Chapter Text
When morning comes, it brings no mercy.
Instead, it brings the trumpet of an all hands assembly as the suns rise.
You and Eli have both survived the night and are awakened by the sounds as the full force of the arena staff and prisoners are gathered for the second consecutive day in the arena. It’s practically unheard of.
It turns your stomach, and a tiny, resolute part of you wonders if it will bring you death.
But once again, you’re reminded that Gideon will not show you that kindness.
He has something else to show you, instead.
Eli figures it out first. “Oh, maker. Don’t look,” he hisses urgently. “Don’t watch, don’t watch.”
But you do.
You watch as the troopers line them up. Eighteen servants. Eighteen very familiar faces.
Stellus. Hali. Sessa. The entire barracks staff—each caretaker and attendant on their knees with their hands behind their head.
“Don’t,” Eli whispers.
But you have to.
There’s no showmanship. Gideon doesn’t ignite the saber. There are no cameras and no theatrics.
Just a standard execution. The quick, sharp chirp of blasters and the thump of bodies on the sands.
Eighteen lost souls whose only crimes were association. For sleeping in the same room, for sharing the same meals.
It was no loss to the facility; they’d ship in new prisoners to fill the spaces left behind. And Gideon would sleep easy knowing the threat of anyone who might have dared to conspire or be inspired by either of you had been eliminated.
Silence fills the arena when the firing ceases. It echoes in your ears. No one dares move or speak.
“There will be no fights today. All staff are to return to their barracks under lockdown,” a Commander announces after Gideon has swept off. “Regular schedules resume tomorrow.”
An execution and a lockdown. Your mind races. Eighteen lost souls, and no meals or medical or anything for those who survived.
You turn to Eli to share your distress and are startled to see a dangerous smile on his face.
“What’s wrong with you?” You hiss.
“He’s scared ,” Eli says, his voice low and rough, nothing you’ve seen before. “Much more scared than he’d be if it were just the Mandalorian’s escape. That means something is happening out there.”
The hope from his revelation is undercut when you realize everyone has left the arena.
The weight of the full lockdown sets in. They aren’t sending a cleanup crew.
They’re going to leave you there with the bodies.
Eli makes you turn around after a while but it doesn’t make a difference. The vacant eyes of your friends and comrades burn worse than the darksaber’s scars.
He slumps more and more as the day creeps forward. The pain from his leg is wearing down his resolve but he still spares energy to try and bring you comfort.
“This wasn’t because of you,” he says. “This is on me.”
You know he means well. But you find it doesn’t matter in the end. They’re dead, and your actions, direct or indirect, led them there.
The next morning, the arena returns to life. The corpses are removed and burned, the sands are swept, and the fights return. It’s easier to look away down here than it was from the box. Easier to just turn enough that you can’t see.
Eli stays awake less and less as the day drags on. You wait and wait for the same to come over you, for your body to pull you gently to the depths and let the current take you. You don’t want to watch him die, too, so you pray again for mercy.
It doesn’t come, but something else does.
In the silence of the third night, you think it’s a hallucination. After the oppressive heat of the long days, the high summer sun holding neither kindness nor cruelty but just by her nature scalding your skin, bodies withering without water, she comes.
You blink slowly, the light of the twin moons making her armor spark and glare. It’s the strangest Mandalorian armor you’ve ever seen—which doesn’t mean much, since you’ve only seen the two kits. But it’s undeniably Mandalorian.
It doesn’t matter. You lurch back away as they cut the bars with a laser and ease the metal quietly to the ground.
They offer a hand, and you stare at it.
“Look, I’m here for the saber, but I promised I’d try to free you. You can go wherever you’d like. If you don’t impede my mission, I’ll give you a ride—” She stops and assesses Eli for a moment, who hasn’t woken at the commotion—“But I’ll leave without you if I have to.”
“Where’s your ship?” you say.
“Just follow me.”
“What about the rest of his armor?”
“We’re not risking getting captured for that,” she says, starting to walk away.
“He’d rather have the armor than the saber.”
She sighs and turns back to give you the location of her ship. “If you’re not there when I leave—“
“I know,” you say.
It hurts like hell to get up and even more to rouse Eli and loop his arm around your neck. The chances of getting him safely there are slim, but you’re fairly sure the guards will shoot to kill if they catch you, so there’s not really a bad option.
