’t let your face change because you’ve learned not to let your face change when he gives you a piece of himself you’ve not earned by asking. You only stroke his knuckle once more, slowly. "I see."

"Cyar'ika…"

"It's alright," you smile at him and mean it, but also don’t mean it. Both things are true at the same time, the way many things have been true at the same time since the day you first climbed aboard the ship. "It was just a question."

You know he doesn’t believe you because his bare hand turns, under yours, catches your fingers, and holds them.

"It’s not a no," he says, quietly. "It’s…" he searches for the word. "It’s a thing I haven’t let myself want because wanting it without being able to have it is…" the vocoder cuts on the next word, very briefly, the way it does when his breath goes uneven "…a wound I've already carried once."

You squeeze his hand. "Alright," you say softly.

He holds your fingers a long moment more, the bare warm pads of his thumb tracing the small bones of your hand as if he’s committing them to memory in case he has to give them up. Then he lifts your knuckles to the chin of the helmet, very briefly – the small substitute kiss that has become his, and yours – and lets you go.

"Get some sleep," he says. "We drop out at oh-four-hundred."

You nod, stand and touch the curve of his pauldron in passing because you can’t quite bring yourself to leave the cockpit without touching him. Then you climb down the ladder into the hold with your blanket trailing from one hand and a sentence echoing somewhere behind your sternum that you can’t yet make peace with.

Or of the woman who might bear me one.

You crawl into the bunk and lie on your back in the dark with your hands folded across your stomach and the hum of the Crest under you like a long patient animal breathing.

You turn the conversation over in your head.

I'm not sure what kind of life I could give a child.

That, you understand. You’ve seen in a year, what this life costs him – the wounds you’ve patched and had patched, the credits that come and go, the bounty pucks that sometimes glow with the faces of people who deserve what’s coming and sometimes with the faces of people who don’t.

He wakes from nightmares sometimes, but you’ve learned not to ask about them. He carries the weight of a creed and a covert and a long list of names he doesn’t speak aloud, and you’ve never once in your year together heard him use the word future about himself except in the most narrow sense –the next jump, the next bounty, when the Crest will next need its compressor flushed.

Or of the woman who might bear me one.

That’s the sentence that won’t lie down.

Because he said it out loud, with you in the chair beside him, your thumb on his bare knuckle and the blue light of hyperspace running over the visor between you. He didn’t say some woman or a woman. He said it with a particular pause before the article, the small hitch you know from a year of cataloguing his hesitations, the place where he thought about the word and chose it anyway.

You lie in the dark and let yourself, for the first time in a year, name the thing properly.

He was thinking of you.

Not promising or asking or perhaps, even hoping, in any active sense. He’s a man who knows how to hope, you’ve begun to suspect, in the way some people know how to swim or to bake bread. But he was thinking of you. He let himself, however briefly, however privately, set the word child and the word you on the same workbench and look at them together. And then he put them away because the workbench is a ship and the ship is a hunting ground and the hunting ground is not a place to raise a small life.

You close your eyes and think about your mother, who didn’t raise you well, but who raised you. You think about the way she once looked at you over the edge of a cup of caf and said, Sweetheart, a person can change a life. A life cannot change a person. Remember that.

You hadn’t understood it at the time, but you think you might be beginning to.

He isn’t going to change. You know that with a clarity that doesn’t hurt the way you might expect it to. He’s not going to wake up one morning and decide that the Crest is a nursery, that the helmet can come off, or that the creed can be set down. He’s told you what he can’t give, and why, and he’s done it not because he doesn’t love you – because he does, you know he does, you’ve heard it in every cyar'ika and feel it in every careful hand at the small of your back – but precisely because he does. Because he’s a man who’s been trained, since he first fit under a Mandalorian's cape, to think first about what he can ask of other people and last about what he can ask for himself.

He hasn’t said no to the question. He said, I have not let myself want it.

The two are very different.

It’s a door he hasn’t locked. A door he’s only set his shoulder against, on the inside, because he’s not yet been given any reason to believe it can be safely opened.

You don’t know if you can give him that reason. You don’t know if any of the things you know how to do around him amount to a reason. You don’t know if you can be a covert for a man who’s lost one. You don’t know if a ship can be a home for a child, even one raised by two people who will, between them, kill the galaxy to keep that child fed.

But you know you’re not going anywhere.

You’ve been waiting, perhaps, for some part of yourself to use the conversation as a door of its own – to look at the or of the woman who might bear me one and decide it’s a polite warning, an exit cue, a closing of accounts. You wait for the part of yourself that has spent a long life slipping out of cantinas at four in the morning to lift its head and say time to go.

It doesn’t lift its head. It’s sleeping somewhere deep, curled around the place where his hand held yours, and it doesn’t stir.

You’re not going anywhere.

You’ll stay by his side. You’ll patch him when he comes home bleeding and let him patch you when required. You’ll feed him caf strong enough to dissolve a spoon and let him have you in the cockpit with the helmet on and his gloves on your hips and you’ll ask him about children again.

Not yet.

You’ll let him sit with the question because you can be patient and because you’re used to waiting for him.

Opening your eyes, you hear, through the deck plating, the small sounds of him moving above – the creak of the pilot's chair, the soft clink of a buckle, the tiny exhale of the modulator as he adjusts something on his vambrace.

He’s not asleep and, you suspect, he’s not going to sleep for a while.

You wonder if he’s thinking about it too. If he’s sitting up there in the blue light with his hand on the throttle and the helmet tilted slightly to the left and a sentence of his own echoing somewhere under his cuirass that he doesn’t yet know how to put down.

You hope he is. You hope he’s thinking about a covert that can be rebuilt instead of mourned. You hoped he’s thinking about a somewhere – a small dirt-floored house on some forgettable moon, a garden that won’t grow much but will grow something, a cradle that he can come home to between bounties and lay his beskar down beside.

You hope that he’s beginning to let himself want it.

You don’t know if he will. You don’t know if you’ll still be on the Crest a year from now, or five, or twenty, or for the long quiet rest of your life. You don’t know if the door he’s set his shoulder against will ever open.

But you know you love him and you know that loving him is the work of a long time, not a short one, and you know that you’re willing to do that work.

So, you close your eyes and sleep.

Above you, in the cockpit, the helmet tilts very slightly to the left. The hand on the throttle flexes once and goes still. The vocoder catches a slow even exhale, and another, and another, and the man inside the armour sits with words on his own workbench in the blue light and looks at them, for the first time in a long time, without putting them away.

He doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do with them.

But he’s taken them out.

Chapter Text

The first thing you notice is that he won’t sit down.

That, by itself, is not unusual. He’s a man who paces, a man who stands at the edge of rooms, a man who has been trained never to take a chair that doesn’t have its back to a wall. In the time you’ve spent together, you’ve learned the geography of his stillness and his motion, and ordinarily you can read him through the soles of his boots.

Tonight you can’t read him.

It’s a slow night – the bounty puck spent, the credits locked away, the next job not yet pulled. You’ve eaten the simple meal you made together, wiped down the small fold-out table in the hold, sat with him on the bench by the carbonite chamber while he field-strips his rifle, and you’ve read aloud, in the small companionable way you’ve begun to develop, from a book of poetry you picked up from a stall on Bestine for two credits.

It was the closest you’re going to get to a bookstore.

He’s been listening with the slightly tilted helmet that means he’s paying attention. And then, somewhere between the second and third poem, he sets the rifle aside half-cleaned, stands up, and begins, with no apparent destination, to pace.

He paces the length of the hold once, pausing at the carbon-freezing controls, then paces back. He stops at the foot of the ladder, sets one gloved hand on the rung and stands there a long moment as if considering whether to climb it. Then he turns and paces again, ending up at the small fold-out table, and he stands there with his hands resting on the edge of it and the visor angled at some middle distance of the deck plating.

You watch him through all of this with the patience of a person who’s learned that the surest way to make him close up is to ask him directly what’s wrong. So, you don’t ask. You set the book down, tuck your feet up under you on the bench and wait.

He paces again and comes back to the table, stopping at it again as if it’s a thing he hasn’t noticed the first time, and exhales unevenly.

"Din,” you say gently, the helmet still turned away. “Come sit.”

He doesn’t move for a long moment. His bare fingers on the edge of the table flex once and go still. Then, slowly, as if it costs him something he doesn’t want to spend, he comes back across the hold and sits down beside you on the bench.

He sits forward, elbows braced on his knees, his bare forearms catching the warm sodium light of the hold. He laces his fingers together loosely and stares at them, or at the deck, or at nothing in particular through the T-visor and says nothing.

After a long time, the vocoder catches a breath.

"Cyar'ika."

"Yes?"

He goes quiet again, so you lay your hand on his forearm. The skin’s warm, the small dark hairs there soft under your palm, and you stroke it very slowly with the pad of your thumb.

"It's nothing," he says, finally. "I'm…being foolish."

"You're not foolish."

"You don’t know."

"Tell me."

He remains quiet so long this time, that you begin to think he’s going to stand up again and pace, but he stays by your side.

"I want something," he says, the vocoder very low. "I want something, and I can’t have it, and I’ve been…I’ve been turning it over in my head all evening like a man turning over a stone he can’t put down. And I’m being foolish, because the wanting changes nothing. So, I will put it down. And we will…" he gestures, small and helpless, at the book on the bench beside you, “we will read another poem, cyar'ika, and I’ll be alright."

You don’t pick up the book. You continue slowly stroking the inside of his bare forearm with the pad of your thumb and feel the small involuntary tightening of muscle there under your hand.

"Tell me what you want," you say.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Tell me."

He draws a long breath through the modulator and turns his hand over under yours so that his palm is up. He lays his bare fingers across your wrist, and traces – with a small careful absent motion, as if he’s not aware he’s doing it – the small bones there.

"I’ve been thinking," he says very quietly, "about a thing I can’t do."

"What thing?"

The visor turns and he looks at you. You feel the weight of it, the long careful look, the way you always feel it when he’s deciding how much of himself he’s allowed to give you.

"I want to put my mouth on you."

You don’t move, don’t even breathe for a moment, because if you move or breathe you might break the small fragile shape of what he’s just set down between you.

"I want…" he says slowly, “I want to taste you, cyar'ika. Your mouth, your body, your…your heat. I’ve been wanting it for…for a long time. Tonight it won’t leave me, I don’t know why. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes the wanting climbs out of where I keep it and walks around the room with me, and tonight it’s been walking with me for hours, and I am…"

The modulator cuts on a small almost-laugh that’s not, you think, a laugh

"I’m tired. I’m tired of pacing around it. I need you to know what’s in my head. I don’t need you to do anything with it. I only…" his bare thumb strokes the inside of your wrist, “I need you to know."

You sit with his words for a long careful moment, because the thing he’s just said is a thing that matters, and you don’t want to answer it before you’ve understood the shape of it.

But you do understand. To put his mouth on you – his true mouth, not the substitute chin of the helmet, not the small kiss of the visor against your skin – is a thing he can’t do without breaking the Creed he’s sworn to uphold.

You know that he’s not asking you to ask him to break it – even though you have before. He’s asking you to know that he wants to.

You lay your hand against the cool curve of his helmet at the cheek and tip your forehead to the brow of the visor, closing your eyes to help yourself think.

"Din,” you say, slowly and carefully, “what if I close my eyes."

The helmet doesn’t move.

"What if I close my eyes the whole time, and I don’t open them. Not once, not for any reason, not even at the end. You could…you could come and go without me ever seeing you. The light could be on or off, whatever you want, but I wouldn’t see you. I swear to you I wouldn’t see you."

The vocoder catches a long uneven breath.

"I'm serious."

"I know you are."

"It wouldn’t be breaking the Creed."

"Cyar'ika…"

"It wouldn’t, Din, think about it. The Creed says, no living being may see your face. If my eyes are closed, no living being sees your face. The helmet is off, but no one sees. The thing the Creed protects is protected."

He sits in silence for a long time and the bare hand on your wrist tightens, very slightly, and loosens, and tightens again.

"I don’t know," he says, finally, “I…."

"I know you don't."

"It’s…" he searches, “it’s the kind of argument a man makes when he wants the answer to be yes."

"Maybe." You stroke the curve of the helmet at his cheek. "But it might still be the right argument, Din. The Creed is about the spirit of the thing, isn’t it. You told me that the covert who raised you cared about the spirit."

"They did."

"And the spirit is that no one sees."

"Yes."

"Then no one would see."

"I don’t know if I can trust myself," he says. " I don’t know if I can trust myself to…to put my mouth on you and not, in some moment of not thinking, demand that you open your eyes and look at me.”

"You can, Din. You’ve spent your life not doing the thing the Creed forbids. You have a discipline. You won’t ask me to do it."

"And if I do?"

"You won't."

"Cyar'ika, if I do…?"

You stroke his cheek through the beskar. "Then I won’t see you, because I won’t open my eyes. You can trust me, Din. I know I asked you to take off the helmet before because I wanted to see but…if we do this, knowing how you feel…I promise I won’t open my eyes."

“I do trust you,” he says softly. “That’s not…that’s not the question I’m holding."

"Then what is?"

He exhales heavily. "Whether I can trust myself to be the kind of man who tests it."

You understand, then, in one long flat clarity, what he’s holding. He’s not afraid that you’ll open your eyes because he has no doubt that you won’t. He’s afraid – he, who has carried the Creed for so long and who has built every other thing in his life on the foundation of its discipline – of what it says about him that he wants it badly enough to negotiate around the edge of it.

You lay both your hands against the cheeks of the helmet and tip his forehead to yours.

"Listen to me. You have spent your whole life not asking. Not for yourself. You have spent your whole life giving the Creed everything it asks of you. You’ve given it well, and you’ve given it without complaint, and the Creed has, in return, taken almost everything from you. And you’ve carried that, Din, without flinching, for longer than most men could."

He goes very still.

"And now, after all of it, you want one thing. One small thing. You want to put your mouth on the woman who loves you. And you’ve built – we have built, between us, you and I – a way that you can have that thing without setting down the spirit of what the Creed protects. And you’re sitting here on this bench asking yourself if wanting it makes you a worse Mandalorian."

You stroke his cheek.

"It doesn't, Din. It makes you a man, that’s all. Just a man. A man who has loved a woman for a year now and who would like, for one night, to put his mouth on her. The Creed is large enough to hold that. The covert that raised you – the one that cared about the spirit – I think they would have held it. I think they would have wanted you to have it."

He doesn’t answer for a long time and the bare hand on your wrist stops its small stroking. It’s simply holding, now, the fingers laced loose through yours.

"Cyar'ika," he says, eventually.

"Yes?"

"I don’t have a blindfold."

You don’t laugh, but you very slowly, smile against the brow of the visor. “I have a scarf.”

****

The scarf is dark blue, almost black in the sodium light of the hold, a long soft length of woven Tatooinian cotton you bought in a market on a planet you can’t now remember the name of. You’ve used it as a head covering on dusty worlds and as a pillow on cold nights and as a small comforting weight around your shoulders when the bunk is too quiet and he hasn’t yet come down from the cockpit. It’s a thing that smells of you and him and the Crest.

You carry it back to the bench, sit down and set it across your lap.

He sits the way you left him, elbows on his knees, his bare fingers laced loose between them, the visor angled at the deck. But when you sit down beside him, he turns, slowly, and lays one bare hand against the side of your face.

"If you change your mind at any moment…"

"I won't, but if I do, I’ll tell you. I’ll say stop, and you’ll stop, and that’ll be the end of it, and we’ll not talk about it again until you want to. I know how this works."

"I know you do,” he says softly.

"Then trust me."

The bare hand at your cheek strokes, slow, the pad of the thumb tracing the small line beneath your eye where you have a habit of pressing your fingers when you’re tired,

"I trust you," he says.

You hand him the scarf, and he kills the lights at the small wall panel by the bench, the sodium glow going down to nothing in one slow fade. The hold drops into the low blue half-dark of the night cycle, where the only light comes from the small standby diodes on the bulkheads and the faint backwash of the cockpit instruments down the ladder shaft. You sit on the bench in the half-dark and watch the silhouette of him come back across the hold to you, the helmet a darker shape against the dark, the cape moving slightly with the air-recycler's breath.

He stands in front of you, holding the scarf in his bare hands. "Close your eyes."

You close them and feel him kneel in front of you, feel the soft brush of the scarf across your forehead, his bare fingers gathering your hair carefully out of the way, the fabric settling over your closed eyelids with a weight that’s somehow both very light and absolute. You feel him tie it at the back of your head and then test it with one fingertip along the upper edge, where it presses gently to your brow.

"Can you see anything?"

"No."

You feel him kneel a moment longer and the visor presses, very softly, to your scarfed forehead – the last kiss of the helmet before it comes off. You lay your hand against the cool beskar of his cheek and smile.

"Take your time," you say.

He draws a long breath through the modulator, then rises to his feet. You hear the small, soft hiss of pressure release and the faint click of a seal disengaging. It’s an intimate sound, one he’s probably not let another living being hear in years.

You don’t move or even consider opening your eyes. The thing he’s setting down, in the small space of the hold, is a thing he’s built every other thing in his life on top of, and you understand that the only way to receive it is with stillness.

You hear the soft thump of the helmet being set down carefully and the next breath you hear is his.

It’s unfiltered, a man's breath, low and a little uneven, no modulator, no metal. It’s the most naked sound you’ve ever heard him make.

You stay very still as he kneels again, feeling his weight come down in front of you, his hands settling on your knees.

"Cyar'ika."

It’s the first time that you’ve ever heard the word without the vocoder.

His voice underneath is lower than you thought. Softer, a little hoarse, perhaps from the suddenness of the unfiltered air, perhaps from emotion, perhaps from both. It has a small warmth in it that the modulator has stripped from you for a year without you ever quite knowing it was there.

You don’t move, but you smile.

"Hello, Din."

You hear him laugh for the first time ever. Really laugh, not the small vocoder-clipped almost-amusement you’ve become an expert in, but the actual sound, low and a little surprised, as if it’s escaped from somewhere he hasn’t been guarding. It breaks against the inside of your chest the way the first cold water of a stream breaks against your bare feet.

"Hello, cyar'ika."

"You sound…like a person."

"I am a person."

"I know you are. I just haven’t heard…" you break off, because you don’t have the word, He laughs again, very softly, and you feel his bare hand come up to your face and lay against your cheek.

Then you feel his mouth.

His mouth.

Not the chin of the helmet, or the brow of the visor, but his actual mouth, warm and slightly chapped, pressing to the corner of yours.

You don’t open your eyes. You only turn your face blindly the small distance it needs to turn, and let your lips find his, and the small soft sound that comes out of you when they do is not a sound you knew you know how to make.

He kisses you slowly, the way a man kisses for the first time something he’s been wanting to kiss for a very long time. The soft press of his lips against yours, the small careful catch of his upper lip against your lower, the warm uneven breath of him through his nose against your cheek. You feel the brush of stubble and, very faintly, the tip of his tongue, tentatively brushing the seam of your lips, asking.

You open your mouth to him.

The sound he makes is small and broken and not for anyone but you. His tongue slides against yours, warm and slow, and you taste him for the first time – a clean simple human taste, the faint trace of the caf you shared earlier, the warmth of a mouth that’s been hidden from you for a year and that is, now, very deliberately, no longer hidden.

He kisses you the way he does everything else – with a careful patient attention, as if you’re a thing he’s been given permission to study and intends to study well. The hand at your cheek slides into your hair behind the knot of the scarf whilst the other finds your waist. He kisses you and kisses you and kisses you, and you sit there blindfolded on the bench with your hands fisted lightly in the fabric of his undershirt, kissing him back. Dimly, somewhere behind the warm flood of it, you realise that you’re going to remember this for as long as you live.

He pulls back, finally, his forehead pressed to yours, his breath uneven against your mouth.

"I’ve wanted that for so long."

"I know, Din."

You stroke the back of his neck, where the hair is curled and soft and feel the small involuntary lean of him into your hand.

"Take your time," you say, again. "Take all of it. I'm not going anywhere."

He kisses you once more – a slow soft press, his lower lip catching at yours – and then he begins to move down.

He kisses the corner of your mouth, the line of your jaw and the soft place beneath your ear that, for a year, has only ever been touched by the cool curve of a visor. The sound you make when his actual mouth finds it is small and shocked and entirely involuntary. He laughs against your throat, low and pleased, and the warm breath of him there makes you shiver.

"That," he says, against your skin, "is a sound I’ve wanted to be the cause of for a long time."

"You have been the cause of it."

"Not like this."

He kisses the hollow of your throat and the small notch above your sternum, his bare hands sliding down to the hem of your shirt, fingers finding the small fastening at the side and working it with the quiet competence of a man who has undressed you a hundred times in the dark. He draws the shirt up over your head, careful of the scarf and your closed eyes beneath it. You lift your arms and let him. Then you feel the cool air of the hold on your skin, and a moment later, the warm slow trail of his mouth down your sternum, between your breasts, to the small soft place at the base of your ribs where you once told him, in the dark, that you’re ticklish.

He pauses there, smiles against your skin, and then, very gently and deliberately, he kisses you there.

You laugh and he laughs against your stomach, unfiltered and warm.

"Din…you’re enjoying yourself."

"I am."

His hands slide up your sides, find your breasts, cups them with a warm careful weight that he’s given you many times before, but which feels now like something entirely new. His thumbs stroke across your nipples, slow, and you arch into his hands. He makes a low pleased sound that the modulator has never been allowed to give you, and you feel his mouth close warm and wet around one nipple, making you gasp.

He takes his time, kissing, licking and drawing gently with his teeth whilst his hand kneads the other breast in slow rhythm. You sit blindfolded on the bench with your hand fisted in the back of his hair and let him learn you, finally, with the part of him he’s never been allowed to use.

He moves to the other breast and gives it the same patient attention. His mouth is hot, and a little wet, and the small hoarse appreciative sounds he makes against your skin are the most undisciplined things you’ve ever heard from him.

When he finally lifts his head, you’re breathing hard, the scarf warm against your closed eyes.

"I want…"

"Yes."

"You don't know yet what I’m going to say."

"I do, Din. Yes."

You feel him laugh again, very softly. His hands slide down your sides to the waist of your trousers and work the fastening, drawing them down, carefully, over your hips, down your thighs and then off, over your feet. He sets them aside and you sit naked on the bench in the blue half-dark of the hold with a blindfold tied across your eyes and a man whose face you’ve never seen kneeling between your thighs.

You had never, in your entire life, felt safer.

"Lie back," he murmurs.

The bench is narrow, but he guides you, his hands warm at your hips, until you’re settled along its length with your head pillowed on your bunched-up shirt, your knees bent and your feet planted on the metal. You feel the cool air of the hold on every inch of you then feel his hands stroke up the inside of your thighs, parting them, and your knees fall open for him.

You do not, for one single second, consider opening your eyes.

Then he kneels at the foot of the bench, and you feel his hands slide up under your thighs, lift them gently, hook them over his shoulders and his face come down between your legs, the warm uneven breath of his open mouth against the inside of your thigh.

You feel the small drag of stubble against the soft skin of your inner thigh and the warm wet press of his tongue. The small low sound he makes in the back of his throat is, you know, simply pleasure and he kisses his way up, taking his time. He kisses the crease where your thigh meets your hip, then the other one. He kisses the small soft place just above where you’re already wet for him, and the warm exhale of his breath against you there makes you shake.

"Din…please…"

"I’ve waited a year for this," he says, against your skin, his voice low and unfiltered and warm. “Let me have this."

You lay your hand on the back of his head. "Have it."

His mouth closes over you and the sound that comes out of you is not quiet and not in any language you know. He’s…he’s good at this, in a way you haven’t been prepared for, the way a man can be good at a thing he’s never done because he’s thought about doing it for a very long time and has spent that time paying close attention to the woman he’s going to do it to.

He knows where you’re sensitive. He knows the small place just to the left of centre that makes your hips lift. He knows the rhythm you like, the slow building one, the kind that gathers and gathers and doesn’t break and doesn’t break – and finally breaks.

He makes small sounds against you, low, hungry ones. Sounds that the modulator has never given you, that come from somewhere deep in his chest and vibrate against you in ways that make you fist your hand in his hair and gasp his name aloud in the half-dark. You hear your own voice come back to you off the bulkheads, but you don’t care.

He licks into you, drawing you into his mouth and sucking, slowly and carefully, the small steady rhythm of it building a low heat in your belly that climbs by inches and then by feet. He slides one hand up your stomach to find your breast, and his thumb strokes your nipple in time with his mouth, the small precise coordination of it almost more than the heat itself.

The other hand slides down and you feel two fingers slide into you.

"Din…"

He hums against you, the vibration running up your spine.

"Din, I'm…"

He hums again and doesn’t stop or slow. He draws you steady into his mouth, curls his fingers inside you and the climb gathers and gathers and the warm wet patient rhythm of him doesn’t let up. You feel your hand tighten in his hair, your hips lift against his mouth, and your breath catch on a sound that’s almost a sob.

And you break.

It washes over you in long white waves. You come against his mouth with your back arched off the bench and your hand fisted hard in hair and his name – Din, Din, Din – falling out of you in a wrecked rhythm that matches the pulse of it. He doesn’t stop. He stays with you, his mouth gentling but not lifting, his tongue easing into a slow patient stroke that draws it out, the small careful hum of him still vibrating against you, until the waves ebb to a long warm ache and your hand in his hair loosens and your hips settle, trembling, back to the bench.

He kisses you, easing his fingers out of you. Then he lays his cheek – warm and rough with stubble – against the inside of your thigh, and stays there a long moment, breathing.

"Cyar'ika..."

"I'm here,” you say, your voice wrecked. "I'm here, Din."

You stroke the back of his head and feel the wave of his hair under your fingers.

"You…" you try, “are very good at that."

He laughs again, low and a little surprised. "Thank you."

"I'm just saying."

"I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

"It shows."

He laughs again and you love him so much, in that moment, that you have to press your free hand to your mouth.

Minutes later, he kisses his way slowly back up your body – your hip, your stomach, the soft place at your ribs that makes you laugh, your sternum, the curve of your breast, the line of your throat, the soft place beneath your ear – and he settles, eventually, half over you on the bench, his weight braced on one forearm beside your head, his other hand stroking slow lazy circles on your stomach. He kisses your mouth slowly and you taste yourself on him.

You stroke his face with your fingertips, eyes closed, learning it the way he’s learned you in the dark of the bunk. You feel the line of his jaw, the rough patch of stubble there, the long bridge of his nose which is a little crooked, the curve of his cheekbone, and the small warm corner of his eye where there are the faint lines of a man who, despite everything, has laughed often enough to mark them.

He holds very still and lets you map him.

"I'm just…looking," you murmur.

"I know."

"Without looking."

"I know."

You stroke the line of his mouth and feel him smile under your fingertips. You feel the small, dry, warm press of his lower lip and the slight chap at the corner and the small, unguarded, pleased curve of him under your touch, and you lay your palm flat against his cheek and hold it there.

