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corazondebeskar-reads · 3 months

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live to rise - chapter one

live to rise series

one: they'll find you, burn you

series masterlist | next chapter

gladiator!Din Djarin x f!reader

word count: 3.7k

summary: The Last of the Mandalorians have fallen; their Mand'alor captured. Stripped of his armor, his weapons, his people. Din rises to fight another day, grasping onto the hope that his son still lives.

No fighter has won their freedom from the Empire's arena before. With the help of a servant girl, can he hope to break free?

warnings: dark, dead dove do not eat, captivity, forced proximity, canon-typical violence, genre-typical violence, prisoner of war, indentured servitude, fight to the death, au where the empire wins, discussions of genocide, discussions of war, graphic descriptions of violence, graphic descriptions of injuries, gore, brutality, religious themes, fictional religion, mand'alor!Din Djarin, major character deaths, many minor character deaths, Din has hearing loss, angst by the bucket, Din Djarin takes the helmet off (kind of)

Please heed the warnings. There will be major & minor character deaths in almost every chapter. This is not a happy story, but I hope you find it worthwhile anyway.

also on ao3

dividers by @saradika-graphics

It’s morning when the news breaks.

By lunch, datapads are discarded in favor of gossip. It’s as useless as the Imperial rags parading as official broadcasts—all speculation and slander.

While the details of the Mandalorians’ final stand for their homeworld circulate above, the stiff air of the lower complex is thick with the question: to whose barracks will the fallen king be assigned?

You know the answer. Your datapad had pinged early, much before your day should have begun. Much before the news went live across the galaxy.

Cell C-5 had been scrubbed clean on your perennially bruised knees the day before when Dup, a young Gungan whose face was bruised as if he’d already gone a round, had failed to return from the arena.

He had been brought in late the previous night, shaking and weeping and not speaking a lick of Basic. Those were the hardest. There was no comfort, no preparation, no honor you could give them.

He didn’t return after his first battle.

It was the way of things. Many never saw a second sunrise.

As caretaker for Barrack Cresh, whether your fighters eat, drink, bathe, get medical attention and fresh clothing, or, well, anything, falls on you.

So you stocked C-5 with the basics, but the Mandalorian King’s file is barren when your clearance arrives. You bristle at the lack of biodata. How are you supposed to provide proper clothing or order his dinner?

It becomes obvious when he arrives that evening.

You’re not.

It’s past curfew when they bring him in, and normally, you’d be in bed. But one of yours had come back a few minutes earlier from the medbay and you know the state they usually return in, so you’re in C-2 with the door shut.

The ex-Rebel pilot, Gino, doesn’t argue as you dab the shallow cuts on his face with an alcohol swab, but he does flinch when you tug the split skin on his calf together like a stubborn bedsheet to apply suture tape. They had used just enough bacta for his serious injuries and left the rest to bleed.

“Sorry,” you hiss, but it’s lost in the pneumatics of the door.

Gino is on his feet immediately, shushing you with a finger to his lips. You can’t risk being seen through the little window, so he minds your space as you flatten to the ground and peek through the delivery slot.

At first, all you can see are boots. So many boots. And among the shiny black rubber is the oddest pair of worn brown leather. It’s been so long since you saw anyone in shoes but the guards; your stomach churns with fear.

Gino taps at your head, and you let him help you up to peek once they’re past the cell.

It’s the Mandalorian. There are five of the Moff’s personal guards in their black kits restraining him, and they still have to jab him with an electrostave in order to shut the cell door fast enough.

He’s snarling, the modulator of his helmet warping and crackling the terrible cacophony. He’s also huge, and the strip of lights shines off his dark armor like someone took a handful of the night sky and smudged it across the wall of the cell.

You brush away the errant question of how much of his bulk is the armor and how much he comes by naturally. You’ll find out tomorrow, like everyone else.

The hype alone ensures a sold-out arena. The officers and their simpering spouses and sycophants are salivating for the battle—or at least for the profits.

