#IM A MANDALORIAN LETS FUCKING GO

[kraviolis]

daredevil star wars au where matt and foggy and karen are all jedi but matt is constantly struggling with the fact that the jedi do a lot of good but they overlook so much suffering and pain because theyre too tied up in politics and keep failing those who need them most and he ends up becoming a dark jedi vigilante while also maintaining his cover within the order itself bcus he does still believe in the jedi code but feels that they dont do enough for the galaxy.

#instead of a few blocks in new york im giving matt an entire galaxy to go fuck around in and also an insane amount of power #matt is still highly against murder and does not kill. he disarms and injures and will take one or two limbs but its fine #he is not sith. he flip flops between the light and dark and tries to find a balance within himself #he does use the dark more when he's DD and gets close to losing himself but he always finds his way back to the light #foggy is a councilor and karen... idk maybe she's a former shadow? #foggy isnt like a high councilor but hes on one of the other ones. like the fuckin... reconcilliation council? is that one a thing? #i cant decide if i also want matt on the same council or if i wanna put him somewhere else. like maybe he works within the senate more? #matt uses jar'kai djem so with 2 shoto sabers #foggy uses niman/soresu #karen is an ataru gal #krav talks #oh god can u imagine the punisher in star wars #he's most definitely got the same exact backstory except maybe hes like. mandalorian or something. #lets put frank castle in some fucking beskar yeah thats a great and sound idea #ohhhhh but then the frank and karen stuff..... a mandalorian and a jedi.....

[gothamcityneedsme]

thinking about how fucking dare she say this to a fellow leader.  lol.

#shitpost #like my character isnt offended really hes like. yeah mandos be weird #an IM not offended by it because im just examining her under a microscope of mandalorian culture lol #but like #as the commander you are constantly choosing between people's lives and death etc forever endlessly #and its like. shae...you are a vital ally and resource. he DOES have a right to choose that when he has the opportunity to #as do YOU if YOU have the opportunity too #you dont just let an important leader of an ally faction die in front of you #it isn't personal. it's professional. its business. you need them to live and you are in a place to do something? #yeah if you don't do something then that is logistically a failure #SORRY SHAE. HE'S NOT YOUR FRIEND OR YOUR ALLY OR EVEN PART OF YOUR CULTURE #hes like. literally not just going to watch you die and do nothing #like hello #also like. this is funny on an imperial agent because youve done FAR worse things its like #ma'am. #if you think me helping you cheat using the weapon that was being used on you and just. swapping it over to your enemy #if you think that's bad. its a good thing i couldn't plan to help you cheat without your knowledge AHEAD of time #because he sure as fuck would have lol #assuming the other side would cheat is a matter of course #really tavon just lacked opportunity here tho #and they DID cheat lmao!!!!! tavon is like. this honor stuff is bullshit #i love this entirely do not think i am hating i am literally loving this so mcuh #but like. lol!!!!!

[no-droids]

Another Rough Day

gif credit @chrishemsworht

Part Twenty of the Rough Day Series

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 13.7K

Warnings: Angst, violence, canon-typical blood and gore, language, hurt/comfort

A/N: i wanna thank yall for sticking around during my hermit era, in the time ive been gone i am now officially a junior at a university majoring in aerospace and it’s a fuckin nightmare and i hate everything and god help us all literally kill me and I will be posting INCREDIBLY slowly because of that (I’m talkin weeks or months in between updates yall, im sorry I can’t dedicate more time to this but I am going to finish this fic within the next handful of chapters idk maybe 5 or 6 so you shouldn’t have to wait too too long).  As a heads up there will be hard angst as we enter the final arc, there will be hurt and it’ll get dark but everything is gonna turn out alright so thanks for sticking with me and continuing to stick with me. im sorry if you dont like it or your expectations were subverted or if this isn’t what you’d hoped it would be after following and waiting around for so long but this was planned a long time ago and it took me a good year or two to recognize that I started writing this fic for me and now I’m going to end it writing for me and I hope yall can respect that

ALSO I asked my best BEST FRIEND in the entire world @cptnbvcks to collaborate with me for this after we both took a very long break from creating and she drew some GORGEOUS artwork for this chapter so it will be posted at the end, everyone please go follow her and say hello

ps brittany girl you’re a fuckin menace i had to use my own two ears and listen to ethan literally say the words “the mandalorian cums, hard” what the fuck was that im actually suing

anyways chapter below the cut lets get serious yall

---

You take two of them down before they even realize they’re being attacked.

Your aim is as swift and steady as if Din were behind your shoulder right now, calmly pointing out which stationary tree to hit next in rapid succession.  You’re positioned perfectly at the bottom of the ramp to take full advantage of the ambush, the only thing running through your mind is strategy and the constant calculating of angles and ricochets.  The other three troopers are trapped inside the open Crest and you’re right next to a large boulder that you can step behind for cover, but it proves unnecessary as the rumors were apparently true.

They’re… awful.

Not a single blaster is even fired in your direction—you think you see maybe one panicked red shot bounce around in the hull, but that’s it.  The troopers fumble for their guns and trip over each other at the unexpected attack—a few scream like children through the modulators, but you’re temporarily deaf to anything besides the screech of your weapon hitting its target and the crumpling of armored bodies.

Later on, if someone were to ask you to describe exactly what happened—who died first, who ran for cover, who cried out for help—you don’t think you’d be able to.  You don’t even really feel like a person right now.  The entire thing is cold, robotic survival instinct, pure ruthlessness rising in your soul for the first time in your life.  It feels sick.  Wrong in your bones.  Born from preemptive defense in fear of your life, but that doesn’t mean you stop.  Not until all of them stop moving.

You empty the entire fucking canister for a handful of stormtroopers, firing plasma and char marks across every square inch of the pristine hull even after the last one drops.  Your heart is beating too fast, your finger keeps pulling the trigger multiple times even after the blaster clicks uselessly, completely empty and beeping a warning that it must’ve begun emitting ages ago.  Being out of ammo scares you—you suddenly feel vulnerable, even though the very far away logical part of your mind reminds you that they have to all be dead at this point and no physical threat was ever able to graze you.

Regardless, you quickly spin behind the boulder and grab another canister from your belt, giving it a spare check for leaks while the empty one slides and drops to the rocky ground.  It’s the first time you’ve ever had to reload this weapon instead of just pointing and shooting, but the mechanics are relatively simple and your brain makes up for your lack of coherent thoughts with lightning fast perception.  What's difficult is that your hands are starting to shake now that you’re not aiming, you’re not breathing correctly because you’re not really breathing at all.  You can’t tell the difference between the adrenaline-fueled dissociative silence that muffles everything around you or if it really is just that quiet now.  No more clatter of armor, no modulated voices or terrified screams.  No blasters, no footsteps along the ramp, no birds singing.

You quickly pause to lift your elbow and check the enormous eyes blinking up at you, tiny claws still holding tight to the fabric of your tunic and completely unharmed, and then you force yourself to move.  The blaster is held out in front of you while you walk forward and your finger rests on the trigger, begging to be pulled again.  It’s suspenseful and terrifying in a different way than before—now it’s less about psyching yourself up for confrontation and more about the fact that any sudden movement could mean your very swift end.

Silence.  Silence.  You’re numb and raw at the same time, walking up the ramp as your eyes fly everywhere, not even registering the blood or gore, just searching for movement.  You don’t know if you feel like a predator or prey, you’re that much more brutal and inhuman because of how fucking terrified you are.  You count four stormtroopers in the hull laying crumpled and still on the metal floor, but the one in the far corner only has blood on his shoulder.  You quickly swing the blaster around to remedy that, but then—

“P-Please don’t kill me!”

His words remind you of something.  Reality, maybe.  A world outside yourself and the kid’s survival, the living beings behind the bloody armor your enemies wear.

It’s a miracle your finger stays hovering over the trigger, and you watch him throw the blaster at your feet with a clang and scramble to show you his empty hands.  “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me—I’m not loyal to the Empire, I don’t want to be here, please, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die—”

Behind the mask, your expression furrows.  Stormtroopers are loyal to the bitter end, what is he saying?  They embrace their expendiality, it’s the only thing that makes them any sort of a real threat.  Kuiil told you horror stories about them during your childhood, the cloning facilities and the propaganda they’re force fed since infancy.  It’s nearly impossible to find one who hasn’t been raised from birth to serve the Empire, no matter how crumbled and trace its remaining authority may be.

No, this is a trap, it has to be.  Your expression twists with dread after hearing him speak, readjusting your aim with the blaster and preparing yourself for the years of nightmares that’ll follow—but then he cries out, “Wait!” and then removes his helmet with trembling hands.

You pause, staring down at him in shock.

It’s him, you recognize him immediately.  It’s the same face from a hologram puck you bore into your memory, spent multiple days staring at so you’d be able to spot him under any disguise or circumstances.  Oshua Ryler.  Your quarry, the fifth puck, the one Din was out Maker knows where searching for before this entire mess happened.  A stormtrooper?  His puck said nothing about the Empire, this doesn’t make any sense.  What is he doing here?  Stormtroopers don’t have pucks, they don’t have bounties or relatives or loved ones searching for them.  They’re brainwashed, replaceable, faceless soldiers in suits of armor and they don’t even have names.

“Please don’t kill me,” he begs again, staring at you with wide eyes even as he cowers.  “I have a family, I-I just want to go home, please—”

“Shut up.”  You can’t think straight with him crying like that and you’re wasting so much time just standing here trying to process when your brain had to literally shut itself down to even do the things you’ve already done.  You have to kill him and escape, you have to—you can’t trust this complication, not with the tiny claws currently digging into your back and reminding you of your purpose, but it was so much easier when he had on a helmet.  You hate looking at his face.  It’s going to haunt your dreams now, just like the man you stabbed on Corellia.

“Please don’t kill me—please don’t kill me,” he screws his eyes up and breathes over and over instead, and your stomach wrenches with disgust.  His posture and expression are so fucking pitiful, you can barely keep your eyes on him through the overwhelming nausea and aversion that climbs up your throat.  He’s with the Empire, and they’re looking for the baby.  You know what needs to be done.  Pull the trigger, just one small movement from you and it’ll be all over.  It would be the easiest thing in the world, it would be so easy.

But then instead, you ask, “Why are you a stormtrooper?”

“I’m n-not—I hate the Empire—”

“The Empire is ashes.”  You don’t know if you’re yelling or whispering with how much blood is roaring through your ears.  “They hold no power anymore.  Why are you with them?”

“Because the one thing they have left is money!”  The quarry shrills the words at you, ghostly pale to the point of turning green.  “Th-They buy troopers now—they opened up a whole new market for the smugglers, there’s a base nearby that’s used for training and…”  He stares wide eyed at you and gulps.  “C-Conditioning.”

Your brain is already going a trillion lightyears an hour and it doesn’t have the capacity to empathize or understand anything beyond the child’s survival and the relevant details right now.  “Were they expecting the baby?”

“W-What?”  He squeaks up at you.

“Was the bounty put out on you a trap set by the Empire?”  You ask him, lifting your free arm just enough to flash him the tiny child clinging to your side.  “He said they’re coming after the baby, so tell me if this was planned from the beginning.”

“Who is ‘he’?”  The stormtrooper asks, furrowing his eyebrows and looking around.  “What are you talki—”

“Tell me if the bounty on you was a trap to take this baby!”  You roar, your blaster shaking as you aim it down at him.  Your mind is acutely focused on the tiny claws hanging onto your tunic, the continued safety of the kid and the life or death situation facing him that you were given absolutely no information about.  “Now—”

“If it was I didn’t know!”  He quickly cries out, pleading with you and clamping his eyes shut in terror under the barrel sight.  “I don’t know anything about a b-baby, or a bounty!  They just put blasters in our hands and told us to search for a ship and to bring back anyone we find alive, I swear!”

You’re silent for a moment, biting your lip under the mask and caught halfway between discerning and stalling.  You could still kill him.  You should still kill him, time is ticking down and more troopers could be heading this way any second.

Shit.  “Who put the bounty out on you?”  You ask sharply.  It might not be a completely fair question, but he can’t exactly blame you for not feeling completely fair right now.

“I—I don’t know,” he gasps, clutching his bleeding shoulder.  “Could’ve been anyone—my mother, Cyra, o-or my dad, Obediah, or Thia, or Benja, or S—”

“Thia,” you interrupt his rambling, catching the slurred word and repeating it back to him.

“Yes!”  Oshua jerks his head up, tears and hope immediately filling his eyes at the sound of her name, “Yes, Thiadura Celi Ryler, that’s my sister!”

Maker, if he’s lying, then he’s fucking brilliant at it.  You look towards the cockpit of the ship, biting your lip under the mask.  Get to Nevarro, tell Karga and he’ll… something.  Din was cut off before he finished.  Help?  Know what to do?  You’re lost, but you have a clear directive and the precious seconds are sliding by.  The controls are right up there, two steps to the ladder and less than a minute until you’re rising into the atmosphere.

But then you think back to the terror in Din’s voice.  The blistering panic that made him speak faster and with more urgency than you’ve ever heard from him.  Get to Nevarro.  Tell Karga.  Get to Nevarro.  Tell Karga.

You look back at the quarry.  “How many of you are there?”

“At the base?  Around three hundred,” he immediately spills.  “Half of us are in the hole right now getting brainwashed, they do it in shifts, but they can be mobilized in a few hours.  There were a lot of bodies outside when we were ordered to split off, maybe a third of our squadron, but the rest were still shooting at whatever was—”

“So around a hundred left,”  You finish breathlessly, almost wanting him to speak faster and cut to the chase so you can calculate quicker.  “How many were dispatched on the search?”

“Uh, there were eight groups of five sent in each major direction,” he informs you, still trembling on the ground.  “Told us not to come back until we covered the entire sector.”

Of which, four you’ve already taken care of.  In other circumstances, you’d be nauseated at the thought, but right now, it’s just another number to subtract, just more panicked math in Din’s frightening absence.  That leaves at least sixty troopers left wherever the base is, minimum, and likely a couple more hours before they’ve combed the sector.  If this wasn’t a preconceived trap purposefully set for the kid, then that means reinforcements haven’t arrived yet but likely will soon.  And if this is a base meant for training and conditioning, then that also means there’s a chance not all of them will be loyal yet.

You make the decision immediately.

“Okay,” you announce, clicking the blaster’s safety switch and holstering it, sounding lightyears more certain than you feel.  “Then you’re going to help me carry out a rescue mission, and I’ll take you back to your sister.”

“You…”  He looks uncertain, blinking at your blaster and slowly lowering his hands.  “You want to rescue the men?”

Ideally?  Sure.  Realistically?  You don’t say anything in response.  Instead, you kick his regulation firearm at your feet further away from the quarry just in case your judgment is flawed, and then turn around and grab one of the bodies behind you.

Your adrenaline is still blaring so fast that you only just barely note the severity of what you’ve just done and what you’re continuing to do.  The corpses aren’t real to you right now, they’re inanimate things that you need out of your ship before you can close the doors to it.  They are, however, heavy as fuck, but the only other adult here has a wound in his arm from the gun on your hip.  Regardless, you have experience with lifting dead weight without a big, strong, capable man to do it for you.

“Help me out here, kid,” you mutter over your shoulder, and in response, you feel his claws dig in and climb up just a little bit until he can peek out in front of you.  Thankfully, the burden is suddenly lifted and you can quickly slide the dead troopers down the ramp with ease.  It takes hardly any time at all—you just yank and haul and release and all four of them tumble the rest of the way all by themselves.

When you stand back up, Oshua hasn’t moved and he’s looking at you with a pale, queasy expression.  Glancing down, you see that your white robe is now stained with streaks and patches of rusty blood.  Instead of swallowing back bile at the sight and bolting to the shower to scrub off every last remaining trace, you breeze past it, noting nothing more than a change of color.  Dirtying your white, pristine clothing with the consequences of protecting this baby—you’d rather have blood-soaked fabric with an unharmed kid clinging to you than any other combination of those things.

“Can you make it up to the cockpit?”  You ask the quarry, kicking his rifle off the ship before closing the ramp and then gesturing up the ladder.  Your voice is calm and steady but your hands are beginning to shake again.  “I need as much information as possible about the base.”  You know that’s where Din is, judging from the wall of blaster screeches that drowned him out through the comm.  Logically, you know you could be headed right into a trap, and every instinct inside you wants to find safety, but… you just cannot imagine flying the ship away from this planet without Din onboard.  It isn’t fucking happening, you’ve made your choice.

Without waiting for a response, you climb the ladder and plop down in the pilot’s seat of the Crest.  While Oshua finds some way to clamber up the steps behind you in bulky stormtrooper armor with one good arm, you hold the kid closer on your lap and begin flight checking.  Din will be fucking furious, but the scolding you’ll be sure to get is the least of your worries right now.  Following his instructions and going back to Nevarro is just making shit infinitely more dangerous for him, turning what could be a potential rescue mission into an undeniable suicide mission.  Even if Karga somehow decides to send a few guild members along to infiltrate the base, it’ll be a war you want to avoid.

Besides.  What did you always tell him about running away from him, even when he instructs you to?

It’s just… not really your thing.

---

They’re everywhere.

They crawl like flies out of the base, and for every single body that falls, three more spill from the open doors.  Rapid fire plasma beams launch from the end of Din’s blaster, melting white armor with every twitch of his gloved finger.  Their aim is terrible, as is to be expected, but the sheer number of them more than makes up for it, as is by design.

Din’s heart pounds with exertion, his breath comes in ragged huffs through the modulator as his helmet identifies and isolates which body is closest to him, which body he needs to bring down next.  His blaster is so hot it nearly burns his hand, even through the thick gloves he wears.  When he runs out of ammo, he holsters the pistol and swings his rifle from around his shoulder, spinning to catch a handful of troopers behind him in the obliterating blast.

He’s not thinking much.  He can’t think, even though your safety and that of his son is currently dangling by a thread.  If he focuses on that, he’ll be dead before he can even picture your faces.  He just reacts, he maims and kills without a single thought in his mind.  Blood splatters, screams and sirens blare as he becomes surrounded by more and more troopers.  Din can hear the sound of plasma colliding and ricocheting off his armor; every single one of them is a potential injury he could currently have but might not even be able to feel right now.

His helmet starts beeping rapidly and he turns just enough to see, highlighted in bright red on the screen, two enormous artillery turrets slowly rising up out of the roof of the imperial base.  He feels a fierce flash of anger burn in his chest, it’s like a lightning strike to his veins.

Din needs to go.

And yet… if he was another man.  If he wasn’t a father, or a husband, if he had no family and no attachments like the creed declared he should, he would go.  With just a twitch of his fingers, he could be launching into the sky and retreating as far away from this battlefield as he could reasonably get.  He’s never been the type to run from a threat, but this isn’t just a threat.  Dozens of troopers are gaining on him, they’re trampling their own dead to get within range.  Plasma pings off his shoulder, another one hits his back as they flank from behind.  He can feel the heat through the sizzling beskar, he can see them surrounding him on all sides, and the propulsion trigger for his jetpack is right there under his wrist.

