#why not just write Din out of the show at this point 🙃

[vvitchering]

I don’t actually have it in me to review today’s episode so I will simply post an image that conveys my feelings the best

[tickle-bugs]

hello! if you’re still writing for the mandalorian, could u do lee!din and ler!cara with the dialogue “can you stop laughing? i’m trying to talk to you. how rude!” and “was that a snort?” (if u don’t want to use both dialogues that’s perfectly fine, u can choose whichever u prefer 🙃)

If Only For a Moment

anon: for the writing requests, if ur still into the mandalorian, if u don’t mind could u do lee!din and ler!cara with the dialogue “wow. you are super ticklish.” please?

Cara’s actor can eat my boot and choke she’s a terrible person BUT I am soft for the friendship these two could’ve had and thus I am taking full custody of Cara. Enjoy!! My first mando fic somehow. AU where they stay on Sorgan for a while/come back to Sorgan to rest.

“Hey.” Cara drops heavily onto the bench beside Din. He makes a soft noise to acknowledge her but doesn’t turn. 

Sorgan had set a sort of peace into his bones that he wasn’t sure how to handle. He’s afraid of handling it, truly. Peace isn’t a luxury because you have to earn it--it’s a luxury because it makes you slow. It makes you take survival for granted. You earn peace when you no longer need to survive. 

But sitting here on this ridge, overlooking a village finally at peace…it clashes against everything he knows to be true. Their huts are still smoldering in places. The villagers have built barricades around some of the deeper gouges in the earth and done their best to fill them with water. Some of the children have already found their way into the shallower pits to play with the mud and frogs. Din can hear their laughter from up here, wavelengths dancing across the right side of his visor display. 

“You gonna sit out here all day?” Cara’s eyes rest heavy on the side of his face. 

“Just keeping an eye on things.” His gaze dips towards the treeline. It’s clear. The only heat signatures there are creatures returning to their natural home. Everything is fine. It has been. But he knows that never lasts. 

“You’ve been keeping an eye on things for a few days. You’ve earned a break.” She claps him on the shoulder once, brief and firm. 

A loud shriek startles them and they both tense with the instinct to rise, but they both know the voices of the village children by now. A pack of them chase each other around a few specific huts--their homes, probably--making blaster noises and shouts that carry on the wind. They watch the grimness of war become a thing of innocence in their hands. 

“Were you ever like that?” Cara points. 

“Like what?” He follows her finger, then squints back at her. “A child?”

She chuckles at him, but her smile stays earnest. 

“Yeah. Did you ever get to be a child?” She tilts her head a bit. Din’s breath catches. They’d talked about personal matters before, but never like this. Their routine was showing their hand, constantly reassuring each other that their mutual interest in saving the galaxy was still mutual. It was always a transaction, never…interest. Is she baiting him in some way? Possibly trying to leech some sort of future blackmail material? Cara lacks that kind of tact from what he can tell, but one can never be too careful. Which opens up more questions still, each unfolding upon and into each other in endless fractals. One question in particular peers up at him beneath the layers, utterly unsettling. 

Why do you care?

“Everyone’s a child at some point. That’s the order of things.” He drops his gaze to the ground. Thinking too much will cost him. He knows that. 

“Now we both know that’s not true, Mando.” She shifts her weight on the bench and it brings them closer together. Something solemn rests its hands on both of their shoulders, seeping into the collective lifetimes of scars and battered muscle between them. He knows that he’s feeding it, this thing, and it turns his gut with unease. 

“Din,” he says quickly, before he can stop himself. He can hear Cara’s confusion without needing to see it. 

“My name. It’s Din.”

“It suits you.” She bumps their shoulders together. He looks at her and allows a smile. 

Another shriek, shriller this time, sends them both jumping to their feet. One of the village boys had been pounced on by the other children, sending a knot of screeching limbs rolling down the hillside. Panic leaps into Din’s throat. He starts making his way towards the edge of the ridge. 

“Din, it’s okay . It’s just--they’re playing. It’s fine.” Cara grabs his shoulder. He lets her lead him back to the bench but his eyes never leave the children. A young boy collapses under the weight of his friends and shouts, piercing through the air. Din flinches. Laughter bursts up from their chaotic little pile but the shrillness still raises his hackles. 

“They’re tickling each other, I think. Explains the screaming. Not sure how much more of that I can take, though.” Cara chuckles and looks to Din as if he’d be in on whatever she’s saying. He stares blankly at her. 

She extends her hands to him, as if asking for something. He doesn’t do what she wants, mostly because he can’t for the life of him grasp what she wants. She takes his wrists and pulls his hands towards her. She peels off his gloves, minding the beskar as if it were glass, and cradles his hands in her own for a moment. Looking up at him apprehensively, she trails her calloused fingertips over his palms, his fingers, even down to his pulse point on his wrist. It’s…soothing in a way, but he senses from the wrinkle between her brow that he’s not doing this right, somehow. 

“I…don’t have much feeling in my hands anymore.” He furrows his brow. Cara makes a pitying noise that he decidedly doesn’t like. He resists the urge to immediately pull his gloves back on. Obviously he didn’t respond the way she wanted. 

