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The attack took place on a sickly looking planet. It was so colorless and slow-moving that it reminded you of the rare albino bearsloths that you had met once in one of the outer rim territories. All it was missing were those red, beady eyes. It made you slightly dizzy just to look at the landscape. Despite the blistering heat surrounding you, you were almost expecting it to start snowing with how the silence enveloped everything and how dark the clouds over the horizon were. You were only here for a chance to stretch your legs and change the oxygen filters in the Razor Crest, that’s what Mando had told you before you left.
With the filters replaced, you led Mando to the starchy market not too far from where you landed. Residents wearing threadbare and sun faded clothing filled the market square. Most of them had a pair of goggles atop their head to fend off the flying sand of the desert. On the whole, they were interspersed throughout the wares, trying not to be caught looking at the Mandalorian. Except for one resident.
He followed Mando and yourself with shifting eyes that seemed to absorb light from where you stood. You tugged on Mando’s cape gently and his visor swiveled around to meet your gaze, then followed where you were staring. He stood a little taller and squared his shoulders, but after a moment of careful evaluation, he told you not to worry about it.
Shaking off your nerves, you meandered around the stalls with Mando listening patiently to your thoughts on the various items lining the street. It was refreshing to have a few moments just to breathe air that wasn’t recycled over several weeks. Even Mando found a few things he was interested in to hold.
The sudden ping of the blaster bolt startled you out of your good mood. There must have been several enemies surrounding you, because blaster fire was incoming from all directions. As bolts of energy ricocheted off the Mandalorian’s armor, you ran for cover behind the grit-filled fruit and vegetable stands in the marketplace. It was a whirlwind of commotion before you could recognize who the gunmen were, but as was the usual strategy, it was your job to take out the smaller players of the ambush while Mando handled the worst one.
The fight wasn’t exceptionally difficult, despite being caught off guard, but the muscles in your legs burned at the use anyway. The clash of armor and stumbling of feet filled your ears as you took out yet another shooter. With an extra moment to breathe, you checked on your partner.
Like the start of a snowstorm, snowflakes gaining momentum slowly and then snowballing, his opponent had gotten the upper hand. Armed with only a knife, his strategy seemed to be to tire Mando out. Mando would move on the offensive and his spear would just barely graze the scales on the reptile’s snout before he would be out of reach again, round and round the market square.
The giant lizard-alien waited until Mando had most of his weight balanced on his back foot before running and slamming his shoulder into his abdomen. Mando landed heavily on his back, movements slowing as he had the wind knocked out of him. The reptile tilted his head back, basking in the feeling that toppling the fearsome Mandalorian gave him. He delivered Mando a stomp on the ribs where his chestplate and back piece left him uncovered. You flinched, imagining how bad the traction spikes on the sole of the lizard’s boot would hurt.
Surely, Mando would have a fractured rib at least, you thought. Even so, he’d been through much worse before and he would turn the tables again. Before you could help Mando get back on his feet, a blaster bolt singed the sleeve of your shirt and you dodged out of sight.
After ticking another attacker off the list, you spun around to see an additional four goons come out of the woodwork. You glanced over, hoping that Mando was faring better, to see that your armored friend was still pinned on the ground, clamoring for purchase on the lizard’s boot. The lizard pulled him up by the sides of his chestplate and slammed his head into the hard-packed sand.
Mando had taken some hard hits to the dome may times in the past, but he seemed a little dazed. With a furrowed brow and apprehension trickling into your heart, you waited for the explosion of Mando’s anger to come back in retaliation.
Mando was victorious in every fight, always, even the ones where he was injured. His armor was able to take most of the hits, sure, but he was strong enough underneath without any help from the metal plates. It was why you never felt fear whenever you felt his warm presence taking up space behind you; always scanning the crowd, using his height to seek out the danger, prepared to strike at any moment if needed. But the minuscule amounts of extra time between swings of his fists began to lengthen, and in your gut, you knew that something was wrong. His attacks had lost all their usual ferocity.
His reaction—a grunt of pain—was what broke through what seemed like the cakewalk this fight was for the lizard. Before you could intervene, a scalding flash of fury came through in his eyes, and he stabbed Mando in the vulnerable part of his flesh where his boot had been previously. Savoring the erratic jerk Mando gave, he twisted the wide, curved knife, hard.