Din holds his ground and continues firing, he plants his feet firmly to the dirt with only one thought in his mind.

Run, sweet girl.  Run.

---

You type in commands to scan for Din’s signal, quickly locating it through the Crest’s computer onboard.  Not far from here, three minutes or less.  The ship rumbles to life beneath you, slowly lifting off the rocky ground and rotating in place as it hovers.  It’s not on autopilot but you feel like you are, you can barely feel your hands as they move the yoke forward and the Crest takes off in the direction of Din’s blinking frequency.

“Tell me about defenses,” you instruct Oshua, restlessly bouncing your leg while the baby coos.

“Two plasma turrets on top of the base,” the quarry quickly answers.  “There’s usually guards stationed around the perimeter, but everyone who’s capable will be outside right now.”

Your mouth twists downwards under the mask.  Blasters don’t scare you much from this high up, but Din’s armor doesn’t cover every inch of his body, he’s not completely invincible.  Doubt churns in your stomach, but you have to stay focused on one task at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed.  The turrets, then.  “Are they automatic?”

“Manual,” he corrects with a shake of his head.

“Radar?”

“Old.  Only engages above fifty meters.”

You eye your altitude and dip the Crest considerably, beginning to weave through the rocky canyons and dodging crumbling cliffs while you travel.  “What about ships?”

“None,” Oshua says, “except for a passenger shuttle used for transport.  TIEs are flown in the Vesta sector, this base is remote and used for basic training only.”

“Anything else?”  You ask, stomach twisting with the knowledge that barely four questions is all you’ve got.  You’re planning to drop into an imperial base to save the man you love and you can’t think of a single other question?  

The quarry shrugs, and your heart slams, does somersaults in your chest at the mere notion that you could fucking die here.  Today, in two minutes or less, you could die here.  The child in your lap looking over the ship’s front panel with a quiet determination in his eyes could die here.  Din could already be dead—that signal broadcasts his location to this computer regardless of whether he’s still breathing or not.  He could already be gone and you’d be flying the baby right into a trap without knowing any differently.

Whelp, you think while taking a deep breath, some strangely calm existential acceptance beginning to flood your soul.  If he isn’t dead, he will be soon if you don’t make it to him on time.

You immediately lift your wrist and speak into the communicator.  “Mando?”  You have no idea if he can hear you, but you need to try anyway.  Your voice is still firm, there’s a strength to it you don’t feel in your chest, but it certainly sounds convincing.  “I’m coming to get you.  Less than a minute to your location, do everything you can to get outside.  If you can’t, I’ll just… uh.  Try to figure something else out.”

That’s it.  That’s it, improvise until you don’t have to.  Even if you’re lacking confidence, you can at least scrounge up some conviction.  Your arms gain feeling again while you veer the Crest through the stony terrain, the familiar reverberations under your feet begin to fill your body with a powerful sense of purpose.  Your breaths begin to come steady, every falling rock you see through the transparisteel feels like it drops in slow motion, allowing you to evade them easily.  It would normally be stupidly dangerous to fly this low with so many unexpected obstacles and hazards narrowly missing the ship, but considering what you’re flying into, a few boulders seems comical.

“Where’s your helmet?”  Oshua asks out of nowhere, and for a second, you don’t think you heard him correctly.

But then it strikes you all at once what he’s attempting to imply, and the sheer lunacy of the thought is enough to make you laugh while you clutch the controls.  “I’m not a Mandalorian.”

“You wear the armor of one,” he points out… rather fairly, you have to admit.  “You cover your face like one.  You have a blaster that fires Philithiorium, a rare and expensive gas native to Mandalore’s stratosphere, and you’re a bounty hunter—”

“I’m not a Mandalorian.”  Your words are short and cutting, you have a daunting task to focus on and don’t feel like having small talk right now.  “I’m not a bounty hunter, either.”

But then again, Karga made you a member of the Guild, didn’t he?  He handed you Oshua’s puck and said this one is for you to find, and you are technically part of a Mandalorian clan.  All of this seems like it happened without your knowledge.  You may be marrying a Mandalorian, you may wear his armor and mother his child and shoot a blaster with his signet branded into it, but war isn’t in your blood.  This robe was a costume when you first made it, this armor was a relic that was restored as a hobby.  In a sense, it still feels that way.  The mask covering your face lended itself to a temporary surge of bravery earlier, but beyond that, the only thing that’s keeping you moving forward now is your family.  The man you love that may or may not be alive right now, the baby holding tight to your leg while the ship sways and weaves through the stony landscape.

Your eyes quickly flick down to the child in your lap, both of his three fingered hands clutching onto the stained fabric of your knee without moving a single inch.  He’d know, you tell yourself.  If his father is gone, he’d already know somehow.  Din is still alive, and he’s counting on you.

---

There’s too many for Din to handle.

They swarmed him, overpowered his endless artillery with massive numbers and there’s nothing he can do anymore.  The backs of his knees are kicked from behind and he slams down to the ground with a clatter, his sizzling hot blasters are ripped from him, and Din folds his hands calmly behind his back even as one of the stormtroopers barks out, “Binders,” to another one, who disappears quickly in response.  In the meantime, a few of them apparently decide to just attempt holding his arms in place, and their measly combined grip is almost enough to make him roll his eyes under the helmet.  These imperial soldiers are even more pitiful than they usually are, but his silent resolve to stall to ensure your escape is enough to keep him stationary and compliant for the time being.

Eventually, a few voices call out from beyond the crowd and there’s some movement from the back.  Dozens of troopers with their blasters all pointed at him begin to shuffle to make way, careful to keep their barrels aimed at him while a path slowly forms.  The crowd of white parts and a stormtrooper with a singular red pauldron on his right shoulder saunters confidently towards Din as he kneels on the ground.

An officer, he assumes.  Conveniently missing from the firefight, the scanner inside his helmet would’ve caught the change in color and Din would’ve made sure to kill him first.

“Well now, what do we have here?”  Comes his thin metallic voice through the tinny filter.  The officer studies him curiously for a few moments, before slowly looking down by his feet, reaching out one cheap, plastic covered foot to gently nudge the body of a dead trooper on the ground with a sigh.  “What a shame.”

Coward, he thinks, his lip curling with disgust under the helmet.

“This is an imperial training base,” he turns his attention back to Din to inform him when he doesn’t immediately respond, rather stupidly he might add.  “How were you able to find us?”

Silence.  The grip on hands held behind his back is even looser now.  He just tilts his chin up slightly in defiance, the scanner inside his helmet locating each weapon strapped to the man’s body and highlighting it red.  Small text boxes blink into existence under each one with a manufacturer and classification—a BlasTech E-11 rifle, a Merr-Sonn thermal detonator, a Kolvo vibroblade—and Din is severely unimpressed with the quality.  The detonator is the only weapon that even catches his eye, and that’s only because the chamber inside that houses the explosive baradium has a release mechanism that’s completely dead.  Useless, then.  Good to know.

After a long moment of quiet tension where Din refuses to speak and the officer continues to confidently scrutinize him, in some strange sort of silent battle of egos that only one seems to have a genuine interest in, another stormtrooper makes his way to the front, shoving past his fellow soldiers to address the superior in charge.

“Commander, we’ve sent out an alert for an intruder,” he tells him, slightly out of breath from running through the crowd in the lightweight armor.  Din wants to roll his eyes, but what he says next makes him snap to immediate attention.  “The fleet informed us that Moff Gideon is currently on route.”

Gideon.  The last time someone spoke that name, it was a quarry on Coruscant and you just barely managed to stop Din from suffocating the bastard for even saying it aloud before freezing him in carbonite.  It would’ve meant half the return on a hunt that lasted nearly a month but he saw red and his hand was crushing his windpipe before he realized what happened.  But he’s dead, Din thinks with a clenched jaw and fists tightening behind his back, he watched that TIE fighter explode and slam into the ground, crushing the man inside it.  The wreck was unsurvivable, he can’t be alive.

“For what?  This Mandalorian?”  The trooper in charge scoffs in response, and Din remains completely mute.

“Yes, sir,” the other one confirms.  “Orders were to capture him, alive.”

“Hm.”  The officer turns his attention back to him, less analyzing and more musing while he tilts his head.  “I see,” he eventually says, and he sounds like he’s grinning, before strolling slightly closer as Din stays completely still on his knees.  “He must want the beskar.  I’m sure it’s worth more than this entire battalion combined.”

All of a sudden, a gloved hand carelessly catches the rim of his helmet and tugs, and Din’s movement is explosive.  He launches off the ground, arms easily slipping from the pathetic grip they were being held in and his fist colliding with the side of the officer’s flimsy white helmet, the plastic making a deafening crack against his face.

Multiple hands immediately rush forward to grab him and yank him back down again while the commanding trooper stumbles backwards in shock, and Din amicably drops to his knees and folds his hands behind his back once more like nothing happened at all.

“Binders!”  A trooper behind him roars loudly once more, and a few men surrounding him begin trotting away this time.

The officer in red stands a few feet away from him now, grabbing his helmet and twisting it back to its proper position on his head where it was skewed.  There’s a shattered hole near his jaw where the material splintered and busted like the cheap piece of banthashit it is, and while he might normally feel pleased with himself for being able to see his skin peeking through, it just fills him with more righteous fury.  It’s such a punchable jaw.

After a few awkward moments of silence, the other one clears his throat and continues.  “He… has inquired about the location and status of a child that should be accompanying him.”

Din inhales deeply through his nose and grinds his teeth.  He wants to snap their necks one by one for even just mentioning his son, but there are just too many, more than even his whistling birds can neutralize.  Still, he gave you as much of a head start as physically possible.  You should be rising into the atmosphere right now, making the jump into hyperspace towards safety.  Karga will know what to do—he’ll protect his family, separate you and the boy so the threat is evenly dispersed instead of collected all in one place, and arm dozens of trained hunters to keep watch over you both individually.  It’s the best Din can do, and it’s the only thing keeping his knees planted on the ground and his body completely motionless while they continue speaking.

“We are combing the sector for a ship with as many men as we can afford to lose,” the trooper in red says, but his voice filter is shattered and now sounds like a puny little droid with a broken voice box, “but our numbers are unimpressive.  Assistance may be required.”

It’s too late, Din thinks, mouth twitching under the beskar with a satisfied smirk.  They’re wasting their time, looking for a ghost.  You’re both long gone by now.  They’ve got no idea you even exist—

“He also spoke of a girl.”

And then he feels his heart stop in his chest.  Every single cell in his body turns to fire, it’s a fucking miracle he doesn’t move a muscle in response.  His sweet girl, the one so far removed from the nightmare of the Empire that she made best friends with the orphans of it.  How the fuck did he know?  He shouldn’t even be breathing, let alone gathering information about you, how did he know?

But then Din thinks back, remembering your makeshift bed on the floor, your panicked eyes and heaving chest as the quarry taunted him with a sick little smile.  Who’s this, Mando?  She’s just darling, isn’t she?  Does Gideon know your crew has a lovely new addition?

“A girl?”

The trooper nods.  “Moff Gideon insisted that if the Mandalorian did not have a child with him, then a girl would likely be protecting him instead.”

He’s going to kill them, Din decides.  Every single one of these imperial pigs, every single soldier standing right now is a dead fucking man.  The blood pumping through his body suddenly turns to acid, deadly black hate poisoning his soul.  His heartbeat morphs into a war drum, the armor strapped to his limbs is the barrel of a gun.  He’s going to fucking kill them and leave an imperial base full of bodies to greet his old nemesis upon his return, and he’s going to enjoy every single second of it.

Except, then—

“Mando?”  The sweetest voice in existence suddenly crackles through the earpiece under his helmet.  “I’m coming to get you.  Less than a minute to your location, do everything you can to get outside.  If you can’t, I’ll just… uh.  Figure something else out.”

And, as Din kneels there in surrender, surrounded by a crowd of enemies he thought he destroyed long ago, all the anger—all the fury and defiance and murder surging through his veins—suddenly morphs to fear.

The emotion is so foreign and old to him, it feels like a face he barely recognizes and a name he can’t remember.  He’s panicked before.  He’s been in situations where a threat has made him blind with rage, he knows what it’s like to look death straight in the eyes and say that he’s busy and to come back another time.  This is different.  This is ice cold that freezes over beskar.

He can’t speak out loud to warn you—he can’t move his hands to press the button on the back of his helmet and allow him to talk without detection.  There’s plasma turrets on the roof of the base, he can see them right now.  The helmet’s scanners say they’re manned and engaged, and though he is outside and this is how you retrieved him before whenever he needed a quick escape, he has fifty fucking imperial blasters trained on him and you know absolutely nothing about this threat.  You’re flying right into a war zone and if either you or his son dies, he won’t ever be able to forgive himself.

Behind the helmet, his eyes fly to each and every trooper, wondering which blaster will be the one to do it.  Which weapon is going to be the one he can’t block in time when you descend, the one that’ll kill him right in front of you.  Which turret will be the one to obliterate the Crest with you and his son inside of it.

“Maker, where are those fucking binders—” he hears someone behind him snarl, but the white noise of pure terror roaring through his ears drowns them out.  His chest starts heaving against his will, sheer panic begins to blur his vision.  For the first time in his life, his armor feels too heavy, his lungs feel like one of these boulders are sitting on them instead of beskar.

All too soon, his helmet starts making a familiar sound that signals quietly in his ear, alerting him of an incoming ship, and the only thing he can physically do is count down the seconds to prepare himself for what is to come.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

Like lightning, Din breaks the grip of multiple troopers and surges up, tackling the officer in red to the ground.  There’s a clatter as they both slam into the rocky floor, but in the ensuing scuffle, he easily snatches the thermal detonator from his side holster and holds it up for everyone to see, before pressing the red button on the front and hearing it begin to beep rapidly.

---

You’re right on time.

The Crest rises up through the rocky cliffs surrounding the base and you spot the turrets you were warned about.  Weapons controls are already engaged and you’re too low to be detected by radar—you fire once, twice, and blast both of them to smithereens from behind before they can even rotate around to target you.

Alarms start wailing but the guns are destroyed.  It’s not comforting, though; blasters won’t touch you up here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t fire at Din on the ground.  Your eyes dart across the sea of white, looking for a flash of silver anywhere, and then you spot him instantly in the chaos.

For some reason, the troopers in his vicinity all seem to be bolting away from him.  Their rifles are down, clutched in their hands while they nearly fall over each other to run away as fast as possible, and your heart soars when you spot his jetpack firing up.  Din launches into the sky while another trooper is revealed underneath him, seeming to juggle something in his hands and then throw it into the crowd of retreating soldiers, but the sight of the man you love rising into the air while a flurry of blaster shots from the far edges of the imperial structure follow him gives you the confidence to immediately turn the guns down towards the horde of troopers.

“Which ones are in charge?”  You ask Oshua breathlessly, who leans forward and points out the transparisteel.

“Red pauldrons—” he barely has time to say it before you aim and fire at one of the troopers wearing red that was closest to Din, the plasma beam launching from the Crest so powerful and devastating that it outright obliterates the surface he’s laying on.  Pieces of shattered armor fly and a smoking crater of rubble is all that’s left behind, but your mind is whirling and you’re already onto someone else wearing red at the edges of the complex, and then two more near the doors, and then another—

To their credit, you think the sixty or so soldiers in training seem to figure out that you’re not aiming into the enormous collection of them.  If you were, the damage would be catastrophic and spraying everywhere, but you’re precise and meticulous with your shots, and the only ones who are loyal enough to the cause to hold still and raise their blasters at the incoming threat tend to be the ones you need to mow down anyways.  The rest of them scatter in all directions, scrambling over each other to escape and then disappearing into the distant boulders surrounding the base—but you notice that not a single one of them runs back inside the safety of its open doors.

The hull dips with the weight of Din dropping in, and relief floods your soul even as you continue raining hell down on the superiors in charge.  Any flash of color you see is a target, your eyes lose focus of everything, your vision blurs and turns monochrome as you just search for red.

“Lift up!”  You hear Din’s voice roar from the hull.  You can hear his rifle unloading through the open door.  “Now!  We have to go now!”

You press the button to shut the hull door with Din inside and punch it, rising so fast that the shove of gravity makes it difficult to keep your head up.  Through the sudden surge of downward force, you just barely manage to raise your incredibly heavy arm to push the button that pressurizes the Crest and ignites the launch boosters, preparing the vessel for space travel.  Outside the transparisteel, the gray sky begins darkening as the atmosphere eventually disappears.  The ship’s engines roar, burning so much fuel at once that you’re actually accelerating through the climb, you’re boosting through the gradual ease of gravity as the planet’s curvature and glow becomes softer and softer below you.

As soon as the blackness of space begins to fill the windows, the slight subsiding of force allows you to plug in the coordinates for Nevarro with less difficulty, but you’re still moving, still rising, still escaping.  You can’t find it within yourself to slow down, but then something catches your attention.

Claws suddenly dig sharp into your thigh, sharp enough to sting and cause you to wince, and you look down to see that the kid has gone incredibly tense.  Deadly tense.  Your heart is still pounding even though you’re away from danger, you’ve got Din in the hull, everyone is safe, and yet—

It flickers into existence all at once.  One second it’s just space, just the endless depths of nothingness spread out for light years in front of you, and within the blink of an eye it’s suddenly there.

A star destroyer.

Your body freezes in horrified awe, having never seen a ship so fucking big in your entire life.  It looks like a massive satellite, the size of an enormous asteroid instantly appearing in your vision and dwarfing the vastness of space around it.  All the stars you used to dream about are suddenly blotted out within a fraction of a second, terror so immense seizes your soul that you stop thinking.  You stop calculating, you stop being yourself for a split second that lasts an entire lifetime.

Before you can move a single muscle, the computer beeps quickly and lurches the Crest into hyperspace.

---

The stars streak across the transparisteel like so many times before.  Utter silence nearly deafens you with how abrupt it is after so much noise, but the peace it used to bring does nothing to quell your fear.  Everything is the same as it always was, same bursts of light as you hurdle faster than it towards Nevarro, same quiet, same rumbling hum of the ship.  But now, everything has changed.

You hear the quarry next to you suddenly inhale and exhale loudly, and it shocks you a little bit, reminds you that there’s a person next to you and another is on your lap.  Other people exist outside of the vision of death that just flickered out of existence just as quickly as it appeared.  They’re breathing, Oshua is shakily unbuckling his seatbelt, life is continuing on in the quiet cockpit but you can’t seem to move like he is.  You can’t seem to breathe like he is.  It’s only when the baby slowly maneuvers himself around on your thigh and blinks up at you, placing a tiny hand on your stomach that you finally feel air enter your lungs.

After a moment, you reach down and click open your seatbelt with trembling fingers, scooping the kid up in your arms and slowly attempting to stand.  Everything feels wobbly and dreamlike, you have to brace yourself on the headrest to prevent yourself from falling back into the chair again.

“That was…” Ryler mutters, his voice sounding foggy and distant, “uh.  A close one.”

