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sixhours · 2 days

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This is beautifully written. You can feel reader’s angst and grief and confusion as she uses her work to try to get through it. And Din is totally smitten, even if he’s trying to be all stoic and analytical and calculating about it. 🤭

Western Skies: Ch 4

Din Djarin x F!Reader. Western!AU. Series Masterlist. Masterlist.

Warnings: Grief; allusions to trauma (none occurs, implications are that Reader expects abuse due to past abuse); fake marriage/marriage of convenience; Reader is described as having hair and a menstrual cycle.

Summary: While you prepare to stay, Din prepares to leave, or: yearning for things we cannot have.

WC: 6.2k

Note: Follow @jules-onpaper for updates! Dividers by @mykento. Thanks so much to @frannyzooey for the encouraging beta read and the Van ladies for their constant support 🩵 Tagging cowboy girlies (gn) below (let me know if you would prefer not to be tagged):

@secretelephanttattoo @imaswellkid @fuckyeahdindjarin @goodwithcheese @maggiemayhemnj @kedsandtubesocks

Din has needed to leave for days now. Karga had been insistent the last time he had visited town. The window of opportunity was closing.

Instead he stays put, observing you closely without watching, tracking your movements through the house and the yard by the swish of your skirt, the trail of water drips you leave behind, the low chatter to the kid. Mostly he sticks by the barn, mending leather; you do not come outside as often if he trails the yard.

Din thinks he catches you watching him too. He feels it seep through the windows, your doubt and irritation and all of the clear signs you’re exactly where you don’t want to be, mourning everything you’ve ever had, and rightfully resenting his making you stay here when you could be on your way to the only other family you’ve ever known. You do not know he has the money to have sent you on your way already, though he certainly does – that it’s only your bargain and his selfishness keeping you here.

If you do suspect it, you don’t bother voicing your displeasure. You’re busy working yourself to the bone in chores and housework. In fact, your first few days at the homestead, he wavers on the knife’s edge of physically stopping you.

You get up so early he wonders if you’re sleeping at all. You haul water for the washing up. He sees you at it, up and about before he is, smoke from your hearth trickling in a lazy trail up into the speckled dome of early dawn, your shoulders wavering to and fro under the weight of the buckets. You’re so small beneath the weight of the yoke, it takes everything in him not to step to you and take it from you. But he knows you want work of your own to feel useful, knows that you resent the weight of your grief and you are fighting it tooth and nail. He doesn’t know if you are winning, but he knows it is a battle worth fighting.

So when you’ve returned, sweating and rubbing at your shoulders with a wince, he calls you over. That morning he teaches you how to feed and care for the cuckoo hens, and the next day, to feed the cows and hogs.

The next time he catches you up with the dawn, he teaches you to milk.

“C’mon,” he jerks his head toward the barn. You freeze like a hunted thing as you always do when he speaks to you, but you let your bundle of logs fall back onto the pile with a wooden clatter and follow him without protest.

The barn’s hay smell does only a little to cover the smells of the animals, but if it perturbs your city sensibilities you don’t comment on it. Din leads you over to the spotted Jersey and pats her down a bit, letting her get used to him.

He sets down the pail and squares up on the stool, tugging a few fine streams of milk into the dirt to clear out any debris from the teat. There’s a thin metallic sound as white streams trickle rhythmically into its tin bottom. You watch him for a bit, and then in a frigid morning whisper,

“She won’t kick me?”

Din shakes his head, bristled cheek rubbing against the cow’s warm side. “No, s’long as you go slow and let her know where you are. She’s gentle, this one.”

“Does she have a name?”

“No.”

There’s a small pause.

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, he stands with a grunt and beckons you over to the stool. You approach warily, despite his reassurance that the bovine placidly chewing her cud wouldn’t harm you.

“All right, you try.”

Biting your lip, you do. You tug, but nothing happens. Your forehead creases. You try again and the cow snorts gently, as though perplexed at the holdup. He sinks to one knee beside you to watch. Ah, that’s it. You’re squeezing your little hand around the teat with all of your fingers, tweaking your wrist deftly, as though you’re–

“Here.” It comes out more gruffly than intended, and you stiffen for a second as he wraps his hand around your cold little fingers, showing you which grip to use, the pressure, the movement, firmly insisting his thoughts not wander and therefore filling his own head with images of your nimble fingers he’s going to see branded behind his eyelids tonight, he’s sure. With his help, the milk lets down. Once you’ve got it, he rises to his feet and watches you fill the pail.

