The Mandalorian: You See Me Even So
Mar. 16th, 2022 04:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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prose_alchemistTitle: You See Me Even So
Author:jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: Mild PG for angst.
Characters: Din Djarin and Cara Dune. (Nothing shippy here, folks. These two are just the purest, sweetest friends I’ve seen in a long time.)
Setting: Postscript to Chapter Fifteen: The Believer.
Summary: After Morak, Din is vulnerable, and Cara takes advantage—in only the most wholesome of ways.
Disclaimer: “The Mandalorian” belongs to LucasFilm and Disney. I’m just playing with it.
Notes: The conflicts and choices Din went through in Chapter Fifteen resonated with me so hard. Now that I’m writing “The Mandalorian” again after a year away, it will still probably take me a long time to unpack everything I think and feel about those events. In any case, this particular attempt also fills the prompt “One of the Dispossessed” atgenprompt_bingo.
Two hours after the Slave I had departed from Morak, Din Djarin sat quietly down below at a makeshift table formed by a crate, disassembling and cleaning his blaster for the fourth time in a row.
He’d started because he had literally nothing else left to focus on that was his own; and he kept going when he discovered that the intricate, methodical motions could let him be numb for a while. If he threw enough of his attention into inspecting every detail of every single small part, it was just enough to push down the bleak, black thoughts and emotions curdling in the depths of him.
Even the beskar hanging heavy on his frame once more was not a comfort, but a silent indictment, reminding him relentlessly of his own impurity and unworthiness. He needed his armor more than ever before in his life—its strength to carry out what he still had yet to accomplish, its concealment to bottle up his shame and confusion until he could figure out just what to do with it all—but its weight now seemed as burning to his body as the stifling, chemical-tinged air of the refinery had been to his face and eyes.
…Dammit. He was thinking again.
It doesn’t matter what happens to me, he reminded himself fiercely. Revealing my face was necessary to save the kid… to save Grogu. I had no other choice.
Well. Except possibly to have told Mayfeld he would blow a hole through him on the spot, if the man didn’t walk into that room and get the information himself. After all, he had gone in anyway when it was all too late, and was not recognized as he’d feared. If only, if only he’d had the guts to just do it in the first place, or Din had forced him to…
Yet strangely, Din felt no anger at him for balking, or even exactly regret that he had insisted on going in himself. Mayfeld bore no responsibility toward the Creed: the moral contract that Din had sworn to himself and his tribe, but the sharpshooter did not share in or even acknowledge. Ultimately, it was the Mandalorian’s own choice to commit what was a sin to him alone.
Maybe it was sin enough that he had been willing to do it. Maybe he deserved this internal torture of dishonor just for accepting the thought, even before he carried out the deed.
When Cara Dune approached him, Din was aware of her presence long before he paused his self-distraction to look up at her.
“Are you okay?”
She had to know how laughable that question was. Grogu’s capture by Moff Gideon and the destruction of the Razor Crest were already far more than enough to make everything in the universe devastatingly not okay to Din. Still, she was one of the few people he had allowed close enough to read him even through the armor. Clearly she realized something in him was even more off than it had been before they landed on Morak.
Din breathed in slowly, considering his options for a long moment, before he gave her a very plain and honest answer.
“…No. I’m not.”
Cara’s face instantly became dark and focused. She pulled up another crate and sat down across from him, gloved hands clenching tight on her knees. “What happened back there?”
He had no good reason to want to tell her, but he did it anyway.
“I broke the Creed. …I showed my face.”
From her stunned expression and heavy intake of breath, he might have gotten a similar reaction if he’d punched her in the gut. She certainly stared at him with wide and incredulous eyes as if he had. Almost as if hearing those words hurt her just as much…
Just as much as he was hurting in his own soul.
“What?” she barked out at last.
“The terminal required a facial scan to access the information. Mayfeld hesitated when he saw that his former superior was there… so I did it myself.”
For a long moment, Cara merely sat processing that explanation. There was a tremor in the breath she slowly let out at last.
