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It's That Simple

Day 16: Praise Kink (Bob Floyd x F!Reader)

(For the 2023 Kinktober event that I created on my own because I am boring and basic and am trying to keep it simple this year...found here!)

CW: Light angst, kinda (Bob gets deflated); talk of panic attacks and self-doubt; smut (handjob); 18+ only.

Word Count: 5656

AN: This was requested by an anon!

AN2: If you've been around a bit, you know the drill: this isn't edited or re-read or beta'ed.

It’s another terrible first date.

Bob struggles to even snag a first date. He’s unassuming; he lacks the swagger and extroversion to stroll up to a woman and talk her up. Most of his dates are obtained from other members of the Daggers—double dates, set-ups, stuff like that.

The latest one was set up by Fanboy, a friend of his sister. Within moments of meeting his date, Bob knows it’ll be a mess: she makes a face when she greets him at the door, and it goes downhill from there.

It ends when she gets a text. An emergency, she tells him, and Bob is too smart and perceptive to buy the lie. But he’s a gentleman, so he nods seriously and offers to drive her home or wherever she’s needed, which she declines. He pays the bill of their abortive dinner, and he pretends not to notice how his date practically skips out of the restaurant and into the waiting car of a friend.

He should go home to lick his wounds. Another failed date, another night alone. He sees the stretch of his life in front of him and despairs that he’ll ever meet someone, and he should go home to sulk, but he goes to the Hard Deck instead.

He might as well break the news to Fanboy, at least, and maybe Nat can cheer him up with her usual sarcastic humor.

-----

The Hard Deck is as packed as always, and Bob—in his date clothes of dress pants and a button down shirt—stands out among the uniformed pilots and fellow wizzos. He finds the Dagger Squad, confesses his failure to Fanboy, then settles into a stool near Nat and Rooster.

Nat puts a hand on his shoulder and gives him a comforting squeeze. “I’m sorry, Bob,” she says.

“Her loss,” Rooster offers.

Bob shrugs. It’s not anyone’s loss but his, but he offers them a weak smile that fools neither of them.

It’s Hangman who sidles up to Bob, and in an uncharacteristic moment of thoughtfulness, the cocky pilot offers to be his wingman—which makes Bob laugh, and it comes out laced with some bitterness.

“No offense, Bagman, but you’d be a terrible wingman,” Bob says.

“What? Why?”

Bob lifts his hands in a helpless shrug. “Because you’re….you. And I’m not like you at all.”

“So?”

He scoffs in frustration at Bagman being so obtuse. As if any woman would look at Bob if he walked up to them with Jake at his side. It’d be like an Aston Martin rolling up alongside an old Honda Civic, and that’s the analogy he uses to make Jake understand. But Jake shakes his head, clasps him on his shoulders and gives him a friendly shake.

“Nah, Baby on Board. You got it all wrong. You just need some confidence.” Another teeth-rattling shake. “Trust me, there’s a girl out there for you. C’mon.”

Bob finds himself powerless to resist as Jake pushes him off of his stool, then shoves him gently in the direction of the crowded bar.

-----

The first pair that Jake sidles up to is a bust, but it’s not Bob’s fault: Jake had hooked up with the one woman before, forgotten about it completely. He’s moments from getting a drink tossed in his face when Bob tugs him away from the danger and they pull back, reevaluate.

The second pair is a bust too. The first woman doesn’t even let Jake get the full sentence out before she’s wagging her ring finger in his face.

“Married,” she says, her words clipped. “Move along, sailor.”

The third pair? The third pair works out. Jake hones in on one immediately, a blonde with big doe eyes, but the second one—you—rolls her eyes at him.

But when you turn to study Bob, you don’t roll your eyes. You hold out a hand, introduce yourself, ask for his rank, then pat the empty chair beside you.

“Settle in, Lieutenant,” and your smile is easy. “Let’s chat while we watch your friend strike out, huh?”

-----

It turns out you’re drunk, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For one, you’ve fallen in with Bob Floyd, the most gentlemanly man a drunk, single girl could come across. He’d never take advantage, and in fact, he’ll end up driving you home at the end of the night, getting you into your apartment. He will take your shoes off of you, tuck you into your bed, and press a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen on you before he sees himself out.

For another thing, Bob Floyd has fallen in with you, the most fiercely sweet drunk that a down-on-himself man could come across. You’re one of those loud cheerleader types when you drink; the kind of woman who chats up other women in the bathroom, who tells them they’re beautiful, that you love them. With your friend and Jake otherwise engaged, Bob finds himself caught in the tractor beam of your charm.

“You look sad,” you tell him around the rim of your glass. “Are you sad?”

You’re drunk and Bob is sad, and you’re staring at him with wide eyes that glitter in the low light of the bar, so he tells you. He tells you about his terrible date, the latest in a string of terrible dates, that he’s been single for so long and he’s not entirely convinced he’ll ever meet someone, that he’s too scrawny, that his glasses are terrible (one date called them serial killer glasses), that he’s too reserved to ever catch the eye of a woman, too unremarkable looking, let alone—

“No!” You cut him off by exclaiming it, a near-shout, and your hand finds his forearm and grips him there. “You’re gorgeous, Bill! Don’t even say you aren’t!”

He grins despite himself. “It’s Bob. But thanks. I mean, it’s nice of you to say—”

“Bob. Yes. Sorry. Bob, not Bill. I say it because it’s true.” You release your hold on his arm and sit back in your chair, your eyes narrowed now as you study him closer. You’re quiet for a long beat, and Bob squirms under your attention, but then you tell him more and he swears he breaks out in a full-body blush.

“You’re gorgeous, really,” you tell him. “It’s just that you have a sneakier handsomeness, you know? Like, that one there—” You gesture broadly at Jake. “—He’s, like, Ken-doll handsome. Like, he catches your eye because it’s all symmetrical and stuff, and he’s fine, but symmetry can be boring and someone like you, it’s sneaky. You have a nice face, and these nice blue eyes, and nice hair, and I bet people think about you after the fact like, ‘oh, that Bob guy, he’s not bad at all,’ and then even later it’s like, ‘oh, Bob, he’s pretty handsome.’ Because you’re that sneaky sort of handsome and that’s the worst damned kind.”

Bob isn’t entirely tracking what you mean, but he shakes his head at the unearned praise, and he can’t stop the smile that’s plastered on his face. He probably looks like a dope.

“Why’s that the worst kind?” he asks.

“Because it’s deadly!” You lean forward again, put your hand on his arm again. “Sneaky-handsome guys are like a virus because by the time you realize they’ve infected you, it’s too late.”

Bob chuckles. “I’m a virus? Suddenly my night has gotten worse, somehow.”

“No, not at all. It’s just…” You trail off, polish off your drink. You wave down Penny for another. “It’s just that you sneaky-handsome types never understand the power you have. Ken-doll over there knows he’s hot, and by the mere fact of him knowing he’s hot, he loses a considerable amount of hotness. But you have no idea you’re handsome, and that makes you even hotter.”

“I think there’s a string of women in the San Diego area that would disagree with your assessment,” Bob replies. “But I appreciate the compliment, nonetheless.”

“Oh, them.” You flap a hand, a dismissive wave. “There’s a lot of idiots in the world, Bob. You can’t let a string of women in the San Diego area make you feel bad.”

“I guess I just need to find someone who isn’t an idiot.”

“Ah, well!” You set your drink down and wave your hands in front of yourself in a ta-da sort of flourish. “Cal Tech graduate, Bobby. I work for NASA.”

He feels a warm flush at you calling him Bobby. “You’re a rocket scientist? Definitely not an idiot, then.”

“Astrobiologist, actually. And only an idiot sometimes, but never when it comes to the sneaky-handsome men here at the Hard Deck.”

Bob shakes his head, a little embarrassed at how much he likes you, a drunk stranger, talking him up. He tries to dial it back, afraid he’s going to fall in love before last call.

“You’re way too smart for me, then,” he tells you.

That makes you arch an eyebrow at him. “You afraid of smart women, Bobby?”

“Not at all. It’s just that smart, beautiful, and sweet? Do you understand the power you have?” He keeps his tone light, teasing, but he’s in over his head with this: he’s definitely going to fall in love before last call.

Of course he is. His question makes you laugh, a warm sound that knocks free the lump in his chest from his earlier failed date. Your laughter makes him feel drunk even though he hasn’t touched a drop; he feels warm and light and big-headed at how kind you’ve been to him, how sweet, but your laughter is the sound that makes him fall in love with you.

-----

The two of you stay until last call. Bagman and your friend disappear hours before then, and you shrug at Bob, say you called it all wrong, that you didn’t think Jake was your friend’s type.

Bob drives you home. You’re unsteady on your feet, so he hovers near you, but you manage reasonably well until it’s time to unlock your door. He watches you try it, then he reaches out and takes the keys from your hand.

It’s the first time he touches you.

He gets you inside. He gets you to your bedroom, and you flop gracelessly across the mattress, and Bob immediately goes into caretaker mode. He slides your shoes off of you, sets them in a neat row by your closet. He makes his way to your kitchen, gets you a glass of water, then stops in the bathroom. He rummages through your medicine cabinet—you use the same brand of toothpaste as he does, the same type of toothbrush, and Bob marvels at the strange intimacy of learning these things, the everyday things that not everyone is privy to about you. He finds some ibuprofen and shakes two out, then takes them and the water back to you.

You’re already drifting off to sleep, and Bob has to cajole you into sitting up. He gets you perched on the side of the bed and gives you the pills and water, which you take without complaints. He takes the empty glass back from you, and then there’s a moment—

—you sit on the edge of your bed and Bob stands over you, and you look up at him with your bleary eyes and he sees fear. You’re understanding what you’ve done, maybe: you’ve invited a strange man back to your place and you’re drunk, and he could do anything, and Bob sees the flicker of uncertainty, the beginning of fear in your eyes. It makes him feel sick because he’d never take advantage. It makes him sick that the world, being what the world is, makes this fear lance through the whiskey fumes in your head.

He reaches down to the foot of your bed where there’s a blanket neatly folded. He shakes it out, urges you to lie down, and when you do, he covers you up.

“Be sure to drink more water when you wake up,” he tells you softly.

The nascent fear fades out of your expression, and it’s replaced by a loose, goofy grin. You free a hand from under the blanket and give him a sloppy salute. “Aye, aye, captain.”

Bob sees himself out but not before he’s struck with a bit of brave optimism. He sees the little whiteboard by your refrigerator, and he writes out his name and his number. He drives home and sends up a silent prayer that his sneaky-handsome virus has already infected you, charmed as he is by your earnestly drunken (albeit clunky) analogy from earlier in the evening.

He wakes up the next morning and feels less hopeful. He queues up a playlist and sets out on his morning run, but his morning pessimism is misplaced: you call him a mile into his run, and Bob stutters in his steps to hear your voice—a little rough, but sunny nonetheless.

“I’m looking for a guy named Bobby,” you tell him over the phone, and he can hear the smile in your voice. “Lieutenant Blue Eyes.”

-----

The two of you make plans to meet up at the Hard Deck, but you don’t call it a date so Bob doesn’t either. He’s in unfamiliar territory: things have always been a date or not a date in the past, but he’s noticed that many of his Dagger teammates speak in looser terms—meeting up, hanging out—with potential partners. He’s unsure how to handle it; if he seems too casual, you might miss his interest. If he comes on too strong, he might scare you off.

He decides to just turn up in his uniform, as he usually does, and when he arrives at the Hard Deck, you are already there. You’re perched in a bar stool and chatting to Penny, but when he strolls in, you see him.

You smile at him as he walks over to you, but then you shake your head in a mock-rueful way.

“Oh, no,” you say as you hop off of your stool. You open your arms and Bob steps into them, and you hug him warmly like you’re old friends. “I thought maybe it was just whiskey-goggles that night, but you really are cute.”

Bob chuckles. He releases you, then takes the stool beside yours. “Well, I’ve been downgraded. You called me handsome that night,” he points out.

“Sneaky-handsome, actually.”

“There seems to be a whole spectrum here that I was never privy to.”

You wave down Penny who comes and takes your orders. Once your drinks are in front of you—a hard cider for you, a shandy for Bob—you click your glass against his.

“Here’s to the sneaky-handsome men of the world,” you say.

Bob ducks his head and grins “And to the rocket scientists,” he adds.

A date or not a date…the evening passes in a blink, and you leave Bob that night entirely sober after long conversations and a lot of easy laughter. You pull him in for another hug before you part, and this hug lingers longer than the hug you gave him as a greeting. When you pull away, though, you gaze at him with a somber expression.

“I wanted to thank you for the other night,” you tell him. “For being a gentleman when you took me home.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean it.” Your hands on his upper arms squeeze him a little firmer. “You could have taken advantage, and you didn’t. You’re a good one, Bob.”

He shakes his head, tries to wave you off, but you squeeze him again. You don’t let him shrug off your thanks. You don’t let him downplay his goodness.

“You are a good man, Bob,” you repeat, and you stare at him, like you’re daring him to disagree.

Bob, who finds that you’re something of a force to be reckoned with, wouldn’t dare to disagree.

-----

He’s still not entirely clear if this is dating or not. Neither of you actually says the word. You text each other steadily, and you meet up sometimes at the Hard Deck, but your schedule isn’t great and Bob’s is even worse. He worries that he’s missed his chance. When he talks about it to the other Daggers, Hangman rolls his eyes and tells Bob he should have taken his shot earlier, that Bob is pretty much friend-zoned now, but Nat rolls her eyes at that and says he’s overthinking it.

Of course Bob overthinks it. Bob overthinks everything.

He doesn’t know yet that you overthink everything too. That you are going through your own pangs of regret, that you think you’ve missed your chance too, that your friends circle around you too and give you tough-love pep talks to build up your courage to take the lead on this burgeoning thing with Bob.

And ultimately, Bob’s hunch that you’re a force to be reckoned with is correct. In the end, you take charge.

-----

You end up inviting him over for dinner on a night when your schedules align, and Bob overthinks that too.

What if it’s a date-date, and he turns up too casual, with nothing in his hands—no wine, no flowers? Or the opposite—what if he dresses up a little, brings you a mixed bouquet, and it’s just a casual friends-type thing?

Bob has no idea how he can manage the systems on a sophisticated plane because his brain grinds to a painful halt the moment he starts to contemplate this dinner at your place. It’s Nat—it’s always Nat, with her no-nonsense lens into the mystique of her fellow women—who smacks some sense into him.

“Wear a nice shirt, shower beforehand, and take a bottle of wine,” she tells him.

“But what if—”

“It’s always polite to take a gift, Bob.” She rolls her eyes, heaves a sigh. “And it’s always polite to, you know. Shower. Show up fresh-smelling and neat. Jesus Christ. Just go.”

So Bob turns up at your apartment, a mid-tier bottle of wine in his sweaty hand. Freshly showered, a daub of cologne behind his ears, and a nice blue button-down that brings out his eyes.

And it’s a good thing he took Nat’s advice too, because you open the door in the sweetest sundress, and there’s music softly playing and the most heavenly smells wafting from your kitchen. Bob realizes all at once that it’s a date-date after all, and his heart does an alarming little stutter in his chest, enough to stun him until you take his hand and gently pull him inside.

-----

Part of Bob’s issue with women is his inability to pick up on subtle, sometimes invisible cues. He has always fallen in with the sort of women who play mind games, who play coy and say one thing while meaning another. He always feels back on his heels; it feels like women speak a language he’s only slightly fluent in, so he’s always playing catch-up to translate what they mean.

But it’s refreshing with you, in this moment, because as you both sit down to the feast you’ve prepared, you just talk with him. The two of you chat about your lives, you catch each other up since the last time you’ve talked, and Bob almost forgets to be nervous.