Either path is better than shriveling up and wasting away in the cage.
You leave him against a wall near the exit closest to her ship, and he tries to stop you before the pain overtakes him again. Dread fills you at the thought of finding him already gone when you return, but you have to do this.
It turns out, though, that you didn’t. The New Mandalorian is already there when you reach the lounge.
“You were right,” she sighs. “It’s one or the other.”
She ends up hauling most of the armor, which is good because you hadn’t thought about how you’d manage with one hand. She also dispatches the guards you encounter without breaking a sweat.
On the ship, you try not to act surprised when she takes her helmet off.
“Bo-Katan Kryze,” she says with an extended hand.
The way she says it makes you think you’re supposed to know who she is.
“I’m going straight back, and we’ll get him healed up enough for a new assignment. But we can try to arrange transport elsewhere for you once we’ve landed,” she tells you.
“I’m retiring,” Eli groans from where she’s secured him to a row of dropseats.
“Unlikely,” she says.
You sit with your hands folded in your lap. It’s not really set in that you’ve made it out. You have nothing to your name but the torn rags that hang loose and limp with singed edges that scrape against your skin.
You can’t go home. You’ll be lucky if they haven’t killed or captured your family as it is, for the sin of knowing you.
All you ever wanted was to protect them. That’s why you had paid their tariffs instead of your own. That’s why you consigned yourself to five years of slavery, of suffering the loss of life and loved ones daily for four kriffing years.
And you risked it all for one man.
And yet, it feels like more. It always had. You risked it for Din, yes, but also for his son and the green Mandalorian and the woman in front of you now, who risked her life to restore his reign, and you think of the hundreds of beings that gave everything in the name of this one man .
And you’d do it again. He had confessed one night that he didn’t find himself deserving of the loyalty sworn to him, but you see it, she sees it, everyone sees it.
The karking Rebel Alliance sees it.
The galaxy needs the Mandalorians. Without them, the Empire will never fall. And the Mandalorians need their king, their leader who would have sacrificed himself a thousand times over for them to survive.
So you clench your jaw and square your shoulders and think of how to live.
You feel the heat of her gaze before you see it, but when you look up, the woman is unabashedly watching you with a raised eyebrow.
She looks you over, now that she has your attention. “Shand will be glad to know you survived,” she says, almost lazily.
“Oh?” you say, forcing down the trace of disappointment. Yes, you had assumed Din was the one who wanted you freed. But any kindness is enough.
“Yes, she said she grew quite fond of you.”
“Hmm,” is all you can reply. Fondness was not really how you had grown to feel, though the last two days had thrown you off track.
Before that, though, you don’t think you could feel fond of someone who would own a being like that.
But you don’t play her game. You don’t dance around the subject. “How is he?”
“He didn’t come back for you, and you’re concerned?”
“It would have been the stupidest move in the karking galaxy, and if you all are such skilled and legendary warriors, you should understand that.”
Silence falls in the cockpit. And then she laughs. “I didn’t expect you to have any bite.”
You don’t say a thing, but you do scowl.
“Well, I didn’t. He calls you kar’talyc. ”
“So?”
“Do you even know what it means?”
“Of course I don’t, I’m not Mandalorian.”
“That didn’t stop your little message.”
Your head snaps back to her. “You saw that? Did…”
“Did he show an uncharacteristic lack of composure when you used a secret Mandalorian code to apologize to him for being tortured on live holo ? Yes.”
She succeeds in shocking you into silence. You sit and turn it over in your head.
“It wasn’t for that. It was for breaking.”
She rolls her eyes—like, actually rolls her eyes at you while you relive the absolute worst moments of your life in your head. “Everyone breaks,” she says. You didn’t know enough for it to matter.”
You can read between the lines. You didn’t know enough to matter. To her, anyway. Your feelings aren’t hurt, though.
“It means you’re a bleeding heart. A sap,” she says, pulling you back into the previous conversation.
You sit for a moment with the new knowledge. “I’m going to take that as a compliment,” you say.
She shakes her head with a hint of a smirk. “He certainly means it as one,” she says in the way of having known someone too well for too long.
It’s near chaos when you land but you manage to go unnoticed. Bo-Katan is talking to three different people as soon as the ramp lowers, and you direct the medic team to Eli with your good hand, hanging back in the shadows.
