Work Text:
Because clever got me this far
Then tricky got me in
I'll take just what I came for
Then I'm out the door again
A Perfect Circle, The Package
Din stands in a gear locker aboard Slave 1, staring at the beskar helmet in his hands.
The T-visor of the face he has shown to the galaxy for the last thirty-five years stares back at him. Blank. Menacing.
So what happens if you take that thing off? They come after you and kill you?
No. You just can’t ever put it back on again.
His mind is starting to slip, as it does every now and again, his distant conversation with Cara flashing before him. He tries to focus once more on the helmet. Looks down upon the beskar and Transparisteel as it looks back and judges him in its cold silence.
You did what you had to do. Mayfeld’s voice in his head. Din has to give him credit – that asshole had actually made it a point to not be an asshole about the whole thing. He’d been… hell… he’d been downright honorable, handing him the trooper helmet and turning away, disavowing any knowledge of his face. Din isn’t sure it makes up for the fact that Mayfeld put him in the position to take his helmet off in the first place, given that Hess hadn’t recognized him even after extensive prodding.
He decides that Mayfeld doesn’t matter. It’s over. He has what he came for. He has the coordinates for Gideon’s ship.
He knows where the kid is.
It means more to me than you will ever know.
His fingers tighten around the helmet and he grits his teeth against the memory of Gideon’s words. Another true believer of the Empire, far worse than even Hess, with the gall to weigh the balance of ten thousand lives as a worthy price for the glory of a fascist regime over drinks in the officer’s mess hall.
With whom this coward shares tables. Paz’s voice now. It had taken every ounce of self-control Din possessed to stem a flashback of his knife-fight with Paz when Hess had poured him a drink, finding himself literally sitting at a table with an Imperial officer, wearing Imperial armor, his face exposed before Imperial eyes. He’s helpless against it now, the memory overcoming him, slamming down around Paz’s arms as the larger man lifts him up by the rim of his own helmet, pulling away, drawing his knife and slashing it over blue armor, the close-quarters struggle, finally ending in a draw.
Have you ever removed your helmet? The Armorer, now.
He stares at it in his hands. Yep. Sure did. Scanned my face at an Imperial terminal. Shared a table with an Imperial officer while he poured me a drink and waxed poetic about mass murder and bringing order to the galaxy.
Once again, the Armorer’s words bubble up through the miasma of his thoughts. When one chooses the Way of the Mand’alore you are both hunter and prey.
The visor looks back at him. Which one is he right now?
It means more to me than you will ever know.
He swallows and his brow furrows. Hunter, he decides. I am the hunter, and I’ll do whatever I have to do to get him back.
He turns the helmet over in his hands and slips it back on.
Din stands at the window, lost in the white and blue ripple of hyperspace flowing by.
The hour is late, but he can’t sleep.
He means more to me… he means more to me than you will ever know… he means more to me…
The soft clumping of boots makes its way down the ladder as Boba Fett descends from the flight deck. The battered Mando approaches Din and stands at his side, letting the silence slip by for a few minutes before breaking it. “You should get some rest.”
Din dips his chin in a hint of a nod, but makes no further movements.
Fett stands there, watching, letting the moments tick away. When some unknown amount of time has passed, he holds out two ration bars. “An effective warrior requires fuel and rest. You did not eat earlier. Now you refuse to sleep. You might get lucky and survive without one, but not both.”
Din looks down at the offering but makes no move to take it.
“You are no good to your son dead.”
Din lifts his hand and accepts the bars. “Thank you.”
They both continue to stand there, Fett staring at him bare-faced and without apology, again, counting off the seconds until he reaches his pre-determined time. “Go eat it now. There’s water in the gear locker.”
Din turns his head in a slow swivel, thankful for the helmet even if he’s not sure he’s still worthy of it, and he manages to put an incredulous tone to his voice. “Is that an order?”
“I won’t go into battle with someone who is unprepared.”
Fett stands still as Din lets out a long-suffering sigh, turns, and stalks into the locker. His suspicions are confirmed when he hears the clang of beskar thrown against deck plating. He hears the dry cough of one who is eating a ration with too much haste followed by the gag of trying to rectify the situation with too much water all at once. The man is an absolute broken disaster and has no idea that he’s fooling no one. Fett can’t blame him in the least, but he won’t risk his life on a mission led by a man with his head so far up his own ass that he sees nothing through the dark.
Time for an extraction.
Din emerges from the locker, crosses the deck, and hands two empty ration wrappers to Fett, proof of consumption. Fett lifts them from his grasp, folds them, and slides them into a pocket. He levels his gaze upon the visor and waits until he knows he has the other man’s attention before speaking.
