Chapter Text
Din felt like crawling out of his skin.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected from the munch, but Fennec’s rigging demonstration had been intriguing. The nondescript social event at a goth bar catered by a Mexican restaurant had seemed non-threatening enough. A casual enough place to run into a few people, feel out the local kink community as a relatively recent newcomer. It wasn’t even a proper dungeon.
Except maybe because of all of that, the whole vibe was very straight and excruciatingly cis. The suspension frame for the ropes rig was also awkwardly pushed off into the corner of the private room, making it clear that technical skills appreciation wasn’t high on the attendees’ priorities. And five minutes in, a woman had sat down directly next to him on the couch, leg purposefully flush against his in blatant violation of the “ask before touching” rule. Then, of course, two minutes later, her boyfriend had sat down next to them and attempted to put an arm around them both.
So now Din stood awkwardly against the back wall, downing handfuls of stale chips and spiceless salsa. Maybe the crunch would make this entire thing less uncomfortable.
Now he could see both the ropes demo and everyone who approached him with a good few seconds’ warning.
Ohhh noo, going to a munch to meet people will be so much more organic, he’d thought. Right. Fuck past him. Din stuffed another chip into his mouth.
He was desperately grateful he’d turned Fennec down when she suggested he’d have more fun rope bottoming for the demo than actually attending. A good way to pick up tricks, but he barely subbed in private, much less in public. The thought of any of this crowd looking at him — ugh.
They couldn’t even see him properly, and it still made him want to flee. As soon as that couple had sat down next to him he’d cranked up his facial filters to max, so anyone with a corporate optical implant (which was everyone, these days) would just see a Picassoan stitch of features.
He tried not to fully activate his filters in public, too much — the lower settings were more than adequate to strongly encourage people to look elsewhere and handily forget about him — but fuck if he wanted a single person in this room to know a damned thing about him.
He should’ve listened to Fennec.
Fennec had said, “Okay, look, I know for a fact that you will hate that munch,” and thrown in, “I’m not going to say that anybody with taste hates it, but also — they comp my food, and I still hate it. I have one other trans friend who goes, and it makes him miserable every time.”
“Why does he keep going, if it’s so bad,” Din had asked.
“He likes finding reasons to be miserable,” she’d muttered. “And making me miserable. Look, there’s this smaller thing — queer-only, private — that you’ll probably like more. Or I know a sub I think you’d get along with.”
He’d protested, stupidly. Where the munch now felt too public, the thought of a house party where everyone already knew each other and had played with the same people for years and he was just the weird stranger with low-grade facial masking… no thank you.
At least Fennec’s sub was lovely — slight yet deceptively strong, to the point that they’d looped their thigh into a complicated set of knots, then hoisted the ropes over the square-framed wood piece to dangle from one leg as a warm-up.
The seating in front of the demo was empty except for one guy — thicker, with close-cropped wiry hair and a bit of black ink peeking up over his t-shirt collar. Subdermal implants interrupted the tattoos’ patterns, hints of hardware subtle enough that Din wouldn’t notice them if spotting those clues didn’t sometimes mean life or death for him while on the job.
The man was also packing a blaster under his jacket, not subtly, but no one was paying Din to make it his problem. Besides, Fennec would’ve already kicked him out if it were an issue — she was backup event security. So Din just watched.
The man’s warm, quiet voice kept asking Fennec questions.
Fennec just kept giving the guy a look — the one Din could place as “I like you, but watch out” rather than “I will literally tear you to pieces if you speak to me again” after the first few months of running into each other in more professional (read: vaguely criminal) settings.
Din couldn’t quite make out what the guy was saying; he could just pick up the words’ rumbling edges. But it seemed to be some sort of posturing standoff. Each question led to Fennec tying increasingly complicated holds.
The sub just kept rolling their eyes, grinning a bit. Eventually, they said, loudly enough for the whole room to hear, “Okay, I need a break, before you two turn me into a human pretzel.” Fennec started the process to untie the sub safely, a combination of quick-release knots and gradual descent, and the guy with the blaster stood up and strolled to the exit.
Din’s eyes caught the couple from earlier, walking toward the demo.
Seemed like a good time to get some air, then.
The frigid air woke Din’s lungs. He hadn’t realized how stressed and trapped he’d felt until he stepped out of the bar, and now something opened up in his chest.