The feeling of hyperspace hasn’t left your bones. You’re adrift in the great cold darkness. Your skin feels cool to the touch, even in the blistering expanse of sand and suns.
The docking bay is makeshift. Cobbled together from sandstone that’s already cracking under the weight of the ships and scrapyard rejects.
The ebb and flow of bodies is endless. Humanoids, aliens, and Beskar blend together and no one pays attention to the lost little girl that you feel like, now. It’s like you’re stuck on the other side of a laser gate—all the cacophony blending into an overbearing hum and the movements all blurring and crackling beyond your reach.
In the end, you sit at the top of the ramp and just watch. Maybe Bo-Katan will come back. Maybe not. But here, you’re out of the way.
She finds you, in the end. Shand. You suppose you’re glad for a familiar face, especially now that the twin suns are drifting toward the horizon and a strange chill has taken over the desert. Not that you noticed. You’ve been shivering all day anyway.
She doesn’t say anything at first; just leans against the post at the end of the ramp and raises an eyebrow.
“Hi,” you say cautiously.
“C’mon,” is all she says, jerking her head behind her and turning to walk away.
You follow her without another word between you. The throngs of bodies part for her despite her small stature, which makes it easy for you to stick close.
You’re surprised to end up in the medbay. You open your mouth to protest, and she gives you the most reproachful look you’ve ever withered under.
“The entire galaxy watched you get fileted, and you’ve clearly got an infection,” she says.
“I don’t want to waste—”
“Fett has a bacta tank. Don’t be foolish,” she says before turning you over to an equally strict looking Aqualish who doesn’t care to hear what you have to say, either.
Din’s there, somewhere, but you don’t see him. Well. You think he’s there. They mention him in a way that sounds like he’s just down the hall or around the corner, but you don’t actually ask.
It seems better that way. Safer. Truthfully, you have little time to think of him anyway.
But there are signs.
The palace, which you learn belongs to the man called Fett, is massive. And it seems to contain half of the Rebellion, including the Mandalorian survivors who have been absorbed into the movement whether they like it or not. But still, you can go through countless halls without seeing a soul.
You get put in a room by yourself on one of the upper floors. You know they’ve been converting the lower suites into bunk rooms. That those rooms are even considered more desireable, since being underground protects them better from the heat.
But when you question it, the tall bald man who escorted you to your room just laughs and says, “I was told you were to never be stuck underground again.”
“I don’t even know if I’m staying,” you protest to no one when he leaves. Or you think it’s to no one, but you jump out of your skin a moment later when Shand says, “You’re staying,” from behind you.
“I don’t know…”
“I volunteered you for the medbay but they’d be happy to have you anywhere. The kitchens, the creche, the cleaning crew. You’ve got enough skills to have your choice.”
“You have a lot of faith in me for being the person who just poured your drinks,” you say wryly.
She snorts. “And managed a barrack and took care of an ornery Mandalorian.”
“I don’t know,” you say again.
“Just think about it. You’ve more than earned a place here,” she says as she leaves.
You sit on the edge of the bed for a long time. It’s too soft, too endless. You think if you lay in it, you’ll sink in and drown.
So you sit and force yourself to accept the way the sheets feel beneath your palms and the mattress dips beneath your weight and how the ground grinds beneath your shoes that you wear, now, for the first time in four years.
You thought they’d feel safer, but they’re more like a cage.
Everything is wrong . Your hand is healed, the bones settled back like nothing happened. The cuts and bruises and raw, flayed flesh are the same as the day you were born. The bacta erased almost everything.
Your mind doesn’t seem to have been blessed by the bath. It still ticks and clicks all wrong, stuttering over things that used to be effortless. You jump and twitch and stop your breath for any reason, for no reason.
And you can’t stand droids.
The first time a protocol droid speaks to you, you find yourself in a storage room two floors up. You don’t know how you got there and you don’t know how long you were gone. Its voice isn’t even the same, but something in you is irrevocably broken. The astromechs are worse. The whirring of their motors doesn’t send you fleeing.
No. You just fall apart.
It’ll get better, you tell yourself. It has to. You can’t avoid droids, but you can certainly try.