You were thankful that his helmet masked the way his voice would have truly sounded—selfish as it was—but the strangled cry that came from Mando’s vocoder would haunt you forever. You never wanted to hear something so miserable ever again.
Lightsaber in hand, you let your ice-cold fear seize your body as you charged at the reptilian monster standing over Mando. You weren’t able to knock him away from your companion without him removing the knife. You prayed he wouldn’t bleed out while you handled the assailant. Dodging the lizard and the blaster fire at once was a pain in the ass, but it was much preferable to Mando’s situation. With a sick twist of your gut, you sliced clean through your attacker’s arm, stupefying him as he stared at his missing hand.
You stared in horror at him. The part of your brain that cracks jokes tried to make light of the situation and ease the weight on your lungs, He’s a reptile—he’ll be able to grow that limb back, right? It was terrible timing for a terrible joke, something that hardly registered in your mind as you focused on more pressing issues. The sound of the world came back into focus and Mando writhing in pain fell on your ears. You started to close the distance between you and the reptile, more than happy to demonstrate that a missing limb was too easy of a punishment for what he did.
He launched at you, tackling you to the ground and slamming your head into the compacted dust of the main street just like he did Mando. Static exploded across your vision. With his one hand, he let go of your hair and scrambled to steal the lightsaber hilt from your loosening grip. The fear of losing your lightsaber (representative of your life, as your instructor had ingrained into you) flared up in your stomach, like an instinct that was thousands of years old, as you pushed him off of you and ended your scuffle with a swipe of the saber through his abdomen. Without waiting to see the pathetic life drain from his eyes, you tumbled over your feet in your pursuit of your partner.
He was still on the ground floundering in a puddle of his own blood. The man that you knew took great care of his armor and flight suit, hoping to pay homage to the reverence his people had for beskar, which is part of the reason it shook you so severely to see his crimson blood dripping down the front of his chestplate. The stark difference in color of his blood on the white sands was nothing compared to the stillness his body had taken on in just seconds. Mando was never one to waste energy if he didn’t need to, but this was unnatural. You couldn’t see the rise and fall of his chest anymore.
You couldn’t wait any longer. Using the burn of adrenaline coursing through your veins, you hauled him back away from the blaster fire and into an abandoned newsstand.
Even before you set him down, he was murmuring your name lowly and saying “No,” over and over. His range of movement for his head was limited, but he continued to shake his head sluggishly. He knocked over a couple racks of magazines as he slumped down against the cabinets to hide from the gunfire.
He was trying to enunciate his words, but you struggled to understand his voice through his labored breaths and modulator. The blaster fire outside the door still roared in your ears. If you hadn’t known him so well, you might have confused his order for a grunt of pain. What he actually said was much worse.
“Go.”
His command cut through the noise in your head like a machete in a cornfield. You stared at him for a moment, reeling from the next steps your mind supplied you against your will; what it would look like if you really did leave him here on this stupid, chalky planet.
You almost let the fear and anger you felt color your words. Your first thought was to tell him to go fuck himself for even suggesting that you should leave him here, but… you held your tongue. Your nostrils flared. You thought that was a little too harsh for a dying man. Especially one that had seemed so invincible in all the time you had known him. One that had taken care of you every step of the way. He must be just as shaken up as you are at the wound in his side.
He gripped your wrist so tightly that it pinched the nerve under your skin, trying to pull your attention away from his wound. “I’m serious. Right now. Leave me.”
For a split second, you caught a glimpse of the man in front of you as he was when you met him for the very first time. Uncompromising. Cold. Eerily still in his movements. The memory of that day snuck up on you and you felt around in your heart, desperately trying to remember what it felt like to have so much emotional distance between the two of you then. You wanted to replicate it—to be able to think rationally before you lost him forever, but it was impossible. You cared too much for him. He was stoic and courageous and honorable right until the very end. A true testament to the reputation of the Mandalorian kind.
