Chapter Text
Having Ris on the Crest with me was something I never anticipated being so… warm. That was the only word I could have used. She brought a warmth to the ship that was hard to describe. She didn’t fill the hole that the kid left, but she kept me from thinking about him too much. There was always something new with Ris. She always needed to say something or bother me in another way. I couldn’t get three hour’s peace with her banging around the ship.
But she hadn’t bothered me for several hours, and I started to get worried. Not about her, but about what she could be messing up down below. I didn’t want to have to repair the carbonite system again this year. It was an expensive repair and only available in certain parts of the galaxy. I didn’t have the credits for that.
I stood and jumped down into the hold where Ris was sitting by a wall.
All the lights went out. Ris muttered a curse under her breath. I wasn’t exactly surprised at the lighting outage; I figured she would do something like this eventually. She kept messing with the wires in the hold. Even I didn’t know what they all did, yet she insisted on messing with them.
Looking up the ladder, I could see the warp-speed stars lighting up the cockpit, but there was no light down in the hold.
I sighed and, walking to where I knew Ris was sitting fixing wires, turned on the light on my helmet.
She jumped at the sudden light, and said, “Kriff, Mando, don’t scare me like that. You might take the Razor Crest out of commission.” I could tell she was trying to joke, and I smiled a little.
“What were you doing?” I asked. She had wires tangled all over her arms, and I figured that she had accidentally pulled one to make the lights go out. She didn’t realize how loud and bothersome she was sometimes; it was endearing.
She huffed and responded, “Untangling these wires. They were a mess.”
I turned my head, and as I did, accidentally shone the light in her face. She blinked and turned away, and I immediately felt bad. I looked away, slightly embarrassed, and a discarded wire cover on the floor caught my eye. It was perfectly smooth. I knew that this particular wire cover had been bent to the point that Peli Motto had left it be when she last fixed the ship because she didn’t think she would be able to fix it.
But Ris… she’d done it.
“You fixed this?”
Ris furrowed her brow slightly. “Well, yeah. It’s not like anyone else was doing it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She had seen something that didn’t need to be done but would benefit the ship and just did it. I didn’t realize that having that bent wire cover had been bothering me, but a weight lifted from my shoulders. Ris helped me and likely didn’t realize it.
I looked back to her, making sure to keep my light out of her eyes. “Thank you,” I said sincerely.
Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted in… shock? But she blinked once and said, “You’re welcome.” Turning back to the wires, she continued to untangle them.
I turned the light to the wires and asked, “Can you see?”
“Well enough,” was the short reply, and she kept working, deftly twisting wire after wire around the others. I watched as her nimble fingers never paused, leaping from place to place.
After a while, I sat down on the floor behind her, my legs aching from crouching for so long. I moved slightly closer to her so that my light was illuminating the wires better.
My heart rate increased, my pulse pounding painfully in my throat. I took slow, deep breaths to steady it, but nothing helped. Why did I feel like this? I wasn’t in danger, nor was she. Yet, my stomach was tight, my heart was racing, and I couldn’t think straight.
Ris’ hands were shaking, so I figured that it might just be the dark affecting us both. But I wasn’t afraid of it, and neither was she, I was sure. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. It was admirable.
It dawned on me that she likely hadn’t eaten anything since she came down here. That would explain her shaking. I didn’t want her to forget to eat.
Speaking quietly to not alarm her with how close I was, I asked, “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”
Her shoulders tensed, and I worried that I had startled her anyway. But she replied, “I don’t know,” in a steady voice, so I responded, “Then hurry up with the lights so you can get some food. Your hands are shaking too much for you to do anything right now.”
Her shoulders relaxed, and she went back to work, shaking slightly harder, I thought. I noticed that the back of her neck was slightly red, the shade darkening by the second. I realized that I was staring at her freckled skin, and when I tried to look elsewhere, I couldn’t.
I was finally able to tear my eyes away from her neck, feeling strange, and I noticed that a loose wire was hanging in her way that she was unable to move.
Pushing away my discomfort at my inability to look away from her, I shifted and leaned forward to grab the troublesome wire, holding it out of her way.
She froze, and I realized that I was all but embracing her. My eyes widened, and I raised my eyebrows. My heart continued to beat hard and fast at the realization, and I couldn’t shake the fact that her hair was right beneath my helmet. I realized that I had never seen her without my tinted visor. I wondered what she would look like without the filter.
No, I couldn’t just take off my helmet. The Creed forbade it. Those thoughts… I must have been hungry as well. The thoughts couldn’t possibly be because I was sitting so close to Ris in the dark.
She was frozen, and I made sure my light was shining on as much of the panel as I could so she could keep working. With a trembling hand, she plugged in the missing wire and the lights around us flickered to life with a soft electronic hum.