When you’re done, you pat the cow’s side as if to thank her for behaving during your first milking, and the soft little secret smile he catches you wearing makes his chest fill with something that satisfies. Something like pride. Something like–

He sighs, scrubs his beard with the back of his hand, looks out into the pinkening sky with a deep inhale. The cool morning air clears his head. Somewhat.

After that, he gives you the charge of the chickens and milking, standing by to help if you need it. With a full load of chores, he’d hoped that you would tire yourself out and take a well-earned break at last, but he hasn’t found you out by the creek once since your first morning here. Morning, noon, and night, you cook meals of dubious consistencies. All day, you chase after the kid – much more deftly with your new moccasins, he notes – as though nervous he’ll disappear.

When at last his frustrated concern outweighs his sense and he offers to haul water and logs, you give him a steely no, thank you and continue to do it yourself, no matter how long it takes you to stagger through the yard. You won’t let him near the hearth either; it has quickly become your territory. Should he even step close to it, he can feel your glare burning into the hairs on the back of his neck. It raises his hackles just the same as a wolf’s eyes on him out on the trail. Now, as then, he steers himself and the kid well clear of the threat and keeps an eye out for any mischief.

You’re a little less wary with the animals each day, but you cook meals and you wash dishes with a focus that ought to leave burn marks behind you. Your hands are red and raw after, as though you’re attempting to scrub yourself clean of some evil he has no idea how you could have come to possess. During your first week you take on what you call “fall cleaning”, despite the fact that the prairie’s heat has barely dipped from oppressive to brisk and the September days are sunny and bright.

Whatever “fall cleaning” is, what results is a cataclysm, with many plumes of dirt any prairie dust up would envy and much moving of furniture and scattering of quite settled families of bugs and spiders. Din takes Grogu into the barn and fixes harnesses. He senses that you’re beating at something harder to reach than the cobwebs, and surmises that you want to be alone for it.

Also, he thinks wryly, rescuing the curious child from the cuckoo cockerel (or rather vice versa, he hardly knows which cawing heathen is worse off) for the third time, it’s perhaps a kindness that the kid’s well out of your way for a day. He’s certainly felt the benefits of having long hours free from having to check every two minutes for a small hand to be where it shouldn’t, to feel the first stab of anxiety at every cry lest it be really bad this time, to feed or clean or soothe. It’s one more item on the list of things he doesn’t know how to express gratitude to you for.

That evening when it seems safe to approach, he has to admit the cabin does look more tidy, though he hardly sees what all the fuss was about. You’ve beaten away the dust and rearranged the room to your liking. The rug that usually caught all the crumbs from dinner now lies in front of the hearth. He doesn’t have much in the way of dishes, but you’ve arranged the nicer ones, two of cheap tin and two of chipped porcelain – in a row on the mantel. They glimmer gently in the evening light, making the place look more like a proper parlor than it’s ever been.

You ask him in a roundabout way if he might hang the nails for the cooking utensils lower, so you can reach them. He agrees at once. He’s ready to do anything you need to get you comfortable here if it will get you out from under that shroud of weariness, ease the hollows beneath your eyes that he fears if touched would bruise and blister like fruit gone to seed too soon.

But that evening, you fall asleep right at the table, your cheek squished flat on one hand, the fork with your last piece of pancake you’d been drowsily offering the kid drooping from the other. Grogu watches with solemn disdain as the food drops uselessly onto the plank floor.

It takes several calls to wake you. “Girl. Girl.” He almost reaches for the delicate curve of your shoulder, the wrinkle of cotton where the borrowed dress doesn’t quite fit you. When you do wake up it’s with a start, a huff of annoyance as your tired gaze slides to his and he looks away, mindful of the beast he has woken.

“What? Now you have nothing to say? You look as though you do.”

Din works his jaw and looks down at his tin plate. It’s still something he’s getting used to, being observed bare faced like this by you. Your eyes are so bright and direct, staring him down as though you have every intention of seeing him clean through to the blood and sinew, through to every mistake and sin he’s ever committed. But this time, instead of wishing for the cover of his hat, his bandana, he steels himself and meets your eyes. His heart thumps uncomfortably hard in his chest.

