Chapter Text
The cell smells like rust and recycled air, and the lights went down hours ago – not off, never off, just dimmed to that bruised red that means the facility's day cycle is over and its prisoners are supposed to sleep. You haven’t slept. You’re not sure you remember how to anymore.
Three days. That’s how long you've been in here, counting by the rhythm of the ration slot and the heavy clank of boots that come once per shift change. Three days since the bounty hunter who calls himself Vane dragged you off your transport with a vibroblade at your throat, smiling like he'd won a sabacc pot. He hasn't told you what he wants yet, clearly being the kind of man that likes to make a woman stew.
You shift on the metal bench that passes for a bunk, drawing your knees up to your chest. The durasteel wall behind you is cold even through your shirt, but you press your shoulder blades into it anyway, because the cold is a real thing, and real things are rare in here.
That’s when you hear him move.
The cell next to yours was empty when they put you in. You'd stared at the dividing wall for the better part of a day, watching the seams, listening for breathing, and there had been nothing. But somewhere in the long stretch between the last meal and the dimming of the lights, they must have brought someone in, because now you can hear the unmistakable scrape of something heavy against metal, the dull clink of what can only be armour settling.
You hold your breath and hear a long exhale on the other side – mechanical, filtered. Like it’s passed through a vocoder before it reaches air. You know that sound. Every spacer this side of the Rim knows that sound.
A Mandalorian.
You don't know what possesses you to speak. Loneliness, maybe, stupidity, definitely and you turn your face to the wall.
"Hey."
There’s nothing for a long moment, just that mechanical breathing, even and slow, like a man who’s been in worse places than this and is conserving himself for whatever comes next.
"You're awake."
His voice lands in your chest like a stone dropped down a well. Low, rough at the edges, made stranger by the helmet's modulator, carrying that slight metallic burr that turns every consonant into something with teeth. It should have been off-putting, but it isn’t. It’s the first voice you've heard in three days that isn’t Vane's oily purr, and your whole body leans toward it before you've even decided to.
"Can't sleep," you reply. "How long have you been in there?"
"Couple hours."
"I didn't hear them bring you in."
"They didn't want you to."
You press your palm flat against the wall, as if you can feel him through it. You can’t, of course, the durasteel thick enough to stop a blaster bolt. But you imagine him on the other side, sitting the way you’re sitting, his helmet tilted toward the sound of your voice.
"Are you hurt?" you ask.
He pauses. "Nothing that matters."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
You smile, in spite of everything. "Fine. Don't tell me your name either, then."
"I wasn't going to."
"Of course not." You let your head tip back against the wall. "So, what do I call you for the purposes of this limited conversation?"
"Mando works."
"Very original."
"It’s functional and descriptive."
You laugh, a tiny breath of one, surprised out of you because it’s been a long time since anything has made you laugh. You hear him shift on the other side of the wall, a slow grinding of beskar against metal that you feel more than hear, the vibration humming through your spine.
"What did you do to end up in here?” he asks.
"Wrong cargo on the wrong ship. You?"
"Wrong face on the wrong wanted poster."
"Yours or his?"
"Mine, apparently."
"Hm." You trace a finger along a seam in the wall, following its line down to where it meets the bench. "Are you going to kill him when you get out?"
"Yes."
He says it the way another person might say I'm going to get water. No inflection, no heat, just the flat statement of a future fact. You should be frightened of him, but you’re not. There’s something steadying about that voice, that certainty. As if the universe is a problem he’s already solved, and you’ve only stumbled into the middle of his working.
"Take me with you," you say, before you can think better of it.
"You don't know me," he replies, with the shape of a laugh through the modulator.
"I know you're not him."
"That’s a pretty low bar."
"It's the one I've got."
He goes quiet for a while after that. Not an uncomfortable quiet, rather the kind that feels like company. You listen to him breathe, slow and even, and try to match your own to it, and find after a few minutes that you have. You inhale when he inhales and exhale when he exhales, as if you’re sharing a single set of lungs through the wall.
"What's your name?" he asks.
You tell him without thinking, the syllables just leaving you, soft, into the dim red dark.
"That's a good name.”
"It's just a name."
"There’s no such thing as just a name."
You turn your face to the wall and press your cheek to it. The metal’s less cold now, or you’re warmer – one of the two.
"Say it again," you whisper.
There’s a pause long enough to make you think he might refuse. Then his voice comes, lower, slower, and he says your name the way you've never heard it said before, like it has weight, like it’s a thing he’s setting down carefully on a table between you, where you can both look at it.
Something flutters low in your belly, and you tell yourself it’s hunger. Three days of nutrient paste can do things to a person.
