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There's a bar, once.
She's half-cut already when he stops in front of her table, her last round still slow-burning its way through the memory of her people turning their backs as she'd left, and it takes her a shameful number of seconds to realise he's not some kriffing hallucination.
"Din Djarin," she says flatly, her eyes flicking over the darksaber on his hip before she forces herself to look up.
He inclines his head. "You gonna shoot me?"
Her thumb rubs against the edge of her blaster's trigger guard. "You gonna sit down?"
He shouldn't though. And she should. But --
A serving droid buzzes over with a fresh jug of the local brew and another cup.
Din sits.
He nurses his cup while she drinks hers, his fingers laced around the earthenware, and the silence is unexpected but not exactly unwelcome. She considers putting her blaster away.
"Nice place," he says.
She snorts. It's spaceport adjacent, with cheap drink and unfamiliar faces, and if she's lucky she'll be drunk enough by the time the next fight starts that she won't feel the bruises she's going to get until morning at the earliest. Nice isn't the first word she'd choose.
He looks around. "Where's --"
Leaning over, she snatches up his cup, cutting him off. "Don't."
He watches her drain his drink, and she can't see his face but she can imagine the look he's giving her, and she's about half a second from lashing out and showing him she doesn't need to possess the darksaber in order to cut him -- so how's the kid doing? oh, that's right, he left you -- when Din reaches over and takes the cup back.
He doesn't keep it though, instead refilling it silently and setting it in front of her, and stars damnit if her eyes don't start to tear up like she's just been gassed.
Holstering her blaster, she laces her fingers around the cup like he had, and says nothing.
Din doesn't leave, despite her projected indifference, but he does drink eventually, his helmet tilted up just enough. Though she can't really make out any details, the brief glimpse she has of his throat, of the line of his jaw, lingers in her thoughts until she desperately wants to know what it would be like to taste the skin there.
He took his helmet off for the kid. Why shouldn't she wonder if he would do it for her too?
Din reseals his helmet before looking over and meeting her gaze steadily.
She has one or three too many and drifts, and the next thing she knows Din is sitting beside her. His shoulder is solid beneath her cheek, his breathing slow and steady, and she'd think him asleep too but when a Bothan bumps their table as they walk past she feels the minute shift in his muscles as he follows their progress and she knows he's not.
Between them, the darksaber presses against her thigh.
She closes her eyes again.
The next time she wakes she's alone and head sore in the morning light, and one of those hurts more than the other but she'll be damned before she works out which one.
Settling her tab, she heads out and she doesn't expect to see him again but when she gets to the spaceport, there he is.
"Figured you'd be gone already," she says.
He nods. "I'm going." The moment stretches out between them, too long. "I have a job. For information on my covert." He tilts his head. "You could join me if --"
She is a bounty hunter no more than she is a leader. "I could not." She watches him adjust his stance and is suddenly back in that kriffing bar, his body too close to hers, his shoulder under her cheek. She lifts her chin. "I'm needed on Kalevala."
It's a lie, but -- and this she knows clearly -- so would be going with him. She cannot be that person. Not for him and not for anyone.
Not anymore.
He rocks forward like he's about to come in closer, and she steps back before she can stop herself.
Covering, she nods once, a sharp farewell. "Din Djarin."
He echoes her a beat too slowly, "Bo-Katan Kryze."
When she walks away -- when he lets her, just like her fleet did -- it cuts deeper than she thought it would.
She doesn't look back.
The End
