Chapter Text
Djarin hadn't expected to be pinned against the wall.
His feet dangled inches above the pavement, his lungs burned, begging for oxygen. He clawed at his throat, but his gloved fingers found nothing to tear away, only empty air and the invisible, crushing vice of the Force. It was terrifying. He fought to maintain his usual stoic calm, but the lack of air was already blurring his vision behind the visor.
"L-leave me," he choked out, the words dissolving into a ragged breath.
"What is it, Mandalorian? I'll leave you, but you don't touch me anymore, understood?" You looked at him with a violence in your eyes he had never seen before.
He closed his eyes, a desperate attempt to keep from blacking out. He was seconds away from fainting.
"I won't," he managed to gasp.
Suddenly, the pressure vanished. Mando’s boots slammed back onto the pavement. The blood rushed back to his head as he let out a ragged cough, his hands flying to his neck to assure himself he was free. Slowly, his vision cleared.
He forced his head up. You were standing there, watching him, your hand resting casually on your side.
"How many credits did they promise you for me?" you asked, your voice laced with faint annoyance.
Mando stayed silent for a beat, bracing himself against the wall as he stood up. "One hundred thousand. Preferably alive."
"Okay." Your eyes scanned the silver silhouette of his beskar armor. "We will do it my way." You turned, looking around the cramped compartment beneath the cockpit.
Mando slowly drifted his hand toward the blaster at his hip, while you put the pair of shock cuffs back into the weapons wall.
"Now, you don't need these anymore," you said flatly, fixing a cold gaze on his helmet. "You're going to take me to whoever promised you those credits."
His grip tightened on his weapon. His breathing, now steady under the helmet, focused entirely on your movements.
"You take the credits. I'll kill them. We both get our reward."
"Why should I listen to you?"
"Because I'll kill you if you don't."
It happened in a flash. Mando cleared his holster and fired, aiming straight for your neck. But it was useless. A sharp, electric hiss rang in his ears as a crimson plasma blade ignited, deflecting the blaster bolt into the wall. You were fast. The space was tight, but you moved the saber with calculated precision, defending yourself without driving forward.
Refusing to back down, Mando drew his vibro knife, closing the distance between you in a desperate rush. The brief, chaotic scuffle ended instantly, with both of your weapons pressed against each other's necks.
You stared at him, eyes wide. His vibro knife buzzed dangerously close to your carotid artery, while your plasma blade threatened to burn the exposed skin of his neck, right where the beskar didn't protect him.
Your breath slightly fogged his visor. Despite his intimidating silhouette towering over you, you held perfectly still. Djarin noticed it, you didn't flinch an inch, knowing the slightest shift would cause the knife to cut your skin. Your hands were locked in a dangerous, symmetrical grid. Your fingers were wrapped tightly around his wrist, anchoring the arm that held the knife away from your throat, while his heavy, gloved hand was clamped over yours, fighting to keep the ignited saber from slicing into his unarmored neck.
The room fell into an eerie, suffocating silence, filled only by the metallic sound of the ignited saber bordering his life.
Both of you remained frozen in that position for longer than necessary, your stare burning through his visor, reaching the skin behind the beskar. The tension was almost palpable. Mando wasn't sure what it was, perhaps the adrenaline being suppressed just to keep both of you still against the shadow of death looming over you. He felt your hand gripping his wrist tighter, proving you weren't done yet.
"I know you're scared," you whispered, your lips incredibly close to his helmet. "I can feel your heartbeat."
Mando's heart was indeed hammering against his ribs. If he moved even a fraction, that plasma blade would shear straight through his neck.
He had miscalculated. He knew it. He shouldn't have trusted his luck twice in a row.
"I will move my saber now," you muttered, your eyes still locked onto his visor. "And you will stop trying to fight me. I need you to bring me to those men."
"Why should I trust you?" Mando spat, the words slipping past the beskar. "You're probably imperial scum."
"Since when do bounty hunters care about who is in front of them?" you hissed.
His grip tightened in response without talking back to you. He felt his body tensing further, a sudden wave of heat washing over him the more he became aware of your warmth against his wrist.
You leaned in a fraction closer, invading the tiny space left between your bodies. The warmth radiating from you felt suffocatingly sharp against his cold beskar.
Mando didn't flinch, but his throat went dry. Through the dark slit of his visor, your face was incredibly close, he could see the fierce violence in your eyes, he could feel your breath slipping beneath the edge of his helmet. It was an intimacy he wasn't prepared for.
He felt overwhelmed. It wasn't just the plasma blade humming against his throat, but the presence of you, strangely intimidating even to him.
For a second, his fingers tightened around the hilt of his vibro knife, a desperate reflex to regain control. But your hand on his wrist was a steady, grounding anchor. You were holding him there, forcing him to feel every single thud of his own frantic heart.
"Tell me, Mandalorian," you whispered, your voice a velvety thread that seemed to echo inside his own helmet. "Are you going to keep playing the stubborn hunter, or are we going to make a deal?"