“…I’m going to have Fett turn this ship around so I can go back there and kill him,” she announced; and when she moved to stand up, Din realized she wasn’t just speaking rhetorically.
“No,” he said quickly, reaching out to halt her with a hand on her arm. “Mayfeld isn’t to blame. This burden was mine. And—he saved me after that, when…”
When I was completely paralyzed by panic and shame, just from being looked in the eye by another person.
Din wasn’t sure that was not a part of the shame in itself. With every fiber of his soul screaming to him of his unfaithfulness, he had barely been able to put two words together in his mind, much less force them through the tightness that choked his throat. Mayfeld wasn’t even wrong to make some excuse to Valin Hess about his poor hearing, when every sound was both unfamiliar without the filtering of a helmet, and muffled by the pounding of blood in his ears. If the sharpshooter hadn’t stepped in when he did, to smile and lie so casually when he was far more justifiably terrified, Din never could have done the same himself. He never could have faked his way through something so mundane and innocent as a conversation over drinks—simply because his face was uncovered. What was ordinary to most other inhabitants of the galaxy was impossible for him.
For all the fighting skill he had inherited from his adopted people, there was no Mandalorian training that could prepare him for simply confronting someone face to face. No such training could exist, because a proper Mandalorian was supposed to die before they allowed that to happen. Had it only been a matter of himself, he would indeed have sooner given up his own life—but not the life of his foundling. Somewhere deep down, it now unsettled him that his tribe had apparently never considered that possibility: the necessity of removing one’s helmet to save the life of someone else. After experiencing his own reaction to that conflict, he couldn’t shake the new awareness that it could expose a crippling weakness… and perhaps one that could even be weaponized by a cunning enemy like Moff Gideon.
Entertaining the thought that this tenet of The Way might perhaps be flawed was probably a sin too. Maybe even more so than the one that had already tainted him.
…It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but saving Grogu.
Across from him, Cara’s tension slowly relaxed, but she was still looking at him with anxious concern. It was an ironic echo of Mayfeld’s words when she observed softly: “Okay. So you did what you had to.”
“I did.” Behind the concealment of his visor, Din briefly let himself squeeze his eyes shut, just as he had in the moment before he’d turned to meet Hess’ eviscerating gaze. “And I’m prepared to accept the consequences.”
“You put it back on, though.” The Rebel tilted her head downward, as if to seek his unseen eyes. “Once the helmet came off, I thought you could never wear it again.”
Din exhaled heavily. That was the secondary conflict he had wrestled with after he and Mayfeld were safely back aboard the ship. It had taken him several minutes—and even a few more surprisingly insightful remarks from Mayfeld—before he could resolve it internally just enough to put the beskar back on at all.
“I don’t know what I am now,” he admitted quietly. “Even if I find any survivors from my covert, they’ll cast me out as an apostate… but still, I’ve been a Mandalorian too long to turn back. And more importantly, even if I no longer have the right, I know that I can’t save Grogu without being the only thing I know how to be. …My own answers will have to wait until he’s safe.”
Cara gave him a pained and sympathetic smile, a trace of mistiness sparkling in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have to be ashamed of anything. You broke the rules to save someone you love. If I could’ve had the same chance… I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.”
She’s thinking of Alderaan, Din realized with a pang, and wondered how much of her own life she had lost without actually dying.
It was something they both had in common.
“You should try to get some rest while you can,” she urged him gently as she stood.
“I’ll try,” Din submitted with little enthusiasm, although he knew his thoughts and feelings would be completely inescapable the moment he closed his eyes.
In the act of turning to leave, Cara paused and glanced back at him. Her eyes were still sharp with a righteous anger, and he could feel the hesitation before she spoke.
“You know, I wasn’t joking. If it would make any difference… I’d be happy to make sure no one back there who saw your face lives to remember it.”
…And while that might not exactly have been the first offer someone ever made to kill for him, it was somehow very much the most direct and personal and meaningful. Enough so that Din felt a warmth rising to his cheeks beneath his helmet.
“Thank you,” he murmured demurely. “But killing the witnesses wouldn’t change the fact that I made the choice. Besides, Mayfeld is already the only one left—and he isn’t a threat to me.”