The night had gotten properly dark while Din was inside. The guy who’d asked a million questions during Fennec’s demo leaned against the wall just outside the streetlight’s reach, lit only by the dim glow of the cigarette in his mouth and the faded neons of highrise adverts. The shadows made his cheekbones look high and stark above his dark eyes.
Din swallowed.
“Want a light?” the guy asked, meeting Din’s gaze.
“Don’t smoke,” Din said, and immediately cursed himself. This guy was hot, and probably one of six people in the room who’d seemed potentially interesting. The cigarette would’ve been a good excuse to chat him up.
The guy just shrugged and took another long, slow inhale that hollowed his cheeks a bit and accentuated the scars that ridged his face. His chest rose, and his broad nose flared as he blew the smoke out.
Din tried desperately not to stare at his lips. “You… like this event?” he asked, looking up at the stars — totally invisible between Coruscant’s light pollution and the clawing reach of skyscrapers — and figuring it couldn’t hurt to keep the conversation going, since the stranger had started it.
“Not for me,” he just said.
“Me neither,” Din said ruefully. “First time, then?”
The guy huffed out a laugh and flicked his ashes onto the pavement. “Nah,” he said. “I come for Fennec. Ask her questions when no one else bothers.”
Oh, Din thought. This was the friend. The same one Fennec had thought he’d “get along with” (euphemistic).
He was a little flattered, actually. And Fennec was spot-on, at least about Din’s interests. The guy was confident, easily mistaken for a dom in this environment, but he had that hint that Din always looked for, the little bit of shyness. A kind of, “welcome — if you have the guts” challenge to it. Not necessarily approachable. Fun to knock off his self-assured pedestal.
Probably a brat.
What would the guy do if Din moved in closer, so he’d have to tip his head up if he wanted to meet Din’s gaze?
“Nice mods,” the guy said, jolting Din out of his increasingly distracted thoughts. “But you know I can see straight through the filter.”
Shit. Sure enough, something Din would’ve bothered to look for earlier, if he weren’t distracted by other thoughts: He was missing that telltale sheen of colored light over the pupils, an inevitable side effect of all the big-brand opticals. Just fathomless dark eyes, only the colors they were born to.
Which meant this guy was all custom wetware, and probably hardwired to boot. Like Din, and like Fennec. Like every fixer and slicer and runner likely to make it past two weeks in the seedy underbelly of this hellhole of a city.
And that tattoo on his shoulder, jagged horns just slipping out past the edge of the sleeve — if Din got close enough to push the sleeve back, run his fingers over it, he suspected he’d see the skull of a mythosaur. Clan markings.
Which meant this guy was probably a colleague, of sorts. But the kind that might kill him off at a moment’s notice.
Sloppy of Din, not to notice. Sketchy of Fennec, not to mention.
And even more sloppy of Din, again, to not realize this guy’d been getting a full-on look at his unfiltered face for this entire conversation, while Din was thinking about trying to pick him up.
Embarrassing.
“Well, I’ve got to get back,” Din said, determinedly not responding to the comments on his mods. Anyone who knew their stuff could see he was half-made of priceless hardware. A conversation about it never boded well.
He crossed to the Razor Crest, parked in a bike lane that probably hadn’t seen a bicycle in decades. The liquid beskar crawled out of the back of his neck implant and formed into a helmet as soon as he got close to the bike, wrapping him in its familiar security.
Din tipped his head at the guy, feeling less unsettled now that he could view him through the t-visor. The HUD showed an entire body laced with metal, the kind of rig you only got if you were rich, near death, or both.
And definitely Mandalorian. No one else ever had the metal veins. Off-network, too, all his mods entirely self-contained in that body of his, with no open connections to any of the many helpful resources that civilians tended to favor.
Damn. The Crest rumbled to life under Din. Unable to resist just a little showing off, after that bit of embarrassment, he skipped the road, engaged the bike’s maglocks, and turned straight toward the nearest high-rise.
In a burst of speed, Din was off the ground, climbing high into the smoggy reaches of the upper city.
Ashes fluttered to the ground and smoke curled into the air, and eyes followed him as he left.
Din still couldn’t even see the stars, up there. The city’s pollution was that thick, reaching far beyond its silhouette.
The cloudways were near-empty, except for the handful of drones and delivery drivers who had night-flying licenses (not Din) and a handful of other technically illegal joyriders (Din) who took advantage of the Republic private cops’ general corruption and inefficacy, and how it led to a lack of traffic law enforcement.
