Work Text:
You’re sore.
Hours spent contorted between the panels of the ship’s hull as you worked away at rerouting some faulty coolant channels, and now that you’re done and free, you don’t think your body is ever going to be the same again. The awkward position you spent the entire day in has left your muscles hurting in ways they don’t normally hurt, and your back feels somewhere between numb and like it has a giant knot twisted up in it. Never mind the assorted bruises and scratches you’re sure you’ll find tomorrow morning, with how often your hip and arms had banged against every metallic ridge that seemed to exist in the small crawlspace and how many times the hydrospanner slipped and magically caught the exposed skin of your wrist just below where your work gloves protected you.
You don’t even have the willpower to take a quick pass through the sonic, instead stumbling over to your cot on the floor of the hull with heavy feet and collapsing as ungracefully as possible on it. A groan rumbles through your chest at the spike of ache-y pain that lances through your body at the muted impact, your face smushed uncomfortably into your pillow and limbs skewed awkwardly, but you don’t have the energy to move them.
You’re the most kriffing sore you think you’ve ever been in your entire life, and with that thought comes the realization that, no matter how exhausted you are, sleep is most likely not going to come easy tonight through the discomfort.
Which sucks… so hard.
You groan again, so caught up in your discomfort that you barely catch Din’s snort of amusement from the other end of the hull, the sound crackling through his helmet’s modulator.
“Rough day?” he asks, and a short grunt of a response is the best you can seem to manage at the moment.
You hadn’t seen much of each other today. You’d woken up in your shared cot alone, with him already up in the cockpit navigating the Crest through less-travelled hyperlanes. By the time he’d gotten you all settled into a comfortable travel path, you’d already wedged yourself into the wall for the day. The one or two times you’d wiggled yourself out to get different tools or equipment, you’d found him sitting on a crate not too far away, deep in focus as he cleaned his armor and weapons, a day-long task for him when he really set himself on it. But aside from that, it had been a quiet day, even the kid seeming to spend much of it napping.
“I feel like I got run over by a blurrg,” you mumble into your pillow, and you’re sure your words are completely muffled, but you can’t find it in yourself to care. Moving just isn’t in the cards, and you’ve accepted that.
That is, until you hear the static of his chuckle again, and you muster enough strength to turn your head to the side to glare at him from across the room. The movement was in vain, however, because he’s still looking down at the blaster (the IB-94, you think) in his bare hands, greased cloth meticulously working through all the different grooves and notches on the weapon. You watch him in profile for a moment, the hard edges of the armor gone and leaving him soft and still impossibly broad in his flightsuit as he leans over in his work, sleeves rolled up enough for you to see the flex of tendons across his wrist as he scrubs the cloth through a tight channel, the helmet refracting the low ambient light of the space.
Watching him is a minor distraction for the aches and pains radiating through your body, one that, unfortunately, you don’t get to indulge in for long. He always seems to know when your eyes are on him, and this time is no different, his hands stilling and helmet cocking until the visor is pointed vaguely in your direction, an ambiguous eye contact that you hold for a long moment before turning your face back into the pillow with another disgruntled groan.
There’s a long minute of quiet, one where you lie there uncomfortably debating exactly how much spotchka you think it would take to numb your body enough for you to sleep. The thought is interrupted by the practiced click-click-schlick of Din reassembling the cleaned blaster, followed shortly by a few other sounds you can’t quite identify and then the near-silent pad of his steps coming towards you. You listen intently as his boots stop directly next to you, the pause followed by the soft shuffle of him settling himself on the ground next to your cot with a soft grunt.
Momentarily confused, you intend to turn your head to look up at him, but then there’s a featherlight touch on your back, the suddenness of it enough to make you flinch before your brain catches up and supplies that it’s just Din. The flinch doesn’t deter him, his fingers travelling a smooth path up your spine, the slight pressure through your shirt nice, nice enough that you feel your whole body sag into the mattress the slightest bit.
Until he hits that particularly nasty-feeling knot in your lower back, and you can’t stop the way your muscles tense back up in pain, his fingers pausing in their tracks at the movement.
“You really did a number on yourself,” he says, his hand resuming its previous motion, gently skimming past the worst spot and continuing its path up, pressing over the notch at the base of your neck before switching directions and travelling back down.
