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SOMETHING HOLY

CHAPTER 9: Burn

WARNINGS: angst, blood/gore, canon-compliant violence, possession

SUMMARY: “How much time is on the clock?” Nova asks, and she can feel Din’s reassurance seep back in, lockstep. In unison, like soldiers, the two of them bullet down the hallway. Nova’s breath clouds in the air in front of them. The base is eerie, quiet, muted.

“Eleven minutes,” Din murmurs, barely air, and Nova feels something strange in the air around them. Almost like gunpowder, but not quite. Something like—stardust. Like what happens after a supernova, an asteroid burst, an exploding star. It tastes hollow, burnt. She swallows it whole. A premonition.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: HAPPY SOMETHING HOLY SATURDAY!!! this chapter, while lacking on any smut, has my favorite scene i've ever written—the first one from Din's perspective, if you're curious. it's truly the culmination of this story and everything it's been built to become over the last four years, and i cannot say enough about how much it means to me—and how grateful i am that anyone cares about it even a fraction of that <3 thank you for reading!

If you're new here, Something More & Something Deeper are the first installments in this series, available on here & ao3!

Hello, Novalise. I’ve been waiting for you.

It’s the voice in all of her nightmares—darkened, scathing, ice-cold. Even Hoth would seem hot in comparison. It is an anathema. Putrid. Evil. It’s the voice she heard in Sparmau’s glittering teeth, in the strike of that ominous lightning, in her imagination of what Thrawn’s words would settle out like—crystalline and poisonous, turning the very air around her into stone.

But it’s not a villain tugging at her. It is not something dark, something crawled out of the depths, something she can calcify or crucify or cut clean through.

It is herself—gnawing, dripping. Smiling. Rows and rows of teeth, dripping black blood—spatters of it falling out of her mouth, the sunken corners of her mouth, the hollows of her eyes.

“You’re not real,” Nova breathes, and she recoils. Snow is falling all around her—hailing sideways. It’s obscured the entrance of the base, and even though she’s walked every inch of this place a thousand times over the last few years, even though she’s memorized the schematics, she has lost her way. “You’re not real,” Nova repeats, to this imitation, to this thing, a half-step stronger.

It grins back, tar peeling through her teeth like venom. Everything inside of her runs cold. Nova swallows, taking another step backward, but she doesn’t know which direction she’s running in, doesn’t know which way is up. And if she’s running towards safety, towards the open mouth of the Rebel base—it means that this thing will follow her, will trace her unwitting steps, and can infiltrate it. Can bring the danger right inside—can force every person she loves to swallow it whole.

Nova blinks.

The Not-Nova in front of her takes another jagged step forward. Her neck is tilted at a strange angle, her eyes open wide—pitch-dark, vantablack. Not green. No iris to be found at all—just a black hole, the absence of where the light once was.

“I am as real as you are,” it whispers, still grinning, and chills erupt across Nova’s skin. She feels feverish—dizzy. Sick. “As real as you are.” It sounds like a chant. A corrupted prayer. “As real,” she whispers, the words a dull ache, “as you are.”

“Go away.” It’s desperate—and childish—but it’s all she can muster. Then, slightly more convincingly: “Get out of my head.”

Not-Nova takes a chilling step closer. “Oh, I’m not in your head,” she croons, and then her voice morphs into Din’s, “sweet girl.” More blood sluices through her teeth, turning the snow beneath her staggering, zombie crawl to black. “I’m as real as you are.”

“No,” Nova says, and then fight or flight finally kicks in, and her hands are on her lightsaber before the thought has even traveled through the map of her nerves. She swings it up, blade igniting yellow—golden, a halo of warmth in a place like this, and she slices forward, screaming out a cloud of hot steam in the frigid air between her and this other self, ready to tear her own self apart, she will, she will, if that’s what it takes—

“Hey!”

It cuts through like a bullet. Like a lightning strike. Nova falls—mercifully, her lightsaber dislodged from her grip as she does, yellow retracting into nothing. She’s expecting Din—Din her anchor, her Din, it’s always Din—but it’s not. Bo-Katan is standing in front of her, helmet off, short red hair whipping furiously in the snow-driven wind, eyes wild.

“Bo-Katan,” Nova says, weakly, and Bo-Katan is heaving her up with a strength neither of them currently hold. She leans forward into her grip—thankful, relieved—and then Bo-Katan is grabbing Nova’s braid at the crown of her neck and yanking it up until their eyes meet.

Tears spring forward, desperate and sudden.

“Ow! Bo-Katan, what the—”

“If you cannot keep it together,” Bo-Katan hisses, “I will send Hera back down here to retrieve you. Right now.”

Nova blinks at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine—”

“Cut the bullshit.” The words are pointed, wielded like knives. “Din and Wedge are already inside, but I saw. I saw, Nova.”

Nova stares, throat suddenly dry. “You saw her—?”

Bo-Katan’s eyes narrow to slits. She doesn’t speak for a minute, but her grip tightens, and a single tear falls. It turns to ice nearly immediately, a glittering memorial frozen to Nova’s brown cheek. “I saw you fighting with the wind. With nothing.” One howling second of wind and utter, stark silence. Nova grasps at straws, then nothing. She closes her shocked, parched mouth. “This is not—you…I need you to keep it together.” Her voice breaks a little on the last word, and finally, finally, Nova sees the furious facade slip, the icy mask crumble.

She blinks, swallows. She nods, and Bo-Katan’s grip on her hair recedes, enough to feel tender instead of threatening. Enough to bring her back to the surface. Level them both down to evenness.

“I can do this,” Nova promises, and Bo-Katan searches her face for a fake, a half-truth. After what feels like ages, she lets go, shoves her helmet over her windblown face, and nods. Nova follows after her—the open door of the Rebel base suddenly reappearing, like it was always there—like she was the one that went elsewhere—and tries to convince both Bo-Katan and herself that it wasn’t a lie.

Din’s visor is trained on Nova like a hawk.

Bo-Katan pushes past him, into the frigid tunnel, boots crunching against packed snow, into nothing, as she follows after Wedge. They’re headed into the center of the base—if anyone’s here, they’ll be centralized in the innermost chambers. They’re big on conserving heat on Hoth. The war room, the central hub, the bunks, the mess hall, the comms center—all smack-dab in the middle. If anyone’s here, they’ll funnel them right back out. Easy.

It should be easy.

Din doesn’t move.

Nova shivers. She’s sorely underdressed for anywhere remotely cold, let alone the ice fortress that is Hoth, but the chill has seeped past her skin, sunk straight into her bones. Into her marrow. She stares up at Din, through that impenetrable visor, trying to suss out what expression he’s wearing underneath.

“Nova—”

“I’m here.” She winces. She meant to say fine, but they both know damn well that’s a lie. And, a stealthy, horrible voice whispers, the word here is technically a lie, too. “I’m holding it together,” she whispers, patching it up with another half-truth, and Din cocks his head to the side. Nova swallows.

“There is enough,” he says, voice hard, thick with emotion, even through the modulator, “of a fight here already.” He pauses. “There’s something wrong on this planet. I need you to stay…here with me, Nova. With us. Please.”

Nova winces at that, too. With Din. With them.

With the Alliance.

With herself. Both versions—Novalise. And Andromeda.

She feels—shaken. All of that fight that flooded back into her on Corellia has been knocked loose. Exhaustion is sluicing through her. Black tinges the corner of her vision—like she cannot trust even that. She blinks, once, twice.

Novalise, the voice calls. It beckons. It taunts.

Something inside of her snaps—glowing, hissing. Rebel orange. You called, Nova retaliates, I’m answering.

Nova comes back into herself like a lightsaber, her body reigniting, her shoulders squaring. Her chin lifts up, braid swinging straight down her spine. Din’s visor tracks her movements, watches how she moves—like herself. Not slinking, not desperate, not undone.

Novalise Djarin—Rebel Girl, here to save the day. The darkness, even the kind that’s taken up a home in her skin, can fucking wait.

“How much time is on the clock?” Nova asks, and she can feel Din’s reassurance seep back in, lockstep. In unison, like soldiers, the two of them bullet down the hallway. Nova’s breath clouds in the air in front of them. The base is eerie, quiet, muted.

“Where is everyone?”

Din raises a finger to his helmet as they stalk in, closer and closer. Nova’s saber is raised, but unignited. Din’s other hand is curled off-kilter around the base of his blaster. An expert’s hold—lazy to the untrained eye, but Novalise knows better. She’s seen Din drop a thousand men with that blaster alone. She swallows, kicking in doors. Abandoned, that’s the word for what they’re looking at. Most of the base has been abandoned.

“Where is everyone?” she murmurs again, more to herself than to Din, but he responds anyway.

“I don’t know.”

It doesn’t feel right. The base is always quiet, yes, but not…empty. Not like this.

Nova peers around the corner, to her old quarters—where Wedge let her stay, gave her a home again when he found her, abandoned and destitute on Dantooine. There isn’t much there—everything, like an omen or like a metaphor, Nova can’t decide which—has already been relocated to Mandalore. But she goes inside anyway, curling her fingers around a forgotten schematic of one her parents’ combined maps—one that was wrong. One that never encompassed the fullness of the galaxy. She pockets it, blinking away tears she’ll cry later, closing the door behind her.

As if that’ll stop destruction. As if that’ll stop annihilation.

But it’ll preserve it in my memory, Nova thinks, and maybe that’s what matters.

They snake in closer and closer to the center of the Rebel base. Din follows Novalise like a soldier. Like a bullet.

Like an omen.

He blinks, and the scene shifts—the first time he laid eyes on her. Not snow, not ice. Lava pits, cracked earth. The same soul he’s tied his heart to, the same path he’s following now, save for one thing.

When Din found Novalise, on Nevarro, she wasn’t Novalise at all.

She said her name was Andromeda. She crashed an X-Wing. It wasn’t her X-Wing—that, she was very adamant about, she would never crash her X-Wing—but it was the only ship she could pilot, and she was in a bad spot, and she had to get out of there. She was a girl made of stardust and laughter and the biggest fucking heart he’d ever seen. She was all warmth—all brown skin and green, green eyes, and teeth that shone brighter than starlight, and Maker, she bowled him over. He didn’t need a pilot, and he certainly didn’t need trouble—and she was trouble. Trouble, because she was running from something that left her haunted; trouble, because she was the kind of beautiful that made people think they had ownership over her; trouble, because she was the purest light he had ever witnessed and he was absolutely terrified of her.

The first time Din touched Andromeda, he had to go lay down. She shocked him—straight through his clothes, his armor—and he grappled with his Creed and with his own anatomy for hours until he realized it wasn’t electricity. It was just her. He couldn’t believe she existed—her kindness. Her warmth. Her goodness. He couldn’t believe she fit into his life—dropped into it from the skies, literally—and made him realize everything he was missing. He couldn’t believe that he had lived thirty-six years without her. Without a lightning strike. Without her touch. Without her light.