You look over at him, recognizing that he’s speaking but not quite able to understand the words right now.  Red catches in your vision, and you blink down at the way he’s clutching his left shoulder, the smear of blood darkening the white armor he’s wearing.  You blink a few more times at the sight of it, and though it feels like you normally would be sickened at the wound, somehow shocked out of your state of shock, it does nothing to you.  When you look back up at his face, his expression seems strangely grateful, even when it’s screwed up in what you know must be excruciating pain.    You did that, a quiet voice whispers in your mind, even though the rest of it seems incredibly blank.

Instead of responding, you stumble a few steps over to the ladder, spinning around and hesitating for a moment.  You’re severely lacking in coherent thought, but one thing seems to break through.  You’re not sure if you have enough coordination to do this safely right now.  However, when there’s movement in your peripheral and you look to see Oshua gently offering his right arm to you, seeming to understand you’d like to use both hands for this, you snap back to your senses just the slightest bit and hug the baby tighter to your chest.  Carefully, you begin making the slow climb down the ladder with the kid, still trembling with the aftershocks of adrenaline.  Your limbs feel extra heavy, but eventually the floor meets your feet.

Din is standing there when you slowly turn around, armor gleaming and still as a statue, but he has his back to you.  His helmet is tilted down at the ground, and when you follow his gaze, you’re met with the sight of the bloodstains of dragged bodies that leave dark red streaks all the way up the ramp.

You feel something this time.  It’s… cold.  A burning, searing cold that creeps into your skin.  Like your heart decides to pump nitrogen through your chest instead of warm blood.  You did that.

There’s a sudden urge inside of you to speak, to address him and inform him of your presence, tell him everything is okay, everything worked out, but you can’t find it in yourself to say a single word.  You can’t find a single word to say.  The kid twists as best he can in your clutch, his ears drag against your chest to greet his father, but for some reason, there’s still a strange sense of fear in your bones.  It’s enough to wake you up slightly, it’s enough to tell you it’s not over yet.  There’s a terror in your heart that hasn’t left since he first called over the comm and begged you to run, a crippling dread that you thought climaxed after seeing that star destroyer appear, but it’s somehow only increased after laying eyes on him like this.

You watch as his helmet turns, slowly meeting the pauldron on his shoulder, and for some reason, you feel yourself harden.  Your feet brace against the metal floor like this is another threat you have to face, you let its unyielding metallic strength transfer up through the souls of your boots to your heart in your chest.

But the second you hear cheap white armor clatter as the quarry steps down the ladder behind you, Din bursts into movement.  He suddenly spins and storms up to you in one single step while catching your holstered blaster on your hip.  It’s out and aimed in the blink of an eye, and it’s a miracle you remember how to speak before he remembers how to kill.

“Mando—” you warn, just in time for the quarry to land on the floor of the hull and turn around to reveal his face.

Din holds there for a second, his helmet locked on Oshua’s features.  His gloved fingers twitch wildly on the trigger of your gun held over your shoulder, like he has to remind himself multiple times not to.  You hear Oshua’s armor clack while he likely raises one good arm in surrender, but then Din’s helmet moves a fraction of a millimeter to your face and holds there.  He just stares down at you, and the air feels heavy, your body feels heavy, the feather light child in your arms feels heavy.

Slowly, he lowers his arm, lets it fall while he continues looking at you from behind the visor.  You look back at him, unblinking, unfeeling, and there’s a few seconds that last an utter eternity where nobody moves.  Nobody speaks, nothing happens, but then a soft coo comes from your arms before you can finally break eye contact, knowing there are still some things that need to be done.

You eventually turn around and lift your chin to address Oshua.

“You have to go into carbonite,” you inform him quietly.  Your voice sounds strange, like it’s coming from outside of yourself.  “We’re taking you to Nevarro, and then you’ll be transported to your home planet. When they unfreeze you, your sister will be there to collect you.”

He looks uncertain, one hand still raised while the other hangs uselessly at his side, and you don’t blame him.

But you also don’t feel like saying anymore, not unless he decides he doesn’t want to go in willingly.  Normally you might’ve tried to empathize, offer him further reassurance beyond just a couple short sentences, but you don’t.  Speaking feels difficult, thinking feels difficult.  You’re still in survival mode, not active but reactive.  There’s also no reason for you to lie to him about this, and you can see him glance at Din standing silently behind you, who hasn’t moved a muscle.

He eventually nods and you walk him over to the chamber without another word, watch him turn to face you as he backs into the opening while you reach up towards the control panel.

But then there’s a moment.  One where you hesitate slightly, one where your vision flashes back to the sight of those bloodstains on the floor, and that burning cold fills you again, so cold it feels completely numb.

“I’m… sorry,” you whisper quietly to him, though your voice sounds so empty.  There’s so much emotion that should be there but isn’t, so much regret and pain that should break through but can’t.  “I’m sorry I… killed your friends.”

Later, you’ll think about how you felt absolutely nothing saying it.  Your heart doesn’t constrict with remorse at the mere words leaving your mouth, guilt doesn’t flood into your soul, pain doesn’t wrack through your bones.  You could’ve been saying anything at all and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

He blinks at you, flicking his eyes between yours for a second or two, but then you press the proper button and watch the gas quickly freeze him where he stands.  He’ll be conscious the entire time, but Karga will send him to the correct location and you have no doubt that this elemental purgatory is leagues better than where he just escaped from.  It’s a benefit being the last quarry to be retrieved—he’ll only have to spend a few days trapped in here before being reunited with his family.

When that’s done and Oshua is a complete statue in front of you, bulky white armor now colored a dull metallic gray and frozen in time, you will yourself to finally turn around to face the enormous mountain of a presence behind you.  The baby gently reaches out for him, but Din doesn’t move from where he’s stood.  Your blaster is still clutched tightly in his hand, and he isn’t looking at you.

Slowly, you walk over and stop directly in front of him in the middle of the hull, blinking at him while the helmet subtly moves to lock onto your face.  The kid begins wiggling in your arms, making soft impatient noises while you both stand in complete silence across from each other.

After a few moments, you hear him flick your blaster’s safety on by his side and then toss it carelessly to the ground.  It skids along the floor, light enough to be mostly quiet.  Gloves reach out as he carefully takes the kid from you and settles him in the crook of one arm, and then he looks you up and down, still not saying anything.

Your eyes follow his movement, watching his arm slowly reaching out to you, and you think he’s going to cup your jaw, or brush your hair back.  Give you some sort of physical reassurance since he hasn’t spoken a single word of it.

Instead, Din suddenly grabs the armor clinging to your chest and starts ripping it off you with one hand.  It clangs to the floor so loudly in the silence of hyperspace, the kid���s ears twitch and flutter with each shattering bang.  You hold still while he does it, you barely respond except the unavoidable movement your body experiences as the pauldron is yanked from your shoulder and thrown against the ground.  The ammo belt is tugged over your head and hurled away, the thigh braces are snatched from your legs and they clang to the floor, and the pearly, opalescent fabric revealed underneath is stained in dead man’s blood, rusty and in such great quantities that it shows up as brown instead of red.

“Are you hurt?”

He sounds… dead.  So monotonic that you can’t possibly gauge his emotional state.  He doesn’t move.   His fists don’t clench, he says every single word like it means the same exact thing as the last.  If nothing at all was a person who could speak, they’d use his tone of voice.

“No,” you eventually whisper.

The helmet nods once, and then he spins around and walks away without anything else.  Without saying anything, without touching you, or double checking you for injuries in case you were lying.  You stand utterly still while Din climbs the ladder with the kid cradled in one arm, and you don’t even flinch when the door to the cockpit slides shut behind him.  You have no idea how long you stand there in the splitting silence afterwards, numb and unmoving.

You feel… nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

The hard defenses you strapped to yourself today to reconcile the things you had to do are still high and strong, guarding your soul even if he stripped away your physical armor.  Self preservation is still animating your body, and your facial expression barely changes.  Your first thought, as soon as you remember that you can have one, is that there are things that still need to be done.  Tasks to complete.

Alone, you shower the lingering traces of blood off your body, the normally clear and refreshing water running a sickly, toxic brown.  Alone, your stomach rolls and suddenly decides to empty itself of the very little that was in it as the scalding drops rain down over you—mostly liquid and bile that easily rinses down the drain.  The water is too warm, it beats down on you like blazing hot sand pelting your skin in the desert.  You feel like you did those first few months with Din, where the silence was suffocating, where you’d only interact with the baby if he was on a hunt or if you could tell he didn’t know how to calm him when he was fussy.  If you were in hyperspace, you usually spent time by yourself in the hull while he lived in the cockpit, and if he decided he needed to be in the hull for whatever reason, then you’d trade places with him.  It was… isolating.  Lonely by yourself.  The quiet used to haunt you before it became your cherished friend, but now it’s a betrayer, a ghost that whispers memories and nightmares in your ears.

When you finally finish rinsing the blood from your skin and get dressed, you see the sheets that used to make up your bed now have fried holes in them from your charred plasma marks, the inside of the hull is covered in them and the trails of dried blood where you dragged the bodies down the ramp.  Your armor is still strewn about the hull, the kid’s hovering shield lays dead in the corner.  Everything you meticulously cleaned and organized and collected and created, now the scene of a bloodbath.  One committed by your hand, your blaster still laying uselessly on the floor forever linked to this atrocity.

You spare a glance towards the ladder, but you don’t want to come face to face with Din yet.  You already knew he’d be furious, but… you had hoped that he’d at least…

What?  At least what?  Comfort you?  Coddle you after you deliberately ignored his instructions?  What exactly, in the past year or so of learning Din’s inner workings and intricacies, would ever give you the impression that he’d come give you a big hug after you purposefully defied him?  You flew the kid directly into an imperial base after being told to protect him, you ignored every order he gave to you in the moments he thought would be his last, and though you did it to save his life, you have a feeling that Din has never valued his life even a fraction of what you do.

The misery stabs at your soul, but your mind is finally beginning to process things logically.  He’s alive, the kid is alive, the quarry is secure, and you’re all onboard the safety of this ship hurtling through hyperspace where nobody, not even the Empire, can touch you.  You weighed the consequences before making your decision, you did what you had to do.  If he wants to be mad, then he can fucking well be mad and you’ll find some way to comfort yourself.  At least he’s here being mad, at least he’s alive and safe and breathing and mad, and your rare act of disobedience is to thank for that.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you realize it’s probably easier than it should be to reconcile the punishment.  Right now, you welcome the exclusion, the negativity and sorrow beating itself into your soul.  Four innocent people died today on this ship, gunned down under your blaster while they panicked and ran for cover.  You keep hearing their screams.

So you start to clean up the hull, needing another task to focus your thoughts on.  You work to erase every inch of the evidence of your deeds, make it disappear like the pool of blood Din once cleaned up while you were sleeping and never acknowledged again.  You only allow the bloodstains to fuck with your head for a single moment, and then you swallow back the nausea until you’re a blank slate again and sink to your knees with a rag in your hand.  After that, your vision stops focusing and it just becomes red contrasting against gunmetal gray, and you work tirelessly to get rid of all remaining traces of it.

Then you start on the blaster marks, you need them gone.  After a few informed attempts at mixing cleaning chemicals, you find one concoction that allows you to wipe them away like they’re nothing more than dirt that got tracked in.  The Crest’s oxygen recycling system works overdrive to constantly purify the air so you don’t get high or pass out, but your nose still stings.  It’s fine, it’s sterile, it burns a bit but it smells sharp and metallic and keeps you hyper focused on the task at hand.

After that’s done, you pick up the charred blankets and ball them up to throw into the trash vent.  You don’t feel anything as you do it.  You don’t think about how long it took you to collect these over months and months of being stuck on this ship, how comfortable they were when everything else was industrial and rigid, how many nights you spent with Din curled up in their softness while he breathed easy and warm.  Sheets are just luxuries, they can afford to be lost.

Next, you gather your armor and wipe it down with the rag, put it away along with your blaster.  The stained robe goes in the trash, along with the sheets and the blood soaked cloth you used to clean everything.  They’re all ruined, you’ll never be able to make them right again.

The hull is sparkling clean when you decide to take another shower.  Nothing on you is dirty except your hands, but you feel filthy.  Wrong, cold, numb, cold, stained, cold.

After scrubbing your skin raw under the water and changing clothes again, since you don’t really know what to do with yourself anymore, you slowly climb the ladder to the cockpit, keeping perfectly silent.  When you reach the upper platform and come face to face with the closed door, you can just barely hear Din’s whispered voice speaking quietly to the baby beyond it.

You raise your hand for a moment, hovering your knuckles over the metal, but then it eventually falls.  Instead, you look over and spot the corner, the same corner Din bunched himself into when he snapped at you for even suggesting going on a hunt with him, blew up at you for the mere notion of something happening like what happened today.  You back yourself into it in defeat and slowly sink down on the floor, resting your head against the metal and hugging your knees to your chest since you don’t have a tiny baby to take their place.

You can’t sleep.  You don’t even try, it’s pointless.  The concept feels foreign the longer you sit here by yourself.  You don’t hear Din or the baby anymore, but you feel… so fucking awful that it’s fitting that you don’t knock or go looking.  You don’t want to hold that sweet child with hands that were covered in blood just a few hours ago.  You killed more people than you can count on your fingers today, and of the ones who had done nothing wrong…  They screamed like younglings, ducked for cover and were able to fire off one single useless shot in the mayhem before you closed their eyes forever and left their bodies to rot in armor that wasn’t ever their choice to wear.

You didn’t know they were kidnapped and smuggled and forced into that situation.  You couldn’t have known, but that isn’t the point.  In this case, knowing doesn’t make one bit of difference.

You also can’t face Din yet, not like this.  You don’t want him to see you cowering, shattered with guilt over the decisions you made under pressure.  How will you ever get him to forgive you for not listening to him when you can’t even forgive yourself for the result of your choices?  Din is a hardened man who grew up in blasterfire and bloodshed, just because you love him doesn’t mean he’s going to magically become someone he isn’t.  You’re here letting guilt sink sharp claws into your chest over four dead men when he had a good fifty or more corpses scattered on the battlefield around him.  You decided to wear that armor, you decided to fly into an imperial base with the kid on your lap, and this is now your penance.  You’ll accept it with your back straight and your chin held high.

Figuratively, of course.  Physically, you’re smaller than you’ve ever been.  Crumpled up into a ball, taking up as little space as possible, curling up as tight as you can like an animal protecting all your vulnerable parts during a brutal attack.

So, since he isn’t here to comfort you himself, you just try to think about what he would tell you.  A long time ago, what would he tell you?

Din would tell you… that you killed someone.  Multiple people, this time.  He’d also tell you that it doesn’t matter what he tells you, what you could have reasonably foreseen or what you should have done.  The end result won’t change.  You own this now.  You’ll carry their deaths with you.

You take a few deep breaths, self-soothing with the undeniable truth that would be murmured matter of factly from his quiet voice.  He wouldn’t argue with you.  He wouldn’t deny the decisions you made or the consequences of them.  It happened, and at the end of the day, you either learn how to handle that, or you don’t.

And, for the four you did shoot, you were responsible for freeing ten times that amount.  You’re responsible for reuniting Oshua Ryler with his family, even if your place in yours is momentarily shunned.  You’d rather be out here alone than in there with the kid, wondering where his dad is or if he’s even still alive.  You rescued Din and now he gets to be here to shut this door on you, hold his son, and whisper calm reassurances to him.  If you listen really hard and imagine, you can pretend they’re for you, too.

That’s it.  Focus on them both, alive and well together.  Focus on the bodies wearing white armor that were moving, the ones that were bolting away from the imperial training base as fast as they could, free from the torture of imprisonment and conditioning.

Finally, you close your eyes and slip into unconsciousness.  It’s not a testament to your exhaustion, but rather just how long you’ve been left to sit here by yourself.  Hours, maybe.  Time is strange in hyperspace.

You dream of a faceless man ringing bells.

---

When you wake up, a small baby has been placed in your arms, and you’re being dragged into a strong, secure beskar hold on the floor.

“Din,” you suddenly lift your head as soon as you’re conscious and nearly bonk it into solid metal, apologies rising in your throat before you even remember where you are.  You did what needed to be done to keep your family alive and together and you’d do it a thousand times again if necessary, but that doesn’t mean you won’t apologize anyways.  After the deeds you’ve committed today, regret feels as natural on your lips as speaking your own name.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I know you’re mad at me but I—”

“Shh,” he whispers, running his gloves through your hair.  He’s still wearing his helmet, he hasn’t taken anything off yet.  “Don’t say anything.  Just… stay here, stay right here with me.”

“I tried to save you,” you croak, tears instantly flooding your eyes.  You did save him.  You saved him and the baby and yourself but you’re so physically and emotionally exhausted that all you can recall is your intent.  “I tried.  Wasn’t gonna leave you there by yourself.  I tried to be brave, like you—y-you wouldn’t have left without me.”

His arms tighten around you, cradling you in such a strong embrace that you burrow into him, you find a place for your head on the hard metal strapped to him and bury yourself there, wishing that you had shovels of dirt being piled on you to justify the death you still feel staining your soul.  Your heart is starting to pound now that you’re remembering, your body is starting to shake with tremors of shock now that you’re aware of your own skin again.

“I was so sc-scared, Din, I didn’t—didn’t know what was happening,” you lament through watery eyes, gasping it out in hopes that it’ll relieve the slightest bit of the gut wrenching guilt just mercilessly crushing you.  It caught you before you could protect yourself against it, that armor you built around yourself isn’t on when you first wake up.  “I-I didn’t want to kill them, but they were already on the ship and y-you said—you said they were coming after the kid s-so I had to, I had to—”

“Stop,” Din whispers, voice so quiet that you can barely hear him.

“I-I cleaned up the blood,” you turn your face against the cold beskar to let all the positives you listed for yourself before scrape across your throat.  They don’t sound comforting anymore, they just sound like excuses.  “It’s gone, it’s like it never happened, everything is okay now, I got the quarry, I protected the baby, I saved a bunch of people, you’re both safe—”

“Stop,” he chokes out.  The modulator cuts off before you can hear his next breath, but you feel it shudder under your body.  “St-Stop it, please.���

Your eyes clench shut so tightly you feel like the streaking stars outside are behind them, tears drop down against his pauldron and you press your face tighter to it like it’s a wound, like the pressure will somehow ease the bleeding.

“Listen to me,” he says very quietly, and you instantly brace yourself.  The walls you just let down shoot right back up, your body physically tightens in preparation for another pain, another trauma, another scar you’ll carry, and you stop shaking.  You stop breathing, even when his hand comes up to ease your face away from his armor.

“You,” he whispers, holding your chin so you’re staring right at him, and your eyes flick fearfully in between his behind the visor, “are a sweet girl.”  Din’s leather thumb brushes along your skin, dragging over the tears below your puffy eyes.  “Not,” his voice catches, “a Mandalorian.”

Your heart goes cold.  Again, everything turns numb.  It doesn’t matter that you already said this yourself out loud earlier today.  It doesn’t matter that you acknowledged this fact, verbally insisted it more than once to hammer home the truth and felt some sense of comfort in it.  For some reason, hearing the words from his mouth is a fucking knife to your chest.