Sky travel was safer for him, anyway. As soon as he reached the tip of the glass monstrosity, he launched the Crest from it. In a crackle of electricity, the Crest fully took flight, and Din settled into a break-neck race through the skies. It was dangerous to leap into the cloudways like this — most travelers used droids and flight administration cues to calculate safe flight paths.
But droids could rust. Din could calculate a trajectory in his head just as quick.
The intensity of it all took him out of his head, let him forget all the things that had sent him to a munch in the first place: The loneliness of moving to a new city, isolated from covert contacts; the dread of returning to an empty apartment, even knowing that Grogu was safely tucked away in some Jedi safehouse; the unfamiliarity and harshness of it all, even though one city was another was another, all identical levels of skyless steel cages in this endless corporate-run hell of a country; the knowledge that the only thing that waited for him tomorrow was trying to find another job making problems disappear for a few measly credits.
At least up in the sky, the only thing in front of him was speed or crash, left or right. Wind whistled in his ears, and his head buzzed pleasantly with adrenaline.
It wasn’t exactly what he’d been looking for, tonight, but it was close enough.
By the time he dropped from the top levels to the dingy residentials, his skin was chilled from the high-altitude flight, and his entire mind felt numb.
He landed the Razor Crest onto his balcony directly from the sky — the one luxury he’d bothered to pay extra for, since it would save him the extra cost of trying to find a berth.
Shedding his civilian clothes, the beskar trickled back into his body. It warmed him some, but he grabbed a pile of blankets and stumbled into bed instead.
By most people’s definition, the new apartment was miniscule, listed as a two-bedroom but more like a cleverly disguised studio. But to Din, it felt too big. Especially after months of bopping around the country in a cramped pre-war gunship (rest in peace, original Razor Crest).
Not for the first time, he wished for the dreamless sleep of Manda — the breaths of a thousand Mandalorians, tuned to heartbeats across the world. Anyone veined with beskar could reach that floating space in the living network, so long as they walked the Way. But Din was dar’manda, now.
That peace was no longer for him.
After a few sleepless nights feeling exposed and nervous as the city lights washed over his face, longing for the cramped space of the old Crest’s berth, Din splurged on a hanging ceiling canopy hoop and draped a blanket over it to make the sleeping space feel smaller. It felt a bit silly at the time, but he slept well every night after.
Din had spent a few days putting together what little cheap furniture he could afford, to try to make everything feel a bit less barren. No rugs or decor, for him. The place was fine, objectively. High ceilings, good light, freshly painted walls — the painters had even bothered to blue-tape the woodwork. Quality work. More than two hundred years old, at this point.
The place was ancient, grandfathered into old building codes. Which meant it was also utilitarian, low-tech, free of smart devices listening in.
Exactly how he needed it. Exactly what would let him keep Grogu safe.
But the most important part: It felt too big because there was an extra bedroom. An empty one. One that would eventually be Grogu’s. Once Din got his shit together, converted all his unstable underground contracts into something that offered stability and certainty for a kid, got all the smokescreens and off-network connections set up.
The Empire would never dare look for their precious experiment in the heart of Republic territory, but Din still wouldn’t take the risk that a wandering eye might find Grogu if Din cut corners.
Soon, Din thought, as he slipped into an uneasy sleep. He was working on it.
Fennec woke him at the break of fucking dawn, even though they didn’t have a job lined up.
“You better have something,” Din said.
“Of course I have something, Mando,” Fennec said, “I didn’t wake you up out of sadism.”
Din wasn’t convinced. But good as her word, she transmitted him the job, and the coordinates — some simple wetwork (aka unnoticed assassination) for her, a quick kidnapping for him, aligned to scare a specific subset of hackers. Fine. Nothing unusual.
Din sent a quick encrypted message to accept the job, but before he could end the comm call, Fennec stopped him, her voice suspiciously light. “So what did you think of my friend?”
If he were being honest, he would’ve said, “Seems dangerous and very, very interesting.” But Din hedged, instead. “What’s the deal?”
“Experienced sub, not super picky, likes ropes but doesn’t need them, no long-term entanglements.”
Was Fennec going to mention the “off-network Mandalorian” bit?
Din decided to fish. “And he comes to every demo at that munch? Asks you questions like that?”
“Wait. Wait. You mean Boba?” Fennec snorted. “I wanted you to meet the rope bottom, actually. Aria.”
“Oh,” Din said, “they’re cute,” and nearly cringed at the obvious disinterest in his voice.
Fennec shook her head. “You’re kidding me.”
“Why would I be joking?”