The thing was—he didn’t.

Din Djarin dreamed. He dreamed of Nova. He dreamed of the Sanct’yia—this mythical, saintlike goddess, forged from sunlight and silver and the stars above, and she held Nova’s face. And when she told him her chosen name, Novalise, he came closer and closer to salvation. But he didn’t put it together until he made the biggest mistake of his life—leaving her on Dantooine, leaving her at all—and when she came back to him, she came back with something more.

And he came back with the origins of her name. Novalise. From the Mando’a Novay’lain. To radiate. To shine. To survive.

The Nova in front of him—she is not just Novalise. She is equal parts her past and her future—Andromeda and Sanct’yia—and there is something dark trapped under her skin. But as she moves through the Rebel base with one hand on her lightsaber and the Darksaber hanging from her belt—she is everything but a monolith. She is everything. She shines, his Supernova. Even now.

Din swears an oath to whatever higher power is listening that he will not let that ever burn out.

“Anything?”

Nova moves through the next set of rooms. She shakes her head, signaling to Din, whose fist is clenched tight around his blaster, the other fiddling with the comms signal filter in his helmet. Her own, nestled into the crook of her ear, crackles with static and an eerie, low thrumming. She tries to shake the noise loose.

Bo-Kaan’s voice crackles through—curt, even. “No.”

“I don’t like this.” Nova shivers at the closeness of Wedge’s voice—like he’s inside her ear, whispering to her. He sounds unmoored, too. She blinks down a flickering, darkened hallway. The Not-Nova reappears, too-sudden, a flash, a lightning strike. She snaps her teeth, and Nova recoils. She reacts like a knife, swinging her saber up, breath catching like a struck match in her throat.

Din’s on her in a heartbeat. “What?”

She shakes her head. Shakes it off. “Nothing.” Nova pushes past him, deeper, after Wedge and Bo-Katan. They’re running out of time. She presses her comm, the hum of electricity sparking in her ear before it pulses through. “Wedge, I need you to fire up the base-wide comms system.” She inhales, exhales. None of them are going to like this. “We’re going to make an announcement.”

“Nova—”

She keeps striding, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. An ice maze, hanging wires and durasteel floors, peppered with rock salt and grip tape, toes frozen solid in her boots. Nova breathes a cloud of air and feels the darkness calling to her again. It creeps at the edges of her vision, curling spores and tendrils around her iris. Like poison. Venom. Fire licking. But cold, utterly cold.

“Novalise.” That isn’t on the comms. The reprimand—or warning—is for her, and her alone.

Din’s striding after her, his footfalls heavier, his legs infinitely longer. But she’s furious, and she’s jittery, and she’s undone, and Novalise is outpacing him because she knows every inch of this base. She ducks and moves through Hoth’s outpost like an expert. Her Mandalorian is playing catch-up. Bo-Katan and Wedge are trying to hail them both through the comms. The Djarins ignore them both as they weave closer and closer to the central hall; the war room. The four of them—their pronged star, their multi-headed animal—they’re used to living in a command center, around a holotable. They are their own concentric circle.

Novalise.

Nova bares her own teeth. Not now. “I know what it’ll do, Din—”

“The plan was to get in and out. Quickly. Quietly. Under cover. No one is here. Making an announcement over the base-wide comm—”

“Will alert anyone with access to our air-comm to exactly where we are. I understand.”

“That is a terrible idea. For all we know, the Chimaera already has access to our system—”

“Okay, maybe the idea’s a reckless one, maybe—”

“No, not just reckless, Nova. A terrible—”

“And we only have minutes before the Chimaera shows up, and then what? Then what, Din?

“Hothian Squadron, come in.”

Nova stops. Din nearly collides with her. That’s not any of them—not on the ground. That’s Hera. Her heart, kept surprisingly calm until now, is ricocheting off her ribcage. It’s loud—cacophonous. Nova breathes, and the darkness inside her snarls. Laughs.

She blinks, and Din’s outpaced her, finally. He stops her, bracing her, and she sags in his grasp, letting her lightsaber blade detract. The golden light disappears. Vanishes. It leaves them both in Hoth’s anesthetic whiteness, stark blue interior. Every hair on the back of her neck is standing up.

“We hear you, General,” Wedge says. His voice is so much steadier than Nova feels. Her knees—they’re shaking. She cannot look Din in the eye. Not even through the visor. She feels small and hungry and beaten.

I want to fight. I want to save Hoth, Nova had said, so determined, so vital, less than an hour ago. How quickly that was bled out of her.

“The Chimaera,” Hera says, somberly, “is about to penetrate Hoth’s airspace.”

Nova grits her teeth together. Din’s fingers clench around her forearms, tight enough to bruise.

“Come on,” he whispers, and slowly, slowly, like they’re moving through an hourglass, through sand, through amber, they drag through the final doorway to the war room, where Bo-Katan and Wedge are braced against the communications center and holotable. Bo-Katan has her head hung, helmet slung low against her chest. Wedge has his hand over his hurt leg, as if in prayer. Neither of them look up as Nova and Din join them—tightening ranks, a sorry, woeful formation. The galaxy’s mightiest heroes, Nova thinks, and then tears threaten at the corners of her eyes.

“Okay,” Nova says, trying to rally the troops, trying to rally herself, “let’s go. Let’s man the trenches.”

She glances at Bo-Katan, whose head is still slung very low. Her eyebrows are knitted down the middle. Nova tries to catch her eye, but Bo-Katan is looking at something—very, very intensely.

“Hey,” Nova whispers, “let’s go, we have a planet to defend—”

“Novalise,” Bo-Katan spits, harshly, “are you stupid?” Nova recoils. Everything goes shutter-silent. “‘Man the trenches’? They tried that here already. That’s how an entire battalion of Rebels got lost.”

“Take it down a notch,” Din snarls, pouncing on her like a panther. Bo-Katan doesn’t flinch. “Are you listening to me? Don’t you dare take this out on her—”

Wedge blinks off in the distance. “I was there,” he whispers.

Nova’s breath catches in her throat. “What?”

“The last time. When Hoth was attacked. I was there.” He laughs. “And here I am again.”

Sadness chokes Nova like a sieve. “Wedge,” she says, surging toward him, “Wedge, we can fight, we can go–I don’t know, to the front lines, and shoot the Chimaera, we can fight—”

“Wait. Hera,” Bo-Katan interrupts, “I have a read on one Star Destroyer.”

One awful, silent second. Static crackling. Then: “Yes.”

“And,” Bo-Katan says, her voice jumping an octave, “...more.”

Nova looks to Din, then to Wedge. All of them, at once, move over to Bo-Katan’s screen—where smaller ships are starting to blink into existence on the radar. Nothing as large as Thrawn’s titanic Star Destroyer, yes—but TIE fighters, bombers, defenders, frigates, freighters.

“Oh,” Hera says, and it sounds like she’s been punched in the stomach.

Bo-Katan’s eyes snap upwards. “What?” Her voice is hoarse. “Hera, what?”

Hera doesn’t speak.

“General Syndulla?” Wedge leans forward. “Hera!”

Static. Then, slowly, “...Stars. He’s…It’s not—it’s not just the Chimaera.” Bo-Katan’s eyes connect with Nova’s, and for the first time, Novalise sees what complete and utter despair looks like on Bo-Katan Kryze. “He has a whole fucking fleet.”

Nova turns away.

“We have no chance.” That’s Din. “We have to go. Now.”

“The rest of the base—”

“Wedge,” Din snarls, “there’s no one here.”

They’re arguing. Nova knows they’re arguing, but it fades out. It fades out, because the chittering, clicking noise is back, and her eyes are closed, because she knows if she opens them, the Not-Nova is going to be in front of her, choking the life out of her, and the last thing she is ever going to see is this place. This Rebel base, where she was born again, after she died, after she died and came back to life. After she remade herself, again. After she became Novalise, again. Her life—it has been a series of rebuilding herself up from ashes, from ruin, and Nova is so, so tired of being a savior. Of being an alchemist. Of forging light from darkness. And now, even that ability has been corrupted—her shine, her light. The villain—whoever it is—Jacterr Calican, Moff Gideon, Ladmeny Sparmau, Grand Admiral Thrawn, it does not matter—the villain in her story is going to make it burn instead. And all Nova wanted was a chance. One chance—to defend Hoth. To keep one home alive.

It was a slim chance when it was Thrawn and his entire Star Destroyer.

But with an entire reanimated Imperial Fleet, conjured from Deep Space?

Hoth won’t just burn. It will be obliterated.

Novalise, the voice calls.

Yes, Nova snarls, I am.

Nova opens her eyes. “Hera,” she says, stalking forward, wrenching the comm out of Bo-Katan’s hands, “get the fuck out of here.”

“No—”

“You may outrank me on Hoth, but in a grand total of ten minutes, Hoth will cease to exist,” Nova interrupts. “Mandalore is hosting all Hothian refugees and Rebel Alliance members until further notice. Therefore, as the Mand’alor, I am ordering you to take my son out of dangerous territory and to safer ground. Once you are there safely, and only when you are there safely, you are to contact General Leia Organa and inform her of what has happened to Hoth. Tell her Mand’alor Novalise Djarin is requesting her immediate aid.”

“Novalise, I want to—”

“I’m not done. There is a holopad in the bag I left on my bed. In it is a message—” Nova swallows, inhales, exhales, “—for Luke Skywalker. In the event that he shows up and we…do not, he needs to get it. That’s imperative. Is that clear?”

“Nova—”

“Hera,” Nova says, “please, please get Grogu, and yourself, and your insane droid to Mandalore.”

Silence. Nova can feel her family behind her staring holes into her skull. She can feel the darkness in front of her pulsing, waiting for a second of weakness. She does not yield to either. Not until Hera—strong, unbreakable Hera, turned vulnerable, staring down the mouth of an entire disappeared Imperial fleet alone—is out of the gaping maw of danger.

“Message received, Mand’alor,” Hera says, and Nova hears the unmistakable whoosh of warp powering up. “Ghost over and out.”

Nova turns around. Slowly. Painfully. “This base,” she whispers, “is not empty.”

Wedge shakes his head. “Nova—”

“I can feel them,” she says, and a sob finally wrenches itself free from her throat. She stabs her chest with her forefinger, forcefully. Hard enough to bruise. “There is something here. Souls. If there are people left on this base, I am not leaving them behind.”

Bo-Katan’s eyes flash. Stony. Hard. With the glint of a weapon. “You are not suited to be making decisions right now.”

