"You gonna take care of that?"
"Take care of what?"
Carasynthia Dune rolled her eyes. "The gash on your leg that's as long as my hand."
Din took himself in -- the glint of the beskar in the fire light, a new patch of carbon scoring on his thigh plate, a scrape along the side of his shoe, the long gash just above the inside of his knee. Below the tattered gap in his flightsuit he saw the crust of dried blood.
It did hurt, now that Cara had mentioned it. He'd clocked the pain hours ago, of course, but he'd moved on. Lots of things hurt, all the time. That was just how these things went.
"It's probably fine."
Cara gave him a look like he'd sprouted a tail. "So you're just going to leave it?"
He shrugged, making a show of giving the wound another once-over. "It's nothing. It's a scratch."
"That is not a scratch."
"I've been hurt before."
Cara scoffed. "Don't talk to a shock trooper about 'hurt'." She wiped the grease of dinner from her hands then reached for a medpac. "C'mon." She crossed by fire and sat in front of him. "Lemme see that."
Din, still protesting, extended his leg.
"Ah," Cara said with a triumphant smile. "So you don't have any Mandalorian tenets against medical care. You're just choosing to be difficult." She put a firm hand on his knee. Din humored her, allowing her to guide his leg to an angle where the fire's light illuminated the gash.
He could tell she'd done this before, probably too many times to count. He wondered how many times she’d quelled a friend’s blood in battle, only to lose them. He wondered how often she’d been the patient.
Cara whistled. "You were centimetres off from bleeding out in the middle of a fight, you know that?" She reached for the medpac, but Din held up a hand.
"I'm fine, Cara. It'll heal. That's what wounds do."
Cara snorted as she pulled a bacta patch from its protective coating.
"You don't have to do that."
"No, I don't." That caught him by surprise, which was perhaps the point. In the time it took him to assemble a response, she'd smoothed the patch over the wound. "But because I'm your friend, I'm going to do it." Cara stood, hands planted triumphantly on her hips. "Was that really so hard?"
Din pulled his leg back in. "You shouldn't have wasted a bacta patch on that."
"That's what bacta patches are for, idiot!" She scooped up the remains of her dinner, sucking the marrow out of a bone. In the light of the dying fire, they sat in an uneasy stillness. Din watched the flames, relieved despite his earlier protestations to find that the pain was receding with each passing minute.
Din rubbed at the bacta patch idly with gloved fingers. "Thank you. I -- I appreciate it"
"Don't mention it," Cara replied. She tossed a bone over her shoulder. "It's what teammates do.”