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The bookstore on Pantora smells like dust and old binding glue, the kind of smell that settles into your lungs and makes you feel like you've stepped backward through a hundred years. You like it and you like the quiet of it too, the way the proprietor – a Pantoran woman with hair the colour of crushed berries – simply nods at you when you walk in and goes back to her work, leaving you to wander the narrow aisles alone.
Well, not quite alone. Grogu rides in the satchel against your chest, his ears twitching at every new sound, his enormous black eyes drinking in the shelves that tower above him like canyon walls. Every so often a little three-fingered hand reaches up to bat at a spine, and you have to gently catch his wrist before he sends an entire row of antique tomes crashing down.
"Easy, womp rat," you murmur, and he coos at you, entirely unrepentant.
You came here for him, after all, for something to read to him at night when Din is out doing whatever it is Din does – the bounties, the favours, the long silences spent staring at the horizon like it owes him money. Grogu doesn't sleep easily most nights and neither do you, if you're honest, but the kid responds to your voice, to the rhythm of words even when he can't understand them and so you've been collecting books. Children's stories, mostly, picture books with bright illustrations that he likes to gum the corners of.
You've already got an armful when you find it.
It's tucked between a star-chart atlas and a thin volume of Twi'leki poetry, its spine cracked and faded, the title embossed in a language you half-recognise and half don't. You only pull it out because the symbol on the cover catches your eye – a stylized helmet, the T-shaped visor unmistakable even rendered in tarnished silver foil.
Aspects of the Mandalorian Peoples: Custom, Creed, and Clan.
Your breath does something funny in your chest and you glance down at Grogu, as if he might tell you to put it back. He just blinks at you and reaches for it, his little hand opening and closing.
"Yeah," you say softly. "Yeah, me too."
****
You don't tell Din about the book at first.
It sits in your pack for three days, riding under the seat of the co-pilot’s chair that’s become your own. You don't tell him because you're not sure how to explain why you bought it, and you're even less sure how to explain the strange flutter you get every time you think about reading it.
The thing about you and Din is that you don't talk.
Well, you talk about hyperspace routes and ration packs and whether Grogu's eaten something he shouldn't have again. You talk about the weather on whatever rock you've landed on, about the temperament of a particular species and the merits of disruptor pistols versus blasters. You talk about everything except the one thing that hangs in the recycled air between you like smoke.
You don’t talk about the fact that you share his bed.
You can’t even pinpoint for sure when it started. There wasn't a moment, a confession, a turning point. There was just one night, both of you exhausted and wired after a job gone sideways, with the adrenaline needing somewhere to go. His mouth was on yours before either of you could think better of it. The helmet, you remember, came off in the dark, because that's his way – he'll bare his face to you only when the lights are out, only when you can't see, his rules and his creed and his complicated heart all wrapped up in that one concession.
And it kept happening, night after night, his hands learning your body like a map he intended to memorise. Your name – the only times he ever says your name with any softness – breathed against your throat in the black.
But you've never talked about it, not once. In the daylight he's Mando again, helmeted and distant, and you're his crewmate, his partner in the loose practical sense, the woman who helps him keep his foundling alive. You both pretend the nights don't exist because it's easier that way – safer.
If you don't name a thing, it can't be taken from you, can't be ruined by clumsy words.
You tell yourself you're fine with it.
You tell yourself a lot of things.
****
You start reading the book on the fourth night, after Grogu is finally down, his little chest rising and falling in the hammock you rigged near the bunk. Din is out – a meeting with a contact, supposedly, the kind of venture he doesn't take you on – and you've got the dim glow of a single lamp and the hum of the ship's systems for company.
You tell yourself you're reading it to impress him.
You imagine it, dropping some piece of Mandalorian lore into conversation, casual as anything, watching the way his shoulders shift when you surprise him. He gives so little away, Din, the helmet sees to that. But you've learned to read him in other ways – the angle of his head, the set of his hands, the rare exhale of breath that means he's amused. You want, badly, to be someone who knows him, who understands the strange architecture of his world.
So, you read.
You read about the Resol'nare, the six tenets that bind every Mandalorian to the Creed. About the language, Mando'a, with its harsh beautiful consonants. About the forging of beskar and the meaning of the colours painted on armour. You file it all away, hungry for it, the way you've been hungry for any piece of him he'll give you.