“I want you to take it easy from now on. You’ve done enough. You’re pushin’ things too hard. Gonna hurt yourself.”

Now as always, your lips part quickly, baring your teeth. He thinks you feared he would strike you during your first days here. If you had ever had cause to be struck by that dead husband of yours, Din privately considers him better off lying washed up somewhere on the riverbank. But now that you’re seemingly satisfied that Din’s not going to do anything close to beating you, your teeth are sharp and ready to bite.

This time, though, he’s ready, even as you begin by sharpening words out of his own mouth.

“You said it was going to be a hard winter, I’m doing my part. You still have to show me how to pickle the vegetables, and I still don’t know how to make jam, and-”

“No,” he cuts you off sharply. Your expression breaks and freezes. He’s never been this firm with you. He sighs through his nose, glances at the kid. Unafraid, but curious at his tone, no doubt. Kid’s eyes are like planets.

“There’s some time,” he says more calmly. “We’ve got time ‘til all that.” When you’re about to protest again, he presses, “Ain’t gonna make spring come faster for working yourself half to death. Can’t do nothin’ for the winter or for the kid if you’re laid up. Cabin’s clean enough, so just worry about the regular chores a while. The rest will keep.”

Your eyes get very bright, almost glassy in the firelight, and if you were another woman he suspects you might have cried. But you’re not weeping. You’re wringing your brain for any other excuse to get what you want.

It’s surprising, really, that he finds your indignation somewhat endearing. You’re just like Grogu when he’s prevented from something he wants. Hot and determined that you’re going to have it, and hang what Din says. So he doubles down. He’ll take the snips you give him, the way you try, subtly, to draw him into a fight that you will lose. Maker be thanked you have no idea how much practice he has at resisting exactly that. May you never know. You’d run a thousand miles away.

“It’s final.”

He returns to his plate. It’s best if he reminds everyone at this table who’s in charge here. He needs to keep you both safe, healthy, and he will not let you work yourself into an illness or injury that Maker knows might kill you out here.

Your scowl deepens, but you rise from the table with the dishes without further argument.

He tries to go on chewing. His appetite has waned, and the… whatever it is you’ve put on his plate isn’t helping. It used to be meat, he thinks. Something squeaks against his back molars and he pauses a moment. Swallows. He’s had worse and survived. Besides, he didn’t keep rat poison in stock on account of the kid. And now because of you.

Din snorts to himself, and earns a look from you. Not a glare, but suspicious all the same, like the moon’s fingernail peeking over the horizon; the bright of your eyes over the smooth curve of your shoulder. Quickly, he goes back to chewing over the meat.

What are you thinking? He has no idea, except that you’d clearly prefer if he wasn’t close by. You have people back East. Are you fond of them? They of you? Do you miss them, or do you return to them out of duty and obligation, because there is simply no one else who would shelter you at their hearth?

It must be a little like being a foundling in the covert, he thinks, except that the rules are different among your people. Women without husbands or fathers or brothers to protect them lose status, as though the ability of a man to care for them made them more virtuous. Your women are not permitted to be warriors in their own right.

This is a shame, in his opinion. If you knew any better, if you had any concept of what a Child of the Watch was truly capable of, would you take pride in being a Mandalorian’s wife? He doesn’t know of any Mandalorian women who are not trained in combat, but supposedly there were some once, before the Fall.

Devoted. Strong. Mothers of warriors.

Needless to say, he doesn’t tell you this; you don’t want to hear it. And he shouldn’t be thinking about the dreams of a younger man, anyway. He hands you his plate.

“Thank you for the meal,” he says, as he has each time before.

No response. Just a tired look, as if you wonder why the hell he’s bothering. The tin plates clatter together noisily.

He says goodnight and again, you do not answer. On his bedroll in the lean-to, he watches the smoke from the hearth dissipate slowly and thinks of you lying in bed. Do you cry there? Do you mourn the man you lost? Or do you simply think, as he does? Perhaps you’re also awake, staring sightlessly, imagining the patterns of the stars hidden from your eyes above.

