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The Jedi doesn’t give Din a name, but after he leaves, somehow it’s on everyone’s tongue. Everybody seems to know him, or at least to know of him, which is honestly a little disgruntling given how long Din’s been looking for those of his kind.
(“Huh,” Cara says a full five beats after the elevator doors close, “didn’t know Skywalker was a Jedi.”
“Did Luke help you out?” the New Republic officer asks knowingly, surveying the havoc of the cruiser as his people take Gideon into custody.
“Karking Skywalkers,” Bo-Katan mutters under her breath, eyebrows angled at a deadly slant.)
It’s a nice name—Luke Skywalker—though Din obviously doesn’t know him well enough to say if it suits him or not. In the weeks that follow, as he tries to sort out the mess of the darksaber and Mandalore and Bo-Katan’s ominous silence, Din likes to think about the kid walking across the skies with his Jedi protector at his side.
It’s a good image.
---
“I’m Luke,” is the first thing the Jedi says when Din goes to Yavin, travelling to coordinates sent via Cara and the New Republic fleet, “and I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself last time.” The words come easily, if a little ruefully, as if the name is one he’s used to saying and hearing all the time.
All things considered, it would be rude to meet him with silence, as Din so often does when introductions are involved. So when Luke looks at him expectantly, Din says, a little awkwardly, “Mando,” and hopes they can leave it at that. He hasn’t spoken his name to an outsider in more than a decade, and if he and Luke are inextricably tied by their connections to Grogu, they still occupy a curious land between strangers and allies.
It’s a land whose borders Din is still feeling out.
When Din goes to return to Mandalore a few days later, leaving the sunlight of Yavin and kid’s voices and Luke’s grin, it feels somehow unfair to use Luke’s name when Din hasn’t even offered his own. He thinks he would like the sound of his name in Luke’s golden voice, thinks that maybe Luke would say it with a weight that has nothing to do with expectation and everything to do with friendship, but that first consonant still catches painfully in his throat. Calling Luke “the Jedi” feels impersonal, and using nothing at all is out of the question, so instead, he settles on something that’s kind of in between.
“Now you listen to cabur, pal,” he admonishes Grogu in farewell before handing the kid over to Luke. It’s what Luke is—a protector, a guardian, not just of Grogu but of the entire galaxy, it seems—but it feels less detached in a language that is Din’s.
Din doesn’t imagine it when Luke’s lips move slowly, carefully, as if he’s testing the shape of that word himself, but Luke doesn’t ask for a translation. He just looks at Din for a moment, curious and thoughtful, before nodding his own farewell.
Later, when he’s alone, Din turns the unspoken name over almost guiltily in his mind. He has no right to it, has done nothing to earn it, but he likes the way it fits in his thoughts.
You listen to Luke, pal.
---
Over the next few weeks, Din spends perhaps a little too much time thinking about the sight of that word on Luke’s lips—about the way his voice might sound if he were to voice it aloud, the smooth trip of two syllables. He thinks about Luke coming to say it as easily as he says Luke, the intonation familiar and worn. There’s something about it that makes Din smile, lips turning up of their own accord behind the privacy of his helmet.
It would be lying to say that the memory isn’t a catalyst, of sorts.
The next time Din’s on Yavin, just a few weeks later, he shakes his head after a fierce sparring bout. He shoots a look at Grogu and Luke’s two other padawans, who watch with interest from the sidelines, and tries to shake the protest from his muscles.
“Kids,” Din gasps out, into the feel of sweat trickling down his face unseen, “I don’t know what dral is talking about when he says he needs the practice.” He can’t help but watch out of the corner of his eye, and sees Luke taste the contours of that word as it rolls silently on his tongue, his face alight in the late morning sun.
As the weeks turn to months and the seasons spin their course, Din tucks more memories away—the warm tilt of Luke’s head as he fashions the hinge of kebii’tra against the blue of a winter’s sky, the implied lilt of nasreyc against the resolute growth of spring, the song of mesh’la and early summer rivers.
And if he wonders with increasing frequency what the shape of Din might look like, he doesn’t think he can really be blamed.
---
It’s a midsummer afternoon on Yavin, the sun strong in the bluest of skies, when Luke chuckles under his breath as Grogu steals a second helping of dessert out what seems to be thin air. Din never ceases to be amazed at how quickly the kid has been learning; it leaves a bright glow of pride in his chest.
“He’s a stubborn one,” Luke says wryly. He hesitates for a moment, and then looks at Din, an almost shy light to his eyes. “Kind of like his buir.” He says the word as if he’s been practicing, voice caught halfway between tentative and assured, and Din—
Din will have to think later about the fact that he’s definitely called Luke beautiful more than once, that he’s lingered on words of Luke’s eyes and blue skies. Of strength, and brightness, and soul.
But for now, he’ll just smile, and hope that Luke can hear it in his voice when he says, “Din. My name is Din Djarin.”
And if his voice catches just a little, he thinks Luke will understand.