One time, when you’re pulling yourself together after an unfortunately literal run-in with a probe droid, you find yourself in the lower levels of the sprawling complex. But you’re not alone.
There’s someone running past the door as you exit whatever empty meeting room you have found yourself in. They trip and fall just as they pass.
“Hey kiddo, you okay?” you say, crouching down to the small child.
The little green toddler pushes back up to their feet, though, looks up at you with wide brown eyes, and squeals something unintelligible.
“Oh, I see. You’re a tough one, huh? Good. Great job.” You hold your hand out for a high five, but they just gently press their tiny palm against yours.
“That works too,” you assure them.
“C’mon, buddy,” an exasperated, foreignly familiar voice says from behind you. “I know you don’t—”
The little one, who, as your stomach sinks, you realize must be Grogu, babbles excitedly and grabs your hand to show you his father.
You stand and let him, though you need no introductions.
The Mandalorian stands before you in all his silver glory. You know that Din is the armor and the armor is Din, but it’s startling to see him this way. He’s not soft or dimpled or warm, now.
But he’s still Din. You can feel it.
Inexplicably, you’re being dragged back by an invisible hand, your worries manifesting into something with more control over your body than your hopes.
You take a step back, leaning your weight on your heel for another.
“Wait,” he says through the unfamiliar crackle of the modulator.
And then he does the last thing you expect in this moment.
He takes the helmet off.
You stand, caught in his orbit, your mouth parted just so as you take in the face of the man you thought you’d never see again, one way or another.
You blink a few times, uncertain.
“I haven’t been avoiding you,” he says in a rush. “Every time I try to find you, I’m too late.”
“You’ve been trying to find me?” Your breath catches noisily in your chest, interrupting yourself.
“I… of course,” he says, brows furrowed.
The way he says it is so blunt, so assured, so Din that you can’t believe you ever doubted. Of course. Even if it wasn’t for the things you shared, that’s just who he was. Of course he’d want to find you, to see with his own eyes that you were alive.
Of course.
You’re not sure who moves first. It doesn’t matter. The embrace knocks the wind out of you after you fail to account for the solid wall of beskar between your bodies, but you barely notice. His hands, while gloved, are clutching you to him, and he’s kissing you and everything is clicking back into place and tiny hands are… tiny hands are grabbing at your tunic?
Grogu uses the leverage of your clothes to launch himself up. Din catches him easily, unsurprised by the tiny child’s dexterity.
It should be strange, you think. This larger-than-life man and this tiny green baby. But seeing his son in his arms completes the portrait of Din that lives in your head. It can’t be strange, could never be.
Din looks at you with those big, sad baby bantha eyes, and his softness seeps away. “Let me get the womp rat back to the creche. Then we should talk.”
You don’t know what to expect, but he takes you to his chambers. The door slides shut behind you, and you blink against the heavy dark of the room.
“I’m sorry,” he says sharply, suddenly, but softens. “I’m sorry. Your parents. They’re gone.”
You close your eyes and take a deep breath. You knew, really. You hadn’t wanted to, but you knew.
“We sent someone,” he adds quietly. “It was too late.”
“Thank you,” you say, staring out the window for a moment, taking in the way the hazy orange sunset blends with the sands. Nothing like the divide of the wind and sea. “Do you know what happened? Or… when?”
He hesitates.
You turn to him. “I can handle it.”
He grimaces and sighs. “You don’t have to.”
“Don’t,” you say sharply, and his shoulders slump.
“Troopers shot them,” he starts, hesitating to let you back out. When you say nothing, he gives in. “After the broadcast.”
It hurts more than you thought. “What are the chances—”
“I’m sorry.”
You can’t quite swallow it. “You were right. I shouldn’t have asked.”
Somehow, as always, he knows. “You would have wondered. And I didn’t want to lie to you, anyway.” He stands up and approaches you, drawing you in by your shoulders even though you don’t want to be held.
But he knows. He always knows. And you fold, because you don’t want to, but you need to.
And it’s easier. Easier to let him envelope you, to fill yourself with the soft slopes of his muscles and lose yourself in his musk. To forget, just for now, not for always, but for a moment. To steady yourself with having one person back from the list of the lost.
You don’t have him, really, you know this. Can’t have him properly. Not the way you’d like. But you let him have you.
Oh, and he does.