Din growls. “Bo-Katan—”

“She’s right.” Nova doesn’t take her eyes off her best friend—a blade, this version of Bo-Katan, but her best friend all the same. “I’m not.”

One long, terrible second. Then, finally: “What do you want?”

“I want to make one, singular base-wide comm announcement. Code red. Evacuation. Anyone on-base will know what that means, and anyone intercepting it will guess, but not know where people will evacuate to. Once we’re clear of Hoth’s airspace, we can beam Mandalore’s location to Rebel vessels to avoid interception.”

Bo-Katan exhales through her nostrils, a cloud of smoke. “Okay.”

“You both start moving toward the ship,” Nova says, “Din and I will be right behind you.”

And they go. There are a million words to exchange, but no time. They go, and Nova breathes, closing her eyes. Din is staring her down, she can feel it, but Nova doesn’t face him until she’s placed on every alarm and Hoth is swirling in red, alert blaring our in staccato rhythm, and she looks up at her Mandalorian, feeling the danger get closer and closer as the sirens blare, as the darkness calls.

“Novalise—”

“I need,” she whispers, her voice ragged, uneven, “a second.”

Din is strong, unyielding. Nova feels like she’s standing on ice, on something about to shatter. Around them, the alarm shrieks. Novalise is shredded—sluiced through in a million emotions. She is choking on poison. She is hallucinating. She is vantablack. She is dancing, laughing. She is dying. She is tipping forward into an inkwell. She is naked with the sun on her skin. She is on Naator. She is alone in a world between worlds. She is nowhere. She is everywhere.

Novalise.

“I’m here.”

“No,” Din says, worriedly, forcefully, “you’re not.”

Something snaps inside of her. Something dark—raw. It takes control. Nova blinks.

“Nova,” he says, squeezing her, thumbs digging into her cheekbones, dragging her back to reality, “we have to run.”

“I want to fight,” she protests, and Din starts dragging her towards the exit. Nova screams. A guttural, bloodcurdling one. “No! No! This is my home! I want to fight!”

“This is not your home,” Din says, tiredly, pulling her back from the nightmare, pulling her away from the ice, “not anymore. Come on, baby.” She can hear the words that he isn’t saying, loud and clear. Come back to me.

“He’s going to annihilate it,” Nova says, and she feels like she’s tumbling. She’s stumbling, swaying, tripping over her feet. Are people rushing around her—she can’t tell. She cannot tell. She thinks she’s in the cargo bay—her breath fogs out in front of her. Distracting her. She can feel the thrash, the cold, unflappable danger of Thrawn and his unkillable fleet. It flushes through her veins like fear. Burn it. Burn it. “He can’t. He can’t.”

“Nova—”

“No.” They’re almost on the ship now. The engines fire up—full flash. Nova can feel the sudden heat. But she pulls free. Somehow—out of Din’s iron grasp. She yanks herself free. He stares at her. Wildly. Under the visor, she can feel it. Betrayed, that stare. She has power. She has the Force. She has the darkness. “I will not let him wipe Hoth out.”

“Novalise.” Not right now, Nova thinks. My name does not mean to shine. It means something stronger than that. More destructive.

And she runs out of the hangar and into Hoth’s unrelenting cold.

Wedge watches through the window as Nova slips out of Din’s grip and runs out into the snow. He wrenches himself free from the seatbelt, but Bo-Katan slams him back into the seat. She’s stronger than she looks—no, he thinks, dully, as the wind is knocked out of his lungs—Bo-Katan Kryze looks like she could take down an entire army single-handedly, but Maker, that hurt.

“Nova’s—”

“That,” Bo-Katan says, lowly, all of the life drained out of her, “is not Nova.”

Wedge feels sucker-punched. “What?”

Bo-Katan forces him back into the chair. “Buckle up.”

Wedge blinks. “What the hell are you talking about?” His voice is ragged. Wheezy. They never should have come here. “No, I–I’m not buckling anything. We can’t just—we’re not fucking leaving her here—”

“Of course we’re not,” Bo-Katan says, pointing, her finger a blade out the window. Through the storm, Wedge can barely make out Din’s beskar hurtling after her. Bo-Katan flips all the switches, getting the ship ready to jet down the runway, which is nonexistent, covered with slip ice and snow, but they’ve flown in worse conditions. “He’s getting her right now.”

Wedge, dazed, buckles in. “What is happening,” he whispers, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. “What do you mean that’s not Nova?”

Bo-Katan doesn’t look at him. Purposefully. She pulls the thrusters back, letting the ship’s engine warm up. On Hoth, even with the ships specifically designed to be weather-resistant for ice and cold, every so often, the engines can short-circuit. And if they are stuck here, now, with an entire Imperial fleet headed their way, about to blast Hoth into nothingness to—well, Wedge still doesn’t understand the details, cannot fathom why Thrawn wants to destroy the Rebel base other than to send a message of general death and despair, especially because everyone is so scattered, and perhaps to incite another war—they’re fucked. He feels—feverish. He thinks his wound is infected. The ship makes a grinding, whining sound, and it jolts Wedge back into the jittery pit of fear that was Bo-Katan’s first sentence.

“Bo-Katan.”

“Wedge, buckle up—”

“What the fuck do you mean,” he snaps, leagues angrier than he ever gets, “that is not Nova?”

Bo-Katan, rightfully, recoils. “There is something,” she whispers, “wrong with her. There has been ever since we landed out in the Unknown Regions. Can’t you feel it? She’s—not herself. No. Not herself at all. Haunted.”

Wedge blinks. “She’s—she’s losing her home, again, she’s getting chased down by someone evil and dangerous again, she’s having to save the galaxy from a massive threat, again—”

“Yes. And something is seriously wrong with her. Fucking around in her head for parts.”

Wedge laughs. High and mirthless. “So, what—Nova’s possessed? Really? We are not having this conversation.”

Bo-Katan glares at him. “You have,” she whispers, “absolutely no idea what I have seen, Wedge.” And something about the timbre of her voice, low and wobbling, exhausted and undone, makes his stomach pierce through like a knife. “You’ve spent your life in the stars, flyboy. Shooting at TIE fighters and knocking idiot stormtrooper skulls together. Fixing ships on Rebel bases. While you and your Jedi friends were celebrating saving the galaxy, Mandalore was getting razed and pillaged and glassed. Burned to the fucking ground. I lost my family. My sister. And I have seen people come back from the dead. I have seen magic, Wedge—and it’s not what you think.”

Wedge feels like all the air has been sucked out of the starfighter. “Bo-Katan—”

“We’re not talking about good versus evil,” she whispers. “We are not talking about strategy, or war games, or being warriors. The second we went after Ezra, the game changed.” She stares at him like she’s begging him to understand something—something Wedge fundamentally cannot. “Something…unholy has Novalise.”

Wedge takes a shallow breath. The ominous blinking of Thrawn’s fleet creeps closer and closer. “Fly,” he says. “Bo, we need to get in the air.”

“Wedge,” she says, “I’m sorry. About Hoth. I really am.”

It’s not the time. It’s the worst timing in the galaxy, really. But that’s Bo-Katan—terrible timing for genuine feelings, and Wedge musters up a tiny smile before she’s hitting the thrusters and he’s saying a small goodbye to the place he’s called home for the last twenty years of his life.

“We’re bringing her back,” he says, more to himself than her, but then panic flares in his chest and he needs to confirm it. “We’re bringing Nova back, right?”

Bo-Katan affixes him with a sour look. “Only Din can bring her back,” she says, “but we’re picking them both off the ground.”

Wedge swallows. “Gonna be tight.” On the screen, the fleet blinks closer. And closer. “Getting them.”

Bo-Katan narrows her eyes, punches the thrusters, and leaves the docking bay in the dust. “Gonna be a fucking miracle.”

Nova’s fast.

She’s fast, and she’s motivated by something Din cannot fathom, cannot wrap his head around. She promised, is all he keeps thinking. She promised that she wouldn’t be a martyr. Never again. She promised she wouldn’t run from me. She promised. Anger is wearing him like a carcass, like an animal. Like the bullet he became down on Corellia, a blade, a weapon of destruction. He’s seeing red.

A predator. He’s tracking her like a predator. Din’s clenching his fists, trying to regulate it, keep it under control, because—he cannot. She is not a bounty. She is not a target. She is the love of his life, the holiest thing he’s ever held in his hands. But she is—she is…

“Novalise!”

The storm is bright—white-out. He can barely make out anything, even through his visor, even with his heat sensor mapping. Terror runs through him—Nova doesn’t have armor on. She doesn’t have anything on other than Hera’s borrowed clothes and her own boots. No helmet, even. Just clothes. Not even suitable for the inside of Hoth’s base, let alone the tundra out here. Maker, if Thrawn doesn’t incinerate the planet first, she’ll die out here from exposure alone.

He tries to regulate himself. What is she chasing? What could she possibly have seen?

Not the fleet. They entered airspace—what was that, six minutes ago? Seven? They’ll be entering the atmosphere soon. Within firing distance. If they have a planet destruction device, then they’re all fucked. Bo-Katan and Wedge will be airborne within a minute if they aren’t already, Din’s been ignoring his comms to search for Nova, and even with the starfighter having both of their locations, it’ll be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Worse. Worse, because there’s also an Imperial fleet trying to bomb the place into nothingness.

“Novalise!”

Novalise.

“I’m here!” Nova roars, into the whiteness, into the whipping storm. Into the whistling, unsettled silence. Something is so, so off. “I’m here. What do you want from me?”

She appears. Her mirror-image. Her awful self, this alter-ego. Flickers into place like a hologram. Smiles with a mouth full of black blood, like tar. “Novalise,” she sighs.

Nova screams, loud, earth-shattering. It echoes off of nothing. Evaporates into the storm.

“Good. Anger.”

“What,” Nova whispers, “do you want from me?”

Not-Nova steps forward, lifting a hand like she’s going to stroke her hair. Nova recoils. “I want you to fight.”

Nova throws up her hands, incredulous. “I WANT TO FIGHT!” she screams, into the storm.

Not-Nova flashes closer. Before Nova can stop her, she presses a thumbprint to her forehead, right between her eyebrows.

A flood—a feeling. Resonance. Blue lightning. A thread. Let’s follow it: Thrawn has to be close, now. He is not in her head. He has appeared in no visions—no dreams. He does not have the Force. He is just cunning. Just terror. She is standing on the precipice. The darkness drip-drip-drips. She turns on her heel—there is lightning. There is the sizzle-flash of a red lightsaber. There is laughter and happiness, too. There is the Mandalorian war room and Din’s mouth against hers and the belly of a ship and the gaping maw of darkness. There is a basin full of silver liquid. There is Nova plunging headfirst into it. Her lightsaber. The darksaber. A world of charged lines, paths leading off in a thousand alternate universes. Her parents. Andromeda. Her future. Novalise, Novalise, Novalise.