“I taught you how to fight, how to shoot a blaster,” he murmurs, thumb catching every single tear that continues to fall as he speaks.  “I taught you everything I know, everything that’s been taught to me.  I taught you how to defend yourself, how to protect yourself when you’re in danger.  I gave you your blaster, I gave you my armor, I gave you everything I could give you to keep you safe.  And when I thought you were ready, I let you loose on Sanctuary II.  Do you know why I did that?”  The helmet tips forward the slightest bit at the question, probing deep into the most shattered part of your heart.  “After all those months of fighting, and shooting, and training, do you know why I told you to run?”

You blink silently at him, a shaky breath quaking through you, and your expression wants to crumple under the reprimand.  You’re so fragile right now, taking hit after hit after hit to the softest parts inside you, and you want to just give up.  Let the guilt and remorse take you, let it wash you away.  But then, instead…

There’s a flicker of something inside you.  Something strong, endlessly strong, and it makes you want to revolt against what he’s saying.  It replaces the hurt and fear and desperation for comfort with a strange sense of insurgence, like it did earlier when you were hiding behind a boulder, cowering and trembling and not wanting to die.  You’re filled with a quiet urge to defend yourself in the face of this, stand up for yourself and refuse to be beaten down any longer.

“Because you needed to know how to escape danger,” he answers himself when you don’t.  “You needed to know how to disappear, how to outsmart any pursuer and find safety, even the trained ones.  Especially the trained ones.  Anything else was meant to be your last resort.  Not your choice.  Not something you chose.”

“I couldn’t leave you,” you admit to him quietly, voice shaky and tears still coming even as you try to speak up for yourself.  The regret you carry has nothing to do with this, and you decide right now that you won’t feel bad for saving him.  Your hurt comes from the meaningless things, the ones without any need whatsoever, not the necessary ones, and you tried.  You repeated his words to yourself over and over again, told yourself to run, told yourself to get to Nevarro, and it wasn’t going to happen.  “I couldn’t do it.  It wasn’t a choice.”

“It was,” he tells you.  He says it softly, whispers it like it’s the gentlest thing in the world, but the power and inherent distance of the armor strapped to his body finds its way into the words.  “And it was the wrong one.”

“What was I supposed to do?”  You ask, just a hint of that rebellion swimming to the surface now, rising out of the waves of self doubt, the one that feels like a spine growing in your back, an energy coursing through your veins that makes your heart start to beat faster.  Din’s hand slowly drops from your cheek but you don’t care.  “Was I supposed to run away and just let you die?”

“Yes.”  It’s quick and blunt and completely emotionless.  Delivered like a punch to the vulnerable parts of yourself he taught you how to protect, and the utter silence following this single word is comparable to the physical pain you learned to defend against.  It jabs hard against everything good and sweet and tender inside of you, and you’re left speechless even as he continues impassively.  “That’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”

It takes a second, but then that unfamiliar feeling suddenly surges up, breaches with the power of an entire ocean.  Your voices may be nothing more than whispers in the dark, you may be clinging to each other, holding each other with the softest, gentlest love in your hearts, but the strength of your conviction on this would rip metal apart.

“No.”  The word holds the might of your entire being, and it stands alone and defiant in the face of everything you fear, everything that threatens you, him, and this child.  Never.  You’ll die before that happens.  “I love you, and there’s nothing in this galaxy that would ever make me do that.  Not fear, not danger, not the Empire, nothing.  Not even you.”

Din stares at you.  His visor reflects your hardened expression back to you, the force in your soul and the purpose in your eyes, and you don’t even realize the gravity of what you just said because like your love for him, gravity is a constant.  It’s a fundamental truth cemented into the rules that govern your actions and it stays true no matter where you are, no matter what terror you face, or how scared you become.  You have him, you have this little boy in your arms, and if that’s all you have, then you have everything.

After an eternity of this, of feeling his eyes pierce deep into you from behind the helmet while you refuse to wither under his stare, you watch him slowly turn and look down, landing on the sleepy child tucked between you both.  He holds there for a long time, before finally whispering, so quiet that the modulator barely picks it up, “It was the wrong choice.”

You stay quiet.  It happened.  What’s done is done, you can’t change the past.  He can scold and reprimand you about this as much as he wants, but you did the right thing and that decision is the only reason he’s even here to be able to do so.  This exhausted child was reunited with his father because of your choices, and this exhausted father was reunited with his child.  You won’t argue anymore, but it’s a certitude that lives deep in your heart now, builds a home there right alongside the both of them.  Din eventually looks up, his eyes find yours again behind the visor, and his hand rises once more to gently cup your jaw.

“I… thought I’d enjoy seeing you in my armor,” Din finally whispers.  It’s not what you expected, but his voice sounds… weak.  Broken.  “You wore mine once before, and it was…”  He brushes his thumb along your cheek, and then his head shakes slightly, pushing the thought away.  “It wasn’t real.  It didn’t fit.  It dwarfed you, it made you look out of place, it made everything soft and innocent about you stand out.  I liked it because it wasn’t real.”

“Was it… really that bad?”  You whisper back, partially to ease the tension just slightly but quickly breaking eye contact with him when you realize it doesn’t land correctly, it just sounds self conscious and sad.  You try to find that conviction again, that strength and assurance that propped you up so sturdily before, but…  Not a Mandalorian, he’d said.  Of course not.  Of course not.

“It wasn’t the armor.”  Din gently tugs up on your face so that you look at him again.  “It was you covered in blood.  It was you purposefully putting yourself in danger.  You killed multiple armed soldiers of the Empire, you dragged their bodies off the ship.  And then you flew into an imperial base, where you killed the officers, too.  You…”  He shakes his head slowly at you while speaking, and although you can’t see his face, you don’t need to in order to hear the horror in his voice.   “You… collected a quarry… in the middle of a massacre, sweet girl.”

Not a Mandalorian.

“You don’t chase down bounties,” he tells you.  “You don’t fly into war zones.  You don’t kill imperials, you don’t collect quarries, you don’t sacrifice yourself, or our son, to save me.  You said you tried to be brave… like me.”  His fingers tighten against your cheek, he dips his helmet to make sure you understand.  “I’ll never ask you to be brave.  I’ll ask you to survive.”

“I’m… sorry,” you finally whisper, and his arm drops from your cheek to join the other in wrapping around you and holding tight.  They hug you and squeeze, encasing you and the baby in a beskar shield and staying there for a long time.  Long enough for you to tuck your head back into its proper place under his helmet, long enough to start to feel okay with the silence again.  It brutalized you the last time you were surrounded by it, it made you feel alone and desolate and barren inside.  You greet it warily now, settling into it for an unknown amount of time until it’s forgiven once more.

After a while, Din quietly breaks it.

“How many?”  He murmurs to you.  You already know exactly what he’s asking, there's no more clarification necessary on his behalf.

You slowly close your eyes and think back to the smoldering craters, the blood soaked ramp, the fear in Oshua Ryler’s eyes as he begged you not to kill him.

“That didn’t deserve it?”  You ask, clenching your eyes tighter at the memory.  “Four.”

And maybe, maybe six or eight months ago, you would’ve begged for some guidance on how to reconcile that.  Hell, maybe a few hours ago, you could’ve used his arms around you exactly like this, his low voice repeating the same things he’s already told you before, over and over again, if only for some semblance of stability when everything feels turbulent and uncertain.  You’ll never be able to change it, though.  This belongs to you now.

This time, all Din says is, “I’m sorry, too.”

And that covers everything.

The silence envelops you both again, but… there’s something else.  Something that still sits deep in your worries, an image that isn’t a scar of what’s happened but a dread of what’s to come.  You need to tell him.  You don’t feel like saying it, you don’t want to speak it aloud for fear of bringing it into existence, but you need to tell him.

“Din?”  You breathe out, and he makes a soft noise in his throat while cuddling you on the floor.  “I saw…,” you whisper, every word sitting tight and reluctant in your throat.  “Right when we made the jump, I was looking through the window and I-I saw…”

“A star destroyer.”  He says it like… like it’s the worst thing in the world and also completely expected at the same time.  He says it like he already knew, yet can’t even imagine.  You lean every bit of your weight against him since you can’t hold him in return, squish him as best you can against the small corner and curl up even tighter in his arms for comfort.

He takes a deep breath, a shuddery sound you don’t think you’ve ever heard him make before.  It holds untold anxiety, unsaid conflict, uncertain action, an unknown path forward.

“I don’t know what to do,” Din eventually whispers to himself, to you, to the baby in your arms.  His voice is barely a breath through the modulator, his fingers digging into your skin with how many emotions he’s repressing.  “What do I do?”

He sounds so distressed that you automatically feel your soul find the floor—instantly, you become steady and calm and you locate all that rationality that kept you going today.  All your worries still twist deep down, all the guilt and the turmoil wrestles with your soft, easy nature until you can only find bits and pieces of it in the most vulnerable places inside you, but if he’s struggling this terribly, then the least you can do is offer some good, true, unwavering faith in times of uncertainty.  You’re in hyperspace, everything worked out, and it’s going to stay that way for right now.  If he doesn’t know how to talk about it yet, then you trust him enough to wait for him.

“It’ll be okay,” you tell him with a newfound confidence and purpose, carefully easing the baby into one arm so that the other can find its way to the other side of his helmet and pull him closer.  Din tucks his head and allows you to brush your lips against the metal, whisper the words soft and steady to him.  “We’ll figure it out together.”

---

@cptnbvcks thank you so much for the incredible art!

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x reader #din djarin #din djarin x you #din djarin x reader #mando x reader #mando x you #reader insert #fanfic #star wars #rough day #no-droids

[daftmooncretin]

rip to rian johnson but star wars sequels would be way better if ben solo was just kinda cowardly and han solo coded so he defected from the jedi and went to be a fun swashbuckling anarchist space cowboy instead

and finn and poe have to find him and try to convince him to come back to the rebellion but hes afraid who he is and what he could become

also instead of luke trying to kill his nephew for NO REASON (so insanely out of character it boils my blood) he just realises after ben dips thats hes not cut out for teaching. and is living on a mandalorian colony as rebellion liason/ambassador with chewie and sometimes lando i guess (din djarin is there) he aids the rebellion (because of course he would fuck that plotline) but he wont stay on the rebel base because he doesnt like all the chosen one clout and mandalorians are very chill and mind their own business

han and leia are still together and play active parts in the rebellion because fuck that plotline too although they do disagree about the ben situation (leia is annoyed and han is understanding) poe and ben childhood friends and for what.

in this au, rey is raised in the empire and is a sith lord but she has doubts and isnt as abjectly disgusting as kylo ren because of course not. (appears slightly too interested in the rebellion when poe is captured and maybe??? possibly lets finn and poe escape but thats up for debate.) rey gets more evil over course of movies before turning to light for plot drama and a satisfying zuko arc.

force awakens timeline

prophecy that a new jedi will rise and take down the dark side. rey and sith lord (dk who but fuck snoke im writing him out) assume it is the missing ben solo (its finn and rey tho fr) and are intent on finding him. movie opens on rey being evil probably and capturing poe. also finn as a character actully needs no real changes hes great. and then next scene space pirate ben solo doing his thing (but without identity revealed so we dont know who he is yet he may go by kylo because funny)

instead of luke poe has a lead on missing almost-jedi before he dipped ben solo and is searching for him on leias orders.(rebellion also believe the prophecy is about him. but nuh uh) torture scene and escape scene doesnt need to change but show reys nuances and how lost she is.

in the interest of narrative poe and finn still crash on tatooine but finn manages to pull poe out of the crash. (finn still gets the jacket at some point because i say so) poe is too injured to fly so they seek out help and and meet ben solo who saves them from pirates or something idk. (but neither know who the other is)

finn and poe convince ben solo to be their pilot still thinking hes a random smuggler named kylo. they get along very well, especially finn and ben. rey by this point is tracking their whereabouts

they end up on that lightsaber planet and ben gets the weird darth vader nightmare and freaks out, (hes afraid of being evil or something idk) poe is getting suspicious now also finn feels the force and takes up the lightsaber. rey comes and finn trys to hold her off. finn get hurt and drops lightsaber. ben is forced to take it up and his identity is revealed as rebel reeforcements led by han and leia arrive and they see him fighting. rey and ben have a weird charged moment (yes i guess i am still making reylo a thing but its reyben now and its woke so shh) and in a dramatic desperate effort he manages to knock her lightsaber away with the force. poe crawls into a plane at somepoint and blows up reys ship. the rebels destroy the stormtroopers but rey captures finn and escapes in a stolen ship.

ben has a oh-shit-i-said-id-never-use-the-force-again related existential crisis which makes him freak out and leaves. a distraught finn-less poe calls him a coward. poe picks up the discarded lightsaber and the jackettm and sadly packs them up. leia tells him about the starkiller and poe volunteers to go on the starkiller and save finn. han and leia have a sweet moment and han decides to go with poe on the suicide mission, chewie goes too.(chewie arrived at somepoint i guess)

mid hostage situation finn blocks reys force attempt and shes shook up. he sees something in her (finn is a beautiful sweetheart) and he trys to appeal to her. she force chokes him and books it out of there. but it is clear she fears him a little. he escapes with mind tricks and runs into han poe and chewie on the deck. finnpoe moment fr. poe gives him his jacket back in order to get the keep it it looks good on you line.

meanwhile ben is back on his ship(i guess its the falcon?) and he thinks about finn and his mom and luke or something.. a dream maybe?? idk something emotional and motivational for his arc. and he goes to a box under the floor in his ship and pulls out a green lightsaber. he turns the ship around.

on the ship poe finn han and chewie are planting the bombs and escaping when they get stopped by stormtroopers ordered by rey. poe is about to be shot by a big droid thing when it is cut in half by ben wow big reveal hes here oooo ah. rey is shot in the shoulder by chewie and angrily orders more stormtroopers. they cant take them all. han sacrifices himself by blowing up the bridge. he tells finn and poe to find luke in the mandolorian colony ben is distraught him and han have an emotional goodbye he tells him to tell leia he’s sorry and that he loves him and he proud of him then he makes chewy get ben out of there and he blows himself up. leia senses it v sad rip man but he had to die to intensify plot drama

rey chases them onto the ice planet and another weird charged moment. mind link established??? this time ben is too angry and grieving though so its not a good match and she wounds him real bad all over hes v scarred now. poe shoots at rey and throws lightsaber at finn. he gets ben onto the ship and finn and rey have the big force awakens show down. finn uses the force v powerful all that jazz the good guys get away. on the ship finn mentions how he felt a connection with rey to poe and claims he sees good in her

movie ends with meeting luke on mandolore. ben is very traumatised wont really speak to finn or poe and avoiding luke. finn returns lukes lightsaber and rey has doubts movie over. movies ends with ominous rey ben mind link

final notes (on first movie and overarching rewrite plans)

finn

finn is the protagonist of this movie so it would be much more character heavy on him them the original. more in depth on his stormtrooper trauma, how he always chooses the people he loves over the cause and his reluctance to join the rebellion. his friendship with poe and the han/leia parallel’s especially. relationships with han and ben important for his character exposition and he plays a key role in supporting both rey and bens character progression. possesses the strong sense of mercy and kindness at the heart of the star wars franchise.

rey

rey is raised in the first empire and does not know anything different. when she meets finn who was able to rebel and escape from the same system she is trapped in she becomes plagued by doubts and projects all of her hatred and resentment onto finn to compensate, but it is clear she fears him. to escape from her doubts she fixates on finding and capturing ben solo imagining him to be a frightening and terrible adversary. however when she meets him they see eachothers minds, and she sees how plagued by doubt and fear he is, how he runs from everything and he sees her too. they connect and develop a strange mutual fascination/understanding. this is put askew by finns appearance at the end of the movie in defence of ben. reys fear of finn increases when she sees the true extent of his power. she fears and hates equally finns strength of character and easy goodness and by extension hates ben for his alliance with finn. she blames finn for “taking” ben from her.

ben solo

kylo ren is a disgusting blight on the star wars names so ben solo is being completely reclaimed by me into a different character because i fucking hate that stupid pretentious eboy. instead ben solo is an incredibly han solo coded character with a heart of gold and deep love and loyalty to his friends and family. his main weakness as a character in this rewrite is his fear and lack of self belief. ben is terrified of being a jedi and of his own power. he fears his own nature and was so afraid he would become his grandfather that he ran from the jedi altogether. ben solo is a runner that wont face his problems, he runs from the jedi and from his parents to avoid failing or becoming something terrible. finn and ben recognise the need to run in eachother (although important distinction finn runs because he doesn’t want to fight for a cause. and ben runs because hes afraid he will be the reason the cause fails) and ultimately encourage eachother to break the cycle and stand their ground (well finn motivated ben in this movie, finns not fixed yet.) Bens arc in these movies is about learning to live with his own nature and fighting for what he believes in despite his fear. also dealing with mommy issues (ben is kind of jealous of poe and leias relationship the son she wanted or something blah blah blah etc) and being a malewife to his murder girlfriend. his job is kind of to support and fight with finn and later rey and help them save the world

finnpoe (will be a gay couple)

their friendship will be front and centre in these movies because they represent duty vs personal loyalty. poe puts the cause above all else and values his own life and personal relationships little. finn on the other hand is disillusioned with establishment cause of stormtrooper trauma and wants to protect himself and others from it. poe is the first person that finn truly bonds with and loves. he puts poe above everything, including being a jedi and the rebellion. this leads to a lot of fighting and discord between finn and poe as finn doesn’t understand how important the rebellion is to poe and poe doesnt get why finn is trying to protect him from it. ultimately though poe teaches finn faith and belief and finn teaches poe to accept love and value himself. (also many hanleia parallels) the two of them are the harbingers of a new age. poe as future leader of the new republic and finn as the jedi messiah or whatever. in terms of romance, im thinking slowburn. baity first movie, kiss at the end of the second and established relationship by the halfway mark of the third.

also when rey eventually joins the light in the beginning she refuses to talk to ben (cause of romantic drama i havent thought of yet but centres around some sort or betrayal in the second movie) or finn (because hes her narrative foil and slow burn best friend forever) so her first friend is poe and she kind of follows him around in her first few months before she eventually bonds with finn 4eva. her poe shadowing has lots of cute friend moments where they fly together and he tries to talk her down about finn and the ben drama but also more importantly it foreshadows her leadership ability and tactical mind as she gives him advice and aids him with the rebellion behind the scenes (also leads to leia taking rey under her wing probably because poe is her surrogate son and mirror) which will eventually lead to her and poe leading the republic together because in my mind rey is a jedi but actively a member of republic government because ben can’t do politics and finn won’t but shes great at it so she’d be a perfect jedi liason and vice president to poe. meanwhile finn and ben lead the jedi. finn as a knight travelling across the galaxy and ben as a teacher. (luke is happy in retirement rn on mandalore but leia is still probably an advisor in the republic because retirement is definitely not for her) and everyone is happy the end. force ghost han solo is clapping.