You felt a little slimy using his Mandalorian heritage to get him to do something, but if he had a problem with it, he could bring it up to you on the Crest when his blood wasn’t pouring all over your hands. “For fuck’s sake, Mando. You’re a fucking Mandalorian warrior, ‘been through much worse than this.” You didn’t know if that was true, but you were casting out lifelines haphazardly for him to grab onto. Whatever worked to instill some will to keep fighting in his pain-addled brain was good enough.
“The men, outside the door-” His helmet jerked sideways to indicate where the danger was coming from. “You need to move,” he said and took a shuddering breath. “Go.”
You ignored him. You thought back to how Grogu had been able to heal Greef Karga on Nevarro when he’d been attacked by those winged reptavians. A stunt like that could jeopardize your chances of making it back to the ship, but Mando was literally dying in front of you. You had to give it a shot. You couldn’t live with yourself otherwise. Something in the way you moved must have given Mando a clue as to what you were thinking, because he tried to capture your hands.
You reached to pull off his armor, preparing your muscles to support his heavy chestplate. Faster than you could blink, Mando lifted his hand and you heard the unmistakable clicks of the gun casing settling and the safety turned off. His blaster was leveled right between your eyes.
Panic flared in your chest and flashed the white hot feeling of desperation throughout your lungs like an atom bomb. His attempt at intimidation was downright insulting. You pointed your finger at him in sight of his visor. “You are not gonna fucking shoot me,” you huff incredulously. Mando would never hurt you, not in a million years. Still… you couldn’t help but shift your eyes to and from the end of the blaster.
His voice caught several times in pain underneath his helmet before he was done speaking, but you heard zero hesitation behind his delivery. “Leave, r-right now. Leave.. or I’ll kill you.” He inched away from you pathetically.
In your hysteria, his sentence gripped your heart in a stranglehold and made you laugh loudly. It didn’t even sound like your own voice. Moving closer to him again, you growled in response, “I’m gonna kill you. Shut the fuck up.”
Hoping to settle his nerves, you add, “I’m not touching your helmet either, so you can cut the fucking dramatics.” You spotted the tremor that ran through his fingers. Whether he was second guessing the fact that he was holding you at gunpoint or at the feather light touch of your hands on his ribs, you weren’t sure, but it did nothing to reassure you for what you were about to do.
You lifted the chestplate off and peeled the blood-soaked fabric off of his torso. The color of his skin was ashen. It only fed the flames of panic when you noticed that his skin was almost as void of pigment as the sand underneath him. You were able to withhold your gasp, but you knew Mando was watching your face. He definitely saw the deep breath in you had taken at the sight of his wound. Ever vigilant, he twitched at the rise in blaster fire trying to clip you from an angle outside. Your eyes jumped to his Adam’s apple as he swallowed thickly and his heavy breathing crackled through his modulator.
The waves of frustration and pain that released from behind his armor consumed your brain like a cluster headache. You shoved the onslaught of emotions he was feeling back into your own mind and compartmentalized them. You could examine these fragments of his existence later.
Even during normal times, you did not appreciate the lack of information he gave you regarding the way he felt, but right now, the spaces that stretched between his sentences felt like torture. That damn black visor still revealed nothing of what Mando was thinking. Unable to see his eyes, you worried that his consciousness was slipping already, until he spoke again. His voice was weaker and that scared you more than the blaster. Even with his armor removed, he attempted to reason with you as a last ditch effort to get you to leave. “Don’t trade your life for mine.”
“I’m not,” You almost interrupted him, your voice tight. You surveyed the wound festering under his ribs. As lightly as you could, you added, “You should learn to trust me more.” Stealing glances at the door, you knew that your time was running out, but you had to fix Mando first.
His voice sounded out again. “You’ll be okay.”
That sentence finally got to you. For once in your life, you wished he would stop fucking talking to you. “No. No,” you forced out through clenched teeth. Your voice shook, and you almost choked on the tears that welled up so easily. “No, I won’t be. Don’t do that.” His words were threatening to destroy your whole plan to save him. Now, you were speaking purely to keep yourself from completely breaking down. “I need you. I need you with me, Din. You can’t leave me, okay?”