He didn't answer right away. The silence was electric, until the tiny compartment felt entirely too small for the both of you.
Mando couldn't take it anymore. Whatever was overwhelming his body was entirely too much for him to control, and it seemed you caught onto that. Suddenly, the dangerous hum of the plasma blade snapped shut, the deadly light disappearing as your hand on his wrist lost its strength. He held the knife still for a few seconds, before eventually retreating and moving the weapon back in its place.
"It will take us three days to get to Coruscant," Mando said, taking a heavy step back to finally make the distance between you breathable enough for him.
"Good." You slowly clipped your lightsaber back to your belt. "It's a deal then."
He didn't answer to you, trying not to be entangled by a promise he wasn't sure he could mantain. He just needed to get away from the suffocating warmth of your presence. Turning on his heel, he headed toward the ladder leading up to the cockpit.
"Don't touch anything," Mando grated over his shoulder, his voice cold and defensive as he disappeared up the shaft.
Up in the cockpit, Mando slammed the hyperdrive lever forward. The stars blurred into lines of blinding light, plunging the ship into the eerie, silent tunnel of hyperspace. He sank into the pilot chair, his body refused to relax, the silence of the cockpit offered no relief. Every small thud from the cargo hold below echoed through the hull, dragging his mind straight back down to the mysterious woman that almost just killed him twice.
He had no idea who you really were. Capturing you hadn't been a challenge, it had been suspiciously, frustratingly easy. At this point, he was certain you planned it. You let him drag you to the Razor Crest, let him bind your wrists, playing along with what should have been a standard bounty hunting routine. He had secured the ship, punched in coordinates, and walked back down to the hold to do his job, to search your clothes for hidden weapons. He expected compliance. Instead, that routine search was exactly how he ended up pinned against the bulkhead, almost choked to death.
And who would pay that much money for you? Of course, you had powers, he figured it now. Something he just saw in Grogu, but Djarin was only used to Grogu lifting a beast to protect him, or healing him, falling asleep from exhaustion after moving an object; a power seemed born from innocence in some ways. But what he had just seen in her eyes was a raw violence. What he had just experienced downstairs was something else entirely. You lifted him like he weighed nothing, cutting off his air from his lungs with a terrifying and effortless strength. It was a dark power that pierced right through his visor, straight to his skin.
Absolutely terrifying, almost more than anything he ever experienced in the horrors of his life.
He had seen Ahsoka glide through the shadows of Corvus, and he had watched Skywalker fight through an army of Dark Troopers. But they were calm, totally stoic even in fight.
As much as Djarin knew, a Jedi wasn't supposed to look at you with that kind of hatred, Luke didn't look like someone that would make you feel like your lungs were collapsing just because you made a wrong move.
He stared at the blue swirling light of hyperspace, a cold knot tightening in his chest. One hundred thousand credits. It was enough to buy a lifetime of safety. But as Mando listened to the low hum of the ship, a grim realization settled deep in his chest…he locked himself in a cage with a monster.
The first hours in the ship were filled with an unsettling silence. Mando didn't move once from his seat, until hunger started to hollow out his stomach. He hesitated for a moment, but eventually decided it was no use hiding up there just because you were on board. He slowly made his way downstairs. You were just sitting on the metal deck, your eyes closed and your head resting against the wall. He noticed your lightsaber still hanging from your wrist, brushing against the black fabric of your pants, your gloved hand resting on top of it. A silent threat, for sure.
He opened a small cabinet, pulling out a ration pack, a cold, grey block of nutrient-dense ration bread and some water. He looked at it, his jaw clenching. Should he give some to you? You were a prisoner, in a way, but a human being nonetheless. But he was entirely unsure of what you would do if he dared to get too close.
It's useless to think about it. He kept a strict, defensive distance, carefully avoiding the space he had violated earlier. Without a word, he set the ration tray down on the pavement next to you, his gloved hand retreating the second the metal clinked against the surface.
"Eat." Through his dark visor, he looked at you. In the sheer light of the cabin, the violence of your now open eyes had shifted down into something exhausting but still terrifyingly careful.
You didn't move, but your gaze locked onto his helmet, tracking the slight rise and fall of his chest. The physical tension between you was still there, an invisible current dancing in the narrow space.
Unable to take the strange feeling anymore, Mando turned away after taking a ration for himself too and climbed back up to the cockpit, leaving you alone with the cold food.
Back in his pilot's chair, the isolation offered no comfort. He tilted his helmet up just enough to clear his chin, chewing on the dry ration bread while trying to force his mind onto anything else, or anything that wasn't you. After some hours of looking at stars, exhaustion began to pull at his eyelids, a heavy toll from the suppressed adrenaline of their encounter. Djarin knew he needed to rest, but locking his eyes behind the visor felt like dropping his shields.
Eventually, his head slumped back against the headrest. The rhythmic thrum of the ship’s engines helped him fall into an unwanted restless sleep.