Almost. A pair of tapered candles flicker between you and cast your lovely face in a golden glow, and low, bluesy music sets the soundtrack as you eat. You sip at the wine he brought, and he eats your home-cooking, and Bob imagines an entire life like this…and he almost misses the way you keep swiping your palms along your thighs, like you’re nervous.

Almost. He leans into his WSO work, studies you closely like you’re a dashboard of lights and alarms and switches. He watches you a little closer, and he sees the way your throat bobs when you swallow a mouthful of wine, like you’re swallowing past a lump or going all dry-mouthed on him. He sees the deep breaths you take, the way you press the back of your hand to your neck, like you’re flushed and trying to calm yourself.

“You’re nervous,” he blurts out when he realizes it for sure, and you pause in where you’re lifting the wine glass to your mouth and stare at him.

“I am.” It’s that simple. No mind games, no coy pretending.

“It’s just me,” Bob says.

You smile at him, and it trembles a little at the corners. He can feel the nerves in you now, and he reaches out a hand across the table, palm up. He makes a grabby motion with it until your smile firms up and you lay your hand in his, and he grasps you lightly.

“It’s just me,” he repeats.

“And I like just-you,” you tell him. “Like-like, I mean. I wanted to tell you so tonight.”

His heart does that wicked little stutter in his chest, but he squeezes your hand. “Sounds like you just told me then.”

“Guess so.” You watch him, and your smile seems tremulous again, so Bob replies, “I like you too.”

It’s that simple. After you each put yourself through your own overthinking hell, each suffering through your own sleepless nights and needless worrying about dumb things like friend zones, it comes down to a moment so simple that it’s stupid: just the two of you holding hands as you confess your mutual feelings matter-of-factly.

-----

It feels too easy. After months (years) of struggling to even land the occasional first date, suddenly Bob’s dream girl turns up just like that. It feels too easy, and so Bob slips into his overthinking almost immediately.

It goes fine after dinner, when the two of you trade nervous kisses on your couch until the nerves burn off enough that your mouth slotted over his feels natural, that you move in concert with each other—your head tilting to the left, his tilting to the right, no longer bumping noses or knocking his glasses askew.

It goes fine as you climb into his lap, the solid weight of you a welcome sensation because Bob’s head feels like it’s filled with helium, drunk and fizzy from the feel of your lips against his, your tongue against his own.

It goes fine when you climb off of him, shaky-legged like a newborn foal. When you hold out your hand and take his to lead him back to your bedroom.

The moment he finds himself stripped down to his boxers and lying on your bed is the moment it falls apart.

It’s like every mean comment, every brush-off and ghosting, every roll of the eyes and beleaguered sigh and overheard commentary about him crowds into the room and leaves no space for this moment with you. Bob thinks of all the feedback he’s ever gotten on dates—the serial killer eye glasses, the lack of muscles, the lack of game. He tries to take a deep breath and finds he can barely pull in a lungful, and his throat feels like it’s closing on him—

And he can’t get hard. His near-erection from making out on the couch deflates, and even though you are perched over him—you’ve shed your sundress, and you’re in the sexiest, sweetest lingerie set, powder pink, like the underside of a cloud at sunrise—he cannot coax himself back to attention.

The panic that floods him—he recognizes the feeling. He’s felt it a million times. He feels the hot, splotchy redness as it breaks out across his chest and neck, and his face flushes furiously bright, and you notice it all in real time. The sultry, heavy-lidded look on your face disappears and is replaced by pure concern.

“Bob? Bobby? Are you…okay?” You reach a hand out and cup his face, and your palm had felt warm earlier but now it feels cool….which proves how hot he’s flushed, how feverish his panic makes him feel.

“I’m sorry. Shit, honey. I’m…I gotta go.” He tries to sit up but your mattress is soft and he flails a moment, and if Bob were just a bit younger he’d burst into tears at how sideways this has all gone so suddenly. You served him up the perfect evening, you’re kneeling right beside him in the hottest fucking lingerie, and he’s been reduced to a stuttering, red-face idiot who can’t even get hard—

“Hey.” You lay your hand on his bare chest, steady him. “Hey, hey, hey. Take a second. Just breathe, Bobby.”

“I gotta—”

“Just relax.” You press against his chest, tap your forefinger against his skin. “Breathe for me, okay? Everything’s fine.”

“It’s not. Fuck, it’s not!” He raises his voice, winces at how shrill he sounds, and the dam in him breaks. Something in him dislodges, and it all spills out: every mean, rotten thing he’s ever thought about himself. Every bit of unfair criticism, every insult and slight and how his own insecurity has twisted it all into a crippling imposter syndrome. How he only ever feels competent at his job but how he struggles with everything else, and now how he’s fucked it all up with you because he’s overthinking, always trapped in the own tangled maze of his mind, always waiting for the other shoe to drop because he’s not good enough, he can’t even get hard even with you looking like a dream—

“Hey. Whoa.” You remove your hand from his chest, but you scoot over to sit beside him, turned to face him, your expression very similar to the night he met you—the same easy smile, the same studious eyes.

“Nothing’s ruined. You haven’t fucked anything up. Take a breath. Is this because of that bad first date you had the night we met?”

He nods. “A little bit.”

“There’s been other bad first dates, I guess?”

Another nod.

“And now you’re worried this is just another bad first date?”

“Yeah.” It comes out a croak, a roughness in his throat.

“Hmm.” You lean forward, press a soft kiss to his forehead. “You wanna hear about my worst first date ever?”

“No, honey, it’s okay—”

“His name was Justin.” Another soft kiss, this one to his temple. “Good job, good looking.” Another kiss, to the other temple, right at his hairline. “Picked me up and gave me flowers, took me out to San Diego’s most exclusive restaurant that has a reservation list a mile long.”

Bob chuckles weakly. “Sounds awful,” he says, wry.

You hum again, kiss his flushed cheek. “He was charming at dinner.” A kiss on his other cheek. “Said all the right things. Asked about my life and listened to my answers.” The lightest of kisses on the tip of his nose, and it makes him smile despite himself.

“Halfway through dessert, a woman comes up to our table.” Bob feels the gentle press of your lips at the corner of his mouth, and he turns his head to kiss you back, but you pull away.

“It was Justin’s wife.” A flurry of kisses now, to his chin, along his jawline, near his ear.

“He was cheating,” Bob says.

“Nope.” A kiss, this one lingering, under his jaw, on his neck. “Turns out, this was a little game he and his wife play. Some weird cheating, cuckolding fantasy.” Your lips skate over his pulse point. “He takes a girl out, his wife pretends to catch them, and then they go to a nearby hotel to fuck each other senseless.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit is right.” You lift your head to gaze at him. “Asshole left me with the bill for dinner too. So Bobby….you’re not my worst first date. You’re not even close.”

“Honey—”

“You have no idea how hard you’re gonna have to work to really, honestly fuck this up.” You grin at him, and then you straddle his lap again, and he lays his hands on your hips and stares up at you.

“Because you’re, like, exactly the sort of man I’ve always been looking for. You’re that sneaky-handsome sort, and you’re smart and sweet, and you took care of me that first night when I was too drunk to make good choices.” You cup his face in your hands, and you stare at him hard, that sweet forcefulness on full display, like you dare him to disagree with you.

“It’s already a sure thing, Bobby.” You lean forward, kiss him gently. “There’s no pressure to do anything tonight. Don’t even think about needing to do anything. How about you just let me love on you, and you just relax, and if you can keep your secret wife from busting in and turning this into a cuckolding fantasy, we’ll end the night just fine, okay?”

That makes him laugh, and it breaks the spell of his terrible ruminating. Bob laughs, and he slides his hands from your hips up to your waist to feel your soft skin.

“I didn’t even think of getting a secret wife before I came here,” he confesses.

“See? It’s a sure thing, then.” You lean forward again, whisper in his ear, your warm breath making him break out in goosebumps as you tell him to just relax and let you love on him.

-----

The antidote to Bob’s awful overthinking, as it turns out, is your care and praise.

As far as first dates go, this is the one where Bob learns something new about his own sexuality. He learns, thanks to you, that he has a praise kink, because your hands and mouth and body on his feels amazing, but it’s your words that make him hard.

Loving on him means you touch him everywhere. You kiss him everywhere. You stroke him, press your soft lips to him, lick against parts of him until he feels like he’s on fire in a way that is completely different than his panic attack. You kiss every inch of his face and neck. You trail your mouth over his shoulders and collarbones, across every bit of his chest and belly, and you praise him whenever your mouth isn’t otherwise occupied.

Look at you, Bobby. Hiding this body away under that uniform.

You praise his arms, the muscles of his chest and abs. You praise his shoulders and back, the smattering of chest hair, the trail of hair that leads down and disappears under the waistband of his boxers, and you glance up at him, the question in your eyes as you toy with the elastic.

“Can I?” you ask, and Bob nods, swallows hard, and you go lower, you push his boxers down and his cock is there, hard from your honied words.

“Holy shit,” you blurt out. “Bob, are you for real with this?”

It probably seems like a cliché, like the pretty girl in a movie who somehow never realized she was pretty, but Bob has never really considered his size. He’s been around plenty of other penises through the course of his career, but he’s never exactly eyed up other men and measured himself against them. The handful of women he’s slept with never said anything so he assumed he was average, but you praise him here too—you tell him he has a beautiful cock, and Bob blushes at the compliment. He’d never call it beautiful, but when you wrap your palm around his shaft and grip him gently, he’d agree to any adjective you might offer, so long as you never let him go.

This feels too easy too, but the panic never claws at Bob’s throat again. You’ve chosen him, you’ve made it a sure thing for him, and you’ve cut through his awkward moment of near-flight to get him to this: your body stretched alongside his, your breasts pressed against his arm, your hand working against his cock while you whisper praise in his ear.

And every time doubt starts to creep in—he should be touching you too, he should be making you feel good too—you hush him, you still his mouth by kissing him, and you tell him that he has all the time in the world for touching you, but he should let you take care of him now.

His orgasm creeps up in fits and starts, and it seems to ratchet closer with each bit of praise you lavish on him, more so than each movement of your hand working against his cock.

“I want you to come for me, Bobby,” you whisper against his neck. You kiss his pulse point, a plush, open-mouth kiss that makes him shiver as you grip him tighter, work a faster rhythm with your hand. “Come for me like a good boy.”

He wants to be good for you; he wants to do as you say. Some not-so-small part of him craves your approval, and maybe the two of you will play around with that sort of dynamic in the future, but for now, he just wants to obey you. He wants to do his part to salvage the night he thinks he almost ruined, so he breathes in time to your strokes, focuses on every sensation—the softness of your breasts pressed against him, your wet, hot mouth kissing him, the light scent of your perfume. The tension in his belly is a coil, and it tightens and tightens until it snaps, and his hips stutter against your grasping hand. He gasps out your name, warns you, and then a beat later, he comes. He spills over your hand, thick ropes of cum coating your fingers and wrist, spilling over onto his belly.

“Just like that, baby.” You kiss his panting mouth, and he feels the curve of your lips as you give a pleased smile. “It’s that simple.”

#bob floyd #bob floyd imagine #bob floyd x reader #bob floyd x you #top gun maverick #kinktober 2023 #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 hours

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I loveeeee this “Bound to You: Prologue”💌.

I'm so glad you like it! I am the biggest sucker for an arranged marriage - it's one of my top five tropes!

#answered ask

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tropes-and-tales · 5 hours

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I’m so happy you’re posting SVU stuff again, I’ve missed your writings so much!

Ah, thank you! But full disclosure - those were old pieces I had reposted.

But for SVU, I actually have a few asks in my inbox for some of those characters! I hope to get to them in the next month or so!

I mean, who can resist this handsome bastard?!?

#answered ask

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tropes-and-tales · 5 hours

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I just read his favorite, the poe fic, and....... It's so good. Really good. It was really really really good. Thank you!!!!

I'm so glad you liked it!

Confession: it's actually a really old piece that I reposted when I cleaned up my messy-as-hell fan fic folder. I'm trying to get everything organized (I have half-written WIP's and outlines scattered everywhere on my computer) so I can get some forward movement on some of these pieces.

#answered ask

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tropes-and-tales · 1 day

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I hope I’m not too late to request for Kinkber, if not, could I request Dave York with #12? Maybe with the nanny reader?

Months and months (and months and months) after the fact, I finally wrote and published it, here.

I like to write fan fiction on a George R.R. Martin-esque type schedule.

#answered ask

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tropes-and-tales · 1 day

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The Softest in the World

Day 15: Fingering (Dave York x F!Reader)

(For the 2023 Kinktober event found here! Is it April? Yes. Am I that far behind in posting that it's April and I'm still working through Kinktober requests? Also yes.)

CW: Smut (Fingering; talk of masturbation; oblique talk of vague future sex acts); 18+ only.

Word Count: 4102

AN: This is a sequel to this, and it was requested for Kinktober by an anon!

AN2: Never edited, never beta'ed. I live and die by my slopping typing.

The first Christmas without Carol goes far better for Dave than he ever thought it would. Of course he misses his wife, nearly a year out from her sudden death. Molly and Alice miss their mother too. But the immediate grief—that sharp, cutting pain that left them breathless and stunned—has faded into a more mellow sorrow. Ever-present, but it doesn’t take Dave out at the knees anymore.

He knows he owes much of his family’s collective healing to you, the nanny he hired months after Carol died. You’re the one who stepped in and took charge of their lives. You never tried to replace Carol, but you’ve managed their day-to-day moments and their larger healing.

This first Christmas was your idea too. A month in Vermont, away from the family home where memories may have been too thick and pressing to allow for any joy. It had proved out to be a great idea too: long days sledding and snow-shoeing and building snow forts leave the girls exhausted by evening, too tired to ruminate about their missing mother.

And it allows Dave more time with you.

Usually you only live at the York home when he’s traveling. You handle their lives at home—drive the girls to and from school, to and from activities. You handle the maid who comes in twice a week to clean. You keep the refrigerator full, get the girls bathed and put to bed with a story and a hug each night. But Dave is never there to see it—when he returns home from his work trips, you leave for your own apartment.

This month in Vermont? You sleep in the room just down the hallway from him. You share a bathroom with him, leave behind the scent of your shampoo and soap after you shower. He hears you each night when you, like clockwork, pad out into the kitchen for a glass of water that you gulp down until you’re breathless.

More than all of that, he has front row seats to how you care for his girls. You’re tough but fair. You cut them plenty of slack, grieving as they are, but you don’t allow them to run roughshod over you. You play with them, you teach them, and you genuinely seem to love them…and they genuinely love you as well.

Him, though? Dave can’t seem to get a bead on you when it comes to him. Your ease with the girls disappears the moment the two of you are alone. You can’t always meet his eye line. You flinch away from him if he brushes against you. Sometimes he wonders if you can sense his former double life—if you have some preternatural prey response to being so close to a predator. But more than once, he’s caught you watching him on the sly. He’s noticed your heavy-lidded eyes, the way you pull your lower lip between your teeth.

When he cornered you in the hallway a few days earlier, he definitely noticed how your breathing quickened.

Maybe you can sense his killer nature, but Dave would also guess that you are attracted to him. And knowing what he does of your character, you probably feel conflicted about that. Guilty. Maybe even a cliché, the nanny falling for the widowed father of her charges.

If Dave has taken one lesson from Carol’s death, though, it’s this: life is short, and life can end in a blink. Why not live while you can?

-----

The day before Christmas is spent in a nearby town. You plan it, of course, and you layer in fun stuff with all the errands you have to run and make it a family affair. You take the girls ice skating at a nearby pond. Dave stands along the rink’s edge and watches you take lazy circles on the ice, Molly’s and Alice’s mittened hands firmly in yours until they get comfortable on their own. Then you skate over to him, and the two of you watch in silence.

