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The Mandalorian floats in the middle of the lake, bathed in a muggy green glow from the canopy of trees above. They stretch tall and skinny, growing from the banks all around them, spreading their fan-like limbs out to shelter the water below from the greedy, endless grasp of the sky.
The air is still and close, heavy with moisture, and it makes the his cowl stick to his neck; already, Mando is tempted to tug at the cloak wrapped around his collar, but self-control and a sense of insecurity, of fragility prevents him.
There is nothing fragile about the Mandalorian, nothing gentle, nothing soft. Yet, lying in the bottom of the hollowed-out, shaped and varnished log as it drifts on the nonexistent current, bathed in coniferous shadow, makes him feel as if there could be.
He is not alone. His companion, the Girl, you - he still doesn’t know what to make of you. Hard, sharp corners where he expects you to be yielding, or timid, and the quiet wisdom and endless patience where he expects the anger, the fire.
You have no reason to be with him, no reason to follow - and yet here you are, leading him more than he knows.
Somehow, you managed to lead him out here, into the middle of a body of deep, dark water with only a tree trunk separating him from the depths.
He’s beginning to think this was a bad idea.
At least it wasn’t his.
You’re smiling, your eyes closed, the fan of your eyelashes outlined against your cheeks. Mando watches you as you open them, as you turn to the water, a joy and spark in your eyes he can’t fathom, has never experienced. He watches from his spot spread out by the bow, and underneath the confines of his helmet, he frowns.
You grin at him, oblivious to his ire. It’s never bothered him before. Today, it does.
When you lean over the side of the boat and drag your fingers in the water, it bothers him even more.
“Hey!” You yelp as his fingers close around your upper arm and yank you back. The boat rocks with the combined movement, and Mando is glad you cannot see the way he clenches his teeth together. “What are you doing? You trying to make us capsize?”
There it is. The edge.
“No, but you could be - leaning over the edge like that,” he says matter-of-factly, his filtered voice betraying none of his anxiety. You huff, exaggerated, and sit back; he lets you go but does not do the same. He hovers touchably close, and from this distance you can see only your reflection in the shine of his Beskar. Not a scratch or a dent in the unmarred, silver surface.
Just you.
“It doesn’t matter if I fall in,” you tell him. “There’s nothing dangerous in these waters. I’ll just swim to shore.”
Mando doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say, ‘but if I fall in?’ but he watches as your eyes rake down, taking him in from his thighguards to his pauldrons, and then settling on his visor again.
“I guess you’d sink, though,” you capitulate then, biting your lip. “Do you know how to swim?”
Mando is silent, but he does finally lean back. He settles himself, spreading out with his arms across the varnished rim of the boat. Deliberately open, although everything else about him is not.
“You don’t, do you?” It’s not a teasing note to your voice, not a jibe - just disbelief. “Nobody taught you how to swim?”
Mando shakes his head, an infinitesimal back-and-forth twitch of the helm, but you catch it anyway - of course you do. And you’re about to open your mouth and speak again, question or judge, so he sees the need to interrupt and speak. For once.
“They taught me to bear the weight of the armor,” he says. “They taught me to walk, to run." No nostalgia, just facts. "To fight...to fly.”
“But not to swim.”
Another twitch of the helmet. “Not to swim,” he confirms.
You smile, and sit up on your knees, shuffling closer to him until your thigh touches his boot. “You should try it sometime.”
“No.”
“Without the armor, I mean. It’s fun. It’s like floating.”
“There’s zero G for that.”
“Not like zero G. It’s like...like you’re on a pillow. Or in a cloud. Being cradled.” You spread your arms, tilt your head back and sigh like you can feel it right now. Mando wonders if he should grab you again to stop you from diving into the water yourself. “Like being a child again.”
He stiffens. A child. He remembers wide, dark eyes, a wrinkled green forehead, an expression of absolute, unearned trust. He remembers a tiny little body cradled in the crook of his arm. The brush of a batwing ear over his Beskar. The soft, nonsense babbling noises in the star-studded night of the cockpit of the Razor Crest.
He remembers the one who taught him more than he could ever learn on his own.
“Mando?” Your voice brings Din back to himself, and when he raises his head he is surprised to see you right there. You are sitting half-straddling his knee, your hands hovering just above his chest as you lean in, afraid to touch him.