And you let yourself say a sentence you’ve never said before.

"I love you, Din."

"I know," he says. “I know."

"I needed you to hear me say it."

He kisses your palm.

"I love you," he says. “I love you, cyar’ika. I’ve loved you for a long time. I’m…" he searches. “I’m still learning how to let myself say it. But I do."

You lie there for a long moment, the cool air of the hold raising small bumps along your bare skin, your mind absorbing the words he’s just spoken. The warm weight of his forearm beside your head, the warm slow circles of his hand on your stomach, the small steady unfiltered breath of him near your ear – you catalogue all of it, eyes closed, the way you’ve catalogued him through the visor.

"Din?"

"Mm."

"Don't put the helmet back on yet."

The hand on your stomach pauses.

"I want…" you turn your face blindly toward where his is and feel the warmth of his breath against your cheek. "I want you, Din. Like this. While you're still…still like this."

He doesn’t answer and you stroke his cheek again, feeling the small tense stillness of him, the careful held breath, the place where he’s sitting with the size of what you’ve just asked for.

"I won't open my eyes," you say firmly. "I haven’t even thought about opening them. The scarf can stay. I just…I want to feel you. I want all of you. Once, just once, with nothing in the way."

He’s silent so long you think, briefly, you’ve asked too much. Then his forehead lowers to yours and, for the first time, you feel the skin of him against the skin of you there.

"You don't have to. If it's too much…"

"It's not too much. I’m only…I’m only trying to remember how to breathe. Give me a moment."

You lie there blindfolded with his bare forehead against yours, his warm breath against your mouth and his hand splayed motionless across your stomach and let him have whatever moment he needs. You have time. For the rest of your life with him, you have time.

Eventually, his breath evens and his thumb on your stomach resumes its small, slow circle.

"Yes," he says quietly and starts to undress.

You don’t see it of course, you hear it. The soft rustle of him sitting up, the quiet drag of the undershirt being pulled over his head, the small clink of his belt unfastening, the rough whisper of fabric over skin as he strips the trousers off. You hear him set everything aside, carefully, the way he sets the armour aside at night, not because it matters where the clothes go, but because the small ritual of placing them gives his hands something to do while the rest of him catches up.

The bench is too narrow, and you feel his hands slide under your shoulders and your knees as he lifts you against his bare chest and carries you the short distance to the bunk.

You feel the familiar give of the mattress as he lays you down on it and kisses you again, his hand coming up to cradle the back of your head where the knot of the scarf still holds, warm now from your skin. It doesn’t slip and you don’t open your eyes.

He settles between your thighs, hard against the soft, warm wet of you, the blunt heat of him pressing where his mouth was not long ago. He presses his bare forehead to yours.

"Cyar'ika…tell me if…"

"Yes, Din. Yes."

He slides into you in a way neither of you have had before – his actual skin against your actual skin from head to toe. He presses his forehead harder to yours and holds there a long shaking moment, just breathing against your mouth, and you understand – blindly, behind the scarf, the warmth of him everywhere on you – that he’s as undone as you are.

"Cyar'ika..."

"Oh Maker, Din…please move."

He moves slowly. He has to because you realise that anything faster will break him. He draws back, almost out, then slides back in, and the warm long stroke of it without anything between you is a thing that makes your breath catch on a small, wrecked sound. He kisses you while he does it, his mouth on yours, swallowing the sound, his tongue moving in slow time with his hips, the unfiltered uneven breath of him pouring into you between kisses. His hands are on you everywhere – your face, your throat, your breast, your hip, your thigh, the small place at the back of your knee where he once told you he likes to touch you in the dark because the skin there is the softest – because he can’t decide where to put them.

You wrap your arms around his back, feeling the long, warm muscle of him and slide your fingers up into his hair, the shape of him under your palms entirely revealed, entirely yours, for this one moment in this one bunk, in the warm blue half-dark of the Crest.

He kisses you over and over whilst he moves in you with that long, warm, slow rhythm, his hips finding yours, the small soft sounds of him unfiltered against your mouth, the warm, wet, patient slide of him building a heat in you that’s slower and deeper than anything you’ve felt with him before. You feel it climb the way the sea climbs a beach, by inches, no hurry, no urgency, only the inevitable.

His hand slides down between you, his thumb finding where his mouth has been and circles it in time with his hips. You break the kiss on a small, wrecked sound and he presses his forehead to yours and breathes against your mouth and watches you as the tide climbs and climbs.

"I'm…"

"I know."

"Din…"

"I know. Come for me, cyar'ika. I want to feel you. I need to…I have you."

You come hard, his body pressed flush to yours, his mouth on yours, his thumb steady and patient through every shaking pulse of it. You sob his name and he drinks it, kissing you through it. He doesn’t stop moving, the long, slow stroke of him in you carrying you all the way through and out the other side, until you’re limp and shaking and gasping against his lips.

Then he lets go and the broken sound he makes when he does is the most undone thing you’ve ever heard from him. His body locks against you, his forehead pressed to yours, his hand fisted in the bedding beside your head, and you feel him spill into you in long, warm pulses with his mouth pressed open and shaking against yours. You hold him through it, your hands flat against his back, your knees high around his hips, and you understand that you’ll never, for as long as you live, have anything more than this.

He stays inside you, on top of you, his forehead against yours, his breath slowing against your mouth. You stroke his back and the hair at the base of his skull and don’t say anything for a long time, because there’s nothing that needs saying.

Eventually, he kisses you, slow and sweet, the kind of kiss you’ve not known a person could give until tonight, his mouth lingering on yours with the small soft drag of his lower lip.

"Thank you," he whispers.

You stroke his cheek. "Thank you, Din."

****

He holds you for a long time before eventually carefully easing out of you and settling his weight beside you in the bunk, pulling you against his chest with your scarfed face pressed to the warm hollow of his throat. You feel his pulse there, feel the small, unfiltered rhythm of his breath against the top of your head, feel his hand splayed warm and possessive across the small of your back, the thumb stroking slow absent circles.

You lie there with your eyes still closed under the scarf and listen to him breathe then feel his lips press, eventually, to the top of your head, the warm, soft kiss of his actual mouth in your hair.

"I'm going to need to put it back on,” he says finally.

"I know," you say, feeling a pull in your throat.

"Not yet."

"No?"

"A few more minutes."

"Take all the minutes you want."

He holds you and somewhere in the small warm dark of the bunk, in the long patient afterglow, the man whose face you haven’t seen, and will not see, presses his bare mouth to the top of your head once more and you understand that he’s committing the unguarded moment to memory the way you are – building it into a thing he’ll carry with him in the long, modulated dark of every day after.

Eventually, he stirs.

"Cyar'ika…keep them closed."

"They’re closed."

You feel him ease out from under you and the cool air of the bunk rushes in to where his warmth has been. You hear the quiet click of the helmet's seal engaging and the small mechanical breath of the vocoder coming back online.

The next sound out of him is filtered again, modulated, but the voice underneath is yours now. Privately and permanently. A thing you’ll carry like the shape of his face under your fingertips. Something that nobody else in the galaxy will ever be given.

He comes back to the bunk, his hand moving to rest on the back of your head. Then he unties the scarf and draws it from your eyes.

You keep them closed a moment longer and then, when you open them, the visor’s waiting and you smile up at him in the blue half-dark.

"Hi, Din."

The vocoder catches a low pleased sound as he bends and presses the brow of the visor to your forehead in the substitute kiss, the one that hasn’t become any smaller for the existence of the other. If anything, it’s grown larger, because you know now exactly what it stands in for, and how willingly he set it down for you, and how carefully he’s picked it back up.

You lay your hand against the side of the helmet and hold him there.

"Come to bed."

He climbs in behind you and pulls you back against his chest, the helmet pressing to the top of your head, his hand splayed warm and possessive across your stomach.

The scarf is somewhere on the floor of the bunk and, tomorrow, you’ll find it, fold it and put it back where it belongs, with the rest of the small private inventory of things that smell of you and him and of the ship that has become, against every odd and every doctrine, the home you didn’t know you were going to find.

You close your eyes and, behind you, in the dark, his thumb strokes once across your stomach and the vocoder catches a long even contented breath.

And the man who lives inside the armour, the man whose face you haven’t seen, holds you against his chest and doesn’t, for the first time in a very long time, find anything in himself that needs pacing around.

Chapter Text

The thing about giving him something he can’t have again, you understand later, is that you’ve not thought about what it’ll cost him to give it back.

You’ve thought about a great many things, in the long warm afterglow of that night. You’ve thought about the shape of his face under your fingertips, the unfiltered laugh, low and surprised, and the warm, hoarse, human voice underneath the modulation, and the soft warm patient slide of him with nothing in the way. You’ve carried all of it, in the days after, like a small bright stone in a pocket, taking it out in the quiet moments and turning it over in your hands.

You’ve not thought about him taking it out in the quiet moments and turning it over in his.

You should have. You should have known. He’s a man who takes things out and turns them over in his hands – that’s the whole architecture of him, that’s how he’s built every interior room of himself. You’ve given him a thing to turn over, and he’s begun to wear it smooth.

The first week is very good.

He’s quieter in a way that’s not withdrawn but settled, the way a man who’s been given something that has rearranged his small interior furniture and is taking the time to learn the new layout is quiet He sits closer to you in the cockpit. He touches you more in small, absent ways and calls you cyar'ika more often. He says it through the modulator, and you hear, every time, the human voice underneath, because you’ve been given it once and you’ll never not hear it underneath now.

The second week is where it begins.

It begins so small you almost don’t notice and you only do because you’ve now spent a year learning to notice small things about him.

You’re in the bunk with the lights out. He comes down from the cockpit and strips his armour, piece by piece, laying it aside in the careful ritual he’s built around the night cycle. He climbs in behind you in his undershirt and his trousers with the helmet still on, pulls you back against his chest and splays his hand across your stomach, his thumb beginning the small, slow, absent, familiar circle of your skin.

And then his hand stops a second too long.

You feel him hold his breath and feel the helmet press, very lightly, to the top of your head. Then you feel the small involuntary tightening of his fingers against your stomach, as if he’s been about to do something and stopped himself.

Then the thumb resumes, the breath is let out and the helmet stays. You don’t say anything. You just close your eyes, let him hold you and tell yourself it’s nothing.

It happens again, three nights later. He bends to press the brow of the visor to your forehead, and you feel him pause, the cool beskar a hair's breadth from your skin, and you feel the small held breath of him through the modulator. Then the visor presses down and he pulls back.

You look up at him in the half-dark.

"Din, are you alright?”

"Yes."

He’s not alright, but you don’t push, instinct telling you that he’s not ready to look at whatever it is yet.

You let it lie and it gets worse.

He starts to take longer to settle in the bunk. He starts to lie behind you with his hand on your stomach and not move at all, to hold so still it’s like he’s teaching himself not to. When he takes you in the dark, he starts to keep one hand always braced against the bulkhead beside your head, as if he needs the anchor of something cold and unyielding to remind him of where the discipline is supposed to live.

He starts to fuck you, in those nights, with a small, new, desperate edge underneath the old patience. Not rough, just…wanting. You feel it every time in the small involuntary catch in his breath when he buries himself in you, the small held-back sound he makes through the modulator when he comes, the way his hand tightens on your hip and then deliberately eases, the way you can feel him pulling against some invisible leash.

You know what the leash is and yet you don’t say, because you also know that the thing he’s leashed against is a thing he can’t be allowed off the leash for again. Maybe not ever. The Creed has given him one negotiated night because you built him an argument he could climb through, and the same argument doesn’t climb twice. You both understand that and asking him for it again will be asking him to break the thing the night only carefully bent.

So, you let him stay leashed. You hold him afterwards, tell him you love him and feel, every time, the small flinch of him hearing it whilst you pretend, every time, you don’t.

But it doesn’t work.

The third week is when you have to start admitting it’s not working.

This is when he starts to pace again. Not the wide easy pacing of a man with nervous energy to spend, but the small, contained pacing of a man who’s holding something down with his hands and can’t quite manage to hold it down with the rest of him. He paces the cockpit between jumps, he paces the hold at night, he strips his rifle and reassembles it twice in one evening, which is something he hasn’t done since the first month of you living on the Crest, when you were still learning to read him and he was still learning to be read.

You try twice to talk to him. The first time is in the cockpit, where you lay your hand on his bare forearm and stroke the skin there gently.

"Din?"

"Mm."

"Talk to me."

He doesn’t turn his head.

"There's nothing to talk about, cyar'ika."

"There is."

"There's not."

"Din…"

"There is nothing."

His voice through the modulator is very level and so you take your hand off his forearm and nod as though he’s given you an acceptable answer.

"All right," you say softly.

The second time is in the bunk. He takes you from on top this time, the way he sometimes does when he wants to watch you – your hands braced on his shoulders, your weight in his lap, his hands at your hips guiding the rhythm. He finishes with the small held-back sound through the modulator and then lifts you off him with the careful competence he always brings to it, laying you down beside him, and beginning the slow absent stroking of your stomach with his thumb that means he’s settling toward sleep.

You lay your hand over his. "Din."

The thumb stops.

"I miss it too," you say, very quietly. "I do. But I have it in my head, and it’s enough. It’s more than enough. We don't have to chase it. We don't have to…to keep looking back over our shoulders at it. It’ll still be there in a year, or five, or twenty. We don’t have to chase it."

The thumb doesn’t resume and he remains silent for a long time before responding.

"I’m not chasing it."

"Din…"

"I'm not, cyar'ika. It was a gift. I know what it was. I'm not…" the vocoder cuts on a small uneven breath, “I'm not the kind of man who chases gifts."

"I didn't say you were."

"Then don't worry about it."

“I only…"

"Sleep, cyar'ika, please."

You sleep or at least pretend to. Behind you, in the dark, his hand stays splayed across your stomach without moving, and you understand, lying there with your eyes closed, that you’ve pushed and he’s pushed back, and that’s the end of the conversation for tonight, and possibly for longer.

The third week ends and the fourth week is Helvista.

It’s a long bounty, seven days of hard tracking on a swamp moon, a quarry who moves at night and sleeps in trees, a stretch of work that leaves you both filthy, underfed and tired down to the small bones of your wrists. You eat ration bars on the bounty's last night without speaking, haul the carbonite slab into the hold at dawn and shower, one at a time, the way you always do.

You come out into the warm dim of the night cycle with your hair damp and your skin warm and find him sitting on the bench by the carbonite chamber with the helmet on and nothing else and a look about him that you’ve not seen in a month.

His visor turns and he watches you cross the hold.

You don’t stop in front of him, moving past him to the bunk, because you understand, from the small set of his shoulders and the careful angle of his helmet, what he wants, and that the bench is not where he’s going to take it.

He follows, his hand coming around your waist from behind and pulling you back against the warm heat of him, the visor pressing to the side of your throat with the small hungry edge of a man who’s been holding something down for a long time and is, tonight, going to let himself stop.

"Cyar'ika."

"I'm here."

He turns you, pressing your back to the bulkhead, then he kisses you through the helmet as his hands go under the loose sleep shirt you’ve pulled on after the shower, finds your breasts and palms them.

You should have stopped him then, but you don’t.

You want him too. You’ve wanted him for a week of swamp moon and longer than that of small held-back hands on your hip and a leash neither of you is talking about. You want him and so you turn your face up to the visor, let him push the shirt up over your head, and guide you into the bunk.

He bends you forward over the edge and that’s the first place it goes wrong, only you don’t realise it at the time.

He’s taken you from behind before many times. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with him bending you forward over the edge of the bunk, pulling your hips back against him and pressing the visor to the back of your neck while his hands run the small inventory down your sides.

But you understand, with a small far slow part of your mind, that he’s chosen this position because he can’t see your face from it and that he’s choosing it because tonight, he doesn’t want to have to remember whose face it is.

You set the thought aside, because you want him.

He presses against you, hard, the blunt heat of him sliding through the wet of you, and the small, low sound he makes through the modulator is rougher than the small, low sound he made through the modulator a week ago. He sheathes himself in you in one long stroke, you cry out against the mattress, and he presses the visor to the base of your skull, beginning, with very little patience at all, to fuck you.

It’s not the rhythm of any night in the bunk before.

It’s hard, harder than he’s been before. This is a man who’s been holding something down for four weeks and who’s decided, somewhere on the swamp moon or in the shower or on the bench, that he’s going to stop holding it down for the next ten minutes, and that the way he’s going to stop holding it down is through you.

His hands grip your hips tighter than usual. You felt the small involuntary pulse of pressure where his thumbs dig into the soft place above your hipbones, where you register, dimly, that there will be bruises tomorrow. He pulls you back against him on every stroke, using you as the anchor he’s been bracing against the bulkhead for. The small, hoarse sounds through the modulator are not the warm, low, pleased ones you know. They’re rougher, the sounds of a man working at something. The sounds of a man trying.

"Din."

"Mm."

"Din, slow…"

He doesn’t slow. The visor presses harder to the base of your skull. The hand on your right hip slides up your back, fists in your hair, and tips your head back. Not gently, not the careful tipping he’s used before, but a harder tipping. A tipping that pulls, that hurts a small clean line down your scalp, and you make a sound that’s not entirely pleasure.

He doesn’t seem to hear you.

He keeps going, the pace never breaking. The pressure of his hand in your hair doesn’t ease and the other hand on your hip pulls you back harder. The visor presses to the side of your neck and the modulator catches a small, rough sound that’s almost a growl. You feel him driving toward something, chasing something, and the small, far, slow part of your mind finally understands.

He’s chasing the feeling of having no helmet between him and you.

He can’t have it. The helmet is on, the Creed is on, the leash is on, he can’t get it off, and he’s trying, in the only way left to him, to fuck through it.

You know you can’t let him – can’t let him chase a thing through you that you’re not going to be the chase for.

"Din."

He doesn’t slow.

"Din."

The visor presses harder, the hand in your hair tightening.

"Stop."

The word comes out small. You don’t even know, at first, that you’ve said it. You haven’t said stop to him before. There have been times when you’ve asked him to slow, to wait, to give you a moment, but you’ve never, not since this all started, said the word stop.

He doesn’t hear you and you say it again, louder.

"Stop, Din. Stop."

He stops so completely it’s as if a thing has been switched off inside him. The hand in your hair releases. The hand at your hip releases. The visor lifts from the back of your neck and the rhythm breaks. He holds inside you a long, shocked moment, breathing through the modulator, and you feel the long uneven shake of him.

Then he pulls out, fast, and steps back. You hear him stumble with the small, uncharacteristic ungainliness of a man whose body is no longer obeying him. You straighten up off the edge of the bunk, slowly, and turn to look at him.

He’s standing in the half-dark of the bunk alcove. The visor’s angled at you, but only barely, the rest of him angled away, shoulders set, hands at his sides, the breath through the modulator coming in small, uneven bursts. He looks, you think, the way a man looks who’s just watched himself do something he doesn’t believe he’s capable of and is, in the space afterward, deciding what kind of man he’s going to be on the other side of having seen it.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Din, it’s alright."

"I…”

"Come here, it's alright. I'm all right.”

You reach for him, but he flinches back, a half-step, no more, and you feel it in your own chest like a blow.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Din, stay, please."

But he doesn’t stay.

He turns and goes across the hold, lifting his discarded flight suit and clumsily pulling it on over his naked form before heading for the ladder. You watch as he climbs it, then hear the small bang as the cockpit hatch closes, the lock engaging.

You stand naked in the bunk alcove in the half-dark with the warm wet ache of him still inside you, listening to him moving above, then sit down on the edge of the bunk and lay both your hands flat against your thighs, breathing slowly, the way he’s taught you to breathe when you’ve come back too hot from a fight and can’t bring yourself down. You take the breaths, count them and let your shoulders come down.

Your hips hurts and when you look down, you can already see, in the small backwash of light from the hold, the dark beginnings of bruises above the bones. You press one with your fingertip and the small, bright ache of it is almost a relief.

You scout the floor for your trousers, pull your sleep shirt back on and think, first, about whether you’re alright.

You are – you know you are. Your hips are bruised and your scalp feels tender and there’s a small soreness inside you that’s nothing you’ve not had before. You’re alright. You said stop and he stopped, the way you knew he would. He stopped completely.

The Creed is a discipline, and the discipline has held, even at the end, even with him chasing something through you that he can’t have.

You sit there a long time wondering if you might cry and quickly realising that you won’t. What comes instead is a long, slow, steady clarity telling you, firstly, that he’s not alright and secondly that he’s not going to be alright by himself.

The third thing the clarity tells you is that you’re going to have to go up there after you’ve given him some time to be alone with the thing he’s just discovered about himself, the way an animal that has been caught in a snare needs a stretch of being alone with the snare before it’ll let anyone near to take it off.

But you know the stretch can’t not be too long, because you know the decision a man like Din Djarin is capable of making about himself, when he’s just hurt the woman he loves and it’s not a decision you’re going to let him reach unattended.

Standing up, you move slowly, around the hold, making yourself useful. You fold the blanket that has slipped off the bench. You pick up the scarf from where it migrated days ago to the small shelf beside the bunk, fold it and put it back. You drink a glass of water and stand in front of the small mirror in the cycler looking at your reflection.

Your hair is wild from his hand and there’s a small flush along your throat. Your eyes look tired, but not frightened, and you don’t look, when you turn at the waist to check, like a woman who’s been hurt past mending. The bruises on your hip are already coming up dark, and you trace one with your fingertip, thinking about how you’re going to tell him about them and deciding you’re going to tell him the truth, because the truth is the only thing that’s going to be useful to him tonight.

You wait fifteen minutes and then walk to the foot of the ladder, laying your hand on the rung.

"Din?"

The cockpit hatch doesn’t open, not that you expect it to. You stand at the foot of the ladder with your hand on the rung and speak up the shaft just loud enough that he can catch your voice through the hatch.

"Din, I'm coming up in a minute. I just want you to know that."

You’re met with silence and you stand there a moment longer, stroking the cool metal of the rung with your thumb the way he strokes your stomach, and you breathe.

"I'm alright," you say quietly. "I want you to hear me say that.”

The cockpit hatch doesn’t open and he doesn’t answer.

You wait two more minutes and then begin to climb. At the top of the ladder, you lay your hand against the hatch.

"I'm at the hatch. I'm not going to open it because I want you to open it when you're ready. I'm just going to sit here on the ladder and wait."

Sitting down on the top rung, you lean your back against the bulkhead beside the hatch, fold your arms across your knees, lay the side of your head against the cool metal, close your eyes and wait.

You don’t how long you wait for but, eventually, the lock disengages. You don’t sit up or push the hatch open. Rather, you wait for him to open it.

The hatch slides open from the inside and when you open your eyes and look up, you see him sitting in the pilot’s chair, turned to face the hatch, with the helmet on, the visor angled at the deck plating between his feet.

He doesn’t look up as you climb the last two rungs and sit down on the lip of the hatch, your legs dangling into the shaft, your hands folded loose in your lap.

"Hi.”

"Cyar'ika...I…"

His voice through the modulator is the voice of a man who’s been crying. You don’t know how you know that because, in all the time you’ve flown with him, you’ve never heard him cry, never even been entirely sure he’s capable of it. But the small uneven catch in his breath and the slight thickness in the way the modulator handles the word tells you that he has and is.

"Can I come in?" you ask softly. “Or do you need me to stay here?"

He doesn’t answer right away.

"Come in," he says, eventually.

You don’t go to him. Instead, you go to the copilot's chair and sit down in it sideways, so that you’re facing him, your bare feet tucked up under you, your hands still folded loose in your lap. You look at the dash, at the dim glow of the navigation readouts, at the small steady spin of the proximity scanner, so that he doesn’t have the weight of your eyes.

He doesn’t look up, the visor remaining angled at the deck.

"Din, I need to tell you some things, okay?"

"Yes."

"Firstly, I’m physically alright. I’ve got two bruises on my hip from where your hands were and my scalp is a little tender from where you pulled my hair, but that's all.”

He doesn’t answer and the visor stays angled at the deck. You watch, very faintly, the small involuntary shake of his shoulders under the flight suit.

"Secondly, I'm going to tell you that I love you and I want you to hear me say that now, before I say anything else. I love you, Din. I’m not any less in love with you tonight than I was this morning.”

The vocoder catches a small broken sound that’s almost a word and also not. You sit with him while he takes in what you’ve said and let him have whatever time he needs.

"Alright," he says quietly.

"Good. Now I'm going to tell you the third thing. And I'm going to say it once, and then we're not going to talk about it tonight again, because tonight isn’t the night to talk about it. We’re going to talk about it tomorrow, or the day after, or when you’re ready. But I want you to hear it once tonight, because I want you to carry it into whatever you’re about to do with yourself in your own head, and I want it to be in there with you."

The visor doesn’t move.

"You were chasing it, weren't you?"

He doesn’t answer.

"You were chasing the way it was that night, and you’ve been chasing it for four weeks. I’ve watched you chase it and I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know how to say it without taking something away from you that I’ve got no business taking. But tonight you chased it harder than you’ve chased it before, and tonight I felt it, Din. I felt you trying to get through the helmet at me with your body because you can’t get through it any other way."

The vocoder catches a small, wrecked sound.

"I’m not angry," you say. "I want you to hear that. I’m not angry, Din, because I understand why. We had something that was real, and it’s not something a man can put down easily after he’s had it. I should’ve understood that better than I did. I should’ve asked you, the morning after about how you were going to carry it and I didn't, and for that I’m sorry.”

You uncurl your hands and lay one palm flat on the armrest of the copilot's chair, facing up, as an offering.

"But you can’t chase it through me, Din. Not because you hurt me, but because if you chase it through me, you’re not being true to yourself. You’re not letting us be what we are to each other. I don’t want to be a thing you have to fight your way through your armour to reach. I want to be the thing inside the armour with you."

You let out a long breath, and still, he says nothing.

"That's all I wanted to say. “

You sit there watching the proximity scanner until he finally speaks and, when he does, the voice through the modulator is very small. The voice he keeps for the things that hurt him.

"Cyar'ika."

"Yes?"

"I…I didn’t know that I was. I thought…I thought I had it under control. I thought I had…I had set it down the morning after. I had taken it out and I had looked at it, and I had set it down. I told myself I had."

"I know."

"I told myself I had every morning. Every morning I would pick it up and look at it and set it back down, and I told myself the setting down was the work. I told myself I was doing the work. I…"

The vocoder catches.

"But I wasn’t doing the work," he says. "I was wearing it smooth."

"I know, Din. I saw you do it."

He bends forward in the chair and lays his hands across the visor of the helmet, the way a man holds his head in his hands when he’s trying to keep something inside it.

"I hurt you."

"Not badly."

"I hurt you."

"Alright, you did, a little. And I said stop, and you stopped. I want you to hear that part – you stopped. You stopped completely, Din, the second I said it. You heard me and you stopped."