Nova opens her eyes.

Not-Nova’s eyes are open wide, eerie and unblinking, smile plastered on her face. “Let me in,” she croons. “Let me fight.”

“Let me fight,” Nova repeats.

The air around her rumbles.

She raises her palm, touches it to Not-Nova’s.

“Let me in. Let me in.” Something yanks at Nova—deep, deep inside of her. It unsettles her, that thread. She cannot quantify it, cannot put it to name. Cannot—the rumbling. The air. The snow. She blinks. “Let me in.”

Everything orange and golden and silver, everything that makes Novalise Novalise—it quiets. Goes mute. Like a line falling slack. She closes her eyes, listened to the snow falling, trying to find her own pulse.

Novalise.

Everything vanishes.

Above her, suddenly, through the ever-permanent haze of white clouds—the unmistakable, faraway, descending shape of an imminent Star Destroyer.

Nova inhales, and she feels like she’s taking something out of Hoth’s air—or maybe like she’s stepping back into herself, snapping back into place, waking up—Maker fuck—and she collides with something hard.

Din’s helmet is off. “What,” he says, voice frantic, panicked, “the fuck were you thinking, Nova?”

Tears freeze on her waterline. “I don’t know,” she whispers, and it’s the truth. She feels another sob rising in her throat, pressing a shaking, frozen hand to her mouth, everything in her body trembling, undone. “Din, I—”

He grabs her head with one hand, her collapsing waist with the other. Together, they sink knee-deep into the snow. He pulls her head back. An anchor, a pain point. Just like Bo-Katan did. Less than twenty minutes ago. It feels like a lifetime. “You trying to take on an entire Imperial fleet by yourself?”

“No, I—”

“You’re not fucking invincible,” he snarls.

“No.”

His teeth clench. “Or powerful enough for that.”

Nova shutters her eyes. “I wasn’t thinking—”

“That much,” Din spits, “is clear.”

She stifles a sob. “Did–did you see what I—?”

“Novalise,” Din says, yanking her braid back, hard enough to force her to open her eyes, and she does, and she has never seen him so panicked, so wild, “the only thing I have seen today is you running off like you are either possessed or have a death wish.” His voice is vivid and clear. It would hurt less if he slapped her. “We are about to be annihilated. Get up.”

“There’s something wrong with me,” she whispers, and she cannot tell if it’s loud enough, if he hears it, but Din picks her up, off her feet, carries her, shoves his helmet over her head, instead of his, and starts running.

“I know, baby,” he says, lost in the wind. “I know.”

A ship materializes out of nowhere. It swoops out of the sky like a bird—a glorious, clunky, strange bird. Nova is half-conscious when Din stumbles them both aboard—she’s buckled in, dazed, his helmet taken off her head somewhere along the way, discarded in the corner. She feels like she’s missing something vital.

“Did we get everyone off-planet?”

Wedge looks back at her. “Yeah,” he says, distant, faraway. “Yes.”

“Good,” Nova murmurs, head off elsewhere, eyes unfocused. Bo-Katan pulls the thrusters up, and they’re going, going, gone—

They’re not.

The Chimaera and its fleet are spanned out across the entire mouth of space in front of them.

Din swears in every language he knows how. “Bo-Katan,” he whispers.

She does not flinch. “I know.”

“Let me shoot.”

“If any one of us,” Bo-Katan hisses, “could take on an entire Imperial fleet, Din, it would be Novalise the Jedi, not you and your unwitting ability to use this clunker’s gun. And the former is currently incapacitated in the back if our vessel. You want to shoot a round at Thrawn? You’ll get us blow to bits. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“Sitting here is doing us no good either—”

“We can jump,” Wedge says. “Just jump.”

“I’m not leading them to Mandalore.”

“Don’t jump to Mandalore.”

“It’s preloaded in the nav system, Wedge, and we’re staring down the barrel of a fleet. Where else,” Bo-Katan whispers, “could we possibly jump to?”

Silence. Then, from the back of the ship, a gasp.

Novalise.

Nova’s eyes fly open. She is not in the clunker from Hoth. She is not anywhere she knows—She is on an Imperial ship. Her heart flips over. “This is not real,” she whispers. “This is not real.”

“Novalise.”

She whips around, exhausted, fight-or-flight flooding through her veins yet again.

“Oh, stars,” she says, her voice breaking down the middle, “Ezra.”

He looks terrible. His hair is overgrown, one of his brilliant purple eyes is black, and he’s severely emaciated. He flashes her a grin. “I owe you one,” he whispers. “Think I can cash in on that right now?”

Nova blinks. “Where are you?”

Ezra points. They’re back on the Rebel starfighter. His finger traces straight to the Chimaera. Nova shakes her head.

“No.”

“Yes. Well, not in the Chimaera. I took over one of the frigates. It’s a really long story. I’ll tell you everything soon. But right now? Now, I’m going to create a diversion. It’ll be chaos. I can block their tracking completely, but only temporarily. You’ll have about fifteen seconds to jump, so the second you see the explosion, you hit hyperdrive, okay?”

“Ezra,” Nova says, weakly, “I am not in control of this ship.”

Ezra looks over his shoulder, then, worriedly, dazzlingly, flashes her a smile. “I have full faith in you.”

“Are you sure,” Nova whispers, “this is going to work?”

“No,” Ezra says, “but I am sure Thrawn will lay siege to your ship and then Hoth if we don’t try.”

Nova lifts her chin. “Okay.”

Ezra smiles. “On the explosion.”

“On the explosion.”

Ezra disappears. Nova opens her eyes. “Bo-Katan,” she calls, half-strangled and woozy, “we’re going to jump.”

“No,” Bo-Katan snarls.

“Bo-Katan—”

“I am not leading Thrawn to Mandalore—”

“In about five seconds,” Nova interrupts, voice ragged, slumping back against her seat, bracing for impact, “one of the Imperial frigates is going to open fire on the Chimaera, disabling their tracking, giving us fifteen seconds of chaos to disappear. We jump then. To Mandalore.”

All three of them whip around to stare at her, with varying levels of incredulity on their faces.

“How do you—”

“Ezra Bridger,” Nova says, hoarsely, “is back on the map.”

They are backlit by an explosion on the Chimaera. Bo-Katan, with only a second of hesitation, punches them into hyperdrive. They slam forward, tunneling through space—it feels like a wormhole, in this ship, not intentionally made to handle intergalactic travel, not at this frequency, not at this carved path, specifically forced between Hoth and Mandalore, and when they empty out into Mandalore’s airspace, and onto Mandalore’s solid ground, none of them speak. They are welcomed back by Mandalorians. By Hera and Chopper, by Grogu.

In the war room, everyone watches in shattered, eerie silence as the battered Chimaera burns Hoth’s ice planet to the ground. Burn is too small of a word. It sieges it. It razes it to nothing. Hoth becomes holocene. Hoth is nothing—not a shard. Nothing but dust.

No one speaks. There is no funeral. There is nothing to gather, nothing to say. Everyone looks, expectantly, to the Mand’alor, a Rebel herself, to incite a great speech about overcoming and fighting and swallowing that stardust to pave the way for the future.

“Novalise,” Din says, softly, so softly.

Nova turns on her heel—silently. She moves away from the Mandalorians, from the Rebels, from everyone she is expected to lead. She is carried by a force that is not her own. She floats through the palace like a ghost, like an apparition, like an after-image of herself.

Novalise—exhausted, alone, locks herself behind the impenetrable door of the Mand’alor’s bathroom. She stares at herself in the mirror and tries to find something to cling to. Something to fight for. Something to burn back.

Nothing answers the call.

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!! please let me know what you think if you're so inclined <3

i have a very busy few weeks coming up (a business trip, my anniversary with my partner, my 27th birthday, and a visit from my best friend) so i'm aiming for a three-week turnaround for the next chapter! CHAPTER 10 WILL (hopefully) BE UP AT 7:30 PM EST ON APRIL 13TH!

xoxo, amelie

#something holy #something holy fanfic #something more series #din djarin fanfic #din djarin fanfiction #din djarin x oc #din djarin smut #din djarin x novalise djarin #the mandalorian fanfic #the mandalorian fanfiction #the mandalorian x original character #the mandalorian x oc #the mandalorian smut #star wars fanfiction #star wars fanfic #amiedala #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters

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amiedala · 1 month

Text

SOMETHING HOLY

CHAPTER 8: It Beckons

WARNINGS: angst, explicit content, blood/gore, possession

SUMMARY: They will take on the darkness together. Never alone. Never again.

He takes the blade. They are both soldiers, after all. A battlefield is in front of them; their family on the other side.

Nova touches her forehead to his helmeted one, kissing skin to steel. Din closes his eyes, imagining the feeling of her heartbeat in his palms, her lips against his, his hands closed around nothing but warmth. I would do anything for you, he thinks. I will do everything for you.

“We’re going to make it,” she whispers, and Din doesn’t know if it’s a promise or a prayer, but he believes her.

“On your mark,” he murmurs, stroking a line over her cheek. It comes back bloody. He doesn’t dare think about what that means.

When Nova charges over the hill, Din follows her like a bullet.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: HAPPY SOMETHING HOLY SATURDAY!!! unsettling and weird narrative-driven romance lovers... this one's for you <3

If you're new here, Something More & Something Deeper are the first installments in this series, available on here & ao3!

The hologram—it pulses. Chitters. Then flares.

Nova is watching the hologram. Din is watching Nova. There’s something that’s plummeted in her stomach. The hologram in his hands is alive. Then dead. Then alive again. Something has shifted, just in the last few seconds. It hangs heavily in the air around them. Nova can taste it, can sense it, can hear it ringing in the sheer, stark silence.

Din curses, slapping at the hologram. “Bo-Katan. Come in.”

Static. Where there was a blue figure before is just air and that same static.

Din tries again. “Bo-Katan. Come in. Can you hear me? Over.”

Nova shakes her head. Once, twice, three times, trying to keep the gnawing in her stomach at bay. She shivers, whispering to it, trying to placate it, hold it. “No,” she murmurs to it, the displacing, unfettered silence. She barely breathes it: “Not here.”

Din’s head snaps to her. “What?”

She swallows, trying to cover her slip. “No signal. Here.”

He watches her like a hawk under the visor. She knows he can feel it, the vantablack poison that’s flowing through her veins, unquiet and undone. But Nova lifts her chin, pointing towards the inner tangle of the city, past the graveyard of bodies she knows Din left in his wake.

“Let’s go—”

“Hell of a fight happening in these parts,” Wedge’s voice blares, clipped through the transmitter, “could really use some backup.”

