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After leaving you on a secluded planet to keep you safe, Din comes back. He had delivered the Child to his people; completed his mission. He looks for you at a marketplace four cycles after the day he left. It’s not too busy, but bustling enough for him to be hyper-aware of his surroundings. Anyone could be you.
He’s walking around, making sure to check the faces of the people working at each stall, hoping each time that it’s you. His confidence drops as he registers each person. And then, he thinks he sees you.
“Cyar’ika [darling],” he calls out. It’s weak, but he knows that if they were you, they’d turn around. Who else would speak Mando’a in this backwater planet? But you do not turn.
Perhaps you had not heard him. He feels his heart pounding in his chest so loud that he swears it’s audible to everyone else. Din’s collected a few odd stares so far. He wouldn’t blame the market people. His kind was not the kind to come to such a place. But his mind was focused on you, and only you.
Footsteps getting heavier and heavier, he calls out to you again. This time, he calls you by your name.
No response.
Din swallows thickly. Surely it’s you. It has to be. But when he taps on your shoulder, and an unfamiliar face meets him, he is proven wrong.
“Sorry,” he finds himself saying. “Wrong person.”
Looking back, he doesn’t even know how he did it. He has no idea how he mustered enough energy to continue. But he was here for you and wouldn’t leave until he found you, or directions to you. If the Maker wouldn’t do anything for him, he begged the stars. He sent up a silent prayer up to the rest of the universe, hoping that someone would listen and let him find his way back to you.
Lost in his pleas, the reputed Mandalorian does not notice the slight tugging on his cape. Din waves it off as the material getting snubbed on some sort of rock. The ground here had not been redone in a while. Rocks of all sizes scattered the pathway weaving around the market and it was not the first time that it had been caught on something.
Angered at yet another failure to find you, he doesn’t even shake his cape to get the threads uncaught. Instead, he marches on harder. If it ripped, so be it.
“Hello?”
He stops. Turns. At first, he cannot see who called his name.
Something tugs on his cape again.
He starts to complain, “Wh-”
And then stops. He is met with the small, round face of a young girl. Toddler, probably. She couldn’t be more than three or four years old. Immediately, he notices five things:
- The girl is holding onto his cape with one hand and a stuffed bunny in the other. The bunny is larger than her face.
- She is dressed in a faded red shirt and blue overalls, with a peeling patch on the left pocket of the shirt. The patch has a rabbit on it.
- A bunny-eared headband is on her head. It looks relatively new compared to the rest of her clothes.
- Her cheeks are very chubby. He wants to squeeze them like he imagined his parents might have. He puts that thought away.
- This girl likes bunnies.
The girl is holding onto his cape with one hand and a stuffed bunny in the other. The bunny is larger than her face.
She is dressed in a faded red shirt and blue overalls, with a peeling patch on the left pocket of the shirt. The patch has a rabbit on it.
A bunny-eared headband is on her head. It looks relatively new compared to the rest of her clothes.
Her cheeks are very chubby. He wants to squeeze them like he imagined his parents might have. He puts that thought away.
Before he can ask her what her name is or where her parents are, the girl asks, “Are you a Mandalorian?”
He’s confused for a bit, as she has pronounced “Mandalorian” as “Nandowowian.”
Din hesitates, wondering if bounty hunters or mercenaries searching for his head had already infiltrated this small town. But would they rope this tiny child into it? He didn’t think so. She barely knew how to speak anyway.
“Yes,” he finds himself saying, disregarding the potential consequences.
Something was vaguely familiar in the face of this girl. Was he seeing things, or did her untamed, unruly black hair remind him of someone? He couldn’t quite place it.
After hearing his verbal confirmation, the girl talks again. “Okay, Mr. Metal Man. Are you my dada?”
Din takes a step back. What does one even say to such a question? He stands there, in the middle of the marketplace, sputtering out incoherent sentences. He doesn’t know what he’s saying either. Just that he has to say something.
And so he continues to panic, staring into those unnervingly familiar dark brown eyes, wondering how searching for his wife led to this. Not even the Creed supplied instructions on how to tell an inquisitive, hopeful child that no, you’re not the father that she visibly has been eagerly waiting for.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he finally manages to say, “but I’m not your da-”
He’s cut off by the girl’s sudden shriek.
“Mama!” she exclaims, then runs shockingly fast with that tiny body of hers behind him.
Din doesn’t turn to look. No, that would be too painful. It’d be too hard to see the mother of the child that mistook him as her father. Not when his mind was immediately bombarded with visions of what could have been—visions of dropping the helmet and his profession to start a family with the love of his life.
So no, he does not turn.
Even though he is a few meters away, he can still hear the girl chatter to her mother. Even though he has forced his feet to move on, to walk away, he can still hear the girl say, “Mama, I saw a Mandalorian today.”
Din is too busy thinking about why the girl would bring that up to hear her mother’s response. Perhaps it was a thing that children did, telling their parents of the things they did and people they saw. He wouldn’t know.
But he snaps himself back to reality fast enough to hear the girl again, to hear her say, “Come on, mama! He went that way!”