"That’s not…that’s not the bar, cyar'ika. That’s not the bar I want to meet."

"I know it isn't."

"I don’t want to be a man who has to be told to stop. I don’t want to be a man who…who chases a thing through the woman he…" the vocoder cuts on the word.

"I know, Din."

He doesn’t say anything for a long time, his hands remaining flat against the brow of the visor. You don’t move from the copilot's chair, but you keep your palm up on the armrest, letting it be a thing he can come to if he wants.

"I’m afraid."

The vocoder almost strips the words, but you hear it anyway.

"Afraid of what?"

"I’m afraid that I’ve…I’ve learned a thing about myself I didn’t know was in there. That there’s a man in here who…who wants past the Creed. Who wants past it badly enough to put his hands on you and pull. And I don’t…I don’t know what to do with knowing that cyar'ika. I’ve built my… my whole self on top of the Creed. The Creed is the floor. If I’m the kind of man who…who pulls against it through you, then I don’t know what the floor is."

You sit with his words for a long careful moment, because the thing he’s setting down between you is a thing that matters, and you’re not going to answer it cheaply.

"Din, will you come over here? I’m not going to ask you anything. I just want you over here because you’re too far away, please.”

He doesn’t move and the hands stay on the visor.

"Din, please."

Finally, he stands slowly and crosses the small space between the chairs. He doesn’t look at you or sit. He stands in front of the copilot's chair with the visor angled at the deck and his hands hanging useless at his sides.

You reach up and take both his hands in yours, gently drawing him down to you. He comes down to his knees in front of the chair, kneeling between your feet on the deck plating of the cockpit, and you cradle his hands in yours and turn them, slowly, so the palms are up, and you lay your own palms flat on them, and hold him there.

"Listen to me."

The visor remains angled at the deck.

"Look up, Din."

He looks up slowly.

"There’s no man in there who wants past the Creed. There’s a man in there who loves a woman and wants to be close to her. That’s all that is. You’ve built your whole self on top of the Creed, and the Creed is the floor, and the floor is fine. The floor is not cracked. The floor held. You said yes to a negotiated night, took it, and then you tried, for four weeks, to carry it without telling me you were having trouble, and that’s the only place anything went wrong tonight. You should’ve told me. The next time you have trouble carrying something, you need to tell me. Yes?"

The visor is very still. "Yes.”

"Good."

You stroke his hands with your thumbs.

“The night in the hold was a gift, we both said so. But a gift isn’t a debt or a thing you have to chase. A gift is a thing you get to have once, and the having of it doesn’t require any more havings to stay real. The night in the hold is real, it will stay real and it will be real in a year, and in five, and in twenty. I’m not going anywhere, Din, and the night in the hold is going to be one of the things I take with me to whatever is on the other side of a long life on this ship with you. It doesn’t need to happen again to stay real. Do you hear me?"

"Yes," he replies, softly. “I hear you."

You sit there with his hands in yours and after a long moment, you feel the long shudder of a breath go out of him through the modulator that you understand, with a small flat clarity, is the first whole breath he’s taken since the bunk.

"I’m sorry, cyar'ika."

"I know."

"I won’t…"

"I know."

He lays his forehead against your knee and you place one hand against the back of the helmet and hold him there, stroking, very slowly, with the pad of your thumb, the small place where the lip of the helmet meets the collar of his flight suit, the small bare strip of skin you’ve touched a thousand times.

"I'm going to ask you something now, Din, and I want you to answer it honestly.”

"Alright."

"Do you need a stretch of nights where we don't do anything at all? Just…nothing but sleeping.? Just my back against your chest and your hand on my stomach and the helmet on and nothing else? Would that help?"

You feel the small careful stillness of him at your knee, the slow consideration of a man who is, for the first time in four weeks, letting himself actually look at what he needs instead of what he’s supposed to be capable of.

"Yes."

The word comes out small.

"Yes, I think…I think I do. I think I need that."

"Then we'll have that."

"Cyar'ika…"

"We'll have that, Din. As long as you want it. You tell me when you’re sitting with it clean, when you’ve stopped chasing it, when you’re settled. And then we can go back to the way it was before, the way I love, Din, the way I love…"

Your voice catches small and unexpectedly, and you steady it quickly.

“And we won’t be chasing anything. We’ll just be having what we have, alright?"

"Alright."

You stroke the back of his helmet.

"And we’re not going to talk about doing the other thing again. Not for a long time, maybe not ever. I’m not going to come to you in six months or a year and ask you to take the helmet off. The night in the hold is not a thing I’m going to ask you to give me again. If it ever happens again, it’ll be because you, the man inside the armour decides that you want it, and not before.”

The vocoder catches a long uneven breath and the helmet nods slowly.

"And if that night never comes, I won’t be wanting for anything. I have the one night here." You lay your free hand flat to your sternum. "I have the shape of your face under my fingertips, and I have the sound of your voice without the modulator, and I have the feel of your mouth on me and I’m full of it, Din. I don’t need another helping. I want you to never, ever again be lying behind me in the bunk wondering if I’m wanting more than I have because I won’t.”

He doesn’t answer and you feel, against your knee, the small uneven shake of him. You sit like that a long time, letting the time be a thing that happens around you until he eventually lifts his head, the T shape of the visor finding your face.

"Cyar'ika, will you let me see the bruises?"

You don’t flinch at the request. Instead, you stand, gently drawing him up, take his hand and lead him down the ladder, across the hold and into the bunk.

You sit on the edge and ease the waistband of your trousers down, slowly, so he can see. The dark shapes above your hipbones have come up in the last half hour to a deep blue-purple, the kind of bruise that will be ugly tomorrow and uglier the day after and will, by the end of a week, be a soft greenish-yellow.

He looks at them for a long time.

“I’m sorry.”

He kneels slowly and lays both hands very lightly on you, cradling the curve of your hips, his thumbs not pressing, just settling near.

"May I?"

"Yes."

He bends, the brow of the helmet pressing, very lightly, to each bruise in turn, holding there a long moment, breathing through the modulator, his thumbs stroking once across the soft skin above the bones.

Then he moves and climbs into the bunk behind you, pulling you back against his chest with the helmet at the top of your head and his bare hand splayed warm across your stomach.

His thumb begins the small, slow, absent circle, and you close your eyes, feeling the warm familiar weight of him. You feel the visor against your hair, the bare hand on your stomach, the thumb in its small slow rhythm, the bare arm warm along the underside of your breasts.

The helmet is on. The Creed is on. The bruises on your hip ache, dully, against the warm length of his thigh behind yours, and the small, clean ache of it is, somehow, against every odd, a comfort – a thing you can feel, a thing that proves you’re both still inside your bodies. A thing that will, in a week, be greenish-yellow and then nothing at all.

"Thank you," he says softly.

"You’re welcome."

"I love you."

The vocoder catches a little on the words, and you hear, underneath, the human warmth of the voice you’ve been given once and will not be given again, and the hearing of it underneath is not a thing that hurts – it’s a thing you have.

You lay your hand over his on your stomach and lace your fingers through his.

"I love you too, Din."

His thumb resumes its small, slow, absent circle against your skin.

You don’t know yet how many nights of just-this it’ll take. You don’t know if there will be a slow careful return to the long, patient rhythm of how it has been, or whether something between you will have to be built newly out of the rubble of tonight, piece by piece, the way the covert he lost is a thing that can perhaps, in some long quiet future, be rebuilt out of the materials at hand.

You don’t know if there will be other nights when he’ll need to lay his bruised wanting at your knee and have you hold it, or whether the work of tonight will be enough.

But you know that you’re both here.

Closing your eyes, you let the warmth of him be the thing your body settles into. You let the small slow circle of his thumb be the metronome your breath organises itself around as you sleep.

When you wake, in the small blue hour before the Crest's day cycle comes up, his bare hand is still splayed across your stomach, and his helmet is still pressed to your hair, and the long warm length of him is still against your back.

He’s still here and the work in front of you both is work that two people who love each other can do.

You lay your free hand over his on your stomach and close your eyes again, sleeping another hour, against him, in the small, warm, blue dim, before the day asks anything of either of you.

Chapter Text

It begins, the way most things do, with something so small you almost don’t notice.

You’re in the cockpit – Din in the pilot's chair, you in the co-pilot’s – your feet tucked up under you the way you sit when the jump is long, a datapad balanced on your knee with a book you’ve been reading off and on for a week. The hyperspace tunnel runs its long, blue spiral past the viewport and the cockpit smells, faintly, of the caf he brewed an hour ago in the small thermal pot mounted by the navicomputer – a smell you’ve loved, for over a year now.

You set the datapad down because the smell of the caf, very suddenly, isn’t the smell you love, but a thicker, sharper smell. It’s the smell of caf but turned by some small chemical wrongness in the air, or in your head, into a thing that climbs the back of your throat and sits there.

You swallow, “Din?”

The visor turns.

"Can you…" you swallow again, “can you put the lid on the pot. Sorry. The smell is…"

He puts the lid on the pot without asking, doing it the way he does most things you ask of him, with a competent immediacy that’s become a thing you take for granted. The smell eases and you breathe through your mouth a minute. Then you lay the back of your hand against your forehead and find it cool.

You pick the datapad back up.

The visor is still on you. "Cyar'ika?"

"It's alright, it just hit me funny for some reason."

"You're pale."

"I'm fine, Din. Just…" you wave a hand, “maybe I'm coming down with something. The water on Helvista, maybe. I read that some of those swamp bugs can take three weeks to come up."

"Drink something," he says. "Not caf."

You drink water, it tastes fine and by the time the jump drops you back into realspace an hour later, you’ve forgotten the caf entirely. You laugh at one of his small, dry observations about the spaceport controller's traffic patterns, and the moment slides away under the accumulating weight of the day.

You don’t think about it again – not that day anyway.

Two days later it’s the ration bars.

You’ve unwrapped one, in the hold, sitting on the bench where he cleaned his rifle that night six weeks ago when the long, careful conversation about wanting had begun. You unwrap it. lift it to your mouth and the smell of it – the slightly sweet, processed smell of the protein binder, a smell you’ve eaten through cheerfully twice a day for over a year –stops you cold. You set the bar down and stare at it.

He’s at the carbonite chamber, checking a seal and the visor turns towards you.

"Cyar'ika?"

"I just…" you say, "I'm really not hungry."

"You haven't eaten since the morning."

"I know but I'll eat later, Din. Just not…not that. I'll find something else."

You find something else, a piece of dried fruit from the small tin he keeps in the galley locker, and it was fine. You eat three more pieces with a kind of grateful greed that surprises you, because dried fruit isn’t a thing you usually eat by the handful. You wash it down with water and feel a million times better.

Again, you don’t think much of it, convincing yourself that it’s a swamp bug, as feared, or the water on Helvista. Simply some small, persistent disagreement between your body and the last bounty, working itself out the long slow way.

A week passes and it’s a quiet week.

He comes down from the cockpit, every night of that week, strips his armour and climbs into the bunk in his undershirt and trousers and pulls you back against his chest with the helmet on and his hand splayed warm across your stomach. His thumb strokes its small, slow absent circle, and nothing else happens.

You’ve both agreed on doing things this way and you’ve both been keeping it the way he keeps everything once he’s agreed to it, with a careful, patient discipline that doesn’t waver. You love him for it more than you have words for and you don’t tell him so, because telling him will make the holding of it harder. You let him hold it.

You sleep hard against him, the way you’ve not slept since you were a child – long, heavy sleeps, the kind that leaves a small, disoriented hollow in you in the first hour after waking, where you have to remember, slowly, who you are, where the ship is in its drift and what day it’s supposed to be.

You notice it, after a while because the small, disoriented hollow has become a thing you wake into more days than you don’t.

"You're sleeping a lot," he says one morning, the vocoder soft. He’s leaning against the bunk with a cup of caf in his gloved hand and you realise that he’s stopped offering you caf, three or four mornings running, without saying anything about it.

"I know."

"Do you…?”

"I'm tired. I don't know why. I think the swamp bug’s taking its time."

The visor keeps still.

"It's been three weeks."

"I know."

He doesn’t say anything else. He drinks his caf and presses the brow of the visor to your forehead before he climbs back to the cockpit. his gloved hand stroking once down your cheek allowing you to lean into it and close your eyes.

You sleep two more hours and when you wake, the Crest is still in drift, and the bunk smells of him. You sit up slowly, put your bare feet on the cool deck plating and feel, for the first time, a small lift of nausea that doesn’t have anything identifiable to attach itself to. There’s no caf in the air, no ration bar in your hand. Just a soft turning of your stomach, the kind that comes and goes in the space of a breath and leaves you sitting on the edge of the bunk with one hand pressed flat to your sternum, wondering.

You don’t yet know what you’re wondering.

You stand up and move over to the cycler, washing your face in cool water. You look at yourself in the small mirror over the basin and think that you look normal. A little tired, perhaps, the faint shadow under your eyes that comes of long sleeps deeper than usual. Your skin has a small warmth to it that’s not quite a flush, your hair longer than you’ve been keeping it.

You lay your hand flat against your sternum again and move it slowly down past your ribs to the soft place below your navel where, six weeks ago, on a bench in the hold, with a blindfold over your eyes and a man between your knees, you felt his warm, bare, patient hand splay possessive across your skin for the first time in fourteen months without anything in the way.

Your hand stops there.

You don’t, even then, let the thought form. You let your hand rest, let your palm be warm and let yourself, for the small space of a breath, simply notice the small warm place beneath your hand.

Then you take your hand away and finish washing your face. You go out to the hold and eat four pieces of dried fruit and a small piece of flatbread from the locker. Then you drink a glass of water and climb up to the cockpit to sit with him for the long quiet hours of the drift.

You don’t say anything to him because you don’t yet have anything to say. You have a swamp bug and a long stretch of quiet nights and a slightly turned stomach and a body that wants to sleep through every afternoon of the blue cycle. You don’t have anything to say.

Another week passes and your body doesn’t get better.

It doesn’t get worse, exactly, but it becomes…different. The sleeping continues. The nausea comes up in unprompted moments, mostly in the morning when you’ve not yet eaten, mostly easing the moment you put a piece of dried fruit or a corner of flatbread in your mouth. Your breasts have been tender. In the bunk one morning when his hand drifts in its small absent rhythm up from your stomach to settle against the underside of one, you flinch slightly and he feels it. He moves his hand back to your stomach without a word and without comment.

You know he’s watching you and that he has been for at least a week. The visor angles in small, careful checks at the cockpit, at the bench and at the bunk. It’s the inventory of him noting that you’ve refused caf again, that you’ve eaten only the dried fruit, or that you’ve napped through the late afternoon. He hasn’t said because you understand he’s waiting for you to say something. He’s waiting because he’s a man who’s learned that pressing you on a thing you’re not ready to be pressed on is not the right move.

You love him for the waiting.

But you also understand, lying in the bunk on the morning of the day you finally let yourself think the thought, that the waiting isn’t going to last forever. He’s a man who can hold a question a long time, but not one who can hold it indefinitely, and the question he’s holding is getting heavier in his hands by the day.

You let yourself think the thought.

You do it in the cycler again, standing in front of the small mirror in your sleep shirt with the cool water dripping off your jaw and your hand laid flat low on your stomach where it’s been wanting to lie for two weeks.

You count backward.

Six weeks since the night in the hold. Six weeks and three days, to be precise, because the night in the hold is a thing your interior calendar has marked.

Three weeks since the night on the bench when he bent you forward and pulled your hair and you said stop.

Three weeks of just-this since. Three weeks of his bare hand splayed warm across your stomach in the dark without anything else. Three weeks of no possibility, no possibility at all, that anything else could cause what your body is, very quietly and very persistently, telling you is happening.

Six weeks and three days.

You’ve not had your cycle since.

The realisation comes up the way the nausea comes up – quietly, from underneath, without preamble. You stand in front of the mirror with your hand flat low on your stomach and watch your own face in the glass and see the slow recognition arrive in it.

Oh.

Oh, Din.

You sit down on the small fold-down stool by the basin because your legs are not, just then, doing what you need them to do. You sit with your hand still on your stomach and stare at the deck plating between your bare feet and let the thought, finally, take its shape.

You’ve not been tracking it because there’s been no reason to track it. You’ve been on the Crest for fourteen months now and the small reliable rhythm of your body has been a thing you’ve been able to take for granted because you have been given the contraceptive shot by the medic on Sorgan just before you climbed aboard.

“Six months,” you remember her saying. “Six months and then you need to come back for the booster, don’t forget.”

You said you wouldn't, and meant it, because your life up until that point had been all about measuring things in six months intervals. You hadn’t known that morning that you were going to escape and steal aboard the Crest the way you did. Then it had lifted off Sorgan, carrying you to some kind of freedom, and you’ve never been back.

You do the count again and come to the same answer the second time and the third time. You sit on the stool in the cycler with your hand on your stomach and the soft, slow recognition warming you from underneath.

You sit there until the cool water on your jaw dries, and the small, disoriented hollow of the morning fades, and your legs are doing what you need them to again. Standing up, you look at yourself in the mirror and notice that you look the way you looked an hour ago. Tired, and a little flushed, but the same woman.

You lay both your hands low across your stomach and let yourself say the words.

"I'm pregnant."

The woman in the mirror smiles a small, surprised smile, the kind a person smiles when they’ve been told a thing they weren’t expecting and which turns out, when they hear it, to be a thing they’ve been wanting without knowing they want it.

Only you do know, because you asked him – weeks ago now – about family and, in a roundabout way, whether that might be something he’d consider.

You stand there a long moment with the smile on your face and your hands low on your stomach and you let yourself, finally, be inside the knowing of it. There’s a small, warm thing low in you the size of nothing yet – a clustering of cells, a possibility, a beginning – but it’s there. It’s there, and it’s his, and yours, and the two of you have made it in the bed you share with a blindfold across your eyes and a man between your knees who set down, for one careful moment, the last unbroken thing he’s carried out of the wreckage of his covert.

You close your eyes a moment and let the clarity of it organise itself. Then you open them again, wash your face, dry it on the worn towel that hangs by the basin, and go out into the hold to find him.

He’s at the workbench with a strip of new leather across it, a small awl in his gloved hand and the visor angled down at his work. From the careful set of his shoulders, you can tell that he’s been at it a while and that the work is a thing he’s using to hold himself steady while he waits for whatever you’re going to come and say to him.

You cross the hold and stop at his elbow, the visor lifting to look at you.

"Din…” You lay your hand on his bracer. "Come sit with me."

He sets the awl down without a question follows you to the bench by the carbonite chamber and sits down beside you, his armour catching the warm light of the hold, his gloved hands settling open and easy on his thighs.

He doesn’t ask – just waits.

You take one of his hands and draw it toward you, laying it, palm flat, low across your stomach.

He holds it there a long moment, the gloved hand splayed warm across the place under your navel that he’s been splaying warm across most nights of his life for the last fourteen months. You watch the visor angle down to look at his own hand on you and watch the involuntary stillness that comes into him – the kind of stillness that comes into him only rarely, when a thing is settling on him that he’s not been expecting.

The vocoder catches a small uneven breath.

"Cyar'ika."

"Yes."

"I…"

"Yes, Din."

"You…?"

"Yes."

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment and the gloved hand on your stomach doesn’t move. The visor stays angled down, and you watch the careful slow recognition arrive in him the way it arrived in you an hour ago in the cycler. You see the same soft turning of the world on its axis, the same clarity that’s almost laughter and almost not.

"Cyar'ika…"

"I think so. I'm…I'm almost sure. I haven't…" you smile at him, a little crooked, “I haven't peed on anything, Din because I don't have anything to pee on. But I'm…I've been counting. I counted back and there isn't another answer. The dates…" you stop, because you see, behind the visor, that he’s already done the count.

You can see it in the careful held stillness of him, the small mechanical breath through the modulator, the way the gloved hand on your stomach presses, very faintly, in the involuntary pressure of a man who’s just located a thing in time and is, in his own quiet way, marking the spot.

"The night in the hold," he says very low. “When I…”

"Yes."

He doesn’t say anything else – just sits very still, his hand still splayed across your stomach, the visor staying angled down at it.

"Din," you say softly. "Are you alright?"

"Cyar'ika, I’m…" he searches, “I’m not alright, cyar'ika. I’m…" the vocoder cuts, “I’m something, but I don’t know the word. There is…there is no word."

"Tell me anyway."

The visor lifts and he looks at you. You feel the long, careful weight of him through the visor, the small, focused attention you’ve been the focus of, on and off, for fourteen months, the kind that makes you understand, every time, why people have been afraid of him before they’ve known him.

"I have a foundling," he says. "Cyar'ika, I have a foundling that’s also…a foundling that’s also of my body. I didn’t know I was going to get to have that. I didn’t…" the modulator cuts on a small uneven breath, “I didn’t know that was a thing the Creed was going to let me have. I thought the foundlings I might get to have were going to be the ones I picked up off other people's wrecked planets, like I myself was picked up, and I thought that was going to be enough, and I was grateful, cyar'ika. I was grateful for the thought of even those, and now you’re sitting on this bench telling me…"

He stops, his hand pressing gently against your stomach.

"You’re sitting on this bench telling me that I get to have one of my own."

You lay your hand over his.

"You get to have one of your own, Din, with me. The two of us. On this ship. We get to have this. I know that you said it might not be a place for a child and that living here, on the Crest with one is something that you wouldn’t want to ask of the woman who might bear you one but…"

He bends forward off the bench and comes down off it, slowly, the way he came down off the copilot's chair five weeks ago, his knees finding the deck plating in front of you, his cape settling around him, his hands coming up to either side of your hips. He presses the brow of the visor to your stomach in the small, substituted kiss that he’s been giving you for fourteen months in place of the other and holds it there a long shaking moment, breathing through the modulator.

"Cyar'ika."

"I'm here."

“I don’t deserve this."

"Din…"

"I don’t, cyar'ika, I don’t. I…"

"Din, listen to me."

You lay both your hands against the sides of the helmet and hold him there at your stomach, the brow of the visor pressing warm now from his breath against the cool inside of it, his gloved hands cradling your hips.

"That’s not how deserving works. That’s not how any of this works. You didn’t earn the night in the hold by being a man who deserves it. You didn’t earn me by being a man who deserves me. You got these things. You got this baby because it came to you, and the only thing in front of you now is to be the man who has it."

You stroke the sides of the helmet with your thumbs.

"And you’re going to be a very good father," you say. "I’m not saying that to make you feel better. I’m saying it because I’ve known for a long time that whatever else you’re going to be in this life, you’re going to be that. So, you can put down the worrying about whether you’re going to be one because you are.”

He doesn’t answer. He presses the brow of the visor harder to your stomach and his hands at your hips tighten.

You let him kneel because you know the kneeling is a thing he’s doing for himself and not a thing it’s your place to lift him out of. The light of the hold falls across his cape, across your bare feet on the deck plating and across the careful held weight of his hands at your hips. Somewhere very far above you both, in the cockpit, the proximity scanner keeps its steady sweep, and the pale starfield turns slowly past. The unrecorded hour of this happens the way every other unrecorded hour on this ship has ever happened, without ceremony and without witness, except by the two of you and the small warm thing under his hand.

Eventually, he lifts his head, the visor finding your face.

"We need a medic."

The practical, immediate competence of it, the way he’s moved, in one breath, from the shaking awe of recognition into the planning of the next step, makes you laugh. You don’t mean to, but it comes out as a soft surprised sound, and his shoulders ease in a way that tells you that he’s been waiting to hear it, to know that you’re as all right with this as you’ve said.

"Yes, we need a medic, eventually. But not tonight."

"Cyar'ika..."

"Not tonight, Din. Tonight I want to sit with it. I want to sit with you, and the two of us, and the…" you lay your hand over his on your stomach, “the three of us. I want one quiet night with just the three of us before there are medics and supplies and a thousand practical things to plan. Can we have that? Please?"

"Yes,” he says quietly. “Yes, cyar'ika, we can have that."

"Good."

You draw him up slowly, your hands at his elbows. He stands and you lay your forehead against the brow of the visor and close your eyes a moment, because it helps you think. You breathe against him, he breathes back through the modulator, and for a long quiet stretch the two of you stand in the warm light of the hold without saying anything.

"Din?"

"Mm."

"I'm hungry."

He laughs, a small, modulated laugh, the one you know, but underneath you hear the warm, hoarse unfiltered laugh of the man from that night with no helmet on, low and surprised and pleased.

"What do you want?"

"Not caf."

"I know."

"Not ration bars."

"Noted."

"Dried fruit, and the flatbread. And…do we still have any of that nut paste from the market three planets ago? The one with the seeds in it?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"All of that. Together. On a plate." You make a face. "I know it sounds strange..."

"It sounds…" he searched, the way he searches when he’s being careful with words, “it sounds like a thing a pregnant woman would ask for."

You laugh again and lay your forehead harder against the visor, feeling his hand come up to the back of your head and cradle there. The warm, careful held weight of him against you is a thing you’re going to remember the shape of for the rest of your life – just like his true face is.

"Get me my strange plate, Mandalorian."

"Yes cyar'ika,” he replies with a low chuckle then goes and gets you your strange plate.

You eat it on the bench with him sitting beside you, his hand splayed once warmer and more possessive across your stomach in the new way you realise it’s going to splay there from now on. You eat the dried fruit, the flatbread and the nut paste and it tastes the way nothing in three weeks has tasted, which is good, and right, and the thing your body’s been wanting and hasn’t been able to name until you put it in your mouth.

You eat two pieces of flatbread loaded with nut paste, a small pile of dried fruit and drink a glass of cool water, then you sit back against him with the warm satisfaction of a meal that has finally agreed with you, and you close your eyes a moment, as the small slow circle of his thumb begins its absent rhythm low on your stomach.

"He's going to be hungry like this."

“He?”

“Yes.”

"I know."

"All the time, so you’re going to have to learn to make more than four things."

"I’ll learn."

"Good." You hesitate. "I know I said he, but I don't…I don't know that. I shouldn't say it because it could be either. I just…" you laugh at yourself, “I keep thinking he. I don't know why."

The hand on your stomach presses, very faintly.

"I know, it's silly."

"It's not silly."

"I just…I've been thinking it since I worked it out and I keep thinking him. I keep thinking the small warm thing is a him. I don't know why.”

"Cyar'ika, if he is a he, then he is a he and I will teach him as my father taught me. And if she is a she…”

He breaks off and you raise your head to look at the visor.

“If she is a she?”

“Then…I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do.”

You lay your hand over his on your stomach and lace your fingers through his as best you can through the leather. Closing your eyes, you let the new shape of your family settle into the shape it’s going to settle into.

A father in beskar.

A mother with nothing but her wits.

A small warm thing under your palm that’s going to be, in the long, unwritten months ahead, a person.

"We’re going to need a bigger ship."