Nova feels relief and irritation flare through her in equal measure. Relief, because they’re still, amazingly, blissfully, alive. Irritation, because the display surrounding Bo-Katan and Wedge’s tinny, rigid, mid-fight bodies is showing even more stormtroopers.

“Where are you?” She’s over the hologram in a second. Din’s visor is still trained on her, not moving an inch. Nova can feel his eyes boring a hole into her own, and she doesn’t dare look at him head-on.

“Middle—” Bo-Katan grunts, firing a precise round at a trooper, dropping three in his wake, “—of the city center. Hurry up, would you?”

“Got sidetracked.”

Through the azure light of the hologram, Bo-Katan affixes Din with a scathing, unimpressed look, eyes flicking up and down. Unimpressed. Judging. Knowing exactly what he’s hiding in that word. So Bo-Katan. She doesn’t have the time to do any of it, and it makes Nova’s heart ache even more. “I’m sure you did.”

“We’re on our way,” Nova says, fingers fumbling over the hilt of her lightsaber, tripping once, twice, until she latches on securely. “Hold on, okay?”

“We’re—BAM!—cutting through the west side,” Bo-Katan grits out, interrupted by another blaster shot. “There’s a small underpass, past a block of flattened buildings. Can’t miss it. Meet you in the middle. Don’t get lost. And when I said hurry, I meant it.” And she clicks off, leaving Nova and Din in the darkness, with nothing but the wind and the crumbling structures of Corellia and all their ghosts.

Nova swallows, pulling the jacket she loaned from Hera—half-destroyed, now—over her shoulders, tucking the loose mess of her curls into the collar. Din reaches out, lightning-quick, and grabs her chin, hooking one finger underneath the curve of it, bringing her face flush against the visor. “What?” she breathes. The heat of it fogs against the beskar. Something low and hungry snarls inside of her belly. Nova flinches, trying to ignore it. It still beckons. Stretches. Yearns.

“Something is wrong,” Din murmurs. “With you. It wasn’t before. Is now.”

Nova tries to shake her head. Din holds steady. He doesn’t speak, capturing her there, under the weight of his body and nothing else.

“Din—”

“Right?”

Nova lifts her chin, away from his grip. He does not falter. She sighs, sinking back into it. “Yes. But—”

“Can you fight?”

Nova blinks. But it’s not the time. That’s what she was going to say.

But he isn’t coddling her. He isn’t protesting.

She swallows it down. She will fight the ringing in her ears, the drip-drip-drip of venom in her blood. Something is wrong—Din’s right. She is off, now, somehow shipwrecked against the violence and unsettling living inside of her, knocked loose by the fighting or the fucking, she cannot tell.

But she is here. Novalise can fight. And something that Corellia reminded her of was that she wants to.

“Yes,” she breathes. For one earth-shattering, painful second, Din does not react. And then he nods, and then he’s leading her deeper into the entrails of Coronet City. His steps are even, determined. His blaster is notched in one hand and the other is firmly latched in hers. Nova follows where his boots leave, imprinting her own into the ground behind him.

In the utter darkness, she almost doesn’t notice the dead things—the stormtroopers and bounty hunters. They’re scattered across the ground, discarded. Like leaves. Insignificant. Bodies upon bodies. Maker, there must be—fifty. No, seventy. No… a hundred. Maybe more. Nova swallows as Din cuts a clean path through the men he slaughtered, kicking armor and weapons aside with his steel-toed boots.

“Din—”

“No mercy.” The words come out clipped. Dangerous. “I made them pay for it.”

“You…you did this alone? There were so many—”

He whirls around. They’re standing in a graveyard of filth and vermin, of bodies belonging to people that meant them harm. Nova tears her gaze off the armor—strange, these stormtroopers’ armor, it itches at her—to look at her Mandalorian. He is a knife, a blade. He could cut her clean through. He yanks her closer, tighter, until her body is pressed flush up against the armor. “I could have killed,” he snarls, voice heavy and thick, “a thousand of them.” He exhales, languid through the vocoder. “It still wouldn’t have been enough.”

That hunger, dark and twisting, flares again. Nova inhales a sharp, stuttered breath. “There will be more ahead,” she whispers.

Din curls his lip over his teeth. Nova can’t see his smile, but she knows it’s there. It’s palpable, as heavy and imposing as the storm hanging in the air above them, and that too stokes a fire in her belly, igniting a spark that she’s not sure she can control.

“Good.” One word. It siphons through the air. He snarls it, like whatever possessed him earlier is still rattling around inside.

Nova’s mouth opens. “Din—”

She’s not sure what she’s going to say. That this place is ruining them. That they’ve both been possessed, and she’s not sure either demon has left. That she’s terrified of what’s waiting for them on Hoth. That she’s scareder still of the monsters in both of their chests, let out to destroy, unsure if that can be reigned back in. That the good that lit her up, golden and divine, has been corrupted, and Novalise is horrified and alive in equal measure—

But then a blaster flares in the dark, once, twice, and the moment is gone. Din’s visor is secured on hers. Nova allows a small, quiet nod. They both know what that means—later. Like everything else, they’ll address it later.

They push the ghosts and blood aside. There will be plenty of room for that once they get Bo-Katan and Wedge, off this gods-forsaken planet, and try to save Hoth from Grand Admiral Thrawn and whatever destruction he brings in his wake.

In the pitch-dark, in unison, Novalise and Din run in the only direction they know. Towards their friends. Towards that light.

“More.”

“Bo-Katan,” Wedge manages, through gritted teeth, “I’m giving ‘em all I got.”

Bo-Katan snarls, a low, angry thing, and Wedge swallows. He doesn’t have armor to hide under. No helmets, nothing to keep him shielded. He grits his jaw down, ducking and hiding behind pieces of scrap metal, reloading his blaster with the half-measures of artillery he found in the trooper’s discarded one a few klicks back.

He doesn’t have time to consider that it was once a Rebel blaster, the one that he picked up. That’s the only reason those bullets fit in his gun. He swallows, looking at Bo-Katan through the haze and smoke. Her helmet is as blue and dangerous as the low light of the night is, and she’s moving like a weapon, because she is. General Kryze, Mandalorian Princess, Commander of the Nite Owls. His sharp and kind friend Bo-Katan, a double-edged sword, a dichotomy of sorts—right now, she is nothing but that aforementioned blade. She’s exhausted, she’s undone. She isn’t slowing down.

He is. He wants to. He’s old, Wedge. And injured. His leg is bruised to all hell. Probably has a few broken toes, if he were to guess. And he is completely unused to fighting these battles on the ground. He wants to be back up there. In the stars. On Hoth. He’s itching for it—to defend his home. That’s the only battle Wedge Antilles wants to be a part of right now. Even if it’s a losing one. Even if they’ve already lost.

He, like the rest of them, wants the hell off this planet.

Maker, they’re so out of their league in this one. He sighs, reloads, and pops back up, aiming to stun.

“Wedge,” Bo-Katan warns. But her voice is soft, like she’s reminding him, not chastising him.

He sighs again. He resets his blaster to kill.

Years ago, before anything truly holy ever fell in his hands, before anything but the Creed crept into his head, Din Djarin dreamed of a girl. She was a saint of sorts. A queen, but beyond that. Something sanctimonious. She was silver and gilded, something divine. Honey and freesia, lavender and midnight. Laughter spilled from her lips. Sweetness undulated from her hips. She was not a blade. She was not a knife. She was something he did not dare pray to—something holier than even that.

She was his Novalise. She was his salvation.

He did not know that yet. He would not know it for years to come. He watched her in flashes, in supercuts. In intermittent, stuttering pauses when he closed his eyes, in the fleeting moments when he was granted rest. Somewhere, in between killing for bringing in bounties and killing for savoring in the bloodlust, Din dreamed. Sometimes, it was the memory of his parents. Sometimes, it was of the home he left behind. Rarely was it ever about the future ahead. He didn’t allow himself to dabble in that happiness, let it linger on his tongue. He was afraid of believing in something like that. Something good. Something more.

Divinity was not meant for Din Djarin.

Until it was.

Divinity walks in front of him now, and Nova is walking like she did in every dream, every hallucination, every premonition.

Every nightmare. It calls. It beckons.

That’s what scares him. Nova is Nova until she isn’t—where she goes, off into that listing, hollow place, where her eyes are not her own. He dreams of her, she dreams of teeth. There’s a metaphor in that, but she’s the one with the map to all those metaphors, and he’s the one with dark matter and handfuls of blood, and he does not know where hers stops and his begins. And some part of him thinks there’s something pious in that too. Something holy, something he can whisper a prayer to, something he can take to his grave.

But the only graves in front of him are the ones of their enemies. He has the blood smeared across his beskar—that sweet nectar of war—to prove it. Nova is Nova. Right now, when it matters, she is wholly herself. He is watching her like a hawk, like a falcon. Like himself.

Selfishly, he needs her to be Nova. The galaxy needs Novalise, yes, their silver salve, their swinging savior, but he needs his Nova.

In his dreams, that figure—she was called the Sanct’yia. In this lifetime, she is called Novalise.

In all of them, she shines.

“What are you thinking about?”

Her words are so faint, Din barely hears them. He swallows. It’s audible through the vocoder. “You.” One word—the truth, all of it.

Nova turns around halfway, shooting him a glance over her shoulder. “Can’t afford to get distracted, Mandalorian,” she whispers. “Even by all of this.” She gives her shoulders a little shimmy, gestures to her torn shirt, her flowing mess of hair, half piled up at the crown of her head. She’s joking. Din’s never felt more serious. Then, all breath: “Get your head in the game.” It’s so like how she used to speak to him—flirty, light—like she was keeping all the oxygen alive in the air around them by her voice alone—that Din feels himself fall in love all over again.

He grunts in response. She knows how to decode that.

Nova winks. A strange expression flutters over her face. Pain—no. It’s not that—it’s like she’s trying to hear a whisper she’s too far away to hear. He can’t tell if that’s the otherness speaking to her, or if it’s the Force, or if it’s something else entirely, but when Nova’s eyes flutter open, the light in them is full-force, crystal-clear.

“We’re close,” she breathes, and Din nods. Nova’s fingers flutter over the hilt of her saber, then the Darksaber, and then, after a moment of deliberation, she palms it, fists it, and places it firmly in his grasp.

He sighs.

“Take it.”

Din fixes her with the same look he did earlier. The same moment, lived over and over again. Deja vu, how it calls to them. “Novalise,” he whispers.

“I know.” And she does. She knows that he struggles against the blade, that he doesn’t fight naturally with it, that something else takes over. That he becomes an animal. That he slices and cleaves until all that is left is blood and sinew and bone. He will become a pit of a man for her, over and over again, if that’s what it takes. But it takes a toll, wielding the Darksaber, on them both. All of this is to say: Nova knows what she’s asking him to do. Din knows he will do it in a heartbeat.