He has you sprawled on the chaise lounge before you register the movement, lowering you down as he kisses you, and you just following the press of his body. He doesn’t stay above you long, his mind far more focused on lifting up your skirt and helping himself to your cunt.
He feasts and you fall. His lips and tongue taste every part of you. The difference this time is that he talks. In the stilted silence of the cell, neither of you had sweet or sultry sentiments but now, oh, now he never stops. Murmurs that fill your cunt, endearments kissed onto your clit, and growls sucked into your thighs, blossoming bruises that seep into your bones.
You can’t hear much of it, but your breath hitches with each word you can snatch from the air. Sweet, he calls you as he speaks of his need and ache. You fall apart on his tongue when he calls you my brave girl.
His.
You hold onto that, rewind and replay on the lonely nights to come. Neither of you speak of it, of course, but he said it, he meant it, you heard it, you kept it.
That night, though he doesn’t say it again, you believe it. He makes you believe it. With each kiss and caress and bite and bruise. He takes and you give and give and give.
He doesn’t stop worshipping your cunt on his knees after you come. It’s not enough; he can’t be satiated. He drinks from you twice more before he can wait no longer, climbing above you and knocking your legs apart with his knee. He can’t be bothered to strip you of your clothes or him of his. Can’t be bothered to waste another second before he’s plunging the full length of him into your soft folds and gasping as if he’s nearly drowned.
Maybe he has. Maybe he’s submersed himself so deeply within you that he can’t breathe. You can’t, so you’d believe it.
He fucks into you somehow sweetly, though the pace he sets is unforgiving. His hands cradle you, though, and his lips find purchase along your neck.
Din doesn’t say it again, doesn’t call you his, but he leaves his mark on every inch of flesh he can reach.
He makes sure you lose yourself in two more orgasms before he pulls out to spill against your slit, rubbing the head of his cock against your puffy outer lips and clit.
“Stay,” he pleads.
So you do.
An hour later, you realize he hadn’t taken your clothes off not because he couldn’t be bothered, but because he was waiting for you. He was perceptive and kind as always, waiting for you to expose your scars.
Not even the bacta could erase Gideon’s “art.”
Din wouldn’t take that from you, wouldn’t make you, but you do it anyway. You bare yourself to him and he takes the offering with as much aplomb as you would have guessed.
Nothing is said, but he pulls you down after, once you’ve fucked yourself full of him, to lay against his own bare body, and his fingers trace the lines with reverence.
He doesn’t say it again, but you hear it. My brave girl, his fingertips whisper.
And you finally cry.
When you’ve run out of tears, he holds you still, doesn’t let go just because the need is gone.
Neither of you sleep that night. You can’t stop your hands and mouths and hearts from following the beat of each other. Like the quiet taps in the darkness of the cell, your bodies speak to one another and you can’t help but to listen, to answer the call.
It’s nearly morning when you ask. He hadn’t wanted you to, if only because he didn’t like the answer.
But he gives it to you anyway.
Two days. He’ll be leaving in just two days.
You knew he couldn’t be bound here, couldn’t be nestled in the safety of the palace while there was a war to wage. Knew he would never keep to the background, would never shy away from standing beside his people and doing what needed to be done.
He has a question of his own for you and this time, you have an answer. You couldn’t promise Shand that you’d stay, but it falls from your lips for Din like nothing.
Where would you go anyway?
But stay, he pleads, so stay you will. Here, where he can find you. Here, where his son will be, for this is not the time for foundlings to flourish. No, there is far too much that will be lost in this final hour. And you know now that there’s not much you wouldn’t do when Din is the one to ask.
So you stay.
In the darkness of the early morning, the three of you stand in the hangar. It’s unsettlingly empty in a way that can only be intentional. Din removes his helmet and tucks it under his arm, tugging one glove off to cup your cheek in his broad palm.
His soft lips find first your forehead and then your lips. It’s saccharine and short; a proper farewell. He hugs his son and kisses his little wrinkled head before placing him into your arms.
The helmet goes back on and the Mand’alor only hesitates once at the bottom of the ramp, nodding his head once. You hold his heart in your hands in every way that matters, and the two of you watch until the tiny dot of his ship disappears.
You think I remember you, so you are eternal, and hope it’s not all you’ll have left of him to hold onto.