Chapter Text
The ground thrums beneath Din’s feet.
He pushes his way through the Kashyyyk forest, following the growing vibrations and the distant swell of noise. It takes just a few seconds to spot a clearing, filled with beings of dozens of races and species. Din recognizes many from his travels — Twi’lek, Rodians, Wookiees of course, even an Ugnaught, lots of humans in… retro-looking Imperial helmets splashed with all manner of colors. The night is overly-warm, with barely a hint of a breeze, and they’re probably sweating under their strange clothing, with its mix of metal studs and black textiles, stuffed with strange little sticks and bulbs lit with neon glows. But they don’t look like they mind the heat.
He’s glad they can’t see him staring from under his Mandalorian helmet. But he also feels more out of place than ever.
People hoot and holler and laugh, and there’s a joy and community buzzing in the dim echoes of flashing lights between the trees. He doesn’t belong here. But he still takes a moment just to soak in the camaraderie of it all.
It would be nice, he imagines, to be able to just sink into an experience like this. They’d welcome him, he thinks. Even if he’d probably skip the ‘downing large quantities of cheap spirits’ and ‘inhaling mystery powders’ parts.
Someone knocks into him, then turns with alcohol-loose limbs and a sloppy smile. “Hey man! Nice costume!” they say, then amble off amiably.
Din shakes his head. Maybe not so out of place, then. Or at least, not noticeably so.
Not for the first time, Din curses one Boba Fett.
The music is getting closer, with a strange electric-burn smell on the air growing too, and Din assumes that’s where he’ll find Boba. But the covert’s medic isn’t anywhere in sight.
Of course.
Din’s torn between annoyance — Boba has an important job! he should be reachable at all times! he shouldn’t disappear to strange concerts in the woods! — and curiosity. What is this crowd of people doing here? They don’t seem like they’re all Kashyyyk inhabitants; there are enough speeders wedged up against tree trunks and ships grounded in a wide makeshift landing field nearby that it’s clear people came here for this.
How did Boba find out about it?
Din starts scanning the treetops. Even though Boba has never taken the Creed and doesn’t wear beskar’gam, he seems to have an uncanny ability to navigate the skyscraping trees. It’s lucky for him — some of the Tribe’s even better-outfitted Mando’ade still haven’t really gotten used to scaling the trees here, and find themselves ill at ease in the latest attempt to find refuge in a galaxy that wants to hunt them down and root them out.
Din looks for telltale signs that could reveal Boba’s presence: a twitch of leaves that leans against the wind, or a branch that seems to bow against its nature. It’s less spotting someone and more looking for the disruption in pattern, the flash of color or movement that gives something away.
Boba taught him how to think about hunting like this.
It doesn’t take long before a brilliant green holocam light flashes across a branch, which seems to dip oddly in response.
There.
Din is a slower climber than Boba, but between his whipcord and a few handy pieces of gear, he finds purchase in the rough bark and begins his ascent. The show must be starting — as he climbs higher, speakers start to blare with a dark, humming rumble that seems to rise up from somewhere beneath the very crust of the earth. Bold, heavy thumps roll out, one after the other, and the crowd surges to meet the rising bass line.
It makes the hair stand up on the back of Din’s neck. But it also fills him with an odd and inexplicable urge to move to the rousing beat. To dance.
He pushes it down, of course.
He reaches the inappropriately behaving branch, a thick perch near the trunk that is wide enough for three people to sit side-by-side with legs crossed. Boba is, of course, hanging out over the edge of the weakest part of the branch, which bends precariously under his weight. Din shakes his head, crawling up to meet him.
“This is a private box,” Boba grumbles. Din can barely make out the words under the now-screaming crowd.
“Here,” Din says, and hands Boba the clip-on comm that he’s started keeping around in case he has to work with another helmetless hunter on a job. “And come back a bit.” He gestures at the more stable part of the branch. Din doesn’t want to fall to his owndeath, either.
Boba rolls his eyes but doesn’t really protest. “Sure, just invite yourself…” His voice is fuzzier through the commlink, but it’s easier to hear when it’s patched directly into Din’s helmet — especially with the noise growing louder around them.
After a bit of scrambling and rearranging, they find an angle that lets them sit side-by-side with a full view of what Din now sees is a stage.
The singer is cradling a holomic now, his voice half-croon, half-scream as the music careens from low rhythm into dizzying synthetic noise. The singer mesmerizes — a blurring flash of teal and metal, bristling with energy and simmering with something that Din can only describe as barely-hidden rage. A visor obscures the singer’s whole face with neon, but it doesn’t matter, because every emotion translates through the way he moves.
“These’re the Meat Droids. Pretty cool, huh?” Boba asks.
Din has no idea. He’s dropped credits for buskers in town squares, seen holorecordings of Coreworld concerts with huge flashy stages and blaring lightshows and colored explosives and pretty musicians, and heard some jizz players in dusty cantinas — but this? This is something else altogether.
The cobbled-together set of equipment and aesthetics feels at once makeshift and totally deliberate — in the way the sound and the noise and the lights and the energy mesh into one frenetic whole.
Instead of saying any of that, Din just goes with, “Would’ve been cooler if I’d known where to find you to start.”
Boba shrugs, then nudges Din with his shoulder. “Just like old times, eh?”
Din snorts. “This isn’t quite the same.”
In old times, Din usually hadn’t had a choice: “Go find the Armorer's perpetual-runaway ad’ika from the other covert before he outs a civilian covert and gets all of us killed” was a mission, not an optional pursuit. That was when there had been more coverts, entire networks of Mandalorians underground.
