Lullaby | The Mandalorian

Chapter One: The Betrayal of the Cause

Note: So since I'm nearing the ends of both of my WIPs I decided to go ahead and start this WIP because I was itching to do so. A few important notes:

- Din is pretty rough in this. He's not a softy, but he's not evil either. Just a very rough and grey character. Pretty dark grey haha, I really wanted to zone in on his bounty hunter characteristics.

- Mayfeld isn't very redeemable in this, I'm sorry XD

- It strays from the timeline of season 1 and 2. Din has been hired to work with Mayfeld, Z, Xi'an, etc.

Warning: Mayfeld is a creep in this chapter!

***

Annelise gripped the mug tightly in her hand.

The cantina was full, the tiny moon outlet a welcoming place for all of the rejected individuals of the galaxy. Annelise did not dare drink the liquid, even just the smell of it burned her nostrils and the booming voices of the drunk occupants around her made her skull pound. She kept her hood pulled over her head, looking down at the table. Running for the past several days had left her exhausted, she had only gotten lucky with the transport ship and her escape from her home – but she knew her father and she knew him to be the kind to send someone after her. Simplistically – she was terrified. He had never been the kind to give up easily, and her arranged marriage was nothing short of a business deal.

An arrangement for her father to gain more territory – more power, more credits. Explicitly to be sold to a man she did not know – also the son of a powerful criminal. Annelise found the prospect to be revolting. Not that she had ever entertained marrying for love, but she wished nothing more than to melt into that cantina, cease to exist. But she lacked the courage to end her own life. So there she was – sniveling and frightened...hiding on that stupid moon in that stupid cantina with all the stupid drunks around her. Unable to breathe properly – unable to think without feeling sick. With very few credits left, she wondered if she would be hungry. She had yet to feel hunger even in the few days of her run. Mostly because the anxiety had been far too great.

Annelise hugged herself close.

Glasses slammed on the tables as music hummed in the background from the band and women danced at the coaxing of offered credits. Annelise felt somewhat safe there in the booth tucked into the corner and no one besides the waiter had approached her since her arrival several hours ago. Really, she was the most comfortable she had been in days. Her anxiety still clung inside of her very bones – conditioned there from childhood, hands placed on her out of rage – and knowing...knowing she was far too valuable of a barter chip for her father to simply let go of. To simply let walk the universe without his control as well as under the control of her 'fiancé'. A man she had only met in passing moments, painful and frightening moments of being backed into walls. Uninvited coaxing.

Annelise was nothing more than a game, but she knew inside of herself she could not maintain that life. And wanted more from the universe. More than captivity.

More than her father and her fiancé and the underworld of crime her father committed day in and out. An agreement to give and give and gain nothing – own nothing. Have nothing. And yet her foolish mother had the audacity to call it a privileged lifestyle of shiny things.

"We get all we could ask for and all we have to do is bed their men. Why not be grateful?"

Maybe she was just ungrateful. Ungrateful and unhappy.

Annelise though – in the crowds, noticed him the moment he entered.

She had been hypervigilant ever since her escape from her home planet and their grounds. And she noticed things she had never noticed before. Annelise knew the look of a bounty hunter, her father had hired many and yet she had only heard stories of the Mandalorians that hunted bounties. Even her father had never reached such power to hire one but she supposed being his daughter, it was no shock that he had hired one specifically for her return. Annelise pulled he hood up a bit the moment he came into the cantina, her heart trembling in her chest and barely beating fully...Oxygen caught in her lungs. Her eyes burned, as she saw his reflective armor – shiny and even a bit beautiful in a way. But she knew what he was...and she knew what she was.