Then there’s hot chocolate at a nearby café, last minute presents for the stockings, and the grocery store. You return to the cabin laden with bags, and the evening flies by. You and the girls make flat breads for dinner, and afterwards, you put on a Christmas movie while the girls put the finishing touches on the tree Dave bought earlier in the month.

Dave helps the girls with their evening baths. He gets them tucked into bed, reads them a story. He presses a kiss to each of their foreheads, and they are out like a light before he’s even quietly clicking their bedroom door shut behind him.

As he’s been tending to his daughters, you’ve tidied up in the kitchen and living room, and now you’re pulling the wrapped gifts from their hiding spot in the hallway closet to arrange them under the tree.

At the sound of his footfall, you glance up and offer him a smile.

“They out already?” you ask.

Dave chuckles. “Before I even left the room.”

You smile, brush the back of your hand across your forehead, miming hard work. “It’s exhausting work, trying to exhaust them.”

“And you manage to do it every time.” He joins you near the tree, kneels down beside you.

“Sometimes I make them run laps at home,” you reply with a laugh, and maybe you don’t notice your casual use of the word home, but Dave notices.

Dave notices everything.

He noticed, for example, how you stood by him at the skating rink, perfect posture and a tension radiating off of you when Dave moved close enough for his coat to brush against yours. He noticed the way you ducked your head at the café, how you pretended not to hear the women who sat nearby and remarked on the lovely little family that you, Dave, and the girls made.

He notices now how you lean away from him just a fraction, how you start when his fingers touch yours each time he hands you a wrapped gift to place. He notices that you won’t look at him, that you keep your gaze carefully fixed on the presents or the tree. He crowds you closer, plays dumb about it, and he notices when the pink tip of your tongue darts out and licks a wet line along your lower lip.

Part of Dave—the dark part of him, the predator in him—wants to grip your face between his hand and force you to look at him. He wants to hold your gaze until it’s too much for you; he wants to stare at you until you squirm and beg him to let you go. And then he wants to not let you go, your begging futile—he wants to hold you tighter and lean in and draw his own tongue along that bitable lower lip of yours.

He keeps that part of him at bay. He knows he has to go slow. Slow movements. You freeze around him, but if he comes on too strong or too fast, you’ll bolt. He needs to quiet that prey instinct, make you feel safe. Alleviate your guilt, if you have any, at being attracted to a widower.

So Dave decides to seduce you instead.

When you reach for the next gift, he instead grasps your wrist lightly. He can feel your pulse against his grip, and he hears the breath you draw in. He holds you like that until you have the courage to look at him, and he smiles at you to put you at ease.

“I’ll finish up,” he tells you, his voice low. “Why don’t you go get a bottle of wine and some glasses? We can have a drink on the couch.”

You hesitate…then nod. It shouldn’t be a turn-on, but Dave loves the hesitancy, then the obedient way you stand up and do exactly as he says. It’s not hard for him to imagine other things he could order you to do, the same uncertainty before you obey him.

-----

The wine is Moscato-adjacent. It’s one of those local vintages made with fruits other than grapes, and far too sweet for Dave’s taste, but you had picked it out at the grocery store, so he sips it carefully and hides his winces when the cloying sweetness burns against the back of his throat.

You? You nearly gulp it down, and he realizes how nervous you are to be here: alone on a couch beside him, the room dark except for the lit-up Christmas tree and the crackling fire in the fireplace. It’s romantic, but you’re his employee, and he swears he can feel you flailing out of your depths to find yourself in this moment.

“Easy,” he says. He stills your hand when you reach for the bottle. You’ve bolted down the first glass so fast, and Dave doesn’t want you drunk. He doesn’t even want you tipsy. He wants just the barest bit of your nerves soothed, but he wants you fully in control of yourself.

He wants you to be completely, stone sober when you beg him.

“Slow down,” he continues. “You don’t want to overdo it.”

You laugh, a nervous giggle that spills out of your mouth, and you start to say, “I just…” but you trail off, don’t finish the sentence.

What were you going to say, Dave wonders?

I just am nervous.

I just think this is too much.

I just think it’s wrong. It’s too soon. It’s too complicated. It’s too unseemly. What will people think, if anyone ever finds out?

“It’s okay.” He says it soothingly. He eases your empty glass out of your other hand, and he sets it down along with his own mostly-full glass, but he does it with one hand—his other, he keeps wrapped around your wrist, unwilling to break his hold on you.

“Mr. York…” You start, and he hears the nerves in your voice. He hears the wobble in your words, the faint tremor, but he also swears he can hear desire too—a huskiness to your voice, the slightest rough edge. And you squirm in your seat, just a bit, but you don’t try to pull away from him.

“Mister York? Since when did I become Mister?” It shouldn’t be so hot, you calling him that, formal with the tremble in your words, but then you breathe out his first name—Dave—and you draw it out, and that’s even hotter.

His hand on your wrist, he pulls you to him, tugs your upper body towards him, and you let him. You go willingly, but your eyes widen. In shock? Fear? Lust?

“Tell me you want this,” he murmurs, his face inches from yours. “If you don’t, say so now, and we’ll forget it ever happened.”

The tip of your tongue darts out, licks nervously against your lower lip. “It’s just…” You take a breath, try again. “It’s just complicated.”

“That’s not a yes or a no, baby.”

You huff and offer him a tremulous smile at his use of a nickname, so he adds, “it’s a simple question.”

You hesitate, and Dave wonders if you’re really conflicted about it. If you’re weighing how your life will change depending on how you answer…

…or if you just don’t want to seem eager, because you nod, then whisper “yes, I do want this,” and when he bridges the remaining distance between you, you’re right there, ready and eager to slot your mouth over his, to part your lips to his searching tongue, to cup his stubbled face with your free hand.

-----

Other men might take you then and there. They might claim you right on the couch, in front of a dying fire and a Christmas tree sparkling with lights. They might rush it, make it some sweaty, sad fumble, then parting to each slink to separate bedrooms.

Dave York has always enjoyed the long game. If he were a game hunter, he would enjoy it better to sit in a tree stand for hours before dawn. He would relish the cool planning, the stalking, the calculating and recalibrating as needed.

Dave York doesn’t fuck you just yet. He wants to give you a taste, just a morsel, because he wants you slavering for it. He wants you looking at him with those wide eyes, that lower lip caught between your teeth, as you beg him for more.

So this night, he only pushes you gently back against the couch as he kisses you. He lowers himself onto you—lets you feel the weight and heft of his body against yours, lets you feel how he can press you into the couch with his weight. He lets you feel the length of his growing erection where it presses against your hip, and each little whimper makes him harder.

He kisses you deeply—tastes the glass of Moscato you gulped down, tastes the sweetness of you beyond the tart, sweet wine. He slides his tongue against yours, licks the inside of your mouth, and he smiles inwardly when you shyly try to do the same. You are mostly led by him but there’s little movements—your tongue pressing back against his, say, or the upward press of your hips as you search for friction—where you try to lead too.

He braces himself with one hand, which allows the other to roam free. He cups your flushed face, feels the heat of your blushing. He draws his hand down, traces a path down your neck, circles his palm there, feels how much he can fit in the span of one palm. Not because he likes choking—he’s never been into breathplay or anything so risky, but he does like the tame feel of his hand partially around your neck with the feel of your pulse and the ragged breaths you pull in.

Then lower. He grasps the softness of your breast, and even through the sweater and bra, he can feel your pebbled nipple. He brushes the pad of his thumb over it, back and forth, and it makes your hips lift up again…and then you groan when you find nothing to meet you, no friction and no touch.

“Be patient,” he whispers in your ear. He nips at your lobe, darts his tongue against the whorl of your ear, and you whimper at the sensation of his hot breath fanning over you.

He moves his free hand lower still. He finds the hem of your sweater, snakes his hand under it. Then he finds the waistband of your leggings. He sends up a silent prayer that he gets to live in a time and place where leggings are a thing—no tricky buttons or zippers, just an elastic waistband so easy to slip his hand under, and he cups your mound through the soft cotton of your panties. Dave chuckles near your ear, then lifts his head to look at you because you’re already wet there, the damp cotton cleaving to you as he skates his fingers over you.

“Bad girl,” he whispers. “Getting wet for your boss.”

He’s watching you as he says it, and he sees the flash of hurt that crosses your face before your pupils get wider and your lips part, as you breathe out a heavy breath. You’re such a good girl; Dave obviously vetted you before ever letting you into his girls’ lives. Straight A student, honors, full ride in college. Not even a speeding ticket in your history. He bets you’ve never been called bad, never been a bad girl, and it seems to hurt you for a beat before you embrace this tamest step outside of your erotic comfort zone.

Dave has so many more steps he wants to lead you on. He wants to take your hand in his and lead you into darker, deeper waters. He imagines spanking you, binding you, blindfolding you. He imagines twisting your innate desire to please into something sensual; he imagines training you to greet him on your knees. He imagines rewarding you, calling you a good girl instead, fucking you senseless until you are left overstimulated and weeping, ruined for any other cock but his.

“Is this just from right now?” he continues, and he strokes you through your soaked panties, feels how they are molded to your folds and cleft. “Or have you been thinking about this?”

“I don’t—”

“Tell me.” He pinches you lightly—not enough to hurt, but the sensation pulls a gasp from you, and your hand flies up to grasp his bicep where his bracing arm is near your head. “Tell me why you’re so wet.”

“I’ve been thinking about this.” It comes out a whisper, barely audible. Tinged in shame, and that’s the first thing Dave will burn out of you. Guilt. Shame. He’ll break you down and tear those useless emotions out of you.

“When?” Another light pinch, another gasp. Your hand grips his arm harder, and Dave will see dusty little bruises there in the morning.

“Since….ah, since a while.” Another pinch, and you add, “over the summer.”

The summer. When Dave was around more due to his busy period at word dying off. When Dave ran each morning and returned home to find you cleaning up the breakfast mess, when he shed his sweaty shirt and walked through the house on his way to shower. When he pretended not to notice the way your eyes followed him each step, and when he pretended like he needed a glass of cold water, shirtless, that he drank down in your eye line.

Bad girl indeed.

“You touch yourself to the thought of me?” Here he moves his hand, shifts it to slip under the lacy band of your panties, and he’s delighted to feel a strip of damp curls there, happy that you haven’t shaved or waxed yourself bare. He drags his fingers through them, then finds your clit, slick and swollen, and he touches you lightly there. Strums you with his thumb and chuckles at the keening whine that tears out of your throat.

“Answer me. You touch yourself, thinking about me?”

“….yes.”

“Like this?”

“S-sometimes.”

“Not every time?”

You fix him with a pleading look, but you’re barely able to hold his gaze for long. When he brushes his lips over your cheekbone, he can feel how hot your face is. This is a challenge to you, possibly humiliating, but also arousing because you continue to lift your hips, chasing the touch you’re desperate for. Such a soft little thing, the softest in the world, and yet you’ve been touching yourself to the thought of him.

Dave stills his hand, and he chuckles again at the groan of disappointment you make. “Tell me or I stop.”

You swallow, nod. “Sometimes I…I have a vi…a vibrator.”

He can imagine it; a sad little tucked-away piece of silicone or plastic. You probably pull it out in the darkness of your room, ashamed at pleasuring yourself. You probably bury it under your socks and blush when your hand brushes against it when you’re putting laundry away.

He hums, considers the mental image that rises to his mind. Your legs spread under the covers, running the toy over your clit, maybe pushing it inside you. Imagining it was him instead.

Not that different from the times he’s gripped his own cock, stroked himself in the shower or in his room and pretended it was you instead of his hand.

Dave could demand to know your fantasies. He could make you tell him what scenarios you’ve used to get off to him. Him bending you over the kitchen counter? Him fucking you in the shower? Him sneaking into your bedroom at night, sliding under the covers and slipping his already-hard cock into your tight little pussy? He could make you blush harder and demand to know these things, but he wants to take this slow, so he kisses you instead, murmurs his thanks, calls you a good girl for answering his questions, and when your face lights up at the praise, Dave pushes one thick finger into you and draws the sweetest, throatiest groan from you.

Other men might take you then and there, but Dave only finger-fucks you. He goes so slow, eases it out, pushes it back in so you feel every goddamned bit of him entering you. He keeps his thumb firm on your clit, and just the pressure makes you whimper each time he presses a little harder.

He adds a second finger and feels the delicious stretch as your pussy cedes to him. You’re unbelievably warm, slick, and your pussy twitches and pulses around him each time he breeches the confines of your body. It’s tight, but you’re nervous, and each bit of praise—good girl, such a good fucking girl for me, just relax and let me make you feel good, baby—makes you unclench a bit more. You relax, and you find the rhythm that he fingers you, and you lift your hips to meet his fingers.

When he adds a third finger, you hiss at the thickness of it, the tight fit. He stills, watches your face for any pain, and when he doesn’t see any, he continues.

Three fingers is a good start to preparing you for his cock, he thinks. He imagines the feel of pushing into you, mounting you, and he imagines your fingers digging into his shoulders as he bottoms out in you.

In due time. Now he fingers you, he scissors his fingers inside you and feels the answering throb in his erection each time you whine or whimper or groan, the sweetest symphony of sounds he’s able to pull from you. When he starts circling your clit with his thumb, when he crooks his fingers inside you, pressing gently until he finds the spot that makes you gasp out his name, but you call him Mister York again, and it unlocks something inside him, the power you’re letting him have over you. He dips his head and sinks his teeth into the side of your neck, right at the pulse point, and you gasp again. Your other hand flies up and cradles the back of his head, and you twist your fingers through his hair, but you don’t pull him away—you hold him there, and he licks against the dimpled marks he’s left in your skin, he breathes against the wet line on your neck, and he’ll see a lurid bruise there in the morning too that will make him instantly hard.

“You’re going to come for me,” he growls against your neck. “You’re going to be a good girl and come when I tell you.”

And his mind boggles at the possibilities with you because you do exactly as he says. You nod at his order, and you press your hips in time to his searching fingers, and he feels when your orgasm approaches because you lose much of your embarrassment. You swear in a hoarse whisper against his head—oh fuck, D-Dave, fuck fuck fuck, I’m close, I’m gonna, oh, don’t stop—and you spread your legs wider to make room for his hand, and the lurid sound of his hand working against your wetness doesn’t seem to even register to you. The entire living room smells like sex and you don’t care, and when you gasp and buck your hips up into his hand, he feels your orgasm break around you: the pulse of your cunt gripping his fingers, the hot slick of cum that coats his hand, the way your body shakes under his.

He fingers you through it. He draws out your pleasure until you shove at him lightly, tell him it’s too much, and he stops. He feels the tension of your orgasm—the arching body, the trembling—leave you, and you lay underneath him, sated and heavy with your release.

Dave draws his hand out from under your clothing, and he straightens the hem of your sweater where it rode up a bit. Then he fixes you with an unblinking stare and lifts his hand to his mouth, and he smiles at your shocked expression as he licks his fingers clean. Then, with the taste of you on his lips, he lowers his head and kisses you again—deep and slow, so you can taste yourself too.

“Good girl,” he tells you when he breaks the kiss. “You’re going to be such a good girl for me.”

#dave york #dave york imagine #dave york x reader #dave york x you #kinktober 2023 #tropes and tales #the equalizer 2

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tropes-and-tales · 2 days

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tropes-and-tales · 4 days

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When you're deep in a way overdue Kinktober piece (oops) and realize too late that you've made the reader character morally grey and made the blorbo far less perfect than usual but you feel guilty about the slow rate you publish and don't want to delete it and start over.

(It's Borracho).

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

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Shadow and Light: Chapter Four

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin x F!Reader

WC: 4174

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Slow-burn; pining; a charged moment in the dark but no smut.