“You’re into Boba Fett.” She was laughing, now, and Din didn’t know what to make of it.
“What, you’ve played with him?”
“God, no. He’s the guy who goes every week to be miserable. We’re friends, but — from other places. You know, work stuff. I like my partners well-adjusted. Less murderous.”
“Are there —” Din gestured vaguely. Concerns.
“Nothing like that. He’s good with boundaries. Never heard a single complaint about him, and I’d be shocked if I ever do. It’s just his… everything else. You’d get along, and I trust him, but — he’s got a lot going on.” Fennec gave Din a long, hard look. “Oh, no. You’re curious.”
Din looked away. He hated how well Fennec could read him, sometimes. They’d worked together for far, far too long.
“I just talked to him a bit, outside the bar,” Din said. “He seemed… interesting. You vouch for him?”
“He’s a good man, by our standards. Or at least, practical. At the end of it, it’s all just work, and he’s just a guy.”
Din didn’t say anything.
“Mando,” Fennec said slowly, “you sure you don’t want to meet Aria? They’re great. Low-drama. Thought you seemed like the right kind of mean.”
Din shrugged, and Fennec sighed.
“Look,” Fennec said. “I don’t totally know what Boba’s deal is — it’s not me, and he’s pretty private, and we run jobs constantly together, so it doesn’t come up. I don’t get the sense that he does these things… long-term.” Her face lit up in a wicked grin. “But I bet he’d drop like a rock for you.”
That sounded promising. That sounded exactly like what Din was looking for. Easier, even, if he and Din both came from the same world, had the same limitations, there.
“I have his number. He wouldn’t mind if I gave it to you,” Fennec said.
Din started to shake his head.
“Oh no,” Din said, “don’t put us in touch without asking —”
“Already texted him just now. He said yes.”
“He knows who I am?”
“I asked if he wanted to talk to the ‘pretty one who accosted him after my ropes demo,’ and he responded, ‘l8r,’ chatspeak, one word, no punctuation, and sent me a three-second livestream of him shooting someone.”
“Well,” Din said, already saving the number that popped up in his overlay, “thanks,” not sure that Fennec was doing him any sort of favor at all.
She forwarded him the livestream, too. All Din could see was a steady hand, training a blaster on a furious face. An easy shot, a splatter of blood.
A shiver ran through him. And he sent Boba a message.
Later?
Smart men wouldn’t get involved with criminals.
The thing was, Din was smart, but he was also a criminal. A criminal with a creed, sure, a code of ethics that he chose as a teen in the covert and kept choosing every day. But a criminal. So that narrowed his options to either men who were stupid enough to not realize he was a criminal, men who were stupid but knew he was a criminal and didn’t care, or men who were smart and also criminals.
Din didn’t like stupid men.
Boba Fett wasn’t stupid. That much was obvious.
But he texted like a teenager taught him and refused to say anything of meaning because, direct quote, “ur encryption = only ok :/,” which. Insulting. He just sent Din a link to a somewhat obscure limits checklist, latlong coordinates for something that turned out to be a mid-level coffee shop, a time and day, and instructions to bring it on paper not digital.
Insulting and pushy.
But Fennec was right. Din was curious.
Generally, he wasn’t a curious person — knowing things in his world got you in trouble. He learned what he needed to know to maintain his implants, to navigate the underworld, to come back alive from job after job. Ask him anything about a weapon, or stay off the network while hiding in plain sight, and he knew it. Beyond that, he looked away and didn’t ask too many questions.
But there were a few safe places he allowed his curiosity to flourish, and one of those was admittedly — and also possibly ill-advisedly — low-stakes BDSM hookups.
Everyone needed a vice. It was better not to be caught off-guard by yours, Din always thought.
Which is how Din ended up in full civilian clothes, settling into a corner table at a cozy cafe with a sheaf of papers that neatly summarized the kink interests he was prepared to share with a near-stranger.
The cafe was an interesting choice — one Din might’ve selected himself, if it had been on his radar. Abiding by Republic regulatory laws (cameras everywhere, live feeds) but only just. Din was pretty sure if he poked around in the wiring of the lamp on the side table next to the lumpy garish couch, he’d find a few jammers, too. Nothing that got said here would make it back to the corps unless the owner wanted it to, Din was pretty sure.
Probably fixer-run.
The checklist wasn’t Din’s usual. The forms split into neat little rows, organized independently of dom or sub roles: a list of acts, with an interest scale for giving or receiving.