“You can still get out,” he was gasping for air, his voice barely audible anymore. “I can- I’ll hold them off.” While you continued to shake your head, he added, “I swear.” He had since moved the blaster away from you and towards the door. His feelings started to change from fear to acceptance, and that’s when your fortitude cracked clean down the middle. Did he seriously think you were worried about his ability to hold off the rest of the attackers?!
Just when you thought he couldn’t possibly provoke you any further, the modulator on his helmet picked up the quietest sentence. “Please… please.” His head sunk down to his chest.
Your anger won out this time, and you thumped him against the cabinets to shake some goddamn sense into him. “Stop it!” You growled in his face. You really could kill him. You could kill him and crush the harrowing vulnerability of your devotion you’ve entrusted him with yourself—like a hummingbird in your hand. At least then, it would be over. How dare he?
His free hand blindly felt around for yours and once he had it in his grip, he squeezed hard enough to break bone, his knuckles whitening. It felt like he was trying to say goodbye and you had never hated his guts more. His heartbeat stuttered through the leather of his gloves. You were grateful it only served to deepen your determination.
The first thing you needed to do was to stop the blood loss. In your task to cut his cape off, your hands slipped off your pocketknife several times. You tried to pack the wound at least until the blood slowed down so you could have the visibility to Force Heal. It took a minute or two of restless waiting, but the rush of blood slowed down.
“You’re doing good. You’re doing good, Din. Just focus. Stay with me here.”
When he didn’t respond immediately, you couldn’t keep your response from sounding shrill. “...I can’t tell how you are because of your helmet. Let me know.”
Without your hand to squeeze, he nodded his head almost imperceptibly to signify that he was still listening. His voice was even more strained than before when he croaked out his next sentence. “It doesn’t feel good.”
The restraint it took to keep yourself from breaking down right then and there again almost abandoned you, but if you couldn’t control yourself, neither of you would make it out of this alive. You were so close. You took a deep breath in, tried to push down the bile that rose in your throat at the smell of his blood on your hands and pushed through. “I’m sorry. I know. It’s almost over, okay?”
He nodded again. You could tell that his mind was far away from this situation, but you were glad he hadn’t passed out yet. But, by the way his helmet slowly swung back and forth like the sweeping beam of a lighthouse, you thought that he must be close to falling asleep. You had to hurry up.
Healing Din with the Force was a Herculean task. You focused on transferring some of your energy to him through your hands. You didn’t know exactly how it was done—you never had the proper training for anything relating to the Force. However, you tried to envision yourself bringing the cells of his skin together and merging them to create scar tissue underneath the surface and up to the top.
You held onto the idea that you could finally repay him for all of the ways he’s saved your life, big or small, to motivate you further. But, it was literally taking pieces of you away, sapping the energy from your very soul and replacing it with nothing but freezing air on your exposed nerve endings. You needed to conserve some energy if you were to pull the both of you out of this hellhole, so you wouldn’t be able to heal him completely.
The blood began to stop gushing over your clothes, and Din’s breathing had evened out a little more. The effort it took to stitch Din’s flesh back together with the Force was starting to take its toll on you and your shoulders curled in on themselves.
Once he had recovered enough to sit up, he was back to business immediately. He pulled his weapons out of their holsters and examined the remaining charges in his belt. He didn’t acknowledge any of the things that he just said to you when he was on the brink of death. When he tried to stand, he wheezed and stumbled into your waiting hands.
You had done a shoddy job with the healing, but hopefully it would be enough to sustain him enough to make it back to the ship. Balancing his weight as best as you could, you heaved him back up onto his feet and leaned most of his weight onto your own. You didn’t know how you were going to travel the distance to the trip without the cover of the hideout, but Mando had armed himself with his blaster, settling the beating of your heart a little. You didn’t know anyone who was a better shot than the Mandalorian beside you.
By the way his reaction time had picked up again, you could tell he was feeling a little better. He was still lethargic, but that was probably due to his adrenaline crash. He caught your eye and gave you a deep nod. You could definitely feel the effects of the missing life force tugging down on your person, trying to wrest your consciousness from your mind, but your eyes filled with tears fiercely anyway.