“Your ship did a number on me,” you grumble into your pillow, though there’s no venom in it, not when his hand is travelling back down your back, dancing past the painful spot as he reaches the base of your spine and then switches directions again, settling into a repetitive motion up and down that has you all but melting into the firm mattress under you as if it was the softest bed imported from Coruscant. He hums in agreement, the sound reverberating more through his chest than through the tinge of the modulator, the noise short as it dissipates into the spacious hull. His hand keeps up its path up and down your spine, a slow rhythm that your mind keys into and settles on as you slowly will yourself to relax into the bed.
You’re not sure exactly how much time passes. At some point, his soft touches gain a bit of pressure, his thumb and knuckles gently pressing into your stiff muscles in slow, circular motions that would sit precariously on the edge of being painful were it not for the relief it brings to your sore body. Each hard press of his fingers as he works up and down the planes of your back loosens something, makes the tension you hadn’t realized your body was holding slowly dissipate until you’re nothing but putty in his hands, half your mind caught in the repetitive, soothing motions as he works you through the discomfort and the other half drifting into some far-away, hazy state that makes each moment blur into the next. Even when he makes his way to the particularly bad knot in your lower back, he works meticulously at it, fingers pressing and smoothing carefully so as to not hurt you, the gradual relief of it dragging a content sigh from the depths of your lungs. The concentration he seems to be giving the entire thing vaguely reminds you of the way he cleans his weaponry and armor, careful and reverent, each motion purposeful and calculated in the way he executes it, his hands somehow knowing the exact position to be in and exact amount of pressure to apply to draw each relaxed sigh from you.
By the time he’s done, you’re so absolutely blissed out and pliant that you barely notice his hand moving away from your back, your head humming in a soft, content fuzz, pressed up against the border of sleep. You feel boneless, like he somehow managed to massage your stiff muscles so loose that your bones turned to mush along with them. Everything feels soft and hazy, your back tingling comfortably with the phantom pressure of his fingers.
“Better?” he asks, and you’re still so lost in that lazy haze in your head that you don’t even think to respond, can’t even figure out what response you’d give even if you could. The soft sensation of his fingers threading up through your hair brings you back the slightest bit, his blunt nails running gently along your scalp. “You still awake?”
Words are still eluding you, so you just hum in response, enough of an affirmative to draw an affectionate snort from him. Then there’s a quiet hiss, a familiar sound that means he’s disengaged and lifted the helmet, and you feel the faint press of his lips to the back of your head, his fingers still tangled up in your hair.
“I need to go set up the flightpath for the night,” he says, voice smooth and warm now that it’s not being choked by the modulator. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes to join you, alright?” You manage to hum another agreement, his fingers drawing up one more time through your hair before slipping out, and then there’s a soft shuffling sound as he pushes himself up off the ground and departs.
It doesn’t take him long. Or, maybe it does, but you’re drifting so gently in and out of the waking world that you don’t really notice the slight lurch of the Crest exiting and then re-entering hyperspace, or the soft click of all the lights in the hull flicking off. All you know is that some unknown amount of time later, the blissful empty space that your mind has settled into is momentarily interrupted by the shifting of your cot under his weight as he slides in next to you. You don’t care to hide the perturbed grunt that rumbles in your throat, but then you’re reaching blindly for him, your face still resolutely pressed into the pillow. His hand finds your wrist and he tugs you over gently with a quiet, unmodulated “c’mere, cyare”, and you have enough sense to oblige and let him guide you into his hold. Your head finds its place on his shoulder, your nose pressed into that space between his neck and collarbone, your leg slotting between his as you situate yourself partially on top of him, your arm slipping around his waist and his own wrapping around to rest between your shoulder blades, rubbing soft circles there.
He’s warm, comfortable, and you find yourself burrowing into it, getting lost in it in a similar way to when his hands kneaded the pain out of your sore back, your whole body melting and forming itself to his so that every place you touch feels blurred, soft around the edges.
Something leaves your lips, but you can’t quite recall what. Maybe some half-coherent thanks, or a content grunt, or a relieved sigh, you’re not entirely sure. But he must make more sense out of it than you can, because you barely hear a soft snort of air through his nose before he’s pressing his face into your hair, kissing the top of your head again.
You barely hear him telling you to sleep, his hand on your back tracing slow, consistent circles, lulling you off, and it’s not too long later that you’re completely gone.