Mandalorians were, by reputation and in reality, a tough people. A culture based around weapons, war – Mandalorians were made, not born. They trained from childhood and were whetted and sharpened into fierce warriors. Mando knew as well as anyone. He had trained – brutal, fierce training – that left him bone-tired, aching, covered in bruises. It had all been to prepare him for his life now – the life of a bounty hunter.

Living with you now made all that training look like a leisurely soak in a Twi’lek healing bath. Mando had never felt so uncertain. He’d never worked so hard. Where his training in the Mandalorian Fighting Corp was physical, living with you was largely a struggle in emotions….which Mando had no experience with.

The first few days were awkward, and they would have been more awkward if you hadn’t addressed it directly one evening. The two of you tiptoed around the other. He stuck to the parameters of the ship, afraid of even brushing against you. You seemed to hold your breath around him. If Mando had more worldly experience, he would have recognized the source of the tension. He didn’t, though, and he was glad you brought it up.

You were both in the tiny galley. You and the Child were eating – you fed the little womp rat and alternated bites for yourself, and Mando sat across from you and watched. He ate separately in the cockpit, of course, but he felt like it was at least polite to sit with you and the little one for a few moments a day. As usual, the tension was thick, but today you acknowledged it.

“It might help if I understood your Creed a little better,” you offered, and you shot him an apologetic smile.

“Help what?”

“This,” you said, and you gestured vaguely between the two of you. “I don’t think either of us are used to working with another person.” You paused, and added, “I’m worried that I’m going to violate some sacred rule and get tossed out an airlock.”

So you had felt the tension too. Mando tilted his head and considered how much of the Mandalorian Way to tell you. In the end, he decided on the simplest version.

“I cannot remove my helmet in front of others,” he said. “Nor can I let anyone else remove it.”

“Because you’re a Gungan under there?”

“No.”

You spooned another bit of stew into the Child’s mouth. “It’s okay if you are a Gungan,” you said conversationally. “I wouldn’t judge.”

Mando huffed in mock-exasperation. “I’m a human.”

You gave him a skeptical look. “Allegedly.”

“Not allegedly. Actually.”

You narrowed your eyes a fraction but smiled. “Are there any exceptions to the helmet rule?”

There were, but Mando didn’t want to discuss them with you, so he only made a non-committal sort of noise and left you to interpret its meaning through his voice modulator.

The conversation stalled, and he only sat and watched you feed the Child. His palms felt itchy in his leather gloves, and he tried to remember the ease that you spoke with Kulil. He remembered that the Ugnaught asked a lot of questions during your conversations.

“How is it?” he blurted out, and you knit your brows in confusion until he jerked his head in the direction of your bowl.

“What, the stew?” You shrugged. “It’s fine.”

Mando had so many questions he wanted to ask, but they all were stuck in his throat until it felt tight, like he couldn’t quite pull in a full breath. Another silence descended until he finally stood up, defeated, and went into the cockpit.

-----

You joined him later. The Child had fallen asleep and been tucked into its crib, and he heard you make your way up the ladder into the cockpit.

“May I join you?” you asked, and he nodded his head. He turned enough to see you settle into the co-pilot’s seat.

“Are there any other rules than the helmet rule?” you eventually asked. “Anything else for me to know?”

The Creed had many rules, but Mando didn’t think you needed to know them. The helmet rule, in fact, wasn’t a hard and fast one for all Mandalorians. It was specific to his tribe.

“None that are very important,” he said. “None that would warrant death by airlock.” It felt strange, you sitting beside and behind him, so he swiveled in his chair and offered to shift your own seat beside his. The co-pilots seats were only shifted back on their tracks because he had traveled alone for so long.

“Is that okay?” you asked, and he answered by leaning forward and reaching down by your feet. He released the lever and pulled your seat until it locked into place beside his own.

Another silence fell between the two of you, but it felt less awkward. Mando knew you well enough now to know that you loved to watch from the cockpit. You were an unabashed space lover: he may have tired of the scenery years ago, but you gave him a sort of second life in that regard. When you gasped at the cold blue star, when you gave a soft sigh at the nearby nebula, it made Mando see it all with fresh eyes too. Tonight, there was nothing much other than the pinpoints of stars.

“You can talk, you know,” he finally said. His voice sounded gruff even to his own ears. “If you want, I mean.”

“That wouldn’t bother you?”

He shook his head and adjusted course by a degree. “No. Why would it?”

You gave a little laugh. “Aren’t you notoriously silent?” Mando didn’t answer, and his silence was proving you right, and he kicked himself mentally once again for not knowing how to talk to people. How to talk to you.

“Alright,” you said. You settled into your seat: tucked your legs under you, leaned onto the arm rest nearest him so that you were only a few inches from him. He swore he could feel you like a magnetic field, through his armor and the thick clothing underneath, but that was ridiculous.

“Have you ever worked with others?” you asked.

“I have.” Mando had worked with Ran’s crew of mercenaries – people with no creed other than the quest for money. It had ended as badly as any money-based relationship could, from the falling out with Ran to the bitter end of his violent little fling with Xi’an, and Mando had been happily solitary since then. Until now.

“I have too,” you said, and you offered many more details – there’d been a crew of former spice runners, and a sibling pair of Keshiri smugglers. And a human partner, but the way you glossed over that relationship versus the others made Mando sit up a little straighter and flush with imagined jealousy. If you noticed, you didn’t remark on it, and you chattered about individual jobs and people you knew by star system.

Mando was so wrapped up in a torturous fantasy of you and that human partner that he missed your question and asked you to repeat it.

“I said, what happens if someone removes your helmet?”

“If someone tried, I would kill them.”

“Hmm.” He could hear the playful tone in your voice, and if he acted cross when you took that tone with him, it was only to hide the fact that he like it when you teased him. It made him feel normal – like you weren’t afraid of him. Like you saw him as you might any other man.

“So what if your head was trapped in the jaws of a rancor, and I pulled you out by your feet?”

“No.”

“What if you were drowning and the helmet was weighing you down?”

“Also no.”

“What if you were trapped in a magnetic field?”

That made him snort. “Beskar isn’t affected by magnets.”

“What if I accidentally saw you without your helmet?” you tried. “What if I accidentally walked in on you in the refresher?”

He snorted at that too. “You mean, what if you cracked the lock on the door? How would that be an accident?”

You laughed, and the sound made a warm flush wash over him. You untucked your feet and sat forward, and you reached for a lever in the instrument panel. The knob on it was askew, and Mando watched as you unscrewed it, studied the threading, and blew into it to get some of the dust out. Then you threaded it back onto the lever carefully, and he was so intently watching you that he nearly missed your last hypothetical scenario.

“What if you were hurt,” you said quietly, and your voice had lost its teasing tone. “What if the only way to save you was to remove your helmet? Could you break the Creed to save your life?”

Mando didn’t even consider any hidden meaning behind your question. “Then I should be left to die,” he answered truthfully. “Or I’d have to kill the person who tries to take my helmet off.”

*****

At first, it was awkward with Mando, but the unease melted away as you got used to each other. The Child helped; it acted like a sort of moderator. Gave you each something to focus on and talk about when the thick silence descended between the two of you.

You forgave Mando his betrayal on Nevarro, and once the bruise on your neck faded to an ugly yellow, you went ahead and forgot it too. Like anything else you had watched him do, Mando had done the right thing….exactly after he had blundered the hard way first.

As the initial new partners awkwardness faded, it was replaced something else. There were great swaths of conversation now, which usually meant you talking and Mando interjecting a sentence or sometimes just grunting. You were getting better at deciphering his grunts, at least. There was sometimes a cozy sort of quiet, when he’d sit and watch you and the Child eat. When you landed on a mid-sized planet with a decent population to get supplies and refuel, Mando had been charmingly protective of both you and the Child.

But there was something more there. Sometimes you felt his eyes on you, and you’d turn to find him standing stock-still, watching you. Sometimes you swore that there were words just on the tip of his tongue (assuming he had a tongue) that he was dying to say. Sometimes you felt like there were words he wanted you to say. Sometimes you caught him muttering to himself in Mando’a, and you started a list of those words in the back of your leather-bound book. A clumsy primer to his native language, and most of the words were probably curses and swear words anyway, you guessed.

The new, indefinable unease grew steadily over time. You worked out a routine of sorts, tried to offer Mando time alone on his own ship where he didn’t have to worry about wearing his helmet. At a certain point in the sleep cycle, you locked yourself into your own narrow berth and didn’t leave it until hours later.

Not that it mattered, you guessed. When the Razor Crest was powered down to just the auxiliary lights in the cockpit, the rest of the ship was plunged in complete darkness. But still – you wanted Mando to feel secure in his Creed. You wanted him to know you respected him.

So when it happened, you swore it was an accident, except the circumstances probably were suspect, given your previous joking conversations of all the ways one could accidentally see Mando without his helmet on.

It was in the middle of a sleep cycle, when you were locked in your berth. You had woken up from the same dream you seemed to have all the time now – the one that had started after you healed Mando all those nights ago on Arvala-7. The dream always left you off-balance and a little sick to your stomach, and you desperately wanted a cup of water to wash the bad taste out of your mouth.

You stood by your door and strained to hear any sounds on the other side. There were the usual creaks and sighs of the old ship. The Child was fast asleep in its cradle in your room, and it gave the occasional grumble or snore. If Mando was up and about, you didn’t hear him. You decided to chance it.

The ship was darker than night, and even if your eyes adjusted a little, you still couldn’t make out anything. You paused and listened – it was still silent.

You reached out to orientate yourself in the hallway, and then you walked carefully towards the galley in a jerky, hesitant gait. You felt like a fugitive, and you tried to hold your breath but only succeeded in making yourself breathless and making more noise.

You got your water and gulped it down gratefully. It was icy cold, and it washed away the lingering dream and the cobwebs of sleep. After your breathing calmed, you listened closer. Still nothing beyond the Crest moving through space.

You gave a little shiver and rubbed your arms. You forgot how cold the ship got at night – your little room was better insulated, and you had a few blankets and your cloak when it got too cold.

You turned to return to your room and the warmth of your narrow cot, and when you turned the blind corner into the hallway, you ran right into something. No, not something. Someone.

A warm, solid someone. You were so used to Mando being encased in his cold armor that you often forgot that there was a body under those layers, so when you crashed headlong into…well, into bare skin…you stupidly thought there was another stowaway.

The someone reached out and stilled your blind shoving by pulling you closer to him, and it wasn’t until you heard them speak that you realized it was Mando.

It took you a beat longer to realize that the voice – smooth, unmodulated – was Mando…without a helmet.

“Oh no,” you whispered in horror. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” You repeated it over and over until Mando hushed you.

“Can you even see me?” he asked, and he sounded curious. His voice had a warmth that you would have never guessed, and you despaired that you had ruined it all – ruined everything – over a glass of water.

“No,” you said. You could feel the tears springing to your eyes.

“There’s no harm if you can’t see me,” he pointed out reasonably. A beat. “What are you doing up?”

“Bad dream,” you muttered, and you reached up to swipe an errant tear away. “Water.” You took a shaky breath. “Are you sure it’s okay? You didn’t break your Creed?”

He chuckled. “No, it’s intact.” You almost missed his words; you were too focused on his laugh. So he did laugh. It came through his helmet as a fuzzy hiss or a distorted sort of bark. Without the helmet, it was a nice laugh. A little throaty. Not unappealing at all.

That thought pulled you directly out of your head and put you back in your body, and you realized that his hands were still on your arms. His bare hands on your bare arms. They were large and warm and a little calloused, and the more aware you grew, the more the air surrounding you seemed to shift and thicken. And suddenly, that indefinable unease felt definable. You knew exactly what it was.

If you felt it, Mando did too. There was no reason to hold you, but he kept his hands on you. Not just that – they tightened their hold a bit, then slid down until he was cupping your elbows. It was pitch black, but you still shut your eyes. You could feel your heart hammering in your chest, and you swore that Mando had to hear it too.

Unable to see, your other senses were heightened. You could smell him – not just the metallic beskar, but the real him – the completely masculine smell, like leather and musk and a clean undercurrent of soap.

Neither of you spoke. It was that same heavy silence, punctuated only by his heavy breathing and your own gulping breaths of air. It was a moment of small movements. Tentative. His hands on your arms as he walked you step by step backwards until your back was pressed against the cold metal of the hallway. Your own hands hanging down in tense fists by your side. You wanted to touch him too – there was no point denying that feeling to yourself, at least – but you didn’t want to press it. You had the sense that Mando was moving exactly as fast as he possibly could, and anything faster would cause him to retreat.

As tense it seemed, it was mostly innocent. You’d certainly done far more illicit things than you were now: you only stood there, eyes shut, heart in your throat, as Mando held you there. He never moved his hands from where they were at your arms, but his hands stroked the soft skin at the hinge of your elbow. Infinitively gentle. Tentative. His body only inches from yours, and the baser part of you wanted him to press against you. You weren’t even sure if he was completely naked – you had touched his bare chest when you ran into him – but that had been a split-second of contact.

You wanted to tilt your head up to his. You wished you could think of something to say – something comforting or encouraging – but your tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of your mouth. If you focused, you could feel his breath against your hair.

How long did the two of you stay like that, you not moving and him only caressing your arms in tiny circles? A minute, an eternity. The tension palpable, until it snapped and Mando shoved away from you and retreated to his berth.

You sagged against the wall, afraid your legs might give out. You waited there a long moment before you followed and sealed yourself in your own quarters. Sleep, for the rest of that sleep cycle, would be elusive, and when you finally drifted off, you had dreams of an entirely different sort that left you even more unsettled than your usual ones.

Dreams where Mando didn’t push away from you in that hallway.

*****

If Mando were alone in the Crest, he would have raged. Kicked the walls, punched the console in the cockpit. He was so stupid. Reckless. Stupid.

He had heard you in the hallway, fumbling your way from your room to the gallery. He had been wide awake. You always woke him when you had those bad dreams.

He had noticed them the first night you slept in your new berth. The walls that separated you from him weren’t that thick, and at first, he had heard you moaning – it had immediately made his ears tune in like a satellite towards you, but it wasn’t that sort of moaning. Then you muttered in your sleep, words he couldn’t make out. Then you whimpered, cried, and finally woke up with a gasp.

Night after night. Every night. Normally he’d just hear you sigh and toss and turn for most of the remaining sleep cycle, but tonight…he heard you stand up. He could picture you listening for him – you had been so thoughtful and vigilant once you understood the importance of his helmet. Then he heard you in the hallway, stumbling past his door towards the galley.

Mando didn’t even think. He just followed you. At the very least, he should have put more clothes on. He ran hot like a furnace, and he slept in little more than shorts. After so many long hours in his heavy gear, the few hours in his berth with little on felt decadent.

He didn’t expect you to run into him. In the dark, your lithe grace was gone, and you crashed into him like a loping Wookiee. He would have joked about it – he joked with you now – but the sudden sensation of your hands on his bare chest for all of a second undid him.

Maker, if he wanted you before…there had been the few times that you’d touched him, tapped him on the arm or on the back of his hand to get his attention or to drive a point home during one of your conversations in the cockpit.

There had been more looks, where he watched you as you moved around his ship, as you tinkered with spare parts in the engineering bay, as you played with the Child and dozed in the co-pilot’s seat or ate distractedly as you wrote in that book of yours. You had loosened up over time, shed some of your own layers. Nothing salacious, but the sight of your bare neck or the hollow at the base of your throat or your hair down as you tried to braid it while the kid cooed and gurgled and tugged on it….they were all like bright little beads that Mando strung on a wire and tucked against his heart under his beskar.

If all of that was a flickering candle flame, then this moment in the hallway was like high noon on Jakku. He felt feverish, almost sick, and your panic over his Creed had pulled him out of his delirium for a moment.