You read about aliit – family, clan. About how a Mandalorian's family isn't defined by blood but by oath, by choice, by the words Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum – I know you forever. A vow that makes a parent of a stranger and a child of a foundling.
You think of Grogu, asleep in his hammock, of the way Din lifted him that first time, this strange green creature, and never once looked back.
And then you turn the page, and find the section on courtship and union, and your whole understanding of the last several months tilts ninety degrees on its axis.
You read it three times to be sure you're not misunderstanding.
The passage is academic, dry, written by some long-dead anthropologist with a fondness for footnotes. But the meaning is clear enough, and it cuts through you like cold water.
Among the traditional Mandalorian clans, intimate relations are subject to a strict and deeply held set of customs. The act of consummation – specifically, penetrative union – is regarded as sacred, reserved exclusively for one's chosen mate. A Mandalorian warrior, regardless of gender, will engage in such an act only with the partner they have selected to share their bloodline, their clan, their life. To take a mate in this fullest sense is understood as a declaration tantamount to marriage. Casual physical affection, even of an intimate nature, may be exchanged more freely, but the final act is given only once and given for life, to the one a Mandalorian intends to make the parent of their children.
You stare at the words until they swim and think about the last several months. About the dark, and his hands, and his mouth, and…
About what he does. About what he doesn't do.
Because in all the nights you've shared his bed, in all the heat and the breathless dark, Din has never once finished the way you assume he wants to. He's brought you to pieces with his fingers and his tongue, his low voice murmuring filth into your skin that makes you flush even now to remember. He's let you take him in your hand, in your mouth, and he's shuddered apart under your touch with a groan that you've memorised like a favourite song.
But he's never once done the thing you keep waiting for him to do. the thing you assume, with a faint and private hurt, that he simply doesn't want with you. You tell yourself he's being careful, that a man who lives by the blaster doesn't go around risking a pregnancy on a ship in the middle of a war.
You tell yourself he doesn;t want you, not really, not the whole way.
And now you understand that it was never about that at all.
The final act is given only once and given for life.
He hasn't refused you because he doesn't want you. He's refused you because, in his world, that act means something. Because it's a vow he hasn't made. Because to do it would be to say, in the only language his creed allows, I choose you. I will make you the mother of my clan. I know you forever.
Your eyes sting and you blink hard, furious at yourself, the words on the page blurring.
He hasn't given you that.
You think about everything that’s happened between you, recast in this new light. The way he pulls you to his bunk every night without fail. The way he holds you afterward, his arm heavy across your waist, his bare face pressed into your hair in the dark where you can't see but can feel, the scrape of stubble against your neck and the warmth of his breath. The way he's never once turned you away. The way he's let you closer than anyone, you suspect, has been in years.
He's been giving you everything he can give without breaking his own creed.
He's been holding the line at the one thing that would bind him to you, not because he doesn't want it, you realise, but because that decision matters. Because in his world you don't just fall into that. You choose it. You vow it.
And he hasn't been able to make himself stop wanting you at the door of it.
You set the book down with hands that aren't entirely steady.
Grogu shifts in his hammock, makes a small sleepy sound, and settles again and you sit there in the dim light for a long, long time, your heart doing something complicated and enormous behind your ribs.
****
He comes back near midnight.
You hear the ramp lower, the heavy familiar tread of his boots and the hiss of the hatch sealing behind him. You've moved to the bunk by then, the book tucked back into your pack, your knees drawn up and your back against the bulkhead. You can’t sleep, unsure you even could if you tried. There's too much moving through you – a tide of feeling you don't have words for, that you're not sure you'd say even if you did.
Din ducks through the hatch into the small living space, and you watch the way his helmet turns, the small almost-imperceptible drop of tension from his shoulders when he sees you. He always does that. You've noticed it for months without understanding what it means. He's looking for you, you realise now. He comes home and the first thing he does is look for you.
"Hey," you say, your voice rougher than intended.
"Hey." He checks on Grogu first, a quick glance at the hammock, then he turns to you. "You're up late."
"Couldn't sleep."
He crosses to the bunk and starts the ritual you know by heart. The vambraces first, unclasped and set aside with care, then the pauldrons. He works methodically, the beskar coming away piece by piece, and you watch him the way you always watch him. But tonight there's something new in your looking. Tonight you're seeing him.
"Din.”
He pauses, the way he always does when you use his name. It's another thing you never understood until now. His name – his real name, the one he gave you in the dark months ago – is a kind of intimacy too. A thing he doesn't give freely.