I let go of the stray wire and quickly stood. “I’ll… be back with some soup,” I said, needing to get up to the cockpit to clear my head. Maybe I just needed to get away from Ris.
I climbed the ladder two steps at a time. I was too shaken to do much, just grab some soup and rehydrate it in the storage room. Usually, I just made one for her, eating mine alone in the privacy of the cockpit, but I wanted to spend a little more time with her. She was a lively presence to be around. Anyone would want to spend more time with her, not just me.
I stepped on the top rung of the ladder, and Ris came running to get her bowl from me. I worried for a moment that she wouldn’t want me to stay. However, the slight, ever-present smile on her lips indicated otherwise.
I handed her a bowl, then climbed down the ladder carefully. She sat on a storage box; I sat on the one next to her. She took a sip of the soup, turned slightly away from me.
I lifted my helmet slightly to drink my soup. My vision was incredibly limited as the visor rose above my eye level, so I silently took off my helmet all the way, careful to watch Ris to make sure she wouldn’t turn and look at me. She was looking straight ahead, and as I watched, she took another sip of her soup, smile widening.
I realized that I was looking at Ris for the first time, no visor in the way. I found myself staring again at her, so I quickly finished my soup. I slid my helmet back on, and in the safety of its privacy, I couldn’t help myself from staring at her face as she turned to me, still sipping her soup. Her eyes, her mouth, her freckles… all were things I was unable to draw my eyes from. What was wrong with me?
Her eyes flicked over my armor, and she asked, “What’s your signet?”
It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to me, and I glanced dumbly down at my pauldron.
“It’s a Mudhorn,” I said, my automatic neutral tone in my voice.
She tilted her head and a short lock of hair fell onto her forehead. I resisted the urge to reach forward and brush it away. Ris turned to face me fully, and I tried to even my breathing as she stared at me curiously, clearing wanting to hear about the Mudhorn.
I put down my soup bowl, desperately buying time for my racing heart to calm. It was becoming frustrating at this point. I turned to face her, mirroring her stance.
“You’re not going to stop asking until you hear the story, aren’t you?” I asked, and her fake-innocent smile made the knot in my stomach tighten.
I shook my head. No, it couldn’t possibly be Ris causing my heart to beat so fast and my stomach to feel so odd. But as I told Ris the story of finding the kid, as she raised her eyebrows and asked questions about the kid, I found myself becoming relaxed because of her presence.
When she said, “I’m sorry for not saving him from the Moff’s experiments,” I was drawn out of my distracted thoughts of her eyes.
“You were with him?” I asked. I hadn’t uttered a word about the kid since that Jedi who was practically just a boy had taken him away.
Ris swallowed, nervous. “I was hiding in the vents, remember? I wanted to help him, but—”
“You would have been killed.” I realized that I cared about Ris. The thought of her death was painful, sending a stabbing pain through my heart. To have a galaxy without her smile seemed impossible. In another attempt to keep my thoughts off of her, I asked, “What experiments did he do on the kid?”
As she spoke, I stared into her eyes. For a moment, I wished she could see mine.
She finished talking, and I had no words for a moment. Finally, I said, “After we get more credits for fuel, we’re going after Bo-Katan.” Not only would I be able to wring the Moff’s neck for what he did to the kid, but it meant that maybe Ris would stay on the Crest for a while longer.
“Agreed,” she said, and I looked up at her. Her cheeks turned red, and she stumbled over her words, explaining that the kid must have known she was there. She was cute when she blushed.
“He knew what the Jedi was before he was even on the ship,” I said quickly, trying and failing to ignore what I had just thought. “It’s possible he knew you were there.”
Ris set her face in a determined expression. She promised, “I promise I’ll stick with you until Moff Gideon gets what he deserves for doing that to The Child, Mando.”
“Din.” The word was out of my mouth before I thought about it.
“What?” Ris’ eyebrows raised, and I looked away.
“My name. Din Djarin.” The words felt foreign leaving my mouth. I hadn’t said the names in so long that they didn’t feel like they were mine anymore. “You can stop calling me Mando.” I couldn’t bear to hear her call me what everyone else called me anymore. She was different. She cared about me. I cared about her.
I looked back to her as she said, “Alright then, Din.” And just like that, the name was sweet and familiar, transformed just by the way she said it. “I vow to help you give Moff Gideon what’s coming to him,” she finished.
My heart thumped in my throat as I realized that she was choosing to stay with me. “Good.” I wanted her to stay. I wanted us to be more than this.
I blinked. I… wanted to be more than friends with Ris. My first friend since I had left the tribe, and I had fallen for her charm and sparkling personality. And yet, I doubted that I stood a chance. I was a Mandalorian and an ex-bounty hunter. I was calluses and hard words. She was sunshine and fresh air. There was no way she would ever return my feelings for her.
Dank farrik. I was in over my head, and yet I was happy to drown.