But only a moment. Your skin was softer than he ever thought possible under his clumsy hands, and he could smell you – that clean, bright smell of your soap and the faintly flowery oil he watched you work into your hands and elbows and knees to fight off the dry recycled air of space travel.

And he could hear you. You didn’t resist him – you seemed to pull him backwards as much as he pushed you towards the wall – but he could hear the uneven breathing, the way you seemed to hold a breath and then gulp in air. Mando wanted to shift a hand to your wrist or, even better, the side of your neck to feel if your pulse was thudding as much as his was.

He waited for you to say something; you waited for him. It was a long moment, and it was made longer because Mando was greedy and never wanted it to end. Wanted to spend an eternity drinking in your scent and feeling your warm skin under his palms. It was far less than most men demanded, but Mando had so little touch in his life, he felt almost drunk on the barest bit he had now.

He still wanted the courage to do more.

Mando didn’t, though. He didn’t want you to flee from him. Didn’t want you to disembark on the next planet with that pack slung over your shoulder without a backwards glance. He knew he was difficult to travel with, even more difficult to know. He’d had one relationship exactly – if you could call it that – a messy, purely physical fling with Xi’an when he worked in Ran’s crew. Those encounters had been mutual and consensual violence – just two lost, angry people taking it out on each other. Mando had never even removed his armor or clothes for those moments. Neither had Xi’an. It’d just been….well, fucking. Purely carnal, pure release. No attachment.

As much as he wanted to dip his head to kiss you, or pull you back into his quarters, the fact was – he’d never kissed anyone before. He’d never been bared in front of anyone before. At best, he’d disappoint you, and at worse, he’d scare you away. Somewhere in between those two extremes was an awkwardness that he realized was inevitable now.

So he tore himself away from you and hid like a child until morning. He waited until he heard you up with the Child and snuck into the cockpit.

And to overcompensate with that unfortunate moment of intimacy that he knew you didn’t understand or reciprocate, he acted cold towards you. Pushed it the other way. If he burned for you inwardly, outwardly he acted as cold as the armor that encased him. He ignored the surprise and faint hurt that crossed your features when he turned you away from the cockpit. He ignored how you knit your eyebrows together and chewed your lower lip in worry when he said he wasn’t interested in talking.

“We’re going to Sorgen,” he told you curtly a few days later, and you only nodded.

It was a forest planet, sparsely populated. A real backwater skug hole with nothing going on. Mando pictured some space – a chance to get away from each other safely and forget the past few weeks.

#din djarin #din djarin x you #din djarin imagine #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian imagine #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

Text

Shadow and Light: Chapter Three

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin x F!Reader

WC: 3312

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Slow-burn; plot-building; canon violence; non-canon fighting; pining.

Channeling always left you drained, and it was doubly so when you used Ashla for healing. It was like a fast-moving river: when you opened the gates and let it flow through you, it wasn’t the using that wore you out – it was closing the gates, turning it off.

You’d heard about entire orders of people who could use the power. You own adopted people had mystics who used it for guidance or healing, and you’d heard of the Jedis and Sith, and darker sects like the Nightsisters. You knew that those who were trained in it could channel it specifically, but for you, it was just torrents of raw power that coursed through you. Neither good nor bad.

And because you couldn’t really control it, there was always a spillover effect. When you healed Mando that evening, the deluge of power also showed you visions upon visions that cycled through your head as you slept by the fire that night. Visions of the past, visions of possible futures. None of them really making sense. The strongest vision – the one that stayed to the forefront of your mind even when you woke – was the most unsettling.

You were still exhausted the next morning, so when you and Mando and the floating pod exited the canyon and saw the Razor Crest being dissembled by Jawas, well….there wasn’t much you could do other than sigh and watch Mando pursuit them pointlessly. Once he was out of sight, you sighed again and guided the pod with the child into what was left of the ship.

“He does things the hard way,” you told the Child, who twitched its ears and held its arms out to you. You lifted it out of its pod, and it snuggled into your arm with a pleased coo.

Jawas were canny scavengers, and you and the Child inspected the damage: they had taken almost everything of value, tearing out components that could be repurposed for other vehicles. The frame of the ship was intact, though, and they’d left most of the personal effects behind. Mando’s sleeping quarters had been tossed and searched, but they’d missed the little nook you’d carved out for yourself in the cargo hold. Your pack was still there, untouched, and you knelt down and rooted through it now for some food.

You had a package of preserved nutrition bars – they tasted terrible, but they were food. You gnawed at one and pressed little bits to the Child, who ate them but frowned so mightily at the taste that you couldn’t help but laugh.

“I know,” you told it. “They’re bad.”

Then there was nothing to do but wait, so you took the Child to the cockpit, settled into one of the remaining seats, and curled up. The Child made a sleepy grumble as it burrowed against you, and before long, it was asleep.

It wasn’t a weapon after all. You had truly thought it was some thing, maybe a cache of kyber crystals that the Empire used to power its awful death machines. But it was just a child, a sweet little thing from what you could tell, and every moment you spent with it, the more certain you were: your original plan only needed a little revision. Instead of destroying the asset to keep it from the hands of the Empire, you were going to protect it.

*****

Mando was discomfited, so when he caught the Jawas destroying his ship, running after them in a blind rage seemed perfectly reasonable.

You’d thrown him off his center when you healed him the previous night, and he had been uncomfortable ever since. Maybe uncomfortable wasn’t the right word. He was a man of few words, after all. Maybe bothered was a better word.

His arm was perfectly healed. Even in daylight when he inspected the wound closer, it was completely mended without a single scar to mark where it had been. It didn’t mean that the spot didn’t burn with the memory of where you had touched him for that too-short moment.

Maybe burn wasn’t the right word. The best word he could use was yaim’la, the Mando’a word for comfort. But more like familiar, like being home. Which wasn’t a feeling Mando had felt in a very long time. He had no home.

You had still been drained by the healing, and he could see the dark circles under your eyes as you trudged beside him. But you never complained or asked him to slow his stride, and he grudgingly gave you some respect for that.

More curious was how you couldn’t quite meet his eyeline like you had before. When you spoke, your gaze seemed to fall just a bit short, like you were addressing the top of his helmet instead of the slit where his eyes were.

The only respite was when he chased down the Jawas’ moving fortress. He had managed to kill a few of the pests and had nearly breached the giant vehicle, but he had ultimately failed and fallen from it. The fall stunned him, knocked him unconscious for a moment.

Then he woke up, and his arm burned with the memory of your hand on him. Irritated, he marched back the Crest to find you and the asset curled up in the cockpit, and you both woke when he tried to turn his ship on. A useless effort: the engines were gone, as was the navigation system and the ignition switch.

-----

The evening was spent with Kulil. Once the situation was made clear to the Ugnaught and a plan was made, Mando pulled back from the rest of you. You and Kulil chatted amiably – you both seemed to be genuinely curious creatures – and Mando eavesdropped a little jealously. He wished he could speak as easily as Kulil.

You each spoke about your experiences under the yoke of the Empire: him as an indentured servant, little better than a slave. You as a hunted person with the rest of the remaining Lasats, hiding in the craggy mountains and pestering the outpost of imps who staffed the permanent base they built on your adopted planet.

Kulil asked about your childhood and what it was like being raised in another species, another culture. Mando tilted his head to listen to your answer – he had an idea what that might have been like. He had been a foundling too. He wondered if you had felt as lost as he had. If you still felt lost. At least he had the Way. You seemed to be completely alone, drifting whatever way the wind seemed to blow you, or whichever way your so-called channeling seemed to pull you.

“It was fine,” was all you said, but even the Mandalorian could hear the lie in your voice. You turned inward then, and Mando watched as your eyes shifted to the horizon. It was twilight on Arvala-7, and you got a sad, faraway look on your face. Kulil felt the shift in mood too, and the Ugnaught fell silent.

One by one, you each carved out your own places to sleep and turned in for the night. Mando just settled in against one of the walls of Kulil’s house – he could fall asleep anywhere. Besides, his spot gave him a prime view to watch you as you slept. When he reasoned with himself that he was just watching over you because he didn’t completely trust you, he almost believed it himself.

*****

You were already thinking of the Child as your ally, your co-conspirator.

When Mando bickered with the Jawas, when he tried to roast one and refused to deal with them, you caught yourself making eye contact with the little green creature, and you swore the two of you were thinking the same thing: Mando does things the hard way.

And because he did things the hard way, you found yourself tossed into the air and in the mud near the mudhorn’s lair. You had suggested that perhaps he scan the cave first, but no – Mando stalked into the cave without a backwards glance, and you had tried to step in to help….and you ended up bruised and stunned while the Child lifted the mudhorn into the air with the same power you used to channel and heal. You could feel that power crackling in the air, even with your head ringing and your thoughts muddled.

When Mando finally made his way over to you, you were seeing double. The sun glinted off his beskar helmet, and you squinted your eyes at him.

“Cyar’ika,” he spat angrily. “I told you to stay back with the kid.” He extended his hand and hoisted you to your feet. “Are you hurt?” he added, a little less rough.

“Fine,” you wheezed. You knew you’d have a constellation of bruises in the morning, but you wouldn’t admit that to Mando. Not when you’d finally exasperated him enough to make him swear in his native tongue.

Besides, the Child was slumped over in its pod, and it needed your attention more than thinking up a witty rejoinder for Mando.

*****

He stayed away from you as much as he could, after that. After that word slipped out of his mouth, unbidden. It was seeing you tossed by the mudhorn, seeing how hard you hit. How you didn’t move afterwards. How you didn’t move until he stood over you, his heart in this throat, only to be greeted by you squinting and smiling up at him.

Luckily, you didn’t seem to know what the word meant, and Mando tried to forget it. The job was almost over. He’d leave you on Navarro, complete the job, and return to his lonely life.

The problem? The more he watched you – with the unconscious Child, with the Razor Crest as you helped rebuild it (you hadn’t lied – you rebuilt both of the engines) – the more he wanted you to stay on. He’d readily admit to himself that this job had been made easier by your presence…and he was starting to admit that he liked your company.

By the time he was punching in the final coordinates for the approach to Navarro, Mando was ready to make a proposition to you. A deal, for you to stay on and work with him. His stomach was twisted and churning, and he could already feel the blood heating his face. For the thousandth time since meeting you, he was grateful for the helmet.

Mando landed the Crest, and he heard you leave the cockpit. He powered the craft down and followed you a moment later, and he found you standing beside the Child’s pod. Your face was wan but resolute, and you looked directly into his eyes. You were obviously gazing at the slit in his visor.

“You can’t finish this job,” you said simply. “You can’t hand the kid over to those…monsters.”

Mando wasn’t surprised. You had taken to the Child immediately, and after it revealed its power – similar to yours, apparently – you had gotten even more productive. He had prepared for this.

“I made a deal,” he replied.

You had prepared for him too, apparently. You gave a single nod and stepped between him and the pod. Never taking your eyes off of him, you pulled your bo-rifle from your back and snapped it into its staff formation. You didn’t turn it on yet.

“I don’t want to fight you, Mando,” you said, and he could hear the trembling in your voice. “But I will if I have to.”

The helmet hid the small smile that crossed his face. It wasn’t cruel or taunting – it was almost soft. “I don’t want to fight you either,” he replied.

“Why can’t we – “ you started, but that thought was cut off by Mando: lightning quick, faster than you could turn on your staff, the dart from his gauntlet found the soft skin of your neck. Your eyes widened a fraction as your hand flew up to finger the tiny dart, but you were already falling. Mando took two wide steps to catch you, and he didn’t miss the look of betrayal on your face before you fell asleep.

You’d get over. So would the kid. Everyone got left behind in the end.

The sedative should work for hours, and once you woke up, maybe you’d be more reasonable and open to business.

-----

When Mando returned to the Razor Crest, he was ready to check on you and wait out the rest of your long sleep. The payment for the job paid him enough beskar to remake his armor, plus extra for the foundlings. If his conscience prickled at leaving the Child behind…he pushed that aside.

You weren’t sleeping, though.

You were waiting for him.

With your bo-staff, turned on and crackling, and when you jumped out of the shadows and shocked him, Mando was taken aback by how furious you looked.

The shock wasn’t enough to seriously stun him, but it threw him onto his heels, and you took advantage of that. You, on the offensive, and Mando fighting off your flurry of strikes as you shouted at him.

“Was it worth it?” you yelled, hitting him hard in his vulnerable instep with the butt-end of your staff. “Worth it to turn an innocent creature over to the Empire?”

“You don’t – “ he started, but you cut him off with a hard chop to his forearm.

“They’re gonna kill it, just like they kill everything they touch!” You spun around to avoid his hand, grasping at you to still you, and Mando felt the shock when it landed on his back. Muted by the beskar, but still stinging.

“Stop!” he roared, and he threw his weight backwards to pin you against the inner hull of the Crest. Once pinned, he swiveled around and grabbed your wrist, and the staff clattered from your hand. The two of you stood like that – your face tilted up at his as you glared at him in pure fury. Your eyes were shiny with tears, and your chest was heaving – more from the effort to hold back your tears than from the effort of sparring with him.

“It was the job,” he said, a little quieter. “And this is the Way.”

Your eyes narrowed. “Oh, the Way.” You said it so sneeringly, Mando pulled back a fraction. You noted the movement and closed the gap and then some, until your face was close to his helmet. Through the visor, this close, he could see your eyes – the flecks of color in the irises that shifted as you blinked away the tears that kept springing up. Even angry – furious – you were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Tell me, Mando. When you become a Mandalorian, what do they do first? Give you a helmet or tear out your heart and replace it with beskar?” You shook your head and pulled your wrist from his grasp. Swiped it across your eyes angrily. “What use is a Creed if you don’t use it to protect the helpless?”

You shoved past him to leave, and his hand shot out again to stop you. “Wait,” he tried, but you pulled against him and he pulled you back and you were stronger than he realized, and you both tumbled onto the hard crating of the Crest. You tried to scramble away from him, but he grabbed at your ankle.

Which made you rear back your other leg and kick him directly in the head. Hard.

It was enough to stun him, and you clambered to your feet and stood over him a moment. “I thought you were different. I saw you in a vision, and it didn’t have to end like this.”

And then you turned on your heel – sans your bo-rifle – and ran into the night.

-----

Everything that came after – rescuing you (while you were rescuing the kid), the fire-fight, the escape on the Crest with the aid of the Mandalorian covert – had felt right. Like his feet were on one of your paths that you had talked about.

Right now, though, he had to make it right with you. Even if you had teamed up to fight off the stormtroopers, mercenaries, and other bounty hunters, you sat in the co-pilot’s seat now and glared at him. As if returning for you and the kid wasn’t quite enough to make up for his betrayal. His eyes drifted to the lurid bruise on your neck from the dart, and he felt a sting of guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You were right.”

You hadn’t been especially talkative before, but your silence now was heavier than the beskar armor he wore. It was palpable. It filled the cockpit and made it hard to breathe.

“You were right,” he repeated. “I don’t know what else to say to make it better.” He swiveled in his seat to face you.

There was a long moment of the two of you just staring. Well, you were staring at him, but Mando’s eyes were studying you – from your stony face to your palms laying on your knees. To your left foot, tapping on the floor.

“Fine,” you finally said, and your face relaxed a little. “So what next?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “We’ll need to stop for supplies. Then I say we lay low for a bit and regroup.” You nodded at that, so he continued.

“You were never trying to join the Guild, were you?” He wasn’t angry at your original lie, but he was curious.

You shook your head, and a faint blush rose in your cheeks. “I had a feeling about that building and the client. About the job.” You glanced at him and then looked past him. “I had a feeling about you.”