He half-expects you not to, but you heed his order to take it more slowly. At least, you look less feral at the dinner table the evening after next. You chat with Grogu, encouraging him to eat the peas on his plate rather than mash them to a green pulp coating in his hands. The baby shows you his milky teeth in a shy smile. You almost smile back, your forehead softens. The dead look seems to leave your eyes for several minutes after that.

Day by day, you’re taut with the stubborn will to live, hollow with a readiness to die. It’s still difficult to watch your grief and have nothing to stem it with but food and shelter and his poor attempts at lightening your load and occupying your time. You wear your pain deeply, yet with a stoicism he recognizes by instinct. He watches as the wound begins to knit and scar. He keeps his distance. He lets you snarl and chew, adjust to things in your own time, lest you jerk from even the most gentle of hands and gut yourself further, a snared rabbit in a trap, your soft body tinged with a red that stains.

Slowly, very slowly, the hollowness fades. Your sharp tongue eases from a weapon of brute force to a mistrustful tool of laceration. Yes, the rest seems to do you good.

You’ve seemed to bond with the child. He had observed the tear tracks and the exhaustion on both of your faces that first day, and determined it best not to ask too much about it. The kid was fine, after all.

He clings to your skirts now, watches you while you mutter at the fire as though daring it to go out. And while you still stumbled and sighed and tried to keep him occupied, it was with the kind of patience you did not offer anything else, including Din himself. And then, you had looked so solemn when you said, I’ll keep him safe. He had believed you. Still did. And not many had earned that trust so quickly.

Maybe that is why he senses the cracks within himself the first time he sees your smile. Not some hidden or halfhearted twitch of lips, but the real thing.

It’s at the kid, of course, but it’s while he’s perched on Din’s shoulder as he’s walking indoors, and your grin is so broad, so sweet and affectionate and gentle that it hits him full throttle in the chest. That stretch of your fine, pretty lips echoes through his body like buckshot. He is as rattled as though you had meant to offer it to him, and not the baby with the fistful of prairie blooms: blue aster, wild bergamot, prairie rose.

“You got some pretty little flowers, didn’t you? Did you eat any bugs today?” you coo, reaching up as the kid caws at you, wearing your own precious gift on your face. When Din only stands there in the doorway, frozen, you glance at him in question.

He catches himself, lowers the kid into your waiting arms. It’s your routine by now; you take Grogu before evening chores, he takes the kid after dinner while you do the washing up.

He just hadn’t expected it, that’s all. How the simple gesture transformed you, made you look beautiful, no, vibrant. Maybe if you had smiled sooner in the day, or later, it might not have caught him so unawares. But there’s something special about this time, he has always thought. He has always felt cloaked and safe as the evening as the stars swell, when the sun retreats behind the curtains of the hills, when the crickets chirp and everything begins to still.

On the road, he enjoys this time best alone. He likes watching the moonrise, a sweet secret of the dark just for him. But here? Suddenly he has the absurd notion that if you possess smiles like this one, what the hell does he need the moon for?

But the smile is not for him. So he leaves it be.

There is so much you don’t know.

Your smile reminds him of that moon so much he thinks he might never sever the connection, and it startles him.

He needs to leave.

A few days after Din demands that you take it more slowly, he decides to punish you for it in an unexpected way. Of course, just as you had begun to feel you’d gotten the first real rest you’d had in weeks, begun to swing into a pattern, it all goes to hell.

“Well hey there, neighbor!” caws the voice from the wagon. Peli scoffs impatiently at your stunned face and brushes past you, hauling a large basket in her arms. Din descends from the wagon, somewhat shamefaced at the glare you aim his way. He had said nothing about anyone coming to the homestead. For kriff’s sake, you’re wearing these strange, comfortable shoes and there had been no hair pins in the box Mrs. Shackleton sent; your hair was braided long down your back and tied with the store twine. You’re still wearing the same damn dress. You look like a heathen.

“Well, girl, where you keep your bread tin at?” Peli calls from within.

“We’re baking bread?” you ask, still staring Din down. Clearing his throat, he passes by you without answering, his bandana and hat masking all but his dark eyes, which he does not give you, either. He sets another basket, this one full of small jars, on the kitchen table with a clinking rattle and touches the rim of his hat with two fingers.

Peli waves him off out of his own house with authority. “Get on, Mando, we won’t be needin’ ya.”