But worried.
“What?” He tries to keep the aggression out of his tone, grasping onto his usual calm like a lifeline, but he doesn’t think it works. You tilt your head and chew your lip; doesn’t that hurt? And you look at him like you’re trying to figure out what he’s thinking, as if his thoughts might scroll across his visor like a computer read-out.
“You went away for a second there,” you say, and he hates the concern in your voice, wants to drown it in this Maker-forsaken muddy puddle of water you’re floating in. But he remains calm and still. Like the water.
“No I didn’t. I’m fine,” he grinds out. You touch his chest, his Beskar, gently.
Such gentle touches should ignite, should burn away from his subsumed steel flesh, boiled and scoured away by his sin, his disloyalty, the broken oozing wounds of his betrayal an eroding acid froth to keep all that is good away. He does not deserve it. Has never really deserved any of it - but along with the Child, with Grogu, he stole those few soft and quiet moments that wore away at the bedrock of his Creed like drops of water forming a channel in a rock.
And here you are, like a waterfall.
Din grabs your shoulder, unsure if it’s to push you away or pull you closer, but he does neither. Just holds you there, hovering over him.
The boat passes below a crack in the canopy above, admitting rays of golden sunlight through and holding them prisoner in your hair. He watches the shimmer, mesmerized, blinded by the reflection of his Beskar in your eyes.
And he does not see a sinner. He sees a man.
He reaches out with his other hand, the one not holding you back like you’re an untamed animal. He brushes a strand of your hair from your face and the leather of his gloves is too rough for its smooth, perfect surface. But you close your eyes and lean into it, chasing the clumsiness of his heavy, battle-worn fingers as if they are capable of handling something so delicate, so breakable.
But you are tougher than he thinks.
So tough that when you reach up to take his hand, he does not stop you. So tough that you pull his glove from his fingers one-by-one, without resistance. So tough that he does not have the will to deny you when you cradle his bare hand in both of yours, holding his wrist, your forefinger and thumb resting just below his vambrace where weapons, terrible cruel weapons lie in wait.
He does not think of those as your fingertips make contact with his skin, as they trace the path of his veins from the meat of his palm all the way up to the inside of his knuckles. No heavier than a butterfly testing the surface tension of the water, you touch him. No firmer than you might touch the delicate membrane of a bubble without trying to burst it, you touch him. This moment exists like the shimmering cellophane-thin mirage cast by abeam of refracted light, ever-shifting, not quite real.
And that is the only way Din can allow it.
When you bring his hand to your face he knows what’s coming but it doesn’t prepare him for the shape of your cheek cradled in his palm. It doesn’t prepare him for the warmth of your skin, just a slightly different temperature to his own. It doesn’t prepare him for the endless, varied texture of you, the changing shapes alien beneath his fingers as he curls his hand around your jaw, stretches out his digits and rests just the pad of his thumb on your bottom lip.
He isn’t sure when it happened but he stopped holding you back at some point. His hand rests by his side, forgotten. He could reach for his holster, his blaster, but it’s like those things have ceased to exist for him in this moment. There is only the softness of your skin, the play of your breath across the back of his hand, and the shift of the boat around them as you nestle closer.
Din holds very still, as much to keep the movement of the boat down as to deal with the shock as you settle next to him, in the half-circle of his arm, your head pillowed by his pauldron. He stiffens as you shift and sling a leg over his thigh, clenches his fists as you sigh.
“What are you doing?” he asks, and to his own surprise he sounds more stunned than angry.
“Getting comfortable,” you say and, well, he can’t argue with that. You are comfortable. And soft, and warm, a weight against his side that, somehow, does not feel out of place.
He does not let himself use words, like nice or pleasant or good, even inside the privacy of his own skull . He blanks the part of his mind that knows words like that because it also knows words like loss and empty and alone. He simply allows himself to...be in the moment.
It will not last forever, he tells himself, with a mixture of relief and sadness.
Din Djarin curls his arm around you, around the very real`curve of your waist. His glove lies in the bottom of the boat, forgotten, as he rests his naked hand on your hip.
He feels the warmth of the sun on his skin for a moment before the boat passes back into the cool green shadows, and he wonders if it wouldn’t be so bad to try to swim, even if he drowns.