Din’s were fairly rote, even boring, by a lot of subs’ standards, but they’ve served him well enough. Most people didn’t really want to sustain something complicated, in the scheme of things. His sexual limits — his usual disinterest in sexual scenes, or sex outside of scenes, and his long list of caveats for when he did feel like sex — tended to limit his options, but he didn’t mind that.
Limits were good.
He’d considered this checklist carefully, evaluating how much he wanted to disclose. He’d set firm boundaries around sexual touch, identified a few of his favorite types of play. He just didn’t fill out anything he didn’t want to disclose, like more psychological forms of play, where his interests varied too much by partner. And he skipped anything relevant to subbing, because that was a separate conversation entirely.
Din wondered what Boba would think of it.
Boba arrived after Din, hands shoved into the pockets of a cowled leather coat that hid every trace of visible implant. Anyone who didn’t know he had metal inside him might assume he was any other civilian.
Din knew better.
Boba just grunted a quick greeting, with a fleeting smile that was more solemn grimace than grin. Awkward, even. The twist of it made his scars look brutal, painful, in the light of day.
“Hi,” Din said.
As soon as Boba sat down, though, he made eye contact with Din and something brash and confident settled over him.
“Right,” Boba said, “let’s do this, then.”
Alright.
Their hands brushed as they swapped papers, and Boba met Din’s eyes for a long moment with a cocky smirk. Oh, would Din love to wipe that expression off his face.
Boba looked to Din’s questionnaire immediately. But Din took the opportunity to observe uninterrupted. Between the low light and the embarrassment last week, Din hadn’t really had a good chance to look at Boba head-on.
He looked ill at ease at a baseline; his eyes darted every time someone dropped a dish in the bucket, though he tried to hide the instinct by quickly fixing his eyes back on the papers in his hands. But he still held himself carefully, confidently, seemed aware of the ways he moved and took up space. Fit, and strong, and broad — plenty of flesh that would redden and bruise beautifully.
Din could work with that.
And better: Serious eyes. Nice hands.
His questionnaire wasn’t what Din expected. Lots of the usual — yes impact play, no water sports, a pretty common laundry list of kinks and limits for someone who’s not into public play. No electricity, which was admittedly surprising, for someone with that many mods. Plus, some interesting edgeplay — knife, blood, gun.
But for every single act, “receiving” was crossed out with a firm, red x. Boba’s unusual checklist format gained new significance.
Fennec might have misstated something, somewhere along the lines.
But, “I bet he’d drop like a rock for you” really didn’t seem ambiguous.
Din read the questionnaire with growing curiosity. Most sexual acts were marked neutrally, as if saying “willing but disinterested” with a big sigh. It wasn’t what he expected. But it was what he would look for in a dom.
If he were looking.
Which he wasn’t.
Or, maybe, which he hadn’t been. Din thought about his long, sleepless nights. He thought of the buzz of Manda, and the warmth of someone else’s beskar in the living network — how much he missed it.
How a nice pain high could feel so, so similar, if he closed his eyes.
When Din finished, he set the last page face-down on the table and regarded Boba thoughtfully. Boba had finished Din’s much more quickly — maybe hadn’t finished it at all — and now looked down at his hands.
If you lined up their questionnaires as-written, the two of them didn’t have a single compatible interest.
Din couldn’t read Boba’s face clearly, but his posture had shifted from confident-if-guarded to outright tense; he hadn’t quite dropped his head, but it was a close thing, with how his eyes still hadn’t left the tabletop. It seemed like he had no plans to speak first.
“I thought you were a sub,” Din said. “Or a switch.”
“Obviously not,” Boba said. Din might take it as rude — aggro-macho — from anyone else. But a note of stress, worry, crept beneath the words. The guy looked almost ready to bolt. “And you don’t seem to be, either.”
“It’s not usually on the table.” Din tapped Boba’s questionnaire thoughtfully. “But I think it could be.”
Boba met his eyes for the first time since they’d exchanged checklists. The cocky smirk was gone — not for the reasons Din would prefer.
But something bright entered his expression.
“So we should talk about that. Because this,” Boba gestured at the checklist, “is not helpful.”
“Sure. Not here, though,” Din said. He wasn’t a checklist guy, really. He liked to talk things through — watch reactions, find the spaces between the lists where he and his partner lined up. And he liked to do that on his own turf.
If he was doing this, he was making the rules and setting the pace.
He stood up to leave. Didn’t wait to see if Boba would follow.
Din had a hunch, anyway, that he would.