The vocoder catches and he laughs, the long, low, full laugh, the one that comes up from somewhere deeper than the modulator can quite strip, the one that you’ve been given once unfiltered and will always now hear underneath. He laughs and the hand on your stomach shakes with it.

"Cyar'ika..."

"I'm just saying."

"I know."

"The bunk is already small."

"I know."

“Where will we put a cradle?”

"We'll figure it out." He presses the brow of the visor to your temple. "Tomorrow.”

"Alright.”

"Tonight we have the three of us."

You lean into the warm familiar bulk of the cuirass against your shoulder and the cool curve of the visor against your temple and the hand splayed warm and possessive across your stomach.

The night in the hold had given him one thing and it’s now given him two.

It’s given him a small, unrepeatable moment with no armour between you. And it’s given him a small warm thing under your palm that’s going to grow, that’s going to be born, that’s going to have his small, crooked nose, perhaps, or your eyes, or both, or neither. A small warm thing that’s going to be raised on this ship, or on a bigger one, by a father in beskar and a mother with her wits, and that’s going to be loved in a way that not very many small, warm things in this galaxy ever get to be loved.

In the morning, you’ll talk about medics, about supplies, about timelines, and about the thousand practical things that the small, warm thing under your palm is going to require of you both.

In the morning.

Tonight, you have the three of you, which is more than enough.

It is, you think, very nearly everything.

And you have no idea what is about to come.

Chapter Text

You wake alone.

That’s the first wrongness. You went to sleep against him and slept the long, heavy sleep that has become, in the last three weeks, your default condition. You expect to wake the same way you went down – warm, his thumb still moving against your stomach, perhaps, or stopped in sleep, but the hand still there.

The bunk is cool on his side. You lay your palm against the place where his hip has been and realise that he’s been up for hours.

You sit up, pulling the blanket around your shoulders, your bare feet on the cool deck plating and listen, the way you’ve learned to listen on this ship, for where he is. The cockpit hum is steady – no jump prep, no manoeuvring. The faint scrape from the hold is him at the workbench, or near it and you hear the small clink of a stylus against a datapad.

Standing up, you pull on your sleep shirt and trousers and pad through into the warm light of the hold, stopping at the edge of the bunk alcove to look at him.

He’s moved the small fold-out table from where it lives against the bulkhead to the middle of the hold and pulled the bench around to face it. On the table, he has three datapads, a stylus, and a small open notebook.

The visor turns when he senses you.

"Morning, cyar'ika."

"Morning.”

"Sit. I made you something."

As you come around the table, you see he’s made you a plate of flatbread with the nut paste from the market three planets ago accompanied by a neat row of dried fruit and, beside it, a tin cup of water with a slice of something pale-yellow floating in it that you don’t recognise.

"What is the…?"

"Ginger root. From Pakuuni. I’ve read that it helps with the nausea. At least, some women say it helps. It's worth trying."

You sit down slowly on the bench, pick up the flatbread and eat a piece. It tastes good and the water with the ginger root is, against every odd, exactly the thing your stomach has been wanting not known to ask for. You close your eyes a moment against the warm spread of it down your throat, then open them again to see him watching you through the visor with the careful attention of a man who’s just successfully treated a wound and is waiting to see if his work will hold.

"It's good," you say.

The visor eases. "Good."

He picks up the stylus again and angles the leftmost datapad toward you.

"I’ve made some lists."

You slowly set down the flatbread.

"You’ve made some lists?"

"Yes."

"Din. It’s…" you look at the chrono on the bulkhead, “it’s the fourth hour of the day cycle."

"I know."

"I went to sleep at the eleventh hour of the night cycle."

"I know, cyar'ika. I let you sleep because you needed it."

"But you didn’t sleep.”

"I slept some."

"Din…."

"Cyar'ika, I’m alright. Look at the list."

When you look, you see that the list is thorough, the kind of thorough that you’ve seen him bring to a bounty briefing and to a weapons inventory and to the careful planning of a job, and you understand, looking at it, that he’s transferred the whole of that competence in one seamless overnight motion to the baby inside you.

The leftmost datapad is a list of medics.
Nevarro sits top of the list, with the comm channel and a note in his small precise hand - commed 02:14, no answer, message left, awaiting return.

Below that, a midwife that Karga had apparently mentioned once, two years ago, that he’s filed away in the precise inventory of his head against the possibility of a day exactly like this one.

Below that, a Twi'lek obstetrician on Ryloth whose name he’s somehow obtained during the night.

Below that, a backup.

Below that, a backup to the backup.

The middle datapad is a list of foods.

The column entitled tolerated contains the dried fruit, the flatbread, the nut paste, water and the ginger root.

Refused or causes nausea is a longer column, with the caf at the top, and the ration bars, and the meat from Akkadua, and a list of small specific things he’s been quietly cataloguing for three weeks while you’ve been thinking he wasn’t paying attention.

To procure at next port is a third column, longer than the other two, containing more dried fruit, more flatbread flour, more ginger root, more nut paste, bone broth (gentle stomach), unprocessed grains, fresh greens (iron), citrus (folate), and three or four other things in the small precise notation of a man who’s spent some of the small hours of the night cycle reading the small online medical reference library on the subject of pregnancy.

The rightmost datapad is a list of threats.
You stop at that one because it’s a list of things that can go wrong on a ship like the Crest during a pregnancy, and the list is long, organised by trimester, and each item has a small precise notation beside it in his hand.

Carbonite chamber – coolant leak, low risk, retest seals weekly.

Hold ventilation – filter due for change, prioritise.

Bunk – too small for late-term sleeping comfort, consider modifications.

No medbay – nearest equipped facility Nevarro 4-day jump, must remain within 6-day jump radius by month seven.

Rifle cleaning solvents – fumes, relocate cleaning to airlock or post-jump.

Gravity plating in hold – uneven near ladder, mark and pad.

Combat –

You stop reading and sit back. He’s watching you, the visor angled at your face.

"Din…how long have you been awake."

He pauses before answering. "Since the second hour."

"You went to sleep at the eleventh."

"Yes."

"So, you’ve slept for three hours."

"Yes."

"And in five hours you’ve…" you gesture at the three datapads, “you’ve done this."

"Yes."

You sit with the knowledge for a long careful moment, because two things are happening in your chest at once, and you need to understand which one of them is going to come out of your mouth first.

The first thing is a great, warm wave of love so unexpected and undefended that it brings the prick of tears to the corners of your eyes.

He’s stayed up the small hours of the night cycle, read the medical library, made you a plate with a slice of ginger root in the water and has built – in five hours, on three hours of sleep, in the warm dim of the hold with the woman he loves asleep in the bunk – a careful, comprehensive scaffolding of practical preparation around the baby inside you that’s not even, yet, the size of anything.

He’s done it because he loves you and the baby already, sight unseen, certainty unconfirmed, with the same practical, absolute love he brings to every other thing he’s ever loved. He’s done it because he’s a man who loves by doing, and he’s been given a thing to do.

The second thing is that you want to throw the datapad at his head.

You want to throw the datapad at his head because you gave him this thing six hours ago with your hand laid flat across his on your stomach and you said tonight, we have the three of us and you’d meant it. You’d meant one night. You’d meant let us be inside the having of it for the space of one night before we’re organising lists. 

And he’d said yes, then waited until you were asleep, gotten up and spent the small hours of his night organising it into lists.

You set the datapad down and pick up the cup of water, drinking it slowly, letting the warm spread of it down your throat steady you. You look at him across the table to where the visor is very still.

"Din."

“Yes?”

"I…” you take a breath. “I love you so much, right now, for what is on those datapads and I want you to hear that first because what I’m about to say is going to sound, on the surface, as if I don’t love you and I do, okay?”

He pauses. “Okay.”

“But I asked you, last night, for one night with just the three of us, and you said yes. And then I went to sleep, and you didn’t."

The visor holds very still.

"Cyar'ika…"

"I’m not angry, I’m just…I’m two things at once. I love you for the lists and I’m also a little hurt about the lists. The lists are the morning conversation, Din. The lists are the thing you and I were supposed to sit down over breakfast and start making together. And instead, I wake up and you’ve made them already without me."

He doesn’t answer.

"I’m not saying the lists aren’t good because they are. The lists are good. The lists are…" you laugh a little, in spite of yourself, “the lists are the kind of lists I couldn’t made if I’d stayed up for a week. The medic on Nevarro, the Twi'lek on Ryloth, the ginger root… I wouldn’t have thought of the ginger root, Din. I would’ve spent six months throwing up over the basin in the cycler thinking it’s a thing I have to endure. You’ve spared me that, so I’m grateful for the lists."

"I…"

"But the making of the lists was supposed to be ours. That was what I was looking forward to about the morning. Sitting on this bench with you and saying, alright, where do we start? And then starting together. The two of us, with our heads bent over the same datapad, working it out. And instead, you’ve done it and I’m a little…lonely, Din. A little lonely about it."

The vocoder catches and the visor angles down at the table. The gloved hand on his thigh flexes once, very slightly, and stills.

"I couldn’t sleep," he says finally.

"I figured."

"I tried, cyar'ika. I lay there with you, and I tried for an hour. And then it was as if…as if every small thing that can go wrong with the Crest between now and the day this foundling is born walked into my head and sat down. All of it. The carbonite chamber, the ventilation, the gravity plating by the ladder, the bunk…”

He pauses.

The bunk is going to be too small. You’re going to be too big to sleep on your back in that bunk by the seventh month, and we’ll need to widen it, and widening it means cutting into the bulkhead, and cutting into the bulkhead is a job that needs to be done in a hangar, not in flight, and we don’t have a hangar booked anywhere in the next four months, and I…"

He stops again, the vocoder catching a small, uneven breath.

"I got up and I’m sorry. I got up because lying still with all of it sitting on my chest wasn’t a thing I could do. I came out here, I sat down and I started writing. I told myself I would write down one list, the medics list, just so I could put it out of my head and go back to bed. And then the medics list was done, and I started the food list. And then the food list was done. And then…"

"Then the threats list."

"Yes."

"And then it was the second hour and then the third."

"Yes."

You reach across and place your hand on his bracer.

"Din, I understand."

The visor lifts and finds your face.

"I do. The thing that you did last night is a thing I would’ve done too, if I were you. If I were the kind of man you are. It’s the way you love, Din. It’s the way you’ve always loved. You love by building. You love me, and half the things you’ve ever done for me have been by building. The chair lift in the cycler. The padding on the copilot's seat for the long jumps, the small shelf in the bunk for my datapad… you love by hands. I know that and I’ve known that for over a year. And the moment I told you about the baby, it became the next thing you were going to build for, and you couldn’t sleep until you’d started doing that.”

You flex your hand against his bracer.

"But I love by sitting, and the two are going to have to learn to live together, on this ship, for the next eight months. Because if you build everything by yourself in the small hours of every night while I’m sleeping, I’m going to wake up in the seventh month inside something that I had no hand in building. And whilst I’ll be grateful, I’ll also feel lonely, and I don’t want that. I want eight months of us. I want to sit at this table with you and write the lists with you, slowly, over weeks. And I want some of the items on the list to be mine and some of them to be yours and I want to argue with you about the ones that overlap. I want the building of it to be ours, not just the finished thing."

He doesn’t answer.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand.”

"Are you angry?"

"No, cyar'ika,” he says, the visor turning to you. “I’m never angry with you.”

"Are you sad?"

"Perhaps a little."

“Tell me why.”

"I don’t know how to do the sitting. I…I don’t know how, cyar'ika. I’ve not had practice. The Creed teaches the building, not the sitting. When the people I loved were in danger, I built. When the people I loved were hurt, I built. I don’t know how to sit with a thing. I don’t know how to lie in the dark beside you with my hand on your stomach, knowing that my foundling is growing inside you, and not get up and start the lists. But I’ll learn. I’ll learn, if you teach me."

You sit with his words for a long careful moment, because the thing he’s just set down is a thing that matters, and you’re not going to answer it cheaply. Then you draw him toward you and he bends, allowing you to lay your forehead against the brow of the visor and close your eyes a moment, because it helps you think.

"I’ll teach you," you say softly. "I will, but I need you to understand that the sitting isn’t the absence of the building. The sitting is the building done together. Last night I wasn’t saying don’t build. I was saying build with me. The building is good. The doing-it-alone-in-the-dark is the problem.”

You stroke the side of the helmet.

"I know you’re scared."

You feel him tense slightly.

"You’re scared, Din. That’s what last night was and that’s what the three datapads and the lists are. You’re scared and you’ve spent your whole life turning fear into building because the building is the only place the fear has to go. I want you to know that I see it, that it’s alright to be scared.”

"But I’m supposed to be…"

“You’re about to be a father and that’s a scary prospect. I’m scared too and I’m asking you to do the being-scared with me. Not in the dark by yourself at the second hour, but with me. Wake me up, even if it’s the second hour. Shake my shoulder and say cyar'ika, I’m scared, and I’ll wake up, and I’ll sit at this table with you, and we’ll be scared together and we’ll make one list, slowly, between us, and then we’ll go back to bed. That’s the deal I’m offering."

The visor presses harder to your forehead.

"Yes.”

“You’ll wake me?”

He pauses. "Yes, I’ll wake you."

"Good."

You hold him for a long quiet moment, the brow of the visor against your forehead, the warm faint smell of the leather of his gloves, the sharp clean of the oil on his armour and the faint trace of the ginger root in the cup beside you on the table.

"Din, you should eat something.”

“I’m fine.”

"You’ve been up since the second hour. Have a piece of the flatbread. I won't be able to eat all of it anyway. Eat with me."

He hesitates then picks up a piece of flatbread, turns the visor away from you the careful practiced few degrees that’s the privacy he’s built around eating in your presence, lifts the bottom of the helmet just enough and eats the flatbread in three small efficient bites. He’s done it a thousand times. You’ve watched him do it a thousand times and have loved him for it a thousand times. You love him for it now.

He drinks water from the cup and sets it down then turns the visor back to you.

"Better?"

"Yes."

"Good."

You lay your hand over his bracer again.

"Alright, show me the lists."

He blinks – you don’t see it, but you know from the small held pause that he’s blinked.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Show me, Din. I want to see them properly this time. Walk me through them. We’re going to go through them together, all three, and I’m going to tell you what I think, and we’re going to add things you’ve missed, because there will absolutely be things you’ve missed because you don’t know everything about what this is going to be, Mandalorian. And you’re going to listen to me, and we’re going to do this together, the way we should’ve done it this morning, yes?"

The vocoder catches the small modulated almost-laugh.

"Yes, cyar'ika."

"Good. Start with the medics."

He starts with the medics, reading each name and the precise notation under each. The comm channel, the location, the jump radius, the cost. You listen and ask questions. You add a question of your own that he hasn’t thought to ask.

“Does the midwife on Nevarro take payment in credits or in trade? If we’re going to be docked there long enough for a birth we’re going to need to know what the cantina runs the room rates at.”

He nods, picks up the stylus and adds a small careful note beside the midwife's entry, and you feel, watching it, the small warm satisfaction of a thing being built together.

You go to the food list and cross off two items he’s put in the wrong column then add three he hasn’t thought of. You laugh at him for putting citrus in the column without specifying which kind, because he’d once eaten a yellow citrus from a market on Florrum that he’d assumed was sweet, but which had turned out to be the sourest thing either of you had ever put in your mouth. He’d spent the rest of the day insisting it was fine, you’d laughed at him then and you laugh at him now, and the vocoder catches the small modulated almost-laugh underneath.

You go to the threats list and sit with it for a long careful moment. You read it slowly, without stopping, all the way to the bottom. You read every small precise notation and understand that what you’re reading isn’t a list at all but a careful inventory of love, the kind a man writes when he’s trying to put words to the shape of what he’s afraid of losing.

You lay your hand over his on the table.

"Din, this one we’re going to take slowly, one a week. We pick one item, we figure out what we’re going to do about it, we put a note next to it, and we move on. Not all at once. Not all this morning. We have eight months."

"One a week?"

"Yes."

"Cyar'ika, that’s very slow."

"It is very slow, Din, but that’s the point. Slow is the gift I’m giving you. Slow is the way you learn to sit with a thing instead of building around it in the dark. We’re going to take this very slow and you’re going to hate it for the first month, and by the second month you’re going to find that you can sleep through the night. And by the third month you’re going to find that the baby in here…" you lay your hand low on your stomach, “hasn’t, in fact, come to any harm because we paced ourselves, yes?"

“Yes.”

"Good."

You squeeze his hand and sit back. You look at the three datapads on the table and at the man in beskar beside you with his hand laced through yours on the table, and you understand that this is the thing you had wanted last night when you asked for one night with just the three of us. You’ve not wanted, you understand now, the absence of the lists. You want this. You want the soft hour at the table with the lists half-made between you, the arguing about citrus, the bare hand laced through yours, the careful pace of two people deciding together what shape the next eight months are going to take.

You have it now.

You have it now because you’ve asked for it, he’s heard you, and because he’s a man who, when the woman he loves tells him in plain words what she needs, does the work of giving it to her – even when the work means setting down the careful comprehensive building he’s spent the night on and starting it over, slower, with her.

"Din, you did well."

The vocoder catches.

"You did. The lists are good and I love you for them. I love you for staying up and I love you for the ginger root because I didn’t think of it. You did well and we’ll do better, together, from here."

He bends and presses the brow of the visor to your temple.

"I love you, cyar'ika."

"I love you too, Din."

His hand on the table tightens, once, around your fingers.

It’s a small beginning, but one that the two of you have made together.

You pick up another piece of flatbread as your stomach suddenly grumbles. “Alright, what’s next?”

He picks up the stylus. “I was thinking about the cradle."

"Tell me." 

He tells you and the two of you begin – together, slowly, the way you’re going to be doing everything from now on – to build.

Chapter Text

The nausea finds you somewhere between systems.

You're curled into the co-pilot's seat with your boots tucked up under you, one hand pressed flat against your stomach as if you can hold the queasiness still by force of will. The stars outside have collapsed into that familiar smear of hyperspace blue-white, and the cockpit hums its low, mechanical lullaby

"Are you alright?"

Din's voice comes through the modulator low and quiet, the way it does when he's worried but doesn't want to make a thing of it. He's in the pilot's seat, gloved hands resting on the yoke, helmet angled slightly toward you.

"I'm fine," you say and make yourself smile. Because, if you don't smile, he'll fuss, and if he fusses, you'll cry, and crying is a new and unwelcome hobby. "Just…the jump. It'll pass."

"We're eight hours out from Nevarro."

"Eight hours is nothing."

He's quiet a moment. “There's ginger root in a tin in the galley if you need it.”

“Good idea.”

You unfold yourself from the chair and pad back to the galley, one hand still resting low on your belly, and you don't see the way his helmet tracks you until you're past the bulkhead.

You're chewing the bitter-sweet ginger and humming something tuneless when the ship lurches.

Not the soft sway of a course adjustment or the gentle bump of micro-debris on the shields. This is a wrench, sideways and hard, and you stagger into the bulkhead with the tin still in your fist, ginger root scattering across the deck plates.

"Din!"

"Strap in,” he says, his voice clipped. "Now."

You don't waste breath on questions. You haul yourself back to the cockpit on legs that feel half-borrowed, and see that the smear of hyperspace is gone, replaced by the hard pinprick stars of realspace and three ugly silhouettes hanging in the void off the starboard quarter.

They look like snub fighters, old Imperial chassis, refitted, the kind of cobbled-together raider rigs that have been slinking around the Outer Rim ever since the Empire fell apart and left its toys to be picked over by scavengers.

"They pulled us out of hyperspace," Din says tightly. "Someone wanted us specifically. Strap. In."

You strap in, the harness clicking across your chest and your lap and you suddenly feel the baby very acutely and press both hands flat to your belly under the straps.

Din's hands are already dancing across the console.

The first cannon shot from the lead fighter screams past the canopy close enough that the deflector wash makes the lights flicker. He pitches the ship into a dive that smashes you into your harness, and your stomach performs a slow somersault you'll be paying for later. He pulls up hard, rolls, and the second fighter overshoots and exposes its dorsal plating to the Crest’s belly guns. Din doesn't even look. His thumb moves once and the fighter blooms into a flower of orange flame and tumbling debris.

"One," he says.

"Din…"

"It's fine."

It is, demonstrably, not fine. The remaining two fighters split – one high, one low – and the cockpit lights up red as the proximity alarms start screaming. He answers them by hauling the ship sideways through a debris field of the kill he just made, letting the wreckage shred at the pursuer behind him. The high fighter takes a chunk of fuselage through its own canopy and spirals off, dark.

"Two."

"Din, the last one…"

"I see him."

The last raider is smarter. He hangs back, fires from range, and one of his bolts catches the underside of the ship in a glancing kiss that makes the whole frame shudder. The lights stutter and somewhere behind you, a relay pops and starts a small, brave fire that the suppressant system smothers in white foam within seconds.

Din curses, low in Mando’a, the kind of word he never translates for you.

He banks hard, brings the nose around and the last raider, too eager, flies right into the killbox. With one squeeze of the trigger, the cockpit lights up gold with the reflected fireball, and then there’s only the dark, and the stars, and your own ragged breathing in your ears.

"Are you alright?" he asks, immediately, before he even checks the boards. "Are you…is the…?"

"I'm okay," you say.

Your hands are still flat on your belly, and you’re not entirely sure your statement’s true, but you don't feel pain or anything wet. All you feel is the slow thunder of your own heart.

"I'm okay. We're okay."

He exhales, then he turns back to the console, and his shoulders go tight again.

"We're losing coolant," he says. "Number two line. I can patch it, but not in hyperspace, and not on Nevarro's vector – the burn we'd have to make is too long. We need to put down."

"How far?"

"Tatooine," he says. "Mos Eisley. We can be there in three hours with what we've got."

You let your head fall back against the rest and sigh heavily. You've been looking forward to seeing the midwife and having a first scan. You want to see proof that the baby you both believe you’re carrying is, in fact, a small and stubborn truth.

"It's only a few days' delay," Din says gently. "I'll send word to the midwife. She’ll wait.”

"I know."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

He doesn't answer that. You've learned that he carries everything that happens around you as if he's somehow caused it by not preventing it, and that no argument you make will ever convince him otherwise. So, you just reach across the gap between your seats and lay your hand over his gloved one. After a moment, he turns his hand palm-up, laces his fingers with yours, and you sit like that all the way to Tatooine.

****

Mos Eisley is the same as it ever is.

Heat shimmers above the duracrete, the twin suns hammering down from a sky like beaten brass. The smell of engine grease, bantha, a hundred kinds of spice and at least three kinds of unwashed sentient drift in the dry wind. You step down the ramp behind Din and Peli Motto comes barrelling out of the hangar office with a wrench in one hand and a half-eaten ration bar in the other, already complaining.

"Oh, no," she's saying. "No, no, no. Mando, I told you last time, I told you, the next time you bring me this ship in this condition I was going to start charging double, and I meant it, you understand me, I meant it…"

"Peli."

"Don't you Peli me in that voice, you big tin…" She stops dead, her eyes finding you, and her whole expression changes.

"Hi, Peli."

"Oh," she says again, in a completely different voice.

The wrench lowers and the ration bar gets stuffed into a pocket. She comes at you with both arms out and you find yourself wrapped in a hug that smells of grease and sun and something faintly herbal, and she pats your back like you're her own and clucks like a mother hen.

"Honey, look at you. Look at you, you're glowing. Are you…Mando, is she…?"

Din coughs, a soft mechanical sound.

"She's pregnant," Peli says, leaning back to hold you at arm's length to look at you. You laugh, helpless, because you haven’t said a word and neither has he. "Don't even try to lie to me, I have eyes, I have instincts. Honey, sit down, you shouldn’t be standing in this heat. When are you due? Who's seeing you? Do you have a midwife? Please tell me you have a midwife and you're not letting this man birth a baby in a gunship…"

"Peli," Din says, with the long-suffering patience of a man who’s been here before.

"There's a midwife on Nevarro,” you smile. “We were on our way there when we got interrupted.”

"Interrupted," she echoes flatly, turning to look at Din. "Interrupted how?"

"There were three raiders," Din says.

"Three…"

"It's fine, we handled them."

"We?"

"He," you correct, before Peli can give herself an aneurysm. "He handled them. I sat very still and tried not to be sick."

"Oh, sweetheart." She pats your cheek with a grease-stained hand. "Inside, now. I've got cold water and a cot in the back and a fan that almost works, and you’re going to lie down and let the grown-ups deal with the ship. Mando, get her stuff. Move."

Din does as he’s told and you let yourself be steered into the dim cool of Peli's office and through to the back room where there is, indeed, a cot and a battered durasteel jug of water beading with condensation, and a fan that wheezes more than it whirs.Peli fusses with the blanket, fluffs a flat pillow, makes you sit and drink, presses her palm to your forehead, frowns and then nods in satisfaction at whatever the verdict is.

"Seven weeks?" she asks.

"How did you…?"

"Honey, please. I worked the cantina circuit for eleven years before I took up wrenches. I have seen pregnant. Seven weeks, I’d say, maybe eight. You'll start showing in another four if you're lucky, six if you're stubborn. Are you eating?"

"When I can keep it down."

"Ginger?"

"Din keeps me stocked."

Her eyes go soft. "Of course he does. Alright, you sleep, you hear me? The droids and I will get this hunk of carbon-scored junk back together and you and your man will be in the air by sundown tomorrow, I promise."

"Thanks, Peli."

She pats your hand then lingers a moment, and something complicated moves behind her eyes – fondness and something else, something more worried. Then she's gone, the curtain falls shut behind her, and you’re alone with the wheeze of the fan and the dim red glow of the lamp and the very small, very stubborn rumour at your centre.

****

Out in the hangar, the suns have started their long slow tumble toward the horizon, and the heat has gone from hammer to slow burn. Din has stripped off his chest plate and cape and is up to one elbow in the coolant assembly, working with the patience of a man who’s rebuilt every piece of this ship at least twice.

Peli is on the other side of the engine, doing the work that requires two hands and a tongue free to swear with. The pit droids scurry in and out with parts and tools and the occasional incomprehensible squeal.

She lets the silence go on for a while, letting him think she’s going to let it be when, of course, she isn’t.

"So," she says, casually. "Nevarro, huh?"

"Nevarro," Din agrees.

"Karga's still got that nice clean little settlement going? Schools and everything?"

"Yes, growing by the day so I understand."

"And the midwife?"

"I’ve heard good things."

"Mm." Peli wipes her hands on a rag. "And what about after the midwife? You got plans?"

The wrench in Din's hand pauses for a beat then resumes.

"She stays on the ship with me."

Peli goes quiet as the pit droid nearest her hands her a hydrospanner and she takes it without looking. "With you," she repeats.

"That's what I said."

"On the ship. On this ship. The one we’re currently rebuilding because it took three raider hits this morning. That ship?"

"Peli..."

"With a baby?"