He goes, but not as though in a hurry. This time, he meets your eyes, a golden-brown gleam.

You stare after him for a few seconds, your heartbeat returning to normal, skipping as it usually did when he got close to you. Leftover fear, you guessed, from being around Leo’s unpredictable moods. “Gonna check the chickens, Peli,” you say suddenly then, and follow him out the door.

He’s already at the barn tacking up Razor when you approach.

“What’s she here for?”

He buckles and re-buckles the strap at Razor’s belly, shifts the horse blanket, the saddle bags. The horse’s ears flick, perturbed. He checks the saddle once more before swinging up, his strong legs lifting him easily. “Visit,” he says at last, not looking at you.

“And you?” You scoff, fold your arms. “You don’t want to welcome your visitor too?”

“Rather not.”

Rage settles into your chest. You would also rather not, and yet here he was, getting to slip away to do Maker knew what, getting to hide behind saddle and bandana, while the sharp-tongued biddy inside was apparently more than ready to turn your day upside down.

“Only be in the way. ‘Sides, I have business in town today with the mayor.” He finally meets your eyes. “Not sure if I’ll be back tonight. Peli’s gonna stay if I can’t make it.”

You balk. “But what about the-”

“Don’t worry about anythin’, hear?” He jerks his chin towards the barn. “They’ll keep. I don’t want you goin’ in there without Peli or me.”

“Fine,” you bite.

He nods, touches the rim of his hat again, but doesn’t move. Razor snorts and paws, eager to go, but Din sits there, watching from beneath the shadow of his hat as you pout below like a child.

“I’ll keep him safe,” you say at last. Of course you would. The only thing that has kept you tethered to where you are, what you’re doing, keeps you from wandering in mind and body are the soft giggles and curious antics of his child.

He nods, solemn, and beckons the horse with his calves.

Your morning with Peli turns out to be a better experience than you feared. Though the two of you had had sharp tongues whetted to lacerate each other the first time you met, upon further reflection, you realize this may have been in large part your own doing. After all, hadn’t she been practically and calmly laying out your options, hadn’t she given you her bed and fed you?

In a few minutes you find yourself relaxing. She is nothing like the women that run the general store, the Shackletons, with their feathered hats that wouldn’t be out of place in your mother’s tailor shop, the women beneath them tutting and fretting at your buttonholes to save a few cents off the asking price. But Peli pays absolutely no mind to your strange footwear or lack of proper stockings and hair. Peli fixes a pair of wired spectacles around her goggling eyes, sets her hands on her hips, and instead of remarking on the mismatched china on the mantel, compliments how well you have scrubbed the floor. Then she takes several minutes to coo and fuss about the baby, bouncing him on her knee and saying things like,

“Look at those ears! Oh, you little prairie rat, it would be a shame not to grow into those. Here’s hopin’, huh? Tiny thing, you don’t seem to grow up much, do you? What have they fed you?”

Well, after that it’s pretty hard not to like her, as odd as she is. You even find yourself chuckling as the two of them chatter; only under your breath, but still. The vibration in your chest grates in your ribs, unfamiliar, and pausing over the coffeepot you feel a pang of shame. You shouldn’t be laughing, surely, with your husband dead only this short while?

The oppressive weight that had collapsed your lungs with shock and grief is easing from a bloodied death grip to a battle-ready fist. You’re surprised, actually, at how far you’ve come in a spare couple of weeks. You slept through the night with hardly any crying most nights, and when you did have a nightmare, it was brief and you could sometimes sleep again afterwards. When you couldn’t, you watched the baby sleep, his little puffs between plump lips and warm cheeks a sweeter vision than the ones rippling behind your eyelids when you shut them.

Peli seems to echo your thoughts as you set down a weak cup of coffee to the first and only guest you’ve ever had as a married woman; you’re also embarrassed to note you have nothing to offer with it, having broken the milk jug. Your mother would have turned up her nose and refused it, but Peli slurps the hot liquid with gusto and carries on talking. “You seem a mite more rested n’ when I saw you last, girl.”

“I am, thank you.”

“Been settlin’ in?”

“Yes.”

