Work Text:
You bit your lip, apprehensive, watching him shyly from beneath your lashes. “I want to know you,” you said softly, mustering your courage. “However you let me. On your terms,” you added hastily. You respected his devotion to his creed, knew it was not up for negotiation. But you also could not deny the strong affection in your heart for the man who protected you. Who entrusted you to care for his son, his foundling. Who had once so quietly revealed to you his name, light of a campfire dancing so beautifully over his beskar armor, pausing for a long moment after you called him ‘Mando’ to rasp: “Din. You can call me Din.” You didn’t dare use it in the presence of anyone but the child, and you carried it in your heart like a whisper; Din. And that was what you wanted, what you struggled to articulate: you wanted him, in whatever form he was able to give you. Whatever part of his heart he could share.
“Beautiful girl,” he said, exasperation evident in his sigh, raspy through the helmet’s modulator. There was a long moment where his visor remained fixed on you, the mystery of the dark T-shape and what lay beneath causing your breath to flutter in your chest. Then, ever so slowly, his hands came together in front of him. The orange fingertips of his left glove gripped the right and tugged. And then your breath whooshed out of you as he removed the leather, his bare, bronze hand revealed. Time seemed to slow as he studied you for a moment, helmet tilting just slightly, before he reached for your face.
The first stroke of his thumb across your cheekbone had your eyes fluttering shut, the gentle pressure causing the hairs on the back of your neck to stand at attention. The rest of his fingers came to gently cup at the hinge of your jaw, cradling your face, and he repeated the motion, moving at half pace, the roughness of his thumb catching on the apple of your cheek as he stroked over it. Eyes still closed, you gave a start as his gloved hand came to rest on your opposite shoulder, inhaling a quick burst through your nose.
“Breathe, cyar’ika,” he said, voice gentler than you’d ever heard — ever known was possible — and your brow furrowed at the unfamiliar word. Was he speaking Huttese? His thumb drifted up to stroke over your eyebrow and you nearly melted in his grasp. His thumb drifted to the crease between your brows, tracing the wrinkle up to your hairline. Four fingers danced across the delicate skin before making a slow sweep downward, hitting the peaks and valleys of your face like a land speeder transversing the desert of Tatooine. His pinkie caught the shell of your ear on its descent, his thumb the corner of your mouth, and the gentle rasp of his fingertips over your sensitive skin had your heart threatening to beat out of your chest, the sense heightened by the absence of your sight. No one in your life had ever mapped your face so tenderly, like a cartographer would a new planet, or a Jedi a star-chart. His gloved hand gripped your neck so firmly but so tenderly all at once, so at odds with the beskar-clad warrior it belonged to. This was a side of the Mandalorian reserved for you — a touch only for you. You felt an ache deep in your gut at the thought. There was something so incredibly intimate about the feel of his bare skin touching yours, made especially more so by the fact that this man did not offer it on principle. The bounty hunter was laying himself bare for you. You let out a sigh, a small whine from within your throat, and you heard the Mandalorian’s breath catch through the helmet’s vocoder, felt his hand spasm where it gripped your neck; his fingers drifted boldly across your lips, tracing them like a promise.
“Cyar‘ika,” he said again, sounding so wrecked it took a moment for your brain to respond, short-circuited by the heat that prickled low in your belly; the foreign word was a lover’s caress to your ears, in the same the way his fingers were to the flushed, delicate skin of your face.
“What does that mean?” you asked after a moment when you finally found your voice, lips moving beneath his fingers as they continued tracing your lips, kissing his fingertips with your words. He let out a light groan before responding.
“It is the tongue of my people. Mando’a,” he said slowly. “It means…” He paused then, leaving you to marvel over his hesitation, how he could possibly be bashful when the mere touch of his bare skin on yours was slowly unraveling your very sense of self. He ran his calloused thumb down the center of your lower lip. “It is a term of endearment,” he settled on finally, and your lips parted as his thumb continued down to trace over your chin, fingers gripping it as though he meant to kiss you. His voice was feather-light as he continued. “My darling. Cyar’ika.”