It is an oil spill, leaching vantablack, whispering poison. And they are swallowing it in equal measure. They will take on the darkness together. Never alone. Never again.

He takes the blade. They are both soldiers, after all. A battlefield is in front of them; their family on the other side.

“We’re going to make it,” she whispers, and Din doesn’t know if it’s a promise or a prayer, but he believes her.

“On your mark,” he murmurs, stroking a line over her cheek. It comes back bloody. He doesn’t dare think about what that means.

When Nova charges over the hill, Din follows her like a bullet.

They’re losing.

That’s the only thing that Bo-Katan registers.

They’re boxed in, and they’re losing, and she’s furious, because she refuses to lose to stormtroopers, and she refuses to die on Corellia. Stormtroopers surround them, flashes and flashes of endless white armor. They’re trained well. They’re trained like actual soldiers—not pawns, but pieces on the chess board. That bothers her beyond just general annoyance. That’s a real, tangible problem. And she’s cut-up, bruised. Bleeding. Wedge is doing the best he can, but he’s faltering. Favoring his left side, and he’s not left-handed. Hell, she’s doing the best she can, but she’s faltering.

“Where the hell,” she seethes, swinging savagely, cutting under a fallen trooper to aim and leverage at another platoon, “are they coming from?”

Wedge doesn’t have an answer. He falls to the ground, hiding and ducking to reload with meager artillery. “Bo-Katan—”

“No.”

He tries to catch her eye. She purposely avoids it. “Bo,” he says, gently, too gently for a warzone, “it may be worth cutting our losses—”

“We,” she says, as definitively as she can while hiding behind a dumpster full of fetid garbage, “are not surrendering. Not to stormtroopers.”

“I meant running.”

She fixes him with a withering stare. Most people cower under that glare. Not Wedge Antilles. He looks beaten, though. Grimy. Tired. “Wedge,” she says, a tiny bit of desperation finally bleeding into her voice, “where the fuck are we supposed to run to?”

“The rendezvous point.” He swallows, loading his final rounds into his blaster. “If we go left…We can try to cut through the alley—”

“We came from there,” Bo-Katan hisses, “and there were even more troopers on the other side. I can try to reach Hera again, but the signal hasn’t gone through.” A beat. Then, angrily: “They must be jamming it.” She slams her fist into metal. It hurts, she registers that, but it’s dully. She has so much rage in her body, rage that’s been simmering, festering, since they left Mandalore weeks ago, and she has nowhere else to put it.

Wedge reaches over to grab her wrist. Her hands are shaking. Badly. Bo-Katan doesn’t shake—not like this. She hasn’t since Sparmau kept her and Din captive, beating and twisting them both within inches of their respective lives. She tries to take a steadying breath, but all she can smell is steaming trash and cold panic, and another wave of it rises in her chest. Wedge’s hand slides into her own. She wants to fight him off, she really does, because tears are rising in her eyes, and she does not cry, especially not in front of anyone, but it’s Wedge, just Wedge, and she squeezes it back, forcing herself to look at him.

“Wedge,” Bo-Katan whispers, as evenly as she can manage, “I can’t be a prisoner again.” She exhales through her mouth, biting down on her bottom lip. His eyes are warm. Sorrowful. “I can’t.” She knows he understands.

Wedge doesn’t say anything. He nods, looking pained. His face is a nasty shade of green. Her eyebrows furrow.

“What?”

He sighs, like he’s conceding a point. Then, miserably: “My leg.”

Bo-Katan looks down. She lets out an obscene string of curses. He’s cut through to the bone. “Maker fuck,” she snarls, ripping a piece of her undershirt—the cleanest bit she can find—to staunch the bleeding. “Why didn’t you say—?”

“We,” Wedge says tiredly, his head making a sick thunk against the dumpster, “were kind of preoccupied.”

Bo-Katan feels a fresh wave of tears rise in her eyes, and she angrily swipes them away. She will not cry. Not on this stars-forsaken planet. Not here. “Okay.” She swallows. “I’m going to be the decoy. Try and shoot as many of them as I can. You try to stand up. Then you grab on to me and I’ll fly us as far away from here as we can. Toward the Ghost.”

Wedge blinks. “That’s a terrible plan.”

Bo-Katan throws up her hands. “Do you have a better one?”

“No,” he says. “Din and Nova—”

“I know,” Bo-Katan says, wiping her traitorous eyes with the heel of one furious hand, “but you’re in dire straits, and I know Hera will have bacta, and likely a better signal than us.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You think I do?”

Wedge sighs. “Can your jetpack even support two people?”

Bo-Katan offers him what she hopes is an encouraging smile. With the way he looks at her, she’s afraid it may have come out a bit more like a grimace. “I couldn’t think of anyone else,” she says, as seriously and kindly as she can muster, “that I would like to test that theory with more.”

“Bo-Katan—”

“Wedge,” she says, gently bracing a hand on his shoulder, trying her best to ignore the increasingly loud blaster fire behind them, “with all due respect, we are running out of time for debate.”

“This,” Wedge announces, “is a terrible plan.”

“We’ve covered that,” Bo-Katan says, sourly. And then, the unthinkable happens. Wedge is smiling. Smiling. “Maker,” she sighs, “I think you might be dying.”

“Assuredly not,” Wedge laughs, toothy grin on full display. It sparkles like stars. Bo-Katan shakes him, a jolt of panic suddenly striking through her. Yep. He’s delusional. Dying for sure. He points to a fixed point beyond her. “Look.”

Bo-Katan whirls, blaster in hand, prepared to throw herself in front of Wedge and go down swinging, if that’s what it takes. But Wedge isn’t pointing at the army of troopers spilling out of the city’s cracks. He’s pointing at the horizon. And there, like a miracle itself, exploding through the advancing line of troopers, are Din and Nova.

They cut. It comes like second nature. There was a time in her life when Nova would have mourned, would have taken a moment to acknowledge the people inside the insidious white armor. But these aren’t just stormtroopers. These are stormtroopers who knifed her deep enough to kill. These are stormtroopers that stand now between them and their family. And these stormtroopers…look different. Act different. Fight different.

Feel different.

They fall the same though. Like anyone that stands against the Light. They tumble down in a storm of white armor and body parts. The sizzle and hiss of the combined sabers, grayscale and golden in equal measure—it singes Corellia’s already awful air into something even worse. It smells like death.

Out of the corner of her eye, in the flashes between soldiers, Nova watches Din cut them down. He moves like an animal. Like a predator. He is obsidian, this blade he has become. The switch has fully flipped. He snarls and stalks his prey. It doesn’t matter that the Darksaber has never fully fit right in his hands. He wields it like it does.

Din Djarin—he has disappeared. The Mandalorian has taken control. Nova used to know exactly where that delineation was, but the line has blurred. Her own has, too. Since they left Mandalore, she—

A trooper rages out of nowhere, shooting Nova straight out of her reverie. She ducks, twists, rotating her wrist to sizzle the shot out of midair. Her own lightsaber—pure sunlight in Corellia’s midnight sky—catches it, disappears it. She cuts him down, cauterizing the cry out of his throat with one thrust of her wrist. She stuns where she can, knocks heads together and cuts limbs instead of ripping hearts out.

She is not a monster. Oh, it beckons to her. That darkness. It sings, like calls to like. The ring on her finger glints, gray and yellow, glancing off the light of her saber as she tries to suppress it, push it down. It calls. But Novalise does not answer. She does not have another persona to step into. Not yet. She is Novalise, and this version of herself—silver Supernova, gilded goodness—that will have to be pried and wrenched out of her cold, dead hands. So she kills, yes, she cuts the troopers down, yes, but she does not relish in it.

She is a Jedi pushed to her limits. She is a Mandalorian forced to be supernatural. She is a Rebel demanded to fight this battle on the ground.

She is Novalise Djarin, and she is not fucking losing.

“Where are they?” Din’s voice is close—too close. It cuts through the open air they’re fighting in, and Nova spins around. He’s closer than she thought—silent in his advancement. Cunning in his strikes. A trooper charges for her, hand on the trigger. Din slices his head clean off. She blinks. He doesn’t move another muscle, a fresh spray of blood coating his beskar. Nova swallows, trying to ignore the nausea and want, both warring for control in the pit of her stomach. “Do you know?”

“I—”

“I know I said, explicitly, ‘don’t come to Corellia’,” a familiar, exhausted voice rings out, and Nova whirls on her heel, relief a rush through her entire, wired body, “but I’m really, really glad you did.”

They’re in bad shape. Even upon first look, that much is clear. Wedge’s leg is a rivulet of red, bleeding through a makeshift tourniquet, jumpsuit muddied to all hell. Bo-Katan’s nose is surely broken, face as crimson as her hair, missing pieces chipped out of her armor. They’re slung together, they’re fractured, and they’re the sweetest thing Novalise has ever seen.

“Maker,” Din breathes, and then all four of them are running, in varying states of ability, to meet in the center, a four-pronged star.

“Three times you’ve rescued me now,” Bo-Katan manages, and her voice is hoarse, shaky, and Nova stumbles through a sea of bodies and white armor to get to both of them before they collapse on this makeshift battlefield, “don’t like owing debts. Especially not to my Mand’alor.”

Nova’s crying. A slobbering mess. “How about,” she manages, through blurry eyes, “your best friend?”

Bo-Katan shrugs, considering. She lets Nova pull her into a bone-crushing hug, both of them wincing at the too-hard contact, both of them refusing to let go. “I’ll allow it.”

“Didn’t know if you were gonna make it,” Wedge says, his voice cracking down the middle, grabbing onto Din’s shoulders like a lifeforce. Din doesn’t flinch, wrapping one arm around Wedge’s waist, slinging the other around Bo-Katan’s. Together, entwined, they hobble forward, Nova’s lightsaber still ignited, leading the way, a four-headed animal. Something out of a folktale, something to be reckoned with. “Really, really glad you did.” He reaches over to Nova to press a kiss into the mess of her bloodied hair. “Rebel girl,” he whispers, through tears, “I have never been happier to see you.”

Nova squeezes his hand as hard as both of them can handle. So much weight is slung behind that gesture—her Wedge, her family—there’s so much she cannot say, cannot manage through the mess of tears tangled in her throat. They are all entangled now, like weeds, grown together over years and years, but the man she’s holding up is the one that kept her alive when no one else did, the one that knew her before she was Novalise at all, who loved her when she was just Andromeda, just her parents’ daughter. What a fraught and full thing it is to be known so deeply. What a terrible and horrific thing to almost lose all of their lives in this awful place.

“Corellia,” Din announces, roughly, thickly, “is not a good planet.”

All of them laugh, through sweat and tears. When the shooting starts again behind them, Nova wrenches free, ready to launch herself in front of the world for the three people supporting each other’s weight, and then the second miracle of the day happens.