You know it isn’t the hunger.
"Tell me something," you say, mostly to fill the silence. "Anything, I don't care."
"Like what?"
"Like…what's the last good meal you had and on what planet. I don’t know, anything."
You can hear him thinking about an answer before he speaks. "Tiingilar. On Nevarro. But there was too much spice, and it burned my tongue for an hour."
"You eat through that helmet?"
"Not in front of you, I wouldn't."
The phrasing is so specific, so oddly intimate, that it makes your face hot. In front of you. As if he's thought about it. As if you’re a person whose presence would change what he does with his mouth.
"Why not?" you ask, voice careful and quiet.
"It's the Way. No one sees my face."
"No one?"
"No one living."
You let that sit and take in the whole shape of it — the loneliness baked into it, the discipline, the strange tender violence of a vow that old. You think about a man who hasn't shown his face to anyone in years, who eats alone, who sleeps alone and who would die before he breaks that code.
You think about what it would mean if he ever did break it for someone.
"What about touch?" you ask, and you can hear your own pulse in your ears now. "Does the Way say anything about that?"
He pauses for a single beat. "No."
"No, it doesn't say anything? Or no, you don't…?"
"It doesn't forbid it."
"Oh."
The silence after that has a different quality, the silence of two people who’ve both noticed the same thing at the same time and are waiting to see who’s going to acknowledge it first. You feel your fingers curl against the wall and the wall against the line of your thigh through your trousers, the cold of it sinking through and meeting the heat of you.
"Mando," you say finally.
"Yeah."
"When's the last time someone touched you?"
The modulator catches his exhale and turns it into something like static. He doesn’t answer right away and so you wait. You can be patient when you need to be, and right now, with your cheek to the wall and your blood loud in your throat, you need to be.
"It’s been a long time," he admits finally.
"How long?"
"Longer than I'm going to tell a stranger."
"I'm not a stranger, you know my name."
"That doesn't make you not a stranger."
"Doesn't it?"
You imagine him in the cell next to yours, that helmeted head bowed, his gloved hands resting on his thighs. You imagine his shoulders pressed back against the same wall you’re pressed against, the only thing between his skin and yours a few centimetres of durasteel and a lifetime of bad decisions.
"What about you?" he says.
"What about me?"
"When's the last time anyone touched you?"
The directness of his question startles you. You've been the one playing this game and somehow, he’s taken the cards out of your hand without you noticing.
"A while," you admit.
"How long is a while?"
"Long enough that I think about it when I shouldn't."
"When shouldn't you?"
"Now," you say, "for instance."
You hear the soft sound through the modulator that you decide, immediately and with some certainty, is a laugh, or the closest thing he allows himself to one. It’s a warm sound and it goes straight down your spine and pools at the base of it.
"You're thinking about it now?" he asks.
"You asked."
"I did."
"Are you going to ask what I'm thinking about?"
"I think I'd rather you tell me."
Your face is suddenly on fire and you’re grateful for the wall, grateful for the dark, grateful for every centimetre of durasteel that keeps him from seeing the colour you must be. You press your forehead against the metal, close your eyes and feel the steady, mechanical sound of his breathing on the other side.
Fuck it, you think. You’re never going to see him and he’s never going to see you. If you both die in this place tomorrow, the only thing left of this night will be the air it’s moved through.
"I'm thinking about your voice," you say.
"My voice?"
"That's where I'd start."
"Where would you start with it?"
You wet your lips. "I'd want you to keep talking. I'd want you closer to the wall. I'd want…I'd want to put my ear right up against it, and I'd want you to put your mouth right up against it on your side, and just…talk. About anything. I just want it in my head."
You hear him move, hear the scrape of beskar against the wall, and you know, even though you can’t see him, that he’s shifted closer, that the helmet is nearer to you now than it had been a minute ago. That if there were no wall, he would be a hand's breadth away.
"Like this," he says, and his voice is lower than it had been, the vocoder rasp gone soft, almost a whisper, and impossibly intimate for that. "This close enough for you?"
"Yeah," you breathe. "Yeah, that's…that's good."
"Tell me what else."
"I'd…" You swallow. "I'd want you to tell me what you'd do."
"What I'd do?"
"If there wasn't a wall."
He takes his time with the answer. You can hear him thinking, hear him deciding, hear the moment he gives himself permission to say what he wants to say. It comes through the helmet as a small exhale, almost a sigh.
"I'd put my hand on your throat," he says.
Your breath catches.
"Not to hurt you," he adds. "Just to feel it, your pulse. You've got it going pretty fast right now, I bet."
"How can you tell? It's…it's not the only thing it's doing."
"No?"
