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You think something about you is broken.
It seems like the only rational explanation for the way your mind sometimes seems to collapse in on itself for seemingly no reason, even on pleasant days like today. The only way to explain the empty numbness that settles into your skull, the mental distance that you can’t seem to shake from your head, the lack of presence or self in your own skin.
You’d retreated to the cockpit while Din spent the evening removing and cleaning all his armor, a ritual that you knew would give you some time to hopefully shake off the haze blanketing your thoughts, maybe make your smiles seem less forced before he inevitably noticed your sudden shift.
It’s not that you don’t trust him with this, know he’s seen you like this before and been every bit as supportive and accepting as he always is. It’s more that you… don’t want to be a burden, don’t want to drag him down with you when you know you’ll be fine in a while.
So the cockpit had been as a good a place as any to find solitude, is where you find yourself now, your back meeting the cold metal wall next to the door where you sit on the ground (one of the chairs just didn’t feel right, you don’t know why, but when everything about your world felt wrong and sitting on the ground felt less wrong in the moment, and you didn’t have enough mental willpower to question it). You hadn’t even turned on the lights, content to just sit in the darkness, eyes fixed on the blur of hyperspace outside the viewport as your mind drifts aimlessly into that empty place your thoughts had carved out.
Some part of you expects the fog over your mind to gradually lift, but it never does, only seems to settle in and fester wherever it happens to reach, a weight solidifying in your chest, one that aches with every breath. It becomes a self-feeding spiral, one that slowly threatens to consume you, the numbness in your head buzzing with something that you might have recognized as dread if you’d had the mindfulness to actually address it.
Time passes like that, you’re not sure how much, but it does pass, and with that passage, nothing changes, some part of you whispering that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re broken, that you don’t really deserve the happiness you have anyways, that it’s all doomed to be taken from you eventually, that it was never yours to begin with.
The loneliness sinks into your skin like talons, crushes your lungs, and you try to let out a deep breath to dispel it, but it’s futile. It’s a vice pressing hard into your ribcage, one that refuses to release no matter how many times your attempt to steady your breaths, to pull them from the deepest parts of your chest that you just can’t seem to reach anymore. A steady discomfort, one that you know would be at least partly abated if you just talked to Din, let him hold you the way your body seems to be craving now, like it’ll ground you, drag you back into your own mind for a while. But you don’t know what words you would even say, leaving you at war with yourself, some distant desire to find relief in the press of Din’s body against yours just so you can feel whole again, at odds with the persistent guilt of dragging him into this.
The choice ends up being taken from you, perhaps for the better.
You hear him before you see him, the soft pad of bare feet on the metal rungs of the ladder. It’s the closest he ever comes to announcing his presence, the allowance of sound instead of the silence that usually covers his every move. Purposeful on his part, you know after so long of being around him, then a long moment before he appears in the open doorway, a shadow in the dark room, only the narrow beams of mass shadows catching in streaks of white across his helmet.
He sees you, there on the ground, and maybe you should have some vague awareness of how pathetic you must look, how dazed. But you don’t, only really managing to look back up at him, to watch the lights dance across the metal surrounding the black visor.
There’s a soft sound, some gentle hmph that comes out of his modulator as more of a low-frequency hum than anything before—
“Scoot forward,” he says, nudging you gently in the thigh with the tip of his toe. Your eyebrows furrow in confusion, but you comply, shifting your body off the wall and a foot or so forward.
You don’t expect him to step into the space now behind you, to sit down and settle himself there, his thighs bracketing your hips as his legs splay bent on either side of you, his arms wrapping snugly around your waist and gently tugging you back against him, his chest flush to your back, his arms not leaving their spot around you. You don’t expect it and yet…
You melt into the heat of his body almost immediately, something warm and content buzzing under the surface of your skin where he presses against you. It’s exactly how you’d imagined it would feel, some subtle relief settling into your bones, unspoken thanks rattling around inside your head for how well he knows you. Your brain still feels packed with sand, but the tension in the rest of your body starts to slowly drain out as the minutes tick by, your head tipping back to rest on his shoulder even as your eyes stay transfixed on the viewport ahead of you, the side of your head tapping against the hard metal of his helmet’s cheek.
You stay like that for a while, secure in his hold as your brain struggles to pull itself back together, the press of him on all sides firm but relaxed, impossibly gentle. You’ve known from nights shared in his cot that he’s practically a human furnace for how much body heat he puts off, and it’s moments like this that you’re eternally grateful for it, for the way his warmth seeps into your body, pushing back the cold numbness that had settled there.
One hand leaves your waist, and you slightly tilt your head away when you feel the slide of metal against your hair, and there’s a telltale hiss and a soft thud of metal being set down off to the side before his hand returns to its spot. Your eyes don’t shift their gaze, don’t feel a need to, and then there’s the brush of his breath against the hollow of your throat, the soft graze of his nose against your pulse before he buries his face against it, pressing a soft kiss into the sensitive skin and staying there.
Wispy hairs tickle your cheek, but you don’t mind them, not with the way Din’s so carefully wound himself around you, every point of contact a pinprick of light through the fog hanging over you. His breath is even and measured against your neck, and it doesn’t take much for you to tune into it, to find the cadence in it, to lose yourself in the steady rise and fall of his chest against your back and each quiet inhale and exhale against your skin. He’s solid against you, warm, grounding, a steady presence that your mind latches onto easily, without hesitation. You don’t even realize you’ve unintentionally synced your breathing to his, or maybe he to yours, until his breathing starts to deepen and elongate, dragging yours with it.
It’s some immeasurable amount of time later, just the blur of hyperspace and his controlled breaths and the press of him wholly encompassing you, when some errant thought brushes to the surface, one born of both relief and the same numbness it rises through.
It was ridiculous of you to try to hide from him, to not just seek this out in the first place.
The thought holds no menace, no darkness like the ones that got you here did, no sharp edges meant to carve at your insides or add to the weight lodged in your chest. It’s just simple fact, a relieved resignation, a promise to yourself to not try to hide it the next time this happens. A reminder that he knows every piece of you and chooses you even despite these moments, loves all of you and has told you as much before, evident in the back-and-forth trace of his thumbs against your stomach, the dark curls of his hair at the edge of your peripherals that you don’t turn and finally see for yourself. A trust so deep it sparks some ghost of feeling in the synapses of your brain, some distant reconnection, a gentle shock of cold water in the middle of a desert, enough to make you blink once, feel the first bit of the dredges weighing down your mind finally slough off, like a physical weight cascading off your shoulders.
Another deep breath, this one reaching the bottom of your lungs, the exhale finally clearing out the ache that had settled there. You find your whole body sagging back into Din with the relief of it, your eyes slipping closed.
“You back with me?” he murmurs into your skin, quiet and soft. You don’t open your eyes, humming a response.
“A little,” you say, the words reverberating around the silent cockpit, around the inside of your head. Your brain still feels wrong, hollow in a way that maybe feels a bit more like exhaustion now, but everywhere he touches you feels right, like comfort, warmth, safety, familiarity. You lean into it, letting your scattered and half-formed thoughts burrow into that feeling, find solace in it, in the way he holds you. “Let’s maybe stay like this for a while, though.”
“We can do that,” he says, nose pressing further into your neck, lips and breath warm against the skin there. His arms tighten around you the slightest bit, legs shifting so that he’s somehow pressed impossibly closer against you, like he’s trying to fit the disjointed pieces of yourself back together (and maybe he knows that’s exactly what he’s doing), blanketing himself around you and showing no signs of wanting to let go.
“For as long as you need, cyare.”