A ship, their one blessed Ghost, descends from the sky, dropping between the four of them and the world against them. Hera Syndulla and her one-woman-army lights up the rest of the troopers, extends the gangplank, and pulls them all to the safety of the stars above.

“Thank you,” Nova murmurs. Wedge, Bo-Katan, and Din have all disappeared to clean up—there are separate freshers and bedchambers buried deep in the Ghost’s belly. Hera must have had a whole crew on here at some point. It feels—empty. Like it was full to the brim, once, and now it’s been forcibly deserted, returned to the crush of space without all of its members. Nova doesn’t know any details beyond what Ezra’s said and what Hera’s alluded to, but she can feel it in the stale air. “For rescuing us.”

Hera’s gaze is so searching. Sad. They’re sitting at the same table they were less than a day ago, but it feels so monumentally different. Novalise is bloodied and bruised. Battered. In an altered state. That darkness, chittering, is pulsing somewhere in the back of her mind, and she is pushing it into the corners, trying to compartmentalize. She can’t deal with it right. She can’t deal with it at all.

“What happened?” The words are so quiet. At first, Nova doesn’t recognize that Hera’s spoken at all. “Down there.” Those blue, blue eyes, river-deep—trained on the newly cauterized wound on her bare stomach. Nova appreciates she’s not trying to hide it. She offered her bacta patches rather than injections, and Nova’s letting them set over the gash before she allows the water to wash her clean.

Nova swallows. “There were so many of them,” she whispers. “Troopers. Bounty hunters. Working together. I killed them—Bo and Wedge did, too. Din killed more.” She laughs, low and mirthless. “Din killed an entire platoon, and they kept coming.” She looks at Hera and then away, because it hurts too much. “They looked different.”

Hera leans forward, jaw set. “Different how?”

That’s the thing. Nova can’t place it. She blinks furiously, trying to explain it, but nothing comes. “Older,” she says, finally, but her voice wobbles, uncertain. “Rawer. Like they were made up of something… different.”

“The armor?”

Slowly, Nova nods. “But not just the armor,” she whispers, dragging a hand over her tired eyes, “the way they fought. Those were not the Empire’s troopers. They were calculated. Trained.” Her eyes flash to Hera’s. “Stronger.”

A look of understanding flashes over Hera’s face briefly, so quickly Nova thinks she may have imagined it. Hera leans forward, gently checking on the patches. “These have set,” she murmurs, green fingers tracing soft, barely-there lines over her skin. “You can shower. Take another injection after. We don’t have much time before we reach Hoth—”

Fear ripples through Nova. “How much?”

Hera looks up at her, and this time, the look on her face is equal in both sorrow and determination. “An hour, at most. Do you have a plan?”

Nova shutters her eyes, just for a second. She wanted this—to be the leader, to be the decision-maker. To run headfirst into battle, light flowing out of her skin. But she has been corrupted by something unsettling. She has sunk somewhere she can’t scry through. She wants a break, a beat, a second—to come up with a tangible plan, to reassess. To go back to Mandalore. To go back to Ezra’s initial message, to listen when he said to stay away. He’s been silent—in holograms and in her head—and she cannot tell if that’s a good sign or not. And she cannot speak that to Hera, not now, not before a faceoff with the man or myth that snatched her son away from her for the last ten years, so she rolls back her shoulders, she lifts her chin, and Novalise does what she always does. She swallows the Light.

“I have a plan,” Nova says. A beat. Then: “But which version we take depends on if we beat Thrawn there.”

Hera stands up. “We can beat him there.”

“Are you sure?”

Hera offers Nova a real smile, all glittering teeth—ones that Nova isn’t afraid of, and something settles in her stomach at that. “You haven’t met my droid yet.”

Nova thinks, oddly, as Hera runs to the cockpit—to someone else, that may sound like a threat.

Din isn’t in the tiny bedroom—he’s in the fresher. Nova can hear the water running—he’s under the stream of it, washing everything clean.

It drip-drip-drips off in the distance, and she slinks in, locking the door behind her, stripping her soiled clothes off. She’s going to need to borrow something else from Hera—hers are truly ruined. But she doesn’t think about it. Not now. She needs to wash herself free of her filth, the blood on her hands, the sins trapped in between. She needs to get clean too.

Din is facing the water when she walks in. Nova drops her clothes off her body, silently. She doesn’t make a noise when she steps underneath the steam. It’s running in rivulets over his pockmarked, muscled body. His skin, tan and deep, looks so much warmer under the low lights in here than it ever does anywhere else. When was the last time she got to look at Din? Really look at him? Nova doesn’t know. Can’t recall. She studies him, plastering herself to the opposite wall of the fresher, eyes cartographing the map of his back. She wants to commit it to memory. She wants to have this moment to cling to when everything is cold and barren.

His muscles contract. Hard. He runs his hands through his hair, curling up and jet-black under the steady stream of water. It’s a luxury—they haven’t had a real one, with running water, since they left Mandalore. Mandalore, Mandalore, Mandalore. Maker, Nova thinks, we never should have left Mandalore. The word feels like a hymn or a curse on her tongue—her home, but not quite. Din’s home, but not really. Half-home, to both of them. She was supposed to rule that planet—to move the Rebel base there. To make it harmonious, a place of refuge, where both Rebels and Mandalorians came together to fight a bigger war. Before all of this. Before evil forced her hand.

A war that is all moving parts—Grand Admiral Thrawn just the biggest tip of the iceberg. Her dreams—blue lightning, sinister laughter, evil rising from the dead, cloning tanks, teeth, all those teeth, Sparmau’s hands, the elusive First Order, flashes of the galaxy in years ahead—it’s too much. Nova watches her husband, captive under the water, and all she can think about is that she wants. That darkness in her stomach—it beckons to her for a reason.

Nova feels weak. Behind. Like she’s slipping through an hourglass, like she’s living on borrowed time.

She wants to win—she wants to save the galaxy, yes. That has always been true, Since Novalise Djarin was forged, created out of silver stardust and orange light—she has been a savior. A martyr, in parts—but a savior, true to her marrow. Nova does not give up. It is not in her blood, her DNA, her makeup. But there is something…coiled deep inside of her. Whether it is desire or selfishness or darkness—she does not know. It doesn’t have a name. It just—yearns. She stares down at the swirling ring, notched perfectly on top of her engagement one, on her left hand—it pulses. Calls. She is a dichotomy of a million things, and she is pulled in a thousand different directions.

She wants it to be simple. To pull the darkness’s mouth open. To threaten it with light.

But, Nova thinks, a swirling, insidious thing, what happens if the darkness has become part of me? What if I am the rip current, not the sunrise?

What happens if I get down to Hoth and I am the dangerous thing?

“I can hear you thinking,” Din says, his voice low and languid, muffled by the pour of the shower. Nova swallows, backing up against the wall. Chills have erupted across her whole body at the sound of it. Vantablack. Obsidian.

“Thought I was sneakier than that,” Nova breathes, “by now.”

Din smirks. His head is tilted to the side. His hair is getting long—curls dripping in his eyes, brown warmth flooded out black. “Not with me, cyar’ika.”

“Most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy,” Nova sighs, stepping under the steam. “How could I have forgotten?”

Din turns to face her. “Can catch anything,” he murmurs, dragging a hand through his hair, pushing it back, “caught you, once.” He yanks her in—hard.

“You’ve caught me in every lifetime,” Nova murmurs, as she’s tipped off her axis. The water hits her and she hisses—it feels too hot, too much—and then Din’s pulling her into his orbit, coaxing her under the stream of it, and with his body, slick and warm, entwined with hers, and with the jet of warm water pulsing over her sore, bloodied muscles—she relaxes.

“Does it hurt?”

Nova’s eyes have shuttered, letting the water run over her curls, weighing them down. They reach almost to the small of her back, flowing over her shoulders, long wispy pieces that used to be bangs now hanging somewhere around her chin. She blinks up through watered-down lashes at her Mandalorian—unarmored, all skin, and her breath hitches in her throat. “Does what hurt?”

His thumb skates over the high point of her cheekbone—the magnetic pull that’s always gravitated him there, tugging right back into place. His pinky hooks under her ear, brushing over her pulse point, and even under all this warmth, Nova shivers. “Your scar.”

She looks down, recoiling a little at the brand-new gash in her stomach. It looks—well, still raw, half-formed, angry. Like a freshly cauterized wound should look. But between Din’s coercive injection and Hera’s patches, the antibiotics have worked enough magic to keep the hurt at bay. “No,” she answers, and it’s the truth.

Din’s eyes roam over the map of her face. It burns so bright. “But something does.”

Nova bites down on her bottom lip. “Hera asked if I have a plan,” she whispers, barely audible over the thrush of the water making them both clean.

Din doesn’t waver. “Do you?”

Nova doesn’t move. He hooks her chin with one hand, forcing her to look at him head-on.

“Novalise.” Her name—a warning shot. He knows her tendency for martyrdom—he’s seen the fires she’s been fighting off internally. That oil-slick, that blinking venom. She is a wound, and she is bleeding, and Nova doesn’t know if it will coagulate Rebel orange or something else entirely. She swallows.

“I am not going to do,” she vows, “anything reckless.” It comes out slightly shaky. Like she’s not sure if she entirely believes it.

Din doesn’t move. “What’s your plan?”

Nova swallows. “Evac.” It’s a bitter word. “Get everyone left on base off-planet. To safety.” A beat. Then, softly: “To Mandalore.”

He blinks at her. “Evacuation—? Evac is a good thing, Nova. And Mandalore is the right choice. The safe choice.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the problem?”

A knot gathers, right at the base of her throat. Tangles there, like roots. “The problem is that the Rebels keep getting their home destroyed. That we’ve had to keep scattering. I want to move us to Mandalore, create a hybrid army, but that’s going to cause tensions to escalate on both sides.” She swallows. “I know we’ve all agreed—agreed on unity. I know that we can make it work. But what happens when the Dark Side catches wind of all of us in a singular location? Then Mandalore will be attacked, again, then tensions will implode, again, then we will have to fight for safety, again.”

“One step at a time.” He’s thinking logically. For some reason, it makes Nova’s anger flare.

She turns away, dragging soap over her body, the tangled mess of her hair. She’s buying time. It doesn’t matter. The words slip out anyway. “I want to defend it.” It’s something she can only bite out when she’s not facing Din. “Hoth.”

“Nova…” It’s so soft, her name. It makes her even angrier.