“If you say so.” Cara hunched her shoulders in a small shrug, surrendering the subject. Even so, she still looked somber and a little perplexed. “It’s almost funny… I never thought I’d have a reason to envy that guy.”
As she began to move away, it took him a moment to fully parse the meaning of that cryptic remark; and when he did, something new broke free from the cold black morass of feelings in his gut. It was no less tangled and messy, but in contrast to all his despair and his fears, it was warm and fierce and impulsive… kind of like the Rebel herself.
What Cara meant was that she wished she could see Din’s face as Mayfeld had.
Something about the realization struck him deeply and unexpectedly. His face had been looked upon by a roomful of now-dead Imps and a convicted criminal—but not by the woman who was quite possibly the closest thing he had to a best friend. The comrade who had followed him into danger more than once simply because he asked her to, and even refused to leave him when he was gravely wounded and facing death in flames.
It suddenly felt so unfair.
A bleak but strangely giddy sort of recklessness came over Din. As he stood up, he drew a deep breath of filtered air and swallowed it down into his chest, trying to calm the pounding of his heart.
“Cara,” he called after her… and she turned to see him with hands raised to grasp his helmet.
Racing thoughts rattled again in his head that it didn’t matter now. To break the Creed once was to break it forever; or at least until he could seek some kind of atonement, if that was even possible. In the meantime, to show his face to just one more person who truly cared about him… Surely, it could not compound the guilt of the sin already committed.
Yet Cara’s reaction surprised him. For an instant, he saw her eyes go wide—and then she was rushing back to hurl herself at him, to seize his wrists and pull his hands down.
“No,” she breathed firmly, shaking her head as she looked into his dark visor with a peculiar urgency. “You don’t have to do that for me.”
“…You want to see me.” Din’s voice came out painfully small and subdued. Looking at her there in front of him, so close that she was almost pressed against his cuirass, he said the words that had been so relentlessly gnawing at his mind. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does. I think it still matters to you—even if you’re too upset to realize it now.” Cara relaxed her grip, smiling at him ruefully. “It’s true. Someday I would love to see your face, if a day ever comes when I know you’re really sure… but you don’t have me convinced you’re ready to make that decision yet. You’re not exactly in the most rational headspace at the moment.”
On the surface Din was faintly offended by that, but whatever part of his brain could still overrule his emotions told him she was right. At the present he couldn’t trust himself to think straight, to assess his options clearly and choose any future path beyond the imperative of rescuing his foundling. Until he had more time to settle all of this with himself, he couldn’t afford to give away any more of what remained of him just yet… even if there was a part of him that perversely wanted to.
He released a faint sigh, permitting his hands to lower completely from beneath hers; but even so, one feeble protest still escaped his aching heart.
“You’ve done so much… but I have nothing else left to give you in return.”
The beginnings of a somewhat more crooked smile crossed Cara’s lips. After looking him up and down thoughtfully, she tapped two fingers against his cuirass.
“Well, maybe there is one thing. You can take this part off for a minute instead.”
Bemused and somewhat reluctant despite his trust of her, Din slowly complied. He removed his cuirass and the padding underneath, carefully setting them aside on a crate. With his chest then unshielded and vulnerable, covered only by the fabric of his clothing, he turned to give her a small questioning tilt of his helmet.
And that was the moment when Cara leaned in and hugged him: her muscular arms wrapping tightly around him, her tear-tattooed cheek pressing over his heart.
Din stopped breathing for several long seconds. After a heavy hesitation, he slowly put his hands on her shoulders, holding her to him in cautious acceptance of the embrace.
He understood her request now. Without a layer of beskar between them, this kindness somehow meant even more. It meant more because, since his childhood before the Creed, no one else except Grogu had been permitted to feel his warmth and his heartbeat this way.
Perhaps because no one else had ever asked or wanted to.
In seeking to show Cara his gratitude, Din had ended up being the one to receive something yet again.
“…Thank you,” he whispered humbly.
