Summary: Din reflects on his past with you and how he's slowly fallen in love with you, his wife, to the Child. Little does he know, you've overheard the entire thing.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Some people say that it happened at first sight. Others claim that it was by the end of the first date. But Din thinks that he's fallen in love with you bit by bit until now.
He fell in love with different pieces of you at different times, and now he's fallen so deep that he can't imagine living a life without you anymore. If someone were to take you away from him, he thinks that his brain would malfunction. Coming from a man who had lived a life of thinking quickly on the spot to make a living, this was tremendous news for him.
The first time Din fell in love with a piece of you? Not the day that he met you, but three weeks after. You had just agreed to move into the Razor Crest as a live-in nanny for the kid. He didn't know it then, but he had just agreed to hand over his fragile heart and see it glow for the first time since childhood.
It must have been all the things you didn't say.
You had asked no questions; his name and age remained opaque. You hadn't deliberately spied on him to see his face. You didn't have any recollection of what it meant to be one of his kind. Mandalorians were those who followed the Creed. This was the way, and you didn't object or say it didn't matter.
Even though the bartenders and the market people he passed by daily in every single planet jeered at him and asked him whether he was green behind the beskar too. Even though you were to live right next to him, personal information didn't matter.
All that you asked him for was things like ration packs or the kid's daily exercise. And sometimes your weekly payment.
All that you questioned was where the refresher was and if he wanted you to move away from him to make him more comfortable. So first, he fell in love with your anti-invasive behavior.
The second time Din fell in love with a piece of you? Exactly four days after you had moved in. Every time he saw you around the ship, you would be with the foundling, giving all of the love and affection he thought his parents would have given him. If they had lived longer.
So after that day, he saw you like you were someone else. Maybe it was because you were the picture of the mother that he barely had. But after that day, Din began falling in love with pieces of you faster and faster.
The third time Din fell in love with a piece of you? He had awoken during the middle of the night to some strange clanging. Grabbing his blaster, creeping towards the door, Din peeked out to see the sight of you thoroughly covered in paint.
You had put down a picnic blanket of some sort underneath you to protect the metal floors. It was such a trivial thing, but Din fell in love with your caution.
Or perhaps he was just a dumb boy who didn't think things through when painting, and you were just a normal person. But at that moment, staring at the slope of your nose flick of your brush, he fell in love with another piece of you.
The fourth time Din fell in love with a piece of you? Right after he made yourself stop staring at your facial features at 4 in the morning, he looked back down to see what you were painting.
And his heart nearly stopped when he saw you painting those little blocks of the Child's red, yellow, green, purple, blue, and gold.
The fact that you'd taken the time to commit to painting something that the Child used was already heartwarming enough. But you woke up in the middle of the night so you didn't take up all the room on the floor, so he didn't constantly have to tell you to move over. It made him fall in love with you even more.
And the cycle went on and on until right now.
They were all small moments that built up pressure behind a mental wall, then breaking all of a sudden and crashing through his mind like the beginning of an everlasting waterfall.
How had he just realized this? Kriff, how was it that he had fallen in love with you so quickly, yet so slowly at the same time? Din didn't know how to put it into words.
But the kid knew what he was talking about. The Child, with his disproportionately large ears and vivid green skin, was nodding along. Din knew that he wasn't making any sense—Stars, he didn't even know what he was talking about—but the foundling was listening attentively.
"Anyway, ad'ika [little son/daughter], I may have gone and fallen in love with your mother."
All of a sudden, the baby squeals and jumps out of his arms to run back to you. His feet patter against the metal floor and Din can hear the uneasy laughter erupting from you.
Din can't move, can't think, and can't even breathe for Maker's sake. Of course, he had to have said that while you were right there. Of kriffing course.
But before his frantic mind can do anything that he'll deeply regret, the Child breaks the motionless silence with a few random claps.
"Uppy arms? Are you tired, Mr. Foundling?"
Your voice is steady and a wave of relief crashes. It's quickly followed by a wave of panic, then another one of confusion. Had you heard him or not? Din didn't think that your voice would have been so casual if you had heard him.
He hears the metal creak as you stand up with the weight of the Child. Din closes his eyes and imagines you holding the baby like a human newborn. He immediately blinks. Kriff.
Din comes to the conclusion that you hadn't heard him. There's no way that you'd be ignoring him right now if you had heard exactly what he had said.
But once the door creaks open, Din hears you say, "Anyway, ad'ika [little son/daughter], I may have gone and fallen in love with your father."