#this entire thing has been gathering in my notes app for about two years #until i was like why didnt i post this #so enjoy #can you find the destiel inspo in here because im a freak #I HATE KYLO REN #i just wanted the finn poe rey ben found family #and for pookie luke not to get character assasinated #star wars sequel trilogy #star wars #rey #finnpoe #poe dameron #ben solo #rey skywalker #finn star wars #han solo #luke skywalker #din djarin #dinluke #the force awakens #the last jedi

[chaosology]

skin

— the mandalorian x reader

prompt 41: “your hands are so cold”

warnings: none besides pregnancy?

a/n: i know it’s an angst prompt but i couldn’t resist IM SORRY

masterlist

You had been stranded on the freezing planet for what felt like days. Din worked dutifully to fix his beloved Razor Crest from the damage caused by a pissed off army of spiders, as you stayed inside with the child and the Frog Lady.

At first, Din had asked you to stay inside to stop the child from eating more of the Frog Lady’s spawn, but it was becoming more and more obvious that he just didn’t want you anywhere you could be getting hurt.

He had been outside in the frost for hours, so you set down the child in his little bed and headed out. The cool breeze stung against your skin as you walked towards him, snow crunching under your boots.

“Come inside, my love. You’re going to get sick if you keep this up.” You asked, holding out your hand and nodding towards the ship. He looked up at you, then down at your stomach, and up at you again.

“Cyar’ika, what did I tell you? It’s too cold for you to be out here.”

“I’m perfectly fine, Din. Look at you, you’re covered in frost. We’ve got blankets inside and it’s getting dark… please” You begged, knowing it would work. He didn’t have many weaknesses, but leaving you upset was one of them.

Reluctantly he got up, gathering his tools and turning towards you once again. “You go. I’ll be a second packing up, go keep yourself and the ad’ika warm.” He added, gesturing towards your stomach.

When you arrived inside, the Frog Lady and your little green son were already asleep (though you had a feeling the latter was faking it until Din came back). You collected a pile of blankets and piled them on the other side of the ship, allowing the two of you some privacy.

As you settled in, you could begin to hear Din’s boots against the floor as he tried his best to not wake the others. He walked over, listing up the blankets and come to rest in his rightful place next to you. You rolled over, feeling the chill of his armour as you rested against his chest.

“I know you can’t take your helmet off right now, but please, let me feel you. Let your daughter feel you, she’s been kicking all day. And I already know you’re her favourite.” You half teased, looking up at him.

He took his gloves off gently, revealing the skin beneath them. He slowly began to slip them under your shirt, coming to rest on your stomach as he felt his daughter kick.

“Fucking stars, Din! Your hands are so cold, how are you not frozen already?”

You could hear his breathy laugh only slightly past the modulater, as he continued to run his hands where your daughter rest. “I’m sorry, cya’rika. We’ll be gone by tomorrow, I prom-”

He was interrupted by a sudden tugging of the blankets, and you sat up to be greeted by your green child. He babbled a bit, as his ears moved up and down expressively. You watched as he struggled to climb up and over into your lap, curling under the covers and falling back asleep. You turned to Din and smiled as he scoffed, “Hey, at least I’ll have one our kids on my side.”

“You know you’ll always have me, right? I’ll be here as long as you’ll have me, my love. I promise”. He turned to you, pressing his helmet against your forehead.

He would always have you. And you would always have him.

#mando x reader #mando x female reader #mandalorian x reader #mandalorian x oc #mandalorian fanfic #star wars fanfiction #din djarin x you #din djarin x y/n #din djarin x female reader #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian x reader

[hinderr]

god people are already being weird about it on twitter. tryna say that 'oh if din could've walked both ways this whole time then-!' no. no. thats- where are you getting this. we literally see the armourer come to that decision on screen. we watched her watch bo-katan and decide her fit to lead. the decision to allow both ways come from a need to reunite the mandalorians, which is only possible after they liberated nevarro and can now live in peace

let me say it again. as ive said it again and again before, the rule against removing their helmet was necessary for survival. did everybody turn their ears off during 'our secrecy is our survival, our survival is our strength'??? it's only now are they able to allow for more walks of life. the mandalorians are a cautious people. they've had to be they got their planet glassed

the narrative decision to have the armourer allow for both ways makes sense. it's good even because, as paz once said, 'our strength once relied on our numbers'. they're a people whose culture revolves around community. they thrive with other mandalorians present. both ways are fine and both ways are equal goddamnit that was the whole point. are you for fucking real

when you say 'why dont they go with bo-katans way' you're invalidating both. because while youre saying that din's creed is ''''unnecessarily hard'''' you're also saying that bo-katan's way is '''easy'''. youre putting them both down. they'll both kill you for that btw.

its just- its really frustrating cause im pretty happy with that decision. the decision to allow for both ways doesn't feel like they're invalidating din's creed. it's just that people are using that as an opportunity to be insensitive. again

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #for the LOVE of GOD how many times do we have to talk about this. its the same thing reskinned. shut up shut up shut up

[tonsillessscum]

AHSOKA SPOILERS

I am just saying, the whole thing this whole time is that Sabine is disconnected from the force bc she’s so deeply Mandalorian. It is absolutely engrained in her nature to NOT be a Jedi. So, if she’s that blocked off from the force for the entire season, actually, even going back to Rebels, who is to say she’s not sensing a single fucking force bond. Bc she’s silly. Bc she finally made a break through with Ahsoka in e7 and now the ending of e8? Shin has been so drawn to -her- and only her. Fuck Ezra, fuck Ahsoka, Shin only wants to dedicate their energy to Sabine. And. Idk. Something something…….indelible mark…… force bond…… lesbian reylo…… dyads…… Sabine only noticing once she actually opens up to the force and Shin is so broken down that they probably have let down the rest of their guard, including guarding their mind, from everyone, including Sabine. 😛😛😛 bc I don’t think it was Anakin she was sensing. Hmmmmm.

ALSO GOD WHAT SABINE SAID AFTER. “just shadows in the starlight” (shin is a shadow, a sad little baby shadow on the force) IM GONNA HAVE THE SHIP NAMES STARBINE (get it, starlight, sabine, moon beam, star beam, Starbine???)AND WOLFWREN IN MY HEAD FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE

#shin hati #star wars #wolfwren #sabine wren #sabine wren x shin hati #ahsoka spoilers #ahsoka #shin hati x sabine wren #ahsoka 2023 spoilers #ahsoka spoilwes #ahsoka speculation #wrenwolf #shinbine #starbine #spoilers #wolfwren spoilers #ristarwars

[samantha-rae-velcher]

Past comes to haunt, future to save

Din Djarin x Fem reader

Requested by: none

Warnings: Jealousy, Swearing, violence, sexual tension, use of a knife, spicy at the end.

A/n: 18+ NSFW if you don't like the Warnings please don't read

___

They had gotten a communication from some guy that Din knew from way back, apparently they used to fly together. Y/n was not happy with this, she could feel something wrong the minute they landed the crest in the hanger.

"I don't like this." She said as Din turned in his chair, getting up to leave the cockpit. "Hey."

Y/n grabbed his arm and pulled him to a stop.

"Do you trust this guy?" She asked.

Din looked down at her hand that was gripped to his bicep.

"This doesn't feel right." Her voice came out just above a whisper.

Din gently caressed her cheek, making Y/n close her eyes.

"I don't like this either. Any sign of trouble, we'll leave."

___

Din and Y/n walked around the hanger with the man, he seemed smug. She kept glancing at the ship, making sure no one was fucking with it.

The three of them went back down to the crest, the man introduced them to a guy called Migs Mayfield. And a Droid that looked like a bug they called him Zero. A big red ugly mother fucker with horns.

"That's Burg." Mayfield said.

Y/n made a disgusted face when Burg shaped up to Din, she took note on how her mandalorian didn't budge even when the red man attempted to scare him.

"I thought you said you had four." Din's voice was gruff, it made a shiver run up Y/n's spine.

"He does." A woman said from behind them.

Y/n turned and furrowed her brows at the sight of a purple Twi'lek. Her fists clenched and uncleaned as the woman stalked closer.

"Hello, Mando." She whispered.

"Xi'an."

Y/n looked over at Din, his voice sounded full of adoration. It made her roll her eyes and look at the razor crest.

"Tell me why I shouldn't cut you down where you stand?" Xi'an suddenly came at Mando only to have Y/n's blade against her throat.

"Because I will fuckin kill you." She growled.

The giggle she let out was sickening, it made Y/n sneer.

"You're his new companion?"

Y/n felt Din's hand press against the small of her back, causing her to lower her weapon and step back.

"Its nice to see you too." Din murmured.

Xi'an smiled and came closer to Mando, she ran her knife down his chest plate and made a clicking sound.

"Ive missed you." She tapped it against his armor and attempted to make eye contact through the visor. "This is shinny. You wear it well."

Mayfield looked over with a confused expression.

"Do we need to leave the room or something?"

The main man that called them there, stepped up and pushed his way into this dog shit of an interaction.

"Well, Xi'an has been heartbroken since Mando left our group."

"Awww." Mayfield mocked. "Are you gonna be okay sweetheart?"

"I'm all business now." Xi'an pointed her dagger at Din. "I learned from the best."

Y/n shook her head and flipped her hands in the air, as the jealousy rose in her.

"That's all well and good! Can we get the fuck going!?"

"What's wrong? Are you scared Xi'an will take your Mandalorian owner."

Y/n grabbed Mayfield by the front of his shirt and pulled him close.

"I am not his pet."

"Sure looks like that to me."

___

Y/n, Mayfield, Xi'an, and Burg all sat in the cargo hold as Din was watching over Zero's shoulder in the cockpit.

"How long have you been with Mando?" Xi'an asked.

"Since he collected his bounty and handed me over, but I kicked the ever loving shit out of the men who wanted me. And I snuck back to his ship and opened the door for him when he arrived."

Mayfield's brows shot up his forehead. "You were his bounty?"

"Yeah."

Burg began digging through Dins stuff, opening the door to his weapons closet, only for Din to shut it in his face. The red devil lookin fucker turned and tried towering over Mando again, growling and huffing.

"You wouldn't scare a sleeping kitten. Sit your fat red ass down!" Y/n yelled.

Mayfield joined in. "Im a little particular about my personal space too, let's just get this done and you'll never see our faces again."

"Tell me why we even need a Mandalorian." Burg grumbled.

"Because apparently they are some the greatest warriors in the galaxy."

Burg looked between Mayfield and Din.

"Then why are they all dead."

"You flew with him Xi'an. Is he as great as they say?" Mayfield asked.

"Ask him about the job on Alzok III."

Everyone looked over at Din.

"I did what I had to do."

"Oh but you liked it." Xi'an smiled and pointed her knife at him. "You see, I know who you really are."

"D- Mando....what is she talking about?" Y/n asked.

Din shook his head. "You don't have to worry about it."

Mayfield chuckled. "He never takes off the helmet."

Xi'an fallowed in his humor and shook her head, they looked over at Y/n.

"You ever seen his face?" Mayfield asked.

"No, and if he ever takes off the mask....I hope I'm blindfolded."

"Why?"

Y/n glanced at Din, then back at Migs.

"This is the way."

Her words made Dins heart race. He never knew that she respected his creed, he always thought she found it a nuisance because she couldn't see his face.

"Your just as weak as he is." Burg said in a gruff tone, making Y/n spin around and get right up in his face.

"Neither of us are weak, and you'll find that out come whatever the fuck it is your planning."

___

The group had finally gotten to the prison ship, they were running through the corridors fighting off droids all the while listening to zero over the ear piece.

Y/n pulled Din into a corner, she held her finger up to her lips and kept her grip on his bicep. Four droids passed by, Y/n looked over watching them walk up the hallway. She could feel Dins gaze on her, his thumb came up to caress her cheek.

"You don't have to be jealous." He whispered.

She locked her eyes on his visor, the deep black was almost bone chilling. If he was anyone else, she would be afraid.

"Jealous of what? Xi'an? I'm not."

"I never mentioned Xi'an....you did."

Y/n felt his hand move to her hip, gently squeezing. Her breath hitched at the warmth his hand spread over her body.

"Din I-"

"Hey are you guys coming!?" Migs yelled from down the hall.

The five of them made it to the control room, zero was babbling about a organic signature in the room but Migs didn't listen.

"Yeah yeah, open the door!"

They entered the room and man jumped out of his chair, pointing a blaster at them. Burg and Mayfield circled him, the man was obviously scared.

This went on for a good few minutes, Din trying to talk him into putting his weapon down. Mayfield yelling at din, both of them pointing their blasters at each other.

And it all led to Xi'an killing the poor bastard.

"Would you all shut up." She said in a bored voice.

Din looked over at Y/n who was glaring at Xi'an. He had never seen such anger in her eyes, she looked as if she wanted to kill her.

"You didn't have to kill him."

Xi'an stood, her smile made Y/n sick. "It was quicker than negotiating. none of you had it under control, so I killed him. All you were doing is waisting time."

Xi'an then ran out the door, the others fallowing until Din stopped and turned back to Y/n. She was standing there looking down at the poor man's body.

"Y/n, we have to get moving." He whispered.

"This is what you did? Killed innocents when they stood in your way? Is that what you did?"

"No."

"I'm having a hard time believing that." Y/n got closer, she could feel the heat of his body radiating off of him. "What was Xi'an talking about back on the ship?"

"Hey Mando! You coming!?" Mayfield yelled from down the hall.

"Something is going on." Y/n whispered, handing him the distress beacon the man was holding. "They're up to something and I don't fuckin like it."

With that she made her way to the others, Din looked down at the dead officer on the floor as he left the control room.

The group ran through the halls once more, Burg battered down on a big droid and threw it to the floor. A droid came walking around the corner yelling "Intruder alert!", Y/n grabbed it by the neck and slammed it into the wall, pulling it's head off. Sparks flew as it's body fell limp, the prisoners cheered and hollered as the group continued down the hallway.

They made it to the cell, Mayfield opened the door and inside was a male Twi'lek. Y/n frowned, this guy was no doubt Xi'an's brother.

"Qin." Din said.

"Mando, funny the man who left me behind us now my savior."

Burg grabbed Y/n and threw her into Din, they stumbled into the cell and landed on their backs. Just as the door was about to close Din fired his blaster, it bounced off the door and the walls. Mando covered Y/n as the blaster bolt hit him in the beskar.

"I told you this wasn't right! Did I not say they were up to something!?" She yelled, clenching her fist as she landed a punch to the door.

Din pulled her over by the arm, he gripped her wrist and examined her hand. Her knuckles her bleeding and her hand was shaking.

"Calm down." He said, pressing his forehead to hers. Y/n closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling of his cold beskar against her skin.

"Din, they know the kid is in the bunk. If they get to crest chances are they're gonna hurt him."

"That's why they won't make it to the crest."

___

Mayfield and the rest of the fuck head brigade made it half way back to the ship when Zero came on the coms.

"Zero to Mayfield, we have a problem."

"What is it!?"

"They have escaped."

"AHH!" Xi'an yelled. She pointed her dagger at migs, getting really close. "I told you we should've ended them."

"I know I know."

Suddenly the lights turned red, they all felt their hearts jump into their throats as the door closed between them.

"Brother!"

"Zero! Where is he!?" Mayfield yelled. "Zero!?"

"Sister." Qin said. "Go with the Devaronian. Find Mando and kill him, Mayfield and I will try and make it back to the ship."

___

Y/n fallowed Din through the corridors, they ducked into a large vent and Din held his finger up to his helmet, motioning for Y/n to be quiet as Burg and Xi'an ran by.

When silence covered the area, Y/n let out the breath she didn't realize she had been holding. Din looked out of the vent and started to leave when she grabbed his arm and pulled him back in.

"You go after Burg, and I go for Xi'an." Y/n whispered.

He nodded and left the vent, Y/n crawled further in and went up an air shaft. She made her way through the ceiling until she found the female Twi'lek, Xi'an was creepy through like the vial little roach she was.

Y/n dropped down, landing behind her. Xi'an turned around and threw her dagger at Y/n. She caught it and ran at the Twi', grabbing her shoulders and kicking her in the stomach. Y/n flipped her over her shoulder and slammed her head against the wall, successfully knocking her out.

Y/n ran up the hall with Xi'an in tow, she was about to run passed a cell when she saw Burg out cold laying on the floor. She shrugged and harshly threw the Twi'lek in there with him.

Y/n was rounding a corner when she heard footsteps behind her, she spun around and took a swing, her fist was caught and she was held against the door of another cell. To her surprise and pleasure it was Din, she felt warmth rush to her core when she realized what a vulnerable spot he has her in.

"Din." She said, her voice just above a whisper.

"Don't attack if you can't over power your opponent."

He released her wrist, slowly sliding his hands down her arms, making Y/n shiver.

"Have you found Mayfield?" She asked.

"Not yet."

"We should probably start looking."

"Yeah....we should."

Y/n kept her eyes locked on Din's visor as she moved around him. He tilted his head and fallowed her with his gaze.

"You coming?" She asked.

He nodded and they started towards the exit. Y/n turned in the direction of where she could hear Mayfield trying to contact Zero, she nodded to Din and he began walking to Mig's voice. Y/n on the other hand kept going towards the ship, she made it to the latter just in time to run into Qin.

She felt a blaster press to the back of her neck, a dark chuckle rang out from behind her, making Y/n cringe.

She turned around and raised her hands up, Qin stood there with a shit eating grin plastered on his face.

"Mando's little woman." He said. "He down graded from my sister to you?"

"If you ask me I'd say it was an upgrade."

"No one asked you."

"I don't need your permission to speak."

Qin chuckled and began rambling off about how he was gonna hold her as a hostage and Mando was gonna give him the crest and how the two of them were gonna be stuck here and blah blah blah.

Din came up behind him and smacked Qin over the head with a droid arm. Y/n smiled as the Twi'lek fell to the floor with a loud thud.

"The kid." She said, turning around and scrambled up the latter. Y/n froze when she saw Zero pointing his rifle at Grogu, she felt rage as she ran up and knocked him over. Y/n ignited her lightsaber, slicing through the middle of the droid.

The sound of Din dragging Qin up the latter startled Y/n. She quickly hid her saber and ran to help.

___

They had gotten rid of Qin and the man that hired them, and now they were on their way to God knows where. Y/n and Din sat in the cockpit, watching the stars race by. She bit her lip as she remembered being pressed against the wall by the mandalorian, the sound of his voice as he stared her down.

The thought of what he could've done to her in that moment made a quiet moan slip past her lips. Din's head slowly turned towards her, Y/n's heart raced when she felt the heat of his gaze burning into her.

"Y/n." He said in a gruff tone.

"Hmm?"

"Come."

He wasn't giving her opinions here, that was a command. Din held his hand out for her, she stood up and took it as she slowly made her way into his lap. Y/n could feel his erection through his flight suit, he grunted as she pressed her hand down and palmed at his cock.

Din gripped her hips, pushing her off and turning her to face the control panel removing her leather belt and pants, he then brought her back down against his chest. Din spread her legs with his so she was exposed for all who dared to take a gander at his woman.

"I won't be gentle, little one." He whispered.

THE END ❤️

Part 2?