"Mm?"
You open your mouth, intending to impress him. Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum, you were going to say, all easy and smug. But the words won't come. The casual approach has evaporated entirely, burned away by everything sitting in your chest.
"I bought a book," you say instead.
His helmet tilts. "Okay."
"About…about Mandalorians. I thought…" You laugh, and it comes out shaky. "I thought I'd learn some things to impress you. Drop some lore into conversation, you know. Be cool about it."
He goes very still, the kind of still he gets when he's listening hard, when something matters.
"And?" he says, carefully.
"And I read a part about…"
You can't quite look at him. You stare at the beskar laid out on the bunk, the dull gleam of it in the low light.
"About how Mandalorians…about what it means when you…"
The words tangle and you try again.
"About what penetrative sex means in your culture."
The silence that follows is total. You make yourself look up and see that he hasn't moved. The helmet faces you, that black visor giving away nothing, but his hands have gone still at his sides and there's a tension in the line of his body now, a coiled stillness that wasn't there a moment ago.
"I see," he says. The modulator flattens his voice, but you've learned to hear past it, and there's something underneath it now, something raw.
"Is it true?" you ask softly.
"Yes."
The single word lands in the middle of your chest and detonates.
"So, all this time…"
Your voice cracks but you press on anyway, because you've started and can't stop now. The dam's broken and everything's pouring out.
"All this time I thought…I thought you didn't want me, not all the way. I thought you were being careful, or…or you just didn't…and I never said anything because we don't talk, we never talk, and I told myself I was fine with it, I told myself I didn't care, but I…" You drag in a breath. "And it was never that at all, was it?"
He lets out a breath, a low rush of static through the modulator.
"No," he says. "It was never that."
He reaches up and for one heart-stopping moment you think he's going to take the helmet off here, in the light, where you can see. But he doesn't. His hand stops at the seal and stays there, his fingers resting against the beskar, and you understand that he's wrestling with something.
"You want me to explain," he says.
"I want…"
You don't know what you want. You want everything.
"I want you to talk to me. For once. Just…talk to me, Din."
He sits down on the edge of the bunk, the mattress dipping with his weight. He's close enough now that you can touch him, and you have to fold your hands together in your lap to keep from doing it.
"In my creed," he says slowly, "there are things you don't…give away. Things that mean too much." His helmet turns toward you. "My face. My name. You have both of those."
Your breath catches.
"And the other thing. That…it's the same. It's not…it's not casual for us. It's the thing you do when you've…when you've decided. When you've chosen someone for your clan. For your life."
He pauses.
"When you want to make a family with them."
The word family hangs there and you think of Grogu in his hammock. The three of you, crammed into this little ship, this strange unconventional thing you've built without ever naming it.
"You haven't done that with me."
"No."
The word should hurt and you wait for it to hurt – only it doesn’t.
"Not because I don't want to."
You go very still.
"You think I don't…"
He stops then starts again, his gloved hand coming up to hover then settle, carefully, against the side of your face. You lean into it without thinking, turning your cheek into the worn leather of his palm.
"Every night," he says, low and rough, all the modulation in the galaxy unable to hide the thing underneath. "Every single night I have to stop myself. You have no idea. You think I'm being careful. You think I don't want you. Mesh'la…" The Mando'a word falls out of him like it surprises even him. "You're killing me."
Heat floods through you, head to foot.
"Mesh'la," you repeat. "What does that mean?"
You can feel the tension in his hand against your face.
"Beautiful," he says.
You make a small sound you can't help.
"Then why haven't you?" you whisper.
His thumb moves against your cheekbone. "Because once I do, there's no taking it back. Not for me. It's not…it's not just sex, for us, do you understand? It's a vow. It would mean…"
His voice drops, almost too quiet for the modulator to catch.
"It would mean you're mine and I'm yours. That this…" his other hand gestures, takes in the ship, the hammock, the sleeping kid, the whole strange shape of your lives, "…is real. Forever. Aliit. Family. And I didn't know if you wanted that. With me, with us."
You stare at the helmet, at the place where his eyes must be, somewhere behind the visor, watching you with an intensity you can feel even if you can't see it.
"You idiot," you say, and your voice breaks on it as you cry and laugh at the same time, which is humiliating, but you can't stop. "You absolute idiot. You think I don't…Din, I've been sharing your bed for months. I've been raising your kid. I make sure you eat. I patch you up when you come back bleeding and won't tell me what happened. What did you think that was?"