It isn’t like that, anymore. And tonight, Din volunteered to go find Boba when the Armorer bemoaned his absence. There’s no true urgency. No medical emergency requiring Boba’s skills. Din just enjoys Boba’s presence. But he’s not going to mention it.
“For one, I’m not dragging you out of a near-death situation as a training exercise,” Din adds.
“Oh? You don’t think this crowd of miscreants is dangerous?” Boba’s making fun of him; Din can hear it in his voice, see it in the way his eyes warm and crinkle at the edges. “Big bad beroya’s not here to fight off the punks?”
Said punks are bobbing their heads and throwing elbows beneath them, working up into a frenzy.
“I don’t know,” Din says, “I’m thinking the tree might be the bigger adversary here. You going to need help getting down?”
Boba blinks, and looks at the long expanse of trunk beneath them. Trees on Kashyyyk aren’t just tall. They’re colossal. “Hm,” he says. “I wouldn’t say no to a little whipcord ride-along. But after the show.”
“When’s that?” Din asks, thinking longingly of his sleeping pad and a warm fire. He tries not to imagine himself actually carrying Boba from the tree, like some sort of holocomic hero clutching a maiden to him. The mere idea’s ridiculous.
Boba shrugs again. “No schedule. We’ll find out.”
Great.
The thought is begrudging, but Din can’t deny he appreciates the excuse to just watch. He’s never seen anything like the synth-player with the shock of white in his hair, or the drummer-slash-synth-guy with his sure hands and easy grin, or the dozens of contraptions and tools that summon the electronic crackles of vibration that create pure energy in the air and draw screams from the crowd.
Din doesn’t understand what the musicians are doing, really, but he knows enough to sense that it’s impressive. It’s not so different from a well-planned spar, in the way they play off each other.
The two musicians in the back are on some sort of glowing pad, facing each other as if to grab a line of noise and volley it across the space between them, catch it, scramble it, and throw it back in a wave of sound at once harmonious and dissonant. The singer’s voice cracks through the visor’s modulator and comes out sounding more machine than human every second.
Now that he thinks of it, the faces in the back do look familiar. Like he’s seen them somewhere before.
Din zooms in with his HUD, and that’s when he realizes that the artists don’t just look a little familiar.
“Are you, uh… related?” Din asks. He’s not sure how to sift through the shock in his emotions, and he knows he didn’t keep it out of his voice. If Boba has family, why join the covert as a foundling? Why live with the Tribe at all?
Boba’s expression turns at once wistful and guarded. “Not really. We’re half-siblings, maybe. Or cousins.”
“Do you… see them often?” For a moment, Din envisions an entire secret life outside the covert, one where Boba has a huge, smiling extended family waiting for him with open arms.
“We’ve never met.”
“Oh,” Din says, at a loss. If you have that, why wouldn’t you reach out for it?
“We were…” Boba trails off uncertainly. Din doesn’t push. But Boba continues anyway, like something else is driving him on. “You could say we were raised differently. Very differently.”
“Do you want to go talk to them?”
“What?” Boba’s eyes widen. “No! No way. They probably don’t even know about me. And if they do —” He cuts himself off and shakes his head, grimacing.
“Why’d you come here, then?”
“For the music!” Boba gestures at the stage.
“Hm,” Din says. He doesn’t know Boba well enough to know, really, but it has to be more than that, right? “I’ll go with you. If you’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Boba says, voice pitching high in a way that Din would bet means he is, in fact, nervous. “And, look, you were supposed to bring me back for something, right?”
It’s Din’s turn to shrug. “It’s too late now. The Armorer wanted you, but that was hours ago.”
A grin lights up Boba’s face. “So I was hard to track, huh?”
Din elbows him. “You were easy to track. I’m here, aren’t I?” Boba generally is, yes, quite difficult to track. Din half-wonders if it’s on purpose — if Boba cuts across streams and through mucky marshes just to throw Din off his trail, to give him a bit of a puzzle. But of course, that’s just how Boba does things. Nothing to do with Din.
Boba’s smile becomes softer, less sharp. “That you are. Now are you gonna shut up and enjoy the show, or what?”
Din regards Boba for a long moment. Boba stares back, eyebrow rising in challenge.
When Din doesn’t respond, Boba adds, “You don’t have to wait up. If no one’s broken an important bone...”
The crowd swells beneath them. The music now blares loudly enough that the sonic waves seem to set their branch gently swaying — or maybe that’s just in Din’s head. But Din’s feet kick in the air, and the sound shakes and vibrates through the wood.
He has so many questions: Why is Boba here? How does he know about these people? Why doesn’t he want to reach out to this chance at family, even if they’re different? What is this music?
Part of him wants to be angry. So many of their warriors have died, so recently; they’ve been uprooted, and scattered, and hunted like dogs. The covert is still rebuilding, smaller than ever. They still aren’t established or safe, here on Kashyyyk. Din’s been exhausted since he officially became beroya just months ago, trying to keep everyone clothed and fed and hidden. No one has time for fun.
But it’s already late, and the neon lights dance in the dark reflections of Boba’s eyes, and the stars are bright above them.
It can’t be too bad, to take a break. To find some gladness, lost in the colorful lights and overwhelming noise.
“Alright,” Din says. “I’ll watch with you.”
If Din gets a bit distracted from the show by the closeness of their shoulders or the brush of their thighs where they sit together on the branch, well, he’s not going to mention it. And he’s certainly not going to do anything to put a stop to it.
Instead, he lets the music carry him away, for a little while.