But his subconscious didn't give him peace either. In his dream, the cold, metallic safety of the cockpit melted away, plunging him back into the dark cargo hold. Except this time, the rules of reality were bent. He couldn't see his own body, but his senses were amplified to a agonizing degree. In the distorted logic of the nightmare, your presence was overwhelming, filling every corner of his mind. He felt your footsteps vibrating through the deck, felt the terrifyingly magnetic pull of your power. And then, he felt the heat. It wasn't the distant warmth from before, it was actually burning, a fire that seemed to bleed through his heavy leather gloves, melting through his flight suit, pressing directly against his bare skin.
He was completely paralyzed. The hunter was entirely at the mercy of his prey. In his mind, he wasn't just terrified of the invisible vice you held over him…he was strangely obsessed by it. He could feel the phantom ghost of your breath slipping beneath the edge of his helmet, invading the absolute privacy of his face. He saw the rage burning in your eyes, a violent storm that stripped him of his title, his armor, and his creed, leaving him completely naked under your stare.
Then, the nightmare shifted, blurring the line between terror and an intoxicating hunger, something close to lust. An overwhelming, foreign urge took possession of him. He wanted to feel it again. He wanted to shatter the distance he had so carefully put between you.
In the dream, his gloved hands moved on their own, guided by an uncharacteristic desperation. He imagined reaching out, his fingers brushing against your skin, craving the burning heat that pierced through his armor. He wanted to pull you closer, to drown in the suffocating proximity that had left him breathless downstairs. It was an intimacy so violent it terrified him, but his mind betrayed him, tracing the lines of your face, aching to feel your breath against his bare skin, beneath the unyielding safety of his helmet. For a chaotic second, the lonely Mandalorian was just a man starving for your touch.
But the warmth turned into a vice. Suddenly, the lustful illusion shattered. The feeling of your touch turned into pure asphyxiation around his throat. The heat vanished, replaced by the bloodcurdling sensation of the Force choking the life out of him. The air in his lungs started dying.
Your voice echoed in the atmosphere, invading the absolute privacy of his thoughts, until he could feel your breath slipping beneath the phantom edge of his helmet.
"I told you not to touch me, Mandalorian," your voice whispered directly into his brain, sharp as a blade. "Even in your thoughts."
Mando snapped awake with a violent gasp, his eyes flying open behind his visor.
He expected the suffocating feeling to vanish with the nightmare, but it didn't.
He couldn't breathe.
The cockpit was pitch black, save for the spinning blue light of hyperspace filtering through the viewport. He looked around almost desperately, his hands flying up to claw at his own neck, but the cab was completely empty. There was no one there. No shadow looming over him, no hands on his neck, but his lungs were burning, collapsing under a terrifying weight that felt real. It was real.
For several agonizing seconds, he choked on the empty air, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal, completely paralyzed in his chair.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the invisible grip vanished.
Din collapsed forward against the console, sucking in a desperate, ragged mouthful of oxygen. He coughed violently, his chest heaving as he clutched his throat, his body trembling in the dead silence of the ship.
As his breathing slowly stabilized, a heavy confusion found space in his chest. He rubbed his gloved hands over his neck, staring blankly at the blue vortex of hyperspace. He felt incredibly strange. The phantom pain in his throat was slowly fading, but the lingering warmth of the dream and the appalying reality of the choking were tangled together in his head.
What had just happened?
Was it just a nightmare? Had his own guilt and twisted desires materialized into a panic attack so severe it had almost killed him? Or was it you?
Djarin sat alone in the dark cockpit, shivering underneath his armor. The realization that you might have actually crawled inside his mind while he slept made his blood run cold. A sickening wave of heat rushed beneath his armor, followed instantly by a cold, sharp dread. You knew. You hadn't just broken through his defenses to punish him but you remained there to witness the exact moment his discipline crumbled. You had felt the pulse of his arousal, the desperate way his subconscious had reached out to crave your skin, begging for you to consume him. For a man who viewed his helmet as a sacred shield against the universe, this was totally insane.
He leaned his head back against the rest, his eyes staring blindly into the swirling blue abyss of hyperspace, completely stranded in his own body. He felt profoundly altered, deeply unsettled by the heavy and new weight of that attraction.
Din caught himself starting to picture your face again, starting to remember the soft but firm tone your voice, and he violently forced the image away, his heart leaping into his throat. He froze, barely daring to breathe, his muscles locking tight in the pilot's chair. If you could hear him sleep, could you hear him now? Was his attraction bleeding through the metal deck of the ship like a small light in the dark?
He was a warrior who survived by analyzing and calculating every move. Now, he was terrified to even think. He sat in the dead quiet of the cockpit, his hands clenched into rigid fists on his lap, desperately trying to force his mind into a hollow void, trapped in a suffocating stalemate against his own heart, praying you couldn't feel him shivering from the thoughts he was fighting so desperately to kill.