A quick tighter squeeze of his ribs was the response. Cara shook her head against his shoulder, and then looked up at him, drawing back just a little but still not quite letting go.
“You don’t owe me anything, Mando. If it wasn’t for you…” A tremulous half-laugh. “I’d still be living off bar-fight money back on Sorgan.” Her left hand finally slid away from his back, wandering down between them to clasp over the marshal’s badge on her belt. “You’re the reason I’ve got another chance to make a difference somewhere. That’s why I should be the one thanking you.”
She believed, then, that Din had helped her, pointing her life to a new and better path—even if it was truthfully through a mere inadvertent chain of circumstances. That knowledge alone was an unexpected comfort. He stood a little straighter, and as she reluctantly pulled away from him at last, he nodded his acceptance that their connection would never again be a matter of debt. Instead, it was solely the bond between friends.
He still felt the desire to offer her a gesture that would be even half as heartfelt as her hug, and struggled to think of something. It was difficult when his entire life had been stripped to its last fraying threads of meaning. Apart from his face that she had already declined to look upon, the one thing worth guarding that remained to him was his very name; and thanks to Moff Gideon’s ruthlessly thorough intelligence, she already knew even that.
She knew it—but she never spoke it.
The one personal gift he could grant her, then…
This time there was no uncertainty in his resolve. He laid his hands on her shoulders once more, gazing at her with a gravity he knew she would feel.
“Listen, Cara. When we’re in private… call me by my name.” Although she would not see it, he made the aching effort to smile at her, so she might at least hear it in his voice. “I know you remember.”
Judging by the small catch of her breath, his permission carried as much weight and value as he’d hoped. Her eyes were bright as she gave a small nod, unwittingly returning his smile.
“I will… Din.”
It was still unfamiliar and strange to hear his name spoken; but coming from her, there was a warmth in it that lightened his soul just a little.
Author’s Note: Does anyone else find it highly noteworthy that in Chapter Six of “The Book of Boba Fett”, Fennec introduced Din by name to Fett’s other allies? After the relative secrecy of his name in the past, I’m curious whether this is some hint of the direction his life will take now.
© 2022 Jordanna Morgan
Author:
jordannamorganArchive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: Mild PG for angst.
Characters: Din Djarin and Cara Dune. (Nothing shippy here, folks. These two are just the purest, sweetest friends I’ve seen in a long time.)
Setting: Postscript to Chapter Fifteen: The Believer.
Summary: After Morak, Din is vulnerable, and Cara takes advantage—in only the most wholesome of ways.
Disclaimer: “The Mandalorian” belongs to LucasFilm and Disney. I’m just playing with it.
Notes: The conflicts and choices Din went through in Chapter Fifteen resonated with me so hard. Now that I’m writing “The Mandalorian” again after a year away, it will still probably take me a long time to unpack everything I think and feel about those events. In any case, this particular attempt also fills the prompt “One of the Dispossessed” at
genprompt_bingo.Two hours after the Slave I had departed from Morak, Din Djarin sat quietly down below at a makeshift table formed by a crate, disassembling and cleaning his blaster for the fourth time in a row.
He’d started because he had literally nothing else left to focus on that was his own; and he kept going when he discovered that the intricate, methodical motions could let him be numb for a while. If he threw enough of his attention into inspecting every detail of every single small part, it was just enough to push down the bleak, black thoughts and emotions curdling in the depths of him.
Even the beskar hanging heavy on his frame once more was not a comfort, but a silent indictment, reminding him relentlessly of his own impurity and unworthiness. He needed his armor more than ever before in his life—its strength to carry out what he still had yet to accomplish, its concealment to bottle up his shame and confusion until he could figure out just what to do with it all—but its weight now seemed as burning to his body as the stifling, chemical-tinged air of the refinery had been to his face and eyes.
…Dammit. He was thinking again.
It doesn’t matter what happens to me, he reminded himself fiercely. Revealing my face was necessary to save the kid… to save Grogu. I had no other choice.