"No."
"Tell me."
You press your thighs together, the friction of the rough fabric almost too much. You haven’t realised how wound you've been, how three days of fear and adrenaline has sat in you with nowhere to go, and now his voice is a key turning in a lock you haven't known was there.
"I'm wet," you say, quiet, into the wall. "I've been wet since you said my name."
The sound he makes then isn’t modulated. It is – for just a fraction of a second – something raw that slips through underneath the vocoder, a breath that turns into something else, and you want to live in that sound, want to wear it.
"Show me," he says. "Tell me. Whatever you're doing…tell me."
"You first."
"I'm hard."
The directness of it punches the air out of you. He says it the way he said yes, I'm going to kill him, flat and true, a simple fact of the universe.
"Are you touching yourself?" you whisper.
"I want to wait."
"For what?"
"For you."
Oh. Oh. You bite down on the inside of your cheek to keep from making a noise that will carry. Some part of you is still aware that there are guards somewhere in this facility, that Vane is somewhere in this facility, and that anything either of you does or says too loudly could be heard. But the bigger part of you, the part that’s been starving for three days and probably longer than that, is already past caring.
"Together, then," you say.
"Together."
You work your hand under the waistband of your trousers. The fabric’s stiff and unfriendly, but underneath it, you’re soft and slick and so ready that the first brush of your own fingertips makes you gasp into the metal.
"Talk to me," you say. "Mando…keep talking."
"I'm undoing the belt," he says. "Just the cod, the rest stays on. You can't be careless in a place like this."
"Yeah."
"I’ve got my hand on it."
"Tell me…tell me what it looks like."
"It's hard. It's been hard since you asked me about touch. And it’s leaking a little at the tip. I'm wiping it with my thumb."
"Are you…are your hands gloved?"
"I took the right one off – for you.”
You whimper softly, and don’t even try to hide it. You have two fingers circling your clit now, slow, the way he’s talking – slow and deliberate, with that mechanical control that you suspect is the only thing keeping him from coming apart already.
"What about you?" he says. "Tell me what you're doing."
"I've got my hand down my pants. My fingers…” you exhale. “I'm so wet, Mando, I can't…I'm circling, just circling, slow."
"Slow's good."
"I want it to be your hand."
"What would my hand do?"
"It would be slower than mine and heavier. You'd make me wait. You'd make me…you'd make me ask."
"Would you ask?"
"Yes."
"Ask now."
You can’t think because you can barely breathe. The wall against your forehead is wet from your breath, the metal smelling faintly of iron. “Please."
"Please what?"
"Please touch me. Please…please don't stop talking, please put your fingers in me, please…"
"How many?"
"Two, start with two."
"Tell me when."
"Now. Mando, now…"
You push two fingers into yourself and the sound you makes is hot and high and you press your other hand over your own mouth to muffle it. On the other side of the wall you hear a sound through the modulator that’s almost a groan, but not quite. He’s holding it back, but you hear the shape of it, hear the way it cracks the calm in his voice.
"That's it," he says. "Tell me how it feels."
"Tight. Hot. I…Mando, I haven't…I haven't done this in so long, I…"
"I've got you."
"What are you doing?"
"Stroking, slow. Long strokes. My grip's tight, I…fuck…"
That word through the modulator, low and almost involuntary, is the most vulgar thing you’ve ever heard. It makes you clench around your own fingers, and whine into your hand.
"Say it again," you beg.
"Fuck."
"Again."
"You feel that good?"
"Yes."
"What if it was me? What if it was my hand inside you?"
"It is. Right now, it is. Tell me you're thinking about it."
"I am. I'm thinking about…about pushing you up against this wall where you can't move. Where I can hold you there with one hand and use the other…"
"How many?"
"Three. You'd take three."
"I would."
"You would. You'd take everything I gave you, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'd take everything you gave me."
You add the third finger. It’s a stretch, just on the edge of too much, and that edge is exactly where you want to be. Your thumb works your clit in tight circles and you pant against the wall, against your own palm, and on the other side of the durasteel a Mandalorian is stroking his cock to the sound of your voice and you’ve never, in your entire life, been so undone by a man you’ve not seen.
"Mando."
"I'm here."
"I'm close."
"How close?"
"Close. Close, I…keep talking to me, please, please, just…"
"Listen to me," he says, and his voice has dropped to something so quiet it’s almost a breath, almost prayer. "Listen. You feel like silk. You feel like the best thing I've put my hand in in years. If I were there, I'd have my mouth on your throat right now. I'd have my teeth on the place where your pulse is. I wouldn't bite hard, just enough that you'd feel it for days. I'd have my fingers in you all the way to the knuckle, and I'd be working you open, slow, until you were begging me, until you were saying my name…"
"I don't know your name."