The uncertainty in the Force was making you nauseous. The dim atmosphere hanging before you felt akin to embarking on a journey down a mountain, trying to ignore the threat of an avalanche that could pull you under the snow and take you away. You managed to get the words out under his weight, “Don’t thank me yet.”
You thought back to the time when you told Mando how Grandmaster Yoda was able to propel himself through his fights using the Force, despite the fact that he couldn’t move much on his own anymore in his old age. The same logic applied to moving the man that was leaning on you now. Without the Force, it wouldn’t have been possible for you to move him much at all. You prepared yourself to support Mando and deflect any blaster fire headed your way simultaneously.
----
You couldn’t begin to guess how long the trek back had taken, but when you finally reached the hold of the ship, your vision was so dim you could hardly see your hand if you held it in front of your face. Exhaustion hijacked your legs and you practically dropped Mando onto the floor. His armor gave a loud CLANG!!! that rang throughout the ship. As if swimming through a pot of honey, your fatigued arm reached out to lock the door and pull in the ramp before all your weight fell on your knees next to the Mandalorian.
You hadn’t heard from him much during your trip back to the Razor Crest, but apparently he’d been able to scrape up the last of his energy to heave himself up and say, “I’m going to be right back. I’ll get us out of the atmosphere. You stay with me,” His voice was low and grave. It scared you, but you were too exhausted to care. He pointed his finger at you in your slim field of vision, much like you had just done to him in the hideout.
The last thing you remember before blacking out was how heavy his footsteps sounded trying to get up the ladder. With the knowledge that you had returned Din safely back to the ship, you let the sweet release of darkness finally pull you under.
----
In less than five minutes, Din had gotten them off the planet and into hyperspace with no snags other than the trembling of his fingers. Despite the fact that you had already saved him from it once today, there had never been a moment where he wanted to just lay down and die more. Instead of gratitude, dread filled his unworthy heart. He wasn’t sure he could face you. The sooner he touched the floor of the cargo hold, the sooner he had to hold your face and confront everything that you had done for him.
His training as a Mandalorian was not helping him—not in the slightest. Mandalorian warriors were not supposed to hesitate when someone was in trouble, but he felt the traitorous slowness in his feet anyway as he climbed down the ladder.
His stab wound wasn’t healed all the way and the pain dug into his paper-thin focus. His muscles were screaming at him to give them a break—to just pass out—but he didn’t care. He would not rest until you were taken care of.
You were still breathing, thank the stars. It had been a long walk back to the Razor Crest in the middle of a desert, after all. But what he didn’t notice in the shopping area, he noticed now. His chest tightened at the realization: your clothes had been completely drenched in his blood. Dried blood was caked on your hands, in your hair, and it even spilled down your back as he had been leaning on your shoulders.
The color was turning brown already; his blood was oxidizing on your clothing. He felt the threatening bubble of nausea waking up in his stomach. Images of his own durasteel armor from when he was a foundling flashed in his mind. The humid atmospheres of his first bounty hunting trips had rusted the alloys in his armor and he had gotten too in his head about returning to his covert with tarnished armor plates. At the time, it had seemed like a problem. If only his younger self could see him now. His visor plate would probably crack, Din thought.
Staring at the ceiling, he waited for the lead filling his limbs to subside. He corrected the deep, involuntary frown that had taken over his face, even though you wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway, and moved to get started. Din collected a bucket of warm water and his clean rags for internal ship repairs, and suppressed the groan of pain when he kneeled down. Gently, he rubbed his hands up and down your upper arms to see if you would respond. His voice cracked when he spoke your name, desperately hoping that you might still be awake. Finding it too hard to look at you, he tilted his helmet down the same way he always did when he felt you were getting too good a read on his emotions.
He couldn’t suppress the shaking of his limbs as he wiped his own blood off your face and arms. His brain replayed the vicious memories of the past two hours. How you had noticed the reptilian man paying attention to the both of you more than was normal for a stranger, following his lead when he brushed the concern off, and the way you had put yourself into a direct line of fire in order to save his sorry ass. Suddenly back in the action, his mind led him through the train of thought he had already entertained when you were patching him up.