The headlines fill seats to a swarming mass, everyone vying to see the latest and shiniest trophy.

He won’t be shiny for long.

Not after they strip away the beskar that protects one of—if not the last of—the “galaxy’s greatest warriors” and see if he’s worth anything underneath.

They don’t expect him to survive. They don’t want him to, really. They want to crush the will of any who would still defy the Empire. A very public, humiliating execution is the Moff’s wet dream.

The Mandalorian is gone before your morning rounds, dragged up to the arena’s cage to watch his fate play out on the faces of others. Either end is the same, really.

And if he survives, it won’t matter. Sure, prisoners can earn their freedom through a percentage of the money they bring in from wagers, or they can die trying.

But no fighter has made it out alive. Not even close.

You’re close, though. Not that you’re in an arena contract. But you’re nearing the end of the third year in a five-year indentured servitude sentence, and it carries a lower fatality rate.

Which isn’t saying much, really. It would be hard to have a higher fatality rate than the fighters.

There are twelve of you and ten barracks, not counting the fluctuating number of sponsored champions who have private accommodations.

Sixty standard fighters, never more or less as the sun rises.

Sometimes, you return to six empty cells.

Only once have you found your flock all home. You fell to your knees and cried right then, bringing acrid dread to a boil as you knew it would never, ever happen again.

Just three days ago, Din Djarin had stood in the grand hall at Keldabe, knowing it would be the last time.

It was still. Silent. Not yet in the chaos of war, but just on the edge, as when rainfall is a distant specter and the uneasiness cloisters in your lungs.

He takes in the art behind the throne with quiet reverence, eyes following the sharp lines and bold colors, the stories of their ancestors dutifully and beautifully eternalized.

The shame creeps up his neck again, but he shrugs it off. It will work. He’s known for his tight and effective strategy, and his advisors had agreed to the plan.

He only hoped the Ka’ra would accept his soul into the Manda all the same. That the blood of his brethren wouldn’t deny him the peace that he ached for.

He thinks once more of Grogu, breathes through the pain, and then clears his mind.

Turning from the throne, he strides to the grand windows—to Paz. With hands clasped behind his back, he follows his general’s focus to the TIE fighters breaking through the atmosphere.

Troopers are within the walls. The Destroyers won’t be long, now.

“Vod,” Din begins, angling toward Paz.

“Do not deal me the insult of an out,” Paz snaps.

“I would never,” Din says, throat cinching around the words. “It’s an honor to have you at my side.”

Paz dips his head. “It’s been an honor to serve with you, ner Mand’alor.”

Din knows he speaks true. Though they may not have always gotten along, they were still vod. Still loyal, until death.

Death they now stood on the brink of.

Outside, the fleet falls fast. Din grimaces as their ships careen to the surface and crush the city into crumbs. Fire spreads, and he has to pretend the homes are empty. That everyone got out in time.

The Empire assumes each Kom’rk-class fighter is full of Mandalorians waiting to drop into battle. They target them with glee, thinking they’ve devastated the sky and ground teams in one fell swoop.

But each ship has only a pilot. A pilot who climbed into the cockpit knowing they would certainly die. Willing to take the place of their vod.

Mando’ad draar digu. They will live on in him until he draws his last. More importantly, they will live on in their families, who—if he’s done anything right—will live far beyond him.

“Par Manda’yaim,” Din says.

“Par Manda’yaim,” Paz echoes.

They are to be the last words spoken to one another.

Inside the palace, the fight leaves no breath for such things. Not that they need it; their movements are fluid and equal.

It takes half the platoon to take Paz down and the other to take Din.

Unlike his vod, they do not grant him a warrior’s death.

In the arena, they’ve left him in the armor as he paces the cage. Every moment with it spurns the barb deeper in his gut, the terror turning terrifying as his rage becomes a tsunami.