There’s a pause. A long one, during which you almost stop breathing.
"Din," he says. "It's Din."
Something cracks open in your chest. He’s given you something he’s not supposed to give, given you something that, by his own laws, no one should have. And he’s given it to you with his hand on his cock and your name in his throat and a wall between you. And you understood, in that moment, that you will never, not as long as you live, hear that name said in that voice again without falling apart.
"Din," you say.
"Yeah."
"Din…Din…"
"Say it again."
"Din, I'm…"
"Come."
You come around your own fingers with his name in your mouth and the metal of the wall against your forehead, and you bite down hard on the heel of your hand to keep from screaming. On the other side of the wall, you hear the shape of his climax through the modulator, the cracked-open sound of a man who hasn’t let anyone hear him in a very long time. It goes on, and on, and on, and when you finally collapse back against the bench, you’re trembling all over, slick with sweat, your fingers still inside yourself, your breath coming in pieces.
For a long time, neither of you speak, but you can hear him breathing. You lie back on the bench with your trousers half-undone and your hand against your chest and your heart hammering up into your palm and listen to him do the same on the other side of the wall.
The dimmed red lights buzz faintly overhead and somewhere far down the corridor, a door cycles. The world is still in here, the way it always was – but underneath the stillness, something new is sitting between you that hadn’t been there an hour ago. You
can feel the weight of it and suspect he can too.
"Din," you say, just to see if you’re allowed to say it again.
"Yeah." His voice is rougher than it has been, the modulator doing its best to flatten it out and failing. "I'm here."
"Are you alright?"
"That's my question."
"I asked first."
"I'm alright."
You smile at the ceiling. There was something so absurdly him about it – a man who has just come apart with a stranger's name in his throat and is now answering you in two-syllable monosyllables, the way he probably answers everyone about everything.
Your fingers are still tacky, your face still hot and you feel, somehow, like you’ve just survived something rather than enjoyed it.
"I'm alright too," you say, in case he’s waiting for it.
"Good."
"Din?"
"Yeah."
"You shouldn't have given me that, should you?"
He’s quiet for a long time and you let him have the quiet. You've learned, over the course of the night, that his silences are a kind of speech, that he’s a man who turns things over thoroughly before he sets them down.
"No," he says finally. "I shouldn't have."
"Are you sorry?"
"No."
"Good."
You roll onto your side, facing the wall, draw your knees up and tuck your hand under your cheek. The metal is warm now where you’ve been pressed against it, warm with the warmth of you, and you imagine that on the other side of it some matching patch of beskar is warm too, warmed by a helmet that’s been resting against the same plane of durasteel for the better part of an hour.
"Are you really going to kill him?" you ask.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow?"
"As soon as I get the chance."
"Will I get to see it?"
"You'll be out of the cell before it happens, I'll see to that."
You close your eyes. The certainty in his voice is a strange thing to lean against, but you lean anyway. It’s the most solid thing you've had to lean against in three days, maybe longer.
"Din?"
"Yeah."
"Tell me something else. Anything, just…keep talking, until I fall asleep."
"What do you want to hear about?"
"Anything that isn't this place."
You hear him shift, heard the soft sigh of the helmet against the metal as he thinks about it and settles him in.
"There's a marsh moon," he says, "out past Trask. There’s nothing on it, no settlements, just water and reeds as far as you can see. The water glows at night. Some kind of bioluminescent thing in it. You walk through it and your boots light up the whole pool, blue, like you're walking on stars."
"Have you been there?"
"Once."
"What did you do there?"
"I refuelled, sat on the ramp of my ship for a while and watched the water."
"Alone?"
"Yeah."
"I'd like to see that."
"I'll show you."
Your chest does a thing it has no business doing, given the circumstances. You press your cheek harder into the wall, not rusting yourself to answer, because if you answer, your voice is going to do something embarrassing.
"Keep going," you say when you can. "Tell me more."
So, he does.
He tells you about a desert at dawn on a planet whose name you don’t catch, where the sand turns the colour of beaten copper in the first light. He tells you about a forest where the trees grow so close together that you have to turn sideways to walk between them, and about a kind of bread they baked on Sorgan that you eat with your hands.
You don't know when you fall asleep. You only know that somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a city built into a cliff face, your eyelids give up, and the last thing you remember is the steady metal-edged sound of his voice telling you about the way the wind moves through the canyon at night and, for the first time in three days, you’re not afraid.
****
You wake to white.