"I thought maybe you were just…”
"Just what? Killing time? On a war-torn rock in the middle of nowhere?"
You shake your head, and his hand moves with you, refusing to let go of your face.
"I'm here because of you. Because of him. Because somewhere along the way this stopped being a job and started being…"
Now it's your turn to struggle for the word, and you find it, the one from the book, the one that's been sitting in your chest all night like a coal.
"Aliit. This is my family. You're my family. I just…I didn't think I was allowed to say it. We never talk."
"We're talking now," he says.
"Yeah," you let out a watery laugh. "We're really doing it, huh. Look at us."
And then – slowly, deliberately – his hand leaves your face, both his hands rise to his helmet, and your breath stops in your throat.
The light is on, and his hands are at the seal of the helmet, and you realise what he's about to do, and the enormity of it crashes over you.
"Din," you whisper. "The light…"
"I know," he says.
"You don't have to…"
"I know," he says again, and there's a steadiness in it now, a certainty that wasn't there before. "I want to. I want to look at you. I want you to look at me when I say it."
There's a hiss of releasing pressure, the helmet lifts and there he is.
You've felt his face in the dark a hundred times – traced the line of his nose, the rough scrape of his jaw, the soft surprise of his mouth – but you've never seen it, not like this, not with light.
You take in his dark hair, mussed and damp at the temples. His brown eyes, deep and warm and tired, with creases at the corners that speak of years of squinting against suns and sand. a scar threading through one eyebrow. His nose has clearly been broken at least once and his mouth is softer than the rest of him, parted now as he looks at you, drinking you in like he's the one who's been starving.
He's beautiful. He's so beautiful it hurts.
"There you are," you breathe.
"Here I am," he says, and his voice without the modulator is lower, rougher, and achingly human. He sets the helmet aside on the bunk, and then both his hands come back to your face, bare leather cradling your jaw, his thumbs sweeping the tears from under your eyes. "Don't cry."
"I'm not crying," you lie.
"You're crying," he says, and there's the ghost of a smile at the corner of that mouth. "Mesh'la, stop. You'll set me off."
"You don't cry."
"You don't know what I do," he says. "You've never seen my face."
"I'm seeing it now."
"Yes, you are." His eyes move over you, every feature, like he's memorising you the way he's let you memorise him in the dark. "You are."
And then he says it.
"Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum," he murmurs, the Mando'a rolling off his tongue like a prayer, and your heart stops entirely. "I know you forever."
His forehead drops to rest against yours, his nose bumping yours gently, his breath warm against your lips.
"If you want it, if you want me, both of us…this whole disaster." His thumb strokes your cheek. "I'm asking. I should've asked a long time ago but I'm asking now."
You can barely speak. "Yes," you manage. "Yes, you idiot, yes."
He kisses you and it’s different with the light on. It's different now that you can see him, now that you know what this means to him, now that the air between you has finally – finally – been filled with all the words you've both been swallowing for months.
His mouth moves against yours slow and deep and certain, no longer the desperate frantic thing of stolen nights but something unhurried, something with all the time in the world ahead of it. His hand slides into your hair whilst yours fists in the soft fabric of the shirt he wears beneath the armour, dragging him closer, and he comes willingly, the bunk creaking as his weight settles over you.
"Wait," he murmurs against your mouth, pulling back just far enough to look at you, and there's something almost shy in those brown eyes now, something raw. "You understand what I'm…what this means. If we…"
"I read the book," you whisper. "I know what it means."
"Once I do this, you're mine. That's…that's not a thing I undo. That's the rest of my life. No-one else gets to have you. No-one else gets to so much as come near you…"
"Good," you say fiercely. "Good, that's what I want. That's all I've ever wanted. I just didn't know I was allowed to ask."
Something breaks open in his face – relief, want, a tenderness so naked it makes your chest ache – and then his mouth is on yours again, harder now, hungrier, all that careful restraint of all those careful nights finally falling away.
He undresses you slowly, with the light on, with his eyes on you the whole time, and the difference undoes you. Every place his gaze lands feels branded. He peels your shirt up over your head and just looks, his throat working, his bare hands settling at your waist like he can't believe he's allowed to touch.
"You've seen me before," you say, suddenly self-conscious under the warmth of those eyes.