Well. Except possibly to have told Mayfeld he would blow a hole through him on the spot, if the man didn’t walk into that room and get the information himself. After all, he had gone in anyway when it was all too late, and was not recognized as he’d feared. If only, if only he’d had the guts to just do it in the first place, or Din had forced him to…
Yet strangely, Din felt no anger at him for balking, or even exactly regret that he had insisted on going in himself. Mayfeld bore no responsibility toward the Creed: the moral contract that Din had sworn to himself and his tribe, but the sharpshooter did not share in or even acknowledge. Ultimately, it was the Mandalorian’s own choice to commit what was a sin to him alone.
Maybe it was sin enough that he had been willing to do it. Maybe he deserved this internal torture of dishonor just for accepting the thought, even before he carried out the deed.
When Cara Dune approached him, Din was aware of her presence long before he paused his self-distraction to look up at her.
“Are you okay?”
She had to know how laughable that question was. Grogu’s capture by Moff Gideon and the destruction of the Razor Crest were already far more than enough to make everything in the universe devastatingly not okay to Din. Still, she was one of the few people he had allowed close enough to read him even through the armor. Clearly she realized something in him was even more off than it had been before they landed on Morak.
Din breathed in slowly, considering his options for a long moment, before he gave her a very plain and honest answer.
“…No. I’m not.”
Cara’s face instantly became dark and focused. She pulled up another crate and sat down across from him, gloved hands clenching tight on her knees. “What happened back there?”
He had no good reason to want to tell her, but he did it anyway.
“I broke the Creed. …I showed my face.”
From her stunned expression and heavy intake of breath, he might have gotten a similar reaction if he’d punched her in the gut. She certainly stared at him with wide and incredulous eyes as if he had. Almost as if hearing those words hurt her just as much…
Just as much as he was hurting in his own soul.
“What?” she barked out at last.
“The terminal required a facial scan to access the information. Mayfeld hesitated when he saw that his former superior was there… so I did it myself.”
For a long moment, Cara merely sat processing that explanation. There was a tremor in the breath she slowly let out at last.
“…I’m going to have Fett turn this ship around so I can go back there and kill him,” she announced; and when she moved to stand up, Din realized she wasn’t just speaking rhetorically.
“No,” he said quickly, reaching out to halt her with a hand on her arm. “Mayfeld isn’t to blame. This burden was mine. And—he saved me after that, when…”
When I was completely paralyzed by panic and shame, just from being looked in the eye by another person.
Din wasn’t sure that was not a part of the shame in itself. With every fiber of his soul screaming to him of his unfaithfulness, he had barely been able to put two words together in his mind, much less force them through the tightness that choked his throat. Mayfeld wasn’t even wrong to make some excuse to Valin Hess about his poor hearing, when every sound was both unfamiliar without the filtering of a helmet, and muffled by the pounding of blood in his ears. If the sharpshooter hadn’t stepped in when he did, to smile and lie so casually when he was far more justifiably terrified, Din never could have done the same himself. He never could have faked his way through something so mundane and innocent as a conversation over drinks—simply because his face was uncovered. What was ordinary to most other inhabitants of the galaxy was impossible for him.
For all the fighting skill he had inherited from his adopted people, there was no Mandalorian training that could prepare him for simply confronting someone face to face. No such training could exist, because a proper Mandalorian was supposed to die before they allowed that to happen. Had it only been a matter of himself, he would indeed have sooner given up his own life—but not the life of his foundling. Somewhere deep down, it now unsettled him that his tribe had apparently never considered that possibility: the necessity of removing one’s helmet to save the life of someone else. After experiencing his own reaction to that conflict, he couldn’t shake the new awareness that it could expose a crippling weakness… and perhaps one that could even be weaponized by a cunning enemy like Moff Gideon.
Entertaining the thought that this tenet of The Way might perhaps be flawed was probably a sin too. Maybe even more so than the one that had already tainted him.
…It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but saving Grogu.
Across from him, Cara’s tension slowly relaxed, but she was still looking at him with anxious concern. It was an ironic echo of Mayfeld’s words when she observed softly: “Okay. So you did what you had to.”