Din sets the wrench down and straightens up, the helmet turning toward her, slow and deliberate. And whilst she doesn’t flinch, she softens her voice just a little.

"Mando…honey, I'm not…I'm not trying to start anything, I'm not. I think what you two have is the sweetest damn thing I’ve seen on this rock in a decade and that is not a low bar, because I cry at weddings, I cry at funerals and I cried last week at a commercial, so don't…"

"Peli."

"…don't think I'm coming at you from a bad place, alright? I'm coming at you from a place of love and a place of having raised three nephews and a niece in a hangar very much like this one, and I'm telling you, Mando. I'm telling you. A baby…on a ship…with your job?"

He doesn't answer.

She presses, gently. "What's the bunk situation? You've got the one. Where does the kid sleep?"

"We can build."

"Build what, a crib? Where? Bolted to the deck plates next to the carbonite chamber? Next to the armoury?"

"It's not…"

"What happens when she's eight months along and you take a hit like you took today? She can't run, Mando. She can't tuck and roll. She can't even bend over. What happens when you've got a colicky newborn screaming its lungs out and a quarry breaks cover and you have to either fly or fight and that baby is crying on the bridge…"

"Peli..."

"…what happens when the kid's two and walking and gets into the maintenance crawl when you're in hyperspace? What happens when it’s four and asking why every door on the ship is locked and what's in the cargo hold and why daddy comes home with blood on his armour…"

"Stop."

She stops, wipes her hands and doesn’t apologise.

"I love that ship because you love it," she says quietly. “But Mando, it’s not a home. It's a weapon with bunks in it. And she…" Peli jerks her chin toward the back room where you’re sleeping, "…is carrying your kid. Your kid, Mando. Don’t you want it to have grass? Don’t you want it to have sky?”

He says nothing.

"I'm saying she needs a door, Mando. A real door, that opens on something that isn't vacuum. A patch of ground. A neighbour. Somebody who can come over with soup when she's so tired she can't see straight, because honey, I am here to tell you, the first six months you cannot see straight, you cannot, and a man in a helmet is not enough. I don't care how many tribes he's got, one man is not enough."

"I…"

"And you." She points the spanner at him. "You need a place to come back to. You think I don't know what your face looks like when you come in off a hunt? I can't even see your face, and I know what it looks like. You need a door to walk through where the killing stops. You need to not bring it home because home is somewhere else."

He stays silent as the pit droid offers her another tool and she waves it off.

"I'm done," she says. "That's all I'm gonna say. You do what you want because you always do. But you asked me to fix this ship, and you didn't ask me about the rest of it and I'm telling you about the rest of it anyway because somebody has to and I don't see anybody else lining up. So there. I said my piece."

She turns back to the engine, and he doesn’t move for a long moment.

When he finally does, it's only to pick up the wrench again. His hands are steady, but Peli, who’s known him a long time, sees the way the helmet tips, just slightly, toward the back room where you’re sleeping.

She doesn't say anything else.

She doesn't have to.

****

You wake in the dim red glow of the lamp with no idea how long you've slept. The fan is still wheezing and there's a fresh jug of water by the cot and a covered bowl beside it that turns out to be a clear broth, still warm, with thin slivers of vegetable floating in it.

You eat slowly, sitting up on the edge of the cot. Your stomach accepts it without complaint, which feels like a small miracle. You finish the broth, drink half the water and when you press your hands to your lower back and stretch the kinks out you feel – astonishingly – almost human again.

You pull your boots back on and smooth your hair. Then you push the curtain aside and pad through the dim office, past Peli's cluttered desk with its lopsided stack of credit chits and tools and out into the hangar.

The suns are nearly down, and the heat has finally broken into something that's only warm instead of murderous. The ship sits on its struts in the middle of the bay, panels open along her belly, guts spilled neatly onto tarps on the duracrete.

A pit droid is hauling a length of coolant line across the floor. Peli is up on a ladder doing something to the dorsal vent whilst Din is on his back under the starboard wing, one knee up, both arms vanished to the shoulder into a panel.

You stand in the doorway and just look at him a second.

He has his sleeves shoved up, the flight suit dark with sweat between the shoulders. The light catches on the curve of his helmet and makes it shine. One booted foot taps a slow, distracted rhythm against the deck plate, which is something he only does when he's thinking hard about something that isn't the work in front of him.

You don't notice that, exactly. You notice that his foot is moving, but you don't read it.

"Hey," you say, softly, so as not to startle the man with both arms inside a power coupling.

The helmet tips. He goes still – that whole-body stillness he does, where every part of him reorients to you – and then he slides out from under the wing and gets to his feet in one easy motion, wiping his hands on a rag tucked into his belt.

"Hey." He comes to you, stopping just short of touching, because his hands are filthy. He tips the helmet down at you in that way that always undoes you. "You slept."

"I slept hard. What time is it?"

"Local sundown. You were out maybe three hours, so you obviously needed it."

"Did I miss dinner?"

"Peli's making something. She wouldn't let me near the hotplate."

You laugh, reach up without thinking and brush a smear of grease off the corner of his vambrace with your thumb, his whole arm going still under the touch.

You don't notice that either,

"How bad is she?" you ask, nodding at the ship.

"Not bad. There’s damage to the coolant line, two power couplings and a relay in the cockpit. The hull plate on the port underside took a chunk, but Peli's pulling one from a scrap Naboo cruiser she's got in the back which should hold." He hesitates. "We'll be up by afternoon tomorrow and on Nevarro by nightfall."

"Good." You let out a breath you didn't quite know you were holding. "The midwife…"

"I sent word. She'll see you the morning after we land. She wasn't worried."

“That’s a relief.”

“Mm.”

That's all he says. Mm. And you, dopey with sleep, broth and the relief of a body that’s stopped trying to mutiny on you, don't hear what isn't in the sound. You only hear that he’s here, the ship will fly, and the midwife will be waiting on the other side of one more jump.

You move into him, press your forehead against his chest and close your eyes. After a beat his hands settle at the small of your back, careful of the grease and careful of you, his thumbs drawing two small slow arcs against your spine.

"Tired?" he asks.

"A little. I’m mostly just glad you're in one piece."

"I'm always in one piece."

"And I'm always going to worry about it. We're at an impasse."

A soft puff of sound comes through the modulator, and his hand slides up between your shoulder blades and rests there. The other settles, very lightly, at your hip, his thumb brushing the soft place just below your waistband, where his foundling sits curled and stubborn inside you.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment and neither do you.

The hangar is full of small sounds – the pit droid muttering at the coolant line, Peli humming something tuneless from the top of her ladder, the slow tick of cooling metal as the suns finally give up and slip below the rooftops of Mos Eisley. You can feel his breathing, slow and even, and the very small pause before each inhale.

"What are you thinking about?" you ask, eyes still closed.

"You."

"Liar. You always say me."

"Because it’s always true."

"Mm-hm."

He goes quiet again. The thumb at your hip moves, just once, almost like he means to speak and then chooses not to.

If you'd opened your eyes then, tipped your head back and looked at him, if you'd been less drowsy, less full of broth and less relieved, you might have caught it – the small careful angle of the helmet, looking past you toward the open hangar doors, toward the dark settling fast over the rooftops, toward some middle distance that isn't the middle distance of a man thinking about a coolant line.

But you don't open your eyes.

"Come on," you murmur. "Peli's going to yell at us if we don't eat."

"She will."

His hand lingers at your back another second, then he steps away, taking his warmth with him, and you blink up into the visor like you've just been woken from a second small sleep.

"Go on in. I'll wash up and follow."

"Don't take forever."

"I won't."

You don't see him stand there a moment longer in the empty bay, helmet tipped down toward the spot where you’ve been standing. You don't see Peli, from the top of her ladder, watching him watch you go. You don't see the way she sets her wrench down very quietly across the rung and waits, like a woman who’s said her piece and now has the decency to let it work.

You only see that she's climbing down to join you, wiping her hands and calling something cheerful about stew and about how she hopes you like nuna because that's what she's got. You laugh and say you'll eat a bantha hoof at this point, and she cackles and pulls you into the office by the elbow.

Behind you, in the bay, Din stands very still for a long moment under the copper sky.

Then he picks up the rag from his belt, and wipes his hands, slowly, finger by finger, the way a man does when he’s not really thinking about his hands at all.

****

Peli's stew is, against all odds, very good.

You tell her so, twice, and she preens like a sand-cat in a sunbeam and tries to pretend she doesn't care. She pours you a second bowl over your protest and pours Din a bowl too when he comes in. She sets it down in front of him without a word, and he carries it off into the back room to eat in private, and she watches him go with an expression you can't quite read.

"Is he alright?" she asks, casually, once the curtain has fallen shut behind him.

You glance up from your bowl. "Din? He's fine, why?"

"No reason. He's quiet tonight."

"He's always quiet."

"Mm. There's quiet and there's quiet." She tears off a piece of flatbread, dunks it and chews. "You'll know better than me."

"He's been working since we landed, he’s tired,” you shrug, smiling, scraping the last of the broth from your bowl. "He'll sleep on the way to Nevarro tomorrow. I'll fly the boring middle hours."

"He lets you fly?"

"He lets me fly the boring middle hours."

She tears off another piece of flatbread and points it at you like a small, accusatory weapon. "Can I ask you something nosy."

"You're going to ask me anyway."

"That's fair.” She watches you over the rim of her bowl with eyes that have, you realise a little too late, been sharpening this question for some time. "You two getting married, or what?"

You choke, very gently, on a spoonful of stew.

"What? It's a question. It's a perfectly normal question to ask a pregnant woman about the father of her baby. Nuns ask it. bureaucrats ask it, hell bartenders ask it. I’m being downright restrained. I’ve not yet asked you about names, or about the bunk situation…I’m leaving you acres of dignity here…"

"You’re leaving me no dignity at all."

"…and all I want to know is whether the man in the helmet has put a ring on it. Metaphorically or Mandalorian-ly. Whatever his people do."

You set your spoon down. You can feel the heat crawling up the side of your neck, and you reach for your water cup to hide behind it, Peli watching you do it with the patient, satisfied air of a woman who knows she’s landed a clean shot.

"It's…it's not a ring," you say, finally. "From what he’s told me, it’s not…there's no ceremony, exactly. No officiant or party. It's just…words. A vow that you make. You say the words to each other and that's the marriage."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"No witnesses?"

"You can have witnesses if you want but you don't need them."

"No cake?"

"No cake."

"Honey." Peli puts a hand over her heart. "That is the saddest thing I've heard all year, and I had a fuel coupling explode in my face in spring."

You laugh, in spite of yourself. "It's not sad. It's…it's actually kind of beautiful the way he tells it. You don't need anyone else to make it real. You just decide, the two of you, you say it, and it's done."

"Mm-hm." Peli's eyes haven’t moved off your face. "And has he?"

The laugh dies a little, in your throat.

"Has he…what?"

"Said the words, whatever they are." She tilts her head. "You said the words make the marriage. So, have they been said?"

You stir your stew, very slowly, and watch the slivers of vegetable turn in the broth whilst you try to think honestly about it – about whether anything Din has murmured to you in the dark of the bunk, in the soft sleepy hours before dawn, in his own tongue or in yours, has been the words.

He’s said many things to you, called you many things. He’s pressed beskar to your forehead and your temple and the back of your hand and whispered into your hair in a language you only half know.

But you don't know. You don't know if any of it was the words. You don't know what the words even are because you’ve never quite worked up the nerve to ask.

"I…” you start, and then stop, because it’s suddenly a much harder question than you were ready for. "I don't…I don't know, actually. Maybe? He says things in Mando'a sometimes and I don't always know what he means."

"Oh, sweetheart."

"It's not like that. It's not…Peli, he loves me. I know he loves me. He…he brings me ginger root. He remembers the things I tell him. He makes sure that all my needs are taken care of. He protects me. He is…he’s married to me in every way that matters. Whether or not we've said any specific…"

"Honey."

"…specific words…"

"Honey, breathe."

You breathe as she reaches across the table and pats your hand. Her palm is warm and rough and smells like engine grease and flatbread, and there's something in her face you can't quite name. It’s not pity, not exactly, but something gentler. Something that almost looks like I'm sorry I asked, except Peli’s never been sorry she asked a question in her life.

"I'm sure he has said them," she says. "Or he's going to. A man like that doesn't get a woman pregnant and not say the words. He's just…he's him. He probably said them once, very quietly, while you were brushing your teeth, and figured that counted."

You laugh. "That does sound like him."

"It does, doesn't it." She squeezes your hand and lets go. "Eat your stew and forget I asked. I'm a nosy old woman with no children of my own and too many opinions about other people's.”

"Noted."

"Eat."

You do as she asks and don't notice that she glances, just once, over your shoulder at the curtain behind which Din is sitting with his bowl and his helmet off and, very possibly, his stew gone cold in front of him.

You don't notice that the curtain is not quite hanging the way it was a moment ago – that it's shifted, slightly, as if someone on the other side has been standing very near it and has only now stepped back.

You don't notice any of it.

You only notice that the stew is good, and the flatbread is warm, and Peli has, mercifully, moved on to a story about her nephew and a loose nuna and a wedding tent. And you laugh and let the question slide quietly off the table and out of your mind.

Where it sits in Din’s.

You don't think about it again.

You don't think about it when Din comes back out, helmet on, bowl empty, and stands behind your chair with one gloved hand resting very lightly on the back of your neck while Peli tells the end of a story.

You don't think about it when his thumb strokes once, slowly, along the nape under your hair, and you tip your head back against his hand, smile up at the visor and agree to go to bed.

You don't think about it when he walks you up the ramp, his hand at the small of your back, and the bay lights dimming behind you.

“Sleep tight!” Peli calls in a voice that has gone unexpectedly soft. You don't think about the way Din lifts his hand off your back to wave at her without turning around or about how the way the wave is, somehow, an answer.

You only think, as you peel off your boots in the dim bunk, crawl under the blanket and feel the mattress dip behind you as he settles in at your back that you’re tired, warm, and very loved, and that tomorrow you’ll be on Nevarro, and the midwife will lay her cool hands on your belly and tell you that you’re definitely carrying Din’s foundling.

His arm comes around you, his bare hand spreading wide and gentle over your stomach, holding it there, the beskar resting against the back of your skull.

"Sleep," he murmurs.

"You too."

You feel his breath move against your hair through the modulator, slow and even. The same lullaby you’ve fallen asleep to a hundred nights now.

You don't feel the way his hand stays awake on your belly long after the rest of him pretends to. You don't feel the small, slow circle his thumb traces, once, just above your navel, and then again, and then again, like a man counting something out and weighing it.

You don't hear him, much later, in the dark, when he thinks you're deep under – when your breathing has gone slow and your body has gone heavy against his – speak, very quietly, into your hair.

And in the morning, when you wake to the smell of caf you can't drink and the wheeze of Peli's fan starting up in the bay below and Din already dressed and moving quietly around the bunk, you won’t ask him what he was thinking about last night, when his hand was on your belly and his forehead was against your hair, because you haven’t noticed.

You’ll only smile up at him sleepily, and he’ll press the beskar to your temple and let it linger there, and you’ll close your eyes, lean into it, and think that everything is exactly where it should be.

Tatooine outside.

Nevarro ahead.

The midwife waiting.

And Din will be thinking about you, as always. But you won’t know that he's thinking of something else, too.

Chapter Text

The ship lifts off Mos Eisley mid-morning the way Din promised she would.

Peli stands in the bay with one hand shading her eyes and the other waving – wide, theatrical, both arms over her head like she's flagging down a freighter – and you wave back from the co-pilot's seat through the canopy until the hangar shrinks to a square of shadow and then to nothing at all.

The sand falls away, the atmosphere thins and Tatooine becomes a freckled orange ball at the corner of the viewport before she's gone too, swallowed by the long, blue smear of hyperspace. There’s only the hum and the stars and the cockpit and Din in the seat beside you, gloved hands resting on the yoke, helmet angled forward at the instruments.

You let out a long breath.

"On Nevarro by nightfall," you say, mostly to hear it out loud, to make it true.

"On Nevarro by nightfall," he agrees.

"And then the midwife in the morning."

"Mm."

"And you’re going to sleep for at least four hours of this jump. Because you were under that wing until the second sun came up and don't think I didn't notice."

"I'll sleep,” he says, with a smile in his voice.

"Promise?"

"I promise cyar’ika."

You settle back in your seat and tuck your boots up under you the way you always do – knees drawn in, one hand resting low on your stomach without you really thinking about it, the way it's become a habit recently. You let your eyes half-close against the soft blue wash of hyperspace, and for a little while there is only the hum, and the slow steady rhythm of his breath through the modulator.

He's quiet a long time, longer than usual, even for him.

You don't think much of it at first. You’ve learned that silence from him isn’t absence or displeasure, but just him. The quiet doesn't worry you. The quiet is fine. The quiet is comfortable, mostly.

It's the throat-clearing that gets your attention.

He makes a small sound through the modulator, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s about to say something and has decided, at the last second, to give himself one more breath of preparation.

You open one eye. "Mm?"

"Nothing."

"That wasn't a nothing throat-clear. That was a something throat-clear."

He doesn't look at you. He looks very fixedly at the navicomp readout, which hasn’t changed in the last twenty minutes and isn’t going to change for the next eight hours, and you watch the side of his helmet with one half-closed eye and wait, because you’ve learned that this is the only thing that works.

He clears his throat again.

"So," he says, “on Nevarro."

"Yes…”

"Karga can…Karga's the magistrate. He can…there's paperwork, if you want." His gloved fingers move once on the yoke. "For…for the foundling. We can give it a name that can be marked on a registry. So, if anything…so it has…so it’s recognised, officially, as ours."

"That's a good idea,” you muse. "I hadn't thought of that, actually. I think we should do that.”

"Then we’ll do that."

You think that's it. You close your eye again and you’re already half-drowsing when he speaks again.

"And there’s…there’s other things that Karga can do.”

"What sort of things?" you mumble.

"He can…there's a… a partnership registry. For…for a couple. He can witness it, if you want."

His voice has gone very careful now, very even, the voice he uses when he's holding something steady in both hands and trying not to spill it.

"It's not Mandalorian. It's not…it wouldn't be the riduurok. But it's…legal. In the system. For…for benefits and…the foundling.”

You sit very still, the drowsiness suddenly gone.

"For benefits," you repeat, slowly.

"Among other things."

"Din, are you…?”

You sit up a little straighter in the seat and turn to look at him properly. He’s still studiously not looking at you, the helmet still angled at the navicomp, his hands still on the yoke.

"Are you asking me to marry you?"

"I..."

"Right now, in the cockpit, eight hours out from Nevarro?"

"It…"

"Through a Nevarro civil partnership registry?"

"It was…" He shifts in the seat. "It was an example of…of one of the things that can be done."

You stare at him and he still doesn’t look at you. Then, like a piece of machinery clicking into place, you understand what he’s overheard without you realising.

You feel the heat climb up the side of your neck for the second time in two days.

"Oh," you say, very quietly. "Oh, Din."

"What?"

"You heard Peli."

"I…"

"You heard Peli last night at dinner. You heard her ask me about…about marriage, and you heard what I said, and now you're…you're sitting here trying to…"

Your voice cracks, a little, in the middle, and you press your palm to your forehead because you can feel the prick at the corners of your eyes and you don’t want to cry about this.

"You're sitting here trying to…to fix it because you think I was upset. You're not…Din, you're not supposed to…

"I was…"

"I wasn't even upset! I was flustered, Peli is nosy, I didn't…I wasn't asking for…I don't want you to…" You drag in a breath. "I don't want you to do this because some woman in a hangar made you feel guilty about it. That's not…that's not what I want. That's the exact opposite of what I want."

He finally turns his helmet towards you and looks at you without speaking for a long moment. You can’t see his eyes, but you can feel them and right now they’re very steady, very serious and fixed unwaveringly on your face.

"Cyar'ika,” he says softly, “look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"Look at me." He reaches across the gap between the seats, and his gloved hand comes up under your jaw, light, just a touch, just enough to angle your face toward the visor when you've been trying to angle it away. "I didn't…I'm not doing this because of Peli."

"You heard her."

"I heard her, yes. I heard her ask, and I heard you answer." His thumb moves once along the line of your jaw. "And I heard you say you didn't know. And that…that I didn't like. That bothered me. Because you should know."

"Din…"

"You should know," he says again, quieter. "That's…that's on me. That you don't. I should have…I should have made sure you did."

"That isn't…"

"Let me finish."

You wait and he doesn't say anything for a second. He keeps looking at you, his hand at your jaw, and you hear, very faintly, the small soft sound of his breathing. You can feel the warmth of the leather of his glove against your skin, and you think – distantly, with a part of your brain that’s not currently busy trying not to cry – that he’s choosing his words very, very carefully.

"I've been thinking about it," he says finally. “About this and you and…”

His thumb brushes once along your jaw then drops, his hand settling instead at the small curve of your belly.

"About this. About…about doing it properly. Saying it properly. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Before Peli. Before…before we even knew about the foundling. So, it’s not because of her. She didn't…she didn't put it in my head. She…she just made me realise I had been carrying it around too long without…”

He stops and makes a small, frustrated sound through the modulator.

"Without saying anything to you," he finishes, finally.

You look at his hand on your stomach and realise that your throat has gone tight, but not because you want to cry. Rather it’s gone tight around something warm and quiet and almost unbearably good, and you have to swallow once, hard, before you can answer him.

"How long?”

"How long what?"

"How long have you been thinking about it?”

"Since Tarvix," he says.

"Tarvix was months ago."

"I know.”

"You were thinking about marrying me when we…when I got hurt?"

"Yes.”

You let out a soft, broken laugh and then move your hand to rest over his. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"I was…I was working out how. I wanted to do it the right way with the right words. I didn't want to…I didn't want to do it badly. I wanted…I wanted you to know it was real. Not…not because there’s a foundling, but because of you. So, I was…I was waiting until I knew how to do it right."

"And then Peli…"

"And then I heard her ask, and I heard you say you didn't know, and I…I went back behind the curtain, and I sat with my stew getting cold and I thought I'd been too careful. I thought maybe being careful was…was its own kind of unkind.”

He pauses and the visor tips down towards your hands.

"So, I'm…I’m telling you that I’ve been thinking about it. That it wasn’t…wasn’t Peli's idea. That it was mine and that it has been for a while.”

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

You don't know what else to say. There's a very large warm thing happening behind your ribs and you don't trust your voice to carry anything more complicated than a single word right now, so you squeeze his hand and he squeezes back.

"I'm not…I’m not asking right now. I want to do it right when I do it. This is…this is just so that you know."

“So that I know you’ve been thinking about it since Tarvix. Just – for clarity,” you add when the visor tips again.

"Stop."

You laugh – a real one, this time, wet and bright – and you lean across the gap between the seats and press your forehead to the cool curve of his pauldron, just there, where the beskar meets the dark of his shoulder. His arm comes up around you, his hand cups the back of your head and you stay like that for a long quiet stretch while the navicomp ticks down its slow countdown to Nevarro.

"For the record," you say, finally, into his pauldron, "the answer is yes."

"I said I wasn’t asking, cyar’ika."

"I know, but I want you to know for the record, that when you do ask, the answer will be yes. So, you can stop…stop workshopping it, or whatever you've been doing. It's yes."

He doesn't say anything. He just gathers you in a little closer. The helmet comes down and rests, very gently, against the crown of your head, beskar to hair, his glove spreads wide across the back of your skull, and you feel the slow shudder of a long breath being let out.

"Okay,” he says softly.

You stay like that until the navicomp pings, soft and patient, marking the first jump-anchor check, and then he straightens, you settle back into your own seat and you both sit for a moment in the kind of silence that’s full instead of empty.

Then you sniff, and wipe at your eye with the heel of your hand. "Right,” you say briskly. “Bunk. Now. Four hours, you promised."

"I…"

"Go. I'll wake you if anything explodes."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Din Djarin – bed."

He rises with a small huff, then pauses at the cockpit door and turns the helmet back toward you, looking at you for one long moment, before ducking down through the hatch and disappearing.

You move into the pilot's seat and press both palms flat to your stomach and breathe. You look at the blue smear of hyperspace and try very hard not to grin like an absolute fool.

You fail – but it’s fine, because there’s no one to see.

****

He sleeps for three hours and forty minutes.

You know exactly, because you watch the chrono with the specific possessiveness of a woman who’s wrangled four hours out of a stubborn man and is going to get her four hours. But at three hours and forty minutes you hear the soft hiss of the hatch sliding open, the soft careful tread of his boots on the ladder, and you don't even turn around.

"You’re twenty minutes short."

"I slept."

"You slept three hours and forty minutes which is a deficiency of twenty minutes."

He's behind your seat now and his hand comes to rest at the back of your neck, light, warm and familiar. "I slept, cyar’ika, I promise. I'm done sleeping. Move over."

"I’m driving."

"You’re sitting in my seat."

"I’m sitting in the pilot's seat, which I have earned, through diligent flying, for…" you check the chrono "…three hours and forty-two minutes, during which no fewer than zero things have exploded…”

"Move."

"…and which I am loath to surrender to a man who’s slept twenty minutes short of his stated commitment."

He sighs the long-suffering sigh of a man who’s lost this argument before, and he leans and presses the cool brow of the helmet to your temple from above. You close your eyes, lean into it and feel his thumb stroke once, light, along the side of your throat.

"Fine," he murmurs. "Fly."

"Thank you."

He doesn't go back to the bunk. He settles into the co-pilot's seat instead, stretches his legs out in front of him, folds his hands across his stomach and lets his head fall back against the rest. And for a while it almost looks like he's sleeping again.

But he isn’t.

You don't notice it right away. You're busy with the slow comfortable nothing of mid-jump piloting – adjusting nothing, watching nothing happen. You hum, softly and rest your free hand on your stomach. You half-make plans in your head about what you'll ask the midwife. Whether you should start writing things down, whether you should ask her about the long stretches in hyperspace, and what they might do, and…

You glance over at him. His helmet is angled toward the canopy, his hands loose on his stomach, his chest rising and falling, slow and even.

But his foot is tapping, almost imperceptibly, against the deck plate. It’s the same distracted tap he was doing yesterday in the hangar, under the ship's wing, when you came out of Peli's office at sunset.

You hadn't read it then, but you read it now.

"Hey," you say and the foot stops. "You're not sleeping."

"No."

"What are you thinking about?"

"You. Both of you.”

He doesn't elaborate.

You wait, watching him out of the corner of your eye, your hand still resting on the yoke. You watch his helmet stay angled at the canopy and the small almost-imperceptible drum of his thumb against the back of his other glove, the one that's resting on his stomach. You watch a man thinking very hard about something.

You think, at first, that you know what it is.

"Are you still working on it?" you ask, lightly, smiling at the canopy because it feels safer than smiling at him. "The…the asking? Is that what's going on under that helmet?"