"Not like this," he says. "Never like this." His palm slides up your ribs, slow and reverent. "I've felt you in the dark a hundred times. I didn't…" His thumb brushes the underside of your breast, and you shiver. "I didn't know you looked like this. Mesh'la."
He lowers his mouth to your skin and you feel the scrape of his stubble against your collarbone and your sternum, then his lips close over your nipple and you arch up into him with a gasp you can't bite back. His hand is at your waistband now, working the fastening, you lift your hips to help him, and then his fingers are sliding down, between your thighs, into the slick heat of you, and you both groan at once at how wet you already are.
"All this just from talking?" he murmurs against your breast, and there's that smile again, the one you can feel it against your skin.
"Shut up," you breathe.
"Make me," he says, and you do, you drag his face up to yours and kiss him filthy and deep while his fingers work you open, two of them sliding into you, the heel of his palm grinding against your clit in slow firm circles that have you rocking helplessly against his hand.
He knows your body. Months of dark nights have taught him exactly how to take you apart, and he does it now without mercy, his fingers curling inside you, his thumb finding the spot that makes your thighs shake.
"Din…" you gasp. "Din, please…I don't want to come on your hand, I want…"
"I know," he says. "I know what you want."
He pulls his fingers free, making you whimper at the loss, and he kneels up to strip out of the rest of his clothes. You watch him with the light on, watch him bare himself to you completely for the first time – the broad chest, the lean muscle, the dark hair trailing down his stomach, and lower, where he's already hard and heavy and flushed, thick enough that your mouth goes dry looking at it.
You reach for him. He lets you wrap your hand around him, lets you stroke once, twice, his eyes fluttering and a low groan tearing out of his unmodulated throat – and that sound, his real voice raw with want, is filthier than anything you've ever heard.
"Stop," he grits out, catching your wrist. "Stop, or this is over before it starts. I've waited…" He breaks off, shaking his head. "You don't know how long I've waited for this."
"Then have it," you whisper, drawing him down over you, opening for him, wrapping your legs around his hips. "I'm yours. Isn't that what you said? So have me. Finally."
He settles between your thighs. You feel the blunt heat of him press against you, and he goes still, looking down at you, his eyes locked on yours, and you understand that this is the moment – the vow, the binding, the thing his whole creed has been holding in reserve all this time.
He’s giving you his virginity.
"Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum," he says again, soft, watching your face.
"I know you forever," you whisper back.
Then he pushes into you and the stretch of it punches the breath from your lungs. He's never done this, never given you this, and the fullness is overwhelming, the slow relentless press of him sinking into you inch by inch until he's seated to the hilt, until you can feel him everywhere, until there's nothing between you at all. He drops his forehead to yours, panting, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding still.
"Kriff," he breathes. "Kriff, you feel…" He can't finish. His hips draw back and roll forward again, slow and deep, and you both cry out. "I'm not going to last. I've waited too long, I can't…"
"It's okay," you gasp, your nails dragging down his back. "It's okay, I'm close too, just…just like that, Din, just like that…"
He moves over you, into you, his bare face pressed to yours so you can feel every gasp and groan, every word of broken Mando'a that spills out of him as he loses himself in you. The light's still on and you can see all of it – the clench of his jaw, the flutter of his lashes, the raw open wonder on his face like he can't believe this is real, like he can't believe you're real, like he's been waiting his whole guarded life for exactly this and can't believe he's finally allowed to have it.
"Mine," he gasps against your mouth, the word torn loose, helpless. "You're mine, say it…"
"Yours," you groan. "I'm yours, you're mine, Din…"
The coil inside you snaps. You come around him with a cry, your whole body clenching tight, and he groans your name – your name, soft and broken and human – and follows you over, his hips stuttering, his arms crushing you to him as he spills into you, deep, complete, holding nothing back for the first time.
For the first time giving you all of it.
You hold each other in the aftermath, shaking, his face buried in your neck, your fingers tangled in his damp hair. The ship hums around you. Grogu sleeps on in his hammock, blissfully unaware that his family just became, in the only language that matters to the man who made it, official.
"We should've talked months ago," you murmur into his hair.
You feel him huff a laugh against your throat. "Yes," he admits, "we're not good at it."
"We can practice."
He lifts his head and looks at you, that soft mouth curving in something that's almost, almost a real smile.
"Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum," he says again, just because he can now, just because it's true.
You pull him back down and kiss it off his lips.