She levels you a dry, doubtful look over her coffee mug. She frowns a little, eyes narrowing at you. The cup makes a gentle clink against the sturdy wooden table. “Girl–” the sigh is as fond as it is exasperated. “Dunno why you won’t admit to it. Shoot, when I lost my daddy I was a wreck for many a day.”

You blink, surprised.

“It’s hard to watch somebody leave this world. Harder still I reckon to have it sudden-like, like you did, and him bein’ so young, yeah? No infirm old man comes out here for a livin’.” Peli’s amber eyes, creased with laugh lines but with no dull to their sparkle, flicker with sadness, but that’s not what loosens your shoulders. It’s the inwardness; she’s remembering a loss perhaps very far away in space and time. And it haunts her still.

Is that what you had looked like?

What did you look like now?

“I’m…” I’m fine, thank you for asking. I’m doing better. I’m all right, thank you kindly ma’am. The polite lies wither on your tongue. “I’m getting on, a little,” you admit. It still feels wrong, but it’s the closest your poor abilities can come to describing how you feel.

You tell her about learning to milk, feeding the chickens. You tell her about learning to handle Grogu. You tell her about the disastrous first instance of your cooking, and the fretfulness you had worked up in yourself over ensuring it did not happen again.

Peli’s gentle chuckles rise to a full belly laugh over your repeated plights in the cooking department, and when you grumble over the baby’s hair full of grits, she cackles and reaches down to tug the ear of the little one, as though congratulating him.

“It’s not funny,” you insist, though the corner of your mouth twitches. “It’s one of the main things I ought to be doing, taking care of the baby and cooking and-”

Peli’s arms fold comfortably. “Mando say so?”

You balk. “No.”

“Give you plenty of chores to do, then? Got you plumb beat?”

You hesitate, unsure from her matter-of-fact tone whether she expects the answer to be in the negative. Peli shuffles in her seat to get even more settled, resting her folded hands on her belly as though she intended to stay there all day. Below the table, Grogu coos over her shoe buckles.

“When Mando first came to town, I was the on’y one – the on’y one, mind – to open my door to his business. Coins are coins, in my opinion, and he had ‘em. Had this little prairie rat too,” she adds, with another fond tweak of the kid’s ear. “Took a shine to him I guess ‘cause he was polite and had a half-pint little rugrat to care for. No proper home as far as I could tell. He wanted me to fix up his wagon. Said he would be gone a few days, would I keep after the little one?”

She grins. “Well, his coin was good,” but she glances down at Grogu adoringly. “The dogs liked him, though Mando doesn’t seem to care for dogs much.”

“What did –” you hesitate over using his name. Did Peli not know Din’s name? That seemed ridiculous, but perhaps this was a nickname the two of them shared… though that didn’t seem to fit either of their personalities very well. You avoid the question. “What did he go off to do?”

Peli shrugs. “Not my business. Coin was good. Came back after a day or so, as he said.”

“And then he stayed?”

“Oh, no.” She takes a long draft of her coffee and smacks her lips. “Came and went for a few months, same as many do. I could tell folks about was as mistrustful of him as they used to be of my daddy, but just like I did, they came around when his business was clean.”

“Has he always…?” you chew on your question, uncertain.

“Covered his face? Sure. Never asked,” she tells you smoothly. “Impolite. Well, I guess he had some hullabaloo about town with some strange folk, and it was all the sheriff could do to help him clear it out. After that, the mayor was grateful enough to hand him a package of land. Good land too,” she adds, glancing out at the window. “Not that he seems of a mind to put it to much.”

“I noticed.” It was strange to Peli too, then, that a homesteader had no farm and few livestock. And, it seemed, the little cache of coins you had found did likely belong to Din, and he had had the money before the land and built that little hideaway to keep it safe. So where did he get it from? Surely a poor little pioneer town like this one hadn’t enough money to reward a stranger that handsomely?

“Well, to tell a man his business is wasted breath,” Peli says sagely. “That’s somethin’ Mando knows well too, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

Her eyebrows fold; pity? Or more exasperation at your clear inexperience? “Girl, you ain’t got a clue what you’re doin’ out here. When he dropped you at my doorstep you were hardly more’n a ghost. Like your body had come outta that river and left somethin’ missin’. Seems to me he’s grateful you’re here at all, never mind what you can do. You’re luckier than most to be alive, girl, and here you are fussin’ about a bachelor’s kitchen?”