Din had had stab wounds before. He knew how they felt and what it took to survive them. He knew that the recovery process was a long and arduous one. However, in order to recover, the bleeding had to stop at some point. By the time you were able to get to him and out of the line of fire, he had lost an impressive amount of blood. He wasn’t planning on saying any of what he had uttered to you in that dingy newsstand, ever, but he wasn’t thinking straight. The pull of his fear for your safety had sold him out.
That, and the fact that he was supposed to be the one protecting you, especially after ignoring your unease. Being on the receiving end of help so personal had always gotten to him a little bit—he was indebted to his covert for saving him that fateful day on Aq Ventina, and it felt like he could never make it up to them. Being saved by you, someone he had hoped never to put stress upon again, made him feel like he was failing—you and his covert in one painful sweep.
He knew his situation was really bad when he had pondered succumbing to the urge to just die. At a certain point, the effort it took to stay awake was more than it was worth. He had given what he could to the foundlings in his covert, tried to make an honorable living putting lowlifes away for the Guild, and safely delivered Grogu to his people. For the most part, he was proud of what he’d done. The gruesome wound in his abdomen had almost stopped hurting entirely. All he needed was to make one last effort to ensure your safety and he could be done.
He felt himself teetering on the edge of blacking out, but his blood ran even colder at the idea of leaving you alone to deal with this mess—the mess that he dragged you into in the first place.
All these thoughts were wispy—lingering amidst the fog that separates life and death—but when you used his real name to speak to him, he knew he was fucked. Din must have looked even worse than he felt because your voice had been so fragile, like the glass bird-shaped ornaments his mother used to keep in the garden. In his distant consciousness, that thought had led him into picturing what you would have looked like under the dappled sunlight of his home planet, laughing the day away with him in the warm summer air. The absurdity of his vision clashed with the scene in front of him and yanked him back to the present moment, your body still laying stiff on the floor. Clenching his jaw so hard that his teeth squeaked, he got to work.
He rinsed the blood out of your hair and changed your clothes for you. At the very least, he hoped it would make your slumber a little more comfortable. With the same tenderness that he would lift Grogu, he picked you up and set you down in his bed underneath the cockpit. He didn’t personally much care where he slept, but as he considered your exhausted form, he felt that it wasn’t quite up to par. There wasn’t much he could do about it right now, but he filed that problem away for later and pulled the covers up around your chin. Din checked the tender space on his ribs and turned down the hallway to wash the blood off of him.
The shower hadn’t been much help to ease the blame he felt, but it was vital to fixing the tension he held in his shoulders. Your Force Healing had been thorough for the limited time and energy that you had. He was secretly grateful for the scar that it would leave behind on his torso. His armor was in desperate need of cleaning, but he wanted to sit in the pilot’s chair and settle on their next destination. After today, he figured you would be more than okay with taking a break from work for a while.
Without you in the copilot chair, it reminded him of the past for the second time and his mind started to wander. Alongside the shame burning in his head from not heeding your warning today, he remembered the way he almost begged you to leave him behind. He knew that you would never actually do it, which is why he pulled his blaster on you. If he had been thinking clearly at all, that thought would have never crossed his mind.
The potential aftermath of what he’d done crawled up his arms and under his helmet. What were you going to think when you woke up? He put his helmet in his hands and resigned himself to the weight of his guilt threatening to buckle into his ribcage.
All the deep breathing exercises in the world couldn’t calm him down. He needed to distract himself. He wanted do something that could keep these thoughts out of his head, like take on another set of bounty pucks from Karga. If only the man was still working for the Guild. That and the fact that you needed real rest—not whatever quality of sleep you could scrounge up dropping in and out of hyperspace.
He dropped his head on the dashboard in the cockpit once. And again. And again. Only when he felt the merciful throbbing of the bump forming on his forehead did he stop. Pain was a reliable and welcome distraction to the fruit flies buzzing around inside, eating his rotten heart.
----
It was excessive how often Din checked your pulse-point under your jaw. Some irrational thought in his brain would convince him that something had changed in the last thirty seconds, and he had to check again. His wrists each had red irritation spots from taking his gloves on and off so frequently, but he just couldn't leave you alone, no matter how hard he tried.