I hope you enjoyed

Reblogs are welcome 🤗

#fyp #foryou #fanfic #foryoupage #x reader #din djarin x you #din djarin x female oc #din djarin x original character #din djarin x reader #din djarin #din djarin x female reader #din djarin x jedi!reader #din djarin smut #the mandolorian x reader #the mandalorian x female reader #the mandolorian x you #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x y/n #the mandalorian smut #the mandalorian x f!reader

[margowritesthings]

Te Beroya: II

SERIES MASTERLIST

pairing: Mandalorian!Arthur Morgan x reader crossover: Star Wars x Red Dead Redemption prompt: 48. “For someone who acts like they hate me, you sure find a way to get me alone a lot.” + 52. “Just because you're pretty, it doesn't mean you can just get away with anything." / "You think I'm pretty?" + 56. “I-I don’t know if I want to yell at you or fuck you.” + 89. “Be careful, sweetheart. Do you really think that's a good idea?” + 90. “You’re playing a dangerous game, girl" word count: 3719 words warnings: sexual innuendos, star wars swears, brief mentions of trauma from readers past authors note: it's here! One last little chapter before I go into full moving mode. Not sure when the next one will be, but Im workin on it!! I love these two crazies, Im not gonna lie. And yes, I went toally ham on that prompt list, but its the best. As always reblogs/likes are appreciated, and if you wanna be tagged in the rest of the series let me know!!

beta read by @cowboydisaster, divider by @saradika

The look shared between you and the 10 foot tall bantha says more than words ever could. 

“I am not riding all the way to Mos Espa on a bantha.” You announce, going on instinct to fold your arms in defiance across your chest, before realising your hands are bound. It frustrates you even more and you huff, one more mishap away from stamping your foot like a child.

Arthur seems unphased by your tantrum. Amused, even. 

“Well, you got two choices, Princess. You can ride up there with me, or I’m sure Boadicea here will gladly drag you along behind…” You roll your eyes, sighing in great defeat, hating that you’ve lost so much control of this situation so quickly. And of course he’s named the damn bantha. 

“Your ‘choices’ suck, you know that? It’s not a choice if one of the options is death or getting dragged across the Dune sea by my broken limbs.” 

Maker help him, he laughs, taking that as answer enough and hoisting himself up onto the saddle by the stirrups. You watch on, unimpressed, as he places his helmet back on and it hisses quietly.  He extends a hand out to help you up and shuffles back in his seat.

When you figure out how exactly this is going to work, you feel your throat dry up, more so than it already is from 18 hours exposed to the elements of the desert. He wants you in front of him, where your back will surely press up against his chest, literally caging you in with those huge arms to keep his hands on the reins. All that contact… 

“No way. We’re not gonna both fit on there.” You shake your head, taking a step backwards. Arthur doesn’t flinch, knowing if you ran now you’d be dead in days, especially with those cuffs on.

“You shoulda’ thought about that before you tried to knock me out and run away, little mouse.” 

Anxiety bounces around your frame at the idea. Ever since that night, the one that changed everything, you hate being touched by others, especially in such close proximity. But what choice do you have? It’s getting hot, and you’re not sure you’d survive a trek across the desert on your feet… Plus, possibly more terrifying than death by sand, he was just touching you everywhere, during your fight. And somehow, you didn’t hate it. It wasn’t like every other time you’ve been touched… The feel of his hard body covering the length of you, his bulge prodding firmly against your thigh as he pinned your wrists down deep into the sand… 

You’re getting distracted. 

“Urgh. Fine. But don’t get any ideas, beroya.” You lift your wrists, letting him grab your hands to help you mount Boadicea. When you swing your leg around, it settles you into the saddle, up close and personal with your captor. His hard chest presses firmly against your back, thighs around yours and crotch in serious danger of grinding up against your ass with each step the bantha makes. You think back to the fight, expecting to regret it, but instead find yourself trying awfully hard not to think about how thrilling it was to have a big, bad bounty hunter on top of you like that…

Maker, what has gotten into you?!

Well… nothing. Maybe that’s the problem… you swore yourself away from all of that after you were shown just how cruel the Galaxy can be, all too focused on the plight of survival once you became such a high value target. But now… well, it’s clearly messing with your head, because there is no way in hell you should be thinking about the hard-on of the man destined to be your end… You make a mental note to get laid once this is over… If this is over. 

When Arthur clicks the reins and Boadicea the bantha starts to walk, you clamp your jaw shut and your breaths come out as sighs, in an attempt to show him just how furious you are at this turn of events. The grinding of your teeth is all part of the act, you tell yourself, and not at all a method of distracting yourself from the ripple of muscle you feel pressed flush against your back. You can feel him breathe, could swear you can feel a soft thrum of his heart as the scent of campfires and cigarettes infiltrates your senses. He’s all consuming, in the most infuriating ways, shuffling logic right out of your mind. 

There’s a tension in the tiny gap between you, one that spikes every time Boadicea moves in a way that presses your ass further up against Arthur’s crotch and you’re sure his breath hitches at each point of contact.

“So-” He starts, his voice sounding almost strangled, “How’s a pretty little thing like you end up on the Outer Rim’s Most Wanted list?”

Ah, perfect. Small talk about life’s greatest traumas to distract you from the fact you now know your captor has the biggest dick in the Galaxy. Unlucky for Arthur, you’re not exactly in a sharing mood, so deflection it is.

“Sorry, beroya, the tragic backstory package is locked behind a level of friendship unattainable to the likes of you.” As an added effect, you move your wrists around so the metal of the cuffs clinks against your belt. A reminder of the situation, if you will. 

“Aw, shucks, and here I was thinkin’ you liked me.” He’s all bravado, slapping his thigh comically. You don’t laugh. “Well, just so you know…” He leans closer, and his breath tickles the back of your ear sending a shiver all the way down your spine, “I don’t like you either, princess.” 

Now that does draw a smirk from you. Ugly words are one thing, but biology doesn’t lie, and Arthur’s is screaming the very opposite. You adjust yourself in the saddle again, feeling that very compelling evidence to the contrary rubbing against your flesh.

“Coulda’ fooled me, cowboy.” 

Being situated in front of him, you don’t see Arthur’s hand coming, don’t realise whats happening until gloved fingers wrap around your neck, thumb and forefinger pressing firmly against the pulse points on your throat. You gasp just in time to capture just enough breath for the Mandalorian to trap in your lungs. He’s so close you feel the cool metal of his helmet against your skin, the way he’s holding you forcing you to crane your neck back into him.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, pretty girl. Be careful, mesh’la. Do you really think that’s a good idea?” His warning is growled into your ear, slightly gravelly through the helmet, and you swear you’ve never felt a heat burn so fiercely everywhere. Fuck, the way he’s holding you is possessive, wanting… It ignites a very dangerous flame you’d rather not address, but the way you squirm, that little whimper that escapes your parted lips, says everything that you’d never admit aloud.

You couldn’t even if you wanted to, especially when he squeezes just that bit tighter and you feel your heart beating in your flushed cheeks. A witty retort would be just in character, but words fail you as your binded hands attempt to scratch uselessly through the leather of his thick gloves. Boadicea continues her trek, unaware that you’re all but soaking the poor girls saddle through.

“Just cause you’re pretty, doesn’t mean you can get away with just anything. Not with me, sweetheart.” You hear every rasp in his voice, the years he’s lived and fought branding it like scars. When he relinquishes the pressure, just a little, the blood rushes back into your face and you know it’s your turn to talk. He’s expecting obedience, and you’ll be damned if you comply, even if he holds your lifeforce between his thumb and forefinger. 

“You… You think I’m pretty? Gee, Arthur, I don’t think you’re supposed to-” He doesn’t let you finish, the frustration at you manifesting into another soul quaking growl as he squeezes harder.

“Do you really think that behaving like that is going to get you want you want, you little brat?” 

…Kriff. You’ve been labelled as difficult before, but never in a way that leaves you panting like this. Fuck, this is not how it’s supposed to go. He’s going to have you killed, and yet your panties are soaking through. You’re losing the last scraps of power you once clung to so vehemently… but Maker does it feel good…

“Listen here, Princess. I ain’t blind, alright? You’re a pretty girl. But I ain’t stupid, either. Half the time I can’t tell if I wanna kill you or fuck you, but that don’t mean shit, cause ever since I got those binders on you, you’ve been mine, alright? So shut that pretty little mouth of yours before I shut it for you. Now, are you gonna behave for me? Or am I gonna have to force you?”

The defiance that blazed in your eyes dies there, your mouth opening and closing pathetically as you fail to find something to say. All you can do is nod, the small movements he’ll allow of you, at least. 

“Good girl.”

You gasp out for the dry air of the desert, and it feels like being washed under a stream after the longest drought. Your fingers rub over the reddened skin of your neck, easing the ache just slightly. 

Arthur grabs the reins again, smacking them lightly to speed Boadicea up. 

You say nothing, trying desperately to extinguish whatever the hell is happening between your legs.

Half the time I can’t tell if I wanna kill you or fuck you.

I can’t tell if I wanna kill you or fuck you.

…kill you or fuck you

The words swim around your mind for the next few hours of the silent, torturous ride. The desert air is hot, but you’d rather marry a wookie than ask for the water your throat is crying out for. The tension between you and Arthur hasn’t dwindled for a second, and you’re putting more blame on that than the suns beating down on you relentlessly for your flustered state. The only relief you get is from knowing its just as hard for Arthur… literally. Knowing he’s just as uncomfortable, all thanks to you, is all the consolation you need. 

The skies are starting to cast an orange glow across your skin as the suns both begin to reach the horizon. You’re not too far out from Mos Espa now, but Boadicea is slowing significantly, and you can tell she’s ready for a break, so it doesn’t surprise you when Arthur swings his thigh from around you to dismount. He leaves you sitting there for a moment while he pulls off his helmet, hanging it next to the saddlebag that he pulls an oat cake out of for Boadicea . 

“There, there, good girl…” he coos to her, patting her thick fur. His words of praise bring you right back to when he said that to you, and it infuriates and arouses you in equal amounts to remember the moment. You hate yourself for it. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves you dizzy. 

Eventually, after petting the only woman you’re sure Arthur Morgan will ever love, he returns to you, holding out a hand to help you down,

“M’lady.” He nods sarcastically and you roll your eyes, making a point to slide off the saddle without his help, landing less than gracefully and taking a second to steady yourself. Arthur shakes his head as he watches you, before turning back to the saddle bag and pulling out a variety of things you’ll need to camp. 

“We’re stopping here?” You ask, voice a little hoarse from the dehydration and protestful lack of speech. Looking around, you can’t see anything but sand. You’re less than enthusiastic about a night here, alone with him, but you’re not exactly the one making the decisions here.

“Well, unfortunately for us, your highness, the palace was booked full, and we’re in the middle of the Dune Sea.” He explains while he starts to unroll the singular bedroll. You sit down in the sand, crossing your legs beneath you with a childish pout on your lips. Oh, how you wish you could get these damn binders off. They’re so uncomfortable, and it’s been hours. 

Arthur gathers enough dry wood from around the area to build a decent fire, dusting the sand away and setting them up like he’s done this a thousand times over. You know the feeling, so long ago forced out from your home and set on the run for the remainder of this lonely life. It makes you wonder if Arthur has a home of his own, a family. Watching him as intently as you are, seeing those tired eyes… somehow you know he doesn’t. Maybe once, maybe in a different life… but you know the look of loneliness well, you see her every time you come face to face with a mirror, and he embodies it. As sad as it is, it makes sense. A loving family man just wouldn’t be cut out for this kind of life.

There’s only one sun left now, the skies above a stunning gradient from orange to purple, all the way to the inky blues on the other side of the horizon. It takes Arthur no time at all to have the fire going, positioning his bedroll out next to it. He gestures for you to sit on it, but you’re stubbornly deciding the sand a few feet away would be better. Arthur snorts,

“Suit yourself.”

He returns one last time to the saddle bag, pulling out some cans, a flask, and a pouch of something wrapped in cloth. By the time he sits beside the fire, it’s roaring

“Hungry?” He asks, extending an arm to offer you the flask. A hesitation, while you decide if you’d rather kill your pride or die of hunger and thirst. It’s a tough choice, but you eventually nod and take the flask in both hands. It takes you a second to figure out how to open it with bound hands, and Arthur seems to take great joy in your attempts, until you manage to squish the flask between your knees and twist the cap off. It takes a lot of restraint to not gulp the whole thing down when that first drop hits your tongue, but both of you still have a ways to go before your destination, so you don’t. The pass back is reluctant, as is the tiny ‘thank you’ you mutter under your breath.

“Oh, look at you, princess, finding your manners.” He takes a sip of his own, starting to unwrap the little parcel to reveal some slices of meat and pulling a knife from his holster to crack the tins open. Part of you wants to prove his point, to growl at him and fight back, but you’re pretty damn hungry, so you stay quiet, silently plotting another escape.

As Arthur starts to work on the food, pouring beans into a little metal pot, he glances at you, finding amusement in your tantrum. 

“You gonna come join me for some food or keep sulkin’? Either way’s fine by me, I’ll have your extras if you don’t want ‘em.” It doesn’t take very long at all for the beans to cook when he holds them over the flame, the aroma reaching your nostrils soon enough. Even for just beans, it smells good, probably cause you haven’t eaten since back in the Cantina, which feels like 3 lifetimes ago right now. Your stomach grumbles pointedly, and you’re forced to swallow your pride and gracefully stand, stomping sand everywhere as you sit right on the edge of the bedroll, as far away from Arthur (by mere inches) as possible.

He raises a taunting brow, “For someone who acts like they hate me, you sure do find ways to get real close to me.” Line thrown, hook absolutely smothered in bait.

The fury in your eyes gives the campfire a run for its credits, “Well if that isn’t the Quacta  calling the Stifling slimy- you’ve been all over me since the Cantina, rubbing your cock against my ass for the last day!”

You know the victory is Arthur’s with the way he smirks at your outburst, like winding you up is his favourite pastime. He’s holding back a laugh, you can tell because his crows feet crease deeper and his lip twitches. Hook, line and sinker. 

There’s a pause, surely being spent figuring out how else to annoy you, before Arthur picks up a slice of the jerky he brought and offers it to you, “...Want some meat?” 

… You’re going to kill him in his sleep. 

Too hungry to refuse, you snatch it off him and take an aggressive bite, the eye contact you’re shooting lasers with never breaking. Maybe it’s the hunger talking, but it tastes so good you almost moan. Almost, though your furious facade might have broken for just a moment. He’s waiting for gratitude, but you have other ideas. 

“I’m not fucking you.” You announce, so out of the blue that Arthur almost chokes on his meat. Now that’d be a sight to see…

“You said you didn’t know whether to kill me or fuck me,” You explain, I’m just telling you ya’ ain’t got chance of either.” 

The offended guffaw you’re after never comes, in its place a look so intense you feel flames lick at your toes and travel up between your thighs. 

“Listen, mesh’la,” He growls the sarcastic term of endearment, and you vibrate, “Just cause I can’t decide if that pretty throat of yours deserves my blade or my cock doesn’t mean you’re getting either. I’ll have you, but only if you’re on your hands and knees begging me for it. I’ve got your fiery little temper worked out, and I know just what fuels it. Don’t worry, little one, you’re safe… for now.”

Dank farrick, how does he do it? Every attempt to rile him thwarted, leaving you flustered, wet, and with your jaw so slack you could catch flies. Maybe silence is the best option, to give him none of your words to twist and pull into whatever this tension between you is. 

You’re not going to fuck him. 

He’s literally holding you prisoner. 

You’re not going to fuck him. 

He’s bringing you back to them. 

You’re not going to-

“Y’alright there, princess? Keep lookin’ at me like that and I’ll think you’ve changed your mind.”

“You’re infuriating.” You spit back, finishing the last of your jerky with another angry bite.

“And here was me thinkin’ we were becoming friends…”

“What?! No. Nu-uh. No way.”

“Well I ain’t leaving you to run off on me. I’m not an idiot.”

“That’s up for debate…” you mumble, just loud enough for him to decipher your words. You’re not helping your case, Arthur holding his hands out expectantly as he awaits your compliance.

“Arthur,” you start, realising you’ve never actually said his name out loud before, liking the way it feels forming on your tongue, hating that fact. “Neither of us are gonna sleep a wink if I’m strapped to you.” 

He has little other choice. You know that, knowing there’s no way he’d trust you to not stab him in his sleep and run away. Smart guy, considering you’d already considered that very plan extensively. But no, he had to be difficult. He’s already stashed his knife with Boadicea, who is laid too far away to reach.

“Hindsight is clear as day, Princess. Maybe next time don’t try to run.” Pfft. Next time. There won’t be a next time, thanks to him. 

Running out of patience, Arthur takes a step towards you, and you take one step backwards. He reaches for the binders and you lift them away. It’s a dance, one he quickly tires of and grips onto your forearm before you can move it. 

His touch burns your skin, even through the gloves, and the fight leaves your body near instantly. His grip is firm, bruising, almost, and that devilish part of you enjoys it.

Would being chained to him for a night really be so bad…?

“Fine. Whatever. But keep your hands to yourself, mando. And you better not snore.”

“Of course, of course… wouldn’t wanna interrupt that beauty sleep, now, would I?” He sarcastically huffs, wrapping rope around the middle part of your binders that keeps your wrists together. Watching him twist and turn the rope around his huge hands does something to you, and you start to wonder if this man can do absolutely anything that won’t turn you on somehow. You’ve gotta knock this off, it’s getting dangerous, especially considering you’re about to share a bedroll tied to him. 

His rope isn’t the longest, giving only a few feet of space between the two of you as he loops it through his belt and around his own arm, knotted so intricately it would be impossible to untie without waking him up. An expert in rope tying… of course he is.

Pushing thoughts of other uses for that skill of his far, far away, you watch your escape plan fall apart before your eyes, every detail somehow preemptively thwarted by Arthur’s actions as if he could read your mind. Maker, you hope he can’t, they’ve been pretty much in bed with him since he bought you that drink back in the Cantina. 

Arthur sits down in the sand, the rope tugging at you to do the same. Notably, he leaves the bedroll for you, situating himself on the ground as far away as the rope will allow. And they said chivalry is dead…

“So we just… sleep? Here?” Your brows are pulled together, a sure sign of how displeased you are at this whole situation. 

“Well I could read ya’ a bedtime story, but some say I don’t get the voices quite right…” By the time you go to glare at him, he’s already laying in the sand, gazing up at the sea of stars. You sigh, taking that as answer enough. 

Silence, just for a moment. 

“G’night, princess…”

“...Goodnight, beroya.” 