Not red, not the bruised dim red of the night cycle, but the cold flat white of the day lights, full and unflattering and merciless on your gummed-shut eyes. You squint and sit up, your body protesting in a hundred small ways and you put your hand to the wall before you've even fully remembered why.
"Din?"
Nothing.
You frown, sleep still thick in your throat.
"Din,” you cough. “Are you awake?"
Nothing.
The breathing’s gone, that’s the first thing you notice, the absence of the slow, even, modulated breath that has become, over the course of the night, as familiar to you as your own pulse. The cell on the other side of the wall is quiet. Not the quiet of a man sleeping, but the quiet of a room with nothing in it.
Your stomach drops.
You scramble off the bench and go to the front of the cell, pressing your face to the narrow slit in the door, trying to angle your eye to see down the corridor. You can’t see much, but you notice the edge of the next cell's door…
…which is open.
Not forced or blown, rather open the way a door’s open when someone’s unlocked it and walked out. The interior, what little of it you could see, is empty. No figure on the bench, no silhouette by the wall, no beskar.
"Din?"
Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to.
You stand there for a long time with your forehead against the cool metal of your own door, and you try to talk yourself into the reasonable explanations. He’s escaped and he’s going to kill the man who put him here, and a man who says a thing like that the way he said it isn’t a man who stays in a cell longer than he has to.
He said he would see to it that you got out before it happened.
He said I'll show you.
You believe him. You had believed him at the time, and you believed him now, in the cold white morning, with your hair stuck to your face and your hands trembling slightly from cold or hunger or the aftershock of a night you’re still half-convinced you dreamed.
You go back to the bench and sit down. You put your hand against the wall, except it isn’t warm anymore. It’s cold all the way through. He’s been gone for hours, probably, since not long after you fell asleep, because that’s the kind of man he is – the kind
who waits until you’re safe in sleep before he does what he has to do, so that you won’t have to lie awake listening to him do it.
You wonder if he said goodbye. If somewhere in the dark, between one of his sentences about canyons and the next, he said something soft to the wall, and you hadn't heard it because you were already gone. You hope so. You hoped he'd put his gloved hand against the metal one last time and said your name the way he'd said it the night before.
You draw your knees up and wrap your arms around them. Then you press your forehead to them and you breathe, slow, in and out, the way you’d breathed with him in the dark, except now you’re doing it alone, and the rhythm doesn’t match anything but the memory of him.
It’s then that you notice it.
A small thing, set on the floor at the base of the dividing wall, on your side, where it must have been pushed under through the narrow gap between the wall and the floor – a gap you haven’t noticed before, a gap barely wide enough for a finger but wide enough, evidently, for this.
You pick it up.
It’s a sliver of beskar, no bigger than your thumb, cut clean, the edges smoothed. A scrap, probably, from some repair he's done to his own armour a long time ago and kept in a pouch for reasons that are his and not yours. The metal’s warm in your hand, even though it shouldn't have been.
Wrapped around it, twice, is a thin strip of leather. And on the leather, scratched in with the point of something sharp, in letters small and precise and careful, he’s written you a message.
Wait for me.
That’s all. No name, no instructions. no promise more elaborate than those three words, in a hand that has pressed hard enough into the leather to scar it.
You close your fingers around the beskar and shut your eyes. You press your closed fist to your mouth and sit there in the cold white morning of the cell that has held you for three days, and you don’t cry, because you’ve not cried in years and you’re not going to start now. But something in your chest does a thing that’s very close to it – a hot, full, aching thing that wants out and can’t get out and so just sits there, glowing, like the water on his marsh moon.
Down the corridor, very faint, you hear footsteps, heavy ones, coming closer.
You open your hand and look at the sliver of beskar once more, and then you close your fist around it again and tuck it into the inner pocket of your shirt, against your skin, where no search would find it without finding you first. You straighten your spine, wipe your face with the heel of your hand and set your jaw.
You wait.
Because he's asked you to. Because he’s coming back. Because a man like that, a man who said yes the way he said it and I'll show you the way he said it and Din – Din, it's Din – into the dark, to a stranger, through a wall, breaking a vow he has kept his whole life – that man doesn’t say wait for me unless he means it.
The footsteps get closer then stop outside your door.
You hear the soft electronic chirp of a lockpad being overridden – not the heavy clang of guards cycling a door open in the normal way, but the cleaner, quieter click of someone who knows exactly which wires to cross and which ones to leave alone.
The door slides back and there he is. Beskar from helm to boot, the morning light off the corridor lamps making a hard silver line down the curve of his pauldron. Blaster holstered at his thigh, vibroblade still wet at the tip. He fills the doorway like he’s been built to fill it, and the visor turns
toward you. You stood up so fast you nearly crack your head on the underside of the bunk.