He doesn't answer right away and when you glance over, the helmet has tipped, just slightly, toward you. The booted foot has gone still again, which means he’s heard you, and the hands have tightened, just a fraction, where they're folded across his stomach.

"Something like that," he says.

"Mm-hm."

"What?”

"Nothing. Just…something like that. Very evasive and mysterious. The man is plotting."

"I’m not plotting."

"Plotting a proposal, perhaps? Workshopping,” you correct yourself. “The phrase was workshopping."

He huffs and the hand nearest you lifts off his stomach, reaches across the gap, finds your knee through the fabric of your trousers, and squeezes once, gentle, and stays there. The thumb strokes a small slow arc along the inside of your knee.

You let him have it – the small evasion, the slow stroke of his thumb against your knee and the way the helmet stays half-angled at you and half-angled at the canopy. You let him have it because you’ve decided, in the warm dazed afterglow of the cockpit half an hour ago, that he’s allowed to be mysterious about the shape of his own proposal. He’s earned that, you think. He’s earned the right to take it slow and do it the way he wants.

And besides, you like the idea of him plotting. You like the idea of him sitting in that seat with his head full of words he’s turning over and over like worry stones, weighing them, trying them, setting them down and picking them up again. You like the idea of being the thing he’s thinking about that hard.

You don't notice – not yet – that the slow arc of his thumb has the same rhythm as the slow tap of his foot a moment ago. The same metronome under the surface. The same man counting something out.

You only notice that he’s warm beside you, that the navicomp has begun its slow descent through the last of the jump, and that somewhere ahead of you, on the other side of the smear of blue, the dark face of Nevarro is waiting with its lava-streaked seams, its small clean settlement and a midwife with cool hands.

You fly whilst he sits with his hand on your knee and doesn’t say anything else for a long time.

****

Nevarro at nightfall is exactly the way you remember it from your previous visits.

The atmosphere is warm and slightly sulfurous, and the wind off the lava plains carries that faint mineral tang you've almost convinced yourself you imagined the first time you ever came here. The landing pad lights burn steady blue against the dark, and Karga is there, standing at the edge of the pad with his hands clasped behind his back, beaming like a man at a wedding.

"There they are," he calls, as the ramp lowers. "There they are. Mando…Mando. Look at you. Look at you both. Get down here." His eyes go past Din to you, and the beam widens, softens. "And you, my dear. Come here. You don't have to come fast, just come."

You laugh and come down the ramp. You haven't even reached the bottom before Karga steps forward and folds you into the kind of hug that smells of cigar smoke and good wine.

"You look well," he says, holding you at arm's length to look at you. "You look…yes. Marvellous. How are you feeling?"

"Tired, hungry and slightly nauseated. Very glad to be on a planet."

"All correct answers." He releases you and turns the beam back on Din. "And you, Mando. You look like you haven't slept in a week."

"He hasn't," you say.

"I have," Din counters.

"He slept three hours and forty minutes in hyperspace and that is the only sleep he’s had since Mos Eisley."

"Cyar'ika."

"It's true."

"Cyar'ika…”

Karga laughs, a big warm rolling laugh, and claps Din on the pauldron hard enough that the beskar rings. "Come on, both of you. There's a house ready, and food. The midwife sends her regards and confirms she’ll see you at the eighth hour. Mando, you can stable your ship here on the pad, my people will see to her. Come, come, come."

You walk through the dark streets of Karga's settlement with one of his arms around your shoulders and Din half a pace behind, helmet turning slow and watchful at every shadow even though Karga's settlement is the safest place in the sector and Din knows it.

You can feel him back there, feel the visor on you, and the careful spacing of his stride – close enough to reach you, far enough to keep his line of sight clean.

You think, at first, it's just him being him, just the helmet's habitual scan.

But you notice that he’s also looking at the little stone-clad houses Karga's settlers have built along the main lane. The lamps in the windows, the plots of dry garden out front, the hardy spiky native plants someone's wife has coaxed up out of the volcanic soil. He keeps looking, his helmet tracking one little house with a green door for a good three seconds longer than it tracks anything else.

You don't say anything, but you file it away.

The house Karga has put you in is small, warm and clean. It has two rooms and a kitchen and a wash. There’s a real bed with real sheets and a fire already laid in the hearth. On the table there’s a covered pot of stew, a loaf of bread under a cloth and a small jar of what turns out to be honey, the kind you haven’t tasted in over a year because honey doesn’t travel well on a gunship.

You make a small involuntary sound at the sight of it.

"I thought so," Karga says, pleased. "Now, I will leave you. Eat and sleep. I'll send a runner to fetch you at the seventh hour. Mando – anything you need, anything at all, you know where I am."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. It’s my pleasure.”

When he leaves, you stand a moment in the warm, small room and breathe in – fire smoke, stew, the faint sweetness of the honey jar with its lid loose – and you close your eyes and let your shoulders drop, all the way down, for what feels like the first time in days.

The Crest is wonderful. The Crest is home. But the Crest doesn’t have a fire.

"Din, come here."

You feel him before you hear him. His hands find your hips and he stands behind you, close enough that you can feel the heat of him through your clothes and tips the helmet down to rest against the back of your head. And you stay like that for a long, quiet stretch while the fire pops and settles in the hearth.

You lean back against him and let his arms come around you from behind – careful, low, both gloves spread wide across the front of your hips with your belly between them – and feel his slow, even breath against the crown of your head. You think, drowsy and warm and full of fire smoke, that whatever he’s workshopping inside that helmet can wait one more night.

You eat at the small table by the fire, conversing like any other couple would, and don't notice that twice during dinner his helmet turns, very slightly, toward the window.

You don't notice that the second time, he holds the angle a beat too long.

He's looking at the lane. At the small lamp-lit windows of the houses across from yours. At a woman, just barely visible through the slats of a shutter, rocking a small bundle in her arms in a chair by her own fire.

You don't see her, but he does.

He doesn't say anything.

He turns back to the table and finishes his stew behind the privacy of the folding screen Karga has thoughtfully provided in the corner, and he reappears a minute later, reaches across the table, lays his hand over yours and squeezes once. You smile at him and squeeze back, and don’t think to ask what he’s thinking about.

You think you already know.

You think it’s the proposal, the words.

But it’s not the words and hasn’t been the words for hours.

****

You lie on your side in the bed with your back to the door, your front to the wall and Din's chest against your spine, the helmet pressed to the back of your shoulder and his bare hand spread wide and warm across your belly. You’ve never, in your whole life, been this comfortable.

You’re almost asleep when you feel it – the slow tap of his fingertip against your belly. Just the index, once, then a pause, then again. The same metronome from the cockpit. The same one he was doing in Peli's hangar. The same one he was doing in the co-pilot's seat with his hand on your knee.

You go very still under his hand.

He doesn't notice or, if he does, he chooses not to.

You lie there for a minute, listening to him breathe feeling something cold start up very quiet under your sternum.

"Din?"

"Yes?"

"What are you thinking about."

The fingertip stops and he doesn't answer for a long moment. His thumb strokes once, slow, along the curve of your belly and his breath against the back of your shoulder goes slightly slower.

"I’m thinking about tomorrow," he says, finally. "About what the midwife will say.”

You wait, but he doesn’t add anything.

"That's it?" you ask softly.

"That's it."

"You sure?"

"Yes.”

"I'm just asking..."

"I'm sure."

You’re very awake now. Your eyes are open in the dark and you’re looking at the small dim line of lamplight at the bottom of the shutters, the way it makes a thin gold seam against the wall. You’re aware – distantly, calmly, the way you would be aware of a small leak somewhere in the hull – that he isn’t telling you the truth, not the whole truth. Maybe not any of it.

He’s probably thinking about the midwife, but there’s something else under it. There’s a shape you can’t name pressing up against the inside of his chest, against your back, where his sternum meets your spine.

You consider turning over, consider pressing your hand to the helmet in the dark and asking him properly, but you don’t.

You don't know, exactly, why you don't. Part of it is the warm slow weight of his hand on your belly. Part of it is the cool beskar against the nape of your neck. Part of it is that you’re pregnant, tired down to your bones, the bed is soft, the fire is dying gentle in the next room and tomorrow there will be a midwife, and you would, very much, like to sleep before then.

But part of it – and this is the part you don’t look at, the part you set very carefully off to one side without examining – is that you’re a little afraid of the answer.

You don't know why, you only know that you don't ask.

“Okay,” you say quietly.

He breathes out, slowly, his hand spreading a little wider on your belly. "Sleep, cyar'ika," he murmurs. "I'm right here."

"I know."

"I love you."

"I love you too," you whisper back. "Din, I love you too."

"I know, now sleep."

You close your eyes and try to sleep. And you almost do when you feel it again, very faint and small - the tap of his fingertip against your belly.

Once, pause, again – like a man counting something out.

You don't open your eyes, because you think he might tell you, if you wait long enough. He might say it into the dark.

So, you wait, but he doesn’t say it.

The tapping slows and stops. Then his breathing evens out into something that might, finally, be real sleep, or might just be the better practiced version of pretending.

You can't tell anymore but you drift, eventually, on the slow tide of his breath. The fire pops once in the next room and goes quiet. The thin gold seam at the bottom of the shutter dims as the lamp outside is turned down for the night. Somewhere across the lane, a baby cries and is hushed. Somewhere else, a door opens and closes.

You think, in the last clear moment before sleep takes you, that you’ll ask him tomorrow, after you’ve both slept properly and after you’ve seen the midwife. Because whatever it is – whatever’s troubling him – you know the three of you can face it together.

Chapter Text

You wake before he does.

That, in itself, is unusual. Din wakes before everything – before the suns, before the ship, before the small chirping things in whatever atmosphere you've parked in – and you’ve learned to roll over into the warm dent he leaves in the mattress and steal another half hour of sleep in the shape of him. But this morning the dent is not empty. This morning he’s still there at your back, breathing slow and even through the modulator into the nape of your neck, his arm arm heavy across your waist, his hand spread wide, warm and proprietary across your belly.

He’s finally sleeping.

You lie very still a moment and let yourself feel it – the rare luxury of him asleep behind you, the soft hiss of the modulator at the crown of your head, the cool weight of the beskar pressed gentle against the back of your shoulder where his helmet has come to rest. The fire has burned down to embers in the next room, the thin gold seam at the bottom of the shutter has gone pale and silvery and the small stone house is full of the soft grey light of just-before-dawn.

You feel, suddenly and powerfully, wonderful and shift, very slowly, under his arm, testing whether he's truly under. His breath through the modulator doesn't change, his hand on your belly loose and heavy. You turn and face him in the dim grey light and look at the visor a long moment.

Then you lean in and press your mouth soft, against the side of the helmet, just below the cheek-line. The beskar is warm where his skin has heated it from the inside. You let your lips linger there and let your hand come up and lay flat against the side of his throat at the strip of warm, bare skin.

His breath through the modulator hitches and you can imagine his eyes slowly opening.

"Cyar'ika," he murmurs, "what…what time…?"

"It’s early."

"Mm."

You kiss the strip of warm skin at his throat and let your hand slide down the front of him, slow, palm flat, over the warmth of his undershirt and the plane of his stomach, and feel, very distinctly, that his body has caught up with the situation considerably faster than the helmet has.

Then his hand catches yours.

"Wait," he says, low. "Wait, cyar'ika, wait."

You pause, your hand caught in his, your mouth at the warm strip of his throat and your bare leg slid between his under the sheet. You feel that nothing about his body wants you to wait. That every part of him is awake now and answering you in the only language his body knows how to speak to yours.

"What is it?" you ask, lifting your head to look at him.

"It's early."

"Yes."

"The midwife's at the eighth hour."

"That's still two hours away."

"I…" The modulator clicks, the small sound of a swallow caught and amplified. His fingers tighten on yours, then loosen. "Cyar'ika, I want to, you know I want to."

"Do I? I'm looking at a helmet, Din."

You hear it before you can stop it – the small sharp edge of it – and he hears it too. The helmet tips, just slightly, and you feel the flinch of it move through his shoulder. You regret the words instantly, drop your forehead against the curve of his pauldron and close your eyes.

"I'm sorry, I didn’t mean…"

"It's alright."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I know."

"I just…I just want…"

"I know what you want." His hand cups the base of your skull, his thumb stroking once, slow, behind your ear. "I want it too. I just…I want to know first. I want the midwife to look at you and tell me that everything's where it's supposed to be. And then…then I'm yours. Then I'm entirely yours."

"It’s two hours.”

You don't lift your face from his pauldron because you don’t want him to see the wetness at the corner of your eyes. You’ve given him your face for more than a year now. You’ve given him every twitch, every blush and every small involuntary thing that has crossed it, in exchange for nothing – for the smooth black blank of a visor that you’ve learned to read like a beloved book. And usually, it’s enough – more than enough.

Today it’s not enough. Today you’re pregnant and tired and hungry for him and you want, more than anything, to see his eyes when he says no.

You want to see through the wall.

But you don’t say this. Instead, you smile, crookedly where he can’t see. "Okay. You're probably right."

"I'm…"

"It's fine, Din."

You roll onto your back and out from under his arm, stare up at the rough plastered ceiling and blink, hard, at the prickle at the corners of your eyes. You tell yourself that he’s being careful with you and that careful is a kind of love, and that a kind of love is what you signed on for.

He props himself up on his elbow, the visor finding you, and his hand cups the side of your face and turns it towards him, his thumb brushing across your cheekbone and, of course, finding the dampness at your eyes.

"Hey."

"It's hormones."

"Cyar'ika…"

"It is, I know it is. And I’ve read enough to know that all kinds of things can seem bigger than they are because of them. So…ignore it."

"I'm not going to ignore it."

"Din…"

"Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum,” he says, softly in Mando’a, a phrase you’ve heard him murmur into your hair before but have never asked him to translate, because you’ve always been a little afraid of what it might mean and a little afraid of what it might not. "I love you. You know I love you."

"I know."

"It's not…it's not that I don't want you. It's not that, never that. I…you’re everything I could ever desire and more."

"I know, Din."

"It’s only two hours.”

He bends and presses his helmet to the brow to your forehead, carefully, the way he always does, and holds it there a long moment. You close your eyes and lean up into it because it’s all you know you’re going to get.

But you’re still a little hurt.

You roll out of bed, wash your face at the basin in the next room, then dress, before making him caf that still turns your stomach and ginger tea for yourself while he puts on his armour. Then you sit at the small table by the dying fire and eat the last of the bread with the honey, and smile at him across the table. He reaches across, lays his hand over yours and squeezes once and you squeeze back and the two hours pass and you don’t let yourself think about it again.

Not until you’re sitting on the midwife's examination cot with your tunic pulled up under your breasts and cool gel spreading across your belly. The midwife is smiling at you, and Din is standing at the foot of the cot with his helmet angled at the screen, and there’s a sound – a small, wet rapid sound like a frantic drum – coming out of the speaker on the wall

“There’s the heartbeat,” the midwife, a woman called Vesha says. “It’s strong, right where it should be and right on schedule.”

Instantly, you forget that you were ever hurt about anything.

Vesha is perhaps sixty with a long grey braid coiled at the back of her head and broad, calloused hands. She has the calm voice of a woman who’s helped a great many babies into the world and isn’t worried about yours.

She runs the wand across your belly, watches the screen and makes small thoughtful noises that are not worrying noises, she assures you, just thinking noises.

The wet little drum keeps beating and you look at the swirling shapes on the screen that don’t look like anything recognisable to you.

Din hasn’t moved at the foot of the cot. His helmet is angled at the screen and hasn’t turned away from it for what must be three full minutes. His hand finds your ankle, where it rests on the cot, and wraps around it, holding on with a steady careful pressure that doesn’t let up.

“Cyar’ika…” he says quietly, “it’s…look.”

“I see,” you murmur.

“It’s…a…a baby.” He turns to look at Vesha, as though he needs her to confirm it.

"Yes, it’s a baby,” Vesha says quietly. “Good.”

"Good?" you ask, because you need to hear it twice.

"Very good."

"Oh," you say and realise that you’re crying. You wipe your eyes with the back of your hand and Din's grip on your ankle tightens, briefly, then eases, the visor still on the screen.

Vesha smiles, wipes the gel off your belly with a soft cloth, clicks off the screen and folds her hands across her lap.

"Alright," she says. "Here’s the good news first. Everything is exactly where it should be at seven weeks. The heart is strong and the size and placement are correct. Whatever you've been eating, keep eating it. Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Right, now the less good news. It’s not bad, just…practical." She looks at you, glances at Din, then looks back at you again. "I understand you currently live aboard a gunship."

"Yes…"

"Mm." She nods. "I would like, very strongly, to recommend that you stop."

You blink.

"Stop?"

"Stop living aboard the gunship." She says kindly. "Not entirely and I’m not saying you have to move tomorrow or abandon your life. But I’m asking you to find a base. A real place, a house, a settlement, a room above a friend's tavern – anything with walls that don't move and a floor that doesn't pitch. And I’m asking you to do it for the rest of this pregnancy and, ideally, for the first year of the child's life."

"I…"

"I'm not saying you can’t fly. I’m telling you that you shouldn’t live in the air. The hyperspace transitions at your stage are tolerable. At twenty weeks, they’ll be less tolerable. At thirty weeks, frankly, they’ll be dangerous. The gravity flicker during a jump-out is hard on the placenta. The vibration of sublight burn is hard on the joints, which will be loosening soon, and you’ll feel that. The radiation shielding on a ship that size is adequate for an adult and inadequate for a foetus over long exposure. The…"

"But…"

"…air on a ship is also not good for you and worse for the baby. I’ve seen babies born on ships and they come out small and wheezing. Some of them never quite grow into their lungs, and I’m not willing to…"

She stops suddenly, because she’s seen your face.

"I'm sorry," she says, more gently. "I’m not trying to frighten you, but I’m giving you my professional recommendation. You asked me to be your midwife, and this is what being your midwife looks like.”

She reaches across and takes your hand.

"There’s no emergency. You’re not in danger today and you have time to find a place. There are places here on Nevarro or, indeed, options on other planets. I’m only saying to you to find somewhere before the second trimester. Will you do that for me?"

You don't answer because you’re looking at Din.

You’re looking at Din because Din will, surely, look at you. Din will, surely, tip his helmet to you, and squeeze your ankle and say, we'll think about it. Or we'll discuss it. Or, even, the small soft let me handle this he uses when a stranger has overstepped and he’s about to politely close the conversation down.

He doesn’t do any of those things. His helmet isn’t angled at you, it’s angled at Vesha. And you can see, very clearly, that he’s nodding.

A small, slow, agreeing nod.

"I…" you hear yourself say. "I mean…the ship is…the ship is fine. The ship is…he’s rebuilt the ship from the inside out a number of times. The air scrubbers are the new model, they're…"

"I'm sure they’re excellent scrubbers, my dear."

"…and the radiation shielding…"

"Is adequate for adults, as I said."

"It's our home."

Vesha's eyes are very kind. "I know and I’m not asking you not to love your home. I’m asking you to find another one, just for a little while, until your child is grown enough to travel.

You look at Din again with the small cold thing under your sternum from last night turning over, slow, into something hotter and harder. You look at him and wait for him to look at you, and he does, finally, the helmet turning toward you, the visor finding your face. And what you see in the line of his shoulder, in the way his hand has stayed on your ankle but has gone very still and in the small soft sound that comes out of the modulator that is not quite a sigh but is almost one – is relief.

You see a man who is relieved that someone else has said it.

And you can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes. You can’t see whatever private apology might be sitting in the corner of his mouth right now, because his mouth is behind beskar, the way his mouth is always behind beskar – behind the wall – and all you have to read is the smooth black blank of a visor that for the second time today has gone from beloved to unbearable.

"Din, tell her. Tell her about the new scrubbers. Tell her about the shielding upgrades on the lower deck. Tell her…"

"Cyar'ika."

"Tell her, Din!"

He doesn't. He stays quiet, the visor on you. And then, slow, carefully, in the low voice he uses when he’s choosing his words, he says, “she’s right.”

The cold thing under your sternum cracks open.

"What?"

"She's right, cyar’ika. About the ship, about everything. She's right. I… I've been thinking. I've been…"

"You've been thinking?"

You sit up on the cot, your tunic still rucked under your breasts, and Vesha has the good grace to look very politely away as you yank it down and swing your legs over the side. Your bare feet hit the cold stone floor, Din’s hand lingering a moment in the air where your ankle was.

"Cyar'ika, let's…let's go home and talk about this."

"Home," you say, and the word comes out with an edge you don’t intend.

Vesha quietly steps through the curtain into the front room and pulls it shut behind her, leaving the two of you alone, with the wet drum of your baby's heartbeat still echoing faintly somewhere in the back of your skull.

"You agree with her."

"I…"

"You agree with her. I just watched you agree with her. I just watched your shoulders agree with her. You were…you were relieved, Din, I saw you, I saw…"

"Cyar'ika, please. Sit down, please."

"Don't tell me to sit down."

"You're going to…"

"I’m going to what, Din? I'm going to what, upset myself?! Upset the baby?! Is that what we're doing now? Is that…is that the best line you can come up with?"

"That's not…"

"Is that how this is going to work now?! I get pregnant and suddenly I'm a thing to be…to be managed?!"

"No."

"Suddenly every decision about my life gets made in some quiet room I'm not in…"

"That's not what…"

"Isn't it?!"

Your voice cracks, and you hate it. You can hear yourself getting shrill and you can’t stop.

"Isn't it, Din? When were you going to tell me? When were you going to mention you've been thinking about it? Last night? Was that what you were doing with your hand on my belly half the night, tap tap tap? You think I didn't feel that? Of course I felt that!"

"Cyar'ika…"

"How long?"

"How long what?"

"How long have you been thinking I shouldn't be on the ship?!"

The visor doesn't move. His hand half-raises, like he means to reach for you and has now forgotten what reaching for you is supposed to look like. It hovers in the air between you a moment, then drops, slow, to his side.

"Since Tatooine," he says.

"Since Tatooine?”

It all starts to make sense.

“Peli said something to you, didn’t she? She said something to you in the hangar yesterday and you’ve been walking around inside that helmet ever since with…with a whole plan in your head and you didn't…"

"I didn't have a plan. I don’t have a plan."

"You had enough of a plan to nod at her!"

"I wasn't…"

"Don't tell me you weren't nodding, Din, I was looking at you!"

"I wasn't nodding at…"

"Then look at me and tell me you weren't!"

It comes out of you louder than you mean it and louder than the small stone room can hold. It bounces off the plastered walls and the curtain and, in the front room you hear Vesha, very deliberately, drop something metal into a tray to give you the cover of a sound.

He stands very still, the visor on you.

"I can't look at you," he says, quietly. "You know I can't look at you. Not…not the way you mean.”

It lands like a slap, which it isn't and which he doesn’t mean as one. It’s the truth, plain and old and Creed-bound and not his fault, and which, today, on this morning, you can’t bear to hear.

Your eyes fill, hot, and you let them.

"No," you say. "No, you can't. I know you can't. I’ve known you can't, Din, for over a year. I’ve made my whole life around what you can't. I’ve made my…my body around what you can't ever since this thing between us started. And after you made it clear to me what your boundaries are, I have never again asked you for what you can’t give. Not even this morning Din when I…”

You can't finish that one. You can't say it out loud – when I wanted you and you said no through a visor. You can't say it because you can’t even admit to yourself that this is what's underneath the rest and what's making the rest twice as big as it should be. You bite the inside of your cheek until it hurts and straighten your tunic with both shaking hands.

"I’m not asking for it now. But you do not get to use the helmet as…as a wall, Din. You do not get to hide behind it when I’m asking you a real question. Do you agree with her?"

There’s a very long pause before he replies.

"Yes.”

"And you were going to, what? Wait? Let her say it? Let her be the one to tell me, so you didn't have to?!"

His shoulders move, the smallest dip of beskar in the dim morning light.

"Something like that."

You laugh, wet and high and it surprises you on the way out. Vesha very politely drops another piece of metal in a tray, and you press the heel of your hand to your mouth and breathe through your nose, hard, twice.

"Cyar'ika, please. Let's go home…"

"Don't say home to me right now."

"Then let's go to Karga's house. Let's…let's sit down and talk, properly."

"You should have talked to me on the ship."

"I know."

"You should have talked to me last night."

"I know."

"You told me you loved me whilst you were lying right next to me thinking…thinking I shouldn't be where I was, and you didn't…"

"I wasn't lying about that."

"I know you weren't lying about that."

"Then…"

"I'm saying you were lying about the rest, Din! You were lying about the rest by not telling me, and you let me lie down with you and you let me…you let me put my hand in yours and tell you the answer is yes when you ask me, and you knew…you'd already been…"

"I hadn't decided…"

"You decided this morning, Din!"

"I…"

"You decided this morning in bed! You decided when you said no!"

It comes out of you before you can catch it, and the room goes very still around it. You watch for the unmistakable flinch travel through his shoulder because you said the bed thing.

You meant to leave that one buried under the rest, you meant to never bring it up at all, and now here it is out in the air between you in the midwife's back room.

His hand comes up again."Cyar'ika…that’s not…that wasn’t…"

"Don't, Din."

"It was just the midwife. I told you. I told you, it was just…I wanted her to look at you first, to make sure that the baby was okay, that's all it was, that's all it was…"

"Was it?"

"Yes."

You look at the visor, your face wet with tears you don’t bother to wipe away. You let him see – let the visor see, let the smooth black blank that has been the closest thing to his face for over a year see – what your face is doing.

"I don't know what you do behind that," you say, quietly. "I never know. I’ve spent more than a year not knowing yet telling myself I do know. That I can read your shoulders, your hands, that I can read the little tilts of you, and I’ve been right enough times that I…that I let myself believe it. I let myself believe I was good at it. I let myself believe it was enough."

"Please…”

"And then this morning you said no to me through it. And then just now you nodded at her through it. And I’m standing here looking at it and I don’t know if you’re sorry. I don’t know if you’re angry. I don’t know if you’re relieved. I don’t know if you’re even here, Din, I don’t."

"I'm here."

"You aren't."

"Cyar'ika. I'm here."

"You aren't, Din. You haven't been here since Tatooine. You’ve been in there, with…with whatever Peli put in your head, and you’ve been deciding things, and you didn't tell me."

He doesn't answer because there’s nothing to answer.

He stands at the foot of the cot with one gloved hand half-raised, the other at his side, the visor on your face and the modulator hissing soft with each careful breath, and he doesn’t defend himself because you’re right.

You wipe your face once, hard, with the back of your wrist and step around him, deliberately staying away from his touch, his hand closing around nothing.

"Cyar'ika…"

"I need a minute."

"Cyar'ika, please…"

"I need a minute, Din."

You push the curtain aside. Vesha is at her steriliser with her back to you, polishing a perfectly clean instrument with the kind of focused intensity of a woman who’s been pretending very hard for several minutes not to hear anything at all.