The lack of movement that you had, even in your sleep, made his knees lock. His feet wouldn’t move. Usually he could guess at what was happening in your dreams early in the mornings just by the look on your face and the twitching of your hands, but you’d been asleep for three days now and you were as still as a corpse.
He remembered how Grogu was when he’d saved Din from the Mudhorn. He had collapsed as swiftly as you did in the cargo hold. He hadn’t known Grogu well enough to be so concerned back then, but after he’d left the baby with The Jedi, a searing slash of pain danced across his lungs again at the thought of losing you too.
In the downtime during your recovery, Din would often think about his life before he met you. It had been repetitive, and cold, and void of any color or music. Sometimes, he would make it out to a beautiful planet on a hunt for a quarry with the urge to show someone the view unfolding in front on him, but the solitary life he led kept him from sharing the wonder he felt with anyone else.
When they had caught wind of his travels with you, The Armorer (and usually Paz) would not-so-subtly warn him about not wavering in his commitment to the Creed. His covert was wary of anyone who wasn’t already part of them. He knew it was his insecurities emerging from the worst recesses of his brain, but sometimes he swore it felt like they were just waiting for Din to trip so they could finally cast the odd foundling out for good.
You were strong and interesting and intelligent, and you respected his pledge to the Creed as if it were your own. The disquiet that he felt when you two were apart was too much to bear anymore and he couldn’t picture his life without you firmly in it. He hadn’t admitted this to you and before the past few days, he had never planned on it. He wished he could just coast along with you forever, never needing to find the words to ask you to stay. To his astonishment, whatever you had done on that white planet, whatever this connection between the two of you was, it seemed like he had gotten his wish.
Throughout the years Din had known you, he had longed for a reliable way to find you when you were separated. A way that didn’t depend on the Holonet, or chain codes, or tracking fobs. Some way that couldn’t be hacked into or altered or smashed to pieces by enemies in the heat of battle. Without the rest of his armor on, the connection he felt now was exactly that: it felt like a bright red thread of trust and understanding anchoring you together, unaffected from the outside world.
Under his helmet, his cheeks burned. He didn’t know why these thoughts had suddenly swarmed him. You must have just woken up, he thought with a smile. As was usual these past few days, his nerves lit up at the urge to check on you. Right now, his heart was in his throat. The connection he felt with you steadily gained warmth as he approached his sleeping quarters; you were definitely awake.
----
When you woke up, you could tell that something was off immediately. You were tucked into Mando’s bed underneath the cockpit with plenty of blankets. It was pitch black, which made you slow your movements, but it served to help you focus on the unfamiliar presence you were feeling.
You had never been successful in using the Force to communicate with Mando. He was practically unreachable in every conceivable way—His beskar armor made sure of that. For all of the thousands of times you had been thankful for his impenetrable armor, this point frustrated you to no end.
Every time you reached out to him, you could feel that his presence was there, albeit very weak, smothered under his armor. It was not impossible, but it was very hard to grab onto Mandalorians using the Force. A normal person walking down the street would have a stronger Force signature than the average Mandalorian. It made it much more difficult to read the emotions he was feeling, so you were often left in the dark, just like anyone else who spoke to Mando. In the beginning, the only information you knew about him was what you could glean from observing his body language and trust that whatever words came out of his mouth were the truth.
----
Din knocked on the door to his sleeping quarters and spoke your name tentatively. The door retracted and he was met with your dimly lit silhouette sitting up in his bed. He ventured a guess that you weren’t feeling great, but he asked anyway. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit,” was your sunny response and Din felt his shoulders drop in relief at the return of your old demeanor.
When your hands met your temples to massage some of the pain away, Din slipped over to your bedside in a flash, fingers moving to cradle the nape of your neck. Your skin was burning hot and he delighted in the feel of your baby hairs on the pads of his fingers. He smiled again, wider than he could ever last remember, under his helmet.
He produced a pair of painkillers and tilted your head back as he fed you some water from a glass. Even in the low light, Din could see the bewildered expression that took over your face and you laughed at him. “Do you think I’m a baby? Give me that.” You snatched the glass out of his hands and drank eagerly.
