Vibrant Eyes | Din Djarin

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Ira Venusta found Din Djarin to be hopelessly funny.

Not funny in the way that it was on purpose. Not because of his dry humor or the serious way he looked at the universe. No, she wouldn't have referred to it as 'hopeless' if it was. He was just... awkward. Fumbling in a way she knew not most could see nor sense like she could.

Ira wasn't lying when she told him that she could sense the basis of thought. Usually, she had to know the person relatively well to begin picking up on it and, over the course of the last month, she had.

She knew him more now than she'd taken the care to know anyone in a very long time.

The thoughts of another person appeared in her consciousness like a light hum in the background. It was similar enough to the hum of a ship to blend into the background and so she often forgot exactly how busy his mind was. But in quiet moments like that one, as she finished off the tales of her younger years and all that happened before they met, she couldn't hope to ignore it.

Din thought, constantly. Or at least he did around her. If she had to guess she'd say that he had some form of anxiety that heightened around a beautiful woman (or so she'd been told, because how would she know?). She supposed no one else ever really noticed it because of the big bad Mandalorian armor.

The helmet made it pretty hard to guess at anything, apparently. Or so they told her.

As he thought of something to say, Ira leaned back in her seat and looked out the window to the stars, listening to the hum of his thoughts. Now, stars were something infinite to her. Because, technically, she'd lied to Din yet again. 

She'd seen one thing before she saw him.

And that was the stars.

Each star was a distant planet, and that meant life. With life, came the Force. And such a concentration of it? Every star in the sky was a shining beacon of the palest lavender light, whispering to her of lives and beauty of the kinds she knew only in the soul or in the far-off beauty of those lives collected where she could see them.

The stars were likely the only thing she saw in the same way as everyone else.

Ira often wondered how they could take them for granted so. And then she wondered how they didn't weep every time they saw them. Such beauty right there for the taking and many chose to forsake them entirely, building lives in tiny corners of a vast universe and staying there.

It was probably why she took to Din so quickly. Why she ran from Winta and Omera the first chance she got. She loved them, she really did, but she needed away from that life.

Ira needed the stars like she needed to breathe.

"And when we met?"

He sounded nervous. Ira stifled a smirk and tore her gaze from the stars to the man she knew to be sitting there. The outline of his armor and the outline of him, sitting before her.

Some days she woke believing it had been a dream, all these months of seeing something real. 

She would weep silently in her bed, treasuring the moments where his voice laughed with hers. The synchronization of daily life. The babbles of a child in her arms and the harshness of reality soothing her to sleep each night.

Then she'd leave her room and stop entirely, drinking in the outline of a man that couldn't possibly fathom the way he shook the stars. Just by being there every night to play cards with her. Just for being him, for the months together, for sitting in the silence, for taking the time to know her, for surviving, and for fearing for her. 

Fearing for her when she held the burden of all that fear on her own for so many years.

In those moments, she was more sure than she was of the stars or darkness that she loved him like she had never loved another.

"It was a shock," she hummed, remembering seeing him for the second time on Sorgan. Feeling his presence, hearing his voice, and knowing that what had been the first real thing she felt in so long had been just that after all. "I got through it by annoying you."

Din huffed. Ira laughed easily.

By the Force, everything was so easy with him.

"I still don't know why I can see you," she decided to elaborate. "But now that I know Grogu, I know he was the one that guided me to your voice. He was also likely the one to set the course to Sorgan, somehow. I'm beginning to wonder if his attachment to you has made this possible."

The mist of light purple swayed as he tilted his helmeted head. "Attachment?"

"Grogu's exceptionally powerful in the ways of the Force, especially at his age. Who knows what he's truly capable of?"

Din chuckled quietly. "He's fifty," he reminded.

"Right. He is older than the both of us, isn't he?"

He nodded, still chuckling, and she smiled like a loon for a moment more before clearing her throat.

"Never mind that, it depends on the development rate of the species. And considering he is still a baby, well..."

"Anything's possible?"

"Anything's possible."

There was silence for a moment with the hum of his thoughts caressing her mind as her eyelids slid shut.

Then—"Would you change it?"

Ira opened her eyes, so he knew she was listening.

"Everything that's happened because you followed me. Navarro. The past couple months. Yesterday."

She nodded for him to go on.

"Do you regret any of it?"

Her heart swelled with the warmth of cosmos' and stars as they trembled in the skies above and below.

"Din," she whispered, voice thick with emotion. "I would change nothing of it for anything."

She loved all of it in the same way she feared she loved him.