“Shame.” She shrugs. That solemn thing between them starts to turn the shade of melancholy. They have enough of that between them, Din thinks. He stares down at the rough canvas of his hands, then hers. 

“What is it supposed to feel like?” He mimics what she did, tracing his fingers over his own palms. It’s different in a way he can’t quite categorize. Cara blinks with something like disbelief and awe--he really wishes people would stop looking at him that way. 

“Alright, well. Don’t kill me, okay?” A hint of an impish smile creeps onto her face. She scoots slightly closer on the bench. 

“Why would I--” 

Din chokes on a high-pitched noise not unlike the ones ringing down from the hillside. Cara’s fingers gently ripple into the divots between the plates of beskar, finding seams of muscle in his sides that make his brain collapse into a heap of sparks. 

“What…is this?” He trembles but doesn’t move, just tries to process the sheer volume of stimuli racing through him all at once. Snickers escape without his permission and he hunches over to try and keep his every atom from spilling out into her hands. 

“Wow. You are super ticklish.” Cara laughs. Her fingers keep a rhythmic pace. 

“Say the word and I’ll stop.” Something concerned crosses her face before she can hide it from him. He wants to tell her it’s okay, or reassure her somehow that this is…a lot but okay--at least for now--but all he can do is rattle in place as if he’s about to launch into orbit. 

Her fingers migrate towards his stomach and his resolve cracks along with his voice. He giggles fervently past bitten lips and collapses into her hands. It’s not lightning, he knows lightning well, but this feeling moves like it. His body seems eager to disseminate it and lessen the impact, but unlike lightning, the electric bursts under his skin have no means of escape. Her hands are on his stomach but he feels the laughter in his veins. 

“C-Cara!” He grabs her wrists for something to hold onto. She swoops her fingers under his arms, tripping up his ribs like a ladder. He flails and nearly takes both of them off the bench. It’s worse, so much worse, and he fights the building urge to flee or mitigate the feeling somehow. It’s not harming him. It doesn’t remotely feel like it. He…trusts her. 

Until she gets under his arms and he cackles, that is. 

“Oh wow. Bad spot, huh?” She giggles with him, a sound he could never truly picture her making. Then again, he could never picture an existence like hers before this either. Certainly never like this. But here he was, soft where he swore he’d never be, melting in the hands of a shocktrooper no longer covered in blood. 

Cara does this thing with her fingers, like she’s fiddling with a stuck button for landing gear, and Din snorts. His entire body buckles and he clasps his hands over his helmet. As if it’ll help muffle him. 

“Did you just snort?” She presses in again and his head collides with her shoulder. He wheezes and it crackles into the air. More snorts filter out of him and his laughter bounces unexpectedly, responding to Cara’s hands like a fine-tuned weapon in the hands of a master. 

“Your ‘tough and mysterious’ act is going to work on me anymore. Just so you’re aware. I respect you, but this…your laugh is so cute, it’s sickening. I mean--” She pauses when Din flails again, sending her grabbing onto his thigh just to keep them both upright. He squeals and his leg twitches violently. She makes a noise of interest that makes his face burn beneath the helmet. 

“Can you stop laughing? I’m tryin’ to talk to you. Rude.” She squeezes his thigh again but this time she doesn’t stop. Din squeals again, much louder, and he collapses into the bench. A wave of desperate, garbled noises escape him before his laughter takes full flight. He shakes with the force of it. 

“I-I’m trying!” He wails. She helps him sit up with a laugh somehow more tickled than his.  

“Oh my god--Din, I’m kidding. It’s okay.” She grips his shoulders and shakes him a little. He nods a little dumbly, trying to remember what it felt like to have control of his limbs. 

“You still with us in there?” She taps his helmet. He swats her hand away.

“I think so. That was…something.” He nods. He finds that his smile won’t leave. It’s…nice. Cara pats his shoulder. He leans into it. 

“It’s not always so much. Sometimes it’s nice.” Cara hums thoughtfully, then gestures to her neck. “Can I show you? Here?” 

He regards her for a while, then nods. 

“Gently. Careful.” He warns, holding her wrists loosely. 

“I’m always careful,” Cara smirks. It would be terrifying if he didn’t already trust her so deeply. She tips his helmet up slowly, slowly, so much so that he almost wants to chide her for treating him so fragile. The low hums of the internal fan click and lose speed as warm air curls against the underside of his chin. His breath hitches when she lifts the helmet a little more, but it sinks lower again as she balances it against her knuckles. With her free hand, she curls her fingers beneath his chin with the lightest of touches. 

He dissolves into giggles easier than breathing, which does not come easy with Cara’s blunt fingernails dance against the scruff on the slope of his neck. Even as he scrunches to trap her fingers, the hand holding his helmet slightly aloft works to bolster the flow of breathy, muffled laughter seeping from the gap in the helmet. 

The sounds of war seem far away with the dragonflies fluttering in his chest. For the first time, Din allows it to remain that way.

@parkersaysthings tagging u bc you asked! hope u enjoy! <3