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan x reader #rdr2 #arthur morgan imagine #arthur morgan rdr2 #arthur morgan x y/n #arthur morgan x you #arthur morgan fanfiction #arthur morgan fanfic #star wars #tha mandalorian #crossover #star wars crossover #star wars fanfic #star wars fanfiction

[loveoaths]

prefacing this question with /gen i’m not trying to start anything i’m just a bit flubbered with some of the new discussion around din and the children of the watch and i trust your interest and analysis on the subject

are the children of the watch not a cult? ignoring bo-katan’s history and hypocrisy and general “bo-katan-ness,” the children of the watch do seem like a cult.

now, i don’t have a positive relationship with the religion i was raised in so i’m a bit biased toward the narrative of din no necessarily adapting bo-katan’s version of being mandalorian, and i think din will have to choose between a bunch of mando’s saying “my way is best” before going “fuck it im making my own Way”

looking at fandom, there’s a lot of (justified) anger toward how mandalorian culture (particularly in comparison to the jedi) is celebrated, and for some reason this sentiment isn’t carried over to the Children of the Watch

again, all /gen and /lh i’m not trying to start anything

great question! well, technically, there are a couple of questions in your ask, but let's start with the main one:     

are the children of the watch not a cult? ignoring bo-katan’s history and hypocrisy and general “bo-katan-ness,” the children of the watch do seem like a cult. 

short answer: no, they are not.

long answer: the children of the watch are not a cult, because they do not meet the requirements of a cult. the children of the watch are more akin to a fringe religious group or sect.

but lio, what is the difference between a religious group and a cult?

i’m glad you asked! for simplicity’s sake, this section borrows heavily from this dictionary site.

a common definition of religion is “a set of beliefs about God or the supernatural.”

general characteristics of religions include:

the group worships a higher source of power rather than a single person;

there is a shared, sincere belief system;

the main belief or beliefs are consistent with basic mainstream standards for human dignity;

appropriate forms of conduct between people are defined;

an understanding of evil is established, especially how it impacts humans;

there are sacred ritual acts.

meanwhile, a cult is “a group of people with extreme dedication to a certain leader or set of beliefs that are often viewed as odd by others.”

general characteristics of cults include:

followers encouraged or forced to worship a specific group leader who gatekeeps or solicits knowledge to maintain social and emotional control over the congregration;

potential members are hounded into joining and rushed through the process while they are distracted from red flags and concerns by a barrage of community love-bombing, outreach, and promises of support;

questioning beliefs, recruitment tactics, or anything else are discouraged or are met with punishment, social ostracization, or other negative responses;

a belief system stolen from pre-existing religions and social movements and cobbled together to suit the leader’s personal narrative;

can be religious, but are not inherently; cults can also be secular social movements, like the nexium cult

followers’ daily lives are dictated and controlled by the decree of the leader, including, in some cases, mandating when cult members can use the restroom, when they can have sex and with who, which body parts they’re allowed to keep, whether or not they’re allowed to raise their own children, where their money and assets go, what words they may use, and other things that should be decided by human sovereignty and independent choice rather than an external force;

followers are personally monitored to ensure they’re adhering to cult guidelines, and spied upon so the cult leader can collect blackmail material, sensitive personal information, fears and desires, and more to manipulate and control them if they try to leave, start questioning the leader, or display too much independence;

the cult deploys methods of control (financial leans, debt, forced isolation, threat of punishment, kidnapping, corporal/emotional/physical/sexual violence, coercion, etcertera) to keep members close by and obedient. 

pretty nasty stuff, right? right.

but lioooooo, that wasn’t the question! is the children of the watch a cult or not?!

patience, padawan! the rest is below the cut!

cults function by relying on several key tenets, such as: preying on the vulnerable; isolating members from society through financial/philosophical/religious teachings and physical removal; re-ordering members' worldviews to centralize the cult; and worshipping or venerating a single individual or duo.

let’s look at a breakdown central cult tenets, then see whether or not the children of the watch displays these tenets in the mandalorian:

1. total authoritarian control-- cults, like any abusive toxic relationship, fundamentally rely on a membership base that is, at its core, utterly dependent on the cult. the membership must believe like they are incapable of living a distinct life outside of the cult, they must believe that it is the cult that gives them meaning and not the other way around, that the cult is beginning and the end of their selfhood. this control is often achieved by deliberately breaking down the memberships' psyches, physical punishment and harm, slowly pushing their boundaries to accept worse and worse behavior, guilting them into giving up all financial assets "for the good of the cult," and worse, all at the behest of their leader. the control must be so complete that the members begin policing themselves not just to keep themselves out of trouble, but because they truly believe this is how the world should work. authoritarian control is achieved by breaking down the individual and rebuilding them with flaws in the foundation, so they are destined to fail, and fail, and fail, so they will crawl back to the cult each time. this is because cults rely on extreme dependency to work, which is why cults are famous for preying on the sick, the elderly, the weak, the grieving, and the socially vulnerable.

verdict:  the children of the watch do not canonically exhibit signs of total authoritarian control, at least not in the mandalorian. 

for one, there are multiple coverts spread across the galaxy, presumably with multiple armorers guiding said coverts' members. real cults rarely break up the leadership like that; there can only be one godhead at any given time. the armorer never mentions running those coverts. there is a canonical line about "other coverts hearing din was in need" on navarro and coming to save him in season one, but with no implication that the armorer ordered them to respond, or was even in close communication with them.

beyond that, the armorer is designated the covert’s spiritual leader who holds the knowledge of mandalore and the way, but she does not control the movements of covert members. in fact, the visuals of the covert imply that it isn’t, exactly, a home for the children of the watch, but a hub; somewhere members return to after completing missions they choose, for the reasons they choose, and a place to return beskar to its rightful owners. 

we know that din believes in returning beskar to the covert, but since the armorer never orders him to go find more, and since we never see or hear other COTW discussing it, we cannot assume that they are mandated to search out beskar by the armorer. this freedom of movement, sans restraint or mission, and conspicuously absent of din seeking the armorer’s permission to leave, would be very uncommon among most established cults, because most cults only thrive when its members are highly segregated from the rest of society and congregated in a joint environment where cult beliefs can be vigorously reinforced until members forget the outside world is any different.

2.   worship or veneration of a single individual – cults have a godhead, a solitary figure through whom the divine knowledge/prophecy/religious beliefs/bullshit is channelled through, who all cult members must admire, obey, and serve without question or face punishment. this person is sometimes drinking their own flavor-aid and believes they really are a prophet or whatever, but more often than not they are charlatans who knowingly prey on the vulnerable for personal gain: sex, power, money, cheap thrills, fame, and so on.

verdict: din’s covert is not a cult, because its spiritual leader, the armorer, is not worshiped. she is a spiritual leader, and admired, but that is as far as her authority goes. she interprets the text of the creed, but she does not gatekeep it; all the covert members have knowledge of mandalore, and seem free to access however much of it as they want to, because all of them have access to the outside world. her status is more like that of a spiritual guide or teacher: she can tell people when they’ve strayed from the path of the creed and declare whether or not they are considered a mandalorian, but she cannot compel them to obey her. this is crucial, especially in the context of season two, where she reneges din’s mandalorian status. she tells him that according to the creed they both ascribe to, he is no longer a mandalorian; the only way to become a mandalorian again would be by bathing in the living waters beneath the mines of mandalore. she does not command him to do this, or shame him, or berate him, or excommunicate him; he is not bodily thrown out of the covert and commanded to get his shiny ass to mandalore on pain of death. he is simply told of his new status, and told what to do if he wants to fix it, but that’s it. this is precisely the role of a spiritual leader: to guide their congregation back to the path of the faithful when they stumble.

3.  social isolation – when new members join, cults go out of their way to deliberately isolate new folks from friends, family, and society as a whole. cults will assign duties and activities to keep new members busy and under the cult’s thumb, will tell them that their friends and family “just won’t understand”, will encourage them to sell their homes and move into a cult building or into neighborhoods filled with other members, convince them to quit their jobs and work in cult admin or otherwise devote every waking moment to the cult, and remind them again and again how only people within the cult will ever understand and support them, unlike their ignorant friends and family. cults actively discourage deep fraternization with outsiders.

verdict: din’s covert is not a cult, the children of the watch do not police who members talk to.  we know this because din has friends, specifically cara dune. their dialogue implies that they’ve known each other for more than just a few months, presumably much longer, because they know pieces of each other’s histories, are close enough to scuffle for shits and giggles, and have a report together. If COTW were a cult, din and cara would have none of this. and, more notably, when din brings cara, greef, the child, and IT into the covert in season two? that would have been a big no-no if this was a cult.

4.  extremist beliefs – cults are usually guided by extremist beliefs, which (in the most boiled down terms possible) are essentially beliefs that render the believer to reject and become intolerant to alternative beliefs, oftentimes to violent ends. this is another controlling tactic used to isolate members, and teach members to obey without question. think of, like… an intense conspiracy theorist. the intensity and wildness of those theories often push your “average” person away from them, causing these people to dig down even deeper in what they believe out of anger and loss, and then turning to one another and creating an echo chamber to reinforce their choice to believe these things. think about how once someone buys into one wild conspiracy theory, they’re often more likely to by into even wilder ones, until they’re suddenly screaming that the universe is actually a space worm’s dream hallucination and to prove it they’re going to blow something up. it often works like that. (however, this is not uncommon, because most people congregate around others who share their beliefs, outlooks on life, morals, values, and so on. It’s why religious communities form. it’s the human desire for interconnection and a shared knowledge base.) again, this is the most crude bare-bones description i can manage with a migraine, so i’m aware i’m missing a lot, here.

verdict:  din’s covert is not a cult, because its members do not adhere to or exhibit extremist beliefs. they don’t seem to be building toward anything, and they aren’t intolerant of all or even most belief systems outside of theirs. they are not concerned with changing the ways of other mandalorians, even if they disagree with them. their belief in the creed does not translate into violence against other mandalorians who are “being mandalorian wrong.” 

if anything, i’d hazard that the children of the watch are more like… mandalorian fundamentalists, i guess? (but even that doesn’t totally fit imo). 

we don’t know how the armorer and other covert members feel about other mandalorians removing their helmets, but we do know how din feels – in season two, he believes that all mandalorians who remove their helmets “are not real mandalorians.” 

din believes there is a right and a wrong way to be a mandalorian, however the fact that he did not know there were mandalorians who removed their helmets at all implies that he straight up was not taught about other traditions. he was only taught the creed, so it’s straight up possible that he came to that conclusion all on his own, because every mandalorian he’s ever met has been in the convert and they’ve never removed their helmets in front of him. 

but even if the armorer had explicitly told him this was the only way to be a mandalorian, it would not qualify as an extremist belief for the reasons above. this is a theosophical and cultural difference between two mandalorian sects, just as there is a long history of disagreements and arguments within real-world religious groups. 

final verdict:   the children of the watch, and din’s covert, are not cults, because they do not meet the cult criteria. rather, they are more akin to fundamentalist-lite religious group. 

now, i don’t have a positive relationship with the religion i was raised in so i’m a bit biased toward the narrative of din no necessarily adapting bo-katan’s version of being mandalorian, and i think din will have to choose between a bunch of mando’s saying “my way is best” before going “fuck it im making my own Way” 

knowing your own bias is important, as is being respectfully open to other peoples’ viewpoints, so know that your internal reflection is seen and appreciated.

as for din’s spiritual journey, i am 95% sure that is exactly what will happen. he will see the damage in-fighting has done to the mandalorians, and decide that neither of these ways works for him, because he is a new kind of mandalorian in a new era; he, and his people, need a new way of relating to one another and the GFFA in the wake of the empire’s destruction. he will find a third path to follow and invite others to join him, with a new idea of what it means to be a mandalorian carrying him to the end of his character journey. 

which is, like… definitely a character journey, i guess; just not an interesting one or one that i care for. it’s a very third-act feeling, same-y “twist”, which is about all i expect. if this doesn't happen i’ll either be happily surprised or consumed by irritation. we’ll see. 

looking at fandom, there’s a lot of (justified) anger toward how mandalorian culture (particularly in comparison to the jedi) is celebrated, and for some reason this sentiment isn’t carried over to the Children of the Watch 

now, i have a question for you (the asker, and other people who are in the same boat vis a vis frustration over fandom views on mandalorians versus jedi) – personally, i’m not sure how, or why, the jedi factor into this, or why anyone cares about the two groups getting erroneously pitted against each other at all?

the jedi are regularly vilified by numbskulls who haven’t rewatched the OT or the PT since they were like, nine, and have less collective critical analysis skills than i have in my left nut, so i don’t really give a shit what those people have to say, and i encourage you and everyone else who is bothered by them to take the same stance. It’s like arguing about the ethics of war with an uncritical call of duty lover: they are not here to engage with themes, they’re here to watch big things go boom boom. it’s a losing battle and all the casualties are on your side.

other people i see falling on the “jedi critical” side of things tend to be newer, younger fans who also are not keen on analysis, or are fans who saw the mandalorian first and are now working backwards into star wars without watching the movies. they are going to have an understandably uncharitable view of the jedi versus the mandalorians because of that framing: they are introduced to din djarin as a hero with a (gray) code of ethics, who has all the benefits of sound design and lighting and plot-armor to come across as the good guy. he is depicted as a “traditional mandalorian”, what this new audience will read as a true mandalorian, whereas the likes of bo katan and the viszlas and boba fett (if you want to go there) will always be read by them as outliers/bad mandalorians because they met din first.

pre-existing fans had the opposite framing experience: you met a bunch of gun-toting HOO-RAH assholes who were talented at two things: killing jedi, and killing each other. naturally, you’re going to be less charitable to mandalorians and whatever hype they get than the aforementioned fans. 

so, imo, the new mandalorian fans are shown a noble culture of ass-kicking space knights in a space-knight militia who rescue kids and beat the shit out of bad guys.* they hear that mandalorians don’t like jedi/annoying youtube fanboy critiques of the jedi as “being as rotten as the republic” and they side with them and talk shit about jedi. the irony is that “a noble culture of ass-kicking space knights in a space-knight militia who rescue kids and beat the shit out of bad guys” IS THE JEDI, but because of how they were introduced to it, and potentially because of some of the salt getting sprinkled around by both sides, totally miss that they can love the jedi and the mandalorians for different reasons. 

also, let’s be real: western propaganda is a bitch. a lot of media conditions people to believe that the gun toting violent man who shows up and shoots evil guys is the true hero of the people, and that anything to do with politics, religion, mediating violence, and advocating for peace is not just useless and a waste of time, but somehow, bizarrely, both elitist and the source of the world’s problems in the first place. 

the people who bought into that are the same ones who think the mandalorians are right and the jedi are wrong, and it’s largely in part because the mandalorians shoot people in the face to solve their problems and people wildly mistake that for a perverted kind of direct action, whereas the jedi are cool space monks who get unwillingly drafted into a war who are trying to straight up stop the war from happening, while not knowing that the war, their involvement, their troops, their government, and everything else was literally created to work against them and rope them in so tightly they couldn’t see it was a trap until the noose was around their neck and their legs were kicked out from under them.

that’s not a slight against the jedi; it’s fucking tragic, and is meant to convey that they were always going to lose but that still fighting to save the people they could was the right thing to do, even if it meant they had to go down swinging. 

unfortunately, once again, using anakin as the pov characters for the only movies about that era was a mistake, because people walked away believing that he’s faultless and the jedi are dumb for not seeing a political trap forty plus years in the making that was created specifically with them in mind, while these same people can’t even see that copaganda is real and shitty and insidious. but i won’t get into that because it makes me crazy.

i’m saying all this to say, you aren’t going to win with these people, because they are ideologically invested in wrongness and the “might makes right” mindset because they either think it’s cool, or it makes them feel safe, or some other reason i can no longer be bothered to guess at. 

it sucks that you and parts of the fandom feel like it is unfair that mandalorians are celebrated for the same actions that jedi are vilified for, because that is unfair, but i do not think the answer to that is to… hate the children of the watch or say the covert is a cult (i am actually not sure what the connection between this part of your ask is compared to the top, so i’m just guessing here) solely based on fanon interpretation, fandom anti-religious sentiment and bias, and two lines from bo katan kryze, of all characters, lol. doing that seems like the exact thing you are frustrated with other fandom people about: hating characters you love and want to defend based solely on how they feel and how they want to cherry-pick and twist canon to suit an anti-jedi narrative.

especially when the children of the watch actually seem quite removed from the mandalorians fandom upholds/is angry about: the children of the watch hold no ill-will toward the jedi, they are not concerning themselves with bo katan’s goal of reclaiming mandalore, they are not looking for revenge, they are not engaging in any of the behaviors and schemes that the main mandalorians are. the children of the watch are focused on survival, and following the way, and reclaiming the beskar they view as their birthright. they have the energy of a cluster of doomsday preppers who learned to prepare for the worst and keep their head down to avoid getting slaughtered again. they do not seem, narratively speaking, like the mandalorians to get angry at, because they are fundamentally disengaged from those people.

it seems to me that the only way to contend with this is to block idiots quickly and without mercy, ignore people who are just flat out wrong, and know that you don’t have to pit two bad bitches against each other to prove a point, or drag one girlie through the mud to make the other one shine. 

again, all /gen and /lh i’m not trying to start anything

no worries. i enjoyed the question! thanks for sending it my way.

and, for the record: i’m a pro-jedi, 100% jedi-lover, and i am a fan of the children of the watch. (in general, my interest in mandalorian history – aside from my fascination with mandalorian jedi – bounces between “oooh shiny” and “whatever this is dumb and you’re all losers” so i don’t really talk about them.)  we exist! happily! join us!

*this is an oversimplification for comparative purposes. randoms reading this, do not come for me in my fucking inbox with some “well actually” shit or i will stomp your crotch to dick-dust.

#star wars meta #pro jedi #din djarin #pro children of the watch #the mandalorian #tw cults #i have many feelings about COTW and din wearing his helmet being a religiously significant act #be annoyed by the mainstream mandalorians if you want but in this house we love COTW and the jedi #i have two fucking hands #walkie talkie. #long post

[crowzwritingstore]

Hello! Plz i need help.

So I’m getting a new kindle right, and i have discovered (before the old one decided that half the screen was going to become the void…) that you can get fucking ao3 fics in there! Either using the web page or fucking downloading them to you laptop then transferring them!

And currently my brain just needs some good ol’ fluffy fics as i want to tear my own skin off and burn my bones :))

So,

If anyone has any ao3 fics from the following fandoms, please can you like recommend me some 👉👈. I don’t mind the genre but i would love fluff or hurt comfort!

please from the following fandoms/ specific characters... xx

The Bad Batch

The Clone wars (mainly just the clones plz)

Call Of duty mw2

Spiderman

Avengers

Marvel

Hermitcraft (Ik this one is going to not exist but hey cant blame a guy for trying)

The walking dead

Mandalorian

BatFam

Hannibal

Stranger things

Hazbin Hotel

The Boys (Amazon)

Peace maker

Znation

Jurassic world

wolverine

arcane

Our Flag Means Death

Jschlatt (DO not ask...)

Joel miller

bbc Ghosts

the lost boys

the punisher

daredevil

bowser

supernatural

Criminal minds

moon knight

the witcher

overwatch

please if you have any recommendations please!

i am going to make a post about fanfics i have read that i have loved on Ao3 but im still tying to figure out tumbler. (lets not talk about how ive been on here for like 3-4 years now lol)

#please #the bad batch #clone wars #cod mw2 #spiderman #the avengers #marvel fanfiction #hermitcraft #twd fanfiction #the mandalorian #batfamily #hannibal #stranger things #hazbin hotel #the boys amazon #peacemaker #z nation #jurassic world #wolverine #arcane #ofmd #jschlatt #joel miller #bbc ghosts #tlb 1987 #the punisher #daredevil #bowser #supernatural #criminal minds

[ravenalla]

Welp. Mando finale thoughts.

