Chapter Text
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Oddly enough, his first instinct is not to kill, but to protect. She notices this right away. It is evident in the way he lifts the beskar gauntlet to her shoulder and, without missing a beat, pushes his body in front of hers, spinning the both of them in one fluid motion. The blaster shots fired at them still hit their target square, but they are now absorbed by the beskar plates at his back. It still must hurt, she thinks, being hit by so much light in such a dark place.
She doesn’t have much time to dwell on the matter, though. The Mandalorian angrily grunts and pushes the both of them to the ground and into cover. Her forehead collides with the stone floor beneath them, hard, as his armored body pins her to the ground.
“What did you do?” he snaps close to her ear, modulated voice tight even through the vocoder of the impenetrable silver helmet.
She grunts beneath the weight of the hard beskar. Anger flaring up inside, igniting like a match.
“I had it under control until you showed up, bounty hunter,” she snaps back, pushing against his chest plate in an attempt to at least see who’s shooting at them. His body doesn’t yield, of course, as blaster fire erupts all around them. He fires back from behind the flimsy cover the bench in front of them provides.
Loose strands of her hair stick to her forehead and she pushes them aside in annoyance, desperately wishing for her own blaster, when she finally catches a glimpse of their attackers. She feels the small hairs on the back of her neck lift: they’re imperial. Stormtroopers. She’s outnumbered. Outgunned. Her mind starts spinning with the presence of the Empire. Panic bubbles up from deep within, something dark, bottomless, flickers at the edges of her vision, of her mind. What are they doing here? How did they find her?
Amidst the commotion and the blaster fire, the bounty hunter’s gloved hand curls around her upper arm, pulling her to her feet again. She kicks against one of the tables in front of them, sends bottles and shattered glass flying their attackers’ way.
It’s not nearly enough and she twists and turns in the Mandalorian’s relentless grip as he drags her along with him, towards the back door, hand around her biceps tight like a vise.
“Stop fighting me,” he hisses in-between blaster shots. But fighting is all she’s ever known. She’ll go down kicking and screaming, reaching out to all of them in blind fury and unimaginable terror. She feels all of it, suddenly, without her conscious doing or her intend. All the things surrounding her. The stormtroopers and their fear, their greed and their dread. The flares of energy cutting through the room, searing everything in their way. The cold smooth beskar of the Mandalorian's armor and the profound sadness of the man beneath it. She sends all of it flying with a scream, everything spinning out of control.
The anger drains from her body as suddenly as it ignited. She stumbles to the ground, her vision blurring around the edges.
The last thing she sees before it fades out altogether is the Mandalorian, tilting his head curiously, as he towers above her.
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