“I did.” Behind the concealment of his visor, Din briefly let himself squeeze his eyes shut, just as he had in the moment before he’d turned to meet Hess’ eviscerating gaze. “And I’m prepared to accept the consequences.”
“You put it back on, though.” The Rebel tilted her head downward, as if to seek his unseen eyes. “Once the helmet came off, I thought you could never wear it again.”
Din exhaled heavily. That was the secondary conflict he had wrestled with after he and Mayfeld were safely back aboard the ship. It had taken him several minutes—and even a few more surprisingly insightful remarks from Mayfeld—before he could resolve it internally just enough to put the beskar back on at all.
“I don’t know what I am now,” he admitted quietly. “Even if I find any survivors from my covert, they’ll cast me out as an apostate… but still, I’ve been a Mandalorian too long to turn back. And more importantly, even if I no longer have the right, I know that I can’t save Grogu without being the only thing I know how to be. …My own answers will have to wait until he’s safe.”
Cara gave him a pained and sympathetic smile, a trace of mistiness sparkling in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have to be ashamed of anything. You broke the rules to save someone you love. If I could’ve had the same chance… I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.”
She’s thinking of Alderaan, Din realized with a pang, and wondered how much of her own life she had lost without actually dying.
It was something they both had in common.
“You should try to get some rest while you can,” she urged him gently as she stood.
“I’ll try,” Din submitted with little enthusiasm, although he knew his thoughts and feelings would be completely inescapable the moment he closed his eyes.
In the act of turning to leave, Cara paused and glanced back at him. Her eyes were still sharp with a righteous anger, and he could feel the hesitation before she spoke.
“You know, I wasn’t joking. If it would make any difference… I’d be happy to make sure no one back there who saw your face lives to remember it.”
…And while that might not exactly have been the first offer someone ever made to kill for him, it was somehow very much the most direct and personal and meaningful. Enough so that Din felt a warmth rising to his cheeks beneath his helmet.
“Thank you,” he murmured demurely. “But killing the witnesses wouldn’t change the fact that I made the choice. Besides, Mayfeld is already the only one left—and he isn’t a threat to me.”
“If you say so.” Cara hunched her shoulders in a small shrug, surrendering the subject. Even so, she still looked somber and a little perplexed. “It’s almost funny… I never thought I’d have a reason to envy that guy.”
As she began to move away, it took him a moment to fully parse the meaning of that cryptic remark; and when he did, something new broke free from the cold black morass of feelings in his gut. It was no less tangled and messy, but in contrast to all his despair and his fears, it was warm and fierce and impulsive… kind of like the Rebel herself.
What Cara meant was that she wished she could see Din’s face as Mayfeld had.
Something about the realization struck him deeply and unexpectedly. His face had been looked upon by a roomful of now-dead Imps and a convicted criminal—but not by the woman who was quite possibly the closest thing he had to a best friend. The comrade who had followed him into danger more than once simply because he asked her to, and even refused to leave him when he was gravely wounded and facing death in flames.
It suddenly felt so unfair.
A bleak but strangely giddy sort of recklessness came over Din. As he stood up, he drew a deep breath of filtered air and swallowed it down into his chest, trying to calm the pounding of his heart.
“Cara,” he called after her… and she turned to see him with hands raised to grasp his helmet.
Racing thoughts rattled again in his head that it didn’t matter now. To break the Creed once was to break it forever; or at least until he could seek some kind of atonement, if that was even possible. In the meantime, to show his face to just one more person who truly cared about him… Surely, it could not compound the guilt of the sin already committed.
Yet Cara’s reaction surprised him. For an instant, he saw her eyes go wide—and then she was rushing back to hurl herself at him, to seize his wrists and pull his hands down.
“No,” she breathed firmly, shaking her head as she looked into his dark visor with a peculiar urgency. “You don’t have to do that for me.”
“…You want to see me.” Din’s voice came out painfully small and subdued. Looking at her there in front of him, so close that she was almost pressed against his cuirass, he said the words that had been so relentlessly gnawing at his mind. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does. I think it still matters to you—even if you’re too upset to realize it now.” Cara relaxed her grip, smiling at him ruefully. “It’s true. Someday I would love to see your face, if a day ever comes when I know you’re really sure… but you don’t have me convinced you’re ready to make that decision yet. You’re not exactly in the most rational headspace at the moment.”