The fights are nothing. The Imps who thought he’d be intimidated by them have clearly never seen an average Mandalorian brawl. These ended with a little more finality and a little less bickering over the winner, but the actual fighting? Mostly pathetic.

He doesn’t look upon them with scorn, though. These are beings stripped of all dignity, underfed, and devoid of hope. The Empire has ground them into the dirt beneath their glossy boots, and he expects that for many, death is a kindness.

In the end, he lets them take the beskar’gam from his bound body. They hold him, scanners at the ready, the whole of the galaxy waiting to witness his final defeat in real time. The giddy grins tell him what he already knows—they are certain this will break him.

He holds eye contact with Gideon just to see the shock that strikes him at Din’s defiance. He aches to smirk or snarl or sink his teeth into the man, but he won’t give him the satisfaction.

They don’t give them weapons for this fight. At least they’re being honest about their intentions.

Hand-to-hand combat with a Wookie should be a death sentence. Should be, for a lesser being. But the Mand’alor is far sharper than their blades could ever hope to be, and he wields his mind and body as expertly as he would a blaster.

Din doesn’t speak Shyriiwook. He wishes he did, for when he asks his opponent for their name, he fails to capture the response. It slips from his grasp, slick as his hands are from the Wookie’s blood.

Bare hands that have rarely dealt such tangible death. Dust stirred up from the struggle sticks to the thick, hot carnage. He’ll feel the give of the Wookie’s eyeballs under his thumbnails for days. The crack of his skull under Din’s knee, driven like a wedge into the soft cartilage, is at least slightly more familiar.

It’s not a long fight. After all, Din has something of which his opponent has long been deprived: something to live for.

The Mandalorian isn’t back by dinner drop-off, but your captain sent the cart loaded with a tray for him, so you dutifully set it on his cot atop the folded blanket.

There’s been no clean-up call, and the roster is empty. But you don’t have to wonder over his whereabouts for long.

In the servants' barracks—which are actually barracks and not a soft word for cellblocks—the reports are already underway.

Some of the attendants get to watch the fights. Or, rather, they have to, bound as they are to a single combatant. The mandated proximity is unforgiving, and no one likes to watch.

After all, there’s very little difference between you and the fighters. Instead, the attendants take on the solemn duty of letting the rest of you know how your residents fared or fell.

“He was a berserker,” Hali says in hushed whispers. “They took all that armor off, and he just looked like a man. A pretty man, but… just a man. But when it started, he moved so fast. It was over in, like, two minutes.”

“Shut up,” says Eli, your bunkmate. “He did not take down a Wookie in two minutes.”

“No, he really kriffing did,” hissed one of the new attendants whose name you hadn’t caught. “It was brutal. The whole arena went quiet. And he just stood there, covered in blood, looking at the crowd.”

“Okay, whose block is he in?” Eli demands. “Someone needs to spill now.”

“Mine,” you say quietly.

“You haven’t said a kriffing word this whole time? What’s he like?”

“I don’t know,” you confess. “I only saw when they brought him in last night. He was still armored. And terrifying.”

“I saw him,” Hali says. “He was in the lounge.”

“They took him to the lounge after his first fight?” you say, jaw hanging open. The after-party was a grotesque performance, with sponsored fighters forced to smile pretty and play nice with their benefactors after a victory.

“No,” Hali’s face is grave. “They displayed him. They’ve chained him up next to his armor.”

You cover your mouth to stem the nausea. “No,” you hiss through your fingers. The disrespect hurts, raking through like a nexu claw to the chest, and you don’t even know the man.

Eli sets a hand on your knee from where he sits cross-legged beside you on the bottom bunk. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I know,” you say. But he knows you, sees it written between your brows, and hears it in the crack of your voice.

It’s a weakness; you know it. It had been a strength back home. Every single being that passes through your barrack doesn’t have long. The small hall of cells is a port, and you are the ferryman. Knowing each of them for the last scant moments has only made you love harder and faster.