Mando tried to ignore the warm flush that sparked in him. “A feeling, or a vision?” he joked, though he wasn’t sure if it sounded joking through his modulator.

You smiled at him, then waved your hand. “Oh, those,” you said dismissively. “I have so many, it’s hard to tell what’s real. They’re only possible futures.”

“So no vision of a possible future like this?”

“Are you asking me if I ever saw myself on a pre-Empire gunship with a stubborn Mandalorian and a creature of unknown origins? No, I hadn’t seen that one before.” The thaw between you seemed complete now, judging by your teasing tone and the corner of your mouth quirked into a smirking little smile. After a beat, you yawned, covering it with the back of your hand.

“Come on,” he said. He stood up and motioned for you to follow him. You had been sleeping in the cargo hold, curled up on your pack and your cloak like a stray lothcat. He had started cleaning out the spare quarters bit by bit on the way back to Navarro. It had been a repository for junk, spare parts, but once cleaned, he hoped you might like it enough to consider it home.

Looking at it now with you by his side, Mando felt a sudden wave of uncertainty. Embarrassment. It was such a small space, just a narrow cot and small footlocker and a pair of tiny shelves. Far less than he wished he could give you, and that thought made him even more uncomfortable.

You seemed fine with the space, though. Happy, even. You gave a little cry of delight and ran off to gather your pack from the cargo hold, and then you came back.

“Thanks for this,” you said, and you reached out to squeeze his forearm in gratitude. Then you were in your new quarters, already unpacking your meager belongings, completely unaware how that lone touch of yours – even through the beskar gauntlet and the course canvas cloth underneath – set him ablaze.

#din djarin #din djarin x you #din djarin imagine #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian imagine #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

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Shadow and Light: Chapter Two

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin x F!Reader

WC: 3853

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Slow-burn; plot-building; canon violence; minor injuries.

It was Mando’s own fault that he got hurt within seconds of landing the Crest on Arvala-7.

You had woken up in the co-pilot’s seat, nestled under your own cloak and a little sore from sleeping in an awkward angle. Mando was in his pilot’s seat, and he gave a quarter turn and the barest of nods as you woke up by degrees. You swiped a surreptitious hand over your mouth in case you’d been drooling. Hoped you hadn’t been snoring too loudly or worse, talking in your sleep.

“Where are we?” you asked, and your voice was rough with sleep.

“Nearly there.”

You watched him a moment as he adjusted course. “I’m going to go clean up a little,” you finally said, and Mando gave you that same curt nod.

You made your way out of the cockpit (smiling at the squeal of the door on its track) and into the ship. You had scouted it out quickly when you had crept on board back on Navarro, so you knew the basic layout. The tiny berth where he likely slept, if Mandalorians slept at all. The weapons locker, where your weapons were likely stashed.

You went into the refresher and slid the door shut behind you. It was a cramped space, but there was a tiny mirror over the sink, and you winced at your own reflection. There was a deep groove in your cheek from where your face had rested on the co-pilot’s seat as you slept. Your hair was a mess.

You did your business, then washed your hands, then undid your braids. Finger-combed your hair and redid the braids, and hoped that you looked presentable. Like a helpful partner and not a saboteur.

If the Mandalorians had their creed, you had your own too. You weren’t exactly sure what culture you came from, and you’d been raised by non-humans, so you had cobbled together your own sort of dogma. You had a connection to Ashla, which some cultures called the Force, and your foster-mother had encouraged that gift. It informed most of your rules, which weren’t really rules as much as a loose framework that you lived by. Try to do no harm. Try to tilt the balance of the galaxy a bit towards the good.

The only real rule you really followed was to always be mindful of the signs sent to you. It would be easy to pretend you didn’t see – you could just settle down on some backwater planet, get a job as a mechanic, get a little house with a garden. But your foster-mother had been certain that the galaxy had plans for you, and you tried to honor her. Navarro had pulled you in like a magnet, and you soon found out why – that secret, guarded science facility. You could sense the malevolence circling it like a storm. It was not unlike the feeling you got all the time on Lasan as you grew up in the shadow of the dying Empire.

So when it came to Mando and this job? You wouldn’t kill him, and you wouldn’t harm him…but if he tried to stop you from destroying the asset you both came to retrieve, you would have to incapacitate him somehow. One way or another, that asset was not going to fall into the hands of that malignant client.

By the time you got back to the cockpit, the Razor Crest was approaching the dessert planet. You sat down and buckled in, just in case the landing was bumpy.

“How do you know where we’re going?” you asked. “Which part of the planet, I mean?” Despite your ulterior motives, you were curious about the technicalities of bounty hunting.

There was a beat of silence. “I usually land outside of a settlement,” he finally offered. “Close enough to walk, far enough to not draw too much attention. Get intel, then go from there.”

You watched him as he piloted the ship over some mountains until he found a valley. He circled around, his hands moving over the controls in a series of smooth motions. The Crest settled onto the planet with a slight jostle that, if you weren’t mistaken, was due to one of the landing skis engaging a second later than the others.

Mando stood up and hesitated a split second before striding past you, and you followed him down the ladder into the cargo hold. You stood back and watched him unlock his weapons cache. He armed himself and then locked it again.

“Can I get my rifle?” you asked. You still had the vibro-knife he hadn’t found when he searched you the night before, but that was barely a weapon.

Mando only shook his head and informed you that he didn’t trust you yet. Fair enough.

So you watched him stride down the gangway, scan the horizon with his tracking fob…and you watched him get mauled by the leathery grey beast that bore down on him from out of nowhere.

You frantically looked around the Crest and found a loose wrench by the carbonite chamber, and you sprinted out to help. You got there in time to find Mando on his back, his arm trapped in the mouth of the dead beast. Another dead one lay a few feet away. You looked closer…no, not dead. You could see the tranquilizer darts sticking out of their hides, and a distance away, a rider mounted on a third beast, his dart gun still in hand.

You walked over to where the Mandalorian lay on his back, his breath a little ragged through his helmet from his skirmish. You brandished the wrench at him.

“I can’t help with just this,” you told him, and he only answered with a huff.

“C’mon,” you said. You extended a hand that he looked at for a beat, then took it with another huff. You helped haul him up and resisted the urge to knock some of the dust off of his armor. “There’s a local who wants to make our acquaintance, I think.”

*****

Mando wasn’t used to working with a partner, so after he rested and returned to the cockpit to begin the approach to the planet, he was startled to see you sleeping in the co-pilot’s seat. You didn’t wake as he carefully stepped past you, and you were curled up like a lothcat under your cloak.

He frowned under his helmet. He hadn’t forgotten you were there, exactly, but he wasn’t as on-guard as he usually was. When he worked with Ran and his crew of mercenaries, he was always on guard. Jumpy, even. Distrustful and nearly paranoid. He should have felt the same about you – you’d stowed yourself away on his ship, for Maker’s sake, and you had nearly held him at rifle-point. But you’d been mild as anything as he disarmed you. Calm, collected – and not like the practiced calm he could exude when needed. It seemed to radiate from some deep place in you.

You were calm when he refused to return your weapons to you. You were calm and bemused as you helped him stand after he was attacked by the squat leathery creatures, the blurrgs.

He relented only a moment later and retrieved your bo-rifle from the weapons locker, and he tried to ignore the smile you were obviously biting back when you took it from him.

The local turned out to be an Ugnaught named Kulil, and you and Mando followed him back to his moisture farm. Kulil gave his insight into the encampment that was causing strife on the once-peaceful planet.

“Many have passed through,” he told the two of you. “They seek the same one as you.”

So you hadn’t been lying about that bit of intel you had offered. The asset was dangerous, guarded by dangerous people. Mando caught you watching him, and you gave him a nod as if to say, told you so.

The Ugnaught agreed to help guide you both to the encampment in exchange for the blurrgs, and then in the next breath, he informed you that said blurrgs would need to be tamed and ridden to the encampment. Maybe you couldn’t see under his helmet, but you still looked at Mando and must have sensed his discomfort, because you burst into a gale of laughter. Then you stood up and followed Kulil to the blurrg enclosure with obvious excitement.

Great.

*****

Your foster-mother always told you to try and do things the easy way, and that lesson had taken a while to sink in. You’d spent most of your adolescence frustrated and angry as you tried to do everything the hardest way possible. But you’d eventually learned.

Mando apparently never got that lesson.

You and Kulil stood side by side against the fence and watched the armored man get tossed, trampled, and otherwise mangled by the ornery blurrg.

“Perhaps if you removed your helmet,” Kulil offered helpfully.

“Perhaps he remembered I tried to roast him,” Mando bit back.

“This is a female. The males are eaten during mating.”

You snorted at that as Mando marched over to you.

“We don’t have time for this,” he told Kulil. “Do you have a landspeeder I can hire?”

You didn’t wait to hear the answer. You pulled off your cloak and hung it over the fence, then ducked under the rail to stand beside Mando in the enclosure. “Come on,” you told him. “You’re just approaching her wrong.”

You could hear the sarcasm in his reply, making his voice staticky through the modulator of his helmet. “Oh, so you can rebuild engines and ride blurrgs? Any other skills you failed to mention?”

“I have many talents,” you said in mock seriousness as you both approached the blurrg. She eyed you each suspiciously, but she had an especially wary eye for Mando. “But you need to be gentle. Like this.”

You demonstrated by reaching a careful hand out to the creature, letting her sniff your palm at her own pace. Then you laid your hand on its head, stroking the rough skin between the wide-set eyes. The blurrg gave a growl, but it was a low rumble of contentment. You turned and looked at Mando. His helmet was tilted a bit as he watched you.

“See? Gentle. No need to overpower.”

“Gentle rarely works in bounty hunting.”

You grasped the rope around the blurrg’s thick neck and swung up onto her back in a smooth motion. She snorted and growled…but let you keep your seat. You looked down and couldn’t, obviously, make out Mando’s expression behind his beskar helmet. You imagined him rolling his eyes in irritation – but you were wrong. He was studying you closer while pointedly ignore the growing spark of feeling that made him study you at all.

*****

Once properly mounted, the three of you rode across the harsh landscape towards the encampment. When Kulil showed you the encampment and then left, you followed Mando carefully, laying low on the ridge beside him and watching him as he surveyed the situation. Theoretically, he was supposed to be teaching you the trade, so he cleared his throat and offered some insight into what he was seeing.

“Nikto guards,” he told you. “Not sure how many, but a lot. They are tough fighters.” He turned and looked you over. You were in your dun-colored cloak, and he could see the outline of the rifle on your back. He certainly didn’t trust you fully, but you hadn’t done anything to disabuse him of the little trust he did have for you now. And you had helped him tame the blurrg in record time.

“How good a shot are you at a distance?” he asked. You gazed at him, and while he knew you couldn’t see his eyes, it felt almost like you could see him. You had looked at him like that on the Crest when he first captured you, and you had looked at him like that again when you had tamed the blurrg. It made his stomach dip curiously.

“I’m good,” you finally answered. “I was raised in the mountain ranges of Lasan, and we went on missions to snipe imps all the time.”

“Good.” He scanned the surroundings and then pointed at a nearby ridge. “You’re good at sneaking around. Do you think you can get to that ridge over there and cover me when the firing starts?”

You shifted a little and leaned closer to him as you followed his pointing, and Mando felt that churn to his stomach again when your shoulder brushed against him. “That one? Yes, I can get there. Give me, say, ten minutes?”

“Good,” he repeated. “Don’t fire until I start, and try to take out their snipers first. I can handle the close range Niktos.”

You nodded and crawled away, and he was only able to watch you for a moment before he lost you in the shifting landscape of browns and reds. You were good.

And then an IG-11 unit marched onto the scene, and Mando forgot about you for a moment or two.

*****

The shooting started before you were set up, but when you took a prone position and sighted your rifle, you saw that it was a droid – an IG unit, you guessed – that was drawing most of the fire from the guards. Then Mando arrived on the scene, and you followed his directions. One by one, you picked off the Nikto guards and snipers that popped up on the roof and parapets of the fortress.

It was almost too easy. They were so focused on Mando and the droid, they never even looked up at the ridge where you lay. Which was good, as far as you were concerned: the moment Kulil showed you the encampment, you felt a strange feeling creep over you. It was the same feeling when you channeled Ashla, and it got stronger and stronger as you holstered your rifle and made your way to the door of the compound to join Mando and the IG unit.

That feeling? It had to be a sign. You were on the right path, and you had to destroy the asset before it fell into the hands of that scientist.

But when you got to Mando, he was already talking to the droid. The Mandalorian held up the beeping tracking fob and the IG remarked that there was a life form present.

“Another Nikto?” you asked, and Mando gave you that short, curt shake of his head that he did.

“The bounty,” he replied.

You shook your own head now. “No, I thought…” You trailed off, tried to form your thoughts. “I thought we were tracking an asset. A weapon. A thing.”

Now Mando tilted his head, and you swore you heard amusement through his helmet. “Bounty hunting usually entails the living,” he said. “Whether we bring them in warm or cold depends on the job.”

You felt the blood rising in your cheeks and shook your head again. “No, I know that. I just…this was off the books. The man who hired you…” You gazed at Mando, at the slit in his helmet where you figured his eyes were. “Didn’t he hire you to bring him a weapon? They kept calling it an ‘asset’ in the cantina.”

He didn’t answer. The IG unit did it’s jerky, mechanical march inside the compound, and Mando followed. You followed too, your mind racing. You had expected a piece of some weapon, some component for the Empire to rebuild, some piece of a new weapon to exterminate entire worlds, entire species…

It was a living creature. No, a child. The egg-shaped container opened to reveal a green creature with huge ears and black eyes, and the feeling that had been growing all afternoon hit you so hard that you gasped. Whatever the creature was, it was linked somehow to Ashla, or the Force.

Not a weapon at all. A child.

Everything after that realization happened in slow motion: the droid raising its blaster, Mando replying, you shouting and reaching across Mando’s armored chest to try and knock the blaster out of the IG’s grip. The IG hitting you, not hard enough to kill or seriously injure, but hard enough to make your ears ring. You on the ground, stunned by the blow, hearing the blaster shot. You, looking up in shock when the IG unit fell to the ground beside you, destroyed.

Mando, holding his own blaster as it smoked in the half-light of the room.

And Mando, looking down at you for a moment before extending his hand to help you up. And once you were back on your feet, his hand on your shoulder just a beat longer than necessary as he asked if you were okay.

*****

Mandalorians were notoriously distrustful. Mando definitely did not trust you.

He would begrudgingly admit that you were a good partner during this job. You took out a shocking number of Nikto guards and had half-trotted, half-slid down the loose scree of the hillside afterwards like it was nothing at all. Your confusion over the bounty was charmingly naïve, but he supposed he understood – the job was off the books and no exactly straightforward.

Afterwards, as the two of you walked with the floating crib, you had been ambushed by other bounty hunters. You had proven yourself there too, fighting with your weapon as an electrostaff. You moved gracefully, like a dancer, without a wasted movement.

And that evening, over the campfire, you proved yourself a different way.

Mando had been injured in the ambush, and the gash in his arm wept blood steadily enough to need attention. It was his dominant arm, and he fumbled with his cauterizer. Dropped it. Picked it up. Dropped it again with a muttered curse in Mando’a. You watched him a moment across the dancing flames of the fire, and then offered to help.

“I can do it,” he grunted, his voice rough with pain. It was a deep cut into the muscle, and he could only go a fraction at a time with the cauterizer before he had to stop and catch his breath from the searing hurt.

He could feel those eyes of yours on him, those big doe-eyes that seemed so expressive and seemed to see through his beskar helmet. You didn’t reply though – you just stood up and made your way over to him, and you sat down beside him.

“Let me help,” you said. “I have a gift for healing.”