On the surface Din was faintly offended by that, but whatever part of his brain could still overrule his emotions told him she was right. At the present he couldn’t trust himself to think straight, to assess his options clearly and choose any future path beyond the imperative of rescuing his foundling. Until he had more time to settle all of this with himself, he couldn’t afford to give away any more of what remained of him just yet… even if there was a part of him that perversely wanted to.
He released a faint sigh, permitting his hands to lower completely from beneath hers; but even so, one feeble protest still escaped his aching heart.
“You’ve done so much… but I have nothing else left to give you in return.”
The beginnings of a somewhat more crooked smile crossed Cara’s lips. After looking him up and down thoughtfully, she tapped two fingers against his cuirass.
“Well, maybe there is one thing. You can take this part off for a minute instead.”
Bemused and somewhat reluctant despite his trust of her, Din slowly complied. He removed his cuirass and the padding underneath, carefully setting them aside on a crate. With his chest then unshielded and vulnerable, covered only by the fabric of his clothing, he turned to give her a small questioning tilt of his helmet.
And that was the moment when Cara leaned in and hugged him: her muscular arms wrapping tightly around him, her tear-tattooed cheek pressing over his heart.
Din stopped breathing for several long seconds. After a heavy hesitation, he slowly put his hands on her shoulders, holding her to him in cautious acceptance of the embrace.
He understood her request now. Without a layer of beskar between them, this kindness somehow meant even more. It meant more because, since his childhood before the Creed, no one else except Grogu had been permitted to feel his warmth and his heartbeat this way.
Perhaps because no one else had ever asked or wanted to.
In seeking to show Cara his gratitude, Din had ended up being the one to receive something yet again.
“…Thank you,” he whispered humbly.
A quick tighter squeeze of his ribs was the response. Cara shook her head against his shoulder, and then looked up at him, drawing back just a little but still not quite letting go.
“You don’t owe me anything, Mando. If it wasn’t for you…” A tremulous half-laugh. “I’d still be living off bar-fight money back on Sorgan.” Her left hand finally slid away from his back, wandering down between them to clasp over the marshal’s badge on her belt. “You’re the reason I’ve got another chance to make a difference somewhere. That’s why I should be the one thanking you.”
She believed, then, that Din had helped her, pointing her life to a new and better path—even if it was truthfully through a mere inadvertent chain of circumstances. That knowledge alone was an unexpected comfort. He stood a little straighter, and as she reluctantly pulled away from him at last, he nodded his acceptance that their connection would never again be a matter of debt. Instead, it was solely the bond between friends.
He still felt the desire to offer her a gesture that would be even half as heartfelt as her hug, and struggled to think of something. It was difficult when his entire life had been stripped to its last fraying threads of meaning. Apart from his face that she had already declined to look upon, the one thing worth guarding that remained to him was his very name; and thanks to Moff Gideon’s ruthlessly thorough intelligence, she already knew even that.
She knew it—but she never spoke it.
The one personal gift he could grant her, then…
This time there was no uncertainty in his resolve. He laid his hands on her shoulders once more, gazing at her with a gravity he knew she would feel.
“Listen, Cara. When we’re in private… call me by my name.” Although she would not see it, he made the aching effort to smile at her, so she might at least hear it in his voice. “I know you remember.”
Judging by the small catch of her breath, his permission carried as much weight and value as he’d hoped. Her eyes were bright as she gave a small nod, unwittingly returning his smile.
“I will… Din.”
It was still unfamiliar and strange to hear his name spoken; but coming from her, there was a warmth in it that lightened his soul just a little.
Author’s Note: Does anyone else find it highly noteworthy that in Chapter Six of “The Book of Boba Fett”, Fennec introduced Din by name to Fett’s other allies? After the relative secrecy of his name in the past, I’m curious whether this is some hint of the direction his life will take now.
© 2022 Jordanna Morgan