"There's a side door, my dear, through the herb room.,” she says quietly. “It leads you out onto the lane.”

"Thank you."

You go through the herb room, push the side door open and step out into the cool, volcanic morning, the dark glass face of Nevarro's rising sun hitting you full in the eyes. The wind off the lava plains is sulfurous and clean and the lane is mostly empty at this hour with only a single old man sweeping his stoop two doors down.

You walk without picking a direction, with your arms wrapped around yourself and your hand pressed flat to the small soft curve of your belly under your tunic.

The small wet drum isn’t echoing in your head anymore. It’s been replaced by the dull roaring of your own pulse in your ears, and you walk past the stoop-sweeping old man, past a shuttered baker's and past a woman drawing water at a public pump who merely glances at you as you pass.

Behind you, somewhere, a door opens but you don’t turn around. You can’t bear, right now, to see the visor come out into the morning after you. You don’t turn around because if you do, you’ll either go back to him or you’ll break.

You don’t know which and, right now, you’re not willing to find out.

Chapter Text

You hear him before you've gone twenty paces.

The footfalls are unmistakable. Beskar boots on cobble have a sound nothing else in the galaxy quite makes – that dense clink under each step, the weight of a man who’s carrying eight kilos of metal on his torso and not bothering to walk quietly about it.

He’s not running because Din has never run after you. But he’s walking, fast, with the long deliberate stride of a man who knows he’s faster than you are and is choosing, very pointedly, not to close the distance entirely.

"Cyar'ika."

You don't turn and walk faster.

"Cyar'ika…. stop."

You don't stop, because if you do, he’ll catch you and if he catches you he’ll put his hands on your shoulders the way he always does and tip the visor down to your face and say something low and careful through the modulator and you will, like an idiot, like a soft, tired pregnant idiot, fold against him and forgive him for things he hasn’t yet apologised for, and you will not, you’ve decided, do that this morning.

So, you walk faster down the uneven lane, past the woman at the pump, past a small cat that scrambles off a low wall in front of you, past a stack of empty crates and a Rodian unloading a hover-pallet who lifts his head as the both of you go by.

"Cyar'ika, please."

"Don't, Din."

The cobbles get worse. Karga's settlement has grown faster than its road crews can keep up with, and there’s a stretch along the lane where the old volcanic-rock paving meets the newer duracrete patch in a small uneven seam, and you don’t see it.

Your toe catches and your hand flies out to break the fall. The world tips and you hear the small involuntary sound of your own breath punching out of you. Somewhere behind you, the modulator say cyar'ika in a voice you’ve never quite heard out of it before, sharp and high and almost cracked.

A hand catches your elbow – a bare hand, broad and weathered and warm. It hooks under your arm and lifts, and an arm goes round your other side at the waist and steadies you upright.

"Easy, ma'am. Easy, I've got you. There you go. You alright?"

You blink up at the man beside you. He’s older, fifty perhaps, with a salt-grey beard, a sun-browned face and a leather work-apron stained with what might be tanner's oil. There's a handcart at his hip and you reason he must have been crossing the lane the other way and stepped neatly into your path the moment your toe caught.

“You need to watch your step,” he says kindly. “These roads…”

He doesn't finish his sentence because Din is there, very suddenly, very fast, and there’s a sound you’ve never heard before, a low metallic snarl coming through the modulator that is barely shaped like a word at all. The older man's eyes go wide and he steps back, both hands going up at once.

"Easy, friend, easy. She tripped and I caught her, that's all."

Din hasn’t drawn his blaster, but his hand is on the grip of it and the grip is half out of the holster and the visor is cantered on the older man's face as he steps back with his hands still high.

"Din," you say.

"Step away from her."

"I’m doing it, friend, doing it."

"Din."

"Step away…"

"He caught me, Din."

"…from her."

"He caught me!"

It comes out of you at full volume and the visor twitches, finally, off the older man's face and toward yours. You round on Din with your face hot, your breath short and the cold sweat of the near-fall still standing on the back of your neck.

"He caught me, Din. I tripped and I would have gone down on my hands and knees on the cobbles, but he caught me. He’s…a stranger on a street who saw a woman fall, and he put his hands out and caught me, and you’re…you’re out here with your blaster half-drawn…!"

"He was…"

"He was catching me! Holster it. Holster it, Din."

His hand doesn’t move, the visor still on you, and you can feel the small private way his shoulders are shaking. Just barely, just at the edge of it.

Adrenaline.

Fear.

The small sound he made when your toe caught is still hanging in the air between you, and you know, you know in some quiet place behind the anger, that the man with his hand on the blaster is a man who just watched the only thing in his life trip on cobbles and you know – you know – that whatever came out of him in the next half second wasn’t aimed at the bearded stranger so much as at the world that put the cobbles there.

You know it, but today, you can’t afford to know it.

"Holster. It. Din."

He does as you ask, slow and careful and you wait to hear the click of the strap going back across the grip.

You turn back to the older man, still standing with his hands raised.

"I'm so sorry," you say, your voice shaking slightly. "I'm so sorry. He…he isn't normally…I tripped, I…thank you. Thank you for catching me. I would have…thank you."

"Nothing to it, ma'am." He lowers his hands, slowly, watching the visor as he does it. "Glad I was there. You take care of yourself, and…" his eyes flick to Din, careful, almost amused now that the blaster is back in its holster, "you take care of her, friend. She's worth it."

"Thank you," you say again, because you don’t trust yourself with any other words.

The older man tips his head to you, picks up the handles of his cart and wheels it past the two of you down the lane. He doesn’t look back, and you watch his salt-grey head go until the cart turns the corner and is gone.

Then you round on Din again.

"What the hell was that?"

"You almost fell."

"I did almost fall. I almost fell, and a nice man caught me, and you came out of nowhere with your hand on your gun…"

"I didn't know him."

"You don't know the baker, Din! You don't know the woman at the pump! You don't know anyone in this entire settlement except Karga! You can’t draw on every person who…"

"I didn't draw."

"You half drew."

"He had hands on you."

"He was holding me up!"

"I didn't…" The modulator clicks. "I didn't see…I saw…I saw you go down and I saw a man on you and I…I didn't…"

"You didn't see because you were too busy reacting, Din, that's the whole… that is the whole problem this morning!"

You stop because your voice has gone high again and your hands are shaking and your knees, very suddenly, are not particularly interested in holding you up. You scrub your hands over your face and breathe, hard, twice, three times as he takes a step towards you.

You hold up your other hand and he stops.

"Don't. Don't come any closer. Don't put your hands on me. Don't say cyar'ika. I can’t…I can’t do this in the middle of the lane, Din. I can’t do this with you with your visor on at me in the middle of the lane fifteen minutes after you let a stranger tell me I have to give up our home."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I said don't."

He stops where he is, three paces off, gloved hands open at his sides now, helmet very slightly tipped.

"I need…" you start. "I need to not be near you for an hour, Din."

You see – you can’t read the visor, but you can read the shoulders – the small terrible flinch travel through him.

"Cyar'ika…"

"An hour. That's all. I'm not…I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going off-world, I'm just…I need an hour, Din. I need an hour to…to breathe without…”

You don't finish and he nods, slowly.

"An hour," he says. "Where will you…?"

"I don't know."

"Cyar'ika, please. Just…tell me where you'll be. So I know. So I…"

"Karga's, probably."

"Okay. I'll…" The modulator clicks and he shifts his weight. "I'll be at the ship. I'll…I'll be at the ship. I'll be there."

"Thank you."

He doesn't say anything else. He stands a long moment with the wind pulling at his cape and the visor on your face, and then he tips the helmet and he turns, and walks away. You don’t watch him go. You stand with your back to him and your eyes on the cobbles until the sound of the boots has gone around a corner and faded into the general low noise of the settlement waking up around you.

Then you breathe out and start walking again.

You don't get half a block before you hear the first shot.

It comes from somewhere two streets over – a single clean crack of a blaster bolt fired in open air, the kind of sound that, on any other planet in the galaxy, would send people running for cover. On Nevarro, it makes the woman at the pump look up, frown, and go back to filling her jug.

Bounty business – always somebody's. You hear it and you don’t break stride.

The second shot is closer.

The third is closer still and is followed by the dense answering chatter of an automatic carbine, and that, you’ve lived on a gunship long enough to know, is not bounty business. Bounty business is precise. Bounty business is one shot, one body, the careful pop of a hunter who’s been paid to bring a target down. Carbines on full auto are something else. Carbines on full auto are people in a panic.

You stop in the middle of the lane, turn your head and look down the cross-street to your left.

A man is running toward you, full out, his cloak streaming behind him, one hand pressed to his side where the dark of blood has already started to spread through the lighter brown of his shirt. Behind him, perhaps thirty meters back, three more figures spill out of an alley mouth – armoured and mismatched – and one of them brings up a carbine. The next crack of bolts comes down the lane and the running man jerks, mid-stride, and goes down on his face on the cobbles ten paces from you.

You don't think – you move. More than a year on the Crest has done that – has put something in you that doesn’t need permission from your higher brain to act, that gets your feet under you and your body sideways and your hand to the small of your back to where your own blaster is clipped against the waistband of your trousers.

You’re behind the corner of a shuttered stall before the next bolt comes down the lane, your back flat to the rough wood, your hand on the grip. Breathing in, you count and estimate you have perhaps four seconds before the attackers cover the distance and see you.

The shuttered stall at your back is the corner of a dry-goods shop. There’s a closed door two meters to your right which could be locked. If it is, you’ll be standing in a recessed doorway with nowhere to go when they come around the corner. If it’s not locked you may be inside it with the door bolted behind you in three seconds, and that is the play, the only play, the one Din would take if Din were here.

A door opens across the lane, ten meters down and a woman's face appears in the gap, dark-eyed and quick. She sees you, sees what’s coming up the lane, and doesn’t hesitate. She flings the door wide and jerks her head for you to run inside.

You go low and fast, the blaster in your hand low at your hip and you’re halfway across the lane when the first of the attackers rounds the corner and sees you.

"Hey!"

The bolt sings past your ear close enough that you feel the heat of it on your cheekbone.

You turn at the hip, the way Din’s taught you, your weight already moving, and fire twice. One of them drops. You don't see where you hit him because you don't have time. You’re already inside the door and the woman is slamming it behind you and dropping a heavy iron bar across it, and the next bolt that hits the door sounds like a hammer ringing on a bell.

You go down on one knee because your knees, very suddenly, have decided they’re done.

The woman puts her hand on your shoulder. “Are you hit?”

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm…I'm not hit. I'm… Your free hand moves to your belly. The woman's eyes go to it, widen, briefly, then narrow into something fierce.

"Up," she says. “Behind the bar. Now."

The bar is heavy stone. You crouch behind it and the woman grabs a slug-thrower from under the counter, an old long-barrelled thing with a stock worn shiny by the press of many hands. She racks it once with a small dry sound that’s almost reassuring.

The door takes another hit. Then another. Then…silence.

"They're going around," the woman murmurs. "Stay down."

You stay down, your hand shaking around the grip of the blaster. Your other hand is flat to your belly, and you can feel – over the slamming of your own pulse – the wet little drum you heard this morning in the midwife's office. Only it’s yours, doubled and quickened and filling your whole skull.

Stay alive, you think, fiercely. Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

The kitchen door opens with a kick. You hear the woman fire and a man scream as he goes down. Then you hear the chatter of the carbine and the sound of the woman’s body hitting the floorboards.

"No…"

You're up before you've decided to be up, your back coming off the bar and the blaster coming up in both hands. The second man is coming around the end of the bar with his weapon swinging toward where the woman has fallen, his eyes find you and widen as you fire.

The first shot goes wide. The second catches him in the throat and he goes down sideways into a stack of clay jugs which explode on impact, and he is, abruptly, not a problem anymore.

You drop back down because the third one is still out there. You didn’t see him follow the second one in, so he must be outside, watching the front again. You’re not sure how many shots you have left, and the woman behind the bar is making a thin wet sound that’s not encouraging. Your hands are shaking so hard now you can hear the small metallic chatter of the grip-plate against your thumb.

You crawl to where the woman has gone down. She’s on her side, her hand pressed to her throat where the carbine has caught her along the side of the neck, the dark blood pumping slow but steady between her fingers. Her eyes find yours and she tries unsuccessfully to speak. Then she lifts her other hand and points at the front door.

You hear it. The iron bar across the front door is moving, lifting from the outside. The third man must have something, a tool, a magnetic lifter, something that’s pulling the bar up out of its brackets from the outside, and in perhaps fifteen seconds the bar’s going to come free and the door’s going to swing open and he’s going to walk in and you’re going to be on the floor of a tavern with nowhere left to go.

The iron bar lifts another inch.

You aim for the door, bracing your elbows on the dead woman's hip, and you sight down the barrel and wait. Your hands shake as the bar lifts another inch and the door creaks, very faintly, against the frame.

Stay alive, you think. Stay alive. I love you. Stay alive.

The bar comes free, the door swings open, and the thing that comes through is not the third man.

The thing that comes through is beskar.

He comes through low and fast, cape streaming behind him, visor already locked on the figure to his right at the door's edge. The long blade comes out from under the cape in a single clean arc, and there is a sound, brief and wet and final, and the third man's carbine clatters to the floorboards. His body follows half a second later, and Din is in the doorway with the blade in one hand and the blaster in the other, the visor sweeping the room, finding the second man dead among the clay jugs, finding the woman dead on the floor at your hip, and finally – finally – finding you.

"Cyar'ika…"

You don't speak because you can't, because something in your chest has come unhooked and the wet sound at the back of your throat is too big to be a word. The blaster is still up, your hands are still shaking, and you can’t, for one long stunned moment, make your hands lower it.

He drops both his weapons. The blade hits the floorboards with a clatter, the blaster going down a heartbeat after it, and he’s across the room in three long strides, dropping to his knees on the bloody floorboards in front of you. His hands close carefully over yours and he eases the blaster down out of your hands and sets it on the floor at his knee. Then his hands come back to you, and they’re everywhere at once.

Your face. Your neck. Your shoulders.

The visor sweeps you, his hands running over you like a man checking a casualty in the field, his palms flat to your ribs and then down to your hips and then spreading wide and warm over your belly.

"Are you hit, cyar'ika? Are you hit? Tell me."

"No."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I'm not…I’m not hit.”

"Anywhere, cyar'ika, even a…even a graze, even a… "

"I'm not, I swear. I'm not hit. She is. She's..."

You turn your head and he follows, the visor finding the woman at your hip, the dark spreading slow under her on the boards, the eyes already gone.

"She…she pulled me in here. She got me behind the bar. She shot the first one through the kitchen and the carbine got her and I…Din, I…I had to…there was a third one, he was…he was lifting the bar, he had…"

"Cyar'ika. Cyar'ika, shh. Breathe. Breathe with me. Breathe."

He pulls you against him, one hand spread over the back of your head and the other still on the curve of your belly and you breathe in shakily against him. The cape comes around you and you bury your face into his throat and breathe.

"I've got you," he says, into the crown of your head. “I've got you. I've got you, cyar'ika. I've got you."

"Din…"

"I've got you."

"How did you…how did you know?"

"I heard the shots. I heard the carbine and I…I started running. I started running the second I heard the second shot. I…I came up the lane, and I saw a man on his face on the cobbles, and I saw a door open and I knew. I knew. I knew it was you. I…"

"Din…"

"I almost…I almost didn't get here."

"You got here."

"Cyar'ika…"

"You got here, Din, you got here. Look at me. You got here."

He looks at you and you can’t see his face, can’t see his eyes, can’t see whatever ragged thing is behind the visor right now, and for the first time today you don’t need to. You can read the way the visor is shaking, just barely, on your face. You can read the way the hand on your belly is shaking, just barely, against your tunic. You can read every single thing his shoulders are doing and what they’re doing is coming apart, slow and silent, the way they come apart when there’s nobody to see them, the way they come apart when only you’re in the room.

You lift one shaking hand and press it, flat, to the side of the helmet. "I'm here. I'm okay. We're okay.”

"Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” he says, voice cracking over the words.

You swallow and shake your head, “I…”

“We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.” He nods slowly. “Mandalorian wedding vows. The riduurock.”

His hand on your belly spreads wider, thumb stroking across the small soft curve of you. The visor lowers against your forehead and doesn’t move.

"Are you...are you asking me to marry you? Here...now?"

"Yes," he replies, the helmet nodding fiercely. "You said the answer would be yes so...marry me cyar'ika, please...marry me. Say...say it back, please."

“Mhi solus tome, Mhi solus dar'tome, Mhi me'dinui an, Mhi ba'juri verde,” you repeat as best you can, tripping slightly over some of the pronunciation. “We are one together, we are one when parted, we share all, we will raise warriors.”

“I love you,” he says quietly. “I love you, cyar’ika, you and our baby. Our baby.”

“I love you too,” you sniff. “I love you so much.”

Somewhere outside in the lane you hear the sound of running footsteps, shouting and the rising whoop of Karga's settlement-guard whistles. Inside the tavern there is only the small, ragged breath of him through the modulator and the slow wet pulse of the woman's blood spreading on the boards beside you, and the baby under his palm, still going.

"She's okay," you whisper. "Din, she's okay. I can feel her. She's okay."

“She?”

“It’s a she today.”

"You can't feel her yet."

"I can today."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I can today, Din."

He makes a sound, something low, broken and entirely without language and presses the helmet more firmly against you.

"We’re getting off this floor," he says, finally. "We’re getting off this floor and you’re going straight back to Vesha. She’s going to look at you, look at…at her. She’s going to tell me you’re both…both…”

"Okay."

"Yes."

"Okay."

"And then…"

"And then we go home, Din. To the Crest. Take me home."

"Okay," he says.

The settlement-guard whistles are getting closer. Karga's voice is somewhere out in the lane, bellowing orders. Din slides one arm under your knees and the other under your shoulders and lifts you carefully, like you weigh nothing, like he’s afraid of waking something, and you let him for once, without arguing.

You loop your arms around his neck and press your face into him, closing your eyes. His cape comes around the both of you, and he carries you out of the tavern over the bodies of three men, toward Karga who’s already running up the lane with his coat flapping, mouth open around your name.

You don't open your eyes for any of it.

You let your husband take you and your baby home.

Chapter Text

Vesha meets you in the front room with a clean towel already in her hands and her sharp old eyes going first to your face and then down your body and back, the quick triage scan of a woman who’s seen a great many people brought in off Nevarran streets and who’s gotten very good at telling at a glance whether they’re bleeding.

"Not hers," Din says, before Vesha can ask. "The blood. It's not…it's not hers. It's not ours. She's not hit. I checked. I checked her. I checked everywhere. She's not…she's not hit."

"Set her down here."

"She…the baby…"

"Set her down here."

He sets you down on the long wooden bench against the wall – the one for waiting husbands – and Vesha is already on one knee in front of you, her hands going to your wrists, your throat, your forehead, the long unhurried thoroughness of her sweep almost more steadying than anything else that’s happened in the last hour.

"Your pulse is fast and your skin’s clammy. Pupils…yes, fine. You’re in shock, just mild, but nevertheless. It’s quite normal. Did you fall, my dear?"

"No."

"Were you struck anywhere?"

"No."

"Did anything hit your belly? Anything at all. A door, an elbow, a bolt that grazed...?"

"No, nothing."

She nods briskly. “Now the belly."

She moves you, carefully, onto the cot in the back room. Din puts himself in the corner with his back to the wall and his hands at his sides, deliberately useless, the way a man makes himself when he knows that if he lets himself help, he won’t be able to stop helping. But the visor doesn’t leave you for a second.

Vesha spreads the gel on your stomach again and passes the wand over you

You hear the small, wet, rapid drum before Vesha has even gotten the wand properly placed, the same frantic pulse from this morning. You close your eyes, and Din makes a small sound through the modulator that is, almost, the same sound he made on his knees on the bloody floorboards of the tavern.

"There she is," Vesha murmurs. "Right where we left her. Same rate, same rhythm. No change. Nothing has happened in there, my dear. Whatever happened to you out there did not happen to her. She is entirely unbothered. Do you hear me? Entirely."

"Yes."

"Good." She wipes the gel away and helps you sit up. She looks at you, and then she looks, sharply, at the visor in the corner. "Mandalorian."

Din starts slightly. "Yes."

"This is the second time today she’s been in this room. I would like it to be the last for a while, do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Take her home, whatever home you decide that is. Make her tea, make her eat something with iron in it and put her to bed. Do not let her replay what happened until tomorrow at the earliest.”

"I understand.”

"Good. Out now, both of you. Go."

You smile your thanks as Din gathers you once more into his arms and proceeds to carry you all the way to the ship. You tell him, twice, that you can walk but he doesn't answer.

He carries you through the lanes – past the small dark knot of Karga's settlement-guard still working the tavern frontage, past Karga himself, who only takes one look at the visor and the way it’s angled and steps back without a word to let you pass – up the slope of the pad, up the ramp and into the cool dim of the cargo bay. Only then, with the ramp hissing shut behind him and the inner door sealing and the recyclers humming, does he set you down.

He rests you on the lower step of the cockpit ladder, carefully, his hands lingering at your hips even after your feet are on the deck. He doesn’t let go for a long moment, standing in front of you with the visor on your face, his hands on your hips and the smallest tremor still running through them. The small careful tilt of his helmet says he is, only now, beginning to register that you’re alive and inside his ship and that no further immediate thing is going to take you away from him.

He bends and presses the cool beskar of the brow to your forehead.

"I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

He moves back and stands a few feet away, leaning his weight against the small fold-down table with both hands on the metal of it, the visor angled down at them, and stays silent for a long moment.

You wait because you can feel the shape of what’s coming and you don’t, just yet, want to help him say it.

"I can't do this," he says, finally. "Cyar'ika, I can't…I can't do this. I can't…I can't have you out there and me on the pad. I can't have you out there and me an hour behind. I…I came up that lane today and I…I heard the second shot, and I started running and the whole way I was…I was thinking…I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. The whole way. For…for two minutes. For two whole minutes I ran up that lane thinking I was going to find you and our baby on the cobbles."

"Din…"

"I almost didn't get there."

"You did get there."

"Barely."

"You got there, Din…"

"By seconds, cyar'ika. By…by the third one bending the bar up with a magnetic lift. By him not knowing his back was to the door. By you being a better shot than I have any right to expect. By all of those things, cyar'ika, and one of them goes the other way and you’re dead. You and her, both, on the floor of a tavern. Because you walked around a corner. Because you walked around a corner, cyar'ika."

You don't speak because the thing behind his voice isn’t anger or blame and you don’t have the strength to mistake it for either.

"I can't," he says quieter. "I can't keep you safe and keep flying. Not the way I've been flying. Not the way we've been flying. I’ve been telling myself since Tatooine that I could, that I could find a way. That the ship is enough and the bunk is enough and the blaster in your waistband is enough. That you’re…that you’re tough enough and quick enough and that I’m close enough and that we can…that we can go on like we have been, just…just with the baby. With the baby in a sling in the cargo bay. I’ve been telling myself that, cyar'ika, and now…now I can’t tell myself that. Now I…now I can’t."

He stops and breathes once, slow, through the modulator.

"Karga offered me a cabin a long time ago before…before you. He offered me a map and a deed and a…” he breaks off. “I said no at the time, but he said it would always be mine if I wanted it. When you were sleeping, before Tatooine, I commed him about the…the baby and he said that it could be ours. He said he’d happily give it to us.”

You laugh, but it comes out wrong – sharp, raw, a little broken.

"All of you," you say. "All of you have been…all of you have been planning this, Din. Peli, Karga, Vesha, you. All of you have been moving me into a cabin in your heads without telling me. I am the last person in this…in this conspiracy of midwives and magistrates and Mandalorians who has been told what is happening to her life."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't cyar'ika me,” you snort, folding your arms across your chest. “Not right now. Tell me the rest, because I know there must be more. All this time you’ve been spending thinking and tapping…there must be more."

He’s quiet a long moment.

"You take the cabin," he says, finally. "You take the cabin and I take the ship. I take the jobs, the careful ones. The ones I know I can come back from. I come to the cabin between jobs. I…I’m there as much as I can be and you and the baby are safe. Karga has guards that will keep watch from a distance. You’re there, and I’m on the ship, and I’ll come back as often as I can, and you’re safe, cyar'ika, you and her, you’re safe."

You don't speak – can’t, because the cold thing under your sternum from this morning has come back and has, in the last thirty seconds, grown teeth.

"How long between jobs?" You ask quietly.

"Cyar'ika…"

"How long, Din?"

"A…a week, sometimes two. Sometimes more. Karga said he could keep me to short runs, mostly. Inner systems. He said he could…he could route me through Nevarro often. He said…"

"Sometimes more."

"Sometimes more, yes."

"How much more?"

"I don't know. It depends on the work.”

"A month?"

"Maybe."

"Two months?"

"Cyar'ika…"

"Two months, Din?"

"Sometimes, maybe. I…I would try not to. I would… "

"You would try not to."

"I would try…"

"No."

It comes out of you flat.

"Cyar'ika..."

"No, Din. No. I’m…I’m not doing that. I’m not going to be a woman in a cabin waiting for her Mandalorian to come back from a run. I’m not going to be a woman who puts her baby to bed at night not knowing if you’re alive. I’m not going to be a woman whose only news of her husband comes through Karga's comms relay. I am not - no."

He raises his hands. "Please…"

"You think I would survive that, Din? Two months at a time? In a cabin with a baby on my own? Not knowing? You think I would…you think I would do that? I would lose my mind, Din! I would lose my mind in a week. In a month I’d be…I’d be a woman who can’t let her baby out of her sight because the baby is the only thing in the cabin and the cabin is the only thing in the world and her husband is…is somewhere in hyperspace getting shot at without her and she doesn’t even know it yet!”

You try to take a breath and find yourself wanting.

“No, Din. No. That’s not…that’s not the deal. That wasn’t the deal when you found me on the Crest and that isn’t the deal now and you don’t…you don’t get to make it the deal because you got scared in a lane today."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I got scared too, Din."

It cracks out of you.

"I got scared too. I was on the floor of a tavern with a blaster in my hands and a dead woman next to me and a man lifting the bar off the door from the outside and I was scared too. I was terrified. I thought…I thought our baby was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was never going to…never going to be able to tell you I love you and I…I got scared too, Din. And I’m still scared, but I’m not going to be scared into a cabin. Not without you in it. Not…not at the price of you. Do you hear me, I am not."

He’s very still, the visor on you. His hands lower into careful fists and the shoulders under the beskar are doing the small terrible thing they were doing on the floor of the tavern.

"Cyar'ika…I'm trying..."

“My life on Shakari…” you go on, your voice cracking, your eyes hot. “I know I don’t talk about it but if you knew…if you knew what that was like for me, then you would know that I can’t.”

You swallow hard.