Din freezes. Surely the girl could not have been referring to him? Yes, he was the main topic of the conversation as of recently, but why would the mother want to see him?
A small part of him knew or at least suspected. Ever since seeing that face of hers—the slope of that nose, those unruly curls—he had questioned. To who? Maker knows.
But if he turned around and the girl wasn’t looking for him, he’d be embarrassed. At least that’s what he told himself. No, Din Djarin was afraid of seeing who that girl’s mother was. Could it be her? What if she wasn’t? He didn’t know what he’d see himself doing either way.
He didn’t come to this planet with a plan set in stone. It was pure instinct that caused him to type in the coordinates—the ones that he had memorized—to this planet onto the Razor Crest. He did not attempt to reroute. Din had no plans, yes, and didn’t know what he’d do once he saw his riduur [spouse] again. But he knew that he had to try.
She might have relocated. She might have moved on already. He’d be crazy to hope that she’d accept him back or have kept loving him the way he loved her.
Din marched on anyway. Where to? Even the Maker wouldn’t have known. But he had to get away from that little girl and clear his mind. All of this thinking was driving him closer to insanity.
Once Din focused on his objective: finding his wife, made a plan, and followed it step by step, he’d find her. He had to. The stars would never be that cruel, would they?
Din shakes his head. Kriff, he really had to stop getting distracted with the what if’s and whatnot that his brain was scrambling to understand.
And then, he hears it.
Someone is calling his name. His given name. The one that he was born with. A word that he hadn’t heard once in the past four cycles.
They scream again. “Din!”
His footsteps falter. His mind is screaming at him, demanding him to turn around. The thoughts swirling around in his head repeat the same sentence—that it’s her, that it has to be her, it’s her. Before he can force his shocked body to just kriffing move, someone collides into him.
The force nearly knocks him off of his feet. He steadies himself before he falls. His knees are buckling. Habit causes his right hand to jerk down to grab his blaster from its holster, but he stops it. He’s frozen after that, still as a dead nerf. His heart is thundering to the point where he thinks it’s about to explode out of his chest. If the adrenaline pulsing throughout his body wasn’t keeping him so still, Din thinks that he’d have collapsed.
Four cycles. Four kriffing cycles. Four cycles without the person that makes him feel like the only person in the entire universe. Four years without her singing those radio songs with that remarkably terrible voice of hers, the one that can make him smile even when he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Din knows who this is, doesn’t he? But why can’t he just turn around, for Maker’s sake?
“Din,” you say, a broken sob coming out of your mouth.
It’s then that he doesn’t allow his mind to continue controlling himself any longer. Not this time, not again. No more thinking. No more wasting time. He lost four cycles with you, and Maker knows he isn’t going to waste a single second longer.
Din turns around and embraces you. You feel like home. Warm and inviting. He missed this, and he didn’t realize how much he’d miss the little things—a hug, for Maker’s sake—when he left. He thought that he’d be able to get over the sudden loss of your presence like he did with his parents. But that was then, and this was now, and you’re different.
He thought that since he was leaving to protect you, his heart wouldn’t ache. But it did, and it hurt oh so much. Din doesn’t want to leave anymore, now that you’re here with him and kriff he doesn’t want to go back. Not to the Bounty Hunters’ Guild. Not even to the Razor Crest, the place that he’d called home for so many years. But you feel more like home than that ship ever was to him.
“I thought you left me for forever,” you say. You’re crying.
His mouth moves, but nothing comes out. He gives up and holds you tighter.
“Riduur,” he chokes out. He tries to explain everything, how the years spent without you haven’t changed the love he has for you, and how he missed you oh so kriffing much, but only another “riduur” comes out.
“Riduur, riduur, riduur.” They’re whispers now, but Din finds that he is crying as well and that that word is the only one that his mouth seems to be able to say. It’s like a prayer, the way he’s saying your name over and over again. He prays to the Maker that you’ll take him back and love him all the same. It might never be, but Mr. Djarin wants his Mrs. back. Kriffing hell. Four years without you? What in the galaxy was he thinking back then?
And then, you lift your head up from its place buried in the crook of his neck and say, “Riduur.” The expression on your face is enough. You’re crying, but you’re smiling through your tears.
Because he’s back. He still loves you. And you still love him.
Hearing you say it back assuages his guilt and floods his body with yet another series of feelings that he cannot explain. And when he feels a tug on his cape and his bunny-loving daughter and the features that they share, Din knows that he is ready.
Din decides, right then and there, helmet tucked in the crook of your neck as he struggles to keep his body weight off of you. He makes his decision to never leave again. He didn’t know it then, but the unconscious choice had been made. Din didn’t think that he could stomach a single look to the ‘Crest right now anyway.
He’s ready to put down the helmet. To shed the armor. To retire from his role as a bounty hunter. To remove himself from the guild.
He has fulfilled his mission—bring the Child to his people—and is now ready to spend the rest of his life with the girl and her mother. His daughter and his wife. His ad [child] and his riduur.