Mando snorted, but he dropped the cauterizer again with his clumsy hand. “Fine,” he said.

You didn’t pick up the tool. You stood back up and retrieved your bo-rifle, and you stopped a moment to scoop the escaping child back into the crib. Then you settled back to kneel beside Mando.

“This,” you said, holding out your weapon, “is for close-range and long-range attacks. Electrostaff and rifle.”

“So are you going to shoot me or electrocute me?”

You smiled at him, and Mando felt that curious dip in his gut again. “Most people don’t realize that there’s a third setting.” Mando watched as you undid a strap, clicked the pieces of the weapon until it resembled a trident. “This setting isn’t a weapon. It’s a….conduit. For channeling.”

“Channeling what?”

You bit down on your lower lip as you pondered your answer. “It has a lot of names. Life Current. Life Wind. The Force. On Lasan, we called it ‘Ashla.’”

Mando had heard stories about that magical nonsense – fairy stories to tell children, as far as he was concerned. But you seemed so earnest that he gave a single nod, and you continued.

“I can…do things with it,” you said. You were halting, and even in the firelight, he could make out your blushing face. “When I use the trident, I can sometimes…see things. From the past. From possible futures. That’s usually how I use it, so I know what to do, where to go. Which path to follow.” You glanced up at him now. “But I can also heal with it.”

“Okay.” He didn’t believe it for a moment, but you had helped him at both the encampment and in the ambush. He owed you a modicum of belief, he figured, and when it invariably failed, he could use the cauterizer.

You nodded, but then the flush on your face deepened. “I’d have to, uh, touch you. I know Mandalorians don’t like that….”

You were right. But something made him mutter “okay” again, which made you nod again, and then you powered on the trident.

Mando wasn’t a believer of anything but the Way, the Creed, the rigid set of rules that controlled his lonely life. In the following days, he’d question what he saw – and felt – in this moment. But right now, the trident sparked a steady stream of blue electrocurrent between its points, and a lovely blue aura was cast over you and him. It made him feel that same calm you seemed to exude. You closed your eyes, squeezed them tight as you concentrated. One hand held the trident steady, and the other reached out, unseeing, to hover over the deep gash in his arm.

“Is this okay?” you asked, and your voice sounded a quarter-octave lower. More assured, too.

“Yes,” he replied, and you laid your hand on him.

When was the last time he’d been touched? When had he last felt someone else’s skin against his own? Your hand was warm, and he flinched at first…but then pressed his arm against your touch a little firmer. Greedy, almost, for the sudden contact, like a desert soaking up rain for the first time in years.

Under your warm hand, Mando could feel….whatever it was. Working. He could feel the muscle knitting itself together, the slashed veins, and then the skin. It was warm too, and he felt contentment wash over him as you touched him.

All too soon, it was over. You pulled your hand away and turned the trident off. Opened your eyes and sagged backwards a little. Mando flexed his hand and twisted his arm to look at it in the fire light. The skin was unbroken, smooth. There wasn’t even a scar.

The mostly-silent man had a million questions, but when he turned to ask you some of them, he saw that the healing came at a price: you were slumped in your kneeling position, and your trident was slipping from your hand.

Mando reached out and caught it. Then he reached out and caught you.

You weren’t unconscious though. You braced yourself as he eased you onto the ground, and you sighed your thanks as he removed his cloak to fold it and place it under your head. He arranged your own cloak around you and watched as your eyelids grew too heavy for you to fight any longer.

Then he watched you sleep for a long, long while, and he only noticed the child watching too when it made a cooing noise at you. Mando could have sworn it sounded sympathetic.

#din djarin #din djarin x you #din djarin imagine #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian #the mandalorian imagine #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x reader #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

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Shadow and Light: Chapter One

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin x F!Reader

WC: 2258

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Slow-burn; plot-building.

The Mandalorian knew every square inch of the Razor Crest. The old gunship wasn’t the fastest, but she was sturdy, and the Mandalorian was aware of every creak and groan it made. He knew that one warning light – the one for leaking coolant – was faulty. He knew the one landing ski took a second longer to engage than the other.

He knew that the door between the cockpit and the rest of the ship made a rusty little squeal on its track before it opened. He had meant to oil it but kept forgetting, and it was the only thing that gave you away now.

He had just set the course for Arvala-7 and was swiveled in his pilot’s chair to rest a bit before landing. There was no sound in the rest of the ship that he wasn’t familiar with, but when the door made that little squeal….well, he wasn’t the one who had set it off. Someone was on the other side.

When the door finally slid open to reveal you, that annoying kid from Nevarro, the Mandalorian was ready for you. You were wrapped in that same dun-colored cloak, everything hidden but your eyes, but he wasn’t focused on that. He was focused on the bo-rifle in your hands, the end sparking and crackling with a blue electric current.

It happened so fast: your eyes widened a fraction to see the Mandalorian charging at you in such tight quarters, and he kicked the weapon from your hands so that it turned off and clattered uselessly to the floor. Then, like in Nevarro, he grabbed your wrist and twisted it behind you until you were pressed against the wall of the ship, and though he wasn’t exactly gentle before, he was less so now.

The same question as before though. “Who sent you?” he asked, his voice tight with anger even through the modulator in his helmet. You shook your head, replied “no one,” and the Mandalorian responded by clamping both of your hands in magnetic cuffs behind your back. He spun you around and scanned you.

Gods, you were loaded with weapons. Other than the bo-rifle that lay on the floor of his cockpit, through the scanner in his visor, he counted at least five other weapons: two blasters holstered low on each hip, two knives tucked away in each boot, and a mean-looking knife, toothed and serrated for maximum damage sheathed on your belt.

He sighed and started searching you more thoroughly. He removed your cloak first, and it revealed that you weren’t a kid after all – even in the dusty black pants and grey shirt and vest, the Mandalorian could make out your curves. Your hair was braided and pinned up, but a few strands had worked themselves loose, framing your face.

The Mandalorian pushed aside all the questions of who you were and why you were on his ship, and he focused on the more pressing question: why weren’t you talking now? Most people – bounties, enemy combatants – pleaded for their lives when he had them dead to rights. Babbled out promises of riches, begged for mercy, tried to explain their convoluted reasons….you only gazed at him as he removed each weapon from you. Silent. Completely calm too. He didn’t sense any trembling or increased heart rate.

In fact, when he reached down to pull the knives out of your boots, you shifted your weight and twisted each leg a little to make it easier for him.

When he was done and your weapons were in a neat pile on one of the co-pilot’s seats, he pushed you into the other seat and towered over you.

“Who are you?” he asked. “And what are you doing on my ship?”

When you hesitated a moment to long in answering him, he added, “I can always shoot you out an airlock if you don’t feel like talking.”

“I wanted to go to Arvala-7 with you for this job,” you replied simply.

“Why? You’re not in the Guild.”

You shook your head at this, and the Mandalorian took a guess. “But you want to join the Guild? You need reputation credits.”

“Y-yes. I, uh, overheard the Guild Master at the cantina talking about this job. I thought if I helped with this one, single job, it’d be enough to get me in.”

The Mandalorian huffed at this. “I told you no on Nevarro. I work alone.”

“I can help.”

He looked you over pointedly, from the top of your head all the way down to your feet. Without the cloak covering you, he would admit that maybe you weren’t a complete novice. Your arms and legs were toned from work, and you had been armed to the teeth. And the bo-rifle was a sophisticated weapon from a race of elite warriors, though he wasn’t sure if you were any good with it.

You took his silence as an opportunity to continue. “I know I don’t look like much, but I can help. I can fight, and I’m a good shot from a distance. I’m very good at blending in and sneaking around.” You mouth twisted into a half-smile. “If you maintained your ship properly, I would have had you. That cockpit door shouldn’t squeak like that.”

“You want to partner up, but you were going to electrocute me first,” he replied sarcastically.

“I wasn’t. That was just to…encourage you to listen to me.” He fixed you with a glare, which you couldn’t see, but most people found a silent Mandalorian just as intimidating. You just kept talking.

“I won’t take up any space or get in your way, and I listen to whatever you say. And I’m good with ships. I know that this is a pre-Empire gunship. I could tear it down and rebuild it for you, and it’d run as good as new. Better, even.”

“I don’t need the Razor Crest torn down and rebuilt.”

You nodded, and for the first time, you looked a little uncertain. He could see you swallow hard. “Sure, but if it breaks down, I can fix it. And I don’t need any cut of the credits. I just want the, uh, reputation credits.”

He only stared at you, and you squirmed a little under the force of the glare through his visor.

Finally, you added, “I know that they kept sending people to Arvala-7. Stormtroopers, at first, then mercenaries and bounty hunters. None of them ever come back. Whatever that asset is, it’s dangerous.”

“So I’d be facing danger in front of me, and have you behind me with a rifle pointed at my back?”

You shook your head. “No, not at all. Like I said, I’d do whatever you say. I could be a lookout, or cover you with my rifle. I promise I’m a good shot. And if I have to, I can fight.”

The Mandalorian considered your offer. He had worked alone since his falling out with the crew of mercenaries he used to run with, and it was better that way. No personal ties, no entanglements. Nothing but him and his Mandalorian Creed.

He’d never concede that it was lonely. He’d never admit that sometimes he let his retrieved bounties stay out of carbonite for the part of the return trip just to hear another’s voice, even if it was pleading for its life.

More immediately, he admitted that you had a point. This job felt wrong from the start – off the books, an immense payoff, no chain code – so your intel about it being dangerous felt accurate. He tilted his head and studied you a little closer as you gazed back at him. Maybe you were all the things you claimed to be. A good shot, a good fighter, a good mechanic. You certainly were good at blending in, as he’d found out twice now.

Maybe a partner would be okay. Just for one job, enough to get you those reputation credits, then dump you off on Nevarro and never see you again.

“What’s your name?” he asked, and the expression on your face was indiscernible.

“Lyra San,” you muttered, and he huffed in irritation.

“Your real name,” he demanded. “Lira San is a legend. Make believe.”

You sighed, and a blush broke out across your cheeks. You looked away from him as you answered. “I don’t know my name,” you said. “My real one, anyway. I was named for their legendary homeworld when the Lasats found me. I was a child when the spacecraft I was on crashed on Lasan. I was…am…an orphan. A foundling. But they raised me.”

The Mandalorian would never concede that it was your admission of being a foundling that made him decide not to shoot you out of an airlock after all. Deep down, though, past the armor and the Way and his own hurt and trauma – he already felt a connection to you.

*****

It was partially luck that saved you – this Mandalorian seemed a bit more willing to listen before acting. You knew there were others of that sect that would have happily put a hole in your head before letting you get a single word out.

You’d been on Nevarro long enough to learn of the covert there, and you were sympathetic to the Mandalorians. Your own adopted people, the Lasats, had suffered the same under the Empire. You understood why only one Mandalorian was ever out at one time, but you didn’t know why it worked – even in their anonymous armor, you were able to tell one from another. One was heavier, one was shorter. One walked with a clomping gait, another walked with steps light as air. Maybe people were too wrapped up in their own lives to notice that an entire group of people lived underneath them.

If the job had gone to any other member of that covert, you would have come up with another strategy. But you’d observed this particular Mandalorian to get a sense of him. Some might call it intuition or second sight. Your foster mother called it a gift from Ashla, the personification of good in the universe. Either way, you were good at reading people, and this Mandalorian seemed…different from the rest. He had the same dark thread that all warrior species did, but there was a bit of light too.

It all ended up fine. A little humiliating, being disarmed so quickly and then receiving a thorough pat-down as he took all your guns and knives from you (though he missed a few, you thought with an inward smirk). Humiliating too to have him retrieve your pack and then go through it in front of you – your extra clothes, your small toolkit, your store of extra rations and medicines. Your small bound leather book that you filled page by page with your observations from your travels. The Mandalorian rifled through those pages, and your blush deepened that he might be reading your innermost thoughts. He didn’t comment on them, though.

Then he laid down the rules.

“You tend to your own needs,” he said. “I won’t spend a credit to feed or clothe you.”

“That’s fair.”

“You do exactly what I say without complaint or question.”

You paused. “Also fair.”

“We retrieve the asset and return to Nevarro. I get paid, you get the credits, and we go our separate ways.”

“Obviously.” You flexed your hands, still cuffed. “Can I get these off?”

He tilted his head at you, then gave a single nod and removed them.

“Thanks,” you said. You clenched your hands into fists, released them, shook the feeling back into your numb fingers. “Can I get my weapons back?”

“You get those back when I can trust you.”

That made you laugh, and he tilted his head at you again. “Aren’t Mandalorians famously distrustful?”

“Then you’ll get your weapons back on Nevarro.”

“What if we run into trouble on Arvala-7?”

He didn’t answer. He just turned and sat in the pilot’s chair, and a moment later, you sat in the co-pilot’s seat. No matter how much you traveled, you never got tired of the sight of space – the stars streaking past you, the distant nebulas of stellar explosions. It made your heart ache in the best way to think of the vastness of the universe, all the different planets and people, all the things to explore. You leaned back and rested your head against the seat, and you felt the past few tense hours grow heavy on you. You tucked your legs up – he hadn’t returned your cloak to you either – and let sleep start to draw you in.

“The guild master calls you ‘Mando,’” you said tiredly. “Is it okay for me to call you that too?”

The Mandalorian turned a little in his seat then gave you a nod. You nodded back and started to reply but was overtaken by a giant yawn.

“Don’t worry about the weapons,” you told him. Your voice was thick with sleep, and you could barely hold your eyes open any longer. “If I can’t fight, I can just disarm the enemy with my charming personality.”

You didn’t hear his response because you drifted off, and besides, it sounded different through the modulator of his helmet…but the Mandalorian laughed.

You also didn’t see him turn in his seat to watch you sleep, and you wouldn’t realize until morning that he shook out your cloak and settled it over your sleeping form so that you wouldn’t get cold before he retired to his own quarters.

#din djarin #din djarin x you #din djarin imagine #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian #the mandalorian imagine #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian x you #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

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Shadow and Light: Prologue

The Mandalorian/Din Djarin x F!Reader

WC: 1769

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Slow-burn; plot-building.

You weren’t exactly sure how you ended up on Nevarro. Well, that wasn’t true: it was a series of decisions – some good, some bad – that led you to that forsaken, rocky world. It was more of a philosophical question. How did I get here? Where am I going?

Right now, where you were going was the local cantina. The drinks were weak, the food was questionable (the vegetables limp, the meat had a queasy grey cast) – but the chatter was good. The cantina was the only real place to socialize, so it was a motley cast of Nevarro locals, travelers passing through, bounty hunters…and even a few stormtroopers, remnants of the Imperial Army.

You settled into a corner seat and focused on the latter. Stormtroopers were bad news. After the fall of the Empire, it was usually just petty thuggery, bullying. Most stormtroopers had taken off their helmets and melted into the shadows. Assimilated to local cultures. Started families, got jobs, explored the galaxy. But some stayed in their uniforms, and without a central tenant to march to, it was chaos.

Since you landed on Nevarro, you had honed in on the small troop of Stormtroopers stationed nearby. They weren’t the usual rowdy bunch of bullies – they were regimented and orderly. They guarded a nearby building that you had scouted a few times. You weren’t sure what was going on in there, but whatever it was, it made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The entire building had an aura of evil, and that was before you observed the two chief occupants entering and leaving. The scientist was bad enough, hiding his beady little eyes behind tinted glasses, but the older man…you could feel the ill intent radiating off of him.

You ordered a cup of the house swill and tuned your ear into the two Stormtroopers sitting nearby. When you concentrated, the din of the place fell away, and you could make out their conversation.

“They keep sending bounty hunters,” said one. “But they never come back.”

“They’re all dead,” the other replied confidently.

“Glad we’re here then.”