"Took your time," you say.
The modulator catches the tired amusement before he's even spoken. "There were six of them."
"And Vane?"
"Five."
You snort because you can’t help it. He steps into the cell, glances at you, glances at the wall, glances – pointedly – at the floor where the sliver of beskar had been. He doesn’t say anything about it because he doesn’t have to. The angle of his helmet says, good, you found it, and the small tilt that follows says come on, and you’re moving before he's finished the gesture, ducking under his arm into the corridor.
"This way," he says.
"I know which way."
"Then go."
You know the layout of this facility because you’ve spent three days memorising the sliver of it you could see through the door slit, and because, it turns out, you also saw the schematics two weeks ago in a briefing on the Crest – a briefing you had pretended to listen to while throwing ration wrappers at the back of his helmet.
You take the left at the junction and he covers your back. Then you take the service stairs down two levels, through the maintenance hatch and out into the cold dawn air of a landing platform where a familiar gunship sits waiting with its ramp already down, because he landed it himself before he came for you and he isn’t the kind of man who leaves a door closed when he might need to run through it.
The ramp clangs shut behind you, the engines spool and you brace yourself against the bulkhead as he takes the pilot's seat and throws the Crest up off the platform with the kind of brutal efficiency he uses for everything. The planet falls away under you, the stars come up, and you’re free.
You stand in the cockpit doorway, breathing.
"Don't say it," he says, without turning around.
"Don't say what?"
"Whatever you're about to say."
"I wasn't going to…"
"You were going to."
"I was going to say thanks."
"No, you weren't."
You laugh, finally. It comes out shaky, the adrenaline leaving you in a slow drain. You let yourself slide down the bulkhead until you’re sitting on the deck with your back against the metal, and you put your hands over your face and laugh until your ribs hurt.
He punches the coordinates in, sets the autopilot, then stands up, slowly, the way he stands up when his back hurts and he doesn’t want you to know. But you know, because you've been flying with him for nine months and you know every small tell his body makes through the armour.
He crouches in front of you and puts his gloved hand on your knee.
"You alright?"
"Yeah."
"Look at me."
You take your hands off your face and look up at the visor. The T-shape of it is the same as it’s always been. The same as it’s been across a hundred campfires and a thousand cantina tables and the dozen times he’s sat across from you in this same hold and cleaned his weapons while you cleaned yours.
The same, and not the same. Because now you know the shape of his voice when it cracks open. Now you know the word he says when he comes.
"We really need to stop doing this," you say finally.
"Doing what?"
"The wall thing. The talking through the wall every time a job goes sideways, and they put us in adjoining cells thing. This is…Din, this is the third time."
"Fourth."
"What?"
"Fourth. You're forgetting Ord Mantell."
"Ord Mantell was a closet, not a cell."
"Still a wall."
"Still a wall," you allow.
He huffs, his hand still on your knee. The leather of the glove is warm from the inside of his fist, and you can feel each individual finger, and that he’s not lifting it away.
"It's because we don't talk like this anywhere else," you say. "You know that, right?"
"I know."
"You only get like that when there's a wall."
"I know."
"It's ridiculous."
"I know."
"Din..." you hesitate. "That's the first time you've told me your real name."
"Yeah."
You lick your lips. "Fuck me."
The hand on your knee tightens, just a fraction, just enough that you know he heard you.
"Don't," he says
"Fuck me. Let’s get it out of our systems. Once, properly, with nothing between us and…and I swear to you, I swear, the next time some Hutt-licking bounty hunter shoves us into a holding block, neither of us is going to need to do the wall thing ever again, because we'll have done it, and the tension will be gone, and we can go back to being…"
"Being what?"
"Whatever we are."
"You think that's how it works?"
"I think it's worth finding out."
You watch the visor, watch the way his shoulders move when he breathes, watch the long, calibrated stillness of a man who’s already decided what he’s going to do and is making himself take an extra second to be sure of it.
"You don't know what you're asking for," he says.
"I do."
"You don't."
"Din, I had three fingers in myself last night while you talked to me through a wall. I think I have some idea."
The sound that comes out of him isn’t a laugh, it’s something rougher, something he doesn’t quite catch in time, and his hand leaves your knee and goes to your jaw, gloved thumb against the corner of your mouth.
You stop breathing.
"Stand up," he says.
You stand he stands with you, and you have to tip your head to keep looking at the visor. He looks down at you for a long moment, and then his other hand comes up and he hooks one gloved finger under the collar of your shirt and tugs, gently, until you take a step toward him, and another, and then his back is against the bulkhead and yours is against him and his arm is around your waist.