The heat flared on his cheeks and down his neck at your accusation. Okay, so he may have been acting a little overbearing. He couldn’t help it. Your absence, despite being so close to him physically the past few days, had been driving him up the wall. A piece of him had been missing.
“How are you?” you asked. You nodded in his direction and said, “How’s your new stab wound?” Clearly, the joking intonation to your question was meant to help you feel out the atmosphere of the cabin, but he was too focused on the new connection he felt between you. There was a slow tingling just underneath the surface of his awareness, sort of like butterflies disrupting the familiar level of composure he forced himself to return to.
“I told you to leave me there.” Believing that he should approach the topic with neutrality so as not to upset you, his voice came out of the modulator sounding detached and emotionless. The smile dropped from your face and he winced. The connection soured and he realized the way his attempt at an opening sounded.
Again, Din felt the sensation of your thought process. Cards flipping through in a sequence like a rolling index, trying to decide on the right response materialized in his mind. He didn’t know if he’d be able to get used to this sixth sense. You stared at your fidgeting fingers before finally settling on a reply. Your voice had been stripped of the playful tone, instead sounding dejected. “Did you really expect me to?”
He dodged the question. “I wanted you to. You put yourself into jeopardy.”
“Yeah, well.” You clenched your teeth, trying to control the irritated crinkle of your nose. Din felt your thoughts drift to his rescue and he could feel the lingering terror and anger you held onto under the careful relief. At the ghostly replications of his words telling you to leave him behind echoed through your mind, the potency of the frustration you felt towards him a few days ago nearly set off his nerves again. You crossed your arms and looked away from him, but not before adding, “Sorry you didn’t get your wish.”
Your words taunted him. Emotion swelled up like a tidal wave in his chest and his throat choked up. That wasn’t true!, he wanted to sob, crumpling down by the nightstand. Your safety was the only thing he wanted. He had just gotten you back—he didn’t want to argue with you. As if sensing his inner turmoil, you flinched. He was falling apart in front of you.
Your name was barely audible past the filter of the modulator. His head bowed and his hands splayed on the edge of the bed, kneeguards scraping against the floor of the room.
"I'm-" Din forced the breath out of his lungs and started over. "It was good. What you did for me." He cringed at his reply. He wanted to find a way that he could explain this to you without involving his own feelings, but it was no use. Balling his hands into fists, he rushed the words out. "I didn't want to lose you. I was so scared I was going to lose you."
Your hands came to rest on his own, moving to interlace your fingers. As if his emotions couldn't overwhelm him more, his skin sizzled like they had been dipped in heated wax. Before you could reply, he continued, his voice almost a whine, "And now I have this thing – this feeling inside like-" He had never hated his inability to put his thoughts into words as much as he did now.
Unused to speaking so much and so quickly, it felt like his skin had been peeled back and his beating heart was on display to the world. His forehead was still touching the duvet and he was terrified to look you in the eyes, but he needed you to comfort him—to come to his rescue once again. "It's like I can feel exactly what you feel. Like I know what you're going to say before you say it." He squeezed your hands even harder.
Your shoulders relaxed as you leaned away from him and you laughed freely. A big smile lit up your face and you enlightened him. “That sounds like the Force, Din.”
As if the Force recognized the mention of itself, a clear musical tone resonated in his brain like the sound of a tuning fork. He was on his feet in a second, still holding your hands in his. It was almost comical if Din hadn’t been dumbfounded at the realization.
You had given him the power of the Force? Din tilted his head as his thoughts tumbled the idea around. His experience with the Force was limited and even more so with the Jedi. But the way that Ahsoka had spoken of the Force, it didn’t seem like the Force was something that could be transferred from one person to another. His heart squeezed at the notion that you’d given him a gift that transcended metaphysical boundaries—reality as he knew it.
Too quickly, he dropped his helmet to you, bumping your heads together in the process. He apologized, but you laughed, and it was the brightest Din had felt in a long time. He didn’t need to figure it all out right now, as long as he had you by his side. He had so much left to explore with you. All of the tension from the past few days left his body and he collapsed into you, pulling you down with him into the warmth of the covers.
He would never be able to repay you for what you had done for him, but it was a privilege to try anyway.