“I know,” she says, teeth gritted. “I know it all, Din. I know this is a losing battle. I know it’s a wasteland of a planet. I know that it’s already been blown up before. I know that barely anyone is left. I know that the Alliance is just scraps, and that something bigger is on the horizon, and that I’m clinging desperately to something that truly died a long time ago.” She swallows. “But I don’t care. I…I think I have earned the right to be a little idealistic. A little selfish. I think I’m allowed the chance to put up a fight. If we have to go down, I want to go down kicking and fucking screaming.” She inhales a shaky, trembling thing, and then she turns back around to face Din, to face his rebuttal.

But all that’s written in his face is love, pride, and stardust.

It knocks Nova off her center, again. She inhales, sharp and dry, blinking through the steam. “What?”

“There you are,” he whispers, and Nova feels something flare in her chest. No—lower.

“You don’t think it’s a bad idea?”

Din takes a step closer in response. He’s boxing her in against the wall—predatory in nature. Nova is his willing, sweet prey. Their eternal roles. She hums as he presses his body into hers. “No.”

“You want me to fight?”

He grins, devilish, white teeth stunning and dangerous in the flickering low light. “Yes, sweet girl.”

Nova sighs, and his mouth closes over hers. For a minute, she is just suspended here—held up by determination and love and the knowledge that she has not gone sideways, that she has not retreated off somewhere she cannot access. Din kisses like a forest fire, all heat, and she wraps her legs around his waist as he pulls her closer. She wants to be torn apart again, to be ravaged by her Mandalorian, to be torn limb from limb.

“Then fight me.”

The words fall out of her mouth before she can stop them. Nova bites down on her lower lip, like that’ll rescind them, box them in. Din goes utterly still—silent. She can hear her blood rush in her ears.

“What?” One word, and everything in her tightens.

“I—”

“No,” Din says, pressing her back up against the fresher wall. There’s barely any room in here to begin with—it’s meant for one person, not two, certainly not two people that have hips and muscles and curves and thighs, like they both do—and suddenly, it feels suffocating. “No, you don’t run from me.” He thrusts one hand out, under her chin. It’s not the simple, gentle lift he usually does, trigger finger with his forefinger and thumb—no, he’s grabbing her like he aims to throttle her. There’s something thrumming through his blood—humming, dripping, singing. Nova can feel it, in turn with hers.

Something darker has invaded them both.

“What did you say?”

“I wanted y-you to—”

“If I am fighting you,” Din snarls, “something has gone terribly wrong.”

Thunder rumbles, sounding off down in her heart.

“Novalise,” Din croons, “has something gone terribly wrong?”

The fist coiled inside of her flexes, cracks.

She wants him. She wants him sheathed inside of her—knocking this darkness, this anger, this un-Nova-ness—loose. She wants to fuck away the pain; to make it sweeter.

Lighter.

Holier.

But they are both running on fumes, both quelling demons, both wound so tight. Din’s cock flexes against her, and Nova knows it would be so easy for him to push it inside of her, to bisect her, to let them both sink into poison, but his mouth hovers an inch from hers and stops.

“Novalise.” It’s all Din. Nothing more, nothing less.

“No,” she breathes. “I’m here.” She blinks, and whatever reached up her throat and pulsed is gone now. She blinks, once, twice, red clearing from her vision.

Din grabs her again, chin in the claw of her right hand. Maker, his eyes are dark in here, pitch-black, but they belong to him. The darkness—whatever had a hold on her a second ago—it hisses, recedes.

“I’ve got you,” he says, and Nova nods, pressing her slick forehead to his. Grounding herself there. “You want a fight? You’ve got a fight down on Hoth, baby. Keep your head in the game.”

It is until after he’s kissed her and released her back into the water that Nova realizes that he’s repeating what she said to him back down on Corellia. She can feel his eyes on her back, boring holes right through her defenses, her armor, her facade.

Something peers into her. Nova does not look back.

Novalise washes herself clean. Din watches her purify, sanctify. He kisses her, braids her hair down her back, holds her eyes in the mirror. She smiles at him, looks at him like the Novalise he knows, he prays to. His Mand’alor, his savior, his Sanct’yia.

She’s here, he whispers, she’s okay. like a mantra. Like a prayer.

Like a plea.

He has a bad feeling about this mission. Hell, he has a bad feeling about all of them—but it’s in the air, and Din moves in her footsteps like a kept animal.

Novalise walks into the belly of the Ghost, every inch a warrior. Din crawls after her, Novalise’s human weapon.

When he dreams tonight, he vows, it will be of how to keep her demons at bay. How to burn them to the ground.

Everyone’s armor has seen better days.

Hera looks relatively untouched, but she’s lended out pieces of the Ghost’s wardrobe to most of them, so she’s missing a few of her own. Bo-Katan’s missing a pauldron, her left shin cover, and one of her chest plates. Wedge’s orange jumpsuit is more brown than anything else, and it’s cut off at the knee where he got injured. Din’s armor is mostly intact, but is in severe need of a wash. He chose taking a shower himself over cleaning it, so it’s still streaked with blood and guts from their Corellian detour.

Nova isn’t wearing anything of her own—except her boots, which are a relic, at this point. They’ve survived Jacterr Calican, an X-Wing crash, being left on Dantooine, multiple kidnappings, an all-out fight against Ladmeny Sparmau, becoming Mand’alor, and Corellia. Nova’s pretty sure nothing except a complete nuclear apocalypse could take them out. She has on tan pants, a black thermal shirt, and a brown vest. Her hair is hanging in a singular braid down her back, tied with a piece of Wedge’s ripped jumpsuit. Cliche, maybe, but necessary. She’s not walking onto Hoth’s whiteout surface without wearing something Rebel orange.

They’re all in the hangar—in a perfect circle. Grogu and Chopper—Hera’s feral droid—are up in the cockpit, and Din keeps shooting worried glances through the visor up through the bridge when he thinks no one’s looking. Bo-Katan catches Nova’s eye and rolls her own, and despite everything, a laugh bubbles up in Nova’s throat, the familiar echo of a smile rolling across her lips.

“The ships on the surface look armed.” Hera is saying, as they descend through Hoth’s cloudy atmosphere, speaking through the comms. The four of them are coiled, ready to strike. “Ready to fly?”

“Ready to fly,” Wedge confirms. “Besides, there won’t be many stragglers.” He’s clutching to the grip above his head like a lifeline. “Most of us are scattered. Not living on Hoth. Working for the New Republic.”

Nova studies him. He looks—shaken. Undone. But when he catches her eye, he nods once. Sharply. She had asked him, when they were preparing to land, if he wanted to stay on the Ghost, be Hera’s gunner, and he vehemently denied her. No, Wedge had said, and if it were anyone else, Nova would have described him as snapping, Hoth is my home. I’m defending it.

They’re all on edge. Not just her. Good, Nova thinks, that’ll keep us alive.

Their plan is simple—Hera isn’t grounding. She’ll be hiding in the clouds, flying airstrikes against the Chimaera. She’s also keeping Grogu and her beloved, insane droid Chopper on the Ghost. When it looks dire, they’re jumping to hyperspace and dropping back to Mandalore, equipped with holograms from the Mand’alor and her First-in-Command confirming that General Syndulla and associated children of the Rebellion are free to fly, as well as a mandate to allow any Rebel-marked ships through the shields. Anything else, Koska confirmed via hologram, will be shot down with extreme prejudice. And excitement, Bo-Katan relayed, with a smile across her own mouth, and Nova knows it’s going to be a diplomatic mess, Rebel refugees and Mandalorian soldiers, and she wants to defend Hoth, she wants to make a stand, but she also wants to save as many people as possible, and the only ones crazy enough to make that stand alongside her are the same four dropping to the icy surface.

The four of them will arm the rest of the deserted Rebel command center with everything they’ve got and take off in the ship primed underground for flight—a chunky, near-indestructible starfighter with three shooters and one pilot’s seat. Like it was made for them, really. Wedge has had it ready to go since Nova and Din first disappeared from Mandalore, two years ago, when Sparmau showed up in Nova’s dreams for the first time and nearly killed her.

Everything feels circular. Like she’s tripping over timelines, through portals. Something gnaws at Nova, and she tries her best to stamp it out, focusing on her friends, the mission at hand, and the planet immediately below them.

“I’ll drop you in thirty seconds,” Hera says. “You’ll have fifteen minutes, tops, to mobilize from initial drop to evac. I have a read on the Chimaera, still a parsec away, but nothing else.”

“That’s good,” Din says. Silence. “That’s good, right?”

“No,” Bo-Katan manages, finally, cutting clean through. Her voice is all ice—all Mandalorian. She has snapped back into her skin, back into a warrior, back into a blade. Nova watches her carefully, knowing that there’s something off with her, too—her Bo-Katan is unsteady, that much is clear, even when nothing else is. “No, that means that Thrawn has something up his sleeve.”

“But if it’s a single Star Destroyer—”

“The Chimaera,” Bo-Katan says, flatly, “is not a regular Star Destroyer.”

“And if we have Thrawn’s signal,” Hera continues, her voice slightly muffled through their commlinks, “that means he wants us to know where he is.”

There’s more behind that, too, but no one pushes it. Din sighs, irritated, and Nova squeezes his hand, trying to stifle some of her own nerves, still some of the grayness molting under her skin. Something feels off. Hoth is quiet. Too quiet. It’s always muffled—it’s an ice planet—but it’s too still. The air feels charged. Nova raises her chin as the gangplank begins to lower.

“I outrank you all on this planet,” Hera says. “So when I say this is an in and out mission, I mean it. No martyrs. No funerals. You get in, you get out. You hear me?”

Every single pair of eyes is trained on Novalise. She wants to protest, but she doesn’t. This isn’t like before. She isn’t indestructible. She is faltering. She is already wounded. And there is something darker whispering to her.

And this is already a dangerous mission. A potential lost cause. No one makes a sound as Hoth is revealed, anesthetic and bleached, snow-covered and unshakable. The ice is unyielding. The cold pierces their skin, the wind howling something horrible.

Nova sends up a prayer to the stars above that everyone on Hoth makes it out alive.

“Loud and clear, General,” Nova says, “over.”

“May the Force be with you,” Hera says, “over and out.”

The four of them drop to Hoth’s silent, foreboding surface. Something dark snarls inside of Novalise. Din, Wedge, and Bo-Katan move in towards the base. Something stops Nova—a feeling, a pulse—the same unsettling that flared at her on Corellia. Darkness. It chitters. It calls.

She hears something they don’t. They run forward. Nova stops in her tracks.

That thing. It beckons to her.

It knows her by name. It whispers in the wind—or is it coming from inside of her? A memory, a prophecy, a voice. Either way, she hears it. Nova pauses, cocking her neck to the side.

The thing coils tight around her. It croons her name.

It beckons: Novalise.

And then it yanks. Hard.

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!! please let me know what you think if you're so inclined <3

CHAPTER 9 WILL BE UP AT 7:30 PM EST ON MARCH 23RD!

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