"Once," he says.
"Once."
"And it doesn't fix anything."
"Probably not."
"And you're going to have to be quiet, because the autopilot doesn't know what to do if you scream and trip the proximity alarms."
"Din, I am going to scream."
"Then I'll cover your mouth."
You go hot all the way through and feel your own pulse in places that have no business having a pulse. You press your forehead against the cold beskar of his chest plate breathe in the smell of him – leather and weapon oil and metal warmed by the body underneath.
"Bed. Bunk. Somewhere. Now."
He picks you up, one arm under your thighs and the other across your back, like you weigh nothing, like he's been waiting a long time for the excuse to find out exactly how much you weigh. He carries you down the short ladder into the hold and through to the narrow alcove where his bunk is set into the wall and sets you down on the edge of it. Then he stands between your knees and starts, with great deliberation, to undress.
The pauldrons came off first, heavy clunks against the deck. Then the vambraces, the chest plate, the cuirass, the thigh plates. He sets them all aside in the order he always sets them, the order you’ve watched him set them in a hundred times, and the familiarity of the ritual mixes with the unfamiliarity of what’s happening making your head spin a little.
The flight suit comes off next. Black, snug, all the seams you’ve stared at across many a hold while pretending to read. He peels it down to his waist and you see the long lean torso of him, scarred in a dozen places, a constellation of old hurt, a body that has been keeping itself alive for a long time and has the receipts.
There’s scant hair across his chest, dark and soft-looking, narrowing down toward his waistband and a long pale scar that wraps around his ribs like a vine. There’s a tattoo, small, on the inside of his left bicep – a mythosaur skull, no bigger than your thumb – that you have absolutely never known exists.
He keeps going. Flight suit all the way off, boots, trousers and the under-layer beneath. Everything. Every stitch.
Except the helmet.
He stands there in the low light of the bunk alcove, completely naked from the neck down, hard already, his cock heavy against his thigh, and the beskar catches in the dim light off the bulkhead in a way that makes the helmet seem almost a separate creature from the body that’s offering itself to you.
"Din...”
"No."
"I didn't…"
"You were going to."
"I wasn't…"
"You were."
"...I was."
"No."
"Just the eyes. Just…just let me see your eyes."
"No."
"Please."
"No."
He says it gently with no heat in it, as a feature of the universe, not a refusal of you. And then he steps closer and takes the hem of your shirt in both bare hands and pulls it off you, slow, then drops it on the floor on top of his own.
"You have me," he says. "All of me. Just not that."
"Din…"
"All of me," he says again, and he puts his bare hand flat over your sternum, between your breasts, hot palm and rough fingertips against your skin, and you forget what you had been going to say. "Everything else. You can have everything else. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I understand."
"Then take it."
He kisses you.
Or…the helmet does. He presses the cool flat front of the beskar to your forehead first, the way he had once or twice before in moments you’ve not allowed yourself to think too hard about. Then he tilts his head and brings it lower, pressing the brow of the helm to your mouth, just for a moment, just enough that you feel the cold kiss of the metal on your lips, and then his hand is sliding up to cradle the back of your neck and he tips you back onto the bunk.
He kisses everything else with his hands.
The pads of his fingers move down the line of your throat. His thumb skates across your collarbone. His palm cups the underside of your breast and his mouth – the front of the helmet, the smooth lower edge – drags slow against your nipple, cool and unyielding, and you arch up off the bunk with a noise that you try, and fail, to keep quiet.
"Shh," he says.
"I can't…"
"You can."
"I can't…"
His hand comes up and his fingers slip into your mouth. Two of them, the same two, and you bite down and moan around them and he makes a low sound through the modulator.
"Good. Like that. Quiet."
He keeps going down, the helmet tracking down the line of your sternum, the soft place under your ribs and the flat of your stomach. His other hand works your trousers open and shoves them down. You kick them off, and your underthings with them, and then you’re naked under him, and the cold metal of the helmet presses against the hot skin of your inner thigh and the contrast makes you whimper around his fingers.
"Din…"
He doesn’t answer with words. He answers by taking his fingers out of your mouth and replacing them, slowly, between your legs. Two fingers, the way you’d asked for last night. He finds you slick and ready and he hisses, audibly, through the modulator.
"All night," he says. "Like this?"
"Most of it."
"Greedy."
"For you, just for you."
The fingers push in slowly, deeper than yours had gone, longer, more deliberate, and you make a sound that starts high and would go higher but for him pressing the front of the helmet to your sternum.
“Quiet, I told you."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder."