Y’ALL IM DYING I WAS RIGHT WE ACTUALLY DID NOT GET HELMETLESS DIN 😂😂 what a fucking joke. Literally it’s like the writing this season has expected you to have the attention span of a five year old, debriefing room? Nah mate that was last episode forget it. This show won’t keep a plotline going to save its life. Sigh. At least Din escaped by his own with the help of Grogu instead of Bo coming to rescue him like a damsel in distress again. His fight scenes were really cool and we got to see the most he’s interacted with Grogu out of the whole season.

The Moff Gideon clone thing makes sense I guess but it kinda just came out of nowhere? Like his epic showdown speech was all about Din destroying the clones when it happened like 5 minutes ago, why didn’t you have any security for that anyways lmao. This is probably just a nitpick but it’s a weird thing to introduce at the last second and have it be his big motivator. Also I was just imagining how much more cool it would be if the darksaber was being wielded by Din in that fight, truly the marketing meant absolute nothing. But hey now it’s gone forever so doesn’t even matter who tf cares anymore there yayyyyyy 🙄 At least Bo Katan would actually have to prove that she’s a worthy leader not just based on fucking sword ownership, which realistically she’d 100% get them all screwed again if she wasnt written as a different person all season lol.

No one was the spy. Kinda glad because I didn’t want the Armorer to be evil but idk why the fuck they named a whole episode that then. Flying scenes were also neat at least.

NO DINBO AND HE DIDNT STAY WITH HER AT THE END LETS GOOOO!!! and FINALLY a father son confession, though I’m sorry Din Grogu? Is that a Mandalorian cultural practice established? Why wouldn’t it be Grogu Djarin tf? 😭 that’s gonna take some getting use to because what. Also come on why didn’t you make Din say he’s his son to the New Republic Officer at the end that would have been the perfect transition from this apprentice nonsense after adopting him. Speaking of, please don’t tell me they are making Din a cop. I know it’s an independent contract to just hunt down imperials not much different than his bounty work but it’s getting dangerously close to cop levels for me.

I will say, after going through all that, I’m at the very least happy we got an ending that can merge into Din and Grogu actually being the focus as a family and going on adventures again. These writers still have lost all my trust and I’m not looking forward to more, but it’s better than any alternatives we could have gotten.

Overall, not a god awful finale, but not a great one either. Lots of missed opportunities, but dodged a couple of bullets we were all worried about.

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #mando critical #din djarin #grogu

[valeriianz]

20 questions for fic writers!

tagged by @honeyteacakes <3 (and belatedly, @tharkuun haha)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

25

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

400,576 (+ 100k extra from fics i've deleted/orphaned in the past few years haha rip)

3. What fandoms do you write for?

i am at the mercy of the hyperfixation, and currently it's The Sandman and Dreamling exclusively.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1) Salvation (How to Get Away With Murder) 2) The Red Witch (Good Omens) 3) Bolt in the Blue (The Sandman) 4) Let Me Down Easy (The Sandman) 5) Show Me (The Mandalorian)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

yes and no. i love that people take the time to show their appreciation for a fic and i always want to reply and show how much it means to me... but i have this bad habit of not replying to comments on say, older works or older chapters of a fic. idk why... im just not good at it lol BUT I LOVE AND APPRECIATE EVERY SINGLE COMMENT, EVEN THE LITTLE ONES 💖💖

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

oh, Exit Wounds, for sure haha

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

im a sucker for happy endings so i'd say, everything else lol but particularly Almost Idyllic (The Song of Achilles) due to the build up and Salvation also, because of the events leading up to the ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not since my ff.net days haha.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

very occasionally. and nothing too wild (except for that dreamling butt plug one. that was. hmm.) but i typically enjoy writing first times.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

i do not.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

nope. though i have seen ideas/prompts used without credit. it doesn't bother me much.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

nope.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

once, The Red Witch (which btw has been discontinued, pls don't read it lol). it started off just me, then my editor jumped on maybe 5 chapters in once i realized they were much more versed in magick and fantasy than me.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship?

haha probably Zutara.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

ahhh haha... fuck. idk i want to say none. but my brain keeps whispering about the dreamling road trip au. i thought i had a plot but as i continue working on bitb and other little drabbles... ive realized i might've bitten off more than i can chew. and my only option is to completely sideline it until im done with bitb, or change the story (because right now the research i have to do for it is too much and y'all know how i am...) it sucks cos i do want to write it. but it's difficult when all my patience for research is already going into one fic (bitb).

16. What are your writing strengths?

dialogue and monologuing, probably.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

self 👏 motivation 👏 finding 👏 the 👏 urge 👏 to 👏 write (technically, it's tense. i flip between past and present tense constantly and at this point i just consider it one of my endearing qualities pfft)

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

i try to avoid it but when it happens i just use Google Translate and then toss a disclaimer that ive done my best (to which usually a commenter will helpfully correct me and then all is well)

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Inuyashaaaaa (Miroku/Sango omg). exchanging physical notebooks with my friends with fanfics we'd written in school lol

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

truly a tie between Savory & Sweet and Let Me Down Easy (at the moment). the restaurant au was so easy and fun to write (probably because i used to be in the industry) and i reread it a lot. the pacing is fast and i love how immediate Hob and Dream fall into each other haha. Let Me Down Easy was very similar. my major was Media Production in undergrad and although it's been a while since i've held a camera, it was fun putting myself back in that environment. also the angst and tension were just a blast to write and figure out.

(this was an excellent waste of time, thanks again!) tagged, if y'all want, @magnusbae @teejaystumbles @ml-nolan @tj-dragonblade @reallyintoscience @delta-pavonis @staroftheendless

#20 questions is a lot so under the read more ya go! #thanks! #tag game #fic things

[saltinekryze]

ahsoka ep 1x04 liveblog / post-mortem

the ultimatum about sacrificing ezra for good to prevent thrawn’s return…. i had a feeling it would come to that but actually hearing it hurt. OOF!

ahsoka expressing the same thought to sabine that ezra once did — “can i count on you?” bro i’m gonna THROW UP 😭

sabine fighting like a mandalorian let’s fucking GOOOOO

HERA AND BROCCOLI BOYYYY

when jacen asked why his mom gets to disobey orders and he doesn’t, chopper definitely said “yeah what’s up with that?” 💀

hera let jacen push the lever to send them into hyperspace 🥹

oh the cloak removal….. the drama….

ahsoka’s lightsaber twirl was SO anakin-like pls

WHY THE INQUISITOR EXPLODE LIKE THAT

“he never mentioned you” ooooh burnnnn

MORE CLOAK REMOVALS (*insert “she’s so crazzyy!! love her!!” meme*)

i must add that i love baylan’s costume design. ray stevenson himself brings such an interesting physicality to the role. like a stoic old king or medieval knight.

interesting that ahsoka hasnt been using her second saber….

canon confirmation that sabine’s family died on mandalore 😭😭😭 but the “because your master didn’t trust you” line had me wondering. didn’t they die in the purge mentioned in the mandalorian? if not, what exactly happened and how does ahsoka tie in?

SABINE NAURRRRRRR. I GET IT BUT NAURRRR 😭😭😭😭

(she is training to be a jedi but can’t let go of her personal attachments… she has lost so much already and she cannot bear to also lose ezra for good….. i am SADDDD)

“i have a bad feeling” HMMM FORCE-SENSITIVE JACEN CONFIRMED?

LIVE ACTION WORLD BETWEEN WORLDS??????? OH FUCK OH SHIT

“HELLO SNIPS” WAAAAHHHHHHHHH

ANAKIN!!!!!! IM CRYING (damn they really got hayden with the cgi. i understand they needed to de-age him but i was like o that’s a Lot)

we are def gonna get some funky world between worlds shit next week (hell yeah). flashback mayhaps???

speaking of the world between worlds. you know who else has accessed that plane? that’s right…. ezra bridger. babe where are u? we miss you. sabine misses you. we want to see you. what have you been up to? are you doing okay? are you staying hydrated?

#ahsoka series #ahsoka spoilers #ahsoka lb #ahsoka post mortem #text

[clonehub]

i mean part of the reason why arcane is as good as it is, besides the stunning visuals, is because it was in development for 6 years. they had six years to go back and forth on the look, the style, the story the story the story. 6 fucking years. that requires patience. that requires cooperation from all writers and directors. that requires seeing the culture change and responding in kind to reflect what people would like to see.

you notice how there's so many female characters, and while even though some of them are on thin ice a little (jinx/powder being that mentally unstable wide-eyed violent young woman/girl who doesn't really wear a lot) they've got beautiful stories that connect deeply with one another's without being centered on a man at all. look at vi's body shape. look at the range of body shapes for female characters, the range of faces. even how they walk (I love Vi's walk). you have a the tale of two cities, political depth and manipulation, meaning displayed in the way character's dress, stand, walk, how they're designed, what their hobbies and interests are, etc. all these things that would take time to figure out. that's partly why arcane is so good. they had time.

anyone who's been following me for a while knows where this is going. im sorry but the reason so many star wars shows falls flat for me is because these stories do not have the time to develop. i see development in the singular. one year here. one year for another show. maybe the concept existed for a while (with DF and GL, it seems they always have concepts that exist for a long time) but because they're concepts and because they basically go in the freezer until they're needed again, they don't really have the time to develop both deliberately and organically. the misbalance of the book of boba fett. whatever is happening with the mandalorian. the general mess that is the bad batch.

arcane is fundamentally a show about politics. you can't have a council, and oppressed class, the rich/poor divide, and all the ways that the class divisions have affected people (vi's incareceration, silco's manipulations, the lack of children in the undercity, viktor's disability) and not have the show be about politics. the writers understood this.

in the bad batch, a show about that takes place during the post-war rise of a fascist regime that has just speedily and aggressively replaced not only an entire republic, but also succesfully committed genocide and now spreads its terror throughout an entire galaxy, hunter, a soldier, says he and his team never cared about politics.

and indeed, theres a clunky way that the bad batch handles the inherently political existence of the clones, the empire, etc. politics should be permeating the interactions that the batch has with greater galactic society, but instead they relegate political discussion to specific episodes or scenes, and then say "okay we'll focus on that later, let's get back to X and Y". the extrajudicial execution of civilians is a political act. running from the empire is a political act. joining the empire is political. having one episode and a handful of scenes dedicated to the political side of their lives doesn't cut it.

its probably because i majored in political science that this is bugging me as much as it is. i know ive moved very far away from the thesis of this post, but bear with me lol. figuring out the political structure of a world and how it affects the characters within that world is hard. like. its not easy. it's not as simple as making a government and slapping a few laws onto it (and notice how even in the well-done political fantasies, there rarely is a government structure that hasn't already been seen in the west specifically). arcane's works as seamlessly as it does because they took the time to figure that out WHILE being aware that there would be large swaths of the audience that know nothing about league of legends (me, all my friends, etc).

people who wanted to watch the bad batch asked if they needed to have seen tcw or any other part of star wars to watch it. most bad batch fans said no. ive seen the bad batch and even i would tentatively say no. but then you watch the series, and nearly every episode has a cameo that you can tell is significant story wise, but if you've never seen tcw and have no idea who anyone is, you'd be really confused as to why everything grinds to a halt to dramatically reveal a character you've never seen before. and then they take two episodes to focus on the development of a character from another series. anyone watching can tell that they're filling in gaps and closing arcs or opening stories for people you will never see again. the bad batch wasn't written with non-star wars fans in mind, as much as people would like to insist otherwise. the main characters want to be apolitical in a politically tumultuous time, while living politicized lives. the political world is not set up very well.

(although i dont know that the "Right" amount of development would have changed much. DF and GL seemed dead set on having their little Trope Troupe, so they may have been doomed from the beginning)

so i know ive contradicted myself in some ways. if the bad batch had time they'd be better but also they've existed for a while and they're still bad and also theyve been doomed from the start. i think all of these are true. conceptually, as characters, doomed from the start--but at least an inch of thought and consideration for the current sociopolitical climate would have undoomed them at least a little. worldbuilding, not doomed from the start but the writers definitely needed more time to consider all their options and write a clear beginning, middle, and end to bridge through, if That Interview with Rau and Corbett signifies anything.

its time and its intent, and arcane takes the cake

#ch posts #under a cut because this got LONG #star wars #arcane #just like. hhhhhh i know that given the tools and time #and given to writers who arent racist #tbb could actually be good but its not #waste of animation! #arcane beloved im holding you so so so close

[galactic-star-bruiser]

Revolution 0 din x reader

The lyrics of the song 'revolution 0' by boy genius matched an idea I had in my head a little too well. hope you enjoy my loves

-rose xx

angst, fluff

warnings: blood, wounds, crying

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,

If it isn’t love then what the fuck is it? I guess just let me pretend

---------------------------------

“Mando!” I screamed at the top of my burning lungs, running as fast as my legs would take me.

The ink black sky of Tatooine taunted me like a raven flying low.

“Fuck”, the gasp tumbled out of my body as I held the limp Mandalorian’s body close to mine. “Wake up, cmon you cant leave me here.” I pleaded with his lifeless form. 

A bounty had gone wrong and the beskar clad man took more damage than he ever had, crushed against the side wall of a building and six men you couldn’t see the faces of. They had now been taken care of... too late. 

It was strange to see him helpless like this... how was he caught off guard? I thought to myself.

I just wanna know who broke your nose

Figure out where they live

So I can kick their teeth in

I sobbed, dragging the large man through desert until my legs gave in. I was going about a mile a minute and felt like I was going to collapse... only the thought of saving him carried my body forward.

On his ship, tears flowed silently down my stone cold, stoic face. Bacta, various medicines, needles, stitching thread, and bandages littered the floor. His pulse was shallow... but he was there. 

I tried my best to respect him, but as more blood flowed like an old testament river from under his helmet... I felt I had no choice but to lift it. 

The whimper that clawed its way out of my throat was unlike anything I had heard a living creature utter before. 

Deep gashes, evidence of a traumatic brain injury, bruising around his throat and eyes, as well as the flows of blood emitting from behind his soft matted hair was enough to break me. 

“Mando... im so sorry” I whispered, caressing his face, not caring about the blood that transferred onto my clean palms.

I cleaned, stitched, and sprayed bacta for what felt like hours. No fever. That was a good sign. 

I used all of the strength left in my body to lift his massive form onto his small, cot-like bed.

He looked like a fallen angel... so peacefully asleep, but that innocence was juxtaposed by the deep scars, and bandages that littered his body and face... his face.

The guilt gnawed at me, I forced myself away after stealing one last glance. He was beautiful, and even that word didn’t seem to describe his features.

I walked back into the small space near the entrance of the ship where I dragged and dropped him. I filled a bucket of boiling hot water, grabbed a rag, and let the water burn my hands as I scrubbed his blood off of the steel floor. Hot tears and sobs escaped me. 

If it isn’t love

Then what the fuck is it?

I guess just let me pretend

I silently put away and threw out the bucket and bloodied rags, with nothing but my own footsteps to listen to.  The scent of rust, blood, and dirt infiltrated my nose and I knew it was something I wouldn’t soon forget. 

How I missed his laugh, his footsteps, and the way he smelled... I never realized you could miss those things. 

I walked to the refresher, stripping my clothes off with winces as if I was peeling bandages off of fresh wounds.

The water only matched the heat of my tears as I pushed my back against the cold tile, sliding down to sit with my head in my hands. 

After what felt like an hour, I finally noticed the freezing temperature of the water and cursed myself for using it all, what if he wanted to- never mind. 

The first night, months ago, that I met The Mandalorian, he had lent me an old shirt of his so that I could go on a mission for him and look like a disheveled woman wandering the streets of Tatooine. The plan worked and a disgusting man gave up all of his information just to get me into his bed... safe to say that never happened after learning what you needed to. 

I wasn’t sure if he knew that I still had his shirt, but I did. It held its place under the small flat pillow that laid upon my bed. I knew it was childish and that I was acting like a school girl, but as soon as I smelled him on his shirt... any hint of embarrassment was washed away.

Tonight I decided to wear it, needing to smell him on my skin. I wondered if it was creepy... but I justified my actions with the thought that any bereaved partner or friend would want to wear the clothes of someone they were missing. 

Before I let the intoxicating way my bed beckoned me to it, I decided to check on him one last time. 

You wanted a song

So it's gonna be a short one

Wish I wasn't so tired, but I'm tired

I knocked softly as if he was going to answer me, then walked in to feel his forehead. Still no fever. His bandages were snug and the bleeding seemed to have stopped. 

I sat up from off the side of his bed when a small but distinct noise choked out of the mans mouth. 

“Mando?...” I said softly, terrified that my mind had made up the sound. 

No, there it was again, soft enough to be akin to the flutter of a birds wing. 

“Im here.” I said, avoiding looking into his bare face “...I’m here, Mando.”

“Din” croaked the small voice as he stirred a bit. “My name, it’s Din.”

“Din” I hummed back to him, with a small smile gracing my lips, “We can speak in the morning, Din.”

“No” a strong arm clasping around my wrist stopped any motion of moving away, “Don’t leave me. Don’t go.”

My heart felt as though it were a rock and had dropped to my stomach. 

“Your helmet... I had to take it off to help heal you.I’m sorry. I don’t want to disrespect you by staying-“

“I don’t care.” He said with a wince. 

“Okay” was all I could whisper before crawling beside the large man, his skin cold with sweat.

Even through his pain, a small cocky smile danced its way across his face, “I like you in my shirt.”

Fuck, he knew now.

“Shut up” I mumbled, a deep red blush creeping its way up from my neck.

He hummed in an attempt to laugh, but even the small sound had him wincing. 

“Sleep, Din.” I said, loving the way his true way tumbled from my lips. 

When he slowly turned to face me, I could feel the breath hitch in my throat as my heart pumped as though it were ready to burst into my chest. 

“You need rest, Din...”

“I know” he managed to choke out, “but it might be my last chance to do this...”

With that his soft lips were on mine and a large warm hand was caressing  my cheek as gently as I had ever felt in my life.

“Din...” I whispered... “I...”. I was too taken aback and drunk with love that I couldn’t speak. 

“Oh.” I said with a slight smile, “Goodnight, Din.”

Sleep had finally found The Mandalorian again, and I watched his chest rise and fall with every breath, each sound like a lullaby made just for me. 

I put my head next to his, tracing the curve of his nose, and feeling the stubble that scattered his cheeks. 

“I love you” I whispered, even if I knew I was the only one awake to hear it.

If you're not enough

Then I give up

And then nothing is

#din djarin #din djarin gif #the mandalorian #mando fic #mando x reader #mando angst #mandalorian fic #mandalorian fluff #fluff and angst #din djarin hurt #reader pov #din x reader #boygenius #revolution 0