You tilted your head in their direction slightly and caught them out of the corner of your eye. Their helmets were off as they downed tankards of drink. Their white armor was tinged red from the dust of Nevarro, a little worse for wear like everyone on this awful planet.

The one nearest you signaled for a refill. “Karga keeps sending new guild members. At this rate, the guild will be empty before anyone brings the asset back.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said the other. “Heard that Mandalorian is on his way back from Maldo Kreis with a ship full of carbonite. If anyone can bring the asset back for Pershing, it’s him.”

The other stormtrooper replied by scoffing and muttering something unintelligible, but you had all the information you needed for now. You knew the Mandalorian they were talking about, and you knew his ship.

Now all you had to do was wait for him…and make him an offer.

*****

The Mandalorian landed the Razor Crest and immediately made his way to the cantina, zeroing in on Karga. The guild leader sat in the middle of the room and held court like a little lord, handing out fobs and parsing out outdated currency for jobs. Back and forth the two went, their little song-and-dance, and the Mandalorian didn’t even mind that Karga called him ‘Mando.’

Finally, the guild leader gave up a good job for him: off-the-books, pays well, but limited information. The man handed over a chit, and Mando found himself standing outside of a non-descript building that had more security than seemed necessary. The building was on a street with storage units and small repair shops. Whatever was behind those walls – well, it wasn’t a landspeeder repair shop.

He’d admit to himself that it all felt off – the older man sitting at the table as he made an offer that Mando could resist taking. All that beskar, returned to the Tribe. Enough to outfit him with a new suit of armor with plenty left over for the foundlings. And as an enticement, a generous down payment. Mando pushed down the unease that settled into his gut as he took the down payment and left the building.

Mandalorians are a hyper-alert people, constantly scanning their perimeter for threats and opportunities. As Mando made his way through the maze of buildings toward the entrance to the covert, however, he failed to notice the person following him. Later, he’d blame the pile of beskar steel, tantalizingly within his grasp, and how it would elevate his covert. Much later, when he knew you, he’d realize that if Mandalorians are stealthy, you were stealthier. Like a Mandalorian’s shadow, almost.

For now, though, when you reached a tentative hand and laid it on his arm to get his attention, Mando was completely surprised, and his reaction reflected that. Pure instinct drove him, and he grabbed your wrist and twisted your arm behind your back before pressing you against the wall of a nearby building.

“Who sent you?” he hissed. He tried to look you over while he held you firm: you were….species unknown. He couldn’t see your face under the dun cloth wound around your head – the same dull brown as the buildings. You blended in.

“No one,” you replied. Your voice was tight with pain as he gave your wrist a tug, and you added, “we need to talk about your new job.”

“You Guild?”

You shook your head. Mando paused a moment, then said, “I’m going to let you go. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

You gave a single nod to that, so he released you and stepped back. You turned to face him as you gave your wrist an experimental flex, and then you reached up and pushed the hood hiding your face back. You were human after all. Or at least looked like one.

“That man gave you a job,” you said, and when Mando didn’t reply, you added, “I want to join you for it.”

Mando was glad for the helmet – it hid the incredulous face he pulled. Most people scattered when they saw a Mandalorian walking, and you had obviously followed him enough to know where he had just come from. People feared him, slunk away from him, but you only gazed at the slit in his visor as if you were looking right into his eyes. In your eyes, he could see fear, but it didn’t seem to be for him.

Who were you? If you were an assassin, you wouldn’t have given up the advantage you’d had on him. If you were Guild, why would you lie and say you weren’t? You didn’t seem old enough to be a bounty hunter. The more he looked you over through his visor, you didn’t seem old enough to be much of anything other than an apprentice with some easier profession than bounty hunting.

“No,” was all he said, and he turned to leave. Now that he knew you were following him, he had to go to a different entrance for the covert.

“Wait.” That hand again on his arm. It brought more questions to his mind. It was known that laying a hand on a Mandalorian was a good way to lose said hand, but you didn’t seem to know that fact. Mando didn’t turn, but he did pause in his step.

“I…I have information,” you offered. “I can help. I don’t want any cut of the bounty, just – “

“No,” he cut you off, curt. Mando had only gotten the final four digit of the target’s chain code and its location – no way you had any more information that would help him. He shook your hand off and strode away, and he was alert enough now to know that you weren’t following him.

*****

Your foster-mother had raised you under the idiom: you can do it the easy way, or you can do it the hard way. “It” could be defined as anything she had taught you: how to cook, how to disassemble and reassemble an engine, how to braid your hair, how to fight. You, her most troublesome child being raised in a different culture by a different species, almost always did things the hard way first. It took a long time for that lesson to sink into your skull.

But now, as an adult, you did truly try to do things the easy way. Following the Mandalorian and reasoning with him was the easy way, and it ended in a bruised wrist and no partnership established.

So, the hard way it was.

You held back and watched the Mandalorian disappear, then went to where you rented a room to gather your stuff. You traveled light anyway, but you didn’t want to miss the small window you had. If you knew anything about bounty hunters – Mandalorians especially – it was that they didn’t dally when it came to new jobs. The one you had spoken to would do his business in the covert (it wasn’t really that covert, in your estimation, but you often saw what others didn’t), then resupply, then leave immediately.

Night was falling by the time the Mandalorian finally returned to the Razor Crest. Of course, you were already aboard, nestled in the cargo hold between spare canisters of carbon gas and extra ship components. Like most ship captains, he didn’t even inspect his ship before taking off. Lazy. Half of your trips around the galaxy were as a stowaway on ships with lazy captains.

You waited for the tell-tale sign of hyperspace – that pleasant little dip you got in your stomach – and then you waited a little more. You listened to the creaks and pings the old ship made, and then you took a deep breath and stood up. You didn’t hear any other noises beyond the Razor Crest journeying through space, but that didn’t mean much. Mandalorians could be quiet even with all that armor.

Still, he was probably in the cockpit. That was your best bet. Catch him sitting, hold him at the end of your bo-rifle, and hope you could get enough words out to convince him before he shot you with his blaster or shot you into deep space.

You’d talked yourself out of worse situations. Your foster-mother had always told you (and only in exasperation half of the time) that you had a clever mind and a cleverer tongue. You hoped both would be enough for the Mandalorian.

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian imagine #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian x you #din djarin #din djarin x reader #din djarin imagine #din djarin x you #tropes and tales

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tropes-and-tales · 5 days

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Bound to You: Prologue

Poe Dameron x F!Reader

WC: 2012

Other Pieces: This is part of a larger miniseries that can be found here.

CW: Arranged marriage trope.

Poe Dameron rose quickly through the ranks of the Resistance. General Leia Organa trusted him, and more to the point, he always got results. Always.

Rare intel into the First Order’s movements? Recruiting missions to convince disgruntled members of the New Republic to join the Resistance? Errands to build relationships with allies in the Outer Rim? Poe did it all with his own unique panache and ineffable charm. Being a handsome bastard with an appealing smile didn’t hurt.

Sometimes, admittedly, his charm failed him and he found himself in…uncomfortable situations.

Like now.

Leia had dispatched him to a planet in the Core, a technological powerhouse that built state-of-the-art spaceships. The goal was to get a deal for new crafts. The problem was that the Resistance had little money (read: no money) and even fewer prospects for more. This planet, however, seemed to prefer the benevolent neglect of the New Republic over the authoritative grip of the First Order, and they had suffered under the Empire, so there was hope that a deal could be made.

Poe’s tricky situation came from two obvious facts. First, the planet was run by a King and his attendant family – a very rich, very powerful man. His wealth lay in his shipbuilding facilities – the technological know-how, the expertise of his engineers, the pride in superb craftmanship that left nothing unattended. His wealth also lay in his vast progeny: he had three wives and, well, countless sons and daughters.

The second fact of Poe’s tricky situation was that this planet, this king, his multitude of children and wives – the entire populace, in fact – was ruled by a very stringent, very precise set of rules. There were rules for everything: how to shake a hand (hand-on-forearm for no more than five seconds), how to sip the strong tea they served (from a lacquered cup, but only after the host sips theirs first), how to open negotiations (after precisely one lap around the King’s pleasure gardens and after saying, three times, that General Organa sends her well-wishes and highest regards). How long to hold eye contact, how to smile, which color shirt to wear to signal certain feelings in certain situations.

Poe would have likely always ended up messing up the negotiations. There was no way for a single person outside of that culture to learn all of their fussy, particular little rules. Of course, Leia had tried to send C-3PO along – the droid had tried to explain all those rules - and Poe had waved her off.

“How hard can it be?” he had said, flashing her a cocky grin.

How hard was it? Well, it happened like a slow-motion explosion. First, Poe had held on a beat too long with the opening handshake. Then he glanced away while the King’s advisor was giving him an exhaustive tour of the King’s sculpture garden.

The worst, though, was when Poe inadvertently insulted the King’s second wife. He wasn’t even sure how it happened – there was a huge dinner, and he used the wrong fork at the wrong time, wore the wrong shirt and looked her in the eye too long, and it devolved into Poe being tersely removed to sparser quarters which, it turned out, was just a prison.

And then, there was a trial (of sorts) which just involved the King’s advisors and astrologers and high priests, who all consulted their histories and star charts and rule books. Poe would have laughed at how ridiculous it all was, except the guards who held him carried top-of-the-line blasters along with wicked-looking scythes, so he wisely kept his laughing to himself and tried to look contrite, though he wasn’t sure where contrite looks ranked with the King.

At last, it was decided (though Poe would never quite be sure if it was due to a historical precedent or some alignment of this system’s dual stars) that Poe would be released and gifted a cruiser, along with a promise of twenty premium gunships.

The cruiser was a wedding gift.

For Poe.

“The laws of our people demand an allyship in blood,” declared one high priest, and Poe’s heart clenched at his implied sacrifice. Then, the priest added, “so you shall marry one of the King’s daughters.”

So the sacrifice wasn’t implied after all. Poe was to be sacrificed on the altar of matrimony. His heart seized up even more, but….a cruiser and twenty gunships? The Resistance desperately needed it, and he could always get a marriage dissolution afterwards.

The slow-motion explosion continued, and if Poe thought he’d at least get to pick his wife (the King had eleven daughters), he was sadly mistaken. Not that it mattered: the women of the royal court (and many of the men) were bound to the strict dress codes of their strange laws. Long hair bound and woven into intricate designs. Long, enameled fingernails. Faces and hands painted in delicate filigrees of designs. Dresses with so many layers that the person’s original shape was lost. It made the Queen of Naboo look like a fishmonger on Quila.

The day of the wedding, Poe found himself sick to his stomach. He’d been given his own clothes back to him, clean and pressed, and his fingers shook as he buttoned his shirt. He raked his fingers through his curls and tried to size himself up in the mirror in his room. He looked wan underneath his tan. Like a man on the way to his own execution.

Him, married. He’d had plenty of casual flings, a few girlfriends, but nothing even veered close to long-term dating or marriage. He was too devoted to the cause of eradicating the First Order from the galaxy, and that’s what he told himself he was doing now: securing those ships, building an alliance for more. He gave himself a nod in the mirror, as if to reassure himself.

All that opulence and elaborate court gesturing, and the guards led him not to a large ballroom or hall, as Poe expected. Instead, he found himself in a small antechamber with only a few people present: an advisor, a high priest and priestess.

And a young woman. Poe’s intended.

You stood placidly a bit apart from the others, and though you weren’t as elaborately done up as others Poe had seen at court, you were still hidden under layers of paint and brocaded cloth. Your hands were folded in front of yourself and that probably meant something in your culture, but you kept your eyes carefully fixed on the floor in front of you.

“Is this it?” Poe asked, incredulous. He couldn’t quite believe that a wedding would have less pomp than the palace’s afternoon ceremony for tea and biscuits. He glanced over at you, and you seemed to cringe at his words.

“She is the third daughter of the third wife,” the advisor said dismissively. “The occasion of her marriage does not warrant more than this.”

So that was the other side of the equation, Poe realized. A cruiser and some gun-ships to offload an unwanted daughter. He tried to look at you a closer, but you seemed to sense his gaze and shrank even more from it.

The occasion of your marriage amounted to a few muttered words by both the high priest and priestess, and then first you and then Poe signed an official looking document on thick, heavy paper. The advisor folded it carefully, then tied it with a white ribbon, then handed it to Poe.

That was it.

No exchanged vows or promises of love. No rings placed on fingers or hands bounds together while prayed over. Not even any eye contact – every time Poe glanced over at you, your eyes were focused elsewhere.

And afterwards? There was no celebration. Not even a goodbye from your parents or any of your multitude of siblings – you and Poe were both ushered away from the palace and onto the promised cruiser. The craft that Poe had arrived on was safely stowed on said cruiser, along with your dowry (some jewelry, some personal effects, and enough gowns to outfit the entire fleet of pilots in the Resistance).

After you were cleared to take off, Poe did just that. He marveled at how well the ship handled, and he practically twitched in anticipation for those gun-ships. Leia would be so happy. If Poe returned with a wife in tow, well…that was the price to pay. He could take care of that situation later.

He set the coordinates for D’Qar and felt the ship ease into hyperspace so smoothly he almost missed the streaks of lights that flew past. He was only two days away from being home. No, not just he anymore. You and he.

Poe stood up from his pilot’s seat and stretched. He felt the weight of the past few days slide off of his shoulders, and he felt like he could sleep until the ship exited hyperspace. But there was a new weight laying on him, and he left the cockpit now to go face it.

You were still sitting in the galley, exactly where he had left you to take off. You gifted him with the barest glance before you returned your eyes to the floor.

You were, like everyone else in your court, off-putting. A human with no shape under the leagues of fabric encasing you. A person with a face so painted that there was no room for expression. And, possibly, a person who didn’t talk.

“I’m Poe,” he said slowly and loudly, and he kicked himself internally at how the bark of his voice echoed off the shiny new walls of the space craft.

He swore he saw the corner of your painted lips twitch – a smile maybe? – but your face resumed its placid surface before you murmured quietly that yes, you knew his name. Of course - he had signed it beside yours on the marriage contract.

“Do you have a name?” he asked, a little gentler. “Or are you just numbered off by birth order?”

That did bring a smile to your face, and you lifted your eyes to meet his gaze for a brief second before returning to watch the space on the floor between you and him. You told him your name in your quiet voice. “Or you could call me number eight, if you prefer,” you added with a hint of a smile in your words.

The eighth child. Third daughter of a third wife. Poe had no idea what you really looked like, and more to the point, what you liked. What you didn’t like. What you’d think of D’Qar and its rough-and-tumble, scrappy quarters. What you’d think of the people in the Resistance. How much you’d stick out in your elaborate gear, how the hems of your sharply pleated skirt would be muddied within seconds of walking through the forest.

Poe could have sat beside you and tried to get to know you. There was some time, after all, and you likely hadn’t asked for marriage any more than he had. But he was keen to get ahold of Leia and report his success, and he wanted to discuss his next mission, which they had already talked about beforehand – finding her brother, Luke Skywalker. Apparently there was someone on Jakku who had a map, and that mission pushed every other thought out of his mind until Poe quite forgot about you.

So when you landed on D’Qar, Poe sprinted ahead of you to find BB-8 and Leia, leaving you behind to fend for yourself.

As you descended the craft, you watched the retreating back of your erstwhile husband. Poe Dameron left you behind. Other women of your court might throw a pretty tantrum or pout winsomely, but you were the third daughter of the third wife. You didn’t rage or pout. You were used to being left behind and forgotten.

So you did what you did best: you squared your shoulders, steeled your spine, and prepared yourself for a new life in this strange world.

As Poe Dameron’s wife.

#poe dameron #poe dameron x reader #poe dameron imagine #poe dameron x you #star wars #tropes and tales

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