He fucks you on his fingers for what feels like a small eternity. Long, slow, brutal strokes, his thumb finding your clit with the precision of a man who knows where every nerve in a body lives and where to put pressure on each of them. You’re drenched, shaking, biting the back of your own wrist to stay quiet and he’s watching you do it, the visor angled down at your face the whole time, and you know – you know – that behind that visor his eyes are on your mouth.
"Din…Din, please, I want…"
"Tell me."
"You inside me, properly. Now."
He takes his hand away and shifts upwards, bracing one hand on the bunk beside your head and the other on his cock. You feel the blunt heat of him drag through your slickness and your hips buck up of their own accord and he makes a low strangled sound.
"Wait. Wait, look at me."
You look at the visor.
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"Din."
"Say it."
"I'm sure. Fuck me, please."
He pushes in slow, so slow you think you’re going to die of it. He pushes in to the hilt and then holds there, his forehead – the brow of the helmet – against yours, his bare chest against your bare chest, his hand on your jaw and the metallic rasp of his breathing the loudest thing in the world. You can feel him trembling, just slightly, with the effort of not moving.
"Alright?" he asks.
"Move."
"Alright?"
"Move, Din…"
He moves the way he does everything – efficiently, without waste, with the calibrated intensity of a man who’s decided what he’s going to do and is now doing exactly that, and nothing else, and nothing less. He sets a rhythm that’s deep and steady and merciless, and you wrap your legs around his hips and your arms around his shoulders and press your face to the side of the helmet, to the place where his ear would be, and you say his name into the beskar over and over again because you can’t say it into his mouth.
"Din…"
"I'm here."
"Din, harder…"
"You'll bruise."
"I want to bruise. Please, Din, please…"
He fucks you harder. He braces both hands on the bunk now, one on either side of your head, and drives into you with the long, full strokes of a man who’s been holding himself in check for nine months and has finally been given permission to stop. The headboard of the bunk knocks, softly, against the bulkhead in time with each thrust, and your hands roam his back as you map him by feel.
The helmet stays on.
You beg, somewhere in the middle of it. When the pleasure has stripped your inhibitions down to nothing, you put your hands on the sides of the helmet and say, "Please, Din, please, just…just let me see…" and he catches your wrists in one hand and pins them above your head.
"No. Not that. Anything else. Anything else but that."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
So, you take the anything. You take his hand off your wrists and put it around your throat, light, the way he said he would in the dark. You feel his fingers settle there, careful, finding the pulse, and he makes a sound that’s almost a groan, almost the sound you heard through the wall last night, and his thrusts falters for one stroke and then comes back harder.
"Like that?" he asks.
"Like that. Like that. Din…"
"You're close."
"Yes."
"Stay quiet."
"I can't…"
"You can."
He puts his other hand over your mouth. Bare, hot, dry and rough and you moan into it. He fucks you through it, hips snapping against yours in a rhythm that’s losing its precision, finally, after how long you can’t say, and you feel him start to come undone above you – felt the small involuntary movements he’s no longer controlling, feel the way his head bows and the helmet presses to your temple, feel the choked sound through the modulator that you’ve now heard five times in your life and will, you suspect, hear a great many more times before you’re done with each other.
"Come for me," he says, against your ear, against the metal between your ear and his mouth. "Now. Now, sweetheart, now…"
You come around him with his hand over your mouth, his other hand at your throat, his cock buried to the hilt and his forehead against yours, and you scream into his palm. He feels you go – feels every pulse of you around him – and he makes a sound you’ve never heard him make before, a real one, a whole one, unmodulated and choked and human, as he comes inside you, hard, in long pulses that you feel all the way up into your stomach.
Then he collapses – not all the way, catching himself on one elbow carefully – but his full weight comes down on you in a way it hasn’t, and the beskar of the helmet rests cool against the side of your face. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and hold him, his bare back slick under your palms, his breathing wreckage.
"Din," you say when you can.
"Yeah."
"You called me sweetheart."
He freezes fractionally. "I did."
"And...I lied."
"About what?"
"The tension. It's not gone."
His forehead – the brow of the helmet – presses harder against yours.
"No," he agrees. "It's not."
"What are we going to do about that?"
"Try again."
"Now?"
"Give me five minutes."
You laugh into the side of his helmet and feel his shoulders shake, just a little. You run your hand up the back of his neck to the very edge of the helmet – the place where the beskar meets the skin – and let your fingertips rest there.
He doesn’t stop you or pull away. He lets your fingers stay at the line where his hidden self begins, and he lets you keep them there, and that, you understand, is a different kind of yes.
You take it, close your eyes and keep your hand where it is.
Five minutes, he said.
You can wait five minutes.
You have, you reflect, gotten very good at waiting for him.