“You asked me to marry you and we said the vows and we are married now and you don’t get to just…we are partners in every sense of the word and I don’t want…I don’t want to be somewhere that you’re not – for weeks and months on end. If that’s what you’re offering me, then let’s take the vows back and go our separate ways. Because I would rather be alone forever than only have you for some of the time and spend the rest of it not knowing.”

He flinches slightly. “We can’t…we can’t take them back, cyar’ika. We’ve said the vows…we’re one now. I belong to you and you belong to me.”

“Then you don’t get to leave me,” you say quietly but fiercely. “You don’t get to leave me – leave us – behind. Not for weeks and months at a time.”

For a moment, neither of you speak and the only sound is the familiar hum of the ship around you.

"I’m not saying no to the cabin. I’m saying no to the shape of it you brought me. I’m saying no to you on the ship and me in the cabin. I’m not separating from you, Din. Not for a job. That’s not…that’s not what we are. That’s not what we’ve built. I want to live with you, wherever that is. Ship. Cabin. Both. Neither. With. Do you understand me? With."

"I understand,” he says softly.

"So, you don’t get to take the jobs without me. You don’t get to take a single one. Not a careful one, not an easy one, not an in-system one. Not one, Din, unless we have sat down – properly – and decided it together. And if I say no…if I say I can’t have you out there for that one, Din, that one is too long, that one I can’t do, then you don’t take it. You turn it down and you tell Karga to give it to somebody else. You stay. You hear me? You stay."

"Okay."

"Say it back to me."

"I…I stay. I don't take a job without you saying yes.”

You let out a shaky breath and look around you, at the ship that you’ve made into a home. You look at the starkness of it and think about everything Vesha said. The Crest is your home because Din is there. Din is your home and you realise, that as much as you love this gunship, it’s not about metal or bricks or mortar.

"We should take the cabin,” you say finally. “We should take it and move our things into it. We build a crib and we hang our weapons by the door. We have a kitchen and a window and a fire. We have all of that, and we have you, Din.”

"Yes."

"And when you go on a job – when we go on a job – when we’ve decided together that it’s one we can take – you take me with you the way you have always taken me since we met. The cabin is the base, the place we go from. The ship is where we go to. Together. Until the baby comes. Until she comes and we…we make a new arrangement, with her in it, together.”

He nods. “Alright cya’rika.”

You let out a long, slow breath and rub your hands over your face. “Where is this cabin anyway?”

“A short speeder ride away.”

You look at him curiously. “You’ve been there?”

“I went to look – once – before you,” he replies calmly.

"Alright, tomorrow we go and look at it together, the two of us, and then we can decide if it’s right. If it’s ours. And if it isn't – if we walk into it and the kitchen is wrong and the window is wrong and the rooms feel wrong – then we tell Karga thank you and we look at another one, and another one, until we find the right one.”

"Yes.”

He moves around the table, crosses towards you and kneels on the deck plates in front of you the way he knelt in the tavern in front of you, only this time there’s no blood on the floor and no body at your hip and no third man at the door. This time there’s only the soft hum of the ship, you on the bench and him on his knees. His hands come up and close, carefully, over your thighs and the visor tips up to your face.

"I’m going to be bad at this," he says, softly. "I’m going to forget and chew on things alone again. I’m going to come to you with a…with a decided thing in my hand and you’re going to have to push it back at me and make me undo it. I want you to know that, so that when I do it, you know I’m not doing it on purpose. And…and I'm asking you to be patient with me, cyar'ika. Will you be patient with me?"

You set your hands over his and suddenly realise that you’re both still shaking.

"Yes, of course I will, Din. Because you’ll have to be patient with me too when I get angry the way I got angry this morning. When I…when I yell in lanes and run out of midwives' offices. When I… when I’m bad at this too. Because I will be."

"I’ll be patient with you.”

"Okay."

He bows his head, the visor comes against your knee and he stays like that, hands wrapped around the backs of your calves, helmet pressed to the top of your thigh, for a long quiet moment. You let go of one of his hands, lay your palm on the top of the helmet, where the smooth beskar curves down over the back of his skull, and stroke once, slow, down to the cowl at the base.

Heat suddenly pools in your belly, hot and demanding.

"I need you, Din," you breathe softly.

The helmet raises again towards you, and, for a moment, you think he either doesn’t understand or that he’s going to refuse you again. You feel it in the stillness that suddenly goes through his body.

"What do you need? What can I give you?"

"You," you reply simply. "You can give me you - here and now."

He gets up slowly, hands sliding off the backs of your calves and bracing on the bench on either side of you, the long beskar-clad height of him uncoiling in front of you in the dim light. You stand with him and fist your hand in his cape.

“I’m still on the floor of that tavern, and if you put me down on that bunk right now and tell me to rest, I’m going to lie there for hours thinking about a man lifting the bar off the door from outside and....I don’t want to rest and I don’t want to sleep. I want you, Din, right now. Hard.”

The visor tips, slow, the modulator hissing, soft, against the air between you. One hand comes up and finds the side of your face, careful with the small unconscious gentleness he can’t help, and you reach up, close your bare hand around the gloved wrist and pull it, hard, down.

"Not careful, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Not careful. I don’t want careful right now. This is our wedding night and I want you to put me against that bulkhead and fuck me until that’s the only thing I can think about – being your wife.”

The visor stays on you. The modulator hisses out, ragged, the small bare sound through the grille that is, almost, the closest thing to him swearing in his own native tongue you ever get in daylight.

"Are you…? "

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"I have never been surer of anything in my life, Din. Fuck me now, please.”

He moves fast, the way he moves when something has finally, somewhere behind the beskar, given – his hands closing at your hips, turning and walking you backwards until your back hits the cool of the galley bulkhead with the small bright sound of skin against metal.

The visor is right there at your forehead, the modulator, ragged, against the bridge of your nose. His hands brace on either side of your head, the cool of the cuirass pressing against the bare of your stomach where your shirt has ridden up.

"Like this?"

"Yes, Din."

"How hard?"

"Hard, Din,” you breathe. “Hard."

"Okay,” he says softly and he pulls both gloves from his hands, one after the other, dropping them to the deck plates between you. They lie there between his boots while he stays braced over you.

His bare hands come up, his palms finding your throat, the left one sliding slowly up under your jaw, his thumb finding the small hammer of your pulse there. He tips your head back against the bulkhead with it, and his other hand comes down off the metal, finds the loose neckline of your shirt and pulls, yanking the fabric off your shoulder, and it slips down to your elbows in one motion.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't ask, Din."

"I’m not asking."

"Then do it."

The ragged sound that comes through the modulator is almost a laugh, almost a snarl. His hand at your throat tightens, carefully but hard, causing desire to climb quickly inside you. His other hand goes down, fast, into the loose waistband of your trousers and his fingers find you already wet, the sound now coming through the modulator against the bare of your collarbone almost a groan.

"Fuck cyar'ika…"

"Don't talk, Din," you gasp, the crudity sending an extra shot of heat to where his fingers still probe.

"You’re… "

"Please, don’t talk!”

His fingers move hard, not the slow, careful, patient thing he’s done a hundred times in the dark, but rather the hard, fast unhurried thing he does only when you’ve asked, only when you’ve begged, and you feel your orgasm climbing fast against the heel of his palm, his other hand at your throat keeping your head back against the bulkhead, the visor pressed to the side of your jaw, the modulator ragged at your ear.

"Din…"

"There."

"Din, I…Din…"

"There, cyar'ika. There, come for me."

You come on his bare hand with your back arched off the bulkhead and your hands fisted in his cape, and a bright, bitten sound torn out of you against the cool of the beskar at the cheek-line. The hand at your throat doesn’t let go and his fingers don’t slow, and the shaking down of it is not, this time, slow. It’s short and hard and bright and he doesn’t give you time to come down before he takes his hand out of your trousers and pulls them down off your hips, where they fall to the deck plates around your ankles.

"Step out."

You do as requested and he kicks them aside with one boot in a careful, efficient motion before his hands go under your thighs and lift you carefully off the deck plates, pinning you to the bulkhead. Your legs come up around the dense warm beskar of his hips, and he finds himself through the opening in the flight suit, lines up and slides into you in one long, hard press.

You cry out, loudly, the sound tearing out of you against the visor. You know the recyclers in the galley will muffle it, but it doesn’t matter, and you don’t care and you make the same noise, again and again and again

"Move, Din. Hard. The way I… oh fuck, Din…"

He moves the way you demand, sliding back and then thrusting forward into your hot wetness, the visor pressed hard to the side of your jaw, the ragged unmodulated-shaped sound through the grille at your ear with every breath.

The bulkhead hits the bare of your shoulders with every press meaning that you’ll have bruises tomorrow but, right now, you want them – you welcome them as proof that you're alive, that you're okay and that you've been fucked well by your husband.

"Harder, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Harder. Ask me who I belong to."

"I don’t…"

"Ask me, Din!"

“Who do you belong to?”

“You,” you pant, “only you, always you…harder.”

He gives it to you harder, hips driving against yours, the sound of flesh meeting flesh mixing with the hum of the recyclers around you as you come for the second time within three minutes, the galley lights flickering under the relentless thudding of the bulkhead.

“Din…oh fuck…!”

“Mine,” he grunts.

Your hands grip his cape tighter, legs locking around his hips, your forehead pressing hard to the brow of the helmet. He doesn’t stop or slow, the sound through the modulator at your ear almost a sob now, and his hands tighten under your thighs.

"Cyar'ika, I’m…I need to…"

"Come, Din, come in me. In me, now. I’m already carrying your baby – please!"

He unleashes himself with the visor pressed hard to your jaw. his hands tight under your thighs and the cool of the cuirass pressing against your stomach as he holds you against the bulkhead through the long shuddering down of it. His hips stutter then he drives into you again, the warmth of him flooding you and you cry out again, the sound stretching into a keening you can't control and which finally dies in the air between you.

For a long time neither of you moves.

The recyclers hum and the galley lights flicker once, then steady as he continues to hold you in his arms.

“Are you alright?” he pants after a long moment.

"I’m perfect, Din."

"You…are you…?"

"I’m perfect, Din. Shut up."

"Your back… "

"My back is fine. Yes, there might be some bruising tomorrow, but I don’t care. I don’t care, Din. Just…set me down carefully.”

He sets you down with the slow, careful, unspoken reverence he uses for the few things he’s afraid to break, his hands at your hips taking the weight you can’t, immediately, take, because your knees don’t quite work. He knows it, and he stays braced against the bulkhead with you for a long moment with his visor at your forehead and his ragged breath at your ear, until you can stand.

“That was good,” you breathe, and the helmet moves back so that he can look at you. “So good.”

“Will you…I mean, every time…?”

You smile wickedly at him as you reach out and lay one hand on the side of the helmet. “Perhaps. I've read that hormones can be funny things. Will that be a problem?”

You sense his gaze dip momentarily downwards to your stomach and then back up again, one hand moving to slide, warm, across your bare skin.

“I don’t want to hurt you – either of you.”

You feel a tightness in your throat. “You could never hurt us, Din. I know that to be true more than I know anything else. And our baby is strong – I can feel that about her already.”

He nods imperceptibly, then presses the visor once more against your forehead. “We will raise warriors.”

“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms around him and pulling him close. “We certainly will.”

Chapter Text

The Crest hums around you in that low, familiar way – the kind of sound that's stopped being noise and started being a heartbeat. You've lived inside this hum long enough now that on the rare nights you sleep planet side, the silence keeps you awake.

It’s not that the cabin Karga’s given you isn’t nice or, ever so slightly, starting to feel like home now that you’ve painted some of the walls and bought some furniture – but this ship, the place where you met and fell in love with your husband, will always be the place you feel most comfortable, regardless of what anyone says.

Outside the viewport, hyperspace streaks itself into long blue threads, ribboning past in their hypnotic slow-motion lunge. Your boots are up on the console and one hand rests on the swell of your belly because lately your hand finds its way there on its own, like it's been reassigned without asking.

Six months and you still catch yourself startled by the shape of you. By the way you have to lean back a little further in chairs now and the way your centre of gravity has wandered off somewhere ahead of you, like a small impatient scout. By the way Din looks at you when he thinks you can't tell he's looking, which – honestly – is most of the time, because he’s wearing a helmet, and you can never tell where his eyes are, he knows it, and he uses it shamelessly.

You can feel him looking now.

He's in the pilot's seat beside you, gloves off, the instruments murmuring to themselves. The nav display blinks its slow blue pulse and somewhere behind you, in the hold, something settles with a small metallic clink, which you decide not to think about because you don’t have the energy to go and investigate.

"You're quiet," you say.

"Mm."

"That's quieter."

The modulator carries a breath that might be a laugh.

"I was thinking about the bunk," he says.

"Romantic."

"About the bunk," he repeats, patient, "and where the cradle goes."

You smile, because you’re glad he’s at least on board for that. Again, not that you haven’t accepted that, practically, the cabin will be your baby’s primary home, but you can’t help the slight thrill that runs through you at the thought of your little family roaming the galaxy together.

He's been sketching one for a week, lines and angles, beskar reinforcement at the corners because of course if there is any problem in this galaxy Din Djarin does not believe can be solved by the application of beskar, you’ve yet to find it. You've watched him erase the same curve four times trying to get it right – the slope of the inner wall, where a tiny shoulder might rest. He thought you were asleep at the time, but you weren't.

"There's room by the ladder," you offer. "If we move the crate of detonators. Which, incidentally, we should probably move regardless of the baby."

"Mm." The blue light slides across his visor in a long, unbroken stripe. "I was thinking closer to the bulkhead. It’ll be warmer there and when she’s old enough to stand, the rungs will be in reach."

"Old enough to stand and climb a ladder on a gunship. I mean, that sounds..."

"She’ll need to learn the ship."

"She’ll need to learn not to fall out of the ship."

He tilts his head – that small Din gesture that on anyone else would be a shrug. "Both."

You let your hand drift in a slow circle over your belly. The baby's been still for an hour, which always feels longer than an hour. Any minute now she’ll wake up and start kicking your bladder like it personally insulted her, and you're almost looking forward to it. You like the moving better than the not-moving because the not-moving makes you hold your breath and think about scenarios you’d rather not think about.

"We could put the chest under the bulkhead bunk," he goes on, thinking out loud, which is rare for him. It means he's been thinking for days and the thinking has overflowed as the time when the thinking requires to crystallise comes closer. "We can move the spare ration crates to the lower hold. The vibration is less near the bulkhead so she’ll sleep better."

"You've thought about this a lot."

"Yes," he replies, as though not thinking about it would be farcical.

You laugh, and the laugh catches in the soft fullness of your ribs and turns into a hiccup. His hand twitches toward you on the armrest, is she alright, is she alright, is she alright, the muscle reflex of a man who’s spent the last few months unsure whether you breaking would be something he could fix. You take his hand before he can decide whether to extend it, and put it on your knee, because his hand on you anywhere calms him, and tonight you want him calm.

"Tell me more," you say. "About the bunk and the cradle. Tell me what you're picturing."

He doesn't answer fast, turning questions over the way he turns a blaster over before he cleans it. You used to find that maddening, but as the months have gone on, you find it tender.

"I picture her small first," he says. "Small enough for me to carry against the chestplate. I’ll need to pad it, on the left side, where the seam’s rough, but I have an idea for a liner.”

"You've already designed a liner?"

"Yes.” He pauses on your look. "You asked."

"I did, so keep going."

"I picture her learning the sound of the engines the way I learned them as a foundling. The Tribe ship was bigger, but the principle’s the same. A child should know the sound of their home well enough that they wake when it changes. And I picture her learning the tools next, when she’s four, perhaps. She’ll know the names – the difference between a hydrospanner and a fusion cutter. She’ll know not to touch the carbonite controls and by six, she should be able to strip a blaster and reassemble it. Slowly, with help."

"Okay."

"By eight she’ll begin the resol'nare…"

At that, you go still.

It's a tiny stillness, the kind he probably doesn't catch through the wall of the beskar. Your hand stops moving on your belly, the hum of the Crest seeming louder all of a sudden, filling the cockpit like water filling a cup. Like the sound has nowhere else to go and so it goes into you.

"The resol'nare," you repeat carefully.

"The Six Actions."

He says it like he's reciting something he learned before he could read, because he is, and he did and seems excited at the prospect.

"Language. Armour. Defence of self and clan. Raising children in the Way. Contributing to the welfare of the clan. Rallying to the Mand'alor when called."

He pauses.

"The first two come earliest. It’s best to start with Mando'a in the home from infancy. Her first words should be ours. I've been…I've been practicing so I don't fumble the lullabies."

Something in your chest does a slow, awful tilt – half a melt, half a stagger.

The melt is for the image of him alone in some quiet corner of the ship, mouth shaping syllables behind beskar, getting the cadence right for a baby that doesn't exist yet.

The stagger is for the rest of it.

"Din."

"She’ll have a small set first. Soft pieces, foundling-grade, until the bones thicken."

He's still talking, and you realise with a kind of slow horror that he's not pitching this to you, he’s sharing it. The way you share a plan with a partner you assume is already inside the plan with you. The way you talk about repainting a room you both already agreed to repaint.

The way he did when he made the lists.

"The helmet comes later and not until she asks for it. The Armorer was clear with me about that. It's not the same for a biological child as it was for me. There's a…a ceremony. I've already spoken to her about…"

"Din."

The second time stops him. He turns his head, the visor finding you, and you take your boots off the console and slowly set them on the deck. You sit up, as much as a six-months-pregnant body sits up, which is to say you list forward like a cargo ship adjusting its load, and look at him.

"When did we decide that?"

There’s a long pause and you can almost hear him reviewing the conversation, looking for the moment he might have missed it.

"Decide what?"

"That our child is being raised Mandalorian."

The cockpit goes very quiet. Even the hum seems to hold its breath, though that's probably your imagination.

"I…" He stops and starts again. "I’m Mandalorian. My child is Mandalorian."

"Our child."

"Our child is Mandalorian."

"Din, we’ve never had this conversation."

"We’re having it now."

"No, we’re having a fight now, because you skipped the conversation."

His hands have gone still on the armrests and you know him well enough to know that means he's recalibrating something deep. Something he didn't know needed to be recalibrated until just now.

"I assumed," he says finally.

"Yeah."

"I…" He shakes his head. "I didn’t realise there was an assumption to make."

"That's the problem."

"Cyar'ika…"

"No, don't cyar'ika me into agreeing with you. I'm not…Din, I'm not saying no. I'm saying I never said yes. There's a difference and it's a big one and you don't get to skip over it because you've already picked out the lullabies."

You sigh heavily.

“We’ve been here before, with your assumptions.”

"You don't want the child to be Mandalorian,” he says, flatly.

"I didn't say that either."

"Then what are you saying?"

You exhale and feel the breath all the way down in your back, somewhere beneath the place where your spine has been protesting for two weeks. The baby chooses this exact moment to wake up and roll, a long slow somersault that punches a knee into your ribs, and you make a small involuntary sound and press your palm flat against the curve.

Din's hand twitches toward you and then stops, hovering, uncertain whether comfort is allowed mid-argument. Uncertain whether he's still allowed to touch what he might have just lost a little ground with.

You take his hand and put it on your belly. Because that part, at least, isn't in dispute, and you would never let him think it was.

"I'm saying," you tell him, quietly, "that this baby is half me. And you have a whole Creed, Din. You have a whole…a whole world you want to hand her. Language and armour and a clan and a Way. And I love that you want that. I love that you've been practicing lullabies, don’t get me wrong…”

"I didn’t…"

"I love that you want to give her what saved you,” you barrel on. “I love that you have a tribe that would catch her if anything ever happened to us. I love that you've thought about the padding on your chestplate. Do you understand how soft my whole body went when you said that? Don't answer, I'll tell you. Very soft, embarrassingly soft."

"Cyar'ika… "

"But I have things too. I have where I came from. I have stories my mother told me at night that I want to tell our child – stories that are not in Mando'a and don't have any armour in them. I have a name I want to give her that isn't Mando'a. I have…”

And this is perhaps the biggest part of what you need to say.

“Din, I have a face. I want to be able to nurse our baby without taking a vow first. I want to look at her while I'm feeding her in the middle of the night, and I want her to look at me. I want her to see my face when I sing to her. I want to know what her face looks like when she smiles at me. And I don't know if any of that fits inside the Way you're describing, and I need you to not assume.”

His hand is still on your belly. The baby kicks against it, you both feel it at the same time, and his fingers twitch – that small involuntary marvel he can't help, even six months in, that small oh of a man who keeps relearning that there is a person in there, an actual person, who will one day have opinions and preferences and possibly bad taste in music.

You watch his thumb stroke once against the cloth, slow, like he's apologising to the baby for the volume of the adults around her.

"I don’t… " he starts, and stops, choosing words like he's choosing stones to cross a river, testing each one for whether it will hold his weight. "I haven’t raised a child before."

"Neither have I."

"I was raised by the Tribe."

His voice through the modulator has gone lower, the way it does when something costs him to say.

"I don’t know another way. When I imagine our child, I imagine…I imagine teaching her what I was taught because it’s what saved me. There was a moment, when I was placed in that bunker by my parents when I thought no one was coming. I remember it. I remember the sound…the sound of monsters coming to take me. And then they came. And after that, I was never alone again. I don’t know how to give our child less than what saved me from that. I wouldn’t know how to look at her and know I had withheld it."

You hear yourself make a small sound that isn't quite a word and put your other hand over his, on your belly, so both of yours are wrapped around his one. His fingers shift, just a little, threading through yours, and you can feel the slight tremor in them.

"That's not less," you say softly. "What you want to give them isn't less. I'm not asking you to give them less. I'm not asking you to leave any of that out. I'm asking you to make room. For me and mine. So our child gets both of us, not just the louder one."

"You think I’m the louder one?"

"You're the one with the helmet. The acoustics alone…"

He laughs properly this time and the hand under yours flexes once in acknowledgment.

"I don’t know how to do this," he says, looking down now, the visor angled toward your joined hands. "I don’t know how to raise a child in two ways. The Creed is…it’s not a thing you do halfway. The resol'nare is six actions, not three. I can’t teach her to defend the clan only on the weekdays. I don’t know what it looks like to…to share this. To make the Way one ingredient in a larger meal. I don’t know if it’s even possible. The Armorer would say it’s not..."

"What would you say?"

"I would say," he says slowly, "that I don’t want to lose either of you. Not to a question I refused to ask."

You feel the heat rise behind your eyes and blink it back. You’re determined not to start crying in the middle of this conversation because you have a thread to hold and you mean to hold it.

"Okay," you say. "Then we start there. Not with the answer, but with the question. With the willingness to ask it out loud, with words. Probably more than once. Probably a lot of times, between now and when this child is old enough to strip a blaster."

"I should’ve asked."

"Yeah."

"I’m asking now."

"I know."

"I just…don’t have an answer to give you tonight.”

"I'm not asking for one tonight."

He's quiet and the Crest continues its comforting hum. The blue threads streak past and somewhere behind you, you hear another clink of metal and make a mental note to investigate once this conversation is over.

"What are you asking for tonight?" he says finally.

You look at the visor and the long blue threads beyond it. You think about the cradle he's sketched four times, trying to get the curve of it right and the padding he's designed for the chestplate. You think about the lullabies he's been practicing in private so he wouldn't fumble them, alone in some quiet corner of the ship, for a person who doesn't exist yet but who he’s already preparing to love out loud.

You think about the boy who remembers the sound of the monsters.

"Tonight I want us to sit here with your hand on my belly until she goes back to sleep and you to lean your helmet against my forehead. And I want you to know that we're going to figure this out, you and me, because we have three more months and then the rest of our lives, and I’m not doing the rest of my life with someone who decides things about our family without me. And you’re not doing the rest of your life with someone who decides things about our family without you. That part goes both ways, I promise."

"You promise?"

"I do."

Slowly, the way he does everything that matters, he leans forward. The beskar catches the blue light in a slow-moving stripe as he lowers his head. You lift your chin to meet him, and the smooth cool curve of the helmet's brow comes to rest against your forehead. One hand stays on your belly and the other reaches up and cups the back of your neck under your hair, thumb settling against the small hollow behind your ear where he knows – because he’s learned you the way he learned the Crest, sound by sound – you like to be held.

You close your eyes.

His breath through the modulator is a soft, even rasp. The beskar between your foreheads is a small held boundary, and somehow, tonight, it doesn't feel like a wall – it feels like a promise he’s keeping, a thing he hasn’t asked you to be part of but hasn’t asked you to give up, either. He’s here. All of him he can give tonight, he’s giving. The parts of him that are yours are yours, and the parts that are the Creed's are the Creed's, and tonight, sitting here in the blue hum, that division doesn’t feel like a wound. It feels like the shape of the man you chose.

You breathe it in, your hand tightening on his over your belly.

The baby chooses that moment – because your baby has, apparently, a sense of theatre already – to give a slow luxurious roll under both your palms. Din's fingers twitch, he tilts his helmet down and his voice through the modulator goes softer than you’ve ever heard it, softer than the static should allow, softer than any machine ought to be able to make a voice.

"Su'cuy, ad'ika," he says. “Hello, little one.”

His mouth shapes the word behind the beskar, careful and unhurried, like he's been practicing this too.

"Buir and buir are here. We’re talking about you. About what to give you. It’s a long conversation that we’ll have many times. But don’t worry, you’ll know us both – know both our voices."

Buir and buir. Both parents. He says it out loud, puts you in the same word he uses for himself, and it lands in you like a small warm stone at the bottom of a well.

"Buir," you echo softly, trying the shape of it. "That's me too?"

"That’s you too." The visor lifts, finds your face again, and even through the black of it you can feel him looking. "If you want."

"I want."

His thumb strokes once across your belly whilst the other, at the back of your neck, curls into your hair.

Nothing is decided. Nothing is fixed. The conversation isn't over – there will be more of them, dozens, hundreds, a long quiet careful thread of them woven through the next three months and the rest of your lives, every one of them a small renegotiation between his Way and your stories and the small third person who will, eventually, have a Way and stories of her own to add to the pile.

But his forehead is against yours through the beskar, and his hand is on your belly and yours is on his, and he’s just called you buir through the vocoder with his voice cracked, and you have just called yourself the same. And somewhere between the two of you a third small heartbeat is doing its quiet competent work of becoming a person, untroubled by Creeds, untroubled by names, untroubled by anything except the warm dim sound of two voices it already knows, finally talking to each other instead of around.

"Stay like this a minute," you whisper.

"As long as you want, cyar'ika."

"A minute. And then another minute. And then… "

"And then another."

"Yes"

You don't move and neither does he. The beskar between your foreheads is warmed by the closeness of the man inside it. His breath through the modulator is a soft even rasp you match yours to, without meaning to, the way you’ve long since learned to match his. His hand is warm on your belly. His hand is warm on your neck. The baby is still.

Outside, the stars stretch on, blue and patient and uninterested in any of it, which is, somehow, exactly the right audience.