Work Text:
Protected by the dark, he waits.
In his rather limited amount of experience for someone of his age, he has found that having a comfortable hiding place is important.
Patience is a necessity when you’re being hunted, after all.
A swarm of children barrels past his hideaway, giggling all the while. He can see their limbs flail with a childlike lack of control through the holes formed by the imperfect weave of the basket. Their voices fade and he waits, silently.
His self-control is truly astonishing. Until it isn’t.
He grows impatient. The children have occupied themselves with something else several huts away, already having been found by the hunter. Suddenly, the pride of having found the best hiding spot in the village seems less important when faced with the prospect of being left behind by his friends.
The child begins to squirm.
He can’t help himself. He raises one tiny, three-fingered hand to the edge of the basket lid and lifts so he can peek through the gap—
—but the lid is promptly thrown open. The child squeaks in shock.
“Shh!” Winta hushes as she promptly scoops him up into her arms.
“We’re the only ones left. I know a spot where he’ll never find us,” she whispers.
The child coos, inquisitively.
Winta peaks around the corner of the shed and, upon finding the Mandalorian nowhere in sight, breaks into a sprint to duck behind the next building over as fast as she can without jostling the child too much. She runs and ducks and hides and repeats until they have reached an unoccupied pond at the edge of the village.
Winta crouches down at the water’s edge and takes one last sweep of their surroundings before she scoots feet first into the pond. The child squeals and slaps his tiny hands over the surface and Winta shushes him as she ducks under an overturned basket.
The child quiets. They wait.
Din is not panicking. He isn’t.
Sure, he’s managed to lose—not lost, just very well hidden, he reminds himself—a kid during a totally innocent game of hide and seek. That doesn’t mean the worry he feels is making him want to crawl out of his skin or scream or panic. Not at all.
The kid is just being competitive, is all. Competitive and very small, which lends itself well to being great at hiding. That’s all there is to it. No need to worry. The rest of the children were easy enough to find, and his—this kid should be no different.
Except this kid is a quarter the size of the rest and twice as quick when he needs to be. Not for the first time today, Din regrets agreeing to play this game. But the tender smile Omera had directed his way as she watched him be dragged away by the throng of children had almost made his reluctant concession seem worth it at the time.
As he jogs—walks fast—weaving between villagers and houses and ponds, Din thinks he should probably tell the kid to lighten up when it comes to hide and seek. As soon as he finds him, that is.
The spaces he searches shrink in size with every pass through the village: an overturned garbage pail, a basket of laundry, the gaps between stacked baskets of krill. There are only so many places for the little womp rat to hide. This is fine.
Unless…?
All the while his panic grows. Has something happened to him? Has he gotten stuck somewhere? Is he hurt? Did he fall into a pond and drown? Did he and Cara miss some of the raiders when they were clearing out their camp? Have they come back to even the score? Where is he? It’s getting late and now and the sun will be setting soon. He’s a bounty hunter! This should be easy—
“Are you okay?”
Din spins around, jerked out of his internal spiral of horror by Omera’s voice.
“I lost the kid,” he sputters, then winces. That’s not what he meant to say. He’s not sure what he meant to say, but it wasn’t that.
Omera, unexpectedly, smirks up at him in amusement.
“You lost him?”
Din pauses, thinking this time before he speaks.
“I don’t know where he is,” he settles on, though that doesn’t sound much better.
“Did you find Winta?” Omera asks, catching him off guard.
Oh, shit.
“I…”
Internally, Din is already beginning to rehearse his apologies. He’s ready to grovel on his knees and beg forgiveness for losing her child as well as his own (well, not his, per se) when Omera, seeming to sense his hysteria, cuts in once again.
“Check the ponds,” she suggests, wryly. “Winta is very serious about hide and seek. I’ve had to hang her clothes on the line three times this week because she keeps wearing them into the water.”
Oh.
Oh.
Din nods almost hesitantly and exhales, thankful that Omera knows her daughter better than he knows his own young charge.
“Thank you.”
Omera nods, amused, and he resumes his search, this time paying extra attention to the ponds.
In their makeshift hideaway, Winta and the child grow cold and impatient.
The sun is setting. In its absence, the water temperature drops and leeches the warmth from their bones. The light is dimmer now and Winta can barely see the straw weave three inches in front of her. The children shiver, but they both refuse to move.
They mean to win this game, so in the rapidly cooling pond they remain.
On the gravel path next to them, Winta hears heavy footfalls and the jangling of armor.
“Kid?”
Reflexively, Winta claps a hand over the child’s mouth as he coos at the sound of the Mandalorian’s voice, but her sudden movement makes a splash. She freezes.
The footsteps halt.
“Winta?” the Mandalorian calls. Silence.
The baby shrieks through her fingers.
“You can come out now. You’ve won the game,” he appeals now, “…by a landslide,” he adds, sounding almost relieved.
Immediately Winta drops her hand from the baby’s mouth and uses it to hoist the basket from over their heads. On the water bank stands the Mandalorian with his hands on his hips. Winta thinks if she could see his face, he would be scowling.
Freed from their confined hiding space, Winta yelps when the child immediately starts splashing as much water as his tiny hands will allow. Then the baby is holding his arms out to his caregiver, who scoops up the boy and holds out his free hand for Winta to pull her out of the pond.
Back on solid ground, Mando regards the two children, both dripping wet, shivering forcefully, teeth chattering. He sighs, unclipping his cloak from his cuirass and settling it around the girl’s shoulders. As he holds the child snugly in the crook of his arm, the boy nuzzles closer in search of warmth. Din sets a hand over his cloak on Winta’s shoulder.
“You really shouldn’t take hide and seek so seriously, you know.”
“Can we play again?” she asks, instead of acknowledging what he just sad, Din notes. His shoulders droop as he finally allows the tension to drain from his body, allows himself to smile at the girl even though she can’t see it. In the crook of his arm, the child’s eyes are already drooping closed in sleep.
“Maybe tomorrow.”