“What will you do with the child after you get him back?”
A wet sigh escapes the modulator. “I told you before. I’ve been quested to return him to the Jedi.”
Fett frowns. “That’s still your plan, then.” Not really phrased as a question.
A long, telling pause hangs in the air before the answer is given. “… Yes.”
“Hm.” Fett fails to suppress a grunt as he brings a hand to his chin, facing back out into the void of hyperspace. “Are you so sure the Jedi are the caretakers you want for your boy?”
The man standing next to him does little more than breathe. Fett waits him out.
“He needs…” Din’s voice cracks and he has to clear his throat before starting over. “The kid is too powerful. He needs training that I’m not qualified to give him.”
“The kid.” Fett casts his gaze in Din’s direction without turning his head.
Din just stares out the window.
“Tell me,” Fett continues, “how much you have sacrificed for… the kid.”
Everything. The word lodges in Din’s mouth along with the remains of the desiccated ration he’d crammed into himself.
Fett presses on. “Shand told me the fate of the covert on Nevarro. How you were expelled from the Guild. I watched the Empire vaporize your ship. I watched you shed your beskar to infiltrate an Imperial base. You got what you went in for, and yet only half the man who went in came back out.”
Is it that obvious? Is it that obvious that his soul has evaporated out of him? Out through the wounds punched through him by the eyes of an Imp looking upon his face?
“You are a Mandalorian without his people. A hunter without his commission. A pilot without his ship. And still you press on. He must mean a great deal to you.”
More than you will ever know.
“And yet you refuse to say who he really is to you. Who you really are to him.”
You are as its father.
You’re like a father to him.
Din can’t suppress a half-shake of his head. Struck by the cruelty of the Armorer welding the clan signet to his pauldron, declaring them a clan of two and then sending him on a quest that would dissolve said clan upon its completion in the same breath. A gift that was given only with the condition that he must give it away. The bile rises and it takes everything he has to keep the rations down.
“I was quested to return him to the Jedi…” He repeats. He’s shocked at the thinness of his voice, how much of it the loss of his soul has stripped away.
“Let me tell you something of the Jedi,” Boba cuts in, his tone bitter. “One of them slew my father. When I attempted to avenge his death, the Jedi imprisoned me. I was a child when the Jedi murdered my father and sent me to prison. I ask you again – are those the people you want to raise your child?”
The rim of Din’s helmet falls almost to his chest as his chin dips. The Armorer had warned him as much, that the Jedi were once enemies, making the quest she had given him all the more confusing. Between Fett’s confirmation that the Jedi were not to be trusted and Ahsoka’s assessment that the kid’s attachment to him made him unsuitable for training, Din wonders if this has been a fool’s errand all along.
You’re like a father to him.
Ahsoka’s words had stung him like a hornet, just as he’d worked up the nerve to hand the kid over to her.
His mind slips again.
Sitting on the edge of his bunk, cradling the baby in his arm, running his thumb over the tiny three-clawed hand, staring into that adorable green wrinkly little sleeping face. He’d lost himself in those moments, had let so much time slip away that Ahsoka had tracked him down even when he’d said he’d bring the kid to her.
The kid.
His kid.
You’re like a father to him.
His son.
It hits him all at once and he sucks in a breath, snapping his head back up. “My son.” The words are whispered, little more than air drifting over moving lips, but a smile twitches at the corner of Fett’s mouth all the same.
Grogu is all he has left in the universe.
He has lost his covert. He has lost his ship, and with it, his home and livelihood. He has quite possibly lost his soul.
And right now, Gideon has his son.
Leather gloves creak over his knuckles as he tightens his fists and the weight of all he has lost pulls him over the edge. Pulls the fury that has been kindling in his gut since the droid stole his son up into his chest where it finally ignites. He feels it burn there, ready to gather strength should he choose to fuel it.
The Imps have stolen his people, his ship, his soul, and his son, but they have not stolen his spirit.
He is a Mandalorian with nothing left to lose, and he will rain all hell down upon the monster who has stolen his son.
The number of lives he has already snuffed out in the defense of his son is immeasurable. Imps. Bounty hunters. Raiders. Mercenaries. Grifters. Pirates. Some more honorable than others.
So many others have willingly sacrificed themselves. The covert. IG. Kuiil.
He has to make it all mean something.
He will tear the galaxy apart until Grogu is once again in his arms or he will die trying.
“I need to send a message,” Din says. His voice is tight and mean. A coiled viper, ready to strike.
“Certainly,” Fett replies.
Din knows exactly what he will say.