To try and ease a soul’s journey is a burden you have always chosen to bear.

Come morning, sure as the stars, your cells are full. The Mandalorian is not the only new face—there’s a humanoid woman in C-1, too. The Klatoonian had been gone before the noon bell prior, and his cell cleaned by your hands within the hour after. Ovesu had survived four battles over ten days, but no trace of him remains now.

You start with her, Reen Sala of Drall. She’s on the roster for early afternoon, and you want to make sure she’s got food in her.

You tell her as much.

“Today? Already?” She wraps her fingers around the window bars, peering at you.

“Yes,” you say solemnly, sliding the tray through the slit at the bottom of the door. “Eat quickly. They’ll be coming to get you any minute. They’re going to take you up and prepare you and make you watch the day’s first battles.”

She has a steadiness to her eyes and stock to her build, just enough to have a chance. When she begins to eat, her hands only shake slightly.

“Are you a farmer?” you ask, watching her broken, stubby fingernails wrap around the metal cup of water.

She nods, gulping down quickly to add, “Mostly grains. Eggs. Basics.”

You give her a wan smile, the image of her in a sun-soaked field behind your eyes. It would have to be enough. If she held on, maybe she could fill in the picture.

“Thought so. Me too. My parents have a grove on Hetzal,” you say.

You chat for a few minutes, exchanging tales of her chasing tipyip and you sneaking honeyfruit and shuula during harvest.

“Good luck,” you murmur when you finally step away.

You don’t linger with Disdraa, the Twi’lek in C-3. She took a nasty blow to the head yesterday, so you slide her tray in as quietly as possible, hoping she’ll steal some extra rest.

Which brings you to the Mandalorian. He has no other name in your database. A mistake, you wonder, or an erasure?

When you knock on his door, you keep your eyes downcast. The decision you made in the lift was impulsive, but clear. He will have this respect here, if nowhere else.

“Good morning,” you say.

It’s silent.

You slide the tray under the door. “Do you need anything?”

Nothing.

“Okay, I’ll be back this evening if you think of something.”

Din rolls his eyes in the dark room. Does the quiet, simpering little act really work on the other prisoners? He vaguely considers rejecting the tray just to irritate you.

But he’s a Mandalorian. He doesn’t give in to petty spite when survival is on the line. He has battles to win and to do so, he must eat.

The food is bland but nutritionally complex, so if he keeps up a routine, he should be able to maintain his strength. He’s already run through and decided the optimal calisthenics and body weight routines he can do in the confines of his quarters.

He’s not stupid enough to think all the fights will be so quick or easy. The only benefit, and he’s unwilling to call it that, of not having his armor is that he’s so much faster.

He’ll get out.

He has a promise to keep.

When the Death Star fell three years ago, it took nearly the entire Rebel Alliance with it. The rest were scattered in the ash. And when the Empire barely flinched, the Mandalorians knew their time was running out.

With one loss notched on their belt already, they would have to strike swift and sure.

And so Din’s life as the rebel liaison began.

When he went to Gideon’s cruiser, he had no backup. Technically, no one even knew where he was. But espionage and false diplomacy took too long, purged time they did not have. And he wasn’t going to get another chance to try.

He lost the intel in the skirmish but gained a sword he knew not how to wield, a title he knew not how to bear, and a son he knew not how to raise.

The guards come for Reen, forcing you to finish your deliveries in a tense, silent two minutes.

She doesn’t come back. You paint her picture that night while her soft face and sun-streaked sangria widow’s peak are still fresh in your mind. It, as with most of your books, is stained with errant tears.

Eli had convinced you to keep the ones you ruined with grief, when you first began, desperate not to forget.

“It’s just more proof they were alive if they were also mourned,” he said, flipping reverently through the pages.

It goes against the practice, but it’s not even the most egregious way you’ve had to compromise, so you let it go. This is not the Hall. You have no easels, no canvas, no priestess.