She snorts. “Well, I guess he ain’t a bachelor any more. Still, though, little thing like you.” She leaves it there as you note with skepticism that you have several inches on her.

“You’ll get on, girl.”

You look up. Your thoughts had wandered back to Din, wondering where he was now on his errand, if he really thought you as fragile as Peli implied. You wonder if you are. After all, what tenuous threads tie you together? The responsibility you were beginning to feel for Grogu? The promise of more work to distract you from your thoughts?

“I guess so,” you offer. It’s the best you can do for now.

She’s looking at you with a stiff jaw, as though her compassion comes at a price she did not often pay. “I ain’t guessin’.”

You sit there and share that thought between you. That you will survive. The knowledge that you will, because you must. Maybe it’ll never be the same, but it’ll be. “And having a little one by to care for don’t hurt none,” she adds, with a bright look for the small hands using her skirt to lift the dark-eyed baby to his feet. The baby inspects the table for treats, and finding none, huffs in a wry tone beyond his years, as if to ask what on earth the point was, without any treats to get by on?

Watching you stroke your fingers gently over his pudgy cheek, Peli declares him as wise a prairie rat as she ever saw, and why didn’t the two of you make him somethin’ to eat? In a matter of minutes after that, she’s teaching you how to make bread, how to dollop cookies into a plate in the oven and throw coals on the lid to bake them. She blathers on about all the jams she’s ever made as she whips up a batch of that too, calling out ingredient for you to fetch, never minding your scurried attempts to follow along.

Once the bread is actually in the oven, though, you’re surprised by how simple it is, this visit with Peli. You show her the paper piecing you’ve traced to make yourself a nightdress and new gown. She peers at the pencil marks and huffs. For the first time, she looks rather impressed. “Maybe you do know somethin’, girl.”

Then she digs into her box that Din had brought and tells you she’s going to piece a quilt, and you seem to be handy with a needle. So you take the shears and the precious bolt of fabric for your gown, and she sits in the chair by the door and bounces Grogu on her knee.

It turns out the stitching is easy and companionable work, but you’re fascinated as she describes the intricate needlework on quilts she’s seen from some of the more skilled women in town. Patchworks of all sizes and descriptions. She asks if you’ve ever made a pinwheel like the one she’s brought, and you say you have not; your mother after all kept enough quilts at home, and the ones you had packed into your wagon had been made by your sister and mother as part of your hastily thrown together trousseau.

“Well, next time I come,” Peli exclaims, “I’ll be setting you to work! You’re quick with a needle, girl, and you’ll be a mighty help for these old eyes. Could sell, if you liked. But for now, let’s get this rugrat fed and to bed.”

Your heart leaps. Sell your sewing? Perhaps to the general store? How much money might that earn you? Would it be enough for a train ticket, or-?

But Peli heaves herself up with a grunt and carries herself to the cold storage, returning with a wrapper of beef, and tells you you’ll be making stew, everybody ought to know how to make stew. The question of sewing falls to the wayside.

Like the bread, it turns out to be simple when patiently explained over Peli’s quick, haphazard movements near the hearth. Surely she didn’t come all this way just to teach you to do that? No, that’s absurd, but it’s the strangest call you’ve ever received or witnessed.

As you sew, your thoughts return to Din. The longer you got to know him the more questions you had. His saddle, his belt, his holster, his boots – every strip of leather on him was carefully maintained, and you had seen him oiling them carefully until each one gleamed. You wondered if he was waiting for the cowhide to flash his reflection back at him.

You’ll ask him about selling some sewing to the store, you vow suddenly, your mood well improved by the full, comfortable stomach of stew and bread. It seems clear Din will not return tonight. You try and fail to coax Peli from the rocking chair, and instead settle her with a spare blanket and take Grogu into bed.

Yes. Oce you’re safely under the covers, the smell of baking helping you drift more quickly than you have in days, you resolve that in the morning you’ll ask him. You’ll be able to pay him back at least for the dress materials, for the costs you must be incurring him, if you could sell little things from the scraps at a profit. Tomorrow.

Dreams take you. For the first time, you sleep through the night.

Din doesn’t return for four days.

#din djarin #the mandalorian #fanfic #fic recs #western au

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