You wonder who’s taken over your space, who they plucked from the apprentices to take over the memorials.

The pictures are small, stacked across the page like a quilt. Most of them have a name, maybe an age, maybe a planet, inked into the corners.

It's certainly not the scale you’re accustomed to, and your colors are limited to the pigments you can press from your dinner, unblessed and unpurified, but you make do.

You never paint them while they still live, not wanting to tether their souls to the pages while they have a chance. But they are yours, and so you will take the burden of remembering from their souls.

“Tray, please,” you say after knocking on the Mandalorian’s door that evening. He’s slow to respond, but you don’t mind. It’ll be a bit before he gets accustomed to the routine, if he makes it that long.

Most don’t.

It grates against the floor when he kicks it out, and you exchange it for the full tray of dinner.

“Do you need anything?”

Silence.

“Okay, have a good night.”

You don’t have hurt feelings. It’s the way of things. Some of the beings who come through never speak a word to you. It doesn’t change your loyalty or your duties.

Din is determined to puzzle you out. Why the farce? Everyone else he’s encountered is open in their disgust and amusement. He’s a novelty, a prize, a disgrace. What purpose does your feigned care serve?

“—dining with us tonight?” calls the inmate to his right in C-3.

You make a show of rolling your eyes, taking the last two trays from the cart. You slide one to the Twi’lek who had spoken.

“Depends. Are you going to behave?” you say.

“I always behave,” the fighter lies.

You seem to laugh, just a silent huff of amusement, and sit down with your back against the wall between the two cells.

He can’t see you from here, but he can hear snippets of you making light conversation between bites.

Something you say gets a lighthearted rise from the Devaronian in C-4 across the hall.

“Old? You want to talk about being old?” he booms.

C-3 groans. “Don’t get him started, come on.”

You laugh. “—else to bitch about. I’m saving— trouble.”

“…that I should suffer your disrespect,” C-4 is trying to say over you.

“Yeah, yeah, Vrar, you’re a terrifying grumpy—,” you tease.

A pause. A murky mumble from C-2.

“—you, Mandalorian? How old—?” You ask, tearing a chunk off your bread roll and popping it in your mouth.

He doesn’t answer.

After you leave, it grows quiet. A few moments pass, as if he was just waiting for you to get out of hearing range, before Vrar speaks up.

“Mando. You holding up? Any injuries?”

Din sits silently on his cot, leaning against the wall.

“Alright, I get it. You don’t have to talk to me. But can you be more respectful to the girl?”

If it’s bait, it works. “I don’t make a habit of being respectful to my captors.”

To his surprise, Vrar barks a hearty laugh. “Is that what you think? She’s a slave, Mando, same as the rest of us.”

Din feels hot guilt rise in his throat. “My mistake. I’ll do better.”

Vrar grunts his approval, and that’s that.

The next morning, when you ask if he needs anything, he tells you, “No, thank you,” in a soft but sure tone.

You straighten a little abruptly and try not to look shocked. “Okay. Good luck today,” you say, and move on. You’re pretty sure if you draw attention to it, he’ll never speak again.

You aren’t privy to the way things operate up top. All you know is that they take your fighters randomly, with at least one day between as a rest. Sometimes, it’s longer between fights.

But not for Mando. For the next two weeks, it’s every other day like clockwork. They’re capitalizing on his novelty, you think, but also hoping to wear him down.

Rumors tell you he’s become a quick crowd favorite. It should mean he has a shot at earning his freedom, but rumors also tell you he has the highest price on record.

They don’t want him free, and they don’t want someone to buy him.

No, they want him to die in the arena.

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thank you so much for reading! i live for your feedback, and i'm not above begging so if you have any thoughts pls let me know

*title from "Get Out Alive" by Three Days Grace

#din djarin x reader #the mandalorian x reader #mando x reader #the mandalorian fic #gladiator!din #the mandalorian x you #mando x you #din djarin x you #fic: live to rise

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